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Rowan Williams tells Japanese students of secular thinking “pitfalls”

Ecumenical News International

The Archbishop of Canterbury, citing nuclear weaponry, has told Japanese university students that the rationality of secular thinking does not assure “understanding and reconciliation”. 

Archbishop Rowan Williams was on a week’s visit to Japan timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Anglicanism in the country where Christians make up only about two percent of the 127 million people.

He made his remarks in his first major speech of the week at Rikkyo Gaukin University, an Anglican college in Tokyo founded in 1874 by Channing Moore Williams, a missionary of the (Anglican) Episcopal Church in the United States. 

Archbishop Williams told his student audience on 21st September that the recent record of the purely rational and secular approach to intellectual and academic life is problematic. 

“The sober testimony of the 20th century is that the rationality of secular thinking is no guarantee of universal understanding and reconciliation,” said the spiritual leader of the world’s 77-million strong Anglican Communion. 

“A rationality that has brought us into the age of nuclear weaponry and global economic meltdown invites some sharp questions, to put it mildly,” noted Archbishop Williams. “As the Pope [Benedict XVI] has argued several times in recent years, the drift towards relativism and pluralism is not the triumph but the defeat of reason.” 

Archbishop Williams added, “How ever secular our age likes to think it is, the disastrous results of exploitative habits and of financial obsession bring people back to the recognition that they need the element of the sacred in their lives in the sense that they need the freedom to respond to the beautiful and the puzzling and the tragic, to all the things that we do not have the power to manage.” 

Later, in a church service on 23rd September, Archbishop Williams asked his congregation of about 2,700 Anglicans in Japan to include “simplicity”, “risk and solidarity”, and “reverence” in their approach to what he called a “barefoot” mission, such as the one of 150 years earlier that he described to his listeners. 

He referred to the British Anglican Bishop Edward Bickersteth, who lived from 1850 to 1897 and in Japan adapted himself to the habits of the country by taking off his shoes when he entered people’s homes, as part of his missionary work within the community. 

The archbishop was preaching at a service to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Anglican Church in Japan (Nippon Sei Ko Kai). The eucharistic service took place at the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St Mary in Tokyo, where Japanese Anglican bishops concelebrated with Williams. 

“Simplicity means walking lightly on the soil – not imposing foreign expression of faith, and not imagining either that faith must be tied inseparably to whatever the nation finds useful or acceptable at any one moment,” the archbishop said. 

In 1859, the first two U.S. Episcopal missionaries, Channing Moore Williams and John Liggins, arrived in Nagasaki in western Japan at a time when Christianity was still banned under the Tokugawa Shogunate government. 

Currently, there are about 35 000 Anglicans in Japan, with 11 dioceses across the country. 

For the full text of Archbishop William’s university speech, see www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/2535 or his sermon, see www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/2538.

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