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Every now and again we all need to be put in our place. Brought down a peg or two. Reminded of our limitations. Told what's what.

Here's Barth telling all would be, self-affirming theologians what's what:

Theology is not a prviate subject for theologians only. Nor is it a private subject for professors. Fortunately there have always been pastors who have understood more about theology than most professors. Nor is theology a private subject of study for pastors. Fortunately there have repeatedly been congregation members, and often whole congregations, who have pursued theology energetically while their pastors were theological infants or barbarians. Theology is a matter for the church.

Karl Barth, God in Action, (Edinburgh:T&T Clark, 1936), 56-7

The last fortnight has been less than the leisurely, contemplative, laid back, spiritually replenishing, intellectually productive illusion I now and again fantasise about as being the ideal life of the grown up Christian. When it comes to the tension between activism and passivity, most times I'm an activist wishing I was a contemplative! That isn't a complaint, more a confession – and not so much a confession of guilt as a confession of faith. There comes a time when you have to trust to who you are, and have faith in the God who made you who you are!

If I had the last fortnight back and was given the chance to revise it, balance it, adjust its demands more in keeping with energy levels – not sure there's much I'd change. Nearly five of the ten working days were dominated by meetings – but none were superfluous, even if at times they redefined upwards the capacity of tedium to enhance sanctity. Three parties in Aberdeen in 12 days and the Induction of Gary to a new ministry in Crown Terrace Baptist Church, Aberdeen  – not a chance we'd have missed any of them. Several pastoral things to share in others' lives, hospitality both given and received in the essntial sacrament of kindness and welcome – it's been a fortnight of much happening.

Last Thursday night was Annette's 90th birthday party. If I'm half as sharp and well at myself as Annette when I'm half way between my age and hers I'll be well content. I was asked to say "Grace" before the party dinner, and I used the occasion to write a prayer especially for Annette – drawing together all that makes her the remarkable friend she is. Reader extraordinary, blessed with spiritual honesty and intellectual curiosity; creative worker of needle and cross-stitch; over 40 years a volunteer at Oxfam; Munro bagger and hill-walker; Christian extraordinary evidenced by a lifetime's faithfulness and attention to detail in the school of Christ. She is one of the most remarkable women I know, one who came into our lives as gift and has remained an established and loved presence there. It is for Annette that the following prayer was written:

Grace for a 90^th
Birthday

Gracious
God, tonight we celebrate Annette’s birthday

To say “Grace”, and so thank you for all that nourishes
our life:

The beauty of a world to walk in and wonder – a feast for
our eyes

The companionship of friends in laughter and tears – food
for our spirits

Living the joy and hard work of love and family  – 
nourishing our hearts

For years the week on week grace of  voluntary work – helping to feed others

Long hours of reading for intellect and imagination –
sustenance for the mind

A lifetime of fellowship in the community of Christ –
replenishing our souls 

The sense of life’s pattern in cross stitch and tapestry
– nurturing memory

And through it all, a body to enjoy and experience your
Grace in all these graces of life

So God
of grace, we say “Grace”, thank you,

for all that nourishes our lives,

and so, for this food,

shared in joy and eaten in friendship

For all that is past – thank you

For all that is to come – Yes.

Amen.

The definitive biography of Bonhoeffer remains that of Eberhard Bethge, published by Augsburg in 2000 as a revised edition. My own hardback copy goes back to the early 1970's, when I first read it as a young pastor. I've never lost the admiration bordering on awe that was evoked by encountering a life so genuinely moral and so theologically shaped around the form of Christ. One way or another, year on year, I've continued to wrestle with the challenge of this man who died in his fortieth year, and whose life so powerfully demonstrated the cruciform shape of Christian existence.

The theological existentialism of the 1970's created an atmosphere of unrest, of impatience with classic expressions of theology, ministry and church. And in the flux and theological turmoil of the time, I sensed in Bonhoeffer both a determination to be faithful to Jesus Christ and a capacity for radical departures from the assumptions and structures of dogmatic formulation and ecclesial pattern. According to Bonhoeffer, an authentic Christian existence, expressed in faithful discipleship, demanded a constant reorientation of life around the person of Jesus Christ, while standing beneath the cross. A life so lived is the most persuasive statement the church can ever make about the reality of her Lord, the nature of the Gospel, and the cost and consequence of following Jesus in the contemporary world. And I was fully persuaded. Ever since, the life and thought of Bonhoeffer have been trusted navigation points for my own traveling in theology and discipleship.

The announcement of a major new biography by Ferdinand Schlingensiepen is therefore an important event. For myself, the significance of a new biography isn't so much that it will provide new information, but that it will exegete the text of a life formed after Christ, and do so with critical reverence for that text. Biography as theology means that a Christian life is itself primary theological data, the living testimony of those who have lived and died by the truth they discerned in Christ. Biography is therefore a key theological resource, primary material for research, albeit mediated through the secondary reflection of the biographer. Schlingensiepen's father was Principal of one of the confessing Church seminaries, and he himself is a German pastor and friend of Bethge. The book is due early December: if the publishers can make that date it will be my Advent companion this year, drawing me into the interplay of light and darkness that is the reality of human life, lived by faith, oriented by hope and sustained by the love that moves the stars and sun.

I wasn't able to blog yesterday, November 15. On that date in 1931 Bonhoeffer was ordained, and so began one of the most remarkable ministries to grace the Church.

Here's Bonhoeffer on the proper balance between pastoral care and the unique freedom of each person in Christ. An entire renovation of authority centred attitudes to Christian leadership is required by Bonhoeffer's central contention:

As only Christ was able to speak to me in such a way that I was helped, so others too can only be helped by Christ alone. However, this means that I must release others from all my attempts to control, coerce, and dominate them with my love. In their freedom from me, other persons want to be loved for who they are, as those for whom Christ became a human being, died and rose again, as those for whom Christ won the forgiveness of sins and prepared eternal life. Because Christ has long since acted decisively for other Christians, before I could begin to act, I must allow them the freedom to be Christ's. They should encounter me only as the persons they already are in Christ.

Life Together, pages 43-44. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 5, Fortress 1966

But
questions cannot go unanswered

unless they first be asked.

And there is a far
worse anxiety,

a far worse insecurity,

which comes from being afraid to ask the
right questions –

because they might turn out to have no answers.

One of the
moral diseases we communicate to one another in society

comes from huddling together

in the pale light of an insufficient
answer

to a question we are afraid to ask.

Posting today over at Scottish Baptist College. The second in a short series explaining the values that shape and define our ethos as a denominational theological College.

Today I am reflecting on Baptist-shaped community, taking seriously the content of what used to be a name of derision, a sarcastic nickname, "Baptist". What I describe there isn't intended to disenfrachise other Christian traditions, or claim that we are more right or less wrong than other Christians seeking to follow Christ in the way that answers to their own sense of call, identity and style of witness. But I am attempting to  explain that cluster of convictions which, taken together, create the parameters of Baptist witness and touch on key theological convictions and faith inspired practices.

I know. The Berlin Wall was a symbol of division and suspicion, a concretisation of enmity, such an offence to human ties of family and friends and such a denial of freedom, that people died trying to escape from behind it. So it seems an incongruous symbol of the Gospel. But in one sense it is just that. It represented, and still represents in the memory, that which the Gospel of Jesus Christ intentionally contradicts, that which Good News of liberation, reconciliation and new creation subverts with the patient persistence of a love from all eternity. And the breach of the berlin Wall 20 years ago remains for me an unforgettable portrayal of what it means when a dividing wall of hostility is dismantled and it is possible to look into the face of the one who is no longer an enemy.

God has given to the Church a ministry of reconciliation. In Jesus God was reconciling the world to Himself, God's purpose being to reconcile all things to Himself, making peace by the blood of the cross. (so 2 Corinthians 5 and Colossians 1) And everywhere walls are dismantled, that radical and subversive Gospel of reconciliation is enacted, proclaimed amongst the rubble of demolished prejudices and hatreds. And conversely, wherever Christians build walls that shut others out, or maintain walls intended for their own safety, or defend walls that exclude and diminish 'the other', then we give comfort to the culture of division, we choose the way of the world, we contradict the realities of the cross, and we lose all claim to be good news for anybody.

So today I celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall.

But I also pray for the dismantling of those walls out there that still stand, that are fiercely defended, that provide ramparts for our prejudices and battlements for our fears.

And I pray for the undermining and overtoppling of those walls in my own heart behind which I hide, and which represent my own strategies of exclusion, separation and self-defence at the cost of the other who is my sister and brother.

And I pray for the courage to confront the ugliness and brutality, the divisiveness and diminishment, the inhumanity and futility, of those walls that seem permanent, those intolerable structures of power we tolerate.

And by such confrontation, to follow faithfully after Christ, the crucified reconciler, embodying a ministry of reconciliation and peace-making.

As Robert Frost said in his unintentionally theological poem 'Mending Wall', "something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down."

One of the real gains of walking through blogland is that like many another stroll in unfamiliar landscape, you turn a corner and discover beauty, are surprised by joy, ambushed by that which deamnds our attention. So on James K Smith's blog, Fors Clavigera, I came across this quotation from Charles Péguy's long prose poem. It distills into beautiful words and cadences some of our inner longing to know enough of the heart of God to live our lives hopefully towards the always new future. To be read slowly, and more than once.

From The Portal of the Mystery of Hope By Charles Péguy

The faith that I love best, says God, is hope.

Faith doesn’t surprise me. It’s not surprising.

I am so resplendent in my creation. . . .

That in order really not to see me these poor people would have to be blind.

Charity says God, that doesn’t surprise me. It’s not surprising.

These poor creatures are so miserable that unless they had a heart of stone,

how could they not have love for one another.

How could they not love their brothers.

How
could they not take the bread from their own mouth, their daily bread,
i

n order to give it to the unhappy children who pass by.

And my son had such love for them. . . .

But hope, says God, that is something that surprises me.

Even me. That is surprising.

That these poor children see how things are going

and believe that tomorrow things will go better. T

hat they see how things are going today

and believe that they will go better tomorrow morning.  

That is surprising and it’s by far the greatest marvel of our grace.

And I’m surprised by it myself.

And my grace must indeed be an incredible force.

~trans. David L. Schindler, Jr.