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If this blog is about anything it is about the life of the mind, living with intellectual passion, learning to learn and listen, being open to new possibilities and opportunities and believing in the transformative power of ideas. One of the fundamental resources of a culture and a society is the capacity to read and write.

For the writer, to distill thought and imagination into words and then craft and shape words as conduits of thought and ideas into written communication.

For the reader to interpret and seek understanding of what is being read, as a way of appropriating so far as possible the thought of the wirter, and to do so with critical appreciation, openness to story and ideas, and therefore to build a deeper and richer understanding of the texture and fabric of the world.

So books are vital to sustain that healthy flow of knowledge, as a cradle for ideas, a stimulus for imaginative thought, as a source of critical interrogation of our assumptions, prejudices and knowledge gaps. Novels and technical manuals, self help and poetry, biography and bio-chemistry, cultural history and management practice, social commentary and sporting celebrity, physics and philosophy – the list goes on. So when a decision to restrict reading material available to prisoners is revoked, this is cause for praise, approval and a sign of a more positive view of reading as a transformative practice capable of changing a person's attitudes, worldview, values and personal aspirations for their own lives.

That is what Michael Gove has just announced – an end to reading restrictions for prisoners. I want to affirm that decision without qualification – that is a very good thing he has done.

However reading the full report, which you can find on the BBC Website here, I am less than impressed by the stated reasons for doing this, and the discourse used to defend those reasons; in particular I am unhappy about the assumptions which lie behind the language used by the Government Minister responsible for the efficiency and ethos of our prison system.

To see prisoners as "potential assets" who can be "productive and contribute", and to describe their value in economic terms is to reduce each individual to the status of economic asset or liability. That each person should be ancouraged to contribute to the common good, to work and be productive and constructive in the society to which we each belong, yes, I can see that. But that kind of thinking and way of speaking requires a preliminary and fundamental recognition of a person's humanity, and of the place of humane learning in enriching that humanity. Such learning includes reading, an intellectual activity which rightly directed enables and empowers a person to live a life both fulfilling and valuable to others around them. A human being is not someone who has potential worth, which can only be realised when their usefulness can be measured in employability, earnings and therefore productivity for the market. A human being is just that – a person with potential to fulfill their humanity and to discover their place and worth in a society. When people feel valued, they then contribute that value to the social frameworks within which they live and move and have their being

But yes. Good move Mr Gove. To see reading as a significant strand in the strategy that enables a person to discover who they are, to grow in understanding towards wisdom, to develop knowledge, skills and insights on which they can build a different life, to explore fields of knowledge from physics to philosophy and from poetry to pottery, and from maths to myths; to see that potential and to enable it is a fine piece of responsible government. Well done Michael Gove; the decision is brilliant, the arguments cogent, though the discourse requires to be de-jargonised and translated into the language of humane politics.  

Hendiadys. Not a word beloved of football managers, computer geeks, bankers, call centre employees, politicians, bus drivers, or nearly everybody who has more important things to do than play around with the latinised form of a Greek phrase. Hendiadys indeed! Get a life!

I came across the word in a commentary on Isaiah the prophet, and it just may be that this strange hybrid word will help us make some sense of what's missing in the contemporary experience of many people in austerity Britain. An Isaianic hendiadys might, just might, empower and enable those most struggling with life just now, to get a life.

Hendiadys is the technical term for two different words, which when paired together by "and", convey one single idea. In Isaiah two such words are "justice and righteousness". For Isaiah, these are not two different values, but the conjoining of both into a single and singleminded commitment to public social justice.

The prophets had no patience for political rhetoric, expedient promises, and truth defying evasions. Whether the poor were badly represented in the law courts, or cheated and kept poor by an unjust economic system, the prophets demanded change from such oppressive decisions, closed systems and exclusive privileges. And what they demanded was "justice and righteousness", an overhaul of the system, a repentance of greed, a reconstructed economy built around humane practices aimed at human flourishing. The hendiadys "justice and righteousness" was a divinely minted sound byte; a theological strap line; a hashtag originating with Yahweh.

Here's a sample of Isaianic social critique:" Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow." (1.17) What he's arguing for is "justice and righteousness" for the vulnerable poor in a society where power is vested in accumulated wealth. Social justice is not an option restricted to when a country has no deficit; the real deficit every time the poor are punished by the rich is a moral one, and it requires repentance. "Zion shall be redeemed by justice, and those in her who repent, by righteousness." (1.27) Repentance is a fundamental change of direction towards newness of possibility and policy.

"In their broadest sense 'justice and righteousness' have political, social, theological, moral and legal dimensions." (Patricia Tull, Isaiah 1-39, Smyth and Helwys, 2010), p.68. At least half a dozen times Isaiah voices the disappointment of God who, looking on the plight of the poor, "expected justice but saw bloodshed, righteousness but heard a cry." (5.17). It's all too easy for any of us to claim the moral high ground when quoting the Bible; and I'm well aware that I am part of a society in which I have become deeply implicated in the way things are, and in the oppression of the poor and the rejection of the stranger.

But Isaiah's hendiadys still brings diagnostic clarity to what is wrong at the heart of western capitalist consumer culture. When wealth is God, – and profit, deficit, debt, interest, cuts, savings, austerity reflect the liturgical language of its worshippers, then someone has to contest such liturgy with an alternative discourse: justice and righteousness, redemption and repentance, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

In the context of 21st Century Britain, single mothers with threatened cuts to tax credits for their children; people with disabilities and threatened reduction of support benefits; increasing numbers of people on wages so low they require working tax credit support from a shrinking benefits budget; and the growing numbers of hungry people depending on charitable food banks – these are our equivalent of orphans, widows, the oppressed and the poor.

One of the great challenges in commentary writing is to discover the contemporary relevance, the practical application, of a text like Isaiah, to those of us who read that ancient text now. I for one have no problem seeing the contemporary relevance of Isaiah's hendiadys to the social realities of an austerity ideology. When the Chancellor announces his Budget today, and the widely expected £12 billion savings from the welfare bill are detailed and justified, that same hendiadys will be a more imposing and perduring bottom line than the savings made at the expense of the poor. "I will make justice the line, and righteousness the plummet; hail will sweep away the refuge of lies, and waters will overwhelm the shelter". (28.17) Isaiah is speaking to the complacent rich, the scoffers who rule in their own interests, and presume upon their own future, while mortgaging that of others.

Whatever else Isaiah was about, in the name of God, the Holy One, he was right into politics, economics, lawmaking and the common good. He put into the mouths of the oppressed poor the complaint,  "Justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us." That is now the deep and chronic feeling of millions in our country struggling to get by. The same Isaiah, with a hopefulness that was defiant of the oppressor, looked forward to the day when "See, a king will reign in righteousness, and princes will rule in justice." (32.1) Until then, those who are Isaianic in their politics will continue to live and embody grace, mercy, love and that hendiadys, so subversive of austerity focused on the poor: "justice and righteousness".

An interesting experiment with the transferability of symbols and images. The photo of this plump pigeon doesn't resonate with what I think of when the Holy Spirit is described as a dove in the Gospels! The idea of this juggernaut flapping around the head of the Son of God has the incongruity of a Monty Python sketch that didn't make it past the director's cut! Urban pigeons are more evocative of lost sinners than the third member of the Holy Trinity.

Living in Aberdeenshire I might be more inclined to think of the Holy Spirit when I see swifts flying like feathered arrows with a mind of their own, or geese flying home in formation honking their conversation across the skies, or, when on the hills, the curlew's long drawn out cry of longing touches deep recesses of yearning I thought I'd forgotten.

Now and again, ornithology overlaps into orni-theology, as observation of birds occasionally coincides with more existential questions. When Jesus spoke of the birds being non-anxious, it's worth remembering his point of comparison was specifically anxiety about food and clothes and accumulation and the real grounds of security in the providence of God.

I'm not sure Jesus would use the urban pigeon, a stomach with legs and a beak, as a model for human flourishing now. As a metaphor for greed and over-consumption that chases others away from life's essentials,it forms the basis of a parable for our time. Only once have I seen a pigeon taken by a sparrow hawk – it was too heavy to get off the ground fast enough. Hmm.

A friend asked on Facebook when the word austerity was first used as a politico-economic term for the approach to dealing with the post 2008 banking crisis. He always asks the kind of questions which act as warning lights about justice and injustice, economic power and its capacity to hide behind the rhetoric of fairness, prudence and obligation imposed on others. That's what debt is, power over the debtor, increased power of the creditor. 

Wondering the same thing, I come at the question not so much from its recent revival as the term of choice for Western democracies struggling to help the golden goose of globalised capitalism survive. I wonder if who used it first is the only or best way to critique this "idolatrous" word. The clue is in the quotation marks! I am intersted in how the term and concept of "austerity" is currently and pervasively used, to what ends, and whence comes its capacity to legitimate the discourse, and policies, of the powerful. It is used with such conviction, belief and confidence that you would think its validity was self evident. 

But "Austerity" is an ideological idol, a god worshipped and propitiated with the sacrifices of others (particularly those on lower incomes) to enable the defeat of the great perceived evil, which apparently has all the destructive potential of a rival deity, "Deficit". From the IMF to the Eurozone to UK, there is a need to critique the allegiance of vested interests to austerity in terms of its consequences for the poor and the rich, the vast differentials in impact of austerity policies, upon the vulnerable and the powerful. A need also to identify, evaluate, and persistently confront the deliberate diminishment of life chances such policies require. By any political definition the four most focal targets of austerity cuts are welfare, development, education, and health, impacting on benefits, social infrastructure, learning and pensions.

The economic ideologies behind austerity lack social conscience, and are more concerned with upholding the possessive affluence of the powerful – individuals, corporations and nations. The monotone mantras of making people go back to work for their own good, of dealing with benefit tourists and immigration, of living within our means, are just that – political polyfilla to disguise the cracks in policies which are not pre-determined by circumstance, but choices which select the sources of Government savings and income. Whatever else austerity means in practice it spawns food banks, reduced benefits and sanctions, frozen pensions and under-provision of affordable homes. We are not "all in this together."

A Christian political theology, and a Christian social ethic, require the application of Christian theological convictions to the realities of human life in our society, culture and global context. So I am looking for those arguments and convictions which  underpin a justification for austerity policies in Christian terms; where are they? And those which critique and deconstruct austerity ideology from the standpoint of a Gospel of grace, and a theology of the God who calls His people to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God; where are they?

These are questions big enough to get the church's attention; and the attention of the best thinkers in the Christian trasdition to help us get a grip on what it means to take the Gospel of Jesus Christ out there into a market place shaped Temple, and start looking at what tables should be overturned first! And these questions about the idol Austerity and its mythological counterpart Deficit, come at a time when major financial and economic disruption looms once again. Greece is in debt and cannot pay; the deficit is massive and beyond the ability of this generation to even significantly reduce, no matter how severe the austerity. As of today, pensioners too poor to have bank cards cannot get money; in any case the banks cannot open or the run on money will bleed the ailing body to death. Deficit, debt, austerity – there is no lack of wealth, the issue is who has access to it. As always the answer is, "not the poor".

How can I as a Christian pray, "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors", and believe that petition is about more than my personal finances? That petition follows the one about daily bread – and the truth is the debt that has not been created by the poor, is now being paid for by the bread of the poor. I as a Christian find that the Lord's Prayer provides an interesting commentary on the way the globalised world of capitalism works. It provides a radical alternative to austerity; I do not believe, as a follower of Jesus I cannot believe, that austerity politics can co-exist in the same mind as the Kingdom of God. There. That's about as bluntly as I can put it. I'm now off to write a paper on "Austerity and the Gospel: Forgive Us Our Debts so We Can Have Our Daily Bread."  

"Who is God? And what is God? These are the questions of an entire lifetime, Nothing reaches so deep into the purpose of human life, nor demands the full scope of the human intellect as do these two brief queries. They stand at the head of Thomas Aquinas' majestic Summa Theologica, and by right they belong to the capital and the footing of any systematic theology." And so begins Sonderegger's first volume of a trilogy on Christian Dogmatics.

With all the right and useful emphases on theology as practical, missional, contextual in the past few decades, Sonderegger is right to insist from the beginning that theology is about God, not us. "Almighty God just is, in length and breadth, height and depth, altogether who He is." So questions of relevance and application, of practicality and comprehensibility, of accessibility in prayer and thought and action, all reduce towards the living centre of faith, God. 

I heard Sonderegger lecture in Aberdeen a few weeks ago. Her carefully articulated thought, framed in language that is doxologically formed as well as intellectually driven, her combination of rigorous scholarship and passionate piety (I use that word piety in the sense of thought laden with prayer), made that lecture itself an act of devotion in its delivery, and a means of grace in its reception. This is theology distilled to its essence, to the essentials which are always to be found in the perfections of God. 

"Every property of Deity is most properly called a Perfection. In all this, and beyond all this, Deity is Mystery: hidden, invisible, transcendent Mystery. The Objectivity of God closes the intellect up in wonder. The richness of this Mystery is inexhaustible, and we study it only in prayer." (xiii)

There is a no-nonsense solemnity in Sonderegger's writing, a reverence proper to the activity of studying, thinking, praying, writing, talking and finally articulating what can be said of God, of who God is, and what we are about when we speak of God, let alone speak to God.

"The Subjectivity of God appears first in Holy Scripture: He speaks, commands, beholds and blesses. Always we stand before a Living God who gives Himself to be known and loved. All the Perfections of God are properly ethicized, yes. But even more they are personalized. God is Knowledge itself that knows; Humility and Dynamism that lowers itself; Presence and Love that invites, heals, exalts. (xiii)

The Bible has quite a lot to say about food, who has it and who hasn't, who deserves it and who doesn't.  The Bible, that most political collection of books, history, letters, speeches, prayers, prophetic oracles and stories is positively stuffed with food and people who need it. From Cain and Abel and Jacob and Esau embodying the colliding interests of hunters and cultivators, from Pharaoh's feast and famine, boost and bust economics, to Moses with his hungry tribes with their mutterings and manna, from laws about clean and unclean to laws about land care, justice and compassion for the stranger, the widow and the orphan. Full of it.

And when the production and distribution of food is controlled by the powerful, and the poor increase and go hungry and the social machinery runs in the interests of the rich who are stuffed and sated and able to dismiss the hunger of the poor, then the Bible is even more political. Micah, Amos and Isaiah do not read like paid up members of the benefits sanctions culture, or the food bank society. When they talk the talk of austerity it isn't the poor and hungry, the vulnerable and the widows and orphans that they have in mind. It's the rich, the powerful, the well fed, those who are so full of themselves and food and money and importance, that they become dismissive and wilfully ignorant of what it means to be a human being dehumanised by power, government, systems and structures.

So I find myself reflecting on some prophetic phrases in the light of recent exchanges in the commons about benefit sanctions, food banks, death and suicide figures. Amos would have been brilliant in our House of Commons, "You sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals. You trample on the heads of the poor." That's as good a description of ideological austerity consequences as you'll find. As for the self-righteous pomposity and uninformed argument that there is no connection between benefit sanctions and food banks, Micah reduces it to three criteria for good government, "act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God".

My problem with those who sepak for our Government and its DWP is that none of these criteria carry any political weight or moral authority. Instead I hear self-serving rhetoric about "doing the right thing", the mantra repetition of "fairness" as if life could ever be fair. A welfare system is precisely for those who have found life weighted against them, whose cirucmstances make life a struggle. The original welfare vision is of a society where welfare is a moral and mutual obligation, in which compassion and generosity have purchasing power, and where we accept there will be some who cheat and lie and don't pull their weight; but in which we do not hurt and harry all who need help, because some people play the system.

So when a straightforward question is asked in the House of Commons, an institution filled with people voted there by an electorate who want to know, about how many of those who have been sanctioned have since died, it should be able to be answered. Indeed it should be required that those in power answer it. And when a Government minister says 'there is no robust evidence' of the link between benefit sanctions and increased use of food banks I hear Amos again, "you deprive the poor of justice in the courts." To my knowledge no one has successfully overturned a benefits sanction through the courts – maybe because the courts are increasingly restricted to those who can pay for the legal help. When, though, did it become acceptable for a minister to so summarily, and arrogantly, dismiss widespread evidence from responsible charities who deal with hungry people every day?

Jesus told a parable about a rich man who walked out of the big house every day and din't notice, or wilfully ignored, Lazarus who was on the only kind of benefits on offer in his day. Power not only corrupts; it blinds; it desensitises; it gives the false impression that you deserve all you get and all you've got; power causes moral amnesia and social complacency. Power does all these things, unless it is constrained by other forces of social capital – compassion not blame, wisdom not bullying, generosity not ridicule, respect not demonising, care not caricature. A welfare state does not have to become steel wool in order to avoid being a sponge. Nor do Government spokes-persons, who are appointed by the people, have the right to avoid answering questions as the only way to sustain the manufactured credibility of their own claimed truth.

"Give us this day our daily bread" is not the privileged prayer of the well off; it is the prayer of the human heart, and it has no place for me, my, mine. Us, our, we, the pronouns of shared communal responsibility for and to each other.

Two paragraphs. Both true. So what is the significance of their juxtapoisition?

David Starkey CBE FSA FRHistS is a constitutional historian and a broadcaster. He is deemed an eminent historian, by which I assume is meant that he is a scholar, committed to academic integrity, and as such one who comments with authority, knowledge and that essential balance of ethical judgement which identifies the true public intellectual. As a CBE, he is publicly honoured for his services to historical research and the dissemination of scholarship that is accessible and trustworthy. As a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society he is recognised as one who meets exacting standards of intellectual enquiry, whose contribution to the scholarship of his discipline enhance the reputation of that august body, and whose public profile adds weight to an historic institution which values independence of thought, academic excellence and humane learning.

I am not a member of Scottish Nationalist Party. I have principled objections to nationalism, separatism, and political ambitions which focus on the self-interest of one country to the detriment of its existing relations, friendships and obligations. I have many friends who are members of the SNP, who voted Yes, who hope for a further referendum when as they see it the time is right. They fly the saltire, play the bagpipes, know their Scottish history, recognise the seriousness and far reaching consequences of the dismantling of the United Kingdom, and still press ahead. Not all SNP supporters are as responsible and thoughtful, like every political party it has its embarrassments, and at times its darker underside.

But the recent remarks of David Starkey, and his toxic comparison of the SNP with the Nazi party means that my two previous paragraphs should not be able to appear on the same page. Why? Because this is rogue mischief by a man who makes money out of controversy; who thrives on outrage; who spouts venom and toxin from behind the respectable facades of institutions which have honoured him. Because he may even believe that his distorted perceptions and wildly inane rhetoric are indeed accurate, wise, prescient insights which warn us of what we might be sleepwalking into. Or alternatively because he doesn't believe a word of it but boy does it get him headlines, contracts and money.

A constitutional historian in a fit of bile disenfranchises a swathe of voters who represent at least half of the Scottish nation by comparing their political goals, and the political process within which those goals are articulated, to pre-war Nazi Germany. Leaving aside the gratuitous obscenity of the comparison, the evidence adduced and argument developed demonstrates the kind of historical analysis that would require he resit a first year undergraduate essay on history. This man is FRHistS for goodness sake! So my modest question is this: what does a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society have to say or do to raise questions about his ongoing suitability to represent the values and aims of that institution? Or is such an honour irrevocable no matter what wild, weird and inflammatory nonsense a member utters as a recognised authority?

Becoming the Gospel means becoming like Jesus, in whom by the Spirit we are transformed and conformed to the image of Christ, who is the express image of the Father. Reconciled to God, we become agents of change, ministers of reconciliation, peacable peacemakers co-opted into God's mission of setting the creation right.

In a nutshell that is Gorman's thesis in this book. This transformative existence is condensed into that astounding exchange Paul describes, "He who knew no sin, became sin, that we might become in him the righteousness of God." To open that exegetical bank vault of a verse requires that we, in James Denney's phrase, "hear the plunge of lead into fathomless depths." But not fathomless in the sense of meaningless; fathomless in that, no matter how deeply we go, there is that which is beyond our grasp, which exhausts our spiritual and intellectual capacity, and reduces us, or better, raises us, to resigned adoration.

George Herbert's poetry is often a commentary on Paul's theology:

Philosophers have measur’d mountains,

Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,

Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:        

But there are two vast, spacious things,

The which to measure it doth more behove:

Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love.

Chapter 3 of Gorman's book examines what it means to become the Gospel, by looking through the lens of 1 Thessalonians, 1.2-3. Paul commends their "work of faith, and labour of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ." By the time Paul wrote to them, the Thessalonian Christians had been through a tough time of persecution arising from their embrace of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They had turned from idols to the true Gods – so were no longer attending the places of worship, or the activities of the trade guilds which had religious obligations, and refusing to call Caesar Lord. Paul of course had moved on and is anxious to let the new Christians know he hasn't forgotten and abandoned them. The letter is laced with encouragement, positive guidance and further explanation of a Gospel of faithfulness, love and hope. That they are already well known for these characteristics is encouraging for Paul, and he reinforces that sense of being caught up into the life of God, Father Son and Spirit. Chapter 1.1-8 traces this Trinitarian life and places it deeply into the missional nature of the God who comes in Jesus Christ, to fulfill the purposes of the Father in the power of the Spirit. "For Paul, Christ's faith and love are onseparable, and on the cross Christ;s faithfulness to God and love for humanity simultaneously reached their quintessential expression." (p.83).

In the core chapters Gorman makes a very important move, from missional God, to missional Apostle, whose theology in turn gives the foundations and resources for missional churches, communities of faithfulness, love and hope. And this is where as I understand him, Gorman's project leads to a strategic re-thinking of what the mission of the church is, and the respources and energy that enable local communities of Christ to become the Gospel wherever they are.

What is faith, faithfulness? The Thessalonians were citizens of an important Greek city under Roman governance. Paul's concern was to support and strnegthen their resolve in staying faithful to Jesus in the public square. Witness is precisely speaking and acting a testimony to the Gospel, and therefore becoming the Gospel in belief, commitments, virtues and practices, all derived from life in the crucified and risen Christ, graced and strengthened by the Spirit, lived in obedience to the Father. Such acts and words, lifestyle choices and behaviour patterns would make these new Christians stand out, and attract hostility, resentment, bewilderment and at times opposition ranging from ridicule to violence, even death. Faith is hard work, costly and expensive in social capital. "They are living in ways, or should be living in ways, that get them into trouble." There's a thought, a new criteria for the end of year audit of the church;s missional effectiveness – how much trouble have we been in?

But Gorman means more than that Christians are called to be faithful. They are called, and enabled, by a faithful God. In 5.23-4 the closing benediction is quite explicit – "he who calls you is faithful, and he will do this." Do what? Sanctify completely and keep securely. And for Christians persecuted for their faithfulness that is the basis of hope and the lived reality of divine love. The living, life giving, and life sustaining God is the one who keeps faith and enables faithfulness, who loves and pours love into faithful hearts, who faces loving faithful hearts towards the future in hope, because God is a God who is future oriented towards the fulfilment of his redeeming purpose of setting creation right.