The Wild God we can't coerce

Weird and increasingly encountered beyond the wilderness.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A pianist raises his arms while sitting at a grand piano amid recording equipment.

Nick Cave recording Wild God.

nickcave.com

Christianity is a wild thing.

I say this, even while only half-understanding what I’m saying. It’s something that I’m learning. Or perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that it’s something that I’m unlearning. Because, admittedly, I’m far more familiar with a somewhat domesticated view of my own faith tradition. The kind that allows me to fashion fences out of my expectations; to put parameters around God’s presence and boundaries upon his behaviour. Both of which are a farce, of course - but a comforting farce, none the less.

You see, there is nothing ‘comfortable’ about a God who cannot be wholly predicted or comprehended, let alone controlled or contained. A wild God is always going to be a challenge to a culture that has enthroned comfort. We’re too easily spooked and too unused to the sensation of being cosmically baffled.

But, affronting as it may be, I am trying my best to sit in the knowledge that the God I believe in is a wild God. And I’m finding this wildness increasingly hard to ignore. Perhaps it’s all the Rowan Williams I’ve been reading, or my newfound interest in the Romantics (as in, the eighteenth and nineteenth century poets, not the 1970’s American rock band). Or maybe it has more to do with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ new album, which I have been listening to relentlessly over the last week.

In this musical offering, Nick Cave introduces us to his ‘Wild God’, who I think is my God too. It’s just that ‘wild’ has never been the first adjective I reach for when describing him.

Until now, I suppose.

Let me clarify what I mean by wild, because what I’m not saying is that God is inherently chaotic, unruly, reckless or irrational. Wild Gods, as we know them from the myths and legends, act on tempestuous whims, and are more than a little havoc prone. They are perilous, largely because one can never truly know where they stand with them. That couldn’t be further from what I mean. The entire Old Testament - as complex, nuanced and masterful as it is - can be understood as a collection of ways in which the God at its centre is saying – this is who I am, this is what I desire, this is what I’m going to do, this is where you stand with me. If you were to read the Bible, it would become pretty clear pretty quickly: God is insistent that those who seek to know him will never have to second guess him. God’s wildness does not mean that we cannot know the essence of who he is or how he feels towards us. I like to think that we can endeavour to know him accurately, but never exhaustively.

Rather, what I’m trying to get my head and heart around is the knowledge that God, and therefore Christianity, cannot be wholly domesticated. Despite my best efforts, it cannot be made into an entirely comfortable and cozy thing. To make it so, one would have to dilute it, shrink it, bleed any truth out of it. In his poem - Sometimes a Wild God -Tom Hirons writes,

Oh, limitless space.
Oh, eternal mystery.
Oh, endless cycles of death and birth.
Oh, miracle of life.
Oh, the wondrous dance of it all’.

There’s an innate weirdness to the Christian worldview, a pure wildness at the heart of it. It’s brimming with mystery and mysticism. As Hirons hints, it’s bigger and more consequential than our comfort-zones would like it to be. And, what’s more, much of it is communicated through the natural world. Biblical narratives and poetry are endlessly pointing us toward the places and spaces that are outside human cultivation – the stars, the mountains, the oceans – the things that pre-date and will outlive us.

Christianity is wild in that there’s an alluring organic-ness about it. Its truth sits beyond human manipulation and coercion.

For millennia, whole lives have been given over to this truly wild and, I believe, wildly true story. Can I give you just two recent examples? Two people who have (utterly unexpectedly) adventured their way into this wild and wonderful way of seeing the world? Two people I’ve had the joy of learning from over the past year?

First up is Paul Kingsnorth.

Paul is an award-winning poet and a best-selling author of both fiction (including the Buckmaster Trilogy: Wake, Beast and Alexandria) and non-fiction (including Real England, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and his ongoing Sub-Stack series: Abbey of Misrule). He is, and always has been, an advocate for treating the natural world as if it were far more than a machine to be used or a resource to be obtained. Such behaviour is, according to Paul, nothing short of sacrilegious. As well as an enchantment with what he can see and sense in the natural world, he also has a long-standing fascination with all things mystical.

Buddhism, Witchcraft – you name it, he’s tried it.

He told Justin Brierley and I the story of how he his adventures have led him to arrive at the wildest possible destination: Christianity.  

And then there’s the renowned mythologist, Dr Martin Shaw, who decided to do a 101-day wild vigil in Dartmoor. Despite not being a Christian, on the very last night, he prayed. While praying, he looked up and saw something utterly unexplainable, something ‘properly Old Testament’. And that was it – after a night of dancing, several other ‘odd’ experiences, and eighteen months of deep pondering – he was able to say, ‘I went into the forest expected to be wedded to the wild and I came out wedded to Christ’.

Thinking about it, it’s probably no accident that ‘Christianity’ began on the margins, and from there, worked its way into the cities. There was a time where the prediction of Jesus’ arrival was being yelled out into the countryside, so loudly that people were emptying the surrounding towns to come and hear more. A time when rumours of redemption were being whispered in the rural hills. A time when its chief messenger was an inexplicably weird man named John the Baptist; who shunned his prestigious priestly heritage to live in the wilds, to dress in camel skins, to eat honey and insects and insist upon the imminent coming of the long-awaited Messiah. This Messiah, by the way, who would be born where animals are kept, sleep on mountains, retreat into deserts, walk on water, speak to storms, and break people (including himself) out of stone graves.

You see what I mean, Christianity is a wild story to believe and live in accordance with.

It’s the story that drove the ‘Desert Mothers and Fathers’ of the Third Century AD to reject civilisation and all its comforts, in order to seek God in the silence and solitude of the desert. It’s the story that is still inspiring people to live in caves on Mount Athos, secluded islands just off the coast of Wales and forests in the heart of Ireland. An uncontainable message has, since its inception, been lived out in uncontainable places.

Honestly, you want weird? Christianity can darn-well give you weird.

Don’t be fooled by over-familiarity or be swayed by that pesky left-side of your brain, the part that wants to convince you that you know all that there is to know. Christianity is a story that I, myself, had forgotten was quite this wild.

Interview

Belief

Creed

18 September 2025

5 min read

Water from the well: a moment with Rowan Williams on Nicaea

A chance encounter with the former Archbishop led to a profound reflection

Hal St John

Hal is a theologian and writer based in London.

Students sit on the grass in front of a fountain.

Pontifical University garden.

Pontifical University.

The gardens of the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas near to the Vatican are a place of quiet reason, where the mind is trained to seek the fundamental truths of existence. But on a sweltering day approaching summer, the temperature was 31 degrees, and reason had given way to a more immediate need: a glass of water.

It was by the water-cooler, tucked behind a shade-giving tree, that I found him: Lord Rowan Williams of Oystermouth, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, a man whose theological depth is matched only by a palpable, gentle presence. Perhaps it was the heat, or a moment of recklessness, but I asked him for an interview. To my delight, he agreed.

The following day, we met. His recent keynote address, ‘Nicaea, the New Creation, and the Body of Christ,’ had laid the groundwork. What followed was not a simple Q&A, but a deep, meandering conversation—a drawing from the well of a tradition that is both ancient and startlingly immediate.

The grammar of divinity

How do you prepare to speak on a Council with 1,700 years of commentary? For Williams, the entry point is not the what, but the why.

“I started by asking - what was the question Nicaea was trying to answer?” he began. “This is the question Nicaea was trying to resolve: How do we say, at the same time, that Jesus really is the embodiment of the eternalism of God… and that he genuinely opens up for us a new relationship with the Father?”

This is what Williams calls the “deep grammar” of the Council—a phrase he embraces with enthusiasm. The Creed, he suggests, sketches a grammar for divinity itself. It asserts a belief in one God, “but the kind of oneness that God is, is a oneness that's always fertile or productive.”

This productive, self-giving life—kenosis—is not just who God is, but the kind of life we are called to participate in. “God is always reflecting itself in word and spirit… boiling over into creation - that's what God is!... a life that is both self-giving (kenotic) and productive… a life that brings others alive.”

The saints, in their radical openness to this “kenotic presence,” become conduits of this new creation. “Rather mysterious things happen,” Williams notes, “when you allow the act of God to go through you.”

The magnetic quiver

But how do we, in our everyday lives, tune into this deep grammar? Williams points not to the esoteric, but to the ordinary acts of faith that structure our existence.

“We’re called on, first of all, to wake up to the fact that in our ordinary lives we're in fact all the time making acts of faith - the faith that what I say to you and what you say to me can be more or less understood... the faith that human commitment and love are significant and worth investing in.”

This trust, this “connectedness,” is a slow “peeling open of human identity to its depths.” It is a universal experience, a “magnetic needle” in creation that “quivers northwards... quivers Godwards. We can't quite keep it quiet.”

He offers a wry, characteristically British illustration: “one of the great mysteries in British society is that British people are much nicer than the Daily Mail thinks they are!”

This inherent pull, this quiver, is what the doctrines of the Creed are meant to protect and describe. The dense, pub-unfriendly language of “consubstantial with the Father” is not an abstract puzzle but a map of a reality we are already, however faintly, experiencing. “The Holy Spirit draws us into the flow of life,” Williams says. “The Creed keeps us aware of it… it's the shape and form we’re growing into.”

The breath of the Spirit

This brings us to the ancient rift of the filioque clause—the Western addition to the Creed stating the Spirit proceeds from the Father “and the Son.” Is it a fatal block to unity or a matter of semantics?

For Williams, the scriptural reality is paramount. “Jesus says to his disciples I will send you the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father. Jesus is saying - you will be receiving a gift from me, which is given me by the Father, to give to you.”

The key, he suggests, is in the tangible action: in John’s Gospel, the resurrected Jesus breathes on his disciples. “Jesus brings the Spirit into action, into full tangible action in human history.” The Spirit proceeds through the Son into the world. At this point, theology reaches its limit. “I’m quite happy to grin feebly and shrug my shoulders...I dunno!” he laughs. “What matters is that the energy of new life and vision is given.”

And this energy, he insists, “goes with the grain of our humanity.” One can almost imagine a divine sigh: “For Heaven’s sake... just wake up to what you are.”

He finds the perfect image in the parable of the Prodigal Son, who, in the depths of his exile, “came to himself.” It is a “paradigm moment” of das Ereignis—a Heideggerian concept for an event of appropriating, of “coming into one’s own.” “There is a self to come to,” Williams affirms, “and a home to go to.”

A unity already given

Will the divided churches ever find structural unity? At times, he admits, we seem to be drifting further apart. But Williams’ focus is on a deeper, prior reality.

“It helps to be aware that there's a unity given already. We're not quite sure how to embody it. We're not quite sure how to organise it. But there's something there.”

Finally, reflecting on the Council itself, he dismisses any notion of Nicaea as a merely political project for a fractious empire, though Constantine’s desire for harmony was a factor. He paints a visceral picture of the attending bishops, as described by Eusebius: men with missing hands, gouged eyes, and the scars of persecution. When Constantine greeted them, “he kneels down and kisses their wounds.”

“They're not just purple cassocked prelates sitting in armchairs! Their faith has been through the fire!”

This is the well from which this Creed was drawn. It is a creed of the persecuted, a truth forged in fire. A truth, as Williams learned from Pakistani Christians this year who heard the story of Nicaea and simply said, “we know about that,” that is known in the bones before it is understood in the mind. It is the water that waits, cool and deep, for any who come thirsty.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge now