At the end of spring term, I had my students sit for a conversational final, during which I had the appalling realization that the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ made absolutely no difference to them in terms of the way they view humanity or ethics. That is, when asked what difference Jesus makes, they all basically invoked WWJD (who was Jack Daniels?). After tearing out large chunks of hair in front of them because it had taken me until the end of the semester to pick up on this tragedy, I pulled myself together and started asking questions tailored specifically toward trying to understand how they could’ve adopted such a superficial perspective. Continue reading ‘Intimacy and History’
Archive for the 'Rowan Williams' Category
Thanks to KP for pointing me toward this. Williams spends time on some of John of the Cross’ Christmas poems. Here’s an excerpt:
The birth of Jesus, in which that power which holds the universe together in coherence takes shape in history as a single human body and soul, is an event of cosmic importance. It announces that creation as a whole has found its purpose and meaning, and that the flowing together of all things for the joyful transfiguration of our humanity is at last made visible on earth.
It seems important to me to note that this interview from October 5th has received relatively little notice by either the Anglican Community or the greater Christian community, whereas the fact that he apparently said little, he mostly listened, at the House of Bishops in New Orleans, has been a great source of consternation for many: “why didn’t he chasten the Episcopals?” on one side; “Why didn’t he affirm [you fill in the blanks]?” on the other.
Anyway, with that comment made, here’s portions of a transcript from an Oct. 5th interveiw with Rowan Williams on BBC radio.
Q: Help me understand Archbishop, why these Christians, these exiles from Iraq have been targeted?
A: Since the Iraq war, Christian communities in Iraq which have lived there for literally thousands of years have been seen as, in some sense, agents of the West. People described how the sort of notes that were pushed under their door, the messages and threats they received said ‘you are American agents’ or ‘you are Zionist agents and we’re going to have to get rid of you.’ So there’s a very clear link in people’s minds with the conflict.
…[W]hatever one says now about that, it’s quite clear that our governments have a very heavy responsibility to see what can be done for these people. To secure the status and the welfare of refugees and to work on what seems the almost impossible task of making a society that they can return to in Iraq. And of course when some people talk – as some do - about the possibility of a partition solution in Iraq, very often the Christians are left out of account in this.
I don’t say this out of a kind of Christian chauvinism – wanting to defend my corner, The presence of Christians in communities like Iraq and Syria is actually part of what you might call a pluralist, tolerant, co-existent tradition in Middle-Eastern Arab society which is itself under threat.
So it’s not just about Christians, what’s at stake is much more than just the future of just the Christian community. But everywhere you go in the Middle-East, Christian people will say ‘the main problem we face is the catastrophic drainage of Christians from this region’. So that what were once plural societies not exclusively or narrowly Muslim, are becoming more and more closed.
…
I don’t know what sort of calculations were made. I do think that two things are clear: that the effect on Christian communities in the region was gravely under estimated, and that the scale of the refugee problem was gravely underestimated. Now what we have at the moment is a refugee problem in the Middle East of almost unprecedented scale. We’ve already got the Palestinian refugee problem and I also visited some Palestinian refugees on the outskirts of Beirut; we now have on top of that another million and a half – and growing – number of Iraqi refugees and this is where, when people talk about further destablilising the region, when you read about some American political advisers speaking about action against Syria and Iran, I can only say that I regard that as criminal, ignorant and potentially murderous folly.
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Q: Do you think there will ever be a time in the future when we look back at the invasion of Iraq and say yes actually that was for the best?
A: No.
I was meeting with my advisor yesterday, and we spoke briefly about JH Newman. The prof asked me where I saw myself fitting in theologically in the Anglican tradition. I didn’t quite know how to respond I remain poorly read in many of the Anglican theologians with whom I would align myself. I guess I could have answered Rowan Williams, but that would have been to evade the obvious question. I think he was asking me if I align myself with a robust (ahem, catholic) theological tradition that looks to Aquinas, etc. for its systematic and philosophical guidance. Seeing as how he is a Newman scholar, I suppose he would have expected something like Newman. Guessing that, I sincerely noted that I hoped to be better read in Newman upon the end of my degree. Add to that Hooker, Cranmer, Taylor, all the Cambridge Platonists, Farrer, Blake, and Herbert - and those are just the Anglicans!
DJW at ipsumesse has offered two meaty posts on Newman - the first is a brief, but helpful introduction to Newman (the man and theologian) that will help you develop a coat hook, so to speak, upon which you can hang the content of … the 2nd post, on Conscience. His exposition of conscience in Newman leads to an interesting comment on Intelligent Design:
It is interesting to note the contrast between Newman’s view and that of contemporary ‘Intelligent design’ proponents. Newman states flat out that “I believe in design because I believe in God; not in God because I see design”. Perhaps all ‘ID’ theorists should bear in mind that “The Almighty is something infinitely different from a principle, or a centre of action, or a quality, or a generalisation of phenomena”.
I imagine the difficult thing for some of us (Anglicans) with Newman is reconciling our appreciation for his work, and maybe even pursuing it on either academic or personal levels, with his conversion to Roman Catholicism.
Rowan Williams has awarded the 2007 Michael Ramsey prize to the master of the worldwide order of Dominican Friars, Timothy Radcliffe for his book What is the Point of Being a Christian?
While I would like to see the award used to highlight excellent Anglican scholarship, since academic theology gets relatively little attention (whether by Anglicans or otherwise), hopefully the award will raise more awarness about Michael Ramsey’s work.
I suggest to you that as the Cross and the resurrection were the spearhead of the gospel’s relevance and potency in the first century, so they can be also for our contemporary world. Ours is a world full of suffering and frustration: of what significance to it is Jesus who lived and died nearly two thousand years ago? The answer is chiefly this: that in the death and resurrection he shows not only the way for human beings, but the true image of God himself. Is there, within or beyond our suffering and frustrated universe, any purpose, way, meaning, sovereignty? We answer, yes, and the death and resurrection of Jesus portray this purpose, way, meaning, and sovereignty as living through dying, as losing self to find self, as the power of sacrificial love.
Thanks to Ben for the link.
Per Caritatem has an interesting 3 part series on a Reformed View of the Eucharist by Mike Vendsel that just ended last thursday. Vendsel reviews Douglas Farrow’s article, “Between the Rock and a Hard Place: In Support of (something like) a Reformed View of the Eucharist”. I must confess, I didn’t know there was such a thing. Just goes to show the state of catechesis when I was growing up. Farrow’s article basically posits two views: 1.is the “traditional” reformed view that attempts to safeguard a notion of Christ’s ontological body, existing in space and time, quite distinct from the sacramental elements. This perspective reminds me of something a youth leader said to me back in high school: “We don’t have sacraments; we have ordinances.” At the time, I took him to be mincing words, but since then I have come to wonder if it really wasn’t just an excuse to not deal with the tensions of being in a rather new tradition that has failed to articulate a metaphysic. Anyway, the problem with this for Farrow is how it radically seperates our materiality from Christ’s, and the Gnostic connotation of the worshipper engaged in some mental/spiritual connection to Christ.
The 2nd view is is the RC perspective, best articulated by Thomas, summarized by Farrow:
“by virtue of His divine omnipresence and omnipotence as the Logos, Jesus is able to provide on earth a eucharistic form of His humanity under the accidents of bread and wine, making present (albeit non-spatially) the actual substance of His exalted body and blood” (p. 171)
Calvin provides the foil to this view. For Calvin, the power of the Eucharist is not in dilluting Christ’s humanity, but rather in transporting us to heaven in union with Christ - a kind of beatific experience, it seems.
I won’t summarize the rest of the posts from Per Caritatem here, but rather direct your attention to the links to each post: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
The series followed a post on an article on the Eucharist by Catherine Pickstock, “Thomas Aquinas and the Quest for the Eucharist.” The post highlights Pickstock’s work with “Desire” and the allegory of the Grail. Here’s an interesting quote from Pickstock that seems to encapsulate most of the summary from Per Caritatem:
“Thus we can see that what the Eucharist is is desire. Although we know via desire, or wanting to know, and this circumstance alone resolves the aporia of learning, beyond this we discover that what there is to know is desire. But not desire as absence, lack and perpetual postponement; rather, desire as the free flow of actualization, perpetually renewed and never foreclosed” (pp. 178-179).
These posts got me thinking about how one might capture the distinctiveness of an Anglican view of the Eucharist. Rowan Williams talks about Hooker’s doctrine of Christology and Sacraments in his book, Anglican Identities. A major theme Williams brings out is Hooker’s emphasis of the incarnation as the redemption (or “restoration”) of humanity via the work of the Holy Spirit, not simply a relationship of solidarity by virtue of his being human: “it is a relation with a humanity itself already transfigured (not annihilated)by the outpouring of a divine gift.” The Holy Spirit can act upon and through us in multiple ways, including by not limited to the Eucharist - however one may theorize the relationship of Christ to the elements.
“Papist error about the Eucharist is less in the doctrine of transubstantiation as such than in the insistence on this as the only legitimate account of how Christ acts… Hooker can say, boldly, ‘there ensueth a kind of transubstantiation in us (67.2, p. 358); [similarly] Herbert argues that Christ died for humanity, not for bread, so it is the former that needs changing…”
While Hooker doesn’t seem to want to spend a lot of time fleshing out the metaphysics of the Sacraments, the point is clear: Christ acts on us through his gifts. “Receive the gift of divine action and the effects of divine action follow - in Christ’s humanity, in the bread and the wine, in the holy person.”
A wonderful essay, delivered by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Faculties of Trinity and Wycliff College at U of Toronto, can be found here. Thanks to Scott and the Faith and Theology blog (where, incidentally, there is also a lively debate about biblical inerrancy occuring just today!) for pointing me toward it originally. The essay is called “The Bible: Reading and Hearing” and is his attemt at a “renewed theological grasp of scripture. It is fitting, then, that in so seeking, he consults my former advisor, Kevin Vanhoozer, and his recent opus, The Drama of Doctrine. Williams raises a couple interesting and helpful points, that I thought I’d raise here, briefly.
First, Williams stresses that the test of any good theology of scripture is the primacy it gives scripture over everything else. This is a basic building block of being Christian. Moreover, this attests to the public nature of scripture; the reading of scripture is a public event. Listening and responsiveness to a unique and identifiable communicative act are the basic characteristics of the Christian, rather than self-generation or self-expression. Hence our understanding of the church as ekklesia. “From one (crucially important) point of view, the celebration of the Eucharist is that representation, the moment when all are equally and unequivocally designated as guests, responding to invitation.”
Second, the bible addresses us in two ways: (i) as “one with” a specific audience of address in the text, as in exhortatory passages; and (ii) texts that, while not addressing a specific audience, suggest a “movement” or change, as in parables. In either case, we need “the capacity to read/hear enough to sense the directedness of a text. Fragmentary reading is highly risky to the extent that it abstracts from what various hermeneutical theorists (Ricoeur above all) have thought of as the world ‘in front of the text’ – the specific needs that shape the movement and emphasis of the text itself.” Williams is concerned both by readers who too quickly draw polemical conclusions from passages, and readers who fail to draw any sort of conclusion about what the text is saying to us, the present audience that should be identifying with the original audience.
“I want to stress that what I am trying to define as a strictly theological reading of Scripture, a reading in which the present community is made contemporary with the world in front of the text, is bound to give priority to the question that the text specifically puts and to ask how the movement, the transition, worked for within the text is to be realised in the contemporary reading community.”
Williams is not here advocating some arbitrary identification of our world with the text’s. Rather, “the effects of the text” actually work to establish a connection with the reader by analogy with the “world in front of the text”: “…the connections between elements of scriptural text, the connections that constitute what I have here been calling its ‘movement’, will be uncovered in the reader’s world as still effecting the same movement and making the same overall demands.”
To fully realize this connection, the theologically sensitive reader understands the dual character of the text, as being an already completed work, but also a work that requires constant rereading and interpretation. “To identify a written text as sacred is to claim that the continuous possibility of re-reading, the impossibility of reading for the last time, is a continuous openness to the intention of God to communicate.” There is an invitation, a Eucharistic invitation even, to reread, reinterpret, and respond to the claims the text makes on us, furthering the basic aspect (attitude) of the Christian mentioned above.
The last thing I wanted to note is Williams’ reflection on the Resurrection in this context. Following the Eucharistic (responsive) aspect of reading scripture, Williams states that to properly hold our theologies of Eucharist and Scripture together, we need a proper Pneumatology, as the spirit is the “binder-togetherer” (to borrow a phrase from Orson Scott Card) of God and the Church. This requires, however, a robust notion of Christ’s Resurrection. The scripture is an invitation by God through the Son to all to join him in fellowship. But, “If it is not the present vehicle of God speaking in the risen Christ, it is a record only of God speaking to others. For it to be an address that works directly upon self and community now, it must be given to us as the continuation of the same act, the re-presenting and re-enacting of the same scriptural reality of invitation and the creation of a people defined by justice, mutual service and the liberty to relate to God as Father and faithful partner.” Resurrection as an ontological reality is the key to a theologically sound Eucharist and reading of scripture. Without it, the message of the scripture and the preforming of the Eucharist are simply remembrances of things past.
Williams’ essay here represents to me a solid step toward clarifying a distinctly Anglican and (surprise) orthodox contribution to Theological Hermeneutics. I only wish he’d expand this into book form. It will be interesting to see how and if other Anglicans respond to this theology of scripture and the ontological affirmation he gives to the ressurrection and its association to the message.
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