tinderbox

Eric Gill Song of Songs (facsimile)

2010-08-02T06:28:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-12-31T10:43:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-21T02:10:00.000-08:00

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"

2009-11-28T15:51:00.000-08:00

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...

2008-06-19T08:09:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-28T07:27:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-07T02:57:00.000-07:00

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)

T F Torrance 1913-2007

2008-04-25T06:01:00.000-07:00

I have sadly only just discovered from 'An Appreciation' by Peter Forster, the present Bishop of Chester, in the current issue of Anvil (Vol. 25 No. 1 2008) that Tom Torrance died on 2 December last year (2007). I am always sad when someone I have respected, enjoyed or known of dies without my knowing, and, as it were, being able to participate in their death.

I also always regret never having written - as I had often planned to do - to the Prime Minister's Office to urge that he be awarded a Knighthood, for Services to Theology.

He was for me a giant among theologians, someone who almost defined orthodoxy, with massive knowledge of the Patristic and Reformation periods, and with an equally clear sense of their resonances in the modern world. Combined with his conviction that theology was a science on a par with, and able to debate with, natural science, his grasp of the mutual benefits of classical theology and modern quantum physics made him a fascinating explorer of God and God's universe(s). Apart from referring readers to the Anvil article (above), I can note three reasons for regarding him so highly, and why (like Peter Forster) I am puzzled that he was not estimated more highly.

Having requested a copy of his Theological Science (1969) from some friends for my deacon-ing in 1970, I recall spending weeks, much later, in the summer of 1978 or 1979, struggling with this thought-defying tome, trying to understand it, and not knowing whether I had or had not properly comprehended his argument, but knowing that he had changed and expanded my mind for ever. Lines of thought can also ingrain themselves subconsciously on your mind, in any case. This was some of the most demanding and rewarding theology I have ever encountered.

But his two 'smaller' books - Space, Time and Incarnation (1969) and Space, Time and Resurrection (1976) - have remained more foundationally seminal. Besides wonderfully limpid phrases (!) such as 'a fatal deistic disjunction between God and the world', 'obsolete phenomenalist and positivistic assumptions', 'Q fundamentalism' and 'an obsolete Cartesian-Kantian dualism' in his introduction to SPR, Torrance stressed that only an undivided theological engagement with the biblical text will do it justice, for while theological questions yield theological answers, historical questions only yield historical answers (e.g. question of authorship, etc.). i.e. he absolutely countered the split between 'history' and 'theology' in modern study. The breadth and depth of his theological engagement with contemporary science was breath-taking, and the consequences of that thinking vital for all theological study.

As his theological debt to Barth, Polanyi and the Gregorys was great, and his scientific debt to Einstein, von Weizsaecker and Goedel equally so, nonetheless some of his most fruitful conversations were between ancient and modern Orthodoxy, on the one hand, and depleted forms of Western Christianity on the other. But all these streams flowed into, and out of, one mind of exceptional ability. He was a colossus: too orthodox and traditional in general for some Evangelicals, and too evangelical for others of a more liberal persuasion; but the strength of his writings very significantly contributed to the extraordinary rapprochement in theology between East and West which we sense going on all around us. His subsequent work on (e.g.) Divine and Contingent Order (1981) and The Trinitarian Faith (1988; sub-titled: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church') shows him engaging deeply in his chosen fields.

A couple of examples of typically precise wording conclude this small tribute, to indicate that he wrote no sloppy English:

'We must not think of the Incarnation as an intrusion of the Son of God into the determinations and conditions of space and time...Rather is the Incarnation (NB: in both cases, capital I) to be understood as the chosen path of God's rationality in which He interacts with the world and established such a relation betwen creaturely being and Himself that He will not allow it to slip away from Him into futility or nothingness, but upholds and confirms it as that which He has made and come to redeem' (STI, 67).

'[The resurrection] is the only historical event that does not suffer from decay and is not threatened by annihilation and illusion' (STR, 95).

I thank God for the memory of a life filled with, and witnessing to, the mind of Christ.

Article cited: Peter Forster, 'T. F. Torrance (1913-2007): An Appreciation', Anvil Volume 25 No 1 2008, pp. 21-31.

Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali

2008-01-06T06:17:00.001-08:00

It is not surprising if Michael Nazir-Ali has been, or will be, pilloried for speaking out about the place of Christian faith in a so-called multi-faith society. If Trevor Phillips warns about Britain sleep-walking its way towards apartheid, he is a wise man issuing a necessary note of alarm. If the wisest and most informed Bishop in the country speaks out, he is told to shut up and sit down. A prophet is not welcome in his own country.

Of course, my 'prophet' may be your 'alarmist'; your 'prophet' may be my 'heretic'. But prophets do not simply warn about the future; they expose the present. Jeremiah - and Jesus - was asking the people of his time to face what was staring them in the eye, but they could not - or would not - see. Or: prophets are allowed on certain themes; but not on others. That is where thought, fact and argument are required, not knee-jerk reactions.

Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali knows Islam inside out, from life in Pakistan and the UK, from personal history and theological research. Of course, there are plenty of critics who have vested interests in viewpoints such as his not being expressed publicly. For instance, the request for permission to introduce the Islamic call to prayer in major cities in the UK expresses a literal claim on that territory for Islam, with strictly legal consequences in terms of Sharia' law.

Advent traditionally begins with the cry to 'Wake up!' Bishop Michael is sounding that cry again now in one specific area of life in Britain. What he is saying is neither surprising nor new: but where ostrich heads have been buried in the sands for years, it does sound shocking. But, as St Paul says, it is time to wake up from sleep. Merely speaking out does not constitute prophecy; but when a wise man, a serious theologian and a believing Christian speaks out, we should listen.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=SEJIOZRWAANTLQFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2008/01/06/nislam206.xml (Why extremism has flourished)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=5SWCYNJWFOFLVQFIQMGSFGGAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2008/01/06/nislam106.xml (Bishops warns of no-go zones)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=SEJIOZRWAANTLQFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2008/01/06/nislam306.xml (Oxford Muslims want call to prayer)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=SEJIOZRWAANTLQFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2007/12/09/nmuslim109.xml (Muslim apostates threatened over Christianity)

The re-birth of the Season

2007-12-23T09:04:00.001-08:00

Just when you thought it was all over for Advent, a German newspaper has been carrying an advert from Ricoh: 'Ricoh wishes you a happy Advent'. Not in England, surely? But Die Welt and The Guardian have both run their own versions of an Advent calendar, even if in the form (at least d .W.) of a daily prize-competition.

Some sense appears to be returning to a proper celebration of Christmas too. The Telegraph has a useful article by Baroness Sayeeda Warsi ('the Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion and Social Action'!), entitled 'Christmas is for everyone to celebrate', rejecting secularists' frostiness, and emphasising that Muslims have no objections to Christians celebrating Christmas at all. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=Y14LVDZM3THQXQFIQMFSFGGAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/opinion/2007/12/23/do2311.xml;

The Guardian, too, celebrates 'the Magic of Carols', with contributions from A N Wilson, Trevor Phillips and Alain de Botton, and makes the really interesting observation that 'Carol singing doesn't just cheer up a bleak midwinter - it's the nearest thing we've go to a shared folk-music'. Precisely: Christmas, which has shaped the Western year for much of its history, is also the national annual mid-winter folk-festival of the Family, and of the Child. So perhaps, when children are being re-enslaved around the world - to bonded or forced labour, and to military service elsewhere, to the consumerism of State and nurseries here - it is critical to encourage a re-naissance of celebration of the birth of the Holy Child Jesus: in Bethlehem, and everywhere.

At the same time, Die Welt reminds its readers that the French philosopher Robert Redeker was issued with a fatwa [death-threat] a year ago for calling Mohammed 'the master of hate' in Le Figaro in September 2006; and the final issue of Der Spiegel for 2007, just out, is entitled 'The Koran: the most powerful book in the world'.

Philip S

'Christ is born' - a musical meditation

2007-12-21T05:46:00.000-08:00

Apart from Messiaen's incomparable La Nativite du Seigneur, two of the most extraordinary Christmas chords I know of are found at the end of Sir JohnTavener's 'God is with us' (to be found at least on Choral Music of John Tavener, Naxos 8.555256, LC 05537 (2000); and on Sacred Music by John Tavener, Hyperion CDA 66464 (1991)). This is our Christmas morning music at home.

The text is: "God is with us. Hear ye people, even to the uttermost end of the earth. The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light..." (Isa 9:2, 6), ending with 'Christ is born!'

I have not seen the score, but, taking it to be in C major, after the first triumphant 'Christ is born!' sung in a great C major chord, there follows a huge C# minor organ chord - a completely unrelated musical key, minor instead of major, and a semitone up, but linked to the previous chord by the E which is common to both C major and C# minor. The voices continue up a further semitone to D minor, modulating then through F major to another strong (E minor) chord, which is also immediately followed by another massive clashing organ chord of E major, with the mediant sharpened third of the scale of E (G# - also the dominant 5th of the earlier C# minor chord, and where the E is the tonic note of the E major and minor scales). The single note of E thus links all the chords: E major and E minor, C major and C# minor. Extraordinary intrusions, there is still a logical harmonic link between all the apparently incompatible keys.

So, in the Incarnation, the apparently impossible and incompatible chords of divinity and humanity are reconciled. The God who is made human, the Word who is made flesh-and-blood, makes possible what takes place because there are pre-given 'true relations' of Creator and creature. Now, in the beginning of the work of the New Creation, the single linking note of God's extraordinary humility sounds a new - certainly clashing and seemingly contradictory, but in reality related and compatible - symphony of hope and love. In Messiaen's Dieu Parmi nous, the foot-pedal's loud opening descending ladder, in no known or single key, portrays God's descent to rest in 'the low degree'of our humanity. The clashes and alternations, the daring flexible fluidity of chords inTavener's 'God with us' offers the same truth: logic cannot defy God; God descends.

In the wonderful words of Gregory of Nyssa, quoted by Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev (The Mystery of Faith, p. 64), 'Man is more precious than all the rest of the cosmos. Man, completed and perfected, is wondrous, even as God is wondrous. He is more than a microcosm - he is a micro-theos... Between God and man there is and must be commensurability in spite of all that is non-commensurable.' There is correlation as well as broken relationship.

In Jesus, God enters and embraces the frail and glorious vessel of our humanity in order to reveal his own glory. Through the Holy Spirit, God enables there to take place a similar and unique transformation of our individually and infinitely variable created humanity, so that each life, called, converted, polished, broken, hewn, held, shaped, riven and re-made may reveal both our source and our destiny. No other life will reveal what our own will. We are not made to be anyone else. Our celebration of the Feast of the Nativity is the focal point of initiation of that mysterious, hidden, quiet, secret, 'sweet exchange' between God and humanity, which takes place in a life offered without reserve and without understanding, and in the common location of a feeding-trough, where alone all our spirits are fed, as God makes himself as hungry as we are.

Lucy and John

2007-12-13T09:23:00.000-08:00

One of the lovely things about the shortening of the days in December is the Saints' Days that illuminate them. For those to whom this form of delighting in time is foreign, please be patient! These two days match one another.

Today is the f.d. of St Lucy (better known in Scandinavia and the Mediterranean as Santa Lucia), who was martyred for her faith in Christ in Syracuse, Sicily, in 303/4, in the particularly vicious persecution of Diocletian. You can find the rather gory details of her death, if you want, in e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Lucy or http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09414a.htm. In the early Julian Calendar, Dec 13th was the shortest day of the year (i.e. with the longest night), but her name means light (lux, lucis). So the remembrance is of her [light] in the darkness, of her being 'a burning and shining lamp' (like John the Baptist - John 5:35), in a deliberate reminiscence of the Light of Christ (John 1:5).

Tomorrow, 14th Dec., is the f.d. of St John of the Cross (1542-1591), the great 'mystical doctor' of the Roman Catholic Church (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08480a.htm; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_the_Cross), and lyrical Spanish poet. Some call him the 'Doctor of Nothingness [Nada]'; I call him the 'Doctor of Darkness', although the darkness he writes of ('The Dark Night') is in reality 'The Living Flame of [God's] Love' burning and en-flaming us. The Orthodox Church does not give the special status to darkness that the Western church does, since it is so coloured by the glory of the Resurrection. But for John, the darkness was proof of the night [of faith] and of our desire for God; the soul is held, cauterised and transfigured in the blinding brilliance of the glory of God: the darkness is held in the light.

Lucy (13th Dec.) points to the light of faith; John of the Cross (14th Dec.) to the night of faith.

Philip S

A Culture-Christian Christmas?

2007-12-12T03:05:00.000-08:00

I know: it's still thirteen days to Christmas, but, thinking ahead just a little, a couple of articles at the weekend did revisit the issue of Christian and 'traditional' cultural Christmases.

You may ignore (or vent your fury or approbation on) the various comments following it, but 'I wish you a very Christian Christmas' does at least show how far Britain has lost its tradition of 'cultural-European' celebrations of the Feast of the Nativity. One writer below senses the kill-joy touch of 'The Party' [i.e. the Stasi spirit of former East Germany] in the UK, which, combined with a Taliban secularising spirit, is determined to put an end to all 'partying' and festivity. Shades of George Orwell; echoes of the White Witch - always winter and never Christmas.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/12/09/do0903.xml

Trevor Phillips, Chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, injects some sense:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3022311.ece, with Leading article at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article3022121.ece

Philip S

Prayer in Advent

2007-12-11T08:40:00.000-08:00

Traditionally, Advent is a time for waiting, in view of the Last Things. As it happens, this year, it is also a time for facing what comes to us in the form of illness.

Please remember in your prayers Peter Lawrence, Heather Waldsax's Training Minister, who has suffered a small stroke, which has affected his speech and his writing - which is very hard for an evangelist! Please also pray for his wife Carole.

Melanie Groundsell discovered two weeks ago that there was a tumour in the area of the bowel for which she had been successfully treated for cancer more than two years ago; she has begun a course of chemotherapy today. This is hard news; please pray for her, and for her father.

This Advent, please also pray for:

the family of Claire Sankey, a former student of STETS, who died earlier in the year
Val Hards' husband, Richard, who has been involved in a quite serious accident in Ghana;
John Kellagher, whose father died in the autumn;
Hannah Knight, in the Academic Office, whose grandfather died recently, aged 100;
the families of the two teenage boys linked with the Fordingbridge school (where Jo Naish teaches) who both died in their sleep this term.

'Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ'.

Philip

first night of the proms

2007-07-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

A very interesting thing happened at the end of the first night of the proms: the conductor, Jiri Belohlavek, bowed to the orchestra. (Parable.)

A great deal is often made of the role of the President at Communion, or the Bishop, as the focus of unity, as the one who gathers God's people. The direction is often accordingly mis-construed as 'from the people to the President'. It often feels as if the president is the one with the power or authority, rather than all the people.

The great conductor of a famous orchestra last Friday night, Jiri Belohlavek, re-dressed the balance more correctly: he bowed to the orchestra, acknowledged (as he said in an interval interview) that it was not he who produced the sound and the music, but the players in the orchestra. His task was to enable them to play the music, to draw the music out of them. So the direction of encouragement is 'from the conductor to the orchestra'; the direction of music is 'from the orchestra'. The direction of a revelatory theology is 'from God to us'; the direction of our referential practice is to point 'from us to God'.

In the concert for Diana a week or two back, some of you will have seen the clip where Princess Diana visited a home for the blind, and one of the men wanted to feel the contours of Diana's face to get a sense of what she looked (and felt) like. One shot showed Diana kneeling on the ground in her stockinged feet at his desk, next to one of the luckiest people in the world that day (as he said), with his hands stroking, and then cupping both sides of Diana's face.

What no eye has seen... God has revealed to us through the Spirit...
...the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ...
...then we shall see face to face...
...we will see him as he is.

He must increase, but I must decrease.
Jesus got up from the table, took off his jacket and shirt, and tied a towel around himself.
Though he was in the form of God, he emptied himself...he humbled himself..even [to] death on a cross
Philip