Difficult Gospel: The Theology of Rowan Williams

Anglican Theological Review, Summer 2006 by Malcolm, Lois

Difficult Gospel: The Theology of Rowan Williams. By Mike Higton. New York: Church Publishing, 2004. viii 170 pp. $18.00 (paper).

This book is more than an introduction to Rowan Williams's theology. It engages its readers in the subject matter at the heart of Williams's often complicated and abstruse prose. After a brief introduction, the first chapter grapples with Williams's insight into God's "non-negotiable" love, a love that "exposes and condemns the acquisitive, defensive, strategic 'self we have created" (p. 16). It describes Williams's distinctive reflection on the "disarming love" of the gospel (p. 23). Though betrayed and crucified, Jesus offers forgiveness and the possibility for transformation, creating among his very betrayers a "community of the forgiven" (p. 22). Jesus is God's word of acceptance and judgment, a gospel that tells of a "free, unauxious, utterly demanding, grown-up love" (p. 33).

The second chapter describes how Jesus, as crucified and resurrected, gives us a picture of God not as an "omnipotent being, free to choose love," but as One in whom power always and only emerges as love. God's will emerges from God's loving nature (p. 39). But Jesus' way of the cross is not a journey into randomness. Rather, it is a "ceaseless growing" into "what is always and already greater"-"the fullness of the divine," a "steady and endless enlarging of the heart" (p. 54). We are drawn to stand where Jesus stands before God as "Abba," sharing equally in his work "towards the good and healing of the world." In the power of the Spirit, we experience the "excess," "openness, and "generativity" of Jesus' relationship to the Father (p. 57). The Spirit is God's infinite capacity for new activity that is also faithful to God's purposes-an openness not exhausted by the particular identities of Father and Son. This Spirit draws us into a disciplceship in a worldwide community that struggles to find a form of life appropriate to God's life.

The third chapter discusses how the gospel involves us in "processes of learning" (p. 61). Drawing on Scripture, the Christian tradition, doctrine, and the church's celebration of the Eucharist, Williams describes the gospel as a language that creates options and new possibilities of action. Arguing tor a "capacious orthodoxy" that offers not "self-justifying projections" but the "risk of incarnation," he stresses the importance of serious conversation and argument in our discernment of truth (pp. 61-88).

Especially interesting is the fourth chapter on "adulthood." For Williams, adulthood is a matter of the right functioning of desire. Maturity contrasts with the infantile temptation to see ourselves as having only specific lacks or specific controllable desires. Grace awakens us to a continual transformation, an unexpected reordering, in which we see others as genuinely other and not as projections of our desires. It enables us to accept our finitude and to live within "the constraints of a finite and material world without resentment" (p. 96).

The fifth chapter on politics stresses the importance of the "ambiguity" that conies with a commitment to diplomacy, negotiation, give and take, conversation, debate, and argument, along with a view of evangelism as involving an ongoing conversation with those who are different from us. The final chapter on sex grapples with Williams's suggestions on how acting in sexual relations might reveal God's character and on how we might test whether certain views on sexuality are gifts to the Body of Christ or community-dividing.

The book is especially suited for college and seminary courses, and adult education classes in churches. It is an excellent guide not only for those without theological training, but also for theologians interested in an exposition of Williams's theology. Higton's writing is clear and passionate without reducing the complexity and nuance that careful theological reflection demands.

LOIS MALCOLM

Luther Seminary

St. Paul, Minnesota