Theology Today - Vol 43, No.4 - January 1987 - BOOK REVIEW - Form and Vitality in the World and God

584 - Form and Vitality in the World and God

Form and Vitality in the World and God

By Trevor Williams

Oxford, Clarendon, 1985. 356 Pp. $29.95.

The character and authority of Christian faith is in dispute in important ways among us. Internally, the character of Christian faith is a vexed issue in many quarters as "liberals" and "conservatives" battle for their claims of truth. In larger scope, the claims of Christian faith must be freshly articulated in the context of world religions, and in the more immediate context of secularism. On the one hand, the normative character of this faith cannot be compromised by the church without loss of nerve and credibility. On the other hand, we are intensely aware that absolutist religious claims give rise to dangerous political conflict, as religious absolutism is readily turned to savage political ideology.

Trevor Williams of Oxford addresses these issues in fresh, imaginative, and compelling ways. He has written a book that is boldly apologetic, committed as he is to reasonable faith. The book is also characteristically English in its lucidity. His argument is subtle and at times elusive, but it is the sort of argument that will reward pondering, re-reading, and discussion. Typical of apologetic work, Williams begins with categories taken from culture, which are always subject to debate. He begins with an awareness that culture, and indeed all of human life, is understood in "evolutionary" terms, by which he seems to mean dynamic and open to change. If faith is to be credible and pertinent in a culture that understands life in terms of change, then it also must be presented in evolutionary categories. The dynamic of the cultural process requires that there be an identifiable form of faith and reality that persists. There must also be, however, an impetus for change that is honored, and a freedom to change that Williams calls vitality. A credible faith must have both reliable, persistent form and legitimate room for vitality. The theological center of the book recasts trinitarian thought in evolutionary categories, so that Jesus is the form of God and the Spirit is the vitality of God.

Jesus the form of God provides an enduring reference. This is who God is through time. Spirit as vitality guards against a calcification and wooden reductionism. The apologetic power of the book consists in the well argued claim that Christian faith peculiarly articulates and embodies the polarity of form and vitality. This polarity makes Christianity a faith valid and appropriate in our cultural situation with its intellectual requirements.

Williams explores the polarity of form and vitality in terms of three major issues. The first is the most extensive and crucial for his argument, and, in my judgment, the most problematic. According to Williams, Christianity has a spirit-filled dynamic and asserts that vitality belongs to the very character of God. Judaism, by contrast, lacks such vitality because of the absoluteness of the torah. Williams portrays

585 - Form and Vitality in the World and God

Judaism, reflected in the Pharisees and in the rabbis, as settling for an immutable torah as authority. I regard this as an unfortunate caricature of Judaism that can scarcely be accepted. While the argument is made urbanely and without polemic, Williams seems to repeat a rather characteristic dismissal of Judaism. His argument for Christianity is not vitiated by this unfortunate contrast, and could be transformed into a statement about how Christianity and Judaism in very different ways share this polarity of form and vitality.

His second exploration, which I found especially helpful, concerns the internal dynamic of the Christian community and its understanding of authority. While Williams insists on the maintenance of the polarity of vitality and form as definitional for Christian faith, he is primarily concerned with the loss of vitality and the absolutizing of form as the most prevalent distortion of faith. He sees this happening wherever a scholastic sense of Scripture is substituted for the live authority of Jesus. Given his understanding of Judaism, such distorted Christianity then behaves much like Judaism. Williams in this context has wise things to say about ecumenism and the struggle of various church bodies that substitute fixed and closed authority for the dynamic of the Trinitarian reality. The book is quite concrete and specific about these distortions in Christianity. This critique will be useful in churches beset by those who want authority reduced to immutable certitude, and thus faith without vitality.

Williams' third exploration concerns the relation of Christianity to other religions and the crisis caused, on the one hand, by absolutizing Christian faith or, on the other hand, by dealing with other religions (especially Islam) that are absolutist. In my judgment, he finds a shrewd and carefully nuanced way to affirm the normative character of Christian faith without failing into a trap of absolutism.

This is an enormously challenging and stimulating book. Much apologetic theology is excessively theoretical, abstract, and removed from reality. Not so Williams. He is in touch with the real issues and life of the church. He is at the hard, important task of continuing to clarify the church's most elemental theological claims. He suggests that even at Chalcedon "the Church preserved the vital parts, but the best it could do was to put them in a tidy pile, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle sorted out and neatly stacked, but not put together." The book is an effort at putting things together.

It is not clear that the evolutionary categories of form and vitality are the best we have. But if this assumption is granted, then Williams' argument is important and compelling. It is hard-nosed intellectual work that will evoke fruitful discussion and important new theological probes. It will require us to face our situation in the world as Christians, entrusted with a peculiarly historical faith that is surely important to culture, but no longer conceded automatic preference. The forfeiture of preference requires clear thinking and sensitivity that is not used up in ill-advised quarrels about wrong issues. A church that is long on form

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and short on vitality may easily spend its energy and credibility in the wrong conflicts.

WALTER BRUEGGEMANN

Columbia Theological Seminary
Decatur, Georgia