Living Wittily

Reading Job as Theological Education

In the biography of his father B F Westcott, the Bishop's son recalls the great NT scholar arguing that he would rather assess a student by their ability to set a first class exam paper than to sit one! Westcott believed the ability to identify the significant questions demonstrated a more thorough knowledge of a subject than the ability to mug up satisfactory answers.

Like much else, the motivation behind a question reveals something characteristically human - curiosity needn't be mere - curiosity can have the urgency of life and death, or be driven by an inner imperative to know in order to understand. Or the question asked may have an answer that is necessary in order to know what the next question might be, in that endless sequence of exploration that underlies all education - including theological education. And the book of Job is a profoundly disturbing course in theological education - if having the truth of God drawn out of us by having our very humanity questioned, counts as theological education.

Balentine's commentary on Job is written into that deeply human activity of questioning and being questioned. For those who desire a faith bolted down in certainties and unambiguous answers, 'the gain of certainty has to be measured against the loss of debate'. But for those for whom life is riddled with ambiguity, and faith and trust are tested by extremes of loss and pain, the loss of debate imposes a n unacceptable and dehumanising silencing of that voice through which the question "Why" is and must be spoken. The question "Why" searches the soul, and confronts God in both protest and prayer, both curse and blessing, seeking meaning more than consolation, and articulating in question and argument that which defines a person's humanity - the capacity to suffer, the yearning for love, and the longing to understand.

When it comes to suffering "for no reason," this book seems intent on reminding us that questions about the world, human existence and God necessarily remain open ended. To settle for anything less is to deny the pain that punctuates every faith assertion with a question mark. (Balentine, 33)

The unpopular idea of submission 2. Christ's submission and the identity of God

The idea of kenosis as a portrayal of self-emptying love has always seemed to me both theologically attractive and  pastorally promising. Theologically attractive because without prying unsubtly into the mysteries of eternal intra-trinitarian purposefulness, and while avoiding inappropriate precision in calibrating the relations between divine love and sovereignty, a kenotic Christology, for all its difficulties as a comprehensive theory, does acknowledge something definintive in the statement God is love, when that statement is made of the Word become flesh, crucified and risen. Pastorally promising because the story of salvation as it is told in the most significant textual locus for kenotic Christology in the NT, Philippians 2. 6-11, is a story which affirms both the identity of the God who comes to us in the humiliation of Christ, and the identity ofthe Christian community as one modelled on the reality of who Christ is, and what is therefore true about God.Self emptying love is thus definitive of Christian existence together, and in ethical demand and spiritually transformative practice, impels Christian community towards life at the radical edge of risky, costly love for the other.

In one stunning passage, the sanctified speculative imagination of Paul seems to have overcome the no less sanctified reverent restraint of one who fully recognised the limits of human thought; limits imposed not only by inadequacy of thought, but also by ineffability of subject. Yet here in this passage Paul states in a rhythmic prose poem what he conceived to be the all consuming, self-emptying motive of the One who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a right to be clung to - but emptied himself.

Now I know there are all kinds of critical and textual arguments about what Philippians 2.6-11 is about. And in this book on submission within the Godhead and the Church,the writer gives them a good hearing. But I do find her conclusion about the nature and purpose of this passage persuasive. Is it a hymn, and if so pre Pauline? No to both - Paul was quite capable of writing exalted prose, and there is no decisive evidence of other non- NT 'early hymns' in form, content or known usage such as this passage. Is it a passage explained as a contrasting parallel between Adam, who snatched at equality with God and Christ who became obedient unto death? Yes, but only if this argument isn't used to exclude the idea of Christ's pre-existence, which Dunn doubts, but Wright affirms, though both see Adam Christology as at least part of the explanation of the passage. Is it telling the story of salvation, a kerygmatic pronouncement (Martin) or is it a call to imitation of Christ (Fowl). In fact it is both argues Park - the passage proclaims the salvation story, but to pastoral and ethical purpose.

However the submission of Christ as depicted in Philippians 2.6-11 gives rise to a number of complex theological considerations. No one explanation exhausts the implications of this passage. There are strong textual  connections with Isaiah 45 where submission to the sovereign God is the attitude that wins divine approval. Christ's actions in emptying himself and taking the form of a servant, and becoming obedient to death on the cross have significance both as descriptions of the saving efficacy of his humiliation and as exemplary demonstrations of an ethic of submissive obedience to God and others as characteristic of God's salvific action in Christ. The exaltation of Christ is not the reward for humiliation, but the confirmation that 'his humiliation belongs to the identity of God as surely as his exaltation does.' (R Bauckham, God Crucified (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1996), p. 61.

The revelation of God in Christ, conveyed through divine movements as depicted in this theologically unsettling passage, is of One for whom submission is not so much a precondition of exaltation, a necessary adjustment of sovereignty, but is an essential expression of divine identity and the characteristic modus operandi of divine love acting with redemptive purpose. God's approval of Jesus, bestowing on him the name which is above every name, is an announcement against grasping at status, clinging to privilege and right, selfish ambition and attraction to power. "Therefore God has highly exalted him....". The 'therefore' is a crucial theological hinge. 'He humbled himself and became obedient.......therefore.....'. This brief passage, with that eternally consequential inference has profound implications for how we think of God, how we understand the dynamics of the community of the church, and how we view submission as not only one amongst many Christian virtues, but as having the mind that was also in Christ Jesus, and points to the mind of God.

I'm not attributing all the above to this fascinating book - except that reading it, engaging with its careful arguments, pushes me into such reflection.

The Unpopular Idea of Submission 1. Is submission irredeemably coercive?

There is something disconcerting about a book that addresses submission as a theological category, not only so, but which seeks to rehabilitate the notion that self-surrender need not imply defeat, diminishment or inferiority, but may be a creative act of willed love. That said, ideas of submission are inherently suspect, for example in feminist theology, being contaminated by perceived patriarchal and authoritarian assumptions. Likewise postmodern rejection of the normativity of traditional readings of texts, expresses a powerfully antithetical resistance to the assumed dominance of such traditional interpretations; such truth claims have no inherent right either to require the submission of other minds or to negate other legitimate construals of truth.

This book sets out to explore whether submission is irredeemably locked into hierarchical sturctures and behaviour patterns. Semantically, is it the case that the term "submission" is irretrievably oppressive, coercive and indicative of a person's inferiority? Theologically, is hierarchy ruled out in any construal of the life of the Triune God that seeks to conceive of that life in relational terms? And even if it is, what of the concept of mutual submission within consensual parameters of love and being? Ethically and spiritually, in Christian existence, is it not the case that submission to the Gospel indicates that deep inner transormation of the self that discovers in obedience a radical and original freedom? Politically - and that means in social, economic and personal relations, is it not the case that the primary claim upon Christian inwardness is not the language of rights but the language of grace?

Questions like these open up wider questions of equality, freedom, mutuality - and also authority, power and hierarchy. Approached through the lens of a New Testament text such as Philippians, the concept of submission compels reflection on urgent contemporary issues of gender relations, Trinitarian theology, Christological models and the interpersonal dynamic of Christian community. Even early in my reading of this book I am aware of my own inner egalitarian prejudices. I genuinely hold to the deep conviction that the Christian mind, heart and will rightly, and only, recognise one absolute claim on their submission. And that is to Jesus as Lord - whose Lordship, authority and claim derive their power from the soul's encounter through the Spirit, with grace unspeakable and love crucified as encountered in the Risen Jesus, gift of the Father. So if I am to be persuaded by this book's title, that there is submission within the Godhead, and that submission is a defining characteristic of Christian community, then (for me, at least) these principles must grow out of an exegetical and reflective theology shaped and given content by attention to primary NT text, by creative Trinitarian reflection and by a Christological hermeneutic applied to Christian community.

The next post on this book will review chapter 1 - on Philippians 2.5-11.   ?

Jonah 2: Grudging Obedience to a Generous God

Jonah cannot find it in his heart to give Nineveh even a million to one chance. So because he believes in God, and because of what he believes about the abounding love and mercy of God, he runs away.

Obedience is more than doing what God asks – it is being at peace with who God is. God is scandalously generous but we can be scandalously grudging. God doesn’t do fair, he does mercy. For ourselves, we are glad God doesn’t give us what we deserve, but sometimes it’s hard not to wish other people got what they deserve. In Jonah, God is the sender of well aimed storms, and fish the size of submarines; the God of nations and empires, the God of cities and their urban problems, of withered gourds and herds of cattle – and He is essentially and intentionally merciful and compassionate to his creation. So how dare any of us reduce God to informal conversation partner, or confine God to our own ideas of what a Christian God should be, as if God’s own reality might seem a bit theologically unsound to us! When God calls us to live up to who God is in Christ – our first thought confronted with such scandalous truth may well be flight - but the second will be worship – of the God who is above and beyond all our limited hopes for this world.

There is in Jewish writing and spirituality a wonderful confidence in laughter as conduit of learning. If you get the joke, you get the insight, you understand, you get it.  This whole book is about Jonah having to be pushed and shoved towards Nineveh, and then pushed and shoved towards the truth of who God is, and when he says he’d rather die than see Nineveh live he has finally to face the ultimate test of obedience – will he allow God to be God? Slow to anger and abounding in love.

And maybe, like Jonah, we so want to have a comfortable, predictable and theologically safe God. C S Lewis unforgettably said of Aslan, 'He is not not safe, but he is good'. In Jonah God's goodness is the counterpoint to the spirit of exclusion, the grudging heart, the narrow-minded faith. So all of us Jonah's can stop thinking of God as our divine resource centre, a kind of holy transcendent megastore of blessings accessible only to a privileged clientele. God does not belong to us – we belong to God. And theology is not so much our thinking about God, but a perilous, precarious way of coming to know something of what God thinks of us, and this our problematic world filled to overflowing with those we call 'other'.  What is revealed in Jonah, and comes to its apotheosis in Christ, is that God's worldview rests on a nature that is  … slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

Jonah, Nineveh and an unfair God in an unfair world

Preaching today on a text that was the first in a series of five on Jonah. Others will do the later ones - my passage was Jonah 1.1-3. Now Jonah is one of the most purposely subversive theological documents in the entire Bible - it is also one of the most artfully crafted protest stories, couched in narrative laced with irony, and delivering one of the most persuasive correctives in all of literature. So not easy to preach meaningfully on the first three verses - the opening scene of a film is hard, even misleading, to interpret without the following plot. Still. I did enjoy rereading and reconsidering this story for our time.  In fact that's the line my sermon took - today's Jonah's and today's Nineveh.  Here's the first part of my thinking:

You only understand Jonah if you’ve learned to hate, if life experience has educated you in heartfelt, instinctive, focused hostility. And you only understand Jonah’s God if you are prepared to unlearn hatred, and by a painful inner re-orientation accept that God is not in the hate business. Jonah hated Nineveh – ‘the great city’ famed for terrorist atrocities, centre of a brutal, organised, military machine – merciless, meticulous, arrogant, conqueror and oppressor of Israel. The equivalent today is hard to imagine – but where there is religious hatred, ancient tribal enmities and people whose suffering and oppression have educated them into hatred, there we come near to the same mindset – that wants to obliterate the enemy. The combination of terror and anger, of hatred and hopelessness, produces that lethal cocktail we call terrorism – and it flourishes in a world sold on consumerism, militarism and polarisation of extremes, two poles arcing in the destructive blue light of violence.

 Jonah stands for those who want to see power get what it deserves; those who pray that cruelty and violence will get its payback. So you’d think that a word from the Lord to preach against the wickedness of the great city would have Jonah book a first class overnight camel to be the first to tell Nineveh they’d had it. God’s prophet being sent to tell the enemy God is going to zap you. Permission to hate, to ridicule, to gloat, to celebrate the anguish of the enemy. So why did Jonah run in the exact opposite direction? Why miss out on the vengeance he’d prayed for? Why not takes his hate and use it to make him an eloquent herald of doom?

Chapter 1 Verse 3 only makes sense when you come to ch. 4 verse 2. Jonah isn’t disobedient – he’s in denial. It isn’t that he doesn’t believe enough in God – he believes too much, he knows too well, his theology of God is so true it’s a liability. He runs in the opposite direction because he senses God is going to do the opposite of what Jonah wants. There’s a million to one chance that Nineveh will repent – and if that happens, there isn’t one chance in a million that God won’t be merciful - it's  an absolute certainty that God would be slow to anger and abounding in love.

And that isn’t fair. That is theologically unacceptable. Abounding in love, slow to anger - That would be absolutely scandalous – that a vast city built on the blood and tears of the conquered should turn from their wickedness and find mercy shows there is no justice in the universe. "Be it not so Lord", - it's the effectual fervent prayer of a righteously indignant man. Jonah won’t take that million to one chance. And as this story unfolds it isn’t that Jonah will, learn a new theology of God – he will learn how to apply that theology to the deepest, hardest, most heartbreaking, experiences of his life. And he’ll learn about God’s generosity and human grievances; he’ll learn that mercy is greater than murder; that compassion not cruelty is God’s way; all that and more he’ll learn – but as this story begins it touches on some of the most important things we will ever need to know about ourselves, about God, about those different others who share this planet with us

Of which more later.

St Deiniol's 3 : Psalm 119 and Theological Education

What's the longest chapter in the Bible? The longest Psalm? It's that remarkable piece of textual cross stitch, Psalm 119. A 22 stanza acrostic going through the hebrew alphabet, each verse in each stanza beginning with the same letter - it is a tour de force of artificially structured thought, but to great and serious purpose. My own study of the Psalm goes back years - I once preached six sermons on it, touching on wisdom, guidance, spiritual longing, hard times, trustful learning and leaning, and so on. The Victorian pastoral theologian Charles Bridges wrote a devout commentary on it: Thomas Manton the Puritan a long series of sermons which dissected and examined it in exhaustive and exhausting detail; Calvin's commentary on it is a masterclass in restrained, focused devotion; Spurgeon ransacked the expositional tradition to produce what is a vade mecum on Christian obedience to the Law of the Lord.

At at St Deiniol's this Psalm was brought to my attention again by reading Bonhoeffer's Discipleship. He quotes one verse that picqued my interest, and resulted in a careful rereading and rehearing of this Torah Concerto in 22 movements! It was then I came across verse 56: 'This has been my practice; I obey your precepts'. None of us really know why certain phrases of Scripture trip us up, slow us down, make us listen - the Holy Spirit interrupts our reading, silences otherwise sound questions and puts on hold the discoveries that drive the intellectual quest. And for no reason other than unlooked for gift, words are transformed to Word, Bible study becomes personal address, and the Word of the Lord has finally been heard. Sitting in a sunlit Victorian library, mellow oak book shelves on three sides, aware of countless others who had sat in this place in pursuit of divine learning, my soul already stirred by the pointed and potent writing of Bonhoeffer, I sensed the passion and longing of the Psalm writer who so long ago tried to express the ordered purposes of God, in well ordered words, as a way of recreating a disordered world - through saintly practices in obedience to divine precepts.

The result is an outline of an essay on psalm 119 as theological education. More about this later. It's time I took the psalmist's advice:
I lie down and sleep; I wake again because the Lord sustains me.

How do you read? On not telling Scripture what it means!

Today I posted on our College Blog which you can find here. I wanted to think around the meaning of Jesus' question to the lawyer in the passage that leads to the parable of the Good Samaritan. "What does the Law say? How do you read?" At College prayers we were helped to hear that question, "How do you read?" The post over at Scottish Baptist College Blog tries to hear the import of Jesus question.

Gleaning, globalisation and putting boundaries on greed.

Two things come together in this Bible sketch by Chagall, 'Ruth Gleaning'. My favourite Bible story and the economic principle of enough applied to social ethics as mercy. For a while now I've promised myself a good read around the literature of Ruth, and what is becoming known in biblical studies as wirkungsgeschichte. The term means the history of the influence of the text. I'm wondering where the story of Ruth, or the incidents that drive and coax the story to its ending, are expressed in art, music or in literature.

Globalisation and gleaning seem to suggest two different worldviews; perhaps gleaning, the practice of leaving the edges of the field unharvested as a giving back to God by giving to the poor and the stranger, was a good principle for 'undeveloped' cultures. Maybe in our more 'developed' society, fair trade is an equivalent today. The quotation marks in the previous two sentences are meant to help you envisage me doing that annoying thing with the finger signalled quotes, as my way of questioning any comparison between our economics and the practices of that ancient culture.

The institutionalisation of mercy in the economic practices of an ancient culture like early Israel, and these underwritten by the religious experience of those who understood the impact on a human life in being a stranger, poor and hungry, is a standing rebuke to the rapacious efficiency of globalised capitalism. The comparison does seem anachronistic given the contrast between the simplicity of life in an emerging ancient culture where gleaning wouldn't cause global markets to tumble, and the complex inner structures of economic self interest and faceless finance that enable a French bank official to play the markets like an amusement arcade. Gleaning is a principle that sets parameters on greed.

Anyway, if you know of art pictures / sculptures, music, creative literature that borrows from or tells the story of Ruth I'd be grateful for nudges in the right direction. And isn't that sketch by Chagall stunning?

Haiku NT Introduction Update

The Haiku NT Introduction is coming along nicely - still some opportunities for others to share their amusing musings.

Most NT introductions are 486 pages - if you use the 5x7x5 model for Haiku we will have a NT Introduction of 486 syllables! (28x17)

I think I have all the correct names beneath the compositions so far, but let me know if I have wrongly attributed a work of genius to the wrong person. By the way, not allowed to do the Pastorals or the Johannines or the Thessalonians as composite correspondence - must do each book - all 28 of them. Happy haiku!

Gospel of Matthew

Son of Abraham
Brings fulfilment of Torah
Global Commission

Catriona

.

Gospel of Mark
Good news! Here's a tale -
starts with mid-life crisis, then
stops before life starts.

Andy Jones

.

Gospel of Luke

Good News! For the poor,
'Sinners' and tax-collectors:
Healing salvation.

Catriona

.

Gospel of John

The Word became flesh.
Uncomprehending darkness
eclipsed by the light.

Jim Gordon

.

Acts

In Jerusalem

The Word in gracious power

To all the world's end.

Jason Goroncy

.

Romans

Saving God seeks... you:
sin-spoiled, grace-gained, destined. Die
to self, live to love.

Andy Jones

.

Galatians

In Christ free at last
They try to re-enslave me
Glory in God's Cross

Jason Goroncy

.

Ephesians

God (who called you to
the skies) fill, gift and grow you;
live in light as one!

Andy Jones 

.

Philemon
Neither slave nor free!
Since bound together in Christ,
Free Onessimus.

Jim Gordon

.

Hebrews

Spoken by the Son
Lo, our great high priest has come
Grace be with you all

Jason Goroncy

.

James

Oft misunderstood
Harmony of faith and deeds
Practical wisdom

Catriona

.

Revelation

Valour in suff'ring
The Lamb who opens the scroll
Making all things new

Jason Goroncy

Augustine and the Mother's love of the Holy Scriptures

It is a wondrous and beneficial thing that the Holy Spirit organised the Holy Scriptures so as to satisfy hunger by means of its plainer passages, and remove boredom by means of its obscurer ones.

If you cannot yet understand [a passage of Scripture], you should leave the matter for the consideration of those who can; and since Scripture does not abandon you in your infirmity, but with a mother's love accompanies your slower steps, you will make progress. Holy Scripture, indeed, speaks in such a way as to mock the proud readers with its heights, terrify the attentive with its depths, feed great souls with its truth and nourish little ones with sweetness.

Both quotations from Augustine, quoted in Greene-McCreight, 164,167.