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I like it when two entirely different people, write in two very different styles, on a similar theme, and from two historically and culturally alien perspectives, enrich our theological understanding, and restore faith in the continuity and congruence of the Christian tradition.

A Seventeenth Century rural parson poet, and a Twentieth Century Swiss Reformed dogmatician, writing on what it is that goes on in the heart of the unworthy guest, just before sitting at the Lord's Table.

"The conversion which the Word of grace ascribes to him consists in the exercise of the freedom which he does not need to assume or give to himself because this is not necessary, since it has been already given in what God has long since done for the world and for his own salutary humbling and therefore for his peace and for that of the whole world.

The Word of grace simply tells him that the table is spread for him and for all, but that a few places – his own included -  are still vacant, and would he be so good as to sit down and fall to, instead of standing about and cleverly or foolishly prattling.  Everything else will then be discovered, or is really discovered already. 

Karl Barth Church Dogmatics,The Doctrine of Reconciliation, IV.3.1, page 247.

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Love (3)

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin. 

But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

If I lack'd anything. 

A guest, I answer'd, worthy to be here:

Love said, You shall be he. 

I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,

I cannot look on thee. 

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

Who made the eyes but I? 

Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame

Go where it doth deserve. 

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? 

My dear, then I will serve. 

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:

So I did sit and eat.

George Herbert, The Temple.

 

 

 

 

There are times I miss being a pastor within a local Christian community. There are plenty of obvious reasons for this. Less obvious, until it happens, is the inner urge to gather together with the community of faith, as one called to encourage and enable this particular community to work out its own theology, with fear and trembling, in the face of disaster. In my years as a pastor I found myself at different times on a Sunday Morning leading worship in the aftermath of Tiannemann Square, 9/11, the Omagh bombing, Piper Alpha, Dunblane, Lockerbie, and in subsequent days sharing the prayers, conversations, questions and grief of a community reaching out in heart to love a broken world.

The task of the pastor and community theologian, when disaster overwhelms some in our world, is to recognise the faith questions and the faith resources within the Christian community. Then gathering our wisdom and bewilderment, holding onto both our faith and uncertainty, mouthing our hope and defying the despair, we pray. Determined to try, together, to respond in a way that willingly absorbs the suffering and human anguish of others, we bring it all into our worship, our prayers, our supplication to the God who in Christ entered the deepest darknesses of a fractured creation.

And so today, with the anguish and danger facing the people of Haiti, I so wish I was again in that role of sharing the life of a known community as its pastor, learning again the necessary humility of the pastor who truly believes that theology and doxology, reflection and worship, plaintive prayer and patient praise, that these are the Church's work of witness in our world, and that they come not from her or him as pastor, but from the community itself. No hard edged doctrine of providence like so much theological shoulder shrugging; no Bible quotations to silence impolite questions; not a word justifying our faith, because God's response is never self-defensive. Instead tears for the dead and the broken; prayers for those who dig with their hands and with kitchen utensils; inner recoil from the hard fact that the logistics in Haiti just now are near impossible; guilt at our own impotence and gratitude for every gesture of help and humanity. ( The photo of the wee toddler's smile of recognition as he is handed to his mother is for me a powerful image of the reaching out hands of God).

How do you pray in all this? The question isn't so much where is God as where are we and where is help for our world, and what will help anyway? Money will. So we give it, then double it. Long term compassion will, because money and relief aid will be needed for years. Questions will – especially those about the unfair distribution of wealth across our world, and why it is that poor people, in a high risk area, whose homes are cheaply built and collapse easily, and who have no state sponsored medical service, are utterly vulnerable. And yes prayer will, especially prayer as Barth urged, the lifting up of holy hands against the status quo.

 Last night, and today and coming days, I will light a candle and pray for the people of Haiti. And that small flame, the candle self-consumed in the giving of light, will signifiy our calling to lighten the darkness, to radiate the life and light of Christ – by the strategic generosity of giving money – by long term commitment to go on giving into the future – by not settling for the rules of the global money-grubbing and resource-grabbing game – by praying against all that diminishes and crushes human hearts and bodies, and by doing so in the name of the One whose own body was crushed, and through whom life and hope and the love of the Eternal reaches the darkest recesses of our God-loved world.

Antidote to cynicism. 

Making the world a better place, and making us feel better about it.

Compassion as the guarantee of honesty.

Which one proved to be the neighbour, huh?.

Click on this link and smile knowingly, then go and do likewise.

Found this prayer over at Michael Gorman's blog and thought it worth circulating.

I think some of the readers of this blog are likely to appreciate its spirituality of perceptive self-critique, and love's instinctive but demanding integrity that seems utterly congruent with the call of Jesus.

I'm compiling a sheet of seven prayers which I'll use one each week-day for a while. This is one from a Franciscan community is one of them.

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half
truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within
your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression and
exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and
peace.

May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain,
rejection, starvation and war, so that you may reach out your hand to
comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you
can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others
claim cannot be done.

Anything I write on this blog about the execution of Akmahl Shaikh by the Chinese authorities is unlikely to add much to the widespread condemnation already voiced. A Government that used tanks and militia with automatic weapons to crush students in Tianneman Square is hardly going to flinch at carrying out a mandatory death sentence on a tourist with mental health issues found guilty of smuggling drugs. 

The diplomatic war of words will proceed with the age old purpose of posturing and seeking satisfaction of the interests of both sides. None of that changes the deliberate killing of a human being. That a person's mental illness is designated as irrelevant, suggests a cynical level of legal pedantry and a wilful rejection by China of human values upheld in the wider international community.

But China makes no claim to respect the values of the wider international community. And the stronger China becomes economically, the more the West is dependent on Chinese trade and money and debt management, the less China's Government will have to care about international opinion. Maybe the award of the Olympic Games, and their global commercial and media success, conferred a degree of acceptance and arrival that sends the signal that human rights are not non negotiable; put another way, human rights violations are less important than long term, even short term, economic self interest.

I have an inner sense of moral futility about events like this, a confusion of spirit, because I am angry and sad, yet not surprised, at this execution. To expect clemency to be refused, is a bleak mindset. Nevertheless, it is right, indeed morally required, that we hope, pray, plead, for mercy; even when all the evidence and signs are that such cries will make no difference. That raises deep, even troubling theological questions – the unbearable tension that has to be borne, between believing that prayer makes a real difference, and the collision of our prayers with those intractable events and incidents, such as state enacted execution, that make prayer seem pointless and unreal.

…………………………………

Lighter Interlude

One side of a telephone conversation in a second hand bookshop. You have to imagine what is being said at the other end…..fill in the dots yourself. Here's the one clue you need.  Somebody wants to sell text books.

Bookseller: "What kind of books did you say"

Caller's Answer…………………..

Bookseller: " Are they all mental books?"

Caller's Answer…………………….

Bookseller: "Naw we don't have a mental section. Mental books don't sell in Glasgow."

Caller's Answer……………………..

Bookseller: "You're best to take them tae Edinburgh. That's where most mental books sell. That's where they study mental."

Callers Answer……………………

Now leaving aside questions of political correctness and socially appropriate discourse, I wasn't the only one biting a near to hand book to avoid explosive guffaws. As we near Hogmanay and the subterranean levels of TV entertainment dished out to Scottish viewers, I think I might try and sell this sketch to Only an Excuse. Anyway, don't try to sell text books on psychiatry in Glasgow!

…………………………………………………

More seriously again, at this one time of the year when "peace and goodwill to all people" are words we are less embarrassed about speaking or hearing, I came across some words of the great NT German scholar, Rudolf Schnackenburg (seasonal first name, eh?). Schnackenburg restates the mission of Jesus in terms of peacemaking, that characteristic goal of the Gospel which is to be worked for as a primary sign of the Kingdom:

"Everywhere where people follow Jesus in his way, a portion of God's rule is realized, the strength for peace grown, and peace emerges triumphant over all hatred, clash of weapons, and tumults of war. Whoever has once comprehended the absolute will of Jesus toward peace, which nourishes itself on the peaceful disposition of God, can and must affirm and recieve all human earthly, socio-political efforts toward peace, all small initiatives and large organizational measures. Out of the message of Jesus, that God will eventually grant humankind the last perfect peace, such a person willnever be disillusioned or discouraged. This is the power of Christian peace efforts and peace work."

Quoted in Willard M Swartley, Covenant of Peace. The Missing Peace in New Testament Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), page 426.

Schnackenburg is right. And his convuiction which I share, is part of my response to my own threatened disillusion at the end of my comments above on prayer, China and capital punishment.

I've now spent the more
relaxing hours of Christmas and Boxing Day reading Sisters of Sinai, by Janet Soskice. It's the story of two women, twins born in Irvine in 1843. Their early years were spent in Kilbarchan before moving to London and then Cambridge. It's the story of two Bible-hunters, scholarly sleuths with brilliant linguistic gifts matched only by a capacity for hard work that's nothing short of stunning. Combine that with an adventurous appetite for travel, personal courage, infuriating determination and sheer intellectual obstinacy and you begin to get the picture.

The book reads like a novel but is deeply rooted
in meticulous research; it deals with an area of my own interest over
many years, the textual criticism and reception of the New Testament;
it champions two women whose story deserves more than one telling while
exposing the sheer weight of prejudice and social convention against
which they (and subsequent generations of women) have had to struggle
towards recognition. My enjoyment of this book goes alongside the
similar feelings I had on first reading Stephen Neil's History of New Testament Interpretation which places the discovery of key NT manuscripts in the 19th century against the larger background of palaeontology and archaeology.

Janet Soskice is a philosophical theologian in Cambridge University. This isn't her usual kind of book at all – but if it has been a mere diversion then it has been a very worthwhile one. This isn't a review of the book. It's a plug for the book;

if you care about how the New Testament text has been shaped by scholarly investigation, wheeling and dealing both honest and dishonest

if you care about the marginalisation of women in the academy and the sheer injustice of gender discrimination that arises from male sponsored small-mindedness

if you care about the stories of Scottish people who made their mark against the odds

if you care about those who care about ancient cultures, and who respect and learn deeply from cultures unsettlingly dissimilar to our own

and yes, if you care about history as the truth that isn't always told, but should be – get this book and read it.

(You might want to wait for the paperback – due late Spring 2010) 

Here's just one example of why this is such a readable and important book. Soskice is helping us understand the initial collision but eventual collusion of two radically opposed views of sacred text, what it is and what we do with it. The Scottish Presbyterian widows, for whom the Bible is the text not the artefact, encounter in St Catherine's monastery, a procession of Orthodox monks following behind a jewel studded Bible, complete with incense and acts of adoration. The black, leather bound bible of Protestantism which the Scottish Presbyterian sisters revered, is contrasted with an Orthodox work of religious art, executed in gorgeous colour, copied with painstaking neatness, jewel studded and bound in the most expensive material, and then handled only with elaborate ceremony and unabashed adoration by the community.

"The monks at Sinai did not just honour but venerated their icons, regarding them almost as members of their community at prayer. For related reasons they also reverenced the physical form of their bibles and religious manuscripts, as well as the contents. For the Western visitors, the idea of processing with a Bible whose covers were studded with jewels and whose pages were illumined with gold, of incensing it and bowing before it was abhorrent. But to the monks, the Bible processed in church and embellished with leaf of gold was, metonymically, the Word incarnate present to their community…

Prior to the invention of printing, the reproduction of a book was a costly, lengthy and- for the monastic scribes – a devotional matter…For those who first wrote and read the manuscripts at Sinai, the formed strokes of ink that made up the words of the Gospels in a handwritten manuscript, the words laid laboriously letter by well formed letter on sheets of precious vellum, or the paints laid on wooden boards that were the images of saints, were emblematic of a God who indwelt the physical world as man."

Easy pleased so I am. Christmas come and gone and I'm happy.

The big read is Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, a book I've put off buying cos Aileen promised it and kept her promise. The combination of historical research and historical imagination when done well is almost irresistible to a mind like mine. History and good storytelling don't have to get in each other's way, and with a writer as good as Mantel, they don't. This is a historical novel that combines the best of both genres. If it is as good as Mantel's earlier To a Safer Place, which explored the inner dynamics and the historic and political consequences of the French Revolution, then it will be worth a long read.

But a good read needs a good drink, and Whittard's Cinnamon Chai Tea is as good as it gets on a winter's night, with a big book, in the front room while the others indulge themselves with Dr Who.

It was recorded so I will see it – but I don't want to wait a week between episodes, so later in the week.

Meanwhile what more than a big book and a good drink of spiced tea.

Well, actually some of these. Courtesy of Sheila who works on the assumption (mistaken obviously), that a large packet of small chocolates will last longer than a big bar.

So. Book. Spiced Tea. Chocolate Caramel Nibbles. Be interesting to see if the book or the chocolate is finished first! 🙂

Told you. I'm easy pleased.

Hope yours was as good as mine.

The 20th Century produced several great commentaries on Romans. Barth, Cranfield, Wilckens, Jewett. Then there were some very good ones, Sanday and Headlam, J D G Dunn, Douglas Moo, Jospeh Fitzmyer, N T Wright. The one that's missing is the one I found hardest to read, which says as much about me as it does for the book.

Ernst Kasemann's commentary on Romans was published in English by SCM in 1980, and bought with a gift from my first church who knew well my love of books. Because it was a gift, (and I chose it for goodness sake), I felt obliged to read it, not to waste a generous gift. For weeks, in my wee sloping roofed study, I slowly made my way up the steep brae that is Kasemann's dense style, theological wrestling and absolutely uncompromising approach to theological exegesis – something Kasemann was doing long before it has become a fashionable innovation to the hermeneutical industry. But I got to the top of the brae – I finished it, and it is one of those few books you begin as a chore, continue as a discipline, persevere as a matter of sheer determination not to be beaten, and then like climbing in low cloud, you move above the cloud base and see the view that makes it all worth it.

And the view Kasemann opened up changed our way of looking at things Pauline. Justification isn't to be limited to the specific individualistic benefit of the justified Christian; justification is cosmic in scale, is gift and power to accomplish, and is the dynamic reality that displays the reality and promise of the Lordship of Christ, now and in God's future for the creation. Not so much a breath of fresh air as a gale that blows you off your feet. For that reason Kasemann goes in the list of great commentaries.

And the man who wrote this dense masterpiece of exegetical toil? It takes a special kind of faith in God and faithfulness in discipleship to Christ, to take Isaiah 26.13 as the text to preach in 1937 Gestapo ridden Germany. Read the text and you'll see why he was arrested. In 1941-2 Kasemann argued passionately for the validity of womens' ministries. No surprise either, that he was a vociferous anti-nuclear campaigner. His daughter was killed in and Argentinian jail in 1977, an event that deeply affected him, pushing his theology in directions of radical critique of power, injustice and economic greed, and fuelling active inviolvement in the theology of world mission. He latterly became a Methodist – John Wesley and Ernst Kasemann!

There is a point to all this. In the Spring Eerdmans will publish collected sermons and lectures of Kasemann, who died in 1996 aged 90. The book cover is pictured above.  In my view this is a publishing event. An absolute necessity in early summer will be allocating blocks of reading time to gather the fruit of what Kasemann was saying and writing to the so complex world in the last quarter of the 20th Century.

Rebecca Elson's Diaries contain fragments and notes for future poems. Here and there a few lines are enough to indicate the trajectory of a thought:

When sleep won't come

And your whole life howls

And words dive around your head like bats

Feeding off the darkness.

What prompted those lines? The howl of rage, or fear? Those familiar with overanxiety will recognise that hyped up inner chatter in which we either rehearse our own reassuring speeches, or hear the imaginary criticisms of others niggling away at our self-confidence. Feeding off the darkness indeed – despair feeding despair, anxiety replenishing itself, and that prolonged state of inner red alert that induces exhaustion. Here and there, especially late into her last illness, Elson shows in these diaries an honest facing of the things we are afraid of. At one point, refusing denial as a coping strategy, she chooses instead defiance – "The thing is not to let the doctors take the poetry out of your body, your life".

And then this beautiful image of life still to be lived, and the sense of one not yet ready to relinquish life's flow, the middle line a hinge of refusal, "I'm not like that…"

"You think the river knows when it's getting near the sea?

Wide and slow & begins to taste the salt

Well I'm not like that

I still feel narrow, quick and fresh

Still somewhere in the mountains."

There are few more poignant poems than those in which the poet confronts their own mortality with dignity, reluctant resignation, and a deep knowing of those insights that define and exalt our humanity. Denise Levertov's late poems have that same quality of writing – there's a case to be made for the poetic fragment as a valid literary form, expressing life's transience and acknowledging the instransigence of that process of relinquishment we call dying.

If that seems too low key for Advent, then maybe that's because somehow we have lost that sense of the precariousness and preciousness of life, the utter giftedness of our own existence, and the great poetry of an Isaiah who recognised that all flesh is grass, but had also discovered theology in the declarative mood, "Thus saith the Lord, Fear not, I have redeemed you, I have called you by name….you are mine….

Been busy welcoming the six other UK Baptist College Principals to Scotland. This is an important network of friendship, collaborative planning, pastoral interest in each other and intellectual stimulus. Twenty four hours from lunch to lunch means not much time for discretionary stuff like blogging. More than made up for by good conversation and the encouragement of work owned, shared and done.

Did get time to open my most recent Amazon package though, with one of my looking forward to reading between Semesters books – Paul Molnar, Thomas Torrance. Theologian of the Trinity. Ashgate have sensibly, even mercifully, issued it in paperback at a very fair price, around £16 and high quality production – their hardbacks are usually just too expensive, though are beautifully produced, and a joy to handle.

I'm expecting the second volume of Torrance's Dogmatics lectures on the atonement to arrive soon as well. As we move into late Advent, then beyond to Epiphany and Easter and Pentecost, I expect to be in the good company of Scotland's greatest theologian of the 20th Century. Incidentally, I think the cover photo of Professor Torrance is superb, showing him in his later years, indomitable, contented, eyes open to truth and mystery, and a smile that might be quizzical or knowing.