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  • The Adoration of the Magi: Comparing and Contrasting Cultural Assumptions.

    Illustration for modern french bible Browsing for different art images of the adoration of the Magi I came across this from a modern illustrated French Bible.

    Can't think of any profound observations to make. The mixture of ethnic and cartoon art give it lightness, movement and though the whole thing seems slightly eccentric, that adds to the strangeness.

    In any case what is more strange than three powerful scholar nobles, crossing several national borders through the desert to reach an obscure out sized village at the back of beyond in occupied Judea, carrying valuable gifts, and offering them reverently while kneeling at the feet of a peasant woman who has just given birth so far as the world knows, to a child of dubious parenthood?

    One of the functions of cartoon art is to nudge us out of the familiar and confront us with a strangeness that may be more true than we are ready to admit.

    Flemish unknown adoration Anyway. If what we are looking for is realism, then none of the great art masterpieces come any closer. Each sets the story in the cultural context of the artist. In that sense the strangeness is twofold – the story itself is strange, but then there is the interpretive chasm we need to span and the leap of imagination required for us to have any idea of the meaning of this scene by an unknown Fleish artist, for 15th Century Renaissance Europeans, many still unable to read, but living through the cultural flux of new knowledge challenging old certainties.

    That two such different pieces of art could refer to the same biblical incident, and portray them with cultural congruence despite a gap of 400 years and generations of historical and cultural change, seems to suggest that art is its own kind of exegesis, or eisegesis; and each artist is one whose hermeneutic approach like our own, is culturally conditioned, historically limited and theologically partial. None of which need be a problem if we are open to learn, to compare, to critique and then to look again at the story and its meaning for our own time. Whatever else art does, it cautions against that first instinct to pin down a story to a single meaning, and opens up meanings we never imagined before.

  • The Theological Possibilities in a Damaged Painting of the Nativity

    Fra lippi nativity From countless depictions of the Nativity I have chosen this one by Fra Filippo Lippi (mid 1400's), because paradoxically it says something the artist intended but not in the way it now appears.

    What do I mean? Mary's robe was originally painted in blue, a tradition of honouring Mary by sparing no expense in portraying her purity, beauty and sanctity. On this painting the blue was a thin coat on dry plaster, rather than blue pigment mixed into the plaster in a true fresco. Over the centuries the colour has degraded into grey. This cost-cutting device has the unintentional irony of portraying Mary as she saw herself, a poor handmaiden unworthy of honour. Thus an upmarket depiction of the Nativity now shows Mary in a flaked and entirely faded cloak. "He was rich yet became poor, that we through his poverty might become rich". So many Renaissance paintings of the Nativity are all but perfect; their codes and symbols, narrative drive and cultural context, theology and piety, their execution and technique – the finest art the world has ever seen.

    Perhaps especially at Christmas, we are helped to see the scandal and the loss, the cost and the consequence, the trust and the terror, the extraordinary ordinariness of the Word made flesh, and the frightened courage of the Mother of the Son of God sharing that poverty as an act of self impoverishing faith in a God who somtimes asks the impossible, and then by divine grace enables and embraces human trust, so winning the response of the human heart.

    Perhaps. A happy and thoughtful Christmas to all who come by here regularly. Because for Christians Christmas is a time when joy should be unconfined, and thought too!

  • BBC Nativity: Good TV and not bad eisegesis either.

    The-Nativity-007 The BBC adaptation of the Nativity finished last night, and I thought it was a beautifully conceived mini-series. Written by Tony Jordan (Eastenders, and Life on Mars) who researched the historical and theological background over four years, it struck the right balance between the discourse of historical drama and soap opera. Tatiana Maslany as Mary was compelling and convincing, both in her confusions and then her growing certainty of the mystery that had engulfed her. The men, Joseph and her father, perhaps understandably rejected her story as fantasy, and their hostility was grudgingly tempered by enough humanity to send her away, and accompany her as far as Bethlehem. Herod was suitably psychotic, just the kind of egomaniac who would have children slaughtered to secure his own security! The Magi were an attractive combination of the comic and and the mystic, otherworldly and well versed in the real-politik of Herod. The portrayal of astrology as a life study and serious epistemology in its own right was sympathetic and I think an authentic depiction of the best science and mathematics of the time.

    The climactic scene of the birth was a remarkable sequence of old, old story and original juxtapositions. Joseph, turned away in Bethlehem by his family so long as he insisted on staying with Mary; his frantic search in crowded streets for a midwife or at least a woman to help Mary; the accidental desperation of kicking in the door of the stable; the labour of Mary, lonely, primal and anguished, and the pivotal moment when Joseph took her hand as the baby is being born; the coincidence of the stars reflected in the convergence of Magi and shepherds; the midwife donating her blue outer garment, signifying much that would come to be revered in Mary. These are thoughtful interpretive moves that gave freshness to familiarity, and depth to a story often enough reduced to shallow thought and surface sentiment.

    On the critical side I have a couple of serious reservations. Rabbi Jonathan Romain, and adviser to the BBC on religious themes, took serious exception to the portrayal of a Rabbi refusing sanctuary to Mary when she and her mother fled into the synagogue to escape a stone throwing baying mob. I think Romain is right. The Torah provides for places of sanctuary, and requires compassion and mercy be shown in sacred space – such a response of mercy would have been more typical of Jewish religious ethics of the time, at least at their best. Rabbi Romain saw the scene as anti-Jewish, and likely to have a negative impact on Jewish-Christian relations. I'm surprised if he is an adviser to the BBC that he wasn't shown the scene much earlier and asked to comment. The refusal to help two life-threatened women did jar, and for me was inauthentic, an unfair caricature of a religious tradition that has always understood mercy is woven into the very texture of law.

    250px-Siena-Duomo-floor My other comment is about why there wasn't a fifth episode. The omission of the flight to Egypt, against the background of the Herod's mad power paranoia, and the Slaughter of the Innocents, sanitises a story in a way that is morally and theologically misleading. There are enough holocausts still happening in our world, enough recurring slaughters of the innocent, for us to be able to locate such atrocity within the very story that points to a promised end to such normalised cruelty. Not for nothing is the Wonderful Counsellor and Prince of Peace prophecy of Isaiah 9 contrasted in the same text with the burning of the trampling boots of the soldier and the blood soaked garments of war.

    The birth of this child is a threat to the world's power structures, from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, from Nazareth to Rome, from Washington to London, and beyond. The birth of this child is a statement by God, reiterated wherever innocent lives are rendered dispensable and redefined as collateral damage, from Bethlehem to Egypt, and from every site of murder and cruelty in the pursuit of power. The birth of this child triggered the ensuing political madness of power paranoia, and this also is part of the story. Not for Christmas cards of course, but for those who follow the One born in the stable, and do so with theological and moral seriousness, there is the call to see and name the cruelties and atrocities of inhumane power systems and unjust structures and merciless economies.

    (The image above is from the pulpit of Siena Cathedral, a detail of The Slaughter of the Innocents.)

  • “Peace on earth, good will to men” – believing against the noise of the artillery

    Nativity-window-at-Middleton-Cheney
    Fallujah-U.S.-artillery-fire-111104-by-Lance-Cpl.-Samantha-L.-Jones

    CHRISTMAS BELLS

     

    I heard the bells on Christmas Day

    Their old, familar carols play,

         And wild and sweet

         The words repeat

    Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

     

    And thought how, as the day had come,

    The belfries of all Christendom

         Had rolled along

         The unbroken song

    Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

     

    Till ringing, singing on it's way,

    The world revolved from night to day,

         A voice, a chime,

         A chant sublime

    Of peace on earth, good-will to men!  

     

    Then from each black, accursed mouth

    The cannon thundered in the South,

         And with the sound

         The carols drowned

    Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

     

    It was as if an earthquake rent

    The heart- stones of a continent,

         And made forlorn

         The households born

    Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

     

    And in despair I bowed my head;

    "There is no place on earth," I said;

         "For hate is strong,

         And mocks the song

    Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

     

    Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

    "God is not dead, nor doth he sleep;

         The Wrong shall fail,

         The Right prevail,

    With peace on earth, good-will to men."

    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807- 1882)

  • Thanks be to God for His unspeakable gift….

    The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his own vanity; God-like, he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis, completely expressible in words. To write or to speak is almost inevitably to lie a little. It is an attempt to clothe an intangible in a tangible form; to compress an immeasurable into a mold. And in the act of compression, how Truth is mangled and torn.

    Anne Morrow Lindbergh, The Wave of the Future, Harcourt brace and Co, 1940, p. 6

    Faith is not expected to give complete satisfaction to the intellect. It leaves the intellect suspended in obscurity, without light proper to its own mode of knowing. Yet it does not frustrate the intellect, or deny it, or destroy it. It pacifies it with a conviction which it know is can accept quite rationally under the guidance of love. For the act of faith is an act in which the intellect is content to know God by loving Him and accepting His statements about himself on his own terms…By faith one not only attains to truth in a way that intelligence and reason alone cannot do, but one assents to God Himself. One receives God. One says "yes" not merely to a statement about God, but to the Invisible,  Infinite God Himself.

    Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, Burns and Oates, 1962, p. 98

    Van_hornthorst_adoration_children_800x583Perhaps something of what Lindbergh and Merton were saying is captured in Paul's apophatic exclamation – "Thanks be to God for His unspeakable gift" – generosity beyond articulation, the Word made flesh because the Word overflows the expressive capacity of words. When all our words are spoken, and all our thoughts are thought, the residue of meaning is immeasurable, infinite, eternal – but has become personal, "all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in Him….and the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, full of grace and truth. And we have beheld his glory…. Gloria in Excelsis Deo! 

  • Baroness Judith Hart – Conviction Politicians, Education and Giving Young People Life-chances.

    Judithhart One of the most important letters I ever received was from a Member of Parliament, the Honourable Judith Hart, MP, Later Baroness Hart of South Lanark. (Photo taken the year I was born). When I needed a Local Authority grant to afford further education my application was declined for reasons beyond my control, and which seemed at the time unjust. Judith Hart intervened and I was able to afford a year full time to get the Highers needed for University. My parents could never have afforded to keep me and pay for fees and accommodation and travel.The grant was small but enough.

    Yesterday I listened to a young woman of 18 talking on radio about not having an Education Maintenance Allowance of around £30 a week. Without that little amount weekly, would she be able still to stay in education – "yes" she said, "but I would go without lunch".

    That is a disgrace.

    I don't mean that word to mean only that it is regrettable or even outrageous – though disgrace absolutely means both. I mean it is a policy that lacks grace, generosity, vision, imagination, compassion, understanding, – apart from lacking in any political sense whatsoever.It is a decision stripped of grace, and a decision that strips the hopes and ambitions of young people of grace, and turns aspiration into desperation.

    Consider the figures. £1200 per annum is sufficient top up to keep a young person in Education for a further year, consolidating their qualifications and preventing them from going on the dole. So apart from that saving – how many could be afforded if a couple of bankers were not to receive their, let's say modest £1 million bonus? Huh? Do the maths. It's about 850 x 2 = 1700. Or how much does the taxpayer pay for a meal on an MP's expense account – much change from £30?

    David-cameron-and-nick-clegg-pic-pa-578347154 There are political and economic decisions that are always going to be hard to call. Choices are inevitable. But the choices we make as a society aren't just about what we do with money and where we make the cuts. Each choice is either for or against someone's life chances. I wonder how many of today's MP's in the Coalition Government have ever had to think twice about what to do with limited income. Eighteen millionaires in an austerity cabinet does suggest a lack of experience of the real world, the hard choices others have to make everyday. Would that today's decision makers had the political stature of Judith Hart to fight for the right of the young to have education based on ability not social class or economic security.

    Are we really saying, you and me, ordinary UK taxpayers, are we saying to that young student that it's ok for her to go without lunch as the price for her education, that as a society we own that choice? Surely if she becomes a social worker, or a lawyer, or an IT specialist, or a manager, – whatever her eventual employment, will she not be a tax-payer who then carries the cost of others coming after her? And even if she doesn't – is education as a humanising and developmental process not something we value enough to underwrite some of the cost to make it as accessible as possible for each person?

    There is something depressingly banal about a Government that lacks moral imagination, that rationalises broken pledges, that picks easy targets, that makes choices that are so against the least powerful they are embarrassingly partisan, and ridiculously out of touch with ordinary folk's struggles.

    Amongst the letters I received on the occasion of my ordination, having completed University and College training, was a brief note of congratulations from Judith Hart, who had followed my progress for five years, and seen the difference a small bursary made to the life chances of a young man from a low income and working class home. Not just moral imagination, but political conviction married to wise priorities based on humane goals. For a return to such politics, I pray and read Amos, Micah and Isaiah.

  • Hauerwas on the importance of questions and the danger of explanatory answers

    Hauerwas In his theological memoir, Hannah's Child, Hauerwas writes with astonishing honesty about himself, others, his faith and how he sees the world. Referring to his wife's mental ill health he reflects on those who have assumed a theologian would have answers about how such life can be so lonely and sad. Then he says this:

    I have learned over the years as a Christian theologian that none of us should try to answer such questions. Our humanity demands that we ask them, but if we are wise we should then remain silent. ..When Christianity is assumed to be an "answer" that makes the world intelligible, it reflects an accommodated church committed to assuring Christians that the way things are is the way they have to be.

    Such answers cannot help but turn Christianity into an explanation. For me, learning to be a Christian has meant learning to live without answers. Indeed, to learn to live in this way is what makes being a Christian so wonderful. Faith is but a name for learning how to go on without knowing the answers….. (pp. 207-8)


  • What Prayer Teaches Us.

    Hauerwas

     

    Prayer has taught me that God is God, and I'm not.

    (Stanley Hauerwas, Interview)

  • Advent Intercessions: Praying for those for whom joy is a hard word to hear, and harder to feel

    Angel_burne-jones "We bring good tidings of great joy,

    Which shall be to all people."

    …

    Advent God, who comes to us in love, peace and joy,

    We thank you

    for love that nourishes and sustains our hearts,

    for peace that enables us to live in friendship with others

    for joy that illumines and inspires our lives.

     

    Yet to be loved and not care for the unloved,

    To live in peace and ignore the shattered lives of others

    To celebrate our own enjoyment selfishly,

    Are sins against you, O Advent God,

    Which deny the very message we preach.

    So in thanking you for the joys that illumine our lives, We pray for those for whom joy seems far away and for others to enjoy.

    For all whose loneliness is made worse by parties, laughter and other people’s joy:

    • For bereaved people still hurting from the death of someone they have loved
    • For wives, husbands and children, whose lives have been broken by family break-up, divorce and the dismantling of their hopes.
    • For older people now living on their own, 1 in 8 of whom will see nobody over Christmas

    Lord in their loneliness, may these your children know the presence of the Wonderful Counsellor, and comfort them through us.

    In thanking you for the joys that illumine our lives, we pray for all who are hungry and homeless at the very time when everyone else will be eating their fill, enjoying the warm comfort of home.

    • Those men and women and young people whose lives simply collapsed and they fell through all the safety nets
    • Those for whom the big issue isn’t a magazine, but the hopelessness, loneliness and placelessness of not having a home
    • Those who have to stand in supermarket queues looking at others with stacked trolleys and finding it impossible not to envy
    • Those who won’t receive any Christmas cards because they have no address, no live relationships with their past

     Lord for those who feel empty and unwanted, be to them the Everlasting Father, and love them through us.

     In thanking you for the joys that illumine our lives, we pray for all who are ill, or suffering, or anxious about their future

    • We pray your compassion on those who are in hospital, feeling isolated, dis-empowered, and often disorientated
    • We pray your strength for those who struggle day and daily with chronic illness, constant pain, and a sense of their own weakness
    • We pray your peace for those who care for their loved family or friend, and who often wonder how long they can keep up with the demands and needs of one they love
    • We pray your patience and respite for those who care for those suffering from Alzheimer’s and other conditions that take away the sense of self, and descend into loneliness.

    Lord for those who are suffering and anxious, and for those needing strength to care for them, be to them the Almighty God whose love and joy and peace surround, uphold and will never let go,

    Through Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, Amen

    (This prayer was prepared for worship in Crown Terrace Baptist Church 3rd Sunday in Advent – you are free to use it and adapt it if it would be helpful in another place).

  • Academic Administration: necessary tedium and / or exciting experiement?

    Amongst the many horizons that have opened up to me in recent years, few have been more personally enriching and theologically challenging than academic administration. Yes. You are quite correct. Not a miss-print, nor a mind flip, not even a joke. AA. Not the Automobile Association, so hard pressed in the recent and returning climate of traffic paralysis. Not Alcoholics Anonymous, that wonderful organisation that, despite its faults and drawbacks, has drawn back many a life from the brink and enabled human beings to discover again their dignity, humanity and purpose. Not stranded motorists then, nor people at the end of the line all but destroyed by alcohol addiction – but something altogether more prosaic – AA, the discipline, skill, and ever recurring demands of ensuring that learning and teaching are up to scratch, quality assured, demonstrably effective. Academic Administration.

    SBC Now I admit I too have seen AA as an algae outbreak in the garden pond, until I realised it might instead be the aerator and filter that keeps the water healthy. Now yes – some academic admin is tedious but necessary, and some is tedious and repetitive and harder to justify. And there's too much of it. (Warning: two long sentences ahead!) But in thinking about theological education, and how to shape a curriculum for 21st Century  Graduates in Theology, whose vocational trajectory is ministry of one kind or another, and for some, definitely pastoral ministry in the uniquely varied context of Scottish Baptist faith communities, the necessary clarity, scrutiny and rigour has come from thought disciplined by educational theory, ideas shaped by academic experience, and our limited small-world agendas pushed outwards by the requirement to demonstrate we know what we are doing! If theological education is to be taken seriously within the academy (and I refuse to have the word academic used always negatively, dismissively, pejoratively, as if loving God with our minds were not at least a quarter of what it means to love God at all!); so if theological education is to gain respectful hearing and serious consideration as a way of knowing, living and acting faithfully in our world, then it should not only survive in the academy, but earn the right to speak, be heard and make a difference to how we understand what a University is about.

    Tokenz-dealwd023 That is why I'm spending much of my time with documentation, Module Descriptors, Programme Specifications, Regulatory Frameworks, QAA Handbooks, SCQF Articulations, Subject Benchmarks, and Annual Monitoring processes heavy on evaluative reflection. If AA is required of the Sciences and the Social Sciences, of Computing and Business, of Health and Engineering, then why not of Divinity?  One particular area of increasing reflection in the wider HE sector is "Attributes of the 21st Century Graduate". Some of the work done here is very helpful in identifying the kinds of persons we ideally want to produce through an effective, distinctive and high quality course of personal and academic formation. So. What might be the attributes of the 21st Century Graduate in Theology and Pastoral Studies. Ideally, what kind of person should emerge from a Degree aimed at training people for ministry in the 21st Century?

    From a  lengthy process of consultation, reflection, and distillation I have formulated eight, which will form the basis of a paper I hope to have published soon. Do any of you readers  want to have a go at suggesting attributes both essential and desirable, of the 21st Century Graduate in Theology and Pastoral Studies? You are allowed up to three.

    By the way, to raise the issue during Advent might seem another AA – Advent Aberration brought on by seasonal over excitement; or AA – Altogether Annoying distraction from seasonal themes; or yet Another Argument not worth having before Christmas:)) Indulge me – make your suggestion a gesture of goodwill…..