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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.

Student supervision, a preaching request, and a long interest in the Epistle to the Hebrews have encouraged me to tackle G L Cockerill's new commentary on Hebrews. Published in the New International Commentary on the NT series, it runs to 760 pages and will take a while to work through. I've done this kind of thing before with Hebrews – 30 years ago with the commentary by F F Bruce in this same series.

I know all kinds of folk come past this blog and not everyone will be interested in everything posted here. Poetry or tapestry, Renaissance Art and Kirekegaard, photos and haiku, books of all kinds on many subjects from spirituality to biography, to systematic theology to novels, and most anything else that seems interesting to share. So every now and then a piece of self-indulgent bibliphilia, often on that expensive genre of the biblical commentary.

F F Bruce mentioned above was a remarkably humble and even more remarkably learned Christian scholar who almost singlehandedly in the 1950's into the 1960's demonstrated that it is possible to be a convictional evangelical and an academic professor of Biblical Studies holding his own in scholarly integrity in a secular institution. His background in the Christian Brethren, his deep and wide knowledge of the New Testament world and the classical languages, his expertise in New Testament Greek and intra-biblical knowledge meant that his commentary on Hebrews was one of the great written gifts to preachers and Bible students keen to do justice to this vibrant and urgent document from the early church.

So I bought it for £3.25 (not cheap in the early 1970's), and I read it, one of the first full length commentaries I read, and realised that such daily increments of conversation with expert exegetes accumulated in the mind, enriching, expanding and transforming my approach to the biblical text. That's why I put in the sidebar the commentary I'm reading – a gentle corrective for those who might wonder at my tedium threshold, and an assurance that such disciplined understudying is no more tedious than a shower after a long day, or before another one starts!

And now Cockerill – who is persuaded, so far as any guess has credibility, that Apollos wrote Hebrews. A long slow summer read, another exercise in incremental gains in 'the grace and knowledge of God'. The painting is Rogier Van Der Weyden's 'Deposition'. This is one of the masterpieces of Renaissance Art, amongst the most remarkable depictions of human sorrow in its diversity and the concentrated anguish of loss which feels utterly, and ultimately, irreversible and irredeemable. Hebrews explores the heights and depths of divine mercy, suffering, judgement and love – Van der Weyden depicts the heights and depths of human suffering, compassion, sorrow and love.

“Prayer is not for getting what we want, but rather for
bending our wants toward what God wants.” (Stanley Hauerwas)

Wanting is one of the
strongest drives in our nature. The Lord's Prayer recognises this. Our wants can be as daily as bread, as needful
as forgiveness, as desperate as a cry for deliverance from whatever might hurt
and harm us. We want the material things we need to live; we want to have
satisfying relationships with other people; we want to be kept safe and to live
as well as we can. And at times we live as if achieving all that was entirely
up to us.

But each of these wants is part of basic prayer. We pray to
God for what we need to live our lives – bread to nourish our bodies, the
security of home, enough money to provide what’s needed, a job to give us a
place and a purpose. We pray to God about marriage, friendships, family
relationships, people we work with, neighbours. Time and again these
relationships need to be salvaged, renewed, cleansed, recycled.

That same prayer deals with needs as well as wants: forgive us when
we get it wrong, as we forgive those who get it wrong with us. In life there are alos givens, those circumstances that come to us, or at us. So we pray to God
about those experiences that test our integrity and our faith, that face us
with hard choices, when it’s easier to do wrong than pay the price for doing
right. So we bring our wants to God; often we want, mostly we need, those things we can’t live without,
or at least can't live well without – bread, forgiveness, strength to survive the traps and tests and temptations of life that often feels way too complex, demanding and confusing. 

The Lord's Prayer is a remarkably clarifying agenda to start, and end, each day.

The photo looks towards Stirling from Gartmore – the sense of space and distance help put this small person in  perspective!

Below is Kierkegaard's prayer as he sets out to write The Works of Love. It's a long time since I read Kierkegaard, and I have to confess I've picked up Works of Love more by accident than design, which could mean more by providence than accident! He is never a comfortable read, always subversive of the ego's search for affirmation and critical of its imaginative strategies to secure opportunities for self promotion, self-comfort, and self advancement into the places of human power and praise.

Geroge Pattison in the introduction encorages a reading one by one of these discourses, each to be considered as effectively a series of scripts for self examination, requiring a response of intentional transformation. This takes place under the discipline of a Love that is the sum and substance and source of all other genuine loves, which are made real in acts, works and habits of performance, sustained by the eternal energy core in the life of the Triune God.

How could love be rightly discussed if You were
forgotten, O God of Love,

source of all love in heaven and on earth,

You
who spared nothing but gave all in love,

You who are love, so that one
who loves is what he is only by being in You!

How could love properly be
discussed if You were forgotten,

You who made manifest what love is,

You, our Savior and Redeemer, who gave Yourself to save all!

How could
love be rightly discussed if You were forgoteen, O Spirit of Love,

You
who take nothing for Your own but remind us of that sacrifice of love,

remind the believer to love as he is loved, and his neighbor as himself!

O Eternal Love, You who are everywhere present

and never without
witness wherever You are called upon,

be not without witness in what is
said here about love or about the works of love.

There are only a few
acts

which human language specifically and narrowly calls works of love,

but heaven is such that no act can be pleasing there unless it is an
act of love–

sincere in self-renunciation,

impelled by love itself,

and
for this very reason claiming no compensation.