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Decided I'm getting too verbose, overly loquacious, verbally profligate, semantically extravagant, expostulating far beyond the exuberance of my usual verbosity (as my Gran used to say – she did, you know!).

Too many long posts, methinks.

So for the next week I'm only going to do ONE sentence posts.

Is there enough in one sentence to kick-start the mind?

We'll see.

Here are the rules:

• After today, and for the next week, only one sentence with no comment before or after.
• An image included to complement the words.
• Each sentence must come from a different author.

As a practice run:

"I have loved to hear my Lord spoken of, and wherever I have seen the print of his shoe in the earth, there I have coveted to set my foot" 

(John Bunyan, 17th Century)

Theological education is not theologically neutral. A confessional College working within the framework of a secular University can either opt for a stance of critical distance and attempted intellectual objectivity, or it can self-consciously position itself within its own confessional tradition, while encouraging that tradition itself to be open to critique and review. Of course critical distance and attempted objectivity can never be neutral anyway; and there is something to be said for stating at the outset the position adopted by teachers, the assumptions and presuppositions that underlie any given course.

That's why our Scottish Baptist College is deliberately and intentionally open about our commitment to a Baptist way of doing theology, while also being open to that mutual enhancement of educational practice made possible by collaborative partnership with a publicly funded University. Theological education is no different from other subject-focused forms of learning. We pursue our peculiar agendas, exploring our particular subject field, develop distinctive discourse, and seek enriched understanding through that cross fertilisation of ideas we call multi-disciplinary study. But all this is done as a theological College which is self-consciously Baptist and Scottish.

It's against that kind of background that Wallace Alston Jr. makes a passionate plea for convictional teaching, a real and acknowledged  relationship between a teacher's personal beliefs and their public instruction. Theological education as a process of Christian formation is at its most formatively effective when teachers are vocational mentors who demonstrate an attractive and persuasive discipleship of the intellect.

"What I am talking about is classroom teaching that leaves no doubt in the student's mind concerning where the teacher stands in relation to the subject under consideration, whether it is of life and death importance or simply an object of dispassionate reflection and evaluation. Convictional teaching is teaching done from the inside of an issue or idea as a sympathetic participant  rather than from the outside  as a disinterested spectator. It is teaching with such obvious passion for the subject matter that the student is caught up, drawn into it, and brought to the point pf personal decision about its meaning and merit. Convictional teaching in theological education  is a form of intellectual mentoring whereby the teacher approaches  questions of truth in scripture and tradition with a hermeneutics of trust and gratitude that bears witness to the sheer delight of serving God with the life of the mind."

Wallace Aston, 'The Education of a Pastor-Theologian', The Power to Comprehend with All the Saints. The Formation and Practice of a Pastor-Theologian, Wallace M Alston & Cynthia A Jarvis (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 71-2.

The painting is called 'Shadow in the Middle' and is by Daniel Bonnell. The play of light and shadow, the protective stance of Jesus, the tooth shaped shadows around Jesus and the woman, the stones lying on the ground – whatever else, Jesus is no dispassionate observer. A crash course in theological education might start with an exegesis of this painting, some convictional teaching on holiness as moral courage on behalf of others. And the competence based learning outcome might be "a demonstrated capacity to stand in the middle beside the vulnerable, daring the stone throwers"!

A cliche is a now unoriginal phrase that started off as something original and well enough said to be repeated often enough to become a cliche. If you see what I mean. The following brief quotation has a metaphor for evangelism that has entered the less than honoured lists of cliche – but its truth is no less important for its over-exposure:

"Evangelism is witness. It is one beggar telling another beggar where to get food. The Christian does not offer out of his bounty. He has no bounty. He is simply guest at his Master's table and , as evangelist, he calls others too."

D. T. Niles, writing thirty years ago, quoted all over the place but nobody ever footnotes it. Is it oral tradition, or displaced text, or borrowed so often it is now orphaned from the original source. So. Where was it first written? I don't know the answer but want to.

The Erskine Bridge is less than five miles from where we live. And on Sunday night two girls aged 14 and 15, whose names are Neve and Georgia, jumped to their deaths, holding hands. The tragedy that spreads out from such an act of despairing self-surrender will leave many people themselves bereft, those who knew them well and those who know only the end of their story as told on the news. The girls were resident in supported and secure accommodation. Their families, those who shared their lives at Bishopton, staff and other girls, social workers and other caring and support professionals, now live with the nightmare aftermath. The complexity of emotions and self-questioning that the tragedy of suicide triggers will be hard to endure, interpret and eventually work through. Seldom worked through to resolution, usually to resignation and a lingering sadness, and the often unjust yet inescapable sense of guilt, personal responsibility and that nagging barbed hypothesis, "what if I had…? Because we can always think of what we could have, might have, should have, done.

There will be an enquiry. Lessons will be learned, and each person within significant radius of their two young lives will have to account for their actions, decisions and professionalism. In the meantime grief is compounded by the demand to know why, and how. Already explanation is assumed to be failed systems and procedures; but the fact remains two young adults chose, together, to turn from life to final ending, and planned and shared the enacting of that so sad decision.

And all I feel I can do, last night and this morning, is light a candle, think of two young lives now ended, lift them in compassion to a merciful God, and pray for them and those they leave behind them.

And pray too that those whose lives are now touched by this act of life defying immolation, will in time find again a sense of the preciousness of life, and therefore the treasure that is each human being, which in the world of social and professional care is too easily overlooked by those of us outside, quick to blame and slow to understand human limitations.

And to pray to the God of whom the poet-psalmist wrote, who knitted each person together in their mother's womb – and so to pray that those young lives which seem so finally to have unravelled, will be gathered into the creative life of God into whose hands we all hope to fall and be held, and formed into the true self God made us to be.

This isn't wishful thinking or sentiment lacking theology. Whatever else the cross declares, it signals the span of divine love reaching outwards and downwards to those deep places we all fear most, where but for the grace of God we might all fall, and if we do, God is there before us, beneath us, and for us.

Lord have mercy.

Christ have mercy.

Lord have mercy.

I was in Aberdeen a couple of years ago when Jean Vanier and Stanley Hauerwas were jointly leading a conference exploring contrasting ways of caring for each other gently in a violent world. (The photo is its own contrast in the gentle listener and the passionate talker!) Hauerwas can sometimes be hard to read – not only because of what he says, but at times he is obtuse, hard to follow, and seems to be pursuing an iniosyncratic bee in his bonnet rather than saying plainly what is so, what needs fixing and why. But most of the time I recognise the angry prophet, the angular debater on philosophy, ethics and theology, getting stuck in to those who live heedless of others, their competitive ways raising issues of human vulnerability, social justice, power-mongering and the idolatry of the bottom line in hard cash terms. Both aspects of Hauerwasian theology were on show at Aberdeen – parts of the lecture that were frustratingly blurred, and times when his meaning was unambiguous. The following two quotations about how hard it is to listen, I heard him say, and they show why Hauerwas remains an important voice himself worth listening to:

"I am an academic, and academics are notoriously bad listeners. We always think we know what people are going to say before they say it, and we have a response to what we thought they would say in spite of what they may actually have said. To learn to listen well, it turns out, may require learning to be a gentle person." 

"I want to remain the academic who can pretend to defend those with mental disabilities by being more articulate than those I am criticizing. I want to be a warrior on behalf of L'Arche,* doing battle against the politics that threaten to destroy these gentle communities. Jean of course, is no less a warrior. But where I see an enemy to be defeated, he sees a wound that needs to be healed. That's a deep difference."

Hauerwas and Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World, (IVP, 2008), 79, 80.

* L'Arche is a netwrok of communities for supported and shared living, that began in the 1960s in Troisly, France and is now a global network providing living space in community for those of different abilities. The work of Jean Vanier is in my view a singular expression of Christlike accompaniment and care that values the human person in radically compassionate terms. Sometime soon I am going to do a Jean Vanier week.

This from AOL News, a lesson in missiology that applies not only to the Church of England, but has considerable relvance to midlle class, well resourced, respectably comfortable evangelicalism of varied flavours.

"The Church of England needs to shed its middle
class "Marks and Spencer"-only image in order to attract the Asda and
Aldi generation of worshippers, a senior bishop has warned.
The Rt Rev Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Reading,
spoke of his sense of frustration at the view that the Church of
England was the "Marks and Spencer" option only, for the highly
educated or "suited and booted".
Jesus would just as likely have shopped at Asda and Aldi as at Marks and Spencer, he said."

He said: "Even today I meet people who think
you have to be highly educated or suited and booted to be a person who
goes to church. That's so frustrating. How did it come to this, that we
have become known as just the Marks and Spencer option when in our
heart of hearts we know that Jesus would just as likely be in the queue
at Asda or Aldi?"

"Jesus got us started with church simply. Like this – sitting us down
in groups on the grass and telling simple stories. Not simplistic. But
certainly not complicated. All his first disciples were down-to-earth
people who wanted to know what life was all about."

Of course like all generalisations it
sounds a bit unfair; and like all rhetorical overstatements it sounds
simplistic. But I didn't find it easy to shut the good Bishop up with a
good put down – even if I do sometimes shop at Aldi's and Lidl's
myself.

I do wonder about the fairness of my own title for this post though –
because the use of the word type is itself a blunt instrument, and act of stereo-typing. Why
assume only the highly educated go to M&S? And what evidence that
Asda shoppers don't have university Degrees? Still. The Bishop is not
wrong about the predominant impression that Christianity is
respectable, comfortable, reliably safe, for the quite well resourced, and by and
large attracts a better class of, a more respectable type of, a more
well-spoken kind of, well, person.

Whereas the inclusive Gospel of
Christ wants the Church to declare and demonstrate that there is
neither M&S nor Aldi's, John Lewis nor Primark, Sainsbury's or Lidl
– in the eyes of the God made known in Christ Jesus, all are to be equally loved, valued and welcomed. The missional challenge for the church then, whatever the denominational flavour, is to create a community in Christ where the least important distinction between us is where we shop.
And where the most important distinctive is to embody the indiscriminate love of God.  

Fifty years ago Dag Hammarskjold observed with worldly wise perceptiveness that in the modern world the road to holiness lies through the world of action. And he was doing so at the same time as Thomas Merton was drawing seekers of God from the hyper-activity of contemporary life to the contemplative search for silence, solitude and the true self. Action and contemplation – not opposites, but forms of being that are intrinsically human and without which our humanity is diminished, our spirituality thrown out of balance and our Christian obedience reduced to monochrome. Parker Palmer has done important work on human fulfilment and lifelong learning as a life enhancing commitment. His writing often reads like a spirituality of pragamatic outward looking action, commending a lifestyle in which energy, inter-relationship, noise, creativity and work, can be as fulfilling as silence, solitude and retreat. In one book he brings as usual, an important balance to all of this.

People caught in the gap between monastic values and the demands of the active life sometimes simply abandon the spiritual quest. And people who follow a spirituality that does not always respect the energies of action are sometimes led into passivity and withdrawal, into a diminishment of their opwn spirits.

in the spiritual literature of our time, it is not difficult to find the world of action portrayed as an arena of ego and power, while the world of contemplation is pictured as a realm of light and grace. I have often read for example, that the treasure of "true self" can be found as we draw back from active life and enter into contemplative prayer. Less often have I read that this treasure can be found in our struggles to work, create, and care in the world of action.

Parker Palmer, The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity and Caring (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990) p. 2.

My guess is that often the spirituality we settle for is a damaging dualism between what we think of as spiritual and all the other stuff. The point is, all the other stuff is the bulk of what we have to do to live life at all. Work, family, other people; the mobile, the laptop, the car; shopping, home-keeping, travelling; caring for friends, pets and ourselves. And God is in it all, not just the overtly intentional spiritual stuff.

And what's more, God can be just as quickly found, and more deeply encountered, not in the retreat and the deep journey into ourselves, but in the outward journey of work, people, circumstance and happening, in the way we drive, the use of our computer, the texts we send, the meals we cook, the bills we pay, the conversation at the checkout, the blether with the neighbour, the walk with the dog, the train journey and the birthday party. None of these get much mention in the more intense worship songs, in the list of spiritual disciplines or prayer techniques. But for followers of Jesus, the Word made flesh, the life of the body with its energy and capacity to work and transform the world, is a life which seeks to incarnate the love of God, suffusing life with the energy and creative action of the God in whose image we are ourselves made. And in the loving of God in all our activity, something deeply sacramental happens, so that all this ordinary stuff stops being a means to an end and becomes a means of grace. Well, anyway, that's what I think! And the new term starts tomorrow and in the busyness of it, God will be found, and will find us.

(The photo above is of a one hundred year old gardener who fully intends to harvest the vegetables from the seed he is sowing.)

Two George Herbert poems set to music, on the one day! Sunday Morning worship in our church began with a George Herbert hymn. As we sang it I could almost see the small parish church of Bemerton, placed lovingly in the mind of Herbert against the backdrop of rural England, 17th Century national politics and Herbert's theological assumption that church and creation reflect the reign and love of God:

Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!
The heavens are not too high, his praise may thither fly,
the earth is not too low, his praises there may grow.
Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!

Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!
The church with psalms must shout, no door can keep them out;
but, above all, the heart must bear the longest part.
Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!


Then on Songs of Praise last night, the kind of hymn that is so old fashioned I thought it almost forgotten, not just out of favour but out of sync with current taste and preference. It recalls a spiritual atmosphere and intensity of devotion requiring more of us than our usual contemporary attempts at dumbed down intimacy and informal conversation with Holy Love that is both transcendent and immediate. But there it was, sung with that restrained politeness that in Anglican spirituality comes near to the spiritual quality of courtesy and quiet gratefulness, not spiritually greedy or emotionally ambitious, but showing that quality of balance that makes Herbert's poetry such a fine example of what he himself called "my utmost art".

King of glory, King of peace,

I will love thee;

and that love may never cease,

I will move thee.

Thou hast granted my request,

thou hast heard me;

thou didst note my working breast,

thou hast spared me.

Wherefore with my utmost art

I will sing thee,

and the cream of all my heart

I will bring thee.

Though my sins against me cried,

thou didst clear me;

and alone, when they replied,

thou didst hear me.

Seven whole days, not one in seven,

I will praise thee;

in my heart, though not in heaven,

I can raise thee.

Small it is, in this poor sort

to enroll thee:

e'en eternity's too short

to extol thee.

When in the creed Christians confess the church as Holy and Catholic, like so much theological language, it all depends what you mean by "holy". Nicholas Lash offers  a rich exegesis:

"Holiness is otherness, the unimaginable, the unattainable fulfilment of all our hopes and dreams, perhaps of all our fears. God, alone, is holy, awe-inspiring, glory-templed. And the purifying touch of holiness can burn. But in uttered Word and outbreathed Spirit, the Holy One comes close, touches and transforms. Holiness is, then, after all, communicable. Indeed all things are sanctifiable, may be made holy, by the breath of God. Life in God's Holy Spirit is, accordingly, all things' existence purified into peace and friendliness, reconciled relationship, sharing – in delight and harmony – in the very life of God. Hence the enablement, and the requirement, that human beings, who are moral agents,…conform their words, and deeds, and institutions, their treatment of each other and of what we call the natural world, to the pattern of God's outpoured peacefulness. Thus it is that, quite properly, but, nonetheless, secondarily and derivatively, we conceive the church's holiness in moral terms. If it could be shown that, on the whole, Christianity had made and makes no significant contribution, by announcement and example, to the peacefulness and healing and completion of the world, then there would be no reason to give it any further serious consideration."

Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God (London: SCM, 1992), pp. 88-89

Burrowing around in my friend Chris's second-hand bookshop up in Old Aberdeen, I unearthed one of those instantly recognisable gems. You know, those ones that you know exist, you've just never seen this particular one before. The Prayers of Kierkegaard, edited by Perry D Lefevre,  is a book of two halves – the first a collection of his prayers from throughout his works, the second a brief but brilliant editorial introduction to Kierkegaard's thought.

Given that P T Forsyth and James Denney were admirers of the Danish philosopher-theologian, I'd expect to find in his writing rebuke and consololation, gospel seriousness and humane sensitivity, moral demand anchored in a radically transformative conception of enabling grace. And it's there in thick chunky nuggets of pastoral truth-telling. Instead of the self-concerned individualism and privatised fulfilment of much contemporary spirituality, Kierkegaard (like Bonhoeffer), calls to a much more astringent way of life.

Like many others Kierkegaard is unfinished business for me. I've read several of his books in English translation, but there is much more I've never read. You can't read everything. But I've a feeling there's more of Kierkegaard I should have read. Still, for now I'm using one of these prayers each day – there's around a hundred of them. Here's one I've already lingered over….

NOT TO ADMIRE BUT TO FOLLOW

O Lord Jesus Christ, Thou didst not come to the world to be served, but also surely not to be admired or in that sense to be worshipped. Thou wast the way and the truth – and it was followers only Thou didst demand. Arouse us therefore if we have dozed away into this delusion, save us from the error of wishing to admire Thee instead of being willing to follow Thee and to resemble Thee.