Who invented god rowan williams

The Scottish Catholics wrote a long and complex answer. Seeking more answers, he also sent a letter to the head of the Anglican Communion, who happens to be Rowan Williams the same Rowan Williams who officiate the recent royal wedding.

Rowan Williams replied :. Your dad has sent on your letter and asked if I have any answers. But I think God might reply a bit like this —. 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. Then they invented ideas about me — some of them sensible and some of them not very sensible. But there was nothing and nobody around before me to invent me. None of the final editors of the Hebrew scriptures is committed to any theory about the non-material nature of their deity.

But in the three or four centuries before the Christian era the divine body is increasingly understood by Jewish writers as drastically unlike our own, invisibly filling or containing all finite space, constituted of or at least manifest in fire or light.

It is not circumscribed as ordinary matter is, and so apparently contradictory things may be said about it. As Stavrakopoulou notes, at some point in the history of what became Israel, Hebrew mythology identified the high god, El, with his more active deputy. No one is quite sure, but this seems to be happening well before the great disruption of the Babylonian conquest in the sixth century BCE, though the traces of the older distinction can be seen in some rather laboured passages in Genesis and Exodus where a shift in the divine name has to be explained.

On the one hand, this means that the biblical god acquires a double set of robustly physical divine attributes — the more sedentary splendours of the enthroned High God as well as the active and violent characteristics of the warrior storm-god. But here the second presence is a glorified human figure representing the struggles and sufferings of the Jewish people.

It is an image that can be perceived clearly behind some of the early Christian language about Jesus. But it originally reflects a second great thought-shift in later Hebrew writings. A connection is made between the divine ruler of the universe and the concrete, human society of his worshippers. The god of the Bible is, in other words, becoming the god of that distinctive and remarkable moral project called Judaism. In contrast to an archaic, religious sacralising of the perfect, glowing, muscular, dominant body, there is a central strand in Jewish and Christian imagination which insists that bodies marked by weakness, failure, the violence of others, disease or disability are not somehow shut out from a share in human — and divine — significance.

They have value and meaning; they may judge us and call us to action. The biblical texts are certainly not short of the mythical glorifications of male power that Stavrakopoulou discusses; but they also repeatedly explore divine solidarity with vulnerable bodies, powerless bodies.

Even a reader with no theological commitments might pause before writing it off. I remember reading Augustine on the Psalms in my middle 20s, I suppose, when I was first teaching the history of Christian spirituality, and being completely bowled over by the Psalm sermons. Because, and they are at times a bit rambling, but the golden thread is the sense that the Psalms are spoken by Christ.

They are spoken by the head on behalf of the body. And then some slightly complicated stuff about the Trinity, trying again to disentangle, and a final more recent essay on what Augustine means by love. I took up a recent critical account of Augustine on love and tried to say a bit. You write that Wisdom is the underlying engine of the two natures of Christ. You are in the midst of giving a series of lectures right now that seem to be about Christology.

It seemed you were making a similar point about Aquinas as well. Well, interesting you should spot that, because I think that is what I am after in this series.

What might we now mean by calling Christ the Wisdom of God? And part of the answer — not the whole thing, but part of it, I think — is Christ is the model creature, just as he is the perfect creator. This to me is the key for so much. And the Wisdom of God so comes to a head, comes to a focus in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, that it releases something for the whole creation Rom.

When it is released in Christ something is released in us as the Spirit is given. The trap is sprung. The chains of sin and self-destruction fall away, and we become able in relation to Christ to exercise our humanity to the full. When we exercise our humanity to the full — lovingly, unselfishly, in praise and glorification — the whole creation comes into order.

Yes, because of course part of being sprung from the trap is sprung from the trap of the illusion that we are really God. And Jesus, I think, says if you want to be divine, stop wanting to be divine. Be human. And unfortunately that kind of spirit is rampant in much of our culture. Something like orthodox Christology translates into better human flourishing than any other alternative.

Well, surprise, surprise! If what we say in the Nicene Creed happens to be true, then the universe is like that. Has the moment passed for that, or is that still something that we can champion and be excited about? I hope we can. I think writing that essay was a very good instance of being careful what you say because God might hold you to it. And I believe that the truth is the truth.

The universe is the way it is and God is the way God is. I think what we see in the New Testament is at least two features which ought to make us pause when thinking about the Church. One is, rather basically, there are four Gospels. Matthew needs Mark. Mark needs Luke.