Living Wittily

George Mackay Brown and "The Harrowing of Hell."

The Orkney poet, novelist and short story writer George Mackay Brown was one of Scotland's finest writers of that kind of poetry that carries the sound and smell of its geographical context. Apart from his education years he lived a lifetime on Orkney, and learned from its silence, stillness and what others have called the bleak beauty of the islands.

There is a long running discussion, mostly inconclusive, about the terminology to be used of poetry written by "religious poetS", by which I mean a poet writing out of an overt, self-conscious faith commitment, but not always writing about religious themes. Devotional poetry, or religious verse can refer to poetry whose content is religious and which explores spiritual experience, and on occasion, are intended to evoke religious feelings and spiritual responses. But such literary influence and exposition of theology and spirituality do not exhaust poetry which, with more often with no overt religious intent, can equally explore, suggest and point to themes of transcendence and human longing for the divine.  

George Mackay Brown converted to Catholicism in 1961 and was a practising communicant of the Catholic church until his death. Much of Brown's poetry is enlivened with the glimmers and shadows of Christian theological themes and convictions, and even when there is no overt reference, the poetry unfolds in rhythms and resonances of what earliest critics discerned as grace. One of the finest examples of Brown's poetry, "The Harrowing of Hell" presupposes in the reader a high level of biblical literacy and spiritual sensitivity to those longings and fears, hopes and anxieties which both sanctify and terrify the human heart aware of morality, mortality and judgement, yet still hopeful of mercy.

The Harrowing of Hell

by George Mackay Brown

He went down the first step.
His lantern shone like the morning star.
Down and round he went
Clothed in his five wounds.

Solomon whose coat was like daffodils
Came out of the shadows.
He kissed Wisdom there, on the second step.

The boy whose mouth had been filled with harp-songs,
The shepherd king
Gave, on the third step, his purest cry.

At the root of the Tree of Man, an urn
With dust of apple-blossom.

Joseph, harvest-dreamer, counsellor of pharaohs
Stood on the fourth step.
He blessed the lingering Bread of Life.

He who had wrestled with an angel,
The third of the chosen,
Hailed the King of Angels on the fifth step.

Abel with his flutes and fleeces
Who bore the first wound
Came to the sixth step with his pastorals.

On the seventh step down
The tall primal dust
Turned with a cry from digging and delving.

Tomorrow the Son of Man will walk in a garden
Through drifts of apple-blossom.

Those last two lines read with the optimism and delicacy of Traherne with his extravagant depictions of nature overflowing with the life-enhancing glory of the Creator. The Old Testament saints are drawn to the wounded Redeemer, and on the seventh step, the primal dust, that from which the Creator formed humanity cries out in hope and joy at a renewed creation, as the seond Adam walks in the garden, and the apple blossom, great contours of white and pink drifts of it, promise a new crop of apples which will come to fruition in the purposes of the Son of Man. This is a playully serious theological meditation on creation, fall and redemption, framed within the medieval fascination with Christ descending to the place of departed spirits, and plundering the kingdom of darkness and lifelessness as the bringer of light and life.

The photo is my personal possession, passed to me by a close friend of GMB, taken some time in the 1960's she thought.

When Government Ministers either Ignore History or are Ignorant of History

Amongst the astonishing deficits of the current Conservative Government is an ignorance, a culpable and culturally unprecedented ignorance, of history and its importance as a resource for wisdom in political discourse and policy development. Along with the frenzy to obtain exemption from employment rights which are integral to our E membership, there is of course the rhetorical nonsense about the interference of Brussels with our judicial freedoms and national sovereignty by our being signatories to the European Convention of Human Rights.

It was about time someone exposed this dangerous and narrowed down national self interest for what it is - yes, all the aforementioned, but actually an embarrassingly ignorant awareness of the origins and rationale for the ECHR, and the central part played by Britain in drafting and implementing it following the brutalities and moral catastrophes of two European wars which engulfed the world. Patrick Stewart brings Shakesperean gravitas and Monty Pythonesque deconstruction to this sketch - his parting obscentiy is not a form of discourse I would personally endorse or repeat - but it has the merit of being unambiguous and memorably comprehensive.  

Enjoy it here

A Festschrift Celebrating Professor David Bebbington.

For those of my friends who are into history, especially evangelical and Baptist history. This book celebrates the life work of Professor David Bebbington, Professor of Politics and Modern History at the University of Stirling.

When I was writing my first book in 1989-91 David was a generous mentor, the last word in courteous criticism and an enthusiastic supporter who instilled confidence and the sound disciplines of research and careful scholarship.

And I am only one of many, many people who have gained from David's own writing, his friendship and his gift for encouraging Christian scholarship and a discipleship of the intellect.

Amongst the strengths of David's work and its legacy are:

moving history to the centre of Christian intellectual work, as an essential discipline for engagement with the modern world.

demonstrating the crucial significance of history in understanding the nature of the church and its social, cultural and historical context

a clear foundation for historiography that both demonstrates the inevitability of presuppositions and points to a way of writing history that is not enslaved by those presuppositions - see his Patterns of History, still in print after almost 40 years

he has offered the most useful definition so far of what is meant by the term "evangelical" when used of the movement which is traced to the 18th Century Revivals and its subesequent development. Evangelicalism is marked by conversionism, crucicentrism, biblicism and activism. Evangelicalism is a diverse movement which is more than these four defining attributes, but not less. See his Evangelicalism and Modern Britain.

David is the pre-eminent Baptist historian of our own tradition, and of Evangelicalism, the larger context of the Baptist way of being the church.

the continuing stream of his own scholarship and leadership as evidenced in published writing, initiatives within Stirling and Baylor Universities, lectures, PhD supervisions, edited collections of essays and his own personal enthusiasm for exploring, expounding and retrieving the past.

In addition to all this David is a superb teacher - here is one of his lectures at a symposium celebrating 400 years of the King James Bible, his lecture begins at 5 minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlBhE92uTbc

David Bebbington

The Lord's Prayer Sung Through the Ages

This morning I listened to Andrea Bocelli sing The Lord's Prayer, accompanied by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.  It set me wondering about musical versions of the Lord's Prayer, and in particular any Renaissance compositions. Then thinking more widely, I wondered about other choral versions, black spirituals, jazz, and whether it might be interesting to gather as many as I could find and explore the recption of this text within musical forms. So that's what I will do as a small sideline interest for a while.

As a starting point I have tracked down a CD with 24 tracks, all from varied musical styles, historical contexts and with variations in the rendering of the text. It will be intriguing to listen to the same words and ideas, in different languages and compositions, offering the same prayer. This of course is a classical CD. Other musical styles will have their offerings - I have for example Elvis singing the Lord's Prayer accompanied by the London Philharmonic!

One of the more interesting pieces is by Verdi, to an Italian text, O Padre Nostro. You can hear it here The music is set to a text which has many resonances, indeed verbal parallels, with Canto 11 of Dante's Purgatorio. Verdi was a passionate nationalist, and the treatment of the Lord's Prayer in Italian, with unmistakable links to Italy's greatest poet, was neither accidental nor insignificant as an example of how a prayer is received, interpreted and its spiritual power exploited in a culture deeply Catholic and self-consciously protective of its new national identity. The piece was composed in 1880, only a decade after the unification of Italy.

One of major areas of interest in New Testament studies today is the way texts have been recieved, and then the impact of those texts on those whop read, heard, sang or visualised them through the creative arts. The Lord's Prayer is a central text in New Testament accounts of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, it is a text which along with the creed and the 10 commandments is seen as a pillar in dogmatic theology, often written as A Body of Divinity. I am not aware of work having been done on how the Pater Noster has been expresed, expounded, celebrated in music.

 

Reading the Bible with a Lump in the Throat.

Sometimes the Gospel of John suggests Jesus is the one in control, the one with authority, who strides through John's narrative with purpose, determination and never a doubt.

The wine runs out but he knows what to do, water into wine, well, after all, he is the eternal Word and all things were made through him.

The crowd is hungry and there are no supermarkets and anyway precious little money; but tell them to sit down, let's bless what we've got, and just as in the wilderness with Moses there's food for everybody, and there are baskets of leftovers.

The sea of Tiberias is having one of its frenzies, gales and waves orchestrated in a performance of destructive energy, and it's dark, and Jesus is elsewhere. And John has Jesus walking on the water, three and a half miles out, Jesus speaks the great Johannine testimony of Jesus, "I am", and before you know it the boat is in a safe harbour. 

His close friends Lazarus, and Mary and Martha are heartbroken; well the women are, because Lazarus has died and Jesus didn't come in time. But this time, even the resourceful one they call Lord, breaks down, and cries. Interpreting the tears of Jesus is futile, graceless curiosity. John is quite explicit; Jesus is gut wrenchingly sick with grief, and his words a mixture of sobs and prayers. But then resurrection happens; death is reversed; Lazarus is the evidence of a power beyond bearing, so much so that some who saw and heard about it wanted Jesus dead.

Reading John today I was in chapter 6, where the story is told about that feeding of the hungry crowd and the great saying of Jesus, "I am the bread of life." Near the end of the episode comes a moment of utter vulnerability, implied more than overt, but every bit as poignant and of great pastoral significance. Jesus said some hard things about himself, as bread to be eaten, and many of his followers had had enough and went away, left him, disowned his words and gave up on him.

John 6.67 is still best read in an older translation, I think.

Jesus said to the Twelve, "Will you also go away?"

Simon Peter answered him, "Lord to whom shall we go?

You have the words of eternal life."

In that brief exchange something profoundly human has taken place, choices are made that will set the direction of life for Jesus and the Twelve. Cords of friendship are woven that will have to survive denial, betrayal, fear, guilt, shame, despair and the desolate loneliness of hearts torn apart by crucifixion.

I have always come to this part of the Gospel and had to stop, and hear again that question, "Will you also go away?" There's a lump in the throat, an ambush of the heart, a glimpse of the actual cost to Jesus, of trusting and entrusting himself to others like Peter, and me. Sometimes to be honest, life can be such a hard journey to travel that turning back, going no longer with him into those valleys of deep darkness, feeling at a deep and distant level that the wine has run out, knowing a gnawing hunger for a life richer and more vital that what it is, that I'm ready to at least wonder if I made a mistake, or maybe Jesus did. Then, exactly then, I need to hear that question. "Will you also go away?"And having heard it, answer the same words as Simon Peter, the patron saint of the big mouth, and the big heart. "Lord to whom would I go? Only you have the words of eternal life."

And you know something? It isn't the sense that Jesus is above and beyond and in control of all the stuff that can and sometimes does go wrong, that helps most. It's those tears at the grave of his friend, and that vulnerability of Jesus the great befriender who asks those closest to him, "And you? Will you also go away?" And ever since I met Jesus and gave him my life, I've known only one answer to that question. And it's another question, "Lord, to whom would I go? Only you have the words of eternal life."

"The Word became flesh and dwelt in our midst, and we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth." And that glory and grace and truth comes amongst human folk like ourselves, and calls us friends. And knowing our capacity for selfishness and playing safe, and understanding from within the unreliability and anxieties that can drive us to do terrible things, still calls us friends, and wants us with him. "Lord to whom shall we go?...Only you have the words of eternal life".

I write this 49 years after I did what the whole Gospel of John was written to make possible; "These are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name." (John 20.31) And like the Twelve, a choice was made that set the direction of my life,   

When the Preacher Shuts Up - And God Speaks in the Silence.

Years ago in College R E O White, Principal, scholar, and teacher not to be messed with, taught us amongst other things, to be better preachers. Well, you can either preach or you can't, he said - if you can, you can improve. If you can't, you might learn the techniques and practicalities, but as REO insisted, calling implies gifts and if you say you have the calling, but don't have the gifts, perhaps it's time to reconsider.And by the way, he would remark, others, not you, will be best able to tell if you have a gift of preaching!

Gifts can develop, skills can be learned, practice and experience enables us to grow and mature. The act of preaching, by which REO meant the practice of preaching, and not that preaching was a performance, was its own education, and the examiners and crit specialists would be the congregations who had to enjoy or endure the sermon. His lectures on preaching were themselves a mixture of the theory and practice of homiletics; a renowned teacher-preacher himself, he was careful not to impose his own style or approach. But the basic disciplines of study, thought, planning, prayer, imagination and conscientious prioritising of preaching in an overall ministry, were to be built into the habits and life patterns of a lifetime.

One day he was lecturing on the importance of conclusions. The last minute or so, the final sentences, the climax and application that could evoke the response of the heart to God, that would nourish, or convert, or strengthen, or move the heart of the hearer nearer to God, this was to be carefully thought through and delivered with persuasion, conviction and within the context of trust and shared humanity of preacher and hearer. He gave an example - if you have been preaching on zeal and commitment as being energized by the Holy Spirit, and you have built the sermon around the idea of enthusiasm, hearers will ask the valid question so what? What would that look like preacher? The worst possible conclusion would be to say as your final words, "So be more enthusiastic!"

REO's own education was in philosophy and then divinity - and both degrees were completed part time while working in pastoral ministry. He learned the hard way, he valued perseverance and was  both baffled and angry if students didn't work hard and make the best of the opportunities for learning and training at University and College. He knew about the connections between enthusiasm, determination, motivation and perseverance. When it comes to preaching on enthusiasm, what is needed is examples that inspire, a renewed experience of the love of God poured into the heart by the Holy Spirit, not so much a moralistic dig (Be more enthusiastic - which is a guilt making cop out by a lazy preacher), but a vision of a grace sufficient, a love endlessly merciful, a calling on our lives that ignites everything in us that will burn for the love of God, and some idea of what enthusiasm for God might look like, and feel like. Enthusiasm is the inpouring of the Holy Spirit, quite literally the meaning of the word. Thomas Chalmers the Scottish minister, social reformer and leader of the Free Church of Scotland famously spoke of the "expulsive power of an opposite affection".

An important benefit of a small College was the way our lecturers taught more than one area of theology - REO also taught Christian ethics and pastoral theology. As an experienced minister, a shrewd and at times a tough judge of character, he understood the inner life of Christian spirituality in the Evangelical tradition. The self induced guilt, the sense of not being good enough, the irony of fiercely holding that we are saved by grace, while just as grimly holding on to sin, or slowly slipping towards a complacent faith, gradually losing its edge as grace declined in amazingness. To turn the eyes of the congregation on Jesus, to lift up the cross, to proclaim the resurrection, to celebrate the gift and presence of the Holy Spirit, to invite and encourage the gathering around the Lord's Table, to remind regularly the gift and promises of baptism - any one of these and other foundation truths of the lived Christian faith is the note to be struck in any sermon on enthusiasm, and each represents a high place on which the sermon should conclude. 

I've never forgotten that lecture on sermon conclusions. Not because it was specially good, but perhaps because it pointed me to a homiletic practice that, to get it right, requires that everything else be dedicated to that end. The last words of a sermon remain hanging in the air, in the silence, allowing space and time for these words to become to each hearer, and indeed to the preacher, God's word and God's words. Those words are to be gospel. Not moralistic dig, but invitation to grace; not guilt, but gratitude is the deep motive of the faithful follower after Jesus. Preachers should never forget that.  

Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God and the Testimony of a Great Theologian

I spent a while yesterday browsing through the many books of Jurgen Moltmann. The first one I ever read was The Crucified God, published by SCM, London, an early softcover edition in a format they called Study Edition. I read this astonishing book during Lent in the late 1970's as a young minister freshly out of College and not long finished an arts degree in Glasgow which majored in moral philosophy. I was aware even then, that this was a book, and this was a theologian, from whom I would never recover. In every life there are moments of disclosure when we unexpectedly encounter truth at a different level, we hear a voice speaking a different theological dialect, with a strange accent, and for me in the case of Moltmann, speaking our language with imaginative force and with power and precision, informed by both passion and prayer.

The Crucified God is a theological classic, forged out of the high tensile steel of a man who faced death as a young soldier, and was rescued from nihilism and loss of soul as a young POW in Ayrshire, Scotland when he read a New Testament and encountered the living Christ, crucified and risen and present in the very depths of all the hells and all the suffering and dying he had lived through. The Gospel of Mark shattered the chains of hopelessness, despair and bewildered anguish that beset this 19 year old German soldier coming to terms with Nazism, Auschwitz and a shamed nation. Here is Moltmann's own reflection in 2006 on that encounter with the crucified God; few theological classics have such an authentic spiritual provenance, rooted in personal experience, and the title a soul conviction that fuels the rest of this person's life:

Then I read Mark's Gospel as a whole and came to the story of the passion: when I heard Jesus' death cry, "My God, why have you forsaken me?' I felt growing within me the conviction: this is someone who understands you completely, who is with you in your cry to God and has felt the same forsakenness you are living in now. I began to understand the assailed, forsaken Christ because I knew that he understood me. The divine brother in need, the companion on the way, who goes with you through this 'valley of the shadow of death', the fellow sufferer who carries you, with your suffering. I summoned up the courage to live again, and I was slowly but surely seized by a great hope for the resurrection into God's 'wide space where there is no more cramping.' This perception of Christ did not come all of a sudden and overnight, either, but it became more and more important for me, and I read the story of the passion again and agian for preference in the Gospel of Mark.

This early companionship with Jesus, the brother in suffering and the companion on the road, has never left me ever since, and I became more and more assured of it. I have never decided for Christ once and for all, as is often demanded of us. I have decided again and again in specific terms for the discipleship of Christ when  situations were serious and it was necessary. But right down to the present day, after almost 60 years, I am certain that then, in 1945, and there, in the Scottish prisoner of war camp, in the dark pit of my soul, Jesus sought me and found me. (from A Broad Place, Jurgen Moltmann, 2008, page 30)

Few world class theologians have written with such personal vulnerability about their own personal encounter with Jesus and their specific journey of discipleship. But some have, and Moltmann is one of that unashamed band of Christian theologians who never settled for the notion that theological thought should be pursued in an objective, detached, intellectual attitude of mind. He writes out of that testimony, and his first major book, Theology of Hope was a book that spoke with direct appeal into the Cold War chill of nuclear threat, international confrontation, and humanity desperate for a braking system that would halt the Gadarene stampede to mutual assured destruction (MAD). Some of the titles of his later books signal the deep theological convictions of the mature Moltman still deciding again and again for discipleship of the crucified God. Theology of Hope, The Future of Creation, Jesus Christ for Today's World, Ethics of Hope, In the End- the Beginning, and so on. And lest you think Moltmann is a heavy hearted prophet most at ease pronouncing the reasons for despair and anxiety, one of his slim masterpieces is called Theology and Joy. 

In celebration of Moltmann's contribution to modern theology, and to the lives of countless people who have read his books, heard his lectures, been taught by the deeply dyed discipleship of this German Christian professor, there will be regular blog posts on Moltmann from now till Trinity Sunday. His book The Trinity and the Kingdom of God stands in my library as one of the most provocative and faithful works of Christian theology I've read - and counting the times this book was discussed in classes on Trinitarian theology, I think my re-readings of it is now in double figures! 

 

 

 

 

 

The Gospel of Mark and the Sense of an Ending.

The idea that our earliest Gospel should finish on a note of fear and silence is a scandal to any Christian reader who knows the other four canonical Gospels, and is familiar with the well rounded and carefully crafted endings. Matthew draws the reader towards the climactic saying about the Great Commission and Jesus ascension; Luke has his own version of the directions to the disciples, about waiting for the Holy Spirit and the enduement of power and the ascension, ; John has two endings both of them deeply satisfying tying up of loose ends and relational healings with Mary Magdalene, Thomas and Peter.

Then there is Mark - and this is how he finsishes his Gospel. 

“Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. ⁷ But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’”

⁸ Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

Now where is the good news in that? How does the Gospel spread if people ar stunned into silence by fears that make them run away? Mark is like one of those films that leaves you hanging, wondering what happens next, aware of unresolved tensions, frustrated by unanswered questions, and feeling let down by a story that had all the makings of an artistic triumph.

That feeling of incompleteness, that lack of any sense of a real ending is why very early in the church's story, some reverent writers, scribes, copyists, who knows, wrote what we now call the longer ending, usually appended with a clear break and a footnote explanation. 

For myself I have never really had a problem with Mark 16.8 being the end of the Gospel. Mark is the Gospel as story, and it begins with an abrupt announcement of the good news of the Kingdom of God; it ends with the abrupt announcement of resurrection but with no proofs of that, just the order for the women to tell the men to go to Galilee. Did they tell? Did the disciples go? The track record of their obedience, trust and understanding isn't impressive throughout the Gospel. But Mark has just created in the reader that same dilemma; will the reader now go to Galilee, encounter the risen Jesus, take up their own cross, and follow in a life of cruciform discipleship, not so much a card carrying Nazarene as a cross carrying follower of the risen Messiah Jesus.

And why not fear, awe, trembling, instinctive running away? Apart from the psychological likeliehood of just such responses when faced with worldview shattering events, Mark is a highly skilled writer. The literary tension has built to a crescendo, most recently Gethsemane, betrayal, denial, trial, brutalisation and long drawn out execution, cry of dereliction and finally burial and a merciful sabbath when the world could rest from its dirty work. To anoint and care for the dead body was the least that could be done - even that is denied because the stone is rolled, the grave is open, the body is gone and there is some stranger talking about resurrection, and giving directions to Galilee where Jesus is ahead of them. Just hear the theological reverberations of that phrase - "he is going ahead of you to Galilee..." Not dead beyond all hope, not abandoned to the grave, not crushed and silenced by the machinery of power, but doing what he said he would, going before them, waiting to eat the bread and drink the wine of the kingdom with his followers.

The longer ending is a pastiche of words and ideas from the other three Gospels. Those verses have little of the power and purposefulness a and drive of Mark's Gospel as it hurtles towards its conclusion which is a brilliantly set up caption - "to be continued". And it will be continued by cross carrying disciples, those who know the fear of God, that combination of awe and love, excitement and risk, and who hear the question at the literary and theological centre of the Gospel of Mark, "Who do you say that I am?" The answer to that question is given as we enter the story, the continuing story, and as we head for Galilee to meet the risen Christ, and to take up the cross and follow the one who came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.