Living Wittily

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  • Faith Without Works is Just as Bad as Works Without Faith!

     James-brother-of-jesus

    I'm in the process of preparing four expositions for a Bible Weekend Conference. They are all based on the Letter of James, which I've been musing and mulling over during Lent. Here is the intended programme – some of the earlier blog posts on words and the Christian Ethic of speaking will give a clue as to where some of these studies will lead………

    Theme: Before Following Jesus,

    Read the Large Print.

     

    Following Jesus. There’s No Such Thing as Freedom of Speech.

    James, Words, and a Christian Ethic of Speaking.

     

    Following Jesus. The Realities of a Relationally Challenged Church.

    James, Conflict, and the Wisdom from Above.

     

    Following Jesus. Hospitality to the Poor is a Requirement Not an Option

    James, the Poor and Christian Neighbourliness

     

    Following Jesus.  Even When Life Hurts.

    James, God’s Faithfulness, and Our Suffering.

  • The Prayer of the Humble Theologian – Yves Congar

    I love the names of authors which are a challenge to spell and pronounce. Antoine de Saint Exupery, Baron Friedrich Von Hugel, Dag Hammarskjold, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and lately reading the magnum opus of Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit. Congar was one of the great Catholic theologians of the second half of the 20th Century, one of the leading exponents of the Catholic renewal movement nouvelle theologie, and one of the theological architects of key documents from Vatican II. 

    In the introduction to his three volume work on the Holy Spirit he writes a personal apologia as a theologian which resonate with every heart given to the study of theology, prayer, and scripture and which works towards the coalescence of all three in the vocation of serving Christ in His Church.

    Each one of us has his own gifts, his own means and his own vocation. Mine are as a Christian who prays and as a theologian who reads a great deal and takes many notes. May I therefore be allowed to sing my own song! The Spirit is breath. The wind sings in the trees. I would like, then, to be an Aeolian harp and let the breath of God make the strings vibrate and sing. Let me stretch and tune the strings – that will be the austere task of research. And then let the Spirit make them sing a clear and tuneful song of prayer and life.

    Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit. 3 vols in 1, 1979-80, (New York: Crossroad, 1983), x.

    You know, I could happily make that my prayer for the remainder of my own life, vocation and love for God.

  • John Macleod Campbell: One of Scotland’s Greatest Theologians.

    RhuOne of Scotland's greatest theologians was John Macleod Campbell. The currency of the word "greatest" is rightly suspect from overuse, like the danger of fake gold coins you need to bite it to see if it's the real thing. So the word is used advisedly – John Macleod Campbell was Scottish, a parish minister, and one of Scotland's greatest theologians. That raises the question of what makes a theologian not just good, but great. It isn't about erudition, as if accumulated knowledge, organised and well articulated into argument and demonstration to clear conclusions were itself sufficient evidence. It isn't about vastness of output, peer affirmation, popular appeal. originality in content or approach, public stature or academic recognition. These are secondary.

    We are nearer an answer using phrases like creative faithfulness to the tradition, critical listening and imaginative re-thinking of that same tradition. Greatness requires such courage of personal convictions that these convictions are themselves open to examination and revision in the light of truth, and in obedience to an integrity of thought and faith required by the subject of study, God. And such thought and faith made both humble and honest by personal investment in the outcome and conclusions of the study of God, with further reflection on God's creative and redemptive ways with a recalcitrant creation, with our broken world and those creatures like ourselves made in his image and called human.

    In all these senses Macleod Campbell was one of the greatest Scottish theologians. He was parish minister in Row (now Rhu), near Helensburgh on the Clyde coast. In 1831 he was deposed from  his ministry by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland for his views on the nature, extent and meaning of the atonement. In 1856, a quarter of a century later, he published The Nature of the Atonement and Its relation to Remission of Sins and Eternal Life. It is a book with a long gestation, quarter of a century, written out of personal suffering, the style of writing containing long sentences of linked subordinate clauses, qualifying and clarifying in the bygoing. But it is brilliant in its distillation of profound biblical reflection, cumulative reasoned argument, pastoral intent (and intensity). Its great significance lies in its historic rootedness in the tradition of a Scottish Calvinist theology, but one in which he now called into serious question the supporting pillars and dogmatic fundaments of its limited atonement theology. Macleod Campbell was the most telling voice in the 19th Century reconfigurations of Scottish Reformed theology and its love affair with the Westminster Confession of Faith, rigidly understood. He was a faithful voice for a more generous Calvinism.

    I mention all this as a way of introducing some of Macleod Campbell's reflections late in life, when the very theology for which he was deposed was becoming the widely accepted understanding of a God whose love in Christ was indeed and genuinely, a love for all, to be expressed and preached in a theology of the cross which secured the truth the Christ died for all. One clue amongst several others to the theological determination and intellectual faithfulness of Macleod Campbell to the truth of the Gospel as he saw and understood it, is in this paragraph:

    "If when I am asked, "How do you know that the Bible is a Divine Revelation?" I thus answer, "Because it reveals God to me" am I to be met by the further question, "How do you know that it is God it reveals?" To such a question, the most solemn that can be addressed to a man, the answer is, that God is known as God by the light of what He is. If the Bible places me in that light, it makes me to know God and to know that I know God with a pure and ultimate certainty to which no certainty in any lower region can be compared."  (The Desire of Divine Love, Leanne Van Dyk, Peter Lang, 1995, p.45)

    Those who knew him recognised in that voice and those words, the humility and docility of a man who was, in a Scottish phrase, "far ben wi' God". Writing to his eldest son, again late in his life, Campbell had read Schleiermacher's biography and commented that he had "perhaps forgotten the love of God which calls to him as God's own child". There too is a clue to the theological passion with which Macleod Campbell preached and wrote of the love of God and the death of Christ for all who will come by faith. The God who loves and calls and desires fellowship with all His children, looks for an answering desire, love, and obedience of faith in receiving the gift of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

  • Christian Witness, the Shadow of the Bomb and the Shadow of the Cross

    Over on Facebook my friend Stuart Blythe asked for names of well known Christians who are or were known for their Christian witness against the manufacture and possession of nuclear weapons. The capacity of human beings to wage technological warfare to the point of life extinction raises the kind of "issue" you would think Christians would be largely agreed upon; namely, supporting the possession of that capacity, with a credible intent to use them in order to deter an attack, is a position incompatible, incongruent and essentially contradictory of the Christian Gospel. To hold the threat of massive destruction and indiscriminate obliteration of civilian populations over those we consider our potential enemies or those we consider may have, now or in the future, lethal intent towards us, may make unassailable military and political sense, though that itself is hugely debatable.

    DSC01895But I am personally perlexed at the thought that those who stand under the cross of Jesus Christ, who witness to the resurrection of Christ as the turning point of history, who are ambassadors of Christ and ministers of reconciliation, who are peacemakers of the Kingdom of God, and who are followers of the Lamb in the midst of the throne, slain from the foundation of the world – as I say personally perplexed to the point where I find it is impossible to conclude that those who witness to such realities embedded in the God of Hope, should give assent to the deployment of such weapons. The inevitable consequence is that credible threat implies use, if pushed to ultimate conclusions. How much more then, should the Christian conscience oppose the manufacture, possession and maintaining of weapons which are first strike weapons, and therefore combine both deterrence and threat with the logical implication that, given the right circumstances, their use as a first act of war is not ruled out.

    I do understand that this is deeply contested territory. But these questions arise in a Scottish Christian context of theological and cultural retrenchment, and where Christian opposition to nuclear weapons is neither co-ordinated nor clear. Christian activism in support of nuclear disarmament seems low on the priority list of churches claiming commitment to the redemptive mission of God in Christ. Church statements, which are representative of a common mind, and which are considered and rooted in the perspectives of a Gospel of mercy, reconciliation, peace and justice, are seldom formulated because there is a lack of agreement of what a Christian position and consensus might sound like, read like and look like at the official levels of denominational life.

    At this moment in the history of our world, with unambiguous signals of political ambition, unrest and threat from Russia, this is not a discussion in principle, nor is it a hypothetical scenario deliberately made extreme to highllight what is at stake in an ethical debate. In a world of credible threat, and destabilised economies and geopolitical changes, the Church has no right given its missional mandate, to leave matters of nuclear defence policy to the politicians, comfortably assuming it will never come to this.

    No, I am not I hope being alarmist; but I am contending that in our dangerous world the Christian Church has a categorical imperative to witness to the Crucified Lord, the Risen Saviour, and to stand under the cross of its Lord on the side of life, creation, new creation and in the service of the God of Hope. It cannot do this by being silent. And as primary evidence in its discussions, decisions and statements, it will have to hear again the voice of Jesus, and ensure that anything we do say, is stated as those who must always say, "Beneath the Cross of Jesus, I fain would take my stand….

  • Learning to Evaluate the Impact and Afterlife of Our Words

    DSC01409So what would it look like to do some quality assurance on how we speak? How would we evaluate the quality of the words we exchange with others? Can we asses and evidence the tone and content, the intention and the impact of what we say and how we say it, and why, and to whom?

    Is there a form of evaluation which might at least require us to think about how we speak, what we say? Indeed could there be an evaluation form that helps us critically review a day's speaking? During Lent it might be interesting, or it might be dispiriting, to review a day's speaking using the fruit of the Spirit as a grid that quality controls an entire day's conversation. It wouldn't matter that I don't recall very much of what precisely I said – there'll be a big enough remembered sample!

    Now of course this could become hilariously serious, ludicrously moralistic, not to mention ridiculously close to semantic OCD! But as a thought experiment, a broad spectrum diagnostic scan, just for a laugh, go on Jim, have a go at the Fruit of the Spirit Speech Quality Control Grid. 

     

    *

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    *****

    Love

     

     

     

     

     

    Joy

     

     

     

     

     

    Peace

     

     

     

     

     

    Patience

     

     

     

     

     

    Kindness

     

     

     

     

     

    Goodness

     

     

     

     

     

    Faithfulness

     

     

     

     

     

    Gentleness

     

     

     

     

     

    Self Control

     

     

     

     

     

    This is how it works. I start every time with a perfect score of 5 stars for all 9 fruits of the Spirit. Let's not overdo the guilt thing. Then I have to take away one star for each occasion I can think of when what I said was deficient in one or other of these 9 dispositions.

    So for example my negativity and moaning, however justified, doesn't exactly enhance the joy of others I live with, work with, speak to at the Supermarket checkout. Lose a joy star for every time I recall dumping my complaints on someone else.

    This could be fun! Sarcasm is a common if sometimes cruel humour; I'm good at it – a day's worth of that bumps the kindness credit into deficit.

    Someone else comes at me with their problem, their turn to be negative. I half listen but wish they'd change the subject or go away, and make that clear by my peremptoriness (if that's a word). Goodness! That one knocks back love, patience, kindness and gentleness in the blink of a sentence.

    OK. So that's the idea. A diagnostic of my habits of speech. Will I do this every day for Lent? No. That would be an exercise in guilt manufacture! But just imagining how it might work on this post, suggests it might provide an interesting hour spent on retreat. Then I might be encouraged to think positively how to use words transformatively;

    to make other people feel valued (love), to lift their day (joy), to reassure (peace), to show I'm listening (patience), to comfort and encourage (kindness), to make someone feel better (goodness), to affirm and respect (faithfulness), to recognise vulnerability (gentleness), and to avoid hurting (self control).

    The photo was taken on the flagstone path which winds towards the 5000 year old Yew tree in Fortingall; it indicates the likely dates on the 5000 year time line, when Collegial Scholarship began to flourish in Scotland. The relation of the photo to this post is the tenuous opinion that I hold, that those who are charged with upholding standards of scholarship, are those who are obliged to be stewards of language, disposed to courtesy in speaking, considerate of the potency of words, and exemplars of that intellectual humility which has no need to dominate or silence others.

  • Academy and Church; “Academic” Theology and “Practical” Ministry.

    Miroslav Volf just posted on Facebook another of his sharp epigrams: "Ministers increasingly see academic theology as irrelevant for their vocation. Unfortunately, theologians return the favour."

    Reading around some of the 20th Century's most influential New Testament scholars it's quite evident that many of them didn't fall into the trap of specialist arrogance. By which I mean they didn't try to  privilege their particular approach, or claim primary importance of the subset of their self-chosen discipline, or assume the priority of history, theology, philosophy, hermeneutics or dogmatic presuppositions, whichever was their comfort zone. Some of the most inspiring scholarship of the last hundred years has been carried out by scholars at home in the church and as Christians at home in the academy. Like a keyboard, the black and ivory keys play best together.

    Rudolph Bultmann was arguably the most influential New Testament theologian and exegete of the 20th Century. He was and remained a deeply committed Christian, whose preaching at Marburg from the 30's into the 50's is unerringly centred on the reality of Christ preached and present as promised in the proclamation of the Word in the context of Christian worship.

    Theology therefore is always exegesis inasmuch as it has access to revelation only through the witness of Scripture and seeks to grasp by exegesis what Scripture, understood as witness, says. In form, therefore, theology is always exegesis of Scripture. Its content speaks of revelation. but since revelation is the eternal event, judging or forgiving man, the object of theology is nothing other than the conceptual presentation of man's existence as determined by God – that is, as man must see it in the light of Scripture. (page 89, History of New Testament Research, vol 3)

    There it is. Scripture, theology, theologian, preacher, – a scholar with reverence for the text and a preacher with a passion for intellectual integrity in the service of the Church seeking to live a faithful Christian existence bearing witness to Christ.

    Volf is right to point out the failure and unfaithfulness of those charged with preaching, pastoral care and missional leadership, but who ignore, despise or reject academic theology – there is a discipleship of the intellect which also requires obedience. He is equally right to deplore the pursuit of academic theology divorced from the realities of Christian existence and the mandated witness of the Church to the world. The Christian tradition, the Scriptures, and the rich heritage of Christian theology each have their own context and content, to be understood and respected for what they are.

    The disconnect between theological learning and pastoral practices is never a service to the church or the academy. Black and ivory keys play best together. To change the metaphor, the pejorative term 'ivory tower' refers not only to academics 'who don't live in the real world', but to those Christian leaders in mission and  ministry for whom stewardship of the mind seems like too much hard work. 

  • We Are Not Called to Discpleship in the Abstract; We are Called to Follow Jesus.

    Transfiguration2006This was written 80 years ago by T W Manson, an unjustly forgotten New Testament scholar whose book on The Teaching of Jesus remains a classic:

    "The teaching of Jesus in the fullest and deepest sense is Jesus Himself, and the best Christian living has always been in some sort of imitation of Christ, not a slavish copying of His acts, but the working of His mind and spirit in new contexts of life and circumstance."

    Revelation reaches its zenith in "the personality and life of Jesus of Nazareth,…It is a revelation in terms of the highest category we can know – that of personality."

    These are wise words, and place the focus of Chhristian discipleship where it belongs – not on mission activity, our church, our spirituality, or indeed anything that takes the possessive pronoun "our". "The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we have gazed on his glory…He who has seen me has seen the Father…."

  • The Simon and Garfunkel Story. A Journey Back into My Teens!

    Tonight it's The Simon and Garfunkel Story, at the Music Hall in Aberdeen. These are the two demi-Gods of my own teenage years, I thought then as now they have a sound and a voice that ranges from playful to poignant, from mischief to wistfulness, from passionate political protest to love fulfilled or requited. And as a young man I sensed there was a seriousness in their take on life, a humanity and compassion in many of their lyrics, anger and resistance to those forces and social realities that dehumanise, from civil rights to Vietnam, from urban poverty to human exploitation. That may all sound idealistic, and much of it is, but listening to them nearly 50 years after Sound of Silence was released, their own peculiar sound still re-awakens memories of my own emerging view of a world where JFK, MLK, Vietnam, CND and other issues and causes were worked out in my own developing sense of who I was and who I wanted to be, and what I thought of the world. 

    Years later, hearing an actor reading Robert Frost's poem, Acquainted with the Night, I sensed the emotional and imaginative connections with the lyrics of The Sound of Silence. So tonight is a tribute show – but for me it has longer roots in my memory. It's an interesting question how formative repeated listening to resonant lyrics borne on music that is emotionally potent can be on moral taste, pers0nal values, life choices and our ability to think for ourselves. Of course we grow away from music of such powerful immediacy, but not before it has touched us into a different awareness of who we are and what matters to us. 

    There were plenty other groups and artists pouring out music in that decade of my growing up that was the 1960's, when nearly all the classic Simon and Garfunkel songs were produced. They have made a life habit of falling out, re-uniting then splitting again. Paul Simon particularly has pursued a solo career of considerable substance. But the songs in the musical tonight are the iconic ones, given context in narrative and dialogue between the songs. I'm expecting to be a wee bit nostalgic – and grateful for the giftedness of such music into our lives. The Sound of Silence, I am a Rock, Bookends, Homeward Bound, Cecilia, The Boxer, Bridge Over Troubled Water – take your pick, they are masterpieces in my canon of classic folk rock!

    For those who want poetry here are two brilliant evocations of urban life, its anxieties, loneliness and understated menace to the humanity of those who live in cities where the drivers are not self-evidently beneficial to those who live there.

    Acquainted With the Night (Robert Frost)

    I have been one acquainted with the night.
    I have walked out in rain — and back in rain.
    I have outwalked the furthest city light.

    I have looked down the saddest city lane.
    I have passed by the watchman on his beat
    And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

    I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
    When far away an interrupted cry
    Came over houses from another street,

    But not to call me back or say good-bye;
    And further still at an unearthly height,
    A luminary clock against the sky

    Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
    I have been one acquainted with the night.

     

    The Sound of Silence (Paul Simon)

    Hello darkness, my old friend
    I've come to talk with you again
    Because a vision softly creeping
    Left its seeds while I was sleeping
    And the vision that was planted
    In my brain still remains
    Within the sound of silence

    In restless dreams I walked alone
    Narrow streets of cobblestone
    'Neath the halo of a street lamp
    I turned my collar to the cold and damp
    When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of
    A neon light that split the night
    And touched the sound of silence

    And in the naked light I saw
    Ten thousand people, maybe more
    People talking without speaking
    People hearing without listening
    People writing songs that voices never share and no one dared
    Disturb the sound of silence

    Fools said I, you do not know
    Silence like a cancer grows
    Hear my words that I might teach you
    Take my arms that I might reach you
    But my words like silent raindrops fell
    And echoed in the wells of silence

    And the people bowed and prayed
    To the neon God they made
    And the sign flashed out its warning
    In the words that it was forming
    And the signs said, 'The words of the prophets
    Are written on the subway walls and tenement halls'
    And whispered in the sounds of silence.

  • Caring for the Words and the Text of the New Testament.

    We all have our idiosyncracies. From food preferences to the clothes we wear, from the TV programmes that do it for us, to those that we have never watched  – and could conceive of no circumstances that might persuade us ever to watch them. Idiosyncracies make our world an interesting, colourful diverse and exciting place to be. It's those infinitely variable human differences that make us who we are, those personal interests and odd enthusiasms, that story that is only and can only be ours, and that only we can tell, the characteristics and quirks that give us our individiuality, uniqueness and definition as the specific, different person we are.

    So if I say I am fascinated by the history of New Testament research, I am referring to one of my idiosyncracies. An enthusiasm limited in its clientele, a minority interest group even in the rarefied world of New Testament scholarship, but for me one of the most exciting areas of study I've lived in for decades. It goes back to one book; The History of the Interpretation of the New Testament, by Stepehn Neil. I spent a summer holiday in 1984 reading that book from cover to cover along with Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October and the biography of Temple Gairdner of Cairo. Who he? That will be another post.

    CodexStephen Neil's book reads like a novel, a biography and a history all in one. It was updated in a Second Edition by N T Wright, and now covers the history of New Testament scholarship up to 1986. Recently a mammoth 3 volume History of New Testament Research from the 18th to the end of the 20th Century was completed by William Baird, and I've just started to read it. Baird is yet another example of scholars who go to heroic lengths in their quest for understanding of the text, and the history, interpretation, reception and influence of the New Testament over 2000 years of reflection, study, understanding and misunderstanding. These volumes trace the fascinating mixture of literary detective work, historical synthesis, biography, textual analysis, academic politics, and colliding theological presuppositions, philosophical assumptions and scientific theorising of around 300 years of intense study. All to make sense of 28 documents the length of a medium sized paperback, written around 2000 years ago by a variety of people and communities of no great moment then, but of vast significance for subsequent human history.

    SinaiIf you want to know what's so fascinating about this stuff let me recommend Sisters of Sinai, by Janet Martin Soskice as a good place to start. It tells of two sisters from Kilbarchan ( In Victorian times a wee Scottish village with weaving mills) who had ambitions to learn and travel. They visited Mount Sinai monastery, discovered ancient New Testament manuscripts and codices, learned several Oriental languages in order to translate them, and contributed significantly to the science of textual criticism and the search for the earliest witnesses to the biblical text.In doing all this they had to take on the male bastions of academia who had little patience and less respect for the accomplishments of these women.

    How scholars establish the reliability of the text of the New testament is a mixture of tedium and inspiration, it requires disciplined sifting of textual minutiae and instinctive genius for language, demands a scrupulous weighing evidence and imaginative but historically plausible reconstructing of context and provenance. During this period of Lent when I'm thinking about words, how they are used, the search for a responsible stewardship of words, and why we should care for words like conservators and curators of meaning. I reflect on the countless scholars, the millions of hours of study, the adventures and the heartache, the passion of the quest and the disciplines of intellectual integrity and humility before a text that no scholar can own, possess or control. And I'm grateful for such holy industry. At least in this sense, of careful attention to words that are life changing, Lent is a time to re-read the New Testament, wth a care for what it says.

     

  • 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.