LEON O. HYNSON

My initial response to Charles Williams’s profound exercise in imaging is that of the stranger in a strange land. I have taken a pilgrimage, journeying down a relatively unmarked way. There have been remote indications of a previous encounter with the surrounding phenomena which combine in a hazy surrealism, a kind of London fog which conceals more than it reveals. Dennis Kinlaw’s sensitive interpretation of Williams1 begins to mark out the lineaments of Williams’s imagery in an attractive manner. I find it intriguing that the writer of this essay, so eloquent and winsome in the presentation of the faith along more classical orthodox lines, and so informed by years of exposure to that style of communication, should give such high praise to novelists, poets, and playwrights, and professors. Is it possible that this gentleman is a literature professor who has come into this society in the image of Dennis Kinlaw? Obviously not! This is the president of Asbury College in all of his reflective ontological dignity.

The "prejudice of education" (to use Mr. Wesley’s phrase) leads me at first to look with narrowed eye upon the literary person (Williams) who would write an exotic interpretation of Christian history-The Descent of the Dove (subtitled A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church-and an extended series of novels which apparently seek by indirection and inference to present the reality of Christ. Presumably (so I thought) these efforts would resemble a Karl Barth writing Out of the Silent Planet (C. S. Lewis gets the credit for that). Surely such a work by Barth would "fall like a bombshell on the playground of the theologians" (to quote a German Catholic’s comment regarding Barth’s commentary on Romans). But in fact my prejudice turns out to be mistaken. Williams has grasped some profound insights and conveyed their truth in images that surprise the "unsuspecting reader."

One of the more attractive illustrations of Williams’s imaging is discovered in The Descent Into Hell in a chapter entitled:

"The Doctrine of Substituted Love." To understand the image the reader should be aware of the familiar reference to "co-inherence" in Williams’s thought. The concept which originated in Christian theological discussion concerning the divine Trinity, conveys the sense of unity, or, the interpenetration (Greek-perichoresis; Latin-circuminsessio) of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Williams uses the term to speak of humanity’s union with Adam in the Fall, with Christ in His reconciling act upon the Cross, and the unity of the Church.

The Christian community is described as "Companions of the Co-inherence."2

With this concept in mind we follow Williams’s idea of substituted love in a conversation between Pauline Anstruther and Peter Stanhope. Pauline shares with Peter her tormenting fear of meeting an exact likeness of herself. Apparently she is terrified by the thought of seeing herself in its true light. When Peter asks the basis of her terror she simply repeats her fears. Stanhope suggests that she ask her friends to carry her fear. Uncomprehending, she rejects the suggestion as nonsense. Finally, Stanhope convinces her to follow his counsel. The sequel to this conversation shows the co-inherence of Peter and Pauline in her fear-filled life.

He recollected Pauline; he visualized her going along a road, any road; he visualized another Pauline coming to meet her. And as he did so his mind contemplated not the first but the second Pauline; he took trouble to apprehend the vision, he summoned through all his sensations an approaching fear. Deliberately he opened himself to that fear, laying aside for awhile every thought of why he was doing it, forgetting every principle and law, absorbing only the strangeness and the terror of that separate spiritual identity. His more active mind reflected it in an imagination of himself going into his house and seeing himself, but he dismissed that, for he desired to subdue himself not to his own natural sensations, but to hers first, and then to let hers, if so it should happen, be drawn back into his own.

But it was necessary first intensely to receive all her spirit’s conflict. He sat on, imagining to himself the long walk with its sinister possibility, the ogreish world lying around, the air with its treachery to all sane appearance. His own eyes began to seek and strain and shrink, his own feet, quiet though actually they were, began to weaken with the necessity of advance upon the road down which the girl was passing. The body of his flesh received her alien terror, his mind carried the burden of her world. The burden was inevitably lighter for him than for her, for the rage of a personal resentment was lacking. He endured her sensitiveness, but not her sin; the substitution there, if indeed there is a substitution, is hidden in the central mystery of Christendom which Christendom itself has never understood,

nor can.3

This passage from Williams echoes the Pauline witness of personal faith: "that I may know Him, and the fellowship of His suffering"(Philippians 3:10). In a manner similar to Jesus’ parables, Williams’s image captures the imagination and draws the spectator into the arena of decision. Here is the point of contact.

But what is the content of the decision? How is the unsuspecting reader moved from the image to the reality? I find it difficult to discover, with a few exceptions, more than abstract configurations (images?) which touch the ground of our being but do not guide to the grace and truth which are in Jesus Christ. I am dissatisfied with the way the content of the image secures the participation of the reader in the reality. It is surely not evident that the image moves one to the ultimate reality which is Jesus Christ. In Descent Into Hell the question arises concerning the meaning of the Chorus in the play to be dramatized. Debating the question, Mrs. Parry asks: "What will the audience make of the Chorus?" "It’s for them to make of it what they can," Adela responded. "We can only give them a symbol."4 Williams’s imaging seems to allow for a relativity of interpretation according to the particular existential bent of the reader. "It’s for them to make what they can of it."

There is much in Williams’s effort to attract the attention of the reader and to appeal to his/her spirit with the symbols of the faith. Those who understand and take seriously Wesley’s theology of prevenient grace will know that there is a divine undercurrent flowing through the experience of every person. No one is destitute of divine influence. The soil of consciousness and experience in everyone has been disturbed by the plough of the Gracious Husbandman.

What then will bear the "unsuspecting reader" to the reality of faith? Unless there is a spiritual motion behind the image, ordinarily (though not always) mediated by the interpreting believer, the reader is not likely to move to the person to which the image points. There must be an interpreter like Philip who, led by the Spirit, intercepts the reader and asks: "Do you understand what you are reading?" The answer is given: "’How can I unless someone guides me?’ And he asked Philip to come up and sit with him." There followed Philip’s interpretation of Isaiah’s image of the Christ and the dawning of the divine light for the Ethiopian (Acts 8:30-35).

The story of Philip and the Ethiopian illustrates well the need for the interpreter. Look at the issue in different terms. I have been impressed and moved by Dr. Kinlaw’s interpretation of Williams, more than by Williams’s presentation. I have required an interpreter to see the power of the image in Williams. Kinlaw has illuminated Williams and has given his writings an evident Christian content and force which Williams seems to lack. My problem is to discover how the unsuspecting pagan moves from the image to the reality if one lacks the mediation of the Christian guide.

In a more positive manner, recognition is given to Williams’s way of balancing the Way of Negation with the Way of Affirmation. Evangelical, including Wesleyan, theology has consistently preferred a theology of salvation, with its backdrop of the Fall, sin and estrangement, to a theology of creation which affirms the goodness of everything God has created; affirming human possibility while insisting upon the saving remedy of the Cross for human sin. Of course the Fall distorts and tragically diminishes the glory of creation, plunging humanity into sinful helplessness. That, however, is not the last word, for God has acted decisively in His prevenient grace to initiate reconciliation and restoration. Prevenient grace grants to fallen man a quality of humanity which we, buying into the Augustinian anthropology far more than the Pelagian, have failed to accentuate.

Walter Brueggemann has written an essay, "The Triumphalist Tendency in Exegetical History."5** in which he concludes that four important theologies are found in Scripture.

The dominance of an Augustinian bias, with its residual Manichaean heresy, in orthodox anthropology, and the failure to incorporate the dimension of human response/responsibility, has resulted in a lessened sense of the value of the human. The incarnation of Jesus Christ should have taught us to see God’s valuation of the human and natural which is His creation. We have erred in the direction of gnostician and Platonism. Probably this has permitted some of us to exploit the natural order somewhat along the lines described in Lynn White’s critique.6** (Some popular gospel songs have grasped the gnostic heresy and have "sanctified" it to present an unbiblical spirituality very much akin to the elitist spirituality which Paul addressed in I Corinthians 2.)

Wesleyan theology will do well to accept the correlation between creation and salvation found in Wesley (but largely undeveloped).7 Dr. Kinlaw’s attractive presentation of the incarnational motifs (images) in Charles Williams’s thought will encourage us to study the theology of creation grounded in Scripture, and carried along in Christian history, albeit like a subterranean stream. Hopefully, this interpretation of Williams, within this scholarly community, will press us back to our roots in Wesleyan history. If this happens, we will discover that, for Wesley, salvation results in a quality of human-ness inaugurated in Christ, the second Adam, which initiates and develops to maturity the authentic humanity of the creation imago dei.

Gratitude to Dr. Kinlaw for his warm interpretation of Williams is a given in this entire response. He has conveyed a spirit of creativity that should challenge those of us who tend to approach our task in a too scholastic or wooden manner.

1Dennis Kinlaw, "Charles Williams' Concept of Imaging Applied to the 'Song of Songs,' " Wesleyan Theological Journal, 16:1 (Spring 1981), pp.85-92.

2Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church, dedication page.

3Charles Williams, The Descent Into Hell, " pp. 100-01.

4Charles Williams, The Descent Into Hell, pp.14-15.

5Walter Brueggemann, "The Triumphalist Tendency in Exegetical History," Journal of the American Academy of Religion (December 1970), pp.367-80.

6See Lynn White, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," Science, 155 (1967):1203.

7See my essay, "Creation and Grace in Wesley's Ethics," Drew Gateway, 46:1-3 (1975-76), pp.41-55.