Yesterday I went to a cafe and read an essay that Williams wrote in 1993 on his former Oxford colleague Maurice Wiles. In the 1970s, Maurice Wiles made quite a stir by challenging the incarnation, among other orthodox Christian doctrines.
The essay represents an intriguing generational shift, however. Williams is highly critical (in a very polite British way of course!) of Wiles because, in his re-appraisal of Christian doctrines, Wiles applies a kind of Kantian 'abstract universalist rationalism.' Williams, the child of the 60s, and more of a neo- Nietzchean, suspicious of power claims and special interests, wants to question this whole method: why is this rationalism immune from critique? What methods can settle the legitimacy of doctrinal claims? Even though Wiles claims to have recovered a pre-dcotrinal Jesus, he has done so by de-historicising and universalising him. Williams rightly disputes this procedure:
If Jesus is constitutive for Christian language about God and for the present reality of the believer’s relation to God, in such a way that what is said, done, and suffered is strictly unintelligible without continuing reference to Jesus in a more than historically explicatory way, doctrine will be an attempt to do justice to the way in which the narrative and the continuing presence (or presence-in-absence, if you want to nuance it further) of Jesus is held actively to shape present horizons, in judgement and in grace. The disagreement is not over whether doctrinal utterances are or are not to be received uncritically, but over whether any kind of critical method can settle the legitimacy of the distinctively doctrinal enterprise itself as generally conceived by Christians, an enterprise resting as it does on the conviction, variously and often very confusedly articulated in our primary texts, [note the doctrine of scripture here! MJ] that our world of speech and corporate life has been comprehensively remade, so that new conceptualities are brought to birth. Kritik can look hard at those conceptualities, with a wide variety of suspicions; but not all Wiles’s reasoned eloquence should persuade us that it is in a position to disallow the underlying unsettlement of our thought: the question, ‘What is it that is true of Jesus of Nazareth that would make some sense of the Church’s commitment to new imaginings of God and humanity and of the possibility of new relation to God and humanity?’ I believe that this is in fact the question that arises from taking with full seriousness the notion of parable which Wiles finds so attractive – an event which interrupts us and compels us to take up new positions by showing us quite unexpectedly where and what we are in respect of an unforeseen reality set down before us; something more than an extended simile. Wiles is far from insensitive to this priority of krisis over Kritik; but how can his model of doctrinal criticism allow it its proper weight?
The answer is no! See how Williams gets from Ricoeur this idea of parable interrupting and compelling new and unforeseen ideas: and how vague Williams is because he is speaking of what may yet come about in an unpredictable way.
The essay represents an intriguing generational shift, however. Williams is highly critical (in a very polite British way of course!) of Wiles because, in his re-appraisal of Christian doctrines, Wiles applies a kind of Kantian 'abstract universalist rationalism.' Williams, the child of the 60s, and more of a neo- Nietzchean, suspicious of power claims and special interests, wants to question this whole method: why is this rationalism immune from critique? What methods can settle the legitimacy of doctrinal claims? Even though Wiles claims to have recovered a pre-dcotrinal Jesus, he has done so by de-historicising and universalising him. Williams rightly disputes this procedure:
If Jesus is constitutive for Christian language about God and for the present reality of the believer’s relation to God, in such a way that what is said, done, and suffered is strictly unintelligible without continuing reference to Jesus in a more than historically explicatory way, doctrine will be an attempt to do justice to the way in which the narrative and the continuing presence (or presence-in-absence, if you want to nuance it further) of Jesus is held actively to shape present horizons, in judgement and in grace. The disagreement is not over whether doctrinal utterances are or are not to be received uncritically, but over whether any kind of critical method can settle the legitimacy of the distinctively doctrinal enterprise itself as generally conceived by Christians, an enterprise resting as it does on the conviction, variously and often very confusedly articulated in our primary texts, [note the doctrine of scripture here! MJ] that our world of speech and corporate life has been comprehensively remade, so that new conceptualities are brought to birth. Kritik can look hard at those conceptualities, with a wide variety of suspicions; but not all Wiles’s reasoned eloquence should persuade us that it is in a position to disallow the underlying unsettlement of our thought: the question, ‘What is it that is true of Jesus of Nazareth that would make some sense of the Church’s commitment to new imaginings of God and humanity and of the possibility of new relation to God and humanity?’ I believe that this is in fact the question that arises from taking with full seriousness the notion of parable which Wiles finds so attractive – an event which interrupts us and compels us to take up new positions by showing us quite unexpectedly where and what we are in respect of an unforeseen reality set down before us; something more than an extended simile. Wiles is far from insensitive to this priority of krisis over Kritik; but how can his model of doctrinal criticism allow it its proper weight?
The answer is no! See how Williams gets from Ricoeur this idea of parable interrupting and compelling new and unforeseen ideas: and how vague Williams is because he is speaking of what may yet come about in an unpredictable way.
7 comments:
There is this division at first between the so called Jesus of history and Christ of faith. The Jesus of history then turns out to be a construction (we are all constructions) within a particular culture, so universalising is a little bit impossible. Williams is saying the context of the understanding shifted; but it is theoretically possible to find a Jesus of the Jewish eschatological faith in which he understood himself, though we might not understand it and in all practicality not be able to reproduce its world view.
I would like to find the reference to this piece by Williams on Wiles: yes, the latter represents a Christian humanism, a universaliser, standing alongside the likes of John Hick.
How can you tell when you haven't understood it?
The essay is in the new collection of Williams essays, but originally came from Wiles' festschrift called 'The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine'.
What do you mean that I haven't understood it?
This is the key text:
our world of speech and corporate life has been comprehensively remade, so that new conceptualities are brought to birth...
In other words, for Williams, doctrine is a form of legitimising narrative, and each is particular not universalising, and there isn't (say) a universalising religious humanism. I'm saying you can find, if difficult, a Jesus of history embedded within the escatological Jewish faith, you can also find him in "remade conceptualities" which also have their own legitimation.
You think I have misunderstood this - perhaps you'd better inform me.
Just to follow this further. Those conceptualities are in the text, so the text does all the work. Wiles was a realist, universaliser, still with objectivity and subjectivity, and so you come at the text from outside. Williams tries to get at it from the inside, but then the Bible gives multiple meanings, especially via biblical criticism. So you might, via such methods, find a highly Jewish Jesus, which is some distance from Christian doctrine, but that would get beyond and around some of the early Christian texts. Those Christian texts show change, and that's the point. Whether they show change as far as Christian doctrine, I doubt very much, as it comes much later. The Bible might point to such doctrine but is just as likely to be read as not (as people did - e.g. early literalist Unitarians, those prior to biblical criticism). Whilst Wiles, then, remakes Christian doctrine, Williams is stuck in the detail of the text going this way and that with it, and whatever it throws up. Some of us call this postmodernism, and Williams is touched by this (whether Ricoeur as well). Williams isn't quite up to Radical Orthodoxy, but it has overlaps with it from his own narrative emphasising methods.
If you think I'm wrong here, or lost the point, inform me.
No, no: I didn't say you hadn't understood it. Re-read what I wrote (in fact it seems to me you have nailed Williams well, and explained why he is so infuriatingly vague!).
What I was saying was in response to your claim that 'we might not have understood Jesus in his original context'. How would we know? (ie, we can't know when we don't know unless at some point we know...)
Thanks for that clarification.
How do we know? We don't. But what we can do is use some imagination. We become like time travelling social anthropologists, Malinowski (and since) style. We try to reconstruct the culture, try to do some history on this Jesus (or Yeshua) via the (well) secondary sources and see what we get. It is another narrative - why, because Jesus takes his understandings from around him, and innovates too, and so inhabits that cultural-story world. Then the charismatic early Churches also innovate, and so it is story after story through the ages. The issue then is how we in our lifeworld (story) relate to which of these stories down the grand river called Christianity.
When Williams appears to be orthodox, he is actually nuaincing the story world.
Meanwhile, the cartoon I assume came from the world of the Simpsons rather than your (or outside) creation. Has Williams ever been made to "appear" on it? I thought I'd do my own version...
http://pluralistspeaks.blogspot.com/2007/08/decision-day.html
Interesting blog, even if we are obviously from different wings of the Church.
Thanks pluralist: this has actually been very helpful to me. One of the problems with Williams is trying to understand HIS story world etc. For an evangelical, he is just coming from such a different place that it takes ages to unpick what he is actually trying to say. And he virtually never engages with evangelical or Reformed thinkers (except dismissively) so it is hard to see how our two worlds overlap. His essay on Barth is helpful, but it is LOOOOONNNNGG.
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