Saturday, January 31, 2009

John Humphreys grills Rowan Williams

Just come across a fascinating BBC radio program, here, where John Humphries interrogates religious leaders and demands that they try and convert him. Only listened to the first part of the Rowan Williams interview so far. Williams says some great things and some not so great things. One thing he said which I appreciated, and which relates to the Contextual Theology thread currently running, is that it is often better to use crude physical imagery to describe God rather than abstract technical language because when we refer to God's arm, or God be like a rock, it is obvious that our language is metaphor and therefore a rather human attempt to grasp the unreachable, but when we use abstract words like omnipresent or eternal we start to think we have a handle on who/what God is.

In the first part of the interview at least, RW refers at least as much to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as he does the Bible.

Let me know what you think :)

No comments:

Post a Comment

Jesus treats the Syrophoenecian Woman as a Disciple

[This is an extract from my essay "Breaking Bread: The Power of Hospitality in the Gospel of Mark" which you can read in full and ...