Archbishop of Canterbury to Resign at End of Year

Like most of you, I woke up to quite a surprise this morning. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has announced that he will step down at the end of 2012 to become Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. (Hmm, I’ve always thought him more an Oxford man.)

There will surely be much comment on his ten years on the throne of Canterbury. I might as well join in.

He is a nice and likeable man and a friend of Church of England Anglo-Catholics. But by most other measures that mean much to orthodox Anglicans, he is a failure as ++Canterbury. At the very time when upholding orthodoxy and church discipline was especially needful, he, willfully or not, enabled and even rewarded apostasy and heresy in the Anglican Communion. By trying to save the Anglican Communion by stringing along the orthodox, indabaing Lambeth, undermining the Primates, and the rest, he has only brought it that much closer to demise.

I wish the man well. But I also pray for a new Archbishop of Canterbury with the backbone to do what Rowan Williams should have done, who will do his part to banish all strange and erroneous doctrines and practices . . . instead of enabling them.