Living Wittily

Conformitas Christi......

L Gregory Jones writes theological ethics. In his approach, the credibility of any theological assertion has to be established through the Christian practices such theologising engenders. Theology to be real has to be embodied, not only in the individual, but in the community that takes the name of Christ. What is believed is most authentically expressed not in words and articulation, but in practice and performance of a life shaped by Christ.

Here's a couple of paragraphs from Transformed Judgment. Toward a Trinitarian Account of the Moral Life (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2008) that have had me thinking again about the how, and why and what of following after Christ. The painting by Caravaggio is a favourite - the young Jesus inviting middle aged Peter and Andrew to follow him.

What is needed is a way of speaking of the prior action of God, namely the saving life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which also calls forth an account of the shape human activity is to take in response. Such an emphasis is found by recovering the relationship between being conformed to Christ and being called to imitate - or as I think is preferable language, to pattern one's life in - Christ. God befriends humanity in Jesus Christ, and in that gracious action, which originates in God alone, humanity is conformed to Christ independently of particular characters, virtues and actions. Grace is the fundamental orientation of Christian life. The context of this conformitas Christi is discovered in the salvation wrought by Christ; it is a salvation revealed throughout the context of his life, deathn and resurrection.

In the light of Jesus friendship, the Christian's vocation, in response to God's prior action in Christ conforming humanity to his righteousness, is to pattern her life in Jesus Christ through discipleship.A person is called and enabled to pattern her life in Jesus Christ because God in Christ has patterned human life into God's life in order to save humanity. Such practices as baptism, eucharist, forgiveness-reconciliation and "performing" the Scriptures are indispensable practices, whereby people learn to become disciples, whereby people learn to be frinds of God and to befriend and be befriended by others. Through such practices, people are aenabled to acquire the habits and skills reflective of the pattern discovered in Jesus Christ." (pages 110-11)

That's about as attractive and complete an account of following after Christ as I've read for a long while. Conformitas Christi. Wouldn't mind a T-shirt with that on it -

Conformitas Christi!

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.  

"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.

"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.

 

Evangelicalism, the Gospel, and Hopeful Imagination in Wales

As the sidebar shows I am reading around Puritanism as a movement at once pastoral, polemical and theological. The recently published Emeregence of Evangelicalism has the subtitle, Exploring Historical Continuities. It is a collection of essays which enter into critical and appreciative conversation with David Bebbington's contention that Evangelicalism properly understood is the movement that began in the early 18th Century Awakenings, an argument supported by evidence shaped around the accompanying defining quadrilateral. Bebbington's thesis is that biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism and activism, represent a cluster of defining characteristics which indicate Evangelicalism was something new in the 18th Century, related to but not continuous with such other movements as Puritanism, Reformed Scholasticism and Continental Pietism.

The question of assurance is a central and contentious theological debate, important in Bebbington's case, where he argues that, for the 18th Century Evangelicals, the search for personal assurance of salvation came to its conclusion in the experience of conversion and regeneration which became itself evidence of salvation. The Enlightenment privileging of empirical experience as evidence rationally interpreted, can be detected in the use by Evangelicals of such words as 'I feel', and  'I know', with reference to personal spiritual encounter.

Following widespread adoption of Bebbington's quadrilateral and its accompanying corollaries, his treatment and defintion of Evangelicalism has become a standard benchmark, broadly received by historians. But there are now other voices questioning whether the discontinuity between earlier movements and Eighteenth Century Evangelicalism are as clear cut and historically certain as Bebbington argues. Several important articles have appeared in recent years, and now this collection of essays throws the debate much more widely open. The resulting statement and restatement of continuities and discontinuities gathers a fascinating, at times persuasive, at other times frustrating chorus of voices. Part of the frustruation is that several of the essays accuse Bebbington of caricaturing earlier expressions of 'evangelical' faith, but come near to caricaturing the position they critique. The fascination comes from many of the essays which undoubtedly raise important questions which require at least a re-alignment of emphases, or a redrawing of the chronology of developments and features.

The response chapter written by David Bebbington is characteristically gracious, and acknowledges the validity of some criticisms, agrees certain emphases need restating, but overall holds to the general proposal that Evangelicalism was something new in the 1730's, but with strong historical continuities with Puritanism and Pietism, that it was strongly influenced by Enlightenment categories, and that it has a remarkable capacity for reflecting and adapting to, the cultural moods of the age, whether the age of Reason, Romanticism or Modernity - and now post-modernity?. In any case, Evangelical historiography is alive and well, and is an essential source of inspiration and education for contemporary Evangelicalism which is in danger of losing continuity with its own historical precedents and values.

 This weekend I'm looking forward to being with the Baptist Union of Wales at their Annual Assembly in Carmarthen. I have the great privilege of being invited to be the keynote speaker for the Assembly on the theme 'Hopeful Imagination'. Readers of this blog will recognise the name of a blog hosted by Andy Goodliff; the phrase is from one of Walter Brueggemann's earlier books on the exilic prophets. There he introduces hopeful imagination as the faith stance of those who, with 'the God who makes all things new' on their cognitive horizons, imagine a different world into being, by giving themselves to serve the new actions and purposes of God in their generation. Here are his words from 1985:

These new actions of God were discernable and spoken precisely by these persons with their enormous prophetic imagination. These poets not only discerned the new actions of God that others did not discern, but they wrought the new actions of God by the power of their imagination, their tongues their words. New poetic imagination evoked new realities in the community.

It may be that preaching today (is it nearly a quarter of a century later?) requires this kind of proclamatory conversation, enabling the community of Christ to discern the new actions of God, and with prophetic imagination, to enter into the new work of God as agents of His kingdom, as witnesses of the Gospel of Christ and as those who confront the growing pessimism and cynicism of a culture afraid of its own dissolution. Hopeful imagination is bold enough to conceive of a different future.

Faith receives, love gives.

Here is Luther on the obedience of faith

Faith receives, love gives. Faith leads people to God, love leads people to others. In faith a person lets God do good to them; in love a person does good to others. For he who believes has all things from God, and he is blessed and rich. Therefore he needs nothing more, but devotes his life and work to the good and welfare of other people. In love he does for his fellow people what God has done for him in faith - as though by faith he draws upon the good from above and by love he distributes good here below.

In a remarkable and readable book, Faith Victorious, the Finnish Lutheran scholar Lennart Pinomaa introduces the spiritual theology of the great Reformer. Here's Pinomaa's comment on Luther's view of the obedience of faith

While Catholicism looked upon sanctification as a continuous activity on man's part, as cultivation of self, as 'school', Luther saw it theocentrically: God does everything. Man's struggle is a struggle for faith, not for works. Faith involves the total man totally. faith cannot result in inactivity, for it lives  by God's judgement and grace, which in turn give rise to the activity of faith. If something is lacking, it at once becomes a matter of faith. The activity of faith in the service of others; the other person is therefore an inseparable part of aith. The aim of faith can never be merely one's own salvation.
Both quotes from Faith Victorious.An Introduction to Luther's Theology. (Lima, Ohio: Academic Renewal Press 2001), 75, 77.

To use the modern grammatical oddity -that is so not wrong!

Mere discipleship is not enough.....

Christianity is not cultured spirituality, but a new creation. Discipleship is well, but it was not discipleship that conquered the world for Christ, it was apostleship. It was not a disciple church but an apostolic, a church not of Christian learners but of Christian confessors. Since the decisive things of the cross, the Tomb, and Pentecost, the Christian is much more than a disciple of Christ - s/he is a member of Christ; s/he is a confessor and a regenerate. Discipleship is no match for the degeneration and egotism which are in the world by lust. We are not now Christ's disciples merely but His purchased property; and Christianity before it is a discipline is a salvation....above all He is the Lord God with something more than a value for us - with an eternal and costly right whose value we but poorly prove. (P T Forsyth, Faith Freedom and the Future, 276-7)

Words to give us pause about what it is we are about when 'making disciples' suggests a more promising future for Christ's church than bearing costly personal witness and confessing His Lordship over our lives, to our actual cost. Forsyth's spirituality of the cross presupposes Christian lives bought with a price, no longer our own, and called to live as those purchased outright as redeemed confessors, whose lives speak His truth by the eloquence of sacrifice.

As always, Forsyth points to depths of Christian truth and experience that might make contemporary Evangelicalism with our passion for the practical, our desire to accentuate the accessible, seem just a little, well, shallow. 'Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me' is a hard lifestyle to sell to others; it's even harder to live it for ourselves.

P T Forsyth, diversionary paths, and the encounter of prayer

Spending some time writing a piece on P T Forsyth, which is all the excuse I need to find all kinds of diversionary paths that lead down fascinating Forsythian avenues. Reading again Harry Escott's small anthology P T Forsyth and the Cure of Souls, I began the now habitual head-nodding that is my bodily acknowledgement that once again he is right, and again, and here again. Here's a chunk of theological granite to weigh alongside some of the overblown plastic of some of the more utilitarian, guaranteed low effort and low-cost approaches to spirituality - what Karl Rahner once called anthropoegoism - (a peculiarly modern heresy evident in a person's self centred and self-interested approach to the Divine as a resource to be used for our purposes). Forsyth will have none of it.

Prayer contains the very heart and height of truth - reality and action. In prayer the inmost truth of our personal being locks with the inmost reality of things, its energy finds a living Person acting as their unity and life, and we  escape the illusions of sense, self and the world. Prayer, indeed, is the great means of appropriating, out of the amalgam of illusion which means so much for our education, the pure gold of God as he wills, the Spirit as he works, and things as they are. (Escott, p. 68)

Prayer in this sense is a form of spiritual clarifying; a willingness to be introduced to the reality of who we are in the presence God and to discover in penitent wonder and surrendering worship who God is. And that encounter strips away our illusions about what our life is for, who and what we are called to be, because 'the soul becomes very sure of God and itself in prayer'. The living, acting Christ becomes known as the one who gives new and regenerated life and who energises and enables action. That is the meaning of one of Forsyth's epigrams: 'Prayer is the assimilation of a holy God's moral strength.'

Which means prayer is transformative - of personality and character, of politics and society, of human failing and human longing. 'Prayer, as our greatest work, breeds in us the flair for the greatest work of God, the instinct of his kingdom, and the sense of his track of time.' (Escott p. 81).

Right back to that article what needs writing!

Evangelicalism's continuity with its own past

Blogging is intermittent at present. Don't blog when I'm away from home. Next few days I'm in Cardiff on a dual purpose visit. I'm doing a couple of lectures on the hymns of Charles Wesley, and meeting up with the other UK Baptist Principals - amongst other things to harden up arrangements for the Baptists Doing Theology in Context conference later this year at Luther King House, Manchester.

I've posted on the Scottish Baptist College blog the details of the lectures - recent blog posts here on Charles Wesley have been sparked by immersing myself again in Weselyan hymns and biography. The Wesleyan hunger for holiness drove Charles and John to a lifelong programme of original research, analysing and exploring the origins and nature of personal Christian experience. Their search for a theology of experience which encompassed redemption and sanctification and took with radical seriousness the power of divine love to renew the image of God in human personality, inspired some of Charles most remarkable hymns. And woven through them a rich combination of Christian theological traditions from Augustine's Homilies on 1 John and his Confessions, to Eastern Fathers such as the Cappadocians; from Ephrem the Syrian to the Anglican poet George Herbert, from Luther to a whole clutch of Puritans; from Henry Scougal of Aberdeen whose Life of God in the Soul of Man had an influence out of all proportion to its size on the theology and spirituality of the Wesleys and Whitefield, and on to the non-conformist expositor Matthew Henry, whose brilliant one-liners at times are the inspiration for entire hymns. And on.....and on.

To study Wesley's hymns is to encounter theology that is passionately felt and told; it is also to discover just how varied and suggestive, how profound and creative Christian theology can be, when powerful streams meet, and earlier tradition encounters contemporary experience in a new confluence. For myself, the devout eclecticism and reasonable enthusiasm of John Wesley's theology, and the poetic virtuosity Charles Wesley displayed in setting Evangelical faith to music and rhythm, demonstrates how a classic stream of Christian tradition such as Evangelical Spirituality, incurs debts it must never disown. Whatever else contemporary Evangelicalism loses, and it is in process of losing much, it must not lose its sense of indebtedness to and dependence upon, the insights and energy, the spiritual resources and theological correctives, of a Christian tradition much older, wider and deeper than any single movement. Of course it's hard now to define Evangelicalism as a movement - qualifiers such as conservative and progressive, variations of species that are encountered in different cultural contexts, claims and counter-claims to represent 'historic Evangelicalism' and thus exclude others as non-representative, and a plethora of agenda driven marketable Evangelical makeovers, suggest a serious dissolution of distinctives. Anyway, Evangelicalism never was a unified, overarching, co-ordinated movement, but rather an expression of Christian faith shaped by a cluster of convictions variously interpreted, and yet which were common to people of many Christian traditions.

Which is why it is important that discussions of contemporary Evangelicalism should not be divorced from the historical origins in the Evangelical revival of the 18th Century; nor should the classic expressions of Evangelicalism be isolated from that continuous flow of Christian tradition, as if Evangelicalism somehow superseded all other traditions in theological truth claims, missional urgency, spiritual vitality. Any particular tradition that cuts itself off from the mainstream, becomes an oxbow lake, and is in danger of simply drying up as the rest of the river flows on.

One of the reasons I study the hymns of Charles Wesley and the sermons of John Wesley, and much else in the Evangelical Spiritual tradition is because I refuse to allow contemporary a-historical fashions to dictate what Evangelicalism is or isn't. And often restatements and redefinitions make little meaningful reference to our own tradition, never mind Evangelicalism's own dependence on those many streams that originate up in the foothills of the Christian tradition, and which in their flow towards the sea feed and sustain each other like tributaries. Traditions must change, adapt, remain responsive to contextual flux, but there is also something given to a tradition which later generations cannot simply decide to dispense with in the struggle for survival we call relevance.

The Evangelical tradition has moved on since Wesley's day - but what is it that gives Evangelicalism continuity with its own past?

What in the tradition is 'given', that without which Evangelicalism begins to lose its impetus and flow, its place in the mainstream, and puts it in danger of becoming an oxbow lake, cut off by the slow accumulation of silt?

Questions. And not unimportant ones.

Charles Wesley and a call for apophatic praise songs

There are times when Charles Wesley is so precisely explicit in recounting Christian experience, so assured and confident of the realities and verities of evangelical theology as it arises from the confluence of evangelical experience and biblical doctrine, that it's easy to forget the balancing reticence that prohibits assurance becoming presumption. The Love Divine that excels all other loves, and which is beyond all knowledge, is to be trusted fully and freely on its own terms, even though such faith has eternal consequence. And trusted not because it is fully understood, or underwritten by  intellectual guarantees, but because it floods the heart with joy, renews the spirit in love, and recreates the entire personality in the image of God, and God does all this by a love that operates outside the categories of any epistemology limited by human finitude.

So when Charles coments, In vain the first-born seraph tries, to sound the depths of love divine; and when he declares,''T'is mystery all! Let earth adore. Let angel minds enquire no more", he is declaring the mystery of Divine Love off limits to any form of calculus, logic or formula that by definition seeks to define, and thus control, and thus limit.

But Charles is not only saying that the Divine Love is immeasurable - he is saying it is a mystery so deep that the only response is adoration, what is demanded is the capitulation of the heart in trustful, grateful love. The apophatic strain in Charles Wesley's hymns is however less than total - for in the Gospel story of God in Christ, who emptied himself of all but love and was crucified for sinners, the divine love is indeed revealed, and in such terms as is sufficient for salvation. But in worship and adoration the Christian heart and mind recognises that the Divine Love has an infinite surplus, an inexhaustible fullness, an endless repertoire of creative, redemptive power, that renders praise all but speechless, and compels a reverent reticence in which words give way to adoring wonder.

One of Charles' lesser known hymns expresses an important truth deeply embedded in Christian mysticism. For example in The Cloud of Unknowing the writer describes the deepest relations of a person to God, not in terms of knowing, but in terms of loving: "Because he may well be loved, but not thought. By love he can be caught and held, but by thinking never".

So in a hymn based on Job 11.7, "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection?, Wesley teaches the importance of theological humility as a spiritual grace, and as a prerequisite to proper worship:

Shall foolish, weak, short-sighted man

   Beyond archangels go,

The great Almighty God explain,

   Or to perfection know?

His attributes divinely soar

   Above the creatures' sight,

And prostrate seraphim adore

   The glorious Infinite.

.

Jehovah's everlasting days

   They cannot numbered be,

Incomprehensible the space

   Of thine immensity

Thy wisdom's depths by reason's line

   In vain we strive to sound,

Or stretch our labouring thought t'assign

   Omnipotence a bound.

.

The brightness of thy glories leaves

   Description far below;

Nor man, nor angels' heart conceives

   How deep thy mercies flow:

Thy love is most unsearchable

   And dazzles all above;

They gaze but cannot count or tell

   The treasures of thy love.

Apophatic theology is an important restraint on that human impulse, particularly strong in accomplished theologians, to reduce God's immensity to manageable theological proportions. What P T Forsyth calls our 'lust for lucidity'. In Charles Wesley's theology of praise and worship there is an important expression of apophatic thinking. At times worship for Wesley is a willingness to glory, not in what we know, but in what we cannot know; a celebration not of understood certainties but of incomprehensible mysteries; a contented acceptance not of doctrinal precision but of personally appropriated spiritual experience.

Mystery is an essential element in Christian theology, a necessary safeguard that, like the angel at the garden of Eden, prevents us from ever presuming to go where we have no right to go. Amongst the priorities in contemporary worship songs and hymns, is a rediscovery of a proper reticence, a willingness to live with and within a mystery that baffles, bewilders and captivates. How about some apophatic praise songs then?