Living Wittily

Category: Theology

  • Thomas Merton on the humility of the theologian who dares to write about God

    09feature1_1 I wish I could write better out of respect for God, who gave me these small and very usual and familiar and unstartling and generous graces…

    But if I am humble I will write better just by being humble. By being humble, I will write what is true, simply – and the simple truth is never rubbish and never scandalous – except to people in peculiar perplexities of pride themselves…

    May I write simply and straight anything I ever have to write, that no dishonour come to God through my writing about Him.

    Thomas Merton, quoted in Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (London: Sheldon, 1986), 191

  • “Fellowship” according to Bonhoeffer – “to kindle the flame of the true fire of Christ.”

    One of my problems with the word 'fellowship', and an increasing diifculty with the word 'community', is the cosy, soft, non-angularity of the words. These are words with a marshmallow softness, a painted-with-a-pastel-palette look that's more impressionist than real, a squishy shapelessness under pressure that gives no confidence we know what their real shape is or would look like. I also worry that both words are more about feelings than actions, and that their overuse makes them sound like sacred alternatives to secular expletives, which tend to be the unthinking blanks inserted to sentences to convey emotional engagement or just as often as a vain repetition by habit.

    Bonhoeffer Which is why now and then it matters to have someone say something about 'fellowship' and 'community' that unsettles us, and dissipates the devotional haze that obscures what fellowship and community at their demanding uncomfortable Christlikeness might actually  look like, feel like and be like. And one of the people who regularly does that for me is one of my best theological friends, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A theological friend is one who isn't interested in reinforcing my conceptual comfort zones, or ignoring my bad intellectual and theological habits, and whom I trust enough to listen when he tells me I'm talking or thinking nonsense.

    So. To the popular notion that fellowship and community are directly tied to intimacy, like-mindedness, mutual knowledge of each other's story, sharing of personal needs and problems, and current place in the world, Bonhoeffer enters a disconcerting disclaimer. Like the good theological friend he is he confirms his trustworthiness as a friend not by agreeing with us but by telling us why we are wrong. In Sanctorum Communio,in a discussion of the Lord's Supper Bonhoeffer compares the experience of those who know each other well with those who break bread as strangers:

    Breadwine It has been deplored that urban congregations celebrating the Lord's Supper are faced with the unfortunate fact that participants do not know one another; this situation allegedly diminishes the weight placed on the Christian Community and takes away from the personal warmth of the ceremony.

    But against this we must ask is this very kind of a church-community not itself a compelling sermon about the significance and reality of the community of saints, which surpasses all human community? Isn't the commitment to the church, to Christian love, most unmistakable where it is protected in principle from being confused in any way with  any kind of human community based onb mutual affection? Is it not precisely such a community that much better safeguards the serious realism of the sanctorum communio – a community in which the Jew remains a Jew, Greek Greek, worker worker, and capitalist capitalist, and where all are nevertheless the Body of Christ – than one in which these hard facts are quietly glossed over?

    Wherever there is a real profession of faith in the community of saints, there strangeness and seeming coldness only serve to kindle the flame of the true fire of Christ; but where the idea of the sanctorum communio is neither understood nor professed , there personal warmth merely conceals  the absence of the crucial element  but cannot replace it. 

    Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio. A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 245-6

  • What is the justification for the justification debate?

    Hunt light

    Evangelicals and New Testament scholars, and Evangelicals who are not New Testament scholars, and New Testament scholars who are not Evangelicals, are all very exercised just now about the doctrine of justification. There are those who hold the Reformation Perspective on Paul, (Luther modified by Calvin), those who hold the New Perspective on Paul, those who hold the revised or beyond New Perspective on Paul, and those who are in the business of writing newer and bigger books on what all this actually means.

    Just now and again I begin to wonder if Paul could possibly have meant anything so complex as the massive books by people like Wright, Dunn and Campbell suggest. Then in my more fanciful moments I wonder how, within the life of the Triune God where self-giving, outgoing love is creative, redemptive and eternally purposeful in God's mission to a broken world, such exegetical scholasticism, theological polemic, and conceptual gymnastics is viewed. In other words what is the justification for Christian scholars argy-bargying (is that how you spell it) over how to reduce what God has done in Christ to words that in the end will have to describe the indescribable, define the indefinable, contain and constrain the mystery of faith, and use terminology that requires in two most recent publications 1200 pages and a million or so of such inadequate words to do so.

    OK. I oversimplify, unjustifiably. But do these books overcomplicate unjustifiably, since we are talking about justification here? So, what justification is there for serial book sized assertions and retorts, positions and assaults, and seasonal contests such as Piper versus Wright, Dunn versus Wright, Dunn versus Piper, Campbell versus Wright and Dunn and Piper, with others in the wing should the protagonists tire and someone else take up the exegetical cudgels and theological brickbats to show where each is wrong and they are right. 

    So with some relief I found someone who brings an admirable clarity to the entire discussion. I refer to the theologian most loved by people who try to live the reconciled life rather than argue about it, who don't need to exhaustively parse their vocabulary of choice before trusting in the God who in Christ justifies the ungodly, and whose goal as Christians is, well, to justify their existence as Christians by living the life of faith enabled by the grace of God in Christ to love and serve a broken but God-loved world:

    Justification: (1) function of word processors that makes sure everything is tidied up satisfactorily at the end of the line (2) divine, grace-filled initiative that makes sure everything is tidied up at the end of the line.

    Adrian Plass, Bacon Sandwiches and Salvation. The A-Z of the Christian Life (London: Paternoster, 2007), 97.

    Whatever else Holman Hunt's painting might portray, it does make me wonder if Christ is knocking unnoticed by those inside, who are so busy debating the finer points of their particular take on theology, they won't open the door. But jesus knocks. And not so they will let him into their conceptually intense living space, but to invite them outside with Jesus into a world where what is needed is more lanterns!

  • T F Torrance on incarantion and atonement II

    When T F Torrance writes about theological science, and such complexities as the relations between space, time and divine and contingent order, you simply have to adopt the disposition of student trying hard not to get lost in the maze of erudition and the labyrinth of specialist discourse woven by a professor at ease in unfamiliar intellectual territory.

    But when Torrance writes about such central doctrines of Christian faith as the trinitarian understanding of God, christology understood as incarnation, atonement and the resurrection reality of Jesus Christ ascended and coming, then we listen to a theologian preach, and encounter preaching that is soaked in the great doctrines of the faith, and these doctrines as the mere articulation of what it means to experience the reality of the living God, encountered in Jesus Christ.

    So here's the next paragraph of Torrance, getting to the heart of the Gospel by a deep theological reading of Scripture. I repeat the last sentence of yesterday's extract. And as a wee forethought before reading it, hHowever new fangled we think theological exegesis is, Torrance was doing it 50 years ago in Edinburgh.

    Whitcruz "And so the
    cross with all its incredible meekness and patience and compassion is
    no deed of passive and beautiful heroism simply, but the most potent
    and aggressive deed that heaven and earth have ever known: the attack
    of God's holy love upon the inhumanity of man and the tyrranny of evil,
    upon all the piled up contradiction of sin.

    To see how that is so, watch what happened when Jesus was arraigned before Pilate and the Jewish nation. Jesus had never lifted a violent finger against anyone, and yet he became the centre of a violent disturbance that has shaken the world to its foundations. The incredible thing is this: the meeker and milder Jesus is, the more violent the crowd become in their resentment against him. The more like a lamb he is, the more like ravening wolves they become. By his very passion and suffering, by his meekness and grace and truth, Jesus imparted passion to his contemporaries and called forth violence from them until at last they laid violent hands upon him and dragged him off to the cross.

    Jesus is the embodiment of the still small voice of God: he is the Word made flesh, the Word that is able to divide soul and spirit asunder. That voice, that Word of God in jesus penetrated as never before into the secrets of humanity and exposed them. The more he stood them, the more the power of God broke its way into the citadel of the human soul. Before the weakness and mercy of Jesus, before this compassion, all barriers are broken down, all the thoughts and intents of the heart are revealed. What wind and earthquake and fire could not do, Jesus did: he penetrated into the proud heart of man and laid it bare, and in so doing he produced the most violent reaction that culminated in his crucifixion. "


    T F Torrance, Incarnation. The Person and Life of Christ (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), p. 150-1.

  • T F Torrance on incarnation and atonement (I)

    For the Love of God The theological legacy of T F Torrance has long been acknowledged as one of the intellectual treasures of Scottish theology. Some of his writing can be dense and hard to get on with; but much of it is theology that is deeply engaged with the living faith of the man who wrote it, and is written by a theologian who has thought downward into the depths of the grace and mercy of divine love. Torrance's best writing is a shining example of theology personally appropriated in the experience of the theologian and expressed in language unembarrassed by the commitment of faith. Below is a passage which to my mind expresses a very Scottish theology of the cross – I hear echoes of James Denney, P T Forsyth and Torrance's own teacher, H. R. Mackintosh, each of whom wrote out of the same reservoir of theological passion.

    "In the incarnate life of Jesus, and above all in his death, God does not execute his judgment on evil dimply by smiting it violently away by a stroke of his hand, but by entering into it from within, into the very heart of the blackest evil, and making its sorrow and guilt and suffering his own. And it is because it is God himself who enters in, in order to let the whole of human evil go over him, that his intervention in meekness has violent and explosive force. It is the very power of God. And so the cross with all its incredible meekness and patience and compassion is no deed of passive and beautiful heroism simply, but the most potent and aggressive deed that heaven and earth have ever known: the attack of God's holy love upon the inhumanity of man and the tyrranny of evil, upon all the piled up contradiction of sin."

                                           T F Torrance, Incarnation. The Person and Life of Christ (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), p. 150.

  • The theological impact of a comma

    Nicholas Lash again, and once again structured for slowed down reading:

    God's utterance lovingly gives life;
    gives all life,
    all unfading freshness;
    gives only life,
    and peace, and love,
    and beauty, harmony and joy.

    And the life God gives
    is nothing other,
    nothing less,
    than God's own self.
    Life is God,
    given.

    Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God (London:SCM, 1992), 104

    That last four word sentence with the theologically determined comma. Brilliant!

  • Listening for the voice of God – who does not shout.

    Decided to arrange the following paragraph from Nicholas Lash into a prose poem, to allow for slowed down reading.

    "Good learning calls,
    no less than teaching does,
    for courtesy, respect,
    a kind of reverence:
    for facts and people,
    evidence and argument,
    for climates of speech
    and patterns of behaviour
    different from our own.

    Watchfulness is, indeed, in order,
    but endless suspicion and mistrust are not.
    There are affinities between the courtesy,
    the delicacy of attentiveness, required for friendship;
    the single minded passionate disiniterestedness
    without which no good scholarly or scientific work is done;
    and the contemplativity which strains,
    without credulity,
    to listen for the voice of God –
    who does not shout."

    Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God (London: SCM, 1992), pp. 10-11.

  • Terry Eagleton: “Truly civilised societies don’t hold predawn power breakfasts”

    51A1suWOeDL._SL160_AA115_ This book is one of the best reads for a long time – pity the dust cover is so dull, even if the simulated tear is meant to symbolise the torn fabric of human ways of knowing). In the London Review of Books, Eagleton (no friend of religion) previously punctured the ego of Dawkins by administering what can only be called a massive dose of qualified rationality! The straw men set up by Dawkins, the caricatures of religion in general and theism in particular, the sloppy argumentation, his culpable unawareness of his own prejudiced assumptions and emotional toxins – an absolutely unanswerable critique of a book that had it been submitted as an undergraduate dissertation would have struggled to survive the flaws of its own methodology. Treat yourself to the tonic of refined academic polemic, a masterclass by one of the sharpest and most controversial literary and cultural commentators. Eagleton in full flow can be read here in his review "Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching".

    This book, Reason, Faith and Revolution consists of lectures he recently delivered in the United States (hence the references throughout to USA). Here he takes on the new atheists with the same verve, conflating Dawkins and Hitchens into the new protagonist Ditchkins – and sometimes with hilarious effectiveness.

    Executed Wanted "Jesus, unlike most responsible American citizens, appears to do no work, and is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented as homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinsfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the Establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful. Though he was no revolutionary in the modern sense of the term, he has something of the lifestyle of one. He sounds like a cross between a hippie and a guerilla fighter. He respects the Sabbath not because it means going to church but because it represents a temporary escape from the burden of labour. The sabbath is about resting, not religion. One of the best reasons for being a Christian, as for being a socialist, is that you don't like having to work, and reject the fearful idolatry of it so rife in countries like the United States [and United Kingdom!]. Truly civiled societies do not hold predawn power breakfasts.
    Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution. Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale, 2009), page 10.

    Quite so!

  • Kenosis – gift, discipline or both?

    Helen and Rosemary, thanks for helpful comments pushing the discussion along in these recent posts. Paul's limited use of "kenosis" as a term, but its quite widespread use as a concept in his letters, suggests to me no simple either /or will do, when talking of kenosis as either gift or disciplne. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God at work in you to will and to act according to his good purpose". (Phil 2.12-13).  Enabled by grace to develop and maintain a disposition increasingly Christlike because 'he who began a good work in us will bring it to completion at the day of Christ'.( Phil 1.6), The first ref. above comes immediately following the great kenosis hymn, the first at the outset of the letter.

    Resurr26 Gorman's argument isn't so much that we are to work at being kenotic, but that those who are in Christ by faith are being conformed to his image which is kenotic, cruciform and raised from death. I've been asked to preach in August on a text that says this and more, and which I have to say has been programmatic in my own understanding of what Christian existence is and must be, when the reality of Christ crucified and risen becomes not only definitive of existence, but radically redefining in terms of self. 'I am crucified with Christ. I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me, and the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me'. (Gal. 3.20) I can't read those words without realising that the issue of what is gift and what is discipline dissolves into all through grace, all through love, and a grace and love that is inexhaustibly generous, utterly self-giving and radical in transformative intent and power. (Sometime I'd like to write about the influence of autobiography on exegesis – this verse has been paradigmatic in my own spirituality from the beginning because it was "given to me" by two very special people….).

    51nkFA39GoL._SL500_AA240_ This summer I happen to be re-reading Charles Partee's recent The Theology of John Calvin, while also thinking my way through Gorman's discussion of kenosis and theosis. The union of the believer with Christ has always been seen as important in understanding Calvin's thought ; Partee thinks it is more than that, it is central  to his spirituality.

    In a beautiful epigrammatic statement about Christ as source and origin of Christian existence, Calvin says, "As God he is the destination to which we move; as man the path by which we go. Both are found in Christ alone. (Institutes II.2.1) And here is Partee explaining how in Calvin's thought, faith is both human response and divine gift.

    "Faith and union with Christ being virtually synonymous means faith is not under human control in initiation and achievement.
    According to modern dispositions and assumptions, faith is correlative and interactive. Against Calvin, faith is today understood, at least in part, as my faith. Since theology requires listening and questioning so faith is assumed to include both gift and response. Calvin affirms a human response to the divine gift, but he creditis the response to the work of the Holy Spirit in order to avoid all self-congratulation or self-glorification. Faith is not a human choice made habitual but a divine blessing made continual by union with Christ."
    (Charles Partee, The Theology of John Calvin. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009) Page 202-3.

    That is as elegant an account of Calvin's theology of faith and response, of gift and obedience, as I've read. And one that answers some of the crude caricatures of Calvin's thought, generated by his enemies, and at times more damagingly those generated post-Calvin by his less pastorally astute friends who claim his name for their theology.

  • Woe is me! Who is me? The riddle of discovering my – self.

    572px-Michelangelo's_Pieta_5450_cropncleaned Helen asks about the dilemma of knowing who we are, our true self. "To what extent is 'myself' the 'me' made in the image of God and to what extent is it the human, fallen, sinful 'me' ? 

    Perhaps the beginnings of the answer are in the recognition that as human beings we are self-contradictory, our place in the world ambiguous, our moral capacities ambivalent, our lives lived under shadow of judgement yet looking hopefully for light. There is a Romans 7 dilemma we all recognise whether that tortured passage of Romans 7.14-25 refers to Paul's experience, or ours, before or after conversion. Who is this radically uncertain "I" who does what I don't want to do, and who is helpless to do the good I both must and want to do? Why can't I do what I must, be what I am called to be?

    Three brief quotations sharpen our dilemma because they each say something true about that mysterious mixture of feeling and knowing, wanting and longing, of conscience and wilfulness, of flesh and soul, mind and spirit, that is this person called me. And the truths don't seem to fit – except in a theology of creation and redemption, of justification and sanctification, of judgement and mercy, and of life through death as the self-giving love of God whose creative purposes persist in pursuing at infinite personal cost, the goal of a redeemed, renewed and reconciled creation.

    For you created my inmost being,
    you knit me together in my
    mother's womb.
    I praise you
    for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

    Psalm 139.13,14.

    Surely I was sinful at birth,
    sinful from the time my mother
    conceived me.

    Psalm 51.5

    “This is my dilemma: I am dust and ashes; frail, wayward, a
    set of predetermined behavioral responses, riddled with fears, beset with
    needs, the quintessence of dust, and unto dust I shall return. But there is
    something else in me. Dust I may be, but troubled dust. Dust that dreams. Dust
    that has strange premonitions of transfiguration, of a glory in store, a
    destiny prepared, an inheritance that will one day be my own…So my life is
    stretched out in a painful dialectic between ashes and glory, between weakness
    and transfiguration. I am a riddle to myself, an exasperation enigma…this
    strange duality of dust and glory.”

    (Richard Holloway – but I can't find the reference – anybody help to pin this down?)