Rowan Williams:

There seems to be some connection between language and the acknowledgement of a creator; as if the sense of finitude and dependence combined with the sense of not being a determined vehicle of natural processes were inextricably involved in using words in the way we do. To labour the point again, this is not an open-and-shut argument for an extra-mental non-finite reality, but it is a way of identifying where the concepts and images of theology and religious belief touch the basic questions about how we make sense of what we as humans characteristically do.

We speak because we are in search of recognition; we want to be heard and understood. And…this must mean that we want to have opened for us the possibility of new kinds of shared action, ways of ‘going on’ in the company of others. In seeking to be heard and changed by whatever presence it is that does not compete or exclude (i.e. does not behave as if it were another agent or subject like myself), I am also seeking to open myself to a kind of agency that is active beyond the plain realm of specific causal processes. We represent this only with the greatest risk and difficulty and habitually trivialize it by trying to display it as another and more effective causal factor in the world, a power that can override any other power. What we want to say is something more like a claim that there will be, for any imaginable future we could have, a context of ‘grace’, of absolution and renewal for our failures and of growing alignment with such an agency so that we become channels of its absolving and renewing operations.

Rowan Williams:

Ritual includes elements of drama, but is not identical with it…. Ritual is repetitive, transformative and publicly theatrical. It traces the same pattern of performance in different enactments over time; it makes ordinary physical stuff (including words and gestures) carry meanings that are not intrinsic to themselves; it involves us in performance that is about more than what happens to be in our individual minds. It has a nuanced relationship to the passage of time: rituals are conserved over time, so that it appears that we are doing the same thing at different moments in time, and the time of the ritual itself provides a narrative sequence that does not vary; yet the reason they are conserved is that they are believed to be pertinent to a constantly changing context of human action and utterance. To return again to a ritual form is to bring together my/our current situation, choices made or to be made, so as to allow them to be informed by patterns of intelligible act and speech which are not directly conditioned by that present situation. In other words, the story of my/our current doings is located against the backdrop of another and supposedly broader narrative canvas…. When Christians join in a celebration of the Eucharist, they allow themselves to be interrogated by the story of Christ’s self-sacrifice, to be questioned as to whether their present lives are recognizably linked with Christ’s and to be reconnected with the story of Christ’s death and resurrection by the renewing gift of the Holy Spirit. So the awareness here and now of how my life is unfolding, and my reflection on what I am going to put ‘out there’ in linguistic exchange to be recognized and responded to is confronted and enhanced by a story whose form is already fixed: a story which has happened, in such a way that my present options are extended or altered. Effective ritual is a matter of holding myself to account, not of retreating to a comforting alternative time-track in which everything is resolved.

Rowan Williams:

Drama highlights what we recognize to be true of our existence as human agents in general, the fact that our self-awareness is always of a moment of transition, as things move into an irrecoverable past and shape an unseen future. And, while we may watch a drama whose plot we know perfectly well, so that the outcome is not in doubt, we shall still be attending with the same intensity to see better how this moment opens and closes possibilities for the next (and beyond), hoping as we attend to see something of how it is that people ‘go on’, follow what is said and done. We are hoping to understand human agency and interaction, hoping to see more clearly how and why this leads to that and so to become aware of larger possibilities for our own ‘going on’ in understanding. The dramatist or novelist proposes a pattern of temporal movement and transformation which I can recognize as (in principle) like what I am aware of living in. In attending to this unfolding pattern, I am assisted to attend to my own narrative — perhaps to recover aspects of that story which I have ignored or buried, perhaps to ‘read’ my actions or those of others with new questions, new suspicions, so that my decisions and in particular my own utterances are formed by larger and more various factors than hitherto.

Lesslie Newbigin, on how the ecclesial debates over social justice versus individual salvation are often “embodied in a structural dichotomy”:

The concern of those who see mission primarily in terms of action for God’s justice is embodied mainly in programs carried on at a supra-congregational level by boards and committees, whether denominational or ecumenical. The concern of those who see mission primarily in terms of personal conversion is expressed mainly at the level of congregational life. The effect of this is that each is robbed of its character by its separation from the other. Christian programs for justice and compassion are severed from their proper roots in the liturgical and sacramental life of the congregation, and so lose their character as signs of the presence of Christ and risk becoming mere crusades fueled by a moralism that can become self-righteous. And the life of the worshipping congregation, severed from its proper expression in compassionate service to the secular community around it, risks becoming a self-centered existence serving only the needs and desires of its members. Thus both sides of the dichotomy find good reasons for caricaturing each other, and mutual distrust deepens.

Lesslie Newbigin:

One almost universal feature of the world scene…seems unlikely to change in the near future. It is what has been described as the revolution of rising expectations. People in every part of the world are agreed in making demands upon society which in former ages were made only by a small segment in each nation…. Everywhere people demand and governments promise “the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and everywhere people grow impatient and rebellious when the promise is not fulfilled; if there is one generalization about the human situation today that is almost universally valid, it is surely this. The inner relationship between this expectation of a new world and the Christian gospel of the reign of God is one of the issues that must be discussed in any contemporary theology of mission.

That last line is tantalizing. I eagerly await what Newbigin has to say about it (assuming that he finds his way back to it later in the book).

Lesslie Newbigin:

We are forced to do something that the Western churches have never had to do since the days of their own birth — to discover the form and substance of a missionary church in terms that are valid in a world that has rejected the power and the influence of the Western nations. Missions will no longer work along the stream of expanding Western power. They have to learn to go against the stream. And in this situation we shall find that the New Testament speaks to us much more directly than does the nineteenth century as we learn afresh what it means to bear witness to the gospel from a position not of strength but of weakness.