Abstract
This innovative volume formulates a Christology present in Rowan Williams’s works, over his decades of wide-ranging scholarship and leadership of the Anglican Communion. Author Brett Gray focuses on the work on Fyodor Dostoevsky, presenting it as Williams’s oblique and most serious meditation on Christ. For Williams, Jesus exists as the “last word” that gives life and frees human beings from anxiety. G. notes that he does not aim for a theological biography, nor an analysis of Williams’s impact, but a dialogical way of proceeding that develops a Christology from Williams’s logic. The book draws upon language outside of Williams’s own idioms to evoke his fullness of vision. G. claims that the allusive nature of much of Williams’s work encourages scholars to “say more than Williams himself might” (1). The author amply illustrates his process throughout, as he identifies christological themes for Williams.
The book begins by discussing divine difference, as an introduction as to how God is present for humanity. From Williams’s 1998 essay on Thomas Merton and Dostoevsky ten years later, G. pronounces that “God might be a little like an author who does not hastily intrude upon his fictions to impose their meaning” (6). Williams appropriates Nicholas of Cusa’s notion of God as not an-other, but also neither not-other. Jesus’ existence has an ultimate grounding in the Word, while still maintaining a human personality. The Word is the “effective possibility of his full human agency” (24). Just as the Word is not-other to God, God has the possibility to be not-other to Creation. Jesus as the exemplary “last word” manifests a relation that is a serene presence, removing anxiety and providing life.
Gray designates Williams as an incarnational historicist; for him, meaning must emerge from the realm of history. Jesus’ own life generates progress and change, due to the “theosis of human possibilities in the place-holding lives around Jesus’s history” (49). Jesus lives within a dialectic of tension in the possibility of not sinning, a place of syncrisis where the truth is tested in a life. G. concludes, “Only then can the an-other who is Jesus mediate the generative not-other of God, and present a ‘last word’ with whom all may find a life-giving relation” (101). The author detects complications in Williams’s theories of mediation. Even though Williams perceives divine agency as tranquil and procreative, he comprehends creation as distressed.
Jesus himself is a concentration of the conflicting pressures and tensions, that demonstrates what it is to be human. Williams opines that the separate, divergent Gospel accounts maintain the original intent of Christian storytelling, to entice the listener into the dramatic tensions of Jesus’ life. The pinnacle of this tension occurs with the silence of the cross. G. explains that Williams highlights the dual opacity and intensity of the mediation in this God-event. “The generative reality of God comes to us most decisively through the syncrisis of silence and inarticulacy that is a tortured and incoherent body dissolving toward death” (109). The scholar holds that the Resurrection cannot exist as a historical event, but is perceptible only in its effects. Interestingly, for Williams the most powerful and central theology of the Resurrection event is Jesus’ legacy of absence, not presence. His body no longer stands as an item in the universe, but a generative and creative non-presence. The missing conclusion to Mark’s Gospel validates that Jesus’ future cannot be definitively narrated. “This non-presence is the mode in which Christ is the ‘last word’ to us, engendering perennial growth. A resuscitated corpse, one that can be itemized in the world, might provide a more determining word” (165).
The author argues that Williams’s eschatology links closely with his Christology, as the conditions of fallenness and the struggles of living in creation are interrelated. Christ’s “last word” of non-tragic end stands in the middle of Creation. God endlessly restores and guides human beings in a return to Him, overcoming any instances of tragedy. G. stresses that Williams’s eschatology maintains creatures in their settings of origin, in which they heal and grow in their relationships to one another. The author proffers that Williams’s eschatology could be bolstered by a more direct account of the possibilities inherent in the end-times. Nevertheless, G. credits Williams’s innovative re-centering of theology away from the primordial fall to the “last word” that endlessly engenders life-giving possibilities.
G.’s volume generally accomplishes his goals of constructing Williams’s Christ, from his theological logic and an array of publications. It exhibits a meticulous investigation of passages and balanced appraisal of Williams. The book tends to be stronger on ontology and soteriology, but lighter on the teaching and prophetic roles of Jesus. While the book would be a difficult text to navigate for those not in the discourse, it would be well suited for those acquainted with Christology and Williams’s scholarship.