Living Wittily

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  • C K Barrett – New Testament Scholar par excellence

    John Readers of Living Wittily will know I have a particular interest in and affinity with the Gospel of John. It was the Gospel I worked through in the Greek text in College, guided by R E O White, for whom the Greek New Testament was peerless literature. He was a classic exegete, training us to explore the text by establishing the basis of the text, working through the grammatical and syntactical issues, carefully reconstructing background in cultural, social and historical contexts, and finally writing out the theological and practical implications of the text so explored.

    Amongst R E O White's exegetical resources of first rank was C K Barrett, whose commentary on John was the class textbook. I have it in its revised form, and am sorry that when I bought the new edition I gave away my first edition – the one with the terracota coloured dustwrapper, a book whose very appearance conjured up impressions of serious, sober scholarship wrapped in unfussy but serviceable dustrwaps.

    Today we heard of the death of C K Barrett at the venerable age of 94. So I took my Barrett on John from the shelves and spent a wee while browsing, remembering and giving thanks for the scholarship and devotion to the text of C K Barrett. Pencil marks in the margin still mark places where I had my eyes opened by Barrett. Just one example –

    John14.6 is the famous threefold I am the way the truth and the life. Barrett is quite sure the primary claim is "I am the way by which men and women come to God". And he is certain that Jesus refers to his coming passion – "the way which he himself is about to take is the road which his followers must also tread. He himself goes to the Father by way of crucifixion and resurrection; in future he is the means by which Christians die and rise….Because Jesus is the means of access to God who is the source of all truth and life, he is himself the truth and the life for men and women."

    Page 458, The Gospel According to John, (SPCK, 1978 rev.ed.)

    51NY8J95RSL__SS500_ Barrett unabashedly acknowledged that even the 1978 revised commentary on John was then old fashioned. So it was, and is. But it is old fashioned in the same sense as any classic – that is, old fashioned does not mean irrelevant, unimportant, dispensable. On the contrary – a classic commentary remains relevant, important and indispensable! I have a shelf of commentaries on John, and some of them I have read through, others have been consulted times without number. It would be untrue to say Barrett is my favourite – I have several favourites for different purposes – and Raymond Brown's two volume commentary is my most used. But Barrett on John was the first Greek Text commentary I worked through with grammar and lexicon, and that habit, instilled by R E O White has never left me as my favourite form of lectio divina. R E O White used to quote Noel Davey, one of Barrett's close friends, who urged students to 'bury your head in a lexicon and you'll raise it in the presence of God".

    C K Barrett now knows the full depth of those words, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life…" May he now, with gladness and gratitude, raise his head in the presence of God and know the fullness of truth and life. Thanks be to God.

     

  • Mozart, Christology, Ministry and the Truth of Impossible Realities

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     On the trip to Vienna I went walkabout with one of the friends we were visiting. Came across the statue of Mozart and this arrangement of flowers. There aren't many comparisons I would dare make between myself and Karl Barth and Hans Kung - but a love for the music of Mozart, and a sense of the theological inspiration it provides is one that seems safely modest.

    While posting this I'm listening to the Ave Verum Corpus which is one of the most beautiful and spiritually consoling pieces of music I know. The incarnation, the atonement and the humility of God are deeply embedded in this serene, composed and gentle hymn of divine self relinquishment.

    9780802865557_l This week is the anniversary of my ordination to pastoral ministry – the book I've bought to commemorate that milestone is Edward Oakes' new volume, Infinity Dwindled to Infancy. A Catholic and Evangelical Christology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011). Oakes is one of the best interpreters of Hans Urs Von Balthasar and has written a major study of Von Balthasar's Christology.

    Years ago the veteran theologian T C Oden wrote a three volume systematic theology based on what he called the ecumenical consensus. It remains a repository of ecumenical theology, both constructive and incorporating a wide range of voices from the diverse streams of the Christian theological tradition. This Christology is a major work of ecumenical and eirenic theology, an account of the person of Jesus Christ that seeks to be faithful to the ecumenical consensus but also considers and interacts with contemporary Christological thought. At the heart of hearts of pastoral ministry and Christian faith is the beauty and mystery of the incarnation, the intersection of eternity with history, the impossible reality of the divine becoming human, the majesty of love expressed in the self-surrender of God.

     It is that mystery and beauty and majesty and that impossible reality that is sung in Ave Verum Corpus. The combination of such musical truth telling and heart searching on the one hand, and an ecumenical essay in Christology that takes with utter seriousness the truth of God Incarnate on the other, is for me a reminder of the central core of faith – the mystery of Jesus Christ, revealing the self-giving love of God for a creation gone far wrong, but entered in the power of a love that suffers and absorbs that wrongness, reconciles the alienated, restores and renews so that once again life is lived in the fullness of God. To be a follower of Jesus Christ, a lover of such a God as Jesus reveals, an agent of the Kingdom of God responsive to the Holy Spirit – whatever else ordination means, it means surrender to truths of such magnitude that wonder, gratitude and love for God and all God has made are only the beginnings of an adequate yes to the divine call.

  • The Enduring Melody – the fellowship of joy and of suffering

    41FVBQFN2WL__SL500_AA300_ My friend Geoff Colmer – whom I see about once a year at a UK Baptist conference, has gently encouraged me for some time to read The Enduring Melody by Michael Mayne. I first encountered the work of Michael Mayne in his volume This Sunrise of Wonder, which I consider one of the most life affirming and theologically literate books I've ever read. So my slowness in getting to The Enduring Melody is only because other things were pressing, and I know a book of such richness isn't one to skim, cram in, flick through or read dutifully. It should be read – and the verb to read means something much more than mere perusal or hurried shopping down the supermarket aisles grabbing what my limited time allows to throw into the mental trolley.

    So for a week now I've been reading The Enduring Melody, and found myself in the company of faith, courage, beauty, wonder, loss, love, pain, anxiety, enjoyment and much else that is expressed in a book that alternates between very personal journal and beautifully crafted essay. In that sense there are two books – the diary of an illness that proves terminal, and essays on some the things that made up the enduring melody of Michael Mayne's life as a Church of England priest, a vocation lived with the classic pastoral genius of Anglican spirituality at its most inquisitively affirming.

    The only other published Journal that comes near this for honest spiritual search, human and humane longing, wise reflection on the meaning of this person's life, regret that life is shortening but gladness for what it has been and still is, are the two volumes of Philip Toynbee, Part of a Journey, and End of a Journey. I remember very clearly reading them, the time in my life and the places I was when I did read them. And I remember too some of the moments when I simply nodded in mute but sincere recognition of those deep undercurrents of faith and fellowship that enable us to say I believe in the communion of saints. I'll write more about Toynbee soon.

    Over the next week or so I'll write about The Enduring Melody. Not a book review, more reports of conversations between pilgrims who know, you've got to walk that lonesome valley, you've got to walk there by yourself. But pilgrims who also know that you don't ever walk by yourself, even if that is the way it feels. You walk with the company, felt or unfelt, of the One whose rod and staff comort; and you walk with those friends and companions in life who also walk their road and ours; and you walk, or run, surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses, with perseverance looking to Jesus.

  • The Environmentally Friendly Nature Loving White Van Man

    Dont-let-the-world White van man and woman are one of the easy targets for derision, criticism and general opprobrium.

    They drive selfishly, assume a sovereign claim on highway territory, behave like gladiators wielding a weapon, and have made an art form of the tailgate intimidatory tactic.

    This morning white van man was in front of me.

    He braked suddenly and hard, and a squirrel went scampering safely across his absolute right of way.

    As the squirrel settled on the garden wall and looked askance at white van man, the driver window opened, a hand appeared, and that squirrel got a finger wagging telling off that would have done credit to a teacher instilling some health and safety consciousness into a jay walking student!

    I like white van man.

  • “…all pure art is praise…” John Ruskin

    DSC00228 "We express our delight in a beautiful or lovely thing no less by lament for its loss, than gladness in its presence;

    Much art is therefore tragic or pensive, but all pure art is praise…Fix then, this in your mind…your art is to be praise of something that you love." 

    John Ruskin, "The Laws of Fesole"

     

    Victorian rhetoric, the art of the prose poem, the fusion in mind and emotion of contemplative insight and apt, indeed artistic expression – Ruskin is one of the great masters of English descriptive writing. I suspect the quality of the writing is directly indexed to his quality of seeing, and responding to what he saw. Thinking about the nature of the contemplative disposition, I recognise the lure of the beautiful, the frisson of pleasure in the encounter with that which awakens longing.

    The photo was taken in Aberdeen Botaninc gardens, and is a case in point

  • Eucharist – Giving thanks for bread or giving thanks for money?

    DSC00188 Sometimes God speaks to us from oblique angles of our hearing. I mean by that, you are happily reading something, minding your own business and a perfectly good train of thought is interrupted by who knows Who?

    Last night after a satisfying day of travelling, preaching, talking and catching up with various folk, I'm lying in bed reading, intending to lull myself closer to that edge where the closing of the eyelids gets easier than the holding of the book.

    Then I read this from Nicholas Berdyaev, whom I hadn't anticipated as a voice in this book:

    There are two symbols, bread and money; and there are two mysteries, the eucharistic mystery of bread and the Satanic mystery of money. We are faced with the great task; to overthrow the rule of money, and to establish in its place the rule of bread.

    At which point thought, prayer and a sense of having been addressed took over. Oh, and when I say "sometimes God speaks to us from oblique angles of our hearing", I do mean us – each of us – all of us. While the politicians from Cameron to Blair indulge in diagnosis skewed by questionable political assumptions, Berdyaev's contrast of the two ways human beings live gets much nearer the reality - bread  or  money, and only one is eucharistic, that which proclaims the celebration of thanksgiving.

  • When the Good Samaritan is a Parable of judgement and a call to prayer

    Breadwine

    The parable of the  Good Samaritan figures highly in my personal rule of life. No big deal in that, it's just a way of trying to pay attention to those around me, notice the realities of the world I work and walk in, and try to embody the compassion of Jesus in ways that are neither by-standing nor walking on the other side of the road. Sometimes being intentional in such attentiveness, and with the Good Samaritan as background theme music, that has meant just doing the decent thing when someone is struggling, needs help and may not even ask. Compassion isn't only emotional sympathy – kindness in action, understanding of another human heart, accompaniment on a hard part of the journey, personal expenditure of time, money or energy – it's all of these.

    But now and again with the best will in the world none of that seems possible. Driving to work yesterday along a busy street, a young woman in a shell suit was clinging to a telephone junction box on the pavement. She was swaying, trying to hold on and was obviously distressed either because of what she had taken, or because she couldn't get what she needed. I was in a flow of traffic, passing roadworks with a contraflow, and no way to stop the car for several hundred yards. Several people walked past, one or two smiling but no one stopping, or speaking. Not easy to approach someone who is behaving so much in character with the dependency that has brought her to this place – alcohol, drugs, who knows. But at 7.45 am, she was clearly not where she needed to be. I felt guilty of and on for a while, then forgot about it until I remembered this morning. I wonder where she is. If anyone help-ed her. If she lives near where I saw her.

    And I wondered too what is the good, or the use, of now praying for her. I don't know her name, her background, and may never see her again. But I have prayed for her.

    That she will find somewhere and sometime, a love that will rescue and redeem.

    That someone will have stopped and asked her name and maybe seen her safely home.

    That we are forgiven for a world where roadworks, house renovation, traffic flow, and impatient commuters on the way to work or the school run, all conspire to make kindness inconvenient, stopping to help socially unacceptable, compassionate action a nuisance.

    And that somewhere deep inside her loneliness and hopelessness, she will discover a love that will hold and enfold her towards wholeness, and recovery, and yes human happiness.

    To such petitions I say amen, and trust to the Love that moves the sun and other stars, will move in that no less impressive work of healing a broken life, and yes, through the prayers of this mororist who didn't stop.

  • Seek the Lord while He may be found – Prayer of Bernard of Clairvaux

    2222240312_e56af494c5 Omniscience is both a comforting and scary thought. God knows everything there is to know. Which means I can't hide anything – neither my sins nor my worries; my need for forgiveness nor for reassurance. 

    It also means my motives which to me usually seem sound, but in reality are mixed and complex, are understood and seen with the scrutinising gaze of holy love.

    But given God's omnisicience, I'm glad we pray to a God who is not slow on the uptake.

    Just as well. Here's one of Bernard of Clairvaux's prayers. The kind of prayer even the Lord might ask should be said twice, just to be sure He got it the first time!

     

     

    Lord, you are good to the soul that seeks you.

    What are you then to the soul that finds?

    But this is the most wonderful thing,

    that no one can seek you who has not already found you.

    You therefore seek to be found so that you might be sought for,

    sought so that you may be found. Amen

     

  • The Transformative Authority of the Bible

    DSC00227 One of the finest spiritual writers in the Evangelical tradition is only read today in edited versions. Like the Puritans, Andrew Murray's writing could be 'prolix', and like a certain washing machine advert of some years ago, he could go on and on and on. But Andrew Murray (if you Google the name you're likely to encounter a tennis player!) was a profoundly influential teacher in the Holiness tradition in South Africa and in England through the Keswick movement. His commentary on Hebrews, The Holiest of All, was very warmly reviewed by no less than James Denney who didn't call geese swans. What Denney liked was the thoughtful application of evangelical truth to Christian sanctification and behaviour, and the centrality of Christ in all Murray's writings.

    Murray wrote one of the best accounts of an Evangelical appropriation of the Bible. Rather than argue for the authority of the text as artefact, he pleaded for a use of the Bible that depended on openness to God and a receptiveness of heart to the transforming work of the Word of Scripture. Here's what he says:

    God's Word only works its true blessing when the truth it brings to us has stirred the inner life, and reproduced itself in resolve, trust, love or adoration. When the heart has received the Word through the mind and has had its spiritual powers called out and exercised on it, the Word is no longer void, but it has done that whereunto God has sent it. It has become part of our life, and strengthened us for new purpose and effort.

    Andrew Murray, The Inner Chamber and the Inner Life, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1950), 72

    Truth that transforms, a Word that is living, dynamic and provocative of response, words through which God speaks now, that is the Word enfleshed, embodied, lived, obeyed – and that is the authority of Scripture that matters most – it authors our lives.  

    (Learning slowly how to use my new camera. The photo was taken in the Aberdeen Botanic Gardens)

  • Dag Hammarskjold – and the importance of saying yes!

    Dag Hammarskjold's Markings is another of those books I've had on my shelves all the years of my ministry. I first bought it in 1972. It cost me £2.25 and is a Faber paperback. I bought it because it was quoted in an article in the Expository Times and that single quotation has sometimes kept me afloat when not much else was giving buoyancy.

    For all that is past Thank You;

    For all that is to come, Yes.

    Hammarskjold We've become used to Journalling now. But in the 1950's and 60's there is something remarkable about this narrative told without plot but with purpose, a slow accumulation of received wisdom, distilled at times to sentences of Zen precision, with poetic rhythms reminsicent of Haiku, and occasional self revealing paragraphs of a mind and spirit refracted through profound moral awareness of the world around and the world within. If you don't know this book, then you are missing an encounter with one of the most fascinating and enigmatic minds of the 20th Century in which political conscience, personal faith and social vision combine so that you could equally say political faith, personal vision and social conscience.

    Markings is the published version of those occasional jottings, found in a black note-book discovered after his still unexplained death in an aircrash. As the then Secretary General of the United Nations he had been on a peace making trip to the Congo. Since then his personal thoughts have given comfort, clarity, insight and encouragement to the readers of Markings. I have a 90+ friend whose yellowing copy is still to hand. Had Hammarskjold lived he would have been about ages with her.

    Here he is on what it means to live a human life:

    God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

    What does that mean? Wrong question. It isn't an argument – it's a confession of faith in the worth of human life, and the conviction of Ecclesiastes the Preacher, 'that to be human is to be b orn with eternity in our hearts'.