Author: admin

“For the Christian, truth has the character of trust”.

Here's a couple of paragraphs you might want to read and see if it makes you look at or think about the world and all its rich happenings differently:

Christians like any other people with religious beliefs, do hold certain things sacred. We do not meddle with them but hold them in awe and respect. Usually, what we hold to be sacred we also consider mysterious in some way or another. The idea of mystery implies the acknowledgement of a limit to what we can understand: the Trinity, the incarnation, and the resurrection are sacred mysteries; the Bible, the institution of marriage, the celebration of the Lord's Supper are also commonly considered sacred.

These sacred mysteries Christians would call truths or sources of truth, but to a Christian truth is first and formeost relational. It is not something one can hold at a distance and look at with supposed objectivity. Christians preeminently locate truth in a person; Jesus is the truth. Probably the most important implication of truth as being located in a person is that if a person who is true makes a promise then you can count on this person to make good on his or her promise. For the christian, truth has the character of trust. So the concept of truth is personal and the implication of this concept is relational"

Quite so!

The Passionate Intellect. Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education, Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 30-3.

(I see no reason why a masterpiece of the Annunciation should not be enjoyed in September…….this would be a painting depicting a sacred mystery then?)

25 September 2009
Education as an economic investment and theological education as a church loss-leader?

Doing a lot of thinking just now about theological education. Not only how to do it, but what it does. But once we ask the question what theological education can do to, – or for, – or with, a person, we inevitably have to come back to the how question. But then, how we do theological education, decisively influences what that process does to or for people. See what I mean? Needs thinking.

Lots of suggestions out there about mentoring, curacy, learning by mimesis, knowledge transfer, information sharing and observed practice as formative training, transformational learning, community learning through enabled learning communities, the relation of lifelong learning to human wellbeing and development. As a College seeking to be a centre of excellence in training for ministry as part of the mission of God, we are constantly asking questions about the nature and purpose of what we do. Even the choice of terms matter – theological education, training for ministry, ministry formation, transformative learning. (The picture by Van Gogh is redolent with light, harvest, reward for labour, for me a picture of human fruitfulness and the deeper levels of learning to live).

What makes all this both exciting and crucial for the future of the church is the chronic and unstable cultural flux within which we are now living. Universities, are now locked into postures enabling rapid adaptation and responsiveness to market demands dictated by economic and employment prospects. The link between a University's funding by the Government, and the Governmeent's own agenda to enforce value for money and define education as economic investment, has decisively reconfigured educational priorities. Education becomes synonymous with training, learning is based on competence based outcomes, and success is then judged by employability. If education is primarily an economic investment, and higher education institutions depend on government funding, and students are seen as customers, and society as a market, and education as a product, that market based goal will decisively influence process and then I ask – what does education do to, for and with a person?

Hence my starting question – what does theological education do to, for and with a person? I'm still thinking – and amongst the things I'm thinking is the role of a Christian College in giving witness to a different set of educationally formative priorities. The title of this post hints at where this kind of thinking is likely to lead….are churches willing to invest in the formation of people towards ministry and the development of all God made them to be, and thus enthusiastic that financial cost and deficit are not the primary inidices of value, and that value for money isn't measured in money, but in a transformative process of human growth? Hmmmm?

24 September 2009
Conformitas Christi……

L Gregory Jones writes theological ethics. In his approach, the credibility of any theological assertion has to be established through the Christian practices such theologising engenders. Theology to be real has to be embodied, not only in the individual, but in the community that takes the name of Christ. What is believed is most authentically expressed not in words and articulation, but in practice and performance of a life shaped by Christ.

Here's a couple of paragraphs from Transformed Judgment. Toward a Trinitarian Account of the Moral Life (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2008) that have had me thinking again about the how, and why and what of following after Christ. The painting by Caravaggio is a favourite – the young Jesus inviting middle aged Peter and Andrew to follow him.

What is needed is a way of speaking of the prior action of God, namely the saving life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which also calls forth an account of the shape human activity is to take in response. Such an emphasis is found by recovering the relationship between being conformed to Christ and being called to imitate – or as I think is preferable language, to pattern one's life in – Christ. God befriends humanity in Jesus Christ, and in that gracious action, which originates in God alone, humanity is conformed to Christ independently of particular characters, virtues and actions. Grace is the fundamental orientation of Christian life. The context of this conformitas Christi is discovered in the salvation wrought by Christ; it is a salvation revealed throughout the context of his life, deathn and resurrection.

In the light of Jesus friendship, the Christian's vocation, in response to God's prior action in Christ conforming humanity to his righteousness, is to pattern her life in Jesus Christ through discipleship.A person is called and enabled to pattern her life in Jesus Christ because God in Christ has patterned human life into God's life in order to save humanity. Such practices as baptism, eucharist, forgiveness-reconciliation and "performing" the Scriptures are indispensable practices, whereby people learn to become disciples, whereby people learn to be frinds of God and to befriend and be befriended by others. Through such practices, people are aenabled to acquire the habits and skills reflective of the pattern discovered in Jesus Christ." (pages 110-11)

That's about as attractive and complete an account of following after Christ as I've read for a long while. Conformitas Christi. Wouldn't mind a T-shirt with that on it –

Conformitas Christi!

23 September 2009
Why does the Church attract M&S types rather than Asda and Aldi types?

This from AOL News, a lesson in missiology that applies not only to the Church of England, but has considerable relvance to midlle class, well resourced, respectably comfortable evangelicalism of varied flavours.

"The Church of England needs to shed its middle
class "Marks and Spencer"-only image in order to attract the Asda and
Aldi generation of worshippers, a senior bishop has warned.
The Rt Rev Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Reading,
spoke of his sense of frustration at the view that the Church of
England was the "Marks and Spencer" option only, for the highly
educated or "suited and booted".
Jesus would just as likely have shopped at Asda and Aldi as at Marks and Spencer, he said."

He said: "Even today I meet people who think
you have to be highly educated or suited and booted to be a person who
goes to church. That's so frustrating. How did it come to this, that we
have become known as just the Marks and Spencer option when in our
heart of hearts we know that Jesus would just as likely be in the queue
at Asda or Aldi?"

"Jesus got us started with church simply. Like this – sitting us down
in groups on the grass and telling simple stories. Not simplistic. But
certainly not complicated. All his first disciples were down-to-earth
people who wanted to know what life was all about."

Of course like all generalisations it
sounds a bit unfair; and like all rhetorical overstatements it sounds
simplistic. But I didn't find it easy to shut the good Bishop up with a
good put down – even if I do sometimes shop at Aldi's and Lidl's
myself.

I do wonder about the fairness of my own title for this post though –
because the use of the word type is itself a blunt instrument, and act of stereo-typing. Why
assume only the highly educated go to M&S? And what evidence that
Asda shoppers don't have university Degrees? Still. The Bishop is not
wrong about the predominant impression that Christianity is
respectable, comfortable, reliably safe, for the quite well resourced, and by and
large attracts a better class of, a more respectable type of, a more
well-spoken kind of, well, person.

Whereas the inclusive Gospel of
Christ wants the Church to declare and demonstrate that there is
neither M&S nor Aldi's, John Lewis nor Primark, Sainsbury's or Lidl
– in the eyes of the God made known in Christ Jesus, all are to be equally loved, valued and welcomed. The missional challenge for the church then, whatever the denominational flavour, is to create a community in Christ where the least important distinction between us is where we shop.
And where the most important distinctive is to embody the indiscriminate love of God.

22 September 2009
The false dualism in spirituality – the active and contemplative.

Fifty years ago Dag Hammarskjold observed with worldly wise perceptiveness that in the modern world the road to holiness lies through the world of action. And he was doing so at the same time as Thomas Merton was drawing seekers of God from the hyper-activity of contemporary life to the contemplative search for silence, solitude and the true self. Action and contemplation – not opposites, but forms of being that are intrinsically human and without which our humanity is diminished, our spirituality thrown out of balance and our Christian obedience reduced to monochrome. Parker Palmer has done important work on human fulfilment and lifelong learning as a life enhancing commitment. His writing often reads like a spirituality of pragamatic outward looking action, commending a lifestyle in which energy, inter-relationship, noise, creativity and work, can be as fulfilling as silence, solitude and retreat. In one book he brings as usual, an important balance to all of this.

People caught in the gap between monastic values and the demands of the active life sometimes simply abandon the spiritual quest. And people who follow a spirituality that does not always respect the energies of action are sometimes led into passivity and withdrawal, into a diminishment of their opwn spirits.

in the spiritual literature of our time, it is not difficult to find the world of action portrayed as an arena of ego and power, while the world of contemplation is pictured as a realm of light and grace. I have often read for example, that the treasure of "true self" can be found as we draw back from active life and enter into contemplative prayer. Less often have I read that this treasure can be found in our struggles to work, create, and care in the world of action.

Parker Palmer, The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity and Caring (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990) p. 2.

My guess is that often the spirituality we settle for is a damaging dualism between what we think of as spiritual and all the other stuff. The point is, all the other stuff is the bulk of what we have to do to live life at all. Work, family, other people; the mobile, the laptop, the car; shopping, home-keeping, travelling; caring for friends, pets and ourselves. And God is in it all, not just the overtly intentional spiritual stuff.

And what's more, God can be just as quickly found, and more deeply encountered, not in the retreat and the deep journey into ourselves, but in the outward journey of work, people, circumstance and happening, in the way we drive, the use of our computer, the texts we send, the meals we cook, the bills we pay, the conversation at the checkout, the blether with the neighbour, the walk with the dog, the train journey and the birthday party. None of these get much mention in the more intense worship songs, in the list of spiritual disciplines or prayer techniques. But for followers of Jesus, the Word made flesh, the life of the body with its energy and capacity to work and transform the world, is a life which seeks to incarnate the love of God, suffusing life with the energy and creative action of the God in whose image we are ourselves made. And in the loving of God in all our activity, something deeply sacramental happens, so that all this ordinary stuff stops being a means to an end and becomes a means of grace. Well, anyway, that's what I think! And the new term starts tomorrow and in the busyness of it, God will be found, and will find us.

(The photo above is of a one hundred year old gardener who fully intends to harvest the vegetables from the seed he is sowing.)

21 September 2009
Bible translation and the question of who controls the text as product?

First line of an intercessory prayer heard recently at a morning service in a church, "O Lord, as you have served us very well in the past……."

The following claim, attributed by Craig Blomberg (Evangelical NT scholar) to Al Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Convention: welcoming the publication, from within their own publishing house, of the Holman Christian Standard Bible Mohler spoke of the importance of having "a Bible translation we can control".

Now many a year ago, when the NIV was first published by Zondervan, it was promoted as an "Evangelical" translation. The Principal of the Baptist College then was R E O White, for whom the Greek New Testament was the equivalent of Jeremiah's scroll, and was to be ingested and digested as the very marrow of Christian life and faith. I still haven't met anyone who could match his enthusiasm for grammar, syntax, punctuation, textual criticism, etymology, critical apparatus, lexical investigation, and who quite simply revelled in the work of textual criticism, translation and exegesis, insisting that such disciplined detail showed reverence for words, and the Word. One of his heroes (not sure but think it was J B Lightfoot) spoke of burying his head in a lexicon and raising it in the presence of God.

So when the NIV was being advertised in Christian media as an "Evangelical" translation, he took time in the Greek class to ask the question I've never stopped asking, "Why would evangelicals of all christian people, want a Bible translation that is made in their own image?" By which he meant, and I concur, shouldn't our desideratum be the criterion of accuracy, disciplined faithfulness to the text, refusal to ignore or give in to the pull of our own theological presuppositions, linguistic honesty, scholarly deference before the challenge of the text, respect for the harder reading even if it is theologically inconvenient, honest acknowledgement of the difficulties and of the polar attractions and repulsions of dynamic and formal translation?

So as an Evangelical Christian, when I hear any publishing house or Christian tradition aspire to the control of a translation I have a deep and reluctant to articulate uneasiness. But that first line of the opening prayer I quoted at the start, "O Lord as you have served us so well in the past…", with its unacknowledged assumption of God at our service, may well be the hermeneutical clue I need to explain and interpret my uneasiness. As Blomberg (see here) gently comments, "Funny. I always thought the Bible should control us…" Yes. And I always thought in worship we are at the service of God.

20 September 2009
John Colwell and biography as theology

Thanks to Andy Goodliff for flagging up the new title by John Colwell due to be published by Paternoster in December. John is one of our most original and constructively provocative Baptist theologians. His previous books on ethics, the sacraments and systematic theology through the Church Year are amongst the most valued volumes of those who've read them. Knowing the man, makes them even more trusted as the genuine wrestlings with faith and truth that they are.

This will be a book that combines biography, theology and pastoral reflection. John talks honestly of his experience of bi-polar illness, and does so as a man of faith seeking to make his human condition somehow capable of meaning within that faith. So the book will be theology lived, and tested in the valleys of deep darkness as well as the green pastures and occasional still waters. As one who teaches systematic theology, or dogmatics, or Christian doctrine, I am only too aware of how much theologising is so technically executed, so dependent on discourse as esoteric as any mystery religion, so inaccessibly beyond all but those who want to play the intellectual power games of the academy. So I'm always keen to find texts that have clear rootedness in and connections to the lived experience of people of faith. Only then do theology and biography enter a fruitful conversation to their mutual benefit.

One of my own research interests is the connection between Christian faith experience, church as community and people whose sense of self is different because of varied conditions that affect mental health.

Here is the information about the book with some significant endorsements.

Review

This book is a gift to anyone who has been touched by
the darkness of bi-polar illness. Colwells willingness to write
honestly about his illness will be an aid for those struggling with the
condition, but even more important is his use of the psalms and
attention to Jesus way of dereliction to locate how such illness is not
pointless. This is a book that needed to be written. But only someone
like John Colwell could write it. –Stanley Hauerwas, Duke Divinity
School, USA

It
is a well-known fact that the Church doesnt do depression. Melancholy
just doesnt sit comfortably with our sanguine view of spiritual
progress. Thank God, however, that John Colwell has the guts to attend
to this erroneous state of affairs and offer us a spirituality that
embraces the wintry as well as the sunny seasons of our lives. –Ian
Stackhouse, Team Leader, Guildford Baptist Church, England

If
the best theology is attentive to Scripture, focused on Christ, and
meaningful for human life in all its messiness, then there are few
better examples than this new book by John Colwell. –Steve Holmes,
Lecturer in Theology, University of St Andrews, Scotland

Product Description

In this powerful book
on the experience of desolation John Colwell focuses on Psalm 22, read
in the light of his own struggle with bi-polar disorder and the
Christian belief that God the Son suffered in his humanity, to offer
existential-theological reflections on the experience of
God-forsakenness.

The author writes, My concern in writing this book
and in reading this psalm is to reflect on the felt experience of
God-forsakenness, my own and that of Christ in the light of this psalm;
to explore the theological and spiritual significance of this felt
experience for myself, for Christ, for Christians generally. If this
exploration proves to be helpful to me or to others then obviously I am
glad, but I am not writing this book to be helpful but rather to be
truthful (and perhaps hopeful). This is a personal journey of
reflection with a psalm which I invite you, the reader, to share if you
will.

19 September 2009
John Donne’s pun on the end of God

John Donne and Julian of Norwich couldn't be more different in temperament, spirituality, lifestyle and life circumstance. But every time I read this sentence from Donne, I hear clear echoes of Julian's confident assurance in the eternal constancy of God's love: “whom God loves, he loves to the end and not to their end and their death, but to His end, and His end is that He might love them more”.

Cheap paperbacks aren't made to last, and I confess I don't have many of those glue-split, spine-peeling, brown-edged, once-read books that weren't supposed to stay important after that first read. But sometimes in a bundle of other people's discards one turns up that your haven't read. Like a Fount paperback on preaching by Colin Morris, Raising the Dead. And on page 55 is a paragraph that is really a theological expansion of Donne's pun, that in turn echoes Julian's theological optimism:

"Those who have known the love of God last as long as his love lasts. For whatever we make of Jesus, its fair to say he died to show us that whoever we are, we matter to God. And since by definition, God must be perfectly consistent, there can never be a time when we cease to matter to him. Therefore we must be the objects of his love eternally. If God loves us, he must love us till the end, not our end but his end, and since God has no end, in the sense of ceasing to be, he must love us eternally."

Of course Donne was playing with the word "end" – God's end is also God's purpose, which is equally constant since grounded in eternal love. I mention all this because of what Morris goes on to say about the preacher and such doctrines as the love of God and the resurrection of Jesus:

Now for the preacher to be diffident about such doctrines in a time of despair and confusion is much more serious than false modesty; it is a dereliction of duty.

To reiterate yesterday's blog – quite so!

18 September 2009
Thankfulness as a Theological Choice.

Who then is God that we must speak of him?

God is he whom we must thank.

To be more precise:

God is he whom we cannot thank enough. (E Jungel)

……………………………

For all that has been,

Thank you –

For all that is to come,

Yes - (Dag Hammarskjold)

…………………………….

Thou hast given so much to me,

Give one thing more, – a grateful heart;

Not thankful when it pleaseth me,

As if Thy blessings had spare days,

But such a heart whose pulse may be Thy praise. (George Herbert).

……………………

Been a hard week so far, for reasons nobody could foresee or forestall. One of the most important theological choices we make is whether we complain or give thanks, fuel resentment or nurture gratefulness, whether we see God in all things or only in those cherry picked experiences we call blessings. Life itself is the blessing, and the daily gift of the God whose gift is life. I'm wondering if inner climate determines our disposition towards complaint or gratitude, or if we determine our inner climate by whether a theological choice towards gratitude is an intentional act of faith that changes our inner climate by "tracing the rainbow through the rain"?

My theologian of 'thankfulness as choice' is Julian of Norwich. When much else fails to persuade, I find her quiet insistent trustfulness, and thus her patient thankfulness, a good antidote to those more enjoyably disruptive attitudes of complaint, unsettlement and soul sulking. More than most theologians, she grounds gratitude in the foundation of a love at once eternal and personal, universal and particular.

Thus I was taught that love was our Lord's meaning.

And I saw quite
clearly in this and in all,

that before God made us, he loved us,

which
love was never slaked nor ever shall be.

And in this love he has done all
his work,

and in this love he has made all things profitable to us.

And
in this love our life is everlasting.

In our creation we had a beginning.

But the love wherein he made us was in him with no beginning.

And all
this shall be seen in God without end …

…………………

Quite so!

17 September 2009
T F Torrance on incarantion and atonement II

When T F Torrance writes about theological science, and such complexities as the relations between space, time and divine and contingent order, you simply have to adopt the disposition of student trying hard not to get lost in the maze of erudition and the labyrinth of specialist discourse woven by a professor at ease in unfamiliar intellectual territory.

But when Torrance writes about such central doctrines of Christian faith as the trinitarian understanding of God, christology understood as incarnation, atonement and the resurrection reality of Jesus Christ ascended and coming, then we listen to a theologian preach, and encounter preaching that is soaked in the great doctrines of the faith, and these doctrines as the mere articulation of what it means to experience the reality of the living God, encountered in Jesus Christ.

So here's the next paragraph of Torrance, getting to the heart of the Gospel by a deep theological reading of Scripture. I repeat the last sentence of yesterday's extract. And as a wee forethought before reading it, hHowever new fangled we think theological exegesis is, Torrance was doing it 50 years ago in Edinburgh.

"And so the
cross with all its incredible meekness and patience and compassion is
no deed of passive and beautiful heroism simply, but the most potent
and aggressive deed that heaven and earth have ever known: the attack
of God's holy love upon the inhumanity of man and the tyrranny of evil,
upon all the piled up contradiction of sin.

To see how that is so, watch what happened when Jesus was arraigned before Pilate and the Jewish nation. Jesus had never lifted a violent finger against anyone, and yet he became the centre of a violent disturbance that has shaken the world to its foundations. The incredible thing is this: the meeker and milder Jesus is, the more violent the crowd become in their resentment against him. The more like a lamb he is, the more like ravening wolves they become. By his very passion and suffering, by his meekness and grace and truth, Jesus imparted passion to his contemporaries and called forth violence from them until at last they laid violent hands upon him and dragged him off to the cross.

Jesus is the embodiment of the still small voice of God: he is the Word made flesh, the Word that is able to divide soul and spirit asunder. That voice, that Word of God in jesus penetrated as never before into the secrets of humanity and exposed them. The more he stood them, the more the power of God broke its way into the citadel of the human soul. Before the weakness and mercy of Jesus, before this compassion, all barriers are broken down, all the thoughts and intents of the heart are revealed. What wind and earthquake and fire could not do, Jesus did: he penetrated into the proud heart of man and laid it bare, and in so doing he produced the most violent reaction that culminated in his crucifixion. "

T F Torrance, Incarnation. The Person and Life of Christ (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), p. 150-1.

16 September 2009