Author: admin

Of the making of many books, and the pricing upwards of many books, there is no limit.

When it comes to possessing a book, like most bibliophiles I prefer a substantial stitched hardback. Especially if it is an important book. And because I just so enjoy handling a well bound book, printed on quality paper, where font and layout and editing and production standards each contribute to a book that is a joy to hold and behold, to handle and read. And if the price is halfway reasonable then here's my money. The book below is the hardback edition of George Herbert at £90 – I got it for half the price from a sensible bookseller in Cambridge. "A thing of beauty and a joy forever".

But I also want to write in praise of the well intentioned paperback. Sometimes the hardback is ridiculously expensive and impossible to justify – and there's no paperback edition. Take for example Susan Gillingham's Psalms Through the Centuries volume 1 – £57 and the second volume will be even more expensive. And no chance of a paperback version, despite the fact that this is a series of commentaries aimed at students! So either you borrow it from a library (if it has it), or from inter-library loan – but what if it's a book you want to read and refer to often, huh? Writing to the publisher of Gillingham's book to point out the unattainability of these prices for all but institutional libraries I received a courteous negative response, essentially the same as one I first encountered and learned to live with when I was twenty one and at University.

I still have an essay I did all those years ago on the hard to make case for the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy. I began with the disclaimer that much as I would like to establish the case for Mosaic authorship, the historical and textual evidence did not point that way. One of the most illuminating feedback comments I've ever had was pencilled in the margin, "Tough!" It was a hard response for a fragile young Evangelical, but one that has served me well – and I still have the essay. The lecturer was himself an agnostic who sympathised deeply with people of faith trying to re-negotiate the foundations of that faith by intellectual dialogue and critical thinking in what could seem a hostile environment.

The point is, the publisher's response for all its courteous explanations of why they couldn't afford to make the book affordable for individual purchasers, came down to that one word I learned to live with decades ago – "Tough!" Now there aren't many books I want to own that I'm not prepared to pay for, and do without other things to buy them. Choices about disposable income are real giveaway clues to our ethics, stewardship, taste, and peculiar but likeable daftness. But even I can't bring myself to spend £115 on, for example, the second volume of Michael Watts The Dissenters, a magisterial history that is simply unmatched in the subject field. The first volume was issued in both hardback and paperback – but not the second. Tough!

And likewise Carol Newsom's The Book of Job A Contest of Moral Imaginations at £66 – but a book of great originality, penetrative in its insight into how this magnificent text interprets us and our world, and our human brokenness and longing for wholeness, before we ever get near an interpretation of it. So at £66, "Tough!" But it has just been published at £13.99 in an Oxford Paperback. The lesson being, sometimes you can't get all you want – I'm still waiting for Gillingham on the Psalms to be affordable, and Watts Dissenters to not need a mortgage preceded by a credit check – so, "tough". But now and again life has unlooked for blessing – and something you want is not only affordable, but a bargain at twice the price – as is Newsom's work on Job, in paperback.

For those interested, Newsom's commentary on Job in the New Interpreter's Bible represents along with Sam Balentine's Smyth and Helwys volume on Job, the finest exegetical conversation on Job I know. And with Newsom bound in the same volume as Clinton McCann's commentary on Psalms, that NIB volume costing around £40 is simply gold at the price of lead. I exaggerate – but only very slightly.

7 October 2009
The Erskine Bridge, tragedy and praying light into darkness

The Erskine Bridge is less than five miles from where we live. And on Sunday night two girls aged 14 and 15, whose names are Neve and Georgia, jumped to their deaths, holding hands. The tragedy that spreads out from such an act of despairing self-surrender will leave many people themselves bereft, those who knew them well and those who know only the end of their story as told on the news. The girls were resident in supported and secure accommodation. Their families, those who shared their lives at Bishopton, staff and other girls, social workers and other caring and support professionals, now live with the nightmare aftermath. The complexity of emotions and self-questioning that the tragedy of suicide triggers will be hard to endure, interpret and eventually work through. Seldom worked through to resolution, usually to resignation and a lingering sadness, and the often unjust yet inescapable sense of guilt, personal responsibility and that nagging barbed hypothesis, "what if I had…? Because we can always think of what we could have, might have, should have, done.

There will be an enquiry. Lessons will be learned, and each person within significant radius of their two young lives will have to account for their actions, decisions and professionalism. In the meantime grief is compounded by the demand to know why, and how. Already explanation is assumed to be failed systems and procedures; but the fact remains two young adults chose, together, to turn from life to final ending, and planned and shared the enacting of that so sad decision.

And all I feel I can do, last night and this morning, is light a candle, think of two young lives now ended, lift them in compassion to a merciful God, and pray for them and those they leave behind them.

And pray too that those whose lives are now touched by this act of life defying immolation, will in time find again a sense of the preciousness of life, and therefore the treasure that is each human being, which in the world of social and professional care is too easily overlooked by those of us outside, quick to blame and slow to understand human limitations.

And to pray to the God of whom the poet-psalmist wrote, who knitted each person together in their mother's womb – and so to pray that those young lives which seem so finally to have unravelled, will be gathered into the creative life of God into whose hands we all hope to fall and be held, and formed into the true self God made us to be.

This isn't wishful thinking or sentiment lacking theology. Whatever else the cross declares, it signals the span of divine love reaching outwards and downwards to those deep places we all fear most, where but for the grace of God we might all fall, and if we do, God is there before us, beneath us, and for us.

Lord have mercy.

Christ have mercy.

Lord have mercy.

6 October 2009
Stanley Hauerwas on the gentleness of listening and why he finds it so hard

I was in Aberdeen a couple of years ago when Jean Vanier and Stanley Hauerwas were jointly leading a conference exploring contrasting ways of caring for each other gently in a violent world. (The photo is its own contrast in the gentle listener and the passionate talker!) Hauerwas can sometimes be hard to read – not only because of what he says, but at times he is obtuse, hard to follow, and seems to be pursuing an iniosyncratic bee in his bonnet rather than saying plainly what is so, what needs fixing and why. But most of the time I recognise the angry prophet, the angular debater on philosophy, ethics and theology, getting stuck in to those who live heedless of others, their competitive ways raising issues of human vulnerability, social justice, power-mongering and the idolatry of the bottom line in hard cash terms. Both aspects of Hauerwasian theology were on show at Aberdeen – parts of the lecture that were frustratingly blurred, and times when his meaning was unambiguous. The following two quotations about how hard it is to listen, I heard him say, and they show why Hauerwas remains an important voice himself worth listening to:

"I am an academic, and academics are notoriously bad listeners. We always think we know what people are going to say before they say it, and we have a response to what we thought they would say in spite of what they may actually have said. To learn to listen well, it turns out, may require learning to be a gentle person."

"I want to remain the academic who can pretend to defend those with mental disabilities by being more articulate than those I am criticizing. I want to be a warrior on behalf of L'Arche,* doing battle against the politics that threaten to destroy these gentle communities. Jean of course, is no less a warrior. But where I see an enemy to be defeated, he sees a wound that needs to be healed. That's a deep difference."

Hauerwas and Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World, (IVP, 2008), 79, 80.

* L'Arche is a netwrok of communities for supported and shared living, that began in the 1960s in Troisly, France and is now a global network providing living space in community for those of different abilities. The work of Jean Vanier is in my view a singular expression of Christlike accompaniment and care that values the human person in radically compassionate terms. Sometime soon I am going to do a Jean Vanier week.

5 October 2009
Induction, covenant and celebration – Catriona has arrived in Scotland!

Every induction of a minister to a pastorate is an event to be celebrated, a covenant to be sealed by promises, a confirmation yet again of the surprising call of God to all too human people to serve the Body of Christ, the Church. As Baptists we gladly hold to the practice of making covenant. A church is a gathering of believers who in their membership of the local church, embody the promise to walk together, faithfully, after Christ. And the call of God is to do so together, and to persevere and work at it even if at times it exhausts patience and breaks the heart. And to do this while also knowing that in the shared fellowship of the journey, they have discovered joy, the understanding of others, the generosity that humbles, and that one surprise, repeated so mercifully often, that one surprise of being loved.

And so to Hillhead Baptist Church on Saturday October 3rd, and Catriona's induction. Most people who visit this blog will know Catriona as the skinny fair trade latte blogger (see sidebar), minister till recently of Hugglescote Baptist Church (aka Dibley). I met her the year before she went to Hugglescote, and then several times more recently as she came up to Scotland to meet those who will now be the congregation amongst whom her ministry will be. The Induction service was built around the theme and the experience of making covenant. Catriona told her story, the Church told theirs, and we sensed how these stories coincided. And of course the church from which Catriona came, Hugglescote Baptist Church, they too are part of the story and they were there too. Then Catriona and the Church made promises, and in our prayers we laid hands not only on the new minister, but on representatives of the congregation, so that they set out together on their journey, in covenant with each other, and looking to God to lead, accompany and hold them true to themselves and each other. All of this gathered together by Ruth Gouldbourne, preacher for the day, under the deceptively simple command, "Be kind to one another". Except that kindness is patterned after the kindnes of God, who in Christ chooses to be kind, to come close, to empathise, to walk the way of human life.

Then there was the biblically mandated buffet meal. This is one of my favourite icons, depicting an early buffet meal, complete with angels unawares. The fact that the icon images the Trinity and the Triune communion of love and perichoretic purpose, enriches further the idea of hospitality. Food, good talk, laughter, the shared satisfaction of being together, the courteous recognition of the other, the welcome that makes the presence of another both wanted and felt to be wanted, – and all expressed with good food, the mutuality of serving, and the fun of not knowing everyone who is there, providing opportunities to reach out with the offer of our name and the gift of their name.

So the day closed around 8.pm and we made our way home. But only after taking time to acknowledge the spiritual potency of those occasions when you know you stand on the brink of new possibility. And however hard we try, and no matter how much we think we ourselves achieve, we know that those possibilities come to be, not merely or mainly through our energy, but because when it comes to kindness, God takes the lead. He is there long before us; his generosity has no inbuilt limitations, and time and again we discover to our embarrasment, his grace second-guesses our needs.

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4 October 2009
Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity. A five star volume *****

Diarmaid MacCulloch is one of the finest ecclesiastical historians on the planet. Some years ago I placed his magnificent biography of Thomas Cranmer on my desk and slowly paced my way through one of the most accomplished biographies in print. The reviewers used words like massive, definitive, exhaustive, detailed, sympathetic, balanced – they're all true enough. But it was also hugely enjoyable, and written by someone who knows that however scholarly the research, and however secure the overall thesis, what makes a book persuasive is the quality of the writing and the shaping of the story. Macculloch is brilliant at the large scale literary masterpiece – and his portrayal of Cranmer the "hesitant hero" is simply that.

So three years ago the only book I took on a walking holiday in the Tyrol was the paperback version of Reformation. Europe's House Divided, 1490-1700. I don't know a better survey of that century of revolutionary religion, radical politics, national re-alignments, political alliances and collisions, of superstition and faith, of lethal wars and fragile peace. I remember, for example, reading MacCulloch's account of Luther's oscillating relationships with the power brokers of his day, whether the Pope, Frederick of Saxony, Zwingli, the peasants, even God – and learning so much about a subject I thought I knew quite a lot about! The whole book is an education in historical nuance, depth of cultural awareness and imaginative analysis, helping us understand how the church has come to be what and where and who it is – and why it din't need to be like this.

So now his new book has landed on my desk with an almighty thump. Twelve hundred pages (well, I exaggerate – 1161), 160 of them notes and further reading. But 1000 pages of carefully organised story, the facts, the dates, the people, but also the movements, the social and cultural trends, the large patterns, the ebb and flow of power and influence as the church has evolved in a changing continuity. Starting from Galilean sect, to Jewish splinter group, to Mediterranean religion, and Roman state sponsored faith under Constantine. Moving on to medieval cultural hegemony in western europe, with alternative versions in the East, the Reformation split, the religious wars, and the European expansion to the new worlds. Followed by the destabilising and disruoptive intellectual energies of the Enlightenment, giving impetus to further reinvention, reaction and accomodation to the modern and now the postmodern and globalised world. And all of this in only 1000 pages. I have a friend who loves thin books – so do I. But everyone needs balance, and just now and again, it's important to pick up a book that requires careful handling to avoid later back problems.

So – there's probably a month's worth of early reading in this big beautiful book, sitting at my desk, a large mug of tea, just before 6.00 a.m., and with only Gizmo the cat for company. If it takes longer it won't matter – I'll be dead erudite when I've read it so I will.

2 October 2009
The importance of the muttered Amen when reading good stuff!

Now and then while reading this book I mutter an 'amen' with a strength of conviction to match the most passionate Calvinist, hearing a prayer of thanksgiving for God's sovereign electing grace and its fixity in the eternal decrees. Or with just as much conviction as Charles Wesley in 'Let Earth and heaven Agree', one of his less savagely satirical anti-calvinist hymns, in which he trumpets, "For all my Lord was crucified, For all, for all my Saviour died".

What provoked such occasional passionate responses in reading this book wasn't in fact these specifics and collision points of theology. It's the way the writers defend that without which all theology becomes a reiterated loop of propositional slogans – a teachable mind. By the way, time and again Calvin preached about the need to be teachable (memorably on Ephesians) – to cultivate a docility and receptiveness open to the truth of God. Not sure what Jean Calvin the pastor would make of the postmodern mindset, but I think he would have little quarrel with the defence of reasonable theologising that's commended in this book:

[The] challenge to one's deepest assumptions plays an important part for the renewal of the mind and for the training of the intelligent – indeed, wise – leaders for the coming generations.* Christian education is not faith-affirming if it merely confirms our cultural and denominational prejudices.* Only when our deepest assumptions are challenged will we be able to hold our faith with the kind of intelligent conviction that makes us credible witnesses of the new humanity instituted by Christ.**

Because God has given all of us reason as a gift integral to understanding the world asnd our purpose in it, thinking is a Christian calling.* In this calling the Christian has to recognise that reason is given to all and that all truth is God's truth…If Jesus is the incarnate Logos in whom we live, and move, and have our being, then all truth is part of him and leads to him.* This makes all truth about humanity and nature worthy of study. To think is not a luxury for the Christian but part of the essence of the Christian's religion.* A person's experience of freedom, including the freedom of intellectual enquiry, is absolutely fundamental to authentic Christian experience.** Thinking, with all its risks, is mandatory for the Christian."*

The Passionate Intellect. Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education, Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 196-7.

The italics for emphasis are in the original (including Wesley's), - the asterisks represent the aforementioned muttered 'Amens!' I use a well developed way of marking books I read – think I'll add to them an A*, symbolising 'intensely muttered convictonal Amen'.

1 October 2009
What is the justification for the justification debate?

Evangelicals and New Testament scholars, and Evangelicals who are not New Testament scholars, and New Testament scholars who are not Evangelicals, are all very exercised just now about the doctrine of justification. There are those who hold the Reformation Perspective on Paul, (Luther modified by Calvin), those who hold the New Perspective on Paul, those who hold the revised or beyond New Perspective on Paul, and those who are in the business of writing newer and bigger books on what all this actually means.

Just now and again I begin to wonder if Paul could possibly have meant anything so complex as the massive books by people like Wright, Dunn and Campbell suggest. Then in my more fanciful moments I wonder how, within the life of the Triune God where self-giving, outgoing love is creative, redemptive and eternally purposeful in God's mission to a broken world, such exegetical scholasticism, theological polemic, and conceptual gymnastics is viewed. In other words what is the justification for Christian scholars argy-bargying (is that how you spell it) over how to reduce what God has done in Christ to words that in the end will have to describe the indescribable, define the indefinable, contain and constrain the mystery of faith, and use terminology that requires in two most recent publications 1200 pages and a million or so of such inadequate words to do so.

OK. I oversimplify, unjustifiably. But do these books overcomplicate unjustifiably, since we are talking about justification here? So, what justification is there for serial book sized assertions and retorts, positions and assaults, and seasonal contests such as Piper versus Wright, Dunn versus Wright, Dunn versus Piper, Campbell versus Wright and Dunn and Piper, with others in the wing should the protagonists tire and someone else take up the exegetical cudgels and theological brickbats to show where each is wrong and they are right.

So with some relief I found someone who brings an admirable clarity to the entire discussion. I refer to the theologian most loved by people who try to live the reconciled life rather than argue about it, who don't need to exhaustively parse their vocabulary of choice before trusting in the God who in Christ justifies the ungodly, and whose goal as Christians is, well, to justify their existence as Christians by living the life of faith enabled by the grace of God in Christ to love and serve a broken but God-loved world:

Justification: (1) function of word processors that makes sure everything is tidied up satisfactorily at the end of the line (2) divine, grace-filled initiative that makes sure everything is tidied up at the end of the line.

Adrian Plass, Bacon Sandwiches and Salvation. The A-Z of the Christian Life (London: Paternoster, 2007), 97.

Whatever else Holman Hunt's painting might portray, it does make me wonder if Christ is knocking unnoticed by those inside, who are so busy debating the finer points of their particular take on theology, they won't open the door. But jesus knocks. And not so they will let him into their conceptually intense living space, but to invite them outside with Jesus into a world where what is needed is more lanterns!

30 September 2009
Arch-episcopal fun, local authority foolishness, and food to restore the soul….

OK. This photo has come by a convoluted route, latterly via Maggi and Ben, and it's just too good to not post on every blog hosted by admirers of the finest Archbishop for yonks. Those who criticise Rowan Williams for being too intelligent to be an Archbishop, for being out of touch and having no idea about the life of ordinary folk, could do with some of the unself-conscious playfulness on display here. "Except you become as a little child…" is an appropriate admonition that comes to mind. I wonder how some of the more rasping journalists would have coped with the serious reality of children's play in a way that both enjoys and affirms the life of the child.

And then to another kind of foolishness altogether. You know how we are all to become energy conscious, climate change aware, careful where we put our big stomping carbon footprints? So yesterday driving down near Braehead and we observe the Council workers cutting the roadside grass with muckle big flymos, wearing the regulation fluorescent orange overalls. It was drizzly wet and windy, and the massacred grass lay in green clumps and apparently needed tidying up. So behind the flymo operator came another toiler in the rain – not with a grass rake to gather it into compostable organic stuff. Naw, naw. Nothing so environmentally responsible. he was sporting one of the big petrol fuelled blowers with which he was blowing the slaughtered grass into the adjoining fields, and doing so against the prevailing stiff breeze! Apart from the obvious non composting policy, here we have a machine that cuts but doesn't collect the grass (petrol fuelled), and one which blows grass against the wind, using petrol to disperse what the wind would disperse in half an hour.

The aforementioned drizzle, pushed into our faces by a stiff breeze, tried its best to waste our walk around the Mugdock reservoir. Nae chance! We knew that when we got back home some of Jim's magnifique home made French onion soup, along with a smoked applewood cheese toastie would restore that inner sense of wellbeing that only comes to those who do the walk and wallow in self-righteousness over a large bowl of immodestly described consummate cuisine………

29 September 2009
Theological education, character formation and competence based outcomes
In their study of the mixed fortunes of the humanities in University education, Klassen and Zimmermann, trace the troubled relationship between the sciences and other ways of knowing such as in the humanities. The move in educational intention from the formation of the person towards a deper knowledge of self and the other, to education as acquiring knowledge and skills to fit the person towards a more effective economic contribution, indicates the triumph of the technological, the pragmatic and the utilitarian.

The Passionate Intellect is a patient exposure of the consequences of this long evolving dichotomy between literary humanism and scientific humanism, between self knowledge and practical knowledge, between knowing who I am (verb, to be) and knowing how to do. Put at its simplest, the book contends that education for literary humanists was conceived as a process of growth in self understanding leading to wisdom and the enrichment of human relations and culture; for scientific humanists education was a process of gaining information about the world, derived from understanding observed objects and phenomena in the world, such knowledge tested and applied with a view to controlling and using the material world towards human benefit.

My interest in these contrasting educational commitments is the tension that is thereby created. The tension between the humanly formative goals of education in virtue and character which have no immediate material or pragmatic benefit to a society. This contrasted with the socially advantageous and humanly beneficial consequences of instilling technological and practical know-how, though with no immediately required prior formation of character, as to how such skills are later to be used. Yet in a theological education we are seeking to combine just such tensions which are not easily held together in the 21st Century University;
- academic excellence in theology and pastoral studies as a chosen subject field
- personal formation in values, virtues and character
- training and acquisition of requisite practical skills and competences.
All of which raises some questions that keep me thinking……

What kind of course would be needed to integrate three such desirable educational goals – the intellectual, the ethical and the practical?

Can the inward journey of self-understanding take place at the same time as a process of practical and applied training; can wisdom for its own sake co-exist with utilitarian pragmatism?

Is there such a thing as ethical and theological competence, and if so, how do we help people towards such maturity?

How does the "can do" mentality so valued by technological culture (and the contemporary church), relate to the more hesitant ethical "should I" based on a different scale of values?

In training people for Christian ministry today, is it more important to focus on instilling practical skills and competences or to form and shape a mind towards a way of thinking that is demonstrably, even radically Christian?

If we aim at both, which of the two is fundamental, Christian character or vocational competence?

Can modular delivery and competence based outcomes be shaped to enable a process of Christian theological and ethical formation which is value and virtue focused?
28 September 2009
Creation, Darwin and the origin of “The Origin of Species”

Last night went to see "Creation", the new movie about the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. It's more a biographical study of Darwin's family life, particularly the relationship with his wife and children following the unexpected death of his daughter. Decided I don't want to write a review that tries to be cleverly critical of the film 's technical aspects – not my thing anayway; or that attempts to explain the psychology of guilt which when it becomes pathological, is a deeply human and inwardly destructive self-rejection that has roots in life circumstance, our closest relationships and our religious commitments or loss thereof; or that points out the historical liberties taken in order to present such a powerful psychological study of a decade in one man's life; or that defends some particular theory of creation as an act of apologetics dutifully undertaken to correct the theological unsubtleties of some less than convincing intellectual positions.

No. No review.

Just the straightforward admission that I enjoyed it, and that in my view this is a good film. It humanises rather than demonises Darwin; it does not caricature the understandbaly defensive postures of Victorian religion confronted by radical shifts in intellectual, cultural and scientific life; it places the writing of a painstakingly written natural history treatise in its historical, emotional and domestic context; and it does all this with the well practised competence of a BBC costume drama, which in reality it is. No review than – other than to say again, I thoroughly enjoyed it, in the way you do when you take time to try to understand what is so about another person's life, and that the struggle to survive isn't only a theory of life's origins – emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and physically it's the reality and experience we all go through, every day of life.

26 September 2009