Blog

Crowded trains, scowling train drivers and exuberant passengers.

On the train going into Glasgow to meet Sheila around 4 o'clock Thursday.

Stop at Corkerhill and it seems the entire student cohort of Cardonald College want to get on this train.

Three loud talking and laughing female teenagers threw themselves into the seats opposite and beside me.

The one on my side dunted me as she landed, turned and smiled which I think was an apology.

In front of me on the table a glossy Now Magazine, and the girls across from me picked it up and looked at me. No I said, it isn't mine! One smiles, laughs at her pals, and then they flick through it using the various pictured celebs for slagging off target practice.

As we draw into Glasgow Central another train drew alongside and the driver with a permafix unsmile was within four feet of our window. All three girls waved and smiled and he looked across – but his mouth didn't flinch one millimetre towards that place where life might look half tolerable for him.

Which sent all three of them into near hysteria mixed with incredulity at their failure to coax him back to the world where it isn't all so grim.

Embarrassed by this virtuoso facial performance of negative emotional equity I muttered to the three of them, 'Apologies on behalf of my generation'. The one holding the magazine looked at me and said one word 'Awthatsawrightyourcool'

By the time I met Sheila at Queen Street I'd stopped floating, buoyed up by such proximity to fun, energy and young possibilities of life, grinning in defiant goodwill at those daft enough to make a career out of joylessness.

Oh, and while we're on the daft stuff. While waiting for Sheila's train to arrive, I noticed a woman eating chips while texting a friend, and managing both with considerable dexterity. Presumably, despite the fact that the phone keypad must have been getting a bit slippery……multi-tasking develops in ever stranger combinations, huh?

9 October 2009
“Fellowship” according to Bonhoeffer – “to kindle the flame of the true fire of Christ.”

One of my problems with the word 'fellowship', and an increasing diifculty with the word 'community', is the cosy, soft, non-angularity of the words. These are words with a marshmallow softness, a painted-with-a-pastel-palette look that's more impressionist than real, a squishy shapelessness under pressure that gives no confidence we know what their real shape is or would look like. I also worry that both words are more about feelings than actions, and that their overuse makes them sound like sacred alternatives to secular expletives, which tend to be the unthinking blanks inserted to sentences to convey emotional engagement or just as often as a vain repetition by habit.

Which is why now and then it matters to have someone say something about 'fellowship' and 'community' that unsettles us, and dissipates the devotional haze that obscures what fellowship and community at their demanding uncomfortable Christlikeness might actually look like, feel like and be like. And one of the people who regularly does that for me is one of my best theological friends, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A theological friend is one who isn't interested in reinforcing my conceptual comfort zones, or ignoring my bad intellectual and theological habits, and whom I trust enough to listen when he tells me I'm talking or thinking nonsense.

So. To the popular notion that fellowship and community are directly tied to intimacy, like-mindedness, mutual knowledge of each other's story, sharing of personal needs and problems, and current place in the world, Bonhoeffer enters a disconcerting disclaimer. Like the good theological friend he is he confirms his trustworthiness as a friend not by agreeing with us but by telling us why we are wrong. In Sanctorum Communio,in a discussion of the Lord's Supper Bonhoeffer compares the experience of those who know each other well with those who break bread as strangers:

It has been deplored that urban congregations celebrating the Lord's Supper are faced with the unfortunate fact that participants do not know one another; this situation allegedly diminishes the weight placed on the Christian Community and takes away from the personal warmth of the ceremony.

But against this we must ask is this very kind of a church-community not itself a compelling sermon about the significance and reality of the community of saints, which surpasses all human community? Isn't the commitment to the church, to Christian love, most unmistakable where it is protected in principle from being confused in any way with any kind of human community based onb mutual affection? Is it not precisely such a community that much better safeguards the serious realism of the sanctorum communio – a community in which the Jew remains a Jew, Greek Greek, worker worker, and capitalist capitalist, and where all are nevertheless the Body of Christ – than one in which these hard facts are quietly glossed over?

Wherever there is a real profession of faith in the community of saints, there strangeness and seeming coldness only serve to kindle the flame of the true fire of Christ; but where the idea of the sanctorum communio is neither understood nor professed , there personal warmth merely conceals the absence of the crucial element but cannot replace it.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio. A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 245-6

8 October 2009
Of the making of many books, and the pricing upwards of many books, there is no limit.

When it comes to possessing a book, like most bibliophiles I prefer a substantial stitched hardback. Especially if it is an important book. And because I just so enjoy handling a well bound book, printed on quality paper, where font and layout and editing and production standards each contribute to a book that is a joy to hold and behold, to handle and read. And if the price is halfway reasonable then here's my money. The book below is the hardback edition of George Herbert at £90 – I got it for half the price from a sensible bookseller in Cambridge. "A thing of beauty and a joy forever".

But I also want to write in praise of the well intentioned paperback. Sometimes the hardback is ridiculously expensive and impossible to justify – and there's no paperback edition. Take for example Susan Gillingham's Psalms Through the Centuries volume 1 – £57 and the second volume will be even more expensive. And no chance of a paperback version, despite the fact that this is a series of commentaries aimed at students! So either you borrow it from a library (if it has it), or from inter-library loan – but what if it's a book you want to read and refer to often, huh? Writing to the publisher of Gillingham's book to point out the unattainability of these prices for all but institutional libraries I received a courteous negative response, essentially the same as one I first encountered and learned to live with when I was twenty one and at University.

I still have an essay I did all those years ago on the hard to make case for the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy. I began with the disclaimer that much as I would like to establish the case for Mosaic authorship, the historical and textual evidence did not point that way. One of the most illuminating feedback comments I've ever had was pencilled in the margin, "Tough!" It was a hard response for a fragile young Evangelical, but one that has served me well – and I still have the essay. The lecturer was himself an agnostic who sympathised deeply with people of faith trying to re-negotiate the foundations of that faith by intellectual dialogue and critical thinking in what could seem a hostile environment.

The point is, the publisher's response for all its courteous explanations of why they couldn't afford to make the book affordable for individual purchasers, came down to that one word I learned to live with decades ago – "Tough!" Now there aren't many books I want to own that I'm not prepared to pay for, and do without other things to buy them. Choices about disposable income are real giveaway clues to our ethics, stewardship, taste, and peculiar but likeable daftness. But even I can't bring myself to spend £115 on, for example, the second volume of Michael Watts The Dissenters, a magisterial history that is simply unmatched in the subject field. The first volume was issued in both hardback and paperback – but not the second. Tough!

And likewise Carol Newsom's The Book of Job A Contest of Moral Imaginations at £66 – but a book of great originality, penetrative in its insight into how this magnificent text interprets us and our world, and our human brokenness and longing for wholeness, before we ever get near an interpretation of it. So at £66, "Tough!" But it has just been published at £13.99 in an Oxford Paperback. The lesson being, sometimes you can't get all you want – I'm still waiting for Gillingham on the Psalms to be affordable, and Watts Dissenters to not need a mortgage preceded by a credit check – so, "tough". But now and again life has unlooked for blessing – and something you want is not only affordable, but a bargain at twice the price – as is Newsom's work on Job, in paperback.

For those interested, Newsom's commentary on Job in the New Interpreter's Bible represents along with Sam Balentine's Smyth and Helwys volume on Job, the finest exegetical conversation on Job I know. And with Newsom bound in the same volume as Clinton McCann's commentary on Psalms, that NIB volume costing around £40 is simply gold at the price of lead. I exaggerate – but only very slightly.

7 October 2009
The Erskine Bridge, tragedy and praying light into darkness

The Erskine Bridge is less than five miles from where we live. And on Sunday night two girls aged 14 and 15, whose names are Neve and Georgia, jumped to their deaths, holding hands. The tragedy that spreads out from such an act of despairing self-surrender will leave many people themselves bereft, those who knew them well and those who know only the end of their story as told on the news. The girls were resident in supported and secure accommodation. Their families, those who shared their lives at Bishopton, staff and other girls, social workers and other caring and support professionals, now live with the nightmare aftermath. The complexity of emotions and self-questioning that the tragedy of suicide triggers will be hard to endure, interpret and eventually work through. Seldom worked through to resolution, usually to resignation and a lingering sadness, and the often unjust yet inescapable sense of guilt, personal responsibility and that nagging barbed hypothesis, "what if I had…? Because we can always think of what we could have, might have, should have, done.

There will be an enquiry. Lessons will be learned, and each person within significant radius of their two young lives will have to account for their actions, decisions and professionalism. In the meantime grief is compounded by the demand to know why, and how. Already explanation is assumed to be failed systems and procedures; but the fact remains two young adults chose, together, to turn from life to final ending, and planned and shared the enacting of that so sad decision.

And all I feel I can do, last night and this morning, is light a candle, think of two young lives now ended, lift them in compassion to a merciful God, and pray for them and those they leave behind them.

And pray too that those whose lives are now touched by this act of life defying immolation, will in time find again a sense of the preciousness of life, and therefore the treasure that is each human being, which in the world of social and professional care is too easily overlooked by those of us outside, quick to blame and slow to understand human limitations.

And to pray to the God of whom the poet-psalmist wrote, who knitted each person together in their mother's womb – and so to pray that those young lives which seem so finally to have unravelled, will be gathered into the creative life of God into whose hands we all hope to fall and be held, and formed into the true self God made us to be.

This isn't wishful thinking or sentiment lacking theology. Whatever else the cross declares, it signals the span of divine love reaching outwards and downwards to those deep places we all fear most, where but for the grace of God we might all fall, and if we do, God is there before us, beneath us, and for us.

Lord have mercy.

Christ have mercy.

Lord have mercy.

6 October 2009
Stanley Hauerwas on the gentleness of listening and why he finds it so hard

I was in Aberdeen a couple of years ago when Jean Vanier and Stanley Hauerwas were jointly leading a conference exploring contrasting ways of caring for each other gently in a violent world. (The photo is its own contrast in the gentle listener and the passionate talker!) Hauerwas can sometimes be hard to read – not only because of what he says, but at times he is obtuse, hard to follow, and seems to be pursuing an iniosyncratic bee in his bonnet rather than saying plainly what is so, what needs fixing and why. But most of the time I recognise the angry prophet, the angular debater on philosophy, ethics and theology, getting stuck in to those who live heedless of others, their competitive ways raising issues of human vulnerability, social justice, power-mongering and the idolatry of the bottom line in hard cash terms. Both aspects of Hauerwasian theology were on show at Aberdeen – parts of the lecture that were frustratingly blurred, and times when his meaning was unambiguous. The following two quotations about how hard it is to listen, I heard him say, and they show why Hauerwas remains an important voice himself worth listening to:

"I am an academic, and academics are notoriously bad listeners. We always think we know what people are going to say before they say it, and we have a response to what we thought they would say in spite of what they may actually have said. To learn to listen well, it turns out, may require learning to be a gentle person."

"I want to remain the academic who can pretend to defend those with mental disabilities by being more articulate than those I am criticizing. I want to be a warrior on behalf of L'Arche,* doing battle against the politics that threaten to destroy these gentle communities. Jean of course, is no less a warrior. But where I see an enemy to be defeated, he sees a wound that needs to be healed. That's a deep difference."

Hauerwas and Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World, (IVP, 2008), 79, 80.

* L'Arche is a netwrok of communities for supported and shared living, that began in the 1960s in Troisly, France and is now a global network providing living space in community for those of different abilities. The work of Jean Vanier is in my view a singular expression of Christlike accompaniment and care that values the human person in radically compassionate terms. Sometime soon I am going to do a Jean Vanier week.

5 October 2009
Induction, covenant and celebration – Catriona has arrived in Scotland!

Every induction of a minister to a pastorate is an event to be celebrated, a covenant to be sealed by promises, a confirmation yet again of the surprising call of God to all too human people to serve the Body of Christ, the Church. As Baptists we gladly hold to the practice of making covenant. A church is a gathering of believers who in their membership of the local church, embody the promise to walk together, faithfully, after Christ. And the call of God is to do so together, and to persevere and work at it even if at times it exhausts patience and breaks the heart. And to do this while also knowing that in the shared fellowship of the journey, they have discovered joy, the understanding of others, the generosity that humbles, and that one surprise, repeated so mercifully often, that one surprise of being loved.

And so to Hillhead Baptist Church on Saturday October 3rd, and Catriona's induction. Most people who visit this blog will know Catriona as the skinny fair trade latte blogger (see sidebar), minister till recently of Hugglescote Baptist Church (aka Dibley). I met her the year before she went to Hugglescote, and then several times more recently as she came up to Scotland to meet those who will now be the congregation amongst whom her ministry will be. The Induction service was built around the theme and the experience of making covenant. Catriona told her story, the Church told theirs, and we sensed how these stories coincided. And of course the church from which Catriona came, Hugglescote Baptist Church, they too are part of the story and they were there too. Then Catriona and the Church made promises, and in our prayers we laid hands not only on the new minister, but on representatives of the congregation, so that they set out together on their journey, in covenant with each other, and looking to God to lead, accompany and hold them true to themselves and each other. All of this gathered together by Ruth Gouldbourne, preacher for the day, under the deceptively simple command, "Be kind to one another". Except that kindness is patterned after the kindnes of God, who in Christ chooses to be kind, to come close, to empathise, to walk the way of human life.

Then there was the biblically mandated buffet meal. This is one of my favourite icons, depicting an early buffet meal, complete with angels unawares. The fact that the icon images the Trinity and the Triune communion of love and perichoretic purpose, enriches further the idea of hospitality. Food, good talk, laughter, the shared satisfaction of being together, the courteous recognition of the other, the welcome that makes the presence of another both wanted and felt to be wanted, – and all expressed with good food, the mutuality of serving, and the fun of not knowing everyone who is there, providing opportunities to reach out with the offer of our name and the gift of their name.

So the day closed around 8.pm and we made our way home. But only after taking time to acknowledge the spiritual potency of those occasions when you know you stand on the brink of new possibility. And however hard we try, and no matter how much we think we ourselves achieve, we know that those possibilities come to be, not merely or mainly through our energy, but because when it comes to kindness, God takes the lead. He is there long before us; his generosity has no inbuilt limitations, and time and again we discover to our embarrasment, his grace second-guesses our needs.

.

4 October 2009
Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity. A five star volume *****

Diarmaid MacCulloch is one of the finest ecclesiastical historians on the planet. Some years ago I placed his magnificent biography of Thomas Cranmer on my desk and slowly paced my way through one of the most accomplished biographies in print. The reviewers used words like massive, definitive, exhaustive, detailed, sympathetic, balanced – they're all true enough. But it was also hugely enjoyable, and written by someone who knows that however scholarly the research, and however secure the overall thesis, what makes a book persuasive is the quality of the writing and the shaping of the story. Macculloch is brilliant at the large scale literary masterpiece – and his portrayal of Cranmer the "hesitant hero" is simply that.

So three years ago the only book I took on a walking holiday in the Tyrol was the paperback version of Reformation. Europe's House Divided, 1490-1700. I don't know a better survey of that century of revolutionary religion, radical politics, national re-alignments, political alliances and collisions, of superstition and faith, of lethal wars and fragile peace. I remember, for example, reading MacCulloch's account of Luther's oscillating relationships with the power brokers of his day, whether the Pope, Frederick of Saxony, Zwingli, the peasants, even God – and learning so much about a subject I thought I knew quite a lot about! The whole book is an education in historical nuance, depth of cultural awareness and imaginative analysis, helping us understand how the church has come to be what and where and who it is – and why it din't need to be like this.

So now his new book has landed on my desk with an almighty thump. Twelve hundred pages (well, I exaggerate – 1161), 160 of them notes and further reading. But 1000 pages of carefully organised story, the facts, the dates, the people, but also the movements, the social and cultural trends, the large patterns, the ebb and flow of power and influence as the church has evolved in a changing continuity. Starting from Galilean sect, to Jewish splinter group, to Mediterranean religion, and Roman state sponsored faith under Constantine. Moving on to medieval cultural hegemony in western europe, with alternative versions in the East, the Reformation split, the religious wars, and the European expansion to the new worlds. Followed by the destabilising and disruoptive intellectual energies of the Enlightenment, giving impetus to further reinvention, reaction and accomodation to the modern and now the postmodern and globalised world. And all of this in only 1000 pages. I have a friend who loves thin books – so do I. But everyone needs balance, and just now and again, it's important to pick up a book that requires careful handling to avoid later back problems.

So – there's probably a month's worth of early reading in this big beautiful book, sitting at my desk, a large mug of tea, just before 6.00 a.m., and with only Gizmo the cat for company. If it takes longer it won't matter – I'll be dead erudite when I've read it so I will.

2 October 2009
The importance of the muttered Amen when reading good stuff!

Now and then while reading this book I mutter an 'amen' with a strength of conviction to match the most passionate Calvinist, hearing a prayer of thanksgiving for God's sovereign electing grace and its fixity in the eternal decrees. Or with just as much conviction as Charles Wesley in 'Let Earth and heaven Agree', one of his less savagely satirical anti-calvinist hymns, in which he trumpets, "For all my Lord was crucified, For all, for all my Saviour died".

What provoked such occasional passionate responses in reading this book wasn't in fact these specifics and collision points of theology. It's the way the writers defend that without which all theology becomes a reiterated loop of propositional slogans – a teachable mind. By the way, time and again Calvin preached about the need to be teachable (memorably on Ephesians) – to cultivate a docility and receptiveness open to the truth of God. Not sure what Jean Calvin the pastor would make of the postmodern mindset, but I think he would have little quarrel with the defence of reasonable theologising that's commended in this book:

[The] challenge to one's deepest assumptions plays an important part for the renewal of the mind and for the training of the intelligent – indeed, wise – leaders for the coming generations.* Christian education is not faith-affirming if it merely confirms our cultural and denominational prejudices.* Only when our deepest assumptions are challenged will we be able to hold our faith with the kind of intelligent conviction that makes us credible witnesses of the new humanity instituted by Christ.**

Because God has given all of us reason as a gift integral to understanding the world asnd our purpose in it, thinking is a Christian calling.* In this calling the Christian has to recognise that reason is given to all and that all truth is God's truth…If Jesus is the incarnate Logos in whom we live, and move, and have our being, then all truth is part of him and leads to him.* This makes all truth about humanity and nature worthy of study. To think is not a luxury for the Christian but part of the essence of the Christian's religion.* A person's experience of freedom, including the freedom of intellectual enquiry, is absolutely fundamental to authentic Christian experience.** Thinking, with all its risks, is mandatory for the Christian."*

The Passionate Intellect. Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education, Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 196-7.

The italics for emphasis are in the original (including Wesley's), - the asterisks represent the aforementioned muttered 'Amens!' I use a well developed way of marking books I read – think I'll add to them an A*, symbolising 'intensely muttered convictonal Amen'.

1 October 2009
What is the justification for the justification debate?

Evangelicals and New Testament scholars, and Evangelicals who are not New Testament scholars, and New Testament scholars who are not Evangelicals, are all very exercised just now about the doctrine of justification. There are those who hold the Reformation Perspective on Paul, (Luther modified by Calvin), those who hold the New Perspective on Paul, those who hold the revised or beyond New Perspective on Paul, and those who are in the business of writing newer and bigger books on what all this actually means.

Just now and again I begin to wonder if Paul could possibly have meant anything so complex as the massive books by people like Wright, Dunn and Campbell suggest. Then in my more fanciful moments I wonder how, within the life of the Triune God where self-giving, outgoing love is creative, redemptive and eternally purposeful in God's mission to a broken world, such exegetical scholasticism, theological polemic, and conceptual gymnastics is viewed. In other words what is the justification for Christian scholars argy-bargying (is that how you spell it) over how to reduce what God has done in Christ to words that in the end will have to describe the indescribable, define the indefinable, contain and constrain the mystery of faith, and use terminology that requires in two most recent publications 1200 pages and a million or so of such inadequate words to do so.

OK. I oversimplify, unjustifiably. But do these books overcomplicate unjustifiably, since we are talking about justification here? So, what justification is there for serial book sized assertions and retorts, positions and assaults, and seasonal contests such as Piper versus Wright, Dunn versus Wright, Dunn versus Piper, Campbell versus Wright and Dunn and Piper, with others in the wing should the protagonists tire and someone else take up the exegetical cudgels and theological brickbats to show where each is wrong and they are right.

So with some relief I found someone who brings an admirable clarity to the entire discussion. I refer to the theologian most loved by people who try to live the reconciled life rather than argue about it, who don't need to exhaustively parse their vocabulary of choice before trusting in the God who in Christ justifies the ungodly, and whose goal as Christians is, well, to justify their existence as Christians by living the life of faith enabled by the grace of God in Christ to love and serve a broken but God-loved world:

Justification: (1) function of word processors that makes sure everything is tidied up satisfactorily at the end of the line (2) divine, grace-filled initiative that makes sure everything is tidied up at the end of the line.

Adrian Plass, Bacon Sandwiches and Salvation. The A-Z of the Christian Life (London: Paternoster, 2007), 97.

Whatever else Holman Hunt's painting might portray, it does make me wonder if Christ is knocking unnoticed by those inside, who are so busy debating the finer points of their particular take on theology, they won't open the door. But jesus knocks. And not so they will let him into their conceptually intense living space, but to invite them outside with Jesus into a world where what is needed is more lanterns!

30 September 2009
Arch-episcopal fun, local authority foolishness, and food to restore the soul….

OK. This photo has come by a convoluted route, latterly via Maggi and Ben, and it's just too good to not post on every blog hosted by admirers of the finest Archbishop for yonks. Those who criticise Rowan Williams for being too intelligent to be an Archbishop, for being out of touch and having no idea about the life of ordinary folk, could do with some of the unself-conscious playfulness on display here. "Except you become as a little child…" is an appropriate admonition that comes to mind. I wonder how some of the more rasping journalists would have coped with the serious reality of children's play in a way that both enjoys and affirms the life of the child.

And then to another kind of foolishness altogether. You know how we are all to become energy conscious, climate change aware, careful where we put our big stomping carbon footprints? So yesterday driving down near Braehead and we observe the Council workers cutting the roadside grass with muckle big flymos, wearing the regulation fluorescent orange overalls. It was drizzly wet and windy, and the massacred grass lay in green clumps and apparently needed tidying up. So behind the flymo operator came another toiler in the rain – not with a grass rake to gather it into compostable organic stuff. Naw, naw. Nothing so environmentally responsible. he was sporting one of the big petrol fuelled blowers with which he was blowing the slaughtered grass into the adjoining fields, and doing so against the prevailing stiff breeze! Apart from the obvious non composting policy, here we have a machine that cuts but doesn't collect the grass (petrol fuelled), and one which blows grass against the wind, using petrol to disperse what the wind would disperse in half an hour.

The aforementioned drizzle, pushed into our faces by a stiff breeze, tried its best to waste our walk around the Mugdock reservoir. Nae chance! We knew that when we got back home some of Jim's magnifique home made French onion soup, along with a smoked applewood cheese toastie would restore that inner sense of wellbeing that only comes to those who do the walk and wallow in self-righteousness over a large bowl of immodestly described consummate cuisine………

29 September 2009