William's Views On God: Opinion Essay

In my opinion William is a very unique kind of person. I feel so because he remains a hardcore theologian and a priest who believes in the omnipotence of God. For him God alone is the basis of his ethics and most of the other concepts. After all this he is condemned for promoting heresies and yet whole of his life he remains a friar and never compromises with his understandings and beliefs. After being under the refuge of a king who protected him from the Church he kept writing against the rulers of the church and the secular rulers. These works are listed under political views of William.

Generations after generations have passed away and we are still in search of the understanding of God, existence of soul and many other similar questions. Though several people have tried to answer these questions none of them have succeeded in giving an ultimate answer; is there an answer at all! And it would be a mistake if I say that William has a more convincing answer.

As Christian he followed the religion, culture and faith. But he made some indigestible statements like “the concept of trinity is a logical contradiction”. But when we situate the period in which William lived one can see that he had put in a praiseworthy effort. He neither did away with God nor with religion. He was interested in simplifying our understanding. He tried to explain that our understanding of existence of God is not wrong but trying to comprehend God through human reasoning alone is unreasonable. It is like digging a hole on the shore and trying to empty the sea into it; that would be impossible! When he said the concept of trinity was logically contradicting, he meant it, because till today no one has been able to explain this mystery and William rightly pointed it as mere concept in words and we cannot prove such a mystery; the church must have labelled him heretic because of this, but this is an appealing statement to a common person.

However William’s views are not out of criticisms. As mentioned by some, his philosophy is too authoritarian and though it is appealing and looks convincing he has taken for granted that everyone believes in God, which is not true. His ethics is filled with theology and all his concepts make it a point to put God’s command that is revealed through the scripture as ultimate. I think if we had asked him how we know what the command of God is, then most probably he would not have a convincing answer and moreover if he had quoted “Scripture” as an answer, he would be proved wrong again because the very account of creation is ambiguous and the scripture is interpreted differently by different people. The criticisms are sensible to a certain extent, but this cannot be a measure to discard his views because the way Williams has presented his philosophy is strongly grounded on logic and systematic representations, the weight of which one cannot deny.

Having said so much about his philosophy one can get confused with his orthodoxy way of prioritizing God and his heavy stress on logical reasoning and representation of things. There would not be a mistake if he is called as a radical religious of his time and no wonder why the church called him heretic. The church had done the same with great people like Galileo and others. Most probably he must have been trying to convince the church and the people of his era that we need to change and grow according to the time and situations or in other words God is not a knowledge possessed by the religious leaders and traded with the lay people to retain their domination and expand their wealth.