“IT IS far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated,” wrote John Ruskin, in a sentence that neatly shows that he could do it. Rowan Williams aims at the same hard-won simplicity in this little book, which seeks “to say something about the overall character of Christian commitment”.
In eight short chapters, which read like talks for non-specialist audiences, he looks at faith, Christianity, theology, the Church, the trio of scripture, tradition and reason, and “why it all matters”, with searching questions for thought or discussion.
This is trademark Williams. His aim is to bring classic Christian doctrines to life in language that almost strains with its abhorrence of cliché, and of what Auden called “the preacher’s loose, immodest tone”. His determination is to be both simple and true.
It is the kind of simplicity that slows our reading down, as Williams makes us look with fresh eyes at what we thought familiar, in non-technical language that, nevertheless, has weight and seriousness. “Because [Jesus] accepts this suffering as an act of love, he changes what is possible for human beings.” “Whatever exactly went on during that first day of Pentecost, suddenly insiders were able to speak to outsiders.”
Some conventional views are challenged. He questions the familiar picture of the “three-legged stool” of scripture, tradition, and reason as if they are equivalents, on the grounds that tradition and reason are part of the process for reading the Bible. He contends that the Reformation is not about a new individualism, but about making it possible for people to read scripture together.
Just occasionally, there is a brush with the nebulous (“an intimacy with the whole world around us that both allows the world to make us more human and allows us to make the world more itself”). A fondness for metaphors of flowing and flooding, outpouring and overflowing promises a new school of hydraulic spirituality.
Discovering Christianity seeks to guide the reader from curiosity to commitment. The author’s deep awareness of God’s glory — “the radiance and the beauty that are at the root of everything” — will appeal to many; some might appreciate more attention to the huge stumbling-block of human suffering.
Unafraid of ideas, Williams is far from dispassionate. His passion is for the truth about God and so about ourselves, as he finds it in the vision of God revealed in Jesus Christ: “if, by standing where Jesus invites us to stand, we see more than we would otherwise see, if we see a world larger than we thought we inhabited, we must at least ask ourselves: ‘Is this not after all a real, a truthful place to stand?’”
But not to stop; for Christian faith — in words that bring together the teacher, the contemplative, and the man — “is a process of educating our vision and our passions”.
The Revd Philip Welsh is a retired priest in the diocese of London.
Discovering Christianity: A guide for the curious
Rowan Williams
SPCK £10.99
(978-0-281-09063-1)
Church Times Bookshop £9.89