Living Wittily

John Colwell and biography as theology

Thanks to Andy Goodliff for flagging up the new title by John Colwell due to be published by Paternoster in December. John is one of our most original and constructively provocative Baptist theologians. His previous books on ethics, the sacraments and systematic theology through the Church Year are amongst the most valued volumes of those who've read them. Knowing the man, makes them even more trusted as the genuine wrestlings with faith and truth that they are.

This will be a book that combines biography, theology and pastoral reflection. John talks honestly of his experience of bi-polar illness, and does so as a man of faith seeking to make his human condition somehow capable of meaning within that faith. So the book will be theology lived, and tested in the valleys of deep darkness as well as the green pastures and occasional still waters. As one who teaches systematic theology, or dogmatics, or Christian doctrine, I am only too aware of how much theologising is so technically executed, so dependent on discourse as esoteric as any mystery religion, so inaccessibly beyond all but those who want to play the intellectual power games of the academy. So I'm always keen to find texts that have clear rootedness in and connections to the lived experience of people of faith. Only then do theology and biography enter a fruitful conversation to their mutual benefit.

One of my own research interests is the connection between Christian faith experience, church as community and people whose sense of self is different because of varied conditions that affect mental health.

Here is the information about the book with some significant endorsements.

Review

This book is a gift to anyone who has been touched by the darkness of bi-polar illness. Colwells willingness to write honestly about his illness will be an aid for those struggling with the condition, but even more important is his use of the psalms and attention to Jesus way of dereliction to locate how such illness is not pointless. This is a book that needed to be written. But only someone like John Colwell could write it. --Stanley Hauerwas, Duke Divinity School, USA

It is a well-known fact that the Church doesnt do depression. Melancholy just doesnt sit comfortably with our sanguine view of spiritual progress. Thank God, however, that John Colwell has the guts to attend to this erroneous state of affairs and offer us a spirituality that embraces the wintry as well as the sunny seasons of our lives. --Ian Stackhouse, Team Leader, Guildford Baptist Church, England

If the best theology is attentive to Scripture, focused on Christ, and meaningful for human life in all its messiness, then there are few better examples than this new book by John Colwell. --Steve Holmes, Lecturer in Theology, University of St Andrews, Scotland

Product Description

In this powerful book on the experience of desolation John Colwell focuses on Psalm 22, read in the light of his own struggle with bi-polar disorder and the Christian belief that God the Son suffered in his humanity, to offer existential-theological reflections on the experience of God-forsakenness.

The author writes, My concern in writing this book and in reading this psalm is to reflect on the felt experience of God-forsakenness, my own and that of Christ in the light of this psalm; to explore the theological and spiritual significance of this felt experience for myself, for Christ, for Christians generally. If this exploration proves to be helpful to me or to others then obviously I am glad, but I am not writing this book to be helpful but rather to be truthful (and perhaps hopeful). This is a personal journey of reflection with a psalm which I invite you, the reader, to share if you will.

John Donne's pun on the end of God

John Donne and Julian of Norwich couldn't be more different in temperament, spirituality, lifestyle and life circumstance. But every time I read this sentence from Donne, I hear clear echoes of Julian's confident assurance in the eternal constancy of God's love: “whom God loves, he loves to the end and not to their end and their death, but to His end, and His end is that He might love them more”.

Cheap paperbacks aren't made to last, and I confess I don't have many of those glue-split, spine-peeling, brown-edged, once-read books that weren't supposed to stay important after that first read. But sometimes in a bundle of other people's discards one turns up that your haven't read. Like a Fount paperback on preaching by Colin Morris, Raising the Dead. And on page 55 is a paragraph that is really a theological expansion of Donne's pun,  that in turn echoes Julian's theological optimism:

"Those who have known the love of God last as long as his love lasts. For whatever we make of Jesus, its fair to say he died to show us that whoever we are, we matter to God. And since by definition, God must be perfectly consistent, there can never be a time when we cease to matter to him. Therefore we must be the objects of his love eternally. If God loves us, he must love us till the end, not our end but his end, and since God has no end, in the sense of ceasing to be, he must love us eternally."

Of course Donne was playing with the word "end" - God's end is also God's purpose, which is equally constant since grounded in eternal love. I mention all this because of what Morris goes on to say about the preacher and such doctrines as the love of God and the resurrection of Jesus:

Now for the preacher to be diffident about such doctrines in a time of despair and confusion is much more serious than false modesty; it is a dereliction of duty.

To reiterate yesterday's blog - quite so!

Thankfulness as a Theological Choice.

Who then is God that we must speak of him?

God is he whom we must thank.

To be more precise:

God is he whom we cannot thank enough. (E Jungel)

.................................

For all that has been,

Thank you -

For all that is to come,

Yes -                                                    (Dag Hammarskjold)

..................................

Thou hast given so much to me,

Give one thing more, - a grateful heart;

Not thankful when it pleaseth me,

As if Thy blessings had spare days,

But such a heart whose pulse may be Thy praise.  (George Herbert).

........................

Been a hard week so far, for reasons nobody could foresee or forestall. One of the most important theological choices we make is whether we complain or give thanks, fuel resentment or nurture gratefulness, whether we see God in all things or only in those cherry picked experiences we call blessings. Life itself is the blessing, and the daily gift of the God whose gift is life. I'm wondering if inner climate determines our disposition towards complaint or gratitude, or if we determine our inner climate by  whether a theological choice towards gratitude is an intentional act of faith that changes our inner climate by "tracing the rainbow through the rain"?

My theologian of 'thankfulness as choice' is Julian of Norwich. When much else fails to persuade, I find her quiet insistent trustfulness, and thus her patient thankfulness, a good antidote to those more enjoyably disruptive attitudes of complaint, unsettlement and soul sulking. More than most theologians, she grounds gratitude in the foundation of a love at once eternal and personal, universal and particular.   

Thus I was taught that love was our Lord's meaning.

And I saw quite clearly in this and in all,

that before God made us, he loved us,

which love was never slaked nor ever shall be.

And in this love he has done all his work,

and in this love he has made all things profitable to us.

And in this love our life is everlasting.

In our creation we had a beginning.

But the love wherein he made us was in him with no beginning.

And all this shall be seen in God without end ...

.....................

Quite so!

T F Torrance on incarantion and atonement II

When T F Torrance writes about theological science, and such complexities as the relations between space, time and divine and contingent order, you simply have to adopt the disposition of student trying hard not to get lost in the maze of erudition and the labyrinth of specialist discourse woven by a professor at ease in unfamiliar intellectual territory.

But when Torrance writes about such central doctrines of Christian faith as the trinitarian understanding of God, christology understood as incarnation, atonement and the resurrection reality of Jesus Christ ascended and coming, then we listen to a theologian preach, and encounter preaching that is soaked in the great doctrines of the faith, and these doctrines as the mere articulation of what it means to experience the reality of the living God, encountered in Jesus Christ.

So here's the next paragraph of Torrance, getting to the heart of the Gospel by a deep theological reading of Scripture. I repeat the last sentence of yesterday's extract. And as a wee forethought before reading it, hHowever new fangled we think theological exegesis is, Torrance was doing it 50 years ago in Edinburgh.

"And so the cross with all its incredible meekness and patience and compassion is no deed of passive and beautiful heroism simply, but the most potent and aggressive deed that heaven and earth have ever known: the attack of God's holy love upon the inhumanity of man and the tyrranny of evil, upon all the piled up contradiction of sin.

To see how that is so, watch what happened when Jesus was arraigned before Pilate and the Jewish nation. Jesus had never lifted a violent finger against anyone, and yet he became the centre of a violent disturbance that has shaken the world to its foundations. The incredible thing is this: the meeker and milder Jesus is, the more violent the crowd become in their resentment against him. The more like a lamb he is, the more like ravening wolves they become. By his very passion and suffering, by his meekness and grace and truth, Jesus imparted passion to his contemporaries and called forth violence from them until at last they laid violent hands upon him and dragged him off to the cross.

Jesus is the embodiment of the still small voice of God: he is the Word made flesh, the Word that is able to divide soul and spirit asunder. That voice, that Word of God in jesus penetrated as never before into the secrets of humanity and exposed them. The more he stood them, the more the power of God broke its way into the citadel of the human soul. Before the weakness and mercy of Jesus, before this compassion, all barriers are broken down, all the thoughts and intents of the heart are revealed. What wind and earthquake and fire could not do, Jesus did: he penetrated into the proud heart of man and laid it bare, and in so doing he produced the most violent reaction that culminated in his crucifixion. "

T F Torrance, Incarnation. The Person and Life of Christ (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), p. 150-1.

T F Torrance on incarnation and atonement (I)

The theological legacy of T F Torrance has long been acknowledged as one of the intellectual treasures of Scottish theology. Some of his writing can be dense and hard to get on with; but much of it is theology that is deeply engaged with the living faith of the man who wrote it, and is written by a theologian who has thought downward into the depths of the grace and mercy of divine love. Torrance's best writing is a shining example of theology personally appropriated in the experience of the theologian and expressed in language unembarrassed by the commitment of faith. Below is a passage which to my mind expresses a very Scottish theology of the cross - I hear echoes of James Denney, P T Forsyth and Torrance's own teacher, H. R. Mackintosh, each of whom wrote out of the same reservoir of theological passion.

"In the incarnate life of Jesus, and above all in his death, God does not execute his judgment on evil dimply by smiting it violently away by a stroke of his hand, but by entering into it from within, into the very heart of the blackest evil, and making its sorrow and guilt and suffering his own. And it is because it is God himself who enters in, in order to let the whole of human evil go over him, that his intervention in meekness has violent and explosive force. It is the very power of God. And so the cross with all its incredible meekness and patience and compassion is no deed of passive and beautiful heroism simply, but the most potent and aggressive deed that heaven and earth have ever known: the attack of God's holy love upon the inhumanity of man and the tyrranny of evil, upon all the piled up contradiction of sin."

                                       T F Torrance, Incarnation. The Person and Life of Christ (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), p. 150.

George Herbert hymns twice on one Sunday - worship and "our utmost art".

Two George Herbert poems set to music, on the one day! Sunday Morning worship in our church began with a George Herbert hymn. As we sang it I could almost see the small parish church of Bemerton, placed lovingly in the mind of Herbert against the backdrop of rural England, 17th Century national politics and Herbert's theological assumption that church and creation reflect the reign and love of God:

Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!
The heavens are not too high, his praise may thither fly,
the earth is not too low, his praises there may grow.
Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!

Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!
The church with psalms must shout, no door can keep them out;
but, above all, the heart must bear the longest part.
Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!

Then on Songs of Praise last night, the kind of hymn that is so old fashioned I thought it almost forgotten, not just out of favour but out of sync with current taste and preference. It recalls a spiritual atmosphere and intensity of devotion requiring more of us than our usual contemporary attempts at dumbed down intimacy and informal conversation with Holy Love that is both transcendent and immediate. But there it was, sung with that restrained politeness that in Anglican spirituality comes near to the spiritual quality of courtesy and quiet gratefulness, not spiritually greedy or emotionally ambitious, but showing that quality of balance that makes Herbert's poetry such a fine example of what he himself called "my utmost art".

King of glory, King of peace,
I will love thee;
and that love may never cease,
I will move thee.
Thou hast granted my request,
thou hast heard me;
thou didst note my working breast,
thou hast spared me.

Wherefore with my utmost art
I will sing thee,
and the cream of all my heart
I will bring thee.
Though my sins against me cried,
thou didst clear me;
and alone, when they replied,
thou didst hear me.

Seven whole days, not one in seven,
I will praise thee;
in my heart, though not in heaven,
I can raise thee.
Small it is, in this poor sort
to enroll thee:
e'en eternity's too short
to extol thee.

Run the race (against Usain Bolt) set before you

 

                                                                                                   

This is what sporting stars do - help our children dream dreams, celebrate life in the body with a laughing crowd, say yes to fun and friendship, and smile at the thought that given another 15 years this wee boy might be an Olympian - that's right, the gift of a dream.

Is this not the best sporting photo of the year so far - at least in the category of athletics and PR?

Sunset as a stressbuster on the M5 and M6 on a Friday

Augustine, Dante, Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards to name only four. They all used their descriptive powers to create unforgettable images of Hell. A whole genre of fiction describes various manifestations of Hell on Earth. But to my knowledge no one has written an entire novel, or a terrifying sermon, or a poetic masterpiece of epic proportions on one of the most vivid and diabolically convincing contemporary images of life rendered futile, of hope intentionally made sterile, of soul corroding and mind dissolving frustration, of that concatenation of circumstance and coincidence of misfortune, of that collaboration of evil purpose and collective ignoring of consequence, that is the M5 and M6, on a Friday afternoon, as it lies before the Scottish pilgrim journeying from Malvern to the celestial city of Glasgow -  334 miles away.

Because fellow travellers and pilgrims together, that's what I did yesterday from 3.00pm arriving home around 11.p.m. The exquisitely moderated anguish of travelling miles in first and second gear, viewing thousands of traffic cones - (are they self-replicating these things?!) -  is now enhanced by overhead messages informing you well ahead of time of the six mile tailback, the serial congestion at consecutive junctions. So you turn on Radio 2 for the travel update from Sally Travel and find that the roads around the M5 and M6 are likewise congested - beginning to sound like a motorway system with a serious chest infection and the antibiotics are not working. So no escape routes or less stressful diversions. It isn't any comfort to know that once you are past Birmingham and Machester there is a further 6 mile tailback in both directions south of Lancaster, result of an earlier accident and long term roadworks with closed lanes. And yes I did consider trains and planes but serial meetings in different parts of the country at different times of the week meant nothing came close to working.

Nevertheless. And I mean nevertheless in the biblical and theological sense of a truth that reconfigures reality, that offers an alternative worldview, a happening or utterance that, despite present circumstances, nevertheless construes existence in a new way and points towards hopefulness. So. Nevertheless. That eight hour journey had its moments of revelation. Somewhere between Birmingham and Manchester, across miles of hazy autumn dusk, spread one of the most glorious sunsets I've ever seen. For ten minutes liquid gold cooled across the clouds in a slowly worked filigree of light and shadow, woven in various shades and tones of yellow, orange, and red. This happened as I was listening to Brahms' violin concerto just as it closed the heart wrenching slow movement and the finale took off. It's hard to sit on the M5 and M6 fuming and thinking black diabolic thoughts about hobgoblins and foul fiends in the shape of traffic cones, when an impromptu performance of a Creation makeover, with musical accompaniment, is put on gratuitously for anyone prepared to see and recover a sense of perspective, and be grateful for life, beauty, love, Sheila, Victoria Plums (I bought a box at the M&S in the Services), Brahms, God, and a home to travel to - and even Sally on Radio 2 whose job is to read that litany of despair every half hour, to drivers, the modern pilgrims, and to do so every blessed day. Yes, every blessed day. Sunset is a stressbuster - not the best strapline for God's creative extravagance but worked for me.

The sunset photograph can be found at Trucking Photographs - where there are other sunsets captured along the motorway - hopefully taken when the trucks were stationary..... Thanks to them though, for the free use of their images. 

The theological impact of a comma

Nicholas Lash again, and once again structured for slowed down reading:

God's utterance lovingly gives life;
gives all life,
all unfading freshness;
gives only life,
and peace, and love,
and beauty, harmony and joy.

And the life God gives
is nothing other,
nothing less,
than God's own self.
Life is God,
given.

Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God (London:SCM, 1992), 104

That last four word sentence with the theologically determined comma. Brilliant!

Listening for the voice of God - who does not shout.

Decided to arrange the following paragraph from Nicholas Lash into a prose poem, to allow for slowed down reading.

"Good learning calls,
no less than teaching does,
for courtesy, respect,
a kind of reverence:
for facts and people,
evidence and argument,
for climates of speech
and patterns of behaviour
different from our own.

Watchfulness is, indeed, in order,
but endless suspicion and mistrust are not.
There are affinities between the courtesy,
the delicacy of attentiveness, required for friendship;
the single minded passionate disiniterestedness
without which no good scholarly or scientific work is done;
and the contemplativity which strains,
without credulity,
to listen for the voice of God -
who does not shout."

Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God (London: SCM, 1992), pp. 10-11.