Category Archives: Rowan Williams

Anglicans and Anabaptists

Posted by on July 22, 2010 14 comments

Another interesting comment from Rowan Williams’ recent address focuses on the importance of the Anabaptist/Mennonite churches:

One other crucial focus today is, of course, the act of reconciliation with Christians of the Mennonite/Anabaptist tradition.  It is in relation to this tradition that all the ‘historic’ confessional churches have perhaps most to repent, given the commitment of the Mennonite communities to non-violence.  For these churches to receive the penitence of our communities is a particularly grace-filled acknowledgement that they still believe in the Body of Christ that they have need of us; and we have good reason to see how much need we have of them, as we look at a world in which centuries of Christian collusion with violence has left so much unchallenged in the practices of power.  Neither family of believers will be simply capitulating to the other; no-one is saying we should forget our history or abandon our confession.  But in the global Christian community in which we are called to feed one another, to make one another human by the exchange of Christ’s good news, we can still be grateful for each other’s difference and pray to be fed by it.

This strikes me as one of the few (I can’t think of any others, actually) occasions where I’ve heard someone of such high ecclesiastical office from one of the magisterial traditions take the Free Churches and their vital contributions to Christianity with some amount of non-patronizing seriousness. And for that, I am quite appreciative.

Bread for the world

Posted by on July 22, 2010 1 comment

Rowan Williams’ keynote address to the Lutheran World Federation Assembly is available online. Some deeply stirring remarks about prayer, the Lord’s Supper and the nature of the church are to be found there:

The Lord’s Supper is bread for the world – not simply in virtue of the sacramental bread that is literally shared and consumed, but because it is the sign of a humanity set free for mutual gift and service.  The Church’s mission in God’s world is inseparably bound up with the reality of the common life around Christ’s table, the life of what a great Anglican scholar called homo eucharisticus, the new ‘species’ of humanity that is created and sustained by the Eucharistic gathering and its food and drink.  Here is proclaimed the possibility of reconciled life and the imperative of living so as to nourish the humanity of others.  There is no transforming Eucharistic life if it is not fleshed out in justice and generosity, no proper veneration for the sacramental Body and Blood that is not correspondingly fleshed out in veneration for the neighbour.

If, then, we are called to feed the world – recalling Jesus’ brisk instruction to his disciples to give the multitudes something to eat (Mark 6.37) – the challenge is to become a community that nourishes humanity, a humanity on the one hand open and undefended, on the other creatively engaged with making the neighbour more human.  ‘Give us our daily bread’ must also be a prayer that we may be transformed into homo eucharisticus, that we may become a nourishing Body.  Our internal church debates might look a little different if in each case we asked how this or that issue relates to two fundamental things – our recognition that we need one another for our own nourishment and our readiness to offer all we have and are for the feeding, material and spiritual, of a hungry world.

As things are, we are liable to fall into a variety of traps.  We may conduct our interchurch quarrels in a spirit that sends out a clear message of unwillingness to live with the other and be fed by them.  We may consume our time and energy in what we like to think of as service to the needy, while ignoring our own need and poverty, especially our need of silence and receptivity to God.  We may imagine that by faithfully performing the liturgy we embody the reality of the Kingdom, whether or not we are being transformed into a community of mutual nourishment.  We may focus so closely on the rights of human persons that we lose sight of their beauty and dignity, the beauty and dignity that help to feed us. The list could go on.  But the point is that the intimate connection between our mission and the prayer for our daily bread impacts at so many levels on the life of discipleship that the range of possible areas of failure is correspondingly broad.

The worst reaction to this would be simple anxiety.  The best is to recognise that our vulnerability to failure is itself a reminder of our basic hunger, our need for each other.  The bread of truth is also the bread of honesty about ourselves, and a church that is genuinely growing up into Christ will be one that is prepared to hear its judgement on these and other matters with patience and gratitude.  So when we pray for our daily bread, we pray too for awareness of our failure, and – hard as this always is – for the grace to hear the truth about it from one another, and also from the wider world.  For God can also act to nourish our humanity by the challenges and questions and rebukes that the rest of the human race puts to the Church.

Baptismal identity

Posted by on May 28, 2010 22 comments

Rowan Williams has a great new lecture available online, which, to my mind is remarkably germane to some of our recent discussions about the nature of Christian identity:

. . . the identity of the baptized is not first and foremost a matter of some exclusive relationship to God that keeps us safe, as opposed to the rest of the vulnerable and unlucky world.  It is at one and the same time living both in the neighbourhood of the Father and in the neighbourhood of darkness.  That is why we speak of being baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ, not simply baptized as a mark of our affinity or alignment with Jesus in a general way, not baptized as an external sign that we more or less agree with what Jesus says.  Our baptism is a stepping-into Jesus’ place with all that that entails.  And it means that Christian baptismal identity is—again at one and the same time—both a depth of human experience that brings us into at least the potential of intense, transfiguring love, the Trinitarian love in which Jesus himself lives, and a continuing experience of expectation, humility, penitence and hope.  The experience of the baptized is not the experience of endings, but of repeated new beginnings.  We don’t simply acquire a relationship with God the Father which then requires us to do nothing more.  On the contrary, to be baptized is to be constantly re-awakening our expectation, our penitence, our protest, our awareness that the chaos and darkness of the world is not what God wills; our awareness that we are colluding with that state of chaos which God does not will.  So as baptized persons we look constantly into ourselves, rediscovering over and over again the hope that comes out of true repentance.

On not kicking out Jesus

Posted by on April 14, 2010 25 comments

Jason Byassee has a great post on Rowan Williams up at the Duke Faith and Leadership blog. It gets at the heart of what a lot of people miss about Williams, his theology, and what it all means in terms of how we understand ecclesial faithfulness.

Williams’ theology holds that Jesus interrupts our easy consensuses — this is handy against fundamentalisms of all kinds (like Jack Spong’s and Pullman’s), but less helpful in situations of, say, church discipline. All the same, to have a spectacular theologian as head of a church is somewhat novel today. One would think those liberals and conservatives in the Anglican Communion who are frustrated with Williams for not disciplining their opponents might have read his “Truce of God” or his “Resurrection.” They would realize that the Archbishop sees the risen Christ as one who meets us in the enemy with whom we cannot leave fellowship. For him to kick the bad guys out of the church would, unfortunately, be to kick out Jesus himself.

But to actually abide in this sort of radical tension is utterly difficult. It requires what Romand Coles rightly found at the heart of John Howard Yoder’s theology: wild patience.

God bless Rowan Williams

Posted by on April 13, 2010 16 comments

Apparently among fringe right-wing Christian groups Rowan Williams is catching some heat, yet again, this time for his comments in his Easter Sermon. Referencing some recent British political happenings about wearing crosses in public, Williams boldly called Christians away from facile claims to being persecuted victims in the big bad secular world, opting instead to inject a little knowledge and reality into the the theatrics that are all too common amongst the power-starved Christian right:

It is not the case that Christians are at risk of their lives or liberties in this country simply for being Christians. Whenever you hear overheated language about this, remember those many, many places where persecution is real and Christians are being killed regularly and mercilessly or imprisoned and harassed for their resistance to injustice. Remember our brothers and sisters in Nigeria and in Iraq, the Christian communities of southern Sudan fearing the outbreak of another civil war, the Christian minorities in the Holy Land facing the extinction of their two-thousand year old presence there; or our own Anglican friends in Zimbabwe, still – as I reminded this Cathedral congregation at Christmas – subject to routine attack from the security forces and locked out of their churches. That’s not our situation, thank God, and we need to keep a sense of perspective, and to redouble our prayers and concrete support.

See what he did here? How he talked about actual persecution? How he called us to stop frenetically chattering about how we are no longer in control of Western civilization and instead simply pray and help those who are actually suffering?

Its truly amazing how conservative Christians are, as whole, more concerned about petty bureaucratic inconveniences to them than about the actual suffering and death of (non-white) Christians throughout the world.

Not easy news

Posted by on April 6, 2010 5 comments

Rowan Williams has a characteristically excellent Easter sermon posted online now. Here’s a snip:

The preaching of Peter and Paul and all the witnesses of the Risen Jesus says that two basic things are demanded of us. First: we must acknowledge our own share in what the cross is and represents; we must learn to see ourselves as caught up in a world where the innocent are scapegoated and killed and where we are all unwilling, to a greater or lesser degree, to face unwelcome truths about ourselves. We must learn to see that we cannot by our own wisdom and strength cut ourselves loose from the tangle of injustice, resentment, fear and prejudice that traps the human family in conflict and misery.

And second: we must learn to trust that love and justice are not defeated by our failure; that God has provided from his own strength and resourcefulness a way to freedom, once we have become able to recognise in the face of the suffering Jesus his own divine promise of mercy and life. The resurrection is the manifesting to the world of the triumph of a love that uses no coercion or manipulation but is simply itself – an indestructible love. The challenge of Easter is to believe that God is not defeated by the most extreme rejection imaginable.

Good news? Emphatically yes. But not easy news. To recognise God in the crucified Jesus alters so much: it alters what we think about God, and it alters where we look for God in the human world. It suggests uncomfortably that God is likeliest to be found among those we have, like the religious and political establishment of Jesus’ day, dismissed or shut out; it suggests that our models of success and failure have to be turned upside down; it suggests that our eternal future is bound up with whether we are able to turn to those we have hurt and seek forgiveness.

The church as digestive tract?

Posted by on March 18, 2010 29 comments

In his recent interview, John Milbank at one point comments that the church, contrary to appearances is not “an institution” (or at least it “isn’t primarily”).  Rather, according to Milbank the church is “the continued event of the ingestion of the body of Christ” which “alone mediates the presence of the God-Man.” Now, I’m all for real presence and a strong ecclesiology (whatever that really means). But the way Milbank expresses himself here encapsulates a few of my difficulties with the Radox way of approaching ecclesiology and Christology.

I certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying that the church has its being in receiving Christ’s presence in the Eucharist (though it obviously isn’t constituted merely by Eucharistic celebration). But Milbank seems to think that nothing much else needs to be said beyond this. The church is simply the event of people continuing to “ingest Christ” by taking the Eucharist. Isn’t there much more needs to be talked about when we say what the church “is”? What of baptism? Proclamation? Discipleship? Service? These are the things I don’t see Milbank spend any time on — not just in this interview, but in general.

Moreover to take the language of  “ingestion” as a meta category to interpret Christ’s relationship to the church is deeply problematic. It suggests a seamless organic coinherence between Christ and the church that doesn’t do justice to the dynamic and dialogical nature of how the church continually receives the self-gift of Christ in its ongoing life. Rowan Williams seems to me to to put the matter far better in describing the church as Christ’s body dialogically. “The church is not the assembly of the disciples as a ‘continuation’ of Jesus, but as the continuing group of those engaged in dialogue with Jesus, those compelled to renew again and again their confrontation with a person who judges and calls and recreates” (Resurrection, 76).

But the image of Jesus as one who judges, calls, and recreates is precisely what Milbank doesn’t seem to care for. By contrast his comments  display a regular tendency to deny Christ any sort of independent agency vis a vis the church (if you don’t believe me, check out his stuff in “The Name of Jesus” in The Word Made Strange). Saying that the church is merely the event of Christ’s ingestion casts Christ in an altogether passive role in which he is simply the object of our (presumably Spirit-enabled) digestion. Christ does not act on us, rather we act on him, assimilating him into ourselves (after all, isn’t that what happens when we digest food?). The only sort of conflict Christ might have with us in this scheme is one involving indigestion. But a stomach ache hardly seems like an adequate image for the relationship between Christ and the church as described in the New Testament (take Revelation 2-3 for example, just for starters). Clearly Christ is the church’s judge in an infinitely more significant sense than the language of gastronomy allows for. At the very least it this language needs to be strongly qualified with other more biblical and helpful language. We don’t merely ingest Christ, we are called by him, judged by him, created anew by him. We follow him, listen to him, seek him, pray to him, wait for him…

And yet this language, the language of actual discipleship, mission, and prayer is precisely what I don’t find in Milbank. Makes me wonder how “strong” this sort of ecclesiology really is.

Rowan Williams on the body of Christ, ctd.

Posted by on February 11, 2010 Comments Off

What I have been proposing is that the empty tomb tradition is, theologically speaking, part of the Church’s resource in resisting the temptation to ‘absorb’ Jesus into itself, and thus part of what its confession of the divinity of Jesus amounts to in spiritual and political practice. Jesus is not the possession of the community . . . The freedom of Jesus to act, however we unpack that deceptively simple statement, is not exhausted by what the community is doing or thinking – which allows us to say that Jesus’ role for the community continues, vitally, to be that of judge, and that those who are charged with speaking authoritatively for or in the community stand in a very peculiar and paradoxical place . . . They remain under the judgement of the Risen One, along with the rest of the community, and their task is to direct attention away from themselves to Jesus, to reinforce the community’s awareness of living under Jesus’ judgement. The point at which they claim to foreclose the judgement of the risen Jesus is the point at which they occlude the reality of the continuing life or freedom of Jesus. Their rationale is to remind the community of the danger of swallowing Jesus up in its own life and practice . . . .

The tomb tradition, then should be the ground of certain kinds of questions put by the Church to itself, especially as regards its attitude to institutional authority . . .

Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Blackwell, 2000), 192f.

Rowan Williams on the body of Christ, ctd.

Posted by on February 11, 2010 3 comments

More from Rowan Williams’ Resurrection:

The resurrection faith is bound up with the existence of the community, then; but that does not immediately answer the question of the source of both faith and community. . . . That is to say: there is something prior to the community. . . . [Thus] it is and is not true to see the Church as “identified” with the risen Jesus: the Church is where Jesus is met, where bodily grace and reconciliation are now shown, it is the “body” of Jesus’ presence; but the Church still meets Jesus as an other, a stranger, it never absorbs him into itself so that he ceases to be its lover and judge. (p. 94-95)

Rowan Williams on the body of Christ

Posted by on February 11, 2010 1 comment

Rowan Williams’ wonderful book, Resurrection has some very helpful thoughts on the nature of the church as the body of Christ, and, specifically on the relationship between the church and the risen, personal body of Jesus.

We have already noted that Jesus as risen is a Jesus who cannot be contained in the limits of a past human life; the corollary of this is that Jesus as risen cannot be contained in the legitimating and supporting memory of a community. The Church is not “founded” by Jesus of Nazareth as an institution to preserve the recollection of his deeds and words; it is the community of those who meet him as risen and the place where all the world may meet him as risen. . . .

So the void of the tomb and the unrecognizable face of the risen Lord both speak of the challenge of Easter to a God who is primarily “the God of our condition.” The Lordship of Jesus is not constructed from a recollection but experienced in the encounter with the one who evades our surface desires and surface needs, and will not subserve the requirements of our private dramas. The Church is not the assembly of the disciples as a “continuation” of Jesus, but the continuing group of those engaged in dialogue with Jesus, those compelled to renew again and again their confrontation with a person who judges and calls and recreates. The Church may be Christ’s “Body”, the place of his presence, but it is entered precisely by the ritual encounter with his death and resurrection, by the “turning around” which stops us struggling to interpret his story in light of our and presses us to interpret ourselves in the light of the Easter event. The “Body” image is one of many. We need to be cautious about any tendency to see the Church as a simple “undialectical” extension of Christ; and we have already explored something of the way in which the Eucharist enshrines the dialectic by both confronting us with our victim and identifying us with him. The Church is where Christ is because it is where persons find their identity through him and before him. Christ is with the believer and beyond the believer at the same time: we are in Christ and yet face to face with him. Christian worship and spirituality wrestles continuously with what this means, as it both addresses Christ directly, and speaks in his name to God as “Abba.” Jesus grants us a solid identity, yet refuses us the power to “seal” or finalize it, and obliges us to realize that this identity only exists in an endless responsiveness to new encounters with him in the world of unredeemed relationships; to absolutize it, imagining that we have finished the making of ourselves, that we have done with desire and restlessness, is to slip back into that unredeemed world; to turn from the void of the tomb to the drama of a cheapened Calvary for the frustrated ego. (p. 74, 76)

It should be noted that I am not interested here in identifying targets for Williams’ critique so much as receiving and appropriating his constructive statements about the nature of the church as the body of Christ. And, more importantly, the tendencies he describes here seem to me to be temptations. Temptations that we are all prone to in our attempts to live out the life of the church in the world. As such they constitute a powerful and helpful exhortation. I know I find it arresting and often needed in my own ecclesial life.

Why Sex Doesn’t Matter

Posted by on June 11, 2009 7 comments

“What is baffling and sometimes outrageous to the modern reader is just this assumption that, in certain circumstances, sex can’t matter that much. And I want to suggest that the most important contribution the New Testament can make to our present understanding of sexuality may be precisely in this unwelcome and rather chilling message. We come to the New Testament eagerly looking for answers, and we meet a blank or quizzical face: why is that the all-important problem? Not all human goods are possible all the time, and it would be a disaster to think that there was some experience without which nothing else made sense. Only if sexual intimacy is seen as the last hiding-place of real transcendence, to borrow a phrase from the American novelist, Walker Percy, could we assume that it mattered above all else.”

~ Rowan Williams, “Forbidden Fruit”, in Martyn Percy (ed.), Sexuality and Spirituality in Perspective (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997), pp.25-26.

Barth on Heresy

Posted by on May 12, 2009 Comments Off

In §2 of Cd I/1 Barth has a number of interesting reflections on the nature of heresy and its relationship to faith:

By heresy we understand a form of Christian faith which we cannot deny to be a form of Christian faith from the formal standpoint, i.e., in so far as it, too, relates to Jesus Christ, to His Church, to baptism, Holy Scripture and the common Christian creeds, but in respect of which we cannot really understand what we are about when we recognise it as such, since we can understand its content, its interpretation of these common presuppositions only as a contradiction of faith. (p. 32)

So heresy is paradoxical for Barth. On the one hand it can only be understood as something recognizably Christian. On the other hand understanding it as Christians presents one with a contradiction in terms of the essence of Christianity. Further to this:

Because of its paradoxical nature, heresy is for faith an important factor. Or, as we might say, unbelief in the form of heresy is for faith and important factor—which is not the case when it is present as pure unbelief. Because in heresy it is present as a form of faith, it must be taken seriously at this point and there can and must be serious conflict between faith and heresy. (p. 32)

Heresy is important for faith, not because it is complete unbelief, but precisely because it is a form of faith with which we have to reckon.

In true encounter with heresy faith is plunged into conflict with itself, because, so long and so far as it is not free of heresy, so long and so far as heresy affects it, so long and so far as it must accept responsibility in relation to it, it cannot allow even the voice of unbelief which it thinks it hears in heresy to cause it to treat it as not at least also faith but simply as unbelief. It must understand it as a possibility of faith [Italics added]. To be sure, it will see it as a profoundly incomprehensible one, which can be regarded only as a possibility of disruption and destruction of faith, as a possibility against which it must be on guard. Yet it must still understand it as a possibility of faith, and therefore and to this extent—hence the need for powerful defense—as its own possibility, a possibility within and not without the Church, hard though it may be to think of it as such. This is the reason why this conflict is a serious conflict. (p. 33)

This is also the reason why I often find it more important to criticize other forms of Christian faith and practice than the secular godless liberals of the world. Paganism can never be as important to Christian faith as heresy.

Anyone think Rowan Williams’s take on heresy and orthodoxy might have been influenced by these passages from Barth? There seems to be more than a few similarities to his arguments in Arius here.

All of it can be transformed

Posted by on April 12, 2009 2 comments

“…the resurrection becomes the moment which overthrows an idolatrous view of grace, idolatrous because it sees grace as serving my needs as I define them…Grace deals with us whole: it does not simply console me as a victim, for that would be to leave untouched the reality of my complicity in the hurt and damage of the world.  Human beings long to be reassured that they are innocent.  [However] the Gospel will not ever tell us that we are innocent, but it will tell us that we are loved; and in asking us to receive and consent to that love, it asks us to identify with, and make our own, love’s comprehensive vision of all we are and have been.  That is the transformation of desire as it affects our attitude to our own selves – to accept what we have been, so that all of it can be transformed….grace will remake, but not undo.  There is all the difference in the world between Christ uncrucified and Christ risen: they speak of two different kinds of hope for humanity, one unrealizable , the other barely imaginable, but at least truthful.”

~ Rowan Williams, Resurrection, 80-81.

Rowan Williams’ Holy Week Lectures

Posted by on April 10, 2009 3 comments

This year for Holy Week, Rowan Williams has delivered a series of lectures entitled “Growing in Prayer: What the Saints tell us about the Spiritual Journey.” Here are links to the mp3 files of these presentations. Definitely worth a listen.

Also, thanks to Jason who first alerted us to these lectures. He’s also been blogging up a storm recently, so folks should check out his blog if you’re not doing so already.

Rowan Williams on Barth

Posted by on April 3, 2009 2 comments

From an interview with Rupert Shortt in God’s Advocates:

What caught me and still catches me about Barth is that sense of exuberant bloody-mindedness, enlarged upon at huge length, the gusto, the verve of the theology, with all its outrageous misunderstandings of other people and its wonderfully sanctified egotism. Its a great performance, The Church Dogmatics, and Barth enjoys being Barth and in spreading himself like this, and in that enjoyment does convey, I think, uniquely among twentieth-century theologians, a sense of the exhilarating otherness of God.”

H/T: Peter Leithart

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