It never ceases to amaze me how some Christians will assume that Rowan Williams doesn't know and value the Bible - one session at Greenbelt produced a questions from a somewhat over zealous member of the audience which presumed that RW had not read John's Gospel.
Equally it concerns me that whether by accident or design RW seems to be offering his most thoughtful work abroad - is it because he cannot find an audience here in Britain or because it is not as well reported here - or this just touch of jingo-jealousy on my part?
However the two concerns come together in the Larkin Stuart Lecture in Toronto Canada which he has offered on the subject of "The Bible Today: Reading and Hearing".
You can read the full text here, and it everything that you might expect - incredibly complex and far ranging, and challenging but none to easy read.Two passages have really struck me.
The first partly because I am not sure that I understand the argument (or whether it is made in such a way that I could offer it elsewhere), but it is about a passage which offers a challenge at most funeral services which I lead. RW writes
"Two contentious examples. The first of them is, as we shall see, of more than accidental importance in understanding certain things about Scripture as a whole, but I choose it because of its frequent use in modern debates about relations between faith communities. Jesus says in the Farewell Discourses of John's Gospel that 'no-one comes to the Father except by me'. As an isolated text, this is regularly used to insist that salvation depends upon explicit confession of Christ, and so as a refutation of any attempt to create a more inclusive theology of interfaith relations. But the words come at the end of a typically dense and compressed piece of exposition. Jesus has, at the end of ch.13, explained that the disciples cannot follow him now; he goes ahead to prepare a place. Thus, he creates the path to the Father that the disciples must follow; they know the path already in the sense that they know him. And this knowledge of him, expressed in the mutual love that he has made possible (13.34-5), will carry them through the devastation of absence and not-knowing which will follow the crucifixion. Seeing and knowing Jesus as he goes towards his death in the perfection of his 'love for his own' is already in some way a knowing of the Father as that goal towards which the self-giving of Jesus in life and death is directed. The Father is not to be known apart from this knowledge of Jesus.
Now this certainly does not suggest in any direct way a more inclusive approach to other faiths. But the point is that the actual question being asked is not about the fate of non-Christians; it is about how the disciples are to understand the death of Jesus as the necessary clearing of the way which they are to walk. If they are devastated and left desolate by his death, they have not grasped that it is itself the opening of a way which would otherwise remain closed to them. Thus it is part of the theology of the cross that is evolving throughout the later chapters of John, the mapping out of a revelation of glory through self-forgetting and self-offering. The text in question indeed states that there is no way to the Father except in virtue of what Jesus does and suffers; but precisely because that defines the way we must then follow, it is (to say the least) paradoxical if it is used as a simple self-affirmation for the exclusive claim of the Christian institution or the Christian system. There is, in other words, a way of affirming the necessity of Christ's crucified mediation that has the effect of undermining the very way it is supposed to operate. If we ask what the question is that the passage overall poses, or what the change is that needs to be taking place over the time of the passage's narration, it is about the move from desolation in the face of the cross (Jesus' cross and the implicit demand for the disciple to carry the cross also) to confidence that the process is the work of love coming from and leading to the Father."
The second relates to two conversations which I have been having locally about the significance of the Ministry of the Word within the Eucharist - the first with some-one who has a more Protestant background who is discovering the significance of the Eucharist as thanksgiving, the second with a more Catholic background steeped in the Mass but begining to realise that the readings of the Bible are more significant than just stories about Jesus. RW writes:
"But to read Scripture in the context of the Eucharist -- which has been from the beginning of the Church the primary place for it -- is to say that the Word of God that acts in the Bible is a Word directed towards those changes that bring about the Eucharistic community. The summons to the reader/hearer is to involvement in the Body of Christ, the agent of the Kingdom, as we have seen; and that Body is what is constituted and maintained by the breaking of bread and all that this means. For Paul, exploring it in I Corinthians, the celebration of the Lord's Supper is strictly bound up with the central character of the community: what is shown in the Eucharist is a community of interdependence and penitent self-awareness, discovering the dangers of partisan self-assertion or uncritical reproduction of the relations of power and status that prevail in the society around. So if Scripture is to be heard as summons or invitation before all else, this is what it is a summons to. And the reading and understanding of the text must be pursued in this light. We ask what change is envisaged or required in the 'time' of any passage of Scripture; and now we can add that whatever change that is in particular, it must make sense in the context of the formation of this kind of community -- the Eucharistic Body."
The use of St Paul is of course especially helpful to my Protestant friend, who recognises that in the Church of his childhood and teens St Paul was probably more important and influential than Jesus.( Can you imagine the morality focused and narrow kind of teaching he experienced) For him to see that Paul had a deep and profound theology of the Lord's Supper - and a theology which was not just a memorial of something in the past, but something which continues through the agency of the Holy Spirit to be active and dynamic today.
So when you have some time to read, and re-read and ponder you might want to follow the link to RW's address.
The chance
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