How does William come to place ”˜judgement’ in such a significant position?
The answer, as Williams painstakingly works it out in a number of studies, is hermeneutical. Williams largely accepts that almost two centuries of historical-critical work on the text of the Bible have made reading scripture as a seamless unity hopelessly naïve. However, this is not a cause for dismay as far as Williams is concerned. Contrary to those older liberal voices who would see the authority of scripture as greatly diminished by historical criticism of the Bible, Williams actually sees the authority and significance of scripture as found in the diverse, inchoate and evidently worked-on text. The phenomenon of scripture always incorporated within its boundaries a plurality of voices and indeed a plurality of perspectives. The historical criticism has only revealed what was in fact always the case: that the New Testament is the record of the first awed, stumbling responses to an encounter with Jesus of Nazareth. We should not expect consistency; in fact, we should be delighted not to find it, because their inarticulacy and disagreements give us hope that our meagre efforts at talking about God are not ultimately futile, whatever their inadequacy.
“Williams largely accepts that almost two centuries of historical-critical work on the text of the Bible have made reading scripture as a seamless unity hopelessly naïve.”
Would Williams also agree that modern sociology, psychology and every other “-ology” has made it clear that human beings are not a seamless unity and as such whatever he (or anyone else) utters can be (like the Bible) desconstructed into a hodge-podge of competing truth claims based on gender, economics, race and unresolved issues with his mother? If the best he can do is interact with a text which is bumbling along in its confused efforts to grasp at the Christ then he does not have much to say, does he? SO I ask, yet again, when will these people who have no confidence in truth claims just stop talking?
“…and unresolved issues with his mother?”
I fear that this bit of humor resolves some otherwise impossible dichotomies about what the man demonstrates and teaches. Wow!
Back to the topic at hand; It is not the small (miniscual) amount of seeming conflicts in the Bible that bother me. It is, rather, the overwhelming consistancy and authority that bothers me.
Fr. Marx you are letting your appalling lack of academic sophistication show. How dare you! 🙂
Great post.
Mark Twain once observed that he was not troubled by the parts of the Bible he did not understand. He was troubled by the parts that he did undersatnd.
The opening question is do you concur with Jensen’s characterization of Williams? It appears that Jeff and Don do. What about other t19 readers? (Full disclosure – I am not a reasserter.)
Just to be clear: I am not trying at all to be polemical in this piece. I am trying as best as I can to make sense of WIlliams’ theological position and to give it a fair articulation. Please let me know if I have been not so!
John, I hope it’s not an accurate characterization. I don’t consider myself informed enough to guess.
Mr Jensen:
Please pay little attention to me; I am one of those low-brow college drop-outs.
My one comment on your work; when you say, “We should not expect consistency; in fact, we should be delighted not to find it, because their inarticulacy and disagreements give us hope that our meagre efforts at talking about God are not ultimately futile, whatever their inadequacy”, I would expect to find here an account of the work of the Holy Spirit. It is not just our inadequacy that determines the effect of the message, it is a great deal the work of God in the human soul that determines the effect of the communication. In both Scripture and my own life I find a plethora of evidence that this is so.
I’m not sure if my observation is of your interpretation of Williams or of Williams’ view, itself.
The courage of Paul’s affirmations in Hebrews, which I’ve been reading this week, make this look so … lame.
John Chilton,
I have no problem with the theology espoused by ++Rowan, but I am not a reasserter either. The theology (or lack thereof) that I have trouble with is the “all or nothing” kind espoused (to a degree) by Marcus Borg and (fully) by academic pretenders like +Spong who throw the baby out with the bathwater. As Mr. Jensen notes, earlier liberals say if one thing is wrong, the whole is demolished. This is actually as radical as literalism.
Michael Jensen,
This work of self-evangelisation requires an exploratory fluidity and provisionality – as it holds out the gospel, the Church is always on the run, as it were, always under its own question. ‘At any point in its history the Church needs both the confidence that it has a gospel to preach, and the ability to see that it cannot readily specify in advance how it will find words for preaching in particular new circumstances’.
I think this is an accurate reading of ++Rowan’s academic position. The problem is that he refuse to put it into practice. He has the fluidity, but lacks the confidence.
You can download a free copy of ‘The theology of Rowan Williams’ by Garry Williams, a professor at Oak Hill Seminary in London. It includes a critique of Williams’ doctrine of Scripture, which is very far from classical Anglicanism and catholicism – ‘orthodoxe malgre soi’? There is also a discussion of RW’s theology on an English website called ‘The Ugley Vicar’, in a series of mp3 talks.
BTW, is Michael Jensen the son of the Sydney Archbishop?
# 11; forgot to give the link:
http://www.latimertrust.org/theology-rowanwilliams.htm
Michael Jensen writes: “[T]he New Testament is the record of the first awed, stumbling responses to an encounter with Jesus of Nazareth.”
Well, it’s the record of some of the first responses to Jesus. Let’s not forget that those responses were not universally shared: Forget Pilate, Herod, etc.; we can infer that even influential sympathizers like Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus didn’t have a similar response — if they had, the record presumably would reflect their prominent roles in the early church, and of course that’s not the case. (And that’s not even mentioning the wealthy Lazarus, who you’d think would have had more reason than most to be a loyal follower of the Teacher.)
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Michael Jensen writes (conjecturing about +Rowan’s views): “We should not expect consistency; in fact, we should be delighted not to find it, because their inarticulacy and disagreements give us hope that our meagre efforts at talking about God are not ultimately futile, whatever their inadequacy.”
That seems pretty much like a non-sequitur. Inconsistency suggests people who are missing the bulls-eye.
The same is probably true of inconsistencies among the world’s various religions — none of them hits the bulls-eye, but maybe collectively they’re not far from it.
Recall the story in The Wisdom of Crowds about the 800 people who guessed the weight of an ox at a county fair in 1906; none of them got it right, but the average of their incorrect guesses was within one pound of the correct number.
(As the book’s author explains, each guess can be represented as [A] the correct answer [B] plus an error component [which could be either positive or negative, depending on whether the guess is too heavy or too light]. If the error components are randomly distributed, you can filter them out by averaging, and the resulting average guess should indeed be very close to the right answer.)
Perhaps humanity’s collective views of the Divine are in something very roughly like the same category.
Son of Sydney’s Archbishop?
Yep, guilty as charged.
What you read here, btw, is not my opinion, it is my attempt to summarise WIlliams.
Michael, I enjoyed your dad’s book ‘The Doctrine of Revelation’ (or some similar title, a couple years since I read it) – a fresh approach from an orthodox outlook. Are you at Wycliffe Hall? The London Times has some negative report on it from university bigwigs, I think.
Yes: studying for my DPhil at the University of Oxford while attached to Wycliffe Hall. Writing about martyrdom – Oxford is a good place to write about it!
Is Williams not essential diminishing the definition of both Revelation and Truth?
If we view the Scriptures only as the collected writings of various inspired men then we can have no real assurance of any consistency. No ultimate “truth” is possible. It is only when it is believed that God is at work behind all of them that a consistency bridging the spatial and chronological distances can be believed and expected.
The real question is; What does Williams believe about the nature of inspiration? If he believes God is involved in inspiring the texts does he think God is inconsistent or simply incompetant to co-ordinate people over time?
Neither (of course). He would say, I think, that God doesn’t squash the humanity of the authors but rather makes use of it. He works with their limitations, so that the books are truly human witnesses to Christ but also divinely inspired.
He would say, I think, that God doesn’t squash the humanity of the authors but rather makes use of it. He works with their limitations, so that the books are truly human witnesses to Christ but also divinely inspired.
Well of course. But does God work with their limitations in such a way that His Truth comes out consistently? Is God able to “write straight with crooked lines”?. If God cannot or does not it really forces the question whether there is any divine plan in the scope of His revelation.
It really seems that he is a reverse Monophysite when it comes to revelation: that is, for him the human side of Scripture dominates whatever divine nature we might see in it. Yet if we are Chalcedonian in our faith we should recognize that the divine does not diminish the human nor does the human diminish the divine. What holds for the Eternal Word should also hold for the Written Word.
Well, that’s a curious (possibly dangerous) incarnational analogy: I take it we are not to worship the written word…right?
And I am sure in case that a Williamsish response would be to accuse you (us) of docetism!
Christopher Hathaway [#18] writes: ‘If we view the Scriptures only as the collected writings of various inspired men then we can have no real assurance of any consistency. No ultimate “truth” is possible.’
Oh, please, Christopher, not that hoary chestnut again. Please look up the fallacy of the false dichotomy (or false dilemma). “If not-A then B, and B is impossible/unacceptable, therefore it MUST be A” only works if A and B are the only two possibilities.
No, we do not worship the Written Word. But if it truly is the Word of God in the sense of God’s communication to us it ought to be analogous to the supreme self revelation of God in His Son.
As far as Docetism, that would be a ludicrous and laughable accusation as the Chalcedonian formula was set out to affirm the humanity of Christ in responce to the monophysite heresy. But one needn’t correct monophysitism or docetism with Arrianism or Adoptionism.
D.C. Have you read Ernst Troelstch/ His theory of history postulates that until the end of history no definitive understanding of the meaning of history can be achieved. Lacking the God’s eye perspective the best we would be able to attain is an approximate understanding. Nothing definitive, thus no ultimate truth. It is only guesses.
Do you claim that we can get closer to the Truth than that? How, I wonder?
Of course, if the end of history enters into history in the middle, or even at the beginning, if God who holds all time in His hand reveals its meaning to us then Troelstch’s observation would no longer apply.
The question is, do you believe the Lord of History has revealed its meaning to those of us living through it?
Oh, and D.C, you misdiagramed the logic of my argument.
I did not argue, Either A or B, B is impossible, therefore A.
I postulated, If A Scripture is ruled by human inconsistency and limitation) then B (no consistent or absolute truths).
I left implied, If not B then not A.
Christopher Hathaway [#23] writes: “Lacking the God’s eye perspective the best we would be able to attain is an approximate understanding. Nothing definitive, thus no ultimate truth. It is only guesses. Do you claim that we can get closer to the Truth than that?”
I have no idea whether we can get closer to the Truth than approximate understandings. Nor does that terribly bother me; approximate understandings seem to be serviceable enough for this life — especially since we seem to keep improving them.
What I do have is a gut-level trust (informed by a lot of study, including conversations here) that in the very, very, very long term, everything is going to work out unimaginably wonderfully. That allows me to be comfortable knowing that I don’t fully know the Truth.
Christopher Hathaway [#24], I didn’t misdiagram your argument.
Your “A,” rephrased in affirmative form, was: Scripture is more than the collected writings of various inspired men.
Your “B” was: We can have no real assurance of any consistency. No ultimate “truth†is possible.
So “If not-A then B, and B is impossible/unacceptable” is an accurate verbal diagram.
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Christopher, in your #23 you ask: “The question is, do you believe the Lord of History has revealed its meaning to those of us living through it?”
I conjecture that the LORD (or as Orthodox Jews would put it, G-d) is revealing all kinds of things to us, in a very long and drawn-out process.
If by “revealed,” however, you mean a complete, final revelation of the meaning of history that happened nearly 2,000 years ago, then clearly the answer must be No — what we don’t know could choke a horse, and we often find that what we think we know can turn out to be wrong. (Besides, you already know my views on christology, soteriology, and the limited authority of Scripture.)
25. D. C.:
You have a good attitude about not having to know everything.
Based on what we do know and are certain of, we then act in areas of the lesser known based on faith.
Without faith, it is not possible to please God.
I wonder if an “aproximate” understanding on the equality of all men would really be serviceable in a fight to end slavery.
Anyway, your rediagram of my argument is not what you claimed. You claimed a “false dichotomy”. Since I argued, If A then B, your turning it into, Either Not-A or B is true, but cannot be described as a “false dichotomy”, since it cannot be both A and Not-A at the same time. It is either A or Not-A.
And check again. I did not say B was impossible. I said if it is not B then it cannot be A.
The logic holds if the premises are true. You did not refute them.
Fr. Jensen, is it the case that many of the inconsistencies that demand fluidity of interpretion arise from the incalculable difficulty of the divine and eternal finding a suitable language that a human can speak and understand? What words can Christ say that in genuine fact, form a grammar and a lexicon adaquate to the task at hand? Is this not so formidable a task that consistency and clarity must inevitably suffer? If scripture were wholly consistent and clear, would we not do well to be profoundly suspicious. Are you saying such a thing?
Larry
Not me: I am trying to articulate RW’s position. And I prefer not to be addressed as ‘Father’!
OK, mate.
Ok. What do I call you, Mike? That seems a to chummy,does it not?
You are not saying such a thing. Very well, but then let me ask you if my proposition is not probable, and if it is not, why not?
I am sorry this has fallen of the table so to speak of the immediately present entries. I really would like to have this answered, for the situation of making divine concepts into human constructs a vital part of understanding scripture. And I asked you because, for some reason, Rowan Williams doesn’t chat with me usually. I cannot imagine why.
Larry