Tidying Up 3: Rowan Williams

And, finally (for now), a directory to some of the material on Rowan Williams on this blog – my series on ‘The Body’s Grace’ and my bibliographical effort.

Rowan Williams Bibliography

1 Jul 2008, 1972–1979
4 Jul 2008, 1980–1985
5 Jul 2008, 1986–1990
5 Jul 2008, 1991–1995
7 Jul 2008, 1996–2000
7 Jul 2008, 2001–2003
7 Jul 2008, 2004–2005
7 Jul 2008, Acknowledgements

On Rowan Williams, ‘The Body’s Grace’

24 Jul 2008, On “The Body’s Grace” (1): God’s Command
24 Jul 2008, On “The Body’s Grace” (2): The Gospel
29 Jul 2008, On “The Body’s Grace” (3): Sex and Sanctification
30 Jul 2008, On “The Body’s Grace” (4): Thomas Nagel, Handmaid
31 Jul 2008, On “The Body’s Grace” (5): Black, White and Grey
14 Aug 2008, On “The Body’s Grace” (6): Not Legalist but Rigorist?
22 Aug 2008, On “The Body’s Grace” (7): Light in the Darkness
23 Aug 2008, On “The Body’s Grace” (8): Love, Faithfulness, Faith
24 Aug 2008, On “The Body’s Grace” (9): Homosexuality
27 Aug 2008, On “The Body’s Grace” (10): Biblical Foundations
5 Sep 2008, On “The Body’s Grace” (11): Reading Romans 1
23 Sep 2008, On “The Body’s Grace” (12): Sex and the Church
7 Dec 2008, On “The Body’s Grace” (13): Concluding Questions

Tidying Up 2: Aquinas’ Five Ways

And here is another directory: to my posts on Aquinas’ Five Ways.

2 Mar 2008, Reading the Five Ways 1. Putting the Ways in Context
2 Mar 2008, Reading the Five Ways 2. Who is Aquinas Trying to Convince?
3 Mar 2008, Reading the Five Ways 3. The Emptiness of the Ways
4 Mar 2008, Reading the Five Ways 4. The Intelligibility of the World
4 Mar 2008, Reading the Five Ways 5. Using Aristotle
4 Mar 2008, Reading the Five Ways 6. The First Way
4 Mar 2008, Reading the Five Ways 7. The Second Way
5 Mar 2008, Reading the Five Ways 8. The Third Way
5 Mar 2008, Reading the Five Ways 9. The Fourth Way
6 Mar 2008, Reading the Five Ways 10. The Fifth Way
6 Mar 2008, Reading the Five Ways 11. ‘This is What Everybody Understands By God’?
9 Mar 2008, Reading the Five Ways 12. The Ways to Mystery
13 Mar 2008, Reading the Five Ways 13. The Five Ways as Foundation
13 Mar 2008, Reading the Five Ways 14. Absolute Dependence
13 Mar 2008, Reading the Five Ways 15. On Not Following Aquinas
29 Jul 2008, Reading the Five Ways 16

The God Delusion">Tidying Up 1: The God Delusion

I’ve been thinking of re-opening this blog after a long, long pause. I therefore found myself clicking idly through old posts – and realised how hard it is to read in order the long post-sequences that make up the majority of the blog’s content. (And yes, I know that is because this is not really what blogs are for.) So here is a directory to the long series of posts on Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion. The series never finished (because I got bored); coverage was widely uneven (as the list below demonstrates); but some of it might still be interesting.

Introductory post:
Sun 2 Sep 2007, The God Delusion

Ch.1, §1
2 Sep 2007, Quasi-mysticism
3 Sep 2007, Darwinian Grandeur
3 Sep 2007, Sagan on Religion
5 Sep 2007, The Supernaturalist God
6 Sep 2007, Einsteinian Religion
7 Sep 2007, Non-Supernaturalist Theology
8 Sep 2007, Sleight of Hand
8 Sep 2007, Naturalism
5 Dec 2007, Teleology
11 Sep 2007, Is Theology a Subject
11 Sep 2007, ‘The Weakness of the Religious Mind’
13 Sep 2007, Folk Religion
16 Sep 2007, Praying to the Law of Gravity

18 Sep 2007, Interim Verdict: On The God Delusion, Ch.1, §1.

Ch.1, §2
18 Sep 2007, Respecting Religion
19 Sep 2007, Holiness and Argument
20 Sep 2007, Ideas and Identity
21 Sep 2007, Religious Conflict
22 Sep 2007, Religious Media
29 Sep 2007, Argument
5 Dec 2007, The Right to Freedom of Religion
7 Dec 2007, Cartoon Analysis

Verdict on chapter 1
24 Sep 2007, Irrational Christianity
8 Dec 2007, Interim Verdict, on The God Delusion, ch.1
19 Mar 2008, Pantheism and Metaphor

Ch.2, Introduction
11 Dec 2007, The God of the Old Testament
15 Dec 2007, The Heart of the Matter
16 Dec 2007, Creation and Explanation
20 May 2008, Creation and Explanation, again
18 Dec 2007, Essentialist Progression

Ch.2, §1
19 Dec 2007, Polytheism
20 Dec 2007, Monotheistic Chauvinism
20 Dec 2007, Charity Law
20 Dec 2007, Hinduism
21 Dec 2007, Dawkins on the Trinity
22 Dec 2007, Trinity and Rationality
23 Dec 2007, Splitting Hairs
3 Jan 2008, Saints

Remainder of ch.2
9 Jan 2008, Stop It, It’s Silly
25 Jan 2008, Which God?
28 Jan 2008, Theologians and Cosmologists
28 Jan 2008, Richard Swinburne
29 Jan 2008, Miracles and the Virgin Birth
19 Feb 2008, On Being Sophisticated
21 Feb 2008, On Being Dim-Witted
23 Feb 2008, The Great Prayer Experiment

24 Feb 2008, Interim Verdict, on The God Delusion, ch.2

Some general points
20 Jan 2008, The God Hypothesis
17 Feb 2008, Why Bother?
24 Feb 2008, Disillusionment

Ch. 3
25 Feb 2008, Dawkins on Aquinas
18 Mar 2008, Arguments for God’s Existence
18 Mar 2008, Dawkins on Anselm

5 Apr 2008, Interim Conclusion on The God Delusion, ch.3

Ch. 4
6 Apr 2008, Cutting the Taproot: The God Delusion, ch.4
20 May 2008, Creation and Explanation, again

Hans Frei papers

A while ago, I made a number of transcripts of materials from the Hans Frei archive at Yale Divinity School available online, at their library website. Reorganisations at that site have made it difficult to find the papers now, so I’ve put up a set on my own pages: Hans W. Frei, Unpublished Pieces: Transcripts from the Yale Divinity School archive. The PDF of the complete collection is a 200 page book, so we’re talking quite a lot of material.

To whet your appetite, here’s the contents page:

I Theological Reflections

1. Analogy and the Spirit in the Theology of Karl Barth
2. Scripture as Realistic Narrative
3. On Interpreting the Christian Story
4. Historical Reference and the Gospels
5. The Specificity of Reference
6. History, Salvation-History, and Typology
7. God’s Patience and Our Work
8. On the Thirty-Nine Articles
9. Theological Hermeneutics

II Historical Investigations

10. Religious Transformation in the later Eighteenth Century
11. Herder
12. The Formation of German Religious Thought in the Passage from Enlightenment to Romanticism
13. Contemporary Christian Thought

III Reviews and Book Notes

14. Review of Wendelgard von Staden’s Darkness over the Valley
15. Notes on Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis

There are also a couple of extras on the website, not included in the pdf, including a letter from Frei to Gary Comstock in 1984, explaining why he is not a ‘pure narrativist’ of any kind.

On ‘The Body’s Grace’ (13): Concluding Questions

I’m sorry that the pressures of an unexpectedly full and fraught academic term have completely derailed my blogging. I imagine that any momentum left in the readers of this series on Williams has vanished just as surely as has the momentum of the writer. Still, there’s a job to finish, and it only needs one post to do it – so here it is.

I simply want to end with a series of five questions with which this exploration has left me.

1. I can’t help wondering whether the Nagelesque description of sexual desire, whilst it works well for the situation he describes in his paper – the initial awakening and recognition of such desire, might have less direct purchase on the long term of an ordinary sexual relationship. There is at least a job to be done in showing how this kind of description can do justice not just to the agonic and the vulnerable in sexual relationships, but to the friendly, the funny, the sweet and touching, the pleasurable and the uncomplicated.
2. There’s a cousin to that first question. We live in a culture in which we regularly meet the claim that sexual activity can truly be casual – i.e., precisely the claim that sexual activity can take place without the complex of emotional involvement that Williams and Nagel describe. Clearly, one of the ways of speaking to this culture that ‘The Body’s grace’ holds out to us is the message that there is so much more to be discovered in the context of mutuality, faithfulness and faith. I find myself wondering, however, about the extent to which the agonic tinge of Williams’ descriptions of sex means that this call necessarily comes wrapped in the initial message, ‘You’re not really having any fun, are you?’ And I wonder how truthful and effective that is.
3. My third question is whether the sexual ethic set out in ‘The Body’s Grace’ hasn’t focused down too closely on the couple alone. What happens if, recognising that a sexual relationship is not simply an encounter between two independent individuals, we bring families, friends, rivals, and communities back into the picture?
4. The sexual ethic set out in ‘The Body’s Grace’ calls for processes of attentiveness and discernment, looking at the problems of power and manipulation that hover around sexual relationships. It is not clear, however, who is to do that discerning, in what contexts, and on what scale. Given the habit urgent desire has of clouding delicate discernment, I take it that we’re talking about more than an on-the-spot reflection by the protagonists – but what more? What ecology of pastoral process might ‘The Body’s Grace’ call for – from individual reflection via the counselling of particular couples in their specific situation through to public teaching from the pulpit?
5. Lastly, I worry about the question of Scripture. I am not saying that Williams’ position needs to be more scriptural (I think it is already formed by deep engagement with Scripture). But – for the sake of recognition, for the sake of the conversation – it needs to display its Scriptural rootedness at greater length (despite all the undoubted difficulties of doing so adequately). It needs to take it for granted less ¬– not in order to be captured by some naïve game of knockdown proof or disproof, but in order to show more clearly the forms of obedience by which it is shaped.

‘The Body’s Grace’ is simply one lecture. However interesting its vision, however provoking its arguments, it is at best a single contribution to a conversation that has much more territory to explore. Any hagiographic approach that suggests that this lecture somehow gets Christians sexual ethics, and that the rest is simply a matter of application, would be a betrayal of the wider ecclesial vision with which the lecture itself coheres. I’ve dallied here long enough; it’s time to move on.

On ‘The Body’s Grace’ (12): Sex and the church

There’s an important question hovering in the background that I have not yet asked. Why am I bothering with all this? This is, after all, now my twelfth blog post on a single article by Rowan Williams, and you may well be wondering why on earth I have taken the time to walk through it so slowly – and so laboriously. Part of the answer, of course, is that I’m an anally retentive academic. Yes, I’m afraid it’s true. I like trying to set things out in order, all the edges lined up. I like my books in alphabetical order and experience physical pain when they are disarranged. And I like dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s when expounding someone else’s ideas.

But there is more to it than that, I promise. You see, with all this clotted verbiage I’ve been trying to model something. I have been trying to show how one might give a charitable reading of Williams’ lecture, and one that is charitable in a very specific sense: I have been asking, as seriously as I know how, whether the lecture is a serious attempt at obedience to the gospel. As I’ll explain in a moment, I think there’s something quite important about such charitable looking for obedience in another’s position.

‘Obedience to the gospel’ is, however, a surprisingly difficult idea to get at. It’s difficult because, of course, there is in Rowan Williams’ work (as in that of any other theologian) a particular construal of what ‘gospel’ means, and so a particular construal of what obedience to that Gospel involves. So there’s a difference between asking whether, in Williams’ own terms, he is trying to be obedient to the gospel, and asking whether he is trying to be so in my terms. Yet if I contented myself with asking whether Williams’ understanding of the gospel, and of the nature of obedience to that gospel, agrees with mine, I would be insulating myself against any deep challenge or insight that his understanding may have to offer to me: I would be declaring in advance that I am right, that anyone who differs is wrong, and that I am not open to reconsidering that assumption. Clearly something more subtle is needed.

Now, there are several ways of striving for that greater subtlety. The most obvious is to make some attempt to set out the absolutely central points on which one is not willing to compromise, and to ask about someone else’s agreement only with those central points – combining that adamant stance with a flexible willingness to learn on all other matters. And some such attempt to set out what is central is, I think, an inevitable part of the mix – though it has perhaps not played quite as central a role in Anglicanism as it has in other traditions where a detailed ‘Confession’ of some kind has been central to the ongoing theological conversation.

However, Williams suggests, elsewhere in his work, a rather different way of thinking about this question. We can ask, when we are seeking to discover whether his or some other theological claim is obedient to the gospel, whether that claim is recognisably a contribution to a common conversation about obedience. That probably sounds irremediably vague, but stay with me for a moment. What I think he means is that, rather than asking a static question (‘Does your position agree with mine, or does it agree with the points I have identified as central to mine?’) Williams is suggesting that we ask a dynamic question: ‘Having heard what you say, can I recognise the possibility of being called to deeper obedience to the gospel (given what I currently understand that obedience to mean) by what you say, and can I see the possibility (given what you currently understand that obedience to mean) of calling you to deeper obedience?’

With a question like this in mind, we might move from a picture of the world divided into those with whom I agree (wholesale, or on the fundamentals) versus those with whom I disagree, to a more complex picture in which, around the brittle circle of those with whom I agree, there is the company of those with whom I disagree but with whom I share a conversation: the wider circle of a community not in possession of consensus but in serious pursuit of it, hoping and working for it.

The boundary of this wider circle is, inevitably, much more difficult to discern than are the boundaries of consensus – though boundaries there certainly are. And those boundaries are not defined simply by the forms of obedience – by the bare fact that my opponent appeals to the same scriptures, say, or tells a broadly recognisable salvation-historical story. Even where those forms of apparent obedience are in place, I might find myself called to the tragic recognition that this opponent and I do not share a recognisable conversation, that I cannot call him to obedience (or he me) except by standing against him, in prophetic denunciation of one kind or another.

Let me illustrate this. Imagine that Williams were speaking to a Christian community that regarded ‘obedience to the Gospel’ as quite straightforwardly defined by unmediated appeal to the plain sense of the scriptures. By ‘mediation’, I mean the kind of arguments that we’ve been exploring all along – where the emphasis falls on the attempt to develop a broader theological view on the basis of the scriptures, and then to read particular passages in its light even when that means going beyond the plain sense. In other words, I’m thinking of the kind of theological–ethical argument where the quotation of particular biblical texts seldom, on its own, settles anything. The community that rejects such mediation of scripture might find that, except to the minor degree that they found the plain sense of certain scriptures elucidated by Williams’ readings, his arguments were largely irrelevant to their way of doing sexual ethics – or, worse, that they seemed like nothing more than sophisticated attempts to sidestep the scriptures. They would not be able to see his arguments as, in any direct way, calling them to deeper obedience (as they currently understand obedience). And they might find in return that they simply could not call him to deeper obedience, because the means by which they might do so – pointing out once again the plain sense of the scriptures in question – was consistently met with a ‘Yes, but…’ In such a situation, we might have to conclude that there is not a common conversation about obedience. The attempt at conversation would stutter to a halt.

Where it does not stutter, however, we have at least the possibility of what I just called ‘a community not in possession of consensus but in serious pursuit of it, hoping and working for it.’ Now, I want to suggest – and this is one of the central points of this whole series – that such a community will be characterised by the same threefold call that I have identified in Williams’ sexual ethics:

1. the call to loving mutuality,
2. the call to faithfulness, and
3. the call to faith.

So, by analogy with Williams’ Nagelesque analysis of sexuality, we are dealing with a community in which I seek your deeper obedience, but in which I also seek your seeking of my deeper obedience (if you see what I mean): I see that I can call you to deeper obedience, and I long for that, but I also see that you can call me to deeper obedience, and I long for that. We are, in other words, talking about a community capable of sustaining an interlocking economy of desire: I desire Christ; you desire Christ; I desire your desiring of Christ; you desire my desiring of Christ; I desire your desiring of my desiring of Christ; you desire my desiring of your desiring of Christ … and so on. This is what, by inadequate shorthand, I have been naming the call to loving mutuality.

The call to faithfulness comes into play when we recognise the time-taking holding on to one another that is required by the pursuit of this desire. To borrow the language that Williams used in the context of sexual ethics, this is a matter of unconditional public commitment, commitment that recognises the existence of the kind of economy of desire just described, and that gives itself the time needed to sustain and pursue it. To be a community not in possession of consensus but in serious pursuit of it, hoping and working for it requires such commitment: it requires the safety that comes from being able to trust that you will not walk away from this conversation simply because we do not yet agree. Of course, it is not that divorce is impossible – but to walk into this with a prenuptial agreement that assumes the inevitability or propriety of divorce is already to betray the commitment involved.

Yet it is also important to say that this faithfulness is not a matter of ‘unity for unity’s sake’ or of ‘unity at all costs’. The faithfulness is there as the proper context for the pursuit of ‘loving mutuality’, the operation of the economy of mutual desire. The whole of this life is directed to the deepening of obedience to the God of Jesus Christ, obedience to the gospel. The call to loving mutuality and the call to faithfulness are inseparable from the call to faith.

So, there you go. If we’re after a relationship with the Rowan Williams of ‘The body’s grace’, we shouldn’t be surprised if we find ourselves shacked up with the Rowan Williams of the 2008 Lambeth Conference. After all, the actions of the latter Rowan Williams are predicated on his belief that both ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ – as well as a lot of people in between – are recognisably part of the same communion, because they are still capable of calling each other to deeper obedience. In that context, his task as Archbishop is and can only be to call them deeper into loving mutuality, to call them deeper into faithfulness, and to call them deeper into faith. And his single-minded focus on issuing those calls, rather than on advocacy of the particular position on homosexuality that he set out in ‘The Body’s Grace’, is exactly what one should have expected from the author of that lecture – unless one expected his ecclesiology to be based on a different gospel from the one that undergirds his sexual ethics. Whether one agrees with the specific ways in which he has pursued these calls – and there is, of course, endless scope for serious questioning on that front – one should be able to recognise that his ecclesiological manoeuvrings do not involve the unexpected abandonment of a previously principled position, nor are they desperate attempts to shore up institutional unity at the expense of Gospel truth. They are fundamentally a matter of hope and labour for the discovery of more of the truth of the gospel, by the main means available to us of such discovery – the Body’s grace.

*     *     *

I know that sounded like the peroration – but I haven’t quite finished. There is one last post to come in this series. Given the theology we have been exploring, it would be entirely inappropriate to finish in a way that appeared to smother conversation in a fluffy blanket of pious words about consensus. And since the motor of ongoing conversation is disagreement, that’s where I’m going to finish.

In memoriam

On Friday afternoon, my father-in-law, Andor Gomme, died at home. This isn’t the place for proper reminiscences, but I wanted to post a brief note on one tiny part of what we have lost. Amongst all the other things that he was, you see, he was a quite remarkable academic, and he taught me more about what it means to be one than, I think, anyone else. I can’t imagine, though, that anyone will ever say of me what must certainly be said of him: No-one who met him could ever think the word ‘academic’ a synonym for ‘narrow’ again. With seriousness, with delight, with a vast store of carefully culled detail, and with spacious clarity, he wrote on Dickens, on D.H. Lawrence, on Jane Austen, on Shakespeare, and on literary criticism in general; he edited several Jacobean tragedies; he taught his way through the works of Doris Lessing and Paul Scott; he wrote standard works on the architecture of Glasgow and of Bristol, a masterwork on the architect Francis Smith, and (most recently) on the development of the English country house; he produced an edition of Bach’s St Mark passion – the list goes on and on. I’m not sure universities make people like him any more.

Gone quiet

Sorry for the blog silence. I’ve only got a little bit more to do on the Rowan Williams series, but there just has not been the brain space to do it at the moment. It’s not so much the absolute lack of time (though that’s been true for much of the last week or so), but the difficulty of changing mental gears after a day of wearing my Head of Department hat and worrying about undergraduate admissions, departmental handbooks, and assessment and feedback strategies. And now, just when I have a bit of time, I realise that my notes for the remaining posts are on the laptop, and the laptop is off with Hester who is currently away from any internet connection…

Watch this space – but it’s probably best if you don’t hold your breath whilst doing so.

Comments

I’ve finally caught up with the fact that Akismet is doing a great job of catching comment spam on this blog – so I haven’t had to deal with the stuff manually for quite a while. So – if I’ve ticked the right boxes – I’ve turned off the need to register, and the need to get your comments individually moderated by me before they appear. Hope that makes it a bit easier.

On ‘The Body’s Grace’ (11): Reading Romans 1

‘The Body’s Grace’ itself contains no discussion of the biblical passages that explicitly address same-sex relationships, but we can go some way to plugging that gap by turning to another piece by Williams: ‘Knowing myself in Christ’ in The Way Forward? Christian Voices on Homosexuality and the Church, ed. Timothy Bradshaw (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997), 12-19 – one of a set of responses to ‘The St Andrew’s Day Statement’ – which is available as an rtf document here.

The portion of the paper that concerns us begins when Williams poses the question,

Is [homosexual desire] always and necessarily a desire comparable to the desire for many sexual partners or for sexual gratification at someone else’s expense – comparable, more broadly, to the desire for revenge or the desire to avoid speaking an unwelcome or disadvantageous truth? (14)

He suggests that the St Andrew’s statement answers this question in the affirmative, and that it does so in large part on the basis of Romans 1 – specifically Romans 1:26-27.

For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

He then draws attention to the fact that same-sex relationships or practices are described here as involving

the blind abandonment of what is natural and at some level known to be so, and the deliberate turning in rapacity to others. (16)

I take it that the first part of this statement connects Romans 1:26-27 to verses 19-25 (’For what can be known about God is plain to them … [but] … they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator’), and that the second part of the statement relates verses 26 and 27 to what comes after in 29 to 31 (’They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious towards parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.’)

Williams then claims that it is ‘quite possible’ to ask whether the desires, relationships and activities condemned by Romans 1:26-27 include everything that we now know as homosexuality.

Is it not a fair question to ask whether conscious rebellion and indiscriminate rapacity could be presented as a plausible account of the essence of ‘homosexual behaviour’, let alone homosexual desire as it may be observed around us now? (16)

Williams asks what happens if, as we ask this question, we are faced with phenomena that seem to match one part of this description (in that they involve same-sex desire and sexual activity) but do not match the rest. He imagines us confronted with a homosexual person who says

I want to live in obedience to God; I truly, prayerfully and conscientiously do not recognise Romans 1 as describing what I am or what I want. I am not rejecting something I know in the depths of my being. I struggle against the