Living Wittily

Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry

Didn't say in yesterday's post - Buechner is an ordained Presbyterian minister as well as a perceptive humane novelist and essayist. So quite a lot of his published work is sermons. In an age when publishers are no longer interested in the obsolete genre of the printed sermon, Buechner defies the odds. His sermons read like wisdom literature - at times gently sceptical like Ecclesiastes, or spiritual experience is shaped and Psalmed into praise, or reflected experience is distilled in Proverbs about the fear of the Lord and what makes for the good life, or again, human love is celebrated in unabashed enjoyment as in the Song of Songs. But all of them immersed in the Gospel, and opening up to those with enough faith to know they are desperate, the realities of mercy and judgement and love and forgiveness, the promise of new possibility through the call to enter the Kingdom, and a way of life shaped by cross-bearing and party going celebration.

Here's an example - an extract from a Church anniversary sermon, called "The Clown in the Belfry." :

In the year 1831, it seems, this church was repaired and several new additions were made. One of them was a new steeple with a bell in it, and once it was set in place and painted, apparently, an extraordinary event took place. "When the steeple was added," Howard Mudgett writes in his history, "one agile Lyman Woodard stood on his head in the belfry with his feet toward Heaven."

That's the one and only thing I've been able to find out about Lyman Woodard, whoever he was, but it is enough. I love him for doing what he did. It was a crazy thing to do. It was a risky thing to do. It ran counter to all standards of New England practicality and prudence. It stood the whole world on its head just like Lyman himself standing upside down on his. And it was a magical and magnificent and Mozartian thing to do.

If the Lord is indeed our Shepherd, then everything goes topsy turvy. Losing becomes finding and crying becomes laughing. The last becomes first and the weak becomes strong. Instead of life being done in by death in the end, as we always supposed, death is done in finally by life in the end. If the Lord is our host at the great feast, then the sky is the limit.

Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry (San Francisco: Harper, 1992), 115-16.

That's why I read Buechner.

The photo above is of the Congregational Church in Henniker, New Hampshire where my friend Becky (pictured here) is minister. So far as I know she hasn't stood on her head in the belfry yet. Buechner lives in Vermont, just a wee bit up the road!

Making light bigger

Looking through the new Eerdmans catalogue I came across New Tracks, Night Falling, a new book of poems by Jeanne Murray Walker. Walker is the author of six previous collections of poetry, including A Deed to the Light and Coming into History. She is Professor of English at the University of Delaware, where she has taught for thirty years. Among her awards are an NEA Fellowship, an Atlantic Monthly Fellowship at Bread Loaf School of English, (how good is that for the name of a school!), a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and the Glenna Luschi Prairie Schooner Prize for Poetry.

There's an effective oddity about some of her homespun images, and as a connoiseur of pizza my mind and heart (and maybe stomach) immediately resonated with her use of spinning pizza dough as an image for stretching out light and hope.(See the publisher's blurb below.)

I also like the image on the book cover. Gonnae get this so I am!

.......

"The poems in New Tracks, Night Falling acknowledge that we are people driven and divided by fear. They talk about racism, war, loss, greed, alienation, our disregard of the earth, and our disregard of each other.

Sometimes we feel like night is falling in the bright light of day. Yet we get glimpses of hope, of what could be:

In this dark time I want to make light bigger,
to toss it in the air like a pizza chef,
to stick my fists in, stretching it
till I can get both arms into radiance above the elbow
and spin it above us.

Hope continually threads its way through these poems. We hear its voice as Walker writes about choices — both those we make and those beyond our making.

And we feel hope rising like bread when Walker focuses on the gifts of potential, resolution, mercy, joy — the new tracks that we can make in fresh snow, on old paths, along the roads more or less traveled. These are stays against the falling night.

With a keen eye for both physical and emotional detail, Walker explores a journey that all of us are on, and she does so in a way that speaks to our deep fears and deeper joys, that engages and inspires. Tempering somber notes with more joyful ones, she reminds us of the good things, great and small, that are still possible in this world."

Dante on the Sin of Usury and the Credit Crunch .

A week ago at the Fabian Society in London Peter Mandelson warned that the recovery from recession would cause a major and painful consolidation of financial services and a reduction of the economy's dependence on such "financial services". Lord Mandelson said in the future there would be "less financial engineering and more real engineering in our economy". Indeed there would be an absolute necessity for the British economy to recover a significantly greater base in manufacturing, in the making of real things, in the production of that which can be traded. Sure money makes money, but it will become critically important to recover a manufacturing base, those people, and more people, who make the products that make the money to make money - I think is the argument.

Speaking a few weeks ago with a retired and previously very senior manager of one of Scotlands now troubled Banks, he was lamenting (that's the right word) the abandoning of traditional banking values and practices in pursuit of financial services and money marketing. Once Banks became more interested in selling credit at higher rates than they borrowed it, they began to lose interest in the depositing and saving customer and more interested in the borrower who is to be persuaded to buy increasingly unrealistic levels of credit. We all experienced it - you are there to do your own business and the teller can't get quickly enough to asking about your mortgage, credit needs - you are no longer a bank customer whose money is to be secured but a money-on-credit consumer from whom the Bank wants to make more money. The result is a global economy dependent less on producing and manufacturing goods, as one in which money moves around, circulates, in arteries increasingly furred up with bad cholesterol / debt.

And so to Dante. One of the serious and enlightening games the mind plays when reading a text that is pre-modern, culturally removed by centuries and geography, translated therefore out of a long gone worldview into the way we view the world, is finding the points of connection that make its insights universal. So I was intrigued to find the following passage dealing with the sin of usury. That's right - the sin of earning money solely by lending it, greedily selling its purchasing function to someone else for a price higher than its face value in hours worked, skills used and products manufactured.

Dante's theological aim is remarkably accurate. Human art, and that represents all productive work by artisans and trade guilds, reflects the Creator God. The good God creates the natural world, and since human beings are made in the image of God, human art expresses and imitates God's creativity. Usury, the lending of money for interest, offends against nature (God's child), and against human art (God's grandchild). It is this view of human work, our innate capacity for creation and stewardship of nature's resources, that Dante sees as the purposive human activity God intends. Amassing wealth by exacting interest is a parasitic activity that produces nothing but money - which will eventually lose its mundane value, and never had any heavenly value. Usury is ultimately an offence against the Creator, the sin of skiving while others do the work and earn the very wealth that is being amassed by credit sellers. Here's Dante's take on the credit crunch - its origins and why it happened.

........

Go back a little to that point, I said,

Where you told me that usury offends

Divine goodness; unravel now that knot.

   “Philosophy, for one who understands,

points out, and not in just one place”, he said,

“how nature follows – as she takes her course –

   the Divine Intellect and Divine Art;

and if you read your Physics carefully,

not many pages from the start, you’ll see

   that when it can, your art would follow nature,

just as a pupil imitates his master;

so that your art is almost God’s grandchild.

   From these two, art and nature, it is fitting,

if you recall how Genesis begins,

for men to make their way, to gain their living;

   and since the usurer prefers another

pathway, he scorns both nature in itself

and art, her follower; his hope is elsewhere.”

(Canto XI, lines 94-111)

.

The Divine Comedy, Everyman's Library, and taking our lives seriously.

In The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Jonathan Rose celebrates the magnificent achievement of J M Dent's Everyman's Library, 'the largest, most handsome, and most coherently edited series of cheap classics'.

Over the years I've read a number of literary classics in the Everyman's Library Editions, and now own a number of them in their contemporary dress. They're still remarkably cheap given the quality of the production. I don't collect them, but now and again when I want to appreciate the beauty of a book as well as the quality of its contents, I indulge. How is this for a publisher's description of their product:

Everyman's Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.

The original series reflected the choices and prejudices of its time - 1906 Edwardian England, in which Empire, Western Europe and maleness acted as cultural blinkers - though not as much as some have claimed. The new series begun in the mid 1990's is much more inclusive, and though it still gives prominence to items in "the Western Canon", there is now due recognition of other important voices. It's this modern Everyman's which I enjoy reading, holding, looking at. There are several key poets, several of the great novels, and an assortment of miscellaneous personal preferences I'd like to accommodate in the already tightly budgetted space on my bookshelves. (Now the Everyman's Pocket Poets - they are already claiming space on the narrow shelves and wee corners where others don't fit).

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever". More prosaically, a number of life coaches and social psychologists are suggesting one way to beat the credit crunch, defy  economic despair, dispel the can't-afford-it gloom, is to go on allowing ourselves the occasional luxury enjoyment, the regular encounter with beauty, a deliberate evasion of barcode valuation. For some it's chocolate, or concert tickets, flowers, colourful clothes - actually I like all these options as well - but a selection of them kinda books what are described above? Would that be credit crunch defiance - or denial? Well no - it would be commendable cultural responsibility, responsibly developed literary taste, judicious aesthetic choices made in a crass consumerist market - aye right.

Anyway, I've quietly been making my way through Dante's The Divine Comedy, which I've never read all the way through. The photo (a reminder of sunshine on a dreich Scottish January weekend) is of Dante's statue which we visited a couple of years ago when in Verona - and I remember wondering why I'd never tackled a full reading of one of Europe's literary masterpieces. So I've started. 100 Cantos - finished by Easter? There are now several industries devoted to things to do before you die - places to visit, foods to eat, people to meet, ambitions for which to reach - haven't come across one yet about books to read before you die. Nevertheless.

Hazlitt's comment on Dante's achievement explains why Dante's is a voice to be attended to at some time in life:

" He stood bewildered, not appalled, on that dark shore which separates the ancient and the modern world...He is power, passion and self-will personified".

Each day for around twenty minutes I'm attending to a voice which to me is strange, often compelling, at times perplexing, but which requires sufficient honesty and courage to have mind and heart, motive and desire, act and being, sifted by verse which is surgical in psychological exposure, but ultimately therapeutic in spiritual vision and intent. At times I've suspected Dante has been reading that diary of our inner life we all keep, which records in encrypted code those truths about us that no one else is allowed to know - but God knows, and in a moral universe, eternal consequence follows.

Robert Browning once described Dante in two lines:

Dante, who loved well because he hated,

Hated wickedness that hinders loving.

The paradox of that line, hating "wickedness that hinders loving", at least recognises the ambiguity of shame and dignity, of guilt and glory that comprises, and compromises, human existence at its worst and best.

Libraries as Supermarkets for the Imagination

Thinking about my earlier life recently - triggered by reading someone else's memoirs - I realised that I could remember the great freedom of mind and expansiveness of spirit that mobile, local and public libraries brought into an otherwise routine and limited life. Routine and limited for various obvious reasons – we lived in the country at a time when working folk couldn’t afford cars, TV was OK but not the pervasive and persuasive time waster it is now, being in the country there weren’t many options for after school activity. Well, anyway, I’ve always been a reader – from Corn Flake packets to Reader’s Digest, newspapers, and at every stage and phase of life, books.

From primary 5 ( I was 9 or 10) I remember the large leather suitcase with LIBRARY stamped on it, which was brought round the classes on a trolley each Friday afternoon for us to choose a book and return the one borrowed last week. That's where I first read Kidnapped, The Invisible Man and Children of the New Forest. Then there was the local library at East Kilbride
in the early 60's when it was a new new town, and the library a new glass sided shiny building. That's where I developed a never lost interest in biography, stories that were real because the people were real, and in stories about animals, and in which animals are the narrators – so Watership Downdidn’t require the mental re-adjustment others felt they had to make.

Then there were the Carluke and Lanark Public Libraries, which supported my reprehensible Western phase. I must have read dozens of not very politically correct stories of stereo-typed goodies and baddies - that was before I graduated to Alistair Maclean and Desmond Bagley adventures, Evelyn Anthony espionage, a long phase of Douglas Reeman (naval war), Hammond Innes and even a few of Neville Shute.

But in those libraries I also began to read history, which along with biography I think accounts for my lifelong interest in the history of ideas and the people who have them! My current love for history, who we were before we became who we are, came into being against the best efforts of the gentlest most boring teacher I ever had to immunise all pupils against ever catching any long term infection or enthusaism for history. Her nickname was Texas, on account of her slow drawl, in which she enunciated word for word and with sing-song, lilting pathos, her handwritten notes from a blue jotter, concerning the various demeanours and misdemeanours of the key players in the Scottish Reformation and the various fates they met. At 13 years old, I couldn’t have cared less about the young, innocently foolish, (or even culpably stupid) Mary Queen of Scots, though I was a bit more sympathetic to the verbally violent theological hard man John Knox.

It took me several years, a conversion experience and a life-changing call to ministry to get me inside a history book again with serious intent. Having left school with nil points as far as qualifications were concerned, and sure God was calling me to be a minister I had to get some Highers. One of them was History, another English and a third French. The first two have remained lifelong enthusiasms. French I can still read well enough but have all but lost spoken French.  More later………

In praise of thin books

Well . Been away to Manchester on a staff retreat which was a mixture of important discussions we needed time and space for, meeting with colleagues at Northern Baptist College, (including a shared meal at one of the local restaurants on Curry Mile), and time for shared conversation and friendship. In the intervening couple of days some of you have upheld the virtues of the thin book. Thansk for all the suggestions, and maybe worth offerinf some responses.

Trevor, since the Bible is a book of books you could probably choose any one of them as a thin book. Printed as a Penguin paberback I doubt if matthew's Gospel or isaiah would go much beyond 60 pages. So it isn't that the Bible doesn't count as a thin book - it counts as 66 of them.

Kate - not sure where I said suggested thin books need to be theological - so in case I gave that impression, it wasn't intended. Amongst the non theological nominations for my thin book shelf would be Saint Exupery's Little Prince, Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, and Dag Hammarskjold's Markings (which if it is theological, isn't defined by its theology).

Gavin - Dissident Discipleship has 245 pages, which makes it a rather thick, thin book. But Augsburger's earlier books are nearly all within the 160 page limit. But thanks for pointing out a book that doesn't reduce discipleship to a ten quick steps programme, but affirms discipleship as a following after Jesus which is characterised by life practices which bear witness to who Jesus is.

The Manse Cat is a veritable thin book enthusiast, and it was good to have amongst others, The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. I once witnessed this wee book lift the spirit and strengthen the hopefulness of a wonderful Christian lady at the time pushing 80. I still have a letter from her in which she quotes Brother Lawrence and Evelyn Underhill with the surprised gratitude of someone who had just had their medication changed and it was doing wonders. And Nuttall's slim biography of Richard Baxter is like all that Nuttal wrote - discretely erudite, written in restrained and elegant prose, and quietly taking its place alongside weightier works as the one that portrats baxter with affection and authority.

The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass gave me indigestion after a Christmas dinner years ago, when I read the entry on the bearded man shouting in church with the riposte, 'he shaved others, himself he could not shave'.

Bonhoeffer's Life Together is as Graeme says, one of those books which is thin only in the sense of its pagination. I've found that it's a book people either love or hate - its demanding, uncompromising, exposure of spiritual psychology and human dynamics as they are worked out in a close-knit, intensely focused community seldom make for comfortable reading. Yet like many others I've read it several times - each time wincing at the accuracy of his observations, at times resentful of such astringent exhortation, and having to own the painful truth that few church fellowships would be prepared to take this thin book as a year's experiment to test the too easy assumption that if all the world were Christians all problems would be solved!

John Colwell's The Rhythm of Doctrine is both a very good brief systematic theology based on the Church Year, and, I hope, an outline of what could become an original and valuable series of larger books expanding on the theological approach John has opened up - and I hope he does them! Few books claiming to be systematic theologies manage to be both brief and sufficiently rigorous - along with this one, Nicholas Lash, Believing Three ways in One God and Kathryn Tanner's Jesus Humanity and the Trinity, being amongst the more obvious. 

Right. I'm off to read one of the thinnest books in the Bible. I'm preaching on Jonah tomorrow. I know the story well, and the way it destabilises safe theologies and possessive spiritualities. In less than four modest chapters this story turns worlds upside down, changes worldviews, forces a revision of how its readers think of God, and ends with one of the most wonderfully funny lines in the whole Bible. In fact, going back to Trevor, and his search for a thin Bible, raises the question of thin books in the Bible. Ruth is a masterpiece in the same tradition of revising theologies built on unexamined assumptions about God. Lamentations expresses the darkness of the darkest hours - or decades, yet with an adamantine determination not to let God go. Philemon isn't a book - it's a letter, but I have a commentary on its 24 verses that is 550 pages long - and the incongruity of such a hefty commentary for such a brief occasional letter, is only felt if we haven't recognised the mustard seeds of Kingdom revolution implied in all the courtesies and gentle nudges woven throughout. A thin book, thick with possibility, eh?

Exegetical prestidigitation.....Eh?

Her Testimony is True

"Establishing equality for all persons regardless of their gender (or any other characteristic) is a cause surely born in the heart of God. But the cause of women's equality is not advanced, rather, it is hindered whenever we attempt to force biblical texts to say things we might wish to hear but they do not say. Just as it is dishonest to deny that certain New Testament texts sanctioned slavery, but also fallacious to argue that such texts warrant the sanction of slavery today, it is counterproductive to contend that the Gospel of John is a document that passes edicts for its context and for ours on how women can and should function in the church. That sort of reading amounts  to an act of exegetical prestidigitation that in essence admits that those who would use the Bible  as a warrant to impose specific patterns of order from ancient communities onto modern ones have a case worthy of being contested. It is to lend dignity to what is actually a frivolous case for the subordination of women....

God's will for Christians is not that they rigidly duplicate the life and ministry of Jesus or his first disciples or the Johannine community (as if such a thing were possible), but that they discover, through the Spirit of Christ, the mind of Christ for each community in its own time and place. It is possible to discover God's will for any contemporary context by Spirit-led exegetical and hermeneutical study of John's Gospel, but not by prohecting contemporary contexts back on to it. Any exegesis is strained that has the Gospel of John setting out roles for people on the basis of gender or any other category, and is in fact contrary to john's teaching that all believers are God's children who, born of the Spirit, move in ways that defy human delineation (Jn 1.12-13; 3.5-8).

The witnessing disciple responsible for the inscription of John's Gospels defines the book as a testimony, and his testimony is vouched to be true (Jn 21.24). Are the testimonies of the women that this disciple reports also guaranteed to be true? Is her testimony true just as his testimony is true. It depends, then as now, not upon the gender but upon the faith of the witness who is born of the Spirit as a child of God. Their testimony is true who truly believe that the messiah, the Son of God, is Jesus."

(Her Testimony is True. Women as Witnesses According to John, JSNTS 125, Robert G Maccini (Sheffield Academic Press 1996) 251-2.

Bob's own disclaimer in the Preface is an important indication of how hard good scholarship tries to make allowances for the scholar's own standpoint. Just one more reason why I love RGM as a friend and respect him as a scholar.

'Because of my vested interest in the advancement of women in the church, I am predisposed to want the New Testament to be favourable towards women. That predisposition cannot be removed, and so I have tried to keep it in view if not in check by playing the devil's advocate against myself throughout the research. Readers will judge for themselves whether or not this gambit was desirable, successful, or even possible.'

Her testimony is True

I quite deliberately chose all the poems for Holy Week from women poets.(Did anyone notice?) The passion story and its aftermath in the resurrection accounts is populated by women whose intervention at different times is as decisive as that of the men. In a story too often read as if Pilate, Judas, Peter and Caiaphas were the key actors, there is a need to hear those other voices. Like those of the woman who anointed Jesus, of the serving girl in the courtyard, of his mother, the women who stood and stayed on Calvary when the men were hiding, Mary Magdalene, and those practical love driven women who gathered the spices together, along with the anointing and binding cloths, and trudged out to do what no one else was ready to do.

I have a very special book, gifted to me by its author Robert Gordon Maccini (Bob is rightly proud of his middle name, which is only one of the connections between us that keeps us close friends with the Atlantic between us). Bob's PhD was supervised by Dr Ruth Edwards at the University of Aberdeen, and under the rigorous and reverent scholarship that characterises all Ruth's own work, it developed into a close and authoritative study of the role of women as witnesses in John's Gospel - in its published form its title is Her Testimony is True. Over the years I've read a pile of books on John's Gospel, and this one is amongst the most significant, because of its meticulous re appropriation of texts too often sidelined by the claim that the testimony of women was inadmissible in Jewish courts.

As a reassertion of the role of women as credible witnesses in the life of Jesus, their original and pivotal role in the story of the Gospel, and as an eloquent questioning of the marginalising of women in the ministry of the Church, Her Testimony is True is a book of continuing significance. Bob doesn't force biblical texts to say what he might want them to say, given that he is a passionate advocate of women's ministry - Becky supported Bob's studies by working in ministry in Aberdeen, and has gone on to develop and focus her own vocation in a pastoral and preaching ministry. No, the texts should speak for themselves, when content and context are carefully and honestly examined. Tomorrow I'll post the last couple of paragraphs which both sum up Bob's research, and explain why during Holy Week this blog insisted we hear the voices of women - whose testimony is true.

Rationalisation, excuse making and library fines

Today I had another one of those threatening but courteous reminders about an overdue library book. Just so that I know, and don't forget, and therefore will be in the words of the Authorised Version, "inexcusable O Man!", I am being reminded of the cumulative nature of the library fine system, and being forewarned that I may soon face my very own personal credit crunch. Thing is, the book cost £4 about 12 years ago, so unless I return it soon I will be paying the purchase price without actually buying it. Then again, why not just return the thing - but life's been too busy and a wee fine seems a fair trade-off to attend to other priorities. Or why not renew it online. Well, can't renew it online once it has hit the fine trajectory.

But the genius of the cumulative fine system is that it pushes returning the book up the priority list, the speed of ascent directly proportionate to projected expense. I have found by previous experience that mitigating circumstances have neither relevance nor purchase power with the library staff. The same courtesy that informs the tone of the emails is discernible in the non-negotiating, smiling but unyielding insistence that, yes indeed, you do owe an arm and a leg, and until you pay it, the amount increases at an alarming rate. And once it reaches a certain level of impressive indebtedness, your library access will be suspended.

So, as well as last minute Christmas shopping, and as a contribution to peace on earth and goodwill amongst all people, I'm going to return the blessed book, pay my dues, wish the librarian a happy Christmas, and maybe even include a wee box of chocolates for those vigilant guardians of literature, scholarship, literacy and culture. Anyway being charged for keeping a book longer than the agreed borrow date isn't so much a fine, as a legitimate rent payment, a modest charge for the hire of educational input, huh? Rationalisation - one of the more obvious signs of excuse making, when to re-quote Paul, "You are inexcusable, O man!" I'm off to the library..........

The Joy of Theological Interpretation of Scripture

For a while now I've browsed in and out of the Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible. Now I'm changing the metaphor and doing some systematic trawling. In recent years biblical studies has been increasingly paying attention to the theological message that is woven throughout the literary variety of the Biblical texts.The near exclusive focus on historical and literary criticism created much too thinly textured interpretive results, and the turn towards theological exegesis, the tradition of pre-critical exegesis and study of how texts have been received and used within the Church, now opens up opportunities to weave a texture much more satsifyingly rich, complex and varied in pattern.

Edited by the splendidly productive Kevin Vanhoozer, whose own contribution to theological hermeneutics is of benchmark quality with volumes such as First Theology, Is There a Meaning in This Text, and The Drama of Doctrine, this one volume reference is worth studying in its own right, as well as serving as an important reference ready to hand for those who want to do theological mining equipped with up to date tools. Biblical topics, the biblical books, leading figures in theological interpretation and major themes and issues in hermeneutics are covered by articles almost always extensive, substantial and freshly written from a theologically articulate perspective.

Do I need to know about pragamtism, post-structuralism, interlocutionary act, etymologycal fallacy, speech-act theory - now that I've read them, yes I did. Does the treatment of biblical books differ from the usual introductory information tediously compiled in brieze block 'Introductions'? Yes, because the history of interpretation and the theological themes of each book are set in place and the book's canonical connections are often indicated. What about questions of meaning, metanarrative, methodology, metaphor and models, music and mysticism - well you'll notice all these areas of interest occur under M, indicating the wide range of concepts and principles explored, here and elsewhere in the book.

Major articles on the historical Jesus, the Gospels, the history of Israel, relationship between the testaments, law, pauline epistles, provide important orientation. Survey articles such as Protestant, Catholic, Charismatic and Medieval biblical interpretation, Western Literature and the Bible, Asian and African biblical interpretation help to widen our too narrow horizons. Substantial doctrinal articles on God, truth, creation, Trinity, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, the church, the last things and a general (brilliant) article on systematic theology and biblical interpretation re-train minds habituated to historical and literary questions to discern the theologocal and ecclesial implications of the text as it has been received and has now to be retrieved.

By now you'll guess I am an enthusiast of this book. Years ago I spent a whole week of reading time immersed in Stephen Neil's History of New Testament Interpretation (revised and updated to 2000, by Tom Wright). It is a seminal book in my own intellectual biography - it set me off on trails into the history of how the Bible has been studied, interpreted, used and abused.

This volume, though a different kind of book is confirming what I've been persuaded of for some years, that the Bible deserves far more reverence, humility and scholarly respect than is evident in either the often over-confident and intellectually arrogant academy, or the often even more over-confident and intellectually arrogant ideologies of fundamentalism. The focus on theological intepretation of Scripture, informed by the catholic and receptive traditions of the church whose book Scripture is, and open to the Spirit who enables personal study, ongoing reflection, communal discernment, and prophetic appropriation and application of Scripture, promises a much more radical obedience to the text. Theological intepretation, evinced from disciplined textual study, employed by minds and hearts that recognise the reality of Scripture as divine discourse, to my mind (and heart) pays due homage to this remarkable gift of God, the Bible by which we nourish, nurture and ennervate the church.

Two weeks to Christmas - still time to drop hints and offer to solve someone's problem by suggesting the gift you'd like!