Rowan Williams and Tendenzkritik

In his essay on Maurice Wiles, Rowan Williams finishes with this question:

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?

By Kritik Williams is indicating not just that historical criticism which questioned the integrity and historical objectivity of the New Testament texts as texts, but also Tendenzkritik - that criticism, originating with FC Baur and the Tubingen School, which sought to uncover the interests at play in the text. In other words, the text is a site of, or a move in, a power struggle, and we can reconstruct the struggle, and then interpret the text in the light of the struggle.

So, Williams is saying to Wiles - 'sure, we ought to enquire as to whose interests are being served in this text, and do some pretty serious unmasking. But even thought you claim you are really interested in how people encounter Christ, can you really show that you put this as a priority?' It's a good question, but one that Williams himself doesn't necessarily evade. In his own work, he does take a great deal of time talking about the moment when people encounter Jesus and how that breaks open into new things, new possibilities; but can he really admit so much Tendenzkritik in and still hope to rescue an inner kurnel of pure Jesus from the mess? By accepting that so much of the Bible is impure and obscure, how can he not have knocked away the supporting testimony to Jesus Christ in its credibility?

Williams on Wiles IV

Re-reading Williams on Wiles after dipping into Bultmann is interesting of course: you get to see what is running in the background of both. Williams asks of Wiles:

...is the historically primary sense, the foundational experience, demonstrably one with the central insight afforded, in a modern theologian's eyes, by the life and death of Christ, the fundamental, distinctive contribution of the Christian vision? The New Testament falls some way short of saying that the life and death of Jesus provide a manifestation of the character of God's love in the sense of giving us a supremely full human analogue, in death as well as life, of that love: if they manifest God's love, it is because they are the action of God, moving towards the restoration and the universalising of God's people, or the adoption of human beings as children of the Father.

Yes, I think this is a helpful corrective. YOu can't just say, Jesus is merely illustrative of how God works with human beings. You have to say that in him something has already been begun between God and man - there is in fact in him a real act of God. The NT writers did not make deductions from Jesus and say 'hmm, this is what God is like'. They said rather 'in Jesus we have met God and God has acted!'.

Williams on Wiles III

From Williams’ perspective, then, there is no way in which Jesus can be merely illustrative of theological truths which are independent of him: he must rather be constitutive for Christian speaking about God. If this is so, doctrine ‘will be an attempt to do justice to the way in which the narrative and the continuing presence…of Jesus is held actively to shape present horizons, in judgement and in grace’.[1]
The way in which Williams’ carefully distances himself from Wiles reveals a great deal about the cast of his own theology. This piece in dialogue with Wiles touches on themes are that given a more full-orbed expression in several other essays. Though definitely affirming of the need for ‘doctrinal criticism’, Williams wants to prevent criticism from overwhelming the potential of the texts to critique us. The objective stance of the modernist scholar a la Wiles, won’t do.[2] By not allowing the theologian to hold Jesus and the tradition of talking about him at arms length, Williams hopes to show how the ‘narrative and continuing presence’ of Jesus functions as a judgement on the Christian, the church and the world, in such a way as new and surprising possibilities are brought to light. As Williams finally asks, ‘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?’[3]

[1] Ibid., p. 260.
[2] Is Williams then a ‘postmodernist’? I am not sure that these terms have today the descriptive usefulness they once might have had. Certainly, Williams is determined to understand from within as much as possible, whereas Wiles finally determines to stand over and against. However, as he insists, Williams is not a radical sceptic, just critically wary of epistemological claims that are a little too sanguine. In another respect, Williams is quite ‘postmodern’: throughout his work, he is acutely sensitive to the charge that theological language can be and has indeed been used in the service of power in a malevolent way.
[3] Williams, "Doctrinal Criticism: Some Questions," p. 261.

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.

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.

Rowan Williams on Maurice Wiles

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.