Living Wittily

The Theology and Practice of Reconciliation

Over the summer part of my work will be preparing a course on Reconciliation: Theology and Practice. There are few areas of human experience, cultural challenge and Christian theology that touch on so many of the fundamentals of human existence. Conflict and peace, prejudice and inclusion, grievance and forgiveness, fear and trust, hatred and love, alienation and belonging, despair and hope, violence and non-violent peacemaking, vicious circles and healing cycles, tears of rage and tears of compassion, the face of implacability and the face of compassion, the way of death and the way of life - that list has no logical completion, and will never become a comprehensive catalogue of human alternatives.

But whatever reconciliation is about, it is about real alternatives, moral choices, theological possibilities, options for life, investments in the human community that are costly yet creative, troublesome but transformative, realistic but visionary. Because reconciliation lies at the very core of the Christian story. That it has not been the beating heart and moral imagination and spiritual commitment and intellectual grandeur of the Church's way of living out the Gospel is, for me at least, one of the scandalous questions that is still looking for an adequate answser - and perhaps even before that, an adequate asking of the question.

Few issues lie more obviously before the world than how human beings learn to live together. In exploring the theology and practice of reconciliation we will encounter some of those depths of Christian thought and practice when we hear what James Denney called 'the plunge of lead in fathomless waters'.

For God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself..... and he has given us this ministry of reconciliation...

Reconciling all things to Himself, making peace by the blood of the cross....blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God...

A Philosophical Theology of Prayer.

I don't enjoy many books about prayer. That doesn't mean there aren't any good ones, just that I'm not sure one ever helped me to pray more, or better. I'd rather have a book of prayers that have been composed, written and prayed in language rich with those human experiences out of which prayer erupts, or is dragged, or writes itself in word and emotion that is the human heart seeking encounter with the heart of God.

When a renowned philosopher whose works on Theism are mind stretchingly challenging decides to explore the basis of Christian prayer, then I don't expect another how to manual, nor another here's my experience, it was great and I'd like you to have it too bestseller. Which is good - because this book is quite different. Owen is unafraid of the theological and philosophical questions raised by our praying - telling God what God already knows, asking for what is in our own interests, establishing any causal connection between our praying and whatever happens that we perceive as an answer to prayer. The main thrust of the book is that prayer is best, perhaps only, understood, in the light of our doctrine of God and our theological conception of what a human being is, and what the relations between God and humanity are, should be and perhaps must be.

I learned so much from this book - The Basis of Christian Prayer, H P Owen (Regent College Pubblishing). Not about how to pray but about what prayer is, about the One to whom prayer is offered, and about the relational interchange that takes place between God and those who dare, and who desire, to address the God who first addresses us. "Prayer validates a personal, as against a non personal view of God. In prayer we address God as Thou." A page later (p.111) Owen quotes a most moving prayer of Anselm, from the Proslogion:

O God, I pray, let me know and love you

so that I may rejoice in you.

And if I cannot in this life fully,

let me advance day by day

until the point of fullness comes.

Let knowledge of you progress in me here,

and be made full there.

Let love for you grow in me here,

and be made full there,

so that here my joy may be great with expectancy

while there being full in realisation.

If there is such a thing as an eschatological spirituality, Then Anselm has gifted to the church a prayer that holds the Christian heart in that creative tension between now and then, here and there, Thou - and I.

Durer's Praying Hands (above) suffers from over-exposure on Christian kitsch products fro m wall plaques to plastic models. But in the original etching the artist combines beauty with beseeching, peace with tension, surrender and expectancy - and few images are more evocative of our humanity than our hands, with which we make and caress, hold and relinquish, clench and open, embrace or exclude. To lift up holy hands in prayer, is therefore no straightforward spiritual exercise.

The use of the adverb Trinitarianly

Was teaching the doctrine of the Trinity yesterday, and we had an interesting session on Trinity and Community. Starting from love that is purposeful, outgoing and creative and which is self giving and combines both trust and risk, we moved back and forward between the inner relations of the Triune God to the outward expression of that life in the economy of creation, redemption and consummation.

It would be misleading and unnecessary to say we all understood what we were talking about! But a lot of learning took place in exploring the realities of human relationships as we work out in our personal lives, the lives of the communities we inhabit, and the life of the world which is a community of communities living with tensions at times creative and at times destructive. Ecclesiology, missiology, spirituality, worship, pastoral care and compassion, ethics and justice, are significant areas of Christian existence and reflection which are profoundly influenced by the way we think of God. And for Christian theology that means thinking of God Trinitarianly. I know, it's not the most elegant of words, but it is a modifying adverb that should be used frequently in our thinking about those key areas of Christian reflection and practice. It's pushing it to talk of a Trinitarian lifestyle, or living Trinitarianly - but to see ourselves as drawn into the life of God, and immersed in the Love that is purposeful, creative, outgoing trusting and risk-taking, and to ask what that might look like in practice, would be to at least make a start on living Trinitarianly.

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.

What kind of God is the Christian God?

 
What kind of God is the Christian God? The early apologist who wrote the Epistle to Diognetus was utterly convinced of the decisive nature of Christ for any understanding of God that claims to be Christian:

"Why did God send the Son? To rule as a tyrant, to inspire terror and astonishment? No, he did not. No, he sent him in gentleness and mildness. To be sure, as a king sending his royal son, he sent him as God. But he sent him as to men, as saving and persuading them, and not as exercising force. For force is no attribute of God.

On this passage the Arthur McGill in his book Suffering. A Test of Theological Method, gives this comment, one of the countless fugitive affirmations of kenosis as the self-giving love that is the disposition of God:

"Force is no attribute of God". - that is the basic principle for Trinitarian theologians. God's divinity does not consist in his ability to push things around, to make and break, to impose his will from the security of some heavenly remoteness, and to sit in grandeur while all the world does his bidding. Far from staying above the world he sends his own glory into it. Far from imposing  he invites and persuades. Far from demanding service from men and women in order to enhance himself, he gives his life in service to them for their enhancement. But God acts toward the world in this way because whithin himself he is a life of self-giving.

(The photo was taken in Aberdeen Botanic Gardens - the random design of a cottage border seems to fit with a piece on the generously extravagant, self giving love of the God who does abundance!)

 

 

Ephesians - The Triune God of love eternal and grace immeasurable...

 

From my early years as a Christian I've read and re-read Paul's Prison Epistles (Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians and Philemon). As a pastor I've preached on them often, nearly always with a residual disappointment that mere preaching doesn't begin to convey the 'unsearchable riches of Christ'. If Isaac Newton really did say he felt like a child playing with seashells on the beach when the great ocean of truth lay before him unnoticed, then as a preacher I've felt the same with the unfathomable depths and irresistible currents of a text like Ephesians. That first extravagantly long sentence in Ephesians chapter 1 betrays a mind pushed into theological overdrive, Paul's vision and imagination running out of subordinate clauses as he finds it impossible to end the sentence. Maybe that's what happens when we speak of God - we run out of clauses and the sentence always, but always, finishes with much unsaid and probably unutterable.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones preached through Ephesians and the published sermons fill 8 thick volumes. By the way the volume on chapter 3, "The Unsearchable Riches of Christ" is a profound account of Christian mysticism illumined by evangelical experience and textual discipline, providing a deeply satisfying exposition of what it means to be in Christ, and for life to be grounded in the eternal love of God made known in Christ.  Here more than anywhere else in his writing. Lloyd-Jones expressed his Welsh fervour, his revival instincts, his theological passion, and through the intensity of his personal experience of Christ, he rhapsodised on the grace unspeakable, the riches inexhaustible, the love unfathomable and the wisdom unsearchable of this God who in Christ reveals His purposes of love and mercy hidden in the ages but revealed in Jesus.

Every now and then I'm drawn back to Ephesians, just as at other times I'm drawn back to other parts of the Bible that to use the old Puritan phrase, 'speak to my condition'. Sometimes Isaiah 40-55;  or the Psalms; the Gospels often, and John most often. But when it comes to Paul the Prison Epistles are where I instinctively go - especially those first chapters in Ephesians and Colossians when Paul sees the universe through the lens of Christ. And my own story is not relativised and reduced by the comparison; it is drawn into it and given a significance that is rooted in precisely that  "grace unspeakable..., those riches inexhaustible, such love unfathomable and the wisdom unsearchable of this God who in Christ reveals His purposes of love and mercy hidden in the ages.

The paradox of revelation and mystery is one we live with as Christians, gladly, gratefully and generously. It's the paradox of the God who comes near in Christ but is beyond our comprehension as the Triune God of love eternal and grace immeasurable. It's the tension of the soul being caught up into the heavenly places while we still deal with the earthly, the everyday, the ordinary, the fragile, the transient, the reality of life as a human being yet as made in the image of God - trying to make sense of this paradox of existence in Christ and living the life that is ours. At those points in our lives when that tension is most acute and that paradox hardest to live with, that's when I read Ephesians 1, and Colossians 1, and Philippians 2. And if I ever need reminding of what it means to deal with the realities of social justice, human values, freedom and community, there's always that short masterpiece of practical theology we call the Letter to Philemon.

All of which arises because I've had on my desk one of the first commentaries I ever bought and which I treasure as a spiritual artefact, a sacred gift to myself, a trusted exegetical companion - Paul's Letters from Prison,G B Caird (Oxford, Clarendon: 1976) Bought in the John Smith Bookshop on the Campus of Stirling University, in March 1976 - cost then - £2.25! I doubt I ever spent money on a book more wisely and for better reward.  Yes there are the big heavies - and I have most of them (Markus Barth, Ernest Best, Andrew Lincoln, P T O'Brien, and just arrived Clinton Arnold and Frank Thielman - no space for Hoehner's encyclopedic doorstopper). But there is an elegance in Caird's 90 pages on Ephesians, and for me an affection for this careful scholar, that makes this small book special. It's one of the very few commentaries I've ever slipped  into a flight bag and read at an airport! I know - sad - better to read Lee Child, or Henning Mankell, Ian McEwan.

Maybe so. But for the umpteenth time I'm keeping company with G B Caird on Ephesians, trying to live with the tensions and paradoxes of grace unspeakable, unsearchable riches, all summed up in Ephesians 2.4-5, "But because of his great love for us, God who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions - it is by grace you have been saved". That's the greatest paradox of them all - our transgressions and God's great love for us. Who would ever have thought they could be reconciled - except God, who is rich in mercy?

Embodying the Christian doctrine of reconciliation

I am doing a lot of thinking, slow pondering and imagining about reconciliation, a theme that lies at the heart of the Christian Gospel. Reconciliation finds varied expressions in forgiveness, conciliation, understanding, compassion, negotiation, self-expenditure, peace-making, bridge-building, and many other attitudes and activities in human healing and wholeness within the heart and within the communities we inhabit.

There are several reasons for this current research interest.

It is a central motif for understanding the meaning of Jesus. "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself".

Asked what the mission of the church is, and how to do mission, I default immediately to "God has given to us this ministry of reconciliation" as a theological encapsulation of Jesus words that are both promise and demand, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God".

Then I look on a world fragmented against itself, criss-crossed by dividing walls of hostility and hear that other Pauline echo, the through Christ God purposed "to reconcile to himself all things making peace by the blood of the cross".

Then I reflect on the rise in Christian culture of conflict resolution courses, and reflect on years of experience of Christian communities struggling and straining, at times crumbling and imploding by the inability of Christians to live their communal life as reconciled reconcilers, peaceable peacemakers, forgiven forgivers and merciful receivers of mercy.

And after a number of conversations with experienced pastors, and reflecting on the responses to a questionnaire on what is essential in ministry training, it is confirmed that a major felt need is training in conflict resolution and dealing with difficult people.

There is a not to be missed irony in all this. That Christian communities experience powerful internal tensions which create strain and stress on relationships and structures is not new. Corinth is one of the reassuringly flawed churches of the New Testament - from the start Christians have unabashedly demonstrated pride and self-regard, power hunting and the urge to dominate, judgemental words and argumentative habits, unforgivingness as obstinacy of the closed heart, and much else. And yet. 

As Jesus said, the language of empire, government, self-appointed and self-inflated leaders, and of all those who aspire to be first in any queue for handouts of power and status is not the language of the Kingdom of God. Mark 10.42-45 is for me the deal clincher in the arguments about how the life of the Kingdom is expressed in community. And Mark has preserved the tone of Jesus veto "Not so amongst you". Abrupt, uncompromising, comprehensive negation without negotiation - "not so among you."

But it is so. In many Christian communities the cultural drivers for recognition, status, power and possessions are deeply and invidiously installed. Mark 10.45 crucially links "giving himself" with "not to be served but to serve". So a Christian doctrine of reconciliation begins at the cross and ends in the embodied practice of reconciliation through self-giving love.

Conflict resolution for Christians is a process that is traceable to the deepest reality of the universe, the reconciling heart of God.

The painting is Van Gogh's "Pieta".

An Invitation to prayer for little people!

" Come now, little man, put aside your business for a while, take refuge for a little from your tumultuous thoughts; cast off your cares, and let your burdensome distractions wait. Take some leisure for God; rest awhile in him. Enter into the chamber of your mind; put out everything except God and whatever helps you to seek him; close the door and seek him. Say now to God with all your heart: "I seek thy face O Lord, thy face I seek'."

The words are by Anselm and were important guidelines in the spirituality of Archbishop Michael Ramsey for whom theology and prayer were experiential synonyms.

They read like a distillation of the Christian tradition of contemplative prayer, the deliberate paying attention to God by withdrawing attention from self-concerned, self-centred, and self-referential activity of mind, emotion and body, being still to know that God is God, not us.

They appeal to me because they address me personally, "Come now, little man...... " :)

 

Donald Mackinnon, Julian of Norwich and the seriousness of sin

One of the most terrifying two hours of my life was in 1986 when I delivered a paper to the Aberdeenshire Theological Club (the oldest such club in Scotland!). The paper was on Julian of Norwich, her view of Divine Love and human sin and whether in her theology these are adequately reconciled. The subject matter is intimidating enough, but sitting in the audience was Professor Donald MacKinnon. He was a large man - broad, tall, a craggy alp with a face that could be just as forbidding as any such North Face. He was also a large presence who when he laughed his shoulders resembled a kind of mirthful earthquake, and I found him to be a warm appreciative listener mainly, except when he gruffed out a 'yes' which was reassuring, or a harrumph which was worrying. The photo of a younger Mackinnon does no justice to the venerable, restless polymath ambling through Old Aberdeen with his brown leather message bag books and papers protruding, and stuffed with who knows what metaphysical speculations, and happy to stop and engage in conversation which could be gossip or gospel, metaphysics or meal times, German Romanticism or the state of the Harris Tweed industry.

I made quite a bit about Julians doctrine of sin appearing reductionist, and at times sitting light to the seriousness of sin as a radical negation of being, a pervasive and invasive power of evil that insinuates itself into the very structures of created being, so that only a redemption which reached into such profound depths of reality (the Cross of Christ as the Love of God ) could adequately negate that negation. The loud gravelly 'Yes', exploding into the sedate company, and the forward thrust of a leonine head were enough to keep me going forward with my paper, while hoping there would be nothing ahead that might provoke an equally strong 'No!'

At the end there were questions, observations, critique, appreciation and a feeling that the paper had, however marginally, passed. Then Professor Mackinnon came up, said kind things and said he would send me a book. He didn't - I think he meant he would send me a suggested book which he did. I bought it in the days before amazon the quick book getter existed. It was The Word of Reconciliation by H H Farmer,(London: Nisbet, 1966) a far too easily overlooked theologian whose philosophical theology remains worth our time and attention. I'll come back to HH Farmer. But in his book are these words, which capture in such lucid theological writing, the psychology and ontology of sin:

A great many people's concern about their sinful shortcomings springs in large measure from a disguised and subtle egotism and pride. They are, perhaps, particularly if they have had a Christian upbringing and take their Christian profession seriously, formed an image of themselves as displaying an exalted Christian character, and when they find, as they inevitably do, that they persistently fall short of this 'ego-ideal', they are cast down and depressed and harassed with guilt feelings. This they mistake for a true and deep repentance but it may be little more than a feeling of injured pride and self-esteem.

...

On the lips of the deeply penitent religious man therefore, the cry against thee, thee only, have I sinned', might almost seem to be an exactly and literally true statement. Some such awareness as this, however expressed, or perhaps not expressed or even expressible in terms at all, but only felt, some sense that because of one's sin the very foundation of one's being and life has been shaken (for what is God if not the very foundation of one's being and life?0, some consciousness that sin holds one suspended not over the shallows of time but over the abyss of eternity, the abyss of God, is an element in sincere and true penitence towards God; it is in fact this consciousness which in part constitutes it towards God.

Pages 65 and 67

The Mystery of the Trinity and the Beauty of the Infinite

"From an aesthetic perspective, David Bentley Hart offers an impressive trinitarian account of beauty that presents Being as primarily the shared life of the triune God: ontological plenitude and oriented toward another. The beauty of the infinite is reflected in the dynamic co-inherence of the three divine persons, a perichoresis of love, an immanent dynamism of distinction and unity embracing reciprocity and difference. The triune God does not negate difference; rather, the shared giving and receiving that is the divine life may be compared to an infinite musical richness, a music of polyphonic and harmonious differentiation of which creation is an expression and variation."

An Introduction to the Trinity, Declan Marmion and Rik Van Nieuwenhove, (Cambridge, CUP, 2011) page 218.

No, it isn't dumbed down theology - and yes, it is a piece of demanding and precise discourse upon the Trinity. But why would we think any serious contemplation of the mystery of the Triune life of God should be immediately accessible in everyday vocabulary? This is a very good book on the Trinity, one that will find its way into our course on Rediscovering the Triune God. It is written as good theology should be - scholarly, lucid, presupposing serious effort from the reader, and rewarding those readers who love to think and for whom thinking deeply and honestly and openly and receptively about God is a way of loving God with mind and heart.

The drawing by William Blake is one of the most delicately subtle pieces of theological art I know. A print of it hangs in my study.