On Sin 2

Crimson Rambler helped expand on the sense of what I was up to in On Sin, and it prompted the following thoughts, which I calculated as being worth a post of their own, even though they end up circling around the theme of the first post.

Since we are established by and in grace, we are also able to claim our sin as our own, even while we are confident in God that this is not the final word on who we are. So there is a sense in which, because of grace, we are freed to be blameworthy, to take responsibility for ourselves - and yet also because of grace, we are able to view ourselves as more than simply a problem to be solved or denied*, but established in and by God in the deepest love so that we may be both discontented and patient with sin: both our own and others'.


* 'Blame' can sound like scapegoating or a reduction of the mystery and extent of sin to something managed and finite: I'd want to avoid that.

Streetwise: Rowan Williams on Anglicanism

Archbishop Rowan Williams has provided, in his estimable book Anglican Identities, a working summary of Anglicanism, which I believe is worth noting:

"I have simply taken it [i.e. Anglicanism] as referring to the sort of Reformed Christian thinking that was done by those (in Britain first, then far more widely) who were content to settle with a church order grounded in the historic ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons, and the classical early Christian formulations of doctrine about God and Jesus Christ -- the Nicene Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon. It is certainly Reformed thinking, and we should not let the deep and pervasive echoes of the Midle Ages mislead us: it assumes the governing authority of the Bible, made available in the vernacular, and repudiates the necessity of a central executive authority in the Church's hierarchy. It is committed to a radical criticism of any theology that sanctions the hope that human activity can contribute to the winning of God's favour, and so is suspicious of organised asceticism (as opposed to the free expression of devotion to God which may indeed be profoundly ascetic in its form) and of a theology of the sacraments which appears to bind God too closely to material transactions (as opposed to seeing the free activity of God sustaining and transforming certain human actions done in Christ's name).

-Rowan Williams, Anglican Identities, p. 2 (italics original)

Streetwise: Rowan Williams on Conflict

'We need, as I have said, to take on the reality and inevitability of conflict; our error is often to see this as a kind of metaphysical statement about the inevitability of mutual exclusion and strife, rather than about the ways in which we are formed in the hard tasks of responding to the resistance, the otherness of the world (people and things), and in the accepting of our inability to guarantee ourselves or anyone an untroubled passage through it. The assumption that strife is an absolute 'given' in the world grows from the convistion that we possess a territory to be safeguarded, whether of law-based achievement or naturally given essential selfhood. The gospel of the resurrection proposes that 'possession' is precisely the wrong, the corrupt and corrupting, metaphor for our finding place in the world. What we 'possess' must go; we must learn to be what we receive from God in the vulnerability of living in (not above) the world of chance and change.'

- R. Williams, from 'Resurrection and Peace', p 273, 274 in On Christian Theology

Streetwise: Rowan Williams on Sacraments and society

A couple more salutary quotations from Rowan Williams in On Christian Theology, this time from the essay 'Sacraments of the New Society'.

'Sacramental practice seems to speak most clearly of loss, dependence and interdependence, solidarities we do not choose: none of them themes that are particularly welcome or audible in the social world we currently inhabit as secular subjects. We are told, in effect, that the failure to see ourselves and find ourselves in one or another kind of corporateness is a failure in truthfulness that is profoundly risky. Our liberty to choose and define our goals as individuals or as limited groups with common interest is set alongside the vision of a society in which almost the only thing we can know about the good we are to seek is that it is no one's possession, the triumph of no party's interests. The search for my or our good becomes the searc for a good that does not violently dispossess any other -- and this not on the basis of rights who balance must be adjudicated, but because of a conviction that the creative regard calling and sustaining myself is precisely what sustains all. And what make this something different [than] an imposed collectivism is the fact that it is appropriated by no force but by trust, by the recognition of the hidden unities of human interest: our own transition, our own 'passover', into the need of the other, whereever and whoever the other may be.' (p. 219)

'It is this capacity to imagine a 'faithful people' [which the sacraments bring] that seems to me the most significant irritant offered by sacramental practice to the contemporary social scene. One of the most ill-disgnosed features of the present crisis in capitalist society (fast being exported to aspiring capitalist societies everywhere) is the decline of trust. Privation today brings cynicism in its wake: there is little reason for anyone to believe that others are dependable, that resources work for the common good. If this is a fundamental perception or experience of the social order, it becomes practically impossible to 'socialize' people who see their world like this -- the young or the old, marginal or suspect communities of any kind, those in prison, the disabled. This invites an adverserial relation to those institutions felt to have betrayed the disadvantaged, directly or indirectly (why are schools in impoverished areas regular targets for arson?) We can easily misunderstand the much-discussed problem of a so-called 'culture of dependency' among the disadvantaged. It is not, surely, that the ideal of collective welfare as such is disabling: welfarism becomes disabling when society is such that recipients or clients of social and health services are frozen in the attitude of suppliants, never becoming fellow-agents with those administering aid. They need but are not needed. It is not surprising, in such circumstances, that a discourse of rights and claims becomes more and more strident and -- often -- uncritical, unexamined.' (p.220)

Two Christmas Crackers: 2006

This year's Christmas sermons from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Durham are quite good, as were last year's. The amazing thing -- and this may reflect that Christmas is a slow news day as much as anything -- is that the Archbishop's sermon and the Pope's are each summarised and remarked on in the news.

Here is ++Rowan's. If you need encouragement, here is a preview of coming attractions:

We are used at Christmas to singing about the poor helpless child of Bethlehem whom we will rock and keep warm and cradle. But the great mystery of the day,
the joy and shock of it, is that it is Jesus Christ who picks us up, helpless children, abandoned, ruined, and promises us everything that he can give. And as he gives, he makes us grow, and sends us to make the same promise in his name to all, whatever the conflicts, whatever the guilt. To all he offers the authority to be children of God; from his fullness we may all receive, grace upon grace.

Pure gold.

In fact, I've often wondered about the dynamics of seeing Jesus as a baby without grappling with what his adulthood looked like. Those who attend church only on Christmas and Easter tend to only see Jesus as a newborn child, or dead and risen and gone ahead of us. Now, clearly these two mysteries are at the heart of our faith as Christians, and please don't hear me saying otherwise, but it seems to me that the whole of his life gives those events a context within which to understand them and more deeply enter and live them.

N.T. Wright's Christmas 2006 sermon is here. An excerpt:

...grace and truth must meet together; if it really is grace, it really must
produce truth, a rich, deep personal, moral and ecclesial integrity which is
deeply true to the created order and to its recreation in Christ, to the deep
structures of God’s wise and loving ordering of his world and of us human
beings.

And his Christmas Eve sermon is here.