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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
In the February issue of New Blackfriars, Rowan Williams explored the unity of theological discourse. He asked what criteria might be used in setting limits to pluralism—how we can go about deciding what should be allowed to count as a statement of Christian truth. He concluded that we must go beyond the domain of formal theological language and look to the way in which a theology becomes enfleshed: ‘the unity of Christian truth is perceivable to the extent that we can perceive a unity in Christian holiness’.
The limits of Christian truth are perceivable as we engage in the hard work of spelling out the human meanings, the hopes and possibilities, carried in this or that theological utterance ... Does it... continue to offer intelligible roles for the living out of new creation? Does it conserve a hope for shared, unrestricted human renewal/liberation/salvation?
I believe that, in an important though rather complex way, Williams is right, and in this article I would like to explore that complexity and to offer some observations on the understanding of Church which implies and is implied by that insight.
One obvious criticism which could be made of Williams’ position is that it shifts the problem of unity rather than solving it. If ‘the unity of Christian truth’ is to be discerned through ‘a unity of Christian holiness’, this latter unity must be in some way recognizable. And that raises a question.
On this view it is not particularly helpful to say, for example, that what unites Mother Theresa and Simeon Stylites is their shared Christian faith. Rather, it is the other way round. What holds the articulated faith of the fifth and twentieth centuries together is the fact that spending forty years on the top of a column and tending the sick in Calcutta somehow display ‘continuities of Christian patterns of holiness’. I would want to say that in the end it must be so. But how can we know?
1 Williams, Rowan. ‘The Unity of Christian Truth’. New Blackfriars 70 (February 1989), p. 93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Williams, Rowan. ‘The Unity of Christian Truth’. New Blackfriars 70 (February 1989), p. 93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Williams, Rowan. ‘The Unity of Christian Truth’. New Blackfriars 70 (February 1989), p. 93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Williams, Rowan. ‘The Unity of Christian Truth’. New Blackfriars 70 (February 1989), p. 93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Williams, Rowan. ‘The Unity of Christian Truth’. New Blackfriars 70 (February 1989), p. 93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 In July 1820, when W.G. was eight, his father, William Ward, made 278 for M.C.C. at Lord's against Norfolk. It was the first double century recorded in the history of the game and is still the fourth highest score ever amassed at Lord's. Five years later he bought the lease on the ground from Thomas Lord in order to save it from property developers. If the son occasionally anticipated the problems of modern theology, the father anticipated those of the modern cricketer: he coped with the poor pitches of his day by the use of a massive four‐pound bat and relied heavily on the drive.
7 Ward, W. G., ‘The Synagogue and the Church’, British Critic, XXXIV (July 1843), p. 4Google Scholar, quoted in Chadwick, Owen, From Bossuet to Newman, The Idea of Doctrinal Development (Cambridge, 1957), p. 136Google Scholar.
8 Ward, W.G., The Ideal of a Christian Church, Considered in Comparison with Existing Practice (2nd ed., London, 1844), p. 517Google Scholar: the book was first published in June 1844.
9 Ibid., pp. 521–22.
10 Though the four adjectives of course go back to the creed of 381, this notion of'note'is a modern one. It was only in the seventeenth century that the idea, and this set of four notes, became widespread. Its popularity in the Anglican communion owed much to such works as William Palmer's Treatise on the Church of Christ of 1838. The classic study of the history of the notes is Gustave Thils, Les Notes de I'Eglise dans I'apologetique catholique depuis la reforme (Gembloux, 1937).
11 Newman, John Henry, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Being a History of His Religious Opinions, ed. Svaglic, Martin J. (Oxford, 1967), pp. 101–102Google Scholar.
12 In this, Newman's view differs from the much weaker form of the theory of the three offices to be found in, for example. Lumen gentium. Though the notion is central to the development of that document its teeth have been drawn through the importation of an underlying hierarchical structure, as if bishops exercised all three offices to the full, priests to a lesser extent, and the simple faithful in some smaller way.
13 Newman, John Henry, The Via Media of the Anglican Church. Illustrated in Lectures, Letters, and Tracts Written between 1830 and 1841, Vol. 1 (London, 1891)Google Scholar, ‘Preface to the Third Edition’, p. xl.
14 Ibid. I, xli.
15 Letter to Isy Froude of 28 July, 1875, in Charles Stephen Dessain and Thomas Gornall, eds., 77k Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Vol. XXVII, The Controversy with Gladstone, January 1874 to December 1875 (Oxford, 1975), pp. 337–38Google Scholar.
16 Newman, Via Media, 1, xl.
17 Ibid., 1, p. lxvii.
18 [W.G. Ward], ‘Notices of Books, The Via Media of the Anglican Church. By Newman, John Henry’, The Dublin Review, New Series – No. LVIII (October, 1877), n. to pp. 514–515Google Scholar.
19 Newman, Via Media, 1, xli.
20 Ibid., 1, xliii, Ixxxii, xciii.
21 Ibid. I, xlii.
22 Ibid., 1, lxxxi.
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