Quotes from Rowan Williams

I have, by God's grace, learned as a member of the Christian community what is the nature of God's mercy, which does not leave me to overcome my sin by my own effort, so I have something to say to the fellow-sufferer who does not know where to look for hope. And what I have to say depends utterly on my willingness not to let go of that awareness of myself that reminds me where I start each day—not as a finished saint but as a needy person still struggling to grow.

admire the ingenuity that goes into this but I am not at all convinced that such people have quite got the right end of the stick. Does God really want us to know, in exact detail, ancient Babylonian history? I suspect not. But I am confident that God does want us to know how people in circumstances of acute displacement, living with the fear and the anxiety of a persecuted minority, responded to a hostile state and a pagan power.

To be baptized is to recover the humanity that God first intended. What did God intend? He intended that human beings should grow into such love for him and such confidence in him that they could rightly be called God's sons and daughters. Human

God and the world are not two things to be added together. Neither are they two things that are 'really' one thing. They exist in an asymmetrical relation in which one depends wholly on the other, yet is fully itself, made to be and to act according to its own logic and structure.

A hermit said, "Do not judge an adulterer if you are chaste or you will break the law of God just as much as he does. For he who said 'Do not commit adultery' also said 'Do not judge.

Silence is letting what there is be what it is. In that sense it has to do profoundly with God: the silence of simply being. We experience that at times when there is nothing we can say or do that would not intrude on the integrity and the beauty of that being.

The gospel will not ever tell us we are innocent, but it will tell us that we are loved; and in asking us to receive and consent to that love, or asks us to identify with, and make our own, love's comprehensive vision of all we are and have been.

In the light of this clarification of the finite/infinite distinction, we can see that 'revelatory' action, including whatever events allow us a closer conscious share in infinite agency (in the love of the Trinity, to use the conventional theological phrasing), will be, not an interruption of the finite sequence, but a particular configuration of finite agency such that it communicates more than its own immanent content.

The denial of emotion is a terrible thing; what takes time is learning that the positive path is the education of emotion, not it's uncritical indulgence, which actually locks us far more firmly in our mutual isolation. Likewise, the denial of rights is a terrible thing; and what takes time to learn is that the opposite of oppression is not a wilderness of litigation and reparation but the nurture of concrete, shared respect.

If people take seriously doctrines such as the divinity of Christ, it is not primarily because they can treat them as if they were tidy conclusions to an argument, deductions from readily available evidence, but because — however obscurely they are grasped, however challenging the detail — they see that the language of doctrine holds together a set of intractably complex questions in a way that offers a coherent context for human living.

Add a note This is what the love of God is like: it is free and therefore it is both all-powerful and completely vulnerable. All-powerful because it is always free to overcome, but vulnerable because it has no way of guaranteeing worldly success. The love of God belongs to a different order, not the order of power, manipulation and getting on top, which is the kind of power that pre-occupies us.

It is impossible to deny that Christians and Muslims have a common agenda here: both faiths have at their heart the living image of a community raised up by God's call to reveal to the world what God's purpose is for humanity.