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The Eighth Annual Isaiah Berlin Lecture
Tuesday 16 November 2010
Faith and Enlightenment: Friends or Foes?
by Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
A transcript of the lecture given to a capacity audience in the Eli Chinn Hall can be found here.
The following is edited highlights of the highly informative Question and Answer Session fielded by the Archbishop after the lecture:
Israel
That Israel is a legally recognised state with a right to
exist and to defend itself, I’ve always recognised as axiomatic; and
precisely for that reason, Israel has to argue as a state within the
arguments about moral and political issues of the states of the world.
Covenant
I certainly don’t want to say that anything abrogates or ends
the covenant with the Jewish people. I don’t think I could read my
Bible on that basis. The discovery (self revelation) of the covenanting,
the faithful God which takes place in the history of the Jewish
scripture records the way in which the understanding of the
promise-keeping God takes a new turn with the emergence of the Christian
community - and another one with the emergence of the Muslim community
later on which raises all sorts of fresh problems. So if I am asked:
“one covenant, two covenants or three”; my inclination is rather to say:
‘Well no actually, one promise-keeping God is what I’m interested in
here’. And exactly how the different communities that have discovered
that promise-keeping God make sense of one another is going to be a long
job. But it won’t happen just by taking a scissors to covenantal
history – whether this replaces that or whether there are three
independent things.
‘The Old Testament’ as a phrase certainly suggests a
superseded part of the Bible, which is why I try to remember to say ‘the
Jewish scriptures’ or some such phrase, rather than use a
question-begging term like that.
Big Society
Q (Michael Howard): Archbishop, I hope you won’t think this
too provocative a question. It seems to me that in the vision of society
which you portray, going beyond the road of the individual, you were
coming quite close to providing an intellectual blueprint for the Big
Society. Would you be happy for what you have said to be characterised
in that way?
A: Very fair question I think, because actually one of the
things that I have found myself saying in the last couple of weeks about
the Big Society debate is that in fact quite a lot of what is being
talked about is very much what religious people of various colourings
believe about the nature of mutual responsibility, mutual accountability
and a politics that empowers rather than disempowers communities at
grass roots level. Now I think there is a great deal of potential there
and I think it’s fascinating that this is the debate we are now being
encouraged to have in our society. And as I said at the Guildhall last
night, I think it is one of the most significant contributions that has
been made by the coalition government to our political arguments in the
country and I look forward to more work on this. I think it’s a
fascinating open door and I think it is also a cruel irony that this has
come through at the same time as we are having to ask all these
appallingly difficult questions about where we save money.
And I do take seriously what a number of my friends across
the river from Lambeth Palace have said: the Big Society ideal is
independent in its origins from a money saving exercise, and it is
unfortunate that it has come at a time when it is easy to be cynical
about that. I don’t think we should be, but that’s one of the
difficulties. However, in basic terms, yes I think it is an opportunity
for people who have a strong commitment to that vision of mutuality and
mutual empowerment to get out into the public sphere and have those
arguments more robustly and intelligently than we might have had ten
years ago.
