Williams on Wiles I

Rowan Williams’ contribution to the festschrift for Maurice Wiles[1] sketches out, with characteristic elegance and urbanity, some aspects of shared commitment to a critical approach to the study of the truth and adequacy of doctrinal statements. Though the two theologians were colleagues at Oxford during the 1980s, what becomes readily apparent is that they were of different generations. Wiles, as Williams presents him, was to be thanked for asking the right questions about Christian doctrine ­– inquiring, for example, as to the production and rhetorical purpose of doctrinal statements.[2] Wiles was raising the pertinent problem of how traditional doctrinal statements, concieved as they were in particular historical and intellectual conditions that are nigh on unrecoverable from the contemporary standpoint, might now be received. For Wiles, the propositional truth of the doctrinal formulae was only of secondary interest: he argued that the real focus ought now to be in the ‘experiential impulse’ (Williams’ phrase) that generated them. Doctrinal claims (such as the incarnation) in the patristic era arose rather haphazardly out of a impulse to find an ontological ground for the dramatic experience of the transforming impact of Jesus. Whatever else, Wiles affirms that Jesus does make a difference. The challenge of doctrinal criticism (offered by Wiles, and which Williams accepts) is to ‘read’ this difference, and, furthermore, to read properly the first and subsequent ‘readings’ of him.

[1] Maurice Wiles (d. 2005) was Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University from 1970-1991; and was most famous for being a part of the publication in 1977 of The Myth of God Incarnate
[2] ‘…Wiles has succeeded in placing on the map of Anglophone theology a set of issues of the first importance’. Rowan Williams, "Doctrinal Criticism: Some Questions," in The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine : Essays in Honour of Maurice Wiles, ed. Sarah Coakley, David A. Pailin, and Maurice F. Wiles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 240.