Living Wittily

Category: Theology

  • Worship is……?

    Res_1117015444__william_temple Both for perplexity and for dulled conscience the remedy is the same, sincere and spiritual worship.

    For worship is the submission of all our nature to God.

    It is the quickening of the conscience by his holiness,  the nourishment of mind with his truth, the purifying of imagination by his beauty, the opening of the heart to his love, the surrender of the will to his purpose; and all of this, gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable….

    William Temple,

    Archbishop of Canterbury, 1942-44.

    Bono1206

    Anyway I stopped going to churches

    and got myself into a different kind of religion. That’s what being in a rock and roll band is, not pseudo religion either…

    Music is worship.

    Whether it’s worship of women or their designer, the world or its destroyer, whether it comes from that ancient place we call the soul or simply the spinal cortex, whether the prayers are on fire with a dumb rage or dove-like desire….the smoke goes upwards…to God, or something you replace God with…

    usually yourself.

    Bono (Paul Hewson), U2

  • Missing voices

    In a couple of days I will post Ei2_1 a list of commentary writing by women. Remember I asked if anyone had any suggestions, favourites? Several replied – I’ll include your suggestions but as I rummaged around in my head I decided to make a fuller list. Further Suggestions can be posted in the comments and I’ll update it as and when. Why bother? Two reasons.

    1. I think commentary writing needs to open up through, but beyond exegesis, as a genre of theological and spiritual reflection. The reason for the series of blogs on Hauerwas – apart from the man’s own appeal as a ‘burr under the saddle’ – is the freshness and challenge of writing that is in conversation with ancient text and contemporary church.
    2. My own exposure to women’s writing on Scripture and theology has been far too limited – but that isn’t only my fault – the entire industry of biblical studies has been dominated by male authors. That is slowly changing, but scheduled lists of commentaries projected by publishers are not encouraging. Despite this, several commentaries by women have demonstrated for me the critical (in both senses of the word) importance of hearing women’s voices in conversation with the biblical text and the contemporary church.

    Julian More whimsically here are some commentaries that were never written, but which I wish had been –

    The Cappadocian Mother, Macrina on Colossians and the Divine life in Christ

    Julian of Norwich on the Passion Narratives as Revelations of Divine Love

    Teresa of Avila on Hebrews and the Way of Perfection in Christ

    George Eliot* on Ecclesiastes and the Eclipse of Faith

    Emily Dickinson’s poetic take on the Creation stories of Genesis

    Dorothy Day on the prophet Amos and social justice for the poor.

    Annie Dillard on the Psalms of Lament and Praise

    Anne Tyler on Ruth as a story of love, friendship and the happenstance of life and the providence of God

    * Perhaps she could revert to her own name of Marian Evans, in the hope that she would now be taken seriously as a writer without a male nom-de plume!

  • Scandalous Presence

    0664224377_01__aa240_sclzzzzzzz__1 In a very fine essay, ‘Scandalous Presence’, almost a mini systematic theology organised around the relational community of the Triune God, Cynthia Rigby gives honourable mention to the late Catherine Lacugna. (Pictured below)

    Ei2 Lacugna’s book, God With Us, was commended by one of our students as one of the more readable and persuasive contemporary accounts of the Trinity. I agree – she’s one of my favourite theologians, and her early death deprived us of what would have been a substantial and innovative work on the Holy Spirit. Her trinitarian thought has been praised widely and criticised extensively – but it will remain (for me at any rate) a passionately engaged expression of what it means to take the relational nature of God with theological and pastoral seriousness.

    Rigby says, "[Lacugna’s] attention to the primacy of community and relationality in the life of the Godhead has been helpful in challenging us to rethink what impact God’s scandalous presence should have on the way we live. To confess that God is triune is to know that God is for us in God’s very being. To reflect God’s triune image in relationship to one another, then, is not to lord it over one another. To be God-like, when God is understood to be a community, is not to be self-sufficient but to live in relation".

    Lacugna’s point is this. To understand God as a community of self-giving love, and to believe that love at its highest implies mutuality, reciprocal service, uncalculating self-expense and consistent faithfulness, will have major implications for how human life, politics and society are organised. The interdependent and mutual exchange of love within the life of God may not be easily replicated in human community, but it does provide a model which seriously calls in question the societal structures of power and self-sufficiency that drive much of social and political activity.

    Just as in a previous post I argued that the imago Dei was an important diagnostic theological insight, so too is the view of God as an eternal threefold relation of mutual loving exchange. I think both these theological realities have serious consequences for how we think about and do those activities we call missional. They also stand as potent critique of any ecclesiology fuelled by self-concern, or immured to the demanding presence of the ‘other’.

  • imago Dei

    0664224377_01__aa240_sclzzzzzzz_ In 1955, James H Robinson was the first African American to deliver the Lyman Beecher Lectures, the most prestgious lecturship on preaching in the United States. He spoke about the dangerous complacency of a nation ‘  flushed with a succession of victories and satiated with economic prosperity, at the height of vaunted achievements  and technological ascendancy in the arts and sciences’. And he demanded that those who dare talk of transformative grace must wrestle with such questions as:

    What must I do with my life – with the power, the knowledge, the wealth and the leisure which modern adbvancement puts at my disposal? And when life tumbles in how do I keep my equilibrium and reinstate my life without going to pieces.(Page 148)

    This from the essay ‘Transformative Grace’, in the edited collection of Essays I am currently reading. (See picture in this post and sidebar). Written by an African American woman theologian, a Reformed view of grace is repristinated to take account of African Presbyterian experience and history over 200 years in the United States. Refusing the role of Reformed theological parrott she embraces the ministry of reformed theological prophet. This is a superbly astringent essay. On the imago Dei she praises the contributors to an anthology, Black Preaching

    The preachers keep themselves and their congregations rooted in the message that every person is a reflection of the divinity. Their exposition of the sacredness and inherent worth of every human being  is uncompromising.; the status of imago Dei has no superior. God’s grace comes to humanity touching each of us directly, so that assured of our intrinsic dignity, we can each live into our highest and most noble self.(Page 149)

    A quotation like that has disruptive and constructive consequences if such a view of each human being were to inform political and social goals. I am deeply interested in the critical edge the doctrine of the imago Dei provides for a Christian theology and practice of justice, and as a doctrine with diagnostic properties for probing the economic values and human costs of social policies. Imago dei and asylum seeking people; imago Dei and homeless people; imago Dei, globalisation and company restructuring; imago Dei and inter-faith dialogue.

    Of course imago Dei is a doctrine decisively shaped by the attributes of the God in whose image it is believed we are made. ‘God is love…in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself….God commends his love towards us in that while we were still enemies, Christ died for us.’ Imago Dei – transformative grace.