Isaianic Haiku
Walk the ways of God –
the politics of shalom
make peace the new norm.
…………………………………………..
Swords into ploughshares –
weapons for food production,
not mass destruction.
………………………………
Double negative,
"We won't study war no more".
Future positive!
We do not live for ourselves alone
and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact
that we begin to love ourselves properly,
and thus also love others.
What do I mean by loving ourselves properly?
I mean, first of all,
desiring to live,
accepting life as a very great gift
and a very great good,
not because of what it gives us,
but because of what it enables us to give to others.
Thomas Merton, The New Man, page xx.
Merton was one of the great affirmers of life. He was a living paradox, a gregarious solitary, a silent voice that wouldn't shut up, an ascetic who sought to live to the full, a monk who fell in love, and, from his Journals, a Christian who understood the inner conflicts, tensions, and anguishes of Romans 7, spilling over in his own experience into the liberty, joy and and fulfilments of life in the Spirit as in Romans 8.
Professor Larry Hurtado (New College Edinburgh) has several times lectured on the pervasive hermeneutic of love throughout the New Testament, and observed the lack of serious engagement with the theology and practice of love as a faith defining critierion in the life of each Christian community. Worship and liturgy, discipleship and doxology, sexual ethics and ecclesial politics, communal care and personal relationships, theological reflection and moral integrity, are each drawn into the orbit of the New Testament imperative of agape, the redemptive goodwill of God.
If we're honest, there's a clanging dissonance in the theory and the practice of agape as the primary Christian disposition, in much of the communal and personal practices of contemporary Christian spirituality. I find this both theologically intriguing and a rather glaring clue as to what the Church is for and its mandate to embody the good news of the Kingdom of God. So without knowing where this is going, for a few months towards Advent I'll post occasionally on the Hermeneutic and Imperative of Love. Not a chain of harangues nor a catena of moralising winges - both of these are in reality demoralising!
More a sowing of seeds of thought, a series of small perpsectival studies as experiments in what love might look like in practice, pieces of a jigsaw which may in the end have some pieces missing, but enough to make it worth looking for the lost pieces!
However. Not to get too philosophically carried away. The photos above and below depict a different perspectival study, entitled 'Smudgy Love'. The two favoured places are the cushion and the cardboard box.
Eerdmans have announced a new commentary on Hebrews. It's a new entry to the New International Commentary on the New Testament and it will replace the commentary of F F Bruce which anyone interested in evangelical New Testament scholarship reveres as a fine combination of historical exposition, textual exposition and theological exegesis. At a time when others were defensively negative about historical critical study of the New Testament, F F Bruce personified the confessional integrity of a man of thoughtful and committed Christian faith, unafraid of critical questions and warmly responsive to the spiritual message of the New Testament.
There are several reasons why Bruce was an ideal commentator on Hebrews for a commentary series launching into the market unsure of its credibility beyond evangelicalism. Bruce was a member of the Christian Brethren, a moderately conservative evangelical (how he tired of these carefully worded theological categories), and there are few traditions more theologically sympathetic to the rich symbolism and typology and the book of Hebrews. He was also a first rate historian, an erudite and meticulous scholar, and with an intellect weighted with both intelligence and integrity.
His commentary was commissioned in 1954, published in 1963 and revised in 1990, the year of his death. From the start Bruce on Hebrews was recognised as a lucid, historically thoughtful and theologically sensitive commentary which has enabled generations of readers to make sense of a book that is enigmatic, mysterious and for some downright perplexing in places. Melchizedek was as puzzling to readers in the 1960's as any complex theory of Derridean postmodern hermeneutics!
The replacement volume will be twice the length of Bruce, and will reflect current approaches to hermeneutics and literary social approaches to the text, majoring on chiasmus as the hermeneutic key. It will have to sit alongside strong competition from Peter O'Brien's Pillar commentary which is becoming the preferred treatment for evangelicals, not forgetting Paul Ellingworth's NICGT volume which is a massive treatment now showing its own age, and the even more comprehensive and richly informed Word commentary by W Lane. Then there is L T Johnson's fine commentary in the New Testament Library series, and Craig Koester's Anchor volume, and Fred Craddocks elegant exegesis in the New Interpreter's Bible.
So it's interesting that Bruce's volume will remain in print as a stand alone treatment of Hebrews. Much of his exposition is not significantly qualified by more recent scholarship and it remains a responsible and spiritually rewarding companion. Old fashioned it may be, but fashions of hermeneutic theory and practice are not the only criteria for exegesis that is faithful to the text because arising from within the faith tradition of the documents that are that same faith's foundation charters. Anyway, Bruce's commentary has no use by date, and in my view no expiry date.
I mention the replacement of a commentary for two reasons. First I own two copies of this commentary. It was one of the first commentaries I bought as a student minister and I read it through. my second copy was a gift from the library of the late Dr Eleanor Walker who died over a decade ago, before she could complete her studies for the Church of Scotland ministry.
Second, I have all the commentaries mentioned above, and I still go back to this veteran commentary by a veteran scholar who changed the opinion of the academy about the seriousness, creativity and integrity of evangelical critical scholarship. Bruce almost singlehandedly demonstrated the possibility that those three words could sit together without threatening oxymoron.
Just spent a few days in Northumberland. The ruin of Dunstanburgh Castle is one of those impressive reminders of dangerous times, human power games and the labour and ingenuity that goes into territorial defence and territorial aggression. These were built to last, 700 years ago
Then there was the beauty and alternative worldview of Alnwick Gardens. The rose garden was past its best and had been battered by rain, but there's a defiance in flowers quite different from the defiance of stone and rock against sea, wind and human determination.
Whether in the shared harmony and profusion of colour and scent, or the single glory of fragile transience shaped into such modest loveliness below, the contrast of rose and rock, garden and castle, vulnerability and power, is one of the distinctions too easily overlooked in the politics of human life. I don't mean we don't need castles in a world of fractured and changing loyalties. But the question of why we need them, is one of the moral perplexities we may be losing the will and capacity to go on interrogating.
I didn't think many of those thoughts while on holiday – they began to assert themselves when looking at photos and deciding what to keep and discard. It could be argued quite persuasively that the beauty of gardens requires time, and peace, work and investment, and the hopefulness that others won't come and build a castle on the garden site. To prevent such purposes you need strong castles to deter and defend.
But if all of life is about looking over our shoulder, identifying the dangerous 'other', then maybe we need the reassuring space and viewpoint of a garden. Worryingly, both garden and castle need walls, and the wall is both a necessary part of human civilisation, and an ambiguous symbol that tells of our need to keep danger out and what we love safe.
Roses and castles. Hmmm.
I've slowly been reading Tom Wright's How God Became King. One of the strengths of Wright's overall approach to the New Testament is the way he takes hold of us, grabs our shoulders, and turns us round to look at things from a different perspective. In other words he calls in question the received point of view, and by a tour de force compels consideration of an alternative interpretation of the evidence.
This book is a delight to read, and it helps that I happen to agree almost without demur with his overall thesis – the Gospels are indeed about the Kingdom of God; and Jesus is the one in whom we see the kingship of God in all the mystery and majesty of love incarnate and the embodied holiness of God. It is unhelpful to create a tension far less a contention between Paul and Jesus – but for that precise reason, Wright is correct to insist that much of New Testament theology and historical study has carried a presumption of priority for Paul as the theologian par excellence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
A reading of the Gospel that takes them at their face value as accounts of the life, ministry and meaning of Jesus restores a necessary balance and provides the major canonical corrective, holding the balance between event and interpretation, between the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and the lived reflection of the first Christian communities. Gospels and Epistles create an essential conversation between the Gospel of Jesus and hermeneutic reflection emeging from the church's experience in the life of the Spirit. This and much more comes from Wright's characteristic combination of creative scepticism about received assumptions and persuasive argument built on analytic and synthetic control of the full range of material necessary for constructive New Testament theology and history.
I am enjoying this book.
The plaque above is by Ghiberti, from the Florence Baptistry of San Giovanni, and shows the Triumphal Entry – a key event not only for understanding the KIngdom of God, but as an authoritative statement of Christology. I love the work of Ghiberti.
Went walking at Forest of Gight and came across the ruin of the Castle of Gight, which used to belong to the Gordons. Unfortunately they ran out of money and it was sold to the Earl of Aberdeen in 1797. By the early 19th Century it fell into disuse and ruin. It still has the outline and some of the features of a Scottish Castle though, and I went in to explore having read the warnings and disclaimers – but I was careful.
From inside I took a couple of photos – one looking up the ruined round tower, and the other through a side window that looked like a stone picture frame.
Here they are:
.
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
This is the poem that brought Mary Oliver's poetry to my attention and I've read her regulary ever since. On a blue sky sunny day in Westhill, Aberdeenshire, this celebration of life and its unique unrepeatable giftedness is a reminder of responsibility to live life well and grateful for the gift it is and the gifts it brings.
The photo was taken in Aberdeen Botanic Garden – such fragile transient beauty, – cause for wonder, and praise and grateful holding of all that is Gift.
Had a moving and hilarious night at the cinema watching The Angel's Share. I've heard about it from others who went, and missed it on general release but caught it on a one off showing in Aberdeen. The reviews describe it as a movie about a young ned with a last chance to make something more of his life. No big names in the film, but lots of acting talent and character portrayal – from the caricature to the stereotype.
Everyone will find their own window into this hard world of social realism at the tough end of the socio-economic spectrum. For me there were several stand out moments in a film that simply drew me into the dramas of several lives, as they slowly became the woven strands of the central drama – how to steal the world's rarest cask of whisky without being caught.
When Robbie holds his new baby son, and calls him Luke, something changes in the way he looks at the world. When he then faces one of the victims of his drugs fuelled violence there are several minutes of relentless emotional hammering as he hears from his victim, and his victim's mother, the cost and cosequence of his mindless violence. Through tears of bewilderment and guilt he hears the mother demand that he look at her. Look becomes an important word no matter how it is spelled.
The amber liquid made in Scotland from girders is not whisky, but Irn Bru. And the Irn Bru bottles become central to the story as it twists and turns to its conclusion. The contrast between the Community Service Group and those bidding over a million for a cask of whisky is one of Loach's recurring themes of social justice, life chances and young people struggling to remain hopeful aginst all the social forces that do them down.
The combination of humour and pathos, of tenderness and violence, of fluent obscenity and linguistic clarity, of friendship and enmity, and of hopelessness and hopefilled longing, was just this side of confusing cynicism and sentiment. And the ending is both hopeful and ambiguous, which life tends to be, even for the most resilient.
Theological reflection on such a film probably shouldn't be done the morning after. But one thought nags away – the love of a good woman, the birth of a child, and the stated theme from the start, of one more chance at life – this film explores the transforming power of love, whether the love of Leone for her and Robbie's son Luke, or the raging love of the mother confronting her son's attacker at the meeting for restorative justice. And woven throughout, the goodness of the Community Services Supervisor, who offers home, guidance and an expanding world to this Glasgow prodigal son.
Yesterday I went to the Aberdeen University Library because I was on holiday. I didn't take my camera so this is the photo I took last year when I did the same. If holidays are about relaxing, finding space, being intrigued, discovering new things, having fun, ignoring the watch, then some hours in a book depository does it for me, every time.
No it's not the same as being where it's sunny and warm, and where new cultural experiences, sights and sounds are all around, where food is different and reliably good, and where there is enough distance to feel the ties that bind slacken enough to give freedom from work, relaxing of usual circumstance and some reduction of the pressures of what we misleadingly call "life".
But then again – what worlds there are in a library; what new vistas to be opened up standing surrounded by thousands of books and free to open any one of them. It's a place of reflective silence, of respected space, of generous extravagance and freedom of movement, of deliberately created opportunity to think, and feel, and wonder. You can sit and read in the sun – as I did yesterday from Floor 6 looking out over the North Sea.
It so happened I was looking for paintings and sculpture – pictures thereof. So I was in early Northern Renaisance Netherlands, then Southern Renaissance Venice, then 19th Century Arles in France, before a flying visit to Victorian England. With a visit to Amsterdam looming I wanted to check on what I absolutely must see in the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum. But I got waylaid at the end by the Pre-Raphaelite section as well.
I've had several holidays in this same place, this green glass intellectual travel agency where the only limit on destination is imagination, thought and curiosity. Poetry, theology, philosophy, and art tend to my usual intellectual resorts, but with unscheduled trips to other, stranger subject areas. I'll be back, and long before next year….