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Utilitarianism, by John Stuart Mill. Read it years ago in Moral Philosophy, and I haven't revisited it since. At least not as a book. But some of the things I learned have stayed in the mind, either as puzzles or insights.

I remember doing an essay on conscience in utilitarian thought, and quoting Mill's definition of what constitutes conscience. I love the way philosophers ask questions some of us would never even formulate, and then answer them with a sublime confidence in the coundness of their own reasoning. Here's Mill on conscience – now stay with me – this gets easier:

The binding force [of conscience] consists in the existence of a mass of feeling which must be broken through in order to do what violates our standard of right, and which, if we do nevertheless violate that standard, will probably have to be encountered afterwards in the form of remorse.  http://www.utilitarianism.com/mill3.htm

So, that's how you get a guilty conscience. That mass of feeling violated and the later remorse. All of this came back to me while reading William Stringfellow's brief essay on conscience. He is not so interested in the general question, what is conscience. He goes for the more personal question, what is a Christian conscience – and then gets interesting. Here's some of the wisdom of Stringfellow:

Conscience, in the gospel, as well as in the actual experiences of the early Christians, refers to the new or restored maturity of human life in Christ.

A person who becomes a Christian… suffers at once a personal and a public transfigurationOne's insight into one's own identity as a person is, at the same time, an acceptance of the rest of humanity… Each time a person is baptized, the common life of all human beings in community is affirmed and notarized.

The baptized, thus, lives in a new primary, and rudimentary relationship with other human beings signifying the reconciliation of the whole of life vouchsafed in Jesus Christ. The discernment – about any matter whatsoever – that is given and exercised in that remarkable relationship, is conscience. In truth the association of baptism with conscience, in this sense, is that conscience is properly deemed a charismatic gift.

The initiative in conscience belongs to God; the authority of conscience is the maturity of the humanity of the Christian; the concern of conscience is always the societal fulfillment of life for all.

What transpires in decisions and actions of conscience, on the part of a Christian or of some community of Christians or of many Christians positioned diversely, is a living encounter between the Holy Spirit and those deciding and acting in relation to human needs in society.

Conscience requires knowing and respecting one's self as no less, but no more, than human. The exercise of conscience represents – as 1 Peter remarks- living as a free human being…Conscience is the access of the Holy Spirit to human beings in their decisions and actions in daily existence.

A Keeper of the Word. Selected Writings of William Stringfellow. ed. B W Kellermann (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994) 299-301.

That's an impressive piece of baptistic pneumatology! The conscience of the baptized is characterised by reconciled humanity and human maturity, actions and decisions for the good of all, freedom and relational renewal, and all within the sphere and orbit of the Holy Spirit's dynamic presence, and in the context of a community of the baptised. In five pages Stringfellow outlines approach to a spirituality of conscience, ethics, justice, compassion, truth-telling and love at the service of the world. Brilliant.

Ever since College days I've been ambivalent about Calvinism – not Calvin so much as the ism. I remember the lilting Hebridean accent of someone I lost touch with after Graduation, as he shook his head sadly, saying, as if he were a doctor giving me a dread diagnosis, "Jim, you're a wee Pelagian Arminian". Now apart from the fact that Pelagius and Arminius are in the unfortunate position of being maligned and [mis]interpreted by those who know them only through the minds of their opponents (Augustine and scholastic Calvinism), and  not from first hand engagement with their writing, it did sound like an ominous theological deficit!

In any case, it was an unfair accusation because it said too little! Yes I am Arminian if by that is meant I believe 'whosoever will' is true at face value as the invitation of Jesus. No I am not Pelagian if by that is meant believing I play the decisive role in the saving work of God, in my life or anyone else's; nor does it mean I have a diluted and perhaps deluded conception of sin. Alongside my Wesleyan commitments to a free Gospel, and faith as a Spirit inspired and graced response to God's call, I hold equally to a strong sense of God's sovereignty and the necessity for a regenerating and sanctifying work of God in the formation of fallen humanity towards Christlikeness. 

I mention all this for two reasons. First, I have learned much from those Christian thinkers down through the centuries who have wrestled and tussled with the Bible and each other, trying to find the words, ideas, and articulations of our deepest Christian experiences. Even those with whom I disagree most, have taught me things I needed to know and forced me to own my own convictions, to question lazily unexamined assumptions which are actually prejudices, and to recognise that though they may get the words and ideas wrong,  with most of them their love for God, faith in Christ and life in the Spirit are no less real than mine. 

I mention it secondly because those old fashioned labels, and their contemporary counterparts (open theist; new perspectivist; emergents; these the least exotic) are mere slogans of convenience, polemical put downs, which say nothing about the relationship to God in Christ of those who allegedly hold such 'unsound' views. Yes I read and admire Moltmann's struggles to speak of God, Jesus, suffering, atonement and hope; he doesn't always get it right but not for want of trying. I also read and admire Calvin who struggles to speak of God, Jesus, suffering, atonement and hope; and Barth, and Forsyth and Fiddes, and Von Balthasar, and Wesley, Julian of Norwich and Jonathan Edwards, not forgetting Athanasius and Torrance, Pinnock and MacCormack, Puritans and Cappadocians, Bonhoeffer and Spurgeon, – all names of people who have thought long and deeply. It's a random list of people in whose company I have learned more about the love of God, and learned to love God more.

I remember being annoyed with Norman – wee pelagian arminian indeed! But I guess he couldn't foresee that I might become a Moltmannian, Balthasarian, Cappadocian, Barthian, full-Wesleyan semi-Calvinist with a Julian-Edwardsian view of creation and a Bonhoefferian take on discipleship – and that's just for starters, and for fun! Theological labels assume consistency, a known content, an ability to reduce the dynamic living relationship of a Christian to God, to the level of their best ideas and words – but words, at best, when speaking of the grandeur and splendour of God, are at best, unprofitable servants.

I wish I had known the words of the Calvinist Puritan Thomas Goodwin (another from whom I've learned loadsa stuff) all those years ago:

"As for my part, this I say, and I say it with much integrity, I never yet took up party religion in the lump. For I have found by a long trial of such matters that there is some truth on all sides. I have found Gospel holiness where you would little think it to be, and so likewise truth. And I have learned this principle, which I hope I shall never lay down till I am swallowed up of immortality, and that is, to acknowledge every truth and every goodness wherever I find it." 

I love that paragraph. 

First photo is Bennachie in winter – bleak, beautiful, a reminder we aren't the biggest deal around.

Second one is King's College open crown – a reminder we've a lot to learn!

This is one of my favourite poems, but from a poet I don't much get on with. I've got a wee soft leather bound Victorian book called Devotional Poets of the 17th Century, and Herrick gets most pages ahead of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw and Traherne. Nowadays I guess 17th Century devotional poetry should be labelled with the nutritional traffic light system. Too sentimental sweet like ladles of condensed milk, too many degree of difficulty semantic gymnastics, too spiritually voyeuristic of others and narcissistic of the inner self with an unhealthy fascination with personal spiritual performance….and so on. 

Certainly, compared with modern religious poetry, the seventeenth century spoke to a a different world, one that seems a solar system or two distant from where we all live now. The leading devotional poets of the 17th Century were coming to terms with civil war and new approaches to military tactics, weaponry and political possibilities beyond absolute monarchy and bloody conflict. It's the difference between the newly effective musket volley, and the laser guided bomb and uranium enriched shell and flechette and cluster bombs. Forget globalisation, they were only discovering the extent of the world, its place in our own solar system post Copernicus, and centuries ahead the importance of international co-operation in economics, collaboration of resources and knowledge in science, technological exploitation of the earth, and capacities for communication that were simply unimaginable. Think Cromwell using social media to make the case against the King, or the international media reporting regicide and a generation later the Restoration.

And yet. Even Herrick, when he got it right, wrote about God in words that still make sense, at least theologically. That's why Herrick's poem on God's Boundless Mercy is such a favourite, because at their best, some of those old 17th C poems give richness to our praise, images to our worship, and a rootedness in the sacraments of creation which communicate the depths of God beyond words.  

Maybe it's living beside the North Sea, replenished up here by two rivers, but this poem works for me:

God's boundless mercy is, to sinful man,
Like to the ever-wealthy ocean:
Which though it sends forth thousand streams, 'tis ne'er
Known, or else seen, to be the emptier;
And though it takes all in, 'tis yet no more
Full, and fill'd full, than when full fill'd before.

One of my favourite walking or running paths takes me past the new Episcopal church in Westhill. An ultra modern, multi-purpose community building that now sits on the outskirts of the town, looking towards the distant hills of Clachnaben and Cairn O Mount.

At one point walking past I had one of those moments when random impressions and ideas, past thoughts and inner conversation, all come together and coalesce in an image. I took the camera this morning on my more causal take it easy walk with occasional bursts of slow jogging. So I took this  picture

The juxtaposition of pylon and cross, both made of steel, both based on the intersection of horizontal and vertical, and, in Christian theology both charged with power to transform and energise – these are some thoughts that coalesce in this image, at least as I saw it. "This the power, of the cross…." is one of the established and rightly more durable songs from the Townsend collection. It affirms in strong language and a powerful and singable tune, the Christian conviction that in the cross we see not the weakness but the power of God made perfect through weakness.

The violent imperial repression of ideas Rome feared, made the cross the chosen instrument of control by terror – when it comes to terrorism no one is better placed to terrorise than the powerful holders of weapons, power and ideology. Then as now. But the framing of the cross against the background of pylons suggests one or more reflections on green theology, the cost to the earth of our energy hunger, the ruining of creation by our manufacturing and consumptive obsessions. And yet. The renewal of creation lies at the centre of the Christian vision of the future; the earth groans awaiting its redemption, creation is about more than human beings, and redemption is about more, much more, than my wee precious unique and eternal soul!

Which is my main hesitation with one line of Townsend's brilliant hymn; I cannot sing "Oh to see my name, written in his wounds…For in your suffering I am free." Not because it isn't true, but because it isn't the most important truth about the cross. Should any of us who have begun to understand the scale and depth of the love of God ever ever be comfortable with the first person singular "I" as the centre of our understanding of the Gospel? Oh to see the wounds of my brothers and sisters in Northern Iraq….. Oh to see Gaza's wounds and Israel's wounds and the wounded earth, and "Oh to see the famished dehydrated children of so many nations…Oh to see their names, written in your wounds, for through your suffering they are free…"

Yes the cross is personal, because God has made the renewal of creation, the redemption of his purposes, the freeing of all creation, yes including me, personal. And yes I am invited to embrace that love, to engage that purpose, to surrender to that vision, to give in by giving myself away to this ridiculously extravagant and scandalous God whose Love dares to be crucified and defy the powers of empires that terrorise. "Death is crushed to death, life is mine to live, won through your selfless love…" He dies that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for Him who died for them and was raised again.

This the power of the cross! That photo makes the connection. Every time I run past this church, from the downward slope I see this image, power and love. In that one line Townsend's hymn, in seeking to make it personal, in my view steps over the line of allowing our personal experience of blessing to eclipse the scale of what took place on the cross. Oh to see their names, our names, all names, written in his wounds….This the power of the cross. That I think restores the scale and eteranl perspective of the Gospel.

Here's a couple of pictures of Westhill Episcopal Church

I've added another typelist on the sidebar, "Off the Beaten Track". This will list books outside my main interest areas, but which have been worth spending time reading, and thinking about. Once I've read each one I'll try to distill into 200 words what made it a worthwhile read. It's my age I'm sure, lending urgency to hours that increase in value year on year, so if a book I start doesn't grab me by the ankles it's just as likely to be kindly placed in the first charity bag that comes through the letter box.

Some of the best things I've read have been in books that found me, or tugged at my sleeve, or propositioned me at a weak moment, or grabbed me by the ankles on the first page. Gillian Clarke's At the Source, was first heard on Radio 4, and the Welsh National Poet's voice and the beauty of her descriptive prose got me clicking on amazon. Conversations with Chaim Potok, brought me into the company of a novelist I've read repeatedly, but who had remained elusive as a person – he is a fascinating conversationalist on his own novels, which takes a bit of doing. Often the writer isn't the best person to say why you should read their work. Michael Foley's The Age of Absurdity is an impressively wise and shrewd account of our culture's capacity to be blind to our own stupidity. Kathleen Norris wrote Dakota as an account of her own spirituality and gave it the subtitle A Spiritual Geography. This is a hard to pin down book – topography and spirituality, observations on climate and the flora and fauna of the Great Plains, her Benedictine predilections and her work as a poet, a wife and an erstwhile yet persistent Christian, – these are all explored against the landscape of the Midwest. Matthew Guerriri wrote The First Four Notes as a historical investigation into how the first four notes of Beethoven's 5th Symphony have captured the imagination and influenced its hearers in literature, history, politics and much else in human reflection and action. 

One of the best pieces of advice I was ever given was to make sure I read beyond my interests, my competences and my imagined areas of expertise. And I always have – that isn't a self-promoting assertion, more a self-deprecating comment of indebtedness. Because some of the most important thoughts I have thunk, some of the most interesting vistas opened in my mind, some of the more telling criticisms of my too easily arrived at certainties, have come from those "off the beaten track books". I start with Moving to Higher Ground. How Jazz Can Change Your Life, Wynton Marsalis – a book endorsed by the late and wonderful Maya Angelou.

Not sure how long this will run for; in my mother's phrase, used as a slow let-down alternative to a straight 'no', "we'll see"! The photo shows you some of the beauty discovered, the interest provoked, the previously unencountered viewpoints attained, and the different horizons opened up, when you walk off the beaten track and read something just for the Heaven of it.

"So how are you enjoying retirement?"  "What do you do with yourself these days?""Got any plans?"

These are tricky questions. Not because they are meant to be but because of the assumptions that shape them. At first I resisted the denominator "retired", because I have no intention of retiring just yet. But that sounds like incipient denial, I'm not that old….yet! But it isn't that. It's to do with an underlying vocational pull towards those so varied areas of life and those diversities of gifts and the always to be looked for opportunities which together with inner motives and accumulated experience make up my life past, my life present and life into whatever future lies within the purposes of God.

Now that last phrase is the important one; "within the purposes of God". What I do with myself these days isn't the straightforward question those who ask it (with kindness and interest) think that it is! What I do with myself is an even more interesting phrase if I simply insert a space – What I do with my self. Over the years I've tried to resist the assumption that what we do defines who we are. So on Facebook I am a former College Principal, but I'm also a former and present Baptist minister; a husband, a father, a friend, a brother. I'm a writer, a scholar, a preacher, a gardener, a reader – I do tapestry, take photos, cook the most amazing lasagne, rice puddings and Moroccan chicken. All of these I do with my self, and as I do them, the self that I am changes and grows.

What I have found as I've thought about all this during a two month sabbatical is that what every one of us has done in all these layers and episodes of life, has been and goes on being the raw material out of which, day by day, we are being shaped and formed into who we are becoming. That present continuous "becoming", should warn us against a fixed, static definition of who we are; we are more than what we have done, and our identity is a dynamic, growing but changing continuity held together by our choices, decisions, circumstances seen and unforeseen, and that nexus of relationships with all those folk who move in and out of our lives. 

Vocation is an important way of living our lives; it has for me a defining Christian urgency. I am called to be me, but a self committed to following Jesus faithfully, living under the rule of Christ. That's true whether I'm preaching or cooking, laying turf in my garden or taking a funeral, stitching and working a tapestry or accompanying people in their lives as they try to discern and live into the patterns and purposes of God. You don't retire from what is a chosen way of life, and whatever else Christian faith is, it is a Way, a way of life we have both chosen and to which we have been called.

So what am I doing with my self these days? Taking time to think, to let the last few years settle and begin to fit into a life lived self-consciously Godward, with more or less understanding of what that means. These words of C S Lewis have helped me to trust God's creative faithfulness, and to believe that it is the grace of God, often undetected at the time, that slowly or quickly, gently or fiercely, persistently and patiently, works away at the envisioned objet d'art that is each one of us :

"All that you are…every fold and crease of your individuality was devised from all eternity to fit God as a glove fits a hand. All that intimate particularity which you can hardly grasp yourself, much less communicate to your fellow creatures, is no mystery to Him. He made those ins and outs that he might fill them. Then he gave you a soul so curious a life because it is a key designed to unlock that door, of all the myriad doors in Him."

The photo is of one of our roses,another unique presence, called and created to be beautiful for a while……