Living Wittily

That's it! Clear and Simple!

I've always liked William Sloane Coffin's maxim (slipped into a comment on the Faith and Theology blog recently) as the description of good writing, a good conversation, and maybe even good preaching:

"Think thoughts that are as clear as possible, but no clearer; say things as simply as possible, but no simpler."

Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison - the distilled essence of spiritual search.

No need to enthuse, explain or review this classic of Christian faith as lived in the mid 20th Century. This is engaged theology, hammered out in the context of imprisonment and paradoxically composed out of a mind and soul insistent on freedom under the God  revealed in Jesus Christ crucified and risen. Consequently, the academic and scholarly study of Bonhoeffer and its application to the ongoing experience of the Church into the 21st Century, continues to interrogate lesser theologies. Bonhoeffer's thought disturbs settled minds, contradicts received arguments, subverts easy or even hard won assumptions, and simply will not fit comfortably into categories of intellectual control.

Phrases like "world come of age" "religionless Christianity", "the church for others", "worldly transcendence", "who Jesus Christ actually is for us today", act like theological detonators setting off chain reactions of thought and energy that lead to surprising and often disconcerting reconfigurations of theological reflection. As De Gruchy says, these papers contain "theological explorations in a new key...". The new Fortress Edition, volume 8, is complete with Introduction and Afterword, Bibliography and Notes, and provides over 500 pages of Bonhoeffers letters and papers. It is a miracle of production, from the first lonely but determined writing out of a mind soaked in Scripture and prayed theology, to the process of smuggling and accumulating and later editing and publishing after Bonhoeffer's death, till now 60 years later, we have this definitive translation, edition and presentation of the distilled essence of a martyr theology, a theology of witness.

This will be a slow, reverential, and I don't doubt deeply affecting re-reading of one of those treasures of the church, the lasting impact of which we will only finally know when all the broken world is gathered again to the wholeness and hopefulness that Bonhoeffer himself did not live to see, but lived, and died, to point towards. One of the most important parts of the volume is the new translation of the prison poems. These are distilled essence of spiritual search, the legacy of Bonhoeffer's own wrestling in the night at the brook Jabbok. Reading them you can sense, even glimpse the lone figure of Bonhoeffer limping towards the sunrise. Some of these poems should only be read, perhaps, when we have learned the meaning of our own tears, accepted the cost of our own faithfulness in following after Christ, recognised in the deep places of the heart where trust is born, the quiet voice of the God who knows us, and enables us to say, "Whoever I am, thou knowest me: O God, I am thine!"

Rest in Peace, Olive Morgan - one of God's peacemakers.

Been out of touch with other bloggers on my sideabr for a wee while. Which is probably why I have only just learned of the death of Olive Morgan from Rishard hall's Connexions. Olive blogged at Octomusings where she wrote with wit and wisdom about living Christianly in a complex world. Olive was 88 when she died, a committed Methodist, a peace campaigner and much else. There aren't many octogenarians out there blogging and arguing for a world more peaceful, more compassionate, less dangerous. Her last post was on "Ban the Bomblet", her approval of the Bill which bans the use of and the storage of cluster munitions. Her sharp enagagement with the world is a powerful argument against the unspoken but pervasive assumption in too many Christian circles, that the future of the church rests almost exclusively with the young people. The future rests with those who live faithfully in the present, look hopefully to the future, and learn wisely from the past. 

Why we are not a waste of time and space

I like this. Not the final knockdown argument that demolishes Dawkins et al. Too subtle for such intellectual dogmatism. And why demolish straw anyway?

No. This is affirmation, hopefulness, trustful optimism that this glorious, beautiful, perplexingly addictive world around us, is more than the collisions of infinite variations of chance. I like the thought that beautiful music skillfully played is a crucial clue to why life matters, and matters to more than ourselves. 

For today let's pause

At my first groping after the First Cause,

Which led me to acknowledge (groping still)

That if what once was called primeval slime

(in current jargon pre-biotic soup)

Evolved in course of eons to a group

Playing Beethoven, it needed more than time

And chance, it needed a creative will

To foster that emergence, and express

Amoeba as A Minor. 

Martyn Skinner, Old Rectory, (Michael Russell Publishing), 1984, Quoted in This Sunrise of Wonder, Michael Mayne, (London: DLT, 2008), p. 110

End of session marking, Mozart, Country Western and Simon and Garfunkel

The absence from here is entirely due to a conveyor belt of marking, collating and responding in feedback to student essays and other assignments. All now safely negotiated and only the final confirmations within the Quality Assurance processes now required.

At this point some unhilarious alleged friends or acquaintances suggest we are now finished for the summer. Once they recover from the instant shock-wave of unspoken but eye-glinting caution to not go there, I explain that the summer is not less busy, just differently busy. Any further attempts at having a go at the alleged easiness of life in the College are not treated with such commendable if barely controlled verbal restraint.

So what happens next. Next year's timetable to be fitted as best can be around the various needs and availabilities of around 40 students doing some of the 50 or so modules. Arranging teaching of modules, accommodation and equipment needs. Aligning College practice and documentation with UWS policies and good practice. Refreshing the Website with next year's information. Research stuff to be progressed and moved towards delivery / publishing. Entire curriculum rebuilding in preparation for revalidation and Subject Health Review. Reconfiguring all our working remits to align our activities with the College Development Plan for the next 5 years, which presupposes extensive personal and institutional development. Oh, and given that we don't take holidays during Semester time which is 30 weeks of the year, there is the not small matter of trying to fit holidays into our lives. These are some of the reasons for the "eye-glinting caution" that greets frivolous comment about life in theological education :)

Last night I travelled home to the accompaniment of Mozart. The Exsultate Jubilate is one of the most sublime pieces I know - yes, my repertoire is limited, but music which has the line (translated) "the skies sing psalms with me", played as I drive alongside a low sun and distant hills. Well - it beats any praise song I can think of, and a lot of them I don't want to think of much. One of the interesting reflections on regular long trips in the car, and listening to some music more than once, is the capacity of music to change my inner climate. I can be quite buoyant till I hear, for example, the slow movement of Mozart's Concerto for Flute and Harp, and I move to a wistful longing that fills the mind and heart like a prayer - not asking for anything, just longing for God knows what. That phrase, "longing for God knows what", isn't a careless irreverence, it's a careful reverent recognition that we are beings whose affinities are with that in life which touches us with wonder, gratitude, possibility, hopefulness and goodness.

 Likewise I can put on Mary Chapin Carpenter singing her song about John Doe, which tells the story of a child with special needs, told through the mouth and eyes of that same child now as an old man, remembering how he was pitied, institutionalised and treated as less than the full human being he is. And I then know why I am so passionate about affirming and embracing the full humanity of each person, and why I so agree with Jean Vanier that every human being has needs, and is special. The same CD has her song Stones in the Road, and Jubilee - and they remind me why being angry with systems, powers and people whose wealth and power-games presuppose the poverty and exploitation of others, is not only allowed, but obligatory. Or I put on Simon and Garfunkel's live concert and simply explore the infinite range of human expereince and emotion in songs that are still for me definitive of modern popular music that touches the heart because it celebrates life.

The journeys in the car are not time wasted when keeping comapny with such articulate humane travellers on that journey we are all sharing.

Diversity, diversification and the church's uncertain future

Last few days have been interesting as people have engaged in some conversation about diversity versus division, and the importance of distinctive traditions over and against the overall Christian tradition within which Christians stand. Over at Blethers Chris has been taking her own thoughts deeper into her own traditional territory, and with the usual commonsense caution about whether the church can now afford the luxury of diversification. There are dire predictions for the future of most denominations in Scotland, and past patterns of alignment may not survive the pressures of decline, marginalised influence, muted voice, unattractive ideas in a changed marketplace, and the sheer indifference of most Scottish people to the things Christians get all worked up about.

Happy to keep this conversation going if there are other viewpoints to be heard. Meanwhile there is marking to be done so the blog gets pushed down the urgent list to somewhere near maybe and perhaps if there's time!

Elton Trueblood - in affectionate remembrance of a Quaker Philosopher

My good friend Bob Maccini, who is a black-belt in karate Quaptist, who plays the coronet and the guitar with consummate skill, who has a doctorate in Johannine studies from Aberdeen, who with his wife Becky gave a home to three Russian children, who is an ordained Baptist pastor, a highly sought after copy editor of academic publishing, a cross country skier and a qualified football ( I mean football) referee - anyway, my friend Bob had his first pastorate in the Quaker meeting attended by Elton Trueblood.

Now I'm not sure how many people now recognise the name of Elton Trueblood (1900-1994), that deeply wise and intelligent philosopher-Quaker. Phiosopher, chaplain to Stanford and Harvard Universities, ecumenical pioneer and in at the founding of the World Council of Churches, leading thinker in the post World War 2 Quaker renaissance across the United States. But he is another of those Christian thinkers whose writing shaped my early thinking, and whose wisdom still lightly guides the way I think a community of Christians should live, treat each other and look with compassionate understanding on the world of people. Three of his books, even in their titles, suggest why the theology and spirituality of Elton Trueblood merges with Baptist theology into that attractive kind of Christian Bob refers to as a Quaptist. The Company of the Committed is a clear argument for human community, centred on Christ, and expressed in costly service in which the cost is the least important thing. The Incendiary Fellowship portrays a community of Jesus' followers who burn with hopefulness, love and a trustful openness to life in the Spirit. The Yoke of Christ is a volume of sermons in which following Jesus is spelled out as learning through living, and living in such a way that Jesus' words are both harness and freedom, that our faith is both a calling and a chosen obedience, the grateful yes with which we embrace the invitation to follow after Christ.

The books don't read so well now. They were so clearly attuned to their times from the 50's to the late 70's, that they have lost that counter-cultural edge because the culture they were countering is long past. And in its place a world infinitely more complex, less congenial to Christian thought or indeed any other over-arching view of the way the world is or should be, and thus a world in which human hopefulness has to survive in an ecology much more fragile, and in a cultural and moral ecology increasingly awash with newly developed toxins we are not sure how to control.

I read a couple of the sermons from the Yoke of Christ a week or two ago - it's the one volume I still have. And the sermons still work at the level of the classic - Trueblood touched on things that are always important, and each generation should at least consider. And in his day, he wrote with diagnostic skill, identifying the malaise of modern culture. His book The Predicament of Modern Man was summarised for the Reader's Digest, received sacks of reader response mail, and he answered every one of them personally. But the cost of contextual popular writing is its effectiveness wanes as the context changes. Still, I'm glad my Quaptist friend reminded me of this fine, modest but spiritually impressive Quaker leader, who embodied the name of this blog and who lived wittily in the tangle of his mind. You can read a bit more about him here.

Enjoying the diversity of difference and resisting the absurdity of division

Following the previous post on Baptist identity and my preferred disposition of persuasive humility, Chris asked a fundamental question with which I have great sympathy. From what I know of Chris (only from her blog, we haven't met yet, though I hope we can do that one of these days), she is an ecumenical enthusiast, and impatient of the barriers that seem to get in the way of Christian unity and a mutual recognition of each other as fellow travelers on the road with Christ. She always writes (here) with a generosity of mind to others, but also with sharp and critical awareness - so as a retired teacher herself, she knows when someone is writing, thinking or speaking tosh!

So when Chris asks her question she does so as one whose complaint I share. There are too many artificial barriers; more than enough personally invested agendas; a surplus of piously defended principles that have little purchase in the contemporary world; too many long memories of bitter divisions, and toxic after-lives of forgotten disputes; too much proud defensiveness about one's own precious if growingly obsolete traditions. And so on. And just to say, my reply presupposes my complete agreement about the unacceptable face of anti-ecumenism.

Here is the comment and question Chris offers, followed by my reply:

Chris:   When I read this, and the post that precedes it, and in fact great chunks of your blog, it keeps hitting me that it's absurd that you call yourself a Baptist and I call myself an Episcopalian. There is far too much we share - and I'm going beyond the basic tenets of faith here - for us to be described as different. "Our sad divisions" are just that - and in this time they are also absurd. Aren't they?

Jim:   Hello again Chris. I'd like to respond to your questions more fully in a post but I'll at least hint at what a response might be. Ecumenical is for me a good word, a generous word, a hospitable word. Diversity likewise reflects something of the fecundity and variegation of created life, human culture and faith expression. Neither term necessitates that difference become sad division. But both safeguard the freedom, identity and integrity of the many Christian traditions that make up the Church, the Body of Christ. Baptist, Episcopalian, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian and a wheen more are for me the names by which we recognise each other, not slogans by which we disenfranchise, diminish or oppose each other. My being a Baptist can never justify me breaking fellowship with other Christians - indeed as you suggest, it says as much about what is shared between us. But it does allow for my own faith story to be heard, coming as it does within a different tradition; and it requires of me to hear your faith story, and value and learn from it. Absurd - division is always absurd in a faith based on the Gospel of reconciliation. But diversity is not absurd, it is the context within which conciliation, peacemaking, fellowship and mutual recognition are worked out. Or so it seems to this Baptist, seeking to witness with persuasive humility to another valid way of being the Church.

Chris: I'll be fascinated in a further exploration of this - though if this is a hint it's a generous one! I knew when I posted the comment that I wouldn't want to lose the lovely things that I associate with my church - which were vital components of my conversion, actually - and of course if you call it "diversity" you cast our differences in a much more benign light. Maybe I'm affected by the book I'm reading about the dissolution of the monasteries - such cruelty in the name of religion! I'll await further developments ...

When Chris says there is far too much we share for us to be described as different, my whole self, (mind, heart and affections), affirms the truth of what she says. A thoughtful, outspoken, Episcopalian, hillwalking chorister peacemaker, who has spent a lifetime teaching, and a thoughtful, outspoken, Baptist preacher, teacher, academic and tapestry worker, for all the other differences, do indeed have a deep and durable affinity. And it's this. To be in Christ, to be incorporated into the Body of Christ which is the Church, in all its variegated glory, Baptist and Episcopalian and all the rest of them / us! That is the fundamental truth that renders other differences relative, but not irrelevant. I think it does matter that we remain true to those stories and traditions that have shaped us. But part of that being true to our own tradition is, I passionately believe, to value difference not as division but as diversity, not as threat but as opportunity, not as opposition but as co-operation, and not as obstacle but as tepping stone to deeper, richer understanding of a Gospel far too gloriously complex and far too redolent of new possibility, for any one tradition to constrain let alone contain it.

All that said. I still lean heavily towards Chris's sense that difference made excuse for division is sad, and absurd, in a church for which Christ himself prayed, that we may be one even as Christ and the father and Spirit are one.

And Chris's second comment about cruelty and brutality in the name of religion is a reminder to ecumenically generous people that the forces let loose by religion, politics and power, are never neutral, and often malign. In that sense the irony of a divided Christianity is itself an impetus to a recovery of a lived Gospel of reconciliation, peace-making, just relations and forgiveness. I am so tired of offensive behaviour, sullen doctrinal judgmentalism, partisan Christianity, rationalised dislike or worse of those who differ in their experience of God in Christ. And yes, when such over-againstness is given the twin engines of religion and political interest, as in Tudor England, then the Gospel of peace becomes an instrument of power, and the Prince of Peace is betrayed for the one Machiavelli called The Prince.

Because whatever else I stand for as a Baptist, I stand in the tradition of the persecuted, not the persecutor, and a tradition that rejects the coalition of church and state, and of political will with the mission of the Church of Jesus Christ. So I'm no ecumenical idealist unaware of the realities of division, divisiveness and a divided church; but I am one who believes Jesus' prayer was not a waste of words or time - "that they may be one." And where there is celebrated diversity, and humbly persuasive wearing of the amazing technicolour dream-coat of the Church (I know, exegetical daftness but it's just a bit of fun!), then at least we can argue we are trying to walk together after Christ, and glad of the company of each other.

Chris, we must meet for that coffee.

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On another note: A brief report of the recent Baptist Union Council, along with downloads of two of the papers, can be found at the Scottish Baptist College Blog here

Being baptist - an exercise in persuasive humility

I am a Baptist, which doesn't make me any better than any other Christian seeking to live faithfully for Christ within their own tradition. Nor does it guarantee that my theology is any more securely right or doctrinally orthodox than other Christian expressions of faith. And my spirituality, though grown in Baptist soil, is in fact a veritable cottage garden of colours and varieties planted from my own tradition and transplanted from others, and a mixture of overgrown abundance and well controlled tidiness. Nor does being a Baptist commit me to rubbishing, or challenging or choosing to be ignorant of other Christian traditions, expressions and ways of being the Church of Jesus Christ.

No, being a Baptist is an exercise in persuasive humility, acknowledging our limitations but also commending the peculiar perspectives we bring to Christian life and practice. Being a Baptist compels me to ask questions about the relations of church and state; to uphold religious liberty for all; to affirm the nature of faith as a personal response to Jesus that isn't only about what I believe, but has transformative power over character and patterns of behaviour; it compels also an embracing of life-shaping Gospel values such as peacemaking, reconciliation, community building and compassionate service.

Baptist identity is moving to the centre of our denominational thinking. That's why I am writing the disclaimers above. There is all the difference in the world between a denomination so insecure that it bangs on about its own rightness; and a denomination that values who it is and was called to be under Christ, and doesn't have to undervalue other traditions to do so. Where all this will take us I don't know. For myself, I long for a rediscovery of Christian existence shaped by the core Baptist affirmation that "The Lord Jesus Christ our God and Saviour is the sole and absolute Authority in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as revealed in the Holy Scriptures". When the Sermon on the Mount has the same purchase on our thinking and living as Paul's Romans; when the parables are as life-shaping as the epistles; when the example and teaching, the life and death and resurrection of Jesus are seen as the treasured truths of a faith that lives only by that name, Jesus Christ. If that is secured, most other things are too.

Baptist identity - is it what we take ownership of, or what we give ourselves to?

The past couple of days I have been with the Baptist Union Council sharing in a residential conference, and trying to practice what we say we believe about a Baptist way of being the church. Communal discernment is all very fine in theory, can be strongly defended biblically, can be shown to be good practice in a community impatient with hierarchy but staying this side of anarchy. But it's hard. And what makes it hard is the ingrained bias of our default habits of thought.

For example, Scottish Baptists are just not comfortable with silence, as if it suggests no one has anything worthwhile to say. Well, actually that might indeed be what it suggests, and in that case silence is the more creative option. Then there's the question of agendas, time constraint and the safety felt in a followed programme, so that departing from what was planned seems radical and risky- what might be radical and risky is to abandon any programme that imposes control, and trust the Holy Spirit to push, persuade, pull and prepare us to see what at present we can't see, to hear what we are too busy to listen to, to think what we previously thought unthinkable, to feel more deeply than we have for years, to reach out to each other in the fellowship of the One who washes feet, breaks bread, shares wine, and walks beside us on the way.

 My own contribution, for what it is worth, and it is worth something I think, was to ask that we choose our vocabulary more carefully. No one was swearing! But some words we use seem to suggest mechanism rather than organism. For example to say we should have a sense of ownership, requires of us a more self-centred and self conscious taking to ourselves of something, denomination, church whatever. I prefer the word belonging, in which the driver is not what I own, but what I give myself to. And indeed the most important form of ownership of Baptist identity isn't to own the principles and practices, but to give ourselves to them. To present our bodies as living sacrifices to Christ, living out his teaching, expressing his risen life within and amongst us, embodying his presence in a world hungry for bread, desolate of light, and where for all our claims to grown up cultural maturity, the church encounters a world frightened of its own shadow side.

I'm not sure where Scottish Baptists will be in a decade. But wherever it is, I would want us to be Christian in our vocabulary. So, why is it we have bought into the word "risk", as if risk was good for its own sake. My own understanding of Christian discipleship is that to follow Jesus is a decision high in risk, offset by trust. Do I trust this One who says, Come and follow me, take up your cross and come.... Radical is a word so overused now it refers mainly to things that might be thought or done slightly differently. I see it as a disruptive word, referring to definite discontinuity with status quo, a word itself redolent with risk, inviting to ways that are different, daring a new way of thinking that is only ever confirmed when practised.

If baptists are radical believers, and if we are people who give ourselves to what we believe, then maybe we need to find radical, risky, costly, personally disruptive ways of being together, thinking and praying together, walking with Jesus together. 

The statue is the magnificent Thorvaldsen's "Christus", in Copenhagen. The artist's intention was that " you only see his face when you kneel at his feet". Maybe that is where communal discernment begins.....