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James Denney, and the grace that saves…..

Standing waiting in the breakfast queue at our annual ministers' fellowship I held the door open for a couple of our more senior ministers one of whom asked, with affectionate irony, 'Where did you find such graciousness, Jim?' To which I replied, 'I didn't – it found me.'

One of those too quick ripostes that can often and easily seem flippant. But actually, I meant it – I always mean it when talking about the love of God made known in Christ. That's why my favourite NT books are Colossians and Ephesians.

And alongside his magnificent commentary on Romans, Colossians shared a special place in the spirituality of James Denney, along with P T Forsyth, Scotland's premier theologians of the cross. In Colossians Denney found a portrayal of Christ crucified, on a scale adequate to his conception of the grace of God, the one "in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell", and who was making peace through the blood of the cross".

Which took me back to some of Denney's lucid passionate statements on the cost and consequence of God's love, words that resonate in the deepest places of my own faith, and perhaps where that instinctive answer 'grace found me', drew its energy.

Sin is only forgiven as it is borne. He bore our
sins in His own body on the tree: that is the propitiation. It is the
satisfaction of divine necessities, and it has value not only for us, but for
God. In that sense, though Christ is God’s gift to us, the propitiation is
objective; it is the voice of God, no less than that of the sinner, which says,
‘Thou, O Christ, art all I want; more than all in Thee I find.’ And this is our
hope towards God. It is not that the love of God has inspired us to repent,
but that Christ in the love of God has borne our sins.
(Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, 162)

Grace is the attitude of God to man* which is
revealed and made sure in Christ, and the only way in which it becomes
effective in us for new life is when it wins for us the response of faith. And
just as grace is the whole attitude of God in Christ to sinful men, so faith is
the whole attitude of the sinful soul as it surrenders itself to that grace….
To maintain the original attitude of welcoming God’s love as it is revealed in
Christ bearing our sins – not only to trust it, but to go on trusting – not
merely to believe in it as a mode of transition from the old to the new, but to
keep on believing – to say with every breath we draw, ‘Thou, O Christ, art all
I want; more than all in Thee I find’ – is not a part of the Christian life,
but the whole of it.
(Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation page 8)

But for His death we should have died in our
sins: we would have passed into the blackness of darkness with the condemnation
of God abiding on us. It is because he died for us, and for no other reason,
that the darkness has passed away, and a light shines in which we have peace
with God and rejoice in hope of His glory. On the basis of the New Testament,
of Christian experience, and of a theistic view of nature…, the writer has done
what he can to indicate the rationale of this; but imperfect as all such
attempts must be, their imperfection does not shake the conviction that they
are attempts to deal with a fact, and that fact the one which is vital to
Christianity.
(Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, page 301)

* Denney was a writer of his time, and even if he were a writer of our day, in the light of his anti-suffragette stance, it's unlikely he would have used more inculsive discourse.

12 June 2009
The Bodleian, George Herbert and the precision of the printer

The second extraordinary gift I received on my visit to the Bodleian Library was to be a viewing of the earliest printed copy of George Herbert's The Country Parson. This in itself would have been a moment to capture for a booklover whose small constellation of favourite poets includes as a luminous guide, George Herbert. So if the chance to see that 17th Century treasure was grace, then what can I say about being shown, and allowed to turn a few pages, of the handwritten copy of Herbert's The Temple which was the licenser's copy used for the first printed edition, produced in 1633, soon after Herbert's death. This was grace upon grace.

Beautifully bound, written on parchment paper, in a flowing hand with restrained flourishes, the work is a labour of love, and the poems some of the most sublime devotional verses ever written in English. My jaw-dropping astonishment prompted my friend Richard to ask if I needed holding up – more seriously, there are times when words written with disciplined precision and a care for beauty become icons, if not of the Lord himself, then of the Word of God distilled into words that intentionally pull the reader closer to God, deeper into that place where heart speaks to heart, in words carefully chosen and prayerfully offered. I looked at the 'Easter Wings' shape poem; turned to the concentrated richness of the sonnet 'Prayer I'; and as always read slowly that last masterpiece of theological invitation, 'Love bade me welcome….'. I looked and simply enjoyed. Not sure when I'll get the chance to se it again – and I suppose it might have been possible to photograph it. But it never ocurred to me task, and that's probably because no photo is equivalent to seeing and touching and connecting with history.

No apologies for taking the excuse to post 'Prayer 1', which is freighted with more spiritual perception and honesty than the sonnet's constraining fouerteen lines have any right to contain.

PRAYER. (I)

PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,

Gods breath in man returning to his birth,

The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth ;

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner's towre,

Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

The six daies world-transposing in an houre,

A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,

Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,

Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,

The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,

The land of spices, something understood.

11 June 2009
The Bodleian Library, Gregory the Great and Regula Pastoralis

The best gifts come as a complete surprise. Even better if it's something you never even thought might come your way. At the recent gathering of UK Baptist College Principals in Oxford we had scheduled time for a visit to the Bodleian. For those who know him, you will know that Sean Winter equates the Bodleian Library with heaven proleptically anticipated. Now he's never said so in these words, but you can see words like that in his eyes when he's talking about his visits there!

Well our guide who was one of the senior members of staff, took us to a secure room where several items had been brought from special collections for us to view, and even touch. Two of those items were breathtakingly important, and left me deeply moved, and consciously privileged to be able to see them, touch them and hear them described for the treasures they are.

The first complete English book, the translation into Anglo Saxon of Gregory's "Pastoral care" by Alfred the Great, dates back more than 1100 years. And I was standing beside it, touched it, and sensed the benign weight of history in those thick parchment pages, written with painstaking care, with stylus and ink, by whatever lights were available once the sun went down. And on page after page, the glosses of successive scribes who came after, explaining, correcting, commenting. The illustration shows all this activity – though conveys little of the mystery and holy labour that was invested in translating, copying, annotating. Standing there gazing at such a gift, the miracle of Amazon, Google books and e-books begins to seem ordinary, even vulgar. Here is a book reeking of holiness, born of the hunger for sacred knowledge distilled as pastoral wisdom, celebrating the passionate patience of the scribe content to toil, reminding us that it is the faithful resolute conservation of words rightly spoken and faithfully written, that enables us to express the depths of human questing and longing for God, for love, and for the love of God.

I'll tell you about the other one later in the week.

8 June 2009
The importance of unfinished work

Came across this small unfinished tapestry recently. (The canvas has 22 holes to the inch).

I started it years ago and either lost it or lost interest, or both. But it's an image of one of my favourite birds – the stonechat. I've never taken to tapestry by kit – the textile equivalent of painting by numbers, so I work freehand, with minimum sketch marks on the canvas, and often with whatever threads are available. So part of the fun is – I haven't a clue how it will look when it's finished.

Decided I'll try to finish it this summer in those odd moments when I need to be reminded that life will always have unfinished work, work in progress, and of the importance of finishing what you start, and using what you've got! Even if that means coming back to it – eventually, even reluctantly. Maybe as a reminder too that sometimes when pulled in several directions life goes skew-whiff – when finished this will have to be stretched and straightened before being mounted and framed.

One of the significant by-products of designing and working tapestry is the clear evidence of when you are stressed – you pull the thread too tight! And noticing that, the discipline of correcting the tension becomes an exercise in self-awareness and control, of deliverate restraint, that isn't far away from that experience contemplatives call centering prayer.

When finished it will be framed, and on my desk, as a reminder of the deadliness of deadlines and the therapy of stress-busting stitching!

7 June 2009
The dangers of a moral recession

An economic recession happens when economic activity goes into sharp decline. If it persists and becomes long term then it becomes an economic depression, when jobs are lost, profits erased, trading confidence evaporates and investment is too big a risk.That has devastating consequences for the prosperity and morale of everyone it affects.

So. Is there such a thing as a political recession? A time when the normal machinery of Government no longer gets the job done, and those charged with maintaining the fabric and structure of our democratic processes have prejudiced public trust? And if that persists would that produce a political depression, a long term loss of confidence in the integrity and capacity of our political system? And who gains most when political process and foundational institutions are discredited? I write this as the news comes in of the first BNP county councillor being elected in Lancashire and Leicestershire.

And. What about an ethical recession? Same problem. When public expectations of moral accountability, personal integrity, and some evidence of altruism, are not only disappointed, but made to look ridiculous, we begin to feel we have moved into a new and dangerous historical moment. When so many of those who formulate our laws and social policies are perceived to be or shown to be self-serving, and claim to have stayed within rules they formulated, and that allow such unchecked abuse, what does that do to the moral ecology of our society? What happens when "flipping" houses generates tens of thousands of tax free profit at the tax payer's expense? And this during a recession? When people are losing their job by the ten thousands? When every house repossession is a family tragedy? And when the cause of so much of the problem has been – well – money and the lengths some people will go to accumulate it. What happens then? Something toxic happens. And that affects the ethical environment we all have to live in.

I remember, long before we became so environmentally aware, as a boy of 9 or 10 living on a farm in Ayrshire, standing broken-hearted beside the burn where I used to guddle for trout, watching dead fish float past. Minnows, catfish, stickleback, trout – all belly up, bloated and dead. I was standing beside the man from the Council (the 1950's equivalent of Environmental Health). Seemingly a farmer further up the burn had (accidentally or irresponsibly – the result was the same) released sheep dip into the water table. The result was catastrophic; the ecosystem was poisoned. It took years for the burn to recover – it was a long time before I was as a child, again able to lie on the banking with a jar tied to string, a cunningly placed rubber lid and some bread, and catch those beautifully marked small shoaling fish called minnows. Because someone had poisoned the system.

I've no party political point to make. I just sense that something toxic and dangerous is happening in the stream and flow of our political systems and social values. The picture of the Prime Minister at the start of this post isn't meant to be a dig either – I'm more interested in the words behind him, about the fight for our future. The economic recession is due to the credit crunch we're told; well in that case the political and moral recessions are due to an integrity crunch. The first might be easier and quicker to fix, and on a different scale of values, cheaper.

Pray God our ethical crisis doesn't deepen into a moral depression of lost values and desperate selfishness. And whatever else the church is doing at this moment in our national history, we should be looking for light and encouraging it, identifying the good and defending them, and praying for a nation struggling with the consequences of moral recession.

6 June 2009
Holidays – almond tarts, ospreys, book shops and long walks.

Thanks to the generosity of friends we have just spent the past week in Boat of Garten, just north of Aviemore. That's osprey and eagle country and we saw both – as well as red squirrels, a heronry with at least 8 herons, and some of the most heart lifting scenery in Scotland. Did a lot of walking, some reading, a fair amount of thinking, and a little writing.

No one will be surprised that we tried several coffee shops and I sampled the life-belt size freshly made doughnuts at Grantown on Spey (twice, but both times we had one between two – they are that big!), almond and apple tart at Inverness, and dumpling and gingerbread (two separate visits) at Carrbridge.

I wrote a Haiku about the osprey – what a magnificent creature, and what a great job being done by the various groups and agencies who protect and conserve their presence in our country.

Feathered piscator,
winged trout-trapping talons tensed –
the "Compleat Angler."

5 June 2009
Picasso, Pentecost and Haiku

Picasso, Pentecost and
Haiku

Invading Spirit,

Gatecrash our solemnity

With holy fervour.

The Church that’s drinking

Intoxicating Spirit,

Never lost for words.

Rushing mighty wind,

hurricane force holiness,

mission impelled church.

Searing tongues of flame,

“Inextinguishable blaze”,

purify our hearts.

Speak in other tongues,

Of love, of peace, of pardon,

People reconciled.

     Tower of Babel,

    Communication breakdown,
New hermeneutic.

Pentecostal Gift,

As Given, Giving, Giver,

“The Go-Between God”.

                                                       Jim Gordon

30 May 2009
Baptist Identity: who is God calling us to be now?

I continue to think about Baptist identity. Not agonise. Not worry. But think, evaluate, indulge in self criticism without indulging in self-denigration. So below I offer the final few paragraphs of my recent paper on Baptist Identity. It isn't the last word on anything, but it is a first word that needs speaking, and hearing, and then more thinking. But at some time the thinking has to become the intellectual and spiritual energy source for theological reconstruction and renewed denominational confidence. And of course I don't mean resurgent and divisive denominationalism – I mean owning and generously sharing our own identity, while encountering and humbly receiving the gift, presence and fellowship of other Christians, all equally faithful to their denominational identities. In that encounter of diversity something of the richly co-ordinated grace of God waits for us to discover – and be discovered.

"Christian denominational identity of
any kind, implies a particular theological style, a principled standpoint
derived from past and present experience, and reflection on, and reinforcement
of that theological style. The same is true of Baptist identity. Historic
tradition judiciously re-appropriated, and contemporary practice of our living
communities reconnected with core Baptist convictions, will only happen if,
looking forward, we can answer the question – not who were we? – nor who are we? But who is God calling us now to be, in faithfulness to a Baptist understanding
of the Gospel?

To answer that question,

·
requires a willingness to explore and live faithfully within those historic
Baptist traditions of radical discipleship that shaped and formed us

·
means being energised by Baptist
convictions which will be inevitably but creatively disruptive of other evangelical
ecclesiologies rooted in other than radical free church congregational principles

·
implies ongoing affirmation of the sole and absolute
authority of Christ the head of the Church, and of each local church, and that as a distinctive Baptist witness radically lived out in local
ecclesial community

·
is to hear and answer Christ's call to a discipleship of
sacrifice, peace-making, reconciliation and imaginative following after Christ,
by those whose baptism is their promise in response to God’s promise, and their dying
with Christ a prerequisite of rising to newness of life.

·
To answer that question then – who is God calling us
to be in faithfulness to a Baptist understanding of the Gospel – to answer that
question in these ways, is to have begun to repossess that without which we are
existentially disadvantaged – our identity as Baptists.

But to do this will involve risk –
of being misunderstood, of being thought old fashioned, of not paying attention
and not listening to the wider constituency. The risk of denominational
regression into narrowly conceived peculiarities no longer popularly owned, the
risk of being accused of pushing a Baptist agenda at a time when the need for
the Gospel was never greater – as if
Baptist identity and Gospel faithfulness were mutually obstructive rather than
spiritually integral.

Risk. At which stage we are called
to row towards the waterfall, taking the necessary risks. As that maybe Baptist
John Bunyan said, “I have loved to hear my Lord spoken of, and wherever I have
seen the print of his shoe in the earth, there I have coveted to set my foot.”
Baptist discipleship is simply and only that – being faithful to who Christ has
called us to be, and to follow faithfully after Him, through the waters of
baptism and into newness of life."

27 May 2009
Alice Meynell: “the heart shattering secret of His way with us”.

One of my favourite poems from the gloriously eclectic Oxford Book of Mystical Verse, D H S
Nicholson and A H E Lee (Eds.), (Oxford 1917), 463-4. This anthology has never been revised or updated so has little in it of the 20th Century. But there are a lot of poems like this one, by minor or near forgotten poets.

This kind of poem pushes
the boundaries of thought and theology, and whatever else prevents that
devotional reductionism by which we try to eliminate mystery and ‘the
heart-shattering secret of His way with us.’ There are lines in this poem that are worth a while of anyone's time to contemplate – maybe alongside the great Christocentric hymns of the New Testament in Colossians, Ephesians and John chapter 1.

Christ in the Universe, Alice Meynell.

With this ambiguous earth

His dealings have been told us. These abide:

The signal to a maid, the human birth,

The lesson, and the young Man crucified.


But not a star of all        5

The innumerable host of stars has heard

How He administered this terrestrial ball.

Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word.


Of His earth-visiting feet

None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,       10

The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,

Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.


No planet knows that this

Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,

Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,       15

Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.


Nor, in our little day,

May His devices with the heavens be guessed,

His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way

Or His bestowals there be manifest.       20


But in the eternities,

Doubtless we shall compare together, hear

A million alien Gospels, in what guise

He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.


O, be prepared, my soul!       25

To read the inconceivable, to scan

The myriad forms of God those stars unroll

When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

26 May 2009
MP’s Expenses – duck islands, moat cleaning and ludicrously elasticated self-interest

As usual, Rowan Williams speaks with a combination of moral imagination and common sense. His most recent intervention into the outrage-fest over the abuse of the expenses system set up by MPs for MPs expresses the deeper concerns behind the scandal.

Individual Members of Parliament who have cases to answer have undoubtedly ranged between errors of judgement, to deliberate maximising of personal advantage, to outright abuse of a system intended to be generous but not to be open to wholesale exploitation. Their behaviour sparked a competition for the best verb to describe them – the winner was "trough-jostling".

The Archbishop warned that the systematic humiliation of MPs would in the long term erode public trust not only in the capacity of people to work generously and justly as MP's, but in Parliament itself and even in the entire democratic process. Already he has been rubbished by a labour peer who described Williams' conerns as rubbish. That sounds also like a response not likely to strengthen our faith in peers to conduct debate in a public discourse underpinned by levels of civic respect.

But I've felt for over a week now, that the press are now indulging in the mentality of the striptease artist or artiste. What is revealed is intended to provoke, to create hunger for more, to pull the voyeur into that half-way world between reality and fanstasy where ethical judgement and respect for the other dissolve. It is this lust for the humiliation of the other that is morally corrosive of respect, and is ultimately abusive.

There are good, honest MPs whose public record, and the expenses records, are above criticism – but we are not hearing of them. There is also a difference between those who have stepped over the imaginary but well known line of honest interpretation, using the necessary and intentional hermeneutic latitude in well conceived regulations, and those who have made a second career out of turning these same expenses criteria into a deregulated free for all expressing ludicrously elasticated self-interest – some now shown to be requiring criminal investigation.

The frequent defence that claims were within the rules exposes so much of what is wrong with contemporary ethical discourse and conceptuality. How so many MP's are to be entrusted with framing laws, paying due regard to moral, legal, economic and fiscal justice, when some of them seem incapable of making basic ethical distinctions or demnostrating rudimentary characteristics of conscience in relation their own affairs, is to be sure cause for public concern, anger, even ridicule.

So perhaps the most significant gain to come out of this scandal (original meaning was stumbling block), will not be the increased transparency of out-sourced auditing and changed rules. It will be public insistence that our public servants rediscover and recover inner personal ethical dispositions and virtues such as integrity, honesty, respect for persons, social compassion, and these as a prerequisites to public trust. Rules and auditors don't make people moral, they enforce compliance and honesty. The deeper questions are about the inner transformation of the person. I don't need ritual public executions. Genuine repentance evidenced by changes in behaviour would be a more durable outcome.

24 May 2009