Ben Myers at http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/ has just included a brilliant quote from Rowan Williams. Williams is a genius and a very frustrating one fro me at times, but he does say so much that I like. The quote is not about universalism, but about God’s concern for the universal creation. The picture of a God who cares for the discarded despite the myth of Hell, as we popularly have been taught. God is there for all, and chooses to be involved in the same creation despite many of that same creation, rejecting them. Very pertinent in our urban settings and institutions such as Prison etc. Excellent quote. I need to read some of Williams.
“If salvation is for any, it is for all…. The ‘return’ to the lost, the excluded, the failed or destroyed, is not an option for the saint, but the very heart of saintliness. And we might think not only of Jesus’s parable of the shepherd, but of the great theological myth of the Descent into Hell, in which God’s presence in the world in Jesus is seen as his journey into the furthest deserts of despair and alienation. It is the supreme image of his freedom, to go where he is denied and forgotten…. He comes to his new and risen life, his universal kingship, by searching out all the forgotten and failed members of the human family.”
—Rowan Williams, The Truce of God (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 30.
