the heresy of tidy language

I’ve just started reading Rowan Williams’ collection of essays On Christian Theology. I imagine I will have lots to share from this book, if the prologue is any indication of the theological fruitfulness of the text.

I was struck by Williams’ re-conception of heresy:

when you try to tidy up an unsystematized speech, you are likely to lose a great deal. What the early Church condemned as heresy was commonly a tidy version of its language, in which the losses were adjudged too severe for comfort – or rather (since ‘comfort’ can’t be quite the right word here), in which the losses were adjudged to distort or to limit the range of reference of religious speech. The question would arise of whether the same God was still being spoken of; or whether a new version of the believing community’s speech allowed as much to be said as an older version.

Rowan Williams, “Prologue” in On Christian Theology

This idea really struck me: heresy as language that is too tidy, too ordered. It speaks of the power of apophatic theology, theology that describes the divine by omission. We Christians get into trouble when we try to speak to neatly and precisely of God, instead of letting the Divine Mystery be just that: a mystery, one we can only tease out the edges on. I’m certainly too often guilty of just this kind of heresy.

May your speech about God be always messy and informal.