Category: Books

Review of a New Psalms Commentary – Another Good One.

The Book of Psalms. Nancy deClaisse-Walford, Rolf A. Jacobson, Beth LaNeel Tanner. (Grand rapids: Eerdmans, 2014) 1051 pages ($60)

This book has xxii pages of preliminaries, 1010 pages of text and 41 pages of indices. It is written by three authors each of whom is a significant player in a vibrant and energetic generation of Psalms scholars working new seams of scholarship and bringing out of the riches of the Psalms treasures old and new. Psalms commentaries compete in a crowded field and their usefulness will depend on (i) whether the authors bring something new into the discussion; (ii) who is consulting and reading it and for what purpose; (iii) how it compares to viable alternatives.

So far as (iii) above is concerned, its closest rival in the field of Evangelical scholarship is the work of VanGemeren, published by Zondervan and recently revised in the Expositor’s Bible Commentary and running to over 1000 pages. It too deals with exegetical analysis and textual probing, historical and contextual details and theological reflection. Another rival is the three volumes of John Goldingay, published by Baker, which likewise brings traditional disciplines to bear on these rich and robust texts, but in the hands of an innovative and independent thinker with a firm commitment to the Old Testament as Christian Scripture, and as a confessed Evangelical. Allen Ross has already published two of a projected three volume exposition published by Kregel and also seeking to fit that perhaps too ambitious defined market of scholar, student and preacher. Given the Evangelical commitments of the New International Commentary on the Old Testament (NICOT), this volume on the Psalms inevitably has a number of similar commitments and scholarly presuppositions to these three substantial presences in the field. So what does the NICOT bring that the others have missed? How does the approach of the three authors differ from VanGemeren, Ross and Goldingay?

Having used all these commentaries now, it becomes clear that this NICOT volume pays more particular attention to the canonical shape of the Psalter and recent study of how and why it is edited and formed in its canonical order. This has significant implications for how texts are read and understood in their internal relations within the Psalter, and also for the intra-textual possibilities within the wider canon. Given there are three authors of this commentary, and they have split the Psalms between them, there are three different styles and approaches to the Psalms each has been allocated, raising the issue of comparison in the quality and depth of treatment. This also makes for a diversity of voices and this is no bad thing for a book itself diverse and complex. Jacobson in my view offers most help to those who want to see the connections between exegesis, hermeneutics and exposition. His Reflections section is thoughtful, avoids moralising and superficial homiletic hints, and is theologically alert and informed. He is the only one of the three who has such a section. The other two embed their theological reflection in the flow of their exegetical treatment, and the result too often is a token sentence or two of application or suggested theme. The editor should have encouraged a more consistent approach.

Decisions about detail of treatment sometimes appear arbitrary, especially since the following page allocation includes the translated text. Psalm 23 has just under 9 pages, Psalm 51 just over 5, Psalm 103 has 9, Psalm 119 has 7 pages of comment, excluding the translated text, Psalm 121 has 3, and the entire Psalms of Ascent, 120-134 a mere 54 pages averaging 3.5 pages each including the text. Jacobson and Tanner are typically fuller, Walford nearly always the most economical. This gives the commentary an unevenness of attention. Psalm 119 is a problem for commentators because of its length, construction, complexity, repetitiveness and subject matter. By far the most satisfying treatment is the 70 pages in Goldingay, while Brueggemann manages 3 pages! But in this level of commentary more is needed than is given on Psalm 119. Each Psalm is signed by the one who wrote the exegesis. An annoying consequence is that each Psalm begins on a new page, even if the previous page only has a few lines printed on it. This means the book has the equivalent of approximately 80 blank pages – could these not have been used to advantage in a more substantial exposition of Psalm 119? If that adds a few dollars to the price it would be worth it.

Alternatively, since almost every Psalm has a blank space after its entry, could there not have been some attempt to include a conversation with the tradition of Psalms reception in the Church? The index has Gunkel, Mowinckel, Westermann and Gerstenberger so the form critical tradition is well represented. But no single reference to Augustine, Aquinas, or Calvin, (though Luther is cited 16 times) or to the wider Patristic, Monastic and Reformation traditions comes close to what C S Lewis called chronological snobbery”.

One particularly strong feature is a fresh translation supported by copious textual notes; all three writers are deeply schooled in the text, and have enjoyed the collaborative enrichment of working together for years on this commentary. Given that each section has been considered by three closely allied scholars, there is a sense that the final product has been carefully sifted and crafted. It is free of technical jargon and exegetical in-speak and is readable, accessible and carries an overall authority that comes from the authors’ familiarity with the texts and the conversations they inspire. There is little doubt in my own mind that this is a significant addition to the field of Psalm studies, not because it supersedes Goldingay or VanGemeren, but because it supplements them. Yes there will be duplication if you have all three and use them together, but there are significant differences of emphasis and exegetical style. These are rich, deeply dyed and thickly textured, sometimes unruly, often obstinate texts, in addition to which they are a treasure of the church and a deep abyss of possibility and demand. My own inclination is to read widely and deeply, comparing and questioning.

For example this NICOT volume read alongside Brueggemann’s recent one volume commentary, and Clinton McCann’s excellent contribution in the New Interpreter’s Bible would make for a fairly engaged three-way conversation. But I wouldn’t want to be without J L Mays, Artur Weiser, Robert Davidson and John Eaton and one or two of the older still experts on the theology and text of the Psalms. I intend to read my way through this commentary; it is as readable as that. For now my rating is a comfortable 4 stars. If you have VanGemeren and or Goldingay do you need this volume? That depends on who you are and what you use commentaries for, point (ii) raised earlier. Preachers will be glad of a substantial one volume commentary, up to date, alert to the relation of the Psalms to the life of the Church, and written by three scholars who clearly love and live in these texts. Scholars will want to consult the translation, notes and supporting exegesis which I found full of surprises and insights. Those who love commentaries, and I am one of them, will be glad of another addition to a commentary series that has established a reputation for faithful scholarship exercised within a faith commitment to the inspiration of Scripture.

30 December 2014
Dreams, books, are each a world…..

Been reading and writing an essay review on the first two volumes of Veli-Matti Karkkainen's Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World. This is a major theological project by one of the leading Ecumenical theologians writing in the West today. He trained as an Ecumenical theologian, has taught on three continents and has a passionate interest in bringing the Christian faith into constructive conversation with the other living faiths (Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism); but he wants to do so by being critically and appreciatively faithful to the range and depth of the Christian tradition.

Not everyone who reads this blog will want to invest the time and energy reading these volumes as they become available. But you can get a good sense of what he is about, and the kind of thinker he is by watching an interview he gave at the launch of the first volume, Christ and Reconciliation. You can find the interview here.

……………………..

Yesterday I spent some time looking through a bookcase of books that used to belong to a friend. I had the pick of them, but the real interest was simply handling books that had been shapers of thought, inspirations for life, companions of comfort. Over 7 or more decades, books that have been bought, ead and reread. Some of them now taped together; others with what the booksellers call foxing, spine split, some highlighting or underlining. The whole lot together wouldn't make much money. But then riches afren;t just about money.

Some of the enduring values and gifts evade the commerical tyrranny of the barcode. I only took four. A lot of them I haven't read and won't. Some of them meant more to my friend than to me – it's like that with books and friendship. I don;t have to like what he liked, nor pretend it does for me what it clearly accomplished in his own inner life. There were two or three though that brought memories of ding dong discussions over a lunch table with a crusty loaf, a pot of soup, and a bowl of fruit. Two of the ones I brought away I'll give to someone else.

The two I'll keep are because they say much for my friend's theology, faith and way of thinking and living. One is a biography of Studdert Kennedy, Woodbine Willie, whose theology was generous, passionately questioning of God in the face of suffering, and utterly grounded in Calvary and the Cross as the place where earthly suffering and Divine mercy comingled in the sacrifice of Christ. The other is The Path to Perfection, W E Sangster's volume on John Wesley's doctrine of Christian perfection. I've read it before, it's now a book of past generations, eclipsed by so much high standard contemporary Wesleyan scholarship which shows no signs of abating. But Sangster was a saintly man, a deep lover of Jesus, and so was my friend. "Love is the key to holiness" says Sangster – and my frienc's life underlined that sentence.

……………………………………

And then there was this wee red booklet I picked up for £1 at Drum Castle Garden, in the wee shed where used books are there with an honesty box.

I merely mention this. I'll write another post later on the fascinating hopes and optimism of a conference 60 years ago. They say times have changed – but reading this, the aspirations and proposals remain vaslid, and largely unfulfilled. More on this later.

28 August 2014
“Divinity saturated and clothed his world….” A New Book on George Herbert.

I'm slowly and satisfyingly making my way through John Drury's new book George Herbert's life and poetry, Music at Midnight. Drury's book Painting the Word was an eye opener to the ways in which art provides exegetical images which are their own hermeneutical essays on the biblical text. Along with Jaroslav Pelikan's Jesus Through the Centuries, and Graeme Finaldi's The Image of Christ, which doubled as the National Gallery's catalogue of the exhibition of that name, Drury's book is an important contribution to a revived interest in visual art as exegesis. And I see Richard Harries has a new book due in a few weeks on The Image of Christ in Modern Art.

Now Drury's book on Herbert comes at the end of years of reading and studying the quintessential Anglican Divine and poet. What makes Drury's book fascinating is the space given to Herbert's world, his early life and the connections between early experiences and the later poems. For example The Collar, with its opening line Drury links to a row breaking out at the table during a meal. "I struck the board, and cried, No more:" The choleric temper of the Herbert brothers, Edward and George are well documented, and Drury exploits the storm of rage between the brothers as the key to understanding a poem which both describes the inner psychology of anger, and the deeper psychological search for peace, harmony and serenity. The form of the poem is erratic, varied line lengths, rhymes and assonance all over the place. As Drury says, "It is an eruption". Such family experience recalled, provides for Herbert familiar experience on which to hang his own religious discontent and spiritual conflict as resentment of life's inner and outer chaos battled in his heart. Until eventually a parental voice addresses him, "Child", to which he replies, "Lord".

I've read The Collar often enough, and am surprised at the obviousness of the connection Drury makes, but only after he pointed it out is it obvious. And so in other parts of Herbert's experience, for example living near the busy intersection of business and society at Chring Cross, and another fascinating connection between Magdalen Herbert's hospitality in an age of genteel etiquette, and that same etiquette made famous in Herbert's best loved poem, "Love III". More about this fine book later – but here are the two poems, The Collar, and Love III. No wonder Rowan Williams chose Love III as his favourite poem, and T S Eliot admired Herbert enough to echo some of his lines in his own work.

The Collar

I struck the board, and cried, "No more;

                         I will abroad!

What? shall I ever sigh and pine?

My lines and life are free, free as the road,

Loose as the wind, as large as store.

          Shall I be still in suit?

Have I no harvest but a thorn

To let me blood, and not restore

What I have lost with cordial fruit?

          Sure there was wine

Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn

    Before my tears did drown it.

      Is the year only lost to me?

          Have I no bays to crown it,

No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?

                  All wasted?

Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,

            And thou hast hands.

Recover all thy sigh-blown age

On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute

Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage,

             Thy rope of sands,

Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee

Good cable, to enforce and draw,

          And be thy law,

While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.

          Away! take heed;

          I will abroad.

Call in thy death's-head there; tie up thy fears;

          He that forbears

         To suit and serve his need

          Deserves his load."

But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild

          At every word,

Methought I heard one calling, Child!

          And I replied My Lord.

……………………….

Love III

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

If I lack'd anything.

"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";

Love said, "You shall be he."

"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,

I cannot look on thee."

Love took my hand and smiling did reply,

"Who made the eyes but I?"

"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame

Go where it doth deserve."

"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"

"My dear, then I will serve."

"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."

So I did sit and eat.

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lacked anything.
"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here":
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat. – See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16121#sthash.fkrHOZe9.dpuf

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lacked anything.
"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here":
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat. – See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16121#sthash.fkrHOZe9.dpuf

1 October 2013
Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (Second Edition) – a no brainer purchase.

You know you're getting on a bit when you are excited about a complete revision and expansion of a book you bought in its first edition over 20 years ago, and have used regularly and gladly all that time. Generations of theological students and pastors keen to do their own exegetical digging have benefited from the IVP black dictionaries on the New and Old Testaments. The Dictionary of the OT Prophets was published a year or two ago completing the full set of Black Dictionaries. The Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels was published 21 years ago, and now needs updating and made consistent with the rest of the set. I guess what we have is a changing continuity with this project, aiming to keep the scholarship current – and for that IVP are to be congratulated.

I've used every one of the IVP Black Dictionaries frequently, profitably and I can think of fewer big volumes that are such value for money. They have well conceived subject indices at the back making it possible to pursue obscure or minor themes through the lens of the major articles. The Jesus and the Gospels volume has a detailed index of gospel texts allowing for further chasing of exegetical detail (a full scripture index would be much too cumbersome).

The pre-publication description on Amazon shows the scope and quality of what is on offer. No I haven't seen the revised edition. It has almost the same number of pages, but as you'll see from the pre-pub. extract below, it is almost entirely a new book:

How can undergraduate students, seminarians, people in professional
ministry, leaders in local churches and other Christian organizations,
even academic scholars, stay abreast of the range of contemporary study
of Jesus and the Gospels? How can the fruit of vital study of Jesus and
the Gospels in recent years help to animate our reading of and
interaction with the Gospels?

When it first appeared some twenty
years ago, the 'Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels' was concerned to
address exactly these kinds of needs. This revision of the Dictionary
follows the same path, though now with new content and up-to-date
bibliographies, as well as a host of new contributors. Some ninety
percent of the original material has been replaced, with most previous
entries assigned to a fresh list of scholars. A number of new articles
have been introduced, and a handful of articles from the first edition
have been updated in light of ongoing research.

I await the arrival of the second generation of this Dictionary with impatience. What will I do with the old one – well what do you do with old friends? You don't sell them, recycle them, dump them or pulp them! You look after them, you find space for them, and if you can find a caring home for them, that would be good!

23 September 2013
Anne Frank, – The Prophetic Voice of a Teenage Diary

While in Amsterdam for those few days on my Van Gogh pilgrimage, I also visited the Anne Frank House. I had tried to book online before leaving to avoid the long queue, but it was booked a week in advance. However long queue or no long queue, I had already decided such a visit was a must.

So we arrived not long after opening at 9.00, and the queue was already long and slow moving. Now I'm not the most patient or contented queuer, but there are times when inconvenience, delay and anticipation are more significant than cramming every unforgiving minute with value for money tourism. We got talking to the couple behind us who had just flown over from Bitmingham, and who were also making a pilgrimage to this place of humane and humanising memory of a young girl whose honest goodness and innocent intelligence defied and triumphed over the inhuman bureaucracy of the genocidal imagination.

Then once we got in, after an hour's waiting, we made our slow way through the house, with the sound of the Kerk bells from nearby, the same bells she heard sounding when in hiding. And the slowness of those in front of us allowed time to see, to think, to pay attention, and so to imagine. One of the greatest moral challenges of our age is the safeguarding of the moral imagination, the developed capacity to anticipate, and have symathy with, and realise in thought and vision the cost and consequences of the intractably human lust for power, power over others, exerted for ends other than humane.

Anne Frank's Diary is one of the most astonishing achievements of World War II. Not just the transparent goodness and hopefulness of the entries; and more than the faithful recording of the experience of what it is like to be afraid, and hated by the powerful and ruthless; and more too than the exposing of political malignity observed and critiqued by a young woman wo was naive, but wise, and whose own future would be foreclosed by the lethal consistency of the racist mindset. The Diary is first hand evidence of human resilience, of spiritual awareness, of life loved as gift and mystery, and of that instinctive will to live and to live well, that occasionally illuminates the historical landscape, and gives us all hope and a much needed reminder of the glory of a human life whose music cannot be silenced.

Then near the end of the exhibit, time to look at the faces of those who hid in the hiding place, blqck and white photographs, and behind the face of Anne Frank, another queue, at the arrival station of Auschwitz, and then images of the Shoah and the Camp liberations. I was overwhelmed by then, having just stood in a slow moving queue to enter this house, and to pay respects to this story of one girl amongst 6 million of her people, and one girl amongst countless more people across continents, whose deaths are the fearful mathematics of state generated hatred linked to military ambition.

It is one of the sanitising statistics worth pondering, that all day every day, this house is open, and the queues are constant. And if everyone who comes to this place comes respectful and goes away subdued by a wondering sadness but a renewed commitment to the nourishing of humane values, then there is hope for us. The Hebrew Bible has the prophetic observation, "a child shall lead them". And so she did, and does.

21 August 2012
Buechner Week I – One of my Literary Angels

Frederick Buechner is one of the angels in my life. I don't read him all the time, months can go by without me taking one of his books from the shelf behind my study chair at College.

In my life as in most lives, there have been moments of annunciation when I've been told I'm blessed whether I like it or not, times when good tidings of great joy have lit up my life around me, encounters when I've wrestled with my own struggles and found somewhere in the wrestling that I had a grip on God but God had a stronger grip on me, times too when I've sensed a guardian angel when walking through valleys of deep darkness. Most times those angels are people sent by God to be a friend and companion, and to voice in their actions the love of God. But now and again that angel comes in the holy words that speak heart to heart, and come from the writer to the reader through conduits laid by the Holy Spirit.

Not many writers do that, and just as well. But when I turn one of those scary corners on my journey, find the wind constantly in my face and trying to push me back the way I came, or begin to find the upward road just far too upward, Buechner comes from the shelf, and time and again speaks the kind of sense I'd hear from very few others whom I read. Buechner's sense is uncommon sense, because he is unafraid of pragmatism so long as it's laced with grace, celebrates each precious moment of life not because they are all extraordinary but because they are possible at all because I am alive, shows me again and again that the most important gift is the gift of seeing and embracing the grace that is already there, of perceiving the goodness and mercy that dogs my steps, of discovering in the friendship of those closest to me the faithfulness of God, and in the company of strangers the friendship of God.

So this week is Buechner week. He is now 86 years old, and the wisdom of those years has been generously and prodigally shared in novels, essays, sermons and autobiography. A very good friend introduced me to Buechner's work in 1985 – that was one of the annunciations I referred to above, and the friend, one of the angels.

"Listen to your life.

See it for the fathomless mystery it is.

In the boredom and pain of it

no less than in the excitement and gladness:

touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it

because in the last analysis all moments are key moments,

and life itself is grace."

Now and Then

"The world is full of dark shadows,

to be sure both the world without and the world within …

But praise and trust him too

for the knowledge that what's lost is nothing to what's found,

and that all the dark there ever was,

set next to light,

would scarcely fill a cup."

Commencement Address at Union Seminary, Richmond.

20 March 2012
Lovers of Discord because Lovers of Truth?

Lovers of Discord is one of Keith Clements' best books, though I guess not all that well known now. Published 23 years ago it is a critical but appreicative account of some of the theological bust ups in England in the 20th Century. Whether or not he agreed with the theological speculations, aberrations and protestations, he clearly admired those who were too faithful to the truth to silence awkward questions, or settle for partial and unconvincing arguments, or put up with dogmatic pronouncements disguised as conviction but in reality strident certitudes scared stiff of hesitation, uncertainty and doubt. On the last page he quotes the well repeated lines about the Lord having yet more light and truth to break forth from his word, and uses it the way most people do – as a warning against ever thinking we have God sussed, or that our views have some kind of secure finality, or that our view of the Bible is the biblical one and other people who differ are, well, unbiblical.

But then on the last page he writes some reflections that could only come from someone whose spirit is ecumenical, whose faith is evangelical, whose theology is liberal in the sense of generous, and whose mind remains open to the Spirit of truth who takes the things of Jesus and makes them known to the intellect, the heart and those secret places within us where truth gains its purchase on our deepest motives, inciters our most passionate longings, and sustains our most persistent hopes. Here is Clements' final words in this book:

"There is a looking back to the past for authoritative reassurance, rather than an anticipation of some new thing, a continual desire to return and check the tomb is empty before taking the road to jerusalem to wherever Christ is to be met anew….We may believe in an ultimate unity of truth, though not apprehended as yet, and only seen in a glass darkly. The resolution of theological conflict is a hope and it will be fulfilled only when there is no more to be taught us by the Spirit of truth." (Page 242)

The book is available used on Amazon for 1p – which just goes to show you can't tell a book by looking at its price! The image is from Hubble – and is included here just to remind us of our size, our place, and our insignificance if we are considered apart from the eternal purposeful Love that moves the sun and other stars.

22 June 2011
Salley Vickers and the joy of novels

I've just finished Salley Vickers' novel, Miss Garnet's Angel, and am about to read it again. Vickers lectures on literature and is a Jungian psychotherapist – she is also a writer who can do that rare thing, take religious, metaphysical and psychological themes and weave them into a narrative that helps us love and affirm our own humanity. The painting is by Vittore Carpaccio, and it features only briefly in the novel – it is however used on the cover. Once I've read the novel again I'll come back to this – but I'm happy to encounter a novelist I hadn't read before – and discover I have two friends for whom a Salley Vickers' novel is a favourite.

25 November 2010
Making room, books, shelving and an understanding friend.

Had an interesting conversation with a friend who is a joiner. Well, a ship's carpenter which means he is an elite joiner who can turn his hand to other skills as well. The problem is still fitting a library into a smaller size study without major deletions from my catalogue. So the large clothes cupboard in this modest room, given a ship's carpenter's skills, will provide another 23 feet of shelving and some filing space. The Tardis principle. Or maybe a jig saw puzzle – all the pieces only fit together one way?

While discussing the problem I mentioned a number of suggestions made by well meaning friends, that I should just downsize my library, get rid of surplus, expel the excess. Didn't mention Stuart's much more convenient suggestion to give them to him :)) Anyway, said my friend, I paraphrase, but accurately, – "I have a tool kit, and several planes, saws, chisels, hammers, and need a wee trailer to carry them to go and do a job. Your library is a tool kit – you'll get rid of something and then you'll need it. A library isn't just books – it's a lifelong collection of the things you do your work with." I love a man who understands. I showed him my prized Cambridge hardback edition of the George Herbert's poems and explained the extended mortgage needed to buy it. It's inconceivable I'd part with it. It and the vast majority of my books are not bought on impulse – they are chosen companions, resident scholars of choice, conversation partners, gifts of thought and ideas that have made me who I am. Sure some of them can go.

But I have an annual review of my whole library anyway, have done every year for decades, and a box or two go away each year to new homes. So we spent time conspiring against the limitations of space, doing the math, planning and measuring so as to have adequate shelving without the study being overwhelmingly stuffed – I also like wall space for my pictures, and a sense of beauty as well as utility.

21 August 2010
Wolfhart Pannenberg, God’s Patience and a Honda Jazz

Every few years or so I've tried to make time to read through a full blown systematic theology. This is not a novel form of intellectual masochism, but an intentional obedience to the call of God to a discipleship of the intellect. Sure, there are some writers who seem to make it harder than it needs to be. But the recognised theologians, the big names, the substantial presences on the theological stage, are far too important to the life of the church and the mind of its leaders to be sidelined by an arrogant laziness disguised as intellectual modesty. And those same substantial presences are far, far too important to be ignored, neglected or despised by those of us called to preach, to care, to serve the church, to build the Body of Christ, and to do so thoughtfully, reverently and from a foundation more durable and adaptable than the latest time limited pragmatic programmes geared to ecclesial renewal of one form or another.

Which is why over the years I've sat in the study chair, fastened the seat-belt, adjusted the mirrors to give better vision, checked I had enough fuel (chai tea and Hovis digested biscuits the current preferred combination ), gripped the book with both hands, and started to read. Half an hour a day eventually gets it done. Which is how I come to be at page 438 of Wolfhart Pannenberg's volume 1. And this post was born when I read his theological reflection on the patience of God. Pannenberg is not easy to read, but…

No wait. First let me tell you about the other night. I took a long run in the new car, a Honda Jazz with which I am inordinately pleased. We went into Lewis
Grassic Gibbon country – Cairn O Mount, Auchenblae, and Arbuthnott. For a while we sat
at the view point on Cairn O Mount and admired a huge vista of
countryside through heavy rain accompanied by shafts of bright sunshine
framed in a vivid half rainbow. It's wild,
miles of heather moorland and mountain, but sloping into green uplands
and fields towards the Mearns.

Now. Reading Panneberg's theology can sometimes be a similar experience to looking at a challenging rough landscape under dark skies, in heavy rain that reduces visibility. But just as often there are shafts of bright sunlight, a partial rainbow and moments of transfigured thought and intellectual epiphany. Here's one of them, from pages 438-9:

"Barth said of patience that it is present 'where space and time are given with a definite intention, where freedom is allowed in expectation of a response' (CD, II/1, 408). Patience leaves to others space for their own existence and time for the unfolding of their own being. If it is not the enforced patience of those who impotently watch the course of events but the patience of the powerful who can intervene in what happens but refrains from doing so, and if the patience is shown to his own creatures, then it is a form of the love that lets the creatures have their own existence. God's patience then, is neither indifferent tolerance nor an impotent but brave endurance of circumstances that cannot be altered. It is an element of the creative love that wills the existence of creatures. It waits for the response of creatures in which they fulfill their destiny."

Patience as love restraining power in order to allow freedom. So patience as the self-limitation that allows space, time and opportunity for the other to grow. And patience therefore as an active form of passivity, an intentional self-imposed limitation which gives permission and trusts the other to be and to become. As a vision of how God is willfully implicated in the life of his creation, Pannenberg's theology of divine patience suggests that in God the three cardinal virtues of faith hope and love have their divine counterpart. The faithfulness, hopefulness and love of God guaranteeing that creation will not forever be in bondage to futility, but in Christ will be brought to fulfilment in the end, and however long it takes, it will not wear out the patience of the God.

13 August 2010