Rowan Williams: The Finality of Christ in a Pluralist World

"On 2 March Rowan Williams, 104th Archbishop of Canterbury delivered a lecture in Guildford, England entitled 'The Finality of Christ in a Pluralist World'. It presents as a meditation on John 14:5–6 and Acts 4:8–13, and following a pattern that can be discerned in many of his addresses since being translated to Canterbury (I think particularly of his Larkin-Stuart Lecture from 16 April 2007) he spends a great deal of time questioning what he describes as 'the classical interpretation of these texts'.

The difficulty with those 'interpretations', according to Williams, is threefold: moral, political and philosophical. 'Can we believe in a just God who — in effect — punishes people for not being in the right place at the right time?' 'Doesn't [the claim that Christ is the final truth about God] simply enshrine with a theological surround or mount, prejudices about the superiority of our culture?' 'Wouldn't [the claim that these texts present a universal truth] be to lift our claims right out of the realm of ordinary human conversation to claim something inhuman and actually indefensible and unsustainable?' The polemical intention driving Williams' presentation is made obvious by the emphasis in the last of these questions and his choice of the word 'inhuman' rather than the less loaded expression 'less than human'.

Those who have read or heard Williams before may well expect that he will proceed to redefine the expressions 'the uniqueness of Christ' and 'the finality of Christ' in the light of these objections. They may also expect that these redefinitions will involve a significant departure from the way these terms have been used by reformed and evangelical thinkers since at least the time of the Reformation. Both of these expectations are, unfortunately, realised again in the Archbishop's lecture."

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