Rowan Williams on Theological Integrity

As the sociologists and cultural critics of the last hundred years have made us aware, most speech, to varying degrees, is political. Whether we are aware of it or not, our speech often aims for or upholds particular power structures. Rowan Williams adresses this issue in his essay “Theological Integrity”. He defines integrity in discourse as “whether such a discourse is really talking about what it SAYS it is talking about”. Speech that avoids talking about the genuine issues, lacks integrity, as there is no possibility of response or conversation on the real issues. The underlying assumptions are never revealed and hence not up for question.
Speech with integrity, however, shows its working with critical self perception, displaying the axioms to which it beleives itself to be accountable, making it clear that there are ways in which it may be criticized and questioned.

Williams notes that religious talk is in a strange position on this analysis. On the one hand, it wants to make large, cosmic and authoritative claims, yet on the other hand these claims should lead to the recognition that the speaker is not God, and does not have a total perspective on everything. How can we speak of a God over the whole cosmos without simply using that speech for our own power claims?
The answer, according to Williams, is not to dismiss the observations of sociologists as post-modern guff, but neither is the answer to capitulate to them in secular scepticism. Rather, Williams looks for a theological response from theology and christian practice.
Firstly, he notes that Christian theology is often not an attempt to map the moral significance of every event in the universe. Not everything is open to definitive interpretation. Rather, it is an attempt to act consistently, even faithfully in a complex world.
“To say that a religious discouse is ‘about’ the whole moral universe may simply be to say that it offers a sufficient imaginative resource for confronting the entire range of human complexity without evasion or untruthfullness”.
For christians, this imaginative resource is the stories of imperfect response to God found in the narrative of Israel, and the narrative of the perfect response of Jesus. On top of this talking ‘about’ God found in the scriptures, there is also mingled a history of speaking ‘to’ God. While address to God can be as starkly ideologically driven as speech about God, Williams draws out three aspects of Christian worship that mitigate against this.
Firstly is repentance. The christian propensity to admit failure before God shows that its speech is as much under the judgement of God as the listeners. Williams encourages us to look closely at the history of the church and theology to become aware of where our speech has been used to justify this or that system of power, rather than being utterly transparent to the power of God, or to the giving of power and liberation to those who are addressed. This self critique and repentance applies both to the content of our speech, and its style. How much do we limit approved talk of God to the pulpit or the college, and exclude songs and stories (blogs?)? How much do we opt for precise language at the expense of evocative imagery? The Bible itself, with its multiple voices and styles, should move us toward repentance in this regard.
The second useful Christian practice is praise. To praise God is to say that there is something worth speaking about outside of my own need for power/ security. It is essentially a decentering activity. This is seen in glossolalia and in Job, as God is praised regardless of his usefulness to humanity, for his sheer otherness as creator.
But more specifically, God is praised for his saving presence in his revelatory acts in history.
Central in this praise for Christians is the Eucharist. Here we praise God by remembering and recapitulating the death and resurrection of his Son, the ultimate revelatory event.
“Here the action of praise necessarily involves evoking a moment of dispossesion, of death, in order to bring the novum of God into focus”.
Here we identify with the unfaithful apostles at table with Jesus, here we identify with a God who was broken for us, recognising our utter need and powerlessness, we worship a God who displays his power in weakness.
In this kind of praise, of this kind of God, we learn to speak about the world in a certain way, and about ourselves in a certain way, that is shaped by the movement from loss and disorder to life.
With repentance and praise come prayer. At the heart of prayer for Williams is contemplation: the realisation that God will never be definitively defined, there is always more of this person to know, so shutting up is always a valuable exercise. Williams notes the strategies of dispossesion of the Carmelites and early Jesuits. Theirs is a process that BEGINS with disruption to the everday patterns of life and speech (sometimes pathologically), but the “fruition of the process is the discovery that one’s selfhood and value simply lie in the abiding faithful presence of God, not in any moral or conceptual performance”. This leaning on the presence, grace and power of God, strengthened through prayer, goes a long way to uniting the outward forms of our speech and our inward reality, as our inward reality is less and less about securing our own position. A theology with integrity then, will be one that presents itself to God in penitence, praise and prayer, but more than that, one that is about supporting and serving the penitent, praising and prayerful people of God. Thus a theology of integrity isn’t about explaining why we have everything right (at least, more right than that church down the road), but constantly probing our assumption we that we have everthing right, and bringing the church to a decentered repentance, praise and dependence on God. “It will understand doctrinal definitions as the attempt to make sure we are still speaking about GOD in our narratives, not about the transactions of mythological subjects or about the administration of religious power”

“And to do this it needs to know when it has said what it can say and when it is time to shut up”

On that note...


ps. for those who were in the class, this is the article that was used to accuse Williams of outright apophaticism. It is worth reading for yourself to make your own judgement. It can be found in "On Christian Theology" by Rowan Williams