Living Wittily

Philosophical Theology an Essential of Pastoral Care. Really?

The turn in recent decades to practical theology has been one of the enriching and expansive influences on how we understand ministry and think about God in relation to human experience. Our understanding of the nature and changing dynamics of Christian ministry has changed as a result, and the approaches to ministry formation and training are now much more responsive to context, and flexible in content, delivery and in recognising the diversities of ministries and service in and beyond the church. So far, so good.

But good as this is, the emergence of practical theology and its powerful spinoffs in missiology, ministry and leadership studies, new expressions of ecclesiology and the near ubiquitous use of qualitative research and analysis, have each and all been accompanied by a corresponding, if unintentional relinquishing of some of the more intellectually abstract disciplines in the theological curriculum. I have in mind particularly the demise of philosophical theology understood as weight and resistance training of the mind. Such a rigorous and interrogative approach to theology, along with text focused biblical studies and systematic theology, helps to keep Christian practical theology honest and faithful to that which is peculiarly and essentially defining of Christian faith and practice. 

Practical theology is theology in practice. Well of course it is. Yes, but the quality and content of the theology matters and is decisive for the quality, content and application of that theology to Christian practice, human experience and ecclesial life in community. Encouraging practical theologians to read deeply in philosophical theology is not an argument for a hospice chaplain being able to trot out the varied forms of theodicy, from the free will defence to the veil of soul-making! But it is to argue that in pastoral care, in community life within the church, there is a need for the reinforcing steel of philosophical analysis and theological precision, woven throughout the poured foundations of concrete existence that is our daily life together in the Body of Christ.

One very fine example of how that works, and what it looks like is John Swinton's Raging with Compassion. What makes this book an important exemplar of practical theology at its best is precisely Swinton's wrestling at the systematic and philosophical level with the abstract questions raised by human concrete experience. The intellectual persuasiveness of the book is not due to it being an effective theodicy (reasoned explanation of whence suffering and evil in a world made by a God of power and goodness). For myself the key to this book's quality and usefulness as practical theology is precisely the analysis of human experiences of suffering measured against the biblical text and the toughest questions asked and answered, with the theological precision of one who knows that pastoral and intellectual integrity are mutually dependent.

All of this came to mind when reading again the essays of the philosophical theologian, Janet Martin Soskice. This slim collection of essays, titled The Kindness of God, is precisely the kind of project I have in mind, but from the other side of the academic common room, and from the other side of the pastoral counselling room. The combination of philosophical and practical theology in the hands of those conversant with both, can at times produce that quite rare thing, a theology of the mind and the heart. Here is Sosckice, near the end of her essay on Imago Dei, and her reflections on what makes us human, and why speech and other people matter:  

"To be fully human, even to praise God, we need others who are different from ourselves. Were Adam alone in the garden, he would not only be unable to reproduce, he would not speak, for speech is a pre-eminently social possession. And without speech there would be no praise, prayer - no 'world'."

We become opurselves through being with others. They conceive and give birth to us, teach us to speak and to write. Whatever meaning we give it, the startling divine plural of Gen.1.26, 'Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness', is no accident."

 

A Book that Educates by Changing Worldview and View of OTher People's World

There's a tag going round Facebook that invites me "to post the covers of 7 books I love or that have stuck with me: no explanation, no review, just the covers." I'm happily engaged in doing so

But when I see the covers of books that my Facebook friends have posted I want to know!

Why is this a book you love, or that has stuck with you?

What is the connection between your reading this particular book and the way you now see the world, or think about yourself, or understand human behaviour?

Was it only for that time in your life or does the book still speak, resonate, carry with it those transformative memories of discovery, reflection or self-understanding?

So I thought I would say a little about one or two of the books I posted. Chaim Potok is a writer I discovered in the 1970's. I had been in John Smith's bookshop, now sadly closed, but a shrine of learning, stories and undiscovered worlds of the mind for those who have known Glasgow these past 50 years and more.

The book I bought was The Chosen, Potok's first bestseller, a wonderful novel about fear and trust, friendship across cultural canyons, and the changes that are part of growing up and sicovering who we are. It was later made into a film with Rod Steiger as the Rebbe, a central character of wisdom and authority throughout these novels about Jewish life in Brooklyn in the decade or two after the Second World War.

I remember as a 21 year old student, first opening this book. I was, sitting upstairs on one of the old green and orange double decker buses, on a wet and foggy afternoon, with the sulphur street lights already on before four o'clock, and the bus slowly making its jerky way from St George's Cross to Gilmorehill. I was transfixed by the intensity and mystery, the narrative pull and the strange world of Hasidic Judaism lived out through the lives of two teenage Jewish boys in Brooklyn.

I have read Chaim Potok's novels ever since. I can't imagine my intellectual and imaginative life without those stories somewhere in the background like one of the backwash tones of a water-colour painting that give the finished picture its depth and texture. He has taught me so much that I needed to know, and was glad to learn. My Name Is Asher Lev is, I think, his masterpiece. The major themes of his writing coalesce in a novel of spiritual intensity and emotional authenticity. The place of the Jew in a post-Holocaust world; the response of different Jewish traditions to living in a culture saturated with the moral assumptions and political ambiguities of Christendom; art as an essential component of human activity and community; the ambivalence of orthodox Jews towards art as image, and painting as making images; and in the context of conflicted art, the crucifixion as an image, unique and essential to understanding Christianity, and yet the devastating truth and reality that it was Jesus the Jew who was crucified; and woven through and through, the place of human suffering as a given in human experience and as a challenge to the benevolence, even the existence, of God. Metaphysics, aesthetics, theodicy and secularism in one story.

All of these strands are made visible on the tapestry pattern, and they are still there though invisible on the back of the tapestry; but, of course,the visible image is only possible to see because of what is not seen. This, for me, is novel writing at its highest artistic expression, and in the mind and words of a man who is rooted in the realities of cultural tensions sometimes so powerful and anguished, that the human being is stretched out with arms wide in both entreaty and embrace. 

The central character, Asher Lev, is part of a family in which his parents consider art and the creation of image a violation of the Torah prohibition about making images. His sympathetic uncle becomes both patron and advocate; his parents worry about Asher being excluded from the community; Asher's growing fame and success force the issue of ultimate spiritual and relational loyalties. The climax of the novel brings these unbearable tensions into a conflict that has no obvious resolution, and threatens Asher's entire future as a member of his Jewish family and community.

The title of the novel contains its own ambiguity. Art is a gift, but from whom? Is it from God or from the "sitra achra", the other side? Is art creative or destructive; does it reveal or hide truth; is the compulsion to paint and its inspiration blessing or curse? In religious communities, is the artist a traitor who prefers 'the other side', or one who with courage and self-sacrifice and being true to the gift, "plumbs the depths of the other side in order to make this side a better place in which to live?'"

Few novels are as demanding and as satisfying. It is an astonishing achievement, which sympathetically and critically opens up the life and faith practices of Hasidic Judaism, and its strained relations with other forms of modern Jewish life and faith. All Potok's novels have elements of autobiographical insight. His own uneasy relations with his Hasidic roots, his training as a Rabbi, his cultural and theological worldview, and his empathy with each conflicted character in his stories, drive novels like Asher Lev towards that difficult terrain between cultural integrity and religious identity. The faithful Jew in the modern (and now the postmodern) world seeks to stand somewhere between accommodation which is not a sell out, and counter-cultural Torah obedience which, however devout, does not make living in a place of exile an impossibility.  

 

Libraries - Who Needs Them?

        Lovely words from The Times columnist, Caitlin Moran:

"A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination … they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate ‘need’ for ‘stuff.’ A mall—the shops—are places where your money makes the wealthy wealthier. But a library is where the wealthy’s taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary, instead. A satisfying reversal. A balancing of the power."

The photo is of the Sir Duncan Rice Library at the University of Aberdeen. Taken on an evening walk to attend one of the Gifford Lectures delivered by N T Wright earlier in Spring 2018. I know, it isn't a public library, though the fee for a years borrowing is by no means prohibitive.

But it is a repository of knowledge, an architectural statement about the importance of education, thought and the nourishment of mind and spirit. It's a favourite place for me.

Touched into gratitude for a beauty I cannot make happen

"Contemplation is that quiet, still opening of the mind to what is before it.

It is that calm presence to what is not oneself, resisting the temptation to take it over, to own it or to use it.

It means letting the other person be different from oneself, refusing to absorb them into one's own way of thinking.

One must let one's heart and mind be stretched open, enlarged by what we see." ¹

I read this early yesterday. Even earlier I took the photo of my favourite rose. The rose is called Rhapsody in Blue, and its appearance in our garden every year is one of my deepest joys. The name fits exactly with the essential thereness of this rose; telling it as it is. The colour is extravagant and attention-seeking, a joyous cry that is inaudible but visible. A rhapsody in blue. And each rose on this florabundant display is playing its own note in the composition and performance of the rhapsody.

To gaze into a rose is to encounter that which is not oneself. Such beauty puts me in my place; try as I might I can't "think" this rose, fully capture or own it in words which are always proximate to reality. Instead I am invited to look, to spend time, to be touched into gratitude for a beauty I cannot make happen, but which I am privileged, yes, privileged to encounter as gratuitous gift.

Contemplative waiting is the demeanour of the hospitable, willing to "let one's heart and mind be stretched open, enlarged by what we see". Contemplation is an act which is mutual gift, so that we give ourselves to an attentive looking and the patient enjoyment, without control, of 'the other'. 

It may be that one of the qualities that could give our lives a deeper rootedness, is to have a heart and mind ready to acknowledge beauty by paying attention to it. The transient delicacy of a flowering rosebud is a contradiction of our unexamined working assumptions about our own importance in the world. We are just as transient, and just as fearfully and wonderfully made.

Transience is a quality of time, posing the mystery of how we exist at all, and the fleeting finitude of each existence. What we do with time becomes one of the defining questions of a life well lived. It is a relatively modern assumption that our time is best crammed with activity, traded for productivity, then invested in the accumulation of possessions gained in exchange for our units of time. Transience contradicts our drivenness, and makes of time a non returnable gift, which once used is gone. 

Contemplation is not, therefore, about spending time but of giving time, nor is it about wasting time but redeeming time. Being possessive of time makes us selfish and unwilling to give time to what does not profit us, benefit us, further the project that is our life. To give time to notice the beauty of a rose, or to attend to the presence of another person, or to reflect on the truth of who we are becoming, is to receive time as a gift to be given to the other, and as an opportunity for ourselves to change and receive an inner realigning of mind and heart.

All of this from an early morning meeting with a rose, a reminder of the importance of contemplative gratitude for that which is not me. In a world too busy to consider its own transience, too absorbed in economic production and consumption to be comfortable with the notion of gift, and increasingly, in a world so afraid and suspicious of those who are other than ourselves that we cannot spare the time to understand or befriend those we fear; in such a world the contemplative Christian bears witness to another way of being, and another way of seeing. 

1. Timothy Radcliffe, What is the Point of Being a Christian, (Continuum, London: 2005), page 122.

Unlikely Juxtaposition of Purchases in the Oxfam Shop

The Aberdeen Oxfam book shop is a place of surprises. I always go in by to see what's new, and they're good at making sure there's a regular turnover. One of the quiet enjoyments of these visits is the unforeseen and therefore unexpected. Like today.

In the window was a book by my friend Ken Jeffrey. I read it when it came out a while ago, but it disappeared, I think borrowed and never found its way back. It's an important study of the revival phenomenon in Scotland, focusing on the mid 19th Century revivals along the Moray Firth. This is contextual history, and therefore an important stepping stone to a contextual theology of revival experience. The book remains the definitive study of the North East revivals, their sociological context, historical precedents and developments, and is based on deep digging in archives, newspapers, church minute books and wide reading.

Then I came across in the American Milestones edition, the live recording of Johnny Cash at San Quentin. This was broadcast by the BBC in 1969 and I still remember the hair rising on the back of my neck at the raw emotion, defiant lyrics and see through humanity of Johnny Cash. So next time I'm in the car by myself, and heading to Montrose, this will be on, and the volume will not be low!

So an academic analaysis of 19th Century religious revivals amongst farming and fisherfolk in a wee corner of a wee country, and a CD of one of the truly iconic evenings of country music breaking through all kinds of barriers to entertain and try to instil hope in one of the bleakest prisons in the United States. There's something deeply satisfying and reassuringly strange in that combination of my enthusiasms.

The Way of the Wise and the Way of the Fool in a Post Truth Culture

I didn't know that by studying the book of Proverbs closely I was an aspiring paremiologist. But apparently so. The Wisdom tradition in the Old Testament is fascinating in its diversity, and intriguing in the way those writings get to the point. By which is meant, the point of life.

Take Ecclesiastes, a book in which cynicism and sarcasm, pessimism and realism, resignation to life's outcomes and resistance to life's constraints, all weave together in a long inner discussion about what life is all about, and does it matter, and if so why it does.

Or that granite rock of a book, Job, in which tragedy and every imaginable form of loss and suffering put a human mind and soul under such pressure that the reader, who knows the why and the how, is drawn into a drama which has no guaranteed resolution. These two books are complex, profound, and tightly woven, with literary themes hanging on theological structures that raise as many questions as they answer. 

Not so the book of Proverbs. Forget the existential angst and theological aegumentation and speculative theories of how to balance the good and evil in life. In Proverbs there is a practical, no nonsense, straightforward pragmatism about how you live your life, get on with people, do business, and mature in experience, grow in understanding, and yes, "get wisdom". And the literary genre of Proverbs is very different. It is not a developed argument or rhetorical persuasion through narrative, or theological and philosophical expositions about God, the World and the troubled relations between heaven and earth.

Proverbs is about the power of wisdom distilled to the daily, the ordinary, the pragmatic, the practical commonsense of the good life. And the scholarly study of those proverbs  is called paremiology. Thus the student of biblical Proverbs is an aspiring paremiologist, one who seeks to become expert in interpreting the ground rules of wise living by careful study of the proverbs themselves.

Here's why I'm spending time in this thick book of Reader's Digest one liners. Let's start with a quotation from a book lamenting the demise of truth in our culture: "The clinching factor in the rise of Post-Truth has been our behaviour as citizens. By rewarding those who lie with political success, exempting them from the traditional expectations of integrity, we have seceded from the duties of citizenship. To the bellowed charge of Jack Nicholson;s character in A Few Good Men - "You can't handle the truth" - we have no ready answer...We tweet, give in to clickbait, share without due diligence...Fool's licence is meaningless when we are all fools." ¹ 

The relationship between the fool and lies, and between integrity and the wise, is charted with determined persistence throughout the book of Proverbs. We now live in a social media world where we are all experts, Google virtuosi, information addicts, never without an audience and never without the stimulus of other users. Such pervasive, unthinking immersion in communicative presence, we have learned to call connectivity, and it is that very connectedness that provides easy and ever available conduits for information, without any quality control as to the trustworthiness of the source, the factual accuracy, or the evidential credibility of what comes our way. Add to that the background selection and data monitoring of algorithms and we end up being fed more of what we like and less of what might challenge those predilections of thought, ethics, or political perspective. To use the language of Proverbs, we would be fools not to recognise this and seek to guard ourselves from being so easily duped, set up and manipulated.

It is a profoundly enlightening exercise to read the book of Proverbs while staying aware and alert to our current cultural realities. Just consider this list of constantly urged actions and attitudes: truthfulness and justice, care for the poor, the dangers of wealth, stewardship of words, trust and trustworthiness in relationships, integrity of character, use and abuse of power. The way of wsdom is the way of righteousness, but the way of the fool is in an altogether different direction. Some of the most acute critical problems facing western democratic societies are now so embedded in a social media worldview that it is more and more difficult to have rational discussions in which both protagonists are appealing to a shared view of truth. And it is that erosion of truth, and indeed loss of faith in truth as anything other than the view I already hold, that makes some of the most dangerous cultural shifts so intractable.

The book of Proverbs is a very handy collection of diagnostic wisdom for a society such as 21st Century western democarcies. Truth decay, low grade anger and discontent, suspicion of the other who is not 'us', politics gradually losing its moral compass, hardened ideologies and polarised communities, fear eclipsing hope, hate displacing love, rejection and not welcome as default to the stranger; these and other social patterns are seen in the book of Proverbs as the way of the fool that leads to conflict, alienation and ultimately death.

The two ways is one of the great moral images in the Bible, and indeed elsewhere in other religious and philosophical traditions. Jesus spoke of the narrow and broad ways, and the foolish and wise builders. An important feature of the book of Proverbs, which also speaks of the two ways and the choices that determine which way we travel, is that it offers guiding wisdom not only to individuals, but to communities. Its warnings and guidance, and its diagnostic applications, reverberate with contemporary relevance to our own times. Perhaps nowhere more crucially today, than in its insistence that truth and trust, integrity and compassion, wisdom and understanding, are not only the ways of life, but the ways for a scoiety to save the life it is in danger of wasting, and ultimately losing. 

1. Matthew D'Ancona, Post Truth. The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back, (London: Penguin, 2017), page 59

A Book About Trump and Evangelicalism's Loss of Faith, and With It, Credibility

It's not often the publishers blurb persuades me to buy a book. At least, not usually as quickly as this. Three reasons I'll buy this book and read it as soon as I can.

1. It is written by an historian of American culture and American evangelicalism, whose credentials as a scholar and social observer are already established.
2. The book is commended by Mark Noll, the premier historian of religion in America, and of American Evangelicalism in particular. Noll is beyond argument a voice of authority in the historic and cultural evolution of evangelicalism.
3. The words in bold below have a plausibility and conviction which I share, about the corruption of the evangelical mindset, the seculrisation of their worldview and their initial flirtation with the idolatry of power tumbling over into the full blown embrace of power for its own sake.

“Believe me” may be the most commonly used phrase in Donald Trump’s lexicon. Whether about building a wall or protecting a Christian heritage, the refrain has been constant. And to the surprise of many, a good 80 percent of white evangelicals have believed Trump—at least enough to help propel him into the White House.

Historian John Fea is not surprised, however—and in these pages he explains how we have arrived at this unprecedented moment in American politics. An evangelical Christian himself, Fea argues that the embrace of Donald Trump is the logical outcome of a long-standing evangelical approach to public life defined by the politics of fear, the pursuit of worldly power, and a nostalgic longing for an American past.

As insightful as it is timely, Fea’s Believe Me challenges Christians to replace fear with hope, the pursuit of power with humility, and nostalgia with history.

I'm currently examining the speech patterns of contemporary cultural and political discourse through the lens of OT Wisdom, and in particular, the Book of Proverbs. Wisdom is now on the 21st Century list of near extinct virtues.

 

Amongst the threats to the survival of wisdom as a public virtue are truth decay, fake news, filtered news bubbles, disrespecting otherness, intellectual narrowness, information gluttony, self proclaimed personal expertise, disqualifying the expertise of others we disagree with, culturally encouraged pursuit of self interest, political polarisation, refusal to question long held assumptions, erasure of ethical road signs, reductionis mockery of virtue, and intermingled with each of these, the rapid deterioration of a publicly agreed standard of social discourse and speech ethics.

 

More on this in due course. For now, these words:

"When a stupid man talks, contention follows;his words provoke blows. The tongue of a stupid person is his undoing; his lips put lives in jeopardy. (Prov 18.6-7)

 

"When pride comes in, in comes contempt; but wisdom goes hand in hand with modesty. Integrity is a guide for the upright; the perfidious are ruined by their own duplicity...By the blessing of the upright a city is raised to greatness, but the words of the wicked tear it down." (11.2,3,11)

Is Serious Academic Study of the Bible a Threat to Faith?

For more than fifty years I've been reading the Bible. For the same amount of time I've been studying the Bible. And all that time since University, I've consulted, learned from and valued the dedicated scholarship of the academic guild of Biblical Studies. Commentaries and grammars, dictionaries and lexicons, biblical theologies and ethics, the social background and history of biblical times, theories of hermeneutics and various approaches to biblical literary studies; there is no shortage of resources to dig, to dig deeply, and go on digging into the biblcal text.

One of my particular interests is the history of biblical interpretation, and in particular how historical context decisively influences how a text is understood, interpreted and applied in faith communities and the wider culture. In the nineteenth century, biblical criticism created widely varied responses. There was generally deep suspicion and hostility of conservative scholars to any approach which seemed to undermine the authority of the Bible. On the other side, a growing enthusiastic pursuit of new knowledge and approaches to the biblical texts as historic documents, and the view that they were to be studied and interpreted like other ancient documents, and open to the same tests of historical and literary analysis.

Evangelicalism has at best been cautious and indeed resistant to the more thoroughgoing approaches of historical and literary critics working on the Bible. Words such as "liberal" and "critical" became shorthand epithets for those who were believed to practice a reductionist science which undermined the historical veracity and spiritual authority of the Old and New Testaments. Fear led to witholding trust in a form of scholarship claiming to be objective, historically impartial and increasingly approved in the academy. The result was general reluctance amongst conservative evangelical scholars to read and use and learn from the writing and teaching of "liberal scholarship". Much of conservative evangelical biblical scholarship was apologetic in content, intended either to contradict the findings of the critics, or offering a different textual interpretation controlled in both content and approach by a high doctrine of biblical inspiration.

Those days of polarised positions with parallel but separate tracks of faith and scholarship which seemed destined never to meet, are now much changed. It has taken time, a hundred and fifty years or so. But today some of the finest biblical scholars of international reputation in the Academy are writing from firm confessional convictions which, they argue, are quite consistent with rigorous critical scholarship and analysis of the biblical text and world.

Which brings me to a book which showcases leading biblical scholars who are comfortable with a "both / and" approach to biblical study. Faith and scholarship are not incompatible, they argue. Indeed they need each other, and are indispensable pre-requisites to the proper study of the biblical texts with results both useful to the church and intellectually honest in their claims.  Of course for evangelicals engaged in critical academic biblical studies, tensions inevitably remain. Questions about the nature of biblical authority, the preferred hermeneutical approach, the fruits and outcomes of academic study of the Bible; these will vary. But as shown by the authors of the essays in this book, questions and tensions are held within a strong commitment to the Bible as normative for the life of the Christian and for the Church as the community of faith.

I (Still) Believe is an unusual, and unusually helpful book. The words of the dedication are telling in their pastoral tone. We are told the book is written "For all who have struggled, wrestled, been discouraged, lamented, lost hope, wanted to give up, wondered if it all made sense, but still believe..." That was enough to pull me in.

Eighteen Christian academics who are at the top of their game and who have international reputations as biblical scholars have each written an autobiographical essay on their own faith journey, and the tensions of being a critical biblical scholar and a practising member of a Christian faith community. Some of them are quite moving in their honesty, while others describe how their intellectual and spiritual journey became a coincidence of study and practice. Still others write of how their scholarship compels new understanding, persuades towards changing conviction, and has personal consequences in life transformation and self-understanding.

Now whether you're interested in biblical studies or not, this is an important book. Reading it exposes you the reader to questions others have asked before you, and have persevered in looking for the answers. If you are a Bible reader, and let's face it that's a core practice of Christian living, then you'll discover the so many other ways of reading the Bible responsibly, wrestling  with this transformative, subversive, disturbing and ultimately life saving book. Even if you're not a frequent Bible reader, take time to listen to the why and how of people who are, and whose life work is the study of these ancient texts from ancient cultures. They may well encourage you to go looking for that Bible and try again. 

These are essays of testimony, each an attempt at an honest account of what it means to wrestle with the Bible as Jacob wrestled with the angel, and like Jacob, hanging on for dear life, saying through gritted teeth, "I will not let you go until you bless me." If that sounds like an exaggeration, just wait till you read the essay which tells of the losing of a loved one, and how that loss has impelled the writer to explore the depths of troubling Bible texts and how they relate to human suffering and comfort.

Another, writing of her upbringing in a racially segregated southern church, tells how that experience made such an impression she "would never again read scriptural texts in a way that excludes others." Here is what she writes:"I have ever since been deeply distressed by attempts to draw circles that exclude, whatever feeble grounds are offered, especially when such circles are presented as 'Christian'".  

This is a book that will do good if it is read in the spirit in which it is written. This is heart speaking to heart about how to use, and not abuse, the Bible. It is testimony, academic scholars helping us to put their own writing and studies and scholarship in their own and personal life context. It is a reassuring book, not because it minimises the challenges of critical scholarship, or argues away the problems the Bible poses to 21st Century readers (and the problems are many and they range from big to humungous). But because each writer in and through their scholarly work, has faced up to those hard questions that might put faith in jeopardy. But in obedience to God and in faithfulness to the truth they seek, they have lived with the tension, neither surrendering intellectual integrity nor that faith which requires trust in the One of whom and to whom these ancient texts bear witness.

The essayists in this book are professional and vocational scholars. Day and daily they engage with the Bible critically and honestly, and with the best intellectual tools available; and they still believe.  

"Today Is All About You" Or Is It?

One of the rules of thumb of Kant's moral philosophy is the universalising principle. In evaluating the validity of a moral choice ask, "Can this principle and this choice be univeralised?" I've found that a really useful and nearly always clarifying question about my own choices, behaviour and attitudes. If everyone acted as I am acting now, what would the world look like? Would it add to or subtract from human flourishing?

Here's what got me thinking about this. I came across this gift bag in a garden centre today and asked my Kantian kind of question. What would happen if everyone today adopted the attitude encouraged by the birthday advice - "Today is all about you?" I confess to being nervous about giving myself permission to be self-interested, self-satisfied, self as centre of attention. I might become addicted to it! It doesn't mean I don't do or think or feel like that sometimes - the fantasy of having a day that's all about me. And maybe I've had days like that.

I guess I'm asking what the world would be like if we all decided today is all about me. That said, it's a gift bag, and on those special days someone is giving permission to be self-undulgent. Do what you want; eat what you like; think about yourself instead of others; don't say no for today is all about you and all about yes.

Self care is a thing these days. In fact, it's a big thing, because if we don't look after ourselves we become so neglected and badly maintained we're likely to break down. So, yes, the occasional day when it's all about you, or me, is ok.

Problem is there is an underlying suspicion that if we had our own way, and had the resources we might seriously consider adopting "today is all about me" as a lifestyle. And that is something else. But isn't that exactly the life plan or life fantasy that the advertising, consumer and image generating culture is dedicated to creating? Make the self central, and its happiness and satisfaction the priority. Suggest, persuade, seduce us into linking that self-satisfaction to purchasbale products, feed our sense of worth and identity with a continuous stream of promises, project into our minds enhanced images of the self we could be, and urging us to enjoy the imagined envy of others. And all of this achieved through buying and possessing things in order to construct a self with enough inbuilt insecurity to never be satisfied, always hungry for more, and newer and better. But it's worth it, because you're worth it, because when it comes down to it, this life, it's all about you. So the philosophy of consumerist self-construction.

And if everybody thought like that, acted on that view of the world and ourself, what then of relationships, community, and the humanity to which we all belong? The "today is all about you" treat for my birthday is one thing. But it carries an assumption, and perhaps a temptation, to think that in an ideal world, this is what it should be like. And as a Christian I'm uncomfortable in ceding that much credence and inner space to such an idea and way of thinking. Placing the satisfaction and fulfilment of the self at the prioritising centre of each person's life project, is perhaps the most spiritually dangerous and morally reckless decisions a human heart can make.

You are no longer your own, you are bought with a price. He who saves his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will find it. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me,...and you will find rest for your soul. What does it profit if you gain the whole world and lose your soul?

These are blank contradictions of any "all about me" approach to life. If Jesus is Lord, and that Lordship is embodied in self-giving love and other-centred service, then that is what it is all about. Not all about me, ever - on the contrary, it's all about the loving grace and forgiving mercy of the one who is the Gift beyond words to the world.

This, then, is not a call to self-negation. It's a recognition that human life and Christian life under God is a gift that defines us as creatures of the gift. Each day is all about God, not us; all about love and the joy of others in which we find our meaning and God's purposes. And on those days of celebration and of self care when someone says, "Today is all about you", that's fine. Receive such days as gift, not entitlement; as occasions of renewal for all those other days that are all about others; and as reminders that when it comes down to it, each day lived in self-forgetful gratitude and self-giving care for the world of people and things around us, becomes all about you doing and being what God intended. Which means each day is all about you, doing God's thing. That is a principle that could, and in the Kingdom of God will, be universalised.