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R S Thomas and kenosis as love giving itself up rather than giving up

One of my current research interests is kenosis, the theological term for the self-emptying love of Christ as, from all eternity, pardigmatic of the love of God. (Phil 2.1-11) It is sometimes the poet who for me, has articulated best the consequences of God's keonitc love. Theology at times places too much weight on doctrinal definition and philosophical precision – mystery more usually evokes wonder, adoration and the surrender of will that is the response of worship. Charles Wesley distilled essential elements of atonement theology in the famous double couplet that was preceded by the instruction, 'let angel minds enquire no more':

He left his father's throne above,
So free so infinite his grace;
Emptied Himself of all but love,
and bled, for Adam's helpless race.

One of R S Thomas' poems contrasts the ego centred, clinging of the self even in prayer, with the self-giving love of God. It is a de profundis, a poem that recognises that in the love affair God has with a broken and fallen creation, deep calls to deep, and love demonstrates it will never give up on the redeemability of creation, even if it means love giving itself up.

Hear me. The hands
pointed, the eyes
closed, the lips move
as though manipulating
soul's spittle. At bedsides,
in churches, the ego
renews its claim
to attention. The air
sighs. This is
the long siege, the deafness
of space. Distant stars
are no more, but their light
nags us. At times
in the silence between
prayers, after the Amens
fade, at the world's
centre, it is as though
love stands, renouncing itself.
(R S Thomas, The Echoes Return Slow,(London: Papermac, 1988), page 117)

14 June 2009
Alexander Whyte – truth as its own witness

Alexander Whyte was a saint – I know- those here in Scotland who trace their theology to the Reformation get edgy and nervous when someone is called a saint, their memory honoured, their written or spoken words cherished, their example held up as an inspiration. And anyway, Alexander Whyte would have denied the charge. His congregation loved him, but there were often complaints that he hammered on and on about sin, his own sins and theirs. Whatever he thought about himself was usually framed in a black border of sorrow for his own failings.

He lived in an age of convulsive social and intellectual change, in the nation, on the world stage, within the churches. His mind was generously open to truth wherever it could be found, but well enough anchored in convictions both evangelical and catholic to be both appreciative and critical. At key times in his life, and in the controversies of his Church, he exemplified what Paul calls 'this ministry of reconciliation'. No surprise then to come across words like those quoted below. Like an eminent consultant in moral and spiritual diagnosis, he knows the importance of preventive measures when it comes to controversy, difference the cause and toxic consequences of conflict. Truth is not a battle – but the basis on which peace is to be built – or to put it in Whyte's own words, characterised as usual by impassioned rhetoric verging on overstatement:

Oh the unmitigated curse of controversy! Oh the detestable passions that corrections and contradictions kindle up to fury in the proud heart of man! Eschew controversy, my brethren, as you would eschew the entrance to hell itself! Let them have it their own way. Let them talk, let them write, let them correct you, let them traduce you. Let them judge and condemn you, let them slay you. Rather let the truth of God itself suffer than that love suffer. You have not enough of the Divine nature in you to be a controversialist

For Whyte, the truth of God as revealed in Christ isn't only discovered in ideas and words, but in the extent to which those same ideas and words are embodied in a life truly reflecting the love of God in Christ. For a Christian, to defend truth unlovingly is a failure of discipleship, an invalid dislocation of priorities. Does anyone still read Paul Tournier, the Swiss psychologist much in vogue in the 1950's and into the 1970's? He once said there is a wrongness in those who are always right; that there are wrong ways of being right.

Whyte, according to those who knew and revered him, largely lived up to his non-controversialism as a theological peacemaker. For him truth if lived in obedience to God and held in love will be its own witness – and if it isn't held in love it is neither obedient to God nor, in the deepest moral sense, truth. You have to be a saint to believe that – and live it.

13 June 2009
James Denney, and the grace that saves…..

Standing waiting in the breakfast queue at our annual ministers' fellowship I held the door open for a couple of our more senior ministers one of whom asked, with affectionate irony, 'Where did you find such graciousness, Jim?' To which I replied, 'I didn't – it found me.'

One of those too quick ripostes that can often and easily seem flippant. But actually, I meant it – I always mean it when talking about the love of God made known in Christ. That's why my favourite NT books are Colossians and Ephesians.

And alongside his magnificent commentary on Romans, Colossians shared a special place in the spirituality of James Denney, along with P T Forsyth, Scotland's premier theologians of the cross. In Colossians Denney found a portrayal of Christ crucified, on a scale adequate to his conception of the grace of God, the one "in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell", and who was making peace through the blood of the cross".

Which took me back to some of Denney's lucid passionate statements on the cost and consequence of God's love, words that resonate in the deepest places of my own faith, and perhaps where that instinctive answer 'grace found me', drew its energy.

Sin is only forgiven as it is borne. He bore our
sins in His own body on the tree: that is the propitiation. It is the
satisfaction of divine necessities, and it has value not only for us, but for
God. In that sense, though Christ is God’s gift to us, the propitiation is
objective; it is the voice of God, no less than that of the sinner, which says,
‘Thou, O Christ, art all I want; more than all in Thee I find.’ And this is our
hope towards God. It is not that the love of God has inspired us to repent,
but that Christ in the love of God has borne our sins.
(Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, 162)

Grace is the attitude of God to man* which is
revealed and made sure in Christ, and the only way in which it becomes
effective in us for new life is when it wins for us the response of faith. And
just as grace is the whole attitude of God in Christ to sinful men, so faith is
the whole attitude of the sinful soul as it surrenders itself to that grace….
To maintain the original attitude of welcoming God’s love as it is revealed in
Christ bearing our sins – not only to trust it, but to go on trusting – not
merely to believe in it as a mode of transition from the old to the new, but to
keep on believing – to say with every breath we draw, ‘Thou, O Christ, art all
I want; more than all in Thee I find’ – is not a part of the Christian life,
but the whole of it.
(Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation page 8)

But for His death we should have died in our
sins: we would have passed into the blackness of darkness with the condemnation
of God abiding on us. It is because he died for us, and for no other reason,
that the darkness has passed away, and a light shines in which we have peace
with God and rejoice in hope of His glory. On the basis of the New Testament,
of Christian experience, and of a theistic view of nature…, the writer has done
what he can to indicate the rationale of this; but imperfect as all such
attempts must be, their imperfection does not shake the conviction that they
are attempts to deal with a fact, and that fact the one which is vital to
Christianity.
(Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, page 301)

* Denney was a writer of his time, and even if he were a writer of our day, in the light of his anti-suffragette stance, it's unlikely he would have used more inculsive discourse.

12 June 2009
The Bodleian, George Herbert and the precision of the printer

The second extraordinary gift I received on my visit to the Bodleian Library was to be a viewing of the earliest printed copy of George Herbert's The Country Parson. This in itself would have been a moment to capture for a booklover whose small constellation of favourite poets includes as a luminous guide, George Herbert. So if the chance to see that 17th Century treasure was grace, then what can I say about being shown, and allowed to turn a few pages, of the handwritten copy of Herbert's The Temple which was the licenser's copy used for the first printed edition, produced in 1633, soon after Herbert's death. This was grace upon grace.

Beautifully bound, written on parchment paper, in a flowing hand with restrained flourishes, the work is a labour of love, and the poems some of the most sublime devotional verses ever written in English. My jaw-dropping astonishment prompted my friend Richard to ask if I needed holding up – more seriously, there are times when words written with disciplined precision and a care for beauty become icons, if not of the Lord himself, then of the Word of God distilled into words that intentionally pull the reader closer to God, deeper into that place where heart speaks to heart, in words carefully chosen and prayerfully offered. I looked at the 'Easter Wings' shape poem; turned to the concentrated richness of the sonnet 'Prayer I'; and as always read slowly that last masterpiece of theological invitation, 'Love bade me welcome….'. I looked and simply enjoyed. Not sure when I'll get the chance to se it again – and I suppose it might have been possible to photograph it. But it never ocurred to me task, and that's probably because no photo is equivalent to seeing and touching and connecting with history.

No apologies for taking the excuse to post 'Prayer 1', which is freighted with more spiritual perception and honesty than the sonnet's constraining fouerteen lines have any right to contain.

PRAYER. (I)

PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,

Gods breath in man returning to his birth,

The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth ;

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner's towre,

Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

The six daies world-transposing in an houre,

A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,

Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,

Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,

The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,

The land of spices, something understood.

11 June 2009
The Bodleian Library, Gregory the Great and Regula Pastoralis

The best gifts come as a complete surprise. Even better if it's something you never even thought might come your way. At the recent gathering of UK Baptist College Principals in Oxford we had scheduled time for a visit to the Bodleian. For those who know him, you will know that Sean Winter equates the Bodleian Library with heaven proleptically anticipated. Now he's never said so in these words, but you can see words like that in his eyes when he's talking about his visits there!

Well our guide who was one of the senior members of staff, took us to a secure room where several items had been brought from special collections for us to view, and even touch. Two of those items were breathtakingly important, and left me deeply moved, and consciously privileged to be able to see them, touch them and hear them described for the treasures they are.

The first complete English book, the translation into Anglo Saxon of Gregory's "Pastoral care" by Alfred the Great, dates back more than 1100 years. And I was standing beside it, touched it, and sensed the benign weight of history in those thick parchment pages, written with painstaking care, with stylus and ink, by whatever lights were available once the sun went down. And on page after page, the glosses of successive scribes who came after, explaining, correcting, commenting. The illustration shows all this activity – though conveys little of the mystery and holy labour that was invested in translating, copying, annotating. Standing there gazing at such a gift, the miracle of Amazon, Google books and e-books begins to seem ordinary, even vulgar. Here is a book reeking of holiness, born of the hunger for sacred knowledge distilled as pastoral wisdom, celebrating the passionate patience of the scribe content to toil, reminding us that it is the faithful resolute conservation of words rightly spoken and faithfully written, that enables us to express the depths of human questing and longing for God, for love, and for the love of God.

I'll tell you about the other one later in the week.

8 June 2009
The importance of unfinished work

Came across this small unfinished tapestry recently. (The canvas has 22 holes to the inch).

I started it years ago and either lost it or lost interest, or both. But it's an image of one of my favourite birds – the stonechat. I've never taken to tapestry by kit – the textile equivalent of painting by numbers, so I work freehand, with minimum sketch marks on the canvas, and often with whatever threads are available. So part of the fun is – I haven't a clue how it will look when it's finished.

Decided I'll try to finish it this summer in those odd moments when I need to be reminded that life will always have unfinished work, work in progress, and of the importance of finishing what you start, and using what you've got! Even if that means coming back to it – eventually, even reluctantly. Maybe as a reminder too that sometimes when pulled in several directions life goes skew-whiff – when finished this will have to be stretched and straightened before being mounted and framed.

One of the significant by-products of designing and working tapestry is the clear evidence of when you are stressed – you pull the thread too tight! And noticing that, the discipline of correcting the tension becomes an exercise in self-awareness and control, of deliverate restraint, that isn't far away from that experience contemplatives call centering prayer.

When finished it will be framed, and on my desk, as a reminder of the deadliness of deadlines and the therapy of stress-busting stitching!

7 June 2009
The dangers of a moral recession

An economic recession happens when economic activity goes into sharp decline. If it persists and becomes long term then it becomes an economic depression, when jobs are lost, profits erased, trading confidence evaporates and investment is too big a risk.That has devastating consequences for the prosperity and morale of everyone it affects.

So. Is there such a thing as a political recession? A time when the normal machinery of Government no longer gets the job done, and those charged with maintaining the fabric and structure of our democratic processes have prejudiced public trust? And if that persists would that produce a political depression, a long term loss of confidence in the integrity and capacity of our political system? And who gains most when political process and foundational institutions are discredited? I write this as the news comes in of the first BNP county councillor being elected in Lancashire and Leicestershire.

And. What about an ethical recession? Same problem. When public expectations of moral accountability, personal integrity, and some evidence of altruism, are not only disappointed, but made to look ridiculous, we begin to feel we have moved into a new and dangerous historical moment. When so many of those who formulate our laws and social policies are perceived to be or shown to be self-serving, and claim to have stayed within rules they formulated, and that allow such unchecked abuse, what does that do to the moral ecology of our society? What happens when "flipping" houses generates tens of thousands of tax free profit at the tax payer's expense? And this during a recession? When people are losing their job by the ten thousands? When every house repossession is a family tragedy? And when the cause of so much of the problem has been – well – money and the lengths some people will go to accumulate it. What happens then? Something toxic happens. And that affects the ethical environment we all have to live in.

I remember, long before we became so environmentally aware, as a boy of 9 or 10 living on a farm in Ayrshire, standing broken-hearted beside the burn where I used to guddle for trout, watching dead fish float past. Minnows, catfish, stickleback, trout – all belly up, bloated and dead. I was standing beside the man from the Council (the 1950's equivalent of Environmental Health). Seemingly a farmer further up the burn had (accidentally or irresponsibly – the result was the same) released sheep dip into the water table. The result was catastrophic; the ecosystem was poisoned. It took years for the burn to recover – it was a long time before I was as a child, again able to lie on the banking with a jar tied to string, a cunningly placed rubber lid and some bread, and catch those beautifully marked small shoaling fish called minnows. Because someone had poisoned the system.

I've no party political point to make. I just sense that something toxic and dangerous is happening in the stream and flow of our political systems and social values. The picture of the Prime Minister at the start of this post isn't meant to be a dig either – I'm more interested in the words behind him, about the fight for our future. The economic recession is due to the credit crunch we're told; well in that case the political and moral recessions are due to an integrity crunch. The first might be easier and quicker to fix, and on a different scale of values, cheaper.

Pray God our ethical crisis doesn't deepen into a moral depression of lost values and desperate selfishness. And whatever else the church is doing at this moment in our national history, we should be looking for light and encouraging it, identifying the good and defending them, and praying for a nation struggling with the consequences of moral recession.

6 June 2009
Holidays – almond tarts, ospreys, book shops and long walks.

Thanks to the generosity of friends we have just spent the past week in Boat of Garten, just north of Aviemore. That's osprey and eagle country and we saw both – as well as red squirrels, a heronry with at least 8 herons, and some of the most heart lifting scenery in Scotland. Did a lot of walking, some reading, a fair amount of thinking, and a little writing.

No one will be surprised that we tried several coffee shops and I sampled the life-belt size freshly made doughnuts at Grantown on Spey (twice, but both times we had one between two – they are that big!), almond and apple tart at Inverness, and dumpling and gingerbread (two separate visits) at Carrbridge.

I wrote a Haiku about the osprey – what a magnificent creature, and what a great job being done by the various groups and agencies who protect and conserve their presence in our country.

Feathered piscator,
winged trout-trapping talons tensed –
the "Compleat Angler."

5 June 2009
Picasso, Pentecost and Haiku

Picasso, Pentecost and
Haiku

Invading Spirit,

Gatecrash our solemnity

With holy fervour.

The Church that’s drinking

Intoxicating Spirit,

Never lost for words.

Rushing mighty wind,

hurricane force holiness,

mission impelled church.

Searing tongues of flame,

“Inextinguishable blaze”,

purify our hearts.

Speak in other tongues,

Of love, of peace, of pardon,

People reconciled.

     Tower of Babel,

    Communication breakdown,
New hermeneutic.

Pentecostal Gift,

As Given, Giving, Giver,

“The Go-Between God”.

                                                       Jim Gordon

30 May 2009
Baptist Identity: who is God calling us to be now?

I continue to think about Baptist identity. Not agonise. Not worry. But think, evaluate, indulge in self criticism without indulging in self-denigration. So below I offer the final few paragraphs of my recent paper on Baptist Identity. It isn't the last word on anything, but it is a first word that needs speaking, and hearing, and then more thinking. But at some time the thinking has to become the intellectual and spiritual energy source for theological reconstruction and renewed denominational confidence. And of course I don't mean resurgent and divisive denominationalism – I mean owning and generously sharing our own identity, while encountering and humbly receiving the gift, presence and fellowship of other Christians, all equally faithful to their denominational identities. In that encounter of diversity something of the richly co-ordinated grace of God waits for us to discover – and be discovered.

"Christian denominational identity of
any kind, implies a particular theological style, a principled standpoint
derived from past and present experience, and reflection on, and reinforcement
of that theological style. The same is true of Baptist identity. Historic
tradition judiciously re-appropriated, and contemporary practice of our living
communities reconnected with core Baptist convictions, will only happen if,
looking forward, we can answer the question – not who were we? – nor who are we? But who is God calling us now to be, in faithfulness to a Baptist understanding
of the Gospel?

To answer that question,

·
requires a willingness to explore and live faithfully within those historic
Baptist traditions of radical discipleship that shaped and formed us

·
means being energised by Baptist
convictions which will be inevitably but creatively disruptive of other evangelical
ecclesiologies rooted in other than radical free church congregational principles

·
implies ongoing affirmation of the sole and absolute
authority of Christ the head of the Church, and of each local church, and that as a distinctive Baptist witness radically lived out in local
ecclesial community

·
is to hear and answer Christ's call to a discipleship of
sacrifice, peace-making, reconciliation and imaginative following after Christ,
by those whose baptism is their promise in response to God’s promise, and their dying
with Christ a prerequisite of rising to newness of life.

·
To answer that question then – who is God calling us
to be in faithfulness to a Baptist understanding of the Gospel – to answer that
question in these ways, is to have begun to repossess that without which we are
existentially disadvantaged – our identity as Baptists.

But to do this will involve risk –
of being misunderstood, of being thought old fashioned, of not paying attention
and not listening to the wider constituency. The risk of denominational
regression into narrowly conceived peculiarities no longer popularly owned, the
risk of being accused of pushing a Baptist agenda at a time when the need for
the Gospel was never greater – as if
Baptist identity and Gospel faithfulness were mutually obstructive rather than
spiritually integral.

Risk. At which stage we are called
to row towards the waterfall, taking the necessary risks. As that maybe Baptist
John Bunyan said, “I have loved to hear my Lord spoken of, and wherever I have
seen the print of his shoe in the earth, there I have coveted to set my foot.”
Baptist discipleship is simply and only that – being faithful to who Christ has
called us to be, and to follow faithfully after Him, through the waters of
baptism and into newness of life."

27 May 2009