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Thankfulness as a Theological Choice.

Who then is God that we must speak of him?

God is he whom we must thank.

To be more precise:

God is he whom we cannot thank enough. (E Jungel)

……………………………

For all that has been,

Thank you –

For all that is to come,

Yes - (Dag Hammarskjold)

…………………………….

Thou hast given so much to me,

Give one thing more, – a grateful heart;

Not thankful when it pleaseth me,

As if Thy blessings had spare days,

But such a heart whose pulse may be Thy praise. (George Herbert).

……………………

Been a hard week so far, for reasons nobody could foresee or forestall. One of the most important theological choices we make is whether we complain or give thanks, fuel resentment or nurture gratefulness, whether we see God in all things or only in those cherry picked experiences we call blessings. Life itself is the blessing, and the daily gift of the God whose gift is life. I'm wondering if inner climate determines our disposition towards complaint or gratitude, or if we determine our inner climate by whether a theological choice towards gratitude is an intentional act of faith that changes our inner climate by "tracing the rainbow through the rain"?

My theologian of 'thankfulness as choice' is Julian of Norwich. When much else fails to persuade, I find her quiet insistent trustfulness, and thus her patient thankfulness, a good antidote to those more enjoyably disruptive attitudes of complaint, unsettlement and soul sulking. More than most theologians, she grounds gratitude in the foundation of a love at once eternal and personal, universal and particular.

Thus I was taught that love was our Lord's meaning.

And I saw quite
clearly in this and in all,

that before God made us, he loved us,

which
love was never slaked nor ever shall be.

And in this love he has done all
his work,

and in this love he has made all things profitable to us.

And
in this love our life is everlasting.

In our creation we had a beginning.

But the love wherein he made us was in him with no beginning.

And all
this shall be seen in God without end …

…………………

Quite so!

17 September 2009
T F Torrance on incarantion and atonement II

When T F Torrance writes about theological science, and such complexities as the relations between space, time and divine and contingent order, you simply have to adopt the disposition of student trying hard not to get lost in the maze of erudition and the labyrinth of specialist discourse woven by a professor at ease in unfamiliar intellectual territory.

But when Torrance writes about such central doctrines of Christian faith as the trinitarian understanding of God, christology understood as incarnation, atonement and the resurrection reality of Jesus Christ ascended and coming, then we listen to a theologian preach, and encounter preaching that is soaked in the great doctrines of the faith, and these doctrines as the mere articulation of what it means to experience the reality of the living God, encountered in Jesus Christ.

So here's the next paragraph of Torrance, getting to the heart of the Gospel by a deep theological reading of Scripture. I repeat the last sentence of yesterday's extract. And as a wee forethought before reading it, hHowever new fangled we think theological exegesis is, Torrance was doing it 50 years ago in Edinburgh.

"And so the
cross with all its incredible meekness and patience and compassion is
no deed of passive and beautiful heroism simply, but the most potent
and aggressive deed that heaven and earth have ever known: the attack
of God's holy love upon the inhumanity of man and the tyrranny of evil,
upon all the piled up contradiction of sin.

To see how that is so, watch what happened when Jesus was arraigned before Pilate and the Jewish nation. Jesus had never lifted a violent finger against anyone, and yet he became the centre of a violent disturbance that has shaken the world to its foundations. The incredible thing is this: the meeker and milder Jesus is, the more violent the crowd become in their resentment against him. The more like a lamb he is, the more like ravening wolves they become. By his very passion and suffering, by his meekness and grace and truth, Jesus imparted passion to his contemporaries and called forth violence from them until at last they laid violent hands upon him and dragged him off to the cross.

Jesus is the embodiment of the still small voice of God: he is the Word made flesh, the Word that is able to divide soul and spirit asunder. That voice, that Word of God in jesus penetrated as never before into the secrets of humanity and exposed them. The more he stood them, the more the power of God broke its way into the citadel of the human soul. Before the weakness and mercy of Jesus, before this compassion, all barriers are broken down, all the thoughts and intents of the heart are revealed. What wind and earthquake and fire could not do, Jesus did: he penetrated into the proud heart of man and laid it bare, and in so doing he produced the most violent reaction that culminated in his crucifixion. "

T F Torrance, Incarnation. The Person and Life of Christ (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), p. 150-1.

16 September 2009
T F Torrance on incarnation and atonement (I)

The theological legacy of T F Torrance has long been acknowledged as one of the intellectual treasures of Scottish theology. Some of his writing can be dense and hard to get on with; but much of it is theology that is deeply engaged with the living faith of the man who wrote it, and is written by a theologian who has thought downward into the depths of the grace and mercy of divine love. Torrance's best writing is a shining example of theology personally appropriated in the experience of the theologian and expressed in language unembarrassed by the commitment of faith. Below is a passage which to my mind expresses a very Scottish theology of the cross – I hear echoes of James Denney, P T Forsyth and Torrance's own teacher, H. R. Mackintosh, each of whom wrote out of the same reservoir of theological passion.

"In the incarnate life of Jesus, and above all in his death, God does not execute his judgment on evil dimply by smiting it violently away by a stroke of his hand, but by entering into it from within, into the very heart of the blackest evil, and making its sorrow and guilt and suffering his own. And it is because it is God himself who enters in, in order to let the whole of human evil go over him, that his intervention in meekness has violent and explosive force. It is the very power of God. And so the cross with all its incredible meekness and patience and compassion is no deed of passive and beautiful heroism simply, but the most potent and aggressive deed that heaven and earth have ever known: the attack of God's holy love upon the inhumanity of man and the tyrranny of evil, upon all the piled up contradiction of sin."

T F Torrance, Incarnation. The Person and Life of Christ (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), p. 150.

15 September 2009
George Herbert hymns twice on one Sunday – worship and “our utmost art”.

Two George Herbert poems set to music, on the one day! Sunday Morning worship in our church began with a George Herbert hymn. As we sang it I could almost see the small parish church of Bemerton, placed lovingly in the mind of Herbert against the backdrop of rural England, 17th Century national politics and Herbert's theological assumption that church and creation reflect the reign and love of God:

Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!
The heavens are not too high, his praise may thither fly,
the earth is not too low, his praises there may grow.
Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!

Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!
The church with psalms must shout, no door can keep them out;
but, above all, the heart must bear the longest part.
Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!

Then on Songs of Praise last night, the kind of hymn that is so old fashioned I thought it almost forgotten, not just out of favour but out of sync with current taste and preference. It recalls a spiritual atmosphere and intensity of devotion requiring more of us than our usual contemporary attempts at dumbed down intimacy and informal conversation with Holy Love that is both transcendent and immediate. But there it was, sung with that restrained politeness that in Anglican spirituality comes near to the spiritual quality of courtesy and quiet gratefulness, not spiritually greedy or emotionally ambitious, but showing that quality of balance that makes Herbert's poetry such a fine example of what he himself called "my utmost art".

King of glory, King of peace,

I will love thee;

and that love may never cease,

I will move thee.

Thou hast granted my request,

thou hast heard me;

thou didst note my working breast,

thou hast spared me.

Wherefore with my utmost art

I will sing thee,

and the cream of all my heart

I will bring thee.

Though my sins against me cried,

thou didst clear me;

and alone, when they replied,

thou didst hear me.

Seven whole days, not one in seven,

I will praise thee;

in my heart, though not in heaven,

I can raise thee.

Small it is, in this poor sort

to enroll thee:

e'en eternity's too short

to extol thee.

14 September 2009
Run the race (against Usain Bolt) set before you

This is what sporting stars do – help our children dream dreams, celebrate life in the body with a laughing crowd, say yes to fun and friendship, and smile at the thought that given another 15 years this wee boy might be an Olympian – that's right, the gift of a dream.

Is this not the best sporting photo of the year so far – at least in the category of athletics and PR?

13 September 2009
Sunset as a stressbuster on the M5 and M6 on a Friday

Augustine, Dante, Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards to name only four. They all used their descriptive powers to create unforgettable images of Hell. A whole genre of fiction describes various manifestations of Hell on Earth. But to my knowledge no one has written an entire novel, or a terrifying sermon, or a poetic masterpiece of epic proportions on one of the most vivid and diabolically convincing contemporary images of life rendered futile, of hope intentionally made sterile, of soul corroding and mind dissolving frustration, of that concatenation of circumstance and coincidence of misfortune, of that collaboration of evil purpose and collective ignoring of consequence, that is the M5 and M6, on a Friday afternoon, as it lies before the Scottish pilgrim journeying from Malvern to the celestial city of Glasgow - 334 miles away.

Because fellow travellers and pilgrims together, that's what I did yesterday from 3.00pm arriving home around 11.p.m. The exquisitely moderated anguish of travelling miles in first and second gear, viewing thousands of traffic cones – (are they self-replicating these things?!) - is now enhanced by overhead messages informing you well ahead of time of the six mile tailback, the serial congestion at consecutive junctions. So you turn on Radio 2 for the travel update from Sally Travel and find that the roads around the M5 and M6 are likewise congested – beginning to sound like a motorway system with a serious chest infection and the antibiotics are not working. So no escape routes or less stressful diversions. It isn't any comfort to know that once you are past Birmingham and Machester there is a further 6 mile tailback in both directions south of Lancaster, result of an earlier accident and long term roadworks with closed lanes. And yes I did consider trains and planes but serial meetings in different parts of the country at different times of the week meant nothing came close to working.

Nevertheless. And I mean nevertheless in the biblical and theological sense of a truth that reconfigures reality, that offers an alternative worldview, a happening or utterance that, despite present circumstances, nevertheless construes existence in a new way and points towards hopefulness. So. Nevertheless. That eight hour journey had its moments of revelation. Somewhere between Birmingham and Manchester, across miles of hazy autumn dusk, spread one of the most glorious sunsets I've ever seen. For ten minutes liquid gold cooled across the clouds in a slowly worked filigree of light and shadow, woven in various shades and tones of yellow, orange, and red. This happened as I was listening to Brahms' violin concerto just as it closed the heart wrenching slow movement and the finale took off. It's hard to sit on the M5 and M6 fuming and thinking black diabolic thoughts about hobgoblins and foul fiends in the shape of traffic cones, when an impromptu performance of a Creation makeover, with musical accompaniment, is put on gratuitously for anyone prepared to see and recover a sense of perspective, and be grateful for life, beauty, love, Sheila, Victoria Plums (I bought a box at the M&S in the Services), Brahms, God, and a home to travel to – and even Sally on Radio 2 whose job is to read that litany of despair every half hour, to drivers, the modern pilgrims, and to do so every blessed day. Yes, every blessed day. Sunset is a stressbuster – not the best strapline for God's creative extravagance but worked for me.

The sunset photograph can be found at Trucking Photographs – where there are other sunsets captured along the motorway – hopefully taken when the trucks were stationary….. Thanks to them though, for the free use of their images.

12 September 2009
The theological impact of a comma

Nicholas Lash again, and once again structured for slowed down reading:

God's utterance lovingly gives life;
gives all life,
all unfading freshness;
gives only life,
and peace, and love,
and beauty, harmony and joy.

And the life God gives
is nothing other,
nothing less,
than God's own self.
Life is God,
given.

Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God (London:SCM, 1992), 104

That last four word sentence with the theologically determined comma. Brilliant!

11 September 2009
Listening for the voice of God – who does not shout.

Decided to arrange the following paragraph from Nicholas Lash into a prose poem, to allow for slowed down reading.

"Good learning calls,
no less than teaching does,
for courtesy, respect,
a kind of reverence:
for facts and people,
evidence and argument,
for climates of speech
and patterns of behaviour
different from our own.

Watchfulness is, indeed, in order,
but endless suspicion and mistrust are not.
There are affinities between the courtesy,
the delicacy of attentiveness, required for friendship;
the single minded passionate disiniterestedness
without which no good scholarly or scientific work is done;
and the contemplativity which strains,
without credulity,
to listen for the voice of God –
who does not shout."

Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God (London: SCM, 1992), pp. 10-11.

10 September 2009
R S Thomas and unintended theological apologetics

I have waited for him
               under the tree of science,
and he has not come;
              and no voice has said:
Behold a scientist in whom
              there is no guile.

I have put my hand in my pocket
              for a penny for the engaging
of the machinery of things and
              it was a bent
penny, fit for nothing but for placing
              on the cobbled eyeballs
of the dead.
                  And where do I go
              from here? I have looked in
through the windows of their glass
              laboratories and seen them plotting
the future, and have put a cross
              there at the bottom
of the working out of their problems to
              prove to them that they were wrong.
R S Thomas, The Echoes Return Slow, (London: MacMillan, 1988), 89

Very few poets manage to write theological apologetics. R. S. Thomas of course never set out to do that, his aesthetic and spiritual integrity make it literally unthinkable. Nevertheless in this poem there is a knowing skepticism about scientific certitude and the imperialistic tendencies rational modernity.

And as often with Thomas, the use of a trojan term, an oblique reference to a Christian symbol, almost camouflaged by ambiguity and easily missed by the secular mindset, by which he pushes the reader towards the place of revelation:

                "…and have put a cross

                     there at the bottom

of the working out of their problems to

prove to them that they were wrong."

8 September 2009
Nicholas Lash on the Church’s Mission: “the peacefulness and healing and completion of the world”.

When in the creed Christians confess the church as Holy and Catholic, like so much theological language, it all depends what you mean by "holy". Nicholas Lash offers a rich exegesis:

"Holiness is otherness, the unimaginable, the unattainable fulfilment of all our hopes and dreams, perhaps of all our fears. God, alone, is holy, awe-inspiring, glory-templed. And the purifying touch of holiness can burn. But in uttered Word and outbreathed Spirit, the Holy One comes close, touches and transforms. Holiness is, then, after all, communicable. Indeed all things are sanctifiable, may be made holy, by the breath of God. Life in God's Holy Spirit is, accordingly, all things' existence purified into peace and friendliness, reconciled relationship, sharing – in delight and harmony – in the very life of God. Hence the enablement, and the requirement, that human beings, who are moral agents,…conform their words, and deeds, and institutions, their treatment of each other and of what we call the natural world, to the pattern of God's outpoured peacefulness. Thus it is that, quite properly, but, nonetheless, secondarily and derivatively, we conceive the church's holiness in moral terms. If it could be shown that, on the whole, Christianity had made and makes no significant contribution, by announcement and example, to the peacefulness and healing and completion of the world, then there would be no reason to give it any further serious consideration."

Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God (London: SCM, 1992), pp. 88-89

7 September 2009