Marc Bloch once remarked that ‘Christianity is a religion of historians,’ which is certainly true when we think that we look back to Jesus who lived in a specific culture and time in the past, we continually read – and give authority to – many ancient texts from a variety of times and cultures, and we continually refer – or at least many Christians refer – to the past as ‘the tradition’ and see continuity with that past as a vital part of our identity. Henry Ford, on the other hand, remarked that ‘history is bunk’ and ‘not worth five cents’.
Many people today, and many Christians, also share this latter sentiment, and it is not unknown for preachers – particularly of the evangelical variety – to imagine that one can have a Christianity that is without a history or which ignores history as having any ‘relevance’. It is this latter group that is the most obvious target audience of this little book of four chapters. However, its real achievement is not that it offers a justification for why a Christian must take history seriously, but that, given that Christians do engage with history, they do so with appropriate sensitivity and critical judgement.
In terms of historical sensitivity the book explores in a skilful way the most controversial topic in historical hermeneutics: given that ‘the past is a foreign country’, can we justify any study of it as ‘our past’ without falling into the pre-critical illusion that the past is simply the prologue to the present? In tackling this, we see Williams the systematic theologian at work: fully aware of the epistemological issues he is dealing with, he suggests a solution from the inheritance of theology. On the one hand, there is the need to recognise that the past is different and that if that is not acknowledged – he charmingly described that fallacy as ‘seeing the past as the present but in fancy dress’– then not only is the past not understood in itself, but any contemporary theological judgement purporting to be based on the past is rendered false. On the other hand, we are the inheritors of the past and there are consistent Christian concerns that manifest themselves variously over time but which ensure that we are not just a continuity of people but of faith. Williams concludes that this demands from the Christian reading history as part of the narrative of faith (for it is not a problem that troubles historians as such) that they read the past analogically: recognising sameness in apparent differences along with difference in apparent continuities. So if an analogical reading of the past is what characterises Christian reading of their own narrative/tradition, what does this look like in practice? Williams's answer is the two test cases: perceptions of the Church in the early patristic period and at the time of the Reformation.
In the two chapters devoted to the two very different imaginings of the Church we see Williams not only as an historian, but as a pastor putting forward an ecclesiology that seeks to identify the essential concerns of Christians within any vision of the Church that can truly claim to be authentic. When looking at the early period he sees a continuity in the sense of Christians seeing their assembly as being the ‘resident aliens’ in human society, always fearful that their loyalty to the Lord would be compromised; and he sees this concern being manifested repeated in history as, for example, in the concerns of the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany.
In the chapter on the Reformation period he sees similar concerns in several of the reformers, in their concerns that the Christian body would have a distinct identity in contrast to the general society in a time when society was seeking to identity itself without reference to the clerical services that a structure of clergy and canon law provided for it. From this study of how the situation in the sixteenth century affected the way people perceived the body to which they belonged, the author proceeds to ask some key questions about our perceptions today, and these questions are particularly pointed when it comes to questions of ecumenism, the unity of the Church, and what precisely we mean by phrases like ‘organic unity’(see p. 82 for example). All the while in these chapters the Archbishop notes how historical evidence is abused to make cases: for instance, in the idea that there was a perfect past – if only for a fleeting moment – to which we must ‘return’.
The final chapter is more tentative in its style and examines how groups of Christians today look back to the past to fix parts of their identities or seek to recover from the past to supply a new imaginative setting for faith. Here the danger lies in the notion that one can simply re-create the past or one can ‘by-pass’ a less amenable present. However, if the past can be held in tension with the present, if it can question the world of today with an alternative vision, then the past can be seen as a treasury for Christian memory.
This is an important book for anyone who is interested in what we mean when we speak of ‘church’, ‘tradition’, ‘the witness of the tradition’ and ‘church unity’, and its importance lies in the frame within which the Archbishop presents these questions to us. As to its value in raising the key methodological questions in historical theology as a fundamental mode of theology, it suffices to note that I have already made it mandatory reading for my undergraduate class on the methodology of historical theology.
