Zoomtard

Relativism. Load of bollix, isn’t it? Absolutely.

But as Archbishop Rowan Williams writes today, “the 20th century built up quite a list of casualties around “principles”". In a deadly little article he considers how Barth offered us, especially relevant at Christmas, a way to acknowledge that there are no human truths that we are bound to without compromise but truth still exists. And truth still binds. Our principles, our absolutisms, our personal truths; they all get put into perspective by the Christ-child.

This makes it sound really abstract and chin-strokey. But let me make it more concrete. You can’t be sure for sure for sure that on one level the new Coldplay album sucked as much as you remembered it nor on another that Jesus is not who he says he is. Most people instinctively doubt the claims that me and my type make about him. But your doubt isn’t complete. There are moments when you catch a glimpse of the story reflected in a novel you are reading or in the way that a niece approaches your sister or whatever it is for you that causes a joyous little moment of epistemic doubt. Maybe there is more to this. Maybe this story is the reality.

See, this is what Williams means when he says Barth argued that Christmas gives us freedom to give away our “principles”. We all have a framework through which we construct our own personal reality. We have a lens through which we view the world. And with the Incarnation, Christians claim that God, if he is real he is the source of reality, is not going to offer a list of theses for his intervention. He doesn’t speak in the language of our principles. He comes as a baby and lives the life of a man. It can’t be absorbed into our systems. It can’t be broken down into essential principles. It is a story you have to get into. It’s a plot you have to let surround you. It’s a person who is other-worldly compelling and ground-breakingly relevant. It is not a theory that you subscribe to like gravity and so should not be approached the same way. It is not a system like free market capitalism that needs to advance and so should not be approached the same way. It’s the story of an unprincipled God and his intention to let us know we are more broken than we can admit and more loved than we can believe.

Williams is the poet and the theologian. Let him finish:

The God of the Christmas story (and the rest of the Gospels) doesn’t relate to us on the basis of any theory. but on the basis of unconditional love and welcome. That act of free love towards the entire human race changed things -- even for those who didn’t and don’t share all the beliefs and doctrines of Christianity. And for those who do share those convictions, loving God and one another is a defiance of all programmes and principles designed to preserve only the wellbeing of people like us.

Your Correspondent, Only does things for me and people like me