Rowan Williams on Whether He is Nietzchean

I had more to say than a comment thread would sustain, so I repair to my own blog. In a recent post dealing with Rowan Williams and the current Anglican controversy over the ordination of homosexual bishops, Craig Carter makes the following assertion:

Essentially, the point made in this article is that by fighting for unity, delay, conversation, listening and political accommodation, Williams is fighting for the liberal agenda of revision in general. I think this is basically correct. To say that we should think further about how to respond to the general cultural acceptance of homosexuality is structurally the same thing as the Serpent said to Eve in the Garden when he asked “Did God really say?” Of course, God really did not say “from any tree in the Garden” but by asking the question and getting Eve to respond the Serpent was able to draw Eve into in a “conversation” that eventually resulted in the Serpent having an opening to deny God’s veracity and, in that situation Eve, who had already surrendered moral clarity, finally was tempted to give in to doubt. Eve made the mistake of dialoguing with an enemy who only wanted to destroy her, not debate with her.

After that astounding two-part assertion that (1) homosexuals are Satan and (2) not immediately and unequivocally condemning homosexuality equates to a full blown endorsement, Carter continues his invective with the following:

Rowan Williams seems to have gone to the school of postmodern philosophy in which the ultimate undecideabilty of things is rooted in the agonistic nature of reality, which is at bottom nothing other than the will-to-power. In that school, nature is not created by God with its own peaceful and good intelligibility; it is raw material for the will. If you wonder what it is that Anglicans are waiting for, listening for and trying to discern, it has more to do with whose will to power is going to triumph than any soft wisperings of the Holy Spirit. The school of Nietzsche is a harsh and brutal school, like so many public schools in the modern West, and you don’t learn about dragons in such places.

Here, the assumption seems to be that in order to exibit any patience with a conflict without forcing it to an immediate conclusion is to endorse an agonistic ontology. Now, it seems to me that Carter has entirely misunderstood the situation if he is calling Williams Nietzschean. From “The Body’s Grace”–his most direct exploration of human sexuality—he does acknowledge the legitimacy of homosexual expression. The fact, however, that he has tarried with this long process of debate shows that he insists upon not foising his will upon the communion at large when it has not arrived at the same point of view as himself.

In Carter’s view, the question of homosexuality is a settled matter, and anything other than direct action to expell the immoral brother betrays a morality of laissez-faire limp-wristedness. (You can only wish such certitude in judment could be expressed toward greedy pastors, or gossips!) For me, how homosexuality relates to Christian discipleship is a question that is far from settled, and so I have no qualms with RW’s course of action. But leaving that aside, I want to take up the matter of conflict, namely with regards to the sort of ontology you can be charged of having if you are willing to abide extended periods of decision making.

Of course on may hold the belief that there is no truth, and that the only honest way to live is to be straightforward with advancing your own agenda. These, to me, are the people who reject dialog, and aim only to organize their base in order to force their will on the minority through an enforcement of majority rule. This, again, is decidedly not what RW is doing.

However, we can also view patience through conflict as an acknowledgment of the fallenness of creation. This is not an endless deferral of the truth, but rather an awareness that since we live in a world of lies, truth is hard to come by. And if there are good people disagreeing on what the truth is, we are not wise to dismiss one or the other of them. As RW writes in his essay, “The Discipline of Scripture,” embracing conflict is not a denial of truth, but rather a denial of the presupposition that we already know what the truth is: “Concern with the literal, the diachronic, is a way of resisting the premature unities and harmonies of a non-literal reading (whether allegorical, existentialist, structuralist or deconstructionist)” (On Christian Theology, 47). And later on, dealing with the use to which scripture is put in the current church conflicts (including homosexual partnerships), RW explicitly rejects notion of tolerance as a solution:

Honest compels the admission that none of these questions is likely to be ’settled’ in the foreseeable future, certainly not by appeal to what is commonly taken to be the ‘literal sense of scripture’ (i.e. particular clusters of quoations). Yet peaceful co-existence in an undemanding pluralism is an inadequate response when the matters at issue seem to relate to basic questions about how the qospel can be heard in the struggles of contemporary social existence…. There can be an exacting patience in the debates of Christians; the confidence (if that is the right word) that it is worth struggling for the life of the Church in and through the awkwardness of dissidence and conscientious protest imposes the discipline of ’staying with’ the public life and liturgy of the tradition, rather than seeking the shortest solution of a newly constructed community of the perfect. (57).