Book Review: Archbishop Ramsey: The Shape of the Church

Abstract

Archbishop Ramsey: The Shape of the Church. By Peter Webster. Famham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2015. vii + 255 pp. $44.95 (paper).Peter Webster's Archbishop Ramsey: The Shape of the Church is a welcome contribution to scholarship on the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury (1961-1974), who was also a principal Anglican theologian of the twentieth century. In this volume in the Ashgate series on Archbishops of Canterbury, in cooperation with the Lambeth Palace Archives, Webster offers a new interpretation of Ramsey by drawing heavily on the Ramsey papers at Lambeth (not catalogued for previous studies of Ramsey), including nearly one hundred pages of previously unpublished extracts from Ramsey's Canterbury speeches, writings, and pastoralia, for which Webster provides helpful historical annotations. The texts comprise the second part of the book, while the first part, divided into five core chapters, assesses his thirteen years in office, offering historical analysis and interpretation for the contemporary church.Previous treatments of Ramsey, such as Michael De-la-Noy's Michael Ramsey: A Portrait and Owen Chadwick's Michael Ramsey: A Life, were written by close colleagues of Ramsey's. Webster, by contrast, was born the year Ramsey left office and therefore had no personal acquaintance with or memory of him as Archbishop. This generational separation gives Webster a valued alternate perspective, and accounts for his different interpretation. As an independent scholar not drawn from Ramsey's Oxbridge world, Webster also considers Ramsey in the context of the concerns of Evangelical Anglicanism.The goal of The Shape of the Church is to see Ramsey's thirteen years as a coherent whole, aiming to evaluate whether or not they were effective responses to a period of rapid cultural change (p. 31). Specifically, Webster connects Ramseys response to the pivotal period in British life that Arthur Marwick has called the long sixties (p. 91) with the cultural context which surrounds Anglicanism in the British Isles and in North America today. Among these are: (1) the collapse of the allure of the social standing of membership in Anglican churches; (2) the precipitous decline of vital statistics of church-going that have reduced confidence in the capacity of the Church's worship to be meaningful to the public (p. 104); and (3) and the lack of consensus of what it means to be a national church, whether established or non-established. Each of these categories still define the framework of the North Atlantic churches in the second decade of the twenty-first century.Webster defines Ramseys leadership as both a series of failures and one great success. Failures include lack of rapid progress in AnglicanRoman Catholic relations and an inability to master the complexities of the Irish Troubles of the time. Above all, Webster gives a masterful account of Ramseys role in the collapse of the scheme for Anglican-Methodist Unity. …