Living Wittily

Blog

  • Karl Barth and theology in italics

    Spiritpicasso18
    If the Holy Spirit is not Himself the true God, in what sense then can we say: I believe in the Holy Spirit? We should be wise to have nothing whatever to do with believing in a mere spiritual power. But if we realise the secret and the miracle of the fact that we believe, that it is really permissible and possible for us to believe in Jesus Christ and therefore in God, if it is plain to us that this permission and possibility are, according to John 3.3 nothing less than a ‘new birth’, then it cannot very long remain hidden from us that the power which achieves that in us cannot be anything less than God’s power. God in Himself is the love which becomes visible in us in this mystery and miracle. In God Himself is the love of the father to the Son, of the Son to the Father. This eternal love in God Himself is the Holy Spirit, of whose work the third article [of the creed] speaks.
    Karl Barth, Credo (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1936), 136.

    The theological emphases are in the italics. Barth’s impatience with mere spirituality, and with vaguely or undefined power, is at least one hint that his view of the Holy Spirit is never intentionally impersonal, and indeed is essentially defined by the nature and being of God. And when Barth identifies the love in God Himself with the Holy Spirit, he is referring to the Lord who is the Spirit, in the same personal intercommunion of love as father and Son. Or as he put it:

    The Holy Spirit of adoption, of revelation and of witness, the Holy Spirit Who makes us free for the Word of God, is eternal Spirit in the same way as the Father is eternal Father and as the Son is eternal Son. He is of one substance with Father and Son and therefore with Them the one true God, Creator, Reconciler, Redeemer. (Credo, 135-6)

    Just some devotional theology to mull over during Pentecost weekend…. before praying the words of another passionate theologian – Charles Wesley

    O Thou who camest from above,
    The pure, celestial fire to impart;
    kindle a flame of sacred love,
    on the mean altar of my heart.

  • Faith receives, love gives.

    Here is Luther on the obedience of faith

    Luther1
    Faith receives, love gives. Faith leads people to God, love leads people to others. In faith a person lets God do good to them; in love a person does good to others. For he who believes has all things from God, and he is blessed and rich. Therefore he needs nothing more, but devotes his life and work to the good and welfare of other people. In love he does for his fellow people what God has done for him in faith – as though by faith he draws upon the good from above and by love he distributes good here below.

    In a remarkable and readable book, Faith Victorious, the Finnish Lutheran scholar Lennart Pinomaa introduces the spiritual theology of the great Reformer. Here’s Pinomaa’s comment on Luther’s view of the obedience of faith

    While Catholicism looked upon sanctification as a continuous activity on man’s part, as cultivation of self, as ‘school’, Luther saw it theocentrically: God does everything. Man’s struggle is a struggle for faith, not for works. Faith involves the total man totally. faith cannot result in inactivity, for it lives  by God’s judgement and grace, which in turn give rise to the activity of faith. If something is lacking, it at once becomes a matter of faith. The activity of faith in the service of others; the other person is therefore an inseparable part of aith. The aim of faith can never be merely one’s own salvation.
    Both quotes from Faith Victorious.An Introduction to Luther’s Theology. (Lima, Ohio: Academic Renewal Press 2001), 75, 77.


    To use the modern grammatical oddity -that is so not wrong!

  • 10p Tax taxes PM and MP’s credibility

    Border0001
    Margaret was asking about whether my MP, Jim Sheridan, got back to me about the abolition of the 10p tax band. The answer is yes – three times! First response was an honest admission that he was and is strongly resistant to removing the 10p tax band unless it was demonstrably clear that lower income people would not only, not lose out, but be overall better off. While understandably supportive of other measures his Party have taken while in Government, he acknowledged that the abolition of the lowest tax rate, which so obviously benefits lower income people, would undermine much of that good work – at least in the public perception.

    While acknowledging both his candour and the validity of some of his points, I wrote back following the inept and vague musings of the Chancellor on Andrew Marr AM, to express astonishment that he claimed a budget can’t be changed once the financial year has started. So either the problems for low income people were not anticipated (not very competent or socially aware), or they were, but the hit was worth taking (so what about social justice), or the system was now so complex that valid adjustments can’t be made (back to competence and that well worn Reid phrase ‘fit for purpose’) – to a fiscal system of which the now PM was the architect. A second reply enclosed an even vaguer set of proposed responses from the Treasury to compensate those who lose out – with Jim Sheridan clearly aligned with those making the strongest possible representations.

    Then earlier this week a further letter from my MP, with a further enclosure showing why the 10P tax rate isn’t effective – not least because its benefit is universal whereas relief for lower income folk should be targeted and more generous. As our Austrian waiter used to say in Mayerhofffen – ‘All OK Fine, but…..’ For me the but is, the child tax credit, pension credit payments are dogged by non-take-up, and require post graduate qualifications in filling up complex forms and negotiating the labyrinth of bureaucratic admin and means testing – a process not unrelated to non take-up. My further question relates to the claim now made by the PM, the Chancellor and the enclosed literature sent to me – that the 10p tax band was never intended as other than a stop gap till other measures were in place, and that it isn’t all that efficient a way of helping the poor. You see my problem is that the Government wants to be seen to reduce income tax for everyone – there is now no pretence that extra money for lower income people should be financed by taxing more those of us who can afford it. Which raises the question of how a Government needing increased revenue can raise the money while giving it back to all earners. Answer has to be indirect taxation – but that too is a universally applied tax method and hits the poor hardest.

    4822272f002a302dbd400cb8e1
    Tax is a complex process. Economic fluctuations and pressures are now harder to predict, control, or avoid. But I am still deeply suspicious of a Government that abolished a measure which DID help all lower income people, and only after a year its MP’s woke up to its consequences. And it was done as a publicity stunt by a Chancellor whose eye was off the ball, cos he was looking towards the goal of being PM. And much of the explanation since has been to devalue the continuing usefulness of the 10p tax band – while putting in its place measures so vaguely defined the threat of a Labour revolt still exists.

    Sorry for the long post – but it started as an expressed concern about social justice, conviction politics in relation to the poor, and a Government own goal. I can’t say my own concerns are now allayed. Trust is always something others give – it can’t be bought, and it shouldn’t be sold cheap. My local MP, Jim Sheridan is one of many good local MP’s whose embarrassment by all this is tangible, and whose loyalty must be strained to limits beyond which Party leaders are entitled to go on expecting support. What I can say is that my local MP has responded to and taken seriously my representations – and with a balance of personal candour and defensiveness of his Party, for which I am grateful for the first, and understanding of the second. 

  • Thomas Erskine and Rabbi Duncan; different, but the same

    God is the only real centre, and separation from Him the only real schism.
    Thomas Erskine

    I desire to know more and more the importance of learning Christ, rather than Christianity; the living, loving, almighty Lord of our spirits, rather than the logic about him.
    Thomas Erskine

    We make far too little of the Incarnation; the Fathers knew much more of the incarnate God. Some of them were oftener at Bethlehem than at Calvary; they had too little of Calvary, but they knew Bethlehem well. They took up the Holy Babe in their arms; they loved Immanuel, God with us. We are not too often at the cross, but we are too seldom at the cradle; and we know too little of the Word made flesh, of the Holy Child Jesus.
    Rev John Duncan (Rabbi Duncan)

    Tartan_shirts_
    Two 19th Century Scottish Christians who couldn’t be more different in theological style and substance – except their Christ-centredness which tends to make all the other differences sound a wee bit relative. Erskine was an adventurous and speculative theologian who pushed at the frontiers of the orthodoxy of his day arguing for a universal gospel. Duncan, one of the most gifted linguists and biblical scholars of the Free Kirk, a man of granite loyalty to the Calvinism of the Westminster Confession. And both, part of our Scottish Christian heritage, at times tense and suspicious of diversity and thrawn and independent in spirit. But the passionate loyalty to Christ is unmistakable.

  • Whitewashing the truth, and true whitewashing

    The term whitewash has a long and sometimes ignoble history. At its best it recalls the biblical metaphor for being washed white as snow, and garments washed pure white in the blood of Christ. But it has far less attractive connotations. Poor Stephen Hendry suffered his first snooker whitewash this week at the Sheffield World Snooker Championship – a whole session of 8 frames with no wins. An old friend in Aberdeen recalls his army days when the coal was whitewashed to avoid offending the scrutiny of visiting dignitaries. Gordon Brown attempted the impossible task of whitewashing over the electoral meltdown of last week, and the even impossibler (I know that such a comparative is grammatically impossible, but using it makes it more rhetorically effective) task of whitewashing over the flaws and cracks of a doomed leadership.

    Whereas, simple and semantically straightforward blogger that I am, I’ve spent most of the Bank Holiday whitewashing the house. And all that I’m covering up is 6 years of weathering which has made the house an unattractive off-white – so I’m whitewashing it, – well painting it with Dulux dead expensive, all weather, eternally lasting, one coat application stuff. It’ll take a few sessions to do it all – and meanwhile I continue to ruminate on metaphors of clean whiteness, cover-ups, the aesthetic appeal of brilliant white as ethical aspiration, or its ethically dubious flip side of denial of unpleasant political realities.

  • The cry of every parent, ‘How can I give you up…..?

    3381800086a4554304156b969849840mlThe disappearance of this little girl, the unending anguish of her parents, the investigations and accusations, our own sense of helplessness in this highly publicised tragedy, and one year on, no answers. No shortage of uninformed or mischievous speculation; as the world watches, the parents live through the occasional raised hopes but the much more frequent desolating disappointment of yet another closed door; and the criticism of Madeleine’s parents, which at best is unkind, at times is irresponsible, but in any case lacks the foundational human and humanising response of compassion as they try to live their lives around the heartbreaking reality of their daughter’s absence.

    150pxcandleburning
    In Hosea, the soliloquy of God has the Eternal One saying, ‘How can I give you up, O Ephraim…? It is the cry of every parent facing the loss of their child, for whatever reason.

    Zechariah’s vision of a city filled with the noise of children playing safely, is one of the longed for visions of a world where too many children are not safe.

    Jesus’ warning about how God views the violation of a child’s trust, about millstones hung round necks and the long deep plunge into an ocean of judgement, brings an essential note of divine outrage to our far too this worldly view of the moral and eternal consequences of child exploitation. Child protection is not simply a modern legislative reaction – it is an essential human concern rooted in biblical principles and in the very nature of the God whose love is imaged, however faintly, in the creative consummate love of parents for their child. 

    Kirie eleison
    Christe eleison
    Kyrie eleison.
    Amen

  • Impulsive openness to conversation with interesting folk

    Ever since I discovered the joy of reading, and the more disciplined joy of study, I’ve been developing the discipline of indiscipline. I’ve never wanted to specialise, though there have been times when particular interests have commanded attention, provided focus, called for sustained study and the work of writing. But overall I’ve learned to be at ease with a wide range of interests, exploring a variety of subject fields and allowing ideas and arguments to cross fertilise, inviting insights and questions to set up tensions, creating inner conversations between voices which don’t usually talk to each other.

    Domeafter_lg
    Just looking over recent posts, there might be a case for suggesting chaos theory underlies my reading choices. Abraham Heschel a Jewish theologian with hasidic forebears, and philosopher in close conversation with Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran, theologian, witness and martyr, and extraordinary writer whose fragments of theological reflection are the antidote for spiritual complacency; Elizabeth Johnson, feminist Catholic theologian whose contribution to a contemporary understanding of God expresses the creative and constructive possibilities of feminist theology;  Samuel Rutherford, Scottish Presbyterian of adamantine certainty, ferocious polemical outbursts and overflowing devotional sentiment; Hans Kung, disqualified Catholic theologian yet deeply qualified apologist for global Christianity and its place amongst the world’s faith movements; John Owen the quintessential Puritan, and as Carl Trueman has argued, a thoroughly Renaissance scholar and foremost exponent of Trinitarian spirituality.

    Asked what my research interests are I always struggle to reduce my interests to such limited menus as ‘the seventeenth century Cambridge Puritans’; or ‘the viability of kenosis as a motif for understanding pastoral care as a communal process of self giving’; or ‘Scottish Protestant piety from the Reformation to the present’; or ‘theological loci as separately or together, clues to the nature and practice of pastoral theology’; or the history of the interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount and the connection between such interpretations and cultural context; or ‘Julian of Norwich, George Herbert and Charles Wesley’s spirituality of love in a broken world. So I move happily and freely from church history to systematic theology, then to spirituality and pastoral care, then there’s biography as a form of theological performance, biblical studies from theological exegesis to the history of interpretation – which then opens up further history, biography, philosophy, exegesis of scripture and life……….

    None of this is a complaint. More a gentle warning to those who might think that there is neither rhyme nor reason to my reading choices. Major focused projects apart, and conscientious (and usually much enjoyed) reading required for specific teaching responsibilities assumed, most other reading is decided by a kind of impulsive openness to conversation with interesting folk. So Brian Kay’s book on Trinitarian Spirituality not only introduces me to John Owen but to the fascinating connections between Owen and Julian of Norwich, the Cloud of Unknowing and Thomas a Kempis; Gordon Mullan’s book on Scottish Puritanism goes to the pulsating core of Scottish Covenant Theology; Sabine Dramm is clearly a highly skilled interpreter of Bonhoeffer’s voice for a post 9/11 world, and without the damaging reductionism of those who want to use Bonhoeffer against his own grain.

    Each year I ensure specific areas of intellectual interest are included in a planned reading list – but that list always leaves room for the large number of unexpected guests that are likely to come knocking – and often is not completed. Both Kay and Dramm were noticed while I was looking for something else – but I’m glad to have spent time in conversation with them – I learned from them. So I’ve never been an enthusiast for specialism, though I recognise that in scholarship we are all faced with choices – and I’ve made some too. Evangelical Spirituality as expressed in the lives of significant exponents; the hymns and theology of the Wesleys; the poetry of George Herbert; James Denney who is less a specialism than an important orienting theological landmark.

    But such openness to conversation does mean that personal convictions, opinions, life experience, limited knowledge – are each likely to be challenged, corrected, deepened, now and then downright contradicted. Which is an important part of growing in the knowledge of Christ, slowly and humbly accumulating wisdom, the heart enlightened even as the mind is informed, as ‘together with all the saints’, heart and mind come to know the length and breadth and height and depth of the love of God in Christ.

    And maybe the true Christian scholar isn’t the specialist at all, but the wide ranging explorer of a faith that is as vast as the Gospel and is expressed in story and song, biography and theology, philosophy and conversation, in text and human life, in community experience and individual encounter with God. I have never envied those whose reading and study are restricted to this or that aisle in the supermarket of ideas, or whose theological vision is deliberately narrowed to systems, schools, publishers or traditions selected for their capacity to confirm what they believe they already know, or know they already believe.

    Time now without number I have been made to think again, and to discover or remember, what it means to be open to the infinite, eternal reality of God who in Christ ‘accommodated himself’ to human capacity. Coming to know the love of God ‘together with all the saints’ for me has meant that I owe more debts than I can pay or even remember, to such people as…. well how would you finish that sentence? Who do you owe a debt of gratitude to, who has taught and shown you the love of God?

  • Mercy and metaphysics

    Gods Mercy

    God’s boundless mercy is, to sinfull man,
    Like to the ever-wealthy ocean:
    Which though it sends forth thousand streams, ’tis n’ere
    Known, or else seen to be the emptier:
    And though it takes all in, ’tis yet no more
    Full, and filled full, than when full-filled before.
    (Robert Herrick)

    188218main_188092main_dprotoplaneta
    Many of the poets of the Seventeenth Century combined theological precision with psychological perception. The best of them weren’t called Metaphysical Poets for nothing; and when they recounted the range of human experiences they called  a spade a spade, a sin a sin, and looked their own unworthiness and deserved judgement head on. But they also revelled in images and words for the extravagant mystery of divine love, the inexhaustible fund of divine mercy, and the inexplicable generosity of a holy God for sinful humanity. The above is one of my favourites from Herrick – I don’t know who reads him much today, and sure some of his verbal gymnastics look like showing off – but here’s another one I like. Not because it is devotionally effective (whatever that might mean!), but because Herrick is enjoying the chance to dig the ribs of over metaphysical theologians:

    God’s Presence.

    God’s present ev’ry where; but most of all
    Present by union hypostaticall;
    God, He is there, where’s nothing else, schools say,
    And nothing else is there, where he’s away.

    Mind you – I wouldn’t mind the odd few lines of metaphysical mind-stretching put up on the power-point as a counter-balance to the limitations of much of contemporary one dimensional praise.

  • I asked for wonder – the spiritual importance of the inexplicable

    51y5ec2yedl_ss500_
    Yesterday in the Theological Reflection class we spent some time savouring the spiritual prose poetry that is the writing of A J Heschel. This writer was mostly new to the class members, and his style of writing a stark contrast to much that passes for spiritual writing today. From the first day they saw this book cover there was interest in a man who had such a lived in face, and near the  end of the course when choices have to be made about what there is still time to explore and discuss – my suggested omission of Heschel was thankfully over-ruled. So we worked through a handout of brief extracts, each of us reading one, not feeling the need always to comment, but now and then saying what we had found touched us, or how what we read found us. It was an important interlude when teaching doesn’t need the constant explanatory, expository, interrogatory voice. It was a class taught by numerous acts of reading, reflecting and occasional vocal appreciation. And I think what was learned wasn’t so much how to do Theological Reflection, as how to recognise the profoundly reflective way of doing theology that arises from depths of human experience. Such expereince is forged in the fires of a faith both profound and immediate, a burning passion for God that welds the mystical and practical, and from the resulting fusion, a philosophical theology distilled to the essence of the religious encounter between the human and the divine, which is the meeting of holiness and humanity, divine pathos and human need.

    Here are a couple of examples of Heschel’s remarkable glimpses into the nature of prayer as both joyful discovery and  unassuaged longing:

    Prayer begins where expression ends. The words that reach our lips are often but waves of an overflowing stream touching the shore:We often seek and miss, struggle and fail to adjust our unique feelings to the patterns of the texts. Where is the tree that can utter fully the silent passion of the soil. Words can only open the door, and we can only weep on the threshold of our incommunicable thirst after the incomprehensible.


    In no other act does the human being experience so often the disparity between the desire for expression and the means of expression as in prayer. The inadequacy of the means at our disposal appears so tangible, so tragic, that one feels it a grace to be able to give oneself up to music, to a tone, to a song, to a chant. The wave of a song carries the soul to heights which utterable meanings can never reach. Such abandonment is no escape…For the world of unutterable meanings is the nursery of the soul, the cradle of all our ideas. It is not an escape but a return to one’s origins.

    Centuries of Jewish dealings with God have shaped such a theology of the soul’s astonishment. The extracts come from Man’s Quest for God. It would be to inexcusably misunderstand and misrepresent Heschel to point out that Christian theology teaches the greater truth of God’s quest for humanity – Heschel would rightly point out, with something of that pathos he understood so personally, that such a view of the initiative of God is yet another idea Christians borrowed from the Hebrew Bible and the people God chose to be an ‘echo of eternity’. Such theological plagiarism (unacknowledged borrowing) tends to obscure the beauty of the tradition out of which, in the providence of God, the Christian faith emerged. The human quest for God, uttered, or unexpressed because inexpressible, is always going to be the soul’s response to the grace that first creates the urge towards God, and calls for that reckless trust so full of risk, to begin the journey with God into a future without tangible certainties.

    Augustine’s great prayer, ‘Thou has made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee’, is the cry that recognises that human incompleteness is itself the truth that turns us towards the One in whom all longing may be satisfied – but not yet, not here, and perhaps – not ever, for how can we ever have the capacity to have enough of God? P T Forsyth had no interest in being a ‘finished futility’ – he too recognised that the longing for God, the inadeqaucy of human expression to do justice to the inexpressible and ineffable, the categorical deficit in human capacity compared to divine inexhaustibility of grace, suggests that even in the encounter with God, in the fullness of glory and face to face, we will still be lost in wonder, love and praise. Which comes back to Heschel, and his willingness to be content, not with reductionist explanation, but with eternal mystery – which is why he confessed, ‘I asked for wonder……’ and not ‘I asked for answers!’

  • Does the future have a Church?

    There Shall Always Be the Church

    There shall always be the Church and the World
    And the heart of Man
    Shivering and fluttering between them, choosing and chosen,
    Valiant, ignoble, dark and full of light
    Swinging between Hell Gate and Heaven Gate.
    And the Gates of Hell shall not prevail.
    (T S Eliot)

    Vangogh_church1890
    So did Eliot anticipate the demise of the Church in Western society? The prescience of the poet a sharper discernment than the statistical trends of the sociologist, or the adjustments and accommodations of uncertain theologians? The ambiguity that lies at the heart of an institution that is at the same time a community that dares to claim allegiance to Jesus, is captured in the ‘fluttering’ between world and church, and the ‘swinging’ between Hell and Heaven. But the final prevailing word belongs to Heaven – the Body of Christ crucified, risen and ascended is the spiritual reality that lies behind a Church besieged by uncertainty, under pressure to justify itself by relevance and marketability to a post-modern consumerist culture.
    ‘And the Gates of Hell shall not prevail’ – is that because the Church will adapt to cultural demands to survive, or resist them as witness to a Kingdom not of this world? What is it that will ensure ‘there shall always be a church’ over and against the world?