Living Wittily

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  • Hauerwas 7:the gospel is not a conquering idea

    Now and again Hauerwas is so engrossed in his conversation with Matthew, Bonhoeffer and Yoder, that his view of Christian discipleship, and of the Jesus who calls, is couched in the language of all three! Here’s a quotation where Yoder’s view of the non-violent Gospel precluding aggressive forms of evangelism, and Bonhoeffer’s portrayal of the self-emptying Word, and Matthew’s portrayal of discipleship as a radical unselfing of the self, coalesce in a theological restatement of Christian obedience.

    Bonhoeffer Following Christ requires our recognising that the one I am tempted to judge is like me – a person who has received the forgiveness manifest in the cross. The recognition that the other person is like me – in need of forgiveness – prevents those who would follow Jesus from trying to force others to follow Jesus. We must, like Jesus, have the patience necessary to let those called deny that call. It means that the disciples are not called to make the world conform to the gospel, but rather the disciples are schooled to be non-violent – which means that the Gospel is not a "conquering idea" that neither knows nor respects resistance. Rather,[as Bonhoeffer comments]  "the Word of God is so weak that it suffers to be despised and rejected by people. For the Word, there are such things as hardened hearts and locked doors. The Word accepts the resistance it encounters and bears it."

    That paragraph is a needed antidote for the underlying triumphalism that informs much thinking about mission, church, christendom, evangelism. And I’m left wondering, because I’ve seldom been asked as bluntly to think about it, what a Christian existence might look like if we stopped thinking of the gospel as a "conquering idea"; if in Christian apologetics the underlying principles were forbearance, patience and respect for this other person, who needs God’s forgiveness which cannot be imposed by logic or compelled by argument, but perhaps which can be caught by the contagion of the Kingdom, the love that does not need acceptance to endure and persist. One of hauerwas’ magnificent overstated but necessary one liners, "The Father has refused to let our refusal determine our relationship to him….we are God’s enemies yet God would still love us – even coming to die for us."

  • all weather walking………

    Dscn0071 Decided to get my walking boots dirty today. The weather forecast was bright, mostly dry – where we went, it was dull mostly wet, at least till about 1.00 o’clock. By then we had just passed Broughton and ate our packed lunch – observing the horizontal drizzle, psyching ourselves up for an all-weather walk along the banks of the River Tweed, doing a self-peruasion act to convince ourselves that the exercise would do us good, that rain is only water without which human life is impossible, and trusting the car thermometer which was indicating a bearable 5 degrees – but with no allowance for wind-chill.

    Dscn0068_1 So dressed for all weathers – that is three layers of jersey, fleece and a wind and waterproof jacket, (and a seriously ridiculous hat) we succeeded in two or three minutes in getting the walking boots not only dirty, but clarty, slaighered wi’ glaur, ( both Scots terms for impressively muddy!). But we did have a walk, with intermittent slitherings and constant squelchings, along what was probably the recent flood plain. And I believe ( I do, really), that it did us the world of good, that it was healthy despite the chill and drizzle, that the fresh air obliterated all sign of mental cobwebs, that we did more than our 10,000 steps worth of daily exercise – but it wasn’t the pleasant wee dauner (Scots for leisurely walk), we had hoped for, to get us back into walking ways.

    Instead it was the kind of walk you do when you have some serious guilt to shift and you believe in more than nominal penance, or if you want to train for the 100 metre dash through a slurry sump – not kidding, we passed a huge shed up on the ridge which was full of happy, noisy, excrementally productive pigs. All that said, the rolling hills, the surrounding woodland, the quiet of the river, the company of a heron, a wren, a kestrel and a bevvy of arguing oytercatchers, a hundred sheep, and of course the pigs, followed by a pot of tea at the Tearoompic1 Laurelbank Tearoom, made for genuine Sabbath – if that word means rest, a halt to productive work, freedom from toil, and time to enjoy what God is doing – then yes, Sabbath. And Aberdeen won!

  • Building a new life

    Banlc_s1e2_1_1 Watched last night’s episode of Build a New Life in the Country. You can read more about it on the programme website, http://homes.five.tv/jsp/5hmain.jsp?lnk=451

    A Whitby middle aged couple bought a ruined farmsteading and bastel house and spent a year making it habitable. Reminded of my own early years in old farm cottages, some of them needing major renovation in days before makeovers. But this project was in a different league. No roof, with decades of weather damage,it was an 18th century bastel house – that’s a fortified farm house on the Scottish borders to deter Scottish cattle stealers! Walls 2-3 feet thick, and parts of the floor feet deep in centuries of dung, muck and rubble; the cows shared the building nights and winters to protect them from the Lowland rustlers.

    It takes a combination of desire, acquired skills, co-operation, muscle and perhaps a little oddness, to envision such a ruin transformed into a dream home. Centuries of dung removed, tons of concrete laid by hand, the stone tiling roof rebuilt, floors, windows, electricty, plumbing, the lot. As an example of a marriage of minds and sharing of a life project it was simply inspirational – and I was moved by the indomitable, resilient, optimism of this pair – and the way they simply, ‘got on with it’, through snow, flooding that washed their building materials away, and serial night shifts of hard graft.

    This would be the place to get homiletical and expand on dilapidation and ruin as metaphor of life, and how vision and passion can make the impossible achievable – but that would be to look for spiritual lessons. And it trivialises the realities this programme was about. It was about stone tiles, hung floors, bolted cross beams, hard packed dung requiring pick-axes, a 50 odd year old 5 foot grandmother revelling in the power of a power hammer. Lord Macleod’s doctrine of creation was deeply biblical because he took matter, the sheer materiality of this world, with theological seriousness. That’s what I saw happening last night – two people tackling ruined chaos with creative energy fired by a vision of the beautiful. Great television!

  • Hauerwas 6

    Hauerwas_1 "Nothing enslaves more than that which we think we cannot live without." (Page 80)

    Freedom is therefore affirmed and strengthened by fasting. Fasting is not only a voluntary statement of self-denial, it is a celebration of that spiritual liberty that makes bodily living a joyous valuing of created things -by keeping them in their place.

    "Abundance not scarcity is the mark of God’s care for creation. But our desire to live without fear cannot help but create a world of fear constituted by the assumption that there is never enough. Such a world cannot help but be a world of injustice and violence because it is assumed that under conditions of scarcity our only chance of survival is to have more".(Page 82).

    This is Hauerwas at the eisegesis again, this time in Matthew 6  – but he stays faithful to the Kingdom meaning of the text, because he has an instinct for those values of the Kingdom that force a revaluation of the values of a culture in which fasting is near sacrilege in the consumer God’s temple. As I read this commentary I am constantly aware of the other ways of writing biblical commentary – historico-grammatical exegesis, socio-cultural analysis, rhetorical and reader response approaches – none of these are all that evident in Hauerwas’ approach. But I am repeatedly finding myself reading the gospel, then reading Hauerwas, and finding that his theologically controlled eisegesis has taken him to the heart of the text – and to the core values of the Kingdom.

    How does this eisegesis thing work? It isn’t true that Hauerwas is irresponsibly imposing his views on the text – I don’t sense that at all. In fact the opposite, his is a deeply responsible handling, reverently receptive, an informed engagement in which who he is, and what he believes is brought to the the text. For Hauerwas, presuppositionless exegesis is not only impossible, but undesirable.  His eisegesis is characterised by several qualities, I think:

    instinct guided by theologically astute reflection on the meaning and transforming power of Jesus the person.

    intuition born of years seeking to listen to, and be changed by, Jesus’ teaching

    ethical and pastoral assertion of what this text says to those prepared to hear it today,

    docility before a Gospel story whose power wrests control from the careful exegete subverting all attempts to domesticate the text by too much knowledge.

    The result, for me anyway, is a reading of Matthew that is informed by serious ethical, theological and political standpoints, and which is compelling in its uncompromising directness – non-directive counselling, objective exegesis, this is not!

  • Spe13 I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they couldn’t. (Mark 9.18)

    Failure, if taken rightly to heart, is an education in humility, in self understanding, an opportunity to grow. But not for the disciples in Mark’s Gospel. Having failed to exorcise an evil spirit themselves, they then become the self-appointed Regional Quality Assurance officers for Exorcisms. Not surprising, that desire to regulate others, control the boundaries,  – they’d just been having an argument about who is the greatest. A kind of Blair Brown ambition-fest as to who would be the leader of the disciples. And Jesus had just given the kind of answer that only works in the politics of the Kingdom of  God, ‘Whoever wants to be first , must be last of all and servant of all.’ And like the self-preoccupied movers and shakers they believed themselves to be, they didn’t, as John Reid would say, ‘get it’.

    So failed exorcists with a lust for leadership, presume to disqualify others from their ministry, and they do it in Jesus’ name, and so unwittingly disqualify themeselves. The not so Blessed John Reid would say, ‘Disciples not fit for purpose’. The whole scary story forced the question, "How dare any of us erect boundaries around compassionate ministry exercised in Jesus’ name?"

    And Jesus reply was generously inclusive, ministry affirming, welcoming compassion wherever it rears its beautiful head …whoever is not against us is for us.

    Such radical open-mindedness implies an ecumenicity of the heart, only possible when being first is an irrelevance, and being servant of all is a priority. Whoever is not against us is for us – this inclusive principle, gives not only the benefit of the doubt, but the benefit of trust. To live with such an attitude of openness to goodness, to see each act of kindness as Christ-serving, to believe each costly casting out of evil wherever it lurks collaborates with God’s Kingdom, to recognise, acknowledge and celebrate compassion wherever it radiates into human lives, is to take on the generous inclusiveness of Jesus who welcomes all the help the world needs.

    The text critiques our motives and self image- there is uncommon honesty in any of us who can identify that part in each of our hearts, that leads us to say, without thinking clearly what we mean, ‘we tried to stop him because he was not following us’ – as if our kind of discipleship could ever be normative!

  • historians of the actual

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    Reverence may be the road to the sacred and wisdom may be the natural song of the spirit, but story is the text of God and the groundkeeper of prayer. (24)

    The Shaping of a Life is autobiography bent to the purpose of spirituality, story-telling as the medium of theology. And Tickle is alert to the dangers:

    Compressing long years of gradual understanding into single epiphanies or even tying revelations to singular events may allow us to organize our spiritual autobiographies, but it certainly does not make us fine historians of the actual. (34).

    So her honesty, and the correctives and disclaimers she inserts, make what might otherwise be an exercise in introspection and self-explanation best kept for a private journal, into a helpful example of how to map the way we have come. Glad I read it – but it’s a hundred pages too long. That’s a pity because the other 280 pages both as connected narrative, and as a mosaic of shorter stories where God is encountered in ordinariness, make the book worth the effort. None of us can so stand outside ourselves that, when it is our own story we are telling, we perform as ‘fine historians of the actual’.

  • mountain and city

    Phyllis_portrait_180 What to make of a woman whose father is a celebrated educationist, whose great grandparents on her mother’s side were Jewish, who loves silence and solitude but also the interchange of relationships, who writes of a near death experience in the 1950’s that has left indelible marks on her spirit, whose experience of serial miscarriage did not prevent her having a family of 7 children, who has rediscovered her Jewishness but within a clear Christian commitment, who is now a recognised expert on American religion and religious publishing, and is attached as an oblate to an Anglican monastery, and is now a bestselling writer and compiler of a three volume set of The Divine Hours, the ancient prayer practice of the Church?

    I know that is one long sentence-question; feel free to put in any helpful punctuation, copy editing. But the book is also one long question – or rather a meandering account of how a life, like a river, makes its way to the sea – in its own time and never in a straight line. The Shaping of a Life is a mixed read; parts of it are chatty and lightweight in a magaziney (new word?) kind of way; some sections are movingly written describing the evolution of a faith with its wits about it; here and there she clunks a big theological nugget on the wooden floor and you’re left to make of it what you will; some parts are dispensable, adding weightless bulk and perhaps clouding the focus of a book that I have enjoyed reading – except the bits I recognised as skim-worthy.

    Brought up within sight of Tennessee’s mountains, and then living in Memphis (in the early days of Elvis fever) she tells of how she ‘walked straight into Western religion’s most ubiquitous pair of twinned metaphors….the mountain and the city’.

    Imagebuachaille I want to think about this – two metaphors that might give us the two handles we need to articulate a balanced spirituality for the 21st century. The lonely bleak thereness of the mountain, there, not built, a place that is given to us, not taken; and the crowded thereness of the modern city, built as human construct, taken and possessed with little sense of it as gift. Yet the urban owned property (real estate) and the isolated grandeur of the mountain each offer clues that might help us live more humanely – it is easy to demonise the city and romanticise the mountain. In Scotland we learn every winter about the inhospitable bleakness, the unforgiving danger, of blizzard blown mountains –

    Roythomson and while urban decay has its own bleakness, the life of our great cities also creates its own kinds of communities where people are cherished, laughter is made and compassion is there to be seen if we look for it.

    Isaiah 2.1-5 combines the two metaphors, the mountain of the Lord’s temple and Zion – mountain and city – and the vision is of justice, companionable walking, and the new technology of peace as weapons are recycled into horticultural implements to the benefit of the entire creation. It is one of the great visions – and amongst the key inspirations of my own faith….come O house of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the Lord.

  • glimpses of uncoercive glory

    Over at Faith and Theology, Ben Myers is doing his usual good job of nudging his blog visitirs towards books they havn’t heard of, or would never think of reading – to our loss. This time from a slim volume by Schleiermacher, Two Letters to Dr Lucke (1829), he highlights one of Schleiermacher’s rare one liners!

    “[T]he verse John 1:14 is the basic text for all dogmatics, just as it should be for the conduct of the ministry as a whole.” (p. 59)

    It’s the biblical reference that makes the statement meaningful let alone remarkable. The eternal Word embodied, incarnation of divine in human, creator in creature, living amongst us, exuding uncoercive glory, overflowing with grace and replete with truth. The basic text for ‘ministry as a whole’? There is an entire curriculum in that one Johannine testimony, "the Word became flesh"; and a lifetime’s vocation living out the meaning of "dwelling amongst" the people we are called to serve; a humbling unreachability for us to bear witness to the glimpsed glory of Christ, except – He is still "full of grace and truth", grace for our emptiness and truth for our evasions.

  • The Shaping of a Life

    What keeps theology from becoming a theoretical hobby, self-indulgently pursuing abstract concepts and intellectual structures is the rootedness of all good theology in the context of a life.  Some time before McLendon wrote his book on theology and biography, I had already met the kind of theology I enjoy reading best. It’s found mainly in autobiography and biography, written with that combination of self knowledge and life savvy, a willingness to engage in an investigative journalism of the self in relation to God.

    In addition to biography and autobiography, there are letters, journals, travel diaries – but each of them seeking to explore and explain the landscape of the spirit, to excavate and examine the rich ore of experience, especially the experience of God. Some of the best church history is in the definitive biographies ( Rack on Wesley, Oberman on Luther, Ker on Newman). But it is the less celebrated writers who often have most to share about their journey, the sights and insights of their travelling, the ways in which theology and faith, doctrine and practice, God and daily life, intersect in surprisingly disruptive and creatively constructive ways. What makes life-story-telling such an effective medium for real theology is simply this; God is the living God, the involved and subversively interested God who is made known in Christ, who became flesh and dwelt amongst us, and whose deepest and defintive statement is made in the life of a person.

    0385497555_01__aa240_sclzzzzzzz_ So the story of a life is narrative theology. And that is what Phyllis Tickle’s book is so good at. The story of a life growing and unfolding towards God. The title, The Shaping of a Life, indicates a slow process, organic and personal; the subtitle is about context, A Spiritual Landscape. I’ll write more about this book when I’m finished it. For now three random, but significant influences in the shaping of her life – Psalms, pubs and T S Eliot. The chapter (26) on her discovery of a Memphis pub called The Pigskin is a beautifully observed narrative of community – here’s just one sentence:

    Ks77446_1 A pub presupposes not just any neighbourhood, but a particular  one of some density which it serves not as a private home or a public husting would, but is "that third good place" of satisfactory human intimacy.

    Made me wonder about church as "that third good place" of satisfactory human intimacy. Discuss.

  • Hauerwas 5: Gladly needful and willingly dependent

    The Sermon on the Mount is a text which is definitive of Hauewas’ entire theological and ethical project. Jesus is not simply teaching an ethical code, but incarnating the Kingdom, which when lived, looks something like the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon is addressed, not primarily to individuals, but to the community of Jesus who as disciples, are called into a Kingdom where Jesus Rules, OK!

    I like his emphasis on the communal intentions of the Sermon – not each lonely struggling individual disciple struggling to live up to each Beatitude. No, but a supportive community of the gladly needful and willingly dependent, in all their diversity, discovering and displaying and disseminating – peace, comfort, hunger for justice and so on. The Beatitudes are about us rather than me; about grace given rather than virtue achieved.

    Hauewas’ take on virtue ethics, as they come into conversation with the Sermon is this: ‘For Christians the virtues, the kind of virtues suggested by the Beaititudes, are names for the shared life made possible through Christ’.

    Virtue – community – Christ – a community of virtue whose resource and motivation is the presence, example and gift of Jesus. And when it comes to anger and lust, the corrosive antitheses of forgiveness and generosity, the obstacles to peace and gift, Hauerwas’ hard headed spirituality says just what’s needed:

    P_hauerwas0014_1 Alone we cannot conceive of an alternative to lust, but Jesus offers us participation in a kingdom that is so demanding we discover we have better things to do than concentrate on our lust. If we are people committed to peace in a world of war, if we are a people committed to faithfulness in a world of distrust, then we will be consumed by a way to live that offers freedom from being dominated by anger or lust…. (Page 69).

    Consumed by a way to live – that seems to encapsulate what Hauerwas, and his conversation partners Bonhoeffer and Yoder, are so serious about. Christian discipleship is walking a way in such a way, that it leads to the cross, where God is most fully revealed, and from which the community of Jesus takes it moral and spiritual, and therefore political bearings.