Living Wittily

Category: Books

  • Jonathan Edwards – who he?

    Jonathanedwards The name Jonathan Edwards used to be famous and recognisable; he’s the New England late puritan revivalist pastor, now widely recognised as the greatest American theologian, and one of the most intellectually gifted philosophers in American history. It’s a pity most people who’ve heard of him tend to know him best, if at all, because of his famous sermon, ‘Sinners in the hands of an angry God’. Edwards’ theological writings can never be reduced to such caricature – his theological works are a huge mother lode of Australian (well, New England) gold nuggets. I can still remember reading his sermons on Charity and its Fruits, coming to the last sermon, ‘Heaven is a world of love’. I know of nothing, nothing, that gathers together such rhetorical and spiritual power in his descriptions of the love of God and the overwhelming mercy that suffuses the whole of reality.

    Ggweltklasse_zurich Nowadays the name Jonathan Edwards isn’t as straightforward. Someone by the same name is a retired world-class, olympic gold-medal winning triple jumper, who until recently presented Songs of Praise. Put Jonathan Edwards into an Amazon search and you get a mixture of athletic autobiography and puritan theology, motivational self-help and no nonsense mercy and judgement.

    Joned23123 And then the past couple of days I was down in Manchester meeting with British Baptist leaders and spent time with Jonathan Edwards (a third one) – Jonathan is General Secretary of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, a highly experienced pastor and a fine reflective church leader.

    41bv41ze32l__aa240_ The puritan, the athlete, the Baptist…..’ The name Jonathan Edwards is to the fore for me again cos I’ve just started the Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards, along with other recent studies of his life and thought. The essays here cover the full range of Edwardsian studies – an essay a day means it’ll take a fortnight to read. As you can see, the book cover does him no favours – probably seemed like a good idea to the graphic artist to use a modern ‘wooden stylised bust’ – doesn’t work as a book cover – just makes him look miserable, scary and…well….wooden!

    I haven’t forgotted my promise to do a couple of posts on Edwards and Moltmann on the Trinity – after Pentecost I’ll get round to it.

    First – on Sunday I’ll post some Pentecostal Haiku!

  • Novel writing as vocation: Chaim Potok

    When Chaim Potok, the well-known Jewish novelist, decided to become a writer, his mother had a different idea. “Chaim,” she said, “don’t be a writer. Be a brain surgeon. You’ll keep a lot of people from dying and you’ll make a lot of money.”

    Chaim said, “No, Mama, I want to be a writer.”

    Periodically his mother tried to change his mind. “Chaim, listen to your mother. Become a brain surgeon. You’ll keep a lot of people from dying and you’ll make a lot of money.”

    But he always replied, “No, Mama, I want to be a writer.” Eventually she lost her temper. “Chaim, you’re wasting your time. Become a brain surgeon. You’ll keep a lot of people from dying.”

    Chaim shouted back, “I don’t want to keep people from dying; I want to show them how to live.”

    Daily_stanford Potok is one of the novelists I re-read – I’ve read several of his stories three times! He writes as a used-to-be insider on New York Hasidic communities in the mid-twentieth century. Talking with a good friend yesterday about what we were reading, she had bought The Chosen, on my recommendation. Hope she isn’t disappointed – one person’s enthusiasm can be another person’s tedium. Potok can be intense, and the world he evokes is the world of fading modernity, where human beings are still trying to figure out their place in this vast universe.

    0140030948_01__sclzzzzzzz_v45545076 But for me, Potok has captured the powerful, ambivalent and even dangerous tensions created by religious commitment and the contemporary world. But he has also articulated those deep religious longings that are tied to community, tradition, difference and identity, and which arise out of that deep place in us where we feel the desperate desire to live our lives towards hope and fulfiment. You want to read something a little different – here’s a novelist who chose storytelling as a way of showing us how to live.

  • Raging with Compassion 5: The place where all questions are askable

    Following the Omagh bombing in August 1998, John Swinton went to church – and with no reference having been made to the previous day’s atrocity during worship, came away thinking

    ‘our church had no capacity for dealing with sadness…because we had not consistently practised the art of recognising, accepting and expressing sadness, we had not developed the capacity to deal with tragedy. In the wake of the tragedy of Omagh, our failure to publicly and communally acknowledge such a major act of evil within our liturgical space demonstrated our implicit tendency towards denial and avoidance. Evil was not resisted by our community, it was simply sidelined…’ (pages 92-3)

    This is a disturbing story of how some expresssions of Christian faith and pastoral response do not deal well with suffering, whether outrageous violence or its victims’ suffering. Inability to cope pastorally is not unrelated to a theology that is uneasy with human anguish and divine suffering … itself strange for a faith in the One who was a man of sorrows and acquainted with the grief of the cross, albeit followed by the resurrection. So Swinton devotes a long chapter to lament as a way of asking the question ‘Why me Lord..Why me?’ – questions which if asked have potentially destabilising vibrations which reach to the inner core of our faith, and the kind of God we say we believe in.

    _42035844_scream_body  By way of a persuasive interpretation of Munch’s masterpiece The Scream, Swinton explores the silent scream of the suffering, and moves on to the silence of Jesus on the cross and the voicelessness of pain. There is in the deepest suffering a resistance to language, a loss of confidence in the normalising of events that articulating them brings. That means that many forms of pain are unsharable. This whole section, pages 95-101 is a rich and rewarding reflection by a theologically and medically informed writer seeking appropriate pastoral response. One of the most helpful and crucial insights he considers is that the silent suffering of Jesus places God unreservedly alongside those who suffer or are victims of evil.

    Jesus’ silence in the presence of evil acknowledges the full numbing horror of suffering and legitimises every sufferer’s experience. Jesus’ sense of alienation from God, which paradoxically was a mark of his experience on the cross, echoes the sense of alienation and disconnection that many people people go through when they experience evil and suffering. The silence of jesus is a statement  that God not only empathises with suffering ‘from a distance’,  but also experiences it in all of its horror. (page 100)

    Not the kind of God some might want. Perhaps we prefer a God who intervenes, reaches into history and sorts things. But the cross is God’s intervention, where suffering is borne in order to be redeemed, and where evil and suffering are experienced as that which ‘wrings with pain the heart of God’. Swinton’s point is – only if we acknowledge the reality of evil and suffering, and the reality of its being borne upon the heart of God,  will we than take evil and suffering seriosuly enough to resist them in that place where all questions are askable, the place of worship; and using biblical forms of prayer, the prayers of lament.

  • Raging with compassion 4: Evil resisted and suffering absorbed

    Johnswinton As promised in the previous post on John Swinton’s pastoral theodicy, Raging with Compassion, here is the second quotation from T F Torrance. Incidentally, both this and the earlier quote are good examples of Torrance’s long theological sentences, with their extended cadences and cumulative clauses, pushing the reader relentlessly and persuasively onwards to a destination and conclusion never far from the saving grace of God in Christ crucified and risen. Torrance represents Scottish theology at its best – erudite, evangelical, experiential, indebted to and constructively critical of the Reformed tradition.

    "Yet this is only at the cost of an act, utterly incomprehensible to us, whereby God has taken the sorrow, pain and agony of the universe into himself in order to resolve it all through his own eternal righteousness, tranquility and peace. The centre and heart of that incredible movement of God’s love is located in the cross of Christ, for there we learn that God has refused to hold himself aloof from the violence and suffering of his creatures, but has absorbed and vanquished them in himself, while the resurrection tells us that the outcome of that is so completely successful in victory over decay, decomposition and death, that all creation with which God allied himself so inextricably in the incarnation has been set on the entirely new basis of his saving grace".

    It is Swinton’s aim to show the theological and practical implications of such a theology of the cross as they are applied in the life of the Christian community as it encounters and experiences evil, human suffering and the inevitable brokenness of life in a disordered creation.

    "In like manner", he argues, "the community that seeks to image God and wait faithfully for the return of God’s Messiah is called to develop modes of being and forms of action that will similarly absorb suffering and resist evil". (p. 67)

    080282997x_01__aa240_sclzzzzzzz_ Swinton is not aiming to answer the question ‘why’ evil and suffering exist. Accepting the theological assumptions of a broken, disordered, fallen creation, the reality and pervasiveness of sin, and the deeper definitively  foundational reality of eternal love that is responsive to the sufferings of God’s creation, Swinton pursues strategies that seek to answer the question ‘how’: how to understand "who God is, what evil is, and what it might mean to live with the reality of evil in a way that maintains our faith and hope in the providential goodness of God". (p. 68)

    There are five further chapters in which Swinton attempts to expound such gestures of redemption and strategies for resistance. So over the next couple of weeks, five more posts on the remaining five chapters.

  • Hauerwas 12 – embarrassing triviality or what?

    Hauerwas_3 Matthew 17 contains the perplexing miracle of Peter being told by Jesus to catch a fish, find a coin in its mouth and pay the temple tax. It sounds for all the world like one of those childish miracle stories where Jesus does the odd trick with divine power. Various approaches to this story try to reduce its oddity, or its embarrassing triviality – was it a round about way of saying Peter was playfully asked by Jesus to go and do what he knew best, catch fish, and with the proceeds pay the tax. Hardly.

    Hauerwas doesn’t flinch from seeing this story as an embarrassing, demanding, paradigm-shifting story. It reveals the required mindset to live in the Kingdom of God. If you can’t believe such a story of the providence of God, how will you believe the harder story of the meek inheriting the earth, or peacemakers as the true children of God. here is Hauerwas:

    Christians rightly desire to do great things in service to God and in service to the world. But too often Christians think such service must insure the desired outcome. We simply do not believe that we can risk fishing for a fish with a coin in its mouth. Yet no account of the Christian desire to live at peace with our neighbour, who may be also our enemy, is intelligible if Christians no longer trust that God can and will help us catch fish with coins in their mouths. No account of Christian nonviolence is intelligible that does not require, as well as depend on, miracle. Christian discipleship entails our trusting that God has given and will continue to give all that we need to be faithful. (Page 159)

    A good friend with a combative approach to most discussions, often finishes her putting of her case with an affectionately pugnacious question, "So what do you think of that then?"

    Hmmmmm?

  • Hauerwas 11:faithful following to Calvary

    When Jesus said Peter was the rock on which he would build his church, what did he mean? Hauerwas has no doubt –

    ‘Peter stands within the church, charged with keeping the church true to its witness to Jesus….Peter was not called to "keep the peace", but rather to insure that the church has the countless conflicts necessary for its holiness.’

    Hauerwas’ take on Peter’s ability to see and state who Jesus is, is sympathetic. What Jesus says about who he is, how he must die, and what it means to follow him, isn’t an invitation to a more satisfying life. Discipleship isn’t about self-fulfillment, but about faithful following to calvary if need be.

    Jesus therefore, tells his disciples that if they are to follow him they must take up their cross. If they seek to save their lives using the means the world offers to insure their existence, then their lives will be lost. Rather, they must be willing to lose their lives "for my sake" if they are to find life. Jesus is not telling his disciples that if the learn to live unselfishly they will live more satisfying lives. Rather, he says that any sacrifices they make must be done for his sake. The crosses they bear must be ones determined by his cross.(Page 152-3)

    P_profile_haurwas1 The ethicist in Hauerwas is deeply ambivalent about the self-fulfilment motive for following Jesus. The cross isn’t an alternative way to self fulfilment – but an alternative way to live in a violent world, which requires the sacrifice of self as a witness to the self-giving love of God in Christ.

    Over at faith and Theology there is a fascinating post on ‘Ten Propositions on Self Love’, which has attracted an avalanche of comments. It is a good corrective to the self-centering tendency of much contemporary spirituality, theology and ethics. Click on Ben Myers name on the sidebar.

  • Hauerwas 10: The church is the ark….

    Back to eisegesis – maybe even a little spiritualising – but once again Hauerwas has my attention. His use of Matthew’s account of the calming of the storm, as an analogy for a fearful church which like an ark is tossed and threatened by storms, gives the story a dramatic twist that depicts both the missional context and inevitable anxieties of life in the world. If I were going on retreat soon, I’d save the rest of this book for then – Hauerwas is good conversational company, and he does get to the heart of the text, if not always by the recognised paths. In the absence of such a treat, I’ll carry on reading him in the wee spaces of reading time salvaged from life as it is at present.

    Noah_6972_1The church is the ark of the kingdom, but often the church finds herself far from shore and threatened by strong winds and waves. Those in the boat often fail to understand that they are meant to be far from the shore and that to be threatened by a storm is not unusual If the church is faithful she will always be far from the shore. Some, moreover, will be commanded to leave even the safety of the boat to walk on  water.

    A church that challenges the powers of this world is not a church that will need to explain Jesus. Such a church needs only to worship Jesus. To worship Jesus means that the fear we experience from being so far from land in a trackless sea, buffetted by winds and waves, will not dominate our lives. Fear dominates our lives when we assume that our task is to survive death or to save the church. Our task, however, is not survive, but to be faithful witnesses. Fear cannot dominate our lives if we have good work to do. Good work to do is but another name for worship.

  • Hauerwas 9:the power they pretend to possess

    P_hauerwas0014_2 Matthew’s story about Herod, John the Baptist and Herodias is the only story in this gospel which does not involve Jesus. And Hauerwas is alert to the political realities of power in his reading of a petty tyrant’s cruelties and insecurities. The connection between political power and popular approval is dangerous – for tyrant and oppressed.

    "Matthew has described the insecurity of those in power who depend on the presumption of those around them; that is, they must act in a manner that assures those they rule as well as themselves that they possess the power they pretend to possess. The powerful lack the power to be powerful, which means that they live lives of destructive desperation. That desperation, moreover, often results in others paying the price of their insecurity". (page 138).

    Intended or not (and knowing Hauerwas, I think it is) that is an incisive comment on the recent history of Britain and America, our leadership and their policies. Leaders trying to "assure those they rule that they possess the power they pretend to possess".

    The next story, the feeding of the crowds, has the same political critique. Jesus feeds the hungry out of compassion, and because they are hungry. Herod feeds those who are not hungry as a way of showing his power and buying their favour. Jesus’ feeding of the hungry is an alternative politics to that of envy, greed and purchased popularity. How exactly the story fits the current news, eh?

    "Those who would be Jesus’ disciples need to learn how to feed the hungry in a manner that charity does not become a way to gain power over those who are fed. There is a violent and nonviolent way to feed the hungry". (Page 139)

    It is interesting, and spiritually astringent, to read a commentary on the gospel which is so outspokenly frank in its commentary on the kind of world Jesus calls us to confront, subvert, love and feed…. a world of Herodian banquets and hungry crowds.

  • Hauerwas 8: It’s that simple

    Hauerwas_2 " The parable of the sower is not often considered by those concerned with the loss of the church’s status and membership in Europe and America, but it is hard to imagine a text more relevant to the situation of churches in the West. Why we are dying seems very simple. It is hard to be a disciple and be rich. Surely, we may think, it cannot be that simple, but Jesus certainly seems to think that it is that simple. The lure of wealth and the cares of the world produced by wealth quite simply darken and choke our imaginations. As a result, the church falls prey to the deepest enemy of the gospel – sentimentality. The gospel becomes a formula for "giving our lives meaning" without judgment. (Page 129)

    Hauerwas is aksing disconcerting questions in his reading of chapter 13. Does Western culture have soil deep enough to grow deep roots? Is the church in the West so identified with the choking entanglements of consumer capitalism and its promised good life that it will inevitably strangle itself?

    ‘Possessed by possession, we desire to act in the world, often on behalf of the poor, without having to lose our possessions…A church that is shrinking in membership may actually be a church in which the soil of the gospel is being prepared in which deeper roots are possible. (Page 130)

    This is Hauerwas commenting on the text by assertion – which he owns up to on the first page of the commentary anyway. But I am finding myself irked by his overstatements – until I ask, overstating what? Not the gospel – because the inevitable consequence of that gospel is that it calls in question the very things I hold on to tightest. And, yes, if Jesus is calling me, the church,us, to relinquish all the stuff that chokes, to risk being deepened by deprivation – that sounds like an overstatement, which means it is probably gospel truth.

  • Hauerwas 7:the gospel is not a conquering idea

    Now and again Hauerwas is so engrossed in his conversation with Matthew, Bonhoeffer and Yoder, that his view of Christian discipleship, and of the Jesus who calls, is couched in the language of all three! Here’s a quotation where Yoder’s view of the non-violent Gospel precluding aggressive forms of evangelism, and Bonhoeffer’s portrayal of the self-emptying Word, and Matthew’s portrayal of discipleship as a radical unselfing of the self, coalesce in a theological restatement of Christian obedience.

    Bonhoeffer Following Christ requires our recognising that the one I am tempted to judge is like me – a person who has received the forgiveness manifest in the cross. The recognition that the other person is like me – in need of forgiveness – prevents those who would follow Jesus from trying to force others to follow Jesus. We must, like Jesus, have the patience necessary to let those called deny that call. It means that the disciples are not called to make the world conform to the gospel, but rather the disciples are schooled to be non-violent – which means that the Gospel is not a "conquering idea" that neither knows nor respects resistance. Rather,[as Bonhoeffer comments]  "the Word of God is so weak that it suffers to be despised and rejected by people. For the Word, there are such things as hardened hearts and locked doors. The Word accepts the resistance it encounters and bears it."

    That paragraph is a needed antidote for the underlying triumphalism that informs much thinking about mission, church, christendom, evangelism. And I’m left wondering, because I’ve seldom been asked as bluntly to think about it, what a Christian existence might look like if we stopped thinking of the gospel as a "conquering idea"; if in Christian apologetics the underlying principles were forbearance, patience and respect for this other person, who needs God’s forgiveness which cannot be imposed by logic or compelled by argument, but perhaps which can be caught by the contagion of the Kingdom, the love that does not need acceptance to endure and persist. One of hauerwas’ magnificent overstated but necessary one liners, "The Father has refused to let our refusal determine our relationship to him….we are God’s enemies yet God would still love us – even coming to die for us."