Living Wittily

Blog

  • Song of Songs: “the riddled journey towards mutuality….”

    616Vi+OLJmL._SL500_AA240_ Recently listened to some of the tracks on this CD on Classic FM. My own copy arrived the other day. Captivating.

    For myself? Not sure how to preach on Song of Songs in ways that would avoid a mass exit by those uneasy with the idea that love, physical, passionate, deliriously, intoxicatingly overwhelming love is itself a gift of God. Yes agape as indefatigable good will. And yes, phileo as faithful friendship. But eros? That too God's gift? Explicitly descriptive? Legitimate desire? Incurable infatuation with the other? The ache of delight and the joy of longing?

    Yes. All of that, and here, in the love poetry of the Song of Songs, set to music by one of the finest contemporary composers and with a Welsh soprano soloist whose voice exults in the language and music of the heart's desire. No wonder this series of poems, found tucked between the gentle cynicism of Ecclesiastes and the great Isaianic trilogy of defiant trustful hope, has survived as a statement of what human love is when two people discover in each other a love that demands language at its best.

    But even then language can fail. Sometimes the reality of human love doesn't live up to the language of love, while at other times our language describes fantasy in terms that make us discontented with the reality that love between fallible humans is. The truth is, human love is seldom unambiguous, unmixed blessing, pure in motive and selfless in gift. It is after all human. But where there is faithfulness and companionship, persistence as well as passion, patience as well as urgency, and giving as well as receiving, then something is being shaped that mirrors the love of God.

    Winchester Christian spirituality has plundered this book for images of divine love, metaphors for the soul's love of God and Christ's love for the Church. From Bernard of Clairvaux's 86 sermons, to the intense intimacy of Samuel Rutherford's descriptions of Christ the Beloved, the Song of Songs has provided powerful descriptions of Christian devotion. But read at another level altogether, the level of human relationships in all their perplexities and passions, these poems provide a theology of human createdness and human creativity. "To the extent that [the Song of Songs] is about anything, it is especially about male and female expressions of love and intimacy, the communion of self with the other, and the riddled journey toward mutuality". (New Interpreter's Bible, Renita Weems on Song of Songs, Vol. V., page 423.

    Here is a CD which is itself an exercise in biblical exegesis, and the hermeneutical principle which compels attention and invites some understanding, is the way the poems, and their musical performance, capture our all too human love and longing, for that which is beyond us, but not so far beyond that we are discouraged from reaching for it in persistent hopefulness.

  • Live – Love – Learn – Hoodies and formative theological education

    Index_03  


    Now I don't want to give the wrong impression. I remain mostly predictable, generally conservative, and occasionally idiosyncratic in my dress sense. I don't think "fashion" is a term that sits comfortably with my approach to choice of apparel, and not one those who know me would immediately choose as a Jim descriptor. So when I step outside my own safe boundaries there's usually a good reason or two.


    I am now the possessor of one of those socially problematic garments, perceived as even sinisterly threatening by tabloids and other culturally alarmist groups. I've worn it in public a number of times. It's a College hoodie. Some of our students took the College logo, had it converted to a graphic for printing on textile, added the motto – Live – Love – Learn, and took orders. I ordered a hoodie. Black with a white logo, and the motto backgrounded in rust red.

    I can now be seen wearing it in the two places where such a garment is both useful and non-alarmist for people nervous around sweatchirts with hoods. When I'm running round the park on the days it's a bit cool, I wear it – hoping maybe it even makes me look a bit cool. Early morning at my desk before the heating clicks on, it's an easy comfy top – and the hood makes me feel and look even more like a monk at prayer, given my now permanent minimalist hair style.

    I'll maybe get Sheila to take a photo, and post it some day when nothing more interesting is happening in the world.

  • Walter Brueggemann: “So the hassle goes on”

    41BX1J47Y1L._SL500_AA240_ Living Toward a Vision.

    Biblical Reflections on Shalom,
    Walter Brueggemann.
    One of my favourite Brueggemann books, which made me glad to change my ,mind about some things when I first read it in 1982! Reprinted and revised recently     it is available from United Church Press. New books still come from Brueggemann with the regularity of quarterly periodicals. The last couple of years two on Jeremiah, one an Introduction to OT Theology. Another on the Bible and Redescribing Reality. And the intriguing An Unsettling God due in August this year. There is a consistency of faithful subversion in his writing that is simply too important for followers of Jesus and members of the Church community to ignore. So here's some more samples.

    "The God of the Bible is contrasted with all other gods. The pagan gods are generally friends of the kings, who are their patrons, and the gods legitimate and support whatever order happens to be in effect. by contrast, Yahweh, the God of the Bible, is not friend to order but insists on justice and is ready to intervene in decisive ways, against legitimated order if necessary, to establish Justice. If God must choose between order and justice, God characteristically chooses justice." (page 106)

    "The world does not believe in newness. it believes that things must remain as they are. And for those of us well off, it is a deep hope that things will remain as they are. Every new emergent is quickly domesticated; and if it cannot be domesticated, it is outlawed or crushed.
    That is the bite in our faith and the crunch in our ministry. We are bearers of newness. But we address, and, in part, ourselves constitute a world which has a low tolerance level for newness. But the faith community, synagogoue and church, exists precisely to announce the new, to affirm that we do not live by what is, but by what is promised. So the hassle goes on…." (page 123)

    Shadow in the middle "So the hassle goes on…" The other day I posted on risk assessment and discipleship. Now I want to think about the hassle factor. Jesus didn't say, "Come unto me and I will add to your hassles" – well, not in so many words. But there are plenty warnings about discomfort, rejection, cost and a general sense that Kingdom living will destabilise our comfort zones. So I think it's an interesting further missional question for a local church, or for me as an individual follower of Jesus: how far is hassle a key performance indicator of the faithfulness of our discipleship? I mean, where has my choice for justice over order created hassle for me? And where have I tried to bring newness of hope, of possibility, of vision, of energy, and found that trying to do this has created for me, hassle – and made me a hassle to the upholders of the status quo? Hmmmm?

    The painting is by Daniel Bonnell, a contemporary american artist. It's called The Shadow in the Middle, and is based on the story of the adulteress. The play of light and shadow, of the woman's fear and the upright stance of Jesus facing the danger, and with his hand on her head, the pointed shadows cast by the stones on the ground and the surrounding shadows of the waiting upholders of the judicial status quo, give the picture a pervasive encroaching menace. Except for the shadow in the middle. So, the hassle goes on….

  • A second hand bookshop where clutter is an art form

    V&R Most times when I visit Glasgow University Library I make time to go to Voltaire and Rousseau's. They are a second hand bookshop 5 minutes from the library. The proprietor, Joseph McGonnigle, I've known (as Joe), since 1971.

    The University Library has thousands of books, arranged neatly on shelves, catalogued and cared for. Voltaire and Rousseau's, which is the size of a small supermarket, also has thousands of books, some on shelves, and nearly as many on the floor. They are piled at times three deep up to three or four feet high. Looking down the book aisles is like looking at one of those 1950's disaster movies with special effects showing the aftermath of a San Francisco earthquake, with skyscrapers leaning crazily in all directions and threatening a domino effect collapse in the event of an aftershock. So first time visitors should probably do the basic health and safety training, wear a hard hat and luminous yellow waistcoat, and stay near the exit point. Och only kidding – it isn't as bad as that – but it is impressively chaotic, as you can see. The glorious photo was taken by J Malky, see more here. .

    The books are in a rough kind of categorised arrangement. As you come in the door, Theology is at the far right hand corner, poetry is middle left, philosophy is middle aisle half way down, and Scottish stuff faces you as you go in the door. Roughly speaking, in general terms, on a good day, when due allowances are made, you can find the section you're looking for.

    Today I came back with some spoils. Because whatever else, this is a shop where bargains are still found, and those odd "never thought I'd get my hands on this", kind of books can be discovered, even if not where you thought it might be. Of course one person's gold is another person's dross. But here's what an hour's digging produced.

    The Confessions of the Church of Scotland. Their Evolution and History, C. G. M'Crie. (Edinburgh 1907) £3.50. One of my heroes is the Rev James Morison of Kilmarnock who along with John McLeod Campbell, did so much, at enormous personal cost and spiritual sifting, to compel the Scottish churches to rethink and restate the doctrine of the atonement in terms less thirled to the Calvinism of the Westminster Confession. In these Thomas Chalmers Lectures M'Crie is an eloquent and sympathetic guide to the post Reformation spiritual history of Scotland.

    Only One Way Left, G. F. MacLeod (Iona Community, 1954) £1.20. Aye, George Macleod knew how to tell a story too, especially the story of the Kirk and its need for constant renewal, reformation and reconstruction. These 8 Lectures were the Cunningham Lectures and they contain much of Macleod's pastoral and liturgical theology, written with outspoken passion. They are fuelled by fearless intellectual fire that energised a ministry of preaching, imagined communal renewal and informed half a century of theologically principled protest against nuclear weapons.

    PTForsyth Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, P. T. Forsyth. (London: Independent Press, 1964) £0.60 pence. I know Jason. Surely Jim already has this book. Yes but this is a clean copy and anyway it cost me more to park my car for an hour! And nobody gets to walk away from a P T Forsyth book because they grudge the cost of an hour's parking! I'm off at meetings in Birmingham and Oxford later in May – this cheaply priced preacher's tonic will provide the spiritual verve needed to recover both energy and equilibrium. Forsyth's lectures on preaching, like so much of his work, helps me find again "the soul's magnetic North".

    A Gathered Church. The Literature of the English Dissenting Interest, 1700-1930, Donald Davie, (London: RKP, 1978). £2.50. Davie is a poet I first encountered as the maverick literary critic who took seriously the poetic achievement of classic hymns by Watts and Wesley. In his volume Purity of Diction in English Verse, he opened my eyes to the lucidity and leanness of Augustan English, and showed how well it serves the theological and rhetorical purposes of Watts and Wesley.

    Davied He also edited the Oxford Book of Christian Poetry, and had no embarassment including hymns from Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, John Newton, and James Montgomery. The introduction to the volume is one of the best apologia's in print for the hymn as poem, and an enthusiastic rebuttal of all those literary snobs who look down their noses at hymns, especially evangelical hymns. Though what Davie would have made of the modern praise song is quite another matter, and whether many of them will ever be anthologisable (new word?), I doubt. Deeply and pessimistically, I don't think so.

    But to lift the heart again after that brief moan – Total cost for the four books £7.80. Worth wearing a hard hat for, eh?  

  • Risk assessment and following faithfully after Christ

    Sod I said something recently in a discussion, and I didn't know I felt so strongly about it until I said it, thought more about it afterwards, and concluded that, for once, I strongly agreed with myself! Here's what I said:

    "If we are committed to following faithfully after Christ, do we follow One who leads us to the place of safety, or to the place of risk? Are we called to save our lives or lose them?"

    The thought didn't arise just because I'm familiar with Bonhoeffer and his call to sacrifice as the norm of Christ-like living. And I don't think it's just my age, and me pushing against the inevitable limitations looking for excitement. But recently I've begun to be impatient with attitudes and dispositions that make a virtue out of erring on the side of caution. I like the phrase – "erring on the side of caution" – it sounds so sensible, so prudent, so responsible, so safe – and not a bit like Jesus. I like the phrase, not because I agree with it, but because it tells the uncomfortable truth. We err when our anxieties and uncertainties, our self-concern and preferred comfort zones, shape the style and habits of our discipleship, and etch deep neurological paths that become the default settings of "responsible living".

    Whatever else following Jesus means, it can't mean a safe, comfortable, defensive life of controlled consequences and negotiable demands. The seed must die. Take up the cross and follow. The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. Greater love has no one than this… Whoever saves their life will lose it. These are some of the texts I offered in College prayers yesterday as I thought out loud about how far risk assessment is compatible with following faithfully after Christ. Going where He leads, living by His words, relying on His grace, believing that, no matter when or where or what, if He calls and we follow, He will always be there before us, ahead of us. But knowing too, that Jesus may take us where we don't want to go, which means faithful following may require us to go against all those well reasoned out inner defense mechanisms that make us want to stay put, or opt for the more prudent alternatives.  

    Which makes me wonder. What's the relationship between trust and risk? Between faithful following and business as usual in this quite comfortable life? I read alongside such thoughts a poem of Mary Oliver. It says something of what I'm trying to think, say, and yes, find ways to live.

    West Wind #2

     

    You are
    young.  So you know everything.  You leap

    into the boat and
    begin rowing.  But listen to me.

    Without fanfare,
    without embarrassment, without

    any doubt, I talk
    directly to your soul.  Listen to me.

    Lift the oars from
    the water, let your arms rest, and

    your heart, and
    heart’s little intelligence, and listen to

    me.  There is
    life without love.  It is not worth a bent

    penny, or a scuffed
    shoe.  It is not worth the body of a

    dead dog nine days
    unburied.  When you hear, a mile

    away and still out
    of sight, the churn of the water

    as it begins to
    swirl and roil, fretting around the

    sharp rocks – when
    you hear that unmistakable

    pounding – when you
    feel the mist on your mouth

    and sense ahead the
    embattlement, the long falls

    plunging and
    steaming – then row, row for your life

    toward it.

     

    I can hear Jesus say something similar – "row for your life – toward it". Life without risk is life without love, because love, for God and for others, requires openness, vulnerability, self-expenditure, a willingness for the unknown, a radical valuing of the other, for Jesus' sake.

    The poem can be found in Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume 2, (Beacon Press, 2007) ISBN 978-0807068878

  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer on The Body of Christ

    510M6Jo5BLL._SL500_AA240_ Yesterday I asked for collaborative detective work to identify which of two versions of a Bonhoeffer sentence was authentic. Here now is the full quotation with the correct phrase underlined.

    " We now know that we have been taken up and borne in the humanity of Jesus, and therefore that new nature we now enjoy means that we too must bear the sins and sorrows of others. The incarnate lord makes his followers the brothers and sisters of all humanity. The "philanthropy" of God (titus 3.4) revealed in the Incarnation is the ground of Christian love towrd all one earth that bear the name of human. the form of Christ incarnate makes the Church into the body of Christ. All the sorrows of humanity fall upon that form, and only through that form can they be borne. The earthly form of Christ is the form that died on the cross. The image of God is the image of Christ crucified. It is to this image that the life of the disciples must be conformed: in other words, they must be conformed to his death (Phil. 3.10; Rom. 6.4f). The Christian life is a life of crucifixion."


    (The quotation comes from R. H. Fuller's 1963 translation, as anthologised in A Testament to Freedom, ed. G. B. Kelly and E. B. Nelson (San Francisco: harper, 1990, 1995), page 321. The misprint was in the phrase "we too much…" – the correct citation as noted above, was "we too must…."

    However in the Fortress Critical Edition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Works, which is the most recent and reliable English translation, the passage reads rather differently again. Compare the one below with that above, and ponder the fluidity of language, while admiring the skill required to translate an author's words adequate to the author's intended meaning, such that those who later read them apprehend that intention. ( Assuming of course that the author's intended meaning is in any definitive sense accessible to us, and that authorial intention and reader apprehension can coincide…. which I do.)

    410WC08VZ3L._SL500_AA240_ "Since we know ourselves to be accepted and borne within the humanity of Jesus, our new humanity now also consists in bearing the sins and the troubles of all others. The incarnate one transforms his disciples into brothers and sisters of all human beings. The "philanthropy" (Titus 3.4) of God that became evident in the incarnation of Christ is the reason for Christians to love every human being on earth as a brother and sister. The form of the incarnate one transforms the church-community into the body of Christ upon which all of humanity's sin and trouble fall, and by which alone these troubles and sins are borne".

    "The form of Christ on earth is the form of the death [Todesgestalt] of the crucified one. The image of God is the image of Jesus Christ on the cross. It is into this image that the disciple's life must be transformed. It is a life in the image and likeness of Christ's death (Phil. 3.10; Rom. 6.4f). It is a crucified life."

    Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Works, Volume 4. Discipleship. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), page 285.

    I think the differences in nuance, style, punctuation and even paragraphs makes a marked difference to the passage. So when we are trying to establish the most reliable text of the New Testament, and working at the best translation of koine Greek into 21st Century English, it's a bit of a challenge eh?

  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer and that confusing misprint

    510M6Jo5BLL._SL500_AA240_ OK. First thank you that nobody gave me a hard time for spelling Dietrich wrong in the title of the previous post!

    Second, Jason has asked to be put out of his misery and I gladly oblige. The second version is the correct one. And it comes from Discipleship as Graeme also suggested, though the extract in A Year with Bonhoeffer is taken from A Testament to Freedom, page 321. But I've more to say about the full quotation which I'll do tomorrow.

  • Diterich Bonhoeffer: authentic voice and misleading misprint.

    Bonhoeffer This morning I came across a puzzling sentence in Through the Year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an anthology in English of Bonhoeffer's writing I regularly use. The sentence was vintage Bonhoeffer – astringent, christocentric, pastorally focused on the covenant commitments of Christian community. Except for one clause which was so unlike Bonhoeffer's voice I couldn't hear him say it or imagine he wrote it. 

    Now it so happens I'm currently reading for the severalth time New Testament Interpretation 1860 -1986, by Stephen Neill and updated by Tom Wright. The chapter on the Cambridge triumvirate of Westcott, Lightfoot and Hort is a remarkable account of scholarship and spirituality at the service of the New Testament. The Westcott and Hort text of the Greek New Testament, prefaced by Lightfoot's outline of the principles of textual criticism was one of the great gifts to the church in the 19th Century. Encouraged by the example of those who meticulously pieced together a more reliable text of the New testament, I decided to go looking for the Bonhoeffer sentence in the book from which it had been taken.

    Here's the two versions of the sentence. Where's the error and which was the one Bonhoeffer wrote? I'll give the full and correct quotation tomorrow – it deserves more than a moment's pondering.

    We now know that we have been taken up and borne in the humanity of Jesus, and therefore that new nature we now enjoy means that we too much bear the sins and sorrows of others.

    We
    now know that we have been taken up and borne in the humanity of Jesus,
    and therefore that new nature we now enjoy means that we too must bear
    the sins and sorrows of others.

  • James Denney, the Cross and the answer to human pride.

    Forgive the gender exclusive language in the quotation below. James Denney was a man of his time and Edwardian Scotland was hardly an oasis of political correctness. It was however singularly blessed with theological correctness, even theological correctives. One of the most lucid and influential was James Denney.

    The condemnation of our sins in Christ upon His Cross is the barb of the hook. If you leave that out of your Gospel, I do not deny that your bait will be taken; men are pleased rather than not to think that God regards them with goodwill; your bait will be taken but you will not catch men. You will not create in sinful human hearts that attitude to Christ which created the New Testament. You will not annihilate pride, and make Christ the Alopha and Omega in man's redemption. (Quoted in God Loves Like That! J R Taylor, London: SCM, 1962), page 165.

  • Scottish Weather Forecast in Haiku

    Tartan_shirts_


    Dreich heavy drizzle
    insinuates, and slowly
    seeps through your Berghaus.

    Raindrops in trillions,
    the same amount down the drain
    bailed out RBS.

    Scottish May Forecast:
    mist, mizzle, miserable,
    wind driven soggy.