Rowan Williams—‘Cloven Tongues’: Theology and the Translation of the Scriptures

from TitusOneNine by Kendall Harmon

God’s meanings in revelation are clear, but they are also fluid in their boundaries: there is a normative story to be told, one which, for the 1611 translators is focused upon the sovereignty of grace and the consequent impotence of human mediation between God and the world. Everything has to be read against the backdrop which alone makes sense of Scripture as a whole – the unique divinity of Christ and the gift of absolving and transforming grace to all who repudiate trust in their own works. The translators were not all in precisely the same place in the complex map of internal Protestant controversy in the early seventeenth century, but all would have subscribed to this overall view. This being said, however, the exact way in which the words of Scripture are seen and read as transparent to these mysteries will not be settled once and for all by this or that particular bit of human hermeneutical enterprise. Thus, knowing what is going on in the work of translation is a stimulus to recognising the ‘common imbecility’ of which Hooker speaks and so to deeper involvement in the common life of the congregation. The qualified indeterminacy of Scripture, manifest in the sheer fact of the translatability of Scripture and the diverse possibilities of saying what it says, becomes an ecclesiological matter: it brings into focus the biblical vision of mutual edification within the Body of Christ. And insofar as it thus becomes part of the opening up of the believer to the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, we can see that the Christological hints which we noted in Smith’s preface are indeed not simply about removing obstacles to a clear and straightforward message but connected with the strengthening of the common life in which alone revelation is rightly received.

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