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:
Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God (London: SCM, 1992), pp. 88-89
You ask for a poem.
I say this blade of grass will do.
It has dressed itself in frost,
It is more immediate
Than any image of my making.
You say it is not a poem,
It is a blade of grass and grass
Is not quite good enough.
I offer you a blade of grass.
You are indignant.
You say it is too easy to offer grass.
It is absurd.
Anyone can offer a blade of grass.
You ask for a poem.
And so I write you a tragedy about
How a blade of grass
Becomes more and more difficult to offer,
And about how as you grow older
A blade of grass
Becomes more difficult to accept.
(Brian Patten (1946)
This anthology of poems is one of those gems bought in a charity shop several years ago. It introduced me to some poets I didn't know, including Brian Patten. There are times when he is so right you can't help the physical nod of your head in agreement, and wonder why you never thought it or understood it, or saw it that way before.
Virginia McKenna's comment on this poem has its own reflective wisdom:
"This poem brilliantly describes how complicated we all become, how convoluted our outlook on life. A frost-robed blade of grass must surely be one of the beauties of nature, but perhaps it takes an open and undemanding heart to recognise it."
Recent sighting of a Baptist monk, pictured while in full conversational flow, beside a secluded loch in the Central Highlands in early summer. Note that the habit, or hoodie, hides the monk's tonsure – for those who don't know, that's the remaining halo of hair once the crowning glory has departed. The sideways glance and talkative grin are characteristic of this particular species of Baptist Hoodie. This posting keeps the promise I made to post photos demonstrating that on rare occasions I can appear in public without a tie!
Most Baptists, including myself, claim John Bunyan was a Baptist in the best and most important senses of that ecclesial descriptor. By 1669 his Bedford congregation were described as Anabaptist. Whether he would own the modern denominational term or not, he held in classic Baptist terms to a profoundly unclerical non hierarchical view of the church and her ministry, and has some uncompromising correctives for all those in whatever tradition, who want to link ministry with authority rather than service, and for whom office and status seem more important than gift and privilege.
The quotation below comes from The Minister's Prayer Book. An Order of Prayers and Readings, ed. John W Doberstein (London: Collins, 1964). This book is a wide and eclectic gathering of orders for daily devotions, shaped around aspects of ministry, supplemented by an anthology of readings. I bought it for 75 pence second-hand years ago and it has travelled most places with me as a focus for reflection and prayer.
The following extract from Bunyan is on page 191. Unfortunately it was culled from another anthology so I can't give the precise reference to Bunyan. It's from Solomon's Temple Spiritualised and you can find it online over here.:
Below is a quotation that providess an important perspective on what the Bible is, how the Christian community is to read it and live in it and through it – or rather, how through it's reading of the Bible, the Christian community is to live in Christ. The extract comes from Arthur McGill's slim but profound account of how Christians might seek to do theology in a world where suffering is interwoven in the textures of existence. The book, Suffering. A Test of Theological Method, was originally written in 1968 so the language is not gender inclusive:
It is not as a history book or as a scientific book or as a book of events or even as a record of man's religious beliefs that the theologian reads the Bible, but as a witness to Christ. The Scriptures function as a servant of their Lord. We are meant not to rest in them but to move through them and beyond them to the One they serve.
Theology is often tempted to rest in the words of Scripture and to read these books as if they transcribed God's life and light for man into words. But theology must resist this temptation. The Bible as such is not the light of the world; nor is the Bible as such the principle of openness which no darkness can overcome. In all its investigations theology must move beyond the Scriptural statements and seek to discern the form of Jesus Christ himself."
Arthur C. McGill, Theology. A Test of Theological Method (Louisville: Westminster Press, 1982) pages 29-30.
Now here's a long passage from Terry Eagleton, whose approach to Christian apologetics is rather novel. As a non theistic cultural critic not averse to strongly worded criticisms of Christian faith, he nevertheless insists (against Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest) that counter arguments should enage with real Christianity not ignoramus caricatures; and that hostile critics should tackle real Christianity which at every level including the rational, is a scandal.
"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" is a notoriously enigmatic injunction; but whatever it means, it is unlikely to mean that religion is one thing whereas politics is another, a peculiarly modern prejudice if ever there was one. Any devout Jew of jesus's time would have known the things that are God's include working for justice, welcoming the immigrants, and humbling the high and mighty. The whole cumbersome paraphernalia of religion is to be replaced by another kind of temple, that of the murdered, transfigured body of Jesus. To the outrage of the Zealots, the Pharisees, and right wing rednecks of all ages, this body is dedicated in particular to all those losers, deadbeats, riffraff, and colonial collaborators who are not righteous but are flamboyantly unrighteous – who either live in chronic trnasgression of the Mosaic law or, like the Gentiles, fall outside its sway altogether.
These men and women are not being asked to bargain their way into God's favour by sacrificing beasts, fussing about their diet, or being impeccably well behaved. Instead, the good news is that god loves them anyway, in all their moral squalor. Jesus's message is that God is on their side despite thier visciousness – that the source of the inexhaustibly self-delighting life he calls his Father is neither judge, patriarch, accuser or superego, but lover, friend, fellow accused, and counsel for the defense….Men and woman are called upon to do nothing apart from acknowledge the fact that God is on their side no matter what, in the act of loving assent which is known as faith. In fact, Jesus has very little to say about sin at all, unlike a great many of his censorious followers. His mission is to accept men and women's frailty, not to rub their noses in it."
Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution. Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale, 2009), pp. 19-20.
Now one part of me wants to make this long apologia for the Gospel of Jesus the basis of an essay assignment on Contemporary Mission Strategy and the Gospel of Jesus, with the uncomplicated instruction – "Discuss".
Another part of me is left wondering why an agnostic who is resistant to Christianity makes a far better job of stating the core of the Gospel than many a Christian preacher and / or theologian.
In any case – the book is a tonic – not so much comforting as bracing, and not so much an apologia for Christian faith as an apology for the intellectual sloppiness of much new atheism dogma.
Earlier this year John Reumann's Anchor Bible commentary on Philippians was published. It has xxiv, + 805 pages. By any standards a massive volume. (By the way, I think the woodcuts used in the dustcovers of the Yale Anchor Commentaries are powerful images resonating with the biblical text). In the Preface readers are informed that Reumann's original manuscript was nearly halved to fit the publisher's demands. When it came into the College Library, given my interest in kenosis, I had a read at Reumann's treatment of 2.5-11, the great Christ Hymn. The section was hard to read, frustrating to follow, and mostly made up of highly condensed notes. It felt like notes for a commentary rather than the notes of a commentary. Anyone people-watching in the library would have seen disappointment written in giant font bold italics underlined and filling the screen of my face.
The recent review of Reumann's work by James Dunn places the blame for the virtual un-useability of the volume on the publishers. Given Reumann worked on this commentary for over thirty years, the work should have been allowed two volumes, the same as Ephesians by Markus Barth. When it comes to metaphorical images, Dunn uses one to describe the failed editing process that is memorably incongruous and hilariously apt.
I refrain from offering any graphics. You can read the whole review over here. Meanwhile us Philippians buffs are now waiting for the next commentary blockbusters – Paul Holloway's volume in Hermeneia (still a few years off), and the new International Critical Commentary by N T Wright, the Bishop of Durham and storm centre of much debate about what Paul did and didn't mean – I hope Wright's will be published this side of the eschaton – otherwise there may be a few exegetical debates in heaven between Paul and N T Wright, or as his less charitable opponents call him, N T Wrong.
Saying no in order to say yes isn't so much a paradox as an important principle in time management. When it comes to research, writing and the life of the mind, there are necessary choices – times to say yes, and no. You just can't read all you want to, or follow all the nudges and hunches that push and pull your curiosity down different intriguing research paths.
My own intellectual and spiritual landscape has several well worn paths. One of my favourite hills is Tinto, in Lanarkshire (pictured in winter, with snow on last year's foreground stubble). It's criss-crossed with paths, evidence of thousands of trudging feet over many a year. There are several ways to the top, and none would get you there unless you stay on them! That's not to say you can't make your own way up, ignoring established paths, and ploughing through heather, bracken, moorland grass, the odd bog and on one side some dodgy screes.
I think of my research map as a kind of inner Tinto! There are well worn paths of reading, writing, study and research! Sometimes they criss-cross, sometimes they just stop and don't reach the top. Now and again I want to go up a different way. Familiar paths for me include Evangelical, Baptist and Scottish spirituality; Scottish theology, the poetry of George Herbert, Julian of Norwich, Trinitarian theology, Baptist identity and theology, Bonhoeffer, theology and disability, and more recently the possible conversations between poetry and theology, kenosis and pastoral theology, and the relations between Scripture and Christology.
At my ordination I chose a hymn that in its first verse also uses the image of hill climbing.
The impetus to study, the attractiveness of truth and wisdom, the love of learning and the desire for God, are I think integral to the spirituality of the pastor theologian. As a Baptist minister serving our churches in theological education, I've never relinquished that sense of ministry as following the Christ of the upward way, and keeping face forward up the hill of God. Pastoral vocation is a deep and searching calling to a ministry in which the qualifier pastoral defines what I am about as a theologian. Academic research and following Christ, theology and pastoral care, intellectual work and heart work, continually weave together in a pattern of discipleship whose dominant motifs eventually define and reflect who we are.
This weekend I marked the 33rd anniversary of my ordination. For reasons I hope are theological as well as personal, I've always viewed that event on August 28, 1976, as utterly decisive and vocationally defining for me. It was the day I promised to follow Christ on the upward way of a pastoral preaching ministry. Whatever else I am in terms of my gifts, and however others see me in terms of gifts or faults, inextricably woven through my own self-understanding was that call to ministry which has been my way of following faithfully after Christ.
So I'm still climbing, keeping face forward up the hill of God. Here is the whole hymn – it still touches deep chords of longing, aspiration and an astonished sense of privilege.
Christ of the upward way, my Guide divine,
Where Thou hast set Thy feet, may I place mine;
And move and march wherever Thou hast trod,
Keeping face forward up the hill of God.
Give me the heart to hear Thy voice and will,
That without fault or fear I may fulfill
Thy purpose with a glad and holy zest,
Like one who would not bring less than his best.
Give me the eye to see each chance to serve,
Then send me strength to rise with steady nerve,
And leap at once with kind and helpful deed,
To the sure succor of a soul in need.
Give me the good stout arm to shield the right,
And wield Thy sword of truth with all my might,
That, in the warfare I must wage for Thee,
More than a victor I may ever be.
Christ of the upward way, my Guide divine,
Where Thou hast set Thy feet, may I place mine;
And when Thy last call comes, serene and clear,
Calm may my answer be, “Lord, I am here.”
Walter J Mathams – composed circa 1915
Victoria plums are back in the shops. As a boy I helped pick several varieties of plums in the orchards which ran the length of upper Clydeside in Lanarkshire – and you were allowed to eat as you picked. The sensible psychology was that a picker would soon have had enough. A theory which worked even for me – there are only so many plums even greedy connoisseurs can eat and enjoy. But I haven't yet encountered a fruit I enjoy more.
Those orchards are long gone – either garden centres, road upgrading or housing developments have removed all but a couple which are now neglected. The season is late August to mid September so it isn't long to enjoy your favourite fruit. And maybe the sheer enjoyment of them is because they are only available once a year, and not for long. The imported other kinds of plum don't come near British Victorias. You can find out why over here.
William Carlos Williams has this delightful poem about eating cold plums from the fridge, and about the temptation to eat them before anyone else does:
This is Just to Say
"Preach the simple gospel. Make sure the old woman who sits at the back of the church can understand you". That kind of comment is patronising nonsense not far away from uninformed arrogance. So forgive me, but I've just heard it or something like it one too many times.
On a par with thinking visiting older people is a chore rather than a privilege, or an inefficient use of a dynamic church leader's time, a task for ancillary ministry rather than strategic leadership. As if accompanying friendship, pastoral companionship, available presence, attentive conversation, weren't a privilege, a gift and an opportunity to share in richly textured experience.
Some of the finest practical theologians I know sit in the back
seats at church, or at their tea table, and I've coveted their nod of approval for the truth I've tried
to speak, framed in words with maybe half the depth of their experience of life with God.
Hence the prophetic edge to this entire treatise in pastoral theology distilled into just over 60 words. An R S Thomas prose poem, written late in life, that tells us why we might never be near good enough to preach up to, let alone down to, the level of "the old woman who sits in the back pew".
'The holiness of the heart's affections.' Never tamper with them. In an age of science everything is analysable but a tear. Everywhere he went, despite his round collar and his licence, he was there to learn rather than to teach love. In the simplest of homes there were those who with little schooling and less college had come out top in that sweet examination.
(R S THomas, The Echoes Return Slow (London: MacMillan, 1988), 62.
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