Living Wittily

Doon the watter....a theological pilgrimage to Rhu.

Yesterday Sheila and I went 'doon the watter' (travelled down the Clyde estuary, not by boat but by car) and spent a while in Helensburgh. A few miles further on into the Gareloch is the village of Rhu (used to be called Row), where the saintly theologian John MacLeod Campbell was minister in the early to mid 19th Century. He was deposed by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1831 for teaching that Christ's death was for all, and that salvation is by the faith that believes this and trusts God that it is so. His masterpiece, The Nature of the Atonement, is one of the greatest theological works ever produced in Scotland.

Not easy reading, but why should a Christian pastor whose careful and passionate proclaiming of the Gospel was misunderstood, and at times misrepresented, by those who engineered through the Church Courts, his removal from ministry, why should he write a dumbed down climb-down? His book remains one of the most challenging statements on the meaning of the death of Christ and the Father's love as the core of the Christian Gospel. Underlying his theology is a generosity of spirit, and a conception of the Father's love that is primary and qualifies any understanding of God as judge. Such a theology is far more amenable to the missional imperative of the church than the hard-edged Westminster Calvinism which MacLeod Campbell challenged.

Which brings me back to Helensburgh, where we met two good friends from Fife, through to close down their caravan for the winter. Bill was recalling his last Sabbatical, all the books he read and the thinking he thought. And he said, 'The most important thing I learned was the parable of the man fishing off the pier. This man fished every day off the end of the pier, and one day one of the local lads came to him and said, "The fish don't come here any more". "Aye," said the man, "but they used to"'.

If the church is to survive and prosper through the current cultural flux, then it needs to stop using the methods, pursuing the practices, clinging to the memories, working on the assumptions, of what used to be. "The fish don't come here any more". Right - let's go find where they do come to.

And it is that go-finding mentality, that adaptability to changing circumstances, that alert noticing that change is deceptive but deceptively fast; that willingness NOT to make our own methods, habits, assumptions, convenience, memories, the standard of truth and the last word on how we go about God's mission, that marks out the faithful follower of Jesus. For John MacLeod Campbell that meant searching for an understanding and portrayal of the Christian Gospel that frees it from theological monopolies and allows it to speak in its own power to the mind of today.

For the church in Scotland, it will mean giving up what used to work, and following once again the One who said, 'Come after me and I will make you fishers of men and women'.

And it may also mean being prepared to listen to the One who says, 'Cast your nets on the OTHER side of the boat.' But maybe it takes some nerve for seasoned, experienced fishermen like ourselves to listen to Jesus telling us how to fish. After all, what does a carpenter know about fishing? Mhmm.

Karl Barth and Hans Urs Von Balthasar 5. Out of the Goodness of God's heart

The central panel in the triptych, which is Von Balthasar's theological masterpiece, is goodness. The first panel is The Glory of the Lord and expounds beauty as reflected in creation from the beauty of God the Creator. The second and central panel is Theo-drama, a careful impassioned telling of the drama of redemption in terms of goodness, the goodness of God which is selflessly poured out in Christ, by sheer benevolence and personal expense of suffering.

It is in the chapter dealing with Von Balthasar's Theo-Drama, and Karl Barth's response to it, that Wigley's book provides valuable and important perspectives on these two theological allies who differed, and despite the mutual respect and courtesy, never agreed to differ. The fundamental differences and even incompatibilities between Barth's reconstructed Reformed perspective and Von Balthasar's traditional Catholicism revived and revised, are brought out in Wigley's careful detective work. In the Theo-Drama there are few explicit references to Barth, but as Von Balthasar wrestles with the immensity and infinite goodness of God as revealed in Christ, he is determined to hold the balance between the infinite and the finite, the divine and the human in Christ, and between divine freedom which is infinite and human freedom which is finite.

  [God in Christ] simultaneously opens up the greatest possible intimacy and the greatest possible distance (in Christ's dereliction on the cross) between God and man; thus he does not decide the course of the play in advance but gives man an otherwise unheard-of freedom to decide for or against the God who has so committed himself. (Theo-Drama, Vol. 3, page 21)

Thus Von Balthasar in redressing the balance, expounds the importance of finite freedom as human response to the infinite freedom of God. The response in the drama of redemption of such central figures as Mary, the paradigmatic saints and the Church as the Body of Christ embodied on earth, is not so much a compromise of the 'all of grace' truth at the heart of the great Theo-Drama of God's saving action. Human response is already written in to a creation which exists by the infinite freedom of God, that infinite freedom constricted by the free goodness of God, to invite the participation of creation, and humanity in the redemptive purposes of God in Christ. This is Von Balthasar's response to Barth making the Revelation of the Word of God, and thus Christology, the sum of theology to the exclusion of other essential balancing truths.

Wigley is a persuasive guide, and fair-minded in allowing both voices to be heard in the conversation. So here is Barth's response to Von Balthasar's criticism that Barth made too much of Christology and not enough of the Church.

I now have an inkling of something which at first I could not understand: what is meant by the 'christological constriction' which my expositor and critic urged against me in mild rebuke. But we must now bring against him the counter question, whether in all the splendour of the saints who are supposed to represent and repeat Him, Jesus Christ has not ceased - not in theory but in practice - to be the origin and object of Christian faith. (Church Dogmatics Vol. IV.1, page 768)

And so the debate continued - and continues, as a high wire theological balancing act that's been going on since the early days of the church. The arguments about the role of human response in the story of salvation, and whether the sole sufficiency of Christ as origin and object of faith, is compatible with making human response decisive in the drama - to which Barth's answer is No! - and Von Balthasar's answer is yes, if, out of the goodness of God's heart, as Von Balthasar maintains, that human response of freedom is itself God's intentional free gift of co-operating with God in the performance of the greatest, costliest drama in universal history.

The gift of asking the gifts we need

The Lord's Prayer

'Give us this day.' Give us this day and night.

Give us the bread, the sky. Give us the power

To bend and not be broken by your light.

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And let us soothe and sway like the new flower

Which closes, opens to the night, the day,

Which stretches up and rides upon a power

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More than its own, whose freedom is the play

Of light, for whom the earth and air are bread.

Give us the shorter night, the longer day.

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In thirty years so many words were spread,

and miracles. An undefeated death

Has passed as Easter passed, but those words said

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Finger our doubt and run along our breath.

Elizabeth Jennings.

This is a poem about prayer - you can ask what it 'means', but that would be to miss the struggle for faith that for Elizabeth Jennings is more important than unquestioning certainty. When I read this poem, recalling us to words long familiar, 'give us this day', I come to that second last line with its haunting phrase 'but those words said', and my own faith is again rooted. And rooted not in what I feel, but in what He said, He who went through that 'undefeated death', and whose words now touch my doubt and uncertainty, and whose words are formed by my own speaking, 'Give us this day'.

And stanzas 2 and 3 use the image of the flower that Jesus also used, the lilies of the field, whose dress sense makes a greater fashion statement than Solomon for all his designer robes. This is a poem about trust and uncertainty, words crafted to the shape of our longing. The Lord's Prayer gives us the words to ask for what we need to be given; the Lord gives the gift of asking the gifts we need. The Word makes articulate our words, prays our prayer, in us and for us.

Where spirituality collides with reality

Last night I was at Firhill to watch Aberdeen play Partick Thistle. Alan and Fraser kindly invited me to join them and others for pre-match hospitality at the Stadium, where the meal was a good, warm substantial input to sustain the long 90 minutes of watching fitba' in the first really chilly night of the Autumn. Then, just to make sure energy levels were sustained, and nobody fainted from low sugar levels, we had pies, tablet and coffee at half-time.

As a Christian and an Aberdeen supporter (and the two are not mutually exclusive), I made every effort to negotiate conversation around the result with dimplomatic evasiveness about who gubbed who. I genuinely, really, honestly, tried not to rub it in, or gloat, or even cheer in hysterical disbelief as Aberdeen scored twice in one game --- Partick 0 Aberdeen 2. So having feasted with my host Alan (Partick Thistle is one of his core commitments in life), and also with his colleague Fraser (who supports Aberdeen as the default when St Mirren aren't involved), and got to know several other football pundits 'n that, I was probably guilty of that really annoying, not hard to perceive smugness, that seems to be reserved for those who try to combine courteous modesty refusing to grin in triumph cos we won, with that secret 'Oh ya beauty!' that lurks just below the superficial politeness of every semi-civilised football fan.

Being the guest at a football stadium, being welcomed and given generous hospitality by a fine host, in the opposition's home ground, does raise the problem of muted celebration, of clandestine smirks, and compels the insincerity of sympathising with the losers while being glad it isn't your own team dumped out of the cup again. So last night I was in the ethical training ground, the place where spirituality collides with reality, when I could hear Paul say, 'Look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others'. Aye right! And being in the place where pastoral responsiveness of weeping with those who weep, was a real challenge.

But thanks to my friends and my hosts - a good night, a good result, and good company.

A Noiseless, Patient Spider

This morning I had an unintended scary moment. Evangelical spirituality was once defined as early rising, prayer and Bible reading. Most mornings I am guilty of all three. And this morning, having risen early, I glimpsed rapid movement across the carpet. A ginormous spider, disturbed in its nocturnal perambulations, was using its over an inch long legs (eight of them) to motor towards whatever hole was home. It didn't make it. My pencil jar became its temporary prison, till the rest of the house was up and I released it into the less comfy temperatures of our front drive - where it can take its chances, which are likely to be better than if someone else in our house had spotted his incursion.

Walt Whitman's poem, 'A Noiseless Patient Spider' is a thoughtful and positive piece of PR for misunderstood and persecuted spiders.

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

I like the wistfulness, and playful seriousness of Whitman's poetry.

Karl Barth and Hans urs Von Balthasar 4.

I once heard Professor Donald Macleod preach on the 'Glory of Christ'. He enunciated the English word 'Glory' with a particular Highland intensity and accent, a noticeable hushed sing-song tone, that left you in no doubt he was speaking of Reality of a different order. Von Balthasar wasn't a Highland, Gaelic speaking Calvinist preacher, he was a Swiss ex-Jesuit Catholic philosopher theologian - but his theological and biblical fascination with 'Glory' as that expression of the reality and splendour of God in Christ, which captivates, ignites and ultimately satisfies human longing, was just as passionately articulate as that of the Free Church Professor in Edinburgh.

The seven volumes of Von Balthasar's The Glory of the Lord are one long argument, meandering across and cutting deep into, a theological and philosphical landscape on the scale of the Alps. But meandering purposefully towards the conclusion that there is a divinely intended and divinely given connection, between the eternal and essential glory and beauty of the Lord, and the inherent grace given beauty of creation. And while there is a proper and necessary distinction between Creator and creature, between 'that unique existence which pertains to God alone, and that sharing in being  which is common to the rest of creation', there is nevertheless a divinely intended connectedness between creation and Creator, which enables purposeful and redemptive relationship to take place in this cosmic theatre within which the Lord of Glory produces and directs the drama of redemption.

The Glory of the Lord, Wigley argues, takes its inspiration from Barth's Church Dogmatics Volume 2.1 and Barth's treatment of 'The Eternity and Glory of God'. I found this whole chapter, and indeed the argument of the whole book, to be convincing, but with a significant hesitation I'll mention at the end of this series of posts.

Convincing in that Wigley has traces key points of interaction demonstrating how Von Balthasar's theological work is constructively and self-consciously responding to what he sees as major weaknesses in Barth. Von Balthasar is offering a view of creation, createdness and creature, that allows for a God-given responsiveness in the contingent created order, answerable to the eternal transcendent beauty and glory of the Lord. For Von Balthasar, 'The whole earth will cry glory', is not only an eschatological statement, but expresses the purposeful generosity of the Creator anticipating the response of worship.

Barth is uncompromising in his position that theology begins and ends with the Revelation of the Word of God. Wigley has a fine section in which he shows Von Balthasar dissenting from this view, because it makes Revelation so dominant that other important theological truths are inevitably and disruptively eclipsed.

'In light of the form of God's revelation in Jesus Christ which unites creation and redemption through the Incarnation, there is more to theology than just revelation. There is a call to participate in the life of Christ which requires an understanding of being and the possibility of an ontological transformation of humanity....The biblical witness to God's revelation leads to a response and participation in Christ. This means in turn that epistemology is insufficient without ontology, both in terms of the transformation of the believer and ultimately of the whole created order, as the Incarnation makes knowledge of God an engagement with being itself.' (Wigley, page 83-4).

Wigley is a good theological intepreter, who like a well briefed interviewer, knows the relational history of those he interviews, understands the influences and the crises, knows how to interpret the important incidents that shape life and thought. And he is sympathetic to his subjects, representing them fairly and allowing them to not have to worry about the ambush question. This is a book that encourages you to like the two theologians whose friendship and differences gave us such a rich vein of Christian theology.

God can handle the mess - but can we?

Today has been full, good and just a wee bit fatiguing! I was preaching in Aberdeen at Crown Terrace and met up again with many folk who are the kind of friends sensible people hang on to - and we are sensible people! We drove up this morning and back late this afternoon - life's lacking some commonsense pace at the moment.

Mind you though they are my friends, that doesn't guarantee an easy  time. They asked me to preach on Nehemiah 3 - have you ever preached on a passage that reads like a fabric convenor's report - or a site manager's worksheets, written up to impress the CEO? Well, here as always in the Bible, chapter 3 only makes sense if it follows chapters 1 and 2 and is followed by the rest of the story. Context. Narrative. Texture of human activity. Removal of pious-find a spiritual application at any cost - spectacles. And what you are left with is the story of how a community rebuilt itself by rebuilding city walls. And that long seemingly tedious chapter 3, written out by some conscientious charge-hand, to record for all who came later, how those who broke sweat together also broke bread together; how perfumers got black nails and goldsmiths got blisters from using a spade; and how they all worked side by side, this one next the other. And don't tell me they didn't argue, or fall out, or think negative thoughts about each other - but they got the job done; the building site was the place where community was reborn.

John Newton once likened sanctification to a building site - whether the individual or the church, he saw Christian growth as a sometimes messy, hard to see progress kind of process. The scaffolding, the rubble waiting to be cleared; the messy, dubious, activities of builders and labourers who you hope know what they are doing. I love that image - I used to work in a brickwork so I know about mess, muck and blisters - and I do think there are times when my own inner life, and the life of most Christian communities, is more like a building site than a building, more a work in process than the finished thing. And I happen to think God can live with the mess, so long as it is mess on the way to being something else! Anyway, some of that was what I preached.

Then we had lunch with two of our best friends. I met Douglas and Helen at a mission when Douglas was a young minister in Dundee and we ran a children's club legendary for its pulsating energy, noise and fun. They are two of the finest people I know, whose service to Christ can't be calculated on any scale I can think of.

Then back down the road on a beautiful autumn, with the Mearns turning towards yellow, gold and brown, with a blue sky and the bales and rolls of straw in the fields. A beautiful day, and now, after a long soak, I'm just letting you know - life's good, even if at times a bit messy. But God can live with the mess, so long as it's on the way to being something else.

Painting, Prayer and Poetry

'The Church at Auvers' is one of my favourite paintings. Van Gogh's church paintings inspired Elizabeth Jennings poem about the complexity and mystery of prayer.

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The Nature of Prayer

A debt to Van Gogh's 'Crooked Church'

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Maybe a mad fit made you set it there

Askew, bent to the wind, the blue print gone

Awry, or did it? Isn't every prayer

We say oblique, unsure, seldom a simple one,

Shaken as your stone tightening in the air?

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Decorum smiles a little. Columns, domes,

Are sights, are aspirations. We can't dwell

For long among such loftiness. Our homes

Of prayer are shaky and, yes, parts of Hell

Fragment the depths from which the great cry comes.

Elizabeth Jennings.

Karl Barth and Hans Urs Von Balthasar 3. On not smart-packaging the Almighty

It occurs to me that a lot of folk who come visit this blog aren't likely to encounter the brieze block volumes of Barth or Von Balthasar as a matter of course - and maybe wouldn't even want to. Life is short enough, you might think, without spending some of its best days and hours poring over the lucubrations, cogitations and obfuscations of incurably literary theologians. And fair enough. But I think it is important for all of us living in the limited franchises of contemporary church experience, being sustained on a fairly predictable diet of worship content, theological range and scale, and simply unable to avoid the insistence of a culture increasingly sold on the accessible, the comprehensible, the practical, the sussable (new word I think - adjective formed from the verb, "to suss", which I define as 'the premature conclusion that I fully understand something'.

As I started to say and got sidetracked - I think it is important for all of us to now and again encounter new and deep ways of thinking about God, and thinking about God on a scale and range vastly beyond our usual, routine conceptions, which by now are comfortably familiar, challenging but not inconveniently so, and to think way, way beyond that domesticated deity able to fit between the glossy flash covers of a less than 150 page paperback entitled God in Sixty Seconds for Busy People. OK I made that title up, but it stands for a whole genre of reductionist christian piety that wants God to fit in with, rather than collide with, our tolerated low intensity intellectual climate. What do I mean? Well, the tendency to smart package the Almighty into praise songs, or standardise the Eternal into devotional sound bytes, to so suss God that unaware of seismic detectors vibrating ominously, we 've lost the capacity to sense that Holy Love that comes to us with the disruptive potential of an earthquake.

All of which is by way of saying that God transcends all our controlling mechanisms, however well meaning. And that some of the people who remind us of how untameable God is are the ones who write brieze block theologies. Whatever else Karl Barth and Von Balthasar's theological writings do, by their sheer vastness they signal the immensity of the subject. And time reading them, or just knowing they are there to be read, is to recognise that our pursuit of God, and God's relentless love pursuing us, takes a lifetime of expanding thought, expended energy, and tireless curiosity.

So as part of my review of Wigley's book, I make these unsurprising observations

1. he isn't easy reading, he is rewarding reading
2. he isn't a devotional writer who gives me pious thoughts, but a theological writer in search of a God worth being devoted to
3. he doesn't promise to make me feel God's attention is fixed on me, but he explores two theological disciples whos elife work was to fix attention on the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

The book is written by an academic theologian interacting at a technical level with the God thoughts of two of Christianity's greatest minds, and there are times when I have to mutter, 'Sorry - you've lost me there' - and I read the page again, and mutter, 'No, still don't get it.' But one thing for sure - I never, ever feel that the deepest spiritual questions and longings I have, are trivialised or patronised. My failure to understand might now and again be because the writer's expression is more difficult than it needs to be; or yes, it might be because I'm not up to the subject; but most of the time it's because what Barth calls the Word of God, and what Von Balthasar calls the Glory of the Lord, and what they both call God, is simply unable to be expressed in words of one syllable - unless it is Love.

So those who come by this blog who aren't into heavy duty theology, please bear with the occasional attempts here to engage with our Christian tradition at those foundational levels that need to be there for there to be much else at all. Living wittily surely means living deeply, living without all the answers, and living in the full knowledge of our smallness and God's utter beyondness, unreachable - except as he comes to us in grace, in love, in Jesus Christ, the Word of God (Barth) and the Glory of the Lord (Von Balthasar).

Elizabeth Jennings Way, Oxford

Coming into Oxford on the park and ride a fortnight ago I noticed a small street of red bricked houses on the outskirts called Elizabeth Jennings Way. The poet Elizabeth Jennings died a few years ago and is one of several women poets whose work I've particularly enjoyed. I rememebr encountering her for the first time in The Tablet, with an advent poem.

Her poems are humane but unflinching in their awareness of all those experiences which give our humanity its rich textured feel - love gained and lost, vitality and mortality and our consciousness of each, art as human language transcending words, suffering as diminishing, frightening and the last thing any person should glamourise with over-inflated claims of its spiritual value, fighting, hurting and forgiving. And because humans are finite with inarticulate longings she explores the ordinariness of human existence against the backdrop of infinity, eternity, but with no cheaply bought settled certainty, more with a faith that's learned to live with frustration, ambiguity, provisionality.

Many a time reading her poetry I have been aware that this poem, or that poem, captures in 14 lines (she is a tireless player-around with the sonnet) the connection between particular human experiences and specific Christian doctrines. When all the philosophical and moral theologians have had their say about original sin, whether children are born with a propensity to sin, or are environmentally, genetically, behaviourally determined, or are free until their responsible conscious choices can be given moral significance; when the theologians think they have it sussed, Jennings' poem 'Warning to Parents' upsets the tidy theological game being played with the surprise finality of a cat jumping on a chess board.

Again, whether reading Gregory Jones' remarkable book Embodying Forgiveness, or weighing the truth laden words of Miroslav Volf who knows a few things himself about forgiveness and human evil and the Gospel, I find that this woman sees with unnerving clarity, the necessity for forgiveness, the apparent impossibility of such a thing, but yet the life-saving quality of the language that both says, 'You are forgiven', and asks, 'Forgive me' - and thus turns enmity to friendship, hostility to love.

Another sublime poet, identified the immensity and mystery of sin and love, and the agonsing tension they create in the heart of God. George Herbert's 'The Agony' in its first verse states that tension:

    Philosophers have measur'd mountains,

Fathomed the depths of seas, of states, and kings,

Walked with a staff to heav'n, and traced fountains:

    But there are two vast spacious things,

the which to measure it doth more behove:

Yet few there are that sound them: Sin and love.

Amongst those who have made the attempt to 'sound them', is Elizabeth Jennings. In her best poems she explores the mental, emotional and spiritual turmoil of what it means to be a human being capable of sin, and love.  Next couple of weeks I'd like to post a few of her poems, in memory of the woman who put Elizabeth Jennings Way on the map.