Living Wittily

Dreams, books, are each a world.....

Been reading and writing an essay review on the first two volumes of Veli-Matti Karkkainen's Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World. This is a major theological project by one of the leading Ecumenical theologians writing in the West today. He trained as an Ecumenical theologian, has taught on three continents and has a passionate interest in bringing the Christian faith into constructive conversation with the other living faiths (Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism); but he wants to do so by being critically and appreciatively faithful to the range and depth of the Christian tradition.

Not everyone who reads this blog will want to invest the time and energy reading these volumes as they become available. But you can get a good sense of what he is about, and the kind of thinker he is by watching an interview he gave at the launch of the first volume, Christ and Reconciliation. You can find the interview here.

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Yesterday I spent some time looking through a bookcase of books that used to belong to a friend. I had the pick of them, but the real interest was simply handling books that had been shapers of thought, inspirations for life, companions of comfort. Over 7 or more decades, books that have been bought, ead and reread. Some of them now taped together; others with what the booksellers call foxing, spine split, some highlighting or underlining. The whole lot together wouldn't make much money. But then riches afren;t just about money.

Some of the enduring values and gifts evade the commerical tyrranny of the barcode. I only took four. A lot of them I haven't read and won't. Some of them meant more to my friend than to me - it's like that with books and friendship. I don;t have to like what he liked, nor pretend it does for me what it clearly accomplished in his own inner life. There were two or three though that brought memories of ding dong discussions over a lunch table with a crusty loaf, a pot of soup, and a bowl of fruit. Two of the ones I brought away I'll give to someone else.

The two I'll keep are because they say much for my friend's theology, faith and way of thinking and living. One is a biography of Studdert Kennedy, Woodbine Willie, whose theology was generous, passionately questioning of God in the face of suffering, and utterly grounded in Calvary and the Cross as the place where earthly suffering and Divine mercy comingled in the sacrifice of Christ. The other is The Path to Perfection, W E Sangster's volume on John Wesley's doctrine of Christian perfection. I've read it before, it's now a book of past generations, eclipsed by so much high standard contemporary Wesleyan scholarship which shows no signs of abating. But Sangster was a saintly man, a deep lover of Jesus, and so was my friend. "Love is the key to holiness" says Sangster - and my frienc's life underlined that sentence. 

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And then there was this wee red booklet I picked up for £1 at Drum Castle Garden, in the wee shed where used books are there with an honesty box.

I merely mention this. I'll write another post later on the fascinating hopes and optimism of a conference 60 years ago. They say times have changed - but reading this, the aspirations and proposals remain vaslid, and largely unfulfilled. More on this later. 
 

"This love encompasses the whole world of creatures...."

On the whole path from the beginning of creation

by way of reconciliation to the eschatological future of salvation,

the march of the divine economy of salvation

is an expression of the incursion of the eternal future of God

to the salvation of creatures

and thus a manifestation of the divine love.

 

Here is the eternal basis of God's coming forth

from he immanence of the divine life as the economic Trinity

and of the incorporation of creatures, mediated thereby,

into the unity of the trinitarian life.

 

The distinction and unity of the immanent and economic Trinity

constitute the heartbeat of the divine love,

and with a single such heartbeat

this love encompasses the whole world of creatures.

 

Over the years I've come to notice the last few sentences with which an author chooses to end a book. Especially a magnum opus. These are the last sentences of volume 3 of Wolfhart Pannenberg's Systematic Theology. They have a liturgical rhythm to them once you allow for the translation from German, and arrrange them for slowed down reading. In which case I read these and can say, Amen. 

The photo was taken in the walled garden at Drumoak Castle, and seems to hint at the love that encompasses the whole world of creatures!

Our hope in God and God;s hope for us.

Hope is lived, and it comes alive, when we go outside of ourselves, and, in joy and pain take part in the lives of others. It becomes concrete in open community with others. (Jurgen Moltmann, The Open Church, 1978, page 35)

I wonder if discipleship today should best be measured by the hopefulness of our living, and thinking, and praying?

The true basis of the soul's hope of God is God's hope of the soul. His confident intention precedes and inspires ours, and gives all its significance to our life. (Evelyn Underhill.)

That old terminology is still important, prevenient grace, the Grace that was there before we ever were, that goes ahead of us, that knows us deeply, truly and unerringly. God has great hopes for each of us - I can live with that thought, and actually without that thought much of what I might call living is deprived of its most sustaining source of energy, hope.

So Paul's prayer speaks directly into the life of those of us, at times overhwelmed by the conveyor belt of evil, suffering and awfulness that is the news just now:

'The God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.' I like that word, overflow - it speaks of excess, generosity, extra space, more than enough.

The photo was taken on Sunday, a visitor to our garden, a fragile beauty and harbinger of transformation.

God and the Philosophers, and Why the Interrogative Mood is an Essential Element in the Grammar of Faith.

I remember my first lecture in Moral Philosophy. I was gobsmacked. I was also introduced to the painful process of someone rubbishing my assumptions, neutralising my presuppositions and playing skittles with my convictions. In that first year I read Plato, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant and they'll do for starters. But I came to love moral philosophy, then took philosophy of religion and philosophical theology, and ever since have kept company with, and been in discussion and argument with, 'the philosophers'.

Philosophy was a process of owning my own faith, reconfiguring on a sounder basis my convictions, and becoming aware of the importance of assumptions and the equal importance of not allowing assumptions to become padlocks on all the doors that lead to new, deeper, more honest thinking. So when I come across a philosopher who writes like this, I know I'm in congenial company, and if I've any sense I'll keep quiet and listen, and perchance learn.....

"...the Bible is conspicuously  lacking in proofs for the existence of God. Insofar as the Bible presents or embodies any method for comprehending the goodness of God or coming to God, it can be summed up in the Psalmist's invitation to individual listeners and readers: Taste and see that the Lord is good.

Whether we find it in the Chambonnais or in the melange of narrative, prayer, poetry, chronicle and epistle that constitute the Bible, the taste of true goodness calls to us, wakes us up, opens our hearts,. If we respond with surprise, with tears, with gratitude, with determination not to lose the taste, with commitment not to betray it, that tasting leads eventually to seeing, to some sight of or insight into God."

Eleonore Stump, 'The Mirror of Evil, in God and the Philosophers. The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason, T V Morris, Oxford, 1994, page 241.

The Unrecognisable, Unworship-able and Non-Existent "god" of the New Atheists

Some years ago I made my way (slowly) through David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Inifinite. In the now legendary words of one of our Honours students, "This is a hard book". The student received the not too unsympathetic and the now equally legendary reply by the lecturer, "This is an Honours course!". That exchange still echoes year on year, in the collaborative and interactive conversations that take place as the preferred form of learning and teaching in our College. 

The Beauty of the Infinite ranks with several other theological books I read through with an experience similar to a middle aged man starting on a fitness regime and not liking the hard work of the gym circuit, liking even less getting up early to keep the discipline of the daily jog and fighting against his badly educated neurotransmitters to lose the taste for junk food and chocolate! The benefits are not immediate, but they are life enhancing, intellectually renewing, they make for a healthier mind, and they open up horizons which previously could only be viewed from afar, or puffed towards, with a stitch in the side, and no guaranteee I'd ever get there.

Other hard books have a similar weight, importance and carry the same intellectual health benefits. Eberhard Jungel's God and the Mystery of the World; Kevin Vanhoozer's The Drama of Doctrine and Is There a Meaning in the Text; Von Balthasar's Mysterium Paschale; Barth's Church Dogmatics Vol II.1 and 2; Pannenberg's Systematic Theology, each of the three volumes a whole year's training circuit!

But then there are other kinds of 'hard books', not because they are intellectually demanding, loaded with complex concepts, rooted in disciplined philosophical and theological traditions, but because they demand the full attention of intellect, affection, conscience and personal responsiveness. These are not better than intellectually demanding books, they are different in the demands they make, but the aim is the same. They seek a similar response of self-giving to the task of faith seeking understanding, and mind and heart learning and living towards a deeper, clearer, more humble vision of the love of God.

My conversations with such books have included Moltmann's The Trinity and the Kingdom of God; Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense; The Rule of St Benedict; Julian of Norwich's Revelations; George Herbert's The Temple; Belden Lane's The Solace of Fierce Landscapes; the Poetry of R S Thomas, Denise Levertov, Mary Oliver and Seamus Heaney; Catherine Lacugna's God for Us; Walter Brueggemann's Old Testament Theology; the novels of Chaim Potok; Merton's No Man is an Island and Seeds of Contemplation.

All of which brings me back to David Bentley Hart, and his latest book. The Experience of God. Being, Consciousness, Bliss, (Yale University Press, 2013). Along with Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith and Revolution, Hart's new volume is one of the most telling and serious riposte's to the intellectual deficits (by the way I miss-typed that word as deificits - is that a neologism for such rationally deficient atheism?) - anyway, Hart's riposte to the intellectual deficits and atheological naivete of the new atheist polemics against God, religion and faith as a way of knowing.

Hart's aim is quite simple, and quite ambitious - he offers an exploration of the concept "God" as the word and concept function within the great theistic faiths of the world. In doing this it becomes clear that what the new atheists so passionately hate, dismiss, deconstruct, fear and fight, is a concept of God unrecognisable by the people and traditions which can be named in any meaningful way as theistic. So this book is an attempt at explicating the conception of God in Christian and other theistic faith traditions, but articulated by a Christian who neither dismisses the authentic traditions of theistic faith, nor cedes to the new atheists the freedom to define the word "God" in terms that suit conclusions, presuppositions and prejudices already in place in such writers' world view.

Starting from next Monday I'll do a series of posts on Hart's chapters (there are 6 of them). .

The Fascination of Modern Theology in a Postmodern or Post Postmodern and Post Christian Culture.

One of the first books I read when I was finding my feet on the terrain of historical theology was John MacQuarrie's Twentieth Century Religious Thought.  It was an SCM Limp Study Edition and cost £4.95. I read it through and discovered that Christian theology is exciting, bracing and enlarging when written by someone who is well informed, fair minded, alert to contemporary philosophical and theological trends, and able to distinguish between genuine game-changing trends and those wayward currents of thought that are fashionable but prove theologically unpromising.

Further reading included direct engagement with major theologians like Barth, Brunner (does anyone still read Brunner), Bultmann, Bonhoeffer (so much now available in the translated works), Pannenberg, Kung, Moltmann (seminal in my own thinking), Tillich, Jungel, moving on to Guttierez, Boff, Lash, and MacQuarrie (himself now part of the story) and later still Torrance, Jenson, Hauerwas.

The next survey of modern theology survey I read  was 20th Century Theology. God and the World in a Transitional Age, by Stanley Grenz and Roger Olson. This book helped me join together and see connections between modernity, Christian theology, cultural and philosophical moves and movements, providing a helpful map of modern theology. This book is now 20 years old, and I still refer to it.

That brings me to two new books waiting to be read and near the top of the have to read soon pile. Mapping Modern Theology. A Thematic and Historical Introduction is a collection of essays on the main topics of Christian theology, in which the main theological loci such as atonement, creation, providence, pneumatology, eschatology are explored through the lens of theological writing rooted in the soil of modernity, roughly the last two hundred years. Edited by Kelly Kapic and Bruce McCormack this is a substantial anf innovative book and I look forward to reading it as an orientation to the contemporary debates.

Just arrived is The Journey of Modern Theology. From Reconstruction to Deconstruction, by Roger Olson. This book began as a revision of the Grenz Olson volume mentioned above. But for very good reasons it has become a much enlarged book in its own right and while incoporating material from the earlier version, it is a very different book. Seven hundred pages now replaces the 400 pages of the earlier book.

The usual suspects are included from Kant, Hagel and Schleiermacher onwards but the entire structure of the book is reworked under the framework of the subtitle, as each chapter explores the way theological assumptions, approaches and constructiuons have changed and adapted or resisted under the pressures of modernity.

Placed alongside the indispensable (I dont use that word often) edition of David Ford and rachel Muers, Modern Theologians (Blackwell Great Theologians series) these books provide a very rich harvest of reflection and constructive critique of contemporary Christian theology in the West and North. By the way, Ford's volume was significantly changed for the third edition, and I have kept my original second edition because they are two very different books! Olson concedes that his Western Northern bias is a significant limitation, but recognises that a very different work is required, and perhaps in several volumes, if someone is to make a serious attempt at a project which would engage with global Christianity and its diverse styles and contexts of theological traditions, without privileging one over the other. Indeed something of such a project is currently underway by Veli-Matti Karkkainen, of which I will say much more in a later post. For now, I wanted to flag up to those who might be interested some of the good tour guides for modern theology. Over the next while I'll do occasional bulletins from the desk and let you know what's what.  y

Karl Barth and the Cure for Desultoriness of Spirit

Earlier today I was desultorying. There's much to be thought about just now, life taking new turnings, decisions that involve both risk and trust, and I was looking around for a conversation partner, someone to take me out of self-pre-occupation for a while. In the corner is a tall narrow bookcase which houses Barth's Church Dogmatics, and sundry other Barthian writing, along with a number of the key monographs on Barth's theology from McCormack to Hunsinger, and Busch to Webster. I took down the Romans commentary - that angry, passionate, turbo-charged bulldozer of a book that didn't only disturb the scholars in their playground, but proceeded to demolish their school.

Barth is one of a few theologians who provide (for me at any rate) a theological and spiritual antidote to the debilitating condition of desultorying. Loss of impetus, boredom with transcendence, spiritual attention deficit, emotional reductionism, theological complacency, - there are plenty of phrases and they describe some forms of desultorying. Nearer where I am just now is something different - experience overload, much happening at once and the need to have time, space and energy to work through what it means, how it feels, and how best live with and through life as it is. In her wonderful Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton wrote something I adopted as a spiritual principle. She spoke of the depletion that comes from 'unassimilated  experience' - she meant those times when life is too stridently demanding, expectations of ourselves are unrealistic, too much happens before previous experience is reflected upon, learned from, made peace with.

One way of interrupting the flow of information, experience and circumstance is to change the subject away from  yourself to that which is beyond, more than, extrinsic to, our own inner world with its worries, problem solving, calculation and self- centred attention. Open a volume of Barth, and I find myself interrupted! Romans 8 belongs in the Alpine range of Paul's theology, and Barth on Romans 8 in his commentary provides a stunning viewpoint to take in the vast vista and far away horizons of the love of God in Jesus Christ. Is it an exegesis of Romans 8? Absolutely not, more like a conductor inspiring an entire orchestra to improvise with passionate responsiveness to the composer's musical vision, and therefore to treat the script with such massive respect that it is not slavishly followed but teleologically fulfilled. The result is an artistic triumph, a virtuoso performance that is unique and arises out of the specific coincidence of musicians, conductor, musical score and historical moment.

Barth's Romans is like that. I spent a while reading him on Romans 8.28, that massive granite rock of a verse that you either stand on because it will never move, or that falls and flattens you if you try to duck beneath it! Here is what I read, the cure for today's desultoriness:

The Love of God stands where there is disclosed,...the pre-eminent affirmation - Jesus Christ, the Resurrection and the Life. Blessed discovery! God stands in light inaccessible. Blessed discovery! All flesh is grass and all the glory of men is as the flower of the field. When in Spirit and in Truth, one of these discoveries is made, the other is involved in it, for both are in fact operations of the One God, whose universal majesty is the 'Yes' in the 'No'. The Love of God dares to see everywhere on this side and on that side, not a 'Here' and a 'There', but wholly and altogether beyond all tension and duality, the revelation of the one Truth, proclaiming that the free and righteous, blessed and living God, knows us, prisoners and sinners and condemned and dead, to be His own. And so in our apprehension which is not-knowing,  and in our not-knowing which is our apprehension, there is shown forth the final and primal unity of visibility and invisibility,  of earth and heaven,  of man and God...Thus God rewards those who love Him. 

Flannery O'connor loved Barth because he 'threw the furniture around'. He did, and he does. But here is an even earthier description that comes from one of those comments at the door after preaching, made by a farmer in the North East, that he was "glad to get a good kick up the backside". Not sure that was the aim of the sermon, but for him it did seem to be the outcome. And his phrase aptly describes Barth's theological impact on a desultory spirit!

The photo is across the Mearns at early sunrise into a liquid sky.

Following Jesus as the Theological Imperative of Hans Kung

Hans Kung recently decided to retire from public life. He is now 84. I first came across the writing and thought of Kung when as a young Baptist minister in my first church I was given a copy of On Being a Christian. It is a huge book - in size, in word count, but more than that, in the scope of its vision of what it means to be a Christian. Reading it was like working out with a personal intellectual trainer. You recognise that the book isn't there to indulge you, but to push you; you don't need to like it, just engage with it; the benefits are not immediate, but they are lasting. 

That book was an eye opener. And my eyes have stayed open. Hans Kung in that book, and in subsequent writing has given to the Church a body of theological and philosophical work that is disruptive, questioning, and demanding. Disruptive in the positive sense of not being content with received wisdom or institutionalised answers; questioning because he is an ardent and patient seeker for truth who is impatient with those who try to obstruct that quest; demanding because he is a bull in the ecclesial china shop, a non-conformist in the most internally conformist tradition of Christian faith; a voice that refuses to be silenced by any authority, (ecclesial or academic) which is hostile to question, enquiry and the reform that discovered and rediscovered truth must inevitably provoke.

Yes he is a pain in the mitre of Pope and Curia; and yes his theology veers in directions some of us think are wrong directions; and maybe he does come over at times as arrogant, self-assured and unwilling to listen and negotiate towards views that others can own. But on the other side his range of knowledge and depth of thought, the combination of rigour and passion in argument, the note of faithfulness to the truth of Jesus as the sub-stratum of theological and philosophical exposition, and all this in a mind both questioning and generous, replete with learning and alert to the urgency of his own priestly vocation; such characteristics make him a complex and necessary voice in contemporary Christian reflection and apologetic

These sentences below sum up the spirituality and loneliness of Kung, his voice not always loved, but always faithful:

Following the cross does not mean copying the suffering of Jesus, it is not the reconstruction of his cross. That would be presumptuous. But it certainly means enduring the suffering which befalls me in my inexchangeable situation - in conformity with the suffering of Christ. Anyone who wants to go with Jesus must deny their self and take upon their self not the cross of Jesus, but their cross, their own cross, then they must follow Jesus. (On Being a Christian, p. 777)

A Theological Reflection on Three Mornings of Problematic Commuting!

On the way to College each morning this week I've been delayed.

Monday it was the lolipop man stopping the traffic with a high waving lolipop, stopping the traffic for one adult to cross the road and no children in sight. That got a few irate horn blasts for lolipop abuse.

Tuesday I was a witness to a motor cyclist who came off his bike because a dog on an extension  lead (not the electrical kind) had run across the road and created a tripwire. The biker wasn't too badly hurt but was rightly mad - I've no idea what the insurance issues will be.

Wednesday it was the huge articulated European transport Lorry which stopped within inches of the Nitshill Bridge and blocked the traffic both ways. No way to reverse because backed in by the Traffic queue - no way forward because, well because of the bridge.

Not the best start to the working day - not talking about me, but the lolipop man who thought he was being helpful, the motorcyclist who probably has no comeback for the damage, and the lorry driver who stopped on time but had nowhere to go, and surrounded by impatient to hostile commuters!

Hard to go in after such encounters of commuting life and sit down with a cup of tea and pick up where I left off in my reading of the more abstract realities of contested ecclesiologies, patristic Trinitarianism and contemporary approaches to mission for faith communities on the cusp of a culture fuelled by disruptive innovation and recessional panic!

But such is the life of a theologian - and seriously, the social and civic attitudes that underlie anger at a car having to stop for a walking human being does indeed provide food for theological critique of the values we live by;

and the questions raised by the unforeseen accident, the injury to others we intend or don't intend, and how to resolve situations that have gone wrong between people, there is an entire theological and ethical agenda for the church;

and to ask ourselves what resources we have to deal with those situations where we are stuck at a low bridge with no easy way forward or back, and all around us people just wanting to get on with their own lives.

I guess that embarrassed lorry driver mirrors the experience of so many folk trying to work out how to make their lives work and be able to move forward from the mistake they have made.

And I'm pondering the parable of the church as articulated lorry, confronted by a low bridge, trapped by the traffic, nowhere obvious to go, the driver frantically directing traffic around a vehicle made for movement but stuck by its own shape and wrong turnings.......

The image of the Eagle Nebulae always reminds me of the context within which all the strangeness of the ordinary is held, 'In the beginning was the Word...and the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us'. And whatever the future of the church, that truth is the intellectual, spiritual and and moral directive for how the Church as the Body of Christ is to live in the creative energy of resurrection, and with trust in the God who in Christ is reconciling the world into the life of the Triune God.

 

Karl Barth on One of His Salutary Rants!

I enjoy a good rant. whether it's mine opr someone else's. Strong feelings, passionate convictions, intellectual energy, just the right degree of unreasonableness, unshakeable confidence in the rightness of the cause and in the analysis of the problem, all of this harnessed to verbal facility with a strong rhetorical accent, these are the active ingredients of the effective rant.

Karl Barth's writings are full of them - they are amongst his most enjoyable paragraphs. They can feel like a loud shout from someone who crept up behind you while you were minding your own business journeying purposefully through some well meaning theological reflection

"Theology is...a function in the Liturgy of the church. One had better take ca\ution what he does, when he neglects theology, or takes it less seriously and thereby practically eliminates it, because it has only this one function. Of all the functions of the Church's liturgy none is to be dispensed with if the Church is to be kept totally intect.

And it is quite in order to say very emphatically today, that it is precisely this function, that of theology, this critical self-examination of the Church regarding its reason for existence and its origin, is not to be eliminated.

Try to carry on your practice without a theory!

Go on, praise "life" at the expense of intellectual work, knowledge or creed.

Worship "reality" and despise truth!

It will quickly become evident that the practical things are not all there is to it; it is only human endeavour, and yet, in  its own autonomous nature it is not a worthy human endeavour. Where such a path leads can be illustrated today before our very eyes, and concerning which the Churches of all countries have every reason to fundamentally rethink themselves.

A Church without an orderly theology must sooner or later become a pagan church.!"

That's what Flannery O'Connor meant when she said Barth throws the furniture around. When Barth takes on the role of exasperated Headmaster he can be fun, but if we laugh we tend to do it discreetly, and nervously, because underneath the impatience is the passion of someone who wants the best and sees it thrreatened by complacency, carelessness or self indulgent minds seeking amusement rather than wisdom. The quote is from God in Action, Edinburgh, 1936, page 49-50