This fascinating set of articles, from the period 1979 through to 1998, has a particular interest in the light of Williams’ subsequent career. There are moments of breathtaking directness in this theologically complex book. For instance, he writes (p. 182, referring to the Church) ‘This community is pretty consistently a travesty of what it is meant to be’, and a little later (p. 195), ‘we are unable to speak truthfully with each other, and public language becomes a mountainous refuse heap of self-protective clichés’. And how much theological argument is a ‘dishonest rhetoric of risk or cost, “redescribing resignation as heroism” ’ (p. 31)? Uncomfortable truths indeed.
This collection reveals Williams’s debt to Hegel. Williams finds himself returning repeatedly to Hegel because he offers a way of thinking about key things — difference, identity, God and history — that postmodernity, in particular, fails to think through adequately. ‘By absolutizing the other, otherness becomes un-thinkable; the laborious process of evolving a practice … in symbiosis with others … is avoided’ (p. 55). Hegel is preferred to Derrida. But how far does Williams appreciate the microstructures of difference? Marx is rarely mentioned, and Foucault not at all.
After Hegel, Balthasar is probably the next most prominent figure. A dense short essay on ‘Balthasar and difference’ explores difference in terms of Balthasar’s view of God as self-differentiating Trinity — in which the abandonment of the Son by the Father somehow grounds the difference between finite and infinite within God. Elsewhere, Balthasar and Rahner are compared, and the relation between the two starts to look a little like the difference between the earlier and the later Heidegger, as well as that between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
The longest essay is ‘Barth on the Triune God’. Williams shows how Barth’s view of the Trinity changed between Church Dogmatics I/1 and IV/1. Barth came to see the radical implications that history has for God. Moltmann and Balthasar come into view as a fuller working out of this.
There is a striking essay on René Girard’s theory of violence. Girard suggested that without transcendence, societies are condemned to escalating competitive violence or social scapegoating. Williams is aware of the awkwardness of claiming that the Church has a way of transcending these processes, but he argues that ‘modernity requires that myth and that community to halt its regression towards sacred violence’ (p. 183). The evidence seems against him given the scapegoating over sexuality currently evident within Anglicanism.
Essays on Simone Weil, Don Cupitt and Maurice Wiles show Williams at his most gently, but irresistibly, critical. There’s appreciation but also serious disagreement.
This is an excellent collection. Williams’ Hegelian stress on identity emerging from dialogue is difficult, since it doesn’t apply to non-human creation, surely our most endangered other, and it looks insufficiently aware of the intricate way that power constructs identity. This book is tremendously valuable, though, for its superb critical account of key figures in modern theology. Williams’ subsequent career makes it essential reading for theologically reflective Anglicans.
