Rowan Willams

The Archbishop’s Dostoevsky: Why Rowan Williams is the best man for the job – of appreciating the greatness of Dostoevsky

This wonderful article by A.N. Wilson appeared in today’s The TimesOnline:

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s views on religion are notoriously hard to pin down with confidence. If you collected up the criticism devoted to Tolstoy, there could be no doubt about what he believed at any stage of his journey. Yet in the history of Dostoevsky criticism we find, for example, Henry Miller reading Dostoevsky as a great social revolutionary, whereas others have seen him as a diehard conservative. Rowan Williams, in his latest book, quotes (and rebuts) William Hamilton, who sought to enlist Dostoevsky as a forerunner of “Death of God” theology; Georges Florovsky, who saw Dostoevsky as an exemplar of Russian Orthodoxy; Malcolm Jones, who has linked him to “post-atheism” in contemporary Russia, and judged him to exemplify the workings of “minimal religion”. Clearly, all these contradictory readings cannot be right. Or can they? Is that precisely the nature of the difficulty?

We need a guide who combines the gifts of a literary critic and a trained theologian to work out how far the novels of Dostoevsky can be used as vehicles for such explorations. We also need a guide who is deeply versed in the ethos and spiritual traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church to place Dostoevsky, and the tormented exchanges of his characters, within some intelligible historical framework. Luckily, the Archbishop of Canterbury combines all these qualities, and more.

There are many insights in Dostoevsky: Language, faith and fiction which will illumine its subject’s novels, and which could only have come from this interpreter. Williams’s discussion of The Idiot, and the salience of Holbein’s painting “Christ in the Grave” (1521) for our understanding of the protagonist, is a case in point. “Holbein’s [deposition] shows (though this is not explicitly described in the novel) a corpse seen from alongside – not only a dead man fixed at a moment in the past (there are Orthodox depictions of the dead Christ and his entombment), but a dead man in profile, a double negation of the iconographic convention. In a fairly literal sense, this is a ‘diabolical’ image.” There will be few non-Orthodox readers who are aware of the fact, presented here by Williams, that in the tradition of icons, the only figures who normally appear in profile are demons or Judas Iscariot. This is a very pertinent addition to Williams’s accumulation of readings of the Idiot’s character. Far from seeing Myshkin as Christ-like, Williams alerts us to his “lethal weakness”: “the person who is presented as innocent and compassionate in Christ-like mode is in fact unwittingly a force of destruction”. With even greater precision, he hits the target with this paradoxical statement: “Myshkin is a ‘good’ person who cannot avoid doing harm” – about the neatest summary of The Idiot that has ever been written. In the conclusion to his book, Williams makes the striking claim that the fusion of incompatibilities in which so much of Dostoevsky’s work consists, creates something comparable to the traditions of icon-painting.

It is this fusion of a surrender to the claims of an independent truth and a surrender to the actual risks and uncertainties of asserting this truth in word and action that makes the entire enterprise of spiritual – and specifically Christian – life one that is marked by the decentring and critique of the unexamined self. What is so distinctive about Dostoevsky’s narrative art is that he not only gives us narratives in which this difficult fusion is enacted; he also embodies the fusion in his narrative method, in the practice of his writing, risking the ambitious claim that the writing of fiction can itself be a sort of icon.

As we read Williams’s discussion, and become absorbed not only in his enjoyment of Dostoevsky’s novels, but also in his own wide reading in the patristic literature and immersion in the Eastern traditions of Christianity, we begin to realize that ambiguities and downright contradictions which seem so startlingly “modern” in Dostoevsky’s pages are often matters that have always been inherent in theology. The book thereby combines a rereading of Dostoevsky with an attempt to confront, not merely the storm clouds of the nineteenth century, as Ruskin called the theological crisis of faith, but also our contemporary phenomenon of Darwinian revivalism which believes itself to have answered, or repeated, the destruction of theology’s claims to plausibility.

The book therefore begins where, one suspects, Dostoevsky himself would want a book published in 2008 to begin – if he were still with us and observing contemporary life. The author starts, not with the great Russian literature that is his theme, but with “the current rash of books hostile to religious faith”. “They treat religious belief almost as a solitary aberration in a field of human rationality; a set of groundless beliefs about matters resting on – at best – faulty and weak argumentation”. In contrast to these writers, whose work, it could be said (though the author does not quite say it), was all anticipated in the writings of the later Dostoevsky, Williams spells out the way in which religion actually operates in individual human lives. This was central to Dostoevsky’s work as a novelist. Williams’s book is a work of literary criticism, but it begins, therefore, as if it were one of theological apologetics.

If this causes some methodological problems as Williams goes along, they are certainly problems that Dostoevsky would have relished. Outside the Roman Catholic traditions represented by writers such as François Mauriac or the later Evelyn Waugh (both of whom Dostoevsky, with his horror of “the foul Roman God”, would have found morally and aesthetically repellent), the better Western novelists have tended to fight clear of theology. Their works might contain a religious element, but they are not vehicles, as Dostoevsky’s great novels are, for the presentation of raw metaphysical debate. It simply is not possible to read The Brothers Karamazov without becoming engaged with the God questions: Does he exist? If he exists, how can the suffering of a child even be thinkable? Is there an alternative to the seductive, and ultimately blasphemous allure of the Grand Inquisitor’s creation of a religion which offers mystery and authority? As we turn the pages of Karamazov, that monumental whodunnit, the question of who killed the brothers’ horrible father becomes inextricably tied up with theological matters. Is the novel the most Christian fictional work ever written, or the most damning indictment of religious faith, from which in fact no “realist” account of religious belief could ever be extrapolated? Or is it neither? Is it a book which enables the reader to wrestle with these questions, unshackled either by obedience to a tightly defined religious system, or by that equally limiting worship of science which the nineteenth century erected as a substitute?

Commentators on Dr Williams’s record as a church leader have sometimes observed his apparent capacity simultaneously to hold two totally incompatible beliefs. This debate need not concern us here, unless we find it irresistible in passing to reflect that Dostoevsky’s own views on female – let alone gay – bishops would be all too easily imaginable. Whether or not there is an advantage in doublethink when performing an Archbishop’s agonizing role of reconciling the ill-thought-out positions of American liberals and African conservatives, the capacity to hold opposite viewpoints on religious matters is precisely what Dostoevsky’s characters demonstrate again and again. Williams acknowledges from the outset his indebtedness to the great Russian critic-philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, whose Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics has been essential reading since it was first published in 1929, and which has had such an immense effect on literary theory.

Bakhtin’s development of what he called “dialogism” perhaps reflected his own necessarily secret attitudes to Orthodoxy. The Party bullies were profoundly suspicious of his readings of Dostoevsky, and saw him as a religious subversive. As far as I know, Bakhtin’s religious position remains a mystery to this day. The 1920s in Russia was not an easy time to come clean about such matters, and this brutal historical fact probably explains some of the tortuousness of Bakhtin’s reflections on religion and literature. Nevertheless, it was Bakhtin who taught us – and Williams reinforces the message in innumerable bits of valuable close reading of the texts – that Dostoevsky is an essentially “polyphonic” writer. Read in this way, the novels do not reflect a divided mind, or a struggling existentialist doubter; they are themselves demonstrations of the areas which have to be explored if one is to make sense of any of the great questions of philosophical theology. If the doctrine of the incarnation is true, for example, it could never be settled by “scientific” analysis. Christians follow not a mere Logos, as the Platonists did, but an enfleshed Logos, a Logos crucified by involvement in human sin. Dietrich Bonhoeffer would probably not have much appealed to Dostoevsky, but the Russian would have seen the poignancy and potency of the German pastor-martyr’s declaration that the only God in whom he could believe was a suffering God. As Williams puts it:

Dostoevsky is not presenting us a set of inconclusive arguments about “the existence of God”, for and against, but a fictional picture of what faith and the lack of it would look like in the social and political world of his day – an assumption articulated by Bakhtin, and also one that shapes some of the most interesting philosophical discussion of Dostoevsky in recent decades.

This is an attractive position to follow, and it certainly avoids falling into the crude trap of believing that the later novels are simply Slavophile or Christian manifestos. But there is a difficulty with it. And the difficulty is raised by the strange voice of Dostoevsky himself, not merely in the books but also in the journalism. If there is a lack in Williams’s rich book – and it will certainly be enjoyed by a wide audience and stimulate an eager rereading of Dostoevsky – it is not that it fails to refer to Dostoevsky’s journalism (there is plenty of ripe reference to A Writer’s Diary), but that it does not confront the problem which this journalism presents to the “polyphonic” reading of the novels. The novels are indeed polyphonic, and it is impossible to catch their essence unless they are read with the patience and the eye for detail that Williams repeatedly demonstrates. But Dostoevsky himself makes abundantly clear (in The Devils, for example) what he thinks of the pernicious influence of 1840s liberals; and the mockery heaped on the heads of old Verkhovensky or of Karmazinov (Turgenev) is precisely of the kind we should expect from Dostoevsky the journalist. Indeed this journalist, far from fading away as the novelist in him got into his stride, is ever-present. As if aware of the aesthetic, not to say philosophical, difficulty which this will present, Dostoevsky invents local narrators in The Devils and Karamazov who relate the strange events as if from the position of the town gossip. But even the use of the narrators cannot entirely blind us to the presence of Another – namely the violently intemperate journalist Dostoevsky who both is, and is not, a part of the dialogues which he constructs for his characters, and for the narratives of the shadowy storytellers. The hectoring satirist, the bombastic nationalist, the predictable anti-Semite who wrote the reams of journalism would not, one feels, have been capable of writing the great novels; and yet – this is the paradox and the proviso – Dostoevsky was not writing (to use the Miltonic metaphor) the novels with his right hand and the journalism with his left. The loud-mouthed Slavophile journalist is there in the very texture of the novels.

English novelists have often done time in their youth as journalists in some shape or form. Yet in almost all cases – whether you think of Marian Evans working on The Westminster Review, or Graham Greene as a sub-editor on The Times, or even of Martin Amis or Alan Hollinghurst on the TLS – the job has been seen as a way of making ends meet before they took wing as purely “creative” writers. The career of Dostoevsky (1821–81) unfolded in a different way. He was involved off and on throughout his career with Russian periodical literature; but far from shaking off the humiliating trappings of hack work, his trajectory rose towards it. He wrote for the St Petersburg Gazette in his youth, after the publication of Poor Folk (1846), and the novels thereafter are all laced with such reflections about the current state of the world as, in an English tradition, would more naturally be found in newspaper columns or other periodicals. The House of the Dead, written about his four years in a Siberian prison camp (from 1849 onwards), is journalism of the first degree. His marvellous travel sketches, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863), are a superbly scornful, and accurate, picture of contemporary Europe. In his European wanderings, accompanied by his much younger second wife Anna, he had written The Idiot and, after the completion of Besy (The Devils, or, as it is called in a brilliant new Penguin translation by Robert A. Maguire, Demons), Dostoevsky returned from his European wanderings to take up the editorship of The Citizen (Grazhdanin). The articles that he himself wrote for this publication, now given the title of The Diary of a Writer and running to well over a thousand pages, must certainly be read alongside the great novels of the later period.

The repeated railing against the corruptions of the West, the defence of a belligerent and militaristic foreign policy against Austria and Turkey, and, above all, the reiteration of the belief that Russians are the God-bearers of history, are familiar Slavophile themes to anyone who has read the literature of the 1870s. “So please don’t tell me that I do not know the people! I know them; it was because of them that I again received into my soul Christ Who had been revealed to me in my parents’ home and Whom I was about to lose when, on my own part, I transformed myself into a ‘European liberal’”. There are endless such moments in this later journalism, when we find ourselves reminded of the more histrionic characters in his novels. No one could enlist the journalist Dostoevsky, as they have enlisted Dostoevsky the novelist, as an Ur-member of the Death of God school, nor even, one suspects, as a post-atheistic minimalist, whatever that is. But equally, only the insensitive could fail to see that it is essential to read the novels as narratives in which ideas repellent to Dostoevsky are given freedom to breathe. Indeed, in one of his finest chapters, Williams argues that this is central to Dostoevsky’s entire purpose as a writer, and as a religious thinker. Auden’s line about teaching the free man how to praise comes to mind. Williams’s Dostoevsky is cleverly constructing a rhetoric of freedom, discovering a language which can escape determinism. Brilliant as the Archbishop’s book is, however, neither he nor anyone else will ultimately solve the riddle, which is one of the reasons why Dostoevsky remains one of the most endlessly interesting writers who ever lived.

Was it Dostoevsky who thought that if man ceases to believe in his immortality and in God, then all is permitted? Or was it Ivan Karamazov, as filtered through his murderous half-brother Smerdyakov, as a feeble excuse for having killed his own father? Is it Dostoevsky, or the Devil, or Ivan Karamazov imagining the Devil, who says that he would rather give up everything and become a merchant’s wife lighting votive candles? It certainly seems very like the Dostoevsky who, in 1854, shortly after being released from prison, wrote to Natalya Fonvizinia, “if someone were to prove to me that Christ was outside the truth, and it was really the case that the truth lay outside Christ, then I should choose to stay with Christ rather than with the truth”. How does one interpret the self-dramatizing outbursts by Dostoevsky the journalist with the comparable, sometimes all but identical statements made in the novels by people who are on the verge of being unhinged? A good example, explored by Williams, is Marya Timofeevna Lebyadkina, the funny little crippled sister of the drunken captain in The Devils, one of the most Dickensian figures in the whole Dostoevskian oeuvre. (The casual slitting of her throat is surely one of the most unbearable events in the novel.) During a scene which begins as semi-farce, when she bursts into the respectable general’s widow’s drawing room after church, she makes the famous speech about watering the earth with tears which will bring forth joy. Williams cautiously tells his readers that the words have “been taken too hastily for an expression of Dostoevsky’s own spirituality”. Williams points out Marya Timofeevna’s heterodoxy, not to say heresy – “God and Nature are all one”, she says, and she identifies the Virgin, “the hope of the human race”, with “Sacred Mother Earth”. “She is in some sense a prophetic presence”, Williams comments, “but we are warned to read her words with care”. Her theological confusions have much in common, he adds, with those of others “who have turned their backs on transcendent reality”, including the key members of the revolutionary cell who cause all the diabolical catastrophes in the story.

His attempts to make sense of this passage for the reader perhaps demonstrate the limitations of any attempt to explain the novels, rather than give oneself up to them. At first it almost seems as if Williams the professional divine is marking the ravings of poor Marya Timofeevna for her theology Finals. Then, as if conscious that such an approach is inapposite, Williams changes gear. First comes a “lit crit” reading of the passage – Marya has a fantasy that she has given birth to a baby whom she has drowned in a pond, and this, Williams argues, perhaps reasonably, “anticipates” the murder of Shatov, to whom she is spinning the yarn, and whose body is eventually destined to be dumped in the pond; it also echoes the gospel narrative which gives the book its title – the cascading of the Gadarene swine into the sea. But having corrected her theology, Williams then turns in the opposite position where he does approve of it after all. When Shatov tells the wicked Stavrogin to repent and water the earth with his tears, “it is a sign of reconnecting with a reality Stavrogin is fleeing from, reconnecting with what is outside his head or his will . . . . Marya is right to the extent that reconciliation with God and with nature are inseparable”. Phew! So the poor lame grotesque perhaps gets her Upper Second after all.

At points such as this, one feels that the commentator is trying to represent Dostoevsky as a more coherent, and in a sense more respectable artist than he really was. It feels as though a gentle Western intellectual is bringing his great Russian friend forward to introduce to us. As Dostoevsky shouts something out, perhaps on the verge of an epileptic fit, or asking to borrow some money for the gambling tables or shouting an anti-Semitic insult, we imagine Williams rendering his comments as some subtly phrased compliment to the Dean and Chapter. But the moments when Williams’s pages give off this tone are rare. For the most part, we feel ourselves uncannily inside not merely the novels, but the mind that made them. There is something electrifying in Williams’s chapters on Dostoevsky’s treatment of the demonic, on his exploration of blasphemy and on the Russian’s incarnational profundity. Precisely because Dostoevsky was trying, in the face of nineteenth-century determinism, to free his characters, and his readers, from the deadness of systems, he took the risk of incoherence. For that reason, trying to extract sense from him is a delicate task.

Towards the end of his book, Williams quotes that quite extraordinary story which Dostoevsky tells in A Writer’s Diary for 1873. (It is Number 4 of The Citizen.) A young peasant pilgrim, for a dare, receives his Communion, but does not swallow it. Instead, to fulfil the dare, he must take the consecrated morsel, place it on a stick, and fire a gun at it. As he does so, he sees the crucified figure whom he is shooting, and he himself passes out of consciousness. Williams uses this story for a deft analysis of the way comparable blasphemous acts in the novels (Fedka placing a mouse in a glazed icon, for example, in The Devils) alert the reader to the manner in which religious truth can be envisioned. “The interwoven stories of Zosima, Markel, Alyosha and Mitya are his mature essay in imaging the holy – not simply in one ‘achieved’ character, despite the pivotal significance of Zosima, but precisely in the interaction and mutual mirroring in these lives.” The point is nicely made. But the shock of the story of the peasant shooting the eucharistic morsel is, as Dostoevsky insists, uniquely Russian: the young peasant with his gun, his defiance, his awful penitence. Only a man who believed in the ultimate reality of Christ in the Eucharist would have perpetrated the act of shooting.

Perhaps one of the deepest mysteries of our own times is not that Darwinian atheists, whom Dr Williams takes to task in his opening pages, have emerged from the milk-and-water post-Enlightenment religious traditions of England to mock simple-minded American-style Evangelicalism. It is that the Russian Orthodox faith, which Dostoevsky was right to see as something different in kind from the religion of other nations, has survived nearly a century of Marxist atheism, with civil war, massacre, starvation and a relentless attempt to eradicate it from the Russian soul by persecution and by programmes of materialist education. Whether a Western intellectual believes in it, or feels at home in it, is an irrelevance. No sooner had the Soviet Union imploded than there reappeared, in full view, the Church of Fr Zosima and Bishop Tikhon, seemingly strengthened by its torments – just as in Dostoevsky’s novels murders and drunkenness, child-molestations, suicides and blasphemies actually quicken the faith of indelibly drawn, mired but redeemed characters.

Rowan Williams: ‘Being Disciples’

Discipleship is, as your title indicates, a state of being. Discipleship is about how we live; not just the decisions we make, not just the courses we attend, but a state of being. It’s very telling that at the very beginning of St John’s Gospel, a text to which unsurprisingly I’ll be coming back later (St John 1.38-39), when the two disciples of John the Baptist come to Jesus they say, ‘Rabbi, where are you staying?’, Jesus says, ‘Come and see’, and they remained with him that day. The Gospel teaches us that the bottom line in thinking about discipleship has something to do with staying.

No accident then that later in the same gospel the language of abiding is what is used to speak about the relation of the disciple to Jesus. In other words, what makes you a disciple is not turning up from time to time. Discipleship may be being a student in the strict Greek sense of the word, but it doesn’t mean turning up once a week for a course, or even a sermon. Discipleship is not an intermittent state; it’s a relationship that continues. In the ancient world being a student was rather more like that than it is these days. If you said to a modern student or prospective student that the essence of being a student was to hang on your teacher’s every word, to follow his or her steps, to sleep outside their door in case you missed any pearls of wisdom falling from their lips, to watch how they conducted themselves at the table, how they conducted themselves in the street, you might not get a very warm response.

But in the ancient world, it was a rather more like that. To be the student of a teacher was to commit yourself to living in the same atmosphere and breathing the same air; there was nothing intermittent about it. Discipleship in that sense is a state of being in which you’re looking and listening without interruption. It’s much more like, for instance, the state of the novice monks as they appear to us in the sayings of the Desert Fathers, who are just hanging around hoping that they’ll get the point, who occasionally say desperately to the older monks, ‘Give us a word, Father’, and the older monk says something really profound like, ‘Weep for your sins’ followed by about six weeks of silence. Or indeed the relationship between (even today) the Buddhist novice and the master in a Zen house, where something similar applies. You’re hanging around; you’re watching; you’re absorbing a way of being, and you yourself are in a state of being. You learn by sharing life; you learn by looking and listening. So “‘Rabbi where are you staying?’ … ‘Come and see.’ … They saw where he was staying and remained with him that day.” is quite a good beginning to think about discipleship. And, as I hinted, I don’t think it’s any accident that John puts it right at the beginning of his Gospel. If we’re going to understand what he has to say to us about discipleship, we have to understand about abiding and sharing, and this non-intermittent side of being a disciple.

I shall have a little more to say about in a while about that sharing a place, an atmosphere, a state of being. But let us just stay with what it involves for a moment and think about it in terms of discipleship as a state of awareness. The disciple is not there to jot down ideas and then go away and think about them. The disciple is where he or she is so that they’ll change – so that the way in which they see and experience the whole world changes. That great Anglo-Welsh poet David Jones wrote in one of his late poems of the poet’s relation to God: ‘It is easy to miss him at the turn of a civilization.’ And discipleship as awareness is trying to develop – to grow – into those skills that help you not to miss God – Jesus Christ – at the turn of a civilization, or anywhere else. Awareness is inseparable in this connection from a sort of expectancy, and I think that is one of the characteristics that most clearly marks the true disciple.

The true disciple is an expectant person, always taking it for granted that there is something about to break through from the master, something about to burst through the ordinary and uncover a new light on the landscape. The master is going to speak or show something; reality is going to open up when you’re in the master’s company and so your awareness (as has often been said by people writing about contemplative prayer) is a little bit like that of a bird-watcher, the experienced bird-watcher, who is sitting still, poised, alert, not tense or fussy, knowing that this is the kind of place where something extraordinary suddenly bursts into view.

I’ve always rather liked that image of prayer as bird-watching. You sit very still because something is liable to burst into view, and sometimes of course it means a long day sitting in the rain with nothing very much happening, and I suspect that most of us know that a lot of our experience of prayer is precisely that. But the odd occasions when you do see what T. S. Eliot called ‘the kingfisher’s wing flashing light to light’ make it all worthwhile. And I think that living in expectancy – living in awareness, your eyes sufficiently open and your mind sufficiently both slack and attentive to see that when it happens – has a great deal to do with discipleship, indeed with discipleship as the gospels present it to us. Interesting (isn’t it?) that in the gospels the disciples don’t just listen, they’re expected to look as well. They’re people who are picking up clues all the way through.

This is shown to us in very different ways in different gospels, different gospels which I think pick up those different keys and registers and styles of discipleship that all of us experience in different ways, so that we can recognize ourselves in very diverse modes. What I mean is that the gospel of St Mark on the whole portrays the disciples as incredibly stupid about picking up clues: they can’t do it. The kingfisher flashes past them and Peter, or someone (usually Peter), turns round and says ‘Oh, I missed that!’ Whereas in St John’s gospel, there’s a much more steady accumulation of moments of recognition and realization from the moment (right after the first sign in Cana of Galilee) when the disciples see his glory, and they pick up, moment by moment, and they see.

And that theme of seeing of course comes to its great climax when Peter and the Beloved Disciple stumble into the empty tomb and see the folded grave clothes. It’s an inexhaustibly wonderful text because it distinguishes so clearly between the first moment when Peter looks in and ‘notices’ and the other disciple comes in and ‘sees’. And you can draw up a chart of those words as they evolve through the whole of St John’s gospel. That ‘seeing’ – noticing and seeing – the noticing and seeing which is part of the disciple’s task. And although the disciples may still be a bit slow in St John’s accounts, they’re not nearly as dim-witted as they appear in St Mark. And that corresponds to dimensions of our own discipleship: those longish periods where, looking back, we feel ‘How could we have been so obtuse?’ and those periods where we think ‘Yes: I don’t see it all yet but it’s beginning to link up.’ And to me the excitement of reading St John’s gospel, in the context of trying to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, is something to do with watching that excitement of things linking up as the great narrative unfolds. And I’m sure that in reality, Peter and John and the rest of the disciples and the Twelve were actually not so very different from us: that is, they had their dim-witted days, and their bright days.

Disciples watch, they remain alert, attentive, watching symbolic acts as well as listening for words; watching the actions that give the clue to reality being re-organized around Jesus. Let me just remind you of the beginning of John’s story once again – the wedding at Cana (St John 2.11): Jesus performed this first miracle in Cana in Galilee. There he revealed his glory, he made his glory to be seen. And his disciples believed in him, his disciples trusted him. They see what’s going on and something connects.

Sometimes those signs are difficult or ambiguous. ‘What did you do that for?’ is a question that is occasionally hangs around the gospel narratives. There’s the occasion in the synoptic gospels of the cursing of the fig tree. Jesus goes to Jerusalem. The puzzlement of what’s going on there, a puzzlement which many modern readers share with the first disciples; but there it is, an action which Jesus so to speak offers to the disciples and says, ‘What do you make of that? Do you see what that’s about?’ Again, another strange exchange between Jesus and the disciples in the boat after the feeding of the multitude, ‘Do you see it yet? Do you understand what was going on yet? How many loaves? How many baskets of leftovers? What have you seen? Tell me.’ So, awareness and expectancy are very much around in the expectation that Jesus seems to have of the disciples. Watching the acts as well as listening to the words. Watching with a degree of inner stillness that allows the unexpected world-changing to occur.

And for us today, trying to be Christ’s disciples, awareness and expectancy are no less important. We are not precisely where those first disciples were. We are post-resurrection believers and, in theory at least, we ought to understand a little more than Christ’s first disciples in the gospels did. In theory at least. We have the Holy Spirit to direct and inform, to energize our awareness, to kindle our expectancy. But like those first disciples, we look as well as listen. We watch with expectancy the world in which live. We listen for the word to come alive for us in scripture. We look at the great self-identifying actions of the Church in the sacraments, asking the Spirit to make the connection come alive. We look, we listen – awareness, expectation. And (a point that I love to underline because it’s not always easy to hold to this in the Church) we look at one another as Christians with expectancy. It cannot be said too often, but the first thing we ought to think of when we are in the presence of another Christian is: what is Christ giving me through this person, this group? Given what we encounter in some of the other Christians we mix with much of the time, that can be hard work. But, none the less, that is the expectation of expectancy.

Jesus has brought us together precisely so that we look at one another with that degree of expectancy, which (as again I usually have to say) doesn’t mean that you will agree with everything the other Christian says. It simply means that you begin by saying, ‘What is Jesus Christ giving me here and now?’ Never mind the politics; never mind the policy; never mind anything, just ask that question and it does perhaps move you forward a tiny bit in discipleship. Can we live in a Church characterized by expectancy towards one another of that kind? It would be a very biblical experience of the Church.

But now, awareness, expectancy, discipleship as not something intermittent – all of this presupposes the category of following, which is so very basic in all the language about discipleship. This listening awareness, this expectancy, presupposes following because it presupposes that we are willing to travel to where the master is, to follow where the master goes. And, of course, in the gospels, where the master goes is very frequently not where we would have thought of going, or where we would have wanted to go. Hence, taking up the instrument of our execution – the cross – and walking his way.

Let me take you to St Luke 14 for a moment. In that chapter Jesus repeats insistently in what sort of lives cannot be lived by disciples. And they’re hard words. Those who come to me cannot be my disciples unless they love me more than they love father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters (14.26). And themselves as well: those who do not carry their own cross and come after me cannot be my disciples. ‘Cannot’: it repeats itself through that chapter in a very alarming way. But the point is that if you’re going to be where the master is, those things you think come naturally and comfortably are not necessarily going to be where you find yourself. The place where you’re going to be is always going to be defined by the master, not by you, because a disciple is not greater than his master, as both St Luke and St John in their different ways say.

Following so as to be in the same place as the master. There are two very interesting, rather different directions in which we can take this idea. First of all, a fairly obvious meaning, but one I think is quite important in thinking about discipleship in the New Testament. Being where Jesus is means finding yourself in the company of the people whose company Jesus seeks and keeps. So, when Jesus goes to be in the company of the excluded, the wretched, the self-hating, the poor, the diseased, that’s where you’re going to find yourself. If you are going to be where Jesus is, if your discipleship is not intermittent but a way of being, that’s where you are going to find yourself, in the same sort of human company that he is in. This is once again an important reminder that our discipleship is not about choosing our company beyond choosing the company of Jesus.

So that is indeed why so many great disciples across the history of the Christian Church, and indeed now, find themselves in the company of people they would never have imagined being with had they not been seeking to be where Jesus is. Those who have gone to the ends of the earth for the sake of the Gospel, and the spread of the Gospel; those who have found themselves in the midst of strangers wondering ‘How did I get here?’ – great figures like (one of my own personal heroes) Bishop Thomas French, a great CMS figure of the nineteenth century who spent almost his entire mission ministry as Bishop of the Persian Gulf at a time when there were (at a generous estimate) two Christians in the whole of the area he was looking after and who died alone of fever on a beach in Muscat. What took him there? The desire to be where Jesus was, Jesus waiting to come to birth – come to visibility – in all those souls whose lives he touched even though in the long years he worked in the Middle East he made barely one convert. He wasn’t there first to make converts, he was there first because he wanted to be in the company of Jesus Christ: Jesus Christ reaching out to and seeking to be born in those he worked with. It’s the very failure, and the drama of that failure, that draws me to his story now (not, I hasten to add, because I have any kind of affiliation to failure, though archbishops perhaps ought to get used to it) but because it just demonstrates the utter value of a discipleship that is concerned with being where Jesus is regardless of the consequences.

But then there’s another, deeper and I think more exciting direction to this, a dimension that comes again and again into visibility in the fourth gospel. ‘Where I am, there will my servant be also’, (St John 12). And where Jesus Christ is – St John has told us at the beginning of his gospel – is next to the Father’s heart. The Word of God in the bosom of the Father. And so, where he is we are to be also. We are to be not only where he is in terms of mission and outreach and service in the world, where he is in serving the outcast; we are also to be where he is in his closeness to the Father. We follow him, not simply to the ends of the earth, to do his work and echo his service; we follow him to be next to the heart of the Father.

As I was thinking about this I was struck by a thought that that had never really occurred to me before: that there’s a connection in St John’s gospel between the way in which disciples are to see and do what their master is doing, and what Jesus himself says about his relation to the Father. If you look at St John 5.19, you find the great affirmation of the Son doing what the Father is doing. The Son gazes on and absorbs the eternal action of the Father, and the acts it out in his own life, in eternity and in history. The Son, the Word of God, drinks in the everlasting act of the Father and then makes it real in another context. Does St John mean us to pick up a sort of echo of that in various places in his Gospel, where he speaks in similar terms about seeing and doing? Look too at St John 7:3: ‘Leave this place,’ say Jesus’s brothers, ‘and go to Judea, so that your followers will see the things that you are doing; for no one hides what he is doing if he wants to be well known.’ And then of course there are the great meditations of the farewell discourses (St John 17) where it seems very clear that the seeing and the doing are connected. The disciples see what Jesus is doing, and they also see that Jesus is doing what the Father is doing, they see the glory that Jesus and the Father give to each other, and that glory is given to them. But I suspect that we’re meant at least to make some connection there between the seeing and doing of Jesus in relation to the Father, and the seeing and doing that goes on between disciples and Jesus. This helps us again in thinking about what I called at the beginning the non-intermittent character of discipleship. The relationship of Jesus to the Father is not episodic. Jesus does not receive an occasional bit of instruction from the Father, his relationship is sustained, eternal and unbroken. He gazes into the mystery of the Father’s love and he does it, in heaven and on earth. And we in our discipleship are gazing into the mystery of that incarnate love and we are seeking to do that same will, to act that same action, on earth as it is in heaven, as the Lord’s prayer puts it.

So, that suggests the rather ambitious thought (but an ambition entirely justified by scripture) that the heart of discipleship is trinitarian; that it is as we understand more deeply the trinitarian life of God that’s uncovered for us in those wonderful passages of St John’s gospel that we understand more fully what it is that is the root and energy of our being disciples here and now. We see and we do, not just because that’s the way discipleship or studentship worked in the ancient world; we see and we do because that’s what the Father and the Son are involved in for all eternity.

Let me try to draw some of this together. What I’m suggesting is that to get some perspective on the biblical sense of the disciples’ identity means first and most obviously the simple willingness to be consistently in Christ’s company. What that means practically for the Christian today is being consistently in the company of other servants of Christ, in the company of the revelation of Christ in scripture, in the company of the Father and the Son in the Spirit in prayer, all of which will require of us a certain degree of inner stillness and, what I think I called earlier, a sort of poise: the attentiveness of the bird-watcher again. Attention and expectancy, an attitude of mind sufficiently free of the preoccupations of this or that business of the ego to turn itself with openness to what God in Christ is giving.

At the primary level, that will mean learning and deepening our attentiveness to the Bible, to the sacraments and to the life of the Body of Christ. And secondly, arising out of that, it means learning a level of attentiveness to all persons, places and things, looking at everything with the eye of expectancy, waiting for something of God to blossom within it. Being in Christ’s company, learning attentiveness and practicing that kind of still alertness that is looking and waiting for the light to break through. Then thirdly, it means being attentive to where Christ is going, keeping company with those he’s with. Among them we will find the most unexpected and unlikely characters, the kinds of people that Jesus seems to spend so much time with in the gospels and today. Most importantly we will find him keeping company with the Father, in whose company he eternally is.

Our attentiveness is not just a kind of aesthetic attitude, an appreciation of beauty. It is also a willingness to bring an active and transfiguring love into that situation of expectancy, to keep company so that an action and a relationship may come to being. So, being a disciple means being in his company, learning stillness and attentiveness, expectancy, being willing to go when Jesus is going and to be in the company of those he’s in company with, letting the action come through and the relation be made; letting his action come through us as the Father’s act comes through him. Finally what seems to be suggested by these reflections upon the biblical identity of the disciple is that our discipleship in the company of Jesus is a trinitarian mode of life that is imbedded in the relationship of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit: that is, it is a contemplative mode of life (not in the sense that we might all become Carthusian hermits, tempting as that often appears); but that we’ve all got to grow into what I’ll call a ‘mature stillness’, a poise and an openness to others and the world, so that thirdly, it can also be a transformative mode of living in which the act of God can come through so as to change ourselves, our immediate environment, our world.

A trinitarian living, a contemplative living, a transformative living: no opposition here (as there isn’t in the fourth gospel) between contemplation and action. (And we do need to say that: it’s one of the awful clichés that Christians have sometimes been trapped by: what matters more, contemplation or action? Perhaps the only answer to that is: just try and think of contemplation without action or action without contemplation, and you realize you’re drawing up a charter for really sterile, and potentially even destructive, human living.) Hold them together – contemplation as your openness to the real roots of transforming action – and maybe it doesn’t look like quite such a stand-off.

The greatest teachers of prayer and action have held those together in the most remarkable way, like the great St Teresa of Avila (1515-82) saying that when you have finally ‘progressed’ through all the hair-raising mystical experiences that she describes, what it’s all finally about is enabling you to do some very ordinary things a little bit better. As she says, when you’ve been through the seventh mansion of spiritual union with God you’re better at the washing-up. The habit of attentiveness and expectancy towards God and one another results, overflows, in modes of being and action in the world that – because it can be free from ego and anxiety – actually allows God-shaped change to take place around you. Not by effort and struggle, furrowed brows and tensed muscles, but by allowing something to rise up, something irresistible within your awareness that is God’s purpose coming through to make the difference that only God can make.

Finally then, discipleship is indeed about traveling, and about growing. You can’t begin to describe the life of the disciples in the New Testament without coming to grips with that dimension of traveling. Disciples were people called away from home because they must be where their master is. And that is never going to be comfortable; but perhaps it becomes intelligible when one realizes (something that again is writ large on every page of scripture) that the home where you will finally realize who and what you are is the home, the place prepared for you, by Jesus. And the disciple is engaged in a journey from a place that looks like a comfortable and manageable home towards a home that is eternal and that – as St Augustine says – doesn’t fall away or fall into non-existence because we don’t happen to be living in it at the moment. Discipleship is, paradoxically, a journey away from home, and a journey toward home. Just as the conversion that is the daily task of a disciple, is a break with what seems closest and dearest to us, and a cleaving to what is actually deepest and most natural in us.

[Source: Fulcrum]

Books worth waiting for: Ansell on Moltmann, and Williams on Dostoeveky

Every now and again, there comes along the book that you just can’t wait to read. For me, at the moment there are two deserving of that honour: First, there’s a excellent study that I’m currently reading by Nik Ansell entitled, The Annihilation of Hell: Universal Salvation and the Redemption of Time in the Eschatology of Jürgen Moltmann (soon to be published by Paternoster). This is a laudable first-rate study.

The other is a study on Dostoevsky by Rowan Williams entitled Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction. I’ve just ordered my copy. William’s Grace and Necessity is one the most exciting theological books I’ve read, and I’m predicting that Dostoevsky will be just as thrilling. I mean seriously, who better to write a study on the world’s greatest writer than one who has so plunged the (theological) depths of the Russian psyche and who appears to be continuously working through the implications of what it means that grace has encountered the human than Williams! In the meantime here’s what the reviewers are saying:

‘Reading Dostoevsky is like looking from a high peak at several mountain ranges, some brightly lit, others dark with mist, going back farther than the eye can see. In this breathtaking book, Rowan Williams takes us on a journey through literary art, the nature of fiction, psychological depths, historical and cultural setting and allusion, and beyond all else a world of faith and doubt, of philosophy and theology not dry on the page but moist with tears of compassion. We return to Dostoevsky with new insight and wide-ranging understanding and to real life with fresh perspectives on what it means to be human, to be under threat from the demonic, and above all to sense the dark and urgent presence of the living God’. – N.T. Wright, Bishop of Durham

‘Rowan Williams here reveals the originality and daring that have made him such a controversial (and inspiring) leader of his church. The readings demonstrate an impressive grasp of current scholarly criticism of Dostoevsky. But this is not just another book about Dostoevsky. The literary interpretations are guided by an intense humanism that shares at points surprising parallels with radical leftist critiques. As author of a previous book of Sergej Bulgakov, Williams is at home in Russian philosophy, particularly the Orthodox emphasis on kenosis, the voluntary emptying out of Christ’s divine attributes during his time on earth. This aspect of Russian thought was important for Bakhtin, who serves as a kind of dialogic third partner in Williams conversation with his reader. This is a work of learning and passion, a heteroglot blend of literary, ethical, and subtle theological argument that is full of surprising local triumphs of interpretation — and that most un-academic virtue, wisdom’. – Michael Holquist, Professor Emeritus of Comparative and Slavic Literature, Yale University

‘Rowan Williams, in this study of Dostoevsky’s characters, brings to attention the theological anthropology implicit in and generative of the narratives’ dynamics. In his hands, theology becomes not a kind of explanation or completion but both a release, an opening of the narratives to the as yet unsaid, and a clarification of the continuities between the characters and the Orthodox Christianity of the setting. Crucial to this reading of Dostoevsky is an understanding of personal identity not as a possession but as a consequence of an ongoing relational process and an interweaving of freedom with a responsibility for others. As we no longer read Dostoevsky the way we did before reading Mikhail Bakhtin, so also, having read Williams, we no longer will read either Dostoevsky or Bakhtin as we once did’. – Wesley A. Kort, Professor of Religion, Duke University

April Book Notes – 1

While there certainly remains a place for more lengthy book reviews, I thought it might be useful to just pen a few very brief book notes (and give some scores – ♦ – out of 5) on some of the more significant books I read each month. So here’s a few from April so far. As you can see, I’ve been following a definite theme.

Geiko Müller-Fahrenholz, The Kingdom and the Power: The Theology of Jürgen Moltmann (trans. John Bowden; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000).

This is one of the most helpful introductions to Moltmann’s thought available. Appreciative, but not uncritical at key points, Müller-Fahrenholz introduces us to the big themes in Moltmann’s major works. Recommended. ♦♦♦

Nigel M. de S. Cameron, ed., Universalism and the Doctrine of Hell: Papers Presented at the Fourth Edinburgh Conference on Christian Dogmatics, 1991 (Carlisle/Grand Rapids: Paternoster/Baker, 1993).

Like most collections of essays, this one is a bit hit and miss. The better essays are those by Trevor Hart, David Powys, TF Torrance and Henri Blocher. ♦♦½

Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God (Boca Raton: Universal, 1999).

See my review here. ♦♦♦

Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge, ed., Universal Salvation? The Current Debate (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2003).

This is a well chosen collection of essays and authors on a timely and important topic for evangelicals. It seeks to engage with Talbott’s thesis of dogmatic universalism which Talbott outlines in the first 3 chapters. His chapter on ‘Christ Victorious’ expands on what I believe is an underplayed theme in his The Inescapable Love of God, and so I was encouraged to see it included here. Biblical, philosophical, theological and historical responses are then offered. Talbott responds briefly in the final chapter. The best responses are those offered by Eric Reitan, David Hilborn and Don Horrocks. Overall, it’s a helpful discussion. It needs an index, but the book is worth buying for the bibliography alone. It’s 18 pages! ♦♦♦

Gregory MacDonald, The Evangelical Universalist (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2006).

This is the most well argued exegetical treatment on the subject of universalism currently available. It’s well written, and the combination of ‘MacDonald’s’ cogency of argument, respect for the Biblical texts, and personal humility as to his claims makes his advocacy of evangelical universalism most attractive. Those who disagree with his position will find here a case worthy of as humble response. Good bibliography, but no index. ♦♦♦♦

Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2007).

A beautifully-written reflection – it’s almost a poem – that deserves the widest readership. ♦♦♦♦

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? With a Short Discourse on Hell (Fort Collins: Ignatius Press, 1988).

While this wee book is not particularly well written (it may be better in the German), it’s almost impossible to put down, and it really does have not a few flashes of magnificent insight. Von Balthasar’s overall thesis regarding a hopeful universalism is attractive, even if not at every point convincing. His aggregating of quotes reminded me of Bloesch’s work (which I love). A good read. ♦♦♦½

Lindsey Hall, Swinburne’s Hell and Hick’s Universalism: Are we free to reject God? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

This is a helpfully lucid outline and critical response to important themes in the theology of Richard Swinburne and John Hick. While her own position is considerably more Hickian than perhaps most evangelical universalists will be comfortable with, Hall is to be commended for avoiding stereotypes and for offering a cogent contribution to an increasingly voluminous discussion on the question of Christian universalism. ♦♦♦

Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart, Hope Against Hope: Christian Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1999).

Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart pair up again for this project that arose out of number of conferences and the result is a stunning collection of six essays on Christian hope – its context, its value, its basis, its power, its praxis, and its goal. Bauckham and Hart set out not merely to expose modernity’s myth of inevitable progress and postmodernity’s Nietzschian anti-metanarrative and deconstruction of mimetic imagination, but do so by laying before our eyes the broad and graced vision of God’s promises begun in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and fully realised in the new creation. Inspired by the work of Jürgen Moltmann (to whom the book is dedicated), this is a book that requires careful and reflective reading, stopping regularly to view the terrain, and then returning to again and again to grapple with its implications. This is one to buy, read, keep and re-read. [NB. This may be a biased note as Trevor is my doctoral supervisor]. ♦♦♦♦

The Scandal of Forgiveness

Yesterday, I posted on forgiveness, noting how all human life is constituted by it, that it is both costly and difficult, that it relates to issues of memory and justice, and that its source is always the crucified God. This morning, I read Rowan Williams’ delightful essay Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2007) wherein Williams offers some poignant and insightful observations about this same theme. (I did wonder if God is trying to tell me something!)

Williams notes that ‘one of the oddest things in our culture is that we seem to be tolerant of all sorts of behaviour, yet are deeply unforgiving. The popular media mercilessly display the failings of politicians and celebrities; attitudes to prisoners and ex-prisoners are often harsh; people demand legal redress for human errors and oversights. We shouldn’t be misled by an easy-going atmosphere in manners and morals; under the surface there is a hardness that ought to worry us. And this means that when the Church in the Creed and (we hope) in its practice points us to the possibility of forgiveness, it is being pretty counter-cultural’ (p. 152).

I still wonder if God is trying to tell me something about the scandal of forgiveness …

[NB. This is a repost from Hopeful Imagination]

Rowan Williams on Christian Anthropology

Rowan Williams recently gave a lecture as part of the ‘A World to Believe in – Cambridge Consultations on Faith, Humanity and the Future’ sessions. It’s well worth reading the whole thing. Here’s a snippert:

‘Religious belief is not only belief about God, it’s belief about human beings. And what is non-negotiable in faith is not simply a set of doctrines about the transcendent, but a set of commitments about how human beings are to be seen and responded to. Not everybody in our society has an anthropology, a doctrine of human nature, not everybody has a set of such commitments and they probably never will. But it is a very impoverished society, and it is a very limited educational policy, that assumes you can do without the memory of such doctrines and commitments around. Christian anthropology, the Christian vision of what human beings are about, assumes a number of things about humanity which shape Christian responses to human existence. It assumes that human beings are summoned to respond to an initiative from God, that human beings are summoned to shape a life that will itself communicate something of God to others, and something of humanity itself to God. It assumes that humanity is called to question fictions about both the society and the human self in the name of some greater destiny or capacity in humanity than most political systems or philosophies allow. So, properly understood, Christian anthropology – the Christian doctrine of human nature – is one of those things which ought to reinforce in the university and in society more widely, a set of deep suspicions about the ways in which that range of human capacity is shrunk by political expediency and convenience’.

Full lecture here.

Rowan Williams on Writing

Anyone who has read Grace and Necessity, or On Christian Theology, or Tokens of Trust will know that Rowan Williams is one of the most creative and mature writers of our time; and in this recent talk, he offered some reflections on the craft:

‘I started out as a theologian thinking that it would be fairly straight forward to write large books about Christian doctrine. I’d spent quite a few years reading them as a student and, you know, it looked fairly straight forward. You started at page one and you went on until you stopped and in some cases, as with the work of the great Karl Barth, it was a very long time between the beginning and the end. And somewhere along the line, I suppose, I wouldn’t say I lost my nerve as that’s not it, but I began to realise some of the dangers of writing large books about Christian doctrine is in the risk of supposing that when you have done it you might think that you’ve done it. My doctoral research was on Vladimir Losky, the great 20th century Russian émigré theologian who lived in Paris, and Losky was somebody who instilled in his readers and his students a very strong conviction that you needed to be restrained in what you aimed to say about God. There was always going to be more that you could be saying and you needed to be very keenly and very acutely aware of that “more”, and if that meant that you said less, well, good. And as the years went by, I found myself, yes, writing a fair bit about theology but never really being able to go very much beyond writing relatively short essays on the subject because of this – I hope its a – godly fear of rabbiting on too much with the fantasy of thinking you’ve got it wrapped up.

… the action of writing is an action of discovery. The very look of a word, sometimes, when you have got it down, will tell you something about what you can and can’t do. The very look of a line will tell you what you can and can’t do and of course that other act which is reading what you have written out loud will tell you something about what you can and can’t do …

With poetry obviously you don’t write a poem just to flex the muscles. You write it because something is asking to be said and that doesn’t happen in quite the same way when you are writing prose but I have found writing some theological essays and lectures and short books that there may be at some early stage a very strong sense that there is one thing here, which I have got to get over somehow or got to get in somewhere. When I used to take sermon classes in the days gone by for theological students, having listened to some apprentice sermons, I’d say, “Perhaps what you need to do is ask yourself: what would you say in a burning house? What would you say if you had forty-five seconds? What do you absolutely have to say about this text or this subject or this festival? Start there and work around it, rather than starting by saying: I’ve got to fill up twelve minutes. And you just keep pouring and mixing and the sludge slowly stirs around but start with “Is there one thing” and sometimes – not always – but sometimes when I’m writing an essay or a lecture there may be one thing like that which I feel I need to say, so yes there is an element of compulsion there’.

Full post here.

Mike Higton on Rowan Williams’ Strategy

In addition to his most helpful recent post Rowan Williams and Sharia: A Guide for the Perplexed, Mike Higton has now posted on Williams and strategy. He contends that Britain has ‘a problem’ in that its ‘dealings with religion in general, and Islam in particular, are befuddled by dangerous myths and clumsy confusions’. ‘We could, if we wanted’, Higton writes, ‘try to fight fire with fire: replace one set of lazy misapprehensions with another – trade slogan for slogan until we’re all bloodied from being beaten with placards. Heaven knows we’ve done this often enough, and will do it again soon enough’.

Rowan Williams’ lecture was a risky attempt at a different kind of strategy, an attempt to raise the bar of public discourse: ‘He tried to speak carefully and precisely about an electrically controversial issue, in the hope of getting some real conversation about it going. We all know what happened next. It worked.‘

As well as offering comment on Islamophobia and the effects of Williams’ lecture on the Anglican communion, Higton also included some witty advice for ‘tired’ journalists. Having authored the best treatment of Williams’ theology of which I am aware – Difficult Gospel: The Theology of Rowan Williams – Higton is certainly well-placed to offer this commentary, and we are again in his debt.

Be sure to read the full post here.

Two afterwords:

1. How different do you think the reaction would have been (in Britain and elsewhere) if the recent lecture on Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective had been delivered not by the Archbishop of Canterbury, but by the ‘Moderator of Assembly’ or ‘General-Secretary’ of a Nonconformist denomination?

2. ‘Within social contexts, truth and justice are unavailable outside of the will to embrace the other’ (Volf). Is this not part of the good news?

It’s time to name the gods: some reflections on some reactions to Rowan Williams’ recent lecture

There are a number of really disturbing features about the reaction to Rowan Williams’ recent lecture, Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective. I want to highlight just three:

1. Thus far, by far the loudest responses have come from those who have not even read the lecture. For a clarification of what Rowan did and did not propose see this post on What did the Archbishop actually say?

2. The element of fear (encouraged by fear politics and a lazy and irresponsible and basically unaccountable media) that exists in the community gut; a fear bred and fed from mistrust and ignorance.

3. Most disturbing, however, has been the coming to the surface of some idols – ‘Christian’ and otherwise – that exist in Britain (and in other places too). As I’ve been listening, and reading responses, to the lecture itself – and to many précised distortions of it! – what is becoming most obvious to me is that here we have a battle of cultus’, cultus’ that must be defended at all costs, whether true to the gospel or not. Nothing more informs a community – religious or otherwise – than its allegiance to its particular cultus. In his On Being The Church Of Jesus Christ In Tumultuous Times (reviewed here) Jones makes the timely observation that ‘one symptom of the disarray in the church today is that most of its actual members are more decisively formed and informed by their national identity than by their identity as disciples of Jesus Christ’ (p. xxi). He proceeds to note that all politics are simply the practices, conversations and processes of forming and sustaining particular communities. The question here for Christians therefore is, ‘What politic will inform our life together and our life-in-relation to others?’ This at least means – alongside a host of other questions – asking the question, ‘What does it mean to love our neighbour as ourselves?’

Agree with him or not, Archbishop Williams’ public comments here – as always – are informed by deep and engaging thought with the gospel itself, and with the implications for the Church and her witness in mind. Here, Williams is an exemplary leader. That the volume has been turned down – and that not least by many Church leaders – on the Truth to which Williams seeks to bear witness is, to my mind, a cause of greater concern than anything that he said, or did not say, in this recent lecture. If we’re going to have a public debate on these things – as we ought – let’s make sure we are absolutely clear on what the issues really are, and are not. Anything less is a destructive and painful waste of everyone’s time. Of course, the issues will be different for members who align themselves with different cultus’. That is unavoidable … but it’s time (and it always is) to name the gods.

    Slavery and Human Trafficking

    ‘Twenty-seven million slaves exist in our world today. Girls and boys, women and men of all ages are forced to toil in the rug looms of Nepal, sell their bodies in the brothels of Rome, break rocks in the quarries of Pakistan, and fight wars in the jungles of Africa. Go behind the façade in any major town or city in the world today and you are likely to find a thriving commerce in human beings’. So begins the recent title, NOT for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade – and How We Can Fight It by David Batstone. [Reviewed here]

    In today’s TimesOnline, Ruth Gledhill draws our attention to a video shot in Zanzibar during the Primates’ Meeting earlier this year in Tanzania. The film was made to promote the Church of England’s Walk of Witness which took place to mark the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. Today it won the IPTV award, a £2,000 award for internet television, at the Jerusalem Awards ceremony in London. I’ve embedded it here:

    Watching this film, I was reminded of some words from Theissen’s investigator regarding the Essene community:

    ‘The first thing that I heard about the Essenes was that they reject slavery. They reject it because it is an offence against human equality: they argue that it goes against the law of nature, which bore and brought up all men. All are children of nature. All men are brothers. Riches led them astray, turned trust into mistrust, friendship into enmity. I was fascinated. Where else is there a community which rejects slavery? Nowhere’. – Gerd Theissen, The Shadow of the Galilean: The Quest of the Historical Jesus in Narrative Form (trans. J. Bowden; London: SCM Press, 2001), 47.

    While I do not believe that the Church – as the Church – should ever identify itself wholly which any social programme (individual believers are free to so do), the Church is impelled – by the Gospel itself – to be at the forefront of practicing, equipping and celebrating all acts of liberation, compassion, sanity, hope, and justice, of naming all that demeans and devalues life, and to lead the way in repentance when it fails to do so. I think here of such statements made not only by official bodies such as the WCC that ‘all forms of slavery … constitute crimes against humanity’, but also of those made by individual believers, such as PT Forsyth’s 3 moving letters to the Editor of The Times in January 1906 protesting against the British Government’s trafficking of Chinese human beings in South Africa. Another example, he suggests, of the ethical giving way to an economic rationalism gone mad.

    Following the UN Protocol on Trafficking, countries have been enacting their own legislation and policies to prevent human trafficking. But at what cost? A new report commissioned by the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, has found that many of the strategies to eradicate trafficking are having an adverse affect on the human rights of the very people they are trying to protect. For more, listen to this recent podcast.

    “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him and he will bring justice to the nations. He will not shout or cry out, or raise his voice in the streets; A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out. In faithfulness he will bring forth justice; he will not falter or be discouraged till he establishes justice on earth. In his law the islands will put their hope.” This is what God the LORD says – he who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and all that comes out of it, who gives breath to its people, and life to those who walk on it: “I, the LORD, have called you in righteousness; I will take hold of your hand. I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles, to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness’. (Isaiah 42:1-7)

    Helen Gardner (via Rowan Williams) on Liturgy


    ‘Liturgy is not a matter of writing in straight lines. As the late Helen Gardner … remarked, liturgy is epic as well as drama; its movement is not inexorably towards a single, all-determining climax, but also – precisely – a circling back, a recognition of things not yet said or finished with, a story with all kinds of hidden rhythms pulling in diverse directions’. – Rowan Williams, ‘Service to commemorate the 450th anniversary of the Martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer, 21st March 2006’. Full sermon here.

    Rowan Williams on Theocracy

    A confession: the only book by Rowan Williams that I’ve read (or been interested in reading, until recently) is his Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love – a book as profound as it is beautiful. A few weeks ago, I read Difficult Gospel: The Theology of Rowan Williams by Mike Higton. This planted a desire to go and read some more Williams – a desire I’ve tried resisting mainly because he’s so trendy at the moment and I have an aversion to trendy theologians (a story for another blog perhaps). Tonight I started reading his On Christian Theology – another beautifully written book. I thought I’d share the three points he makes on theocracy for two reasons: (i) because it struck me how his words echo similar reverberations in Forsyth’s own thinking on the topic (there is no evidence of which I am aware that Williams is familiar with Forsyth); and (ii) because I think there’s much here to reflect on.

    ‘Theocracy assumes that there can be an end to dialogue and discovery; that believers would have the right (if they had the power) to outlaw unbelief. It assumes that there could be a situation in which believers in effect had nothing to learn, and therefore that the corporate conversion of the Church could be over and done with. Second, following from this, theocracy assumes an end to history. The powerful suggestions of Barth and von Balthasar about history between the resurrection and the second coming as the gift of a time of repentance and growth are set aside; instead of God alone determining the end of the times of repentance, the Church seeks for foreclose the eschaton. Third, most obviously, theocracy reflects a misunderstanding of the hope for God’s kingdom, a fusion of divine and earthly sovereignty in a way quite foreign to the language and practice of Jesus. Theocracy, the administration by Christians of a monolithic society in which all distinction between sin and crime is eroded, is neither a practical nor a theologically defensible goal’. – Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 36.