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The Mystery of the Trinity and the Beauty of the Infinite

"From an aesthetic perspective, David Bentley Hart offers an impressive trinitarian account of beauty that presents Being as primarily the shared life of the triune God: ontological plenitude and oriented toward another. The beauty of the infinite is reflected in the dynamic co-inherence of the three divine persons, a perichoresis of love, an immanent dynamism of distinction and unity embracing reciprocity and difference. The triune God does not negate difference; rather, the shared giving and receiving that is the divine life may be compared to an infinite musical richness, a music of polyphonic and harmonious differentiation of which creation is an expression and variation."

An Introduction to the Trinity, Declan Marmion and Rik Van Nieuwenhove, (Cambridge, CUP, 2011) page 218.

No, it isn't dumbed down theology – and yes, it is a piece of demanding and precise discourse upon the Trinity. But why would we think any serious contemplation of the mystery of the Triune life of God should be immediately accessible in everyday vocabulary? This is a very good book on the Trinity, one that will find its way into our course on Rediscovering the Triune God. It is written as good theology should be – scholarly, lucid, presupposing serious effort from the reader, and rewarding those readers who love to think and for whom thinking deeply and honestly and openly and receptively about God is a way of loving God with mind and heart.

The drawing by William Blake is one of the most delicately subtle pieces of theological art I know. A print of it hangs in my study.

1 July 2011
Aung San Suu Kyi and the Reith Lectures – political courage and moral leader

What is the passion which is so strong we are willing to forego the comforts of a conventional existence? In her Reith lecture Aung San Suu Kyi answers this in one word. But it is a word that makes all other words possible – freedom. And it is a word which has always exacted the price of suffering to uphold, defend, achieve and live in freedom.

This lecture is more than, indeed is nothing like, a scholarly reflection on the concept of freedom. Nor is it primarily autobiography though it is a deeply humane story of the forming and growing of a self that recognised the imperative to be free and to work for the freedom of others. Aung San Suu Kyi speaks of inner freedom, spiritual liberty which is to live in harmony with your own conscience. But the purpose of inner freedom is to work towards the liberation of other people in practical human life, to uphold the basic human rights of others, and to defend the right to live without fear and oppression. To carry on despite fear is a stance of unimaginable courage for us who live in an open democracy, and she speaks with great moral authority and insight about the inner dynamics of conscience, fear, courage and action.

This is an enlightening, ennobling and crucially significant voice speaking from expereince, about those matters without which human life cannot flourish. Humanity, humility and humus are all semantically related – they are morally related too, because out of the humus of humane and humble resistance and protest, grows a moral imperative that cannot finally and ultimately be eliminated by force, whether brute force or sophisticated systems of surveillance and suppression. This woman is a beacon of hope, a moral exemplar of political courage at its higher levels of ethical and humane development. Listening to her lecture is a profound education in political responsibility and moral courage. Incidentally, humour comes from the same semantic range – and the humour and laughter in her interviews and question responses is just one further dimension of this woman who embodies the patience, tenacity and hopefulness of the struggle for the freedom of her people.

You can hear the lecture and discussion here on Radio 4 Iplayer.

30 June 2011
When comment is superfluous 1.

Sometimes comment is superfluous. As in the case of the incomparable G Campbell Morgan, who is always good value, often theologically precise, and sometimes profoundly right, and unfailingly accessible.

"Said Thomas, 'except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails…I will not believe. What Thomas said of Christ, the world is saying about the church. And the wolrd is also saying to every preacher: Unless I see in your hands the print of the nails, I will not believe. It is true. It is the person who has died with Christ…that can preach the cross of Christ."

Allow me one unsuperfluous comment. The mission of the church the Body of Christ? It's about nailprints, visible and tangible.

28 June 2011
Karine Polwart, Folk Singing and the Prophetic Imagination

It's becoming an enjoyable if unpredictable habit. Innocently driving down or up the road to Paisley listening to the radio and there's a moment of illumination, or a coincidence of mood and music, or the fusion of idle thought and good ideas, or the interruption of the complacent routine by the unsettlingly different. It was the last of these this morning. I was ambushed by a song that compels our consideration of an unsettlingly different view of ourselves, our world and our responses to life around us.

On Radio Scotland I heard the haunting voice of Karine Polwart singing Better Things, the lyrics deceptively gentle in their subversive questioning of the way things are. And that lyrical gentleness and acoustic melody pushes ideas through our road metal defences like patiently persistent green shoots whose life force won't be denied the life giving sun even by the tarmac surface of minds hardened by the endless traffic of excess experience, information overload and sensory saturation that is our post- modern networked, globalised, rapid-feed culture. And yes, that is a long sentence, and a few over-wrought metaphors – perhaps.

The truth is that some of our best folk singers fulfil the role of prophet, and speak truth to power. They do this by calling in question the assumptions of the powerful, they dare to interrogate the ethics of political decisions, they refuse to accept that the economic bottom line has some kind of absolute veto on human compassion, is the reality check for kindness, or makes an ethical generosity foolish, unrealistic, or even worse, unaffordable.

The song Better Things does several of these things in oblique poetry that is at the same time a profound questioning of the wisdom of the world. Here are the words, and Karine polwart's own reasons for writing them given at the end:

So is this the best that we can do?
Oh I can think of better things – can't you?
Yes I can think of better things
That hands can make and hearts can sing

For now we deal with those for whom
A life is but a carnal tomb
In which the darkness holds no power
And neither does the final hour

So is this the best that we can do?
Oh I can think of better things – can't you?
Yes I can think of better things
That hands can make and hearts can sing

We may lament the deadly art
Of tiny atoms torn apart
Of visions that we can't return
And future fires in which we fear we'll burn

So is this the best that we can do?
Oh I can think of better things – can't you?
Yes I can think of better things
That hands can make and hearts can sing

Yet this is the art of those before
Who found a cure within the core
The noble mind behind the ray
That eased our earthly cares away

So is this the best that we can do?
Oh I can think of better things – can't you?
Yes I can think of better things
That hands can make and hearts can sing

Words & Music: Karine Polwart (Bay Songs Ltd 2007)
I wrote this for the "Bin The Bomb" campaign in protest at the UK Government's decision to re-commission the Trident generation of nuclear weapons. I just think maybe there are a few imaginative and constructive ways to spend £30 billion or so that don't involve weapons of mass destruction.

Swords into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks, and technology turned towards the healing of the wounds of the world – I too can think of better things that hands can make, and hearts can sing.

26 June 2011
Why we all need to get a theological life!

The great and erudite and sometimes not easy to read Jaroslav Pelikan, once wrote a book called The Melody of Theology. A Philosophical Dictionary. It is both a dictionary and an autobiography in which Pelikan discusses alongside philosophical theology his own faith and convictions. The metaphor of music for theology, with the appeal to composition, melody, harmony, disciplined originality, precision and improvisation, provides a wonderful range of possibility in the thinking, writing, speaking, listening, conversing and praying that is the theological life.

I can hear already some sighs of impatience with such an apparently self-conscious and self-indulgent phrase – what on earth is a theological life? Anyone who leads one or wants one needs to get a life. Aye, but what kind of life? Because at its most creative, transformative and fruitful, it is a well lived theological life that not only helps us get a life, but helps make it a life worth getting! And no, I don't want to turn everyone into amateur dogmaticians, two words that should never be juxtaposed outside of an irenic spirit. Nor do I think everyone should give up other life pursuits, intellectual interests, family commitments, cultural experiences, leisure and entertainment pleasures, personal development for work, just to waste the time saved doing God stuff.

The theological life is life lived with God always on the horizon, and often in the foreground.

The theological life is a worldview interpreted through what we believe about God.

The theological life is what we believe about God being brought into conversation with our lived experience in our daily world, from the personal to the global.

The theological life is a way of listening to our lives, the world and the voices of all the others we encounter in the I-Thou of our living relatedness to all around us.

The theological life is to take with both committed seriousness and creative openness, the central truths of Christian existence and experience through which God has addressed His creation with the I-Thou of eternal love.

And thus the theological life is to live and learn, to give and take, to wonder and worship, to desire and enjoy, the great symphony of purposeful, precarious yet persistent love that has as its dominant theme what God has said and done in Jesus Christ.

And so the theological life is to see our lives, our world and the future of all creation as that symphony moving towards its thunderous, rapturous and sublime finale.

And so the theological life is to get a life, and one worth getting – and giving in love and service to one another, and to the Triune God, Father Son and Spirit, One God, Blessed forever.

24 June 2011
Lovers of Discord because Lovers of Truth?

Lovers of Discord is one of Keith Clements' best books, though I guess not all that well known now. Published 23 years ago it is a critical but appreicative account of some of the theological bust ups in England in the 20th Century. Whether or not he agreed with the theological speculations, aberrations and protestations, he clearly admired those who were too faithful to the truth to silence awkward questions, or settle for partial and unconvincing arguments, or put up with dogmatic pronouncements disguised as conviction but in reality strident certitudes scared stiff of hesitation, uncertainty and doubt. On the last page he quotes the well repeated lines about the Lord having yet more light and truth to break forth from his word, and uses it the way most people do – as a warning against ever thinking we have God sussed, or that our views have some kind of secure finality, or that our view of the Bible is the biblical one and other people who differ are, well, unbiblical.

But then on the last page he writes some reflections that could only come from someone whose spirit is ecumenical, whose faith is evangelical, whose theology is liberal in the sense of generous, and whose mind remains open to the Spirit of truth who takes the things of Jesus and makes them known to the intellect, the heart and those secret places within us where truth gains its purchase on our deepest motives, inciters our most passionate longings, and sustains our most persistent hopes. Here is Clements' final words in this book:

"There is a looking back to the past for authoritative reassurance, rather than an anticipation of some new thing, a continual desire to return and check the tomb is empty before taking the road to jerusalem to wherever Christ is to be met anew….We may believe in an ultimate unity of truth, though not apprehended as yet, and only seen in a glass darkly. The resolution of theological conflict is a hope and it will be fulfilled only when there is no more to be taught us by the Spirit of truth." (Page 242)

The book is available used on Amazon for 1p – which just goes to show you can't tell a book by looking at its price! The image is from Hubble – and is included here just to remind us of our size, our place, and our insignificance if we are considered apart from the eternal purposeful Love that moves the sun and other stars.

22 June 2011
The Disabled, The Minimum Wage, and Mr Davies’ Preposterous Idea

There are times when the statements emanating from members of the current Government simply have to be named for the nonsense they are.

And sometimes named as the dangerous nonsense they are.

The latest is the suggestion by Philip Davies, Conservative MP for Shipley, that disabled people and people with mental ill health issues, should be allowed to / prepared to work for less than the minimum wage of £5.93 an hour.

The ostensible justification is that such a move would make disabled people and people with mental ill health more employable by offering a financial advantage to the employer.

That this creates an entire new pool of cheap labour, based on discrimination seems to have escaped Mr Davies.

That it sends a powerful social signal of devaluation likewise seems to surprise him.

Look at the article in the link, from the Daily Telegraph, which is hardly at the left wing of British political journalism See here

Now Shipley has a different tradition of both politics and theological viewpoint. P T Forsyth was once the Congregational minister there. He wrote a booklet on "Socialism, the Church and the Poor". Wonder what he would have written to Mr Davies as his local MP?

When all allowances are made for the MP's back-tracking and special pleading of good intentions towards those with disabilities and mental ill-health, it remains embarrassing, preposterous and outrageous that an MP should even think let alone articulate such a suggestion.

I'm not questioning his right to hold such views, or to state them. (Though the Equality and Diversity and Discrimination watchdogs are more than interested in a conversation about them).

I am however questioning whether his view has any ethical validity, discerning compassion, or social wisdom – his suggestion seems on the contrary to be ethically vacuous, cynically insensitive and socially reckless.

Downing St has distanced itself from the statement – but I await an outright apology and rebuke that a member of the Government has spoken such, well, such nonsense – I just spell checked this sentence and had originally written nosense, which is also true.

18 June 2011
Reading the Old Testament as a Christian, with humility and a care for its origins in Jewish faith

Over the past decade or so John Goldingay has produced an astonishing quantity of quality studies on what he calls the First Testament. His two erudite and elegant volumes in the International critical Commentary on Second Isaiah are reason enough to wonder. But they were preceded by the large monograph The Message of Isaiah 40-56, which is the best thing around for getting to the heart of this majestic document of renewed hope and persistent faith.

Three volumes of commentary on the Psalms constitute a further gift to the church, and these I've used regularly over the past few years. Years ago one of Goldingay's first books was a paperback study of the Psalms 42-51, Songs from a Strange Land. Those of us who used it hoped he would eventually write a full scale commentary. The three volumes in the Baker Wisdom Commentary series are comprehensive in exegesis without being overwhelming, the theology of the each psalm is explored and opened up for the church's response of praise, thanksgiving, confession or lament.

Then there is the trilogy on Old Testament Theology, a total of 2,500 pages of some of the most stimulating and discursive theological exegesis I've read. And discursive doesn't mean unstructured, or wandering – it means bringing a range of disciplines together in the task of interpreting the gospel, the faith and the life of Israel. He concedes that his approach overlaps with J W McClendon's threefold division of ethics, doctrine and witness, and like McClendon he insists that it is the life Israel is called to live, and its faithfulness in pursuing it, that gives credibility to Israel's gospel and substance to its faith. Likewise it is ethics, lived practice that most fully expresses the Gospel of Jesus. Not that doctrine and confessional proclamation are unimportant, but they depend upon transformative living through obedient appropriation of what God has declared in Jesus Christ.

Goldingay holds in close connectedness the First and Second Testaments. And his treatment of Torah gives no concession to the the extreme of reductionism that devalues and dismisses the biblical witness to Torah as the instruction for human life before God. But neither does he entertain any idealising or absolutising of Torah as overarching law whose requirements are mere demands without enabling grace. In Goldingay's approach there is a conscientious and respectful handling of the witness, faith and ethics of Israel. The result is one of the most usable and enlightening overviews of Old Testament Theology available.

Over the years I've worked through several of the big names, some of them double volumes, and learned much in the process. But Goldingay writes out of profound scholarship, alert to the post-modern challenges faced by faith traditions embedded in meta-narratives now open to question, sympathetic to the original bearers of the witness of the First Testament, yet committed to understanding the place of the Old Testament in Christian living and in the church's proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The three volumes expound life in community as it is lived towards God, embraces the neighbour and calls to personal integrity. And Goldingay writes well, out of personal conviction, generous to other views, lucid and engaged, and above all as someone who loves the text too much to force it into any distorting conformity with theological assumptions imported from elsewhere.

John Goldingay sits alongside several others whose work on the Old Testament I find illuminating, refreshingly unpredictable, and written by scholars respectful of both text and reader – Walter Brueggemann, Kathleen O'Connor, Terence Fretheim, William P Brown, Clinton McCann come to mind. Amongst the servants of God within the church, for whom the church should reserve a Sunday to celebrate and give thanks, are those biblical scholars who think and pray, consider and weigh, write and publish, providing the nourishment of soul and the fruit of scholarship for the nurture of the faith and the health of the church. John Goldingay is one such scholar.

15 June 2011
When a moment of transcendence becomes unbidden prayer

I've long given up on trying to understand why some things happen when they do. The theological answer, depending on your theological view, is that all happens, directly or indirectly, in the providence of God. Where the theology becomes tricky is when we try to make that providence absolute and determinist. I prefer to think of God as engaged with, involved with, invested in, the history and destiny of creation. As to whether that means every leaf that falls is by God's direct will, it does mean that Jesus' image of the attentiveness of the Father who notices and cares for each sparrow is more than exaggerated sentiment.

So what am I to make of yesterday's coincidence of music and ornithology, when immanence and transcendence coalesced in a moment of joy, and a recognition of the marvellous serendipity of small things intimating the vastness of possibility for God to nudge us awake to the beauty of life?

I was sitting in the car at Sandend (the Moray coast), listening to Classic FM and Vaughan Williams' Lark Ascending.

The window was down, the waves were breaking white against some rocks further along the shore.

Two skylarks rose singing their accompaniment to the violinist and showing how it should be done.

And the combination of sunshine, blue sky, blue sea and white waves, sublime music and perfectly timed skylark notes, provided an orchestration that became a glimpse of that infinitely wise and fecund purpose that notices the sparrow, and endows the skylark with a song of heartbreaking and heart-healing melody.

As a child I lived in the Ayrshire countryside when skylarks were numerous, their song a daily liturgy of aspiration, and ever since that song embedded in memory and feeling.

Prayer is often at its most real, not in the speaking of words, but in those moments of awakened memory, wonderful surprise, and impossible coincidence. No wonder poets love skylarks.

15 June 2011
Holiday for a week so staying at home!

I'm having a holiday week at home in Westhill. It's been a busy time with end of Semester and end of Session marking and processing, but now everything is tidied up. And before we begin the wind up to next academic year I'm having a week to let the horizons draw back again and look at all the other things in life that also matter, indeed yes, they do!

There's much to see and enjoy on our doorstep – castles and gardens, coastal and hill walks, we are bird watchers and coffee shop connoisseurs, I get to do the cooking for dinner, and if it's raining we have DVD's, the cinema – oh, and rain jackets. Will have a day in Edinburgh to meet some folk and I'll carve out an hour at the National Galleries.

Meantime there hasn't been a poem here for a while. remedied now:

Soloist

Seeing above Glen Lyon a forester

sawing in a shaft of sunlight so far

downwind the sound is drowned

by perpetual lark-song, I am drawn

to that sweltering auditorium decades ago

and Rostropovitch playing Dvorak's cello

concerto; folk melody rising, the soloist

silhouetted in a nimbus of gold dust.

Stewart Conn, The Breakfast Room (Bloodaxe, 2010), page 54.

That's a holiday poem, and we will be walking in Glen Dye later this week, if there's a sunny day. I don't walk in rain for fun!

s!

13 June 2011