Rowan Williams’ Lenten Theology

Wesley Hill takes up the theology of Rowan Williams in  Books and Culture :

Lent is the moment in the church’s calendar in which Williams’ theology seems most at home. During the forty days leading up to Easter, we practice abstinence, we repent and discipline our desires, placing our hands over our mouths, partaking of what Bulgakov calls the “luminous sorrow” of the preparatory fast. If we recognize the legitimacy of this pentitential discipline, perhaps we can better appreciate what Williams aims to achieve in his theology. But at the same, recognizing that Lent eventually yields up its shadows to the brightness of Easter, perhaps we can also find room to criticize Williams’ choice to  linger  over Lent. Darkness and fasting can’t be the whole  story. “A theology of Lent is a great thing,” writes Myers, “but one cannot live by ash alone.” Reading this comment, I found myself recalling W. H. Auden’s criticism of Kierkegaard’s theology: “like all heretics, conscious or unconscious, he is a monodist, who can hear with particular acuteness one theme in the New Testament—in his case, the theme of suffering and self-sacrifice—but is deaf to its rich polyphony . . . . The Passion of Christ was to Kierkegaard’s taste, the Nativity and Epiphany were not.” Might the same be said of Williams?

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