Williams again, sorry.

At the Rollright Stones, Oxfordshire

It is not too much to say that Williams is reticent about any criteria other than judgement in and of itself. The bringing of the world ­– and the church – to judgement by means to the story of Christ is the decisive criterion. This is true even to the extent that what is bedded down as an axiom of Christianity in one generation may well require ‘judgement’ in the next. Just what it is about Jesus that will provide that test of judgement, likewise, is not a frozen dogmatic formula, but rather something dynamic. A dogmatic formula such as expressed in the Nicene Creed may both reflect and in turn provide just such a means of allowing Jesus to be our judge; but it certainly will not suffice if it is used as a way of bolstering very human forms of hegemony. Even the truth may become untruthful if it is used without the prior awareness that the encounter with person of Jesus proclaimed in the gospel ought to bring us to repentence.

The Christian claim is thus always evolving and being reconstrued along the line of history: ‘Christians in general and theologians in particular are thus going to be involved as best they can in those enterprises in their culture that seek to create or recover a sense of shared discourse and common purpose in human society’.[1] This may mean collaboration with groups that share a common purpose.[2] What Williams advocates is that the Church plays a supportive role in the search for human unity in Christ. This is a search for what recogniseably shares in the same project that the Gospel defines. He pleads:

Can we so rediscover our own foundational story in the acts and hopes of others that we ourselves are reconverted and are also abe to bring those acts and hopes in relation with Christ for their fulfilment by the re-creating grace of God?[3]

This account of Christian mission involves contemplative attention to the unfamiliar, and a humble realisation of the difficulty of speaking. The skills for this should be learnt from speaking, but: also from those transformations of scriptural narrative that restore to us or open to us the depth of that which the narrative deals. So, feminist exegesis (for example) provides a reading of scripture that disturbs and upsets our more comfortable readings and so makes possible the judgement - and with it the transformations – that are themselves part and parcel of responding to the gospel of Jesus Christ. They keep character with Jesus’ own disruption of the comfortable religious sensibilities of his own day.

[1] Williams, "The Judgement of the World," p. 37.
[2] Williams characteristically envisages these groups as ‘left-leaning’ in political terms: Marxists and feminists, for example. But this seems arbitrary. Why not conservatives? Or, to be more provocative: fascists? surely, some parts of a fascist agenda might mesh with a Christian one...
[3] Williams, "The Judgement of the World," p. 38.