Living Wittily

Living Wittily is Retiring Kind Of.......

Many of those who regularly visit Living Wittily will be aware that life is in process of changing for me. For the past 11 years I have served Baptists in Scotland as the Principal of the Scottish Baptist College, and done so with a burden of responsibility and an awareness of high privilege. When a 19 year old lad from Lanarkshire turned up in the West End of Glasgow on the steps of the Scottish Baptist College, with Highers gained at night school after leaving school at 15, and asked to come and study for ministry, he had no idea that 30 years later he would be appointed Principal. Nor that, untrained, untried and untested as he was then, he would later be entrusted with the formation of women and men towards Christian ministry within and beyond the church.

During my time as Principal I have grown and changed, learned more than I ever conceived I would need to know about Higher Education and ministry formation, and met and worked with a remarkable staff in the College and in the wider circle of UWS staff. It has been a rich time, not without its considerable expenseof emotion and energy and time, but always with an awareness of gift, purpose and shared vision, and it's hard to ask for more.

For the past three years I've travelled from Aberdeen to Paisley, living away from home 4 days a week, and working from home. Family life remains as it should the foundation of my life, and the time has come to be at home more, to reconfigure life around a new sense of vocation, and to plan for the next stages of our lives. That sounds as if I am feeling my age! Well yes, and no. At 62 I am indeed feeling my age, as I did at 52 and even 32. But more important is to accept, even embrace change, as what keeps us alive; to understand that movement is what gives impetus; and to co-operate with the reality that desire and hope and vision give life its energy, direction and purpose. All of that I feel, and clearly recognise in the disjunctions and changes, in the stirring up and invitation, that is the continuing work of the Spirit, disturbing with a deeper peace, and calling into newness and risk.

It would be wrong to say I've been pulled out of my comfort zone! Whatever else the past 11 years have been, it hasn't been that, thankfully.

To teach and share with students at the great creative cusp of life that is study; to encourage and support the discovery of new things that converts monochrome faith to plasma screened subtlety; to accompany students in the at times painful but fruitful work of rediscovering what seemed lost; to bring to birth the recovery of faith as proper confidence, so that life becomes both thoughtfully trusting and responsibly informed, what is not to like in that vocation.

To learn how to encapsulate high vocational ideals and powerfully transformative spiritual principles into the framework and discourse of academic documents, that is itself a gift of the Spirit intepreting the glossolalia of the academy!

To demonstrate in church and academy, that academic excellence, vocational integrity, creative scholarship, and formation of character and competence are hard work, and entirely to be the goal of the student life, and to do so in an intentional community, that is what I mean by responsib ility and privilege. 

I will complete my tenure as Principal on August 31. It is likely I will continue to teach at the College part time, at least till August 2014. My heart has always been in pastoral work and in sharing the life of a Christian community as theologian, preacher, friend and servant. Where opportunities present I hope to still be of service to Christ and to the work of God's Kingdom. And in addition? God knows!

A Theological Reflection on Three Mornings of Problematic Commuting!

On the way to College each morning this week I've been delayed.

Monday it was the lolipop man stopping the traffic with a high waving lolipop, stopping the traffic for one adult to cross the road and no children in sight. That got a few irate horn blasts for lolipop abuse.

Tuesday I was a witness to a motor cyclist who came off his bike because a dog on an extension  lead (not the electrical kind) had run across the road and created a tripwire. The biker wasn't too badly hurt but was rightly mad - I've no idea what the insurance issues will be.

Wednesday it was the huge articulated European transport Lorry which stopped within inches of the Nitshill Bridge and blocked the traffic both ways. No way to reverse because backed in by the Traffic queue - no way forward because, well because of the bridge.

Not the best start to the working day - not talking about me, but the lolipop man who thought he was being helpful, the motorcyclist who probably has no comeback for the damage, and the lorry driver who stopped on time but had nowhere to go, and surrounded by impatient to hostile commuters!

Hard to go in after such encounters of commuting life and sit down with a cup of tea and pick up where I left off in my reading of the more abstract realities of contested ecclesiologies, patristic Trinitarianism and contemporary approaches to mission for faith communities on the cusp of a culture fuelled by disruptive innovation and recessional panic!

But such is the life of a theologian - and seriously, the social and civic attitudes that underlie anger at a car having to stop for a walking human being does indeed provide food for theological critique of the values we live by;

and the questions raised by the unforeseen accident, the injury to others we intend or don't intend, and how to resolve situations that have gone wrong between people, there is an entire theological and ethical agenda for the church;

and to ask ourselves what resources we have to deal with those situations where we are stuck at a low bridge with no easy way forward or back, and all around us people just wanting to get on with their own lives.

I guess that embarrassed lorry driver mirrors the experience of so many folk trying to work out how to make their lives work and be able to move forward from the mistake they have made.

And I'm pondering the parable of the church as articulated lorry, confronted by a low bridge, trapped by the traffic, nowhere obvious to go, the driver frantically directing traffic around a vehicle made for movement but stuck by its own shape and wrong turnings.......

The image of the Eagle Nebulae always reminds me of the context within which all the strangeness of the ordinary is held, 'In the beginning was the Word...and the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us'. And whatever the future of the church, that truth is the intellectual, spiritual and and moral directive for how the Church as the Body of Christ is to live in the creative energy of resurrection, and with trust in the God who in Christ is reconciling the world into the life of the Triune God.

 

Karl Barth on One of His Salutary Rants!

I enjoy a good rant. whether it's mine opr someone else's. Strong feelings, passionate convictions, intellectual energy, just the right degree of unreasonableness, unshakeable confidence in the rightness of the cause and in the analysis of the problem, all of this harnessed to verbal facility with a strong rhetorical accent, these are the active ingredients of the effective rant.

Karl Barth's writings are full of them - they are amongst his most enjoyable paragraphs. They can feel like a loud shout from someone who crept up behind you while you were minding your own business journeying purposefully through some well meaning theological reflection

"Theology is...a function in the Liturgy of the church. One had better take ca\ution what he does, when he neglects theology, or takes it less seriously and thereby practically eliminates it, because it has only this one function. Of all the functions of the Church's liturgy none is to be dispensed with if the Church is to be kept totally intect.

And it is quite in order to say very emphatically today, that it is precisely this function, that of theology, this critical self-examination of the Church regarding its reason for existence and its origin, is not to be eliminated.

Try to carry on your practice without a theory!

Go on, praise "life" at the expense of intellectual work, knowledge or creed.

Worship "reality" and despise truth!

It will quickly become evident that the practical things are not all there is to it; it is only human endeavour, and yet, in  its own autonomous nature it is not a worthy human endeavour. Where such a path leads can be illustrated today before our very eyes, and concerning which the Churches of all countries have every reason to fundamentally rethink themselves.

A Church without an orderly theology must sooner or later become a pagan church.!"

That's what Flannery O'Connor meant when she said Barth throws the furniture around. When Barth takes on the role of exasperated Headmaster he can be fun, but if we laugh we tend to do it discreetly, and nervously, because underneath the impatience is the passion of someone who wants the best and sees it thrreatened by complacency, carelessness or self indulgent minds seeking amusement rather than wisdom. The quote is from God in Action, Edinburgh, 1936, page 49-50 

 

The Unwise Impatience with the Contemplative Mission of the Church,

When E M Forster in A Passage to India sniffed with the disdain of the omniscient narrator at 'poor little talkative Christianity' he was doing what the best novelists do so well, exposing pretension and presumption and daring to name what is ridiculous. Of course not all Christianity is talkative in that embarrassing way when much speaking disguises insecurity, or pretends maturity, or silences other viewpoints by not shutting up about itself.

But there's still a sharp enough barb in Forster's words to make me uneasy about the contemporary expressions of evangelical spirituality and worship. The urge to talk to the point of overtalking, the impatience with silence as if silence were wasted time, the compulsion to fill every unforgiving minute with maximum information, our praise song factories churning out new stuff at increasing rates of quantity, our uncritical acceptance of prayers that seldom reach the depths of our love or the heights of our aspirations and are often the mere immediate chatter of Facebook exchanges with God.

Add to that our programmatic approaches to mission, activism as the index of discipleship, the concessions made in Christian practices and social attitudes to consumer culture and the radical individualism of personal choice and privatised lifestyles, and there is little time, energy or inclination to stop, shut up, listen, pay attention and let the engines that drive us slow down, quieten down and cool down.

Now all that is overstated, and mostly unfair, and anyway I can much-speak and fast-talk and non-stop with the best of them. But perhaps that enables me to say all this less self-righteously than it might sound. T S Eliot's question (was it wistful, angry or resigned) 'where is the life we have lost in living...' remains one of the most important questions the contemporary church has to ask, and with which the contemporary disciple of Jesus has to grapple.

I know that discipleship is at the centre of current thinking on the nature of the Church's mission, but I'm not persuaded that the way the idea is used to shape and fashion people towards a particular view of mission does justice to the New Testament vision of what it means for each person to follow Jesus. There are other calls of Christ, other ways of being, other paths of following that are equally important to the Kingdom of God, if we take the time to consider and ponder the richness of the people of God and the unsearchable riches of Christ. But the irony is that the more we talk and the faster we live, the harder it is to even see what the important questions are, let alone what kinds of answers there might be.

Which brings me to a question I am considering and pondering myself. What would be the impact on our ways of being the church if we recovered,, in our midst, the contemplative tradition of Christian discipleship? I have in mind certain words that seem to me to offer important theological and spiritual correctives to a church perhaps too fond of unexamined assumptions.

Attentiveness to the way the world is without assuming our quick diagnoses are always accurate. Amos didn't come to the conclusion overnight that worship is a waste of time for those who grind down the poor. His entire collection of prophecies detonates beneath unexamined assumptions.

Attendance - in the sense of waiting before God, just waiting. If we are attending before God our minds can't be in two places at once. Prayer isn't multi-tasking, it is letting God be God, instead of telling God who to be.  

Pondering - rumination and turning things over in our minds, may not be the preferred approach to problem solving in our quick as you can solutions culture. Somewhere in Christian spirituality there is a necessity for the long view, the slow maturation of thought, the virtue of patience which is in fact waiting trustfully. Isaiah looked down the long winding road of exile and realised it would eventually be the road that led back to God.

Recollecting - so many fugitive thoughts, fleeting experiences, volume of emotional and mental traffic passing through our inner processors. Time to assimilate, to collect together what is important and taken in, to absorb the significance of things. Where in our life together in Christian community is there the same urgency towards non-urgency, the same valuing of that discernment and sifting that turns experience into wisdom?

Remembering - in the sense of recalling our calling; meaning time to reorient our hearts towards the Love that not only moves the sun and other stars, but moves our hearts; and with a view to being re-membered, joined together, co-ordinated, so that over time our disjointed living recovers co-ordination, and our strained activism gradually gives way to living that is purposeful, creative and balanced in its intake and outflow of energy.

No this is not all a rant. It's a plea for a recovered humanism towards ourselves, a cherishing of our humanity in a way that takes our deepest selves seriously as ones loved by God. It is a recognition that Christians are called not only to do, but to be, and to give time of day to that genuine instinct for stillness and slowness, two dispositions I for one find unfamiliar, but out of which may come the finding of our life's hopes. It is an acknowledgement that the trivialisation of God is an inevitable process of trivialising our own lives. And it is a growing conviction that Isaiah was right to say to a people who had exhausted their capacity to hope, "they that wait upon the Lord shall renew theyr strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run  and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint..." Waiting - yet another word with which our culture, and the church, and our own hearts, are impatient.

Hauerwas and what the church is and is not about

  Stanley Hauerwas, self described as a truculent Texan who swears, is one of the leading exponents of discipleship as theological ethics embodied in virtues and practises that are so reminiscent of Jesus they tell forth the same good news, albeit in fallible humanity trying to be faithful in our following.

Those who have heard Hauerwas lecture know that he doesn't do scintillating rhetoric, and at times is just plain hard to listen to. But he's always worth the effort and irritation it takes to grasp what he's saying because he seldom misses the hearer and hits the wall. His writing likewise can seem at times obtuse, other times persuasive, and occasionally needing to be read with some patience and that intelligent watchfulness that comes from realising this man is a teacher, and a very, very, good one. And if we come away from an encounter with his voice, mind and keyboard with nothing much new to think about, it may be that our own capacities of thought and capaciousness of heart are the limiting factors.

Just been reading his essay on 'The Servant Community: Christian Social Ethics' in the book Living Out Loud, edited by Luke Bretherton. He's at it again. Telling the church to be the church and stop trying to be what people think the church should be.

"The church serves the world by giving the world the means to see itself truthfully. The first question we must ask is not 'What should we do?' but 'What is going on' Our task as church is the demanding one of trying to understand rightly the world as world, to face realistically what the world is with its madness and irrationality."

I used to have an elderly friend who would emphasise her emphatic tone by mixing up her words, and to borrow one of them in response to Hauerwas, abso-bloomin-lutely!!

And how does that work out in practice? Here he is again:

"It is particularly important to remember that the world consists of those, including ourselves, who have chosen not to make the story of God their story. The world in us refuses to affirm that this is God's world and that, as Loving Lord, God's care for creation is greater than our illusion of control. The world is those aspects of our individual and social lives where we live untruthfully by continuing to rely on violence to bring order."

Van Gogh, Thomas Merton and Rowan Williams - and the connection is?

Had a good day yesterday when important things have been done, said and enjoyed.  Journeyed to Glendoick to meet my friend Ken where we spent several hours at the garden centre. In the taciturn and occasionally nasty summer we're having the day was sunny, clear views for miles and the roads still quietish at the end of the school holidays. We don't get the chance to meet often so we tend to make a meal of it. This time we made two meals of it, a bacon and egg roll and a pot of tea, an hour's walk, then Carrot and orange soup with herb scones.

We've been friends more than half our lives and though we'd planned another bookshop crawl in Edinburgh, a civilised conversation over good food for three hours was much to be preferred.

Got home and listened to Albinoni's Oboe Concerto in D Minor while writing and reading, and gloating (no other word will do) over recently bought books. The slow movement of this concerto should be played quietly while reading one of the great narratives of divine and human tenderness in the gospels - for me the encounter of Mary Magdalene with Jesus in the garden.

Of the books being gloated over the one I read next will be The Yellow House, Martin Gayford, (Penguin) is the account of Van Gogh, Gaugin and nine turbulent weeks in Arles. Two geniuses with all their psychological complexities, artists at the zenith of their talent and the extremes of innovation, both eager for friendship but encountering in each other the greatest obstacle to mutual friendship! While working on the Sunflowers tapestry I'm keeping in touch with Vincent in different ways - not trying to understand him, which I think is neither possible nor necessary. But to know the whence of the chaos and the wherefore of the genius, to accept and respect the relationship between his illness and inner turmoil and the immense achievements of his art, and to have an emotional context out of which to work an impression of his favourite painting, and the focus of his desperate longing for sunlight, hope and inner rest.  

 

One of the traits of the bibliophile is gloating over a forthcoming book yet to be printed! This one brings together the Christian whose writing has shaped my own spirituality and thinking in ways decisive for my view of ministry, myself, human relationships, the nature of prayer and the paradoxical imperatives of community, silence and solitude as places and times where and when God is to be found. Ever since I read The Seven Storey Mountain, followed by Thoughts in Solitude I have never had a year when I haven't read Merton's writing. This forthcoming book is by Rowan Williams, and I can't think of someone I'd rather have exploring and reflecting on Merton's continuing relevance in a world where the things Merton made deep concerns remain deeply concerning - cultural conflicts, violence, consumer greed, cultural superficiality and human creativity turned against human interests and flourishing. Merton's great insight that the contemplative was a necessary presence in a world in desperate need of redemption, righteousness, peace and justice remains a major portion of his legacy that is of enduring value. He spoke into the cultural urgencies and reconfigurations of the 50's and 60's and much that he wrote remains valid half a century later. Is that because human nature, our profligacy and pretensions, our anger, angst and anxiety, our propensity for self-preservation and self-harm, remain humanity's greatest threat? And thus a great and fallible human being like Merton can bring together the contemplative and the active, the promise of divine grace enabling human goodness, the monk as holy person in whose prayers are gathered up the broken pieces of a God loved world?

Recovering a Neglected Text: Songs Based on the Song of Songs

The Song of Songs is one of those hidden treasures of the Bible that is more hidden than treasured in contemporary preaching and liturgy. Its explicit sensuality, its celebration of love in all its emotional fervour and poetic physicality, and its unmistakbable affirmation of love as the utter giving up of the self in deepest longing and passionate embrace, tend to mean that those committed to expository preaching give it a skilled body swerve. 

That's a pity, however understandable.  Some of the most lyrical writing, and spiritually perceptive devotional expression, and profound theological imagining has been produced by those in the Christian tradition who have studied and sung and prayed over this collection of Hebrew Love songs. From the mystical Bernard of Clairvaux and his eighty odd sermons on the first couple of chapters to the equally mystical if evangelical Charles Haddon Spurgeon's communion meditations, from the speculative and extravagant Origen to the restrained devotion of the 19th C. Lutheran Franz Delitzsch, from Samuel Rutherford the intense and volatile Scottish Puritan whose letters are marbled with the sensual imagery of the Song, to Marvin Pope whose Anchor Bible Commentary remains the vade mecum of previous interpretations, from such diverse directions in the tradition the Song of Songs has been a rich source of devotional and theological nourishment.

But no. It isn't necessarily the text to read out in church of a Sunday morning, either before or after the children leave. And yes, it is probably wise not to decide to do a long detailed series of expositions verse by verse - though that was done 30  odd years ago by the Rev Willie Still in Gilcomston South Church in Aberdeen.

But still, this book about love and passion and longing is there, right in the middle of the Bible, and it won't go away. So what to do with it. Read it. Think about it. It has much to teach a culture saturated by overstated desire, tone deaf to tenderness and delicacy, suffering an ennui of the heart and losing the capacity for imaginative and winsome discourse (a recent article mercilessly mocked the crass opening chat up lines that now pass for respectful introduction and consideration for the other).

Alternatively, buy Patrick Hawes' beautiful arrangement of 6 songs on the Song of Songs. The soloist Elin Manahan Thomas has one of the clearest and sharpest voices I've heard. The CD is a really good example of exegesis by lyric and music, a genuine expansion and exposition of ideas that lie at the centre of the Song. These ideas give content and substance to those words we try to use when we speak of love, desire, longing, passion, anticipation and fulfilment, devotedness given and received, the move from fear to trust and therefore to that joy which, if never complete, at least finds its home in the mutual enjoyment of human togetherness.

The Song of Songs has been understood as an allegory of  the love between Christ and the Church, between Christ and the soul, and between a man and a woman. That such rich resources to explore divine and human love lie in this earthy but sublime poetry is one of the great miracles of the canon of Scripture. I guess there are those who, if it were up to them, would have wanted it excluded for reasons of modesty.  And the Holy Spirit thankfully thwarted them! So here it is, between Ecclesiastes with his probing mockery of faith that comes too easy, and Isaiah with his defiant imagination in face of exile and imperial power, daring to hope - and between them, Sage and Prophet, this love letter, this unabashed celebration of love, divine and human, love which in the human heart and in the heart of God is the foundation of existence and the meaning and purpose of life itself.

Benedict XVI in London, Education, Dialogue and Freedom ( I )

When Tony Blair famously said the priorities for a 21st Century economy were "Education. Education. Education", he said more than he meant, and New Labour delivered less than he promised. Long before him the Scottish Reformation Kirk aimed to have a school in every parish, an historic decision Pope Benedict XVI commended in his response to the Queen's welcome. Education remained closely related to the Church in its various expressions in the following centuries, Catholic, Established and Nonconformist, until from the mid 19th Century onwards the state increasingly took responsibility for universal education. The resources needed, and the economic implications of having an educated, skilled and trained population capable of competing in modern industrialised societies, made it increasingly necessary that Government rather than Voluntary Agencies should drive educational provision.

Alongside state provision in Britain, the Catholic Church has had its own established network of faith schools. Education remains a primary goal of Catholic social policy and theology today, and involves massive commitments of resources worldwide. When Benedict spoke on Friday to several thousand young people at St Mary's University College he spoke of those things that make life good and make for human happiness. To be happy is to be a friend of God. To live well there must be good models, those whose lives are worthy of imitation. There is much in Benedict's public discourse, and in his message here in Britain, that reflects the profound thinking of his encyclicals Deus Caritas Est and Caritas in Veritate. To be friends of God is a description of a relationship in which love is the exchange of divine grace and human response. He spoke of God's love, and God's desire for happiness and holiness as essentials of a full humanity, and did so as one who has thought profoundly, and spoke simply.

This is a Pope whose theological emphases decisively shape his public discourse, and he talks with ease and practised confidence about the love of God, but also about those cultural and intellectual trends that undermine and erode the humane goals of education as a humanly formative activity. To talk theologically, and with a heightened social conscience in a showpiece Catholic educational establishment, is to introduce a quite different level of discourse about the meaning, significance, purpose and practice of education. Whatever arguments there may be about the place of faith based schools in a pluralist culture, they provide an important corrective and in a democarcy a required alternative, to secularised education evacuated of religiously formative education.

John Henry Newman's Idea of a University reads today like an impractical, unaffordable, unwanted and idealistic educational utopia. Unless of course you want to challenge the prevailing secular view that education is a process whose primary goal is economic growth and development, student employability and mass produced graduates. But I'm reluctant to concede the inevitable and final necessity for such educational reductionism, or that these are the only or best educational goals. It may indeed be inevitable that state funded education in our universities has to bend to the economic priorities, and available funding of the Government of the day. But there will still be, in my own view, a place for those institutions which exist to serve more humanising ends, including religious instruction, moral formation, humanising values, intellectual humility, and these explored within a faith tradition both itself open to critique and yet critically aware of alternative worldviews.

Benedict has a similarly rich and humane view of the purpose of religious encounter between different faiths. Such meeting he said yesterday, is a necessary expression of human formation, cultural development and social interaction. Co-operation and dialogue engender mutual respect, and enable faith traditions to support each other in seeking freedom of worship. of conscience and of association. Nor should such co-operation and mutual understanding be selfish, but provide a platform from which faith groups can work for peace, mutual understanding and witness to the world. Living alongside each other and learning and growing in respect and knowledge of each other, provides a fertile soil for peace, justice and works of compassion to grow.

Whatever else can be said about this Papal visit, each time Benedict has spoken he has been generous in spirit, rigorous in intellect and both warm and dignified in his responsiveness. And the issues he deals with are of common concern to all humanity - justice and peace, the foundation of moral standards, religious freedom and freedom of conscience, the nature of education, the relations of faith and reason, and of spirituality and secularity. This is a man of courage, conviction and adamantine firmness on dogma; he is also a man of intellectual power, pastoral passion for the global church and ranks as one of the greatest Catholic theologians of the past 50 years. Interesting that the current Pope and the current Archbishop of Canterbury are both regarded as scholar theologians of the first class, at a time when intellectual range and depth are discounted in the markets of contemporary communication culture.

 

Emerging Church, Rabbi Gamaliel and the Theological Curriculum

Just spent the last couple of days meeting with colleagues in Oxford, at Regent's Park College. We were looking at the issues for theological education arising from the flux and diversity of expression in church community that has come to be called emerging church, or fresh expressions, or whatever catch phrase we care to use in the vain attempt to catch in neat definition this phase of the church's life in contemporary Westernised Christian culture.

Stuart Murray Williams is one of the central figures trying to interpret, understand and evaluate what is of permanent value and what of transient interest in the plethora of alternatives on offer for those no longer satisfied with 'inherited church' or 'traditional church' or 'mainstream church'. See - even the non emergent status quo is now accruing nuanced definitions! And given the long list of options from cafe church to to Sci Fi church, Post-Alpha church to Cyber church, from menu church to common purse community, it was an important exercise to try somehow to grasp the significance of whatever is happening, in a culture that values the 'whatever' word.

Not rehearsing it all here, but several really important questions are at least worth posing:

What is necessary for any group to legitimately claim for itself the word church as a valid descriptor of what it is and how it expresses its life? What is the ecclesial minimum for a group to call itself church?

How important is sustainability in any of these new developments in Christian mission and community? If it is a transient phase is that necessarily a sign of failure? And if some of these survive and become self-sustaining is that validation, 'if it is of God it will prosper'?

If a group aim to accommodate a culturally specific group (Goth church for example), how does that relate to the catholicity of the Church? If Christian community is inclusive, how does that square with groups whose nature, aim and identity are so specific and culturally focused that by definition others would find them all but inaccessible?

If these new and imaginative and creative initiatives are part of a search for a more authentic and participatory way of being Christian community engaged with surrounding culture, what are the criteria for such authenticity?

Given that fresh expressions of emerging or emergent church are self-consciously developmental, uncontrolled and organic, what is it that nevertheless enables them to define themselves as Christian? Where are the theological and spiritual parameters, and who sets them?

And the specific question for theological education as formation and preparation for ministry in such a cultural flux - what impact should such developments, and the need to understand them, have on curriculum content, styles of teaching and a theological understanding of ecclesiology and Baptist Identity?

All good questions - much sharp discussion - several tentative conclusions - and most importantly, food for thought and reason for dialogue.

Christian witness - bespeaking hopefulness to a culture mired in its own despair

Hope. To look to the future as open and replete with new possibility. To see our past and our present circumstances without conceding they determine who we will be, and what is now possible.

If there's one disposition, one emotion, one word for which our times are sick with hunger, it's hopefulness.

 Are any of us immune to that darkness and heaviness of soul that occasionally descends as we glimpse our own shallowness, sense the superficial transcience of a life lived too rapidly, and long for something more permanent, durable, worth giving our lives to?

How to bear witness to Jesus who brings freedom in a culture suffering an advanced case of creeping exhaustion through trying to keep the creaking economic machinery going through the cycle of sustainable economic growth, global recession, and economic recovery. Remorselessness engenders hopelessness, and it's no accident that a theology of hope has an umbilical connection to liberation theology.

And alongside the search for meaning and identity through our capacity to participate in a consumer culture, isn't there something existentially significant about the contemporary pursuit of belonging, identity and connectedness through Facebook, Twitter and yes the blog? 

One way or another we each try to locate our own living in the excitement and sameness, the creativity and the mess, the valuable and the trivial, the enduring and the disposable, the worthwhile and the wasteful, the optimism and the despair,  that is the cultural flux of our times.

So I think of some of the great words that bespeak hopefulness. Bespeak - that is speak and make be. Speak into existence. Talk up. Not in the silly sense of make-believe, but in the prophetic sense of re-imagining a world in which hope and not cynicism is the default posture of our forward thinking. For example:

Amos 9.13, at the end of a doom laden sermon or two:

The time is surely coming, says the Lord, when the one who plows shall overtake the one who reaps, and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it.

Isaiah 55.12, as a promise that simply denies to the status quo its claims to permanence and determinism

You shall go out with joy, and be led forth in peace, and the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

Revelation 22.1-2, one of those texts that Hollywood would need CGI's to do justice, a vision of life and movement, of growth and fulfillment, of international healing and peace. 

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the lamb, through the middle of the street of the city. on either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

And the lines from Browning's Paracelsus, Victorian rhetoric and human longing for a future drawn forwardt by the sense that in the murk and darkness we might be a bit like Moses sometimes, and have to draw near to the thick darkness in which god dwells.....

If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,
It is but for a time. I press God's lamp
Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom. I shall emerge one day.

God is love. God is light. But a Christian understanding of God, standing this side of resurrection, manages to look at a tired, scared, fragmented world, buckling under the strain of human activity, and pray, The God of hope fill you with all hope. It is God who bespeaks the future, not us. Thank goodness, and thank God!

Faith then, is  both defiant and imaginative - refusing to concede that how things are is how they must be. Instead faith sends out trajectories of hope towards a future differently imagined. Not because we can simply wish fulfil the future - but because wherever our human future takes us, God is already there, and there as eternally creative love, reconciling our shattered cosmos, and bringing to completion our own brokenness through that same reconciling love.

The Colossian Christ, the image of the invisible God, the one in whom all things hold together, in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell - there is the core of any theology that claims to be Christian and relevant to a culture mired in its own despair, and apparently hell-bent on foreclosing on its own future. To bear witness to a different future, and live towards that future by a life of peace-making and conciliatory love, and to embody these in actions of generous, gentle, costly healing of whatever is hurting around us, - that is to bespeak hopefulness, is to be the Body of Christ, broken for the nourishment of the world.

In Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross.

(The painting is Hope in a Prison of Despair, Evelyn De Morgan, Pre-Raphaelite)

(The space image above can be found here )