Living Wittily

Conflict, conciliation and the sole authority of the Colossian Christ

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.

C S Lewis, "No dreamer, but thy dream."

Prayer

Master, they say that when I seem
    To be in speech with you,
Since you make no replies, it's all a dream
    --One talker aping two.

They are half right, but not as they
    Imagine; rather, I
Seek in myself the things I meant to say
    And lo! the wells are dry.

Then, seeing me empty, you forsake
    The Listener's role, and through
My dead lips breathe and into utterance wake
    The thoughts I never knew.

And thus you neither need reply
    Nor can;thus, while we seem
Two talking, thou art One forever, and I
    No dreamer, but thy dream

C.S.Lewis, quoted in James H Trott, A Sacrifice of Praise, (Nashville: Cumberland House, 1999), page 735.

Kenosis - gift, discipline or both?

Helen and Rosemary, thanks for helpful comments pushing the discussion along in these recent posts. Paul's limited use of "kenosis" as a term, but its quite widespread use as a concept in his letters, suggests to me no simple either /or will do, when talking of kenosis as either gift or disciplne. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God at work in you to will and to act according to his good purpose". (Phil 2.12-13).  Enabled by grace to develop and maintain a disposition increasingly Christlike because 'he who began a good work in us will bring it to completion at the day of Christ'.( Phil 1.6), The first ref. above comes immediately following the great kenosis hymn, the first at the outset of the letter.

Gorman's argument isn't so much that we are to work at being kenotic, but that those who are in Christ by faith are being conformed to his image which is kenotic, cruciform and raised from death. I've been asked to preach in August on a text that says this and more, and which I have to say has been programmatic in my own understanding of what Christian existence is and must be, when the reality of Christ crucified and risen becomes not only definitive of existence, but radically redefining in terms of self. 'I am crucified with Christ. I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me, and the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me'. (Gal. 3.20) I can't read those words without realising that the issue of what is gift and what is discipline dissolves into all through grace, all through love, and a grace and love that is inexhaustibly generous, utterly self-giving and radical in transformative intent and power. (Sometime I'd like to write about the influence of autobiography on exegesis - this verse has been paradigmatic in my own spirituality from the beginning because it was "given to me" by two very special people....).

This summer I happen to be re-reading Charles Partee's recent The Theology of John Calvin, while also thinking my way through Gorman's discussion of kenosis and theosis. The union of the believer with Christ has always been seen as important in understanding Calvin's thought ; Partee thinks it is more than that, it is central  to his spirituality.

In a beautiful epigrammatic statement about Christ as source and origin of Christian existence, Calvin says, "As God he is the destination to which we move; as man the path by which we go. Both are found in Christ alone. (Institutes II.2.1) And here is Partee explaining how in Calvin's thought, faith is both human response and divine gift.

"Faith and union with Christ being virtually synonymous means faith is not under human control in initiation and achievement.
According to modern dispositions and assumptions, faith is correlative and interactive. Against Calvin, faith is today understood, at least in part, as my faith. Since theology requires listening and questioning so faith is assumed to include both gift and response. Calvin affirms a human response to the divine gift, but he creditis the response to the work of the Holy Spirit in order to avoid all self-congratulation or self-glorification. Faith is not a human choice made habitual but a divine blessing made continual by union with Christ."
(Charles Partee, The Theology of John Calvin. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009) Page 202-3.

That is as elegant an account of Calvin's theology of faith and response, of gift and obedience, as I've read. And one that answers some of the crude caricatures of Calvin's thought, generated by his enemies, and at times more damagingly those generated post-Calvin by his less pastorally astute friends who claim his name for their theology.

Woe is me! Who is me? The riddle of discovering my - self.

Helen asks about the dilemma of knowing who we are, our true self. "To what extent is 'myself' the 'me' made in the image of God and to what extent is it the human, fallen, sinful 'me' ? 

Perhaps the beginnings of the answer are in the recognition that as human beings we are self-contradictory, our place in the world ambiguous, our moral capacities ambivalent, our lives lived under shadow of judgement yet looking hopefully for light. There is a Romans 7 dilemma we all recognise whether that tortured passage of Romans 7.14-25 refers to Paul's experience, or ours, before or after conversion. Who is this radically uncertain "I" who does what I don't want to do, and who is helpless to do the good I both must and want to do? Why can't I do what I must, be what I am called to be?

Three brief quotations sharpen our dilemma because they each say something true about that mysterious mixture of feeling and knowing, wanting and longing, of conscience and wilfulness, of flesh and soul, mind and spirit, that is this person called me. And the truths don't seem to fit - except in a theology of creation and redemption, of justification and sanctification, of judgement and mercy, and of life through death as the self-giving love of God whose creative purposes persist in pursuing at infinite personal cost, the goal of a redeemed, renewed and reconciled creation.

For you created my inmost being,
you knit me together in my
mother's womb.
I praise you
for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Psalm 139.13,14.

Surely I was sinful at birth,
sinful from the time my mother
conceived me.

Psalm 51.5

“This is my dilemma: I am dust and ashes; frail, wayward, a set of predetermined behavioral responses, riddled with fears, beset with needs, the quintessence of dust, and unto dust I shall return. But there is something else in me. Dust I may be, but troubled dust. Dust that dreams. Dust that has strange premonitions of transfiguration, of a glory in store, a destiny prepared, an inheritance that will one day be my own…So my life is stretched out in a painful dialectic between ashes and glory, between weakness and transfiguration. I am a riddle to myself, an exasperation enigma…this strange duality of dust and glory.”

(Richard Holloway - but I can't find the reference - anybody help to pin this down?)

Miroslav Volf and the embrace of the other - Kenosis as resisting the power of exclusion in the power of the Spirit.

This quoted by Gorman, (page 97), from one of the most profound and important theological works of the last 20 years.

Through faith and baptism the self has been re-made in the image of "the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me". No "hegemonic centrality" closes the self off from the other...For Christians, this "de-centered centre" of self giving love - most firmly centered and most radically open - is the doorkeeper deciding the fate of otherness at the doorstep of the self...The Spirit enters the citadel of the self, de-centers the self by fashioning it in the image of the self-giving Christ, and frees its will so it can resist the power of exclusion in the power of the Spirit of embrace."

From Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace. A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 71, 92.

Miroslav Volf lived with his family through the violence, ethnic cleansing and orchestrated hatred of the Balkan conflicts in the 1990's. He is one of the Christian church's most authoritative and persuasive voices on the subject of living humanely in a pluralistic world, fragmented by fear, hatred, guilt, religious demonisation of the other, and the deep memories that can embed such toxic responses in nationalist and ethnic conflict.

His book Exclusion and Embrace is hard reading - (1) Volf doesn't have an easy style and can be like a mountain guide, sometimes impatient with those who don't keep up;  (2) he is dealing with areas of human experience not many of us are ready to examine, such as the origins of hate and enmity, the relations between fear and prejudice, our capacity to turn on our neighbour, the terror of community validated violence against some of its own members who happen to be different; (3) he isn't content with social and psychological analyses of the problem of ethnic conflict and religiously driven hatreds. He insists on a Christian theological exploration of the root causes in sin, communal and individual, banal and radical, and the even more radical cure of new creation in Christ; and he does so by constructing a theology that centres on what God has done, is doing and will do in Christ by the power of the Spirit.

The book is a theologically determined, philosophically sophisticated and biblically insistent study of the existential collision between the Gospel of Jesus Christ and our all too human addictions to the preservation of the self, the will to power and personal security, and thus the elimination of any "other" perceived as threat. Volf is a frequent conversation partner in chapter 4 of Gorman's book entitled 'While we were enemies. Paul, the Resurrection and the End of Violence'. I'll do a separate post on that chapter where Gorman makes an explicit link between non-violence and kenosis. That's a connection I hadn't before made, but now seems so obvious - turning the other cheek as a kenotic act?

Kenosis in Laura's Tea Room at Carmunnock

Kenosis - a theological term that means self-emptying. Used as a description of how love does not seek its own interests but gives itself in the service of others.

Laura's Tea Room yesterday morning. (Read more about it here. And see the notice below - but note it is now Sunday it is closed, not Tuesday). An oasis of peace and refreshment in a busy life - best coffee for miles, home baking consistently excellent (cherry and coconut scones...mmmmmmm!!!), and customer service always pleasant, attentive, and efficient...and then much more.

Consider. A couple come in and make for the corner table. Both are hearing impaired and neither can speak. Communication is by sign and touch. The young woman who has just served us, goes over and begins a conversation with them, using only her hands - with considerable skill, laughter and patience, and in no time orders are taken. Sheila and I were well impressed, and deeply moved.

Later when leaving we mentioned all this to the young woman (whose name we know), asking if she had trained in sign language. No she said. She learned it for that customer who has now been coming for a year or two. They taught her a few letters of the alphabet, she borrowed their training booklet, and she learned enough from it to be able to greet them and serve them.

See the young folk nowadays.....wonderful!  Customer service - never seen anything like it. Kenosis isn't only a theological term people write books about. It's a disposition towards others that can entirely transform their life experience. It involves putting our selves out - in order to welcome the other in.

Christian existence shaped around the reality of cross and resurrection

In his comment Tony notes the important link between the nature of God the Creator and the redemptive response to the fallenness of creation by God. Self emptying and other-giving love is the characteristic and outward movement of God. In the gift of life, created and redeemed, self-emptying love reveals what is eternally true of the heart of the Triune God.

The central thrust of Gorman's book is that kenotic love is characteristic of God, Father, Son and Spirit, and such kenosis is not passive surrender but takes intentional cruciform shape. Christian existence, defined by our being in Christ and Christ in us, and thus by the indwelling of individual Christian and Christian communities, is therefore shaped around the reality of the Cross. "To be truly human is to be Christlike, which is to be Godlike, which is to be kenotic and cruciform." (Gorman page 39) Gorman understands Philippians 2.6-11 to be Paul's master story about Christ, and with others such as NT Wright, Stephen Fowl, Richard Bauckham, translates "though he was in the form of God" as meaning not only "though" but "because". Kenosis, self-emptying love, is not a one off act of unilateral obedience - it is of the very nature of God. Heaven is not surprised by the self-emptying love of the Son - kenosis is only to be expected in a Triune relationship of self giving love in eternal communion. It is human beings whose default view of God insists power, sovereignty and exalted status are of the essence, the core realities of who God is; on the contrary, "divinity has kenotic servanthood as its essential attribute" (Gorman, 31).

The cross and resurrection of Jesus, as actions of self-emtpying love and its vindication, reveal the heart of God through a narrative of surrendering love absorbing rather than inflicting violence, loving enemies rather than destroying them, but yet doing all this in a way that absorbs finally and fully, the fatefull consequence of sin and negating them by God's great Yes in Christ. The political and ecclesial implications of Christian witness being shaped by such cruciform kenosis, vindicated and energised by God's raising of Jesus, are yet to be worked out by the 21st Century Church often obsessively concerned about its own relevance, influence and even survival. Such a theology of cross and resurrection, as self-emptying love, points to a radically different discipleship, and in our time, a radically different way of being the Body of Christ.

Recognising some will be uneasy at the apparent loss of power and majesty implied in the notion of a self-emptying cruciform God, Gorman approves an important comment by John Webster( Professor of Systematic Theology in Aberdeen - and for me essential reading):

"Webster rightly defines God's holiness, not as pure majesty, but as "majesty in relation". Because God's majesty and God's relationality cannot be separated, we must understand  God's majesty in light of God's revealed relationality. We do not simply hold the majesty and relationality of God in tension; with Paul, we must see them in concert, a unison revealed in the power of the cross. God is not a God of power and weakness but the God of power in weakness...we must always keep the divine activity and divine atributes together: God's actions  are self revelatory, the expression of God's essence and character. Thus if the cross is theophanic [God revealing], God must be understood as essentially cruciform." ( Gorman page 33)

I'm not finished with this book yet!

Nationalistic, military power is not the power of the cross....

The kenotic cruciform God is the substance of divine holiness. The embedded theology of most Christians still revolves around a non-cruciform model of God's holiness, character and power, and a crucial corrective is needed.

This brings us inevitably back to politics, to the "normal" god of civil religion that combines patritoism and power. Nationalistic, military power is not the power of the cross, and such misconstrued notions of divine power have nothing to do with the majesty or holiness of the triune God known in the weakness of the cross. In our time any "holiness" that fails to see the radical, counter imperial claims of the gospel is inadequate at best. Adherence to a God of holiness certainly requires the kind of personal holiness that many associate with sexual purity. That is one dimension of theosis. But particpiation in a cruciform God of holiness also requires a corollary vision of life in the world that rejects domination in personal, public or political life - a mode of being that is often considered realistic or "normal". Kenotic divinity and a corollary kenotic community constitute "both the best possible commentary" on Paul and a "frontal assault" on "normalcy".

Michael J Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God. Kenosis, Justification and Theosis in Paul's Narrative Soteriology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), Page 128.
Picture "The Face of the Saviour of the World", Noehani Harsono, Indonesia)

As one who stands in a radical spiritual tradition, when it comes to theology and its impact on our civil and political life, I'm all for asking serious questions about normalcy, status quo, use and abuse of power, patriotism, and the religious validation of national and international exercises of political and military power. Time we started more faithfully attending to "the counter imperial claims of the gospel". Hm?

(Wish Michael Gorman had chosen a better sub-title for his book- good fun memorising the sub-title and going into Wesley Owen to ask if it's in stock though.....  :))

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.

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 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.

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:

" This commentary is written with elegant brevity and an unembarrassed enjoyment in explaining ancient texts in accessible language. In 220 pages we have "multum in parvo" - Ephesians in 94 pages and 24 footnotes. Caird is allergic to academic jargon and is the kind of scholar who knows so much about the text and its world that he feels no need to prove it by killing the text under an avalanche of scholarly see how much I know footnotes. This is a book all scholars should read and reckon with - as an example of commentary writing that serves the Church well by serving the text faithfully."

Or words to that effect! Wonder if Wipf and Stock would republish it? Think I'll suggest it......it's a classic.  

Sanctus! Sanctus! Sanctus! Jessye Norman on Youtube

I have a double CD of Jessye Norman (pictured). Had it for years and years - obviously so, I got it for my 40th birthday to go with my then state of the art sound system - long since superceded. On these worn but cherished CDs she sings Amazing Grace and The Holy City, both of them sung with a voice that is breathtaking in its control, passion and capacity to unsettle and then excite even the most complacent listener.

But the track I remember first hearing on this album is the Sanctus from Gounod's St Cecilia Mass. And that was for me a musical watershed moment. I'd heard some classical sacred music before, but never, never, the overwhelming power of a voice that commanded such a profound and responsive attentiveness to the music and its content that it could only be described as a call to worship. From the brief introduction of the solo flute, to the crashing climax, and then the final quiet reprise of the flute solo, Jessye Norman's voice has made it impossible for me to read Isaiah 6 ever again, without hearing that majestic soprano voice compelling adoration and urging utter surrender to the one who is called, Holy! Holy! Holy!

I've just listened to and watched the original performance (again) on YouTube. If you're jaded, complacent, anxious, living with limited horizons, feeling deprived of beauty and the energy to care about it; or if you are the opposite of all the foregoing, and life is good and getting gooder; or if today is neither up nor down and likely to be much like any other. Go listen, watch and see the world differently, and love the God who gives the gift of such music. You can find it on YouTube here.  And Amazon had 10 used copies when I checked last night.