Living Wittily

Music, Calvin, cultural critique, and missional relevance

Here's an extract from a readable and sympathetic biography of Calvin:

In the very depths of his being Calvin had a most intimate awareness of the power of music. He feared and relished it at the same time. It possessed an ascendancy over souls and bodies that could either capture them by its evil spells or liberate them by its beauty: "Among the things that are proper to divert a man and give him pleasure, music is either the first or one of the most important....For there is hardly anything in this world that can more readily bend the manners of men this way and that...And in fact we find by experience that it has a secret and almost incredible ability to move hearts one way or another."

Music, that deceitful power, should be put to the service of the text and the Word, illustrating them and not obscuring their meaning. "All evil speech..., when accompanied by music, pierces the heart much more strongly and enters into it in such a way that, just as wine is poured into a vessel from a funnel, so also venom and corruption are distilled to the bottom of the heart by melody."

Calvin analysed the double potential effect of music, at once destructive and creative, on a sensibility whose dangerous instability he perceived, an instabilty that would shortly reveal itself to be fundamental to baroque psychology.
          Bernard Cottret, Calvin. A Biography, (Edinburgh:T&TClark, 1995), pages 173-4.

There is a pastoral realism and cultural awareness about Calvin that is annoyingly inconvenient for those who simply want to dismiss him as either cultural philistine or theological bogey man. When Calvin's shortcomings are acknowledged, and the problems of his thought aired, he remains a theological source and resource for a church desperately looking for its voice, and struggling to remember the words that articulate the Word. For all our fascination with relevance, our accommodation to the postmodern mindset, our neglect of transcendent mystery in favour of the accessible and experiential, the contemporary Church often enough lacks a sense of its own calling to bear witness to the Eternal, to see the world as the theatre of God's glory, and to understand its own vocation as the Body of Christ which embodies the Word it proclaims in repentance, faith and the fear of God.

One remedy, astringent and at times uncomfortable, is to include the voice of Calvin in the conversations the Church must always have between surrounding prevailing culture, its own diverse theological traditions, and the innovative impulses of a Church so anxious to be missionally relevant that it can fail at the level of its own vocational integrity as the community of Christ. Missional relevance itself can be driven by the Church's survival instinct as much as by Gospel imperatives - Calvin's theology of divine sovereignty, built on the centrality of the Word, is a necessary corrective.

This year is the 400th anniversary of Calvin's birth, on 10th July 1509. I'm going to celebrate it by reading his sermons on Ephesians. However, Calvin is only the second most important person born on July 10 - that's also my mother's birthday! 

The portrait of Calvin above is less severe than some of the more popular ones on book covers. And given the sheer volume and quality of Calvin's written output - what would he have done if the quill had been replaced with a keyboard?

Wisdom for learners and teachers, from the Desert Fathers

Wisdom for learners and teachers, from the Desert Fathers:

A visitor came to the monastery looking for the purpose and meaning of life.

The Teacher said to the visitor, "If what you seek is Truth, there is one thing you must have above all else."

"I know", the visitor said. "To find Truth I must have an overhwelming passion for it."

"No", the Teacher said. "In order to find Truth you must have an unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong."

Gifts, blessings and Greetings

A red Cashmere sweater that makes me look soft, cuddly and slim. (not many people look cuddly AND slim).

A new 2 CD production of Haydn "The Creation" which I intend to leave a couple of hours for some afternoon when everyone else is doing much less civilised stuff around the telly.

Coldplay, James and the Beethoven's 7th Symphony wrapped together as a gift package of eclectic music.

A book of the Duke of Edinburgh's politically incorrect gaffes and hilariously witty put downs which makes the Duke sound like a lot of fun to accompany.

Chocolate laced with chillies, and a large bar of chocolate with caramelised hazelnuts and praline.

A box of three bottles of rather fine selected red wines.

A hand cast metal paperweight in the shape of the dove of peace now sitting on my desk beside several other important objects of spiritual import to me - (including my holding cross, a 19th century brass light switch, a framed 1940's postcard of Izaak Walton's window in Winchester Cathedral).

So I've had a good Christmas - enriched further by good company and some surprise emails, phone calls and other people stuff. I'm just off to phone Bob and Becky - Becky is the much loved minister of the church in the gloriously Chirstmassy photo above. So if you read this Becky, leave a comment as kind of literary footstep in the snow!

Peace to all and joy forbye!

Manchester, Obama celebrations, Pre-Raphaelites and Bookshop dissonance......

Just returned from my say cheerio to Sean trip to Manchester. Turned out to have all the most important ingredients in abundance.

Met with Catherine (married to Sean), Sophia and Lucy ( two delightful daughters) and so made three new friends. They are a family skilled in welcome, and where hospitality includes inducting the guest into the delights of CBBC. Then there was the bonfire and fireworks party (actually a mini street party chez Winter) doubling up as both Guy Fawkes commemoration and Obama celebration, (complete with pre-printed Obama badges universally distributed to all attendees by Sophia) and sustained through the cold by Sean's gourmet pumpkin soup and piles of rolls and sausages, apples and tangerines.

Good conversations with Sean and others about the next stages of life, the logistics and the plans, the new job and the new country. All very exciting, only tinged with the (slightly selfish) sadness that distance might be a factor in future opportunities to sit, talk and enjoy.

Had a varied cultural day on Thursday on which I'll post later. Just to say I went to the Holman Hunt and Pre-Raphaelite exhibition and the Manchester City Gallery and saw several versions of Hunt's 'The Light of the World.' I also saw paintings I hadn't known about, and a couple I did and was so pleased to see - not least 'The Scapegoat', a painting of powerful imaginative pathos.

Part of the day was a visit to the John Rylands Library. As I walked in I thought of F F Bruce, that great Scottish Evangelical NT scholar closely associated with Manchester and the John Rylands Library. Bruce did so much to erode the bulwarks of academic suspicion that all but excluded evangelicals from the higher echelons of academia. Some time it will be important to properly assess the influence of people like Bruce in redeeming evangelical scholarship from its own defensiveness. And the John Rylands building! What a masterpiece of Gothic showing off! But my main mission was to see Papyrus 457, that tiny fragment of the earliest part of the NT we have - itself a work of art, painstaking strokes of ink painting on papyrus, words about the Word. Just realised that works as Haiku.

Painstaking strokes of
ink, painting on papyrus,
words about the Word.

As a piece of spoil-sport reality crashing in on such cultural peregrinations, I also found Wesley Owen Bookshop and the Catholic Truth Society Bookshop just round the corner. I, the patron saint of impulse book buyers and incorporating those who will buy a book to mark any occasion that serves as excuse, bought nothing in either of them. They are two examples of what happens when bookshops stock only what is theologically congenial to the dominant clientele. I am left wondering what the underlying message is when a shop only sells what certain sales managers think is congruent with the true gospel message, as they see it, from their perspective, as represented by their company / branch of the church, over and against those who, when it comes to key essentials, are, by and large, more or less, wrong!

In one I could buy Banner of Truth and in the other Ave Maria Press; I could have Raymond Brown on Hebrews in one, or Raymond Brown on John in the other - the first was a Baptist minister, beloved expositor and Principal of Spurgeon's College, the second a Jesuit NT Scholar who was a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. Both shops had music playing,  - one a gently insistent Benedictine chant, the other was a hymn compilation that happened to be playing Amazing Grace - and as I listened to Newton's hymn, I smiled at the subversive activity of the Holy Spirit - the Benedictine chant had been playing in Wesley Owen bookshop, and 'Amazing Grace' in the CTS, - perhaps a gesture of impatience from the One who urges the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace.   

Time spent in the MLK Library was mainly given over to reading a particular book I want to finish, and burrowing in unfamiliar journals like a manic truffle hunter. Came away with several heavily annotated slips of scrap paper with references to articles, books to go looking for and various other fragments of data that, like the jars of screws, nuts, ball beairings, clips, clamps and nails in my father's shed, are captured and kept because 'they might come in handy some time'.

Tomorrow I preach in my own church in Paisley - Remembrance Sunday. And Isaiah 25 which begins with a hymn about a dangerous world, and the acts of God that 'silence the song of the ruthless'. In Congo and Darfur, in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Gaza and Israel, in the US and the UK, the song of the ruthless has drowned out the cries of complaint for long enough.

"here's tae us, wha's like us" - Is there a Scottish spirituality?

 
An area of increasing interest for me is the way a spiritual tradition grows out of its native soil, and takes on the characteristics of its environment. The question of what is distinctive, even unique, in a spiritual tradition depends on the particularities of context - historical, political, cultural, religious - perhaps even geographical.

The term "Scottish piety" (not sure about the continuing usefulness of the ubiquitous descriptor "spirituality") needs some clarifying.
Is there a uniquely Scottish stream of Christian faith as it has been experienced, thought and lived? If so what gives Scottish piety its distinctive flavour?
What in the Scottish context, over centuries, shaped and gave specific Scottish content to Christianity in Scotland, as through processes of revolution and evolution, it developed and changed?

And what is meant by piety? In Scotland, amongst other things the impact of religious experience, doctrinal developments and doctrinal fixity, the role of the Kirk in discipline, worship, liturgy and community and people's experience of all of these. But also the relation of people to Bible, prayer, preaching and the hard to measure extent that such piety and faith exerted on and influenced daily life.

All of this - but even then, "Scottish piety" remains unsatisfactory as a catch-all. For Scotland itself has a religious history and representation as varied as its own georgraphical landscape - Prebyterian and Catholic, Episcopal and Dissenting, Highland and Lowland, West and East - and in all this variety a gift of fractiousness that made fragmentation inevitable, bringing both blessing and loss.

The research part of my current sabbatical is focusing on how to explore all this in a way that will help Scottish Christians to 'look to the rock from which we are hewn". Such an exercise involves a long ponder about what in our tradition, our way of following Christ, is of lasting significance and value, what can be appropriated and what now needs to be relinquished, in order to clarify what faithful following of Christ means in contemporary Scotland. If context is decisive in how a tradition is formed, it is also decisive in how that tradition changes, adapts and stays healthy. Quite straightforward really - not!

A subsidiary interest is the way Scottish Baptist communities have emerged, developed, declined and yet continue to feature within the Scottish ecclesial landscape. Again, the focus of my personal interest is the way Scottish Baptists have experienced, thought and lived out their way of following Christ. The suggestion there is such a disctinctive thing as "Scottish Baptist piety" might be even more contentious. And for that very reason even more interesting, as a route to self-understanding and renewal for communities sharing in the experience of decline, and badly needing to recover confidence in a Gospel which never promised us a rose garden - or an assured place at any table, political or religious, other than the one where bread is broken and broken hearts are healed.

Anyway, that's what I'm about these days.

George Herbert: Secretary of Praise

Amongst my treasured literary possessions are several carefully sought out, frequently handled, and regularly read editions of The Temple, George Herbert's matchless contribution to Anglican Spirituality. For my 40th birthday I was given a leather bound early Victorian copy by my friend Kate. It was given as a prize for Arithmetic, to Master W L Riddell, in 1864, while a pupil at Mr Crerar's School,13 Forth Street, Edinburgh. It was published by the Edinburgh firm of James NicholI, around the time they started issuing those famous sets of the works of Standard Puritan Divines such as Thomas Goodwin and Richard Sibbes. The book has copper engraved borders within which each poem is placed like a framed word picture - which much of Herberts verses are. In bookseller's parlance, the condition is "used, no marking, previous owner's bookplate (the prize label), finely bound in tooled and gilt leather with signs of some use." Perfect - and it couldn't be in safer, more appreciative hands!

  Nearer my 50th Birthday I uncovered another Victorian edition, maroon cloth, elaborate gilt celtic tooling, and used enough in the past 150 years to make me feel that reading it is an act of recognition, that someone else, numerous someone elses, have enjoyed the look and feel, the smell and heft, as well as the contents of a favourite book. This edition has copper engraved prints(an example here) as well as page borders, good illustrations of how the Victorians imagined seventeenth century English life, and now enjoyed by a 21st century bibliophile. One example of Victorian devotional book illustrative art shows the choir singing 'Let all the world, in every corner sing, My God, and King'. I've  never visited  Bemerton where Herbert was country parson, but later this year, as part of several sabbatical pilgrimages, I'm going looking for Herbert's church of St Andrew's, Bemerton. and Leighton Bromwold. Salisbury Cathedral  which I've never seen is nearby and will be enjoyed as an enduring  expression of  devotion to God through archtecture on the grand scale. But the little church Herbert restored bears witness to a different scale and quality of devotion - in my imagination I see Herbert being as careful about the details and care for restrained beauty of expression in the restoration of God's house as he was about the selection and arrangements of words and images in The Temple.

I remember on a warm June evening, singing that Herbert psalm, 'Let all the world, in every corner sing', in the magnificent setting of Coats Memorial Church, with the choir (who didn't look anything like in the picture above) and a small gathered congregation. I've never forgotten the coincidence of mellow late evening sunlight, the soft authority of the great organ, the harmony of choir and congregation, and the aesthetic beauty of a building that is itself an historical accident. It was built in 1894, when the finest material and the most skilful craftsmen were affordable, when Victorian confidence was still high enough to build without thought to cost, and before the turn of the century move away from large scale gothic towards more functional, modest places of worship. But that night, the glow of late sun-soaked oak, the clear handmade glass, the sanctified spaciousness outwards and upwards from the chancel, allowing light to be shaped and toned by warm sandstone and carved wood, all of which was part of the architect's intention - it all makes for a memory still sharp with the sense of smell, touch and sound. Reading George Herbert's hymn still has the effect of collapsing time into vivid memory of sight and sound.

Chestnuts, hazelnuts and brown theology.

Aesculus hippocastanum, the horse chestnut season is here again. I remember as a wee boy in Ayrshire going looking for chestnuts, with all the excitement and anticipation of a child looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or the half crown lying neglected on the pavement would do. I've always felt when, under autumn trees I've picked up a newly dropped chestnut, that I've found something absolutely worth having. Every year I pocket a few; but they don't keep well. Their real beauty is in their newness, and in their promise of renewal - after all a chestnut is a seed. The colour something between red and brown but with contours that make the surface look like a polished spherical ordinance survey map traced on the grain of burnished wood; the shell smooth, glowing warm though cold to the touch; and the play of light on the naturally varnished shell, like a brown gem not so much reflecting the sun as absorbing it, and bearing witness to promised life.

And yes, I know it was a hazelnut that did it for Julian of Norwich, but every year chestnuts do it for me. So with apologies to Lady Julian:

And in this he shewed a little thing, the size of a chestnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and it seemed to me round as a ball. I looked thereon with the eye of my understanding and thought, "What may this be?" And it was answered generally thus: "It is all that is made." I marvelled how it might last, for me thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth and ever shall, for God loveth it. And so all things have being by the love of God.

As soon as it's light I'm off for my slow trot around the park - to gather a few sacraments of created smallness which witness to the being all things hath by the love of God. As I hold them and gaze on them, I will be engaging in brown theology - seeing in their burnished glow, the prodigal promise of life instilled in a world that was only ever intended as gift to be enjoyed. 'All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made...'.

Such sacraments of created smallness rebuke the destructiveness and waste of our way of living by their sheer incongruence. Give it time and that 1 inch nut becomes the 70 foot tree; for so all things have their being by the love of God.

"The Catholic Spirit", John Bunyan and Post Denominationalism

"Christians are like the several flowers in a garden, that have upon each of them the dew of heaven, which being shaken by the wind, they let fall their dew at each other's roots, whereby they are jointly nourished and become nourishers of one another."

(John Bunyan, Christian Behaviour, quoted in Bunyan the Christian, Gordon Wakefield, Collins, 1992).

Gordon Wakefield was a lifelong Methodist, and passionate ecumenist. He had no hesitation in affirming the valid and rich diversity of the Christian tradition, while holding with careful intent to his own Methodist convictions. Like John Wesley, he exemplified a devout eclecticism, and urged amongst different Christian communities the nurture of 'a Catholic Spirit'. Reading yet again Wesley's great sermon on this theme was one of the diversions of my time at St Deiniol's. The anti-ecumenical stance of some contemporary evangelicals is deeply embedded in some strands of the Evangelical tradition - but it is also challenged by others, including the Wesleys, John Newton, Charles Simeon, and if we include the Puritans then Thomas Goodwin and of course Alexander Whyte. Indeed Whyte defined Evangelical spirituality as Christ-centred and hospitable hearted - a balance that both encourages and enables fellowship, avoids small minded and exclusive claims, and maintains the place of Christ without displacing others.

The text for Wesley's sermon comes from Second Kings, "And when he was departed thence, he lighted on Jehonadab the son of Rechab coming to meet him, and he saluted him, and said to him, Is thine heart right, as my heart is with thy heart? And Jehonadab answered: It is. If it be, give me thine hand." 2 Kings 10:15.

Now we might have some exegetical hesitations about the use of such a text as a justification for the Catholic spirit, and ecumenical engagement. But right hearts and extended hands does seem to suggest a willingness not to see 'the other' as a threat, or one who must think as I think. There's something grudging about giving someone the benefit of the doubt - why not give them the benefit of our goodwill that is willing to take risks? One of the consequences of celebrating, lamenting or simply conceding the onset of  "post-denominationalism" is an impatience with difference, a nervousness about what is distinctive in how various groups of Christians have understood the call of Christ upon their lives. Diversity need not be competitive, exclusive, negative; it can be co-operative, inclusive and positive - and not in any way that need minimise the call of Christ to each of us to be faithful in following Him in the way He has called us to be. Indeed John Bunyan, who knew in his own experience the consequences of offending the rampant rightness of those who used power, exclusion and coercion in their efforts to standardise Christian behaviour and practice, makes exactly this point in Pilgrim's Progress.

"Behold the flowers are divers in Stature, in Quality, and Colour and Smell and Virtue, and some are better than some: Also where the gardener hath set them, there they stand, and quarrel not with one another."
(Quoted in Wakefield, page 67)

I am deeply, probably now indelibly dyed as a Baptist Christian, for whom "our Lord Jesus Christ, our God and Saviour is the sole and absolute Authority in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as revealed in the Holy Scriptures....". The Baptist tradition, with its radical and separatist history, has much to offer the Church of Christ, much to teach and much to live up to as a stream in the Christian tradition. But we also have much to receive from the Church of Christ, much to learn, and much to discover and value in what others have experienced and come to know of the fullness and richness of Christ. Here are three verses of a longer hymn from Charles Wesley - they say so much........

Weary of all this wordy strife,
These notions, forms, and modes, and names,
To Thee, the way, the Truth, the Life,
Whose love my simple heart inflames,
Divinely taught, at last I fly,
With Thee and Thine to live and die.

Forth from the midst of Babel brought,
Parties and sects I cast behind;
Enlarged my heart, and free my thought,
Where'er the latent truth I find
The latent truth with joy to own,
And bow to Jesus' name alone.

Join'd to the hidden church unknown
In this sure bond of perfectness
Obscurely safe, I dwell alone
And glory in th' uniting grace,
To me, to each believer given,
To all Thy saints in earth and heaven.

 

Michael Ramsey and the centre of theology

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

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

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

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

Prayer distilled to the essentials

'Lord, let me not live to be useless'.

This one line prayer explains something of the devotional intensity and driven pragmatism of John Wesley.

'Lord give me life till my work is done, and work till my life is done'.

The epitaph of Vera Brittain, expressing that longing so characteristically human for our lives to have meaning and value.

'For all that is past, thanks - for all that is to come, Yes!'

Dag Hammarskold's formula for spiritually respopnsible and responsive living.

And then this, which I found today, another one line prayer from Albert C Outler, Wesleyan scholar, Christian gentleman, and ecumenical enthusiast:

'Keep us Lord from the love that deceives, and from the candour that wounds.'

As a succinct statement of Christian hospitality to the views of others, that is hard to beat for its generosity tempered by integrity.

Comments open for your favourite one line prayer.