Rowan Williams and Revelation Wrapped Up
By Charles Raven, SPREAD
Last Sunday, 25th January, the Archbishop of Canterbury delivered a sermon at Great St Mary’s Church, Cambridge, England as the Diocese of Ely launched its 900th anniversary celebrations. Although barely noticed by the press, it was an event which brought a lamentable truth into sharp focus – that despite centuries of Christian heritage, what now passes for Anglicanism in England has drifted far apart from the faith which GAFCON reaffirmed last year in the Jerusalem Declaration…
…But can the content of revelation – which is of course Scripture itself – be given a subsidiary role? While it is obviously the case that biblical revelation is not comprehensive in telling us all that we could possibly want to know, the historic Anglican understanding has been that God’s Word written is real revelation containing all things necessary for salvation. It is also true that biblical revelation comes to us as personal knowledge of a God who knows us far more truly than we know ourselves and reconciles us through Jesus Christ, but the lethal error which runs through this sermon is the downgrading of the content of revelation while maintaining the concept of revelation. Thus revelation is ‘the drawing of the mind into a place where it is overwhelmingly aware of being acted upon ad thus of its own secondary and vulnerable character’. In fact, revelation has more to do with asking questions than having secure knowledge ‘We are stuck with the difficult task of negotiating how to say ‘This is true’, sensing the accumulated weight and tracing its imprint on other believing lives, without saying, ‘This is a truth that needs no more questioning’.
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