Living Wittily

Amsterdam, Van Gogh and the Things that Lie close to the Heart.

We have just spent a few days in Amsterdam doing some of the things I've wanted to do for years. So I spent a long time in the Van Gogh Museum, looking at some of his most famous work. It's a busy place. Even if you book online and miss the long entrance queue, there are still long queues, guided tours, people with audio guides enwrapt in the context and detail, and most folk jostling for a good view of the celebrity paintings. It would have been easy to become grumpy at the sheer struggle to look, see, gaze, admire, appreciate these masterpieces. And I often find those in front of me are bigger than I am which means a total eclipse of the painting if it's one of those really big tourists.And I haven't developed that brass knecked assertiveness that proceeds through an art gallery oblivious of courtesy, - an art gallery seems an inappropriate place to text out the survival of the fittest. 

But standing amongst such riches of aching beauty, soul piercing eagerness to articulate deepest pain and deepest joy, and the anguish of someone who was unheard, misunderstood, and at times ridiculed by those who thought his art was merely madness, the least of my concerns was the bustling art lovers. Enough to be amongst those who have found there way here, to stand in front of this man's soul shaped and passionately coloured art, and to feel the depths of my own humanity, my own needs, and yes my own anxieties and joys. Some of these paintings expose our most cherished hopes, and our most self-diminishing fears, while also drawing us to see in the angst and exuberance of the artist, the two poles of human longing.

All that said, how can you look at the painting of his bedroom and not feel a deep love for the man who saw like that, and thought to paint a place so constrained and ordinary, with such extraordinary freedom and emotional investment. The story of Van Gogh and his brother Theo is one of remarkable courage, vision, tragic struggle against illness, faithful friendship between brothers, grabbing life with both hands yet unable to hold firmly to all that is life affirming and humanly fulfilling.

Some have tried to write about the spirituality of Van Gogh, or have used his paintings as devotional sounding boards. I don't doubt there are profound symbols and hints obvious and obscure in his work that encourages spiritual reflection. Indeed several of the overtly religious paintings do their own kind of aesthetic homiletic. But sometimes the message isn't in the painting; the painting reaches beyond articulated understanding and wounds us where comprehension is unnecessary, and recognition of who we are and why we are is sensed in that place deeper than reason and more permanent than passion. 

 

 I took a photo and removed the picture frame - better than some of the prints on sale, but the power is in the original.

Isaianic Imagination - Dorothy Day and Peaceful Nay-Saying

Isaianic Haiku

Walk the ways of God -
the politics of shalom
make peace the new norm.
..................................................

Swords into ploughshares -
weapons for food production,
not mass destruction.
....................................

Double negative,
"We won't study war no more".
Future positive!

The Hermeneutics and the Imperative of Love 1

 

We do not live for ourselves alone

and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact

that we begin to love ourselves properly,

and thus also love others.

What do I mean by loving ourselves properly?

I mean, first of all,

desiring to live,

accepting life as a very great gift

and a very great good,

not because of what it gives us,

but because of what it enables us to give to others.

Thomas Merton, The New Man, page xx.

Merton was one of the great affirmers of life. He was a living paradox, a gregarious solitary, a silent voice that wouldn't shut up, an ascetic who sought to live to the full, a monk who fell in love, and, from his Journals, a Christian who understood the inner conflicts, tensions, and anguishes of Romans 7, spilling over in his own experience into the liberty, joy and and fulfilments of life in the Spirit as in Romans 8.

Professor Larry Hurtado (New College Edinburgh) has several times lectured on the pervasive hermeneutic of love throughout the New Testament, and observed the lack of serious engagement with the theology and practice of love as a faith defining critierion in the life of each Christian community. Worship and liturgy, discipleship and doxology, sexual ethics and ecclesial politics, communal care and personal relationships, theological reflection and moral integrity, are each drawn into the orbit of the New Testament imperative of agape, the redemptive goodwill of God.

If we're honest, there's a clanging dissonance in the theory and the practice of agape as the primary Christian disposition, in much of the communal and personal practices of contemporary Christian spirituality. I find this both theologically intriguing and a rather glaring clue as to what the Church is for and its mandate to embody the good news of the Kingdom of God. So without knowing where this is going, for a few months towards Advent I'll post occasionally on the Hermeneutic and Imperative of Love. Not a chain of harangues nor a catena of moralising winges - both of these are in reality demoralising!

More a sowing of seeds of thought, a series of small perpsectival studies as experiments in what love might look like in practice, pieces of a jigsaw which may in the end have some pieces missing, but enough to make it worth looking for the lost pieces! 

However. Not to get too philosophically carried away. The photos above and below depict a different perspectival study, entitled 'Smudgy Love'. The two favoured places are the cushion and the cardboard box.

 

FF Bruce and the Epistle to the Hebrews - A Test Case for Evangelical Critical Scholarship Half a Century Ago.

Eerdmans have announced a new commentary on Hebrews. It's a new entry to the New International Commentary on the New Testament and it will replace the commentary of F F Bruce which anyone interested in evangelical New Testament scholarship reveres as a fine combination of historical exposition, textual exposition and theological exegesis. At a time when others were defensively negative about historical critical study of the New Testament, F F Bruce personified the confessional integrity of a man of thoughtful and committed Christian faith, unafraid of critical questions and warmly responsive to the spiritual message of the New Testament.

There are several reasons why Bruce was an ideal commentator on Hebrews for a commentary series launching into the market unsure of its credibility beyond evangelicalism. Bruce was a member of the Christian Brethren, a moderately conservative evangelical (how he tired of these carefully worded theological categories), and there are few traditions more theologically sympathetic to the rich symbolism and typology and the book of Hebrews. He was also a first rate historian, an erudite and meticulous scholar, and with an intellect weighted with  both intelligence and integrity.

His commentary was commissioned in 1954, published in 1963 and revised in 1990, the year of his death. From the start Bruce on Hebrews was recognised as a lucid, historically thoughtful and theologically sensitive commentary which has enabled generations of readers to make sense of a book that is enigmatic, mysterious and for some downright perplexing in places. Melchizedek was as puzzling to readers in the 1960's as any complex theory of Derridean postmodern hermeneutics!

The replacement volume will be twice the length of Bruce, and will reflect current approaches to hermeneutics and literary social approaches to the text, majoring on chiasmus as the hermeneutic key. It will have to sit alongside strong competition from Peter O'Brien's Pillar commentary which is becoming the preferred treatment for evangelicals, not forgetting Paul Ellingworth's NICGT volume which is a massive treatment now showing its own age, and the even more comprehensive and richly informed Word commentary by W Lane. Then there is L T Johnson's fine commentary in the New Testament Library series, and Craig Koester's Anchor volume, and Fred Craddocks elegant exegesis in the New Interpreter's Bible.

So it's interesting that Bruce's volume will remain in print as a stand alone treatment of Hebrews. Much of his exposition is not significantly qualified by more recent scholarship and it remains a responsible and spiritually rewarding companion. Old fashioned it may be, but fashions of hermeneutic theory and practice are not the only criteria for exegesis that is faithful to the text because arising from within the faith tradition of the documents that are that same faith's foundation charters. Anyway, Bruce's commentary has no use by date, and in my view no expiry date.

I mention the replacement of a commentary for two reasons.  First I own two copies of this commentary. It was one of the first commentaries I bought as a student minister and I read it through. my second copy was a gift from the library of the late Dr Eleanor Walker who died over a decade ago, before she could complete her studies for the Church of Scotland ministry.

Second, I have all the commentaries mentioned above, and I still go back to this veteran commentary by a veteran scholar who changed the opinion of the academy about the seriousness, creativity and integrity of evangelical critical scholarship. Bruce almost singlehandedly demonstrated the possibility that those three words could sit together without threatening oxymoron.

Roses and Castles and the Politics of Life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just spent a few days in Northumberland.  The ruin of Dunstanburgh Castle is one of those impressive reminders of dangerous times, human power games and the labour and ingenuity that goes into territorial defence and territorial aggression. These were built to last, 700 years ago

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then there was the beauty and alternative worldview of Alnwick Gardens. The rose garden was past its best and had been battered by rain, but there's a defiance in flowers quite different from the defiance of stone and rock against sea, wind and human determination.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whether in the shared harmony and profusion of colour and scent, or the single glory of fragile transience shaped into such modest loveliness below, the contrast of rose and rock, garden and castle, vulnerability and power, is one of the distinctions too easily overlooked in the politics of human life. I don't mean we don't need castles in a world of fractured and changing loyalties. But the question of why we need them, is one of the moral perplexities we may be losing the will and capacity to go on interrogating. 

 

I didn't think many of those thoughts while on holiday - they began to assert themselves when looking at photos and deciding what to keep and discard.  It could be argued quite persuasively that the beauty of gardens requires time, and peace, work and investment, and the hopefulness that others won't come and build a castle on the garden site. To prevent such purposes you need strong castles to deter and defend.

But if all of life is about looking over our shoulder, identifying the dangerous 'other', then maybe we need the reassuring space and viewpoint of a garden. Worryingly, both garden and castle need walls, and the wall is both a necessary part of human civilisation, and an ambiguous symbol that tells of our need to keep danger out and what we love safe.

Roses and castles. Hmmm.

The Wright Stuff - The Gospel of the Kingdom

I've slowly been reading Tom Wright's How God Became King. One of the strengths of Wright's overall approach to the New Testament is the way he takes hold of us, grabs our shoulders, and turns us round to look at things from a different perspective. In other words he calls in question the received point of view, and by a tour de force compels consideration of an alternative interpretation of the evidence.

This book is a delight to read, and it helps that I happen to agree almost without demur with his overall thesis  - the Gospels are indeed about the Kingdom of God; and Jesus is the one in whom we see the kingship of God in all the mystery and majesty of love incarnate and the embodied holiness of God. It is unhelpful to create a tension far less a contention between Paul and Jesus - but for that precise reason, Wright is correct to insist that much of New Testament theology and historical study has carried a presumption of  priority for Paul as the theologian par excellence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

A reading of the Gospel that takes them at their face value as accounts of the life, ministry and meaning of Jesus restores a necessary balance and provides the major canonical corrective, holding the balance between event and interpretation, between the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and the lived reflection of the first Christian communities. Gospels and Epistles create an essential conversation between the Gospel of Jesus and hermeneutic reflection emeging from the church's experience in the life of the Spirit. This and much more comes from Wright's characteristic combination of creative scepticism about received assumptions and persuasive argument built on analytic and synthetic control of the full range of material necessary for constructive New Testament theology and history.

I am enjoying this book.

The plaque above is by Ghiberti, from the Florence Baptistry of San Giovanni, and shows the Triumphal Entry - a key event not only for understanding the KIngdom of God, but as an authoritative statement of Christology. I love the work of Ghiberti.

Gight Forest in the sunshine :)