My Ordination Bible is a beautifully bound King James Version which remains always to hand, and is read for the soft draping comfort of holding such a lovely volume, and for the glory of the language and as a reminder of what my life, finally and gladly is about. There's something all but sacramental in the recurring act of holding that one Bible, handed to you at the time you make promises which will thereafter guide, undergird and sustain your life of faith.
I went back to my Bible today after reading the last pages of F W Dillisone's old fashioned volume, The Christian Understanding of the Atonement. Old fashioned in this case is a positive term, an affirming and approving response to a book that is relaxedly learned, displaying elegant architectonics, broad in sympathy, precise in analysis and eschewing controversy and partisan posturing. Published 45 years ago it remains one of the finest treatments of the atonement for theologians; polemicists and partisan apologists for this or that theory of the atonement will be definition be impatient with it - and be the poorer for their quick all too narrow judgements. This is a book in which scholarship is in the service of faith, and the exposition of the living core of Christian faith is reverent, searching and sufficiently open to allow for mystery and intellectual humility that feels no discomfort in not knowing, and opting for wonder rather than cognitive closure.
On the last page Dillistone quotes Luke 1.78-79, as follows:
Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us,
To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.
The last words of the book are from Auden's Christmas Oratorio, the words of Simeon:
"Because of his visitation we may no longer desire God as if He were lacking: our redemption is no longer a question of pursuit but of surrender to Him who is always and everywhere present. Therefore at every moment we pray that following Him, we may depart from our anxiety into His peace." page 422.
The Giotto Deposition shows Jesus gazed upon from different perspectives and vantage points. And what each saw was cause for wonder, prayer, tears and thanksgiving. Worship always out-thinks and out-wonders controversy.
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