WASHINGTON, DC: ROWAN WILLIAMS: TO UNDERSTAND BELIEVERS, UNDERSTAND UNBELIEVERS

Rowan Williams: To Understand Believers, Understand Unbelievers

By Robert Stowe England

The Christian Challenge

Washington, DC

March 30, 2004

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams told a packed house at a lecture delivered at Georgetown University that one can better understand believers in other faiths and even atheists by understanding what others disbelieve about one’s own faith. In turn, their understanding of your unbelief can help them.

The lecture was delivered as part of a “Building Bridges” interfaith seminar between Muslim and Christian scholars that began last night and will continue through Wednesday. It is the third such “Building Bridges” conference, following on the heels of similar gatherings in London in 2002, hosted by Williams’s predecessor, Lord Carey, and Qatar in 2003.

Williams, who delivered his lecture in an authoritative, polished style, argued that interfaith discussions can be helpful if they find “the appropriate language in which differences can be talked about rather than used as an excuse for violent separation.” His learned discourse illustrated why so many consider him a towering intellect.

The Archbishop used the occasion to criticize a proposal in the United Kingdom to require that religious instruction in schools include the “non-belief systems” of atheism and humanism. While he agreed religious instruction and faith can benefit by looking at criticisms of the faith, he rejected the notion that atheism is a fully developed system of its own outside the context of the faith systems it rejects.

Williams began by recalling the story of Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, who was arrested, charged with being a Christian, and brought before a magistrate in 156 A.D., when he was an aged man in his 80s.

The magistrate admonished Polycarp he could save his life by renouncing his faith and acknowledging the divine spirit of the emperor by saying ‘Away with the atheists.’

In this instance, “atheists” was used to refer to Christians and others who did not take part in the civic cult of the Roman Empire, and did not perform public religious duties and take part in the Roman festivals, Williams explained.

Polycarp, though, looking around at the noisy mob in the amphitheatre gathered to witness the fights of the gladiators and public executions said, ‘Away with the atheists.’ The magistrate grasped what Polycarp meant and he condemned him to be burned alive.

Various atheistic approaches in Western societies are “not intelligible apart from a specific context of thought and image, representation and misrepresentation of specific religious doctrines,” Williams said.

The Archbishop then described several varieties of modern atheism to illustrate his point that they are simply responses to a belief system and not a system in and of themselves. He named, among others, the “protest atheism” of Bertrand Russell, who found Christianity conceptually inadequate, and the “supreme intellectual detachment” of atheists who see the intellect “as a mechanism for processing checkable information only, with everything else reduced to emotive noise.”

The Archbishop also noted that atheists like Marx and Nietzsche who claimed that religious talk is ideological and “an instrument of social control whose surface conceptual structure is designed to obscure its real function and to divert thought, emotion and energy from real to unreal objects.”

The Archbishop faulted the UK proposal to teach atheism and humanism as belief systems, noting such proposals are based on “the pervasive assumption of modernity that the intellectual default position is non-religious.”

Williams warned that such instruction could “end up treating atheism as the only position not subject to critical scrutiny and the construction of a proper intellectual genealogy: not a welcome position for a rationalist to be in.” Even so, Williams argued, religious faith can be strengthened by intellectual skepticism and criticism.

The Archbishop, however, questioned the tendency in current religious instruction to teach about “finished systems for which questions have been answered rather than (to borrow Alastair Macintyre’s phrase) ‘continuities of conflict,’ in which the moral, spiritual and intellectual tensions constantly press believers towards a fuller, more comprehensive statement of their commitments.”

To build his case for a more critical assessment of faith, Williams cited the Zen dictum, “If you meet the Buddha, kill him.” Such a command is made to illustrate the point that “any shape given to enlightened awareness (the Buddha) will take its shape from the unenlightened awareness.”

The Archbishop transferred the analogy to the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He cited the work of Simone Weil, who, he says, concluded that “when the human ego says ‘God’, it cannot be referring to any reality to which the name might be truthfully applied. Because the ‘I’ that says ‘God’ is always self-directed and so wedded to untruth, God cannot properly be spoken of.”

Continuing the analogy from Weil, Williams added, “Any God my selfish mind can conceive is bound to be a false, non-existent God. The true God is known only in ways that cannot be reduced to theory or third-person language. If you meet God (in the language of systematic theology or metaphysics), kill him.”

Williams then began a tutorial in how certain statements from each of the Abrahamic faiths that are disbelieved by one or both of the other two can illuminate each of the faiths. He noted, for example, that Jews disbelieve the proposition that “God is free to disregard or rewrite the solemn promise made to a specific people at a point in history.”

Christians disbelieve the proposition that “God needs to be persuaded by our virtue to love us or to act on our behalf,” Williams said.

Muslims disbelieve the proposition that “god is the compound of several distinct divine agents,” as in the Trinity, Williams said.

The Archbishop noted that it is important to understand that the belief systems of one of the Abrahamic faiths is not a rejection of an opposite point in each of the other two faiths. “[O]ne of the darkest and most tragic parts of our history in relation to other faiths… is the construction of the other as the opposite,” Williams said.

Williams argued that the differences between groups in dialogue can help those participating in the dialogue to clarify their fundamental points of view. For example, he noted, Christians view the church as a separate body from the political community while Muslims see the religious and political world intertwined. “But this does not at all mean that [Muslims believe that] ‘religious’ authorities must dominate the state, or that the free exercise of different faiths is unthinkable,” Williams said.

Williams contended that “the issue of voluntary abandonment of Islam is a subject that needs to be looked at with nuance.” He noted that to Muslims, this is a political offence, but he added that it was not clear that Muslim jurisprudence required an extreme political penalty, such as death. Christians see this Muslim view as a denial of human liberty.

Discussions between Christians and Muslims on the issue of voluntary abandonment of Islam, he suggested, could lead to “a deeper recognition of the logic of free submission, and the unavoidably paradoxical nature of a political community governed by law which also assumes that loyalty and obedience to this community cannot be secured by external sanctions that seek to constrain the will by threat.”

The Archbishop said the interfaith dialogue does not have to be condemned “to the sterile and abstract task so often envisaged for it, of identifying a common core of beliefs.” This approach is built on the misunderstanding that the points of agreement are, indeed, the important points of the three faiths, Williams said.

“The exercise I have been describing is not about finding a common core at all; it is about finding the appropriate language in which difference can be talked about rather than used as an excuse for violent separation.” Williams said.

“[I]n the interfaith conversation, we can continue to make the claims we make out of conviction of the truth, but seek to break through the assumption that everything can be reduced to whether people say yes or no to a set of simple propositions,” Williams said. “Only in the wake of such a move can true dialogue proceed.”

Williams’s Letter to Griswold (first reported by VIRTUOSITY)

THE AUTHOR BRIEFLY TALKED with Rowan Williams at a reception after the lecture. While Williams was cordial and discussed topics not currently in the news, he declined to answer any “hard questions” about alternative episcopal oversight in the United States or the state of the Anglican Communion.

Williams’s press secretary, the Rev. Jonathan Jennings did, however, provide some comments about the ongoing claims and counterclaims about a recent letter Williams sent to Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold.

Jennings confirmed that Williams sent a letter to Griswold ahead of the recent meeting of the House of Bishops in Texas, urging that an effort be made to provide alternative Episcopal care for parishes at theological odds with their bishops. He said that the verbatim quotations Griswold read to the bishops in Texas was an accurate reading from the letter.

However, no transcript of those quotations has been made public, so the exact text is not widely known.

According to various news reports, Griswold claimed the letter stated that Williams said that alternative Episcopal oversight should occur within the parameters of the Province’s canons. But, it still remains unclear if the news reports accurately reflect what Griswold read from the letter since it was a closed meeting, and all reports have been reported second hand.

Jennings did make it clear that the quoted remarks read by Griswold from Williams’s letter could not be construed as a direct comment on the confirmations by five visiting bishops in Ohio in the week ahead of the House of Bishops meeting. “The [Archbishop’s] letter went out before that happened,” Jennings noted.

Jennings stated the Williams’s position is that ECUSA authorities and those who wish to set up alternative Episcopal care should work together to find a solution. Beyond that, he would not comment.

END