Living Wittily

Short story writers and people who don't get out much.....

Short stories are an acquired taste. Sheila enjoys them. I have to persevere.

Book reviews can be hacked out blurb, or carefully crafted appreciation which is neither gushing nor keen to put down.

Books and Culture is one of my favourite sources of advice and warning about what's what and what's good on the book front.

So if you go to Books and Culture here you'll find a carefully crafted appreciation of the most recent volume of The Best American Short Stories.

This is a book review as it should be - makes me want to read the book. Encourages me to go against the grain of what I usually like reading. Invites me to persevere.

Wouldn't you, once you are drawn in by the first few sentences of this review, written by someone who clearly knows a thing or two about the cruciality of story?

"Fiction writers, people who by definition have chosen as their life's work to sit at home, alone—often in their jammies—and make things up. The world, as seen by people who don't get out much.

But the facts are all there on the evening news (or we'd like to think at least they once were). We are awash in information. What we need is understanding, some way of puzzling the whole thing out, deciding what to make of all the goings-on.

Enter the short story writer—in a bathrobe—with a cup of coffee, a compass, a thermometer, a flashlight, a spyglass, a decoder ring."

Gordon Fee as Exegete: Giving Paul his due and the importance of word order

Two examples of Fee's no nonsense exegetical comments:

"R F Collins argues (unconvincingly) that Paul has here taken over an earlier formula and adapted it to his own purposes. While all things are possible, not all possible things are equally probable. Indeed, it is of considerable interest that the most creative theologian in the early church is seen as not capable of being creative at points like this, but must be assumed to be borrowing from others - and that without evidence."

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On Paul's use of charis and shalom in the greeting:

"Paul salutes his brothers and sisters in Christ with "grace to you - and peace." It is worth noting that this is the invariable order of Paul's words, not "grace and peace to you" as in most translations. Very likely there is significance to this order: the grace of God and Christ is what is given to God's people; peace is what results from such a gift. Hence "grace to you - and peace."...The sum total of God's activity towards his human creatures is found in the word "grace"; God has given himself to his people bountifully and mercifully in Christ. Nothing is deserved, nothing can be achieved. The sum total of those benefits  as they are experienced by the recipients of God's grace is "peace", God's eschatological shalom, both now and to come."

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If the task of the exegete is to enable later readers to hear as clearly as possible, the voice of the one speaking in the text, then these two brief quotations are good examples of why Gordon Fee is a trusted guide. For myself, I wholly concur with his pedantic care in translating Paul's greeting "grace to you - and peace". Allowing the brief pause between the two both distinguishes and connects them in a way that is profoundly theological.

On another note, the Scottish Baptist College Blog is being revived into a discussion forum for issues that we as part of the Scottish Baptist community want to explore in conversation. In particular we want to explore areas of theological education, ministry formation, discipleship in 21st Century Culture, and we will include occasional book reviews. It will also contain news and comment from our College community and have some guest posts from students and others now and again. You might want to go look - I'll occasionally flag it up here as new material is added. 

Of the making of many books, and the pricing upwards of many books, there is no limit.

When it comes to possessing a book, like most bibliophiles I prefer a substantial stitched hardback. Especially if it is an important book. And because I just so enjoy handling a well bound book, printed on quality paper, where font and layout and editing and production standards each contribute to a book that is a joy to hold and behold, to handle and read. And if the price is halfway reasonable then here's my money. The book below is the hardback edition of George Herbert at £90 - I got it for half the price from a sensible bookseller in Cambridge. "A thing of beauty and a joy forever".

But I also want to write in praise of the well intentioned paperback. Sometimes the hardback is ridiculously expensive and impossible to justify - and there's no paperback edition. Take for example Susan Gillingham's Psalms Through the Centuries volume 1 - £57 and the second volume will be even more expensive. And no chance of a paperback version, despite the fact that this is a series of commentaries aimed at students! So either you borrow it from a library (if it has it), or from inter-library loan - but what if it's a book you want to read and refer to often, huh? Writing to the publisher of Gillingham's book to point out the unattainability of these prices for all but institutional libraries I received a courteous negative response, essentially the same as one I first encountered and learned to live with when I was twenty one and at University.

I still have an essay I did all those years ago on the hard to make case for the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy. I began with the disclaimer that much as I would like to establish the case for Mosaic authorship, the historical and textual evidence did not point that way. One of the most illuminating feedback comments I've ever had was pencilled in the margin, "Tough!" It was a hard response for a fragile young Evangelical, but one that has served me well - and I still have the essay. The lecturer was himself an agnostic who sympathised deeply with people of faith trying to re-negotiate the foundations of that faith by intellectual dialogue and critical thinking in what could seem a hostile environment.

The point is, the publisher's response for all its courteous explanations of why they couldn't afford to make the book affordable for individual purchasers, came down to that one word I learned to live with decades ago - "Tough!" Now there aren't many books I want to own that I'm not prepared to pay for, and do without other things to buy them. Choices about disposable income are real giveaway clues to our ethics, stewardship, taste, and peculiar but likeable daftness. But even I can't bring myself to spend £115 on, for example, the second volume of Michael Watts The Dissenters, a magisterial history that is simply unmatched in the subject field. The first volume was issued in both hardback and paperback - but not the second. Tough!

And likewise Carol Newsom's The Book of Job A Contest of Moral Imaginations at £66 - but a book of great originality, penetrative in its insight into how this magnificent text interprets us and our world, and our human brokenness and longing for wholeness, before we ever get near an interpretation of it. So at £66, "Tough!" But it has just been published at £13.99 in an Oxford Paperback. The lesson being, sometimes you can't get all you want - I'm still waiting for Gillingham on the Psalms to be affordable, and Watts Dissenters to not need a mortgage preceded by a credit check - so, "tough". But now and again life has unlooked for blessing - and something you want is not only affordable, but a bargain at twice the price - as is Newsom's work on Job, in paperback.

For those interested, Newsom's commentary on Job in the New Interpreter's Bible represents along with Sam Balentine's Smyth and Helwys volume on Job, the finest exegetical conversation on Job I know. And with Newsom bound in the same volume as Clinton McCann's commentary on Psalms, that NIB volume costing around £40 is simply gold at the price of lead. I exaggerate - but only very slightly.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity. A five star volume *****

Diarmaid MacCulloch is one of the finest ecclesiastical historians on the planet. Some years ago I placed his magnificent biography of Thomas Cranmer on my desk and slowly paced my way through one of the most accomplished biographies in print. The reviewers used words like massive, definitive, exhaustive, detailed, sympathetic, balanced - they're all true enough. But it was also hugely enjoyable, and written by someone who knows that however scholarly the research, and however secure the overall thesis, what makes a book persuasive is the quality of the writing and the shaping of the story. Macculloch is brilliant at the large scale literary masterpiece - and his portrayal of Cranmer the "hesitant hero" is simply that.

So three years ago the only book I took on a walking holiday in the Tyrol was the paperback version of Reformation. Europe's House Divided, 1490-1700. I don't know a better survey of that century of revolutionary religion, radical politics, national re-alignments, political alliances and collisions, of superstition and faith, of lethal wars and fragile peace. I remember, for example, reading MacCulloch's account of Luther's oscillating relationships with the power brokers of his day, whether the Pope, Frederick of Saxony, Zwingli, the peasants, even God - and learning so much about a subject I thought I knew quite a lot about! The whole book is an education in historical nuance, depth of cultural awareness and imaginative analysis, helping us understand how the church has come to be what and where and who it is - and why it din't need to be like this.

So now his new book has landed on my desk with an almighty thump. Twelve hundred pages (well, I exaggerate - 1161), 160 of them notes and further reading. But 1000 pages of carefully organised story, the facts, the dates, the people, but also the movements, the social and cultural trends, the large patterns, the ebb and flow of power and influence as the church has evolved in a changing continuity. Starting from Galilean sect, to Jewish splinter group, to Mediterranean religion, and Roman state sponsored faith under Constantine. Moving on to medieval cultural hegemony in western europe, with alternative versions in the East, the Reformation split, the religious wars, and the European expansion to the new worlds. Followed by the destabilising and disruoptive intellectual energies of the Enlightenment, giving impetus to further reinvention, reaction and accomodation to the modern and now the postmodern and globalised world. And all of this in only 1000 pages. I have a friend who loves thin books - so do I. But everyone needs balance, and just now and again, it's important to pick up a book that requires careful handling to avoid later back problems. 

So - there's probably a month's worth of early reading in this big beautiful book, sitting at my desk, a large mug of tea, just before 6.00 a.m., and with only Gizmo the cat for company. If it takes longer it won't matter - I'll be dead erudite when I've read it so I will.

The importance of the muttered Amen when reading good stuff!

Now and then while reading this book I mutter an 'amen' with a strength of conviction to match the most passionate Calvinist, hearing a prayer of thanksgiving for God's sovereign electing grace and its fixity in the eternal decrees. Or with just as much conviction as Charles Wesley in 'Let Earth and heaven Agree', one of his less savagely satirical anti-calvinist hymns, in which he trumpets, "For all my Lord was crucified, For all, for all my Saviour died".

What provoked such occasional passionate responses in reading this book wasn't in fact these specifics and collision points of theology. It's the way the writers defend that without which all theology becomes a reiterated loop of propositional slogans - a teachable mind. By the way, time and again Calvin preached about the need to be teachable (memorably on Ephesians) - to cultivate a docility and receptiveness open to the truth of God. Not sure what Jean Calvin the pastor would make of the postmodern mindset, but I think he would have little quarrel with the defence of reasonable theologising that's commended in this book:

[The] challenge to one's deepest assumptions plays an important part for the renewal of the mind and for the training of the intelligent - indeed, wise - leaders for the coming generations.* Christian education is not faith-affirming if it merely confirms our cultural and denominational prejudices.* Only when our deepest assumptions are challenged will we be able to hold our faith with the kind of intelligent conviction that makes us credible witnesses of the new humanity instituted by Christ.**

Because God has given all of us reason as a gift integral to understanding the world asnd our purpose in it, thinking is a Christian calling.* In this calling the Christian has to recognise that reason is given to all and that all truth is God's truth...If Jesus is the incarnate Logos in whom we live, and move, and have our being, then all truth is part of him and leads to him.* This makes all truth about humanity and nature worthy of study. To think is not a luxury for the Christian but part of the essence of the Christian's religion.* A person's experience of freedom, including the freedom of intellectual enquiry, is absolutely fundamental to authentic Christian experience.** Thinking, with all its risks, is mandatory for the Christian."*

The Passionate Intellect. Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education, Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 196-7.

The italics for emphasis are in the original (including Wesley's), -  the asterisks represent the aforementioned muttered 'Amens!' I use a well developed way of marking books I read - think I'll add to them an A*, symbolising 'intensely muttered convictonal Amen'.

Terry Eagleton and the radical claims of the Gospel of Jesus

Now here's a long passage from Terry Eagleton, whose approach to Christian apologetics is rather novel. As a non theistic cultural critic not averse to strongly worded criticisms of Christian faith, he nevertheless insists (against Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest) that counter arguments should enage with real Christianity not ignoramus caricatures; and that hostile critics should tackle real Christianity which at every level including the rational, is a scandal.

"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" is a notoriously enigmatic injunction; but whatever it means, it is unlikely to mean that religion is one thing whereas politics is another, a peculiarly modern prejudice if ever there was one. Any devout Jew of jesus's time would have known the things that are God's include working for justice, welcoming the immigrants, and humbling the high and mighty. The whole cumbersome paraphernalia of religion is to be replaced by another kind of temple, that of the murdered, transfigured body of Jesus. To the outrage of the Zealots, the Pharisees, and right wing rednecks of all ages, this body is dedicated in particular to all those losers, deadbeats, riffraff, and colonial collaborators who are not righteous but are flamboyantly unrighteous - who either live in chronic trnasgression of the Mosaic law or, like the Gentiles, fall outside its sway altogether.

These men and women are not being asked to bargain their way into God's favour by sacrificing beasts, fussing about their diet, or being impeccably well behaved. Instead, the good news is that god loves them anyway, in all their moral squalor. Jesus's message is that God is on their side despite thier visciousness - that the source of the inexhaustibly self-delighting life he calls his Father is neither judge, patriarch, accuser or superego, but lover, friend, fellow accused, and counsel for the defense....Men and woman are called upon to do nothing apart from acknowledge the fact that God is on their side no matter what, in the act of loving assent which is known as faith. In fact, Jesus has very little to say about sin at all, unlike a great many of his censorious followers. His mission is to accept men and women's frailty, not to rub their noses in it."

Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution. Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale, 2009), pp. 19-20.

Now one part of me wants to make this long apologia for the Gospel of Jesus the basis of an essay assignment on Contemporary Mission Strategy and the Gospel of Jesus, with the uncomplicated instruction - "Discuss".

Another part of me is left wondering why an agnostic who is resistant to Christianity makes a far better job of stating the core of the Gospel than many a Christian preacher and / or theologian.

In any case - the book is a tonic - not so much comforting as bracing, and not so much an apologia for Christian faith as an apology for the intellectual sloppiness of much new atheism dogma.

The Brazos Introduction to Christian Spirituality

If you are at all interested in Christian spirituality as both personal discipline and intellectual interest, then this is a book you might want to have on your desk, rather than the shelf - it's way too big for reading in bed. There are now several text books on Christian Spirituality, suitable for class use or personal study, offering breadth but not always depth. What makes this book worth buying and working through is the obvious virtue of its having grown in dialogue with students, being refined through collaboration with other scholars, and the alert attention the author has paid to his own spiritual development; and all this taking over thirty years of slow and healthy gestation towards publication.

At 500 pages, double columns and hardback, the book has every appearance of meaning business. Each chapter begins with a clear outline and aim, then ends with a section on Christian spiritual practice, a chapter summary, several focused questions and a section for further study with suggested resources. There are sidebars developing content, excerpts from classic texts and figures in Focus boxes and illustrations which aren't there simply to break up the text.

All in all I reckon this is the most user friendly substantial Introduction to Christian Spirituality now available, and one mercifully free from the desire to be comprehensive at the cost of depth. I've spent time on and off over the past few days reading, browsing, getting a feel for the overall schema and discourse level. My feeling is that the book still reads as a substantial handbook on Christian Spirituality which balances essential information and analysis of key theological concepts and disciplines, with practical focus on the personal and formative implications of spirituality. At around £15 Hardback and high quality production, the book is good value - and in more ways than the near giveaway price.

This isn't a review - just a mention of a book I bought on the recommendation of friend and colleague, Deans Buchanan - who knows a thing or two about Christian Spiritual development. Have a look for yourself at the Brazos Press website here. .

Two Big books in one Week. 2 Beginning from Jerusalem, J D G Dunn

The first book I read by J D G Dunn was his Unity and Diversity in the New Testament. Then his commentary on Romans in the word series. Those who want a readable and theologically rich reading of Romans (from the "new perspective") won't find much better than the Explanation sections of Dunn's two volume commentary - except Tom Wright's Romans in the New Interpreter's Bible. Then there was his The Parting of the Ways, followed by The Theology of Paul the Apostle, his two books on Galatians and the first volume of his magnum opus on Christianity in the Making, Remembering Jesus - which I am now well through but with a few hundred pages to go! And now this huge weight training resource has landed with a satisfying if intimidating thump on my desk. So finishing the two Dunn volumes over the summer has become an ambition that has every chance of being frustrated - but not if I can help it!

Over the years I've slowly worked through a number of big books on biblical studies - some of them shifting my perspectives, opening up new ways of coming at the biblical revelation, and time and again challenging me to think myself towards a much more reflective and much less predictable take on that wonderful complexity of faithful understanding, critical integrity, prayerful patience and immediate human communication, that, at its best, we call preaching. Brueggemann's Old Testament Theology; W D Davies, The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount; N T Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God; Beasley Murray, Jesus and the Kingdom of God; F F Bruce, Paul. Apostle of the Heart Set Free; Gordon Fee, God's Empowering Presence; Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament - and so many more.(The volume by Bruce is hardly cutting edge now - but it is still one of my favourite books, a tribute to the kind of scholarship that makes a difference to what and how you preach - or so it did for me.)

I'm not qualified to review Dunn's life work, carved and shaped as it is from an enormous accumulation of knowledge - in this volume 1330 pages! I'm just happy to sit at the feet of this Scottish Gamaliel, exiled to Durham, and admire and ponder the work of a virtuoso scholar whose grasp of the field of NT studies is sure and whose treatment is respectful. Today I jumped to a late chapter on Ephesians - which he doesn't think Paul wrote (I'm not so sure) - but there are sentences, footnotes, paragraphs and references that coax you back to the text, to think again - because Dunn is a master at critical appreciation and theological appropriation of text. What more would you want from a NT teacher than that persuasive invitation to go look again.

Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense - yet again!

Today I'm doing the Lenten post over at Hopeful Imagination. This year contributors introduce a book that is important in their own spiritual story. My choice is Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense by W H Vanstone, a book I've already mentioned a few times on Living Wittily.

The sub title is The Response of Being to the Love of God. This book taught me so much about the love of God, and flowing from that, so much else. You might think my comments on the book are the excusable exaggeration of the enthusiast, or sales talk inexcusable in academic criticism. Just read the book - still in print 33 years after it was published -  then decide which is the right response, enthusiasm or criticism. Neither word quite covers it for me - the word I would choose is admiration - for the man, and for the ability to write a book like that. If biography is theology, here's the real thing. And if pastoral theology has first principles, they are embedded in the mystery of that self-giving Love that risks, creates and redeems in the willed vulnerability of the Triune God.

I've got an elderly friend whose approach to his faith is much more straightforward than mine, who now and again signals part of a conversation is over by stating with all the authority of a Benediction, "Well, that's whit ah think onywey". Ditto me! :)

Evangelical disenchantment and disenchanted evangelicals.

One school of thought suggests that conversion and subsequent religious activity under the Methodist and Finneyan revivals helped empower women in such areas as public speaking, fundraising, and organisational leadership. Hempton is sceptical. The claim that "evangelical religion through its disruptive piety opened a small but expandable crack in the wall of male power and control", is a tidy theory with too many untidy loose ends.

More liberal groups like the Quakers, Universalists and Unitarians produced many of the women leaders in various abolitionist and emancipationist movements. Hempton points out that relatively few American feminist leaders came from the Evangelical stable, and most of those who did, eventually distanced themselves from it. Early conversion experience, and revivalist affiliations, for some of these women raised as many questions as they answered. Two key areas of intellectual discontent quickly emerged; biblical hermeneutics and evangelical dogma. By 1836 Sarah Grimke was arguing forcefully that any plain reading of the Bible will convince any reasonable mind informed by Christian conviction, that slavery was an abomination to the God who is 'in a peculiar manner the God of the poor and the needy, the despised and the oppressed.'

The open letter Sarah wrote was overtly critical of clergy who condoned slavery either by exegetical underpinning or by expedient silence. This and further letters begin to show a loss of confidence in the Bible as the primary arsenal of male power, and consequently her loss of confidence in any mainline denomination, for none upheld " the Scripture doctrine of the perfect equality of man and woman, which is the fundamental principle of my argument in favour of the ministry of women". (page97) The result of such a theological position was alienation from groups that upheld traditional biblical views - prominent amongst them those sponsored by Evangelicalism. In the minds of feminist activists still prepared to found their views on the Bible, abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women were key areas requiring political activism, the social persuasion of protest and debate, and a much more rigorously critical biblical hermeneutic.

"Love to God manifested by love to his creatures." That was a fundamental and sufficient theology for Sarah Grimke. It wasn't long before opposition to oppression fused with concentration on love as theologically definitive, raised serious questions over key evangelical doctrines founded on penal substitution, human sinfulness and hell. In reaction to such theology, leading Christian feminists adopted an increasingly rationalist and universalist position. Elisabeth Cady Stanton was the philosopher and intellectual engine of much mid- 19th century American feminism. Weighed down by the whole panoply of evangelical dogma, "these gloomy superstitions", these "fears of the unknown and unknowable", she found her way to light and truth by "rational ideas based on scientific facts".

There is something deeply significant, which evangelicals today need to think through with some self-reflective and self-critical candour, that these women, protesting against social and institutional oppression, believed they could trace in evangelical dogma and in evangelical biblical interpretations, ideas on which such oppressive attitudes were uncritically founded. Though 20th Century South African Apartheid or Segregation in the American south may seem extreme cases, they do show that abuses of the biblical text to warrant oppression is too well documented in history to be seriously denied. Alongside that of course, goes the honourable record of people like Wesley, Newton, Wilberforce and a host of other evangelical abolitionists whose contribution was decisive and rooted in a securely biblical theology of humanity.

Another Christian feminist, Frances Willard, moved from evangelical Methodism, to collaborative evangelistic activity with D L Moody, and then disenchantment set in. Her interests were more in social reform, particularly temperance and women's suffrage, and her theology morphed into a faith more inclusively catholic, less biblicist and more speculative even at times dabbling in esoteric spirituality. But again what inexorably drew her away from more evangelical principles, what disenchanted her, was what she saw as the inherently patriarchal and hierarchical exclusiveness of evangelical male clergy. This was coupled with a perceived anti-intellectualism and cultural suspicion pervading and constraining evangelical thought and practice seeking to be "in the world but not of the world." Each of these women, in different degrees, saw such attitudes as both informing and distorting Evangelical hermeneutics, so that patriarchy and the suppression of women's leadership and ministry, were inextricably linked to biblical authority understood in male terms, implemented to male advantage, and based on an almost total monopoly of male biblical scholarship.  A closed shop of biblical knowledge, (and indeed of formal advanced education), they believed, secured male dominated control of ecclesial power

The importance of such research into the individual experiences and personal stories of those who, over two centuries, chose to make an exit from the evangelical big story is self-recommending. But after reading it I'm left with a hard to shake off depression, an inner repentance at the incapacity of many expressions of evangelicalism, historic and contemporary, to respond creatively and live adaptively with difference, able to welcome and learn from valid questions.

Failure to focus on the Gospel as the commanding invitation to follow Jesus in radical love, to join with Jesus in liberating protest, to be ministers of reconciliation through costly peacemaking, to live with open armed welcome that transcends our constructed divisions whether of gender, doctrine or view of the Bible; and instead to indulge in an eager pursuit of self-defeating and corrosive arguments over doctrine, or hard edged definitions of the Gospel whose goal is to claim exclusive possession of truth, while also disenfranchising those who dare to differ. These are amongst the failures that led to evangelical disenchantment, and therefore disenchanted evangelicals making their exit left.

And yes, there is another side to this story - but that gets told in plenty of other books, from responsible history and theological reflection all the way through to unabashed propaganda. For now, evangelicals who read this book with requisite humility, will hear important voices of protest and insider critique, that requires attention and honest self-appraisal - and the criterion of that critique in my view must be the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the extent of our faithfulness in following after Jesus.