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Good comment Hermina. I suspect the book was produced for other academics and particularly students at or planning to go to seminary. For them it matters that such senior scholars have had their struggles and are still in there. Also, though not always spelled out, several of those who write have indeed struggled especially with an earlier form of narrow evangelicalism; one or two have even found their tenure questioned. But I agree that the dedication suggests a different kind of book or at least a book in a different key. I thought you might be interested - the endorsement of Peter Enns is I think, telling. Good wishes from over here to you over there!
Is Serious Academic Study of the Bible a Threat to Faith?
For more than fifty years I've been reading the Bible. For the same amount of time I've been studying the Bible. And all that time since University, I've consulted, learned from and valued the dedicated scholarship of the academic guild of Biblical Studies. Commentaries and grammars, dictionarie...
Thanks for all of this Hermina. Like many others, some of my best thinking is done on paper, or keyboard, and only once launched into words does thought become free to grow in directions I often had not planned. On the other hand writing is also a way of taking what we already think and road testing it, or seeing if it will fly, and if it does will it carry our weight. Trust life is good Hermina, albeit always with awareness of life's losses as well as gains, and either of these can be lifelong legacies of our love for our own and others. Shalom from a very sunny and even hot Aberdeen.
Living Wittily is back after a month of unexplained absence - now explained.
For the first time since starting blogging in January 2007 I decided to take a month off, or have a sabbatical, or have a rest. Or even, give it a rest! But I am still committed to this blog as personal space for exploring the world around me and within me, and doing so in writing and sharing ...
Thanks for taking the time to comment Lucy. The Summer School I'm involved in here in Aberdeen is looking at the seasons of life, and the challenges of change and transition that is involved in our growth as human beings and as Christians. The ebb and flow of the tide is another metaphor I often ponder, especially when beach walking.
When God is unaccountably silent, unreasonably absent, apparently indifferent,
Now here's something you don't come across every day. An honest account of what it feels like when God is unaccountably silent, unreasonably absent, apparently indifferent, and our inner climate is colder than winter. That's the title of one of my favourite songs, sung by Sarah Brightman in a ...
Thank you too Beverley, for your encouragement. George Herbert is such a demanding poet, but also one who is rich and enriching.
Seasoned Timber; A Metaphor of Christian Maturity.
This old railway sleeper has been recycled as a strainer post. I first came across it in 1978 on holiday and walking along the Inverbervie to Gourdon coastal path. Since well before then it has held the wire tension of the fence, facing the sea only 50 metres away. I love old weathered wood, s...
Thank you to each of you for your comemnts and encouragement. Now and again an email or comment is like a wee hello confirming the worthwhileness of this writing space. May each of you discover the good roads that go to new places, the mountains with the best views and well worth the climb, and those corners and crossroads, paths and fences that make us think and choose and keep going and climb over our hesitations and fears about what matters most.
Not the End of Living Wittily.
I started this blog 11 years ago. The aim was to stimulate thought, discussion and engagement with other perspectives and other folk's ways of looking at the world. My own perspective is Christian, with every attempt at being open, respectful and helpful through my writing. Over the years the...
Thank you Angela - always glad to persuade people they are not crazy after all :) Facebook has replaced a lot of the shorter more occasional forays into social comment, and that can also be fun, thought provoking and occasionally takes a less helpful turn. Living Wittily remains the place where self expression and self discovery overlap in the disciplines of writing, reading and thinking. All good wishes for 2018 to you two too!
Not the End of Living Wittily.
I started this blog 11 years ago. The aim was to stimulate thought, discussion and engagement with other perspectives and other folk's ways of looking at the world. My own perspective is Christian, with every attempt at being open, respectful and helpful through my writing. Over the years the...
Hello David, and thank you for commenting. I wonder if accepting in simplicity is the only way for faith to be faithful? Not everyone comes to faith in the same way, and assurance and certainty about God is often a matter of temperament, experience and is known best to the one who in sincerity and faithfulness goes on seeking, in order to be found, and to find. For myself I hesitate to judge those whose faith includes questions, loneliness, doubt and faith seeking understanding. R S Thomas' poetry is thickly textured, theologically complex, and diverse in its moods. It can be affirmative and interrogative, expresses thanksgiving and lament, confesses the faith and also probes beneath the words for the reality that God is. All good wishes David, Jim
"I walked on, simple and poor, while the air crumbled and broke on me generously as bread."
The Moor, R S Thomas It was like a church to me. I entered it on soft foot, Breath held like a cap in the hand. It was quiet. What God was there made himself felt, Not listened to, in clean colours That brought a moistening of the eye, In movement of the wind over grass. There were no pra...
Thanks for this Dave. I can see why Muriel would find this shoreline a "thin place" (George MacLeod of Iona). Yes I saw the verse, and it comes from a favourite Psalm, one I read when life comes clattering in on top of us and we are looking for a foothold, a promise, a safe harbour. Hope you're doing ok, and life is good just now.
The Camera as Prayer Book 2. Stand. Look. Enjoy.
Today has been fitted wall to wall blue sky, bright but mellow autumn sunshine, and a pervasive sense of summer giving way, but reluctantly. A four mile walk along the coast confirms this, and reflecting on it now I'm aware that amongst other things, I have again been ambushed by beauty. How so?...
Thanks Dave. I can see what you mean so the post is edited to clarify. The book is not "dangerously liberal" - that was the perception of someone else who of course had never read either the book, or anything about the author. Hans Walter Wolff was a highly respected Christian scholar, deeply committed to the Church, and as able an expositor as he was an exegete. His love of the biblical text is everywhere apparent in his books.
On Not Censoring or Silencing Those Who Think Differently - They Might Be Prophets.
I remember, in the years before Amazon and one click book-buying, ordering a book on Micah from a theologically conservative bookshop. It was local and I wanted to support it. There was some breathing in through teeth, and shaking of the head, and I was asked if I really wanted to have a book...
Pontifex Maximus, the highest priest in Republican Rome, and therefore a quasi divine figure, leaves the pious Jews of Jesus' day in a quandary. To use this money is to handle that which declares Caesar one with divine authority. Jesus' words then become an implied refusal to concede God's authority to any other pretender, including Caesar. When Rome built bridges it was to conquer, or to administer conquered lands.
As to whether Jesus is the equivalent of Pontifex Maximus as used by the Romans, I think his exercise and view of power was its own contradiction of that. Mark 10.45 is his chosen route, and his rejection of the three temptations were each refusals to be seduced by the pomp and power which defined Rome and Empire.
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's - the Politics of Obedience.
This Sunday I'm preaching in the church where I was minister for 18 years, and where I am now a member. The text I've been given is Mark 12.12-17. It's the one about giving Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and giving God what belongs to God. The powers that be need to shut Jesus up, they need to ...
Hello LJ - you are by no means alone in asking this question. How evangelical Christians have managed to accommodate to, and rationalise their support for Donald Trump, raises questions about the nature of evangelicalism itself. Of course American evangelicalism has a diversity, and an entanglement with politics that differentiates it from other streams of global evangelicalism.
When Wayne Grudem, Franklin Graham, John Piper and other leaders endorsed his candidacy, it raised profound questions for many of us about American evangelical integrity. These first days of the Presidency confirm many of my own fears for the liberties, generosity, values and international standing of America.
Many evangelicals I know in America don't support Trump,but they are a minority. It is inevitable that such a deep fault line will mean those preachers and writers who support Trump have, in my view, raised serious questions about their moral judgement, understanding of Scripture and commitment to the clear unambiguous teaching of Jesus about love, peace, forgiveness, mercy, compassion and so much else that is radically diffeent from the nationalistic selfishness Trump and his team are promoting.
As to being judgemental, we are required to be critical of policies that discriminate, treat people inhumanely, demand unswerrving allegiance to the State and its power brokers. That means for me, those whose writing and speaking purport to guide me in my faith, require to pass the test of integrity and discernment in what they see, support and believe to be right. I will not read a book about how to be a Christian, written by someone who endorses and will not critique a President who has no qualms about the use of torture, or writing an edict of exclusion based on race or faith commitment. Like you, I am saddened and troubled about the kind of world that is triump's vision; I see nothing of the biblical values of justice, peace, mercy and service. These lie at the heart of my faith for they arise from my faith in Jesus. Hope this helps - thank you again for your comment.
Why a Christian Cannot Approve Torture and Follow Jesus.
I was proud of the BBC Correspondent and Political Editor Laura Kussenberg when she questioned Theresa May and Donald Trump at the Press Conference in the White House. She asked such a direct question, and asked it so pointedly that despite the evasions and characteristic deflections, there was ...
I watched this programme Angela - it was a good introduction to Julian and showed the historical accidents by which the early copies of her manuscript were preserved. Aye, the presenter sometimes gets in the way of what is being presented - very few presenters can let the subject be the star of the show; David Attenborough is the consummate presenter who happily makes the world of nature the star.
The Theological Significance of Laughter as the Sound and Seed of Hope.
"I like a good laugh." That phrase, "a good laugh", opens an interesting set of questions. Laughter is a human response to a whole range of experiences, from the incongruous to the completely unexpected; laughter can be a shared joy, a healing relief, a derisory put down, a vocal signal of sar...
Prayer is both personal and universal, and how and when and why we pray is likewise personal and as diverse as our hearts and minds must be. What suited Waite in captivity may not suit him now;but I do understand the strategy of objective prayers as a wall against self-pity, introspection and self-concern. Extempore prayer seems natural, open to the Spirit within us, rooted in the relationality of God's ways and Being. It needn't be the "God deliver me" petition, though the Psalms are full of that! What I am increasingly feeling is that amongst the responses of the church to the brokenness of our culture, the dissemination of fear, anger and hate, there is the praying community, and communities, affirming the opposites of fear, anger and hate. Grace, mercy and help as in the text from Hebrews is a start. But Isaiah, Amos, Micah, Luke, Revelation are also voices we need to hear and echo for justice, righteousness, peace-making, defence of the poor and vulnerable, and speaking truth to power, and the more corrupt the power the more persistent the triuth speaking and praying!
Be Careful What You Pray for - You May Be Your Own Prayer's Answer
If I'm honest, which mostly I try to be, honest! Anyway. If I'm honest, I find prayer as much of a problem as a solution; and I find praying raises at least as many questions as answers. It isn't that I don't believe in prayer - of course I do. And I believe in prayer because I believe in a Go...
Thanks Mark, well spotted and duly corrected, and thank you too for taking time to respond. I'm not sure I would eliminate awe from worship - my closing comment on the post had in mind such encounters as Exodus 3, Psalm 8, the epiphany at the end of Job, the Transfiguration, Revelation 1 and the many other occasions in the Judaeo-Christian tradition where an extreme amazement of wonder precisely leads to worship, and in some cases prostration in adoration. A long line of biblical interpretation understands such encounters as Moses, Job, Isaiah, disciples in the Gospels and John in the Apocalypse, responding to those encounters at the deepest levels of human being. The great Jewish Rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel defined faith as what we do with radical amazement.
A Responsibility to Awe - Rebecca Elson
Rebecca Elson died in 1999, at the age of 39. She was an astronomer, physicist and poet. I came across her name and her work in Robert Crawford,(ed.), Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science (Oxford: OUP, 2006), a volume of essays and poems with responses from scientists. The book sets up...
Thank you Kathleen for your encouragement, and for sharing a little of your own journey. A big year coming up in 2017 for Lutherans and the whole church. A couple of good biographies are already issued - they'll feature in later blog posts. Greetings from Scotland!
God's Call: grace that looks beyond our own self-assessments to the truth of who God calls us to be.
Sunday August 28 was the 40th Anniversary of my ordination to Christian ministry, hence the cake from the congregation at Montrose Baptist Church - which I am slicing up to share!). A whole tangle of thoughts and feelings accompany such a milestone in a life which has been given in service to...
Hello Mona and thank you for your kind words about the blog. I'm always encouraged when people find sense and sustenance in what is written here and read in so many other places. I can now add Arkansas to that geographical spread of friends! I think the blog referred to has either chaged its name and link, or has discontinued. I;ll check it out and fix it if I can. All good wishes from Aberdeen, Scotland.
R S Thomas and Advent: "Within listening distance of the silence we call God..."
But the silence in the mind is when we live best, within listening distance of the silence we call God... It is a presence, then, whose margins are our margins; that call us out over our own fathoms. It's the eve of Advent which is a season of depth and waiting, of promise, hope and patience...
Thank you Brian. It's often difficult to say in words those experiences of the heart and spirit that need nevertheless to be said to honour those who inspire our love, respect and gratitude. But words are often all we have. I'm more glad than I can say that you so graciously affirm what I have written, and what I had hoped, to compose a fitting tribute to a remarkable woman who left footprints around her for all to see. Grace and peace to you and all your family, Jim
Rev Dr Moyna McGlynn: Church as the very epitome of the welcome of God
Amongst God's greatest gifts are the people who come into our lives, often unannounced, and with no indication that having met them, we would look at the world differently, and they would help us to see further, deeper and to look harder. Amongst the nicest compliments ever paid to me was when...
Please see the latest post where I mention Robert Bolt and his play A Man for All Seasons - which is where the epigraph comes from. So far as I know this is a fictional construction of the kind of thing MOre might have said!
Living Wittily and serving God in the tangle of our minds
To serve God wittily in the tangle of our minds.... This post was written three years ago when I started blogging as Living Wittily. It's based on the motto at the head of the blog page, words of Sir Thomas More, from Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. I read it every now and then to check i...
Hello Damien - thank you for your kind words, and the encouragement they offer. When I started blogging it was a reasonably new medium, overtaken now by more immediate and interactive media now. But the Blog allows space to explore, reflect, consider and suggest, rather than merely respond and react. So yes, I'll be keeping on blogging, and glad that some of what is written brings help, wisdom and new thought to those who come by. Grace and peace from Aberdeen, Jim
Living Wittily means learning to listen attentively, learn humbly, and consider carefully
It's been some weeks since I was reularly posting here. Various reasons for this amongst them a short sabbatical from blogging - I have been at it for 9 years! It isn't that the world has become less interesting, or that there is nothing to be said or written about that same world in all its c...
Yes Angela - but there's something equally worrying that oversensitivity to an expletive can eclipse an issue as important as our support for the ECHR. Is the same moral sensitivity alive to the ethical consequences of the UK withdrawing its signature to such a fundamental document? I guess the film makers would reply that outrage and strong language express the justifiable anger of those who see the ECHR as a non negotiable collaboration on behalf of humanity. Sometimes being sincerely oversensitive gets in the way of an affirmative obedience to the truth. For myself, other people's use of expletives trouble me not ever since the days I worked in a brickwork as a teenager and heard a range of adjectives for every conceivable occasion :)
When Government Ministers either Ignore History or are Ignorant of History
Amongst the astonishing deficits of the current Conservative Government is an ignorance, a culpable and culturally unprecedented ignorance, of history and its importance as a resource for wisdom in political discourse and policy development. Along with the frenzy to obtain exemption from employm...
Hello Kris. Thank you so much for your appreciative and encouraging comment. What you describe is the main reason I maintain this blog, to encourage thought, discussion and exploration of the life of faith. I fully understand the tensions of being in a community where a particular kind of spirituality and immediacy of access to God is felt to be the norm. And there is the word that causes the difficulty - norm, as if God could be fitted into our patterns of thinking and experience. Thomas helps us to begin to accept that there are times of silence, absence, darkness and unresponsiveness which are not necessarily barren; but they are bewildering. Shalom, Jim
Lent with R S Thomas: The God of Deeper Fathoms and Distant Stars
A lot of time and money is spent on books on prayer which are of the Teach Yourself, Idiot's Guide, Prayer for Dummies genre. Sometimes it's a help if someone gives you the instructions for the IKEA pack. There are also books of prayer or prayers that prime the pump, kick-start the engine, flick...
"Our enemy is constructed by us" This is true so far as it lies with me, my relation, past and present to this person. But once we start dealing with human communities it becomes more complicated I think. For example Western powers bombing Isis targets inevitably kill non combatant civilians who are not in any meaningful sense my enemy - but I am implicated in the violent actions that follow from Isis being considered an enemy of Western countries. At the same time Isis represents an ideology powerfully defined by its declarations of enmity, and that enmity is against people Isis fighters have never encountered but whom they intend to kill. Those randomly targeted in Paris were in any not in any meaningful sense people who had constructed the enemy, other than as belonging to a country, culture or world view that differed from that of the perpetrators.
The former Archbishop, Rowan Williams has an interesting lecture on the need to understand Isis. It is worth pondering - http://www.lapidomedia.com/understand-isis-rowan-williams-journalists#.Vk36ev1O5vs.twitter
Part of my response to this is, Yes. To understand the person who sees me as enemy is an imperative of both civilised human relations and for me Christian ethics in obedience to the Gospel. But the very acronym Isis, or the concept Islamic State, are themselves dehumanising abstractions which carry powerful codes of hate and imagined violence followed through to perpetrasted violence. You cannot dialogue with a State, or an idea, but with persons - who, on both sides, must be open at least to encounter, listening, and speaking. I am unaware of any attempts on either side to seek any such encounter. And I wonder if that is due to this hydra headed phenomenon of hatred whose heads include fear, rage, ignorance, enmity, depersonalisation, suffering and hostility to 'the other' who is different from the tribe that hates.
Enmity is not a unilateral state - yes I can refuse to BE an enemy, but I cannot compel another to NOT be my enemy if they have no wish to do so.
Such complexities don;t make for easy sermon preparation and lead to the temptation to think I should preach on something easier tomorrow - like love. Except love, as God's love, takes me to that place where hate and enmity collided with the purpose of God on Calvary, and lost.
What Kind of Love Does It Take to Redeem Hate? (2)
Having announced I am preparing a sermon for Sunday on the theme of hate, someone whom I have known for decades, and whose judgment and Christian wisdom I hold in high regard, asked me why. Why at this time of all times, preach on a subject which is raw, painful and very much a reality in the em...
Bob asks two questions, but they touch on the same experience for people of faith - how we think of death, ours or those we love in the light of our faith in Christ and the promise of eternla life. My post was an honest argument with Ecclesiastes and the underlying weariness of that 'gentle cynic'. A human life is a precious and unique gift, initiated and called into being by the creator God. Each human life is an unprecedented act of creative love. We are created for life, and Jesus said I have come that you might have life and life more abundant. Yes, that saying looked to what John the Evangelist called eternal life - but eternal life is not about duration or location, but about the deepest fellowship with the Father through the Son made possible by the Spirit. So I believe the life we live is to be lived, enjoyed, endured, experienced through the lense of a love eternal that created us for this, for life. To ever say or think it would be better not to be born, or death is better than life is to return the gift of ourselves to God, unopened.
As to Paul's words being universalised as an attitude that says the dead are better off than when they were alive, that is to overlook two things I think. First, Paul knew his life was a story nearly finished; his dilemma of whether to stay or go is one of those holy soliloquy's in which he imagines the moment of being in the presence of Christ in heaven, and then looks at his chains and thinks of those Philippian believers. But remember, when push came to shove, as it were, to stay and live for Christ was the better choice. But it wasn't his choice - and I guess I am simply saying that the well meant 'she is in a better place' doesn't always mean, or need not always mean, that any Christian is entitled to devalue or wish to abbreviate the time that God gives.
There is a fatalism in wishing ourselves in heaven prematurely, or privileging death as if life was mere prelude, or preface. We were created to live, to image the Creator, to walk in the new creationand new life that is in Christ, and to do so in the life God has given. Ecclesiastes is a book that shows why, exactly why, the revelation of God is in a person whose life is the source of life, and whose love, incarnate, crucified and risen, calls us to live out our days in life abundant. But when those days are completed we are called into the life of God...I don;t think that is 'better', I think it is different, and the next stage of what it means to be 'In Chrst'.
When the Preacher Contradicts One Text by Prioritising Another.
Long before the Rev I M Jolly, the lugubrious melancholic cleric, there was Qoheleth, The Preacher, the one who wrote Ecclesiastes. When it comes to incurable negativity, one foot in the grave complaining, and brutal honesty about what life can be like at its worst, Ecclesiastes is up there with...
That's fine William - I;m happy to have the discussion widened.I've read your post, and fully agree that the hermeneutic stance of myself even asking the question is relevant. As is your positing different questions and questioning the adequacy of mine. That is the case not only with every question we ask, but why we choose these questions, and how carefully we listen to alternative questions. The central characters are women, the initiating protagonists throughout are women - that I think is simply there in the story. Of course the outworking purposes of God in history is the focal point, but in this story those purposes are refracted powerfully through the experiences of women. The book of Ruth is not short of commentaries - the gender imbalance is impressive, and my question remains whether a woman's perspective would enrich the understanding and interpretation of this Bible story.
The Exegetical Captivity of the Book of Ruth
This is an interesting list of names. Athalya Brenner Kathryn Pfister Darr Tamara Eskenazi Kathleen Farmer Marjo Korpel Kirsten Nielsen Katherine Sakenfeld Karin M Saxegaard This is another interesting and longer list of names David Atkinson Daniel Block Frederic Bush Edward Campbell Robert...
Hello Bob - I did wonder if you;d be in touch about this, and glad you were! I presume you know well W P Brown's Seeing the Psalms. A Theology of Metaphor. Strangely it has little to say about weather metaphors. I'm also hoping eventually for his commentary in the OT Library series. Hope you are well and Psalm study is flourishing. Have you used Ross's volumes on Psalms?
What in Heaven's Name is Meteorotheology?
A wee while ago I posted a reflection on clouds. Since then I came across this book which looks like an intriguing read. It's now on my wants list of exegetical studies on Psalms. Here's the blurb. The weather is all around us all the time. From ancient times people have attributed the weather...
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