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Carol Ann Duffy – Text, message and text messaging.

I’m not good at texting. It’s one of the aspects of my personal development that needs additional support and encouragement. If I ask why I’m so slow at becoming a skilled texter, allowing for laziness, technophobia, latent luddite syndrome – I become aware of an unexplained but persistent ambivalence I feel bout text-message communication. It’s something to do with the medium, the hardware and the software, my feeling that the actual process gets in the way of the human spontaneity that makes communication personal; or maybe it’s the way texting mangles language to make the text message carry the maximum message with the minimum words or even letters.

The poem below is a playfully serious piece of contemplation on the benefits and limitations of texting. It is one of the responsibilities of the poet to articulate the human and social consequences of cultural change, perhaps especially as they impinge on our uses and abuse of language – to gently warn us when we are being seduced into thinking that something that is good and useful has no down side. The poet is in love – and in the absence of the beloved the main source of relational sustenance is texting. At several key points in this poem, Duffy drops broad hints about the inadequacy of texting as a way of keeping love alive. And the last line pinpoints one of my own hesitations. It is precisely this ability of the poet to see and feel the impact of culturally celebrated technological arefacts on our humanity, and on language, one of the main arteries of cultural expression and human exchange. Which is why I think theology and poetry (theologians and poets) need to talk more to each other.

Text
I tend the mobile now
like an injured bird

We text, text, text
our significant words.

I re-read your first,
your second, your third,

look for your small xx,
feeling absurd.

The codes we send
arrive with a broken chord.

I try to picture your hands,
their image is blurred.

Nothing my thumbs press
will ever be heard.

Carol Ann Duffy, from Rapture (London: Picador, 2005), page 2.

5 August 2008
Thou shalt not covet what thou cans’t ill afford!

Strange kind of day, satisfying in an unintentional way; it just happened. I’m on holiday but as always takes a few days to get out of thinking about work mode. So we had a walk at Lochwinnoch as far as the Castle Semple Collegiate Church. Sun blazing one minute, and then cool and cloudy the next, and for most of our walk we weren’t sure if the tee shirt without the rain jacket was a mistake. But the sun shone sufficiently long on the righteous. The Collegiate Church is just over 400 years old, and if you use the link below you can read about its history, and connection with the battle of Flodden – one of the key dates for those still trying to understand why the Scottish temperament has a persistent note of melancholy. The loss of so many significant political and influential figures, and the sheer misery of the aftermath, makes Flodden as defining for Scottish identity as Bannockburn or Culloden. http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/lochwinnoch/castlesemplechurch/index.html

Spent the afternoon chasing stuff for my paper on the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy. Loadsa stuff, but not always easily accessed – and much of it focused on her feminist credentials, and vaudeville style, rather than the specific aspects of her work I’m interested in. Browsing further afield I discovered Glasgow University Library has the new Cambridge Edition of the English Poems of George Herbert, edited and with a rich harvest of notes from Helen Wilcox. I’ve known about this book since it was announced, and looked at it often enough on the CUP website – but £85! Never mind the credit crunch – at that kind of cost it might need a mortgage. That said – the definitive edition of one of the finest poets in the language – with scholarly notes – and made to last. No paperback announced so won’t be around for a few years I suppose. How much should anyone pay for a new book? At what point is cost unreasonably beyond perceived benefit? A meal for four at a modest restaurant would knock you back as much as £85 – and a book lasts longer…….

Speaking of Herbert – I discovered Vikram Seth, the Indian novelist, bought Herbert’s house in 2003, and has recently written six poems as a tribute to Herbert. He includes in his piece, some lines of Herbert carved in stone on the north wall of the rectory:

If thou chance for to find
A new house to thy mind
And built without thy cost
Be good to the poor
As God gives thee store
And then my labour’s not lost.

Wonder if those lines are in the Cambridge definitive edition? Typical of Herbert – a default setting of holiness dressed as compassion!

Late evening sun, so spent an hour in the garden reading some of Classics for Pleasure. (on the sidebar) Dirda’s enthusiasm for books I’ve never heard of, or vaguely remember some obscure reference to, and some that, yes, I do know and have even read – but whichever he reviews, he’s interesting because interested, a critic who knows what critical appreciation means in practice. I’ve decided what it is I like about Dirdan: it’s the pervasive affection he has for those whose writing he has read and enjoyed. There isn’t a sarcastic or cutting sentence in the 200 pages I’ve read so far, but much praise tempered by honest recognition of genius and its limitations.

4 August 2008
Catherine and Ben Mullany: Pax Christi.

The litany of sadness and brokenness that seems woven throughout our 24/7 news-soaked daily lives occasionally still manages to shock. Sometimes the scale of the horrors visited on our planet, and the immediacy of camera, satellite and internet, create levels of information and graphic image that we simply have to filter them down to more emotionally manageable proportions. Compassion, moral revulsion, sympathy, anger, sadness, helplessness, hope, faith, all those feelings and passions that identify us as human, humane; if allowed full expression all the time would make despair and spiritual ennui inevitable.

Yet. There are times, usually when tragedy becomes personal, and touches the deepest places of our vulnerability and hopefulness, when we are, again, shocked and deeply, painfully aware of our feelings. I’m not the only one whose sense of what is important in life, what is real, valuable, to be cherished and never taken for granted, is heightened by occasions of brutal waste, when nothing can explain such senseless loss. Catherine and Ben Mullany loved each other, were on honeymoon on a Paradise island, had life and joy ahead of them, and no doubt their share of – well no one can know. I heard the news that Ben had died with a distressingly ambiguous confusion of emotions: relieved for him, profoundly saddened at the death of two people in love, angry at the needless anguish of so many people, and wondering again, yet again, what it means to live our lives in such a random, risky, world where beauty of love and lethal violence can inhabit the same few square metres of a honeymoon bedroom.

Over the years I have taken enough funerals to know that the bewildering loss of bereavement, the disorientation and chronic ache of what seems a forever inconsolable absence, are part of the inhernent cost of love, passionate, long-faithful, life-shaping and self-surrendering – love. But when death comes from an act of callous violence, unlooked for, undeserved, inexplicable – then a further layer of despair-inducing misery falls on those left to cope with the aftermath of such loss. I pray tonight for those who now have to care for two bereaved families – three weeks ago celebrating a wedding. I pray for those two families, and wonder how any words, gestures or decisions can make any of this better, easier, less hellish But it may be that with the gifts of faithful presence, wise restraint of well-meaning words too quickly said, and tears which share both the baffled silence and raging anger, God will bring the touch of divine mercy through human compassion. As often now, when words don’t work, I hold my holding cross and think with compassion in the presence of Christ crucified and risen, and believe that even in such God-forsaken anguish, these two families will find strength, the beginnings of comfort, and in time some healing.

Lord have mercy
Christ have mercy
Lord have mercy

3 August 2008
The amazing grace of biblical scholars!

“Amazing”! Amazing how often the word is amazingly overused. Overstatement is one of the most insiduous and pervasive linguistic diseases afflicting contemporary discourse. It’s amazing we put up with it. If most things are amazing, then jaw-dropping, eye-brow raising genuine astonishment becomes a redundant experience, and wonder is also out of a job.So when referring to human achievement, I try to use the word “amazing” to refer to those things which can be truly praised to the point of admitting I don’t know how they did it, but in humble admiration I stand, (I use the word advisedly), amazed!

In which case I think Vincent Taylor’s Commentary on the Gospel of Mark, published in 1952 is an amazing work of biblical scholarship and human endeavour.

Consider.

It was in process during and beyond the Second War. Taylor was a family man and an active Methodist Churchman. Travel to libraries was limited, the scale of the commentary was towards being a comprehensive summary of previous scholarship with Taylor’s own independent judgement woven through. He was a practitioner of text, form, source and historical criticism, and by the time he wrote his commentary, a scholar immersed in study of NT christology and atonement, evident throughout his exegesis of the Markan passion story. And all this was done before PC’s allowed cut and paste, painless re-drafting, footnote and bibliographic software, file back-up – and before the internet gave access to the bibliosphere and that republic of information communication called cyberspace.

And there it stands. An amazing monument to meticulous, persistent, faithful, disciplined labour; described as a no-stone-left-unturned commentary. Part of the MacMillan series, those detailed examinations of text, syntax, Greco-Roman context, classical parallels, verbal studies – a thorough literary dissection aimed at all round textual explanation. The volume is a hefty repository of learning, set out in double columns of smallish print, few concessions to those untrained in the biblical languages, and here and there, in partial explanation of this labour of love, Taylor’s own faith appropriation of the text.

I remember R E O White telling a story (whether apocryphal anecdote or true memory I never confirmed) of Vincent Taylor and ten tons of topsoil. Asked how he had managed to keep going at the commentary he recalled the delivery of ten tons of topsoil to his front drive at the manse. Over the summer he moved it round to the back of the house to rebuild the garden, shovel by shovel, barrowload by barrowload, till it was moved. The commentary was tackled in the same faithful incremental way.

Study of Mark’s Gospel has moved beyond Taylor’s work, and the concerns of contemporary scholarship are very different. Numerous and various forms of NT criticism have come and gone, pushing study of Mark’s Gospel in excitingly different directions. But few commentaries today are written out of a lifetime’s textual cultivation of one allotment in the large acreage of biblical studies. Shovel by shovel, sentence by sentence, over the years, Taylor worked the text of Mark with the thorough patience of the gardener who knows the time it takes to build a garden, work the tilth of the soil, sow seeds and wait for worthwhile growth and eventual fruit. For that reason, now and again, I open Vincent Taylor’s Commentary on Mark, read him on some passage or other, and thank God for that unsung apostolic succession of those who have given their lives to scholarly study of the biblical text. They are God’s carefully chosen gifts to us.

3 August 2008
Benedictine Broadband – now that’s living wittily!
Years ago now I read Esther De Waal’s book Seeking God. It is an attractively written introduction to the Rule of St Benedict and introduced me to the central values of the Rule; prayer, manual work and study, or heart, hands and head, which is shorthand for a holistic approach to daily life. Ever since the Rule of Benedict has been a source of check and balance in my own occasional life audits – but has also been a regular quiet conversation partner. Balance is another important Benedictine virtue, practised long before our post-modern overworked culture discovered the urgent need of a life-work balance. I’m still intending to do some posts on thin books – and amongst the thin books whose importance is out of all proportion to size is this introduction – to an even thinner book – the Rule of Benedict which through the great monastic movements, decisively shaped the culture and civilisation of the Christian West.

In the mid 1980’s I subscribed for some years to the Journal Cistercian Quarterly. It contained many articles on monastic spirituality which then and since informed pastoral practice and personal maturing in Christ, and from a perspective so different from my own Evangelical viewpoint. The new monasticism is another of those eccretions emerging from the post-modern (or post-post-modern?) search into the disciplines and practices of the past – Brian Maclaren’s latest book is the latest to do this, with the usual blurb making it sound as if this is significantly NEW! Kathleen Norris, Esther De Waal, Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton have been diagnosing modern rootlessness and spiritual malnourishment going back half a century to merton’s Contemplative Prayer and Seeds of Contemplation, and prescribing a return to the practices that have been shown to shape community, instil stability, nurture Christian practice, and draw human personality towards maturity in Christ.

Among lessons learned from Cistercian Quarterly, which I took for the best part of a decade, are the following
- the significance of silence as an intentional disposition, to be encountered as both absence of external noise and presence of inner peace – an important spiritual constraint for a preacher, and talker!
- Stability as a willingness to settle in and accompany a community, so that relationships deepen, challenges are not evaded, and longevity of ministry is valued – one of the underlying principles of a life lived against pervasive short-termism.
- lectio divina as a form of reading, rooted in Scripture and branching into the great mustard tree of the Christian traditions where it is possible to find shelter and food – for a Baptist, the recognition that love of the Bible as transformative Word, is not, despite often inflated and uninformed claims, the monopoly of Evangelicals
- hospitality as an openness to people, other people and people who are other, but also hospitality as an openness to God, and to the Spirit of truth who doesn’t always leave our over-tidy minds as ordered as he finds it! – a predisposition to welcome, to greet the stranger as Christ, says most of what is essential in pastoral care.
The Cistercian Quarterly at that time was administered from Caldey Island. I still have a handwritten letter from the Brother who dealt with my subscription (and who was clearly intrigued by a Baptist minister with Benedictine tendencies), with kind words about something I had written for the Expository Times.

All of this came back to me when I read this morning that the monks of Caldey Abbey, on the Island ,have run out of patience with the slow speed of their dial-up internet connection. So they’ve installed fast-speed Broadband. The image of monks clicking impatiently, and getting into a spiritual stew about slow dial-up connection, made me smile. The image of monastic life as ascetic, pre-industrial, judiciously Luddite, sold on discomfort, is neither fair nor true. Online Lectio Divina, email as a way of maintaining silence while communicating with each other, surfing the world while enclosed in cloisters – the Lord bless them in their newfound freedoms! But the life they inhabit (by the way the use of that word as a recently introduced way of describing Christian character – “inhabiting virtues” from Alistair MacIntyre – carries rich semantic options – dwelling, dwelling place, monks clothing,) – anyway, the life they inhabit is an important witness to our overbusy, technologically addicted, fast-speed culture. And if Broadband contributes to the nurture and dissemination of such a witness to slowness, patience, and the virtues of balanced living, then Father Daniel the Abbott, may find his faith in the blessings of Broadband justified! Benedictine Broadband – I love it! Benedictine Broadband – now that’s living wittily!
1 August 2008
George Mackay Brown – and the music of poetry

Reading an essay on the poetry of George Mackay Brown, the Orkney poet, I came across examples of why his poetry can best be described as musical.

Whether the words are shaped to symphonic sounds, or set in the informal discipline of a sonata, or showing off like the soloist in a concerto, there are sounds and rhythms in his poetry, and a capacity to evoke both image and emotion, that I’ve always found haunting, in a comforting kind of way.

“I have a deep-rooted belief that what has once existed
can never die: not even the
frailest things, spindrift or clover-scent or glitter of star on a wet
stone. All is gathered into
the web of creation, that is apparently established and yet perhaps only
a dream in the eternal mind.“
from Finished Fragrance,

We are folded all
In a green fable
And we fare
From early
Plough-and-daffodil sun
Through revel
Of wind-tossed oats and barley
Past sickle and flail
To harvest home,
The circles of bread and ale
At the long table-
It is told, the story –
We and earth and sun and corn are one.
from
Christmas Poem,

See what I mean? I once knew a brave woman whose life had more than its fair share of pain, of hurt, struggle and wrestling with circumstance. She had lived in Orkney and knew George Mackay Brown. She loved his poems, corresponded with him till his death in 1996, and took comfort from his poetry (of which she had several written for herself). I can understand why. Her resilience and lack of bitterness was at least partially due, I reckon, to an instinct for the beauty and healing of words. Does remembering people before God, with gratitude, constitute praying for the dead? I hope so.

31 July 2008
I just want to say I’m a proud Welsh and Punjabi Sikh girl

Sarika Watkins-Singh, excluded from school for wearing the kara, a wrist bangle which is an important expression of her Sikh faith, has just won her case at the High Court. I find it interesting that political correctness, originally an approach to language and behaviour intended to avoid exclusive or discriminatory attitudes and actions, becomes in some contexts, precisely that – exclusive and discriminatory.

Now I understand the school policy of prohibiting the wearing of jewellery -which suggests decorative and ornamental objects worn for cosmetic purposes. But I would have thought such a policy would accommodate the wearing of jewellery recognised as an expression of a person’s religious identity – Sikh, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and other acknowledged faith traditions. As a Baptist Christian I have heightened sensitivity to infringements of religious liberty, and belong to a historic tradition that upholds the right of people to express their faith without fear of persecution. I don’t think for a minute the school intended to be discriminatory, though it has been found that Sarika was a victim of religious discrimination. And I don’t think the school intended to curtail Sarika’s religious liberty, though the consequence of a strictly applied blanket policy had that perhaps unintended consequence.

But when the policy was formulated why didn’t religious jewellery feature as an issue; in a pluralist multi-cultural ethos that question should now be standard. And if it had unintended consequences, why fight it in court – admit the flaw in the policy and sort it. Whether the veil, the cross, the kara, the yarmulche – the symbols of a faith tradition are not to be assessed on the same level of social significance as cosmetic jewellery. A school, of all places should be a place where that distinction is recognised and respected – how else teach young people tolerance, respect, and acceptance of the other person whose way of life is different. What is the message to a young Sikh woman if the only options are change your religious practice or be banned from school?

Following the court judgement Sarika said: “I am overwhelmed by the outcome
and it’s marvellous to know that the long journey I’ve been on has
finally come to an end. “I’m so happy to know that no-one else will go through what me and my family have gone through.”

She added: “I just want to say that I am a proud Welsh and Punjabi Sikh girl.”

Hope the school learns its lesson.

29 July 2008
Refined embarrassment

Miss Cranston’s Tearoom is one of the more select places of refreshment and consistently reliable civility as a given of customer service. Located in Gordon Street (a name almost synonymous with civility as those who know me had better testify), in the centre of Glasgow, it’s within a minute’s slow walk from Border’s Bookshop. If you are there at the right time you are shown to a window seat from whence to watch all kinds of people anticipating, transacting or reflecting on their various retail experiences; conversing, arguing or walking along in silence – companionably warm or post-stooshie chill. Sit long enough you see both.

On my recent visit I ordered the individual rhubarb tart and a cafetiere of Blue Mountain coffee. In the discreetly sedate surroundings, sitting at the table with the crisp white cover, and enjoying the joys of refined and leisurely self-indulgence, I discovered the embarrassing problem of the cafetiere with the stuck plunger. I began with a slow even pressure downwards, intending to watch the coarse ground coffee being gently pushed down as the dark brown liquid gathered above. Feeling some resistance I pushed harder, then a little harder, and on the assumption this was an easily overcome technical challenge, a little harder still. The result was an impressive impromptu coffee fountain accompanied by a loud attention drawing clatter of metal on glass. The consequences were neither discreet nor pretty. And within seconds the manager was over, took away the tray, cleaned the table, apologised for the mess (which I’d made), and brought me a fresh and bigger cafetiere of that kind of coffee that makes you aware that not all blessings were lost in the aftermath of the Fall.

As mentioned, Borders is only a minute’s walk away and I was on the hunt for a book for Sheila. Milan Kundera’s elegiac novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is a profound narrative reflection of the nature of human choices, which tend to be risks we cannot assess beforehand, guesses at happiness, decisions which all but determine the future. Ah but I wasn’t after Kundera’s considered probing of the human capacity to build, break or endure relationships. I was after a novel with only one word of difference in the title, The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, by Alexander McCall Smith. Holiday reading as a gift. To give a story as a gift is to encourage those we care about to take an inner holiday, the rest and recreation that comes from going someplace else through imaginative literature. In that sense a gift wrapped book is a package holiday.

Not a bad Saturday morning.

Two Cafetiere Disaster Haiku

One

Showing off brute strength,

malfunctioning cafetiere,

coffee eruption.

Two

Coarse ground coffee grain

spews and spreads like speckled mud,

‘I’m that embarrassed!’

27 July 2008
Poetry and the wisdom of this world.

.A couple of weeks ago we took the Park and Ride bus at the Pear Tree, Oxford. Like the child I’ve never quite not been, I wanted top deck, front seat. And as so often in life, I was disappointed because some other height addicts with a love for seeing ahead before anyone else, had already usurped my rightful seat. So, content with ‘near the front’, I sat on the right side, and amongst the great sights of Oxford, saw again that red brick street of quite modern houses which I always take time to look for on the passing bus, ‘Elizabeth Jennings Way’.

It’s a kind of Baptist pilgrimage thing, allowing a place of significance to remind me of why it’s important not to forget the person whose life made the place significant in the first place! Indeed I’m hoping to visit a number of such significant places later in the year as part of my Sabbatical, of which more in due course.

I’m currently working on a paper for the Baptists Doing Theology in Context Conference, which in the plenary sessions, will be on the general theme ‘The Wisdom of This World?’. (August 26-29 at Luther King House, Manchester). My own effort is on the role of the poet in contemporary culture, and on the importance for christian witness of paying attention to ‘the wisdom of this world’ as expressed in the voices of those who are dissident, or dissonant, or interrogative, or disinterested – but never indifferent to life questions and cultural experience. It’s a short paper, 30-35 minutes maximum speaky time with time for conversation and reflection. The poet whose voice I am listening to is Carol Ann Duffy. Don’t know if there will ever be a Carol Ann Duffy Way in Manchester (where she now lives). Whether or no, her poems express Carol Ann Duffy’s way of looking at the world, and seeing the comic and tragic, the trivial and crucial, ranging through wistfulness, realism, cynicism, to their deeper perhaps truer emotions of longing, acceptance and scepticism.

In her collection The World’s Wife she distills much of what makes her an essential voice for those who want help in understanding the strange perspectives, unfamiliar emotions, named and nameless anxieties, and much else that makes up the tangled, fankled mess of human relationships in a post-modern culture. Stuart Blythe uses the word flux as a verb which describes what our culture is doing – it is fluxing. Duffy is an honest commentator and mostly compassionate observer of that fluxing which takes place in the emotional sub-structure of human relationships, and which is externalised in a culture that doesn’t quite know what to want.

To anticipate a paragraph of my paper. Her poem on the myth of Icarus, who manufactured wax wings and was so pleased with his techonological brillince that he flew too high, the sun melted the wax and he fell to his doom, is a scathing comment on the myth of male mastery through technology.
Mrs Icarus witnessed the fall:

Mrs Icarus
I’m not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock,
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he’s a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock

26 July 2008
Hans Kung: On Still being a Christian 5 The church must change to remain itself

This final post is a collection of quotations from Disputed Truth. One of Kung’s gifts is a way of writing that has style, lucidity, and a restrained but persistent passion for his subject.

One of Kung’s most important books is Justification. The Doctrine of Karl Barth and a Catholic Reflection, English edition 1964, which along with Von Balthasar’s volume on Karl Barth, represents some of the best appreciative Barthian criticism, both still having to be reckoned with as interpretations of Barth -(though Bruce McCormack’s work has since ‘reckoned with’ Von Balthasar’s thesis). Kung spoke with affectionate admiration at Barth’s memorial serrvice, and comments in his latest Memoir volume:

Now the theologian who could point to an incomparable theological oeuvre has returned to his God. And I remember the moving moment when he told me that if ever he had to go before his God he would not refer to his many ‘works’ not even to his ‘good faith’, but simply say, ‘God be merciful to me, a poor sinner’. I do not doubt for a moment that he has been received graciously. (page 98)

The relationship between Kung and Ratzinger, now Benedict xvi, is woven throughout this volume. Is there any love lost between them? Or found? It’s harder to read Kung’s inner feelings than to read the well written narrative, anecdotes, and comments; a mixture of fair-minded recall, reflection after the fact and not infrequent acid aside, which could be humorous, ironic or sarcastic, depending on the tone of voice – not discernible in print! Here are a couple of his comments:

From the beginning to the present day Joseph Ratzinger has seen himself ‘really at home’ in traditional Bavarian Catholicism…He saw and sees himself as a theologian of tradition, who persists essentially in the theological framework marked out by Augustuine and Bonaventure. For him the ‘early church’, or the ‘church of the Fathers’ is the measure of all things…
This is the early church as he understands it. He doesn’t see Jesus of Nazareth as his disciples and the first Christian community saw him but as he was defined dogmatically by the hellenistic councils of the fourth/fifth centuries, which in fact split Christianity more than they united it. The Jesus of history and the undogmatic Jewish Christianity of the beginning hardly interests him, so he also has no deeper understanding of Islam, which is stamped by their environment. Nor does he show much understanding for the diverse charismatic structure of the Pauline communities and the different possibilities of a ‘succession of apostles’, and also of’prohpets’ and ‘teachers’. he isn’t interested in the church of the New Testament but in the church of the fathers (of course without the mothers). (page 131)

In his critique of Rahner, Ratzinger and other dogmaticians, Kung can sound more Protestant than Catholic. But that would be to misunderstand him. Rather than a church where one branch claims monopoly of catholicity, Kung insists that all Christian traditions submit to the singular authoritative criterion. However to make the Gospel of Jesus Christ as attested in the New Testament that primary criterion, as Kung does, is an obvious challenge to a too narrowly conceived Roman Catholicism:

...this criterion cannot be other than the original Christian message, the gospel of Jesus Christ. That means that the theologian who is catholic in the authentic sense must have an evangelical disposition, just as conversely the theologian who is evangelical in the authentic sense must be open in a catholic direction. In this sense we can be ecumenical theologians, whether catholic or evangelical. In other words, authentic ecumenicity means an ‘evangelical catholicism’, centred on and ordered by the gospel of Jesus Christ. (page 167)

Jesus isn’t a phantom, but a historical person with human features. And if one can learn about him only from the foundation documents of the faith, and in the end it is often impossible to decide what is historical and what isn’t, the great contours of the message, the conduct and the fate of Jesus of Nazareth and his relationship with God, come out so clearly and so unmistakably, that it is evident that the christian faith has a support in history and that therefore discipleship of Jesus is possible and meaningful. (page 225)

Another of Kung’s enduring contributions is his work on ecclesiology. His book The Church, became a source of considerable anxiety to those with centralist Vatican prejudices, and is still a standard account of the church as primarily a charismatic community expressing the Body of Christ in a life which is incarnational, redemptive and sacramental, all three teleologically present both in the Church’s origins and in the defining expressions of its mission. It is a singluar irony of Kung’s life that he is one of the best apologists for ecumenical rapprochement and inter-faith conversation, yet has been a focus of divisive controversy within his own communion for half a century. So these words bear the weight of considerable experience and persistent hopefulness.

The church must change even more to remain itself. And it will remain what it should be if it remains with the one who is its origin; if in all its progress and change it remains faithful to this Jesus Christ. It will then be a church which is closer to God and at the same time closer to men and women. Then the catholics with their emphasis on tradition will become more evangelical and at the same time the Protestants with their epnasis on the gospel will become more catholic, and in this way – and this is decisive – both will become more Christian. (page 230)

The reading of Kung’s Memoirs has been an emotionally demanding and theologically enjoyable encounter with one of the few theologians whose theological and moral programme seek to span cultures within and beyond Christianity, and on a global scale. His ‘Global Ethic’ is not without its serious critics, and his theological reconstructions do read at times like an older form of demythologising and disowning of mystery, removing the sharp edges of a Gospel which both wounds and heals. Like many others, there are times when I think Kung is simply wrong, and in seeking to explain, explains away, and in seeking to communicate with the modern world is perhaps too accommodating to the modern, and now post-modern mindset. But in a world that manages to be both polarised and fragmented at the same time, a message of global responsibility and a way of moving towards a more responsible and hopeful way of human existence, Kung believes, arises out of the nature of the Church and its rootedeness in the life, death and present reality of Jesus Christ.

Kung is right about the Gospel of Jesus Christ as first criterion, judging both church and world. You don’t need to go to Nicea and Chalcedon to root such a message of global conciliation and human healing in the reality of Jesus Christ – ‘through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things…making peace by the blood of the cross’. Kung’s latest theological reflection published before this volume was on the Beginning of All Things. I hope he has time and inclination to write one on the End of all things, with Christ as the telos in whom meaning and purpose, in creation and in human life, finally and fully cohere.

24 July 2008