One can never wrestle enough with God
if one does so out of a pure regard for the truth.
Christ likes us to prefer truth to him
because, before being Christ, he is truth.
If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth,
one will not go far before falling into his arms.
Simone Weil, Waiting for God, (Fontana) page 69.
It's the conference season and the past few days have been in Manchester and Malvern – the first with UK Baptist theological educators, the second with Regent's Pentecostal College as External Examiner. So a week to think about what theological education is, or should be all about.
Theological education outside the public funded universities is a loss leader for the church. The training of the mind to plunge deep pillars into the bedrock of Christian theology is a necessary way of loving God with our minds, and an essential preparation for a life of spiritual care, a foundation for responsible and responsive pastoral guidance, a commitment to personal growth in the impossible task of knowing the love of God that passes knowledge, and an inner disposition of being content to acknowledge both the limits and the possibilities of a heart that thinks passionately and a mind that feels deeply, and a life open to the truth of God that always comes to us as risk and opportunity.
Theological education like that is unaffordable, if what we mean is it pays its way in hard cash. The time and the investment of resources, by student and College, makes the deal a non-starter if what we are looking for is break even, let alone profit. So it becomes a question not of cost but of value. The things we value we pay for – the gain is in the benefit we purchase at a cost we think "is worth it". Which raises important questions for us a theological educators, and pushes questions just as urgently for our churches. We are all experiencing the destabilising pressures of a culture in which change, development, progress, growth, celebrity, security and wealth creation and possesion collide with the realities of recession, climate change, political and religious extremism, the reconfiguration of expectations based on a now defunct financial market, and the consequent slow evaporation of hope as previously planned futures look increasingly uncertain.
Who will be the community theologians in our churches? I don't mean the minister, pastor, ordained leader. Where are our thinkers, those of faithful imagination and thoughtful presence, informed and humble in their wisdom, sharpened and poised in critique and creative encouragement, of church and culture, and rooted in the permanent sub-stratum of the Gospel of Jesus. I mean how is the church responding to the need for minds trained in loving God, those called to a discipleship of the intellect, spiritually alert, theologically astute, pastorally agile?
How do you put a price on the presence in our churches of people who learn and teach, who share and give the gift of thoughful prayer and prayerful thought? Not all theological education is about forming people for ordained ministry. Nowadays many of our students are those who are seeking precisely this deeper rootedness in the Faith, working their way to a place where they know where they stand, and why. But not as minds closed – rather as minds that are open to the new things God is always doing. Horizon scanning was one of the gifts of the Hebrew prophets before it became organisational management speak.
Theological education is one of the Church's most important missional resources. To dialogue with the culture in which we are embedded, requires a clear grasp of our own faith, a living active commitment to the truth of God in Christ, and a humble but critical listening to what's going on around and amongst and within us as we live out the life of the the Body of Christ – the Light of the World.
To spend a day or two thinking about all of that – it's not time wasted, it's time invested. Likewise for those who sense God's call to come to College and study theology. Maybe we have to honestly recognise that God calls people to study in the school,of Christ – and of course it doesn't stop there. Study begins with information, then formation, and then transformation as good thinking and good practices are disseminated in the community of Christ.
The Caravaggio of the Emmaus Supper shows what happens when people walk the journey with Jesus, learn deeply, and discover life changing truth that they have to go and share with the world. .
Prayer – Seek ye
first the Kingdom of God
Lord,
the life we live is too full;
Too
full of expectations, our own and other people’s
Too
full of demands, the ones we make and the one’s we meet
Too
full of responsibilities, to others, and for others
We get
used to being reviewed and appraised, developed and trained
As if
our value was indexed to how well we function
Lord
help us to be still in your presence
Just
to stop, to be, and to like who we are.
Teach
us to cherish silence,
to
distinguish between loneliness and solitude
to be
at ease with the life you have given
and
with you the Giver of Life.
Give
us the sense to seek first your Kingdom :
*********************
Lord
you have made us human, our bodies instruments of life and sense
We are
sentient, sensitive, sensory – but our life of sense is overloaded
Too
full of loud noise and fast movement.
Instant,
efficient, fast, – the core requirements of a consumer culture.
Now,
immediately, no waiting, – we can have what we want, –
Because
credit cards collapse time, but credit too collapses..
Our
eyes too full of things to touch, and purchase, and possess
As if
life could ever consist in the abundance of things.
Even
taste and smell have become addictive
As our
society eats its way to un-wellness;
So now
the delicious and the aromatic, have become dangerous and tempting,
And
food a threatened epidemic rather than a daily blessing.
Lord
you are the one who heals and nourishes the hungry soul,
Who
cures our addiction to self, to things;
Teach
us again what it is we live by.
Remind
us that having you we need no more,
and
lacking you nothing else matters much.
**********************
Lord,
our lives are full, busy, hyper-active,
Driven
by our purposes rather than lived to yours,
And so
we have become self-important, self-propelled,
The
indispensable player in our own lives.
Lord,
bring us to our senses,
And to
a proper sense of life’s proportion, balance, intention.
Our
chief end is to glorify you, and to enjoy you forever.
Grant
us the joy that comes from trusting in you.
Give
us wisdom to ask, patience to seek, and joy in the finding
Of you
love in Jesus Christ your Son.
Amongst the spiritual directors I return to when I am confused and uncertain about the call of God to His people, is Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. One of the signs of a prophet is the capacity to see clearly and say courageously, and to offer a diagnosis of the surrounding culture that is not itself so culturally conditioned it merely echoes its context. That doesn't mean it is unaffected by context. All speech emerges from that inevitable nexus of history, experience, intellectual conviction and personal commitments that is the human mind reflecting with self consciousness on our own existence.
But Heschel never would claim to be an objective and distant commentator. He took his convictions and experience, his faith commitment and the history of his people and his own life, and he used them freely and openly to look at the world from an honestly confessed standpoint. In other words the prophet has a perspective like everyone else – it's just that it is more often counter-cultural than culturally conditioned, interrogative instead of affirmative, future oriented rather than complacently contemporary. So I read the words below and regain a necessary perspective – to see the world as a place where, whatever the darkness, the light shines in that darkness and the darkness has not overcome it:
The spiritual blackout is increasing daily. Opportunism prevails, callousness expands, the sense of the holy is melting away. We no longer know how to resist the vulgar, how to say no in the name of a higher yes. Our roots are in a state of decay.
The is an age of spiritual blackout, a blackout of God. We have entered not only the dark night of the soul, but also the dark night of society. We must seek out ways of preserving the strong and deep truth of a living God theology in the midst of the blackout.
For the blackness is neither final nor complete. Our power is first in waiting for the end of darkness, for the defeat of evil; and our power is also in coming upon single sparks and occasional rays, upon moments full of grace and radiance.
We are called to bring together the sparks, to preserve single moments of radiance, and keep them alive in our lives; to defy absurdity and despair; and to wait for God to say again, "Let there be light".
And there will be light.
Another Jewish Rabbi, following his encounter with the Living Christ urged the Philippian Christians to shine as lights of the universe in the midst of a dark and crooked generation. Faith in light over darkness, hope that the light will not be put out, bringing together single moments of radiance, – such is the witness of a community of the Living God.
Quotation from A J Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1996) page 267
The photos were taken late evening looking west from Sherrifmuir.
This week is the anniversary of my Ordination to Christian ministry. Every year that's a special date for me, and I find ways of marking it as another milestone on my own Emmaus Road.
I have a list of the books I've bought to mark this date, 36 of them now. You know you're getting on when some of the early ones show their years- not just the ageing of the book and the signs of reading, and in some cases re-reading. But the contents were for a different time, the analysis emerging from a previous cultural cusp, and revisiting some of them the realisation that this isn't just where we are now. But most of them are not so timebound, and remain valuable teachers and conversation partners.
I'll never part with J V Taylor's The Go-Between God, one of the most refreshing books on the creative work of the Holy Spirit in the world, the church and the Christian's personal life.
My hardback edition of the two volumes of The Victorian Church by Owen Chadwick are thick and solid, in contrast to the writer whose prose is lightly erudite and seductive in the way he makes Church History a joy to read.
Belden Lan'es The Solace of Fierce Landscsapes, is a book about the experience of the desert as the place where God is encountered in the experience of absence, loss and longing, and it is that rare thing – a book about loving God for God's sake, and hanging on in trust when all that keeps us going is the grace of the God who is there, and the only evidence of God's presence is the being held.
Brueggemann's Old Testament Theology is a ridiculously provocative book, and apart from a couple of other things I've read on the Old Testament the most stimulating, annoying and persuasive thing around. I've read Brueggemann throughout my ministry, and he is that most helpful of friends – the ones who don't go in for bland niceness, but like a good argument about what's most important.
And David Bosch's Tranforming Mission remains, depsite so much work done and change experienced in the whole wide world, a defining classic of how a theology of mission should be constructed, from the biblical, theological and cultural resources of the church in the world.
Which brings me to Frederick Dale Bruner's commentary on the Gospel of John. My love for this gospel was instilled by a verse by verse Greek exegesis in College, over two years. I don't need another commentary on John given the embarrassment of riches in my own and other libraries. Except Bruner is a different kind of commentator, and his two volumes on Matthew published in the 1970's were early examples of a commentary that takes seriously the tradition of exegesis. So in this commentary several classic treatments from Augustine to Westcott, by way of Aquinas, Calvin and Godet, are treated as respected voices, alongside the contemporary approaches to exegesis. Bruner's interest is to hear the text, and hear it through the voices of those who have studied it and lived it. It is a commentary for the church before the academy; but it is an academic commentary that takes seriously the text, the Christian intellect and a Church rooted in a faith that calls for our deepest thought baptised in prayer.
From now to Advent I'll let Bruner convene the round the table discussion on John, and hope to learn more about what it means to be ordained to the service of Christ in the Church – maybe by then I'll have reached that story about the basin and the twoel.
The fruit of the Spirit is love
Joy is love’s consciousness
Peace is love’s confidence
Long–temperedness is love’s habit
Kindness is love’s activity
Goodness is love’s quality
Faithfulness is love’s quantity
Meekness is love’s tone
Temperance is love’s victory
The fruit of the Spirit is love.
The words were originally part of a sermon by G Campbell Morgan, preached at Westminster Chapel in the 1930's. Campbell Morgan was one of the most attractive classic evangelical biblical expositors. His sermons on 1 Corinthians 13 are spiritual reading that is both soul searching and psychologically astute. Not often is such literacy, rhetoric and spirituality fused into biblical reflection and made accessible through a demonstrably holy personality.
His commentary on Hosea is still one of the few that explores the full range of emotions in God that makes Hosea 11 amongst the most theologically subversive chapters for those who want a God predictably sovereign or indulgently loving – Holy Love is agony, but agony that persists in mercy.
The photo was taken on a walk beside a burn – (from Scots Gaelic for a watercourse that feeds larger rivers).
Isaianic Haiku
Walk the ways of God –
the politics of shalom
make peace the new norm.
…………………………………………..
Swords into ploughshares –
weapons for food production,
not mass destruction.
………………………………
Double negative,
"We won't study war no more".
Future positive!
We do not live for ourselves alone
and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact
that we begin to love ourselves properly,
and thus also love others.
What do I mean by loving ourselves properly?
I mean, first of all,
desiring to live,
accepting life as a very great gift
and a very great good,
not because of what it gives us,
but because of what it enables us to give to others.
Thomas Merton, The New Man, page xx.
Merton was one of the great affirmers of life. He was a living paradox, a gregarious solitary, a silent voice that wouldn't shut up, an ascetic who sought to live to the full, a monk who fell in love, and, from his Journals, a Christian who understood the inner conflicts, tensions, and anguishes of Romans 7, spilling over in his own experience into the liberty, joy and and fulfilments of life in the Spirit as in Romans 8.
Professor Larry Hurtado (New College Edinburgh) has several times lectured on the pervasive hermeneutic of love throughout the New Testament, and observed the lack of serious engagement with the theology and practice of love as a faith defining critierion in the life of each Christian community. Worship and liturgy, discipleship and doxology, sexual ethics and ecclesial politics, communal care and personal relationships, theological reflection and moral integrity, are each drawn into the orbit of the New Testament imperative of agape, the redemptive goodwill of God.
If we're honest, there's a clanging dissonance in the theory and the practice of agape as the primary Christian disposition, in much of the communal and personal practices of contemporary Christian spirituality. I find this both theologically intriguing and a rather glaring clue as to what the Church is for and its mandate to embody the good news of the Kingdom of God. So without knowing where this is going, for a few months towards Advent I'll post occasionally on the Hermeneutic and Imperative of Love. Not a chain of harangues nor a catena of moralising winges - both of these are in reality demoralising!
More a sowing of seeds of thought, a series of small perpsectival studies as experiments in what love might look like in practice, pieces of a jigsaw which may in the end have some pieces missing, but enough to make it worth looking for the lost pieces!
However. Not to get too philosophically carried away. The photos above and below depict a different perspectival study, entitled 'Smudgy Love'. The two favoured places are the cushion and the cardboard box.