WHO IS ROWAN WILLIAMS?
Public Domain.
Eyebrows and all, Rowan Williams – born in Wales in 1950, Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, and a prolific writer throughout his career – is one of the most recognizable contemporary Anglican theologians. Alongside numerous devotional texts, he has written profound works of theology which are accessible to non-specialist readers, most notably his trilogy of Being Human, Being Christian, and Being Disciples, as well as the collection of essays published as On Christian Theology. His work has catalyzed transformative engagements between Western and Eastern Christian theologians, especially through his popularization of Vladimir Lossky and Sergii Bulgakov. His book on Arianism cemented the current consensus that Arius is best understood as a conservative neo-Platonist, not an iconoclastic radical. From a literary perspective, he has written books on the theological significance of, among other subjects, Dostoyevsky, tragedy, and poetic form, as well as publishing a collection of his own poetry. ‘The Body’s Grace’ and The Wound of Knowledge, meanwhile, have been staples of seminary and church formation programs since their publication.
All of which is to say that the depth and breadth of Williams’ interests defy substantive summary, much as glints of light off a flowing stream defy reduction to still images. Rather than trying to capture the glimmering of his work through an attempt at survey, then, this introduction hopes to calibrate what it means to see Williams’ writing in its fullness, by tracing his understanding of how grace works in and through theological reflection.
In his preface to Christ the Heart of Creation, Williams says he hopes to show that exploring both what Christians have believed about Jesus and how these beliefs have emerged from wrestling with their sense of the divine life can “give more depth and substance to imagining … what new connections or possibilities are opened up by speaking and imagining [through the classical theologies of Christ’s nature].” (1) The purpose of working through the slow and contested development of this theological tradition is to deepen our capacity for forging new possibilities through old words.
Williams’ sense of this deepening reflection is deeply intertwined with his understanding of Jesus’s person. Echoing Kathryn Tanner’s influential account of ‘non-competitive transcendence,’ he shows how classical accounts of the union of God and creature in Christ clarify our talk “about God’s relation with the world, the relation between infinite and finite, Creator and creation.” (2) More specifically, in describing how Jesus Christ can be one person who is both human and divine through divine transcendence rather than in spite of it, classical Christology implies that Creator and creation should not be understood as competing for the same space: they are so different from each other that they can be co-present without contradiction. Generalized beyond Jesus’ unique specificity, this worldview casts God’s grace as working through the contingent activities of creaturely freedom, at the same time as making our freedom possible. We can think here of how a spontaneous gesture of care from a stranger can be experienced as God’s love, without needing to think of the stranger as God or God as benign puppet master. God loves us in and through our neighbor’s love, without the act of love being any less our neighbor’s own; God’s grace works through the creature’s freedom.
This understanding of the relationship between God and creation has profound implications for how we understand theological reflection. For if God’s grace works through acts of creaturely freedom, then God can work through the historical development of theological reflection, without requiring us to posit crude identifications between God’s thinking and the historical development of doctrine. As Williams puts it, under this view “the passage of time becomes the vehicle of grace, in that what is achieved and realized in the temporal order is genuinely more and deeper than the initial relation of Creator to creature.” (3) So, the development of Christological reflection is not a matter of solving an intellectual puzzle. Rather, by thinking through this development, Christians can take on an intensified sense of how God relates to creatures (without saying that God ever gets further from or closer to creation). And in this, our sense of how we can relate to God and neighbor is likewise deepened and intensified, as we are invited to imagine and enact novel forms of gracious communion. In all, thinking through the development of Christian doctrine is a way of entering into the ways that grace works through theological reflection to intensify how creatures relate to God and each other.
Crucially, this does not mean that Christian theological reflection is transmuted into an infallible vehicle of absolute truth. Williams does not hold that God works through our thinking by effacing what makes it creaturely thought: the finitude of our language, for example, or the limits of our understanding. To say that God can realize a deeper relation to the creature through theological reflection is not to render Christian doctrine divine,; and to say that God intensifies God’s relation to the creature through our contemplation does not mean that we can claim the prerogatives of the mind of God. Instead, grace works by inviting us to inhabit the fullness of our creaturely finitude.
Williams illustrates how this inhabitation works over the course of the six densely layered chapters of The Edge of Words. Here, he explores what it means to think of language as a material phenomenon—as part of how created bodies navigate a world where they must negotiate resistance from and mutuality with other bodies. Among other things, this means that our language is necessarily ‘unfinished,’ such that our expressions (including our theological expressions!) are always open to reinterpretation and rearticulation. It means seeing our speech as responsible speech, since what we say is always forged through encounter. And it means sitting with the consequences of the fact that, in a very real sense, we can never say the same thing twice—every repetition adds to and intensifies the significance of what we have already said (think of what it is like to reread a story after a decade, and to feel the words in a whole new way).
Most fundamentally, Williams shows that our ways of making meaning can themselves be transformed by what we say. In our habitual speech, he argues, “there is an underlay of language taken for granted.” (4) This does not just cover facts we treat as given, but specific ways of thinking and reasoning, of creating and then ascribing meaning. Think of how one forms a concept ‘human’, for example, and then uses this concept to render an array of claims meaningful—the ethical import of human rights, the responsibility to avoid acting ‘inhumanly,’ the ascription of a particular consciousness of the world to other bodies. Judgements of this sort are often made instantly because of how deeply ‘human’ is coded into the underlay of language. Indeed, this underlay is a feature of our life that we rarely see operating, because its very operation governs how we see. It shapes what we can imagine, and so what we can imagine doing. Our talk about God can, however (much like various forms of poetry and other modes of reflective thinking), provoke a ‘crisis’ in our habits of thought, one that transforms the fundamental frameworks of our imagination. As Williams puts it, “part of our linguistic practice is to put pressure on what we say in order that we may come to see more than our initial account delivers.” (5) And part of the practice of theology is to concentrate this pressure through the effort of thinking our thoughts of God, to see how they might reconfigure the patterns of meaning that shape the patterns of our life.
It is here that we see how theological reflection can deepen and intensify our relationships with God and each other—namely, by transforming our most fundamental habits of mind. Christian theological speech, in its attempts to speak of the humanity and divinity of Christ, the unity and Triunity of God, the co-constitutive nature of grace and freedom, puts pressure on how we understand each of these terms. By joining these words together in ways that should not work, theological reflection generates an excess of meaning, ‘making strange’ what might have seemed familiar. Williams thus holds that our words about God should be “carefully calculated shocks,” (6) designed not to represent God according to a fully coherent logical system, but to disrupt the coherence of our schemas as we try to represent God through them. (Importantly, this means that theological reflection must make itself strange as well; Christian theology should not be a last word from which to discern the absolute truth of the world.)
Williams is not saying that Christian theology brings us ever closer to a predetermined endpoint. He is illustrating the divine significance of the fact that, as we put pressure on our everyday language in our efforts to talk about God, our theological reflection can catalyze transformations of thought which are simultaneously transformations of life (indeed, this is a part of writing the continuing history of the development of doctrine). As he writes in The Edge of Words, after all, “what we say … alters what we can say next.” (7) The wager of Williams’ theology is that our attempts to speak of God will alter not just what we can say next, but also what we can do and who we will be, as God’s infinite grace works in and through the contours of our creatureliness.
One can begin exploring Rowan Williams’ thought from any number of starting points. And there are substantial ways in which his work is subject to important critiques. His works rarely engage with non-white or LGBTQ+ thinkers in any substantial manner, for example, often limiting their depth and scope when read in isolation. The way that Williams emphasizes the fundamental relationality of human existence, for example—which I have not broached here, but is beautifully developed in Being Human in particular—risks assuming that his readers are not already all too conscious of both this reality and the constitutive vulnerabilities that it entails, thereby treating as a conclusion something that other theological thinkers treat as a problematic starting point for critical reflection. (8) But wherever one starts and whatever critiques might be levelled, one can have confidence that his goal is not to give his readers final answers or authoritative conclusions. He is instead inviting us into a mode of theological reflection that is open to transforming its own presuppositions and whose endpoint is unknown. Premised on the Christological idea that God’s grace both preserves and works through our contingency and finitude, this reflection invites us to prayerfully think alongside how others have sought to express God. And it does so in the hope that as we think old thoughts anew, God will work through our communal thinking to transform the shared patterns of our lives, making our worlds beautifully strange and suffusing our bodies with the meanings of grace.
Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation, xi
Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation, xiii
Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation, p.121
Williams, Edge of Words, p.6
Williams, Edge of Words, p.129
Williams, Edge of Words, p.148 There is again consonance with Kathryn Tanner’s work in Theories of Culture here.
Williams, Edge of Words, p.62
Linn Tonstad in particular has made this general argument with regards to the role of ‘vulnerability’ in contemporary theological thought: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AIHZTkS-tKk
