Rowan Williams's On Christian Theology (2000) collects fourteen essays that together articulate one of the most sophisticated accounts of theological method produced in the Anglican tradition since Austin Farrer. Williams, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 2002 and served until 2012, is one of those rare figures - like the Renaissance humanists he studied - who is simultaneously a scholar of the first order, a poet, a pastor, and a public intellectual, and these essays show all four faces.
The book's central contribution is its account of what Williams calls theology's three 'styles' or modes: the celebratory, the communicative, and the critical. Celebratory theology is doxology - the first language of Christian faith, the speech of worship and praise in which the community renders its fundamental understanding of reality. Communicative theology is the effort to translate this primary speech into forms intelligible to those outside the community, engaging the philosophical, moral, and cultural questions of the contemporary world. Critical theology is the ongoing self-examination of the Christian tradition, testing its formulations against scripture and against the demands of coherence.
John 20:16 - Mary Magdalene's recognition of the risen Jesus at the garden tomb, prompted by her name being spoken - is a touchstone in Williams's treatment of theological language. The resurrection appearances in John are characterized by a particular kind of recognition that cannot be anticipated or engineered: the disciples encounter someone they do not at first recognize, and recognition comes as gift. This structure - of being surprised by the familiar, of the known appearing in a form that requires relearning - is, Williams suggests, the model for authentic theological encounter with the biblical witness.
1 Corinthians 1:18-25 - Paul's insistence that the cross is 'foolishness to those who are perishing' but 'the power of God and the wisdom of God' to those who are being saved - is the irreducible particularity that Williams insists theology cannot abstract away. The temptation of systematic theology is to domesticate this foolishness, to make it philosophically respectable, to translate the scandal of the cross into something the cultured despisers can accept. Williams argues consistently that this temptation must be resisted: genuine theology begins from the strange, particular, scandalous particulars of the biblical narrative rather than from general truths the narrative is taken to illustrate.
John 1:14 - 'And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us' - grounds Williams's Christology and his account of theological language. The Incarnation means that God's self-communication takes the form of a particular human life, a particular death, a particular resurrection. All Christian doctrine is, at bottom, an attempt to think rigorously about what this means - not to transcend it toward some purer spiritual content, but to inhabit it more fully.
Romans 8:26 - 'the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words' - opens Williams's reflection on silence and apophatic theology. The limits of theological language are not failures but appropriate acknowledgments of the divine excess that always exceeds what can be said. The tradition of negative theology - speaking what God is not rather than what God is - is not a flight from the particular claims of Christianity but their rigorous implication.
Williams's intellectual debts are broad and unusual: Aquinas, Wittgenstein, Dostoevsky, Hegel, Donald MacKinnon, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the Welsh mystical tradition of which he is a product. This eclecticism is not eclectic muddle but the coherent expression of a mind that has found resources across the full range of the Christian tradition and its philosophical conversation partners.
On Christian Theology has been widely used in theological seminaries and graduate programs as an introduction to contemporary Anglican theological method and as a model of how rigorous academic theology can remain in service of the church's practical and spiritual life.
Williams's engagement with the Russian Orthodox tradition - particularly Sergius Bulgakov and Vladimir Lossky - sets him apart from most British systematic theologians and gives his work an ecumenical breadth that reflects his conviction that no single tradition has exhausted the riches of Christian theology. His essay on Bulgakov's sophiology - the doctrine of divine wisdom as the link between God and creation - is one of the most sympathetic and critical engagements with Eastern Christian metaphysics in English, and his ability to draw on both Western and Eastern sources without simply harmonizing them makes On Christian Theology a model of ecumenical theological method.
The collection is not easy reading. Williams writes with the density of a scholar who has absorbed an enormous range of sources and expects his readers to have done the same. But the difficulty is not obscurantism - each essay repays close attention with genuine insight, and Williams's occasional moments of luminous clarity justify the effort required to reach them. For those who want to understand what Anglican theology at its most serious looks like in the early twenty-first century, and why the Archbishop of Canterbury's theological credentials are taken seriously by Catholic and Orthodox theologians as well as by his own communion, On Christian Theology is the essential text.