On His Knees Before Terror: Rowan Williams and the Death of Christian Nerve

Twenty-five years after the towers fell, the theologian who was there still cannot tell revenge from justice — or good from evil.

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org I August 24, 2026

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Rowan Williams was a hundred yards from the World Trade Center, in a studio at Trinity Wall Street, preparing to record a program on the spiritual life. Then the towers came down and the dust rolled in under the doors. To his credit — and one should always credit a man’s courage before weighing his ideas — Williams did not retreat into himself. He prayed with the frightened, comforted the trapped, and stayed. He is, whatever else follows, a man of genuine learning and real pastoral instinct. That is precisely what makes the wreckage of his thinking so instructive.

For out of that morning came a small book, Writing in the Dust, and out of the book came a posture that has governed the Anglican mind for a quarter century — a posture on open display again this month, as the retired archbishop, now Lord Williams of Oystermouth, rose from his ermine to accuse Nigel Farage of “channeling anti-Muslim feeling.” This is the same Williams who, of the men who murdered nearly three thousand people, could bring himself to say they had “serious moral goals.” Severe toward the politician who names the threat; tender toward the ideology that embodied it. Hold that inversion in your mind. It is the whole man.

The Breathing Space

Writing in the Dust is seventy-eight pages of deliberate irresolution. Williams offers no just-war reckoning, no verdict, no program — only what he calls a “breathing space,” a pause in which the West might decline to answer violence with violence. He is eloquent on the dense religious language the killers used to sanctify slaughter, and eloquent again on the danger that we might dehumanize them in return. Retaliation, he warns, merely ensures “how the conversation will continue.” He will, grudgingly, call the attack a crime. What he will not do is call it evil and draw the one conclusion evil demands — that it must be stopped.

The Woman in the Dust

The title is the confession. It comes from the eighth chapter of John — the woman dragged before Jesus, caught in adultery, the mob already fingering their stones. He stoops and writes in the dust, and in that silence the accusers melt away. Williams takes the bent, silent figure as his model: do not react, make a space, let the fury spend itself.

But look again at who stands where. In John 8 the one who is spared is the guilty party. The crowd she is saved from are self-appointed executioners. Mercy runs from the innocent Christ to the guilty woman. Williams inverts every role and never notices. On September 11 the “adulteress” was not the sinner awaiting sentence — it was three thousand innocents already dead. The stones were not poised in the hands of a mob; they had already been thrown, out of the sky, into the sides of buildings. To lift Christ’s mercy off the guilty and lay it over the aggressors, while recasting the grieving West as the bloodthirsty crowd, is not exegesis. It is eisegesis. It is a category error wearing a halo. Jesus wrote in the dust to stop an unjust killing. Williams wrote in the dust to stop a just defense.

The Wrong Villain

No one saw the pattern earlier or named it better than Melanie Phillips.

Reviewing Williams’s remarks on the third anniversary of the atrocity, she pronounced him “on his knees before terror.” The verdict was merciless and exact. Here was the leader of a global communion whose people were being burned and butchered in Nigeria, Sudan and Pakistan, who managed, on the very anniversary of the greatest Islamist strike in history, to travel to Al-Azhar in Cairo and dwell on the common inheritance of the children of Abraham. Again and again, Phillips observed, Williams located the true villain not in the jihad but in the West itself — its modernity, its arrogance, its wall in the Holy Land, its wars. The persecuted Christian, of which there are millions, was invisible; the wounded Muslim sensibility filled the whole frame. He had a boundless capacity to understand everyone except his own.

The Fourth Plane

Set beside all this the passengers of United Flight 93. They did the one thing the book forbids. Somewhere over Pennsylvania they took a vote, said the Lord’s Prayer, and stormed the cockpit — and in answering force with force they spared the Capitol the fate of the towers. Would the archbishop have had them keep their seats and turn the other cheek as the plane banked toward Washington, and offer a thirty-second homily on non-resistance as the ground rushed up? Their “vengeance” was the salvation of hundreds of strangers who never learned their names. That is the line Williams cannot draw — the line between revenge, which feeds itself, and justice, which shields the innocent. Not to take up the sword, in that cockpit, was to hand the murderers their victory. What sort of justice is that, Mr. Williams?

The Synthesis of Sin

The root goes deeper than nerve. Williams is a dialectician to his marrow — an heir of Hegel, for whom every thesis meets its opposite and both are gathered up, sublated, reconciled into some higher synthesis that cancels neither. Turn that habit of mind upon morality and it becomes acid. Evil ceases to be a thing you name and resist; it becomes a moment in a larger process, a partial truth awaiting its reconciliation, a rage to be understood rather than a wickedness to be opposed. Hence “serious moral goals.” Hence the breathing space in place of the sword. In the dialectic there are no final enemies — only unfinished conversations. Call it the synthesis of sin.

But the Bible knows no such synthesis. Its moral world is stubbornly two-fold — light and darkness, the two ways, wheat and tares, Christ and Belial with no treaty between them. Evil there is not a stage to be transcended but a power to be renounced and, at the last, judged. The cross is not the reconciliation of good and evil; it is the defeat of the one by the endurance of the other. Williams’s dialectic quietly dissolves that antithesis, and with it the whole architecture of Christian moral seriousness. If evil is merely misunderstood good, then Gethsemane was a negotiation and Calvary a breakdown in dialogue. The learned will object that Williams draws as much from Augustine and the Orthodox Lossky — evil as the mere privation of the good — as from Hegel. Grant it, and the door still opens on the same empty room: an evil with no substance of its own to be resisted, only a lack to be pitied.

The Stones Had Already Been Thrown

Twenty-five years on, the towers are rebuilt and the doctrine is not. Rowan Williams was handed a front-row seat to the clearest manifestation of evil in our lifetime — close enough to choke on its dust — and he spent the rest of his life reasoning it away. He could pray with the dying and would not defend the living. He could call it a crime and would not call it evil. He could weep over New York and still choose its bloodiest anniversary to preach common ground in Cairo. That is not gentleness; it is abdication with a miter on. A man who will not say no to the jihad soon finds he can say no to nothing — which is why the shepherd who could not name the wolf watched his flock scattered from Nigeria to Pakistan and christened the scattering dialogue.

The stones, Your Grace, had already been thrown. The hour did not call for another man to understand the men who threw them; it called for one with the nerve to stand in their way. He knelt in the dust instead.

David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found here: www.virtueonline.org and at his Substack on the Middle East here: davidvirtue2.substack.com If you like his scribblings please consider becoming a paid subscriber.