Living Wittily

What is the justification for the justification debate?

Evangelicals and New Testament scholars, and Evangelicals who are not New Testament scholars, and New Testament scholars who are not Evangelicals, are all very exercised just now about the doctrine of justification. There are those who hold the Reformation Perspective on Paul, (Luther modified by Calvin), those who hold the New Perspective on Paul, those who hold the revised or beyond New Perspective on Paul, and those who are in the business of writing newer and bigger books on what all this actually means.

Just now and again I begin to wonder if Paul could possibly have meant anything so complex as the massive books by people like Wright, Dunn and Campbell suggest. Then in my more fanciful moments I wonder how, within the life of the Triune God where self-giving, outgoing love is creative, redemptive and eternally purposeful in God's mission to a broken world, such exegetical scholasticism, theological polemic, and conceptual gymnastics is viewed. In other words what is the justification for Christian scholars argy-bargying (is that how you spell it) over how to reduce what God has done in Christ to words that in the end will have to describe the indescribable, define the indefinable, contain and constrain the mystery of faith, and use terminology that requires in two most recent publications 1200 pages and a million or so of such inadequate words to do so.

OK. I oversimplify, unjustifiably. But do these books overcomplicate unjustifiably, since we are talking about justification here? So, what justification is there for serial book sized assertions and retorts, positions and assaults, and seasonal contests such as Piper versus Wright, Dunn versus Wright, Dunn versus Piper, Campbell versus Wright and Dunn and Piper, with others in the wing should the protagonists tire and someone else take up the exegetical cudgels and theological brickbats to show where each is wrong and they are right. 

So with some relief I found someone who brings an admirable clarity to the entire discussion. I refer to the theologian most loved by people who try to live the reconciled life rather than argue about it, who don't need to exhaustively parse their vocabulary of choice before trusting in the God who in Christ justifies the ungodly, and whose goal as Christians is, well, to justify their existence as Christians by living the life of faith enabled by the grace of God in Christ to love and serve a broken but God-loved world:

Justification: (1) function of word processors that makes sure everything is tidied up satisfactorily at the end of the line (2) divine, grace-filled initiative that makes sure everything is tidied up at the end of the line.

Adrian Plass, Bacon Sandwiches and Salvation. The A-Z of the Christian Life (London: Paternoster, 2007), 97.

Whatever else Holman Hunt's painting might portray, it does make me wonder if Christ is knocking unnoticed by those inside, who are so busy debating the finer points of their particular take on theology, they won't open the door. But jesus knocks. And not so they will let him into their conceptually intense living space, but to invite them outside with Jesus into a world where what is needed is more lanterns!

Arch-episcopal fun, local authority foolishness, and food to restore the soul....

OK. This photo has come by a convoluted route, latterly via Maggi and Ben, and it's just too good to not post on every blog hosted by admirers of the finest Archbishop for yonks. Those who criticise Rowan Williams for being too intelligent to be an Archbishop, for being out of touch and having no idea about the life of ordinary folk, could do with some of the unself-conscious playfulness on display here. "Except you become as a little child..." is an appropriate admonition that comes to mind. I wonder how some of the more rasping journalists would have coped with the serious reality of children's play in a way that both enjoys and affirms the life of the child.

And then to another kind of foolishness altogether. You know how we are all to become energy conscious, climate change aware, careful where we put our big stomping carbon footprints? So yesterday driving down near Braehead and we observe the Council workers cutting the roadside grass with muckle big flymos, wearing the regulation fluorescent orange overalls. It was drizzly wet and windy, and the massacred grass lay in green clumps and apparently needed tidying up. So behind the flymo operator came another toiler in the rain - not with a grass rake to gather it into compostable organic stuff. Naw, naw. Nothing so environmentally responsible. he was sporting one of the big petrol fuelled blowers with which he was blowing the slaughtered grass into the adjoining fields, and doing so against the prevailing stiff breeze! Apart from the obvious non composting policy, here we have a machine that cuts but doesn't collect the grass (petrol fuelled), and one which blows grass against the wind, using petrol to disperse what the wind would disperse in half an hour.

The aforementioned drizzle, pushed into our faces by a stiff breeze, tried its best to waste our walk around the Mugdock reservoir. Nae chance! We knew that when we got back home some of Jim's magnifique home made French onion soup, along with a smoked applewood cheese toastie would restore that inner sense of wellbeing that only comes to those who do the walk and wallow in self-righteousness over a large bowl of immodestly described consummate cuisine.........

Theological education, character formation and competence based outcomes

In their study of the mixed fortunes of the humanities in University education, Klassen and Zimmermann, trace the troubled relationship between the sciences and other ways of knowing such as in the humanities. The move in educational intention from the formation of the person towards a deper knowledge of self and the other, to education as acquiring knowledge and skills to fit the person towards a more effective economic contribution, indicates the triumph of the technological, the pragmatic and the utilitarian.

The Passionate Intellect is a patient exposure of the consequences of this long evolving dichotomy between literary humanism and scientific humanism, between self knowledge and practical knowledge, between knowing who I am (verb, to be) and knowing how to do. Put at its simplest, the book contends that education for literary humanists was conceived as a process of growth in self understanding leading to wisdom and the enrichment of human relations and culture; for scientific humanists education was a process of gaining information about the world, derived from understanding observed objects and phenomena in the world, such knowledge tested and applied with a view to controlling and using the material world towards human benefit.

My interest in these contrasting educational commitments is the tension that is thereby created. The tension between the humanly formative goals of education in virtue and character which have no immediate material or pragmatic benefit to a society. This contrasted with the socially advantageous and humanly beneficial consequences of instilling technological and practical know-how, though with no immediately required prior formation of character, as to how such skills are later to be used. Yet in a theological education we are seeking to combine just such tensions which are not easily held together in the 21st Century University;

• academic excellence in theology and pastoral studies as a chosen subject field
• personal formation in values, virtues and character
• training and acquisition of requisite practical skills and competences.
  

All of which raises some questions that keep me thinking......

What kind of course would be needed to integrate three such desirable educational goals - the intellectual, the ethical and the practical?

Can the inward journey of self-understanding take place at the same time as a process of practical and applied training; can wisdom for its own sake co-exist with utilitarian pragmatism?

Is there such a thing as ethical and theological competence, and if so, how do we help people towards such maturity?

How does the "can do" mentality so valued by technological culture (and the contemporary church), relate to the more hesitant ethical "should I" based on a different scale of values?

In training people for Christian ministry today, is it more important to focus on instilling practical skills and competences or to form and shape a mind towards a way of thinking that is demonstrably, even radically Christian?

If we aim at both, which of the two is fundamental, Christian character or vocational competence?

Can modular delivery and competence based outcomes be shaped to enable a process of Christian theological and ethical formation which is value and virtue focused?

Creation, Darwin and the origin of "The Origin of Species"

Last night went to see "Creation", the new movie about the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. It's more a biographical study of Darwin's family life, particularly the relationship with his wife and children following the unexpected death of his daughter. Decided I don't want to write a review that tries to be cleverly critical of the film 's technical aspects - not my thing anayway; or that attempts to explain the psychology of guilt which when it becomes pathological, is a deeply human and inwardly destructive self-rejection that has roots in life circumstance, our closest relationships and our religious commitments or loss thereof; or that points out the historical liberties taken in order to present such a powerful psychological study of a decade in one man's life; or that defends some particular theory of creation as an act of apologetics dutifully undertaken to correct the theological unsubtleties of some less than convincing intellectual positions.

No. No review.

Just the straightforward admission that I enjoyed it, and that in my view this is a good film. It humanises rather than demonises Darwin; it does not caricature the understandbaly defensive postures of Victorian religion confronted by radical shifts in intellectual, cultural and scientific life; it places the writing of a painstakingly written natural history treatise in its historical, emotional and domestic context; and it does all this with the well practised competence of a BBC costume drama, which in reality it is. No review than - other than to say again, I thoroughly enjoyed it, in the way you do when you take time to try to understand what is so about another person's life, and that the struggle to survive isn't only a theory of life's origins - emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and physically it's the reality and experience we all go through, every day of life.

"For the Christian, truth has the character of trust".

Here's a couple of paragraphs you might want to read and see if it makes you look at or think about the world and all its rich happenings differently:

Christians like any other people with religious beliefs, do hold certain things sacred. We do not meddle with them but hold them in awe and respect. Usually, what we hold to be sacred we also consider mysterious in some way or another. The idea of mystery implies the acknowledgement of a limit to what we can understand: the Trinity, the incarnation, and the resurrection are sacred mysteries; the Bible, the institution of marriage, the celebration  of the Lord's Supper are also commonly considered sacred.

These sacred mysteries Christians would call truths or sources of truth, but to a Christian truth is first and formeost relational. It is not something one can hold at a distance and look at with supposed objectivity. Christians preeminently locate truth in a person; Jesus is the truth. Probably the most important implication of truth as being located in a person is that if a person who is true makes a promise then you can count on this person to make good on his or her promise. For the christian, truth has the character of trust. So the concept of truth is personal and the implication of this concept is relational"

Quite so!

The Passionate Intellect. Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education, Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 30-3.

(I see no reason why a masterpiece of the Annunciation should not be enjoyed in September.......this would be a painting depicting a sacred mystery then?)

Education as an economic investment and theological education as a church loss-leader?

Doing a lot of thinking just now about theological education. Not only how to do it, but what it does. But once we ask the question what theological education can do to, - or for, - or with, a person, we inevitably have to come back to the how question. But then, how we do theological education, decisively influences what that process does to or for people. See what I mean? Needs thinking.

Lots of suggestions out there about mentoring, curacy, learning by mimesis, knowledge transfer, information sharing and observed practice as formative training, transformational learning, community learning through enabled learning communities, the relation of lifelong learning to human wellbeing and development. As a College seeking to be a centre of excellence in training for ministry as part of the mission of God, we are constantly asking questions about the nature and purpose of what we do. Even the choice of terms matter - theological education, training for ministry, ministry formation, transformative learning. (The picture by Van Gogh is redolent with light, harvest, reward for labour, for me a picture of human fruitfulness and the deeper levels of learning to live).

What makes all this both exciting and crucial for the future of the church is the chronic and unstable cultural flux within which we are now living. Universities, are now locked into postures enabling rapid adaptation and responsiveness to market demands dictated by economic and employment prospects. The link between a University's funding by the Government, and the Governmeent's own agenda to enforce value for money and define education as economic investment, has decisively reconfigured educational  priorities. Education becomes synonymous with training, learning is based on competence based outcomes, and success is then judged by employability. If education is primarily an economic investment, and higher education institutions depend on government funding, and students are seen as customers, and society as a market, and education as a product, that market based goal will decisively influence process and then I ask - what does education do to, for and with a person?

Hence my starting question - what does theological education do to, for and with a person? I'm still thinking - and amongst the things I'm thinking is the role of a Christian College in giving witness to a different set of educationally formative priorities. The title of this post hints at where this kind of thinking is likely to lead....are churches willing to invest in the formation of people towards ministry and the development of all God made them to be, and thus enthusiastic that financial cost and deficit are not the primary inidices of value, and that value for money isn't measured in money, but in a transformative process of human growth? Hmmmm?

Conformitas Christi......

L Gregory Jones writes theological ethics. In his approach, the credibility of any theological assertion has to be established through the Christian practices such theologising engenders. Theology to be real has to be embodied, not only in the individual, but in the community that takes the name of Christ. What is believed is most authentically expressed not in words and articulation, but in practice and performance of a life shaped by Christ.

Here's a couple of paragraphs from Transformed Judgment. Toward a Trinitarian Account of the Moral Life (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2008) that have had me thinking again about the how, and why and what of following after Christ. The painting by Caravaggio is a favourite - the young Jesus inviting middle aged Peter and Andrew to follow him.

What is needed is a way of speaking of the prior action of God, namely the saving life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which also calls forth an account of the shape human activity is to take in response. Such an emphasis is found by recovering the relationship between being conformed to Christ and being called to imitate - or as I think is preferable language, to pattern one's life in - Christ. God befriends humanity in Jesus Christ, and in that gracious action, which originates in God alone, humanity is conformed to Christ independently of particular characters, virtues and actions. Grace is the fundamental orientation of Christian life. The context of this conformitas Christi is discovered in the salvation wrought by Christ; it is a salvation revealed throughout the context of his life, deathn and resurrection.

In the light of Jesus friendship, the Christian's vocation, in response to God's prior action in Christ conforming humanity to his righteousness, is to pattern her life in Jesus Christ through discipleship.A person is called and enabled to pattern her life in Jesus Christ because God in Christ has patterned human life into God's life in order to save humanity. Such practices as baptism, eucharist, forgiveness-reconciliation and "performing" the Scriptures are indispensable practices, whereby people learn to become disciples, whereby people learn to be frinds of God and to befriend and be befriended by others. Through such practices, people are aenabled to acquire the habits and skills reflective of the pattern discovered in Jesus Christ." (pages 110-11)

That's about as attractive and complete an account of following after Christ as I've read for a long while. Conformitas Christi. Wouldn't mind a T-shirt with that on it -

Conformitas Christi!

Why does the Church attract M&S types rather than Asda and Aldi types?

This from AOL News, a lesson in missiology that applies not only to the Church of England, but has considerable relvance to midlle class, well resourced, respectably comfortable evangelicalism of varied flavours.

"The Church of England needs to shed its middle class "Marks and Spencer"-only image in order to attract the Asda and Aldi generation of worshippers, a senior bishop has warned. The Rt Rev Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Reading, spoke of his sense of frustration at the view that the Church of England was the "Marks and Spencer" option only, for the highly educated or "suited and booted". Jesus would just as likely have shopped at Asda and Aldi as at Marks and Spencer, he said."

He said: "Even today I meet people who think you have to be highly educated or suited and booted to be a person who goes to church. That's so frustrating. How did it come to this, that we have become known as just the Marks and Spencer option when in our heart of hearts we know that Jesus would just as likely be in the queue at Asda or Aldi?"

"Jesus got us started with church simply. Like this - sitting us down in groups on the grass and telling simple stories. Not simplistic. But certainly not complicated. All his first disciples were down-to-earth people who wanted to know what life was all about."

Of course like all generalisations it sounds a bit unfair; and like all rhetorical overstatements it sounds simplistic. But I didn't find it easy to shut the good Bishop up with a good put down - even if I do sometimes shop at Aldi's and Lidl's myself.

I do wonder about the fairness of my own title for this post though - because the use of the word type is itself a blunt instrument, and act of stereo-typing. Why assume only the highly educated go to M&S? And what evidence that Asda shoppers don't have university Degrees? Still. The Bishop is not wrong about the predominant impression that Christianity is respectable, comfortable, reliably safe, for the quite well resourced, and by and large attracts a better class of, a more respectable type of, a more well-spoken kind of, well, person.

Whereas the inclusive Gospel of Christ wants the Church to declare and demonstrate that there is neither M&S nor Aldi's, John Lewis nor Primark, Sainsbury's or Lidl - in the eyes of the God made known in Christ Jesus, all are to be equally loved, valued and welcomed. The missional challenge for the church then, whatever the denominational flavour, is to create a community in Christ where the least important distinction between us is where we shop. And where the most important distinctive is to embody the indiscriminate love of God.  

The false dualism in spirituality - the active and contemplative.

Fifty years ago Dag Hammarskjold observed with worldly wise perceptiveness that in the modern world the road to holiness lies through the world of action. And he was doing so at the same time as Thomas Merton was drawing seekers of God from the hyper-activity of contemporary life to the contemplative search for silence, solitude and the true self. Action and contemplation - not opposites, but forms of being that are intrinsically human and without which our humanity is diminished, our spirituality thrown out of balance and our Christian obedience reduced to monochrome. Parker Palmer has done important work on human fulfilment and lifelong learning as a life enhancing commitment. His writing often reads like a spirituality of pragamatic outward looking action, commending a lifestyle in which energy, inter-relationship, noise, creativity and work, can be as fulfilling as silence, solitude and retreat. In one book he brings as usual, an important balance to all of this.

People caught in the gap between monastic values and the demands of the active life sometimes simply abandon the spiritual quest. And people who follow a spirituality that does not always respect the energies of action are sometimes led into passivity and withdrawal, into a diminishment of their opwn spirits.

in the spiritual literature of our time, it is not difficult to find the world of action portrayed as an arena of ego and power, while the world of contemplation is pictured as a realm of light and grace. I have often read for example, that the treasure of "true self" can be found as we draw back from active life and enter into contemplative prayer. Less often have I read that this treasure can be found in our struggles to work, create, and care in the world of action.

Parker Palmer, The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity and Caring (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990) p. 2.

My guess is that often the spirituality we settle for is a damaging dualism between what we think of as spiritual and all the other stuff. The point is, all the other stuff is the bulk of what we have to do to live life at all. Work, family, other people; the mobile, the laptop, the car; shopping, home-keeping, travelling; caring for friends, pets and ourselves. And God is in it all, not just the overtly intentional spiritual stuff.

And what's more, God can be just as quickly found, and more deeply encountered, not in the retreat and the deep journey into ourselves, but in the outward journey of work, people, circumstance and happening, in the way we drive, the use of our computer, the texts we send, the meals we cook, the bills we pay, the conversation at the checkout, the blether with the neighbour, the walk with the dog, the train journey and the birthday party. None of these get much mention in the more intense worship songs, in the list of spiritual disciplines or prayer techniques. But for followers of Jesus, the Word made flesh, the life of the body with its energy and capacity to work and transform the world, is a life which seeks to incarnate the love of God, suffusing life with the energy and creative action of the God in whose image we are ourselves made. And in the loving of God in all our activity, something deeply sacramental happens, so that all this ordinary stuff stops being a means to an end and becomes a means of grace. Well, anyway, that's what I think! And the new term starts tomorrow and in the busyness of it, God will be found, and will find us.

(The photo above is of a one hundred year old gardener who fully intends to harvest the vegetables from the seed he is sowing.)

Bible translation and the question of who controls the text as product?

First line of an intercessory prayer heard recently at a morning service in a church, "O Lord, as you have served us very well in the past......."

The following claim, attributed by Craig Blomberg (Evangelical NT scholar) to Al Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Convention: welcoming the publication, from within their own publishing house, of the Holman Christian Standard Bible Mohler spoke of the importance of having "a Bible translation we can control".

Now many a year ago, when the NIV was first published by Zondervan, it was promoted as an "Evangelical" translation. The Principal of the Baptist College then was R E O White, for whom the Greek New Testament was the equivalent of Jeremiah's scroll, and was to be ingested and digested as the very marrow of Christian life and faith. I still haven't met anyone who could match his enthusiasm for grammar, syntax, punctuation, textual criticism, etymology, critical apparatus, lexical investigation, and who quite simply revelled in the work of textual criticism, translation and exegesis, insisting that such disciplined detail showed reverence for words, and the Word. One of his heroes (not sure but think it was J B Lightfoot) spoke of burying his head in a lexicon and raising it in the presence of God.

So when the NIV was being advertised in Christian media as an "Evangelical" translation, he took time in the Greek class to ask the question I've never stopped asking, "Why would evangelicals of all christian people, want a Bible translation that is made in their own image?" By which he meant, and I concur, shouldn't our desideratum be the criterion of accuracy, disciplined faithfulness to the text, refusal to ignore or give in to the pull of our own theological presuppositions, linguistic honesty, scholarly deference before the challenge of the text, respect for the harder reading even if it is theologically inconvenient, honest acknowledgement of the difficulties and of the polar attractions and repulsions of dynamic and formal translation?

So as an Evangelical Christian, when I hear any publishing house or Christian tradition aspire to the control of a translation I have a deep and reluctant to articulate uneasiness. But that first line of the opening prayer I quoted at the start, "O Lord as you have served us so well in the past...", with its unacknowledged assumption of God at our service, may well be the hermeneutical clue I need to explain and interpret my uneasiness. As Blomberg (see here) gently comments, "Funny. I always thought the Bible should control us..." Yes. And I always thought in worship we are at the service of God.