What intrigues me is how this idea plays out in a study of history. To some degree, I think that any historian worth his salt will recognize history is a 'decentring' exercise. After all, it doesn't take a long time researching to discover the 'otherness' of the people or civilizations we study. The foreignness, the strangeness of people in the past cannot help come through as we discover that our assumptions about the world are not universal and that people in the past had very different assumptions about the world, the universe and, yes, even God. Thus, what seems to be extremely irrational, perhaps even crazy behavior to us, actually, makes sense when one takes the time to figure out what is it that people in a time period believed.
A case and point is St. Martin of Tours, a fourth century monk/bishop about whom I've been reading about for some fifteen years in a, perhaps, over-ambitious attempt to translation the writings about him. He first came to my attention because I have attended two churches bearing his name (one in London, Ontario and one in Toronto), so I became familiar with the popular stories about him. The two best known of these is his decision to cut his military cloak into two to clothe a beggar (who turned to be Christ) and his defiant refusal to fight in battle for the Emperor Julian because Martin was trying to live out his Christian faith out and so couldn't kill. Those are the easy to understand stories, but, when one delves deeper, one finds more disconcerting stories like his campaigns against pagan religious sites in his diocese, his regular encounters with demons and his miracles stories which looks so improbable that they defy belief. Indeed, even contemporaries weren't sure about him. His successor as Bishop of Tours, St. Brice, openly questioned Martin's sanity on, at least, two occasions, because the old man (by then) seemed to see demons everywhere.
Yet, when one realizes that his biographer's main concern in his Life and other writings was to defend Martin's status as a holy man of God, very much in the tradition of St. Anthony and the other monks of the Egyptian and Syrian deserts. All this talk of miracles and demons may still strike us as uncomfortably strange because we moderns usually tend to assume that demons are either the preserve of horror movies or the delusions of a mentally disturbed mind. Yet, the belief in supernatural beings, who could be benevolent or malevolent, was obvious in the minds of generations of humans in the late Roman and mediaeval periods as was the role of the holy man in banishing them. We moderns don't really know what to do with these stories because we don't see the world this way- teaming with supernatural beings, benevolent or not. Yet, historians can't deny the influence of these beliefs on the actions of people. That this belief was so strong may be unsettling to us, but, perhaps, it is a good reminder that, instead of coming to history assuming we know best, we need to listen to what the past tells us before we try to interpret it. We might not believe what Martin's biographer, Sulpicius Severus, is telling us, but we would be wrong to forget that generations of people did.
I think that is what Dr. Williams is trying to get us to see with this image of history as a 'de-centring'spiritual discipline. Certainly, for me, it is my reading of history which taught me, and never fails to remind me, that even my most cherished ideas and assumptions are not obviously true and that I cannot assume that anyone is going to act the way that I expect. And, if my fellow human being from the past, with whom I share a common humanity, is so exceedingly strange to me, then, how can I expect God, who is another level of 'otherness' to us, will act in ways that I can predict or, even, understand. It reminds me that the world, and God, is a whole lot bigger than what I know and what I think I want. And that, given my limited vision and imagination, is probably a good thing.
