Living Wittily

The Role of a Denominational College

Several key points from our presentation on the work of the Scottish Baptist College at our Annual Baptist Assembly.

What the Scottish Baptist College is "For".

The College is a means to an end. But to a great end – the training of those God calls to be builders of graced communities, to be supporters and encouragers of communities of witness, to be Christ centred activists for the Kingdom of God.

Theological Education as Ministry Formation

Theological education and ministry formation are nothing less than taking seriously Christ’s invitation, Come ….take my yoke upon you….learn of me… Or Paul’s plea, ‘be transformed by the renewing of your mind…and conformed to the image of Christ”  The years in College can be hard years of self discovery, inner change, growth through a process of sifting and searching that deepens mind and soul. That’s why the focus of the College is on academic quality and spiritual formation, clearly centred on Christ and earthed in Scripture, evangelical in purpose and Baptist in conviction.

Calling and Curriculum

Our calling under God as a College is to share the Gospel, to build graced communities of witness to Jesus Christ, and towards this our College works, year in and year out, to replenish and resource ministry in our churches. But we don’t just go on doing the same thing, working to the same old models, indiscriminately  pumping information into heads like forcing insulation foam into cavity walls.

A curriculum has to be shaped around our context, the time and place in history that we call contemporary - and ours is a time of cultural flux. So we need leaders and servants, pastors and evangelists, imaginers of mission, gifted builders of graced community, creative thinkers for God.

“Does God call the equipped or equip the called?” someone asked. Daft question! God does both. The Church is caled to be culturally informed, culturally engaged, in order to be counter cultural; so it must be Gospel informed and Gospel engaged in order to be counter cultural. Because our counter-cultural lives are to be rooted in the reality of the Living Christ, the transformative power of a Gospel of reconciliation, peace and hope.

A strange mixture of a day - of funerals and laughter

Yesterday was a strange mixture of a day. Made up of attending a funeral standing for over an hour in a packed church; being at the afternoon session of our Baptist Assembly; having a meal out with friends between Assembly sessions; and then the evening Assembly session through most of which I was by then exhausted.

At the funeral met people I hadn't seen for anywhere between 35 and 5 years - some of them thought I'd aged. Is it that obvious 35 years on.....? The funeral itself was for Linda. We've known Linda and Jim for, well, 35 years, nearly all our married life, and been friends all that time. The funeral service was an experience that even this experienced pastor found heartbreakingly comforting, emotionally overwhelming in a way that seems even the day after, both inexplicable and right.

You see Jim presented the eulogy for Linda, preceded by a Visual Tribute of family photographs showing Linda as she was from baby to this year. And in what Jim said, he ministered to those who were there sharing in his love and gratitude for the life of his wife and lifelong friend. Then this man who couldn't sing, told of how during Linda's illness he took voice coaching so he could sing at her funeral, the love song that had meant so much to them as a couple down the years and in these past months. Being their friends for all these years, knowing the two of them, and hearing a non singer singing so well in leading a congregation, is simply one of the most moving events I've ever shared. And this was no exercise in denial - we all knew the reality of what was lost, and along with the promise of comfort within that loss, the deep human bonds of recognition that lie at the heart of love and loss, joy and grief, life and death - and how in the best friendships, these are shared.

May Sarton the poet once warned against wasting life's deepest experiences by being so busy in life we move on without assimilating and understanding what they have done to us. So maybe sometime later, when all of this is assimilated, I'll want to write something more - and only with Jim's permission. For now I am simply humbled though not puzzled, by how the love of these two people was made so astonishingly evident and then given as a gift to Linda, and us.

And the rest of the day went by in a haze - except the moment at the evening Assembly Session when, sitting with my friend Catriona of Skinny Fair-Trade Latte fame, the hymn THESE ARE THE DAYS OF ELIJAH was announced.

That was a moment of clarifying mischief, electrifying accidental providence, belief-defying coincidence (or did I pre-arrange it - no honest, I didn't!!) Eye-contact with Catriona came dangerously near irreverent guffaw. Instead I sang it with triumphalist gusto! If you read this Catriona, you can explain the metaphysical implications of your least favourite Assembly hymn being chosen at your first Scottish Assembly.

A strange mixture of a day.................

Reading Bonhoeffer for the health of the soul

If you're looking for a couple of books that take you to the heart of Bonhoeffer's theology, then here's two I've learned a lot from, and which are good theology in their own right:

G. B. Kelly and F. B. Nelson, The Cost of Moral Leadership. The Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003)

Sabine  Dramm, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. An Introduction to His Thought, (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2007)

There's a huge and growing body of secondary material on Bonhoeffer, much of it stimulated over the past decade with the publishing of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Works now being translated into English. I have a friend who may well know more history than, as the Scripture says, "all we can ever imagine or think", who scoffs at the purists who say don't read secondary works first, read the primary texts. His advice was much more sympathetic, and I've followed it for many a year. Applied to Bonhoeffer it means: Get a hold of two or three books on Bonhoeffer written by trusted guides and read them, then when you read Bonhoeffer you will have a sense of who he was, what he was saying and why, the central themes of his thought, and an appreciation of him as a human being engaged in the life of his time. My friend is the kind of friend you disagree with only if you can provide securely nailed down footnotes.

In any case I agree with him, and have relied on that simple common sense trustfulness of the scholarship of others, as a way of being introduced to the great minds of Christian thought and philosophy. Bauckham did it for me with Moltmann: Hunsinger and Webster for Barth; several unforgettable conversations with Donald Mackinnon for Von Balthasar; Robert Jenson and Perry Miller for Jonathan Edwards; and for Bonhoeffer, apart from Bethge's huge biography a number of others, but the two above are now amongst the most engaged and engaging guides.

But after a guided tour by a couple of experts, it's time to start hearing the original voice, reading Bonhoeffer and allowing him to speak for himself.

To read Bonhoeffer is like engaging in a theological detox programme. The toxic build-up of lazy assumptions, intellectual evasions, ethical cost-cutting exercises and spiritual suppressants don't easily survive regular dozes of Christocentric reality checks!

To read Bonhoeffer is good for the soul - astringent, purifying, unsettling, demanding, not recommended for the timid who don't want to ask questions, or the comfortably sure who don't want to hear answers that might contradict their certainties.

Here's two extracts, one is Kelly and Nelson's commentary, and one is unadulterated Bonhoeffer:

Hence Bonhoeffer's injunction, "Only the believers obey, and only the obedient believe"...Faith and obedience are linked together in a dialectical and indissoluble unity in which the willingness to serve God by obeying the Gospel mandates is the natural and spontaneous note of Christian life governbed by the person and mission of Jesus Christ.

Christianity without the living Jesus Christ remains necessarily a Christianity without discipleship, and a Christianity without discipleship is always a Christianity without Jesus Christ.

Both quotations are on pages 134-5 of The Cost of Moral leadership.

Turning right, yellow boxes and another failed experiment in counting to ten.

Sitting in the car waiting to turn right at the yellow boxes.

Murky early morning drizzle makes visibility a bit of a challenge.

Car coming the other way stops and the driver waves me across. Courtesy & Invitation

I see a cyclist coming up the offside of his car and wait for him to pass.

The cyclist waves his acknowledgement and I wave back. Gratitude & Courtesy

At the same time the driver behind me starts leaning on the horn. Impatience & Anger

Four travellers meet at a busy intersection, three of them see each other.

The fourth can't see beyond the car that's in his way.

I'm glad God didn't answer my muttered prayer for the horn happy motorist.

Would have been far too painful.

But I hope God will answer mine -

that the God of mercy

will bring to maturity

that one fruit of the spirit

of which, after decades of practice,

and serial prayer marathons,

I still have a serious deficit.

Now which one is that?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer - "We must have some share in Christ's largeheartedness..."

Reading a lot of Bonhoeffer just now. No ulterior motive beyond spending time with one of the most pastorally astringent and spiritually decisive voices in modern theology. I learn more about the reality of Christ and the call to reality in my living for Christ, from Bonhoeffer than from most other writers. In place of our current accommodation to a host of lesser demands, Bonhoeffer reminds us of the greater demand of the Christ who calls us to take up the cross and follow into the freedom that may in the end require that we lose our lives in order to find them.

"We are not Christ, but if we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ's largeheartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the hour of danger comes and by showing a real compassion that springs not from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ for all who suffer. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behaviour. Christians are called to compassion and action, not in the first place by their own sufferings, but by the sufferings of their brothers and sisters for whose sake Christ suffered."

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Testament of Freedom, 483-484).

I know of no other writer whose biography so faithfully embodies his theology, whose spirituality is so intensely this worldly but is energised by a grace not of this world, and whose life choices so deliberately echo the ominous but purposeful surrender intimated in that crucial Gospel detail, 'Jesus turned his face steadfastly towards Jerusalem". To have "some share in Christ's largeheartedness", to live our lives "with responsibility and in freedom", to be called to compassion and action - is there a more distilled account of what Christian witness looks like in the political and social arenas of our contemporary existence?

It's one of the enriching paradoxes of Bonhoeffer's thought and writing that he remains, decade after decade a voice as contemporary as today's online newspage. He is the theologian whose life and words combine to challenge our theological flabbiness, rebuke our ethical evasiveness, expose our spiritual self-centredness, and our chasing after the chimera of relevance and manufactured connectedness. Instead of such accommodations to culture, his is the call to an asceticism of the heart, an invitation to utter self expenditure in that reckless giving away that is the cost of discipleship, and the clearest reflection of the largeheartedness of Christ. Largeheartedness - that is a demanding benchmark to place over and against our current church programmes, our missional activism, our thinking and public stances on matters of peace, justice and compassion for the vulnerable. I don't read German - so I'd like to know what the word was that Bonhoeffer used that led a translator to use such a magnificently expansive word for the disposition of Christ towards those who suffer. Largeheartedness.

(The icon depicts the resurrection and Christ the lifegiver - the ultimate demonstration of theological integration - Eastern Orthodoxy doing liberation theology?)

Oak trees, Suffragettes, and not taking political equality for granted.

At University of Glasgow Library and parked my car near Kelvingrove Park.

Frustrated and couldn't find what I wanted.

Sauntered back to the car which had collected some large fading oak leaves from the big tree under which I'd parked it.

Noticed a wee plaque at the base of the tree and went over to read it.

Planted on 20 April 1918 by the Women Suffragette Movements in honour of their being granted the vote.

Not sure why but I decided one of those oak leaves, from this 100 year old oak tree, should find its way into one of my books for a while.

100 years is a long time, even for a tree. It is though, a magnificent tree.

But it's astonishingly recent in the history of discrimination - just 100 years ago women were largely excluded from political decision-making. 

The photo below is of women protesting outside Duke Street prison in Glasgow. The City had a Women's Socialist and Political Union (WSPU), just one of the organisations far too easily forgotten, but made up of women of courage, conviction and passionate commitment to social justice and political equality. My oak leaf honours them!

Up. Food for thought and freedom to fantasise.

Sheila and I went to see "Up", the new Pixar animated film. It's a feast for the imagination, visually beautiful, woven through with wit and wisdom, and one of the best arguments around for combining in one film food for thought and freedom to fantasise. No need to tell the story. If you don't go see it you wouldn't get it - if you do go and see it you won't forget it. An entire pastoral theology module could be based around some of its themes of life, death, love, friendship, ageing, care of creation, adventure, courage, rejection and welcome, carelessness and responsibility, selfishness and generosity, and all of it wrapped up for each of us in our personal adventure book, with its page, "Stuff I Want to Do." Do yourself a favour - go see it.

One Sentence Blogposts: Thought Bytes for the Mind 6

"We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome."

G K Chesterton, Orthodoxy

The BBC, Question Time, murky waters and the need for navigation charts

It's the morning after the night before. I suppose I have two initial comments. My main question remains: Where in the whole BBC editorial decison making process does moral responsibility and social ethics feature alongside the political principle of impartiality - a principle which the BBC invests with considerable moral rhetoric? Second, having watched the programme it neither clarified BNP policy nor fulfilled the impartiality which the BBC itself holds so highly. Were BNP members allowed to be part of the audience and invited by the chair to participate? Not one voice in support of the BNP in the audience - I am not arguing for this, I am asking why the BBC isn't. The logic of insisting elected politicians are entitled to be there, surely holds for the entitlement of members of his party to be there. Were they?

But David is right in his observation in his comment - a media driven culture is a place of murky, complex, contested values - and the BBC has to navigate a way through them with a diminishing number of moral depth charts. I am left with the irony that the plaque inside BBC Headquarters erected inside on the appointment of its first Director General, that wild Scottish secular Calvinist Lord Reith, quotes Philippians 3.8. In 1931 the following inscription was unveiled

To Almighty God, this shrine of the arts, music and literature is dedicated by the first Governors in the year of our Lord 1931, John Reith being Director General. It is their prayer that good seed sown will produce a good harvest, that everything offensive to decency and hostile to peace will be expelled, and that the nation will incline its ear to those things which are lovely pure and of good report and thus pursue the path of wisdom and virtue.

I know times have changed - and we are no longer a biblically literate culture. And the BBC now sees itself as reflecting culture rather than seeking to shape it, and is therefore a cultural follower rather than a creative initiator - or is that too hard? Anyway, that earlier vision for media as humanising, entertaining, educational and reflective of a culture's core values was not wrong. There are a few moral depth charts in that quotation, a few lights to navigate by, and the verse itself, though from the Christian New Testament, has significant resonance within the faith and cultural pluralism that makes up our culture and our changing social fabric.

OK. I broke my own rule. I didn't complete a week of one liners. Sorry. But five out of seven might be called " a reasonable attempt at the assignment". 

BBC, BNP and the conveniently camouflaged idols behind the scenes

My own tradition of Christian discipleship arises out of a history of persecution, intolerance and resistance to those powers, political and religious, that want to tell me what to think, what to say, how to live. At the heart of Baptist history and thought is a passionate witness to the right of each person to have freedom of conscience before God in the expression of their faith. Witness, in its semantic derivations, points us back to those for whom willing martyrdom for the sake of religious freedom was preferable to religious compulsion enforced by political oppression. So I try to live my life within that same passionate commitment to liberty of conscience before God with its inevitable corollary of religious toleration. And in turn, I stand in a tradition preferring the use of reason, persuasion and the witness of an alternative way of living as the preferred approach to changing the views of the other. In other words, witness, testimony, lived practices of faith, trust in truth as both ultimately self-verifying and as primary ethical stance, define the moral and political modus operandi of those committed to the classic nonconformist Baptist dissenting tradition.

So when there is a public furore about freedom of speech, political validity, liberty of conscience, I am interested, I have an opinion, I have a way of life to which I want to bear witness, my freedom of conscience conviction starts to sound shrill warnings like a manic car alarm. Should the BNP leader be allowed to appear on the BBC flagship political talk forum Question Time? The position of the BBC is that as a legal party with elected MEP's, the BNP is entitled to an invitation to take part, otherwise the BBC would be accused of political discrimination. And for the BBC to refuse to invite the BNP would give rise to accusations of bias, the BBC being in the pocket of the establishment, the independence of the BBC being compromised. And then of course the claim that the BNP would be made martyrs, would be given legitimacy for their claim that Britain no longer belongs to the British because the BNP which represents those disaffected with a multi-cultural Britain is simply being silenced; and if their views are so heinous, why not let them be heard and so be self-condemned before a mature thoughtful public. And so on. And so on. The claim is made that the BBC must be impartial; cannot be partial; must provide the same platform for the BNP as any other political party. 

Now I know I'm standing on thin ice. Liberty of conscience must also extend even to those whose conscience recognises very different values to my own, even the leader of the BNP and its supporters. But I am not questioning his right to hold repugnant political opinions rooted in dehumanising convictions about human beings whose colour, faith, cultutral identity is different. Nor am I advocating the muzzling of voices that spew the toxic waste of racial hate and violence - by all means let's have the argument. And I recognise that in a democracy people vote for the candidate who most represents their interests, opinions, political apsirations, and therefore the election of the BNP to public office is its own moral critique of our culture.

But the question of whether or not Nick Griffin should be invited by the BBC to sit alongside mainstream politicians and other social commentators is not about democracy - but about the legitimation of that which has no moral legitimacy. And the invitation to the BNP isn't about free speech either. The BBC's concern not to silence the BNP, need not have meant providing them with a platform of perceived acceptance by a major public institution with unique status across the world - a publicly funded Corporation.

(I should say I am deliberately posting this before the programme is aired this evening, and so without the benefit of hindsight.)

No. As one trying to interpret what religious toleration means today, and as one doing his best to live faithfully and responsibly (only God knows with what mistakes and miss-judgements) in upholding freedom of conscience before God, I can see no moral justification for the appearance of Nick Griffin on Question Time. And yes. I know that the moral argument is described as slippery and oppressive - whose morals, who is the adjudicator, who has the right to pull the plug, and what about the rights of BNP members? Well actually lets not talk only of rights. How about obligations? If the BBC feels obliged to have the BNP on the show, and does so by claiming the high ground of impartiality, and the claim it is merely reflecting the realities of a society that elected these men in the first place - then here's my question. What is the BBC's obligation to those who are the targets of BNP villification, intimidation and political rage?  Do they have rights that the BBC recognises as playing a significant part in their editorial decisions? What does moral responsibility mean if it doesn't have some purchase on precisely those editorial decisions that impact on the safety, dignity and right to exist in peace of large sections of our popuplation of British citizens?

This isn't the first time on this blog I've taken issue with the BBC. The same claim to the absolute value of impartiality was made by the BBC in January. Then the Corporation refused to broadcast an appeal to relieve the suffering and misery of the civilians of Gaza, the appeal made by DEC the internationally recognised emergency disaster charity. (See the post on January 26 on this blog)

Are democracy and freedom of speech absolute values with no restrictions? No - they are fenced around by laws such as incitement to racial hatred. Right. But we all know that attitudes and underlying convictions that drive political goals are capable of being moderated in the public forum to allay moral censure and perhaps avoid legal action. The BNP is learning the lesson well, that the way to win power as an extremist group is to temper the worst excesses as a deliberate strategy of disarming opposition. At which point we are back to the issue of moral values, cultural fabric, humanising and humane politics. Are democracy and freedom of speech and editorial impartiality absolute values to be upheld at any price? Or are they the conveniently camouflaged idols of a culture so sold on free expression that it no longer has the moral vision to see and name evil for what it is, the courage to say no, and the ethical literacy to say why no must be said?