Living Wittily

Pastoral depth and theological reach: Balentine on The Book of Job

Some time ago I mentioned the commentary on Job by Sam Balentine. (And the other day I promised Robert a few extracts as a sampler). For a long time now I've read slowly through  a commentary as a kind of background music to other study. There is no pressure to read fast, the aim being a long slow conversation between biblical text, commentator and me listening in. Not all commentaries read easily because they're meant to be consulted, a resource available on demand. Still, I've persevered over a long while and found it for me a very satisfying form of lectio divina. It's taken me the best part of two months to read around half of Sam Balentine's commentary on Job, and I feel no compulsion to speed up the process - that would be like being part of a conversation where you rudely interrupt by saying to the other person, "Come on! Get on with it! Get to the point! We haven't all day!" You don't interrupt someone in a conversation who is speaking more sense than you are likely to.

So Balentine is being savoured sip by sip (think Sean the Baptist and an expensive but worth it Italian or Australian red wine!). Here are some of my pencil-marks-in- -the-margin extracts from Balentine.

The persistent voices of dissent in Hebraic tradition - Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, the anonymous pray-ers of the lament psalms, and especially Job - challenge orthodoxy with the problem scholars call theodicy. Suffering inevitably raises questions about God and justice, which defenders of the faith are compelled to answer. Theodicies come from those who, like Job's friends, seek to counter questions that impugn divine justice by pronouncing God 'Not Guilty'.

Such a verdict may of course be entirely justified, for as the witness of the scriptures makes clear, God will certainly punish the wicked. However, as the dialogues [of Job] unfold, Eliphaz and the friends exemplify how this truth may be overstated or misapplied. Theirs is the approach of those who maintain a safe distance from the suffering of others in order to defend doctrine at the expense of compassion. (page 109).

If our vantage point is the ash heap, then we look with the eyes of the sufferer and ponder the gap between the world and the world we have been shown. The world Eliphaz envisions summons Job to praise, but the broken world in which Job lives invites only lament. If doxology alone is acceptable in God's world, where then is the place for those who cannot as yet (if ever) speak this language?...Before we take up the ministry of comforting others, it is wise to ask ourselves if our intent is to help them find their place in God's world, or in ours. (page 120 and 121).

"Words of despair" speak a truth that must not only be heard but also seen and felt. If Job's friends would only pay attention to him as a person, if they would only look at him 'face to face,' then his face would make a moral claim on them that would change both their words and their attitudes. (page 129)

There aren't many commentaries on Job that are so pastorally oriented. I find that a surprising thought. Balentine's impatience with theodicies that seek to protect God from our deepest human questions and complaints gives his exegesis and comment a spiritual depth and theological reach that I have found deeply satisfying. This is a great commentary. Very different from Clines, (3 volumes in the Word Series) who can also write with pastoral and theological sensitivity, but with such informational detail that his work needs a different kind of study. But when complete it will be the benchmark in encyclopaedic coverage The commentary that comes closest to Balentine is that by Carol Newsom in the New Interpreter's Bible. At times I've checked Balentine against her work, because she is a remarkably lucid and searching contributor to the conversation about Job. Newsom has an independent mind, whose exposition is rich with pastoral intent, and who also writes beautifully. The next post on Job will be on the great Redeemer text in Job 19.25-27.

New Look Blog, Sabbath and shoogly stepping stones!

Decided to change the mood and dress style of the blog for the duration of my sabbatical. Don't be misled by the books on the top banner - I'll do my fair share or reading, writing, studying. But there is more to this wonderful life than books, and I'm going looking for it over the next few months. But I DO like the colour, the layout and the sense of lightness just bouncing off the page.

The picture  was taken while on holiday exploring a medieval monastery  and walking across the river using ancient stepping stones.  Amongst the benefits of a sabbatical  will be the chance to regain balance and  be able to  negotiate the stepping stones that are the next stages of life in all its vocational  possibilities. 

When  I did the crossing last year several of the stones were shoogly, moving just enough to remind the unwary or over-confident  pilgrim that  life isn't always free of shoogles!  Recreation, prayer, reading, walking, people, food -  in no order of priority - these are part of daily life, unless they are squeezed out by that over-determined work ethic that Sabbath is meant to interrupt and thus reset life to normal! So these are mostly what I'll be doing a refresher course in! That way I'll cope with the shoogles and nae fa' in. (shoogle is a variation of 'shog' which means 'to wobble from side to side' - 18th century NE of Scotland).

Baptist Theology Consultation - a very good week

Just back from Manchester where I met with 30+ British Baptists all enthusiastic about doing theology in context. Held at Luther King House (shown in the two photos in different seasons - great place for a retreat / conference). Originally the brainchild of Professor Paul Fiddes, Baptists Doing Theology in Context isn't a conference but a consultation. It's a place where we come to share what we are already working on, thinking about, exploring, mostly as that arises in the context of our ministry and lives; it is a place where 'prayer is valid.' Those who come are committed to theology by collaboration, participating in a fellowship of thought in which friendships grow and our own limited grasp of faith is strengthened and enlarged.

The papers as indicated earlier were varied in content and approach, each of them evidence of serious engagement with truth that can be elusive, disturbing, renewing and transforming, and shared in a safe place where the main pre-requisite is a love of shared enquiry within the broad context of Baptist identity and loyalty to Christ. Varied viewpoints, differing backgrounds, any number of personal  academic interests, a pervasive sense of seriousness that never precludes fun, exchanges of viewpoint, judgement and opinion moderated by respect and intellectual  fairness; these set the spirit of the occasion. Everyone who brought a paper or a contribution to share, made themselves vulnerable by offering their thinking as a gift to the rest - I have notes from those I was able to attend which will become part of my own continued following after the way of Christ and the reality of God. I don't want to mention highlight contributions - that would be about my personal preferences. Quality of research, reflection and thought is judged not by  personal taste, but by the integrity of those for whom a discipleship of the intellect is an important path traceable on their landscape.

High points for me were to do with people - I met Andy Goodliff finally after repeated blog exchanges; he is as lively and theologically alert over coffee as at his keyboard. I met Catriona again and attended her paper on (local) church history as a resource for practical theology. Clare whom I've know for a good while now, and who was studying in Aberdeen  while I was minister there, continues to work with faithful persistence in a place where the circumstances are hard but the people are well worth the sacrifices made to continue supporting them in their shared life. (Indeed  - ditto for Catriona whose own ministry requires similar faithful tenacity, and is resourced from deep vocational wells). Briefly encountered Sean the Baptist just back from holiday and looking the picture of rude health - rude and healthy? -  anyway looking good! Talking with all the various participants - none of us have life easy - for some theology has to be done in a hard place - it becomes clear that those who think theology is a rarefied intellectual hobby, or a diversion from 'real' life, should talk with some of these real life theologians. Some of them I simply admire and quietly note the importance of new friendships being incorporated into prayer for each of them.

So. A good three days. I'm on sabbatical in a couple of days and now tidying up emails 'n stuff. The blog will continue but with occasional hiatuses (is that the plural?) I promised a post on Balentine on Job to one of my new friends from this week. It'll appear soon, Robert!

 I'd asked several people to lead us in our prayers and they each set our thinking, talking and searching within the holy brackets of prayerful attentiveness, to God, and then to each other. I had time to catch up with several folk I don't see nearly often enough - and talking to them reminds me of why I feel that way.

Baptists Doing Theology in Context Consultation. August 26-29, at Luther King House, Manchester

Tuesday I'm off to the Baptists Doing Theology in Context Consultation. Not taking the laptop so won't be blogging till the weekend. I've included the menu of papers below, with apologies to participants who are noted here only by surname. The overarching theme of the Consultation is 'The Wisdom of this World', and a keynote address will be delivered by Professor Paul Fiddes, sure to be a theological and intellectual highlight for all of us. Paul has been a major inspiration and encouragement for Baptists to engage together in theological reflection and pastorally constructive consultation. His own theological writings are exemplary of a theology that frutifully combines generous breadth in its ecumencial debts, and clear historical and theological focus in exploring and affirming the essentials of  a Baptist identity recovering its confidence.

Beyond that the idea of the consultation is that there will be three papers offered by particpants in each Open Session (five of these), all based on work they are doing within their own vocational context. Each of the College Principals will lead a plenary session based on their Paper, which will tackle some aspect of contemporary culture and attempt to hear and interpret the wisdom of this world as those who live by a more radical wisdom. It is going to be a theologyfest reflecting the remarkably wide range of theological interest amongst Baptists in the UK. I'll do a report here sometime over the coming weekend. After which I will be on sabbatical leave - a promised disengagement that may take me a week or two to adjust to.

Papers Offered for Baptists Doing Theology in Context

Topics and Timetable

 

Name	Paper Title	Time
Langford	“God in the Conversation: An Alternative to the Business Model of Church Meeting.”	Tue 4.pm
Vincent	“Living with the Bible Today: The Rhetoric and the Reality.”	Tue 4.pm
Presswood        &McBeth	“Embracing Eleanor: A Response to the Apology for Slavery.”	Tue 4.pm
Holyer	“Something Different – Theology Now.”	Wed 9.30
Humphreys	“The Provenance of John 8.-11. Some Light from Statistics.”	Wed 9.30
Kidd (Rosemary)	“‘And when was it we saw you a stranger and welcomed you?’ (Mat.25.38) Engaging with Asylum Seekers.”	Wed 9.30
Bottoms	“Spiritual Direction in the Service of the Kingdom of God".	Thurs 9.30
Carter	“Labelling ‘the sinners’ in Luke’s Gospel.”	Thurs 9.30
Colyer	“The Geometry of God.”	Thurs 9.30
Goodliff	“From dedication to presentation: a study of Baptist Order of Service for Infants.”	Thurs 4.pm
Gorton	“Doing Theology: History for the Health of the Church.”	Thurs 4.pm
Gotobed	“Ministerial Formation, Pastoral Experience and Practical Theology.”	Thurs 4.pm
Philips	“Wotsername!”	Fri 9.30
Thacker	“The Significance of Richard Dawkins' Atheistm for Christians and Others Today.”	Fri 9.30
Haymes	“The Communion of Saints.”	Fri 9.30
	Plenary Papers by College Principals
Finamore	“Atonement in Novel and Film.”	Tue 2.30pm
Wright	“Theological Topography – The stones cry out!”	Tue 7.30
Kidd	“From Cave Painting to Icons.”	Wed 7.30
Gordon	“Giving poets their place: Why Theologians should read Carol Ann Duffy.”	Thurs 11.am
Weaver	“Twenty Four Hour News.”	Thurs 7.30
Ellis	“Sport, Culture and Theology.”	Fri 11.am

Happy Birthday Brian : Parties, friendship and human life well lived

Celebrations are important acts of community building and friendship sustaining. This weekend we celebrated the 50th birthday of a great friend we've known and journeyed with since 1978. A shared meal in a cool, place-to-go-to type restaurant in Aberdeen, a band that knows how to sing blues and soul, a brief but moving acknowledgement of the importance of friendship and family as the given context for our spiritual and human maturing, a huge birthday cake and a lot of long time friends in one place. While our newly turned 50 year old host spoke of people who had been an inspiration and support, the rest of us had our own thoughts of admiration, affection and gratitude for the capacity of people like himself, to live unselfishly, being there in the background or foreground as part of the peculiar and essential landscape of our lives.

We came away from Aberdeen aware of the need for a modern equivalent of 'blest be the tie that binds, our hearts in Christian love'. The sentiments of the old hymn are fine, they're just too sentimental for contemporary experience to feel comfortable with - I think. For some time now I've been impatient with the use of community at every turn as the term to be used for people gathering together, working together, living together, worshipping together. It's not the experience of togetherness I'm uncomfortable with - I suppose I'm looking for something that qualifies the kind of community, the nature of relationship, the basis of commitment. For myself, I am working with other words like friendship, hospitality, welcome, laughter, companionship, even partnership providing it's minus all commercial connotations. 

Amongst the important tasks we undertake for our own good, paradoxically for the good of others also, is the careful maintenance and repair of friendships. An interesting piece of research, study and practice for a sabbatical - examine the fabric of our lives, and the friendships woven through it, and do the necessary restoration. There is considerable skill, and craft in such relational care, and friendship building. 'I no longer call you servants, but friends.....'.  Few of Jesus apparently incidental comments are more  revealing  of what it meant for Jesus to embody and live out a full and true humanity - and to call the likes of the disciples, and us, his friends. In any audit, review or appraisal of my life and work - I'd want quality of friendship to come before most other things - including the friendship of God in Christ which For Christians is the energy source of that faithfulness, affection and trust which are integral to all other friendships.

Sabbatical, and Sabbath as the Creation of Repose

The words: "On the seventh day God finished His work" seem to be a puzzle. Is it not said: "He rested on the seventh day"? ... "What was created on the seventh day? Tranquility, serenity, peace and repose [menuha]."

There is happiness in the love of labor, there is misery in the love of gain. Many hearts and pitchers are broken at the fountain of profit. Selling himself into slavery to things, man becomes a utensil that is broken at the fountain.

He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. He must go away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling his own life. He must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of man.

These three almost random quotations from Heschel's book The Sabbath, at least partially explain why I'm excited, a wee bit apprehensive, deeply appreciative, and a bit introspective. In a week's time I will be on Sabbatical. And next week I am at the Baptists Doing Theology in Context Consultation - so Sabbath soon.

The first quotation indicates the theological rootedeness of Sabbath in the activity and creativity of God, the balance of work and rest. The word 'menuha' refers to a quality of composed repose, of trustful enjoying of what is and of letting be, and something that is getting harder to find in the high octane, performance driven ways of living that reward productivity, excellence and achievement. Sabbath is one way of demonstrating the counter-achievement - of not exhausting the core and source of our own vitality.

The second quotation is important for those of us who call what we do vocation.Years ago Luther insisted, rightly, that every Christian's vocation is to be conformed to the image of Christ, and serve Christ in the place where God has called us. Now I've always known the work of theological education, just as pastoral ministry, is a non-profit-making activity. But for  us purpose-driven* Christians the warning isn't about profit measured in money - it's the insidious equivalent of achievement, results, publicly demonstrated success, which all unnoticed can become a religion of works in which work and results become the criterion of worth. Heschel's image is telling and  clear - 'a utensil broken at the fountain' - to lose the capacity to hold the essentials of life. Evangelical activism can too easily become a dependence, the spiritual addiction of doing, that is sustained by an inward restlessness that doesn't know when, or how, to be still. A time of Sabbath enables a recovery of equlibrium, a rediscovery of our own dispensability and also of our dependence - on the grace that neither needs nor demands our works. (*Mischievous question - what would a purpose-driven Sabbatical look like??? Would the book The Purpose-Driven Sabbatical be a good task-oriented, time-limited goal to set while on sabbatical?)

'The betrayal of embezzling our own lives' - the idea that we filch, embezzle, steal, misappropriate, who we are and what we were made for by an overemphasis on our own work isn't new. But Heschel's way of putting it highlights why overwork is theologically suspect - it is to secretly steal what it is not ours to possess. The life God has given is to be lived, not lost in living. And Sabbath as a life principle is simply that, a principle that preserves life. I have a feeling that 'the profanity of clattering commerce' has some application also to the way doing displaces being, so preoccupied with serving God that God himself goes unnoticed - and unloved.

Sabbath is a gift from God. Sabbatical is a gift too - from those who by adding to their own work create space and time. The remarkable group of people who are my colleagues and friends in the Scottish Baptist College, are making such a time of Sabbatical leave possible. I'm well aware of what that will mean in extra work and responsibility for all of them. That's the point of the reference made at the start, of being deeply appreciative as Sabbath time approaches. Their vocational faithfulness, giftedness and work enables Sabbath to happen for me - I receive that as generous gift, and am grateful for the unselfish giving that makes it possible.

Pencil Notes in the Margin: The Vision of Denise Levertov

We are living in a time of dread and of awe, of wan hope and of wild hope; a time when joy has to the full its poignance of a mortal flower, and deep content is rare as some fabled Himalayan herb. Ordinary speech no longer suffices. (Denise Levertov, 'Great Posessions', in New and Selected Essays (New Directions, 1992), 120.)

The grandeur of real art...is to rediscover, to grasp again, and lay before us that reality from which we become more and more separated as the formal knowledge which we substitute for it grows in thickness and imperviousness - that reality which there is grave danger we might die without having known and yet which is simply our life. (Marcel Proust, Time Retrieved, quoted in Levertov)

Twenty and more years ago, when this essay was first written Levertov had already diagnosed the malaise that was settling over a world  increasingly and anxiously uncertain about the future it was busy creating. This essay, 'Great Possesions', she explores the above quotation from Proust, the 'great Possessions which are our real life'.  And she argues that poetry may be the one source  of 'song that suffices to our need.' I have long read and listened to Levertov's voice, and tried to see with her vision; the political and ethical edges, the importance of poems 'to inform us of the essential', her commitment to an aesthetic of poetry that pays attention to human significance as revealed in the ordinary everydayness of experience, and does so by 'naming and praising what is'.

Libraries as Supermarkets for the Imagination

Thinking about my earlier life recently - triggered by reading someone else's memoirs - I realised that I could remember the great freedom of mind and expansiveness of spirit that mobile, local and public libraries brought into an otherwise routine and limited life. Routine and limited for various obvious reasons – we lived in the country at a time when working folk couldn’t afford cars, TV was OK but not the pervasive and persuasive time waster it is now, being in the country there weren’t many options for after school activity. Well, anyway, I’ve always been a reader – from Corn Flake packets to Reader’s Digest, newspapers, and at every stage and phase of life, books.

From primary 5 ( I was 9 or 10) I remember the large leather suitcase with LIBRARY stamped on it, which was brought round the classes on a trolley each Friday afternoon for us to choose a book and return the one borrowed last week. That's where I first read Kidnapped, The Invisible Man and Children of the New Forest. Then there was the local library at East Kilbride
in the early 60's when it was a new new town, and the library a new glass sided shiny building. That's where I developed a never lost interest in biography, stories that were real because the people were real, and in stories about animals, and in which animals are the narrators – so Watership Downdidn’t require the mental re-adjustment others felt they had to make.

Then there were the Carluke and Lanark Public Libraries, which supported my reprehensible Western phase. I must have read dozens of not very politically correct stories of stereo-typed goodies and baddies - that was before I graduated to Alistair Maclean and Desmond Bagley adventures, Evelyn Anthony espionage, a long phase of Douglas Reeman (naval war), Hammond Innes and even a few of Neville Shute.

But in those libraries I also began to read history, which along with biography I think accounts for my lifelong interest in the history of ideas and the people who have them! My current love for history, who we were before we became who we are, came into being against the best efforts of the gentlest most boring teacher I ever had to immunise all pupils against ever catching any long term infection or enthusaism for history. Her nickname was Texas, on account of her slow drawl, in which she enunciated word for word and with sing-song, lilting pathos, her handwritten notes from a blue jotter, concerning the various demeanours and misdemeanours of the key players in the Scottish Reformation and the various fates they met. At 13 years old, I couldn’t have cared less about the young, innocently foolish, (or even culpably stupid) Mary Queen of Scots, though I was a bit more sympathetic to the verbally violent theological hard man John Knox.

It took me several years, a conversion experience and a life-changing call to ministry to get me inside a history book again with serious intent. Having left school with nil points as far as qualifications were concerned, and sure God was calling me to be a minister I had to get some Highers. One of them was History, another English and a third French. The first two have remained lifelong enthusiasms. French I can still read well enough but have all but lost spoken French.  More later………

When email is easier than conversation

From AOL News on the work practices of desk workers:

A survey of over 1,200 office staff found that most admitted that better communications made them lazy because it was easier to email someone than meet face to face.

The study, by employment law firm Peninsula, showed that seven out of 10 workers described themselves as unfit because they sat at their desks all day.

Managing director Peter Done said: "Modern technology has made people lazy. It has even got to the point where employees prefer to send each other emails to someone sitting in the same room, just so they don't have to engage in a spoken conversation."

"This over reliance on technology is taking away the social side of people's jobs and leaving workers too lazy to bother with exercise."

I had a conversation the other day about a moratorium on the word "community" unless it is used with some sense of what is meant by it. So. Amongst the things I mean by it are two principles implied in the titles of two books. These six words describe a basic philosophy I've long subscribed to and tried to live - "respect for persons," and "persons in relation". If community is the working out of human relationships then the interchange of human beings is integral, essential and defining, and that interchange presupposes respect and relationship between persons.

So it matters that I see a face, hear a voice, be present to and with the other person, share at least in the broad outlines of a life story, care and be interested in who someone is and what other than work goes on in their lives. The email exchange is a highly efficient and useful tool for some purposes; sure, a conversation can be tiring, less informationally focused and time consuming. But a conversation isn't a tool - it isn't only a means of communication - it is an opportunity for human relationships to be kept open, for understanding to have a chance, for coming to know those with whom we work, however tangentially. Conversation maintains those bridges that enable us to travel freely into each other's world, at least far enough to know and understand those who live there.

The workplace community is sometimes called a "team", and "team-building" has become an important priority in a shared workplace - it's hard to see how emails do it better than conversation. Respect for persons, and persons in relation, are phrases which provide a minimal sub-structure for workplace practice. As a Christian, I follow One whose way of encountering people was the expression of the love of God. The conversations of Jesus are told with great delicacy and sharp observation by the Evangelists. And while I find the 'What would Jesus Do' question is often clarifying, it  can be frustrating when the situation is anachronistic. Would Jesus send an email or go speak to the person along the corridor? Would the Word who became flesh, reduce the Word to texting? I've a feeling Jesus would have preferred human faces to digital screens, and an embodied voice instead of electronic cyphers.

Now to send an email suggesting a meeting to talk over the matter.....? That uses the tool but doesn't reduce the person we contact to mere recipient of the information WE want to pass on. It sets up a meeting - of persons, faces and minds. 

Disappointing Excellence

We are having the best GB Olympic performance ever. The tally of medals is 11 gold and a couple of handfuls of silver and bronze. And yet time and again in the commentating and interviews the word disappointed and disappointing have been used. Either an athlete didn't make it to the final, or they did but didn't get a medal, or they got the medal but not the gold, ONLY a silver. Now I can understand some athletes being disappointed - it's natural and human to be disappointed when our highest hopes and expectations collide with the reality of personal limitations and other competitor's abilities. What I find it hard to tolerate is commentators and pundits using such a word for people who have worked so hard, whose dedication and personal investment in their event is huge.

I'm not disappointed in any of our competitors all of whom will have done their best, whether or not they feel they did themselves justice. Many of them have recorded personal bests and lifetime bests - for goodness sake what more can be asked. I can feel for and with the women's fours rowing team having a third silver in three consecutive Olympics, and their disappointment is very understandbale. But I hope none of us couch spectators have the small-mindedness to be so disappointed their silver wasn't gold that we underestimate the achievement behind that silver - likewise the men's eights.

Excellence is about a person performing to their potential - that may be good enough to win, but if it isn't it's good enough. Disappointing excellence is one of the sillier oxymorons.

OK. Got that clear. I'm looking forward to the rest of the games and am sure I won't be disappointed. If I keep using my exercise bike will I get thighs like Chris Hoy? Probably not, in which case I'll be....disappointed!