On Rowan Williams here in Australia

On Rowan Williams is available here in Australia - at the legendary Moore Books.

It contains essays by Andrew Cameron, Greg Clarke, Matheson Russell, Byron Smith, Ben Myers, Rhys Bezzant, Tom Frame, and Andrew Moody. .

Oh, and me.

Intro is by Oliver O'Donovan

From the blurb:

Theologian, poet, public intellectual, and clergyman, Rowan Williams is one of the leading lights of contemporary British theology. He has published over twenty books and one hundred scholarly essays in a distinguished career as an academic theologian that culminated in his appointment as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford University. Williams left this post to serve in the Anglican Church, first as Bishop of Monmouth, then Archbishop of Wales, before finally being enthroned in 2003 as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury.In this collection of essays, a talented younger generation of Australian theologians critically analyzes the themes that bind together Williams' theology. These sympathetic yet probing essays traverse the full breadth of Williams' work, from his studies on Arius, the Desert Fathers, Hegel, and Trinitarian theology to his more pastoral writings on spirituality, sexuality, politics, and the Anglican Church.

On Rowan Williams is available!

The collection of essays by a group of Australian Anglican theologians edited by Matheson Russell is now available.

On Rowan Williams...

I notice that Wipf and Stock have listed On Rowan Williams on their forthcoming titles list

http://wipfandstock.com/forthcoming_titles

This is a book edited by Matheson Russell from the University of Auckland and which contains essays by Ben Myers, Andrew Cameron, Greg Clarke, Byron Smith, Matheson Russell and me, among others. Oliver O'Donovan has kindly penned a foreward!

Andrew Goddard on the Williams controversy

I think this piece by Andrew Goddard is as good as I have seen on the whole Williams matter. It is good because it doesn't make Williams out to be guiltless in the whole debacle, but also shows how truly interesting his argument was. Goddard's very sympathetic reading of Williams says basically 'hey, Rowan was exposing the necessity for theological discourse when it comes to thinking about law, and you guys all fell for it!' Perhaps this is giving the Archbishop too much credit for a crafty rhetorical strategy. But even Goddard admits that the Archbishop's mode of expression, in the interview and in the lecture, were ill-advised.

However, as the Ugley Vicar points out , the media coverage hasn't been all ignorant and unprofessional. And, while there are some who think Rowan W can do no right, there are certainly those who seem to think he can do no wrong... and they are doing just as much damage to clear debate, in the church and without.

Even he doesn't believe this!

The Rowan Williams affair

Readers of this blog will know that I have rather a fascination with the bearded one, and may have expected comment from me on the unfolding controversy over his comments on the possible integration of Sharia law in the UK.

Well, here is my two cents.

Yes, the immediate reaction of the media was disgraceful - deliberate stupidity always is.

But, as the controversy unfolded, there was in fact a variety of very intelligent comment in the British papers, interacting with the actual lecture that Williams had given and for the most part disagreeing profoundly. So, the media reaction was not all as bad as Williams' defenders would have us believe.

As Williams himself admits, his main fault was obscurity of expression. I maintain that this is serious - it is not a minor flaw. Being a public intellectual means an awareness of how public discourse operates. The 'oh it is very subtle and complex' defence just isn't good enough. It is no good bleating 'why does everything have to be media grab size'; he knows the way the media works already. And besides which, it is expecting far too much of even very interested people to make an effort to understand what he is saying. When you talk, as I have, to intelligent and educated British people who haven't been to church for many years, everything they fear about the C of E is confirmed by the way their chief bishop talks to them. That is, that he can't speak plainly, and that he hasn't really got confidence, even quiet confidence, in what he is saying. I am not saying that this is true, but that that is the impression given.

However, the reaction to the issue is fascinating to me because it reveals that secular Britain has a choice. Does it really believe in its own pluralism? I think the debate reveals that it doesn't; on the whole, even secular Britons would rather the Archbishop stick to defending Christian 'values' or a Christian way of life for Britain! Secular Britain is just as hypocritical as Christian Britain was¬!

Williams, on Williams

Rowan Williams gives a nice, almost lucid summary of his own thought:

...the tradition of 'negative theology' in Christian thinking needs to be be understood not just as a corrective but as something of definitive importance in itseld. It is not just that theologians make positive statemenst and then add 'Mind you, this only applies in a rather extended sense, not too literally.' It is rather that both the subject matter and (for lack of a better word) the style of good theology insist upon a radical change of attitude. A doctrine like that of the Trinity tells us that the very life of God is a yielding or giving-over into the life of an Other, a 'negation' in the sense of refusing to settle for the idea that normative life or personal identity is to be conceived in terms of self-enclosed and self-sufficient unities. The negative is associated with the 'ek-static', the discovery of identity in self-transcending relation. And accordingly, theology itself has to speak in a mode that encourages us to question ourselves, to deny oursleves, in the sense of denying sustems and concepts that are the comfortable possession of individual minds. This means both that theological language has to open out on to a sort of darkness - not the darkness of obscurity or confused ignorance, but the darkness of sheer resistance to the finite mind on the part of the divine. And at the same time, theological language must be the language of a community of persons actively engaged in the common life of building the Body of Christ. (Wrestling with Angels p. xiii)

So: apophatic theology is not an addendum: the whole of theology is shot-through with apophaticism.

More on Williams and Wiles...

Has Williams succeeded in outflanking Wiles? Has he, in other words, managed to burrow into the world of the text such that krisis – that moment of decision when we are confronted, yea even judged by what we meet in the text ­­– is allowed its prominence? Williams attempts to see from within: but has he smuggled in an objectivism – the kind of objectivism he repudiates – somewhere along the line? Tendenzkritik, that form of criticism most interested in uncovering in the text the interests of various individuals and communities, per definition tends to be hypersuspicious of ‘interests’. It holds as its moral starting point the critique of power itself. Is it not the case, however, that Williams’ version of krisis – his teaching on the judgement of Christ – resembles the values of Tendenzkritik?

That is to say: Williams seems to operate with a definite set of moral presuppositions. For example, he is tentative in his claims about language because of the tendency of individuals and groups to use language – and perhaps religious language more than any other kind – for their own interests. This is what the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth exposes to us, on his account. Williams would argue that Kritik is the right kind of intellectual work prompted by and encounter with Jesus: it takes his judgement and applies it self-critically to the practice of Christian speaking and thinking about God. Yet is it not surely the case that this reading of Jesus, and this application of Jesus’ teaching, is itself generated by the application of critical methods to the New Testament? It goes without saying that the history of New Testament scholarship is dominated by the triumphant revelation by each generation of the prejudices and preferences of the previous one.[1]

My charge is that Williams’ exposition of krisis is a product itself of Kritik, rather than the other way around. The problem is, once Tendenzkritik is in the tank, it tends to devour all the other fish. Where does Kritik end and krisis begin? Can we so readily shift from one to the other? Is this a moral possibility to have a text which is so beset with interest-laden and inadequate human talk as authoritative Scripture, as the catholic church has always held it to be? It is difficult to see how, on Williams account, we can read the New Testament with any confidence that we are able to apply the right filtration to the text and so be judged by it in exactly the right way. Can we really be both radically suspicious and humbly naïve about the text at one and the same time?

[1] See Stephen Neill and N. T. Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861-1986, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Rowan Williams raps with Ricky Gervais

This is an intriguing encounter from an apologists point of view. Mainly because Gervais is floundering and inarticulate, and because Williams just waits. Gervais comes across I think as typical of people one meets: wants to own to the word 'spiritual' and also makes it clear just how moral he is, but 'I am living my life'. He also does the typical race from one question to the next without waiting for an answer. I think the best moment was when Williams says 'is fundamentalist religion the only type of religion?' and Gervais goes on to say something along the lines of, 'well, if God exists he would be full on wouldn't he?' This IS quite a revelation I think - it is a similar line of attack to that of Dawkins. He almost refuses to talk seriously any kind of faith but the most fundamentalist kind, so that he can reject it.

Could Williams have done any better than he does here? I think he plays it quite well to score a 3-0 victory in the face of Gervais's blather. It is hard to play such opposition without sinking to the same level. Gervais is becoming more and more like his alter ego David Brent...





He then went on to an interview where he was reported as having denied the nativity story. What in fact he denied was the extra-biblical legendary materials: the big star, the stable, the donkey, that there were THREE kings (when there were certainly three gifts, but who knows how many Magi) and so on. Then he said you could become a Christian without believing the virgin birth, though he himself believed it. Scarcely controversial - but I guess when you have a name for being controversial, people hear what they expect to hear.

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 and hermeneutics

From his lecture on the Bible given in Toronto this year:

"It is not that we are given only a method of interpretation by the form of Scripture – a method that, by pointing us to the conflict and tension between texts simply leaves us with theologically unresolvable debate as a universal norm for Christian discourse (I make the point partly in order to correct what some have – pardonably – understood as the implication of what I have written elsewhere on this matter). There is a substantive and discernible form. The canon is presented to us as a whole, whose unity is real and coherent, even if not superficially smooth. To quote from Kevin Vanhoozer’s recent and magisterial work on The Drama of Doctrine. A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology, p.137, ‘The canon both recounts the history of God’s covenantal dealings with humanity and regulates God’s ongoing covenantal relationship with his people…[I]t is the text that “documents” our covenantal privileges and responsibilities.’ We must acknowledge the tensions and internal debates in Scripture; we must also acknowledge the clear sense that the text is presented as a narrative of ‘fulfilment’ – as one that contains a vision claiming comprehensiveness of meaning. We are to locate ourselves within this set of connections and engagements, the history of Israel, called, exiled, restored, and of Jesus crucified and risen and alive in the Spirit within the community, not to regard Scripture as one element in a merely modern landscape of conflicts. "

Williams defends himself from the charge that he sees 'unresolveable debate' as the key to Christian hermeneutics. He admits that it is understandable that people have misheard him on this. I would have to say the emphasis of his theological writing falls very much on observing the dissonance. There seems to be very little on the fulfilment aspect.

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 Eliot

I have been reading 'The Four Quartets': breathtaking.

Rowan Williams says:

This is the pivot of the Quartets: God has borne all we bear and so has made the fabric of history his own garment. The world has no discernible meaning or pattern; but into it there has entered the compassion of God.

He continues:

Eliot was a great preacher of the gospel because he had the integrity not to close his eyes to any of the real horror of the world; preaching is cheap if it fails to meet human beings at their darkest points. The reconciliation he writes of is utterly costly, mortally hard: our sole nourishment in the task is the blood of God's costly love, the assurance that death, loss, disorder are none of them stronger than the compassion of God.

Open to Judgement, p. 218-9

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.

Rowan Williams and hermeneutics

How does William come to place ‘judgement’ in such a significant position?

The answer, as Williams painstakingly works it out in a number of studies, is hermeneutical. Williams largely accepts that almost two centuries of historical-critical work on the text of the Bible have made reading scripture as a seamless unity hopelessly naïve. However, this is not a cause for dismay as far as Williams is concerned. Contrary to those older liberal voices who would see the authority of scripture as greatly diminished by historical criticism of the Bible, Williams actually sees the authority and significance of scripture as found in the diverse, inchoate and evidently worked-on text. The phenomenon of scripture always incorporated within its boundaries a plurality of voices and indeed a plurality of perspectives. The historical criticism has only revealed what was in fact always the case: that the New Testament is the record of the first awed, stumbling responses to an encounter with Jesus of Nazareth. We should not expect consistency; in fact, we should be delighted not to find it, because their inarticulacy and disagreements give us hope that our meagre efforts at talking about God are not ultimately futile, whatever their inadequacy.

This text has generated a huge variety of diverse and even inverse readings. For Williams, when the Church comes to interpret the world through its foundational narratives, the very act of interpreting affects the narratives as well as the world.[1] This kind of reflection is generative: a discovery of what the text may become and a discovery of the world, too. The Church, as it absorbs scriptural exegesis even from its own margins and beyond, discovers what it itself has been saying all along. Thus, the Church is exposed to a judgement, even as it holds out a judgement: ‘[I]n judging the world, by its confrontation of the world with its own dramatic scripture, the Church also judges itself’.[2] This work of self-evangelisation requires an exploratory fluidity and provisionality – as it holds out the gospel, the Church is always on the run, as it were, always under its own question. ‘At any point in its history the Church needs both the confidence that it has a gospel to preach, and the ability to see that it cannot readily specify in advance how it will find words for preaching in particular new circumstances’.[3] So, the Church, for Williams is constantly seeking a pathway between this confidence that there is a message, but an opennes to discovering what form that gospel will take as history twists and turns.


[1] It is, for example, not possible to read the Exodus story following its appropriation by the black slave culture of the Americas.
[2] Williams, "The Judgement of the World," p. 31. He is aware, too, that this places the church in the dominant positon over scripture (See the Wiles essay comment he makes)
[3] Williams, "The Judgement of the World," p. 31.

Is Rowan Williams a postmodernist?

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 old school modernist Maurice 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. As child of the 60s he accepts that generation's suspicion of power and of language's role in the maintenance of power.

In a third sense, Williams shares the postmodern love of flux over fixity, of many over mono. He just loves staring into the Heraclitean fire...

Williams on orthodoxy

Pre-Nicea, Williams paints a picture of an international network of churches who were perhaps like no other group determined to connect with one another in travel and by epistle:

Only against such a fluid and complex background does the emergence of a canon of writings become possible and make sense. 'Orthodoxy' in short depends heavily on the sheer mobility of believers as missionaries in the first generation and emissaries later on; it has a great deal to do with ease of communication in the Roman world, with all that- paradoxically - makes it possible to creat and sustain a 'rival' world of interlocking and supportive communities.

Letter writing and travel it seems were decisive to the development of orthodoxy. The ethos generated by this mutuality includes 'a capacity to question or distance oneself from the deliverances of a narrowly conceived present experience, from the merely local in time as well as space'.
That is: difference and criticism is already built in to orthodoxy.

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.