Rowan Williams on Christian beginnings...

...what is mysterious in Christian beginnings is not the experience of hearing the Christian kerygma but the record and image of Jesus himself. His is conceived as a parabolic story, yet it is remembered in diverse and less than wholly coherent narrative forms, whose historical foundation is uncertain. To be introduced into relation with such a figure is to encounter what is not exhaustible in word or system - or so Christians have concluded: it is to step into faith (rather than definitive enlightenment). In so far as certain features of the development of canon and orthodoxy paradoxically worked against the absorption of Jesus into a thematized religious subjectivity and a system of ideas, they preserved the possibility of preaching Jesus as a questioning and converting presence in ever more diverse cultures and periods, and the possibility of intelligible debate and self-criticism within Christianity. 'Is it possible to speak of a pre-Nicene orthodoxy?' p. 17

Well this is an interesting encapsulation of Rowan Williams' theological vision. Williams accepts the historical-critical paradigm of the gospels, but actually tries to make what may have seemed like an insurmountable difficulty into a virtue. That is, the gospels themselves show, in the difficulty they have in rendering the life of Jesus into a credible and unified narrative form, how inexhaustible the figure of Jesus is: he won't sit still even for his portraitists. He eludes even them: so that we cannot merely absorb him into our theological system of ideas. The canon, and orthodoxy with it actually ensured this: orthodoxy prevented a far too glib schematisation of Jesus with the massive benefit that the gospel of Jesus is rich enough to be preached even today. What is important for Williams - a central tenet of all his theological work (or such that I have read) - is that Jesus functions as 'a questioning and converting presence': his a parable of a life, functioning to bring about transformation in human beings.

What this conversion might be, Williams doesn't want to pre-empt: that would be to short-cut the process, which would render the process of transformation and conversion a still-birth. That is why I think he is often so infuriatingly vague: because his Jesus is a Jesus who holds out who knows what possibility for newness in human life, a newness that can't be described beforehand but can only be prepared for by attentive and self-critical listening to what the Spirit may be saying.

It is interesting that parable features so prominently: I think that this is because for the historical-critical writers at their most sceptical, the parables are what can be traced to the authentic Jesus himself. (So, JD Crossan, for example). So, the gospels then represent a churchly attempt to grapple with this parable of a life... It is the grappling that we are to imitate, not the answers that they necessarily were able to achieve from their grappling.