Living Wittily

For the theological joy of it...

The Christian religion is identical with Jesus Christ;
if there is no accessible Christ, there is no Christianity.
It is the Church's being to trust in Christ;
it is her vocation to bear witness to Christ;
if the shadow of uncertainty falls upon Christ,
her testimony is paralysed,
the breath of her life is withdrawn.

(James Denney, British Weekly, Nov 6, 1902)

As always, Denney saw to, and got to, the heart of things. And for him the heart of things is Christ,  and Christ crucified and risen. Decided I need to read some of Denney again, this time not as research, but for the theological joy of it. Good phrase that - theological joy! Reminds me of a book by Edward Schillebeecx, I Am a Happy Theologian. I think it was Steve Holmes who pointed out the aptness of that title for any theologian serious about a vocation in theological reflection and thought. Just do it for the joy of it!

The Good Life - a life spent reading.........

Here's why I like Annie Dillard's writing. Apart from reinforcing my bibliophilic tendencies, her writing sends shafts of light into those corners of our experience we choose not to notice - till someone like her takes us by the scruff of the neck and points us in their direction.

Two of her books, Holy the Firm, and Teaching a Stone to Talk are examples of thin books that weigh a ton in intellectual and spiritual freight. meantime, here she is making me feel better about the time I spend reading. 

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading - that is a good life.

('The Writing Life', Annie Dillard, in Three by Annnie Dillard, San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990, page 569)

A J Heschel: Sincere intensity and intense sincerity

The elephant is a bonny bird,

it flits from bough to bough;

it makes its nest in a rhubarb tree

and whistles like a cow

Nonsense verse, when considered sensibly, usually has some plausible reference to sense! In this case, I realise that, judging from my blogging posts, it must look like my reading pattern flits from book to book. I haven't abandoned Rob Warner's Evangelicalism book -but I was, as promised, ambushed by Moltmann's In a Broad Place, and I'm too much of a Moltmann fan to allow any discipline or prior commitments to keep me from reading it undistracted. I'd just finished it when I was ambushed again - this time by the arrival of Edward Kaplan's second volume of his biography of A J Heschel, entitled Spiritual Radical. My enthusiasm for this Hasidic philosopher, rescued from the Holocaust by immigration to the US, who combined social justice with mystical piety, and who wrote some of the most sublime prose poetry about the reality of God, will be well enough known to regular readers of Living Wittily.

So again I am sidetracked by a book about someone who is anything but a sidetrack on my spiritual and intellectual journey. Here are a few sentences from some of Heschel's earliest writing in English:

Prayer takes the mind out of the narrowness of self-interest, and enables us to see the world in the mirror of the holy. For when we betake ourselves to the extreme opposite of the ego, we can behold a situation from the aspect of God.

Faith does not spring out of nothing. It comes with the discovery of the holy dimension of our existence. Suddenly we become aware that our lips touch the veil that hangs before the Holy of Holies. Our face is lit up for a time with the light from behind the veil.  Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the Holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.

In the realm of faith, God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. To rationalists He is something after which they seek in the darkness with the light of their reason. To men and women of faith He is the light.

Such sincere intensity, and intense sincerity; reading the story of Heschel's life, and pausing over words forged and glinting in such mystic fire, I sense the shallowness and emotionalism of what we evangelicals call 'the devotional life. And I further sense the misguided rationalism of many forms of Evangelical apologetics, as if the reality of God, the God who burns with Holy Love revealed in Christ, could be proven into existence by ensuring we were working with the right epistemology. The immediate experience of a Holy God demands self surrender not self indulgence, adoration not argument.

Hopeful Imagination and Advent

Today I posted over at hopeful imagination Advent is an important time for me, and I'm already well launched on Advent Reflection after my week-end up in Inverness. There is a daily posting at Hopeful Imagination so go looking each day during Advent.

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.......

Embarrassment

How embarrassing for man

to be the greatest miracle on earth

and not to understand it!

How embarrassing for man

to live in the shadow of greatness

and to ignore it,

to be a contemporary of God

and not to sense it.

Religion depends upon what man does

with his ultimate embarrassment.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, peace be upon him.

I wonder if this was a gentle play on the more serious suggestion of Tillich's 'ultimate concern'. A reminder that God is ultimate,and the ultimate response of human beings is attentive, adoring wonder that is content to be embarrassed by knowledge too wonderful for us.

Defiance of despair

A religious man

is a person who holds God and man

in one thought at a time,

at all times,

who suffers in himself harms done to others,

whose greatest passion is compassion,

whose greatest strength is love

and defiance of despair.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, on whom be peace.

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a friend of Martin Luther King, whose volume of sermons entitled Strength to Love is a 20th century spiritual classic. Heschel is second from the right, and MLK in the middle. The photo is called, 'Praying with their Feet'. Amen, and Amen

Not beyond our will

We live by the conviction that acts of goodness reflect the hidden light of His holiness.

His light is above our minds but not beyond our will.

It is within our power to mirror his unending love in deeds of kindness, like brooks that hold the sky.

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

The meaning of existence is experienced in moments of exaltation. Man must strive for the summit in order to survive on the ground... his ends must surpass his needs.

The security of existence lies in the exaltation of existence. This is one of the rewards of being human: quiet exaltation, capability for celebration. It is expressed in a phrase which Rabbi Akiba offered to his disciples:

A song every day,

A song every day.

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

I love this man's writing; Heschel's wise compassionate patience with imperfection, and the trustful imagination of his spirit, never fail to touch the deeper places of my own spirit.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, peace be upon his name.

Words are feeble...yet priceless things

Over at Euangelion, Mike Bird  has draw attention to the death of C. F. D. Moule, former Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. I still remember  reading his book The Birth of the New Testament, and wondering why other writers of New Testament Introductions needed to write books two or three times as long, to say half as much that was important for understanding where the New testament came from and what it was about.

I also remember R E O White, former Principal of our College, coming to teach us NT Greek armed with Wenham's Elements of NT Greek, Arndt and Gingrich's Lexicon, and C F D Moule's Idiom Book of NT Greek, to answer the more elusive questions about this or that text. Below is a revealing extract from Moule, a friendly caution to those of us who live by words, and written in Moule's little book The Holy Spirit. The book was written in 1978, when a lot of words were written about the Holy Spirit, charismatic experience and renewal, much of it anecdotal, only some of it theologically grounded, and even less of it related through careful scholarship to the evidence of the NT documents. Moule offered neither comfort for charismatics, nor ammunition for anti-charismatics - instead, measured reflection refusing to rush to conclusions:

Words are feeble things – never adequate for the job; yet priceless things – seldom dispensable. They are dangerous things, for they are so fascinating that they tempt the user to linger with them and treat them as ends instead of means. But the Word became flesh; and a word that is not in some way implemented goes sour and becomes a liability instead of an asset.

Charles was an important name in 20th Century British New Testament scholarship - Charles H Dodd, Charles Kingsley Barrett and Charles Digby Moule. I think it would be a good idea to have an alternative to the calendars of saints - how about a calendar of biblical scholars when we celebrate through the year, the gift to the church of countless hours of labour and devotion, poured like precious nard, upon those ancient documents that together we call the Bible. And on their feast day, a reading from that part of Scripture on which they have shed the light of their learning? Open for suggestions.....

Integration and integrity

In trying to explain what it means to be in right relationship, with God, with creation, with others and with ourselves, David Willis writes about integration and integrity. It is an important and faith expanding description of what God is about in our lives.

This being in right relationship includes the integration of various things - ideas, emotions, economic condition, physical health, hunger for righteousness, delights, artistic drives and so on - which make us who we are intended to become.

The word for the condition to which we are being delivered is..."integrity". Integrity is wholeness, unsplinteredness, unfragmentedness. We are invoking this imagery when we say so-and-so or such and such rings true. Wholeness in this sense is held-togetherness: as crystal or a forged bell is a 'resounding' holding together of things in tension. Tension is not incidental to integration, for the tensile strength of something is the way its component partsicles cohere, are congruent. The tensioned parts 'fit'. They belong together to make up a whole, and are most themsleves in that tensioned belonging. Integrity is being integrated! Integrity in this sense is a progressing condition, not a fixed state. (page 54).

The tensions between aspiration and frustration, devotion to Christ and the attractiveness of countless alternative calls, between our earthboundness and our spirituality, between emodiedness and inwardness. Jesus knew about those key moments, those urgent decisions, those tensile choices that we face once we've put our hand to the plough, left our nets, left the money at the tax table. And whether the source of tension and the test of integrity is faithfulness to our Lord, or to our covenanted life partner, committed love to our children or answering thedemands of our vocation, Willis is right. Integrity isn't a fixed state, but a continuing process of refinement. Like the crystal vase and the forged bell, now and again God pings or strikes us, to hear the resounding holding togetherness that is discipleship as a way of life, a following after the One whose integrity integrates a fragmented creation.

abysses of purple...wild grey shrouds...and flaming windows

  Writing postcards is a chore - and a gift if it's done properly. Travel writing, done well, reads like a very long postcard. Here's an extract from a letter, written to her mother, by a Victorian traveller in the Alps. She is describing the view down the mountain just as an alpine storm is passing. It is one of my favourite quotations from those Victorians who knew how to write - and in the absence of digital technology, captured in words, images which elude even the best photographs .

Imagine yourself midway between heaven and earth, the sharp point of rock on which we stood hardly seeming more of earth than if we had been in a balloon, the whole space around, above, and below filled with wild, weird, spectral clouds, driving and whirling in incessant change and with tremendous rapidity; horizon none, but every part of where horizon should be, crowded with unimaginable shapes of unimgined colours, with rifts of every shade of blue, from indigo to pearl, and burning with every tint of fire, from gold to intensest red; shafts of keen light shot down into the abysses of purple, thousands of feet below, enormous surging masses of grey hurled up from beneath, and changing in an instant to glorified brightness of fire as they seemed on the point of swallowing up the shining masses above them; then, all in an instant, a wild grey shroud flung over us, as swiftly passing and leaving us in a blaze of sunshine; then a bursting open of the very heavens, and a vision of what might be celestial heights, pure and still and shining, high above it all; then an instantaneous cleft in another wild cloud, and a revelation of a perfect paradise of golden and rosy slopes and summits; then, quick gleams of white peaks through veilings and unveilings of flying semi-transparent clouds; then, as quickly as the eye could follow, a rim of dazzling light running round the edges of a black castle of cloud, and flaming windows suddenly pierced in it; oh mother dear, I might go on for sheets, for it was never twice the same, nor any single minute the same, in any direction........

The writer was Frances Ridley Havergal, a contemporary of another Christian poet who likewise revelled in nature as the theatre of God's glory:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;....