Living Wittily

Benedict XVI in London, Education, Dialogue and Freedom ( I )

When Tony Blair famously said the priorities for a 21st Century economy were "Education. Education. Education", he said more than he meant, and New Labour delivered less than he promised. Long before him the Scottish Reformation Kirk aimed to have a school in every parish, an historic decision Pope Benedict XVI commended in his response to the Queen's welcome. Education remained closely related to the Church in its various expressions in the following centuries, Catholic, Established and Nonconformist, until from the mid 19th Century onwards the state increasingly took responsibility for universal education. The resources needed, and the economic implications of having an educated, skilled and trained population capable of competing in modern industrialised societies, made it increasingly necessary that Government rather than Voluntary Agencies should drive educational provision.

Alongside state provision in Britain, the Catholic Church has had its own established network of faith schools. Education remains a primary goal of Catholic social policy and theology today, and involves massive commitments of resources worldwide. When Benedict spoke on Friday to several thousand young people at St Mary's University College he spoke of those things that make life good and make for human happiness. To be happy is to be a friend of God. To live well there must be good models, those whose lives are worthy of imitation. There is much in Benedict's public discourse, and in his message here in Britain, that reflects the profound thinking of his encyclicals Deus Caritas Est and Caritas in Veritate. To be friends of God is a description of a relationship in which love is the exchange of divine grace and human response. He spoke of God's love, and God's desire for happiness and holiness as essentials of a full humanity, and did so as one who has thought profoundly, and spoke simply.

This is a Pope whose theological emphases decisively shape his public discourse, and he talks with ease and practised confidence about the love of God, but also about those cultural and intellectual trends that undermine and erode the humane goals of education as a humanly formative activity. To talk theologically, and with a heightened social conscience in a showpiece Catholic educational establishment, is to introduce a quite different level of discourse about the meaning, significance, purpose and practice of education. Whatever arguments there may be about the place of faith based schools in a pluralist culture, they provide an important corrective and in a democarcy a required alternative, to secularised education evacuated of religiously formative education.

John Henry Newman's Idea of a University reads today like an impractical, unaffordable, unwanted and idealistic educational utopia. Unless of course you want to challenge the prevailing secular view that education is a process whose primary goal is economic growth and development, student employability and mass produced graduates. But I'm reluctant to concede the inevitable and final necessity for such educational reductionism, or that these are the only or best educational goals. It may indeed be inevitable that state funded education in our universities has to bend to the economic priorities, and available funding of the Government of the day. But there will still be, in my own view, a place for those institutions which exist to serve more humanising ends, including religious instruction, moral formation, humanising values, intellectual humility, and these explored within a faith tradition both itself open to critique and yet critically aware of alternative worldviews.

Benedict has a similarly rich and humane view of the purpose of religious encounter between different faiths. Such meeting he said yesterday, is a necessary expression of human formation, cultural development and social interaction. Co-operation and dialogue engender mutual respect, and enable faith traditions to support each other in seeking freedom of worship. of conscience and of association. Nor should such co-operation and mutual understanding be selfish, but provide a platform from which faith groups can work for peace, mutual understanding and witness to the world. Living alongside each other and learning and growing in respect and knowledge of each other, provides a fertile soil for peace, justice and works of compassion to grow.

Whatever else can be said about this Papal visit, each time Benedict has spoken he has been generous in spirit, rigorous in intellect and both warm and dignified in his responsiveness. And the issues he deals with are of common concern to all humanity - justice and peace, the foundation of moral standards, religious freedom and freedom of conscience, the nature of education, the relations of faith and reason, and of spirituality and secularity. This is a man of courage, conviction and adamantine firmness on dogma; he is also a man of intellectual power, pastoral passion for the global church and ranks as one of the greatest Catholic theologians of the past 50 years. Interesting that the current Pope and the current Archbishop of Canterbury are both regarded as scholar theologians of the first class, at a time when intellectual range and depth are discounted in the markets of contemporary communication culture.

 

Emerging Church, Rabbi Gamaliel and the Theological Curriculum

Just spent the last couple of days meeting with colleagues in Oxford, at Regent's Park College. We were looking at the issues for theological education arising from the flux and diversity of expression in church community that has come to be called emerging church, or fresh expressions, or whatever catch phrase we care to use in the vain attempt to catch in neat definition this phase of the church's life in contemporary Westernised Christian culture.

Stuart Murray Williams is one of the central figures trying to interpret, understand and evaluate what is of permanent value and what of transient interest in the plethora of alternatives on offer for those no longer satisfied with 'inherited church' or 'traditional church' or 'mainstream church'. See - even the non emergent status quo is now accruing nuanced definitions! And given the long list of options from cafe church to to Sci Fi church, Post-Alpha church to Cyber church, from menu church to common purse community, it was an important exercise to try somehow to grasp the significance of whatever is happening, in a culture that values the 'whatever' word.

Not rehearsing it all here, but several really important questions are at least worth posing:

What is necessary for any group to legitimately claim for itself the word church as a valid descriptor of what it is and how it expresses its life? What is the ecclesial minimum for a group to call itself church?

How important is sustainability in any of these new developments in Christian mission and community? If it is a transient phase is that necessarily a sign of failure? And if some of these survive and become self-sustaining is that validation, 'if it is of God it will prosper'?

If a group aim to accommodate a culturally specific group (Goth church for example), how does that relate to the catholicity of the Church? If Christian community is inclusive, how does that square with groups whose nature, aim and identity are so specific and culturally focused that by definition others would find them all but inaccessible?

If these new and imaginative and creative initiatives are part of a search for a more authentic and participatory way of being Christian community engaged with surrounding culture, what are the criteria for such authenticity?

Given that fresh expressions of emerging or emergent church are self-consciously developmental, uncontrolled and organic, what is it that nevertheless enables them to define themselves as Christian? Where are the theological and spiritual parameters, and who sets them?

And the specific question for theological education as formation and preparation for ministry in such a cultural flux - what impact should such developments, and the need to understand them, have on curriculum content, styles of teaching and a theological understanding of ecclesiology and Baptist Identity?

All good questions - much sharp discussion - several tentative conclusions - and most importantly, food for thought and reason for dialogue.

Christian witness - bespeaking hopefulness to a culture mired in its own despair

Hope. To look to the future as open and replete with new possibility. To see our past and our present circumstances without conceding they determine who we will be, and what is now possible.

If there's one disposition, one emotion, one word for which our times are sick with hunger, it's hopefulness.

 Are any of us immune to that darkness and heaviness of soul that occasionally descends as we glimpse our own shallowness, sense the superficial transcience of a life lived too rapidly, and long for something more permanent, durable, worth giving our lives to?

How to bear witness to Jesus who brings freedom in a culture suffering an advanced case of creeping exhaustion through trying to keep the creaking economic machinery going through the cycle of sustainable economic growth, global recession, and economic recovery. Remorselessness engenders hopelessness, and it's no accident that a theology of hope has an umbilical connection to liberation theology.

And alongside the search for meaning and identity through our capacity to participate in a consumer culture, isn't there something existentially significant about the contemporary pursuit of belonging, identity and connectedness through Facebook, Twitter and yes the blog? 

One way or another we each try to locate our own living in the excitement and sameness, the creativity and the mess, the valuable and the trivial, the enduring and the disposable, the worthwhile and the wasteful, the optimism and the despair,  that is the cultural flux of our times.

So I think of some of the great words that bespeak hopefulness. Bespeak - that is speak and make be. Speak into existence. Talk up. Not in the silly sense of make-believe, but in the prophetic sense of re-imagining a world in which hope and not cynicism is the default posture of our forward thinking. For example:

Amos 9.13, at the end of a doom laden sermon or two:

The time is surely coming, says the Lord, when the one who plows shall overtake the one who reaps, and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it.

Isaiah 55.12, as a promise that simply denies to the status quo its claims to permanence and determinism

You shall go out with joy, and be led forth in peace, and the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

Revelation 22.1-2, one of those texts that Hollywood would need CGI's to do justice, a vision of life and movement, of growth and fulfillment, of international healing and peace. 

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the lamb, through the middle of the street of the city. on either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

And the lines from Browning's Paracelsus, Victorian rhetoric and human longing for a future drawn forwardt by the sense that in the murk and darkness we might be a bit like Moses sometimes, and have to draw near to the thick darkness in which god dwells.....

If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,
It is but for a time. I press God's lamp
Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom. I shall emerge one day.

God is love. God is light. But a Christian understanding of God, standing this side of resurrection, manages to look at a tired, scared, fragmented world, buckling under the strain of human activity, and pray, The God of hope fill you with all hope. It is God who bespeaks the future, not us. Thank goodness, and thank God!

Faith then, is  both defiant and imaginative - refusing to concede that how things are is how they must be. Instead faith sends out trajectories of hope towards a future differently imagined. Not because we can simply wish fulfil the future - but because wherever our human future takes us, God is already there, and there as eternally creative love, reconciling our shattered cosmos, and bringing to completion our own brokenness through that same reconciling love.

The Colossian Christ, the image of the invisible God, the one in whom all things hold together, in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell - there is the core of any theology that claims to be Christian and relevant to a culture mired in its own despair, and apparently hell-bent on foreclosing on its own future. To bear witness to a different future, and live towards that future by a life of peace-making and conciliatory love, and to embody these in actions of generous, gentle, costly healing of whatever is hurting around us, - that is to bespeak hopefulness, is to be the Body of Christ, broken for the nourishment of the world.

In Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross.

(The painting is Hope in a Prison of Despair, Evelyn De Morgan, Pre-Raphaelite)

(The space image above can be found here )

Haiku and Holiday in Ireland 5: The Burren, the Faith and the Pub

Amongst my favourite books are those which don't have their edges trimmed. Instead of neat guillotined sides there is a roughly textured layering of paper sheets, not a concession to economy but an aesthetic delight that makes each page unique, and when lying on its side, gives the whole book a soft sense of happenstance, the binding together of different sheets into a finished whole that looks so right that any attempt to machine it into uniform neatness would be unthinkably crude.

Imagine then a large geological volume with sheets made of rock, miles long and wide, lying on its side with the edges facing the sea, grey and green in colour, and formed over millions of years. The layers are clearly differentiated but belong together, the geological pages lie flat one on another and their edges are untrimmed.  And if you can imagine that, then you have some idea of what The Burren is. A massive geological structure and substructure that dominates northern County Clare. We visited it and walked on it, over it, alongside it by the sea. And looking at those places where it layered its way down to the sea was like standing beside a gigantic volume of natural history, created millions of years ago.

The Burren has some of the most diverse fauna in the world. Even the small area of seashore we explored displayed all kinds of small plants, flowers and grasses. 

1.

Laid aeons ago,

Carboniferous limestone,

layered stone pages.

2.

Barren Burren rock,

diversity of flora -

fertile paradox.

We also visited a number of Irish pubs, and as well as the company and conversation, I took time to look at some of the pictures and writings on the pub walls. In several we saw fading photographs or pictures of three very different historical figures. I couldn't help sensing that the fading pictures were slow process reminders of a slow relinquishing, generation by generation, of the Catholic faith, the Christian tradition that has so defined the history, culture and spirituality of Ireland. There were often pictures of Jesus or Mary; sometimes a photo of JFK; and often images of John Paul II (and the present Benedict XVI) - but I was interested in the reluctance to remove the pictures of the Pope of the people. A long conversation with two Irish friends, over a wonderful meal and an afternoon of meandering, themselves no longer regularly practising their faith, but a tangible sense of loss, and anxiety that their grown up children, and their grandchildren would be very different people living in a historically changed Ireland, leached of the dynamic cultural colour that comes from shared religious belief.

Whatever theory of secularisation we buy into, and however we interpret the decline of Christian faith and belonging in Western Europe, there is something profoundly unsettling in living through a transition away from those values and convictions that have, like the Burren, been laid down over generations till they all but defined the human landscape. And the Church of Jesus Christ, in its varied traditions and expressions, is called now to exist in a place where familiar landscapes, known topography, cultural comfort zones and previous privilege are being swept away with the same ruthless thoroughness as those last glacial ice flows that stripped vegetation and topsoil from 1200 square kilometers of NW County Clare, leaving a more barren surface - but one where smallness, diversity and beauty could still flourish.

And maybe that is as good a metaphor as I can think of for the reinvention of the Christian community - flowers in rocky places, beauty surviving an ice-age environment, Christ-embodying community flourishing in a globalised world where human value, and humane values might otherwise perish in an inhospitable climate.

Worship as our amazed yes to the love of God.

Two books being read in tandem provide important comment on worship as foundational to Christian existence, Christian practice and Christian experience. I deliberately put experience last - avoiding the too easy assumption that it is our personal experience that matters. Christian existence is not individual; Christian practice is not personal choice; and Christian experience cannot remain private however specific it is to our own personal circumstances. So N T Wright has an important comment in his book, Virtue Reborn:

"The life of worship is itself a corporate form of virtue. It expresses and in turn reinforces the faith, hope and love which are themselves the key Christian virtues. from this activity there flow all kinds of other things in terms of Christian life and witness. But worship is central, basic, and in the best sense habit-forming. Every serious Christian should work at having worship become second nature."

Worship is a "whole person vocation", according to Wright. And the essential lived relationship between worship, mission and the communal embodiment of the love of God is the core reality of Christian existence and God's good news for the world. And as often in recent years, I am left uneasy at the focus given to mission as the church's primary calling. The spring and source of the church's life, and its first calling, is glad, grateful, self-surrendering worship, expressed in a Christ-like obedience to the out-reaching and in-grasping love of God, an unembarrassed embracing of God's call on the church to be the Body of Christ, to embody the love of God, and to respond with an amazed yes. That amazed yes, that self surrender, that unembarrassed embrace of God's call, is the essential response of worship. And it is the energy source of mission.

Which is why there are probably important questions to be asked about contemporary worship styles, about the assumptions that drive our practices when we meet together, about the importance of customer satisfaction as a criterion for what we do, about the words we choose to sing, and yes, tedious as it may sound, about the theology that shapes all the above. Theology - our way of thinking about God - is betrayed in the how and the therefore of worship. If worship of God in Christ by the power of the Spirit is the energy source of mission, then I am left asking, how often have I been compelled to utter that amazed yes, how powerfully and persistently am I drawn to that act of glad self-surrender, how clearly and persuasively have I been called to that unembarrassed embrace of God's call to be as Christ to the world? Because if the God being worshiped is the God of all grace and love, the God revealed in Jesus, the God active in the church and the world through the Holy Spirit, then worship must surely be more than what we often take it to be. They are important criteria - arbitrary you might think - but as New Testament as they come. Amazed yes. Glad self-surrender. unembarrassed embrace.

Enjoying the diversity of difference and resisting the absurdity of division

Following the previous post on Baptist identity and my preferred disposition of persuasive humility, Chris asked a fundamental question with which I have great sympathy. From what I know of Chris (only from her blog, we haven't met yet, though I hope we can do that one of these days), she is an ecumenical enthusiast, and impatient of the barriers that seem to get in the way of Christian unity and a mutual recognition of each other as fellow travelers on the road with Christ. She always writes (here) with a generosity of mind to others, but also with sharp and critical awareness - so as a retired teacher herself, she knows when someone is writing, thinking or speaking tosh!

So when Chris asks her question she does so as one whose complaint I share. There are too many artificial barriers; more than enough personally invested agendas; a surplus of piously defended principles that have little purchase in the contemporary world; too many long memories of bitter divisions, and toxic after-lives of forgotten disputes; too much proud defensiveness about one's own precious if growingly obsolete traditions. And so on. And just to say, my reply presupposes my complete agreement about the unacceptable face of anti-ecumenism.

Here is the comment and question Chris offers, followed by my reply:

Chris:   When I read this, and the post that precedes it, and in fact great chunks of your blog, it keeps hitting me that it's absurd that you call yourself a Baptist and I call myself an Episcopalian. There is far too much we share - and I'm going beyond the basic tenets of faith here - for us to be described as different. "Our sad divisions" are just that - and in this time they are also absurd. Aren't they?

Jim:   Hello again Chris. I'd like to respond to your questions more fully in a post but I'll at least hint at what a response might be. Ecumenical is for me a good word, a generous word, a hospitable word. Diversity likewise reflects something of the fecundity and variegation of created life, human culture and faith expression. Neither term necessitates that difference become sad division. But both safeguard the freedom, identity and integrity of the many Christian traditions that make up the Church, the Body of Christ. Baptist, Episcopalian, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian and a wheen more are for me the names by which we recognise each other, not slogans by which we disenfranchise, diminish or oppose each other. My being a Baptist can never justify me breaking fellowship with other Christians - indeed as you suggest, it says as much about what is shared between us. But it does allow for my own faith story to be heard, coming as it does within a different tradition; and it requires of me to hear your faith story, and value and learn from it. Absurd - division is always absurd in a faith based on the Gospel of reconciliation. But diversity is not absurd, it is the context within which conciliation, peacemaking, fellowship and mutual recognition are worked out. Or so it seems to this Baptist, seeking to witness with persuasive humility to another valid way of being the Church.

Chris: I'll be fascinated in a further exploration of this - though if this is a hint it's a generous one! I knew when I posted the comment that I wouldn't want to lose the lovely things that I associate with my church - which were vital components of my conversion, actually - and of course if you call it "diversity" you cast our differences in a much more benign light. Maybe I'm affected by the book I'm reading about the dissolution of the monasteries - such cruelty in the name of religion! I'll await further developments ...

When Chris says there is far too much we share for us to be described as different, my whole self, (mind, heart and affections), affirms the truth of what she says. A thoughtful, outspoken, Episcopalian, hillwalking chorister peacemaker, who has spent a lifetime teaching, and a thoughtful, outspoken, Baptist preacher, teacher, academic and tapestry worker, for all the other differences, do indeed have a deep and durable affinity. And it's this. To be in Christ, to be incorporated into the Body of Christ which is the Church, in all its variegated glory, Baptist and Episcopalian and all the rest of them / us! That is the fundamental truth that renders other differences relative, but not irrelevant. I think it does matter that we remain true to those stories and traditions that have shaped us. But part of that being true to our own tradition is, I passionately believe, to value difference not as division but as diversity, not as threat but as opportunity, not as opposition but as co-operation, and not as obstacle but as tepping stone to deeper, richer understanding of a Gospel far too gloriously complex and far too redolent of new possibility, for any one tradition to constrain let alone contain it.

All that said. I still lean heavily towards Chris's sense that difference made excuse for division is sad, and absurd, in a church for which Christ himself prayed, that we may be one even as Christ and the father and Spirit are one.

And Chris's second comment about cruelty and brutality in the name of religion is a reminder to ecumenically generous people that the forces let loose by religion, politics and power, are never neutral, and often malign. In that sense the irony of a divided Christianity is itself an impetus to a recovery of a lived Gospel of reconciliation, peace-making, just relations and forgiveness. I am so tired of offensive behaviour, sullen doctrinal judgmentalism, partisan Christianity, rationalised dislike or worse of those who differ in their experience of God in Christ. And yes, when such over-againstness is given the twin engines of religion and political interest, as in Tudor England, then the Gospel of peace becomes an instrument of power, and the Prince of Peace is betrayed for the one Machiavelli called The Prince.

Because whatever else I stand for as a Baptist, I stand in the tradition of the persecuted, not the persecutor, and a tradition that rejects the coalition of church and state, and of political will with the mission of the Church of Jesus Christ. So I'm no ecumenical idealist unaware of the realities of division, divisiveness and a divided church; but I am one who believes Jesus' prayer was not a waste of words or time - "that they may be one." And where there is celebrated diversity, and humbly persuasive wearing of the amazing technicolour dream-coat of the Church (I know, exegetical daftness but it's just a bit of fun!), then at least we can argue we are trying to walk together after Christ, and glad of the company of each other.

Chris, we must meet for that coffee.

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On another note: A brief report of the recent Baptist Union Council, along with downloads of two of the papers, can be found at the Scottish Baptist College Blog here

Bonhoeffer and the self evident truth about Christian community

"Christian community is not an ideal we have to realise, but rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate."

D Bonhoeffer, Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible, Works vol. 5, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 38

 

Logo of United Methodist Church which you can find here.

Pastoral theology as honouring care-givers

Renita Weems again - this time on a society that has its values upside down.

"We are bereft because we lack traditions that elevate caring for children, the aged, and the informed to meaningful venues for encountering spiritual wisdom. Our society views caring as an impediment that squanders our potential and ties us down. It demeans mothering, underpays day-care workers and teachers, and penalises adults who take time off to care for aging parents....A society that spurns the work of caregiving cuts itself off from learning about life itself. Relegating all the caregiving that faces us to spouses, nannies, housekeepers, maids, live-in nurses and paid personnel threatens to make us overestimate our strengths and can blind us to our own vulnerabilities. We miss the work that can help to civilise us."

Question: What would change in the way the Church functions, and in the way the world sees the Church if, as the Body of Christ, it gave priority to caregiving in a reversal of the priorities of our culture?

"The greatest of these is love" - On not looking too hard for the Church's raison d'etre

Below is the Prayer of Intercession I composed and offered within the worship service at which I was also preaching yesterday. I don't often post prayers of my own. This one touches deep places in the way I look at the world, the church and the people who move in and out of our lives. If using some or all of it lifts your heart and hands to God so much better. It is written around the seldom noted superlative at the end of I Corinthians 13, "Faith, hope and love remain, but the greatest of these is love". For all our talk of mission and missional - there is a job description for the Church that isn't hard to understand - just hard to live in, live up to, live towards. 

Eternal God and Father,

Whose infinite yet intimate love

shared from all eternity between Father, Son and Spirit,

is the same love you have poured into our hearts by that same Holy Spirit.

 

 We pray for all those people in our lives,

Who have been touched and transformed by love,

faithful, unselfish, generous, joyful, love.

Lifelong friends and good neighbours

wives and husbands, parents and children,

sisters and brothers, best friends and new friends

overcoming differences in language, race, gender, religion.

O God, in that rich life of love as Father, Son and Spirit,

We see love’s inexhaustible possibilities:

 

So we pray for those whose lives are broken for lack of love:

Children whose safety and health come second to adult demands;

Friendships ended by exploitation and backstabbing;

Marriages shredded by unfaithfulness and broken promises;

Families fractured by social pressures, whether poverty or affluence;

Neighbourhoods where love is weakness and compassion despised

Businesses whose bottom line isn’t the welfare of the work-force;

 

We pray for Churches, and for our church

which you have called to be the Body of Christ,

to embody and to model the love of God in Christ,

which is gift of the Spirit and the sign of your Presence

May our love for others, like your eternal love,

Be generously given, lovingly available,

patiently faithful, willingly sacrificial

persistently hopeful, and self-evidently joyful.

 

We pray for those we’ve only heard of on television,

Those whose lives disintegrate under pressures of hate and violence,

Whose lives are in different ways, damaged, diminished, defeated,

by the absence of love, a vacuum filled by the power of hate.

Two boys whose home was so toxic they tortured other children

The 19 year old whose reckless driving killed his friend

The mother who made her own son ill, to gain media attention

The teacher injured trying to separate fighting pupils

The baby abducted in Ireland, and returned on the Cathedral steps

The Sikh neighbour stabbed to death defending a young woman from a mugger

These and so many more, human lives caught in the crossfire of love and hate,

we hold them before your healing mercy:

 

God of love and hope,

we pray for our society, our city, our neighbourhoods,

and for ourselves as your ambassadors of love

Make us ministers of reconciliation with a passion for peacemaking

Fill us with compassion for the poor, the hungry, the lonely

Like Jesus gives us eyes to see Zacchaeus hiding in shame;

courage to ask the name of violent terrified Legion;

to stand between the vulnerable victim and those holding the stones;

to touch with tender risk those who like the leper are feared and excluded;

to see the best in the Samaritan and go do likewise –

to open our arms in welcome like the prodigal father

to take our loaves and fishes and bless them to the use of others,

and so to be perfect, as our Heavenly Father is perfect;

whose sunlight love gives life to all within its radiance,

whose rain of mercy falls with life giving refreshment,

who reaches out with a love that warms and waters,

embraces, holds and heals a broken world,

and all this, in Jesus' name and in the power of the Spirit,

Amen.

Theological education and a durable pastoral theology of mission

One of the challenges of theological education as formation for ministry is to help students make the connections. The connections between what is so about God and what is so about our lives; the connections between God revealed in the incarnate Christ and experienced in the power of the Spirit, and what it means to be a human being; the connections between human community, its possibilities and failures, its frustrations, agonies and cost as well as its fulfillments, joys and gifts, and the life of God as the God who is for us, and whose nature is loving outreach; the connections between theological conviction and pastoral practice, and the connections between a richly dynamic Christian theology of the reconciling, restoring, renewing love of God in Christ through the Spirit, and Christian existence as embodying that reconciling, restoring and renewing love in a community of faith and hope.

Theological education can never afford to be merely pragmatic, practice centred, informed primarily by pastoral need or missional urgency. Theological education and a durable pastoral theology of mission requires a deeper rootedness, a more transcendent vision, a more dynamic source of energy, insight and spiritual aspiration. And that is to be found in an adequate understanding of who God is, and that the God who is with us and for us in Christ, and who is in us and in the world through the Spirit, is a God who comes to us, who "exists from all eternity in relation to another".

I'm now immersed in preparation for the class on the theology of the Triune God. As part of that preparation I'll now be reading several of my favourite theologians,  swimming again in some of my favourite deep water places. From now till Pentecost I'll post a weekly reflection on the essential connections between our understanding of the Triune God and the nature and practices of pastoral care and the mission of the Christian community to incarnate the reality of the God who, in the power of the Spirit, was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

Here's Catherine Lacugna, stating her understanding of the Triune God:

The ultimate ground and meaning of being is therefore communion among persons: God is ecstatic, fecund, self-emptying out of love for another, a personal God who comes to self through another.

Indeed the Christian theologian contemplates the life of God revealed in the economy, in the incarnateness of God in Christ and in the power and presence of God as Spirit. Revealed there is the unfathomable mystery that the life and communion of the divine persons is not intra divine: God is not self-contained, egotistical and self-absorbed but overflowing love, outreaching desire for union with all that God has made. The communion of divine life is God's communion with us in Christ and as Spirit.

Catherine Lacugna, God For Us. The Trinity and Christian Life (San francisco: Harper Collins, 1991) page 15. 

Decided to display the Rublev Icon on the sidebar for a while. In my own spiritual life this has been a source of inspiration, comfort, insight, imaginative reverie, prayerful and playful contemplation, soul-steadying beauty and suggestiveness, for over two decades. Taking time to wait and pay attention to it, is like an act, better, a process, of re-orientation, of regained perspective, of enhanced awareness of that which always lies beyond our understanding, but closer to our hearts than we can ever know.