Hitching up your robes

Today was my formation group's quiet day and we took a Lectio Devina approach to The Prodigal Son (Luke 15). I think I first read about Lectio Devina through Bosco Peters with his amazing Liturgy site from NZ.

This is how Bosco describes Lectio Devina:

The tradition of reading the scriptures prayerfully to hear what the Spirit is saying to us, individually and corporately...  It is different from and complementary to the scholarly study of the scriptures. Two people making love are not opposed to the scientific understanding of the biological processes, similarly, the love we experience from God in God's Word to us encountered in Lectio Divina is not opposed to careful exegesis. 

I was very happy to be reminded by my friend today about this very important way of reading the scriptures because I have become rather stuck, reading scripture exegetically or with a particular hermeneutic or as a part of the Daily Office. Sometimes the scriptures are read slowly as part of the Daily Office at college and sometimes they are really brought alive with music or drama but more often than not, they are delivered without long pauses.

Lectio Devina might just help me to approach the scriptures and be more careful about what I am hearing. There is the space given between ideas in the reading of a passage.

...so we sat in a small room with glass windows through which we could see the stained glass of the church and read from Luke 15, very slowly, savouring each word, allowing it to flesh itself out in our imaginations as we waited for God to communicate his word to us by the power of his Spirit.

'...while he was still far off...' struck me afresh with real force.

I see that Father hitching up his robes and running to meet his son.

I am reminded of the words we speak after we have received the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ:

To God of all, we give you thanks and praise, that when we were still far off you met us in your Son and brought us home.

I am reminded of Jesus allowing Thomas to touch him if he wishes so that Thomas might no longer doubt.

I am reminded that when we think that we are not walking fast enough towards God, it is alright because he is running out onto the roads, hitching up his robes, running without a thought for the preservation of his own dignity, running out to meet us half-way, for our God to have given us his Son and with such an undignified death, we can trust that this is a picture too of our Heavenly Father who has gone to the farthest lengths to bring his prodigals home.

If you feel as though you can't find God, as if you are finding it difficult to come into his presence because of your circumstances, as I have of late, imagine perhaps that road, which you are walking down. You are penitent and want so much to be back in his presence again, don't dwell on the effort you are making, see instead clouds of dust in front of you, small stones flying to the left and right from the sandals of your Father as he runs the rest of the way to you.

Speaking in tongues

I like this. H/t Clayboy



It rather reminds me of the amazing possibilies for unity and disunity which the internet provides and because I am writing an essay which should conclude with what the Church should look like today in terms of my textual analysis of Eph 1:1-14, I am wondering about our disunity and the fact that we do not understand each other and what we must do to overcome that.

On Facebook, I have a friendship with an Italian deacon and religious educator, a Catholic and we speak by using google translation tools and we've had some pretty deep and interesting converstations Having said that, I am just about the worst person at understanding people with heavy accents, which has often resulted in serious confusion. I thought I was suffering from calcium deficiency when I was pregnant, when in actual fact I was being told to see a consultant physician. I thought that the man buying my first house was declaring it full of damness and condemnation when in actual fact he was asking whether I had certificates for treatment for dampness and condensation and believe me these are just a few of the examples I can bring to mind!

Theories on Paul and his use of the second person plural pronoun at Ephesians 1:13

Oh heck. I'm frozen. Unable to get over a hermeneutical hurdle. I do not want my essay to get stuck on one small personal pronoun but I feel I have to come to some conclusions about it.

Paul has considered his state alongside that of the Ephesians for twelve verses now with his inclusive pronouns, 'we', 'us', 'our'...he now speaks of the seal and the pledge of the Holy Spirit and addresses believers with 'you'. Is there a specific reason? Is he addressing the Ephesians (well, that's debated so better not state that so explicitly) the believers in Asia Minor? Is he now addressing just the Gentiles but doesn't this have implications for how we read the application of the other spiritual blessings? Is this swap of pronoun an...now what was that word...which really I should know...because I was an English teacher...an anacoluthon? Fee and O'Brien say one thing. Martin and Hoehner another. Oh 'eck!

Shifting ground

...so I consider my past couple of weeks at theological college either the experience of someone having a crisis of calling or the wearing off of a honeymoon period or simply a maturation into the realities of what ministry is really going to be like. I have not decided which one it is yet.

There is this feeling you see that I am never doing anything particularly well. The essay would be better, if I didn't have to deliver that presentation, the presentation would be better if I didn't have to attend that meeting or organise that kids club, the kids club would have been better if I hadn't had to research the history of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms in order to keep up in class and that would have been more through, if I also didn't have a family with whom I need to spend some time once in a while ...so when we are also asked if we want to try being street pastors or deliver goods to the Arches or volunteer for assisting at the table-top sale, the sighs are big and the feelings are worse when we decline.

Is it a crisis of calling? Well, sometimes I forget about God altogether and wonder how I got myself into all this, then I remember the reason for it all, Him and it doesn't seem so bad but I am asking why? I am wondering whether He (God) and them (the Church) got it wrong. I am imagining scenarios where they say, 'Well, good try but perhaps not, after all.'

Has the honeymoon worn off? Maybe. I miss God. Yes, weird. It's just that I am learning so much about God, I miss talking to him and worshipping him. These things happen but the balance seems to be all wrong. There is the formality, the liturgy, the expectation. But it is as if the expectation is placed upon us. What are we going to do?
'What is God going to do?' I want to say and yes, I know it's about him working through us but again it seems a little off kilter.

Am I simply understanding more the realities? The never doing anything brilliantly is about working in the best way you can with the time you have and prioritising. The tensions are those of the inbetween times, the groans are those we all share over our own ineptitudes and the problems of earthly existence in general. We live in the heavenlies too, I know. We have a dual citizenship but the plane I am on seems to have temporarily run out of fuel, I can not get off the ground and the sound of the revving engines and the speed of everything shifting so rapidly around me is giving me a serious case of vertigo.

...so the ground is shifting

...and I am finding it hard to keep my balance...

Hermeneutical circles

The motivation behind Tom Wright's Five Act Play
It is not clear when Wright first thought of the idea of the five act play but a driver was his frustration with people who claim that Leviticus says that we should not mix fibres and hence setting aside bits of the OT justifies our setting aside parts  of the New. This should not be so.Wright started to think about the way that drama works. There are a lot of true doctrines and ethics in the Bible but they are communicated in the framework of a story from the garden to the city.

He is happy to concede that there is a sixth act, but the early acts must not be collapsed. We must not miss out the story of Israel, if we do, we will not understand the allusions to it in the New Testament. Wells and Young have also written about this idea of a five act play: it is a good heuristic tool.

We watch Tom Wright saying these things on the interactive Time-line being produced by Tim Hull at St John's college. It helps us to engage with different theologians over time.

In our module, we are looking at how the narrative idea of scripture has been eclipsed by the enlightenment. We have turned the Bible into a series of propositional statements. Frei's 'The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative' redeems the sense of scripture as narrative. Balthasar's 'Theodrama' explores this as does Van Hoozer was influenced by Balthasar.

And so systematic theology is rescued, in a sense, from the enlightenment demands for certainty. Balthasar says Barth's Christological concentration was too heavy at the cost of our own role in the story.

What we bring to the story triggers interpretation.

Hermeneutical circles

There has to be a something in a text to which we can relate. We come with our presuppositions.

"Any interpretation is never a presuppositionless apprehending of something presented to us. " Heidegger 191 (Being and Time)

We are living in a culture of interpretation. our lives our a process of interpretation, says Heideggar. Hermeneutics impacts all disciplines, not just theology.

D A Carson
Instead of a straight line there is a hermeneutical circle as the text makes an impact on me and its impact upon me changes. The objective truth evades us because we do not have access to it, only interpreted truth.

Our lecturer wondered, on hearing Carson say this whether he was on a slippery slope to relativism. He asked him in person if this was the case and it did not go down too well.

It is refreshing to hear D A Carson say this. However, Carson does put a hedge around hermeneutics.

I understand our Epistemological modesty and I often think of 1 Cor 13:12 when I am writing up my thoughts about what the Scriptures might mean here.

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

We often have this in mind when we engage in theological debates in the biblioblogosphere. I have also found it freeing to discover that there might be something inherently 'good' about our interpretations.

I am wrestling now to shake off life in the old paradigm where the hermeneutical task seemed somehow the natural task for a fallen people, if it is instead the natural task for a people all made unique, then this seems much more positive.

Heidegger (the 20th century philosopher) describes how we have inherited a world-view but then we are dragged along by the crowd and their hermeneutic. This is violent. Derrida says that there is violence done to the text too. There is also a dominant hermeneutic which does violence to the more marginal hermeneutic. I had not thought about this before and I am considering now whether some of own feminist theologies both do a violence to the text and suffer violence from the more dominant hermeneutical models and I wonder which is the bigger violence.

The return to Reason at the turn of the Enlightenment was a reaction to people claiming that divine truth was theirs when claims conflicted.

Smith reflects on the interpretation of interpretation and 'The Fall of Interpretation' is a brilliant book which I would buy if it didn't cost £38. I Must look out for a second-hand copy.

We have been asked to read Sanders who writes about the classical background: the influence of Aristotle and Plato. Greek thought has polluted the way that we do theology. Open theism seeks to liberate Christianity from the dominance of Greek thought.


We have also been asked to consider Bray's argument, defending the Greek philosophical approach.

Carson ('Becoming Conversant with the Emergent Church') believes that the emergent church has left the enlightenment behind and has become very frustrated at the extent to which we are arguing for interpretative difference. He believes we need not choose between a meaning that is wholly determinate and a meaning that is wholly indeterminate. If we travel too far in the direction of relativism, then we are going to have chaos.

There is the idea that the traditional arguments for the existence of God are not valid in a post-modern but this is a fallacy says Craig. Relativism does not pollute all things. There are texts that we trust at first-hand. Our culture remains deeply modernist in terms of its science and technology. We read the Headache tablets packet and the Rat poison packet and we do not confuse them.

Craig believes the the idea of sharing our narrative brings us to a place of postmodern uncertainty which will be the death of the church because there is no objective truth. This sits uneasily when scientific investigation sits more confidently with its declarations of truth. He wonders whether we should not instead reaffirm apologetics and the rational if we want the Church to remain.

How does it work for us? Can we not defend a middle way? There is truth and there is uncertainty as there is with any relationship we have.

Learning to lament

I was affected in a very unexpected way by tonight's worship.

We sang a service of lament. We listened to a lecturer share his life-story and it did many things for me. It taught me that it is okay what I do here. I record my story. It gave me a kind of permission to keep doing so. We need each other's stories. We need to share in the experiences of our shared humanity.

But moreover, this evening taught me that I am not very good at lamenting. I wonder if I ever learnt to do this. i wonder if I have ever really allowed myself to do this. My upbringing, with a very pragmatic mum and a very positive dad, my Britishness handed down by a very victorianesque grandfather of the stiff-upper-lip variety, my parents-in-law, whom I have known since I was 16, who have survived a world-war, hard labour in Siberia and the struggle of setting up lives in a land that is not their own, working in factories when they could have had professional jobs back in Poland, a husband who is also not prone to lamenting and complaining because he is made of strong stuff, me being the eldest in the family - all these things mean that I have never really learnt to lament.

I returned tired. I stood in front of my fire at home and the sadness of everything really hit me, the complications, the messiness of the church and particularly the Church of England in the present climate, human messiness, that we can all tell a version of our story, just like my lecturer did in the first third of his sermon and we rejoice in all the good things that God has done, where he has worked in our lives heaping such blessings and bringing us more closely into his presence and then we tell the rest of our story, we also have those parts we haven't laid bare and so we expose them just a little, as my lecturer did, and he wept, and we feel very cold and vulnerable but there is a place and a time to do this and we have to help each other to do this, to lament a little, to complain just a bit, to cry out like the psalmist and wonder where God is in all of this.

And as I sang my lament standing in the choir, I fixed my eyes on my little girl, my youngest, looking so pale on her daddy's knee. She has a stomach upset and I carried on singing and he went out with her to the toilet and then came back again, out again and back again and then I was free so that I could be with her, and I know this is all a strange application of her discomfort, but as I stood holding her in the bathroom, as she cried on the toilet because her body was not behaving as it should have been, I thought of the whole people of God, this groaning body, not behaving as we should, out of control and needing comfort and I thought about how every now and then we need to free ourselves from the singing and run to each other instead, not so that we can necessarily tidy up the messiness and flush it away, (although I did this for the sake of the St John's cleaning staff), but so that we can just hold each up, as I held onto her as she sat on the toilet, and be just prepared to be there, to share in the groaning, the pains, the discomfort and lament with one another a little.

Buses and Bishops

If our bishops won't fly in, our buses will fly out!

I've been talking at college today with my very good friend who is part of an FIF church. It is lamentable to see his struggles over what might happen next and he suspects that when it comes to ordinations and confirmations over where he worships, they will all just simply get on a bus and these ceremonies will occur in another church where a male bishop presides and is willing. I must say I imagine them all getting on that bus, some are unaware why they are being transported out from their own church but others are fully aware, some care and some do not. For some it is very necessary and for others the confirmation or ordination would have been equally valid if it had been performed by a female bishop. Thus are our churches, there are all sorts of people of all sorts of theological persuasions on board.


Fulcrum does not articulate what the solution might be but they are praying into it and affirm the latest developments from the Revision Committee. You can read their statement here. Personally, I am glad that Fulcrum exist because they express conservative open evangelicalism as I see it and at least give me a 'body' with which I can identify, which is rather an unfortunate image to use really considering the only body to which I really belong is the Body of Christ. I suppose, as with earthly bodies, there are some bits which trouble us and some bits about which we feel comfortable, but even so the whole body must remain united in order to be whole and holy, let's just hope there aren't any nasty dismemberments no matter how much some of the limbs cause us pain. I think I would rather my friend stayed home than got on his bus!

Why can't I be a conservative female priest?

How is it that' liberalism' is banded about like a dirty word? What is liberalism anyway? To me a liberal is someone who does not believe in the authority of the scriptures and perhaps the virgin birth and the resurrection are not a part of their professing faith at all, which is hard to relate to. I do not want those who believe in women priests to describe themselves as liberals, surely it does us no favours? It muddies the waters. If you are a liberal, explain for me what that means, please. Don't tell me Jesus was a liberal, because I understand the use of the word in that context but it doesn't seek to unmuddy what these distinctions mean today, because in the political church climate, they mean something else altogether.

Virtueonline describes how:
The facts are these. Women bishops are at least 10 years away. More and more women are being ordained but confined to the house of clergy. They can only vote as clergy in the synodical structures, but the laity represents the broad mass of the C of E which is strongly conservative. The point is women priests will not swamp the church and will not ultimately make or break it. All the major seminaries and theological colleges are filled with next generation evangelicals, the product of seeds sown by faithful Anglican evangelicals like John Stott, Jim Packer, Michael Green, Alistair McGrath et al some of whom are now octogenarians.




So why are these things exclusive of one another? I am an evangelical, one of those 'filling the theological colleges'. I adhere to the 39 articles and the Book of Common Prayer....okay, some of these things need proclaiming afresh for our context. For example, I aim to resurrect services in which we give thanks for the safe arrival of new babies in my future parish but what I will not include is that section from the BCP where women declare how they repent for having thought that all men are liars when they were in the throes of labour. I mean, come on, let's be sensible about things. But, my faith is orthodox.


VOL declare that
The churches will not be filled by women priests or women bishops either. There is simply no evidence for it. Bending to the culture will only make churches orphans in time. Confronting the culture with the Good News of Jesus, as difficult as that might be, is England's only hope.

The thing is I never set out to either make or break the church and I agree with VOL that 'Bending to the culture will only make churches orphans in time.' It's just that the church has bent to a patriarchal culture for two thousand years and even more recently to a culture which believed that one human being could declare another its property because of their misreading and manipulation of St Paul. So why are some parts of the church lamenting a future more representative of God's justice, without first inspecting the incongruities of their own past? Why are they making crass generalisations about the motivations of one half of the human race? Why is all so blinkingly exasperatingly sad?


Maranatha!

Talking on facebook

Facebook is proving quite useful for networking. It's a strange kind of place because unlike a blog you have no control over your page in the sense that you can not filter out that which might cause you to gasp and bristle although you do not, of course, have to accept all friendship requests. I've live-chatted with Pete Broadbent whom I think was very gracious to give me five minutes and I have spoken in Italian to an Italian deacon who I do not know but by using google translation tools, we decided we had Jesus in common and after that the conversation flowed. A few of my lecturers are facebook users, as are other students so it can prove quite useful. As with anything, you also need to ensure that you don't let it distract you from other things but it really is the friend of every social animal and like everything in life it can be used to build or distort God's Kingdom. It has been criticized by many but essentially, it is about communication. It is about saying, 'this is what I am thinking, do you ever think like that too?' and if people do not, there is the chance to grow and learn and if people do, then there is the chance of fellowship. It is not meant to compete with a hug and a coffee in one-to-one interaction, that is not its claim, it is just another way us human beings have invented in an attempt to connect with one another and that can be no bad thing.