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  • Lectures and Questions on Charles Wesley

    20816 Just back from Cardiff where, as Jane Austen’s Emma would say, in an attempt at modesty but without trying too hard,  ‘People tell me I acquitted myself quite well’! We had a great afternoon singing, contextualising, analysing, criticising (in the literary sense), and admiring one of the greatest repositories of Christian spiritual experience ever composed, A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists. (Available from Amazon for around £30 – you can hardly get a hefty theological paperback for that now – and this is a critically annotated work of undisputed spiritual genius)!

    Following each lecture we had some discussion and several questions I found intriguing and to be thought about further.

    Doesn’t Isaac Watts, an Old Dissenter, have an equal claim on our admiration, and isn’t he the real originator of the hymn that articulates and perpetuates the spiritual theology and experience of Evangelicalism? HMMMMMMM?   That sparked a debate about the Evangelical movement, its origins, earliest representatives, and the relative importance and positions of Watts and Wesley in relation to Evangelical hymnody.

    In the current post-Christendom, postmodern situation of a sidelined and increasingly marginalised church, should the old hymns of the tradition be preserved as they are, or updated, or dispensed with as no longer serviceable artefacts of a previous generation’s spirituality? With their out of date and frankly meaningless discourse to most folk outside, and increasingly inside, the church what now is the apologetic and evangelistic value of traditional hymns? HMMMMMMMM?  This got us talking about the place of traditional and classic expressions of faith, over and against the need for language and theology which ‘connects’ and ‘communicates’. After all, how many now use the King James Version when more contemporary translations are available?

    Going back to Charles Wesley, what drove a man to produce such an enormous output of versification? Around 9,000 hymns with a huge output in four years that ran into several thousand – 3 or 4 a day! HMMMMMMMM? This raised the question of heightened awareness, inspiration, poetic gift and technical skill, pastoral strategy and catechetical intentions and much else. And perhaps the recognition that creative overdrive and spiritual experience and individual psychological drives are not always to be interpreted as if they cancelled each other out. We are, as was commented, fearfully and wonderfully made.

    These and much else made for good talk, good laughter and good learning, both me and those who came to share the day.

  • Evangelicalism’s continuity with its own past

    C_wesley2 Blogging is intermittent at present. Don’t blog when I’m away from home. Next few days I’m in Cardiff on a dual purpose visit. I’m doing a couple of lectures on the hymns of Charles Wesley, and meeting up with the other UK Baptist Principals – amongst other things to harden up arrangements for the Baptists Doing Theology in Context conference later this year at Luther King House, Manchester.

    I’ve posted on the Scottish Baptist College blog the details of the lectures – recent blog posts here on Charles Wesley have been sparked by immersing myself again in Weselyan hymns and biography. The Wesleyan hunger for holiness drove Charles and John to a lifelong programme of original research, analysing and exploring the origins and nature of personal Christian experience. Their search for a theology of experience which encompassed redemption and sanctification and took with radical seriousness the power of divine love to renew the image of God in human personality, inspired some of Charles most remarkable hymns. And woven through them a rich combination of Christian theological traditions from Augustine’s Homilies on 1 John and his Confessions, to Eastern Fathers such as the Cappadocians; from Ephrem the Syrian to the Anglican poet George Herbert, from Luther to a whole clutch of Puritans; from Henry Scougal of Aberdeen whose Life of God in the Soul of Man had an influence out of all proportion to its size on the theology and spirituality of the Wesleys and Whitefield, and on to the non-conformist expositor Matthew Henry, whose brilliant one-liners at times are the inspiration for entire hymns. And on…..and on.

    Scottishhighlands02cr To study Wesley’s hymns is to encounter theology that is passionately felt and told; it is also to discover just how varied and suggestive, how profound and creative Christian theology can be, when powerful streams meet, and earlier tradition encounters contemporary experience in a new confluence. For myself, the devout eclecticism and reasonable enthusiasm of John Wesley’s theology, and the poetic virtuosity Charles Wesley displayed in setting Evangelical faith to music and rhythm, demonstrates how a classic stream of Christian tradition such as Evangelical Spirituality, incurs debts it must never disown. Whatever else contemporary Evangelicalism loses, and it is in process of losing much, it must not lose its sense of indebtedness to and dependence upon, the insights and energy, the spiritual resources and theological correctives, of a Christian tradition much older, wider and deeper than any single movement. Of course it’s hard now to define Evangelicalism as a movement – qualifiers such as conservative and progressive, variations of species that are encountered in different cultural contexts, claims and counter-claims to represent ‘historic Evangelicalism’ and thus exclude others as non-representative, and a plethora of agenda driven marketable Evangelical makeovers, suggest a serious dissolution of distinctives. Anyway, Evangelicalism never was a unified, overarching, co-ordinated movement, but rather an expression of Christian faith shaped by a cluster of convictions variously interpreted, and yet which were common to people of many Christian traditions.

    Which is why it is important that discussions of contemporary Evangelicalism should not be divorced from the historical origins in the Evangelical revival of the 18th Century; nor should the classic expressions of Evangelicalism be isolated from that continuous flow of Christian tradition, as if Evangelicalism somehow superseded all other traditions in theological truth claims, missional urgency, spiritual vitality. Any particular tradition that cuts itself off from the mainstream, becomes an oxbow lake, and is in danger of simply drying up as the rest of the river flows on.

    One of the reasons I study the hymns of Charles Wesley and the sermons of John Wesley, and much else in the Evangelical Spiritual tradition is because I refuse to allow contemporary a-historical fashions to dictate what Evangelicalism is or isn’t. And often restatements and redefinitions make little meaningful reference to our own tradition, never mind Evangelicalism’s own dependence on those many streams that originate up in the foothills of the Christian tradition, and which in their flow towards the sea feed and sustain each other like tributaries. Traditions must change, adapt, remain responsive to contextual flux, but there is also something given to a tradition which later generations cannot simply decide to dispense with in the struggle for survival we call relevance.

    The Evangelical tradition has moved on since Wesley’s day – but what is it that gives Evangelicalism continuity with its own past?

    What in the tradition is ‘given’, that without which Evangelicalism begins to lose its impetus and flow, its place in the mainstream, and puts it in danger of becoming an oxbow lake, cut off by the slow accumulation of silt?

    Questions. And not unimportant ones.

  • Charles Wesley and a call for apophatic praise songs

    Cwesley2 There are times when Charles Wesley is so precisely explicit in recounting Christian experience, so assured and confident of the realities and verities of evangelical theology as it arises from the confluence of evangelical experience and biblical doctrine, that it’s easy to forget the balancing reticence that prohibits assurance becoming presumption. The Love Divine that excels all other loves, and which is beyond all knowledge, is to be trusted fully and freely on its own terms, even though such faith has eternal consequence. And trusted not because it is fully understood, or underwritten by  intellectual guarantees, but because it floods the heart with joy, renews the spirit in love, and recreates the entire personality in the image of God, and God does all this by a love that operates outside the categories of any epistemology limited by human finitude.

    So when Charles coments, In vain the first-born seraph tries, to sound the depths of love divine; and when he declares,”T’is mystery all! Let earth adore. Let angel minds enquire no more", he is declaring the mystery of Divine Love off limits to any form of calculus, logic or formula that by definition seeks to define, and thus control, and thus limit.

    46_11_65clouds_web But Charles is not only saying that the Divine Love is immeasurable – he is saying it is a mystery so deep that the only response is adoration, what is demanded is the capitulation of the heart in trustful, grateful love. The apophatic strain in Charles Wesley’s hymns is however less than total – for in the Gospel story of God in Christ, who emptied himself of all but love and was crucified for sinners, the divine love is indeed revealed, and in such terms as is sufficient for salvation. But in worship and adoration the Christian heart and mind recognises that the Divine Love has an infinite surplus, an inexhaustible fullness, an endless repertoire of creative, redemptive power, that renders praise all but speechless, and compels a reverent reticence in which words give way to adoring wonder.

    One of Charles’ lesser known hymns expresses an important truth deeply embedded in Christian mysticism. For example in The Cloud of Unknowing the writer describes the deepest relations of a person to God, not in terms of knowing, but in terms of loving: "Because he may well be loved, but not thought. By love he can be caught and held, but by thinking never".

    So in a hymn based on Job 11.7, "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection?, Wesley teaches the importance of theological humility as a spiritual grace, and as a prerequisite to proper worship:

    Shall foolish, weak, short-sighted man

       Beyond archangels go,

    The great Almighty God explain,

       Or to perfection know?

    His attributes divinely soar

       Above the creatures’ sight,

    And prostrate seraphim adore

       The glorious Infinite.

    .

    Jehovah’s everlasting days

       They cannot numbered be,

    Incomprehensible the space

       Of thine immensity

    Thy wisdom’s depths by reason’s line

       In vain we strive to sound,

    Or stretch our labouring thought t’assign

       Omnipotence a bound.

    .

    The brightness of thy glories leaves

       Description far below;

    Nor man, nor angels’ heart conceives

       How deep thy mercies flow:

    Thy love is most unsearchable

       And dazzles all above;

    They gaze but cannot count or tell

       The treasures of thy love.

    Apophatic theology is an important restraint on that human impulse, particularly strong in accomplished theologians, to reduce God’s immensity to manageable theological proportions. What P T Forsyth calls our ‘lust for lucidity’. In Charles Wesley’s theology of praise and worship there is an important expression of apophatic thinking. At times worship for Wesley is a willingness to glory, not in what we know, but in what we cannot know; a celebration not of understood certainties but of incomprehensible mysteries; a contented acceptance not of doctrinal precision but of personally appropriated spiritual experience.

    Whirlpool Mystery is an essential element in Christian theology, a necessary safeguard that, like the angel at the garden of Eden, prevents us from ever presuming to go where we have no right to go. Amongst the priorities in contemporary worship songs and hymns, is a rediscovery of a proper reticence, a willingness to live with and within a mystery that baffles, bewilders and captivates. How about some apophatic praise songs then?

  • How unlucky can you get?

    This briefly reported AOL news item is a really good example of the short story. Hardly a wasted word, just enough information to set context, a sense for the reader of just desserts in tension with ‘how unlucky can you get’!

    And I love the hugely understated last half sentence, which leaves everything to the imagination!

    Wish I could write a sermon as short and effective as this:

    An armed robber picked the wrong target when he raided an Australian bar where a biker gang was holding a meeting — and ended up hog-tied and in hospital.

    Police said the man and an accomplice, wearing bandanas and waving machetes, stormed into a club in a western Sydney suburb and ordered customers to lie on the ground as they tried to rob the till.

    The noise attracted the attention of up to 50 members of the Southern Cross Cruiser Club, who had just started a club meeting in another room and who then decided to intervene.

  • God is closer to sinners than to saints

    5134gwgjnhl__ss500_ The Desert Fathers and Mothers can at times be worryingly severe, annoyingly obtuse, and not infrequently clearer in their thinking than any 21st century clued up, theologically literate, culturally aware, postmodern follower of Jesus. Ironically, with their refusal to answer questions with closed answers, and their penchant for the two sentence story, and with their restless refusal to accommodate living for Christ to the urges of the prevailing culture, these representatives of extreme Christian discipleship help us survive the desert of consumer religion and consumerism as religion. And despite their no-nonsense approach, they could be movingly gentle in their understanding of who God is and what God is about in our lives. here’s a favourite story.

    "God", the elder said, "is closer to sinners than to saints."

    "But how can that be?", the eager disciple asked.

    And the elder explained. "God in heaven holds each person by a string. When we sin we cut the string. Then God ties it up again, making a knot – bringing the sinner a little closer. Again and again sins cut the string – and with each knot God keeps drawing the sinner closer and closer." (Page 29)

    The story is recounted in The Rule of Benedict. Insights for the Ages, by Joan Chittister. If Chittister wrote a commentary on an Argos catalogue or the small print of a credit agreement, I’d almost be tempted to read it. She is a Benedictine sister whose writing on feminist spirituality, issues of social justice, and the complexity of living with and for others, is fresh, sensible and honest about how tough it is just to keep going as a Christian.

    For years I have returned periodically, to the Rule of Benedict, and the core values of Benedictine Spirituality – prayer, study, work, hospitality, community, stability, and an immensely impressive and humane balance between the life of the mind (study), of the heart (prayer and community), and of the body (physical work or exercise). The people who have helped me understand how a monastic rule which shaped western civilisation can still decisively shape the life of obedience to Christ today are Chittister, Esther de Waal, Kathleen Norris, Maria Boulding, Columba Stewart and Thomas Merton. I’m currently meandering in an orderly way through Chittister for the severalth time.

    I’m beginning to work at what might become a paper on Benedict and the Baptist. Might post it if it works…meantime here’s a brief comment from Chittister that is now written in my journal:

    Clearly, living life well is the nature of repentance. To begin to see life as life should be and to live it that way ourselves is to enable creation to go on creating us. (page 28)

  • Kite flying as a sacrament of the Spirit

    Various1 Some years ago on holiday at Poolewe, up the West coast of Scotland, near Ullapool, I was flying my kite. It wasn’t a fancy two string acrobatic stunt kite. It was an ordinary diamond shaped honest to goodness kite I’d had for years. And the sea breeze took it the full length of the string till it was a wee dot way up there. Then the string broke. And I took off along the beach in pursuit, trying to put my foot on the trailing string to recapture my kite. Twice I got my foot on it but the wind was too strong, and all I got was a sore foot. I gave up and the last my kite was seen it was heading out to sea………

    Some time ago I was given the gift of a kite. I’ve never flown it yet. One of the costs of being too absorbed in doing busy stuff, is you forget to play. And it is years now since I played with a kite. Why should that occur to me at around 6.00 a.m. on a dark February morning? Not because the wind is blowing a gale outside – it’s too strong to fly a kite in anyway. But because I came across this in David Runcorn’s book, something I didn’t know:

    Some Greek Orthodox communities mark the start of Lent as the first outdoor day of the year. Lent is the beginning of Spring. After the long death of winter, here is the first sign that new life is coming. We must go out to greet it. The community celebrates this day by climbing the nearest hill and flying kites on the fresh spring wind!

    Always more important than what we turn from is what we turn to. Here we meet the Spirit enticing, driving, inspiring us in the struggle to turn from sin and be caught up into the adventure of divine love. (Page 133)

    That new kite was a gift from people who know what’s good for me. And this weekend it’s going to become a sacrament of the Spirit, a way of yearning to be caught up into the adventure of divine love.

    I’ve posted a full review of David Runcorn’s book,  Spirituality Workshop on the Scottish Baptist College Blog.

  • We are always human becomers……

    David Runcorn’s Spirituality Workbook continues to give me good cause to pause, and ponder. He writes:

    At a very confused and painful stage in my life I remember saying to a friend, ‘I don’t think I believe any more.’

    ‘You don’t sound to me like someone who has lost his faith, she replied. ‘You sound like someone who is having to live out of a new part of himself. You are still a stranger to this "you" that is emerging. So it is not surprising if you don’t yet know what faith means.’

    This honest, and compassionate recognition that we are all persons in process, that we are not yet definitively who God calls us to be, and that indeed what makes us human, loveable and fascinating, is our capacity to grow and change. Of course there must be a fundamental continuity that gives content to our personal identity, but there is also something necessarily provisional in who we are at each stage of life.

    Earlier in the book Runcorn indicates what he call ‘core truths about what it means to be human’. Amongst these is the statement,

    Getimageidx ‘We are becomers. We are unfinished. We are lives in process. On the wall of Chartres cathedral in France there is a sculpture of God creating Adam. Adam has half emerged from the dust of the ground and is resting, (or has slumped) against God’s knee, which he is clutching strongly with his left hand. The sculptor has chosen to freeze the action at mid-point. Adam is not yet a complete human being. He is halfway between death and life, being and non-being, dust and divine image. And so are we. We are always human becomers – growing, journeying, exploring.

    Amongst the many implications of such a dynamic view of human being, becoming and identity is that as a human being I can come to temrs with incompleteness. And all those experiences that evidence this truth about who I am becoming, such as my mistakes, failures, limitations, discontents, desires, regrets, fulfilments, frustrations – why cite the entire lexicon of human finitude – they are simply the truth and reality of what it means to be me, but also what it means to be me with potential, me in process of becoming.

    Earlier I was reading that remarkable ending to 1 Corinthians 13 – ‘Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.’ Till then who I am, only God knows. According to 1 John 3.2, ‘Now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.’

    And as a Christian, that is what defines me. Not my sin; not my finitude; not my achievements. But, ‘we shall be like him’; we will know ourselves, even as we are fully known. Till then we are being formed of the dust of our finitude, by a grace infinite in possibility, and endlessly original in creativity.

  • Non sacramental experience and the Church’s loss

    A sacrament has been described as like the experience of encountering the expression on someone’s face. We look and find ourselves looked upon. The smile, the eyes, convey the living personality behind the face. A sacrament is a sign that carries with it the living reality of what it signifies.

    So why is it that few contemporary books on spirituality, prayer and Christian life mention sacraments or communion at all? The best known introduction to Christian faith, the Alpha course, completely omits it. Contemporary worship songs show little interest in it. For a great  many people today an encounter with Christian worship and prayer will be a non-sacramental experience.

    These words are from David Runcorn’s very fine Spirituality Workbook (London: SPCK, 2006), 68.

    41kz59mvfxl__aa240_ This is one of the most enjoyable, articulate, spiritually sensible books I’ve read on spirituality for a long time. Runcorn aims at providing an integrated vision of Christian spirituality, based on a course of lectures given over some years to some very fortunate generations of students of Trinity College, Bristol. I’ll do another post later on the Scottish Baptist College blog and outline the contents and overall usefulness of this book. But reading it this morning I was halted by his beautiful description of sacrament, and by his justified complaint about the inexplicable neglect of Holy Communion at a number of levels in our contemporary practice.

    As a Baptist I already worry about the downgrading of the Lord’s Supper, so often appended to the service, at times stripped of liturgical depth, lacking spiritual beauty and omitting careful setting in the context of worship of the One whose real presence is an assumption of every community of believers gathered in Jesus name. Partly that’s because there is a fear of sacramentalism, and a corresponding insistence on simplicity, insisting it is only bread and wine, and avoiding any suggestion that anything happens of a miraculous nature – they are mere symbols, memorial elements.

    Dechaunaclatejuly3 And yet. Broken bread and poured out wine were Jesus’ own chosen vehicles to convey the truth and grace of who He is. Our fear of sacramentalism too easily becomes evasion of mystery, and reducing sacrament to mere symbolism empties the gifts of bread and wine of that rich evocative giftedness that transforms bread into nourishment and wine into healing and refreshment. Even our prayers of thanksgiving for the bread and wine, which at their best are a grateful remembering of Jesus’ death, can become reduced to mere remembering of Jesus’ death. That is, at the communion table, when we break bread and share it, pour wine and drink it together, we are not merely remembering, we are proclaiming – the death of Jesus Christ – but also the resurrection of Jesus, the life-giving gift of the Spirit to the community of Jesus Christ for the renewal of creation, the love of the Father and Creator revealed in created things, and the future hope ’till he come’, and when God will be all in all. The Gospel is a richly textured, theologically overwhelming story, which in bread and wine, in the community of Jesus, is ineffable truth condensed through faith and love into an affirmation of the redeeming activity and presence of the Triune God.

    So yes. I think Runcorn is right to warn us of contemporary Christian worship, praise songs, evangelism that provide a non-sacramental experience. The inexplicable yet inexhaustible love of God in Christ, embodied in the human life of Jesus, given in love and in mercy broken, forever living in the reality of the Risen Lord, creatively, subversively, transformingly active in a renewed and reconciled people, pushed out into a world groaning with impatience for redemption, yes, all of this, and far more, is implied in the sacrament of Holy Communion, the celebration of God in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

    A communion service that captures something of all that rich spiritual complexity, and a community that vitally and joyfully lives out of sacramental experience as God’s gift of himself in Christ through the Spirit, may be one of the most effective occasions for witness available to a church, perhaps too often looking for more dumbed down, marketable and convenient diets of worship.

  • Happy birthday to me

    1576871487_01_pt01__ss400_sclzzzzzz Yesterday was my birthday. One present was a subscription to a certain sports channel so I could see the Bayern Munich v Aberdeen game. Some might think since the result was 5-1 to Bayern Munich it wasn’t exactly the most affirming present. But we know our limitations – and live with them, albeit with grudged humility. Anyway, phoning up to arrange said subscription the service person asked for my exact name and title as on my card. It was the Rev that piqued up the conversation. What church? What College? Theology – very interesting she said. ‘Is that about God?’ I said yes. She said ‘I think God’s dead interesting’ I said, ‘God tends to be’. A few minutes later our deal was concluded, my details processed, and that was that. But I hope she goes on finding God interesting.

    Then walking along the street I passed four musicians setting up their pitch to do some buskering. Spoke briefly to wish them a good day – only one of them had enough English to have a conversation. They were from Eastern Europe, and had brought with them their horn, a trumpet, a trombone and another brass instrument I didn’t recognise. By the time I came past again 10 minutes later they were playing a beautiful version of Ave Maria – outside the Rangers shop! I gave them a second donation, and grinned all the way back to the car. Multicultural Scotland doing its own wee bit to erode by muscial stealth the hard edges of a sectarianism often enough expressed in music of a quite other kind.

    Left my keys at the Gateway cafe in the University. When I went back for them, it was explained that I forgot them because, and I quote, ‘Ye were too busy yappin’. I gently suggested that was a bit harsh so she rephrased it, ‘You were indulging in facetious conversation, then!’ Aye probably I was. But I love a world where in the space of a day, God is interesting, music undermines prejudice, and somebody knows me well enough to affectionately insult me, both in the vernacular and in overdeveloped discourse. And the chai tea latte was superb.

  • Honey from the lion’s belly…….?

    Honey is one of my favourite foods. There are those who are connoiseurs, who distinguish flavours, regions, species of bee, thickness and texture. And though i wouldn’t call myself a connoiseur quite, I do know what I like. And I like honey – most kinds. I haven’t tasted one yet that I don’t like. I’ve never left a jar unfinished. Whether it’s the runny honey that can make eating toast a form of extreme risk sport if you wear a shirt and tie, or the solid light brown stuff that bends the knife as you hack it out and spread it on the scone, or the honey on the comb which gives you hoeny in the raw, with some of the wax, I love them all. Greek Mountain honey that has a tang of liquorice; acacia honey that requires pouring over hot pancakes; Australian eucalyptus which unmistakably conjures images of koala bears; and Scottish Heather honey, none of your blended cheap stuff, the real rich natural coloured honey that was (I’m sure) in the mind of the biblical writers who dreamed of a land flowing with it, and called it the promised land.

    Lylesclassictins Obviously I love sweetness. Syrup and honey – yes and condensed milk, maple syrup, Scottish tablet.  I don’t just have a sweet tooth, I have a mouth full of them. Maybe because I grew up in a home where my mother baked often, and there was always a Tate and Lyle syrup tin in the house. Those who remember the green and gold tin with the black print, and the small oval panel with a picture of a dead lion, and underneath the biblical riddle, ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’, will now share in a moment’s nostalgia.

    The connection between syrup and honey, between Greenock (the town where sugar was a major product in Scotland’s recent industrial story) and Timnah (the village where Samson killed a lion and later found bees making a hive in the carcass), is the relation of sweetness to power. The riddle Samson told was a taunt to the Philistines; the sugar industry in this country was founded on slavery across the Atlantic. Makes it interesting that in ancient times when refined honey was greatly valued, it could be used as a form of diplomatic gift. The connections between honey and politics, between the sweetness of power and the bitterness of oppression, isn’t as fanciful as it first sounds.

    Lyleslionlogo Makes it interesting that Doug Gay entitles the lecture he will give in Paisley "Honey from the Lion’s Belly.’ The biblical allusion is impossible to ignore – but what does it mean? Come along and spend the evening with Doug, and take time to explore together the implications of nationalism as a feature of contemporary Scottish life that could do with some serious theological reflection. Honey from the lion’s belly is an allusion that could point discussion in several directions. The reason we’ve invited Doug to come is to enable us to think carefully and responsibly, about nationalism and national identity, about cultural distinctives and theological perspectives, and to do this from a Christian standpoint. Doug is a practical theologian, and that means he is committed to connecting theology with our lived experience, in our nation and communities. If you are interested and free, it’ll be a good night, and an important discussion. Details are on the Scottish Baptist College blog – click on the name on my sidebar of blogs I regularly visit!