THERE has been much criticism of the Rt Revd Justin Welby for saying, in a BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg this week, that he “forgives” John Smyth. In reality, his comments were much more nuanced. Watching the whole interview, I found it impossible not to be moved as he sat still like a prisoner, or at least a penitent, as, for nearly 40 minutes, Ms Kuenssberg politely but firmly hammered in the nails, and, again and again, he expressed profound sorrow at the safeguarding failures that led to his resignation last November.
There has been much tragedy in Bishop Welby’s life: an unhappy childhood, the death of his own child in infancy, and a depressive tendency that runs through the family. Towards the end of the interview, he expressed a longing for the obscurity of private life.
It left me wondering whether the greatest tragedy of his life was to have been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. It was, after all, an unlikely appointment. He had only recently become Bishop of Durham; he was a late ordinand, having previously worked in the oil industry, and he was initially turned down for ordination.
But he was also an Evangelical with Charismatic leanings, and had worked briefly at Holy Trinity, Brompton. The ever-powerful Evangelical networks chose him as their man, trusting him to promote their particular vision of mission and growth, which he did, as far as he could, setting the Church on a path of rewarding church-planting and innovation over traditional parish ministry. In the interview, rather touchingly, he claimed that the Church was actually growing, a claim for which there is, sadly, limited evidence.
In his years as Archbishop, he gradually outgrew his initial supporters. One of the most moving parts of the interview was when he spoke of conducting the funeral for the late Queen. Suddenly, it was as though he “got it”: he understood what it meant for the C of E to be the national Church. As his archiepiscopate went on, he upset the Evangelical lobbies and a substantial part of the Anglican Communion over gay relationships, greatly overestimating his ability to bring them on board.
For all his well-earned reputation as a reconciler, he never really had the bandwidth to cope with the demands of those who had promoted him and expected him to toe the line. But then this was the central dilemma of his episcopate. He is a product of the Iwerne camps, with their repressed homo-eroticism and, in some quarters, disregard for the wider Church of England. It was his misfortune to have come from the same stable as the serial abuser Smyth.
Plain Bishop Welby, in his blue open-necked shirt, has carried the can not only for safeguarding errors, but for the whole theology that has been used to mould the C of E into its image and is now exposed as theologically and morally bankrupt.
