28 September 2008

Generally speaking, there are two ways of telling the story of the development of Christian theology: by examining the social, cultural, and political forces that provide the context for reflection; or by attending mainly to the unfolding internal logic of Christian convictions. Both approaches are obviously important, and it should go without saying that they aren’t mutually exclusive. What often is excluded from these developmental accounts is the experience of Christians as Christians, the way they responded to the questions that inevitably arise in trying to live a life of faith. This, to my mind, is the great accomplishment of Rowan Williams’s brief history of spirituality, The Wound of Knowledge: to show that the experience of faith is as integral to the evolution of theology as context or the logic of doctrine. It is from the daily, often painful attempts of Christians to respond in earnest to the challenge set before them in the gospel that “we see most clearly the tension… between the affirmation of the human and contingent and the devastating rejection of creaturely mediation”—and so much of Christian theology gains its real dynamism from precisely that tension.

In one way, the book is just a series of casual forays into the spiritual thought of important Christian figures. The book can be read fruitfully as such, whisking us quickly and powerfully to the very center of Origen’s spirituality, or Benedict’s, or Luther’s. But all together these forays stand as an important intervention as to the way we usually read these figures, a calm but forceful challenge against an overly ‘detached’ reading of their main intellectual contributions. At the very heart of their thought stands an exceedingly personal struggle to make positive sense of the madness and trials of their own life in the light of Jesus crucified and risen, to discover there the power of God made perfect in weakness.

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Tags: Book Notes,Rowan Williams