Twystematics 2: Revelation

For anyone who is interested, the second locus of my tweeted systematic theology, the doctrine of revelation, is now online here.

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Festblogging Paul Fiddes’s 65th birthday

With others, it’s a pleasure to mark online Paul Fiddes’s 65th birthday today, and to celebrate Paul, and his contribution to the life of the Baptist denomination, and to the academic theological scene in Britain and internationally. Paul is one of the most delightful people you could ever hope to meet, a true gentleman. He is also deeply committed to Baptist life in the UK and internationally, and has made several very substantial contributions to our life, some through his writing, more perhaps through his personal interaction in formal and informal contexts. As a theologian, he has contributed widely also, with Past Event and Present Salvation standing out as one of a handful of really important books on the atonement from the last few decades, Participating in God being the most accessible account of the difference recent Trinitarian theology might make to church life, and The Creative Suffering of God being, in my estimation, the best defence yet written of divine passibility. Paul’s contributions go much wider than this – theology and literature, for instance – but these are areas I know well enough to comment on the lasting significance of his work. It happens I find myself on the other side of most of these debates to Paul, a fact that has not dented at all his willingness to offer friendship and help to this, very junior, colleague in the academy. The best testimony I can give to Paul’s theological ability and contribution is to mention publicly what I have long thought of in my own mind as the ‘Fiddes footnote’. I regularly write about the atonement, or passibility, or the Trinity, sketch the general arguments on one side, and give arguments that seem to me to be decisive against them. Then I insert a footnote which invariably begins ‘Fiddes evades this criticism, however…’ and goes on to explain how, on one or another these issues, Paul’s presentation is more careful and more defensible than, usually, any other I have read. Knowing Paul personally is a delight; knowing his work sharpens my own. It is a pleasure to wish him a very happy...

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Reflections on Spring Harvest 2012

We’re recently back from Spring Harvest in Skegness, where I worked with Norman Ivison of Fresh Expressions each morning, and had my usual mixed set of lectures and seminars in the afternoons – this year discussing ecclesiology (SH’s theme this year), women and men in leadership, using social media, and dealing with divorce. I was also, for the first time, on the Event Leadership Team – a role which involved ‘early morning’ (7.45, but in SH terms…) prayer meetings, which turned out to be really good times, as wonderful stories were shared of what had happened around the site the previous day. The event was excellent; Ness Wilson, pastor of Open Heaven Church in Loughborough, gave the morning Bible readings and was, by universal consent, quite stunningly good; someone pointed out to me that the main platform speakers were about 50% female, and about 50% under 35/40 (the latter statistic depending on some guesses that, in view of the former, might be considered ungallant…). This was my sixth SH on team; for the first time, my big memory of the event is not the talks I gave. Two in particular were difficult in advance: divorce, because I know little about the subject; and women and men in leadership, because I care deeply about what people think. I did some work and coped, I think, with the former; the latter was rendered easy by the context. I spoke after Ness had given a Bible reading that morning, and after Bev Murill had preached powerfully the previous evening; my notes had a list of great female preachers and leaders from history, with the question – can you really believe God did not gift and call?  To say to folk, given what we’ve heard and experienced over the last 24 hours, can you really believe… was easy – Ness and Bev were both wonderful – and powerful. (I think I said that almost any preacher must be jealous of the gifts God has given to the pair of them – certainly my feeling…) Working with Norman was great – an easy relationship from the word go, and we instinctively shared a vision of what the church is called to be, without having to work at it. My lasting memory, though, was not any of this, good though it was. Two snapshots, perhaps. First, Pete Greig, of 24/7 Prayer, preaching one night. It was an extremely powerful message, but in the course of it he recalled with much humour his first dabblings with friends into what an earlier generation would have called ‘experimental Christianity.’ These experiments in prayer and discipleship all took place in Pete’s mother’s shed, where they would meet together and see what God would do. Second, one of our daughters, arriving home at lunchtime, shyly telling me that she prayed for a friend to be healed, and that as she prayed, her friend was healed. She and friend (daughter of others on the team, so I could follow up the story) were astonished… Both snapshots capture a sense of God running ahead of us in ministry, doing more than we ask or imagine. And there was a sense for me, and for others on the speaking team who I talked to, that we were being taken places in ministry we’d not been before. No doubt other colleagues were well within a comfort zone, but I found myself repeatedly in a place where there was a temptation to look around the room/tent and say something like – ‘the guy there? with the beard? Pete Greig – he does this stuff; why don’t you go talk to him?’ A boldness that comes from grace, however, kept me going. The night I walked past the ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’ session, was grabbed by a despairing steward who needed backup because too many people wanted to come in, and ended up forgetting the party I was headed to and diving in to minister to all comers for ninety minutes – this is not my normal experience (altar calls at the end of lectures are frowned upon where I work…). There were other examples. It wasn’t just me, either. No names, of course, but one colleague told a lovely tale of seeing someone fall over in response to offered prayer ministry; a concerned friend asked ‘Does that mean God is doing something special?’ to which my colleague replied in the heat of the moment, ‘I don’t know – it’s never happened to me before…’ For much of the event, my overarching experience was the sense – familiar to many of us, I guess, from youth group/student days – that God was...

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My Twystematic Theology

If anyone not on Twitter is interested in my project to tweet a system of doctrine, the first locus, the definition of theology, is now posted in its entirety on the website here.

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Coleridge on Easter

Wendy Cope somewhere reflects on being asked who her favourite poet is; she comments on thinking of her current lover, who is unquestionably her favourite poet – and whose poetry she finds to be of some merit, also. Samuel Taylor Coleridge is my favourite poet. I’ve written more than once on Coleridge’s theology, starting with my Masters’ dissertation – most recently (well, because of the history, the book was published a decade or near after the piece was first written, but…) contributing the chapter on STC to the Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth Century Theology. He downplays the theological significance of the historical details of the life of Jesus, because of a commitment to a neoplatonic system (and as a response to the scandal of particularity); the following two poems are not explicit celebrations of Easter, but they do rejoice in Christ’s victory over death in their own ways. Human Life, On the Denial of Immortality (1815) If dead, we cease to be; if total gloom Swallow up life’s brief flash for aye, we fare As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom, Whose sound and motion not alone declare, But are their whole of being ! If the breath Be Life itself, and not its task and tent, If even a soul like Milton’s can know death ; O Man ! thou vessel purposeless, unmeant, Yet drone-hive strange of phantom purposes ! Surplus of Nature’s dread activity, Which, as she gazed on some nigh-finished vase, Retreating slow, with meditative pause, She formed with restless hands unconsciously. Blank accident ! nothing’s anomaly ! If rootless thus, thus substanceless thy state, Go, weigh thy dreams, and be thy hopes, thy fears, The counter-weights !–Thy laughter and thy tears Mean but themselves, each fittest to create And to repay the other ! Why rejoices Thy heart with hollow joy for hollow good ? Why cowl thy face beneath the mourner’s hood ? Why waste thy sighs, and thy lamenting voices, Image of Image, Ghost of Ghostly Elf, That such a thing as thou feel’st warm or cold ? Yet what and whence thy gain, if thou withhold These costless shadows of thy shadowy self ? Be sad ! be glad ! be neither ! seek, or shun ! Thou hast no reason why ! Thou canst have none ; Thy being’s being is contradiction. My Baptismal Birth-day (1833) (Original title: ‘Lines composed on a sick-bed, under severe bodily suffering, on my spiritual birthday, Oct. 28th) God’s Child in Christ adopted,–Christ my all,– What that earth boasts were not lost cheaply, rather Than forfiet that blest name, by which I call The Holy One, the Almighty God, my Fahter?– Father! in Christ we live, and Christ in Thee– Eternal Thou, and everlasting we. The heir of heaven, henceforth I fear not death: In Christ I live! in Christ I draw the breath Of true life!–Let then earth, sea, and sky Make war against me! On my front I show Their mighty master’s seal. In vain they try To end my life, that can but end its woe.– Is that a death-bed where a Chrsitian lies?– Yes! but not his–’tis Death itself there dies. He is risen indeed!...

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