Lent: Incarnation and Passion with Rowan Williams

Good afternoon. My name is Father Dominic Parrish. I'm the director here at Church of the Ascension in St. Agnes. I would like to, on behalf of all the members of this wonderful parish, welcome all of our guests. Thank you for blessing us with your presence here today for this very, very special gathering. This is sponsored, if you will, by what we are calling the ASA School of Theology and Prayer, which we recently launched here in the parish under the leadership of our recently arrived assisting priest and resident theologian, Mother Sarah Coakley. And she will introduce our most honored guest today. Thank you so much, Father Dominic. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you all for coming. It is, of course, a very great honor to have here in our midst Rowan Williams, a dear friend of mine from our student days in the 1970s, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury between 2002 and 2012, a poet, theologian, philosopher of religion, church leader, eminent cultural thinker. He has written books that range widely. From those that are most accessible and introduce people, skeptical people to faith, right through to sophisticated volumes such as his Gifford Lectures on the Edge of Words and his recent book on Christology, which summons up a great deal of his work through the decades on the doctrine of Christ, Christ, the heart of creation. And it's this that I have asked him to speak to us about today, because it seems to me that here in our School of Theology, it represents a wonderful segue from our reflections during Advent on the nature of incarnation through to our reflections in Lent on the nature of the cross and atonement. I have also been asked by Father Dominic to explain to some of you who may not be aware in Episcopal College who the Archbishop of Canterbury is. He's not this one anymore, to his great relief, but the Archbishop of Canterbury in the current office, Archbishop Justin, is the head of the Anglican Communion worldwide, but also the senior bishop within the Church of England, and to hold that position in a post-modern age is a tense undertaking of considerable strain, which Rowan undertook with the greatest nobility, and with, I think, great self-worth, is what I would say. So, to hear from him about the nature of the cross, and how it relates to the incarnation, is what we are going to hear today. And, as I reread this book, which I originally heard as lectures, and then Richard also lectures, I thought of four questions as sort of leading questions, which I think he is likely to deal with en passant. I'll just name them at the outset, if I may. We have negotiated this, I'm not springing it on. One is, I think, a core theme of the book, which is perhaps not familiar to everybody about the doctrine of Christ, and that is how not to think of God and humanity as competing for space in our world. I think he'll be saying quite a bit about that. The second issue is one that bothers us a lot these days, which is how biblical and historical treatments about Christ and his life and suffering relate to metaphysical speculation about the relationship between the divine and the human. The third one is about how we can or cannot avoid paradoxicality, in thinking about that relationship between the divine and the human. A lot of the modern history of Christology has tried to erase or smooth out the difficulties of such paradoxicality in thinking. The third one is the one we all care about, which is what does any of that speculation mean for us now, spiritually, theologically, religiously, culturally, and politically? And that's quite enough from me. I'm going to hand over to Graham. I know that he will be willing to accept questions from the floor towards the end of this hour. I'll let him time that, as he wishes. I will chair that, and then when we get to the end of the hour, I suggest we quietly compose ourselves and say the Lord's Prayer as an ending to the session. Let me welcome the Lord with us. Sarah, thank you very much indeed for your invitation and for your welcome, and thank you to all of you for giving up a precious Sunday afternoon to this. May I just check at the very beginning whether, if you want to hear me, you can? More or less alright. If at any point you can't, and you still do want to, would you wave your hand and let me know? Because I don't want to be just talking into the void here. So I'll do my best. Now Sarah has very kindly outlined this. She's outlined some of the things which might be of interest to a mixed group, thinking about the nature of their commitment to Christ and what it involves. And she's underlined what is, in a sense, the governing idea of the book that she mentioned on the doctrine of Christ, Christ the heart of creation. Perhaps I can best express it in a few words. First, I would like to take these terms, to give you a little bit of an analogy for the point I'm trying to make. Imagine that somebody invites, for the first time, a visitor from Mars to attend a Shakespeare play. They go along to the play, they look at the list of characters, they follow the action, But where's Shakespeare? This is supposed to be a Shakespeare play. I can't see his name on the list of characters, and he doesn't seem to play any role in the drama. And you'd have to explain that the point is, the drama is what it is, because it comes from the imagination of Shakespeare. And there's no, as it were, conflict, no competition between Shakespeare and the play. The play is there, it is what it is, because one creative imagination brings it into being, and is present at every point in that drama. It's not that, as some people sometimes think, Shakespeare would need at various points to step on stage, push the actors aside. I say, what I really want to say is this. The drama itself, as it evolves, its different characters, its actions, its sufferings, all of that speaks Shakespeare. Now that's, as I say, a remote analogy for what we might want to say about God and the world. How does God speak? Well, God speaks a word. So? So the Gospel of St. John tells us, in which the world comes to be. The world itself, the creative world we inhabit, carries the meaning of God in being what it is. And that's why it's always a bit peculiar if we think that somehow God has to shoulder aside the world and history and the stuff we're made of to say what I really mean. There are questions there about the nature of miracle and revelation, I know, which I'm quite happy to come back to. But the bottom line, I would say, is that when God has made the world, God speaks in and through it. And when God remakes the world, when God recreates what has been made, through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God does not rip apart the fabric of the world and step in and say, what I really mean is this. Rather, God brings. the life of the world to a sort of climax, a point, a clustering point in history, in which all that divine action and meaning and communication is focused in one life that belongs completely within our history, and yet at the same time speaks as fully as possible of who God is. Put that in more abstract terms, and you have indeed the definitions you find in the creeds that the Church uses. Jesus Christ is complete in divinity and complete in humanity. But unless you come at it with something like my Shakespeare model in mind, you can get into a bit of a tango about that. A lot of the theologians who were around when you and I were young, Sarah, tended to take all this very, very literally and end up banging their heads against brick walls and say, well, how can something be completely divine and completely human? Isn't that rather like saying, this is a square and at the same time it's a circle? The problem with that, of course, is that it assumes that it is a square and at the same time it is a circle. And I underline both those words, theology and discipleship. Because if you can get that in focus, you perhaps begin to understand what St. Augustine meant when he said in the early centuries of the Church that to serve God was to be perfectly free. to serve God was to be perfectly free. A formula which occurs, of course, in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, in one of the prayers said daily at Matins, whose service is perfect freedom. In other words, the more God, the more us. Not the more God, the less us, and the more us, the less God. God's service is freedom. In our relationship of loving receptivity to that endless richness of divine life, we become more richly and fully who and what we are. And so, some of the classical standoffs between talking about grace and freedom become a little bit less clear. Some of the classical standoffs between talking about grace and freedom become a little bit less clear. of a nightmare to sort out. Some of the controversies about what happens in the Holy Eucharist become slightly less intimidating. Is it bread or is it the body of Christ? You don't have to think in terms of a zero-sum game, as we say these days. You don't have to think for the more of one, the less of the other, and so on. So that's the first point I want to make, the first issue which Sarah drew out of the book as a major theme. The second of your questions, Sarah, just remind me of the way in which you put it. It's a big one. It's how historical, how biblical, and then metaphysical accounts of Christ story. Yes. Or cosmological accounts of Christ should be thought together. This causes a lot of problems. And again, I think the kind of theology we were hearing a lot of when we were young. Sorry, I shouldn't keep saying that. We're still, of course, as young as we ever were. Again, seem to think either you had a faith which rested on solid historical foundations or you took refuge. You took refuge in a world of theological abstractions, which had very little to do with history or with Scripture. That, again, seems to be the kind of standoff which is massively unhelpful once you start trying to think it through. Behind it is a model which is very, very tempting, but I would say very, very controversial. As I said, it's very, very simple, but I would say very, very paralyzing for theology. And that's to think that somewhere there's a set of nice, simple, basic facts about Jesus of Nazareth. Get those straight, and you can draw the right conclusions from them. Jesus was a very, very, very, very good man, so there's good evidence that he was God. Or, perhaps, we can't know that Jesus was a very, very, very good man, so we can't know that he was God. Oh, dear. And that sort of thing was around a bit, I think, in a certain kind of theology. It's still around. It's still around. Tell me about it. But, frankly, we can't do without that. Because what happens, as far as one can see, in the early generations of Christianity, is not lots of people setting out evidence, but there is a great deal of evidence. There's a lot of evidence of arm's length and working out conclusions. At the very heart of the history of Christian beginnings, what you see is a set of human lives so transformed and turned upside down that people are left puzzled. Those whose lives are being turned inside out by St. Paul will say, "Well, it's all because of Jesus of Nazareth." And exactly how that works is, as you all know, something that St. Paul spends rather a lot of time trying to clarify, not always very successfully. Paul, so to speak, knows with every fibre of his being that the world on this side of Jesus of Nazareth looks different from the other side of Jesus of Nazareth. And the task that is set for Christian thinkers is not so much working out what a reasonable conclusion is from the clear facts of the life of Jesus, as making sense of the fact that's already there. A fact of a new frame of reference, a new creation, as St. Paul says. Theology explores the new creation. And as people enter more deeply into that sense of a new creation, they begin to see just how drastic, how far-reaching the change is that takes place in and around the person of Jesus. And they begin to talk in cosmic terms. So great a change is this that surely will happen in the future, when the creation of the universe is at work, and at work in a unique way, with a unique intensity. But what does that mean? How can the creator of the universe be at work in a human life? And that's when the metaphysics start. That's when you have to do a little bit of conceptual heavy lifting. Never mind if you don't get it right first time. The first three or four centuries of the early church are a story of people not getting it right first time. I like to say to my students in years gone by that you need to understand the early history of Christian doctrine as a history of discarded solutions. You have to think of early Christian theologians looking at all of this and saying, "Oh, I know. I've got it. It must be. Yeah, exactly. Oh, no, it's not. I'm picking up another piece of paper and trying again." But that's very different from saying you can identify a set of phenomena, a cluster of evidence, and you can draw straightforward, reasonable conclusions. As the late, great Cardinal Newman reminded us, "You can draw a set of phenomena, a cluster of evidence, and you can draw a set of conclusions." As the late, great Cardinal Newman reminded us, the human mind draws conclusions and reaches decisions not as a result of simple, linear arguments, but in a much, much more diverse and rich and exciting way. All the commitments we make that really matter to us are commitments that don't just come at the end of a neat chain of reason. And that doesn't mean they're unreasonable. It means that we need to to think again about what reason is and discover what a much more exciting thing it is than just reaching conclusions. So I think that's where I'd begin to reflect on the interaction between history and what we'd call it the metaphysics, the high-level theology, the conceptual refinements. But a word of caution: that doesn't ever mean that the complex theological reflection can just cut loose from the historical reality. At the beginning of all this lies an unequivocally human life. None of this would make sense unless Jesus of Nazareth had indeed been a flesh and blood individual who had said certain things and done certain things and suffered certain things. And while it is really a futile quest to try and unearth a complete cast-iron certain biography of Jesus in historical terms, we can say, well, given the way his impact works out, it's likely that the life had this shape rather than that shape. This claim about what he said makes sense rather than that one, and so on. So this is not a shortcut. It's not saying we can say what we like about Jesus of Nazareth. Just a reminder that from the beginning, talk about Jesus of Nazareth and what Jesus of Nazareth is woven in with the collective experience of a community who find that their awareness of God and of one another has been radically shifted because of their allegiance to Jesus and their encounter with those who speak and pray and think about Jesus. It's always worth remembering that the oldest bits of the New Testament, are not actually simple historical records. They are already the words of bewildered, grateful, wandering faith. And it's out of that that theology comes. And so next to Sarah's third question about paradox. What do we mean by paradox? We use the word when we're talking about a reality that refuses to sit still in our minds. We can describe it well and satisfactorily from this point of view, and that takes us so far, and then somehow we can't get further. We have to shift our perspective. We have to talk about it from another point of view, another angle. And we can't just collapse those into each other. As a matter of fact, we use paradox all the time. And as we're often reminded, scientists use paradox as much as anybody else does. And one of the stupidest ideas that's current in our intellectual world is that something called silence is full of certainties and clarities and straight lines. And every other way of thinking or knowing is messy and subjective. Talk to any real practicing scientist for more than five minutes, and you realize how completely wrong that is. So the element of paradox is that it's not just about talking, it's about understanding. So the element of paradox, of having more than one way of talking and no easy way of harmonizing and rationalizing, again, in our terms, that's not something unique to theology. It's a sign of our language actually doing its job. For example, they very often turn to paradox. And we've already seen, a quotation from St. Augustine, that some paradoxes, a service that is actually freedom, are the only way in which we can capture the real richness of what's before us. The thing about human language is that it doesn't come to a state of final clarity and determination. To speak is to invite someone else to listen and respond. And when they respond, we speak again, and they speak again. And bit by bit, we discover more. The world of our language increases. That's why conversation is basically a good idea, and why we need rather more of it in the church. That's another story. Point is, where I start from, the questions I think are obvious, the perspectives I think are natural, are not everybody's world, not everybody's assumptions. And so I live, so far as I live to myself, in a small and limited world. I need something else. I need to be challenged. I need to be enlarged by what is said to me, what I hear, not just recycling again and again what I say. I vividly remember a little exchange in an ecumenical meeting about 40 years ago, in which a number of Anglicans were meeting some Greek Orthodox theologians. I yielded to none of my love and admiration for Greek Orthodox theologians, but one of the theologians present in that particular group was a slightly, let's say, hard-nosed thinker, and came up with some quite complicated response to the question under discussion. And one of the Anglicans in the group did a very Anglican thing, and said, "I think what Father so-and-so is saying is…" And was interrupted very abruptly by the Greek participant, who said, "I'm not interested in what you think. I'm interested in what I think." Now, you know, that's where a lot of us land. And our language, happily, is more than that and richer than that. Paradox is one of those ways in which we understand that our language is on the move, that we speak in time, that our use of language grows, and I think that is so important. The ideal of language is not a timeless museum, with all the exhibits on the wall and the labels underneath. That's not language. Language is listening, exchanging, discovering, sometimes coming up against baffling puzzles, difficult questions. But it's not language. It's language. It's not language. It's not language. It's not language. It's not language. It's not language. It's not language. Difference is a perspective that we can't quite match to each other. But it's worth sticking with the exchange. So, when paradoxes occur in theology, whether it's the divine and the human, Jesus, or the oneness and the freeness in the life of God, then the Christian church simply has to rise up with one voice and say, don't panic. This is language. This is knowing. This is how it is. Don't be frightened. And above all, don't run away with the really, really dangerous idea that the ideal is nailing it down once and for all. And so finally, and this should leave us, I think that's about half an hour to get to some questions, but finally, what's the use of all this? Where does it lock into our concerns day by day? Do the mission of the church, the priorities of a church seeking to make healing, saving, hopeful sense in the world, is there? Do the mission of the church seek to make healing, saving, hopeful sense in the world, and reassuring is the wrong word, but an encouraging picture. of how we cope with our inevitable failures and weaknesses in a complex world. And, last but not least, it helps us to make a bit of sense of the fact that, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, God, in the life of Jesus, allows himself to be edged out of the world onto the cross. When God becomes human, God does not defend territory, does not fight against rivals. God simply lives in through this life, this death, this love, this mercy, this healing. And, as Jesus says to Pontius Pilate at his trial in the Gospel of John, "If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight." In other words, if belonging with God and with Jesus were just yet another interest group defending its interests, well, of course we'd fight for it. But it isn't, so we shouldn't. So let's not. Sometimes when we look at the life of Christ, as spelled out in the Gospels, its transforming effect comes from that sense, I would argue, of Jesus repeatedly relativizing, dissolving, stepping across a whole variety of frontiers. One thing he does not have to do is, as I said, patrol the borders. And so deep is that commitment to a vulnerable, welcoming engagement that not even death, the threat of death, can shake that. Lots more could be said about that, but I think that is one way into thinking about what's going on. In the life and death of Jesus. And to see that the death of Jesus is not a sort of unhappy accident that comes at the end of the story, but is intrinsically part of the way God made human, lives out the divine life in the midst of the world. And I often think that's how we make sense of some of the parables in the Gospels, and some of the healing stories. But we don't know what the end of the story is. When the father of the prodigal son goes to the elder son and says, come in and join us. Does the elder son come in or not? We don't know. We don't actually have to, but the celebration goes on. When Jesus heals the ten lepers, and only one comes back to say thank you, does Jesus then say, okay, the other men are getting their leprosy back? Jesus doesn't try to foreclose the response that comes. And that dangerous freedom of not foreclosing the response, not seeking to close everything down, that's what leads him to the deepest risk, the deepest suffering. It's all of the peace, but the life he lives, the language he speaks, the death he dies. Well, I've gone on for longer than I planned to do, I'm afraid, but time for me to stop and see if there are further questions or probes you might want to come up with. So, over to you, now, if I may, or Sarah, if you have anything to. Thank you so much, Robert. Now, we have only about 15 minutes, and so we'll have to exercise some ascetical discipline. Moreover, we don't have a roving mic, so I suggest that we're going to just choose about six questions, and we might just get them out, and then Rowan will answer in the time that's left. Does that seem reasonable? And when you wave your hands, I'm going to have to be a little bit, I'm afraid, serendipitous about who I call. I'm sure there are far more questions than we can answer immediately. And when you ask your question, could you ask it very succinctly, and then if it can't be heard by everybody else, repeat it before it's answered? Is there any analogy that you see between the non-competitive, if you will, model between the divine and the human, and the relationship between the person and the human? Great. You can remember these? I know you have a very good memory. These are the seminarians and seminary professors. What advice can you give them? I think they're the best for dreaming, to minister in the world. Okay. One paradox I've been thinking about is the relationship between Jesus preaching the abundance of our lives, but also asking us to give up our lives altogether. How do we go about not simply destroying ourselves? How do we go about destroying ourselves? In your book, The Peace of God, you talk about commitment, communities to commitment, like the Zazen community, living in our bottom, a particular mission under a long-term commitment. Do you see such communities being formed? Okay. You talked about how Jesus. transformed not only human lives, but the entire world. So you've got pre-Jesus and post-Jesus. And yet our world does not seem to have gotten any better since Jesus, and the powers of darkness seem to have just as strong a hold on it. How do we interpret cosmic history? Thank you. I wonder if I could, before I forget all this, just respond as best I can to this. Let's start with the Trinity. Brilliant. Absolutely on top. Yes, this is indeed an analogy to work with. Because it's almost as if we need to say that the character of God's action, right from the center of God's being, is consistent. The life of God's Trinity, we believe it seems, is a life in which there's no fixed, unburied points, but a flow of life between what we call centers of agency, so utterly generous and other-focused that it never creates division. There's a. well, Sarah's written about this far more eloquently than I ever could. But the genotic element, the self-emptying element in the life of God goes right to the center of God. So it's hardly surprising that when God creates the world, the nature of the relationship between God and the world is again self-emptied, in the sense that God doesn't sort of reserve a little bit of territory for God's self in the world. It just lets the world be just as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit let one another be in a deep way. So, thank you. That's absolutely a way to say it. Um. Let me, so I'll skip around a little bit, but let me take the question about, um, effectively abundance and self-denial and so forth, and the paradox that's, um, inscribed there. One of the things that I find most compelling about the Gospels, one of the things which strikes me as the most unusual and authentic in the Gospels, is essentially that the language flips back and forwards there. That the Jesus who says that he's come to bring life away from abundance is also the Jesus who says, "Pick up your cross, pick up your electric chair, pick up your gallows, and come with me." As if, in certain contexts, what Jesus most needs to say is, "Look, you need to fling open the doors of the wilderness, you're not allowing the utter abundance and excess of divine love to come in." And on other occasions, what Jesus most wants to say is, or needs to say, is, "You need to identify, to name, and to turn from a whole set of habits which are, in fact, a kind of concreting up your doors and your windows." And that's going to hurt. It's really, really going to hurt. Jesus is supremely realistic in that. Opening up to God sounds wonderful. And, I choose my words for the deliberation, it hurts like hell because we are so stuck to our self-defending habits, that not keeling away is deeply painful. So again, read in the context, read what is Jesus saying to this audience at this time. What you need is a greater openness to the radical mother of God. What you need is greater awareness of your own absolute paralysis and curl-upness. So, on one hand celebrate, on the other hand deny yourself, or deny what you think is yourself. A real paradox, and yet the heart of it is the one purpose of opening this up. Two questions of practical nature. A very interesting question about intention. What is intention? I think it is a very interesting question. It is an interesting question. I think it is an interesting question. I think it is an interesting question.