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Jonah and the Incredible Sulk

This wee book on Jonah cost me £2.50 in 1977. I bought it because I was speaking at a Conference in Kilcreggan on mission. Back then Missiology was an up and coming area of major theological attention and grew into an essential discipline for research, reflection and forward looking ecclesial praxis. I hadn't long finished reading through Let the Earth Hear His Voice, a massive document produced at the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, 1975. Three years later J Verkuyl's Introduction to Contemporary Missiology appeared as an early introduction to a more serious and structured approach to missiology as a serious doctrinal imperative in its own right, and an area of study requiring urgency, imagination and courage to challenge the more superficial or outdated theories and practices of evangelism and missionary activity.

Back to Jonah. I had just spent £6.25 on Leslie Allen's commentary on Joel, Obadiah, Jonah and Micah, and was fascinated by Jonah as a missionary who wanted to give evangelism a body swerve, whose reluctance to preach mercy was ruthlessly obstinate, and whose entire body language was an enacted "No" of defiance, poorly disguised as justified protest at the scandalous softness of God!

So when I read Fretheim's theological commentary (by the way the current very fruitful attention to theological exegesis is not as recent or as innovative as is often claimed in publishers' blurb – Fretheim et al were doing it decades ago) I was intrigued by the playfulness and literary enjoyment of a commentator who understood irony and the subversive persuasiveness of an anti-hero. All the way through the book Jonah is a missiological liability. He doesn't want to preach repentance and mercy; he says yes but walks in the opposite direction; he prays a Psalm of repentance that reads like pious obedience but is more a wheedling negotiation with God; then when he does preach, his words are unadulterated pessimism; and his response to the Ninevites repentance is anger, resentment and a suicidal sulk.

The story of Jonah is a brilliant exposition of obedience through gritted teeth, a servant of God who thinks he can manage the universe better than the Creator. He sits beneath his gourd plant, hoping against hope that the Ninevites will be offered no hope, no mercy, no future. He is angry with God because God is slow to anger; he is critical of God because mercy is the best outcome of judgement; his sense of proportion is so skewed that he is moved by the tragedy of a withered gourd tree, and unmoved by the thought of annihilation on an urban scale. And the book ends in one of the best jokes in the entire canon – leave aside the 120,000 people, what about all the animals. Weigh it up Jonah – one gourd bush or an entire city. Where does the burden of mercy rightly fall?

Here is one of Fretheim's best comments, a comparison of Elijah and Jonah: "And Elijah asked that he might die, saying, 'It is enough. Now O lord take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers.'" The difference between Jon ah and Elijah is striking. Elijah was in despair over his failure to turn the hearts of the idolatrous people of Israel. Jonah was in despair over his success…Jonah has become angry because God has refused to pour out his anger. Jonah will be angry if God will not be."(p. 122)

No wonder God asks the incredulous question, "Are you right to be angry". In the 21st Century world where religious anger is often clothed in lethal violence, or simmers into a resentment of 'the other', whoever 'they' are, Jonah comes as an ironic subversion of all devotion to God that uses God's judgement as an excuse for our hatreds, justification of our prejudices and confirmation of our presupposed rightness. Because however right we think we are, there is always the danger that we feel so right that rather than accept the reality of God's eternal love and mercy, we remake God in the image of our own prejudices and begin instructing God in the dynamics of anger, punishment and judgement.

"God was in Christ breconciling the world to himself, not counting their tresspasses against them…." Go and do likewise! The Gospel remains subversive, generous, outrageous, scandalous, unbelievably merciful, incredibly forgiving, and the God made known in Jesus remains the God who throws extravagant parties for every sinner who repents, and who even comes looking for the Jonah-like elder brother, out there sulking because God has no favourites.

25 May 2014
Just Who Do We Think We Are?

I want to think more about the theology of the quotation below.

"We are not self made selves:

our identity is not determined solely by others.

Human life is Theonomous –

we are from God, toward God, for God.

Each human person is destined for transformation by the glory of God,

as seen in the Transfiguration of Christ,

the foreshadowing of Love given on the Cross

and Love bonding with its Source in the Resurrection."

Michael Downey, Altogether Gift. A Trinitarian Spirituality, page 136

On first reading it seemed to me to be an important corrective to the creeping devaluation of our human ordinariness, the inner blame we sometimes feel for our felt mediocrity, and the shoulder shrugging dismissiveness we can practice towards ourselves and our potential to be what God calls us to be as children made in the image of God.

In the meantime, the words point us away from self-critique towards the One whose judgments have more mercy and grace than our own.

But I want to think about it a bit more………….

The photo is of gorse, on the cliff tops at St Cyrus, taken on Good Friday.

22 May 2014
Book Burning, Political Correctness, and responsible Freedom of Speech

"Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them…

We should be wary therefore what precaution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed…whereof the execoution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at… the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life.

John Milton, "A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicenced Printing". Quoted in The Joy of Books, Eric Burns, page 63.

Burns goes on to show that context is everything, and later in life, in the Areopagitica Milton made numerous excpetions to this passionate opposition to censorship, amongst other exceptions being obscenity, libel and atheism – these should have no place in print and further, Milton argued "no book be printed unless the printer's and the author's name or at least the printer's be registered. Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libelous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectual remedy that man's prevention can use."

Burns sardonic comment isn't unworthy of Milton's own reasoned sarcasm: "It is as if Milton had written a stirring defence of pacifism, and then gone on to explain that war is justified on special occasions, say if your country wants more land or more gold or better-looking women or better bred animals or it's a day of the week ending in "y"!"

So was Milton for or against censorship. Yes, and no. Sometimes. Depends on who is doing the censorship. But context is everything. The idea of freedom has to imply the freedom of ideas. But can that ever mean carte blanche for ideas, printed or spoken or online? Amongst the finest writing of the previous Chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, is his book, The Dignity of Difference. There and in a number of other books he argues not for a multicultural smorgasbord, but for a community of communities, respectful of difference, affirming human dignity, upholding of human rights, and much else that is rooted in the wisdom and faithfulness of his own religious tradition of Judaism.

Perhaps censorship of ideas is necessary for social stability as Milton argues, or intellectual homicide leading to oppression as Milton also argues. But in the use of words, written, spoken, online or digital, the criteria of respect for difference, affirmation of human dignity, the human right to ffreedom, and that controlled only by the human rights of all others to that same freedom, perhaps these are amongst the principles that at least enable us to evaluate, and yes to judge, the validity, viability and virtue of written, spoken and online discourse. This I think is very, very different, from an overscrupulous political correctness which applies the hermeneutic of suspicion with at times a wooden lack of moral insight. The polis is the city, the political is that which is about the welfare of the city. Politcal correctness is best served by political responsibility, political ethical principle, political imagination, political respect for persons; because in the end politics is for and about people. Language, written and spoken, is a humane and humanising gift essential for the health of the polis, the people, ourselves, others.

Lord Reith, that least politically correct broadcasting pioneer, nevertheless had these words engraved outside Broadcasting House.

Whatsoever things are true,

whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just,

whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely,

whatsoever things are of good report;

if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise,

think on these things.

These granite engraved words speak of the emotional, moral and intellectual biosphere out of which the best of human communication comes, best because it fosters community, creates space for communities of difference, and makes possible, across all the diversities of human culture, that deeper communion of those made in the image of God.

21 May 2014
Confessions of a Bibliophile…….

I'm now well into the transition stage of finishing my time as Principal then Lecturer within the Scottish Baptist College. The time is right and good to move into the next stage of the 'journey called ministry'.

As those who know me will expect, my metaphor for a disrupted life is an all over the place library! And I'm now in the process of remarrying the two halves of my library which for the past twelve years have been separated between home study and College study. Hence Graeme's recent comment about me reducing my library, and his not unreasonbable scpeticism that such a reduction may in the end be more cosmetic than surgical. Not entirely though. My aim is to get back to what has always been a principle of house management – that my books don't overflow my study into other areas of our home.

So I spent a satisfying morning at John Lewis ordering two cracking new bookcases to match the existing ones, and paid for with a gift previously given from the friends of the College. Seems a good deal – love of learning took me to the College, love of learning will continue – lifelong learning as a vocational imperative is also a quite persuasive argument for having books around.

Aye, but how many Jim? How many lifetimes to read this lot? And who is going to make sure they're dusted and looked after, eh? And what about libraries, are there not enough books in the Uni library and a lot cheaper? Yes I hear all that – and I now have to think longer before buying more.

As I did when I bought the C S Lewis Trilogy, in hardback, for £3 last week – must have pondered, considered and swithered for at least 5 seconds……….

20 May 2014
The Cosmic Trilogy of C S Lewis

Yesterday I bought three books. I know. I'm trying to reduce my library. But in a charity shop these three volumes of the C S Lewis Cosmic Trilogy were on sale for £1 per volume. They are in very good condition, published by Bodley Head, Hardcover, 1976, and dustcovers clean and unclipped. I first read the Cosmic Trilogy in the 1970's in the first paperbacks, now long gone as brown, cracked and done. I reckoned I could find three inches of shelf space, and will read them again over the summer.

C S Lewis is an acquired taste, and also a taste that can be lost. I can't read some of his stuff now. Maybe because some of his writing is now seriously dated, and much of it has been gathered into massive volumes of letters, essays and miscellania that are really for CSL enthusiasts rather than interested readers. But the good stuff is still very good. The Chronicles of Narnia remain an alternative world for all ages; Surprised by Joy is an enduring classic of religious discovery; Reflections on the Psalms say as much about Lewis as the Psalms; The Four Loves is a mixture of philosophy, pscychology, lierary criticism, Christian reflection and a sometimes blinkered C S Lewis; Mere Christianity is unlikely to perauade postmodern minds instinctively sceptical of clever apologetics; Till We Have Faces is, for me at least, a beautiful story of human love, identity and divine longing; and so on. But I have and will hold on to each of these books, flawed as they are.

16 May 2014
A Stream of Consciousness Walk for Haddock

Went walking to the fish van along at Elrick; it comes from up the coast every Thursday.

Passed the old cottages which rejoice in the name Earlick Cottages – how did they ever come to be called that – an address that says Earlick Cottages, Elrick?

Elderly gentleman in a bunnet wobbles on to the pavement on an ancient bike, I step aside with exaggerated courtesy to let him pass – just as well, he didn't see me!

Bought three seriously fine haddock, and discussed the weather and a certain last minute Motherwell goal with the fish wifey.

Then I'm stalked by an angry blackbird who clearly thinks I've no right to be on his turf – quite right too. I guess there's a nest with the weans somewhere.

Then coming towards me a woman walking her dog. It's on one of those extension leads, you know, the kind that just as you get near, the dog decides to run across your path so you either have to jump or, the dog's preferred option, you fall on your face.

I did neither. It was a daft young spaniel which decided it liked me. Not surprised, I'm a cat owning dog lover.

Lying on the road a small spanner, drop forged, size 600 mill and 700 mill. Handy wee thing if I ever need it!

The photo is taken a mile further along the road from where I walked this morning – not bad for the back door.

15 May 2014
Lesslie Newbigin: Christology and the Community of Jesus

From Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret, page 176

Christology is always

to be done in via,

at the interface

between the gospel

and the cultures which it meets on its missionary journey.

It is of the essense of the matter that Jesus was not

content to leave as the fruit of his work a precise

verbatim record

of all that he said

and did, but that

he was concerned

to create a community

which would be bound

to him in love and

obedience, learn

discipleship even in

the midst of sin and

error, and be his

witnesses among all peoples.

13 May 2014
T S Eliot, Clematis and the “Still Point of the Turning World”

This is one of our clematis growing up our fence – called "Avalanche".

It reminded me of what I still consider Eliot's best poetry, The Four Quartets.

Burnt Norton IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?

Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

10 May 2014
Luther’s anti-Jewish theology, German Theologians and the Holocaust.

Looking for background reading for something I'm writing on Bonhoeffer I discovered the recently published Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther's Theology, edited by R. Kolb, I. Dingel and L. Batka, (OUP: 2013). Of the 47 essays a number of them are to do with the reception of Luther's theology, and its legacy in different historical periods. Essay 41 is on the reception in the Nineteenth Century; chapter 42 then jumps forward to Marxist reception. There is no chapter on the reception and use of Luther in Germany in the first half of the 20th Century. There is a chapter on 'Luther's Views of Jews and Turks' (chapter 30).

I did a Google search for Holocaust and there is one occurrence of the term in the entire 688 pages – in chapter 30 on the Jews and Turks. I did a further search for Susannah Heschel whose book on The Aryan Jesus. Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany is a watershed in scholarship and research into the role of many Christian theologians and of significant sections of the German Lutheran church in the construction of an anti-Semitic mindset. Her name does not occur once.

It would be very unfair to make a critical judgement of this volume solely on such slight evidence as a Google search. But it's the omission of a chapter that spooked me, that jump of a hundred years missing out mid 20th century central Europe. I came away perturbed at such a lacuna in an authoritative academic Oxford Handbook on the subject of Luther's theology and its reception. There is only an introductory glance in chapter 30 referring to the Holocaust, and that is the one reference found by Google. The catastrophic impact of Luther's anti-Semitic writings and the direct role of a significant number of 1930s German theologians, academic and clerical, in giving such lethal prejudice the oxygen of scholarly credibility, is surely significant enough to have required an essay in its own right?

The same trawl on Amazon led to Before Auschwitz. What Christian Theologians Must Learn from the Rise of Nazism, by Peter Hinlicky. Susannah Heschel's name comes up with 21 hits. The relation between a number of German Christian theologians and the fate of the Jewish people in Europe from 1930 to 1945 is fully explored in this book.

Back to Bonhoeffer. I've been exploring the context of his writing in the 1930's and the increasingly dangerous call to follow Jesus through the minefield of National Socialist anti Semitic policies, and the crossfire between Church politics oscillating between collaboration and compromise, with significant numbers of Christians driven by conscience to stand firm in confession of Christ over and against sworn allegiance to Fuhrer or Fatherland. Bonhoeffer of course was a Lutheran, as was Martin Niemoller and Helmut Thielicke, so while Luther's anti Jewish writings were exploited in the interests of National Socialists by a number of leading academic theologians, there was no inevitable or essential connection between Luther's anti-Jewish writing, Lutheran theology and ideological anti-Semitism as political goal seeking religious justification. Many, many German Christians were not so easily taken in by such religious opportunism collaborating with political cynicism, with vast lethal consequence.

It is this complexity of motive and manoeuvre, the difficulties in establishing blame or innocence, culpability or naivete, and even culpable naivete, that gives rise to the moral perplexity and theological embarrassment evoked for subsequent generations of Christians, by Luther's anti-Jewish writings, and their reception culminating in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. These issues remain far too important, and that period of political and ecclesial history an episode of too recent tragic memory, for it to be subsumed into minor references and a page or two here and there, in what is a recognised academic reference work published by a highly respected University publisher, on the reception, legacy and content of the theology of Martin Luther.

I was so perturbed by this that I wrote a personal email to Professor Robert Kolb, one of the editors, and had a courteous and thoughtful reply, seeking to address my concerns from the standpoint of the editorial team and its decisions. I can see the Editors' point, that the issues of hard editorial choices meant that other important perspectives were also omitted; and that German reception of Luther in 1930's Germany competes with other important areas of interest for inclusion in full essay treatment; but editorial choices are inevitably powerful interpretive tools in the survey of a subject field, defining the relative importance of what is in and what is not.

I am glad too that my concerns are at least alluded to in several other essays in the collection, with pointers to further resources. But I remain perturbed – because the Holocaust is a permanent defining watershed in Jewish-Christian relations, requiring a disposition of Christian openness, repentance, self-critique and continuing reflection. Added to this, the active collaboration of prominent German Christian theologians using Luther's writings, baleful tendentious biblical eisegesis, and a theological overlay of public respectability, to give comfort, distorted credence and ideological validity to the anti-Semitic policies of National Socialism, was of critical importance in creating a zeitgeist in which the Holocaust was thinkable and made possible of implementation.

Such vast tragic evil makes an essay on Luther's theology, early 20th Century Germany, and the road to the Holocaust and beyond, self-choosing in the list of essential contents in a volume on Luther's Theology. The absence of such a treatment remains for me, a matter of deep regret, in an otherwise richly resourced compendium of current scholarly perspective on Luther's theology.

9 May 2014
Faith: Trusting we are held, even in our falling

I like it when I'm ambushed by a poem. Reading an article on the way the Bible is interpreted in English poetry, this celebrated poem by John Milton was referenced. The lines recount the anguished questioning of a poet whose sightless eyes now frustrate his main talent, writing poetry. The resolution achieved by patience is an ideal and obedient spiritual response. And I'm left wondering whether for Milton such reluctant surrender was unattainable aspiration or complaint uttered as obedience to unchangeable circumstance?

On His Blindness

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait."

The mind that conceived Paradise Lost, was imaginative, interrogative, dealt in complexity of motive and soul, was familiar with the inner terrain of temptation, guilt, remorse and the longing for forgiveness and heaven. Perhaps that last line is indeed a resolution – "They also serve who stand and wait"; then again, when it comes to making sense, understanding, coming to terms with life-changing personal loss, there will always be the question mark after a phrase such as 'light denied'.

Sometimes faith is knowing you don't know, living with ambiguity, trusting we are held even in our falling, letting go of the love that even then will not let us go.That's when faith becomes more than 'sweet trust', and feels the stern demand of another great literary artist who shared Milton's "superb imagining": Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11.1)

Blakes etching of the Trinity is a beautiful image of the love that will not let us go, especially when we no longer find the strength to hang on.

7 May 2014