One: The Gospel According to Mike: a review

There are things I like about this book and there are things irritated me.
First the things I like.
It's a really interesting core proposal and one which resonates for concerns I have myself. The core thesis seems to be that on the cross God has already achieved in Christ everything needed for God to become one with creation -hence "ONE" the title. Mike Williams talks about this in terms of the sin of one man, Adam, being offset by the righteousness of the one man Jesus. What I liked was Williams' unrelenting attention to the once-for-allness of this proposition and his exploration of the declension of various forms of Christianity from this such that we all too often reintroduce or substitute law for grace (my characterisation more than his, that). As a result, he writes about "Christianity" and it becomes evident that for him it is not an affectionate term but rather a term denoting a system of religion which in effect avoids or side-steps the real good news and substitutes rules and/or unfreedoms.

There's a big part of me that resonates to this approach. I think he's right to notice how religiosity both binds and screws people up. ONE is laced through with Williams' own testimony of how religious Christianity helped put him in mental health hell on several occasions -illustrating vividly the latter point. This is rooted in one of the things that I think he's right to explore theologically: in older language 'the sufficiency' of the cross. I think he's broadly right to notice that a lot of contemporary Christianity often doesn't take the cross seriously enough as a game-changing event cosmically affecting the relationship between God and creation. Williams does take it seriously. My main criticism here would be the lack of attention to the systematic/philosophical dimensions of this, for example considering the time -related implications: whether the cross could affect people backwards in time being one area of consideration here.

What Williams seems to be doing is reiterating the theology which says that the Christian life is about putting into practice what Christ has already achieved for us: becoming what we are. I think that Williams goes further in that his thesis seems universalist so it is about all human beings becoming what we are in Christ rather than continuing to live in Adam. This is an important area for consideration because I think Williams is right that much Christian teaching has fallen into legalism -that is in effect what he is railing against. It is a legalism that is rooted in a negation of the Cross at key points of thinking and doing. It is a negation of the cross which has filip from enforcement of power and status games within Christian communities and networks.

I liked too that he wrestled with his sexuality and had a deep and passionate dialogue between the theology he inherited and the realities of his human condition. And so as an example of practical theology it is useful to see the way that experience can question our neat theologies and the practical outworkings of them.

What I found irritating most were things like the lack of systematising the topics: I kept finding myself wondering how Williams would handle the more philosophical and theological implications of the position he was developing. For example, what would he say to the charge of antinomianism? -or rather to the suspicion that his position would provide no way to gainsay licence or wickedness. I think that there are ways to deal with that kind of charge from what I understand his position to be, but I kept finding that he simply didn't go there at the points when that question was begged.)

The lack of systematisation also irritated in relation to his repeated statement that God imputed unrighteousness to humanity following the sin of Adam. What does it mean to impute unrighteousness? Does that mean we weren't really unrighteous? Similarly he tends to see this in very clear timely terms: so before the cross everyone was unrighteous in God's sight, afterwards everyone (absolutely, without exception) is unrighteous in God's sight. Now I think that there is a way to think this through (and which doesn't necessitate a commitment to a historical Adam -another issue, despite Williams' protestation towards the beginning).

I think that I'd recommend that Williams engage with the work of Karl Barth (you may get a flavour of why I say that from this article) -on religion and then Barth's thinking about Christ as saviour in the Dogmatics -perhaps especially the exposition of Ephesians chapter 1. In that way Williams's instincts about the Cross and its meaning could be given some systematic rigour and he'd also be able to come to a more nuanced assessment of some of the church where such things have already been thought about.

I felt that Williams could sometimes be unfair to positions and people he thought disagreed with him -and not always consistently so. I think that Martin Luther actually agreed with Williams' over many things but you wouldn't always get that from the way the Williams writes about him, for example. Also there are sometimes sweeping statements which are borne of ignorance: Williams appears to think of Christianity as a fairly narrow section of EPIC Christian expressions and a cartoon of Catholicism. Yet if he know more about theology more widely than there is evidence of in this book, he'd find that much of what he says is already part of a wider Christian conversation -and has been for some time.

That said, I recognise that this was born out of some pain and desperate circumstance and so the catharsis of it is an important part of it: I would just want to say that this is not a finished or polished theology and there are more questions that arise from it and more discussions to have even if one grants Williams's perspectives as seen here.

One: The Gospel According to Mike"