Tokens of Trust - by Rowan Williams
Canterbury Press 2007

A Review by Bishop Saunders Davies

After its publication in Lent, Archbishop Rowan Williams’s book headed the ‘Church Times’ top ten religious books for several weeks.   It is intended as an introduction to Christian belief as the author shares his reflections on each clause of the Creed.   For example:

The first phrases of the Creeds are not just about the beginning of the universe. They’re about the present state of the universe and the present state of you and me and our society. They express a confidence in the God who can make us one with ourselves and with our world, the God who can take the darkness in us and heal it and turn it towards the light … When we express trust in ‘God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible’, we affirm that we have grounds for hoping that our lives in all their fragmentedness, their conflict and their imperfection, can be held and drawn into cohesion – just as the diverse and alarming world itself is held in cohesion – so that God’s own self-consistent active love and beauty may be reflected within the universe.   We have grounds for hoping that our lives here within the complex system of created reality can show in some degree the gratuitous and generous love out of which everything comes, the love of the Creator in whose image we are made (p.55).

In an age of mistrust and suspicion Archbishop Rowan encourages us to put our trust in the trustworthy God. That is what ‘I believe’ entails in practice.   Pages of print are broken by highlighting memorable quotations such as:

We can trust the maker of heaven and earth precisely because he is the maker of heaven and earth (p.11).

            God always has the capacity to do something fresh and different, to bring something new out of a situation (p.16).

Things are going on in the universe, glorious and wonderful things, of which we know nothing (p.51).

In his exploration of the second paragraph of the Creeds Archbishop Rowan asks two key questions: Who is Jesus? and Why is Jesus’ life required?   He starts with the ‘Who?’ question because what is said about Jesus

builds on the whole pattern of establishing that God is to be trusted, before we examine in more depth just what the difference is that Jesus makes and why it needed making.   If we can start from the conviction that the one who is speaking to us in the life of Jesus is to be relied upon, because he displays the self-consistency of God’s love available and unbroken in all things, we may be more ready to trust what is being claimed as the result of this life – and death (p.78).

And Easter,

When we celebrate Easter, we are really standing in the middle of a second ‘Big Bang’, a tumultuous surge of divine energy as fiery and intense as the very beginning of the universe (p.95).

So what is claimed for Jesus?

Here is a human life so shot through with the purposes of God, so transparent to the action of God, that people speak of it as God’s life ‘translated’ into another medium. Here God is supremely and uniquely at work (p.57).

In the light of the third paragraph of the Creeds Rowan Williams reminds us

The Holy Spirit, the breath of Jesus’ life, is described in the Bible both as the Spirit that gives ‘communion’ and as the Spirit of truth – as if experiencing the truth that the Spirit conveys is always part of living the common life of Christ’s ‘Body’, the assembly of God’s people (p.100).

Such an experience of the Holy Spirit leads to a discussion of the Creeds’ statement on the Church. The Church is the community of those who have been ‘immersed’ in Jesus’ life, overwhelmed by it (p.112).    Here we have a summary of the Archbishop’s understanding of the Bible, baptism, eucharist, ministry and the Christian life.   So a well-functioning Christian community is going to be one in which everyone is working steadily to release the gifts of others (p.108).  God has not stopped making the Church to be the Church (p.132).

In the final chapter Archbishop Rowan assures us that the trustworthiness of God will not let us go even on the far side of death.

Christians believe in eternal life not because they believe something about themselves as human (that they have an immortal element in them), but because they believe something about God (p.144).

Valuable insights are offered on death and judgement, heaven and hell, repentance and forgiveness.  The Church exists to get us acclimatized to peace and praise, to bring us now into the atmosphere where what pervades and shapes everything is the life of God the Holy Trinity (p.139) – that is, to prepare us for heaven.

This little book, which is beautifully produced, gives us a glimpse of the world which Rowan Williams inhabits.   It is the fruit not just of study and scholarship but of deep contemplation.   Prayer often runs ahead of ideas.   We are given this clue in his final section which points out that contemplation is taken on not for a simple set of results, but for the sake of the truth, for the sake of eternity’ (p.155).   To share in this contemplation could inspire us to pray the Creed and live the Trinity in our life together as a Church.

Saunders Davies  X

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