January stations …

I’ve decided to continue on with my habit of recording some of my stopping points – books read, music listened to, films watched, etc. – each month. Some readers seem to enjoy knowing from where I’m being fertilised, and I enjoy keeping a track of my journeys. So here’s January’s ‘stations’:

Reading:

Listening:

Watching:

Some other news
I’m anticipating that posts here at Per Crucem ad Lucem might be a little scantier over the next few weeks. I have some other writing that I need to set aside some extra time to do, and I’ll be away speaking at a number of events, including Going Further. By the way, upon my return I’ll be giving a public lecture on the Supper entitled ‘Learning to See and to Waddle with our Tongues: a view from the Table’. All are heartedly invited (both to the lecture and to the Supper!). For any who may be interested, I plan to post a copy of my talk here after the event.

 

Collingwood on philosophical writing

‘Every piece of philosophical writing is primarily addressed by the writer to himself. Its purpose is not to select from among his thoughts those of which he is certain and to express those, but the very opposite: to fasten upon the difficulties and obscurities in which he finds himself involved, and try, if not to solve or remove them, at least to understand them better … The philosophers who have had the deepest instinct for style have repeatedly shrunk from adopting the form of a lecture or instructive address, and chosen instead that of a dialogue … or a meditation … or a dialectical process where the initial position is modified again and again as difficulties in it come to light. The prose-writer’s art is an art that must conceal itself and produce not a jewel that is looked at for its own beauty but a crystal in whose depth the thought can be seen without distortion or confusion; and the philosophical writer in especial follows the trade not of a jeweller but of a lens-grinder. He must never use metaphors or imagery in such a way that they attract to themselves the attention due to his thought; if he does that, he is writing not prose but, whether well or ill, poetry; but he must avoid this not by rejecting all use of metaphors and imagery, but by using them, poetic things themselves, in the domestication of prose: using them just so far as to reveal thought, and no further’.

– R.G. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method (ed. James Connelly and Giuseppina D’Oro; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 209–214.

Presbyterianism 101 [updated]

While in the throes of writing lectures and two talks for the Going Further event, I’m also trying to put together a new course outline for the Presbyterian & Reformed course that I teach. And while, to be sure, such things exist in a state of constant flux and demand regular updating, here’s what (inspired by Marc Cortez) I’ve come up with so far.

Note: blind freddies and/or those viewing with ancient monitors may prefer to view a larger image. In which case, click on the blur below:

Aidan Nichols on the beatitudes

‘The Beatitudes predict that if we are discover deep happiness at all it has to be – for disciples of Jesus, that is – via a list of fairly obviously unpleasant life-situations: in poverty, tears, hunger, and even being hunted down by agents of the State.

In these sayings, Jesus washes his hands of the future of any would-be disciples who are content just to make over a bit of their lives or income to religion. He makes an appeal that we should make over our selves, turn our personal world upside-down if need be. And the way of the disciple that flows from that gift of self is ‘blessed’ or ‘happy’ because, typically, they are to find themselves without a bank account (poor in spirit probably means, first and foremost, voluntarily poor), bereft of things and persons they love, with an empty belly and under suspicion by the authorities. It sounds rather implausible, doesn’t it?

Fortunately, we have a key for understanding it later in St Matthew’s Gospel where the New Law is summed up in the twofold command to love: love God and neighbour. The Beatitudes are about the things that love will suffer, they are about what love will willingly endure, the things that love will find itself able to give, and to find satisfaction and even delight in giving. And these things are endless.

The teaching of Christ, then, puts a literally infinite demand on us. We can’t say, ‘No more’ or ‘That’s it’. His teaching admits no limits in what may be asked of us in the way of sacrifice … The Christian religion is a hard way. It is the way of the Cross. But it has the right to make an infinite demand, since it springs from an equally infinite succour, an equally limitless eagerness not only to help us but also to raise us up to share the divine life.

The heart of Christ wants each of us totally, everything about us: our intellect, our emotions, our energies, our talents, our surplus income, our imagination, our freedom. It wants them so as to consecrate them to the Father that God may be all in all, and we be who we were made to be, in God’s image and likeness.

There has to be a powerful element of reckless, exuberant, self-abandoned, love of God in our lives – ‘folly’ was St Paul’s word for it – or we shall never be on the wavelength of the excessive, ecstatic, mad love of God for humankind which made him enter his own creation in Jesus Christ and there be crucified to re-make us all’.

– Aidan Nichols, What Love Will Endure.

Remembering Robert Burns

Yesterday was Robbie Burns Day, and so a good excuse to pull down off the shelf my copy The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns and to be reminded yet again of what an incredibly playful wordmaster the Ayrshire-born poet was.

It was a good day too to dig out some words by Burns’ compatriot PT Forsyth, who in March 1878 (and then again the following year) lectured on Burns, wherein he offered the following remarks:

‘Scotland is not a land of artists. Perhaps it has only produced one really great artist in the true sense of the word. I mean Scott. If the artist is one who sets himself with all his power to please in a noble and lofty way – one whose chief thought is not self-revelation, but the revelation of something above and beyond self; if he is the interpreter of the vast and varied physical and moral and spiritual world, I say Scott is probably the only Scotchman in the highest sense worthy of that name. But, perhaps our dearest poets are not our highest artists. Burns was much that was bad. He was always true – true to humanity, true to his own class, true with himself. You have him as he really was, painted with his own brush with rare skill, much fineness of line, great firmness of touch, great range and depth of colour. You do not find him so much of an artist as to paint for you the thing he would wish to be considered, and offer you that as a portrait of himself. The first influence that woke Burns’s poetic fire was Scotland, the second was woman, the third was nature, the fourth was religion, the fifth was man. Of course, I do not mean that these followed one another in exactly that order. The soul of genius does not grow up in that orderly way. It has a perplexing way of mixing the courses in its spiritual diet … His attitude to women was at once his glory and his shame. Here he rises to his best and here he sinks to his worst. His worst was very bad … It was not humanity that touched him. It was the men and women around him; especially the women. Do not forget that Burns belonged to a country where, I am ashamed to say, a high idea of purity is not the rule in his class of society … Burns, in his fine and fresh fidelity to nature … taught us that nothing can be really beautiful which is not also fundamentally true. And truthful is the one word we can most fully apply to Burns, whether in poetry or in his life. He did many things he ought not to have done. One thing he did not do: he never lied. And he never distorted the voice of nature … [On religion], except in the hour of passion, or in the time of revolt from the horrible religion around him, Burns himself was a pious man, almost a godly man. He strove to pierce to the heart of the matter when everybody round him was feeding on the husks … [Burns] is one of the very foremost of the apostles and apologists of human nature. It was because he could not stand the wholesale denunciation of it, preached by men holding the Calvinistic and unscriptural dogma of total depravity, that he revolted so fiercely from the ecclesiastical conception of man. He saw a dignity, a tenderness, a goodness, a manliness in the men and women round him which did not seem to spring from their having been converted. He saw loving and faithful hearts among those whom the Church called reprobate and non-elect. He felt in himself, along with sins he never blinked, something more and better which the religious world of his day would give him no credit for … And write what you will against him, hang, draw, and quarter him on the moral rack, yet you must say this, that the most compassionate of human hearts was his, that his pity covered all the world except a liar; that it ranged tearfully from daisies and field mice, dogs and old mares, through little children and fond foolish women to heroic souls in their dire adversity, and their conflict with death’.

It was also good necessary to close the day with a wee dram … the Lord knows I needed one.

Church Unity as a Living Concord

One of the books that I currently have on the go is Reinhard Hütter’s Bound to Be Free: Evangelical Catholic Engagements in Ecclesiology, Ethics, and Ecumenism. So far, there’s much to commend it. But rather than write a review, time permits me only to share some challenging words from the book that I’ve been reflecting on, and which recall some Hunsingeresque themes:

‘Would the Roman Catholic communion be prepared, in the framework of a Vatican III, to nuance or delimit its insistence upon the jurisdictional and doctrinal primacy of the bishop of Rome as a condition for mutual recognition and communion in faith and confession? And on the other hand, would the churches of the Reformation be prepared to recognize an ecumenical primacy of the bishop of Rome that stood under the authority of the Scriptures, was post-confessional, and operated iure humano in service to the visible unity of all Christians? We would do well to remember Melanchthon, who in his postscript to the Smalcald Articles of 1537 sent a signal that is decidedly both evangelical and ecumenical: “However, concerning the pope I maintain that if he would allow the gospel, we, too, may (for the sake of peace and general unity among those Christians who are now under him and might be in the future) grant to him his superiority over the bishops which he has ‘by human right.”‘ Melanchthon’s postscript must be understood as an entirely proper use of Reformation ecclesiology. Precisely because the church stands or falls on the truth of the justification of sinners, she is free to recognize historically evolved structures and traditions and to affirm them as gift of the Holy Spirit to the church. This recognition and affirmation is valid as long as these structures and traditions serve the proclamation of the gospel. Thus the church is free also to recognize and affirm an office of ministry understood as constituted by human right that both presides over and is in collegiality with the bishops and that serves the unity of the whole church. Were the churches to pass this test case, it would leave open the possibility for a communio-ecclesiology perspective in which unity did not necessarily flow out of an abstract reunification of the churches under the umbrella of a Tridentine-Vatican-ordered primacy. On the contrary, it would then be possible for Christian unity to be understood as a concord of faith and confession in the Holy Spirit that would reconcile the multiplicity of churches and whose visible manifestation would be the common celebration of the Lord’s Supper, at which the bishop of Rome could preside as sign of unity. However, the head and center of this unity of concord would remain Christ alone, who is present in the word of promise and forgiveness and in the elements of the Supper. For only on the basis of this Center can the nature of the ordained office of word and sacrament manifest itself as an office of ministry to the proclamation of the gospel and, further, to the living concord of Christians in the local parish, as well as on the regional and indeed the universal level of the church. According to Luther’s ecclesiology, the test case of the papal office can hinge solely on whether the ordained ministry to the gospel also includes – and indeed, where possible, requires – a ministry of unity to all of Christendom. If the papal office permitted itself to be understood as a ministry under the gospel, serving as a transforming – even re-forming – catalyst for the unity of the church, it would open the door to an ecumenically promising and, from the perspective of the Lutheran Reformation, permissible approach to the thorniest of all ecumenical dilemmas. After all, Luther himself asserted in 1531 that he “could kiss the pope’s feet if he would permit the gospel”’.

– Reinhard Hütter, Bound to Be Free: Evangelical Catholic Engagements in Ecclesiology, Ethics, and Ecumenism (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 192–3.

Jack Clemo, ‘On the Death of Karl Barth’

He ascended from a lonely crag in winter,
His thunder fading in the Alpine dusk;
And a blizzard was back on the Church,
A convenient cloak, sprinkling harlot and husk –
Back again, after all his labour
To clear the passes, give us access
Once more to the old prophetic tongues,
Peak-heats in which man, time, progress
Are lost in reconciliation
With outcast and angered Deity.

He has not gone silenced in defeat:
The suffocating swirl of heresy
Confirms the law he taught us; we keep the glow,
Knowing the season, the rhythm, the consummation.

Truth predicts the eclipse of truth,
And in that eclipse it condemns man,
Whose self-love with its useful schools of thought,
Its pious camouflage of a God within,
Is always the cause of the shadow, the fall, the burial,
The smug rub of hands
Amid a reek of research.

The cyclic, well-meant smothering
Of the accursed footprints inside man’s frontier;
The militant revival,
Within time and as an unchanged creed,
Of the eternal form and substance of the Word:
This has marked Western history,
Its life’s chief need and counter-need,
From the hour God’s feet shook Jordan.

We touched His crag of paradox
Through our tempestuous leader, now dead,
Who ploughed from Safenwil to show us greatness
In a God lonely, exiled, homeless in our sphere,
Since his footfall breeds guilt, stirs dread
Of a love fire-tongued, cleaving our sin,
Retrieving the soul from racial evolution,
Giving it grace to mortify,
In deeps or shallows, all projections of the divine.

– Jack Clemo, ‘On the Death of Karl Barth’ in The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse (ed. Donald Davie; Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 291–2.

Robert Jenson on the Supper

I’ve just completed writing a lecture on the Supper. It was great fun to research, not least because I used it as an excuse to read Robert Jenson’s two-volume systematics. And while I don’t engage with Jenson in the lecture per se, his charateristically-stimulating work charged my thinking in ways that I had not anticipated and which birthed some fruitful avenues of thought. Here’s one passage that I spent some time meditating on:

‘When the Eucharist is celebrated, Christ’s promises of the Kingdom and of his presence in it are in fact fulfilled: even though the Kingdom is still future so long as we are not risen, each celebration is already a wedding feast. Anticipation, we may say, is visible prophecy; so in the Eucharist we come together to live the Kingdom’s fellowship beforehand. But our coming together, however faithful and pious, does not locate us at the gate of heaven, unless God puts us there. That he does is the content of faith that has the Supper itself as the external object to which it clings. That is, it is the content of faith in those other promises: “This bread is my body. This cup is my blood of the new covenant”’. – Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, Volume 2: The Works of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 216.

Grace and the City [of God]

The ABC’s Encounter program recently aired a worthwhile discussion about the contemporary relevance of Augustine’s City of God. The program, titled ‘Grace and the City’ can be read here, listened to via a stream here, or downloaded here.

The guests on the program include Charles Mathewes (Associate Professor in Religious Studies, University of Virginia), John von Heyking (Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Lethbridge, Alberta), Lawrence Cross (Associate Professor, Faculty of Theology and Philosophy, Australian Catholic University), John Milbank (Professor in Religion, Politics and Ethics, The University of Nottingham) and Thomas Smith (Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Villanova University).

There are also extended interviews with John Milbank and Charles Mathewes available as downloads.

While I’m thinking Augustine, can anyone recommend a decent biography on Augustine? I have read a few older biographies, and I own, but have not yet read, Augustine: A New Biography by James O’Donnell. And I’m wondering about I’ve just purchased Peter Brown’s book Augustine of Hippo: A Biography which Diarmaid MacCulloch cites favourably. Other recommendations? Warnings?

The Novel-Reading Disease

Every historian can testify that one of the real stimulants in their field of study is happening quite unexpectedly upon amusing choice morsels, even if they come via the help of Google Books. Here’s one that I happened across today on the dangers of engaging in that most womanly of contemporary vices – reading novels!

‘The Novel-Reading Disease’ and ‘Novel-Reading and Insanity’ both appeared in The Sabbath School Magazine, designed for the use of teachers, adult scholars, and parents (ed. William Keddie; Glasgow: John M’Callum, 1872), 34.

Why poetry?

Tucked away in one of last year’s editions of Christian Century – an edition I picked up largely to read articles by John de Gruchy on Bonhoeffer, Clifford Green on Metaxas’ version of Bonhoeffer, and Stanley Hauerwas’ review of Peter Leithart’s Defending Constantine – is a delightful review (pp. 62–5) by Brian Doyle, of Mink River fame, on three books of poetry: Every Riven Thing by Christian Wiman, Swan by Mary Oliver and Walking Papers by Thomas Lynch. Doyle begins by ‘tiptoeing’ towards an answer to the question, ‘Why poetry?’ As someone who reads, and posts, a goodly number of poems, I thought his answer worth repeating:

‘Poetry is “memorable speech,” said the (great) poet Wystan Hugh Auden, “about birth, death, the Beatific Vision.” Or, in less lovely words: good poetry, great poetry, is the distilled salt and song of the way we speak; it is espresso speech, perhaps; it pierces and penetrates and illuminates, it makes us see fresh.

Poetry is crucial to us as human beings, for speaking memorably and listening ferociously is perhaps how we best evolve and pray powerfully and stutter toward grace and peace and joy, toward a world where no child weeps and violence is a dark memory. If we do not, as a species, speak memorably and listen ferociously, we have no horizon, no map, no theme. Think, for example, of a world in which the thin Jewish man Yeshua ben Joseph did not speak so colorfully and memorably of forgiveness and grace. Would we have come even this far toward the Light?

I know there are some among us who court silence as their prayer, but I cannot imagine a world shorn of the music of language, the dance of words, the mysterious ways that lines and sentences and images conspire to awaken and elevate and inspire us. Yes, inspire; how very many times have we been lifted by songs and poems, chants and litanies, a twist of words that exactly caught the way we felt but could not say? More times than we can ever count, yes?

So, if we are serious about attentiveness – which is to say, if we are hard at work spiritually – we read poetry on the chance that it might move and startle and illuminate us, that it might be memorable in ways that other written (and sung) language is not. This is why we are so often left cold by lesser poetry, because many poems are merely precious, allusive, self-conscious and self-absorbed without being memorable, moving, startling or accessible. Sometimes I think that great poetry is the highest literary art because it has to claw past such an ocean of terrible muck’.

Library services

After reading about this latest threat from the depraved, short-sighted, unimaginative and wreckless Dunedin Council to cut library services, I was inspired to read (via Jim Gordon’s blog) about the people in Stony Stratford, near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, who have spent the week withdrawing their maximum allowance of books in protest against council plans to close it as part of budget cuts. They withdrew all 16,000 books from their library. So we’re off to the library again to max out our borrowing, doing our bit to undermine the claim that ‘the proposed changes reflected the number of people using the library …’, a claim I find astonishing given the high number of library users I observed when I was in there last week; in fact, every time I’ve been in there. In fact, I don’t think that I’ve ever seen so many using a public library. It was a bit like a packed stadium, only the crowds were there for longer. So if you live in Dunners, and you’re not a regular at our library, please get reading our books!

BTW: here’s one of the priceless images from last century, depicting the London Library after the 1940 blitz:

Update: I will continue to post links related to this issue here as I find, or am alerted to, them:

 

 

 

Reducing to nothing the things that are: a wee reflection on the politics of power

Vince Boudreau’s book Resisting Dictatorship: Repression and Protest in Southeast Asia begins with these words:

There are times and places about which nothing seems more significant than the sheer energy and violence that states direct against basic freedoms. The snippets of information that filter from these dictatorial seasons – tales of furtive hiding and tragic discovery: hard times and uneasy sleep – describe lives utterly structured by state repression. Authoritarians bent on taking power, consolidating their rule or seizing resources frequently silence opponents with bludgeons, bullets and shallow graves, and those who find themselves in the path of the state juggernaut probably have trouble even imagining protest or resistance without also calculating the severity or likelihood of state repression. Such considerations surely influence whether individuals take action or maintain a frustrated silence, and will over time broadly shape protest and resistance. (p. 1)

My long interest in the people and politics of Burma, in particular, means that I think a lot about this kind of stuff, and particularly about how the community of God might witness to and in the midst of such situations where the abuses of authority birth such blatantly evil fruit and where the climate of hope has been beclouded in fear. [Rose Marie Berger’s recent post on Guantanamo: When Will it Get Foreclosed?, for example, recalled such fruit in another part of the world]. Certainly, all human relationships and institutions live under the constant threat of the abuse of power. And even a cursory reading of history will reveal that the Church too has been both victim and perpetrator of such abuse. (I am aware that already I have used the words authority and power interchangeably here. Certainly they are at least related, and the proper understanding and use of each will decide whether the ways being pursued bring the fragrance of life or the stench of death to a situation.)

In my teaching, I am particularly interested to encourage thinking about the relationship between power and pastoral ministry, between the politics of power and what I call the ‘eucharistic ontology’ of Christian witness. Of course, we might do just as well reading 1 Corinthians 1.27–29, and recalling that ‘God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, what is weak in the world to shame the strong, what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God’. I guess that I am concerned with exploring the Church’s option of resistance to powers’ abuse as noted by Boudreau; namely, whether we ‘take action or maintain a frustrated silence’. And if the Church is called, among other things, to participate in Jesus’ work of destroying ‘the works of the devil’ (1 John 3.8), then what weapons does God (for surely, to paraphrase Bonhoeffer, that section of humanity in which Christ is taking form must resist the temptation to take up other weapons!) arm the friends of Jesus with?

In his ‘Reflections on the Notification Sent to Jon Sobrino’, published in Getting the Poor Down From the Cross: Christology of Liberation, José Comblin recalls that ‘Christendom has meant that there has been a close alliance between the clergy and the civil powers, meaning the civil authorities. A long reflection that is not only theory, but that has emerged out of living together with the poorest of the people, has demonstrated that this alliance has left no space for the Church of the Poor. This alliance has treated the poor like beggars, and has not allowed them to grow socially and/or culturally. This has been the case despite the pretty speeches of the authorities, meaning the dominant aristocracies’ (p. 75).

The fact is, as Duncan Forrester has also reminded us of in his Theological Fragments, Christian worship loses its integrity when it becomes either isolated from the realities of life, or an escape from the implications of oppression. ‘It is impossible to keep company with Christ if we refuse to accept the company he has chosen to keep. Following the patristic principle ubi Christus ibi ecclesia (where Christ is, there is the Church), it is necessary to go to find Christ and therefore the Church among the poor he loves, to listen to them, and to learn afresh from them how to worship God in Spirit and in truth … Worship separated from the great issues of liberty and justice has become idolatry, an instrument of ideological manipulation, a way of hiding from God rather than encountering Him’ (pp. 109, 110).

So the need to keep worshipping, to keep being confronted by the Word who puts us and our schemes to death and then calls us to participate in his action, and to keep hoping, like John the Baptist, that the One we encounter on the road might be ‘the one who is to come’ (Matt 11.3//Luke 7.19–20).

A prayer for refreshed sensibilities

‘O Lord, refresh our sensibilities. Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in and sauces which are never the same twice. Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with, and casseroles that put starch and substance in our limp modernity. Take away our fear of fat, and make us glad of the oil which ran upon Aaron’s beard. Give us pasta with a hundred fillings, and rice in a thousand variations. Above all, give us grace to live as true folk – to fast till we come to a refreshed sense of what we have and then to dine gratefully on all that comes to hand. Drive far from us, O Most Bountiful, all creatures of air and darkness; cast out the demons that possess us; deliver us from the fear of calories and the bondage of nutrition; and set us free once more in our own land, where we shall serve thee as though hast blessed us – with the dew of heaven, the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine’. – Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969), 278.

Christopher Morse on heaven

An interesting wee interview with Christopher Morse appeared in today’s Salisbury Post in which Morse (the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Theology and Ethics at Union Theological Seminary) speaks about his latest book The Difference Heaven Makes: Rehearing the Gospel as News. Here’s a few snippets:

‘The reason I titled my book “The Difference Heaven Makes” is that I find that the subject of heaven is trivialized today in both academic and popular contexts. One reviewer has commented that it was surprising to find a professor from Union seminary writing about heaven. When schools of the church cease to explore afresh the traditions of scriptural and doctrinal testimonies regarding heaven other voices in the public media, often with little knowledge of these traditions, presume to speak for Christianity in their place without any accountability. Heaven becomes, as one author has written, whatever we want it to be. But rather than complaining that such popular writings sell many times over our books as professors, we should work harder as theologians and scholars to convey as clearly and vitally as possible how it all really matters’.

‘To pray that “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” is to acknowledge that heaven involves a doing. Notice, it is a doing based upon a coming. But what in practice does this mean? In the Gospel this heavenly doing is said to be a coming to us from God that is described as “at hand” but not under our control, not in our hands or originating from us. From this Gospel standpoint what we call ethics, or our human responsibility, is actually our being enabled to respond to what is taking place. Jesus called his disciples to seek this kingdom at hand in the promise that it is the Father’s good pleasure to give it to us. In doing so we are said to become witnesses of what is being done in heaven’.

Read the entire interview here.

On confession

One of the things that the so-called ‘Parable of the Two Sons’ teaches us is that as far as God is concerned, repentance is not principally about the admission of guilt or the acknowledgement of fault but rather is first and foremost about the confession of death. Another thing that the parable announces is that as far as Jesus is concerned, real confession is subsequent to forgiveness. Confession is not a transaction. Confession is not a negotiation in order to secure forgiveness. Confession is, as Robert Farrar Capon avers in The Parables of Grace, ‘the after-the-last gasp of a corpse that finally can afford to admit it’s dead and accept resurrection. Forgiveness surrounds us, beats upon us all our lives; we confess only to wake ourselves up to what we already have … The sheer brilliance of the retention of infant baptism by a large portion of the church catholic is manifest most of all in the fact that babies can do absolutely nothing to earn, accept, or believe in forgiveness; the church, in baptizing them, simply declares that they have it … And our one baptism for the forgiveness of sins remains the lifelong sacrament, the premier sign of that fact. No subsequent forgiveness – no eucharist, no confession – is ever anything more than an additional sign of what baptism sacramentalizes … We may be unable, as the prodigal was, to believe it until we finally see it; but the God who does it, like the father who forgave the prodigal, never once had anything else in mind’ (pp. 140–1).

Some encouragement for preachers

In Luke 12, Jesus tells his ‘little flock’ a number of things: He tells them (and here I’m following Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase) to not fuss about what’s on the table at mealtimes or if the clothes in their closet are in fashion. He directs them to look at the ravens, free and unfettered, to not be tied down to a job description, and to be carefree in the care of God. He commands them to be generous, to give to the poor, and to keep their shirts and lights on waiting for the master to return. To all of which Peter replied, ‘Master, are you telling this story just for us? Or is it for everybody?’ And the Master said, ‘Let me ask you: Who is the dependable manager, full of common sense, that the master puts in charge of his staff to feed them well and on time? Blessed is the person who is doing their job when the master shows up’.

In light of this Lukan text, Robert Farrar Capon (in Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus) suggests that preachers labour under three distinct requirements:

First, they are to be faithful (pistoí). They are called to believe, and they are called only to believe. They are not called to know, or to be clever, or to be proficient, or to be energetic, or to be talented, or to be well-adjusted. Their vocation is simply to be faithful waiters on the mystery of Jesus’ coming in death and resurrection. What the world needs to hear from them is not any of their ideas, bright or dim: none of those can save a single soul. Rather, it needs to hear – and above all to see – their own commitment to the ministry of waiting for, and waiting on, the only Lord who has the keys of death (Rev. 1:18).

Second, the clergy are to be wise (phrónimoi). They are not to be fools, rich or poor, who think that salvation can come to anyone as a result of living. The world is already drowning in its efforts at life; it does not need lifeguards who swim to it carrying the barbells of their own moral and spiritual efforts. Preachers are to come honestly empty-handed to the world, because anyone who comes bearing more than the folly of the kerygma – of the preaching of the word of the cross (1 Cor. 1:21, 18) – has missed completely the foolishness (mōrón) of God that is wiser (sophōteron) than [human beings]. The wise (phrónimos) steward, therefore, is the one who knows that God has stood all known values on their heads – that, as Paul says in 1 Cor. 1:26ff., [God] has not chosen the wise, or the mighty, or the socially adept, but rather that [God] has chosen what the world considers nonsense (ta mōrá) in order to shame the wise (sophoús), and what the world considers weak (ta asthené) in order to shame the strong. The clergy are worth their salt only if they understand that God deals out salvation solely through the klutzes (ta agené) and the nobodies (ta exouthenéména) of the world-through, in short, the last, the least, the lost, the little, and the dead. If they think God is waiting for them to provide them with classier help, they should do everybody a favor and get out of the preaching business. Let them do less foolish work …

[And thirdly], … preachers are stewards whom the Lord has ‘set over his household servants to provide them with food at the proper time.’ After all the years the church has suffered under forceful preachers and winning orators, under compelling pulpiteers and clerical bigmouths with egos to match, how nice to hear that Jesus expects preachers in their congregations to be nothing more than faithful household cooks. Not gourmet chefs, not banquet managers, not caterers to thousands, just Gospel pot-rattlers who can turn out a decent, nourishing meal once a week. And not even a whole meal, perhaps; only the right food at the proper time. On most Sundays, maybe all it has to be is meat, pasta, and a vegetable. Not every sermon needs to be prefaced by a cocktail hour full of the homiletical equivalent of Vienna sausages and bacon-wrapped water chestnuts; nor need nourishing preaching always be dramatically concluded with a dessert of flambéed sentiment and soufléed prose. The preacher has only to deliver food, not flash; Gospel, not uplift. And the preacher’s congregational family doesn’t even have to like it. If it’s good food at the right time, they can bellyache all they want: as long as they get enough death and resurrection, some day they may even realize they’ve been well fed. (pp. 243–5).

An anniversary

Today, Judy and I celebrated our wedding anniversary. Ten years ago, we made public vows to one another to ‘establish our marriage in the cross of Christ’, we shared in our first holy communion together as partners-in-covenant, and then we enjoyed another meal together with family and friends, some of whom we still keep in touch with.

Though this morning’s news that parts of the recently-opened Mediterranean Garden at the Dunedin Botanic Garden had again been vandalised left something of a cloud over an already-cloudy Dunedin day, it was good to pack the troops into the ute and drive down to the Taieri Mouth where we sat in the car, ate home-made salami Caesar salad out of old ice-cream containers, drink a bottle of cheap-but-Aussie Cabernet Sauvignon out of chipped plastic picnic glasses, and enjoy knowing that the downpour which was blurring our view of the Taieri River at its low and muddy tide was also filling our near-empty water tank at home. I think we also broke the record in how many knock-knock ‘jokes’ (I use the word loosely) a perfect four-year-old daughter and her besotted-father can author in an afternoon. Samuel appeared unimpressed. A stop at Pier 24 – for hot chocolate, a fluffy and a barely-passable flat white – on the way home was required by all, and was ruined only by watching the seagulls defecate all over the car that I’d just washed for the first time in twelve months. It’s not like they don’t have anywhere else to void excrement from their little sand- and chip-filled bowels!

We decided that dinner tonight would be at one of our favourite eating holes – Fleurs Place. It was a good choice. We began with seafood chowder, and scallops (from Nelson) cooked with mushroom and locally-cured bacon. Then came the main course: a whole blue cod, baked, and served with locally-grown vegetables and four additional fish fillets – sole, moki, gurnard and more blue cod – lightly pan-fried and served with chilli, coconut and coriander. Good Central Otago wine and an appropriate amount of pilsner accompanied a conversation in which gratitude, joy and hope recurred as dominant themes. It’s often hard, but it’s good to love, to keep loving, and to share together in the hope of love’s great victory. There was no room left for dessert.

The drive home was slow, as after-dinner driving should be. The heavy fog on the highway had by now largely lifted, or was blown away. We talked more, and wondered about these two poems by RS Thomas:

Anniversary
Nineteen years now
Under the same roof
Eating our bread,
Using the same air:
Sighing, if one sighs,
Meeting the other’s
Words with a look
That thaws suspicion.

Nineteen years now
Sharing life’s table,
And not to be first
To call the meal long
We balance it thoughtfully
On the tip of the tongue.
Careful to maintain
The strict palate.

Nineteen years now
Keeping simple house.
Opening the door
To friend and stranger;
Opening the womb
Softly to let enter
The one child
With his huge hunger.

– RS Thomas, ‘Anniversary’, in Collected Poems, 1945–1990 (London: Dent, 1993), 103.

A Marriage

We met
under a shower
of bird-notes.
Fifty years passed,
love’s moment
in a world in
servitude to time.
She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
‘Come.’ said death,
choosing her as his
partner for
the last dance. And she,
who in life
had done everything
with a bird’s grace,
opened her bill now
for the shedding
of one sigh no
heavier than a feather.

– RS Thomas, ‘A Marriage’, in Collected Poems, 1945–1990 (London: Dent, 1993), 533.

 

 

Critics, writing, Sudoku and some other interesting stuff …

Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Randall Jarrell, Lionel Trilling and Walt Whitman.

The New York Times recently ran a fascinating multi-author series on criticism, and on why criticism (still) matters:

An interesting wee piece by Ed Park on The Art of the Very Long Sentence.

Richard Bauckham has a very witty piece on ‘Reconstructing the Pooh Community’ wherein he has a swipe at some of the speculative sociological readings of the NT that some in the guild are want to become obsessed with.

Ben Myers continues to enthral us with his own fiction, this time with ‘a short story’ called The Shakespearean Death.

Benedict Carey tells me why I’m a Sudoku- and crossword-junkie (and more recently a jigsaw-puzzle-junkie) in his article on Tracing the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving.

Michael Jinkins posts some Nominees for Today’s Niebuhr.

The latest edition of the Journal of Reformed Theology is out. It includes articles by David P. Henreckson (‘Possessing Heaven in Our Head: A Reformed Reading of Incarnational Ascent in Kathryn Tanner’, pp. 171–184), Paul Helm (‘Reformed Thought on Freedom’, pp. 185–207) and Meine Veldman (‘Secrets of Moltmann’s Tacit Tradition: Via Covenant Theology to Promise Theology’, pp. 208–239).