Rowan Williams: We can reach out beyond the market

The great revolt against traditional authority in the 17th and 18th centuries was a necessary moment, because tradition was understood as the way in which the past dominated the present. But what about the person who is now able to inhabit a tradition with confidence, fully aware that it isn't the only possible perspective on persons and things, but equally aware that they are part of a network of relations and conventions far wider than what is instantly visible or even instantly profitable, and this network is inseparable from who they concretely are?

I suspect that many of us would recognise in this more of freedom than of slavery, because it makes possible a real questioning of the immediate agenda of a society, the choices that are defined and managed for you by the market.

Further, if specifically religious tradition has a place here, it is because of those elements that only religious conviction seems to secure in our sense of what is human. For the religious believer – very particularly in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim worlds – each of us, and each item in our environment, exists first in relation to something other than me, my needs, my instincts.

They are related to a life or agency independent of any aspect of how things happen to be or turn out in the universe; to the eternal, to God. To see or know anything adequately is to be aware of its relation to the eternal. And if the stuff of the world around us is related to, grounded in God, our current human desires, our immediate agenda cannot exhaust what can be said about that world.