Chapter 4: The Sacramental Theology of Rowan D. Williams: A Missiological Reading
5.1 Delores S. Williams: A Mission Theology from the Margins
5.1.5 Mission: Living Out Christ’s Ministerial Life
In Chapter 4426 I noted that relationship of sacrament to Incarnation. In particular, what Christ did in his acting in full obedience to God’s mission revealed the Kingdom of God that yet exists. Whilst this seems paradoxical, the point is that because Christ was fully divine and fully human, he was able to live in and out of God’s mission in such a way that it was salvific and liberative for those whom he met. Williams adds and expands this to suggest that liberation whilst always a potentiality, this side of the eschaton may still be far off. The Incarnation serves as the fulfilment of mission, complete and fully liberative for those oppressed. Yet, the very act of participating in God’s call to live in and live out Christ’s mission entails recognising that sin distorts and may even prevent the possibility of those marginalised to grow in their quality of life. There is a sense of humility, that as humans, it is
426 See Chapter 4, pages 00.
always God’s act in and through human persons that first calls disciples to care, and what comes out of that care for the other cannot always be predicted. Earlier, I noted that Williams is critical of redemptive Christologies, and it is because she fears they support surrogacy roles of redemption, where African American women were surrogates for raising the master’s children, for conceiving children for the master, and so forth. In these roles, slave women took the place of someone else, because the powerful slave master controlled the bodies of the slaves.427 She uses this to explore and critique surrogate notions of redemption, and this has particular bearing on how I have set up Christology thus far.
Delores S. Williams offers a Christology that expands our notion of sacramentality. To understand her Christology, we must first understand her soteriology. She approaches the cross very cautiously and yet with critical force. Any approach to the cross that would glorify the death of Jesus is questionable, she contends, because the cross itself was an instrument of torture and death by the Roman Empire, and to suggest that the cross is redemptive would entail that God wishes suffering and death.428 Rather, she argues, God brings life out of the human, sinful propensity to inflict death-dealing circumstances. God gave a new vision to humanity in the transformation of Christ. What is redemptive, therefore, is the transformation of life in the midst of death.429
Moreover, and helpful to our own concern for the initiation of Christ’s own life, is the notion of the ministerial life of Christ. To reduce redemption to the cross, that is, the death of Jesus is to neglect the rest of his earthly life. What Christ Jesus did in his entire life was to show a new vision in the midst of death-dealing forces. He raised the dead, he cast out demons, he healed those afflicted physically, and he challenged inequitable economic situations in the Temple. These were all occasions of transforming the vision, that is, the raising of the consciousness of the people.430 In other words, Jesus resisted oppressive situations, and acted according to God’s vision. The cross did not support this vision, but rather, was “opposed to this vision.”431 The implication here is that one need not die in order to find life. As we have seen in prior accounts, the question of participating in God’s authentic mission was construed as a dying to one’s self in order to find authentic life. For Williams, there are two reasons why human persons ought not to search out self-sacrifice or death- dealing forces.
427 Delores S. Williams, “Black Women’s Surrogacy Experience and the Christian Notion of Redemption”, in Cross Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross Today, ed. Marit Trelstad (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2006), 19.
428 Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 165-167.
429 Ibid., 172-173.
430 Ibid., 164-165.
431 Ibid., 165.
Firstly, those oppressed are already the recipients of death-dealing forces.432 They do not have to seek death out, because they are already experiencing and living within these forces daily. These forces need healing and transformation, not continuation. The vision they need is not to seek out more forces of death, or even to see these forces as salvific or somehow bettering them as disciples, but rather, to be given a quality of life that supports life in the midst of suffering and oppression.
Secondly, at its very root, death (i.e., death-dealing forces) distorts God’s vision; that is, death is not an entrance into God’s mission, and is, therefore, directly contrary to death.
Quite rightly, Williams notes that the crucifixion entailed the mocking of, the violent hurting of, and destroying of the human body.
The execution destroyed the body, but not before it mocked and defiled it. The cross thus becomes an image of defilement, a gross manifestation of collective human sin. Jesus, then, does not conquer sin through death on the cross. Rather, Jesus conquers the sin of temptation in the wilderness (Matthew 4.1-11) by resisting…death…. Jesus therefore conquers sin in life, not in death.433
Therefore, as Williams notes, the cross mocked and destroyed his body, and it also, by implication, was an act against to mock and destroy the very mission he embodied. The cross, therefore, is antithetical to God’s mission, or for Williams, God’s vision. Therefore one must resist death rather than actively seeking it out, in order that God’s gift of God’s self, God’s life in and through the Holy Spirit, must be transformed.
In much the same ways as Rowan D. Williams, Delores S. Williams is much more concerned about transforming current sinful practises, but does not her critique of Jesus’
death challenge the kenotic Christology of Rowan D. Williams? His three-part sacramental theology rests heavily on the dispossession of one self in order to be repossessed by God.
Dispossession, as I noted, need not be construed as actively seeking suffering or death, that is, the cross. In contrast, Rowan D. Williams recognises that suffering and sin are the context into which human persons live, and mission, I argued, is not only to be transfigured (living in) but also to be transfiguring (living out) suffering and death. Dispossession is giving up competitive relations with others for one of deepening relationships. Therefore, the three-part sacramental theology of Rowan D. Williams does not conflict with Delores S. Williams’
concerns against seeing death as redemptive. Both agree that transforming sin is the cause or desire of God, not death. Delores S. Williams, however, extends Rowan D. Williams’
theology by seeing Christ’s ministerial life as constitutive to mission in addition to death and resurrection.
How does resistance, then, fit into the transformed vision? Because there is a much more realistic and less idealised vision of God’s mission – that is, survival not liberation –
432 Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 162.
433 Ibid., 166.
then resistance is more like a holding out against those death-wielding forces. This is evidenced in how Williams relates Jesus’s resisting temptation whilst he was in the wilderness. Of course, the pericope is concerned with Jesus and temptation, and Williams understands temptation as the forces of oppression trying to distort God’s vision. In the face of forces trying to bring about great imbalances of death over life, Jesus resisted temptation.
As Williams notes, “he refused to allow evil forces to defile the balanced relation between the material and the spiritual, between life and death, between power and the exploitation of it.”434 Here, Williams acknowledges explicitly that sin “defile[s] the balanced relation”, in other words, sin is not only something that the church and the world share in at the anthropological level, but it also sets up unbalanced relations resulting in a competitive dialectic between two contrasting poles, whether that is life and death, male and female, or poor and rich. The sin of temptation leads one to want to set up opposing relations where none ought to exist. The challenge of God’s mission, then, as Williams seems to suggest, is that there will always be the struggle of the person with temptation – to create imbalances that create oppression.