ROWAN WILLIAMS’s enthronement sermon in 1992 concluded with a prayer that the Church be given “an imagination set on fire by the vision of God the Holy Trinity”. Over the years, he had repeatedly alluded to the “imaginative bereavement of contemporary secularism with its instrumental and managerial focus, and consumerist materialism, and the threat it poses to our humanity”. Now he had a platform from which to promote the imaginative resources of religion and art as a corrective to such cultural bereavement, with the Church as “an echo chamber of the eternal Word”.
But what did he mean? After all, although he promoted imagination as playing a critical part in rebalancing culture through a rejuvenated Christian witness, it is a theology of imagination which is never formally articulated or systematised in Williams’s extensive oeuvre. It is to the provision of just such a systematic exposition of his theology that Barbara Howard devotes herself in this well-researched, clearly argued, and passionate labour of love.
The key dynamic informing Williams’s theology of imagination is divine love overflowing into creation (kenosis) and standing outside itself (extasis) as instantiated in the crucified Christ. The “finite analogue” of this dynamic is human beings giving expression to self-transcending capacities of human imagination.
Divine desire is the energy “activating creation and enticing our human response”. That response mirrors divine desire and imagination, and is the energy that refocuses human desire “towards the realisation of God’s purpose for creation, the restoration of all things in Christ”. The Christian Church is a “workshop” for the refocusing of desire and imagination.
Language must be augmented by the “excessive” speech of metaphor, symbol, drama, and paradox to articulate imagination — and, for Williams, poetry, spiritual reflections, and praying with icons. Howard enriches each chapter with an effective exposition of one of his poems which subtly balances sometimes quite dense analyses of Williams’s debt to the likes of St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, Paul Ricoeur, and Erich Przywara, to name but a few. Howard concludes that Williams’s image of “a world . . . pregnant with a different kind of life” draws together the various lines of thought that constitute his theology of imagination.
Of course, it is a world as yet imperfect and incomplete. What Williams calls “the Christian tragic imagination” is the capacity “to hold together in faith and hope both the destructive aspects of finite existence and the vision of God’s ultimate eschatological purpose”. This is to discern “the sparkle from the coal” — the sparkle of hope-filled love within the coal of finite existence.
The very fact that Williams’s enthronement vision requires such detailed exposition and explanation fuels doubts about its effectiveness as a cultural and kerygmatic game-changer. But his diagnosis and proposed cure retain their potency, and Howard has put us in her debt by so assiduously collating and articulating such profound wisdom and prophetic challenge to Church and society.
The Rt Revd Dr John Saxbee is a former Bishop of Lincoln.
The Sparkle from the Coal: Rowan Williams’ theology of imagination
Barbara Howard
SCM Press £35
(978-0-334-06629-3)
Church Times Bookshop £28