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Theology with an X factor
Christopher J. Insole enjoys a profound meditation on the relationship between God and the world
 Called to God: the thoughts of St Francis of Assisi are used by Patricia Jordan to lead the reader on an exploration into the mystery of God’s love, in An Affair of the Heart: A biblical and Franciscan journey (Gracewing £9.99 (£9); 978-0-85244-690-4). The book looks at biblical themes from a Franciscan perspective; its jacket illustration, reproduced here, is St Francis receives the Stigmata, by Giotto, which is in Santa Croce, Florence |
| Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in modern theology Rowan Williams, edited by Mike Higton
SCM Press £21.99 (978-0-334-04095-8) Church Times Bookshop £19.80 ENGLISH-SPEAKING theology has gone through a number of phases in the past 50 years. In the 1960s, many theologians were smoking in the bike sheds with the cool kids — secularists, existentialists, and atheists — trying not to cough, or wear the wrong socks. Going to university in the 1970s and ’80s, theologians began to find that they preferred their own company, and discovered that they could pass for a surprisingly acceptable intellectual sub-culture. We then see an explosion of what we might call “Christianity without x” — “x” standing variously for God, Jesus, Church, metaphysics, realism, presence, religion, transcendence. Rowan Williams’s thought, exemplified in this collection of essays from 1978 to1998, demonstrates his independence of mind. Williams prefers to do “Christianity with x”, learning the idiom and concerns of a range of modern interlocutors — without slavishly following the trend — but transposing them into a different key, which brings them into relationship rather than opposition. Theological anoraks will enjoy tracking and questioning the shifting nuances of Williams’s fidelity to Hegel as a “basically Christian philosopher”, or weighing up the justice of his sharp critique of Rahner, or McCord Adams. That Williams is always quiet, patient, and calm can make his criticism all the more devastating when it comes. Seen at more of a distance, these essays constitute a profound meditation on the relationship between God and the world, creatively disciplined by the great themes of the Trinity and divine simplicity. These two doctrines — Trinity and simplicity: “threeness and oneness” — are not, at first, easy bedfellows. When Christians confess belief in a Triune God, they are in some sense — as Williams unpacks it — committing themselves to thinking of God as a plurality, a relationship, a participation in another, a self-abnegation and communication. Williams, rather like a Middle Earth sage, has the ability to suddenly appear behind you when you thought you saw him in receding into the distance. To speak of the Trinity is to think of God as a gathering concept for the “thinkable (and thus reconcilable) character of reality”; and to hope for this reconciliation is to come full circle and “think ultimate simplicity, indivisibility and self-relation”. Both Trinity and simplicity arise from a refusal to conceive of God as an object alongside the world, or as another person, only bigger. Williams’s underlying doctrine of God generates a coherent set of preferences: for a mediated conception of truth rather than the linear delivery of information; and for communication that shapes the participants rather than imposing solutions. Self-discovery requires involvement rather than privacy and purity; and we flourish in our particular love of creaturely things rather than in an abstract love of the principles (even where our principle is “to love the particular”). Relationship and risk are the way into otherness, rather than a mystical palpitation about silence or the void. As creatures, we should accept “the inescapability of taking time”, the need for “puzzlement, invitation, dialogue” rather than suspicion, certainty, or the search for secret gnosis. These preferences make, one suspects, the Archbishop of Canterbury a nice person (kind, patient, attentive, and so forth). But, make no mistake, Williams does not choose them because God is very nice and so archbishops should be quite nice, too. Rather, they are a meditation on our constraints as creatures before our Creator, as “we are driven at last to fling ourselves down upon human mortality, the skin and bone,” in which “the Wisdom of God speaks to us.” Dr Christopher J. Insole lectures in theology and ethics in the University of Durham. To order either book, email the details to Church Times Bookshop (please mention "Church Times Bookshop price") |
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