Williams on Wiles II

Williams is not, however, happy with Wiles’ take on the way in which the transforming impact of Jesus is to be described and applied. On Williams’ account (and this is why I say rather cheekily that there is a generational dispute between the two) Wiles comes very close to the profession of a ‘very full-blooded abstract universalist rationalism’.[1] While professing agnosticism about the veracity of Christian truth-claims, in reality his stance is positively skeptical. In other words, Wiles does tend to favour the settling of issues of truth while at the same time he appears to eschew them. Like the more conservative Pannenberg, Wiles assumes for his criticism in practice the standpoint of a universal tribunal in a quasi-legal paradigm. Williams reminds us of the Kantian orgins of the idea of ‘criticism’ in this mode; and of the post-Enlightenment turn against such ‘legal’ universalism. Willaims writes:
To say that there is no universal tribunal, that pluralities of perception cannt be settled by ‘legal action’, is not necessarily to doom ourselves to irrationalist relativism. It is, though, to acknowledge that what is sustainable, what can be asserted without arbitrariness…has more to do with how particular perceptions cope with and absorb contesting claims and maintain elements of critical ‘listening’ provisionality within their own frameworks than with meeting foreordained universal conditions of legality.[2]
For Williams it is axiomatic (he uses the word ‘commonplace’) that neutrality is not available in the assessment of traditional doctrinal statements. The alternative is not, however, hopeless nihilism. Rather, it is the process of ‘coping with’ and ‘absorbing’ the various transitions along the line of Christian tradition that requires attention ­– a process that actually serves to ‘extend and outgrow’ even the pots in which it is planted. That is: one can’t posit beforehand the terms by which the validity of doctrinal statements ought to be judged, not least because these statements themselves exist in a dialectical relationship to the conventions of making sense, and involve, repeatedly over the course of history, the transformation and renewal of theological discourse.
[1] Ibid., p. 260.
[2] Ibid., p. 259.