Living Wittily

The occasional inconvenience of providence

Danny was having a bad day. The morning I met him he was sweeping the gutters outside the Prince Regent Hotel. Every 20 yards an impressive heap of rubbish to be shovelled into his bins and carted away. But most of it was green leaves and new twigs, ripped from the trees in the high winds of the previous night. He swept with determined anger, as if these leaves were each a personal offence. Our eyes met and I stopped to commiserate.."Don’t expect to be doing this in May… usually September before you have to sweep up leaves". 

 

Took out his map, showed me the streets in highlighter pink that were his patch, then showed me the patches in fluorescent green where he was to help the next squad. Asked how he was supposed to get all this done? It didn’t seem like the time to tell him it was Pentecost week… you know the Holy Spirit…like the wind of God, blowing through the world. Nor the words of  John Newton, Amazing Grace, in a storm every leaf (and snowflake) falls by the will of God at the appointed time and in the ordained place. Instead I said thanks for what he was doing…it was appreciated…made a difference, he was a bit embarrassed and said he wouldn’t be doing it if he didn’t need the job. So he got stuck in again, tidying up the world, tackling the chaos, bringing order to those parts of the world he was responsible for, picked out in a couple of inches of fluorescent pink.

 

People who tidy up our world…You know how Genesis begins, "In the beginning…." Think of it, the Spirit of God as the wisdom and purpose of God tidying up the chaos, making sense of the messiness. Proverbs 8.30 refers to 'the craftsman at [the Lord's] side'. The one who takes raw material and the right tools, who works with skill, experience and flair so that something is manufactured, created, brought into being. And the Spirit delights every day, rejoicing in this whole world and delighting in human life. This is a view of God that is playful, the relaxed leisurely joy of the artist with her gifts in full flow. The Holy Spirit as God’s craftsman, God’s artist, working in the world.

It is this God who works in our lives. Proverbs 8 is about the wisdom of God. This is a view of the universe that has God at the centre. When you think of the God who watches over us think of one whose wise delight iImagined oceans into being, touched the depths of the earth to gush springs of life-giving water, settled the mountains in  place like an interior designer arranging the furniture, spreading soil like fitted carpets, arranging the dust of the world, speck by speck. Tell that to Danny, whose two inches of fluorescent pink mean hours of back-breaking work.

 

But this is poetry, this is truth, deep truth about the world we live in and the life we live in the world.

‘ Earth’s crammed with heaven 

and every common bush afire with God:/

but only he who sees, takes off his shoes,

the rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

And the deep truths are all here. The heavens set in place; the Lord rules the stars, and so the Lord, not the stars, rule our lives. The horizons are measured, all our possibilities fall within the wise love of God. The clouds are established, ‘Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take, the clouds you so much dread; are big with mercy and will break, in blessings on your head.’ We all have our clouds, those experiences that come between us and our happiness, the job we hate, the job we can’t get, the row that hurts, the illness that lays low, the depression that won’t lift, the lost chances that don’t come back, but they are part of life, and in the miracles of our lives this craftsman God can turn clouds to blessing.

 

The sea boundary is set and it can’t overstep God’s command…"when you pass through the waters they shall not overwhelm you"… "he marked out the foundations of the earth." Foundations give a structure its integrity, its durability, and the integrity and durability of  God’s creation is in his hands. This isn’t science; it’s a way of looking at the world that sees beneath the surface, that senses God at work. All these words are work words, from architects and builders vocabulary. This is God at work. Set in place the heavens… marked out the horizon, established clouds, fixed the deep fountains, set the boundaries of the sea, measured out the foundations. The world isn’t a chaos and neither are our lives. John Newton knew perfectly well that he was exaggerating when he speaks of God ordaining the shape, the precision timing, and the exact location of each falling snowflake and every wind-driven leaf. But he was trying to find pictures for the grace that brings us safe thus far, and the grace that leads us home. Just as Proverbs is trying to give us pictures of a God who doesn’t leave us to our own devices, but who is working in us and through us, in the details and the dailiness of our lives

 

And if the wind blows, and the leaves fall, then still,in this vast mystery of generous creative yet sometimes fristrating and wounding place we call the world, God works at working things out, according to a purpose established in love deeper than thought.

Karl Barth and theology in italics

If the Holy Spirit is not Himself the true God, in what sense then can we say: I believe in the Holy Spirit? We should be wise to have nothing whatever to do with believing in a mere spiritual power. But if we realise the secret and the miracle of the fact that we believe, that it is really permissible and possible for us to believe in Jesus Christ and therefore in God, if it is plain to us that this permission and possibility are, according to John 3.3 nothing less than a 'new birth', then it cannot very long remain hidden from us that the power which achieves that in us cannot be anything less than God's power. God in Himself is the love which becomes visible in us in this mystery and miracle. In God Himself is the love of the father to the Son, of the Son to the Father. This eternal love in God Himself is the Holy Spirit, of whose work the third article [of the creed] speaks.
Karl Barth, Credo (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1936), 136.

The theological emphases are in the italics. Barth's impatience with mere spirituality, and with vaguely or undefined power, is at least one hint that his view of the Holy Spirit is never intentionally impersonal, and indeed is essentially defined by the nature and being of God. And when Barth identifies the love in God Himself with the Holy Spirit, he is referring to the Lord who is the Spirit, in the same personal intercommunion of love as father and Son. Or as he put it:

The Holy Spirit of adoption, of revelation and of witness, the Holy Spirit Who makes us free for the Word of God, is eternal Spirit in the same way as the Father is eternal Father and as the Son is eternal Son. He is of one substance with Father and Son and therefore with Them the one true God, Creator, Reconciler, Redeemer. (Credo, 135-6)

Just some devotional theology to mull over during Pentecost weekend.... before praying the words of another passionate theologian - Charles Wesley

O Thou who camest from above,
The pure, celestial fire to impart;
kindle a flame of sacred love,
on the mean altar of my heart.

I asked for wonder - the spiritual importance of the inexplicable

Yesterday in the Theological Reflection class we spent some time savouring the spiritual prose poetry that is the writing of A J Heschel. This writer was mostly new to the class members, and his style of writing a stark contrast to much that passes for spiritual writing today. From the first day they saw this book cover there was interest in a man who had such a lived in face, and near the  end of the course when choices have to be made about what there is still time to explore and discuss - my suggested omission of Heschel was thankfully over-ruled. So we worked through a handout of brief extracts, each of us reading one, not feeling the need always to comment, but now and then saying what we had found touched us, or how what we read found us. It was an important interlude when teaching doesn't need the constant explanatory, expository, interrogatory voice. It was a class taught by numerous acts of reading, reflecting and occasional vocal appreciation. And I think what was learned wasn't so much how to do Theological Reflection, as how to recognise the profoundly reflective way of doing theology that arises from depths of human experience. Such expereince is forged in the fires of a faith both profound and immediate, a burning passion for God that welds the mystical and practical, and from the resulting fusion, a philosophical theology distilled to the essence of the religious encounter between the human and the divine, which is the meeting of holiness and humanity, divine pathos and human need.

Here are a couple of examples of Heschel's remarkable glimpses into the nature of prayer as both joyful discovery and  unassuaged longing:

Prayer begins where expression ends. The words that reach our lips are often but waves of an overflowing stream touching the shore:We often seek and miss, struggle and fail to adjust our unique feelings to the patterns of the texts. Where is the tree that can utter fully the silent passion of the soil. Words can only open the door, and we can only weep on the threshold of our incommunicable thirst after the incomprehensible.

In no other act does the human being experience so often the disparity between the desire for expression and the means of expression as in prayer. The inadequacy of the means at our disposal appears so tangible, so tragic, that one feels it a grace to be able to give oneself up to music, to a tone, to a song, to a chant. The wave of a song carries the soul to heights which utterable meanings can never reach. Such abandonment is no escape...For the world of unutterable meanings is the nursery of the soul, the cradle of all our ideas. It is not an escape but a return to one's origins.

Centuries of Jewish dealings with God have shaped such a theology of the soul's astonishment. The extracts come from Man's Quest for God. It would be to inexcusably misunderstand and misrepresent Heschel to point out that Christian theology teaches the greater truth of God's quest for humanity - Heschel would rightly point out, with something of that pathos he understood so personally, that such a view of the initiative of God is yet another idea Christians borrowed from the Hebrew Bible and the people God chose to be an 'echo of eternity'. Such theological plagiarism (unacknowledged borrowing) tends to obscure the beauty of the tradition out of which, in the providence of God, the Christian faith emerged. The human quest for God, uttered, or unexpressed because inexpressible, is always going to be the soul's response to the grace that first creates the urge towards God, and calls for that reckless trust so full of risk, to begin the journey with God into a future without tangible certainties.

Augustine's great prayer, 'Thou has made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee', is the cry that recognises that human incompleteness is itself the truth that turns us towards the One in whom all longing may be satisfied - but not yet, not here, and perhaps - not ever, for how can we ever have the capacity to have enough of God? P T Forsyth had no interest in being a 'finished futility' - he too recognised that the longing for God, the inadeqaucy of human expression to do justice to the inexpressible and ineffable, the categorical deficit in human capacity compared to divine inexhaustibility of grace, suggests that even in the encounter with God, in the fullness of glory and face to face, we will still be lost in wonder, love and praise. Which comes back to Heschel, and his willingness to be content, not with reductionist explanation, but with eternal mystery - which is why he confessed, 'I asked for wonder......' and not 'I asked for answers!'

They not only tingle, they soar.....

When J P Struthers, the remarkable minister of Greenock Reformed Presbyterian Church in late 19th Century Scotland, offered to buy James Denney a set of the Standard Puritan Divines as a wedding present, it was a joke between two men who remained very close friends, and went separate ways theologically, at least so far as biblical criticism and modern thought was concerned. Denney's aversion to Seventeenth Century theology can be explained in several ways; his own upbringing in a church tracing its ancestry to the Covenanters and to the turmoil of theological conflict; his openness to new thought and growing resistance to Westminster Calvinism as intellectually stifling and inherently hostile to views of the Bible which allowed a believing criticism; his taste for the 18th century Augustan plain style in language, on which his own lucid, to the point, reasonably argued style was modelled; and his impatience with prolix, argumentative or dissected divinity.

However his contemporary P T Forsyth wasn't as dismissive. The two great Congregationalist Puritans, John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, were honoured conversation partners in Foryth's intellectual drawing room. Here is Forsyth on Goodwin:

Theological truth was not the deposit of a scholl's thought but the register of the Church's experience of eternal things. There is soemthing more than Shakespearian in the dramatic majesty and passionate intimacy of some of Goodwin's pages, because they apply  genius to a region of the soul above any that Shakespeare ever entered. They not only tingle; they soar; and they come home with a beauty and poignancy of spiritual truth which makes them, ever after they are read, ingredients in one's own spiritual life. (Faith Freedom and the Future, pages 116-118).

I've started two books on Puritan Spirituality, one of the research areas I am beginning to explore. I think I am somewhere between Denney and Forsyth as far as reading such people as Owen and Goodwin, Sibbes and Flavel, Baxter and Charnock, are concerned. Prolix yes; over-elaborated divinity - yes at times; scholastic Calvinism as a controlling intellectual grid often a given, yes; but there are times, actually many times, when they are saying important things the church can't afford to forget, neglect or dismiss. One of my other enthusiasms is the theologian often called the last Puritan, Jonathan Edwards. He shares many of the characteristics, less of the faults, and is an important bridge in modern intellectual thought.

Anyway - more of this later. Still not online at home, but there are fingers of light streaking the horizon suggesting a new internet connection maty be about to dawn.

In Memoriam - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martyr, April 9, 1945

Last night, the anniversary of the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I sat a bit later, reading his Discipleship. I had made time throughout the day to read some of his thoughts on the cost of following Jesus, and the cost of the grace revealed on the Cross, and which calls us in our own time and place so to follow. I wonder if too much is made today, of discipleship as a programmatic approach to Christian education and training, so that discipleship has lost some of its astringent costly demand. For Bonhoeffer the disciple is one who bears witness by following, whether to death or not; a Christian is a martyr.

"Discipleship is a bond with the suffering Christ." (Discipleship, 82).

Reading Bonhoeffer's own words, reflecting as I worked in the garden, I felt a mixture of inspiration and sadness; a life so effectively given to Christ, a life so tragic in lost potential for his future and ours. His writing fragmentary but glinting with spiritual light, his life incomplete yet consummated in faithful witness; his execution such a waste, his witness a beacon of grace.

These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore they are before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple. (Rev.7.14-15.)

Station 11A at Glasgow Central and the long walk home

  I don't walk slow. In fact despite my legs being some inches shorter than most of my family and friends I am referred to by the, I presume modestly flattering name, "The Strider". Which is just as well. Not sure how many who read this blog ever have to travel by train from Glasgow Central to Paisley Canal Street. But it now leaves from Platform 11A. Not 11, and not 12, but 11A. And no it isn't a take-off of Harry Potter, but it might as well be.

Platform 11A is a good 5 minutes walk from the entrance of the Station from Gordon Street. Now I don't mind walking - I do it quite a lot. But if a train is 4 minutes walk from the first illuminated timetables it does kind of put pressure on you if you assumed that arriving at the station a couple of minutes before the train leaves, and you've already bought your ticket, you have a decent chance of catching it. Just last Tuesday I watched a number of elderly folk (older than me, and walking slower though trying to walk faster) doing the long walk to 11A - more than one has muttered, not so soto voce, 'Are we walkin' hame?'

Is 11A the longest train platform in Scotland? Should passengers be given a discount for walking the first 500 metres? Is there a case for courtesy buses, or buggies for non-striders?  Or are we just so used to convenience that we need the occasional Platform 11A to remind us that walking is a natural, healthy human activity? And of the 34 million who use it each year, how many are going to paisley canal Street anyway, huh? In any case, First Train aren't going to reconstruct a classic Victorian train station, built in 1879, for the convenience of passengers travelling to Paisley Canal Street.

I may encounter 11A later today as I go to hear my Doktorvater, Professor David Fergusson deliver his second Gifford Lecture. First one on the rise of the new atheism was a good contextual introduction. Tonight we get stuck into the implausibility of religious belief. On the assumption they will be published, I'm not taking notes - just listening, thinking, and enjoying. By the way, 'Stuff and Nonsense' refers to the first part of this post - this last paragraph is why it is followed by the 'Theology' category. Just so's you know!

The world is not overcome by demolition but by reconciliation. (Bonhoeffer)

Nan Watson died just over 10 years ago. She was a diminutive septuagenarian when I met her, and osteoporosis had reduced her height further. But size and height are no guarantee of presence, and capacity to influence those around. Her dry crackly voice was always a blessing to hear, not least because of the wisdom and counsel it conveyed. She had an instinctive kindness held in check by hard won commonsense and a rather ruthless conviction that independence was one of the fruits of the spirit Paul never got round to mentioning, and some Christians needed to pursue!

Her sharp mind  probed into the hard to negotiate regions of life, and coming from a generation when educational opportunities were sacrificed for the sake of putting bread on the family table, she never was able to realise her potential  in any formally recognisable way. Which for all practical purposes didn't matter - because she was also of that generation that did lifelong learning and personal development before it was all new discovered, and formalised, and reduced to programmes and processes.

So no surprise when after an evening service she asked if I could recommend any books that would help her get a handle on Bonhoeffer. For the next few months I had conversations with her about Finkenwalde, the Confessing Church in Germany, even the nature of Christian ethics as freedom acting in love and centred on the Word made flesh. I quoted Bonhoeffer when I took her funeral - and I wish Sabine Dramm's book, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. An Introduction to His Thought had been available to give her those years before. It isn't a popular book, yet it is accessible and written by an enthusiastic scholar whose enthusiasm doesn't get in the way of clear exposition and fair critique. Now and then over the next few weeks I'd like to post a few reflections on Bonhoeffer in the course of reading this book and some of Bonhoeffer's key texts. Stuart has lent me the new critically acclaimed DVD which I've slotted into a couple of hours of peace during my holidays.

For now, here is Bonhoeffer's classic statement on what it means to live with the realities of the world and in the reality of Jesus Christ:

Ecce homo - Behold, what a man! In Him, reconciliation of the world with God was made perfect. The world is not overcome through demolition but through reconciliation. Not ideals, programs of action, not conscience, duty, responsibility, virtue, but simply and only the consummate love of God is capable of encountering reality and overcoming it. Nor is it a generalised idea of love, but God's love truly lived in Jesus Christ, which accomplishes this. This - God's love for the world - does not withdraw itself from reality in a rapture of noble souls foreign to the world, but instead experiences and suffers the reality of the world in all its harshness. The world does its worst to the body of Jesus Christ. But he who was martyred forgives the world its sins. This brings about reconciliation. Ecce homo.

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics. Edited Clifford Green, Works, Vol. 6, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005)

Liberation, structural sin and human flourishing

Sister Elizabeth Johnson's chapter on Liberation Theology has a number of fine passages, and disturbing asides. On page 72 she quotes the Puebla Document and its use of the image of the human face, the faces of the poor, as a way of demonstrating what is at stake in political theology. Vagrant children, sexually exploited minors, marginalised indigenous peoples, ill-paid labourers, women trafficked and enslaved, old people cast off as unproductive....and the list goes on, of human beings whose faces tell a story, and it is a story of those who hunger for liberation.

What Liberation Theology seeks to articulate is the outraged cry that rises to heaven, as it did when the Israelites were in bondage in Egypt. The liberation theologian believes in a God for whom bondage is a scandal, oppression a contradiction of God's intention for humanity, and poverty that leaches life of joy, meaning and fruitfulness a condition at odds with the benevolence and generosity of the Creator.

Johnson's critique of money as a divinised source of oppression, a universally sought after means to power, faces head on the capacity of finance to dominate and enslave, to dehumanise and oppress. So in common with liberation theologians she wants the focus of the Gospel to be fixed, not on the nonbeliever struggling for faith, but on the nonperson struggling for life. Life, liberation, fruitfulness, human fulfilment:

"Liberation is the signature deed of the saving action of God in history. To liberate is to give life, life in its totality. Consequently it becomes clear that God does not want humankind to suffer degradation. Far from happening according to divine decree, the sufferings of the poor, oppressed and marginal  people are contrary to divine intent. The dehumanising and death-dealing structures that create and maintain such degradation are instances of social sin. they transgress against the God of life..... (p. 79)

Speaking of the Americas, but incorporating in the same argument the impact of unrestrained economic globalisation she reflects:

Starting with the conquistadores and continuing for five centuries through successive ruling systems up to multinational corporations today, greed has divinised money and its trappings, that is, turned them into an absolute. Core transgressions against the first commandment have set up a belief system so compelling that it might be called money-theism, in contrast to monotheism. (p.80)

Bishop Irenaeus gifted to the church a four word motto I think I'd like to get put on a T-shirt in both Latin and translation:

Gloria Dei,

vivens humanitas -

"The glory of God is the human being fully alive"

Liberation theology has taught us to give important weight to freedom from oppression and establishing justice for the poor and dispossessed as definitive of the Kingdom of God and of the God whose Kingdom will come. as Holy Week approaches, and we begin to have a sense of our own individual unworthiness, it may be that God's greater requirement of us is to look on a money-theistic world, and repent of our idolatry. Structural sin is much harder to confess, and to turn from.

Grasped by the mystery of who God is

Lectio Divina is a way to God, which when persevered in, becomes a determined pilgrimage from where we are to wherever God's invitation takes us. Spiritual reading, which I think is very different from other reading (whether academic or devotional) has given me my richest moments of encounter with God. My own spirituality is inextricably linked to words as sacrament; words undoubtedly convey spiritual truth freighted with meaning  that touches me in the depths of who I am.  The Jewish reverence for Torah, is demonstrated by the importance of writing the scroll by hand, each word then has to be thought about, meticulously constructed, meditated upon as it is written with a calligrapher's care for beauty, precision and accuracy.  A spiritual reading journal which I write now and then, also acts as an important vehicle for careful, considered respect for  words. In such a journal what is most important is not quantity and regularity of entry – but thoughtfulness, attentiveness, so that what is written is only that which communicates the sense of truth and presence, that intimates the reality of God.

Reading Elizabeth Johnson’s reflections on the importance of being able to ask questions, as a defining characteristic of being human, opened up for me yet again, the essential mystery of the God whose incomprehensibility both evokes ultimate questions and eludes final answers.  She mentions that the first words of Karl Rahner's doctoral thesis are, "One asks". One important way we as human beings relate to God is, “A person asks a question”. After that, the limitless horizon of knowledge, including sacred knowledge, opens up. The true theologian prays, so that when we pray a true prayer we are being theologians. One way or another, God is the epistemological presupposition of our lives – the starting place and ending point of wisdom. "One asks" - and question becomes prayer.

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“The concept of God is not a grasp of God by which a person masters the mystery; but it is the means by which one lets oneself be grasped by the mystery which is present yet ever distant.”

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Words like these act as brakes on that intellectual hubris that deludes us into thinking that God is there to be known. Humility encouraging  receptiveness, patient longing as the passive activity of desire, curiosity as an outward looking trustfulness seeking answers to inner questioning – but these grasped by the mystery which draws us out of ourselves, towards the mystery of who God is.

The reward of tireless searching

Here are some words from Elizabeth Johnson's new book, Quest for the Living God. Mapping frontiers in the Theology of God, (New York: Continuum, 2007).

The profound incomprehensibility of God coupled with the hunger of the human heart in changing historical cultures actually requires that there be an ongoing history of the quest for the living God that can never be concluded. Historically new attempts at articulation are to be expected and even welcomed. An era without such frontiers begins to turn dry, dusty and static.

Christianity today is living through a vibrant new chapter of this quest. People are discovering God again not in the sense of deducing abstract notions but in the sense of encountering divine presence and absence in their everyday experience of struggle and hope, both ordinary and extraordinary. New ideas about God have emerged for example from the effort to wrestle with the darkness of the Holocaust; from the struggle of poor and persecuted people for social justice; from women's striving  for equal human dignity; from Christianity's  encounter with goodness and truth in the world's religious traditions; and from the efforts of biophilic people to protect, restore and nurture the ecological life of planet earth. No era is without divine presence, but this blossoming of insight appears to be a strong grace for our time. (p.13-14)

A couple of things strike me about Johnson's view of things. First, she takes seriously the importance of seeking as itself a form of love for God, and a recognition that the living God remains a profound mystery of love eternal who goes on seeking the response of creation. Second, she sees such theological developments as post Holocaust Theology, feminist theology, liberation theology and many other contextual and historically  specific developments in Christian theology as offering important insights from the theological and spiritual experience of those who have had to live with life circumstances very different from my own. From such articulations of the presence and absence of God I have a lot to learn about God, about human life, and about my own limited capacity for God as only one, male, middle-aged, Western, un-poor, white human being, whose own experience of God is equally valid, but mustn't be made the norm by which to judge the truth of God in Christ that others have come to discover in their very different lives.

I haven't lived under a military dictatorship, or in a country near bankrupt by corrupt centralised power - liberation theologians have. I am white, so have to listen humbly to the insights and affirmations of African and Asian theologies. As a male I need women to explore and express and explain their experience of God, and to listen to the hurt caused by an entire tradition that finds biblical warrant for marginalising female experience, excluding women from places where decisions are made and influence nurtured. Nor can I as a person whose own religious convictions make me who I am, ignore the presence in my neighbourhood, our country and our world, of others whose religious commitments are as genuinely held, felt, believed and practised, and with whom I have to live on this planet. Speaking of the planet, I am also one of those responsible for the sickness of our planet, the depletion of those important processes and resources that make this planet livable for human beings and for the rest of God's creation.

So rather than hide behind my own certainties and limited insights, I have to grow up, and be mature enough in Christ to listen to all those other voices who are also singing God's praise, praying out of the hurts and joys of their very different lives, and calling in question some of my own cherished certainties with truths that I can't simply dismiss - lest in doing so I dismiss the presence, and the seeking voice, of the living God. Being aware of the pluralist nature of Christian theology does not make me a pluralist - but it should make me a humble listener and a more humble talker when it comes to our experience of God.

Johnson's previous theological writing is provocative, and I have serious reservations about some of her proposals. But her voice is an important corrective, and a much more generous response to the diversity and vitality of global Christian thought, than those voices which want all God's children not only to sing from the same hymn sheet, but to read from the same theology books!