Category: Politics, Faith and Theology

Dag Hammarskjöld: 1. Recovering the Moral Burden Inherent in Political Action.

Writing the Saturday Sermon for our North East paper The Press and Journal, and chasing a quotation to its source, I picked up Dag Hammarsköld's book Markings. I've read this book off and on since I first came across a reference to it in a slim book by Mark Gibbard, Twentieth Century Men of Prayer. I bought a Faber pbk and read it through in a sitting. And my mind was as uncomfortable as an overloaded digestive system. It isn't a book to devour, but to sample; it isn't fast food for the soul, more a health food to be eaten slowly, and in small increments. This is a writer who is unpredictable in tone, theologically subversive, either interrogative or imperative in mood, at times enigmatic and perplexing, at other times inspirational, energising mind and heart alternatively, and occasionally simultaneously.

Markings is the English translation by W H Auden of a diary written in Swedish by a man of immense intellectual vision and global diplomatic reputation. Hammarskjöld was the first Secretary General of the United Nations, a man of profound and at times anguished Christian faith, a quiet and private person who confided his self-doubts, prayers, and his hopes and visions for humanity to his diary. He wrote in brief poems, sharply observed epigraphs, meditations no more than a paragraph long, zen like riddles and one liners and frequent quotations and references from the Psalms. One or two entries at a time is enough to be going on with, so that the book is best read the way it was found after Hammarskjöld's death, at the bedside; or failing that, on a seat with a coffee or tea, and five minutes to listen and think in the company of a remarkable man.

Reading Markings again I hear that same stern voice calling for integrity of thought and action, and articulating a near stoic acceptance of human life as a gift laden with responsibility. But Hammarskjöld was no mere moralist, and no under-resourced humanist facing courageously an indifferent universe. Markings is a gathering of his best ore, wide seams glittering with the gold of a faith that had grasped forgiveness, experienced grace, surrendered to vocation, and envisioned peace as a purpose worth living and dying for. Indeed to die for what one believes in is the proof that we believed it in the first place. "Never. – for the sake of peace and quiet, deny your own experience or convictions."

This is a man who understood sacrifice, and the Gospel truth of the seed that must die or it will forever be merely that, – a seed, an unfulfilled promise, a locked up promise never realised. That stern voice again: " Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for." Remember these words were written for his eyes only, in a diary that went everywhere with him. These were words addressed to himself. And here is the zen like puzzle that he sets himself, and afterwards, those of us who read these remarkable pages:

What makes loneliness an anguish

Is not that I have no one to share my burden,

But this:

I have only my own burden to bear.

I cannot help but love a man talking to himself with such searing honesty about himself, and at the same time, looking beyond himself to a burdened world, and feeling personally the weight of that suffering and and a sense of responsibility for all that weighs down human lives. These are the words of a global diplomat, a man of huge prestige in his time, and he takes time to write in his diary words that unlock the secret places of one who saw himself as a peace maker and a hope builder in a world divided by the Cold War and riven by post colonial conflicts in Africa and Asia. That he died in a plane crash while on a peace mission to the then Belgian Congo is one of those ironies that adds even greater mystery to a man who lived at a level of political and ethical vision, rare in his day, and verging on extinction in our own media ridden politics of the 21st Century. "In our era the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action." That is one of his most anthologised lines. He lived and died living out of that conviction.

(The quotations are from page 84-5 of my edition, published by Knopf 1964)

1 September 2016
Keir Hardie, The Labour Party and the State We Are In.

I've been enjoying Bob Holman's study of Keir Hardie for various reasons. Professor Holman was one of the finest teachers I had at Glasgow University. Much of Hardie's life was lived in and around Cumnock, in Ayrshire, where much of my own childhood was spent. His background in mining, and the importance of the mines in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire resonates with my own family history in which back to 1860 on both sides, my own family were predominantly miners. And therefore his passionate outspoken criticism of wealth built on low wages and dreadful housing, of inherited privilege and its political protections, and his compassion for poor labourers, destitute unemployed and all but abandoned elderly poor likewise fires my own political and ethical opposition to injustice that is systemic and the valuing of human life on economic and financial scales.

An intriguing series of parallels with Jeremy Corbyn makes it even more interesting. Hardie was mocked and verbally abused for daring to come into Parliament dressed in workers' tweeds; he was not prepared to validate the class elitism of the monarchy and on numerous occasions was outspoken about the cost of the monarchy, the indifference of the royal family to the plight of workers, and the validation of the Czar by a royal visit seeking trade agreements; he was vehemently opposed to militarism and especially the recruiting of working class young people to fight in the interests of Empire economics abroad. It would be too far to say Corbyn has modelled his political style and actions on Hardie, but there is strong DNA evidence of a common ancestry of ideas.

Reading this story shows the vast distance that the modern Labour Party has travelled away from its social, ethical and ideological roots. In some ways it has had to adapt and develop, reshape and reinvent, in a rapidly changing world. But you are left with the question: If the blade of my spade wears out and I replace it, then the handle breaks and I replace it, do I still have the same spade – indeed, depending on what I replace the aprts with, do I still have a spade at all?

19 October 2015
Leaving University In Debt or Indebted? The Long Term Cost of Student Debt.

I posted these thoughts of Chomsky the other day on my FB page. At the time they seemed to be saying something important about education. Reflecting further they are also saying something about human formation and the processes that shape our values and our way of looking at the world. Then as I've gone on thinking about it I have the uncomfortable feeling that his words are a warning that we are well on our way to losing any conception of education as humanising gift, social capital, cultural treasury, creative possibility for the future, imaginative empowerment of the minds, affections and commitments of the recent and coming generations of pupils and students.

Trying to pinpoint the precise nature of unease isn't easy. Education does have to be paid for by somebody. Schools and Universities are expensive places where learning is impossible to measure in the pounds it costs, saves or will ultimately make. Chomsky's warnings ring with the alarm notes of a social prophet – trapped in debt, no time to think, thus unlikely, unable to think about chnaging society because of the burden of debt and the urge to earn. These two phrases "unable to afford the time to think" and "unlikely to think about changing society" are chilling outcomes of an educational process which requires the student to mortgage much more than large amounts of money. A burden of debt, and a sense of having been burdened, is deeply corrosive of social capital, and ultimately fatal to that altruism that springs from gratitude and instils a commitment to the common good.

An education bought at the price of long term debt, knowledge and know how purchased on a mortgage, a relentless focus on employability and the market as key drivers in educational aspiration, reduces education to commodity, pupil and student to customer, and having paid for my own education I am entitled to exploit it in the market place. When that happens what are the chances of intellectual energy focused on making life better, imaginative thinking towards new possibilities, creative and critical reflection on change and opportunities for others, and fundamental to each of these is, ironically, the feeling of indebtedness. A person's fundamental attitude to the culture in which they have grown and been nourished, allowing for all the social inequalities and diversities of life chances, is defined largely by how that word is used.

If indebtedness means I have been supported through my education, and if I have been enabled and empowered by the processes of learning and formation and growing, then I am likely to be a net contributor to my community. If I live in a culture that takes for granted the right to education towards fulfilling and living into my potential, and if that gift implies sacrifice for others on my behalf, and part of the educational process is a deepening awareness of such gift, then a sense of indebtedness will solidify into gratitude. The giving and receiving of co-operative and communal resources in the education of each person is one of the essential pillars of social security and the common good.

Indebtedness for a gift is very different from being in debt for £50,000 and seeing my education as something I bought and out of which no one has any further claim. Employability, career trajectory, personal development, earning potential, plus the debt I now have to pay off, have become the values that will drive my thinking and acting and sense of social responsibility. I have become through being in debt, someone who has no sense of indebtedness. My education is my possession, and my product with which to play in the market. I have become "an efficient component in the consumer market."

In debt or indebted. Resentful or grateful. Owing my community nothing, or owing it my life and my living. Education as product or as gift. University as knowledge supermarket or as school for life and living. I know. I'm fully aware of the issues of funding, grants, loans, part time work, sacrifice and sheer toil for very many of our students; and equally aware of Government spending priorities and the need for viable economic strategies of affordability in the economic realities in which we are enmeshed on a global scale. But training generations of our students to think of their education as purchased employability, rather than enabled humanity, is short-sighted and will have its own economic, social and ultimately political consequences. And they will be different from what might have been, had these same generations of students come out of University, not in debt, but nevertheless indebted, grateful, still employable and ambitious, but with an undertow of indebtedness, gratitude and acknowledged responsibility. Or so it seems to this erstwhile theological educator, who came late to University, and whose own personal story is of education as grant aided, as gift, and as otherwise impossible.

28 July 2015
A Long reflection on the General Election in Three Parts. Part 1

All my life I have been interested in politics. I don't mean curious, I mean taking an interest because I have an interest in how my life is affected by political decisions and policies. My father and mother were passionately Labour, hard to be otherwise as farm workers in rural Ayrshire. From them I learned the importance of co-operation in working towards a better life for everyone; mum did all her shopping at the Co-operative, an institution founded on values and ideals close to the heart of working folk. From them I also learned the generosity and sheer hard work of those who don't have much, but who have learned how to share, support and above all respect the dignity of people irrespective of income, possessions, address or social background.

I still remember when I was about 6 years of age, the farmer regularly came down to our house at Saturday around lunch time and handed my dad his wages, peeled from a large wad of banknotes. I wondered why he had so much, and my dad who worked so hard had so little. Call it the politics of envy, but that was the beginning of a deep questioning that would later find ethical, theological and political concepts that enabled that question to be asked with deeper intent and intellectual passion.

By the time I left school aged 15 and was working in a brickworks, I was elected a shop steward for the TGWU, a role I fulfilled with teenage over-seriousness but supported by a labour workforce of around 50 rough and ready men whose aims in life seemed no higher or further than the next wage packet. My appointment as a local Union Rep was due to my ability to argue, listen and argue better. While there I studied for my O Levels and Highers and made a late entry into University at age 20. The years studying Moral Philosophy, Scottish History and Social Administration were formative in ways that have permanently set my inner compass towards the magnetic North of social justice and ethical politics (not an oxymoron).

Teachers such as Bob Holman and Kay Carmichael taught me the important lesson of impatience. When it comes to issues of care for the poor, looking out for and speaking up for the vulnerable, being open and welcoming to other people who are human as I am, wanting the best for their families as I do, looking for a chance to live in a fairer and safer society, then patience can easily become indifference. In an unjust world passivity is collusion with a system set up in structures that do not allow for the flourishing of each human person. Long before privatisation of the NHS became such a controversial political debate, and long before benefit sanctions, Holman and Carmichael were out there arguing and gathering evidence to demonstrate the realities of poverty, the necessity of a compassionate benefits system and the absolute duty of Government to lift children out of the poverty trap, and all the social disadvantages that flow from early deprivations.

And so as a recently converted follower of Jesus, of the limited and narrow evangelicalism of the early 1970's and central Lanarkshire, I was confronted by two lecturers who sounded more like Amos and Isaiah than any preachers I had so far heard on a Sunday. Holman's faith was never overt in class, but we knew he lived in Easterhouse, helped people find their way thropugh the Social Security maze, was a powerful advocate and eloquent and not easily intimidated voice for the poor who lived all around him on that housing estate. He taught me that following Jesus is about justice, righteousness, compassion, generosity, moral imagination, and though the phrase only came later, speaking truth to power.

Carmichael took us through the politics of poverty, the economics of welfare, the psychology of selfishness, the sociology of power, and made an unforgettable impression when she went incognito as a homeless woman to test the responses of the Social Secutity system in the east end of Glasgow. The resulting TV documentary was damning, exposing the lack of respect, evident indifference, bureaucratic obstructiveness and pervasive lack of hopefulness and helpfulness in a system failing those for whom it was created.

So no wonder I am pondering the results of the Election. I have deep questions about a population that affirms the policies of these past 5 years. Not that the years before were perfect or without that far more telling deficit, in ethical and morally principled politics. But the health of the NHS, the compassionate provision for the poor and the vulnerable, the social justice imperative that seeks to ensure a basic social security as a right – these are now principles of social organisation that for me are ethical, political and more importantly theological. And they are not prominent in the actualities and realities of what is actually happening.

Which brings me to the current status quo. The new god on the block called Austerity, accompanied by its demanding consort Deficit Reduction, is to be challenged as to its veracity, legitimacy and efficacy. Like the false Gods in Isaiah 46, Bel and Nebo, they are gods who have to be carried around, carted as burdens and hindrances. Isaiah proclaims a contrast – we can be the people who carry our Gods, or trust the God who carries his people. And don't spiritualise that into an apolitical spirituality. Isaiah was talking about the economy, the monarchy, the temple, the city and its courts and markets – these would come under the judgement of God. Part of my pondering concerns the nature and the timing of God's judgement on societies in our time which behave in ways mirrored in Isaiah, Micah and Amos – the trampling of the poor, the selling of people's liveliehoods for the price of a pair of trainers, neglecting the care of the widow (for which read immigrant, asylum seeker, benefit sanctioned single mother) appropriating land and goods into the hands of fewer and fewer. Is that a naive Hermeneutic? Perhaps. But perhaps not. Before deciding read Matthew 25. 31-46.

8 May 2015
A Divisive Prime Minister in a United Kingdom.

On a long run to Fort William I stopped north of Loch Lomond to enjoy the beauty of the country where I live. I am not a nationalist, but I am Scottish, I love this country, and want its people to flourish.

The Prime Minister's political rhetoric about Scotland betrays an attitude that is dismissive, non-inclusive and frankly ignorant. Ignorant of our history, our culture and the contribution Scotland has made to the story of these islands.

In the pursuit of power, politicians become visually impaired, unseeing of the people, disinterested in history and culturally selective at their peril.

20 April 2015
Christian Witness, the Shadow of the Bomb and the Shadow of the Cross

Over on Facebook my friend Stuart Blythe asked for names of well known Christians who are or were known for their Christian witness against the manufacture and possession of nuclear weapons. The capacity of human beings to wage technological warfare to the point of life extinction raises the kind of "issue" you would think Christians would be largely agreed upon; namely, supporting the possession of that capacity, with a credible intent to use them in order to deter an attack, is a position incompatible, incongruent and essentially contradictory of the Christian Gospel. To hold the threat of massive destruction and indiscriminate obliteration of civilian populations over those we consider our potential enemies or those we consider may have, now or in the future, lethal intent towards us, may make unassailable military and political sense, though that itself is hugely debatable.

But I am personally perlexed at the thought that those who stand under the cross of Jesus Christ, who witness to the resurrection of Christ as the turning point of history, who are ambassadors of Christ and ministers of reconciliation, who are peacemakers of the Kingdom of God, and who are followers of the Lamb in the midst of the throne, slain from the foundation of the world – as I say personally perplexed to the point where I find it is impossible to conclude that those who witness to such realities embedded in the God of Hope, should give assent to the deployment of such weapons. The inevitable consequence is that credible threat implies use, if pushed to ultimate conclusions. How much more then, should the Christian conscience oppose the manufacture, possession and maintaining of weapons which are first strike weapons, and therefore combine both deterrence and threat with the logical implication that, given the right circumstances, their use as a first act of war is not ruled out.

I do understand that this is deeply contested territory. But these questions arise in a Scottish Christian context of theological and cultural retrenchment, and where Christian opposition to nuclear weapons is neither co-ordinated nor clear. Christian activism in support of nuclear disarmament seems low on the priority list of churches claiming commitment to the redemptive mission of God in Christ. Church statements, which are representative of a common mind, and which are considered and rooted in the perspectives of a Gospel of mercy, reconciliation, peace and justice, are seldom formulated because there is a lack of agreement of what a Christian position and consensus might sound like, read like and look like at the official levels of denominational life.

At this moment in the history of our world, with unambiguous signals of political ambition, unrest and threat from Russia, this is not a discussion in principle, nor is it a hypothetical scenario deliberately made extreme to highllight what is at stake in an ethical debate. In a world of credible threat, and destabilised economies and geopolitical changes, the Church has no right given its missional mandate, to leave matters of nuclear defence policy to the politicians, comfortably assuming it will never come to this.

No, I am not I hope being alarmist; but I am contending that in our dangerous world the Christian Church has a categorical imperative to witness to the Crucified Lord, the Risen Saviour, and to stand under the cross of its Lord on the side of life, creation, new creation and in the service of the God of Hope. It cannot do this by being silent. And as primary evidence in its discussions, decisions and statements, it will have to hear again the voice of Jesus, and ensure that anything we do say, is stated as those who must always say, "Beneath the Cross of Jesus, I fain would take my stand….

2 March 2015
Luther’s anti-Jewish theology, German Theologians and the Holocaust.

Looking for background reading for something I'm writing on Bonhoeffer I discovered the recently published Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther's Theology, edited by R. Kolb, I. Dingel and L. Batka, (OUP: 2013). Of the 47 essays a number of them are to do with the reception of Luther's theology, and its legacy in different historical periods. Essay 41 is on the reception in the Nineteenth Century; chapter 42 then jumps forward to Marxist reception. There is no chapter on the reception and use of Luther in Germany in the first half of the 20th Century. There is a chapter on 'Luther's Views of Jews and Turks' (chapter 30).

I did a Google search for Holocaust and there is one occurrence of the term in the entire 688 pages – in chapter 30 on the Jews and Turks. I did a further search for Susannah Heschel whose book on The Aryan Jesus. Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany is a watershed in scholarship and research into the role of many Christian theologians and of significant sections of the German Lutheran church in the construction of an anti-Semitic mindset. Her name does not occur once.

It would be very unfair to make a critical judgement of this volume solely on such slight evidence as a Google search. But it's the omission of a chapter that spooked me, that jump of a hundred years missing out mid 20th century central Europe. I came away perturbed at such a lacuna in an authoritative academic Oxford Handbook on the subject of Luther's theology and its reception. There is only an introductory glance in chapter 30 referring to the Holocaust, and that is the one reference found by Google. The catastrophic impact of Luther's anti-Semitic writings and the direct role of a significant number of 1930s German theologians, academic and clerical, in giving such lethal prejudice the oxygen of scholarly credibility, is surely significant enough to have required an essay in its own right?

The same trawl on Amazon led to Before Auschwitz. What Christian Theologians Must Learn from the Rise of Nazism, by Peter Hinlicky. Susannah Heschel's name comes up with 21 hits. The relation between a number of German Christian theologians and the fate of the Jewish people in Europe from 1930 to 1945 is fully explored in this book.

Back to Bonhoeffer. I've been exploring the context of his writing in the 1930's and the increasingly dangerous call to follow Jesus through the minefield of National Socialist anti Semitic policies, and the crossfire between Church politics oscillating between collaboration and compromise, with significant numbers of Christians driven by conscience to stand firm in confession of Christ over and against sworn allegiance to Fuhrer or Fatherland. Bonhoeffer of course was a Lutheran, as was Martin Niemoller and Helmut Thielicke, so while Luther's anti Jewish writings were exploited in the interests of National Socialists by a number of leading academic theologians, there was no inevitable or essential connection between Luther's anti-Jewish writing, Lutheran theology and ideological anti-Semitism as political goal seeking religious justification. Many, many German Christians were not so easily taken in by such religious opportunism collaborating with political cynicism, with vast lethal consequence.

It is this complexity of motive and manoeuvre, the difficulties in establishing blame or innocence, culpability or naivete, and even culpable naivete, that gives rise to the moral perplexity and theological embarrassment evoked for subsequent generations of Christians, by Luther's anti-Jewish writings, and their reception culminating in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. These issues remain far too important, and that period of political and ecclesial history an episode of too recent tragic memory, for it to be subsumed into minor references and a page or two here and there, in what is a recognised academic reference work published by a highly respected University publisher, on the reception, legacy and content of the theology of Martin Luther.

I was so perturbed by this that I wrote a personal email to Professor Robert Kolb, one of the editors, and had a courteous and thoughtful reply, seeking to address my concerns from the standpoint of the editorial team and its decisions. I can see the Editors' point, that the issues of hard editorial choices meant that other important perspectives were also omitted; and that German reception of Luther in 1930's Germany competes with other important areas of interest for inclusion in full essay treatment; but editorial choices are inevitably powerful interpretive tools in the survey of a subject field, defining the relative importance of what is in and what is not.

I am glad too that my concerns are at least alluded to in several other essays in the collection, with pointers to further resources. But I remain perturbed – because the Holocaust is a permanent defining watershed in Jewish-Christian relations, requiring a disposition of Christian openness, repentance, self-critique and continuing reflection. Added to this, the active collaboration of prominent German Christian theologians using Luther's writings, baleful tendentious biblical eisegesis, and a theological overlay of public respectability, to give comfort, distorted credence and ideological validity to the anti-Semitic policies of National Socialism, was of critical importance in creating a zeitgeist in which the Holocaust was thinkable and made possible of implementation.

Such vast tragic evil makes an essay on Luther's theology, early 20th Century Germany, and the road to the Holocaust and beyond, self-choosing in the list of essential contents in a volume on Luther's Theology. The absence of such a treatment remains for me, a matter of deep regret, in an otherwise richly resourced compendium of current scholarly perspective on Luther's theology.

9 May 2014
A reflection on Seamus Heaney: “Poetry is like the line Christ drew in the sand….”

For most of my grown up life I've known of Seamus Heaney, and for years now have read him and considered him a poet sage. His view of the world was shaped by memory, sharply considered experience, and critical but compassionate attentiveness to human nature. He had a keen eye for beauty and an inner radar finely tuned to detect emotional movements such as longing, sorrow, joy in embryo, and exquisite sensitivity to the chronic human hunger for transcendence frustrated by transience and human finitude.

The death of a poet is attended by its own poignancy; a distinctive voice silenced; visionary eyes closed in unwaking sleep; ripples of words and cadences which have emanated outwards for so long, slowing, finally, to stillness; a way of construing the world which opened the eyes of many to see that world differently, but from now onwards, dependent on the poetry which first gave form and expression to his vision. What we are grateful for, however, is the large ouevre Heaney has left us. And yet the more powerful impetus to gratitude is what we have known of the poet as we read him, his humanity, individuality, and just this; the fact that he lived and found his voice, and spoke to the world, and in doing so spoke into being a richer, more complex world in which the very fact of existence, and the pervasiveness of the ordinary, and the miracle of being, challenged and challenges our superficiality, carelessness and self-absorbtion.

So when I think of Heaney, of course the poems are obvious. But in this post I want to mention Denis O'Driscoll's Stepping Stones. Interviews with Seamus Heaney. Here the poet talks frankly and revealingly about his roots, his role as poet in Irish culture, the ethical and artistic challenges he faced during the nightmare years of the Troubles, his own development as a poet and celebrity representing the highest levels of artistic achievement. And in each of the interviews, chronologically structured around his most significant published collections, Heaney opens his mind and shares from deep places the things that matter to him, the energy sources of human thought and expression. I mark many of my books as I read them, in pencil, and with my own code for easy reference later. Reading this volume again, a kind of tribute and In Memoriam for a favourite poet and fine human being, the phrase from Hebrews is confirmed, 'he being dead yet speaketh.'

Discussing his relationship with Czeslaw Milosz he alluded to the Troubles, and his own aesthetic ambivalence and ethical dilemma as a poet: "Deep down the question about obligation in relation to the Troubles persisted. The old Miloszian challenge was unavoidable: What is poetry that does not save/ Nations or people?" Reading Heaney's prose there is a passionate exposition of poetry as a transformative gift which articulates human experience from anguish to zeal and all else in between, including love and hate, violence and peace, grief and joy, loneliness and community, despair and hope. Poetry is neither pastime nor aesthetic luxury, its true work lies outside the academy, more likely in pubs and public libraries, and intended to change attitudes, dispositions, worldview, moral perception. Poetry sensitises human beings, offers pardigm shifts in consciousness, says in oblique fashion truths we would otherwise refuse to hear.

"Poetry is like the line Christ drew in the sand, it creates a pause in the action, a freeze-frame moment of concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves". I don't know a better explanation of why it's important to read poetry. In relation to the Troubles he goes on to say "a good poem holds as much of the truth as possible in one gaze", and the call to poets in Northern Ireland was "to hold in a single thought reality and justice."

And finally for this post, this, reminiscing about his time as Harvard Professor: "A populace that is chloroformed day and night by TV stations like Fox News could do with inoculation by poetry. Obviously, poetry can't be administered like an injection, but it does constitute a boost to the capacity for discrimination and resistance".

Of course there are many other strands in Heaney's work – but the moral seriousness with which he took his role as, Nobel Laureate, Ireland's foremost poet since Yeats, and as academic celebrity, meant that he wrote out of deep wells, water that is living and life-giving.

31 August 2013
The Anguish of Egypt, and a Prayer to God the Father ” from whom every family on earth is named.”. (Eph 3.14-15)

This prayer was written for worship in Crown Terrace Baptist Church, Sunday past.

The news from Egypt continues to be distressing, and solutions and resolutions farther away than ever.

You are invited to pray this prayer.

Prayer for Egypt

God the Father of all Nations, in the ancient stories of
Israel and the Church,

the great story of your love, justice and mercy has been
told.

You brought Israel out of the land of Egypt, out of the
house of bondage.

Lord we pray today, now, for the people of Egypt.

We have seen the pictures of lethal exchange,rocks and
bullets, rockets and tear gas.

We have heard the arguments about numbers of casualties,as
if the statistics have no human reality.

We have seen mosques used as fortress and refuge,besieged
and stormed,

that which is holy and safeturned into a place of death and
terror .

And our hearts cry out for the people, children, mothers and
fathers,

You are the God of the oppressed, the poor and the
suffering,

Liberating God, the oppressed you set free by your power.

God of Justice, the
poor you fill while the rich you send empty away.

God of mercy, the suffering you comfort, and befriend in the
comp anion ship of mercy.

Into the cauldron of hate, fear and violence, pour your
Spirit of justice, mercy and peace.

Response Together

He has shown you O
man what is good, and what does the Lord require of you,

But to act justly,
and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.

Creator God, Lord of History and God of Hope,

we recognise the mixed blessings of TV and Twitter,

with their immediate images of conflict

with blood stained shirts,rows
of bodies,

faces wild with rage
or crushed in despair.

As followers of Jesus the Prince of Peace,

we have no right to hide from the reality of such suffering,

no remit to close our eyes to the cruelty of power out of
control,

no excuse for switching stations to the fantasy of Reality
TV

to escape the true reality of other people’s suffering.

Lord in our own words, actions, attitudes, make us
passionate for justice,

practitioners of mercy, and humble followers of Jesus crucified
and risen;

Not just card carrying Christians, but cross carrying
disciples,

a resurrection people of hope living in the power of the
Spirit.

Amen

19 August 2013
The Christian Theologian, Nuclear Weapons, Strange Love, Original Sin, and the Sermon on the Mount

I still remember the chill and existential angst as an impressionable if more than a little rebellious teenager watching Dr Strangelove. Two years after the Cuban crisis, and one year after the assassination of President Kennedy, the film dropped into a cultural worldview already distorted by fear, suspicion and the growing insanity of language that spoke of MAD, as mutual assured destruction. The mad antics and the terrifyingly implausibly plausible script did nothing to reassure, nor wat it meant to.

I came across this clip here the other day and watched it with scared fascination. It isn't only the content, it's the jaunty optimism of the narrator describing the triumph of Britain dropping its first hydrogen bomb to explode in the atmosphere in 1957. At the time the fear was an icy terror, a remorselessly spreading glacial fear dubbed the cold war. Perhaps the upbeat BBC commentator was expressing relief that Britain was no longer defenceless against an evil and ambitious Russia. At the very least we could destroy cities of the perceived enemy in retaliation for any attack on our cities. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a million for a million, it's the same principle. It's called deterrence.

There has not been a nuclear exchange in the 56 years since that first successful atmospheric detonation of city killing bombs. Supporters of deterrence would say that's because deterrence works. Maybe. Opponents will argue that nuclear weapons are morally unjustifiable and pose an extinction level threat to human life, and indeed to the future of the planet. I don't know that the argument can be settled – by definition the proof would either never be forthcoming (in which case it worked, maybe) or there will be a catastrophic exchange in which case the argument becomes academic in a nihilistic sort of way.

What's your point Jim? It isn't a global politicised point. I am not an expert in global security, military mind games, or defence strategy and policy. As a Christian theologian I have other concerns, a different perspective, alternative intellectual tools to think through the meaning of human existence and what makes for human flourishing. I watched the clip with a profound and solemn awareness that amongst the crucial components of a Christian worldview is an adequate doctrine of sin. The hydrogen bomb as it was then known carried a mushroom shaped shadow of ultimate menace for humanity's future – and the clip celebrates the success of British efforts to obtain this instrument of mass destruction. I use instrument deliberately – in the background of the clip it would have been entirely appropriate to play Holst's brutal and relentless Mars the Bringer of War to trumpet and announce the newly acquired capacity for orchestrated death on a symphonic scale.

Celebrating the success of such a creation as nuclear weapon capacity is according to the late Lord Macleod, blasphemy, the original sin of creating from the foundation blocks of God's Creation, an instrument capable of global annihilation. I do not see that theological pronouncement as an overstatement. It is one of the most important prophetic denunciations of military and political power in the history of Scottish theology; theology, not politics. But it is theology effectively used to critique all intellectual accommodations to nuclear weapons as an option for the Christian mind. Of course not everyone agreed with Macleod; and not all will agree with what I'm writing here. But go back and look at the clip, listen to the narrative, and then read the Sermon on the Mount. How do the two inhabit the same moral, theological and political universe?

One further thought – the bomb lauded in the 1950's clip is a mere firework when compared with the destructive payload of current contemporary capacity. I recall Jesus argument from the lesser to the greater…how much more…?

17 May 2013