Anglican Identities by Williams Rowan

Author:Williams, Rowan [Williams, Rowan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd
Published: 2014-02-11T05:00:00+00:00

The Bible does not supersede labour, but by its very form proclaims labour to be fruitful…There is, no doubt, a restless desire in man for some help which may save him from the painful necessity of reflection, comparison, judgment. But the Bible offers no such help. It offers no wisdom to the careless, and no security to the indolent. It awakens, nerves, invigorates, but it makes no promise of ease.8

The invocation of the name of Origen is significant – and Westcott wrote, for the Dictionary of Christian Biography, what remains probably the best overview in English of the great Alexandrian’s life and work. Origen’s conviction of the divine authorship of Scripture was perfectly compatible in his eyes with intensive textual research (according to Eusebius, his sources included what sounds like one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a text ‘found in a jar near Jericho’), a fascination with conflicts and apparent errors in Scripture (as an incentive provided by God to go beyond the surface meaning), and a willingness to sit loose to the historical reference of certain texts. Westcott is cautious about this last (it is illuminating to read in this context the introduction to his commentary on John’s Gospel, which will strike the modern student as highly ‘conservative’), but the spirit is the same; the fundamental conviction is that Scripture is a field in which to exercise and to grow spiritually. For Origen, exegesis was the attempt to find the unity of divine speech and purpose in the diversity of the text, just as in the diversity of the world;9 in so doing, the created spirit rediscovered its lost freedom. And for Westcott, the endlessly patient attention to the detail of Scripture makes for human and spiritual maturity; it holds us back from premature and limiting accounts of God’s nature and acts. As we read, what we are watching is other human subjects growing by their labour in response to God’s initiative; and so we in turn are moved to the same faithful labour and the same patience with mystery. This is not a matter of mystery in the sense of ‘new and startling revelations’; we read in the trust that the general sense of the reading Church remains dependable.10 But we need to acknowledge that our reading of any one text is likely to be in some degree provisional – simply because we cannot suppose that we shall be able definitively to exhaust what God has given in the whole interactive system of scriptural language and imagery.

This allows Westcott to drive home an important point which may sound surprisingly ‘Barthian’ for a nineteenth-century Anglican. ‘The world is not what I should have expected, nor the Church, nor the Bible.’11 This emphasis may be in some degree a response not only to conservative Protestant critics, but also to the apriorism of Catholic apologists; Newman’s work on development explicitly appeals to what sort of Church we might reasonably expect the saviour to have instituted. But for Westcott, God remains strange to us.

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