Sean the Baptist

Globe

I spent a part of this morning looking again through Micheal O'Siadhail's recent collection Globe (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2007).  O'Siadhail's poetry has long been a part of my thinking and reflection about the (cliche alert) meaning of life, etc..  I have never been into Jazz that much, but the use of Jazz as a metaphor for the fragility and responsibility of human life and relationships (from the personal to the global) is in O'Siadhail's hands, almost endlessly suggestive.  It is no surprise that he has been a strong influence  on a number of theologians (David Ford and Dan Hardy to name but two).  In Globe, I have found again poems that resonate with some of my thinking and writing about interpretation and pluralism and that draw on the Babel story.  This poem is from the climactic sequence 'Angel of Change'.

Skeins
Never to forget the towering dreams
Of heaven-hankers before their time,
Brick for stone, for mortar, slime

So many offered for madcap schemes.
Over and over again some other fable
Of perfection: Let us make a name.

Another skyscraper and still the same.
Fall and fall all spires of Babel
To lovely confusions of our gabble.

Scattered abroad on the face of the earth
As slowly we relearn each other's worth,
Difference and sameness incommensurable.

In all our babble birds of a feather -
Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile,
Beetle knows beetle - Qui se ressemble

S'assemble - all over flock together,
Skeins of hope, gleich und gleich...
Like to like, kind calls fellow -

Rui wa tomo o yobu in Tokyo.
Around our globe, a netted Reich,
Of random trust, cross-ties of civility,

Farflung jumbles 0f non-violent voices
Argue our intertwining choices
To weave one planet's fragile city.

Micheal O'Siadhail, Globe (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2007), 112.

Radical Gospel Library

This site contains a number of interesting looking articles, some of which are unpublished, by the likes of Cavanaugh, Ellul, Hauerwas, Milbank,Yoder, Mccarthy-Matzko.  This is the blurb:

The library contains radical and subversive writings by several prominent Christian theologians.The work here reflects the alien nature of following Christ, and being a people in exile, "living out of control". These theologians are challenging the standard reading of the bible and Christ presented in todays mainstream establishments. Their writings are uncompromising and threatening to the cheap theology characteristic of the North American Church.

If you are interested in radical, political theology (and even if you aren't but think you ought to be) then go and take a browse.  H/T Ben Myers.

Sabbatical Purchases

I am taking this week off, with no more than a passing thought for those who are spending parts of the week retreating (fellow staff and students) or researching (hope its going OK Catriona).  So I have been out on the spend, the results being:

The Box Set of Karl Richter's recordings of Bach (Matthew and John Passions; B Minor Mass; Christmas Oratorio and Magnificat).  This is a bargain on Amazon at the moment (£3.00 per CD)

Apple keyboard.  There have been some comment recently in the blogosphere about the relative merits or demerits of Apple kit.  But tell me, what would you rather use - a cheap, nasty Dell keyboard, each key of which requires depression to the depth of about half an inch, or a chrome and white streamlined wonder of engineering; not only beautiful but functional beyond any reasonable expectation (full numeric keyboard; 2 USB ports; one key to expose the desktop; full control of ITunes etc etc etc)?

Oh yes, and books, but not theology.

John Stubbs' highly praised biography of John Donne (hardback, local Oxfam bookshop for a few quid)

Edward Said's lectures on musical performance and interpretation.

Easter Reading: Between Cross and Resurrection

Allow me to make a suggestion for anyone who wants to do some in-depth exploration of the nature of Easter Faith.  Alan Lewis' Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday is one of the most profound and poignant theological works that I know.  T. F. Torrance in the blurb on the jacket calls it 'the most remarkable and moving book I have ever read'.  Essentially it is a work that explores cross and resurrection from the perspective of the mid-point of Easter Saturday.  Its is not  an easy read (over 450 pages of deep theolohical reflection) and Lewis' reflections are shaped by immersion in the theology of Luther, Barth, Bonhoeffer, Jungel, Moltmann and von Balthasar.  What gives the discussion its edge, however, is the fact that mid way through writing it Lewis was diagnosed with a cancer from which he eventually died, before completing the work.  This renders the final chapter on 'Living the Story in Personal Life' a classic of spiritual and theological autobiography.  Here are two quotations from that final chapter to whet your appetite.  I recommend that, following your Easter celebrations you get a copy, as a way of getting a better understanding of what you have just been celebrating, and as a way of preparing for next year.

On Death

Death is relationlessness and utter isolation, the absence of others and the final severance of those connections with neighbors, friends and family which have been in an accelerating process of collapse throughout the period of one's dying.  By the end, all relationships are broken, and our solitude is complete, save for the presence of the fearful by all-gracious Judge.  No matter how the dying of a loved one might break our hearts and make us wish that we could substitute our lives for theirs, suffering and even dying in their stead, that is one act of selflessness which is denied us.  To lay down one's life for one's friends can give them at best a temporary reprieve.  The time still comes when they and we, utterly bereft of community or substitutes, must complete a journey which no one else can take.  Then, if not before, with the self quite naked and absolutely singular, the question, however much evaded through life and theologically perhaps best left to last in any case, will be postponed no longer.  It is the final question raised by Easter Saturday, when God's own self, clothed in our humanity, lies dead and buried, abandoned, solitary, all alone: the question ' Who am I?' (438-439)

On Baptism

To be baptized, and thus appropriate to oneself the historical event in which once and for all one's identity was crucified and buried with Christ Jesus, is itself nothing less that to have an Easter Saturday identity.  Baptism confirms our unity with Christ, and thus our participation in his repentance which led from the cradle to the Jordan, to the cross and tomb.  In this union, sealed with the sign of water the drowns, cleanses, and gives new life, we repent of our old identity, consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus, who himself has died to sin and ended death's dominion.  For at whatever age this sign is laid upon us, we receive it with empty hands open for the gift of grace, becoming like the little children of whom God's kingdom is comprised. (447-448)

I think this book is a theological and spiritual classic, and deserves to be better known.  Hence this recommendation!

Lent Reading

There is a debate running around the house at the moment as to whether we should be giving up TV (not including DVDs) or sugar for Lent.  We did alcohol last year, and anyway a nice delivery from Avery's arrived on Saturday so that option is clearly excluded.

Whichever we decide, I am committing myself to picking up and reading Raymond Brown's The Death of the Messiah over Lent: synopsis in hand.  It is 1524 pages long, excluding indices, which amounts to about 38 pages per day.  There is lots of bibliography though, so it isn't as bad as it looks.  If i find anything interesting, I'll let you know.

NB, the Amazon link is to second hand copies of the hardback volumes, hopefully in their beautiful slipcase.  You can buy the single volumes in paperback if you wanted to - but as with well done beef...what is the point?

What We Need: Imagination

We have been working with students this semester on aspects of preaching.  I have been wondering why some of the insights and examples we have been sharing have failed to meet with the same kind of enthusiastic response that they created in me when I first encountered (say) aspects of the new homiletic.  Barbara Brown Taylor's discussion of the importance and power of imagination for the preacher leads me to suspect that we all, staff and students alike, suffer from a dearth of imaginative resources, a shrinking of our imaginative capacities.  We struggle to read Scripture and use imagination to shape our perception of what we read - and the result is all too often flat and lifeless.  This is her definition of imagination as revelation:

In the imaginative act, we are grasped whole.  Revelation is not a matter of thinking or feeling, intuiting or sensing, working from the left side of the brain or the right.  It is a shocking gift of new sight that obliterates such distinctions, grabbing us by our lapels and turning us around, so that when we are set back down again we see everything from a new angle.  We reason differently, feel differently, act differently.  Imagination does more than affect us; it effects change in our lives.
Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Lanham: Cowley, 1983), 48.

What she says about our attitude to the world in general, goes also for our atttitude towards Scripture. She speaks of:

...an imaginative enterprise, in which I must first give up the notion that I know what I am looking at when I look at the world.  I do not know.  All I know is that there is always more than meets the eye and that if I want to see truly I must be willing to look beyond the appearance of things into the depth of things. (p.52)

How to cultivate imagination for prospective preachers?  How do I, as someone whose imaginative life is fed as much by novels and poetry and music as well as film and TV, help those who don't read that stuff?  Once, in a meeting of seminary teachers on the subject of spirituality within the curriculum, a tutor from the Baptist seminary in Cuba stated that he felt that his calling and that of his institution was to help his students (prospective pastors and preachers) to 'appreciate beauty' - what would it look like if we took such a calling seriously?

Logue's Homer

Christopher Logue's re-performance of The Iliad is utterly stunning.  I am deep into War Music and the next two installments, Cold Calls and All Day Permanent Red, have just arrived from Amazon.  This is the opening of the first part of War Music, 'Kings'.  I am posting simply out of the need to share my excitement at reading poetry that is this dynamic, powerful and dramatic.

Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet.

    Now look along that beach, and see
Between the keels hatching its western dunes
A ten-foot-high reed wall faced with black clay
Split by a double-doored gate;
Then through the gate a naked man
Run with what seems to break the speed of light
Across the dry, then damp, then sand invisible
Beneath inch-high waves that slide
Over each other's luminescent panes;
Then kneel among those panes, burst into tears and say:

    'Mother,
You said that you and God were friends.
Over and over when you were at home
You said it. Friends.  Good friends.  That was your boast.
You had had me, your child, your only child
To save him from immortal death. In turn,
Your friend, the Lord our God, gave you His word,
Mother, His word: If I, your only child
Chose to die young, by violence, far from home,
My standing would be first; be best;
The best of bests; here; and in perpetuity.
    And so I chose. Nor have I changed. But now-
By which I mean today, this instant, now -
That Shepherd of the Clouds has seen me trashed
Surely as if He sent a hand to shoo
The army into one, and then, before its eyes,
Painted my body with fresh Trojan excrement.'

Just Enough to Know ... An Attempted Meme

In the light of the previous quotation from Rowan Williams, I was reminded of a friend of mine, a great preacher, who sometimes uses the rhetorical line in sermons: 'I have been around long enough to know....'.  Studying theology is like that.  The deeper you get in the more you realise that you don't know much at all and the less inclined you are to speak, or preach or teach.  But given that theology is about finding language 'tells enough truth', there is something appropriate about the idiom: 'I know enough to say...'

Given that so much is learned through reading, I wonder how others might respond to the invitation to share thoughts in the following key:

'I have read enough (insert name of book/theologian/etc) to know/believe/think that....'

Here are my starters for 10.  If you choose to pick up the idea, please leave a comment and I will update the post with all further contributions.

1.  I have read enough Barth to know that theology is basically a matter of Nachdenken, thinking after God.

2.  I have read enough Bonhoeffer to know that my inclination towards pacifism oversimplifies what are often profoundly complex issues.

3.  I have read enough Anabaptist history and theology to know that good theological ideas contain within them the seeds of self-destruction, that enthusiasm is not always a good thing, and that Christian pacifism can function has an important corrective to theological and political arrogance and eschatological fervour.  In short, I am re-reading Q.

4.  I have read enough contextual, practical theology to know that, when done badly, it becomes little more than social analysis wearing a pair of doctrinal earrings, or at its worst, what Stephen Pattison calls 'staring up your own arse backwards'.  My solution would be to declare a moratorium on the use of questionnaires in theological research.

5.  I have read enough recent Baptist theological writing to believe that the recovery of the significance of the language and theology of 'covenant' has the potential both to shape the fortunes of a denomination (which we aren't) and to contribute to wider ecumenical debates and relations.

And a few related to NT things.

6.  I have read enough Stanley Porter to know that I was mis-taught the meaning and function of Greek tenses.

7.  I have read enough Lou Martyn to believe that apocalyptic is really at the centre of Paul's thought.

8.  I have read, listened to and sat in tutorial with N. T. Wright enough to know that he is at his best when talking about Pauline theology.  When it arrives, the big book on Paul will constitute his lasting contribution to the discipline.

9.  I have read enough Bultmann to agree with John Ashton's brilliant summary: '...yet over them all Rudolf Bultmann, unmatched in learning, breadth and understanding, towers like a colossus.  Nevertheless, in spite of his pre-eminence, every answer that Bultmann gives to the really important questions he raises - is wrong ... if one were to try and distil the essence of Bultmann's achievement into a single word ... the best word, I think, would be penetration - the peculiar ability to see John clearly and to see him whole.' (Understanding the Fourth Gospel, 45).  Update: this is set something running - see Mike Bird's response, and Jim West's rejoinder.

10.  I have read enough NT scholarship: essays, articles, monographs, textbooks etc. etc. etc. to know that, in a simple phrase 'less is more', as the now departed C. F. D. Moule knew only too well.

Anyone else want to offer their thoughts?

Update: here are the offerings thus far

Andy Goodliff

Jim Gordon: best line so far 'I have read enough Rick Warren'.

Books I Recommend

A meme via Jim (see the list of contributors here).  Here are 10 books that I regularly recommend to people, with a focus on stuff published relatively recently.

Pauline Studies:  David Horrell's Solidarity and Difference: A Contemporary Reading of Paul's Ethics   Deeply impressive and insightful, bringing Paul into dialogue with contemporary ethical debate (Habermas v. Hauerwas).  Key to the book's appeal, however, is Horrell's skill as an exegete: a model of NT scholarship.

Commentary: Luz on Matthew.  I just love this commentary, wirkungsgeschichte and all.  I can't wait to purchase the new version of Volume 1 (in the Hermeneia series) to replace my old T & T Clark edition.

On Bonhoeffer: Stephen Plant's introductory book in the Outstanding Christian Thinkers series, not least because of its focus on Bonhoeffer as a Biblical theologian and on the Ethics (the focus of Plant's still unpublished doctoral dissertation).

By Bonhoeffer: the DBW Volume 6, Ethics.  Crucial for understanding a still oft-misunderstood theologian.

Theology: Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust. This is what happens when a real theologian writes an introduction to Christian belief.  A book that demonstrates the sheer poverty of much of the Pseudo-Alpha rambling that passes for doctrine in UK churches.

Anabaptist/Baptist History: Meic Pearse, The Great Restoration.  To understand the left wing of the Reformation, you need someone who shares something of the idiosyncrasies of its protagonists.  This book is the wittiest guide to the weird and wonderful world of 16th and 17th century religious radicalism.

Baptist Theology: a tough one again, but in the end I come out with Paul Fiddes' Tracks and Traces.  The original essays that form the basis for this work were the writings that helped me to see a different way to be Baptist, a way that is at once more ecumenical, catholic, biblical and thus authentic.

Hermeneutics: A K M Adam, Faithful Interpretation - who says what I have recently tried to say, only much better.

On Postmodernity: James K A Smith, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? - an antidote to all those books that say that postmodernism is rubbish because to say that we are in a time when metanarratives don't convince is to construct a metanarrative and thus to be wrong (these are the same books that claim that Derrida believed that is nothing outside of language/text).

Novel: one simple choice, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead.  For why see here, here and here.

Books That Have Shaped Me: E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism

I am not sure if this will become a regular feature, but in preparing for a lecture this afternoon on the work of E. P. Sanders, I was struck by how deeply I was shaped as an undergraduate by his work on the historical Jesus.  Paul and Palestinian Judaism also, of course, affected me profoundly but the admission must be that at that stage, I never read PPJ for myself, but appropriated its insights through my teacher, John Ziesler.

Jesus and Judaism was different.  My other NT teacher was Meg Davies who at the time was married to Sanders.  She ran a whole term class on Jesus and Judaism, (it must have been the academic year 1987-1988, so the book had only been out a couple of years) and I think I read that book in a way that I had never really read a book before.  My copy is falling to pieces (SCM binding was particularly poor in those days), with annotations, highlighting etc. on almost every page.  I then, in 1989-1990 had the chance to teach that seminar to others, while Meg was away on sabbatical.

Sanders' influence on me is best described, I think, in terms of his provision of an account of the historical Jesus that was and continues to be fundamentally compelling from a historical point of view.  When I read other books on the historical Jesus, I find myself mentally testing new suggestions, hypotheses and ideas against the basic framework that Sanders establishes.  To put it another way, while I am happy to re-think aspects of Jesus teaching and ministry in the light of work since 1985, I have yet to find an alternative overall account that is likely to displace that found in Jesus and Judaism.  I think that Jesus was a law-observant, Jewish, eschatological, restoration prophet; that table-fellowship with 'sinners' was central to his ministry and was a strategy designed to include those otherwise excluded from the covenant; that the temple incident was destruction symbolized rather than reform attempted; that actions speak as loudly as words when it comes to Jesus.

I know that others are fans of Sanders' work.  I would argue that N. T. Wright works broadly within the framework that Jesus and Judaism sets out, and recent works on the historical Jesus seem to be picking up and refining aspects of that framework, to good effect (I think here especially of Brant Pitre's impressive monograph, Jesus, The Tribulation and the End of the Exile - see Michael Bird's review here.)  Mark Goodacre, who studied with Sanders and who now teaches in the same institution, shares similar views to mine on the significance of Sanders' work.

One more point, Jesus and Judaism was written while Sanders was at Oxford.  The books from this period (including Studying the Synoptic Gospels; Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah and Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 BCE-66CE) cost him a lot, in my view.  There are stories of him waking at 4.00 a.m. to write, before the administrative demands of being an Oxford Professor took over.  We should be grateful: it seems to me that in future years when many of the recent books on Jesus will have simply disappeared into deserved obscurity, people will still be reading and learning from Jesus and Judaism.