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  • P T Forsyth, diversionary paths, and the encounter of prayer

    P_t_forsyth Spending some time writing a piece on P T Forsyth, which is all the excuse I need to find all kinds of diversionary paths that lead down fascinating Forsythian avenues. Reading again Harry Escott’s small anthology P T Forsyth and the Cure of Souls, I began the now habitual head-nodding that is my bodily acknowledgement that once again he is right, and again, and here again. Here’s a chunk of theological granite to weigh alongside some of the overblown plastic of some of the more utilitarian, guaranteed low effort and low-cost approaches to spirituality – what Karl Rahner once called anthropoegoism – (a peculiarly modern heresy evident in a person’s self centred and self-interested approach to the Divine as a resource to be used for our purposes). Forsyth will have none of it.

    Prayer contains the very heart and height of truth – reality and action. In prayer the inmost truth of our personal being locks with the inmost reality of things, its energy finds a living Person acting as their unity and life, and we  escape the illusions of sense, self and the world. Prayer, indeed, is the great means of appropriating, out of the amalgam of illusion which means so much for our education, the pure gold of God as he wills, the Spirit as he works, and things as they are. (Escott, p. 68)

    Prayer in this sense is a form of spiritual clarifying; a willingness to be introduced to the reality of who we are in the presence God and to discover in penitent wonder and surrendering worship who God is. And that encounter strips away our illusions about what our life is for, who and what we are called to be, because ‘the soul becomes very sure of God and itself in prayer’. The living, acting Christ becomes known as the one who gives new and regenerated life and who energises and enables action. That is the meaning of one of Forsyth’s epigrams: ‘Prayer is the assimilation of a holy God’s moral strength.’

    Which means prayer is transformative – of personality and character, of politics and society, of human failing and human longing. ‘Prayer, as our greatest work, breeds in us the flair for the greatest work of God, the instinct of his kingdom, and the sense of his track of time.’ (Escott p. 81).

    Right back to that article what needs writing!

  • Exegetical prestidigitation…..Eh?

    Her Testimony is True

    Poussin88 "Establishing equality for all persons regardless of their gender (or any other characteristic) is a cause surely born in the heart of God. But the cause of women’s equality is not advanced, rather, it is hindered whenever we attempt to force biblical texts to say things we might wish to hear but they do not say. Just as it is dishonest to deny that certain New Testament texts sanctioned slavery, but also fallacious to argue that such texts warrant the sanction of slavery today, it is counterproductive to contend that the Gospel of John is a document that passes edicts for its context and for ours on how women can and should function in the church. That sort of reading amounts  to an act of exegetical prestidigitation that in essence admits that those who would use the Bible  as a warrant to impose specific patterns of order from ancient communities onto modern ones have a case worthy of being contested. It is to lend dignity to what is actually a frivolous case for the subordination of women….

    God’s will for Christians is not that they rigidly duplicate the life and ministry of Jesus or his first disciples or the Johannine community (as if such a thing were possible), but that they discover, through the Spirit of Christ, the mind of Christ for each community in its own time and place. It is possible to discover God’s will for any contemporary context by Spirit-led exegetical and hermeneutical study of John’s Gospel, but not by prohecting contemporary contexts back on to it. Any exegesis is strained that has the Gospel of John setting out roles for people on the basis of gender or any other category, and is in fact contrary to john’s teaching that all believers are God’s children who, born of the Spirit, move in ways that defy human delineation (Jn 1.12-13; 3.5-8).

    The witnessing disciple responsible for the inscription of John’s Gospels defines the book as a testimony, and his testimony is vouched to be true (Jn 21.24). Are the testimonies of the women that this disciple reports also guaranteed to be true? Is her testimony true just as his testimony is true. It depends, then as now, not upon the gender but upon the faith of the witness who is born of the Spirit as a child of God. Their testimony is true who truly believe that the messiah, the Son of God, is Jesus."

    (Her Testimony is True. Women as Witnesses According to John, JSNTS 125, Robert G Maccini (Sheffield Academic Press 1996) 251-2.

    Bob’s own disclaimer in the Preface is an important indication of how hard good scholarship tries to make allowances for the scholar’s own standpoint. Just one more reason why I love RGM as a friend and respect him as a scholar.

    ‘Because of my vested interest in the advancement of women in the church, I am predisposed to want the New Testament to be favourable towards women. That predisposition cannot be removed, and so I have tried to keep it in view if not in check by playing the devil’s advocate against myself throughout the research. Readers will judge for themselves whether or not this gambit was desirable, successful, or even possible.’

  • Her testimony is True

    02357_noli_me_tangere I quite deliberately chose all the poems for Holy Week from women poets.(Did anyone notice?) The passion story and its aftermath in the resurrection accounts is populated by women whose intervention at different times is as decisive as that of the men. In a story too often read as if Pilate, Judas, Peter and Caiaphas were the key actors, there is a need to hear those other voices. Like those of the woman who anointed Jesus, of the serving girl in the courtyard, of his mother, the women who stood and stayed on Calvary when the men were hiding, Mary Magdalene, and those practical love driven women who gathered the spices together, along with the anointing and binding cloths, and trudged out to do what no one else was ready to do.

    I have a very special book, gifted to me by its author Robert Gordon Maccini (Bob is rightly proud of his middle name, which is only one of the connections between us that keeps us close friends with the Atlantic between us). Bob’s PhD was supervised by Dr Ruth Edwards at the University of Aberdeen, and under the rigorous and reverent scholarship that characterises all Ruth’s own work, it developed into a close and authoritative study of the role of women as witnesses in John’s Gospel – in its published form its title is Her Testimony is True. Over the years I’ve read a pile of books on John’s Gospel, and this one is amongst the most significant, because of its meticulous re appropriation of texts too often sidelined by the claim that the testimony of women was inadmissible in Jewish courts.

    As a reassertion of the role of women as credible witnesses in the life of Jesus, their original and pivotal role in the story of the Gospel, and as an eloquent questioning of the marginalising of women in the ministry of the Church, Her Testimony is True is a book of continuing significance. Bob doesn’t force biblical texts to say what he might want them to say, given that he is a passionate advocate of women’s ministry – Becky supported Bob’s studies by working in ministry in Aberdeen, and has gone on to develop and focus her own vocation in a pastoral and preaching ministry. No, the texts should speak for themselves, when content and context are carefully and honestly examined. Tomorrow I’ll post the last couple of paragraphs which both sum up Bob’s research, and explain why during Holy Week this blog insisted we hear the voices of women – whose testimony is true.

  • Speed and spirituality

    556224 Yep. Driving responsibly is a spiritual discipline. Christians should know their Highway Code well enough to drive safely, understand the rules and recognise and interpret the signs. They should also keep to the speed limit. Driving along a dual carriageway in a built up area, the Micra in front was doing exactly 29mph. The car was in the outside lane and had been for a distance. Truth to tell I wasn’t bothered as it was a rare sunny spring morning, blue sky, sun shining and Sheila and I with the day off, (Good Friday) on our way to one of our favourite coffee places. I too was on the outside lane cos I was bearing right at the next roundabout. And yes, I was getting a bit itchy at the slow progress.

    Then this massive big black BMW came tanking up behind me till I could see the whites of the driver’s eyes, and feeling unreasonably pious, I moved to the inside, whereupon he bore down on the wee Micra lights flashing to scare its driver into the inside lane. But no. Steady as you go, at 29 mph the wee car tootled along – so big BMW with a surge of power and a Lewis Hamilton swerve, cut inside just ahead of me, passed on the inside of the unintimidated wee Micra, gunned the engine and took off – then slammed on the brakes. But too late. There, in the middle of the road, a hundred metres ahead, was the luminous yellow jacket and the raised hand of the nice local speed cops.

    I’d like to deny the sin of gloating, but I can’t. I’d prefer to say I behaved in an emotionally mature way and didn’t shout ‘Oh yah beauty’. I’d also feel less embarrassed if I could report that I prayed for the driver of the BMW, that he might not lose his licence, that he would just see the error of his ways, Lord. But instead I have to confess that for years when someone has behaved like that I’ve lamented the absence of the polis just when you need them. So I have to confess to a culpable sense of personal uplift, a smug feeling for the justness and rightness of things, a quite unreasonable degree of self-righteousness; and as the wee Micra turned right into the Rouken Glen car park I wondered how many coffees you could buy with the standard speeding fine.

    I need to learn to love other road users more!

  • A Sacrifice of Praise 8 The Resurrection

    The Resurrection

    I was the one who waited in the garden

    Doubting the morning and the early light.

    I watched the mist lift off its own soft burden,

    Permitting not believing my own sight.

    .

    If there were sudden noises I dismissed

    Them as a trick of sound, a sleight of hand.

    Not by a natural joy could I be blessed

    Or trust a thing I could not understand.

    .

    Maybe I was a shadow thrown by some

    Who, weeping , came to lift away the stone,

    Or was I but the path on which the sun

    Too heavy for itself, was loosed and thrown?

    .

    I heard the voices and the recognition

    And love like kisses heard behind the walls.

    Were they my tears which fell, a real contrition?

    Or simply April with its waterfalls?

    .

    It was by negatives I learned my place.

    The garden went on growing and I sensed

    A sudden breeze that blew across my face.

    Despair returned but now it danced, it danced.

    (Elizabeth Jennings)

    Acciwsunset Whether intended to or not, Jennings’ poem is an exposition of Luke’s description of disciples who ‘disbelieved for joy’. The triumph of the resurrection came later, on reflection. The more immediate responses were fear, bewilderment, disbelief, panic, the consequent confusion of thought and emotion when confronted with impossibility dawning into a clear perhaps. The mist lifts, and sight is permitted, but faith needs more than sight, and how do you ‘trust a thing you do not understand?’

    Today I will celebrate the resurrection of our Lord. And like those first witnesses, there will be the thrill of recognition, that ‘sudden breeze’ of new possibility, of fresh and refreshing movement, and that inner redeeming movement, as despair is reborn in hope, and sorrow is turned to dancing. There will also be, I trust, time for deeper reflection of how a resurrection faith can be practised and lived by the community of Christ who are witnesses to the Easter faith. And in our worship, the affirmation that life overcomes death, darkness gives way to light, and ‘love, like kisses’, is heard behind the walls’, and then lived out in the streets.

    A joyful and reflective Easter to all who now and again come by here.

  • A Sacrifice of Praise 7. ‘Oblique Prayer’ for Holy Saturday

    Holy Saturday – the essential hiatus in the story of redemption, when the Son of God entered into the abyss, and when the death throes of death were entered into and endured; Holy Saturday, when the reality of the Son being made sin who knew no sin, fell with tragic force on the heart of God. Some of the most profound theology of the past few decades has tried to take seriously the suffering of the Son who died, and the suffering of the Father bereft of His only begotten Son, and that anguish communicated within the eternal communion of the Triune God through the Spirit.

    9780802826787_l Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s Mysterium Paschale is a masterpiece of reflection on the theology of Easter, and the significance of Holy Saturday as the quiet, empty, menacing abyss where death, loss and defeat intimate the triumph of the tragic, the death of God, with a persuasive finality; Jurgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God and his later reflections, explore with theological courage, perhaps even some theological recklessness the meaning of Christ’s death for the inner life of the Triune communion of love that is God; Alan Lewis, whose Between the Cross and the Resurrection was written during the last months of his life when he was dying of cancer, and out of his suffering came a book of immense integrity, of movingly engaged theology, the theological and personal testimony of one who built his own hope on the mystery of life overcoming death, enduring light rescinding final darkness, redeeming love eclipsing the power of sin.

    Here is one paragraph from the end of Lewis’s remarkably penetrating and contemplative understanding of the paschal mystery:

    For surely it is only in the mode of prayer —in meditation, reflection, and straining of the heart and ear for a word of God beyond human speechlessness, that one could finally do justice to a narrative like ours which at its centre-point has God buried in the grace on Easter Saturday. What is there left to do but pray, if the story of God’s own death and burial be true? (p. 463)

    What Lewis is suggesting is not prayer that is fuelled by certainty, but prayer that grows out of the bewilderment and speechlessness that must overcome mind and heart when the implications of Holy Saturday are thought and felt.

    Denise All of which reminded me of Denise Levertov’s poem, ‘Oblique Prayer’, a poet’s take on spiritual truth that is too profound for words, too elusive for certainties, and a poet’s honesty about those experiences of God that speak more of absence than presence. The poem is set out in a way that allows the text to convey the fragmented, at times fearful, yet finally hopeful searching of those for whom Holy Saturday speaks of God’s own dark night.

    Oblique Prayer

    Not the profound dark

    night of the soul

    .

    and not the austere desert

    to scorch the heart at noon,

    grip the mind

    in teeth of ice at evening

    .

    but gray,

    a place

    without clear outlines,

    .

    the air

    heavy and thick

    .

    the soft ground clogging

    my feet if I walk,

    sucking them downwards

    if I stand.

    .

    have you been there?

    Is it

    .

    a part of human-ness

    .

    to enter

    no man’s land?

    .

    I can remember

    (is it asking you

    that

    makes me remember?)

    even here

    .

    the blessed light that caressed the world

    before I stumbled into

    this place of mere

    not-darkness.

    This Holy Saturday, I am glad to pay tribute to Alan Lewis, an alumnus of New College, Edinburgh, and one whose theology was lived and written in the presence of God. The book cover shows Alan’s memorial window at Austin Presbyterian Seminary. I have bought his book three times – because I have twice given my own copy away as a gift – there aren’t many book you buy three times.

  • A Sarcifice of Praise 6 The Eternal Cross

    Good Friday is a day of heaviness. The weight of a world’s pain borne in the heart of God in Christ crucified, the very nature of crucifixion compelling the body to feel its own weight in proportion to the physical anguish of wounded limbs supporting a broken frame. It is inevitable that the passion of Christ should reverberate within the penitent devotion  of hearts bewildered by the agony of love.

    Elizabeth_jennings_2 Saint Exupery writes that ‘sorrows are the vibrations of the soul that remind us we are alive’. And early in devotional verse Jesus was called the Man of Sorrows, absorbing into the infinite spaciousness of divine love the malignant consequences of a world’s sin; and in his case those sorrows were linked at one and the same time to his death, and the gift of life it released. Elizabeth Jennings’ poem while acknowledging the anguish of Christ crucified, faces up to the reality of sin as more than radical evil; sin is also the accumulation of small acts of selfishness, cruelty, indifference, neglect; it is the diligently learned skill of witholding acts and words that bless and care for and heal those who are carrying the heavy end of the cross in their lives. The weight of sin is made up not only of those occasional vast blocks of granite, but also of mountains of sand, that inumerable and unimaginable number of microscopic rocks that defies our best calculus. A bag of sand is as heavy as a lump of granite – but easier accumulated, perhaps representing the sheer quantity of our lost opportunities to bear the weight of someone else’s struggle – and when that happens, says Jennings, Jesus is crucified again.

    The Eternal Cross

    He’ll blossom on the cross in three weeks now,

    The saviour of the world will die again.

    He is the flower upon a hurting bough,

    The crown of thorns and nails will give him pain.

    But the worst one is how

    .

    We go on daily wounding him and he,

    Although he’s out of time, still feels the great

    Dark of betrayal. He’s nailed on a tree

    Each time we fail him. Suffering won’t abate

    Until the liberty

    .

    This God-Man gave us is used only for

    Kindness and gentleness. Our world is full

    Of dying Christs – the starved, the sick, the poor.

    God sleeps in cardboard boxes, has no meal.

    We are his torturer

    .

    Each time we fail in generosity,

    Abuse a child or will not give our love.

    Christ lets us use our fatal liberty

    Against himself. But now and then one move

    Of selfless love sets free

    .

    The whole of mankind whom he saw at play

    And work as he lay dying, when his side

    Was pierced. That spear was how we fail to say

    We love someone, but each time tears are dried

    It’s Resurrection Day.

    (Elizabeth Jennings, from An Easter Sequence)

  • Honey from the Lion’s Belly – Lecture

    230pxlionrampant_svg I’ve done a report and review of Doug Gay’s lecture on Honey from the Lion’s Belly: Theological Perspectives on Scottish Nationalism over at the Scottish Baptist College Blog. Didn’t say much about my own responses as I wanted to give a full and fair report to help others join the discussion. Have a look and if you’re inclined, perhaps enter the discussion through the comments.

    The Good Friday post on this blog will be posted later.

  • Sacrifice of Praise 5. I am not skilled to understand

    Greenwell_d Now those of you who know my theological preferences are well aware of my enthusiasm for P T Forsyth. No mean theologian, a precursor of Barth some fellow enthusiasts claim, and certainly someone whose theological legacy perdures like a rich quarry of high quality Aberdeen granite that carries long term promise of productivity. So it’s a comment on the theological perception and intellectual sure-footedness of Dora Greenwell that she and Forsyth collaborated on a book on prayer entitled, The Power of Prayer. Now don’t let the Victorian portrait fool you – you might think she’d look out of her depth at a quite good house group – but she’d wipe the floor with the lot of us if it came to serious theological engagement with the meaning of the Cross, the relations of human and divine suffering, and the mystery and reality of the provident purposes of God. In that short essay on ‘prayer as will’, she probes deeply into the truth of God’s will as it encounters human volition, and recognises that finally faith has to rest not in answers and certainty, but in a knowing trust in God revealed on the cross. One of her poems, for a long time a favourite in hymn-books, is an uncomplicated meditation on the trust-worthiness of God in Christ, no matter what.

    I am not skilled to understand

    I am not skilled to understand
    What God hath willed, what God hath planned;
    I only know at His right hand
    Is One Who is my Saviour!

    I take Him at His word indeed;
    “Christ died for sinners”—this I read;
    For in my heart I find a need
    Of Him to be my Saviour!

    That He should leave His place on high
    And come for sinful man to die,
    You count it strange? So once did I,
    Before I knew my Saviour!

    And oh, that He fulfilled may see
    The travail of His soul in me,
    And with His work contented be,
    As I with my dear Saviour!

    Yea, living, dying, let me bring
    My strength, my solace from this Spring;
    That He Who lives to be my King
    Once died to be my Saviour!

  • A Sacrifice of Praise 4. The Choice of the Cross

    Dorothy Dorothy Sayers wrote some of the most accomplished detective stories in the genre. She wasn’t so much a crime-writer who could write well, she was an exceptionaly fine writer who wrote crime stories, plays for radio, and a translation of Dante still popular enough to remain in print half a century later. She was also a fine theologian whose slim essay on the vocational value of work, and whose The Mind of the Maker, and Creed or Chaos? are as lucid examples of accessible, thoughtful theology as you’re likely to pick up. I wish she’d written more theology – but some of her theological fingerprints are all over her poetry.

    The following poem shows her characteristic sharpness of mind just held in check by an acknowledged deference before mystery – that word ‘perhaps’ at the end of the last line but three, is an unmistakeable giveaway. I confess I love and trust the God revealed in Christ crucified as the One who refuses by lightning to smite the world perfect.

    The Choice of the Cross

    Hard it is, very hard,

    To travel up the slow and stony road

    To Calvary, to redeem mankind; far better

    To make but one resplendent miracle,

    Lean through the cloud, lift the right hand of power

    And with a sudden lightning smite the world perfect.

    Yet this was not God’s way, Who had the power,

    But set it by, choosing the cross, the thorn,

    The sorowful wounds. Something there is, perhaps,

    That power destroys in passing, something supreme,

    To whose great value in the eyes of God

    That cross, that thorn, and those five wounds bear witness.

    Dorothy L Sayers, From ‘The Devil to Pay’.