Living Wittily

Author: admin

  • From Facebook to Youtube to a Theologian, Poet and Philosopher.

    HartThe Australian poet, theologian and philosopher Kevin J Hart gives an intriguing interview here What is so helpful in this extract from a fuller conversation is Hart's indebtedness to an algebra lesson for his conversion. The Damascus road experience came to him while looking at a blackboard with a simple equation, and his realisation as he looked around the class that he was now seeing the world differently. At this stage there was no theological content, more a sense of the mystery and longing and beauty of life distilled into the elegant rightness of an equation. Later his discovery of a Southern Baptist congregatrion (in Australia), opened him to new and deeper longings for a God both transcendent and immediate, whose love beyond words was nevertheless sung out with passionate intensity in hymns utterly inadequate to their theme, and in their lack of metaphysical reach, all the more poignant and valid.

    When later at age 21 he converted to Catholicism, he became interested in the mystical streams of Catholic theology, and in the tension between kataphatic and apophatic theology,the classic distinction between positive theology as a revelation and way of knowing, and negative theology as a more reticent admission of unknowing. Hart is an important voice because what he says is refracted through a mind at ease with mathematical abstraction, careful in theological humility, precise in philosophical reflection, imaginative in poetic discourse, and each of these articulated within his Catholic faith in which the sacraments function as reminder and confirmation of the God in whose mysterious conjoining love Creation, human being, and life itself subsists.

    Hearing Hart's testimony is a reminder of the need for some apophatic reticence in  all of us if we are ever tempted to make our own experience the paradigm, our own theology the norm, our own take on the world a claim we know 'the way it is'. Truth is not univocal, as if 'it means one thing and that's what I think it means'. Nor is truth equivocal, as if 'it means what each person thinks it means'. Mathematics, poetry, evangelical hymnody, mystical theology, Continental philosophy are any one of them slightly off the beaten path of the ordinary; as an intersection of disciplines, intellectual, theological and ethical, they provide for Hart a multi-vocal exploration of this vast mystery, this terrifyingly beautiful conundrum that is our human existence in relation to the God in whom we live and move and have our being.

    I came across this interview clip by entire accident, follwing several links from facebook to youtube. By such random purposefulness life is enriched. 

  • Listening to Your Life Knowing God Listens Too.

    These past few days I've been thinking. I do quite a lot of that. Live inside my own head, reflect on this and that, consider, ponder, worry, praise. Rehearse memories, imagine conversations, read, pray, give thanks, complain. Feel guilty or contented, uplifted or sad, impressed by beauty or depressed by brokenness; these and other emotional and intellectual puzzles are the colours and sounds of that world known only to me, and God. And in the most important sense, thankfully, known better to God than to me.

    DSC02639So how much of all of that inner noise and silence, searching and finding, that continuous flowing of thought and feeling that is the life I inhabit, how much of all this muchness of me is prayer. Do I pray or does God pray in me? Is prayer my seeking God or God seeking me? Is prayer indeed "the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed"? As an introvert I hope so, because there is a lot of living goes on inside our own heads, and inside our own hearts, and much of it a shared secret between us and God. Interestingly I find that more reassuring than worrying.

    "O Lord, you have searched me and know me….you perceive my thoughts from afar…you are familiar with all my ways…before a word is on my lips you know it completely, O Lord." All this inner noise, like an orchestra tuning up and never quite ready for the concerto at which I am to be the guest soloist, God hears it, knows and understands the pre-performance anxiety. The closed circuit of action and reaction to all that happens in my life, that turns the affective and emotional kaleidoscope of my inner life into ever changing patterns I can't predict, God sees, and knows and understands the passion and the hope, the longing and the shadows, the joy of love found and the fear of love lost. 

    All this is a reminder to myself of something too often overlooked and under-appreciated. A human being is a stupendous mystery of unique and eternal worth to God, created and known and enfolded in the creative love that calls us into the freedom and glory that is a human life.

    For you created my inmost being;
        you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
    14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
        your works are wonderful,
        I know that full well.
    15 My frame was not hidden from you
        when I was made in the secret place,
        when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
    16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
        all the days ordained for me were written in your book
        before one of them came to be.

    IMG_0127There are of course deep and perplexing questions posed by such theological optimism about my life and metaphysical confidence about the way the universe works. I neither ignore them as irrelevant nor answer them with answers by definition partial, limited and speculative. Like everyone else I have to live with them. As a Christian I have no calling to understate the reality of evil, give intelligible answers to the tragedy of suffering, explain with what could only be uninformed impertinence the mystery of life's injustices cruelties and waste. No, as a Christian, facing the full realities of human existence and being a participant in this essential part of the human story that is my life, I think, pray and act out my life in the long shadow of a cross illumined by the blaze of resurrection.

    Donald Mackinnon, was a courageous, intrepid explorer of the metaphysical landscape of 20th Century philosophical theology. He was a giant of a man, with steel wool eyebrows, a a love for his Harris Tweed jacket, and a voice that compelled attention, as with the huge hands and the body language of an Olympic wrestler he grappled and swayed to get a better hold on ideas both massive and elusive, but whose truth if it can be held and stated, are words of life. In one of his last publications he wrote movingly of the witness of the Christian church in a world full of just such tragedies and perplexities as our own.

     “The Church exists in part to manifest to the world, albeit in a splintered reflection, that ultimate love whose expression in time is found in the crucifixion of the Son of God – to call men and women to their rest in its unfathomable deeps.”

    Out of such ultimate love, we live and move and have our being.

    (Both photos were taken early morning – one at the beach in Aberdeen, the other looking across the Mearns from the Bervie Road.) 

  • The Letter of James 2. Words of Advice for Confused Strugglers

    I'm still reading, marking and learning in the Epistle of James, and taking time to inwardly digest a text that is nourishing and therefore not fast food. James is writing "in the name of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes of the Dispersion". So in the very first verse he uses a word that tells us who we are as followers of Jesus, whether we live now or 2000 years ago – we are exiles, dispersed people, a scattered community.

    Postmodernism_for_beginnersI've long felt that the biblical story of Exile has important parallels for Christians trying to live in our 21st Century culture where faith commitments and religious privilege are no longer the assumed context for our daily living. Christian values, practices and moral patterns are now minority interests, one option in a plethora of other chosen lifestyles, value systems and relational commitments, which have equal validity and powerful promotional claims in a post-Christian, media soaked, inter-connected society.

    So when James says his letter is for those who feel displaced, who live away from home, whose identity is constantly under pressure, whose cultural roots are planted in alien soil, then it just may be that his message takes on particular urgency and poignancy. A recent study of Global Diaspora might help us understand why it is that Christians struggle to survive in our society, and are tempted time and again to take the lines of least resistance, and to settle for being non-radical in our discipleship. Here are some of the realities pointed out in that study of what it means being an exile, being dispersed and away from where we are most at home. Each of them is energy sapping, vision reducing, hope impairing, and thus diminishing of life possibilities:

    • separation from homeland (alienation from an increasingly anit-Christian culture)
    • life on the move (living with rapid paced change)
    • erosion of identity as a people (Christian community)
    • living on the periphery when power is at the centre (end of Christendom)
    • loss of cultural roots ( the things that matter most to Christians matter least now)
    • refugee status (citizens of heaven locked into ways of life hostile to Christian values)

    Now the New Testament scholar Joel Green then points out that James himself identifies key features of dispersion and exile:

    Decision-making-processes1trials of every kind (1.2)

    testing of faith (1.3)

    humiliation (1.9)

    temptation (1.12)

    distress (1.27)

    conflicts and disputes (4.1)

    victims of hostile treatment (5.4,6)

    a life of wandering (5.19)

    However, James says something early on that is crucial for our survival as Christians amidst all this negative sounding talk – "Count it all joy when you face various tests…". Why? Because suffering trials and tests brings endurance and then maturity. Joy isn't happiness; it's much nearer confidence, a trusting attitude to life that isn't based on only good things happening to good people, and behind all that, James urges a recognition that God is a particular kind of God. James 1.16-18 "Every good gift, every perfect gift, comes from above. These gifts come down from the Father is the creator of the heavenly lights, in whose character there is no change at all. Or in an older translation, "in whom there is no shadow of turning."

    So exiles in a time and a place, a culture and a society, struggle to exist where following faithfully after Jesus is neither easy nor popular. But, says James, they are those who have a strange, durable joy, because the God who gifts us life and whose gifts sustain our life is faithful, constant, unchanging. No wonder these verses are embedded in hymns of the Church:

    "Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father,

    There is no shadow of turning with thee;

    Thou changest not, thy compassions they fail not,

    As thou hast been thou forever wilt be."

  • Lenten Thoughts and a Lenten Prayer a Full Fortnight Before Lent…….

    Sometimes, following faithfully after Jesus no longer makes sense, our first love has become our last love, focus is blurred, purpose confused, DSC01895joy is muted.

    Sometimes, for all our pragmatism, insistence on faith as "practical" and truth as "applied", Jesus' demands sound like high ideals and begin to sound ludicrously impractical.

    Sometimes, we have to admit that our understanding of what it means to be a Christian gravitates downwards towards playing safe, staying predictable, being non-disruptive and we begin to believe following Jesus is easily accomodated within our otherwise busy multi-tasking lives.

    Sometimes, reading what Jesus says has the same minimal impact as humming our favourite music, with the lyrics and beat familiarly and smoothly pulsing through headphones into a mind preoccupied by other stuff.

    Sometimes, complacency becomes so comfortable, so unnoticeably normal, that we are in danger of losing our edge, closing our eyes, cruising to a fuel efficient slowness, at which point the only thing that might save us is, well, Jesus.

    Sometimes, what is needed is a new vision, a recovered love, a re-orientation of the heart.

    Sometimes, being a Christian means believing what is wildly implausible but true.

    Sometimes, Jesus asks something that is risky and disruptive and demands our whole self all over again.

    Sometimes, the soul is healed by unfamiliar music inviting us to move again in God's direction, along unfamiliar roads.

    And sometimes, it is the call of Christ coming with resurgent force that electrifies and defibrillates the spirit, and re-establishes the rhythms of our discipleship.

    So Lord,

    Once you called our name, and we followed; but sometime, somewhere along the way, the sound of your voice diminished beyond our hearing:

    Lord forgive our pragmatism and open our minds to the wildly impractical practices of your Kingdom of love and peace-making

    Lord replace our complacency with urgency, and replenish our hearts with a holy recklessness turned outwards in compassion and service

    Lord save us from the exhaustion of multi-tasking the ordinary, and give us energy for gestures of redemption and enthusiasm for the extraordinary

    Lord make us sick and tired of the familiar, the normal, the routine, and call us once again to take up again the cross, the cost, and the consequence of following after you.

    May your Kingdom come, here, now, in me, in your world, Amen

     

  • God only knows the love of God: In Honour of Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

    DSC02698

    Some years ago in a favourite antique shop I found this bust of Spurgeon. It is an original Victorian piece by John Adams Acton, dated 1878, when Spurgeon was at the zenith of his powers as a preacher, Nonconformist leader, and staunch defender of Reformed Calvinistic orthodoxy. I've never doubted either the genius or the incendiary spirituality of the most popular preacher in an age of celebrity preachers. His sermons still read as inspired and inspiring ruminations on the biblival texts. His love of the Bible and his total immersion in the text make him an exemplary Baptist. He spoke of soaking in the text as in the bath, until his body, deep dyed in the words of the Word, became bibline. 

    He sits there on my church history bookshelves as a reminder of the importance of preaching, the centrality of the biblical text, and also as a reminder of the Gospel as centred in the person of Jesus. Yes, I know Spurgeon was a thorough-going Calvinist, and that to him Arminian theology was like a high pollen count to hay fever victims. But when he expostulated on Jesus, (no other word really captures the lyrical, emotional, imaginative flights of his  Gospel storytelling), he spoke of One who was quite simply his friend and Saviour, a crucified Lord and risen Companion, One in whom love and sacrifice gladly offered, pulls the rug from every pretention and excuse.

    If speculation has any value, I'd speculate about what Spurgeon would now make of the way Jesus is preached today. He might even ask IF Jesus is preached today in any way that would make Jesus accessible, attractive, demanding, unignorable in the magical mystery melee of post-modern, post-Christian, post most things culture. Because Spurgeon knew how to connect with his own culturasl context. The sentiment and emotional appeal, the theatrical performances of extempore preaching, and the reasoned apologetic for a Saviour in an age where private guilt and public shame were powerful undertows, instilled in Spurgeon's preaching a magnetic core, pulling on the cultural longings of Victorian society.

    Spurgeon was a man of his age, that's what made him a great preacher and a great man. But by the time he died the world had changed, and the theological climate was altogether more Acrtic for a theology more declarative than interrogative. He had been faithful in his time, as he saw it, and as he understood faithfulness to the Gospel and to Jesus. Even in his own lifetime he was becoming a man rooted in the past, drawing inspiration and strength from his beloved Puritans and Calvin.

    His bust sits there, safely placed amongst my books on Puritanism, well away from modern authors and new theological thought forms that would seriously upset him. I think he would deplore hermeneutics; too much like evasion, dissimulation and intellectual mind games with the text! That wouldn't make him right, but it does point to a serious reminder for those of us charged with responsible biblical interpretation for and in our own age. To be faithful to truth doesn't mean a mind made up and closed to all further traffic; it does mean knowing where I stand, and why, and enough humility to confess my knowledge is partial, my judgements provisional, and my task of hearing and obeying the living Word of God a continuing discipline of listening. I treasure the words of another Evangelical statesman, John Stott:

    "Life is a pilgrimage of learning, a voyage of discovery, in which our mistaken views are corrected, our distorted notions adjusted, our shallow opinions deepened, and some of our vast ignorance diminished. (Christian Mission and the Modern World, page 10)

    Dialogue and humility, intellectual honesty and theological integrity, faithfulness to a tradition and refusal to close the mind to new and better ways of understanding and seeking truth – these are the characteristics of what that other old Victorian evangelical, Alexander Whyte, affirmed as the required stance of the hospitable hearted Evangelical. And it means this. If I live under an imperative to handle the Bible with reverence, respect and humility before God, then before God I am also required to follow where truth leads, to handle holy things with care, and therefore to tell my own presuppositions to quieten down so that the text can be heard above the din of my own opinions, conclusions, or even, God give grace, my certainties. Perhaps the most we can claim with certainty is that over a lifetime, by that same gentle, corrective grace of God, some of our vast ignorance is being diminished!

    So Spurgeon looks across at my desk, from behind my shoulder. I honour both his memory and his work. He being dead yet speaketh as one of a great cloud of witnesses who give testimony to the power of the Bible to transform and convert, to sanctify and make new, to lift up heads and give strength to those who struggle and restore hope in those whose lives seem empty of life itself.

    "God veiled the cross in darkness, and in darkness much of its deep meaning lies, not because God would not reveal it, but because we have not the capacity to discern it all..God only knows the love of God."

    I love someone who can preach like that!

  • How Many Bibles Do You Need?

    Mosaic bibleI've just bought a new Bible. It isn't that I've worn the other one out completely – it's still serviceable enough. I've had it since 1992. So, why buy another Bible? How many Bibles does someone need for goodness sake?

    Come to think it, that question could be interesting if we drop the rhetorical flourish and simply ask;

    How many Bibles do I need for goodness sake,for the sake of goodness, that is, before I get the point, in order to begin to be transformed by words that are life giving, or to be touched by grace that is heart changing, or troubled by stories that are conscience building, and grabbed and graced by good news that is mindset changing?

    The answer is one,

    just one, if it's read faithfully, angrily, routinely, in perplexity, expectantly, reverently, honestly, even guiltily

    just one, if it's held prayerfully and pondered slowly for guidance or grabbed desperately  and ransacked for, well, guidance too

    just one, to be read falteringly with broken heart, or joyfully with soaring thoughts, or in the confusion, fatigue, boredom and frightening array of options that is life at high speed in high definition at a too high price

    just one, to find answers which might not be there, or in search of the right questions which we might just discover

    just one, to look for some comfort and love in our sorrows, or to remember again why laughter is a way of thanking God twice for the same blessing

    just one, to find guidance, wisdom, mercy, judgement and grace, gifts already there for the finding and each of them underwritten by the promise of God

    just one, because a hungry traveller needs one good meal at one good inn to make the next miles possible.

    Yes one Bible is enough, if it shows sufficient signs of use. Years ago, one of Scotland's more spectacular Baptist preachers, in a wee corrugated iron church in Lanrkshire, Scotland, demonstrated, with stunning unintended improvisation, the cost and consequences of using and abusing a Bible for a lifetime.

    He was lampooning the thought that a Bible should be kept in its box, treated with reverence and deference so that from one year to the next it kept its pristine appearance in keeping with its sacred status.  When he preached that morning he held up his own Bible, and waved it wildly as he thundered and threatened about the tragedy of the unread, under-used over-protected gilt edged Bibles he believed were languishing in drawers and cupboards all over the town. Then he loosened his grip on his Bible, and was left holding the covers as a veritable blizzard of pages began to fall from the raised pulpit, and wafted with sacramental slowness, left to right, like sacred text snowflakes, settling on the choir seats, the floor and occasionally brushing the heads of the few choir members within range.

    He never faltered. Forty years later, having taught homiletics and biblical studies, philosophy and systematic and pastoral theology, and preached over 3000 sermons myself, I still remember the hairs on the back of my neck being raised, by those slow motion india paper pages, loose-leaves of testimony to a Bible that had seen better days, but which had sustained and nurtured and given life and passion and purpose to this man's story.

    How many Bibles do you need? For all practical purposes, just one.

  • Caring for Words, Living Speech, and Christian Courtesy

    "In the beginning was the Word", the first clause of the theological masterpiece which is the Gospel of John. "And God said, "Let there be light….", the first words of God at the beginning of all things, according to that equally remarkable meteor of theology, the creation story in Genesis. For Christians, those two moments of divine articulation should be enough to teach us respect, indeed reverence, for words. Whether written or spoken, words have performative power, they make things happen, they have an impact, they influence for good or ill, persuade of truth or lie, affirm or diminish, enlighten or deceive, liberate or oppress, heal or hurt.

    SpeechAs a Christian I have a responsibility to give an account of my words; indeed Jesus warned that the day would come when we will give an account of every word we have spoken. Now there's a warning for the biblical literalist self-righteously ramming their words of truth down other people's throats. Elsewhere in the Gospels there's a quite different scenario; of a Roman Centurion, a man of few words and most of them were orders to other people. His personal servant is about to snuff it, but he has heard Jesus is a healer, someone who speaks with authority. So he uses his networks and his influence, he sends Jewish Elders to bring Jesus. To cut a short story shorter, the centurion gets a message to Jesus, "Say the word and my servant will be healed." Now there's a man who knows what words are for, who understands the power of the spoken word, someone used to seeing the performative power of words.

    We live in a culture buried under words and blinded by an endless supply of new or familiar flickering images. We hear so much, we are losing our hearing; we see so much our sight is blurring from image overload. But stayng with words for the present, Marilyn Chandler McIntyre in her book Caring for Words in a World of Lies states with prophetic frankness, "Like any other life-sustaining resource, language can be depleted, polluted, contaminated, eroded, and filled with artificial stimulants."

    I am persuaded – I like the confidence and settledness of Paul's phrase in older translations – "I am persuaded" that an ethic of language, a care for the words we speak and for the words we hear, is a crucial aspect of Christian witness. From the praise songs we sing to the texts we send; from our conversations at work to the confidences we hold in trust for others; from the jokes we tell and laugh at to the lies we refuse to tell; from the clever put downs of those we dislike to the caring affirmations of other people's worth; language carries with it obligations the follower of Jesus has to attend to.

    That's why this Lent – only a week or two away, – I want to consider the nature of language, what it is that we do when we speak words to each other, how to endow words with sacramental significance so that speech becomes a means of grace, a strengthening of the soul in ourselves and others, and an influence for good, compassion, truthfulness and conciliation in our society. I'm tired of cliche and spin, of the conspiracy, not of silence, but of unworthy words spoken in half-truth, evasive rather than clarifying, cruel rather than compassionate, empty of human communion rather than full of attentive human presence.

    I've just bought James Boyd White's book, Living Speech. Resisting the Empire of Force. I've read some of his writing before. As a Professor of Law at Harvard, and an accomplished literary critic, and a Christian, he knows about words. At a time when the Western world near absolutises freedom of speech and expression, it's time to examine much more closely the proper constraints on speech and expression; time too to recognise the power of language to dehumanise and diminish other human beings in the interests of our own agendas, prejudices and unacknowledged as well as confessed enmities.   

  • It would be wrong to scrap Trident! It would be wrong to replace Trident!

    The Scottish Labour Leader, Jim Murphy, has said an unequivocal no to scrapping Trident. That's no surprise! He also said, and I quote, "The nuclear deterrent is too important to get involved in that sort of horsetrading on the nation's safety. I want a world free of nuclear weapons but you should negotiate that away with other nuclear powers, not negotiate it away for party political gain." More about this over here.

    For now though, I want to pick up two words, which isn't nit picking, but a serious scrutiny of the discourse used in the political manoeuvering and rhetoric evident in the way words are used.  First, Mr Murphy said it would be wrong to get rid of Trident. Now would that be strategically wrong, economically wrong, geo-politically wrong, party politically wrong, internationally tactically wrong or any other kind of wrong? Except the one sense in which used in this context, and about a matter of such grave human consequence, I think the word wrong would be correct. That is, on the grounds of moral principle. Would it be morally wrong to get rid of Trident? If so on what ethical grounds can this argument be made?  

    Second, Mr Murphy uses two synonyms which are not synonymous – horsetrading and negotiation. He is absolutely right that the question of a nuclear deterrent, the nation's safety and therefore the question of renewing and upgrading our nculear weapons is too important for party horsetrading should it come to a coalition Government. So the question of whether we renew Trident is too important for part political horsetrading. Renewing Trident allows us to negotiate (not horsetrade) with other nuclear armed powers in hypothetical multilateral discussions some time in the (distant) future. My problem with this word negotiate is that such a soft word can obscure the reality that the content of the discussion is the commitment of nuclear powers to the ideology of mutually assured destruction as ultimate deterrence. Which brings us back to the use of the word "wrong".

    TridentMr Murphy thinks it would be wrong to scrap Trident – he doesn't mean morally wrong. I think it would be wrong to renew and keep a nuclear deterrent, and I do mean morally wrong. Now where is the ground for negotiation there? The moral argument for maintaining a deterrent threatening massive obliteration of millions of human beings I'm sure can be made, but Mr Murphy doesn't make it. That is perhaps because there is a category confusion in the current debates around nuclear weapons, Trident replacement, and international and geo-politics. The moral question is marginalised in the political discussions, even when politicians say their opposition is principled, as Nicola Sturgeon has said on repeated occasions.

    I'm well aware of the complexities, or at least as aware as any other person interested enough to go looking for the moral cases for and against nuclear deterrence. My point in this post is more modest than stating the moral case for scrapping Trident. I simply want to put the case for the moral arguments being included for consideration in the intellectual, political, strategic, military, economic discourse of such a far reaching dilemma. If Jim Murphy thinks it would be a political mistake, an error of defence judgement, a tactical faux pas, an economic own goal, that would be his privilege and he would be entitled to be heard. But to say it would be "wrong" to scrap Trident, uses a word that imports substantial questions of ethics at the personal, social, national, international levels which he has no intention of addressing.

    Or am I the only one who suffers ethical dissonance when I hear someone say "it would be wrong to scrap Trident". All along I've argued it would be morally wrong to replace it just as it was wrong in the first place to buy into the brutal game of deterrence. The other ways it might be wrong are secondary – principled opposition to nuclear deterrence arises in my case from a refusal to countenance the possibility of global scale destruction of humanity and our planet as a way of ensuring my personal survival. That brings me from morality to theology, and that would be a quite other, but deeply related, form of discourse.

     

  • The Marburg Sermons of Rudolph Bultmann – Beams of Light into Cultural Darkness

    BultmannIn the Old Aberdeen Book Shop yesterday for a long trawl through the shelves, a browse amongst the novels, a meandering nosey around the art books, and then a final quick reprise up and down the theology bookcases. And the providence of God rewards my perseverance!

    This World and the Beyond. The Marburg Sermons of Rudolph Bultmann. Published in English in 1960, but these sermons were preached in Germany between 1936 and 1950, in the heart of Hitler's Germany. Bultmann was one of the giants of 20th Century New Testament scholarship, whose programme of demythologisation earned him bogey man status amongst more conservative biblical scholars. But even his most severe critics acknowledged the genius, brilliance and erudition of a scholar who dominated the discipline of New Testament Studies for two generations.

    Bult bookBut these sermons are something else. They are the flip side of Bultmann the demythologising critic; they are the words of a kerygmatic theologian proclaiming the Kerygma, and extolling the reality of the crucified risen Christ. But they are also fearless preaching from the pulpit of a persecuted and pressured church, targeted by the most ruthless and ultimately godless of ideologies, and in danger of selling its soul and betraying its own family by colluding with an increasingly anti-semitic and lethal regime. Bultmann lived the Christian faith with a courage and hopeful forthrightness that is too easily forgotten by those opposed to his theology, and arrogantly dismissive of his Christian credentials. These sermons are Bultmann at his most devoted to Christ. Some of them positively ring with a confidence and boldness that was the last thing a regime seeking to domesticate the church wanted to hear.

    Here are some lines from December 1939 – they should be read slowly, then once again imagining words like these proclaiming the Word in Germany 3 months into war:

    He bestows upon us the light of life, that unquestioning transparent luminosity of our being. For in Him the love of God shines fully; because, if we are so prepared, he becomes understandable to us as the very act and initiative of the divine love, as the gift to us of the Divine love. It is the love of God which has always sustained us and ever will sustain us. To be sustained and held by the love of God means to have an attitude of unquestioning childlike acceptance, to be comforted and commit ourselves to the control of a hand which guides everything for the best even when we ourselves do not know what the best for us is.

    By this means our life gains clarity and peace. This does not mean that in the ground plan of our life, in its purposes and aims, we embody an intelligent solution to the riddle of existence. Every question which is aimed at mastering the secret pattern of existence must in fact be silenced; and we remain ignorant of the goal to which God is leading us. No, our life gains clarity only because everything He sends us we may and must receive as the gift of His love.

    "Let his loving glance deeply penetrate your soul, and His eternal light and joy will flood your being. Heartt and mind and spirit shall then awaken to new life."

    That is the pure Gospel according to John. That is devotional writing of a quite different order from much of today's fast written, quickly thought, and swiftly forgotten Christian equivalents of the Mind, Body, Spirit and Self Help genres. What a generation of theologians in Germany in the second third of the 20th Century. Barth, Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, Brunner, Lohmeyer; these were heroes; but there were others whose scholarship and academic weight was thrown behind the Nazi will to power and allowed themselves to be used as justification for anti-semitic policies that would lead like iron rails to Auschwitz. Bultmann was not one of them.

  • Jesus shows us how to turn food into a means of grace….

    DSC02562Cooking is a humanising activity. Yesterday I spent a couple of hours preparing food for other people. Buying the ingredients, gathering everything together, using a trusted recipe for a dish I already know they enjoy and anticipate, adds to the sense that, in cooking for other people, we offer a different kind of gift. The cost of the ingredients, the time and energy preparing and cooking, the setting of the table (or trays), and the clearing up and doing the dishes afterwards. A meal to the grateful recipient is like a package holiday. You arrive, enjoy, and there's no tidying up before you go. 

    I've always been moved and intrigued by the way Jesus handled food, welcomed guests, arranged meals and parties, and knew what to do with loaves and fishes and hungry folk. When he took bread and blessed it, poured wine and gave thanks, he was doing something deeply characteristic. That particular gesture of inclusion was enough to open the eyes of two disciples who couldn't see past their own sadness. But the Word who became flesh understood the wonder and fragility of human flesh. Through bread and wine He was respecting and caring for human bodies, serving and nourishing human beings, using food as a sacrament. Jesus shows his followers how to turn food into a means of grace, a tangible blessing which tells the other that they are welcome to this space, and to this food, and that the trouble gone to is a privilege, inconvenience being willingly enjoyed for the sake of blessing these others.

    Celebration doesn't have to be tied to a special occasion; the coming of a guest is occasion enough. Not extravagance and anxiety to impress, but the simple offering of who we are and what we have, but with trouble taken to make the occasion happen as a memory in the making. And hand-made memories of food shared are later powerful evocations of gratitude which nourish the roots of friendship, making hospitality an essential activity in any community intentionally shaped around Jesus and his table. 

    So two hours of my time, making Italian meatballs in a home made tomato and olive sauce and served with spaghetti and garlic laden buttered bread is the spiritual equivalent of attending serial prayer meetings. The sacrament of hospitality, the grace of welcome, the joy of food, the companionship around a table, the gratitude of friends in conversation and laughter accompanied by the clink of cutlery and glass, these are experiences impossible to replicate in any other way. A meal cooked and shared and enjoyed fills the stomach, but in so doing it courses through us to those deep places where life obtains its equilibrium, and roots itself in substance and builds sources of hope. Food does that. It instils hope.

    Conversely, hunger undermines hopefulness, and those who have no food are often also those who have no friends to cook, share and welcome. A proper Christian theology of cooking presupposes food is for sharing, and will insist that we incorporate and embody, companionship. Com panus – sharing bread with; and I wonder what the consequences might be if Christians in their neighbourhoods were known as companions of the community, people who make and buy and share and eat bread with others.

    A favourite poem is a reminder that bread is sacred as well as staple, and that the One who taught us to pray for our daily bread, also teaches us reverence for food;

    Be gentle when you handle bread.

    Let it not lie uncared for,

    taken for granted or unwanted.

    There is such beauty in bread,

    beauty of sun and soil,

    beauty of patient toil.

    Wind and rains caressed it.

    Christ often blessed it.

    Be gentle when you handle bread.