Once more with Rowan and Lulu

Oh, and speaking of children: my recent post on Rowan Williams' letter to six-year-old Lulu was the most popular post I've ever had at F&T. It was shared over 4,000 times on Facebook, and received loads of extra visitors from StumbleUpon. All in all, the post got about 27,000 hits in the first three days – and it's still making its way around Facebook.

I found this very intriguing: I wonder why Rowan's letter struck such a chord with so many people?

Rowan Williams: a letter to a six-year-old

Speaking of Rowan Williams, I was quite touched by a news story in The Telegraph.

A six-year-old Scottish girl named Lulu wrote a letter to God: “To God, How did you get invented?” Lulu's father, who is not a believer, sent her letter to various church leaders: the Scottish Episcopal Church (no reply), the Presbyterians (no reply), and the Scottish Catholics (who sent a theologically complex reply). He also sent it to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who sent the following letter in reply:

Dear Lulu,

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 them 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 Rowan

Now that's what I call real theology! Isn't this exactly why we need theological specialists: not to make the faith more complicated and obscure, but to help us grasp how simple it really is?

Rowan Williams: three lectures on Narnia

This year, Rowan Williams' Holy Week Lectures were devoted to the Narnia stories of C. S. Lewis. The lectures are available online:

Lecture 1: 'Not a tame lion'
Lecture 2: 'I only tell you your own story'
Lecture 3: 'Bigger inside than outside'

When my daughter and I sat down to listen to the first lecture, she turned to me, wide-eyed, and said: 'He even sounds like a character from Narnia!'

Call for reviewers: Rowan Williams

Our friend Scott Stephens will be hosting a whole series of reviews on the new book by Rowan Williams and Larry Elliott, Crisis and Recovery: Ethics, Economics and Justice (Palgrave 2010). There are still three review copies to give away – so please email Scott if you're interested in receiving a copy and writing a 1500-word piece for ABC Religion & Ethics.

Rowan Williams: writing as discovery

Rowan Williams, discussing the process of writing:

"Something which will be familiar to anybody who has ever tried to do serious writing ... is the sense in which you only discover what you have to say in the doing of it. Saunders Lewis, the Welsh poet, used to quote somebody saying – a child saying – 'How do I know what I think until I see what I say?' and I have always resonated rather with that. And that means that for me in writing even a straight forward prose essay or a short book or a lecture, there is that awkward moment when ... the engine is turning over a bit and you are wondering exactly at what point you are going to discover what the argument is. That's a warning really about the first four pages of everything I have ever written!

"Writing isn't translating something in here onto the page. Writing is an act. If it were just transference, no doubt you could plug in the electrodes and something would neatly type up what was going on inside your head.... Writing is an act, it is an action of self-discovery and an action of trying to put something into being."

This week with Rowan Williams

Lots of good stuff from Rowan Williams over the past week or two. He gave a very fine public lecture on the Philokalia at St Vladimir's Seminary (well worth listening to the whole thing). He has a video message to mark the beginning of Lent. He writes in The Guardian about the abyss of individualism. And in the new issue of Reviews in Religion and Theology 17:2 (2010), he has a rip-roaring good review of Luigi Gioia's important new book, The Theological Epistemology of Augustine's De Trinitate (Oxford UP 2009). The review begins:

"Too many theologians writing about Augustine in recent decades have fallen under the malign spell of Olivier Du Roy's substantial monograph of 1966 on faith and intelligence in Augustine's Trinitarian thought – an essay which argued in detail for an almost unqualified Platonism and individualism in Augustine generally, and an isolation of his Trinitarian theology from the economy of salvation. Du Roy's book, along with a somewhat misread passage in de Régnon's studies in the history of Trinitarian theology, produced a curious 'received wisdom' about Augustine as the source of all the theological ills of Western Christendom or even Western society; he appears to have been responsible for everything but the common cold."

Incidentally, the same issue of RRT includes Thomas Cattoi's incisive review of Giorgio Agamben's latest, Il Regno e la Gloria:

"Yet, it is true that, in this volume at least, Agamben offers few, if any, suggestions as to how the subject could break out of the spell of glory. Angels and bureaucrats conspire to make oppression ordinary, and even aesthetically pleasing; any capacity of resistance to the kingdom is shattered, as glory reasserts its transcendent and immutable character. Those readers who persevere to the end of the volume must wait for the next installment to receive their reward."

For more on Agamben's book, you can't go past Adam's invaluable synopses.

Course reading tips: the spirituality of theology

At the college where I teach (which now has a new website), I take a small postgraduate seminar each year on contemporary theology. In the coming semester, I've decided to focus on "the spirituality of theology" (sorry, I'll try to think of a better title). My idea is to explore the work of Rowan Williams, Sarah Coakley and Mark McIntosh, focusing on the way these three writers have articulated (and modelled) a distinctive integration of theology and spirituality. In their work, systematic theology itself becomes a kind of spiritual discipline, more akin to prayer and contemplation than to Wissenschaft.

So anyway, I'm looking for some tips and suggestions. Do you think it's a good idea to stick with Williams, Coakley and McIntosh? Or are there one or two other writers whom you'd include? (I don't want to include too many writers: I'm aiming for depth rather than breadth.)

And which primary or secondary texts would you suggest? At this stage, I'm thinking of including a couple of full books, together with various chapters and essays. Each week we'll discuss a particular text, so the choice of readings is important. Any suggestions would be very welcome!

Caption contest: the Archbishop's tea party

Okay, when Maggi linked to this, I just knew it had to be our next caption contest. The winner will receive a nice new book.


Note: See also Bruce's disturbing Jesus caption contest: it'll scare the bejesus out of you.

Why sex tells you nothing about what it means to be human

Halden posts a superb quote from Rowan Williams’ essay, “Forbidden Fruit”, in Sexuality and Spirituality in Perspective (1997), pp. 25-26:

“What is baffling and sometimes outrageous to the modern reader is just this assumption that, in certain circumstances, sex can’t matter that much. And I want to suggest that the most important contribution the New Testament can make to our present understanding of sexuality may be precisely in this unwelcome and rather chilling message. We come to the NT eagerly looking for answers, and we meet a blank or quizzical face: why is that the all-important problem? Not all human goods are possible all the time, and it would be a disaster to think that there was some experience without which nothing else made sense. Only if sexual intimacy is seen as the last hiding-place of real transcendence, to borrow a phrase from the American novelist Walker Percy, could we assume that it mattered above all else.”

And in a follow-up post, Halden raises some critical questions about Karl Barth’s idea (he might also have mentioned John Paul II) that sexual differentiation is the defining feature of our humanness, the key that unlocks the door to human identity. Halden concludes with the provocative statement: “If Christ is truly the fullness and definition of authentic humanity, we must say categorically that marriage, sex, and parenthood tell us nothing whatsoever of ultimate significance about humanness” – since Jesus himself did not participate in any of these experiences.

There’s a storm of comments responding to Halden’s post – but personally, I think he’s absolutely right. In this connection, I think more Christians would benefit from reading Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976). Foucault overturns the historical myth that we are liberating ourselves from a period of sexual “repression”; on the contrary, one of the central themes of modernity is the idea that we must constantly speak about our sexuality. By analysing our own sexuality, we believe we will finally discover the deep secret truth of our humanness. Foucault’s argument shows that we are obsessed not with sex itself (as a physical act), but with “the truth of sex” – with the idea that sex is a revelation of truth. Thus we form sexual sub-cultures; we worry about the ever-more-precise definition of all our sexual habits and preferences (just look at the amazing proliferation of technical sexual terminology since the 19th century); we constantly think about our sexuality; we write about it incessantly; we “confess” our sexual secrets and peculiarities to counsellors and psychoanalysts; we have never been fully honest about ourselves until we have given utterance to our sexuality. (A fascinating example of this is the way biographers assume that the sexual life of their subjects will disclose the deep secret truth about who they “really” are.)

As the passage above from Rowan Williams indicates, our assumptions about the revelatory character of sex are so deeply ingrained that we simply assume (against all evidence) that the New Testament writers were also preoccupied with questions about the meaning of sex, or that they must have some answers to our own pressing questions about sex.

I think this can be especially hard for Christians to grasp, since a very deep part of our moral formation has been the belief that human identity is ultimately wrapped up in the suburban bliss of family life. (On which, see the TV series Mad Men...) This is also why our churches are often so strangely inhospitable to “single” (read: pre-married) people. We simply can’t really believe that these people are fully formed human beings. And so we treat them with all the sympathy or suspicion or indifference that their estate demands; our charity might even compel us to subject them to the peculiar indignity of a “singles” social event, all in the hope that the bright truth of sex will at last dawn in their dark lives.

So what’s the upshot of all this? For one thing, I think Christians ought to take much more seriously the category of friendship, while thinking a good deal more critically about the unbridled theologisation of marriage and the so-called “family unit”. Is it at least possible that the idle carefree banter of friendship might tell us more about “what it means to be human” than any anxious confession of one’s darkest sexual longings or secrets? Might friendship itself – so lacking in anxiety, so free and undemanding – provide a much-needed critique of our culture’s profound sexual anxiety, an anxiety which is simply part and parcel of the dubious (and ultimately theological) doctrine that the truth of our humanness is disclosed in the truth of sex?

Reading Barth with Rowan Williams (in Auckland)

I’ll be away for the next few days (blogging will continue if I have internet access) at a New Zealand conference on “Barth and Trinitarian Theology” – it looks set to be a great event, with about 60 people attending, and with papers by Bruce McCormack, Paul Molnar, Murray Rae, Ivor Davidson and many others.

My own paper is entitled “On Barth’s Second Doctrine of the Trinity: Reading Barth with Rowan Williams.” The paper discusses Rowan Williams’ essay on “Barth on the Triune God” (published here) in connection with Barth’s section in CD IV/1 on “The Way of the Son of God into the Far Country”. Here’s an excerpt:

Taking Rowan Williams’ reading as a point of departure, I now want to focus more directly on the theological implications of Barth’s “second” doctrine of the Trinity, as it is articulated in IV/1. Whereas Barth’s “first” doctrine of the Trinity, in I/1, gives an account of the dynamics of divine revelation, the trinitarian theology in IV/1 functions as a critique of the very notion of God.

This critical dimension had already emerged sharply in the doctrine of election, where Barth had protested that “there is no deity as such”, but only “the deity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” (II/2, 115). Similarly, here in IV/1 Barth insists that “no general idea of ‘deity’,” nor any general divine attribute such as freedom or lordship, can be applied to Jesus Christ: “he defines those concepts: they do not define him” (IV/1, 129). The lowliness and humility of Christ show us that such humility belongs to the very definition of God; God’s deity “is not the deity of a divine being furnished with all kinds of supreme attributes” (IV/1, 177). God’s way of being God, “his ‘divine nature’,” comes to light only in the human history of Jesus; in his humble obedience, Jesus discloses “the mystery of the inner being of God as the being of the Son in relation to the Father” (IV/1, 177).

Jesus thus belongs to the very identity of God; as the prologue to the Fourth Gospel puts it, this man, Jesus of Nazareth, is in the beginning with God. God’s “godness” is an event that takes place in the relation between this man and the one whom he calls Father; there is no general “divine nature” lurking behind the particularities of this history. The “essence of the divine”, Barth writes, is something that takes place in Jesus’ history (IV/1, 186). We can think of a “divine nature” only as our thinking is oriented around the history of this man, the one who is obedient unto death: “It is from this point, and this point alone, that the concept [of the ‘divine nature’] is legitimately possible” (IV/1, 199). Barth thus insists that such a thinking of the death of Jesus eliminates the false and idolatrous concept of any “neutral deity,” the “pure and empty deity … of an abstract ‘monotheism’” (IV/1, 203). As Williams rightly observes, Barth’s argument here is driven not by formal categories of revelation or divine lordship (as in I/1), but by the highly specific texture, the historically determinate shape of Jesus’ life. God’s identity is bound up with the way of this man, Jesus of Nazareth; God is thinkable only in the thinking of this man’s history.

I should hasten to add that Barth is not merely advancing an epistemological claim about Jesus. He is not merely suggesting that God would remain remote and unknowable if God had not accommodated himself to us in Christ; at this point, Barth is worlds away from Calvin’s notion of divine accommodation. Instead, Barth’s point is precisely an ontological one: God has no being apart from what happens in the man Jesus. The merest idea of a “divine being” existing outside relation to Jesus is, Barth thinks, the very essence of idolatry. God’s being as God is constituted by God’s self-determined relation to the man Jesus. Simply put, this means that what happens in Jesus really matters for God.

Williams underscores this point by speaking of God’s risk in Jesus: “God, for our sakes, ‘risks’ his very identity” in the act of reconciliation”. Although this has a not-very-Barthian ring to it, I think it captures well the direction of Barth’s thought at this point. God’s being itself is at stake in what happens to Jesus. God has so chosen to identify with Jesus that there is no longer any divine being apart from relation to this man. Jesus is not merely epistemologically significant, as the one who makes God known; he is ontologically significant, as the one who (so to speak) makes God God.

Falling over things in the dark

Many thanks to Kim for his generous review of my chapter in the new book, On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays, ed. Matheson Russell (Cascade 2009).

Resurrection: Piero della Francesca

One of the greatest artistic representations of Christ’s resurrection is Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection in Palazzo Communale of Borgo, Sansepolcro in Tuscany:

Rowan Williams’ new collection, Headwaters (Perpetua 2008), includes a poem about this painting, entitled “Resurrection: Borgo San Sepolcro”. Here’s an excerpt:

So the black eyes
fixed half-open, start to search, ravenous,
imperative, they look for pits, for hollows where
their flood can be decanted, look
for rooms ready for commandeering, ready
to be defeated by the push, the green implacable
rising. So he pauses, gathering the strength
in his flat foot, as the perspective buckles under him,
and the dreamers lean dangerously inwards. Contained,
exhausted, hungry, death running off his limbs like drops
from a shower, gathering himself. We wait,
paralysed as if in dreams, for his spring.

Jesus and the immanent Trinity

“If God is neither a quasi-Hegelian organizing principle, nor an abstract postulate, nor yet an agent among other agents, what is to be said of him? Christian practice begins to answer that question by repeating the story of Jesus: what is to be said of God is that Jesus of Nazareth was born, ministered in such and such a way, died in such and such a way, and was raised from death. This is an odd statement, in that it treats the narrative of a human being as predicated of a substance or subject which is God…. God is what is constitutive of the particular identity of Jesus; that is what can be said of him, and it is what the homoousion of Nicaea endeavoured to say…. The ‘essential’ or ‘immanent’ Trinity can finally be characterized only as that which makes this life (and death and resurrection) possible and intelligible.”

—Rowan Williams, “Trinity and Ontology,” in Christ, Ethics and Tragedy: Essays in Honour of Donald MacKinnon, ed. Kenneth Surin (Cambridge UP, 1989), 79-80, 83.

Once more with William Stringfellow

Okay, I promise this will be my last post on Stringfellow – here are some brief excerpts from four different essays on Stringfellow (by Stanley Hauerwas, Rowan Williams and others). Note especially the brilliant title of the second essay: “Speaking Nonsense to Power.” I think that’s a great way of summing up Stringfellow’s theology.

“Stringfellow sometimes comes over refreshingly as someone very short on common sense. He had massive imagination, massive depth, and some ways very little self-protective sense. What the world calls common sense was uncommonly lacking in much of what he did. This is characteristic of many of the servants of Jesus Christ throughout the ages, because it is not common sense that they are interested in, it is the uncommon sense of Christ himself.”
—Rowan Williams, “Being Biblical Persons,” in William Stringfellow in Anglo-American Perspective, ed. Anthony Dancer (Ashgate 2005), p. 185.

“Whereas the whole 20th-century Christian theological project has been conditioned by multiple arguments about how biblical texts can fit into our way of seeing things (whether that way is one circumscribed by autonomous secular reason or by pluralistic religious expressivism), Stringfellow’s point of departure is to transform existing procedures and to invite us to re-encounter the world narrated biblically. As he said …, his purpose was to construe America biblically, not to construe the Bible Americanly.”
—Simon Barrow, “Speaking Nonsense to Power: The Mission of William Stringfellow,” in William Stringfellow in Anglo-American Perspective, ed. Anthony Dancer (Ashgate 2005), p. 175.

“ ‘Translating’ Stringfellow’s apocalypticism … is a means of evading what he was saying and avoiding what really disturbs the reader about him – the uncompromising character of his criticisms, his refusal to leave any ‘common ground’ for dialogue…. What is so remarkable about Stringfellow’s use of apocalyptic is that he did not think it needed to be demythologized. Rather than seeing apocalyptic as an extravagant and overblown way of talking about matters that liberal politics and social science discuss more directly, Stringfellow … wanted to help us see how apocalyptic language narrates our world.”
—Stanley Hauerwas and Jeff Powell, “Creation as Apocalyptic: A Homage to William Stringfellow,” in Radical Christian and Exemplary Lawyer: Honoring William Stringfellow, ed. Andrew McThenia (Eerdmans 1995), p. 32.

“Stringfellow died before I could have known him personally. In the books, though, he draws us into his circle, mixing anecdotes about himself and his acquaintances in with theological tracts. He seems to offer himself as a friend, one with bits of crazy advice and carelessly-repeated stories. Beneath our cacophonous politics, his pages whisper about how to live in a world both consumed by the power of death and infused in every corner with, for what it is worth, the Word of God.”
—Nathan Schneider, “The Biblical Circus of William Stringfellow”, Religion Dispatches March 2008.

William Stringfellow: freedom from death

William Stringfellow’s theological writing is pervaded by the conviction that the resurrection of Jesus frees us from the dominion of death. The world is ruled by principalities – by suprahuman, suprapersonal institutional powers which bind human life to the service of death. But the gospel sets us free to live and work within these institutions as servants of Christ; we are freed from the dominion of the principalities, since the resurrection of Christ frees us from the fear of death. Since death is the only power with which the principalities can threaten us, we have nothing whatsoever to fear! This, for Stringfellow, is the gospel; this is the Christian life.

Reading Rupert Shortt’s new biography of Rowan Williams, I came across a passage that beautifully illustrates this theme of freedom from death. On the morning of September 11, Rowan Williams was due to address a group of Christian leaders in a building next to Trinity Church, Wall Street – just one block away from the World Trade Center. They watched and waited in horror as the morning's events unfolded. When the first tower collapsed, their building began to shake and fill with smoke and soot. Rowan gathered with a few others in a stairway, trying to breathe the suffocating air. They felt certain they were going to die. Fred Burnham later described the experience:

“None of us will ever forget it. We were bonded for life. We became comrades in the face of death. And there was in the group a total submission and resignation to the prospect of death…. And I discovered for the first time that I am not afraid of death, and that has totally changed my life. My experience, my every breath from that moment on has been different from anything prior to that. That transformative moment, discovering that you are not afraid to die, can totally transfigure your life” (Rupert Shortt, Rowan's Rule, p. 214).

This is exactly the message of William Stringfellow’s theology: because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we find ourselves strangely unafraid of death’s power; we discover that we are free. And this means that nothing will ever be the same again.

Two new books on Rowan Williams

Spending time with the work of Rowan Williams is a rare joy. It’s like the poetry of George Herbert: reading Williams, you sometimes feel as though you’re overhearing a private conversation between the author and God. Reading work like this is not merely interesting and informative; it does something to you.

So anyway, if you need a little more of Rowan in your life (and who doesn’t?) there are two excellent new books about him. Matheson Russell has edited a collection of essays engaging with some of the central themes of Williams’ theology: On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays (Cascade 2009). I think this is an important and valuable book (admittedly I’m a little biased, since the book also includes my own essay on how Williams’ theology of resurrection shapes his understanding of church history). There are some excellent essays on Williams’ view of scripture, his political theology, his understanding of “the body’s grace,” his understanding of creatureliness, and more. The book is available from Amazon, or (at a better price) from the publisher. Here’s an excerpt from my own essay:

“While [Kathryn] Tanner views Christian history as devoid of any criteria by which some meanings and interpretations may legitimately be privileged over others, Williams’ account suggests that there is indeed a fundamental criterion by which the faithfulness and legitimacy of doctrinal formulations can be measured: for Williams, this criterion is not some stable core or grammar which inheres in the community itself, but it is rather the event through which the community was created. This radical singularity, this shattering disruption which occurred in the resurrection of Jesus – this is the criterion which stands in judgment over all Christian speech. And since this is the only ultimate criterion, the church can never rest assured in its own possession of ‘orthodoxy’: it must be unceasingly disturbed and unsettled and brought to judgment. The purpose of doctrine is to facilitate this process of judgment, to teach Christian speech the discipline of remaining open to the reality of its own strange past” (p. 63).

Secondly, Rupert Shortt has now released his big biography of the Archbishop, entitled Rowan’s Rule (Eerdmans 2009). This is a lovely book, packed with intelligent analysis of Williams’ theology and with surprising insights into his life and career. (I’m especially grateful for the valuable discussions of some of the young Rowan’s unpublished writings.) I’m reading this book slowly in order to savour it; but so far, here are some of the interesting new things I’ve learned about Rowan Williams:

• As a Cambridge student, he once expressed his contempt for the historical-critical reading of the Gospels by composing a source-critical version of Winnie the Pooh.
  
• As a student in the early 70s, he edited and contributed to three volumes of student poetry.
• As a student, he had an annoying habit of causing numerous women to fall in love with him. (I reckon it’s the eyebrows.)
  
• In New York 1974, he delivered a (still unpublished) series of lectures on the theology of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. (If anyone out there knows Rowan personally, please, for God’s sake, beg and entreat him to publish these! Implore him as Farel implored Calvin!)
  
• Throughout most of his twenties, he took a traditional stance against both women’s ordination and same-sex relationships.
  
• In 1983, he applied unsuccessfully to be Professor of Christian Doctrine at King’s College London; the job went instead to – you guessed it – Colin Gunton!
  
• He finished work on his great book on Arius during a sabbatical in Chicago in 1985; but the whole manuscript was nearly lost forever when his luggage went astray in transit to England! (Thus proving what we have all long suspected: that airports are secretly trying at all times to do the devil’s work.)
  

So far, my only mild disappointment is that Shortt doesn’t offer more details about the exotic and enigmatic personality of Donald Mackinnon. (He does, however, quote a former colleague: “Donald would even tell you the time of day with the angst of Auschwitz.”) But on a very happy note, I saw Murray Rae on the weekend, and I was thrilled to hear that one of his doctoral students has nearly completed a full intellectual biography of Mackinnon.

So anyway, do something good for yourself this year: spend a little more time with Rowan Williams.

Rowan Williams: Christmas with Karl Barth

Today’s Telegraph features a Christmas meditation by Rowan Williams, focusing on Karl Barth’s critique of “principle”:

“What [Barth] was warning against was the temptation of unconditional loyalty to a system, a programme, a ‘cause’ which was essentially about ‘me and people like me’…. Christmas is supremely the story of a God who is not interested in telling us about principles…. Christmas doesn’t offer an alternative set of economic theories or even a social programme. It’s a story – the record of an event that began to change the entire framework in which we think about human life, so that the unique value of every life came to be affirmed and assumed…. That’s one reason why we tell this story repeatedly, the story of the ‘unprincipled’ God who values what others don’t notice, who relates to people we’d all rather forget, whose appeal is to everyone because he has made everyone capable of loving response.”

Resurrection as God's self-determination: a note on Adam Eitel, Bruce McCormack and Rowan Williams

Earlier this year, Adam Eitel published an important IJST article on “The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: Karl Barth and the Historicization of God’s Being”, which argued for a more Hegelian reading of the relation between Trinity and resurrection in Barth’s thought.

According to Eitel: “God’s eternal triune act of being and Christ’s resurrection from the dead are not peculiar or separate acts. Rather, Christ’s resurrection was the historical continuation of God’s eternal being-in-act…. Put another way, the resurrection was nothing less than the historicization of the intra-triune activity of God’s own being.”

To paraphrase Eitel’s argument, God’s being can thus be described as a kind of being-towards-resurrection; the resurrection of Jesus is the goal of God’s eternal self-determining action. In this historical (or better, this history-creating) event, God becomes what God eternally is – and this is just because God eternally is what he becomes in this event.

I think this is a brilliant and compelling way of interpreting the relation between resurrection and the doctrine of God, and of extending Bruce McCormack’s important thesis on triunity and divine self-determination. Interestingly, this analysis of the resurrection had already been anticipated by Rowan Williams in his stunning 1982 book, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (2nd ed.; Pilgrim Press, 2002). Here’s what Williams has to say:

“Jesus’ life is historical, describable…. But there is a sense in which the raising of Jesus … does not and cannot belong to history: it is not an event, with a before and after, occupying a bit of time between Friday and Sunday. God’s act in uniting Jesus’ life with his eludes us: we can speak of it only as the necessary condition for our living as we live. And as a divine act it cannot be tied to place and time in any simple way. It is, indeed, an ‘eternal’ act: it is an aspect of the eternal will by which God determines how he shall be, his will to be the Father of the Son…. The event of resurrection, then, cannot but be hidden in God’s eternal act, his eternal ‘being himself’; however early we run to the tomb, God has been there ahead of us” (pp. 89-90).

The resurrection is an eternal act in which God determines the kind of God he will be. It is an act in which the trinitarian persons are differentiated: Father, Son and Spirit relate to one another in this event. The resurrection is God’s determination to be the triune God – so that God’s decision about his own being is fulfilled not in the abyss of eternity, but in this unique occurrence within human history.

Headwaters: poems by Rowan Williams

At last! I’ve been waiting eagerly for Rowan Williams’ new book of poems, and it’s finally here: Headwaters (Oxford: Perpetua Press, 2008), 72 pp. The book includes 25 collected poems, plus a sequence of sonnets responding to ten of Shakespeare’s plays, plus Williams’ striking translations of several Welsh and Russian poems. (It doesn’t seem to be available yet in the US, but it can be ordered direct from the publisher, or from Abebooks, or from Amazon.co.uk.)

I’ve only read through the collection once so far, but I can tell I’ll be spending a lot more time with these poems. Here’s one of my favourites – an astonishing poem entitled “Sin,” translated from the Welsh of D. Gwenallt Jones:

Take off the business suit, the old-school tie,
The gown, the cap, drop the reviews, awards,
Certificates, stand naked in your sty,
A little carnivore, clothed in dried turds.
The snot that slowly fills our passages
Seeps up from hollows where the dead beasts lie;
Dumb stamping dances spell our messages,
We only know what makes our arrows fly.
Lost in the wood, we sometimes glimpse the sky
Between the branches, and the words drop down
We cannot hear, the alien voices high
And hard, singing salvation, grace, life, dawn.
Like wolves, we lift our snouts: Blood, blood, we cry,
The blood that bought us so we need not die.

Dostoevsky and a theology of writing

“In writing fiction in which no formula is allowed unchallengeable victory, Dostoevsky has implicitly developed what might be called a theology of writing, specifically of narrative writing. Every fiction is at its most fictional in its endings, those pretences of closure and settlement. Every morally and religiously serious fiction has to project something beyond that ending or otherwise signal a level of incompletion…. The gratuity of fiction arises from the conviction that no kind of truth can be told if we speak or act as if history is over, as if the description of what contingently is becomes the sole possible account of language…. The novel ought to be a stout defender of the independence of eschatology in its most robust sense – that is, a defender of the apparently obvious but actually quite vulnerable conviction that the present does not possess the future.”

—From Rowan Williams’ extraordinary new book, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008), pp. 46, 60.