Living Wittily

PT Forsyth, a Japanese Translation and an Unforgettable memory of Professor Donald Mackinnon

I  opened a parcel yesterday and found in it the recently published collection of essays on P T Forsyth, published in Japan, and in Japanese. I have a chapter in it which is a reprint of the piece on Forsyth from Evangelical Spirituality - never thought I'd be published in Japanese though!

The volume is a translation of Justice the True and Only Mercy, the collection of essays edited by Trevor Hart after the Forsyth Colloquium held in Aberdeen in 1995. That they wanted to add my chapter as a concluding essay is humbling and at the same time makes me feel a wee bit chuffed!

One memory of that colloquium stamped deeply in my affections was the paper delivered with Shakespearean power by Donald Mackinnon. It was a characteristic combination of lucid perplexity and integrated disjointedness! You have to envisage Professor Mackinnon's large presence, big arms waving and hands grasping and ungrasping as he threw out  grappling hooks, seeking anchor points on which to hang a virtuoso account of Forsyth, tragedy, German philosophy and high culture, atonement theology, kenotic christology and much else delivered with passion and in a voice modulating between gruff assertion and poignant questioning. It was as memorable a performance of theology as I've ever seen.

The essay in the book, revised and tidied up for publication, is a pale reflection of that encounter between Forsyth, Mackinnon and a bemused audience. Those of us who were there were both puzzled and moved, taught from deep wells and frustrated by an intellect ablaze, witnessing one of the great minds in 20th Century philosophical theology, like Samson wrestling with huge pillars of thought and threatening to bring it all crashing down on our heads. I exaggerate - a little! But it is the exaggeration of an affectionate admirer who gladly witnessed one of the genuine polymaths, performing an intellectual mini-concert, and displaying genius that eschewed pedagogic techniques that might make his thought more accessible to his audience. We weren't there to hear, but to overhear the theological soliloquy of a mind independent, fierce and passionately religious.

Rowan Williams on Theological Education

This is Rowan Williams at his reflective, discursive and penetrating best. This lecture on theological education is a startling and refreshing apologia for wisdom, holiness and loving God with heart and mind

"...a person who is educated in reading the Bible is a person who, you can say theologically, by the Grace of the Holy Spirit, has been brought into that relationship with the God of the Bible which allows them to recognise in the language of the Bible their own faith and their own narrative. And that is something rather different from quarrying the Bible for little bits that happily remind you of how you feel. That is not biblical theology. It may be a useful form of apologetical psychology but it is not particularly theological. But to find in that language, that narrative, that register of exploration, something of the faith that transforms your own life; that I think is to see what biblical understanding is. And it is not a million miles away from what Martin Luther said when claiming that the Christian response to reading the Bible always had to be, if you heard the words, this is about you, datae loquitor, this is about you."

The whole lecture text is here

Intellectual work, breaking sweat, and theological reading!

Delivery

Customarily, I rise early and spend

a couple of hours in my study before

washing and shaving. One morning

last week, the postman catching me

in night attire, I explained I had been

 

up for ages, rhyming away. Today,

exercising, I was perspiring freely

when the bell rang: he eyed me

impassively, then went on his way

murmuring, "Heavy work, this poetry!"

Stewart Conn, The Breakfast Room, Bloodaxe, 2010,  p.33

Poetry, theology, philosophy - all three ways of writing, speaking and spending time. Not everyone would call such reflective thinking, intellectual exercise, and mental discipline, work. So I like the postman's ironic scepticism, or innocent wonderment at the thought that hard thought and careful writing breaks sweat! And I'm sympathetic to a poet who does a couple of hours before the working day starts - Some of my best hours are early morning too - that's when I slowly make my way through the big books, several pages at a time. It's an interesting thought that 5 pages a day can give access to 1,825 pages - which is a lot of poetry, theology, philosophy or whatever else takes our interest. Six three hundred page volumes - do that for a few years and you become dead erudite so you do!

My current reading is a book that needs that slow, attentive listening. Mark McIntosh is a theologian who understands the connection between the study of theology and the encounter the theologian is likely to have with the Subject of her study. Divine teaching. An Introduction to Christian Theology (Blackwell: 2008), takes the view that in studying theology, if the mind and spirit are open to it, the theologian is taught by the One who is the subject of study. It's a fine book, and one that offers an innovative and inviting approach to theological reflection.

Hauerwas on the importance of questions and the danger of explanatory answers

In his theological memoir, Hannah's Child, Hauerwas writes with astonishing honesty about himself, others, his faith and how he sees the world. Referring to his wife's mental ill health he reflects on those who have assumed a theologian would have answers about how such life can be so lonely and sad. Then he says this:

I have learned over the years as a Christian theologian that none of us should try to answer such questions. Our humanity demands that we ask them, but if we are wise we should then remain silent. ..When Christianity is assumed to be an "answer" that makes the world intelligible, it reflects an accommodated church committed to assuring Christians that the way things are is the way they have to be.

Such answers cannot help but turn Christianity into an explanation. For me, learning to be a Christian has meant learning to live without answers. Indeed, to learn to live in this way is what makes being a Christian so wonderful. Faith is but a name for learning how to go on without knowing the answers..... (pp. 207-8)

Academic Administration: necessary tedium and / or exciting experiement?

Amongst the many horizons that have opened up to me in recent years, few have been more personally enriching and theologically challenging than academic administration. Yes. You are quite correct. Not a miss-print, nor a mind flip, not even a joke. AA. Not the Automobile Association, so hard pressed in the recent and returning climate of traffic paralysis. Not Alcoholics Anonymous, that wonderful organisation that, despite its faults and drawbacks, has drawn back many a life from the brink and enabled human beings to discover again their dignity, humanity and purpose. Not stranded motorists then, nor people at the end of the line all but destroyed by alcohol addiction - but something altogether more prosaic - AA, the discipline, skill, and ever recurring demands of ensuring that learning and teaching are up to scratch, quality assured, demonstrably effective. Academic Administration.

Now I admit I too have seen AA as an algae outbreak in the garden pond, until I realised it might instead be the aerator and filter that keeps the water healthy. Now yes - some academic admin is tedious but necessary, and some is tedious and repetitive and harder to justify. And there's too much of it. (Warning: two long sentences ahead!) But in thinking about theological education, and how to shape a curriculum for 21st Century  Graduates in Theology, whose vocational trajectory is ministry of one kind or another, and for some, definitely pastoral ministry in the uniquely varied context of Scottish Baptist faith communities, the necessary clarity, scrutiny and rigour has come from thought disciplined by educational theory, ideas shaped by academic experience, and our limited small-world agendas pushed outwards by the requirement to demonstrate we know what we are doing! If theological education is to be taken seriously within the academy (and I refuse to have the word academic used always negatively, dismissively, pejoratively, as if loving God with our minds were not at least a quarter of what it means to love God at all!); so if theological education is to gain respectful hearing and serious consideration as a way of knowing, living and acting faithfully in our world, then it should not only survive in the academy, but earn the right to speak, be heard and make a difference to how we understand what a University is about.

That is why I'm spending much of my time with documentation, Module Descriptors, Programme Specifications, Regulatory Frameworks, QAA Handbooks, SCQF Articulations, Subject Benchmarks, and Annual Monitoring processes heavy on evaluative reflection. If AA is required of the Sciences and the Social Sciences, of Computing and Business, of Health and Engineering, then why not of Divinity?  One particular area of increasing reflection in the wider HE sector is "Attributes of the 21st Century Graduate". Some of the work done here is very helpful in identifying the kinds of persons we ideally want to produce through an effective, distinctive and high quality course of personal and academic formation. So. What might be the attributes of the 21st Century Graduate in Theology and Pastoral Studies. Ideally, what kind of person should emerge from a Degree aimed at training people for ministry in the 21st Century?

From a  lengthy process of consultation, reflection, and distillation I have formulated eight, which will form the basis of a paper I hope to have published soon. Do any of you readers  want to have a go at suggesting attributes both essential and desirable, of the 21st Century Graduate in Theology and Pastoral Studies? You are allowed up to three.

By the way, to raise the issue during Advent might seem another AA - Advent Aberration brought on by seasonal over excitement; or AA - Altogether Annoying distraction from seasonal themes; or yet Another Argument not worth having before Christmas:)) Indulge me - make your suggestion a gesture of goodwill.....

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.

Michaelangelo Pieta, and the prayer that is best unspoken

 

 

 

 

I didn't know this poem by C Day Lewis until I read it today. The combination of this exquisitely worked Pieta and the poignant first person poem I find breathtaking. To read the poem aloud, while looking at this image is to pray in language that takes us beyond mere words to a sense of the unspeakbale sadness at the heart of the Gospel of good news. Atonement is not a theory to argy bargy about - not argument, adoration is the disposition of the true theologian.

Pieta

A dome superb as heaven's vault, capping a story

whose hero blessed the meek; a desert of floor

Refracting faith like a mirage; the orchestration

Of gold and marble engulfing the still, small voice:

You cannot pass over St Peter's and what it stands for,

Whether you see it as God's vicarious throne

Or the biggest bubble yet unpricked....

I was lost, ill at ease here, until by chance

In a side chapel we found a woman mourning

Her son: all the lacrimae rerum flowed

To her gesture of grief, all life's blood from his stone.

There is no gap or discord between the divine

And the human in that pieta of Michaelangelo.

...........................

 

What a teacher ought to be - Benchmarks according to the Desert Fathers.

One of my favourite definitions of the character and calling of a teacher. And an ideal worth persevering towards in daily practice and vocational accountability.

A teacher ought to be a stranger to the desire

for domination,

                vain-glory,

                             and pride;

one should not be able to fool her by flattery,

               nor blind her by gifts,

                             nor conquer her by the stomach,

                                           nor dominate her by anger;

but she should be patient,

        gentle,

             and humble

                as far as possible;

she must be tested

      and without partisanship,

              full of concern,

                    and a lover of souls.
     —Benedicta Ward, The Desert Christian (Ref details lost - sorry - need to do some more CPD on referencing :)

Theological education and a durable pastoral theology of mission

One of the challenges of theological education as formation for ministry is to help students make the connections. The connections between what is so about God and what is so about our lives; the connections between God revealed in the incarnate Christ and experienced in the power of the Spirit, and what it means to be a human being; the connections between human community, its possibilities and failures, its frustrations, agonies and cost as well as its fulfillments, joys and gifts, and the life of God as the God who is for us, and whose nature is loving outreach; the connections between theological conviction and pastoral practice, and the connections between a richly dynamic Christian theology of the reconciling, restoring, renewing love of God in Christ through the Spirit, and Christian existence as embodying that reconciling, restoring and renewing love in a community of faith and hope.

Theological education can never afford to be merely pragmatic, practice centred, informed primarily by pastoral need or missional urgency. Theological education and a durable pastoral theology of mission requires a deeper rootedness, a more transcendent vision, a more dynamic source of energy, insight and spiritual aspiration. And that is to be found in an adequate understanding of who God is, and that the God who is with us and for us in Christ, and who is in us and in the world through the Spirit, is a God who comes to us, who "exists from all eternity in relation to another".

I'm now immersed in preparation for the class on the theology of the Triune God. As part of that preparation I'll now be reading several of my favourite theologians,  swimming again in some of my favourite deep water places. From now till Pentecost I'll post a weekly reflection on the essential connections between our understanding of the Triune God and the nature and practices of pastoral care and the mission of the Christian community to incarnate the reality of the God who, in the power of the Spirit, was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

Here's Catherine Lacugna, stating her understanding of the Triune God:

The ultimate ground and meaning of being is therefore communion among persons: God is ecstatic, fecund, self-emptying out of love for another, a personal God who comes to self through another.

Indeed the Christian theologian contemplates the life of God revealed in the economy, in the incarnateness of God in Christ and in the power and presence of God as Spirit. Revealed there is the unfathomable mystery that the life and communion of the divine persons is not intra divine: God is not self-contained, egotistical and self-absorbed but overflowing love, outreaching desire for union with all that God has made. The communion of divine life is God's communion with us in Christ and as Spirit.

Catherine Lacugna, God For Us. The Trinity and Christian Life (San francisco: Harper Collins, 1991) page 15. 

Decided to display the Rublev Icon on the sidebar for a while. In my own spiritual life this has been a source of inspiration, comfort, insight, imaginative reverie, prayerful and playful contemplation, soul-steadying beauty and suggestiveness, for over two decades. Taking time to wait and pay attention to it, is like an act, better, a process, of re-orientation, of regained perspective, of enhanced awareness of that which always lies beyond our understanding, but closer to our hearts than we can ever know.

A personal essay on the importance of ideas in the practical renewal of the church

Ever since I heard Alexander Broadie lecture on Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan in the undergraduate Moral Philosophy Class at the University of Glasgow, philosophy has remained a cantus firmus in my spiritual and theological development. The phrase means an underlying melody which supports the harmony of various independent voices, such as in plainsong. (I first learned to use this phrase as a metaphor for the theologically informed life and Christian discipleship from Craig Gardiner in his excellent Whitley lecture).

In 1971-2, my first year at Glasgow University, Broadie was a young lecturer just launched on a glittering career as a philosopher, historian and Scottish intellectual. His lecturing style was memorably fascinating to a young recently converted Lanarkshire Baptist, slowly realising the range and depth of faith and human experience, and who was about to discover the exhilaration and scary attractiveness of intellectual engagement of a quite different order. Broadie had a glass decanter of water, and a glass which before each lecture he meticulously filled, then held in both hands, and strolled back and forth across the platform, thinking as he spoke, and speaking as he thought. It was mesmerising, and deeply impressive. Broadie taught me not only how to think, but the moral reasoning that is essential if intellectual work is to have integrity, humility and honesty.

It was one of the great providential blessings of my life that I had opted to take Principles of Religion, in parallel with Moral Philosophy. It was a course of ridiculous diversity and ambition, but opened doors in directions I'd never imagined, some of which have become areas of major importance in my own formation. Amongst these was a short section of the course - I think about 12 weekly tutorials - on Pirkei Avot, loosely translated "Ethics (or Sayings) of the Fathers", a small tractate of the Mishnah.
The teacher, by a stroke of singular providential luck (!), was the same Alexander Broadie whose own faith tradition is Judaism. It was a masterclass on ethics, exegesis, logic, religious imagination, moral seriousness and inter-faith exploration. I loved it. I learned so much about myself, about reverence for text, about listening for the polyphonic harmonies in a writing of spiritual power - and about the importance of hearing the heart as well as the words of people of other faiths. When I came to study closely the Sermon on the Mount*, I heard unmistakable echoes, discovered ethical and spiritual coincidences of thought, and rejoiced in the Jewishness of Jesus teaching. Which says a lot about Christian preconceptions - of course the teaching of Jesus the Jew would be saturated with Jewish ethical wisdom! - just as Scottish people speak with a Scottish accent!

*(I look back on a careful reading in 1977, of W D Davies' The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount as the equivalent of an exegetical epiphany.)

All of which is to say, amongst those to whom I am intellectually indebted, is Professor Alexander Broadie, who couldn't have know that a 21 year old Lanarkshire Baptist would be decisively influenced by his exposition of Leviathan, Hobbes' bleak political philosophy of absolute power, and his exposition of Pirkei Avot, with its humanising ethical maxims growing out of the Jewish Wisdom tradition. But so we are all shaped in ways we don't always recognise at the time.

Over the years since, and every year, several philosophy books sneak onto my shelves, and eventually push onto my desk. I don't mean only philosophical theology, either as Christian apologetics or theistic critique. I mean books of moral philosophy, that branch of the humanities dedicated to the searching questions of ethics, the significance of values, the nature of the virtues, understanding of human formation and thus alert analysis of our cultural and moral history. Again and again I've found that the important issues about discipleship, witness and Christian presence in the world come into clearer focus when they are explored from the standpoint of faith engaged in philosophical questioning and search, faith committed to ethical reflection, and faith sympathetic in pursuit of cultural understanding. Issues of faith are deepened not ignored, clarified not confused, put on fresh expression rather than recycled cliche, and are invested with practical urgency rather than pragmatic relevance, by a process of disciplined, dedicated and honest thinking. And if that kind of analytic and diagnostic thinking is to be done by the Church it will be done at its best when the standpoint of faith is demonstrably open to other insights and criticism. And it will be done at its most credible, when the Church shows itself capable of self-critique and renewal through the Spirit of Truth, because it has learned the requisite humility to listen and learn.

At a time when programmes, practice, and pragmatism make up a not always holy trinity of approaches to Christian living, it is far too easy to be dimissive of ideas, impatient with theory, disinterested in that which begins as abstract principle or argued conviction. Best practice is surely the result of sound thinking; effective (Christian) programmes as surely require principles that mark them as Christian; and the philosophy of pragmatism, however effective, will always require underlying evaluative questions about appropriate means and ends that meet the Christian criterion, which is the Gospel of Christ. I suppose this is a plea that the contemporary Church, in the midst of cultural flux and chronic fast paced transition, recover confidence in the gift of thinking, rediscover the power of ideas, respect the vitality of conviction, and accept again the adventure of intellectual risk-taking in the service of Christ, and in the living of a Gospel that is far too big an idea to be reduced to a flat pack faith of utmost utility, but which lacks credibility and durability in the rapid climate change that is the 21st Century zeitgeist.

So perhaps along with all our other committees and work groups, and short term task groups, local churches and denominational centres might consider forming groups whose remit is to think, to explore ideas, to clarify convictions, to listen to cultural voices, and so follow the advice of the sages in Pirkei Avot, "Make your house be a meeting place for scholars, and sit at the dust by their feet, and drink up their words with thirst." (1:4)

So I still read philosophy, spend time with ideas, pay attention to what I believe and why, ask questions of the church, of myself, of what it means to think and act and thus live faithfully for Christ, in whom as Logos incarnate, human experience and intellectual reach find their fulfilment. 

** The photo is of my friend Becky's church in Henniker, New Hampshire. It is displayed here for no other reason than that it is a beautiful church, and the snow seems just right for the weather we and they are having just now. Greetings Becky and Bob - I still remember my visit to Hanover some years ago, and the hot tub in February at -25 degrees, my hair with icicles, and the absolute requirement to jump out of the hot tub into a snow drift! Oucha!! Great days, my friends!