avoidance

This may not mean very much to those of you who are unaware of the feverish excitement that surrounds Australian Rules football in Melbourne, but:
Every year, as a matter of personal amusement, I make it my aim to try not to know which teams are in the Grand Final. Initially, this is not too difficult - just a matter of being generally ignorant about the teams and their progress. As the season progresses, however, and particularly as the Grand Final approaches, it becomes increasingly challenging. I have to politely excuse myself from conversations, avoid certain sections of the newspaper, listen to my iPod on the tram. Last year I succeeded, this year I unintentionally discovered that the Sydney Swans were once again on the menu. But I've got about 24 hours to not find out who the second team is. The pressure is on, and I'm seriously considering skipping the departmental coffee break, as way too dangerous. I mean, there are people here writing their PhDs on Aussie Rules!

Hallelujah! Get happy!

Less than two months since I submitted my thesis, and the examiners' reports are back! The two eminent scholars (whose sandals I am not worthy to untie) who read the thesis did their job thoroughly. A nice balance of compliments and criticism: they unerringly identified the methodological flaw at the heart of the work, which had bothered me from the beginning - I still don't know how to fix it! Overall they were both enthusiastic, and passed it without amendment. I just have to bind it, hand it in, and wait for the letter that proclaims me 'all but degree'! And decide whether I want to try and turn it into a book (which, as both examiners said, would require a fair bit of reframing. It's a slippery little sucker!)
So sincere thanks to those of you who've seen me through this! There will be a party, and you're all invited.

string thing

Were a genie to appear and offer me three wishes, I would ask (having dealt first with world peace and church unity) whether I could please be given a proficiency in playing the banjo. I've never even picked one up, but there is something about the combination of rhythm and whine in banjo music that I find deeply endearing. Five albums that I am currently listening to on my iPod make good use of those qualities. In no particular order, I recommend:

40 Days (The Wailin' Jennys)
Blue Horse (Be-Good Tanyas)
Illinois (Sufjan Stevens)
O Brother Where art Thou? (Various)
Why should the fire die? (Nickel Creek)

Toe-tapping good!

Bebbington visit

If you're in or around Melbourne next week, you might like to come along to this mini-conference that I'm organising, which kicks off with a paper from David Bebbington, godfather of British evangelical history:

'Fanaticism and Sound Learning: Primitive Methodist Revival in County Durham in 1851'
David Bebbington, University of Stirling
1-2pm, Tuesday, 29th August
Jessie Webb Library, Dept of History, University of Melbourne

Followed by a seminar on 'Religion in the Modern World', 2 - 5.30pm.
Members of the Department will present papers on their own research into the historical place of religion in the modern world. After the seminar, all are invited to dinner at a restaurant on Lygon St.

Organising this seminar (and writing a paper for it) is one of the things keeping me too busy to blog!

worse and worse

I certainly don't think there are any simple answers to what's going on in the Middle East at the moment, but one thing I'm sure of: this doesn't help at all.

synopsis

So, anyway, I wrote this thesis and submitted it, but I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it was about. Is that a bad sign? (Can I just note that after I handed in my thesis, Andrew gave me a card, in which he congratulated me and added 'In this regard, I have always thought it important that my wife submit.') I've written a synopsis for the purpose of applying for postdocs, which goes like this:

This thesis examines the construction of suffering in early English Methodism, with particular reference to the hymns of Charles Wesley, co-founder of the movement. Wesley wrote thousands of hymns, many of which focus on the experience of overwhelming pain. As eighteenth-century men and women sang or read these hymns, they were encouraged to adopt a distinctive approach to suffering, one which drew upon long-standing elements in Christian tradition, as well as new patterns in English culture. Identifying the construction of suffering in the hymns illuminates the culture of early Methodism and its complex relationship to its eighteenth-century English context.
My analysis places the hymns within the broader 'narrative culture' of early Methodism, which encouraged individuals to interpret their lives and experiences as part of a story of great spiritual significance. The hymns engaged men and women with a spiritual drama of conviction, conversion, sanctification and heavenly reward. Suffering was central to Wesley's depiction of this drama. I examine his construction of the suffering of Christ, the suffering of Christians, and Christian responses to the suffering of others, demonstrating that each of these had an important place in his portrayal of the normative Christian experience. Those who read or sang the hymns were encouraged to embrace suffering as an experience that offered opportunities for intimacy with, and imitation of, Christ.
Recognising Wesley's construction of suffering does not explain exactly how Methodist men and women responded to affliction, but it does illuminate these responses. The letters and journals of Methodist men and women reveal that not all early Methodists adopted Wesley's construction of suffering. The broad contours of his construction are, however, reflected in early Methodist attitudes to affliction. This construction of suffering helps explain some distinctive aspects of early Methodist culture, in particular the role of women in the movement, the intensity of early Methodist fellowship and the involvement of Methodists in social reform.

Does that make any kind of sense to the general reader?

book meme

Ben has come up with a meme about books... I've tagged a few people below, but I'd love to hear anyone else's responses, too!

1. One book that changed your life.

Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

2. One book you've read more than once

Joan Aiken, Wolves of Willoughby Chase
(at least fifteen times before I was 12!)

3. One book you'd want on a desert island

Psalms

4. One book that made you laugh

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

5. One book that made you cry

Primo Levi, If This is a Man

6. One book you wish had been written

Jurgen Habermas, The Simple Version

7. One book you wish had never been written

The Scofield Reference Bible
(just the reference bits, obviously!)

8. One book you're currently reading

Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 1783 - 1867

9. One book you've been meaning to read

William Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination

10. Tag five people:

Greg
Simone
Simon
Stephen

No Presbyterians, No Machines

... was the slogan of a group of Luddite campaigners in the North of England during the industrial revolution. I mentioned it to my mother, and she said it sounded like the perfect world. I think (given that she's a Presbyterian minister's wife) that she was joking. But the slogan is evidence, once again, of how intertwined religious and social change are in British history. Why were Presbyterians and machines associated? Because if you were a dissenter from the Church of England, you were barred from almost every means of advancing yourself except through business and industry. In addition, because dissenters were not allowed to attend Cambridge or Oxford, they got a much more practical and thorough education through their own academies, which were more open to new science and technology. In particular, the Scots (who were mainly Presbyterians) had a far superior education system to the English. So many of the inventors, businessmen and industrialists at the forefront of industrialisation were dissenters.
It is because of this kind of connection that I am going to spend much of my first few weeks of tutoring explaining basic elements of Christian doctrine and church structure to my students. That, and the fact that I'm on much safer ground there than trying to explain how the spinning jenny worked!

all done bar the waiting

Yes indeedy, the thesis is in. The forms have been signed, the champagne has been drunk, the celebratory balloon has been received (a Melbourne Uni tradition). After three and a half years working on this project, I feel like someone who has just done something incredibly risky - presented my work to senior scholars for their merciless scrutiny - WHAT WAS I THINKING???
And now: semester has begun, I start tutoring today, I have post-docs and jobs for which to apply, articles to write, publishers to contact, seminars to organise.... and plenty of blogging to catch up on! I'm looking forward to it all.

taking a break

Well, as the silence might indicate, I have been very busy. It's three months until my thesis submission date and I have got to the point where I'm waking up in the middle of the night thinking about chapter four. (At present I feel as though chapter four will haunt me for the rest of my days, but I hope that's just paranoia). In addition, a colleague and I have been given the opportunity to develop and teach at least one (hopefully two) British history subjects in our department next year. Very exciting, given that neither of us has actually received our doctorates yet, but it's meant a flurry of work preparing course outlines. In short, I haven't had the time or energy for blogging and I think until the thesis is submitted that's unlikely to change. So I'll be dropping in occasionally, but not posting much. I hope to get back into it in August - until then, thanks so much for reading!

perils of an ipod (or 'from the sublime to the ridiculous')

Can I just ask: is there anything more ridiculous than a 31-year-old, middle-class white woman standing in a train carriage jam-packed with commuters, jutting her chin and tapping her toe while repeatedly mouthing the words 'Jesus walks'?
I think not. And yet, when it comes to this song, I simply cannot help myself. My fellow-passengers should just be relieved that I have so far resisted the urge to actually start rapping. 'Y'll know what the midwest is?/ The young and restless - the restless/ Might snatch your neckless/ Next day - they'll jack your Lexus'. I save that for the shower.

Song of Songs (6): Resurrection

Christ has died.
Christ has risen.
Christ will come again.

Reflecting on the resurrection over the weekend, I realise that the connection between eros and Easter is an important one. We listened to a series of talks by N.T. Wright on Sunday afternoon, which brought this home to me. The bodily resurrection, rightly understood, is the sign of God's lasting commitment to what he has made. He will not simply destroy this creation: he is recreating it, and one day he will bring that recreation to completeness. God's commitment to creation is why this body and its desires and its experiences matter. It's why gender and sex matter. It's why eros is God's good gift, not simply the meaningless impulse of flesh that has nothing to do with the important matters of spirit. It's why sexual abuse is so deeply and agonisingly destructive to people and an abomination to God. It's why we cannot simply say (much as I would like to!) that with all the poverty and injustice in this world, who cares what people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms? The resurrection means that God cares. This is not to say that the state should regulate sexual practice as it does taxes or traffic. It is to say that we come to God as whole people and as whole communities: our eating, our drinking, our sexual desires, our shopping, the thoughts and inspirations of our hearts, our treatment of the poor, the art we create and the books we read and write. God is committed to it all, and this is the context in which he builds his kingdom. And perhaps this is the insight to which the Song points when it recognises how profoundly and how powerfully love can move a person:

"Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned." (Song 8: 6-7)

Song of Songs (5): the Pope and the Song

Given that Benedict XVI and I are such chums, it's not surprising that he too should have been giving the Song some thought in recent months. In his first papal encyclical, the Pope explores the idea of God's love. In the process, he deals with the question of the relationship between eros (which he variously defines as 'worldly', 'possessive' or 'ascending' love) and agape ('love grounded in... faith', 'oblative' or 'descending' love). The Pope argues strongly that the biblical tradition affirms the value of eros, but he condemns any use of sex that demeans the body or turns it into just another product to be consumed. Eros has the potential to lead men and women to an unselfish love, towards 'the Divine' - but only through 'a path of ascent, renunciation, purification and healing'. And this is where he turns his attention to the Song:

"Concretely, what does this path of ascent and purification entail? How might love be experienced so that it can fully realize its human and divine promise? Here we can find a first, important indication in the Song of Songs, an Old Testament book well known to the mystics. According to the interpretation generally held today, the poems contained in this book were originally love-songs, perhaps intended for a Jewish wedding feast and meant to exalt conjugal love. In this context it is highly instructive to note that in the course of the book two different Hebrew words are used to indicate “love”. First there is the word dodim, a plural form suggesting a love that is still insecure, indeterminate and searching. This comes to be replaced by the word ahabà, which the Greek version of the Old Testament translates with the similar-sounding agape, which, as we have seen, becomes the typical expression for the biblical notion of love. By contrast with an indeterminate, “searching” love, this word expresses the experience of a love which involves a real discovery of the other, moving beyond the selfish character that prevailed earlier. Love now becomes concern and care for the other. No longer is it self-seeking, a sinking in the intoxication of happiness; instead it seeks the good of the beloved: it becomes renunciation and it is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice."

This is a thoughtful attempt to give eros an honoured place in Christian theology and experience. Two of the many responses to the encyclical, one positive from the theologian John Milbank, another less so from an Anglican priest here in Melbourne, suggest that the church is ready to hear a lot more discussion about the rightful place of eros.

Song of Songs (4): Actually singing it.

Here's a tough question: what do we do with the Song of Songs in the modern church? The problem, I think, is that it creates a clash of categories for us. In the modern church, we sing together, about stuff in which we have some kind of communal investment. Even when our songs are individual ('I just really want to praise you' style) they represent topics and sentiments that are communal, public. In the modern church, sexual desire is not really a 'together' topic: it's deeply private. I feel resentment at being asked to sing 'I feel like dancing' in church, but I would feel intense embarrassment about being asked to sing 'Shall I climb that palm and take hold of the boughs?' in church. Not to mention the pastoral issues involved in singing of the sweetness of sexual desire for those for whom this desire is a matter of agony.
A friend and relation of mine, whom I will call Simone (because that's her name) suggests that the Song works best as a kind of pop music - for performance, not communal singing. She's used the Song as the inspiration for lyrics that could be sung as a solo performance, in 'pop' style. I reproduce it here: she'd happily receive any comments or suggestions!

kiss me, kiss me

1. My lover like no other,
A pear tree in the forest,
My joy to sit in his shelter,
His fruit is sweet, sweet to my taste.

Lay me down among your foliage,
Cover me with love, your banner, your flag,
Strengthen me with fruit for I, I am fev'rish
Revive my flesh for I am faint.

Kiss me, kiss me,
Fill me up
Delight my senses with your touch,
Kiss me, kiss me,
Soar above
I'm drunk on your fragrance
and your wonderful love.

2. My lover wants no other,
My vineyard his desire
Come see the buds that have blossomed
The flowers opened; they're in bloom

Come, come with me now, beloved
As you touch my hand, my pulse rises above
Open up your lips, your mouth to my sweetness
Drink the new wine of my love.

Kiss me, kiss me,
Fill me up
Delight my senses with your touch,
Kiss me, kiss me,
Soar above
I'm drunk on your fragrance
and your wonderful love.

Bridge:
I am a garden locked up,
My springs, my fruits are enclosed
But now I give you the key,
My lover coming to me
His left hand under my head,
His right hand holding me close.

Kiss me, kiss me,
Fill me up
Delight my senses with your touch,
Kiss me, kiss me,
Soar above
I'm drunk on your fragrance
and your wonderful love.

Song of Songs (3): movies and marriage

O for your kiss! For your love
More enticing than wine,
For your scent and sweet name -
For all this they love you.

Take me away to your room,
Like a king to his rooms -
We'll rejoice there with wine.
No wonder they love you!

(Poem 1, in Marcia Falk's translation of The Song of Songs)


Of all the places you might expect to hear a bit of the Song of Songs, a rather black British comedy starring Rowan Atkinson would probably not be one of them. In the recent film Keeping Mum, however, the Song has an important role to play. The film itself is an odd mixture, combining black humour and some rather disturbing sub-plots with a quite profound story about a struggling marriage. There's an unevenness about it that reminds me of Love Actually, which managed to place a series of rom-com stories ranging from the frothy to the outrageous, next to a searingly honest and powerful story of a marriage betrayed.
Keeping Mum tells the story of the Reverend Walter Goodfellow, a rather ineffectual parish priest, trying to manage the endless tasks of ministry alongside a family that's wilting because of his neglect. His son is being bullied, his daughter is sleeping her way through a succession of boyfriends, and his wife Gloria (Kristen Scott Thomas, magnificent as always) is being seduced by the local golf coach (played by Patrick Swayze, who was born to play sleazy Americans!). Into their lives comes a new housekeeper Grace Hawkins, who immediately begins to transform their lives, through fair means and foul. Bodies pile up, self-discovery and the revelation of secrets ensues.
Apart from the rather clever play with names (Goodfellow, Gloria, Grace) the thing I really liked about this movie was the way it dealt with Walter and Gloria's marriage. It is on the rocks: Walter is obsessed with his parish and his sermon-writing: he is trying to be everything to everyone and failing miserably. Gloria, who married Walter because she recognised that he was different and special, is starved for attention and desperate for an escape from the stultifying world of the village. Grace engineers a solution, and in part it involves the Song. She encourages Walter to read the Song, brushing aside his suggestion that its an allegory of divine love. 'The Bible is full of sex!' she exclaims. In a beautiful scene, Walter reads the Song, while watching his wife prepare for bed. When I say that this scene makes Rowan Atkinson an extremely desirable man, fans of Mr Bean will appreciate the power of the Song!
In one sense, this is quite a conventional use of the Song: it expresses desire within the sanctioned context of marriage. Reading the Song itself, it's quite clear that the Song is not primarily about marriage, but about erotic desire. The Song assumes that this desire is connected to marriage (though not necessarily monogamous marriage, given the references to Solomon's concubines), but the language is of 'my bride', not 'my wife'. On the surface, the Song is about youth, beauty and honeymoons, not about a middle-aged vicar and his cardigan-wearing wife. But I think the insight of the movie is that this idealised depiction of youthful love among the pomegranates is also fittingly read within a tried and tested sexual relationship. In that context the Song points to the possibility of a continual rediscovery of desire, to the sudden recognition of the beauty of the other, and to the love 'stronger than death' that fuels these encounters. Against this background, the frantic promiscuity of the Goodfellows' beautiful daughter is clearly seen to have little to do with love or desire of such depth.

Song of Songs (2): a little hymn and a little history

Song of Songs doesn't get a whole lot of air time in the churches I've been to. And for a text that's identified as a 'song', it doesn't get sung much. The one exception I can think of is a chorus we used to sing in Sunday School, 'His banner over me is love'. For which I still have a soft spot! Historically, however, there have been a few attempts to make the Song 'singable' - one of the few is by the godfather of hymn-writing, Charles Wesley.
Let me start with a little context for this hymn. It comes from a series of hymnbooks that Charles Wesley published in the mid-eighteenth century, entitled 'Short Hymns on Select Passages of Holy Scripture'. Together, these hymnbooks make up a kind of poetic commentary on the whole of Scripture. They include 21 hymns on the Song of Songs. The following is the first hymn in the series (the title indicates which verse Wesley is responding to).

'The song of songs, which is Solomons - i. I.
1. Hence ye profane! far off remove
Ye strangers to redeeming love,
Sinners, who Jesus never knew,
The song of songs is not for you!
Away ye worldly goats and swine,
Who trample on this pearl Divine,
Which only wisdom's sons esteem,
While fools and infidels blaspheme.

2. With deepest shame, with humblest fear,
I to Thine oracle draw near,
To meet Thee in the holiest place,
To learn the secret of Thy grace:
Now, Lord, explain the mystery,
Display Thy precious self to me,
And when Thou dost the veil remove,
My heart shall sing the song of love.

3. Thou heavenly Solomon Divine,
To teach the song of songs is Thine,
Thy Spirit alone the depths reveals,
Opens the book, and breaks the seals:
O might I find the bar removed,
And love my Lord as I am loved,
This moment gain my heart's desire,
The next within Thine arms expire!

What I find most interesting about this hymn is the tension about the text that it communicates. Anxiety that it will be misunderstood by 'the profane' (presumably those unbelievers who read the Song as a poem about human sexual experience), but also concern that it will be unintelligible to the believer. It is a text that must be approached 'With deepest shame, with humblest fear'; the language of veils, depths, seals and bars suggests that its meanings are hidden. Even when understood as an allegory, the use of the erotic as a metaphor is one that Wesley clearly experiences as dangerous.
Wesley's hymn certainly supports my overall suggestion that Song of Songs has historically been seen as a disruptive text. Why? Well, plenty of other people have written about the historical and theological reasons that Christians have worried about sex. In the Methodist context, though, I think the erotic is particularly dangerous because it's a threat to self-control. Early Methodists placed a very high value on the mastery of one's own body and emotions. Sex was one of the greatest challenges to that mastery (the other, I would argue, was suffering). How frightening, then, to read a text that deliberately describes and evokes sexual desire. And how important to begin any reading with a strong denunciation of 'profane' interpretations and with an attitude of 'shame' and 'fear'.

The Song of Songs (1): Disruption

My dove
in the clefts
of the rocks
the secret
of steep ravines

Come let me look at you
Come let me hear you

Your voice clear as water
Your beautiful body


Poem 10 in Marcia Falk's translation of The Song of Songs.

In reflecting on the Song of Songs over the next week, I am responding to my own experience of the book as disruptive. Read as a description of erotic love (particularly in careful and evocative translations such as Marcia Falk's) it is a book that sits profoundly uncomfortably within traditional Christian ideas about sex (and, to a lesser extent, gender). This is made obvious by the almost 2000 years of allegorical interpretation that Christians have developed, in which the poem(s) becomes an extended description of the relationship between the human soul and the divine lover.

In being disruptive, I think the Song fits well with other texts that are characterised as 'wisdom literature'. My own experience of teaching and studying Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes with evangelicals is that they are each experienced as problematic. I well remember the anxiety created in a bible study group I was leading over the question: 'In what sense are biblical proverbs true?' More dramatically, Job offers no easy answers to the problem of suffering and Ecclesiastes is an almost unrelentingly bleak vision of human experience. The attempt to summarise these books within a simplistic system (eg. Ecclesiastes is the viewpoint of a person who doesn't know Yahweh; Job provides a watertight theodicy; the Song is about the delights of conjugal love) does violence to the complexity of the texts and, I assume, to their purpose.

Modern scholars like myself delight in disruption and tension, and it's possible to just embrace these texts as overturning any attempt at systematic theology. But the anxieties these books create do reflect real pastoral issues that any Christian should be deeply concerned over. For example, simply celebrating the erotic adventures of the characters in the Song as a vindication of wholehearted sexual expression may insensitively ignore the agonies, longings, humiliations and doubts that bedevil most people's experience of sexual desire in this life.

So this week, I don't plan to explain the text, or preach it, or simply ogle it. Rather, I want to sit with it for a while. In particular, I want to reflect on a number of responses to the text and the issues it raises - in a movie, in a hymn, in a modern song, in Marcia Falk's amazing translation, perhaps even in a papal encyclical! And also, I hope the responses of those of you who continue to read my ramblings.

Tomorrow: an eighteenth-century hymn on the Song.

sex and spirit: a week on song of songs

Well, I am taking my courage in both hands and preparing to start a week of blogging on that fascinating biblical text, the Song of Songs. I'm not planning anything like a systematic theological discussion, rather a series of responses (including some historical stuff, a movie review and some modern lyrics) that represent different angles on the text. I hope to start tomorrow or the next day, and I'd certainly appreciate your company as I step into dangerous territory!

justice and beauty

On Friday night we went to hear N T Wright speak on 'Justice and Beauty'. It was a talk clearly aimed at a general (Christian) audience, rather than a rigorous theological exploration, but good nonetheless. Below is a skeleton outline of his talk...

Wright began by discussing human longings for justice and beauty, and the way that these longings have been explained and responded to in major philosophical and religious traditions. He identified three basic philosophical responses to the desire for justice (and beauty):
- the desire for justice (or beauty) is simply a projection of childish fantasies; there is no such thing as absolute justice (or beauty) and maturity requires us to accept that.
- the desire for justice (or beauty) is a sign of a perfect world which has no relation to this one
- the desire for justice (or beauty) is a call from a person who is committed to bringing true justice to the world.
He differentiated justice from beauty more strongly than I have, but it will do for a summary!

He then suggested that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is the way God begins his transformation of this world into a place of perfect justice and beauty. The resurrection is particularly important in this regard, because it means that there is continuity between this creation and the new creation. If God is committed to the transformation of this creation, then we must not simply see ourselves as killing time here, waiting for another, perfect world. Instead we need to be part of God's work in this world, which has been begun through Jesus' death and resurrection, is continued in the world now, and will be completed when Jesus comes again.

In regard to justice and beauty, we (Christians) need to consider two questions:
1. how can we implement God's justice?
[From my notes]: A commitment to justice is part of recognising the meaning of the resurrection. The resurrection is revolutionary (here he compared the politically active Pharisees and the politically quietist Sadducees). Christians have gone to two extremes in regard to justice:
- seeing preaching the gospel as the only really significant task for Christians, with 'bandaid' charity as a response to justice issues
- trying to bring in the kingdom here and now by our own efforts (trying to pull the world up by its bootstraps!)
Instead, we need to demonstrate a commitment to justice while understanding the framework of God's work in the world. Wright said he wanted to go on the record as saying that the international economic imbalance was the biggest justice issue for Christians today and we must be involved in debt relief and other measure that will address these inequalities.
2. how can we celebrate God's beauty?
[straight from notes again] Beautiful things are more beautiful when you know the beautiful purposes they are made for. eg. a violin
Christians need to see art not as an 'extra' in life, but as an integral part of responding to God's world. To continue to affirm that there is beauty in the world is to testify that it is God's world. We need to avoid the extremes of sentimentalism and brutalism, both of which deny the realities of life. In the question time he gave some examples of art that manages to avoid these extremes, both among Christians and others. Interestingly, most of the questions were about beauty, whereas I would have liked to ask about justice... I'll collect my thoughts and blog about that soon.

the archbishop on history

[T]he very effort to make any kind of historical narrative can be seen as a sort of act of faith, faith that massive disruption does not in fact destroy the possibilities of understanding, and thus the possibility of a shared world across gulfs of difference... this also helps us see why for a Christian the writing of history is bound to be theological in some ways. It is not that considerations of doctrine decide the results of research; God forbid. But the possibility of telling a consistent or coherent story about how God's people have lived is inescapably, for the believer, the possibility of seeing two fundamental theological points. God's self-consistency is to be relied on (ie. God is not at the mercy of historical chance and change); and thus relation to God can be the foundation of a human community unrestricted by time or space, by language or cultural difference.

Rowan Williams, 'Why Study the Past', p.22.