ROWAN WILLIAMS ON CONTEMPORARY THEOLOGY

theology at the moment is really a very very interesting field of study and especially in in britain in the last 20 years or so i think has changed enormously and changed mostly for the better what i've seen is two or three trends two or three movements that have quite drastically changed how theology feels and perhaps i can go back a bit here to to thinking about when i began my theological study in the 1960s that was a time when one of the most dominant elements in theology was the study of the new testament in a way that was shaped by german expertise by the great german figures like rudolf bultmann who on the whole approached the new testament as a document which reflected the life of the early church rather than the life of jesus say which assumed that the world view of the early church was mythological that is it was dominated by assumptions about supernatural beings and activities which we just don't share and therefore that the important thing in the new testament had to be simply the challenge to change your life which was expressed mythologically in stories about jesus including the story of jesus's resurrection it didn't matter much whether these stories were history or not they almost certainly weren't in bolton's eyes and we were left with the challenge to step up and change though what two was never very clear and alongside that in those years i think there was a growing kind of alienation from or skepticism about some of the traditional language of the creeds and we were all the inheritors i guess of books like bishop john robinson's honest to god in that era people were saying well all the language we use about god it's surely so much shot through with a symbolism that we now can't accept that it's just a universe we don't really believe in so we've got to drop the doctrinal structures and start again what i saw happening from let's say the middle 70s onwards was people realizing that actually you can't drive that kind of a wedge between the basic realities of faith and the language in which they're expressed you can't strip christianity of its imagery its metaphors its symbols if you try you end up with a very very thin kind of christian picture you end up really with a sort of doctrine that it's nicer to be nice than to be nasty and that doesn't add up to very much in the kind of world we live in and you can't really begin to make sense on that basis of the dense rich textured language in which we worship especially the language of the eucharistic prayers the holy communion so what i've seen i think is people taking much more seriously the the underlying structures and logic of some of those traditional doctrinal positions people getting much more interested for example in the doctrine of god as trinity which is one of those things in the 60s which seemed to be completely ignored people started asking well what what was it that drove people to talk like that in the first place and isn't this saying something absolutely fundamental about the nature of god that god isn't just a big individual but his relationship eternally isn't that something rather crucial for us and doesn't that tell us something about us as well as about god so you begin to see in those years from the mid-70s onwards a deeper interest emerging in those classical doctrines it helps that there's a new generation of theologians on the continent of europe at that time figures like jurgen multmann whose book the crucified god in the 70s made a huge impact on people of my age here at last it seemed was somebody who was thinking so much more deeply and so much more interestingly than a lot of the theologians we were reading that again i think produced more interest in the theology of the early church in the middle ages it led many people to think again and look again at some of the eastern orthodox writers i mentioned earlier and the result was i think that by let's say the late 80s early 90s there was quite a generation of theologians growing up who were profoundly interested in these what i call these big picture questions what we say about christ what we say about the trinity and very importantly connecting that with what we say about the church

Channel: Timeline Theological Videos

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Length: 5min 6sec (306 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 31 2015