Theological Journal – August 27 Rowan Williams: 3 Forms of Theology
Rowan Williams defines these three forms of theology as “celebratory,” “communicative” and “critical.”
“Celebratory theology”: is the “attempt to draw out
and display connections of thought and image so as to exhibit the fullest
possible range of significance in the language used. It is typically the
language of hymnody and preaching,” but it can also be found in the church’s
creeds and iconography.[i]
“Communicative theology”: is “theology experimenting
with the rhetoric of its uncommitted environment.”[ii]
What Williams is referring to here might also be described as apologetic
theology. It is the effort to “persuade or comment, to witness to the
gospel’s capacity for being at home in more than one cultural environment, and
to display enough confidence to believe that this gospel can be rediscovered at
the end of a long and exotic detour through strange idioms and structures of
thought.”[iii]
“Critical theology”: arises out of the struggle
with the question as to what is “continuous with what has been believed” and
with what “the ‘fundamental categories’ really mean.” The task becomes
“critical,” Williams notes when the church becomes “alert to its own inner
tensions and irresolutions.”[iv]
For all three forms of
theology to truly serve the life of the church, each has to has to held in
conversation with the others. A celebratory theology that is not made
known in fresh ways through communicative efforts can be cut off from the world
around it, shrivel and die. A communicative theology that fails to notice
the tensions that emerge in conversation with the world can become stale and
irrelevant in a different way. A critical theology that is cut off from
both the celebratory and communicative task loses its vital connection with the
faith that gave it birth and can easily become a heresy serving nothing but its
own ends.
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