Rowan Williams’s Tokens of Trust is the most straightforward as well as the most persuasive of the three, although, or perhaps because, it is also the most evidently addressed in the first place to a Christian audience. Talks the Archbishop of Canterbury gave in his cathedral in Holy Week 2005 have become a short, attractive book on the basics – impossible now to use the word “fundamentals” – of Christian belief as expressed in the statements of the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creeds, printed at the beginning of the book. This is no easier a project now, though no more difficult either, than it was for Ratzinger in 1968. Dr Williams, careful neither to put off the beginner with a forbidding demandingness nor to blunt the definitiveness of Christianity’s description of the plight of the human race and the salvation it is offered, achieves a remarkable degree of success. He begins, in our world pervaded by mistrust because pervaded by the competitiveness of different versions of the will to power, with the possibility of trust. “I trust in God” is both easier and harder to say than “I believe in God”: easier because it requires less of an intellectual effort, harder because trusting in God cannot make sense unless there is God to trust. Paul’s resounding, complex statement of the core of Trinitarian faith at the opening of Ephesians is given at the outset as the affirmation without which there can be nothing truly recognizable as Christian belief. In its light, false notions of God should begin to fade into the shadows – and here, for the first but not the last time, Williams suggests that we may see in human lives lived in this light (“the communion of saints”, in the phrase from the Apostles’ Creed) some “faint reflection” of what God is “like”.


What follows, lucid, warm, never intimidating – a sea, as was long ago said of Christianity itself, shallow enough for children to paddle in, deep enough for the wise to swim in – could not have been written without, behind it, decades of theological and philosophical study. Great thinkers of the past are about in the depths; none is mentioned by name but their enriching presence is often detectable. Williams’s account of creation, that is of God as creator and sustainer of being, is, for example, Thomist and profoundly orthodox, but free of Aristotelian terminology, easy to understand on a number of levels, and a sound basis for his dismissal of “the pointless stand-off between religion and science”. That “our present ecological crisis” has “a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world in relation to the mystery of God” is in this properly established context incontrovertible.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Archbishop of Canterbury • * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * Theology • Apologetics

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