Living Wittily

"The path of life leads upwards..." Proverbs 15.24.

The image of the path is deeply resonant with my understanding of what it means to follow Jesus faithfully. There's something about walking boots, a rucksack, food and water for the journey that turns a mountain hike into something as spiritual as it is physical.

Hillwalking is the image of the hymn I chose for my Ordination. And the following of the path that is Christ informs the entire hymn, weaving obedience and trust, perseverance and grace, into a prayer of dedication to the journey, and the One who goes before.

The photos were taken up Bennachie today, from the Mither Tap (1699 feet). Standing between the massive rocks, looking down onto the hill range below what you see is a visual image of "a long obedience in the same direction". Below is the first verse of the hymn, Christ of the Upward Way; it is followed by a favourite poem by the early 17th C poet Giles Fletcher. The first line of the stanza I quote has virtually been a Christian mantra at those times when my life hasn't been straightforward, the path isn't clear, the hill is rocky and the body is tired. But He has led me in right paths, for His name's sake. I've believed even when the evidence wasn't in, that "to trust in God with all my heart" is to find that he directs my paths. I have deep affinities with Benedictine spirituality and love the Rule of Benedict as a moderate, sensible framework for Christian obedience, and that first chapter which begins with the promise "I will run in the paths of your commandments.

No I'm not always consistent in practice; but Jesus said he was the way, the truth and the life, and his call to follow faithfully after him remains for me the homing call of the heart, the magnetic North of the soul, and the Gospel of reconciliation in Christ, remains the truth around which the mind finds its orbit, with the prayer, that, in the honesty and humility of a grace not mine, "every thought can be captive to Christ."

Christ of the upward way,my Guide divine,

Where Thou hast set Thy feet, may I place mine;

And move and march wherever Thou hast trod,

Keeping face forward up the hill of God.

Giles Fletcher, from his poem,

The Incarnation

He is a path, if any be misled;

He is a robe, if any naked be;

If any chance to hunger, he is bread;

If any be a bondman, he is free;

If any be but weak, how strong is he!

            To dead men life is he, to sick men health;

            To blind men sight, and to the needy wealth—

A pleasure without loss, a treasure without stealth.

 

 

God. The Beginning and End of Systematic Theology.

"Who is God? And what is God? These are the questions of an entire lifetime, Nothing reaches so deep into the purpose of human life, nor demands the full scope of the human intellect as do these two brief queries. They stand at the head of Thomas Aquinas' majestic Summa Theologica, and by right they belong to the capital and the footing of any systematic theology." And so begins Sonderegger's first volume of a trilogy on Christian Dogmatics.

With all the right and useful emphases on theology as practical, missional, contextual in the past few decades, Sonderegger is right to insist from the beginning that theology is about God, not us. "Almighty God just is, in length and breadth, height and depth, altogether who He is." So questions of relevance and application, of practicality and comprehensibility, of accessibility in prayer and thought and action, all reduce towards the living centre of faith, God. 

I heard Sonderegger lecture in Aberdeen a few weeks ago. Her carefully articulated thought, framed in language that is doxologically formed as well as intellectually driven, her combination of rigorous scholarship and passionate piety (I use that word piety in the sense of thought laden with prayer), made that lecture itself an act of devotion in its delivery, and a means of grace in its reception. This is theology distilled to its essence, to the essentials which are always to be found in the perfections of God. 

"Every property of Deity is most properly called a Perfection. In all this, and beyond all this, Deity is Mystery: hidden, invisible, transcendent Mystery. The Objectivity of God closes the intellect up in wonder. The richness of this Mystery is inexhaustible, and we study it only in prayer." (xiii)

There is a no-nonsense solemnity in Sonderegger's writing, a reverence proper to the activity of studying, thinking, praying, writing, talking and finally articulating what can be said of God, of who God is, and what we are about when we speak of God, let alone speak to God.

"The Subjectivity of God appears first in Holy Scripture: He speaks, commands, beholds and blesses. Always we stand before a Living God who gives Himself to be known and loved. All the Perfections of God are properly ethicized, yes. But even more they are personalized. God is Knowledge itself that knows; Humility and Dynamism that lowers itself; Presence and Love that invites, heals, exalts. (xiii)

Benefit Sanctions, Food Banks, the Bible and the Poor

The Bible has quite a lot to say about food, who has it and who hasn't, who deserves it and who doesn't.  The Bible, that most political collection of books, history, letters, speeches, prayers, prophetic oracles and stories is positively stuffed with food and people who need it. From Cain and Abel and Jacob and Esau embodying the colliding interests of hunters and cultivators, from Pharaoh's feast and famine, boost and bust economics, to Moses with his hungry tribes with their mutterings and manna, from laws about clean and unclean to laws about land care, justice and compassion for the stranger, the widow and the orphan. Full of it.

And when the production and distribution of food is controlled by the powerful, and the poor increase and go hungry and the social machinery runs in the interests of the rich who are stuffed and sated and able to dismiss the hunger of the poor, then the Bible is even more political. Micah, Amos and Isaiah do not read like paid up members of the benefits sanctions culture, or the food bank society. When they talk the talk of austerity it isn't the poor and hungry, the vulnerable and the widows and orphans that they have in mind. It's the rich, the powerful, the well fed, those who are so full of themselves and food and money and importance, that they become dismissive and wilfully ignorant of what it means to be a human being dehumanised by power, government, systems and structures.

So I find myself reflecting on some prophetic phrases in the light of recent exchanges in the commons about benefit sanctions, food banks, death and suicide figures. Amos would have been brilliant in our House of Commons, "You sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals. You trample on the heads of the poor." That's as good a description of ideological austerity consequences as you'll find. As for the self-righteous pomposity and uninformed argument that there is no connection between benefit sanctions and food banks, Micah reduces it to three criteria for good government, "act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God".

My problem with those who sepak for our Government and its DWP is that none of these criteria carry any political weight or moral authority. Instead I hear self-serving rhetoric about "doing the right thing", the mantra repetition of "fairness" as if life could ever be fair. A welfare system is precisely for those who have found life weighted against them, whose cirucmstances make life a struggle. The original welfare vision is of a society where welfare is a moral and mutual obligation, in which compassion and generosity have purchasing power, and where we accept there will be some who cheat and lie and don't pull their weight; but in which we do not hurt and harry all who need help, because some people play the system.

So when a straightforward question is asked in the House of Commons, an institution filled with people voted there by an electorate who want to know, about how many of those who have been sanctioned have since died, it should be able to be answered. Indeed it should be required that those in power answer it. And when a Government minister says 'there is no robust evidence' of the link between benefit sanctions and increased use of food banks I hear Amos again, "you deprive the poor of justice in the courts." To my knowledge no one has successfully overturned a benefits sanction through the courts - maybe because the courts are increasingly restricted to those who can pay for the legal help. When, though, did it become acceptable for a minister to so summarily, and arrogantly, dismiss widespread evidence from responsible charities who deal with hungry people every day?

Jesus told a parable about a rich man who walked out of the big house every day and din't notice, or wilfully ignored, Lazarus who was on the only kind of benefits on offer in his day. Power not only corrupts; it blinds; it desensitises; it gives the false impression that you deserve all you get and all you've got; power causes moral amnesia and social complacency. Power does all these things, unless it is constrained by other forces of social capital - compassion not blame, wisdom not bullying, generosity not ridicule, respect not demonising, care not caricature. A welfare state does not have to become steel wool in order to avoid being a sponge. Nor do Government spokes-persons, who are appointed by the people, have the right to avoid answering questions as the only way to sustain the manufactured credibility of their own claimed truth.

"Give us this day our daily bread" is not the privileged prayer of the well off; it is the prayer of the human heart, and it has no place for me, my, mine. Us, our, we, the pronouns of shared communal responsibility for and to each other.

 

David Starkey: Bringing History into Disrepute with Impunity?

Two paragraphs. Both true. So what is the significance of their juxtapoisition?

David Starkey CBE FSA FRHistS is a constitutional historian and a broadcaster. He is deemed an eminent historian, by which I assume is meant that he is a scholar, committed to academic integrity, and as such one who comments with authority, knowledge and that essential balance of ethical judgement which identifies the true public intellectual. As a CBE, he is publicly honoured for his services to historical research and the dissemination of scholarship that is accessible and trustworthy. As a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society he is recognised as one who meets exacting standards of intellectual enquiry, whose contribution to the scholarship of his discipline enhance the reputation of that august body, and whose public profile adds weight to an historic institution which values independence of thought, academic excellence and humane learning.

I am not a member of Scottish Nationalist Party. I have principled objections to nationalism, separatism, and political ambitions which focus on the self-interest of one country to the detriment of its existing relations, friendships and obligations. I have many friends who are members of the SNP, who voted Yes, who hope for a further referendum when as they see it the time is right. They fly the saltire, play the bagpipes, know their Scottish history, recognise the seriousness and far reaching consequences of the dismantling of the United Kingdom, and still press ahead. Not all SNP supporters are as responsible and thoughtful, like every political party it has its embarrassments, and at times its darker underside.

But the recent remarks of David Starkey, and his toxic comparison of the SNP with the Nazi party means that my two previous paragraphs should not be able to appear on the same page. Why? Because this is rogue mischief by a man who makes money out of controversy; who thrives on outrage; who spouts venom and toxin from behind the respectable facades of institutions which have honoured him. Because he may even believe that his distorted perceptions and wildly inane rhetoric are indeed accurate, wise, prescient insights which warn us of what we might be sleepwalking into. Or alternatively because he doesn't believe a word of it but boy does it get him headlines, contracts and money.

A constitutional historian in a fit of bile disenfranchises a swathe of voters who represent at least half of the Scottish nation by comparing their political goals, and the political process within which those goals are articulated, to pre-war Nazi Germany. Leaving aside the gratuitous obscenity of the comparison, the evidence adduced and argument developed demonstrates the kind of historical analysis that would require he resit a first year undergraduate essay on history. This man is FRHistS for goodness sake! So my modest question is this: what does a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society have to say or do to raise questions about his ongoing suitability to represent the values and aims of that institution? Or is such an honour irrevocable no matter what wild, weird and inflammatory nonsense a member utters as a recognised authority?

Becoming the Gospel 3. Faith in the Faithful God

Becoming the Gospel means becoming like Jesus, in whom by the Spirit we are transformed and conformed to the image of Christ, who is the express image of the Father. Reconciled to God, we become agents of change, ministers of reconciliation, peacable peacemakers co-opted into God's mission of setting the creation right.

In a nutshell that is Gorman's thesis in this book. This transformative existence is condensed into that astounding exchange Paul describes, "He who knew no sin, became sin, that we might become in him the righteousness of God." To open that exegetical bank vault of a verse requires that we, in James Denney's phrase, "hear the plunge of lead into fathomless depths." But not fathomless in the sense of meaningless; fathomless in that, no matter how deeply we go, there is that which is beyond our grasp, which exhausts our spiritual and intellectual capacity, and reduces us, or better, raises us, to resigned adoration.

George Herbert's poetry is often a commentary on Paul's theology:

Philosophers have measur’d mountains,

Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,

Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:        

But there are two vast, spacious things,

The which to measure it doth more behove:

Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love.

Chapter 3 of Gorman's book examines what it means to become the Gospel, by looking through the lens of 1 Thessalonians, 1.2-3. Paul commends their "work of faith, and labour of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ." By the time Paul wrote to them, the Thessalonian Christians had been through a tough time of persecution arising from their embrace of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They had turned from idols to the true Gods - so were no longer attending the places of worship, or the activities of the trade guilds which had religious obligations, and refusing to call Caesar Lord. Paul of course had moved on and is anxious to let the new Christians know he hasn't forgotten and abandoned them. The letter is laced with encouragement, positive guidance and further explanation of a Gospel of faithfulness, love and hope. That they are already well known for these characteristics is encouraging for Paul, and he reinforces that sense of being caught up into the life of God, Father Son and Spirit. Chapter 1.1-8 traces this Trinitarian life and places it deeply into the missional nature of the God who comes in Jesus Christ, to fulfill the purposes of the Father in the power of the Spirit. "For Paul, Christ's faith and love are onseparable, and on the cross Christ;s faithfulness to God and love for humanity simultaneously reached their quintessential expression." (p.83).

In the core chapters Gorman makes a very important move, from missional God, to missional Apostle, whose theology in turn gives the foundations and resources for missional churches, communities of faithfulness, love and hope. And this is where as I understand him, Gorman's project leads to a strategic re-thinking of what the mission of the church is, and the respources and energy that enable local communities of Christ to become the Gospel wherever they are.

What is faith, faithfulness? The Thessalonians were citizens of an important Greek city under Roman governance. Paul's concern was to support and strnegthen their resolve in staying faithful to Jesus in the public square. Witness is precisely speaking and acting a testimony to the Gospel, and therefore becoming the Gospel in belief, commitments, virtues and practices, all derived from life in the crucified and risen Christ, graced and strengthened by the Spirit, lived in obedience to the Father. Such acts and words, lifestyle choices and behaviour patterns would make these new Christians stand out, and attract hostility, resentment, bewilderment and at times opposition ranging from ridicule to violence, even death. Faith is hard work, costly and expensive in social capital. "They are living in ways, or should be living in ways, that get them into trouble." There's a thought, a new criteria for the end of year audit of the church;s missional effectiveness - how much trouble have we been in?

But Gorman means more than that Christians are called to be faithful. They are called, and enabled, by a faithful God. In 5.23-4 the closing benediction is quite explicit - "he who calls you is faithful, and he will do this." Do what? Sanctify completely and keep securely. And for Christians persecuted for their faithfulness that is the basis of hope and the lived reality of divine love. The living, life giving, and life sustaining God is the one who keeps faith and enables faithfulness, who loves and pours love into faithful hearts, who faces loving faithful hearts towards the future in hope, because God is a God who is future oriented towards the fulfilment of his redeeming purpose of setting creation right.

 

The Best Baptist Preacher of His Age - By Some Distance.

In 1855 Charles Haddon Spurgeon, aged 20, stepped into New Park Street pulpit and preached a sermon on the Immutability of God. The sermon shows Spurgeon the pastoral exegete, evangelical mystic and Calvinist preacher, each of them demonstrably present, and for the next three decades, gifts that would make him one the greatest preachers of any age in the English pulpit.

I have an original 1878 bust of Spurgeon, a piece of genuine Victorian Evangelical celeb culture. It sits comfortably on the Church History bookcase surrounded by volumes on Puritanism - I guess it might explode if I placed it beside Newman on the Oxford Movement shelf. The first paragraphs of the sermon, despite his early years, are vintage Spurgeon. In the wide corpus of his sermons there are countless paragraphs that combine spiritual passion, biblical rootedness and homiletic gift to such effect.

"There is something exceedingly improving to the mind in a contemplation of the Divinity. It is a subject so vast, that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity; so deep, that our pride is drowned in its infinity. Other subjects we can grapple with; in them we feel a kind of self-content, and go our way with the thought, “Behold I am wise.” But when we come to this master science, finding that our plumbline cannot sound its depth, and that our eagle eye cannot see its height, we turn away with the thought that vain man would be wise, but he is like a wild ass’s colt; and with solemn exclamation, “I am but of yesterday, and know nothing.” No subject of contemplation will tend more to humble the mind, than thoughts of God....

But while the subject humbles the mind, it also expands it. He who often thinks of God, will have a larger mind than the man who simply plods around this narrow globe.... The most excellent study for expanding the soul, is the science of Christ, and Him crucified, and the knowledge of the Godhead in the glorious Trinity. Nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man, as a devout, earnest, continued investigation of the great subject of the Deity.

And, while humbling and expanding, this subject is eminently consolatory. Oh, there is, in contemplating Christ, a balm for every wound; in musing on the Father, there is a quietus for every grief; and in the influence of the Holy Ghost, there is a balsam for every sore.

Would you lose your sorrow? Would you drown your cares? Then go, plunge yourself in the Godhead’s deepest sea; be lost in his immensity; and you shall come forth as from a couch of rest, refreshed and invigorated. I know nothing which can so comfort the soul; so calm the swelling billows of sorrow and grief; so speak peace to the winds of trial, as a devout musing upon the subject of the Godhead. It is to that subject that I invite you this morning."

 

When Your Bible Becomes Disbound Don't Throw It Away

This Bible is 60 years old. It has been read most days and has seen better days. It belongs to a very special friend, who used to read this Bible along with her late husband. It is a King James Version, and was published by the National Bible Society of Scotland just after the second world war. My friend was a missionary to India in the early 1960's, and she met her husband there. My friend had this Bible when she went out to India, and they have used it all their married lives, and it shows.

This Bible has been around, and in book seller's discourse, the volume is now disbound. Which is a more gentle way of saying falling to bits, done. The binding is broken, pages are loose and torn, the marbled endpaper is ripped on one side and missing on the other. When it's opened it is quite likely to drop a few pages, and here and there an entire pamphlet is likely to fall out - these are called signatures, a large printed sheet, folded three times, and sewn into the spine. Hard now to use this Bible without having to hold it together, and reading it is a bit of a distraction if as well as meditation on the printed word there also has to be vigilance to prevent it falling apart!

Yes we could have bought my fried a shiny new Bible. A full range available, in any amount of translations and a variety of bindings from leather to hardback, plastic to linen, restrained solemnity of the traditional or multi-coloured options from pink to golden to green, and there's even a camouflage Bible. I joke not. But this is her Bible, replete with memories of countless readings, handled till it feels as familiar as her own hands, opened and closed over a lifetime when it has brought comfort and solace, or questions and upset, read aloud by her or her husband and in the reading the memory of his voice and hers, reciting words that are both prayer and conversation.

This isn't mere book, this is a living repository of a lifetime reading, listening, waiting, questioning, sharing and in all of this the discipline of faith in God who can be heard in these words, and argued with, trusted, and known.

Which is where the ancient craft of bookbinding comes in. Down at the University Bindery there are those who take old worn out books and make them live again. With an inbuilt love of the book as object, and a deep appreciation of the bonds that bind a person to a much loved and well used book, they take dilapidated pages and broken spines and bind them together again into a new usefulness.

Not a new book, a renewed book. And that's what has happened to my friend's Bible which we'll take to her tomorrow. The bookbinder is very busy - a waiting list of weeks to get a book done. But he knew this was a book used most days of the week and every week of every year. One week to the day he phoned to say it was ready.

This post is to say thank you, not only for this Bible of the second chance, but for work that is utterly and gloriously counter-cultural. It's done; throw it away; replace it; get a new one. That's the pared down philosophy of hearts and minds accustomed to newness, novelty and stuff. It's called the consumer culture. No such concessions to built in obsolescence for the bookbinder, who specialises in taking that which is broken, cracked, past it, disbound, and restores it to strength, durability and usefulness again. A bit like God really!!

Becoming the Gospel 2: Participatory Mission and Missional Participation.

Michael Gorman chose the title of his book with some care. Becoming the Gospel is a programmatic title, not only for the book but for how Gorman understands the nature and role of each Christian and each Christian community. From the very first, Paul "wanted the communities he addressed not merely to believe the gospel but to become the gospel and in so doing to participate in the very life and mission of God." (2) In his earlier book on Inhabiting the Cruciform God, Gorman firmly set this trajectory. Looking to the consummation when "God will be all in all" (I Cor 15.28) Gorman concluded, "In the meantime, by the power of the Spirit of Father and Son, the new people, the new humanity bears witness in word and deed to that glorious future by participating now in the life and mission of the triune cruciform God."

That word participation is fundamental in Gorman's understanding of Pauline spirituality and to Paul's view of mission. In 2 Corinthians 5.21 Gorman finds an astonishing promised exchange between the cruciform God and those communities responsive to the Gospel and therefore called to "faithful allegiance" and "trusting loyalty". "For our sake God made Christ to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."

The cruciform shape of Christian faith, practice and mission is distilled by Gorman in the sentence, "The cross of Christ reveals a missional, justifying, justice making God and creates a missional, justifying, justice making  people." (9) This is a book about particpatory mission or missional particpation, and throughout Gorman expounds Paul's theology by taking with utmost seriousness Paul's vision of human life being caught up into the life of the cruciform triune God. In the power of the Spirit each Christian and each community participates in that life as agents of reconciliation, peacemaking peacemakers, persecuted for their faithfulness to the God of kenotic love and cruciform conciliation as they turn from the idols of the age and demonstrate deepest loyalty to God by their counter-cultural commitment to the new life in Christ.

Quoting Morna Hooker, another pastorally alert Pauline scholar, Gorman spells out what he intends by his title, becoming the gospel. Referring to the "we" of 2 Cor. 5.21m sge argues: 

"The we has particular significance for Paul's own understanding of discipleship and ministry, and becomes an invitation tyo others to share in the divine activity. What Christ is to us - righteousness, wisdom, sanctification, redemption - Christians must now be to the world." (6)

What is God up to in the world, what is the missio dei? What happens if we read Paul's letters and interpret his life from the standpoint  of the church as a sent community? the answeras to these two questions will take up the next review post. Beyond that Gorman takes us deep into the texts and contexts of several of Paul's letters, exploring and confirming his overall thesis that Paul's view of the gospel assumes a people who, in response to the love of God and the faithfulness of Christ revealed on the cross, and given vital reality throughout creation by the resurrection, become themselves faithful communities. By the power of the Spirit, redeemed into a new creation which is cruciform in shape and energised by resurrection, Christian communities are called to faithfulness, love and hope, embodying the very reality of that cruciform reconciling and renewing love set free into human life, the life of the creation and indeed of the entire cosmos.

If Gorman is right in his overall interpretation of a missional Paul in the service of a missional God, calling into being missional communities of faith and faithfulness, then he is providing a post-Christendom church with a theology of mission adequate to our condition. A church haemorraging confidence as quickly as members, which despite desperate attempts at cultural adjustment and accommodation is being  increasingly pushed to the peripheries of post-modern culture, and urgently needs to rediscover, and recover, its own raison d'etre. By focusing on God's purpose for the church, and embedding that in the biblical narrative of Christ crucified and risen, and affirming communities called into being to re-present and participate in that same cruciform, reconciling kenotic love - that is to begin to give the church back its true existence, and that is what Gorman aims to achieve. As participants in the divine nature, as those who through the astonishing exchange of redemptive love, each church recovers its own true value as created by God, its own mission which is essentially, and necessarily different from the cultural icons of 21st century Western society. That difference will inevitably lead to persecution, almost in proportion to a community's faithfulness to and faith in Christ. This book is about spelling out the nature of that difference as seen in some of the earliest communities in the New Testament.

The Exegetical Captivity of the Book of Ruth

 

This is an interesting list of names.

Athalya Brenner

Kathryn Pfister Darr

Tamara Eskenazi

Kathleen Farmer

Marjo Korpel

Kirsten Nielsen

Katherine Sakenfeld

Karin M Saxegaard

This is another interesting and longer list of names

David Atkinson

Daniel Block

Frederic Bush

Edward Campbell

Robert Chisholm

Iain Duguid

Daniel Hawk

Robert D Holmstead

Robert Hubbard

Andre Lacoque

Tod Linafelt

James McKeown

Leon Morris

Roland Murphy

Jack M Sasson

K Lawson Younger

The first list comprises women biblical scholars who have written a commentary or monograph on the biblical book of Ruth. The second list comprises men who have written a commentary on Ruth - the number of monographs by men would lengthen the list considerably. And my point is? Well I have several points.

1. Around half of the women writing on Ruth write from within the Jewish tradition, and all of them, Jewish and Christian, take cognisance of feminist and womanist perspectives. Question: Can a man write an adequate commentary on a book in which women's experience is definitive and central in the story? Is gender irrelevant to how a person approaches a narrative text like Ruth?

2. The list of men commentators covers almost all the mainstream series of Old Testament Commentaries in English. The exceptions are Nielsen in the Old Testament Library, Farmer in the New Interpreter's Bible and Sakenfeld in Interpretation Commentary. Question: when editors commission scholars to write commentaries on biblical books, do they consider the advantages of having a woman write a commentary on a book so replete with women's experience in a patriarchal society?

3. Is gender relevant when choosing someone to write on a biblical text? Like Ruth, or Esther, or Song of Songs? What would a woman bring as scholar, and as woman, and therefore as woman scholar, to the approach and interpretation of any biblical text; but especially a text telling a complex narrative of women's life experience?

4. I have looked at the most recent commentaries and those forthcoming - they are still predominantly commissioned to men. James McKeown, Robert Chisholm, Lawson Younger and in a month's time Daniel Hawk in the Apollos series; these are all recent, and written by men and they are all appearing in series within the evangelical tradition.

5. Of those forthcoming there is Marjo Korpel in the highly academic HCOT series and Kandy Queen-Sutherland in the more accessible Smyth and Helwys volume. All else is commissioned to men.

I know - books like Ruth and Esther were most likely written by men, and reflect the social structures and mores of their time. But surely in trying to explore and expound the meaning of such texts for the original readers, and in seeking the contemporary appropriation of these texts as part of the Church's Bible, it would make sense to value and actively seek those whose own life experience gives access to the complexities and anomalies in a book such as Ruth? Or is that unreasonable, special pleading, patronising, or what? 

Becoming the Gospel 1:Missional God = Missional People

Those who know me will be aware I have an aversion verging on allergy to the word missional used as a ubiquitous adjective to anoint the latest programmes and strategies with biblical merit and mandate. I am absolutely and overwhelmingly convinced that mission lies at the heart of the church. The rhythm of worship and witness compels the pracvtice of mission. Worship draws us centripetally to the centre of our life in Christ, and then we are thrust centrifugally outwards to bear witness to the grace, love, mercy and reconciling purposes of God in Christ.

And therefore I am persuaded that an entire approach to Christian dogmatics could, and perhaps should, be founded on the mission of God. Such a Dogmatics would be constructively elegant in its use of fundamental doctrine s drawn from the classic Christian traditions, would be essentially centred on the graced nature and salvific purposes of God, and would be ecclesially innovative and pastorally evangelistic, as the eternal saving purposes of the Creator and Redeemer God are worked through in the context of our own times and our own calling under God, and applied in an exploration of the essential practices of the community of the Christlike God.

I am currently reading my way through Michael Gorman's new book, Becoming the Gospel. Paul Participation and MIssion. I've read Gorman's earlier books and he is now a go to writer I have personally found a valuable and trusted guide through the New testament texts, in particular the letters of Paul. A major emphasis in Gorman's interpretation of Paul up till now is a word he virtually coined, or at least established as a powerful interpretive key to the letters of Paul - it's the word cruciformity. His book Cruciformity. Paul's Narrative Spirituality of the Cross is a careful and persuasive exposition of Paul's theology and practice in terms of the cross; all of Christian life is cruciform, formed and transformed through the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus. The existence of the church, and the life and lifestyle of individual Christians is cruciform, shaped and conformed to the image of Christ crucified and risen.

From that starting point came a second book, Inhabiting the Cruciform God, in which Gorman developed further the conception of Christian existence as life liberated from sin and death through new creation in Christ. In that new creation the individual Christian and the community of the church are being shaped towards and come to embody the reconciling love and restorative forgiveness, and renewing grace and transformative justice and mercy of God. Once that quite dense sentence has been absorbed it is then easier to grasp the subtitle of this second book: Kenosis, Justification and Theosis in Paul's Narrative Soteriology. The theological content distilled into each of those words makes them potent with ideas and possibilities that enrich and expand our understanding of Paul's theology of Christian existence. I personally found this book profoundly helpful in the search for conceots that might aid my understanding and articulation of my own journey in Christ.

It's no coincidence that Michael Gorman is a Methodist, who has deep roots in Wesleyan theology in which such notions as theosis, participation, kenosis and conformity to the image of Christ so deeply inform the understanding of justification and sanctification, and of anthropology and ecclesiology. Much of what Gorman is exploring and expressing is a Pauline justification for a particular understanding of the dynamic of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the revolutionary impact on the individual of the work of God in the human heart. I have to confess a deep affinity with much Wesleyan theology and spirituality, though not uncritically. So I have to confess also that much of Gorman's work is already congenial to me, takes me into familiar theological territory, provides substantial exegetical warrant for much that I already believe, and hope more and more to grow into.

However what makes this third book so important, and worth a number of reflective review essays, is the word mission, and yes, the word missional, used theologically, carefully and always embedded in its exegetical and theological foundations in the biblicsal text. On page 9 is a succinct summary of what this book is about. In later posts I'll reflect on a chapter at a time, but for now here is Gorman's nutshell statement:

"To put it simply: the cross of Christ reveal a missional, justifying, justice-making God and creates a missional, justified, justice-making people. Because the cross reveals a missional God, the church saved and shaped by the cross will be a missional people."