Who’s blogging what?

  • Halden tells us why John Owen’s soteriology threatens to turn God into ‘little more than an omnipotent demon’.
  • Byron responds to common Christian misconceptions of going-to-heaven-when-you-die in a wee reflection on John 14.
  • Ben introduces us to Matthew Myer Boulton’s new book, God against Religion: Rethinking Christian Theology through Worship.
  • Cramner has a swipe at Google in his post on the Christian Institute’s suing of the Goliath.
  • If you’re a parent (or planning to be) and you need a good laugh (which you do), then click here.
  • Richard is posting a interesting series on The Theology of Ugly in which he offers, among things, reflections on Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. (Parts I, II, III, IV, V). He writes of Grünewald’s piece:

‘… the monks at the Monastery of St. Anthony specialized in hospital work, particularly the treatment of ergotism, the gangrenous poisoning known as “Saint Anthony’s fire.” In ancient times ergotism was largely caused by ingesting a fungus-afflicted rye or cereal. The symptoms of ergotism included the shedding of the outer layers of the skin, edema, and the decay of body tissues which become black, infected, and malodorous. Prior to death the rotting tissue and limbs are lost or amputated. In 857 a contemporary report of St. Anthony’s fire described ergotism like this: “a Great plague of swollen blisters consumed the people by a loathsome rot, so that their limbs were loosened and fell off before death.” The theological power of the Isenheim Altarpiece is that Grünewald painted the gangrenous symptoms of ergotism into his crucifixion scene. As the patients of St. Anthony’s Monastery worshiped, and a more hideous, ugly and diseased congregation can scarce be imagined, they looked upon the Isenheim Altarpiece and saw a God who suffered with them.

Buchanan or Dylan?

I’m facing a potential crisis with my soon-to-be-two-year-old daughter. She prefers Colin Buchanan’s Follow the Saviour to Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. Now it’s not that I don’t like Colin; in fact, I reckon the guy (and his music, and his theology) is awesome. But I’m trying to introduce my daughter to the classics, the greats of music, like Dylan and Bach. (For the record, she really likes Bach; it’s just Dylan, and Iris DeMent she won’t listen to for more than a track or two. She definitely takes after her mother here!). I sometimes go the bribe compromise and play some of Colin’s more adult albums, like Hard Times or Edge of the Kimberley.

My questions to fellow parents are: 1. ‘Is this a crisis I really need to avert?’ 2. Is Colin part of the necessary diet of milk (albeit milk of the best quality) through which one must progress in order to get to the meat (like Bach)? 3. If so, are there other flavours of milk that your kids (and you) are enjoying at the moment?

[This is a repost from Per Crucem ad Lucem]

Buchanan or Dylan?

I’m facing a potential crisis with my soon-to-be-two-year-old daughter. She prefers Colin Buchanan’s Follow the Saviour to Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. Now it’s not that I don’t like Colin; in fact, I reckon the guy (and his music, and his theology) is awesome. But I’m trying to introduce my daughter to the classics, the greats of music, like Dylan and Bach. (For the record, she really likes Bach; it’s just Dylan, and Iris DeMent she won’t listen to for more than a track or two. She definately takes after her mother here!)

My questions to fellow parents are: 1. ‘Is this a crisis I really need to avert?’ 2. Is Colin part of the necessary diet of milk (albeit milk of the best quality) through which one must progress in order to get to the meat (like Bach)? 3. If so, are there other flavours of milk that your kids (and you) are enjoying at the moment?

Life

Life is the relationship between Father, Son and Spirit. Life is what the Son knows in the Spirit with the Father. Life is what the Father knows with the Son and the Spirit. Life is what the Spirit knows with the Father and the Son. Life is the Triune God, and whatever the Triune God chooses to create and love and redeem. Creaturely life – unlike God’s – is never life in itself, but is always given life, borrowed life, graced life. And, creaturely life is only life when is exists from, and corresponds to, the social life – which is Life – of the Triune family.

Creaturely life is not like a soap opera; it has an ending, albeit one that is constituted by a new beginning, or series of new beginnings. Life is a ‘proper story’ which although it leaves at least some parts of the narrative open ended, and not fully resolved, because it is authored by one who does not have to live in the same time as the story but has freely chosen to, and because this author is unsatisfied to leave the story where it is at, or to let it be merely the victim of all that has gone before, it leads to somewhere else, even to a conclusion, however conceived. And because life’s author is life’s God – not any god but one who has in and through the life of one particular Jew shown unbridled interest in all creation, and primarily in creation’s priesthood – the story leads to life with God, life in God, life in life; it leads to life, and that without rivals. This is the conclusion of life, the new beginning. Such life satisfies and helps to confer meaning on the chapters and plots and subplots we encounter in the now – and maybe then too – on the way. Only when history reaches its time of new beginning – a time already begun in the resurrection from the dead of the aforementioned Jew – will the meaning of things be unveiled. God alone can make satisfying meaning out of history. God alone does make satisfying meaning out of history.

So, time for another cuppa …

The Scandal of Forgiveness

Yesterday, I posted on forgiveness, noting how all human life is constituted by it, that it is both costly and difficult, that it relates to issues of memory and justice, and that its source is always the crucified God. This morning, I read Rowan Williams’ delightful essay Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2007) wherein Williams offers some poignant and insightful observations about this same theme. (I did wonder if God is trying to tell me something!)

Williams notes that ‘one of the oddest things in our culture is that we seem to be tolerant of all sorts of behaviour, yet are deeply unforgiving. The popular media mercilessly display the failings of politicians and celebrities; attitudes to prisoners and ex-prisoners are often harsh; people demand legal redress for human errors and oversights. We shouldn’t be misled by an easy-going atmosphere in manners and morals; under the surface there is a hardness that ought to worry us. And this means that when the Church in the Creed and (we hope) in its practice points us to the possibility of forgiveness, it is being pretty counter-cultural’ (p. 152).

I still wonder if God is trying to tell me something about the scandal of forgiveness …

[NB. This is a repost from Hopeful Imagination]

The Justifying Judgement of God: A Reaction

Over at Theology Forum, James has posted the first of what will be a series of reflections on Justyn Terry’s book, The Justifying Judgement of God. I plan to engage a fair bit in my thesis with Terry’s book so I’ll leave much of what I have to say about it to there. But I would like to say a few things about this book all the same; though more as a brief reaction than a review. Terry’s thesis is well written, and any study that takes on both Forsyth (even though I found his reading of Forsyth unconvincing and distorting at some junctures) and Barth (he does a much fairer job with KB) in the one book is going to be worth reading. Moreover, he is undoubtedly saying some very important things that are – in light of many contemporary attitudes towards God’s judicial work – things that the Church certainly needs to hear and, in some circles, recover as part of its witness to the cross. For this, we are in his debt. But his conviction that judgement is ‘the paradigmatic metaphor’ of the atonement is problematic. Here he trods very close (perhaps too close at points) to the same trap as those who are trying to suggest that penal substitution is the totus of the atonement. (I have posted on this here, here, here and here). He is careful, however, to maintain an important – crucial in fact! – distinction between ‘metaphors’ and ‘theories’, and does so while arguing that judgement is the co-ordinating metaphor.

One of the unfortunate aspects of Terry’s thesis is that such a move threatens to undermine the forward-looking elements of the atonement in favour of predominantly backward-looking ones. By making judgement the key metaphor, Terry then has to proceed to find a way of accounting for the human response to Christ’s saving work, an account which is then fundamentally a separate work. Forsyth, on the other hand (and we could add Calvin, Mozley, Barth, TF Torrance, JB Torrance, Tom Smail, and others), by interpreting the proper human response to have already been offered by Christ in the two-fold movement of his cross – a response in which we participate – keeps the unique act of the atonement and its subsequent action in the life of God’s people grounded firmly in the one person and action of Jesus Christ and so bears witness that from first to last grace is grace and that grace’s name in Jesus Christ.

With that whinge off my hairy chest, let me affirm that the book is certainly worth reading, and there is not a little therein to serve as the basis for some very worthwhile discussion.

On Forgiveness and Majesty

All human life is constituted by forgiveness. Such forgiveness is both costly and difficult – for both offerer and receiver. Costly, because the telos is not to be drawn into a situation of truce but reconciliation, trust and love. Difficult, because two estranged parties are moved from a place of dissatisfaction and what has often become a strange comfort of calloused survival towards a place of new vulnerability, raw tenderness and tentative hope.

‘If forgiveness lies in the memory of wrongs suffered’, writes Miroslav Volf in The End of Memory, ‘it must lie more in what we do with those memories than in the memories themselves. And what we do with our memories will depend on how we see ourselves in the present and how we project ourselves into the future’. I was reminded afresh today in this podcast of the value for human community of Volf’s theological reflections on remembering rightly, on forgiveness, and on truthfulness as a form of justice.

I was also reminded of those haunting words from Simon Wiesenthal’s pen in his significant essay, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness: ‘It is clear that if we look only to retributive justice, then we could just as well close up shop. Forgiveness is not some nebulous thing. It is practical politics. Without forgiveness, there is no future’ (pp. 267–8).

One, of course, cannot stop there; but must proceed to inquire after the fountain – or source, or justification itself – of such forgiveness. Such asking will bring us – even if it takes eternity to do it – face to face with the true nature of divine majesty which is neither material vastness nor the majesty of force, neither the majesty of mystery nor the majesty of thought. The true majesty of God is his mercy. The true majesty of God is that he did what we would never have done – he had mercy on all flesh. His greatness is not in his loftiness, but in his nearness. God is great not because he is above feeling, but because he feels as none of us can. The majesty of God is completely saturated through and through with his forgiving love, which comes out most of all in his treatment of sin … his treatment of those who would wish him dead.

The Good News of Psalm 22

God, God…my God! Why did you dump me
miles from nowhere?
Doubled up with pain, I call to God
all the day long. No answer. Nothing.
I keep at it all night, tossing and turning.

And you! Are you indifferent, above it all,
leaning back on the cushions of Israel’s praise?
We know you were there for our parents:
they cried for your help and you gave it;
they trusted and lived a good life.

And here I am, a nothing—an earthworm,
something to step on, to squash.
Everyone pokes fun at me;
they make faces at me, they shake their heads:
”Let’s see how God handles this one;
since God likes him so much, let him help him!”

And to think you were midwife at my birth,
setting me at my mother’s breasts!
When I left the womb you cradled me;
since the moment of birth you’ve been my God.
Then you moved far away
and trouble moved in next door.
I need a neighbor.

Herds of bulls come at me,
the raging bulls stampede,
Horns lowered, nostrils flaring,
like a herd of buffalo on the move.

I’m a bucket kicked over and spilled,
every joint in my body has been pulled apart.
My heart is a blob
of melted wax in my gut.
I’m dry as a bone,
my tongue black and swollen.
They have laid me out for burial
in the dirt.

Now packs of wild dogs come at me;
thugs gang up on me.
They pin me down hand and foot,
and lock me in a cage—a bag
Of bones in a cage, stared at
by every passerby.
They take my wallet and the shirt off my back,
and then throw dice for my clothes.

You, God—don’t put off my rescue!
Hurry and help me!
Don’t let them cut my throat;
don’t let those mongrels devour me.
If you don’t show up soon,
I’m done for—gored by the bulls,
meat for the lions.

Here’s the story I’ll tell my friends when they come to worship,
and punctuate it with Hallelujahs:
Shout Hallelujah, you God-worshipers;
give glory, you sons of Jacob;
adore him, you daughters of Israel.
He has never let you down,
never looked the other way
when you were being kicked around.
He has never wandered off to do his own thing;
he has been right there, listening.

Here in this great gathering for worship
I have discovered this praise-life.
And I’ll do what I promised right here
in front of the God-worshipers.
Down-and-outers sit at God’s table
and eat their fill.
Everyone on the hunt for God
is here, praising him.
”Live it up, from head to toe.
Don’t ever quit!”

From the four corners of the earth
people are coming to their senses,
are running back to God.
Long-lost families
are falling on their faces before him.
God has taken charge;
from now on he has the last word.

All the power-mongers are before him
—worshiping!
All the poor and powerless, too
—worshiping!
Along with those who never got it together
—worshiping!

Our children and their children
will get in on this
As the word is passed along
from parent to child.
Babies not yet conceived
will hear the good news—
that God does what he says.

(HT: The Dancing God)

DH Lawrence: ‘Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the
world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the
Hesperides.

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.

– David Herbert Lawrence, ‘Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’, in Complete Poems (ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts; New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 250.

Karl Barth on Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope

To Prof. Jürgen Moltmann

Bonn

Basel, Bethesda Hospital, 17 November 1964

Dear Colleague,

It was most kind of you to have a copy of your Theologie dei Hoffnung sent to me. During my stay in the hospital, which is to end the day after tomorrow, I had the leisure to read it all at once and assimilate the basic contents. It is time for me to express my thanks not only for the attention shown to me but also for the instruction and stimulation I received from reading your work. May I say a couple of words about the impression it made on me? I have been looking for decades-I was looking even in the twenties-for the child of peace and promise, namely the man of the next generation who would not just accept or reject what I intended and did in theology but who would go beyond it positively in an independent conception, improving it at every point in a renewed form. I took up and studied your book with this expectation, and at beginning of my reading I seriously asked myself whether Jürgen Moltmann, who, as far as I recalled, was as yet unknown to me personally, might not be the man. I have in fact been impressed not only by your varied scholarship but also by the spiritual force and systematic power that characterize your book. This attempt, as I foresaw, had to be ventured one day, and the critical insights you have brought on both the right and left hand must and will carry the discussion further. It is to be hoped that note will be taken of you in all circles. I am glad to see how you deal with some earlier efforts to portray me and to note what you say about the present state of knowledge concerning me.

But, dear Dr. Moltmann, I do not find in your Theology of Hope what is really needed today to refine C.D. and my own theological thrust. I will not hold it against you, as Gollwitzer does, that your book gives us no concrete guidance on ethics in this sphere, determined and bordered by the eschaton. Nor does it seem any more important to me that one looks in vain for a concrete eschatology, i.e., for an elucidation of such concepts as coming again, resurrection of the dead, eternal life etc. You obviously did not intend to write an eschatology, but only the prolegomena to one and to the corresponding ethics. My own concern relates to the unilateral way in which you subsume all theology in eschatology, going beyond Blumhardt, Overbeck, and Schweitzer in this regard. To put it pointedly, does your theology of hope really differ at all from the baptized principle of hope of Mr. Bloch? What disturbs me is that for you theology becomes so much a matter of principle (eschatological principle). You know that I too was once on the edge of moving in this direction, but I refrained from doing so and have thus come under the fire of your criticism in my later development. Would it not be wise to accept the doctrine of the immanent trinity of God? You may thereby achieve the freedom of three-dimensional thinking which the eschata have and retain their whole weight while the same and not just a provisional) honor can still be shown to the kingdoms of nature and grace. Have my concepts of the threefold time [C.D. III, 2, §47.1) and threefold parousia of Jesus Christ [C.D. IV, 3, §69.4) made so little impact on you that you do not even give them critical consideration? But salvation does not come from C.D. (I started out here when reading your book) but from knowledge of the “eternally rich God” with whom I thought I should deal (problematically enough). If you will pardon me, your God seems to me to be rather a pauper. Very definitely, then, I cannot see in you that child of peace and promise. But why should you not become that child? Why should you not outgrow the inspired onesidedness of this first attempt in later works? You have the stuff (and I congratulate you on this) from which may come a great dogmatician who can give further help to the church and the world …

With friendly greetings, renewed thanks, and all good wishes for future,

Yours,

Karl Barth

– Karl Barth, Letters 1961–1968 (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), 174–6.

Peter Enns: Ironic isn’t it …

On page 9 of his now-more-popular-than-ever Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, Peter Enns writes:

I am thankful for being part of such a solidly faithful group [the Westminster faculty] that does not shy away from some difficult yet basic questions and with whom I am able to have frank and open discussions. This does not happen at every institution, and I do not take that privilege for granted.

mmm …

[HT: Tyler F. Williams]

Rowan Williams on Christian Anthropology

Rowan Williams recently gave a lecture as part of the ‘A World to Believe in – Cambridge Consultations on Faith, Humanity and the Future’ sessions. It’s well worth reading the whole thing. Here’s a snippert:

‘Religious belief is not only belief about God, it’s belief about human beings. And what is non-negotiable in faith is not simply a set of doctrines about the transcendent, but a set of commitments about how human beings are to be seen and responded to. Not everybody in our society has an anthropology, a doctrine of human nature, not everybody has a set of such commitments and they probably never will. But it is a very impoverished society, and it is a very limited educational policy, that assumes you can do without the memory of such doctrines and commitments around. Christian anthropology, the Christian vision of what human beings are about, assumes a number of things about humanity which shape Christian responses to human existence. It assumes that human beings are summoned to respond to an initiative from God, that human beings are summoned to shape a life that will itself communicate something of God to others, and something of humanity itself to God. It assumes that humanity is called to question fictions about both the society and the human self in the name of some greater destiny or capacity in humanity than most political systems or philosophies allow. So, properly understood, Christian anthropology – the Christian doctrine of human nature – is one of those things which ought to reinforce in the university and in society more widely, a set of deep suspicions about the ways in which that range of human capacity is shrunk by political expediency and convenience’.

Full lecture here.

Ratzinger on Christian Faith

 

‘Christian faith means understanding our existence as a response to the Word, the Logos, that sustains and maintains all things. It means affirming the fact that the meaningfulness that we do not create but can only receive has already been given to us’. – Joseph Ratzinger, Einführung in das Christentum. Vorlesungen über das Apostolische Glaubensbekenntnis (Munich: Kösel, 1968), 47.

More on The Shack

A few weeks ago, I posted on the novel The Shack by William P. Young. There’s now available a 30 minute interview of William Young with Mike Feazell, wherein Young ‘discusses the popular view of God as a Christianized Zeus or Gandalf-with-an-attitude as opposed to the loving Father portrayed by the prodigals father or Papa in The Shack, some of the objections people have raised to The Shack, the unity and diversity of the Trinity, the truth of the wrath of God, legalisms expectations and some personal reflections’. It’s available in the following formats:

Bringing Up Britain

Parents and those with responsibilities for bringing up children may be interested to know that BBC Radio 4 will be hosting a 4-week series about parenting called Bringing up Britain which starts this Wednesday 2 April at 8pm. It will be presented by Mariella Frostrup.

[Note: I’m not sure if those outside of Britain will be able to listen online]

Those interested in parenting issues may also like to check out one of my other blogs, Paternal Life.

Latest IJST is out

The April 2008 edition of the International Journal of Systematic Theology (Volume 10/Issue 2) is now out and includes the following articles:

Abstract: The position of Barth and others, that the covenant with Adam is thoroughly legalistic, is based on the incorrect assumption that grace and works cannot coexist as covenant principles. However, the difficulty of seeing the harmony between these principles is real. This article reconsiders the covenant with Adam in light of the medieval concept of the two powers of God, or as we shall argue here, the two perspectives on God’s power. These two perspectives, part of the original intellectual milieu in which covenant theology arose, demonstrate that the divine covenant with humanity may include aspects of both God’s grace and human merit simultaneously. God’s grace is apparent de potentia absoluta, from the perspective of God’s absolute power, and God’s justice and the possibility of Adam’s merit are apparent de potentia ordinata, from the perspective of God’s ordained power. Both perspectives, what God could do and what he has in fact chosen to do, are valid and necessary perspectives for understanding God’s covenant dealings.

Abstract: In recent theology, both Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg have made the kingdom of God a central theme in their thought. However, there has been little ensuing discussion delimiting the precise theological insights entailed in their positions or relating this aspect of their work to their broader theological endeavours. Moreover, discussions surrounding the moral implications of the kingdom of God in these two thinkers have been oddly estranged from the theological articulations on which these ethical suggestions have been based. This article aims to address this deficit in the current debate by examining and exploring the nature and role of the kingdom of God in Moltmann and Pannenberg’s thought. Once the material content of the kingdom has been explored theologically, both theologians will be critiqued on the manner in which they include the theme of judgement into the kingdom, and the subsequent ethical results.

Abstract: Henri de Lubac intended to found his theology on a revaluation of nature achieved by reasserting nature’s dependence on divine supernatural action. He usually identifies nature with human nature however, and therefore fails to demonstrate that the wider natural order also depends on God for its creation, preservation and redemption. In his extensive engagement with the oeuvre of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, de Lubac nevertheless begins to revise this reduction of nature to human nature, although does not fully incorporate the insights gained into his theology. Teilhard’s fundamentally eucharistic understanding of materiality provides suggestive possibilities for the successful completion of de Lubac’s abolition of the philosophy of pure nature.

Abstract: Beginning from Pope Pius IX’s doctrinal definition in Ineffabilis Deus, this article explores the circular paradox of the Virgin Mary’s immaculate fiat. Fully contingent on Christ’s work of reconciliation (and ‘immaculate’ by virtue of it), Mary’s fiat paradoxically precedes that work and consents to it. The article suggests that this circularity is integral to the intimate bond that unites Mary’s fiat to the Son’s kenosis on the cross. Her fiat thus points the way of redeemed creation into the reflexivity of God’s own intra-trinitarian communication. Mary is hereby read as ‘the way to prayer’, the ‘epiphany’ of the Holy Spirit (as Alexander Schmemann names her) who cries ‘Abba, Father’ on behalf of those who do not know how to pray

Abstract: While holiness is one of the motifs in theological discourse that can legitimately be said to entwine many others, the coinage it receives for such honour is being largely exiled from discussion. Thus, any contribution that could be made by considering Jesus Christ as the defining revelation of holiness is sidelined. Beginning with some biblical observations, and enlisting some help from Scottish Congregationalist P.T. Forsyth, this article seeks to encourage a reclaiming of holiness vocabulary as a distinctly christological reality and gift that finds expression first in the unique incarnate life and death of the Son, and then in the life and mission of the community created and sustained by that same Son.

Children and Church

Since being joined to the church, I have always struggled with the notion of children being ‘sent out’ of the service. I hear the rhetoric of church as ‘family’ and so often see this translated as ‘the men’ going off to do their thing, ‘the women’ going off to do their thing, and ‘the children’ going off to do their thing. Lots of groups ‘doing their thing’; but not much family. It’s all a bit like a ‘get your own lunch today’ day that we sometimes have at our place … and, as convenient as it sometimes is, and as it means that I usually get to eat what I want to eat (when I want to eat it), I don’t like it one bit!

Having a toddler of my own has not changed my mind about kids in church one bit. Sure, it’s not always the most convenient way to pray while someone is pulling off your glasses and hitting you in the head with a Bible, but I want to publically worship with my daughter and with the other kids, not have them shoved out to the back hall while ‘we’ do the real ‘church stuff’. Not only are these young people missing out on worshipping with – and learning from – us adults, but we are missing out on worshipping with – and learning from – our kids.

Of course, we’re all familiar with the old arguments that kids learn differently, that their attention spans are less – and these are important considerations that I don’t want to undermine – but what I (and too often they) really hear is ‘they’re a distraction’, and ‘we can’t be bothered thinking of a way of doing church that is relevant to non-adults, or at least to non-adults different from ‘us’.

So it is that I was excited to come across the following words from FW Boreham, cited by Geoff Pound (and reprinted here with his permission):

I am told that, away beyond the Never-Never ranges [remote areas of Australian outback] there is a church from which the children are excluded before the sermon begins.

I wish my informant had not told me of its existence. I am not often troubled with nightmare, my supper being quite a frugal affair.

But just occasionally I find myself a victim of the terror by night. And when I am mercifully awakened, and asked why I am gasping so horribly and perspiring so freely. I have to confess that I was dreaming that I had somehow become the minister of that childless congregation.

As is usual after nightmare, I look round with a sense of inexpressible thankfulness on discovering that it was only a horrid dream. An appointment to such a charge would be to me a most fearsome and terrifying prospect. I could not trust myself.

In a way, I envy the man who can hold his own under such circumstances. His transcendent powers enable him to preserve his sturdy humanness of character, his charming simplicity of diction, his graphic picturesqueness of phrase, and his exquisite winsomeness of behaviour without the extraneous assistance which the children render to some of us.

But I could not do it. I should go all to pieces. And so, when I dream that I have entered a pulpit from which I can survey no roguish young faces and mischievous wide-open eyes, I fancy I am ruined and undone. I watch with consternation as the little people file out during the hymn before the sermon, and I know that the sermon is doomed. The children in the congregation are my salvation. – FW Boreham, ‘Pity My Simplicity!’ Mushrooms on the Moor (London: Charles H Kelly, 1915), 151-152.

If the NT is anything of a reliable witness, it is clear that kids loved being with Jesus. What does this tell us about Jesus? What ought this tell us about the way that the church (the body of which he is head) ought to be?

On Good Friday this year, I took my daughter to a service at the Baptist Church in St Andrews. Many things struck me at that service. Here’s three of them: (i) The worship leader made an enormous effort to help ‘all’ those at the service to worship God in a way that was meaningful to them; (ii) The welcome of children was a fantastic and practical reflection of the stained-glassed window above the communion table that represented Jesus welcoming children; and (iii) Sitting on a pew surrounded by the wriggles and voices of children and their praise, I worshipped God with them.

Three further notes:

1. I am not necessarily advocating the cessation of Sunday Schools.

2. Perhaps the argument that children are better served by the Christian family via some more age-appropriate teaching time (during the sermon, for example) is the most practical (and convenient) compromise, but is it really the best option? I don’t know. Perhaps it is. If so, how can churches better communicate to young people that this service to them is an act of love and an affirmation of their value to the community, and to God? Perhaps this is the real issue behind this post.

3. My wife is convinced that my theological idealisms do not translate into the ‘real world’. She may be right! She usually is!