Volf on divine violence

Here is Miroslav Volf, a pacifist himself, on why Christian nonviolence actually needs the vengeance of God to be coherent (not to mention Biblical):

My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone...Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. the thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban hom for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God's refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind...

Exclusion and Embrace, p. 204

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 on Christian beginnings...

...what is mysterious in Christian beginnings is not the experience of hearing the Christian kerygma but the record and image of Jesus himself. His is conceived as a parabolic story, yet it is remembered in diverse and less than wholly coherent narrative forms, whose historical foundation is uncertain. To be introduced into relation with such a figure is to encounter what is not exhaustible in word or system - or so Christians have concluded: it is to step into faith (rather than definitive enlightenment). In so far as certain features of the development of canon and orthodoxy paradoxically worked against the absorption of Jesus into a thematized religious subjectivity and a system of ideas, they preserved the possibility of preaching Jesus as a questioning and converting presence in ever more diverse cultures and periods, and the possibility of intelligible debate and self-criticism within Christianity. 'Is it possible to speak of a pre-Nicene orthodoxy?' p. 17

Well this is an interesting encapsulation of Rowan Williams' theological vision. Williams accepts the historical-critical paradigm of the gospels, but actually tries to make what may have seemed like an insurmountable difficulty into a virtue. That is, the gospels themselves show, in the difficulty they have in rendering the life of Jesus into a credible and unified narrative form, how inexhaustible the figure of Jesus is: he won't sit still even for his portraitists. He eludes even them: so that we cannot merely absorb him into our theological system of ideas. The canon, and orthodoxy with it actually ensured this: orthodoxy prevented a far too glib schematisation of Jesus with the massive benefit that the gospel of Jesus is rich enough to be preached even today. What is important for Williams - a central tenet of all his theological work (or such that I have read) - is that Jesus functions as 'a questioning and converting presence': his a parable of a life, functioning to bring about transformation in human beings.

What this conversion might be, Williams doesn't want to pre-empt: that would be to short-cut the process, which would render the process of transformation and conversion a still-birth. That is why I think he is often so infuriatingly vague: because his Jesus is a Jesus who holds out who knows what possibility for newness in human life, a newness that can't be described beforehand but can only be prepared for by attentive and self-critical listening to what the Spirit may be saying.

It is interesting that parable features so prominently: I think that this is because for the historical-critical writers at their most sceptical, the parables are what can be traced to the authentic Jesus himself. (So, JD Crossan, for example). So, the gospels then represent a churchly attempt to grapple with this parable of a life... It is the grappling that we are to imitate, not the answers that they necessarily were able to achieve from their grappling.

O'Donovan on Equality

I am re-reading Ways of Judgment in preparation for a Symposium on the book next week. As is his common practice, Oliver O'Donovan will respond to three papers on his own work. This is one of the great things he does, actually: he has responded several times in print to reviews of Desire of the Nations which actually provides a terrific resource for his readers.


Anyways, he says some great things about equality:


The value of human life is equal, because equally infinite, not susceptible of any exchange value. p. 44



There is a hideous bureaucratic element in contemporary thinking about equality which calculates everything, even human life, in dollar terms. The Ford car company notoriously factored in the cost of compensation law suits for wrongful death in their manufacturing of the Pinto (nicknamed 'the barbecue that seats four'...). Equality is not an aspect of justice, but in fact an element of the doctrine of creation. Thinking about equality as justice leads us to this terrible calculation of exchange rates. We never stop counting things...

The hero of his book is Hugo Grotius, whose suggestion for 'attributive justice' O'Donovan is enthusiastic about. Attributive justice is not a theory of justice as such... it is a determination to play each case on its merits. It

elaborates differences. It strengthens relations of affinity and bonds of loyalty, it promites talkent and makes wise appointments to office, it gives opportunities to those who can use them.

Attributive justices recognises the fitness of acting in a certain way on certain occassions. If that sounds vague, that is because it cannot be prescribed ahead of time! Equality plays a different role, a remedial one (we might say).

Transportation as punishment

On 13th May 1787 11 ships loaded to the gunwales with a human cargo set sail from Portsmouth for Botany Bay, in the land of New South Wales discovered by Captain James Cook some seventeen years previously. The 1420 souls aboard – somewhat more than that arrived at the other end – were to begin a colony in the form of a prison under the governorship of Captain Arthur Phillip – a colony built by forced labour at the barrel of the gun and at the crack of the cat o’ nine tails. Their journey must have been as terrifying in prospect as it was remarkable in completion. What could a poorly educated horse thief or pickpocket have imagined lay before him across the sea?

Transportation provides a fascinating case study in the history and methods of criminal punishment. Its need arose out of changing social conditions in England in the 18th century – the increasing urbanisation and population growth in Britain owing to the industrial revolution resulted in a terrific displacement of persons and, naturally, in an increase in crimes against property in particular. Whereas localised crimes of a relatively minor nature could have been dealt with by temporary and economic measures such as the stocks in rural districts, the rapid growth of the anonymous city meant that the means of administering punishments in this way was far less manageable. A village miscreant could have been quickly isolated, condemned and shamed by a community familiar to him or her. In the streets of London, it was easier to slip in and out of the crowd unnoticed.

Transportation was not a new punishment in 1787. But Cook’s discovery of an apparently empty and vast island at the other end of the globe made it a more attractive solution to the perennial problem of punishment. Transportation was, it was argued, more humane than the noose. The prisons of the day were notoriously overcrowded and disease-ridden; and in fact the government had resorted to putting its prisoners in prison-hulks moored on the Thames. More space was needed in the jails. What is more transportation was a means of excreting the waste matter from the body of society for its general health: the community stood only to benefit from the disposal of its more annoying and troublesome members. This was opportunity to lance the boil. It had its deterrent effect, too: New South Wales was to the eighteenth century mind surely further away than the moon is to ours – it was a terrifying prospect. And, it could also be argued, transportation was a great opportunity for the rehabilitation of the convict: if he survived the journey and the beatings and did not starve and served out his seven- or fourteen-year sentence he could find himself presented with all the opportunities of a new life in a new country.

O'Donovan on punishment

Oliver O'Donovan does talk good sense about a lot of things, not least on the matter of punishment. He takes from Grotius the cue that punishment is 'ontologically native to God'. He repudiates some of the contemporary theology that denies this (namely that of Gorringe) in the name of dening that punishment of any kind is valid, but fails to do so coherently, or theologically.

He writes:

When we speak of God's own 'punishing' we are speaking of his judgement within the quasi-political context of his own covenant-faithfulness. Divine punishment...is God's disclosure of himself as our good, revealing the truth of our wrong. For this reason Christians have always found it necessary to speak of divine punishment in connection with the Atonement, for the Atonement is the supreme demonstration of God's covenant-faithfulness. Ways of Judgment, p. 107

Rowan Williams on speaking parabolically

In an essay entitled 'The Judgement of the World' Rowan Williams proposes the intriguing idea of parabolic speech as a catalyst for a new kind of life: for conversion. The parables that Jesus told have the capacity to tranform people's perceptions: of themselves and of their communities. And indeed, his own life was a larger parable of the gospel of challenge and transformation. Jesus' telling of parables and teaching his disciples how to receive them is a preparation for us of the pattern of loss and recovery of the self that we will see in his death and resurrection story.

He goes on:

The transfiguring of the world in Christ can seem partial or marginal if we have not learned, by speaking and hearing parables, a willingness to lose th eidentities and perceptions we make for ourselves: all good stories change us if we hear them attentively; the most serious stories change us radically....And if we can accept a very general definition of parable as a narrative both dealing with and requiring 'conversion', radical loss and radical novelty, it may not be too far-fetched to say that the task of theology is the exploration of parable, and so of conversion.

Mike Higton on Rowan Williams

Mike Higton's book on Rowan Williams is a very readable and challenging introduction to Rowan Williams' work. His central theme is encapsulated in the title: the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, as preached by Williams is one that never leaves us comfortable or settled. It always challenges, always subverts, always complicates. It is never 'easy' in the sense of cheap.

The cross in Williams' thought stands for the judgement or condemnation of all our trying to secure for ourselves impregnable fortresses of certainty and security. The love of God in Christ is so total that it is almost unbearable to contemplate it. "We coat even the cross in sugar, and protect ourselves from the bitterness of the Gospel" (p. 35).

While he is generally affirming in his account, Higton finds this unrelenting darkness in Williams' theology itself almost too much: and I have to say it is a feeling I have had as well. In amongst the endless challenge, the persistent upsetting, what light is there, what joy? Higton writes:

It sometimes seems that Williams is willing to risk muting the note of joy, of thankfulness, of release and rescue, appropriate to the news that God has stepped over all the barriers which seperate us from him... We must ask, I think, whether the focus falls too consistently on the 'No' of the cross rather than on its encompassing 'Yes'. (p. 35)