The Church in Dialogue with the World
Rowan Williams on Coping with the Seriousness of the World
I recently purchased a used copy of On Christian Theology: Challenges in Contemporary Theology, a collection of essays by Rowan Williams addressing contemporary culture. In “The Judgement of the World” Williams takes on the problem of the church in a late capitalist, or post-modern, culture. Proclaiming the gospel involves content, a message that is grounded in the tradition of Christianity about the death and resurrection of Jesus. At the same time, judgement, as Williams discusses it, necessitates a common world—a shared understanding of what it means to be human and what has gone wrong with the world. This isn’t judgement in a fire and brimstone sense, it’s the recognition that to call people to repent, or to a new way of life, means there is an overall common life experience. The problem, as Williams sees it, is the current cultural moment lacks this common experience. “Late capitalist societies are neither coherent nor integrated around a system of common values.” (34) Calling the world to judgement, in this context, leads to empty stares looking back at you.
At the heart of late capitalism is commodification in which every message or movement is co-opted into a meme for the sake of power and influence, which usually ends in exploitation. The church, like other cultural institutions, is tempted to participate. Williams writes, “There remains, of course, a nostalgia for ‘values’, which the Church should beware of exploiting. The diffuse discontent that consumer pluralism can engender…yields itself readily to any program that dresses itself persuasively enough in moral rhetoric…The Church misconceives its missionary task if it simply latches on to this kind of window dressing and echoes the individualistic and facile language of moral retrenchment that often accompanies a further intensification of administration control and the attrition of participatory politics.” (35)
Williams is critical of those who retreat to “communal enclaves” focused on “socialization and mutual support” over and against cultural pluralism. (36) Without a concern for public discourse or engagement with the world, they become “trivialized into stylistic presences”—a cheap meme and soundbite with nothing to say. The Church is necessarily historical, proclaiming the message of the gospel in a particular time and place. Every attempt to present an ahistorical gospel, some static deposit of tradition, becomes simulacra—a Christian Disneyland distracting us from the recognition there’s nothing there.
This is what is happening around the sexuality issue in many Reformed churches. Moral posturing around the meaning of sexuality and marriage plays in the current environment, meaning it sells. Like a Tik Tok meme or an Amazon Prime Day sale—it gathers a following, but to what end? Much of this posturing over biblical truth and confessions is really about money and power. The playbook is one of withholding funds from ministry shares and institutions that don’t parrot the correct language. This thinly veiled economic posturing reveals the true sacrament of the current age to be money, with the sure sign of God’s blessing being economic success.
The task of the Christian community is to live into the historical moment. To recognize how the gospel calls us to speak to the world, not in triumph as conqueror, but in uncertainty and vulnerability. Williams writes, “The Christian is at once possessed by an authoritative urgency to communicate the good news, and constrained by the awareness of how easily the words of proclamation become godless, powerless to transform. The urgency must often be channelled into listening and waiting, and into the expansion of the Christian imagination itself into something that can cope with the seriousness of the world.” (40) Listening and waiting—to speak in parables and stories. To dialogue, bringing the tradition and message of the gospel to bear on a new situation and moment, leaving room for the Holy Spirit to bring forth something new.
I end with a quote from Williams, who references Bonhoeffer’s Papers and Letters: “Bonhoeffer’s paradigm (as the July letter explains) are the encounters in the gospels between Jesus and those he calls or heals: these are events in which people are concretely drawn into a share in the vulnerability of God, into a new kind of life and a new identity.” (41) May we have the courage to testify to this gospel, the revelation of God’s love for this world—the real world, not some abstract ideal projection—in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is what it means to be the church.