Editor's note: due to space constraints, a shorter version of this review appeared in ENY.

Why Study the Past? : The Quest for the Historical Church
By Rowan Williams
Eerdmans
129 pages

A recent movie, Kingdom of God (2004), deals with the Crusades; and since that episode in western history seems to have implications for Christina-Muslim relationships, the makers made a considerable effort to insure historical fidelity. And in many ways they succeeded. At the minute level of detail–truly important in a film, not trivial–the costumes, hairstyles, clothing, buildings, weapons, are quite close to the mark. And the facts are not distorted. The Europeans really did establish their Palestinian version of feudal Europe around Jerusalem. The Muslim general, Saladin, really was a most enlightened and civilized individual.

And so on. But at a climactic moment in the film, when Jerusalem is hopelessly besieged, the French Count, Geoffrey, delivers a speech that is rousing, noble, and effective–and utterly ahistorical. The sentiments the star utters –about liberal values, tolerance, and the dignity of the individual versus the state–are, to put it simply, impossible for any thirteenth-century person anywhere. John Locke or Thomas Jefferson might have been able to say these things; any contemporary leader could. Geoffrey could not. And this weakened the movie considerably, if it indeed did not spoil it.

This illustrates one of the sorts of errors that even serious students of the past tend to make: what Rowan Williams calls “modernizing of motivation” (p. 4). Do that in a work of historical fiction, and what you have done is merely to give us a version of the past that is just “the present in fancy dress”–no matter how authentic that dress may be.

I could have chosen many other kinds of examples to illustrate that point, but I chose a recent example from popular entertainment for a reason: to suggest the wide-ranging relevance of Rowan Williams’ new book, Why Study the Past: the Quest for the Historical Church. This dense, closely-reasoned, and rich essay really is concerned with our relation to the past–primarily as Christians, secondarily as thinking human beings. It challenges our self-understanding, again as Christians, but especially as members of the world-wide, and momentarily fractious, Anglican Communion, and as twenty-first century Christians.

Williams accomplishes this by fulfilling both halves of his title. He A) works out, in the course of the essay, an approach to study of the past that is both faithful to the past, and faithful to the faith, and a theology of history: in other words, an answer to the question in the main title, and B) examines the past himself, through his own lens, as it were. In doing the first, Williams gives us a set of tools; in achieving the second, he offers his own vision of Christian history.

Briefly put, the answer to the question “why study the past?” is that Christian faith is rooted in a historical moment, the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. In doctrine, and more importantly ethics, and more importantly still worship, that moment must be allowed to “become contemporary.” Williams notes that many, many theologians, Church historians, and serious lay Christians (lay in the academic sense!), on either and any side of various polemical issues, have used the past merely as proof-text for their own positions–which really is nothing but a slightly more sophisticated version of using Scripture in that blunt way. Williams in other words would see the educated progressive who uses a quote from Irenaeus or some other Patristic writer to bolster his liberalism to be as culpable as the fundamentalist who quotes Leviticus to support his condemnation of homosexuality. Both commit, in the (more serious, Williams would assert) theological domain, the same error the makers of Kingdom commit in the realm of art.

The past, Williams suggests, is not “there” for us to mine for confirmation of our own positions: but neither should the past simply refute our attitudes, nor is it impenetrable and useless. To study an Irenaeus–or Martin Luther, or Augustine, or Thomas Aquinas, or Bishop Andrewes, or even our Victorian forbears (Williams exhibits a bit of hesitation here, so I add the “even”)—is to be challenged by a vision different from our own. That means that study of the past will not so much offer answers to our questions on “positions” as offer us a new way of looking at the problems in the first place.

Williams concentrates on three crucial periods in our past–the early Patristic (from the Resurrection to the first version of the Ecumenical Creed–that is, mid first to mid fourth century); the Reformation; and the modern and contemporary era (the twentieth century through the present moment). He applies his own method–uses his own lens–throughout; an example from the first period, Williams’’s own specialty, will suffice here to illustrate.

Everyone who studies the first, say, two centuries of the Church is struck by the courage and the power of the infant Church. But equally visible is an attitude toward sexuality that really contradicts our zeitgeist, that we would find politically incorrect–almost all of us. That is an extolling of Virginity, in and of itself, as a supreme Christian status. Seeing this, the modern liberal-minded Christian tends to see repression, authoritarianism, patriarchal male chauvinism, Platonic hatred of the body–the list could go on for a while.

Williams’ says that this is to see the fact but misunderstand it completely: virginity was extolled for one reason and one reason only, because it was a perfect symbol for the integrity of the whole Christian body, the locus of charismatic power. That is the only explanation that makes sense, given the Judaic roots and the Incarnational convictions of the early Christians.

Now this is unlikely to change our more open attitude toward sexuality–that would involve the “proof-text” approach. But Williams suggests that taking this seriously might change us in another, a deeper, way–it might change our understanding of Church. Modern people tend to see the Church as a society of like-minded religious people. The Second century faithful saw themselves as a “holy assembly of aliens” (39)–holy “in the sense not of exceptional goodness but of the active presence of a holy and terrifying power (36). And we think of worship as our weekly religious duty, or our weekly opportunity for spiritual “recharging.” The early Christians thought of it as “the celebration...where the body of believers, through identification with Christ’s prayer to the Father, enter the heavenly sanctuary with the angels, receive from Christ the miraculous food of immortal life and re-emerge newly constituted as the locus in the world of divine life and agency...” (39).

“The locus in this world of divine life and agency.” It is one of a host of working, and challenging, answers to what Williams identifies as the central question of Church history: what, exactly, is th Church? Or rather, a host of versions of exactly the same answer: a body of believers granted enormous charismatic power to challenge, and serve, a secular world. It is an understanding, a vision, of the Church that has recurred from time to time–at the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, when the dizzying power of the modern state first was felt, as Williams demonstrates in his careful, balanced, yet bold analysis of that era; and this present moment. Whenever the Church finds itself “up against” a Rome-like political world, this vision seems to re-emerge, as a challenge.

Williams’’s challenge to us is to “study the past” in exactly this way. Not for antiquarian interest (that’s what the Victorians did with the medieval period, as Williams humorously points out several times); not as proof-text for our own assumptions; and not merely to “learn lessons” and avoid repeating human mistakes. We study the past to look into the “distant mirror” and there discover our authentic selves.