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Look at the flowers of the field… not even Solomon in all his glory….if your Heavenly Father so clothes the flowers….how much more you!

Jesus at his most naive –

Lord grant us just enough naivete to help cancel our cynicism, and turn trepidation to trust.

"Death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered…" A whole biblical symphony of resolute hopefulness, risk-taking trust, imaginative thoughtfulness and not least redemptive peace-making surrounds those words with their own alternative-sounding reality. The love of God, of which we so often speak in terms that are glib, even unthinking, or exclusive, so often lacks the notes of holiness, mercy, justice and judgement. Divine love wins by sacrifice, overcomes by surrender, redeems by self-giving, but in the end is a love that is free and confers freedom, that is powerful but not overpowering, and that is holy and reaches out to hallow and sanctify all that falls short of the glory of God.

All of this was in mind when I wrote yesterday of Stuart Townend's song and the way his words capture huge vistas of biblical vision and Gospel hope. I've just finished a book of essays on the love of God, Nothing Greater, Nothing Better. Theological Essays on the Love of God. The subtitle is accurate, the main title sounds like a bad line from a praise song, but the essays with only one or two exceptions are telling theological, at times pastoral or dogmatic, reflections on Divine love.I am entirely partial, but the essay that is standout for me is by my Doktovater David Fergusson, entitled, "Will the Love of God Finally Triumph".

Here in a short essay is an articulated theology of God's love that recognises the nature of love as that which confers freedom because love's essence is relational freedom in which lover and beloved give and respond in grateful commitment and chosen joy. Compelled love is oppression; manipulative love is destructive; love cannot be deterministic and remain love. One of the greatest books ever on the love of God (I seldom use such exaggerated superlatives) is W H Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense. Its sub-title, The Response of Being to the Love of God. That book has provided me with a generous but honest vocabulary about love – precarious, out-going and out-giving, passionate, investment, self-donation, no guaranteed outcome, waiting; and Vanstone gathered much of that conceptuality into one of the finest hymns on the love of God that I know, Morning Glory, Starlit Sky.

Back to Fergusson – I detect in Fergusson's critique of Barth's universalist tendency that same passionate acknowledgement that the love of God is not sentimental surrender to wishful thinking, nor is God's love a trawler net that hauls all human beings into the kingdom choiceless, and regardless of who and what in the end they choose to be and do with the gift of life. The voice of God is consistent with the love of God, 'I have set before you life and death, therefore choose life.'Love dies under coercion, and love lives always with the possibility of rejection – the Divine love defines love and though the love of God is unending, there will always be the possibility and reality of those whose choice is rejection, a final self-determining no.

A good example of David Fergusson's theological instincts is when he puts in their place, those wistful non-universalists who desperately wish universalism was true but regrettably cannot make it so:

Such remarks are puzzling. Are we saying that  God's final scheme is undesirable? Are we even suggesting that our own moral preferences are somehow better than God's? Can we claim to be evangelical if we hold that it would be good for universalism while also lamenting wistfully that this is not what God has on offer? There is a good dominical response to this: "If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your
children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to
those who ask him!" Matt. 7:11

All of which brings me back to Stuart Townend's See What a Morning. What gives the hymn its theological, pastoral and liturgical power is the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus in the way Christians see the world. Love crucified is risen; love survives the violent attempts at its extinction; life says no to death; finality does not rest with despair but with hope; against the closing down of all possibilities, the love of God holds open possibilities infinite and eternal; and love remains love, the free offer of gift and the invitation to response in that same freedom.

"To know the love of God that is beyond knowledge", indeed the entire doxological sections of Paul's Ephesians, is one of the great theological limiters on our intellectual hubris – even what we know is partial, finite, seeing through a glass darkly. We lack words and concepts, ideas and arguments; our imagination and vision and mental stretch and emotional range are inadequate to a different and vaster reality. 

A closing challenge from Fergusson: "If choices are made only when made in the full knowledge of God's love in Christ, it is in the church that the burden of human responsibility is greatest".

The photo is of Schiehallion, early morning, before we climbed it. Shrouded in mystery, much of it obscured but there in all its solid reality, waiting to be climbed but not conquered, providing a standpoint from which to view the world, and remember that this ancient mountain puts us firmly, finally, and faithfully, in our place!

Stuart Townend writes too many hymns, just like Charles Wesley and Graham Kendrick. And yes I do mention them all in the one sentence, because at their best the have given the Church some of the finest hymns in the worship repertoire. What makes a hymn  good, great, even classic is a seriously contested question and no obvious answers forthcoming. Rhythm, imagery, tune, resonant experience, affective power, words – yes, and perhaps the precise cultural moment the hymn is composed and first sung.

Stuart Townend's "See what a morning", is one such hymn – theologically spacious, glistening with the imagery of hope, utterly Christocentric and rooted in Trinitarian faith, affirming of life and new beginnings and possibilities. I can't sing it without recognising the disjunct between this hymn and the litanies of despair and negativity that now dominate global news prostrate at the altar of The Economy. The irony is that the spacious, generous, inclusive safety of the term 'economy' is now lost in our worship of wealth, growth, the possession of power and the power of possession. The economy of salvation works quite differently in Christian theology, 'wrought in love, borne in pain, paid in sacrifice.'

With a defiance every bit as unflinching as Paul in 1 Corithians 15, the hymn finishes each verse with the resurrection cry: "For he lives: Christ is risen from the dead!". Likewise the sixth line of each verse trumpets the great reversal of the Gospel, when all that ruins God's loving creative purposes is confronted with a power it can neither comprehend nor overcome. And the last verse is programmatic for the Church of Christ facing a world wearied and worn thin by human activity that is singlemindedly self-serving, and therefore resolutely destructive. To sing in such a world, "death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered", is to experience a trnasfigured worldview, to speak a different narrative, to look for a different ending that is in effect a new beginning.

The scandal of the resurrection remains for all sophisticated cultures, the late post-modern West included, the most radical questioning of what matters most, the most outrageous statement of what is ultimate, and the clearest most compassionate reticence about all explanations of purpose and meaning in the face of human suffering and the pain of all creation. Resurrection is not a statement that it all worked out in the end; it is a doctrine of utter disconinuity, a divine reversal of the order of things, the working out of a different economy in which cost, sacrifice and loss are borne in a transfiguring act of Eternal Love.

The Church is a resurrection community; a place where we are speaking life, stirring hope, bringing peace: a place where we sing and shout, "death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered"; for he lives, Christ is risen from the dead.  

See, what a morning, gloriously bright,

With the dawning of hope in Jerusalem;

Folded the grave-clothes, tomb filled with light,

As the angels announce, "Christ is risen!"

See God's salvation plan,

Wrought in love, borne in pain, paid in sacrifice,

Fulfilled in Christ, the Man,

For He lives: Christ is risen from the dead!

See Mary weeping, "Where is He laid?"

As in sorrow she turns from the empty tomb;

Hears a voice speaking, calling her name;

It's the Master, the Lord raised to life again!

The voice that spans the years,

Speaking life, stirring hope, bringing peace to us,

Will sound till He appears,

For He lives: Christ is risen from the dead!

One with the Father, Ancient of Days,

Through the Spirit who clothes faith with certainty.

Honor and blessing, glory and praise

To the King crowned with pow'r and authority!

And we are raised with Him,

Death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered;

And we shall reign with Him,

For He lives: Christ is risen from the dead!

"See, What a Morning" (Resurrection Hymn)
Words and Music by Keith Getty and Stuart Townend
Copyright © 2003 Kingsway Thankyou Music

The Pilgrm Psalm 121 has always raised my spirits by lifting my eyes. And when it comes to lifting my eyes to the hills, Schiehallion is about as impressive as they come. I've seen it in snow, a glistening majestic peak clothed in ermine with the occasional rocky outcrop showing; I've seen it in autumn with the colours muted and warm; and I've seen it at sunset in the afterglow of a summer day. Today I saw it from the window of the place we are staying. I lift my eyes to the hills. From whence doth my help come. Statement or question, the answer is the same – the Lord who made haven and earth.

"It is not we who sustain the Church, nor was it those who came before us, nor will it be those who come after us. It was, and is and will be the one who says 'I am with you, even to the end of time…' As it says in Hebrews 13 'Jesus Christ the same, yesterday, today and forever. And in Revelation 1, 'Who was, and is, and is to come. Truly he is that one, and no one else is, or ever can be."

Quoted in A McGrath, Roots that Refresh, 192.

Now there's a presupposition that should inform every missional decision, preface every strategic review, edit every agenda for change, reassure every discipleship risk assessment. And there's a presupposition that should alleviate anxiety, prevent paralysis, dissolve complacency, and negate negativity by the positive assertion of the eternal reliability of who God is in Christ.

Frederick Hart's Christ Rising is one of my favourite images. The cruciform shape and the bursting energy show a figure transcending humanity, but profoundly human.

For a number of years now I have taught a module entitled Rediscovering the Triune God. The title was borrowed from the book of the same name by the late Stanley Grenz, a Baptist scholar of remarkable learning, wide theological sympathy and an intellect graced by spiritual integrity. His book isn't easy reading, but it gets the job done in reviewing the 20th century developments in Trinitarian theology. Alongside Grenz we read our way through Moltmann's The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, not because Moltmann is the last word on Trinitarian theology, but because his construal of a social doctrine of the Trinity provokes theological discussion over a wide range of doctrinal issues from ecclesiology to Christology, from the incomprehensible suffering of God to the incomprehensible but all too apparent suffering of humanity, as the crucifixion of the Son of God is brought into salvific relation to the crucifixion of creation through sin, by the unprecedented and unimaginable action of the Triune God.

It's a tedious and intellectually lazy cliche that the Christian understanding of God as Trinity is an exercise in abstract speculative or systematic theology with little relevance or practical value in Christian life and existence. My own experience has been one of deepening love for the Triune God, an awakened hunger not only for understanding and appreciation, but for the love grace and fellowship that flow within and beyond the life of Father Son and Spirit. The Holy Trinity is less about relevance than revelation, less about abstraction than adoration, less about speculation than spirituality, less about our pragmatism than our prayers and God's perfections.

And yet. Ironically once grasp the mystery and glory of the Trinity and we discover that the reality of God is an eternal mutual exchange of self-giving love, which reaches out beyond that life in creative purposeful action which is love's continuous expression; well, then we realise the practical import of an adequate theology of the Triune God. In a more recent paper Moltmann ends by a characteristic call to Christians to live in the experience of the grace, love and fellowship of the Triune God of suffering, redeeming and hope-filled love.

The fellowship of believers lives mystically in the Triune God. The triune God is the broad place in which we embrace each other, it is the field of force of the love which makes us, together with each other, living people; it is the open future which invites us to hope.¹

The new module I'm teaching from September is Trinity and Community, and while some of the content of the earlier module will be included, it will be from a quite different pastoral and theological perspective. If today's high powered buzz words (especially in Evangelical circles) are to be preserved from becoming verbal idols at worst, or pragmatic solutions to church decline, or secondary focal points of community efforts which displace the primary and central focus of God in Christ in the power of the Spirit, then it will be through a recovered, resurgent and embodied Trinitarian theology. Mission, discipleship, worship, evangelism -some of the high powered buzz words – and their grammatically dubious cousins missional and discipling, are indeed key theological urgencies for the Church, for the churches and for Christian people seeking to be obedient to God in a post most things culture that routinely displaces and confuses the Church and its historic forms of witness.

But in seeking to be obedient to God, the first priority is to know God well enough to bow before mystery, to embrace the rich complexity of loving reality that is the God revealed in Jesus Christ. That, as the Church early came to discover, involves us in contemplative wonder, thoughtful adoration, reverent experiment, joyful intellectual toil, conceptual humility, and the fear of God which is the beginning of wisdom, and which reminds us, with our unabashed impatience with mystery, to take our shoes off. The Holy Trinity is the life of God, into which we are drawn by the grace of Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit. And for myself, discipleship, mission, worship, evangelism and all other defined activities characteristic of Christians, draw their relevance, importance and ultimate significance from the God whose Triune life of creative, redemptive and consummative love seeks to reconcile all things unto Himself.

¹See his paper "The Church in the Power of the Spirit", in The Holy Spirit in the World Today. Jane Williams (ed.), (London: Alpha, 2011), 28.

The tree is my everlasting salvation. 
It is my food, a shared banquet.  Its roots and the spread of its
branches are my own roots and extension… Its shade I take for my resting
place; in my flight from oppressive heat it is the source of refreshing
dew for me… Food for my hunger and wellspring for my thirst, it is also
covering for my nakedness, with the spirit of life as its leaves… Fearful
of God, I find in it a place of safety; when unsteady a source of stability. 
In the face of a struggle, I look to it as a prize; in victory my trophy.

It is Jacob’s ladder, the passage
of angels, at whose summit the Lord is affixed.  This tree, the plant
of immortality, rears from earth to reach as high as heaven, fixing the
Lord between heaven and earth.  It is the foundation and stabilizer
of the universe, undergirding the world that we inhabit.  It is the
binding force of the world… It is riveted into a unity by the invisible
bonds of the Spirit, so that its connection with God can never be severed. 
Brushing heaven with its uppermost branches, it remains fixed in the earth,
and between the two points, its huge hands completely enfold the stirring
of the air.  A single whole, it penetrates all things and all places.