Living Wittily

Believing in Jesus as a Way of Life

As a Christian I believe in Jesus. That obvious and apparently simple and pious confession shouldn't need much theological analysis. There aren't many of our deepest, most significant and defining experiences that can be reduced to concepts, contexts or constructs. They do not need argumentation, they are their own validation. The reality of lifelong love for another person; astonishment at music that causes our inner being to vibrate in sympathy; standing on a mountain top knowing ourselves rooted in landscape, or looking at a clear night sky and feeling small and immense in that one moment of perceived vastness; I believe in love, art, natural beauty. As C S Lewis famously said, whether original to him or borrowed from elsewhere, "I believe in the sun not because I see it but because by its light I see everything else."

So, I believe in Jesus. Is that as self evident as it sounds?

• I believe in Jesus of Nazareth.
• I believe in the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith.
• I believe in Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.
• I believe Jesus is Lord of all.
• I believe in Jesus, the Son of the Father, and who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, is One God.

All of these are Christian confessions, from a minimum to a maximum attribution of divinity. So how did Jesus become God? That is one of the pivotal questions in New Testament study today. The big players on the field are Larry Hurtado, Richard Bauckham, N T Wright and my favourite NT scholar, J D G Dunn. I have embarked on a long journey of reading through Dunn's magnum opus, Christianity in the Making, a three volume study that distills a lifetime of scholarship, enquiry and faith seeking understanding. At the heart of Dunn's quest is his own faith as it has grown from that of Scripture Union camps to one lived and studied as one of the pre-eminent New Testament scholars of his generation.

Reading Dunn is like being shown round the National Gallery by someone who knows what they are talking about, who has a passionate interest in and love for the subject, and for each of the exhibits. He is an enthusiast who is self critical, knowledgeable with a disconcerting honesty about what can be known, and what can be shown by the evidence. The range of his mastery of the New Testament social and cultural context, his awareness of the history of the three centuries which straddle what we now call the Common Era, and his patient immersion in the texts of the New Testsament and the extra canonical sources could make him an intimidating and authoritative voice; except he is first and foremost a research led teacher, and one who was doing this long before universities tried to manufacture entire faculties aimed at generating research funding with teaching increasingly ancillary to the real work of the University. Yes that is overstated, only slightly though.

The first 160 pages are important methodological chapters setting his study into the ongoing story of biblical scholarship of early Christianity. Central to that story is what the church and the academy have meant when they have said "I believe in Jesus". And the answers range from Jesus the fictional construct of early sectarian communities to Jesus as understood through the dogmatic and historic traditions of the Church. Of course there is no one understanding of Jesus, how could there be? Dunn's early work was on the unity and diversity of the New Testament, the different styles of Christianity represented in the New Testament documents, and how, despite such diversity there was an underlying unity to be found in the person of Jesus and how he was understood and construed in those writings. 

Those who preach the Christian Gospel have to wrestle all through life with the reality of Jesus, and how that reality impinges on the world of human affairs and the created and cultural circumstances within and around which we all live. But not only preachers; every follower of Jesus is confronted with the challenge of Jesus' own question, "Who do you say that I am?" And to those who follow he says, "What do you want?" Like the disciples at the start of John's Gospel we stumble into we know not what and blurt out the question which represents all our deepest questions, "Lord where do you stay?" And his answer remains sufficient, "Come and see."

I believe in Jesus. And for the best part of 50 years I have followed to see if I could see. And I've seen enough to want to keep following in order to see more. It's well known that John uses several words for sight; from the surface vision that takes in what's around us and processes it as information, to that lingering contemplative gaze that compels attention and urges towards new, deeper, more humble understanding, to that moment of revelation when the window of heaven is opened and we are dazzled by glory - "we have beheld his glory, full of grace and truth". 

J D G Dunn is a contributor to a fascinating book, I (still) Believe, in which leading biblical scholars share their stories of faith and scholarship. He titles his chapter In Quest of Truth. The whole book is well worth reading, perhaps especially for those who stand outside academia and wonder what all the fuss is about; even more especially for those suspicious of biblical scholarship and dismissive of scholarly and intellectual engagement with the foundation documents of our faith.  At the end of his magnificent and flawed The Quest for the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer wrote words that move me every time I read them:

“He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside,
He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same words: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.”

 

The Importance of Holocaust Studies to Educate and Humanise Conscience.

I have a very good friend who  every now and again passes on his used copies of The Tablet and The Times Literary Supplement. The first is a long established Catholic weekly which is full of news, reflection, critique and comment on all thimgs Catholic and many things not. The TLS is also a weekly, and much of its content can be eclectic, esoteric and at times downright inaccessible - at least to someone whose interests are pretty wide, it often seems so. But every issue of both these weeklies has enough to make it worth trawling through, and here and there reading thoroughly something you would be hard pushed to find elsewhere. Such is the serendipity of browsing within a weekly rather than online. 

That's how I came across a review of the book KL. The book is a history of the Nazi concentration camps, and on this year, the 70th Anniversary of the liberation of the camps, Nikolas Wachmann has provided a comprehensive, authoritative and humane account of the inhuman concepts and practices that gave birth to horror on an industrial scale.

Over the years I have tried to take seriously as a Christian the theological, cultural and political realities that culminated in genocide as ideology. The novels of Chaim Potok, the writings of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank, Corrie Ten Boom, and a number of historical studies such as Martin Gilbert's definitive account, have opened up an experience as wide as humanity and deep as any theology can take us. Add to this several of the more significant films including Schindler's List, The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, Defiance, The Pianist, and The Reader, and to such fictional and historic written accounts above, is added imagination, image and that visual representation of good and evil that leaves us nowhere to hide from the realities of human life in all its degraded fallenness, and in all its inexplicable goodness. Because if the problem of evil is a challenge to faith in a loving God, the problem of unselfish sacrifice for others is an equal challenge to atheistic nihilism. 

And for me all of these perspectives were distilled into two particular days, each during a holiday. The first was the visit to the Holocaust Memorial in Washington DC about 10 years ago. The second was a visit to the House of Anne Frank in Amsterdam 4 years ago. Both are places of pilgrimage, and therefore of education, reflection and prayer - prayers of repentance, for forgiveness, of self-examination, and of commitment to fundamental values of humanity such as justice, mercy, compassion and non-negotiable defensiveness about respect for others, however "other" they are. 

Which brings me back to Wachsmann's book, KL, a title which is merely the abbreviation of Konzentrationslager. Even that acronym, KL, is redolent of administrative efficiency, reducing the reality of the word to an abbreviation in which, pun intended, profound evils are concentrated. And here is what I learned; the concentration camps started in 1933, and eventually there were 1,100 installations. And note this book does not cover purpose built extermination camps where evil well rehearsed in other places, was carried out with an orchestrated brutality that reached across Nazi Europe. These camps were instruments of lawless oppression, set up to demoralise, degrade and exploit human beings with the specific intention of stripping them of humanity and reducing them to disposable and depersonalised commodity.

So having been given a pile of second-hand weeklies, and browsing inncocently and all unaware, I found myself once again being confronted with the murderous work of those who in stripping others of their humanity, lose that essential core which defines the truly human. Whatever else the Holocaust demands of later generations, including me, and us, it requires us to identify what is human and humane, and then to protect, cherish and embody that humanity in a committed humanism. I choose to do so as a Christian, repentant that such horrors happened at the heart of Christian Europe, and alert to all forms of repressive discrimination, and answering back the careless cynicism of rhetoric that demonises and fears and therefores threatens those "others" who share our humanity, and our planet.

The statue is "Tragende", by Will Lammert, Ravensbruck. 

Becoming the Gospel 1:Missional God = Missional People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Anatomy of a Disappearance, Hisham Matar. The Power of Story.

This is not review; it's more a meditation on the power of story in our lives. For a while I've found it hard to read a novel. It wasn't a deliberate evasion of fiction which I've always enjoyed, and just as importantly, learned from. Story is the way we think through our lives, encounter other possible selves, explore from both distance and nearness, the experience of others, and ask ourselves questions where it overlaps with our own, or diverges into territory we have never explored.

Anatomy of a Disappearance, by Hisham Matar, is a strange novel. I’m not sure what  is to be assimilated as ‘lesson’ or ‘wisdom’; other than the recognition of complexity not only in our relationships with people, but in the mystery and experience of the people to whom we relate; and the puzzle all but insoluble, of our own selves, as that same complexity multiplied by our intermingled relatedness to all those others in our lives, for good or ill.

What is love? Does it change its forms as we grow and mature? Or is it us who change? How many kinds of human relationship are there in which we can still with confidence use the term ‘love’ as descriptor? Does love cause jealousy, or does the birth of jealousy kill love at source? As this story unfolded and the boy becomes a man, his mother dies, his father remarries the woman he wants for himself, then is discovered to have married her to secure her presence for his son, while he secretly loves and lives with the person he really wants to be with, but in the process his father then disappears as a kidnapped political dissident.

Emotional nuance, the dread and dream of desire, the embodiedness of love and yet the inadequacy of mere embodiedness to fully express it; the tension of father and son in this story; the ambivalence of stepmother and child growing into a man and the awakening of desire – all of these are beautifully portrayed in a story that describes the limitations which circumstance inevitably imposes on human love and experience, with resultant sadness, and inevitable if reluctant resignation, but which nevertheless, in the alchemy of human relatedness, enrich and change the protagonists.

And I guess in every human heart there is the intersection of these same fallibilities and possibilities. We love as we can. Occasionally we reach degrees of intimacy that truly satisfy, more often there is the restless attempt to understand, the yearing to build bridges, to reach out, but all the times the frustration of circumstance without and hesitations of confidence and trust within. I do wonder if Christian theology has often enough made allowances for the mismatch between love at its best and the human heart as it is; if our theology of love is adequate to the essential complexity of created being. And I wonder too if or when we might ever clearly understand and pay attention to the frightening precipice on which we all stand as we survey the world of people around us, with all of whom we share this mysterious potentiality that is our life from God, love as divine and human gift, divine grace and human longing, essential vocation and terrifying treasure which must not be wasted.

Psalm 51 with its profound anguish of guilt, shame and yet irrationally persistent hope of redemption, and 139 with its God hauntedness and its mixture of complaint and comfort in the omnipresence and omnisicience of God, are written from such a knowing heart. A heart familier with the confused complexity and inherent dignity in this bundle of longings and anxieties we call our humanity, and which nevertheless trust that God's mercy, grace and love can draw purpose and wsorth out of such a fankled existence.

This novel, with its tale of a son, a mother, a stepmother, a father, and the impact they have on each other at different stages of life, is a potent example of how story enables us to look with compassion on humanity, ours and others; and to be more patient and unjudging of human love in all its fallibility and mistakenness, because it is love in its mysterious reality that sounds the echo in our hearts that we are made in the image of God, and thus allows us to hear the footsteps of God in our lives. 

Theology as an Act of Hospitality A New Theological Project

It was 1973 when I first read Kenneth Cragg's The Call of the Minaret, while writing an essay on the Christian and Islamic conception of God. To say it was mind opening is understatement. Reading it represented a loss of innocence for a young Scottish Baptist evengelical, ignorant of the sophisticated theology and cultural depth of Islam, and guilty of narrow-minded caricature. For two years I had been reading Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University, and was now in a second year reading Principles of Religion, a cutting edge course early in that decade of the 70's when growing cultural diversity in Glasgow was forcing the recognition that Christianity was no longer the only game in town. It was during that course that I first encountered the notion of inter-faith dialogue. And by being compelled to write an essay comparing two historic, related but highly differentiated monotheistic faiths, I found myself engaged in my own head experiencing a radical makeover of ideas, and persuaded in my soul where convictions strike deep roots, of the significance of dialogue in Christian relations with people of other faiths.

I discovered that dialogue need not be compromise, concession, or tame conversation in search of the lowest common denominator. Rather dialogue is conversation in which listening is as important as speaking, it concerns beliefs held with integrity and deep conviction, it requires respect, humility, and willingness to learn as well as teach; it is founded on the assumption of friendship and shared commitment in the search for truth, and as its beating heart, it recognises without demur the Other's right to hold to and practice their faith with the same freedom as I enjoy, and with an agreed covenant of faithfulness in our witness to, and practice of, our own faith.

There have been many significant formative moments in my life as a minister and theologian. There's little point in grading them in degrees of significance; indeed the importance we attribute to events, circumstances, encounters, experiences, thoughts, memories, conversations, books, are likely to depend on which stage of the journey we look back from. But I do know, that from the time I wrote that essay and read Cragg's great book, I moved from Christian mission as declaratory theological monologue to Christian witness as Holy Spirit enabled hospitable dialogue. If I haven't always lived up to that key principle of Christian witness in a pluralist world, then that is my own failure to live out of what remains a central Christian conviction: namely, bearing witness to Jesus requires us to relinquish the places of theological, intellectual and cultural power, and to sit down next to those who share our world and our lives. In that disposition of recognition and accompaniment as a faithful follower of Jesus, I am free to bear witness in a conversation which is a sharing and searching for the truth that sets free. And to do so as one who seeks to live under the rule of Christ, in the power of the Spirit, and in the love of God.

All of which brings me to a book I've been asked to review for the Regent's Reviews online Journal. Christ and Reconciliation. A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World, Veli-Matti Karkkainen (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013). This is one of the most promising theological projects to come along for some time. It is one desperately needed by a Western-Northern Post Most Things Christianity in danger of recycling its own in-house theological discourse and history, talking its own talk to an increasingly disinterested culture, and in a linguistic currency increasingly distorted and devalued by the absence of defining voices from other cultures and contexts of globalChristianity.

Karkkainen has for years been writing theology from global and contextual perspectives. He is unafraid of the clumsy, even ugly term "glocal", because it's very awkwardness highlights the need to recognise the complex interaction of local and global perspectives which now impimge on Christian theologies. Here is a brief paragraph which makes a very obvious connection between my earlier encounter with Bishop Kenneth Cragg's plea for dialogue, and this major new theological project.

"Theology, robustly inclusivistic in its orientation, welcoming testimonies, insights, and interpretations from different traditions and contexts, can also be a truly dialogical enterprise. It honors the otherness of the other. It also makes space for an honest, genuine, authentic sharing of one's convictions. In pursuing the question of truth as revealed in the triune God, constructive theology also seeks to persuade and convince with the power of dialogical, humable and respectful argumentation. Theology then becomes an act of hospitality, giving and receiving gifts." (page 29)

"Divinity saturated and clothed his world...." A New Book on George Herbert.

I'm slowly and satisfyingly making my way through John Drury's new book George Herbert's life and poetry, Music at Midnight. Drury's book Painting the Word was an eye opener to the ways in which art provides exegetical images which are their own hermeneutical essays on the biblical text. Along with Jaroslav Pelikan's Jesus Through the Centuries, and Graeme Finaldi's The Image of Christ, which doubled as the National Gallery's catalogue of the exhibition of that name, Drury's book is an important contribution to a revived interest in visual art as exegesis. And I see Richard Harries has a new book due in a few weeks on The Image of Christ in Modern Art.

Now Drury's book on Herbert comes at the end of years of reading and studying the quintessential Anglican Divine and poet. What makes Drury's book fascinating is the space given to Herbert's world, his early life and the connections between early experiences and the later poems. For example The Collar, with its opening line Drury links to a row breaking out at the table during a meal. "I struck the board, and cried, No more:" The choleric temper of the Herbert brothers, Edward and George are well documented, and Drury exploits the storm of rage between the brothers as the key to understanding a poem which both describes the inner psychology of anger, and the deeper psychological search for peace, harmony and serenity. The form of the poem is erratic, varied line lengths, rhymes and assonance all over the place. As Drury says, "It is an eruption". Such family experience recalled, provides for Herbert familiar experience on which to hang his own religious discontent and spiritual conflict as resentment of life's inner and outer chaos battled in his heart. Until eventually a parental voice addresses him, "Child", to which he replies, "Lord".

I've read The Collar often enough, and am surprised at the obviousness of the connection Drury makes, but only after he pointed it out is it obvious. And so in other parts of Herbert's experience, for example living near the busy intersection of business and society at Chring Cross, and another fascinating connection between Magdalen Herbert's hospitality in an age of genteel etiquette, and that same etiquette made famous in Herbert's best loved poem, "Love III". More about this fine book later - but here are the two poems, The Collar, and Love III. No wonder Rowan Williams chose Love III as his favourite poem, and T S Eliot admired Herbert enough to echo some of his lines in his own work.

 

The Collar

I struck the board, and cried, "No more;

                         I will abroad!

What? shall I ever sigh and pine?

My lines and life are free, free as the road,

Loose as the wind, as large as store.

          Shall I be still in suit?

Have I no harvest but a thorn

To let me blood, and not restore

What I have lost with cordial fruit?

          Sure there was wine

Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn

    Before my tears did drown it.

      Is the year only lost to me?

          Have I no bays to crown it,

No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?

                  All wasted?

Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,

            And thou hast hands.

Recover all thy sigh-blown age

On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute

Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage,

             Thy rope of sands,

Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee

Good cable, to enforce and draw,

          And be thy law,

While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.

          Away! take heed;

          I will abroad.

Call in thy death's-head there; tie up thy fears;

          He that forbears

         To suit and serve his need

          Deserves his load."

But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild

          At every word,

Methought I heard one calling, Child!

          And I replied My Lord.

............................

Love III

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
        Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
        From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
        If I lack'd anything.

"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";
        Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
        I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
        "Who made the eyes but I?"

"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame
        Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
        "My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
        So I did sit and eat.

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning If I lacked anything. "A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here": Love said, "You shall be he." "I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on thee." Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, "Who made the eyes but I?" "Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame Go where it doth deserve." "And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?" "My dear, then I will serve." "You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat." So I did sit and eat. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16121#sthash.fkrHOZe9.dpuf

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning If I lacked anything. "A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here": Love said, "You shall be he." "I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on thee." Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, "Who made the eyes but I?" "Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame Go where it doth deserve." "And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?" "My dear, then I will serve." "You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat." So I did sit and eat. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16121#sthash.fkrHOZe9.dpuf

Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (Second Edition) - a no brainer purchase.

You know you're getting on a bit when you are excited about a complete revision and expansion of a book you bought in its first edition over 20 years ago, and have used regularly and gladly all that time. Generations of theological students and pastors keen to do their own exegetical digging have benefited from the IVP black dictionaries on the New and Old Testaments. The Dictionary of the OT Prophets was published a year or two ago completing the full set of Black Dictionaries. The Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels was published 21 years ago, and now needs updating and made consistent with the rest of the set. I guess what we have is a changing continuity with this project, aiming to keep the scholarship current - and for that IVP are to be congratulated.

I've used every one of the IVP Black Dictionaries frequently, profitably and I can think of fewer big volumes that are such value for money. They have well conceived subject indices at the back making it possible to pursue obscure or minor themes through the lens of the major articles. The Jesus and the Gospels volume has a detailed index of gospel texts allowing for further chasing of exegetical detail (a full scripture index would be much too cumbersome).

The pre-publication description on Amazon shows the scope and quality of what is on offer. No I haven't seen the revised edition. It has almost the same number of pages, but as you'll see from the pre-pub. extract below, it is almost entirely a new book:

How can undergraduate students, seminarians, people in professional ministry, leaders in local churches and other Christian organizations, even academic scholars, stay abreast of the range of contemporary study of Jesus and the Gospels? How can the fruit of vital study of Jesus and the Gospels in recent years help to animate our reading of and interaction with the Gospels?

When it first appeared some twenty years ago, the 'Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels' was concerned to address exactly these kinds of needs. This revision of the Dictionary follows the same path, though now with new content and up-to-date bibliographies, as well as a host of new contributors. Some ninety percent of the original material has been replaced, with most previous entries assigned to a fresh list of scholars. A number of new articles have been introduced, and a handful of articles from the first edition have been updated in light of ongoing research.

I await the arrival of the second generation of this Dictionary with impatience. What will I do with the old one - well what do you do with old friends? You don't sell them, recycle them, dump them or pulp them! You look after them, you find space for them, and if you can find a caring home for them, that would be good!

The Text as Critic: What makes us and Keeps us Christian?

I've just spent a while reading Paul's two letters to the Thessalonian Christians. I'm reading Paul's letters in chronological order, and reading each of them in their entirety at a sitting. Paul could never have remotely imagined the centuries of scholarship and study, exegetical and expository activity, contemplative prayer and public reading, that would expose his occasional at times frantic writing to letter by letter scrutiny, word by word lexical analysis, syntactical disentangling, grammatical scrutiny, theological construal, contextual reconstruction, textual criticism and socio-rhetorical examination.

I've spent most of my life immersed in the New Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures, and Paul has been a conversation partner with whom I've argued, to whom Ive listened, whose company I've mostly enjoyed, whose tone of voice has often comforted, upset, inspired, interrogated, rebuked, encouraged and nourished my mind and heart. So I'm spending some time trying to hear once again what he is saying. You know how those few close friends we have who know us so well we can't kid on in their presence, they know us. And we know them too well to be daft enough to think we can wing it and present only a selected self? Paul is like that for me - actually, so is the Jesus of the Gospels, only more so, but that's another story.

Near the end of the second letter to the Thessalonians Paul writes one of his wish prayers, which comes as a softener for some of the hard things said and one or two hard words that follow. "May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ." (2Th 3.5) Just now and then words like that clarify what it is that makes us and keeps us Christian. The way Paul writes the phrase " the love of God" is deliberately ambiguous - it's about how we read the genitive 'of' - is it the love of God for us, or our love of God. Likewise the steadfastness of Christ - the word means faithful, longsuffering, durable, persevering, indefatigable - it's a word that is much more descriptive of the real thing than those abstract nouns so loved by preachers, such as commitment, decision. Christ's steadfastness towards us enables our perseverance; his durable love enables us to endure; unless we trust the steadfastness of Christ towards us, it will be hard for us to live after and in the steadfastness of Christ. 

The psychology of Christian obedience is shaped by profound gratitude for the love with which God loves us, and given resilience and durability by Jesus Christ whose own patience and perseverance endured the cross, and defeated death, and lives in resurrected power that makes new, creates grace, and recreates us.

I've never used this verse as a benediction at the end of worship. I'm not sure I've ever heard it used. Has anyone else? But next time....

"May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ."

Yesterday I met my steadfast friend Ken for breakfast and a long catch up. His life is now divided between the United States and Scotland, and we try to meet up each time he is back here. Amongst our obvious shared passions are reading and books, and there is probably a book could be written about our book chasing adventures -like the one at the greasy B&B in Oxford. That too is another story. As was our attempt yesterday to eat a soft poached egg in a roll with some decorum, minimum mess, sitting across from each other and with barely controlled hysteria!

The point of this diversion is that amongst the sacraments of the steadfastness of Christ are those friends who are steadfastly there, who share our lives, and by whose kindness and faithfulness direct our hearts to the love of God. I have several such sacraments.

Dag Hammarskjold - the United Nations and the Road to Holiness.

In conversation with Jason the Forsythian when we met in Scotland he was guilty of shameless name-dropping:) He had been in the company of Archbishop Rowan Williams no less, a Christian thinker whose writing is often complex enough to both frustrate and satisfy; frustrating because you know he is saying something important and profound, satisfying because he never short changes the reader by dumbing down, cutting corners, or pretending all the jig saw pieces are even there. His return to academia will I hope mean he will begin to draw together much of his thought into a substantial vision of God enriched from important influences of Eastern and Western theology. 

But anyway, Williams mentioned to Jason the new biography of Dag Hammarskjold, and commended it warmly. His blurb is on the dust jacket:

"And admirably judicious and comprehensive - and long overdue - study of one of the most remarkable figures of the twentieth century, whose presence remains both spiritually and politically significant for an age of violently confused international relations."

Another former Archbishop, this time K G Hammar of the Church of Sweden, also commends the volume:

"A great book about a great man who must not be forgotten in a time which more than ever needs to see the footprints of Dag Hammarskjold - the combination of wholehearted engagement in the world and familiarity with the spiritual journey inwards."

My own debt to Hammarskjold goes back to the first reading of Markings, and how many people have to say that. It is a quite extraordinary book, a reservoir of wisdom, deep, fresh, reflecting shimmering sunshine, some blue sky but also clouds and the shadow of mountains. Maybe it would be better described as a Scottish loch then. But the maxims and reflections, the prayers and the psalms, the confessions and thanksgivings, the self critique and the compassionate outwardness, and through it all the sense of the reality of a power that is transcendent, suffusing life with mercy and hopefulness, - through it all, the sense of God.

I've often wondered what a book club would make of it, filled as it is with the heart and the mind of a great human being, part of whose greatness was his own sense of mortality, fallibility and the urgency of what we do with the gift of our life. One of his best known maxims remains true as a reminder to the Church of what its life is about, what its mission is to be:

"In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action."

Yes, and yes again. Lipsey's aim in this biography is to explore the importance of Hammarskjold's inner life as the engine and energy of his outward activities as an humanitarian, diplomat and man of faith caught up in the world of politics, power and international tensions. That small book of markings, found on his bedside table after his death, remains a classic of spiritual honesty, moral striving and the felt tension between disciplined duty and enabling grace from beyond ourselves. 

The High Calling of the Holy Fool - Ben Myers on the Theology of Rowan Williams

Ben Myers' study of the theology of Rowan Williams is a good read for three reasons, well it would be three wouldn't it, given that Williams is one of the most subtle Trinitarian theologians writing today.

First, Williams' theology is explored with sympathy, explained with clarity and expounded with critical affection. Myers traces the intellectual mileposts of Williams' theological itinerary so far, taking time to look at the landscape before moving on. The study is both chronological and thematic. Some of the chapters are significant theological reflections in their own right, underpinned by Williams' theological style and convictions, but in conversation with a sharply observant friend.

Second Myers brings the theology of Rowan Williams into the rich and at times bewildering company of those who have shaped and stimulated, shaken and stirred, subverted and converted the ideas and insights of a mind too much in love with God to settle for simplicity, tidiness or finality in theology. Williams' travelling companions are as diverse as they come: the Russian Orthodox theologian Bulgakov, the German philosopher Hegel, Augustine and Von Balthasar with Barth, the granite polymath Donald Mackinnon and the Eastern Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky, Gillian Rose the French scourge of post-modern philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, T S Eliot and Dostoevsky, and from a different but no less powerful theological genre, Andrei Rublev and his Icon of the Trinity.

Third, this study allows Rowan Williams to speak, and creates both space and congenial environment for him to be heard. The endnotes to each chapter direct the reader to Williams' scattered corpus. One of the features of Williams thought is that much of it is occasional, thought out and thought through in the midst of discussion, debate and not a little controversy. But always, you have a sense of a mind that is original and unafraid of the inconvenience of hesitation, qualification and deferred answers. This can make him a frustrating provisionalist, a thinker reluctant to claim more than can be rightly said. Intellectual humility seldom goes with such high intelligence, and when it does in a Christian leader, it is usually one of the more persuasive criteria for holiness. I think Myers is right to suggest that Williams is deeply influenced by, and is himself an example of, the holy fool.

To be a fool for Christ's sake is no small achievement in the scale of sanctity. Diplomacy and political nous, administrative acumen and managerial competence, religious entrepreneurship and judicious statement, strategic foresight and relational leadership - all these are desirable in an Archbishop in an established church. Unlikely a search consultancy will put holy fool amongst the essential attributes, indeed it may, rightly, be reason enough to quietly drop a name from the long list let alone the short list.

But Myers uses the phrase in its strongest biblical sense of a prophet who speaks a different language and come from a different country and sees things we don't, because we are all so busy we cannot be bothered looking. In that sense the fool is the one who sees the folly of our seriousness; the one who refuses to prioritise the wisdom of the world; the one who speaks truth to power from a place where the view is different; the one who is never seduced into going along with the crowd who are so duped they aren't prepared to see, let alone say, that the emperor is naked.

In his retirement I hope Rowan Williams has time, space, energy and opportunity to leave to the church a substantial corpus of uncomfortable theology. Goodness, not because I would nod assent to everything he says and writes - just as often I find him frustrating, at times annoying, frequently hard to follow, but seldom trite, predictable or irrelevant. Because deep springs of prayer and a contemplative intellect dedicated to loving God give life and reality to Williams' theology.

I still remember years ago reading The Truce of God, an Archbishop of Canterbury Lent Book, when Williams was a young academic theologian. It too was a tough read, but it changed the way I look at movies, it alerted me to the fears that pervade consumerist culture, and it converted me to a view of Christian discipleship in which reconciliation, justice and peacemaking are essential digits in the bar code of Christian lifestyle. Since then I have read Williams with gratitude and anticipation - with considerable respect, and with just about equal measures of agreement and disagreement. And maybe I've learned most when I have disagreed with him, and had to clarify in my own mind and heart why.

One last thought - how can you not like an Archbishop who describes the impact of hierarchical church leadership on his soul by saying it's like 'the effect of coca-cola on your teeth'!