Talking about how Christians make such a mess of living with difference and diversity in their understanding of their faith, a very good friend once remarked, "The way you relate to people demonstrates your conception of God."
Those who prefer conflict to reconciliation and argument to dialogue; those who see gentleness as weakness; those for whom openness to revision of thought is called compromise, and theological peacemaking is the culpable surrender of perma-fixed dogma; those who think certainty means the same as faith; those who believe that humanly framed theological propositions can be relied on to adequately express the mystery of sovereign self-emptying love as revealed in Jesus Christ; those whose standpoint is on that kind of terrain will have one kind of God.
But it will be hard to square that God with the God revealed and made known in Jesus Christ; the One in whom God was and is reconciling the world to himself; in whom the fulness of God was pleased to dwell in bodily form, in whom the Father who blesses all peace-makers as God's children is finally and definitively revealed; this God whose defining nature is love, and whose love is defined by the Cross.
I find this argument utterly compelling, and biblical in the most profound and searching sense of that often abused adjective - biblical. Amongst my theological and biblical ambitions (can you have such things?), for the next six months is to immerse myself in Colossians, that unparalleled exploration of what it is Christians claim when they confess, "Jesus is Lord!" - and in doing so bow in adoration before the One who is "the image of the invisible God..in whom all the fullness of God dwelt bodily", and the One through whom "God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things in heaven and on earth, making peace through the blood of his cross."
The remarkable sculpture which illustrates this post is by Lyn Constable Maxwell. It was commisioned in 1994 and is titled ‘The
Crucified and Risen Christ’. It adorns All Saints Pastoral Centre,
London Colney.
The first three bible commentaries I ever bought.....and read
My biblical library has two or three commentaries on each Bible book - and on a number of the more substantial books, quite a bit more than three. As newer or better commentaries become available (though newer doesn't always mean better), I happily weed out those that have been superseded. Which keeps my biblical work up to date and keeps my library within the limits of the bookshelves. But in all the culls and clearouts, the new additions and the jettisoned, there are commentaries I'd never let go.
And amongst them all are several I bought in my earliest years of Christian study. Not many of them would be called classics, benchmarks or definitive. At least not by others. But from the start of my Christian life, my spiritual development has always been closely indexed to my exegetical growing up. Taking text seriously, reading Scripture and hearing the Word of Christ opening up the Scriptures; trying to read the Bible from a heart informed by honest study.
The words 'benchmark', 'gold-standard', 'definitive' are too loosely thrown around by those who churn out the publishers blurb, those literary spin doctors who endorse, commend and give borrowed authority. And sometimes they boldly say 'destined to become a classic'. Maybe so. But isn't a classic a book that has proved itself, that bears rereading, that has enduring value for its content and insights, that has the capacity to address universal human questions, or to transcend limits of time and idiom? Those amongst other critieria? So a 'classic in its field', say a classic commentary - what would that be? And which commentaries would any of us hold up as such an example?
I'm happy to hear suggested classics from those who use commentaries. Meantime the reason for this post was a revisit I made to one of the first commentaries I ever bought...and read. Not all commentaries are readable. By their nature they are somewhere between a reference book to be consulted on a word, phrase, verse or section of text, or to be one of several perspectives being weighed as part of the comparing of evidence, perspective and interpretation that helps overcome our subjective often distorting individual preferences. That's why I have several commentaries on each biblical book. Not all from the same publisher; or the same theological perspective; or with the same exegetical approach.
And in all those years some commentaries have been for me, and without the say-so of blurb writers, benchmarks, definitive of my approach to the text, and thus for me, classic commentaries. One of them is pictured here. Published in 1976, the year of my ordination. I paid £2.25 for it, in the John Smith University Bookshop of Stirling University. There isn't a single word of endorsement or publisher's blurb. So if the publisher were to reprint it (the only Amazon copy is currently priced at £46.25), I'd happily do a wee endorsement, thus:
Or words to that effect! Wonder if Wipf and Stock would republish it? Think I'll suggest it......it's a classic.
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