Part of the power of the parables is, for Williams, in their ‘secularity’. As he says in one of his sermons: ‘Jesus, in his acts and parables, is a strikingly secular figure, unconcerned to ask question about the status or purity of those who come to him’.[1] Taking his lead from Bonhoeffer’s famous appeals for a non-religious language with which to proclaim the gospel, Williams describes Jesus’ own langauge as ‘non-religious’, and so a model of speaking the word of God to be followed. By ‘non-religious’ Williams means: ‘it is not primarily concerned with securing a space within the world for a particular specialist discourse…whether or not it uses the word ‘God’, it effects faith, conversion, hope.’[2] There is the characteristic Williams emphasis here on what the words do, as opposed to what they say. Their right function is not imperial, as certainly is the case with some religious talk. What seems to matter most is the right outcome - whether or not this speech results in the transformation of those who encounter it. 'Religious' language (at least in the terms that Williams uses) does not transform in this way, but rather dominates and makes subservient.
I sense here the tendency to some universalised conception of what ‘religious’ means. Jesus did not encounter in the religious rulers of his day merely ‘religious’ rulers but Jewish ones. His specific critique is not of them as religious qua religious, but as those who were entrusted with the covenant and its laws and ceremonies. It is not religiousity that is critiqued in and of itself. To posit Jesus as a critic of religion itself risks making him into a Marcionite – or, perhaps less alarmingly, makes him too much of a Lutheran, preaching faith to the exclusion of law. Yet Jesus seems very Jewish: he is radical in the very sense that he calls Israel back to its roots, as well as preparing her for an entirely new act of God. The parables themselves, we ought to remember, make use of profoundly Jewish symbolism: they do not appear as secular in the sense that vineyards, sowers, sheep and seeds were symbols already deeply embedded in the religious self-identity of Israel. They turn the religious life of Israel back to its central meaning and purpose.
[1] Rowan Williams, Open to Judgement : Sermons and Addresses (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1994), p. 54.
[2] Williams, "The Judgement of the World," p. 41.
1 comment:
I sense here the tendency to some universalised conception of what ‘religious’ means.
Michael I suspect that's right as far as it goes ... but since one would most likely be employing Williams' call against Christian religiosity, does your caveat here have much take-home value?
To make clear where I'm coming from: I think the evangelical church is quite poor at talking to unchurched people, in a way that the parables are not; and the analogy between the Pharisees and Christian establishment of any kind is a commonplace. The statements you quote from Williams serve as an intelligible challenge to the church on these points. On the other hand, I'm not sure it would have occurred to me to bring them to bear on religiosity-in-general ... but maybe that's because I'm a credal Christian. How wide is Williams' readership?
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