Author: admin

I've spent the last few days at the Eternal God – Eternal Life conference at the University of Aberdeen. Various scholarly papers ranging from analytic philosophy to bio-ethics and technology to systematic theology, were the primary forms of delivery and discussion. The quality and accessibility was likewise varied and I guess we all have our preferences, personal interests, prevailing presuppositions and particular expectations. But it was the standout paper which set my interest alight. I've heard many a lecture in my time and a very few of them have made a permanent place in the memory as perspective changing and truly transformative of a subject area. This lecture was one of these.

This morning Professor Katherine Sonderegger from Virginia Theological Seminary spoke "Toward a Theology of Resurrection". From the first sentences of reflection on Hopkins' poem God's Grandeur we were in the hands of a theologian whose roots go deep down into the soil and compost of the Christian tradition, and produces food for thought that is edible, assimilable, nourishing and plentiful. This was a magnificent lecture on creation, human life and longing, and the good God who has set eternity in human hearts, and created a hunger for God and righteousness that makes the heart restless and incomplete. Indeed the idea that heaven may be a place of comprehensive fulfilment, completed perfection, speaks of a stasis and fixity that does no justice to our creatureliness, or to the Creator's overflowing purposefulness, and would lead to a creation that would become a "finished futility", my words taken from P T Forsyth.

For a large part of the paper Sonderegger explored the nature of love and longing, of relatedness and connection, and of our lived experience on earth of broken connection, relations gone wrong, a view of the world, people and other creatures as functional and utilitarian that is ultimately reductionist of what it means to be God's creature with eternity in our hearts. The coming of God in Christ, and the forward thrust of reconciliation and redemption through cross and resurrection, point us towards a different kind of ressurected reality when what will be fulfilled will be our capacity for relatedness, a completion that is organic and dynamic, in which growth is part of the completeness of the creature, eternally frowing into the life and fellowship with all that is which we might call eternal life.

It is very difficult to convey the passionate thoughtfulness, biblical erudition, theological confidence rooted in intellectual humility, all of which informed and shaped this paper. At some stage this paper will be published, and when it is I will make it known here. Meantime I am grateful for the privilege of having heard a theologian articulate and enrich the Christian understanding of the new thing that God is and will do in Jesus Christ. Eschatology is too often esoteric in conceptuality, speculative in exposition and analytic in its preoccupation with metaphysics, epistemology and over-rationalised curiosities. This was a lesson in theology that is dogmatically constructive, imaginative and visionary, biblical in parameters and pastoral in orientation. I can easily take much of what she was saying and build deep gospel responses to those who are bereaved, dying, or suffering the deep sense of bewildered anxieties generated by our self-contained culture with its limited and limiting worldview.

The tragedy of the Mediterranean migrants became a political character attack yesterday. Whether because the Labour party mischievously released a press statement knowing Ed Miliband would say something more nuanced and less specific in its criticism; or because it was an honest statement which Conservatives mischievously misinterpreted and misrepresented in order to accuse Ed Miliband of gross distaste akin to, but even worse than UKIP. Or just because the pursuit of power in this country has become a dirty, corrupting, frantic ego-fest, driven by the greed of vested interests, divisive fear-mongering about the SNP, and the dissolution of public trust in any of the political parties because that same dissolution is caused by disillusion. 

As a follower of Jesus Christ I couldn't be less interested in the shoddy shenanigans of politicians, media and spin. They can argue all they like about who was going to say what, who said what, and what the public should think about who said what. There's something tragic and morally indefensible about the focus and energy being on blame and finger pointing for poltical advantage, when every day desperate people are fleeing from the danger and misery of their home country and risking a 50% chance of death or enforced return, by paying traffickers to bring them to Europe.

I am troubled by the varied use of the words to describe this misery. Are these people migrants or refugees? Are they seeking a change of economic opportunity or refuge? Are they driven by economic aspiration or despair? What drives whole families to risk death on the sea or utter misery if they survive and are returned? These are questions I ask because my worldview is theological as well as economic, geographic, ethical and social.There is all the difference in the world, a world of difference, in the words we use, because human beings are dying of desperation. And as a wise Jewish philosopher said that every time a human being dies, a world dies.

Theologically that is intolerable. Every human being is created in the image of God and has inherent worth, to be respected, cared for and given the chance for life. God incarnate in Jesus Christ confers on God's creation and on human destiny a dignity and hope that is carried into the heart of the Creator and Redeemer God. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, making peace by the blood of the Cross, and to put it in evangelical terms, every human being is one for whom Christ died. As followers of the crucified and risen Lord I am for life, and part of that is the welcome to the stranger, compassion for the suffering, justice for the oppressed, and mercy to those who otherwise have no further hope.

I am haunted by those words of Christ when the nations gather for Judgement: "For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink; I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not visit me." I am haunted because this parable is about the nations; it is a wanring to the intenrational community as well as a caution to every individual person in their ways of treating others.

So I am ashamed of our politicians. Doubly ashamed that in the 21st Century this election campaign has up till now largely ignored Foreign Policy as a matter for serious political debate, until this nasty piece of rhetorical posturing exploded into toxic personal attack. Miliband and Cameron are not the news that matters here. The mess in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Pakistan Border and the relentless inhumanity of ISIS are the issues. Refugees fleeing danger, death and the mayhem of tribal warfare is nothing new – but the scale of it in the modern era is undoubtedly a problem stretching beyond the apparent scope of the national, economic and moral imaginations of the international community.

Do I have practical answers? A few, but they would be based on my own limited perceptions, ignorance of the intricacies of international law, a passion for human rights being upheld as a universal obligation, and a lack of practical power to make things happen. What I do have is a high view of the value of each human being, and a sense of political resposibility to vote for those who demonstrate a will, capacity and conscience to resist the self interested economic and political pressures to ignore our responsibilities to those who are refugees with nowhere else to go. So far I've heard very little fro any party about such a moral vision for the world beyond these increasingly self-absorbed, reactionary and in recent years isolationist shores.    

"It were well you should be thoroughly sensible of this, — 'the heaven of heavens is love.'

There is nothing higher in religion; there is, in effect, nothing else; if you look for anything but more love, you are looking wide of the mark, you are getting out of the royal way…

Settle it then in your heart, that from the moment God has saved you from all sin, you are to aim at nothing more, but more of that love described in the thirteenth of the Corinthians.You can go no higher than this, till you are carried into Abraham's bosom."

(John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, Section 25. Question 33)

…………………..

The plate is a mid-Victorian cockle plate, a gift from Sheila, the mug was bought at Gwennap Pit, and the Oxford Critical Edition of the Hymns is one of my most treasured and used possessions.

Trust the Quakers to take every opportunity to remind us of the basic needs of human life for others.

The photo was taken in the Gents, in the Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham,  strategically placed so you can't miss it!

This also is the Micah principle, acting justly and loving mercy. Hygiene, disease control, conferring dignity and safety, are life-saving ways of loving our neighbours.

Sometimes in our devotions it's better to thank God for blessings basic and necessary, than the highly spiritualised blessings we often associate with prayer.

For millions sanitation is as much a blessing as sanctification.

 

 

"He also showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand. It seemed to me as round as a ball.

I gazed at it and thought, ‘What can this be?’

The answer came, ‘It is everything that is made.’

I marveled how this could be, for it was so small it seemed it might fall suddenly into nothingness.

Then I heard the answer, ‘It lasts, and ever shall last, because God loves it. All things have their being in this way by the grace of God.’"

The brilliant theologian, Julian of Norwich.

This is a weird painting, even by Gaugin's standards. I have a large high quality print of this framed and hanging in my study. As Old Testament stories go, the encounter of Jacob with a man, or an angel of the Lord, or the Lord, is amongst the spookiest stories in the Bible. Mystery, menace, ambiguity, human destiny and divine purpose, accumulated guilt and anxiety at critical point, can all legitimately be read into the picture; they are all rooted in the Jacob text narrative. And the agony goes on all night, and the outcome is uncertain, but when it comes is decisive, and leaves Jacob forever changed.

In this painting, called "Vision of the Sermon. Jacob Wrestling with the Angel", Gauguin captures the eerie dream world of spiritual vision, prayer and the human struggle for meaning, purpose, fulfilment. The vision is born of prayer, shown in the intense concentration of the faces in profile, the hands pressed together, and the central figure facing the relatively small figures in the distance, where Jacob is either enfolded by the angel wings or is caught in the talons of a bird of prey. The painting is psychological drama and spiritual crisis surrounded by a praying community. Gauguin's own inner torment is woven into the pigment of this painting.

Charles Wesley's hymn, "Come, O Thou Traveller Unknown" has 14 original verses, and is abbreviated in later Hymnals. The drama of spiritual conflict has turned into a personal argument. Jacob is no longer a victim but a protagonist; he knows perfectly well who he is, after all God gave him his name. But who is the visitor? In Wesley's hymn Jacob is the Christian struggling with all that baggage of guilt, anxiety and life's contingencies. He suspects, and is desperate to name the One who comes with the indescribable love of the crucified for the sinner. It is a hymn telling the narrative of Christian appropriation of a grace that comes to meet us at the point of ultimate crisis.

For Wesley the story of Jacob and the angel is one of theological discovery and life re-orientation. So in Wesley's verses the reader and singer are drawn into the psychological processes of a human heart and spirit and mind, wrestling with the reality of God and determined and desperate for an answer. Is God love or not? Can he expect mercy or judgement? It is one of Charles Wesley's reverent games to play with the reader; we know where this is going. The hymn is a catena of clues, but the tension builds.

In vain thou strugglest to get free;
I never will unloose my hold:
Art thou the Man that died for me
The secret of thy love unfold:
Wrestling, I will not let thee go,
Till I thy name thy nature know.

In that eerie darkness at Jabbok, Jacob is encountering the crucified saviour, the presence of God embodied but beyond naming, until God himself declares it to the heart. Here, in a hymn based on one of the pardigmatic stories of the Bible, is a robust doctrine of Christian assurance, the distilled essence of Wesleyan Arminian theology. God is love. Pure, universal love. No more argument, now he knows!