Living Wittily

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  • St Deiniol’s Library and the Lord’s Prayer

    Deiniol_2 Came across an old journal I kept during a week at St Deiniol’s library, near Hawarden, a few miles from Chester. For those who don’t know this quaint, unique, old fashioned haven for Casaubon like scholars, religiously inclined eccentrics, aspiring eremites and many other interesting visitors, it still claims to be the Uk’s only residential library. It’s welcome is to ‘interested persons wishing to puruse divine learning’.

    Gifted by Gladstone’s family after the great man’s death, it retains its Victorian ethos, with oak shelving, occasionally creaky chairs, the book shelves designed by Gladstone for maximum books in allotted space. It’s a mixture of the delightful and the odd; the community works to the gentle rhythm of matins and vespers; the bedrooms are basic, the food OK. But the setting and the building, the ethos and the very idea of a library you can live in!

    While there I’ve noted in the Journal that Sheila’s uncle died, and we went to the funeral from holiday – which meant me searching Oxfam shops for a dark tie! We also did some "ye olde churche" viewing, chapels mostly. One of my study projects was to prepare a series of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer which would span Advent and the first three Sundays of the new millenium – I gave them the title ‘Is Your Faith Y2k Compatible?’

    From my notes I have a comment from Gerhard Ebeling’s The Lord’s Prayer in Today’s World. There is a combative, non-submissive note to Ebeling’s theology of prayer, reminiscent of P T Forsyth’s insistence that prayer is a struggle of wills, and petition and intercession are God’s call to us to trust, to believe, to defy the will-lessness and resignation that too quickly become a giving in to the way things are. Importunity, sheer dogged desire for change is a more Christian spiritual virtue than passive or premature surrender to things as they are. In speaking of the Father who is in heaven, Ebeling warns:

    It seems religious to put God beyond time, as the Eternal, and to keep time well clear of God, as being something limited, earthly, human. But with this kind of piety we make God unreal, and reality Godless. (page 72)

    I still remember the thrill of reading that, and still find that comment a needed corrective to over spiritualised prayer. Into the limited, earthly and human, comes God in Christ, with love unlimited, holy love incarnate in the earthly and human, transforming existence, human life, and creation itself. The one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, in whom creation is summed up and comes together, and who reconciles all things making peace by the blood of the cross, is not one who can be placed beyond time. So why should prayer be timid, or resignation to circumstance be deemed a higher spirituality?

  • Odd Enthusiasms

    I have a tie that I like, but it is so time specific, and is now so dated, that even a tie-wearing radical like me probably won’t wear it again. A tie- wearing radical is anyone who now turns up at conferences, committee meetings or to other occasions of social posing where a tie is not strictly necessary. So I’m wondering, just where now is a tie strictly necessary. I’ve recently been at funerals, weddings, ordinations where several of the key players didn’t wear a tie. This doesn’t make anyone a bad person – it just signals a social shift, and leaves me feeling that the few people who were cool and independent thinking because they dispensed with a tie, are now in the majority and it’s those of us who still wear a tie who are becoming cooler. Or is my logic flawed yet again?

    Anyway, the tie in question is a Wallace and Gromit tie, and against a navy blue background it is covered in sheep, only one of which is wearing green wellies. Now you see why I don’t wear it now – and wonder with flabbergasted amazement why I ever wore it in the first place. But each to his / her taste. When I first wore it a friend who risked becoming an ex-friend suggested the sheep with the wellies was the pastor, who was just like the other sheep but wasn’t prepared to walk unshod in the farmyard manure of life. Whatever, I doubt if there are many of this particular tie now in existence, and if anyone will ever risk wearing it again. But I still like the tie, and don’t need the affirmation of other fashion officionados to justify my odd enthusiasm for it.

    Which brings me to some of my other odd enthusiasms, of the literary kind. I’ve recently re-read several of books that I’m not sure many other people would get all that worked up about. Let me know if you’ve heard of / read / think much of:

    The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen

    A Dresser of Sycamore Trees, Garret Keizer

    Walking a Literary Labyrinth, Nancy Malone

    Wind, Sand and Stars, Atoine de Saint Exupery

    Life and Letters of H R L Sheppard

    The Dean’s Watch, Elizabeth Goudge

  • Domestic incident

    Two Kitchen Haiku

    …

    Plastic jug bounces

    when filled with hot chicken soup

    and dropped on the floor.

    …

    Dropped soup spurts upwards

    in forensic spray pattern

    of airborne food stuff.

    Written after the fact!

  • Why not shut the chip shop?

    250pxpommes1 Minding my own business this morning listening to Radio Scotland when a discussion was going on about schools failing in their responsibilities to ensure pupils eat healthy food. Now apart from the fact that schools are places of learning, and teachers and head-teachers are not usually trained dieticians, and the main responsibility for a child’s health lies primarily with parents or other full time carers, and our entire culture is saturated (as in fats) with outlets for fast food, confections (or sweeties), foods high in sugar, sodium, fat and therefore calories – apart from all that, how does a school ensure that secondary school young adults – that’s right, forget children – young adults with the disposable money to buy what they want and  like to eat – how does a school do what it is accused of failing to do. How do you tell a teenager raised in a ‘consumer rules ok’ culture, that an apple is better than a Snickers, and a banana is better than chips.

    A very articulate health educationalist, doing a PhD on why primary schools are doing better on the healthy food conversion statistics, was able to tell us that young adults can’t be compelled to not eat unhealthy food, and you don’t change taste and appetite by draconian measures of compliance. Quite so. The young people interviewed had their own opinions of healthy food, I quote only one, and I regret that I am unable to reproduce the exact inflection used in his chosen adjective: "Healthy food juist tastes mingin!"

    Suggestions to try to improve the situation in secondary schools have apparently included lunch time lock in, bag search, banning vending machines. The intended social control exerted by such measures I find worrying, and frankly, breathtakingly narrow minded and short sighted. What we put into our bodies is surely one of the most important freedoms and choices we have, always excepting dangerous substances. If in trying to combat obesity and change people’s eating habits, forcing social compliance towards healthier eating is acceptable, why not shut the chip shop? And if chips are so unhealthy (and of course they are if they are staple diet), why not make them a controlled substance, or measure or weigh people in the chip shop queue or at the confectionery stand? I know this is all daft stuff – but no more daft than thinking you can bag search at the school gate for Mars bars or crisps.

    _41287094_transplantbag203 What grabbed my attention in this debate is the way a basic right to choose what we put into our own bodies can, at the suggestion of well meaning policy makers, simply be put up for grabs. It goes alongside the weekend revelation that what is already in my body, mainly my organs, are also up for grabs. The presumed consent debate is about who is presumed to own the vital organs and living tissue which at the moment embodies me. Unless I opt out of the assumed right the State wants to have to Nationalise my body, then my permission isn’t needed for others to take parts of me as donor organs. The bigger debate is about life-saving transplants, I know; and the tragic situations of people dying because donor organ availability can’t keep up with medical demand. But a presumption of ownership over a person’s body is a quite outrageous shift in our perception of human value, dignity and definitive freedoms.

    I’m beginning to think it’s time to waken up to the danger of allowing daft, half baked proposals for social change to be spoken, argued for, given even minimal plausibility as serious debating points. Bag search teenagers for Mars bars; change the presumption of each person’s inviolate ownership of their own body; change from the presumption of innocence to that of guilt; extend by weeks the length of time a person can be held without charge; introduce universally required identity cards, and link these to employment, spending and other social activity; pay as you go road tax so that every journey is traceable and on someone else’s database; live move and have your being under the pervasive surveillance cameras in cities. Not all these social changes or proposals are daft – but cumulatively it’s hard to escape the feeling that freedom, privacy, personal value, are being eroded by stealth. Or am I just having a bad day?

  • Confessions of a Bibliophile. A long awaited new book

    Now and again you get tired of superlatives, you begin to suffer from overstatement fatigue. Whether it’s the latest, coolest, fastest, cheapest, most reliable, healthiest, longest lasting, exclusive, superb, benchmark, unrivalled, bestest, very bestest, very bestest ever, really very bestest ever…see what I mean. Tediously repeated superlatives are like a dimmer switch attached to the brain; they’re as annoying as the monotonous musically vacuous bass beats of sound systems in passing cars; meant to communicate more or less justified enthusiasm, superlatives end up being a turn-off.

    51zi6vsyltl__aa240_ So what do I say about The Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters, the latest (note the only remaining superlative in this review) dictionary published by IVP? It’s a revision and expansion of a previous volume called A Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters, which has served well as a reference book on the history of biblical interpretation. The new edition enhances that usefulness by widening the scope of the contents and bringing the entire volume up to date. It is plain fact to say there isn’t another volume that covers this ground, and this much ground, in such a comprehensive and representative scale. (1100+ pages). There are five chronological chapters adding up to over 100 double column pages, providing an overview of historical context, key personalities and important developments in scholarly examination of the Bible.

    At a time when serious attention is being paid to the history of biblical interpretation, and the history of text reception within the community of faith is being given significant hermeneutical weight, such a reference book offers substantive discussion of key personalities, and opens up a diverse and crucial field of study. Most articles about the biblical interpreters selected explore four areas of their respective subject – the context, the life and work of the person, main interpretive principles, and continuing significance.

    The selection has sought to be representative and inclusive, incorporating Catholic and Protestant, conservative and progressive, ancient and modern, men and (far too few) women, hugely weighted towards Europe and America, and spanning two thousand years. Intentionally, nearly all those included are dead – so living scholars either wait a later edition!, or another book is needed looking at contemporary practising interpreters. This editorial decision goes some way to explaining the Euro-American male dominance of entries, without excusing the history that underlies it. But Phyllis Trible and Schussler Fiorenza are there, and thankfully are still here – a wise editorial act of positive discrimination and inclusion.

    However the Dictionary can only include those who are indeed the significant players in the history of interpretation, and this it does under the overall editorship of Donald McKim, an experienced and reliable editor who is himself a contributor to the academic discussions arising from biblical interpretation. As an indication of the range of interpreters treated here is a list of ten, chosen on a quick skim back and forwards through the book:

    Hugh of St Victor, Gerhard von Rad, E Schussler Fiorenza, Pilgram Marpeck, John Owen, Paul Ricouer, Erasmus, Didymus the Blind, C K Barrett, C I Scofield.

    Eyrwho121 As a Scot I am delighted that A B Bruce, James Moffatt and James Denney (pictured) are included – by the way, has any other church ever been more privileged in the New Testament expertise of its ministers than Broughty Ferry East Free Church which had these three influential Scottish scholars within the space of around forty years?

    Then there are the premier league scholars of the 20th Century; from Europe Barth, Von Rad, Bultmann, Cullmann, Eichrodt, Kasemann, Lohmeyer; and from Britain C F D Moule, Vincent Taylor, G B Caird, C K Barrett, C H Dodd, T W Manson; from America H J Cadbury, Brevard Childs, Bruce Metzger, Walter Brueggemann (another thankfully still with us inclusion) G Eldon Ladd, Raymond E Brown; from the tradition of great commentators Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Matthew Henry, J A Bengel, J P Lange, H A W Meyer, Keil and Delitzsch. And so on. And the dictionary short changes none of them. No half column digests of facts – each a substantial article, and all articles supported by generous up to date bibliography.

    For biblical interpreters, aspiring or established, who want to understand how we came to be where we are in the scholarly study of the Bible; and for those fascinated by the immense labour and human devotion that has gone into the faithful study of the biblical text; and for those like myself who are both captivated by the story of how the church has listened, learned and interpreted Christian scripture, this is a superlative book!

    And in these days of required transparency and declared interests, I have to inform you that the article on James Denney was written by me, and the volume is much the better for it – not because I wrote it, but because Denney was a superlative interpreter of Scripture!

  • Jurgen Moltmann: Academic Theology and Christian testimony

    51urzon0g0l__aa240_ Testimony is always more persuasive, more human, less argumentative, less concerned with point scoring and logical victories as a form of personal witness, perhaps because testimony and witness point beyond ourselves to the One of whom we testify, and to whom we bear witness. Thus what is at stake isn’t the otucome of an argument, but the reality of our experience. Unless theology arises out of the church’s witness to the Gospel, and unless Christian theologians are able to speak of God from experiences of God’s presence and absence, then theological discourse will be ‘academic’ in the least useful sense of that badly abused word.

    In Christian terms, academic theology at its best is a form of prayerful reverent study, a reflective dwelling in the essential and crucial realities of our existence, as those to whom God has come in the glory and grace of Jesus Christ. Jurgen Moltmann is an academic theologian in this sense; his writing and teaching combine personal testimony, Christian witness and what he calls speculative systematic theology. Speculative but disciplined by the constraining cords of the biblical, ecclesial and doctrinal traditions of Christian faith, in all their changing continuity and diversity.

    Hand1 I guess one of the reasons I read Moltmann both avidly and critically, is that even when his ideas and speculative suggestions are wide of where I think the mark is, I never doubt that he is seeking to faithfully and truthfully understand more of the love and grace of God in Christ crucified. His emphases on eschatology and the future Kingdom’s ‘nowness’ (my word), his passionate belief in the passion of God, his willingness to be caught out in inconsistency if new thinking leads him to review and revise earlier positions, his refusal to ignore the political implications of faithfulness in following Christ today; these and much more, make me pause, ponder and if necessary, dissent. And yes, he admits that what he offers are contributions to systematic theology rather than a finished systematic theology with a tidy overarching comprehensiveness. But Moltmann so often has said what needs saying, and what pastors need to hear. I still remember the coincidence of reading The Crucified God at Easter while accompanying several families through terminal illness and bereavement.

    As a pastor, for me serious theology, yes academic theology, has always mattered, because human life and people’s deepest experiences deserve our best thought. People’s perplexities, their struggles to understand, the sheer effort just sometimes to go on being faithful, deserve from us that attentiveness to truth and such sensitivity to human longing and hurt, as only grows in minds and hearts patient of God’s incomprehensible ways, and impatient with all ad hoc paperback solutions to those problem areas of our lives where what we seek is not solutions, but God. Just God.

    All of which is by way of saying Moltmann’s theological story, told through his life, and his life told through his theology, is yet another important ‘contribution’. The now characteristic mixture of testimony, theological exposition as familiar themes are revisited and further summarised, and with the occasional page or two where eyebrows go up and I want to politely, but appreciatively, dissent.

    Something of what I find so attractive about Moltmann’s spirit is the humility and gratitude to God that is the low background music of this book (and of a number of the others). Here’s just one such doxological hint:

    Ricoeur for his part convinced me about the ‘logic of undeserved overflow’ in Pauline theology, implicit in the phrase ‘how much more’ with which Paul extols the overmastering power of grace over against sin, and Christ’s resurrection over against his death on the cross. (page 107)

  • Reinventing English Evangelicalism 3 Vision Inflation

    Spstandard_9781842275702 Entrepreneurial Evangelicalism arose within the conversionist activist, predominantly charismatic axis of the movement, and Warner examines this in relation to the spectacular and symbiotic growth of the Evangelical Alliance and Spring Harvest from 1980 to around 2001. Pragmatist enthusiasm, product branding, vigorous and franchised marketing, features normally associated with business growth and management, came to be applied to a movement that had previously been modest in its social and political goals.

    ‘Calverism’ is Warner’s term for the centrality of Clive Calver in the rise of both Evangelical Alliance and Spring Harvest as focal points for Evangelicals hungry for identity and influence beyond their own constituency. Calver’s driven personality, charismatic leadership, expansive vision, punishing personal itinerary and extensive network within Evangelicalsm are depicted as the primary engine behind the early mushrooming of personal membership of EA and the increasing popularity and influence of Spring Harvest. However Warner’s analysis of personal membership figures, claims of EA to represent over a million Evangelicals, and other factors behind the presented success story, suggest that such claims were either exaggerated, or unsubstantiated by official statistical data.

    A sociological examination of a movement, and of the influence of a prominent leader seeks explanations through causes, influences, personalities, historical happenstance, and is always likely to sound reductionist. There are times when Calver’s influence and personal impact does indeed seem to have been a decisive factor. What Warner calls the ‘collapse of the Calvinistic hegemony’ in the late 60’s and early 70’s, left the way open for EA to reinvent itself under Calver by including large constituencies of Pentecostal and charismatic new churches within its orbit. Spring Harvest became a recruiting ground for EA personal membership, and the annual gathering a place where styles of worship, teaching emphases, corporate experience of learning and listening in seminars and large worship gatherings, began to present a new brand of Evangelicalism increasingly confident in the relevance, influence and public expression of an Evangelical programme mediated through EA and Spring Harvest and their branded products.

    Warner has serious questions about claims about EA personal membership, (potential 100,000, actual highest 50,000+), and indeed he demonstrates that the higher figure was always an aspirational claim rather than data supported realities. In addition, he argues that personal membership taken out at an emotionally charged gathering such as Spring Harvest, did not imply that from then on, new memebrs were committed to evangelical activism and significant funding of EA once the fervour of the big occasion cooled. The failure ‘to sustain the period of meteoric growth’ Warner attributes to the fact that ‘personal members were passive, and unwilling to become active recruiters’ of others. So personal membership was never an accurate guage of active committed support expressed in funding, activism or recruiting.

    The point of all this for Warner, and his argument has to be read in its detail and complexity, considered critically, and weighed honestly, is that through Calverism, the conversionist-activist axis of English Evangelicalism underwent significant transition. That transition may have triggered short term rapid growth – but the long term effects of ‘vision inflation’ will be felt within Evangelicalism as a whole, and may not be a fruitful legacy. Here are three observations Warner makes, which give a flavour both of his critique and his conslusions about EA in the last 20 years.

    Many Evangelical had unconsciously made a transition from traditional evangelicalism that affirmed the truth of the gospel, to late-modern entrepreneurialism that assumed wholehearted adherence to the gospel guaranteed success for the church. (page 63)

    The EA failed to deliver, not because of lack of effort, but because its visionary goals were unrealistic, not merely in terms of propsepcts for future recruitment of personal members, but because of a wholesale  failure to grasp the corrosive effects upon evangelical influence and identity of the ineluctable cultural transitions of secularization and postmodernity. Evangelicals lacked a coherent socio-political critique and had failed to come to terms with the implications of a secularized and pluralistic culture; enthusiastic rhetoric and ethical conservatism are no substitute for rigorous and reflexive analysis. (page 64)

    The legacy of evangelical boom and bust is apparent; disappointed expectations, a sceptical distrust of subsequent expressions of ambitious vision, and a shift in attitude towards the Alliance so that allegiance to the organistiaon became more provisional, more episodic, more post-institutional. (page 65)

    Warner’s style is at times unsparing of mistakes more easily discovered with hindsight; and he was himself a participant in much that he now critiques. But the underlying impression I have is of one who now sees the serious theological and strategic miscalculations evangelicalism makes when it buys into a consumerist approach to faith sharing and faith celebration. Bono’s scathing observation that joiners of mail order organisations are less "members" than "consumers" of a cause, providing only "cheque-book affiliation", is embarrassingly to the point.

    Amongst the uncomfortable questions raised (for me at any rate), by Warner’s case study of EA, is whether entrepreneurialism, market penetration, pragmatic activism, evangelical branding and franchising, the search for political influence and social recognition, are anything more than reflections of core values and principles inimical, or at least secondary, to a people seeking first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness……. but more of this anon.

  • Moltman”s theological autobiography

    51urzon0g0l__aa240_ The first 60 pages of Moltmann’s autobiography are a mixture of memoir, hindsight, family gossip and reflections on the formative experiences of war and the political and spiritual rebuilding of Europe. Some of the central insights and arguments of Moltmann’s later theology are traced to experiences that now, with hindsight and from the perspective of an established theologian, he sees to be of decisive impact on his development. To that extent, autobiography provides important context for his theology – and it’s up to us, the readers, to decide if this is crucial inside information that drove his theological interests, or whether his established theological positions are being read back into earlier experiences. Almost certainly both, and who better to interpret and contextualise the personal world out of which theology grows, than the person who lived in it and through it. Of course there are other contextual perspectives, perhaps better detailed by more objective observers – but they don’r have the passion, the poignancy and the personal nerve centre that vitalises theological autobiography.

    Here’s one of Moltmann’s pastoral memories – worth pondering by those called to preach living words to living people that enhance life. he is recalling his early days as a totally inexperienced pastor in a rural and remote farming community:

    My own personal theology developed as I went from house to house and visited the sick. If things went well, on Monday I learnt the text for the following Sunday’s sermon, took it with me as I visited the congregation and then knew what I had to say in my sermon. Here a ‘hermeneutical circle’ developed, not the one between textual interpretation and one’s own private interpretation…but the one between textual interpretation  and the experience of a community of people, in their families, among their neighbours, and in their work. In conversation I came to believe that this was a shared theology of believers and doubters, the downcast and the consoled.

    Jurgen Moltmann, A Broad Place, pages 59-60.

  • Holbein18 It’s a year today since I gave up lurking and started blogging. Enough folk have been positive and encouraging about their visits to livingwittily for me to feel that, though it’s a place where I can think in words and try ideas, others like those reading this now, are listening / reading / commenting / appreciating – and that, whether or not you are agreeing.

    373 posts represents a lot of words, ideas, time and work – so the question why I go on blogging needs some justification, if only to me.

    1. a place to think in words
    2. a forum to try ideas
    3. a way of enhancing the good stuff in life by noticing it and telling it
    4. a regular excuse to celebrate the joy and contentment of reading
    5. a meeting place with others who are usually critically appreciative companions
    6. a voice that tries to speak truth about what it means to be human, and to care about justice and long for peace
    7. a form of theological reflection aiming at acting faithfully by living wittily!

    I suppose I could keep the list going, but most of these are reason enough, at least for me and for the moment. I don’t doubt that communication technology, developments in software, social habits, will mean folk move on to new things, or maybe blogging will exhaust itself as a useful, or amusing, or socially relevant form of virtual or literary conversation.

    This week sees the birth of a Scottish Baptist College Blog. You can find it here. This won’t be updated daily or anything like as often. But it will feature a number of posts a month, ranging from College news, information about previous students, book reviews, theological reflections on this and that, and some ongoing discussions about such obvious areas as training for ministry, theological education, changing patterns and approaches to how we express our life together in a Scottish Baptist context, and anything else we think would be interesting, important, aye, and fun. Where significant new posts are added I’ll mention them here.

    I haven’t forgotten the Haiku Introduction to the NT. All NT books are now done – but I can’t get the software on Typepad to accept large chunks of cut and paste without it doing daft things to it. So in spare moments, I’ll begin to type up the end result and post it when it’s complete.

  • The problem with the problem of money, and moneylessness

    Two consecutive news stories this morning.

    This is the day in the month of January when a large percentage of UK citizens have no money. The post-Christmas pay-check isn’t due, the credit card and store card bills are due, and apparently the option for many is more credit or use savings. The Finance Adviser was asked how people can avoid such levels of personal debt – apparently a significant number of us are still paying off Christmas 2006. Her advice was straightforward – re-schedule existing debt to as favourable a rate as possible; make a payback plan and stick to it; don’t spend more than you can afford; save modestly in an ISA. Overall advice, spend less.

    Second story. The high street retailers are anticipating a difficult time between now and the summer, and particularly up to Easter. The credit crunch, the big Christmas overspend, the overall uncertainty in the financial world, are all leading to a slowdown in spending and a lowering of consumer confidence. Even if interest rates come down that might not be enough. And if businesses fail, jobs are lost, credit remains unpaid, mortgaged homes are at risk, so we need to stem a rising tide of threatening business liquidations. The answer – consumers need to spend more.

    So to avoid debt, spend less. To avoid recession, spend more. Consumer prudence and consumer confidence, with mutually exclusive results, it seems. Now Mr McCawber was no financial adviser, and had he lived in our era of Credit Card Consumerism he’d have ruined himself in a week. But he still had the right kind of idea even if he couldn’t live it.

    Income 20 shillings a week, expenditure 20 shillings and sixpence a week – result, misery.

    Income 20 shillings a week, expenditure 19 shillings and sixpence a week, happiness.

    OK if you can do it. But I’m left wondering about the relationship between consumerism and contentment; and about the connection between the urge to buy and the hunger for personal value; and about how as Christians we live wisely, and follow Jesus faithfully, in a society where spending  and not spending can be at one and the same time social virtues, and moral problems, or social problems and moral virtues!

    What would it mean to seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness in a society where moneylessness and money availability, credit and consumerism, are apparently both necessary for our common life to function? Forgive us our debts………hmmmm?