But their idols are…,
made by human hands.
They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see.
They have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but cannot smell.
They have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but cannot walk,
nor can they utter a sound with their throats…
But I Praise you
for I am fearfully and wonderfully made,
your works are wonderful,I know that full well.
My Ordination Bible is a beautifully bound King James Version which remains always to hand, and is read for the soft draping comfort of holding such a lovely volume, and for the glory of the language and as a reminder of what my life, finally and gladly is about. There's something all but sacramental in the recurring act of holding that one Bible, handed to you at the time you make promises which will thereafter guide, undergird and sustain your life of faith.
I went back to my Bible today after reading the last pages of F W Dillisone's old fashioned volume, The Christian Understanding of the Atonement. Old fashioned in this case is a positive term, an affirming and approving response to a book that is relaxedly learned, displaying elegant architectonics, broad in sympathy, precise in analysis and eschewing controversy and partisan posturing. Published 45 years ago it remains one of the finest treatments of the atonement for theologians; polemicists and partisan apologists for this or that theory of the atonement will be definition be impatient with it – and be the poorer for their quick all too narrow judgements. This is a book in which scholarship is in the service of faith, and the exposition of the living core of Christian faith is reverent, searching and sufficiently open to allow for mystery and intellectual humility that feels no discomfort in not knowing, and opting for wonder rather than cognitive closure.
On the last page Dillistone quotes Luke 1.78-79, as follows:
Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us,
To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.
The last words of the book are from Auden's Christmas Oratorio, the words of Simeon:
"Because of his visitation we may no longer desire God as if He were lacking: our redemption is no longer a question of pursuit but of surrender to Him who is always and everywhere present. Therefore at every moment we pray that following Him, we may depart from our anxiety into His peace." page 422.
The Giotto Deposition shows Jesus gazed upon from different perspectives and vantage points. And what each saw was cause for wonder, prayer, tears and thanksgiving. Worship always out-thinks and out-wonders controversy.
A bright sunlit path,
blue door in summer shadow,
walk through, see what’s next.
I sit down and when I rise up you discern my thoughts from afar.
(Psalm 139 v 3)
Last week I wrote about Bernard McGinn's series of encyclopedic works on Christian m ysticism, under the general title The Presence of God. So far five volumes are published with two more scheduled over the next few years. I was aware as I wrote it that the descriptors Mystic and Baptist don't seem to fit easily into each other's company. But that's to misunderstand both terms.
Baptists are certainly resistant to esoteric spirituality, and dismissive of gnostic claims to special extra-biblical revelation. We are deeply committed to a biblically shaped faith and experience. We draw our understanding of Christian life from a faithful following after Jesus the risen Lord as revealed in Scripture, acknowledging the One who is the "sole and absolute authority in our faith and practice". But it is precisely that intetentionally Christocentric faith, rooted in the realities of the Triune God, that provides a source of deep and tranformative encounter with the God who draws us into the love and life of that eternal Triune relationship of creative, outflowing Love that is the source and fountain of Divine Grace.
Christian Mysticism and Baptist identity don't trip of the tongue as two descriptors you would expect to use naturally. In fact chalk and cheese, apples and pears seem more logical pairings than Baptist mystic – you would think. And you'd be wrong. C H Spurgeon, whose bust sits on my bookshelf ( a Victorian one, not a 20th century repro!) was a Baptist Mystic, and his mysticism, was profoundly, exuberantly, Christological. He might have scowled at the comparison, but his best writing of the experience of rapture and vivid encounter with Jesus Christ compares with Bernard of Clairvaux's Christocentric rhapsodising, Teresa of Avila's joy in the Crucified and Charles Wesley's praise band approach to celebrating the Saviour and the Gospel of captivating overwhelming love, with words used as creatively and startlingly as Van Gogh's most life transcending juxtapositions of colour, image and human experience.
The last hymn Spurgeon wrote (which can be sung to the tune Nottignham) is a remarkable text of Baptist Mysticism. It deserves a place in any anthology of mystical writings.
1. All my soul was dry and dead
Till I learned that Jesus bled;
Bled and suffered in my place,
Bearing sin in matchless grace.
2. Then a drop of Heavenly love
Fell upon me from above,
And by secret, mystic art
Reached the center of my heart.
3. Glad the story I recount,
How that drop became a fount,
Bubbled up a living well,
Made my heart begin to swell.
4. All within my soul was praise,
Praise increasing all my days;
Praise which could not silent be:
Floods were struggling to be free.
5. More and more the waters grew,
Open wide the flood-gates flew,
Leaping forth in streams of song
Flowed my happy life along.
6. Lo! A river clear and sweet
Laved my glad, obedient feet!
Soon it rose up to my knees,
And I praised and prayed with ease.
7. Now my soul in praises swims,
Bathes in songs, and psalms and hymns;
Plunges down into the deeps,
All her powers in worship steeps.
8. Hallelujah! O my Lord!
Torrents from my soul are poured!
I am carried clean away,
Praising, praising all the day.
9. In an ocean of delight,
Praising God with all my might,
Self is drowned; so let it be:
Only Christ remains to me.
—C.H. Spurgeon, 1890
.
When I am afraid I put my trust in you (Psalm 56.3)
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 betwen the courtesy, the delicacy of attentiveness, required for friendship;
the singleminded passionate disinterestedness without which no 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, pages 10-11.
That's as good a description of learning and teaching in an interactive class as I have ever come across. Theological Education at its best is training in conversation and courtesy, forming habits of enquiry and friendship, encouraging an intellect both passionate and contemplative, inviting on a journey in good company to new places, and doing so at the summons of the Eternal God, in the company of the often unrecognised stranger who comes alongside us as Risen Lord, and our hearts burning within us by the fire of a Holy Love whose presence both consumes and makes new.
Such attitudes and dispositions don't come easily. They require a willingness to unlearn, to take the risk of relinquishing old certainties to make possible the discovery of new truth. They demand that we unclench our hold on unexamined assumptions and open our hands and heart and mind to the vast realities of God who cannot be tamed by our dogmas, nor contained in our theology be it ever so sound. In effect, such dispositions require faith not certainty, trust not defensive tactics lest truth unsettle us, a surrender of will and intellect to the One who leads us into all truth, who takes of the things of Jesus and teaches them to us, and a joyful freedom to dive into the depths of the grace and mercy and mystery of the unsearchable riches of Christ.
Van Eyck's Adoration of the Lamb, despite the ambiguities of Renaissance ecclesial and patronage power games, infuses enquiry and contemplation with adoring prayer, focusing wonder and worship on 'the Lamb in the midst of the throne'. It is a powerful statement of the fundamental disposition of the theologian.
My Tongue will sing of your righteousness….(Psalm 51.14)
My heart overflows with a good theme…My tongue is the pen of a ready writer. (Psalm 45.1)
I am a well known champion of thin books, and some previous posts have celebrated a variety of slim volumes of around a centimetre thick. Which means you could get around 100 of them on one metre of bookshelf space. I've often wondered about the concentrated quality and value of such a bookshelf if I gathered together a year's reading of 100 such books, reading around 30-40 pages a day. The first month might include Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense; Nicholas Lash's Believing Three Ways in One God; Richard Bauckham's Theology of the Book of Revelation: Alastair Campbell's Rediscovering Pastoral Care; Jean Dauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Henri Nouwen's Genesee Diary; Jonathan Sacks The Persistence of Faith; P T Forsyth's The Cruciality of the Cross; Denise Levertov's The Stream and the Sapphire; Dag Hammarskjold's Markings. Around 10 centimetres of distilled wisdom, theological imagining, contemplative reflection, human experience, passionate enquiry, honest confession, and not least, personal enrichment. Not a bad return for 10 centimetres of shelf space.
However, I am also an advocate of the carefully chosen tome, freighted with learning and weighted with significance in its field. So the arrival of Volume 5 of Bernard McGinn's magisterial and mind boggling history of Western Christian Mysticism is a welcome parcel which thuds impressively on the desk and makes you feel you've got your money's worth from Amazon's free delivery! This book would take up half the space of the ten volumes above, – it is 5.6 cms thick! 720 pages, 200 of them endnotes. Even the title forces the mind to slow down, The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 1350 – 5550. Once I've finished the biography of Hammarskjold this is next on my discretionary reading list. Some of the most important names in Christian mysticism are here – Jan Van Ruusbroec, Catherine of Genoa, Catherine of Sienna, Thomas a Kempis, and the English Mystics Julian of Norwich, the Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton.I've read or spent time with most of these spiritual writers.
I've been baffled and blessed, fulfilled and frustrated, enriched and at times perplexed by strange discourse, conceptual complexity, the oddities and even extravagances of human experience, the cultural and historical canyons that separate medieval Europe from the post-postmodern West. These are formidable barriers to understanding, and are likely to try patience and stamina. But I've never doubted that these writers thought deeply and adventurously about their encounter with God, felt powerfully and passionately about Jesus Christ, and believed against criticism and rejection that what they experienced and expressed was mediated and befell them by the Spirit of God, calling to communion with the Father in the Son. And at the core of their convictional existence was a consuming apprehension of the Love that ignites, purifies, vivifies and draws the soul along the trajectory that leads to the heart of God. No they didn't always get it theologically right; at times they flirted dangerously with ideas corrosive of core Christian realities; the seduction of ecstatic experience and the afterglow of mystical encounter laid open the possibility of the individual's experience claiming a dogmatic authority free from the theology of the Christian tradition out of which it had grown.
All that is true. But there are rich and searching truths in Christian mystical writers which pose devastatingly apt questions to our own 21st Century understanding of what it means to be human; what our lives mean; which priorities in human society make for death and which make for life; how we construct a framework of moral awareness within which to think and decide in ways which are humane and responsive to others; offering as an alternative to the now this instant, remorselessly innovative, obsessively consumerist, savagely individualist mindset of our times, a perspective in which transcendence, other awareness, self knowing and generosity of mind and spirit have the opportunity to grow, perchance to flourish.
That probably claims too much for those mystical astronauts, pioneers of Christian exploration who boldly went where no one had gone before. But what McGinn's large volumes provide is a sympathetic, authoritative and comprehensive presentation of Christian mystics in the context of their time, by one who understands and can expound their ideas and experiences, and do so from within the mainstream Christian tradition with critical appreciation.
(The photo was taken from my study window)
Keep me as the apple of your eye…..Psalm 17.4