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Speaking light out of darkness…

In the beginning was the Word…..

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,

and the earth was without form, and void,

and darkness was upon the face of the deep,…..

and God said….Let there be light’.

Speech, Holy Word,

the articulation of divine intention and purpose,

‘Let there be…’

Made in the image of God, we too speak,

and what we say vibrates with possibility.

Words call into existence,

make possible,

shape relationships,

communicate meaning,

become freighted with significance

because once we speak, words are let loose.

They cannot be recovered, unsaid,

and their healing or hurt may have a long afterlife.

Made in the image of God,

we are wise if we listen not only to what God says,

but to how God speaks;

and wiser still if we pay attention to why God speaks.

When James tackles the fundamental spiritual disciplines he says little of contemplation, mystical joy rides, charismatic gifts – he speaks of wisdom, words, and therefore wise speaking and even wiser listening. James 3.1-12

Prayer

Lord we all make many mistakes in our conversation.

The way we choose words and construct sentences,

which temper and tamper with truth

The tone of voice, the pace of diction, the volume of our speaking,

communicating impatience and self-importance.

Lord forgive us when we use words as weapons to hurt others,

or as shields to hide behind when we are criticised:

Lord forgive us, when our words are arrogant and self serving,

when we would rather speak than listen

and rather be seen and heard than seen and serving

Lord, whose words called worlds into being,

Make our words creative and life-giving;

Lord whose words wrestled order out of chaos,

and still speak light out of darkness

Put words in our mouth that call chaos to account;

That challenge injustice and defend the vulnerable,

So may we speak light out of darkness,

Through Jesus Christ, the Word, and Light of the world, Amen

14 May 2007
O Lord of every shining constellation…

The universe that is steadily being disclosed to our various sciences is found to be characterised throughout time and space by an ascending gradient of meaning in richer and higher forms of order. Instead of levels of existence and reality being explained reductionally from below in materialistic and mechanistic terms, the lower levels are found to be explained in terms of higher, invisible, intangible levels of reality. in this perspective the splits become healed, constructive syntheses emerge, being and doing become conjoined, and integration of form takes place in the sciences and arts, the material and the spiritual dimenisions overlap, while knowledge of God and of his creation go hand in hand and bear constructively on one another.

T. F. Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, xi.

This piece of abstract but highly assertive theology reminds me of one of my favourite hymns:

…

O Lord of every shining constellation

that wheels in splendour through the midnight sky;

Grant us your Spirit’s true illumination

to read the secrets of your work on high.

.

You, Lord, have made the atom’s hidden forces,

your laws its mighty energies fulfil;

Teach us, to whom you give such rich resources,

in all we use, to serve your holy will.

.

O Life, awaking life in cell and tissue,

from flower to bird, from beast to brain of man;

Help us to trace, from birth to final issue,

the sure unfolding of your age-long plan.

.

You, Lord, have stamped your image on your creatures,

and, though they mar that image, love them still;

Lift up our eyes to Christ, that in His features

we may discern the beauty of your will.

.

Great Lord of nature, shaping and renewing,

you made us more than nature’s heirs to be;

You help us trace, with grace our souls enduing,

the road to life and immortality.

A F Bayly

12 May 2007
T F Torrance’s intellectual debts – in Haiku!

Hard to argue with the dominant presence of Tom Torrance on the Scottish theological landscape for over 60 years. He is a mountainous presence, admired worldwide for his contribution to the study of Barth and Calvin, the relations of Christian faith to scientific ways of knowing, the development of a viable theological rapprochement on the Trinity between the East and the West, and all these informed by deep long reading in patristic, reformed and ecumentical theology.

But he doesn’t only gather, reconstruct and recycle the theological products of others, he is also a creative and cosntructive theologian in his own right. It is that combination of creative assimilation and constructive initiative that makes this book on the Christian doctrine of God such rich, hard, rewarding reading.

In a more playful mood last night I drafted some Haiku in celebration of Torrance and his theological heroes. As always, I use the 5x7x5 haiku structure, the trinitarian structure indicating what Jonathan Edwards might have called ‘the shadow of divine things’!

Torrance Haiku

…

Athanasius,
Lucid apologist for
‘The Incarnation’

…

Homoousios,
One substance with the Father,
Torrance-structured truth.

…

Calvin’s Institutes,
Reformed fons et origo,
Torrance’s benchmark.

…

Barth’s Church Dogmatics,
Everest meets Niagaran
Grammar of The Word.

…

Scottish Dogmatics
Displaying Reformed barcodes,
Geneva and Basle.

11 May 2007
Torrance and devotion to the Trinity

Tom Torrance’s theological debts are well known. Athanasius, Calvin, Barth, H R Mackintosh are primary influences on his understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, his lifelong exploration of the unsearchable riches of Christ, the incarnate, crucified and risen redeemer as these are revealed, bestowed and appropriated, in communion with the triune God of grace. I argued yesterday that every believer is a theologian, and promised a sample of Torrance. In fact three extracts from early in the book, The Christian Doctrine of God – the third is from H R Mackintosh, Torrance’s teacher.

The specifically Christian doctrine of God is thus inescapably and essentially Christicentric…..this does not mean that all our knowledge of God can be reduced to Christology, but that as there is only one mediator between God and man, who is himself both God and Man, and only one revelation of God in which he himself is its actual content, all authentic knowledge of God is derived and understood in accordance with the incarnate reality of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, and is formulated in doctrinal coherence with Christology.

[Jesus Chrts] is not some created intermediary between God and the world but the very Word and Son of God who eternally inheres in the Being of God so that for us to know him as the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, is really to know God as he is in himself in his eternal Being as God and in the transcendent Love that God is. He is in himself not other than what he is toward us in his loving revealing and saving presence in Christ.

The contrast between Torrance’s careful if convoluted sentences and Mackintosh’s sharp lucidity is obvious – but the theological vision is equally Christ centred, and definitive of the Christian apprehension of God.

The words of Jesus are the voice of God. The tears of Jesus are the pity of God. The wrath of Jesus is the judgement of God. All believers confess, with adoring praise, that in their most sacred hours, God and Christ merge in each other with morally indistinguishable identity. When in secret we look into God’s face, still it is the face of Christ that rises up before us.

You can learn more about God, and more about the meaning of devotion and the God we adore, by reading the few pages from which these quotations come, than from a whole supermarket trolley of devotional pot-noodles !

10 May 2007
Every believer is a theologian
‘ If you are a theologian you will pray truly, and if you pray truly you will be a theologian.’ (Evagrius Ponticus, On Prayer).

Here’s my thesis for discussion:

If the priesthood of all believers is a revolutionary and essential principle of Christian community, so is the principle that every believer is a theologian.

Evagrius Ponticus established a theological democracy when he said, ‘The theologian is the one who prays truly, and the one who prays truly is a theologian’. Theology is not a specialist subject for the awfy clever folk in the church. Theology is to talk about God, think about God, to find ideas, words and images that help us express the inexpressible, glimpse the ineffable, adore and praise the One we will never comprehend except through the grace and love of the One who in gracious love makes Himself known. Theology is prayer doing its thinking, and thought leading to adoration and contemplation. Theology is to enjoy God’s company without ever forgetting in whose company we are.

So, in the Body of Christ, in fellowship with God in the communion of the Spirit, we’re all theologians – some of us are better at it than others, but theology is something we do for each other, with each other. There is a theology of all believers, a call for us to bear testimony, to express our faith, to praise and glorify God in our language and song and art and actions towards each other and towards the whole human community.

All of this was sparked by my enjoyment of Tom Torrance’s book, The Christian Doctrine of God. One Being Three Persons. (see sidebar). This is not an easy book – the greatest Scottish theologian of the 20th and 21st century wrote it, so devotional marshmallow it isn’t; spiritual fast-food it isn’t; the Trinity for Dummies it isn’t. In theology, the via negativa is a theological approach that begins by saying what something is not.

Positively this book is amongst the finest pieces of theological writing on the Christian doctrine of God. Scottish theology has its own distinctive flavour, something I’ll blog about one of these days. But part of that distinctiveness is critical indebtedness to Reformed theology and deeply informed interaction with the Christian ecumenical consensus. Tom Torrance embodies that. And the subject matter of this book is too important to be confined to any self-appointed theological elite. This is high carb theology for hard worked Christian souls. There’s nothing instant or pre-cooked about it; it isn’t theology to go. It’s theology to sit down with, to develop a taste for, to be prepared to pay for…because it’s worth it.

Torrance has an unrivalled grasp of theological history, combined with a passionate faith in the centrality of Jesus Christ for all Christian thinking about God, and these passed through the prism of a mind both pastorally sensitive and intellectually precise. So, not an easy read – but it is devotional reading, if we devote ourselves to the work it takes to know God, to learn of the great love which loves us, and rejoice in a mystery that baffles and a truth that our minds will never exhaust.

So I’ve a small cluster of questions about how we nurture devotion these days.
1. In the absence of regularly singing hymns which are deliberately and skillfully theological, where do we fix our doctrinal reference points?
2. In a Christian book market fixated on practical, applied, ‘how to’, self help approaches to Christian devotion, what ignites the fires of the mind and the passions of the heart to love God more than whatever it is we want God to do for us?
3. If in our different jobs, continuing professional or personal development is an accepted and valued goal, where is the equivalent of that in the life of the church as we each fulfil our role as true theologians who pray, and who when we pray are true theologians?
4. How daft is it to expect every Christian to be practical, practising theologians, prepared to think deep and long, to pursue the reality of God, and who knows, to risk being baffled by a chapter of Torrance in order at least to sense the complexity and richness, encounter the glory and the mystery, endure the discipline and soul stretching, of what it means to love God with all of the heart, soul, mind and strength we can bring?
Next post I’ll give a few samples of Torrance in full flow – will it be devotional reading? Depends whether we do our devotions as theologians who pray, and whether in our praying we are theologians, lovers of the God who comes to us in Christ through the Spirit, and whose presence requires our best attention.
9 May 2007

What can you say? Can’t argue with providence.

When it comes to performance and feedback, the Amazon Marketplace customer is in a powerful position. You can seriously dent a seller’s credibility with withering feedback. So there’s an unwritten code of ethics that means you don’t rubbish someone else’s business unfairly. Now and again the human dimension of this shines through all the seller’s anxieties about having a good percentage rating. I got the following email from Mary (that’s all I know of her).

Dear Dr Gordon, Due to circumstances entirely beyond my control, I regret that this book is no longer in my possession.(Another Reverend has given it, unknown to me, to an elderly sick friend!)I am very sorry indeed to inconvenience you. Mary.

An email like that leaves me genuinely pleased I’d been disappointed. When I think the book I want has just come into my grasp, God sometimes has other ideas and somebody else needs it more than me! This is God’s take on socialism, a more equitable distribution of resources, delivered at the point of need! Lesson learned.

What else could you leave on the feedback than excellent! The charm and gift of this email is that it allowed me to pray for folk I don’t know – Mary, bless her for her up front honesty and courtesy, the ‘other Reverend’ for his kindness, and the elderly sick friend that they’ll be blessed by the book God ensured went to the one who needed it most. Who says the internet is an impersonal electronic web, huh? Or that a cyber-community is an artificially created alternative to real people – clearly not always.

One of my 1980’s culturally sad confessions is that I watched the A Team when our kids were growing up. Never want to see it again – but the cheesy end-line lives on in the memory, and occasionally describes an important theological truth and spiritual response. The theological truth is Providence – the spiritual response is gratitude. And the cheesy line was, ‘I love it when a plan comes together’. And Mary whoever you are, in that diverted book, Someone else’s plan came together – I love it when that happens.

By the way the book I didn’t get was The Spirit of Early Christian Thought – I’d rather live in the Spirit than read about it anyway.

8 May 2007

Urban Warriors

Sitting at Cardonald pedestrian traffic lights two pigeons flew over the car and landed on the road island, standing on the road studs for visually impaired folk. Green man comes on, bleeper bleeps, and they start strutting across the road,the arrogant saunter of ornithological neds, just making it before the lights flashed and the traffic started moving. Last I saw them they were plundering the remains of someone’s discarded takeaway.

Pigeon’s – not the Mary Poppins, ‘Feed the Birds Twopence a Bag’ kind; and not the biblical or liturgical dove of peace either; but the hardened urban warriors who work part time as the auxilliary co-opted members of local authority cleansing operatives. And as evolutionary survival tactics, they do us the service of eating our throwaway rubbish and set an example by waiting for the green man before crossing.

7 May 2007
‘The best laid schemes of mice and men, gang aft agley’.

The title of the post is from one of Robert Burn’s best known poems, ‘To a Mouse’. In the aftermath of the Scottish Election debacle, Radio Scotland, Radio Clyde and other local stations had all kinds of informed pundits, public commentators, academics as political apologists, apologies for politicians but few apologies from politicians, all giving there take on what went wrong. With a court case threatened about one seat where a majority of 48 is a figure only 1/20th of the number of spoilt votes, the scale of the scandal is put into some perspective. And yes, whatever went so badly wrong – was someone’s responsibility, and needs sorted. The number of spoilt votes now exceeds the combined turnout for three constituencies!

But my day was made by one of the presiding officers, responding to email and phone-in suggestions that if people filled the voting forms in wrong it was because they were stupid. Not trying to hide her serious no’ pleasedness, she put aside the protocols of public discourse and suggested such people got right up her nose, made her blood boil and should be neither seen nor heard, and she’d like to have a (private and probably unrepeatable) word with them. After which she resumed her public persona and said. ‘People aren’t stupid. It was a new system. They simply made a mistake. And that can happen to anyone.’

Later, when the debate between stupid or mistake was taken out onto the streets, we got the definitive answer from someone whose career path, probably to our considerable loss, didn’t take him into politics. Asked whether he felt stupid, or had just made a mistake, one of the public declared with considered solemnity and self deference;

‘Naw. Ah juist made a mistake. (Momentary pause…..) It wis a stupid mistake, but!’

I love the wisdom, and forbearance of the Scottish public – and the creative use of grammar by putting a conjunction at the end of a sentence for emphasis. Guid rhetorical strategy, is it no’ juist? And I admire the ability of Scottish folk to spot patronising questions coming at them like a Henman passing shot, and returning them with the ego-deflating sharpness of an Andy Murray cross-court volley. Unfortunately as the answer above was delivered, the limitations of radio became obvious – it was unable to capture the millimetre or two movement of one eyelid. Guid on ye, pal!

But a country whose folk are hungry for change, with a history of political engagement and enlightened inventiveness, conscious of the opportunities that our own Parliament makes possible, – deserves better than the standards of political discourse and leadership so far shown. And for the next five years of Scottish Government to be reduced to horse-trading about who and which party’s interests can be preserved, is not only embarrassing, it is to reduce the expressed political will of the Scottish people to personal and party political ambition.

I think the message of the Scottish voters is neither fudged nor surprising. The message is – on track records so far, no one party is to be trusted with our future – maybe a hung Parliament with all its frustrations, is still an effective corrective to party interest, personal ambition, and narrow non negotiable agendas.

Going back to the man in the street quoted earlier, one of Burns’ most potent political poems, celebrates him and his answer. And the third verse of ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’ should give the Holyrood power mongers serious food for thought – and who knows even repentance!

Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord,
Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that;
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,
He’s but a coof for a’ that:
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
His ribband, star, an’ a’ that:
The man o’ independent mind
He looks an’ laughs at a’ that.

7 May 2007
Songs for Life’s Journey

When it comes to devotional books, the Victorians knew a thing or two about sentimental feelings, emotionally loaded poetry and idealised botany! Amongst the books I recently rescued from threatened oblivion in Voltaire and Rousseau’s, is just such a devotional book.(V&R are the kind of second-hand booksellers, near Glasgow University, where there are heaps of books arranged in heaps- that teeter on the brink of avalanche – making a bookshop browse into a kind of outward bound course for booklovers). The book in question is called ‘Songs from Life’s Journey’; it’s a combination of well known Sankey type hymns, illustrated with scrapbook impossibly arranged flowers, thick gilt edged paper and all arranged in a highly stylised coffee-table format.

The front page announces the publisher as Groombridge and Sons, Paternoster Row, London, one of the publishers of quality productions from early in the 19th century. The picture I scanned shows the cover page, and gives an idea of the extravagant use of images on sepia paper, suggesting an impression of colourful profusion. It’s cheesy – ( but by the way, how will folk a hundred years from now judge our taste in praise songs, purpose driven paperbacks, and lack of emotional rootedness in vital doctrinally informed religious experience)? Hmmmmm.

Anyway, I love the way the Victorians were unembarassed about cheesiness – and there is something quite poignant about a book that who knows who, took trouble to buy, and use or give to someone – and for what occasion? Wedding? Bereavement? Conversion?

Don’t know – but enjoy one of the pages with its hymn, its pictures, and its connection with some unknown Christian from a hundred and something years ago. And if the hymn strikes you as sentimental – good – the sentiments of the hymn are timeless – and timely.

6 May 2007
Providence, Books and Richard Baxter

I’ve bought more books. Not from Amazon – from those second-hand places where books are piled precariously and the one you want is at the bottom, and to get it you have to risk the whole Babel tower of them landing on your head like a judgement from heaven. One of the books I saw, seized and rapidly paid for, was by Richard Baxter the Puritan – not a killjoy, not a censorious policeman of others’ behaviour, not as someone once defined Puritans, a person who lives with the constant worry that someone somewhere is enjoying themselves.

It was an edited version of his Autobiography, an account of the Civil War, his pastoral labours in Kidderminster, and the trivia of domestic gossip that makes an autobiography of a human being interesting. So, keeping in mind I had to remove it from the bottom of a perilously leaning pile of miscellaneous literary curiosities, here’s his take on why we should believe God watches over us bibliophiles, to keep us safe when we walk through valleys of deepest darkness, and books precariously heaped around us:

Another time as I sat in my study, the weight of my greatest folio books broke down three or four of the highest shelves, when I sat close under them, and they fell down on every side of me, and not one of them hit me save one upon the arm; whereas the place, the weight and the greatness of the books was such, and my head just under them, that it was a wonder they had not beaten out my brains, one of the shelves right over my head having the six volumes of Dr Walton’s Oriental Bible, and all Augustine’s works, and the Bibliotheca Patrum and Marlorate etc.

I love that picture of Baxter lost in writing the several million words he wrote with a quill and ink, late into the night burning the midnight candle, and getting the fright of his life as his 17th century IKEA bookshelves collapsed and nearly brained him! As a pastor he is legendary for thoroughness and psychological precision in spiritual direction; as a controversialist he feared no argument if it was about the freedom of the Gospel and the independence of the church; as a writer and a fellow bibliophile he wrote exhaustively.

And when asked to assess the worth of his writings as he lay dying he said, ‘I was but a pen in God’s hand, and what credit is due to a pen?’

Such great spirits are undeservedly neglected today. It was Baxter who gave C S Lewis the title of his bestseller, Mere Christianity. The same C S Lewis in one of his best essays, urged contemporary Christians to read old books at least as often as we do new books, otherwise said Lewis, we are guilty of chronological snobbery, a phrase he might have offered as a definition of overstated postmodern prejudice against premodern wisdom.

5 May 2007