The painting is by W H Y Titcomb and is called The Sunday School Treat. It shows children defying all the health and safety rules as they embark from a Cornish harbour. This image is from the back cover of David Tovey's biography, available from Amazon. Another of Titcomb's better known paintings is The Primitive Methodists at Prayer, (below) another of those closely observed historical snapshots of another era, another culture, now gone.
Author: admin
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Making room, books, shelving and an understanding friend.
Had an interesting conversation with a friend who is a joiner. Well, a ship's carpenter which means he is an elite joiner who can turn his hand to other skills as well. The problem is still fitting a library into a smaller size study without major deletions from my catalogue. So the large clothes cupboard in this modest room, given a ship's carpenter's skills, will provide another 23 feet of shelving and some filing space. The Tardis principle. Or maybe a jig saw puzzle – all the pieces only fit together one way?
While discussing the problem I mentioned a number of suggestions made by well meaning friends, that I should just downsize my library, get rid of surplus, expel the excess. Didn't mention Stuart's much more convenient suggestion to give them to him :)) Anyway, said my friend, I paraphrase, but accurately, – "I have a tool kit, and several planes, saws, chisels, hammers, and need a wee trailer to carry them to go and do a job. Your library is a tool kit – you'll get rid of something and then you'll need it. A library isn't just books – it's a lifelong collection of the things you do your work with." I love a man who understands. I showed him my prized Cambridge hardback edition of the George Herbert's poems and explained the extended mortgage needed to buy it. It's inconceivable I'd part with it. It and the vast majority of my books are not bought on impulse – they are chosen companions, resident scholars of choice, conversation partners, gifts of thought and ideas that have made me who I am. Sure some of them can go.
But I have an annual review of my whole library anyway, have done every year for decades, and a box or two go away each year to new homes. So we spent time conspiring against the limitations of space, doing the math, planning and measuring so as to have adequate shelving without the study being overwhelmingly stuffed – I also like wall space for my pictures, and a sense of beauty as well as utility.
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Two Bishops, Western Culture, Islam and Conversation as Mission
Yesterday's post about witness as a term preferred to mission, came back to haunt me when I was skimming through a couple of books on, well, mission! The late Lesslie Newbigin was a pioneer of thinking about mission, and his generous humility combined with lucid criticism make several of his books classic statements of Christian critique of culture, the world and the church. Best known for The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, which remains a classic text, I value just as much his less technical but persuasive The Open Secret. That's the book I was browsing in when I came across this paragraph:
The Christian confession of Jesus as Lord does not involve any attempt to deny the reality of the work of god in the lives and thoughts and prayers of men and women outside the Christian church. On the contrary, it ought to involve an eager expectation of, a looking for, and a rejoicing in the evidence of that work. There is something deeply wrong when Christians imagine that loyalty to Jesus requires them to belittle the manifest presence of the light in the lives of men and women who do not acknowledge him, to seek out points of weakness, to ferret out hidden sins and deceptions as a means of commending the gospel. If we love the light and walk in the light we will also rejoice in the light wherever we find it – even the smallest gleams of it in the surrounding darkness. (page 198 )
Along with Bishop Kenneth Cragg, Newbigin exemplifies that intellectual generosity, spiritual humility, and self-critical honesty which commends the gospel without imperialism, makes Jesus the benchmark of our social interactions, and looks on the world of human affairs as the sphere where goodness is to be found and attended to. I still remember my naive and prejudiced inner world being remade by reading Kenneth Cragg's The Call of the Minaret. I still don't know a more sympathetic portrayal of the conversation that is possible between Christianity and Islam. Without shirking the points of difference, Cragg appreciates, affirms, and while acknowledging areas of ignorance, offers an exposition and critique whose undertone is friendship and whose aim is dialogue. Cragg and Newbigin – Bishops both, and apostles too even if with a small 'a'.
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“The cross unmasks the world…” Not mission but witness?
The answer to Tony's question is that the book available for $38 in the States is Resurrection and Discipleship, the earlier and larger book by Lorenzen. It's also the one from which Graeme quotes.
The one shown on the right is the book I quoted from (Stuart's copy which I'm still clutching) which expands on the earlier sections on Discipleship and Justice. And it is indeed expensive wherever it's for sale – the $21.95 one on Amazon is from a US seller who doesn't so international shipping.
"The cross unmasks the world as the "world" – bereft of love and therefore of God, driven by selfishness, self-interest and violence. Where the "world" remained true to itself by fording Jesus to the cross, God remained true to God's self. God, being love, identified with the victim, took the crucified one onto God's own being, and thereby created new life out of death. The violence of the world was transfigured into a new ontology; the ontology of justice. That means that at the center of life, in the foundation of being, there is not nothing, but God; there is not violence but nonviolence; there is not war but peace; there is not hatred but love." (page 79-80)
Now I have issues with the term "missional". Far too agenda driven, dominating, smacking of ideological imperialism and conquest or control seeking. For Christians the preferred and New testament term is "witness". And that last sentence about what is at the center of life is as comprehensive, challenging and attractive as any statement of the church's call to witness as I know. And if nonviolence, peace and love were further up the agendas of Baptist communities we might be able to stop agonising about models and methods of mission and start affirming the models and methods of the God revealed in Christ – peace-making, reconciliation, love, the grace of generosity and the generosity of grace. Or so it seems to this baptist with a small b, or to this small baptist 🙂
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Enjoyment and Smileys as Emotional Prompts
Well into enjoyment week – varied experiences of en-joy-ment include, a punnet of opal plums (the Victorias aren't in the shops yet), making the least happy member of staff in a place I often go, smile; listening to the new Ennio Morricone double CD while sitting in traffic at roadworks; an exchange of emails about me being responsible for the "divinity" at the University, opening a book packagewhich is a common occurence that never loses the pleasure, oh and when I asked for soup at lunch in the wee place we go to, and was told there was none left, I immediately ordered a choc-chip muffin instead, and was given a lecture on healthy eating and aksed wouldn't I prefer a pizza….wouldn't I just!
Off to enjoy myself …… the picture above, captions please…..
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Resurrection and Discipleship – the Theology of Thorwald Lorenzen
Stuart has just bought a book. Another book. I'm guilty of envy. I've borrowed it clutchingly. Stuart burst or robbed a bank to buy it – as you have to if a book is both brilliant and scarce. Why hasn't Smyth and Helwys republished this slim masterpiece of applied theology and saved the rest of us from enying the possessions of someone else who hands over their wodge of cash smilingly and think the deal is still a bargain? I've been allowed to borrow it on the secure assumption that my envy will remain a sin of disposition and won't graduate to the sin of misappropriation.
Resurrection, Discipleship Justice. Affirming the Resurrection of Jesus Today, by the Baptist theologian Thorwald Lorenzen, argues that the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are relational events aimed at the establishing of justice. So resurrection is relational; but (my phrase, not Lorenzen's), Christian relationship is also resurrectional. In other words the resurrection defines discipleship and community. To be a new creation in Christ is to be radically resurrected so that as the blurb says, "resurrection faith has to be understood in terms of intentional and serious Christian discipleship."
Here are two brief quotations taken at random cos I haven't read the book – yet. I am about to hand over a wodge of cash smilingly when I click the add to your basket button. When it comes it will feature here for a week – at least. And maybe Stuart will guest post as well….please?
"The Holy Spirit is relationship par excellence. The Holy Spirit brings together what belongs together. The Holy Spirit makes what happens between people interesting."
"The Kingdom of God is celebrated when love becomes an event."
Pages 54 and 74
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Anguished Protestants and Grumpy Catholics – according to Von Balthasar
Here's one of my favourite theologians putting miserable Christians and arid theology in their place:
How could Christianity have become such a universal power if it had always been as sullen as today's humourless and anguished Protestantism, or as grumpy as the super-organised and super-scholasticised Catholicism about us?…It is not dry manuals (full as these may be of unquestionable truths) that express with plausibility for the world the truth of Christ's Gospel; it is the existence of the saints who have been grasped by Christ's Holy Spirit. And Christ himself foresaw no other kind of apologetics."
Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord. 1. A Theological Aesthetics, Seeing the Form, (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), 493-4
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Gabriel’s Oboe – and why only the occasional composition should be called “glorious”
I saw The Mission the year it was released, and still remember my first hearing of the soundtrack, and the glorious Gabriel's Oboe. I was once told by someone who knows a bit about writing that the word "glorious" is too overused, and now a cheapened word. Well, yes it can be. And a lazy word, a flattering exaggeration, a way of investing importance in something relatively mediocre by invoking a vaguely heavenly glow. But Gabriel's Oboe on its first hearing was glorious, and hundreds of subsequent hearings have only confirmed that for The Mission, Morricone composed a musical score that is heartbreakingly congruent with the tragic story of a priest for whom glory only came through martyrdom.
The Mission remains a potent and subversive statement of the perilous connections between church and state, faith and empire, prayer and politics – because mission is itself an ambiguous word. If the Church has a mission, so has the state. The word mission is used of an army incursion, a diplomatic service, a task delegated by a higher authority. And in the film, there is a collision of missions, an encounter between the Gospel and the Empire, a fatal meeting between the priest carrying the gold sunburst Ostensorium surmounted by a cross out of the burning mission church, and the lead musket balls that tear the life from his body. And all of this haunted by the aching melody of Gabriel's Oboe, and a film score redolent with the gift of genius.
The popularity of Gabriel's Oboe made it inevitable someone would want to put words to it. Written by Chiara Ferrau, and first performed by Sarah Brightman, the lyrics (English translation below) convey the aching longing of humanity for a different and better world, a humanity more humane and a world more just, and a wistful yearning for cities warmed by the winds of peace. And the singer confesses this is all in the imagination – but the music is not wistful and resigned – what makes Gabriel's Oboe such an emotionally subversive experience is a melody that weaves together our deepest longings and highest aspirations as human beings, and composes them into imagined possibilities and resilient hopefulness. I suppose that's what is meant by saying the piece is inspired….and glorious.
All the above reflection is because I've just ordered the double CD (will wait for Christmas for the DVD) of Morricone's recent Vienna Concert. I'm familiar with a number of other Morricone scores. There's an apparent incongruence between some of his music and the films that engendered them. The spaghetti westerns of Clint Eastwood are bleak, violent, enjoyably cynical, and minimally moral, other than the blunt and dubious morality of vengeance in the shape of a poncho wearing gunfighter who gives the really bad people their come-uppance. Yet in for example, "The Good the Bad and the Ugly", some of the soundtrack is haunting, even tender, while other tracks even 40 years on have a menacing edge that bears comparison with the best of contemporary cinema music. The versatility and imagination of Morricone has produced for cinema goers unforgettable music – and for music lovers some of the finest compositions of the last 50 years. The music of Gabriel's Oboe, and the lyrics translated below, are still for me the pinnacle of cinematic musical interpretation.
In my imagination I see a just world,
Everyone lives in peace and in honesty there.
I dream of souls that are always free,
Like the clouds that fly,
Full of humanity in the depths of the soul.
In my imagination I see a bright world,
Even the night is less dark there.
I dream of souls that are always free,
Like clouds that fly.
In my imagination there exists a warm wind,
That breathes on the cities, like a friend.
I dream of souls that are always free,
Like clouds that fly,
Full of humanity in the depths of the soul.Hurry up with my CDs!!
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A week of Enjoyment – A Confession and an Explanation
This is the first post at the beginning of Enjoyment Week.
This is an idea I've had for some time to counteract a recently diagnosed
tendency to slow onset grumpiness, a condition that is not specific to me but which is like a virus, reaching epidemic status and from which the church seems to have no immunity.The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace (and
six others). But joy comes second only after love. Enjoy is an
interesting word – from old French, "to take pleasure in" – like
diving into deep water and swimming, so being immersed in pleasure,
reveling happily in the environment that is our life and in which we live our days.But does joy
refer to a preferred disposition?Is enjoyment a way we choose of seeing and responding to
the world?Or should such an intense word as joy be reserved only for
those occasional bursts of extraordinary pleasure we can't predict and make happen?Can joy, and
enjoyment, be an act of will, something we set out to feel, a habit to
be formed?Or is joy a gift that sometimes comes unexpectedly and
unbidden as gift and surprise?Enjoyment surely can't be a constant
state – a life of unmitigated joy would self-destruct from an excess of
sameness and exhausted emotions!Still.
I do think that joy and enjoyment have some moral content. Is there not in
all of us, an obligation to look on life without sourness, to be
receptive to gift, to detect and reject those first negative impulses
that once welcomed become complaint, and before long distill into
bitterness, or worse still reduce to concentrated cynicism?En-joy-ment – to be on
the side of joy, to opt into fun and laughter as an affirmation of what
is good for us, and good for others. Because selfish joy is an
oxymoron. The connections between celebration and community, between
enjoyment and wellbeing, between laughter and contentment, humour and humanity, are not coincidental – they are creative links between the life we are given and the lives of others.
So a week of enjoyment means finding and making en-joy-ment in my own life; and making and giving en-joy-ment in the lives of others. And the week I've chosen for this experiment is the first week back at work after a long holiday. So if enjoyment is something we can make happen, for ourselves and for others, this might be a good week to try and prove it. One other thought.
There is a mini-lexicon of words that cluster around enjoyment, and are spiritually if not semantically related, and which if not the same thing, each contribute to that same inner sense of en-joy-ment.
You can even do a fibonnaci poem about them – just for the enjoyment of it :))
Gift
Praise
Laughter
Gratitude
Appreciation
Achievement and encouragement
Plus. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience,
kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control. Live by the Spirit – and enjoy!
Part Mary Oliver's poem Meadowlark Sings and I Greet Him in Return, helps get the sense of all this:
Meadowlark, when you sing it's as if
you lay your yellow breast upon mine and say
hello, hello, and are we not
of one family, in our delight of life?
You sing, I listen.
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Wolfhart Pannenberg, God’s Patience and a Honda Jazz
Every few years or so I've tried to make time to read through a full blown systematic theology. This is not a novel form of intellectual masochism, but an intentional obedience to the call of God to a discipleship of the intellect. Sure, there are some writers who seem to make it harder than it needs to be. But the recognised theologians, the big names, the substantial presences on the theological stage, are far too important to the life of the church and the mind of its leaders to be sidelined by an arrogant laziness disguised as intellectual modesty. And those same substantial presences are far, far too important to be ignored, neglected or despised by those of us called to preach, to care, to serve the church, to build the Body of Christ, and to do so thoughtfully, reverently and from a foundation more durable and adaptable than the latest time limited pragmatic programmes geared to ecclesial renewal of one form or another.
Which is why over the years I've sat in the study chair, fastened the seat-belt, adjusted the mirrors to give better vision, checked I had enough fuel (chai tea and Hovis digested biscuits the current preferred combination ), gripped the book with both hands, and started to read. Half an hour a day eventually gets it done. Which is how I come to be at page 438 of Wolfhart Pannenberg's volume 1. And this post was born when I read his theological reflection on the patience of God. Pannenberg is not easy to read, but…
No wait. First let me tell you about the other night. I took a long run in the new car, a Honda Jazz with which I am inordinately pleased. We went into Lewis
Grassic Gibbon country – Cairn O Mount, Auchenblae, and Arbuthnott. For a while we sat
at the view point on Cairn O Mount and admired a huge vista of
countryside through heavy rain accompanied by shafts of bright sunshine
framed in a vivid half rainbow. It's wild,
miles of heather moorland and mountain, but sloping into green uplands
and fields towards the Mearns.Now. Reading Panneberg's theology can sometimes be a similar experience to looking at a challenging rough landscape under dark skies, in heavy rain that reduces visibility. But just as often there are shafts of bright sunlight, a partial rainbow and moments of transfigured thought and intellectual epiphany. Here's one of them, from pages 438-9:
"Barth said of patience that it is present 'where space and time are given with a definite intention, where freedom is allowed in expectation of a response' (CD, II/1, 408). Patience leaves to others space for their own existence and time for the unfolding of their own being. If it is not the enforced patience of those who impotently watch the course of events but the patience of the powerful who can intervene in what happens but refrains from doing so, and if the patience is shown to his own creatures, then it is a form of the love that lets the creatures have their own existence. God's patience then, is neither indifferent tolerance nor an impotent but brave endurance of circumstances that cannot be altered. It is an element of the creative love that wills the existence of creatures. It waits for the response of creatures in which they fulfill their destiny."
Patience as love restraining power in order to allow freedom. So patience as the self-limitation that allows space, time and opportunity for the other to grow. And patience therefore as an active form of passivity, an intentional self-imposed limitation which gives permission and trusts the other to be and to become. As a vision of how God is willfully implicated in the life of his creation, Pannenberg's theology of divine patience suggests that in God the three cardinal virtues of faith hope and love have their divine counterpart. The faithfulness, hopefulness and love of God guaranteeing that creation will not forever be in bondage to futility, but in Christ will be brought to fulfilment in the end, and however long it takes, it will not wear out the patience of the God.