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The Unity of Christian Truth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Rowan Williams
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Theological pluralism has been pressed upon us with increasing enthusiasm over the past twenty years. It has been seen as the only appropriate response to the cultural fragmentation of our world, and also as the continuation of what has in fact been the nature of theological discourse from the first. We had been too easily misled, by a harmonizing biblical exegesis on the one hand, and a Denzinger-based version of doctrinal history on the other, into supposing that the articulation of what is believed by Christians to be true about God and the world naturally falls into a pattern of tidily unified correlations. The pendulum has now swung a fair way towards the opposite pole from this.

Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 70 , Issue 824 , February 1989 , pp. 85 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 See David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination. Christian Theology and Culture of Pluralism, pp. 448–9, for an observation on this.

2 Raymond Brown's work on the distinctive contours of Johannine Christianity should be mentioned; and for an extreme recent example of the emphasis on the diversities of early Christianities, see Mack, Burton, A Myth of Innocence. Mark and Christian Origins, Philadelphia 1988Google Scholar, esp. the first section.

3 On the various factors at work in determining early Christian orthodoxy, see Sanders, E.P. (ed.). Jewish and Christian Self‐Definition, vol I: The Shaping of Christianity in the Second and Third Centuries, London 1980Google Scholar, and the forthcoming volume of essays in honour of Henry Chadwick edited by Williams, R., The Making of Orthodoxy, Cambridge 1989CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See Tracy, op.cit. p. 449, and the final chapter of his more recent Plurality and Ambiguity. Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope, London 1987Google Scholar.

5 London 1986.

6 Ibid. p. 111.

7 Ibid. p. 92.

8 On the dominance of style in a late capitalist environment, see Turner, Bryan, Religion and Social Theory, London 1983Google Scholar.

9 Op. cit. p. 93.

10 Op. cit. pp. 108ff. For a general discussion of the notion of an ‘implicit axiom’ in various kinds of discourse, see Ritschl's essay, ‘Die Erfahrung der Wahrheit. Die Steuerung von Denken und Handeln durch Implizite Axiome’, Konzepte, Okumene, Median, Ethik. Gesammelte Aufsatze, Munich 1986, pp. 147–166Google Scholar.

11 The Logic of Theology, p. 202. Williams, C.P.R., ‘What is Catholic Orthodoxy?’ (pp. 11–25 in Essays Catholic and Radical, ed. Leech, K. and Williams, R., London 1983), p. 15Google Scholar.

12 See the excellent study of canonical formation and its significance by Sanders, James A., Torah and Canon, Philadelphia 1972Google Scholar.

13 Apart from the way in which language appropriated to the Torah as the principle of creation is used of Jesus in some strands of the New Testament (notably the beginning of Colossians), there has been some speculation about whether the symbolic significance of the Aqedah, the ‘sacrifice’ of Isaac, related in rabbinic traditions to creation and Exodus, was early transferred to the death of Jesus. See Williams, R., Eucharistic Sacrifice. The Roots of a Metaphor, Nottingham 1983Google Scholar, for a brief introduction to this question.

14 See note 13 above.

15 J.A. Sanders, op. cit.; and, for a wider discussion of the varieties of ‘canonical criticism’, Barr, James, Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism, Oxford 1983Google Scholar.

16 On the appropriating of roles, see A.C. Thiselton, ‘Knowledge, Myth and Corporate Memory’, (pp. 45–78 in Believing in the Church. The Corporate Nature of Faith, the Report of the Church of England Doctrine Commission, London 1981), pp. 65–6.

17 See Barton, John, Oracles of God, London 1986Google Scholar, on this interpretation of the ‘classical’ prophetic literature.

18 Rhees, Rush, Without Answers, London 1969, p. 131Google Scholar.

19 In this respect, of course, the project of theological analogy exercised on the narratives of Christian life is as much a matter of mutual critical address as any other variety of hermeneutics.

20 I take this to be the force of Eamon Duffy's remark that ‘the divinity of Jesus is not a “fact” about him’, in ‘The Philosophers and the China Shop’, New Blackfriars October 1988, p. 449; and I am not quite clear why Professor Dummett (‘What Chance for Ecumenism?’New Blackfriars December 1988, pp. 541–2) takes this so much in malam partem. The whole point of Chalcedonian Christology as developed in the doctrinal tradition seems to be the denial that divinity is a characterisation among others of the human nature of Jesus, either an additional feature or a substitute for some human lack.

21 Lossky, Vladimir, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, London and Cambridge 1957, ch. 8, esp. pp. 166–7Google Scholar.

22 Ch. 16 of Nicholas Lash's recent Easter in Ordinary. Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowing of God, London 1988Google Scholar, has some salutary things to say about the necessary co‐existence of plurality in theological idiom and integrity in witness (see p. 266 in particular).