Anglicans: Empty Pews, Full Spirit

(4 of 10)

After Cambridge, Ramsey entered Cuddesdon College, a theological seminary near Oxford, and began his rapid and seemingly effortless rise to the top rank of the Established Church. He served for two years as a deacon and priest in a Liverpool slum parish before moving on to more gracious livings in Lincoln, Boston, Durham and Cambridge. His first theological writings—The Gospel and the Catholic Church, The Resurrection of Christ, The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ—earned him applause in churchly reviews and a promotion to Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. Then 45, he already looked so venerable that his students used to joke about old ladies helping him to cross streets and climb stairs. A High Churchman, Ramsey was chosen to be Bishop of Durham in 1952; he was well liked by the clergy of this ancient diocese, but one layman who recalls his sermons there admits that "he wasn't always very clear." Ramsey was translated to the archbishopric of York in 1956.

During his placid career, Ramsey had gradually earned a reputation for spirituality as well as theological scholarship. Two years ago, it fell to Harold Macmillan to choose a successor for the retiring Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher. Although some Englishmen suspected that Ramsey was picked because he looked the part, the Prime Minister had his mind set on getting a "religious" primate, and Ramsey was his personal choice.

"A Man of God." It was not a uni versally popular appointment. Low Churchman Fisher himself preferred another man, and one British publisher summed up: "He went to a second-rate public school, got a second at university, was an indifferent Archbishop of York, and therefore he'll make a perfect Canterbury." Today, many of his critics admit that Ramsey has grown into his job, and could well retire as the best-loved Archbishop of Canterbury of the 20th century. Says the provost of one English cathedral: "He's a deeply committed man of God."

In office, Arthur Michael Ramsey has blessedly proved to be not primarily an administrator or church politician but a pastor, a father-in-God whose task is less to change the world now, and more to prepare men's hearts and minds for Christ's coming. Although he reads and absorbs such radical theo logians as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Ru dolf Bultmann, he preaches an oldfashioned, timeless spirituality that echoes the language of the Authorized Version. "By sophisticated attempts to be contemporary at all costs," he said once, "we blunt the force that lies in the universal imagery of the Bible: bread, water, light, darkness, wind, fire, rain, hunger, thirst, eat, drink, walk."