(John I Durham, The Biblical Rembrandt, 2004. The painting is Rembrandt's "Paul in Prison.")
Paul's Prison epistles remain amongst the core texts in my own spiritual journey, a delight first kindled by G B Caird's brief and elegant commentary in the long defunct Clarendon series. That was in 1976. Caird's book, bought in Stirling University bookshop, is still a favourite. So much has been written on Paul since then, starting with E P Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, and then the several subsequent turns on the long road and many branch roads of Pauline scholarship, guided by such luminaries as J D G Dunn, N T Wright, Richard Hays, J Beker, J L Martyn, Beverly Gaventa, and most recently John G Barclay.
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ver the years I've preached through all four of Paul's prison letters and revisited key passages often enough. Such engagement cannot but allow those ancient texts to soak into and permeate mind and heart. Some of the passages I know by heart, and have become part of the inner vocabulary both of prayer and contemplative soliloquy.
Several years ago I experimented with tapestry design. I read the Colossian Hymn, (Ch 1.15-20), every day in various translations and the Greek text, often before I picked up the canvas. I used several commentaries throughout the several months the tapestry took to complete, including Caird, J D G Dunn, E Lohse and Marianne Thompson.
The design was worked from the centre outwards, playfully asking the question, What colour is Christology? The result is in the second picture (excuse the camera flash on the glass).
From Philippians has grown one of my long term research interests, kenosis as both pastoral style and theological resource in Christian spirituality. Philippians 2.5-11 has been like and exegetical Rubislaw Quarry for me – it's a place I just keep digging! For those who don't know, Rubislaw Quarry is one of the largest human made holes in Europe, and source of millions of tons of Aberdeen granite.
One of the seminal books in my thinking has been W H Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense, first read over 40 years ago. The book provides a modified process theology as the best way to understand the love of God. Vanstone envisaged kenosis as love refusing to guarantee its own outcomes. He argued with patience and passion that divine love was precarious and vulnerable because love cannot compel the desired response. I thought then, as now, he was on to something essential about the nature of divine love, and indeed the human experience of love as great trust and great risk.
A decade later an encounter with P T Forsyth 's Person and Place of Jesus Christ provided a robust relocation of kenosis in the purposive power and intentional moral decision of God in Christ crucified, the One who tasted death as the great ethical act that effects reconciliation between God and humanity. Kenosis, for Forsyth, is interpreted best through the cross, which is the culmination of the incarnation, the presupposition of the resurrection, and the eternal truth of Holy Love working towards a redeemed Creation.
All of this from a chance browse in a bookshop one summer late afternoon, and with £2.95 to spend on a new book.
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