Showing papers by "Rowan Williams published in 1999"
Book•
27 Dec 1999
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a reading in New Testament Ethics with a focus on the nature of a Sacrament and its relationship to the act of the Incarnation of Christ, and the Renewal of Community.
Abstract: Acknowledgements. Preface. Prologue. 1. Defining the Enterprise. Theological Integrity. The Unity of Christian Truth. The Judgement of the World. The Discipline of Scripture. 2. The Act of God. On Being Creatures. Beginning with the Incarnation. The Finality of Christ. Word and Spirit. 3. The Grammar of God. Trinity and Revelation. Trinity and Ontology. Trinity and Pluralism. 4. Making Signs. Between the Cherubim: the Empty Tomb and the Empty Throne. The Nature of a Sacrament. Sacraments of the New Society. 5. Living the Mystery. Incarnation and the Renewal of Community. Interiority and Epiphany: a Reading in New Testament Ethics. Resurrection and Peace: More on New Testament Ethics. a Nobody Knows Who I Am Till the Judgement Morninga . Index.
345 citations
TL;DR: In the New Testament, the author addresses himself to the even more diverse persons who now make up the Church; they have never been a 'nation', they have not belonged together, but now they have been given as we might say a'stake' in each other, a common ground of identity as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: 'Once you were not a people; but now you are the people of God' (I Peter 2: 10). This is perhaps the fundamental text for thinking about the meaning of laos in Christian theology, a text that directly evokes the promise of Hosea 2:24, though it gives it a new turn of significance. In Hosea, God has declared that he will cast off those who were called his people (1 :9), reversing the ancient covenant formula expressing God's commitment to Israel (Ex. 6:7, Deut. 4:20; c.f. Jer. 13: 11, 31 :34). God has forged a nation out of the disparate elements he has brought out of Egypt, and has adopted this nation as his own, the one to which he gives his law and reveals his name. But in the New Testament usage cited, it is as if the author addresses himself to the even more diverse persons who now make up the Church; they have never been a 'nation', they have never belonged together, but now they have been givenas we might say a 'stake' in each other, a common ground of identity. This is to say more than that the grace of God creates a 'community' a word notoriously difficult to define with any precision. A 'people' is both a group that provides a basic, non-negotiable identity for its members, a foundation of shared kinship, and a structure within which the life of its members is lived. For the Church of God to be described as a laos is for it to be seen as in important respects like a nation, a political and social body. When the Christian Scriptures call the Church 'Israel', they are not simply employing a loose metaphor for a collection of likeminded individuals or for a body of close-knit persons characterised by a particularly strong corporate life; they are claiming that there is a given common ground for the identity of Christian believers that is more like belonging to an ethnic or linguistic group than anything else and that has a public structure that manifests this common ground. It could be said at once that this identifies the Church with a kind of tribalism, with an exclusive and potentially divisive sense of belonging that sets up markers designed to keep others out; this, surely, is what a nation or a people looks like in much of our experience. An age in which monstrous forms of nationalism have brought about a regime of death and misery in so much of Europe and Africa, an age
1 citations