Living Wittily

Parties, photos and our literary DNA

OK. After several requests and not a few demands - here's the picture - Sheila and I routinely out for a night....! Unfortunately the picture doesn't show the whole me - which included multicoloured trousers, pink gloves, luminous striped socks and lurid lime green plastic shoes. That one might yet be emailed to me, in which case, for a small fee.......

Must be a new lease of life. Or we've suddenly become socially in demand. Whatever, we are just back from another party in Aberdeen. Not fancy dress this time - a significant birthday of a good friend. But we are back in Aberdeen later this week for a 90th birthday party.

Three parties in 12 days. And each of them special because the person whose life is being celebrated is special and integral not only to our lives but to that sense of who we are, that derives from the giftedness of those relationships that define, enrich and impinge on our lives in many welcome ways. I believe deeply that we are persons in relation, and that individuality only matters when it is encompassed within the shared lives of those who move in and out and within our lives. Who these people are, how we met them, what led to the formation of such enduring connections of love, affection and friendship is part of the mystery of human relatedness, but also part of the graced gift that each person is who troubles to think any one of us worth getting to know.

So not much time for reading you'd think. True enough, but wee corners of time still found here and there. I've just finished Susan Hill's book about a year's reading of only the books already in her home. Along the way she dishes out wisdom and advice, opinion and prejudice, gossip and mini-memoirs - the book is a delight. And there are still a couple of quotes worth inserting here. The last one did get a couple of gentle correctives from Rick and Jason - you can see my comment response on Jason's blog here. Anyway, here's Ms Hill saying what I've long suspected - that the books we read deeply become part of who we are:

"Books help to form us. If you cut me open, will you find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me?....What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books, as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA."

 Susan Hill, Howard's End is on the Landing (London: Profile Books, 2009), 201-2.

One of the real gains of walking through blogland is that like many another stroll in unfamiliar landscape, you turn a corner and discover beauty, are surprised by joy, ambushed by that which deamnds our attention. So on James K Smith's blog, Fors Clavigera, I came across this quotation from Charles Péguy's long prose poem. It distills into beautiful words and cadences some of our inner longing to know enough of the heart of God to live our lives hopefully towards the always new future. To be read slowly, and more than once.

From The Portal of the Mystery of Hope By Charles Péguy

The faith that I love best, says God, is hope.

Faith doesn’t surprise me. It’s not surprising.

I am so resplendent in my creation. . . .

That in order really not to see me these poor people would have to be blind.

Charity says God, that doesn’t surprise me. It’s not surprising.

These poor creatures are so miserable that unless they had a heart of stone,

how could they not have love for one another.

How could they not love their brothers.

How could they not take the bread from their own mouth, their daily bread, i

n order to give it to the unhappy children who pass by.

And my son had such love for them. . . .

But hope, says God, that is something that surprises me.

Even me. That is surprising.

That these poor children see how things are going

and believe that tomorrow things will go better. T

hat they see how things are going today

and believe that they will go better tomorrow morning.  

That is surprising and it’s by far the greatest marvel of our grace.

And I’m surprised by it myself.

And my grace must indeed be an incredible force.

~trans. David L. Schindler, Jr.

Internet browsing versus love of books

I know. The post title is a set up. There aren't only two alternatives. But I suspect that out there most people opt for one or the other as the default route to information.

Of course surfing the web and reading a good book aren't mutually exclusive. But I still think Susan Hill's observation comes as a dunt in the ribs to those of us too easily lured along the labyrinthine paths of that endlessly seductive land called Worldwideweb.

"Too much internet usage fragments the brain and dissipates concentration so that after a while, one's ability to spend long, focused hours immersed in a single subject becomes blunted.

Information comes pre-digested in small pieces, one grazes on endless ready meals  and snacks of the mind, and the result is mental malnutrition." 

Susan Hill, Howards End is on the Landing, page 2.

Gordon Fee as Exegete: Giving Paul his due and the importance of word order

Two examples of Fee's no nonsense exegetical comments:

"R F Collins argues (unconvincingly) that Paul has here taken over an earlier formula and adapted it to his own purposes. While all things are possible, not all possible things are equally probable. Indeed, it is of considerable interest that the most creative theologian in the early church is seen as not capable of being creative at points like this, but must be assumed to be borrowing from others - and that without evidence."

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

On Paul's use of charis and shalom in the greeting:

"Paul salutes his brothers and sisters in Christ with "grace to you - and peace." It is worth noting that this is the invariable order of Paul's words, not "grace and peace to you" as in most translations. Very likely there is significance to this order: the grace of God and Christ is what is given to God's people; peace is what results from such a gift. Hence "grace to you - and peace."...The sum total of God's activity towards his human creatures is found in the word "grace"; God has given himself to his people bountifully and mercifully in Christ. Nothing is deserved, nothing can be achieved. The sum total of those benefits  as they are experienced by the recipients of God's grace is "peace", God's eschatological shalom, both now and to come."

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

If the task of the exegete is to enable later readers to hear as clearly as possible, the voice of the one speaking in the text, then these two brief quotations are good examples of why Gordon Fee is a trusted guide. For myself, I wholly concur with his pedantic care in translating Paul's greeting "grace to you - and peace". Allowing the brief pause between the two both distinguishes and connects them in a way that is profoundly theological.

On another note, the Scottish Baptist College Blog is being revived into a discussion forum for issues that we as part of the Scottish Baptist community want to explore in conversation. In particular we want to explore areas of theological education, ministry formation, discipleship in 21st Century Culture, and we will include occasional book reviews. It will also contain news and comment from our College community and have some guest posts from students and others now and again. You might want to go look - I'll occasionally flag it up here as new material is added. 

Gordon Fee and the intellectual deference of a New Testament scholar.

There are occasional Bible commentaries that have a long shelf life, and then there are those that are hacked out to meet the voracious appetite of publishers for niche series. The carbon footprint of commentary mania is brontosauran in its scale. There are currently around 125 biblical commentary series in production in various North Western World publishers. You can see them here if you click on Series button on the upper menu bar. I'm not sure whether to describe this as ludicrous, wasteful, exegetical overkill, marketing madness, unbiblical abuse of creation gifts, or just plain stupid. But out there somewhere people are buying them, seduced by claims of niche market, latest scholarship, and that underlying assumption that if the book is about the Bible it must be justified.

So. When I buy a new commentary now (it was not always thus for me), I have to have a good reason. It has to give me what I don't have and really need. The fact that it rehearses what everyone else has said, or the concern to defend particular positions, or the claim that it now adds a different perspective isn't enough. Nor do I want a commentary that forecloses exegetical options because the publisher takes a particular theological line - and that goes both for the conservative and the critical.

For the discerning commentary reader and user there are certain names that are the gold standard. Gordon Fee is one. Now Professor Emeritus of New Testament Exegesis at Regent's College Vancouver, he is a retired Pentecostal scholar of singular standing across the denominations. His exegetical honesty, focused erudition, rigorous scholarship, and crisp no nonsense writing style laced with fun and gentle critique of others' positions, make him a joy to read. His First Corinthians and Philippians are amongst my most used volumes - I've read them both and used them constantly. His two massive exegetical studies of the Holy Spirit (God's Empowering Presence) and of Christology (Pauline Christology) as well as his up-front honest exegesis of the Pastoral Epistles, are full of help for those who want to break sweat doing some exegetical excavations.

So now I am slowly reading my way through his newest volume on the Thessalonian Epistles. I'm going to blog on Fee once a week for a while - just highlighting what makes him interesting, reliable, for me the commentator of choice on any book he chooses to work on. And not because he is always right, or says what I'd like to confirm my own exegetical prejudices; but because he is to be trusted with a text, which he treats with an intellectual deference that nonetheless tolerates the hard questions. And because he knows when to expose nonsense, question unexamined assumptions, and link up creative connections across the range of the Bible, while making sure that pastors and preachers, scholars and enquirers see both the wood and the trees, and learn to love the view. Tomorrow a few characteristic quotes from Fee to show that all the above isn't just another sales pitch for another commentary to take up further space in an already overpopulated market. 

The afterlife of a new idea

•

The human mind once stretched by a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions. 

(Oliver Wendell Holmes)

The above one liner was on a picture in my friend's house. I read it late on Saturday night / Sunday morning after returning from a fancy dress birthday party at which I was judged the best dressed hippie - or clown. I have a photo to prove it, but not sure I want to put it on public display.....

Bonhoeffer - the church is no domesticated abstraction

"...the church is subjected to all the weaknesses and suffering of the world. The church can, at times, like Christ himself, be without a roof over its head...real worldliness consists in the church's being able to renounce all privileges and all its property but never Christ's Word and the forgiveness of sins. With Christ and the forgiveness of sins to fall back on, the church is free to give up everything else."

"Whoever lives in love is Christ in relation to the neighbour....Christians can and ought to act like Christ; ought to bear the burdens and suffering of the neighbour...It must come to the point that weaknesses, needs and sins of my neighbour afflict me as if they were my own, in the same way as Christ was afflicted by our sins."

Sometimes I don't agree with Bonhoeffer. He is just too uncompromising in tone, an extremist in his style of writing, excessive in the demandingness of his vision of what a Christian is and what the church is. But no matter how strongly I disagree, no matter how cleverly my intellect squirms away from reality, somewhere inside me where it is harder to hide from truth, I know he is right. It's Bonhoeffer who embraces risk and cost and the high calling of God in Christ Jesus, and I who want to have it all toned down to a much more manageable Gospel, a more attainable standard, a more respectable and compliant spirituality. There is a diagnostic precision in Bonhoeffer that leaves little room for argument - it isn't that he has misunderstood the Gospel; more likely that I miscalculated the cost, or flirted once again with compromise. I don't know how easy it would have been to be in Bonhoeffer's company - we don't tend to relax in the presence of such unassuming intensity, articulated in words chosen for the truth they tell - and the truth they tell us about ourselves.

The Annoying Habit of Being Pedantic - mea culpa!

Now I try not to be. But sometimes I am. Pedantic that is. And sometimes my pedantry is no more than my discontent that someone doesn't share my biased and idiosyncratic view of the world. Pedantry is a kind of low grade intellectual showing off! And now and again I'm guilty.

Like tonight. Songs of Praise for All Saints Day. Edward Stourton was wheeled in as the spokesperson on behalf of St Paul. Asked if Paul's legacy still influences the writing of hymns today - "Why yes", says Edward. And the example used as evidence was "Purify my Heart".

Now I don't want to be pedantic, but is it not the Letter of Peter that makes much of purifying the heart, the refiner's fire, holiness as set-apartness? Sure you could find a reference here and there in Paul to those ideas, but short of writing to Brian Doerksen, the writer of the hymn, my guess is that it is more likely to be Peter.  I happen to like the hymn and have never detected an obvious connection between it and the theology of Paul. Not as obvious as 1 Peter anyway - look at 1 Peter chapter 1.

Here's the words - what do you think? Am I just being pedantic?

Purify my heart,
Let me be as gold and precious silver.
Purify my heart,
Let me be as gold, pure gold.

Refiner’s Fire,
My heart’s one desire, is to be holy.
Set apart for You Lord.
I choose to be holy,
Set apart for You my master,
Ready to do Your will.

Purify my heart,
Cleanse me from within and make me holy.
Purify my heart,
Cleanse me from my sin, deep within.

Refiner’s Fire,
My heart’s one desire, is to be holy.
Set apart for You Lord.
I choose to be holy,
Set apart for You my master,
Ready to do Your will.

The Role of a Denominational College

Several key points from our presentation on the work of the Scottish Baptist College at our Annual Baptist Assembly.

What the Scottish Baptist College is "For".

The College is a means to an end. But to a great end – the training of those God calls to be builders of graced communities, to be supporters and encouragers of communities of witness, to be Christ centred activists for the Kingdom of God.

Theological Education as Ministry Formation

Theological education and ministry formation are nothing less than taking seriously Christ’s invitation, Come ….take my yoke upon you….learn of me… Or Paul’s plea, ‘be transformed by the renewing of your mind…and conformed to the image of Christ”  The years in College can be hard years of self discovery, inner change, growth through a process of sifting and searching that deepens mind and soul. That’s why the focus of the College is on academic quality and spiritual formation, clearly centred on Christ and earthed in Scripture, evangelical in purpose and Baptist in conviction.

Calling and Curriculum

Our calling under God as a College is to share the Gospel, to build graced communities of witness to Jesus Christ, and towards this our College works, year in and year out, to replenish and resource ministry in our churches. But we don’t just go on doing the same thing, working to the same old models, indiscriminately  pumping information into heads like forcing insulation foam into cavity walls.

A curriculum has to be shaped around our context, the time and place in history that we call contemporary - and ours is a time of cultural flux. So we need leaders and servants, pastors and evangelists, imaginers of mission, gifted builders of graced community, creative thinkers for God.

“Does God call the equipped or equip the called?” someone asked. Daft question! God does both. The Church is caled to be culturally informed, culturally engaged, in order to be counter cultural; so it must be Gospel informed and Gospel engaged in order to be counter cultural. Because our counter-cultural lives are to be rooted in the reality of the Living Christ, the transformative power of a Gospel of reconciliation, peace and hope.

A strange mixture of a day - of funerals and laughter

Yesterday was a strange mixture of a day. Made up of attending a funeral standing for over an hour in a packed church; being at the afternoon session of our Baptist Assembly; having a meal out with friends between Assembly sessions; and then the evening Assembly session through most of which I was by then exhausted.

At the funeral met people I hadn't seen for anywhere between 35 and 5 years - some of them thought I'd aged. Is it that obvious 35 years on.....? The funeral itself was for Linda. We've known Linda and Jim for, well, 35 years, nearly all our married life, and been friends all that time. The funeral service was an experience that even this experienced pastor found heartbreakingly comforting, emotionally overwhelming in a way that seems even the day after, both inexplicable and right.

You see Jim presented the eulogy for Linda, preceded by a Visual Tribute of family photographs showing Linda as she was from baby to this year. And in what Jim said, he ministered to those who were there sharing in his love and gratitude for the life of his wife and lifelong friend. Then this man who couldn't sing, told of how during Linda's illness he took voice coaching so he could sing at her funeral, the love song that had meant so much to them as a couple down the years and in these past months. Being their friends for all these years, knowing the two of them, and hearing a non singer singing so well in leading a congregation, is simply one of the most moving events I've ever shared. And this was no exercise in denial - we all knew the reality of what was lost, and along with the promise of comfort within that loss, the deep human bonds of recognition that lie at the heart of love and loss, joy and grief, life and death - and how in the best friendships, these are shared.

May Sarton the poet once warned against wasting life's deepest experiences by being so busy in life we move on without assimilating and understanding what they have done to us. So maybe sometime later, when all of this is assimilated, I'll want to write something more - and only with Jim's permission. For now I am simply humbled though not puzzled, by how the love of these two people was made so astonishingly evident and then given as a gift to Linda, and us.

And the rest of the day went by in a haze - except the moment at the evening Assembly Session when, sitting with my friend Catriona of Skinny Fair-Trade Latte fame, the hymn THESE ARE THE DAYS OF ELIJAH was announced.

That was a moment of clarifying mischief, electrifying accidental providence, belief-defying coincidence (or did I pre-arrange it - no honest, I didn't!!) Eye-contact with Catriona came dangerously near irreverent guffaw. Instead I sang it with triumphalist gusto! If you read this Catriona, you can explain the metaphysical implications of your least favourite Assembly hymn being chosen at your first Scottish Assembly.

A strange mixture of a day.................

Reading Bonhoeffer for the health of the soul

If you're looking for a couple of books that take you to the heart of Bonhoeffer's theology, then here's two I've learned a lot from, and which are good theology in their own right:

G. B. Kelly and F. B. Nelson, The Cost of Moral Leadership. The Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003)

Sabine  Dramm, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. An Introduction to His Thought, (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2007)

There's a huge and growing body of secondary material on Bonhoeffer, much of it stimulated over the past decade with the publishing of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Works now being translated into English. I have a friend who may well know more history than, as the Scripture says, "all we can ever imagine or think", who scoffs at the purists who say don't read secondary works first, read the primary texts. His advice was much more sympathetic, and I've followed it for many a year. Applied to Bonhoeffer it means: Get a hold of two or three books on Bonhoeffer written by trusted guides and read them, then when you read Bonhoeffer you will have a sense of who he was, what he was saying and why, the central themes of his thought, and an appreciation of him as a human being engaged in the life of his time. My friend is the kind of friend you disagree with only if you can provide securely nailed down footnotes.

In any case I agree with him, and have relied on that simple common sense trustfulness of the scholarship of others, as a way of being introduced to the great minds of Christian thought and philosophy. Bauckham did it for me with Moltmann: Hunsinger and Webster for Barth; several unforgettable conversations with Donald Mackinnon for Von Balthasar; Robert Jenson and Perry Miller for Jonathan Edwards; and for Bonhoeffer, apart from Bethge's huge biography a number of others, but the two above are now amongst the most engaged and engaging guides.

But after a guided tour by a couple of experts, it's time to start hearing the original voice, reading Bonhoeffer and allowing him to speak for himself.

To read Bonhoeffer is like engaging in a theological detox programme. The toxic build-up of lazy assumptions, intellectual evasions, ethical cost-cutting exercises and spiritual suppressants don't easily survive regular dozes of Christocentric reality checks!

To read Bonhoeffer is good for the soul - astringent, purifying, unsettling, demanding, not recommended for the timid who don't want to ask questions, or the comfortably sure who don't want to hear answers that might contradict their certainties.

Here's two extracts, one is Kelly and Nelson's commentary, and one is unadulterated Bonhoeffer:

Hence Bonhoeffer's injunction, "Only the believers obey, and only the obedient believe"...Faith and obedience are linked together in a dialectical and indissoluble unity in which the willingness to serve God by obeying the Gospel mandates is the natural and spontaneous note of Christian life governbed by the person and mission of Jesus Christ.

Christianity without the living Jesus Christ remains necessarily a Christianity without discipleship, and a Christianity without discipleship is always a Christianity without Jesus Christ.

Both quotations are on pages 134-5 of The Cost of Moral leadership.

Turning right, yellow boxes and another failed experiment in counting to ten.

Sitting in the car waiting to turn right at the yellow boxes.

Murky early morning drizzle makes visibility a bit of a challenge.

Car coming the other way stops and the driver waves me across. Courtesy & Invitation

I see a cyclist coming up the offside of his car and wait for him to pass.

The cyclist waves his acknowledgement and I wave back. Gratitude & Courtesy

At the same time the driver behind me starts leaning on the horn. Impatience & Anger

Four travellers meet at a busy intersection, three of them see each other.

The fourth can't see beyond the car that's in his way.

I'm glad God didn't answer my muttered prayer for the horn happy motorist.

Would have been far too painful.

But I hope God will answer mine -

that the God of mercy

will bring to maturity

that one fruit of the spirit

of which, after decades of practice,

and serial prayer marathons,

I still have a serious deficit.

Now which one is that?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer - "We must have some share in Christ's largeheartedness..."

Reading a lot of Bonhoeffer just now. No ulterior motive beyond spending time with one of the most pastorally astringent and spiritually decisive voices in modern theology. I learn more about the reality of Christ and the call to reality in my living for Christ, from Bonhoeffer than from most other writers. In place of our current accommodation to a host of lesser demands, Bonhoeffer reminds us of the greater demand of the Christ who calls us to take up the cross and follow into the freedom that may in the end require that we lose our lives in order to find them.

"We are not Christ, but if we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ's largeheartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the hour of danger comes and by showing a real compassion that springs not from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ for all who suffer. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behaviour. Christians are called to compassion and action, not in the first place by their own sufferings, but by the sufferings of their brothers and sisters for whose sake Christ suffered."

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Testament of Freedom, 483-484).

I know of no other writer whose biography so faithfully embodies his theology, whose spirituality is so intensely this worldly but is energised by a grace not of this world, and whose life choices so deliberately echo the ominous but purposeful surrender intimated in that crucial Gospel detail, 'Jesus turned his face steadfastly towards Jerusalem". To have "some share in Christ's largeheartedness", to live our lives "with responsibility and in freedom", to be called to compassion and action - is there a more distilled account of what Christian witness looks like in the political and social arenas of our contemporary existence?

It's one of the enriching paradoxes of Bonhoeffer's thought and writing that he remains, decade after decade a voice as contemporary as today's online newspage. He is the theologian whose life and words combine to challenge our theological flabbiness, rebuke our ethical evasiveness, expose our spiritual self-centredness, and our chasing after the chimera of relevance and manufactured connectedness. Instead of such accommodations to culture, his is the call to an asceticism of the heart, an invitation to utter self expenditure in that reckless giving away that is the cost of discipleship, and the clearest reflection of the largeheartedness of Christ. Largeheartedness - that is a demanding benchmark to place over and against our current church programmes, our missional activism, our thinking and public stances on matters of peace, justice and compassion for the vulnerable. I don't read German - so I'd like to know what the word was that Bonhoeffer used that led a translator to use such a magnificently expansive word for the disposition of Christ towards those who suffer. Largeheartedness.

(The icon depicts the resurrection and Christ the lifegiver - the ultimate demonstration of theological integration - Eastern Orthodoxy doing liberation theology?)