Rowan Williams on the Church

Stanley Hauerwas has an immense respect for Archbishop Rowan Williams, which is recognized in Hauerwas' own writing. The following excerpts are from William's book The Truce Of God.

The Church is never going to be completely itself while history lasts-or, in more traditional theological terms, the Church and the world will never completely coincide. We live in hope, and to the extent we live in hope, we also live in creative dissatisfaction. (pg. 29)

[Faith] depends on the possibility of meeting Christ in any and every place, and in any and every person. The degree to which we fail to find him, see or hear him, in anyone, is the degree to which we have not grasped-or rather yielded to, been grasped by-his Lordship. And that is why the Church is 'catholic'-for all, adapting itself endlessly to human culture and to human need, opening itself to all, and linking the cultures and needs, the various identities, the diverse roots, of men and women the world over. It strives to show and interpret and share the gifts of one person or group or nation, offering them to all; and to each it offers the resources of all. When it is not catholic, it is not truly itself (hence the seriousness of the division between Christian communions-the deeper the split, the less freely grace works in the divided groups, because they are refusing the unique gifts they should be receiving through each other). And when it is, however sporadically and usurely, catholic, it is a sacrament of peace; not a peace of undramatic, topic co-existence and noninterference, but a peace which is free, active involvement, compassion, grateful receiving, generous offering, reciprocal enrichment. This is the peace Jesus creates between God and world, because it is the kind of peace which exists between him and his father. We shall be looking at this later in more detail; perhaps for now we can let it stand as a general and provisional definition at the most basic theological level of what the Church is about in relation to the life and death of Jesus. (pgs. 31-32)

The Church is a challenge to that view of the world which claims that the welfare of some may rightly be secured by the dispensability of others. (pg. 38)

The Church is, as always, less to prescribe policy solutions than to challenge the terms of the debate itself. (pg. 60)

The religious life remains an indispensable sign in a healthy Church of the seriousness of baptismal commitment. For we are all enjoined at baptism to be Christ's soldiers, and to join battle with untruth and fear. (pgs. 63-64)

The believer is invited to 'choose life', though at the cost of the usual cushions and consolations for the individual-and the collective. The Christian Church is bound to be a protesting body; it will rightly ask of its members a degree of 'monastic' disengagement, a sustained willingness to step back into critical distance. It will ask for solitude-distance from the tight huddle of fear, where people cling together to feed each other's fantasies. It will ask for silence-distance from the decayed and corrupting language of self-justifying and self-perpetuating cliques. It will ask for contemplation-distance from the manipulations and distortions of a self incapable of opening up to others. And out of all this will flow community, speech and action, all that we normally think of as the opposites of solitude, silence and contemplation. It is a death embraced for the sake of life-not the world traded in for the security of self, but the fearful self surrendered in order to rejoin the real world, the truth of God's creation. (pgs. 64-65)

Can this society be a catholic society? The answer is that it cannot contain such a vision. Jesus is, as Bonhoeffer put it, 'edged out' to the cross; Jesus's followers are likewise squeezed out of their religious milieu into a new community without the familiar barriers. The Church is what is expelled by societies as they struggle with the challenge of God's peace. (pg. 72)

The Church, like the Lord, proclaims God's peace best when least preoccupied with maintaining a bland consensus with society, when it is most ready to be uneasy and constructively suspicious (and that is why it itself needs sometimes to 'precipitate' in its own protest groups, like the monastic movement). It gathers around the Eucharistic table to hold together the present realities of struggle and breakage, and the hope of the Kingdom where we shall seriously, affirmingly and joyfully look at each other in the face, at peace in Jerusalem. And again; we gather to recognize the way in which the struggle runs through us; in penitence, we look at our own refusals to be catholic, we bring to the surface our own resistance to grace. What we think of as the redeemed soul or mind or spirit is what is precipitated, drop by drop, in these regularly renewed confrontations with the defensive worldliness in each of us. (pg. 72)

The Church exists to show in the form of its common life the final destiny of the human race; it gives a place and a value to all. But what about the mental and spiritual life of the individual? Is it doomed to a perpetual anxiety? This is a difficult question. The anticipation of the Kingdom in the life of the Church can hardly be a corporate reality unless it is also, in some degree, an individually experienced one. (pg. 73)

The Church is a community constituted in the Spirit who constantly recreates in its life the critical transaction of the cross: 'the last, the dread affray' is, by the Spirit's action, being refought daily and hourly in the Church's life and the believer's life. And it is here, in this battle, that the love, joy, and peace of life in the Spirit are being daily and hourly brought to birth. (pg. 82)

The Christian Church implicitly claims to be the most decisive and comprehensive such global moral community; not because it has a complete and detailed programme, because it is an embryo United Nations or a superior NGO, but because it claims to have been given awareness of certain basic facts about humanity-that it is created by God for the purpose of joyful collaboration, and that it has been given the possibility of release from the ingrained compulsions of rivalry and self-serving. The existence of the Church, as has often been said in these pages, demonstrates the possibility of a community whose uniting rationale is the exact opposite of the assumptions of rivalry and containment as basic human concerns with which this chapter began. It is in principle a moral community equipped to challenge national ethics when they have become obsessed with the assumptions of rivalry and self-serving; it is charged with querying the passionate desire for innocence that pervades such a lot of talk on the international stage. It may be that one of the abiding tasks of the Church is to help nations and societies come to terms with a history that is not one of infallibility and injured righteousness. (pg. 119)

But to challenge myth of benevolence and innocence is not to substitute a myth of evil or hypocrisy. In a group's history as in an individual's, recognising the 'shadow' is a mark of maturity. Human growth involves choices made and prices paid, often in ways that will not bear easy moral scrutiny; to see what has actually made you what you are involves owning that not all of it is a story of righteous advance or of blameless suffering and heroism. Churches have frequently got involved in myths of national victimhood or national virtue (both Ireland and England have been cases in point at different times in their history); to turn away from this is not only an advance in the really 'churchly' identity of a local church, it is an advance in the growing up of a society now able to accept its fallibility. Not every question is destructive; not every bit of 'demythologising' in this connection is a blow to the corporate self-confidence or loyalty of the right kind. (pg. 120)

Without the community of grace and truth, charity and clarity, it is hard to see how our individual and collective fears can be dealt with. But of course it is not really enough to talk as though such a community already existed in any and every church group in the world. If we put the problem in these terms, it is plain that we have a great deal of work to do in making the Church more Church-like. (pg. 123)