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The Berlin Wall as symbol of the Gospel: breaking down dividing walls of hostility

I know. The Berlin Wall was a symbol of division and suspicion, a concretisation of enmity, such an offence to human ties of family and friends and such a denial of freedom, that people died trying to escape from behind it. So it seems an incongruous symbol of the Gospel. But in one sense it is just that. It represented, and still represents in the memory, that which the Gospel of Jesus Christ intentionally contradicts, that which Good News of liberation, reconciliation and new creation subverts with the patient persistence of a love from all eternity. And the breach of the berlin Wall 20 years ago remains for me an unforgettable portrayal of what it means when a dividing wall of hostility is dismantled and it is possible to look into the face of the one who is no longer an enemy.

God has given to the Church a ministry of reconciliation. In Jesus God was reconciling the world to Himself, God's purpose being to reconcile all things to Himself, making peace by the blood of the cross. (so 2 Corinthians 5 and Colossians 1) And everywhere walls are dismantled, that radical and subversive Gospel of reconciliation is enacted, proclaimed amongst the rubble of demolished prejudices and hatreds. And conversely, wherever Christians build walls that shut others out, or maintain walls intended for their own safety, or defend walls that exclude and diminish 'the other', then we give comfort to the culture of division, we choose the way of the world, we contradict the realities of the cross, and we lose all claim to be good news for anybody.

So today I celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall.

But I also pray for the dismantling of those walls out there that still stand, that are fiercely defended, that provide ramparts for our prejudices and battlements for our fears.

And I pray for the undermining and overtoppling of those walls in my own heart behind which I hide, and which represent my own strategies of exclusion, separation and self-defence at the cost of the other who is my sister and brother.

And I pray for the courage to confront the ugliness and brutality, the divisiveness and diminishment, the inhumanity and futility, of those walls that seem permanent, those intolerable structures of power we tolerate.

And by such confrontation, to follow faithfully after Christ, the crucified reconciler, embodying a ministry of reconciliation and peace-making.

As Robert Frost said in his unintentionally theological poem 'Mending Wall', "something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down."

10 November 2009
Parties, photos and our literary DNA

OK. After several requests and not a few demands – here's the picture – Sheila and I routinely out for a night….! Unfortunately the picture doesn't show the whole me – which included multicoloured trousers, pink gloves, luminous striped socks and lurid lime green plastic shoes. That one might yet be emailed to me, in which case, for a small fee…….

Must be a new lease of life. Or we've suddenly become socially in demand. Whatever, we are just back from another party in Aberdeen. Not fancy dress this time – a significant birthday of a good friend. But we are back in Aberdeen later this week for a 90th birthday party.

Three parties in 12 days. And each of them special because the person whose life is being celebrated is special and integral not only to our lives but to that sense of who we are, that derives from the giftedness of those relationships that define, enrich and impinge on our lives in many welcome ways. I believe deeply that we are persons in relation, and that individuality only matters when it is encompassed within the shared lives of those who move in and out and within our lives. Who these people are, how we met them, what led to the formation of such enduring connections of love, affection and friendship is part of the mystery of human relatedness, but also part of the graced gift that each person is who troubles to think any one of us worth getting to know.

So not much time for reading you'd think. True enough, but wee corners of time still found here and there. I've just finished Susan Hill's book about a year's reading of only the books already in her home. Along the way she dishes out wisdom and advice, opinion and prejudice, gossip and mini-memoirs – the book is a delight. And there are still a couple of quotes worth inserting here. The last one did get a couple of gentle correctives from Rick and Jason – you can see my comment response on Jason's blog here. Anyway, here's Ms Hill saying what I've long suspected – that the books we read deeply become part of who we are:

"Books help to form us. If you cut me open, will you find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me?….What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books, as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA."

Susan Hill, Howard's End is on the Landing (London: Profile Books, 2009), 201-2.

9 November 2009
One of the real gains of walking through blogland is that like many another stroll in unfamiliar landscape, you turn a corner and discover beauty, are surprised by joy, ambushed by that which deamnds our attention. So on James K Smith's blog, Fors Clavigera, I came across this quotation from Charles Péguy's long prose poem. It distills into beautiful words and cadences some of our inner longing to know enough of the heart of God to live our lives hopefully towards the always new future. To be read slowly, and more than once.

From The Portal of the Mystery of Hope By Charles Péguy

The faith that I love best, says God, is hope.

Faith doesn’t surprise me. It’s not surprising.

I am so resplendent in my creation. . . .

That in order really not to see me these poor people would have to be blind.

Charity says God, that doesn’t surprise me. It’s not surprising.

These poor creatures are so miserable that unless they had a heart of stone,

how could they not have love for one another.

How could they not love their brothers.

How
could they not take the bread from their own mouth, their daily bread,
i

n order to give it to the unhappy children who pass by.

And my son had such love for them. . . .

But hope, says God, that is something that surprises me.

Even me. That is surprising.

That these poor children see how things are going

and believe that tomorrow things will go better. T

hat they see how things are going today

and believe that they will go better tomorrow morning.

That is surprising and it’s by far the greatest marvel of our grace.

And I’m surprised by it myself.

And my grace must indeed be an incredible force.

~trans. David L. Schindler, Jr.

8 November 2009
Internet browsing versus love of books

I know. The post title is a set up. There aren't only two alternatives. But I suspect that out there most people opt for one or the other as the default route to information.

Of course surfing the web and reading a good book aren't mutually exclusive. But I still think Susan Hill's observation comes as a dunt in the ribs to those of us too easily lured along the labyrinthine paths of that endlessly seductive land called Worldwideweb.

"Too much internet usage fragments the brain and dissipates concentration so that after a while, one's ability to spend long, focused hours immersed in a single subject becomes blunted.

Information comes pre-digested in small pieces, one grazes on endless ready meals and snacks of the mind, and the result is mental malnutrition."

Susan Hill, Howards End is on the Landing, page 2.

7 November 2009
Gordon Fee as Exegete: Giving Paul his due and the importance of word order

Two examples of Fee's no nonsense exegetical comments:

"R F Collins argues (unconvincingly) that Paul has here taken over an earlier formula and adapted it to his own purposes. While all things are possible, not all possible things are equally probable. Indeed, it is of considerable interest that the most creative theologian in the early church is seen as not capable of being creative at points like this, but must be assumed to be borrowing from others – and that without evidence."

……………………….

On Paul's use of charis and shalom in the greeting:

"Paul salutes his brothers and sisters in Christ with "grace to you – and peace." It is worth noting that this is the invariable order of Paul's words, not "grace and peace to you" as in most translations. Very likely there is significance to this order: the grace of God and Christ is what is given to God's people; peace is what results from such a gift. Hence "grace to you – and peace."…The sum total of God's activity towards his human creatures is found in the word "grace"; God has given himself to his people bountifully and mercifully in Christ. Nothing is deserved, nothing can be achieved. The sum total of those benefits as they are experienced by the recipients of God's grace is "peace", God's eschatological shalom, both now and to come."

………………….

If the task of the exegete is to enable later readers to hear as clearly as possible, the voice of the one speaking in the text, then these two brief quotations are good examples of why Gordon Fee is a trusted guide. For myself, I wholly concur with his pedantic care in translating Paul's greeting "grace to you – and peace". Allowing the brief pause between the two both distinguishes and connects them in a way that is profoundly theological.

On another note, the Scottish Baptist College Blog is being revived into a discussion forum for issues that we as part of the Scottish Baptist community want to explore in conversation. In particular we want to explore areas of theological education, ministry formation, discipleship in 21st Century Culture, and we will include occasional book reviews. It will also contain news and comment from our College community and have some guest posts from students and others now and again. You might want to go look – I'll occasionally flag it up here as new material is added.

6 November 2009
Gordon Fee and the intellectual deference of a New Testament scholar.

There are occasional Bible commentaries that have a long shelf life, and then there are those that are hacked out to meet the voracious appetite of publishers for niche series. The carbon footprint of commentary mania is brontosauran in its scale. There are currently around 125 biblical commentary series in production in various North Western World publishers. You can see them here if you click on Series button on the upper menu bar. I'm not sure whether to describe this as ludicrous, wasteful, exegetical overkill, marketing madness, unbiblical abuse of creation gifts, or just plain stupid. But out there somewhere people are buying them, seduced by claims of niche market, latest scholarship, and that underlying assumption that if the book is about the Bible it must be justified.

So. When I buy a new commentary now (it was not always thus for me), I have to have a good reason. It has to give me what I don't have and really need. The fact that it rehearses what everyone else has said, or the concern to defend particular positions, or the claim that it now adds a different perspective isn't enough. Nor do I want a commentary that forecloses exegetical options because the publisher takes a particular theological line – and that goes both for the conservative and the critical.

For the discerning commentary reader and user there are certain names that are the gold standard. Gordon Fee is one. Now Professor Emeritus of New Testament Exegesis at Regent's College Vancouver, he is a retired Pentecostal scholar of singular standing across the denominations. His exegetical honesty, focused erudition, rigorous scholarship, and crisp no nonsense writing style laced with fun and gentle critique of others' positions, make him a joy to read. His First Corinthians and Philippians are amongst my most used volumes – I've read them both and used them constantly. His two massive exegetical studies of the Holy Spirit (God's Empowering Presence) and of Christology (Pauline Christology) as well as his up-front honest exegesis of the Pastoral Epistles, are full of help for those who want to break sweat doing some exegetical excavations.

So now I am slowly reading my way through his newest volume on the Thessalonian Epistles. I'm going to blog on Fee once a week for a while – just highlighting what makes him interesting, reliable, for me the commentator of choice on any book he chooses to work on. And not because he is always right, or says what I'd like to confirm my own exegetical prejudices; but because he is to be trusted with a text, which he treats with an intellectual deference that nonetheless tolerates the hard questions. And because he knows when to expose nonsense, question unexamined assumptions, and link up creative connections across the range of the Bible, while making sure that pastors and preachers, scholars and enquirers see both the wood and the trees, and learn to love the view. Tomorrow a few characteristic quotes from Fee to show that all the above isn't just another sales pitch for another commentary to take up further space in an already overpopulated market.

5 November 2009
The afterlife of a new idea

•

The human mind once stretched by a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.

(Oliver Wendell Holmes)

The above one liner was on a picture in my friend's house. I read it late on Saturday night / Sunday morning after returning from a fancy dress birthday party at which I was judged the best dressed hippie – or clown. I have a photo to prove it, but not sure I want to put it on public display…..

4 November 2009
Bonhoeffer – the church is no domesticated abstraction

"…the church is subjected to all the weaknesses and suffering of the world. The church can, at times, like Christ himself, be without a roof over its head…real worldliness consists in the church's being able to renounce all privileges and all its property but never Christ's Word and the forgiveness of sins. With Christ and the forgiveness of sins to fall back on, the church is free to give up everything else."

"Whoever lives in love is Christ in relation to the neighbour….Christians can and ought to act like Christ; ought to bear the burdens and suffering of the neighbour…It must come to the point that weaknesses, needs and sins of my neighbour afflict me as if they were my own, in the same way as Christ was afflicted by our sins."

Sometimes I don't agree with Bonhoeffer. He is just too uncompromising in tone, an extremist in his style of writing, excessive in the demandingness of his vision of what a Christian is and what the church is. But no matter how strongly I disagree, no matter how cleverly my intellect squirms away from reality, somewhere inside me where it is harder to hide from truth, I know he is right. It's Bonhoeffer who embraces risk and cost and the high calling of God in Christ Jesus, and I who want to have it all toned down to a much more manageable Gospel, a more attainable standard, a more respectable and compliant spirituality. There is a diagnostic precision in Bonhoeffer that leaves little room for argument – it isn't that he has misunderstood the Gospel; more likely that I miscalculated the cost, or flirted once again with compromise. I don't know how easy it would have been to be in Bonhoeffer's company – we don't tend to relax in the presence of such unassuming intensity, articulated in words chosen for the truth they tell – and the truth they tell us about ourselves.

3 November 2009
The Annoying Habit of Being Pedantic – mea culpa!
Now I try not to be. But sometimes I am. Pedantic that is. And sometimes my pedantry is no more than my discontent that someone doesn't share my biased and idiosyncratic view of the world. Pedantry is a kind of low grade intellectual showing off! And now and again I'm guilty.

Like tonight. Songs of Praise for All Saints Day. Edward Stourton was wheeled in as the spokesperson on behalf of St Paul. Asked if Paul's legacy still influences the writing of hymns today – "Why yes", says Edward. And the example used as evidence was "Purify my Heart".

Now I don't want to be pedantic, but is it not the Letter of Peter that makes much of purifying the heart, the refiner's fire, holiness as set-apartness? Sure you could find a reference here and there in Paul to those ideas, but short of writing to Brian Doerksen, the writer of the hymn, my guess is that it is more likely to be Peter. I happen to like the hymn and have never detected an obvious connection between it and the theology of Paul. Not as obvious as 1 Peter anyway – look at 1 Peter chapter 1.

Here's the words – what do you think? Am I just being pedantic?

Purify my heart,
Let me be as gold and precious silver.
Purify my heart,
Let me be as gold, pure gold.
Refiner’s Fire,
My heart’s one desire, is to be holy.
Set apart for You Lord.
I choose to be holy,
Set apart for You my master,
Ready to do Your will.

Purify my heart,
Cleanse me from within and make me holy.
Purify my heart,
Cleanse me from my sin, deep within.

Refiner’s Fire,
My heart’s one desire, is to be holy.
Set apart for You Lord.
I choose to be holy,
Set apart for You my master,
Ready to do Your will.
1 November 2009
The Role of a Denominational College

Several key points from our presentation on the work of the Scottish Baptist College at our Annual Baptist Assembly.

What the Scottish Baptist College is "For".

The College is a means to an end. But to a great
end – the training of those God calls to be builders of graced communities, to
be supporters and encouragers of communities of witness, to be Christ centred activists for the Kingdom of God.

Theological Education as Ministry Formation

Theological education and ministry formation are
nothing less than taking seriously Christ’s invitation, Come ….take my yoke
upon you….learn of me… Or Paul’s plea, ‘be transformed by the renewing of your
mind…and conformed to the image of Christ”
The years in College can be hard years of self discovery, inner change,
growth through a process of sifting and searching that deepens mind and soul.
That’s why the focus of the College is on academic quality and spiritual formation, clearly centred on Christ and earthed in Scripture, evangelical in
purpose and Baptist in conviction.

Calling and Curriculum

Our calling under God as a College is to share the Gospel, to build graced communities
of witness to Jesus Christ, and towards this our College works, year in and year out, to
replenish and resource ministry in our churches. But we don’t just go on doing the same thing, working
to the same old models, indiscriminately pumping information into heads like forcing
insulation foam into cavity walls.

A curriculum has to be shaped around our context, the time and place in history that we call contemporary – and ours is a time of cultural flux. So we need leaders and
servants, pastors and evangelists, imaginers of mission, gifted builders of graced community,
creative thinkers for God.

“Does God call the equipped or equip the called?”
someone asked. Daft question! God does both. The Church is caled to be culturally informed, culturally engaged, in order
to be counter cultural; so it must be Gospel informed and Gospel engaged in order to be
counter cultural. Because our counter-cultural lives are to be rooted in the reality of the Living Christ, the transformative power of a Gospel of reconciliation, peace and hope.

31 October 2009