What Difference Does it Make? - The Gospel in Contemporary Culture Questions & Answers Session

Archbishop answering Questions at Great St Mary's Church

The lecture: 'What Difference Does it Make?' - The Gospel in Contemporary Culture

Listen to What Difference Does it Make? - The Gospel in Contemporary Culture Questions & Answers Session [26Mb]

Several related questions dealing with Christianity and other faiths:

What possible elements might bind diverse groups – like fundamentalist Muslims or fundamentalist Christians, secular Chinese and the rest of the pluralistic world?

Should the Christian Church play a greater role in the justice system?

What is the role of missions for the future of Christianity? Should their emphasis be on social welfare or preaching the gospel?

Do you believe there is such a thing as productive inter-faith dialogue? And do you think that only through accepting the claim of the gospels in Jesus will we be able to fully realize perspective, giving and intimacy, or do you think there are other ways to come to these understandings?

Archbishop:

Let me take the last two of those to start with. 'Is there such a thing as productive inter-faith dialogue?' Well, the short answer is yes. I've experienced it many times with Jews, Muslims, Buddhists particularly, and with some others too. And what I define as productive inter-faith dialogue is not an attempt to negotiate a position that nobody recognizes as their own, but to understand where each person's coming from, to be open to the possibility that you might emerge from the dialogue knowing more about God than when you started. This doesn't mean being converted to the other person's point of view, necessarily. And I believe also that good inter-faith dialogue helps you clarify a bit the possibilities and limits of action together in our society. This is related to one of the other questions: 'What possible elements might bind groups together?'

Now the examples there are of what might bind fundamentalist Muslims, fundamentalist Christians and secular Chinese and the rest of the world ... I'm afraid I haven't got a short set of answers that will solve that one. (That means my chances of the Nobel Peace Prize are much reduced!) But let me say this: in what is now several years of experience of dialogue with both Jews and Muslims in fairly intense and sustained ways, I've come to believe not that we have x, y and z in common and a, b and c that divide us; I've come to realize we do start from very different places, and we end in very different places and yet there is behind all of it a very strong sense that we see human beings in a comparable way. We see human beings as capable of receiving the will of God as an imperative and a possibility, human beings as given responsibility, and that's quite something. We don't see the process of that revelation in the same way. We don't see the precise demands upon us in the same way. And yet we have some sense of a human dignity, which I think is not trivial. And do I think that is only through accepting the claims of the gospels? Well, I suppose, finally, the reason why I'm a Christian is that I believe that it is in that relationship that human beings will most fully come to what God purposes for them. That's why I'm a Christian. Does God regard himself as bound by that? That's for God to say. Are there evidences of lives of creativity, holiness and excellence outside the boundaries of the Christian Church? Yes, don't let's delude ourselves about that. Does that mean that the grace and gift of God is around in places where I hadn't expected to see it? Yes, of course it does. Jesus had quite a bit to say about Samaritans in his own day, and some of what Jews said about Samaritans, and what some Christians say about Muslims these days no doubt, are not all that different. And yet, I can't get away from the fact that the gospel lays before me what I regard as a coherent, and credible and compelling vision of human beings becoming human in that relationship with Jesus. That's what I believe I've been given and what I must witness to. And what God is doing outside that relationship – I'm not God – I leave to him.

Should the Christian Church play a greater role in the justice system?

One of the things I was trying to say, a couple of weeks ago, is that a good society is one which understands that people have lots of overlapping allegiances. While everybody may be a subject of the law of the land, that's not the only thing about them. The law of the land when it's working well, is working with, not against those commitments and loyalties which, as a matter of fact, hold people together. These are sometimes as strong as religious law, and sometimes are just a matter of association and habit. So, I would like to see in a well-functioning society a universal law that – as I think I said in the lecture a couple of weeks ago - guarantees fundamental liberties for absolutely everybody with access for absolutely everybody. But one that is prepared to ask where conscientious exceptions should be made, where local custom or religious methods of conflict resolution might be supported by the law of the land ...and I think that does apply to Christian culture and law and morals, as to Islamic.

What is the role of missions for the future of Christianity? Should their emphasis be on social welfare or preaching the gospel?

Both! Because preaching the gospel is preaching, proclaiming that human beings are immeasurably worthwhile in God's eyes. They are so worthwhile that the life of God in the flesh, the life of Christ, is poured out for the sake of everybody. God so loved the world that that he gave his only son says the fourth gospel. In other words, preaching the gospel is saying that human beings are more worthwhile than you could ever begin to imagine. And if that's the case, the social implications and the political implications are immense. Most of our world is not organized on the basis that human beings are massively worthwhile. The Archbishop of York and I spent a couple of hours this afternoon in a detention centre in Oakington, and that is why I want to say rather strongly this evening that quite a bit of our society and our world is not organized on the basic vision that human beings are infinitely worthwhile.

If you decide to ignore parts of the Bible which clash with modern ideas of equality and human rights, do you undermine its primacy and part of Christian belief? Does this mean that you believe that some parts of the Bible are not divinely inspired?

I don't think we ought to ignore any parts of the Bible, and I certainly don't think that modern ideas of equality and human rights are God-given and obvious. How we read the Bible's vision of human rights and responsibilities in our contemporary social context is always a bit of a challenge, and it's shifted a bit across the centuries. To take the obvious example: it took us quite a while as Christians to notice that slavery didn't sit very easily alongside the gospel. But I don't think that for all those centuries Christians were being biblical, and then suddenly acquired a notion of equality and human rights that taught them slavery was wrong. I think they just started reading their Bibles a bit more carefully. And so I don't think there is that absolute opposition (I think I see where the question's coming from) I don't think we simply ought to take slogans about equality in the modern sense, as obvious and unarguable. We need to bring them face to face with what scripture says. But be prepared to be surprised by what scripture says.

Genuine faith is openness to more than we have yet seen or known. How do you marry this with a New Testament called to guard the deposit of faith? How do exploration and authority stand together – or can they?

The deposit of faith in the New Testament is, I think, first and foremost the memory of Jesus and the witness to the fact that he is contemporary. That is, the memory of the mystery of the cross, the witness to his resurrection. That's what has to be guarded, transmitted, and made real in life after life after life, generation after generation after generation. And because St John says that the whole world could not contain all the books that could be written about Jesus: I take it that the New Testament also says that in that process of passing on the memory of Jesus and the witness of the resurrection, there will be more and more to discover, more depths. There is a great eighteenth-century Welsh hymn which speaks of the mystery of God as 'a sea to swim in, not to cross over'. That will do for me.

How do we as Christians effectively show this loving vision to the world?

Well, how long have you got! I can tell you how we don't. We don't show that loving vision by presenting an image of people who are constantly monitoring one another with such hostile anxiety that other people can't see in us a fundamental gratitude and generosity. And from age to age the Church has, sadly, got stuck in that anxious monitoring of one another so that we may not quite know where we are, but we're absolutely sure where they are. And the famous story of the old Scots lady, who decided to found her own church, comes to mind. The local Presbyterian minister came to visit her and says 'Are you quite sure that only you and your coachman are going to heaven?' (This was the only membership the church had got.) The old lady thought for a while and said 'Well, I'm not so sure about Jock...' That's one way we don't do it! I think the way we most effectively show loving vision, is by going on behaving as if change for the better were possible, as if it were not a fiction or a fantasy to think that peace and justice and reconciliation could happen.

Who are the people that the world looks to as hopeful signs of our time?

Well, I may be prejudiced as an Anglican, but I do think that Desmond Tutu is pretty well up on most people's list ... and why is that? It's partly because he shows that change in the direction of justice, reconciliation and forgiveness actually are not fantasies. That's a good place to start, I think.

In the sense that science can help us master the world, is it, in your words a form of 'terrible religion'?

Actually, yes ... I think that a scientific world view which says that the purpose of science is the exhaustive mastery of our environment is both bad science and bad religion. It's a form of religion. It starts with a massive world-conquering confidence that it can wrestle human limitation to the ground. I don't think that's a particularly good place for science to be, and most serious scientists wouldn't want to go there. It's certainly a form of bad religion. 'Mastery' is a very double-edged word. The mastery of our circumstances, meaning it helps us to have some control over the circumstances in which we live, so that we're not passive and helpless, OK. Mastery in the sense of containing and enslaving the environment we're in - so that we are never surprised by it and never at a loss in the face of it – I think there's something deeply inhuman about that and deeply unreal.

Modern Western society doesn't as a corporate body recognize its need for God. It does however seem to acknowledge a great deal of boredom and restlessness. In what ways do you think the Gospel can offer a compelling response to the modern experience of boredom?

When I preach sermons to young confirmation candidates I do sometimes, I'm afraid, say 'Sooner or later somebody is going to have to let you into the terrible secret: church can be boring. Get used to it.' A degree of boredom is part of your humanity; don't expect that being human is being constantly entertained. Putting that on one side ...though it's a warning worth heeding... I sense in the great saints of the Church, the really great Christians that you come across from time to time, that they are capable of what the spiritual tradition calls the Practice of the Presence of God or the Sacrament of the Present Moment. That moment by moment you are aware of yourself and your surroundings as somehow shot through with gift, with generosity, and moment by moment you just open yourself to that reality. And that doesn't mean you're in a constant state of ecstasy, it simply means that what's before you is itself. God's gift, God's being somehow radiates in it and you move from moment to moment with a sense of welcome. What else can one say–a sense of welcome; and maybe that overcomes boredom? But how to get that across as a sort of cultural programme, I'm not at all sure.

Do you have any thoughts about the way in which climate change and its connection with the movement of Western civilization may affect the way which religion has historically conceived of human beings in the world?

A very good question and I think already we're seeing in the world of religious faith, especially Christian faith, a degree of embarrassment about the way in which bad religion has prevailed to such an extent that we have been seduced into thinking that the world's there to be squeezed and used by us and no more. I think that over the last forty to fifty years gradually the emphasis has begun to shift for a lot of religious people and I think it will shift still more and it needs to. We need to be back in touch with that dimension of religious commitment which, as I said just now, looks at our environment with a spirit of welcome. Not 'What can I get out of this?' but 'What's the gift I need to receive from this person or this bit of the environment just being the way it is'. 'What can I receive from that?'

What do the gospels teach about homosexuality, is it an affliction to be healed?

Is sharia law a product of terrible religion?

Two very simple and very tough questions. Neither the gospels nor the New Testament as a whole have a teaching about homosexuality as an orientation as far as I can see. In the gospels Jesus is very clear about certain kinds of sexual behaviour being inadmissible for his followers. He doesn't mention homosexuality specifically, though he may take it for granted. St Paul at the beginning of Romans famously has quite a bit to say about the perversion of what he calls natural heterosexual desire into homosexual desire and regards the practice of that desire as a sign of human failure. The question with which the Church is wrestling at the moment is how to map all that onto people's experience and understanding today of homosexual orientation and behaviour. I'm not one of those who think you just tear up what the Bible says and move on. Equally I'm not convinced that we fully understand how to put those things together. And that of course is why the Anglican Church is in such a muddle over this at the moment, and if I knew how to cut the Gordian knot overnight, once again, I'd be very glad of a quick solution. I can only say that that's where we are. And I don't think that the Bible gives us much ground for simply regarding homosexual orientation as an affliction to be healed. It says quite a lot of other things about homosexual behaviour, St Paul takes it for granted that it's sinful but you don't get much about the orientation as such.

As for sharia law – it is a very, very wide-ranging scheme of legal understanding within historic Islam. It's rooted in the sense of doing God's will in the ordinary things of life. In some of the ways in which it's been codified and practiced across the world, it has been appalling. And in some of the ways in which it is practiced now in terms of the punishments inflicted and the attitudes to women encoded in places like Saudi Arabia, it's grim. But, to judge Sharia in its entirety by that, is really rather like judging the Bible by a couple of chapters on the genocide of the Canaanites, let's say, from the Old Testament. We need a bit of perspective on this, and my doomed enterprise the other day was trying to produce a bit of perspective ... let that be a warning to you all!

Can you unpack a bit more the way in which art can aid the life of faith?

I suppose I'm slightly prejudiced in that I find the arts one of the most enriching things about my faith. It's one of the things that feeds my faith: drama, the visual arts and perhaps particularly poetry. And art feeds the life of faith when it keeps alive that sense of the unseen depth of things: whether it's the depth of human relations and emotions in drama and fiction or the depth of the visual world in the visual arts. That sense that there's always more to it ... I think the phrase I used a few years ago writing about this, was that the religious dimension of art isrecognizing that everything is more than it is; gives more than it has; has a resource, a dimension to it that we don't otherwise see. Understanding something about the world of art just habituates us to living in a world which is strange, not a world that's capturable and containable, and I think that's good for us as people of faith.

Is faith the fruit of our desire or renunciation?

Well, the fascinating thing I suppose is that faith is both the end of all our desiring, it's where all our deepest longings and emotions are converging, and at the same time we're told that when you get to that point of deepest convergence you can expect it to be like nothing you've ever imagined–renunciation. So, I'm afraid it's a very Anglican answer, both. We can't understand faith at all unless we understand that it is about desire. It's about Eros, about longing, about the yearning for beauty, love, relation, intimacy and you can't read a word of any religious text without seeing that. And yet, and yet the worst thing that can happen to us, it's sometimes said, is to get our heart's desire, as if I were to write what would make me happy, fill in the form, hand it in to the holy and mysterious, and holy and mysterious instead of being holy and mysterious, said to me 'OK, you can have exactly what you want. No more, no less'. And what I would miss out on was all that I hadn't known I wanted, all that I'd never known I desired. It's why, if you'll forgive the analogy, computer dating is a bad analogy for faith! We need to be surprised, and if we want to be surprised we need to do a bit of renunciation, letting go of our attempt to master the future. It's the old ego again, trying to get on top of things and renouncing that and saying 'OK, I have to let go of what I think I want from God, what I think I want God to be like: I'd better let God be God.' Every serious Christian writer, I think, has taken that for granted and spelled it out, and it's what the great masters and mistresses of contemplation are always talking about.

You spoke of the difficulties of ego. Is there a particularly hard battle to be fought in this respect, surrounded by the ceremony and importance of your office?

Many years ago when I was fairly newly ordained, I remember taking part in a ceremony – I think it was a wedding – in Norwich Cathedral. Dressed up a bit and going in procession to the Cathedral to take the service, we passed some tourists peering at us round a pillar. And I suddenly had this awful revelation of how utterly absurd it must all look! Quite seriously, unless you retain at least some sense of the absolute ridiculousness of it, you're missing out. Because, here we are, a Church with a long history and intellectual sophistication of sorts and lots of treasures both literal and metaphorical, telling the world about poverty and openness of heart and all the rest of it ... Here we are, an established Church talking about a rejected, powerless, crucified Saviour ... And the reason for carrying on with the Church is not that it looks serious and compelling and earnest all the time, but that whatever else happens it still retains from age to age the saving grace of repentance, which is another way of saying it sees itself as stupid. I said a couple of years ago that rather than saying the Church is one holy, catholic and apostolic, we should say the Church is one holy, catholic, apostolic and repentant. Because when the Church turns on itself that perspective of realism, then it must know what it is not doing, witnessing and achieving. And we just have to keep that alive as individuals, not just Archbishops, as a Church corporately, otherwise we are sunk.

Thank you.

© Rowan Williams 2008