Living Wittily

Choosing Scotland's Future?

Today I'm at a theological colloquium on Scotland's Future. A wide range of people interested in theological reflection on issues raised by nationalism, devolution, independence and indeed the theological significance of those political processes which underlie forms of government, and such concepts as self-determination, freedom and national and cultural identity. The National Conversation and The Calman Report, and a response from a working group from ACTS (the Scottish ecumenical body), have created opportunity and context for such theological reflection.

No idea how it will go, what will come out of it. But Christians should have some informed and responsible sense of how political processes of change impinge on the wider community life - and should have a view of what that will mean for Christians looking to follow faithfully after Christ in a less than straightforward world.

Might report on it eventually - but not over the next couple of days - Advent itself has rather much to say about power, politics, identity and our human future. Would be interesting if today's colloquium kicked off with a robust reading of the Magnificat, eh?

Archbishop Robert Leighton (1611-1684) - a God-sent eirenicon for a violent age

One of the most attractive figures in the history of the Scottish Church was Archbishop Robert Leighton. In an age of theological extremes, inter-communal violence and intransigent "Christian" hostilities, he was a man of peace, a conciliatory spirit, to his opponents a man of compromise, to his admirers a God-sent eirenicon. The life and work of Leighton, and in particular the contrasting pieties of such as Leighton and Rutherford, the eirenic spirit of the former and the passion for Gospel purity of the latter, suggest fundamental differences in faith that were ultimately irreconcilable. Both men embodied in such a collision of contrasts, something of the tragedy of recalcitrant religion, when personal spiritual experience and its doctrinal confession are of such intensity that they can neither be questioned by others nor left unspoken, whatever the cost. Even if that cost is bloody conflict.

In the history of Scottish Christian piety, doctrinal collisions, spiritual suspicion, political conflict, ecclesiatical self-interest, are all the stuff of tradition formation - like tectonic plates grating against each other, now and then colliding and recoiling, only coming to an accommodation when the contrary energies are absorbed by impact, so theological traditions are shaped. And people like Leighton are far too often overlooked when the time comes to identify 'the movers and the shakers', and 'the significant players', the ones later history writers place centre stage.

Leighton, and his student Henry Scougal, are two men of moderate spirit, whose spirituality of peaceableness remains one of the glories of the Scottish Episcopal tradition. Here is Leighton, relegating historical research to its proper place:

But when all is said and done there is one only blessed story, wherein our souls must dwell and take up their rest: for amongst all the rest we shall not read...come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest: and never any yet that tried Him, but found him as good as his word.

The Works of Robert Leighton, with life by J. Aikman (1860), xvi.

Scotland has produced many important biblical commentaries over the centuries, and some of those now called 'pre-critical', remain as important historical and theological depositories illustrating how texts were received, interpreted and brought to bear on life. Amongst the most celebrated was Leighton's 1 Peter, almost continually in print for over three centuries. As devotional commentaries go, and as an example of Puritan exposition, it remains a milestone of practical divinity spelt out in exhaustive detail by one whose gentleness of spirit made all his writing pastoral before polemical.

Scottish Spirituality: Horatius Bonar, Victorian hymns and contemporary praise songs

The fierce Scottish presbyterian minister in the photo is Horatius Bonar (1808-1889). The Bonars were like a Presbyterian theological dynasty in Victorian Scotland. Horatius studied under Thomas Chalmers, Andrew edited Rutherford's Letters and the life of Robert Murray McCheyne, and other members of the Bonar family served the Kirk and then the Free Kirk as distinguished ministers.

Horatius Bonar was a popular devotional writer and one of Scotland's most prolific hymn writers. Some of his hymns are too sentimental, allowing emotion to dominate responses and eclipse the place of thoughtful doxology, weakening any literary impact as verse, and diluting that theological force which at its best in a good hymn both educates and inspires. Others were occasional and read now like what they are - poems so historically and contextually specific to their age that a later age lacks the right interpetive keys and needs to go looking for them. Others are long, theologically ponderous and even at times tedious in the writer's anxiety to spell out spiritual truth with serious devotional intent. But when Bonar's hymns are good, they are amongst the best. I reckon I've read most of the 600 or so he wrote, some of them only once! But some of them repeatedly, and several of them I think are so important they couldn't be displaced from the singing tradition of the Church in Scotland without serious deficit.

I say in Scotland, for Bonar's hymns reflect the deep piety of Reformed Calvinism of a very Scottish flavour, fired by theologically principled ecclesial disruption, shaped into verse which is unembarrassed in its use of Scottish idiom, and focused on Christ the Redeemer King who alone is Head of the Church and whose rights are supreme above all other claimants. His best hymns percolated into the hymnbooks of other denominations, though I suspect they are slowly but surely disappearing from use, even in Scotland. That's a pity. A Christian spiritual tradition at its healthiest has an enduring respect for those figures of the past, both great and unknown, whose piety and lived faith gives biographical shape to the faith. Yes the reformed church is always being reformed, and therefore changing and welcoming change, but with the qualification that Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever. And yes, those convictions about the sufficiency of Christ and the claims of His Gospel, forged for Bonar in the heat of Victorian scientific optimism colliding with pious triumphalism, have ongoing life-giving significance for the church today and always. But only when they are translated into convictional practices valid for a church seeking to be faithful to Christ, now, in a postmodern, post-Christendom, pluralist society where consumer capitalism, not Christian conviction, is the primary social and spiritual driver. Christ, who is not time-bound, dares us to follow Him, learning from the past and from the communion of saints, demands that together we discern His mind for us now, and trusting the One in whom all things hold together, invites us to accompany Him into that future which is the coming of God. Yesterday, today, forever - Jesus Christ the same - but those who follow Him do so in the changing contingencies, challenging contexts, and moral perplexities, of our own and the world's history.  

So yes, as disciples of Jesus we need now more than ever, hymns and other sung resources for contemporary worship, which reflect our contemporary malaise and our contemporary hopes, our contemporary anxieties and our contemporary search for peace, and which put into words and thought a faith resonant with the huge cultural shifts we are living through. But the word contemporary is a risky word, a word habitually dismissive of past insights, and easily overused as in the last sentence. But it is an important word, a reminder of how time bound we all are, and that our life together, our being time bound together, in this unstable and "fluxing" society, provides the context where we are now, in our own time, to hear Christ's call to follow faithfully after him. (Footnote: I owe the effectively descriptive word "fluxing" to Stuart.)

In worship I want hymns / praise songs / worship songs to encourage, envisage, enable such faithful following. Hymns that help me bear with the hard questions, because they are soaked with Gospel; hymns that know how to tell the triumph of the cross without the pretences of a discordant triumphalism; hymns that gather up Gospel grace and unsearchable riches of love, and help me behold the beauty and glory of that Triune community of love Who embraces the universe with mercy that is eternal in its faithfulness. I long for worship songs that don't forever encourage me to tell God what I feel about God, but enable me to respond from my deepest being to John 3.16 and Romans 8.38-39, which amongst other things are telling what God in Christ feels about all human beings, and why that mighty love is to be trusted. And if we must insist on "praise songs" as an alternative to "hymns", then let's also have "response songs"; songs that through the beauty of language and image, express certainties but don't forbid hesitations, celebrate beauty wherever it is found and lament and resist ugliness, and with equal passion let me sing songs that don't leave me hymning my own emotions, but invite me to share in the communal act of saying thank you to the great Giver of Gifts who is himself the Gift.

All of which, by a long and circuitous route, brings me back to Horatius Bonar. Whatever else the church today is called to be and do, it remains a baptised community centred on Christ and gathered round the table of communion, in company with God and with each other. And one of the hymns that best expresses the individual Christian's response to that gathering around the Lord's Supper is Bonar's "Here O my Lord, I see Thee face to face". Like much else in his writing, Bonar isn't so strong on the communal or the catholic (in the sense of universal). But in this hymn Bonar describes, and through the description invites, face to face encounter between the believer and Jesus, through actions perfomed together, of bread broken, wine poured out. The hymn is nearly always edited and the verses rearranged - acts of sympathetic improvement because in its original form it is disjointed. I've copied the original below - for myself, it has long been one of the prayers I have open at communion - if there's a hymn-book! That has it in it!!

The photo (above) of "The Hymns of Faith and Hope" is of the copy of Bonar's hymns I picked up in a wee secondhand shop a week or two ago, for the price of a fish supper! It's a bit worn, but dated 1876, when they knew how to make a book that would last, and would be worth keeping more than a century later.

Here, O my Lord, I see thee face to face;
here would I touch and handle things unseen;
here grasp with firmer hand eternal grace,
and all my weariness upon thee lean.

This is the hour of banquet and of song;
this is the heavenly table spread for me;
here let me feast, and feasting, still prolong
the hallowed hour of fellowship with thee.

Here would I feed upon the Bread of God,
here drink with thee the royal Wine of heaven;
here would I lay aside each earthly load,
here taste afresh the calm of sin forgiven.

I have no help but thine; nor do I need
another arm save thine to lean upon;
it is enough, my Lord, enough indeed;
my strength is in thy might, thy might alone.

Mine is the sin, but thine the righteousness:
mine is the guilt, but thine the cleansing blood
here is my robe, my refuge, and my peace;
thy Blood, thy righteousness, O Lord my God!

Feast after feast thus comes and passes by;
yet, passing, points to the glad feast above,
giving sweet foretaste of the festal joy,
the Lamb's great bridal feast of bliss and love.

Posted By Jim Gordon

Thanksgiving Conference for Thomas Torrance

Yesterday I spent the day in two places - the M8 and New College, Edinburgh. I was four and a half hours on the M8 and 7 hours in New College attending the Thomas F Torrance Thanksgiving Conference. And the 7 hours in new College made the 270+ minutes on the M8 well worth it. But just to make sure blog visitors appreciate the rhetorical force of the comparison, the M8 without roadworks is like a slow release anxiety enhancer. The M8 with roadworks you have a choice - be miserable, be very miserable, or make sure you have good conversation partners in the car and a stack of your favourite CD's. Yesterday I had both.

On the way there in Andrew's car, the state of the central artery road system provided Graeme and I with an endless supply of discouraging and demoralising comment. Andrew's sanctification levels have thereby been considerably augmented. 

On the way home, driving my own car which has been having a holiday with Aileen, I discovered some of her CD's including a supply of Johnny Cash. The mixture of snarling defiance and sentimental regret, sung by one of the greatest Country performers of my generation kept my own levels of sanctification at least this side of going subterranean!

And it was worth it for the following reasons
I met Jason Goroncy, my virtual and blogging friend and now I can call him a real friend whose face I recognise, whose voice and accent I recognise, and who unfortunately is leaving Scotland for New Zealand three weeks after actually meeting me.. though I'm assured the move has been planned for some time.

At the conference I met and spoke with several others including a Church of Scotland minister from Cyprus who is a friend of Steve Chalke, which led to interesting discussion about Torrance on Atonement; a retired minister who experienced Torrance's lectures halfway through his degree (1949-52), and whose preaching had been sustained by fires ignited over two brief years of Torrance dogmatics; Robin, a key player in Paternoster publications and someone whose theological awareness of 'what's going on' and 'what works' is both impressive and generously shared; Stuart the Edinburgh post-grad (not my Word from the Barricades friend and colleague), with whom I shared coffee, brief discussion of high falutin theology and memories of standing together at Hampden on that Saturday when Queen of the South gubeed Aberdeen 4-3; several other friends I already knew but had a chance to talk to while juggling a plate of chicken tikka sandwiches, a cup of coffee and a mini choc muffin!

Registered members were given a complementary copy of Torrances new book on the Incarnation, beautifully produced by Paternoster / IVP, and already slotted in to be my main reading during Advent in a month's time - on which I'll blog. This, and a second volume on Atonement to be issued next year, contains much of Torrance's lectures on dogmatics, revised and rewritten over the years and now issued to a wider audience, edited by Bob Walker who is uniquely qualified to do this sympathetically, thoroughly and as one who knows the peculiar excellencies of Torrance's mature theology.

Then there were the papers, all of them good, a couple of them outstanding, and at least one contribution from a recently retired minister that was deeply moving and reminded me how it could be that any of us ever thought we might just be able, by the grace of God, to preach such a Gospel, serve Christ in his Church, and express in pastoral care the self-giving love of the Triune God, incarnate in Christ crucified and risen, and actively redemptive throughout Creation, in the power of the Spirit. 

The epilogue to such a full day was a Pizza and Wispa night watching the fitba with my son Andrew, home from Uni and reminding me of the importance of self-indulgence. As if.....

"here's tae us, wha's like us" - Is there a Scottish spirituality?

 
An area of increasing interest for me is the way a spiritual tradition grows out of its native soil, and takes on the characteristics of its environment. The question of what is distinctive, even unique, in a spiritual tradition depends on the particularities of context - historical, political, cultural, religious - perhaps even geographical.

The term "Scottish piety" (not sure about the continuing usefulness of the ubiquitous descriptor "spirituality") needs some clarifying.
Is there a uniquely Scottish stream of Christian faith as it has been experienced, thought and lived? If so what gives Scottish piety its distinctive flavour?
What in the Scottish context, over centuries, shaped and gave specific Scottish content to Christianity in Scotland, as through processes of revolution and evolution, it developed and changed?

And what is meant by piety? In Scotland, amongst other things the impact of religious experience, doctrinal developments and doctrinal fixity, the role of the Kirk in discipline, worship, liturgy and community and people's experience of all of these. But also the relation of people to Bible, prayer, preaching and the hard to measure extent that such piety and faith exerted on and influenced daily life.

All of this - but even then, "Scottish piety" remains unsatisfactory as a catch-all. For Scotland itself has a religious history and representation as varied as its own georgraphical landscape - Prebyterian and Catholic, Episcopal and Dissenting, Highland and Lowland, West and East - and in all this variety a gift of fractiousness that made fragmentation inevitable, bringing both blessing and loss.

The research part of my current sabbatical is focusing on how to explore all this in a way that will help Scottish Christians to 'look to the rock from which we are hewn". Such an exercise involves a long ponder about what in our tradition, our way of following Christ, is of lasting significance and value, what can be appropriated and what now needs to be relinquished, in order to clarify what faithful following of Christ means in contemporary Scotland. If context is decisive in how a tradition is formed, it is also decisive in how that tradition changes, adapts and stays healthy. Quite straightforward really - not!

A subsidiary interest is the way Scottish Baptist communities have emerged, developed, declined and yet continue to feature within the Scottish ecclesial landscape. Again, the focus of my personal interest is the way Scottish Baptists have experienced, thought and lived out their way of following Christ. The suggestion there is such a disctinctive thing as "Scottish Baptist piety" might be even more contentious. And for that very reason even more interesting, as a route to self-understanding and renewal for communities sharing in the experience of decline, and badly needing to recover confidence in a Gospel which never promised us a rose garden - or an assured place at any table, political or religious, other than the one where bread is broken and broken hearts are healed.

Anyway, that's what I'm about these days.

Thomas Erskine and Rabbi Duncan; different, but the same

God is the only real centre, and separation from Him the only real schism.
Thomas Erskine

I desire to know more and more the importance of learning Christ, rather than Christianity; the living, loving, almighty Lord of our spirits, rather than the logic about him.
Thomas Erskine

We make far too little of the Incarnation; the Fathers knew much more of the incarnate God. Some of them were oftener at Bethlehem than at Calvary; they had too little of Calvary, but they knew Bethlehem well. They took up the Holy Babe in their arms; they loved Immanuel, God with us. We are not too often at the cross, but we are too seldom at the cradle; and we know too little of the Word made flesh, of the Holy Child Jesus.
Rev John Duncan (Rabbi Duncan)

Two 19th Century Scottish Christians who couldn't be more different in theological style and substance - except their Christ-centredness which tends to make all the other differences sound a wee bit relative. Erskine was an adventurous and speculative theologian who pushed at the frontiers of the orthodoxy of his day arguing for a universal gospel. Duncan, one of the most gifted linguists and biblical scholars of the Free Kirk, a man of granite loyalty to the Calvinism of the Westminster Confession. And both, part of our Scottish Christian heritage, at times tense and suspicious of diversity and thrawn and independent in spirit. But the passionate loyalty to Christ is unmistakable.

Samuel Rutherford and devotional rapture

Came across this remarkable extract of Samuel Rutherford in full flow about the loveliness of Christ. In his book on Trinitarian Spirituality and John Owen Brian Kay points out that 'the loveliness of Christ' is a Puritan cliche - and certainly Rutherford reckoned exaggeration was impossible in eulogising the 'Altogether Lovely One':

I dare say that angels' pens, angel's tongues, nay, as many worlds of angels as there are drops of water in all the seas and fountains, and rivers of the earth cannot paint Him out to you. I think His sweetness has swelled upon me to the greatness of two heavens. O for a soul as wide as the utmost circle of the highest heaven to contain His love! And yet I could hold but little of it. O what a sight, to be up in heaven, in that fair orchard of the New Paradise, and to see, and smell, and touch, and kiss that fair field-flower, that evergreen tree of life! His bare shadow would be enough for me; a sight of Him would be the guarantee of heaven to me."If there were ten thousand thousand millions of worlds, and as many heavens, full of men and angels, Christ would not be pinched to supply all our wants, and to fill us all. Christ is a well of life; but who knows how deep it is to the bottom? Put the beauty of ten thousand thousand worlds of paradises, like the Garden of Eden, in one; put all trees, all flowers, all smells, all colours, all tastes, all joys, all loveliness, all sweetness in one. O what a fair and excellent thing would that be? And yet it would be less to that fair and dearest well-beloved Christ than one drop of rain to the whole seas, rivers, lakes, and fountains of ten thousand earths.

Just now and then it's good to be ambushed by unadulterated spiritual fervour, to encounter an ardent soul in full rapturous flow. The contrast between such spiritually triggered rhetoric and our own contemporary uncertainty about religious affections and emotional experience can be a telling critique of modern forms of Christian spirituality, focused more on personal fulfilment than that praise of Christ that takes us out of ourselves. Rutherford was a man of extremes - ferociously polemical and pastorally intense; a man of contrasts in an age of conflict, whose inner tensions of spiritual theology and political vision remained unreconciled. It is from such flawed human  personality that some of the best Christian writing has been distilled - Rutherford, Richard Rolle, Bernard of Clairvaux, Augustine, Jonathan Edwards, Kierkegaard.

Honey from the lion's belly.......?

Honey is one of my favourite foods. There are those who are connoiseurs, who distinguish flavours, regions, species of bee, thickness and texture. And though i wouldn't call myself a connoiseur quite, I do know what I like. And I like honey - most kinds. I haven't tasted one yet that I don't like. I've never left a jar unfinished. Whether it's the runny honey that can make eating toast a form of extreme risk sport if you wear a shirt and tie, or the solid light brown stuff that bends the knife as you hack it out and spread it on the scone, or the honey on the comb which gives you hoeny in the raw, with some of the wax, I love them all. Greek Mountain honey that has a tang of liquorice; acacia honey that requires pouring over hot pancakes; Australian eucalyptus which unmistakably conjures images of koala bears; and Scottish Heather honey, none of your blended cheap stuff, the real rich natural coloured honey that was (I'm sure) in the mind of the biblical writers who dreamed of a land flowing with it, and called it the promised land.

Obviously I love sweetness. Syrup and honey - yes and condensed milk, maple syrup, Scottish tablet.  I don't just have a sweet tooth, I have a mouth full of them. Maybe because I grew up in a home where my mother baked often, and there was always a Tate and Lyle syrup tin in the house. Those who remember the green and gold tin with the black print, and the small oval panel with a picture of a dead lion, and underneath the biblical riddle, 'Out of the strong came forth sweetness', will now share in a moment's nostalgia.

The connection between syrup and honey, between Greenock (the town where sugar was a major product in Scotland's recent industrial story) and Timnah (the village where Samson killed a lion and later found bees making a hive in the carcass), is the relation of sweetness to power. The riddle Samson told was a taunt to the Philistines; the sugar industry in this country was founded on slavery across the Atlantic. Makes it interesting that in ancient times when refined honey was greatly valued, it could be used as a form of diplomatic gift. The connections between honey and politics, between the sweetness of power and the bitterness of oppression, isn't as fanciful as it first sounds.

Makes it interesting that Doug Gay entitles the lecture he will give in Paisley "Honey from the Lion's Belly.' The biblical allusion is impossible to ignore - but what does it mean? Come along and spend the evening with Doug, and take time to explore together the implications of nationalism as a feature of contemporary Scottish life that could do with some serious theological reflection. Honey from the lion's belly is an allusion that could point discussion in several directions. The reason we've invited Doug to come is to enable us to think carefully and responsibly, about nationalism and national identity, about cultural distinctives and theological perspectives, and to do this from a Christian standpoint. Doug is a practical theologian, and that means he is committed to connecting theology with our lived experience, in our nation and communities. If you are interested and free, it'll be a good night, and an important discussion. Details are on the Scottish Baptist College blog - click on the name on my sidebar of blogs I regularly visit!

Rev Professor David F Wright, 1937-2008

Jason picked up from the New College website the sad news that the Rev Professor David F Wright has died. In leaving a comment on Jason's blog, I found myself writing an appreciation of this good, wise and humbly faithful man, whose intellectual gifts were consecrated to the service of Christ and His church. I simply repeat here what I wrote there.

David Wright was one of Scottish Evangelicalism's leading lights. Professor Wright was a remarkably gifted church historian and theologian, whose expertise in Patristics as in Reformation studies was encyclopedic in scope and profound in the depth of his thought. Few scholars successfully become a recognised authority in two major periods of Church History - but David did this while also ranging throughout the wider disciplines of Christian scholarship with a most enviable facility.

But as with a number of his generation it was his scholarly humility, his generous encouragement of others, his lifelong commitment to theological education as itself both spiritual discipline and intellectual vocation, his genuine enthusiasm for learning, that made him such a respected and loved teacher. He was one of a cluster of luminaries which included the late Tom Torrance, Alec Cheyne, John McIntyre - each of them scholar pastors whose learning was devoted to the service of Christ.

Like Jason, I value the Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology - there isn't a book like it, and it is only one of the legacies David leaves. British Evangelicalism in general, and the Scottish church in particular, have lost the presence and gifts of a Christian thinker steeped in the traditions of our faith, a man of measured, generous judgement, and an example to those of us who aspire to be scholars in the school of Christ.

May the peace of Christ enfold him, and Anne-Marie and his family, while we in mourning his loss, give thanks for his life - and the way that life enriched ours.

"...the hospitable hearted, spiritually exercised Evangelical..."

'Get yourselves into a relation of indebtedness to some of the great writers of the present and the past.....' The advice of Principal Alexander Whyte to New College Students, in a lecture on Thomas Goodwin, a Premier League Puritan, later published in Thirteen Appreciations. I am an admirer of Alexander Whyte for many reasons, though well aware he may be too Victorian for some tastes; psychological moralism, occasions when sentiment and scolding get in the way of persuasive insight, and all the time his fascination, in almost equal terms, with both sin and grace.

But at his best Whyte has the dazzling, glimmering presence of Scheihallion, (his favourite Scottish mountain) covered in snow. In his sentimentality there isn't a whiff of insincerity, and in his scolding there is the unmistakable solidarity of pastor with people, of scolder with scolded. And one of the main reasons I admire this Victorian Free Kirk preacher, is because he explains why I have long valued the writings of the most famous 20th century Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. And if you think a Free Kirk minister, who was Moderator of his church, who was Principal of its most influential College, and who for decades filled the pulpit of the Free Church's most influential Edinburgh church, might raise a hoary eyebrow at a Baptist minister who is also Principal of a Denominational College claiming his support for such a reason - you'd be wrong and you'd be surprised.

In the volume referred to Alexander Whyte wrote appreciations of thirteen Christian writers. As a Scottish Presbyterian Calvinist you'd expect Samuel Rutherford and William Guthrie the Fenwick Covenanter, and the New England Puritan Thomas Sheppard, to be 'appreciated'. And Thomas Goodwin the Puritan was Whyte's theological and spiritual mentor-in print - he read Goodwin so much the books had to be rebound in leather to withstand the wear and tear of a reader who lugged such tomes around with him while on holiday in the Highlands. But Whyte's appreciation reached much further afield - he wrote one of the most penetrating reviews of the sermons of Cardinal John Henry Newman, and as a younger man visited this celebrated Roman Catholic Convert at the oratory in Birmingham. His appreciation of Teresa of Avila was reviewed in The Tablet and read in religious communities as the lunchtime sacred reading. His review of father John of Kronstadt took him into the Russian Orthodox tradition where he sensed the importance of bowing to mystery, gazing on the beauty of holiness and lifting the heart in passionate and unembarrassed devotion to God.

So what's the connection between Alexander Whyte and my appreciation of Thomas Merton? Quite simple - Whyte urged those who would preach and pastor others to be a "true Catholic...a well read, open-minded, hospitable hearted, spiritually exercised Evangelical", and to be "in a relation of indebtedness" to those who on the journey with God are further down the road than I will ever be. At many important turns in my own journey, Merton has been one of those who knew the road better than me. As a guide he has helped me map some of my own inner geography, that changing landscape of the soul where psychology, spirituality and the reality of God provide the raw material of my own humanity in Christ. Over many years few writers have taught me better than Merton, the importance of knowing myself known, loved and called by God, to serve Him open of mind and heart to the truth and the presence of God in all of life.

Whyte understood as few others in his age did, the damage done to the Gospel of Jesus, the mission of the church, and our personal spiritual development, by misguided and exclusive loyalty to the one narrow strand of the Christian tradition to which any of us happens to belong. Evangelicalism has been a tradition that, perhaps as a defensive buffer zone, developed strands of intolerance, its own list of no go theological areas and traditions, its in-built hermeneutic of suspicion that simply does not trust other traditions to be as 'sound', as 'biblical', in their understanding, interpretation and living of the truth of Christ. My own heart has never settled for such exclusiveness. Instead, like Alexander Whyte, A W Tozer, Thomas Goodwin, John Wesley, Richard Baxter and many, many others who stand either in Evangelicalism, or in the earlier traditions from which it emerged, I have put myself 'in a relation of indebtedness' to great souls of the Christian tradition, and been taught so much by those guests I have made welcome companions on my own journey.

This Baptist then, has learned a lot I needed to know about loving God without pretence, from Merton the Trappist. But I've also learned how not to limit the range and depth of the love of God in Christ from the medieval Julian of Norwich and the Methodist Charles Wesley. The studied devotional precision of Anglican George Herbert, the astringent but healthy questioning of the Welsh priest R S Thomas, the verbal virtuosity in service of spiritual certainty and uncertainty of the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, continue to teach me the importance of words in conversation about God, more especially in conversation with God. But these are other stories, for other times.

For now, over Christmas, I'm re-reading The Seven Storey Mountain, surely one of the 20th Century's genuine spiritual classics. Not least because it is a frank, flawed and distilled account of spiritual emptiness and hunger, and of the remorseless mercy that pursues us with gracious and loving intent.