Category: Theology

  Working through John Macquarrie’s God and Secularity in my last year at College in 1976 I came across his good natured jibe at John Robinson’s book Honest to God. ‘He’s taken three good German beers – [Bultmann, Bonhoeffer and Tillich] and produced a lot of froth’. Macquarrie’s death last week removed a significant, personally accessible theologian from our midst – and one from whom I’ve learned a great deal. He was born in Renfrew five miles from our house – and went to school less than a mile along the road from here, Paisley Grammar School.

The following comments are only my opinion, I’ve no interest at this stage in being critical, only appreciative. I’m simply reflecting my experience of learning amongst many things from this exiled Scottish theologian, the importance of bringing Christian faith into conversation with modern ways of thinking and living. His Twentieth Century Religious Thought remains a readable vade mecum of modern theology which I still browse – I took it on holiday with me in 1978! Jesus Christ in Modern Thought is one of the more substantial constructive Christologies I’ve read, combining critical systematic thought about Jesus with interest in contemporary appropriation of the core of Christian faith. I still remember reading through it during Lent. Principles of Christian Theology was the modern theology textbook of the 70’s and 80’s, and I still have the hardback revised edition. His Paths in Spirituality, with its treatment of ‘passionate thinking’ has long been an important reference point in my own spirituality, in which passionate intellect and reflective heart are necessary tensions. And God and Secularity is still one of the few books of pure theology I read as an undergraduate that I actually enjoyed – three beers, much froth! Indeed John!!

So another great Christian thinker goes where, perhaps, some of his most searching persistent questions will be answered – but since heaven is not supposed to be boring, may he find much more to enquire about there, and discover that demythologising has become a redundant hermeneutical principle, and existentialism is eclipsed by authentic existence! May he rest in peace.

It is through the agency and power of the same Holy Spirit speaking in us and through us that the Word of God can be and continues to be communicated, as living dynamic Reality to humankind in the proclamation and the teaching of the Church. This holds good in the most difficult circumstances, for it is the coming of the Kingdom of God in Christ and the Lordship of the Holy Spirit on earth that are at stake in the mission of the Church. Just as when Jesus cast out demons by the Spirit (or finger) of God, the Kingdom of God or his sovereign Presence and Power came among people, so when the church proclaims  the victory of Christ over all the forces of evil and darkness, it is God himself  in the Sovereign Presence and Power of his Spirit who is at work bringing redemption and freedom to captive humanity.  (Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, page 63)

Aye, but do we believe all that? Does Pentecost decisively shape my worldview? Not if I’m simply flattened by the avalanche of gloom and manufactured anxiety that passes for ‘ the news’. Pentecost is the day when the Church believes in miracles again, when all that darkens and diminishes life is swept up into purposes much bigger than sin, and more determined than any number of demons. Whatever else, Pentecost announces Who rules, OK??

Two short italicised extracts from Sean’s Whitley Lecture give a good indication of what he is proposing as a Baptist Covenantal approach to interpreting the Bible:

Biblical interpretation in covenantal perspective should be understood as the church’s active, diverse and ongoing engagement with the biblical texts.

A Baptist, covenantal hermeneutic will permit interpretive diversity and disagreement as a hallmark of the church’s life and not insist on particular interpretive decisions as the necessary hallmark of being ‘biblical’.

Embedded in a magisterial, though still developing lecture, these proposals offer important and liberating principles that could enable Baptists both to take the Bible seriously, and accept that differences of biblical interpretation can be seen as both enriching corrective and shared responsiveness in our task of living under the rule of Christ. The underlying assumption is that if we are met together in covenanted fellowship in Christ, then that foundational covenant agreement should be strong enough to support significant difference, enable us to agree to differ and respect our differences, and continue talking towards, and walking towards, a shared understanding in seeking to discern the mind of Christ.

Listening to Sean eloquently and persuasively arguing for such interpretive diversity within a covenanted unity raised the thought:

the maturity of a Baptist community could well be measured by its capacity to allow, encourage and practice the interpretation of Scripture, believing that differences in interpretations of Scripture are to be subsumed under the greater responsibility to live out our covenanted relationship with each other in Christ, within the diversity of the community Christ Himself has called together.

In other words, as we explore, discuss, disagree, try to agree on the meaning of the biblical texts, we presuppose as a prior principle, our shared relationship with the living Christ, and our sincere goal of hearing and obeying His call. That call to obedient living is often mediated through the faithful questioning of a community engaged in listening…to Christ through Scripture, and to Scripture interpreted by a community held together by covenant and trustful of the Spirit, who bears witness to Christ amongst us and within us.

Those of us who heard Sean’s lecture, now look forward to the intended expansion of his reflections into a full monograph. As Baptist Christians too often tempted to claim ‘biblical’ for our point of view, and to represent any other view as ‘unbiblical’, we sorely need such wise, generous and capable guidance. Thank you Sean for a good evening of thinking and rethinking about an area of our life together that is both crucially important and culpably neglected.

The universe that is steadily being disclosed to our various sciences is found to be characterised throughout time and space by an ascending gradient of meaning in richer and higher forms of order. Instead of levels of existence and reality being explained reductionally from below in materialistic and mechanistic terms, the lower levels are found to be explained in terms of higher, invisible, intangible levels of reality. in this perspective the splits become healed, constructive syntheses emerge, being and doing become conjoined, and integration of form takes place in the sciences and arts, the material and the spiritual dimenisions overlap, while knowledge of God and of his creation go hand in hand and bear constructively on one another.

T. F. Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, xi.

This piece of abstract but highly assertive theology reminds me of one of my favourite hymns:

…

O Lord of every shining constellation

   that wheels in splendour through the midnight sky;

Grant us your Spirit’s true illumination

   to read the secrets of your work on high.

.

You, Lord, have made the atom’s hidden forces,

   your laws its mighty energies fulfil;

Teach us, to whom you give such rich resources,

   in all we use, to serve your holy will.

.

O Life, awaking life in cell and tissue,

   from flower to bird, from beast to brain of man;

Help us to trace, from birth to final issue,

   the sure unfolding of your age-long plan.

.

You, Lord, have stamped your image on your creatures,

   and, though they mar that image, love them still;

Lift up our eyes to Christ, that in His features

   we may discern the beauty of your will.

.

Great Lord of nature, shaping and renewing,

   you made us more than nature’s heirs to be;

You help us trace, with grace our souls enduing,

   the road to life and immortality.

A F Bayly

‘ If you are a theologian you will pray truly, and if you pray truly you will be a theologian.’ (Evagrius Ponticus, On Prayer).

Here’s my thesis for discussion:

If the priesthood of all believers is a revolutionary and essential principle of Christian community, so is the principle that every believer is a theologian.

Evagrius Ponticus established a theological democracy when he said, ‘The theologian is the one who prays truly, and the one who prays truly is a theologian’. Theology is not a specialist subject for the awfy clever folk in the church. Theology is to talk about God, think about God, to find ideas, words and images that help us express the inexpressible, glimpse the ineffable, adore and praise the One we will never comprehend except through the grace and love of the One who in gracious love makes Himself known. Theology is prayer doing its thinking, and thought leading to adoration and contemplation. Theology is to enjoy God’s company without ever forgetting in whose company we are.

So, in the Body of Christ, in fellowship with God in the communion of the Spirit, we’re all theologians – some of us are better at it than others, but theology is something we do for each other, with each other. There is a theology of all believers, a call for us to bear testimony, to express our faith, to praise and glorify God in our language and song and art and actions towards each other and towards the whole human community.

All of this was sparked by my enjoyment of Tom Torrance’s book, The Christian Doctrine of God. One Being Three Persons. (see sidebar). This is not an easy book – the greatest Scottish theologian of the 20th and 21st century wrote it, so devotional marshmallow it isn’t; spiritual fast-food it isn’t; the Trinity for Dummies it isn’t. In theology, the via negativa is a theological approach that begins by saying what something is not.

Positively this book is amongst the finest pieces of theological writing on the Christian doctrine of God. Scottish theology has its own distinctive flavour, something I’ll blog about one of these days. But part of that distinctiveness is critical indebtedness to Reformed theology and deeply informed interaction with the Christian ecumenical consensus. Tom Torrance embodies that. And the subject matter of this book is too important to be confined to any self-appointed theological elite. This is high carb theology for hard worked Christian souls. There’s nothing instant or pre-cooked about it; it isn’t theology to go. It’s theology to sit down with, to develop a taste for, to be prepared to pay for…because it’s worth it.

Torrance has an unrivalled grasp of theological history, combined with a passionate faith in the centrality of Jesus Christ for all Christian thinking about God, and these passed through the prism of a mind both pastorally sensitive and intellectually precise. So, not an easy read – but it is devotional reading, if we devote ourselves to the work it takes to know God, to learn of the great love which loves us, and rejoice in a mystery that baffles and a truth that our minds will never exhaust.

So I’ve a small cluster of questions about how we nurture devotion these days.

1. In the absence of regularly singing hymns which are deliberately and skillfully theological, where do we fix our doctrinal reference points?
2. In a Christian book market fixated on practical, applied, ‘how to’, self help approaches to Christian devotion, what ignites the fires of the mind and the passions of the heart to love God more than whatever it is we want God to do for us?
3. If in our different jobs, continuing professional or personal development is an accepted and valued goal, where is the equivalent of that in the life of the church as we each fulfil our role as true theologians who pray, and who when we pray are true theologians?
4. How daft is it to expect every Christian to be practical, practising theologians, prepared to think deep and long, to pursue the reality of God, and who knows, to risk being baffled by a chapter of Torrance in order at least to sense the complexity and richness, encounter the glory and the mystery, endure the discipline and soul stretching, of what it means to love God with all of the heart, soul, mind and strength we can bring?

Next post I’ll give a few samples of Torrance in full flow – will it be devotional reading? Depends whether we do our devotions as theologians who pray, and whether in our praying we are theologians, lovers of the God who comes to us in Christ through the Spirit, and whose presence requires our best attention.

Last night, at the end of a full day, I sat for a while with Dogmatics II.1 and II.2 and browsed – even browsing Barth is intimidating, but also an invitation. Here is the real thing – a mind delving into mystery and kneeling before transcendence. Time spent with this theologian who loved the church revives faith and hopefulness.

Not long ago I finished reading Flannery O’Connor’s letters, The Habit of Being. This mildly questioning Catholic, who wrote bizarre stories about the mystery and mastery of grace that invades human lives, had a lot of time for Karl Barth’s big thick volumes. Her copy of Evangelical Theology (lectures given on Barth’s only visit to the US) was heavily marked. In a letter to her best friend she confided: ‘I distrust folks who have ugly things to say about Karl Barth. I like old Barth. He throws the furniture around.’

Not long to Pentecost. Are you allowed to have favourite doctrines – if so, mine’s the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes I think of the Holy Spirit as the One who throws the furniture around, breaks up the comfortable sofas and routines, rips up the well worn carpets, heaves the telly and the Sky tuner into the corner, even out the window, goes in for some serious Feng Shui to maximise the space in mind and heart and life, for the presence of God to be acknowledged and the worship of God freed from the competing claims of an over cluttered life. As a metaphor of spiritual change, the Holy Spirit doing a makeover of our intellectual and spiritual furniture is worthy of longer consideration – and touches nerves in my own spirit.

Andy Goodliff – thanks Andy, has drawn attention to a Systematic Theology Conference in Aberdeen, January 2008, on the theme of Providence. I emailed the organiser to say I intended to come (dv)!(Details here), and would he send me booking details in due course.

So. Does God guide our lives? Are coincidences just that, the accidental coming together of circumstances, just one of those things that happen, or does God surprise us and challenge us to look again at how blessing and unlooked for pleasure might be God knocking at the door of  lives too busy and self-centred for their own good? Or come at it another way, when someone survives a crisis, sometimes there’s a half-joking but half serious flick of the eyes upward, and the comment, “Someone up there must have been looking after me!”

Our last Austrian holiday was in Mayrhofen, in the Tyrol where it is hard not to think of God, if only because the mountains demand to be looked at, walked on, and thought about. At six thousand feet, looking at ribbons of water, six feet wide, tumbling a hundred feet down a sheer rock face, millions of water drops refracting sunlight and making rainbows against the background of grey rock and green mountain meadow, it’s hard not to ask, so does all this just happen to be here. Is this the intentional beauty of an artist, or just coincidence, nature doing it’s thing?

Then there’s the contrast between hundred ton boulders and tiny symmetrically perfect flowers, in pink, yellow and blue, growing in the sheltering shadow of those same rocks, ages old. Or again, in Alpine sun, climbing towards the Alpenhut where hot soup and a cold drink will both be needed to warm and cool a body working harder than it has for some time, we stop and fill our water bottle at a mini-torrent of crystal clear water, and drink mineral water as nature intended before it got bottled and labelled.

Enjoyment, wonder and admiration for mountain permanence and floral fragility, experiences of the mind and heart which put the routine worries of life in a different more humbling perspective. So is all this extravagant attention to detail an irrelevant by-product of natural forces, or is beauty one of God’s significant nudges to get the attention of minds too preoccupied with achievement, performance, production, results, profit margins, bottom lines and all the other trivialities we have invested with such undeserved significance.

So is all this just coincidence? I learned a long time ago that the word ‘just’ is a devaluing word, best avoided. Are there times when ‘coincidence’ is a significant nudge. That same holiday we were on a walk all morning. On the way back along the valley we stopped to talk to John and Julie, a Yorkshire couple and great company. The steam train passed us on its way to Mayrhofen, we waved to the passengers, and walked on to Mayrhofen ourselves. As we walked past the station, there, deep in conversation about the best way to spend an hour in the town before the train left, were Stewart and Helen, two close friends from our time in Aberdeen. I didn’t even know they were on holiday. If we hadn’t met John and Julie… If Stewart didn’t still have the heart of a boy for steam trains… if we had gone up the cable car instead of to our favourite coffee stop. Coincidence? Yes, but not just coincidence. One of God’s more significant nudges, I believe.

I hope, God willing, to learn more of what all this means at the conference in January 2008!

A long time ago, when I was 40, one of my best friends bought me a print of Rublev’s Icon. Before then it was an attractive piece of Russian medieaval art – since then it has been a source of spiritual and contemplative reflection that has often drawn me into the presence of the Triune God.

I never tire of looking at it, thinking about the rich interplay of familiar symbol, noting the liturgical colours, listening for unmistakable biblical resonance, joying in (enjoying) the deep mystery it portrays, of the Holy Trinity, the eternal communion of self-giving love, the God who is Father, Son, Spirit. Sixteen years on my icon has faded, it hangs in the College study and is still one of the focal points in my mind and heart when I want lifted beyond all this – whatever ‘all this’ happens to be at the time!

And then today, Frances brought me a new copy (for which many thanks!) – bright, colourful, unfaded, once again a glimpse into truths too dazzling to see, and into a world beyond any categories I control. The restful gaze of God’s love, the eucharistic cup surrounded by eternal communion, the threefold touch of God from hands shaped in blessing, the hospitality of God laid out in the meticulous generosity of welcome – for once the overused epithet is appropriate – it is a ‘stunning’ achievement of human spiritual creativity.

The idea that beauty is an important category for theology has become an important recent emphasis in the way Christian theologians think of God. Beauty, along with truth and goodness appeal to that in us which retains the image of God. Jonathan Edwards called this the sense of divine things, which is the gift of grace that enables us to apprehend, appreciate and respond to the beauty of God. This icon draws me into a sense of divine things, and into a sense of the beauty of God’s Holiness.

Christ has brought it to pass, that those that the Father has given him, should be brought into the household of God; that he and his Father and his people, should be as it were one society, one family; that the church should be as it were admitted into the society of the blessed Trinity.

A week or so ago I promised a blog on Jonathan Edwards and Jurgen Moltmann. Edwards the New England Calvinist would have puzzled at the icon, Moltmann loves it. I’ll post a few excerpts from their writings on the Trinity soon. For now see a characteristically engaged sermon on the Trinity by Moltmann over here.

The "Which Theologian are You" quiz can be done here. It sets a lot of theological questions and you show how far you agree/disagree. Then it works out which theologian your theological profile best fits. Seems straightforward enough. I came out as 100% Jurgen Moltmann – and I’m not sure I’ve ever had a 100% for anything before! Here’s the result and the summary of who I am theologically and what matters to me theologically, according to this quiz. ………………………. You are Jurgen Moltmann. The problem of evil is central to your thought, and only a crucified God can show that God is not indifferent to human suffering. Christian discipleship means identifying with suffering but also anticipating the new creation of all things that God will bring about.

Jürgen Moltmann 100% Martin Luther 73% Karl Barth 60% Friedrich Schleiermacher 60% Anselm 60% John Calvin 53% Augustine 47% Charles Finney 47% Paul Tillich 47% Jonathan Edwards 27% ……………………………………………………………. OK now for the disclaimers The problem of evil is not central to my thought – Christology is central, and the cross and resurrection are definitive of my Christology because the loving purpose of God is revealed in the crucified and risen Christ. The problem of evil is however deeply implicated in my theology, but also in my worldview. Thus while I think discipleship involves every follower of Jesus in identifying with suffering it involves much more – for me it also involves what John Swinton would call forming strategies and gestures of resistance to the causes of suffering, based on the call of Christ to follow after him, carrying the cross, in the power of the Spirit, witnessing to the Gospel of God’s love through a ifestyle of hopefulness generated by the resurrection. Now as for the quiz itself I have a few awkward questions. How come there are no explicit questions about the Trinitarian nature of God, or about the form of Christology that underlies any Christian theology? How come there are no women? I know – most of the big noises are men for well rehearsed reasons – but Julian of Norwich bequeathed to the church her Revelations of Divine Love, one of the most profound, perceptive and doxological pieces of theological reflection in the entire tradition. Does every woman who does this quiz have to end up being a man?!? Where are Aquinas, Wesley, Pannenberg, and for those who know me they’ll expect me to ask also, and where is James Denney, P T Forsyth or Tom Torrance? I know – they aren’t exactly the giants in the field – but who gets to pick the giants anyway, huh? I rate Forsyth well ahead of Tillich – no slight on Tillich, just that Forsyth understood as few before or since, the nature of love as holy, and of God as holy love. Now as one whose theology is a theology of the cross, understood in Trinitarian terms, Moltmann and Luther are not surprisingly top of the list, and followed by Barth. I’ve spent months of my life, over the years reading them, but how did Schleiermacher get way up there? He is the one I have least first-hand knowledge of. And just as intriguing, let me say, if I had to rescue only 10 books from my burning study one of the first would be my (really expensive, but who cares?) Yale Edition of the Ethical Writings, by Jonathan Edwards, containing his sermons on 1 Corinthians 13. This volume contains some of the finest late Puritan moral theology, expressed in language that I still remember on my first reading, bringing a lump to my throat and a never-forgotten heart sense of ‘God’s great ocean of love’. Schleiermacher’s Christian Faith is a Reformed masterpiece in its own right, but in my canon, not before Edwards – so why is Edwards bottom of my list and Schleiermacher is fourth? I’ve thought a bit about this last question and here’s my attempt at an answer. When a quiz asks propositional questions and asks me to indicate degree of agreement, it assumes I want to be the person who thinks most like me. I’m not at all sure of that! There are aspects of Edwards’ theology which I can’t easily agree with – but there is also much in his theology of God’s grace and glory, and in the homiletical and moral reflections on the Bible that expound these, that have shaped my own spirituality at foundational levels. I have learned more from this towering Christian intellect than most of the other names above him on this list, perhaps with the exception of Barth and Moltmann, and maybe not even them. So allowing for the glitches in the way the quiz is set out – and the kind of predicable paths it pushes you into, I am not embarrassed by the prominence of Moltmann, NOR by the position of Edwards – where they are on the list is irrelevant. They are long-time and deep conversation partners of mine, lovers of God in Christ through the Spirit, and within the communion of saints, in which they both believe – but expressed it differently. I am going to put a few quotations together for a later blog, with Moltmann and Edwards alongside each other – a parallel of opposites who from different perspectives and contexts know a thing or two about theology as doxology, and the theologian’s task of expounding the God of Grace and Glory.