Blog

Necessary tedium in the service of the Gospel?

Not tired of blogging – just tired. End of term marking and QA processes work within tight deadlines, and a number of other commitments are unavoidable at this time of year and seem to come in waves of several at a time. So – not complaining, just explaining uncharacteristic levels of literary silence.

Friday started at 5.a.m. and included a 6.15 am flight to Gatwick, two examination boards at Spurgeon's, then the plane back at 6.30 – except an emergency landing by another plane delayed take-off for another hour while we were on the plane waiting to taxi.

Saturday at the Ordination and Induction of one of our students in bonnie Bo'ness. One of those occasions when many things come together – a person's sense of vocation, years of preparation, anticipation and hard application, the affirmation of a call from a local congregation and the confirmation of that call by the wider fellowship of our Baptist communities in Scotland – and this in the context of worship, prayer and celebration of the Gospel and the Christ who calls us to follow after him, faithfully and even recklessly.

Sunday worshipped at our own church, spent time talking with good folk whose ways of dealing with what comes at them in life go far to explaining why anyone would want to be a pastor. To love as we've been loved, to strengthen through encouragement the weak knees and uphold through prayer the feeble arms, as people of faith just get on with it – and when it gets too much, well many a time the grace that is sufficient comes to us through those other fellow travellers who come alongside us and walk awhile.

Monday, back to College and a staff meeting to catch up with where we each are, what's on our agendas, and what still needs doing. Another week with a diary that is ridiculously optimistic about energy, time and presence all being able to be held in an effective and productive balance. But lunch was shared with the Eejits, a group of friends who try not to take ourselves too seriously, but who in conversation and shared story take the Gospel and the Church with both seriousness and we hope, a creative if at times critical playfulness.

Tuesday morning till Thursday late evening it's meetings – I'm trying to develop a theology, even a spirituality, of meetings. Agendas, minutes, apologies, business arising, financial statements, reports, feedback analyses, candidate papers, publicity and promotional concerns – all of that admin paraphernalia shouldn't be allowed to disguise the realities behind the at times necessary tedium. These realities are people – students and their families, staff and their families, colleagues in the University and at the Baptist Union, churches looking for relevant, faithful and available ministries, and a Gospel worthy of our hardest work, our best ideas, our clearest thinking, and well worth any amount of tedium that enables the coming of the kingdom – watching a seed germinate and grow in real time isn't the most instantly gratifying pastime.

But wait. If you have faith…..a grain of mustard seed…..eventually birds building nests in branches. Sometimes in the committee (that greatly abused structure for human conversation and decisions) it helps to envisage a mustard seed. In fact, maybe this week, at the various committees, along with the pens, the stationery, the mint imperials, the bottled water, there should be, placed on the top of the agenda paper, a mustard seed – a small subversive reminder that we don't know everything now, don't see all that can be, and our words and dreams may have a significance beyond the limitations of our too easily bored attention span. Anyway I hope so. In fact, if I have faith as a grain of mustard seed……

16 June 2008
It was women……

Messengers

It suddenly strikes me
with overwhelming force:

It was women
who were first to spread the message of
Easter –
the unheard of!

It was women
who rushed to the disciples
who, breathless and bewildered,
passed on the greatest message of all:

He is alive!

Think if women had kept silence
in the churches!

Marta Wilhelmsson

12 June 2008
The unpopular idea of submission 2. Christ’s submission and the identity of God

The idea of kenosis as a portrayal of self-emptying love has always seemed to me both theologically attractive and pastorally promising. Theologically attractive because without prying unsubtly into the mysteries of eternal intra-trinitarian purposefulness, and while avoiding inappropriate precision in calibrating the relations between divine love and sovereignty, a kenotic Christology, for all its difficulties as a comprehensive theory, does acknowledge something definintive in the statement God is love, when that statement is made of the Word become flesh, crucified and risen. Pastorally promising because the story of salvation as it is told in the most significant textual locus for kenotic Christology in the NT, Philippians 2. 6-11, is a story which affirms both the identity of the God who comes to us in the humiliation of Christ, and the identity ofthe Christian community as one modelled on the reality of who Christ is, and what is therefore true about God.Self emptying love is thus definitive of Christian existence together, and in ethical demand and spiritually transformative practice, impels Christian community towards life at the radical edge of risky, costly love for the other.

In one stunning passage, the sanctified speculative imagination of Paul seems to have overcome the no less sanctified reverent restraint of one who fully recognised the limits of human thought; limits imposed not only by inadequacy of thought, but also by ineffability of subject. Yet here in this passage Paul states in a rhythmic prose poem what he conceived to be the all consuming, self-emptying motive of the One who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a right to be clung to – but emptied himself.

Now I know there are all kinds of critical and textual arguments about what Philippians 2.6-11 is about. And in this book on submission within the Godhead and the Church,the writer gives them a good hearing. But I do find her conclusion about the nature and purpose of this passage persuasive. Is it a hymn, and if so pre Pauline? No to both – Paul was quite capable of writing exalted prose, and there is no decisive evidence of other non- NT 'early hymns' in form, content or known usage such as this passage. Is it a passage explained as a contrasting parallel between Adam, who snatched at equality with God and Christ who became obedient unto death? Yes, but only if this argument isn't used to exclude the idea of Christ's pre-existence, which Dunn doubts, but Wright affirms, though both see Adam Christology as at least part of the explanation of the passage. Is it telling the story of salvation, a kerygmatic pronouncement (Martin) or is it a call to imitation of Christ (Fowl). In fact it is both argues Park – the passage proclaims the salvation story, but to pastoral and ethical purpose.

However the submission of Christ as depicted in Philippians 2.6-11 gives rise to a number of complex theological considerations. No one explanation exhausts the implications of this passage. There are strong textual connections with Isaiah 45 where submission to the sovereign God is the attitude that wins divine approval. Christ's actions in emptying himself and taking the form of a servant, and becoming obedient to death on the cross have significance both as descriptions of the saving efficacy of his humiliation and as exemplary demonstrations of an ethic of submissive obedience to God and others as characteristic of God's salvific action in Christ. The exaltation of Christ is not the reward for humiliation, but the confirmation that 'his humiliation belongs to the identity of God as surely as his exaltation does.' (R Bauckham, God Crucified (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1996), p. 61.

The revelation of God in Christ, conveyed through divine movements as depicted in this theologically unsettling passage, is of One for whom submission is not so much a precondition of exaltation, a necessary adjustment of sovereignty, but is an essential expression of divine identity and the characteristic modus operandi of divine love acting with redemptive purpose. God's approval of Jesus, bestowing on him the name which is above every name, is an announcement against grasping at status, clinging to privilege and right, selfish ambition and attraction to power. "Therefore God has highly exalted him….". The 'therefore' is a crucial theological hinge. 'He humbled himself and became obedient…….therefore…..'. This brief passage, with that eternally consequential inference has profound implications for how we think of God, how we understand the dynamics of the community of the church, and how we view submission as not only one amongst many Christian virtues, but as having the mind that was also in Christ Jesus, and points to the mind of God.

I'm not attributing all the above to this fascinating book – except that reading it, engaging with its careful arguments, pushes me into such reflection.

11 June 2008
The Unpopular Idea of Submission 1. Is submission irredeemably coercive?

There is something disconcerting about a book that addresses submission as a theological category, not only so, but which seeks to rehabilitate the notion that self-surrender need not imply defeat, diminishment or inferiority, but may be a creative act of willed love. That said, ideas of submission are inherently suspect, for example in feminist theology, being contaminated by perceived patriarchal and authoritarian assumptions. Likewise postmodern rejection of the normativity of traditional readings of texts, expresses a powerfully antithetical resistance to the assumed dominance of such traditional interpretations; such truth claims have no inherent right either to require the submission of other minds or to negate other legitimate construals of truth.

This book sets out to explore whether submission is irredeemably locked into hierarchical sturctures and behaviour patterns. Semantically, is it the case that the term "submission" is irretrievably oppressive, coercive and indicative of a person's inferiority? Theologically, is hierarchy ruled out in any construal of the life of the Triune God that seeks to conceive of that life in relational terms? And even if it is, what of the concept of mutual submission within consensual parameters of love and being? Ethically and spiritually, in Christian existence, is it not the case that submission to the Gospel indicates that deep inner transormation of the self that discovers in obedience a radical and original freedom? Politically – and that means in social, economic and personal relations, is it not the case that the primary claim upon Christian inwardness is not the language of rights but the language of grace?

Questions like these open up wider questions of equality, freedom, mutuality – and also authority, power and hierarchy. Approached through the lens of a New Testament text such as Philippians, the concept of submission compels reflection on urgent contemporary issues of gender relations, Trinitarian theology, Christological models and the interpersonal dynamic of Christian community. Even early in my reading of this book I am aware of my own inner egalitarian prejudices. I genuinely hold to the deep conviction that the Christian mind, heart and will rightly, and only, recognise one absolute claim on their submission. And that is to Jesus as Lord – whose Lordship, authority and claim derive their power from the soul's encounter through the Spirit, with grace unspeakable and love crucified as encountered in the Risen Jesus, gift of the Father. So if I am to be persuaded by this book's title, that there is submission within the Godhead, and that submission is a defining characteristic of Christian community, then (for me, at least) these principles must grow out of an exegetical and reflective theology shaped and given content by attention to primary NT text, by creative Trinitarian reflection and by a Christological hermeneutic applied to Christian community.

The next post on this book will review chapter 1 – on Philippians 2.5-11. ?

10 June 2008
The Good Life – a life spent reading………

Here's why I like Annie Dillard's writing. Apart from reinforcing my bibliophilic tendencies, her writing sends shafts of light into those corners of our experience we choose not to notice – till someone like her takes us by the scruff of the neck and points us in their direction.

Two of her books, Holy the Firm, and Teaching a Stone to Talk are examples of thin books that weigh a ton in intellectual and spiritual freight. meantime, here she is making me feel better about the time I spend reading.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading – that is a good life.

('The Writing Life', Annie Dillard, in Three by Annnie Dillard, San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990, page 569)

9 June 2008
Little green men, patience and a tiny pebble.

Spent the day with the good folk of Adelaide's.It was a day of quiet, reflection and prayer and lasted till around 3.30 in the afternoon.

Walking back from bath street to Central Station I crossed at least eight ( 8 ) pedestrian crossings and they were all showing the wee green man.

Having spent a day praying and reflecting, trying again to experience slow, put the brakes on rush, possess my soul by learning patience, not sure what the message of that was. I really thought as I came to the Bothwell Street junction I'd be stopped by a red and would be compelled to practice that futile gesture of impatience, pressing the button as if repeating the process would change or speed up the phasing of the system. But it too was at green, which meant I arrived at the station a bit early for my train.

Never mind. The train would probably be leaving from Platform 11A,that one that's a five minute hike to the nether regions of platformworld. But of course today it was to leave from Platform 13.

So having saved all that time by the ubiquitous green man, and not having to walk half way home to reach Platform 11A, the time I saved was spent impatiently hanging around waiting for the train to leave.

Need another quiet day to reflect on the meaning of all that.

But nothing to do with any of the above, from a day of reflection one line is worth quoting here – think of it as a tiny pebble in your trainer, unignorably there and needing attention:

'If physical hunger is the result of social injustice, as the Sermon on the Plain has it, then hunger and thirst after righteousness is the beginning of the way out of it.'

Luke and Matthew – Sermon on the Plain, Sermon on the Mount. Need both of them to come anywhere near the rich revolutionary possibilities that lie hidden in the words of Jesus.

7 June 2008
The Road Home – immigration, identity and the gift of welcome

One of the less obvious ways of sensing what is going on around us is to ask what kinds of stories people are telling, and what kinds of novels people are writing. Cultural shifts can be gradual and unnoticed, like tectonic plates moving without collision; or they can be sudden and disruptive if the plates collide or suddenly shift. Rose Tremain's novel, The Road Home, won the the recent awards for the Orange Prize. It's a story about Lev, an Eastern European migrant worker who comes to Britain, his struggle to survive as a stranger and foreigner in a world now harshly defined by economic inequities, and the consequent draining of hope and energy from those who didn't start off with undeserved advantages.

One of the judges in the Orange panel made a comment that might indicate one of those tectonic cultural changes – and whether it is gradual and unnoticed, or latently destabilising remains uncertain, and may depend upon our capacity as a country to welcome the stranger. Referring to the 120 submissions for the prize he observed that the key themes were, "immigration and identity and, alongside that, loss and bereavement.
And these themes are connected. In an age of globalisation and
migration these are the questions that we grapple with." What Tremain has done is provide a compassionate and humane window into the experience of those who come from one country to another to work for a living, and to work for a better life for them and their families. It isn't so much homelessness as economically impelled exile; and that exile involves cultural displacement, emotional loneliness, relational deprivation from those friendships and family ties that sustain and replenish identity. Involuntary economic exile can drain away hopefulness, and leave no sense of life's purpose beyond the desperate search for survival and the small freedoms that some money might bring to those entrapped in a relentlessly uncompromising global market.

Tremain's book is an essential corrective, a gently prophetic invitation to readers to respond with human sympathy and understanding to those who have to leave home in order to earn what is needed to live – both for themeselves and for those they themselves love, and leave at home. Tabloid harangues about cheap labour, job stealing, Britishness and a whole lot of other strident resentful excuses for exclusion are at best annoyingly selfish, at worst uninformed rants about the virtues of hating. A novelist who writes imaginatively and tellingly into the experience of those who come as strangers to our country, is one whose role as instructor in social ethics and humane citizenship, gives us a cultural gift that deserves its own kind of prize. Voices like hers, and demonstrations of bridge-building through narrative shaped by imaginative empathy, give hope for those of us listening for signs of our own culture's capacity for hospitality, welcome, friendship, and some signs that we are coming to recognise it is in our own interests as human beings to 'look humanely forth in human life'.

6 June 2008
Jonah 2: Grudging Obedience to a Generous God

Jonah cannot find it in his heart to give Nineveh even a million to one chance. So because he believes in God, and because of
what he believes about the abounding love and mercy of God, he runs away.

Obedience is more than doing what God
asks – it is being at peace with who God is. God is scandalously generous but
we can be scandalously grudging. God doesn’t do fair, he does mercy. For ourselves,
we are glad God doesn’t give us what we deserve, but sometimes it’s hard not to
wish other people got what they deserve. In Jonah, God is the sender of well aimed storms, and fish the
size of submarines; the God of nations and empires, the God of cities and their
urban problems, of withered gourds and herds of cattle – and He is essentially and intentionally merciful and
compassionate to his creation. So how dare any of us reduce God to informal conversation
partner, or confine God to our own ideas of what a Christian God should be, as
if God’s own reality might seem a bit theologically unsound to us! When God calls us to live up to who
God is in Christ – our first thought confronted with such scandalous truth may well be flight – but the second will be
worship – of the God who is above and beyond all our limited hopes for this
world.

There is in Jewish writing and spirituality a wonderful
confidence in laughter as conduit of learning. If you get the joke, you get the insight,
you understand, you get it. This whole
book is about Jonah having to be pushed and shoved towards Nineveh, and then
pushed and shoved towards the truth of who God is, and when he says he’d rather
die than see Nineveh live he has finally to face the ultimate test of obedience
– will he allow God to be God? Slow to anger and abounding in love.

And maybe, like Jonah, we so want
to have a comfortable, predictable and theologically safe God. C S Lewis unforgettably said of Aslan, 'He is not not safe, but he is good'. In Jonah God's goodness is the counterpoint to the
spirit of exclusion, the grudging heart, the narrow-minded faith. So all of us Jonah's can stop thinking of God as our divine resource centre, a kind of holy
transcendent megastore of blessings accessible only to a privileged clientele. God
does not belong to us – we belong to God. And theology is not so much our thinking about
God, but a perilous, precarious way of coming to know something of what God
thinks of us, and this our problematic world filled to overflowing with those we call 'other'. What is revealed in Jonah, and comes to its apotheosis in Christ, is that God's worldview rests on a nature that is … slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

3 June 2008
Jonah, Nineveh and an unfair God in an unfair world

Preaching today on a text that was the first in a series of five on Jonah. Others will do the later ones – my passage was Jonah 1.1-3. Now Jonah is one of the most purposely subversive theological documents in the entire Bible – it is also one of the most artfully crafted protest stories, couched in narrative laced with irony, and delivering one of the most persuasive correctives in all of literature. So not easy to preach meaningfully on the first three verses – the opening scene of a film is hard, even misleading, to interpret without the following plot. Still. I did enjoy rereading and reconsidering this story for our time. In fact that's the line my sermon took – today's Jonah's and today's Nineveh. Here's the first part of my thinking:

You only understand Jonah if you’ve learned to hate, if life
experience has educated you in heartfelt, instinctive, focused hostility. And
you only understand Jonah’s God if you are prepared to unlearn hatred, and by a
painful inner re-orientation accept that God is not in the hate business. Jonah
hated Nineveh – ‘the great city’ famed for terrorist atrocities, centre of a
brutal, organised, military machine – merciless, meticulous, arrogant,
conqueror and oppressor of Israel. The equivalent today is hard to imagine –
but where there is religious hatred, ancient tribal enmities and people whose
suffering and oppression have educated them into hatred, there we come near to
the same mindset – that wants to obliterate the enemy. The combination of
terror and anger, of hatred and hopelessness, produces that lethal cocktail we
call terrorism – and it flourishes in a world sold on consumerism, militarism
and polarisation of extremes, two poles arcing in the destructive blue light of violence.

Jonah stands for those who want to see power get what it deserves;
those who pray that cruelty and violence will get its payback. So you’d think
that a word from the Lord to preach against the wickedness of the great city
would have Jonah book a first class overnight camel to be the first to tell

Nineveh

they’d had it. God’s prophet being sent to tell the enemy God is going to zap
you. Permission to hate, to ridicule, to gloat, to celebrate the anguish of the
enemy. So why did Jonah run in the exact opposite direction? Why miss out on
the vengeance he’d prayed for? Why not takes his hate and use it to make him an
eloquent herald of doom?

Chapter 1 Verse 3 only makes sense when you come to ch. 4 verse 2. Jonah isn’t
disobedient – he’s in denial. It isn’t that he doesn’t believe enough in God –
he believes too much, he knows too well, his theology of God is so true it’s a
liability. He runs in the opposite direction because he senses God is going to
do the opposite of what Jonah wants. There’s a million to one chance that

Nineveh

will repent – and if that happens, there isn’t one chance in a million that God
won’t be merciful – it's an absolute
certainty that God would be slow to anger and abounding in love.

And that isn’t
fair. That is theologically unacceptable. Abounding in love, slow to anger –
That would be absolutely scandalous – that a vast city built on the blood and
tears of the conquered should turn from their wickedness and find mercy shows
there is no justice in the universe. "Be it not so Lord", – it's the effectual fervent prayer of a righteously indignant man. Jonah won’t take that
million to one chance. And as this story unfolds it isn’t that Jonah will,
learn a new theology of God – he will learn how to apply that theology to the
deepest, hardest, most heartbreaking, experiences of his life. And he’ll learn
about God’s generosity and human grievances; he’ll learn that mercy is greater
than murder; that compassion not cruelty is God’s way; all that and more he’ll
learn – but as this story begins it touches on some of the most important
things we will ever need to know about ourselves, about God, about those
different others who share this planet with us

Of which more later.

1 June 2008
In praise of thin books

Well . Been away to Manchester on a staff retreat which was a mixture of important discussions we needed time and space for, meeting with colleagues at Northern Baptist College, (including a shared meal at one of the local restaurants on Curry Mile), and time for shared conversation and friendship. In the intervening couple of days some of you have upheld the virtues of the thin book. Thansk for all the suggestions, and maybe worth offerinf some responses.

Trevor, since the Bible is a book of books you could probably choose any one of them as a thin book. Printed as a Penguin paberback I doubt if matthew's Gospel or isaiah would go much beyond 60 pages. So it isn't that the Bible doesn't count as a thin book – it counts as 66 of them.

Kate – not sure where I said suggested thin books need to be theological – so in case I gave that impression, it wasn't intended. Amongst the non theological nominations for my thin book shelf would be Saint Exupery's Little Prince, Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, and Dag Hammarskjold's Markings (which if it is theological, isn't defined by its theology).

Gavin – Dissident Discipleship has 245 pages, which makes it a rather thick, thin book. But Augsburger's earlier books are nearly all within the 160 page limit. But thanks for pointing out a book that doesn't reduce discipleship to a ten quick steps programme, but affirms discipleship as a following after Jesus which is characterised by life practices which bear witness to who Jesus is.

The Manse Cat is a veritable thin book enthusiast, and it was good to have amongst others, The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. I once witnessed this wee book lift the spirit and strengthen the hopefulness of a wonderful Christian lady at the time pushing 80. I still have a letter from her in which she quotes Brother Lawrence and Evelyn Underhill with the surprised gratitude of someone who had just had their medication changed and it was doing wonders. And Nuttall's slim biography of Richard Baxter is like all that Nuttal wrote – discretely erudite, written in restrained and elegant prose, and quietly taking its place alongside weightier works as the one that portrats baxter with affection and authority.

The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass gave me indigestion after a Christmas dinner years ago, when I read the entry on the bearded man shouting in church with the riposte, 'he shaved others, himself he could not shave'.

Bonhoeffer's Life Together is as Graeme says, one of those books which is thin only in the sense of its pagination. I've found that it's a book people either love or hate – its demanding, uncompromising, exposure of spiritual psychology and human dynamics as they are worked out in a close-knit, intensely focused community seldom make for comfortable reading. Yet like many others I've read it several times – each time wincing at the accuracy of his observations, at times resentful of such astringent exhortation, and having to own the painful truth that few church fellowships would be prepared to take this thin book as a year's experiment to test the too easy assumption that if all the world were Christians all problems would be solved!

John Colwell's The Rhythm of Doctrine is both a very good brief systematic theology based on the Church Year, and, I hope, an outline of what could become an original and valuable series of larger books expanding on the theological approach John has opened up – and I hope he does them! Few books claiming to be systematic theologies manage to be both brief and sufficiently rigorous – along with this one, Nicholas Lash, Believing Three ways in One God and Kathryn Tanner's Jesus Humanity and the Trinity, being amongst the more obvious.

Right. I'm off to read one of the thinnest books in the Bible. I'm preaching on Jonah tomorrow. I know the story well, and the way it destabilises safe theologies and possessive spiritualities. In less than four modest chapters this story turns worlds upside down, changes worldviews, forces a revision of how its readers think of God, and ends with one of the most wonderfully funny lines in the whole Bible. In fact, going back to Trevor, and his search for a thin Bible, raises the question of thin books in the Bible. Ruth is a masterpiece in the same tradition of revising theologies built on unexamined assumptions about God. Lamentations expresses the darkness of the darkest hours – or decades, yet with an adamantine determination not to let God go. Philemon isn't a book – it's a letter, but I have a commentary on its 24 verses that is 550 pages long – and the incongruity of such a hefty commentary for such a brief occasional letter, is only felt if we haven't recognised the mustard seeds of Kingdom revolution implied in all the courtesies and gentle nudges woven throughout. A thin book, thick with possibility, eh?

31 May 2008