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  • Inexplicable and unimaginable…the murder of Rhys Jones.

    A_dying_11_year_old_boy_b2216394118 I used to play football in the local park, in the red ash playfield, on the tarmac of the school playground, in the farmer’s field, even on proper football pitches – the worst that ever happened was skint knees, and later torn ligaments because of a bad tackle. That an 11 year old boy, playing football in a pub car park, is shot with a handgun and killed by another young man riding on a BMX renders all the usual inner mechanisms of moral response stuck. I’ve no idea what to think, or feel, or write – pain, anger, sorrow, revulsion, compassion, – an entire spectrum of human response to inhuman behaviour seems redundant.

    But it wasn’t an inhuman person who did this – it was a young human being who acted out the ultimate violent fantasy of ending the life of another human being. As easy as the flick of a joystick – more fun than the limits of virtual violence – translating the familiar comic book violence of movie and computer game onto the streets where real people can die. The causal connection between a person’s preferred entertainment, and the patterns of their own behaviour is not established, researchers tell us. There is a lack of evidence-based documentation so we’re told.

    There is a longstanding way of viewing reality called the Scottish Commonsense School. One of its assumptions is that we can trust the evidence of the common experience of people. Human experience of the real world whether moral, intellectual, emotional or volitional, is to be seriously considered as itself having evidential value. The desensitising of a young mind, by exposure to regular pre-packaged violence in a virtual environment, or the pumped up messages of music that celebrates violence, is not, on any common sense reflection, irrelevant to patterns of behaviour where inexplicable and lethal violence result in dead people – in the real world.

    There are profound and disturbing changes taking place in the moral fabric of our culture. Now and again events such as Dunblane, the killing of Jamie Bulger, the knifing of Damilola Taylor, and….and….. You see, what was once unusual and unprecedented becomes a list, routine, a series of heinous crimes so that the word heinous becomes a regular adjective, its edge blunted by constant use.

    Whatever else I might want to try to say or think, as a Christian, I instinctively consider two theological truths that underlie such happenings like theological bedrock –

    1. Sin is a catastrophic reality in the human story and can always visit the inexplicable and unimaginable upon the innocent; and as evil it must never be explained away by finding more comfortable explanations in social determinism, psychological profiling or genetic programming. The killing of a boy playing football was an act of hellish indifference to the reality of a human life.

    2. Redemption is that action of God, creative and costly, in which the suffering and death of Christ demonstrate the inexplicable and unimaginable mercy of God, on creatures capable of that same hellish indifference to human suffering and death. I believe in sin; I believe in redemption through Christ even more. As my theological mentor and hero James Denney never tired of asserting – sin is not the last reality of the universe – here it is, eternal love, bearing sin.

    For this young boy, Rhys Jones, for his mother who held him as he died, and for all touched by this tragedy, I only offer words of perplexed intercession –Lord in your mercy.

  • On the sin of being greedily wasteful

    _42160484_bin203 I’ve been doing some thinking (and preaching) about following Jesus in a consumer society. You know the phrase, ‘marching to the sound of a different drummer’? Maybe the phrase for Christ-followers in a consumer driven culture is ‘we pay attention to a different bottom line’. But is that true? Are Christians less wasteful – are cutting down on waste, recycling, responsible purchasing, doing without, virtues more obvious in Christian lifestyle?

    Last night watched some of a programme about families who create most waste, and the ongoing debate about what we do with the amount of throwaway stuff we create – pay as you throw waste-bags, microchip bins where you pay by weight, for example.

    Reminded me of this wee poem by Norman McCaig

    Small Boy

    He picked up a pebble

    and threw it into the sea.

    And another, and another.

    He couldn’t stop.

    He wasn’t trying to fill the sea.

    He wasn’t trying to empty the beach

    he was just throwing away,

    nothing else but.

    Like a kitten playing

    he was practising for the future

    when there’ll be so many things

    he’ll want to throw away

    if only his fingers will unclench

    and let them go.

    We live in a world where we throw away too much, want too much, and find ourselves being both possessive (things we can’t do without) and wasteful (things we no longer want, let alone need). McCaig captures with fine irony the idea of practising being greedily wasteful, and he exposes that capacity we all have,- to hold on to, and to throw away, to possess and to waste – and so to lose a sense of the value of things, to obscure that humanising regard for a world that is too beautiful to be rubbished.

  • Entertaining angels unawares

    51qz4afx6xl__aa240_ Last week I posted on my first spiritual and pastoral mentor, Charlie Simpson. I mentioned his habit of reading reference books and announced my intention to remember this good man by reading a reference book, The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought. So far I’ve read amongst other things, about Peter Abelard, Abortion, Abraham, Adam and Allegory. And just read the article on Angels. Some of our hymns assume the reality and activity of these messengers from God – Wesley tells us to Hark! the herald angels sing; in Newman’s ‘Praise to the Holiest in the Height’, it’s the angels who are left gobsmacked (my word, Newman one of the finest prose stylists in the English language would eschew such slovenly syntax) – left gobsmacked at the coming of the second Adam to the fight and to the rescue. And Wesley again is the earth’s cheerleader, celebrating the mercy of God, ‘Let earth adore’, and then he advises angel minds to enquire no more.

    The article clarified for me the status of angels, something I hadn’t thought much about –

    the angels are not divine, but fellow servants of God with humanity, integral even if invisible elements of the cosmos, mightily influencing, for good and ill, according to their primordial option, the stage upon which the  history of salvation unfolds.

    Beato25 In the Bible angels appear and act at key moments in the story – the three guests of Abraham turn out to be the angels unawares (and are immortalised in Rublev’s magnificent icon of the Holy Trinity); Jacob’s wrestling partner at the brook Jabbok is an angel who leaves jacob with the blessing of a limp(which triggered one of Charles Wesley’s greatest productions). They are protectors of God’s people and proclaimers of God’s purposes. Isaiah six gives a stunningly image-rich portrayal of the heavenly courts busy with the synchronised traffic of adoring praise at the speed of light. The Annunciation and the Nativity stories make sense only because God’s messengers interrupt the long slow history of human longing, with the ultimate news bulletin. And in the wilderness, and Gethsemane Jesus is strengthened, accompanied, supported, but then they withdraw and we are left to ponder the loneliness of the Son of God.

    The article finishes:

    ‘The angels serve God and humanity, and especially Christ, God incarnate, the sole mediator. They labour invisibly, throughout the cosmos, to further the final unity of all things, in heaven and on earth, in Him.

    I’m not sure how carefully I’ve considered a theology of angels before; I’m well impressed that Karl Barth and Karl Rahner both made significant space to expound the ministry and mystery of God’s messengers. And maybe now and again, when the good things happen, we should be more alert to the presence and action of God’s gophers.

  • Ethics of undercover journalism

    Emillerms1808_228x340 This is Emily Miller, aged 25. The attempt by the Daily Mirror (Labour’s most loyal fleet street paper) to plant Ms Miller, an investigative journalist, deep in the Conservative Party Election Campaign office is comical, cyncical and morally problematic. Opinions of right or wrong are divided depending on the polictical colour of the commentator. What kind of ethics could sensibly be applied across the board to regulate investigative and undercover journalism, which by definition succeeds by deceit, stealth and ultimately betrayal of those whose trust has been won? Some of the most important exposures of corporate wrongdoing, animal cruelty, human trafficking, human rights abuses, public risks linked to commerical activity, were possible because resourceful and at times very courageous reporters, went undercover to film, report and expose. In these cases it would seem that the acts of deceit required were morally justified in order to expose and perhaps end a far greater evil.

    But that is surely different from trying to infiltrate a political party, to access confidential information and expose private conversations, internal strategies, personal weaknesses of key individuals, as a way of undermining the credibility of a party preparing for election in a modern democracy. The democratic process itself is surely weakened by such party-biased activity. Those who think it is ok to do this, or attempt to, should at least ask the old Kantian question of whether they are prepared to universalise this behaviour – that is, is gaining employment and trust by deceit, in order to harm the election prospects of a legally established political party, a principle which can be morally countenanced in all situations?

    I’m uneasy with answering that question too dogmatically- the British National Party stands for policies many people (and I’m at the front of the opposition queue here) would call extreme, dangerous, and would oppose on deep ethical, social, and for me also theological grounds. Much of what we know about the inner psyche of such an organistaion only comes to light when exposed in its unguarded moments, when it’s members feel safe to reveal and speak the truth of who and what its members are. But doesn’t that too influence the outcome of the democratic process by targeting unpopular parties to publicise them at their worst? Yes it does – and again I’m not sure I want to condemn such journalism as morally unacceptable.

    But the Daily Mirror’s little ploy was nothing so morally courageous. If successful it would have been the equivalent of planting the best surveillance equipment possible at the centre of a mainstream political party, for the purposes of harming reputations, disabling leadership, discrediting stated intentions, stealing ideas, undermining strategies by publicising them, or internal hesitations about them. The Fleet Street editor on BBC news on Sunday morning, who thought it was a pity the young woman was ‘rumbled’, and praised the attempt, has no ethical qualms about such a tactic. But surely there is a difference between the journalist who infiltrates a racist organisation, or a dog-fighting culture, or the dangerous underworld of trafficking in vulnerable people, and a reporter whose intention is not to expose criminal behaviour in the interests of public safety and human compassion, but to weaken, undermine and inform on employers through systematic betrayal? Or am I naive?

    One further thought though. Supposing such a paper planted several of its reporters in various Christian churches, with the remit of establishing how genuinely we live the Gospel of reconciliation, live out the community of love rooted in the Triune Love of God, practice compassion for the poor,engage in prophetic critique of all that diminishes human life locally and globally? What would such a journalist be able to publish, to the embarrassment of the Name we honour, the one we follow and worship? Intriguing thought – undercover journalists seeing if these Christians are half as serious about the Kingdom of God as they want others to believe….and if so where’s the evidence? MMHHHMMM?

  • Integration and integrity

    51vvka0g6jl__bo2204203200_pisitbdp5 In trying to explain what it means to be in right relationship, with God, with creation, with others and with ourselves, David Willis writes about integration and integrity. It is an important and faith expanding description of what God is about in our lives.

    This being in right relationship includes the integration of various things – ideas, emotions, economic condition, physical health, hunger for righteousness, delights, artistic drives and so on – which make us who we are intended to become.

    The word for the condition to which we are being delivered is…"integrity". Integrity is wholeness, unsplinteredness, unfragmentedness. We are invoking this imagery when we say so-and-so or such and such rings true. Wholeness in this sense is held-togetherness: as crystal or a forged bell is a ‘resounding’ holding together of things in tension. Tension is not incidental to integration, for the tensile strength of something is the way its component partsicles cohere, are congruent. The tensioned parts ‘fit’. They belong together to make up a whole, and are most themsleves in that tensioned belonging. Integrity is being integrated! Integrity in this sense is a progressing condition, not a fixed state. (page 54).

    The tensions between aspiration and frustration, devotion to Christ and the attractiveness of countless alternative calls, between our earthboundness and our spirituality, between emodiedness and inwardness. Jesus knew about those key moments, those urgent decisions, those tensile choices that we face once we’ve put our hand to the plough, left our nets, left the money at the tax table. And whether the source of tension and the test of integrity is faithfulness to our Lord, or to our covenanted life partner, committed love to our children or answering thedemands of our vocation, Willis is right. Integrity isn’t a fixed state, but a continuing process of refinement. Like the crystal vase and the forged bell, now and again God pings or strikes us, to hear the resounding holding togetherness that is discipleship as a way of life, a following after the One whose integrity integrates a fragmented creation.

  • Scotland, religion and education

    Two books came today. Expensive, hefty, sturdily bound by the Edinburgh academic publisher, John Donald. They are two volumes in a 14 volume set on Scottish Ethnology. They deal with Religion (vol. 12) and Education (11).

    41tzljoto1l__aa240_ The volume on religion covers the arrival of Christianity and brings the cultural story up to the 21st century. It is by far and away the most comprehensive and authoritative account of religion in Scotland, and it includes chapters dealing with the pluralistic and multicultural context of modern Scotland, and its inevitable and enriching consequence of religious diversity. This looks like one of the big books I’ll slowly work through as a course in culture, Christianity, religious diversity, folk theology, and the entwined relationship between social development, religious history and the contemporary cultural landscape. In a world fractured and fragile, where religion can be cause or cure of human suffering and conflict, it is a responsibility to understand our own religious heritage, context and peculiarities. Because in a diverse world, and in a pluralist Scottish society, for many, many people, Christians are ‘the other’; and more than ever we need the gift to see ourselves, as others see us, and to see the others, as part of who we are.

    41egvqb93gl__bo2204203200_pisitbdp5 The volume on Education is similarly comprehensive – tracing historical development, cultural influences and consequences on Scottish Education. Interesting chapters for me include the account of Special Education provision, Scottish Universities, ‘approved schools’ for troubled and troublesome children, Catholic education and women in education. Ever since I read and was converted by George Davie’s magnificent and wonderfully partisan account of the role and value of Scottish University education, in The Democratic Intellect, I have been passionate about education as more than preparing people for employability. As an expression of my own vocation in theological education, I am vocationally committed to education as formative, humanising and driven by aims significantly higher than market demands and other functional goals. These are arguably necessary to make education socially and economically viable; but the pursuit of learning and the search for knowledge have deeper goals in the human character, mind and will. Varieties of information when integrated bring knowledge; knowledge when assimilated into character and applied to life, brings wisdom – and we desperately need graduates in wisdom, and post-graduates in the science of living well.

  • Charlie Simpson – a quiet presence in my memory…..

    Charlie Simpson was one of the cheeriest human beings I’ve ever met. An old school Baptist minister, complete with deep dog collar, black stock, striped trousers and black jacket. He trained for the Baptist ministry just after the Second War and did much of it by correspondence with the London Bible College. Like many people going into ministry after the war when there was an acute shortage, he was fast-tracked in, and most of his life he felt the lack of a formal academic training. I met him when he was minister at Carluke Baptist, and he was the one who led me to faith in Christ. He guided my first hesitant enquiries about ministry, (less than a year after my conversion), he lent me several of his books (one of them Spurgeon’s "nae messin aboot’" approach to baptism, called Much Water and Believers Only!). He was also one of the first Christians who modelled a love for learning, a passion for books, and the importance of continuing personal development. Remember this was in 1967 he had no degree – no diploma – just a man in love with God, and determined to serve God with the best he could be.

    Two further early memories of Charlie Simpson the lover of God who happened also to be a book-lover, which have influenced me subtly but permanently. The year I was converted (1967 – forty years ago), he persuaded me to go to Filey Christian Holiday Camp. I still remember the embarrassment, the strange world of big gatherings and having to drink bucketsful of Christian devotional cordial concentrate. BUT – I also remember Charlie took me into the humungous Book Tent and I stood there like Moses gazing at the promised land – except in my case I’ve been allowed to go in and possess it. I wandered around, picked up what I think was the first commentary I’d ever handled, and Charlie bought it for me. It was John Stott’s Tyndale Commentary on John’s Epistles, hardback. I still have it. He told me that he always had a commentary on his desk that he was slowly working through, and he encouraged me to read my bible using a well informed guide. And so, from then till now, I have been a commentary reader.

    And then there was the time, near the end of my ministry training, I went into Charlie and Nettie’s house in Knightswood, Glasgow, and Charlie came to gloat over his new purchase. It was the Baker Dictionary of Christian Ethics. It was 500 pages of double column text covering loadsa stuff. I was impressed and, by now as bad (or as good) as he was, decided I needed to get one as soon as I could afford the £6 – which by the way was expensive in 1975. Then Charlie said something which ever since, I’ve refused to forget, and which probably contributes to my ongoing love for learning and desire for God. This wonderfully cheerful, spiritually serious man of curious intellect, hefted the book in both hands and said, ‘I’m going to read this. I’m going to start at A and work my way through to Z’. It turned out that Charlie read reference books. Oh, he knew they were for consulting. That they were the quick route to the essential information. But he also knew, that if you want an overview of a subject, if you want to know where your gaps are, if you want to have a mind stored with the salient issues, the varied perspectives, and the relevant arguments, then there was nothing to beat a systematic browse through a recognised reference book. The New Bible Dictionary, and the New Bible Commentary, and the Baker’s Dictionary of Practical Theology, and the New International Dictionary of the Christian Church were amongst the goodly land he traversed from Ararat to Zion, from Agape to Zeal, from Abelard to Zwingli.

    Charlie Simpson raised my intellectual awareness and nurtured my love for books. But more than that; the gleam in the eye and the heft of a heavy book, and the anticipated hour or two at the desk with a book it would take a long time to finish, but which would feed his faith and increase his mind’s capacity for the truth of God, showed a 17 year old retro ned, that study is a way of loving God. From that first Spurgeon book on baptism, and Stott’s Tyndale Commentary, and Baker’s Dictionary of Christian Ethics, Charlie, that self-taught, well read, disciplined scholar (he would have laughed at the word scholar predicated of himself, but I reckon I’m now qualified enough to recognise one when I see one), who was my pastor and friend, has been a quiet presence in my memory. He is in the front row of that section of the great crowd of witnesses nearest where I am on the track. And if the communion of saints means anything at all, then he is likely to be cheering cheerfully and wanting to know what commentary I’m reading.

    51qz4afx6xl__aa240_ I tell you all this for two reasons. First, people like Charlie Simpson shouldn’t be forgotten. Through an honest ministry conducted with a total absence of self-advertisement, who knows how many souls were touched, lives turned and minds made up for following Jesus? He is a central loved presence in my testimony. Second, in the 40th year since Charlie led and guided me to Jesus, and just under 30 years since he died, I am going to do something in his memory. I’m going to read a reference book, from A to Z, Abelard to Zwingli. The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought is a mega-book – 808 pages, 27.7 x 22.6 x 5.8 cm (that’s big!). Now and again, I’ll use one of the articles to blog – just to map my progress from relative ignorance to the promised land of knowing some stuff! Hope my wanderings won’t take forty years.

  • Held in the nexus of a sane trust

    On Sunday I offered some initial reflections on pastoral and theological responses to those who suffer from Alzheimer’s, dementia or other conditions which impair their sense of self, and frustrate their capacity to relate to others and to God.

    51vvka0g6jl__bo2204203200_pisitbdp5 I was encouraged to think about this further while reading David Willis, Clues to the Nicene Creed, and his chapter on what believing means. This slim book is a gem of accessible theology – (see sidebar). Describing how hard it is at times to believe, and how life circumstances, inner changes, and yes, certain forms of affective disability and mental ill health, can make personal faith all but impossible, Willis argues something very close to the last two paragraphs of my post on Sunday. Here’s what he writes, knitted together from three pages:

    Faith is knowing by heart the one on whose heart all the members of his body rely. When we feel overwhelmed by doubt…we do not feel God to be in our hearts; but that does not mean that God ever ceases to have us in his heart. Our faith – as trusting knowledge of God’s benevolence is not faith in our faith, nor heartfelt experience of our experience…..

    In fact almost as often as not, believers get guided, comforted, compelled, and sustained from day to day by other members of Christ’s body. There are times when we are dependent on what I think we must recognise as the vicarious faith of the community. Often the community trusts on our behalf. We need to recognise – rejoice in, let ourselves be helped by – that vicarious trust of the community to which we belong, in season and out.

    All I am insisting on in recognising the comforting reality of the vicarious faith of the community is that since we are united to Christ in his body and since it is finally Christ’s own fidelity on which we rely and who is the author and finisher of our faith, even in our most forlorn and apparent unbelief, we do not fall out of the nexus of sane trust…..The good news includes the belief that ultimately, no matter how far away and with what unimagined twist, the only inevitable thing is sovereign love.  (pages 25-27).

    Saints Maybe our insistence on faith as personal responsive trust, as an individual, cognitive and volitional response to Christ, can be pushed so far that we overlook those who, for many reasons best known to God, cannot, or do not, believe and trust in such a self conscious, publicly acknowledged way. Yet they are still loved, held, incorporated within the purposes of God’s gracious and sovereign love – and it may be that an important priestly role of all those believers who insist on ‘the priesthood of all believers’, is to hold all those for whom faith comes hard if at all, within the vicarious faith of the community. And perhaps in such cases, the prayer ‘ Lord I believe, help Thou mine unbelief’, could become, less selfishly and more generously, ‘Lord we believe, help Thou their unbelief’. Because in that vicarious faith, those for whom faith and trust as experience of God is at present impossible, will be enfolded in love, and treasured in hope, within a community where no one’s life is hopeless, no person is unloved, and all are faithfully held and cannot fall out of the nexus of a sane trust.

  • The high cost of bottled water….

    Bottled11_2 In our environmentally challenged age we are learning to live with new ethically loaded terms such as carbon footprint. What about water footprint? And yet…major charity projects taking place in Africa and Asia are concerned with providing adequate, clean and safe drinking water. A major consumer market now exists for bottled uncarbonated water, which is drunk in the western world not by the litre but by the loch. Running, walking, working at the desk, driving, talking, in countless social situations people now carry a bottle in one hand and a mobile in the other.

    How long before a night at a classical concert includes as the norm, the soloist trumpeter having a quick swig of Highland Spring while awaiting the next cue for entry? Has anyone yet come across a preacher who preaches with a bottle in the hand – or at least at the lectern? By the way I remember a Glasgow church years ago in the 1970’s was famous for ensuring a bottle of fizzy Schweppes Tonic water was placed in the pulpit for the preacher’s refreshment!

    Byron has an interesting post on the current bottled water market, carbon footprints and a world where the water is ill divided. He is quoting from the Sydney daily newspaper acccount (see the link here). Amongst the environmentally relevant and justice issue comments Byron makes are:

    • higher levels of bacteria than quality tap water;
    • transfer of toxins from the plastic bottle to the water;
    • the production of a plastic bottle creates 100 times more carbon emissions than making a glass bottle;
    • 1.5 million tonnes of plastic water bottles are created each year, only a fraction of which are subsequently recycled;
    • bottled water costs about 10,000 times as much as tap water;
    • and perhaps worst of all, the privatisation of water amongst the rich removes the incentive for ensuring high quality tap water for all.

    So. What is a responsible Christian to do? The cup of cold water that Jesus recommended as an act of compassion, presupposed it was clean and a gift. At the very least perhaps we should opt to pay, as an act of discipleship, a personal tax on the bottled water we drink, by ensuring that we are financial supporters of those charities desperate for money to sink wells, buy purification plants, ensure clean safe water is supplied to those for whom bottled water, bought and drunk in a society with constant, clean, running water on tap, is unimaginable, inexplicable, and perhaps inexcusable. How big is my water footprint?

    I find all of this complexity, my unavoidable implication and participation in a society that now trades globally, creates an underlying uneasiness, a sense that no matter what I do, someone can show me connections and consequences I hadn’t foreseen, but can’t easily avoid. Fairness, justice, generosity, humanity, responsibility…these are virtues it’s hard to impose on a market – and one way or another I can’t live outside the market. But on the other hand, I am a follower of Jesus, and one way or another, that cup of cold water, whether it comes from a bottle or not, isn’t for my consumption but for the comfort of the other. HMMMM?

  • Books I often recommend

    Over at Faith and Theology Ben is encouraging one of those meme things. No-one has tagged me, and I don’t know how to tag people anyway (sounds like a web version of a playground game, which we used to call tig!). But it set me asking myself, so what books do I often recommend if people ask about this ‘n that. The list below shows some of the books I’ve recommended to people – though one person’s enthusiasm is another person’s ‘whit’s this a’ aboot’? Still for what it’s worth, each of the books below is one I’ve read a number of times, and still think they are worth anybody’s time.

    Books I Often recommend

    1. Pastoral Theology
    W H Vanstone, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense. This is quite simply the ideal of pastoral experience rendered into theology, earthed in the Incarnation and embedded in the love of God.

    2. Christian Doctrine

    D Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding. This is an elegant, accessible mid range theology, written with a convictional edge but generous in its scope and sympathies.

    3. The Cross

    D J Hall, The Cross in our Context. This theology of the cross, by a too often overlooked theologian, condenses his systematic theology into a more manageable and accessible form. The result is theology from the standpoint of the cross, a reflection on the contemporary scene from the perspective of Calvary. And not a hint of sentimental pietism – a robust exploration of crucified love as it encounters a broken creation.

    4. Poetry

    R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems. This Welsh clergyman poet stands no nonsense. This is undiluted human search, discontent, praise and lament, about how hard it is to find God – and how compellingly essential to persevere in the search.

    5. Novel.

    Anne Tyler, The Patchwork Planet. Not because this is her best (that’s probably either Saint Maybe, or Morgan’s Passing). But because this novel builds around small incidents and observations, and shows how accidental moments can change lives. I also think the central figure who works for a firm called rent-a-back, is an interesting study of what it might mean to ‘by love serve one another’!

    6. Biblical

    Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder. I happen to think that a lot of Peterson’s more recent writing is good but not brilliant, and rehearses stuff he has written better elsewhere and earlier. This collection of theological reflections on worship (published in 1988), with the subtitle, The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination, represents some of the finest biblically literate pastoral writing I know. This is way beyond the pastor’s quick dose of pick-me-up devotional exhortation. This is searching spiritual theology, written with literary skill and a poet’s deep trust in the power of words to generate in the mind, alternative realities.

    Anyway – these are some of my many times recommended books. I’ve bought Vanstone so often I think I keep it in print!! Another way into this would be to ask, which of your books have you lent most….and which ones did you get back!…or which ones wouldn’t you lend?……..MMHMM.