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New Friends and old books

Well the jaunt to St Deiniol's as always didn't go exactly to plan. Yes, I did read chunks of Balentine on Job – but only a few and I decided I prefer the slow piece by piece approach. No I didn't get very far with Psalm 119 as I was sidetracked by Hermeneutics of Doctrine by Tony Thiselton. This is tough going but I'm learning just how much I don't know – and hoping that reading this will fill some hiatuses in my hermeneutical up to dateness. More immediately rewarding was Andrew Purves, Pastoral Theology in the Classical Tradition, which is a good concise survey of several ancient treatments of pastoral theology and how the values and theological commitments of the past remain relevant today – albeit with considerable adjustment for changed context and knowledge.n

But as usual I found the people as interesting as the books. And as varied. And as much a matter of taste. But I made two new friends – Peter from Arizona (pictured below) and Steve from Cardiff (pictured on the right). You know you need friends around when a retired Canon asks "What's a Baptist doing in an Anglo-Catholic library?" Could have said giving it some credibility – or – I'm here to do some personal witnessing – or take the more diplomatic route of murmuring that Baptists also honour divine learning, as Gladstone the Library's founder knew very well!

So I appreciated the friendship, conversation and shared learning Steve, Peter and I enjoyed at the meal table, the farm shop (where we had Italian coffee and Welsh tea bread), and over post dinner tea. Steve is well into a PhD on inter religious dialogue and wrestling with hermeneutics and religuous discourse in the public sphere, via Habermas et al. He's responsible for church based learning and Practical Theology at St Michael's College Cardiff and is Vice Principal; he was at St Deiniol's to get his head round some of the hard stuff in one of his PhD chapters. So I learned a bit more about Habermas.

Peter is doing research on the early 18th century non-jurors which got us into a conversation about Susanna Wesley who knew a thing or two about non-juring! Peter's great enthusiasm is Schleiermacher – he is a native German speaker and his area of expertise is 19th Century rational theology.This
photo is from Peter's profile on the University website – the moustache
was gone, so had the cowboy tie, by the time we met – but he tells me he and his wife have three horses in the garage / stable!

One of the joys of email is that it enables such friendships to go on being nourished by conversation and the stimulus of learning and sharing in that fellowship we call Christian scholarship.

11 September 2008
Reading and Retreat at St Deiniol’s Library.

Today I'm off to St Deiniol's for a personal reading retreat. I have to be in Crewe for a prior commitment Thursday coming, and the chance to combine that trip with a few days at St Deiniol's 40 minutes away was too good to miss. The banner under the photo syas something very near to my own sentiments – with just the moving of an 'S' – Libraries Matter!

I want to do some further work on Psalm 119 reflecting on the psalm as theological education within a wisdom curriculum. Not sure what will come out of this but I am trying to find a handle on Wisdom Psalms, and especially this elaborately constructed eulogy on the law of God, as structured encouragement to live Torah. The connections between Torah nurtured wisdom and theological education as life shaped by intentional practices of obedience to God, seem to me to promise important insights into what shapes and sustains ministry. In recent years there has been a growing recognition that ministry has its own competences. These are not mere practical skills, but grow out of theological and spiritually formative experience, and such competences express both the wisdom of a long, rich pastoral tradition, while also requiring of us an innovative adaptability in embodying and practising wise ministry in a contemporary and changing context.

My current commentary enthusiasm, Sam Balentine's commentary on Job will accompany me and I've scheduled some longer periods of reading in order to immerse myself more deeply in the flow of this remarkable volume. I'm also taking David Ford's Christian Wisdom, one of several volumes held back till they can be read without the interruption of normal life! It's the first of five big volumes I'm hoping to meander through by a daily diet of manageable chunks and careful note-taking.

Aside from those the library at St Deiniol's has enough variety to keep me going – including a superb Victorian poetry section. Books, music, running shoes, morning prayers, a cake and coffee shop across the road of which our Ministry Advisor advised a level of restraint (aye right!), – not doing the ascetic retreat, more an exercise in taking life easy, in a serious but not over-intense way – you know, the discipline of responsible freedom. So what would be responsible freedom in a coffee and cake shop? Hmmm? I'll let you know after some experiementation. No internet access for a few days so next blogging is after I get back.

7 September 2008
Messed about by time, and the perspective of poetry

The last couple of days I've been messed about by time. Well, messed about by watches anyway. Two or three years ago my Rotary watch, a gift from Sheila for my 21st birthday, finally creaked to a halt and the jeweller said it couldn't be repaired. So Sheila bought me a new watch, a Skagen slimline like the one in the picture. Last week at the Baptist Consultation, while delivering my paper, I became aware that it had been half past eleven for ages! The watch continued to start stop for a couple of days, finally giving up on Sunday morning, just as I was leaving for the Sunday service at Hillhead! I borrowed Sheila's, and went in the afternoon to have the battery changed. Only to be told it needed repairing and would cost a lot.

I came home weighed the pros and cons, but I do need a reliable watch, so I ordered a replacement, virtually the same but with a different coloured face – titanium blue this time. Then I went into my desk drawer where my old Rotary had lain untouched for over two years, wound it up more in hope than expectation – and it started, and kept going, and is still going. So I have a new watch coming, which is ok cos the old Rotary has a high mileage on the clock. But speaking with another watch repairer in Glasgow, he didn't seem to think my first Skagen was irreparable, and would estimate before proceeding, and at no charge for the check up and tests. I could end up with three watches, which isn't at all what I set out to do.

While negotiating my way through these past days of unreliable time, I was also reading Elisabeth Jennings and came across this poem. Is it not a beautiful meditation on the elusive and perplexing experience of time, the unknown future, the known history, and the present which is all we actually have…momentatily? This is Jennings the Christian poet at near her best, as she takes something ordinary, like ordinary time, and finds a pathway from there to those deep doctrinal realities that are themselves the mainspring of Christian faith.

The poem is dedicated to a Dominican preacher.You can find out about him here.

Time's Element
For Robert Ombres OP

I know that I was wrong about the hours
      And time and clocks and bells.
I thought that only future had its powers
Upon us. Hearing you, I see the false

Premise and perspective. All that's now
      Indeed is moved into
Futures we can't rely on or know how
Anything that happens here is true.

Of course the past is only sure and feels
      Certain. It is our
History. The future may be false
And any moment take from us one hour.

Then I remembered those prophetic words,
      'Before all was I am.'
Christ lived among us with a cross and swords
And yet he with his Virgin Mother came

Into the moments of the angel's plea.
      She carried God and man
And gave the future her willed history
As she took part in God the Father's plan.

From Elizabeth Jennings. New Collected Poems (Carcanet: 2002) 308.

5 September 2008
Glasgow Central, where this train terminates….

You know how the automated voice on trains helpfully keeps you informed of your whereabouts? For example:

"This is Dumbreck. The next stop is Glasgow Central where this train terminates."

At least, that's what you're supposed to hear. But if you're on sabbatical, and you're listening for a word from the Lord, you know, a wee word of encouragement or a hint that life is supposed to be for fun as well as work, and Sheila points out the phonetic possibilities, what you hear is

"This is Dumbreck. The next stop is Glasgow Central where the strain terminates".

And as Sheila and I were on our way to Miss Cranston's Tearoom we took this as such a wee prophetic word. At Glasgow Central the strain terminates, and fifty yards along Gordon Street is Miss Cranston's – now is that a wee word or what!
Readers of this blog will remember I covered myself in embarrassment on my last visit after a bad experience with a cafetiere plunger that took messy revenge on me for forcing the issue. This time – nae problem. Just a gentle downward push, and all the staff can breathe a sigh of relief.

On another note, yesterday – while watching the afternoon downpour I was on the exercise bike listening to Mozart's Clarinet Concerto and the Fourth Horn Concerto. Not sure Mozart could ever have envisaged the joy he would bring a sweaty Baptist working out – but the Clarinet Concerto is a work of heartbreaking genius.

Tomorrow if I don't get out running cos of the rain – though it looks to be better – I'll listen to the first piece of classical music I ever sat right through and listened to – in astonished surprise. I was given it on a vinyl LP by Sheila (around 1974!) after I'd read Unfinished Journey, the autobiography of Yehudi Menuhin. It's Brahms' Violin Concerto, a piece I've listened to regularly ever since, and never yet tired of it.

Now. What else should I listen to that would tone up my mind and spirit the same way that physical exercise does the body? This month is classical – so any suggestions welcome. I've a wee budget for some new CDs.

One of the tasks over the next while is reducing the number of CDs which sit on the shelves no longer listened to. Charity shops here I come – but does anyone listen to the likely rejects anymore…..?.

4 September 2008
A Haiku New Testament Introduction.

After a long delay due both to my oversight then the inability of Typepad to cope with pasted content – (now in the improved version much easier), I can publish one of the shortest (if not the shortest) NT Introduction available to hard pressed students. Thanks to all those who contributed now months ago. I'll be soliciting contributions to the OT version soon.

Gospel of Matthew
Son of Abraham
Brings fulfilment of Torah
Global Commission
         Catriona Gorton

Gospel of Mark
Good news! Here's a tale –
starts with mid-life crisis, then
stops before life starts.
        Andy Jones

Gospel of Luke
Good News! For the poor,
'Sinners' and tax-collectors:
Healing salvation.
       Catriona Gorton

Gospel of John
The Word became flesh.
Uncomprehending darkness
eclipsed by the light.
       Jim Gordon

Acts
In Jerusalem
The Word in gracious power
To all the world's end.
    Jason Goroncy

Romans
Saving God seeks… you:
sin-spoiled, grace-gained, destined. Die
to self, live to love.
       Andy Jones

1 Corinthians
Life in the body –
A guide for a healthy church
Three cores: faith, hope, love.
       Catriona Gorton

2 Corinthians
Don't do what I said;
do what I meant – and don't give
me all this hassle!
       Andy Jones

Galatians
In Christ free at last
They try to re-enslave me
Glory in God's Cross
       Jason Goroncy

Ephesians
God (who called you to
the skies) fill, gift and grow you;
live in light as one!
       Andy Jones

Philippians
A prisoner writes
of joy and freedom, for Christ's
crowning came through loss.
       Andy Jones

Colossians
False philosophies
hinder. Live holy lives, be good
to one another.
       Andy Jones

1 Thessalonians
Renowned for your faith
Live with faithful vigilance
The Lord is coming!
       Jim Gordon

2 Thessalonians
Show perseverance!
Stand against the Man of Sin!
Shun pious spongers!
Jim Gordon

Philemon
Neither slave nor free!
Since bound together in Christ,
Free Onessimus.
Jim Gordon

1 Timothy.
Teach what you were taught,
my son. Practice your gifts, and
keep the flock faithful.
Andy Jones

2 Timothy
Stick at it young Tim!
Pleasing God should be your aim.
P.S. bring my coat!
       Catriona

Titus
Pick leaders with care:
prize sound doctrine AND lifestyle.
Epimenides!
Catriona

Hebrews
Spoken by the Son
Lo, our great high priest has come
Grace be with you all
Jason Goroncy

James
Oft misunderstood
Harmony of faith and deeds
Practical wisdom
       Catriona Gorton

1 Peter
A chosen people
kept by the power of God
through fiery trial
       Jim Gordon

2 Peter
Divine election
Means live the last days trusting
Precious promises!
       Jim Gordon

I John
Walk in light and love!
Holy love will cast out fear
from hearts made perfect.
       Jim Gordon

2 John
Thirteen verses long:
Lady and kids, walk in love.
Beware docetism!
       Gordon Jones

3 John
The elder commends
kind hospitality (wish
others followed suit!)
       Andy Jones

Jude
Beware false teachers!
Love the sinner, hate the sin.
God will keep you safe.
       Catriona

Revelation
Valour in suff'ring
The Lamb who opens the scroll
Making all things new
       Jason Goroncy

3 September 2008
The way we were!

Trawling around on the internet looking for some places I used to know I came across class photos from a school I attended in the late 1950's.

Here's the class photo. Not telling which one is me – not yet anyway! Guesses welcome.

2 September 2008
‘I know that my redeemer liveth…’ Job, Balentine, Handel, Wesley and Maddy Prior!

Those of us who buy commentaries because it is our calling to study and preach scripture, have far too many options in what has become a crowded field, (especially with Evangelical publishers). There is an ecological ethic waiting to be discovered by publishers. Way at the start of my ministry I read and have followed W E Sangster's advice never to buy commentary sets. Find the best ones in a set and create your own "Best Set". That's even more important for someone like me who reads the things, providing they are well written. Amongst the tests of a good commentary is how they deal with the hard bits! Most exegetes can do the running commentary / say something about most things approach. But who unfankles textual knots? Who hears and pays attention to theological tensions? Which commentary has the balance between raising and answering questions, and raises real questions without providing answers too controlled by unacknowledged personal agendas?

I've spent an hour or so chasing the 'test text' of the redeemer in Job
19.25. Briefly – Balentine finds the Christianisation of the text
attractive but unsupportable. Though he isn't prepared to be closed to
other interpretations – the way of wisdom, he thinks, may be to linger
within the question that refuses to be answered – who will be the
redeemer of the Jobs of this world? Amongst his more telling points –
Job has not been asking or expecting to be delivered BY God, but is
demanding to be vindicated before and delivered FROM God. All of which
sounds very Brueggemannish! He also (following David Clines and Carol Newsom)
proposes that v25 and v26a are separated from v26b and 27, so that the second
of Job's affirmations is that he will indeed see God, in his flesh,
before he dies. Thus he isn't postulating resurrection, but demanding and claiming
vindication through a redeemer-advocate who will take up his case, and before a death that now seems certain.

That is a far too limited precis – and captures none of Balentine's
subtlety and theological delicacy. Likewise, the treatment by Newsom in
the New Interpreter's is a careful and nuanced argument along similar
lines. Handel in the gorgeous aria from the Messiah may well have found a remarkable resonance for Christian
theology in the passage – but these modern commentators think the force of Job's
argument for pre-Christian readers / hearers is the sheer human
determination to speak out against any system, theological or cultural,
that unjustly inflicts suffering and is unresponsive to the cry of the
innocent. And that in the context of Job, and in the context of our modern world, there is a crucial aptness that a text of such defiant faith should be heard with its original force.

Still. Is Handel's oratorio an entirely mistaken appropriation of a text that has comforted countless Christian believers? Why should our contemporary treatment of the text be privileged over the way the Church has found in this text strong resources of pastoral support and theological vision? I've just listened again to Handel, whose rendering of the text frames it in adoration and the persistence of faith. And I confess I find no destructive dissonance between the ultimate and glorious vision of the redeemed before the Redeemer, and the urgent moral enquiry of the sufferer who refuses to have human anguish rendered meaningless by an ultimate and inscrutable silence. They are of course two very different hermeneutical methods – but must they disqualify each other?
The text is even further enhanced – and removed from strict context – by Charles Wesley – and then rendered even more creatively by Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band. Maddy Prior's voice does something entirely different from the soprano performing Handel's oratorio – there is an intimacy and personal responsiveness that takes seriously the first person singular…"I know…." When cleansed of its dogmatic stridency, "I know…" is personal appropriation of mercy and grateful affirmation of faith in the grace that redeems – or so Wesley.

As one who invests personally – in money and study time – on what I try to ensure are good commentaries, I fully sympathise with
the problem of choosing books wisely and within a tight budget. I've had to
do it all my life! So. I still think Balentine's is a magnificent
example of the commentary genre that does what I most want – wrestle
with the text, honestly, skillfully, creatively and with theological
sensitivity. Carol Newsom's work is bound with Clinton McCann on Psalms in volume
IV of the New Interpreter's Bible and that volume costs about the same
as Balentine, though it is one of the key volumes in the NIB. This isn't helping is it? I would find it very hard to do
without either now – but if the NIB is in a library near you, why not
treat yourself to Balentine. But I can hear at least one friend who is an OT scholar muttering about Clines' three volume masterpiece – and I just wish ……..

1 September 2008
Pastoral depth and theological reach: Balentine on The Book of Job

Some time ago I mentioned the commentary on Job by Sam Balentine. (And the other day I promised Robert a few extracts as a sampler). For a long time now I've read slowly through a commentary as a kind of background music to other study. There is no pressure to read fast, the aim being a long slow conversation between biblical text, commentator and me listening in. Not all commentaries read easily because they're meant to be consulted, a resource available on demand. Still, I've persevered over a long while and found it for me a very satisfying form of lectio divina. It's taken me the best part of two months to read around half of Sam Balentine's commentary on Job, and I feel no compulsion to speed up the process – that would be like being part of a conversation where you rudely interrupt by saying to the other person, "Come on! Get on with it! Get to the point! We haven't all day!" You don't interrupt someone in a conversation who is speaking more sense than you are likely to.

So Balentine is being savoured sip by sip (think Sean the Baptist and an expensive but worth it Italian or Australian red wine!). Here are some of my pencil-marks-in- -the-margin extracts from Balentine.

The persistent voices of dissent in Hebraic tradition – Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, the anonymous pray-ers of the lament psalms, and especially Job – challenge orthodoxy with the problem scholars call theodicy. Suffering inevitably raises questions about God and justice, which defenders of the faith are compelled to answer. Theodicies come from those who, like Job's friends, seek to counter questions that impugn divine justice by pronouncing God 'Not Guilty'.

Such a verdict may of course be entirely justified, for as the witness of the scriptures makes clear, God will certainly punish the wicked. However, as the dialogues [of Job] unfold, Eliphaz and the friends exemplify how this truth may be overstated or misapplied. Theirs is the approach of those who maintain a safe distance from the suffering of others in order to defend doctrine at the expense of compassion. (page 109).

If our vantage point is the ash heap, then we look with the eyes of the sufferer and ponder the gap between the world and the world we have been shown. The world Eliphaz envisions summons Job to praise, but the broken world in which Job lives invites only lament. If doxology alone is acceptable in God's world, where then is the place for those who cannot as yet (if ever) speak this language?…Before we take up the ministry of comforting others, it is wise to ask ourselves if our intent is to help them find their place in God's world, or in ours. (page 120 and 121).

"Words of despair" speak a truth that must not only be heard but also seen and felt. If Job's friends would only pay attention to him as a person, if they would only look at him 'face to face,' then his face would make a moral claim on them that would change both their words and their attitudes. (page 129)

There aren't many commentaries on Job that are so pastorally oriented. I find that a surprising thought. Balentine's impatience with theodicies that seek to protect God from our deepest human questions and complaints gives his exegesis and comment a spiritual depth and theological reach that I have found deeply satisfying. This is a great commentary. Very different from Clines, (3 volumes in the Word Series) who can also write with pastoral and theological sensitivity, but with such informational detail that his work needs a different kind of study. But when complete it will be the benchmark in encyclopaedic coverage The commentary that comes closest to Balentine is that by Carol Newsom in the New Interpreter's Bible. At times I've checked Balentine against her work, because she is a remarkably lucid and searching contributor to the conversation about Job. Newsom has an independent mind, whose exposition is rich with pastoral intent, and who also writes beautifully. The next post on Job will be on the great Redeemer text in Job 19.25-27.

31 August 2008
New Look Blog, Sabbath and shoogly stepping stones!

Decided to change the mood and dress style of the blog for the duration of my sabbatical. Don't be misled by the books on the top banner – I'll do my fair share or reading, writing, studying. But there is more to this wonderful life than books, and I'm going looking for it over the next few months. But I DO like the colour, the layout and the sense of lightness just bouncing off the page.

The picture was taken while on holiday exploring a medieval monastery and walking across the river using ancient stepping stones. Amongst the benefits of a sabbatical will be the chance to regain balance and be able to negotiate the stepping stones that are the next stages of life in all its vocational possibilities.

When I did the crossing last year several of the stones were shoogly, moving just enough to remind the unwary or over-confident pilgrim that life isn't always free of shoogles! Recreation, prayer, reading, walking, people, food - in no order of priority – these are part of daily life, unless they are squeezed out by that over-determined work ethic that Sabbath is meant to interrupt and thus reset life to normal! So these are mostly what I'll be doing a refresher course in! That way I'll cope with the shoogles and nae fa' in. (shoogle is a variation of 'shog' which means 'to wobble from side to side' – 18th century NE of Scotland).

30 August 2008
Baptist Theology Consultation – a very good week

Just back from Manchester where I met with 30+ British Baptists all enthusiastic about doing theology in context. Held at Luther King House (shown in the two photos in different seasons – great place for a retreat / conference). Originally the brainchild of Professor Paul Fiddes, Baptists Doing Theology in Context isn't a conference but a consultation. It's a place where we come to share what we are already working on, thinking about, exploring, mostly as that arises in the context of our ministry and lives; it is a place where 'prayer is valid.' Those who come are committed to theology by collaboration, participating in a fellowship of thought in which friendships grow and our own limited grasp of faith is strengthened and enlarged.

The papers as indicated earlier were varied in content and approach, each of them evidence of serious engagement with truth that can be elusive, disturbing, renewing and transforming, and shared in a safe place where the main pre-requisite is a love of shared enquiry within the broad context of Baptist identity and loyalty to Christ. Varied viewpoints, differing backgrounds, any number of personal academic interests, a pervasive sense of seriousness that never precludes fun, exchanges of viewpoint, judgement and opinion moderated by respect and intellectual fairness; these set the spirit of the occasion. Everyone who brought a paper or a contribution to share, made themselves vulnerable by offering their thinking as a gift to the rest – I have notes from those I was able to attend which will become part of my own continued following after the way of Christ and the reality of God. I don't want to mention highlight contributions – that would be about my personal preferences. Quality of research, reflection and thought is judged not by personal taste, but by the integrity of those for whom a discipleship of the intellect is an important path traceable on their landscape.

High points for me were to do with people – I met Andy Goodliff finally after repeated blog exchanges; he is as lively and theologically alert over coffee as at his keyboard. I met Catriona again and attended her paper on (local) church history as a resource for practical theology. Clare whom I've know for a good while now, and who was studying in Aberdeen while I was minister there, continues to work with faithful persistence in a place where the circumstances are hard but the people are well worth the sacrifices made to continue supporting them in their shared life. (Indeed – ditto for Catriona whose own ministry requires similar faithful tenacity, and is resourced from deep vocational wells). Briefly encountered Sean the Baptist just back from holiday and looking the picture of rude health – rude and healthy? - anyway looking good! Talking with all the various participants – none of us have life easy – for some theology has to be done in a hard place – it becomes clear that those who think theology is a rarefied intellectual hobby, or a diversion from 'real' life, should talk with some of these real life theologians. Some of them I simply admire and quietly note the importance of new friendships being incorporated into prayer for each of them.

So. A good three days. I'm on sabbatical in a couple of days and now tidying up emails 'n stuff. The blog will continue but with occasional hiatuses (is that the plural?) I promised a post on Balentine on Job to one of my new friends from this week. It'll appear soon, Robert!

I'd asked several people to lead us in our prayers and they each set our thinking, talking and searching within the holy brackets of prayerful attentiveness, to God, and then to each other. I had time to catch up with several folk I don't see nearly often enough – and talking to them reminds me of why I feel that way.

29 August 2008