Rowan Williams and Eucharistic Hermeneutics

A wonderful essay, delivered by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Faculties of Trinity and Wycliff College at U of Toronto, can be found here. Thanks to Scott and the Faith and Theology blog (where, incidentally, there is also a lively debate about biblical inerrancy occuring just today!) for pointing me toward it originally. The essay is called "The Bible: Reading and Hearing" and is his attemt at a "renewed theological grasp of scripture. It is fitting, then, that in so seeking, he consults my former advisor, Kevin Vanhoozer, and his recent opus, The Drama of Doctrine. Williams raises a couple interesting and helpful points, that I thought I'd raise here, briefly.

First, Williams stresses that the test of any good theology of scripture is the primacy it gives scripture over everything else. This is a basic building block of being Christian. Moreover, this attests to the public nature of scripture; the reading of scripture is a public event. Listening and responsiveness to a unique and identifiable communicative act are the basic characteristics of the Christian, rather than self-generation or self-expression. Hence our understanding of the church as ekklesia. "From one (crucially important) point of view, the celebration of the Eucharist is that representation, the moment when all are equally and unequivocally designated as guests, responding to invitation."

Second, the bible addresses us in two ways: (i) as "one with" a specific audience of address in the text, as in exhortatory passages; and (ii) texts that, while not addressing a specific audience, suggest a "movement" or change, as in parables. In either case, we need "the capacity to read/hear enough to sense the directedness of a text. Fragmentary reading is highly risky to the extent that it abstracts from what various hermeneutical theorists (Ricoeur above all) have thought of as the world ‘in front of the text’ – the specific needs that shape the movement and emphasis of the text itself." Williams is concerned both by readers who too quickly draw polemical conclusions from passages, and readers who fail to draw any sort of conclusion about what the text is saying to us, the present audience that should be identifying with the original audience.

"I want to stress that what I am trying to define as a strictly theological reading of Scripture, a reading in which the present community is made contemporary with the world in front of the text, is bound to give priority to the question that the text specifically puts and to ask how the movement, the transition, worked for within the text is to be realised in the contemporary reading community."

Williams is not here advocating some arbitrary identification of our world with the text's. Rather, "the effects of the text" actually work to establish a connection with the reader by analogy with the "world in front of the text": "...the connections between elements of scriptural text, the connections that constitute what I have here been calling its ‘movement’, will be uncovered in the reader’s world as still effecting the same movement and making the same overall demands."

To fully realize this connection, the theologically sensitive reader understands the dual character of the text, as being an already completed work, but also a work that requires constant rereading and interpretation. "To identify a written text as sacred is to claim that the continuous possibility of re-reading, the impossibility of reading for the last time, is a continuous openness to the intention of God to communicate." There is an invitation, a Eucharistic invitation even, to reread, reinterpret, and respond to the claims the text makes on us, furthering the basic aspect (attitude) of the Christian mentioned above.

The last thing I wanted to note is Williams' reflection on the Resurrection in this context. Following the Eucharistic (responsive) aspect of reading scripture, Williams states that to properly hold our theologies of Eucharist and Scripture together, we need a proper Pneumatology, as the spirit is the "binder-togetherer" (to borrow a phrase from Orson Scott Card) of God and the Church. This requires, however, a robust notion of Christ's Resurrection. The scripture is an invitation by God through the Son to all to join him in fellowship. But, "If it is not the present vehicle of God speaking in the risen Christ, it is a record only of God speaking to others. For it to be an address that works directly upon self and community now, it must be given to us as the continuation of the same act, the re-presenting and re-enacting of the same scriptural reality of invitation and the creation of a people defined by justice, mutual service and the liberty to relate to God as Father and faithful partner." Resurrection as an ontological reality is the key to a theologically sound Eucharist and reading of scripture. Without it, the message of the scripture and the preforming of the Eucharist are simply remembrances of things past.

Williams' essay here represents to me a solid step toward clarifying a distinctly Anglican and (surprise) orthodox contribution to Theological Hermeneutics. I only wish he'd expand this into book form. It will be interesting to see how and if other Anglicans respond to this theology of scripture and the ontological affirmation he gives to the ressurrection and its association to the message.