Know-it-all heretics

Eunomius has everything figured out. Which pretty much summarises everything that is wrong with his theology. Divinity is, Eunomius claims, unbegottenness (which is why he thinks that the Son cannot be divine). Basil is aghast: “How much arrogance and pride would it take for someone to think that he has discovered the very substance of God?” (Against Eunomius, 1.12). Eunomius is like every other heretic: an aggravating know-it-all.

Arius is certain that the Son is not co-eternal with the Father. Apollinaris, agreeing that Arius must be wrong, knows that Christ can be fully divine so long as he is not fully human. Nestorius, going with the dismissal of Apollinaris, figures out how the divine and the human natures interact in Jesus (even in Mary’s womb!). Eutyches, standing with the church in rejecting Nestorius, solves the metaphysical problem of two natures (or one or three—the numbers all blend together). The early christological heretics all claim to understand the relation of the divine to the human in Christ. Each heretic solves the problem with confidence, but the church confidently keeps the problems and so keeps the faith.

The orthodox tradition maintains the tension between the knowable and the unknowable in its affirmations. We cannot know what divinity is in itself, just as we hardly understand the nature of humanity, but it seems necessary to say—if salvation is real—that Christ is fully divine and fully human and that these two “natures” are not merely pressed up against each other or mixed together, but are somehow united in the person of Jesus Christ. But orthodox theology rarely attempts to specify that “somehow”.

The heretics prefer to iron out the creases in their doctrines of God and Christ, leaving a smooth surface where everything is laid bare. But the orthodox tradition leaves the bedsheets in a crumpled pile, with hidden and mysterious crevices. Ironing the divine linen is an impossible task, for God is like a fitted sheet—accomodating yet unwieldy. Talk about God will always have hidden depths and untidy corners. “Heretics were too clever by half, thinking they could know God precisely so as to define the divine Being in all exactitude” (Frances Young, God’s Presence, 253).

Rowan Williams points out that the word “heresy” comes from the Greek hairesis, which connotes making a choice that creates division—“a heresy in St Paul is… choosing to belong to this little group rather than the whole fellowship” (“What is Heresy Today?”). The heretic is the one who looks at the doctrine of God and says “I understand this” or “I can prove that this is so” in such a way as to exclude all other understandings. The creeds, by contrast, were written to establish unity within the church through prayer, contemplation, and interpretation. To riff on Robert Jenson, there is nothing as capacious as a creed.

Teaching theodicy: a sketch

Tomorrow I will be guest-lecturing on theodicy for a colleague’s class on pastoral care and theology. Knowing the problem of evil to be one of those prevalent digressions in the theology classroom, I agreed to teach a whole unit on theodicy some years ago with great reluctance. But it has since emerged as one of my favourite topics to teach, blending the theological and the pastoral as it does. Particular suffering of the sort encountered in pastoral ministry problematises theology’s preference for neat answers.

The best resource I have found for teaching theodicy is Rowan Williams’ essay “Redeeming Sorrows” (found in Wrestling with Angels). While I have only once set this essay as reading for a class, I always keep it in mind while teaching on suffering. In the background of tomorrow’s class will be his line from the essay, “I suspect that it is more religiously imperative to be worried by evil than to put it into a satisfactory theoretical context, if only because such a worry keeps obstinately open the perspective of the sufferer” (p. 272). Throughout, Williams is attentive to the “uncomfortable question of who theodicy is being done for” (p. 271).

Together with Williams, my classes on theodicy tend to be a mix of Simone Weil, Marilyn McCord Adams, John Hick, James Cone, Sarah Coakley, G. K. Chesterton, and lots and lots of Augustine. A serious theological discussion about theodicy will always dip into Dostoyevsky, reckon with memories of tsunamis, and include the silence of unspoken personal horrors, but I find that the emerging discussion always tends towards certain important emphases. I’ve attempted to lay them out here:

• Suffering is mysterious, which is why we should pay attention to it and talk about it as much as possible
• Evil is [sic] actually evil, which is why it is never covertly good
• God is not a finite agent, which is why we cannot expect God to respond to suffering the way we would
• Christ’s suffering is real and particular, which is why it does not provide a general principle that confers meaning upon all experiences of suffering
• In theodicy, the temptation is to justify God to ourselves, which is why we need to question our motives in attempting to provide a theodicy
• Christianity does not provide a theoretical answer to the problem of evil,  but particular responses to the experience of suffering
• The life of prayer is the best stimulant of compassion, which is why Christians pray “deliver us from evil”

Lecture in Adelaide: Rowan Williams and theology in the public square

Tomorrow I'll be heading down to Adelaide to give a commencement lecture for St Barnabas' Theological College. It will be held at St Peter's Cathedral, with a commencement service at 6.30, followed by the public lecture at 7.30. I'll be speaking (gasp) twice, with a homily in the worship service followed by a lecture on "Rowan Williams and Theology in the Public Square." 

For the lecture I'll be suggesting a typology of four main types of public theology:

1. Proclamation (directly presenting the Christian message in the public square)

2. Policy (directly attempting to influence policy or public institutions)

3. Re-description (attempting to show that some aspect of a society or its history is only fully intelligible within a Christian frame of reference)

4. Imagination (a more general attempt to cultivate a rich imaginative vision of the world as seen through Christian eyes)

And I'll try to show that each of these approaches is always pressing towards something beyond itself – towards a public embodiment of the Christian message in particular lives. Here's an excerpt from the last part of the paper:  

To make room for God: that is the final aim of any public theology. To make room for God in human life and room for God in the public square. All our theological speech is gesturing towards this. In the end it is only life itself, a life reoriented around God, that can convey all that Christian faith means. This kind of public engagement is what Williams has called “taking responsibility for God.” In an essay from the new volume on Faith in the Public Square, Williams describes the public religious life as a life that “takes on the task of ensuring a habitation for God,” a life that “offers hospitality to God, so that this place, this identity, becomes a testimony.” Where this occurs, he suggests, one’s life becomes a sign, a word, a living sacred text. It is here that “we begin to learn how to be a sign inhabited by God’s meanings.” And this is what the public square needs most of all: not just more discussion and debate about God, not just a deeper consideration of Christian ideas, but the visible presence of symbolic lives, lives that mean God. 

Christ the Stranger: around the traps

My Rowan Williams book, Christ the Stranger, has been getting a lot of generous attention over the past week or two. I was astounded to see it listed as one of the Guardian's books of the year for 2012 (selected by the travel writer Colin Thubron). Even my wife decided to read it when she saw that it came recommended by the Guardian!

It was also listed today in the Christian Century's year-end list of top books in theology and philosophy. Wesley Hill gave it an extended review last week in Books & Culture, and that was picked up by über-blogger Andrew Sullivan in a post on theology for dark times. Simon Perry gave it a generous review in Oxford's Regent Reviews [pdf], and Philip Harvey from the Carmelite Library in Melbourne reviewed it with some thoughtful criticisms about the importance of Williams' Anglicanism.

I'm very flattered by all the attention! It says a lot more about Rowan Williams than it does about me – but I'm thankful all the same. And I'm glad so many people are reading about Rowan Williams: he's well worth the trouble, that's what I've found.

On other writing fronts, I recently turned in the manuscript of Salvation in My Pocket: Fragments of Faith and Theology, to be published by Cascade Books. It's a collection of the best short pieces from this blog, together with a bunch of new pieces that I've written lately (which explains why I haven't been blogging much!). The book has new pieces on childhood, saints, silence, time, the cross, the death of Thomas Merton and Karl Barth, travel notes on Illinois, and who knows what else. 

And I'm back at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena for the next month, where I hope to finish a draft of Dear Mister Herbert, my letters to George Herbert on the Christian life.

Caption contest: Rowan Williams at the Olympic Games

Life is never easy for the Archbishop of Canterbury – as these photos attest. Anyone want to supply the caption?

(Thanks to Buzzfeed for the great pics.) 

As long as they spell your name right: Rowan Williams and the Observer

After last week's posts, the Observer added an apology to the end of their piece on Rowan Williams, and removed the offending paragraph. An acknowledgement also appeared at the end of Theo Hobson's piece in The Guardian. The Islamophobia Watch website summed up the whole debacle in an extended post, rightly concluding: "It turns out that the Observer report is in fact misleading in almost every respect." Though to give them their due, they did manage to spell Rowan's name correctly.

No doubt the Archbishop of Canterbury was shocked and surprised to see his views misrepresented in the British press. But it's all water under the bridge. And let the one who has never misunderstood Rowan Williams cast the first stone. (I don't understand him, and I wrote a whole book about it!)

Anyway, it wasn't journalism's finest hour. But for a more positive and hopeful portrayal of the journalistic arts, and the capacity of the news media to "speak truth to stupid", be sure to check out the new HBO series The Newsroom. It's the latest creation of Aaron Sorkin, whom you'll remember from The Social Network, A Few Good Men, and greatest-show-of-all-time The West Wing.

Once more on Rowan Williams, Islam, and loyalty

Well, I contacted the author of yesterday's Observer piece on Rowan Williams. I explained that the potentially inflammatory quotations about Islam had been lifted out of context, and that they were actually statements of a position that Williams rejects. The Observer writer flatly denied that he had taken the quotes out of context. Maybe that's my fault; maybe my post yesterday wasn't explicit enough. So let me try this again.

Here are some excerpts from the original 2004 lecture which forms part of Williams' new book, Faith in the Public Square. The lecture is titled "Convictions, Loyalties, and the Secular State" – this is the section of the book from which the quotes on Islam were taken in yesterday's Observer. The sentences quoted in the Observer are in bold:

... the person's religious commitment involves both an additional level of social belonging, a membership in some other nexus of relations than that of the state, and a formation in critical questioning of the state's decisions, a reluctance to take for granted the legitimacy of these decisions without some further scrutiny.

This whole cluster of issues has become more immediate and practical with the current complexities over the modern state's relation to Muslim identity. Liberal commentators properly concerned to combat anti-Muslim prejudice ... persist in assuming that Islam is a set of convictions in the mode of much modern Christianity. To suggest that the Muslim owes an overriding loyalty to the international Muslim community, the Umma, is worrying; it is a factor in Muslim identity (say the liberal commentators) that intensifies suspicion towards the Muslim community in a quite unnecessary way. What is desirable is thus for Muslims to make clear that their loyalty is straightforward modern political loyalty to the nation state, unaffected by the private convictions that individual Muslim believers happen to hold in common.

...Maleiha Malik, a professional jurist of Muslim allegiance, has recently written at length on this conflict....

What this implies is in fact a subtle reframing of the issue of loyalty. Loyalty to a sovereign authority is replaced by or recast as identification with a public process or set of public processes; the simple question about loyalty, 'Are you with us or against us?' becomes a question about adequate and confident participation in a law-governed social complex. We are taken beyond a polarised picture of exclusive loyalty to the state menaced by mysterious fifth column-ish affiliations elsewhere. Loyalty to the Umma is not necessarily in competition with dependable citizenship in the state if the state's practices of consultation and acknowledgement of communal identities remove the threat of a total and terminal privatising of religious conviction.

This particular discussion ought to sharpen the agenda of Christian theologians, and to send them back to some foundational texts. Early Christianity, as we have seen, is a communal phenomenon proclaiming an allegiance that is deeply threatening to the unitary and sacred identity of the ancient city and the ancient empire. I have argued elsewhere that what we find in some of the records of the martyrs is in fact a surprisingly novel account of political loyalty: the accused refuse to treat the emperor as divine, but they accept the duty of paying taxes and praying for the public good. Thus they see themselves as participating in a public process, not as rebels against existing order; but they will not regard their loyalty to the state as a matter of exclusive and absolute obligation, religious obligation. They are, it seems, trying to clarify the sense in which political loyalty and religious loyalty are not in direct competition.

... While not a simple rival to the secular state, [the Church] will inevitably raise questions about how the secular state thinks of loyalty and indeed of social unity or cohesion. To this degree, it is not in a different case from the Muslim Umma.

As if by magic, this account of loyalty in Christianity and Islam becomes, in the Observer:

[Williams] also calls for greater integration of Muslims living in Britain and insists they make their loyalty to "the nation state" rather than "the international Muslim community". "To suggest that the Muslim owes an overriding loyalty to the International Muslim Community [the Umma] is extremely worrying," he writes. "Muslims must make clear that their loyalty is straightforward modern political loyalty to the nation state."

I'm sure this was an honest mistake – we've all misquoted things under the pressure of deadlines. But after Rowan Williams has spent so much of the past decade trying to build bridges between the church and Muslim communities in Britain, it was dismaying to see how quickly this paragraph was quoted across the web as evidence that Williams is, after all, a reactionary Islamophobe. By the time it got to the American papers, the headline had become: "Archbishop of Canterbury Ridicules Muslims..."

That's why I think the Observer ought to publish an apology.

Rowan Williams in the Observer: Muslim loyalty and the nation state

So a piece in today's Observer discusses Rowan Williams' forthcoming book, Faith in the Public Square, in which the Archbishop attacks David Cameron's 'big society' rhetoric. Excitingly, the article claims to be quoting from leaked passages of the book. Including the following, on Islam:

[Williams] also calls for greater integration of Muslims living in Britain and insists they make their loyalty to 'the nation state' rather than 'the international Muslim community'. 'To suggest that the Muslim owes an overriding loyalty to the International Muslim Community [the Umma] is extremely worrying,' he writes. 'Muslims must make clear that their loyalty is straightforward modern political loyalty to the nation state.'

That sounds pretty dismaying, and naturally it has drawn the ire of bloggers (e.g. here and here). But is it really possible to believe that these are Williams' own thoughts about Islam? 

He has written and lectured extensively on Islam in recent years. (If you search his website for 'Islam', you'll start to get the general idea.) He has discussed this issue of loyalty in other settings, and his views on the subject are no secret. He thinks that loyalty to the international Muslim community, the Umma, “is very close to what a Christian would say about loyalty to the church”. He notes that “the kind of comprehensive loyalty we associate with the nation state is a very modern and local phenomenon.” He stresses that, for Muslims and Christians alike, loyalty to one’s country is not a matter of “foolish” patriotism, but is “fundamentally a moral and religious loyalty, the kind of loyalty which holds you accountable to God.” Those quotes are from his published Zaki Badawi Memorial Lecture on Islam, Christianity and Pluralism, pp. 6-7. 

Williams has written so much on Islam in recent years, all along similar lines, that I find it impossible to believe that his new book will argue the proposition that “Muslims must make clear that their loyalty is straightforward modern political loyalty to the nation state.” Disregarding the question of Muslims, Williams doesn't believe that anyone ought to have a “straightforward modern political loyalty to the nation state”!

So what's the explanation for this sensational report in the Observer? I'd be willing to bet you five dollars that the passage quoted is, in fact, just the summary of someone else's view – a view of religion and national loyalty that Williams is critiquing. The line has been lifted out of context for journalistic purposes: it's the oldest trick/mistake in the book.

[UPDATE: A commenter at AUFS has identified the full 2004 lecture in which this passage appears – you can read it here. Williams is indeed merely summarising the way 'liberal commentators' talk about Islam, and his whole lecture is an attempt to explain why their view is inadequate. Interestingly, while Williams notes that such commentators view Muslim loyalty to the Umma as 'worrying', the Observer writer appears to have slipped in an additional adverb: 'extremely worrying'!]

This reminds me of a front-page newspaper article many years ago, back in ancient Israel. While the Psalmist was still hard at work on his latest song, an eager journalist got his hands on some leaked passages. Next morning, the headlines were printed: PSALMIST SAYS: THERE IS NO GOD. If only he'd waited for the published version – it was Psalm 14 – he would have seen the line in its proper context: 'The fool hath said, There is no God.'

Politics of the empty tomb

Some excerpts from Christ the Stranger have been posted as an Easter reflection at the ABC site: Rowan Williams and the politics of the empty tomb.

Rowan Williams and the Easter church

On Radio National this morning, Scott Stephens and I talked about Rowan Williams and the Easter church. You can hear the interview here – it goes for about half and hour.

Karl Barth website

Karl Barth's great-granddaughter has created a new Barth website as part of a university project. It's well worth a visit, especially for the nice selection of photos, videos, and audio.

And speaking of Barth, I can't resist reposting this from David Williamson – this is Rowan Williams on Barth's obedient theology:

Somewhere in all of this business of theological education we have to come to terms with that sense of an otherness, an elsewhere – not another place, another realm, another world but that which is not simply on the map of our concerns, our security, our ideas. An obedient theology is one which seeks to be formed by what is there and a holy life is one which lets itself be impacted, be impressed by the will of God. For Karl Barth, that meant of course, that an obedient theologian was someone who was free to be the most dramatic possible nuisance in church and world. Obedient to the otherness of God, such a person would be obedient to no other constraints and no tyranny that could be concocted on the face of the earth.

The problem with Rowan Williams

I wrote a short piece about Rowan Williams' resignation for this week's Times Higher Education – you can see it here, and reposted by the ABC here. "Williams believes in the Church more than he believes in his own opinions. All his troubles as Archbishop of Canterbury have stemmed from this fact."

Speaking of Rowan, I'm told the first print run of Christ the Stranger has already sold out – thanks to everyone who bought a copy! There are a couple more blog posts about the book by Rod Green and Mike Bird.

Job opportunity: Archbishop of Canterbury

So it's official: Rowan Williams is stepping down from the office of Archbishop of Canterbury at the end of the year, and will take up a position as Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Her Majesty the Queen is now accepting CVs from interested applicants for the position of Archbishop of Canterbury. Though no prior experience is necessary, applicants should be strongly motivated, with a proven ability to lead a worldwide communion, work with dangerous animals (including evangelicals and tabloid journalists), reform British society, and generally please everyone at all times. Experience in performing royal weddings and presiding over Lambeth Conferences is also highly desirable. The successful applicant may be required to relocate.

For full details of the salary package, including travel allowance, health benefits, superannuation, and lodgings in a medieval palace, please contact royal.highness@buckingham.co.uk.

The Church of England is an equal opportunity employer. Druids and other minorities are especially encouraged to apply. (Women need not apply at this time.)

Christ the stranger reviews

• Rachel Marszalek has posted a review of my new Rowan Williams book: the beauty of theology. Thanks Rachel!
• And Doug Chaplin posts about reading the book through Lent. He also has some good criticisms, which sound right to me.

Christ the stranger

My little book on Rowan Williams is available now in the UK. The print edition won't be available for another month yet in the US, though the Kindle edition is available now. You can also preview the contents at Amazon. Here's an excerpt from the start of Chapter 1: 

One afternoon in the middle of the 1960s, a scruffy Welsh teenager sat cross-legged on the ground upon a windswept headland, intently reading a dog-eared paperback while the crying gulls wheeled above him and the grey sea foamed against the rocks along the shore. He finished the last page – it was something by Wittgenstein – and looked for a long time across the bay, while the book lay open in his lap and his bare toes twitched in the grass. Then he got up, shoved the book in his coat pocket, and made his way slowly back up the hill towards the house, limping slightly as he went. Rain clouds had darkened the sky; tonight it would be cold, even indoors.

Rowan Williams grew up here, in Swansea, a coastal town in the south of Wales – a group of villages held together by gossip, as a local saying has it. One former resident, the poet Dylan Thomas, called it an ‘ugly, lovely town.’ That may be true enough: the town’s inauspicious brick houses squat in the shadow of the old copper works, the little suburbs huddle modestly in their white caps along the hills, a towering viaduct rises up above the poisoned river. But it is also a place of wild anarchic beauty: the town looks out across the brooding darkness of the sea, while the vast open moors stretch away to the north. Swansea is known for its strong university and rich intellectual heritage, and the young Rowan Williams, an uncommonly quiet and bookish boy, was shaped by that heritage. As an infant he had been very ill with meningitis, and he was never able to play sports or ride a bicycle or generally run about as most boys do. So from an early age he withdrew into the slower, solitary consolations of literature, philosophy, and history.

New Rowan Williams book: coming soon

One of my favourite songs is about going to California – and that's what my family and I will be doing in the morning. I'm on sabbatical, so for the next few months I'll be a Visiting Scholar at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena.

My new book on Rowan Williams should be out pretty soon too. There's an edited extract at the ABC site, from the chapter on politics: Politics of the Empty Church: Why Rowan Williams Defended Sharia Law.

And here's a blurb from Lewis Ayres:

Myers’ book exhibits many of the traits he describes in the theology of Rowan Williams: an attentiveness and care that makes the familiar strange, a sparse but rich prose that bears re-reading, a seeking always for historical foundations and resources. In fact, this elegant book is a complex intellectual biography that convincingly roots its hero in a series of engagements – the centrality of MacKinnon, Wittgenstein and Hegel in Williams’ thought is revealed – which are then shown to occur within an on-going reflection on the life of prayer. Throughout, the complex paths of Williams’ theology are introduced with clarity and verve. —Lewis Ayres, Durham University

It's a small book, short and snappy, with 14 chapters. Here's the table of contents:

    Prologue
1. Sociality
2. Tragedy
3. Language
4. Boundaries
5. Tradition
6. Growth
7. Mission
    Interlude
8. Saints
9. Desire
10. Hope
11. Prayer
12. Fantasy
13. Renunciation
14. Writing
    Epilogue

The St Paul's Cathedral hornet's nest

At the ABC site, Scott has run a triptych of pieces on the St Paul's Cathedral crisis:

• Rowan Williams: "The Church of England and the Church Universal have a proper interest in the ethics of the financial world and in the question of whether our financial practices serve those who need to be served - or have simply become idols that themselves demand uncritical service." 
• John Milbank: "And while very many London clerics over the years have made an honourable social witness, the fact is that the higher echelons of the London diocese have tended to be complicit with just this flummery and too much in love with a power that they can only touch through its trappings. Indeed, it is this sham ritual that has frequently blinded them to genuine symbolic resonance. And now this inherited blindness is exposed for the world to see – a most spectacular blindness. 
• Luke Bretherton: "For what is a Cathedral meant to be but a place where people can come and experience a different time and space, and can live, if only for a moment, in a vision of a different future, and thereby have reality re-framed?"

Michael Ramsey Prize winner: David Bentley Hart

This year the prestigious Michael Ramsey Prize for theological writing has gone to David Bentley Hart for his book Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale University Press). The £10,000 prize was awarded today by Rowan Williams.

Williams described David Bentley Hart not only as "a theologian of exceptional quality" but also "a brilliant stylist":

This book takes no prisoners in its response to fashionable criticisms of Christianity. But what makes it more than just another contribution to controversy is the way he shows how the most treasured principles and values of compassionate humanism are rooted in the detail of Christian doctrine. I am pleased that we have identified a prize winning book that is so distinctive in its voice. It is never bland. It will irritate some, but it will also challenge and inspire readers inside and outside the church. No one could pretend after reading this that Christian theology was lacking in intellectual and imaginative force or in relevance to the contemporary world.

It's true: Hart is an extraordinary prose stylist and a brilliant controversialist. He's a unique voice in contemporary theology. Grumpy, elegant, outrageous, and delightful – often all at the same time. Though this isn't my favourite of his books – I don't think it's as good as The Doors of the Sea, for example – it's great to see his writing recognised in this way.

The other shortlisted books were:

• Thomas E. Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality (Brazos Press)
• Christopher Cocksworth, Holding Together: Gospel, Church, Spirit (Canterbury Press)
• Richard Harries, The Re-enchantment of Morality (SPCK)
• Angel F. Montoya, The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist (Wiley-Blackwell)
• Robert Hughes, Beloved Dust: Tides of the Spirit in the Christian Life (Continuum)

Has anyone read that last one by Robert Hughes? It sounds really impressive, but I haven't got a copy yet. If anyone has read it, I'd love to know what you thought of it.

Once more with Rowan and Lulu

Oh, and speaking of children: my recent post on Rowan Williams' letter to six-year-old Lulu was the most popular post I've ever had at F&T. It was shared over 4,000 times on Facebook, and received loads of extra visitors from StumbleUpon. All in all, the post got about 27,000 hits in the first three days – and it's still making its way around Facebook.

I found this very intriguing: I wonder why Rowan's letter struck such a chord with so many people?

Rowan Williams: a letter to a six-year-old

Speaking of Rowan Williams, I was quite touched by a news story in The Telegraph.

A six-year-old Scottish girl named Lulu wrote a letter to God: “To God, How did you get invented?” Lulu's father, who is not a believer, sent her letter to various church leaders: the Scottish Episcopal Church (no reply), the Presbyterians (no reply), and the Scottish Catholics (who sent a theologically complex reply). He also sent it to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who sent the following letter in reply:

Dear Lulu,

Your dad has sent on your letter and asked if I have any answers. It’s a difficult one! But I think God might reply a bit like this –

‘Dear Lulu – Nobody invented me – but lots of people discovered me and were quite surprised. They discovered me when they looked round at the world and thought it was really beautiful or really mysterious and wondered where it came from. They discovered me when they were very very quiet on their own and felt a sort of peace and love they hadn’t expected. Then they invented ideas about me – some of them sensible and some of them not very sensible. From time to time I sent them some hints – specially in the life of Jesus – to help them get closer to what I’m really like. But there was nothing and nobody around before me to invent me. Rather like somebody who writes a story in a book, I started making up the story of the world and eventually invented human beings like you who could ask me awkward questions!’

And then he’d send you lots of love and sign off. I know he doesn’t usually write letters, so I have to do the best I can on his behalf. Lots of love from me too.

+Archbishop Rowan

Now that's what I call real theology! Isn't this exactly why we need theological specialists: not to make the faith more complicated and obscure, but to help us grasp how simple it really is?