THE BOOK THAT SHAPED MY FAITH: ROWAN WILLIAMS “ON CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY”
I first read On Christian Theology by Rowan Williams in June 2007. It was a month and a half before the birth of my second daughter and about six months before my family made our third trans-Atlantic move—this time to the UK, where I had just accepted a position as Lecturer at the University of Exeter.
At that time, I was in the late stages of what I now call my "Protestant liberalism era." I had been formed in a Pentecostal church in my late teens, but by my early twenties, I had all but lost my faith. A toxic mix of clergy abuse and spiritual burnout drove me away. My pastor and mentor—the one who had nurtured my call to ministry in high school—ended up in prison, the church split apart, and my trust in God shattered with it.
When my faith collapsed, I was already two-thirds of the way through seminary. Ever the pragmatist, I decided to finish my degree and, rather than continue with ministry, pursue an academic career. After all, many of my favorite professors seemed to be agnostic—perhaps losing faith was part of the academic journey?
I was attending Fuller Seminary at the time, so for me, my ‘rebellion’ (at least, rebellious for Fuller in the 1990s) took the form of seeking intellectual refuge in theologians like Paul Tillich, Don Cupitt, and John Dominic Crossan—thinkers who allowed me to engage with theology while rejecting the idea of an interventionist God. The God I was rejecting was the one I had closely associated with the pain and trauma of my broken church experience—a God who resembled a genie, capriciously granting wishes, or a holy slot machine that occasionally rewarded the coin-drops of prayer with prosperity and security (but just like a slot machine, more often didn’t). After watching my church-world fall apart, I could no longer trust in this vision of God.
So, instead, I clung to the poetry of theology—its symbols and rituals—but dismissed its metaphysical claims. The bodily resurrection of Jesus, miracles, even personal prayer felt like relics of a faith I had long since abandoned. Instead, I took refuge in "Christian atheism" and theological hermeneutics, where I replaced metaphysics with narrative, and saw God not as an intervening agent in the world, but as the subject of my “ultimate concern”—a conceptual anchor for values and meaning rather than a personal, acting deity.
If this had happened to me in the 2020s, I would have called it "deconstruction"—the term post-evangelicals now use when the faith they were raised with no longer aligns with the faith they need. Looking back, I see that I didn’t just deconstruct my faith. I discarded it. I wasn’t interested in salvaging what had been broken. I was wounded, traumatized, burned out, and wanted nothing from God, assuming God felt the same.
By the time I purchased On Christian Theology, I was a year past the completion of my doctorate and had spent much of that time adjuncting and wondering if I’d made a grave mistake in pursuing an academic career. Unexpectedly, I landed a three-year fixed-term post at the University of Exeter, where I would work with Mike Higton on a research project about ministry formation in southwest England. Mike had just finished a major biography on Rowan Williams, and although I had the freedom to shape my courses, I thought it wise to read Williams’s work, given my colleague’s interests.
I distinctly remember reading On Christian Theology in the backyard of our rental house in West Seattle, sitting in an Adirondack chair on a rare sunny day. When I reached the chapter titled “Between the Cherubim,” something in me shifted.
In this chapter, Williams reflects on the resurrection of Jesus, particularly the scene in John’s Gospel where two angels flank the folded grave clothes—a visual echo of the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant. Just as the empty space on the mercy seat points to the presence of God through absence, so too is the reality of Jesus mediated in these resurrection stories through what is not there—namely, the body of Jesus. For Williams, the resurrection is not about the resuscitation of a corpse, but rather a living, divine presence that transcends and ruptures human expectations. He emphasizes that the indeterminacy of these resurrection stories—full of unrecognizable figures, confusion, and delayed understanding—serves to upend our own fixed ideas of how God operates in the world. Williams invites us not into a certainty of knowledge (something I ironically believed I could never have again), but into a relationship of trust, where we encounter a God whose ways remain elusive yet deeply present.
In short, Williams’s treatment of the resurrection offers a picture of a God who is actively upending, subverting, and undermining all of our attempts to fix, possess, or domesticate the divine. In On Christian Theology I encountered a God that resisted manipulation by wishes or prayers – still less by the structures of a fallible church – but who instead was made known through self-giving love. The empty tomb becomes a symbol not just of Christ’s victory over death, but of a presence that resists being controlled by human institutions, theological constructs, or religious practices. Williams concludes by suggesting that the subversive power of the resurrection reminds us that Christ’s presence—known in this profound absence—transcends the structures and systems we create in our attempts to control or contain God. It is an invitation into an ongoing, dynamic relationship with a God who is both present and elusive, beyond the reach of human certainty.
As I read his words, a light flicked on in both my mind and soul. Williams’s intellectual rigor, combined with rich theological imagery, made the bodily resurrection of Jesus—a belief I had long dismissed—suddenly seem not so implausible.
It wasn’t just Williams’s intellectual credibility that moved me—it was his profound honesty. Here was someone who still believed in something I had written off, and his belief gave me permission to consider believing again.
This wasn’t an immediate conversion experience; the seeds were planted, but they took time to grow. Slowly, I noticed a shift in how I approached theology, both in my research and in my teaching. I found myself less interested in theology as an intellectual exercise and more curious about how it functioned as the language of the church—a way to describe the God encountered in the resurrected Jesus, a God known to us in endlessly self-giving, non-coercive love. I wasn’t merely critiquing the faith as a self-made outsider, but as someone who had experienced something akin to what Paul Ricoeur describes as a “second naivete”—a desire to return to the texts of faith and to be seen by God again. My faith was becoming less about solving theological puzzles and more about entering into a relationship of trust, shaped by a God who defies neat categorization yet continually invites us to draw near. Theology wasn’t just an academic subject I could play with or critique; it was how I learned to love God with my mind.
When I left the church in my early twenties, I had also left behind my ordination as an associate pastor (at age 19!) in a small Pentecostal congregation. Since I was a tween, I had believed that I was called to ministry, but I abandoned that conviction when my faith crumbled. However, On Christian Theology, and that chapter in particular, made me reconsider everything.
In 2009, I was confirmed by the Bishop of Salisbury at the Easter Vigil, marking my formal return to the church through membership in the Church of England. Ten years later, I would be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church. Rowan Williams’s theology helped me rediscover a God I could trust and led me to a church I could call home.
Years later, as the academic dean at General Seminary, I had the privilege of finally meeting Rowan Williams. He was on the Close to deliver the annual Paddock Lectures. By that time, I had used his work extensively in my teaching, even leading a graduate seminar on his theology (which he attended as a special guest that winter!). On the morning of his departure, while waiting for his Uber to Newark, I awkwardly shared the story of how his book had played a part in my reconversion, and with pen in hand, asked him to sign my well-worn copy of On Christian Theology.
Today, I still use the chapter “Between the Cherubim” in every Christology course I teach. As a nerdy flex, I include a scan of the cover page with Rowan’s signature in the PDF of the chapter I assign. It serves as both a reminder of the circuitous path God leads us on and a mark of how this book profoundly shaped my faith.
