Justice and Compassion

Earlier today the Scottish Government agreed to the compassionate release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, previously convicted of the Lockerbie bombing. I thought I would post some brief thoughts on this.

1. Correct me, O Lord, but in justice;
not in your anger, lest you bring me to nothing. Jer 10:24.

I'm not sure that justice and anger go well together. We rejoice in this prayer of Jeremiah's, do we then choose to live in anger rather than justice?

2. Why is the statue of justice blindfolded? To be just, justice must be impartial. There is an element of penalty in all sentencing, but only an element. Is the principle purpose of sentencing punishment? Is there not another purpose served? I'm not comfortable with the wishes of victims of crime for retribution having a substantial claim over the course of justice.

3. Compassion is not weakness. Compassion is a strong, motivating emotion. We do well to heed the claims of compassion.

4. I really don't like being lectured by American politicians on justice. If they had captures Mr Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, no doubt he would have been detained without trial, incarcerated in a prison wearing an orange jump suit and being regularly tortured.

5. We can't only have compassion on high profile prisonners who are Lybian. The claims of compassion extend to all in our prisons where need arises.

6. No 2 above does not seek to diminish the pain experienced by victims of crime, rather we should live in a society where justice is prized and compassion for all is practiced.

Textual Quirks

I'm really enjoying this book. Chapter 2 is on Quirks, those aspects of narrative texts that crop up again and again and you need to watch out for them.

On the author, "We want, when reading narrative, to get into the narrator's own head, to know how he looks upon the matters he describes, or - what is the same for me, how God looks upon those matters." (p. 12)

I am grateful for this reminder of the overlap between the human author and the Divine author, when using the best tools we have to understand literature, we remember to submit to God the author.

Some quirks: reticence (a narrative author doesn't always tell us what the point is), eavesdropping (a narrative author will sometimes tell us information the characters in the events narrated don't know).

Selectivity (a narrative author doesn't always tell us everything we want to know). "You are dying of curiosity and the narrator answers none of your questions. Hence they must not be that important!" (p. 15) It is a sign of great pride to imagine that our concerns are greater in importance than those of the author of Scripture. I've heard too many good sermons go bad when a preacher begins to imagine (read - make up) details that are not given in the text. This is not a complaint about extra-biblical historical background, but about the imposition of psychological and/or emotional motives upon biblical characters where there is no evidence in the text for this. Since God is the author, his concerns should become our concerns, and if God doesn't tell us we don't need to know.

I like what Dale writes about surprise, "Sometimes we may be so familiar with the flow of a biblical story that we fail to be surprised when we should. We need to cultivate a 'first-time-reader' frame of mind." (p. 19)

In biblical narrative emphasis is achieved by repetition. Let me make the point this way:

"For a man solemnly to undertake the interpretation of any portion of Scripture without invocation of God, to be taught and instructed by his Spirit, is a high provocation of him; now shall I expect the discovery of truth from any one who thus proudly engages in a work so much above his ability." (from John Owen on p. 1 - see my earlier post!!)

There are other quirks in chapter 2, but buy the book - it's well worth it.

I can't finish without one final quote.

"But this tension (in Ex 2:1-10) is not some mere literary device; it is a theological primer. It tells us that sometimes Yahweh's providence is a heart-stoping providence. In fact, it tells us something important about God - he is not boring; he is able to keep you interested. He may perplex you; he may even drive you to despair; he may keep you on the edge of your seat far longer than you want - but no one who knows him will ever call the God of the Bible boring." (p. 28-29)

On a Friday morning, may those of us called to preach by this God on Sunday be excited by the great big God of the Bible.

Approaching Preaching

I found this book at Keswick, and already am glad that I did. Dale Ralph Davis was speaking on the first week, check out the programmes on clayton.tv

This is a book on preaching, or perphas a book on Old Testament narratives in preparation for preaching. In chapter 1 Dale writes on an approach to preaching.

Quoting John Owen, "For a man solemnly to undertake the interpretation of any portion of Scripture without invocation of God, to be taught and instructed by his Spirit, is a high provocation of him; now shall I expect the discovery of truth from any one who thus proudly engages in a work so much above his ability." (p. 1)

I found this a humbling reminder of my human weakness, a great challenge to any professional pride in handling Scripture. A call to prayer and dependance upon God is surely the only way to approach preaching.

Later on, "In facing Scripture one must take account of two realities: Spirit and text. This fact forces me to one of my operating presuppositions: God has given his word in the form of literature, part of which is narrative; I should therefore use all available tools for understanding literature. So I seek the Spirit's aid and use an approach suited to the form of his word." (p. 3)

What a great operating presupposition! Let's try to understand God's word starting from the form in which he has given us his word - literature, narrative. This leads to some obvious questions.

Why? What is the authors intention?

"Now all this concern with a writer's intention is terribly out of step. I call it 'dinosaur hermeneutics'. Reader-response criticism is more the current rage; it only wants to answer, 'How does this text affect me?' There is no precise or correct meaning but only meanings which arise from within the reader. I admit my preoccupatin with a writer's intention is dated. And I really don't care. It's hard to get away from the suspicion that someone meant to mean something with a text. Sooner or later folks will recognize that - again." (p. 4-5)

Yes, yes, yes! Words consciously and deliberately placed in sentences, in paragraphs, in narratives mean something. I do not construct a meaning by imposing my meaning upon a text - that is textual abuse. Submission to Scripture begins with a sustained seeking of the purpose of the text, the intention of the author.

Dale then comments on: (ii) How? What is the Structure of the text? (iii) What? What is the actual content of the text? Before coming to So what?

"We need to hear some loving mockery behind us, crying, 'So what? What difference does all this study make for anyone? Why should I want to pay any attention to this?' If we are constantly 'berated' that way, it will make us far better interpreters." (p. 7)

We have not preached, we have not studied a portion of Scripture until and unless we have answered this 'So what?' question. The authors intention must connect with my life. The structure and content of the passage must bear down upon me and land on Monday morning.

What a simple and straighforward approach to understanding Scripture in preparation for preaching. Pray as though everything depended upon the Spirit (which it does) and work hard at a few simple questions as though the whole thing is depending upon your study (which it does).

May God raise up such preachers and ministers of his word in our land.

Steve Brady at Keswick

Introducing the evening series on Faith At Work for the evening celebrations this year Steve Brady spoke on these three headings:

Faith leans upon a person

Faith lasts under pressure

Faith lives by the promise

It was a good talk and I'm sure you'll be able to catch it on clayton.tv

Steve shared a quote from Churchill, "The secret of success is going from failure to failure with no noticeable loss of enthusiasm."

When going from 'aparant' failure to 'aparant' failure it is good for those of us involved in Christian service to remember, we already know the end of the story - our God wins!

Total Church = Total Community

More from this excellent book.

Chester and Timmis are totally into community. This is the big challenge to church as we've always known it. It isn't enough to speak to new people who come on a Sunday, for Total Church community is much more than that.

On p. 48 we read of how identity as Christians is found in a Christian community, and this Christian community is Christ's new community.

For many of us experiences of church are different from what we hope Christ's new community will be like. We find the old ways of being in community - competition, aggression, fear, gossiping - all the old destructive patterns of life. It is not a new challenge that the church should be a new community, a new kind of community (perhaps for a new kind of Christian!). We have all felt the force of this challenge before. I think in this book it comes with a fresh power and import.

Where do we seek our identity? In Christ. Well Jesus is usually the answer. But, what does this mean? It cannot mean less than the church becoming a whole life community in which we find our new identity in Christ.

I really like the thought on p. 38. A weakness exists in building my own identity rather than receiving one constructed by God's grace.

What freedom there is in not having to find myself, in not needing to be affirmed by any other than God in his grace. This I think is one of the most frightening ideas in the book, I must almost give up my own identity to receive a new one in grace.

No doubt this is included in cross bearing self-denial, but does not demean self or diminsh the worth placed upon me by a God whose Son died for me.

If only church could be a place where genuine grace shaped identity is born and nurtured in a community of those growing in the new, grace-given identities.

Alpha, The Guardian, NT Wright and the Resurrection

I've copied below the post from Friday Night Theology from the Evangelical Alliance (7/8/09).

It appears that Adam Rutherford who writes for The Guardian is attending an Alpha course and writing of his thoughts on this. In his recent article he strongly questions the historicity of Christianity in general and the resurrection of the body of the Lord Jesus in particular. Bishop Wright offers a brief response to this and points to his two wonderful books - 'The Resurrection of the Son of God' and 'Surprised by Hope'.

I hope you find this helpful, and please do check out the EA site for Friday Night Theology.


Wright on the Resurrection

This week’s ‘special’ FNT first appeared on the Guardian's commentisfree site. It is reproduced here with the permission of Bishop Tom Wright.

Various things could be said of Adam Rutherford's take on the resurrection (apart from the fact that the criticism doesn't seem to be engaging with the central issues, so it's hard to tell whether he's really heard the point or not).
1. The historical basis of Christianity is vital precisely because Christianity isn't just a moral philosophy or a pathway of spirituality, however much many in late western culture (including in the church) have tried to belittle it by treating it as such. Of course sceptics want Christianity to be "simply a moral philosophy". That's not nearly so challenging as what it actually is.
2. The reason many of us refer to the New Testament in dealing with early Christianity is not just that it's "The Bible", but that it's the close-up, often first-hand evidence both for what happened and for what Jesus' first followers made of it all.
3. The historical evidence for Jesus himself is extraordinarily good. I have no idea whether the Alpha teachers have gone into the detail of how we know about things in Palestine in the first century, but the evidence dovetails together with remarkable consistency, as I and many others have shown in works of very detailed historical scholarship. From time to time people try to suggest that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, but virtually all historians of whatever background now agree that he did, and most agree that he did and said a significant amount at least of what the four gospels say he did and said.
4. Just as Christian faith is far more than a moral philosophy or spiritual pathway (though it includes both as it were en passant), so it is more than a "how to get saved" teaching backed up by a dodgy "miracle". Christian faith declares that, in and through Jesus, the creator of the world launched his plan to rescue the world from the decaying and corrupting force of evil itself. This was (if it was anything at all) an event which brought about a new state of affairs, albeit often in a hidden and paradoxical way (as Jesus kept on saying): the "kingdom of God", that is, the sovereign, rescuing rule of the creator, breaking in to creation. If this stuff didn't happen then Christianity is based on a mistake. You can't rescue it by turning it into a philosophy.
5. Of course, this was nonsense in the ancient pagan world, as it is nonsense in the modern pagan world. Nothing new there. The Jewish worldview (in which there is a creator God who has promised to rescue the world, and whose people are somehow a vehicle of this rescue operation) was and is always offensive to pagan worldviews of every sort. The sceptics of today add nothing to the sceptics of the first and second century AD.
6. And, of course, we all know that dead people don't rise. Actually, the early Christians knew that too; they didn't suppose that people did rise from the dead from time to time and that Jesus just happened to be one of them. (The other "raisings" in the NT are of course what we would call "near death experiences" – people who are clinically dead and then find themselves called back.*) Rather, they claimed that Jesus had as it were gone through death and out the other side into a new form of physicality for which there was no previous example and of which there remains no subsequent example. They knew as well as we do how outrageous that was, but they found themselves compelled to say it. As one of the more sceptical of today's scholars has put it, "It seems that they were doing their best to describe an event for which they didn't have the right language."
7. You can't explain how they came to say what they said unless there were both several "sightings" of and meetings with someone they took to be Jesus, alive again, and an empty tomb where he had been. Without the first, they would have said the grave had been robbed. Without the second, they would have known it was a hallucination (they knew as much about those as we do). But if both occurred, how do we explain them? All other explanations fail to account for the reality of what they said and the change in their lives and their sense of call. (Which can't, by the way, be rubbished by likening it to Jones or Koresh; read Acts and compare and contrast with that sort of stuff.)
8. Jesus' resurrection was not, for them, a kind of odd phenomenon which validated a particular atonement theology (though of course all these things are joined up). It isn't an extra thing, bolted on to the outside of a moral philosophy. It is the launching-pad for God's new creation. "Christian spirituality" is learning to live in that new creation. "Christian ethics" is learning to let the power of that new creation shape your life. A Christian political theology is discovering what it means that, through the resurrection, Jesus is the world's true Lord.
9. Ridiculous? Of course. It was in AD 35 and it is today. But actually it makes sense – historically, culturally, philosophically and even dare I say politically. We've tried all sorts of other stuff recently and got fairly stuck, haven't we? But actually that shoulder-shrugging pragmatism, though it might alert people to the fact that normal western scepticism may not have the last word, isn't enough. It is possible to argue historically for the truth of Jesus' resurrection. I and others have done so and the case is remarkably good. But I'm not sure, to be honest, that the writer attending the Alpha course is really interested in the historical argument. If he is, he might look at Surprised by Hope, especially chapters 3 and 4. And if he wants a fuller account, he could tackle The Resurrection of the Son of God.
Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham
*For more details on what Tom Wright means by this, please see his Surprised by Hope (Chapters 3,4) and The Resurrection of the Son of God (pp440ff).

Total Church: Gospel and Theology

Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church: A radical reshaping around gospel and community. Pub IVP, 2007

This was one of my summer reading books. I can't commend it highly enough, if you've already got the book, read it, if not buy it and read it.

Written from the experience of church in The Crowded House the authors write from a conviction that community is at the heart of the gospel and should be at the heart of church.

In the first section of the book they write of gospel and theology in relation to church.

p. 16 - gospel-centred means two things: word-centred and mission-centred. The gospel is a word to proclaim.

What a challenge to much of our church life in CofS! So often God's word is marginalised by our fighting over it and whatever we mean by mission we can hardly be described as mission-centred. Do we agree that the church is to be gospel-centred, and if so, is this what we mean by gospel-centred?

p. 18 "The theology that matters is not the theology we profess, but the theology we practise."

We are so good, and quick, to argue for our own chosen theological position and to defend the purity of our profession. What would happen, what difference would it make if we promoted our theology by our living? When, for example, we claim to hold to the doctrines of grace, why do we so seldom practise grace? Here's a theological challenge, why not, everytime we state to ourselves or in public a theological position we commit to immediately identifying a practise, a way of life implied by that theological position - and then living this theology in our lives day by day.

p. 36 writing on the difference between full-time and part-time in ministry - we need to model whole-life gospel-centred missional living.

We really have lost the thread of the ministry of the people of God, we diminish all ministry by thinking and speaking about full-time, or paid-ministry. Each disciple of the Lord Jesus should be whole-life engaged in discipleship, whole-life engaged in gospel mission. How do we model this? What does it mean in Scotland in 2009? Is whole-life gospel-centred missional living the age old plan of God to save the world one life at a time?

As you can see, I have been greatly challenged by this book. More to follow.