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St Deiniol’s 3 : Psalm 119 and Theological Education

What’s the longest chapter in the Bible? The longest Psalm? It’s that remarkable piece of textual cross stitch, Psalm 119. A 22 stanza acrostic going through the hebrew alphabet, each verse in each stanza beginning with the same letter – it is a tour de force of artificially structured thought, but to great and serious purpose. My own study of the Psalm goes back years – I once preached six sermons on it, touching on wisdom, guidance, spiritual longing, hard times, trustful learning and leaning, and so on. The Victorian pastoral theologian Charles Bridges wrote a devout commentary on it: Thomas Manton the Puritan a long series of sermons which dissected and examined it in exhaustive and exhausting detail; Calvin’s commentary on it is a masterclass in restrained, focused devotion; Spurgeon ransacked the expositional tradition to produce what is a vade mecum on Christian obedience to the Law of the Lord.

At at St Deiniol’s this Psalm was brought to my attention again by reading Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship. He quotes one verse that picqued my interest, and resulted in a careful rereading and rehearing of this Torah Concerto in 22 movements! It was then I came across verse 56: ‘This has been my practice; I obey your precepts’. None of us really know why certain phrases of Scripture trip us up, slow us down, make us listen – the Holy Spirit interrupts our reading, silences otherwise sound questions and puts on hold the discoveries that drive the intellectual quest. And for no reason other than unlooked for gift, words are transformed to Word, Bible study becomes personal address, and the Word of the Lord has finally been heard. Sitting in a sunlit Victorian library, mellow oak book shelves on three sides, aware of countless others who had sat in this place in pursuit of divine learning, my soul already stirred by the pointed and potent writing of Bonhoeffer, I sensed the passion and longing of the Psalm writer who so long ago tried to express the ordered purposes of God, in well ordered words, as a way of recreating a disordered world – through saintly practices in obedience to divine precepts.

The result is an outline of an essay on psalm 119 as theological education. More about this later. It’s time I took the psalmist’s advice:
I lie down and sleep; I wake again because the Lord sustains me.

19 May 2008
St Deiniol’s 2. Walking the walk and not forgiving our tresspasses

One of the enjoyable features of a time at St Deiniol’s is you meet a number of people even more interesting than yourself! Sean’s well meant advice about the resident scholar pursuing the identity of the young man in Mark came far too late of course. I did indeed meet this tireless scholar and one of my first questions was, ‘What are you researching?’ And yes, some time later I was still sat there receiving a deep education on exegetical options I’d never have imagined possible or plausible. I threw in a little twist of my own and asked if the young man in Mark was the first gospel’s equivalent of the Beloved Disciple in John – that took us to Bauckham and back some time later.

Then there was the afternoon conversation over earl grey tea and chocolate cake with an elderly Philadelphian doing research into the family history and theological ancestry of Hannah Whittall Smith, Keswick, perfectionism and much else. She gave us a sharply observed run down on US politics, particularly scathing on the patronising President who’s giving up golf to avoid offending parents whose sons won’t be home from Iraq to play golf. Her views on Hillary and Obama were clear, informed, slightly prejudiced (which she acknowledged), and hoped to see the first black President of the US before she died, and so she would die happy. After a tour of Wesleyan perfection, Dubya Bush’s imperfection, and Obama’s near perfection, she took her leave from the table, raising her hand outward in the sign of peace, pronouncing the rarely used benediction, ‘Keep the faith, baby!’ An utter delight.

Then there was (and is) the chaplain for the month, The Rev Arderne Gillies from Chorleywood Free Church (Baptist). First spoke with Arderne on Monday night, when she suggested we take a walk in the grounds of Hawarden castle (see later this post for the consequences of this pastoral advice!) As chaplain, Arderne celebrated the pre-breakfast Eucharist with the guests during our stay. Now you read it right – Arderne is a Baptist minister, chaplain for a month at St Deiniol’s, and she celebrated according to the liturgy of the Church of Wales – which allowed me the rare privilege of being ministered to in a worship service thoroughly ecumenical, overtly egalitarian, and movingly personal as we received the bread and wine with the affirmations and blessings which express the mystery and gift that is the Body and Blood of Christ. And the service was conducted with such care as requires personal preparation, the intercessory prayers earthed into the hurts and hopes of a broken world, and the solemnity of the service tempered by the engaged presence of one spiritually at one with both congregation and her own role as minister. Thanks Arderne.

The version of the Lord’s Prayer used is the traditional form with the petition, ‘Forgive us our tresspasses…..’ which we prayed with sincere fervour, having fallen foul of the factor in Sir William Gladstone’s estate, because we were so busy blethering we didn’t notice the wee private signs, and inadvertently trod on one of the recently declared non public parts of England’s green and pleasant land! Comes from being Scottish where such laws of tresspass aren’t so easily enforced. One of those occasions when pastoral advice about walking the walk can mean offending the world!

17 May 2008
St Deiniol’s 1. Study is slowed down prayer…….

I’ve just spent five days at St Deiniol’s Library which was restorative, relaxing, interesting, modestly productive, and reassures me that my brain can still be kick-started given the right kick and the right fuel! What makes St Deiniol’s special is the people who go there, the Library itself with its atmosphere of prayer and learning, the ethos of Victorian ingenuity and support for humane learning, and the overall concept of a residential bolt hole for those who want to pursue divine learning or whose vocation is theological education – which if we are to be adequate to the task presupposes that our own theological education and commitment to divine learning remains both an enthusiasm and a calling.

Let’s talk ethos. The original oak interior of the library has been preserved, including the ingenious arrangement of shelves allowing maximum books in available space. Unlike many academic institutions, there isn’t the same urgency to move older stuff to the less accessible stacks, so much of the original older library is there mingled with the new – I worked a lot on psalm 119 for reasons I’ll mention in a later post. But I was happy as Larry (anyone know the origin of this phrase?) sitting at a table beside Neal and Littledale’s five volume Victorian bric a brac shop of Patristic comment on the Psalter, Spurgeon’s homiletic supermarket called the Treasury of David, the venerable two volume J S S Perowne, devout Anglican commentator on the Psalms, the equally imposing commentary by Joseph Addison Alexander, Reformed Calvinist and important conservative biblical scholar at mid 19th century Princeton, as well as the latest Hermeneia volume Sean enthused about earlier this year, and several of the spate of recent usable sized and theologically enriched commentaries on Psalms by Bob Davidson from Glasgow, John Eaton of Birmingham – and a new discovery I’ll blog about soon. Point is – though several recent important volumes weren’t there, much that isn’t so easy to find is.

But what gives working in the Library an added sense of prayerful purpose is the early morning pre-breakfast Eucharist for those who want to communicate. To join study with the wider church at prayer was an important reminder each day that theological study and theological education has its goal in a developing, deepening devotion to God. The liturgy is simple, carefully crafted, each day was conducted with the right balance of dignity and personal warmth, and is shared by people representing the diversity and richness of the Body of Christ. The quiet coolness and filtered light of the library add to the sense of being about God’s business, physical reminders that study is slowed down prayer, quietened thought, and instilling a gentle awareness that to study is to want to know, and to want to know requires an inner humility that recognises there is much to learn, much to receive, and much for which to give thanks – including the gift of the work of those from whom we learn.

I read a chunk of Bonhoefer’s Discipleship, a book which decisively frustrates any attempt at skim or speed reading, information filleting or desultory browsing. Bonhoeffer is uncompromising, utterly to the point about discipleship as personal response to the crucified risen Jesus. Reading him I realise how easy it has been to lose that edge of fitness and stamina, to relax that alertness and readiness for self expenditure required of cross carrying Christians. If I’d found myself on Manchester United’s training field, the physical demands of keeping up with the pace might be considered the equivalent of hearing that remarkable voice of a young German pastor lay out the demands of discipleship and the costliness of responding to the grace of God in Christ. The right book, read in the right place, at the right time……

16 May 2008
The leisurely pursuit of learning and divinity

This week Monday to Friday is one of those gift weeks – when work is hard to discern amongst the pleasure. It is however a reading and writing week – but at St Deiniol’s library in Hawarden, near Chester. I’m going with a good friend and colleague so the week includes conversation, fellowship, mutual enthusiasm for ‘divine learning’ (the purpose behind St Deiniol’s endowment) and the hope of a pub where we can watch the Uefa Cup Final.

Blogging is on hold for the week. Maybe next week I’ll be able to post some of the theological and intellectual proceeds of a week’s work – then again, the pressure to produce is a market concept that has limited usefulness in the life of scholarship. There are times when what is most needed is replenishment rather than productivity. I’ve a couple of big books lined up – but in a library of over 200,000 items, there may be tempting alternatives. I’ve several preaching occasions I need to prepare for including the English speaking Welsh Baptist Union Assembly and ordinations of finishing students. To preach at the beginning of a ministry is one of those key moments in theological education as vocation, when all the things that matter most are to the fore.

Time to pack the books, paper and pencils – oh and the laptop.

12 May 2008
Karl Barth and theology in italics

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.

10 May 2008
Faith receives, love gives.

Here is Luther on the obedience of faith

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!

9 May 2008
10p Tax taxes PM and MP’s credibility

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.

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.

8 May 2008
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)

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.

6 May 2008
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.

5 May 2008
The cry of every parent, ‘How can I give you up…..?

The 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.

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

4 May 2008