Living Wittily

A Philosophical Theology of Prayer.

I don't enjoy many books about prayer. That doesn't mean there aren't any good ones, just that I'm not sure one ever helped me to pray more, or better. I'd rather have a book of prayers that have been composed, written and prayed in language rich with those human experiences out of which prayer erupts, or is dragged, or writes itself in word and emotion that is the human heart seeking encounter with the heart of God.

When a renowned philosopher whose works on Theism are mind stretchingly challenging decides to explore the basis of Christian prayer, then I don't expect another how to manual, nor another here's my experience, it was great and I'd like you to have it too bestseller. Which is good - because this book is quite different. Owen is unafraid of the theological and philosophical questions raised by our praying - telling God what God already knows, asking for what is in our own interests, establishing any causal connection between our praying and whatever happens that we perceive as an answer to prayer. The main thrust of the book is that prayer is best, perhaps only, understood, in the light of our doctrine of God and our theological conception of what a human being is, and what the relations between God and humanity are, should be and perhaps must be.

I learned so much from this book - The Basis of Christian Prayer, H P Owen (Regent College Pubblishing). Not about how to pray but about what prayer is, about the One to whom prayer is offered, and about the relational interchange that takes place between God and those who dare, and who desire, to address the God who first addresses us. "Prayer validates a personal, as against a non personal view of God. In prayer we address God as Thou." A page later (p.111) Owen quotes a most moving prayer of Anselm, from the Proslogion:

O God, I pray, let me know and love you

so that I may rejoice in you.

And if I cannot in this life fully,

let me advance day by day

until the point of fullness comes.

Let knowledge of you progress in me here,

and be made full there.

Let love for you grow in me here,

and be made full there,

so that here my joy may be great with expectancy

while there being full in realisation.

If there is such a thing as an eschatological spirituality, Then Anselm has gifted to the church a prayer that holds the Christian heart in that creative tension between now and then, here and there, Thou - and I.

Durer's Praying Hands (above) suffers from over-exposure on Christian kitsch products fro m wall plaques to plastic models. But in the original etching the artist combines beauty with beseeching, peace with tension, surrender and expectancy - and few images are more evocative of our humanity than our hands, with which we make and caress, hold and relinquish, clench and open, embrace or exclude. To lift up holy hands in prayer, is therefore no straightforward spiritual exercise.

Advent Enthusiasms and Idiosyncrasies (1)

My favourite soprano singer is Jessye Norman. Ever since I heard her sing the Sanctus from Gounod's St Cecilia Mass (20 years ago), I've listened, learned and been renewed by that magnificent voice. That double CD is now scratched and looks its age.

I've just bought her double CD, Christmastide for the Aberdeen - Paisley weekly jaunt. So instead of Abba, Mozart, John Denver, Thomas Tallis, Mary Chapin Carpenter,and various other voices I'll play several CD's I've now bought for Advent. The Jessye Norman one begins with O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. Sung with slow, deliberate enunciation, like a prayer quietly passionate and long in the saying. It builds towards a crescendo of longing, orchestra and voices demanding to be heard, and above it all the clear confident cry, no longer quietly desperate but sure in its rejoicing, "Emmanuel will come to you, O Israel". 

If it is to be faithful to its own mission and message, then this year the Church, more than any other institution, more than any other source of wisdom or authority, and more confidently than any marketing agency cleverly luring customers, - the Church should speak, live, embody, sing, pray, share, demonstrate, the truth by which it lives. "Rejoice, Rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel." Whatever else our culture currently lacks, joy, hope and trust are in highly significant deficit.

The question haunts me - how does believing God comes to us in Jesus Christ make me act differently from my neighbours?

If in Jesus the love and mercy of God have come, and if Christmas brings a message of peace on earth and goodwill amongst all peoples, then why in the name of Jesus do I buy into the gloom and anxiety of a global economy on the critical list?

What listening to Jessye Norman's rendering of O Come, O Come Emmanuel does is question our culture's default position on what matters most. And it lifts my eyes beyond the Euro zone, to the economy of heaven, and the call to live with hopeful joy and trustful peace, not because that makes problems go away, but because it looks with clearer vision at the God who comes near.

The painting is The Annunciation, by Fra Angelico. It is replete with biblical clues, it is a masterpiece of reverenced mystery. It is a painting of God at work invading and interrupting with urgency and demand - awaiting that "Yes" that allows the Word to become flesh.

The Transformative Authority of the Bible

One of the finest spiritual writers in the Evangelical tradition is only read today in edited versions. Like the Puritans, Andrew Murray's writing could be 'prolix', and like a certain washing machine advert of some years ago, he could go on and on and on. But Andrew Murray (if you Google the name you're likely to encounter a tennis player!) was a profoundly influential teacher in the Holiness tradition in South Africa and in England through the Keswick movement. His commentary on Hebrews, The Holiest of All, was very warmly reviewed by no less than James Denney who didn't call geese swans. What Denney liked was the thoughtful application of evangelical truth to Christian sanctification and behaviour, and the centrality of Christ in all Murray's writings.

Murray wrote one of the best accounts of an Evangelical appropriation of the Bible. Rather than argue for the authority of the text as artefact, he pleaded for a use of the Bible that depended on openness to God and a receptiveness of heart to the transforming work of the Word of Scripture. Here's what he says:

God's Word only works its true blessing when the truth it brings to us has stirred the inner life, and reproduced itself in resolve, trust, love or adoration. When the heart has received the Word through the mind and has had its spiritual powers called out and exercised on it, the Word is no longer void, but it has done that whereunto God has sent it. It has become part of our life, and strengthened us for new purpose and effort.

Andrew Murray, The Inner Chamber and the Inner Life, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1950), 72

Truth that transforms, a Word that is living, dynamic and provocative of response, words through which God speaks now, that is the Word enfleshed, embodied, lived, obeyed - and that is the authority of Scripture that matters most - it authors our lives.  

(Learning slowly how to use my new camera. The photo was taken in the Aberdeen Botanic Gardens)

Reading the Old Testament as a Christian, with humility and a care for its origins in Jewish faith

Over the past decade or so John Goldingay has produced an astonishing quantity of quality studies on what he calls the First Testament. His two erudite and elegant volumes in the International critical Commentary on Second Isaiah are reason enough to wonder. But they were preceded by the large monograph The Message of Isaiah 40-56, which is the best thing around for getting to the heart of this majestic document of renewed hope and persistent faith.

Three volumes of commentary on the Psalms constitute a further gift to the church, and these I've used regularly over the past few years. Years ago one of Goldingay's first books was a paperback study of the Psalms 42-51, Songs from a Strange Land. Those of us who used it hoped he would eventually write a full scale commentary. The three volumes in the Baker Wisdom Commentary series are comprehensive in exegesis without being overwhelming, the theology of the each psalm is explored and opened up for the church's response of praise, thanksgiving, confession or lament.

Then there is the trilogy on Old Testament Theology, a total of 2,500 pages of some of the most stimulating and discursive theological exegesis I've read. And discursive doesn't mean unstructured, or wandering - it means bringing a range of disciplines together in the task of interpreting the gospel, the faith and the life of Israel. He concedes that his approach overlaps with J W McClendon's threefold division of ethics, doctrine and witness, and like McClendon he insists that it is the life Israel is called to live, and its faithfulness in pursuing it, that gives credibility to Israel's gospel and substance to its faith. Likewise it is ethics, lived practice that most fully expresses the Gospel of Jesus. Not that doctrine and confessional proclamation are unimportant, but they depend upon transformative living through obedient appropriation of what God has declared in Jesus Christ.

Goldingay holds in close connectedness the First and Second Testaments. And his treatment of Torah gives no concession to the the extreme of reductionism that devalues and dismisses the biblical witness to Torah as the instruction for human life before God. But neither does he entertain any idealising or absolutising of Torah as overarching law whose requirements are mere demands without enabling grace. In Goldingay's approach there is a conscientious and respectful handling of the witness, faith and ethics of Israel. The result is one of the most usable and enlightening overviews of Old Testament Theology available.

Over the years I've worked through several of the big names, some of them double volumes, and learned much in the process. But Goldingay writes out of profound scholarship, alert to the post-modern challenges faced by faith traditions embedded in meta-narratives now open to question, sympathetic to the original bearers of the witness of the First Testament, yet committed to understanding the place of the Old Testament in Christian living and in the church's proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The three volumes expound life in community as it is lived towards God, embraces the neighbour and calls to personal integrity. And Goldingay writes well, out of personal conviction, generous to other views, lucid and engaged, and above all as someone who loves the text too much to force it into any distorting conformity with theological assumptions imported from elsewhere.

John Goldingay sits alongside several others whose work on the Old Testament I find illuminating, refreshingly unpredictable, and written by scholars respectful of both text and reader - Walter Brueggemann, Kathleen O'Connor, Terence Fretheim, William P Brown, Clinton McCann come to mind. Amongst the servants of God within the church, for whom the church should reserve a Sunday to celebrate and give thanks, are those biblical scholars who think and pray, consider and weigh, write and publish, providing the nourishment of soul and the fruit of scholarship for the nurture of the faith and the health of the church. John Goldingay is one such scholar.

 

Why, now and again, I read the King James Bible now and again.....

It can't have escaped the notice of alert blog readers that 2011 is the 400th anniversary of the publishing of the King James Bible (The Authorised Version). Leaving aside the issue of the textual reliability of the Received Text, and the reliance on Erasmus's Greek New Testament, itself an insecure textual foundation, and the wholesale borrowing from Tyndale's English translation of the New Testament and part of the Old Testament, the King James Bible remains a stellar achievement of English literature, and one of the glories of the English language.

However accessible or contemporary, relevant or scholarly, all other translations by comparison dilute, diminish and render banal a text produced by a rich vocabulary distilled into stylistic concentrate, and then composed into sonorous prose and sublime poetry. Mixed metaphor? Yes. Exaggeration? Caricature? Possibly - but only slightly.

Since the mid 20th Century, translation of the Bible has become a hugely profitable industry. Leave aside (yes, please do) the hundreds of sectional interest Bibles - I mean, recently we were insulted by the issue of the C S Lewis Bible. I can just hear Lewis delivering his lecture in heaven on the occasion of the publication of the C S Lewis Bible. And beginning with the acronym he used to describe the hated task of writing his allocated volume of the Oxford History of English Literature - OHEL!

Leaving aside all that nonsense, there has still been a conveyor belt of translations sponsored by publishers and major church traditions. The RSV, the Good News Bible, Living Bible (described by Ian Paisley as the Livid Libel), Jerusalem Bible, New English Bible, The Common Bible, New International Version, Today's English Bible, New RSV, New Living Translation, Today's NIV. And yes, even a New KJV!

There are now substantial books written to guide Christians to the right Bible for them. Criteria range from readability, accuracy, theological presuppositions, cultural resonance, and marketing terminology includes new, today, contemporary. I get all of that. And I recognise that reading the Bible isn't easy for committed Christians, let alone the casually interested or dismissively indifferent. So there is a good case for accessibility balanced with accuracy, and readability linked to reliability. And I have absolutely no brief to defend the King James Version as the best translation - it isn't. Nor am I saying that the others are inferior in all ways to the King James - they are most decidedly not.

  But. If as an English language speaker and reader you want to hear the Psalms rendered into poetry written by a genius that sounds as if it was written by a genius - then read them in the Authorised Version.

And if you want to be moved to the deep places in your soul and ignited in the complacent corners of your heart, read the Authorised Version of Isaiah 1 and 2, 35 and 40, 53 and 55, and catch a glimpse of images that flash from inspired words. The Beatitudes read and sound in the Authorised Version like promises that, if they were true would be miracles, and in the unforgettable rhythms of the Authorised Version they do indeed sound miraculous. The King James translation of Romans 8 is a text worthy of Patrick Stewart's voice as Jean Luc Picard of the starship Enterprise declaring that life and the universe are ultimately and finally redeemed.

The scan of the big black Bible above is of my ordination Bible. And though seldom read in church now, and I preach from the New RSV (though I still love my even larger RSV!), now and then I take up this Bible with my name stamped on it in gold, and I read it. Not because it is accessible, relevant, the last word in textual integrity, culturally resonant or ecclesially approved - none of that matters. I read it because it is great literature. I read it because the cadences and rhythms of language are a joy to read and hear; because our language is sequined with words and phrases that still catch light and sparkle with meaning and point. I read it because it is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, and its language is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.

And I read it now and again, because now and again, in the dumbed down discipleship for dummies approach of much contemporary Christianity, I need to hear a language that reminds me that God is Other than us, that the transcendent God whose eternal love is known in Beauty, Truth and Goodness, is one who is beyond the language of the news bulletin, whose holiness and mercy eludes the appeal of the too-clever advert, and whose Being is way above and beyond the reductionism that tries to domesticate majesty, or dissolve indescribable mystery in a solution of oversimplified prose justified by the impudent adjective "New"!

Feel better now. Sorry. Didn't mean to rant - much. Think it's time to remember the One who "maketh me to lie down in green pastures; [and] leadeth me beside the still waters...and restoreth my soul". Yea, verily..."my cup runneth over".

Coincidence, providence, random Bible verses and guidance or what?

A week or so ago driving down the road and looked at the mileometer.

Total miles travelled, though I didn't reset it before leaving, 114.9 miles.

At the same time I'm passing a petrol station where unleaded petrol is 114.9 pence.

Now I don't do the random open your Bible and see what it says thing, so deduce this is sheer coincidence.

Begin to worry about the word coincidence when providence, or guidance might be more theologically responsible words.

Run through in my head whether this could be a Bible verse - if so, could only be Psalm 114.9.

Still don't do the random Bible verse thing, but just in case....I check, but it's OK.

Psalm 114 only has 8 verses, so couldn't be guidance.

Spoke with a friend about this coincidence, and received the following email reply, which is worryingly worrying!

"As I'm sure you've already checked - Psalm 114 sadly only has 8 verses - however the 9th verse on the 114th page of my NIV says "If it is spreading in the skin, the priest shall pronounce him unclean: it is infectious", is that of any help!! This guidance thing is difficult."

Now supposing petrol goes up in price, what verses might be appropriate guidance from the relevant Psalm.

I've looked - most of them are quite comforting - 140.9 is a good one for my enemies! As are 141.9 and 143.9.

And I like 146.9 as a message of comfort and inclusion for those who have little sense of belonging.

No. I still don't think random verses are the way ahead. Anyway, I hope petrol doesn't go up that much anytime soon!

Bible translation and the question of who controls the text as product?

First line of an intercessory prayer heard recently at a morning service in a church, "O Lord, as you have served us very well in the past......."

The following claim, attributed by Craig Blomberg (Evangelical NT scholar) to Al Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Convention: welcoming the publication, from within their own publishing house, of the Holman Christian Standard Bible Mohler spoke of the importance of having "a Bible translation we can control".

Now many a year ago, when the NIV was first published by Zondervan, it was promoted as an "Evangelical" translation. The Principal of the Baptist College then was R E O White, for whom the Greek New Testament was the equivalent of Jeremiah's scroll, and was to be ingested and digested as the very marrow of Christian life and faith. I still haven't met anyone who could match his enthusiasm for grammar, syntax, punctuation, textual criticism, etymology, critical apparatus, lexical investigation, and who quite simply revelled in the work of textual criticism, translation and exegesis, insisting that such disciplined detail showed reverence for words, and the Word. One of his heroes (not sure but think it was J B Lightfoot) spoke of burying his head in a lexicon and raising it in the presence of God.

So when the NIV was being advertised in Christian media as an "Evangelical" translation, he took time in the Greek class to ask the question I've never stopped asking, "Why would evangelicals of all christian people, want a Bible translation that is made in their own image?" By which he meant, and I concur, shouldn't our desideratum be the criterion of accuracy, disciplined faithfulness to the text, refusal to ignore or give in to the pull of our own theological presuppositions, linguistic honesty, scholarly deference before the challenge of the text, respect for the harder reading even if it is theologically inconvenient, honest acknowledgement of the difficulties and of the polar attractions and repulsions of dynamic and formal translation?

So as an Evangelical Christian, when I hear any publishing house or Christian tradition aspire to the control of a translation I have a deep and reluctant to articulate uneasiness. But that first line of the opening prayer I quoted at the start, "O Lord as you have served us so well in the past...", with its unacknowledged assumption of God at our service, may well be the hermeneutical clue I need to explain and interpret my uneasiness. As Blomberg (see here) gently comments, "Funny. I always thought the Bible should control us..." Yes. And I always thought in worship we are at the service of God.

Arthur McGill: "The Scriptures function as a servant of their Lord".

Below is a quotation that providess an important perspective on what the Bible is, how the Christian community is to read it and live in it and through it - or rather, how through it's reading of the Bible, the Christian community is to live in Christ. The extract comes from Arthur McGill's slim but profound account of how Christians might seek to do theology in a world where suffering is interwoven in the textures of existence. The book, Suffering. A Test of Theological Method, was originally written in 1968 so the language is not gender inclusive:

"If the Christian in his existence and in his thought focuses on Christ, this is because Christ is present to him. And Christ is present to him because of Holy Scripture...Above and beyond the various details that they contain, the Biblical documents mean to point - or witness - to Jesus Christ as the power and wisdom of God. The books of the Old Testament point in expectation and those of the New Testament point in fulfilment... "the Scriptures are not a witness among others [to Jesus Christ], but the witness without parallel".

It is not as a history book or as a scientific book or as a book of events or even as a record of man's religious beliefs that the theologian reads the Bible, but as a witness to Christ. The Scriptures function as a servant of their Lord. We are meant not to rest in them but to move through them and beyond them  to the One they serve.

Theology is often tempted to rest in the words of Scripture and to read these books as if they transcribed God's life and light for man into words. But theology must resist this temptation. The Bible as such is not the light of the world; nor is the Bible as such the principle of openness which no darkness can overcome. In all its investigations theology must move beyond the Scriptural statements and seek to discern the form of Jesus Christ himself."

Arthur C. McGill, Theology. A Test of Theological Method (Louisville: Westminster Press, 1982) pages 29-30.

Joachim Jeremias and the Central Message of the New Testament

Well I'm on holiday. That's when you get doing what you like. I like second-hand bookshops. So that's what we did, Graeme and I. James Dickson's out at Kilsyth, via Caulders Garden Centre with tea room. Only bought three books - two of them recently published but well reduced. One of them a wee gem from another era. A hardback first edition of Joachim Jeremias, The Central Message of the New Testament, published by SCM in 1965. What was a surprise about the book was the reverse of the dust cover. Unlike the bad and often annoying habit of contemporary publishers, who put the mutually congratulatory blurb of sympathetic peers on the back, this one has something much more interesting. A map. The SCM Map of Theology 1965, showing the university whereabouts of some of SCM's main European continental authors. Fascinating and a who's who of mid-20th century and mainly German and Swiss Protestant biblical scholars. It both dates me and pleases me that I've read something by most of them, and lots of stuff by some of them.

Joachim Jeremias himself I have admired and enjoyed reading ever since working through Volume 1 of his New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus. He never finished the second volume - and some of his main contentions are now questioned or superceded. But there is a seriousness of purpose and a reverence for the words of Jesus in Jeremias that helped to reassure a young Scottish Baptist student who had discovered that reading German biblical criticism can be like a debut attempt at white water rafting not knowing how to hold the paddle. So I bought this book in appreciation of a good man and a careful scholar. His other books, The Parables of Jesus, The Eucharistic Teaching of Jesus and Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, show the same careful learning tracing its way through ancient cultures and texts.

The last lines of Jeremias in The Central Message of the New Testament, on the Johannine Prologue (John 1.1-18), are a good example of his style and his way of doing New Testament theology from the standpoint of a faith both critical and confident:

It is in a world which knew of God's silence as a token of his inexpressible majesty that the message of the Christian church rings out: God is no longer silent - he speaks... [and] God has not always remained hidden. There is one point at which God took off the mask; once he spoke distinctly and clearly. This happened in Jesus of Nazareth; this happened above all on the cross...God is no longer silent. God has spoken. Jesus of Nazareth is the Word - he is the Word with which God has broken his silence. Page 90

Intentional Bible reading and transformative practice

Ian asked in a comment for an unpacking of an admittedly dense sentence in the previous post (in mitigation, it was written early morning though;) )

"Intentional Bible reading as spiritual discipline leading to transformative practice, while a core emphasis in Baptist spirituality, is certainly not a Baptist or Evangelical monopoly game."

So I'll try to expand and explain. Those of us embedded in Scottish Baptist life recognise that we often make a strong claim to being a Bible believing people. Our devotion to Scripture is expressed in such characteristic ways as Bible study, preaching that is biblically rooted in exposition of the text, and testing of church practice, personal ethics and doctrinal conviction against the benchmark of Christ as revealed in Scripture. The place of such Christ-centred biblical commitment is historically and culturally pervasive in our spirituality and is all but unquestioned amongst Scottish Baptists. But we are prone to exaggerate such biblical devotion as an Evangelical or Baptist distinctive, at times being dismissive of the biblical rootedness of other traditions which may not claim to be either Baptist or Evangelical. Yet actual reading of Scripture, and practice of the Gospel in faithfulness to Christ, are as evident in other traditions as our own - so that at times we can sound painfully self-righteous. So we don't have a monopoly on such biblically oriented spirituality.

I suspect the more compacted clause is the first one though, and especially the phrase "transformative practice". I was thinking of how deliberate and regular consideration of Scripture, alone or even better in fellowship with others, leads to transformation. By prayer, study, reflection and application to life, the word again becomes flesh, embodied and active in Christ following action. The transformative power of Scripture is therefore pervasive and invasive, reaching both within us and beyond us, re-shaping Christian community to the form of Christ, and flowing outward in witness and service.
For example to encounter the words, "He has shown you human beings what is good, and what does the Lord require of you, but to act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God", is to know ourselves addressed by God, called to change; it is to hear love's ultimatum, to recognise a sovereign invitation to grow through an inner reconfiguring of priorities, attitudes and responsiveness, that instigates in us and around us, new pattterns of behaviour. So not only the change in me, but as I am summoned by God's requirement to change and behave differently, I become an agent of mercy, an enthusiast for just acting, one who walks humbly with the God whose transformative Word disrupts and reconfigures my worldview. That's what I meant by "Intentional Bible reading as spiritual discipline leading to transformative practice".

As a matter of fact it would be an interesting experience for a Christian community to let that one Micah verse be the focus of attention, and through a process of communal discernment and intentional reading, ask the question;

so what for us as a people does it now mean,
for us, at this time and in this place,
to act justly, and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with God?

Ask such a question seriously, work towards its answer with honesty and imagination, and sooner or later the Spirit of Christ translates intentional reading into transformative practice.