First comes a bit of history, that the King James Bible language was old even when it was produced. He doesn't quite say that, but he says it was different.
The point was, whereas Shakespeare expanded the language, the King James Bible economised on it for effect and built up its rhythms. It gives us, as a whole package:...the story of a world broken and out of control - but still a world God loved fiercely; the story of God promising to be there for the people he had made, in good times and bad; of his promise being kept in the most dramatic way you could think of, when God himself lives a human life in Jesus Christ. And woven into all this were the records of how individuals – very like us in their confusions and failings – had got caught up in this great story of God's promises, and how it had changed them.
What he is telling us is that the Bible is a story, and our lives are a story. This is, on the one hand, the classical liberal Christian position that the Bible is used as a validation and a criticism of our lives; it is used as a means of working out our own individual lives.
So reading the King James Bible told you that your life story was set within the biggest of pictures, the story of the whole universe.
There is a potential problem with this, on this four centuries anniversary:
Four hundred years on, that can feel quite remote. You may be the sort of person who feels that you can make sense of your own story in your own terms. Or you may feel that there's only one big story and that's about money and whether I've got a job tomorrow or whether my children can afford higher education.
So there is the possibility that it is irrelevant as a story. However, that wouldn't be good enough, so it's themes are big themes that must still be relevant:
But the trouble is that we so often don't have the kind of big picture that simply tells us that we matter, never mind what happens, that tells us there is something quite outside ourselves that can eventually make sense of things – even if, like some of the writers of the Bible, specially the Psalms, there are moments where all we can do is shout out in protest.
So even the shouting out in protest is to be biblical. All very clever.
So we've had the classical subjective appeal as in a liberal Christian use: your life and its life. But then, the postliberal side of this, or Radical Orthodox, possibly, is that the book just is its standard of performance for the Christian, and therefore if in another religion or none the individual will want another big vision, or another big picture. For example, the Big Society notion needs a view of humankind.
Whether you're a Christian or belong to another religion or whether you have nothing you'd want to call a religion at all, some kind of big picture matters. If we 're going to talk about a 'big society', that'll need a big picture, a picture of what human beings are really like and why they're so unique and precious. This year's anniversary is a chance to stop and think about the big picture – and to celebrate the astonishing contribution made by that book four hundred years ago.
So he says, as a sort of underplayed evangelism, do acquire a big vision. It's not that his big vision is necessarily the best, because a postliberal cannot make any such objective view. Not when it is a story. You just have visions as packages.
A lot of people, though, muddle through. What is wrong with muddling through and asking questions; why not build up your own vision? Because postliberals believe in packages, and usually they are delivered whole, frozen from some past culture, to be performed again and again.
May the New Year be a time to discover something of this vision in your life; a time to discover more of the meaning of another of the King James Bible's great words – the 'loving kindness' we all need to give and to receive. A very happy New Year to you all.Loving kindness I recognise as a core element in Western Buddhism (and I am sure key in other expressions of Buddhism) in that it is the behavioural product of spiritual practice. That's an orthopraxis, and eastern orthopraxy carries a different philosophy that already has aspects the West discovered in postmodernism and postliberalism, but has its own relationship of transience and realism that doesn't fit into the Western objective-subjective collapse that is involved in postliberalism.
Update
Nothing said in this more direct piece (the first link is where I discovered the video) has contradicted what I have written above. You wouldn't expect Rowan Williams to be so inconsistent - though, of course, I could have misinterpreted him. The clue is where he states: "is made real in this community." And it is "not a textbook". He says that the Holy Spirit breathes through the pages of the Bible as the Bible itself says. And so on.
10 comments:
"Not when it is a story. You just have visions as packages"
I think you misunderstand him. I don't think he's saying that visions are just packages and that all visions are equal (because they're just story). I think he's saying that God's truth is expressed through story, which gives this story more weight than other stories. And which also means that the story isn't irrelevant because it was written 400 years ago or 2000 years ago.
And yes, a postliberal can believe (could believe) that his vision is the best. It depends on whether the postliberal has a deep faith or not. Because he'd not be postliberal in some kind of abstract, reference free universe, but he'd be a postliberal Christian embedded in his Christian framework.
He cannot believe his is the best, except on some subjective basis, but that subjective basis itself is denied for one that has more a collective 'language' performance.
There is no objective basis for anything to be better in the world than anything else.
There is a potential claim to revelation, but the revelation is never open to cultural checking - that is the legacy of Karl Barth.
Williams can talk about God in this way but it is a self-referential package in terms of the package and the community that uses it.
Adrian,
You are a great guy. Widely educated, incredibly intelligent and extremely good at writing.
But you tend to believe that every other intelligent person just has to think like you, or they're not intelligent.
Yes, Rowan CAN (or could) believe that his belief system is more accurate than others. Easily.
Because he's not a relativist and he's not an abstract intellectual like you are.
He's a Christian. He lives and breathes within that framework.
He has probably had some experiences or intellectual thouhts that, for him, strengthen that way of looking at the world. And he might simply not agree with Karl Barth.
You don't have to agree with him. You really don't.
But you also don't have to believe that because you find something intellectually impossible, he will too.
There isn't a hierarchy of brilliance and logic in which everything you believe has to be shared by every other highly intelligent person.
Two highly intelligent and educated people can genuinely have a different view of things.
Yes, but I also read his recent piece given on Fulcrum, so it's not that I am going by what I think, but by what he has said.
Note: Barth's indifference to Germany as it is, says Williams, but the exhilaration that God is God, but then later he says of the need to get away from The Myth of God Incarnate and how he overlaps with and has some criticisms of Radical Orthodoxy. Now some of us know that Barth leads on to postliberalism and this is the Protestant version of Radical Orthodoxy, and my own view is that Williams pushes for objective-like via detail but is still within the grand scheme that Radical Orthodoxy develops.
He says: So I do feel some sense of involvement in the history of Radical Orthodoxy; and the enormous stimulus and constant mental stretching that I’ve had from conversations with John Milbank is a big part of my life. I’ve expressed some of my reservations about the project from time to time. Basically, though I think it’s on the right lines.
That has consequences because both the Protestant and Catholic versions are non-objective and cannot therefore compare with anything else. That's the logic, and it is why I wrote my recent fantasy Chadderbox as I did when Rowanov Treetri speaks up.
That might be hard to understand. It matters that Barth, seen as a defender of ethical Protestantism, could not with his theology grapple with culture. And objectivity in the world depends on saying something about culture as true. But Williams is no fool, because objectivity is grasped by science and by research, which means that Christianity has to be a story, and occupies a postmodern space. He pushes but he can't push over the boundary. People think Williams is orthodox, but he's sawn off the branch he's sat on. It's all self referential. I remember Cupitt referring to him when Williams was still Bishop of Monmouth.
Good analysis, Adrian, of Rowan trying to have his cake and eat it too! He exaggerates the unity of the church and the happiness of the so-called Anglican family. The everyday reality is fragmentation. He seems to have been taken in by synecdoche, the taking of a part for the whole.
Muddling through sounds better than pretending to adhere to a package deal. The tradition, if it is a tradition, has not arrived yet because it has to be obsessively repeated.
Gary
"A lot of people, though, muddle through. What is wrong with muddling through and asking questions; why not build up your own vision? Because postliberals believe in packages, and usually they are delivered whole, frozen from some past culture, to be performed again and again."
. . . a picture of what human beings are really like and why they're so unique and precious. . . .
Yes, each creature is unique, and we're precious to one another -- but all life on planet Earth is one. All life, plant and animal, has common ancestors. Humankind's assumed superiority has got the planet in deep trouble. The big picture we need is one of our place among our fellow organisms.
Indeed, as according to the Archbishop, you can adopt your own packaged vision...
"A picture of what human beings are really like" is a metaphor and cannot be true. What are people "really like?" What is comparison and how does he decide that the scriptures function like a picture?
Rowan's rhetoric is vague.
How odd that a man who cites Wittgenstein that some people come to religion because of suffering seems to forget that the later Wittgenstein moved away from the metaphor of language being like a picture!
Gary
"A picture of what human beings are really like" is a metaphor and cannot be true. What are people "really like?" What is comparison and how does he decide that the scriptures function like a picture?
Rowan's rhetoric is vague.
How odd that a man who cites Wittgenstein that some people come to religion because of suffering would forget that the later Wittgenstein moved away from the metaphor of language being like a picture.
Gary
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