In memoriam John Webster
Readers of this blog will probably by now have heard that my senior colleague John Webster died suddenly yesterday morning. I had the privilege of writing a brief obituary for our School website, which reads as follows: The Revd Professor John Bainbridge Webster, DD, FRSE 1955-2016 It is with enormous sadness that the School announces the sudden death on Wednesday 25th May of our friend and colleague John Webster, Professor of Divinity. John was amongst the leading English-language theologians of his generation. Twelve monographs, four major edited volumes, and a host of shorter publications would have established his reputation on their own; when his extensive service to his discipline and the wider academy—founding the International Journal of Systematic Theology; serving on many editorial boards; membership of peer review colleges and learned societies—is added in, the true magnitude of his contribution can begin to be seen. John’s academic career began at St John’s College, Durham (1982-86), then continued in Canada, at Wycliffe College, Toronto (1986-96). His eminence was recognised in 1996 when he was appointed Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford, a post he held until moving to the University of Aberdeen as Professor of Systematic Theology in 2003. He took his chair here in St Andrews in 2013. We remember John as a warm and generous colleague, whose penetrating intellect was combined with a down-to-earth attitude, a ready sense of humour, and a deep Christian faith. Our thoughts and prayers are with his widow and family at this time. Other tributes will no doubt follow. Fred Sanders already has an excellent account of John’s theology here. I just want to add some personal reminiscences now. I had known John for a couple of years only when the Society for the Study of Theology met in his then home university of Oxford in 2000. In one plenary session, I found myself seated between him and Tony Thistleton, as the speaker started telling us of the ‘pastoral need’ to ‘forgive God’. Tony turned across me to John and said ‘forgiving God is rather a difficult concept theologically, is it not?’. John’s response was straightforward: ‘It’s not difficult at all; it’s blasphemy. Come on, we’re going for a pint.’ That was not the last conference session we vacated together for the bar. John became a good friend and a mentor to me, particularly after my doktorvater Colin Gunton died equally suddenly, and also in May, thirteen years ago. Nor was it the last time I was to hear John cut dismissively through windy ‘theological’ rhetoric. Indeed, his theological style became more uncompromising as the years went on. Working back from Barth, through a Reformed scholastic tradition (particularly Owen), to a fascination with the intellectual clarity and deep piety of Thomas Aquinas, John became more and more convinced that dogmatic theology well-done began unapologetically with the word of God revealed in the Scriptures and preserved in the faith of the Church. The task of theology is, on John’s telling, to expound that word and that faith carefully and extensively, so that every thought may finally be taken captive to Christ. John also became more and more focused on ‘theology proper’: the doctrine of God’s life in se. Unfashionably, it was the treatise de deo uno, not trinitarian theology, that captivated him. The careful explication of God’s eternal life through the enumeration and description of the divine perfections was for him the highest calling of the theologian—and an act of praise. Such summaries of his academic interests make him sound somewhat intellectual and austere. The power of his intellect was unquestionably dazzling, and he was perhaps a little remote from the modern world (he wrote his publications longhand with a fountain pen, then typed them into a computer when finished for editors who demanded electronic copy). John was never remote from people though: a zest for life, an easy sense of humour, a gift for devastating one-line summaries of fellow theologians, and a genuine interest in his students and colleagues were all as much a part of him as his intellectual interests. Giving himself to the careful explication of God’s eternal life, he then viewed all else sub specie aeternitatis. I remember him a couple of years back, in conversation at the end of a seminar in our College Hall here in St Mary’s, commenting almost in passing about the brevity of life, over in the blink of an eye compared to the endless ages of joy that would follow the resurrection (and, he believed with the church down the ages, would be enjoyed in anticipation by the soul between death and bodily resurrection). This was not...
Read MoreOur story begins in exile: ‘Baptist social theology’ and the EU referendum
One of the books I have recently been reading with interest and profit is Anglican Social Theology (ed. Malcolm Brown) (London: Church House Publishing, 2014). Apart from the intrinsic interest in tracing significant contributions to political theology that happened to come from within the Church of England, I was struck by the contributors’ awareness that the project, or projects, they were tracing were distinctively ‘Anglican’. As Brown puts it in an early prospectus: We have chosen to speak of an Anglican social theology with a deliberate intention of echoing the concept of Catholic social teaching because we recognise that the latter is much better known as a theological school or tradition that informs practice. Our contention … is that a distinctively Anglican tradition of social engagement can be discerned through most of the twentieth century… (p. 2) I find this interesting because I have long had a minor interest in the extent to which different Christian traditions in fact propose different practices in various areas—and of course a sustained interest in the distinctively Baptist contributions that may be available. What, I have begun to wonder, would a ‘Baptist social theology’ look like? We are, after all, the largest protestant tradition in the world, and have had our fair share of social reformers whose programmes were in some way shaped by their faith—a list headed, but far from exhausted, by Martin Luther King. At the same time I have been following what Christian contributions to the debate over the EU referendum I have been able to find. Most are Anglican, whether for Remain (Michael Sadgrove, ex Dean of Durham, founded Christians for Europe), Brexit (Christians for Britain is run by Giles Fraser and Adrian Hilton), or thoughtfully neutral (Andrew Goddard‘s personal contribution, or the excellent and thoughtful Reimagining Europe blog, which is billed as a joint project between the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, but a glance down the contributors list suggests the balance is heavily tilted south of the border). Is there, I have wondered, a specifically Baptist approach to the EU referendum, and to the wider questions it crystallises? Political matters are generally questions of practical wisdom, and so do not admit of definitive theological answers. We might argue theologically that the most vulnerable in our society must be protected, but theology cannot then guide us to the best way to offer such protection. A robust doctrine of original sin will warn us that greed and fraud will be endemic under any tax regime, but it will not then help us to construct a regime that protects effectively and efficiently against these problems. I am not, then, looking for an argument that will insist that all Baptists should vote one way; there are issues where this might be the case (a narrow proposal to limit religious liberty, for example), but it seems clear enough that the EU will not be one of them. Rather, I want to suggest that Baptists, if they are faithfully Baptist, will argue and evaluate differently. Things will matter to us that others will be careless of; things that are decisive for others will be unimportant to us. Although not decisive, such considerations might well make us more likely to lean one way, so that Baptists might split 70-30 when society is 50-50. In other cases we will split the same as others, but for very different reasons. An obvious example of this is the sermon many of us preach in the run up to each general election. The messaging from every party is often enough ‘you will be richer if you vote for us’; we preach that Christians should not vote selfishly, to enrich themselves, but for other reasons (which vary: for some it will be, pick the pro-life candidate, regardless of party; for others issues of justice and ‘good news to the poor’ will loom largest; for others again it might simply be the personal morality or faith of a candidate). I want to suggest that one of the main themes of the EU referendum is a matter Baptists should have a distinctive view on. The matter is national sovereignty; and at the heart of our Baptist distinctiveness is, I suggest, the historical fact encapsulated in my title: ‘our story begins in exile’. The British Baptist movement began in 1609 when, as John Robinson reports, ‘Mr Smith [sic] baptized first himself and next Mr Helwys and so the rest.’ Smyth and Helwys were the officers of an illegal separatist congregation that had been meeting in Gainsborough, north of Lincoln, but like many others they fled Anglican persecution and by 1609 were resident, with much...
Read MoreOn sensory metaphors for revelation
An interesting, but inconclusive, dialogue is sporadically happening between two of America’s most interesting theologians, Robert W. Jenson and Katherine Sonderegger. As is well known, Jenson proposes that theology has been too focused on visual metaphors, which (he claims) allow a detachment from the object observed. He proposes instead that ‘faith comes by hearing’ and so we should describe our engagement with the divine in auditory, not visual, terms. Sonderegger, particularly in the recent first volume of her systematics, pushes back at this, arguing that visual metaphors are appropriate, and need not be about detachment, instead creating space for an appropriately affective knowledge. At root this debate is about the primary sensory metaphor for revelation: is it visual or auditory, and how does that decision shape our account of knowing God, and so our developed accounts of all things? This is clearly an absolutely fundamental question for theology. I have followed the Jenson-Sonderegger debate with great interest, but I find it ultimately inconclusive: neither visual nor auditory metaphors seem adequate to do the necessary work here, of giving a convincing account of theological knowledge in a profoundly sceptical late-modern context. I have come to suspect, however, that this is one of those places where recent advances in human knowledge help us to hear themes from the Scriptures that we have previously missed or neglected. Some readers will know of the pioneering work of the French neuroscientist P. D’Avril, who has demonstrated beyond doubt that our sense of smell is extraordinarily powerfully linked to our emotions. If our theological quest is for an appropriately affective epistemology, we might wonder whether there is any way of moving away from both sight and hearing, and instead moving toward smell? As soon as we ask this, of course, a welter of Biblical images come to mind. Prayers ascending ‘like incense’; the redeemed as ‘the aroma of Christ’; … Olfactory metaphors for knowing are remarkably common in the Psalms, but are also peculiarly Pauline. More, when we consider the reconceptualisations of the logic of Pauline theology proposed by the new apocalyptic readings, we see, again and again, that appeals to the sense of smell occur at almost every decisive moment in Paul’s various arguments (the repetition of ‘fragrance’ three times over in 2Cor. 2:14-16 is only the most obvious example of this, but see a recent paper by Dr Rick Rolling for a much fuller demonstration). Of course, this collision of recent science and Biblical emphasis may be merely coincidental, but it surely deserves investigation. What doctrinal insights might we uncover if we moved fundamental theology away from visual or auditory metaphors into a new olfactory mode? I am convinced that we will find here an exciting new departure for fundamental theology. Only when we learn to savour the beautiful fragrance of Jesus will our intellectual and emotional responses find proper unity and balance! I am pleased to say that I have received some modest funding to investigate this further, and can announce some available research grants into olfactory theology. Details are available...
Read MoreStigmatic: a poem for Good Friday
[Years ago I read an account of someone—at this distance I don’t even remember who—receiving the stigmata. The detail that has stayed with me ever since was that the wounds did not come all at once, but gradually developed over several months.] You pierced me slowly, Lord. An itch at first. Mere irritation. Then four sores. Blood seeping, Staining sock and shirt. Skin scraped away as if by Sandpaper. Why not the quick urgent thrust of a lover Breaking my virgin skin with rush of blood? Penetration completed in a moment. As swift as when nails impaled you. Your mining as ponderous and painstaking As an archeological dig. Pits Excavated in my extremities With excruciating exactness. Pressing imperceptibly deeper Precise, damaging no bones. At last you break the further skin and It is finished, your languid lancing. Four fleshy tunnels oozing gore. Flies find passage through me. Strange and sluggish God, Lord of the fords of Jabbok, Why is it that You wound all those you love? A rough wooing, yours, that Leaves us scarred and limping. And the exquisite extension of your Infliction of injury! You could shatter my hip in a second But you wait till the night-wrestle is done. What did you discover As you dug into me? What did you uncover Between muscle fibres Behind bones Beneath veins? You are the God who sees; What did you want to show when You laid me more than bare? Or are the hurts my own? My Malignant mind, my agonistic soul So fixed on the pains that were yours that I have etched them into my flesh, Deeper and sorer than any tattoo? Is it our malformed love for you that cripples us, O God of Jacob? Is there so much pain in your penumbra that To draw near is to suffer? Is it our own distortions that Break us in your light? Your glory has Gored me. Your beauty has Broken me. Your grace has Gutted me. Is it masochism that drives me to seek you still? ‘Through death you have trampled down Death’. ‘Your wounds in Beauty glorified.’ Through this long Good Friday I choose To wait For a mountain Moved. For an answer Unimagined. For the repeal of An execution. For a vivified Corpse. You have tunnelled through my body. You have undermined my soul. Distorted. Partial. Broken. I see a displaced stone. I see discarded rags. I see an empty cave. I put my hope in absence. I cannot see you. I cannot not...
Read MoreOn the surprising origins of the advent wreath
Sunday night we had our church carol service, with considerably more candles than any Scottish Baptist of a previous generation would have approved of outside of a power cut. Front and centre was our advent wreath, four red candles now of differing heights burning, a central larger candle waiting until Christmas morning to be lit. It was a good service; later that evening, whilst certain other members of the family were watching The Apprentice final, I noticed some tweets about the origins of advent wreaths. The Anglican mission society US (once USPG) had tweeted a picture of a pink candle alight, and linked it with the theme of remembering Mary on the fourth Sunday of advent; others had responded querying the link and suggesting that the pink (sic, ‘rose’) candle properly belongs to the third Sunday, and the celebration of Gaudete Sunday, when in Roman tradition rose vestments are worn. Which was the original tradition, and when did it start? asked Julie Gittoes, residentiary canon at Guildford Cathedral. It struck me as an interesting question, certainly more interesting than a business tycoon being gratuitously rude to sycophantic idiots. Plenty of internet sites – and plenty of books, I have since discovered – talk about the ‘ancient custom’, some proposing pre-Christian pagan origins. There was nothing concrete, though, and in my experience claims about pagan origins of Christian customs unravel fairly quickly more often than not. One of the joys of a modern university library is how much material is electronic, and so available from home late on Sunday night. I turned up a fascinating paper by Mary Jane Haemig, ‘The Origin and Spread of the Advent Wreath’ (Lutheran Quarterly, XIX (2005), pp. 332-343). Haemig proposes a startlingly specific origin for the tradition: Johann Heinrich Wichern, head of the Rauhe Haus, a Hamburg city mission, created the first advent candle arrangement (not yet a wreath) in 1839, with the greenery added in 1860. This is all documented in D. Sattler (ed.) Der Adventkranz und seine Geschichte (Hamburg, 1997), and it is clear that Wichern believed he was doing something new. Haemig points also to research done for the ‘Atlas der deutschen Volkskunde’ around 1930, which demonstrated that advent wreaths were largely confined to Protestants at that time, and were much stronger amongst the upper classes. This makes it more likely that Wichern’s innovation, or at least some similar Lutheran invention, is the origin of the tradition: an ancient tradition would presumably have been remembered by Catholic families not just Protestant ones. The Lexicon fuer Theologie und Kirche (a Roman Catholic publication) affirms the origin of the wreath amongst Protestants, but notes its adoption by Catholics after 1945. Haemig goes on to look at the arrival of the wreath in the USA, finding it proposed as something new in the Lutheran Standard magazine in 1939. She suggests that the wreath moves from home to church sanctuary in the late 1950s, and then discusses the colours and significance of the candles, which are clearly not fixed. Her evidence suggests two things: an assimilation to liturgical colours, and an identification of the candles with the lectionary themes of the four advent Sundays. The first of these led to the introduction of the rose/pink candle for Gaudete amongst the purple/violet set; the second to the identification of the fourth candle with Mary. The last piece of the journey is not hard to trace: confronted with an odd pink candle, and not knowing the tradition of rose vestments for Gaudete, and inculturated with the modern obsession that pink is somehow feminine, moving the rose candle from Advent 3 to Advent 4 and linking it with Mary is an obvious move. When and how did this German/US custom reach the UK? Very recently would seem to be the answer. Google ngram can find no use of ‘advent wreath’ in its British English corpus before 1955, and I suspect (from poking around the data a little) that the early incidences are mostly down to US books being misidentified as from the UK in the Google dataset. 1973 looks like the year we really first started talking about advent wreaths over here, at least in print. (In the US dataset the big jump is in 1939, which fits with Haewig’s data above.) Anne Peat, who had been a part of the Twitter conversation, confirms that the 1980 Alternative Service Book of the Church of England makes no mention of advent wreaths (the ECUSA 1940 Book of Common Prayer does, under ‘Additional Directions’ for Morning and Evening Prayer). Finally, Paula Gooder offered a recalled comment from Michael Perham, the former Bishop of Gloucester, who wrote...
Read MoreIrregular Hope: Seven Stanzas for Christmas
Irregular Hope: Seven Stanzas for Christmas 1. Epiphany Thrice fourteen men and Just three women named Between Ur and Nazareth. The men are rapists, murderers, Incestuous, adulterers, and the rest. We read and note the female lives To be irregular. 2. Benedictus Pretending to have Dreamt. Straining to Forget. Then the blood Fails to flow. Young enough Still to be irregular She tries to hope For two weeks more. 3. Annunciation His voice controlled. Effort Etched into his neck. He searches for civility. ‘But how? It all seems … Most irregular.’ She fails to hope Until he dreams her reality. 4. Quickening Her belly soon begins to Swell. Straining to contain the One who fills time, space. One day she prays. Between Her kidneys prayer is heard. Omnipotence awakes; She feels it kick. 5. Nunc Dimittis An unremitting sun and A dusty track and A troubled fiancé add To the weight that Hangs from the Front of her torso. At least the donkey’s gait is regular. 6. Nativity Of course, where Animals live the Straining of females and the Crying of newborns is All quite regular. New life brings new hope And blood-sodden straw. 7. Advent Mucus gives way. Waters descend. Sweat dilutes urine. On this moment the world balances. The Spasms that pull her apart Become more regular. She subsides. Here is hope: The Word which spoke light is heard again. ...
Read MoreOn religious liberty: an open letter to Franklin Graham
Dear Mr Graham, This week someone who has put himself forward as a candidate for the presidency of your great nation made a number of hate-filled and inaccurate comments about Muslims, and proposed some extreme policies on the back of those comments. This came to our attention here in the UK because one of the things he claimed, entirely erroneously, was that parts of London were so radicalised that they had become no-go areas for our police and security services. Our national response was, as our national responses so often are, as mocking as it was derisive. The mayor of London led the way, but on social media many of us joined in with the humour. I know London well; I trained for ministry there, took my PhD there, pastored my first church there, made, with my wife, our first home there, and saw two of our three daughters come into the world there. My home has been elsewhere for eleven years now, but it is a city I still visit several times a year, a city that still has a significant place in my heart. For all these reasons, I know that the truth about London was expressed far better by a young Muslim Londoner caught on camera as our police arrested someone who had attempted violence, pretending to represent Islam. In a pure London accent he called out to the attacker, ‘You ain’t no Muslim, bruv!’ London is an exhilarating and sometimes disorientating coming together of people of different national backgrounds and of different faiths; London is also a city that is passionate that people come together, without denying who they are. London Muslims are truly Muslim, and devoted the the peace of the city also; London Baptists the same, as I know well. In London, the person who believes the two are impossible to hold together will be told, straightforwardly, ‘You ain’t no Muslim, bruv.’ It was with sadness, therefore, that I noticed that you had associated yourself with some of the policy proposals of that presidential candidate, specifically the suggestion that your nation should close its borders to Muslims for an indefinite period. I know that you have spoken strongly about Islam before, calling it a ‘religion of violence’ and so on; I know that your words then were as mistaken as they were inflammatory. I wish that you had taken the time to understand Islam a little before speaking so publicly about it, but I am a Baptist, and so I believe passionately in freedom of speech, even if that speech is damaging and inaccurate. Which is why I am writing to you now, although I do not expect that you will ever read this. Your father is, alongside Martin Luther King, the greatest Baptist statesman your nation has produced; I do not know if you would claim to be Baptist also, but your most recent comments are unacceptable to any Baptist, and – as a Baptist – that concerns me. Let me take you back to suspicious religious minorities in east London; the attack I referred to above happened in Leytonstone; not far away from there, just the other side of the Olympic Park really, is an older part of London called Spitalfields. There, in 1611, a religious radical suspected of violence and insurrection established a new congregation. His name was Thomas Helwys; his congregation tiny – perhaps in single figures. But that church was the very first Baptist church in England and the origin of the Baptist movement across the world. Your father’s faith, and so I suppose yours, can be traced, under God, back to those few believers in Spitalfields. Helwys was soon imprisoned by the government; the immediate cause of his imprisonment, somewhat ironically, was a book he had written demanding the government grant religious liberty – not only to him and his followers, but to all. As the most famous passage of that book has it, ‘…man’s religion is between God and themselves … Let them be heretics, Turks [that is, Muslims], Jews, or whatsoever, it does not appertain to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.’ Did you know that the faith of your father virtually began with a plea for religious freedom for Muslims in (what was then) the greatest city in the Western world, Mr Graham? It is not just Baptist beginnings, either. As your nation began, in the heady days of the revolution, a Baptist, Isaac Backus, was arguing the same point. Backus objected to the newly-independent States imposing compulsory church taxes to support the ministers of the majority, Congregational, churches. In his finest rhetorical flourish, he...
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