Jesus is my favoured suitor? Erotic spirituality in earlier ages
A good-natured, entertaining, and informative discussion occurred a week or so ago online, sparked by Carl Beech and Vicky Beeching, concerning the perceived ‘feminization’ of worship songs, resulting in a ‘Jesus is my boyfriend’ spirituality in (some strands of) contemporary worship which (it is argued by some) might keep men away from the church. I don’t want to argue the subject at hand particularly, but some historical context occurred to me. I was typing up some songs for our evening service this afternoon, and came across a query from our musical director with reference to Isaac Watts’s ‘How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds.’ One verse, in Newton’s original, read: Jesus, my Shepherd, Husband, Friend, My Prophet, Priest, and King, My Lord, my Life, my Way, my End, Accept the praise I bring. Our more recent songbook, apparently, suggested replacing ‘Husband’ with ‘Saviour’ (which could only be entertained by someone with a tin ear; the more common ‘Master’ is better). I chose to retain ‘Husband’; Newton’s Biblical reference is Song of Songs 1:3, so ‘Husband’ is appropriate. This brought to mind a long tradition of Puritan spirituality, drawing extensively but not exclusively on the Song of Songs to picture the relation of the human soul to Christ. The texts that survive are mostly from male authors (Anne Bradstreet or Elizabeth Rowe would be the most obvious exceptions); they are strikingly graphic and direct in their appropriation of marital and erotic imagery to narrate the relationship between Christ and the believer – or sometimes, drawing on Eph. 5 and similar, between Christ and the church. There is a good discussion of this theme in Belden C. Lane’s Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality (Oxford: OUP, 2011), pp. 105-115. Lane quotes, for instance, Edward Taylor’s funeral poem for his wife, which moves on to reflect on his own experience of God’s love: Shall Mortall, and Immortall marry? nay, Man marry God? God be a Match for Mud? The King of Glory Wed a Worm? mere Clay? This is the Case. The Wonder too is Bliss. Thy Maker is thy Husband. Hearst thou this? John Cotton, famous pastor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, repeatedly used the image of maternal milk to describe the teaching the pastor offers his people. In commenting on the Song of Songs he casts himself as the ‘breasts of Christ’ from which the pure milk of the Word can be sucked (Lane, p. 114). Michael Winship’s 1992 paper, ‘Behold the Bridegroom Cometh! Marital Imagery in Massachusetts preaching, 1630-1730’ (Early American Literature 27, pp. 170-184) contains other striking examples: for Samuel Whiting, the joy of heaven will include ‘his sweet embraces … in that Celestial Bride Chamber and Bed of Love’; for Samuel Willard, the reality of earthly devotion is that if the saints ‘could but now and then, steal a Sight of him, or obtain a Kiss from him … they reckoned themselves happy.’ Contrast this to heaven: ‘there shall be that intimacy which there is between the most loving husband and most beloved wife and transcendently greater … they will not be interrupted Carresses which they shall have from him … There will be no more Coyness on their part … but the delights which they shall enjoy, shall be both full and uninterrupted … the reciprocal ardours of Affection between him and us, shall break over all Banks and Bounds, and we shall be entirely satisfied, both in Soul and Body.’ (Really, comparing the current Vineyard stuff to this is like comparing Stephanie Meyer to D.H. Lawrence…) There are other examples of such extreme rhetoric in the tradition – medieval Western mystics, for one. The Puritan tradition flowered fairly briefly, with Watts the dying end of it in the 1730s. Some explanations of this sort of spirituality major on the fact that the word ‘soul’ in Latin is grammatically feminine (anima); I think this is a mistake: confusion between grammatical and biological gender seems a very recent phenomenon to this non-linguist, at least. Grammatical explanations also fail to explain the ebbs and flows of such language in history: Tillotson and a moderate Anglicanism disdained such spirituality whilst the Puritans were luxuriating in it; this is not because the Puritans were better Latin grammarians! (And if the Evangelicals of Watts’s day and after also refrained from it, it is not because they were less passionate in their devotion.) Freudian readings are also available (Leverenz, The Language of Puritan Feeling suggests Puritan men desired to be transformed into women and children and protected by a transcendent father); like most Freudian readings of most things, these can and should be ignored....
Read MoreBaptist Times to close, apparently
ABP report that the Baptist Times is to cease publication from January here. At the time of writing, there is nothing about this on either the BT‘s own website, or on BUGB’s, but the report seems to quote the right people and when I queried it on Facebook Ian Bunce from Didcot assured me it is true. It’s not news that the BT has been losing money, and has survived only through financial support from BUGB; nor is it news that the print media are struggling, particularly daily and weekly newspapers, in the internet age. Most other smaller denominations in Britain (even the CoS) have gone the way of a glossy monthly publication. Monthlies, however, fulfill a different role: good at features; much less good at reporting news or at providing a forum for denominational debate. Of course, online news is instant and free, and online debate far more rapid and responsive. But in the face of such advantages, we should not forget the accompanying disadvantages. The day after the opening of the Leveson enquiry might not be the ideal time to say this, but journalists are professionals, trained to source and check stories; internet commentary – including this blog – is done by amateurs, who can easily get things wrong. (The – essentially false – ‘Word Alive split was over Steve Chalke’s orthodoxy’ story from a few years back is a case in point: running on the internet, it did real damage to real people, and to effective mission organisations.) Further, discussion in print fora is moderated by editors, which can introduce problems of partiality and the like, but is much more often a great boon. There are very few, if any, popular religious or news websites where it is worth reading anything ‘below the line’, and so anyone with any sense doesn’t. (Blogs generally do better, because of their semi-private nature, and because there is, generally, a degree of quiet editing. Yes, I do delete comments even here, albeit only a handful – see policy tab above.) The appearance of open debate online, therefore, is often an illusion, resembling less a reasoned public forum and more the incoherent shoutings of a mob that simply drown out any worthwhile contributions that happen to be made. Editors exist to preserve certain standards of quality in reporting and debate; where there is no editing (as generally is the case online) there are no standards. This is inevitably bad news. Finally, a print journal provides a focus; online debate is generally dispersed and fragmented. Those who hold to particular views gravitate to their own fora, and so discussion across party lines is much rarer. Factionalisation and polarisation are more likely in a debate that has no central context to draw it together. The BT did this for BUGB, and so was a real, if quiet and partial, force for denominational unity. For these reasons, the loss of a newspaper like the BT is sad, even if it was inevitable. BUGB’s denominational life will be the poorer for...
Read MoreBritish/European theo-bloggers
For reasons explained in the previous post, I would like to start to construct a list of British and European blogs with theological content. Nominations are hereby invited. I guess we need to define ‘theological content’. I would go for something like this: ‘a majority of the posts would be interesting to someone, educated to higher degree level, who is generally interested in theology and wants to keep abreast of contemporary developments and discussions.’ So a blog that offers informed and reasoned posts on a particular theological topic, and a blog that serves to alert its readers of upcoming publications, lectures, and conferences, both make the cut. I would generally like to err on the side of generosity, also: it is a list inviting people to explore, after all, and I don’t think it is going to be excessively long… (‘British/European’ also invites some analysis; what of Brits now living abroad, or Americans temporarily resident here to do a doctorate? The test is content, and again to be applied generously. Suggest away.) I have ten or so candidates in my own head, but I’d like to hear others’ proposals, so I’m not even going to start a list. Tell me what should be...
Read More‘Hooded hoardes swarming…’
Not quite four years ago, when I began this blog, I put a blogroll in the right gutter; it seemed the thing to do back then. I have been conscious for most of those four years that the blogroll was out of date, but unsure how to reform it. Recently, I deleted some dead links, but otherwise I have not changed it since the initial creation of the blog. My problem has been knowing what a blogroll is for. Two traditions are visible out in the blogosphere. The first is to list all the blogs one reads. That makes very good sense if your blog is somehow a record of your life. This site, for me, however, has never been a personal diary; there are important parts of my life never mentioned here (trivially, my love for cricket; centrally, my children). (That sentence is now no longer true. Oh well.) I have chosen on this site – my Facebook/Twitter feed is rather different, and I have had another, private, blog – to focus narrowly on theological themes. Of course, the themes are the ones I happen to find interesting, and so you will find much here about Baptist and Evangelical life, and pretty much nothing about radical orthodoxy or scriptural reasoning, but this is still a very limited record of one part of my intellectual life, not a personal chronicle. The 60-odd blogs that feature on my RSS reader are much more eclectic; some represent leisure interests; others are user blogs for software packages I use regularly; most are blogs of personal friends, some of which intersect with my subjects here to some extent, but which I read because of personal relationship with the author(s), not because of the subject. I have several friends who are, simply, much better bloggers than I am. Catriona, a fellow-minister within the Baptist Union of Scotland, blogs movingly, honestly, perceptively, and daily about her own life and ministry. Jim’s blog is a series of thoughtful, often profound, explorations of personal spirituality, and again is updated pretty much every day; I suspect in either case, however, interest in the blog will generally be the result of some level of personal relationship with the blogger; other than a degree of public acknowledgement (which is not to be dismissed, of course), I am not sure what including either in a blogroll on a site like this would achieve. The second live tradition is (to attempt) to maintain a list of, either all blogs on a topic, or all worthwhile blogs on a topic. This is difficult, commendable, and useful. Andy Goodliff does a great job for British Baptist blogs; Ben Myers a remarkably good job for theological blogs on a world scale. I’d never thought of trying to do similar, but recently Andrew Wilson, who maintains the excellent New Frontiers theology blog, asked me (in a lunch queue, as I recall) where to look for British theo-blogging. It struck me at once as a good question – online theology, at least in the Evangelical tradition, circles around American debates, and our ways of thinking and doing are different in significant ways from those on the other side of the Atlantic. It also struck me that there was no good place to go for an answer. So, this is what I want to start doing with my blogroll on this site: a list of active blogs, offering worthwhile theological discussion, from a British – actually, I’ll expand it to European – perspective. I’ll put up another post, lacking all the meandering justification, asking for nominations, and start to construct the list. Two of us, at least, will find it...
Read MoreTrue Christian manliness? CVM & The Code
Back in the day, I led my share of Boys’ Brigade parade services. Now, I’ve nothing at all against the BB (I’ve known, indeed chaplained, companies that worked astonishingly well as Christian youth organisations), but that bit in the service where we went through the organisation’s old object, ending with ‘and all that tends towards true Christian manliness’ was, I confess, always a struggle. With some rehearsal, and a resolute refusal to look at certain friends in the congregation, I got through each time without collapsing in helpless laughter; without even smirking, indeed. The aim of that ‘object’ was truly noble, but the wording was, shall we say, not phrased in the vernacular of this generation (or the last one, or the one before that…). There have been times recently when I’ve longed for ‘true Christian manliness’ to re-appear. I try to avoid contemporary Evangelical discussions of Biblical manhood – not for fear of laughter, but of despair. I will acknowledge that I have heard one sensible discussion of ‘Biblical headship’ in my life, but of the several dozen I’ve come across, that is not a good average. I’ve read Driscoll, Grudem, Piper, Mohler, and the rest on the subject because I’ve had to; I find them unhelpful and unedifying; there have been moments when my gut reaction to a particularly poorly expressed thought has been a sudden irrational desire to embrace my feminine side with an energy that would make Frank N Furter or the travellers aboard Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, look positively macho (darling!). (And to put this into context you need to know that I generally refuse to buy shaving foam with moisturiser in it because to do so would be uncomfortably metrosexual…) I say all this because I want here to praise a book on Christian masculinity, and it is appropriate context to indicate that this does not come naturally to me. Carl Beech, Andy Drake, and Ian Manifold are all leaders within Christian Vision for Men (CVM), and a year or so ago they published a little book called The Code: It’s time for a new kind of man. Codelife is a programme CVM are running, inviting blokes to sign up to a series of ethical commitments, The Code (you can see the list here); The book is a series of brief chapters illustrating each commitment in The Code. What’s so good about it? First, it does not fall into the trap of defining masculinity against femininity. For Carl (who – full disclosure – is a friend), Andy, and Ian, being a man is not primarily about not being a woman. So it is not about headship, or leadership, or protection, or strength (or indeed inability to multitask, or a pathological hatred of Strictly Come Dancing – that last is just part of being properly human, surely?). Or, rather, there is discussion of leadership (Codelife IX: ‘I will lead as He would lead…) and protection (Codelife X: ‘I will use my strength to protect the weak and stand against the abuse of power.’), but this is not cast in binary gender terms, but as a positive account of a well-lived life. It is certainly not gender-indifferent, but nor is it controlled by a simple opposition. As Gen. 1:27 points out, we are human before we are male and female; to narrate being human solely in terms of that binary opposition is a serious mistake. Second, however, it is serious about (contemporary, British) masculinity. This is subtle, but obvious. Carl, Andy & Ian recognise that living as a man in C21st Britain is different from living as a woman, and The Code, and their explications of it, are alike constantly alive to that. They – perhaps wisely – make no commitments about which (if any) of the differences are down to a fundamental gender divide, and which (if any) are down to contemporary cultural mores, but they are alive to the lived reality of being male in Britain today. (How far might this extend, culturally? I don’t know; I’d be interested to know, for instance, the extent to which British Asian or Black British men might feel the need to shape and nuance what is said here to make it real for them.) For me, however, this book speaks to the world I live in, to the expectations and complications and (significant) privileges of being a man in British society today. Third, their vision of ‘true Christian manliness’ is holistic. It is about creation care, as well as about unashamed personal evangelism; being a man, for these three brothers, means taking with utmost seriousness the injustices of the global...
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