TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/090291/0902510.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.4 KB | 234 lines

                                                                                INTERVIEW, Page 12

Answering the Call of God In the 1990s


From dealing with hostage takers to deciding whether to ordain
gays, Archbishop of Canterbury GEORGE CAREY redefines his exacting
job to suit the times

By DAVID AIKMAN/LONDON and George Carey


    Q. You once said, "I've never found it easy to believe in
God." Why not? Has belief come easier over the years?

    A. I can identify with many people's struggles with
notions of faith. When you look at a world such as this and you
see, for example, the Holocaust, this is where I identify with
many of my Jewish friends, when 6 million Jews perished and
probably at least that number again of Christians and Russians
and others who died. Now, they must have said their prayers, and
yet God didn't deliver them. There are no glib answers to that
sort of thing. Having said that, I think the intellectual
grounds for God and for the vitality and reality of the
Christian faith are strong.

    Is belief getting easier? Well, yes, I think it is. Simply
because, over the years, for me personally there have been many,
many indications of God's presence in the world, personal
happenings where I've been convinced of his reality and answered
prayer in all kinds of ways which I couldn't quantify.


    Q. What does being a Christian mean to you?

    A. First of all, it is a personal allegiance to a
historical figure, Jesus Christ. It means believing in him and
following his life-style, his person. For me, Christianity is
a way of life. It is to be holy, a spiritual person for whom
that spirituality takes a primary role in anything I do and
anything I say. I think that is authentic Christianity. It's the
kind of thing that led the first Christians to the stake.


    Q. You have described a deep experience at the age of 17.
What happened?

    A. I'd been brought up in a working-class family in the
East End of London, bombed out in the war, moved to our home in
Essex, was a deep-thinking young man searching for something,
was taken along to a local Anglican church and then found
through the fellowship there the beginning of answers to some
questions. I felt the reality of the Christian faith beginning
then, and, no doubt about it, it was the beginning of a very
deep and meaningful experience. It was a real encounter with the
living God.


    Q. Was there a lasting change in your personality or your
ambitions as a result of that?

    A. I suppose it is true to say that the experience was so
real to me that there was a moral change, no question about
that. My family was solidly working class, and my mother and
father were deeply intelligent. They actually made the journey
into the Christian faith later, after I did, and we were able
to argue and discuss it together and so on. But meeting Christ
also meant that I met education, and it had a very profound
influence on my discovering the richness of life. I've said that
at the age of 17 1/2, I discovered the letter h in the English
language, which, you know, isn't much known among the English
working class. Now that's not to be elitist about it, but that
was a reality.


    Q. Many people believe that all religions point in some
way to God or at least to the idea of God. Why should people in a
pluralistic world today prefer Christianity to other faiths?

    A. Well, I think many -- not all -- religions do point to
God. Whether all religions lead to God is a different matter
altogether, and, again, one has got to say within the Christian
tradition that they don't all lead to God, that Jesus Christ is
the way, the truth and the life. I stand with that. The kind of
people, however, who say that all religions lead to God are
generally the ones who want to avoid any way of getting to God.
In other words, they want to sit on the fence themselves.


    Q. You have said that Christians should not proselytize
adherents of other religions. How do you reconcile that with
your statement that Christians "are under a historic mandate to
proclaim their faith to all people"?

    A. I think there is a great difference between
proselytizing and evangelizing. Evangelizing is a portrayal of
the person of Jesus Christ while sensitively listening to the
views of other people, taking into account where other people
are at, affirming where they are. Proselytizing is the arrogant
assumption that the other person has nothing to offer to a
debate. There is no dialogue in proselytizing. It is a kind of
cowboys-and-Indians approach to another person that robs him of
his dignity. Responsible evangelism always listens to the
culture of a person.


    Q. What is your perspective on Jews and Judaism?

    A. Well, my perspective is that if you look at Romans,
chapters 9 to 11, you will see that we could not be Christians
today were it not for the Jews, and we owe so much to them, to
the Old Testament, the life of the Torah, the Prophets. They
gave us the Messiah, Jesus Christ. The difference between us,
when we're agreed about so much, is Christology. I'd want to
say, well, I have been captivated by this person, Jesus Christ,
the onus is upon me to share him with all people, Jews and
other people. But in the eyes of Christians, Jews are always in
a very special relationship with God.


    Q. Do you favor the admission of women to every rank in
the Anglican priesthood?

    A. I see no reason why not. My theological starting point
would be from the fact that I believe that biblically, if you
work this out from a theology of baptism, if you work it out
from the theology of the Spirit's gifts to his people, to women
as well, the evidence leads me to see the ordination of women
to the priesthood as something quite logical that follows from a
woman as an equal in the sight of God. I can understand from the
Roman Catholic side that the argument from tradition is a very
important one. Women have not been in the ordained ministry for
nearly 2,000 years, so this is a novel thing. Against that, I
would argue that it took the church 1,825 years to come to terms
with slavery and overrule it.


    Q. How do you balance this view against your desire to
improve relations with Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox
Church, both of which oppose women's ordination?

    A. I don't think we must ever sacrifice the truth of
Christianity for the peace of Christians, so I believe that's
terribly important for me. I long for peace, I long for unity.
I believe that it is at the very heart of our mission. But all
our churches are not yet united, and yet the question of women's
ordination has been put. Why should we subordinate ourselves to
the views of other churches with whom we are not yet in unity?
Rome has never sought Anglican advice on any changes it made;
neither did the Orthodox communion seek Roman Catholic advice.
We're looking for the things that draw us together, and there
is so much. That creates the greater pain, doesn't it?


    Q. Many priests within the Anglican tradition have
abandoned whole areas of historical Christian faith. Do you
think there should be minimal criteria of belief for admission
to the Anglican clergy?

    A. We already have it, actually, in that whenever I ordain
or a bishop ordains, we read out the statements "Do you believe
that the Bible contains all things necessary for salvation? Will
you accept the doctrine of the Church of England? Will you obey
the bishop?" And so on. People know they are actually going
along with the whole package, which includes the
trustworthiness of the Bible, its centrality in terms of
authority and tradition and reason. So we can't really pick and
choose.


    Q. What is your position on ordaining avowed, practicing
homosexuals?

    A. Now I know some people have called me homophobic. In
fact, I'm far from that. I've ordained homosexuals, but I think
we've all got to understand that the Bible is consistently
against practicing homosexuality, and therefore I would have to
say, probably with the majority of bishops and probably the
majority of Christians in the Church of England, that we see no
way of going against that tradition.


    Q. Do you see your role as requiring you to speak out at
times in criticism of the government?

    A. I hope I will have the faithfulness of my calling to be
prepared to do that if I ever felt that our government and
nation were either reneging on Christian values and commitment
to the poor and helpless or acting in such a way that they were
denying Christian truth. I have a very close relationship with
the Prime Minister [John Major] and the ministers of
government. We talk a lot to the Foreign Office about our
hostages in Lebanon and about other things because the Anglican
Communion is very much an international body. We are actually
more international than the British government. We've lost our
empire, the Commonwealth is in name only, but the Anglican
Communion has more than 32 countries, so we've got all these
links.


    Q. What do you hope to accomplish as Archbishop?

    A. I want to demystify the term evangelism and address the
urgent need of being a relevant church in a needy world. We have
to face the fact that for 150 years, the Church of England
hasn't really come to grips with the culture of its day, hasn't
addressed the central issues. We've actually plodded along very
nicely. We've used our position well, I believe, in society. But
we've been bleeding to death, and that is a very urgent issue
we've got to face up to. It presents all kinds of challenges to
us today. If we ended up being a smaller church but much more
open and confident of doing good things, I would have felt we
had achieved something very real indeed.


    Q. You once described the Anglican Church as "an old lady
muttering platitudes through teethless gums." What image would
you like it to project?

    A. I think the image that I'd like to see is the picture
in the Gospel of John, chapter 13, of Christ washing the feet
of his disciples. I think the church has got to take the form
of a servant in stooping and sharing, in caring action. The
person whose feet we are washing? Well, it could be the
homosexual, it could be the starving poor. It could be the very
rich man who has no need of God. So the church has got to be the
servant of all, and if it is, then it will be the kind of church
I would be proud to belong to.