Psalm 95 at St Ebbe's

Listen to my sermon on Psalm 95

Rorty: America is an experiment

Yes, you Americans: the whole American idea ain't nothin' but a great experiment and y'all are its lab rats. Richard Rorty says so:

Both Jefferson and Dewey described America as an 'experiment'. If the experiment fails, our descendants may learn something important. But they will not learn a philosophical truth, any more than they will learn a religious one. They will simply get some hints about what to watch out for when setting up their next experiment. Even if nothing else survives from the age of the democratic revolutions, perhaps our descendants will remember the social institutions can be viewed as experiments in cooperation rather than as attempts to embody a universal and ahistorical order. It is hard to believe that this memory would not be worth having...

So, what hints do you think the next generation ought to get from the American experiment? Here's some:

1- don't say anything about arms in your constitution!
2- state religion actually makes religion more boring, not less.
3- Texas oughta be its own country.

Got any others? Don't go being rude now...

Rorty on an analogy with the decline of religious faith

The Last Judgement Mosiac on St Vitus' Cathedral, Prague.

Here's old man Rorty on the decline of religion and the theology of heavenly rewards:

That decline, and specifically the decline of people's ability to take the idea of postmortem rewards seriously, has not weakened liberal societies and indeed has strengthened them. Lots of people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries predicted the opposite. They thought that hope of heaven was required to supply moral fiber and social glue - that there was little point, for example, in having an atheist swear to tell the truth in a court of law. As it turned out, however, willingness to endure suffering for the sake of future reward was transfered from individual rewards to social ones, from one's hopes for paradise to one's hopes for one's grandchildren...

Fascinating, this, given the rhetoric of environmentalism AND also technological triumphalism which reference grandchildren, though both contradict one another profoundly.

However, his comment about ethics is interesting: one which Christian apologists fail to realise frequently. Somehow, humans continue to behave in more or less ethical consistency in liberal society without reference to religion. (By which I mean: sure, people remain sinful and greedy, but chaos does not reign as we might expect it to). How is this to be accounted for? Has Rorty perhaps overestimated religion's decline? Are people still referencing some kind of divine judgement seat even though they do not articulate it in this way? Are people merely doing what helps them (and theirs) to get along best - ie, is it actually in their self-interest to act 'ethically' and so they do it?

The Mission of God X

In his zeal to show the continuity between the testaments, Wright has not (to my mind) sufficiently accounted for the difference between them. Marcionitism was attractive precisely because it has a point: in Christ, something new comes to pass. Or at least, the themes and concerns of the Old Testament are presented in a surprising new way. This is true of Wright’s particular emphasis on mission. It is precisely because of the revelation of Christ that it becomes possible to read the Old Testament in the light of mission. That this is an emphasis of the Old Testament becomes apparent on a re-reading of this text after the fact of the encounter with the New Testament. If reading the New Testament must be a canonical business, then so also must reading of the Old.[1] It simply will not do to read off a concept or theme found in the Old Testament, and apply it to the church without careful theological qualification. The church is not Israel. Wright is of course well aware of the danger of this kind of application. He insists: ‘[W]e are not Old Testament Israelites living within a theocratic covenant bound by Old Testament law’ (see p. 304-5). He rightly complains about the tendency of liberation theologians to do this with the exodus. But I am not convinced that he himself has completely evaded it. Especially, this comes into play in his discussion of the jubilee, one of his favourite biblical themes (p. 290ff). Wright says: ‘Mission belongs to God - the biblical God. The message of mission is to be drawn from the whole of God's biblical revelation. So we cannot simply relegate the powerful message of events such as the exodus or institutions like the jubilee to a bygone era. They are an integral part of the biblical definition of God's idea of redemption and of God's requirement on his redeemed people’. (p. 306) Certainly, Wright is right: relegation is not an option for a full-orbed biblical theology. But how are we to handle the transition between the social legislation directed to Israel and the era of the Church? Wright’s response to that question would be that the New Testament explicitly declares some Old Testament material to have been provisional – the food laws, for example, and the sacrificial system. There is an explicit rationale for our nonobservance of these ‘matters’ (p. 305). In other words, for Wright, ritual requirements are made particular to Israel’s own identity in time and space; whereas, the ethical principles gleaned from the Old Testament are universalised. But can this distinction be so easily sustained from reading the Old Testament itself? Wright seems to overlook the fact that the Jubilee itself was not merely an ethical teaching or principle, but precisely a ritual practice with an ethical and theological meaning that Israel was to engage in on regular occassions. Which is to say: the line between ceremonial and ethical command is not so easily drawn as Wright imagines. The critique of the latter prophets was not against ritual practice per se but against ritual practice set against a context of injustice and idolatry. Isn’t the charge that is frequently made against Calvin’s division of the law into moral, ceremonial and civil law – that it is an arbitrary division not found in the text, which for its part simply speaks of the whole as torah – also a charge that can be made to Wright’s proposed reading of the Old Testament ethical material? Certainly, many theologians in the history of the church have made proposals for criterion by which the Old Testament material ought to be received by Christians A further query I have along these lines is as to what Wright makes of holy war in the Old Testament. The relationship of Israel to the other nations surrounding her was frequently marked by armed struggle at the command of Yhwh. If there was an international perspective on view it was that that the defeat of the nations and their submission to the Lord’s anointed one was to be the way in which Israel would carry her mission to the nations. There was then a definite negative side to Israel’s mission: she was not merely the bearer of divine blessing to the nations, but also the bringer of divine curses. This too had been promised in the Abrahamic covenant of course. How is this negative aspect of the mission translated into the era of the church?

I find myself agreeing with Philip Ruddock!

A Bill of (so-called) Rights would be a spectacularly BAD idea for Australia, just as it would be for the UK.

I hate to agree with Ruddock, but... there you go.

The Unity of the Bible?

All this talk in Chris Wright and Graeme Goldsworthy about 'overarching frameworks' and such makes me want to ask: in what does the coherence of the Bible lie? How can it be properly described?

Narratives cohere (often) around a central character or set of characters. Or, as in a saga, like D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, several generations of people living in the same place provide the threads of interconnection between the succesive stages of the novel. One novel I read, Annie Proulx's Accordian Crimes, coheres around an inanimate object (an accordian) as its finds itself in successive sets of hands. In Anna Karenina two plots are interwoven though there is little connection between them - they are connected in that the characters share in family relations of a somewhat distance kind.

Ultimately, it is the collecting of the elements together in the single work that unifies them, though usually there are more elements of formal coherence than that. Think of a painting in an art gallery: it is the framing and placing of the elements within the frame and on the wall that invites us to consider them as a unity, even if the elements of the painting are quite discordant. If they are discordant, we tend to ask why they have been juxtaposed and wrestle to discover what relation there might be or that we might find between them.

These formal coherences - often unimportant in themselves - invite the reader to consider and discover thematic coherences as suggested by the stories. Sometimes these are quite surprising, granted. Sometimes the formal coherences do not account for all the elements in the work, at least not obviously. But the human love of comparing and contrasting, and of finding patterns, makes for the most enjoyable part of engaging with narrative art forms.

The other aspect of our apprehension of coherence when it comes to narratives is of course time. We experience time in narratives through emplotment. No matter how many post-modern novels cut and paste their narratives, the narrative form relies heavily on a succession of events and invites us to consider (or tells us) what the relation between the events consists in. EM Forster famously wrote: 'The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then the queen died of grief is a plot.'

The canonical Bible has a coherence in a formal sense in the first instance in that it traces the history of Israel with its God in a roughly chronological order. The New Testament claim is that it continues and indeed completes this history. However, there are things that are collected within the lists of Law, Writings and Prophets that are not obviously part of the main succession of events. Very few clues are given as to why Job, for example, has been placed within the canon: which is for us readers an invitation to consider what it does contribute. It is almost as if it has been placed there by intuition: (from the human side) by an editor not quite knowing what he was yet looking at but sure that what he had was of inestimable value, and recognising in it the divine voice.

I suppose what I am leaning towards saying is this: the formal unity of the Bible consists of the collecting of these books together as Scripture; and its relation to salvation-history. The Bible describes a series of events that were connected to one another over time, in place, and by a people connected intergenerationally. This formal unity allows then for multiple strands of thematic coherence to be discerned, some of which are more prominent and others less so, and which have complex relations to one another. Of course, some of these coherence is quite obvious, as the authors of scripture deliberately cite each other, and play with and develop - even critique - the themes and other content of other scriptural books. This is also why it is inadequate to read any passage of scripture without due consideration to its relationship to salvation-history and without relation to how the particular themes within it are treated and developed within the canon.

Psalm 95 - if you hear his voice today

Cesky Krumlov

This week, I am preaching on Psalm 95. It is a Psalm that haunts me. When I went to St Andrew’s North Oxford as a kid in the 1970s they would chant this Psalm just before we went out to Sunday school. So the words got buried in my head right next to the multiplication tables and the words to Abba songs.

My kids won't have this experience, because we don't do liturgy like that anymore...

But this Psalm also haunts me because it is such a disquieting and uncomfortable Psalm. It starts out as a very normal and upbeat sounding Psalm, a Psalm of praise to God. But half way, it turns into a stern warning. It is like a cute furry animal you pick up and cuddle, that then bites you so that you scream... If you hear God's voice today, you better be ready and responsive. You had better be ready for what comes, receptive to its most angular and critical parts. You had better be soft-hearted...

It was a great choice to have this Psalm in morning prayer, just as the word of God was about to read. Come, let us sing for joy to God the rock of our salvation!... but, if you hear his voice today - and let's not mistake it, you ARE hearing his voice - be ready to receive it. Don't be deaf to it...

Some holiday reading

Sacha gazes out over Prague.

Prague Castle with St Vitus' Cathedral from the Charles Bridge.

OK - we are are back. Czech Republic was great. Sadly, the churches seems to be emptied out shells, and I could see no evidence of Protestantism at all. The land of Jan Hus is no longer a place of the kind of preaching he was known for, even though his statue is in the Old Town Square.

I read while I was away:

Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost. I went through an Ondaatje phase back in the mid 90s - I read all his poetry and novels. Loved his poetic style and his depictions of love and pain. He is a writer who really knows about the human body. Then I never got around to this novel which he sets in his native Sri Lanka. It is brilliantly written - three or four terrific, wounded characters. And more suffering of an appalling kind mixed in with illicit and licit love. The narrative has a kind of CSI flavour which is becoming a bit tired now after all those TV shows (the main character is a forensic anthropologist).

Franz Kafka - The Trial. OK, I tried here and failed again. I have tried several times to enjoy this book and where better then in Kafka's home town? But frankly, it is a dull book. Perhaps it is badly translated...

Will Self - The Book of Dave. I enjoyed this immensely. I am a self-confessed Self fan (??). He is a real surrealist. This is a kind of dystopian fantasy of what England would like if the mad, racist and misogynist ranting of a London cabbie of today were written on metal plates and found in a post-apocalyptic future and then treated as a divine revelation. It is a non-too-subtle satire of revealed religion and its capacity to wreak havoc. But Self also endears us to Dave, who by the end of the novel has been redeemed sufficiently to have written a second, more humane book... Wonderful passages written entirely in Cockney.

Sam Wells - God's Companions. I have to review this book - as I said before, I think it is frustratingly cheesy. I won't put it like that in my review...the best thing is that Wells has discovered the local church as the site of theo-praxis. Evangelicals I think have know that the local church is where the action is for years. The emphasis on symbolic practices is curious to me: Wells wants us to practice foot-washing, for example. It is funny that ritualists read scripture literally at this point, and non-ritualists read it metaphorically...

Charles Taylor - Modern Social Imagineries. Interesting take on the way in which revolutions come about and why or why not they are successful. There needs to be a vision of what a society could be under a new regime - merely opposing the current ruler will produce chaos unless there is a deeply felt sense of an alternative national/social/political identity. Why did the Velvet revolution succeed in 1989 without bloodshed? Because it was obvious to the Czechs that there was another and better way of being Czech, without communism. Maybe Taylor is only saying what is obvious in different words... also, he clearly feels he has earned the right to make sweeping historical statements without footnotes or evidence. It is hard to challenge him when he is writing like this.

Roger Scruton - Modern Culture. Scruton is a fabulous English conservative. The real thing. And thoroughly Kantian. His thesis in this book is that without religion 'high' culture will die. He mounts a sterling defence of high culture against the dominance of 'cultural' 'studies' in our schools and universities. I have to say he has my sympathies: good writing just is good writing I am afraid. You can't make pop culture better by clever criticism of it I am afraid. One of his best points is that the canon of Western culture is already a tolerant and diverse and self-critical canon - and is so because of Christianity. To present as a single monolithic ideology is simply false. Scruton is an unabashed Kantian, and I feel this is his great weakness - because he presents Kant's view of religion rather than the really Christian one. Christianity for Scruton seeps out of the English soil and is the natural accompaniment to Englishness. Only an Anglican of a certain blinkered and rural kind could think that.

A break

Well, we are off:

it's time for a holiday and so we are going to visit relatives in the Czech republic!

Back in two weeks or so: but feel free to rake over the coals of a few of the discussions below and add your thoughts.

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.

Kostenberger and O'Brien on Mission

I found this comment from Kostenberger and O'Brien to be a helpful clarification (Wright's book suffers from conceptual confusions):

The mission of the exalted Jesus is accomplished through the witness of the apostles in the power of the Holy Spirit. The one who is himself sent by God sends his representatives to bear testimony to his salvation, to announce the forgiveness of sins and to make disciples of all nations. In other words, his witnesses continue the mission of Jesus by declaring to men and women everywhere the glorious gospel of the grace of God. As the Father has sent him, so Jesus sends them. Moreover, this testimony to Jesus and his saving work involves a wide-ranging series of activities that result in believers being built up in Christ and formed into Christian congregations. It is not limited to primary evangelism and its immediate results...

And so: good works of all kinds, that flow from the impact of Christ in the power of the Spirit, are rightly ordered to mission (and to ecclesiology, too).

K and O'B do a much better job at a 'Biblical Theology of Mission' I find, partly because they don't overplay the OT to the extent that Wright does.

The Mission of God IX

How big is our gospel? Chris Wright asks, in his chapter on God's model of redemption. (I am curious about this language of 'models'... I think there is a problem here, not sure what yet).

He goes on:

The scope of our mission must reflect the scope of God's mission, [Granted] which is turn will match the scale of God's redemptive work. [well i think I get what he is trying to say...] Where do we turn in the Bible for our understanding of redemption? Already it will be clear enough that in my view it will simply not do to turn first to the New Testament. ...

What!??

YOU project starts again

My on-again off-again project is on again!

Love to have you comments.

The Mission of God VIII

An important issue to settle for me is 'what IS mission'? That is: does mission include any good work that Christians may do? Is fighting for 'social justice' (whatever that means!) found theologically speaking under the heading of 'mission', and if so, why? What about taking care of the environment?

There are two ways of arguing. One (my preference) is to say that we participate in the mission of God as we call people from darkness into his marvellous light, making disciples of all nations. Paul's mission to the Gentiles, for example, did not seem to have a lot to do directly with 'social justice' - though it certainly had the effect of changing society remarkably in lots of ways as people heard the gospel and responded to it. Neighbour love is, then, an imperative outworking of mission, but it isn't mission in and of itself. Having said this, it is true that the loving actions of Christians may indeed result in others giving glory to God, and that the NT has a lot to say about the coupling of actions to words in mission. Fair enough: but mission refers to the work of God in reconciling the world to himself in Christ. We do 'mission' insofar as we work to this end. Commending the gospel in word and deed is our mission. Question is I guess: does me secretly reducing my carbon footprint (for example) contribute to the mission of God? Has a Christian agency whose aim is alleviating poverty without any other evangelistic consideration have the right to call itself a 'mission' agency? (Note: I am not for a second questioning the importance of such agencies; merely wondering whether 'mission' is the right theological heading for them. Nor am I saying that one ought to preach the gospel without alleviating suffering where it is found. On the contrary).

The alternative position is that almost anything given to Christians to do can be called 'mission' if it seen to be fitting in the purposes of God . So, yes, caring for animals: mission. Alms-giving: mission. Lobbying for fairer laws: mission. Campaigning for fair-trade: mission. In fact almost anything we do having been sent out at 11:00am Sunday until we meet at 10:am the next send can be labelled mission, if it is doing what God wants done.

Brock, on Augustine, on the Psalms

Brian Brock's readings of the Psalms are really doing it for me:

...the love of earthly goods without the love of their giver turns into a fear of losing them. And fear of losing them develops into a social rationality - an ethos. Augustine asks, Do all those who trust in technology live better lives? Do all those with comprehensive insurance coverage avoid disaster? Does ever-increasing investment in medicine stop untimely death? Augustine saw clearly that whole societies are structured around the avoidance of pain, embodying the escape from their primal fears.... 'Singing the Ethos of God' p. 161-2

I am sure Augustine didn't know about comprehensive insurance, but still, the point is made: security is never quite secured as we hope it will be.

Brock goes on...
Augustine shows how this vision of the blessed life shapes the Christian understanding of the church, which is conceived not as a safe haven from the world but as the focal point of a praising people caught up in Christ's service to the world.
This is the pilgrim church, we might say: secure, yes, but also exposed and vulnerable. Liable to get persecuted; but secure in hope.

Pionius and Sabina see the funny side...

Pionius said: 'Would that I were able to persuade you to become Christians.'
The men laughed aloud at him. 'You have not such power that we should be burnt alive', they said.
'It is far worse', said Pionius, 'to burn after death'.
Sabina smiled at this, and the verger and his men said: 'You laugh?'
'If God so wills,' she said. 'I do. You see, we are Christians. Those who believe in Christ will laugh unhesitatingly in everlasting joy.'

The Acts of Pionius, 8.

The Mission of God VII

Chris Wright says:

How then can it be suggested that evangelistic proclamation is the only essential mission of the church? It seems impossible to eme to justify such reductionism if we intend to sustain any claim to be taking the whole Bible seriously as our authority for mission and as that which defines the content and scope of our mission. Mission belongs to God - the biblical God. The message of mission is to be drawn from the whole of God's biblical revelation. So we cannot simply relegate the powerful message of events such as the exodus or institutions like the jubilee to a bygone era. They are an integral part of the biblical definition of God's idea of redemption and of God's requirement on his redeemed people... p. 306

This is typical Wright, and it is problematic in a typical way. I would never dispute that we need the whole Bible for our understanding of mission. This is what Wright has got so wonderfully right. However, Wright does not sufficiently account for the difference between the Old and New Testaments. He has over-reacted to a contemporary Marcionitism by going to the opposite extreme, it seems to me. We cannot relegate the exodus and the jubilee to a bygone era, sure: but also we cannot simply take them on board in an undifferentiated way. We are not Israel. We are the church. This basic observation cannot be overstated! Things are different: even the most ardent advocate of a third use of the law knows this. Wright gives (as far as I can see) an insufficient account of the difference.

Wright is of course highly selective in his reading of what aspects of the OT are still operative, though he keeps banging the 'holistic' drum. His version does not highlight the moral law, as forms of Calvinism do; rather, he pulls out some aspects of social justice and concerns of a vaguely left-wing nature. But it is just as arbitrary. This particularly obvious with the year of Jubilee, which is given a quite questionable amount of emphasis in this book considering its lack of prominence in the Scriptures. And I keep searching for an enunciated principle of differentiation that would account for his selectivity.

Evangelistic mission, I would argue, is deserving of particular emphasis and priority, also. But more of that later.

The living out scripture meme

Jason and Byron tagged me with this meme begun originally by Andy Goodliff. I haven't done them before because I get confused doing all those links... but this is a good one.

The brief is to post "that verse or story of scripture which is important to you, which you find yourself re-visiting time after time".

For me: Colossians 1:15-20:

15He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

I guess I just didn't realise how big the work of God in Christ was until I 'discovered' this passage. It's the scope that gets me: not only is Christ the supreme means and end of the whole creation in all its material and immaterial aspects, he is also its final destiny. Even death is not insurmountable, though of course the passage points to Christ's death as the point of peace and reconciliation between all things and himself. The atonement is a universal reconciliation of all things in Christ, to Christ.

The song that comes to mind? Radiohead's Everything in its Right Place. I am sure they didn't mean it to be a Psalm, but it is.

[PS: I notice that in Pierced for our Transgressions the authors make nary a mention of this key passage. Shame.]

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.

Charles Taylor's 'social imagineries'

Taylor offers an interesting analysis of the ways in which societies conceive of themselves:

By social imaginery, I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectuual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how thigs go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations. 'Modern Social Imagineries' p. 23

To talk about a social 'theory' is not enough to capture this, because people don't think of their societies in terms of a theory so much as in terms of legends, myths, values and images. However, theories can infiltrate the social imagineries by a kind of trickle-down effect.