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Blinking Blinkered Hermeneutics – OR – Seeing in the Text What We Want to See, and Turning a Blind Eye to What We Need to See

I love biblical commentaries. I don't mean only that I like, value, use, buy, read, browse, collect commentaries. I mean all of these and added into it a glad amazement at the inexhaustibility of the biblical texts. A definition of a good commentary is hard to formulate – so much depends on the kind of reader and the kind of commentary. So, is Gary Smith's commentary a good one?

Well according to one Amazon reviewer called Shandy, mostly yes but with a serious caveat. I leave you to read the whole review and tell me what you think of the caveat.

Another excellent commentary from the NIV application series. Good exposition of what the prophecies meant to those who first heard them in Bible times. Original ideas for how the messages of the ancient prophets help us in our lives today.
Gary Smith presents some challenges to the Bible believer, such as his powerful argument of the importance of the "Lament" in the life of the Christian.
My only criticism of the book would be that Smith urges Christians to become political activists on behalf of the poor and oppressed. This seems to go against Christ's example of refusing to become involved politically (e.g. refusing to be made king, or become involved in protests against heavy taxes) as his mission was first and foremost to preach the good news about God's coming kingdom on earth, where oppression will be destroyed once and for all.
With our world being ravaged by earhquakes, tsunamis, wars, famines and terrorism, Micah's prediction of a righteous king from Bethlehem – Jesus Christ – ruling over a worldwide kingdom of peace is as relevant now as it ever was.

This was accessed here

Dear Readers, on the strength of Shandy's caveat, I will buy Smith's commentary and soak up every instance of being urged to become politcally activist in the pursuit of justice and righteousness and mercy.

Incidentally what on earth did Micah mean by "He has told you O people what is good; and what does the Lord require of you? But to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." How do you act justly in an unjust society? How do you love mercy in a politcally ruthless society?By amongst other things, being politcially activist, that is, acting in ways that arte for the common good, and out of a commitment to Jesus, who was crucified for reasons of political expediency and religious convenience.

3 June 2014
Eucharistic Grace is Always Surrounding Us…….

I've spent a while filleting back issues of The Tablet, passed on to me by my friend Derek. The Tablet is one of the main Journals of contemporary Catholicism in which news, opinion, cultural comment, theological and ethical issues and much more are explored from a faithful but critical Catholic persepctive. One of the regulars is Father Daniel O'Leary whose columns contain some of the best spiritual writing around on the graced gift that is life in a God-loved world. In the 24th August 2013 issue (I told you they were back issues!!!), he wrote about the Eucharist as the feast of the love of God.

Quoting St Symeon the New Theologian he then moved on to celebrate the Eucharist as a deeply transformative re-reception of the embodied grace of God in the sacrament of bread and wine. At the miracle of communion:

…. everything that is hurt, everything

that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,

maimed, ugly, irreparably

damaged, is in him transformed

and recognised as whole, as lovely,

and radiant in his light

he awakens as the beloved

in every last part of our body.

O'Leary goes on: "These infinitely intimate experiences of our sacred senses …purify and confirm our graced potential, for recognising God's bread in every bread, God's incarnate body in every human body, God's own need in every need. And we do not just receive the holy bread….we become it.

In becoming it we are gifted with our true identity. Reputations, titles, possessions, power and prestige do not determine our identity. They die when we die. Who we are before ourselves and our God is who forever we are. And we become the blessed bread and wine not just for ourselves, as Pope Francis preached recently, we become it to light the way for others.

That is one of the most penetrating and generous expositions of the Eucharist I've read in a long while. Leaving aside the theological pragmatism many others indulge in trying to reduce the miracle to the spiritual technology of God's workings, what Daniel O'Leary offers here is a glad receiving, and faithful living into our true identity as the Body of Christ, a regular recovery and rediscovery of our graced potential, a thankful taking of the bread for which we hunger and thirst, as we hunger and thirst for righteousness, for justice and and for peace in a reconciled world.

Father O'Leary goes on:

It is in the ordinariness, accessibility and blessing of bread that this ravishing love incarnate is experienced and celebrated. And it is the sacramentality of the celebration that reveals a most comforting truth; in all our daily efforts to be human and loving, eucharistic grace is always surrounding us, enfolding us, empowering and consecrating us.

Like R S Thomas at the end of his poem, 'The Moor', I read this and then

I walked on

Simple and poor, while the air crumbled

And broke on me generously as bread.

1 June 2014
A Theology of Marking Essays in a Theological College…………….

I finished the last batch of marking in College yesterday. The process of grading, marking and feeding back on student work is an intriguing mix of discipline, yes at times tedium, enjoyment and reflection on what theological education achieves in the process of forming and transforming people.

Driving home in the car with Emmy Lou Harris singing sadly, then with Dave Crowder blasting out his Happiness Mass in C Major, I had time to think about the formative impact on a teacher of twelve years reading the work of our students.

Theological education is one of the most important foundations for Christian mission today. I am not going to argue that; I take it as self-evident for followers of Jesus who dare to take up the double invitation 'take my yoke upon you and learn of me….take up your cross and follow me.

But one overwhelming argument is the evidence Semester after Semester, of students growing in their faith, beginning to move out of constrained comfort zones into the risky place that is thoughtful discipleship, and engaging with adventurous thinking about a faith that is never safe and sound, but :

celebrates God incarnate in Jesus,

argues, because life depends on it, for the foolishness of the cross,

lives always towards newness and hope, because that's what resurrection people do

comes alive and learns to serve within the orbit of an eternal community of Triune Love

studies and wrestles with Scripture as if their lives depended on it, which it does

learn to love the Church again because it is the Body of Christ and they are part of it

begin to discover, and learn to accept, who they are, God's gift to the church today

and in all of this, to read, pray, think and follow faithfully after Jesus.

So when an essay on Christology and Ecclesiology, or a sermon in Creative Homiletics, or an Exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount, or a Journal of Theological Reflection on a church placement, or a review of a chapter on the significance of Nicaea for a wee local Scottish Baptist church in the 21st Century – when any of these 'assignments' comes on to the desk for marking and grading, they are sacraments of learning, they are formative spiritual exercises, they are attempts at loving God with mind and heart, they are snapshots of a soul growing and a spirit spreading its wings towards a bigger sky.

So yes. There is the tedium of overload, the deadline for marks to be submitted, the pressure of marking; before that, for the student, the hard graft of reading and researching, of finding the right books and articles, of deadlines looming and 1000 words to go. But theological education is about something much more enduring and transforming than ticking the assignment boxes.

Theological Education is a commitment to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength so that, in service to God in Christ, we can learn to love our neighbours as ourselves, live as peacemakers, be ambassadors for Christ and ministers of reconciliation. And in all that commitment to develop wisdom and discernment, to open ourselves up to God's wide and wonderful world with the confidence of those who know enough to know they'll never know enough; but to live as those who take what they know, what they deeply know, of the grace and truth of Christ, and live it out so that once again in the Christian community, the Body of Christ, the Word becomes flesh and dwells, tabernacles, makes its home in this God-loved world. A world forever changed by Love incarnate, crucified and resurrected in Jesus, the One in whom God was pleased to dwell, and to unite all things to Himself, making peace by the blood of the cross.

All of that underlies an academic assignment in a theological College which is committed, students and staff, to personal formation for the ministry of Christ and His Body the Church. "Take my yoke upon you and learn of me…take up your cross daily, and follow me…you are the Body of Christ."

30 May 2014
An Evening with N T Wright on Paul and the Faithfulness of God

Yesterday was an N T Wright day here in Aberdeen. The Launch event for the Aberdeen University Centre for Ministry Studies included an evening lecture by Wright on his recent 2 volume study of Paul and the Faithfulness of God. It was a virtuoso performance by a scholar whose grasp of the height depth, length and breadth of Paul's Gospel was shared, with passion and Christian seriousness in full flow, with a full house of all kinds of people; and it was earthed in the pastoral implications and resources of Paul's theology in the service of Jesus the messiah and the church as the Body of Christ. That by way of acknowledging the contribution of Wright as NT scholar, Bishop, and Christian to the wider church. Post grads, theological educators, ministers and priests, a wide range of church people in none of the aforementioned groups, and an audience whose average age was impresssively low, and whose attention was held for over an hour.

Is Wright right or wrong is one of those clever bytes that wear thin after the first time! Of course he is right and of course there is room for disagreement, debate, alternative interpretation; and of course he has an agenda, who hasn't. What was obvious was his control of the NT text, his deep reading of Paul and his immersion in the history of the times of Jesus and Paul. Equally evident was his insistence that context and particularity are part of the givenness of revelation in the incarnation, ministry, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Messiah, and the rootedness of the narrative of God and the people of God in the election of Abraham and Israel fulfilled in Jesus.

I'm reading Charles Marsh's new biography of Bonhoeffer. One of the real strengths of this book is the clear account of Bonhoeffer and his early collision course with National Socialism over the question of the Jews, and particularly the Aryan paragraph adopted widely in the German Church. So last night Wright's insistence that to decontextualise and de-historicise the New Testament makes the Jewishness of Jesus and Paul dispensable, is in my view a crucial and ethically required element of responsible hermeneutics. In Nazi Germany that historical move of de-historcising and decontextualising opened the door to a distorted Christianity characterised by a legitimated anti-Jewishness; helping lay the ideological rail track that would eventually lead to Auschwitz; and creating an Aryan Jesus abstracted from his own Jewishness and turned into a reason for the lethal hatred of Jews. Evil has its own lethal ironies.

The evening ended with the ususal reception, book signing and conversation. I took along my early copy of The Climax of the Covenant, in which Wright's essay on Philippians 2 was published (the reason I bought the book in 1991), and now have the imprimatur and greeting of the author.

A good night, one when it was fun to sit at the feet of a Gamaliel and learn how much I don't know, and feel again the importance of attentiveness to the centre of our faith, Jesus Christ, witnessed to in Scripture, and living in the new community, the Body of Christ.

28 May 2014
Abraham Joshua Heschel: Mercy, purpose and redemptive intent.

Now here's another reason why Abraham Joshua Heschel is one of my most trusted spiritual guides. He preserves and affirms the Godness of God. Long before we fell for what Bill Placher called 'the domestication of transcendence', Heschel was insisting that God is not reducible to human categories of control and usefulness. Those who want a God who is manageable and amenable to our wants, likes, dislikes and life plans had better look elsewhere than the God of the Bible, who refuses to be the default option of the self-interested ego, religious or secular, sincere or selfish, assertive or fearful.

"God is of no importance unless He is of supreme importance. It is hard to define religion, it is hard to place its wealth of meaning into the frame of a single sentence. But surely one thing may be said negatively: religion is not expediency.

If all our actions are guided by one consideration, how best to serve our personal interests, it is not God whom we serve, but the self. True, the self has its legitimate claims and interests; the persistent denial of the self, the defiance of one's own desire for happiness is not what God demands.

But to remember that the love of God is for all men [and women], for all creatures; to remember His love and His claim to love in making a decision- this is the way He wants us to live. To worship God is to forget the self. It is in such instants of worship that humanity acts as a symbol of Him."

That single paragraph, broken into three thought sized bytes, contains the substance of Heschel's philosophy of religion, which itself is one of the more demanding intellectual achievements of mid 20th century religious thought. What I get from Heschel is thought distilled to the essence of what we most want to say about the God whose love pervades the universe, carrying with it mercy, purpose and redemptive intent.

26 May 2014
Jonah and the Incredible Sulk

This wee book on Jonah cost me £2.50 in 1977. I bought it because I was speaking at a Conference in Kilcreggan on mission. Back then Missiology was an up and coming area of major theological attention and grew into an essential discipline for research, reflection and forward looking ecclesial praxis. I hadn't long finished reading through Let the Earth Hear His Voice, a massive document produced at the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, 1975. Three years later J Verkuyl's Introduction to Contemporary Missiology appeared as an early introduction to a more serious and structured approach to missiology as a serious doctrinal imperative in its own right, and an area of study requiring urgency, imagination and courage to challenge the more superficial or outdated theories and practices of evangelism and missionary activity.

Back to Jonah. I had just spent £6.25 on Leslie Allen's commentary on Joel, Obadiah, Jonah and Micah, and was fascinated by Jonah as a missionary who wanted to give evangelism a body swerve, whose reluctance to preach mercy was ruthlessly obstinate, and whose entire body language was an enacted "No" of defiance, poorly disguised as justified protest at the scandalous softness of God!

So when I read Fretheim's theological commentary (by the way the current very fruitful attention to theological exegesis is not as recent or as innovative as is often claimed in publishers' blurb – Fretheim et al were doing it decades ago) I was intrigued by the playfulness and literary enjoyment of a commentator who understood irony and the subversive persuasiveness of an anti-hero. All the way through the book Jonah is a missiological liability. He doesn't want to preach repentance and mercy; he says yes but walks in the opposite direction; he prays a Psalm of repentance that reads like pious obedience but is more a wheedling negotiation with God; then when he does preach, his words are unadulterated pessimism; and his response to the Ninevites repentance is anger, resentment and a suicidal sulk.

The story of Jonah is a brilliant exposition of obedience through gritted teeth, a servant of God who thinks he can manage the universe better than the Creator. He sits beneath his gourd plant, hoping against hope that the Ninevites will be offered no hope, no mercy, no future. He is angry with God because God is slow to anger; he is critical of God because mercy is the best outcome of judgement; his sense of proportion is so skewed that he is moved by the tragedy of a withered gourd tree, and unmoved by the thought of annihilation on an urban scale. And the book ends in one of the best jokes in the entire canon – leave aside the 120,000 people, what about all the animals. Weigh it up Jonah – one gourd bush or an entire city. Where does the burden of mercy rightly fall?

Here is one of Fretheim's best comments, a comparison of Elijah and Jonah: "And Elijah asked that he might die, saying, 'It is enough. Now O lord take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers.'" The difference between Jon ah and Elijah is striking. Elijah was in despair over his failure to turn the hearts of the idolatrous people of Israel. Jonah was in despair over his success…Jonah has become angry because God has refused to pour out his anger. Jonah will be angry if God will not be."(p. 122)

No wonder God asks the incredulous question, "Are you right to be angry". In the 21st Century world where religious anger is often clothed in lethal violence, or simmers into a resentment of 'the other', whoever 'they' are, Jonah comes as an ironic subversion of all devotion to God that uses God's judgement as an excuse for our hatreds, justification of our prejudices and confirmation of our presupposed rightness. Because however right we think we are, there is always the danger that we feel so right that rather than accept the reality of God's eternal love and mercy, we remake God in the image of our own prejudices and begin instructing God in the dynamics of anger, punishment and judgement.

"God was in Christ breconciling the world to himself, not counting their tresspasses against them…." Go and do likewise! The Gospel remains subversive, generous, outrageous, scandalous, unbelievably merciful, incredibly forgiving, and the God made known in Jesus remains the God who throws extravagant parties for every sinner who repents, and who even comes looking for the Jonah-like elder brother, out there sulking because God has no favourites.

25 May 2014
Just Who Do We Think We Are?

I want to think more about the theology of the quotation below.

"We are not self made selves:

our identity is not determined solely by others.

Human life is Theonomous –

we are from God, toward God, for God.

Each human person is destined for transformation by the glory of God,

as seen in the Transfiguration of Christ,

the foreshadowing of Love given on the Cross

and Love bonding with its Source in the Resurrection."

Michael Downey, Altogether Gift. A Trinitarian Spirituality, page 136

On first reading it seemed to me to be an important corrective to the creeping devaluation of our human ordinariness, the inner blame we sometimes feel for our felt mediocrity, and the shoulder shrugging dismissiveness we can practice towards ourselves and our potential to be what God calls us to be as children made in the image of God.

In the meantime, the words point us away from self-critique towards the One whose judgments have more mercy and grace than our own.

But I want to think about it a bit more………….

The photo is of gorse, on the cliff tops at St Cyrus, taken on Good Friday.

22 May 2014
Book Burning, Political Correctness, and responsible Freedom of Speech

"Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them…

We should be wary therefore what precaution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed…whereof the execoution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at… the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life.

John Milton, "A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicenced Printing". Quoted in The Joy of Books, Eric Burns, page 63.

Burns goes on to show that context is everything, and later in life, in the Areopagitica Milton made numerous excpetions to this passionate opposition to censorship, amongst other exceptions being obscenity, libel and atheism – these should have no place in print and further, Milton argued "no book be printed unless the printer's and the author's name or at least the printer's be registered. Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libelous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectual remedy that man's prevention can use."

Burns sardonic comment isn't unworthy of Milton's own reasoned sarcasm: "It is as if Milton had written a stirring defence of pacifism, and then gone on to explain that war is justified on special occasions, say if your country wants more land or more gold or better-looking women or better bred animals or it's a day of the week ending in "y"!"

So was Milton for or against censorship. Yes, and no. Sometimes. Depends on who is doing the censorship. But context is everything. The idea of freedom has to imply the freedom of ideas. But can that ever mean carte blanche for ideas, printed or spoken or online? Amongst the finest writing of the previous Chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, is his book, The Dignity of Difference. There and in a number of other books he argues not for a multicultural smorgasbord, but for a community of communities, respectful of difference, affirming human dignity, upholding of human rights, and much else that is rooted in the wisdom and faithfulness of his own religious tradition of Judaism.

Perhaps censorship of ideas is necessary for social stability as Milton argues, or intellectual homicide leading to oppression as Milton also argues. But in the use of words, written, spoken, online or digital, the criteria of respect for difference, affirmation of human dignity, the human right to ffreedom, and that controlled only by the human rights of all others to that same freedom, perhaps these are amongst the principles that at least enable us to evaluate, and yes to judge, the validity, viability and virtue of written, spoken and online discourse. This I think is very, very different, from an overscrupulous political correctness which applies the hermeneutic of suspicion with at times a wooden lack of moral insight. The polis is the city, the political is that which is about the welfare of the city. Politcal correctness is best served by political responsibility, political ethical principle, political imagination, political respect for persons; because in the end politics is for and about people. Language, written and spoken, is a humane and humanising gift essential for the health of the polis, the people, ourselves, others.

Lord Reith, that least politically correct broadcasting pioneer, nevertheless had these words engraved outside Broadcasting House.

Whatsoever things are true,

whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just,

whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely,

whatsoever things are of good report;

if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise,

think on these things.

These granite engraved words speak of the emotional, moral and intellectual biosphere out of which the best of human communication comes, best because it fosters community, creates space for communities of difference, and makes possible, across all the diversities of human culture, that deeper communion of those made in the image of God.

21 May 2014
Confessions of a Bibliophile…….

I'm now well into the transition stage of finishing my time as Principal then Lecturer within the Scottish Baptist College. The time is right and good to move into the next stage of the 'journey called ministry'.

As those who know me will expect, my metaphor for a disrupted life is an all over the place library! And I'm now in the process of remarrying the two halves of my library which for the past twelve years have been separated between home study and College study. Hence Graeme's recent comment about me reducing my library, and his not unreasonbable scpeticism that such a reduction may in the end be more cosmetic than surgical. Not entirely though. My aim is to get back to what has always been a principle of house management – that my books don't overflow my study into other areas of our home.

So I spent a satisfying morning at John Lewis ordering two cracking new bookcases to match the existing ones, and paid for with a gift previously given from the friends of the College. Seems a good deal – love of learning took me to the College, love of learning will continue – lifelong learning as a vocational imperative is also a quite persuasive argument for having books around.

Aye, but how many Jim? How many lifetimes to read this lot? And who is going to make sure they're dusted and looked after, eh? And what about libraries, are there not enough books in the Uni library and a lot cheaper? Yes I hear all that – and I now have to think longer before buying more.

As I did when I bought the C S Lewis Trilogy, in hardback, for £3 last week – must have pondered, considered and swithered for at least 5 seconds……….

20 May 2014
The Cosmic Trilogy of C S Lewis

Yesterday I bought three books. I know. I'm trying to reduce my library. But in a charity shop these three volumes of the C S Lewis Cosmic Trilogy were on sale for £1 per volume. They are in very good condition, published by Bodley Head, Hardcover, 1976, and dustcovers clean and unclipped. I first read the Cosmic Trilogy in the 1970's in the first paperbacks, now long gone as brown, cracked and done. I reckoned I could find three inches of shelf space, and will read them again over the summer.

C S Lewis is an acquired taste, and also a taste that can be lost. I can't read some of his stuff now. Maybe because some of his writing is now seriously dated, and much of it has been gathered into massive volumes of letters, essays and miscellania that are really for CSL enthusiasts rather than interested readers. But the good stuff is still very good. The Chronicles of Narnia remain an alternative world for all ages; Surprised by Joy is an enduring classic of religious discovery; Reflections on the Psalms say as much about Lewis as the Psalms; The Four Loves is a mixture of philosophy, pscychology, lierary criticism, Christian reflection and a sometimes blinkered C S Lewis; Mere Christianity is unlikely to perauade postmodern minds instinctively sceptical of clever apologetics; Till We Have Faces is, for me at least, a beautiful story of human love, identity and divine longing; and so on. But I have and will hold on to each of these books, flawed as they are.

16 May 2014