Living Wittily

I asked for wonder - the spiritual importance of the inexplicable

Yesterday in the Theological Reflection class we spent some time savouring the spiritual prose poetry that is the writing of A J Heschel. This writer was mostly new to the class members, and his style of writing a stark contrast to much that passes for spiritual writing today. From the first day they saw this book cover there was interest in a man who had such a lived in face, and near the  end of the course when choices have to be made about what there is still time to explore and discuss - my suggested omission of Heschel was thankfully over-ruled. So we worked through a handout of brief extracts, each of us reading one, not feeling the need always to comment, but now and then saying what we had found touched us, or how what we read found us. It was an important interlude when teaching doesn't need the constant explanatory, expository, interrogatory voice. It was a class taught by numerous acts of reading, reflecting and occasional vocal appreciation. And I think what was learned wasn't so much how to do Theological Reflection, as how to recognise the profoundly reflective way of doing theology that arises from depths of human experience. Such expereince is forged in the fires of a faith both profound and immediate, a burning passion for God that welds the mystical and practical, and from the resulting fusion, a philosophical theology distilled to the essence of the religious encounter between the human and the divine, which is the meeting of holiness and humanity, divine pathos and human need.

Here are a couple of examples of Heschel's remarkable glimpses into the nature of prayer as both joyful discovery and  unassuaged longing:

Prayer begins where expression ends. The words that reach our lips are often but waves of an overflowing stream touching the shore:We often seek and miss, struggle and fail to adjust our unique feelings to the patterns of the texts. Where is the tree that can utter fully the silent passion of the soil. Words can only open the door, and we can only weep on the threshold of our incommunicable thirst after the incomprehensible.

In no other act does the human being experience so often the disparity between the desire for expression and the means of expression as in prayer. The inadequacy of the means at our disposal appears so tangible, so tragic, that one feels it a grace to be able to give oneself up to music, to a tone, to a song, to a chant. The wave of a song carries the soul to heights which utterable meanings can never reach. Such abandonment is no escape...For the world of unutterable meanings is the nursery of the soul, the cradle of all our ideas. It is not an escape but a return to one's origins.

Centuries of Jewish dealings with God have shaped such a theology of the soul's astonishment. The extracts come from Man's Quest for God. It would be to inexcusably misunderstand and misrepresent Heschel to point out that Christian theology teaches the greater truth of God's quest for humanity - Heschel would rightly point out, with something of that pathos he understood so personally, that such a view of the initiative of God is yet another idea Christians borrowed from the Hebrew Bible and the people God chose to be an 'echo of eternity'. Such theological plagiarism (unacknowledged borrowing) tends to obscure the beauty of the tradition out of which, in the providence of God, the Christian faith emerged. The human quest for God, uttered, or unexpressed because inexpressible, is always going to be the soul's response to the grace that first creates the urge towards God, and calls for that reckless trust so full of risk, to begin the journey with God into a future without tangible certainties.

Augustine's great prayer, 'Thou has made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee', is the cry that recognises that human incompleteness is itself the truth that turns us towards the One in whom all longing may be satisfied - but not yet, not here, and perhaps - not ever, for how can we ever have the capacity to have enough of God? P T Forsyth had no interest in being a 'finished futility' - he too recognised that the longing for God, the inadeqaucy of human expression to do justice to the inexpressible and ineffable, the categorical deficit in human capacity compared to divine inexhaustibility of grace, suggests that even in the encounter with God, in the fullness of glory and face to face, we will still be lost in wonder, love and praise. Which comes back to Heschel, and his willingness to be content, not with reductionist explanation, but with eternal mystery - which is why he confessed, 'I asked for wonder......' and not 'I asked for answers!'

Does the future have a Church?

There Shall Always Be the Church

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.
(T S Eliot)

So did Eliot anticipate the demise of the Church in Western society? The prescience of the poet a sharper discernment than the statistical trends of the sociologist, or the adjustments and accommodations of uncertain theologians? The ambiguity that lies at the heart of an institution that is at the same time a community that dares to claim allegiance to Jesus, is captured in the 'fluttering' between world and church, and the 'swinging' between Hell and Heaven. But the final prevailing word belongs to Heaven - the Body of Christ crucified, risen and ascended is the spiritual reality that lies behind a Church besieged by uncertainty, under pressure to justify itself by relevance and marketability to a post-modern consumerist culture.
'And the Gates of Hell shall not prevail' - is that because the Church will adapt to cultural demands to survive, or resist them as witness to a Kingdom not of this world? What is it that will ensure 'there shall always be a church' over and against the world?

Michael Ramsey and the centre of theology

One of the most holy, if often misunderstood figures in the 20th Century Church of England was Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury. The biography by Owen Chadwick is characteristically elegant, sharply and humanely observed, and a good example of theology being done through biography, faith lived in the lapidary tumbling of relationships, circumstances and human activity, that eventually give shape and definition to who we are.

As a student Ramsey wanted to buy a couple of pictures to give some interest to the bare walls of his undergraduate room. He bought a print of the crucifixion by Perugino. The significance that print took on with passing years is described in a moving paragraph that shows Anglican spirituality at its best - theologically sensitive, sanctifying the ordinary, at ease with contemplative wonder in the presence of Christ incarnate, crucified, risen. Here is Chadwick's gently observed comment on the private devotion of an Archbishop for whom time and again, prayer took precedence over politics:

'He hung the reproduction over the mantle-piece in his room at Magdalene. Slowly it came to be something more than an ornament. It hung in the same central position in every house or apartment where he lived; so that it hung during his life on nineteen different walls, but never, so to speak, changed its place. 'At the time of purchase', he said,'I thought it a "nice picture". It soon came to be the centre of theology, doxa.' 'It is for me a great picture, because it wonderfullyshows a large part of what christianity means. christ is seen suffering, suffering terribly, and yet in it there is triumph; because love is transforming it all'.

Owen Chadwick, Michael Ramsey. A Life, (Oxford:OUP, 1990), 369.

24/7 news and a plea for compassionate reserve

The immediacy and constancy of 24 hour news carries an inevitable and negative consequence that at times triggers within me, a deep uneasiness about contemporary obsession with 'as it happens' news. The past few days the story of the disappearance of a mother, and her son with severe learning and other complex difficulties, has been told in a series of slow release revelations. Now we know that both are dead, at least one suspected murdered, and two men are being questioned, one the partner of the dead woman. Speculation is inevitable when such a story is ongoing and the facts still only selectively known; but along with that natural speculative searching around in our minds for explanations, hoping that tragic as any such explanation must now inevitably be, we hope against hope that when the story is told it will not confirm and realise our worst fears.

It is that agonising tension between our need to know and our not wanting to know the worst, that exposes both our human compassion and our human curiosity - and how a voracious curiosity can displace that essential human response to other people's tragedy - compassionate reserve. I mean by that phrase, enough imagination to guage that the scale of suffering and loss is incalculable and calls forth a communal human sorrow for others, but with a built in limiter that recognises a person's murder, and the surrounding fear and loss to others, are not mere stories for public consumption or private rumination. In one of her characteristic touches of genuine psychological insight P D James has Inspector Adam Dalgleish reflect that a person's death is an act of such final intimate privacy there is something dehumanising even in investigating to discover the perpetrator. But such investigation serves the process of justice, not the appetite for violating the privacy of the corpse, which retains the right to that respect and dignity afforded that which we with determined moral wilfulness, call human.

The inescapability of stories told through the all pervasive, ever present news, delivered with metronomic regularity hour by hour, exposes I think both the profound ethical and disquieting human questions raised by our belief in the sovereign priority of the news story. However this story turns out, a mother and son are dead, people close to them are being questioned by police, and we are all the poorer for such things happening in communities not much different from our own.

Lord have mercy
Christ have mercy
Lord have mercy

The Unknown God

For a long time now I've used the Revised Common Lectionary Online as a basis for daily reflection on the Bible. The four weekly passages ensure that there is a reading from the Hebrew Bible, Psalms, Epistle and Gospel on which to think and pray each week. One or two of the passages I usually explore much more thoroughly - an exercise in exegesis intended to keep me exegetically fit, the equivalent of the three or four times a week run to sustain aerobic fitness.

Alongside this particular trek through the Bible in company with the many Christian traditions which use the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL), I use the New Interpreter's Bible (NIB) on each passage as a mid-range commentary. There are contributions to the NIB which are very high quality biblical comment - Fretheim on Genesis, Brueggemann on Exodus, Birch on Samuel, Newsom on Job, McCann on Psalms, Miller on Jeremiah, O'Day on John, Wall on Acts, NT Wright on Romans, Craddock on Hebrews I've found are highlights in a set that does have some less impressive efforts.

One passage this week is Acts 17.22.31, Paul's speech at the Areopagus. I've always found this a passage that shows Paul at work as a skilled, innovative mission tactician - on this occasion outmaneouvering the cultural intellectuals on his way to making his witness to Christ the saving revealer of God. Maybe the church today has to respond 'to a similar "culture war" in which the gospel is challenged by cities "full of idols" and where the church is asked to respond to the important questions  of secular intellectuals. In which case Paul's proclamation of resurrection faith as a thoughtfully presented  challenge to those other ultimate loyalties (modern idols) to which people now give their lives. The knowability of God, the grace of the One who is no 'unknown God' but comes near in love and judgement, not the God of the Philosophers but certainly the God the philosopher is groping after; but the God who is not found by argument, not contained by reasoned logic, not domesticated by abstract concepts at a sufficient remove to leave the deep places of the soul undisturbed. The living personal God who is known in encounter, who speaks and calls, who comes and invites, - but also the God who to use a phrase used by Flannery O'Connor of Karl Barth - throws the furniture around.

The living room of the mind is given a radical makeover by affirming faith in the resurrection of Jesus. Faith in Jesus' resurrection isn't a correction of mental perceptions; it isn't a surprising change of opinion; it is a reordering of the mind, a new worldview, a radical break with that most comforting of securities, that we inhabit a controllable predictable world. The resurrection of Jesus is a miracle of theology, not a miracle of technology. In Jesus, incarnate, crucified and risen, the unknown God (comfortingly vague and safely distant), becomes known.

Intellectual Hospitality and Theological Humility

"Always make time to read authors with whom you know you will profoundly disagree". I can still hear the slow deliberate way that was said, the last two words enunciated with a combination of relish and mischief. One of many one liners that stuck when I was at College. It was in the philosophy of religion class, and we were being subjected to R E O White's unrelenting enthusiasm for disciplined thinking which he believed, rightly, is an essential key competence for responsible pastoral ministry.

He would have loved Stephanie Paulsell's Pastoral Agility and Intellectual Work for its persuasive arguments in favour of forming and maintaining habits of careful, disciplined thought in the areas of intellectual reflection, analytic thought and critical appreciation of the thinking of others. Of course he would have put a red pen through my lazy and incongruous use of the word 'loved' at the start of that previous sentence - not least because it betrays intellectual laziness and semantic carelessness. Great teacher, R E O White - Principal of our denominational College when it was still called The Baptist Theological College of Scotland. I still like the serious ring of that now rather old fashioned name.

  Anyway I took his words to heart. It was wise permissive advice, telling us that if our heart's loyalty was to Christ, and if we were serious about being biblically literate, theologically alive, pastorally wise and homiletically worth listening to, then we'd better not stop thinking. And we'd better learn while we had the chance in College, those habits and disciplines of thought that would enable us to read and think with critical understanding, to discriminate between the ephemeral and the enduring trends in cultural thought and development, and to remain humble learners always excited by different perspectives, hard won insights, and scholarly labour in the service of truth. And if we wanted to have worthwhile, constructive things to say about the world we live in, Christian perspectives and responses to the events and movements of our own times, relevant and faithful preaching that had vital connections with where people live, then we'd better learn to be patient with those disciplines of thought that would enable us to think, and to think in a certain way. To think with clarity and the thick texture of an open, well informed and fair mind, with awareness of our own prejudices and assumptions, and with intellectual charity so that our comments are constructive rather than dismissive, hopeful rather than cynical, morally mature instead of religiously shrill. I like that combination - thinking with intellectual clarity and charity.

One way of achieving even the beginnings of such moral and intellectual thoughtfulness was to read those with whom we know we will profoundly disagree. In theological education I suppose there is always going to be a tension between the aims of training people for ministry within a clearly stated confessional context, and training people to be mature, careful, Christian thinkers unafraid of those changes and developments in thought that are part of the ongoing history of Christian existence. 

If there is to be the right balance between, on the one hand, being a thoughful reader able to engage with thinking that is uncongenial, that gets my back up, or that just sounds plain wrong, and on the other, being a thoughtful reader who in following after Christ knows there is more to know than is already known, then the discipline of intellectual hospitality is essential. Does not faithfulness to Christ who is above all, through all and in all, require resistance to self-imposed limitations such as reading only certain authors from certain publishers? Is Christ the Word through whom all things were made, the Colossian Christ in whom all things hold together and in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell - is this the Christ we worry about in the marketplace of ideas? Is the truth of Christ, of the One who pervades and gives reality and substance to all that is - is such truth so fragile and Christian faith so uncertain that we fear to venture beyond what we now know? The gospel of Jesus Christ does not call us to intellectual timidity, and is not best served by chronic loss of theological nerve. The Gospel impels us outward in a mission that includes debating with the philosophers of our age, and seeking at a level way beyond our own inner piety, to bring every thought captive to Christ.

So I have learned to learn from those who think as I do - and from those who think what I think is wrong. For example, reading Hans Kung's On Being a Christian in the late 1970's, (and most of what he's written since), I was confronted by a mind of vast erudition, provocative courage, and a way of doing theology that took seriously the fact that we live in a world of historical and political circumstances where being a Christian is no straight-forward exercise in personal piety. Sure in R E O White fashion I 'profoundly disagree' with some of Kung's observations on Christology, or on the nature and aim of dialogue with other faiths - but this book, along with Does God Exist? and his magisterial Christianity, demonstrates to church and world alike, that Christian faith is not forced into embarrassed silence because it cannot compete in the marketplace of ideas. These three books remain important repositories of some of the most telling critiques of aspects of Christian tradition, atheist philosophy and cultural relativism as these are confronted by the New Testament reality of Jesus Christ.

In like manner, Augustine's understanding of sin and human sinfulness, on the nature of the church, and on how the grace of God is operative in human salvation; John Wesley's view of original sin and of the pervasiveness of sin as a condition of fallen human existence; John Calvin's conclusions on reprobation and the divine decree; Clark Pinnock and Greg Boyd on Open Theism as a critique of classic Reformed thought on Providence; Barth's hard line on the inadmissability of natural theology in a prolegomenon to Christian Dogmatics; Tom Torrance's views on paedo-baptism as a valid expression of covenant theology over and against believer's baptism; Moltmann's eschatological (over?)-emphasis, and his exposition of social over economic models of the Triune life of God...and on and on. Those with whom we profoundly disagree are some of our best teachers, urging us to think, challenging us to answer, inviting us to listen, proposing other ways of seeing honestly and living faithfully the truth we say we believe.

Because in the life of pastoral and theological reflection, while it is essential to have confidence in our own understanding, a clear grasp of hard-won insights and experience, a good and growing awareness of our own standpoint and how that affects how and what we think, and a sense of belonging and at-homeness within our own place in the Christian tradition,while all these are essential - they only come to those who cultivate before God one of the more elusive spiritual disciplines and theological virtues. Theological humility, a willing and inward recognition of the scale of mismatch between the immense reality of a Gospel which is the mystery of the ages enfolded in the heart of the Eternal God, and our own limited time-bound capacities. There is truth in the Gospel that will always be beyond us - and will always call into question, as truth must and God will, our present, partial and personal grasp of the God who comes to us in Jesus Christ, and whose Spirit leads us into truth. By that calling into question, we grow to a more mature apprehension of the Gospel by which we have been apprehended. A Colossian understanding of Christ, accompanied by an Ephesian understanding of Christian existence in the love of God:

I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power, through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you,being rooted and grounded 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, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure of the fullness of God. (Eph 3.16-19)

To know the love that surpasses knowledge - always there is more, and always our understanding is partial. That is the reason for cultivating theological humility, and that is the promise and joy of theological discovery - Christ dwelling in the heart, through faith.

Samuel Rutherford and devotional rapture

Came across this remarkable extract of Samuel Rutherford in full flow about the loveliness of Christ. In his book on Trinitarian Spirituality and John Owen Brian Kay points out that 'the loveliness of Christ' is a Puritan cliche - and certainly Rutherford reckoned exaggeration was impossible in eulogising the 'Altogether Lovely One':

I dare say that angels' pens, angel's tongues, nay, as many worlds of angels as there are drops of water in all the seas and fountains, and rivers of the earth cannot paint Him out to you. I think His sweetness has swelled upon me to the greatness of two heavens. O for a soul as wide as the utmost circle of the highest heaven to contain His love! And yet I could hold but little of it. O what a sight, to be up in heaven, in that fair orchard of the New Paradise, and to see, and smell, and touch, and kiss that fair field-flower, that evergreen tree of life! His bare shadow would be enough for me; a sight of Him would be the guarantee of heaven to me."If there were ten thousand thousand millions of worlds, and as many heavens, full of men and angels, Christ would not be pinched to supply all our wants, and to fill us all. Christ is a well of life; but who knows how deep it is to the bottom? Put the beauty of ten thousand thousand worlds of paradises, like the Garden of Eden, in one; put all trees, all flowers, all smells, all colours, all tastes, all joys, all loveliness, all sweetness in one. O what a fair and excellent thing would that be? And yet it would be less to that fair and dearest well-beloved Christ than one drop of rain to the whole seas, rivers, lakes, and fountains of ten thousand earths.

Just now and then it's good to be ambushed by unadulterated spiritual fervour, to encounter an ardent soul in full rapturous flow. The contrast between such spiritually triggered rhetoric and our own contemporary uncertainty about religious affections and emotional experience can be a telling critique of modern forms of Christian spirituality, focused more on personal fulfilment than that praise of Christ that takes us out of ourselves. Rutherford was a man of extremes - ferociously polemical and pastorally intense; a man of contrasts in an age of conflict, whose inner tensions of spiritual theology and political vision remained unreconciled. It is from such flawed human  personality that some of the best Christian writing has been distilled - Rutherford, Richard Rolle, Bernard of Clairvaux, Augustine, Jonathan Edwards, Kierkegaard.

Doughnuts, a sail on the ferry, and time at an important place

One of those glorious days when the West of Scotland lives up to the postcards. Bright sunshine and only white clouds, a fresh breeze, and the Firth of Clyde looking at its glorious best. we went down to Largs for the 10.15 ferry to Cumbrae. A latte to go and a freshly made doughnut was nae problem cos we were going to spend much of the day walking. A ten minute sail gets you to Cumbrae, and then we circled the island in the car. Goatfell had a dusting of snow and the Arran hills against a blue sky and blue sea made you want to up roots and live within sight of Arran, Bute, Cumbrae, and Little Cumbrae. Spent a wee while in the Cathedral of the Isles, stilled by the stillness and quietened by the quiet. Smallest extant cathedral in Britain, but what a beautiful old place, long steeped in spiritual longing.

Walked across the island, back into Millport and back out towards the war memorial that looks up the Clyde. I've always found the rhythmic sound of lapping water makes me yearn - not sure what for. And the sound of water on the shore, the blueness and clearness of the water itself, the cold breeze even my thick fleece didn't keep entirely out, the sound of a curlew's cry that whisked always whisks me back to my days as a boy on the farm, and the sight of two Oyster Catchers turning their heads against the breeze and burying that two inch orange bill down their wing - hard not to love God's world on a day like this.

They not only tingle, they soar.....

When J P Struthers, the remarkable minister of Greenock Reformed Presbyterian Church in late 19th Century Scotland, offered to buy James Denney a set of the Standard Puritan Divines as a wedding present, it was a joke between two men who remained very close friends, and went separate ways theologically, at least so far as biblical criticism and modern thought was concerned. Denney's aversion to Seventeenth Century theology can be explained in several ways; his own upbringing in a church tracing its ancestry to the Covenanters and to the turmoil of theological conflict; his openness to new thought and growing resistance to Westminster Calvinism as intellectually stifling and inherently hostile to views of the Bible which allowed a believing criticism; his taste for the 18th century Augustan plain style in language, on which his own lucid, to the point, reasonably argued style was modelled; and his impatience with prolix, argumentative or dissected divinity.

However his contemporary P T Forsyth wasn't as dismissive. The two great Congregationalist Puritans, John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, were honoured conversation partners in Foryth's intellectual drawing room. Here is Forsyth on Goodwin:

Theological truth was not the deposit of a scholl's thought but the register of the Church's experience of eternal things. There is soemthing more than Shakespearian in the dramatic majesty and passionate intimacy of some of Goodwin's pages, because they apply  genius to a region of the soul above any that Shakespeare ever entered. They not only tingle; they soar; and they come home with a beauty and poignancy of spiritual truth which makes them, ever after they are read, ingredients in one's own spiritual life. (Faith Freedom and the Future, pages 116-118).

I've started two books on Puritan Spirituality, one of the research areas I am beginning to explore. I think I am somewhere between Denney and Forsyth as far as reading such people as Owen and Goodwin, Sibbes and Flavel, Baxter and Charnock, are concerned. Prolix yes; over-elaborated divinity - yes at times; scholastic Calvinism as a controlling intellectual grid often a given, yes; but there are times, actually many times, when they are saying important things the church can't afford to forget, neglect or dismiss. One of my other enthusiasms is the theologian often called the last Puritan, Jonathan Edwards. He shares many of the characteristics, less of the faults, and is an important bridge in modern intellectual thought.

Anyway - more of this later. Still not online at home, but there are fingers of light streaking the horizon suggesting a new internet connection maty be about to dawn.

April 16th - grace that defines and circumscribes my life

On April 16, 1967, in a small cluttered vestry in Hamilton Baptist Church, at 9.45 pm, in the company of the Rev Charles Simpson, I gave my life to Christ. Not everyone's conversion is as time and place specific, but that was how God found me. Ever since, April 16th has been as important as my birthday, my wedding date, the birthdays of my wife Sheila and my children.

I don't tend to compare these significant dates and draw up a priority list of significance. I am who I am because I was born of the two parents in whose love I was conceived. I am who I am because Christ called, and I followed, overwhelmed and apprehended by a grace I still don't understand. I am who I am because since 1970 when I met her, and 1972 when we married, my life and heart have been given to Sheila with whom my life is now entwined. I am who I am because two other human beings who happen to be my children are likewise intertwined in some of the deepest relationships and commitments of our lives.

All of which said, that grace that seeks and finds, that fills and impels, that renews and regenerates, that pushes and pulls, that grasps with inexorable gentleness and holds with steadfast intent, that judges with mercy and forgives with joy - that grace that entered my life with transformative purpose and power, that grace which is prevenient and immediate, sovereign and condescending, sufficient and demanding - to be saved by that Grace through faith, by that One full of Grace and Truth who dwelt amongst us, and dwells within the heart that trusts enough to surrender to Him - that Grace, is what defines and circumscribes the life I want to live and the person I wish to be in Christ. And just as well that God's self-defining approach to us is so full of grace, mercy and peace - for in my weakness there is grace, my failures there is mercy, and in the assurance of the Gospel, there is, more or less, most of the time, peace. And when there isn't, that may be because that same grace and mercy are again drawing me to the one who is our peace.

Thanks be to God for his gift beyond words.......