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I finished the last batch of marking in College yesterday. The process of grading, marking and feeding back on student work is an intriguing mix of discipline, yes at times tedium, enjoyment and reflection on what theological education achieves in the process of forming and transforming people.

Driving home in the car with Emmy Lou Harris singing sadly, then with Dave Crowder blasting out his Happiness Mass in C Major, I had time to think about the formative impact on a teacher of twelve years reading the work of our students.

Theological education is one of the most important foundations for Christian mission today. I am not going to argue that; I take it as self-evident for followers of Jesus who dare to take up the double invitation 'take my yoke upon you and learn of me….take up your cross and follow me.

But one overwhelming argument is the evidence Semester after Semester, of students growing in their faith, beginning to move out of constrained comfort zones into the risky place that is thoughtful discipleship, and engaging with adventurous thinking about a faith that is never safe and sound, but :

celebrates God incarnate in Jesus,

argues, because life depends on it, for the foolishness of the cross,

lives always towards newness and hope, because that's what resurrection people do

comes alive and learns to serve within the orbit of an eternal community of Triune Love

studies and wrestles with Scripture as if their lives depended on it, which it does

learn to love the Church again because it is the Body of Christ and they are part of it

begin to discover, and learn to accept, who they are, God's gift to the church today

and in all of this, to read, pray, think and follow faithfully after Jesus.

So when an essay on Christology and Ecclesiology, or a sermon in Creative Homiletics, or an Exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount, or a Journal of Theological Reflection on a church placement, or a review of a chapter on the significance of Nicaea for a wee local Scottish Baptist church in the 21st Century – when any of these 'assignments' comes on to the desk for marking and grading, they are sacraments of learning, they are formative spiritual exercises, they are attempts at loving God with mind and heart, they are snapshots of a soul growing and a spirit spreading its wings towards a bigger sky.

So yes. There is the tedium of overload, the deadline for marks to be submitted, the pressure of marking; before that, for the student, the hard graft of reading and researching, of finding the right books and articles, of deadlines looming and 1000 words to go. But theological education is about something much more enduring and transforming than ticking the assignment boxes.

Theological Education is a commitment to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength so that, in service to God in Christ, we can learn to love our neighbours as ourselves, live as peacemakers, be ambassadors for Christ and ministers of reconciliation. And in all that commitment to develop wisdom and discernment, to open ourselves up to God's wide and wonderful world with the confidence of those who know enough to know they'll never know enough; but to live as those who take what they know, what they deeply know, of the grace and truth of Christ, and live it out so that once again in the Christian community, the Body of Christ, the Word becomes flesh and dwells, tabernacles, makes its home in this God-loved world. A world forever changed by Love incarnate, crucified and resurrected in Jesus, the One in whom God was pleased to dwell, and to unite all things to Himself, making peace by the blood of the cross.

All of that underlies an academic assignment in a theological College which is committed, students and staff, to personal formation for the ministry of Christ and His Body the Church. "Take my yoke upon you and learn of me…take up your cross daily, and follow me…you are the Body of Christ."

Yesterday was an N T Wright day here in Aberdeen. The Launch event for the Aberdeen University Centre for Ministry Studies included an evening lecture by Wright on his recent 2 volume study of Paul and the Faithfulness of God. It was a virtuoso performance by a scholar whose grasp of the height depth, length and breadth of Paul's Gospel was shared, with passion and Christian seriousness in full flow, with a full house of all kinds of people; and it was earthed in the pastoral implications and resources of Paul's theology in the service of Jesus the messiah and the church as the Body of Christ. That by way of acknowledging the contribution of Wright as NT scholar, Bishop, and Christian to the wider church. Post grads, theological educators, ministers and priests, a wide range of church people in none of the aforementioned groups, and an audience whose average age was impresssively low, and whose attention was held for over an hour. 

Is Wright right or wrong is one of those clever bytes that wear thin after the first time! Of course he is right and of course there is room for disagreement, debate, alternative interpretation; and of course he has an agenda, who hasn't. What was obvious was his control of the NT text, his deep reading of Paul and his immersion in the history of the times of Jesus and Paul. Equally evident was his insistence that context and particularity are part of the givenness of revelation in the incarnation, ministry, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Messiah, and the rootedness of the narrative of God and the people of God in the election of Abraham and Israel fulfilled in Jesus.

I'm reading Charles Marsh's new biography of Bonhoeffer. One of the real strengths of this book is the clear account of Bonhoeffer and his early collision course with National Socialism over the question of the Jews, and particularly the Aryan paragraph adopted widely in the German Church. So last night Wright's insistence that to decontextualise and de-historicise the New Testament makes the Jewishness of Jesus and Paul dispensable, is in my view a crucial and ethically required element of responsible hermeneutics. In Nazi Germany that historical move of de-historcising and decontextualising opened the door to a distorted Christianity characterised by a legitimated anti-Jewishness; helping lay the ideological rail track that would eventually lead to Auschwitz; and creating an Aryan Jesus abstracted from his own Jewishness and turned into a reason for the lethal hatred of Jews. Evil has its own lethal ironies. 

The evening ended with the ususal reception, book signing and conversation. I took along my early copy of The Climax of the Covenant, in which Wright's essay on Philippians 2 was published (the reason I bought the book in 1991), and now have the imprimatur and greeting of the author.

A good night, one when it was fun to sit at the feet of a Gamaliel and learn how much I don't know, and feel again the importance of attentiveness to the centre of our faith, Jesus Christ, witnessed to in Scripture, and living in the new community, the Body of Christ.

Now here's another reason why Abraham Joshua Heschel is one of my most trusted spiritual guides. He preserves and affirms the Godness of God. Long before we fell for what Bill Placher called 'the domestication of transcendence', Heschel was insisting that God is not reducible to human categories of control and usefulness. Those who want a God who is manageable and amenable to our wants, likes, dislikes and life plans had better look elsewhere than the God of the Bible, who refuses to be the default option of the self-interested ego, religious or secular, sincere or selfish, assertive or fearful.

"God is of no importance unless He is of supreme importance. It is hard to define religion, it is hard to place its wealth of meaning into the frame of a single sentence. But surely one thing may be said negatively: religion is not expediency.

If all our actions are guided by one consideration, how best to serve our personal interests, it is not God whom we serve, but the self. True, the self has its legitimate claims and interests; the persistent denial of the self, the defiance of one's own desire for happiness is not what God demands.

But to remember that the love of God is for all men [and women], for all creatures; to remember His love and His claim to love in making a decision- this is the way He wants us to live. To worship God is to forget the self. It is in such instants of worship that humanity acts as a symbol of Him."

That single paragraph, broken into three thought sized bytes, contains the substance of Heschel's philosophy of religion, which itself is one of the more demanding intellectual achievements of mid 20th century religious thought. What I get from Heschel is thought distilled to the essence of what we most want to say about the God whose love pervades the universe, carrying with it mercy, purpose and redemptive intent.

I want to think more about the theology of the quotation below.

"We are not self made selves:

our identity is not determined solely by others.

Human life is Theonomous –

we are from God, toward God, for God.

Each human person is destined for transformation by the glory of God,

as seen in the Transfiguration of Christ,

the foreshadowing of Love given on the Cross

and Love bonding with its Source in the Resurrection."

Michael Downey, Altogether Gift. A Trinitarian Spirituality, page 136

On first reading it seemed to me to be an important corrective to the creeping devaluation of our human ordinariness, the inner blame we sometimes feel for our felt mediocrity, and the shoulder shrugging dismissiveness we can practice towards ourselves and our potential to be what God calls us to be as children made in the image of God.

In the meantime, the words point us away from self-critique towards the One whose judgments have more mercy and grace than our own.

But I want to think about it a bit more………….

The photo is of gorse, on the cliff tops at St Cyrus, taken on Good Friday.

I'm now well into the transition stage of finishing my time as Principal then Lecturer within the Scottish Baptist College. The time is right and good to move into the next stage of the 'journey called ministry'.

As those who know me will expect, my metaphor for a disrupted life is an all over the place library! And I'm now in the process of remarrying the two halves of my library which for the past twelve years have been separated between home study and College study. Hence Graeme's recent comment about me reducing my library, and his not unreasonbable scpeticism that such a reduction may in the end be more cosmetic than surgical.  Not entirely though. My aim is to get back to what has always been a principle of house management – that my books don't overflow my study into other areas of our home.

So I spent a satisfying morning at John Lewis ordering two cracking new bookcases to match the existing ones, and paid for with a gift previously given from the friends of the College. Seems a good deal – love of learning took me to the College, love of learning will continue – lifelong learning as a vocational imperative is also a quite persuasive argument for having books around.

Aye, but how many Jim? How many lifetimes to read this lot? And who is going to make sure they're dusted and looked after, eh? And what about libraries, are there not enough books in the Uni library and a lot cheaper? Yes I hear all that – and I now have to think longer before buying more.

As I did when I bought the C S Lewis Trilogy, in hardback, for £3 last week – must have pondered, considered and swithered for at least 5 seconds……….

   Yesterday I bought three books. I know. I'm trying to reduce my library. But in a charity shop these three volumes of the C S Lewis Cosmic Trilogy were on sale for £1 per volume. They are in very good condition, published by Bodley Head, Hardcover, 1976, and dustcovers clean and unclipped. I first read the Cosmic Trilogy in the 1970's in the first paperbacks, now long gone as brown, cracked and done. I reckoned I could find three inches of shelf space, and will read them again over the summer.

C S Lewis is an acquired taste, and also a taste that can be lost. I can't read some of his stuff now. Maybe because some of his writing is now seriously dated, and much of it has been gathered into massive volumes of letters, essays and miscellania that are really for CSL enthusiasts rather than interested readers. But the good stuff is still very good. The Chronicles of Narnia remain an alternative world for all ages; Surprised by Joy is an enduring classic of religious discovery; Reflections on the Psalms say as much about Lewis as the Psalms; The Four Loves is a mixture of philosophy, pscychology, lierary criticism, Christian reflection and a sometimes blinkered C S Lewis; Mere Christianity is unlikely to perauade postmodern minds instinctively sceptical of clever apologetics; Till We Have Faces is, for me at least, a beautiful story of human love, identity and divine longing; and so on. But I have and will hold on to each of these books, flawed as they are.

 

From Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret, page 176

 

Christology is always

to be done in via,

at the interface

between the gospel

and the cultures which it meets on its missionary journey.

It is of the essense of the matter that Jesus was not

content to leave as the fruit of his work a precise

verbatim record

of all that he said

and did, but that

he was concerned

to create a community

which would be bound

to him in love and

obedience, learn

discipleship even in

the midst of sin and

error, and be his

witnesses among all peoples.

This is one of our clematis growing up our fence – called "Avalanche".

It reminded me of what I still consider Eliot's best poetry, The Four Quartets.

Burnt Norton IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?

Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

Following on from yesterday's post, about Wilfred Owen's passionate appeal for and understanding of Jesus' radical call to peace as a call to passivity rather than war, I came across this quotation from Nancey Murphy. It occurs at the end of her essay 'Agape and Non-violence', in Craig Boyd (ed.) Visions of Agape. Problems and Possibilities in Human and Divine Love, (Ashgate: 2008), 61-72.

Agape is said to be a kind of love that is without regard to status, beauty, relationship, kinship of the object of love. This essay has argued for a more radical (Radical) understanding, emphasizing the call to love particularly one's enemies, and to love without regard to the cost to oneself. God's paradoxical promise is that those who participate in this way in his unlimited and self-emptying love will not lose their very selves, but instead will find eternal life.  page 72

In a previous book, On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology and Ethics, Murphy and Ellis argued for noncoercive and self-sacrificial responses to threat, oppression and overt violence. This is not an argument for passivity but for non-violent direct action. Murphy's conversation partners in her essay are an interesting and eclectic gathering round the table – Simone Weil, John Howard Yoder, and Gustav Aulen amongst others, with considerable side comments from the Radical Reformation. In this essay as elsewhere Murphy is arguing for a 'kenotic view of human flourishing as a core thesis to be elaborated and tested in the social sciences'. This is both a courageous and radical position for a Christian moral philosopher, and it's no impractical idealism either, as she applies a kenotic ethic to economics, judicial practices and coercive social policies.

My interest in all of this is because my own theology and theological ethics are shaped by that same kenotic instinct, perhaps even conviction. Trinitarian theology can be articulated from numerous perspectives, but my own explorations have been about the relationship between kenosis and perichoresis as explanatory terms about the eternal movements of love and self-giving as these are revealed in the economic Trinity. Such a Trinitarian kenotic theology has ecclesial implications in that an understanding of the church as the Body of Christ, suggests that the Christian community is kenotic and perichoretic in its internal and external relations, in its ethical practices and in its bearing witness to Jesus Christ whose Body it re-presents to the world.

I'm well aware of the theological hesitations around the concept of kenosis, but I am equally aware, and more impressed by, the presence in the New Testament of ineradicable trajectories pointing to self-giving love, the pouring out of life for others, the cross-carrying practices of discipleship and the call to live, by the grace of God, towards the outrageous demands of the Sermon on the Mount. The intricacies of systematic theology notwithstanding, there are equally strong arguments which take with uncomfortable, and discomfiting seriousness, kenosis as the revealed disposition of the life of the Holy Trinity. I am therefore compelled to affirm one of Murphy's distilled sentences, itself a distillation of Yoder's vision of Christian existence as informed by Anabaptist thought and practices:

The moral character of God is revealed in Jesus' vulnerable enemy love and renunciation of dominion. Imitation of Jesus in this regard constitutes a social ethic.

 

I read this story and was moved to thankfulness for the faithful witness to Jesus of this good man. Amongst the most strategic gifts of the Holy Spirit, is the gift to the rest of us of the testimony and witness of a Christian life lived in sacrificial joyfulness and faithful compassion. .