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Yesterday I received a modest wee cheque, royalties for a book I wrote 27 years ago! It was a study called Evangelical Spirituality. From the Wesleys to John Stott. At the time it was an early attempt to resist the assumptions of the growing literature on spirituality that Evangelicals didn't have much of a spiritual tradition worth mentioning. "Evangelical spirituality consists of early rising, prayer and Bible reading." said the brief article in the then recently published SCM Dictionary of Christian Spirituality. That was true as far as it went, but didn't go far or deeply enough. So I wrote the book to give lived examples of a spiritual tradition that includes amongst its achievements activism in social justice, evangelistic missions at home and abroad, growing opposition to the slave trade, and a theology of spiritual experience that was dynamic, transformative and radical in its demands and promises.

It was written as an insider, one who has tried to live out my Christian life with ecumenical openness and willingness to learn from other tributaries of the Christian tradition; but as one who was himself Evangelical. The four defining characteristics as argued by David Bebbington remain deeply embedded in my own experience as a Christian: conversionism, activism, biblicism and crucicentrism. Much of the fifty years I have been an evangelical Christian I have been content to remain so defined, though I have often been critical and uncomfortable and at times embarrassed with some of the ways some forms of evangelicalism have come to express themselves.

Like many, many other evangelicals, I have had to rethink, deeply and disconcertingly, whether the term is now too compromised by its American versions to be a useful broad based descriptor of who I am in Christ. The evangelical right in the United States has created a major identity crisis, and caused fault lines and drawn red lines that may never be overcome. The politicisation of American evangelicalism and the religious Right has resulted in culture wars, internal dissension as evangelicals of right and left have chosen sides, and overt conflicted stances on key issues. One writer describes the past two decades as a time when political ideology and fundamentalist theology were put in a blender; two separate ingredients produced a new cocktail of political power, religious conviction, emotional and rational commitments, agendas driven by cultural fears and hopes, producing a religiously energised political activism.

Many evangelicals in the United States, and indeed in global Evangelicalism, view with growing alarm, the public alignment, convenient alliance, and some would even say uncritical allegiance, of the majority of white evangelicals with the White House. The word 'white' is pre-loaded in America with enormous social burdens. That is why it becomes disturbing to the point of alarm, that a reported 81% of white evangelicals voted for the present President. The Trump presidency and administration, and the continuing and strengthening support for its policies by leading white evangelicals, has become deeply problematic for other evangelicals who do not share the political commitments of the religious and political Right.

Hence this book. Eleven essays in which evangelicals work through the implications of the current situation for their own evangelical commitments. They reflect the diversity of both American culture and evangelical expression; men and women, white and people of colour, African American, Asian American, Mexican, Latino, pastors, professors and leaders in Evangelical institutions. They wrestle with the question of "who is defining the evangelical and social vision? Is it the Gospel or is it the culture?" Those are deal-breaking questions depending on the answer. Here are two quotations, one from the Introduction by Mark Labberton, and one by Shane Claiborne, probably the most widely known of the contributors.

 "[The term] Evangelical has value only if it names our commitment to seek and demonstrate the heart and mind of God in Jesus Christ, who is the evangel.
To be evangelical is to respond to God's call into deeper faith and greater humility.
It also leads us to repudiate and resist all forces of racism and misogyny, and all other attitudes and actions, overt and implied, that subvert the dignity of people, who are made in the image of God. Any evangelicalism that doesn't allow the evangel to redefine, reorder and renew power in the light of Jesus Christ is lost and worth abandoning."

“With the cross of Christ as the theological centrepiece and model of evangelical faith, people inside and outside the church expect evidence of the pursuit of moral purity and/or the humility of self-sacrifice. Both of these now seem buried in the rhetoric of populist and partisan political power…the evangel itself seems to have been marginalised.”

From Still Evangelical. Insiders Reconsider Political, Social and Theological Meaning. Ed. Mark Labberton, Page 17, 8.

"We can maintain oour orthodoxy (right thinking) while reclaiming our orthopraxis (right living). Doctrinal statements are important things, but they are hard things to love. God didn;t just give us words on paper; the Word became flesh. And now we are to put flesh on our faith. In the end Christianity spreads best not by force but by fascination.  And the last few decades of evangelicalism have become less and less fascinating. We've had much to say with our mouths but often very little to show from our lives. People can;t hear what we say because our hypocrisies are too loud." Page 165.

I am increasingly uneasy about the way the word 'evangelical' has become a totalising synonym for the American white evangelical right in its use by the media and the resulting perceptions of a global public. No nuance, no recognition of the global diversity of a movement at least three centuries old and with roots going back into Christian antiquity. So is the term useful or a hindrance, accurate or misleading, fatally hijacked or capable of recovered integrity? I don't know. But I appreciate the conscientious wrestling and shared uneasiness in the majoirty of these essays. It is worth reading if only because it gives voice to other evangelicals and their misgivings about whether they can still be called, or want to call themselves, still Evangelicals. Most of them do. I'm not so sure.

"When Jesus said love your neighbour, a lawyer who was present asked him to clarify what he meant by neighbour. He wanted a legal definition he could refer to in case the question of loving one ever happened to come up. He presumably wanted something of the order of "A neighbour (hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part) is to be construed as meaning a person of Jewish descent whose legal residence is within a radius of no more than three statute miles from one's  own legal residence unless there is another person of Jewish descent (hereinafter referred to as the party of the second part) living closer to the party of the first part than one is oneself, in which case the party of the second part is to be construed as the neighbour to the party of the first part and one is oneself relieved of all responsibility of any sort of kind whatsoever.

Instead Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan, the point of which seems to be that your neighbour is to be construed as meaning anybody who needs you."

(Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking. A Theological ABC (San Francisco: Harper, 1973), pp. 65-66.

I've just read Rudolf Bultmann's essay on 'Humanism and Christianity'. His critique of humanism, and of a Christianity too quick to sideline the education of intellect, conscience and imagination remains a telling rejoinder to the claims of human autonomy from any authority other than the self-determining self.

And the threats to human freedom and dignity from a mechanised, economically dominated existence in which human beings are means to the ends of economic, political and cultural forces, is one Bultmann understood deeply, and existentially.

"The decisive factor is that man is not looked upon, and does not look upon himself, as a being serving the purposes of natural, corporate, economic and political life, but as a person, that is, a being who is something on his own account and carries his significance and value in himself, and who is independent of his availability for any of life's practical objects. In a world which is more and more technically developed, and organised to the hilt, man is misused more and more as a means to ends, and is degraded to the status of a member in the machine of life" (pp. 166-167)

The turn in recent decades to practical theology has been one of the enriching and expansive influences on how we understand ministry and think about God in relation to human experience. Our understanding of the nature and changing dynamics of Christian ministry has changed as a result, and the approaches to ministry formation and training are now much more responsive to context, and flexible in content, delivery and in recognising the diversities of ministries and service in and beyond the church. So far, so good.

But good as this is, the emergence of practical theology and its powerful spinoffs in missiology, ministry and leadership studies, new expressions of ecclesiology and the near ubiquitous use of qualitative research and analysis, have each and all been accompanied by a corresponding, if unintentional relinquishing of some of the more intellectually abstract disciplines in the theological curriculum. I have in mind particularly the demise of philosophical theology understood as weight and resistance training of the mind. Such a rigorous and interrogative approach to theology, along with text focused biblical studies and systematic theology, helps to keep Christian practical theology honest and faithful to that which is peculiarly and essentially defining of Christian faith and practice. 

Practical theology is theology in practice. Well of course it is. Yes, but the quality and content of the theology matters and is decisive for the quality, content and application of that theology to Christian practice, human experience and ecclesial life in community. Encouraging practical theologians to read deeply in philosophical theology is not an argument for a hospice chaplain being able to trot out the varied forms of theodicy, from the free will defence to the veil of soul-making! But it is to argue that in pastoral care, in community life within the church, there is a need for the reinforcing steel of philosophical analysis and theological precision, woven throughout the poured foundations of concrete existence that is our daily life together in the Body of Christ.

One very fine example of how that works, and what it looks like is John Swinton's Raging with Compassion. What makes this book an important exemplar of practical theology at its best is precisely Swinton's wrestling at the systematic and philosophical level with the abstract questions raised by human concrete experience. The intellectual persuasiveness of the book is not due to it being an effective theodicy (reasoned explanation of whence suffering and evil in a world made by a God of power and goodness). For myself the key to this book's quality and usefulness as practical theology is precisely the analysis of human experiences of suffering measured against the biblical text and the toughest questions asked and answered, with the theological precision of one who knows that pastoral and intellectual integrity are mutually dependent.

All of this came to mind when reading again the essays of the philosophical theologian, Janet Martin Soskice. This slim collection of essays, titled The Kindness of God, is precisely the kind of project I have in mind, but from the other side of the academic common room, and from the other side of the pastoral counselling room. The combination of philosophical and practical theology in the hands of those conversant with both, can at times produce that quite rare thing, a theology of the mind and the heart. Here is Sosckice, near the end of her essay on Imago Dei, and her reflections on what makes us human, and why speech and other people matter:  

"To be fully human, even to praise God, we need others who are different from ourselves. Were Adam alone in the garden, he would not only be unable to reproduce, he would not speak, for speech is a pre-eminently social possession. And without speech there would be no praise, prayer – no 'world'."

We become opurselves through being with others. They conceive and give birth to us, teach us to speak and to write. Whatever meaning we give it, the startling divine plural of Gen.1.26, 'Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness', is no accident."

There's a tag going round Facebook that invites me "to post the covers of 7 books I love or that have stuck with me: no explanation, no review, just the covers." I'm happily engaged in doing so

But when I see the covers of books that my Facebook friends have posted I want to know!

Why is this a book you love, or that has stuck with you?

What is the connection between your reading this particular book and the way you now see the world, or think about yourself, or understand human behaviour?

Was it only for that time in your life or does the book still speak, resonate, carry with it those transformative memories of discovery, reflection or self-understanding?

So I thought I would say a little about one or two of the books I posted. Chaim Potok is a writer I discovered in the 1970's. I had been in John Smith's bookshop, now sadly closed, but a shrine of learning, stories and undiscovered worlds of the mind for those who have known Glasgow these past 50 years and more.

The book I bought was The Chosen, Potok's first bestseller, a wonderful novel about fear and trust, friendship across cultural canyons, and the changes that are part of growing up and sicovering who we are. It was later made into a film with Rod Steiger as the Rebbe, a central character of wisdom and authority throughout these novels about Jewish life in Brooklyn in the decade or two after the Second World War.

I remember as a 21 year old student, first opening this book. I was, sitting upstairs on one of the old green and orange double decker buses, on a wet and foggy afternoon, with the sulphur street lights already on before four o'clock, and the bus slowly making its jerky way from St George's Cross to Gilmorehill. I was transfixed by the intensity and mystery, the narrative pull and the strange world of Hasidic Judaism lived out through the lives of two teenage Jewish boys in Brooklyn.

I have read Chaim Potok's novels ever since. I can't imagine my intellectual and imaginative life without those stories somewhere in the background like one of the backwash tones of a water-colour painting that give the finished picture its depth and texture. He has taught me so much that I needed to know, and was glad to learn. My Name Is Asher Lev is, I think, his masterpiece. The major themes of his writing coalesce in a novel of spiritual intensity and emotional authenticity. The place of the Jew in a post-Holocaust world; the response of different Jewish traditions to living in a culture saturated with the moral assumptions and political ambiguities of Christendom; art as an essential component of human activity and community; the ambivalence of orthodox Jews towards art as image, and painting as making images; and in the context of conflicted art, the crucifixion as an image, unique and essential to understanding Christianity, and yet the devastating truth and reality that it was Jesus the Jew who was crucified; and woven through and through, the place of human suffering as a given in human experience and as a challenge to the benevolence, even the existence, of God. Metaphysics, aesthetics, theodicy and secularism in one story.

All of these strands are made visible on the tapestry pattern, and they are still there though invisible on the back of the tapestry; but, of course,the visible image is only possible to see because of what is not seen. This, for me, is novel writing at its highest artistic expression, and in the mind and words of a man who is rooted in the realities of cultural tensions sometimes so powerful and anguished, that the human being is stretched out with arms wide in both entreaty and embrace. 

The central character, Asher Lev, is part of a family in which his parents consider art and the creation of image a violation of the Torah prohibition about making images. His sympathetic uncle becomes both patron and advocate; his parents worry about Asher being excluded from the community; Asher's growing fame and success force the issue of ultimate spiritual and relational loyalties. The climax of the novel brings these unbearable tensions into a conflict that has no obvious resolution, and threatens Asher's entire future as a member of his Jewish family and community.

The title of the novel contains its own ambiguity. Art is a gift, but from whom? Is it from God or from the "sitra achra", the other side? Is art creative or destructive; does it reveal or hide truth; is the compulsion to paint and its inspiration blessing or curse? In religious communities, is the artist a traitor who prefers 'the other side', or one who with courage and self-sacrifice and being true to the gift, "plumbs the depths of the other side in order to make this side a better place in which to live?'"

Few novels are as demanding and as satisfying. It is an astonishing achievement, which sympathetically and critically opens up the life and faith practices of Hasidic Judaism, and its strained relations with other forms of modern Jewish life and faith. All Potok's novels have elements of autobiographical insight. His own uneasy relations with his Hasidic roots, his training as a Rabbi, his cultural and theological worldview, and his empathy with each conflicted character in his stories, drive novels like Asher Lev towards that difficult terrain between cultural integrity and religious identity. The faithful Jew in the modern (and now the postmodern) world seeks to stand somewhere between accommodation which is not a sell out, and counter-cultural Torah obedience which, however devout, does not make living in a place of exile an impossibility.  

        Lovely words from The Times columnist, Caitlin Moran:

"A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination … they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate ‘need’ for ‘stuff.’ A mall—the shops—are places where your money makes the wealthy wealthier. But a library is where the wealthy’s taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary, instead. A satisfying reversal. A balancing of the power."

The photo is of the Sir Duncan Rice Library at the University of Aberdeen. Taken on an evening walk to attend one of the Gifford Lectures delivered by N T Wright earlier in Spring 2018. I know, it isn't a public library, though the fee for a years borrowing is by no means prohibitive.

But it is a repository of knowledge, an architectural statement about the importance of education, thought and the nourishment of mind and spirit. It's a favourite place for me.

"Contemplation is that quiet, still opening of the mind to what is before it.

It is that calm presence to what is not oneself, resisting the temptation to take it over, to own it or to use it.

It means letting the other person be different from oneself, refusing to absorb them into one's own way of thinking.

One must let one's heart and mind be stretched open, enlarged by what we see." ¹

I read this early yesterday. Even earlier I took the photo of my favourite rose. The rose is called Rhapsody in Blue, and its appearance in our garden every year is one of my deepest joys. The name fits exactly with the essential thereness of this rose; telling it as it is. The colour is extravagant and attention-seeking, a joyous cry that is inaudible but visible. A rhapsody in blue. And each rose on this florabundant display is playing its own note in the composition and performance of the rhapsody.

To gaze into a rose is to encounter that which is not oneself. Such beauty puts me in my place; try as I might I can't "think" this rose, fully capture or own it in words which are always proximate to reality. Instead I am invited to look, to spend time, to be touched into gratitude for a beauty I cannot make happen, but which I am privileged, yes, privileged to encounter as gratuitous gift.

Contemplative waiting is the demeanour of the hospitable, willing to "let one's heart and mind be stretched open, enlarged by what we see". Contemplation is an act which is mutual gift, so that we give ourselves to an attentive looking and the patient enjoyment, without control, of 'the other'. 

It may be that one of the qualities that could give our lives a deeper rootedness, is to have a heart and mind ready to acknowledge beauty by paying attention to it. The transient delicacy of a flowering rosebud is a contradiction of our unexamined working assumptions about our own importance in the world. We are just as transient, and just as fearfully and wonderfully made.

Transience is a quality of time, posing the mystery of how we exist at all, and the fleeting finitude of each existence. What we do with time becomes one of the defining questions of a life well lived. It is a relatively modern assumption that our time is best crammed with activity, traded for productivity, then invested in the accumulation of possessions gained in exchange for our units of time. Transience contradicts our drivenness, and makes of time a non returnable gift, which once used is gone. 

Contemplation is not, therefore, about spending time but of giving time, nor is it about wasting time but redeeming time. Being possessive of time makes us selfish and unwilling to give time to what does not profit us, benefit us, further the project that is our life. To give time to notice the beauty of a rose, or to attend to the presence of another person, or to reflect on the truth of who we are becoming, is to receive time as a gift to be given to the other, and as an opportunity for ourselves to change and receive an inner realigning of mind and heart.

All of this from an early morning meeting with a rose, a reminder of the importance of contemplative gratitude for that which is not me. In a world too busy to consider its own transience, too absorbed in economic production and consumption to be comfortable with the notion of gift, and increasingly, in a world so afraid and suspicious of those who are other than ourselves that we cannot spare the time to understand or befriend those we fear; in such a world the contemplative Christian bears witness to another way of being, and another way of seeing. 

1. Timothy Radcliffe, What is the Point of Being a Christian, (Continuum, London: 2005), page 122.

The Aberdeen Oxfam book shop is a place of surprises. I always go in by to see what's new, and they're good at making sure there's a regular turnover. One of the quiet enjoyments of these visits is the unforeseen and therefore unexpected. Like today.

In the window was a book by my friend Ken Jeffrey. I read it when it came out a while ago, but it disappeared, I think borrowed and never found its way back. It's an important study of the revival phenomenon in Scotland, focusing on the mid 19th Century revivals along the Moray Firth. This is contextual history, and therefore an important stepping stone to a contextual theology of revival experience. The book remains the definitive study of the North East revivals, their sociological context, historical precedents and developments, and is based on deep digging in archives, newspapers, church minute books and wide reading.

Then I came across in the American Milestones edition, the live recording of Johnny Cash at San Quentin. This was broadcast by the BBC in 1969 and I still remember the hair rising on the back of my neck at the raw emotion, defiant lyrics and see through humanity of Johnny Cash. So next time I'm in the car by myself, and heading to Montrose, this will be on, and the volume will not be low!

So an academic analaysis of 19th Century religious revivals amongst farming and fisherfolk in a wee corner of a wee country, and a CD of one of the truly iconic evenings of country music breaking through all kinds of barriers to entertain and try to instil hope in one of the bleakest prisons in the United States. There's something deeply satisfying and reassuringly strange in that combination of my enthusiasms.

I didn't know that by studying the book of Proverbs closely I was an aspiring paremiologist. But apparently so. The Wisdom tradition in the Old Testament is fascinating in its diversity, and intriguing in the way those writings get to the point. By which is meant, the point of life.

Take Ecclesiastes, a book in which cynicism and sarcasm, pessimism and realism, resignation to life's outcomes and resistance to life's constraints, all weave together in a long inner discussion about what life is all about, and does it matter, and if so why it does.

Or that granite rock of a book, Job, in which tragedy and every imaginable form of loss and suffering put a human mind and soul under such pressure that the reader, who knows the why and the how, is drawn into a drama which has no guaranteed resolution. These two books are complex, profound, and tightly woven, with literary themes hanging on theological structures that raise as many questions as they answer. 

Not so the book of Proverbs. Forget the existential angst and theological aegumentation and speculative theories of how to balance the good and evil in life. In Proverbs there is a practical, no nonsense, straightforward pragmatism about how you live your life, get on with people, do business, and mature in experience, grow in understanding, and yes, "get wisdom". And the literary genre of Proverbs is very different. It is not a developed argument or rhetorical persuasion through narrative, or theological and philosophical expositions about God, the World and the troubled relations between heaven and earth.

Proverbs is about the power of wisdom distilled to the daily, the ordinary, the pragmatic, the practical commonsense of the good life. And the scholarly study of those proverbs  is called paremiology. Thus the student of biblical Proverbs is an aspiring paremiologist, one who seeks to become expert in interpreting the ground rules of wise living by careful study of the proverbs themselves.

Here's why I'm spending time in this thick book of Reader's Digest one liners. Let's start with a quotation from a book lamenting the demise of truth in our culture: "The clinching factor in the rise of Post-Truth has been our behaviour as citizens. By rewarding those who lie with political success, exempting them from the traditional expectations of integrity, we have seceded from the duties of citizenship. To the bellowed charge of Jack Nicholson;s character in A Few Good Men – "You can't handle the truth" – we have no ready answer…We tweet, give in to clickbait, share without due diligence…Fool's licence is meaningless when we are all fools." ¹ 

The relationship between the fool and lies, and between integrity and the wise, is charted with determined persistence throughout the book of Proverbs. We now live in a social media world where we are all experts, Google virtuosi, information addicts, never without an audience and never without the stimulus of other users. Such pervasive, unthinking immersion in communicative presence, we have learned to call connectivity, and it is that very connectedness that provides easy and ever available conduits for information, without any quality control as to the trustworthiness of the source, the factual accuracy, or the evidential credibility of what comes our way. Add to that the background selection and data monitoring of algorithms and we end up being fed more of what we like and less of what might challenge those predilections of thought, ethics, or political perspective. To use the language of Proverbs, we would be fools not to recognise this and seek to guard ourselves from being so easily duped, set up and manipulated.

It is a profoundly enlightening exercise to read the book of Proverbs while staying aware and alert to our current cultural realities. Just consider this list of constantly urged actions and attitudes: truthfulness and justice, care for the poor, the dangers of wealth, stewardship of words, trust and trustworthiness in relationships, integrity of character, use and abuse of power. The way of wsdom is the way of righteousness, but the way of the fool is in an altogether different direction. Some of the most acute critical problems facing western democratic societies are now so embedded in a social media worldview that it is more and more difficult to have rational discussions in which both protagonists are appealing to a shared view of truth. And it is that erosion of truth, and indeed loss of faith in truth as anything other than the view I already hold, that makes some of the most dangerous cultural shifts so intractable.

The book of Proverbs is a very handy collection of diagnostic wisdom for a society such as 21st Century western democarcies. Truth decay, low grade anger and discontent, suspicion of the other who is not 'us', politics gradually losing its moral compass, hardened ideologies and polarised communities, fear eclipsing hope, hate displacing love, rejection and not welcome as default to the stranger; these and other social patterns are seen in the book of Proverbs as the way of the fool that leads to conflict, alienation and ultimately death.

The two ways is one of the great moral images in the Bible, and indeed elsewhere in other religious and philosophical traditions. Jesus spoke of the narrow and broad ways, and the foolish and wise builders. An important feature of the book of Proverbs, which also speaks of the two ways and the choices that determine which way we travel, is that it offers guiding wisdom not only to individuals, but to communities. Its warnings and guidance, and its diagnostic applications, reverberate with contemporary relevance to our own times. Perhaps nowhere more crucially today, than in its insistence that truth and trust, integrity and compassion, wisdom and understanding, are not only the ways of life, but the ways for a scoiety to save the life it is in danger of wasting, and ultimately losing. 

1. Matthew D'Ancona, Post Truth. The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back, (London: Penguin, 2017), page 59

It's not often the publishers blurb persuades me to buy a book. At least, not usually as quickly as this. Three reasons I'll buy this book and read it as soon as I can.

1. It is written by an historian of American culture and American evangelicalism, whose credentials as a scholar and social observer are already established.
2. The book is commended by Mark Noll, the premier historian of religion in America, and of American Evangelicalism in particular. Noll is beyond argument a voice of authority in the historic and cultural evolution of evangelicalism.
3. The words in bold below have a plausibility and conviction which I share, about the corruption of the evangelical mindset, the seculrisation of their worldview and their initial flirtation with the idolatry of power tumbling over into the full blown embrace of power for its own sake.

“Believe me” may be the most commonly used phrase in Donald Trump’s lexicon. Whether about building a wall or protecting a Christian heritage, the refrain has been constant. And to the surprise of many, a good 80 percent of white evangelicals have believed Trump—at least enough to help propel him into the White House.