New York Times Op-Ed: The New Atheists ‘Attack a God I Don’t Believe in, Either’: A Q&A With Rowan Williams [Author, Discovering Christianity: A Guide for the Curious (2025)], by Peter Wehner (Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center):
Rowan Williams is among the most important religious thinkers in the world. A theologian, poet, playwright and literary critic, he served as the archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012. I spoke to Dr. Williams about his journey of faith and doubt, why God allows the innocent to suffer and how to interpret the Bible (and how not to). He talked about the New Atheists and the influence on his theology of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, what makes Jesus such a compelling figure and what it means to pastor people through grief. Dr. Williams also talked about how, for him, the Christian faith is “the perspective that enriches.” Our conversation, which has been lightly edited, is the third in a series of interviews I am doing that explores the world of faith.
Dostoyevsky Led the Way
Peter Wehner: Let me start out by asking you to describe your journey of faith. As a young adult, what was the pull toward Christianity for you? Was it primarily intellectual or aesthetic or an appeal to the imagination or some combination of those? Did you experience what C.S. Lewis called “Sehnsucht,” an intense longing and divine spark for something that’s unattainable in this material world?
Rowan Williams: I’d grown up in a Christian environment but not a very intense one. It was really when I was a teenager that it began to speak to me, and it did so largely, to pick up your categories, at the imaginative level. It felt like a larger world to inhabit and at a time when I was discovering more and more about the literary world, about philosophical questioning, about the historical roots of our culture.
All of that seemed to me, as a student, enriching and exciting. But it was also brought alive — and here was my good fortune — through particular people who were very important to me at the time, especially my parish priest, who was a huge influence — encouraging, supportive, giving me the message all the time that there’s room for all that in the life of faith.
When I started as a university student — coming into contact with an awareness of human need and human suffering that I hadn’t quite registered before, meeting homeless people when I was a student in Cambridge, the sense that you needed to have quite a capacious picture of human nature in order to see the dignity and the need — that reinforced my feeling that the faith I’d grown into was something which actually allowed you to engage at depth with people.
Wehner: Is the draw of faith for you now essentially what it was when you were younger?
Williams: It’s probably pretty much what I grew up in, in many ways, which is not to say it’s not changed or developed. It’s certainly been battered and tested in various ways. But when I go back to what I was learning at that time, it’s still that same sense that this is the perspective that enriches. This is the perspective that enlarges.
Wehner: You’re a person of great theological depth, but I imagine, like many people of faith, you’ve struggled at various points with doubt. If so, how has that manifested itself to you?
Williams: Looking back, there have been very few times when I felt what you might call a substantive doubt of the whole thing. You know, “Is any of this true?” It’s much more, “Does any of this make sense where I am?” I’ve always resonated with the person who said, “God exists, but I don’t believe in him,” in the sense that the system’s there, the pattern’s there and it’s compelling. But how much am I actually inhabiting it? How much am I making it my own? How much is it really making sense of where I am? And there have been periods, especially of personal loss and personal awareness of struggle and uncertainty, where it’s been not so much I doubt that God exists but I don’t know whether I’m connecting with what’s there — and I don’t know how to.
Wehner: Those moments, that particular manifestation of doubt, how have you worked your way through that?
Williams: It’s a lot to do with doing the next thing. It’s a lot to do with trying to hold your position, and I don’t mean an intellectual position. I mean holding a place where you are standing firm and doing what you can do. I was very struck as a young man reading the fiction of Iris Murdoch, particularly her novel “The Bell.” At the end of that, you’re faced with a chapter about the experience of somebody who has been intensely involved in religious activity and has just had an absolutely traumatic shock to everything that he believes in and everything he holds dear.
He’s living next door to a convent, and all he can do is to go to Mass every morning. And I thought, “Yes, I see what’s going on there. He’s doing the next thing.” He’s treading water, you might say, but also he knows something can be done — not to keep the darkness at bay but to keep breathing, to keep moving, to keep open to something. I think that sense of wanting to keep open to something is probably quite near the center of what I believe about a spiritual life. You don’t pray or meditate or contemplate in order to get results, exactly.
Wehner: Sometimes doing the next thing is the best thing to do. You wrote a book on Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He’s one of the writers who have meant the most to you, and it’s understandable why. What is it about the work of Dostoyevsky, in particular, that has so impressed you in the context of faith? How has your theology been shaped by him?
Williams: I discovered Dostoyevsky as a teenager and read him fairly intensely as a student and as a graduate student. What struck me most was two things. One is he’s very good at depicting characters who are holy, who are in some sense transparent to the divine and also letting you see that they’re not going to have all the answers. They’re going to be the window that lets the light in. And I thought, “That tells me something about holiness. Don’t look for the leader, the controller, the problem solver. Look for where the light gets in.” In Leonard Cohen’s famous image, the persons who are part of the crack that lets the light in.
Throughout my life I’ve been privileged to see a number of individuals in whom I could say, “Yes, there’s the crack. They’ve let the light in.” They’ve been people of varied accomplishment or status, but the one thing in common is things look different in their light. So that was one thing I learned from Dostoyevsky.
I suppose the other thing was Dostoyevsky’s absolutely relentless commitment to making it as difficult for himself as he possibly could. He says: You want the grounds for atheism? I’ll tell you the grounds for atheism. Let me lay out to you all the good reasons for not believing in God.
Of course, in the famous chapters in “The Brothers Karamazov” where Ivan Karamazov talks about the suffering of children, that’s Dostoyevsky saying: Let me show you. You think you have reason for not believing? I can show even better reasons for not believing. And pushing through that, saying: I’m not going to pretend it’s simpler than it is. And saying at the end of that: I’m not going to pretend to give you an answer. I’m going to give you the fact that love is possible in the middle of this.
The moment of reconciliation, of love, of forgiveness, of acceptance is as real as all the nightmares that he describes. Dostoyevsky, as it were, flings down his pen and says: Well, there you are. You make your choice. The world is full of evidence against love, against reconciliation, against the possibility of a God who holds the world.
The probabilities stack up in a fairly unpromising way, and then a moment happens where the light gets in, where something in the world refuses to be crushed by that.
Nick Cave, the singer and songwriter, with whom I had a long conversation a couple of years ago, spoke about the impact on him of the tragic death of his teenage son. He said his main feeling was not that it made faith harder but that it made faith more imperative: I’m not going to be defeated.
I think there’s something of that in Dostoyevsky, when at the end of that astonishingly painful and difficult section of “The Brothers Karamazov” Alyosha kisses his brother. It’s as if Dostoyevsky is saying: Well, that is as real as any amount of suffering. Make what you will of it. I’m not going to tell you, but there it is.
Wehner: Let me stay on Dostoyevsky for a moment, because, as you said, his indictment of God was so searing in “The Brothers Karamazov” that he wasn’t even confident that he’d adequately refuted it. That raises the issue you touched on, which is theodicy, the effort to resolve the problem of evil with the existence of an all-powerful and all-benevolent God. You touched on this in your answer, but I want to home in on it a little bit more. What is Dostoevsky’s response to suffering? If I understand you right and if I’ve read Dostoyevsky correctly, the answer is not philosophical or theological. It’s primarily love. How would you respond to people who ask this ancient question: Why does a good God allow the innocent, the children, to suffer?
Williams: The question I want to ask in reply — though, of course, I can’t ask it in quite these terms if somebody is actually in the middle of suffering — is: What would a satisfactory answer to that look like? What would our lives be like if I could say, “I’ll tell you exactly why your child died. I’ll tell you exactly why you suffered that terrible accident. I’ll tell you exactly why people are dying daily in Ukraine and Gaza and Congo. I can tell you, and it’ll all be clear, and you won’t have to worry about it any longer.”
What would that feel like? When people say they want an answer, it’s not that kind of answer they’re really looking for. I don’t know entirely what to make of that. But whenever people say, “Have you got an answer?” I say, “Do you really want that kind of answer?” Imagine the bereaved mother turns up at the parsonage door and says, “Why should my child die?” And you say, “Because of this, this and this. Satisfied? See you next week.”
No, that’s not it. And what is “it”? I don’t entirely know, except that people live with these horrors. People make personal sense of them. People are sometimes opened up by them to depths they hadn’t expected. That’s, again, as Dostoyevsky would say, it’s as much a part of the fabric of the world as anything else.
The other dimension was that he’s always nudging us to ask, “You talk about suffering. So what’s your complicity in this?”
He invites you to understand that you are part of the problem. You’re part of what tangles and embroils the world more and more in injustice and suffering. Just step up to that and say, “Yes, I’m part of this. I’m responsible. I’m answerable for the neighbor.” We’re not just talking about love in a vague and general way, but as he put it and as the great Dorothy Day liked to quote, this is a “harsh and dreadful love.” This is asking something really quite frightening of you, that you understand your solidarity in this.
Wehner: I imagine what some people might ask, what Ivan Karamazov might ask, isn’t simply, “Tell me the reason that this happened.” It might be, “Why did you allow it to happen in the first place?”
Williams: Of course. It essentially has to do with the basic question of why there is anything other than God. Because anything other than God is going to be, in some ways, unstable, in some ways flawed. If God made the perfect, God would make another God. So why does God invest in what isn’t God? And not being God, I don’t have a very clear sense of the answer to that, nor do any of us.
2. The Purpose of God’s Elusiveness …
3. The Jesus Who Never Stops Asking Questions …
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