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Theological Reflection on a Frog.

We have a new addition to our family, defined as the various denizens who live in and around our house. In the wee pond at the foot fo the garden we now have a resident frog. Andrew who is the acquaculture expert around here dug a small 18 inch hole, planted it with water plants and marsh plants and created a mini-ecosystem which our frog clearly approves.

My favourite nature poet, John Clare, had a sensitive and compassionate understanding of creaturely life. His poetry reveals his intimate knowledge and alert experience of nature around him. His bird poems are amongst the best in our language. His poem Summer Evening, which I've quoted below, shows just how observant, sympathetic and "green" Clare was, a couple of centuries before any of us caught up with his way of looking at the world around us. More than most he saw human activity as despoiling, threatening and wasteful of nature's gifts, and understood human behaviour to be more about replenishing the earth rather than dominating it. Sure he recognised that nature has its cruelties and necessities; but these are natural in a way that human activity is not; manufacturing on an industrial scale, a free for all for the earth's resources of land, minerals, forests and wood, fossil fuels, tolerance of polluted oceans, and addiction to processes that accelerate climate change. Human greed is one of the original sins and is the primary ingredient in the setting agent that enables us to build structural sins into the machinery and plant of the human economy. The last two lines of Clare's poem capture exactly the inward groan of a looted creation awaiting its redemption.

John Clare didn't live to see the full impact of the Industrial Revolution. But for his illness he might have been a David Attenborough though, or at least a presenter on Countryfile. In any case, he would have smiled and nodded appreciatively at Andrew's handiwork, and the provision of a purpose built home for our frog.

Summer Evening

The frog half fearful jumps across the path,
And little mouse that leaves its hole at eve
Nimbles with timid dread beneath the swath;
My rustling steps awhile their joys deceive,
Till past, and then the cricket sings more strong,
And grasshoppers in merry moods still wear
The short night weary with their fretting song.
Up from behind the molehill jumps the hare,
Cheat of his chosen bed, and from the bank
The yellowhammer flutters in short fears
From off its nest hid in the grasses rank,
And drops again when no more noise it hears.
Thus nature's human link and endless thrall,
Proud man, still seems the enemy of all.

John Clare

8 August 2013
“A non religious language…but liberating and redeeming”; Bonhoeffer’s Advice to the 21st Century Western Church

"The day will come …when people will once more be called to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed. It will be in a new language, perhaps quite non-religious language, but liberating and redeeming, like Jesus' language, so that people will be alarmed. and yet overcome by its power – the language of a new righteousness and truth, a language proclaiming that God makes peace with humankind and that God's kingdom is drawing near."

"The most important question for the future is how we are going to find a basis for living together with other people, what spiritual realities and rules we honour as the foundations for a meaningful Christian life."

These words were written by Bonhoeffer a year or so before Bonhoeffer was executed. They seem to me to be an important comment on the words of jesus, spoken a year or so before he was executed, "I have come that you might have life, and have life in all its fullness."

This identification with Jesus is spelt out further in another of Bonhoeffer's letters: "Our relationship to God is no 'religious' relationship to some highest, most powerful and best being imaginable – that is no genuine transcendence. Instead, our relationship to God is a new life in 'being there for others,' through participation in the being of Jesus."

"Liberating and redeeming like Jesus' language". If only Jesus' ambassadors could echo the tone and content of Jesus' language, words formed and gifted by grace to set free and make possible a new and renewed beginning. "The whole creation groans awaiting its redemption", and that was as clear to Bonhoeffer in his cell, when his life was forfeit, his family at risk, his nation embroiled in a fight to the death and its military responsible for mass death by blitz, Holocaust and the madness of power. His words were written and his thought shaped by concern for what the church would be, and need to be, in a post-war world.

As Clifford green comments, quoting Bonhoeffer further, "The overall emphasis is on service, not domination, on demonstrating by example what new life in Christ means, of speaking with 'moderation, authenticity, trust, faithfulness, steadfastness, patience, discipline, humility, modesty, contentment.'" The italics are mine, because these ten words provide a barcode for ecclesial speech, Christian witness, a discipleship that so shapes emotion, will, and thought, that what is articulated in words is recognisably, and startlingly reminiscent of Jesus.

They may be one of the vital clues to what disqualifies the church from the attention of a secular, post-modern culture. Speech that is self-excusing and self-defensive yet critical and judgemental of "the other", the world; on too many occasions words that are carefully chosen as if witness was a synonym for diplomacy; unchristian attitudes of moral superiority, betraying a profound unawareness that is itself sin at its most toxic; and pervasive in the language and apologetics of the church, a fear and anxiety of the world of culture and technology, an ambivalence about human progress and human crisis; and most tragic of all, the gradual disappearance over time of Jesus Christ as the living centre of the church and the dynamic source of Christian life, thought and action.

In a prison cell, facing his own death, looking to a future he would not see, Boinhoeffer wrote letters to his friend containing seeds and seedlings of some of the most crucial ideas required for the Church facing a world where assumptions of religious commitment could no longer hold, and in which the status quo of religious institutions and their influence and power would disappear. In both senses his words were prophetic – speaking into the future, and speaking necessary truth inspired by the Spirit of God.

Amongst the miracles of providence, was the relationship established between Bonhoeffer and Corporal Knobloch, a member of the guard detail in Tegel Interrogation Prison. But for Corporal Knobloch, the letters to Eberhard Bethge would not have survived, may not even have been written. By such coincidences of providence, the gates of Hell shall not prevail…..

7 August 2013
Hiroshima, August 6, 1945 ; And a Mother and Children’s prayers

When all the arguments are stated and heard, whether military, strategic, historic, or even moral, I am much more persuaded by the theological solemnity of the late George Macleod's contention that atomic warfare is a blasphemous abuse of God's creation and of nature's energy.

The photo is of a mother and children praying for surviving victims 68 years on from the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The only nation on earth that has been attacked with nuclear weapons speaks and acts with a different authority when addressing the problem of nuclear weapons, human fallibility and our capacity as humans to self destruct. Such voices can never be on the side of deterrence; they are on the side of peace.

For myself, I too want to place my hands together, and love this world with all its brokenness and possibility, and hold a wounded creation before the loving Creator, and align my hope and trust with my faith in the God of resurrection whose gift is life, and whose light is not the blinding flash of nuclear death, but the brilliance of love magnified by the splendour of holiness, earthing its energy and power in our world in the stable, the cross and the empty tomb.

And my favourite prophet points to an alternative reality:

Come let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, that we may walk the
paths of the Most High. And we shall beat our swords into ploughshares
and our spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword
against nation – neither shall they learn war any more.
And none shall be afraid, for the mouth of the Lord of Hosts has spoken.

6 August 2013
“Dogma clarifies rather than obscures” biblical interpretation…

Now here's a no nonsense statement on intent from the publishers of a theological commentary series.

This series of biblical commentaries was born out of the conviction that dogma clarifies rather than obscures. The Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible advances upon the assumption that the Nicene tradition, in all its diversity and controversy, provides the proper basis for the interpretation of the Bible as Christian Scripture. God the Father Almighty, who sends his only begotten Son Son to die for us and for our salvation and who raises the crucified Son in the power of the Holy Spirit so that the baptized may be joined in one Body – faith in this God with this vocation of love for the world is the lens through which toi view the heterogeneity and particularity of the biblical texts. Doctrine, then, is not a moldering scrim of antique prejudice obscuring the meaning of the Bible. It is a crucial aspect of the divine pedagogy, a clarifying agent for our minds fogged by self deception, a challenge to our languid intellectual apathy that will too often rest in false truisms and the easy spiritual nostrums of the present age rather than search more deeply and widely for the dispersed keys of the many doors of Scripture.(Brazos Theological Commentary, Series Preface, Matthew, Stanley Hauwerwas, page 12).

I've only used the Brazos commentary on Matthew by Stanley Hauerwas. It was definitely Matthew through the lens of Hauerwas, and none the worse for that. The truth is the Hermeneia Commentary is Matthew through the lens of Luz. Every commentator brings their self to the text, and the text is explored, exegeted, expounded, explained so that every commentary is treasure in an earthen vessel.

Has anyone who reads this blog, and reads commentaries, used any of the other commentaries in this series with the magnificent Series Preface as quoted above?

5 August 2013
The Bible and the Error of Literal Mindedness: A J Heschel Again

I'm reading Abraham Heschel again – and also working through Divine Pathos and Human Being. The Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel by Michael Chester, a Methodist scholar whose post-grad work was done on Heschel. Time and again I find Heschel writing in the 40.s, 50's and 60's saying things that have powerful resonance and uncanny relevance to some of the challenges and cultural pressures facing people of faith today. As a Christian I have a profound love, respect and I hope some humility when I explore the faith and traditions which give Christian thought and experience much of its shape and historic rootedness. Heschel's conviction that faith is to be lived, practiced, evidenced by action performed in obedience, given heart and motivation by piety as reverence for the One whose ultimate claim upon human life is grounded in the ineffability, holiness and loving mercy of God.

The Bible (by which Heschel meant the books of the Hebrew Scriptures) is a profound, uniquely rich and authentic text out of which comes the voice of God calling to obedience, seeking response rather than explanation, and demanding transformed living as well as, and indeed as more important than, full understanding. Here are two brief paragraphs from Heschel which would be provocative starting points in a class on hermeneutics and sacred text.

The surest way of misunderstanding revelation is to take it literally, to imagine that God spoke to the prophet on a long distance telephone. Yet most of us succumb to such a fancy, forgetting that the cardinal sin in thinking about ultimate issues is literal mindedness. The error of literal mindedness is in assuming that things and words have only one meaning.

Man has often made a god out of dogma, a grav en image which he worshipped, to which he prayed. He would rather believe in dogmas that in God, serving them not for the sake of heaven but for the sake of creed, the diminutive of faith. Dogmas are the poor man's share in the divine.

Both quoted in Chester, page 58.

Heschel's reverence for Torah is not so much articulated in words and ideas; it glows throughout his writing, it imbues his words with passion and poetry, Torah represents the splendour and glory of God gifted in grace to human eyes, ears and hearts. He would have been moved deeply by this picture, and the story that goes with it here.

3 August 2013
A Day on the Moray Coast and a new word – “Desult”

Today was our 41st wedding anniversary, a statistic that can easily be appealed to should Sheila ever require evidence of a miracle for her canonisation. It was a sunny day all along the Moray coast, one of our favourite haunts so we spent the day there. Lunch was at the Whitehills Galley which you can find out about here Jumbo haddock in breadcrumbs for me and Monkfish Scampi for Sheila. This is an excellent place to eat, and worth booking beforehand – we were lucky and got the last table before the rush. Then a wander along the coastal path before having the dessert, which was a double scoop 99 from Portsoy Ice Cream Shop.

After that a visit to Fordyce, a hidden gem conservation village which has a peaceful slowness about it that we love. There is an old church yard where if it was nearer I'd happily spend an hour now and again. Some of the stones go back 300 and more years, and the older stones have the brief story of the life of the person comemorated.These two photos are from inside the ruined church tower.

The harbour at Whitehills has been in operation for centuries and is owned and run by the village. It's a lovely place to sit and desult – that is, sit and enjoy the sea, feel the breeze, and think and thank in a desultory way.

Up the back of the harbour is a ruined gable end with a window. I like this photo; it will be on my profile page above for a while.

2 August 2013
A Small Church and a Battered Bible; Theological Reflection in a Scottish Glen.

Along the single track road that leads to Forest of Birse you eventually come to the little Forest of Birse Church. This small chapel in the glen sits in a secluded fern covered field, behind and around it the hills which today were beginning to look purple with the early heather, encouraged by long sunny days. Inside is the size of a large living cum dining room, plainly decorated and with windows on only one side.

Behind the pulpit, lying on a chair was this old Pulpit Bible, which has seen better days. It would be easy to see it as a sign of days long past and never returning; to interpret its battered testimony as signaling the demise of the church and the Christian way of life; and my photo providing the kind of image to put on the cover of yet another book lamenting the loss of biblical literacy. A battered Bible, pages in disarray, torn and water stained, but still there, as if no one has the heart to remove it.

Looking at it yesterday, with what I can only call affection and admiration, I can well understand how such an object as a worn out copy of a sacred book should be treated with reverence, and perhaps buried with thanksgiving for all that it has given of truth and guidance to those who preached from it, and heard it, and tried to live it. The refusal of Jewish people to simply dispose of old scrolls of the Hebrew Bible at the recycling units, comes from a deep instinct for that which is holy, sacred, precious and indeed sacramental in significance. This old Bible as you see contains the comments of Matthew Henry and Thomas Scott; their multi-volume works were written as expositions which explained and applied each verse to the life situations of the reader. This pile of paper, torn, disarrayed, and 'disbound' as used book dealers would call it, is much, much more than a battered old relic.

Here for generations was the bread of life; here the lamp unto countless feet tramping up and down this glen; here the light to paths too easily missed; here the sharp two edged sword that pierced to the marrow and inspired love, drew forth praise, urged to repentance and changed ways, and comforted broken hearts. This old Bible should be placed in a prominent place, a glass case even, with a notice telling whoever comes into the church, what its life has been. We were numbers 6 and 7 who had signed the visitors' book yesterday by 3.00 pm – that's a lot of people for an isolated glen. But then, those who go looking for solitude, a long walk, Highland scenery, and communion with either God or God's creation, are likely to take time to go in and look at this simple sacred space, enriched with all its human stories of fellow travellers, and have a seat for a few minutes, and either speak to God, or listen for the quiet whisper that says "Be still, and know that I am God….."

Here are some other photos of the Church.

1 August 2013
Min Jin Kym, the Stradivarius, and Yes there is a God!

This interview has made my day, and will probably make my week. Sometimes our worst nightmares are real, and then end like this. Watch Min Jin Kym tell her story here

Cue for a track from Brahms!

31 July 2013
The Living Paul: What it Means to Confess Christ as Lord.

You know when you are reading an author who knows his (or her) stuff, and who writes with an authority that doesn't need to name drop in footnotes, or pile up reasons for the reasons that makes their argument cogent. They say as much in a paragraph as others do in pages; they cut through the tangle of unclear thinking, or cumulative referencing of alternative viewpoints, and give you the considered conclusions from that process.

Anthony Thiselton does that in his brief, rich, and satsifying book The Living Paul. Part of what makes Thiselton an academic treasure to many of us is the sheer range and scale and variety of his intellectual discipleship. His major works on Hermeneutics range from substantial, to massive to gargantuan. His dictionary of the philosophy of religion is a one man vade mecum on the subject. His magnum opus in New Testament studies is his commentary on I Corinthians, universally recognised as a defining contribution to the study of that letter for this generation; and then he publishes a briefer more accessible commentary on the same letter which isn't a summary, but a further fresh reconsideration of the letter. His latest work on The Holy Spirit; in Biblical Teaching, Through the Centuries and Today is moving along my reading shelf. His book on The Last Things can be compared with N T Wright's Surprised by Hope as a genuine wrestling with eschatology, Christian hope and biblical teaching, drawing out wide discussion on areas of Christian thinking and reflection that remain existentially urgent.

Amongst the shorter books on Paul I've valued are TR Glover's Paul of Tarsus (back in print), C K Barrett's volume in the Outstanding Christian Thinkers Series and N T Wright's Paul: Fresh Perspectives. These are books for orientation, revision, and a reasonably brief survey of Paul's life and thought. The easy expertise I mentioned at the start of the post is evident throughout Thiselton; Romans, Galatians and Philippians are each summarised in a page or two of distilled scholarship and narrative.

The following paragraph is characteristic:

"…two distinct aspects for part of what it means to confess Christ as Lord. The practical aspect, which gives the confession currency in daily life, may be called the personal, or 'existential' aspect. The aspect which underlines God's enthronement of Christ, however humans may responde, grounds the confession in reality, and may be called the 'reality' or ontological aspect. …If this is so, and it does seem to be the case, the confession cannot be a simple assent to a head-content, or to a right beliefe about Jesus Christ. It implies not less than this, but more. It involves trust, involvement, surrender, obedience, reverence, and grateful love."

The meaning, nature and reality of faith in Jesus Christ, and confession of Christ as Lord is reduced to its concentrate in that last sentence. This is a fine book, and a refreshing holiday read. Rembrandt's Paul gives every impression of being stuck, trying to think his way forward as he writes to maybe the Roman Christians about life in the Spirit, or the Galatians with whom he's furious, maybe the Corinthians whose problems multiply like rabbits in Spring. Either way, remember he doesn't have a keyboard with a delete or cut and paste facility, and papyrus is expensive. So he thinks before he writes – always a good rule 🙂

30 July 2013
When Twitter is Used to Threaten and Vilify – and what that has to do with Jane Austen and a £10 note

My relationship with social media is fairly simple. Apart from this blog I don't do Facebook or Twitter. There are various reasons; I understand the positives and how social media can enrich lives, share information, create and stimulate discussion, use social, psychological and moral leverage through numbers. I also understand the negatives, obsession with trivia, inflated self-importance that others actually care what we think, do, feel, buy, or say, the diversion of time, energy, attentiveness in keeping the audience current with the detail and progress of our inner climate and weather of our circumstances. Then there is the abuse of Twitter to abuse others, and with very little control over content, or sanction for such abuse.

I with millions of others celebrate the announcement of the new £10 note commemorating unarguably one of the greatest writers in English Literature, Jane Austen. The news that Caroline Criado-Perez, who campaigned for a woman's image on the next generation of banknotes, has been subjected to sexist abuse and threats of rape raise for me not so much the social usefulness of Twitter, but its social menace as long as it remains unpoliced, unregulated and open to such criminal tactics without fear of sanction. This comes at the end of a week of wider controversy about filters and controls on access and content on the Internet. Caroline Criado-Perez campaigned, responsibly, imaginatively and in my view rightly for women to be depicted on our currency on the same basis as men, significance for our culture, contribution to our history, and representation of figures of national and international importance. Jane Austen is an obvious, popular and even a brilliant choice.

The idea that a woman can be abused and threatened by such violent and obscene language, anonymously and with impunity, is first a violation of her person, and also a real threat to wider society. Not only so; she campaigned within a democratic culture, enjoying the privileges and obligations of freedom of expression, responsible discussion, informed debate and shared agreement. When a person is intimidated, threatened, made the focus of co-ordinated hate and violent expression by hidden haters of women then two essential principles of a healthy society are broken. Respect for persons consists in the recognition and respect for the other, and a willingness to live in humane co-operation for the welfare of the community, the common good. Respect for individual freedom enables a community to live in creative accommodation through discussion, democratic decision-making and the compromises necessary to reflect the diversity and interests of the community.

The abuse of Twitter violates both respect for the individual, and the balance of individual freedom with community obligation – rights always bring obligations. The problem is the current failure of law and regulation to not only to control the content of Twitter (which is not what I am asking), but to identify and bring to account those who use it as a weapon against others (which I am asking). The demand is now overwhelming for legislation to enable the prosecution of criminal uses of Twitter (and personal threat of rape is in anyone's definition criminal). During the London riots those fomenting riot on Facebook were traced and prosecuted; using Twitter to threaten rape is surely just as socially corrosive and criminally significant?

Twitter has issued reassuring statements – but they lack legislative authority and are couched in obvious self-interest. Whatever decisions are now made, it is outrageous that a woman, any woman, should be threatened with rape by a man, any man. No circumstances justify that; and no democratic Government can ignore the need to change the rules of what is not a game, but a socially embedded reality. Even as this is being written, Twitter is seeking to reassure two women MPs that it will do all in its power to ensure that Twitter complies with the Protection from Harassment Act.

As a Christian I would want to say more – about the nature of communication, the power of communication technology to change and shape that most human of qualities, communication through words, body language and presence; about the virtues of integrity, compassion, wisdom, humour, love and friendship; and about what it means to be made in the image of God and therefore made as essentially communicative and social beings. But for now, I simply want to record my own sense of outrage, and my demand for more than words from Twitter. Interestingly, and ironically, Twitter users have started a campaign against those who sent the scurrilous messages – maybe they can force Twitter to introduce controls.

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28 July 2013