Category: Biography as Theology

He so contained the Gospel in its intensity, that its light radiated from the cracks

There are several biographies of Christian people that for me are definitive of the genre – and I mean the genre of Christian biography. Not hagiography. Not over devotionalised life stories projected as exemplars to make the rest of us feel guilty, inadequate or spiritual amateurs. Not propaganda for Christian projects, lifestyles, or personalities.

I mean the telling of a life in such a way that we can see how far what the person believed and what they lived coincided, and where they had more than a little resemblance in practice and values to the life and person of Jesus of Nazareth.

I mean the skilled unfolding of the delicate parchment of a person's lived experience, with such care and comprehension that those of us reading over the biographer's shoulder can appreciate the living text of a human life given in its own way to God.

I mean the quite rare ability to be both appreciative and critical, honest but understanding, imaginative yet without making things up for effect, open to the disappointments that are part of every life and alert to the gifts that are easily hidden.

I mean a reading of a life that is both theological and biographical, so that the experience and convictions of faith are allowed to inform the flow of the narrative, while the story provides a plausible framework for a portrait of a life given Christianly, both complex and living.

On my own shelves, as a select biographical bibliography there are a dozen or so books that are treasured for such reasons.

Helen Waddell, by Dame Felicitias Corrigan; R. W. Dale, by his son A. W. Dale; Temple Gairdner of Cairo, by C E Padwick; The Selected Letters of Baron Friedrich Von Hugel; Jonathan Edwards, by George Marsden; Michael Ramsey, by Owen Chadwick; H. R. L. Sheppard. Life and Letters, by R. Ellis Roberts; George Macleod, by Ronald Ferguson; Dorothy Sayers, by Barbara Reynolds; Thomas Chalmers, by Stewart (Jay) Brown; Cicely Saunders, by Shirley Du Boulay. And a few more.

But I suspect most (?) readers of this blog will wonder who H R L Sheppard is or was. He was one of God's fragile, flawed, earthen vessels who so contained the Gospel in its intensity that its light radiated from the cracks. One of those rare and magnificent pastors of the people that the Church of England produces, and critics of Anglicanism far too easily overlook and underrate.

I read the volume in 1976, again in 1986, and once more since. Then I lent it to someone who later couldn't find it to return it. A pity – it was a marked copy, and marked by me when I was in my first pastorate, and as receptive of heart as I've ever been since, I reckon. Last week I remembered a passage from my lost book – and no I didn't then find that by a miracle of providential circumstance or awakened conscience it turned up.

No miracle, just Amazon. I went looking for it and found a crisp clean copy which has now arrived. I've browsed in it off and on since it arrived – and now decided more people need to know about this pastor whose missiological methodology was love embodied, enacted, exemplified and enmeshed in the lives of others. So I'll read it again – and post on it again. Here's a sampler:

The biographer speaks of Dick Sheppard who for "snatched and precious moments in the early morning, came ardently, humbly to Jesus in prayer, remembering his friends, remembering his family, remembering himself, wrestling with God for Dick, desiring passionately to understand God enough to be able to proclaim him to all people as the Love he knew Him to be."

One of the most complex and vulnerable personalities of his generation, Dick Sheppard was no emotionally overwrought pietist – he was an emotionally engaged human being whose compassion and drive was traceable to an intense love for God, understood as the One exhibited in the ministry and passion of Jesus. I can think of only two or three Christians as attractive and available as a human being to those who knew him and found Christ through him. I wish I'd met him.

5 February 2010
Mary Oliver on why life should be lived with energy and intentionality.

The photo is of a gardener whose 100th birthday has passed. And he is sowing seeds with the expectation of organic veggies next year!

A poem. About why life is good, and why it is important to receive it as a gift and enjoy it as a blessing. Mary Oliver understands that mixture of hard-headed strategy and wistful longing that recognises life only happens once, and is precious and is not ever to be devalued as mere routine, or wasted through unamazed disdain. We are ourselves God's investment, created by a love that knows our possibilities, capax dei, "dust, but glorious dust", as Richard Holloway once wrote in a magnificent reflection.

When Death Comes

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement:

I was a bridegroom, taking the world

into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something

particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing

and frightened

or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having

visited this world.

4 February 2010
“Tiny as we are” (Jacques Maritain)

Jacques Maritain was one of the great Catholic intellectuals of the 20th Century. His book True Humanism deeply influenced Dorothy Day. Asking herself why she and ten other Catholics made a spectacle of themselves as a way of voicing opposition to war, why they made themselves "a spectacle to the world, to the angels and to men", she found the answer in her annotated personal copy of Maritain.

"We are turning towards men to speak and act among them, on the temporal plane, because, by our faith, by our baptism, by our confirmation, tiny as we are, we have the vocation of infusing into the world, wheresover we are, the sap and savor of Christianity."

Words like these transcend Christian differences, elude the grasp of categories, render traditions and denominations relative though not unimportant. These are words of Christian witness that vibrate with purpose, are born of authentic spiritual experience, sourced and resourced in Christian conviction, and as clear a statement of determined compassion as an indifferent world is likely to hear – even if it stopped long enough to listen. Maritain is both Catholic enough and Christian enough to recognise the foolishness that confounds the wise, to smile knowingly at the strength that resides in weakness as a paradox of grace, and to register a gentle defiance in that four word qualifier, "tiny as we are…"

The call to discipleship, the imperative mood of the Gospel, the uncompromising yet persuasive voice of Jesus calling us to follow faithfully after him, now, here, in our time and place – these are each implicitly present, and to be explicitly lived out in Maritain's one sentence missiology: "the vocation of infusing into the world, wheresoever we are, the sap and savor of Christianity." I am not so narrowly Baptist I don't recognise the authentic New Testament adventure of grace such vocation implies. Of course our capacity to infuse, and that which we infuse, is gift and grace, and mystery and mercy; and of course the different sacramental theology of Maritain feels like an annoying and persistent elbow in the ribs for self-respecting Baptists like myself. But I share the vocation because I hear the same voice, and it calls all God's people; I can only be the light of the world as Christ commanded, if Christ the light of the world radiates through my being; and that word savor (even with its American spelling), is a welcome if unnecessary reminder of how the function of salt is directly dependent on, well, its savor.

8 December 2009
“Free our hearts to faith and praise.” Too good a hymn to forget.

Preaching this morning on the wisdom that comes from above. How to live the life we are given wisely, faithfully and with a discerning heart. I Kings chapter 3 and James chapter 3. The last hymn, 'God of Grace and God of Glory, by Harry Emerson Fosdick, is one I don't suppose is sung in many places now. (how many of you even know it? – the words are reproduced below). It doesn't fit the taste, appetite or idiom of much modern praise music, and it isn't guitar friendly. A couple of times it fails on the gender inclusive standards – though I've little doubt if Fosdick had been writing today he would have been entirely sensitive to the need to negotiate the tensions between gender inclusive language and theological and linguistic integrity.

Opposed by Fundamentalists (and by more moderate voices) as a Liberal, there's little doubt Fosdick was disturbingly progressive in theology, an advocate of a social gospel, and an active advocate for modernist restatements of Christian faith. It's an often told story that sometimes on a Sunday when he was being lambasted from the pulpit by outspoken opponents, he was in his own church praying for those ministries and churches.

At the end of our service this morning we will offer a responsive closing prayer using the last two lines of the second stanza: "Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the living of these days". The use throughout of the second person plural is crucial – this is a prayer of the Church. Several lines are one liner prayers, "Free our hearts to faith and praise", or brief petitions "Save us from weak resignation to the evils we deplore", and the two lines of our closing prayer. Fosdick's own autobiography, The Living of These Days, is a moving account of his spiritual pilgrimage.

What is unmistakable on any fair reading of his own telling of his story, is the faith he had in the person of Jesus Christ, and in the Gospel as good news for humanity. Expressed through his passionate care for humanity locally and globally, and his fear of the foolishness of the mid-20th century trend towards living in a menacing world without moral reference to God as revealed in Jesus. The hymn was written in the 1930's, during the rise of Fascism and National Socialism in Europe, the Great Depression as the backdrop, and Fosdick having turned pacifist following his experiences in the First World War. So the hymn is dated in its idiom and context – not though, in its underlying yearning for a more securely founded way of living responsibly and faithfully these days. Wisdom and courage we still need; weak resignation we still need saving from; we are still rich in things and poor in soul; and more than ever we require to pray, "Free our hearts to faith and praise".

God of grace and God of glory,
On Thy people pour Thy power.
Crown Thine ancient church’s story,
Bring her bud to glorious flower.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
For the facing of this hour

Lo! the hosts of evil ’round us,
Scorn Thy Christ, assail His ways.
From the fears that long have bound us,
Free our hearts to faith and praise.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
For the living of these days.

Cure Thy children’s warring madness,
Bend our pride to Thy control.
Shame our wanton selfish gladness,
Rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
Lest we miss Thy kingdom’s goal.

Set our feet on lofty places,
Gird our lives that they may be,
Armored with all Christ-like graces,
In the fight to set men free.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
That we fail not man nor Thee.

Save us from weak resignation,
To the evils we deplore.
Let the search for Thy salvation,
Be our glory evermore.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
Serving Thee Whom we adore.

19 July 2009
Alexander Whyte – truth as its own witness

Alexander Whyte was a saint – I know- those here in Scotland who trace their theology to the Reformation get edgy and nervous when someone is called a saint, their memory honoured, their written or spoken words cherished, their example held up as an inspiration. And anyway, Alexander Whyte would have denied the charge. His congregation loved him, but there were often complaints that he hammered on and on about sin, his own sins and theirs. Whatever he thought about himself was usually framed in a black border of sorrow for his own failings.

He lived in an age of convulsive social and intellectual change, in the nation, on the world stage, within the churches. His mind was generously open to truth wherever it could be found, but well enough anchored in convictions both evangelical and catholic to be both appreciative and critical. At key times in his life, and in the controversies of his Church, he exemplified what Paul calls 'this ministry of reconciliation'. No surprise then to come across words like those quoted below. Like an eminent consultant in moral and spiritual diagnosis, he knows the importance of preventive measures when it comes to controversy, difference the cause and toxic consequences of conflict. Truth is not a battle – but the basis on which peace is to be built – or to put it in Whyte's own words, characterised as usual by impassioned rhetoric verging on overstatement:

Oh the unmitigated curse of controversy! Oh the detestable passions that corrections and contradictions kindle up to fury in the proud heart of man! Eschew controversy, my brethren, as you would eschew the entrance to hell itself! Let them have it their own way. Let them talk, let them write, let them correct you, let them traduce you. Let them judge and condemn you, let them slay you. Rather let the truth of God itself suffer than that love suffer. You have not enough of the Divine nature in you to be a controversialist

For Whyte, the truth of God as revealed in Christ isn't only discovered in ideas and words, but in the extent to which those same ideas and words are embodied in a life truly reflecting the love of God in Christ. For a Christian, to defend truth unlovingly is a failure of discipleship, an invalid dislocation of priorities. Does anyone still read Paul Tournier, the Swiss psychologist much in vogue in the 1950's and into the 1970's? He once said there is a wrongness in those who are always right; that there are wrong ways of being right.

Whyte, according to those who knew and revered him, largely lived up to his non-controversialism as a theological peacemaker. For him truth if lived in obedience to God and held in love will be its own witness – and if it isn't held in love it is neither obedient to God nor, in the deepest moral sense, truth. You have to be a saint to believe that – and live it.

13 June 2009
The Doctor, the Prisoner, the Nun and the Hospice Director….. Dr Sheila Cassidy

I'm preparing a course for next year based on James McClendon's Biography as Theology. I read biography as frequently as novels. Indeed a well written biography can have the qualities of a good novel – character, plot, development, and a story that may or may not resolve as expected. Some of the best writing, and most enjoyable reading, can be found in biographies. And biography can be the best kind of story, and a rich source of theology as it has been lived, practised and embodied. And according to McClendon, that's the most important kind of theology, because only embodied theology makes a difference.

In 1976 a young idealistic female doctor went to work amongst the poor in Chile. She treated a young man with a bullet wound in the leg and found herself arrested by the secret police. Her name was Sheila Cassidy. The account of her subsequent interrogation, torture and imprisonment was written as an early autobiography called Audacity to Believe, and tells the story of her struggle to find a faith adequate to her experience. I remember a couple of summer afternoons reading that book, and sensing the thrill of what happens when you have the audacity to believe God isn't on the side of the powerful – and that to our personal cost, God may call us to say so. Cassidy's own sense of vocation to be a nun was tested in the years afterwards but she quickly acknowledged that hers would be a different life and she returned to medicine.

Her subsequent career as a doctor, Director of a Hospice in Plymouth, and Consultant in Palliative Care, enabled her to use her medical skills much more widely, and to explore and expand her Christian vocation. The account of her life, and her passionate commitment to enhancing life and accompanying those late on in their life's journey, provide a study of that practical compassion that draws energy from the love of God. I think the phrase "The love of God" should always be understood as a playfully ambiguous genitive – the love of God (for us) and the love (we have) of God. What we do, we do for the love of God and by the love of God.

One of Cassidy's prayers is one I use often. It sits in my mind alongside Van Gogh's Good Samaritan painting as a description of compassion as action arising from the love of God:

Lord of the Universe
look in love upon your people.
Pour the healing oil of your compassion
on a world that is wounded and dying.
Send us out in search of the lost,
to comfort the afflicted,
to bind up the broken,
and to free those trapped
under the rubble of their fallen dreams.

Sheila Cassidy

22 March 2009