Living Wittily

Taking a photo of a rose. The momentary mutual presence of flower and human mind.

Using my camera most days has taught me how to pay attention. Or perhaps in this case, it is the flower that breaks through the usual inner preoccupations and insists on being noticed. Either way I continue to reflect on the practice of photography and the practice of contemplation, the link between gazing at the world around and prayer as seeking God wherever God may be found. 

Once we move away from prayer as words, and ideas, and therefore a kind of saying and hearing, we can begin to think instead of prayer as seeking, and seeking to see.

Take this rose, the last autumn rose at the bottom of our garden, whose beauty drew me out one near dawn to photograph it in the early morning sunlight that touches this part of the garden for a short time. The coincidence of light and colour, the petals joined in harmony without symmetry, but nevertheless held together in a fittingness that cannot be improved.

This rose is not an argument for God, like a sophisticated argument from design. But it is an intimation of transcendence, a reminder of beauty as a summons, and the fragrance of goodness as a gift. I now look at this photo, and image minus the smell, detached from the cold early breeze of a particular morning, captive in the digital stillness of an image, unable to float in the slow dance of sprung movement. But looking at it now, in my memory I am acknowledging that moment of mutual presence of flower to human mind in a living encounter in a garden. And perhaps that is argument enough for that humbling of mind and recall of inner attention that begins as contemplative waiting and ends as gratitude, and therefore prayer.

Prayer can sometimes become captive to our dependence on words to convey meaning, words as freight carriers of our ideas, desires, fears and so much else that sits in our mind like the familiar furniture of home. Paying attention to that which is not us, looking outward to the life of the world beyond my ego, outside of my concerns, in the otherness of all that is not me, is an exercise in horizon stretching, or a disciplining of self to focus on that which is other, and which if I pay attention has much to say, and much to be seen.

In an age when novelty and newness in experience are craved, and living in a culture of immediacy and instancy of gratification, such patient noticing of that which is not me can, paradoxically, be self-preserving. Instead of the exhausted and dissipated self, driven to distraction and focused on self creation and self-image making, that inner core of who we are paying atttention to that which is there but unnoticed, is like that encounter with a rose in morning light, helping us see, and giving us time to retrain our affections outwardly and towards others.

That rose, and the time to take a good photo, offers an encounter with life in all its beauty and transience, its harmony and difference, and the minutes taken to pay such reverent attention are important interludes in an otherwise selfish life. Jesus knew this. That's why he warned that whoever saves their life will lose it; but whoever loses their life for my sake and the Gospel's will find it.

The simple, yet complex act of taking a photo, can be a rehearsal for something deeper, a developing of the soul outwards to see the movements and consequences of God's creative masterpiece, of which we may be  a significant brush-stroke.

Believe Me. 2. Fear is not a Christian habit of mind.

"Fear is not a Christian habit of mind." 

Marilynne Robinson's unremarkable observation comes in an essay remarkable for its analysis of the mindset, worldview and emotional profile of contemporary America.  You can read the whole article here. Written in 2015, and before the 2016 Presidential election, Robinson's main thesis has gained cogency in the events unfolding in the three years since it was written. With the publication of John Fea's book Believe Me. The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, we now have a much more substantial analysis and narrative of how we came to be where we are. This time written by a historian who understands the American evangelical mind from within.

Writing, then, as a historian and an evangelical Christian, Fea is trying to understand how 81 percent of white evangelicals came to vote for Donald Trump over other Republican candidates of the more traditional Christian Right. In the search for an answer, Fea traces the origins of recent political events backwards to the 1970's and the political playbook written then to "win back" or "restore the culture" which white evangelicals believed was being lost to secularism, pluralism and moral decay. Speaking of a long history of evangelical fear, Fea apllies this diagnostic observation to contemporary events in America:

"For too long white evangelical Christians have engaged in public life through a strategy defined by the politics of fear, the pursuit of worldly power, and a nostalgic longing for a national past that may have never existed. Fear. Power. Nostalgia." (7)

Moving backwards, the Obama years are seen by white evangelicals as bringing about the threatened "end of white Christian America". Cultural changes around human sexuality in particular, happened very quickly, and are seen by conservative evangeliclals as a dangerous erosion of the moral foundations of the nation. Opposition to Hillary Clinton is likewise rooted in the moral fears of those who have witnessed the

"thickening of the walls of separation between church and state, the removal of Christianity from public schools, the growing ethnic and religious diversity of the country, the intrustion of the federal Government into their everyday lives (especially as it pertains to desegregation and civil rights), and legalized abortion." (8)

These are grievances that are existential in their impact on those who hold that America is a Christian nation, and that such was the intention of the Founding Fathers. What white evangelical America is afraid of is the loss of a way of life, a worldview and the integrity of their nation as one nation under God. The consequence of this is not stronger faith, but a shift of trust.

"Despite God's commands to trust him in times of despair, evangelicals have always been fearful people, and they have built their understanding of political engagement around the anxiety they have felt amid times of social and cultural change.." (8)

"The politics of fear always result in the quest for power", so the next stage of Fea's analysis is the role now being played in the White House by what he calls "court evangelicals". Rather than speaking truth to power as prophets insisting on justice, righteousness and mercy, those court evangelicals closest to the White House are keen to hear power speak its own versions of truth, and these as supportive of their own political and social agendas. One of the most important chapters of the book is that which critically examines the way conservative white evangelicals have appealed to a selective and tendentious view of the past as justification for their current political positions. My earlier post expressed my own questioning of how the call and values of the Kingdom of God are furthered by values and ambitions inimical to the ways of Christ and the Gospel. However, Fea's questions push that critique even deeper, and expose the dangers of nostalgia for the past. Nostalgia refuses to acknowledge changed situations, resists that which is new and idealises a past in ways that are selective, artificially positive, and comforting for those disturbed by the forces of change.

"Instead of doing the hard work necessary for engaging a more diverse society with the claims of Christian orthodoxy, evangelicals have become intellectually lazy, preferring to respond to cultural change by trying to reclaim a world that is rapidly disappearing and has little chance of ever coming back. This backward looking approach to politics can be seen no more clearly than in evangelicals' embrace of Trump's campaign slogan, "Make America great again". (9)

No wonder then, culturally pressured white evangelicals all but heard the words of a new prophet in Trump's election promises which included: "So let me state this right up front: [in] a Trump administration our Christian heritage will be cherished, protected, defended -- like you've never seen before. Believe me."(Donald Trump, 2016, Values Voter Summit)

And there it is. The promise of political power as the achievement of fifty years of culture wars. Fea's comment on this, as an evangelical Christian and a professional historian:

The court evangelicals have been shown "all the kingdoms of the world and their glory."(matt. 4.8-10):but, unlike Jesus in his encounter with the Tempter, they have gladly embraced them. Evangelicals claim to follow a Savior who relinquished worldly power - even to the point of giving his life. Yet they continue to place their hope in political candidates as a means of advancing an agenda that confuses the kingdom of God with the United States of America. (10)

Fea's central thesis, towards which this book moves, is a call for evangelicals to replace nostalgia with history, power with humility, and fear with hope. Nostalgia, power and fear can never be the valid expression of the Christian Gospel; history, humility and hope are embedded in the Christian narrative, and when given their convictional priority as part of an obedient faith, they represent the core values of evangelical Christianity. A politicised gospel that serves the interests of Christians is something other than the gospel which called in question the core values and false transcendencies of the most powerful Empire the world had then known.  

 

Believe Me 1. The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump.

I'd better come clean. My own church tradition is Baptist. Amongst the peculiarities of Baptist commitments is the clear separation of the powers of church and state. Historically Baptist was a pejorative nickname, a way of dismissing those who dissented from the universal ecclesial practice of infant baptism into the church, and who wished to stand outside the state sponsored institutional power of the established church of the day.

For such dissent Baptist were persecuted by the arm of the state at the instigation of the Church. The fusion of state power and church power, indeed the marriage of church and state, gave stability and control over a population nominally co-opted into the authority structures and imposed practices of church and state. By the early 17th Century, whether on the European continent or in Great Britain, the politicisation of ecclesial practice and the attempts to impose Christian uniformity, persuasive or enforced, created a growing number of dissenting and non-conforming voluntarist communities.

The subversive impact of growing dissident communities of faith led inevitably to persecution, and where such persecution involved fines, imprisonment and at times death and torture, these required and were granted the sanction of law and the authority of state political power. Baptist are dissenters. Baptism by immersion on profession of personal faith in Christ, and the claims of conscience to religious freedom in expressions of worship and Christian practice, and the formation of local communities of faith outside the authority and structures of state sponsored ecclesial authority, are each peculiar emphases of Baptists. They lead logically to the insistence that State and Church are separate.

Historically, Baptists have insisted that their expression of Christian faith is evangelical. Internationally Baptists have been vocal and active and indeed proud to be numbered as Evangelicals. But the Baptist kind of Evangelical holds with convictional persistence that the relationship between Church and State is one of separation, with a clear division of powers, and that the rights of religious freedom are based on the assertion of the sovereignty and obedience of each person's conscience before God. Baptists insist on the exclusive and primary headship of Christ over the Church, and over each local church; that each Christian community is free of State interference to govern its own affairs; and that the Church is a spiritual kingdom, called to bear witness to the power of the Gospel within the principles of the Kingdom of God and the Kingship of Christ. Theologically Baptist tradition stands alongside Jesus' disclaimer, "My Kingdom is not of this world."

It is therefore an astonishing and disturbing phenomenon when Baptists are at the forefront of a movement to politicise Christianity, and bring Christian faith and practice into a close and enaged relationship with the President of the United States and the current US Administration. For several decades the Evangelical Right in the United States has sought political influence to advance its own brand of Christian agenda, tied to several very specific issues.

That 81% of white Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump raises all kinds of intriguing, disturbing and theologically serious questions. The aligning of the Church's Mission with the political agenda of the secular state, and the advancing of Christian values by aligning with, suppoorting and defending the policies of a political party in power, of whatever party colour, is deeply inimical, indeed self-contradictory, for any group claiming the name Baptist. Unless of course the term is evacuated of all radical and original intent and becomes a self-defining slogan reduced to amounts of water in a baptistry.

Like many other evangelical Christians, I am dismayed and perplexed at the naked political ambition and moral accommodatuions demonstrated by US evangelicals in the power courts of Washington. As a Baptist I see no meaningful content to the word if the primary life goal of those self-describing as 'Baptist' and 'Evangelical' is influence at the White House in order to achieve the reversal of social policies with which they profoundly disagree.

That brings me to John Fea's book, Believe Me. The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. My hope is that he might help me understand how those who are avowedly evangelical, can align with an administration which pursues policies, has a style of government, and supports a President, whose modus operandi is inimical to any standard understanding of Christian values and ethics. Early in the book Fea explains why he wrote it, quoting J D Hunter, an author who describes the recession, marginalising and distortion of Christianity in the United States over the past decades. It's a careful lucidly written analysis of how the Religious Right has tried to stay influential, relevant and in control of a culture and way of life fast being overtaken by progressive change.

Fea distil's Hunter's thesis to this sentence: "In grasping for political power evangelicals have made it more difficult to spread the gospel, promote justice for the poor and oppressed, and pursue human flourishing in the places where God has called them and placed them." Letting Hunter speak for himself: "The proclivity toward domination and toward the politicization of everything leads Christianity today to bizarre turns, turns that...transform much of the Christian public witness into the very opposite of the witness Christianity has to offer." (Fea page 2)

That is as damning a conclusion as can be imagined from a sociologist who is a Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture and Social Theory. The Gospel of redemption has been turned into a pursuit for power, and the Kingdom of God identified with the kingdoms of this earth. In supporting Donald Trump, and believing his promises to bring about the social changes evangelicals seek, his evangelical supporters are adopting the tactics, politics and principles of secular power, but in the service of a Kingdom founded on a cross, and built on an empty tomb.

At the cross, and at the tomb, sin is confronted, death has been defeated, hate eclipsed by love, and in the kingdom of the cross and the tomb, those who will be called the children of God are the peacemakers, not the lawmakers. In pursuing political victory, and policy changes through courting secular power, the Gospel of reconciliation, justice, peace-making and neighbour love has become secondary. Evangelicals giving uncritical support to any Governement Administration have done what Jesus at his trial refused to do, identify his Kingdom and its methods with the kingdom and methods of the empire.

For the many evangelicals who think otherwise, and for Baptists like myself, witnessing many prominent Baptist leaders seeking influence in the secular court and power bases, such contradiction of principle take on the force of a betrayal of core convictions of evangelical witness and Baptist traditions of radical dissent. Baptists are members of a spiritual community committed to Jesus as Lord. They owe no unthinking or unswerving allegiance to anyone but Jesus. This means if the political leader one supports pursues policies contrary to the words of Jesus, and irreconcilable with Christian ethics, what is required is not approval, or defence of the secular power, but faithful truth-telling and bearing witness to the ways of the Kingdom of God.

It is out of such feelings of betrayal, and the abandoning of a tradition of dissent in order to further personal agendas by conforming to the ways of the political, secular world of power, that pushes me to try to understand both the motives for such a reversal of convictions, and the possible ways back. Fea's book, which I have now read, points in some hopeful directions. As I engage with his book, perhaps there will be some light at the end of what seems like an ominously long tunnel, leading into a darker future.

Living with mysteries rather than dying for the answers

There's enough metaphysics, theology, philosophy, natural history, botany, science and linguistic analysis in Mary Oliver's poems to satisfy the curiosity of most poetry readers. But her learning is carried with duck-down lightness, because her mind isn't the repository of a polymath, it is the place where experience is held with gentle patience until it yields its truth. Her heart is replete with reflected on human experience, her mind erudite, first-hand informed and passionately present in the world she observes, notes, notices, attends to and allows entry. And in those reserved places of contemplative waiting, and deep intentional listening, where experiences are not subjected to critical analysis but to receptive openness, in those places, poems are born.

Oliver's poetry can be uncomplicatedly frank, or sensitively oblique, tenderly humorous and occasionally serious pushing towards melancholy. But I haven't found many of her poems leave me puzzled - though maybe the truly great poet should occasionally leave us unsure, lacking the answers we seek, perplexed but thus even more passionately interested in the question, if there is one. What Oliver offers is poetry that points the finger and says "Look". And look, not just to see, but to appreciate, to recover perspective on our lives, to restore the capacity for wonder, gratitude and praise. But also to take with full seriousness our hurts, our problems, the bleak despair that can at times envelope us, but not to take it all so seriously that we overlook the primary fact of our being alive, and of the possibilities and gifts that such livingness bestows.

To that extent she is a writer theological students should encounter - and they will next year! "Look", she says - at the world, at your heart, at your neighbour at flowers, birds, landscapes and people. Look until you see. And not only see but understasnd what it is you see in relation to the life you are now living. Here's an example of what I mean:

Mysteries, Yes

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous

to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the

mouths of the lambs.

How rivers and stones are forever

   in allegiance with gravity

      while we ourselves dream of rising.. 

How two hands touch and the bonds will

  never be broken.

How people come, from delight

or the scars of damage,

  to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those

   who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say

"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads.

Mary Oliver, Evidence (Bloodaxe, 2009) page 62.

Now. Is that not a poem to set in a theological reflection essay with the simple instruction. "Discuss with reference to your life."

And even if you aren't a student - same invitation, "Come and ponder".

When Evangelicals Lose Faith in the Wisdom and the Weakness of the Cross, and Opt for Secular Power Games

In a review of the current Tolkien exhibition at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, Rowan Williams makes this observation. "Desire for power – the kind of power that will make us safe, reverse injustices and avenge defeats – is a dream that can devour even the most decent."

Power is seductive and corruptive. The lure of power destabilises character, undermines previously solid moral principles, turns relationships from a worthy end into unworthy means to a different end. The political insanities of the past few years are explicable in terms of the powerless exerting their anger against a powerful elite who for too long ignored the unjust consequences of social and political elitism.

Rowan Williams points to a real and present moral danger. The peddlers of fear have turned populations towards those who promise safety; those suffering from economic and social inustice are looking for someone to reverse the upward flow of wealth; people who feel defeated by life are looking for and finding scapegoats, and want someone to lead them to victory over those perceived causes of life's unfairness, misery and hopelessness. It doesn't take much imagination to see what has been going on in Brexit, Trump's America, and the rise in popularity and plausibility of far right agendas in several European nations.

In terms of influence, and yes power, followers of Jesus are called and committed to an altogether different scenario. Jesus isn't the strong man deliverer looking for strong and powerful lieutenants. Instead he warns his disciples about power games. English translations of Matthew 20 miss the abruptness of Jesus prohibition on power as a desired goal for Christians. "It will not be so amongst you." His response is stronger than that. "Not so. On the contrary. You couldn't be more wrong." Quite literally he could have said, "Never! Not on your life!"

Then the mother of Zebedee’s sons came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favor of him.

“What is it you want?” he asked. She said, “Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.”

“You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said to them. “Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?” “We can,” they answered.

Jesus said to them, “You will indeed drink from my cup, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father.”

When the ten heard about this, they were indignant with the two brothers. Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

In the quest for a solution to church decline, seeking more power is not the answer. As a way of bringing the Christian voice from the margins back to the centre, power-seeking is not only counter productive, it is counter to the way of Jesus. Power seeking is a mindset unwilling and unready for service and sacrifice. For that reason self-concern can never be a settled Christian attitude, nor a church's motive for mission. Jesus' answer to any and every power play in the church is "No. On the contrary. Not the way of the Kingdom of God." And Jesus' answer to those of his followers chasing after influence in the political and secular realms as a way of advancing the Kingdom meet with the same contradiction, "No!" Not in my name!"

Evangelicals are supposed to heed the words of Jesus; live up to and within his teaching; model and embody the call to deny self, take up the cross, follow, serve and like a seed, fall into the ground and die, and live towards the fruitfulness of the Kingdom of God. That American Evangelicals are prepared to go after power, and then support anyone who furthers their social and political agenda, regardless of the cost and consequence in ignoring the central teaching of Jesus in all four gospels, is one of the perplexing scandals of that particular Evangelical mindset. Such unmistakable signs of the Kingdom of God as peacemaking, reconciliation, love of neighbour, brother and sister and stranger and enemy, self sacrifice in cross-bearing, serving others recognising that in the vulnerable and the least and the lost and the last, we are face to face with Jesus - these are irreconcilable with political power plays which choose secular means supposedly to achieve Kingdom of God ends.

"No" said Jesus. It doesn't work that way. If it did, why did Jesus tell Pilate his Kingdom is not of this world. Neither its goals nor its methods, its King nor his subjects, are servants of the world and its powers. There is something incongruous to the point of nonsense about Evangelicals celebrating a political victory which, even if it achieves their moral goals, does so by silencing the ipsissima vox of Jesus. Ipsissima vox, a phrase learned from Joachim Jeremias, one of the finest interpreters of Jesus' teaching, and used to identify those teachings of Jesus which are of the distilled essence of the mission and teaching of the Son of Man.

 

The Transient Grass and the Preciousness of Life.

"All things, there, are charged with love, are charged with God and if we know how to touch them, give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him. "(Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sermons and Devotional Writings, OUP)

Sometimes words and photo come together. The words of Hopkins I came across by accident while reading an issue of The Tablet. I hadn't read them before, and immediately fell in step with the peculiar rhythm and imagery of a poet I know well.

The photo is one of a set I've been working with to explore the play of light. I took these at the foot of Bennachie on a very sunny and breezy afternoon, when the tree-filtered sunlight made the grass glow like gold. That afternoon I took several photographs of grass, water, stones, and against the larger perspective of tall trees, a mountain and wide skies.

Searching for what might make a worthwhile photograph is an exercise in looking, an intentional focus on seeing, and then the effort of paying attention. The inner focus of the mind, the natural focus of the eye, are prerequisites to the thrid level focus of a camera lens. More than once I've felt the inner merging of aesthetic appreciation and a responsiveness as near to prayer as makes no difference. 

Grass is a thickly textured image of human life in the Bible, and often weighted with a poignant acknowledgement of transience. "As for man his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field; the wind blows and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more." (Psalm 103.15-16) The same image in Isaiah 40, occurs in one of the most powerful calls to hopefulness and new possibility in the entire Hebrew Bible. But it too is touched with transience;"All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field...The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever." (Isaiah 40.7-8)

There's the realism of a Bible which looks time and life and death with humility and hope. Yet Psalm 103 begins, "Bless the Lord O my soul and all that is within me bless his holy name." To know ourselves blessed, and to know that reality with all that is within us - mind, emotion, spirit, conscience, will, memory, hope, sorrow, joy - to know in such depth that we are blessed, that is to celebrate the mere fact, no, the miracle fact, that we live at all. And Isaiah while looking at our human temporality with unflinching honesty, does so in the context of good tidings, a comforted people, new roads and opportunities, the company of One who is incomparable, and that immense final promise to those of us who know we are as grass, and as the flowers of the field, "Those who wait on the Lord (better, those who hope in the Lord) will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles...."

So in taking the photo of golden grasses, illumined by sunlight and orchestrated by the breeze, there is that moment of realisation, that this is not forever. That life is gift, immense, immeasurable, immediate and never asked for because it was given before we ever could. So this unlooked for, unasked gift we are called to live, to inhabit our circumstances and our being, with the seriousness of joy and the freedom of responsibility. Our utterly mysterious and gratuitous existence is a life to be received with humble gratitude and shared from a gladly generous heart. Alongside the transience of grass, comes the promise of Jesus, "I have come that you might have life, and life more abundant."

It would be misleading to say all, or even much of this was in my mind when I crouched to the level of the grass to take the photo. But some stirring of the "all that is within me", was triggered, one of those mysterious nudges of the Holy Spirit I've come to trust, intimating that this image of flowering grass setting to seed is a reminder that life is God's gift, fecund, transient, and precious. Had I gone looking for words to describe such a moment of intimation, and in such a luminous place, I couldn't improve on Hopkins' lyrical yes to such beauty:

"All things, there, are charged with love, are charged with God and if we know how to touch them, give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him."

Paul, the human, fallible, mercurial ambassador of Christ, and of his gospel which starts and ends with Jesus.

Paul. A Biography, Tom Wright (London: SPCK, 2018).  464 pages, £19.99.

James Denney once said to his friend J P Struthers that he wanted a break from writing about the apostle Paul because “There are other interesting things in this universe.” Those familiar with the writing of N T Wright must be wondering what can be left to say about Paul given his own long list of publications dating from his Tyndale Colossians commentary now over thirty years in print.

Since then Wright has produced a small library of Pauline scholarship which includes a major commentary on Romans, several mid-level state of play treatments of Paul, and dozens of essays and articles dealing in detail with Pauline themes and texts. Most recently his magnum opus, Paul and the faithfulness of God, and the recent collected essays, Pauline Perspectives, supplemented by Paul and His Recent Interpreters gather together his most important work on Paul. This is apart from other published research and a whole range of popular and mid-range volumes exploring various theological themes from Kingdom of God, to Christian hope, ethics and biblical interpretation, and including a complete series of daily study New Testament commentaries.

This book is not intended as yet another tendentious reconstruction of Pauline life and thought, although the above titles demonstrate Wright’s credentials to do so. Instead he is looking for the man behind the texts; he wants to make historical, emotional and theological sense of the man who more than any other gave decisive shape to Christian thought and practice in those first decades of the Christian church, and for two millennia thereafter. Paul is not to be pigeon-holed either as hero or villain, but to be understood as a converted Jew, whose life work was within Jewish and non-Jewish communities in the context of the Roman Empire and within the cultural milieu of Greco-Roman civilisation.

The book reads like a well-researched novel. Lucid, imaginative, rooted in long maturing thought, informed by encyclopaedic knowledge of sources, history and alternative viewpoints, and driven by a narrative with built in impetus and interest, this book could  easily replace the meaty novel you planned as the summer holiday read! If it does, you will be taken into a world of politics and philosophy, religious intrigue and change; and into the smaller worlds of house churches made up mainly of the small and marginal people, but with influential and well-off members too. And you will also be pulled into the local politics and problems of those churches, with their personalities and characters, their plots and sub-plots, and each of them a context  in which Paul either had influence or sought to be an influence in his mission to spread the gospel of Jesus crucified and risen. The “brilliant mind and passionate heart” of Paul is complex, challenging, resistant to preconceived theological patterns and interpretive grids. Paul, says Wright, would be a high maintenance friend, but the rewards would be amply rewarding.

Near the end of the book Wright expresses Paul’s gospel and ethics in a nutshell:

“God will put the whole world right at the last. He has accomplished the main work of that in Jesus and his death and resurrection. And through the gospel and spirit, God is now putting people right, so that they can be both examples of what the gospel does, and agents of further transformation in God’s world.” (Italics original)

Much of this book is a contextualised exposition of Paul’s gospel and ethics in those terms, from Galatia to Rome, from Corinth to Ephesus, and many a place in between. The chapters on Ephesus and Corinth, for example, are scintillating accounts of what Paul was about and why, the problems he confronted and those problem people who confronted him. Throughout the volume Wright opens up so many new ways of thinking about Paul’s mission strategies, pastoral challenges and passionately pursued goals, as he worked from within and often from a distance with such varied communities in all the overlapping social and cultural complexities of the first century Mediterranean.

For example Corinth fixated with celebrity culture, and dismissive of a vulnerable and quite ordinary apostle; or temple ridden Ephesus with multiple gods, idolatry as the norm, and the call to Christians to discern what they could and couldn’t eat, and in Galatia who to eat with and who to refuse to eat with. Wright is like a brilliant documentary narrator, observing behaviour, explaining local customs, being both critical and questioning of what is going on in order to understand better, the motives and responses of the main players. 

Central to Paul’s gospel, because central to his own experience and subsequent thought, is the transformative reality of Jesus, crucified, risen and Lord of the church. Jesus is the fulfilment of all that God purposes for his creation and its renewal.  

For Paul, “it was always Jesus: Jesus as the shocking fulfilment of Israel’s hopes; Jesus as the genuinely human being, the true “image”; Jesus the embodiment of Israel’s God – so that, without leaving Jewish monotheism one would worship and invoke Jesus  as Lord within not alongside, the service of the “living and true God”. (400)

The life work of N T Wright to date is distilled into this excellent biography of Paul. It does what good biographies do: it tells the story of the subject with fairness, verve and critical appreciation; it intrigues, poses questions, offers solutions to problem areas in the narrative; above all you come away from a good biography with a more informed, more sympathetic, and less prejudiced (positively or negatively) judgement of who he was and what he was about. Add to this the biographer’s  expertise in the life context, the cultural swirls and movements, the social and political pressures of change and conformity, within which the subject lived and moved and had his being, and you have a biography worth the time in reading about, and later, in pondering the wonder of that life.

However this is like no other book on Paul I have read. There is imaginative reconstruction, albeit earthed in erudition. As one highly significant example, the chapter on Paul’s Damascus experience is portrayed as very different from the classic conversion narrative. This isn’t so much an individual experience of regeneration, as a radical reorientation of worldview, a defining reversal of life’s meta-narrative for a zealous Jew whose zeal has just been flipped from enmity to Jesus and his followers, to apostle of the good news that Jesus is God fulfilling God’s eternal purposes for Israel and the world. Throughout the book Wright in similar fashion repeatedly pulls the rug from established, and as he would see it, too long unquestioned assumptions about what Paul was about, and why. 

The book has no footnotes to secondary studies, and no bibliography. If you’ve read Wright’s other work there are echoes and familiar themes, and you’ll recognise where his interpretation of Paul and Paul’s theology is contested, sometimes vigorously, by other scholars. But the absence of scholarly paraphernalia is deliberate on Wright’s part, and in my view a wise decision. What we have is a flowing narrative, richly informed, long pondered, imagination mostly disciplined by textual rootedness, and with its own internal coherence. The result is a very satisfying and persuasive account of Paul, the human, fallible, mercurial ambassador of Christ, and of his gospel which starts and ends with Jesus, the one of whom Paul wrote with incendiary passion, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself….and has given to us the ministry of reconciliation.”   

The Pittenweem Art Festival and the Art of Human Relationships.

Appreciating art starts with appreciating the artist. Here's why I think that.

Yesterday I went 90 miles south to the East Neuk village of Pittenweem. Every year in August they have an Art Festival for local and guest artists. The exhibit venue's range from established artists to glad amateurs to accomplished hobbyists. The styles vary from abstract to landscape from oil, water to mixed media, photography and textile. The whole place buzzes for 9 days.

Two of the artists are personal friends, and the Arts Festival is both reason and excuse for catching up with life stories and nourishing one of the finest forms of human art, friendship patiently worked at and faithfully expressed.

It's an extraordinary way to spend a day, wandering around the historic fishing village, in and out of people's garages, living rooms, gardens and sheds, browsing through thousands of works of art some of which may have taken weeks, certainly many hours to create. When you find an artist whose work you like, it's easy to compliment, converse and explore with them what it is about their art that moves them to paint, draw, sculpt, throw clay (as in pottery!), weave and photograph. What about the art which perplexes, or is a turn-off, or even seems hardly art at all? How do you say that? Or more constructively, how start the kind of conversation that might help you understand what the artist is getting at, what the painting is about, or seeking to express or represent, or more delicately, what am I to like about not only the painting but the human experience and this human artist who is its creator?

So yesterday was a day of looking and trying to see, of talking and trying to listen, of paying attention and trying to appreciate, and of making a serious attempt now and again to seek access to the human mind and heart that given time and materials, produces through skill, toil, imagination and discipline, this particular piece of art? And strange combinations of emotions swirl around. You look, pay attention, try to understand and appreciate the art, and the artist seems distant, or off-hand, or anxious for you to like it, or takes pleasure in your pleasure. Some artists smile from the corner while doing sodoku, or on their Tablet, one or two with easel and brush filling the unforgiving minute. You see the one you would seriously think of buying, but it already has a sold red sticker on it. Walking into a venue you know right away it's not 'your thing', but to turn and walk out on an artist's year's work would be an act of emotional sabotage.

All of this makes me aware of what goes on in all the daily transactions and interactions with all kinds of people with whom we form relationships in social interaction, from the friendly hello to the long conversation, from the relationships we negotiate at work to family dynamics, from casual informality to long established intimacy.  The way we walk in and out of each other's lives, view what their life is like so far as we can see or understand, learn something of who they are by their behaviour and a character which is an art form in progress. Trying to understand what someone is working so hard to achieve in life, what it is they are making of the raw materials they have been given, the importance of appreciating what we don't always understand, and recognising the personal investment of identity and life vision that has gone into the making of this, particular, here and now person whom I meet as a you in relation to me.

There is a vulnerability in being an artist who puts their art into an exhibition, and whose prices reflects the value they put on their art. It is part of the required courtesy of the exhibition that the viewer respects, seeks to understand, tempers criticism with appreciation, remembering that the art being evaluated or admired, has its source in the deeply human and profoundly personal. In all those encounters with other people every day, there is something of the same significance that should take place; a required courtesy, seeking to understand this other person, and seeing the person they are as a work in progress being formed from the given materials of circumstance and experience, gift and genes, inspiration and choice - and these have their source in the deeply human and the profoundly personal. 

Now if all this sounds too serious, it can be lightened by other realities from yesterday. Like a vanilla ice cream in a chocolate oyster, Masala black Thai tea and a lemon and cinnamon crepe, and a tea tray sized pizza with a special friend before the journey home. Now that pizza was, a work of art.

Why are you cast down O my soul? Hope in God for I shall yet praise him.

Scunnered!

Amongst the most expressive Scottish words is the near onomatopoeic 'scunnered'. One dictionary definition is itself a literary gem, "bereft of any lust for life". Now that's a bit extreme, but the best words are the ones that have the volume turned up.

Scunnered is an inner negativity about the way life happens to be, and the mood is pervasive and invasive and affects motivation, drains energy levels, impairs capacity for joy and therefore robs life of one of its primary drivers, a sense of purpose. Most times being scunnered is temporary; a sleep, a meal, the encouragement of friends, the right music, a glimpse of beauty, can restore something of our muchness. Or perhaps nothing other than passing time and the slow recovery of the sense that life is a gift too vital to be ignored or suffocated under a blanket of complaint.

I suspect some of the Psalms were written out of a sense of scunneration. Technically called psalms of lament, they are poetic complaints to God about the way life is and the sense of being under siege by circumstances which frustrate our hopes, exhaust our energies or threaten our happiness. In such Psalms the rhythm always moves from lament and complaint to praise and thanksgiving. Why? Because faith is the synchronic capacity to look at life with realism and look to God with hope. There is an element of defiance in faith, a strong undercurrent of resistance to that nexus of negative emotions we call scunneration. 

The mindset of the Psalmist poet is a complex combination of both resistance to what troubles and diminishes us, and surrender to the God we have learned to trust with our real significance. The cure for inner negativity is not mere positivity, like willing ourselves to believe against all the evidence that life is a struggle right now, that life is fine. Trust in God is not a denial that life is hard and has enmeshed us in an emotional downer.

In a powerful balancing of question and answer the Psalmist poet both faces the reality of life as it is, and asserts the reality that places life as it is against a different horizon of possibilities. And it is all condensed into that one small horizon-stretching word "yet".   

"Why are you cast down, O my soul?

    Why so disturbed within me?

Put your hope in God,

    for I will yet praise him

    my Saviour and my God.

Being scunnered is a natural response to what feels like the chronic and relentless frustrations of life, large and small, serious and trivial, unexpected and predictable. Hope in God is not denial of their reality, but denial of their finality. Somewhere in all the frustration, trouble and inner negativity there is a "yet", a reality that is ultimate and promised, and that will turn scunneration to praise. That's what hope does. It gives us a reference point beyond penultimate of present circumstances. Hope points us to the God whose love is ultimate, whose purposes are on a different horizon which as yet we don't see, except that against the first slivers of dawn is the silhouette of a cross illumined by the resurrection promise of early morning. 

All of this comes out of reflecting on the small Sabbath poem of Wendell Berry, and noticing the determined but still tentative hopefulness he invests in the word "perhaps". Like a modern day Psalmist poet of wisdom he gives us the anatomy of hope. Desire, love, gratitude and joy are each and together the antithesis of being scunnered. The chain linking of desire perhaps love perhaps gratitude perhaps joy ends in the Maker, and rest. In all the penultimacy of what scunners us, the promised ultimacy of desire fulfilled in love, suffused with gratitude and resting in joy, the joy of God. 

Learn by little the desire for all things
which perhaps is not desire at all
but undying love which perhaps
is not love at all but gratitude
for the being of all things which
perhaps is not gratitude at all
but the maker's joy in what is made,
the joy in which we come to rest.
                     Wendell Berry, This Day. Collected and New Sabbath Poems, page 312

 

Is the Term 'Evangelical' Now Beyond Redemption in the Trump Era?

Yesterday I received a modest wee cheque, royalties for a book I wrote 27 years ago! It was a study called Evangelical Spirituality. From the Wesleys to John Stott. At the time it was an early attempt to resist the assumptions of the growing literature on spirituality that Evangelicals didn't have much of a spiritual tradition worth mentioning. "Evangelical spirituality consists of early rising, prayer and Bible reading." said the brief article in the then recently published SCM Dictionary of Christian Spirituality. That was true as far as it went, but didn't go far or deeply enough. So I wrote the book to give lived examples of a spiritual tradition that includes amongst its achievements activism in social justice, evangelistic missions at home and abroad, growing opposition to the slave trade, and a theology of spiritual experience that was dynamic, transformative and radical in its demands and promises.

It was written as an insider, one who has tried to live out my Christian life with ecumenical openness and willingness to learn from other tributaries of the Christian tradition; but as one who was himself Evangelical. The four defining characteristics as argued by David Bebbington remain deeply embedded in my own experience as a Christian: conversionism, activism, biblicism and crucicentrism. Much of the fifty years I have been an evangelical Christian I have been content to remain so defined, though I have often been critical and uncomfortable and at times embarrassed with some of the ways some forms of evangelicalism have come to express themselves.

Like many, many other evangelicals, I have had to rethink, deeply and disconcertingly, whether the term is now too compromised by its American versions to be a useful broad based descriptor of who I am in Christ. The evangelical right in the United States has created a major identity crisis, and caused fault lines and drawn red lines that may never be overcome. The politicisation of American evangelicalism and the religious Right has resulted in culture wars, internal dissension as evangelicals of right and left have chosen sides, and overt conflicted stances on key issues. One writer describes the past two decades as a time when political ideology and fundamentalist theology were put in a blender; two separate ingredients produced a new cocktail of political power, religious conviction, emotional and rational commitments, agendas driven by cultural fears and hopes, producing a religiously energised political activism.

Many evangelicals in the United States, and indeed in global Evangelicalism, view with growing alarm, the public alignment, convenient alliance, and some would even say uncritical allegiance, of the majority of white evangelicals with the White House. The word 'white' is pre-loaded in America with enormous social burdens. That is why it becomes disturbing to the point of alarm, that a reported 81% of white evangelicals voted for the present President. The Trump presidency and administration, and the continuing and strengthening support for its policies by leading white evangelicals, has become deeply problematic for other evangelicals who do not share the political commitments of the religious and political Right.

Hence this book. Eleven essays in which evangelicals work through the implications of the current situation for their own evangelical commitments. They reflect the diversity of both American culture and evangelical expression; men and women, white and people of colour, African American, Asian American, Mexican, Latino, pastors, professors and leaders in Evangelical institutions. They wrestle with the question of "who is defining the evangelical and social vision? Is it the Gospel or is it the culture?" Those are deal-breaking questions depending on the answer. Here are two quotations, one from the Introduction by Mark Labberton, and one by Shane Claiborne, probably the most widely known of the contributors.

 "[The term] Evangelical has value only if it names our commitment to seek and demonstrate the heart and mind of God in Jesus Christ, who is the evangel.
To be evangelical is to respond to God's call into deeper faith and greater humility.
It also leads us to repudiate and resist all forces of racism and misogyny, and all other attitudes and actions, overt and implied, that subvert the dignity of people, who are made in the image of God. Any evangelicalism that doesn't allow the evangel to redefine, reorder and renew power in the light of Jesus Christ is lost and worth abandoning."

“With the cross of Christ as the theological centrepiece and model of evangelical faith, people inside and outside the church expect evidence of the pursuit of moral purity and/or the humility of self-sacrifice. Both of these now seem buried in the rhetoric of populist and partisan political power…the evangel itself seems to have been marginalised.”

From Still Evangelical. Insiders Reconsider Political, Social and Theological Meaning. Ed. Mark Labberton, Page 17, 8.

"We can maintain oour orthodoxy (right thinking) while reclaiming our orthopraxis (right living). Doctrinal statements are important things, but they are hard things to love. God didn;t just give us words on paper; the Word became flesh. And now we are to put flesh on our faith. In the end Christianity spreads best not by force but by fascination.  And the last few decades of evangelicalism have become less and less fascinating. We've had much to say with our mouths but often very little to show from our lives. People can;t hear what we say because our hypocrisies are too loud." Page 165.

I am increasingly uneasy about the way the word 'evangelical' has become a totalising synonym for the American white evangelical right in its use by the media and the resulting perceptions of a global public. No nuance, no recognition of the global diversity of a movement at least three centuries old and with roots going back into Christian antiquity. So is the term useful or a hindrance, accurate or misleading, fatally hijacked or capable of recovered integrity? I don't know. But I appreciate the conscientious wrestling and shared uneasiness in the majoirty of these essays. It is worth reading if only because it gives voice to other evangelicals and their misgivings about whether they can still be called, or want to call themselves, still Evangelicals. Most of them do. I'm not so sure.