Rowan Williams on Capitalism

Yesterday an essay by the Archbishop of Canterbury was published by The Spectator.

It is a great essay, filled with human concern about the mythology which surrounds the market and the real damage it can do to people. A couple of quotations:

'We find ourselves talking about capital or the market almost as if they were individuals, with purposes and strategies, making choices, deliberating reasonably about how to achieve aims. We lose sight of the fact that they are things that we make. They are sets of practices, habits, agreements which have arisen through a mixture of choice and chance. Once we get used to speaking about any of them as if they had a life independent of actual human practices and relations, we fall into any number of destructive errors. We expect an abstraction called ‘the market’ to produce the common good or to regulate its potential excesses by a sort of natural innate prudence, like a physical organism or ecosystem. We appeal to ‘business’ to acquire public responsibility and moral vision. And so we lose sight of the fact that the market is not like a huge individual consciousness, that business is a practice carried on by persons who have to make decisions about priorities — not a machine governed by inexorable laws.'

...

'...ascribing independent reality to what you have in fact made yourself is a perfect definition of what the Jewish and Christian Scriptures call idolatry. What the present anxieties and disasters should be teaching us is to ‘keep ourselves from idols’, in the biblical phrase. The mythologies and abstractions, the pseudo-objects of much modern financial culture, are in urgent need of their own Dawkins or Hitchens. We need to be reacquainted with our own capacity to choose — which means acquiring some skills in discerning true faith from false, and re-learning some of the inescapable face-to-face dimensions of human trust.'

Read it all here.

But somewhat troubling is that the essay itself is entitled "Face it: Marx was partly right about capitalism". Now, I am assuming that, as with newspapers, the headline was not composed by the author but added in later by someone else. (I suspect but do not know - I am not a regular reader of the Spectator - that the deliberately provocative 'Face it:' is a regular feature, and that the specific headline follows the colon.) But the headline, whilst attention-getting, is not apposite to the essay. He does indeed mention Marx near the end, in a by-the-way fashion, but this is not his overarching concern, not the theme of the essay. As it stands, it might sound like a full-court-press defense of Karl Marx and Marxism, but this is far from the intent. In fact, he says of Marx, in the only mention of him in the essay:'Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right about that, if about little else.' Hardly a ringing endorsement. And hardly a suitable headline for a passionate, thoughtful, and irenic essay.

Streetwise: Rowan Williams on Suffering and God-Talk

'The resolution of the sheer resistant particularity of suffering, past and present, into comfortable teleological patterns is bound to blunt the edge of particularity, and so to lie; and this lying resolution contains that kind of failure in attention that is itself a moral deficiency, a fearful self-protection. It is just this that fuels the fantasy that we can choose how the world and myself shall be.’

'The world is such - is, independently of our choice and our fabrication - that we cannot think away particulars into comprehensive explanatory systems; the world is such that attention to particularity is demanded of us. If we are to speak of God, can we do so in a way that does not amount to another evsion of the world? There is a way of talking about God that simply projects on to him what we cannot achieve - a systematic vision of the world as a necessarily inter-related whole. Trust in such a God is merely deferred confridence in the possibility of exhaustive explanation and justification; and deferred confidence of this sort is open to exactly the same moral and logical objection as any other confidence in systemic necessity of this kind in the world. A God who essential function is to negate the 'otherness' and discontinuity of historical experience, and so to provide for us an ideal locus standi, a perspective transcending or reconciling discontinuity into system, is clearly an idol, and an incoherent one at that...'

Rowan Williams, 'Trinity and Ontology', On Christian Theology, p. 155,6

Death is real; death is overcome. (Rowan Williams' Easter sermon)

A typically fine Easter sermon today the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams. Two choice excerpts:

Easter is not about denying death, and the resurrection doesn't make the nightmare death on the cross unreal. Death is exactly what the artists and scientists and psychoanalysts say: it is a full stop to human growth and response, it is night falling on everything we value or understand or hope for. Fear is natural, and so is grief at the death of another (Jesus, remember, shed tears for the death of a friend). Don't attempt to avoid it or deny its seriousness. On the contrary, keep it in view; remind yourself of it. When the tradition of the Church proposes that you think daily about death and prepare for it, it isn't being morbid but realistic: get used to it and learn to live with the fear. And meanwhile - Shakespeare was being entirely Christian in this respect - get used to loving and valuing things and persons irrespective of the fact that they won't be there for ever. Love them now, and what you would want to do for them, do now. 'Night is coming when no-one can work', says Jesus. (John 9.4)

and further along:

...the overcoming of death - made clear to us in the only way it could be made clear, by the historical, tangible recreation of the life of Jesus, still recognizably who he always was, yet changed in ways we can't grasp in their fullness. Death is allowed to do its worst in him - not only in the form of physical pain and final extinction, but in the terror and desolation with which Jesus approaches it. He lets go of everything, even the hope that God will intervene to spare him. He descends into Hell, and is brought up again by the creative call of his Father. A true struggle, an agon as the Greeks said, an agony of conflict; and a victory - not a reversal or cancellation but a new thing, risen life, the new age begun.

And so when we proclaim all this today, we as Christians are charged to address ourselves to two different sorts of delusion. On the one hand: we face a culture in which the thought of death is too painful to manage. Individuals live in anxious and acquisitive ways, seizing what they can to provide a security that is bound to dissolve, because they are going to die. Societies or nations do the same. Whether it is the individual grabbing the things of this world in just the repetitive, frustrating sameness that we have seen to be already in fact the mark of an inner deadness, or the greed of societies that assume there will always be enough to meet their desires - enough oil, enough power, enough territory - the same fantasy is at work. We shan't really die - we as individuals can't contemplate an end to our acquiring, and we as a culture can't imagine that this civilization like all others will collapse and that what we take for granted about our comforts and luxuries simply can't be sustained indefinitely. To all this, the Church says, somberly, don't be deceived: night must fall.

On the other hand, this alone would only be to echo the not very helpful remark of John Maynard Keynes – 'In the long run, we are all dead'; not much of an Easter message! So the Church says: 'We shall die, we shall have no choice but to let go of all we cling to, but God remains. God's unshakeable love is untouched by death, and all we do and all we care about matters to him. He and he alone is free to make us afresh, to re-establish the world on the far side of every catastrophe.'

It isn't so much that Christians say, 'Death is not the end'. In an important sense, it is the end, and we must prepare for it as people of faith by daily seeking to let go of selfish, controlling, greedy habits, so that our naked souls are left face to face with the creating God. If we are prepared to accept in trust what Jesus proclaims, we can ask God for courage to embark on this path. We don't hope for survival but for re-creation - because God is who he is, who he has shown himself to be in Jesus Christ.

It is particularly dismaying (although the Archbishop didn't mention it) how we work to deny death and greedily 'assume there will always be enough to meet [our] desires - enough oil, enough power, enough territory', and do so specifically by bringing death, or the threat of death, on others. In our fear and anxiety of death, a primary way we are able to keep it at bay is through the death of others, perhaps as some perverse propitiatory sacrifice of a false deity. Such is the thirst of idols - or, more particularly, since idols are simply transference of human perversity, such is our thirst.

And if you'd also like a little something else, here is NT Wright- albeit from five years ago - musing on what sort of sermon you probably heard today and giving some theological indications of how it might have been a rather bad or good sermon.

Quick links for more reflection on the Archbishop's speech

N.T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, for whom along with Archbishop Rowan Williams I have profound respect, has written an essay on ++Rowan's speech, clarifying what he sees as the essential matters of the speech, offering his appreciation of its importance and regretting its misreporting and misunderstanding. Whilst I respect them both, I find that +Wright has been given a gift of exercising elegant, piercing clarity in his prose in a way which quite often (by his own admission) eludes ++Wiliams. (H/T Steven Harris)

Moreover, Mike Higton continues offering ruminations and insights, this time from a slightly different perspective that before. A great reminder, through ++Williams and via Milbank that the 'secular' itself has a history, and is not simply the obvious or the given, much less the 'neutral' backdrop against which religion may (or may fail to) establish itself, even while there are some good reasons why it arose historically. This is offered not as a means of clearing away secularity, or traditions of universal rights, but to complicate them a bit, in order to open up a future which doesn't look exactly like the past.

Not Quite Distractionfest Again, Yet: A Few More Bits and Bobs on the Archbishop

A few worthwhile links, for those with the interest and stamina not merely to read the Archbishop of Canterbury's remarks - you have read them, right? Today's address in Synod, too? - but who would like some more perspective and information.

First, if you've read the archbishop's speech and would like some further clarification, Mike Higton is up to the job. An acquaintance who teaches at the University of Exeter, Mike is author of 'Difficult Gospel', an introduction to the thought of Rowan Williams, and edited Williams' most recent collection of essays. If one wants to understand the archbishop better, and the man himself is otherwise occupied, Mike is probably the person to whom you should turn. Mike has provided, via his blog, a multi-layered summary and interpretation of just what the archbishop said. It should not take the place of reading the thing itself, naturally, but may prove quite helpful in clarifying bits of what you have read.

He has also written an interesting reflection on how the very upheaval associated with Williams' remarks may actually serve the very ends he was recommending. That is, it may have actually spurred, alongside the thoughtless bashing and ludicrous accusations, some genuine thought on the matter; not all agreeing with what Williams proposes, of course, but he would never imagine that that would (or should) be the case. Harder to assess, Higton recognises, is the extent to which the misunderstandings associated with it may have also contributed to further islamophobia. Read it all here. Also worth noting, at the very end, are his tongue-in-cheek suggestions of 'easy narratives' for reporters, all of which I have (depressingly) heard or read in one guise or another over the last few days.

To return to one of yesterday's questions: how much time should the media be expected to spend on this stuff? Perhaps enough to grasp and report fairly the facts of the matter. I take it, after all, that that is the standard - at least of the quality press and the BBC - upheld in other complex and potentially obscure matters such as Middle Eastern politics and the ongoing crisis in the banking industry owing to subprime lending. I trust you to get it right in those cases. Why stop there?

And, lest I be seen as simply and only acting as an apologist for what the archbishop said, have a look at a critic who has actually read the speech, Simon Barrow at ekklesia.co.uk. I'm not sure that Barrow entirely grasps the way that Williams is trying to complicate the - allegedly - unitary sphere of secular power, and the inadequate ways it deals with people's membership in various groups; or, perhaps just as likely, I haven't appreciated the gist of his criticism and should have another look. But this sort of contribution seems likely to help advance the argument at any rate, and is worth a look.

Interrupting the Distraction: the Archbishop of Canterbury and Broadcast Media

First off, if you would like to know what the Archbishop of Canterbury said last week in relation to Sharia law and British law, please - I beg of you - read it yourself. Too many have proven themselves too quick to believe the farfetched or scandalous and denounce the Archbishop in light of that, rather than actually engaging with what he has said. Moreover, the broadcast media - not least the (otherwise) eminently balanced and thoughtful BBC4 - have not been entirely clear or fair in their presentation of the Archbishop's remarks.

In addition, showing the seriousness of the matter and the anguished conscience of the nation, the Sun posted two prostitutes page 3 girls outside of Lambeth Palace calling for the Archbishop's resignation. Who says the tabloids aren't serious journalism?

Just as oddly, Archbishop Gregory Venables of the Southern Cone has chided Archbishop Williams for saying such a thing when relations between Christians and Muslims were not on particularly strong ground. My question is, 'as opposed to when during the last 1350 years?'

But strangest of all, I think - and again, most odd that it was broadcast on BBC4, closer to a paragon of careful and thoughtful engagement than nearly any other contemporary media outlet - was the report on this morning's Broadcasting House, a weekly radio newsmagazine on the media. (You can listen again, at least for now, on the programme's homepage.) At one point the presenter Paddy O'Connell said 'Realistically, how much time is the modern media willing to devote to complex, challenging, and contentious religious argument?'

I would think that the answer to this question would be: enough time to understand the argument and accurately depict its significance for the listening public.

He went on to interview a former press secretary for Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, as well as an Anglican vicar who formerly worked as an ad exec, but now is curate at St. Bride's, Fleet Street. The latter of the two said 'Where he's got it wrong, I think, is that he's fallen victim to the required pithiness of the media, the sort of 24-7 soundbite culture. in that he attempted to summarise something very complex in a very short and pithy way and in doing so I think has fallen victim to a brevity that required a greater fullness.' There were some good remarks later on in the interview, but it seems to me that the gist of the beginning of the interview was this: the media and its audience cannot be expected to take the time and mental effort to understand something complex or nuanced, and so it was the archbishop's own fault that he was misunderstood.

It seems to me an appalling lack of any kind of introspection to say that when someone else is damaged by one's own shortcomings it is entirely their problem for failing to take such into account. The problem is not our short attention span or our unwillingness to expend a little energy understanding a complex argument and issue; the problem is not the media's seeming inability to inform in proper depth and give people any genuine insight into their world (as opposed to trivia, bullet-point factoids and water-cooler conversation starters); no, the problem is someone trying to think aloud publicly and present a nuanced and complex perspective.

To the extent that this is a reasonable characterisation of what has happened, then let us be clear what it is: blaming the victim. And that is pathological.

For some sensible writing in the blogosphere on the furore surrounding the archbishop's remarks, Maggi Dawn is a good place to start, and she links to others.


Photo courtesy of The Archbishop of Canterbury's website.

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 Reading Scripture

First off, let me be entirely upfront that I owe this reference - even down to the post title - to Sean the Baptist. (Thanks, Sean!) Thankfully, the internet allows for (perhaps even encourages) endless iteration, and so it is not entirely beside the point to reproduce a great quote from Rowan Williams on the dynamics of reading (and just as importantly, re-reading) Scripture.

The address as a whole is great and well worth a thoughtful read through. Here are a few quotations from ++Rowan's speech to whet your appetite (including Sean's original quotation):

[B]efore Scripture is read in private, it is heard in public. Those of us who assume that the normative image of Scripture reading is the solitary individual poring over a bound volume, one of the great icons of classical Protestantism, may need to be reminded that for most Christians throughout the ages and probably most in the world at present, the norm is listening. ...the Church in reading Scripture publicly says both (i) that it is not a self-generated reality, created simply out of human reflection and ideals, and (ii) that what is read needs to be read as a communicative act, - that is, not as information, not as just instruction, but as a summons to assemble together as a certain sort of community, one that understands itself as called and created ‘out of nothing’. Whatever we do in private with our reading of Scripture, we must do in awareness of this public character. The Church – a familiar enough point – is in the language of the Bible itself an ‘assembly’, a ‘convocation’: an ekklesia. It declares its basic character when it represents itself as listening to the act of ‘convoking’, calling together.
. . .
what I am trying to define as a strictly theological reading of Scripture, a reading in which the present community is made contemporary with the world in front of the text, is bound to give priority to the question that the text specifically puts and to ask how the movement, the transition, worked for within the text is to be realised in the contemporary reading community. To move too rapidly to the use of the text to make a general point which does not require the reader to be converted is to step outside what I have been calling the time of the text, the process by which it shapes its question. It is to make the text more passive than active, and so to move away from the stance of the listener, from the stance of the Church as trying to be still enough to hear and free enough to respond to God’s summons to be his community. Of course the work of exegesis to establish doctrine and ethics is unavoidable; commentary is always going on. But the first moment of commentary – if this emphasis on the basic character of listening is correct – needs to be the tracing of the ‘time’ of a text so as to chart where it is moving.
. . .
A written text inevitably has about it a dual character. It comes before the reader/hearer as a finished product, and so as something that can in some ways be treated as an object. If we are not careful its written character can be misused by working with the text as if it were passive. In contrast to the event of a voice speaking, it can be abstracted from the single occasion when the hearer has no control over what comes to her or him from outside. At the same time, a written text requires re-reading; it is never read for the last time, and it continuously generates new events of interpretation. It is fruitful of renewed communication in a way that the spoken word alone cannot be. So to identify a written text as sacred is to claim that the continuous possibility of re-reading, the impossibility of reading for the last time, is a continuous openness to the intention of God to communicate. Just as the text itself contains re-reading, is almost constituted by re-reading, so that it repeatedly recreates a movement towards conversion (towards the cross of Jesus, in Christian terms), so the eternal possibility of ‘reading again’ stands as a warning against ignoring the active ‘restlessness’ of the text in summoning the reader to change. The writtenness of the text is from one point of view risky as a strategy of communication: it risks the appearance of passivity, and the re-readability of the text risks the appearance of indeterminacy. Yet from another point of view it can be seen as inseparable from the risk of the communication it itself describes as well as enacts – a divine communication that is never without human speech and narrative, never just an interruption of the created continuum but a pressure upon it that opens up to the divine by the character of its internal relations and connections, the shifting, penitent perspective of a story enacted in time. The writtenness of the text is like the sheer factuality of the historical past as the vehicle of revelation: it is
something irreversibly done, but for that very reason continuously inviting or demanding.

Read the rest here.

This is classic Williams. For all the occasional pains of living in communion with Anglicans, it is truly gratifying to have a primus inter pares archbishop who can theologise well in public.

Credit for the picture of Archbishop Williams and his wife Jane goes to Lambeth Palace. Similar such pictures may be found here.

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)

Streetwise: On Christian Theology

First, I should say that I was startled to realise that it has been three weeks since I last published - where does the time go?

Streetwise is an occasional feature on Gower Street wherein I share and sometimes comment on or expand one or more quotations from something I am reading.

Right now, I am reading Rowan Williams' On Christian Theology.

'And because we assume the analogy between our time and the narrative time of Scripture, and Scriptural time moves toward the specific time of renewal and liberation in Jesus, we [in the church] in our own conflicts can maintain hope. We are not spared the cost of conflict or promised a final theological resolution; rather we are assured of the possibility of 're-producing' the meaning that is Christ crucified and risen, through our commitment to an unavoidably divided church - not by the effort to reconcile at all costs, but by carrying the burdens of conflict in the face of that unifying judgement bodied forth in preaching and sacrament. In that openness to the plain historical difficulty of belonging to the Church, we open ourselves to the gift of Christ.' (p.58)

Some theological odds and ends

I know I haven't posted much recently - busy. And likely to be so to the end of March, not that I'm saying I won't post. Just don't hold your breath.

But do go check out Kim Fabricius' 10 Theses on the Holy Spirit at Faith & Theology; especially note numbers 6 and 10. (Hat tip to Alistair.) Good stuff from an estimable theological thinker.

+ + +

Also from Alistair, a quotation from Rowan Williams:

Scripture and tradition require to be read in a way that brings out their
strangeness, their non-obvious and non-contemporary qualities, in order that
they may be read both freshly and truthfully from one generation to another.
They need to be made more difficult before we can accurately grasp their
simplicities…. And this ‘making difficult’, this confession that what the gospel
says in Scripture and tradition does not instantly and effortlessly make sense,
is perhaps one of the most fundamental tasks for theology.

(Alistair himself got it from Faith & Theology, so it's really the whole circle of life thing...or something.)

+ + +

Also, there is a lot good out there on the whole "Jesus and family tomb" questions. You'll find alot of it at Mark Goodacre's weblog, which will point you towards other great resources, too.

+ + +

I had an experience a little while ago of finally reading Colin Gunton and thinking to myself 'why did no one tell me about this guy?! This is great!' Of course, that wasn't completely true. Others had told me, or held forth on his worth - not least Andy Goodliff - and I was simply heedless. And although I found much great, I also think he is limited in some unfortunate ways. I once said to Andy that I would say how I think he is, but this is not that post. I've had a very similar experience recently. But let me back up.

I root for the Chicago Cubs, and for England in international test cricket - I know all about self-loathing. But Calvin takes it to new depths. I have been reading Calvin's Institutes over Lent, along with some friends. There are hints and glimmers of real insight and brilliance. There is also some really wretchedly awful bits. And a lot of banal truth in-between. But he's not who I've 'discovered'.

As a respite from Calvin, to some degree, I have been reading Jurgen Moltmann, namely his Trinity and the Kingdom of God. Before this, I had read extracts from The Crucified God, and on that basis, well, let's just say I wasn't a fan. But Trinity and the Kingdom has completely changed my outlook on him. Why didn't anyone tell me about him before?

That's not to say I am now somehow a 'Moltmannian'. As with Gunton, I find him limited in ways. But he is intensely hopeful, and makes some very interesting moves. Much, much better than Calvin: even if, like Gunton, he works broadly within he same tradition.