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Muslims can go to heaven, says Archbishop
By Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent
THE TELEGRAPH
8/30/2004
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, yesterday vented his frustrations with the Church factions warring over homosexuality and also reminded Christians that they did not have a monopoly on the afterlife.
In a rare glimpse of his anger over the row that has overshadowed his first two years at Canterbury, Dr Williams said the debate had lacked grace and patience.
He said that this had been aggravated by pressure groups with entrenched positions who posted instant reactions to events on their websites.
The Archbishop also admitted to failing to live up to people's expectations, a reference to the disappointment many felt that he had not been more radical over his opposition to the war in Iraq.
He surprised some at the three-day Greenbelt festival in Cheltenham, Glos, by declaring that Muslims can go to heaven.
Dr Williams said that neither he nor any Christian could control access to heaven. "It is possible for God's spirit to cross boundaries," he said.
"I say this as someone who is quite happy to say that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father except by Jesus. But how God leads people through Jesus to heaven, that can be quite varied, I think."
During a wide-ranging discussion, Dr Williams reflected his disappointment at the tone of the debate on homosexuality, and his dismay at the vitriol of many of the e-mails he had received.
"It is not so much that we have disagreement in the Church - that happens," he said. "It is more to do with how those disagreements are conducted. The dismissiveness, the rawness of the anger . . . need to be worked with."
Speaking about the furore that followed the appointment of the gay cleric Dr Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading, a post from which Dr John later withdrew, Dr Williams said that both sides had suffered shock.
Dr John, who was recently installed as Dean of St Albans, was also a speaker at the festival yesterday.
The Archbishop said: "On both sides of the debate as it evolved, quite a lot of people had to learn that the Church of England wasn't just them, because what I heard a lot of on both sides of the controversy was 'we thought the Church of England was us and people like us and maybe one or two others who don't matter very much'.
"I was intrigued by the mirror imaging that went on there. There was a sense on both sides, therefore, of shock and dispossession, that it is not all ours after all. It is not full of faithful evangelicals, it is not full of enlightened liberals.
"Very quickly pressure groups can form and settle and decide where they stand and invest in where they stand.
"We haven't had an effective forum in which that process can be slowed, not just for the sake of putting things off but for the sake of mutual understanding. We haven't quite found that forum yet. It is not the General Synod. It is certainly not the trading of websites."
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