Living Wittily

TFTD Feb 3-9 - Love is the QR Code of Christian Living.

Monday

Matthew 23.36-8 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’” This is the first and greatest commandment.”

In his answer Jesus concentrated all the questions about what true obedience to God might look like. Love God with everything you have, and all that you are. Worship, adoration, praise and thanksgiving are the first response of our hearts to God’s gracious love and faithful mercy. To love God is to give God that space in our lives where we grow, and are transformed by the Spirit who pours God’s love into our hearts. We love because God first loved us – the initiative always comes from God. Our response is loving gratitude and faithful obedience to that love. 

Tuesday

Matthew 23.39-40 “And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Jesus links love for God and love for neighbour. And don’t bother trying to define neighbour to make it manageable and convenient. The Good Samaritan story put an end to all that moral squirming. To love God, we must love those made in God’s image, and in whom we meet those Jesus called sisters and brothers. Forasmuch as you love the poor, hungry, hurting, lonely, scared, struggling person you come across on each day’s journey, to that extent you love Jesus, and show your love for God to be genuine, because costly, generous because a sign of the grace that has helped us.

Wednesday

John 13.34-35 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 

The commandment is new because it has a new point of reference; “As I have loved you.” Jesus is the exemplar of what Christian love looks like, how it speaks and acts. Jesus had just washed the feet of each disciple. This wasn’t an act of passive humility; this was Jesus’ answering all the earlier arguments about who was the greatest. The one who serves, who takes care of others’ needs, they are the greatest. That kind of servant love is the logo of the Christian community. Wear it – with humility!

Thursday

1 John 4.7-8 “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” 

John never forgot the lesson of the foot washing. Now 50 years later he keeps coming back to love as the authenticating test of Christian experience. To know God is to know we are loved with an infinite and inexhaustible love. It is the love that bore the sins of the world, forgives our sins, holds us safe, fills our hearts and guides our ways of being. That’s why whoever does not love does not know God. “God is love” is not for bumper stickers. It’s the theological reason why Christians of all people, love - because it is our calling, and our clearest witness to the love of God.

Friday

1 John 4. 19-21 “We love because he first loved us.  Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.”

This is logic on fire with truth. In three lines all objections or suggested limits for the scope of love to others are brushed aside by an unbreakable argument. We are loved, not because we deserve it, but because God’s love has been made known to us in Jesus. Therefore, it follows, by force of love’s own logic, and as a truth that has to be lived from the heart, we cannot now hate others while saying we love God. The brother and sister are there before our very eyes, their presence is God’s call to do to others as God has done to us. No ifs or buts. We love because he first loved us!

Saturday

Matthew 5. 43-4 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”

This is Jesus the revolutionary asking what seems impossible. Only by grace can we even think like this, and only because God’s love is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. But it’s a start, to pray for those we don’t like, who are a problem to us, and when we pray for them, the face we dislike, even hate, can become the face of one we are learning, by God’s mercy and grace, to love as an also child of God.

Sunday

1 John 4.10-11 “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”

The cross of Christ is the defining truth of God’s love. Once we understand that, and receive the gift of God’s love and grace into our hearts, to live in that love becomes our way of life. If God loves us like that, then we ought to love others out of sheer gratitude! Ought is a word of obligation placed on all who stand beneath the Cross.

'To Love Your Neighbour', Rudolf Bultmann. Pursuit of a Footnote, Part Two.

This is a follow up to the previous post. In that piece I told of the difficulty I had following up on a reference to Rudolf Bultmann's essay "To Love Your Neighbour." You can read that post for the full story of how eventually it was traced, and a copy kindly sent my way.

But there were leftover questions. Why would Rudolf Bultmann have an essay published in the first issue of an obscure Scottish journal? What was Scottish Periodical in the reference? How long did it last? Are there hard copies in existence anywhere?

One of my friends, John Dempster, a professional (retired) librarian, found the answer to some of these questions which unlocked the big one - how did an essay by the leading New Testament scholar of the age end up being published in a completely unknown journal in Scotland in 1947? I had asked John if he could find any trace of a publication titled Scottish Periodical. This was his response:

"I did a little bit of rooting around, and found the attached record in the British Library Catalogue - it suggests they have something called 'Scottish Periodical', and it gives a shelf mark in the record store at Boston Spa. However, there are no bibliographic details present."

But John also sent two extracts from The Scotsman - one  from August 1947 announcing a new Journal, and the other from October 1947 listing the contributors and subjects. I knew it was gold as soon as I saw the name of the Editor - none other than Ronald Gregor Smith! Here are the two Scotsman extracts John sent - now you can see why they are gold!

Ronald Gregor Smith was one of Scotland's most significant theologians in the 1950s and 1960s In 1946, while still a military chaplain, Gregor Smith was appointed Education and Control Officer for the University of Bonn, where he was responsible for the de-Nazification of the University. He was already acquainted with Bultmann, and in the following years he would be instrumental in disseminating German theology in Britain and particularly in Scotland, through his work as a translator and editor. Smith translated and guided the publishing of works by Martin Buber (he had translated I and Thou as a young student in 1937), Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Soren Kierkegaard. As the later Editor of SCM press he ensured the early publication in English of some of the most influential writings of German biblical and theological scholarship. 

So when in 1947 Ronald Gregor Smith went into full time publication with the launch of Scottish Periodical, of course he would ask Bultmann for permission to publish one of his essays, and one pertinent to the moment. And that's how 'To Love Your Neighbour' was translated into English by the Editor of Scottish Periodical, Ronald Gregor Smith. It had previously been published in German in 1930, then in another journal in French later that same year, but Gregor Smith saw it as important enough to be the first piece of Bultmann he translated and saw through publication for the post-war era. That in itself makes it a significant publishing occasion.

There is more. The Contents announcement in The Scotsman (above) mentions several contributors who became significant Scottish literary figures, including David Daiches, Edwin Muir, Andrew Young and Norman McCaig - Bultmann was in good company! These were Gregor Smith's friends, to whom we can add Edwin Morgan and T. S. Eliot. Eliot wrote very encouragingly of Ronald Gregor Smith's own poems, urging him to keep writing them, not so much for publication but as accounts of spiritually authentic searching. There were only two issues of Scottish Periodical, one in 1947, and one in 1948. By then Gregor Smith, and the post-war world, were moving on.

So all this started by chasing a footnote! That footnote occurs in the important book on New Testament ethics by Victor Paul Furnish, The Love Command in the New Testament. With considerable help from several friends, a modest-sized essay first published in 1930 in German and French, is traced to a now forgotten journal from 1947, and lands in my inbox from a generous scholar in 2025. Then its context and provenance are revealed through the detective work of my friend John. Then after some further digging into the life and times of an unjustly overlooked Scottish editor, translator, minister and theologian who was Primarius Professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow from 1956 till his early death in 1968, we can understand how this overlooked gem is well worth bringing to light again. Well, at least I think so!

"To Love Your Neighbour", by Rudolf Bultmann

Yesterday I had one of those experiences of the scholarly community that demonstrates the generosity and shared commitments out of which comes so much enjoyment - and grace.

I was trying to trace an essay for work I've been doing on Jesus' teaching on neighbour love, the nature of Christian love as a test of a life devoted to Jesus in which we see others as God-loved, and therefore those whom we are called to love in Christ's name. The essay was written by Rudolf Bultmann, and called "To Love Your Neighbour."

 

Bultmann's article was referenced in two books but the reference made no sense. It said 'Scot Per, 1, 47'. I spent a while checking various libraries and Journal indices and resources. No joy. Further chasing gave me the full title 'Scottish Periodical, 1. 47.' But no trace anywhere of a journal called Scottish Periodical - and anyway, why would Rudolf Bultmann, the leading German New Testament scholar, have a technical essay published in the first issue of an obscure Scottish publication which now no one seems to have heard of?

 

I checked, just to rule out an editorial oversight, thinking it might be the first issue of the Scottish Journal of Theology - no joy there either, its first issue was in 1948 - but I checked the 8 issues for 1948 and 1949 just to be sure. I then asked a couple of librarian and archivist friends who 'ken stuff' about chasing obscure items, but neither could find any footprint or even a blurred fingerprint of such a journal's existence!

 

Then I did what I have sometimes done before. I emailed one of the currently leading scholars on Bultmann, explained the current impasse, and asked if he could offer any light. Here's part of the reply:

"Dear Jim, This is one of the most obscure of all of Bultmann’s writings, at least in English. It took the help of the research librarians at Princeton Seminary to track this one down, but I have a copy of it that I have attached here. The periodical is correctly named, but it seems extremely obscure."

 

That made me feel so much better about my own failed efforts! And what generosity to reply within hours and send a copy of the article - which I've since read, and very glad to have done so. The article is Bultmann in full philosophical mode, analysing the nature of love as a graced capacity of the new life in Christ, concluding with the Johannine text,

"We love him, because he first loved us. If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also." (1 Jn 4.19-21)

 

I mention all this because in a world where so much of academic and educational resources is hidden behind paywalls, or otherwise jealously guarded, old fashioned knowledge-sharing and mutual support in learning is still not only a thing, but a living thing.

 

My thanks to someone who had never heard of me, and whose email had arrived in an inbox over in Kansas that is already busy enough, for taking time and trouble to nudge me another step forward in my own learning and thinking. There is such a thing as the communion of learning as a sub-set of the communion of saints

TFTD Jan 27-Feb 2 2025: "Blessed are the Merciful." Preach it and Practice it.

Monday

Matthew 5.7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.”

It isn’t often that the word mercy becomes headline news; or that a plea for mercy becomes politically controversial. For readers of the Bible from the Psalms to the Prophets, and from Micah to Jesus, mercy is one of the moral imperatives of a life obedient to God. “Mercy is a generous attitude which is willing to see things from the other’s point of view and is not quick to take offence or to gloat over others’ shortcomings.” Being merciful is a requirement of all those who follow Jesus, seeking the Kingdom of God, Jesus couldn’t be clearer on God’s approval of being merciful!

Tuesday

Luke 6.36 “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

Jesus has just spoken about loving and doing good to those we consider enemies. Loving our enemies seems entirely counter-intuitive. However, Jesus is calling his followers to a radical transformation of how we restore, sustain and redeem relationships that have gone wrong. Mercy is to be our first response. Mercy is a personal initiative, a freely offered invitation to a new beginning. The best part is, by being merciful we act in ways that affirm and imitate the generosity of God. It’s a very short step from praying “Lord have mercy” to praying, “Lord make me merciful.”

Wednesday

Psalm 103.8 "The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love". 

When Jesus calls us to be merciful, it helps if we can define “mercy” clearly, so there can be no misunderstanding – or get-out clauses! If we are to be merciful as God is merciful, our verse above gives an expansive paraphrase - gracious, slow to anger, and filled full of the love that stays faithful and dependable. So when Jesus says, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful”, this is the familiar understanding of mercy he was working from. Interestingly, the Sermon on the Mount has quite a lot to say about the blessings of mercy, the dangers of anger, and the love that reaches beyond what makes sense to us. The Sermon describes this astonishingly gracious and steadfast love of God which we are called to model as followers of Jesus.

Thursday

Micah 6.8 “He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

These three requirements are all part of the one consistently righteous life before God. Justice, mercy and humility can’t be separated in our life of obedience to God. What’s more, these are not options, they are obligations under God. Micah is spelling out God’s priorities, those acts and attitudes that control how the people of God speak and act, how we conduct our relationships and use our money and belongings in all the transactions of daily life. It’s a searching check-list of what community life should be like, first in church, then as witness to the world – justice, mercy, humility.

Friday

Matthew 9.12-13 “Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.  But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Sacrifice was one of the central acts of worship in Israel. Sacrifice was an act of devotion to God, from which a life of obedience and righteousness followed. One of the essential marks of a righteous life is mercy, compassion for the poor, care for the suffering, welcome to the stranger, feeding the hungry. Sacrifice without mercy is hypocrisy; worship by those who couldn’t care less for others is not only a waste of time, it’s offensive to God. As John says, “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.“ (1 Jn 4.20)

Saturday

James 2.13 “Judgement without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgement.”

A heart that does not do mercy is judgemental, and sets the rules by which it too must be judged. When we pray “Forgive us our debts, just as we forgive our debtors”, that isn’t just pious window dressing. If we refuse to forgive, close our hearts to someone else’s pain, or fault, or predicament, then we nurture hardness in our own spirit. We are a hard path on which the seeds of forgiveness cannot grow, a calloused spirit unable to recognise our own need of mercy. When the choice is between judgement and mercy, it is mercy that is the game changer and life giver.

Sunday

Psalm 23.6 “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord, for ever.”

And there it is. Our whole life long we have been pursued by the goodness and mercy of God. We have lived and loved, worked and rested, given and taken, grown up and grown old, and never once has God’s mercy been absent. Mercy is the compassion of God’s grace, the gift of God’s peace, the assumption on which all that is most important in our lives is securely founded. God is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love". So, if God is merciful, go and do likewise!

Shalom: A Prayer for the World and for Ourselves

Shalom.

Of course it means peace.

But shalom is a word that overflows the boundaries of its own letters and irrigates other words.

Wellbeing. Harmony. Justice. Fruitfulness. Righteousness. Welcome. Union. And yes, Peace.

"Shalom bears tremendous freight - the freight of a dream of God that resists all our tendencies to division, hostility, fear, drivenness and misery...It refers to all those resources and factors which make communal harmony joyous and effective." (Brueggemann, Living Toward a Vision.)

Shalom is when there are streams in the desert, and the wilderness blossoms. Shalom is an oasis of rest where there are green pastures and the refreshment of water. Shalom is when eyes are opened, the silenced burst into song, the lame dance in freedom, and the broken-hearted learn to smile again.

Shalom is when the heart opts for mercy rather than indifference, chooses compassion instead of blame, urges conciliation in place of conflict, argues that healing is always preferable to wounding, seeks unity and community above division and self-interest, nourishes neighbour love and resists the discourse of division.

For all who, today as every day, long for shalom, in our heart, community, and world, this is a good prayer:

"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you believe in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit."