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Now and again I find something in the Oxfam bookshop that requires to be bought! In the years I've been going there I've bought a first edition Pieta, by the poet R S Thomas, since passed on to another of his devoted readers. The days of such finds are rare now, but when it happens it's hard not to feel 'It was meant!'

Last year one of my College teachers died. We had been good friends all those years, and in recent years lived near enough each other to be able to meet and enjoy many a conversation about history, theology, poetry and a whole lot more. 

A couple of years ago I knew from one of our conversations that he was enthused about a hard to get book, and ridiculously expensive new. It turned up in the Oxfam shop, seriously reduced and I bought it and gave it to him. Such exchanges of shared enthusiasms are amongst the most cherished joys of friendships like that.

Then there was this older and much cheaper book lurking at the back. Let me introduce it. In the months leading up to the Second World War, Archbishop William Temple wrote one of the classic interpretations of the Gospel of John, modestly titled, Readings in John's Gospel. For £1, I replaced the volume I used to have years ago, a chunky well produced paperback by MacMillan Publishers, which I had also given to a friend who liked it so much it became a gift.

The book is dated, the language identifiably mid-twentieth Century and the voice that of an Anglican Archbishop, doing his best to be accessible without short-changing one of the most profound writings in world literature. He succeeded admirably. At least I think so. 

A book by an Anglican Archbishop 90 years on. Dated? Predating serial revolutions in Johannine scholarship? No matter. This is a study of the Fourth Gospel by a scholar who unhesitatingly confesses himself, to borrow Jesus words, "a disciple in the kingdom of heaven…like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.”

This is my second time working through this old, dated gem of a book, whose author's main purpose was always to provide spiritual nourishment and food for thought for those hungry for truth, and thirsting for a refreshment of faith.

By the way, the top photo is from a recent visit to the philosophy section of our Oxfam Book Shop. I'm intrigued and smilingly approving of their catalogue system. Those who know anything about philosophy know that Immanuel Kant is "the big yin".

Not this time! Our national treasure of a comedian, Billy Connolly, known as "The Big Yin" sits there in all the brash colours that have been his trademark self-announcement. And it may well be that there is as much guidance on how to live live well in the thoughts of the Clydeside comedian, as there is in the metaphysical machinations of the sage of Königsberg!

The Big Preachers

Of atoms were ignorant and molecules;

but thundered verbally from their high

pulpits, training captains pacing

their unstable bridges and warning always

of the wreck of the soul. No scientist

had their renown; the invisible

was undiscovered. What was made

plain by the lightning flash

of their faces was the Creator’s

inimitable purpose. And the people hungered

for more, exposing themselves Sunday

by Sunday to that tempestuous

weather, sharpening their appetite

thereby. You have heard the story

of the visiting preacher’s drawing

of a pretended bow, and how they parted

for the shaft to go by? Those

were the imagination’s heydays

and will not return. Being too thick

to give ground, we take our stand

now on the facts, and the facts

must do for us, a multitude at a time.

R.S. Thomas, Uncollected Poems, (eds.) T Brown and J W Davies, 2013, (page 120)

The title runs straight into the poem. The poet is a preacher himself, but not a big preacher. Some time in the past, within living memory, the big name preachers of Welsh Nonconformity, the revivalists, evangelists and revered expositors of the faith, showed a dismissiveness of new scientific knowledge. Not because they had understood it and answered its claims, but because they were ignorant, perhaps even culpably uninformed about developments in human knowledge, the new physics, the discoveries about how life is formed and matter is constructed. And consequently unperturbed by the implications of such new knowledge on the old faith.

Instead they perform like captains of a ship in trouble, "verbally thundering" from the bridge about the dangers of the storm and the risk of shipwreck for the soul. "No scientist had their renown;/the invisible was undiscovered." In this world of restricted intellect and spiritual excitement, there was neither time nor interest in the "invisible undiscovered", no curiosity about the how of creation, no interest in the inconvenient verging on blasphemous facts, that might dare question "the Creator's inimitable purpose."

Thomas was a pastor, a poet and a Christian with all the desperate questioning of Jacob wrestling through the dark night with an angel of the Lord, wanting to know who He was. Thomas's antipathy to technological control, and his suspicions about the machinery that served human greed for possession and lust for power, arose in part from his being convinced of science as a form of knowledge which challenged religious truth, however zealously proclaimed. 

The image of thunder and lightning gives the big preacher's words an ominous sound; the lit up faces of the people suggests illumination, their seeing of truth only in the preacher's words, and they love it, lap it up, and hunger for more; and all the time, no scientist has their renown, they are ignorant of atoms and molecules. They love this tempestuous weather, the themes of judgement and shipwreck and last minute redemption; but are unconcerned about the other world, the real world, of reason, fact, experiment and proof. 

The story of the preacher's pretended bent bow, and the impact of an imaginary arrow parting the congregation so sure that what is preached is real, exposes the disenchantment about to be told. "Those were the imagination's heydays / and will not return." The old revivals with their fire and rhetoric, verbal thundering and words hurled by tempestuous weather; they are over. That was then, and this is now.

The last four lines are after the storm, and into a chastened silence come words that acknowledge the triumph of science as the primary epistemology of the contemporary world. I'm not entirely sure what Thomas means when he says the people "are too thick to give ground." Thick, as in slow to understand, perhaps even lacking capacity to have seen all this coming? Careless, perhaps, in not taking time to adjust and expand the parameters of faith and science, and seeking mutual enrichment. Instead, they embrace the default negative options of either a fixed reciprocal hostility, or a truce with the protagonists now separated by a Berlin wall of indifference, making impossible any rapprochement of religion and science.

Facts. Atoms and molecules. Science and scientists renowned. No more verbal thundering. No longer the heydays of imagination. The day of the big visiting preacher with his pretended bow has gone, is finished The invisible has been discovered, and it has less need of God.

Being too thick

to give ground, we take our stand

now on the facts, and the facts

must do for us, a multitude at a time.

The age of science and technology, of new discovery and accumulating knowledge, of human understanding and knowledge based on autonomous reason and observed reality; facts. The last line is ambiguous, and may have an underlying admission that many of the claims at the heart of Christian faith may not stand up to the scrutiny of autonomous reason, and scientific facts. "Facts / must do for us, a multitude at a time." Faith could be overwhelmed by facts, by observed realities from atoms, to molecules, to matter, to a whole physical universe and its exploration and explanation in terms of science, not religion, of facts not faith, of human reason not God.

And so if "we take our stand now on facts, / the facts must do for us, a multitude at a time", we may be standing on that which cannot bear the weight of the asserted facts of Christian faith. Such credal truths as incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and the reality of God as revealed in those central claims of Christian faith, may not survive facts coming at them "a multitude at a time." 

This is a courageous poem, honest about the religious history of Wales as it was in centuries past and in the more recent past of revivals and controversy over biblical truth, the decline of Nonconformity and its chapels, and unsettling scientific discoveries. Thomas writes with open-eyed realism about the 'now' world, and the changed ways of seeing, understanding and exploiting the world. I'm left wondering if Thomas is arguing (like Barth) that apologetics that seek to argue against the scientific world view, are doomed to failure – if Christians do that, "the facts must do for us, a multitude at a time."

On the other hand, if we are willing to enter into dialogue and live with scientific facts, however inconvenient; if we acknowledge and affirm that though some of the central claims of Christian faith are not verifiable facts, they are nevertheless true in ways beyond empirical laboratory observation. If we can do that, it is possible that facts will do for us, we can live with them, in that more secular world of science where faith relinquishes its stranglehold on all truth. 

In reading Thomas, it is important to give full weight to the tensions and frustrations of this pastor of ordinary folk, trying to preach a gospel that is true and relevant to their struggles, all the while being careful not to claim more than he knew to be true. But what truth? Who's truth? And how does he know? Fact and faith are not opposites; each are ways of knowing, statements of truth, convictions based on lived experience. Thomas, who never aspired to be a 'big preacher', is not ignorant of atoms and molecules. In his pulpit he stands in that liminal space where faith is humble enough to be questioned, and he hopes science is wise enough to acknowledge it doesn't have all the answers to questions only a human can ask. 

The poem was written in 1983. One wonders what Thomas would have made twenty years later in 2003, when the human genome mapping was completed. Perhaps a poem on such an event would have the same ending: "the facts / must do for us, a multitude at a time." 

The world is going through great changes. Much we took for granted is being destabilised. We are living through another age of anxiety, and with good reason. One way to regain a faith perspective is to read the Psalms. Many of them were written in times of chaos, fear and national crisis.

Psalm 97 starts with an affirmation deep rooted in confidence and trust – and perhaps a defiant hopefulness when everyone else is tempted to gloom and doom. "The Lord reigns!"

Monday

Psalm 97.1 “The Lord reigns, let the earth be glad, let the distant shores rejoice.”

Who’s in charge of the world these days, or any day? Nations, governments, vast business and finance corporations, and media and social media empires seem to think they are. Not so says God’s poet. The Lord reigns – behind the machinations and power games, God is working out his purposes. “This earth belongs to God, the world its wealth and all its peoples.” Let the earth be glad – including you!  

Tuesday

Psalm 97.2 “The Lord reigns…Clouds and thick darkness surround him; righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.”

The God we pray to, worship and serve, is full of mystery and beyond our understanding. The fear of the Lord isn’t being scared of God – we worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. The holy God who reigns cares about doing right, and making justice happen. These are the foundations of God’s throne; not profit, not power, but earth and its distant shores rejoicing in justice, mercy and compassion.

Wednesday 

Psalm 97.4- 6 “The Lord reigns…His lightning lights up the world; the earth sees and trembles. The mountains melt like wax before the Lord, before the Lord of all the earth. The heavens proclaim his righteousness, and all peoples see his glory.

God is Light. Nothing is hidden from God. There is no place so dark God cannot find us. “Even the darkness is daylight to you O God.” However dark life may seem to us, whatever shadows hang over us, God knows and is with us. The million volt lightning that can melt mountains comes to us in the presence of Emmanuel. Jesus is the light of the world, the light of the nations, the glory of God, the Light of God’s love.

Thursday

Psalm 97.7 “The Lord reigns…All who worship images are put to shame, those who boast in idols – worship Him all you gods!”

The Lord reigns – not governments; not banks; not big business; not celebrities and influencers; not right wing or left wing political ideologies. All of these are human ways of power, attempts to be big name lords of the earth. And when they are made the biggest thing in life they are idols. God’s poet is having none of it! Images and idols are pure embarrassment. “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.” 1 Cor 1.31.

Friday

Psalm 97.8-9 “The Lord reigns…Zion hears and rejoices and the villages of Judah are glad because of your judgments, Lord. For you, Lord, are the Most High over all the earth; you are exalted far above all gods.”

My guess is God’s poet would have composed some brilliant terrace songs for his team’s supporters! He knows how to get the support singing, whether home or away – and part of that is to make fun of the opposition supporters and their team. This psalm is full of gladness, rejoicing and feel-good phrases. These supporters have no doubt they’re in the winning team. God’s judgments, tactics, motivation, and team talks will make them winners. And the team slogan? “The Lord reigns!”

Saturday

Psalm 97.10 “The Lord reigns…Let those who love the Lord hate evil, for He guards the lives of his faithful ones and delivers them from the hand of the wicked.”

Justice and righteousness are the foundation stones of God’s throne. So those who worship God can’t live a contradiction. If you love justice and righteousness, then you hate evil. Simple as that – well, but it’s much more complicated in a world as complex as it is today. Still. God guards our lives, so we pray God will guide our choices and decisions. Politicians often reduce the moral currency of phrases because their actions contradict what is claimed. “That is why we are doing the right thing”, is one such phrase. Make it a prayer, “Lord help me to hate evil, and to do the right thing.”

Sunday

Psalm 97.11-12 “The Lord reigns…Light shines on the righteous and joy on the upright in heart.  Rejoice in the Lord, you who are righteous, and praise his holy name.”

God’s poet in nearly every psalm uses parallelism. He says the same thing twice in words that are different but similar. He does this for emphases, to get important truths into our sometimes thick heads! The light that lights up the world (v 4) shines on the righteous; and not only light, but joy shines on the upright of heart. Not only shine, Jesus shine; but “Lord shine on me – and through me!”

So the Psalms can become our prayers, and a way of strengthening our faith by reminding us of who God is, and what God is about. Sometimes faith is a mixture of defiance and trust, a combination of wisdom and hope, and a call to faithfulness and witness – “The Lord reigns!” 

Since my days as a young boy, walking the banks of the Nith in south Ayrshire, I've been fascinated by swans. To the child I was, swans were huge fabulous creatures. The first times I heard the whoosh of their wings as they took off, and flew overhead, I was in awe of their combination of beauty and power. Where we walk these days, there's a pair of resident wild swans. Occasionally they come over, keeping their distance, and perform what I can only call water ballet, graceful slow movement, effortless gliding, posture and head held just so.

As a theologian I have happily lived with the belief that beauty is its own argument for creative purpose, however conceived and expounded. I have little interest in an analysis of the concept of beauty when I stand beside a lochan and watch a swan embodying that elusive and very thing, beauty.

At least one starting point of reflection would be what any of us might make of the urgency and the urge to "Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness." A white swan, against dark water, in winter sunlight, makes a deep impression on the heart, so that I could as easily describe it as the holiness of beauty. Because those moments of aesthetic joy are their own form of inarticulate prayer, that need no words but simply turns us inside out in an embrace of a world where such moments happen, as pure gift and unexpected joy.

Keats' famous line, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," has its own truth, but that first moment of beauty perceived rebukes our emotional complacency and awakens in us a new hopefulness for a wounded world. To that extent, that first moment of perception, beauty can be the subtle call of God, a nudge towards looking for and living into the beauty of the world. 

But Keats is right. Beauty leaves a lingering legacy, a gift both of memory and the transformative impact of that moment when beauty ambushes us.

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing."

Some time in my fifties I discovered the poetry of Mary Oliver. She is a poet of nature, of the world around her. Many of her poems are about birds, which makes much of her poetry a form of literary ornithology.

Her descriptions are both observation of what the eyes see, and inner perception of what the heart feels. What the eyes see, the mind and heart consider, knowing this is a transformative moment of encounter with a hummingbird, an egret, a robin, wild geese, – or a swan.

In her poem, 'The Swan', Oliver laces together metaphors in an attempt to describe what is seen when a swan takes off, rises, and slowly recedes upwards and away. Only at the end of the poem does she raise the question that I think is a rhetorical question expecting the answer, "No. Not really."

The first line asks the only important question when beauty presents itself to us. "Did you see it?" From then on the whole poem is a series of questions, asked with the enthusiasm and persistence of one who has been captivated and needs to share the gift. She knows that beauty has the power to weave bonds out of shared experiences, gifts to us transcendent moments that transform the way we see the world, and each other. And that last line, with its interrogative mood, requiring of us an accountability before beauty; that question, and its answer, takes us back to the biblical command and invitation, "Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness."

                                               SWAN 

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life? 

 

In his classic study of the Hebrew Prophets, Abraham Joshua Heschel deals with Jonah in less than two pages. But they are a clear lens through which to read the story of Jonah. His comments occur in his analysis of divine anger, (pp. 279-298) and in particular the contrast between God's anger which is but for a moment, and God's love which is from everlasting to everlasting. 

Here are several passages from Heschel which shed important rays of theological illumination on the dilemma of Jonah as he encounters the God who loves in freedom. The man who wrote this book, and this chapter on divine wrath, himself fled Nazi Germany, lost many of his family in the Holocaust, walked with Martin Luther King, and became an incendiary prophet whose outspokenness and passion for truth at times seemed to channel Amos, Micah, Isaiah and Jeremiah. No wonder his book is a classic treatment of those prophets whose words were as fire in their bones, and who heard the word of the Lord and could not be silent. 

"This is the mysterious paradox of Hebrew faith: The All-Wise and Almighty may change a word that he proclaims. Man has the power to modify his design. Jeremiah had to be taught that God is greater than his decisions. The anger of the Lord is instrumental, hypothetical, conditional and subject to His will. Let the people modify their line of conduct and anger will disappear. Far from being an expression of 'petulant vindictiveness,' the message of anger includes a call to return and to be saved. The call of anger is a call to cancel anger. It is not an expression of irrational, sudden and instinctive excitement. , but a free and deliberate reaction of God's justice to what is wrong and evil. For all its intensity it may be averted by prayer. There is no divine anger for anger's sake. Its meaning is…instrumental:: to bring about repentance its purpose and consummation is its own disappearance." (Page 286)

"The contingency of anger is dramatized in the story of the prophet Jonah…God's change of mind displeased Jonah exceedingly. He had proclaimed the doom of Nineveh with a certainty, to the point of fixing the time, as an inexorable decree without qualification. But what transpired only proved the word of God was neither firm nor reliable…God's answer to Jonah stressing the supremacy of compassion, upsets the possibility of looking for a rational coherence of God's ways with the world. History would be more intelligible if God's word were the last word, final and unambiguous like a dogma or an unconditional decree. It would be easier if God's anger became effectively automatically: once wickedness had reached its full measure, punishment would destroy it. Yet, beyond justice and anger lies the mystery of compassion." (Page 286-7)

"God's anger is not a fundamental attribute, but a transient and reactive condition. It is a means of achieving 'the intents of His mind'. Inscrutable though it seems to the people in the end of days they will understand it clearly (Jer. 23.20)…The ancient conception that the gods are spiteful seems to linger on in the mind of modern man, and inevitably the words of the Hebrerw Bible are seen in the image of this conception. In gods who are spiteful, anger is a habit or a disposition. The prophets never speak of an angry God as if anger were his disposition. Even those who dwell more on His anger than on his mercy explicitly or implicitly accentuate the contrast. His anger passes, His love goers on for ever. "I have loved you with an everlasting love." (Jer. 31.3) Again and again we are told that God's love or kindness (hesed) goes on forever; we are never told that his anger goes on forever." (Page 288-9)

This is not Heschel going soft on justice, holiness and God's righteous anger. The entire discussion of anger is theologically charged by Heschel's conception of God as righteous love, patient mercy, and slowness to anger, but whose anger is the divine recoil from evil.

"No single attribute can convey the nature of God's relationship to man. Since justice is His nature, love, which would disregard the evil deeds of man, would contradict his nature. Because of His concern for man, His justice is tempered with mercy. Divine anger is not the antithesis of love, but its counterpart, a help to justice as demanded by true love. The end of sentimentality is the enfeeblement of truth and justice. It is divine anger that gives strength to God's truth and justice. There are moments in history when anger alone can conquer evil. It is after mildness and kindness have failed that anger is proclaimed." (Page 297) 

 

Apparently Erasmus wasn't kidding when he wrote, 'When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes'. I'm not quite as book mad as that, but on occasion I have been known to buy an expensive book.

In June 1991 a book was announced that at the time seemed, and was, an eye-watering price. This was before online comparisons and discounts. Understanding the Fourth Gospel by John Ashton was the first major survey and analysis of Johannine scholarship from Bultmann onwards. Published by Oxford University Press it was beautifully produced in hardback, at 600 pages, by a publishing house who produced amongst the finest examples of book-building and book-binding of volumes intended never to wear out. In 1991 it cost £65, today the equivalent of £177.

I ordered it and turned up at Blackwell's in Old Aberdeen with book tokens and a late birthday present, and came away happier than I ever did driving away a new car. So, yes, Erasmus wasn't far wrong about how priorities are quickly reshuffled when books enter the equation! (The current price of the extensively revised second edition from the publisher is £162, with a softcover at £37.99). For the avoidance of doubt, I would have bought the softcover if there had been one!

At College in the 1970's I worked through the Greek text of John's gospel under the guidance of R.E.O White, whose love of the Greek Testament was such that more than once he was accosted on the bus by someone reading over his shoulder and asking him what he was reading. He was never sure how far his enthusiasm for the Greek New Testament rubbed off on the enquirers. But it rubbed off on me. He passed that love of the NT text on to many of his students, myself included. I was captivated by his close exegesis and the wide range of secondary voices he introduced. Ever since I've tried to keep up with scholarly study of the Fourth Gospel, and that as a means to the end of preaching it well, and allowing it to be formative in my own spiritual life and practice. 

John Ashton's book found its place alongside Raymond Brown's 2 volume masterpiece in the Anchor Commentary; the three volume Schnackenburg which remains an intimidating invitation to dive in at the deep end; and C K Barrett, the commentary we used in college. I still have it, still consult it, and no other commentary has displaced it from that special place reserved for those books that were like a mountain to climb, but the view from the top made the effort worthwhile.

Monographs have kept coming and I have a selection that has grown slowly with the years. In close second to Ashton is my copy of John A T Robinson's The Priority of John, which I read throughout Lent in 1986. Bishop John Robinson is one of my heroes. He was a careful scholar, quite prepared to swim against the stream of the 'established' consensus in New Testament scholarship. His own spirituality was warm and enquiring, his intellectual honesty and learning beyond question. He was seriously and pastorally responsive to people struggling to make sense of the whole Christian thing in a secular society driven by consumer competitiveness and cultural flux in the second half of the 20th Century. 

His book on John is a remarkable piece of argumentation, based on careful if at times eccentric detective work. The Priority of John is theologically penetrating in his opening up of the passion story in John, one of the most moving sections of the book, given that Robinson was terminally ill during the writing of it. They were intended as the Bampton Lectures but were never delivered. 

There's much more on my John shelves, and they keep coming. But these two books, by two scholars called John, on a Gospel called John, are special. They are gifts to the church, and have been gifts to me in my own attempts at deep diving into the Fourth Gospel. With apologies to Erasmus, I'm glad that when I had a little money, I was able to buy and read them, and, with thanks to God, still have enough over for food and clothes.    

"As a student of theology, no one can and should do otherwise than keep enquiring after the true gospel, even more attentively and objectively, in ever more truth and love."

Bonhoeffer was saying farewell to the theological students in Berlin when he wrote this, prior to going to London to pastor two German churches. This short address is a passionate defence of theology and theologians as a calling essential to the life and future of the Church.

There was theological error, ecclesial compromise, a contamination of motive and a failure of vocational faithfulness in the German Church as it aligned its fortunes and future with the Nazi vision. Bonhoeffer was very clear that in the face of such false theology, theological faithfulness would require outspoken witness, and the cost and sacrifice of a true discipleship.

He urged theological students to go on doing good theology, enquiring after the true gospel. The theologian is not called to ecclesial politics and tactics. "The student of theology is the last one who should be thinking tactically and instead should carry on working with purely theological objectivity, in service to God." The theologian is called neither to loud protesting arguments nor clever tactical manoeuvres in church and state. "One should in such times, err on the side of being too quiet rather than too loud. Fore the false confidence of a loud voice has nothing to do with the assurance of repentance and the gospel."

Bonhoeffer himself would go against his own advice later when he became embroiled in precisely the machinations of a church in extremis, seeking to minimise the harm being done by his country's war machine in blind devotion to an ideology of death.

"Finally, one should know as a true theologian that, even where our knowledge of the gospel of Jesus Christ in its truth and purity keep us away from false doctrines, we stand beside our brethren who have wandered and been misled, sharing their guilt, interceding and praying for them., knowing that our own life depends, not on our better knowledge of being on the right side, but on forgiveness."

This is a call to radical discipleship, a blend of peace-making, truth telling, and gospel humility, each an essential in a true theologian. Those commitments of the theologian were carried forward and given firm biblical anchorage in his later writings, especially Life Together and Discipleship.

For now I read this short address and am astonished yet again at the prescience and theological instincts of Bonhoeffer. This was spoken to students when he was 27 years old, his country descending towards immense darkness, the church divided and confused and tempted by the idols of State prestige and power, his best efforts in the Church Struggle seeming ineffective; but he recognised that the gospel would require minds committed to truth, vocations faithful in their focus on the gospel and the health of the church, and for that the church needed theologians with a passion for Jesus Christ. 

"Theological students must learn and know that the driving force in their lives and thinking, as theologians, can only come from the passion of Jesus Christ, our crucified Lord. The study of theology cannot be conquered by the overflowing vitality of one's own passions; rather the real study of theologia sacra begins when in the midst of questioning and seeking human beings encounter the cross; when they recognize the endpoint of all their passions in the suffering of God at the hands of humankind and realize that their entire vitality stands under judgment."

This is about first loyalties in Christian discipleship for theologians. Truth and Love, and both as revealed in Jesus Christ and his gospel. The encounter with the cross is not a single moment, but a whole life commitment, an alignment of life purpose and theological vocation with "the suffering of God at the hands of humankind." Theological education is not neutral, but arises out of a commitment to truth and love as revealed in the gospel. And it may be costly and demanding, but it is in the service of a God whose suffering on the cross bears witness to the love and truth of God as eternal realities that have intersected with the world at its worst as redeeming and reconciling grace.

So Bonhoeffer concludes, "One should keep on, ever more undaunted and joyfully, becoming a theologian, speaking the truth in love." (Eph. 4.15)

All quotations are from 'What Should a Student of Theology So Today?", Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Works (English Edition), London 1933-35. Vol. 12:432-435.

Monday 30 January

Ephesians 3.7 &14, 15 “I became a servant of this gospel by the gift of God’s grace given me through the working of his power…For this reason I kneel before the Father from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name.”

“For this reason I kneel…” What reason? Paul’s answer is the reason we all kneel before the Father – “the gift of God’s grace given us through the working of God’s power.” It’s a hard time to be a Christian in a world so broken. Yet by prayer and God’s grace we can have the same wide, generous, open-armed compassion for the world that brought Paul to his knees in prayer for the whole family of God, that is, every soul made in God’s image. By intercession we make ourselves conduits, sluices, through which God’s grace flows.

Tuesday 31 January

Ephesians 3.I6 “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being…”

When the problems of the world, and the worries of our own lives, and the anxiety felt by whole communities of our country – when these and much more drain us of energy, joy and hope, think of what Paul prayed for, and hear him praying it for you. Then make it your own prayer, now, here: Lord strengthen me with power through your Spirit in my inner being…”

Wednesday 01 February

Ephesians 3.17 “So that Christ may dwell in your heart through faith.”

By faith in Christ we are made one with the Saviour, drawn into the very life of God. Christ dwells in our hearts, the risen life of Christ is within us and strengthens us in our inner being. But more than that, Christ is in us and we are in Him, so that “our lives are hidden with Christ in God.” (Col 3.3) Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!

Thursday 02 February

Ephesians 3.17-18 “And I pray that you being rooted and established in love may have power together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep  is the love of Christ.”

Rooted is about being a tree with strong anchorage and full nourishment from deep roots. Established is about foundations, straight, true, sound, solid, and our foundation is the love of Christ. You can’t ever fully grasp the depth dimensions of God’s love in Christ; as well stand beneath Niagara with a bucket, or a thimble! Just stand under the deluge!

Friday 03 February

Ephesians 3.19 “And to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

To know what surpasses your knowledge, to understand the incomprehensible – that can only happen if God expands the horizons of our hearts and draws us ever more deeply into the mystery that Charles Wesley puzzled over and admitted defeat. “In vain the first-born seraph tries, to sound the depths of love divine.” We’ll never understand until we are in heaven. Till then we wonder, and worship at the one who “emptied Himself of all but love, and bled for Adam’s helpless race.” Amazing Love!

Saturday 04 February

Ephesians 3. 20 “Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us…”

I don’t know about you but I can ask a lot, and I have quite a lively imagination. But they are not enough to outdo the One who is able to do immeasurably more than anything I can think of. We aren’t asked to be followers of Jesus in our own strength. Yes, at times it’s hard going, and we pray for strength, faith, help with hard decisions, and help for those we love – Remember, “He can do immeasurable more, and his power is at work within us.” We’re not on our own. We are in Christ, and He is in us, and as our Risen Lord it is his power that’s at work within us, renewing and reviving.

Sunday 05 February

Ephesians 3.21 “To Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever.”

This whole passage is like an illuminated manuscript that places the love of God in Christ against a shining gold foil background. And that dazzling gold highlights who God is towards us; Love. Love beyond our grasp but within our reach. Love that the baffles the mind, but which the heart recognises. Love deeper than any needs we could ever have. Love beyond our imagination, but nearer than our own hearts.

So we make Paul’s prayer our own: May Christ dwell in our hearts through faith, and may we be rooted and established in love, filled to the measure of the fullness of God.