Category: Theology

When I go to Glasgow University
Library I usually ignore the lifts and take the stairs. Theology is on floor
10. I think of it as a sancta scala, a stairway to wholeness if not holiness,
at one and the same time aerobic exercise and a defiance of that creeping
laziness that thinks saved time and energy is a greater virtue than healthy
slowness. Those who know me know I need to learn healthy slowness!

I joined the University of Glasgow Library in 1974 when I graduated, paying £50 for a
lifetime membership. That is one of the greatest gifts and biggest bargains in
my life. Mum and Dad paid half of it, and I paid half with a prize what I
winned by having wrote the goodest essay (but not for good grammar!). Over the
years I've borrowed, browsed and buried myself among the stacks. Amongst the
various places I go to feel nearer to God, or at least to put myself within
range of God's presence and voice, is the familiar library, a place of learning, quiet and inner humbling.

The University of Glasgow, New
College Edinburgh, University of Aberdeen, St Deiniol's in Hawarden, are all
places where I've spent hours, days, in one or two cases weeks, in the company
of a great cloud of witnesses. But Glasgow's  theology floor is the highest and hardest
to get to by stairs. There’s something symbolic about the hard climb and the
sense of exertion and effort before walking into Floor 10 with its hundreds of
feet of shelved theology and philosophy. Reading Eberhard Jungel’s The Mystery of God in the World is the
intellectual equivalent of climbing to Floor 10 to do your theology! Exertion and
effort are required but you hope it’ll be worth it. This is a book that has
dared me to read it – and having dared, my instinct for recognising a hard book
is again confirmed. 

Now time was when I would finish
any book I started. A matter of pride and conscientious resistance to
cherry-picking, body swerving, free-wheeling – in other words I was refusing to
take the lift, preferring to persevere with the stairs. But more recently,
whether because of experience, wisdom or the sense that life isn’t forever and
there’s too much to read that’s good, I’ve become more impatient with those
books that don’t quite do it any more. A book like Jungel’s Mystery of God could easily be dismissed
as unnecessarily hard going, and defensible reasons given for laying it aside.
But I’m thinking of it in terms of Floor 10. The hard work of taking the stairs
eventually brings you to the place where theology and philosophy are given
their place, and where learning can begin. And the by product of the long
climb, if it’s done regularly, is an improved cardiovascular system, or in
reading terms, theological fitness and stamina.

Anyway, it’s only in the hard books
that you come across such observations as this. Speaking of human anxiety in
the face of life’s precariousness and human mortality:

Anxiety is not to be understood as a
deficit, but rather something positive as concern for that which exists. Man is
not less human when he perseveres in that anxiety than when he is definitely
removed from it. In a definitive way, however, man cannot remove himself from
this anxiety. Definitively he can only be
removed from it. And if man is definitively removed from his anxiety about
non-being, then God has been at work and is experienced as the one who always was at work, so that one can only
look after him and can only recognise the posteriora
dei (hinder parts of God, Ex 33.23). (Page 34)

In a passage like this, Jungel’s
own experience of anxiety and insecurity doing theology in the former Communist
East Germany, injects a charge of spiritual authenticity and faith tried in the
place where it carries its own cost. Anxiety being transmuted into concern and
caring for life, our own and others, is one of those counter-intuitive comments
that sheds an entirely different light on our own inner fears. Instead of feeling
guilty about being anxious, we cast all our anxieties on Him – but that needn’t
mean we will no longer feel anxious for others – for such anxiety may only be
the urgency and persistence of love. And a book about the theology of the Crucified One we
should expect to challenge every attempt to minimise the personal cost of loving others.

Danny was having a bad day. The morning I met him he was sweeping the gutters outside the Prince Regent Hotel. Every 20 yards an impressive heap of rubbish to be shovelled into his bins and carted away. But most of it was green leaves and new twigs, ripped from the trees in the high winds of the previous night. He swept with determined anger, as if these leaves were each a personal offence. Our eyes met and I stopped to commiserate.."Don’t expect to be doing this in May… usually September before you have to sweep up leaves". 

Took out his map, showed me the streets in highlighter pink that were his patch, then showed me the patches in fluorescent green where he was to help the next squad. Asked how he was supposed to get all this done? It didn’t seem like the time to tell him it was Pentecost week… you know the Holy Spirit…like the wind of God, blowing through the world. Nor the words of  John Newton, Amazing Grace, in a storm every leaf (and snowflake) falls by the will of God at the appointed time and in the ordained place. Instead I said thanks for what he was doing…it was appreciated…made a difference, he was a bit embarrassed and said he wouldn’t be doing it if he didn’t need the job. So he got stuck in again, tidying up the world, tackling the chaos, bringing order to those parts of the world he was responsible for, picked out in a couple of inches of fluorescent pink.

People who tidy up our world…You know how Genesis begins, "In the beginning…." Think of it, the Spirit of God as the wisdom and purpose of God tidying up the chaos, making sense of the messiness. Proverbs 8.30 refers to 'the craftsman at [the Lord's] side'. The one who takes raw material and the right tools, who works with skill, experience and flair so that something is manufactured, created, brought into being. And the Spirit delights every day, rejoicing in this whole world and delighting in human life. This is a view of God that is playful, the relaxed leisurely joy of the artist with her gifts in full flow. The Holy Spirit as God’s craftsman, God’s artist, working in the world.

It is this God who works in our lives. Proverbs 8 is about the wisdom of God. This is a view of the universe that has God at the centre. When you think of the God who watches over us think of one whose wise delight iImagined oceans into being, touched the depths of the earth to gush springs of life-giving water, settled the mountains in  place like an interior designer arranging the furniture, spreading soil like fitted carpets, arranging the dust of the world, speck by speck. Tell that to Danny, whose two inches of fluorescent pink mean hours of back-breaking work.

But this is poetry, this is truth, deep truth about the world we live in and the life we live in the world.

‘ Earth’s crammed with heaven 

and every common bush afire with God:/

but only he who sees, takes off his shoes,

the rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

And the deep truths are all here. The heavens set in place; the Lord rules the stars, and so the Lord, not the stars, rule our lives. The horizons are measured, all our possibilities fall within the wise love of God. The clouds are established, ‘Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take, the clouds you so much dread; are big with mercy and will break, in blessings on your head.’ We all have our clouds, those experiences that come between us and our happiness, the job we hate, the job we can’t get, the row that hurts, the illness that lays low, the depression that won’t lift, the lost chances that don’t come back, but they are part of life, and in the miracles of our lives this craftsman God can turn clouds to blessing.

The sea boundary is set and it can’t overstep God’s command…"when you pass through the waters they shall not overwhelm you"… "he marked out the foundations of the earth." Foundations give a structure its integrity, its durability, and the integrity and durability of  God’s creation is in his hands. This isn’t science; it’s a way of looking at the world that sees beneath the surface, that senses God at work. All these words are work words, from architects and builders vocabulary. This is God at work. Set in place the heavens… marked out the horizon, established clouds, fixed the deep fountains, set the boundaries of the sea, measured out the foundations. The world isn’t a chaos and neither are our lives. John Newton knew perfectly well that he was exaggerating when he speaks of God ordaining the shape, the precision timing, and the exact location of each falling snowflake and every wind-driven leaf. But he was trying to find pictures for the grace that brings us safe thus far, and the grace that leads us home. Just as Proverbs is trying to give us pictures of a God who doesn’t leave us to our own devices, but who is working in us and through us, in the details and the dailiness of our lives

And if the wind blows, and the leaves fall, then still,in this vast mystery of generous creative yet sometimes fristrating and wounding place we call the world, God works at working things out, according to a purpose established in love deeper than thought.

If the Holy Spirit is not Himself the true God, in what sense then can we say: I believe in the Holy Spirit? We should be wise to have nothing whatever to do with believing in a mere spiritual power. But if we realise the secret and the miracle of the fact that we believe, that it is really permissible and possible for us to believe in Jesus Christ and therefore in God, if it is plain to us that this permission and possibility are, according to John 3.3 nothing less than a ‘new birth’, then it cannot very long remain hidden from us that the power which achieves that in us cannot be anything less than God’s power. God in Himself is the love which becomes visible in us in this mystery and miracle. In God Himself is the love of the father to the Son, of the Son to the Father. This eternal love in God Himself is the Holy Spirit, of whose work the third article [of the creed] speaks.
Karl Barth, Credo (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1936), 136.

The theological emphases are in the italics. Barth’s impatience with mere spirituality, and with vaguely or undefined power, is at least one hint that his view of the Holy Spirit is never intentionally impersonal, and indeed is essentially defined by the nature and being of God. And when Barth identifies the love in God Himself with the Holy Spirit, he is referring to the Lord who is the Spirit, in the same personal intercommunion of love as father and Son. Or as he put it:

The Holy Spirit of adoption, of revelation and of witness, the Holy Spirit Who makes us free for the Word of God, is eternal Spirit in the same way as the Father is eternal Father and as the Son is eternal Son. He is of one substance with Father and Son and therefore with Them the one true God, Creator, Reconciler, Redeemer. (Credo, 135-6)

Just some devotional theology to mull over during Pentecost weekend…. before praying the words of another passionate theologian – Charles Wesley

O Thou who camest from above,
The pure, celestial fire to impart;
kindle a flame of sacred love,
on the mean altar of my heart.

Yesterday in the Theological Reflection class we spent some time savouring the spiritual prose poetry that is the writing of A J Heschel. This writer was mostly new to the class members, and his style of writing a stark contrast to much that passes for spiritual writing today. From the first day they saw this book cover there was interest in a man who had such a lived in face, and near the  end of the course when choices have to be made about what there is still time to explore and discuss – my suggested omission of Heschel was thankfully over-ruled. So we worked through a handout of brief extracts, each of us reading one, not feeling the need always to comment, but now and then saying what we had found touched us, or how what we read found us. It was an important interlude when teaching doesn’t need the constant explanatory, expository, interrogatory voice. It was a class taught by numerous acts of reading, reflecting and occasional vocal appreciation. And I think what was learned wasn’t so much how to do Theological Reflection, as how to recognise the profoundly reflective way of doing theology that arises from depths of human experience. Such expereince is forged in the fires of a faith both profound and immediate, a burning passion for God that welds the mystical and practical, and from the resulting fusion, a philosophical theology distilled to the essence of the religious encounter between the human and the divine, which is the meeting of holiness and humanity, divine pathos and human need.

Here are a couple of examples of Heschel’s remarkable glimpses into the nature of prayer as both joyful discovery and  unassuaged longing:

Prayer begins where expression ends. The words that reach our lips are often but waves of an overflowing stream touching the shore:We often seek and miss, struggle and fail to adjust our unique feelings to the patterns of the texts. Where is the tree that can utter fully the silent passion of the soil. Words can only open the door, and we can only weep on the threshold of our incommunicable thirst after the incomprehensible.

In no other act does the human being experience so often the disparity between the desire for expression and the means of expression as in prayer. The inadequacy of the means at our disposal appears so tangible, so tragic, that one feels it a grace to be able to give oneself up to music, to a tone, to a song, to a chant. The wave of a song carries the soul to heights which utterable meanings can never reach. Such abandonment is no escape…For the world of unutterable meanings is the nursery of the soul, the cradle of all our ideas. It is not an escape but a return to one’s origins.

Centuries of Jewish dealings with God have shaped such a theology of the soul’s astonishment. The extracts come from Man’s Quest for God. It would be to inexcusably misunderstand and misrepresent Heschel to point out that Christian theology teaches the greater truth of God’s quest for humanity – Heschel would rightly point out, with something of that pathos he understood so personally, that such a view of the initiative of God is yet another idea Christians borrowed from the Hebrew Bible and the people God chose to be an ‘echo of eternity’. Such theological plagiarism (unacknowledged borrowing) tends to obscure the beauty of the tradition out of which, in the providence of God, the Christian faith emerged. The human quest for God, uttered, or unexpressed because inexpressible, is always going to be the soul’s response to the grace that first creates the urge towards God, and calls for that reckless trust so full of risk, to begin the journey with God into a future without tangible certainties.

Augustine’s great prayer, ‘Thou has made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee’, is the cry that recognises that human incompleteness is itself the truth that turns us towards the One in whom all longing may be satisfied – but not yet, not here, and perhaps – not ever, for how can we ever have the capacity to have enough of God? P T Forsyth had no interest in being a ‘finished futility’ – he too recognised that the longing for God, the inadeqaucy of human expression to do justice to the inexpressible and ineffable, the categorical deficit in human capacity compared to divine inexhaustibility of grace, suggests that even in the encounter with God, in the fullness of glory and face to face, we will still be lost in wonder, love and praise. Which comes back to Heschel, and his willingness to be content, not with reductionist explanation, but with eternal mystery – which is why he confessed, ‘I asked for wonder……’ and not ‘I asked for answers!’

When J P Struthers, the remarkable minister of Greenock Reformed Presbyterian Church in late 19th Century Scotland, offered to buy James Denney a set of the Standard Puritan Divines as a wedding present, it was a joke between two men who remained very close friends, and went separate ways theologically, at least so far as biblical criticism and modern thought was concerned. Denney’s aversion to Seventeenth Century theology can be explained in several ways; his own upbringing in a church tracing its ancestry to the Covenanters and to the turmoil of theological conflict; his openness to new thought and growing resistance to Westminster Calvinism as intellectually stifling and inherently hostile to views of the Bible which allowed a believing criticism; his taste for the 18th century Augustan plain style in language, on which his own lucid, to the point, reasonably argued style was modelled; and his impatience with prolix, argumentative or dissected divinity.

However his contemporary P T Forsyth wasn’t as dismissive. The two great Congregationalist Puritans, John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, were honoured conversation partners in Foryth’s intellectual drawing room. Here is Forsyth on Goodwin:

Theological truth was not the deposit of a scholl’s thought but the register of the Church’s experience of eternal things. There is soemthing more than Shakespearian in the dramatic majesty and passionate intimacy of some of Goodwin’s pages, because they apply  genius to a region of the soul above any that Shakespeare ever entered. They not only tingle; they soar; and they come home with a beauty and poignancy of spiritual truth which makes them, ever after they are read, ingredients in one’s own spiritual life. (Faith Freedom and the Future, pages 116-118).

I’ve started two books on Puritan Spirituality, one of the research areas I am beginning to explore. I think I am somewhere between Denney and Forsyth as far as reading such people as Owen and Goodwin, Sibbes and Flavel, Baxter and Charnock, are concerned. Prolix yes; over-elaborated divinity – yes at times; scholastic Calvinism as a controlling intellectual grid often a given, yes; but there are times, actually many times, when they are saying important things the church can’t afford to forget, neglect or dismiss. One of my other enthusiasms is the theologian often called the last Puritan, Jonathan Edwards. He shares many of the characteristics, less of the faults, and is an important bridge in modern intellectual thought.

Anyway – more of this later. Still not online at home, but there are fingers of light streaking the horizon suggesting a new internet connection maty be about to dawn.

Last night, the anniversary of the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I sat a bit later, reading his Discipleship. I had made time throughout the day to read some of his thoughts on the cost of following Jesus, and the cost of the grace revealed on the Cross, and which calls us in our own time and place so to follow. I wonder if too much is made today, of discipleship as a programmatic approach to Christian education and training, so that discipleship has lost some of its astringent costly demand. For Bonhoeffer the disciple is one who bears witness by following, whether to death or not; a Christian is a martyr.

"Discipleship is a bond with the suffering Christ." (Discipleship, 82).

Reading Bonhoeffer’s own words, reflecting as I worked in the garden, I felt a mixture of inspiration and sadness; a life so effectively given to Christ, a life so tragic in lost potential for his future and ours. His writing fragmentary but glinting with spiritual light, his life incomplete yet consummated in faithful witness; his execution such a waste, his witness a beacon of grace.

These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore they are before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple. (Rev.7.14-15.)