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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.

From Bleak Liturgies ¹

"Alms. Alms. By Christ's

blood I conjure you

a penny." On saints'

days the cross and

shackles were the jewellery

of the rich. As God

aged, kings laundered their feet

in the tears of the poor.

Economics eventually lead back to God. Because justice and injustice, generosity and greed, compassion and callousness, sharing and possessiveness, these and many other contrasts in the human condition are inextricably woven into the fabric of human ethics, and for people of faith, provide the texture of holiness in practical terms. Living in contemporary Western affluence there was a time, in the not too distant past, when we could say at least people didn't starve, there is a welfare safety net, that our economy budgets for the vulnerable. The days just before the advent, then the normalisation of food banks.

We believed that, at its best and with all its faults and holes in the safety net, our benefit system seeks to be all those positive things listed above; just, generous, compassionate, sharing – not in order to create dependency, patronise or undermine a person's independence, but to support and enable and empower people to participate as fully as they are able in the wider life and culture of our society.

Much has changed in the past decade or two of this new millennium, and there are multiple explanations for those changes in the ethos of our society. But whatever selected explanations satisfy us, we are still left with an increasing deficit in the social capital, and I would argue the moral vision, of a society more and more fixated on individual self-interest, national economic advantage, and tectonic shifts in the distribution of wealth as fewer and fewer have more and more. Our worldview is increasingly monoscopic, its focus on economic growth and prosperity so fiercely specific, that much else which is essential to human flourishing is deemed secondary. More significantly, these other aspects of human welfare and flourishing are often presupposed to depend upon economic prosperity, which is assumed to be morally and politically prior in demand for resources and sacrifices.

The poem above comes as the critical comment of an odd, often angular, sometimes angry Christian man who 30 years ago sensed the trends of a culture becoming more and more one in which obscene rewards are available in the cultures of celebrity, entertainment, sport, financial industries, and with their con-commitant attitudes of self-expression, self-promotion and ultimately self-manufactured individuality. It isn't a large step from such unexamined self-importance to a selfishness which is made socially acceptable and politically validated.

What I read in this poem, Bleak Liturgies is R. S. Thomas as Amos the prophet. Amos condemned those who sold the poor for the price of a pair of slippers; Thomas condemns those 'kings' who launder their feet in the tears of the poor. Both prophets are raging against the inequalities and cruelties of a society in which it is just so hard for the poor to have life chances. And both reserve their sharpest words for the rich whose opulence and extravagance in money and material things, are the distorted sacraments and physical embodiments of their greed and arrogance. Thomas makes no mention of judgement, but of course, presupposes it; while Amos lays about him with graphic threats and sarcastic images of overfed cows, ivory beds, rotting fruit baskets of wasted food. Mind you, Thomas has his own ironic edge – the cross and shackles reduced to trivia, baubles of the rich who long forgot the realities to which the symbols point.

Easter brings an end to Lent. But not the need for critical self-reflection, refreshed repentance, changed ways, renovation of our moral furniture, refurbished lifestyles more aligned with the contemporary living Christ who strode out of the tomb into the resurrection possibilities of peace, justice and hopeful actions let loose by the Resurrection.

Those two images in Thomas's poem take us back to basic realities of human life – the contrasts of those who need alms and those who give them; and the scandal of a secularised power elite, 'laundering their feet in the tears of the poor.' And if we ask where Jesus is in such a society, he is more likely to be in the food bank than the 3 Star Michelin restaurant where a meal costs more than 4 weeks benefits.

The cry of the poor in this poem invokes the most sacred of obligations – 'by Christ's blood'. Till we acknowledge the imperative of that invocation, it's doubtful if we have the slightest clue what Easter is all about, and what its consequences if we commit to living an Easter faith.² 

1. R. S. Thomas. Collected Later Poems. (Bloodaxe, 2004) p. 185.
2. I collect cruciform images. This one was taken in John Lewis's, an old repair to the floor covering, worn and scuffed by countless feet. The trampled cross is a telling image of a culture which values value for money, and confers worth mostly without reference to human value and human worth. 

'The Agonie'

Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom'd the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love.

Who would know Sinne, let him repair
Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skinne, his garments bloudie be.
Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.

Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquour sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.