One winter's evening in Easter Term 2000 the largest of the lecture rooms in the Divinity Faculty in the University of Cambridge was packed in expectant awaiting of the arrival of two prominent intellectuals who would rivet the vast crowd with their erudition, passion, and eloquence of speech and reasoning. Either of the conversants on his own could have drawn a large audience in such an academic environment hungry for stimulation, affimation, and challenge. That the billing was for two who would directly engage each other for an hour and a half whetted the appetite even more. The somewhat unlikely couple were Professor George Steiner - a liberal Jewish thinker whose learning enviably spans such volumous disciplines as literary studies, cultural criticism, philosophy and theology - and Prof. Rowan Williams, then bishop of Monmouth and formerly Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford.
I had already a fond memory of having met Prof. Steiner two years' earlier, subsequent to a lecture he had delivered in the Faculty, and had become engrossed with the manner of his destabilising reflections darkened as they were/are by his post-Sho'ah sensibilities (it was primarily through Profs. George Steiner and Nicholas Lash that I came to read the writings of Prof. Donald MacKinnon, former Norris Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, one whose darkened imagination almost, Steiner observes, puts the resurrection itself in question).
This was, however, the first occasion I had encountered Prof. Williams other than as a name on several book covers (the books continually recommended to me I had not, up to that point, read other than his study of Arius). The proceedings of the Steiner-Williams conversation have unfortunately all but flitted from my memory apart from some hastily scribbled notes. Nevertheless, an impression of the occasion does remain with me. Prof. Williams had a considerable theological mind, but a disarming humility and rich respect for those who inhabit different ways of telling the world's stories from him.
Reading several of Williams' writings since that moment has reinforced my impression that he is a highly imaginative and skilful Christian thinker, sharply incisive, abundantly generous and gracious, sensitive to the subtleties and complexities of believing and worshipping in a church claiming 'catholicity' for the gospel, while passionate about the vision of God's world in the resurrected Christ that he is committed to (Williams' interrogations and apophaticism are not borne out of any uncritical 'postmodernism' - in fact, he makes it clear that the Christian, at the very least, should be suspicious of infinite suspicion). These are traits well disposed to challenge an established church to watchfulness if it is to be in any way successful in resisting being mislead into (and subsequently deafened by its) uncritical social/cultural and political applause. But, and here I speak as one from a Reformed ecclesial tradition, constantly fearful of the pietistic sentimentalism of so much of Protestant faith, they also put a challenge to nonconformist churches tempted to spiritualise the gospel and hide behind protective shelters to care about the good of the world and to live an exposed life in commitment to its flourishing.
Donald MacKinnon vociferously complained (most clearly in the mid 1960s) that the establishment of the church weakened the church's integrity [see, for e.g., The Stripping of the Altars: The Gore Memorial Lecture Delivered on 5 November 1968 in Westminster Abbey, and Other Papers and Essays on Related Topics (London: Collins, 1969)]. As an Irish Presbyterian I had always agreed. In Rowan Williams, however, I sense a man who, while highly critical of establishment, is nevertheless profoundly sensitive to the tough, and often painful, discipline of learning Christian integrity, and whose integrity is worked out creatively and prophetically (I cannot see how the two can be divorced for the Christian, as Karl Barth's emphasis on the single movement of the divine Yes and No to the world makes clear) for the good of the society and state that the church is a part of, and responsible for and to (and this having concern for the good of this state may lead one 'patriotically' to envision not another state but this state in another way from the way it presently looks).
TAr the time of writing this (March 2003) there is much talk in both the USA and the UK that those who do not support the recently commenced war against Saddam Hussein (since he and his government are the supposed targets and not the people of Iraq) should be silent and/or support the military action. The Most Reverend Rowan Williams has already denounced the Bush-Blair policy as lacking moral authority and encouraging (if not already, even more worryingly, operating from) a distinctly shallow assessment of the issues involved (particularly issues concerning our own unacknowledged complicity in creating such a situation in the first place, and therefore of the need for much soul-searching in acting according to the constrained range of options that we have left ourselves with in this situation). Yet numerous commentators continue to speak of justice, morality, prayer, and the blessing of God as if these legitimately remain part of the vocabularly of a secularised liberal democracy, and have any 'natural' life outside of the people who historically embody the liturgies of reconciliation. Have we not learnt anything from the theological rhetoric of Kaiser Wilhelm II or Adolf Hitler, to name but two C20th German examples?
Williams' theologically informed work, I think, seeks to return a sense of honesty to all our deliberations, discourses, and living - in short to the entire range of our various commitments (i.e., no matter what those commitments are - religious, political, economic, cultural, and so on). There is no room for shortcuts in reasoning for a discourse that allows and encourages itself to be conscious of its own limitations, and that consequently retains a proper interrogative silence or self-reflexivity. What Prof. Nicholas Lash has recently claimed about the nature of theological learning applies well to the concerns of Williams:
"Learning to tell the truth takes time, attentiveness, and patience. Good learning calls no less than teaching does, for courtesy, respect, a kind of reverence; reverence for facts and people, evidence and argument, for climates of speech and patterns of behaviour dofferent from our own. There are, I think, affinities between the courtesy, the attentiveness, required for friendship; the passionate disinterestedness without which no good scholarly or scientific work is done; and the contemplativity which strains, without credulity, to listen for the voice of God - who speaks the Word He is, but does not shout." ['Cacophany and Conversation', The 2002 Prideaux Lectures delivered at Exeter University]
Or, in a slightly different way, and with an emphasis concentrated on a highly significant place, Joerg Rieger warns of this in terms of theology (but, I think, the scope of the point can be greatly expanded):
"mainline theology needs to understand how we are part of the problem and how resistance can be formed. The primary issue is not first of all advocacy, in the form of doing things for others in ways that leave the self intact, but self-critique." [God and the Excluded: Visions and Blindspots in Contemporary Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 190f.]
Perhaps if and when this is borne in mind there could become available possibilities for the enjoyment of the aroma of reconciliation and peacefulness (a peacefulness which is actively greater than there mere absence of conflict). Now is the time to speak and be silent - but not so that we may support certain forms of action blindly (and that includes the lack of theological sensitivity as well as strategic lack of wisdom in some quarters of the Anglican Communion refusing support to Williams on grounds of divergent sexual ethics ['constrained'/generously conducted dispute can give vitality to the church - but there, in the way the 'war' against Williams, is presently being conducted on this issue, a deep politics of interpretation that needs to be acknowledged]), but rather so that we may be attentive to the various manipulations that determine our journeying (including even the most cherished interpretations of sacred texts) in this world. In short, it is a silence that sensitively attends to the various forms of silencing others, and the legitimating rhetorics that accompany this destructive activity of silencing of others. There may well be a time for silence, but an absence of honest speaking there never should be a time for. I have found a sense of this theologically interrogative mood in Williams' prophetic commendation of the statement from Deninis Potter that "Religion is the wound not the bandage."
Williams is a difficult thinker whose every sentence is richly nuanced with creative possibilities and significances. Reading and assessing him, therefore, is not an easy business, although many have tried to take the broad and less strenuous road (and, I am afraid, looked foolish in their simplistic analyses - as Nicholas Lash, Emeritis Norris Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge is recorded by The Independent as claiming, "He is the best theologian in Britain and thoroughly orthodox." "The term 'liberal' makes no sense applied to him. ... But society has been dechristianized so rapidly that very few people recognize what an orthodox Christian is and believe what a few noisy evangelicals tell them." [www.all-angels.com/rowanwilliams.htm]).
Reading Williams, then, requires skills of patience, careful attention, and an intense struggle to understand. Here, in the very theological style of Williams, is testimony to the fact that living responsibly as a Christian is hard work and takes time to learn, and no amount of appeal (no matter how loudly and ferociously they are made) to the 'simple faith', to authoritative structures or texts can excuse the Christian or enable her to modify the complexity involved in worshipping the God of Jesus Christ whose expansive ways with the world exceed our contracted and fragile imaginings. Strategies of taking shortcuts in interpretation are theologically significant - what kind of 'simple' God has been made 'available'?
John C McDowell
Meldrum Lecturer in Systematic Theology
University of Edinburgh
28th March 2003 |
