Holy Week: Faith and History Questions & Answers Session

Archbishop at Westminster Abbey

Listen to the Faith and History Questions & Answers Session [26Mb]

Question:

What do you think of the theological movement in the Church and the University world now known as 'Radical Orthodoxy' as articulated by writers like John Milbank?

Archbishop:

A number of the people who've been involved in that movement have been close associates, students of mine and others, and I have huge admiration for what they're doing. For those who don't know the detail, it's a movement which has attempted to recover a sense of the confidence and independence of Christian discourse as something that can't just be reduced to sociology. I think that's good news.

Was Jesus real in the way that Mohammed really existed?

Why doesn't the Church recognize Mohammed as a prophet, as the mosques affirm that Jesus was indeed a prophet?

To the first: I'm perfectly clear that Jesus existed, and indeed exists. And I think that the evidence for Jesus as a historical personality is as good, as solid as the evidence for Mohammed's existence or for that matter the existence of Julius Caesar. I realize there are some scholars in past generations who have argued that Jesus did not historically exist; I think it's a very, very tough case to make indeed. I have no doubt at all of the historical reality of Jesus' existence. But the more difficult question about the relation between Jesus and Mohammed requires a longer answer. For a Muslim, as I understand it, Mohammed comes at the end of a continuing sequence of prophets revealing aspects, dimensions of the word of God and the demands of God to the world. In that sequence of prophets Jesus occupies a crucial, very important place, and is regarded with profound respect by Muslims. Nonetheless for the Muslim, the whole point of Islam is that Mohammed is – so to speak – the end of the story, the point to which the others are moving. For the Christian, Jesus is the defining moment in the whole story of God's dealings with humanity. It may then be possible for a Christian to recognize Mohammed or other religious teachers, as conveying something of the truth about God, and yet that would have to be for the Christian, interpreted in the light of the identity of Jesus, his teaching and his nature. And that's why it is not quite a simple matter of Christians and Muslims in this area 'exchanging mutual courtesies' and recognition in the same terms. We have different convictions about how God reveals himself to us, and there's no short cut in dealing with those, I believe.

Could you believe in a faith whose fundamental narrative could clearly be shown to have been fabricated? How important is the credibility of the historical narrative to your faith?

I was asked this question in another context a couple of weeks ago and I had to reply that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine I could not be a Christian in the way that I now am. I could not celebrate the Sacraments: I could not understand the life of the Holy Spirit as I do: I might still want to be associated with some of the insights and values of the Christian tradition but you would no longer have me as Archbishop of Canterbury (I rather hope you wouldn't have anyone as Archbishop of Canterbury!) because I actually don't think that the Church would be credible in its central historical shape. So it does matter, and when you ask 'could I believe in a faith whose foundations could easily be shown to have been fabricated?' well, I have to say that that is a risk that every Christian takes: the risk of believing that a difference truly has been made to the world: a risk which depends upon the fragility of these historical affirmations. History alone doesn't give you a knock-down argument for faith, but I couldn't do without it because of the very nature of that faith, that at some point God worked, specifically in this way, in human history, and that was the beginning of something different. Christianity has shown itself reasonably robust in seeing-off what some people have thought to be easy and obvious attempts to shake its historical credibility, but that there remains an element of risk I think is undeniable. And that is, depending on your temperament, either something very worrying or something really rather exhilarating. There is a degree of adventure at least, about this, as Dorothy Sayers liked to say about the Christian claim: call it what you like, but not boring.

How do we understand Mark's Gospel ending so abruptly and fearfully?

A very good question about the earliest detailed narrative of Easter morning, the original ending: they said nothing to anybody, they were afraid. I think one has to understand it in connection with the whole of the way Mark tells the story of Jesus. Throughout his Gospel, Mark emphasizes again and again that those closest to Jesus don't fully see who he is and what he's about, they misunderstand his priorities, they fail to see the point of the parables and so on. And so at the very end Mark tells the Resurrection story in such a way as to maximize the shock and the difference: this, like everything Jesus ever said, was something impossible, challenging, even appalling to those who might be expected to understand him best. Throughout, Mark underlines that mysteriousness, that almost numinous difference and darkness about Jesus. Not even the Resurrection is allowed to be blazingly clear, because if it were it would be a danger of fulfilling all our expectations and so being boring again. And I think Mark is quite deliberately underlining over and over that element of mystery, surprise, astonishment and frightening difference that there is, in the reality of Jesus.

You centred your comments on the stories as related in the Gospels. St Paul, writing earlier than the Gospels, doesn't seem to regard the 'empty tomb' terminology in the same way, though clearly the resurrected Jesus is central to his presentation. Does this suggest that the bodily Resurrection is a late development?

Personally, I've never quite been able to see why St Paul's statement that Jesus was 'raised on the third day' should imply anything other than that the tomb was empty. Paul is a rabbinically trained, first century Jew: when he talks about 'rising' he means what he says, he means what the prophet Daniel says, he means 'someone being restored to the earth'. I don't think that this alleged polarity between what the Gospels say and what St Paul says in I Corinthians 15 is anything like as marked as some would like to make it. So, given that St Paul is clearly drawing on some of the same reservoir of tradition that you find in Mark or in John: I don't think I'd want to entertain the idea that the empty tomb is a late-comer in the story. And if it were, I think we'd need quite a good explanation as to why it came in when it did and what the work was it was supposed to do. If Paul already assumed that Resurrection was the Resurrection of a body, I think he must have been taking it for granted.

Doesn't emphasis on the historical truth of the Gospels bring unwelcome focus on the exclusive aspects of faith? Could not Jesus have been a marvelous myth based in all likelihood on a highly charismatic historical personage? If he was, none of the marvelous things about Christianity that you've identified would be invalidated.

I think what would be lacking would be the conviction that the forms of holiness and access to God that Christians talk about were rooted in a specific life which created that possibility. That's where I have to stand; that's not to say that there can be no lives of transparency and holiness and transcendent goodness outside the visible Church. My questioner here mentions Gandhi, to take the most obvious example and I quite see that, though that would lead to another long discussion about the relation between faiths. But I feel that if Jesus were a myth, then the possibilities we're talking about would be possibilities finally generated by human beings thinking something up, I don't mean deliberately fabricating, I mean coming to conclusions. But the Gospels are about an initiative from elsewhere: breaking through a deadlock in human existence which human beings can't break for themselves. That's how I read the Gospels, and I can't see them in any other way, and I think anything other than that would have to be something other than historical Christianity.

Other Christian scholars take a less positive view of the historical accuracy of the stories of the Resurrection of Jesus. Do you see that as simply a different historical judgement or as a failure of faith?

I think those who take a less positive view are wrong; it's as simple as that. It's an argument that I and others have had with those who take a less positive view, over many many years. I do sometimes suspect that that climate of the modern age makes it a bit less easy for people to settle with the kind of interpretation I've given, but I suppose one of my reasons for holding to a more traditional, more material view, is admittedly not a historical reason at all but it's the way in which these claims about the – in some sense material - Resurrection interlock with how we understand the Sacraments and the nature of our prayer. And I feel that to unscramble one bit is to unscramble it all and I've no reason to unscramble it all. So there may be a loss of nerve somewhere, there may be a too ready buying-into the assumptions of the age but we have to go on having that historical argument. I do accept, as somebody else raised the question, that there are Christians who, in good conscience, can't see their way to accepting the emptiness of the tomb and yet live lives of exemplary Christian devotion. I can't see that their position is consistent, but I respect it as a position that is held by prayerful, thoughtful Christians. I wish they could see it otherwise, but this isn't the Spanish Inquisition, and I'd like to think that some people grow and move in their understanding of these things as well. A very significant Anglican theologian of about a hundred years ago, described in a review in a periodical how he had over the years come to move from a rather sceptical approach to the historicity of the empty tomb to a much more receptive view of it, on the grounds he said, that as he grew older the world looked stranger and fresher every day. And he was no longer prepared simply to assume what could and couldn't happen. That's one way of growing older in the faith.

If Christ's incarnation, death and resurrection took place in the present day rather than the first century, would history notice and would the Church come to being and grow as it has?

I've no idea how one could translate a first-century story simply into our own age, partly because so much of the framework of our own age is shaped by what happened in the first century. So I just don't know, I can't speculate. Had history gone on without the incarnation, death and resurrection of the Lord, where would we be now? We wouldn't just be here as we are, but it is quite important to remember the sort of difference that the coming of Christianity did make. For example, in the long and protracted but very important ways in which Christianity 'softened the fabric' and changed the frame of reference of human society. Very gradually, it made slavery indefensible, to take just one example: gradually establishing the notion that there are no 'spare' human beings without dignity. In other words, we can't imagine the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus happening now because the now we're in is already formed by the history we have.

What about the historicity of the apostolic succession? For example St Ireneus meeting St Polycarp, meeting St John, meeting Jesus of Nazareth ... and your present position in relation to the sixteenth-century Cardinal Pole for example?

Apostolic succession is the transmission of continuous tradition and teaching from the time of Jesus to the present day, symbolized and made concrete in a succession of Bishops, Priests and Deacons. I think that the notion of the visible transmission of what Jesus handed on, is an important part of being a Christian. I believe in that continuity of succession, though I believe that in the history of the Church it has fractured in a number of different directions and that what matters most about it is perhaps a little less the transmission of Bishops laying hands on the heads of others through the centuries than Bishops conveying the integrity of the faith from generation to generation. And where that transmission of the integrity of the faith has become a matter of dispute and conflict as in the dispute between Christian East and West and the dispute between the Churches of the Reformation and the Churches faithful to the Pope: that process is no longer just one line. So, yes I stand in the succession of Cardinal Pole in the sixteenth century, and believe that in some sense – whether he knows it or not – he has transmitted to me the Catholic faith, the integrity of belief. It has come to me through a process which has also challenged and argued many things that he would have taken for granted.

Do you and the Church of England believe that this historical Jesus is both the Son of Man and the Son of God?

Yes, absolutely I believe that the figure I've been speaking about this evening, the figure that history gives us some information about, where we can have some degree of certainty, that this person is the embodiment of that aspect or dimension of God's being that we call the Son or the Word. I believe that the action of God was, without qualification, alive and at work in the action of Jesus, and that's the foundation of my faith and indeed the faith historically of the Church of England.

I find the Trinity confusing. Do we pray to the Father, or the Son or the Holy Spirit?

One of the things I was trying to suggest rather indirectly this evening was that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity comes from the way in which Christians experience their prayer. The Spirit of Jesus, alive in Christians, gives to them the freedom and the power to say to God what Jesus said to God: 'Abba, Father'. The Spirit brings us therefore, to be where Jesus is, gazing on the Father, reflecting the Father's glory: we pray to the Father, we pray to the source of divine life. We pray in and as the Son, the eternal one who responds to the Father in love: before the world began, that response which was made particular and immediate in the humanity of Jesus. And we pray out of the power and action of the Spirit: that agency which draws us into the life of Jesus and gives to us the capacity to speak as Jesus spoke and to see what Jesus sees in God the Father. That's how the doctrine of the Trinity comes into being in that dynamic of our prayer.

When you say that Jesus is an agent, to what extent might he be the instrument of God rather than his own agent?

This is partly covered by my previous answer. Jesus is an agent, as risen from the dead, who is also the one who realizes what God the Father desires and wants to bring into being. In that sense you could say 'an instrument' though it's language I'm not completely happy about.

I find it hard to believe. What comfort can you give me of God's existence?

I was asked a little while ago whether I found it hard to believe, and my answer was in one sense I did, but I couldn't think of any other way of living my human life. And the hardness of belief was really the difficulty of sustaining a commitment which demanded of me a self-sacrifice, a level of love which naturally I'm not that much inclined to give. The hardness of believing isn't just a matter of ideas; it's a matter of how I want to live. But what comfort can I give in respect of God's existence? I think I can say that for me what is most compelling is the fact that there are people, as human as I am, for whom trust in God transfigures everything: people whose lives, emotions, priorities and visions are completely shaped by that belief in such a way that the human life that emerges is compellingly attractive. 'I want to be human like that'. When I look at some of these lives, even one Saint at the very least suggests that something else is possible. And if you can trust the instinct of a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Desmond Tutu, a Mother Teresa, and say 'that's where humanity comes through most obviously, then somehow their belief helps to make yours possible. Establishing the existence of God is not simply a matter of abstract argument, it's a matter of whether you find lives like that, trustworthy, worthy of respect, worthy of imitation.

On the question of coping with appalling, unexpected loss and how God is to be seen in the middle of that: there are never any generalized answers that will help, never. There is only, once again the knowledge that Christians, like other through the ages, have seen death and tragedy as dropping into the hands of a God whose love is not exhausted, who still has purpose for the life of the departed and for our own lives. That is an immense challenge. There are no generalities that help.

What is so compelling today about Christianity? Why can't I just be a modern, good pagan?

Feel free! But what's compelling for me is that I know of no system, religious or secular that is so wonderfully ambitious about humanity. Christianity claims that our humanity is 'open at the top', it can grow into a fullness of joy and liberty that is part of God's own joy and liberty without limit. And when you see that kind of immense horizon opening up in actual prosaic human lives like yours and mine: that has about it something compelling and attractive. The good pagan, I would say, for all his or her admirable qualities, will end up living in a rather smaller world than that. Part of the attraction of the offer of Christianity is living in a larger world, a world that takes human potential as seriously as God takes it. And I think that is in a world where often humanity is being shrunk and distorted by our systems and our ideologies and our politics, that sense of taking humanity with the seriousness God takes it and seeing that immeasurable possibility ahead of a joy that's continuous with God's own joy: I think that's worth believing.

© Rowan Williams 2008