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Millport, Ministry and fresh cooked doughnuts

Off to Millport with the Ministry Resource Team, to think about, well, ministry! Looking forward to discussion, prayer, a bit of time on a beautiful wee island, good conversation with good friends – and out of it fresh ideas, recovered vision, renewed enrgy, clearer strategy – or any two of the above as a start. There's something different happens when a 'committee' shares food, spends time in the one place for a couple of days, allows ideas to form and kites to fly, and so makes available the time and space for God to be heard.

And the sun is shining, I've packed my wee overnight bag with such essentials as toothbrush and a couple of books, and there's this wee cafe at Largs that sells sublime coffee, newly cooked doughnuts….

23 June 2008
Reading Job as Theological Education

In the biography of his father B F Westcott, the Bishop's son recalls the great NT scholar arguing that he would rather assess a student by their ability to set a first class exam paper than to sit one! Westcott believed the ability to identify the significant questions demonstrated a more thorough knowledge of a subject than the ability to mug up satisfactory answers.

Like much else, the motivation behind a question reveals something characteristically human – curiosity needn't be mere – curiosity can have the urgency of life and death, or be driven by an inner imperative to know in order to understand. Or the question asked may have an answer that is necessary in order to know what the next question might be, in that endless sequence of exploration that underlies all education – including theological education. And the book of Job is a profoundly disturbing course in theological education – if having the truth of God drawn out of us by having our very humanity questioned, counts as theological education.

Balentine's commentary on Job is written into that deeply human activity of questioning and being questioned. For those who desire a faith bolted down in certainties and unambiguous answers, 'the gain of certainty has to be measured against the loss of debate'. But for those for whom life is riddled with ambiguity, and faith and trust are tested by extremes of loss and pain, the loss of debate imposes a n unacceptable and dehumanising silencing of that voice through which the question "Why" is and must be spoken. The question "Why" searches the soul, and confronts God in both protest and prayer, both curse and blessing, seeking meaning more than consolation, and articulating in question and argument that which defines a person's humanity – the capacity to suffer, the yearning for love, and the longing to understand.

When it comes to suffering "for no reason," this book seems intent on reminding us that questions about the world, human existence and God necessarily remain open ended. To settle for anything less is to deny the pain that punctuates every faith assertion with a question mark. (Balentine, 33)

22 June 2008
The occasional inconvenience of providence

Danny was having a bad day. The morning I met him he was sweeping the gutters outside the Prince Regent Hotel. Every 20 yards an impressive heap of rubbish to be shovelled into his bins and carted away. But most of it was green leaves and new twigs, ripped from the trees in the high winds of the previous night. He swept with determined anger, as if these leaves were each a personal offence. Our eyes met and I stopped to commiserate.."Don’t expect to be doing this in May… usually September before you have to sweep up leaves".

Took out his map, showed me the streets in highlighter pink that were his patch, then showed me the patches in fluorescent green where he was to help the next squad. Asked how he was supposed to get all this done? It didn’t seem like the time to tell him it was Pentecost week… you know the Holy Spirit…like the wind of God, blowing through the world. Nor the words of John Newton, Amazing Grace, in a storm every leaf (and snowflake) falls by the will of God at the appointed time and in the ordained place. Instead I said thanks for what he was doing…it was appreciated…made a difference, he was a bit embarrassed and said he wouldn’t be doing it if he didn’t need the job. So he got stuck in again, tidying up the world, tackling the chaos, bringing order to those parts of the world he was responsible for, picked out in a couple of inches of fluorescent pink.

People who tidy up our world…You know how Genesis begins, "In the beginning…." Think of it, the Spirit of God as the wisdom and purpose of God tidying up the chaos, making sense of the messiness. Proverbs 8.30 refers to 'the craftsman at [the Lord's] side'. The one who takes raw material and the right tools, who works with skill, experience and flair so that something is manufactured, created, brought into being. And the Spirit delights every day, rejoicing in this whole world and delighting in human life. This is a view of God that is playful, the relaxed leisurely joy of the artist with her gifts in full flow. The Holy Spirit as God’s craftsman, God’s artist, working in the world.

It is this God who works in our lives. Proverbs 8 is about the wisdom of God. This is a view of the universe that has God at the centre. When you think of the God who watches over us think of one whose wise delight iImagined oceans into being, touched the depths of the earth to gush springs of life-giving water, settled the mountains in place like an interior designer arranging the furniture, spreading soil like fitted carpets, arranging the dust of the world, speck by speck. Tell that to Danny, whose two inches of fluorescent pink mean hours of back-breaking work.

But this is poetry, this is truth, deep truth about the world we live in and the life we live in the world.

‘ Earth’s crammed with heaven

and every common bush afire with God:/

but only he who sees, takes off his shoes,

the rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

And the deep truths are all here. The heavens set in place; the Lord rules the stars, and so the Lord, not the stars, rule our lives. The horizons are measured, all our possibilities fall within the wise love of God. The clouds are established, ‘Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take, the clouds you so much dread; are big with mercy and will break, in blessings on your head.’ We all have our clouds, those experiences that come between us and our happiness, the job we hate, the job we can’t get, the row that hurts, the illness that lays low, the depression that won’t lift, the lost chances that don’t come back, but they are part of life, and in the miracles of our lives this craftsman God can turn clouds to blessing.

The sea boundary is set and it can’t overstep God’s command…"when you pass through the waters they shall not overwhelm you"… "he marked out the foundations of the earth." Foundations give a structure its integrity, its durability, and the integrity and durability of God’s creation is in his hands. This isn’t science; it’s a way of looking at the world that sees beneath the surface, that senses God at work. All these words are work words, from architects and builders vocabulary. This is God at work. Set in place the heavens… marked out the horizon, established clouds, fixed the deep fountains, set the boundaries of the sea, measured out the foundations. The world isn’t a chaos and neither are our lives. John Newton knew perfectly well that he was exaggerating when he speaks of God ordaining the shape, the precision timing, and the exact location of each falling snowflake and every wind-driven leaf. But he was trying to find pictures for the grace that brings us safe thus far, and the grace that leads us home. Just as Proverbs is trying to give us pictures of a God who doesn’t leave us to our own devices, but who is working in us and through us, in the details and the dailiness of our lives

And if the wind blows, and the leaves fall, then still,in this vast mystery of generous creative yet sometimes fristrating and wounding place we call the world, God works at working things out, according to a purpose established in love deeper than thought.

21 June 2008
Confessions of a Bibliophile: Sam Balentine on Job

No doubt at some stage the credit crunch will hit bibliophiles and books will increase in price, and hard choices will become cultural dilemmas, even existential crises. Now instead of thinking twice, I might have to think again before deciding that a particular book is a necessity as well as a luxury. It isn't the odd paperback that's the problem – it's those works of art, those cultural artefacts we call academic monographs, usually published in a small print run and still built as a book that's meant to last through years of reading and regular loving use. I count a high quality commentary in that bracket – serious scholarship, encased in a book that is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

It's an interesting question whether we are more disposed to the contents of a book if its construction, quality of materials, format and layout are part of the way the author's writing is presented to us. Should that recognisably no nonsense navy blue buckram, the high quality paper and discreetly strong stitching, the elegant font and ungrudging space for footnotes, along with the gold crest of Oxford, give an assumption of authority and serious, lasting importance, to a book such as The Countess of Huntigdon's Connexion. A Sect in Action in Eighteenth Cenutry England? And is it worth the price? I can just hear the answers – (most of them I've rehearsed in my own head) –

What? Pay that for a book?

What's wrong with libraries?

How many times do you have to read a book to make it worth the price?

Are you sure you need this, or do you just want it?

To all of which I can construct answers which merely rationalise a decision already made somewhere deep within, in that place where personal indulgence, common sense stewardship and valid personal choice argue out in a process that eventually identifies what, for us, matters more than money. Membership of a golf club or gym, a CD collection, an upper range car, the holidays abroad, the shirt with the small telling logo (which tells others it was expensive); I can do without these if now and again I can have a book like this. See. Told you. Anybody can rationalise when they put their minds to it.

Which is just as well. Cos I've just done it again. Bought an expensive book. Possible alternative routes for the money spent give urgency to the process of post purchase rationalisation. Commentaries now come in all sizes, written for every niche market you can think of, and some of them for niche markets you would never have thought of. Just how many commentaries does any one person need on a biblical book? That is, I think a key question – and being less tongue in cheek, there is now a real danger that too many commentaries eclipse the text they are meant to clarify. For example, a niche set of commentaries with applications, illustrations, not too technical, aimed at preachers, – encourages intellectual and spiritual short-cuts, which eventually short-change both preacher and congregation. Or, on the other hand technical critical commentaries which absorb information like a paper sponge, and expand to pages and pages of information less and less pertinent to the text, merely give commentaries a bad name amongst those who need them most.

Sam Balentine is a Baptist. He is a professor of Hebrew Bible. His commentary on Job arrived yesterday. It wasn't cheap. It was worth every pound. Yes it is beautifully produced; and yes Balentine is a very good writer, deeply conversant with the text, at ease in the world of critical, literary and theological scholarship; yes, he has spent years on this volume, it isn't one of those quickly assembled cut and paste previous stuff and shape it into a commentary efforts, justto* fill the publisher's list. This is the real thing. A commentary that wrestles with text – the text of Scripture, the text of human experience, and does so in a commentary format that is in my view way ahead of the game. (* decided to leave this typo as a new word which refers to those actions of others which are justto impress others!)

The Smyth and Helwys series includes sidebars with relevant and richly sourced comment from literature such as novels and poetry, the text has windows in which important background or social comment offer further interpretive perspectives, illustrations from art and other cultural ways of conveying human responses to God. And all of this in a volume that uses several colours to highlight text, that has imaginative and user friendly layout, and that is simply a joy to read, use and work with. You can see the details of the series here (www.helwys.com/commentary)

No series is worth investing in uncritically. There are strong and weak entries in this series as well. But Terence Fretheim on Jeremiah, Sam Balentine on Job, Walter Brueggemann on Kings, C H Talbert on Romans – these I have used, and for me they are self recommending, as authors I've learned to trust – not because they are always right, but because reading their other work, they have always been important conversation partners. I'm looking forward to some conversations with Balentine and Carol Newsom (in the New Interpreter's Bible) over the summer, about this book which sits in the middle of my Bible like a great chunk of theological granite likely to outlast any question I'm ever likely to ask.

19 June 2008
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