Eric Gill Song of Songs (facsimile)

To my immense delight, and complete surprise, I was able to buy from e-bay last week a rare facsimile of Eric Gill's 1931 famous illustrated Canticum Canticorum (Song of Songs) - albeit in a German translation (Das Hohe Lied Salomo; but there was delight in that, in the fact that it is Luther's original German translation that was used). I saw for sale somewhere an original copy at c. $12,500; another company is offering the eleven prints separately at £13,500. Mine cost...er...slightly less!... As the original, so this was printed at the Cranach Press in East Germany, and features eleven wood engravings and a whole series of intial capital letters.

For those of you who might want to track down the individual wood-cuts on google, I list them here, using the AV for the English translations:

nigra sum sed formosa [I am black, but comely] - 1:5
inter ubera mea [betwixt my breasts] - 1:13
transiliens colles [skipping upon the hills] - 2:8
qui pascitur inter lilia [he feedeth among the lilies] - 2:16
vadam ad montem [I will get me to the mountain (scil. of myrrh)] - 4:6
hortus conclusus [a garden inclosed] - 4:12
dilecti mei pulsantis [(the voice) of my beloved that knocketh] - 5:2
invenerunt me custodes [the watchmen...found me] - 5:7
ibi dabo tibi [there I will give thee (my loves)] - 7:12 (there is another, earlier, 1925 engraving of this same text)
in domum matris meae [into my mother's house] - 8:2
fuge dilecti mi [Make haste, my beloved] - 8:14

One or two other engravings with English titles from the Song of Songs refer to separate earlier works - e.g. 'Stay me with apples' (re: 2:5), 'On my bed by night' (re: 3:1; both 1925).

For something completely different, you could consult Marc Chagall's Le Cantique des Cantiques (The Song of Songs). The details for that would be a separate exercise!

Of course, this relates to a little forthcoming opusculum: Redeeming Eros. Reading the Song of Songs (Cambridge: Grove Books, 2010)!

...To end the year with thanks...

The end of the year sees me bringing together a medley of mortality, some more famous in their deaths than in their lives, some deaths sudden, shocking and early, others coming as a 'natural' end. These struck me for a variety of reasons.

Two First World War veterans, whose lives had been, at the Whitehall Remembrance Day parade, an annual reminder of the lunacy let upon the world by WWI, and the ghoulish visions of the battlefields of France:

Henry Allingham, who died on July 18, aged 113, the last known survivor of the RNAS to serve at sea and abroad during WWI; and Henry J ('Harry') Patch, who died onJuly 25, aged 111, the last "Tommy" of WWI.

One single symbolic death, utterly different in kind and context, the news - or rather, the video - of whose death spread round the world like a bushfire via the internet, despite the 'best' efforts of the Iranian censors to block it:
'Neda' (Neda Salehi Agha Soltan), who died on 22 June, aged 27, shot in the heart during the demonstrations in Tehran against the the recent elections. She would have been a year or so older than our own youngest daughter.

http://nedasvoice.com/
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/.../article6557858.ece - 6 hours ago
http://www.france24.com/en/20090622-death-neda-becomes-face-protest-iran-opposition-tehran-video-footage

Googling 'Neda' and 'crucifix' will take you to at least a couple of web-sites - cornerstone-forum.blogspot.com/2009/07 (Reflections on Faith and Culture) for 6 July, and newcitizenship.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archiv... (Politeia) - which take seriously the suggestion, on the basis of photos of her apparently wearing a crucifix, that Neda was a Christian. Others argue that her name does not allow that conclusion to be drawn, since it is not one of those regularly known as denoting Christian religious affiliation.

Three New Testament scholars:

Martin Hengel, who died on 2 July, 2009, (sic: not, of course, 2010, as incorrectly and regrettably entered on my earlier blog!), was one of - if not the - most oustanding New Testament scholar and theologian of early Christianity, indeed of the whole of the ancient Graeco-Roman Hellenistic world;

Graham Stanton, Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University from 1998 to 2007, and for over twenty years before that, Professor of New Testament and King's Colege, London, who died on 18 July, aged 69. Though much of his professional work was done on St Matthew's Gospel, his major contribution was to re-engage with the topic and language of 'Gospel' in a scholarly way, it having been ignored as a serious topic of Historical-Jesus study for decades. His The Gospels and Jesus (2002, 2nd ed.), but much more his Jesus and Gospel (2004) and the Festschrift The Written Gospel, edited (2005) by Markus Bockmuehl and Donald Hagner in his honour, all bear testimony to years of study, hard work and positive contributions in this area;

www.telegraph.co.uk/.../obituaries/...obituaries/.../Graham-Stanton.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/13/graham-stanton-obituary
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6800946.ece -

John Sweet, Fellow and Chaplain of Selwyn College, Cambridge, from 1958, and a well-known figure in the Divinity Faculty of Cambridge University, and well beyond, who died on July 2, aged 82. A delightful, unassuming man, the encouragement of his life is to know that you do not have to write many books to be a scholar. His 1979 Pelican Commentary on Revelation is a gem of precision, simplicity and lack of pretention.

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6795017.ece
www.telegraph.co.uk/.../obituaries/...obituaries/.../Canon-John-Sweet.html -

Two outstanding modern contemporary dance choreographers:

Merce Cunningham, 'the outstanding figure of contemporary dance,' who died on July 26, aged 90; and Pina Bausch, another outstanding creative interpreter and choreogapher, who died on 30 June, at 68, a mere five days after being diagnosed with cancer. Having been for many years inolved with the Tanztheater Wuppertal, she explored virtually the whole range of artistic expression, from the extreme brutality and violence of Bluebeard through the provocative but less offensive mid-ground Rite of Spring to the recent quasi-innocent Nelken(Carnations). These two were acknowledged giants in their field.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/jul/01/pina-bausch-obituary-dance
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture.../Pina-Bausch.html

In the world of music, the sadness of the death of Richard Hickox, aged only 60, last November (24 November, 2008), still resounds. He was a doyen among conductors of an extraordinary range of music, and in particular left a 'progidious recorded legacy of British music,' having been widely loved and appreciated throughout the musical world.

www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/.../obituary-richard-hickox
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article5225000.ece
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/richard-hickox-conductor-who-left-a-prodigious-recorded-legacy-of-british-music-1033825.html

Then,this year, two female sopranos:

Hildegard Behrens, the German lyric-dramatic operatic soprano and magnificent exponent of the Wagner-Strauss repertoire, who died on 18 August, aged 72;

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6802369.ece
www.guardian.co.uk/music/.../obituary-hildegard-behrens
www.independent.co.uk › News ›

and Elisabeth Soderstrom, who died on 20 November, aged 82, leaving behind a legacy of a fabulous lyric soprano voice across a whole range of music.

www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/.../elisabeth-soderstrom-obituary
www.telegraph.co.uk/.../obituaries/...obituaries/...obituaries/.../Elisabeth-Soderstrom.html
www.independent.co.uk/.../obituaries/elisabeth-sderstrm-soprano-admired-in-britain-for-her-interpretations-of-richard-strauss-1826471.html
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6927434.ece

Sic transit gloria mundi. And/ but: deo gratias. 'So...whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God' (1 Corinthians 10:31).

Tribute to Martin Hengel

Before the year ends, and before Christmas begins, I want to honour the memory of Martin Hengel, without doubt one of the greatest New Testament scholars of the past century, if not of several centuries, who in many ways has re-written major areas of NT sholarship. His particular contribution was to underline the very early development of Christology in a fundamentally Jewish matrix, as against the previous view that it was a late development in a Hellenistic milieu.

Martin Hengel died on 2 July, 2010, at the age of 82. I visited him during my brief sabbatical in Tuebingen in January/ February 2006, and sat in one of his studies, a room perhaps 30' long and 10' high, lined with books. Peter Stuhlmacher, a colleague of his at Tuebingen, said that he had 'perhaps the finest private library in Europe.'

In 1974 (!), his Judaism and Hellenism (two volumes: one of text, one of notes) instantly blew apart the long-held distinction between the two supposedly quite distinct categories of thought which had so long dominated NT research. Instead, he noted that the Palestine of Jesus had been under Hellenistic rule for over 350 years, and in consequence that 'Jewish Galilee was not more but less Hellenized than Jerusalem (Between Jesus and Paul, 1983, 7), that 'Syria... had the strongest Jewish Diaspora,' and that 'virtually all the Gentile-Christian missionaries of the first twenty-five years were Jewish Christians' (Between Jesus ahnd Paul, 45).

His monographs The Son of God (1976), Crucifixion (1977) and The Atonement (1981) are all brief stunning scholarly works. 'Paul's conception of the Son of God...was certainly not his own creation but goes back to earlier community tradition' (Son of God, 15). 'In the Son, God himself came to men and was involved with their deepest distress, therein to reveal his love to all creatures. Only as the broken figure on the cross was Jesus - paradoxically - the exalted one...' (76)

Crucifixion is a detailed historical study of a barbaric form of execution -the 'supreme Roman penalty' (and reportedly being used currently against Christians in Sudan). 'The heart of the Christian message...ran counter not only to Roman political thinking, but to the whole ethos of religion in ancient times and in particular to the ideas of God held by educated people' (Crucifixion, 5). 'The one thing which made Paul's preaching the offensive 'word of the cross' was the fact that in it the apostle interpreted the death of Jesus of Nazareth, i.e. of a specific man, on the cross, as the death of the incarnate Son of God and Kyrios, proclaiming the event as the eschatological event of salvation for all men' (20). On p. 50 he quotes Quintilian to the effect that crosses ought to be set up on the busiest roads as a blunt, obscene deterrent to everyone. 'That this crucified Jew, Jesus Christ, could truly be a divine being sent on earth, God's Son, the Lord of all and the coming judge of the world, must inevitably have been thought by any educated man to be utter "madness" and presumptuousness' (83).

The Atonement considers ancient forms of self-sacrifice, both Greek and Jewish. Hengel then investigates the origins of the doctrine in the NT, particularly with reference to Isaiah 53, and writes: 'That the man Jesus died meant little, for many men were crucified in Jewish Palestine at that time; incomparably more astonishing was the confession that this man Jesus, executed as a criminal, was raised by God' (40).

Taking up elements of his major early study of The Zealots (ET 1989; original German 1961, revd. ed. 1976!) in his The Pre-Christian Paul (1991), Hengel rejected another false split (that between politics and religion) by showing that Pharisaism was easily combined with zealotry, indeed that Pharisaism (in aspects of its origins), as a movement for the purifying of the land ('the ritual sanctification of everyday life in Eretz Israel', 30), was precisely the foundation and motivation of Paul's own persecution of the early believers in Jesus. The 'typically Palestinian phenomenon' of 'zeal for the law' 'between the time of the Maccabees and 70CE' 'is...attested in our sources only for Jewish Palestine' (41). The zealots - like the Taliban - intentionally combined theology and politics. This required Paul's theology and politics alike to be radically overthrown by the appearance of the risen Jesus to him.

In his essays in Between Jesus and Paul (1983), Hengel continued to press back the origins of early Christology. In one of his most significant sentences he writes (39-40): 'the christological development from Jesus as far as Paul took place within about eighteen years, a short space of time for such an intellectual process. In essentials more happened in christology within these few years than in the whole subequent seven hundred years of church history.' 'The multiplicity of christological titles does not mean a multiplicity of exclusive "christologies" but an accumulative glorification of Jesus' (41). And so: 'It is astonishing how quickly the post-Easter christology of the Greek-speaking community...interpreted this "sending" of Jesus in terms of an eschatological sending of "the Son of God" (Gal. 4:4f., Rom. 8:3f). This is a pre-Pauline formula...which probably already developed in the first ten years of earliest Christian history (178, n. 76).

His Studies in Early Christology (1995) includes a long esay on 'Jesus, the Messiah of Israel' (1-72) in which he overturns the assumptions of a century and more concerning the 'non-Messianic' nature of Jesus' ministry and 'self-consciousness'. For him, Paul's understanding of God and Christ did not originate with Paul, but is 'ultimately rooted in Jesus' own self-understanding' (ix). Before Jesus, there was no firmly-established conception of what the Messiah would do or be (33) - only a whole range of ideas based on different passages from the Old Testament. Additionally, 'Jewish eschatology knows no genuine "transcendence", one might also say, no clear distinction betwen "immanence" and "transcendence". The earthly and heavenly world formed one continuum, were bound together and continually influenced one another.' (35-6)

(A recent volume by Michael Bird: Are You the One Who Is To Come? The Historical Jesus and the Messianic Question (Baker, 2009) is at least partly indebted to the writings of Martin Hengel.)

The essay on 'Jesus, the Messiah of Israel' closes with words that seem apposite for this season of Advent and Christmas, and I will conclude with them: 'The Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, became the Messiah of Israel in order to fulfil the promises made to the fathers, and he became for us, who have come afterwards from all the nations of the earth, "the author of our salvation", because we experience in him what the love of God is, that we might, for the sake of such grace, praise as our Father, the God of Israel and Father of Jesus Christ' (72).

In memoriam aeternam!

"Syrian Islamic revival has woman's touch"

After far too long, with endless ideas coming and going (and going nowhere), a brief note of an article just seen on the BBC news web-site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7710822.stm

As so often, there seem to be concurrent movements in both conservative and flexible directions. The situation in Syria is worth watching: Assad's wooing of the West, combined with the ?destruction of the Baath party in Iraq following the invasion in 2003, and an increasing fascination with the earliest days of Christian faith in the area (from Paul in Damascus onwards), and a consequently greater number of visits to Syria being offered on the market, all make for an interesting resurgence.

Obituaries of three great Christian men from three continents; plus one that doesn't fit...

Today's Times has an obituary of Henry Chadwick - 'Formidably erudite historian of early Christianity who served Oxford and Cambridge colleges with humane distinction', who died this Tuesday, 17th June, aged 87. Every word of the title is correct. He was avuncular, benign, warm, instructive, and though he (!) 'erroneously believed himself incapable of preaching an intelligible sermon to an ordinary congregation', he served generations of students with his Pelican history of The Early Church and a headful of knowledge. His translation of Augustine's Confessions is beautiful, all his scholarship was measured and wise, he was a fine musician and organist, and he maintained an generous orthodox Christian faith while the tides of radicalism raged around him.

See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/2153316/The-Very-Rev-Professor-Henry-Chadwick.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/19/religion
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article4166998.ece

(Incidentally, and in large parentheses, I think Henry might have been quite amused that his obituary was on the same page in The Daily Telegraph as, and preceded in The Times by, that of Cyd Charisse, she whose 'simply fabulous legs', the 'longest legs in film', which 'went on for ever', dominated MGM in the 1950s, and were reputed to have been insured for $10 (or $1) million, and photos of whom (or which) have not surprisingly been filling the obituary pages of the last two days...).

http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2286137,00.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/cyd-charisse-dynamite-dancing-star-in-the-golden-era-of-hollywood-musicals-849945.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article4163507.ece

Last week, the death was also announced of Kwame Bediako, a Presbyterian African theologian of great breadth of mind and surpassing scholarship with doctorates in French and English. A Ghanaian by birth, his first and major contribution was his (big) book Theology and Identity. The Impact of Culture upon Christian Thought in the Second Century and Modern Africa (1992), in which he painted a magisterial picture of the way in which early Christian thought 'overcame the world' in its engagement with and resistance to Hellenistic thought, so providing a model for Christianity's engagement with the African world-view. He did not hold the negative picture that so many do of a second-century 'Hellenisation of Christianity'. His scholarship and life has been a major inspiration to hosts of African theologians and Christians, let alone Europeans. I have not been able to find his d.o.b., but he was not old.

See http://zondervan.typepad.com/zondervan/2008/06/kwame-bediako.html

On 29 April, The Daily Telegraph and The Times announced the death of The Rt Revd Hassan Dehqani-Tafti, the Anglican Bishop in Iran from 1961-1990, who had had to leave after the Revolution in 1979 and live in exile in England, where he became an Assistant Bishop in Winchester. 'Many considered that...he was one of the 20th century's saints...he seemed incapable of thinking evil of anyone.' 'He was entirely without guile.' At the time of the revolution he and his wife Margaret were shot at in their beds, and his son Bahram was murdered the following year. Bishop Hassan wrote a most moving 'A Father's Prayer upon the Murder of his Son'. He died at the age of 78.

See some beautiful obituaries:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1918728/The-Rt-Rev-Hassan-Dehqani-Tafti.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/21/anglicanism.iran
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3918778.ece

Philip S

Eugene Peterson and Czeslaw Milosz

Eugene Peterson is well known in the Christian world as a prolific author, but more importantly as a sensitive, orthodox, socially-aware Evangelical Presbyterian American, now Professor Emeritus of Spiritual Theology at Regent College, Vancouver. The Jesus Way. A Conversation in Following Jesus now completes his trilogy on Spiritual Theology , which began with Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. A Conversation in Spiritual Theology , followed by Eat This Book. The Art of Spiritual Reading. All are very accessible, readable and nourishing books.

More interesting is the fact that this final volume - The Jesus Way - contains studies on key Old Testament figures such as Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, (I & II) Isaiah. No false splits, then, between Old and New Testament here! Rather, a discerning of continuities. The final three chapters have the interesting titles of The Way(s) of Herod, Caiaphas and Josephus. Hm!

Most interesting of all, almost, is the final recommendation in his Appendix on Some Writers on Discerning the Way: Czeslaw Milosz, A Treatise on Poetry. A 1980 Nobel Prize winner, but hardly known in England (?), I need to read him. Peterson writes: 'The bottomless pit of evil in which he began and the subsequent exilic conditions of his maturity galvanized his art in discerning God's truth and beauty in the particularity of his life and times.' He concludes his recommendation with the lines that 'One clear stanza can take more weight/ Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose'.

Elsewhere, Seamus Heaney speaks of how Milosz has gone from 'emigre writer to world visionary'. He writes: 'Milosz's poetry, even in translation, fulfils the ancient expectation that poetry will delight as well as instruct. It has a magnificent balance...Milosz dwells in the middle, at times tragically, at times deliciously, for he will renege neither on his glimpses of heaven upon earth nor on his knowledge that the world is a vale of tears.'

An Amazon review of his The Captive Mind (Penguin Modern Classics) says: 'At the risk of overstatement, this is one the handful of books from the twentieth century that genuinely deserves the title "great". It is about the use of coercive power by clear minds in the cause of absurd lies...It serves...as an analysis of... the processes which force, cajole and woo thinking men and women to believe self-eivident lies...This book is a wonder." I need to read it. Recent reports on the terrorist tactics of Ms Harriet Harman in the abortion debate in Parliament indicate that lobbying and threats easily achieve what no rational or irrational argument can.

Eat These Books!

Mangrove swamps

In the wake of the Burmese cyclone, the BBC web-site has published a report with a sickeningly familiar tone
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7385315.stm).

The ASEAN (Association of South-East Nations) Secretary-General, Surin Pitsuwan, suggests that it was the destruction of the mangrove swamps of the vast Irrawaddy delta for the sake of sprawling coastal developments which enabled the cyclone to have such destructive power. This is desperately sad, but no surprise: it was exactly the widespread process in many areas of South-East Asia that enabled the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 to wreak such havoc, and which conversely reduced fatalities where mangrove swamps were still to be found in profusion.

Debbie and I saw these enormous mangrove swamps in southern Nigeria in the 1970s, and they occur all around the world. They are fascinating natural 'bio-guards' for coastal settlements, in that their complex intertwining root-systems have been shown to dissipate wave energy (see the BBC article). The article also reports that 3.6 million hectares of mangrove forest have disappeared since the 1980s. They seem(ed) to be useless and unproductive; now we know how important the 'useless' was, and how much 'use' they are. (But the local people always knew.)

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. It is clear that many such events are nothing to do with spectacular 'acts of God'; rather, the globalisation of the mad modernist myth of progress (and foreign holidays to countries ruled by dictators) has enabled people everywhere to treat creation as dispensable, to be re-ordered according to our own whims. Disaster follows. cf. floods in England: plant (build) on flood-plains, reap the floods.

What adds two further sour notes is that predictions were given but not broadcast in Burma (do. prior to the Boxing Day tsunami). Secondly, the Burmese government has acquired vast financial resources from mining over the past 20 years, which it has largely spent on building a new capital inland (far away from the sea), funding the army, genocidally destroying the Christian population in the East Karen and Kachin tribes; cf. Sudan)
(See http://dynamic.csw.org.uk/country.asp?s=id&urn=Burma; www.cswusa.com/countries/burma.htm),
and most recently committing atrocities against thousands of Burmese monks.

For further reading, see James Maudsley, The Heart Must Break (2002: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heart-Must-Break-Burma-Democracy/dp/0099426943)
Benedict Rogers, A Land without Evil (2004: http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Land-Without-Evil/dp/082546059X)