Living Wittily

Caption Contest on Rembrandt's Paul.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some Captions as Hermeneutic Suggestions.

"How come they didn't find my sword when they strip searched and jailed me?"

"My feet are killing me!"

"Come on think, think! What was that guy's name again, came from Philippi, begins with an E..."

"Wish they'd invent email and data sticks!"

"God, I need a good PA - I hate paperwork."

Happy to hear other caption suggestions for this painting.

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The above is one of my favourite portraits of Paul the Apostle. Not the armour clad Caravaggio's muscle bound warrior, more the frail and hunted ageing apostle much less sure of himself. Is he ever going to leave prison - he doesn't know, so he has one sandal on and the other under his foot to keep it warm, how beautiful the feet that bring good news.

The books on his bed are almost as big as some recent works written about him by Jewett, Campbell and Wright! More seriously, this is the premier theologian of the nascent church thinking his way towards an adequate theology of the One he calls Lord; or maybe he's wondering just what he needs to write to those migraine inducing Corinthians whom he loves and longs to see grow up!

The sword, lying against those massive tomes, is no longer the persecutor's tool of trade, it is the Word of God, cruciform, the sword of the Spirit. He is blissfully unaware that his own face is radiated by the light of Jesus Christ, he is no longer lost, just lost in wonder, love and praise - even if his expression is a mixture of apprehension and contemplative puzzlement

The stylus is in his left hand - was Rembrandt left-handed, the most natural explanation for showing Paul like this. And the stylus is inactive, awaiting the clarity of thought that perhaps only an apostle who doesn't have delete and cut and paste has patience for, and therefore what is written has to be first thought, because papyrus and ink are unforgiving materials in the service of a forgiving Gospel.

What particular thought is he struggling with - Perhaps that moment of illumination when he, like the rest of us was unsure of God's purposes, and as he weighs the possibilities,  "For to me living is Christ, and dying is gain....I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you Philippians."

This portrait is of an apostle both vulnerable and uncertain, not a hint of self-confidence but somewhere deep in the heart's core, a love that inspired recklessness, persistence and some of the greatest thinking about God in Christ the church would ever know.

Isaac of Nineveh and Micro Photos of Grains of Sand

I like Isaac of Nineveh who said, "Be a herald of God's goodness". Against all preaching and announcing of life's negatives, this 7th Century Syrian Bishop insisted that the vocation of the follower of Jesus is to herald God's goodness.

Not that I've seriously read Isaac of Nineveh, but I've come across him now and then. Most recently in Olivier Clement's The Roots of Christian Mysticism, a catena of patristic texts threaded by Clement's commentary. I keep it handy because it provides food for rumination on any page I open.

In a chapter on the difficult love, that is the demand and cost of loving God and neighbour, Isaac is quoted to show that the Divine Love outshines and indeed overwhelms our own effort, and in doing so doesn't obliterate them but redeems them.

As a grain of sand does not balance a load of gold, so the effect of God's justice does not counterbalance His compassion.  As a handful of sand thrown into the ocean, so are the sins of frail flesh as compared with God's providence and mercy. As a fountain that flows abundantly is not dammed by a handful of earth, so the mercy of the Creator is not vanquished by the wickedness of the creatures.

Now speaking of grains of sand - I recently bought this book as a visual tonic. The micro-photographs are amazing, exept our capacity to be amazed suffers from the deflation of that word being over-used.  Likewise the word awesome. But using the words without the downward drag of careless overuse, the photographs do cause what Arthur Quiller Couch calls 'cerebral inconveniences', and their beauty does hint at the transcendent - so yes, amazing, and awesome.

Now when I read about sand in the Bible I have a much richer sense of what a grain of sand looks like - and the individuality and beauty of each and every one of them - that;s another overused cliche, often used in churches, as we pray for 'each and every one of them'. But I can think of few better uses of the phrase than sich an inclusive set of brackets - each and every one. Maybe the one biblical text where grains of sand don't get such a good press is when foolish builders build houses, not on solid higher ground, but on flood plains!

The Unrecognisable, Unworship-able and Non-Existent "god" of the New Atheists

Some years ago I made my way (slowly) through David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Inifinite. In the now legendary words of one of our Honours students, "This is a hard book". The student received the not too unsympathetic and the now equally legendary reply by the lecturer, "This is an Honours course!". That exchange still echoes year on year, in the collaborative and interactive conversations that take place as the preferred form of learning and teaching in our College. 

The Beauty of the Infinite ranks with several other theological books I read through with an experience similar to a middle aged man starting on a fitness regime and not liking the hard work of the gym circuit, liking even less getting up early to keep the discipline of the daily jog and fighting against his badly educated neurotransmitters to lose the taste for junk food and chocolate! The benefits are not immediate, but they are life enhancing, intellectually renewing, they make for a healthier mind, and they open up horizons which previously could only be viewed from afar, or puffed towards, with a stitch in the side, and no guaranteee I'd ever get there.

Other hard books have a similar weight, importance and carry the same intellectual health benefits. Eberhard Jungel's God and the Mystery of the World; Kevin Vanhoozer's The Drama of Doctrine and Is There a Meaning in the Text; Von Balthasar's Mysterium Paschale; Barth's Church Dogmatics Vol II.1 and 2; Pannenberg's Systematic Theology, each of the three volumes a whole year's training circuit!

But then there are other kinds of 'hard books', not because they are intellectually demanding, loaded with complex concepts, rooted in disciplined philosophical and theological traditions, but because they demand the full attention of intellect, affection, conscience and personal responsiveness. These are not better than intellectually demanding books, they are different in the demands they make, but the aim is the same. They seek a similar response of self-giving to the task of faith seeking understanding, and mind and heart learning and living towards a deeper, clearer, more humble vision of the love of God.

My conversations with such books have included Moltmann's The Trinity and the Kingdom of God; Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense; The Rule of St Benedict; Julian of Norwich's Revelations; George Herbert's The Temple; Belden Lane's The Solace of Fierce Landscapes; the Poetry of R S Thomas, Denise Levertov, Mary Oliver and Seamus Heaney; Catherine Lacugna's God for Us; Walter Brueggemann's Old Testament Theology; the novels of Chaim Potok; Merton's No Man is an Island and Seeds of Contemplation.

All of which brings me back to David Bentley Hart, and his latest book. The Experience of God. Being, Consciousness, Bliss, (Yale University Press, 2013). Along with Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith and Revolution, Hart's new volume is one of the most telling and serious riposte's to the intellectual deficits (by the way I miss-typed that word as deificits - is that a neologism for such rationally deficient atheism?) - anyway, Hart's riposte to the intellectual deficits and atheological naivete of the new atheist polemics against God, religion and faith as a way of knowing.

Hart's aim is quite simple, and quite ambitious - he offers an exploration of the concept "God" as the word and concept function within the great theistic faiths of the world. In doing this it becomes clear that what the new atheists so passionately hate, dismiss, deconstruct, fear and fight, is a concept of God unrecognisable by the people and traditions which can be named in any meaningful way as theistic. So this book is an attempt at explicating the conception of God in Christian and other theistic faith traditions, but articulated by a Christian who neither dismisses the authentic traditions of theistic faith, nor cedes to the new atheists the freedom to define the word "God" in terms that suit conclusions, presuppositions and prejudices already in place in such writers' world view.

Starting from next Monday I'll do a series of posts on Hart's chapters (there are 6 of them). .

R S Thomas, the Expanding Universe and the Crucified God.

R S Thomas is best known as the poet of the absence of God, or at least of the presence of God made most acute by his absence. When he is in an angry interrogative mood he besiges the customer services department of the Divine, and with a determination and articulation that makes it difficult to pacify him, let alone satisfy him.

Tell Us

We have had names for you:

The Thunderer, the Almighty

Hunter, Lord of the snowflake

and the sabre-toothed tiger.

One name we have held back

unable to reconcile it

with the mosquito, the tidal wave,

the black hole into which

time will fall. You have answered

us with the image of yourself

on a hewn tree, suffering

injustice, pardoning it;

pointing as though in either direction:horrifying us

with the possibility of dislocation.

Ah, love, with your arms out

wide, tell us how much more

they must still be stretched

to embrace a universe drawing

away from  us at the speed of light.

...

There is a surprising softness, even sympathy in the portrayal of love crucified, of God spreadeagled and hung in the ultimacy of human pain as it stretches to enfold the whole creation. The last five lines are the reluctant recognition of the poet that infinite suffering is beyond finite comprehension, and therefore the supreme scandal of Christian faith, that the stretched arms of the crucified Jesus are the embracing arms of God holding the universe in being and drawing all that is into the reconciling embrace of the Creator.

This poem echoes some of my own thought and feeling as I've lived within the text of Colossians 1.15-20. That hymn to Christ gives a theological vision which is complemented by Thomas's poem, and the poet's sense of God crucified underlies the cosmic oxymoron that is foolishness to rational minds, and yet is the wisdom of the redeeming God.

Spiritual friendship: When Sharing is More than Gossip in Freefall.

Been thinking a bit about openness within the community of Christ. What kinds of relationship makes it possible for us to speak with each other trustfully and listen attentively? These essential presuppositions of mutual pastoral care and accompaniment are about our willingness to entrust ourselves to others, who also entrust themselves to us, in a relationship of mutual respectful love. Such New Testament imperatives as ‘bear one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ’, and ‘admonish one another in love’, require an openness of heart and spirit that is hard to manufacture, and grows within us only as we are open to the grace of Christ.

When Paul is having a hard time with the Corinthian community he urges them to open their hearts to him. For Paul Christian fellowship is only possible when generosity of heart issues in emotional and spiritual hospitality as we welcome one another as God in Christ welcomes each of us. Paul is not commending emotional exhibitionism, spiritual self-advertisement, or any other self-concerned form of ‘sharing’. He is rooting our care for each other in the compassionate competence of Christ, the sufficient grace of God, the enabling and transforming counsel of the Counsellor. Such open-hearted conversation enables each of us within the Christian community to speak and listen, and come to a new understanding of what it might mean to be heard, understood, and affirmed within the love of Christ.

A couple of recent encounters with folk have led to conversation about just how hard it is to follow after Christ, just to keep going, and to know that we are travelling in the right direction

De-motivation – what takes the wind out of our sails? Which of our recent experiences drained us of energy, eroded confidence, knocked our self-esteem - which is different from teaching us humility? Recognising and challenging de-motivators in us, and in others, is one of the first principles of a ministry of encouragementis important in sustaining our ministry.

Life Balance – Prioritising is an obvious way of managing conflicting demands. But who decides on the order of priority? Family; personal walk with God; wider ministry; ministry in the church; Sabbath; study versus people. How far would we trust someone to tell us we are unbalanced?

Hopes – ambition is not a bad word, unless it is an engine driving us along a self-chosen road. So what we hope for arises both from our identity and from our self-awareness. Talking of our hopes is an important way of articulating our faith – and of putting anxiety, fear and tedium into perspective. But who would we netrust with our hopes, and with the insight to guide us towards them?

These I think are crucial areas in which genuine spiritual accompaniment takes place within a discerning and wise sharing. When Paul speaks to the Corinthians about opening their hearts in affection towards him he is asking an awful lot; and so do we when we throw around that word, 'sharing'.