KULEUVEN

Anglican Social Teaching

Jeroen Jans

25-4-2013

Introduction

Key facts of Anglican church structures

World-Anglicanism and the Church of England

Within the Anglican community, there is a difference between the Church of England, and churches that have similar beliefs, worship practices and church structures, or are historically tied with it. Important to note, is the fact that each church province is autonomous. The Anglican community is governed by a Synod, which exists of three houses: laity, clergy and bishops. They may organize national, provincial or diocesan synods and have a different scope of authority. Nevertheless, to be a member of the Anglican Communion, one must be in full communion with the See of Canterbury. There are three international bodies, whose resolutions are not legally binding for the different Church provinces:

The Lambeth Conference (since 1867), is held every ten years by the archbishop of Canterbury, where bishops are invited for consultation

The Anglican Consultative Council (since 1968) exists of bishops, clergy and laity, and has a permanent secretariat (the Anglican Communion Office), of which the Archbishop of Canterbury is the president

The Anglican Communion Primates’ Meeting (since 1978) is a forum for thought, prayer and deep consultation

Within England, there are two provinces: York and Canterbury, of which the second is primate of all England. The legislative body of the Church of England is the General Synod, which can create measures that have to be approved by the British Parliament and canons which require Royal Licence and Royal Assent.

By now, it’s easy to understand why discussing “Anglican Social Teaching” is such a complex matter. An interesting example, is the fact that some provinces allow female homosexual bishops, while others, like the Church of England, do not allow female bishops at all. Because of the complexity, we will focus our attention to the Church of England1.

Catholic and reformed

To make it even more complex, there is the question if Anglicanism should be defined as Catholic, Protestant or as a distinct branch. On the one hand, Anglo-Catholic practices have revived as a consequence of the Oxford Movement in the 19 th century, and have become more dominant in the last century. On the other hand, many churches still hold to the Evangelical practices. While Anglo-Catholics have a more Roman Catholic vision on theology, the Anglo-Evangelicals are in favour of more liberalisation of church structures. Maybe the best definition is the following:

High Church is generally used to describe forms of Anglicanism influenced, to a greater or lesser extent, by the Catholic tradition. Anglo-Catholicism is often identified with this variety of churchmanship, although not all “High Church” Anglicans, such as Liberal Anglo-Catholics, would endorse some prominent aspects of Anglo-Catholicism.

Low Church usually refers to Anglicans of a more Evangelical tradition who, more consistent with the Protestant tradition, emphasi[z]e the primacy of scripture and salvation through faith alone. Low Church Anglicans usually worship according to the official prayer books, but with much less ceremony.

1 For more, see the official website of the Anglican Communion: http://www.anglicancommunion.org/index.cfm

~ 2 ~

Broad Church generally refers to Anglicans somewhere between the “high” and “low” traditions. The term is sometimes used to denote Anglicans of a more liberal theological perspective2.

Politically speaking, Radical Orthodoxy is more dominant among Anglo-Catholics and Political Theology among Anglo-Evangelicals. Nevertheless, the line is not that clear. N.T. Wright for example, is considered to be more on the Open Evangelical side, while in his Biblical interpretations, he is considered as more conservative. The former Archbishop, Rowan Williams, is an Anglo-Catholic, but when it comes to politics, he is more in line with the Political Theology. While these terms may be useful when speaking of church structures, they are quite useless when speaking about social teaching. We will therefore use the categories Radical Orthodoxy and Political Theology.More and more media suggest that the second one is becoming the most dominant within the Church of England. The Daily Telegraph, for example, writes that the pastoral care today, tends more to feeding the mouths than saving the souls. One article even has the following title: “The Anglican Church is now the Labour Party at Prayer”3. Within the broader, global Anglican Community, this is less certain4. We must also note that this dialogue runs in two directions, which is, for example, shown by the article “Catholic MPs Urge Pope Francis to Allow Ordination of Married Men”5.

The established Church in Britain

The Lords Spiritual

Probably best known in the relation between Church and state in the UK, is the presence of 26 bishops in the House of Lords, from which 5 diocese have a permanent seat (Canterbury, York, Durham, London and Winchester). The other 21 members are the longest serving bishops of the UK. Normally, archbishops become life peers after their retirement, which means that they take seat among the Lords Temporal for life. There is always at least one bishop present, to read prayers before debates start. The others normally attend when matters of interest and concern are laid before the House 6. The Church of England describes its task in the House of Lords as follows:

Their [The bishop’s] presence in the Lords is an extension of their general vocation as bishops to preach God’s word and to lead people in prayer. Bishops provide an important independent voice and spiritual insight to the work of the Upper House and, while they make no claims to direct representation, they seek to be a voice for all people of faith, not just Christians7.

The commons

The Church of England has not only a role to play in the House of Lords, but also in the House of Commons, where the government is present. One of the key members for this dialogue between Church and state, is the Second Commissioner. For the moment this is Sir Tony Baldry MP, who is a member of the conservative party. He is the link between Government and Parliament on the one hand, and with the Church on the other. “The Second Commissioner answers oral and written questions from MPs about Church of England matters, is a member of the Ecclesiastical Committee and steers Church of England legislation through the House of Commons”. He is also a ex-officio

2 Anglo-Catholicism, https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Anglo-Catholicism.html3 T. STANLEY, Justin Welby v David Cameron, The Anglican Church is Now the Labour Party at Prayer, in The Daily Telegraph, 11 March 2013.4See for example: M. EBERSTADT, Viewpoint, In the War over Christianity, Orthodoxy is Winning, 29 April 2013, http://ideas.time.com/2013/04/29/viewpoint-in-the-war-over-christianity-orthodoxy-is-winning/5M. TEAHAN, Catholic MPs Urge Pope Francis to Allow Ordination of Married Men, in Catholic Herald, 27 March 2013, http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2013/03/27/catholic-mps-urge-pope-francis-to-allow-ordination-of-married-men/6The Lords Spiritual, http://www.churchofengland.org/our-views/the-church-in-parliament/bishops-in-the-house-of-lords.aspx7 Ibid.

~ 3 ~

member of the General Synod. To become Second Commissioner, it is required to be a lay member of the Church of England and an MP from the governing political party8.

We now move to the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament, which exists of 30 backbenchers, 15 members of each House, chosen by the Speaker of each of those Houses. The most important role of this Committee is describes as follows: “The Ecclesiastical Committee examines draft Measures presented to it by the Legislative Committee of the General Synod of the Church of England. It reports to Parliament on whether or not it considers the measures to be expedient”9.

The Speaker’s Chaplain, finally, says prayers for Parliament in the Chamber each day, but also takes the services in The Chapel of St Mary Undercroft, which is located within the Houses of Parliament. This post is held by Rose Hudson-Wilkin10.

Radical Orthodoxy

This line of thinking, situates itself mostly within the Anglo-Catholic approach, and is very critical towards modernity. It opposes a constructive use of secular social theory within theology. Nevertheless, like we already mentioned, the line will not be that thick.

John Milbank

John Milbank is a Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics at the University of Nottingham. Interesting to note, is that, in Cambridge, he studied under Rowan Williams, who, as we will discuss later on, prefers a rather different approach. Milbank claims, that the false humility of modern theology is a fatal disease, because it has become the voice of a finite idol, instead of articulating the word of God. When theology stops qualifying other discourses, these discourses will position theology11. About these political theologians themselves, he writes: “Contemporary ‘political theologians’ tend to fasten upon a particular social theory, or else put together their own eclectic theoretical mix, and then work out what residual place is left for Christianity and theology within the reality that is supposed to be authoritatively described by such a theory”12. The following quote of Milbank is also very striking:

I wish to challenge both the idea that there is a significant sociological “reading” of religion and Christianity, which theology must “take account of”, and the idea that theology must borrow its diagnoses of social ills and recommendations of social solutions entirely from Marxist (or usually sub-Marxist) analysis, with some sociological admixture13.

Milbank adds to this explanation that scientific social theories are theologies or even antitheologies themselves, but in disguise. That his vision on liberal secularism is very negative, becomes clear when he describes it as an ontology of violence: “a reading of the world which assumes the priority of force and tells how this force is best managed and confined by counter-force”14. Sociology, he consideres to be positivist. When theology goes in dialogue with sociology, it becomes a church in disguise, which promotes a certain secular consensus. That is the reason why Milbank wants this dialogue to end. Christian socialism, then, “is itself a theology which has surrendered to liberalism in the form of transcendental philosophy”15. In short, he calls the previous the nihilistic voice16. That

8The Second Commissioner, http://www.churchofengland.org/our-views/the-church-in-parliament/second-church-estates-commissioner.aspx9Ecclesiastical Committee, http://www.churchofengland.org/our-views/the-church-in-parliament/ecclesiastical-committee.aspx10Speaker’s Chaplain, http://www.churchofengland.org/our-views/the-church-in-parliament/speaker%27s-chaplain.aspx11J.MILBANK, Theology and Social Theory, Beyond Secular Reason, Oxford, 1990, p. 1-2.12Ibid., p. 2.13Ibid., p. 3.14Ibid., p. 4.15Ibid., p. 4-5.16Ibid., p. 3-5.

~ 4 ~

he is an opponent of the idea that theology can embrace elements of social science, becomes very clear when he writes that:

If truth is social, it can only be through a claim to offer the ultimate “social science” that theology can establish itself and give any content to the notion of “God”17.

Later on, he takes it even a step further, by calling theology the queen of the sciences for all who live in the altera civitas. Milbank himself, is thus in favour of a Christian social theory, which is in the first place an ecclesiology. Because the Church is already a reading of other human societies, ecclesiology may be considered as a sociology18. This Christian sociology, is described by Milbank as follows:

[It is] the explication of a socio-linguistic practice, or as the constant re-narration of this practice as it has historically developed. The task of such theology [...] is to tell again the Christian mythos, pronounce again the Christian logos, and call again for Christian praxis in a manner that restores their freshness and originality. It must articulate Christian difference in such a fashion as to make it strange19.

Positive in his way of reasoning, however, is that he asks the question of how Christianity has affected human reason and practice. Milbank also makes his goal very clear, namely: a moral practice, which is embedded in the historical emergence of a new, but also unique community. He goes on, by using terms like “counter-history”, “counter-ethics” and “counter-ontology”. He considers the word “counter” to be justified, because there is a total difference between Christianity and the nihilism that threatens the other cultural systems. Another important aspect is an ecclesial self-critique, which, most of the time, will have to do with too much engagement with the liberal secular world. Nevertheless, this does not make the Christian doctrine a static narrative, for God can still reveal himself later on, to give a deeper understanding of his being for example. It is important to note that no historical study is, as Milbank expresses it “over and done with”. Therefore, it is essential that the Church stands in a narrative relation to Jesus and the gospels. Salvation is available for us, since Jesus inaugurated a new sort of community, whose response to Christ is made possible by the Holy Spirit, and it is from the Spirit that the community receives the love that flows between Son and Father. This story is already realized in a finally exemplary way by Jesus Christ, but it still has to be realised universally and both in harmony with Christ and differently by all generations. This shows why the context of the Church is essential for “real history”, but also to interpret and regulate with respect to all other history. That is the reason why the Church is the carrier of the metanarrative. According to Milbank, the Church claims to be the “exemplary form of human community” 20. He clarifies his point of view:

The logic of Christianity involves the claim that the “interruption” of history by Christ and his bride, the Church, is the most fundamental of events, interpreting all other events. And it is most especially a social event, able to interpret other social formations, because it compares them with its own new social practice21.

Probably, it will already have become clear, that Milbank is highly in favour of the idea of two cities, as described by Augustine in Civitas Dei. According to Milbank, it shows that that the critique of political theology can come directly out of the developing Biblical tradition, without using external supplementation as a resource. Essential in this work, is the priority of peace over conflict. Salvation means the liberation from the political, economic and psychic dominium, and thus from all structures that belong to the saeculum or Civitas terrena22. Through the attraction that is exercised by a particular set of words and images, we may acknowledge the good and get an idea of the ultimate telos. In the

17Ibid., p. 6.18Ibid., p. 380-381.19Ibid., p. 381.20Ibid., p. 381-388.21Ibid., p. 388.22Ibid., p. 389-392.

~ 5 ~

stories of Jesus, a testimony of the Good, is offered to us. We must, therefore, practice non-violence as a skill, and learn it’s idiom23.

Milbank regularly repeats the distinct and interruptive character of Christianity. For him, this is not only the case for its attitude towards modernity, but also antiquity. It’s a new ethos, in a new kind of community: the ecclesia. When not only Roman citizens, but also Roman rulers began to be converted, there arose a gradual confusion of the boundaries between imperium and ecclesia. This encouraged the monastic movement. Milbank nevertheless acknowledges that, according to Augustine, worldly justice and government as paideia are partially realised on earth. Still, it is only fully realised in heaven. Yet, the most predominant governing purpose of associations, is not automatically communality or justice. Societies, Augustine argues, need a collective object of worship to bind them together. In this regard, Milbank argues that for the civil state, this will often be a violent object, like honour and glory. By saying this, Milbank, implicitly criticizes individualism, through the Augustenian way of thinking. Also important is that, as long as time persists, there will be sin in the world. We therefore need regulation through worldly dominium and peace, which will be a compromise between competing wills. Nevertheless, Milbank holds the opinion that this is not really justice. The civitas terrena, thus stays sinful, since sin is curbed by sin24. The implications is that a “‘Christian emperor’ [...] is a just ruler exactly to the extent that he treats his political function as an inner-ecclesial one, or as an exercise of pastoral care”25. The reason for Milbanks reservations for the political engagement of theology, becomes clear when he criticizes Aquinas:

Once the political is seen as a permanent natural sphere, pursuing positive finite ends, then, inevitably, firm lines of division arise between what is “secular” and what is “spiritual”26.

He continues, by explaining the consequences of this line of thought:

A desirably parochial existence of small local groups, constant adjacent mediations, plural membership of many different, inter-involved and overlapping corporations is bound to be eroded. One ceases to see social, spatial and temporal life as itself the continuum which shades off into infinity27.

As a consequence, true justice and virtue, require the existence of this new form of society, which is ontologically characterized by:

1 micro/macro cosmic isomorphism;2 the non-subordination of either part to whole or whole to part;3 the presence of the whole in every part; and4 positioning within an indefinite shifting sequence rather than a fixed totality28.

Why are the pagans unjust according to Augustine? Because they don’t grant priority to peace and forgiveness. It is true that the pagans saw a difference between body and soul, but they failed to see the third dimension: God/heaven/peace. It is important to note, that only in the third dimension, the soul can realize its true desire and is able to be drawn into reciprocal relationships of affirmation with the other souls. Essential for true ethics, is thus an interpersonal perspective. Remarkable is the idea that in heaven, only the virtue of charity remains, which is not a matter of mere generous intention, but the very consummation of justice and prudence. To approach divine perfection, forgiveness is essential29. The reason for this, is the following:

[B]ecause virtue itself as charity is originally the gratuitous, creative positing of difference, and the offering to others of a space of freedom, which is existence. As an infinite serial emanation,

23Ibid., p. 398.24Ibid., p. 399-402.406.25Ibid., p. 407.26Ibid., p. 407.27Ibid., p. 408.28Ibid., p. 409.29Ibid., p. 409-411.

~ 6 ~

charity does not lay down a fixed hierarchy, and every “position” it establishes is of equal importance, and of equal necessity to all the other positions, even if there remain inequalities of ability and necessary inequalities of function30.

Essential to grasp, is that the most important difference between Christianity and the civil state, lies in her reconciliation of virtue with difference. Also important is the necessity of coercion in the earthly city. Milbank notes that this is not without risk and that it does not have the true final peace in view, but it is needed for reaching the peace of compromise between wills. Still, he emphasizes that judgement and punishment is never occupied by God, because it is an act against sin, which was, in the first place, not intended by God. Actually, Milbank writes, that the trial and punishment of Jesus itself condemned, to some degree, all other punishments and trials. The most important thing of punishment, is that wrongs must be put right. While recognizing the need of an external punishment, the Church must also be an asylum31: “a house of refuge from its operations, a social space where a different, forgiving and restitutionary practice is pursued. This practice should also be ‘atoning’, in that we acknowledge that an individual’s sin is never his alone, that its endurance harms us all, and therefore its cancellation is also the responsibility of all”32. Characteristic for Milbanks way of thinking, is the following quote:

The Church, to be the Church, must seek to extend the sphere of socially aesthetic harmony – “within” the state where this is possible; but of a state committed by its very nature only to the formal goals of dominium, little is to be hoped33.

When starting his ideas on counter-ontology, Milbank summarizes his theory, like we discussed it so far, rather well:

This counter-ontology speculatively confirms three major components of the counter-ethics: first, the practice of charity and forgiveness as involving the priority of a gratuitous creative giving of existence, and so of difference. Secondly, the reconciliation of difference with virtue, fulfilling true virtue only through this reconciliation. Thirdly, the treatment of peace as a primary reality and the denial of an always preceding violence34.

Milbank ends his reasoning with two noteworthy ideas: 1) he notes that Christianity has helped to unleash a more naked violence. He therefore refers to the middle ages; and 2) the state itself assumed the form of an anti-Church35. Above all, it has, by now, become very clear that Milbank is highly negative for secular reason, which becomes especially clear when he writes:

While it is possible to recover the narrative and ontological shape of the Christian “interruption” of history [...], one should also recognize that this interruption appears to have tragically failed, and that it is the course of this failure itself which has generated secular reason. Once there was no secular...36

And the absolute Christian vision of ontological peace now provides the only alternative to a nihilistic outlook. Even today, in the midst of the self-torturing circle of secular reason, there can open to view again a series with which it is in no continuity: the emanation of harmonious difference, the exodus of new generations, the path of peaceful flight...37

30Ibid., p. 416.31Ibid., p. 416-422.32Ibid., p. 422.33Ibid., p. 422.34Ibid., p. 423.35Ibid., p. 432-433.36Ibid., p. 432.37Ibid., p. 434.

~ 7 ~

Garry John Williams

One who even takes it a step further, is Garry Williams. Remarkable, is the fact that he is an Evangelical Anglican. He is Director of the John Owen Centre, teaches Church History and Doctrine at Oak Hill College in London and is visiting professor of the Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and London.G. Williams writes that the widespread suspicion of power, is a post-modern phenomenon. Of course it is true that God undermines human systems and we do not know Him in His essence through His works. Nevertheless the catholic tradition holds confidence in the revealed truth that can be found in Scripture. 1 Clement, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus state that there is no error in the Scriptures. The first two even mention the influence of the Holy Spirit on the Bible. G. Williams concludes: “We find no talk of misapprehension here”38.G.Williams also notes that theology is a system of revealed public truths, so we can test our thoughts against the revelation of God. He is opposed to a theology, where human experience becomes the measure for truth. The idea that Jesus brings only questions is, for him, not very satisfying39. How strong his reservations for certain forms of life-style, which are part of the most modern societies, are, becomes clear in his critique on Rowan Williams:

The sexual ethics which Rowan Williams espouses will have terrible eternal effects, since it is a matter of salvation and condemnation. It is identified as such within the framework of biblical theology. In Romans 1:26-27 homosexual practice serves as an instance of the consequences of human rebellion against God and as an example of the judgement of God manifested in the present age. As such, it is identified […] as an epitome of human rebellion against God. For a senior presbyter in the church […] to defend such an epitome of sin is to place himself in conflict with the Gospel and to imperil the souls of the men and woman who follow him.

This is easily demonstrated by considering the consequences of Williams’s words and actions. […] Certainly he has published on the subject and has thus encouraged his readers. And now his views have been reported within the hearing of millions of people, and he has taught them that God has no problem with gay sex, and that there is grace in other non-marital sexual encounters.

In this way the senior presbyter of the church has been instrumental in encouraging people to engage in what the Apostle Paul regards as an embodiment of human rebellion. And where will that lead them? The same Apostle tells us that if they do not turn from it in repentance it will lead them […] to being shut out of the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9-10). The Archbishop has taught and is teaching people, now millions of people in this country and around the world, a sure way of being shut out from the presence of God for ever.

Given his views on these issues, the theology of Rowan Williams puts souls at risk of perishing. […] To keep silence in the face of his theology is to acquiesce in the injury of souls40.

How does Garry Williams see the role of theology in the public square? Strange enough, he usus a quote from Rowan Williams to explain his position:

[P]eaceful co-existence in an undemanding pluralism is an inadequate response when the matters at issue seem to relate to basic questions about how the gospel can be heard in the struggles of contemporary social existence. There is a case for protest, even for “confessional” separation over some issues41.

38 G. J. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, An Outline, Critique, and Consideration of Its Consequences (Latimer Studies, 55), London, 2002, 2002, 22003, p. 22.39Ibid., p. 21-24.40Ibid., p. 36-37.41Ibid., p. 37. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, On Christian Theology, p. 57.

~ 8 ~

Political theology

Tom Wright

Tom Wright was bishop of Durham from 2003-2010, which gave him a seat in the House of Lords, and is currently Research professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews in Scotland. His arguments for political engagements are the following:

[S]o long as we maintain the historic split of religion and politics, of faith and public life, we will be powerless to do more than lament before the errors of misplaced imperial ambition. The good news is that the great scriptural narrative, which we have for so long hushed up, tells a different story, one which calls all human empires – ancient or modern, military or economic – to account. This is the biblical story of the strange lordship of Jesus Christ. It has compelling implications for the conduct of British government today42.

According to Wright, it was far too long taken for granted that the early Christians weren’t interested in serious political theology, but that changed in the last 30 years. In order to explain this, Wright uses his knowledge of Biblical theology. For example: when it is emphasised that Jesus, Who was crucified, is the one Lord, than this means that Caesar is not, and even that the notion of lordship has changed. Another example is Jesus trial before Pilate in John 18-19, in which Wright sees two types of kingdom. In Caesar’s kingdom, truth is relative to power. The kingdom that Jesus brings is, on the contrary, not of this world. Nevertheless this is not the same as saying that the kingdom of Jesus is purely spiritual. It does not derive from this world, but is designed for it. But, says Wright, “precisely because it is the kingdom of the wise Creator God who longs to heal this world, whose justice is aimed at restoration rather than punitive destruction, it can neither be advanced nor attained by the domineering, bullying, fighting kingdom-methods employed in merely earthly kingdoms”43. Jesus also states that Pilate couldn’t have the authority of releasing Him, if it were not given from above. So, even in the rebellious state of this world, God does not desire anarchy or chaos. To have no rulers is thus even worse than having ones from the ranks of the wicked. Therefore, Jesus has not come to destroy the world, but to rescue it from evil. The abuse of the structures of human authority is a double evil, because they are part of the good creation. Wright concludes his explanation of John 18-19, by writing that Jesus has given us a new notion of ruling and thus power, namely the transformative and healing power of suffering love44.

His political understanding of the history of the Bible is also striking:

It is the underlying theology, in fact, which enables the New Testament writes to avoid that kind of shallowness and lay the foundations for a mature political theology. We trace their thinking, through books such as the Wisdom of Solomon, all the way back to the biblical story of God’s people under pagan rule. The line from Genesis 3 to the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 then gives way to the call of Abraham, Abraham’s family ends up in Egypt, rescued when God judges their pagan overlords; the decidedly ambiguous conquest of Canaan results in the still ambiguous kingdom of David and Solomon; and eventually we find ourselves back in Babel, in the Babylonian exile, which creates the context for those two most deeply political prophecies, Isaiah and Daniel. The Psalms, meanwhile, celebrate the kingship of YHWH over the nations, and YHWH’s placing of his Messiah as the one who will bring the king’s of the earth to order. It is this story that formed the matrix within which the early Christians fashioned their own political stance45.

By now, it has become clear that Jesus’ life and death redefined lordship, and thus power. If we want to understand His Lordship correctly, we must do this in harmony with the theological themes of creation and judgement, which tell us about a Creator, Who takes position against the darkness of a

42N.T. WRIGHT, Neither Anarchy nor Tyranny, Government and the New Testament, in N. SPENCER& J. CHAPLIN (eds.), God and Government, London, 2009, p. 63.43Ibid., p. 65.44Ibid., p. 64-67.45Ibid., p. 70-71.

~ 9 ~

world gone astray. This is not only a heavenly lordship, and not only something to be expected in the ultimate future. It is the task of the followers of Jesus, to bring the signs of His hopeful rule and healing to the present time46.

Wright then moves to a more political part, in which he outlines “God’s alternative empire”, about which he writes that the Creator intended the world to be ordered and structured, with parts that are in harmony with each other and enable flourishing, fruitfulness and, eventually, the fulfilment of God’s intention. The possibility of human rebellion and their will to set up on their own, goes all the way back to Genesis 1. This story learns us, that instead of abandoning the world to chaos, God works from within, for the purpose of restoration47. From this, Wright concludes:

in a threefold typology, based on the doctrines of creation and redemption: (1) God intends the world to be ordered, and will put it in proper order at the last; but (2) he doesn’t want chaos between now and then, and uses human authorities, even when they don’t acknowledge him, to bring a measure of his order in advance of the end; and (3) since that puts awful temptations in the way of the authorities, God’s people have the vital calling to speak the truth to them and call them to account in anticipation of that same final day48.

This explains, why, according to Wright, the Church has to reject both tyranny and anarchy, but must affirm that God intends the world to be ruled by properly constituted authorities. Nevertheless, holding the authorities to account, remains one of the duties of the Church. He also writes that people, these days, are only interested in the way other people attain power, while the early Christians were far more interested in what they did with that power, and in holding up a mirror to power. Therefore, “[t]he church must, in short, learn from Jesus before Pilate how to speak the truth to power rather than for power, or merely against power”49. There are also many misinterpretations of the meaning of an “established” church, for the church is not in charge of the state, but “bishops do have a voice, and often use that voice to speak up for the voiceless in their regions, and indeed for other denominations and other faiths”50. It is also wrong to think that the state tells the church what to do. What the church actually has, is a voice in the discussion, but not the only or an easy voice 51. He illustrates his arguments on a typical, and yet beautiful, way:

God wants there to be good government, and the church – and Christian politicians – must bear public witness to the fact in every way possible. That, after all, is what Christians are doing when they pray, as Jesus himself taught us, for God’s kingdom to come on earth as in heaven52.

Nick Spencer

Nick Spencer is Research Director at the public theological think tank Theos, which deals about the place of religion in society. He emphasises that the Christian political interest is very divers. They can be part of or go into dialogue with each of the mainstream political parties of the UK, on very diverse topics. According to Spencer, this idea makes British people nervous. This is no wonder, since “there is a notable absence of serious thinking on the question of what political Christians should actually be trying to achieve as political Christians”53. It is obvious, then, that there is no consensus on these topics. This does not mean that Christians are bound to disagreement about the role of the government54. About the Bible, which, as we have seen, is of particular importance for N.T. Wright, Spencer writes the following:

46Ibid., p. 71-72.47Ibid., p. 72-74.48Ibid., p. 74-75.49 Ibid., p. 77.50 Ibid., p. 78.51 Ibid., p. 76-78.52 Ibid., p. 79.53 Ibid., p. 2.54 Ibid., p. 1-2.

~ 10 ~

Its guidance may not be particularly obvious, neatly assembled, focused on contemporary concerns, or framed in current terms, but the Bible has a wealth of serious and important material outlining the central purposes of government, material that has fed a long, rich and, sadly, largely unknown tradition of political theology55.

He also complains about the fact that the academic resources do not often connect with political Christians. As Christians, our political standpoints must be as much as possible controlled by our Christian convictions. We may not expect the Bible to give us percentages, but it should be helpful to come wisely to those percentages. It is therefore important to note, that Christian theology “may not ultimatelymakepolitical decisions but it can shape them”56. So without obliging others to follow the same political line, for the sake of unity, they should work hard, in order to come to points of agreement and to work together as much as possible57. The goal of Spencer’s article is “persuading Christians that politics is an honourable and worthwhile vocation”58.

Jonathan Chaplin

Jonathan Chaplin is Director of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics, a member of the Divinity Faculty of Cambridge and Consultant Researcher of Theos. Just like Spencer, Chaplin writes political theology will not bring detailed policy prescriptions forward. This is also true for political theory in general. The real purpose of political theology is “to help form practical Christian political wisdom”59. The core question, is the following: “what is the unique role of government in society and how may it better discharge that role on behalf of its citizens?”60. Important in this regard, are the common good and the priority of justice, but the views on these topics may differ61. About coming to a conclusion in democratic debates, he writes:

Where consensus is attainable, well and good: it should be seized upon and made the most of. Where it is out of reach, debate continues until a decision must be taken, and all sides must then accept the constitutional (if not moral) validity of the outcome, at least until it is formally reopened62.

He also writes that political truth is not dependant on parliamentary majorities and there is no guarantee that it will be achieved by democratic debates. Nevertheless, it can only be reached by such debates. When introducing a principle, it should be specified how it can be concretely applied. This is also true for the Church, when she wants to engage with the public debate63.

Chaplin now moves back to the Christian political wisdom, which consists of skill and substance. It “involves discerning how a body of political principle is to assume concrete form in policy-making and statesmanship at a particular time and place”64. Like all valid Christian traditions, Christian politics must continually be tested by a fresh biblical scrutiny. It should also be coherent in its worldview. Chaplin also affirms that government is on the one hand created, but on the other, fallen. Still, it is open for redemption65. This, he explains as follows:

It [the government] is, in the first place, one outworking of the ‘cultural’mandate given to humanity at creation, a mandate to realize the many potentials of created life by establishing institutions that serve human needs. But, second, it is also as thoroughly corrupted by sin and evil as anything else in the human creation. Indeed, as one of the ‘powers’ it forms part of [...] the

55 Ibid., p. 3.56 Ibid., p. 6.57 Ibid., p. 3-6.13.58 Ibid., p. 14.59 Ibid., p. 206.60 Ibid., p. 206.61 Ibid., p. 205-208.62 Ibid., p. 208.63 Ibid., p. 209-211.64 Ibid., p. 211-212.65 Ibid., p. 212-213.

~ 11 ~

threatening sway of the powers insofar as they are in rebellion against the Creator. Yet, third, government, again like everything else in the human creation, remains open to the restraining and elevating influence of redemption, whereby, [...] state power is drawn ‘towards the service of justice and kindness’66.

Yet, government is only secondarily and indirectly advanced by God, first comes the Church. One of the insights that can be generated from this vision, is a warning against unrealistic expectations of what a government may achieve, but it also affirms that it doesn’t have an inexhaustible capacity to do evil at its disposal. Chaplin than explains the legal status of the government: (1) it’s legitimate authority extends only so far as its divinely assigned purpose; (2) it is to be held accountable when it discharges that authority; (3) in the divine ordering, there are many other centres of legitimate authority; and (4) it must be representative of its citizens67. For his fourth point, Chaplin addresses the modern secular liberal view, which most of the time, is only seen in one direction: “political authority originates with the ‘sovereign’ people and is transferred to government in acts of consent”68. The implications on this view, is a lack of inherent moral purpose or limit. Most secular liberals also think that democratic majorities should safeguard people’s liberty. In this regard, they often refer to individual human rights, interests or needs. Still, the divinely assigned purpose of government isn’t exhausted by these needs. Nevertheless, Christians aren’t hostile towards democracy, for if the state has to protect the common good, the public must play a role in identifying the requirements of this common good. This is perfectly understandable, since the common good, is the good of the whole people. It has thus to do with a corporate responsibility69.

Out of the different political theological perceptions, there can arise different visions on policy. When one, for example, brings the human-made government close to the fall, the essential task will normally be a corrective justice. Most of these theologians are inclined to argue in favour of policies which require the smallest of government intervention as possible. Of course this is not always the case. According to Chaplin, the government “does not extend the whole of the common good” 70, it can only create the conditions in which we can exercise our social responsibilities. Another source of disagreement arises from different interpretations on common good, justice, solidarity, subsidiarity and equality. The common good is a qualitative concept and it is irreducible held in common. The principles of subsidiarity and solidarity do help to specify the role of the government. Normally, there is no discussion on political and legal equality, but there is, for example, on property and the capacity of a government to redress economic inequality71.

Chaplin then asks the question if a government is able to pursue moral purposes. Too often, the link between these moral goods and economy is not established. Yet there are attempts [example: speech of David Cameron at the conservative party conference in 200872]. Nevertheless, people often wonder, how much weight is given to these issues when doing politics becomes really hard. Chaplin is convinced, that governments should, at least, tray harder. In the British context, it is, in the first place, the task of political parties73. He continues:

Their [the political parties’] challenge is to formulate a clear political vision, a coherent ‘body of principle’, and to work it out in successive policy documents, major speeches by leaders, manifestos and in other ways. Citizens then rightly expect parties once in government to continue to articulate this body of principle and to seek as far as possible to put it demonstrably into practice in specific policies. If this were done, the result would be less pandering to narrow and short-term populist instincts, and more commitment to longer-term, strategic, principled policy-making74.

66 Ibid., p. 213.67 Ibid., p. 214-215.68 Ibid., p. 220.69 Ibid., p. 213-223.70 Ibid., p. 224.71 Ibid., p. 223-225.228.72 See appendix B73 Ibid., p. 230-232.74 Ibid., p. 232-233.

~ 12 ~

Chaplin agrees with Margaret Thatcher, when she says that we need “conviction politicians”, but he thinks that we need “communities of constructive dissent” to stimulate social change75.

The Church of England’s official teaching

We now move our attention, to have a look about how the Church of England deals with public issues in its official documents. Its worldly character becomes immediately clear, when we look at the topics, which are dealt with:

Marriage, Family and Sexuality Issues International Affairs Home and Community Affairs Environment and Rural Affairs Ethical Investment The Church in Parliament Medical Ethics & Health & Social Care Policy Women Bishops Education76

Although there are many different interesting topics to be discussed, we will have a closer look at “Medical Ethics & Health & Social Care Policy”, which is ordered as follows:

Abortion Dying matters – End of Life Care Genetics Healthcare Chaplaincy Human fertilization and embryology NHS Reform Organ Donation Protecting life – opposing assisted suicide Social care77

Today, we will have a closer look at “NHS Reform” and “Social care”, but due to the limited amount of time, we will only discus “NHS Reform” more in detail.

NHS Reform 78

In July 2010, the newly elected Coalition Government of Conservatives and Liberal-Democrats proposed a NHS reform, which is considered to be the most far-reaching in sixty years. They published a White Paper “Equity and excellence: Liberating the NHS”. An answer of the established church could, of course, not stay off. They therefore published the report “Health Care and the Church’s Mission”, which is a product of the discussion in the General Synod. It is structured as follows:

Introduction NHS Chaplaincy NHS Reforms The Need for Change An International Dimension

75 Ibid., p. 233.76 Views, http://www.churchofengland.org/our-views.aspx77Medical Ethics & Health & Social Care Policy, http://www.churchofengland.org/our-views/medical-ethics-health-social-care-policy.aspx78 See M. HILL, GS 1857, Health Care and the Church’s Mission, http://www.churchofengland.org/our-views/medical-ethics-health-social-care-policy/nhs-reform.aspx

~ 13 ~

We will now quote some parts from the document. It begins as follows:

That this Synod, mindful of Our Lord’s ministry of healing and his charge to his disciples to heal the sick in his name:

(a) affirm the ministry of all who promote health and wholeness in body, mind and spirit, and call upon Her Majesty’s Government to ensure that chaplaincy provision remains part of the core structure of a National Health Service committed to physical, mental and spiritual health;

(b) call upon Her Majesty’s Government to apply as the test to any proposed changes to the NHS whether they are best calculated to secure the provision throughout the country of effective and efficient healthcare services provided free at the point of delivery and according to clinical need;

(c) commend the work of mission agencies and the networks of the Anglican Communion in embodying the churches’ contribution to health and wholeness and promoting fairer sharing of health resources worldwide.

Introduction

Throughout the history of the Church, healing has been an integral part of the proclamation and application of the Gospel. [...] Christian concern for physical and social wellbeing, as well as for spiritual transformation, was evident in times of persecution under the Roman Empire. [...] The emergence of modern nation states resulted in greater governmental involvement in the delivery of healthcare, but Christian agencies, often in the form of voluntary or charitable bodies, continued to be at the forefront of highlighting and addressing health issues, especially among the poor and disadvantaged.

The establishment of the National Health Service [...] owed much to the insight and energy of Archbishop William Temple and other Christian thinkers and activists.

It is, therefore, appropriate for the Church to look at the current and prospective state of healthcare delivery in England, focussing on particular areas of interest and concern that are pertinent to the Church’s healing ministry and mission.

NHS Chaplaincy

There is no defensible rationale for separating spiritual and religious care from other aspects of healthcare.

Chaplaincy Care

While faith communities ought to be willing to cooperate with NHS Trust in delivering such [spiritual] care, it remains the responsibility of the NHS to see that every patient is properly cared for.

NHS Reforms

It has been argued that such a situation [where state welfare squeezes out local, voluntary and charitable provision] not only encouraged an abdication of personal and community responsibility, in deference to a centralised organ of the State; it also encouraged the State to become overbearing in its care for its citizens. In reaction to this, disquiet at the imbalance of power in the relationship between State and people has been expressed in revulsion against the “Nanny State”.

The Need for Change

~ 14 ~

[The expression] “drivers for change” [...] suggests that pressure to change is externally imposed and is beyond anyone’s control.

Choices remain to be made and it is the responsibility of the government to ensure that a correct balance is set between contrasting pressures.

The Church has played a full and active role in the government’s consultation process and it is encouraging to note that some of our observations have been reflected in changes made to the original proposals.

There are still issues that continue to cause concern, including [...] the need to safeguard healthcare delivery in England against an unwarranted degree of privatisation or fragmentation.

The Church has an obligation to warn of the dangers of a wrong balance.

An International Dimension

Our interest as the Church of England should, we argue, combine a deep-rooted concern for the health of the people of our nation, and a lively interest in the most effective mechanisms for delivering physical, mental and spiritual care across the land, combined with the determination to contribute as far as we are able to the health and flourishing of all God’s people. In this, we believe, we are following the example and the mind of Our Lord.

Social care 79

One of the documents you can find in this section, is “Older and Disabled People Need More Support” of 2012. It is written by James Newcome, the Bishop of Carlisle, who supports a petition for a reform of the care system, so that everyone gets the care they need. The document was then published on the website of the Church of England. Again, we quote some parts of the document.

The social care system was set up to help ensure that no-one who couldn’t cope alone was left to struggle.

But years of underfunding of the social care system has, Age UK believes, left a system that is in crisis despite the best efforts of those who work with older people, and as a result, the whole system fails many of those who need it.

Families, neighbours and parishioners are providing increasingly intensive levels of social care support.

But the care they so lovingly given needs to be underpinned by a properly functioning, adequately funded system of social care.

Church communities have a proud history of effecting social change both here and overseas and Age UK is hoping that parishioners will rally behind the cause of making the care system better to help those who are among the most vulnerable in our society.

The former archbishop of Canterbury: Rowan Williams

79See J. NEWCOME, Older and Disabled People Need More Support, http://www.churchofengland.org/our-views/medical-ethics-health-social-care-policy/socialcare.aspx

~ 15 ~

After having discussed the different lines of thought within the Church of England and having given some examples from official texts, we now move our attention to the theology and political ethics of Rowan Williams, who was the archbishop of Canterbury between 2002-2012, after having been elected bishop of Monmouth in 1991 and archbishop of Wales in 1999. He is currently Master of Magdalene College at the Cambridge University and is life peer in the House of Lords. We will only shortly discuss his theology, insofar as it is relevant for our actual point of interest: his book “Faith in the Public Square”.

The theology of Rowan Williams 80

Central in Williams' political theology, is the meaning expressed through language, which he sees as follows:

Death Resurrection

Because we cannot adequately capture what we mean, in words, Williams compares this with the death of language. Still we have to try to express what we have to say. Through our failure to do this, we search for new ways of expressing our views. This we can do best in community, because, while speaking with others, we say things we would otherwise not have thought of. This way, a shared meaning arises. It is certainly the case for laws, structures, governments,... That is the reason why ongoing debates are essential. The reasoning as presented above, is compared by Williams, by the poet, or the artist. Five elements are important in this regard:

1. In art, poems for example, one can never capture its full meaning. Still the poet continues trying to use words as adequately as possible.

2. Another very important element is, of course, the creativity of the poet. He/she wants to create things, in an original way. Christians believe they, and the earth, are created by one and the same Creator. This has two very important consequences:

a. The other is already seen and loved, before I have seen him/her. b. Because the other is created and loved by the same Creator that created me, I have to

love my neighbour and defend his/her rights as if they were my own.3. To be creative, the poet has a need of imagination, to go beyond the normal structures of this

world. Nevertheless, this world still matters.4. The artist starts from a point that is not controlled by the public realm. This is also true

for the Church, whose truth goes beyond the legislation of the state.5. The piece of art is not for him-/herself:

a. For it is seen and interpreted by others, which means that there is not one objective truth. Translated into politics, this means that we are in need of different communities.

b. Although this piece of art remains the same, its meaning may thus evolve in time. It can even become a “fuller” more adequate meaning than was originally intended by the artist, and it has the potential of keeping its relevance in time. Therefore, we can speak about a creative re-engagement with the past, which remains relevant for the future. This is what Williams means by a living tradition of prayer.

80The part only captures Williams theology insofar as it is relevant for a clear understanding of “Faith in the Public Square”. For a more extended version with references, see Appendix A.

~ 16 ~

But what is true for language, is equally true for moral reasoning:

Where moral reasoning tries to evade the tragic dimension, where it posits any unambiguous good, it becomes an exercise in fantasy and a failure to accept that God’s grace is at work in the real, damaged world of human experience81.

The best way to give expression to this form of live, Williams writes, is by adopting a contemplative life, for which three elements are essential:

1. It’s a man that nobody knows. He/she does not long for worldly prestige, and does not long to become an idol. Therefore, he/she has no interest in becoming the object of prayer. On the contrary, he/she lives in a radical dependence of God.

2. The monastic person lives in the worldly city, and thus among the children of God. Because he/she lives in the city, he/she is confronted with the failure and sin of earthly structures. In other words: the monk has seen the demons of our world, but he/she has said “no”. It is possible that he/she lives in the margins of society instead of the centre of the Church. This is what Williams means with the “saint”.

3. A final aspect that is of essential importance for the monastic life, is living in communion, whether it are the members of the abbey or the people living in the city. This, says Williams, is also true for theology, which should not be studied in private, dark offices, but in a community.

[T]he solid reality of a really functioning Christian community is like that of a good marriage, in which mutual attention, giving and receiving, enjoyment and sacrifice are tightly woven together, as both realize that there is nothing good for one that is not good for both, nothing bad for one that is not bad for both, that fullness of life is necessarily a collaborative thing82.

This may be interesting, but where to begin? Well, says Williams, let’s start with the Eucharist, for it’s there that the living community meets, and it’s there that people are inspired by the framework that is repeated every week: whine, bread, and the cross. These three words, capture everything we have been discussing till now. In them, we see the free gift of God, and we learn that life is not only about receiving, but giving is equally important. Perhaps the most important thought in all the works of Rowan Williams, is that orthodoxy is about common life, before common doctrine. It’s therefore that the Church “happens”.What is the Church than? It’s the place where Christ is visibly active in the world. We all know examples where we saw the Church, and it worked.For Williams, this happened for example at the “Jubilee 2000”:

Back in the millennium year, the ‘Jubilee 2000’ campaign for debt relief reached a climax with a huge demonstration in Birmingham in the UK, where the economic power-brokers of the G8 countries had gathered. We had brought two coach loads from my diocese in South Wales; and, as I looked at the extraordinary variety of Christian groups on the streets – Catholic, Pentecostal, outrageously left-wing, and outrageously right-wing – I, like others, felt able to say, ‘I have seen the Church and it works.’Something of a real hunger and thirst for justice in Christ’s name had drawn and held this unlikely coalition; its only agenda was to further what all believed was the call of God’s kingdom, to resist what offended God’s justice83.

Or in other words:

81 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 27.82Ibid., p. 109.83 Ibid., p. 130.

~ 17 ~

Our life and our death is with our neighbor. If we win our brother, we win God. If we cause our brother to stumble, we have sinned against Christ84.

Faith in the Public Square

Introduction

We cannot turn ourselves away from the task of finding out how doctrine affects public life. His book, “Faith in the Public Square”, in which Williams has collected some of his most important speeches, is not “a compendium of political theology”, but “a series of worked examples of trying to find the connecting points between various public question and the fundamental beliefs about creation and salvation”, from which he hopes, “Christians begin in thinking about anything at all”85. Still, there are some unifying threads running through them, which, says Williams, may be elements of a “broader theory about faith and social order”. It is, he continues, not the loud, criticizing voices, which form a problem, but the confusion between communities86.

What is secularism?87

Williams points out, that it is very hard to speak about “secularism”, because it is such a broad term. He therefore makes use of two kinds of secularism. The first one is procedural secularism, which he defines as follows:

It is the principle according to which the state as such defines its role as one of overseeing a variety of communities of religious conviction and, where necessary, assisting them to keep the peace together, without requiring any specific public confessional allegiance from its servants or guaranteeing any single community a legally favoured position against others88.

the second one is programmatic secularism, which is a paradigm:

In which any and every public manifestation of any particular religious allegiance is to be ironed out so that everyone may share a clear public loyalty to the state unclouded by private convictions, and any signs of such private convictions are rigorously banned from public space89.

The latter has at least 3 negative consequences:

1. Moral convictions, which may be the most important foundations for the opinion people express, are no longer allowed in the public debate. One can therefore no longer express why one has a certain opinion on public issues. When someone still wants to do this, he/she has to express his/her opinion in a far poorer language, because all religious and ideological elements that do not fit within the vision of the state, have to be taken out of his/her speech. Or, in other words: we do not know any longer why people say, what they say.

2. Fundamental criticism for a real change, has become impossible, because all arguments that go beyond the state, are stuck in the private space, for arguments my not go beyond the tangible. The negotiation happen between visible agents. When they do not meet these standards, they have to translate their language, into a vocabulary, that is accessible for all.

3. Public criticism on religions also becomes impossible. The consequence may be the creation of ghetto’s and religions that formulate their visions, isolated from the secular state. When a religion turns to fundamentalism, a critique from the state or even the public debate, has become impossible, for it is a private, and thus personal matter.

84Ibid., p. 13. Originally published in W. BENEDICTA, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Kalamazoo, MI, 1984, p. 3.85 R. WILLIAMS, Faith in the Public Square, London, 2012, p. 2.86Ibid., p. 1-2.87 See Ibid., p. 1-22.88Ibid., p. 2.89Ibid., p. 3.

~ 18 ~

A way in which secularism has succeeded is in secularizing some religions.In this regard, religious commitment has, in the first place, to do with an acceptance of propositions that determine acceptable behaviour. By now it has become clear that secularism and secularized religions come into confrontation over social power, for both want to replace each other’s certainties.

So, in its neat distillation, secularism is inseparable from functionalism. This functionalistic secularism will generate a social practice, which is dominated by managerial or instrumental considerations.

The state that allows a procedural secularism, thinks of itself as a “community of communities”. This, one could call a more “pluralist ideal” of social life.When being honest to the complex society, there will be challenge between the communities. It will be no surprise than, that the argument is an essential element for the democratic state, in which religion should be involved. Their sense of limitedness and dependency of human creatures, is liberating us from the myth that an absolute human control over the human destiny would be possible.

But what is the non-secular than? “what I am aware of, I am aware of as in significant dimensions not defined by my awareness”90. The imaginative construction can be compared with art, which allows itself to be contemplated from other perspectives than those of the subjectivity of the artist. The world is therefore not reducible to an instrumental account, “related to one agenda, one process of negotiation at one time”91.

Towards a positive or negative liberty?92

An argument in favour of secularism, that is often heard, is that a “secular society is one in which it is possible to have fair and open argument about how common life should be run because everyone argues on the same basis”93. Thus there should be something as public reason. This is often accompanied by some version of the distinction between a negative and a positive liberty, as formulated by Isaiah Berlin. A negative liberty is:

What you have in a society where government allows a maximal level of individual choice and does not seek to prescribe moral priorities94.

A positive liberty is:

The situation arising in a society where government sees itself as having a mission to promote one or another ideal of emancipation – as having a specific agenda95.

A true liberal, says Williams, must be in favour of the negative liberty, for the “positive liberty leads to ideological tyranny, to the closing-down of argument and the ironing-out of plurality”96.

There is also a difference between the true interest of people, and what they claim to want. By now it has become clear that a policy of maximal individual choice will not do.For Williams, liberty goes far beyond consumer choice. When we have identified sources of injustice and formulated a language that allows us to think about them, we are bound to be involved in the process of public change. Otherwise, one makes an active choice for stagnation.

Williams summarizes his position on secularism and liberalism as follows:

It [the distinction between programmatic and procedural secularism] is the distinction between the empty public square of a merely instrumental liberalism, which allows maximal private licence, and a crowded and argumentative public square which acknowledges the authority of a legal mediator or broker whose job it is to balance and manage real difference. The empty public square

90 Ibid., p. 13.91 Ibid., p. 14.92 See Ibid., p. 23-48.93 Ibid., p. 23.94 Ibid., p. 23.95 Ibid., p. 23.96 Ibid., p. 23.

~ 19 ~

of programmatic secularism implies in effect that the almost value-free atmosphere of public neutrality and the public invisibility of specific commitments is enough to provide sustainable moral energy for a properly self-critical society. But it is not at all self-evident that people can so readily detach their perspectives and policies in social or political discussion from fundamental convictions that are not allowed to be mentioned or manifested in public97.

What Williams sees as an alternative situation, is one in which these convictions get a public hearing in debate. This is an approach which does not deny difference in society. To avoid that only the loudest voice is being heard, there must be a sharedrecognition of law, which determines the limits of freedoms. These decisions can be lived with, because they remain open for argument, and can therefore be reformed. The state itself is “a coalition of groups agreed on a legal structure”98.

Instead of being a pacific force, the state can be a violent system, when it wants to achieve social integration in a society with no shared ends. According to the state, each citizen is an agent in need of integration. In order to secure the agreed boundaries between the interests of these agents, the state proposes a concordat. Therefore the state assumes that it has a direct relation to its citizens. From this point of view, there is no room for mediation through communities.

The state has to legalize the rights of communities, but it has to make sure that these communities are able to identify themselves with public processes and social institutions. This way, specific groups can play a positive role in the policy, before a legislation is finalized. This, on its turn, requires more developed representative institutions of consultation.The previous asks for a different understanding of loyalty, in which the state consults and acknowledges communal identities, but at the same time accepts that she cannot deal with them as they concretely are. When the state fails to do this, it intensifies the impression that there is a competition between two comparable loyalties.

According to Cavanaugh, the modern state generates a state-society complex, in which it defines what is culturally acceptable or dominant. In this regard, Cavanaugh writes that the public space of contemporary culture is not neutral or free in any meaningful sense. In the same regard, the Christian community must distinguish itself, by telling and enacting a narrative that differs from that of the modern state. This explains why lobbying cannot be the main activity of the Church in society.

Despite the fact that the Church is not a simple rival of the secular state, it will, and must, raise questions about how the secular state thinks of social unity and loyalty.Still, this apparatus is essential in a law-governed society, where different communities exist side by side, and whose members are more diverse and mobile than ever before. After all, a government has to know who to address.

What the state thus implicitly proposes, is a minimum level for political virtue, moreover: “the keeping of the law as a form of acknowledging the basic claim of other agents to the same stability or security as you desire for yourself”99.Even if the majority vote determines what is lawful, it does not specify what is true. There is thus a need for a vantage point to discuss moral questions.

What we understand by democracy, says Williams, is a sort of political accountability, in which the government has to answer regularly and routinely to the will of the people. This way, it is possible to avoid that one interest group can gain an unchallenged power. Also important is that democracy should be more than a guarantee that majorities have their way. In this regard, Williams uses the notion lawful democracy, by which he means:

democratic institutions that earn credibility not just by corresponding to “popular will” but by placing themselves under law100.

The active pluralism101

So the law actually creates conditions, which enable communities to pursue what they see as good, in a complex social environment. It defends the good of the groups within, but also against

97 Ibid., p. 27.98 Ibid., p. 31.99 Ibid., p. 46.100Ibid., p. 49.101 See Ibid., p. 49-74.

~ 20 ~

destabilizing from outside. This is what Williams means with pluralism as it should be. Nevertheless, in the actual understanding of pluralism, the single sovereign power of the state’s law comes first.

By now, it has become clear, that an important task of assuring certain general social conditions of stability, by addressing the agenda, which no community can, and has the right, to manage. This is something quite different than delegating downwards. It’s thus about dealing with things at the appropriate level, and acknowledging that no single national jurisdiction can manage. This could be a version of the principle of subsidiarity, except that Williams’ views differ from a delegation downwards.Maybe the metaphor used by John the Dwarf, captures Williams’ theology even better:

“You don’t built a house by starting with the roof and working down. You start with the foundation.”They said, “What does that mean?”He said, “The foundation is our neighbor whom we must win. The neighbor is where we start. Every commandment of Christ depends on this”102.

The moral interest of the state is twofold: “An interest in securing the liberty of groups to pursue their own social goods, and an interest in building in to its own processes a set of cautions and defences against absolutism”103. The state can facilitate co-operation between groups by its own partnership and sponsorship. Williams concludes adds that, for the Christian tradition, only the Body of Christ can claim a divine authority.

Basic to all these elements is the belief in the human capacity for self-creation. The scepticism, in which nothing, not even the self, was secure, came in. This explains the success of the novel, which actually tells about how selves are shaped. This allowed people to discover different “roles” in society and the consequences of non-conformity. They could read or hear the diagnoses of the ills of society and the recipes for its transformation. The novel even moved its focus from the goal to the search.

Williams describes the purely postmodern climate as “a world of imitation, endless self-reflection which doesn’t do much to take forward the creative project”104. In such a world, it is tempting to look for convictions, that give us absolute certainties, and thus liberate us from our uncertainties. If this is true, all the questions have been answered, and the idea of culture is death. Things that are innovative or questioning are than resisted. Williams concludes:

[I]f this spirit [of Christianity] is to be critical, a means of proper judgement, it can’t be endlessly suspicious, it can’t settle with the notion that there is nothing to trust anywhere. Christian faith tells us that, because God is to be trusted, we can be very bold indeed about the degree of scepticism we give to what is less than God. In the context of faith, this is the ‘unbearable lightness’ that is given to us in relation to the systems and expectations of the world around, the irony that is still compatible with love and commitment in God’s name105.

Political liberalism, writes Williams, is “the idea that political life can and should be a realm of creative engagement”106. It is not just about individual liberties or democratic rights, but it acknowledges that loyalty to the state and religious belonging are not the same thing. The Church defines itself as a community, that locates itself alongside, but also in a different order than the political society. Nevertheless it is no empire on the same level as the worldly empires. Therefore, its citizens do not have to live in rivalry to the existing systems.The Christian community speaks of alternative citizenship.

The role of the church is to harmonize and regulate the social variety to some degree. This explains the importance of an interactive pluralism, which is about allowing distinct styles and convictions to challenge each other, but by assuring that they, in the first place, had the freedom to be themselves.

102R. WILLIAMS, Where God Happens, p. 15. Originally published in W. BENEDICTA, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, p. 93.103Ibid., p. 58.104Ibid., p. 72.105Ibid., p. 73.106 Ibid., p. 78.

~ 21 ~

The enjoyment of the real107

Williams explains the rejection of religion through the loosing of monopoly. It is clear by now, that people choose their identity, and this is the result of economically developed societies, who shift away from a controlling narrative, which tells about shared goals and meanings.

Traditional styles of religious commitment had not so much to do with resolving lines of thought, but is about creating environments where people are supplied with possible roles within a comprehensive narrative. Religious freedom is, in this context, “the liberty to embody an objective truth”108. Another important element of religion is responsibility, for it has to do with being called to answer for and to other agents. There is also a need for a starting point and motivation for radical challenge and possible change.

What the religious distinguishes from the spiritual, is especially an interpersonal imagery. “To discover who I am I need to discover the relation in which I stand to an active, prior Other, to transcendent creator”109. This creative imagination is also greatly expressed by the mystical writers, moreover “an awareness that the policy of living in faith and worship constantly opens upon a landscape still to be explored, resisting mastery and mapping, yet also authoritative in its distance from what the individual or collective human will produces”110. One could describe this as the enjoyment of the real.

Williams concludes about religion:

In short, as religion – corporate, sacramental and ultimately doctrinal religion – settles into this kind of awareness, it becomes one of the most potent allies possible for genuine pluralism: that is, for a social and political culture that is consistently against coercion and institutionalized inequality, and is committed to serious public debate about common good111.

The current archbishop of Canterbury: Justin Welby

To become an Anglican priest, Justin Welby turned his back on a successful career in the oil industry in 1989. In 1983 his seven-month-old daughter, Johanna, died in a car crash. Although it was a dark time for the family of Welby, it brought them closer to God. He is considered to be on the Anglo-Evangelical side. One of his many functions was that of co-director for international ministry at the International Centre for Reconciliation, in which he came, in a number of occasions, close to being killed. In November 2011, he became bishop of Durham, and in January 2013 Welby was elected as Archbishop of Canterbury. He is also a member of the parliamentary commission on banking standards and has written on business ethics. Instead of discussing these works, we will turn our attention to his public interventions as archbishop. That this is worth mentioning, is somehow proven at the moment that Welby compared the reports of the Cypriot financial crisis to some accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus112.

At the 10th of March, even before his enthronement, Welby condemned the governments benefit changes, for she has the duty to protect people who are vulnerable and in need. This whas not an isolated voice, since 43 bishops wrote a letter in the same regard, which was supported by the archbishop of York, John Sentamu. What Welby thinks of public systems, becomes a bit clearer when he says that: “These changes will mean it is children and families who will pay the price of high inflation, rather than the government”. The reason for this intervention of bishops, is to press for a vote on an amendment, which could result in a defeat for ministers. That this intervention of the Archbishop is not meaningless, is shown by the reaction of the president of the Liberal Democrats,

107 See Ibid., p. 75-96.108 Ibid., p. 89.109 Ibid., p. 91.110 Ibid., p. 91-92.111 Ibid., p. 95-96.112S. JONES, Archbishop Justin Welby Warns Against Trusting Fallible Leaders, in The Guardian, 31 March 2013.

~ 22 ~

Tim Farron, who describes this intervention as “an immensely helpful one in strengthening [its] hand to fight for a fairer deal”. The priority of this archbishop will be tackling poverty113.

Already in his first Sermon, Welby made very clear what the priorities of the Church should be. The Church Welby has in mind, is certainly no Church that just gets on with its own business. For a society without Jesus at its centre, is a deficient society, and it is the task of the Church to place Jesus there. About such interventions in the public sphere, he said:

Slaves were freed, Factory Acts passed, and the NHS and social care established through Christ-liberated courage. The present challenges of environment and economy, of human development and global poverty, can only be faced with extraordinary courage. [...] A Christ-heeding life changes the church and a Christ-heeding church changes the world114.

Yet at the same time the church transforms society when it takes the risks of renewal in prayer, of reconciliation and of confident declaration of the good news of Jesus Christ. In England alone the churches together run innumerable food banks, shelter the homeless, educate a million children, offer debt counselling, comfort the bereaved, and far, far more. All this comes from heeding the call of Jesus Christ. Internationally, churches run refugee camps, mediate civil wars, organise elections, set up hospitals. All of it happens because of heeding the call to go to Jesus through the storms and across the waves115.

When we keep Jesus at the centre of the Church’s life, this inevitably results in a desire to see the world changed. The Church itself, is a community of individuals, who are united in their love for Christ. They wish to share what they have received from God and challenge injustice116.

In his first Easter sermon, Welby said that it is simplistic and wrong to pin hope on politicians or priests, because they are frail and fallible human leaders. The reason why this is a mistake, has to do with the human sin. As a consequence it’s naïve to assume that an organization can have such good systems, that human failure will be eliminated. Only by trusting in God’s power, can we escape cynical despair and fear. Nevertheless, also Christian leaders have not always listened to God, when they were confronted with fearful consequences of change117.

However, one of the archbishop’s most significant politic interventions happened the 23th of April, when he called for an introduction of regional banks, as one of the major steps to get Britain out of the economic depression, hereby backing an idea, put forward by Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour party and the opposition. He said this in a discussion, which was organized by the Bible Society. Welby argues that the problems we are facing today, were created when banks became distant from the communities they served118.

Conclusion: What role has the Church of England to play in the contemporary society?

113T. REID, Archbishop of Canterbury Condemns Benefit Changes, 10 March 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21731488114G. SCOTT, Justin Welby, A Church Confident in Christ will Transform the World, 22 March 2013, http://godandpoliticsuk.org/2013/03/22/justin-welby-a-church-confident-in-christ-will-transform-the-world/115Ibid.116Ibid.117S. JONES, Archbishop Justin Welby Warns Against Trusting Fallible Leaders.118 B. QUINN, Archbishop of Canterbury Calls for Introduction of Regional Banks, in The Guardian, 23 April 2013.

~ 23 ~

More and more voices are heard these days, who have questions with the presence of an established church in the UK. While the previous, Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, wanted to create cardinal-emeritus, Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Life Peer in the House of Lords; the Conservative prime minister David Cameron suggested the possibility of Roman Catholic bishops becoming Lords Spiritual. The Liberal Democrats were in favour of different religions being represented in the House of Lords. Still others wish to keep religions out of parliament. The results of these discussions where the following: cardinal Murphy-O'Connor refused Brown’s offer, the only Roman Catholic bishop, who showed real interest in the offer of Cameron was the archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, who was held back by the then pope Benedict XVI; and the reform of the House of Lords was outvoted by parliament. Still the discussion on the role of the Church of England within politics, remains intriguing. We therefore share our thoughts on this issue:

1. Appointing bishops-emeriti can happen in the context of normal British politics, where people with an exceptional merit or intellectual skills can get a seat in the House of Lords. When it has to do with getting Roman Catholics in the House of Lords, it is one of the least desirable options. When Anglican bishops take seat as Lord Spiritual and Catholics as Lord Temporal, the devision still exists. Nevertheless, it resolves one difference between them: both Anglican as well as Catholic former archbishops can become life peers, and thus, Lord Temporal. Still the real issue is not yet resolved.

2. Creating both Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops Lord Spiritual, actually creates two established churches in one country. This creates three further problems:

a. What about other Christians (like the reformed church) or other religions. In other words: inequality still exists, it has just changed.

b. According to Canon Law (canon 285§3), Catholic priests are not allowed to take seat in parliament, and while the Anglican heads are the British queen and archbishop of Canterbury, the Catholics serve a pope who doesn’t live in the UK and is thus an external force. This can create problems in parliament, where laws for a country are being voted.

c. Since the Catholic archbishop of Westminster supports the Conservatives and the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury supports Labour, relations between both Christian communities can become more complicated. There would be a real risk for focussing on political conflicts instead of the Kingdom of God. In other words: in their discussions, Anglicans and Roman Catholics could be more determined by their political preferences than by faith.

3. Allowing more religions as Lords Spiritual, creates the question where to stop. There will always be religions who are not included. In that case it is worse when some are held back, than when one is privileged.

4. Having no religions at all in the House of Lords allows even more space for secularisation. We may not forget that thanks to the presence of Anglican priests and bishops in both parliaments, religious wisdom drops into politics. Further the bishops can, and do, defend the rights of the other religions. In this regard they are a voice for religious people, but also for the poor.

In conclusion to this point we are principally against the presence of bishops in parliament. Since this can create serious problems, we would not advice countries to include them into that parliament. Nevertheless, since the Anglican tradition is already hundreds of years closely woven with British politics, and above all because it works, we would argue to make an assumption here. The Roman Catholic tradition, with its centre in Rome, works different. Our answer would thus, in both cases, be a conservative one: respect both traditions. The real advantage for both, when entering in a fruitful ecumenical dialogue is this: while Anglicans can defend the rights of Roman Catholics in parliament, the strongly independent Roman Catholics can be very critical, and even protest, against unjust governmental decisions. This, of course, does absolutely not exclude a fruitful dialogue between Catholics, whether they are bishops, priests or laity, with MPs.

With regard to the radical orthodoxy, we discern three problems:

~ 24 ~

1. Often the two-city theory of Saint-Augustine is copied into our time, taking note little of the changed context. No arguments are needed to see that the Roman, imperial context, was very different from the contemporary British society. Therefore one can use the following model:

Church Fathers ~ medieval authors ~ contemporary authorsAncient society medieval society contemporary society

2. According to the Christian tradition, the Kingdom of God is not yet fully, but partly realised. We find ourselves in a time between yet and not yet. When emphasizing on the sinfulness and violent character of the secular society, it does not pay enough attention on what is realised.

3. It creates too high expectations towards the leaders of Christian communities. When they behave sinful, this has severe consequences for the credibility of communities, who have to show an example. In other words: the expectations of human leaders becomes unrealistically high.

We therefore prefer the political theology, which seems to acknowledge the good realisations of society, and wants to engage to make the structures more just. Nevertheless, there are still risks, when Spencer and Chaplin write that Christians can be involved in the whole spectrum of mainstream political parties. While we agree on the idea that the Bible does not deliver clear answers on contemporary problems, a line of thought needs to be searched. Our specific question is this: can people be involved with the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats and UKIP on the basis of the same truth? How can two contradicting parties be both right in a Biblical perspective? Although we acknowledge that Chaplin and Spencer would nuance this and are in fact searching for the direction which the Bible suggests, the problem is a realistic one. For example: because the cigarette was not yet invinted in the time of Jesus, He never spoke of it. While Labour is against smoking in pubs, UKIP is in favour. Now, when Christians are involved in both parties, who’s right? In this regard, the attitude of archbishop Welby is an healthy one: not forcing Christians to look in one direction, but trying to convince them by argument. He also does not continually support one party, but gives reasons to support a specific perspective. The texts of the Church of England itself, seem to follow the same direction: they warn the government for the risks of certain policies and write down their own, Christian vision, but without condemning Anglicans who are member of these parties.

One who has found the middle ground, is Rowan Williams. He argues that religious communities should have the right to govern their own structures, and should be motivated for active discussions in the public sphere. Still it is up to the government to create laws, in a democratic way, to protect the people and prevent groups from harming each other’s rights. Still, these groups are also responsible for each other. Therefore the state has the duty to create laws to protect its citizens, but she doesn’t have to regulate everything. In the same regard, we, as persons, are determined by different groups. We can, for example, be member of the Church of England, the Conservative Party and the Fire Brigades Union. All these communities while determine our identity, while we may partly determine the direction of these three groups. That is another very good reason for discussing by argument what the “right” position is, instead of condemning specific people.

Appendix A

~ 25 ~

Noverim Me Noverim TeThe Theology of Rowan Williams

Introduction

Many people consider it difficult to read the theology of Rowan Williams, and even he himself admits that his words can be “constipated and abstract”119. Nevertheless, for Williams, this difficulty is not a problem at all, for reality is complex, and therefore he is working with something which “does not instantly and effortlessly make sense”120. According to Mike Higton, one question runs as a red thread through Williams’ works:

[A]ll of it, that is, tries to proclaim the good news of God’s utterly gracious, utterly gratuitous love, and raises the question of what difference that love makes to us. And that simple message is the most difficult one we can ever hear, in a rather different sense of ‘difficult’: it is difficult, not because it will demand our most painstaking intellectual skills but because it will demand everything121.

Higton also writes that Williams often follows unpredictable paths, in response to particular situations, under particular conditions. He also tends to think that the only truly honest and useful theology happens through practical engagements, which make a connection with specific lives of people. In some way, Williams’ theological books can be seen as a preparation, instead of a fixed theory122. Further, Williams holds the opinion that Christ is universally available, and “the truth of the gospel can be refracted through all the disparate fragments of human experience and tradition” 123. About Williams’ theology, Myers writes:

Theology, in his [Williams’] view, is not a private table for one but a rowdy banquet of those who gather, famished and thirsty, around Christ. The lonely work of reading and writing is not yet theology but only its preparation. Theology happens wherever we are drawn together into the congenial and annoying labour of conversing, listening, and disputing – in short, where we are drawn into a collective struggle for truthful speech. The aim of Williams’ writing is to provoke us into such a struggle, to remind us that truth is not something possessed by any one of us but a promise and a project for which we have to take responsibility together124.

This is why he keeps doctrine and social critique together125. Also very striking, is his response to a 6-year-old girl who had sent a letter to God, asking “How did you get invented?”. Her non-believing father sent the letter to Williams, who answered as follows:

Dear Lulu,

119 M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, The Theology of Rowan Williams, London, 2004, p. 3. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, On Christian Theology, Oxford, 2000, p. 270.120M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 3. Originally published in . WILLIAMS, Arius, Heresy and Tradition, London, 1987, 22001, p. 236.121 M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 5.122Ibid., p. 6-7.123 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, The Theology of Rowan Williams, London, New York, NY, 2012, p. xi.124Ibid., p. xi-xii. Italics included by the author of this thesis.125G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, An Outline, critique, and consideration of its consequences (Latimer Studies, 55), London, 2002, 22003, p. 3. This becomes particularly clear in “Lost Icons”, which we will, more often refer to in the chapter on Williams’ political reasoning.

~ 26 ~

Your dad has sent on your letter and asked if I have any answers. It’s a difficult one! But I think God might reply a bit like this –

‘Dear Lulu – Nobody invented me – but lots of people discovered me and were quite surprised. They discovered me when they looked round at the world and thought it was really beautiful or really mysterious and wondered where it came from. They discovered me when they were very very quiet on their own and felt a sort of peace and love they hadn’t expected. Then they invented ideas about me – some of them sensible and some of them not very sensible. From time to time I sent some hints – specially in the life of Jesus – to help them get closer to what I’m really like. But there was nothing and nobody around before me to invent me. Rather like somebody who writes a story in a book, I started making up the story of the world and eventually invented human beings like you who could ask me awkward questions!’

And then he’d send you lots of love and sign off. I know he doesn’t usually write letters, so I have to do the best I can on his behalf. Lots of love from me too.

+ Archbishop Rowan126

This letter fits perfectly in the way Williams thinks about theology, moreover that “human experience and everyday language can become windows into God’s activity”127. The paradox of Williams’ work is that God is near and hard to grasp. Williams himself compares doing theology with “the noise of someone falling over things in the dark”128, for this God, “who rearranges the furniture of our lives”129, “enters into a world of confusion and ambiguity, and works in contradictions”130. In this regard, Williams uses the example of the child, whereby God speaks through the crying of the child, which is disturbing, interrupting and uncontrollable131. Even God’s self-communication was not a unilateral declaration, but happened through the ambiguity of death and resurrection132.

Finally, the Nicene Creed runs as a red thread through Williams’ theology. One could even argue that his theological reflection is actually a commentary on this Creed. It is, therefore, impossible to understand Williams’ views without keeping the Nicene Creed in the back of our mind. It is not strange then, to begin our actual study with the Creed:

I believe in one God the Father almighty,maker of heaven and earth,

and of all thingsvisible and invisible:

And in one Lord Jesus Christ,the only-begotten Son of God,

begotten of his Father before all worlds,God of God, Light of Light,

very God of very God,begotten, not made,

being of one substance with the Father,by whom all things were made;

126Ibid., p. 3. Originally published in D. THOMPSON, A Six-Year-Old Girl Writes a Letter to God. And the Archbiship of Canterbury Answers, The Thelegraph, 2011.127 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 4.128Ibid., p. 5. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Telling the Christmas Story Like It Is, The Guardian, 2000.129 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 5.130Ibid., p. 5. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, The Wound of Knowledge, Spirituality from the New Testament to St. John of the Cross, London, 1979, 21990, p. 14.131M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 50-51.132 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 3-5.

~ 27 ~

who for us men and for our salvationcame down from heaven,

and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary,and was made man,

and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate.He suffered and was buried,

and the third day he rose againaccording to the Scriptures,and ascended into heaven,

and sitteth on the right hand of the Father.And he shall come again with glory

to judge both the quick and the dead:whose kingdom shall have no end.And I believe in the Holy Ghost,

the Lord and giver of life,who proceedeth from the Father and the Son,

who with the Father and the Son togetheris worshipped and glorified,who spake by the prophets.

And I believe one catholic and apostolic Church.I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.

And I look for the resurrection of the dead,and the life of the world to come.

Amen133.

Important here is that “Jesus begins to be as a human being because of this meeting of God’s free grace and Mary’s grace-filled human readiness and openness”134. The essence for Williams’ theology and political thinking becomes already very clear, when he mentions that:

Only three human individuals are mentioned in the Creed, Jesus, Mary and Pontius Pilate: that is Jesus; the one who says ‘yes’ to him; and the one who says ‘no’ to him. You could say that those three names map out the territory in which we all live. Through our lives, we swing towards one people or the other, towards a deeper ‘yes’ or towards a deeper ‘no’. And in the middle of it all stands the one who makes sense of it all. Jesus – the one into whose life we must all try to grow, who can work with our ‘yes’ and can even overcome our ‘no’135.

We will not follow a specific timeline in accordance to the sequence in which Williams’ ideas came into being. In the light of the main aim of this contribution, we will set out some main themes, which we consider to be important for his political way of thinking and ordered these in a logical order, which can be object of discussion, for, in Williams’ mind, there are always strong connections between different areas. Therefore “you are seldom safe when reading Williams’ work. […] Williams’ work is constantly crossing boundaries, in the confidence that the Gospel has crossed them before him”136. Nevertheless, we must admit that during the years a shift has taken place in the views of Rowan Williams, which is not surprising, since he himself admits that every theory comes being through conversations with the community and is tested by this very same community. The change is

133Sometimes Williams uses the Apostles Creed, but most of the time he seems to prefer the Nicene one. The translation he uses is that of “The Book of Common Prayer Communion Service” of 1662. See R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. xii-xiii.134Ibid., p. 76.135Ibid., p. 76.136Ibid., p. 9-10.

~ 28 ~

this: while Williams began his studies with strongly emphasizing the unknowability of God in “The Wound of Knowledge” (1979), “Open to Judgement” (1994), “On Christian Theology” (2000), “Arius” (2001) and “Resurrection” (2002); he later on began creating an opening to say something about God in the contemplative life. The first time this was clearly hinted, was in “Where God Happens” (2005). Williams later on continued to mention the importance of contemplative life for knowing something of God in the last chapter of “Tokens of Trust” (2011) and his letter to Lullu (2011). It was, finally, extensively discussed in “A Silent Action” (late 2011). We therefore may conclude that his experiences as Archbishop of Canterbury have fruitfully contributed, nut only to his social and political views, but also on his theological position.

The priority of life over ideas

For Williams, there is a clear priority of life over ideas, which will become more clear throughout this study. Myers also writes correctly that Williams “is best understood not as an Anglican with an interest in Orthodoxy but as essentially ‘Orthodox in an Anglican form’” 137. He is especially interested in Vladimir Lossky’s negative or “apophatic” theology, who claims that speaking of God means saying what He is not138. Williams himself writes that “[f]aith is always, not only in this life, a longing and trust directed away from itself towards an object to which it will never be adequate, which it will never comprehend. God is what we have not yet understood, the sign of a strange and unpredictable future”139.

For Williams this is not a conceptual game, but a process of transformation of the self, “whereby we are drawn outside ourselves into the presence of someone who is different” 140. This is what happened to the first Christians when they were addressed by Jesus. He gave His life for the sake of others, stepping beyond all boundaries141. Lossky himself describes the trinity as “a cross for human ways of thought”142. “In the trinity, there is no self-interest, no ‘individual will’, but only an enormous movement of painful, ecstatic self-renunciation. This self-renouncing pattern of life is the root of all personal being”143, for the image of God is not to be found inside the self, but outside. It is by attaching ourselves to the interests of others, instead of our own, that we begin to reflect God. This reasoning implies that personhood is only known apophatically, because we can never determine what a person is, “since the ‘personal’ element is exactly what remains most dark and unknowable in another” 144. In other words: humans reflect God’s unknowability145. Myers continues: “Mystery is not the opposite of knowing; it is the exact content of what we know about others”146, or:

[W]hen God’s light breaks on my darkness, the first thing I know is that I don’t know – and never did. […] Christ’s is the kingship of a riddler, the one who makes us strangers to what we think we know147.

137Ibid., p. 16. See also R. SHORT, Rowan’s Rule, The Biography of the Archbishop, London, 2008.138B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 16-17. See also M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 48-49.139Ibid., p. 49. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, The Wound of Knowledge, p. 58.140 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 17. See also R. WILLIAMS, Lossky, the Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology, in M. HIGTON (ed.), Wrestling with Angels, Grand Rapids, MI, 2007, p. 2.141M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 21-22.142 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 17. Originally published in V. LOSSKY, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Cambridge, 1957, p. 66.143 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 17. See also R. WILLIAMS, Lossky, p. 14-15.144Ibid., p. 18.145Ibid., p. 17-18. About not owning the message of the Gospel, see M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 20-21.146 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 18.147G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 7. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Open to Judgement, London, 1994, p. 120.131.

~ 29 ~

This denial of knowledge is also presence in Williams view on the trinity, which teaches us that certainties must be given away as God gives himself away in this Trinitarian relationship 148. In his own reasoning, Williams intertwines Wittgenstein with Lossky’s theology of the human person: “Social life […] is not about collapsing differences or engineering an artificial unity. Instead differences should be accentuated as sharply as possible, so that what you experience in another person is not fantasy, not another deceptive projection of yourself, but the real intractable mystery of another self. You can never be done with another person, since every advance in knowing is an opening on to greater mystery. […] It is in the most intimate proximity to others that we are most painfully aware of their difference. […] Understanding another person […] is […] a continuing labour”149. Or in Williams’ words:

‘We must long to learn the secret of our own nothingness (not God’s secret first of all, but our own secret). But God alone can show us our own secret’. If every person’s identity is hidden in God, every person’s bound to seek it through that perilous exposure to God in solitude which is the basis of contemplation. Contemplation is not a religious exercise but an ontological necessity in the intense personalism of Christian faith, the encounter of the human person with the Divine Council of Persons150.

The moral priority of tragedy

According to Williams, the entire sequence of history is empty and trivial, but, paradoxically, the incarnation becomes a vehicle of divine meaning. In this human life, God willingly endures the emptiness of history. In his preaching on Eliot, Williams states that we can only make room for the work of love and communion by abandoning our self-centered fantasies151. In other words: by addressing us by the cross, God shatters al our images and idols152. Far more important for our faith than the idols of our society, is the man that nobody knows:

Christian belief finds the ground of truth in the silence of Christ, in the story of a man so ‘poor’ that, at the end of his days, he preaches no word, no idea, but suffers only, takes the world to himself by resisting nothing of it, by exercising none of the self’s habitual violence, and whose life is thus transparent without qualification to the shape of reality. A man nobody knows153.

As a metaphor, Williams, prefers the poet, which, at first, is disillusioned because of the failure of language to be transparent to reality, but, in complete honesty, endures the failure in order to continue speaking154. This way, poets discover ways of expressing themselves that goes beyond the normal limits of language155. Williams explicitly expresses the “hope that one effect of Christian

148 G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 6-7.149Ibid., p. 18.150 R. WILLIAMS, A Silent Action, Engagements with Thomas Merton, Louisville, KY, 2011, p. 30-31. See also: T. MERTON, A Secular Journal, New York, NY, 1959, p. 98.151Ibid., p. 23-25. See also B. RAJAN, The Unity of the Quartets, in B. RAJAN (ed.), T.S. Eliot, A Study of His Writings by Several Hands, London, 1947, p. 86.95. See also R. WILLIAMS, Lazarus, In Memory of T.S. Eliot, in R. WILLIAMS (ed.), A Ray of Darkness, Sermons and Reflections, Cambridge, 1994.152M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 51. See also: R. WILLIAMS, On Christian Theology, p. 10; ID., The Wound of Knowledge, p. 149.153R. WILLIAMS, A Silent Action, p. 18.154 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 26-27.155 M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 78-79. See also R. WILLIAMS, What is Catholic Orthodoxy?, in R. WILLIAMS& K. LEECH (eds.), Essays Catholic and Radical, A Jubilee Group Symposium for the 150th Anniversary of the Beginning of the Oxford Movement 1833-1983, London, 1983, p. 11-25 (especially p. 12.17).

~ 30 ~

believing is always seeing the world in a new way – seeing beyond the surface without letting go of what’s actually there on the surface (which still matters immensely)”156.

There are no private or individual meanings, but only the shared meanings that we exchange with others. It is this what Myers calls an ethical version of negative theology. Moral agency is only possible when we recognize the tragic limitations of our actions, but nevertheless resolve these limitations to make it possible to act. According to Williams, we have to act against the grain of the world and what is humanly possible, instead of embedding moral norms objectively into the world, like natural law ethics does157.

For theologians is hard to speak in terms of positive definitions. Defining oneself can happen more clearly by negations. This is, like we already stated, also true for poetry. According to Williams there are four things that poetry is not: (1) poetry is no magic, (2) it is not about being useful, (3) poetry is against a focus on the artist in instead of the work, and (4) poetry is against the self and its awareness that brings forward the idea that we have indefinite choices158. By now it becomes clear why Williams prefers the artist: the perception of art is always incomplete. These works constantly evoke more response. It is, in other words, the response, and not a definition of the effects, that becomes a datum for the mind159. Following Douglas R. Hofstadter, Williams writes:

‘[T]he self-awareness comes from the system’s intricately intertwined responses to both internal and external stimuli’. And this presupposes a difference between a signal – which triggers a reaction but has no meaning in itself – and a symbol, which is already a complex bundle of interrelated elements, a meaningful reality. A symbol is intrinsically bound up with the relation of things sensed and lodged in the subject, it is part of a system of seeing or absorbing what is there; and so it necessarily generates further symbolic connections, not merely a repeatable, generalized response. Mental activity instantly combines – complicates – signals into symbols; recognition is never simply of an isolated stimulus – or perhaps we should say that recognition at such a level is so deeply buried in the process of the mind that it cannot even be intelligibly described160.

About the artist he writes: “To speak of art as having ‘dimension’ in this way is to say that the artist is always concerned with things as they are in relation to something more and other than the artist. This holds true at both ends”161. Myers describes the social consequences of this view:

Moral reasoning does not show us the right way to act; it only exposes the claustrophobic limits of our capacities. There is no unambiguously good act, no act that escapes the web of tragic relations in which our lives are enmeshed. Where moral reasoning tries to evade the tragic dimension, where it posits any unambiguous good, it becomes an exercise in fantasy and a failure to accept that God’s grace is at work in the real, damaged world of human experience162.

Williams thus holds the opinion that God is at work where he is most hidden. When the world rejects Him, He is most committed. As a consequence, ethics includes endurance, disappointment and

156R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. ix.157B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 26-27. Myers writes the following about the poet: “poets expand our human capacities by exposing us to the sheer objectivity of language, the way it enables human community while resisting human mastery and control” (p. 26). See also R. WILLIAMS, Poetic and Religious Imagination, in Theology 80 (1977), p. 178-187.158R. WILLIAMS, A Silent Action, p. 40-47.159R. WILLIAMS, Grace and Necessity, Reflections on Art and Love, London, 2005, 42010, p. 135.160Ibid., p. 136-137. See also: D.R. HOFSTADTER& D.C. DENNETT (eds.), The Mind’s Eye, Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, London, 1981, p. 176-178.200.161 R. WILLIAMS, Grace and Necessity, p. 149.162 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 27.

~ 31 ~

recommitment163. And still we can know something about God: “If Jesus is translucent to God in all he does and is, if he is empty so as to pour out the riches of God, if he is the well-spring of life and grace, what then? He is God, in infancy, in death, in eating and drinking, in healing and preaching … This is the Lord, God in flesh, God made known in history, God fearing, struggling and suffering; the only God we know or can know, the glory of God in the face of Christ, love and healing in human hands and eyes – how else could we grasp it”164? The difficulty with Jesus is, that, as a human being, His power and knowledge was finite, and He Himself was confined to one time and place. In this way He was not only involved with, but also dependent of others. And yet, He is God. Therefore we are obliged to take Jesus whole life into account, as the Word of God. Although Jesus lived in a particular time and place, He transcends these borders by his resurrection. So, on the one hand, He loved people in particular ways, in which He met them in their need, deceit and failure and has set them on solid ground, living His love towards them in a particular relationship in concrete encounters. On the other hand, the resurrection has made an encounter with Him possible everywhere. Jesus love is therefore particular as well as universal. Healing is only possible through constantly repeated encounters with Jesus165, or in the words of Williams:

Jesus grants us a solid identity, yet refuses us the power to ‘seal’ or finalize it, and obliges us to realize that this identity only exists in an endless responsiveness to new encounters with him in the world of unredeemed relationships166.

Because Jesus lives the Gospel, that tells us about His love, it is not in anyone’s control, except for His own. It is for this reason, that Williams warns us for thinking that we understand all of it and can manage the challenges that come from it. The Lordship of Jesus is ‘one who makes us strangers to what we think we know”167. We can only become as human being as we are meant to be, in relation to Christ. Because Jesus lives, we can encounter Him again. Therefore His personal identity remains and He will always be “a person who obstinately stands over against us”168.

Christians are a people who continually point away from themselves, towards the righteousness of Christ. The Gospel itself tells us about Jesus’ “free, unanxious, utterly demanding, grown-up love”. It tells us that it is possible for us human beings to “receive from his fullness and set others free” 169. In the incarnation, we find God’s pure and selfless love for us. Nevertheless, Christ is no “container of all”. Instead He comes to us as gift and question, thereby challenging and transforming every situation we are confronted with. It will be no surprise than, that, for Williams, theology is more about people than about ideas, theories or concepts. What he is not trying to do, is to create a theory of

163Ibid., p. 27.164M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 28. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, On Christian Theology, p. 70.165M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 29-31. See also: R. WILLIAMS, A History of Faith in Jesus, in M. BOCKMUEHL (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Jesus, Cambridge, 2001, p. 220; ID., Resurrection, London, 2002, p. 82; ID.,Tokens of Trust, p. 57.166M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 31. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Resurrection, p. 76.167M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 32. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Open to Judgement, p. 131.168M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 32. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Resurrection, p. 72.169M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 33. Both originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Enthronement Sermon, 27 February 2003, http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermon_speeches/. In “The Wound of Knowledge”, he expresses him as follows: “Christ is the root of our security and our insecurity alike, promise and judgement, end and beginning, the burning bush, the Paschal lamb, the rock and the tabernacle, present as a sign of hope at every stage of our painful journey out of bondage and across the wilderness”. M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 33. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, The Wound of Knowledge, p. 70.

~ 32 ~

everything170. For Williams, the Gospel is an invitation “to be drawn into cross and resurrection and to find there … at once a decisive No and an everlasting Yes to our selves”171.

But it has not only to do with receiving. The free gift of God asks for a response, which is not less divine than the gift. What makes the Christian faith different from the others, is that it is about giving, as well as receiving; depending, as well as controlling. And this can reflect God’s life in all our aspects. As a consequence it is not correct to say that God only gives His life, He shares His life with us. The same is true for His love. Therefore we can say that we are sharers of God’s life and love172. And by now, we know that this love is not just an idea but an never ending deed:

Remember, Christianity is a contact before it is a message. God is at work, God is communicating himself in flesh and blood, from the first moment Mary embraces her child. God is at work in this presence even when Jesus is saying nothing particular and doing nothing particular173.

Further, when we pray together in the Holy Communion, “[w]e stand before God the Father, clothed in the identity of Jesus by the gift of the Spirit”174. So, when we walk in the fire of God’s love, we are accompanied by Christ, the eternal Son of God. At the moment when we receive bread and wine, we are as near to the heart of what it is to be a Christian or the Church as possible. “It is a moment when we declare who we are and when we are given the greatest opportunity to grow as believers because we are as open as we can be to the act of God in Jesus and the Spirit”175. Also important and already mentioned, is the Bible, which originally was read in communion, and still is before the Holy Communion takes place, in the context of prayer and shared reflection. That way, these texts can constantly renew and convert the Church, as a constant test of her own integrity. In a shared experience, we are what we are meant to be. In this regard, the Church’s holiness has to do with standing where Jesus stands, instead of being an achievement176. Thus, what we have, are signs: “[Signs are] the totally enigmatic face on the wall, the cross, the bread and wine[.] […] [They are] [s]ilent signs, as silent as he was before Pilate, consistently refusing a straight and simple answer. […] We can draw little balloons coming out of his mouth, as much as we like. What does that tell us? The vulgarity of the analogy underlines the futility of the exercise”177.

When the correspondence is missing, we find ourselves in error. Conformity is the test of faithfulness178. “When we start to force the shape of our thinking to make it consistent within itself, we may gain internal intellectual consistency, but we will lose ‘the coherence of lived fidelity’” 179. Williams continues: “The meanings of the word “God” are to be discovered by watching what this community does – not only when it is consciously reflecting in conceptual ways, but when it is acting, educating or “inducting”, imagining and worshipping”180. What is the Church than? It is the place

170 M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 31-35.54-55.See also R. WILLIAMS, On Christian Theology, p. 94; ID.,Tokens of Trust, p. 92-95.171 M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 35. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, On Christian Theology, p. 91.172R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 65-68.71.173R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 92-93.174Ibid., p. 117.175Ibid., p 118.176Ibid., p. 118.122-126.177G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 8-9. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, On Christian Theology, p. 107.178 G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 12-13.179Ibid., p. 13. See also R. WILLIAMS, What is Catholic Orthodoxy?, in K. LEECH& R. WILLIAMS(eds.), Essays Catholic and Radical, London, 1983, p. 16.180 G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 13. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, On Christian Theology, p. xii.

~ 33 ~

where Christ is visibly active in the world. We all know examples where we saw the Church, and it worked181. For Williams, this happened for example at the “Jubilee 2000”:

Back in the millennium year, the ‘Jubilee 2000’ campaign for debt relief reached a climax with a huge demonstration in Birmingham in the UK, where the economic power-brokers of the G8 countries had gathered. We had brought two coach loads from my diocese in South Wales; and, as I looked at the extraordinary variety of Christian groups on the streets – Catholic, Pentecostal, outrageously left-wing, and outrageously right-wing – I, like others, felt able to say, ‘I have seen the Church and it works.’ Something of a real hunger and thirst for justice in Christ’s name had drawn and held this unlikely coalition; its only agenda was to further what all believed was the call of God’s kingdom, to resist what offended God’s justice182.

The death and resurrection of language

For Williams, death and resurrection are the heart of reality. The resurrection narratives are about creating a new form of life, or a new shared language for God 183; or, in Williams words: “the death and resurrection of meaning”184. Moreover: they show us that our orthodoxy must constantly be transformed. For our judgement, cross and resurrection are the frame. “[I]f you do believe in and commit yourself to this frame of reference, this point of judgement, you may expect to live with a continuing breaking and recovery of this same frame of reference, at deeper and deeper levels”185. The power of the pre-Nicene orthodoxy was, that it did not gave too many answers. According to Williams, orthodoxy is a process of breaking and remaking186.

Because in Christ, God came unbearably close, there is no safe vantage point to speak about God187. Williams puts it this way: “Christians must learn to speak of a God from whom their lives are not to be separated, a God, therefore, involved with the whole fabric of their being” 188. Or in another writing:

[T]he divine nature cannot be abstracted from God’s active relationship with the world. And since that relationship, in which the theologian as believer is caught up, is not susceptible of being distanced and exhaustively defined, neither is God’s nature. His everlasting act is as little capable of being a determinate object to our minds as the wind in our faces and lungs can be held still and distant in front of our eyes189.

It is about “a steady and endless enlarging of the heart”190. A topic on which Williams was influenced by Mackinnon, is in his interpretation of the

resurrection. In his reading of the resurrection, Mackinnon, distances himself from the liberal as well as the conservative interpretations, for both ask the question if a given historical fact happened or not. Instead he argues that the resurrection transcends what we understand as history, and is more than can

181R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 129-130.182Ibid., p. 130.183 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 29.184 G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 15. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Between Politics and Metaphysics, Reflections in the Wake of Gillian Rose (Modern Theology, 11:1), 1995, p. 20.185 G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 15. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, What is Catholic Orthodoxy?, p. 20.186 G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 16.187 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 29-30. See also M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 54.188 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 30. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Resurrection, Interpreting the Easter Gospel, Cleveland, OH, 1982, 22002, p. 87.189 M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 54. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Arius, p. 242.190 M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 54. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Arius, p. 243.

~ 34 ~

be proven or observed191. Therefore Myers holds the opinion that we can best understand Williams’ theology by a quotation of Mackinnon: “I sometimes think that only when we bring out into the open what it is that defeats our every day attempt to handle the tings of the Christian faith confidently and without hesitation, will we be able to perceive at least a small measure of its uniqueness”192.

They both think that theology is meant to perform a semantic untangling, instead of clearing things up. With our language, we are not able to grasp the resurrection 193. Still we cannot avoid this language and we must take it seriously194. This difficulty is also attested by the Christian narratives195. On the contrary, it is not correct to think of God as a character of the story, He is the author of the script, and only He can tell us who we truly are196. Christ is the light, who pierces our protective shield, and because of that makes me a stranger to myself197. In the light of this, Williams writes: “When God’s light breaks on my darkness […] the first thing I know is that I don’t know, and never did”198.

For Williams, original sin is an ugly wound that runs right through human reason and experience. In this, he thus follows Augustine. Because we are fallen, we cannot simply trust our belief in God. The Awareness of a disordered reality is what keeps us morally alert. This means not that we must remain silent about God, for despite the fact that language is annihilated by the trauma of Christ, it is also reborn. From this, a new community is shaped. This is the reason why the Christian tradition is a “continuing process of the conversion of human language to God” 199. Theology is thus rather about life, then about ideas. It is God who fractures the human identity 200, and because He has no self-interest, He does not make us fit neatly in His own agenda, but allows us to discover our proper identities201. We do this “not by struggling for an entirely illusory independence but by turning to our deepest, purest dependence – the undistorting dependence of creatures on their Creator”202.

But which are the implications Jesus’ death and resurrection for the human community?

The resurrection, Williams argues, is a universal happening. For Christ, creation has no frontiers. And the existence of the church is already implicated in the existence of the risen Christ: the resurrection immediately gives rise to a new community whose imagination has been converted to this new and unbounded world, the ‘new creation’ of the gospel (Gal. 6.15). The church exists not for itself but for the sake of a reconciled humanity. Indeed the church is humanity made new, a new world in which the old walls of division have been torn down203.

It now becomes clear that, for Williams, in the first place, orthodoxy is about a shared pattern of life, far more than a shared body of doctrine. He makes clear that “orthodoxy is common life before it

191 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 30. See also M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 25-26. See also: R. WILLIAMS, On Christian Theology, p. 159-160; R. WILLIAMS& R. BAUCKHAM, Jesus – God with Us, in C. BAXTER (ed.), Stepping Stones, Joint Essays on Anglican Catholic and Evangelical Unity, London, 1987, p. 28.192 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 29-30.Originally published in D. MACKINNON& G.W.H. Lampe, The Resurrection, A Dialogue Arising from Broadcasts, London, 1966, p. 87.193Ibid., p. 30.194 M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 47.195B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 30.196M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 47.197Ibid., p. 30-32. For an interpretation of Williams’ vision on language, see alsoM. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 45-48. Williams writes that this is especially the case for action (p. 46-47), see therefore: R. WILLIAMS, Doctrinal criticism, Some Questions, in S. COAKLEY& D.A. PAILIN (eds.), The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine, Essays in Honour of Maurice Wiles, Oxford, 1993, p. 239-264.198B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 32. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, A Ray of Darkness, in R. WILLIAMS, A Ray of Darkness, Sermons and Reflections, Cambridge, 1994, p. ?199 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 35.200Ibid., p. 32-35.201M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 47-48.202Ibid., p. 47.203Ibid., p. 38.

~ 35 ~

is common doctrine”204. It is no surprise than that mission is about a way of life, rather than changing minds by preaching205. Williams formulates it as follows:

[Mission] is not the work of persuasion, getting someone to adopt your views or join your group; or, rather, it’s only persuasion in the sense that an extended hand, a smile, an opening door, a greeting could be called persuasion.

This new form of social life makes it possible to speak about God in new ways. For the first-century Christians, questions about social identity and social boundaries where treated as theological questions, and therefore had to do with the identity of God. From here it is but a small step to creation. The fundamental reordering of the world, in relation to Christ, is due to His resurrection. In this reasoning the physical embodiment of the risen Christ is essential for the embodied human experience, and thus for the relevance for our lives206. In the reasoning of Williams the Christian language is neither complete nor finished, and we are in a need of critical work, which constantly returns to the sources that generate it. Therefore the Church is judged in the light of the reality of which her existence is supposed to bear witness too207. As a consequence: “The theologian’s job may be less the speaking of truth … than the patient diagnosis of untruths, and the reminding of the community where its attention begins”208.The end of this journey, is describes by Williams as follows:

[The goal is to] stand where Jesus stands as Christian believers, and pray as Jesus prays; and in standing in that place before God as “Abba” [to] share equally in Jesus’ directedness towards the good and the healing of the world209.

A living tradition of prayer

It is no wonder then, that Williams is “not just talking about ideas in their own right, but about the interaction between thinking, doing and praying out of which the statements of belief originally came”210. The church always had to negotiate her own continuity with the past and her early doctrinal affirmations are very fragile. Nevertheless the struggle for a normative orthodoxy is essential for a Christian community. “Orthodoxy is the church’s attempt to resist and to compose for itself a coherent social imaginary”211. Therefore Myers writes that: “If the Christian community is a theological reality, the beginning of a new reconciled humanity, then the church’s history will be a matter of urgent theological importance for the present”212. It now becomes clear, that for Williams, the past is right at

204 G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 14. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Open to Judgement, p. 264.205 G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 14-15. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Open to Judgement, p. 265.206B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 40-41. See alsoM. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 26.207Ibid., p. 11-12.208Ibid., p. 12. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, On Christian Theology, p. 196. In “Don Cuppit”, he even goes a bit further, by writing: “Under modern conditions … a theologian has got to be a heretic” M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 12. Originally published in: R. WILLIAMS, Don Cupitt, in M. DE-LA-NOY(ed.), Michael Ramsey, A Portrait, London, p. 99.209M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 56. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS,To Stand Where Christ Stands, in R. WALLER& B. WARD (eds.), Introduction to Christian Spirituality, London, 1999, p. 2; ID., Tokens of Trust, p. 94.210Ibid., p. viii-ix.211B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 44-45. See also R. WILLIAMS, Defining Heresy, in A. KREIDER (ed.), The Origins of Christendom in the West, Edinburgh, 2001, p. 324-327.212 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 45.

~ 36 ~

the centre of the present, or in other words: “The present is simply what the past is doing now”213. Against Arius, Athanasius made clear that a continuity of the tradition can create the necessarity to have a break in the linguistic continuity. In the light of this, one can argue that there is no simple choice between conservation and innovation. There is more needed for the continuity of faith, than just a repetition of traditional vocabulary214. With regard to the theology of Nicaea, Williams argues that:

The loyal and uncritical repetition of formulae is seen to be inadequate as a means of securing continuity at anything more than a formal level; Scripture and tradition require to be read in a way that brings out their strangeness, their non-obvious and non-contemporary qualities, in order that they may be read both freshly and truthfully from one generation to another. They need to be made more difficult before we can accurately grasp their simplicities … And this ‘making difficult’, this confession that what the gospel says in Scripture and tradition does not instantly and effortlessly make sense, is perhaps one of the most fundamental tasks for theology215.

This is a difficult task, for one has to identify the changes that are needed to secure a proper continuity. According to Williams this asks for a critical and creative re-engagement with the past. To make this possible we need orthodoxy, or a tradition. In Williams’ opinion, the history of doctrine is actually a history of formative conflicts and struggles. “What the articulation of doctrinal truth concretely is can be traced only through the detailed reworking and re-imagining of its formative conflicts”216. This may not be simplified as a conflict between truth and error, or orthodoxy and heresy, for with its struggle with heresy, orthodoxy comes into being. That is the reason why the doctrinal orthodoxy is an unfinished, continuing project and Its fulfillment is still future217.

For Williams heresies are heresies because they owe a destructive longing for complete clarity and a total vision, just like political and religious idolatry. In orthodoxy, on the contrary, we find “a constantly expanding network of interpretive resources in which the ‘raggedness’ of Christian language is retained. Orthodoxy is messy, like real life”218. Therefore the church’s identity is the object of continual negotiation and dispute, and at every stage, the gospel becomes more difficult, and even a stranger219. This is actually not hard to understand, for “[w]ords of faith […] are too-well known to believers for their meaning to be knowable”220. This has also to do with the current cultural setting: “almost any words in the modern cultural setting will be worn and shabby or illusory and self-serving”221. On the other hand it becomes possible to preach Jesus in diverse cultures and periods222. Williams expresses his view on doctrine as follows:

The slow and difficult evolution of a doctrinal language, creeds and definitions ... [has] to do at heart with maintaining the possibility of speaking about a God who becomes unreservedly accessible in the person of Jesus Christ and in the life of Christ’s community. What is rejected is,

213Ibid., p. 45. See also R. WILLIAMS, Why Study the Past?, Grand Rapids, MI, 2005, p. 23-24.28. for more about the Arian controversy within the debates about the nature of Christian continuity, see R. WILLIAMS, Arius, Heresy and Tradition, London, 1987, 22001.214 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 43-46.215Ibid., p. 46. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Arius, p. 235-236.216 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 47. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Arius, p. 25.217 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 46-48. For more of the already and the not yet, see R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 95-100.218Ibid., p. 48.219Ibid., p. 48-49.220R. WILLIAMS, A Silent Action, p. 11.221Ibid., p. 11.222 M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 80. See also R. WILLIAMS, Does It Make Sense to Speak of Pre-Nicene Orthodoxy?, in R. WILLIAMS (ed.), The Making of Orthodoxy, Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick, Cambridge, New York, NY, 1989, p. 17.

~ 37 ~

pretty consistently, any teaching that leaves God only provisionally or partially involved in the communicating of the new life of grace and communion223.

As a church leader, Williams struggled to uphold the catholic vision, that Christ is “the beginning of a reconciled human community in which all dividing boundaries are broken down”224. This sharpens the riddle of difference and identity. For Williams, the problem is that if there is an absolute difference or a colourless homogeneity between people, than the idea of a catholic community becomes impossible. In the mind of Williams, the difference is tenuously preserved. Because of the hard labour of keeping the difference between ourselves and others in place, our own identity comes forth. The solution was found in the works of Hegel, due to Williams’ friendship with Gillian Rose, who saw Hegel as an alternative for the postmodern ethics of the Other. According to Rose, the loss of difference in theology and the loss of self in ethics, are two sides of the same coin. “We betray difference whenever we try to ‘mend the world’, whether through a secular or religious teleology or through the elevation of an absolutely transcendent Other”225. Instead, she argues that difference is not an obstacle to be overcome, but that we have to accept the flawed middle between the difference. It is with this broken middle that we must sustain. This, she calls the “agon” of difference. The importance is that we act in the face of the opposition that cannot be overcome226.

Also growth is central in the ideas of Williams. From this theory, he made a Christian theology of identity, difference and sociality. He holds the opinion that otherness and identity emerge dialectically. They are mutually dependent and mediating. Therefore the incompleteness of language has to do with Hegel’s conception of a social mediation of truth. Authentic social exchange occurs wherever different persons mediate meaning to one another. When we have a good conversation, we see something new, something which would not have revealed itself when we would have reasoned individually. In the hard work of sustaining differences, by different selves, the truth comes into being as a new thing. When we want to receive the truth, in order to share it freely with others, we must give up the desire to own it. The tragic shadow is the fact that the distance between myself and the other can never be overcome. Instead of a synthesis, there is a history of negotiation an dispossession. Therefore, the social life is interpreted by Williams under the theological category of kenosis, which he understands as “the painful work of negotiating difference”227. This shows the importance of hard and patient labour that makes a life together possible. That is why the theology of Williams is a “theology of growth”228. Important in this regard, is the notion of thrust:

I shall be suggesting that Christianity asks you to trust the God it talks about before it asks you to sign up to a complete system. I hope it may become clear how, once you have taken the step of trust, the actual teaching, the doctrine, flows out of that. A good and sensible bit of Christian teaching is good and sensible because it has grown out of exploring the implications of believing in a completely trustworthy God229.

223 M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 80-81. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Teaching the Truth, in J. JOHN (ed.), Living Tradition, Affirming Catholicism in the Anglican Church, London, 1991, p. 32.224B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 51.225Ibid., p. 53. See also G. ROSE, The Broken Middle, Oxford, 1992, p. 293.226 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 51-53. For Williams critique on Hegel, see R. WILLIAMS, Trinity and Ontology, in R. WILLIAMS, On Christian Theology, Oxford, 2000; ID., Between Politics and Metaphysics, Reflections in the Wake of Gillian Rose, in M. HIGTON, Wrestling with Angels, Grand Rapids, MI, 2007. For the position of Rose, see G. ROSE, Broken Middle.227B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 55.228Ibid., p. 53-56. For more about Williams opinion of Hegel, see R. WILLIAMS, Hegel and the Gods of Postmodernity, in M. HIGTON, Wrestling with Angels, Grand Rapids, MI, 2007. For his vision on growth, see R. WILLIAMS, Against Anxiety, Beyond Triumphalism, in R. WILLIAMS, A Ray of Darkness, Sermons and Reflections.229 R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. viii.

~ 38 ~

By now it becomes clear that, for Williams, it is important to live the tradition230. The consequence is a church, whose members represent different stages of understanding, maturity and responsiveness. He also writes that Christian eschatology is not about a final triumph over human limitation and imperfection, for then the differences that make us human would be gone. What is a real human possibility then? For Williams it is truthfulness. Whenever he thinks about God, he also thinks about human relations, because the trinitarian God is also characterized by difference. Therefore, when one speaks about God, one also speaks about the universal human community. In the light of this analysis, we may conclude, for now, that the church does not yet posses its identity, but in the Holy Spirit, God is patient with us231.

Nevertheless, Williams is not very comfortable with hope, because it opens the possibility for fantasy and projection. In other words: we hope for the wrong things. What Williams is actually advising is a patience beyond hope and he therefore translates the language of hope into a moral attention. It is a refusal of the final gratification of human desires and it is only tragic for the human beings, who watch to life through the glasses of unredeemed desire. From this perspective, even the trinitarian love seems to be tragic.

In the light of this, theology may not allow itself to become the final word, for theology is too often used for gaining and keeping power. As a reaction Williams suggests that we can only be freed when we use a language of prayer and praise, and direct that language to God. After all, prayer is the confession of our own failure. Only then, a real conversation with others becomes possible. For Williams, Christianity is thus in the first place a tradition of prayer. As a consequence, the people who pray should be the subject matter of theology. The life of one who devotes his/her life on prayer may seem marginal for those who determine the movement of history. Nevertheless, they show us what speaking of God really means. Here Williams is highly influenced by Simone Weil, who states that we have to open ourselves for what is already there. In other words: we have to wait. In this way there is an intimate bond between spirituality and the study of theology, and thus also between love and knowledge232. According to Williams, they meet in contemplation, where “we are ‘questioned, stripped naked and left speechless’ by a reality that we cannot control”233, for the Gospel cuts across our desire to control and denies our systems and policies. This becomes clear in Williams comments on the birth and childhood of Jesus, where we find God, Who is present, but unable to speak clearly to us234. He continues:

Ask a baby about the ordination of women, about divorce legislation, violence on television, who will win the election: it is not a fruitful experience. […] So far from the divine child being a cipher, the tool of our schemes and systems, he confronts us with the alarming, mysterious, shattering strangeness of God235.

230 M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 81. See also R. WILLIAMS, Arius, p. 236.231R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 56-58.232 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 93-10é. See also: R. WILLIAMS, Theological Integrity, On Christian Theology.For the unpredictable future, see R. WILLIAMS, The Wound of Knowledge, London, 1990; ID., The Spirit of the Age to Come, in Sobornost 6:9 (1974), p. 613-626. See also: R. WILLIAMS, The Health of the Spirit, in M. BRIERLEY (ed.), Public Life and the Place of the Church, Reflections to Honour the Bishop of Oxford, Aldershot, 2006; ID., The Finality of Christ, On Christian Theology, Oxford, 2000.233 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 103. See also R. WILLIAMS, The Wound of Knowledge, p. 1.234G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 5.235Ibid., p. 5. Originally published in: R. WILLIAMS, Open to Judgement, p. 35-37.R. Williams also uses the image of a nine-year-old spastic child: “This is the solitude of truth, the solitude, finally, of God: God as a spastic child who can communicate nothing but his presence and his inarticulate wanting” (G. Williams, p. 6; R. Williams, p. 145).

~ 39 ~

This undermines all our power-seeking systems236. It is a misunderstanding that there is too few meaning or too much incomprehensibility, it is actually quite the opposite: from Williams’ point of view, there is too much meaning and communicativeness in God for us to understand. God is se near, that He is strange to us. This, Williams describes as “divine darkness”. That is the reason way language can collapse into a contemplative silence. In Williams’ theology of sociality, only within the contradiction of irreducibly different lives, the truth comes to sight237. Myers concludes: “What prayer is to speech, what difference is to sociality, what the saint is to a damaged humanity, so the cross is to the world, and so Christ is to God”238. As a consequence, Williams does not want us to think of a “Christ who saves us the trouble of being crucified”239. Instead, our baptism, is a baptism into Christ’s death240. Higton writes it as follows: “And, as such, our speech about God, our ideas about God, our theology, needs to share in the same characteristics that mark a life being captivated by the Gospel: thankfulness and openness to judgement. So, in the first place, we receive our language about God as a gift, and celebrate it; in the second place, we need constantly to be open to the breaking and remaking of our language, as the truth of the Gospel works upon our lives and our ideas”241.

For Christians, God’s power is the source of a radical dependence of the human being to God. Yet, this dependence is not self-destructive: “To depend for one’s identity ultimately upon a hidden source of self-giving or self-sharing is to be as free as one can be within the tragic limits of the world”242. It can even lead to a self-awareness. Because we search to often for idols and slip to self-protective claims, our theology is in a constant need of demythologizing. In the other case, God would become a projection of wishes and a tool for power. Therefore it is up to theology, to unmask our fantasies and our comfort of false images of God. Influenced by Iris Murdoch, who studied about Sigmund Freud, Williams says that we can only be freed from our selfish fantasies by seeing something beyond ourselves243. And by praying we get to know ourselves, and put off our masks, to stand naked before God. We let go of our self-protection, of what makes us feel comfortable and good244. He holds the opinion that:

faith becomes the one wholly inflexible ground for resistance to violence, precisely because it … allows us to recognize power for what it is and isn’t: as what is given us for the setting-free of each other; not as the satisfying of our passion for control245.

Nevertheless, what we need is art, far more than therapy, Murdoch states. Since art is one of the few points where we deliberately cultivate a truthful seeing of reality, it is an essential source for

236G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 5.237 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 103-104. See also: R. WILLIAMS, The Deflections of Desire, p. ?. For Simone Weil, see S. WEIL, Waiting for God, New York, NY, 1951.238Ibid., p. 105.239M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 35. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, To give and not to count the cost, A Sermon Preached at Mirfield in February 1976, in Sobornost: The Journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius 7.5 (1977), p. 401.240M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 35. Williams puts it like this: “into his [Christ’s] descent into hell, into a condition of vulnerability” (p. 35). Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Bread in the Wilderness, The Monastic Ideal in Thomas Merton and Paul Evdokimov, in M.B. PENNINGTON (ed.), One Yet Two, in Cistercian Publications (1976), p. 463.241M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 48.242Ibid., p. 109. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Freudian Psychology, in A. RICHARDS, The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology.243B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 109-111.244 R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 155.245 M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 40. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Presidential Address, 20 September 2001, http://www.churchinwales.org.uk/archbishop/00IIe.html.

~ 40 ~

moral action246. Williams describes the importance of art as follows: “Art … dispossesses us of our habitual perception and restores to reality a dimension that necessarily escapes our conceptuality and our control. It makes the world strange”247. This image is comparable with Williams way of speaking about the Scripture. We may not try to control it by systematizing or harmonizing it. Instead of being grasped at once, we must take time to read and re-read the Bible, time for questioning and discussion. This is, according to Williams, the core of literal reading, which allows us to pay attention to the intractable resistance of the text. This kind of reading acknowledges that it takes time to unfold the meanings of the biblical texts. The resistance of the text becomes particularly clear within the differences of the four gospels. The reason for taking time, is the fact that the texts where written over time, by individuals and communities who struggled to come to terms with the reality they had encountered, but also with each other. In other words: these texts are produced by historical beings, within historical settings. These weak, mortal people learned what it means to live the Gospel. In solidarity with those authors who struggled with the biblical texts, and even misapprehended and misread these texts, we read these texts. In this reading, we bring all that we think to find to the cross, where it can be judged and sifted. This way we have to refuse the violent fantasies, but we also have to avoid making the texts acceptable. The biblical texts have to be read in the light of Jesus, or in Williams words: “When we approach the Bible, […] we must approach it as if it were … held open before us by the living Christ”248. The Gospel has to be read in company, as to allow ourselves to be challenged by the readings of others249. Williams himself formulates his biblical ideas as follows:

The Bible is not a human record from the distant past, full of a mixture of inspiring and not-so-inspiring stories or thoughts; nor is it a sort of magical oracle, dictated by God. It is rather the utterances and records of human beings who have been employed by God to witness to his action in the world, now given to us by God so that we may learn who he is and what he does; and the ‘giving’ by God is by means of the resurrection of Jesus. The risen Jesus takes hold of the history of God’s people from its remotest beginnings, lifts it out of death by bringing it to completeness, and presents it to us as his word, his communication to us here and now250.

Important in this regard is the teaching of the Church, which itself exists of a community of people. By inviting others to join with her in learning, but also by pointing others to the sources from which she is slowly learning herself, the Church will teach. Therefore Williams argues: “If we had to choose between a Church tolerably confident of what it has to say and seeking only for effective means of saying it, and a Church constantly engaged in an internal dialogue and critique of itself, an exploration to discover what is central to its being, I should say that it is the latter which is the more authentic”251. So instead of being a bearer of answers, the Church “transmits God’s question from

246 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 111. For Murdoch, see: I. MURDOCH, The Sovereignty of Good, London, 1970.247 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 111. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Grace and Necessity, Reflections on Art and Love, London, 2005, p. 37.248M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 66. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, The Dwelling of the Light, Norwich, 2003, p. 77.249M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 62-67. See also R. WILLIAMS, On Christian Theology, p. 30.47.55; ID., Does It Make Sense to Speak of Pre-Nicene Orthodoxy?, in R. WILLIAMS (ed.), The Making of Orthodoxy, Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick, Cambridge, New York, NY, 1989, p. 1-23; ID.,Open to Judgement, p. 116.159-160. About reading in company, see R. WILLIAMS, Foreword, in M. PRYCE (ed.), Literary Companion to the Lactionary, Readings Throughout the Year, London, 2001, p. ix.250M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 67. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, The Dwelling of the Light, p. 33. See also: G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 9-11.251M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 69. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Women and the Ministry, A Case for Theological Seriousness, in M. FURLONG (ed.), Feminine in the Church, London, 1984, p. 12.

~ 41 ~

generation to generation”252. One could argue that the Church teaches by pointing to a reality, which cannot be fully grasped by any system. It is, of course, not correct to suppose that the Church is only a question, that it does not have a content. The reason why the Church has a content indeed, is the fact that it believes to know the source of the questioning and it also believes to know that the character of the questioning is a life-giving love. The Church thus has not yet achieved the fullness of humanity and is never in itself an object of faith253. Williams makes his position very clear when he writes that “We are imposters, travelling in borrowed clothes, under an assumed name, the name of Jesus”254. We now may conclude that:

The resurrection of Jesus Christ and the Pentecost of his Spirit do not mean that Jesus Christ is henceforward the answer to everything[.] … They indicate that God bears witness that the question raised by Jesus Christ is the one by which God manifests himself. Jesus “uniquely” reveals the God whose nature is not to make the claim of unique revelation as total and authoritative meaning. He is presented as the revelation of God: as God’s question, no more, no less255.

At least it means that Christian teaching isn’t just static; it’s always trying to learn from the last set of mistakes256.

Now one question remains: what do we have to do when we disagree over who Jesus is? The vital thing , Williams writes, is that we stick together in our discipleship and come to the eucharist, for it is there that we are all judged by the silence of the cross. We must be ready to go into the desert, were pictures and ideas fade away, and in the end all theologies will give way to God. Therefore we cannot have access to God’s Own truth by theology. The ones who claim to have found it, are the oppressors who attack others; or the spiritually immature, who did not meet the silence and darkness of the cross. In this regard, we may question, but not exclude257.

Personal identity and engagement with the world

Williams holds the opinion that the “grammar of social life is a wellspring of love and life – the holy trinity”258. He thinks of God as a community of people, who relate to each other, who give and receive259. This community is not just held together by justice or a common sense of calling. It has far more to do with mutual giving, nourishment and dependence. This is what Williams means by “sharing as giving”260. For his interpretation of desire, he finds his inspiration in the work of Augustine, who sees the difference between “use” and “joy”. According to Williams, the greatest temptation is to use the world as an enjoyed end in itself. In other words: we look at the world, as if it exists for our own stake. By acting this way, we do not take the process of growth in love into account. When desire is asymmetrical – read: seeing another person’s body as a device of gratification – perversion occurs. Also in the light of Augustine, Williams considers God to be an infinite basis of love, objectivity and truthfulness. In God, there opens a differentiation, whereby God loves God, with

252M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 69. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, The Wound of Knowledge, p. 2.253M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 68-71. See also R. WILLIAMS, Ponder These Things, Norwich, 2002, p. 46; ID.,The Wound of Knowledge, p. 1-2; ID.,On Christian Theology, p. 31-33; ID., Resurrection, p. xiv-xv.254M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 71. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Open to Judgement, p. 187. See also: G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 7.255 R. WILLIAMS, On Christian Theology, p. 104-105.256R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 72.257Ibid., p. 9.258 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 83.259M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 43.260R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 101-102.

~ 42 ~

a desire that is never gratified, and the Spirit personifies their mutual excess of love261. Myers explains it as follows: “In short, God is a trinity of love: the lover, the beloved, and a constantly expanding surplus of love itself. God’s love never comes to rest but forms a widening field as it surges back and forth, infinite giving, infinite receiving, infinite deflection of desire”262. God therefore does not decide to give. Instead He gives and relates eternally263. There is thus an openness, which allows us to participate in the love of Father and Son. This openness is made possible by the infinite capacity for new, and yet constant, faithful activity by the Holy Spirit. The reason we can be drawn into it, is the opening, created by the incarnation. We therefore have to think about the active giving of the life of God by God in Trinitarian ways, moreover as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit Who translates the relation between Father and Son in the medium of human existence, and forms a “Son-like” life in the human world264. Williams himself puts it like this:

The whole notion of a God who is ‘productive’, free to create a world to which he can communicate something of himself, depends upon conceiving God’s intrinsic life as generative of relation: the creation of the world only makes full theological sense in the light of a belief in the everlasting generation of the Son from the Father; the shape of the redeemed life is the realizing in our world of an eternal actuality265.

[T]he actual concrete meaning of logos in the world, the pattern decisively and transformingly embodied in Jesus, could only be seen and realized through the entire process of the history to which the event of Jesus gives rise, with all its fluidity and unpredictability266.

When we accept the non-negotiable and unavoidable love, we cross the boundaries we have set up against rejection and call our own. In this way, the Gospel takes away our understanding of ourselves, others and the world267. And although there is no I without a you or a we, the identity between I and you remains a real difference268. What we have to discover, is the fact that our identity is not located within ourselves, but in the pattern of love and deflection. Only then can we recognize ourselves as loved269. “So believing in the Church [as a community] is really believing in the unique gift of the other that God has given you to live with. The New Testament sees the Church as a community in which each person has a gift that only they can give into the common life”270. It is God’s gift, which makes us givers. That is why Paul cannot accept that some churches have more than they

261B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 83-86. See also: M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 16. For the interpretation of Augustine by Williams, see: R. WILLIAMS, Language, Reality and Desire in Augustine’s De Doctrina, in Journal of Literature and Theology 3:2 (1989). For Williams opinion on embodied desire, see: R. WILLIAMS, The Body’s Grace, The 10th Michael Harding Memorial Address, London, 1989. For his ideas about love and trinity, see R. WILLIAMS, What Does Love Know?, St Thomas on the Trinity, in New Blackfriars 82:964 (2001); ID., The Deflections of Desire, Negative Theology in Trinitarian Disclosure, in O. DAVIES& D. TURNER(eds.), Silence and the World, Negative Theology and Incarnation, Cambridge, 2002.262B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 86. Italics included by the author of this thesis.263M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 43.264Ibid., p. 56-58. See also R. WILLIAMS, Sapientia and the Trinity, Reflections on De Trinitate, in B. BRUNING, M. LAMBERIGTS& J. VAN HOUTEM (eds.), Collectanae Augustiniana, Mélanges T.J. van Bavel, vol. 1, Leuven, 1990, p. 317-332; ID., The Spirit of the Age to Come, in Sobornost: The Journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius 6.9 (1974), p. 615; ID.,On Christian Theology, p. 120.265M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 43. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, The Wound of Knowledge, p. 51.266M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 58. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, On Christian Theology, p. 172.267M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 16-17. See also: R. WILLIAMS, To Give and not to Count the Cost, A Sermon Preached at Mirfield in February 1976, in Sobernost, The Journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius 7.5 (1977), p. 401-403; ID.,The Truce of God, London, 1983, p. 26.268R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 106.269B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 89.270R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 106.

~ 43 ~

need, while at the same time, others do not have enough. For him, this is a signal that they are frustrated in what they are free to give. Just like the gift of each is unique, says Williams, the need of each is unique. And this need has just as much to do with God as the gift271. He continues:

[T]he solid reality of a really functioning Christian community is like that of a good marriage, in which mutual attention, giving and receiving, enjoyment and sacrifice are tightly woven together, as both realize that there is nothing good for one that is not good for both, nothing bad for one that is not bad for both, that fullness of life is necessarily a collaborative thing272.

Far too often, we want to force the world, to feel its moral obligations to us, or make ourselves so small, that the world will not notice us. We also think we can shape the world, or that we make no difference, which releases us of being responsible273. According to Williams, it is the Gospel, which “frees us from fear and fantasy … it is the great enemy of self-indulgent fantasy”274, or in other words: “Establishing the truth of a religious claim is a matter of discovering its resource and scope for holding together and making sense of our perceptions and transactions without illusion” 275. After all, God does not have personal interests or needs, in other words: “God is not self-interested276. Therefore, an obedience towards God, is not the same as being obedient to the state. The refusal to be a slave of Satan, and thus to illusion and falsehood, is actually a liberation, moreover a liberation into obedience. And the One we are obedient to, is He, “whose service is perfect freedom”277. It is, for instance, not about commanding or lawgiving, but instead about being an example for all278. In the same regard, only the unknown person can know the truth: “Truth can only be spoken by a man nobody knows, because only in the unknown person is there no obstruction to reality: the ego of self-oriented desire and manifold qualities, seeking to dominate and organize the world, is absent. There is no-one there to know; but what is there to know is the form, the configuration of a wider reality expressed in one place, one story”279.

There is no isolated I, but a vast and universal web of I’s. In this web, I have a true and right place280. It is not the intention of Williams to erase the distinctiveness of the self. What we have to do, is locating the ego outside ourselves, in another personal source. He also “‘demythologizes’ the autonomous subject by locating human selfhood within the movement of divine self-giving”281. Because God never satisfies our desire, we learn to love without limit or closure. Even though this means true freedom, people still feel this infinite refusal of gratification as pain and privation. We therefore experience God’s love as darkness and absence, instead of fulfillment. It now becomes clear that we have to abandon our self-centered desires. In the light of this ideas, the trinity is about grace, about “divine gratuity and other-centredness”282. For the community of Christian faithful it is about participating in Christ’s relation, as a Son, to the Father. Therefore the doctrine of trinity is “nothing other than a teasing out of what it is to be converted and to come to live in Christ”283. This reflection makes clear why the saint is so important: he/she has become eccentric. In this reasoning, love forms

271Ibid., p. 106-109.272Ibid., p. 109.273M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 17.274Ibid., p. 17-18. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, The Truce of God, p. 17. See also R. WILLIAMS, Wound of Knowledge, p. 1; ID.,Resurrection, p. 54.275 R. WILLIAMS, On Christian Theology, p. 14.276M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 44.277R. WILLIAMS, A Silent Action, p. 27-28.278Ibid., p. 27-28.279Ibid., p. 17-18.280Ibid., p. 18.281B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 89.282Ibid., p. 89. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, What Does Love Know, p. 270.

~ 44 ~

the basis for everything. For Williams, “[l]ove is reality, love is clarity, love is truth”284. It is even possible to trust on love, when our experience is coloured by tragedy and failure285. Williams himself, writes it as follows:

The whole story of creation, incarnation and our incorporation into Christ’s body tells us that God desires us as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God’s giving that [God] makes in the life of the Trinity. We are created so that we may be caught up in this, so that we may grow into the whole-hearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God. The life of the Christian community has its rationale … the task of teaching us this: so ordering our relations that human beings may see themselves as desired, as the occasion of joy286.

The only adequate way of reacting to this gratuitous love, is with gratitude and a deep openness to be judged and remade287. Nevertheless we must avoid to judge other members of the community. What we search is more Christ, is the unity between the different representations of Christ 288. “Only in the activity of conversation do we find what the depths and what the limits are of our common language, what it is that holds us together as sharers in one world”289. For Williams, the Church “is the experimental beginning of a new creation”290, for God is no watchmaker. Instead religions hold that now, at this very moment, creation is going on. Creation is a commitment of God, a beginning of an active relationship, which we are in before we even realize it291. Williams continues: “It means that every object or person we encounter is in a relationship with God before they’re in a relationship of any kind with us. And if that doesn’t make us approach the world and other people with reverence and amazement, I don’t know what will”292. Creation itself is therefore not a theory of the start of things, but about seeing everything in relation to God293. The gospel has a message that can take root in different places, languages and cultures, and can thus be translated into every conceivable human situation. For the Church’s internal identity, nothing is more important than here engagement with the world. Therefore Williams claims that the Church is the beginning of a new world, right in the centre of the old one. It is the place “where the rationale of all other relations is made plain” 294. When we stand, where Jesus is standing, we can say what Jesus sais, and be in a direct relation to God. So because of Jesus, we are adopted in God’s intimate family. In His own days, Jesus is never thought of, as just being a prophet. That is because the emphasis is not on His ideas but on His deeds. It is Jesus, Who has created a new community, which prays in a unique way295. It is Christ Who enabled people to owe a coherent mode of belonging. In this coherent human belonging, everybody draws their life from a common well296. Nevertheless our current capitalistic society functions rather different:

283 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 89. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, De Trinitate, in A.D. FITZGERALD (ed.), Augustine through the Ages, An Encyclopedia, Grand Rapids, MI, 1999, p. 850.284 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 90. Italics included by the author of this thesis.285Ibid., p. 86-90. See also M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 17-18.286 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 90. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, The Body’s Grace, p. 3.287M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 18.288Ibid., p. 86. See also R. WILLIAMS, On Christian Theology, p. 23.289M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 86. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Newman’s Arians and the Question of Method in Doctrinal History, in I. KER& A. HILL (eds.), Newman After a Hundred Years, Oxford, 1990, p. 283.290B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 59.291 R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 34-35.292Ibid., p. 35.293Ibid., p. 37.294B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 60. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Incarnation and the Renewal of Community, in R. WILLIAMS (ed.), On Christian Theology, Oxford, 2000, p. 226.295 R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 60-62.296 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 59-60.

~ 45 ~

Contemporary western societies have witnessed the emergence of a new tribalism, fuelled by the logic of capitalism with its proliferation of niche identities, and by the politics of multiculturalism with its advocacy of mere ‘difference’ without any vision of a common good. Such multicultural pluralism is a mirror image of the postmodern ethics of difference, where each person is assumed to be absolutely ‘other’. Once this doctrine of otherness has taken hold of political imagination, Williams argues, we are left with the depressing prospect of ‘a world in which there aren’t and couldn’t be any real discussion of the goals and destiny of human beings as such’. The resulting social order starts to look like a Hobbesian war of all against all, a chaotic rivalry between segregated interest groups, each ruthlessly brandishing its own rights and freedoms while the state is reduced to the role of suppressing open conflict by policing the borders of ‘difference’. This amounts to a crisis in our social imagination: we find ourselves unable to imagine what it might really mean to live together297.

It is no wonder then, that there is a social crisis, namely that there is no more society. In this contemporary world, Williams tries to explain that the Church is not “just another interest group”, but a community whose interest is “the interest of all”, for Christ can only be relevant to someone, as his/her personal Lord and Savior, when He is relevant to everybody. In this case, Williams develops Hegel’s vision that freedom is mediated through community. Persons “have no legitimate interests that are purely private or individual”298. On the contrary, their interests have to do with the good of the whole community. Therefore rights are not purely private rights that can be used against others, but something that has to be negotiated with others299. The reason for this idea of including all, comes from the knowledge that everybody around us, is also loved by God300. The relevance of Williams’ theology for the public debate is already visible:

There is, in all this, a vision of the world as something like a chandelier: God’s light at the centre of all things streams out, and is caught and refracted in thousands upon thousands of crystals, created to reflect the central light to one another and back to him. Crystals may be fractured or smeared, but the light is fierce enough to burn them clean, and to melt them enough to heal their wounds. […] [T]here is something overwhelming at work: […] a life that refuses to be domesticated. Just as with his focus upon the cross, Williams’ vision of God will allow us no easy Gospel: to know God is to be caught in this fierce current, and to have all the comforting accretions which have cushioned us against its flow stripped away, one by one301.

Williams describes the living by each other’s generosity as an “economy of gift”. This path of gratuity is easily left when it becomes demanding or puts us at a real disadvantage. Original sin, then, is about mixing up our learning how to exist with learning what does not contribute to our own life or joy. The only way to reverse this is by human action. To achieve this, the life and identity of Jesus is utterly important, for in God’s freedom, there is no trace of self-interest or self-defence 302. He continues: “If we know what it means to trust the God who made the world, we can see where we must look for the action that will transform it”303. Here we can see the importance of Jesus as being fully human and fully divine. His life is without restriction, rivalry or envy in its capacity for giving,

297Ibid., p. 60-61. See also R. WILLIAMS, Mission and Christology, J.C. Jones Memorial Lecture, 1994, p. 4-5.298 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 61. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Logic and Spirit in Hegel, in M. HIGTON, Wrestling with Angels, Grand Rapids, MI, 2007, p. 44.299 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 61-62.300 M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 54. See also R. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky, An Exposition and Critique (doctoral thesis), Oxford, 1975.301M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 59.302R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 82-83.303Ibid., p. 83.

~ 46 ~

because it is unconditionally open to the divine freedom. This life, Jesus sacrificed to restore the communication between God and the world. After His resurrection, Jesus has breathed His Spirit into His disciples. Therefore, meeting a Christian in whom the Spirit is working, is being contemporary with Christ Himself304.

A real political engagement than, is a form of kenosis. “Politics begins where I am dispossessed of my attachment to my own interests, and I accept responsibility for the interests of others”305. Therefore politics is not about groups lobbying for their own interests, but about having a vision of the social good, when private interests are not at stake. Of course this is more addressed to those in power, than to the ones who are vulnerable and disposed, the ones who try to maintain a precarious footing. This explains why, for Williams, just translating the liberation theology into a Western society is not realistic enough. Instead he asks the question: “what would it mean to practice Christian political commitment in a society like Britain, where the church is not a powerless or persecuted minority but is itself one of the institutions of cultural power?”306. It then becomes clear why Williams says almost the opposite to the established Anglican church in the UK, than the liberation theology in Latin America. According to Williams, it is the task of the Anglican church to give away power and to make use of her position to negotiate with the political powers to defend the rights of vulnerable social groups. In the political vision of Williams there can be no more sides. On the contrary: in a fully human community, “the ends of each are identical with the ends of all”307. He raises the question if what they see, can be part of what I see. This approach, he calls “interactive pluralism”. This would result in a cohesion between local and universal societies. It is the vocation of the Church to bring down the fragmentation of self-protective ghettos within the human community308. Williams writes that the Christian tradition warns “against canonizing in theology the tempting idioms of human personal interaction, requiring us to strain beyond these if we are to begin to hold to any sense of the radicality of divine gift”309.

In line with this, an interfaith dialogue is not a sign of relativism or liberalism, but a dimension of liturgy, a public sign of the Church’s engagement with the finality of Christ. According to Williams, the radical singleness of Jesus Christ is the rationale for interfaith dialogue 310. “Because Christ’s life is catholic and unbounded, he is never fully absorbed by any particular human context. He is both ‘native’ and ‘stranger’ to all social locations. The word of life and love that Christ addresses to the church is only the echo of a word addressed to the whole of humanity”311. This humanity has one human future, which is fundamentally peaceful. In this peaceful future, their belonging together becomes visible. Her vision is centred on Christ, and is “a single – or better, a freely communicating – human culture, in which the diversity of human experience and human struggle would seem to be ‘at home’ with, focused on, the identity of Jesus”312. By living His life, Jesus has shown how life is lived fully for God. When we are called to be Christ-like, we must look different from Christ, for we live in

304Ibid., p. 83-84.87.92.305B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 62.306Ibid., p. 62.307Ibid., p. 63.308Ibid., p. 62-64. For Williams vision on liberation theology, see R. WILLIAMS, Liberation Theology and the Anglican Tradition, in D. NICHOLS& R. WILLIAMS, Politics and Theological Identity, Two Anglican Essays, London, 1984. For his ideas about pluralism, see R. WILLIAMS, Christian Identity and Religious Plurality (The Ecumenical Review, 58:1), 2006.309M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 44. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Arius, p. 267. See also: R. WILLIAMS, Resurrection, p. xii.310B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 64-65.311B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 64. See also: R. WILLIAMS, The Finality of Christ in a Pluralist World, a lecture in the Diocese of Guildford, March 2010: http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/585/the-finality-of-christ-in-a-pluralist-world.312M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 114. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, On Christian Theology, p. 94.

~ 47 ~

a world that is loved by God in a particular time and place. Therefore we must see these particular lives. People like Francis of Assisi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Thomas Merton saw Jesus differently. When a distinctive way of being Christ-like is denied, then, says Williams, there is also something denied in God’s communication to the world. This work is done by the Holy Spirit. So “our common future is a vision of harmonious diversity animated by the Spirit”313. It is about fitting in a communion which is not fragmented. The Spirit draws out each individual voice, and brings this voice into the greater whole. This is the work of redemption. By talking to other people, we show ourselves different and say things that we would otherwise not have said314. Williams writes:

The stranger … is neither the failed or stupid native speaker, nor someone so terrifyingly alien that I cannot even entertain thought of learning from them. They represent the fact that I have growing to do, not necessarily into anything like an identity with them, but at least into a world where there may be more of a sense of its being a world we share315.

Instead of thinking that others speak of a different Christ or to condemn them, we must explore patiently how the same Christ can be reflected from this different perspective. A vision of peace, therefore, does not ask a denial of difference316. Instead, Williams says, you must pay attention to

your elusiveness, your mystery, your terrible singleness and solitude. And because your solitude, like mine, belongs to God, I shall stand before you as I stand before God. You are holy, as God is holy, and unknowable and unpredictable, as God is. So that I must give up and put away all hopes of trapping you in my words, my categories and my ideas, my plans and my solutions. I shall offer you whatever I have to offer, but I shall not commit the blasphemy (I don’t use the word lightly) of ordering your life or writing your script317.

In another of his writings, Williams makes clear how fundamental love is for this vision:

To purify love is to learn how egotistic fear and fiction work to smooth out the particular otherness of another person, so that my language remains uninterrupted, my control unchallenged, my involvement in time and chance unacknowledged. And to know his contingence in the event of love is precisely to retain and nurture an apprehension of the difference of this or that ‘other’, their own contingency; to be surprised, delighted, puzzled, hurt by them in a way which witnesses to their unassimilated reality, an independent hinterland to their side of the conversation318.

313M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 116.314Ibid., p. 115-117. See also R. WILLIAMS, Jesus – God with Us, p. 27-28; R. WILLIAMS& P. SHELDRAKE, Catholic Persons, Images of Holiness, A Dialogue, in J. JOHN (ed.), Living the Mystery, Affirming Catholicism and the Future of Anglicanism, London, 1994, p. 84-85; R. WILLIAMS, Sermon at Canterbury Cathedral, Morning Service, 2 March 2003, http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/; ID., The Spirit of the Age to Come, in Sobornost: The Journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius 6.9 (1974), p. 621-622; ID., Open to Judgement, p. 191-192; ID., Review of Paul Evdokimov, L’Esprit Saint dans la tradition Orthodoxe, in Sobornost: The Journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius 6.4 (1972), p. 285; ID., Resurrection, p. ? (ch2). For more of the importance of a community to discover God’s peace and mercy, see R. Williams, Tokens of Trust, p. 100-102.315M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 117. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Christ on Trial, Grand Rapids, MI, 2002, p. 62.316M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 117.317Ibid., p. 117-118. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Open to Judgement, p. 148.318M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 118. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, The Necessary Non-Existence of God, in R.H. BELL (ed.), Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture, Readings towards a Divine Humanity, Cambridge, 1993, p. 66.

~ 48 ~

Because the Church embodies a new creation, the only good of the Church, is the social good. In other words: the life of Christ is nothing we can just claim for ourselves, but can only be active when we go beyond ourselves towards mission. Through dialogue and engagement with the contemporary pluralist societies, the Church shows people that her message, namely the redemption of Christ, is relevant for all. “It is in such ‘missionary’ activity that the church discovers its own identity, and finds that its own ends are identical with the ends of all”319. Therefore the eucharist loses her meaning when it is “cut off from the pattern of God’s mission in the world”320. The centre of the life of the Church is the eucharist, because it is outside the Church, which means that this eucharist connects us “with an energy of life that lies beyond our own resources”321. Here the Church “shows itself its source and criterion”322. The eucharist reminds us at the last supper, where Jesus created an unexpected fellowship and handed Himself over to His disciples323. Here the Church receives anew what it never possesses. Moreover, we receive the body of Christ, which is what we have to become 324. This body, was given freely on the cross. To eat and drink at Christ table, than, is to accept the gift of fellowship325. “Our own identity lies beyond ourselves, so that every act of receiving the eucharist is also a dispossession of whatever identity markers we might have constructed for ourselves. In this way, the eucharist enacts the catholicity of Christ and the elasticity of a community that makes room for the whole world of human experience”326.

Mission is thus locating the Church where Christ really can be found. In the opinion of Williams, liturgy is about letting go the fantasy that we posses Christ. When we arrive at the table, Christ is already there, offering us breath and wine, while we are actually “unworthy, but welcome guests”327. In the eucharist, we discover Christ’s gift and our own poverty. We stand before Him with empty hands. This poverty is the experience of a community “whose source of life lies beyond itself”328. The fully reconciled human belonging, in which our hunger can be fully satisfied, does not yet exist on earth329. Myers concludes:

The Church’s mission is to go out looking for Christ in the world, following the risen one on his way across all the self-protective barriers that human beings have erected. As it follows Christ on this path, the Church lets go of its own power, privilege, and security. We are ‘always likely to forget that Jesus is different from the Church, not the Church’s possession’: the eucharist is a tonic against this lethal forgetfulness. The Church, then, exists not for itself but for the sake of a reconciled humanity. We are a laboratory of human possibility, human flourishing, human

319 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 65.320Ibid., p. 65. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Imagining the Kingdom, Some Questions for Anglican Worship Today, in K. STEVENSON& B. SPINKS(eds.), The Identity of Anglican Worship, Harrisburg, PA, 1991, p. 10.321 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 65.322M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 72. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Authority and the Bishop in the Church, in M. SANTER (ed.), Their Lord and Ours, Approaches to Authority, Community, and the Unity of the Church, London, 1982, p. 97.323 M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 72-73.324 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 64-65.325 M. HIGTON, Difficult Gospel, p. 73-75. See also R. WILLIAMS, Resurrection, p. 102-103; ID., Foreword, in H. MCADOO& K. STEVENSON(eds.), The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Anglican Tradition, Norwich, 1995, p. viii-ix.326B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 65.327Ibid., p. 66. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Mission and Christology, p. 20-21.328 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 66.329Ibid., p. 66. See also: R. WILLIAMS, The Church as Sacrament (International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 10:1), 2010, p. ?; ID., Mission and Christology.

~ 49 ~

belonging. And our materials are not test tubes and chemicals, but a book, a [cup], and the broken body of God330.

Saints and sinners

Another thread through the theology of Williams, is the importance of the saints. For him, the saints, and not Church structures, form the heart of the Church. These saints are not at a distance from ordinary life. On the contrary: they can be found in any neighbourhood or village. It is the saint who stands closest “to the source of what it means to be a full human being”331. For Williams, sinners and saints belong together. In his vision there are two polis: one of limping growth and one of holy lives. The presence of these saints learns us to be patient with others. They give freely and receive freely from others. Being a saint means not the same as saying no to who you are, but it is the self that hears a yes from the other. One can even say that these people enjoy of the expansive capacities of the self, but as if they were the capacities of somebody else. This attitude, Williams names “holy egotism”332.

The self also becomes more free, when it stops considering itself as the centre of things. This is the “holy fool”. According to Williams they are not very balanced, but rather confused because of the strange world of God. For us, the saint looks a bit weird, because our own world is out of shape. Therefore we do often not recognize holiness while actually seeing it. Saints are not noticed for their wholeness, often on the contrary, but because they are awake, and therefore are aware of “the glorious and troubling difference of God”333. It is off course possible that the holy lives are marginal to the activity of the Church that is visible. This, one could call an “ecclesiology of the margins”: The one’s at the real center of the work of God, are those who are found in the social margins, for one cannot expect God to work through the appropriate channels. When Williams writes about “the hiddenness of Christ in the Church”, than this is what he actually means334:

What if the life that fuels the Church through prayer is not the routine prayer of the worshipping community, not even the prayer of the religious orders, but moments of exposure and insight, or of desperately needy openness to God on the part of very irregular Christians? Isn’t this actually what Jesus’ story of the Pharisee and the tax-collector might suggest? What if the Church really lives from the prayer and experience of those it least values in its public talk335?

All we know is that we are called to pray, to trust and to live with integrity before God (to live ‘holy’ lives) in such a way as to leave the door open, to let things come together so that love can come through336.

Williams also thinks that it is more often our success that keeps us far from the Kingdom of God than our failures, because it are our failures which decentre our ego. It is in the saints that our fantasies about God are overcome and where we truly learn to know something about God, or to quote Williams: “If they take God that seriously, at least this isn’t some cosy made-up way of making yourself feel better”337. We have to be aware that our choices can destroy us. And maybe that is a state

330 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 66. We changed chalice by cup, because the chalice is more a medieval object. See also: R. WILLIAMS, Mission and Christology, p. 20.331 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 75.332Ibid., p. 73-76.333 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 78. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Saints, p. 74-75.334Ibid., p. 76-79.335Ibid., p. 79. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Ponder These Things, Praying with Icons of the Virgin, Norwich, 2002.336R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 45.337 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 80. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 21.

~ 50 ~

of hell. Williams sees it as a God Who is knocking on a closed door, which we struggle to hold shut 338. Instead of making God incredible or only available for the elite, saints let God in, and by doing so, make Him credible and available339, by self-questioning and self-scrutiny before the Lord. The Church is thus a community of hope, which is not afraid of her failures and is willing to point to God. This also implies (the hope for) the possibility of forgiveness, which is not very popular in our current culture. This forgiveness is not something self-evident, for it is the restoration of the relation with the victim and with God, and He has given us the power to say no, even if he always says yes340.

In short: In being the channel of Christ’s action to the community, each person becomes fully him-/herself. For Williams, life in the Church is more about “swimming in an overwhelming current of divine loving activity” than about “signing up to a society”341. Because the Church is the image of the Trinity, unity and plurality are completely simultaneous, for “what makes me have an identity is always absolutely bound up with the otherness to which I am related”342. In this regard, these other people do make things a lot more difficult, for the relation we have with eternal truth and love, is inseparably connected with the way we manage the proximity of our human neighbors343. To illustrate this, Williams quotes Anthony the Great, who was a Christian desert monastic teacher:

Our life and our death is with our neighbor. If we win our brother, we win God. If we cause our brother to stumble, we have sinned against Christ344.

Maybe the metaphor used by John the Dwarf, captures Williams’ theology even better:

“You don’t built a house by starting with the roof and working down. You start with the foundation.”They said, “What does that mean?”He said, “The foundation is our neighbor whom we must win. The neighbor is where we start. Every commandment of Christ depends on this”345.

This is the basis for our growth in the life of grace. After all, Christ wants to communicate with all. So if I fail to bring someone in touch with Him, I block Christ’s urgent will. Therefore, bringing the neighbor in touch with Christ, means the death of a particular sort of picture of myself. One of the most important blockings, is pretending that you know more about God than others. Than your own vision is misty due to self-satisfaction or self-obsession. On the contrary, when one is busy with his/her own faults or shortcomings, he/she does not have the time to judge those of others. Not by showing your superiority, but by quiet personal exposure of failure in such a way that we show the path for others to show the same truthfulness, we can win our neighbor. This, of course, is not the same as judging yourself too harshly. The goal of all this is to reconcile our brothers and sisters with God, through truth and mercy. And then, a harsh judgement can lead to despair. It is about healing by

338R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 151.339 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 79-81.340 R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 152-153.341Ibid., p. 136. In “A Silent Action” Williams write more explicitly that the church does not have to be turned into a State. Rather the contrary: the end of the state should being worthy to become only the church. R. WILLIAMS, A Silent Action, p. 25. Here he draws his inspiration from: F. DOSTOEVSKY, The Brothers Karamazov, in Penguin Classics 1, p. 69.342R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 137.343 R. WILLIAMS, Where God Happens, Discovering Christ in One Another, Boston, MA, 2005, p. 12.344Ibid., p. 13. Originally published in W. BENEDICTA, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Kalamazoo, MI, 1984, p. 3.345R. WILLIAMS, Where God Happens, p. 15. Originally published in W. BENEDICTA, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, p. 93.

~ 51 ~

solidarity, and not by condemning someone346. This is beautifully expressed by Abba Poemen, who is confronted with a brother who has sinned and wants a penance of three years:

The old man said, That’s a lot.” The brother said, “What about one year?” The old man said, “That’s still quite a lot.” Some other people suggested forty days; Poemen said, “That’s a lot too.” And he said, “What I think is that if someone repents with all one’s heart and intends never to commit the sin again, perhaps God will be satisfied with only three days”347.

Or, in the Words of Williams:

In the eyes of Christ we are all victims, since we are all sinners348.

He also states sinning is victimizing. Therefore we are victims, but we are also unforgiven for our victimization. Because the death do not forgive, forgiveness for our victimization is impossible for us, but not for God349. In this regard, the dessert fathers show the Church what kind of community she must be. This community, has to be a fearless community, which needs to develop a self-awareness and attention to each other. These habits have to be grounded in the pervasive awareness of God. And this awareness, on its turn, comes from the constant exposure to God in reading the Bible and in praying. This is the reason why not judging is not just the easy way: receiving forgiveness in the way that our lives will be changed, is a work that takes a lifetime and it requires the most relentless monitoring of our lazy and selfish habits, that lead to our thinking and reacting. We must be aware of our fragility, and this is something of which we never must stop weeping about. Nevertheless God will heal and accept us with all our shortcomings. All of this explains the tenderness of these desert fathers towards sinners: moreover, knowing that you yourself have sinned, but are surrendered by the loving grace of God350. In ritual and language, far more than in its deeds, the Church expresses what she believes she actually is: “‘Love, actually’: this is where the eternal reality of selfless divine love and gift is to be identified in the world”351. What we see is heaven352, which means that:

The Church makes sense only when we see that it exists to get us acclimatized to peace and praise, to bring us now into the atmosphere where what pervades and shapes everything is the life of God the Holy Trinity353.

The right to forgive, God gained by the cross: “God is the ultimate victim of all human cruelty, says the Gospel: God bleeds for every human wound”354. Because God has become the ultimate victim of human hatred on the cross, He can forgive, for his love is infinite. Important for R. Williams’ doctrine of the atonement, is the concept of suffering pain. “In every extremity, every horror and pain, Jesus is accessible as the one who continued to make God’s loving presence wholly present in the depth of his own anguish and abandonment”355. Hell he explains as dereliction, abandonment, emptiness and poverty. Jesus holds the keys of hell, because he dwelt there and is still living. About

346R. WILLIAMS, Where God Happens, 15-20.347Ibid., p. 19. Originally published in W. BENEDICTA, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, p. 169.348 G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 25. See also R. WILLIAMS, Open to Judgement, p. 17.349 G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 25.350R. WILLIAMS, Where God Happens, p. 28-30.351Ibid., p. 137. For the human selfless attentiveness, see R. WILLIAMS, A Silent Action, p. 18.352 R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 135-138.353Ibid., p. 139.354G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 25. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Open to Judgement, p. 60.355 G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 26. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Open to Judgement, p. 69.

~ 52 ~

the healing, Williams writes: “If there is a God whose will is for the healing of men and woman, he can heal only by acting in the worldliness of the world, in and through the vortex of loss and death. He must share the condition of our sickness, our damnation, so as to bring his life and his fullness into it”356. For Williams this life comes into our midst by the resurrection of Christ. This, he also interprets as a rescue from victimization357:

In the resurrection we learn that victims are not lost: God takes their side, their “perspective” becomes one with God’s. God in raising the reviled and executed Jesus pronounces that there is an end to the perspective of the oppressor, and that history can move beyond victimage and slaughter. There is a future, a voice for the voiceless358.

God’s blameless servant is the victim of a paradigmatic act of violence and rejection, but God “returns” him to the world as the ultimate and decisive symbol of undefeated compassion and inexhaustible creative resource359.

Important for R. Williams is the healing of who I am as a complex web, which includes my past and memories, because who I am now, cannot be separated from who I was in the past. Therefore we may not deny our past, it must be healed, for “I am my history”360. “Our memory is not to be abolished, but it is to be transformed to the point where ‘even its pains and traumas will speak to us of God’”361.

The contemplative life: “a heart inflamed with charity for the entire creation” 362

The actual theology of Williams is “[d]evotion to Christ as ascetic renunciation of fantasy”363. The reason that Christ is strange to us, is because it is we who have become the strangers. We can only escape from being strangers, by holy living364. This explains the necessarity of renunciation:

Communal disciplines and practices of renunciation are thus the means by which the self slowly gropes towards an awareness of its own displacement, an awareness that our labours of self-protection are no longer necessary, since human freedom is found not in a posture of anxious grasping but in receptivity and response. We find ourselves only as we begin to lose hold of ourselves, and so become free to receive ourselves as a gift. It is here, then, not in momentary epiphanies but in the habitual environment of holy living, that we discover human identity as the ‘site’ of God’s identity[.] […] It is the holy life that cracks open the hard shell of the ego ‘by making for me in the world the room I thought I had to conquer and possess’365.

356 G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 26. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Open to Judgement, p. 218.357 G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 25-26.358Ibid., p. 26. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Open to Judgement, p. 242.359 G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 26-27. Originally published in R. WILLIAMS, Authority and the Bishop in the Church, in M. SANTER(ed.), Their Lords and Ours, London, 1982, p. 94.360 G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 27. Also see R. WILLIAMS, Open to Judgement, p. 58.361 G. WILLIAMS, The Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 27. Also see R. WILLIAMS, Open to Judgement, p. 102.362R. WILLIAMS, A Silent Action, p. 31. Originally published in P.EVDOKIMOV, The Struggle with God, p. 167.194363 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 113.364Ibid., p. 114. See also R. WILLIAMS, Divine Presence and Divine Action, Reflections in the Wake of Nicholas Lash, an address written for a colloquium at Durham University in June 2011, http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2131/divine-presence-and-divine-action-reflections-in-the-wake-of-nicholas-lash.365 B. MYERS, Christ the Stranger, p. 114. See also: R. WILLIAMS, Know Thyself, What kind of Injunction, in M. MCGHEE (ed.), Philosophy, Religion and the Spiritual Life, Cambridge, 1992, p. 226.

~ 53 ~

Also for the summary of Williams theology, we would like to quote his impression of a painting of Jesus in a chapel of an orthodox monastery:

It was a place intensely full of the memory and reality of prayer. The monk showing me around pulled the curtain from in front of the sanctuary, and inside was a plain altar and one simple picture of Jesus, darkened and rather undistinguished. But for some reason at that moment it was as if the veil of the temple was torn in two: I saw as I had never seen the simple fact of Jesus at the heart of all our words and worship, behind the curtain of our anxieties and our theories, our struggles an our suspicion. Simply there; nothing anyone can do about it, there he is as he has promised to be till the world’s end. Nothing of value happens in the Church that does not start from seeing him simply there in our midst, suffering and transforming our human disaster366.

This analyses of Williams’ theology has made clear that, according to Williams, God has to do with every aspect of who we are. The Christian God, is a God, Who can deal with all of it. “And that also means that we should not be surprised if Christians are interested in things like politics or economics, art or sport, and have awkward questions to ask and contributions they want to make. There are no areas that are essentially off-limits if God is truly the Creator of this world”367. This also becomes clear in the Gospel according to Matthew, where the poor are blessed. This story tells us about the sort of lives that show that God is in charge. These are lives which are characterized by a dependence on the goodness of God and “show forgiveness, singlemindedness, longing for peace and justice, and patience under attack. Williams writes that the people who live in such a way, already belong in the new world. This message is a social and political one, as well as one can never be captured by political or social reform alone368. “The changed life that these texts outline will challenge all sorts of things in our present world, but the change in question is one that can only begin in a personal yes to what Jesus is saying and offering”369.

If Williams’ reasoning has made one thing clear, than it is the fact that is quite difficult to understand Christ, Who most of the time remains a stranger. The Gospel that tells His story is far from easy to deal with, in other words: it is a difficult Gospel, which narrates of Christ the stranger. Yet it is not impossible to know anything or to live a life in the Light that Christ is, for, in spite of – or better ‘just because’ – He is so unbearably close to us, we can know a lot, by praying in a community of love, without fear for the truth, without our masks, without self-protection. It is the contemplative life that is to be preferred, but only “as partners in dialogue with God”370:

Like heaven itself, contemplation demands everything and gives everything; it is about stripping and it is about letting yourself more and more be clothed with Christ, taken into his prayer and love371.

The poor man, the monk who possesses nothing, can share nothing but ‘his being, his Eucharistic flesh and blood,’ and is free to be the brother of all372.

366R. WILLIAMS, On Christian Theology, p. 34.367R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 54.368Ibid., p. 54.59.369Ibid., p. 59.370R. WILLIAMS, A Silent Action, p. 31.371R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 156. See also R. WILLIAMS, A Silent Action, p. 11-12.25-27.372Ibid., p. 27. In correspondence with F. DOSTOEVSKY, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 123.

~ 54 ~

It is now possible for the layperson too interiorize the monastic state, and this is the vocation of every believer373. Then, we can be saved collegially, for “he will be saved who saves others”374:

What they imply, finally, is a condition of receptivity to the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, who is alike the giver and the gift of authentic human being. Monasticism is a universal epiclesis, an invocation of the Spirit upon all humanity and all creation; there must be no weakening of its demands by any such evasion as the traditional distinction between ‘counsel’ and ‘precept’ in the Gospel. The encounter of the monk with God is the same encounter to which all Christians are called; and here, of course, we are reminded of Merton’s constant insistence that contemplative prayer is the vocation of every believer, or, rather, that the ‘contemplative dimension’ […] exists in everyone, and that the Christian is called upon to realize it as their true identity, their ‘identity-in-God’375.

When one takes his/her calling seriously, this will lead to a degree of solitary existence, even when he/she is a member of a community. This because of a refusal of falsehood and a search for the identity-in-God. This solitude will often be experienced as abandonment or dereliction. Nevertheless, a life in community is equally important for being a person376.

Conclusion: All you need is love

Actually, love is all around us, or eyes just have to get used to the clarity of the Light, which we have to let it being itself in and for us. This will be no easy task, for “we have to pass through midnight before it turns towards dawn”377, or in other words: “When we pray … we put out our hands … into a darkness that is God’s welcoming touch”378. We conclude:

The Christian is baptized into the death of Christ, into his descent to hell, into a condition of vulnerability to the suffering of the whole of humanity; so that the solitary who goes out to face the demons is exploring the consequences of his baptism, his being-in-Christ. Paradoxically, his calling to be alone with Christ in the desert is made possible by his existence in the Church, in ‘communion’, because it is thus that he becomes sensitive and vulnerable to the presence of the demons afflicting mankind; in the desert he has to bear the weight not only of his own interior devils, but of the world’s suffering and bondage. The solitary is such because he is a member of Christ’s body, and so, ultimately, because he is a human being: and his way must, in some measure, be the way of all members of Christ’s body, and so of all human beings379.

373R. WILLIAMS, A Silent Action, p. 29-30.374Ibid., p. 31. Originally published in P.EVDOKIMOV, The Struggle with God, p. 137.375R. WILLIAMS, A Silent Action, p. 30. See also: P.EVDOKIMOV, The Struggle with God, Paramus, NJ, 1966, p. 130.376R. WILLIAMS, A Silent Action, p. 38.377R. WILLIAMS, Tokens of Trust, p. 157. Williams has taken this sentence from St John of the Cross.378Ibid., p. 159.379R. WILLIAMS, A Silent Action, p. 31-32.

~ 55 ~

Appendix B

~ 56 ~

David Cameron's speech in full

INTRODUCTION

It's great to be here in the Symphony Hall. But it's even better to know that in this party, everyone: the Shadow Cabinet, the Members of Parliament, the council leaders and all our candidates and colleagues. Everyone is playing the same tune.

THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

Today the financial crisis means that all eyes are on the economy and the financial markets and that is absolutely right. As I said yesterday, on this issue, we must put aside our differences and work together with the government in the short-term to ensure financial stability. I am pleased that our proposal to increase the protection for depositors to £50,000 has been taken up. I'm pleased that the European regulators are looking at our proposal to bring stability to the banking system. I repeat: we will not allow what happened in America to happen here, we will work with the government in the short term in order to protect our economy. But as I also said yesterday, that must not stop us telling the truth about the mistakes that have been made. It is our political duty and if we had a written constitution I would say constitutional duty to hold the government to account, to explain where they went wrong, and how we would do things differently to rebuild our economy for the long-term.

So we must not hold back from being critical of the decisions that over ten years have led us to this point. We need to learn the lessons, and to offer the British people a clear choice. It is our responsibility to make sense of this crisis for them, and to show them the right way out of it. We started to do that in Birmingham this week. We've had a good conference this week, an optimistic conference - but a sober one. We understand the gravity of the situation our country is in. And our response is measured, proportionate and responsible. The test of a political party is whether it can rise to the challenge of what the country requires and what the times demand. I believe we have passed that test this week and I want to thank George Osborne, William Hague, all my team in the Shadow Cabinet and all of you for making this conference a success. The reality of government is that difficulties come not in neat and predictable order, one by one and at regular intervals. Difficulties come at you from all sides, one on top of the other, and you've got to be able to handle them all. So amidst this financial crisis let us not forget that we are also a nation at war.

AFGHANISTAN

~ 57 ~

In Afghanistan today, our armed forces are defending our freedom and our way of life as surely and as bravely as any soldiers in our nation's history. Let us be clear about why they are there: if we fail in our mission, the Taliban will come back. And if the Taliban come back, the terrorist training camps come back. That would mean more terrorists, more bombs and more slaughter on our streets. That is why we back our troops' mission in Afghanistan one hundred per cent. I've been to visit them every year since I've been doing this job. Earlier this month, up the Helmand River in Sangin I met a soldier in the Royal Irish Regiment, Ranger Blaine Miller. He'd just turned eighteen years old. He was the youngest soldier there. He's not much more than a boy and he's there in the forty-five degree heat, fighting a ferocious enemy on the other side of the world. I told him that what he was doing was exceptional. He told me he was just doing his job.

Every politician says it's the first duty of government is to protect our country, and of course that's right. But today we are not protecting the people, like Blaine, who protect us - and that is wrong. In Afghanistan, the number of our troops has almost doubled but the number of helicopters has hardly increased at all. American soldiers start their rest and recuperation the day they arrive back home, our troops have to count the days they spend getting home. We've got troops' families living in sub-standard homes; we've got soldiers going into harm's way without the equipment they need we've got businesses in our country that instead of welcoming people in military uniform and honouring their service choose to turn them away and refuse them service. That is all wrong and we are going to put it right. We are going to stop sending young men to war without the equipment they need, we're going to stop treating our soldiers like second class citizens we will do all it takes to keep our country safe and we will do all it takes to protect the heroes who risk everything for us.

GURKHAS

And today there are a particular group of heroes that I have in mind. They fought for us in the slit trenches of Burma the jungles of Malaya and the freezing cold of the Falklands. Yesterday the courts ruled that Gurkhas who want to come and live in Britain should be able to. They risked their lives for us and now we must not turn our backs on them. I say to the government: I know there are difficult questions about pensions and housing but let's find a way to make it work. Do not appeal this ruling. Let's give those brave Gurkha soldiers who defended us the right to come and live in our country.

VALUES AND CHARACTER

These are times of great anxiety. The financial crisis. The economic downturn. The cost of living. Big social problems. I know how worried people are. They want to know whether our politics, and let's be frank, whether our politicians - are up to it. In the end, that's not really about your policies and your plans. Of course your plans are important but it's the unexpected and unpredicted events that can dominate a government. So people want to know what values you bring to big situations and big decisions that can crop up on your watch. And people want to know about your character: the way you make decisions; the way that you operate.

RESPONSIBILITY

My values are Conservative values. Many people wrongly believe that the Conservative Party is all about freedom. Of course we care passionately about freedom from oppression and state control. That's why we stood up for Georgia and wasn't it great to have the Georgian Prime Minister with us here, speaking today? But freedom can too easily turn into the idea that we all have the

~ 58 ~

right to do whatever we want, regardless of the effect on others. That is libertarian, not Conservative - and it is certainly not me.

For me, the most important word is responsibility. Personal responsibility. Professional responsibility. Civic responsibility. Corporate responsibility. Our responsibility to our family, to our neighbourhood, our country. Our responsibility to behave in a decent and civilised way. To help others. That is what this Party is all about. Every big decision; every big judgment I make: I ask myself some simple questions. Does this encourage responsibility and discourage irresponsibility? Does this make us a more or less responsible society? Social responsibility, not state control. Because we know that we will only be a strong society if we are a responsible society.

CHARACTER

But when it comes to handling a crisis when it comes to really making a difference on the big issues it's not just about your values. There's something else people want to know. When people ask: "will you make a difference?" they're often asking will you – i.e. me – will you make a difference? You can't prove you're ready to be Prime Minister – and it would be arrogant to pretend you can. The best you can do is tell people who you are and the way you work; how you make decisions and then live with them.

I'm a forty-one year old father of three who thinks that family is the most important thing there is. For me. For my country. I am deeply patriotic about this country and believe we have both a remarkable history and an incredible future. I believe in the Union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and I will never do anything to put it at risk. I have a simple view that public service is a good way to channel your energy and try to make a difference. I am not an ideologue. I know that my party can get things wrong, and that other parties sometimes get things right. I hold to some simple principles. That strong defence, the rule of law and sound money are the foundations of good government

But I am also a child of my time. I want a clean environment as well as a safe one. I believe that quality of life matters as much as quantity of money. I recognise that we'll never be truly rich while so much of the world is so poor. I believe in building a strong team – and really trusting them. Their success is to be celebrated – not seen as some kind of threat. Thinking before deciding is good. Not deciding because you don't like the consequences of a decision is bad. Trust your principles, your judgment and your colleagues. Go with your conviction, not calculation. The popular thing may look good for a while. The right thing will be right all the time. Tony Blair used to justify endless short-term initiatives by saying "we live in a 24 hour media world."

But this is a country not a television station. A good government thinks for the long term. If we win we will inherit a huge deficit and an economy in a mess. We will need to do difficult and unpopular things for the long term good of the country. I know that. I'm ready for that.

EXPERIENCE

And there is a big argument I want to make – about the financial crisis and the economic downturn, yes but about the other issues facing the country too. It's an argument about experience. To do difficult things for the long-term or even to get us through the financial crisis in the short term what matters more than experience is character and judgment, and what you really believe needs to happen to make things right. I believe that to rebuild our economy, it's not more of the same we need, but change. To repair our broken society, it's not more of the same we need, but change.

Experience is the excuse of the incumbent over the ages. Experience is what they always say when they try to stop change. In 1979, James Callaghan had been Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary and Chancellor before he became Prime Minister. He had plenty of experience. But thank God we changed him for Margaret Thatcher.

Just think about it: if we listened to this argument about experience, we'd never change a government, ever. We'd have Gordon Brown as Prime Minister – for ever.

~ 59 ~

Gordon Brown talks about his economic experience. The problem is, we have actually experienced his experience. We've experienced the massive increase in debt. We have experienced the huge rise in taxes. We experienced the folly of pretending that boom and bust could be ended. This is the argument we will make when the election comes. The risk is not in making a change. The risk is sticking with what you've got and expecting a different result. There is a simple truth for times like this. When you've taken the wrong road, you don't just keep going. You change direction – and that is what we need to do. So let's look at how we got here – and how we're going to get out.

HOW WE GOT HERE

At the heart of the financial crisis is a simple fact. The tap marked 'borrowing' was turned on - and it was left running for too long. The debts we built up were too high. Far too high. The authorities – on both sides of the Atlantic – thought it could go on for ever.

They thought the days of low inflation and low interest rates could go on for ever. They thought the asset price bubble didn't matter. But it's not just the authorities who were at fault. Many bankers in the City were quite simply irresponsible. They paid themselves vast rewards when it was all going well and the minute it went wrong, they came running to us to bail them out. There will be a day of reckoning but today is not that day. Today we have to understand the long-term policy mistakes that were made.

In this country, Gordon Brown made two big mistakes. His first big mistake – and his worst decision, sowing the seeds of the present financial crisis was actually contained within his best decision: to make the Bank of England independent.

Let me explain. At the same time as giving the Bank of England the power to set interest rates he took away the Bank of England's power to regulate financial markets. And he took away the Bank of England's power to blow the whistle on the total amount of debt in the economy. He changed the rules of the game, but he took the referee off the pitch. Eddie George, who was the Bank of England Governor at the time, was only given a few hours notice of this massive decision. He feared it would end in tears – and it has.

Gordon Brown's second big mistake was on government borrowing. After a prudent start, when he stuck for two years to Conservative spending totals, he turned into a spendaholic. His spending splurge left the government borrowing money in the good times when it should have been saving money. So now that the bad times have hit, there's no money to help. The cupboard is bare.

HOW WE'RE GOING TO GET OUT

So the question is, how are we going to get through this crisis? How are we going to rebuild our economy for the long term? Now I've studied economics at a great university. I've worked in business alongside great entrepreneurs. And as Gordon Brown never stops reminding people, I've been inside the Treasury during a crisis. But when it comes to handling the situation we're in, none of that matters as much as some simple things I believe to be true.

SOUND MONEY

First of all, I believe that government's main economic duty is to ensure sound money and low taxes. Sound money means controlling inflation, keeping spending under control and getting debt down. So we will rein in private borrowing by correcting that big mistake made by Gordon Brown, and restoring the Bank of England's power to limit debt in the economy. That will help give our economy the financial responsibility it needs. But we need fiscal responsibility too.

So we will rein in government borrowing. You know what that means. The country needs to know what that means. And it has a lot clearer idea now, thanks to that fantastic speech by George Osborne on Monday, one of the finest speeches made by any Shadow Chancellor. Sound money

~ 60 ~

means saving in the good years so we can borrow in the bad. It means ending Labour's spendaholic culture it means clamping down on government waste and it means destroying all those useless quangos and initiatives.

So I will be asking all my shadow ministers to review all over again every spending programme to see if it is really necessary, really justifiable in these new economic circumstances. But even that will not be enough.

The really big savings will come from reforming inefficient public services, and dealing with the long-term social problems that cause government spending to rise. To help us stick to the right course, we'll have an independent Office of Budget Responsibility. There will be no hiding place, no fiddling the figures – for all governments, forever. It's not experience that will bring about these long-term changes. Experience means you're implicated in the old system that's failed. You can't admit that change is needed, because that would mean admitting you'd got it wrong. We propose a major shake-up in the way the public finances are run and we have the character and the judgment to scrap the discredited fiscal rules and make this vital long-term change.

LOW TAXES

It's a change that will help us get taxes down. I believe in low taxes – and today, working people are crying out for relief. Like the young couple I met in York three weeks ago, who both work seven days a week and still struggle to make enough to pay the mortgage.

But I am a fiscal conservative. So is George Osborne. We do not believe in tax cuts paid for by reckless borrowing. So let me say this to the call centre worker whose mortgage has gone up by four hundred quid a month but his salary's gone down. To the hairdresser who's a single mum doing another job on the side to try and make ends meet and pay for childcare. To the electrician whose fuel bill, rent bill and food bill have all gone up and he's trying to work out which one to pay when the tax bill's gone up too.

I know it's your money. I know you want some of it back. And I want to give it to you. It's one of the reasons I'm doing this job. But we will only cut taxes once it's responsible to do so once we've made government live within its means. The test of whether we're ready for government is not whether we can come up with exciting shadow budgets. It is whether we have the grit and determination to impose discipline on government spending, keep our nerve and say "no" - even in the teeth of hostility and protest. That is the responsible party we are and that is the responsible government I will lead.

ENTERPRISE

Sound money; low taxes. Simple beliefs with profound implications. And here's something else I believe about the economy. I believe that people create jobs, not governments. I understand enterprise. I admire entrepreneurs. I should do – I go to bed with one every night. And today, Labour's taxes and regulations are making life impossible for our entrepreneurs.

Just this week, the exodus of business from Labour's Britain continued as WPP announced it was moving to Ireland. A man called Steven Ellis Cooper emailed me at the end of last month. You know him, this conference heard his story on Sunday. He's from Worcestershire – and with his wife and two daughters he's been running his business for nearly twenty years. He saw it grow into something he described as "magical", employing five people and contributing to the economy. And then along came Labour . Now he's down to his last employee and he says "I am sat at my desk now in tears as I'm so sad that what I have spent such a long time trying to build up is being so systematically smashed into the floor and the Labour Government are to blame." What an outrageous way for a government to treat someone who's trying to do their best, trying to make a living for their family, trying to create opportunity for others. So here's what we're going to do. We'll start by dealing with the nightmare complexity of our business taxes. We'll get rid of those complex reliefs and allowances and use the savings to cut corporation tax by three pence.

~ 61 ~

BEYOND FINANCE

But I don't believe that the government's role in the economy is just about tax and spend and sound money and finance. I have never believed in just laissez-faire. I believe the government should play an active part in helping business and industry. So when our economy is overheating in the south east but still needs more investment in the north the right thing to do is not go ahead with a third runway at Heathrow but instead build a new high speed rail network linking Birmingham, Manchester, London, Leeds let's help rebalance Britain's economy.

But the problems this country faces go far beyond financial crisis and economic downturn. In the end I want to be judged not just on how well we handle crises, but on two things how we improve the public institution in this country I care about most, the NHS and how we fulfil what will be the long-term mission of the next Conservative government: to repair our broken society.

NO TIME FOR MORE STATE CONTROL

Now there is a dangerous argument doing the rounds about how we do that. You may have heard it. I have to tell you, Labour are clutching at it as some sort of intellectual lifeline. It goes like this. In these times of difficulty, we need a bigger state. Not just in a financial and economic sense, but in a social sense too. A Labour minister said something really extraordinary last week. It revealed a huge amount about them. David Miliband said that "unless government is on your side you end up on your own." "On your own" - without the government. I thought it was one of the most arrogant things I've heard a politician say.

For Labour there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance. You cannot run our country like this.

It is why, when we look at what's happening to our country, we can see that the problem is not the leader; it's Labour. They end up treating people like children, with a total lack of trust in people's common sense and decency. This attitude, this whole health and safety, human rights act culture, has infected every part of our life. If you're a police officer you now cannot pursue an armed criminal without first filling out a risk assessment form. Teachers can't put a plaster on a child's grazed knee without calling a first aid officer. Even foreign exchanges for students…you can't host a school exchange any more without parents going through an Enhanced Criminal Record Bureau Check.

No, when times are tough, it's not a bigger state we need: it's better, more efficient government. But even more than that we need a stronger society. That means trusting people. And sharing responsibility.

NEW POLITICS

But no-one will ever take lectures from politicians about responsibility unless we put our own house in order. That means sorting out our broken politics. People are sick of it. Sick of the sleaze, sick of the cynicism. Copper-bottomed pensions. Plasma screen TVs on the taxpayer. Expenses and allowances that wouldn't stand for one second in the private sector.

This isn't a Conservative problem, a Labour problem or a Liberal Democrat problem. It is a Westminster problem, and we've all got to sort it out. In the end, this is about the judgment to see how important this issue is for the credibility of politics and politicians. And it's about having the character to take on vested interests inside your own party.

~ 62 ~

That's what I have done. The first to say: MPs voting on their pay, open-ended final salary pension schemes, the John Lewis list – they have all got to go. And it's no different in Europe. We've drawn up a hard-hitting code of conduct for our MEPs. With European elections next year, the message to them is simple: If you don't sign, you won't stand. And while we're on this subject, there's one other thing that destroys trust in politics. And that's parties putting things in their manifesto and then doing the complete opposite. Next year in those European elections we will campaign with all our energy for that referendum on the European constitution that Labour promised but never delivered. Taking responsibility is how we will mend our broken politics. And sharing responsibility and giving it back to professionals is how we will improve our public services.

NHS

Let's be straight about what's happened to our NHS. Money has been poured in but maternity wards and A&E departments are closing. Productivity is down. The nurses and doctors are disillusioned, frustrated, angry and demoralised. I know from personal experience just how brilliant and dedicated the people who work in the NHS are. But they have been terribly, terribly let down.

Instead of a serious long-term reform plan for the NHS working out how we can deliver a free national health service in an age of rising expectations and rising healthcare costs, never mind the rocketing costs of social care, we've had eleven years of superficial, short-term tinkering. Top-down target after top-down target, with another thirty seven targets added last year. Endless bureaucratic re-organisations, some of them contradictory, others abandoned after just a few months. Labour have taken our most treasured national institution, ripped out its soul and replaced it with targets, directives, management consultants and computers.

In August, I got a letter from one of my constituents, John Woods. His wife was taken to hospital. She caught MRSA and she died. Some of the incidents described are so dreadful, and so degrading, that I can't read you most of the letter. He says the treatment his wife received "was like something out of a 17th century asylum not a 21st century £90 billion health service." And then, as his wife's life was coming to end, he remembers her "sitting on the edge of her bed in distress and saying 'I never thought it would be like this'." I sent the letter to Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary.

This was his reply."A complaints procedure has been established for the NHS to resolve concerns…"Each hospital and Primary Care Trust has a Patient Advice and Liaison Service to support people who wish to make a complaint…"There is also an Independent Complaints Advocacy Service…"If, when Mr Woods has received a response, he remains dissatisfied, it is open to him to approach the Healthcare Commission and seek an independent review of his complaint and local organisation's response…"Once the Health Care Commission has investigated the case he can approach the Health Service Ombudsman if he remains dissatisfied…."

A Healthcare Commission. A Health Service Ombudsman. A Patient Advice and Liaison Service. An Independent Complaints Advocacy Service. Four ways to make a complaint but not one way for my constituent's wife to die with dignity. We need to change all that.

But here is the plain truth. We will not bring about long-term change if we think that all we have to do is stick with what Labour leave us and just pump some more money in. Instead of those targets and directives that interfere with clinical judgments we'll publish the information about what actually happens in the NHS. We'll give patients an informed choice about where to go for their care so doctors stop answering to Whitehall, and start answering to patients. This way, the health service can at last become exactly that: a service not a take it or leave it bureaucracy. I'm afraid Labour have had their chance to show they can be trusted with the NHS, and they have failed. We are the party of the NHS in Britain today and under my leadership that is how it's going to stay.

SOCIAL REFORM

~ 63 ~

But if you want to know what I really hope we will achieve in government. If you want to know where the change will be greatest from what has gone before. It is our plan for social reform. The central task I have set myself and this Party is to be as radical in social reform as Margaret Thatcher was in economic reform. That's how we plan to repair our broken society.

BROKEN SOCIETY

I know this is a controversial argument. Some say our society isn't broken. I wonder what world they live in. Leave aside that almost two million children are brought up in households where no one works. Or that there are housing estates in Britain where people have a lower life expectancy than in the Gaza Strip. Just consider the senseless, barbaric violence on our streets. Children killing children. Twenty-seven kids murdered on the streets of London this year. A gun crime every hour. A serious knife crime every half hour. A million victims from alcohol related-attacks.

But it's not just the crime; not even the anti-social behaviour. It's the angry, harsh culture of incivility that seems to be all around us. When in one generation we seem to have abandoned the habits of all human history that in a civilised society, adults have a proper role - a responsibility - to uphold rules and order in the public realm not just for their own children but for other people's too.

Helen Newlove spoke to us yesterday. I can't tell you how much I've been moved by working with Helen over the past year. This woman, whose husband Garry was brutally kicked to death on her own doorstep This woman, who had to explain to her beautiful children that their father was not coming home from the hospital, not ever, because he had dared to be a good, responsible citizen.

Helen Newlove knows our society is broken. But she believes we can repair it – and so do I. The big question is how. And here is where we need some very plain speaking. There are those who say – and there are many in this hall – that what is required is tough punishment, longer sentences and more prison places. And to a degree, they're right. We'll never mend the broken society without a clear barrier between right and wrong, and harsh penalties when you cross the line.

But let's recognise, once and for all, that such an approach only deals with the symptoms, picking up the pieces of failure that has gone before. Come with me to Wandsworth prison and meet the inmates. Yes you meet the mugger, the robber and the burglar. But you also meet the boy who can't read and never could. The teenager hooked on heroin. The young man who never knew the love of a father. The middle aged failure where no-one in the family has known what it's like to go out and work for two generations or maybe more. Miss the context, miss the cause, miss the background and you'll never get the true picture of why crime is so high in our country.

There are those who say that all of this – mending the broken society - will require state action, state programmes and state money. And to a degree, they are right too. We are not an anti-state party. In the twentieth century, state-run social programmes had real success in fighting poverty and making our society stronger. Pensions, sickness benefits, state education: I honour those men and women of all parties and none who created these safety nets and springboards. But today, the returns from endless big state intervention are not just diminishing, they are disappearing. That's because too often, state intervention deals with the symptoms of the problem. I want us to be different: to deal with the long-term causes. That will be the test of our character and judgment.

FAMILIES

First, families. If we sincerely care about children's futures, then all families, however organised, need our help and support. So I don't have some idealised, rose-tinted view of the family. I know families can be imperfect. I get the modern world.

But I think that in our modern world, in these times of stress and anxiety the family is the best welfare system there is. That's why I want to scrap Labour's plans for a new army of untrained

~ 64 ~

outreach workers so we can have over 4,000 extra health visitors and guarantees of family visits before and after your child is born. To those who say this is some sort of nanny state I say: nonsense.

Remember what it was like the first few nights after your first child is born, the worry, the uncertainly, the questions. Health visitors are a lifeline – and I want more of them. It's because I want to strengthen families that I support flexible working. To those who say this is some intolerable burden on business, I say "wrong". Business pays the costs of family breakdown in taxes – and isn't it right that everyone, including business, should play their part in making Britain a more family-friendly country? Do you know what, if we don't change these antiquated business practices then women half the talent of the country are just put off from joining the workforce.

We will also back marriage in the tax system. To those who say…why pick out marriage why do you persist in aggravating people who for whatever reason choose not to get married I say I don't want to aggravate anyone, but I believe in commitment and many of us, me included, will always remember that moment when you say, up there in front of others, it's not just me anymore, it's us, together, and that helps to take you through the tough times and that's something we should cherish as a society.

SCHOOLS

When families fail, school is the way we can give children a second chance. My passion about this is both political and personal. After the 2005 election, shadow education secretary was the job I asked for in the Shadow Cabinet and Michael Howard kindly let me have it. I'm not sure my reshuffles work quite like that, but there we are. He's a very kind man and was a great leader of our party. But it's personal because I'm the father of three young children – and I worry about finding good schools for them more than anything else.

There's nothing quite like that feeling when you watch your children wandering across the playground, school bag in one hand, packed lunch in the other, knowing they're safe, they're happy, they've got a great teacher in a good school. But the straightforward truth is that there aren't enough good schools, particularly secondary schools, particularly in some of our bigger towns and cities. Any government I lead will not go on excusing this failure. That's why Michael Gove has such radical plans to establish 1,000 New Academies, with real freedoms, like grant maintained schools used to have. And that's why, together, we will break open the state monopoly and allow new schools to be set up. And to those who say we cannot wait for structural reform and competition to raise standards I say - yes, you're right, and we will not wait.

The election of a Conservative government will bring – and I mean this almost literally - a declaration of war against those parts of the educational establishment who still cling to the cruelty of the "all must win prizes" philosophy and the dangerous practice of dumbing down.

Listen to this. It's the President of the Spelling Society. He said, and I quote, "people should be able to use whichever spelling they prefer." He's the President of the Spelling Society. Well, he's wrong. And by the way, that's spelt with a 'W.'

And then there's the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. These are the people who are officially supposed to maintain standards in our school system. You pay their wages. And do you know what you get in return? They let a child get marks for writing "F off" as an answer in an exam. As Prime Minister I'd have my own two words for people like that, and yes, one of them does begin with an 'F'. You're fired.

WELFARE

If strengthening families is the first line of defence against social breakdown, and school reform is the second – then welfare reform is the full, pitched battle. This problem goes very deep – and dealing with it will be very tough. There are almost five million people in Britain of working age who are out of work and on benefits. That's bad for them. It's bad for our society. And it's bad for our economy. Decades ago, when we had a universal collective culture of respect for work, a system of

~ 65 ~

unconditional benefits was good and right and effective. But if we're going to talk straight we've got to admit something.

That culture doesn't exist any more. In fact, worse than that, the benefit system itself encourages a benefit culture, and sends some pretty perverse messages. It's not even that it's picking up the pieces and treating the symptoms, rather than providing a cure. Today, it is actively making the problem worse.

So we will end the something for nothing culture. If you don't take a reasonable offer of a job, you lose benefits. Go on doing it, you'll keep losing benefits. Stay on benefits and you'll have to work for them. I spent some time recently sitting with a benefit officer in a Job Centre plus. In came a young couple. She was pregnant. He was the dad. They were out of work and trying to get somewhere to live. The benefit officer didn't really have much choice but to explain that they would be better off if she lived on her own. What on earth are we doing with a system like that? With the money we save by ending the something for nothing welfare culture we will say to that couple in that benefit office: Stay together, bring up your kid, build your family, we're on your side and we will end that couple penalty.

PROGRESSIVE ENDS, CONSERVATIVE MEANS

In all these ways, and with the inspiring help of Iain Duncan Smith, we have made the modern Conservative Party the party of social justice. The party that says yes: we can build a society where anyone can rise from the bottom to the top with nothing in their way but only if we put in place radical Conservative school reform to do it.

Yes: we can build a society where we end the scandal of child poverty and give every child the decent start they deserve but only if we have radical Conservative welfare reform to achieve it. This is the big argument in British politics today, an argument through which we show that in this century as we have shown in the centuries that went before with Peel, with Shaftesbury, with Disraeli, when the call comes for a politics of dignity and aspiration for the poor and the marginalised, for the people whom David Davis so vividly described as the victims of state failure, when the call comes to expand hope and broaden horizons it is this Party, the Conservative Party it is our means, Conservative means that will achieve those great and noble progressive ends of fighting poverty, extending opportunity, and repairing our broken society.

READY FOR CHANGE

Progressive ends; Conservative means. That is a big argument about the future. That is a big change. And it is because we had the courage to change that we are able to make it. We changed because knew we had to make ourselves relevant to the twenty-first century. You didn't pick more women candidates to try and look good you did it so we wouldn't lock out talent and fail to come up with the policies that modern families need. You didn't champion green politics as greenwash but because climate change is devastating our environment because the energy gap is a real and growing threat to our security and because $100-a-barrel oil is hitting families every time they fill up their car and pay their heating bills.

You didn't take international development seriously because it was fashionable but because it is a true reflection of the country we live in, a Britain that is outward-looking, internationalist and generous and because this Party that has always believed in one nation must in this century be a Party of one world. This is who we are today and those who say the Tories haven't changed totally underestimate the capacity this Party has always had to pick itself up, turn itself around and make itself relevant to the challenges of the hour. Those who say we haven't changed just show how little they have changed.

~ 66 ~

A UNITED PARTY

We are a changed party and we are a united party. We are making progress in the north in the south in the east and in the west. The first Conservative by-election gain from Labour in thirty years. The first Conservative metropolitan council in the North East in thirty four years. And the first Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. We are a united party, united in spirit and united in purpose. And we know that our task is to take people with us. Rebuilding our battered economy. Renewing our bureaucratised NHS. Repairing our broken society. That is our plan for change. But in these difficult times we promise no new dawns, no overnight transformations. I'm a man with a plan, not a miracle cure.

A UNITED COUNTRY

These difficult times need leadership, yes. They need character and judgment. The leadership to unite your party and build a strong team. The character to stick to your guns and not bottle it when times get tough. The judgment to understand the mistakes that have been made and to offer the country change. Leadership, character, judgment. That's what Britain needs at a time like this and that's what this party now offers.

I know we are living in difficult times but I am still optimistic because I have faith in human nature in our remarkable capacity to innovate, to experiment, to overcome obstacles and to find a way through difficulties whether those problems are created by man or nature.

We can and will come through. We always do. Not because of our government. But because of the people of Britain. Because of what you do – because of the work you do, the families you raise, the jobs you create because of your attitude, your confidence and your determination. So because we are united… Because we have had the courage to change. Because we have the fresh answers to the challenges of our age.

I believe we now have the opportunity, and more than that the responsibility, to bring our country together. Together in the face of this financial crisis. Together in determination that we will come through it. Together in the hope, the belief that better times will lie ahead.

~ 67 ~

Appendix C

Milbank

With regard to social reasoning

Liberal secularism

Ontology of violence

Sociology

False humility

Becoming the voice of finite idols

Sociological reading of religion

= nihilistic voice

Theology as queen of the sciences

Christian sociology

Unique community

“counter”-terminology+ ecclesial self-critique

+ narrative relation to Jesus & Gospels

~ 68 ~

=> metanarrative

With regard to politics

Secular reason

Two city’s

Civitas terrena

Violence as object of worship

Sin

Regulation

Compromising between competing wills

No priority for peace and forgiveness

CoercionCivitas Dei

Words and images in line with stories of Jesus

Non-violence as a skill

New ethics+ new kind of community: ecclesia

Third dimension

~ 69 ~

Interpersonal perspective

Virtue of charity

Reconciliation of virtue with difference

Asylum

Garry Williams

Post-modern society

Widespread suspicion of power

Human experience

Catholic tradition

Confidence in the revealed truth

Revealed public truth

N.T. Wright

Caesar’s kingdom

Truth as relative to power

Justice through punitive destruction

Jesus’ Kingdom

Not of this world

Justice through restoration

God doesn’t want anarchy

Rescue the world from evil

~ 70 ~

Transformative and healing power of suffering love

Bringing signs of hopeful truth and healing to the present time

Holding up a mirror to power

Chaplin

Political theology democratic debate

Form practice Christian political wisdom

consensus

common good establishing institutions+ priority of justiceto meet human needs

Political principle + how concretely applied? + tested by fresh biblical scrutiny

Representative of Citizens

Identifying the common safeguarding people’s Good liberty

Corporate responsibility

~ 71 ~

Creation fall

Government intervention corrective justice

Pursue moral purpose

Conviction politicians + communities of constructive dissent

Rowan Williams

The line in "Faith in the Public Square"

Secularism

Procedural secularism

Negative liberty

Law-governed society+ Democracy

Lawful democracy

Pluralism

Subsidiarity

Moral interest

Political liberalism

Alternative citizenship

Interactive pluralism

Religious freedom

Interpersonal imagery

The enjoyment of the real

Programmatic secularism

Positive liberty

~ 72 ~

Democracy

(National interest)

Pluralism

Subsidiarity

Neutrality

Self-creation

Novel

Endless self-reflection+ loosing of monopoly

Religious freedom

(Individualistic spirituality)

(No fundamental critique)

~ 73 ~

Welby

Church government

Getting on with own business

Placing Jesus at the centre of society

Duty to protect

Trusting in fallible human leaders

Changing the Church Changing the world Trusting in fallible human leaders

Trust in systems Renewal in prayer Trust in systems+ reconciliation

+ confident declaration of the

Good news

Transformed society

Unified by love for Christ

Trusting God

Being in touch with the

communities you serve