Living Wittily

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  • Commemorating Ordination 5. Philosophical Theology and Pastoral Doctrine

    Pfiddes_small_2 The book I bought in 1990, to commemorate my ordination was, Paul Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God. This wasn’t the first of Paul’s books I bought, (it was – and remains, the dearest!), and it persuaded me that there is theological congruence in the notion of a God who suffers creatively, freely and redemptively. Not the easiest book – but how could it be with a subject which pierces to the core realities and mysteries of tragic yet creative suffering, faces honestly the bliss and anguish of human existence and the divine-human relationship, and does so by sweeping critically and constrcutively across a broad range of Christian theological proposals.

    5180v3xx0kl__aa240_ Inside my copy is a letter from someone whose life partner had died, tragically young, and had left a family still with much of its growing up to do. It is a note of gratitude to me, but more significantly the words cannot obscure the questions, the anger, the existential resentment that for one bewildered family, the defining relationship of life was ended. This is a book of rigorous sytematic and philosophical theology, but written by a theologian alert to the pastoral relevance of our deepest thinking about God, and who refused then, as now, to minimise questions for the sake of convenient answers. One reviewer pointed out how unfortunate that there was a second D in the surname – Fides = faith, which is what Paul’s life has been about, to the great enrichment of all of us.

    This book helped me in the privacy of the study, to pray to a God who freely chooses to suffer in the creative, redemptive love that is divine, who became flesh and dwelt amongst us, and whose Being is an eternal communion and interchange of Love, giving, creating, sharing the Divine life, in the great lived out narrative of God’s eternal purpose. And it did so by making me think – hard – honestly – deeply, about the God I believe in.

    5170rqgvsxl__aa240_ The book I’ve just finished reading, The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. John Polkinghorne, has an essay in it by Fiddes which continues his reflection on what it might mean for God to freely create those who, in order to grow into divinely intended freedom of love and fullness, chooses to forego absolute control over ultimate outcomes. The work of love is that the Triune God will eternally, persistently, patiently, redemptively work, with creative passion and vulnerable self-giving, till all creation sings, in a performance that will never end and therefore need no final encore!

  • Commemorating Ordination 4. ‘with cheerful aplomb’

    1986  Adrian Hastings, History of English Christianity, 1920-1985. A terrific survey of English church history in the volatile and challenging 20th Century. Now revised and updated to 2000, but I haven’t bothered replacing my first edition.

    1987  Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 Vols. The best history of the Victorian Church by the best church historian I’ve ever read. Owen Chadwick exemplifies careful, witty and weighty judgement. His comment on Spurgeon’s spiritual confidence, ‘He approached the burning bush with cheerful aplomb’. Superb!

    1988  Philip Toynbee, End of a Journey. This was the second volume of Toynbee’s Journal. The first, Part of a Journey, I read while on a caravan holiday in 1977! This volume is movingly written against the backdrop of his final illness, and his late-in-life journey to God. He is a crabbit saint, at times moody, at other times surprisingly reconciled to his own mortality, and most of the time on speaking terms with God.

    1989 Gordon Rupp, Religion in England, 1688-1791. Vintage Rupp. He writes about the decades before the Evangelical Revival with far more historical reliability than a lot of stuff up till then. And his account of the Evangelical Revival itself is nuanced, fair and satisfying. This is one of those books that is also beautifully produced by Oxford – a bibliophile’s must have. And it aint cheap – but quality shows. You show me your BMW and I’ll show you my Rupp!

  • Commemorating Ordination 3. And remembering a liberal prophet

    1985 – J A T Robinson, The Priority of John.

    Book Bishop John Robinson was infamously famous for his book ‘Honest to God’. It was the book John MacQuarrie described as the result of taking three good German beers (Bonhoeffer, Bultmann and Tillich) and creating a lot of froth! That wasn’t fair, and it probably wasn’t MacQuarrie’s finest scholarly hour, but it is a brilliant sideswipe. When a book of theology becomes a bestseller, though, academic theologians need to pay attention, listen, and hear the sound of people’s longing, rather than rush into print scoffing at those who have touched the nerve of a public MacQuarrie could never have hoped to reach with such effectiveness.

    Anyway, The Priority of John represents John Robinson’s legacy – he died before it was published, and did the final writing while suffering at the later stages of cancer. They were to be the prestigious Bampton Lectures, but were never delivered. The book is way out on a limb, arguing not only for the substantial historicity of John, but that John was the Gospel written first. Now I wasn’t persuaded by his arguments, but I was tempted to be, by the sheer ingenuity, passionate exposition, and oh so obvious love for this wonderful Gospel story as told by John the Evangelist and interpreted by John (Robinson). The book is a gem. I bought it hardback – it cost £19.50 – (Amazon have it ranging from £40 to £151!!). I read it slowly through Lent 1986 and appreciated the reverent scholarship of one who spoke deeply about the Passion of Jesus. All the more poignant that some of this writing was done in the full knowledge of his own terminal illness.

    Here’s a very small extract which shows why this Bishop was also a trusted pastor to many. Commenting on Matthew 26.53 where Jesus says he could appeal to the Father to send 12 legions of angels to rescue him, Robinson observes:   

    "There is no suggestion he could lay them on because he was God. He is a man of power because he is a man of prayer. But because he is a man of prayer, he knows that it is not the Faither’s will to win that way."

    A good book to commemorate the vocational centre of ministry, which is abour prayerful obedience rather than charismatic power.

  • In memoriam: Hayley and Emma, loved by God

    Here is a news report from yesterday, headed,

    UK Prostitute death: Four arrested

    Police investigating the death of a prostitute whose body was found dumped in an alley in Hull have arrested four people. Two men, aged 30 and 28, and two women, aged 25 and 18, were being questioned in police stations in the Humberside area. The body of Hayley Morgan, 20, was found on Friday morning in Beverley Road. Red-haired Hayley, who also used the surname Marshall, was a chronic drug abuser who worked the Luke Street red light area of the city, near where she lived, police said.

    Now here’s another wee item of news pushed to the bottom of the front page of todays Herald

    Four men arrested over prostitute’s death

    The arrests were made at dawn in Glasgow city centre and several premises are being searched, Strathclyde Police said. They followed raids on properties in Bridge Street near the city centre and Duke Street, in the east end. Apolice spokesman last night said, Four men aged 31, 34, 35 and 55 have been detained in connection with the death of Emma Caldwell. They are being interviewed. A number of premises are being searched in connection with the investigation. Miss Caldwell, 27, who had been working as a prostitute, disappeared from a hostel in Glasgow’s south side. An inquiry was launched in May 2005 after a dog walker discovered her body in woods near Roberton, Lanarkshire. Miss Caldwell became addicted to heroin after the death of her sister and turned to prostitution to feed her habit.

    Can I also say that Hayley and Emma were human beings? These women, their worth, their dignity and their humanity are not defined by either their work or their habits. They are people, whose death diminishes all of us, whose ordeals were inflicted on them by other people, whose brutality mirrors something critically wrong at the heart of our society. Each woman, in her loneliness and desperation, found themselves victims of the latent violence and gratuitous cruelty of people whose behaviour and character raise much more telling questions about how we define humanity.

    The point of all this. I was offended,and angry, that on TV, Radio and in the papers and news websites, the first thing to say about these two murder victims was that they were prostitutes. How they earned their living – or at least tried desperately to survive – is not irrelevant, but it is not DEFINING – I don’t need to know as the first fact about these two women, that they were prostitutes. I’m neither prudish nor embarrassed by the term – though I seethe at the exploitation and hopelessness that underlies and sustains it. But their names, tell me their names, and yes the tragedy that befell them, the loss of their lives, the waste of all other possibilities for their lives, how they died and how they lived. And yes, expose the moral turpitude of those who used, abused and murdered them – these are bleak stories of our time.

    Lord have mercy. In your love, grant peace to Hayley and Emma.

  • Leadership – and all too human forms of community

    1175193430508_2 When a group of people who would (probably!) be considered ‘leaders’ amongst Scottish Baptists, meet together to discuss the nature of ‘leadership’, based on previously prepared papers, and with a whole day to expose areas and expressions of difference, disagreement, consensus, temperament, personal baggage, – it becomes clear that ‘leadership’ can have as many expressions as there are people, contexts, leaders! That’s what I was doing yesterday, along with five others, up in early autumn Pitlochry.

    So it was interesting to move throughout the day (guided by praying the daily offices of the Northumbria Community), to levels of agreement on some underlying principles, theological and pastoral assumptions – and also to be just as clear where there were quite fundamental differences in other key areas. I’m neither phased nor surprised at that. I think uniformity of model when discussing and exploring the nature of leadership within a Christian community would do violence to specific contextual realities. It would also overwrite individual giftedness and temperament, and would simply be one person / group’s construct, even if they claimed it was ‘biblical’ – ‘even THE biblical view’. All of which would ignore the variety and provisionality of the New Testament evidence, and the interpretations of such texts, and their translation into existing models of Church leadership. Diversity of practice so underlies our own Baptist traditions that it takes considerable care to identify what are the changing continuities of that tradition.

    My own paper was a further stage in my thinking about the community theologian(s), and in particular that person or more likely, group of people’s role in calling the community to faithful obedience to Christ. In fulfilling such a role I further developed two key ideas – kenosis (self-emptying as the notion is used in Phil. 2.1-15; and paracletos with its cognate paraclesis (with their core meaning of encouragement and accompaniment).

    The one sentence I’ll quote is the one that was affectionately but loudly mocked for its rhetorical flourish – och they were just jealous anyway!

    "Community theologians heighten awareness of divine activity amongst us, in our all too human forms of community – and do so by reminding us, with the gentle persistence of Scottish drizzle on a June day in the Trossachs, of the graceful kenosis and non-grasping love of God in Christ."

    Now what’s wrong with that as a piece of tartan theology? Eh?

  • Uncomfortable but comfortingly so?

    Weems_2 A couple of years ago I read the commentary on Song of Solomon, in the New Interpreter’s Bible. It is written by Renita Weems, an African American Pentecostal turned Methodist now married to a Baptist Pastor, and previously a Professor of Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt University. The commentary is a wonderful corrective to those who approach the Song with all the inhibitions of Western culture, uncomfortable with the relationship between love, physicality and the human body. Written by a woman, taking seriously the sensuality and romance of these ancient love poems, the commentary is an unembarrassed affirmation of human love as God’s good gift, nothing to be ashamed of but to be celebrated, enjoyed and wondered at in all its life-enhancing mystery. But more of this another time.

    71c8pbrn38l__aa240_ I’ve just read another of her books, Listening for God. a Minister’s Journey Through Silence and Doubt. This is spirituality that is honest, self-inquisitive, unafraid to own up to the hard journey that is our walk with God – Who if always present, is seldom obviously so. Here and there Weems comes close to self-pity – but even that, if we are half as honest as Renita Weems, is an attitude most of us fall into, and as quickly deny. But most of the time she writes out of a hard won faith, and describes the inner landscape of uncertainty, of missed opportunities, disappointed hopes, hurts and wounds that have very long half-lives; and she does so with an at times desperate determination to hold God to account. How can any human hold God to account – well that depends on the God. A God who is faithful, constant, there but not obviously so, a Sovereign Creator whose mercy can at times seem severe, that Other whose purposes are hidden behind our most feared scenarios, and whose presence makes such scenarios survivable.

    Here is just one excerpt, which can stand as a sample for the whole of this fine, brave and in the best sense en-couraging book:

    But what if God’s silence is not a ruse? What if God’s silence is precisely the way God speaks….Silence can also be an invitation, an invitation to communicate without words, without thunder, without burning bushes. In an age addicted to words, when memos, faxes, Post-its, E-mail, announcements, flash bulletins, cell-phones and news make talk cheap and easy it is frustrating to be told we must not rely on words – direct speech that is. The burning bush was an invitation to be weaned off burning bushes, to come closer, to stay awahile, to learn idiosyncracies, to commune.

    God speaks through burning bushes to get our attention so as never to have to speak again that way. Perhaps it’s when we confuse God’s intervention with God’s intention that we set ourselves up for years of fist-raising questions…… (pages 198-99).

    The whole book is uncomfortable reading, in a strangely comforting way.

  • Commemorating Ordination 2: And remembering F. F. Bruce

    There is neither rhyme nor reason to the books I’ve bought myself around my ordination date. Looks like it was whatever volume I fancied at the time or whatever area I was interested in, or preaching on….

    1981 – J Thompson, Jeremiah, (NICOT)

    This book proved to be a solid, unexciting and traditionally conservative treatment of Jeremiah, whose passion, anguish, anger and sheer persistent in your face protests against political and religious stupidity, needs a much more imaginative and passionate commentator. Thompson was concerned about history and historicity, and sure his commentary is full of important detail – but the prophet’s message isn’t in the details. It’s in his outrage and courage, in his strangeness and stridency, in the tension between theological vision and political realities. Brueggemann and Fretheim (along with Patrick Miller in the New Interpreter’s Bible), quarry the theological depths and measure the seismic disturbances triggered by Jeremiah’s prophecy – they are now my preferred guides in this ‘dark valley’ of a book.

    1982 Evelyn Underhill, The Mystics of the Church

    Long before Anglicans ordained women into ministry, people like Evelyn Underhill exemplified pastoral care as spiritual direction. This wise, likeable, well-off middle class scholar of mysticism was the real thing. This book introduces various key figures in Christian spirituality – and it’s written by one who was herself a key influence in 20th Century spirituality. Her book, Mysticism, and the later volume Worship, are now classics in their field. But her best writing is in her retreat addresses. The School of Charity is a beautifully written meditation on the Apostle’s Creed, that once ‘restored my soul’.

    1983 Gordon Rupp, The Righteousness of God

    I won a prize with an essay on Luther in 1984! It was entitled, "Luther’s Tower Experience; A Theological Evolution?" I’ve still got the laboriously type-written copy in the days before computer word documents made every essay look like publisher’s copy. I remember being captivated by Rupp’s account of Luther’s theological discoveries through his work as Bible expositor. It created an interest in Luther and Reformation spirituality that lasts to this day

    1984 F F Bruce, Galatians (New International Commentary on the Greek NT)

    Brucef No Evangelical biblical scholar did more to instil respect and gain a hearing for Evangelical biblical scholarship than Frederick Fyvie Bruce. From a north east Scotland Christian Brethren background, and a grounding in classics, he became a universally esteemed NT scholar, eventually Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism at Manchester. Bruce’s work was characterised by sober judgement, researched historical detail documented and fairly interpreted, and by an underlying faith commitment that ensured his tone was respectful of the text and aware of its spiritual significance. This commentary, along with his book Paul. Apostle of the Heart Set Free, and his classic commentary on Hebrews, are now dated, but are still revered and faithfully visited presences on my shelf.

    For an affectionate pen portrait of this attractive Christian scholar, written by David Clines, also Brethren, one time student under Bruce, now himself a global class OT scholar, see Clines’ tribute here. Any of you readers whose background is in the Bretheren should read this delightful but positive account of Brethren culture, its ‘Bible conferences’, ‘meetings’ and the dangers of ‘mixing’ with the world!

  • Arboreal accidents or tidily trimmed trees

    This weekend I gave our two 20 foot conifers at the front of the house, a haircut. Third time I’ve done this in five years and I think I now need to pay attention to my size and age, and make this my last major forestry project. When all due attention has been paid to health and safety –  stable ladders and no stretching or leaning, taking care of cables when operating trimmers around and above, protecting the eyes from flying and falling clippings – when all such attention is paid, the one thing impossible to avoid is the aching muscles, (all of them from calves, to thighs, to back, to neck, to arms) – and the shoulders that feel as if I’ve been dancing at a Scottish wedding reception where I was hurled around at Strip the Willow for two hours by people bigger and stronger than me!

    That said, I do enjoy getting stuck in to a job that’s more than whirling around with a flymo, garden hose or dutch hoe. And the trees do now look as if they are part of a garden instead of arboreal accidents. And I suppose that also says something about my own way of construing the world – trying to make at least some parts of it tidy, shaped – a way of pretending mere humans can control and shape the world around. Well of course we can…for a while. But at a cost – and for me, that will probably be paid in the next day or two when my shoulders refuse to allow my arms to go above my head. Might well ruin my personal praise and prayer time, being unable to raise my arms……

  • Commemorating Ordination 1

    Below are the titles of the books I bought to mark my ordination date, August 30, years 1976-1980. And some of the reasons I bought them.

    1976, W D Davies, Setting of the Sermon on the Mount.

    I’ve always taken an interest in the critical appropriation and existential demands of the Sermon on the Mount, and Davies’ massive study set the benchmark for exploring the background of the Sermon in 1st century Palestine. He went on to write with D C Allison the second best commentary on Matthew,[ in the International Critical Commentary (3 vols)] – I agree with Sean, Luz on Matthew is a masterpiece – also three volumes, but I don’t know a commentary like it.

    1977, Leslie Allen, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, (NICOT)

    This volume includes Allen’s take on Jonah as a short story, presenting a deeply ironical reading,  replete with theological insight. Some conservative minded folk took umbrage at his unconcern about historicity in Jonah. It’s still my preferred commentary on these books because it takes God seriously, and it allows the genre of this little masterpiece to fly beneath our self-righteous radars and realise that God’s mercy, and God’s ideas are bigger than ours – mercifully. I used the volume in 1978 when I took a week’s Bible Studies at WEC Kilcreggan on Mission and the Love of God.

    1978, Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret, SPCK.

    I still remember reading this book chapter by chapter, aware that I was reading theological construction and reflection of a high order. Newbigin’s later stature as a leading missiologist and interpreter of the Gospel in a pluralist society, for me begins with this book. Details here and there are dated – but this is still a key text in understanding the why as well as the how of the church’s mission as God’s mission.

    1979, C E B Cranfield, Romans, Volume 2, ICC.

    I bought the first volume of Cranfield’s Romans, volume 1 in mint condition for 10 pence (That was 1/60th of its cover price then), in a University book-sale in 1976 – a review copy some blessed liberal didn’t want to keep. I say blessed because the book blessed me, and I’ve blessed the person who donated it, many a time. So in 1979 there was no discussion – the book to buy was the just released volume 2. Cranfield pre-dated the New Perspective on Paul, and so is now dated – but it remains a thorough, balanced, exegetical commentary in the classic enlightened Reformed tradition. The two volumes will be on my shortest short list of books to keep when life means downsizing my library.

    1980, R E O White, Christian Ethics, Volume Two. Changing Continuities.

    Again a second volume. The first was biblical, this second volume historical. They’ve since been combined in a chunky softback. They are dated now of course – but the attraction for me was that the books were based on lecture notes, and reading them I could hear the loved voice of a stern, authoritative teacher who had done his own thinking. Buying this book was a way of paying tribute to a former Principal of the College, one who’s influence went beyond what he taught.

  • How was I to know, eh?

    Went to the local library to get some light reading. came back with Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories. As I left I noticed a brown parcel lying on the floor at the entrance, slightly torn and showing a book inside. I assumed it had been dropped in for return or something. If I’d looked at the neatly printed label on what turned out to be a brown envelope wrapped round a book, I would have read ‘Doorstop – Please don’t Remove’.

    But I didn’t, did I? Like the responsible adult I claim to be I took it to the issue desk. And the librarian looked at me with what I am convinced was a hint of pity, and said, with thinly disguised courtesy, – ‘Aye juist put it back where ye goat it. Thanks’.

    Well?    How was I to know?    I don’t go around nosing into other people’s parcels, especially books in plain brown paper bags………I wonder how many times in a week some well meaning wee nyaff comes in to put the world right by handing in what, to all appearances, is a fugitive book??