Living Wittily

Category: ministry

  • We need to stop using “WE NEED TO….” in preaching

    We need to….

    We ought to….

    We must…..

    I once heard a brilliant Valedictory Address by Dr Derek Murray more than 30 years ago, in which he spoke about pastoral care as avoiding guilt-making. I’ve never forgotten the gentleness, compassion and pastoral wisdom of that address. Now I have no doubt at all that New Testament Christianity is profoundly, even outrageously challenging, demanding. And I know Paul especially, but John in his First Letter, and Peter and James, all assume a rigorous ethic of either imitating Jesus, being clothed with Christ, following Jesus in persevering obedience, getting the connection between discipleship and discipline, between trust and trying, between works and faith. But throughout the New Testament Gospel is Gospel, and the massive assumption that underwrites all Christian living is the invasive, radically renewing grace of God in Christ.

    3orsini Guilt is NOT the primary motivator; guilt is countered by grace and transmuted into gratitude which is then reminted in worship and service. New creation means the old has gone – including those buttons that are easily pushed to make us feel guilty, and which then act as levers to make us act differently, and live the way we are told to. But preaching the challenge of the Gospel is not about making sure I’m confronted with my own failure to live up to the demand of Christ; it is being reminded again of the grace unspeakable; it is being shown again the tragic beauty of holiness in Christ crucified and the triumphant glory of Christ risen; it is being drawn again towards that ingrasping love that reaches out to me in all my weakness, and failure and need. In fact the most important use of the word ‘need’ is not what I need to do, but that I need, and that Christ is all I need! What I need is not a moral makeover, but a miracle.

    Of course there is a place for conviction of sin, for recognising that even at our best we are unprofitable servants. But the wonder of the Gospel is that God doesn’t write us or others off as unthinkingly as we or others do. If it was up to some of us, and some of us preachers with our ‘we need to’ and ‘we must’, and ‘we ought to’ approach to ministry, the Gospel would be far less scandalous, grace would be far less free (by the way, how can something be less free anyway?), the love of God would begin to be brought under much more stringent theological control instead of being such an indiscriminate and endlessly patient mercy that pours down on our heads in huge cataracts of restoring, redemptive, renewing passion.

    The Christian heart is brought again to obedience and held in continuing obedience, not by any preacher’s scolding, not by diminishing me but by exalting Christ, by a Gospel proclaimed, by grace, mercy, and peace finding their ultimate focus on Calvary where God in the holiness of love encounters our sin at its most persistent and worst, and in its most trivialising disloyalty – and overcomes it. Grace is not only free it is liberating; holy love is not only forgiving, it is enabling; and my sin, my oft recurring sin, becomes by a mystery beyond telling, the occasion for a divine intervention that restores my soul. And if someone wants they can press my guilt button, but before I can ever think about changing my ways, I need to find my way, yet again, to the one who changes me.

    The hymn Amazing Grace is too easily eclipsed by cliche. But it tells a truth that should quality control all preaching that claims to be Gospel preaching.

    ’twas grace that brought me safe thus far,

    and grace will lead me home.’

    Newton was too clear-headed a Calvinist ever to make our relationship to God in Christ dependent on our own performance. ‘We need to….we ought to….we must….’ . Moral exhortation has its own importance, but when I go to worship what I need to hear preached is not my failure, but my Saviour; not my sins but the cross; not what I need to do, but what Christ has done with my deepest need.

  • Children’s work a hundred years ago

    Been an unsatisfying but sanctifying day. Spent most of it doing lots of cosmetic fiddly stuff with a massive 250 page document getting it ready for printing. Whoever formatted the template built in various safeguards that kept making the blessed document ( I use the word beatitudinally) do all the wrong things. This incrementally increased the longsuffering aspect in my overall sanctification portfolio.

    Then I spent a while writing a brilliant post for this blog – vintage rant, ascerbic wit, politically subversive, carefully crafted with minimal semantic infelicities. Went to save it and the blessed Web page expired message came up. Again I use the word beatitudinally. This tragic loss to the literary archives tested the resilience of that other slow ripening fruit of the Spirit which is likely to become an area for ongoing self development in any spiritual audit I do, self control. Indeed it probably becomes one of the learning outcomes in my lifelong learning programme.

    So here I am. And I’ve scanned in a wee card I found in a second hand book. The date written in neat fountain pen on the back is March 18th 1903. As you can see it’s an invite to a children’s meeting in one of Glasgow’s biggest public halls. Changed days, eh? The speaker was the renowned R A Torrey, who knew a few things about sanctification. Wrote books on holiness, Bible study, prayer, the work of the Holy Spirit. The singer was Mr Alexander. Not sure if he was an Edwardian Stephen Fischbacher, but apparently the weans were going to be ministered to by a big name preacher and a soloist. Eat your heart out Lynn from ‘help I work with Children’ (By the way, where are you Lynn – haven’t had your wisdom / wit / wistfulness / for a wee while?

    Book_2 

  • Moltman”s theological autobiography

    51urzon0g0l__aa240_ The first 60 pages of Moltmann’s autobiography are a mixture of memoir, hindsight, family gossip and reflections on the formative experiences of war and the political and spiritual rebuilding of Europe. Some of the central insights and arguments of Moltmann’s later theology are traced to experiences that now, with hindsight and from the perspective of an established theologian, he sees to be of decisive impact on his development. To that extent, autobiography provides important context for his theology – and it’s up to us, the readers, to decide if this is crucial inside information that drove his theological interests, or whether his established theological positions are being read back into earlier experiences. Almost certainly both, and who better to interpret and contextualise the personal world out of which theology grows, than the person who lived in it and through it. Of course there are other contextual perspectives, perhaps better detailed by more objective observers – but they don’r have the passion, the poignancy and the personal nerve centre that vitalises theological autobiography.

    Here’s one of Moltmann’s pastoral memories – worth pondering by those called to preach living words to living people that enhance life. he is recalling his early days as a totally inexperienced pastor in a rural and remote farming community:

    My own personal theology developed as I went from house to house and visited the sick. If things went well, on Monday I learnt the text for the following Sunday’s sermon, took it with me as I visited the congregation and then knew what I had to say in my sermon. Here a ‘hermeneutical circle’ developed, not the one between textual interpretation and one’s own private interpretation…but the one between textual interpretation  and the experience of a community of people, in their families, among their neighbours, and in their work. In conversation I came to believe that this was a shared theology of believers and doubters, the downcast and the consoled.

    Jurgen Moltmann, A Broad Place, pages 59-60.

  • …compassion and ethically galvanised sorrow for the state of the world

    Merton1 Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain is a flawed masterpiece of spiritual autobiography. But frankly, any spiritual autobiography that isn’t flawed isn’t much good to those of us who, flawed as we are ourselves, are looking for companions in realism, guides who even if they know the road better than we do, still find it hard to follow. What makes Merton’s self-told story both fascinating and moving, is that it was written by a young man who, in later life, regretted some of the faults in his book that others were quick enough to point out to him.

    With distance it’s obvious, at times embarrassingly obvious, that the book is marred by the triumphalism of pre Vatican II Roman Catholicism and by Merton’s dismissiveness, even caricature, of other Christian traditions.

    And then also, at times Merton’s memories of his own sinfulness get him entangled in explaining the machinations and intricacies of his guilt-laden conscience to his readers, but only succeeding in a less than authentic moralising and self-despising, which is hindsight at its least helpful as it hints at a still uncompleted sense of renewal through forgiveness.

    And his earlier separation of sacred and secular amounted to a practical dualism, a separation of life into categories of holiness that he later did much to oppose. Some of his best later writing provides important guidance on how to live a whole life in which such categories dissolve into a reconciled worldview, a balanced lifestyle and an openly generous spirituality that is alert to the presence and activity of God in all things. It’s this later Merton I most value, before his fascination with Eastern faith traditions pushed him towards much less orthodox interests.

    But reading this book again over Christmas my respect and affection for Merton is undiminished. Because with all its flaws it is a book that tackles the big question of our life’s meaning, of whether life is driven by a sense of the rights and selfishnesses of the sovereign fragemented self, or whether life’s purpose is to be discovered in response to God’s call to lose ourselves in self-surrender to the sovereign love and severe mercy of the one in whose gift is our life, and in whose healing is our wholeness. I am a Baptist, not a Trappist; yet I sense a kindred spirit in Merton, one who knows as I know myself, that the call of God is both sovereign command and self-giving love. And that in our encounter with Christ we touch the deepest reality of all, the Reality that not only enables us to be, but wills our being, eternally, redemptively, entirely, and wills our being for no other reason than love for us, and for the whole creation that awaits its redemption.

    The fact that Merton’s was a monastic vocation in the middle years of the 20th Century does nothing to reduce the relevance and very great importance of his insights into the disfigurements and diseases of 21st century existence. Indeed he believed that as a contemplative holding the world in his heart before God, he was called to see clearly, to speak courageously and to act prophetically on behalf of peace and humanity. And this is possible at all because it is the contemplative who takes time to see below the surface of things, to view the world from a spiritual standpoint, to develop and nurture resources of compassion and ethically galvanised sorrow for the state of the world.

    51ttif4gqll__ss500_ As an Evangelical, I am aware of the deep resources of intentional silence, thoughtful solitude, contemplative and compassionate reflection, which the monastic tradition instils – and of which Evangelicals are often impatient or even suspicious. But in a world that is complex now beyond description, in which ethical choices are reduced to pragmatic options, when huge issues of the human future now need addressing, there is a need for a durable spiritual resourcefulness rooted deep in the Christian tradition. Our churches need to begin forming and nurturing people trained and rooted in contemplative wisdom, communities hungry for a recovery of personal holiness formed through prayer but allied to an ethical agility unafraid of tight-ropes. Globalisation and consumerism, terrorism and militarism, pluralism and polarisation, ecological urgency and theological uncertainty, are some of the oscillating voices of a world confused by its own complexity, and bankrupt by its own profligacy.

    The writing and the legacy of Thomas Merton is for me, an important resource, empowering and articulating such politically responsive and spiritually responsible prayerfulness. I know of little in Evangelical spiritual practices which come near to such non-functional contemplative dwelling in the Reality of God so as to challenge pervasive realities such as global consumerism. Somewhere in our missiologically driven activism, there must be found place for contemplative prayer, dwelling deep in the truth and Reality of God, learning patiently to see clearly and act faithfully.

    In the coming year, I will offer occasional reminders of Merton’s gift for transfusing contemplative prayer and faithful action into a life that is Christian, explicitly and outspokenly, Christian.

  • When is a sermon past its use by date?

    Friday afternoon I spent a while sifting through an impressive pile of my previous sermons stretching back at least 20 years. Fascinating how what I preached then doesn’t seem to cut it now; and the contemporary engagement with political, historical and ecclesial events now dates them, in the negative sense of out of date, but also in the positive sense that when they were preached, they were taking the life and events of the world seriously.

    Sermons referring to Piper Alpha (when I was in Aberdeen), the invasion of Kuwait, Nelson Mandela’s release and the overturning of apartheid laws, the Berlin Wall, numerous Balkan conflicts (appearing in several remembrance Sunday sermons), the crushing of student protests in Tianneman Square by the Chinese military, the Omagh bombing when on the Saturday afternoon I went into the study and did an entirely different sermon;

    numerous harvest sermons asking increasingly serious questions about ecological concerns, globalisation and non-accountable economics; the Ethiopian famines, the Lockerbie bombing, the Dunblane and Hungerford massacres;

    various attempts to think Christianly about consumerism, the lottery, genetic science developments; affirmations and questionings about changing views of church, mission, faith and work;

    regular explorations of the meaning of the Lord’s Supper, the blessings, the challenge, the frustrations and the guilt trips associated with praying or not praying; the nature of the church as community, agonising about inter-faith dialogue and the uniqueness of Christ…..and so on….and on….and on.

    Domeafter_lg A quick scan of the texts preached caused no surprise – the Gospels are well ahead of Paul, some of the OT narratives are well represented including Moses, Jacob, Joseph, Elijah and Samuel and David. Ruth and Jonah I’ve preached through twice! But the thick pile of sermon notes in one bundle shows Isaiah has been a key text in my ministry and in my life ever since as a 19 year old I sat in a car, beside the River Tay in Perth, and prayed really hard that I’d manage not to make a fool of myself when I preached for the first time in a ‘real’ Baptist church. I opened my Bible at Isaiah 43 and the first words I read were ‘Fear not I have redeemed you; I have called you by name….’ I’ve never doubted that random anxious flicking through Scripture was whatever the divine equivalent is to a reassuring arm round my shoulder. I still have the handwritten sermon, in a brown paper covered notebook – it was on Philippians and the AV text "I press on towards the mark of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus". I’ll never chuck that one out – it’s one of those holy relics that remind me of grace that takes our ordinariness and makes it sing. If forced to have only one book in the Bible other than the Gospels it would be Isaiah then, a book I’ve learned to call the fifth gospel.

    Anyway and anyhow, I’ve been preaching for over thirty years so there’s a lot of this stuff despite previous clear outs. James Denney claimed to have burned all his sermons when he left Broughty Ferry in 1897, but fortunately there’s still a few hundred of them so he must only have burned the ones he thought unpreachable elsewhere. Whatever, it’s time to engage in some discriminating sifting to see how many might be worth keeping. Having made a start I’ve got one carrier bag full of sermons now well past their use by date.

    Question 1. What criteria should be used to decide if a sermon preached in the past is worth keeping now?

    Question 2. Should an old sermon ever be re-cycled?

  • The unimportance of the visitor, the all importance of the patient, and the blessing of our nurses

    Hospitalnursesfocusonnurseinblueuni I went to visit one of our students who is seriously ill and in ITU at the hospital. In the end I couldn’t see him because medical staff were busy doing all the things that need to be done to help and support a patient confronting serious illness. I’ve done such visits often enough over the years, and I’m still left with several deep convictions confirmed – about ministry, about gestures, about the unimportance of the visitor and the all importance of the patient, and about the miraculous humanity of nurses.

    1. To visit another human being who is going through deep times of suffering, weakness and that uncertainty that is part of every life but now and again becomes acute, is to be put in the privileged position of being allowed to minister. None of us IS a minister, certainly not by right or office. Ministry takes place when we first offer ourselves and only then whatever help we can bring. In that sense the verb ‘to minister’ will always be primary – the noun merely describes the person so privileged.
    2. I’m sorry I didn’t see our friend. But I recognise that to go, to be there, to yield to that instinct that values gestures of kindness and affirmation as part of the fabric of the grace and humanity the Holy Spirit uses in the work of healing and holding others, is to simply put ourselves in the place where, in God;s grace, intention matters.
    3. Visiting those who are very unwell requires a deep and gentle firmness that recognises the vulnerability and preciousness of the other person. There are few places where it is more important for the talkative ego to be silenced than in the place where another human being is suffering, vulnerable, and more important than anyone else present.
    4. Nurses are saints. I mean that in a way that could never come close to being exaggeration or cliche. I’d give them all an immediate £5k rise, just for starters. Caring for others in acute illness requires professional skill, human compassion, tough protective barriers that keep well meaning others at a distance, and an inner toughness in themselves that mean they get on with what needs to be done, but at a personal cost most of us just guess at. Few people know more about pastoral care, and how reverence and realism are both required in caring for, working with, the patient frightened at how their unwell body threatens their very sense of self.

    Cb004011 Tonight I pray for the friend I went to visit, for his mum, his aunt, and others for whom he is a special presence in their family. I pray too for nurses, whose gift of caring brings such telling demands, and without whom illness, hospital and the thought of facing whatever lies ahead of us there, would be unbearably more lonely and frightening. Perhaps it’s only me, but I’ve come to recognise that when we have been in a hospital, as visitor or patient, we are reminded of our mortality, our humanity, and those gossamer threads of life and possibility that are held together in that fragile tension that is our own future. Faith is to trust God in that place of fragile tension, and know that there we are held in the grip of a purpose both eternal and good.

  • Commemorating Ordination 8. Great Books

    1996 David Denby, Great Books

    21t6wtkts3l__aa115_ One of the great literary and cultural arguments for the last generation has been whether or not there is a Western Literary Canon. And if there is, is this a good thing? Isn’t it the case that those who say what the great books are, have the advantage of dictating literary and cultural values? Classics are attributed an authority that can be used as a way of silencing, marginalising, even rubbishing the voices that don’t fit the favoured elites and empowered cultural norms. After all why should George Eliot’s Middlemarch represent the great novelist’s literary benchmark, and Bridget Jones be dismissed as chick lit? Or why should Homer’s Odyssey be given canoncial status and placed on a different literary level from Lord of the Rings, arguably the greatest quest fantasy of the 20th century? And is Jane Austen the epitome of literary craft and human observation or at best a more or less boring, perhaps an occasionally amusing writer, who pales alongside today’s more emotionally outspoken and psychologically informed writers like Margaret Attwood, Anne Tyler or Penelope Lively?

    148_profile I bought David Denby’s, Great Books, to commemorate my ordination in 1996, and to indulge my passion and interest in the influence of reading, and the role of books as great literature on the culture of the individual mind and of any given society. David Denby was in 1996 Film Critic for the New York Magazine (still is I think). In 1961 as a student he took the ‘Great Books’ course at Columbia University but didn’t take it all that seriously. So 30 years later he went back to take the course again, as an experienced, mature, hardened social and media critic, and to do so in a class, interacting with the students and ‘instructors’. The book is the account of that year – and it is wonderful reading, at times annoyingly clever, but mostly honest and wise. He describes lying on the sofa reading and trying to ‘get’ Kant, feeling the heart-rending tragedies of Sophocles, amazed at the subtly cynical but politically effective power plays of Machiavelli, bemused by Hegel, won over by Jane Austen, going with the flow (of consciousness) that is Virginia Woolf’s take on human experience….and so on throughout the whole academic year.

    Denby summarises and criticises, respects but isn’t intimidated by this exploration of great literature; arguing with mostly everyone, just as often humbly listening to students half his age who are an entire culture removed from Denby’s generation, sometimes he is arrogantly declaring what this or that means, must mean, might mean – but through it all trying to hear what these great books say about what it means to be human, to live a human life, yes to LIVE a human life. I would have to say for myself I learned more about human existence and reflection in this book than in a dozen theology monographs. This is a modern encountering the post-modern in the classroom thirty years on.

    Denby is passionate about what he writes here – this year back at Columbia clearly deepened the irrigation channels in his own spirit. Here is his own description of the ennui that drove him back to school, the creeping boredom that comes from being saturated by media images, the mind being deprived of reflective substance, the emotions depleted from overstimulation and moral muscle atrophied through lack of sufficient exercise:

    By the early nineties I was beginning to be sick at heart, sick not of movies or movie criticism but of living my life inside…the society of the spectacle – that immense system of representation and simulacra, the thick atmosphere of information and imagery and attitudes that forms the mental condition and habits of almost any adult living in a media society. A member of the media, I was also tired of the media; I was more than uneasy in that vale of shadows, that frenetic but gloomy half-life filled with names, places, chatter, acts, cars racing, gunshots, expertstalking, daytime couples accusing one another of infidelity, the sheer busyness of it all, the constant movement, the incredible activity and utter boredom, the low hum of needs being satisfied.

    That last italicised phrase is the clue to the book. Denby went looking for substance, not to have needs satisfied, but to understand the nature of human longing that gives rise to needs, to encounter the tragic and the comic, the romance and the quest, the philosophical search for enlightenment and the poet’s quest for meaning. And he went looking for all this in the great books of the Western Canon.

    Here is Denby again

    I know longer knew what I knew. I felt that what I had read or understood was slipping away. I possessed information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs. The foundations of the building were turning to sand while I sat in the upper balconies looking out at the sea. Feeling the wiggle, I knew I was in trouble. I sensed my identity had softened and merged into the atmosphere of representation, and I couldn’t quite see where it ended and I began. My own memories were lapsing out into the fog of media life, the unlived life as spectator.

    As a Christian, a preacher, a pastor, and as a human being first of all, I found this book to be quietly but persistently an argument for recovering the power of literature to shape and enrich, to inform and nourish, to deepen and in the end to humanise, human life. I’ve read this book three times and expect to enjoy it again.

    And it is ridiculously cheap on Amazon – which tends to suggest not everyone thinks it’s as wonderful as I do. Don’t care! Or as Catherine Tate might say, (and with due acknowledgement of the source!), in language unlikely to establish itself in the Western Canon, ‘Not bovvered’!

  • Commemorating Ordination 7: Jesus and the Shalom of Israel

    I hadn’t really intended to let a few reflections on previously bought books grow into a series – but I now find it personally intriguing trying to trace some of my footprints through books bought years ago because they were significant at the time – and now might not be, or might still be. Apologies for what is therefore becoming self-indulgence!

    1994 Joel Green (ed) Jesus of Nazareth Lord and Christ.

    Marshall This is the sixtieth birthday collection of essays in honour of Howard Marshall. Thirty essays, and only one by a woman – Ruth Edwards, herself a careful, unassuming but deeply learned New Testament scholar, and dedicated Episcopal priest. But there are some important essays here – some of them heavy going. Such essays date quite quickly, and some of them have already been overtaken by scholarship, sometimes by the essay writer’s own developing thought. But most of Howard’s main areas of biblical interest (which are remarkably wide) are represented. I value the book for reasons of personal friendship, and because I think Howard Marshall’s contribution to New Testament scholarship and to Evangelical credibility in the academy, is in the same tradition, and on the same scale, as his mentor F. F. Bruce.

    1995 S. M. Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Elie Wiesel: You are My Witnesses.

    0824505425_01__ss500_sclzzzzzzz_v11 My view of the world, of faith, and of how faith and tragedy combine in the deep moments of personal and moral life, is long indebted to these two Jewish thinkers. Heschel (is that not a wonderful face on the book cover?) was a remarkable thinker, whose work on the prophets and the pathos of God represents some of the most profound theology and humane reflection I have ever read. It deeply influenced Moltmann. Elie Wiesel (pictured below) is a holocaust survivor whose writing is dedicated to ensuring that the world never forgets the story of mechanised evil and genocidal hatred that befell central Europe. Wiesel’s two volume autobiorgaphy, All Rivers Run to the Sea, and The Sea is Never Full, I read while on holiday in Yorkshire – they are a remarkable account of a human life lived in the shadow of great evil, and refusing to allow his humanity to be eclipsed by the memories of such moral horror.

    Wie0_image Friedman’s book examines the life values of these two Jewish thinkers, one a devout philosopher, the other an agnostic novelist, both of them men whose writing glows with morally generated power. Reading this I was conscious of two people, whose life experience and intellectual legacies require those of us who are Christians to read them humbly, and thank God for their capacity to construe and construct a worldview lacking in that embittered hostility that inevitably ignites enmity. They represent the ethical genius of Judaism. They are the obvious riposte to those who say religion per se is inevitably the source of violence, hatred and enmity. As a book to commemorate my ordination to Christian ministry, it compelled searching reflection then, as now, on the relationship between God’s ancient people, and the Church of Jesus Christ, within the family of faith that traces its genealogy to Abraham. Shalom.

  • Commemorating ordination 6. Gospel, Mission and Scotland

    1991 John Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel.

    51h2t9vj35l__bo2204203200_pisitbdp5 Along with the likes of C. H. Dodd, John Robinson, Stephen Smalley and Raymond Brown, this massive monograph by Ashton holds its own on my shelves as an elegant and encylopeadic account of how John’s Gospel has been understood , especially through the lens of Bultmann. Ashton brilliantly commented that Bultmann asks all the right questions and usually gets all the wrong answers. But another master of Johannine scholarship, B. F. Wescott famously said that he would give a First Class Honours to a student who could write a first class examination paper which asks the right questions. This was the summer read the year that my own book on Evangelical Spirituality was published. Ashton on John provided a different scholarly landscape (and refreshing relief) from the history of Evangelicalism, biography and desk-loads of primary Evangelical literary outpourings.

    1992 David Bosch, Transforming Mission.

    41jk2wdtgsl__aa240_ This is one of the great Christian books of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Along with Newbigin, Bosch put missiology right up the theological agenda for many of us. I read this book throughout Advent and preached on Christmas and Mission for four Sundays. I still have the sermons, and I can still remember the mind expanding scale of this marvellous book. The pencil marks and comments are like footprints of a long satisfying journey. As a minister, preacher and Christian trying to get a sense of the scale of the Gospel / culture / church equation, this book provided an utterly dependable orientation.

    1993 Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology.

    Tartan_shirts_ After I bought this I was sent a review copy! So a pal got a freebie. There’s nothing else like this volume. For Scottish Christians interested in our own wee (but rich and influential) cluster of Christian traditions, this volume is all but indispensable. Now out of print – a casualty of a great Scottish Publisher, T&T Clark, being absorbed and assimilated by the globalising BORG – it can only be bought second-hand usually requiring a mini-mortgage. There’s hardly a week goes by but I have this book open. There are some gaps, and some of the articles reflect the views, even prejudices of the writers, but it’s a five star book nevertheless.

  • 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!