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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.

One of those odd coincidences that make you smile, and pray thank you, and smile again.

That AOL voice with the mid-western accent, announced "You have email" – which on checking, I discover an update from Amazon. "Your order has shipped" – meaning Jurgen Moltmann's now out of print little gem, Theology and Joy, was on its way in time for Christmas.

The coincidence? I'd just finished reading, and marking in my book, the following from Dorothy Day, just after her child Tamar was born. Maybe a self-conscious echo of Mary's heart leaping at the annunciation:

"No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship and adore."

Gratitude. Joy. Worship. Adoration. And thus the connection between Theology and Joy. 

Jesus says in his society there is a new way for people to live;

you show wisdom, by trusting people;

you handle leadership, by serving;

you handle offenders, by forgiving;

you handle money, by sharing;

you handle enemies, by loving;

and you handle violence, by suffering.

In fact you have a new attitude toward everything, toward everybody. Toward nature, toward the state in which you happen to live, toward women, toward slaves, toward all and every single thing. Because this is a Jesus society and you repent, not by feeling bad, but by thinking different.

Rudy Wiebe, The Blue Mountains of China (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970), p.215-16.

Sometimes the dilemmas of yesterday come back to teach us the truths we missed first time round. In the early 1960's there was a big debate in the US on "shelter ethics". Sparked by a priest who defended the ordinary citizen's right to use loaded weapons to keep other people, neighbour or stranger, out of his nuclear fallout shelter (a more modern version pictured – attractive wee thing eh?).

Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton exchanged letters about it. Merton picked up the themes of hospitality, love of neighbour and seeing the 'other' as Christ. Three cardinal principles of Christian discipleship modelled on Jesus came to mind – welcome, love, and seeing the other as graced presence. Here Merton weaves these together in a theology of redemptive risk taking compassion:

Merton declared, "If I am in a fallout shelter and trying to save my life, I must see that the neighbour who wants to come into the shelter also wants to save his life as I do. I must experience his need and his fear just as if it were my need and my fear…and if I am strong enough to act out of love, I will cede my place in the shelter to him…It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are."

The willingness to walk in the path of another, Merton proposed, is the very essence of Christianity (and of all the world religions); and in order to see what we have in common with out enemy, "and to respect his personal rights and his integrity, his worthiness of love." He went on, " we have to see ourselves similarly accused along with him, condemned to death along with him, sinking to the abyss with him, and needing, with him, the ineffable gift of grace and mercy to be saved. Then, instead of pushing him down, trying to climb out by using his head as a stepping stone for ourselves, we help oursleves to rise by helping him to rise. For when we extend our hand to the enemy who is sinking in the abyss, God reaches out to both of us."

I believe deeply in the importance of such idealistic and principled theology. In our own age, 50 years after those words were written, the Church of Jesus Christ is called to a life of risky solidarity not with the status quo, but with those who look for shelter, for comfort, for a chance of life. In our own day we have our own reasons for fearing the other, seeing the world as populated by enemies. Copenhagen and climate change; Afghanistan and Iraq and the war on terror; global recession and the threat of global capitalism to the world's poorest as powerful economies plan for economic recovery; plenty of crises to shelter from.

For all our agonising about mission, its definitions and challenges; for all our wondering about what the Gospel means in a postmodern conflicted world, here are words that are uncomfortably unrealistic, ridiculously principled, devoid of that pragmatism that so often and so easily promises effectiveness. Instead, words that are devastating in their Gospel simplicity, unanswerable in their Christ mirrored grace and mercy – idealistic with ideas such as not using another's head as my stepping stone out of the abyss, but helping him to rise, and finding God reaching out to both of us, in mercy and grace.

Where are the Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton figures today who haunt and humble us by the clarity of their conviction that Jesus was serious in what he said, not deadly serious but seriously on the side of life – "inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me?"

Lord grant me grace so to live, Amen

 

The image is the Hubble ultra image deep field. Now and then, well oftener than that, I go looking for Hubble images, clues not so much to the how of creation, but glimpses of the pure artistry of God. The beauty of space, where no matter how much we magnify and zoom, there is still the sense of infinite distance, unthinkable scale, not so much the final frontier as that which renders all frontiers relative. Sometimes image and poem coincide. Reading Hopkins I came across the poem below, The Starlight Night. Of course another of my favourite paintings is Van Gogh's Starry Night, and I like Don MacLean's rendering of Starry Starry Night as well.

Anyway. Advent. A time when stargazers saw something that changed the way they saw everything else. A time to have our frontiers rendered relative. A time when, as Hopkins says, all is a prize, and thus a time for prayer, patience, aims, vows.

 Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!

Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!

Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!—

Ah
well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows.

Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!

Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!

These are indeed the barn; within doors house

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse

Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.