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Baptists and the authority of Scripture.

Blogging elsewhere today. I've just posted a report on the first meeting of the Scottish Baptist Theological Society which took place last night. Around 20 of us gathered to hear Dr Stephen Holmes, Lecturer in Systematic Theology at the University of St Andrews, deliver the inaugural lecture: Baptists and the Authority of Scripture. You can find it here at the College Blog.

Not everyone is into this kind of thing though. So here's a poem from U A Fanthorpe (a poet my friend Kate pushed me towards)

Angel's Song

Intimates of heaven,
This is strange to us,
The unangelic muddle,
The birth, the human fuss

We sing a harder carol now;
Holy the donkey in the hay;
Holy the manger made of wood;
Holy the nails, the blood, the clay.

Christmas Poems, U A Fanthorpe, (Enitharmon, 2002, 15)

We got our first two Christmas cards this week – one from Australia and one from nearer. Years ago I inadvertently threw away a Christmas card I meant to keep. I so wish I hadn't been so careless…

It was made by Christian refugees caught up in the conflict that tore the heart out of Beirut. The picture was of a woman holding her baby, standing in a doorway at night, illumined from behind by a large bright star. Her shadow fell forward in the shape of a cross, as her two arms, half open holding the child, and her upright but tired body, intersected in the light, and cast history forward.

This Sunday is Advent – my favourite liturgical season. Those who pass by this blog – what are you planning to read / listen to?

28 November 2008
Blogging, the sense of loneliness, and the current cultural mood.

"Since the underlying reason for writing is to bridge the gulf between one person and another, as the sense of loneliness increases, more and more books are written by more and more people, most of them with little or no talent. Forests are cut down, rivers of ink absorbed, but the lust to write is still unsatisfied….If it were only a question of writing it wouldn't matter; but it is an index of our health. It's not only books, but our lives, that are going to pot."

W H Auden is a difficult poet. He is at times hard to read, and I wouldn't personally like to plough through his entire Collected Poems. But in his prose writings there are sharp-edged observations about what's going on, and about the state of cultural health. The above was written in 1932, (quoted in Charles Osborne's biography of Auden) – and long before the current blogging outbreak of literary loneliness! I have a feeling this least indulgent of poets would have fulminated against this "everybody thinks their opinion is worth hearing" social game we call blogging. So is blogging popular now, as Auden thought mass publications were in 1932, because of "our sense of increasing loneliness", and evidence "that our lives are going to pot"?

As a writer Auden seems to be wanting some form of quality control in the dangerous and exciting marketplace of ideas, not only over the ideas themselves, but over the literary artistry (or lack thereof) with which they are communicated. And any of us familiar with the blogosphere know only too well that everything from mediocrity and tedium, and from malice and terrorism, to narissistic trivia and embarrassingly detailed confession, can now be aired on a blog. Yes, but. Some of the most creative, funny, informative, artistically inventive, theologically humane and intellectually satisfying conversation and discussion can also be found in responsible blogs. What impresses me about Auden in the above quote, though, is his willingness to attempt diagnosis, to seek explanation, to understand what in his day was a phenomenal rise in the publication of ideas and self-expressed concerns. And that as a poet he felt it his duty to ask the human question underlying social changes and phenomena – as he did in 1945 when he defined the zeitgeist as The Age of Anxiety.

Makes me wonder who are the contemporary poets who are ruminating, probing, engaged in diagnostic reflection and articulating the current cultural mood.

……………………………………

And because I can't resist. I've just been reading Crossing the Snowline, the latest collection of poems by Pauline Stainer.

Immense grief and family sadness explain her silence for over five years. This volume of poetry breaks that silence. More about this later.

But here's a poem about Emmaus, a story that I am living with just now.

River Landscape to Emmaus

Three men walking,

dippers working the water,

the river

writing its monograph

on mosses

Later,

the two disciples

watch him break bread,

lightfingered,

backlit.

Not nonchalant exactly –

for love is nothing

if not improvised,

wounds troubling the light

the art of extremity

27 November 2008
Me and my Bible – is there a problem with the possessive pronoun.

Recently was away from home for a few days. Forgot to take my Bible. Now there was a Bible there, but it wasn't my Bible. It isn't the first time I've gone away without my Bible. But the unmistakable sense of loss, the definite feeling of non-attachment to other available Bibles, the apparently irrational annoyance that I didn't bring my familiar 20 year old re-bound but otherwise quite ordinary Bible, all got me thinking.

What exactly is it I don't have, if I don't have my Bible? How far is familiarity with one particular Bible a significant element in my relaxed contemplation of "the Word"" in the words?

Does using an unfamiliar Bible deprive me of familiar context; render less accessible that acquired inner mapping of literary memory that is the geography of this specific Bible I know so well; dissipate that resonance and reassurance that comes from knowing and finding yourself in familiar places? Well, yes, probably.

But does all that invest the physical printed object (the unavailable my Bible) with more significance than it should? After all I still have several Bibles I've used, each of them for years, before replacing them with the next.

26 November 2008
Good news for “an age of paranoia”.

Blogging over at the Scottish Baptist College today. About paranoia and the Gospel!

A recent report by a leading psychiatrist at King's College, London, describes the 21st Century as "the age of paranoia".

Question. What is the good news of the Gospel for such an age – and how do we live in such a way that our words are made credible by a way of life in which our faith in Jesus makes us demonstrably different?

You might want to go look.

25 November 2008
Too many sparrows are falling to the ground……..

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground but your Father notices it." (Matthew 10.29).

Even the sparrow and the swallow find shelter in your temple (Psalm 84.3)

So the Bible about sparrows, providence and responsible living.

In a world made already much more precarious by the way we hammer and hack the environment into submission to our self-centred goals, sparrows are an ecological smoke detector. So it should give us even more pause for thought that the house sparrow has declined by around 60% in the last decade. Lock block drives, front gardens turned to parking spaces, the popularity of cheap non-native plants, square kilometres of decking, urban pollution reducing botanically based insects, are only some of the reasons.

Don't know about you – but I'm rapidly running out of optimism about our capacity to reverse the damage we do. The whole depressing story about the decline of the house saprrow can be read here.

Meanwhile, John Clare, the finest writer of poetry about birds, lived in such a close rapport with the natural world that he sensed the significant fragility yet irreplaceable wonder of life for each creature. His own remembered experience of mental ill health (his madness, as he called it) made him uniquely qualified as an advocate of compassion and care for those vulnerable and far from insignificant lives that share our planet, and whose interests intersect with our own.

Sure my sparrows are my own,

Let ye then my birds alone,

Come poor birds from foes severe

Fearless come, you're welcome here,

My heart yearns at fate like yours,

A sparrow's life's as sweet as ours.

24 November 2008
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?
When an ex Secretary General of the United Nations and an ex President of the United States are refused visas by Zimbabwe, the world is expected to be impressed by more petty power games of a corrupt regime.

But for the people whose suffering is intentionally orchestrated in the power-hungering and power-mungering across international borders, this is no game.

I turn to a poem by a Victorian Catholic, one of the finest peace poems in our language, I think. Hope and disappointment, longing and endurance, impatience and trustful waiting, the rebuke from the heart of the oppressed tempered by a hopefulness driven underground seeking means of survival, and finding it – believing that eventually, one day, peace will come.

The tyrant who causes other people's fear to hide his own insecurity, can't forever silence voices, crush human spirits, exclude hope. The Spirit of God needs no visa, is subject to no exclusion orders, and when He comes 'He comes with work to do'.

And so I pray, "When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?

Peace

When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite

To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.
22 November 2008
Ouch! Remember Lot’s Wife?

Lot's wife. She looked back didn't she? The sensible way to move forward is to face the front. Yes?

Walking to the car park at Braehead I heard a horn blast and a screech of tyres. I turned round to see what was happening. Like Lot's wife, I looked back. But I kept walking at a brisk pace. Since nothing happened I turned round to face forward. My timing has always been good. Whether it's hitting a dead ball, volleying a high ball, or heading a ball providing I could reach it, the important thing to generate force is to co-ordinate the speed of the projectile and the co-ordinated speed of body and head or foot at the point of impact.

My timing is still good. As I turned round, still walking briskly, the side of my face connected with alarmingly good timing with a large cold, hard, shiny steel lightpost!

##@@**@@##!

My eyebrow, my cheekbone and my jawbone, propelled by my body speed and given added impetus by my head turning to the front, all made a precise and simultaneous connection with the post.

Result? A cut eyebrow that will almost certainly be a black eye in time for sympathetic pastoral comment on Sunday, a bruised cheekbone and a tender jawbone. Oh, and a badly bruised ego

21 November 2008
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

Regular readers of this blog will know I'm not a Jonathan Ross fan. So please note that the book pictured here is by one Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, (New Haven: Yale, 2001). This book is utterly absorbing because based on original research, with masses of material organised around an overall theme, and then written with verve and an evangelistic zeal to persuade. Rose has unearthed and illustrated the significance of the working class autodidact – the self taught scholar whose learning is the result of self-motivation towards improvement and a latent yet persistent intelligence and hunger for knowledge that will not be frustrated by being denied social opportunity.

Books about reading are irresistible to the long confirmed and happily resigned to their personal fate bibliophile. But when such a book is also a window on social development and human aspiration, and in addition acts as a catalyst for recalling my personal memories and reinforcing some of my least negotiable political convictions, then it is given a space on the shelf reserved for books to be read straight through, without the diversion of anything else being read at the same time. This is a book for those drizzly, dreich weekends, to be read while fortified by the good things of life. Not piecemeal chapter a day lift and lay, but wholesale undiverted attention.

Rose explains and illustrates why it is that reading and learning has been such a a formative human activity these past couple of centuries. reading him you learn the importance of the Everyman Library, consider the significance of facts like this – Scottish weavers were amongst the most literate citizens of 18th and 19th C Scotland; (David Livingstone wasn't the only one who propped latin books on his weaver's beam). No wonder the Scottish Lowlands had 'one of the highest literary levels in the world in the late 18th century', creating a community in which the Waverley Novels and the poetry of Byron and Moore fired the minds and imagination of thousands of day labourers. And then there was John Christie 'the literary shepherd', who amassed a library of 370 volumes which included complete sets of the Rambler, Spectator and Tatler, and who was one of an entire culture of self-taught agricultural workers who used their isolation in the bothy to read. And much more of the same.

But Jones is pursuing an even bigger goal – he is exploring how working folk read – read texts of all kinds, including books, newspapers, lectures, sermons, plays, films, radio broadcasts. In other words this is a book about how people excluded from elitist education, nevertheless learned for themselves how to read the world. This is a history of working class independent hermeneutics, in which Rose provides "an intellectual history of people who were not expected to think for themselves". But who did, and with remarkable social and historical consequences.

My two grandfathers could remember older Lanarkshire miners in Shotts, early in the Twentieth Century discussing the atonement, socialism and other "intellectual" questions at the coal face, while eating their "pieces".* And my grandmother, the wife of a miner, (who had full sets of Dickens, Scott, Dumas, and several editions of Burns), knew as much about the Waverley novels, the social context of Walter Scott, and was as aware of the distortions caused by such historical romanticising of Scotland's history as any academic expert of her own time. Of my four grandparents, she is probably most responsible for that wonderful gene that makes a love of reading hereditary!

* A "piece" in Scotland refers to the home made packed food workers took to their work. And a "play piece" the food taken to school in the absence of crisps, chocolate and other unheard of extravagances!

20 November 2008
The dangerous politics of presumed consent, or the generous freedom of the Gift.

The Westminster and Scottish Governments are again considering the issue of a shortage of organ donors and the arguments for and against presumed consent. Lying behind the urgency, and apparent moral validity of the move to establish a norm of presumed consent, there are the very human stories of considerable suffering for those awaiting donor organs, and an underlying anguish made worse for patients and their families by the anxiety of a long indefinite wait, often against a reducing time deadline. Any reasonable and ethically defensible course of action that might mitigate such suffering and make for more hopeful outcomes, should surely elicit the support and co-operation of everyone for whom humane compassion and generous care for the other are key principles of human community.

However, the UK Organ Donation Taskforce has concluded in its recently published report that presumed consent would be unlikely to boost organ donation, and have not therefore recommended such a far reaching change in the law. To be sure there are countries like Austria and Spain where presumed consent is the norm and they have high levels of registered organ donors. By contrast in the UK only 25% of those eligible have registered despite widely acknowledged estimates that a large majority of the eligible population are in favour of organ donation. The frustration such an anomaly causes further strengthens the case for presumed consent, it is claimed. Further, the current debate is about "soft presumed consent", that is, if the law were changed to make presumed consent the norm, next of kin would be able should they wish, to withold consent to organ removal for transplant purposes, and their veto would be upheld.

A number of reasons were given by the Taskforce for rejecting presumed consent as a viable way forward. First, while in countries that do operate presumed consent the number of donors is impressively higher, the explanation is thought to lie elsewhere than in the policy of presumed consent. In these countries greater resources are invested in increasing and maintaining public awareness of the benefits to others, and in promoting programmes of social education and support throughout the entire process of recruiting and registering donors.

Second, the Taskforce believes that presumed consent would significantly undermine trust in the medical profession, and the capacity of medical professionals, under pressure from several directions, to deal with conflicting claims of those requiring organs and those potential donors who may have serious illness or injury. Whether such conlicts are real or perceived, public trust is largely based on perception, and if the public perception is less positive then the consequence would still be a serious loss of trust in the core relationship of patient and doctor.

Third, the Taskforce believes that presumed consent would eliminate the concept of "gift". When a recipient is given the organ of another human being, the fact that the organ is donated is an act of generosity, free and gratis. Knowledge of that "giftedness" is an essential element in the emotional reconciliation between the host body and the donated organ, and plays no small part in the recipient patient's future emotional and mental health. For recipients and their families presumed consent lacks the element of free gift, that willing surrender of the self that is profoundly characteristic of the key moments of human exchange.

Now a Christian approach to such a morally complex and emotionally charged debate will surely include a careful consideration of all the above. And the tone and character of the debate should reflect the life or death nature of the questions involved, and these as felt from both sides. But there is at least one nexus of Christian truths and insights that move the discussion to a different level. It is the Christian understanding of a human being as created by God with an identity and value that is inherent in each created being. And a core element in defining the nature of humanity and the dignity of each human being, is the capacity for moral freedom and ethical choice.

The legal terminology of presumed consent masks a highly dangerous and morally unacceptable claim. Who has the right to presume any "presumed consent"? If the law is changed to enact it, presumably the state. But what exactly is being presumed? That a human being's body is not inviolate but may be "used" on the authority and preumed ownership of another; in this case the State. Such a utilitarian view when applied to human beings and human bodies implies a process of commodification, and the human body becomes one more resource, which the state can presume it is free to use, (albeit for beneficent purposes), unless a prior opt out disclaimer is registered. That I believe runs flat contrary to a Christian view of human beings, human bodies and human life as defined in Christian theology and ethics.

The state has no right to presume any ownership of a person; has no right to legislate into existence a presumed right to use parts of a human body without explicit consent; has therefore no right to impose by law presumed consent in the absence of an explicit denial. If presumed consent were introduced, I would then have to opt out of a legally imposed situation in order to retain ownership, control and freedom over my own body. Which means (by a legal sleight of hand), that ownership, control and freedom over my body has already been presumed by the state and ceded by me, till I take it back.

It has not, and cannot. For a Government to presume my consent by legal enactment, it must first presume such a degree of power over me that it can take to itself the right to make decisions about the use of my body. It has no such power, and to seek such power by legal enactment would be to establish in law a dangerously reductionist view of what a human being is. It would signal an equally dangerous assumption of state power over human life and freedom that has no political or moral justification.

All that said, Christian compassion and pastoral considerations cannot be content with the status quo of acute donor shortage in a population apparently largely in favour of organ donation. That the Government is now making £4 million available for an education and awareness campaign seems an obvious and responsible first step – but the amount doesn't seem to equate to the importance and urgency of the issue. But secondly, as a Christian I belong to a faith tradition in which self-giving for the sake of the other is a central ethical and theological value, rooted indeed in my understanding of God. That has significant purchase on such socially responsive and responsible issues as being a blood donor, a registered organ donor, a strategic and generous donor of money and energy in the service of others. Then there is the importance of pastoral experience. I have accompanied several people whose lives have depended on the "gift" of another human being's organ. The profound emotional, moral and spiritual experience of the recipients takes them and those who love them to the far edges of human courage, wonder, gratitude and trust. The gift of life is like no other gift.The Taskforce were right to highlight this, and to affirm its moral and spiritual importance.

In a culture still in shock at the ongoing consumerist catastrophe, a reaffirmation of the inalienable worth and dignity of every human life is both a required corrective witness and a crucial social goal. Our Governments at Westminster and Edinburgh are going to have a hard job educating us all in the importance of socially responsive compassion, and resetting mindsets away from me, money mine. Organ donation and the concept of the "gift" require a different mentality and morality from value for money and bottom line imperatives of contemporary consumerism. For more than a generation, the self-centred lifestyle sustained by consumer commodities and celebrity focus has dominated (perhaps suppressed) moral aspiration.

For in my own admittedly personal view, our willingness to donate our organs, our blood, our money, our time and energy, and all of these for the good of others – is a moral question not a political or economic one. It is about how we view our own life in relation to others. It's about how as a Christian I look on other people's suffering and think with critical compassion of what that person's situation requires of me as a follower of Jesus. Beyond my Christian commitment I am also a citizen and a member of the human family. That too brings gift and obligation – somewhere in this mess of a world these two ideas need to be invested again with moral purpose and human possibility. You cannot legislate generosity and a sense of responsibility for others – perhaps communities that celebrate the grace of God in worship can again find the energy and imagination to embody that generous self giving love in ways that act as salt and light.

And one further thought. When each Christian community gathers around the table of communion, and takes bread and breaks it, and hears the words, "This is my body which is for you", "This my blood shed for the sake of many", we assent both to the final truth of who God is, and to the lifestyle that flows in worship and gratitude from such a source of Love. In Christian discipleship the link is explicit and essential between the Eucharist, and that giving of ourselves in love and service to God and others, in Jesus name, in the power of the Spirit.

.

19 November 2008
Caravaggio’s “Jesus Calls Saints Peter and Andrew”.

Today I was in Edinburgh doing important things. I had lunch with Sheila at the Queens Gallery Mews restaurant and had the best carrot soup ever, followed by a slab of millionaire shortbread with toffee a minimum of 1 cm thick. We then met up with oor Aileen for an early afternoon coffee (and for her a late lunch), and I borrowed my car back for a while!

But before that.

We visited the Queens Gallery Baroque Exhibition where I wanted to sit and gaze at Carravagio's "Jesus Calls St Peter and St Andrew". This sumptuous painting was on the news recently – as part of the Royal Collection it was assumed it was an early copy. But no – it's the original masterpiece and it has now been restored and is on view till early 2009.

The scene is from Mark's Gospel, "Follow me and I will make you fishers of men". The first surprise is the artist's assumption that Peter and Andrew are middle aged while Jesus is an unbearded youth. Not sure what to make of this – I suppose I never thought about relative ages of the disciples. And if Peter's mother in law was still around, and was ill but healed by Jesus, I suppose that would suggest Peter wasn't that old, at least not as old as in this painting?

Then there's Peter's neck – strong, corded, thick, and his hands, one holding fish and the other held out in a gesture of….what? The choice is between the fish and his liveliehood, or the emtpy hands of the disciple who leves it all and follows, and finds life. Peter's hand is at the centre of the painting, and has a three dimensional effect – it is open, empty, the gesture of a reasonable man questioning an unreasonable command. Andrew's hand is pointed at himself as if to say, Who? Me? You serious? And Jesus hands point to the future offstage, a gesture towards the unknown but travelling in the direction he points.

The contrast of the dark background in the top half of the painting and the shadow of light coming from the direction Jesus points, gives the painting a dramatic effect – not least because the only light part of the background is also on the shadow side of the figures. Not sure what that means – even if it means anything, other than that in the sharp crisis of decision, nothing is certain, obvious or predictable. Peter and Andrew are faced with an outrageous lack of options- fish or follow, stay or go, the safety of status quo or the risk of everything. Incredulity, confusion and no time to think it through; sometimes the greatest opportunities come once if at all.

What I can't easily convey, and what is lost in any print, scan or e-image of this painting, is the quality of light that spills from the faces, reflecting the mystery of revelation. You have to see it, sit before it, gaze at it, and feel the theologically charged impact of colour. The supernatural light is given added force by the white sash across Jesus shoulder and chest, reflected on Andrew's face, and creating an aura of concentrated intensity on each of the faces.

If I'd gone to Edinburgh, got off the train, walked to Holyroodhouse, sat for 15 minutes before this painting and then come home – it would have been more than worth it. My ticket allows me to have a years free entry to the Queen's Gallery – I'll be back every time I'm in Edinburgh. As a commentary on one of my favourite Gospel stories, it beats any amount of scholarly words.

17 November 2008