Living Wittily

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  • A train of thought, or thoughts about trains

    Tartan_shirts_ Mixed experiences on my jaunt to Musselburgh to do my talk on Evangelical Spirituality on behalf of the Diocese of Edinburgh. From Paisley to Queen Street, 23 minutes. But the 3.30 and the 3.45 to Edinburgh were cancelled due to the failure the points system somewhere ( the announcement said where – but it was indecipherable, and in any case I didn’t need to know where they failed, just that that they had). So I waited with moderate displays of patience for the 4.00 p.m. "express" to Edinburgh – got on and it left on time. But once we were ensnared in the carriage, and five minutes out of Glasgow, it was announced that the train would divert to Dalmeny, and this would add a further 20-30 minutes to the journey.

    033002000709 There is a tangible sense of annoyed resignation ripples through the carriages when such morale deflating announcement is made. One passenger who wasn’t prepared to allow resignation to temper annoyance, was half way through ( at a conservative guess) his umpteenth can of Strongbow. He was already complaining to everyone that he wanted to go to Glasgow not Edinburgh – no he wasn’t on the wrong train, the train was going to the wrong place. He needed to go to Glasgow because he was going to Dublin, to see his sister, who wanted to give him some verbal because he was drunk…..

    It was a long journey, and I struggled to read my book on Anselm. I suppose Scotrail, Strongbow and the Ontological argument are a reasonable challenge to those creative thinkers who can always make connections. The train confused our inebriated Robert Carlyle lookalike in shades so much he decided to use his compromised gifts of rhetoric getting us all onside to complain. Not helped when the train stopped, then began to travel back the way it came, in reverse. Maybe we were going back to Glasgow – but no, this was a train doing the equivalent of a three point turn – at 5.25 we got into Waverely.

    From there I went down to Leith to pick up my car which Aileen had used for her holiday. Walking towards her house, dressed in my suit and carrying my brief case, a small elderly woman, stopped me and said,

    ‘Oh hello, is that you Dr Stewart.’

    I said no – and she was clearly disappointed, but went on to tell me anyway, ‘Well’, she said, ‘it’s just that you prescribed the wrong pills for me’.

    I explained I wasn’t Dr Stewart, she squinted into my face, smiled, and it dawned on her I was right, she apologised, and went on her way.

    After that, drove to Musselburgh, did my talk, enjoyed the company of the folk and drove home to get in just before 11.00pm.

    I am still trying to work out what theological reflections, spiritual lessons, human insights, arise from such a day…… Suggestions……

  • Call to Conversion

    Just finsishing a paper on Evangelical Spirituality for Edinburgh Diocese tomorrow night. Got me thinking again about what it means to be converted! I was converted on April 16, 1967 – like George Whitefield I can still see the place, and recall the exact time. I have, however, been converted many times since, and always by that same grace of God that found me that night. Here’s Jim Wallis on conversion, which he argues (rightly as I see it), is not only a personal event or process of turning, but also that constant turning that is part of our faithfully following the One who goes ahead and doesn’t always walk in a straight line.

    .

    Wallis We are called to respond to God always in the particulars of our own personal, social and political circumstances…As such, conversion will be a scandal to accepted wisdoms, status quos, and oppressive arrangements. Looking back at biblical, saintly conversions they can appear romantic. But in the present, conversion is more of a promise of all that might be; it is also a threat to all that is. To the guardians of the social order, genuine biblical conversion will seem dangerous…there are no neutral zones or areas of life left untouched by biblical conversion. (Call to Conversion, Lion, 1981, page 6)

    Where the Kingdom of God collides with all the other status quos, that is precisely the point where conversion and witness to the One who called us, coalesce in response to God. Mission is our response to the divine commission. As John Stott put it, avoiding that pietistic, devotional self-centredness that wants to privatise faith, "Love for God is not an emotional experience but a moral obedience". Conversion is just that – the regeneration of moral life, through a renewed will, inspired by revived religious affections, and turned outwards in a passionate following of Jesus in the service of the Kingdom of God – which, as Jim Wallis so consistently witnesses, calls all status quos into question.

  • Words are feeble…yet priceless things

    Deadguy185_216068a Over at Euangelion, Mike Bird  has draw attention to the death of C. F. D. Moule, former Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. I still remember  reading his book The Birth of the New Testament, and wondering why other writers of New Testament Introductions needed to write books two or three times as long, to say half as much that was important for understanding where the New testament came from and what it was about.

    I also remember R E O White, former Principal of our College, coming to teach us NT Greek armed with Wenham’s Elements of NT Greek, Arndt and Gingrich’s Lexicon, and C F D Moule’s Idiom Book of NT Greek, to answer the more elusive questions about this or that text. Below is a revealing extract from Moule, a friendly caution to those of us who live by words, and written in Moule’s little book The Holy Spirit. The book was written in 1978, when a lot of words were written about the Holy Spirit, charismatic experience and renewal, much of it anecdotal, only some of it theologically grounded, and even less of it related through careful scholarship to the evidence of the NT documents. Moule offered neither comfort for charismatics, nor ammunition for anti-charismatics – instead, measured reflection refusing to rush to conclusions:

    Words are feeble things – never adequate for the job; yet priceless things – seldom dispensable. They are dangerous things, for they are so fascinating that they tempt the user to linger with them and treat them as ends instead of means. But the Word became flesh; and a word that is not in some way implemented goes sour and becomes a liability instead of an asset.

    Charles was an important name in 20th Century British New Testament scholarship – Charles H Dodd, Charles Kingsley Barrett and Charles Digby Moule. I think it would be a good idea to have an alternative to the calendars of saints – how about a calendar of biblical scholars when we celebrate through the year, the gift to the church of countless hours of labour and devotion, poured like precious nard, upon those ancient documents that together we call the Bible. And on their feast day, a reading from that part of Scripture on which they have shed the light of their learning? Open for suggestions…..

  • The Saxophone and Sacred Longing

    Qtz2009 Last night I was writing a responsive liturgy for one of our Baptist communities. It’s intended to invite all those who work and serve within the church to rededicate their gifts of time, energy and ability – and to seek the blessing and strength of God. While all this was happening I was listening to Christian Forshaw’s CD, Sanctuary. I first heard this during advent two years ago, sitting outside Parcel Force while Sheila collected our mail, with Classic FM on. The track that was played was ‘Let all mortal flesh keep silence’.

    I sat transfixed. It was one of those brief interludes when something other than the music is heard, but which can only be heard through the music. It was as if the Holy Spirit pulled up the blinds, and left me with my eyes screwed up against early streaming sunlight. And that moment was recpatured last night, as again this stunning piece of music simply opened my eyes – the eyes of my mind, the eyes of my imagination, the eyes of my soul – whatever part of us it is that needs to be opened in order to see the glory and beauty of what always lies beyond our senses.

    Christian Forshaw is the Professor of Saxophone at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. One of his great passions and current interests is music as an experience of purity and intensity, particularly as music within the context of worship.

    ‘I first began working with the church organ in 1995. I was intrigued by the way the saxophone could sit within the sound of the organ, but could also add a far more expressive dimension. The sound of the organ is static once the key is pressed, whereas the sound of the saxophone is ever changing and moving.’

    On this disc the combination of human voice, church organ and saxophone make possible enormous variety and subtlety of mood, of pace, of sound. There are episodes of rumbustuous joy and passages of gentle, persuasive assurance; at times I find the invitation to worship which is inherent in this music, an irresistible grace, and at other times the longing and yearning conveyed in tones ranging from the shrill to the plaintive, is more reminsicent of the flickering sun and shadows of the Psalms at their most poetic and disturbing.

    The rendering of Come Down O Love Divine, ends with a passage of saxophonic improvisation that expresses my spiritual longing more authentically than any words I could ever write. This is a track of the most sublime sacred music – by which I mean music that makes the sacred not only plausible but audible, not only imaginable but desirable with that desire that is fuelled by the eternity that God has put in our hearts.

    The CD can be found on the Quartz website here. You order it from them as it isn’t easily available in High St megastores. (Which makes me feel unreasonably and sniffily superior!)

  • Karl barth and Hans Urs Von Balthasar 6. The light of the hope of the world

    41yfqy2bxgyl__bo2204203200_pisitbdp The last sections of Wigley’s Karl Barth and Hans Urs Von Balthasar, examine Von Balthasar’s understanding of truth. The last three volumes of his trilogy he called Theo-Logic, an exposition of truth as reasoned truth about God, revealed in Christ, by the Spirit. By now Wigley has persuaded me – Von Balthasar’s masterpiece is shaped and formed in response to the theological pressures, both attractive and disruptive, that he believed were exerted by Barth’s theology. Here is one paragraph of Wigley, expounding Von Balthasar…and as I said earlier in this series, I’m not perturbed but strangely reassured when I encounter theological writing that has to be read twice! I’d find a God who could be done and dusted in strap line prose unpromisingly boring.

    In his exposition of how the Spirit works to establish the universal truth of Christ…Von Balthasar establishes the Spirit as the one who "interprets" Christ, and in so doing "introduces" people into the Christian life, using three key themes for this mission of the Spirit, namely ‘Gift’, ‘Freedom’ and ‘Witness’….He is looking to show how the Spirit is at work trinitarianly (and thus in creation and redemption) in both objective  and subjective terms. In subjective terms, this witness to the truth is seen in the life of the individual Christian in prayer, forgiveness and in the gifts and  of the Spirit, and in the witness of a ‘Christian life’. But equally, …it is also evidenced in objective terms, namely in the tradition, in Scripture and above all in the apostolic ministry of the Church. (Wigley, 134)

    Scripture bracketed between tradition and the Church would always pose a theological obstacle for the Reformed Barth, just as Von Balthasar’s view that Barth lacks an adequate ecclesiology created inevitable distance for a mind so passionately Catholic.

    396274 What Wigley has achieved in this book is an account of two theological friends, whose differences were never negotiated away in a bland and ultimately false ecumenism. Instead, they spent their lives and their best intellectual energies, in creative dialogue carried out on a theologically gargantuan scale, each seeking to know what it might mean ‘for the Church to be the people or the place where the glory of God is revealed’.

    41v4q6he43l__aa240_ Wigley has also shown that an ecumenical theology needn’t be about lowest common denominators, or agreed statements that understate difference. It can be discussion about the core doctrines of the Christian faith, as lived, thought and articulated by theologians from across the Christian spectrum, in which difference does not provoke defensive hostility, but evokes an exchange of truth as each understands it. Both Von Balthasar and Barth bore passionate witness to truth – together they were admirers of Anselm, and his famous dictum, faith seeking understanding.

    Which brings me to a final comment on this fine book. There is a form of intellectual snobbery that thinks books about books, or theologians theologising about other theologians, lacks originality and is a kind of parasitic reliance on other people’s ideas. I’ve never shared that view. Some of the best theology I have read is by those who seriously engage the theology of others with sympathy and critical appreciation. In the past few years Bauckham on Moltmann, Mark McIntosh on Von Balthasar, Webster on Barth, Davies on Aquinas, Marsden on Edwards, Zachman on Calvin,  Lohse on Luther, have represented some of the best creative and interactive theological writing. From earlier years Rupp on Luther, Wendel on Calvin, Gilson on Aquinas, Busch on Barth, Burnaby on Augustine, Bethge on Bonhoeffer, remain theological classics.

    Wigley’s study of Barth and Von Balthasar is more narrowly focused because it is exploring and explaining how one theologian influenced another – and does so by allowing us to overhear, and at times imagine, the conversation of two friends, whose agreements and differences arose from their own theological integrity. And though neither would countenance convenience-driven compromise, they seldom approached each other’s thought with less than appreciative criticism. One last extract from Von Balthasar, about the penultimacy of the Church and the ultimacy of Christ the Word, demonstrates considerable overlap in theological commitment:

    The Church…is the moon not the sun; the reflection, not the glory itself. Put more precisely, she is the response of glorification, and to this extent she is drawn into the glorious Word to which she responds, and into the splendour of the light without which she would not shine. What she reflects back in the night is the light of the hope of the world.

    Amen, and Amen.

  • Dniprio 1 – Aberdeen 1

    1908 Now I don’t want to get into debates about mathematics, epistemology or metaphysics. I don’t care if there are some people out there who don’t understand how a draw can be a win. Take my word for it – a 1-1 draw is a victory. Aberdeen are in the group stages of the UEFA Cup thanks to a nail-biting, nerve shredding, blood pressure raising, language straining 94  minutes in the Ukraine.

    Dniprio 1 – Aberdeen 1 – and for once a Scottish team has gone through on the away goal. See that – it’s juist pure metaphysical so it is!

  • Maintaining the fabric of the world

    U11856405 One of my bestest friends phoned the College today to ask if I was alright because I missed a day on my blog! I love it when people miss me – makes me feel wanted. And if they miss me on my blog then I am even more affirmed. I’m pleased to say I’m fine. Busy with the stuff that needs to be done in the administrative nether worlds of academia these days – but we all have our routines and tedium which is part of training in patience, attention to detail, and just sheer faithfulness to our vocational commitments. That’s true whether you are a nurse or a scaffolder, a cook or a taxi driver, a blacksmith or a goldsmith, a social worker or a computer analyst, a cleaner or a mathematician, checking out items at the supermarket or checking in baggage at the airport, whether you’re a brain surgeon or a tree surgeon.

    In the Wisdom of Sirach, are words that speak about the importance of the ordinary, the consecration of routine, the faithfulness of those who just do it… they are words that have often been my own inspiration when what has to be done isn’t fun, but it is necessary, and when the payoff is perhaps only what St Ignatius prayed at the end of his prayer, "..not to ask for any reward, save that of doing thy will". And with that to be content – Here’s Sirach, a wise man

    25. How can he become wise who handles the plow, and who glories in the shaft of a goad, who drives oxen and is occupied with their work, and whose talk is about bulls?

    26. He sets his heart on plowing furrows, and he is careful about fodder for the heifers.

    27. So too is every craftsman and master workman who labors by night as well as by day; those who cut the signets of seals, each is diligent in making a great variety; he sets his heart on painting a lifelike image, and he is careful to finish his work.

    28. So too is the smith sitting by the anvil, intent upon his handiwork in iron; the breath of the fire melts his flesh,

    and he wastes away in the heat of the furnace;

    he inclines his ear to the sound of the hammer, and his eyes are on the pattern of the object.

    He sets his heart on finishing his handiwork, and he is careful to complete its decoration.

    29. So too is the potter sitting at his work and turning the wheel with his feet; he is always deeply concerned over his work, and all his output is by number.

    30. He moulds the clay with his arm and makes it pliable with his feet; he sets his heart to finish the glazing, and he is careful to clean the furnace.

    31. All these rely upon their hands, and each is skilful in his own work.

    32. Without them a city cannot be established, and men can neither sojourn nor live there.

    33. Yet they are not sought out for the council of the people, nor do they attain eminence in the public assembly. They do not sit in the judge’s seat, nor do they understand the sentence of judgment; they cannot expound discipline or judgment, and they are not found using proverbs.

    34. But they keep stable the fabric of the world, and their prayer is in the practice of their trade.

    And by the way – my friend who checks up on absentee bloggers is also one of those who keeps stable the fabric of the world.

  • A holding cross

    Cross This morning Stuart gave me a gift of a holding cross. For which thanks and appreciation both for the gift and what informs it. Wood is one of my favourite materials, though funnily enough I’ve never been very good at making things with wood. But I love its touch, its warmth, the flow and contours of the grain, the varieties of colour, tone and texture. One of my treasured possessions is a hand tooled beech wood bowl from the children and staff of Beechwood School in Aberdeen, a place where some of my most hilarious, holy and hilariously holy moments were enjoyed. Another is the Victorian Oak picture frame that holds one of my own designed tapestries of a stained glass window – think I’ll blog on it when I get a decent photo of it. So now to add to these, and other wooden artefacts (like Victorian hand carved book-ends in the shape of two parrotts), I have a holding cross.

    The leaflet that comes with it has several prayers and readings. But nowadays when I think of the cross, and search for words that are anywhere near adequate, my inner default takes me to James Denney

    When we look at Christ crucified and risen, the revelation of God it makes to us is this; God is redeeming love, in power of omnipotence; or God is omnipotent power in the service of redeeming love.

  • The unimportance of the visitor, the all importance of the patient, and the blessing of our nurses

    Hospitalnursesfocusonnurseinblueuni I went to visit one of our students who is seriously ill and in ITU at the hospital. In the end I couldn’t see him because medical staff were busy doing all the things that need to be done to help and support a patient confronting serious illness. I’ve done such visits often enough over the years, and I’m still left with several deep convictions confirmed – about ministry, about gestures, about the unimportance of the visitor and the all importance of the patient, and about the miraculous humanity of nurses.

    1. To visit another human being who is going through deep times of suffering, weakness and that uncertainty that is part of every life but now and again becomes acute, is to be put in the privileged position of being allowed to minister. None of us IS a minister, certainly not by right or office. Ministry takes place when we first offer ourselves and only then whatever help we can bring. In that sense the verb ‘to minister’ will always be primary – the noun merely describes the person so privileged.
    2. I’m sorry I didn’t see our friend. But I recognise that to go, to be there, to yield to that instinct that values gestures of kindness and affirmation as part of the fabric of the grace and humanity the Holy Spirit uses in the work of healing and holding others, is to simply put ourselves in the place where, in God;s grace, intention matters.
    3. Visiting those who are very unwell requires a deep and gentle firmness that recognises the vulnerability and preciousness of the other person. There are few places where it is more important for the talkative ego to be silenced than in the place where another human being is suffering, vulnerable, and more important than anyone else present.
    4. Nurses are saints. I mean that in a way that could never come close to being exaggeration or cliche. I’d give them all an immediate £5k rise, just for starters. Caring for others in acute illness requires professional skill, human compassion, tough protective barriers that keep well meaning others at a distance, and an inner toughness in themselves that mean they get on with what needs to be done, but at a personal cost most of us just guess at. Few people know more about pastoral care, and how reverence and realism are both required in caring for, working with, the patient frightened at how their unwell body threatens their very sense of self.

    Cb004011 Tonight I pray for the friend I went to visit, for his mum, his aunt, and others for whom he is a special presence in their family. I pray too for nurses, whose gift of caring brings such telling demands, and without whom illness, hospital and the thought of facing whatever lies ahead of us there, would be unbearably more lonely and frightening. Perhaps it’s only me, but I’ve come to recognise that when we have been in a hospital, as visitor or patient, we are reminded of our mortality, our humanity, and those gossamer threads of life and possibility that are held together in that fragile tension that is our own future. Faith is to trust God in that place of fragile tension, and know that there we are held in the grip of a purpose both eternal and good.

  • Doon the watter….a theological pilgrimage to Rhu.

    Waverley_millport_1967_one_2 Yesterday Sheila and I went ‘doon the watter’ (travelled down the Clyde estuary, not by boat but by car) and spent a while in Helensburgh. A few miles further on into the Gareloch is the village of Rhu (used to be called Row), where the saintly theologian John MacLeod Campbell was minister in the early to mid 19th Century. He was deposed by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1831 for teaching that Christ’s death was for all, and that salvation is by the faith that believes this and trusts God that it is so. His masterpiece, The Nature of the Atonement, is one of the greatest theological works ever produced in Scotland.

    350pxjohn_mcleod_campbell Not easy reading, but why should a Christian pastor whose careful and passionate proclaiming of the Gospel was misunderstood, and at times misrepresented, by those who engineered through the Church Courts, his removal from ministry, why should he write a dumbed down climb-down? His book remains one of the most challenging statements on the meaning of the death of Christ and the Father’s love as the core of the Christian Gospel. Underlying his theology is a generosity of spirit, and a conception of the Father’s love that is primary and qualifies any understanding of God as judge. Such a theology is far more amenable to the missional imperative of the church than the hard-edged Westminster Calvinism which MacLeod Campbell challenged.

    Which brings me back to Helensburgh, where we met two good friends from Fife, through to close down their caravan for the winter. Bill was recalling his last Sabbatical, all the books he read and the thinking he thought. And he said, ‘The most important thing I learned was the parable of the man fishing off the pier. This man fished every day off the end of the pier, and one day one of the local lads came to him and said, "The fish don’t come here any more". "Aye," said the man, "but they used to"’.

    If the church is to survive and prosper through the current cultural flux, then it needs to stop using the methods, pursuing the practices, clinging to the memories, working on the assumptions, of what used to be. "The fish don’t come here any more". Right – let’s go find where they do come to.

    And it is that go-finding mentality, that adaptability to changing circumstances, that alert noticing that change is deceptive but deceptively fast; that willingness NOT to make our own methods, habits, assumptions, convenience, memories, the standard of truth and the last word on how we go about God’s mission, that marks out the faithful follower of Jesus. For John MacLeod Campbell that meant searching for an understanding and portrayal of the Christian Gospel that frees it from theological monopolies and allows it to speak in its own power to the mind of today.

    For the church in Scotland, it will mean giving up what used to work, and following once again the One who said, ‘Come after me and I will make you fishers of men and women’.

    And it may also mean being prepared to listen to the One who says, ‘Cast your nets on the OTHER side of the boat.’ But maybe it takes some nerve for seasoned, experienced fishermen like ourselves to listen to Jesus telling us how to fish. After all, what does a carpenter know about fishing? Mhmm.