Living Wittily

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  • Words as Couriers of Hope

    DSC02171Another way of thinking about the words I speak during Lent and beyond, would be to find ways of speaking that give sound and presence to the cardinal virtues – Hope, Love, Faith.

    When I speak is hope enhanced, love confirmed, faith sustained?

    So what about hope? Do my words encourage hearts and lift up heads and strengthen feeble knees?

    Or, by something I say, casually or thoughtfully, is love kept faithful, set free and made more real?

    And faith? Do words and sentences, comments and conversations, greetings and silent gestures, invite faith, instil trust, affirm worth?

    But let's begin with hope. If ever the Christian witness needed to repristinate a word that has become obscured and vague; if ever a word was slipping towards the margins of our living like an almost lost memory; if ever a word was under siege from its opposites, pressured to the edges of personal experience and political priority, that word is hope.

    No that isn't a counsel of despair, nor a surrender to the dark side. It is a recalling of Christian obedience to a faith where the deep seeds of hope are embedded in Calvary, that deep red soil where they propagate and rise in the flowers and fruits of Resurrection.  Resurrection hopefulness is our most powerful, sustainable energy source; and if so it should be evident in the way we look at the world and talk about it. The blazing radiance of resurrection should illuminate our words. So as a Lenten corrective to much that we feel and think and therefore say, here are two helpful voices:

    May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15.13)

    Try memorising that, and saying it before you open the office door of a colleague and waste their day, or when sitting in the hardly moving traffic queue fuming at all this precious time in your life that is so frustratingly unproductive, or when life comes tumbling or rumbling towards us with the promise of yet more hassle. 

    The antidote to which might be this poem by Denise Levertov, who knows the resurrection power of words, kindly spoken, courageously proclaimed, firmly stated, angrily shouted, gently whispered, hilariously shared, and as couriers of hope.

    New Year Poem. 1981

    I have a small grain of hope—
    one small crystal that gleams
    clear colors out of transparency.

    I need more.

    I break off a fragment
    to send you.

    Please take
    this grain of a grain of hope
    so that mine won’t shrink.

    Please share your fragment
    so that yours will grow.

    Only so, by division,
    will hope increase,

    like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
    unless you distribute
    the clustered roots, unlikely source—
    clumsy and earth-covered—
    of grace.

    –Denise Levertov

    Last summer, one of our roses (photo above) produced this Trinitarian reminder. For this and the next two posts it will be a reminder of the three cardonal virtues of Faith and Hope and Love.

     

  • Beware of Deedless Words

    So, Lent is about not speaking empty words. The NIV translates Jesus saying in Matthew 12.36: "But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken." NRSV says "careless": KJV "idle". An old 17th Century commentary paraphrases, "frothy language".

    Now this becomes interesting. Matthew uses a Greek word meaning "unemployed, lazy" if it's used of a person. But it means "unproductive" when used of something like a word. Words should lead to deeds. Words that do nothing and go nowhere are unproductive, fruitless, make no difference to the way things are. In that sense are empty of purpose, devoid of practical meaning. Ulrich Luz, the premier contemporary commentator on Matthew (his 3 volume commentary is a prized personal possession over which I inordinately gloat!) connects this hard saying of Jesus to the way the Church speaks and acts: "On the day of judgment human wordas are asked whether they have produced deeds, and in Matthew that means essentially whether they have produced love." (Luz, Matthew, Hermeneia, Vol. 2. p.211) In other words Jesus is warning against talking the talk but not walking the walk.

    In a wonderful book, The Language and Imagery of the Bible, G B Caird expands on this idea that words accomplish things. He writes, "The point is not thoughtless words, such as a carefree joke, but deedless ones…the broken promise, the unpaid vow, words which said "I go sir" and never went (Matt 21.29)"

    Between them, Luz and Caird guide my Lenten search for responsible stewardship of my words and speech.

    How many of my words are deedless?

    Can my words, let alone my word, be trusted?

    What compels me to speak out and act out of what I say?

    What words will best stand the scrutiny of the Judgement if not those uttered against injustice, if not words of performative kindness?

    PatonThose questions remind me of a conversation in one of Alan Paton's short stories, in Ah! But Your Land is Beautiful. A conversation takes place between a white man and his black friend about the dangers of protesting against the system of apartheid and its inhumanity to those crushed by state sanctioned segregation and discrimination. I think Paton captures exactly what Jesus words mean if we are going to walk the walk as well as talk the talk:

    “When I go up there, which is my intention, the Big Judge will say to me, Where are your wounds? and if I say I haven’t any, he will say, Was there nothing to fight for? I couldn’t face that question."

    Well I did say that a Lenten examination of how I use words might be harder than giving up coffee or chocolate.

  • Giving Up Empty Words for Lent

    It's Ash Wednesday. Once again the annual give-upfest comes around. Need to eat less. Do more exercise. Reduce caffeine. Refuse chocolate. Prohibit clicking the Amazon shopping basket. Stop cheating in speed limits. Walk more and drive less. Keep tabs on food waste. Keep tabs on my own waist. Detox from the Internet.  I've just written a Lenten Decalogue. Ten new commandments to make life, me, the world, a little more this, a little less that.

    Raphael52I'm not going to try to keep any of them. Each one is valid, valuable and salutary. These I should be doing whether it's Lent or not. The fact I can so easily compile such a personally relevant checklist of virtues or their absence is evidence enough of my need for improvement.

    And yet. Somehow this year I feel less interested in pulling out a few weeds, and more interested in replenishing the soil. Not so much interested in dealing with this or that bad habit, more challenged by the issue of the kind of person whose habits they are.

    Which brings me to Jesus, believe it or not – but I'd prefer that you did believe it. Matthew 12.35-37 tends not to be amongst the more comforting words Jesus ever spoke.  My guess is we interpret them as hyperbole, a good natured warning phrased strongly for rhetorical effect. That is a category mistake. These words are spoken with an exacting exactness – Jesus means what he says. Seriously, Jesus is being serious.

    35 A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him. 36 But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken. 37 For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.

    So as I mentioned in a previous post on the Epistle of James, this Lent I am giving up words. Well at least giving up, so far as prayerulness and carefulness allow, empty words. Earlier today Professor Dana Greene left a comment here on Living Wittily. It relates to a post I did on Elizabeth Jennings and one of her poems. To show what words are and achieve in human relations when they are not empty, and to give an idea of a stewardship of words, here is one of a good number of poems in which she considers language, words and the therapeutic effect of good words spoken:

    Hours and Words

    There is a sense of sunlight where

    warm messages and eager words

    Are sent across the turning air,

    Matins, Little Hours and Lauds,

     

    When people talk and hope to teach

    A happiness that they have found.

    Here prayer finds a soil that is rich

    and sets a singing underground.

     

    Let there be silence that is full

    of blossoming hints. When it is dark

    Men's minds can link and their words fill

    A saving boat that is God's ark.

     

    O language is a precious thing

    And ministers deep needs. It will

    soothe the mind and softly sing

    and echo forth when we are still.

     

    As a Lenten discipline, what might it look like to cultivate a stewardship of words, develop a discipline of language, practice a care for speech as therapeutic. And perhaps above all, a recovery of the eloquence of silence, out of which comes our deepest thoughts and those words that have a lasting worth and legacy in the enriched lives of others.

    The painting  by Raphael, Paul Preaching at the Areopagus, has its own message about the importance of the words we speak out of fullness of heart and the empty words we do better to refrain from speaking. Remembering we speak in the presence of the God in whom we live and move and have our being.

  • Wednesday Nights are Wolf Hall.

    Wolf hall 2The title of this blog is Living Wittily. The phrase comes from Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons. The play is based on the life of Thomas More and explores the moral, psychological and theological morass created by Henry VIII and his ruthless determination to produce a male heir with or without Catherine of Aragon. Of course, it was going to have to be without her, which set Henry on a collision course with the Pope, the Catholic Church, and any close to him whose conscience prohibited approval of the King's dynastic goals.

    Disapproval of the policies of a Tudor King may well be dictated by conscience but it was equally an act of political suicide and invited martyrdom. This was brilliantly captured in the most recent episode of Wolf Hall, in which the King's ruthlessness, Thomas Cromwell's manipulative cleverness, and Thomas More's adamantine refusal to violate his conscience. were composed into a concerto movement of tragic slowness, tortuous windings, and an outcome made certain in its fatal climax. The psychological subtleties and virtuoso ethical performances of More were never going to save him in a drama about power in need of substance, about evolving national identity, debts of remembered grievance being called in, and the beginnings of Parliamentary muscle flexing towards a more democratic distribution of power, at least amongst the nobility and between Parliament and King.

    Anton-Lesser-Thomas-More-012The portrayal of More's moral dilemma and spiritual crisis, was a brilliant narrative of a frightened man whose fear of death was only tolerable because the alternative would be the fear of an enraged God should he go against conscience. In Bolt's brilliant paraphrase of human tragedy and moral perplexity, More claimed he sought to serve God in the tangle of his mind. Equally brilliant, was Cromwell's deconstruction of More's own self-image as one who never sought another human being's harm. Although not made more prominent than it needed to be, the use of the rack, burning at the stake, and the whole hellish machinery of religious violence against those who believe differently, is a telling reminder in our own day of the cruelties and violations unleashed when an ideology with the status of a religion secures its dominance by a process of elimination. I welcomed the reference to the deceits behind Tyndale's capture, More's gloating piety, and Cromwell's much less religious distaste for religious persecution as justifiable on theological grounds.In this production More is saint and sinner, with the weight on the saint oblivious of his own deep and cruel sins against others.

    Which doesn't mean Thomas Cromwell was himself above coercion of conscience and the use of force to suppress dissent; More's hounding to execution is part of the evidence against him. 

    Anne_boleyn_1_wolf_hallAnother enjoyable and important strand in the production is the role of women in the making and breaking of power in a cultural context so structurally masculine. While serial Queens were to be taken and discarded if they failed Henry's obsession with succession, Catherine, and Anne Boleyn, are not portrayed as the wilting, timid, or unintelligent consorts in other productions. They are strong; they understand power; they form alliances and plot against dangers; their fears are real, but so is their courage and integrity. They are an important alternative narrative to the insecure King desperate to establish a dynasty, and the power hungry nobility and advisers whose loyalties are ambiguous, and whose own security has to be bought at the expense of others. 

    A TV adaptation will always struggle to persuade those who are fans of the original book, but this one comes as close to the real thing as may be possible. The occasional historical anachronism is easily ignored in a production that varies in pace but is overall a leisurely unfolding, increasing in tension and crisis, and which therefore allows the chief characters to be developed and established in all their emotional complexity and political ambiguity in the mind of the viewer.

    Wolf-HallThomas Cromwell is I think convincing, chilling, hard to read, but a man with a long memory for grievance and a passively violent way of settling things his way and in his own interests. Not sure what it says about me but so far I like him! His portrait being painted in this week's episode (by Holbein?) placed him in the classic partial side profile of Renaissance portraiture, and showed that same strong, unreadable face, unflinching in gaze, and coming alive only when he speaks in an understated, considered forcefulness of someone who always, but always, thinks before he speaks.

    I can understand why Hilary Mantel is very happy with the adaptation. It will bear repeat broadcasting later.

  • From Facebook to Youtube to a Theologian, Poet and Philosopher.

    HartThe Australian poet, theologian and philosopher Kevin J Hart gives an intriguing interview here What is so helpful in this extract from a fuller conversation is Hart's indebtedness to an algebra lesson for his conversion. The Damascus road experience came to him while looking at a blackboard with a simple equation, and his realisation as he looked around the class that he was now seeing the world differently. At this stage there was no theological content, more a sense of the mystery and longing and beauty of life distilled into the elegant rightness of an equation. Later his discovery of a Southern Baptist congregatrion (in Australia), opened him to new and deeper longings for a God both transcendent and immediate, whose love beyond words was nevertheless sung out with passionate intensity in hymns utterly inadequate to their theme, and in their lack of metaphysical reach, all the more poignant and valid.

    When later at age 21 he converted to Catholicism, he became interested in the mystical streams of Catholic theology, and in the tension between kataphatic and apophatic theology,the classic distinction between positive theology as a revelation and way of knowing, and negative theology as a more reticent admission of unknowing. Hart is an important voice because what he says is refracted through a mind at ease with mathematical abstraction, careful in theological humility, precise in philosophical reflection, imaginative in poetic discourse, and each of these articulated within his Catholic faith in which the sacraments function as reminder and confirmation of the God in whose mysterious conjoining love Creation, human being, and life itself subsists.

    Hearing Hart's testimony is a reminder of the need for some apophatic reticence in  all of us if we are ever tempted to make our own experience the paradigm, our own theology the norm, our own take on the world a claim we know 'the way it is'. Truth is not univocal, as if 'it means one thing and that's what I think it means'. Nor is truth equivocal, as if 'it means what each person thinks it means'. Mathematics, poetry, evangelical hymnody, mystical theology, Continental philosophy are any one of them slightly off the beaten path of the ordinary; as an intersection of disciplines, intellectual, theological and ethical, they provide for Hart a multi-vocal exploration of this vast mystery, this terrifyingly beautiful conundrum that is our human existence in relation to the God in whom we live and move and have our being.

    I came across this interview clip by entire accident, follwing several links from facebook to youtube. By such random purposefulness life is enriched. 

  • Listening to Your Life Knowing God Listens Too.

    These past few days I've been thinking. I do quite a lot of that. Live inside my own head, reflect on this and that, consider, ponder, worry, praise. Rehearse memories, imagine conversations, read, pray, give thanks, complain. Feel guilty or contented, uplifted or sad, impressed by beauty or depressed by brokenness; these and other emotional and intellectual puzzles are the colours and sounds of that world known only to me, and God. And in the most important sense, thankfully, known better to God than to me.

    DSC02639So how much of all of that inner noise and silence, searching and finding, that continuous flowing of thought and feeling that is the life I inhabit, how much of all this muchness of me is prayer. Do I pray or does God pray in me? Is prayer my seeking God or God seeking me? Is prayer indeed "the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed"? As an introvert I hope so, because there is a lot of living goes on inside our own heads, and inside our own hearts, and much of it a shared secret between us and God. Interestingly I find that more reassuring than worrying.

    "O Lord, you have searched me and know me….you perceive my thoughts from afar…you are familiar with all my ways…before a word is on my lips you know it completely, O Lord." All this inner noise, like an orchestra tuning up and never quite ready for the concerto at which I am to be the guest soloist, God hears it, knows and understands the pre-performance anxiety. The closed circuit of action and reaction to all that happens in my life, that turns the affective and emotional kaleidoscope of my inner life into ever changing patterns I can't predict, God sees, and knows and understands the passion and the hope, the longing and the shadows, the joy of love found and the fear of love lost. 

    All this is a reminder to myself of something too often overlooked and under-appreciated. A human being is a stupendous mystery of unique and eternal worth to God, created and known and enfolded in the creative love that calls us into the freedom and glory that is a human life.

    For you created my inmost being;
        you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
    14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
        your works are wonderful,
        I know that full well.
    15 My frame was not hidden from you
        when I was made in the secret place,
        when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
    16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
        all the days ordained for me were written in your book
        before one of them came to be.

    IMG_0127There are of course deep and perplexing questions posed by such theological optimism about my life and metaphysical confidence about the way the universe works. I neither ignore them as irrelevant nor answer them with answers by definition partial, limited and speculative. Like everyone else I have to live with them. As a Christian I have no calling to understate the reality of evil, give intelligible answers to the tragedy of suffering, explain with what could only be uninformed impertinence the mystery of life's injustices cruelties and waste. No, as a Christian, facing the full realities of human existence and being a participant in this essential part of the human story that is my life, I think, pray and act out my life in the long shadow of a cross illumined by the blaze of resurrection.

    Donald Mackinnon, was a courageous, intrepid explorer of the metaphysical landscape of 20th Century philosophical theology. He was a giant of a man, with steel wool eyebrows, a a love for his Harris Tweed jacket, and a voice that compelled attention, as with the huge hands and the body language of an Olympic wrestler he grappled and swayed to get a better hold on ideas both massive and elusive, but whose truth if it can be held and stated, are words of life. In one of his last publications he wrote movingly of the witness of the Christian church in a world full of just such tragedies and perplexities as our own.

     “The Church exists in part to manifest to the world, albeit in a splintered reflection, that ultimate love whose expression in time is found in the crucifixion of the Son of God – to call men and women to their rest in its unfathomable deeps.”

    Out of such ultimate love, we live and move and have our being.

    (Both photos were taken early morning – one at the beach in Aberdeen, the other looking across the Mearns from the Bervie Road.) 

  • The Letter of James 2. Words of Advice for Confused Strugglers

    I'm still reading, marking and learning in the Epistle of James, and taking time to inwardly digest a text that is nourishing and therefore not fast food. James is writing "in the name of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes of the Dispersion". So in the very first verse he uses a word that tells us who we are as followers of Jesus, whether we live now or 2000 years ago – we are exiles, dispersed people, a scattered community.

    Postmodernism_for_beginnersI've long felt that the biblical story of Exile has important parallels for Christians trying to live in our 21st Century culture where faith commitments and religious privilege are no longer the assumed context for our daily living. Christian values, practices and moral patterns are now minority interests, one option in a plethora of other chosen lifestyles, value systems and relational commitments, which have equal validity and powerful promotional claims in a post-Christian, media soaked, inter-connected society.

    So when James says his letter is for those who feel displaced, who live away from home, whose identity is constantly under pressure, whose cultural roots are planted in alien soil, then it just may be that his message takes on particular urgency and poignancy. A recent study of Global Diaspora might help us understand why it is that Christians struggle to survive in our society, and are tempted time and again to take the lines of least resistance, and to settle for being non-radical in our discipleship. Here are some of the realities pointed out in that study of what it means being an exile, being dispersed and away from where we are most at home. Each of them is energy sapping, vision reducing, hope impairing, and thus diminishing of life possibilities:

    • separation from homeland (alienation from an increasingly anit-Christian culture)
    • life on the move (living with rapid paced change)
    • erosion of identity as a people (Christian community)
    • living on the periphery when power is at the centre (end of Christendom)
    • loss of cultural roots ( the things that matter most to Christians matter least now)
    • refugee status (citizens of heaven locked into ways of life hostile to Christian values)

    Now the New Testament scholar Joel Green then points out that James himself identifies key features of dispersion and exile:

    Decision-making-processes1trials of every kind (1.2)

    testing of faith (1.3)

    humiliation (1.9)

    temptation (1.12)

    distress (1.27)

    conflicts and disputes (4.1)

    victims of hostile treatment (5.4,6)

    a life of wandering (5.19)

    However, James says something early on that is crucial for our survival as Christians amidst all this negative sounding talk – "Count it all joy when you face various tests…". Why? Because suffering trials and tests brings endurance and then maturity. Joy isn't happiness; it's much nearer confidence, a trusting attitude to life that isn't based on only good things happening to good people, and behind all that, James urges a recognition that God is a particular kind of God. James 1.16-18 "Every good gift, every perfect gift, comes from above. These gifts come down from the Father is the creator of the heavenly lights, in whose character there is no change at all. Or in an older translation, "in whom there is no shadow of turning."

    So exiles in a time and a place, a culture and a society, struggle to exist where following faithfully after Jesus is neither easy nor popular. But, says James, they are those who have a strange, durable joy, because the God who gifts us life and whose gifts sustain our life is faithful, constant, unchanging. No wonder these verses are embedded in hymns of the Church:

    "Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father,

    There is no shadow of turning with thee;

    Thou changest not, thy compassions they fail not,

    As thou hast been thou forever wilt be."

  • Lenten Thoughts and a Lenten Prayer a Full Fortnight Before Lent…….

    Sometimes, following faithfully after Jesus no longer makes sense, our first love has become our last love, focus is blurred, purpose confused, DSC01895joy is muted.

    Sometimes, for all our pragmatism, insistence on faith as "practical" and truth as "applied", Jesus' demands sound like high ideals and begin to sound ludicrously impractical.

    Sometimes, we have to admit that our understanding of what it means to be a Christian gravitates downwards towards playing safe, staying predictable, being non-disruptive and we begin to believe following Jesus is easily accomodated within our otherwise busy multi-tasking lives.

    Sometimes, reading what Jesus says has the same minimal impact as humming our favourite music, with the lyrics and beat familiarly and smoothly pulsing through headphones into a mind preoccupied by other stuff.

    Sometimes, complacency becomes so comfortable, so unnoticeably normal, that we are in danger of losing our edge, closing our eyes, cruising to a fuel efficient slowness, at which point the only thing that might save us is, well, Jesus.

    Sometimes, what is needed is a new vision, a recovered love, a re-orientation of the heart.

    Sometimes, being a Christian means believing what is wildly implausible but true.

    Sometimes, Jesus asks something that is risky and disruptive and demands our whole self all over again.

    Sometimes, the soul is healed by unfamiliar music inviting us to move again in God's direction, along unfamiliar roads.

    And sometimes, it is the call of Christ coming with resurgent force that electrifies and defibrillates the spirit, and re-establishes the rhythms of our discipleship.

    So Lord,

    Once you called our name, and we followed; but sometime, somewhere along the way, the sound of your voice diminished beyond our hearing:

    Lord forgive our pragmatism and open our minds to the wildly impractical practices of your Kingdom of love and peace-making

    Lord replace our complacency with urgency, and replenish our hearts with a holy recklessness turned outwards in compassion and service

    Lord save us from the exhaustion of multi-tasking the ordinary, and give us energy for gestures of redemption and enthusiasm for the extraordinary

    Lord make us sick and tired of the familiar, the normal, the routine, and call us once again to take up again the cross, the cost, and the consequence of following after you.

    May your Kingdom come, here, now, in me, in your world, Amen

     

  • God only knows the love of God: In Honour of Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

    DSC02698

    Some years ago in a favourite antique shop I found this bust of Spurgeon. It is an original Victorian piece by John Adams Acton, dated 1878, when Spurgeon was at the zenith of his powers as a preacher, Nonconformist leader, and staunch defender of Reformed Calvinistic orthodoxy. I've never doubted either the genius or the incendiary spirituality of the most popular preacher in an age of celebrity preachers. His sermons still read as inspired and inspiring ruminations on the biblival texts. His love of the Bible and his total immersion in the text make him an exemplary Baptist. He spoke of soaking in the text as in the bath, until his body, deep dyed in the words of the Word, became bibline. 

    He sits there on my church history bookshelves as a reminder of the importance of preaching, the centrality of the biblical text, and also as a reminder of the Gospel as centred in the person of Jesus. Yes, I know Spurgeon was a thorough-going Calvinist, and that to him Arminian theology was like a high pollen count to hay fever victims. But when he expostulated on Jesus, (no other word really captures the lyrical, emotional, imaginative flights of his  Gospel storytelling), he spoke of One who was quite simply his friend and Saviour, a crucified Lord and risen Companion, One in whom love and sacrifice gladly offered, pulls the rug from every pretention and excuse.

    If speculation has any value, I'd speculate about what Spurgeon would now make of the way Jesus is preached today. He might even ask IF Jesus is preached today in any way that would make Jesus accessible, attractive, demanding, unignorable in the magical mystery melee of post-modern, post-Christian, post most things culture. Because Spurgeon knew how to connect with his own culturasl context. The sentiment and emotional appeal, the theatrical performances of extempore preaching, and the reasoned apologetic for a Saviour in an age where private guilt and public shame were powerful undertows, instilled in Spurgeon's preaching a magnetic core, pulling on the cultural longings of Victorian society.

    Spurgeon was a man of his age, that's what made him a great preacher and a great man. But by the time he died the world had changed, and the theological climate was altogether more Acrtic for a theology more declarative than interrogative. He had been faithful in his time, as he saw it, and as he understood faithfulness to the Gospel and to Jesus. Even in his own lifetime he was becoming a man rooted in the past, drawing inspiration and strength from his beloved Puritans and Calvin.

    His bust sits there, safely placed amongst my books on Puritanism, well away from modern authors and new theological thought forms that would seriously upset him. I think he would deplore hermeneutics; too much like evasion, dissimulation and intellectual mind games with the text! That wouldn't make him right, but it does point to a serious reminder for those of us charged with responsible biblical interpretation for and in our own age. To be faithful to truth doesn't mean a mind made up and closed to all further traffic; it does mean knowing where I stand, and why, and enough humility to confess my knowledge is partial, my judgements provisional, and my task of hearing and obeying the living Word of God a continuing discipline of listening. I treasure the words of another Evangelical statesman, John Stott:

    "Life is a pilgrimage of learning, a voyage of discovery, in which our mistaken views are corrected, our distorted notions adjusted, our shallow opinions deepened, and some of our vast ignorance diminished. (Christian Mission and the Modern World, page 10)

    Dialogue and humility, intellectual honesty and theological integrity, faithfulness to a tradition and refusal to close the mind to new and better ways of understanding and seeking truth – these are the characteristics of what that other old Victorian evangelical, Alexander Whyte, affirmed as the required stance of the hospitable hearted Evangelical. And it means this. If I live under an imperative to handle the Bible with reverence, respect and humility before God, then before God I am also required to follow where truth leads, to handle holy things with care, and therefore to tell my own presuppositions to quieten down so that the text can be heard above the din of my own opinions, conclusions, or even, God give grace, my certainties. Perhaps the most we can claim with certainty is that over a lifetime, by that same gentle, corrective grace of God, some of our vast ignorance is being diminished!

    So Spurgeon looks across at my desk, from behind my shoulder. I honour both his memory and his work. He being dead yet speaketh as one of a great cloud of witnesses who give testimony to the power of the Bible to transform and convert, to sanctify and make new, to lift up heads and give strength to those who struggle and restore hope in those whose lives seem empty of life itself.

    "God veiled the cross in darkness, and in darkness much of its deep meaning lies, not because God would not reveal it, but because we have not the capacity to discern it all..God only knows the love of God."

    I love someone who can preach like that!

  • How Many Bibles Do You Need?

    Mosaic bibleI've just bought a new Bible. It isn't that I've worn the other one out completely – it's still serviceable enough. I've had it since 1992. So, why buy another Bible? How many Bibles does someone need for goodness sake?

    Come to think it, that question could be interesting if we drop the rhetorical flourish and simply ask;

    How many Bibles do I need for goodness sake,for the sake of goodness, that is, before I get the point, in order to begin to be transformed by words that are life giving, or to be touched by grace that is heart changing, or troubled by stories that are conscience building, and grabbed and graced by good news that is mindset changing?

    The answer is one,

    just one, if it's read faithfully, angrily, routinely, in perplexity, expectantly, reverently, honestly, even guiltily

    just one, if it's held prayerfully and pondered slowly for guidance or grabbed desperately  and ransacked for, well, guidance too

    just one, to be read falteringly with broken heart, or joyfully with soaring thoughts, or in the confusion, fatigue, boredom and frightening array of options that is life at high speed in high definition at a too high price

    just one, to find answers which might not be there, or in search of the right questions which we might just discover

    just one, to look for some comfort and love in our sorrows, or to remember again why laughter is a way of thanking God twice for the same blessing

    just one, to find guidance, wisdom, mercy, judgement and grace, gifts already there for the finding and each of them underwritten by the promise of God

    just one, because a hungry traveller needs one good meal at one good inn to make the next miles possible.

    Yes one Bible is enough, if it shows sufficient signs of use. Years ago, one of Scotland's more spectacular Baptist preachers, in a wee corrugated iron church in Lanrkshire, Scotland, demonstrated, with stunning unintended improvisation, the cost and consequences of using and abusing a Bible for a lifetime.

    He was lampooning the thought that a Bible should be kept in its box, treated with reverence and deference so that from one year to the next it kept its pristine appearance in keeping with its sacred status.  When he preached that morning he held up his own Bible, and waved it wildly as he thundered and threatened about the tragedy of the unread, under-used over-protected gilt edged Bibles he believed were languishing in drawers and cupboards all over the town. Then he loosened his grip on his Bible, and was left holding the covers as a veritable blizzard of pages began to fall from the raised pulpit, and wafted with sacramental slowness, left to right, like sacred text snowflakes, settling on the choir seats, the floor and occasionally brushing the heads of the few choir members within range.

    He never faltered. Forty years later, having taught homiletics and biblical studies, philosophy and systematic and pastoral theology, and preached over 3000 sermons myself, I still remember the hairs on the back of my neck being raised, by those slow motion india paper pages, loose-leaves of testimony to a Bible that had seen better days, but which had sustained and nurtured and given life and passion and purpose to this man's story.

    How many Bibles do you need? For all practical purposes, just one.