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Baptists Doing Theology in Context Consultation. August 26-29, at Luther King House, Manchester

Tuesday I'm off to the Baptists Doing Theology in Context Consultation. Not taking the laptop so won't be blogging till the weekend. I've included the menu of papers below, with apologies to participants who are noted here only by surname.
The overarching theme of the Consultation is 'The Wisdom of this World', and a keynote address will be delivered by Professor Paul Fiddes, sure to be a theological and intellectual highlight for all of us. Paul has been a major inspiration and encouragement for Baptists to engage together in theological reflection and pastorally constructive consultation. His own theological writings are exemplary of a theology that frutifully combines generous breadth in its ecumencial debts, and clear historical and theological focus in exploring and affirming the essentials of a Baptist identity recovering its confidence.

Beyond that the idea of the consultation is that there will be three papers offered by particpants in each Open Session (five of these), all based on work they are doing within their own vocational context. Each of the College Principals will lead a plenary session based on their Paper, which will tackle some aspect of contemporary culture and attempt to hear and interpret the wisdom of this world as those who live by a more radical wisdom. It is going to be a theologyfest reflecting the remarkably wide range of theological interest amongst Baptists in the UK. I'll do a report here sometime over the coming weekend. After which I will be on sabbatical leave – a promised disengagement that may take me a week or two to adjust to.

Papers Offered for Baptists Doing Theology in Context

Topics and Timetable

Name	Paper Title	Time
Langford	“God in the Conversation: An Alternative to the Business Model of Church Meeting.”	Tue 4.pm
Vincent	“Living with the Bible Today: The Rhetoric and the Reality.”	Tue 4.pm
Presswood &McBeth	“Embracing Eleanor: A Response to the Apology for Slavery.”	Tue 4.pm
Holyer	“Something Different – Theology Now.”	Wed 9.30
Humphreys	“The Provenance of John 8.-11. Some Light from Statistics.”	Wed 9.30
Kidd (Rosemary)	“‘And when was it we saw you a stranger and welcomed you?’ (Mat.25.38) Engaging with Asylum Seekers.”	Wed 9.30
Bottoms	“Spiritual Direction in the Service of the Kingdom of God".	Thurs 9.30
Carter	“Labelling ‘the sinners’ in Luke’s Gospel.”	Thurs 9.30
Colyer	“The Geometry of God.”	Thurs 9.30
Goodliff	“From dedication to presentation: a study of Baptist Order of Service for Infants.”	Thurs 4.pm
Gorton	“Doing Theology: History for the Health of the Church.”	Thurs 4.pm
Gotobed	“Ministerial Formation, Pastoral Experience and Practical Theology.”	Thurs 4.pm
Philips	“Wotsername!”	Fri 9.30
Thacker	“The Significance of Richard Dawkins' Atheistm for Christians and Others Today.”	Fri 9.30
Haymes	“The Communion of Saints.”	Fri 9.30
	Plenary Papers by College Principals
Finamore	“Atonement in Novel and Film.”	Tue 2.30pm
Wright	“Theological Topography – The stones cry out!”	Tue 7.30
Kidd	“From Cave Painting to Icons.”	Wed 7.30
Gordon	“Giving poets their place: Why Theologians should read Carol Ann Duffy.”	Thurs 11.am
Weaver	“Twenty Four Hour News.”	Thurs 7.30
Ellis	“Sport, Culture and Theology.”	Fri 11.am

25 August 2008

Happy Birthday Brian : Parties, friendship and human life well lived

Celebrations are important acts of community building and friendship sustaining. This weekend we celebrated the 50th birthday of a great friend we've known and journeyed with since 1978. A shared meal in a cool, place-to-go-to type restaurant in Aberdeen, a band that knows how to sing blues and soul, a brief but moving acknowledgement of the importance of friendship and family as the given context for our spiritual and human maturing, a huge birthday cake and a lot of long time friends in one place. While our newly turned 50 year old host spoke of people who had been an inspiration and support, the rest of us had our own thoughts of admiration, affection and gratitude for the capacity of people like himself, to live unselfishly, being there in the background or foreground as part of the peculiar and essential landscape of our lives.

We came away from Aberdeen aware of the need for a modern equivalent of 'blest be the tie that binds, our hearts in Christian love'. The sentiments of the old hymn are fine, they're just too sentimental for contemporary experience to feel comfortable with – I think. For some time now I've been impatient with the use of community at every turn as the term to be used for people gathering together, working together, living together, worshipping together. It's not the experience of togetherness I'm uncomfortable with – I suppose I'm looking for something that qualifies the kind of community, the nature of relationship, the basis of commitment. For myself, I am working with other words like friendship, hospitality, welcome, laughter, companionship, even partnership providing it's minus all commercial connotations.

Amongst the important tasks we undertake for our own good, paradoxically for the good of others also, is the careful maintenance and repair of friendships. An interesting piece of research, study and practice for a sabbatical – examine the fabric of our lives, and the friendships woven through it, and do the necessary restoration. There is considerable skill, and craft in such relational care, and friendship building. 'I no longer call you servants, but friends…..'. Few of Jesus apparently incidental comments are more revealing of what it meant for Jesus to embody and live out a full and true humanity – and to call the likes of the disciples, and us, his friends. In any audit, review or appraisal of my life and work – I'd want quality of friendship to come before most other things – including the friendship of God in Christ which For Christians is the energy source of that faithfulness, affection and trust which are integral to all other friendships.

24 August 2008
Sabbatical, and Sabbath as the Creation of Repose

The words: "On the seventh day God finished His work" seem to be a puzzle. Is it not said: "He rested on the seventh day"? … "What was created on the seventh day? Tranquility, serenity, peace and repose [menuha]."

There is happiness in the love of labor, there is misery in the love of
gain. Many hearts and pitchers are broken at the fountain of profit.
Selling himself into slavery to things, man becomes a utensil that is
broken at the fountain.

He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the
profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. He must go
away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury
of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling his own life. He must
say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has
already been created and will survive without the help of man.

These three almost random quotations from Heschel's book The Sabbath, at least partially explain why I'm excited, a wee bit apprehensive, deeply appreciative, and a bit introspective. In a week's time I will be on Sabbatical. And next week I am at the Baptists Doing Theology in Context Consultation – so Sabbath soon.

The first quotation indicates the theological rootedeness of Sabbath in the activity and creativity of God, the balance of work and rest. The word 'menuha' refers to a quality of composed repose, of trustful enjoying of what is and of letting be, and something that is getting harder to find in the high octane, performance driven ways of living that reward productivity, excellence and achievement. Sabbath is one way of demonstrating the counter-achievement – of not exhausting the core and source of our own vitality.

The second quotation is important for those of us who call what we do vocation.Years ago Luther insisted, rightly, that every Christian's vocation is to be conformed to the image of Christ, and serve Christ in the place where God has called us. Now I've always known the work of theological education, just as pastoral ministry, is a non-profit-making activity. But for us purpose-driven* Christians the warning isn't about profit measured in money – it's the insidious equivalent of achievement, results, publicly demonstrated success, which all unnoticed can become a religion of works in which work and results become the criterion of worth. Heschel's image is telling and clear – 'a utensil broken at the fountain' – to lose the capacity to hold the essentials of life. Evangelical activism can too easily become a dependence, the spiritual addiction of doing, that is sustained by an inward restlessness that doesn't know when, or how, to be still. A time of Sabbath enables a recovery of equlibrium, a rediscovery of our own dispensability and also of our dependence – on the grace that neither needs nor demands our works. (*Mischievous question – what would a purpose-driven Sabbatical look like??? Would the book The Purpose-Driven Sabbatical be a good task-oriented, time-limited goal to set while on sabbatical?)

'The betrayal of embezzling our own lives' – the idea that we filch, embezzle, steal, misappropriate, who we are and what we were made for by an overemphasis on our own work isn't new. But Heschel's way of putting it highlights why overwork is theologically suspect – it is to secretly steal what it is not ours to possess. The life God has given is to be lived, not lost in living. And Sabbath as a life principle is simply that, a principle that preserves life. I have a feeling that 'the profanity of clattering commerce' has some application also to the way doing displaces being, so preoccupied with serving God that God himself goes unnoticed – and unloved.

Sabbath is a gift from God. Sabbatical is a gift too – from those who by adding to their own work create space and time. The remarkable group of people who are my colleagues and friends in the Scottish Baptist College, are making such a time of Sabbatical leave possible. I'm well aware of what that will mean in extra work and responsibility for all of them. That's the point of the reference made at the start, of being deeply appreciative as Sabbath time approaches. Their vocational faithfulness, giftedness and work enables Sabbath to happen for me – I receive that as generous gift, and am grateful for the unselfish giving that makes it possible.

22 August 2008
Pencil Notes in the Margin: The Vision of Denise Levertov

We are living in a time of dread and of awe, of wan hope and of wild hope; a time when joy has to the full its poignance of a mortal flower, and deep content is rare as some fabled Himalayan herb. Ordinary speech no longer suffices. (Denise Levertov, 'Great Posessions', in New and Selected Essays (New Directions, 1992), 120.)

The grandeur of real art…is to rediscover, to grasp again, and lay before us that reality from which we become more and more separated as the formal knowledge which we substitute for it grows in thickness and imperviousness – that reality which there is grave danger we might die without having known and yet which is simply our life. (Marcel Proust, Time Retrieved, quoted in Levertov)

Twenty and more years ago, when this essay was first written Levertov had already diagnosed the malaise that was settling over a world increasingly and anxiously uncertain about the future it was busy creating. This essay, 'Great Possesions', she explores the above quotation from Proust, the 'great Possessions which are our real life'. And she argues that poetry may be the one source of 'song that suffices to our need.' I have long read and listened to Levertov's voice, and tried to see with her vision; the political and ethical edges, the importance of poems 'to inform us of the essential', her commitment to an aesthetic of poetry that pays attention to human significance as revealed in the ordinary everydayness of experience, and does so by 'naming and praising what is'.

20 August 2008
Libraries as Supermarkets for the Imagination

Thinking about my earlier life
recently – triggered by reading someone else's memoirs – I realised that I could
remember the great freedom of mind and expansiveness of spirit that mobile,
local and public libraries brought into an otherwise routine and limited life. Routine
and limited for various obvious reasons – we lived in the country at a time
when working folk couldn’t afford cars, TV was OK but not the pervasive and
persuasive time waster it is now, being in the country there weren’t many
options for after school activity. Well, anyway, I’ve always been a reader –
from Corn Flake packets to Reader’s Digest, newspapers, and at every stage and phase of life, books.

From primary 5 ( I was 9 or 10) I
remember the large leather suitcase with LIBRARY stamped on it, which was
brought round the classes on a trolley each Friday afternoon for us to choose a
book and return the one borrowed last week. That's where I first read Kidnapped,
The Invisible Man and Children of the New Forest. Then there was the local
library at East
Kilbride
in the
early 60's when it was a new new town, and the library a new glass sided shiny
building. That's where I developed a never lost interest in biography, stories
that were real because the people were real, and in stories about animals, and
in which animals are the narrators – so Watership
Downdidn’t require the mental re-adjustment others felt they had to make.

Then there were the Carluke and Lanark Public Libraries, which supported my reprehensible
Western phase. I must have read dozens of not very politically correct
stories of stereo-typed goodies and baddies – that was before I graduated to
Alistair Maclean and Desmond Bagley adventures, Evelyn Anthony espionage, a
long phase of Douglas Reeman (naval war), Hammond Innes and even a few of Neville
Shute.

But in those libraries I also began
to read history, which along with biography I think accounts for my lifelong
interest in the history of ideas and the people who have them! My current love
for history, who we were before we became who we are, came into being against the best efforts of the gentlest most
boring teacher I ever had to immunise all pupils against ever catching any long term infection or enthusaism for history. Her nickname was Texas, on account of her slow drawl, in which she
enunciated word for word and with sing-song, lilting pathos, her handwritten
notes from a blue jotter, concerning the various demeanours and misdemeanours
of the key players in the Scottish Reformation and the various fates they met.
At 13 years old, I couldn’t have cared less about the young, innocently foolish,
(or even culpably stupid) Mary Queen of Scots, though I was a bit more
sympathetic to the verbally violent theological hard man John Knox.

It took me several years, a conversion
experience and a life-changing call to ministry to get me inside a history book again with
serious intent. Having left school with nil points as far as qualifications
were concerned, and sure God was calling me to be a minister I had to get some
Highers. One of them was History, another English and a third French. The first two have remained lifelong enthusiasms. French I can still read well enough but have all but lost spoken French. More later………

19 August 2008
When email is easier than conversation

From AOL News on the work practices of desk workers:

A survey of over 1,200 office staff found that
most admitted that better communications made them lazy because it was
easier to email someone than meet face to face.

The study, by employment law firm Peninsula,
showed that seven out of 10 workers described themselves as unfit
because they sat at their desks all day.

Managing director Peter Done said: "Modern
technology has made people lazy. It has even got to the point where
employees prefer to send each other emails to someone sitting in the
same room, just so they don't have to engage in a spoken conversation."

"This over reliance on technology is taking away the social side of people's jobs and leaving workers too lazy to bother with exercise."

I had a conversation the other day about a moratorium on the word "community" unless it is used with some sense of what is meant by it. So. Amongst the things I mean by it are two principles implied in the titles of two books. These six words describe a basic philosophy I've long subscribed to and tried to live – "respect for persons," and "persons in relation". If community is the working out of human relationships then the interchange of human beings is integral, essential and defining, and that interchange presupposes respect and relationship between persons.

So it matters that I see a face, hear a voice, be present to and with the other person, share at least in the broad outlines of a life story, care and be interested in who someone is and what other than work goes on in their lives. The email exchange is a highly efficient and useful tool for some purposes; sure, a conversation can be tiring, less informationally focused and time consuming. But a conversation isn't a tool – it isn't only a means of communication – it is an opportunity for human relationships to be kept open, for understanding to have a chance, for coming to know those with whom we work, however tangentially. Conversation maintains those bridges that enable us to travel freely into each other's world, at least far enough to know and understand those who live there.

The workplace community is sometimes called a "team", and "team-building" has become an important priority in a shared workplace – it's hard to see how emails do it better than conversation. Respect for persons, and persons in relation, are phrases which provide a minimal sub-structure for workplace practice. As a Christian, I follow One whose way of encountering people was the expression of the love of God. The conversations of Jesus are told with great delicacy and sharp observation by the Evangelists. And while I find the 'What would Jesus Do' question is often clarifying, it can be frustrating when the situation is anachronistic. Would Jesus send an email or go speak to the person along the corridor? Would the Word who became flesh, reduce the Word to texting? I've a feeling Jesus would have preferred human faces to digital screens, and an embodied voice instead of electronic cyphers.

Now to send an email suggesting a meeting to talk over the matter…..? That uses the tool but doesn't reduce the person we contact to mere recipient of the information WE want to pass on. It sets up a meeting – of persons, faces and minds.

18 August 2008
Disappointing Excellence

We are having the best GB Olympic performance ever. The tally of medals is 11 gold and a couple of handfuls of silver and bronze. And yet time and again in the commentating and interviews the word disappointed and disappointing have been used. Either an athlete didn't make it to the final, or they did but didn't get a medal, or they got the medal but not the gold, ONLY a silver. Now I can understand some athletes being disappointed – it's natural and human to be disappointed when our highest hopes and expectations collide with the reality of personal limitations and other competitor's abilities. What I find it hard to tolerate is commentators and pundits using such a word for people who have worked so hard, whose dedication and personal investment in their event is huge.

I'm not disappointed in any of our competitors all of whom will have done their best, whether or not they feel they did themselves justice. Many of them have recorded personal bests and lifetime bests – for goodness sake what more can be asked. I can feel for and with the women's fours rowing team having a third silver in three consecutive Olympics, and their disappointment is very understandbale. But I hope none of us couch spectators have the small-mindedness to be so disappointed their silver wasn't gold that we underestimate the achievement behind that silver – likewise the men's eights.

Excellence is about a person performing to their potential – that may be good enough to win, but if it isn't it's good enough. Disappointing excellence is one of the sillier oxymorons.

OK. Got that clear. I'm looking forward to the rest of the games and am sure I won't be disappointed. If I keep using my exercise bike will I get thighs like Chris Hoy? Probably not, in which case I'll be….disappointed!

17 August 2008
God as the Mystery of the World, and the long climb to theology

When I go to Glasgow University
Library I usually ignore the lifts and take the stairs. Theology is on floor
10. I think of it as a sancta scala, a stairway to wholeness if not holiness,
at one and the same time aerobic exercise and a defiance of that creeping
laziness that thinks saved time and energy is a greater virtue than healthy
slowness. Those who know me know I need to learn healthy slowness!

I joined the University of Glasgow Library in 1974 when I graduated, paying £50 for a
lifetime membership. That is one of the greatest gifts and biggest bargains in
my life. Mum and Dad paid half of it, and I paid half with a prize what I
winned by having wrote the goodest essay (but not for good grammar!). Over the
years I've borrowed, browsed and buried myself among the stacks. Amongst the
various places I go to feel nearer to God, or at least to put myself within
range of God's presence and voice, is the familiar library, a place of learning, quiet and inner humbling.

The University of Glasgow, New
College Edinburgh, University of Aberdeen, St Deiniol's in Hawarden, are all
places where I've spent hours, days, in one or two cases weeks, in the company
of a great cloud of witnesses. But Glasgow's theology floor is the highest and hardest
to get to by stairs. There’s something symbolic about the hard climb and the
sense of exertion and effort before walking into Floor 10 with its hundreds of
feet of shelved theology and philosophy. Reading Eberhard Jungel’s The Mystery of God in the World is the
intellectual equivalent of climbing to Floor 10 to do your theology! Exertion and
effort are required but you hope it’ll be worth it. This is a book that has
dared me to read it – and having dared, my instinct for recognising a hard book
is again confirmed.

Now time was when I would finish
any book I started. A matter of pride and conscientious resistance to
cherry-picking, body swerving, free-wheeling – in other words I was refusing to
take the lift, preferring to persevere with the stairs. But more recently,
whether because of experience, wisdom or the sense that life isn’t forever and
there’s too much to read that’s good, I’ve become more impatient with those
books that don’t quite do it any more. A book like Jungel’s Mystery of God could easily be dismissed
as unnecessarily hard going, and defensible reasons given for laying it aside.
But I’m thinking of it in terms of Floor 10. The hard work of taking the stairs
eventually brings you to the place where theology and philosophy are given
their place, and where learning can begin. And the by product of the long
climb, if it’s done regularly, is an improved cardiovascular system, or in
reading terms, theological fitness and stamina.

Anyway, it’s only in the hard books
that you come across such observations as this. Speaking of human anxiety in
the face of life’s precariousness and human mortality:

Anxiety is not to be understood as a
deficit, but rather something positive as concern for that which exists. Man is
not less human when he perseveres in that anxiety than when he is definitely
removed from it. In a definitive way, however, man cannot remove himself from
this anxiety. Definitively he can only be
removed from it. And if man is definitively removed from his anxiety about
non-being, then God has been at work and is experienced as the one who always was at work, so that one can only
look after him and can only recognise the posteriora
dei (hinder parts of God, Ex 33.23). (Page 34)

In a passage like this, Jungel’s
own experience of anxiety and insecurity doing theology in the former Communist
East Germany, injects a charge of spiritual authenticity and faith tried in the
place where it carries its own cost. Anxiety being transmuted into concern and
caring for life, our own and others, is one of those counter-intuitive comments
that sheds an entirely different light on our own inner fears. Instead of feeling
guilty about being anxious, we cast all our anxieties on Him – but that needn’t
mean we will no longer feel anxious for others – for such anxiety may only be
the urgency and persistence of love. And a book about the theology of the Crucified One we
should expect to challenge every attempt to minimise the personal cost of loving others.

16 August 2008
The Big Issue is a big issue

Coming out of Glasgow Central Station a Big Issue vendor is singing her sales line about the new Big Issue. Not a bad voice, the lyrics not very memorable cos I can't remember them. Provoking a lot of good-natured smiles and occasional looks of perplexed sympathy, but the song is a sales pitch asking for money.

A hundred yards along Gordon Street, a woman is kneeling outside a shop, holding a polystyrene cup, eyes closed, in the disposition of meditation, asking without asking, for money.

Doorbell goes at 6.45pm and a man with glossy publicity brochures is asking about roofs, windows, conservatories and doors. This is a cold call which I try hard not to point out, while also making a brave attempt at hiding my annoyance at what is a commerical unasked for intrusion, asking for money.

An email comes from one of the good causes I once gave a donation to, with several anecdotes of people who have been helped, and several of people who can now only be helped if funds come in, so they're asking for money.

There are endless options for how we choose to use our money, and no shortage of those with various subtle and not so subtle ways of trying to influence those choices. The Big Issue is a couple of pounds, but there are lots of vendors; the polystyrene cup is only one of several to be seen on a saunter round the city centre, and I suppose any amount we give is welcome; the cold call seller parked his car outside our door as he worked the street, and it's significantly more upmarket than mine, and he wants me to spend hundreds or better thousands of pounds on the off chance I've been waiting for just him to suggest how we use the spare loot lying around; the charity generated email is one of a constant flow of conscience pricking, guilt triggering, appeals from worthy causes to which we would all always want to give.

I think money and how I use it is an uncomfortably accurate index of how seriously I try to live Jesus' words. Good intentions don't always lead to the best choices. Once you analyse whether you should give and why, are you not already rationalising a refusal? And isn't there something spiritually to the point in the comment that we regret most the good that we meant to do, and didn't? Of the four options it's no one else's business what I did or didn't give – but just to avoid misunderstandings, we declined the conservatory and assorted real estate upgrades!

15 August 2008
Pencil notes in the margin

For years I've had my own way of marking books I read. This is not vandalism or graffiti practice. It's a record of a conversation, minutes of a meeting of minds. And in many books I've read there is the index at the back – not the one the publisher or writer compiled – but the one I compiled. The more significant ones are linked to a key index.

Where there's an "S" in the margin, near it the underlined word indicates subject; an arrow ( > ) indicates something that needs more thinking about; a vertical line that stretches to a few lines is a pasage I'll read again – and again probably. A "T", along with a biblical reference links the page to whichever biblical text is written in the margin. A "?" means I've a question for the writer, but I always add question marks tentatively – always good to assume that the writer knows what they're talking about, and even if I remain unconvinced, I've thought about it.

Today reading in a couple of places, here are three pencil marked extracts. The first an important reminder of life balance. The middle one is self-explanatory and one of those unsettling examples of serendipity cos I only read this page this morning. The last an example of Balentine's astute realism and psychological honesty about what suffering can do to people's thoughts about God:

We have sought truth, and sometimes perhaps found it.
But have we had fun?
(Benjamin Jowett, amongst other things the great translator of Plato)

The books that matter are those we have wrestled with, like Jacob and the angel, those we have questioned and argued with and been persuaded by. The best way to create a proper agonsitic encounter with any text is to mark it up.
(An Open Book, Michael Dirda, Senior Editor, Washington Post Book World)

Job's call for God to remember the sad state of his life is not an appeal for God to be more present with him, for in his judgement divine presence equates with human misery. What he seeks instead is for God to be more absent.
(Sam Balentine, Job, page 134).

For the record, I use a pencil when taking minutes of a meeting with a book. Recently the reloadable BIC gives a sharp fine line – nothing if not fussy, me.

14 August 2008