International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 15 Number 3 July 2013

doi:10.1111/ijst.12004

‘Taking time’ and ‘making sense’:

Rowan Williams on the Habits of
Theological Imagination
MEDI VOLPE*

Abstract: This article argues that Rowan Williams’ methodology cannot be

fruitfully employed by others without grasping his intellectual habits and the
depth of his engagement with Christian tradition. The argument is centred on
the themes of ‘taking time’ and ‘making sense’, which run throughout Williams’
work, and proceeds in three sections. First, ‘taking time’ implies an attitude
of patient humility that frames engagement with all Williams’ interlocutors.
Second, ‘making sense’, as the primary work of the theologian, depends upon
‘taking time’. Third, Williams’ theological style cannot be imitated without the
conversion of desire that characterizes Christian discipleship as he describes it.

For several years I have included essays from Rowan Williams’ collection On
Christian Theology in the syllabus for my introduction to systematic theology.
Although they often find Williams’ arguments somewhat difficult to tease out, my
students, most of whom are preparing for ordained ministry, enjoy the challenge. But
that is not why I assign them. I draw students’ attention to how Williams constructs
his proposals, and the kinds of arguments he makes, in order to show them what the
performance of good theological thinking looks like. Appeals to isolated themes
in Williams’ theology have become quite commonplace, but there has been little
sustained attention to his theological methodology. To be sure, Williams himself
hesitates to set forth a methodology; yet his orientation to the theological task
implicitly identifies both the best starting-place for theology and a set of intellectual
habits that provide the best approach to the subject-matter. Closer attention to his
methodology suggests that the key themes in his theology cannot be properly
developed in isolation from a set of intellectual habits that help keep theological
thinking faithful to its subject-matter. In this article, I suggest that what distinguishes
Williams’ theological work is his emphasis on the way we do theology: theology is

* Cranmer Hall, St John’s College, Durham University, Durham DH1 3RJ, UK.
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346 Medi Volpe

always a risky business, and so the theologian should approach the subject-
matter with the right attitude (humility) and make judgements in the right spirit
(provisionally). I will argue that Williams’ theology (both ‘constructive’ and
‘historical’) centres on certain essential habits of thinking. My analysis draws out the
notion of ‘taking time’ as the essence of the practice of theology, then uses ‘making
sense’ to introduce a partial critique of Williams’ method. Although I find Williams’
method fruitful for constructive work in theology, I will argue that it lacks attention
to the condition of possibility of its employment – namely, the process of formation
of the theologian. I have divided the article into three sections: the first two sections
centre on the habits of ‘taking time’ and ‘making sense’; the third sets forth my
critique of Williams and suggests a way forward.
For Williams, theology’s primary task is the construction of narratives of the
development and practice of Christian faith, which communicate to believers
the character of Christian life.1 In this context, theological language serves ‘to make
sense of [the] world; not so much to explain it as to find words that will hold or reflect
what in the environment is sensed to be solid, authoritative and creative of where we
stand’.2 This language, Williams suggests, emerges from a process of careful
discernment and provisional judgements. ‘Taking time’ names the habit required for
the theologian to engage faithfully in the conversation that, for Williams, is the arena
for discovery and reflection. ‘Making sense’ is the fruit of patient conversation: it is
– to gloss over the nuances in Williams’ description – an interpretation that does not
preclude further interpretations.3 Note that Williams is describing the parameters for
fruitful theological conversation: theological work should be pursued in patience and
humility. This seems good advice for intellectual endeavors in general. But I will
show that in Williams’ theological method these habits are inseparable from living
Christian faith.4

1 I situate Williams’ theological methodology in the context of his account of Christian

identity in ch. 2 of Rethinking Christian Identity: Doctrine and Discipleship (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
2 Todd Breyfogle ‘Time and Transformation: A Conversation with Rowan Williams’, Cross
Currents 45 (1995), p. 296. I return to the ways in which these themes shape Williams’
theological method below.
3 Mike Higton observes that time plays an important role in Williams’ theological
performances: not only is the taking of time required, but every performance is open to
reinterpretation. See Higton’s introduction to Wrestling with Angels: Conversations with
Modern Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), pp. xxi–xxv.
4 Benjamin Myers also points toward this in his recent book, Christ the Stranger: The
Theology of Rowan Williams (London and New York: T. & T. Clark, 2012). Unfortunately
his book appeared too late for me to engage it as fully as I would have liked in this article;
nevertheless I have noted at certain points herein that our accounts of Williams overlap.
Jane Barter Moulaison has observed, likewise, the close relationship between ‘self-
deception [and] theological error’ in her article ‘The “secret fire and the heart of earthly
reality”: the theological vision of Rowan Williams’, Touchstone 28 (2010), p. 55.
Moulaison takes her argument in a fundamentally different direction than I take here,
though her interpretation of Williams’ theology is compatible with my own.
© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Rowan Williams on Theological Imagination 347

‘Taking time’: Rowan Williams on self-knowledge

Although taking time and making sense are inseparable in Williams’ theological
method, I start with the former, which is logically prior. The concept of taking time
emerges most clearly in his account of self-knowledge. At the centre of Williams’
concept of self-identity is the rejection of the idea that a ‘real’ self exists at some
deeper level of consciousness. Williams does not so much reject the idea that there
is more there, beneath the surface, than we are able to grasp, as he rejects the notion
that practices of excavation can unearth the ‘real’ self. There is more to the self than
we can know, but our inability to know it is not due to lack of skill.5
Williams offers dream interpretation as an analogy: he suggests that if dream
interpretation is ‘presented as the uncovering of a deeper and determinative truth, it
deprives us of possibility . . . by taking us away from the constraint of here and
now’.6 To give the interpretation of dream symbolism is to claim ‘to know
independently of agreement . . . to have a knowledge that is nobody’s in particular’.7
Instead, he invites us to consider successful dream interpretation as a performance of
interpretation that occurs in the context of an ongoing course of treatment involving
particular people. The persistent obscurity that characterizes this and all human
relationships is not a puzzle ‘waiting for fruitful suspicion to uncover the real
script . . . [it is] to do with the inescapability of taking time’.8 Neither autobiography
nor confession will sidestep the taking of time.9
The impossibility of complete self-possession further complicates the quest for
self-knowledge. All selves lack comprehension of the principle of their unity. This is
so, first, because the self is living a history whose conclusion is uncertain.10 Williams
explains that ‘the relating of a history is not the fixing of the self’s definition or the
uncovering of a hidden truth, but part of the process of construction’.11 In spite of
the impossibility of final self-definition, the attempt at narration is thus necessary
for the development of the self. Relating a history provides a sense of self that
influences future action and self-perception.12
Williams offers a second reason for our lack of self-possession: the other is a
constitutive part of the self. In Williams’ theology this other is first and foremost God.

5 Williams identifies in this attitude of suspicion a tendency to convert ‘metaphysical

finitude into intellectual lack’. See Rowan Williams, ‘The Suspicion of Suspicion:
Wittgenstein and Bonhoeffer’, in Richard H. Bell, ed., Grammar of the Heart: New
Essays in Moral Philosophy and Theology (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), p. 42.
6 Williams, ‘The Suspicion of Suspicion’, p. 39.
7 Williams, ‘The Suspicion of Suspicion’, p. 40.
8 Williams, ‘The Suspicion of Suspicion’, p. 50.
9 See also Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Harrisburg,
PA: Morehouse, 2000), pp. 136–8.
10 Williams, Lost Icons, p. 146.
11 Rowan Williams, ‘Know Thyself: What Kind of an Injunction?’, in Michael McGhee, ed.,
Philosophy, Religion and the Spiritual Life (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), p. 222.
12 See also Williams, Lost Icons, p. 144.
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348 Medi Volpe

God acts and speaks, and we come into being in response to God. Williams offers
Bonhoeffer’s experience in prison as an example: Bonhoeffer felt turmoil within,
yet he was seen as calm by fellow prisoners. Rather than identifying the ‘exterior’
presented to his companions as somehow false, and the turmoil as representing
Bonhoeffer’s ‘true’ self, Williams suggests that the unity of these two apparently
conflicting experiences does not reside within Bonhoeffer’s self at all: ‘the wholeness
of Bonhoeffer’s selfhood lies in its belonging to God’.13 There is no submerged ‘true
self’, which might be brought to light in its entirety: our wholeness exists only in God.
We are mysterious to ourselves in a manner analogous to that in which God is
mysterious to us, and for the same reason – our finitude.14 We have only glimpses of
ourselves, from which we discern as best we are able who we are; the same is true
in our relations with others. Thus, taking time never produces an explanation or a
solution to the ‘problem’ of the identity of the self: each articulation of self-identity
is an endeavour to make sense of the evidence available. Authentic communication
requires time, because there is no formula for interpretation of a self.15
In reading Williams one finds that it is not so much the case that taking time is
required for making sense. That is true, but the more important fruit of taking time
is the discovery that making sense is not the same as knowing. What happens in the
process of self-narration, to take one example, is that one discovers with increasing
precision what cannot be known. Williams suggests that the goal of reflection is ‘the
learning of patterns of behavior that reinforce the awareness of [our] finite and
provisional status, [our] being in time’.16 The limits on human life and human
understanding form the conditions for our existence. For Williams, literary tragedy
captures the finitude and provisionality that characterize human life.17 It often
presents a view of the world that is ‘deeply theological – and it demands of us a
certain degree of “venture, slowness and strain” ’.18

13 Williams, ‘The Suspicion of Suspicion’, p. 43.

14 See Williams, ‘The Suspicion of Suspicion’, p. 50. The concept is found also in Gregory
of Nyssa. For Gregory, knowledge of the essence of created things is as impossible as
knowledge of God’s essence: only God knows essences. See Contra Eunomium II, 106
(Gregorii Nysseni Opera II/2, ed. Werner Jaeger (Leiden: Brill, 1952), p. 36; Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 2, Vol. V, ed. William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson
(Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1892), p. 146).
15 Williams explains that suspicion overreaches itself when ‘it proposes to us a self-
description enabling us to set aside once and for all the illusion that our value or “reality”
depends upon the success with which we can activate a suprahistorical knowing subject
in penetrating to the hidden structures beneath the world of time and flesh’ (Williams,
‘The Suspicion of Suspicion’, p. 51).
16 Williams, ‘The Suspicion of Suspicion’, p. 50. It is not entirely clear in what Williams
says, however, how taking time helps us to avoid the pitfalls of confession.
17 Myers offers an eloquent and concise discussion of Williams’ engagement with literary
tragedy in Christ the Stranger, pp. 21–7.
18 ‘Living the Questions: The Converging Worlds of Rowan Williams’, interview by
David Cunningham, Christian Century 119 (2002), p. 29. See also Rowan Williams,
‘Resurrection and Peace: More on New Testament Ethics’, in On Christian Theology
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 273.
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Rowan Williams on Theological Imagination 349

Although Williams emphasizes the provisional nature of our making sense of the
world, making sense is interpretation, and involves making judgements.19 In order to
grasp the full import of Williams’ statement here, we must bear in mind his account
of interpretation. Success consists not in ‘right’ interpretation but in the reception of
an interpretation by those to whom it is offered. Understood in this way, the
judgement that sense-making implies does not resemble a sentence handed down so
much as a reading of a literary text or work of visual art offered in a community of
common interest in the object at hand.20 Williams’ characterization of the sort
of work involved in constructive theology as ‘taking time’ is important because it
takes into account (often implicitly) the ambiguity of our knowledge and so
emphasizes the necessity of provisionality in judgement.21
We should note that both the question Williams poses regarding the nature
of self-identity and the answer he suggests are framed by prior theological
commitments: the truest self we can identify is the self that acknowledges God as its
source. Moreover, ‘the acknowledgement is inseparable from converted behaviour
. . . the meaning of self-knowledge here is displayed in the performing of acts
intelligible as acts of a finite being responding to an initiative of generosity from
beyond itself’.22 The ‘converted behaviour’ corresponding to the acknowledgment
that one receives selfhood from God also serves as a clue to one’s own character. To
know oneself as existing in and for relation to God is inseparable from acting on that
knowledge.

‘Making sense’: narrative and the shape of Christian life

In what follows, I show how the habit that emerges in self-knowledge is mirrored in
the narration of history.23 For Williams, all human activity, and especially the activity
of making sense of the world by ‘imaginative “reading” and reordering’, is an
ongoing search for and creation of meaning. Making sense involves the construction

19 Rowan Williams, ‘Between Politics and Metaphysics: Reflections in the Wake of Gillian
Rose’, Modern Theology 11 (1995), p. 13.
20 In Williams’ discussions of judgement, there is a sense in which the ambiguity of the
world is like the ambiguity of a text or work of art. See Rowan Williams, Grace and
Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2005). See also
Williams, ‘The Judgement of the World’, in On Christian Theology, pp. 29–43.
21 This provisionality in interpretation accounts for the ‘dangerous’ character of history in
Williams’ work. See Benjamin Myers, ‘Disruptive History: Rowan Williams on Heresy
and Orthodoxy’, in On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock,
1999), pp. 47–67.
22 Williams, ‘Know Thyself: What Kind of an Injunction?’, p. 219. For discussion of
‘intelligible action’, see Williams, ‘Between Politics and Metaphysics’, p. 6.
23 Williams observes the similarity in approach to self and tradition, for example, in
Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past?: The Quest for the Historical Church (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 24: ‘Just as, in a good analysis of individual self, we emerge
with a heightened awareness of the strangeness within, so with history.’
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of narratives; for Williams, an attempt to narrate the progress of Christian doctrine is

an inescapable aspect of the study of Christian tradition.24 Each time ‘sense’ is made,
further questions arise.25 Taking time, as Williams employs the concept, is a form of
attention,26 an attitude of patient listening that is conducive to making sense.27
For Williams, the task of the theologian is most obvious and most difficult in
moments of crisis, confusion or change; hence, the fourth century is a paradigmatic
moment for constructive theology. Theologians are constantly in the process of
forming language adequate to the practice in which they are engaged, which orients
their lives toward God. When the difficulty of matching language to practice
becomes acute, Williams suggests, the task of theologians is more likely to be seen
as ‘pushing forward the consideration of coherence and transparency that are already
at work in more “informal” ways. And of course, when this happens, the possibilities
of crisis are actually multiplied: when you try to tidy up an unsystematized speech,
you are likely to lose a great deal.’28 In view of such a possibility, the theologian is
called to tame the desire for full, neat explanation. For Williams, every Christian
theologian starts in the middle of a conversation within a community whose past
belief and practice have shaped it in innumerable and unnameable ways: ‘what any
one believing life makes possible for others (and for which particular others) is not
there for inspection’.29 We are always already formed by precisely that which we are
trying to understand and to articulate.
Williams approaches the fourth-century trinitarian controversies as complex
events whose story cannot simply be told as the tale of the battle between
‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’. Therefore, Williams sets the ‘Arian’ crisis against a
background of pre-Nicene conflict. Prior to Nicaea, he argues, what constituted

24 See Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian
Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 384–429. John Milbank also
implies this necessity in the final chapter of Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular
Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 380–434. It is worth noting that both Ayres and
Milbank were taught by Williams.
25 Williams, ‘The Nature of a Sacrament’, in On Christian Theology, p. 198.
26 I owe the phrase ‘form of attention’ here to Lewis Ayres, ‘On the Practice and Teaching
of Christian Doctrine’, Gregorianum 80 (1999), p. 78. It should be noted that the
distinction between ‘attention’ and ‘activity’ is not clear: taking time is at once a form of
attention and an activity.
27 Williams’ description of reading Gillian Rose illustrates the kind of attention making
sense requires. Rose writes ‘in such a way that you have to work with her and almost
“perform” with her when you’re reading: you have to sense with her the pressures
that shift her writing this way and that’ (Breyfogle ‘Time and Transformation’ p. 296).
Anyone who has spent time trying to digest Rose’s work will certainly
appreciate Williams’ description.
28 Williams, ‘Prologue’, in On Christian Theology, p. xiii. For an interesting parallel
to Williams’ understanding of loss as partially constitutive of selfhood, see Frantz Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld,
1991), pp. 109–11.
29 Williams, Why Study the Past?, p. 24.
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Rowan Williams on Theological Imagination 351

‘orthodoxy’ was a set of commitments to the story of Jesus, not adherence to an

official formula.30 The trinitian controversies were ‘a debate about the kinds of
continuity possible and necessary in the Church’s language’.31 In this context,
Williams notes, ‘it became necessary to say new things and explore new arguments,
even while still professing to make no changes in the deposit of tradition’.32
Williams’ account of the the narrative of the church (as bearer of tradition) parallels
his account of the narrative of the self. Williams observes that ‘every telling of myself
is a retelling, and the act of telling changes what can be told next time, because it is,
precisely, an act with consequences like other acts, in the world and speech of
others’. So also, he argues, the telling of the church’s history shapes the church
itself.33
Williams’ appreciation for John Henry Newman’s treatment of questions
involving language for God reveals a central theme in his own theological practice.
For Newman, Williams observes, orthodoxy is
never, before or after Nicaea, just a matter of getting one set of formulae right
. . . We cannot simply assume that we know what any one set of words means in
isolation, let alone concluding from our analysis that such and such a writer is
‘really’ heretical, or that Arius’s theology was shared by this or that pre-Nicene
divine. It is an unexpected echo of Wittgenstein and kindred philosophers of
language: to find meaning, look for use, use in the global context of a system
of speech.34
Newman’s attention to language emphasizes pre-Nicene mindfulness of the
mysteriousness of God, and the consequent difficulty of speech about God. At
the same time, Newman eschews questions about the ‘orthodoxy’ of pre-Nicene
language. For Williams, Newman’s approach makes a very important point for

30 So the answer to the question Williams poses in the title of the essay, ‘Does it make
sense to speak of pre-Nicene orthodoxy?’ is yes, insofar as orthodoxy can be defined as
commitment to the story of Jesus. But the story must include Jesus in cosmic perspective
as well as being in communion with bishops of apostolic succession who share the basic
story. In fact asking ‘whether there was an identifiable “orthodoxy”, a prevailing sense
of the norms of Christian identity, prior to ad 300’ raises a whole series of questions about
the definition of a religion. Rowan Williams, ‘Does it Make Sense to Speak of pre-Nicene
Orthodoxy?’, in Rowan Williams, ed., The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honor of
Henry Chadwick (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 2.
31 Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition, rev. edn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001),
p. 234.
32 Williams, Arius, p. 235. For Williams, the ambiguity in theological language is not
complete. It is tied to ‘a set of commitments as to the limits and defining conditions
within which the believing life is lived, and the metaphorical or narrative beginnings of
theological reflection necessarily generate new attempts to characterize those defining
conditions’ (Arius, p. 236.)
33 Williams, Lost Icons, p. 144.
34 Rowan Williams, ‘Introduction’ to John Henry Newman, The Arians of the Fourth
Century (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), p. xlii.
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contemporary constructive theologians and historians of theology: the key to good

theological practice is attention to language, especially the language of Scripture
and early Christian theology.35 Moreover, this attention must be appropriately
disciplined: Williams criticizes Newman sharply for his distorted story of the
fourth-century trinitarian controversies. On Williams’ reading, Newman’s historical
account fails because ‘a very rigid structure has been allowed to dictate Newman’s
narrative and analysis’.36
In Williams’ criticism of Newman, we catch a glimpse of what I suggest
characterizes the process of ‘making sense’: making strange. Because Newman finds
what he sees in the fourth century familiar, he misinterprets the details. Williams
warns that when we assume that the meaning of Christian texts from late antiquity is
obvious, we are very likely being deceived. Studying the past is in this respect like
learning a second (or third) language: the words most likely to trip us up are false
cognates.37 Williams’ approach to the fourth century teaches us a crucial lesson in
theological practice: the strangeness of what we encounter in conversation with the
past is not always evident. Therefore theologians ought to begin by drawing out
the strangeness – the complexity and ambiguity – of ‘what the Gospel says in
Scripture and tradition’.38 As the self is not a puzzle to be solved, neither are
Christian texts puzzles whose solutions will provide dogma with an irrefutable basis.
Taking time and making sense are essential habits of thought for the construction of
narratives of Christian tradition.
Williams plays on the parallel between Christian doctrine and human
relationships, observing that ‘conversing with the Christian past is . . . simply
something that we do, and like other conversations, it has its unexpected gulfs
in understanding’.39 In spite of the impossibility of full disclosure, it is essential in
human relationships to construct narratives of the self and its development. A
narrative of doctrine is also necessary in spite of the ambiguity or obscurity which
shapes and limits all our readings of it. Williams rejects all neat narratives that
recount the hard-won victory of ‘orthodoxy’ over ‘heresy’. For Williams, the notion
that theological formulae can serve as a standard for ‘orthodoxy’ leads to two
mistakes. First, the idea of a standard suggests a certain ease of application: whether
something fits or not should be obvious. Second, it leads to the mistake of

35 Williams, ‘Introduction’, pp. xlii–xliv. Williams evaluates Newman’s Arians as

successful ‘in establishing a new set of possibilities from doctrinal history, in that it gives
a real theological valuation to the processes of intellectual history and does not attempt
to deny that the accurate perception of Christian truth is shaped by conflict’ (p. xxxv).
36 Williams, ‘Introduction’, p. xl.
37 Williams points to surprising incongruities and ‘unexpected convergences’ in encounters
with the Christian past. See Williams, ‘The Suspicion of Suspicion’, p. 45.
38 Williams, Arius, p. 236. See also Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy, pp. 384–429 for
discussion of the way in which misinterpretation of the fourth-century controversies has
misdirected trinitarian theology in the twentieth century.
39 Williams, ‘The Suspicion of Suspicion’, p. 45.
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Rowan Williams on Theological Imagination 353

understanding our study of the Christian past as the quest for final answers or certain
foundations for doctrine.40
The obscurity encountered in human relationships mirrors the interpretative
undecidability that obtains in situations in which doctrines are produced.41 Engaging
the history of Christian faith and practice thus involves venturing judgements
based on the available evidence, while knowing with certainty that the evidence is
incomplete. The patterns of attention that shape this engagement guide its outcome.
Yet the act of imagining the narrative continuity of Christianity is itself a function
of the set of principles that generate practices (or habits) of interpretation, which
involves the cultivation of attitudes and perceptions commensurate with those
practices.42 To take a belief or practice as ‘traditional’ involves a judgement and a
narration – and this judgement is also a judgement of faith that such narration is
possible.43 Ideally, each attempt at making sense of a particular doctrine or practice
reinforces the habits of attention best suited to the practice of sense-making.
As the foundational work of theological reflection, making sense requires
provisionality in judgement and an appreciation of the ambiguity inherent in the
materials available for theological reflection and construction. Here, I want to draw
attention to a crucial feature of Williams’ method that is easily overlooked: Christian
theology is to be practiced in the context of what he describes as eucharistic living.44
Making sense takes place in two interdependent moments in his theological thinking,
each of which has the Eucharist as its point of reference. First, theological
interpretation is displayed in an act of narration. Telling a story about the world and
one’s place in it that begins and ends with Christ as creator and redeemer and the one
whose body Christians become as the Spirit binds us together in the mystery of
the Eucharist. Thus, Williams suggests that the primary sense-making activity is the
Eucharist. Each celebration of the Eucharist narrates again the story of God’s
generosity to God’s people, supremely evidenced in the death and resurrection of

40 Myers makes similar observations, but takes the conversation with tradition in a different
direction. See Christ the Stranger, pp. 43–9.
41 See Williams, ‘The Suspicion of Suspicion’, p. 50. I owe the phrase ‘interpretative
undecidability’ not to Williams, but to John Milbank. For Milbank, the situation of
interpretative undecidability means that doctrines cannot be described as articulating in
propositional form the basic meaning of the narrative. See John Milbank, Theology and
Social Theory (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991), p. 383.
42 See Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998). Bourdieu names these ‘generative principles of distinct and
distinctive practices’ that at the same time involve ‘classificatory schemes, principles of
vision and division, different tastes’, a habitus (p. 8). The attitudes and perceptions do not
simply generate the practices; rather, the two aspects of habitus develop together and
reinforce one another. Perceptions and attitudes cannot be isolated from practices.
43 See Rowan Williams, ‘Doctrinal Criticism: Some Questions’, in Sarah Coakley and
David Pailin, eds., The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine: Essays in Honor of
Maurice Wiles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 239–64.
44 See, for example, Williams, ‘The Nature of a Sacrament’, in On Christian Theology,
pp. 200–6.
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Jesus.45 Second, we live accoding to the ‘sense’ Eucharist makes: eucharistic living
is a creative performance in response to God’s ‘ “absolute” creativity’.46 Christian
living and theological imagining meet here: the church and its self-understanding are
in process, and each narration of the church’s history is an aspect of its
construction.47 What is involved in articulating Christian identity is what Williams
terms ‘making sense’: it is both trying to understand and creating meaning in the
process.
Making sense, therefore, does not attempt to decode the world or ourselves.48 It is,
rather, a performance that takes the form of conversation with the world as well as with
the Christian past.49 This performance may be creative, even improvisational, but the
stage is set and the plot has been given. The ‘play’ is unpredictable to a certain extent;
it exists between the players, and there is a considerable amount of latitude in the
performance. The scope of this freedom is not absolute, however: there are limits to
what constitutes an acceptable rendering of the story. Importantly, one develops a
sense for fitting performance as one participates in the Eucharist-shaped life of the
Christian community.50 Learning the habits of taking time and making sense cannot be
removed from their proper context: Christian discipleship, which Williams portrays as
growing into the image of God in Christ. The marks of that growth are the habits of
attention appropriate to making sense of ourselves, others and the world around us.
I suggest that, given my reading of Williams’ theological method, the actual
practice of theology depends on the development of a habitus.51 He suggests that
faithfulness to the mystery of God informs and shapes a theologian’s practice,
implying that the possibility of the production of a faithful and constructive
proposal to some extent depends upon the theologian being herself in a process of
transformation. That is, though Williams does not explicitly deny the possibility
of the theology student understanding the subject-matter without believing any of it,
he nonetheless prescribes habits of imagination that centre on growing appreciation
of and respect for the divine incomprehensibility, habits best cultivated in the
context of particular liturgical practices. Because the rules for the practice of

45 Here again, the repetition is non-identical; see also Talal Asad on the liturgy training
the Christian self in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in
Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 153–9.
46 Williams, ‘Trinity and Revelation’, in On Christian Theology, p. 140.
47 See Williams, ‘Know Thyself’, p. 222.
48 Williams, ‘The Suspicion of Suspicion’, p. 39.
49 See, for example, Williams, Why Study the Past?, pp. 4–31.
50 For an account of the way narrative structures the theological imagination, see also
Graham Ward, ‘Narrative and Ethics’, Literature and Theology 20 (2006), pp. 452–3.
51 Here, I am operating with a narrower definition of habitus than Christopher Brittain in
‘Can a Theology Student be an Evil Genius?’ (Scottish Journal of Theology 60 (2007),
pp. 426–40). He applies the term to a broad set of practices that instantiate theological
concepts; I am working with a more strictly sociological concept, the notion of habitus
that Marcel Mauss sets out in ‘Techniques of the Body’, in Techniques, Technology, and
Civilization (New York: Durkheim Press, 2006), and which Pierre Bourdieu and Talal
Asad develop in different directions. Also see note 42 above.
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Rowan Williams on Theological Imagination 355

theology are flexible but indispensable, doing theology implies an ability not only to
recognize those – largely implicit – rules but to know how to apply them: in order
to follow Williams’ own theological method requires participating in a process of
formation. That is, the theological habitus Williams recommends corresponds to the
way of life he describes as eucharistic. How, then, does the theologian learn to live
eucharistically?

Redirecting desire: formation for the practice of theology

Before I can take Williams’ methodology forward, I need to bring into view two
aspects of the problem with his account of the practice of theology. First, as I have
suggested above, although Williams recommends a practice that depends on the
development of specific intellectual habits, he stops short of describing a process of
formation that might cultivate these habits. His reflections on Christian practice for
a lay audience emphasize the mutual interdependence of learning doctrine and
being in a process of spiritual formation. Christian theologians, in order to follow
Williams’ lead most faithfully, ought also to be in a process of formation: one grows
in ‘understanding’ the doctrine of the Trinity, for example, not by studying a
particular formula, but by contemplation of the mystery. Second, even given the
reflection on formation Williams does offer, his account is incomplete without
considerable reflection on soul-obscuring sin, which we might expect to find in the
context of Williams’ account of the self. Yet Williams does not give much space to
discussion of human sinfulness. Being conformed to the image of Christ is a difficult
process because our sinful habits, which obscure, violate or subvert that image, must
be overcome. Sin blocks conversation, since sinful habits run counter to the forms of
attention required for taking time and making sense. Because of the epistemological
and ontological effects of sin, which Williams seems to recognize, his failure to
describe sin in detail or to discuss strategies for forming Christians to resist it is
problematic.
I have argued that Williams’ account of the working of theological imagination,
and of Christian faith and practice more generally, involves a transformation of the
self. Yet Williams does not offer sustained reflection on the transformation involved.
Therefore, I suggest that further attention ought to be directed at the subjectivity of
the theologian. While I leave open the question whether faith is a requirement for
theologians (although Williams’ account seems to imply this), it seems safe to say
that, for Williams, the disciplining of theological imagination to attend properly to
the mystery of God is a process that might more fittingly be pursued as an aspect of
Christian life. In what follows, I argue that the production of a disciplined theological
imagination involves two interrelated aspects of subjectivity: desire and memory.
Accordingly, I first sketch Williams’ account of desire; then I use Talal Asad’s
account of the transformation of subjectivity in the medieval monastic context to
suggest a direction for the development of an account of Christian formation
commensurate with Williams’ account of the practice of theology.
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356 Medi Volpe

For Williams, desire fuels theological imagination. He interprets our desiring as

evidence of a niggling insecurity that surfaces as a sense of ‘dis-ease’. As such, desire
places us at an important crossroads intellectually and spiritually. The good news is
that this sense of insecurity can drive us in the direction of the God who does not
change. When this is our response to feelings of rootlessness or loneliness, which
beset us all at one time or another, then desire feeds a theological imagination
properly directed to and by hope in God. But if this sense of insecurity awakens a
yearning for control, then our desire draws us away from God, and so into a sinful
pattern of fearful self-protection.52
It is not surprising that Williams’ exposition of the history of Christian
spirituality indicates that ‘the tradition . . . insists that the conversion of desire lies
at the centre of Christian life’.53 The transformation of desire is as important for
theological imagination as it is for living out Christian faith: good theological
thinking proceeds from a heart that desires God.54 The heart that is turned toward
God reflects the divine love even as it participates in that love. Williams explains:
‘We do not begin from innate or intuitive ideas of the absolute or the transcendent;
we are drawn into a transformed life, speech and activity, in which the inexhaustible
resource of the God who draws us is gradually discovered.’55 In the context of this
discovery that the supply of love is endless and its source never exhausted, the life of
the one being drawn in is transformed.
As much as Christian living is characterized by the filling of the self with God,
however, active imitation takes the form of discipleship: ‘to be restored in the image
of God is consistently to follow the pattern of God’s life as revealed in Jesus’.56
Williams argues that the narrative that takes us from Good Friday to Easter indicates
‘what the whole project [of Christianity] is all about’; therefore, he suggests, ‘the
pattern . . . of loss and recovery’ inherent in that narrative is impossible to avoid.57
Like Christian life itself, all reflection on Christian living proceeds in a circle of loss
and recovery: each interpretation raises further questions. The ebb and flow of
making sense and discovering further ambiguity mirrors the ‘reversal and renewal’
of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection. In following this pattern, Christians
participate in Christ’s own desire for God.
Williams’ description of desire appears most suited to a discussion of individual
spiritual growth, yet the themes of sin and desire also shape his account of
theological practice. Theology, as Williams describes it, is an enterprise conducted in
full view of the perils that confront it – the temptation to create a system in which

52 Williams compares this desire to sexual desire in Rowan Williams, ‘The Body’s Grace’,
in Charles Hefling, ed., Our Selves, Our Souls and Bodies: Sexuality and the Household
of God (Boston: Cowley, 1996), pp. 58–68.
53 Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1999),
p. 130.
54 See Williams, ‘Living the Questions’, p. 29.
55 Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, p. 52.
56 Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, pp. 64, 128.
57 Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, p. 83; see also p. 46.
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Rowan Williams on Theological Imagination 357

‘criteria for conclusions’ would be clearly articulated is the theological equivalent of

the personal desire to control others and/or the world around us. Williams warns
against the seductive power of ‘the promise of explanation’. As with the self in
psychoanalysis, or the historian investigating the development of Christian doctrine
or practice, so also the theologian only ever gains more precision about the contours
of the mystery, but does not approach the essence of divinity. The explanation, the
clarification or the neat formula that resolves a problem or tension is to be suspected
of covering over the limitations of our own knowledge of God. Williams suggests
that good theology
can remind the world of religious discourse that it offers not a total meaning
but the possibility of a perception simplified and unified in and through
the contingencies of human biography: not the conquest but the transformation
of mortal vision. God is there not to supply what is lacking in mortal knowledge
or mortal power, but simply as the source, sustainer and end of our mortality.58
For Williams, just as the desire to control is inimical to the healthy development
of human relationships, it is an obstacle to the development of theological
judgement. The reformation of desire paves the way for good habits of
theological thinking. Acknowledging the provisionality of all theological judgements
parallels the acknowledgement of dependence on God necessary for the preservation
of healthy desire. Theological security consists in the certain knowledge that God
remains beyond all our attempts at description or explanation.59
Williams implies that desire is at its purest when it is characterized by the
kind of receptivity necessary for healthy relationships – and fruitful conversations
– to develop.60 The language of receptivity points back to the central themes of
Williams’ theology: openness to conversation, willingness to take time and the
patience to make sense rather than ‘explain’. The parallel to conversation is clear:
the ‘relationship’ in which one is involved in theological reflection is not simply
with God, but with the sources for constructive theology. The conversion of desire
from the inclination to control to the attitude of receptivity that characterizes
transformed desire involves the development of the same habits of attention that
make conversation – in Williams’ sense – possible.61 Thus the transformation
of our everyday habits of thinking are at the core of Williams’ theological

58 Williams, ‘Theological Integrity’, in On Christian Theology, pp. 13–14.

59 This reading of security is, of course, a bit ironic. Williams suggests that knowledge of
God is most certain when the knower grasps the ultimate unknowability of God’s
essence.
60 Williams’ account of desire borrows from and modifies Augustine’s. See Rowan
Williams, ‘Language, Reality and Desire in Augustine’s De Doctrina’, Literature and
Theology 3 (1989), pp. 138–50.
61 Cf. Myers discussion of desire in Williams’ theology; he interweaves the language
of desire with Williams’ account of the doctrine of the Trinity (Christ the Stranger,
pp. 83–91.
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358 Medi Volpe

methodology, just as such a transformation is the core of his account of the

practice of Christian life.62

Conclusion: the theological habitus

I have suggested that Williams’ account of theological imagination implies a habitus.

For Williams, good theological work depends upon particular ways of thinking and
desiring that oppose the inclination to explain or problem-solve. While this account
of theological work raises questions about formation for the practice of theology,
Williams does not include recommendations for the development of theological
habitus in the essays that most clearly indicate its importance. I bring the work of
Talal Asad into the discussion at this point because Asad shows how reflection on the
transformative practices of monastic life might supplement Williams’ own account
of the habits of good theological practice. Importantly, the monastic impulse that
emerges from Asad’s description places obedience at the heart of spiritual practice,
as the key ingredient in reshaping desire. Asad describes the process involved, for
monks under the direction of Bernard of Clairvaux and his followers, as the replacing
of cupiditas with caritas.
Asad’s use of Bernard to illustrate the development of theological habitus (in a
monastic key) helps, because it identifies misdirected desire as the main obstacle to
the development of caritas, love practised humbly, in joyful obedience to and
imitation of Christ. Asad’s rendering suggests that cupiditas is sexual desire, but for
Bernard (and his predecessor Augustine) cupiditas is misdirected desire.63 The
monastic context targets precisely the problem Williams himself identifies: desire
gone wrong. The tendency (proclivity, even) of desire to go astray points to the sinful
human condition. Practices of formation (which Williams certainly values and
reflects upon elsewhere) ought to be integral to Williams’ theological method
because sin is what most directly frustrates it.
Asad describes the procedure for transformation:
Bernard is not manipulating desires (in the sense that his monks do not know
what is happening to them) but instead is erecting a new moral space for the
operation of a distinctive motivation. In order to do this, he develops a discursive
practice – ritual dialogue – for facilitating and regulating a new way of living.
The sermon that gives authoritative exegesis of biblical texts provides a new
vocabulary by which the monks themselves can redescribe, and therefore in
effect construct, their memories in relation to the demands of a new way of life.

62 That is, for Williams, the intellectual habits of everyday life include all our habits of
thinking, not just high-level cognition. See also Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 74–5.
63 Bernard would have been familiar with Augustine’s terminology. See John Cavadini,
‘Bernard of Clairvaux’, in Allan Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine through the Ages: An
Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 99.
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Rowan Williams on Theological Imagination 359

This redescription of memories is a long and complex process. In it, (1) the
authoritative preacher and the monk addressed, (2) the monk interacting with
fellow monks, (3) the confessor and the monk in confession, and (4) the
remembering religious self and the secular self remembered, all contribute in
the production of a moral description by which the monk’s desires and feelings
are reconstructed.64
Williams’ own theological method calls for precisely the sort of ‘new moral space’
in which the theologian can exercise the humility that grounds the habits of taking
time and making sense. In his account, Christian tradition and the narrative of
Christ provide ‘moral space’ and ‘discursive practice’ as the context for constructing
those narratives essential to the practice of Christian life. The juxtaposition of
Williams and Asad highlights the importance of deeper and more sustained attention
to sin.
I have suggested that, for Williams, at the heart of the development of Christian
theological imagination is a form of receptivity. Relinquishing the desire to
explain or to control the outcome(s) of conversation involves the theologian in an
engagement with others past and present whose end-result cannot be predicted or
foreseen. And yet this engagement is not directionless: it parallels the process of
transformation of the monk entering the monastery, whose goal is conformity to the
image of Christ. It is clear from Asad’s account, as well as in Williams’, that
the original desire, which initiates the transformation by placing the subject in a new
discursive context, needs strengthening against the tendency to go astray. This
original desire need not be pure: as Augustine suggests, the reason for one’s decision
to go into a church is of very little consequence, because the church is the place
where desire is converted.65 The ‘willing obedience’ that is the primary Christian
virtue in Asad’s estimation is the emulation of the kenotic career of Christ. Such
obedience reflects a purified desire, the fruit of monastic discipline. Seen from this
perspective, the desire that must ground the development of Christian character is the
basic desire to be formed in the image of Christ. Then the desire for God that
develops is a participatory desire: properly-oriented Christian desire unites the
believer to Christ, and so doing involves her in the love of God. In Christ, believers
come to participate in the love and desire of God for God.66
Williams’ account of Christian subjectivity presupposes the reformation that
Asad discusses, but neither attends sufficiently to the obstacles to its development.
Given that Williams sees an attitude of patience and humility as the heart of the

64 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity

and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 143–4. The role
of memory in the (re-) construction of Christian identity is a topic I take up in more detail
in ch. 5 of Rethinking Christian Identity.
65 See Catherine Chin, ‘Telling Boring Stories: Time, Narrative and Pedagogy in De
catechizandis rudibus’, Augustinian Studies 37 (2006), pp. 43–62.
66 See Lewis Ayres, ‘Augustine on Love as God and God as Love’, Pro Ecclesia 5 (1996),
pp. 470–87.
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practice of theology, as of the practice of Christian faith, we should be aware that this
attitude does not develop except through conscious effort to resist the temptation to
explain, foreclose or gloss over the difficult bits. In particular, we should not be
misled into thinking that the habits Williams recommends can be cultivated in
isolation from a notion of Christian faithfulness that extends through the whole of
one’s life.67 Patterning one’s life after the example of Christ forms the context for
developing habits of theological thinking. Apart from this context, the practice of
patience and humility might be read merely as analogous to – for example – the style
of engagement Alasdair MacIntyre proposes in Three Rival Versions of Moral
Enquiry, which does not depend upon the kind of Christian commitment at the heart
of Williams’ account of the practice of theology and does not attend to the problem
sin poses in cultivating the virtues.68
I suggest, given the need for formation in Williams’ account of theological
imagination, that there is more at stake in the pursuit of theological integrity than a
set of rules for charitable discourse. For Williams, there are habits essential to the
whole enterprise of doing theology, which suggests that there is more to developing
theological imagination than training within an academic discipline. The close
parallel between the habits of Christian life and the habits of theological integrity
points to the importance of receptivity and the corresponding discipline of desire
for both endeavours. Good theological discernment rests as much on a form of
faithfulness in relating to God and others (past and present) as on the development
of other intellectual skills.69

67 Williams says as much in his 2009 Easter Sermon (www.

archbishopofcanterbury.org/2377, accessed 1 May 2009), suggesting that knowing the
truth of the Christian gospel is inseparable from living a life transformed by Christ;
unfortunately limitations of space preclude a detailed discussion of the Archbishop’s
Easter Sermon in this article.
68 As those familiar with MacIntyre’s philosophy will be aware, however, the strategy he
recommends for adjudicating between traditions depends upon one’s place within a
tradition, and the ability to evaluate charitably is not isolated from virtue. See Alasdair
MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and
Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990) and After Virtue: A
Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981), especially pp. 181–225.
69 I would like to thank Ian McFarland, Mike Higton and the two anonymous reviewers for
comments on earlier drafts of this article.
© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd