Author: admin

Robert Browning’s “A Death in the Desert”.

"Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought."

Robert Browning's line comes from one of the very best introductions to John's Gospel – his long poem, "A Death in the Desert".

Does anyone still read Browning?

Rublev's enthroned Christ I've always thought conveys the majesty of the glory of Christ – and thus the miracle of what it meant to say, "we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth".

Some time when you want to come at John's gospel from a different route, try Browning's poem. You know how on the motorway or A road you sometimes see the sign that offers the tourist route, or the scenic route? Think about leaving the critical historical motorway for a while to meander with Browning into the mind and heart of John the ageing evangelist, reflecting on the Gospel he is composing in his head, and every now and then "stung by the splendour of a sudden thought".

23 May 2009
Baptist Identity – Seven Spiritual Values

Seven Spiritual Values Embedded in
Baptist Identity.

·
Sole
Headship of Christ as final authority in faith and practice, as revealed in Scripture

·
Baptismal
confession of faith by believers in context of worshipping community

·
Covenant
faithfulness to Christ within a living community of believers

·
Gathered
community as the Body of Christ, competent under God to discern together
the mind of Christ

        ·       Mission as bearing witness to the world
through the lived practices of the Gospel in the

          power of the risen Christ.

·
Principled
separation from State control and State privilege

·
Religious
freedom and tolerance as the rationale for our own claimed freedom to
witness to Christ.

Baptist identity is elusive. Ways of being Baptist are so diverse that, to avoid partiality and unfair narrowness, it would be more useful to talk of Baptist identities. But I still would want to argue that all of the above provide a cluster of spiritual values which, when taken together, are integral to Baptist identity. Or am I missing something – or claiming too much?

21 May 2009
Baptist Identity and Rowing Toward the Waterfall

Off to the Fellowship of British Baptists, a kind of Baptist summit meeting that includes representatives from the BUGB, Baptist Missionary Society, the Baptist Union of Wales and the Baptist Union of Scotland. This year we are in Birmingham. It's always a good couple of days of discussion, reflection, shared hopes and concerns, prayer, friendship, laughter, and the kind of occasion that's all too rare in lives too thirled to diaries, deadlines and to do lists.

Amongst the things we'll discuss is Baptist identity – who Baptists are, why Baptists matter and who cares anyway? Well I do for one. Not because I'm a denominational dinosaur in a post-modern, post-christian, irreversibly pluralist, unabashedly consumerist and unrepentantly fluid world. But because I happen to think that important spiritual values and theological commitments are entrusted to those whose ways of following Christ are different from mine, and mine from theirs. This isn't about denominational narrowness, but about Christian diversity; nor is the concern for a strong sense of denominational identity a way of claiming Baptists are right and others are wrong. It's a concern that we each be faithful to those truths that are part of our history and witness, thereby conserving the essential diversity of the Body of Christ, which I think is a large part of what it means to speak of the church catholic.

I do think that in the conversations that take place between the different members of the family of God, the Baptist voice brings its own insights, its own story, its own witness to what it has meant to follow faithfully after Christ. Of course meaningful conversations only happen when listening takes frequent precedence over speaking, and when the stories of those others are heard by us with humility of mind and a receptive heart, and welcomed as the gifts they are. In other words I don't think my strongly held convictions as a Baptist require me to silence or out-argue the convictions of others in order for them to retain their spiritual and theological purchase on my own life and witness. Being secure in your own denominational identity doesn't depend on questioning or diminishing the identity of others. At least not as I've tried to live out my faith.

Anyway, I've been asked to lead off the discussion on Baptist identity. I've done a wee informal paper and given it a title based on that poem of Mary Oliver I quoted a couple of weeks ago:

Rowing Towards the Waterfall: The Necessary Risk of Being Baptist.

Might do a couple of posts on it later once it's thought through a bit more carefully and had the benefit of conversation, disagreement and the friendly correctives that always improve the way we say the things we feel strongly.

20 May 2009
Ascension, Acts of the Apostles and indiscriminate indexes

On May 21, this Thursday, the Church celbrates the Ascension of Christ, and May 31st is Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Spirit, then the following Sunday is Trinity Sunday. Decided I want to spend this high point of the Christian year and then into the "ordinary time post-Pentecost becoming familiar again with volume two of Luke's Gospel. We call it The Acts of the Apostles, but it's the story of the Gospel as it overflows from hearts into communities, then across cultural barriers, racial divisions and national boundaries.

So I'm reading my way through the new commentary on Acts by David Peterson. Now and again I'll include some of the story of the early Church in the occasional blog post. Instead of gazing wistfully at emergent church, I'm going to have a longish think about how the church emerged. I've a feeling the Holy Spirit had more than a little to do with it. The calls to co-operate with the Spirit, to be responsive to those prompts and nudges that knock us off our stride, to think new things and try again what previously "didn't work", to relinquish our grip on ideas we cherish and take into our hands trustfully that newness that by definition is unfamiliar, even untried.

In other words, we are back to questions of risk, impelled and compelled by the Spirit to innovative action, urged to subversive witness, shoved into places and circumstances where imaginative faith finds ways of undermining all those powers that frustrate the telling and living of the Good News. Peterson is a fine scholar and determined to provide reflections that do justice to the underlying theology of a book too easily assumed to be mainly history.

Now. One complaint and one compliment which I'll pass on to the publisher. To do with the indices. Compliment first. The subject index is substantial enough to be very user friendly and a helpful pointer to significant discussions – as it should be. But the author index is so overloaded with citations that you are simply put off even trying to trace them. One writer has one work cited in the Bibliography, yet it is indexed over 150 times. But Krodel's brilliant commentary is cited once so gets one footnote! The standard commentary by the great C K Barrett has over 400 page references, and Witherington has over 300 – and all of them unsorted, a catena of numbers.

Come on!! Stop using computers to generate indices. There's no rationale or selection of the significant references, just a lumping together in consecutive page order of every citation. The result is an exercise in tedium that is simply a guaranteed turn away. Had the indexer taken a bit longer to edit this unsorted blizzarrd of data, by going through the citations retaining the most significant ones, then there might have been a point in the exercise. I want to know what Barrett thinks of the Jerusalem Council, but i don't need to know every time his name is bracketed in a footnote. As it is, the author index reads like the old logarithm tables – remember them? – and they are just as fun to use.

19 May 2009
Spirituality – conjugating the verb “to be”.

Evelyn Underhill once observed, in her little book The Spiritual Life.

"Most people spend their lives trying to conjugate the verbs 'to want,'
'to have' and 'to keep'— craving, clutching, clinging—when all the
Spirit wills us to do is to conjugate the verb 'to be.' "

This comfortably off, middle class, Anglican spiritual director, whose devotional writing is a mixture of shrewd psychology and pastoral compassion, rooted in contemplative prayer, lived those words well. I still treasure many of her books – some of them in places laughably dated, but time after time you recognise, with a perhaps questionable spiritual envy, this woman's been 'far ben' with God.

The phrase "far ben" is Scottish, used by Alexander Whyte (one of Scotland's finest preachers and most catholic spirits), to describe a shepherd he knew in his teens, who used the isolation of his days sheep herding in 1860's Glen Clova, to think and pray towards a closer walk with God.

Both Underhill and Whyte, who I'm not sure ever even knew of each other, were steeped in the literature of spirituality – and from their starting points of high traditional Anglicanism with open edges (Underhill), and Scottish militant Free Church Presybterianism in which Whyte pushed the edges outwards beyond confining narrowness, they couldn't be more different. But as one of the puritans remarked of those he admired for their piety, they both "carried the scent of the same distant country of the soul."

Reading some of their work again, along with other spiritual writers from the past century or so, I'm not persuaded, not even half convinced, that what is available in today's spiritual writing comes anywhere near the quality and spiritual perceptiveness of people like Whyte and Underhill. And without being overly judgemental, I wonder if that's because writing today is aimed at the niches of the market, rather than being an essential by-product of a heart and mind with much to say that grows with organic healthiness out of lives that are and have been "far ben" with God.

18 May 2009
Jigsaws and broken stories

For years now I've written a Saturday Sermon for the Aberdeen Press and Journal. It's one of the few papers left that preserves some column inches (400 words to be precise) for comments and perspectives that express Christian values and derive from Christian teaching. Not a good idea to overcook the occasion by proselytising or pushing party lines. No problem about overt Christian comment, just an assumption of courtesy and respect for a readership that is multifaith, multicultural, and may or may not be interested in a Saturday Sermon, whatever that is! Here's the script for the one published in Aberdeen today.

………………………………………

I once managed to so offend at least four people in one
sermon, that I had to apologise for speaking of that which I did not fully
understand. The sermon is now long forgotten, at least by me. But for some
reason I took a good natured swipe at jigsaw puzzles and those who spend hours
completing them. Why would you spend hours trying to piece together a picture
someone else deliberately cut up into small pieces and jumbled up in a box?

With more courtesy than perhaps I’d shown, it was explained
to me that ministers could learn as much from putting a jig-saw together as
putting a sermon together. One of the jigsaw enthusiasts explained that time
without number, through building a jigsaw with them, he had helped young people
whose lives had fallen to pieces, whose hopes were reduced by circumstances or
choices to fragments that needed fitting together again. Corners, square edges,
a picture of what might be, and a supportive collaborative friend, created a
place and a process where rebuilding could begin. That image has since entered
my key moments of insight about how to live wisely and well.

Sir Kenneth Calman, Chancellor of the University of Glasgow, and a former Chief Medical
Officer of Health at the Scottish office and then Westminster,
is currently studying for an M.Litt on medicine and literature. Calman began as
a GP, and has always been interested in patients as people, recognising the
importance of the story that was each individual life. Telling of his lifelong
passion for human wellbeing he mentioned an observation that reminded me of
that less than proud moment many a year ago when I scoffed at those parables of
pastoral care, the jigsaw builders. Someone had said: “my story’s broken, will
you help me fix it?”

And there it is again. The recognition that sometimes our
own story is broken, and often enough there are those we meet day in and day
out whose own story is also broken. I’ve thought for a while that compassion
requires imagination, an ability to wonder what it’s like for that other person
to live out their story. Or having the patience to sit alongside someone whose
life is in pieces and help them look for the straight edges, the corners, the
picture that can still be made. Or as Jesus said, “Do for others whatever you
would that others do for you.”

16 May 2009
Walter Brueggemann on “interesting but confining questions”.

Not a poem. A paragraph from Brueggemann's Living Toward a Vision. I've broken it down into smaller thought units, to allow the flow of the prose to slow down, allowing our own thought to catch up with his.

If we are going to talk about peace,
we have to make a fundamental decision
about ourselves.

How we make that decision
will determine in large measure
how we shall speak about theology.

Narrowly preoccupied citizens can do theology
around questions of sin, guilt and salvation.
That is an important task.

But people charged with resisting chaos
and making peace,
must not be preoccupied
with those interesting but confining questions.

Rather, theology must be done
around the issues of freedom and power,
authority and responsibility.

And when those issues are faced squarely,
we shall be speaking about peace.
And when those questions are resolved,
we shall be on the way to authentic shalom.

15 May 2009
Music, Calvin, cultural critique, and missional relevance

Here's an extract from a readable and sympathetic biography of Calvin:

In the very depths of his being Calvin had a most intimate awareness of the power of music. He feared and relished it at the same time. It possessed an ascendancy over souls and bodies that could either capture them by its evil spells or liberate them by its beauty: "Among the things that are proper to divert a man and give him pleasure, music is either the first or one of the most important….For there is hardly anything in this world that can more readily bend the manners of men this way and that…And in fact we find by experience that it has a secret and almost incredible ability to move hearts one way or another."

Music, that deceitful power, should be put to the service of the text and the Word, illustrating them and not obscuring their meaning. "All evil speech…, when accompanied by music, pierces the heart much more strongly and enters into it in such a way that, just as wine is poured into a vessel from a funnel, so also venom and corruption are distilled to the bottom of the heart by melody."

Calvin analysed the double potential effect of music, at once destructive and creative, on a sensibility whose dangerous instability he perceived, an instabilty that would shortly reveal itself to be fundamental to baroque psychology.
Bernard Cottret, Calvin. A Biography, (Edinburgh:T&TClark, 1995), pages 173-4.

There is a pastoral realism and cultural awareness about Calvin that is annoyingly inconvenient for those who simply want to dismiss him as either cultural philistine or theological bogey man. When Calvin's shortcomings are acknowledged, and the problems of his thought aired, he remains a theological source and resource for a church desperately looking for its voice, and struggling to remember the words that articulate the Word. For all our fascination with relevance, our accommodation to the postmodern mindset, our neglect of transcendent mystery in favour of the accessible and experiential, the contemporary Church often enough lacks a sense of its own calling to bear witness to the Eternal, to see the world as the theatre of God's glory, and to understand its own vocation as the Body of Christ which embodies the Word it proclaims in repentance, faith and the fear of God.

One remedy, astringent and at times uncomfortable, is to include the voice of Calvin in the conversations the Church must always have between surrounding prevailing culture, its own diverse theological traditions, and the innovative impulses of a Church so anxious to be missionally relevant that it can fail at the level of its own vocational integrity as the community of Christ. Missional relevance itself can be driven by the Church's survival instinct as much as by Gospel imperatives – Calvin's theology of divine sovereignty, built on the centrality of the Word, is a necessary corrective.

This year is the 400th anniversary of Calvin's birth, on 10th July 1509. I'm going to celebrate it by reading his sermons on Ephesians. However, Calvin is only the second most important person born on July 10 – that's also my mother's birthday!

The portrait of Calvin above is less severe than some of the more popular ones on book covers. And given the sheer volume and quality of Calvin's written output – what would he have done if the quill had been replaced with a keyboard?

14 May 2009
Song of Songs: “the riddled journey towards mutuality….”

Recently listened to some of the tracks on this CD on Classic FM. My own copy arrived the other day. Captivating.

For myself? Not sure how to preach on Song of Songs in ways that would avoid a mass exit by those uneasy with the idea that love, physical, passionate, deliriously, intoxicatingly overwhelming love is itself a gift of God. Yes agape as indefatigable good will. And yes, phileo as faithful friendship. But eros? That too God's gift? Explicitly descriptive? Legitimate desire? Incurable infatuation with the other? The ache of delight and the joy of longing?

Yes. All of that, and here, in the love poetry of the Song of Songs, set to music by one of the finest contemporary composers and with a Welsh soprano soloist whose voice exults in the language and music of the heart's desire. No wonder this series of poems, found tucked between the gentle cynicism of Ecclesiastes and the great Isaianic trilogy of defiant trustful hope, has survived as a statement of what human love is when two people discover in each other a love that demands language at its best.

But even then language can fail. Sometimes the reality of human love doesn't live up to the language of love, while at other times our language describes fantasy in terms that make us discontented with the reality that love between fallible humans is. The truth is, human love is seldom unambiguous, unmixed blessing, pure in motive and selfless in gift. It is after all human. But where there is faithfulness and companionship, persistence as well as passion, patience as well as urgency, and giving as well as receiving, then something is being shaped that mirrors the love of God.

Christian spirituality has plundered this book for images of divine love, metaphors for the soul's love of God and Christ's love for the Church. From Bernard of Clairvaux's 86 sermons, to the intense intimacy of Samuel Rutherford's descriptions of Christ the Beloved, the Song of Songs has provided powerful descriptions of Christian devotion. But read at another level altogether, the level of human relationships in all their perplexities and passions, these poems provide a theology of human createdness and human creativity. "To the extent that [the Song of Songs] is about anything, it is especially about male and female expressions of love and intimacy, the communion of self with the other, and the riddled journey toward mutuality". (New Interpreter's Bible, Renita Weems on Song of Songs, Vol. V., page 423.

Here is a CD which is itself an exercise in biblical exegesis, and the hermeneutical principle which compels attention and invites some understanding, is the way the poems, and their musical performance, capture our all too human love and longing, for that which is beyond us, but not so far beyond that we are discouraged from reaching for it in persistent hopefulness.

13 May 2009
Live – Love – Learn – Hoodies and formative theological education

Now I don't want to give the wrong impression. I remain mostly predictable, generally conservative, and occasionally idiosyncratic in my dress sense. I don't think "fashion" is a term that sits comfortably with my approach to choice of apparel, and not one those who know me would immediately choose as a Jim descriptor. So when I step outside my own safe boundaries there's usually a good reason or two.

I am now the possessor of one of those socially problematic garments, perceived as even sinisterly threatening by tabloids and other culturally alarmist groups. I've worn it in public a number of times. It's a College hoodie. Some of our students took the College logo, had it converted to a graphic for printing on textile, added the motto – Live – Love – Learn, and took orders. I ordered a hoodie. Black with a white logo, and the motto backgrounded in rust red.

I can now be seen wearing it in the two places where such a garment is both useful and non-alarmist for people nervous around sweatchirts with hoods. When I'm running round the park on the days it's a bit cool, I wear it – hoping maybe it even makes me look a bit cool. Early morning at my desk before the heating clicks on, it's an easy comfy top – and the hood makes me feel and look even more like a monk at prayer, given my now permanent minimalist hair style.

I'll maybe get Sheila to take a photo, and post it some day when nothing more interesting is happening in the world.

12 May 2009