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Years ago a man who was my mentor in ministry, explained one of his idiosyncrasies that had served him well over many years. When he went on holiday in the Highlands or the West Coast of Scotland, even in an already overloaded family car, he stuffed in the latest big book to have a good browse while he was away and had time and space to enjoy it.

The book which prompted that conversation was the newly issued New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, published in 1974, the year I became a student pastor in Cornton, Stirling, where the Rev Jim Taylor was the senior minister in the mother church in Stirling. I took his advice and have done the same on self-catering holidays in Scotland in whatever cottage and wherever. A post on previous big books taken on holidays is for another time.

The new Dictionary of Paul and His Letters is undoubtedly a book worth giving time to browse and become familiar with the contents. This final review post is a broad survey of what I've found while exploring the surrounding landscape and landmarks of recent Pauline studies.

Let's start near the middle with the overall subject of interpretation. In 1993 Grant Osborne wrote 'Hermeneutics / Interpretation of Paul', (9 pages) a wide-ranging article which tried to do too much even then. It's still worth reading if only as a snapshot taken just as new approaches in New Testament Studies gathered momentum. The 2023 revision has 50 pages on Interpretation that represents distinctive interpretive approaches to Paul: there are separate articles on Asian and Asian American; Augustine; Calvin; Jewish; Luther; Medieval; Modern European; New Perspective; Patristic; Postcolonial; Latinamente. This provides a much more rounded, representative sampling of approaches to Paul, both key historical figures and specific cultural and ethnic contexts.

The list isn't comprehensive but widely representative, and the Editors have had to make hard choices about what is included. I wondered about post-holocaust studies, or liberationist interpretations of Paul – though some comment on these can be found using the subject index. I did, however, note an omission that surprised me. There is no article on Feminist Interpretations of Paul – The Oxford Handbook of Pauline Studies has an entire article on Paul and feminism, acknowledging the gains from the probing questions and diverse perspectives of the feminist contributions to Pauline studies. There are some brief references traceable in the index, and a number of articles on women and their role in Paul's work. I know choices are difficult, and it is hard to be comprehensive, but I regret the absence of a summary article on how women scholars have critiqued Paul.     

The article 'Old Testament in Paul' is completely rewritten by Roy Ciampa and fully reflects the developments in recent decades, particularly relating to intertextuality.  The essay on the phrase 'In Christ' reflects recent emphases on participation and union with Christ, and is written by Michael Gorman who has been a persuasive voice in the theological recovery of a more fully participationist understanding of Paul's 'cruciform and resurrectional' gospel. Indeed the theme is part of an overlapping conversation with systematic theology and the renewed interest in theological interpretation that has been going on for some time now, as for example, in Grant Macaskill's work on Union with Christ in the New Testament,¹ and its more accessible Living in Union with Christ: Paul's Gospel and Christian Moral Identity.

'Grace' is a concept that is core and centre of Paul's gospel, and in recent years our understanding of what Paul meant and implied by the term 'grace' has been significantly redefined by John Barclay, who by a happy providence is the author of the article on 'Grace'! This is a good example of the value of reference books like this – Barclay's magisterial study is distilled into exegetical concentrate, presented in three steps – the unconditioned gift of Christ – Grace and response – Grace and generosity. This is a joy to read.

Scot McKnight was a good choice for 'James and Paul' – "The issue of which 'lexicon' James and Paul were using matters immensely." It certainly does! And Mcknight is a deep reader of both James and Paul and a sure guide through the intricacies of works of law, boundary markers, nuances of justification language and theological tensions created by confused semantics. His final sentence reads and sounds like an apostolic sigh of relief: "Where James finishes is consistent with the apostle's own framework of a grace that transforms the unworthy person into an agent of good works."

A final quick scan of highlights – 'Apocalyptic Paul' is by Jamie Davies, one of the best interpreters of this increasingly significant approach to Paul; a completely new article on 'Empire' updates recent research on Paul's stance on Rome and the question of anti-imperial undertones in his letters; 'Preaching from Paul Today' is an excellent update of the previous treatment – 30 years is a long time, and there are new and urgent questions to be asked and answered; various articles deal with the theology and ethics of human sexuality, and these are entirely updated to reflect significant shifts in how the church seeks to engage with changes in cultural and social ethics, and how these relate to Pauline theological ethics; two articles, 'Ministry' and 'Mission' account for 20 packed pages of analysis and explanation of what Paul thought he was about during those driven years of apostolic joy and sorrow, labour and love, hope and disappointment, and all because of that day he was knocked off his horse, or at least his feet, by the One he came to know as the Crucified-Risen One.   

This and the two previous posts should be enough to show how much I value and am enjoying this new Dictionary. It now sits in arm's reach along with the revised Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels. As to price, the new Paul dictionary can be bought for less then the price of 3 or 4 Tyndale commentaries. It is packed with up to date scholarship, is uniformly well written in my reading so far, some articles are superb in summarising the subject, others gather material hard to find elsewhere, it is solid and well produced, lies open on the desk, and will last for years.

The Editors, authors and publishers have done an excellent job on a huge task, and those of us looking to seriously engage with Paul and his letters are in their debt – and then some!

1. Some years ago, on holiday at Crieff Hydro, sitting in the sun lounge, with a pot of Earl Grey Tea and a slice of coconut cake, I spent a while reading some of this book. The evidence is in the photo! 

One of the most significant features of the new edition of Dictionary of Paul and His Letters is that, as in the 1993 edition, there is an extensive essay on each of Paul's letters. These deal with the usual introductory questions of author, recipients socio-historical context, date and place of writing, purpose, aim and style of the letter, identifying leading theological themes, and generally making the best historical and theological sense of each particular letter.

When Hawthorne wrote in 1993 he did so as a leading evangelical commentator on Philippians – his Word commentary was published in 1983. His primary concerns addressed most of the introductory questions of the time, with considerable focus on where the letter was written, its integrity as a single letter whose author was Paul, and identifying Paul's opponents.

His treatment of the theology of the letter largely featured the Christ-hymn, sanctification as Christian maturing in Christ, and the pervasive tone of joy. The article still reads well, but unsurprisingly feels dated and thin on areas of study now deemed crucial to our understanding of what Paul was about in writing a letter like this to a church like Philippi, given the personal history between Paul and the community of believers in Philippi.

In the intervening 30 years several new questions and approaches have come in for consideration: history of interpretation, rhetorical criticism, literary structure, and overall a more rigorous examination of the social realities of the city, the Empire, and the demographics of small house churches opting out of the civic and religious mainstream. These more recent developments have reshaped the study of Philippians and guide the treatment of the letter in the new edition. 

Jeannine Brown's treatment extends to 19 columns compared to Hawthorne's 14, indicating the widening range of 21st Century biblical studies. One immediate impression in comparing the two articles is that Brown reflects the increased contemporary interest in theological interpretation. Compared with Hawthorne's treatment the theological themes she identifies are more extensive, clearly traced and give a more nuanced account of the contextual, place-specific, and rhetorical effectiveness of Paul's theological arguments in pursuit of unity in missional purpose, and communal harmony in the internal relationships at Phillippi. These are clearly connected to, and derive from, an understanding of the text as it emerges from the realities of first century Philippi. the Roman city, in which small house groups made up the local church, where questions of power and competing loyalties were causing hairline fractures that could widen into community division. 

Brown doesn't neglect questions of occasion, and the integrity of the letter as a single missive from Paul. The discussion is brought up to date to take account of new approaches and conclusions such as literary shape and structure, missional thrust, more recent work on the Christ hymn, and the underlying implications for both Christology and cruciform discipleship. Such themes as christology, eschatology, friendship, communal discernment, unity and resilience in suffering, are traced and examined in this urgently written letter.

These matters are mostly mentioned in Hawthorne as well, but Brown has more rigorously tied them to text and context. The new article expounds more effectively the rhetorical how, the theological what, and the pastoral why behind what Paul wrote to this particular church, at this critical stage of its development, reconstructing the existing and hoped for relationships of the church in Philippi to him – and to each other.

Looking over the two bibliographies demonstrates the progress made in 30 years of scholarship on Paul's letter of pastoral concern to the house church believers in Philippi. For example, in 2001 a key monograph was published by Peter Oakes, Philippians. From People to Letter. Here is the first paragraph of a review of what became a model study:

In this engaging and persuasive study Oakes models a method for investigating the social make-up of early Christian communities by focus-ing his attention on the early Pauline community at Philippi. Drawing on archaeological and literary evidence, he sheds light on the diverse range of people within the community while showing that Paul’s letter to the Philippians is a call for unity in the face of economic suffering.¹

Then there is the amount of recent work on Philippians 2.6-11, the Christ-hymn. Several names indicate the energy and range of those who continue to mine this text for its meaning and purpose in Philippians. Richard Bauckham's work on Paul's Christology of divine identity, along with the late Larry Hurtado, has opened up further seams of theological interpretation. The late Ralph Martin's edited collection of essays on the Christ-hymn has the telling title, Where Christology Began (1998).  Michael Gorman's work on Paul's cruciform theology of discipleship and missional practice is also deeply indebted to Philippians 2.6-11, a text he has explored in several publications, most exactly in his monograph Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification and Theosis in Paul's Narrative Soteriology. (2009)  In Brown's thought and writing on Philippians, you can detect the fingerprints from each of these contributions, and from the latest research and commentaries.

Finally the list of subjects cross referenced within the Dictionary at the end of each article are important sign-posts. Not everything that is significant can be included in the main article. A list of relevant associated references to articles allows a thorough engagement with the subject being pursued. For example, the cross reference to the article on Christology provides further information on Phil 2.6-11 and places it in the vaster landscape of Pauline Christological reflection ion his other letters. The theme of suffering in Paul has also been an area of recent research and a in the revised Dictionary a very full article by S F Wu reflects back on Philippians and in the wider context of Paul's life and other letters. By the way, I've read both Scot Hafemann (1993) and Siu Fung Wu (2023) on 'Suffering', and am happy to have both of them available. There are theological and pastoral implications in the human experience of suffering that are not so sensitive to changes in scholarly directions. 

In this post I've tried to compare these two Dictionaries printed a generation apart by zooming in on a single article with occasional glances aside. The overwhelming sense is that a thorough revision of the Dictionary of Paul and His Letters has been essential, and has been carried off with evident success on multiple levels. In this detailed comparison I've tried to provide a fair examination of one core sample from the overall site of Pauline excavations.²     

1. Biblical Theology Bulletin, Vol. 35. Issue 4. page 151 (Richard Ayscough) 
2. The photo of the cross was taken by my friend Graeme Clark, and shows one of the small crosses on the railings of Paisley Abbey. The photo of the cross through the trees is of King's College Aberdeen, taken by me while walking in the rain on campus in an Aberdeen summer! Please do not reproduce the photo of the cross without permission. Thank you

"Out with the old and in with the new" is a reasonable principle to uphold only if you're impatient with the past, undiscerning about what's of lasting worth, and therefore guilty of what C S Lewis dubbed 'chronological snobbery. 

This week the Second Edition of Dictionary of Paul and His Letters landed on my desk with a near onomatopoetic 'thwump'! I've had the First Edition of Dictionary of Paul and His Letters since its publication in 1993. It has been needing revision and significant updating because so much has changed in the subject field in the last 30 years, easily a generation.

Now that both sit on my desk I wish to make clear that I will keep and use both. Partly, that's due to affection and familiarity with a Dictionary I've used at least every week of those 30 years. It's also because it will continue to be a valuable source of scholarship on areas much less vulnerable to changing fashions and emphases in scholarship – and because I have an affection for that earlier generation of NT scholars – like Howard Marshall, George Beasley-Murray, F F Bruce, Jimmy Dunn, Gordon Fee, Ralph Martin, David Wright.

The new edition brings the landscape into clearer focus as older landmarks fade and new constructions appear on the scene, several of them currently dominating the foreground. That means the list of contributors in 2023 has few of the original scholars from 1993 re-contributing. After a period of 30 years many of those writing in the new volume are now established scholars, many of them in the newer fields of study. Of the three editors only Scot McKnight was an original contributor (The Collection for the Saints) – an article replaced by one newly commissioned from D J Downs whose monograph on the Collection was published in 2016. The other two editors, Lynn Cohick and Nijay Gupta are now established scholars with an extensive publishing record in NT studies.   

The 1993 edition has 1038 pages, just over 200 articles, 107 contributors of whom 7 are women, and few outside white Western academia and church. 

The 2023 edition has 1223 pages,around 210 articles, 141 contributors of whom 20 are women, with significantly more representation from beyond white Western academia and church. 

The 1993 edition lacked this front Contents List of articles, making it difficult to easily discover what has been superannuated from the 1993 edition, and what is new in the latest 2023 edition. So the addition of this list of article contents in the new edition is a big help for easy and quick reference, providing a bird's eye view of where particular . 

Thirty years is a long time in New Testament Studies and that is reflected in the thoroughly up to date bibliographies that come at the end of every article. A number of the subjects are of special interest in my own studies so I'm more familiar with the scholarship and literature behind those articles: The Prison Epistles, "In Christ" and participation, the fundamental importance of the three virtues of faith, hope and love, Pauline christology, biblical models of prayer, and for obvious reasons Paul as preacher and Paul as pastor.

In each of these the bibliography reflects current scholarship without neglecting important classic items, inclusions are representative of differing perspectives, and the listing gives more than adequate guidance to pursue further study in and beyond the topic.

The overall style retains the original format of a substantial main article, list of related and relevant subjects, followed by excellent bibliography. The indices cover subjects and scripture texts – as an aside by far the longest lists of entries are from Exodus and Isaiah, perhaps reflecting the volume of scholarship around Paul's constructive and narrative use of the Old Testament in building the theological framework for his understanding of the church and its mission to the world. These indices help navigate around the various articles that deal with a particular text or sub-theme.

The new Dictionary happily retains the user-friendly format, the comprehensive coverage, up to date scholarship and high quality of writing we got used to in the earlier edition. The physical heft and durability of the volumes is important in a heavy use reference book. Here too comparisons are favourable. I personally miss the dust-cover in the British edition, but I can also understand that on a quality bound hardcover destined for heavy use a dust-cover wears and becomes as much a nuisance as a useful feature. Overall the quality of production seems high quality and built to last – ask me if I;m right in 30 years! 

In my next post I'll compare and comment on several of the main articles. 

Yesterday I was down at the University meeting up with a couple of folk, but mainly spending time on Floor Seven. Just to be clear, Floor Seven is on the top of the building – the floor numbering excludes a couple of floors for ground, basement and and administration level. 

If you've been around this blog any time at all you'll know I love this building. It's one of my happy places; a large tinted glass hub of knowledge and information, two of the basic ingredients of understanding and wisdom. The building wouldn't be out of place as the corporate headquarters of some high flying business in the financial sector of a city. That seems entirely congruous.

Inside this building there are books and journals, computers and desks, seminar rooms and a cafe, and people whose profession and expertise is knowledge and where to find it. Floor Seven, the capitalisation isn't a typo, it's a place name in my inner geography. Here there are hundreds of yards of shelves with theology and philosophy. When it comes to wealth, power, status, and making a human difference, education is ahead of finance, and the business of learning towards wisdom is one that should have secured investment towards the future.

Walking along the narrow pathways of Old Aberdeen, at eye level, is this beautiful wall-flower. They populate the cracks and seem to thrive on very little by way of care and nurture from any gardener.

The contrast between this resilient and clever flower and the spectacular glass cube visible over the wall I find agreeably disconcerting. Because as well as contrast there is connection. Whatever else we use our knowledge for, the care and curation of the world around us is, or should be, an undisputed priority. 

You can see where this is going can't you? That glance at the flower, eye-catching at eye-level, and behind it the shining glass cube, triggered the memory of Tennyson's lines:

  Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is. 

Yesterday I met with a couple of friends, I enjoyed a coffee in the library browsing in the book I had bought in Blackwell's, then a couple of hours well spent amongst the Journals coming away with a number of noted clues to follow up, a visit to our only second-hand bookshop whose proprietors are our friends, and on the way there about five feet from the ground (I know this because that's eye-level for me), a wall populated with flowers, for all the world growing out of the stone. 

There are times when it pays to pay attention. To enjoy the conversation; to savour the coffee; to make time to learn new things; to wonder at the beauty waving at us before our eyes; to wonder at the amazing ordinary that is everyday life. 

A final thought, well a complaint really – despite the fame of Tennyson's lines, they read today as a graphic illustration of how the Victorians, with all their cleverness and pursuit of knowledge and curiosity about how to subdue the world to human will, gave little thought to what was destroyed in the pursuit of wealth, business, power and status – Tennyson destroyed the flower to ask his question. 

The photo of pine cones was taken three years ago, on one of our allowed walks during the Covid lockdown.

I posted it on Facebook with this Haiku, whose sentiments still hold, more than ever. 

Whimsical Haiku
Acknowledge beauty,
and pay attention to seeds
which hold the future.

The last words of a book I've always found fascinating. More so if it's a theology book and the final few sentences gather up what has been argued and explained. Even more so if it's a book about Jesus, and those last sentences are effectively a confession by the author about what they really think of Jesus.

The other day I finished again a book I first read in College in 1975; The Person of Christ in New Testament Teaching, by Vincent Taylor. In the Preface he describes it as the culmination of a seven year series of lectures which had resulted in the trilogy The Names of Jesus, The Life and Ministry of Jesus, and now this final volume on Christology, The Person of Christ. 

Taylor was a first rate Methodist scholar, author of the most thorough commentary on the Gospel According to Mark, and had previously written extensively on the work of Christ in an earlier trilogy: Jesus and His Sacrifice, The Atonement in New Testament Teaching, and Forgiveness and Reconciliation. This culminating volume on Christology came near the end of his intellectual and theological journey, and it has the ring of mature scholarship, patiently argued, but with an inner impetus of spiritual engagement.

Objective biblical and theological scholarship needn't lack an affective responsiveness and it is that personal experience of the Christian scholar that brings to a satisfying close Taylor's long record of explorations into the central mystery of Christian faith, the person and work of Jesus Christ.

These closing words are both scholarly summary and personal testimony:

In addition to the study of New Testament teaching a personal response to the revelation [of Christ] is necessary. The encounter is a challenge to faith. Faith alone knows who Jesus is. 

This demand for faith is wrongly conceived if we imagine that we can short circuit the issue by neglecting the study of Scripture and the fellowship of the Church, for while God speaks to us directly by His Spirit, He speaks also through His Word and through the life of the Christian community. Faith is the response to this threefold witness. Only when this response is made do we learn the truth of the words addressed to Thomas, 'Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed'. 

Then only do we cry, 'My Lord and my God.'

The Person of Christ in New Testament Teaching, Vincent Taylor, (London: MacMillan, 1963) p.306 

In a recent book on significant studies of the Apostle, Paul Ben Witherington reiterates the complaint "there's an appalling amount of Paul in the New Testament." He is also referring to the "appalling amount" of commentaries and monographs, articles and essays pouring from scholars year on year and decade after decade. Voices and Views on Paul is the sequel to The Paul Quest, a book Witherington wrote in 1998, and still an excellent survey of scholarship on Paul up to that date. 

The new book co-authored with Jason Myers, deals with some of the most important developments in our understanding of Paul and includes interaction with some of the towering Pauline scholars – E P Sanders, J D G Dunn, N T Wright, Beverley Gaventa, J L Martyn, Douglas Campbell and John G Barclay are amongst the most influential Pauline scholars of the last four decades. Witherington's book is an exposition of their ideas, with some searching critique and helpful comparative comments on the different approaches taken to the same corpus of biblical text. 

But apart from commending both of Witherington's books for their usefulness in orienting us to where we are in the study of Paul's theology and ideas, I mention it for a more personal reason. My long engagement with Paul's letters has included regular reading through the whole 13 letter corpus of the letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament. It works like this.  

Alongside other ways of reading the Bible, for years now I've used a couple of my own reading plans when I want to immerse myself in one section of the Scriptures. It wouldn't work for everyone, but it helps me, and gives discipline and focus to my reading, and if recent research is half-way accurate, might help keep my neural connections sparking!

Years ago I made out a daily reading plan for the Gospels and Psalms, and another for the Letters of Paul which I've used now for a number of years. Each can be completed over three months. As a way of becoming familiar with the texts the process is slow and the benefits cumulative over time.

Like most exercise regimes, regular and repeated circuits have long term positive effects. C H Spurgeon once said he soaked himself in the text until his blood became bibline! I think he meant something like this slow accumulation of text and response, the transformative effects of regular exposure to the good news of God's reconciling love refracted through the lens of his flawed and often vulnerable apostle, and written with hopeful passion and reckless trust in the One whose love was even more reckless in its self-expenditure and hazarding all in obedience to the Father.

What is everywhere evident in the writing of the scholars mentioned above is these scholars' own deep engagement with and detailed familiarity with the biblical text, and Paul in particular. Taken together, they are amongst the most productive, provocative and informative group of scholars writing on any genre or section of the biblical canon. Reading them is helped by having more than a passing acquaintance with what Paul actually wrote, to whom, and for what reasons. 

This photo shows the reading plan for the Letters of Paul, but the format works for any set of biblical texts.Tomorrow I launch once again into 2 Corinthians, containing some of Paul's most outspoken, self-revealing writing, some of his most profound theology, and some of the best rhetorical writing on Christians giving money to the work of Christ's reconciling mission.

If you can read chapters 8 and 9 and keep your bank card in protective custody, then you're missing the heart of the Gospel.

If you can read Paul's catalogue of hardships and not realise how easy we have it as Christians today, then perhaps we need personal seminars on sacrifice.

If you can read chapter 5 and not have a deeper sense every time you read it, of the anguish and glory of the Cross, and of the Christian imperative to be ambassadors of Christ and ministers of reconciliation, then somewhere along the line you have missed the whole point of "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself." 

And that's just one of Paul's letters.

(Here is a photo of what I use for reading the letters of Paul. Click on the photo to enlarge it to make it more legible.)

The image is designed around the Revelations of Divine Love, by Julian of Norwich; in particular her vision of 'the little thing, the size of a hazelnut'. Here is the passage:

“And in this he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’

I marvelled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.

In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”

Of course Julian is best known for her theology of hope, in words that have become so popular they are in danger of becoming a cliche: "And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." But that theological hopefulness was never for Julian a misleading optimism about the reality of evil; nor was it some form of denial of the realities of human experiences of darkness, such as grief, suffering, loneliness, guilt, fear, and encroaching despair at the brokenness of the world. 

That future orientation towards a renewed creation in which all would be made well, was imagined and energised in a soul that had pondered for years on her visions of the Divine Love, which poured from the wounds of the crucified Christ. Julian's interpretation of the hazelnut, which to her seemed so vulnerable, precarious and fragile and with what seemed a tenuous hold on existence, took its form and confidence from her growing conviction of the eternal Love which creates, sustains and brings to purposed fulfilment all that God has made.

The tapestry images play with images of hazelnut, our planet and the ever expanding realities of "all that is made". The size of the hazelnut, the earth and the sun is the same, because in the Love of God significance is not in size or importance, but in the relationship of Creator to creation.

The work grew out of the text above, and was enriched over the months by regular reading of The Revelations. The eventual pattern evolved, and the lines and colours were trial and error, and occasionally I unpicked some parts which didn't work, seemed wrong, and needed to be reworked. As to the overall concept, one friend captured much of what was being attempted when she wrote, in response to the finished work, "the fluidity of line and shape feel right for Julian, who is never a straight edge person."

The decision to make the earth the same size as the hazelnut, and to frame them separately within the landscape, was made early on. I was playing with the idea of  her hand-held hazelnut, "round as any ball", and the round earth, indeed all that exists, being held in the hand of the Creator. The sun is the same size and the light emanates to the farthest reaches; it also shines brightest behind the hazelnut – a theme important in my own theology, "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not."

The blue ribbon has several layers of significance. Julian makes much of Mary, as one who brings together the humanity and divinity of Jesus; and her colour is blue. Across the landscape of "all that is" flows "the river of the waters of life", the life-giving energy of the God who will make all things well. In Medieval iconography blue is the colour of divine majesty, and in the crucified Christ majesty and meekness coalesce in the redemptive love that is revealed to Julian. That majestic love is edged in red, a colour that signifies sacrifice. 

Each will find their own meanings within the work. It's hard for me as the artist to reduce to words and explanation what is a work of creative and visual exegesis, using colours, techniques, materials and stitches which are both deeply personal choice, and creatively purposeful improvisation. It is a prayer in stitches, an exegesis in colour and form, a tapestry of a text in which theological truth, mystical vision and spiritual experience distil into Revelations of Divine Love. 

But one further thought. Julian has no interest in speculative mysticism cut loose from Christian orthodox doctrine. Oh yes, she pushes the boundaries to their limits, but when she writes of the love of God, her ideas are deeply embedded in orthodox Christology, coloured through and through by a richly embroidered atonement theology. Themes of creation, fall and redemption are woven throughout her work, and the central image of the Cross and the crucified Christ constrain her theological speculations, and results in a mind that is restlessly curious, yet patiently contemplative, and therefore produces a work that did not fit existing categories of ecclesial teaching.

Julian's Revelations are at one and the same time, securely orthodox but with deep and well nourished roots capable of subverting the foundations of some of those fixed boundaries; not to diminish the Gospel, but to expand understanding of inexhaustible truth. Some of that creative subversion may also be hinted at in the finished tapestry. 

Aberdeenshire is a very large shire. A run in the car the other day was a round journey of around 100 miles, and we never came near crossing into any of the neighbouring local authorities. Given its size Aberdeenshire presents itself in so many different landscapes – sea and coast, mountain and glen, arable, cow and sheep farming, forest and moor.

Running throughout the shire is a network of minor roads and single tracks with passing places. It really is possible to travel miles and miles on these traffic capillaries and not encounter anyone else – well apart from the occasional tractor. Our own meanderings took us into Glenbuchat, a place that used to be a hidden hamlet known only to those who had their annual holiday in one of the under developed cottages scattered along the way. Now most of those cottages are gone, mainly because they are now overdeveloped second homes or holiday lets.

Still, so long as there is still life in the glen, and the occasional visitor can still enjoy a landscape more or less maintained and retaining its character as rural agricultural Aberdeenshire, there's little reason to be anxious about the continuing joy to be found in those hidden places of solace and silence. And there, up one of the lesser used single track dead-ends, is the Old Kirk of Glenbuchat.

I've often wondered if old places of worship retain the vibrations of previous prayers and praise within the ancient stones of a sacred space. The Precentor's tuning fork is still there, a reminder of a past community in which singing of the Psalms was as necessary to the soul, as ploughing and farming the soil to keep it fertile.

This parish and church was born in the late 1400s after a tragedy, when some of those coming to worship were drowned crossing the River Don. It has twice been rebuilt in 1629 and again in 1792. Now it has an annual communion service on the third Sunday of August, a tradition now centuries old. 

The photograph shows a church enclosed within a graveyard. In taking it I was aware of the long slow decline in the numbers of those for whom church retains any significance or even relevance for human life and flourishing. The communion of saints is made up of the gathered company of Christian believers throughout the world and across the centuries. An isolated Kirk, in a Highland glen, where worship has all but ceased after more than five centuries, could be reason to sigh in sad resignation, and hard to resist nostalgia for what has been lost.

But as I stood there, trying to align my own faith with those for whom this was the place of worship, communion and prayer, I prayed a prayer of both relinquishment and hope. To relinquish the past is not to invalidate or devalue it; but to surrender it to the providence of God. Hope is to go on asking, "So what is the form and mission of the church in our own times, and how do we till the soil of our own souls so that we too are fertile with ideas, and fruitful in our living of the Gospel of Jesus?"

T S Eliot had it right about the church. For all our human strategies and anxieties, ultimately the church as the Body and presence of the risen Christ, as the community of the Kingdom of God, lives and moves and has its being in the grace and mercy of God. T S Eliot had it right about the church in the flux and furores of human history:

There shall always be the Church and the World
And the heart of Man
Shivering and fluttering between them, choosing and chosen,
Valiant, ignoble, dark and full of light
Swinging between Hell Gate and Heaven Gate.
And the Gates of Hell shall not prevail.

Or to put it in the language of the church in much more militant mood:

The Church's one foundation
is Jesus Christ, her Lord;
she is his new creation
by water and the Word.
From heav'n he came and sought her
to be his holy bride;
with his own blood he bought her,
and for her life he died.

Elect from ev'ry nation,
yet one o'er all the earth;
her charter of salvation:
one Lord, one faith, one birth.
One holy name she blesses,
partakes one holy food,
and to one hope she presses,
with ev'ry grace endued.

Relinquishment then, of what is past. Hope as we live in our own time. But relinquishment must include gratitude for faithful worship and practice of the way of Christ, and repentance for failures in such faithfulness. And hope when it is rooted in the grace of God, becomes hope which is imaginative, creative and energised by love for Christ, and keeping in step with the Spirit hope with a vision of human community towards which we work with humility, welcome, generosity, and joy.