‘Forgive me Lord, for I pray in paragraphs’
I think it is Peter Wimsey who somewhere apologises for the fact that he speaks in paragraphs; his thoughts are so ordered, he seems to suggest, his mind so clear, that whole chunks of connected logic fall from his mouth when he opens it; he realises that this might be irritating to those less blessed with intellectual clarity, and so he says sorry. It struck me with force last week during a church leaders’ meeting that I pray in paragraphs. Not because my relationship with God is so ordered, but because I have become professional about praying, at least in public; I wish that were not so. One of our pastors introduced an issue that was on his heart, asked us to pray; it was something I cared about deeply in the life of our church, and I began; I managed a sentence that was heartfelt, and then instinct took over; I said all the right things fluently and elegantly; I prayed in paragraphs. I was minuting the meeting; I recorded a time of prayer, and wrote beside it, ‘forgive me Lord, for I pray in paragraphs’. I suppose it is a Free Church pastors’ disease, although I will not assume that any other pastor is infected: called on regularly to offer extempore prayer at no notice in a variety of situations, we become adept at expressing what we know that we and our people should feel, and doing so in well-constructed prayers. I am not even going to suggest that this is wrong; in many contexts (‘Would you say grace, pastor?’) it is, I suppose, exactly the right response; but where something actually matters, where what is needed is a heart poured out before God in naked honesty, to pray in paragraphs is a betrayal. No doubt more experienced, or more prayerful, or just better, pastors than I are alive to this, and are able to switch off autopilot and respond with authenticity. Perhaps this is my problem alone, but I at least have to confess that when, in public, I should be praying honestly, I default to praying in paragraphs. I know what honest prayer feels and sounds like; I know it in my private prayers. The words are often enough broken; for me, honest prayer is bodily – kneeling, prostration, and outstretched arms are integral to any real expression of my heart. When my heart overflows, I generally default to praying in tongues, unable to find words to express the complexity of guilt and trust and faith and hope that courses through me, I turn to the Spirit within who can pray as I cannot, and groan… …in public, though, even when the ‘public’ is a small group of fellow-leaders who I have journeyed with and trust, I so instinctively pray in paragraphs that I am presently unable to restrain the impulse. I wish it were not so; I wish I were able to be honest before God in public as I am in private; but at present I am unable to restrain myself… …forgive me, Lord, for I pray in...
Read MoreiPray: reviewing prayer apps for iOS
For anyone who ever travels, though, a daily office is a really natural thing to look for on your smartphone; I’ve tried quite a number of prayer apps – I think all the ones currently available for iOS, at least – and have come to some views on what’s good, what’s bad, and what someone really ought to do better soon. Here are some app reviews…
Read MoreReflections 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...
Read MoreThe spirituality of doctrine?
Renovaré, the organisation founded by Richard Foster (Celebration of Discipline, et al.), have recently published a book entitled 25 Books Every Christian Should Read: A Guide to the Definitive Spiritual Classics. The list can be seen here (you’ll need to scroll down a little). I’ve read most of them, and at least some of almost all of them (as it happens, the only one I’ve never opened is Nouwen’s Return of the Prodigal Son; I know it’s wonderful; there’s even a copy in the house, as Heather’s homegroup worked through it a few years back; other things just keep getting in the way). The title is, I take it, deliberately provocative; such lists always generate argument, and an argument that leads to people being exposed to previously-unencountered classics of Christian spirituality is surely a good thing? I don’t particularly want to start that argument here; the list is a good one. It contains, however, three texts that would not often be included in the genre of ‘spirituality’: Athanasius On the Incarnation; Calvin’s Institutes; and Lewis on Mere Christianity. These are texts in doctrine (or perhaps apologetics for Lewis); the study of doctrine is not generally considered to be an aid to prayer in those parts of the church in which I move, at least. (And academic theological conferences do not often feel like powerhouses of prayer…) When John Rackley was BUGB President, he ran a survey asking (British Baptist) ministers what fed them devotionally, and commented in writing it up that almost none of them (two, from memory) mentioned reading doctrine. As it happens, reading Calvin does inspire me to devotion from time to time; the same is true of Barth, and one or two others in the dogmatic tradition. But if devotional inspiration is my aim, Brother Lawrence or Mother Julian are far, far more reliable options for me (and much lighter to carry around than Calvin or Barth!). This is, of course, a modern problem. The connection between doctrine and piety was routinely assumed in the tradition, whether in arguments that only the true contemplative could even try to do theology (Gregory of Nazianzus, First Theological Oration), or arguments that any right understanding of doctrine will inevitably lead to heartfelt worship and devotion (Calvin, Inst. 1:1-2). Less happily, heretics are routinely accused of the grossest acts, because it is assumed that their wrong doctrine must make them morally incompetent. This connection is, one way or another, traceable down to the beginning of the nineteenth century (it’s there in Coleridge (‘They must become better before they can become wiser’) and, in a way, in Schleiermacher), but had begun to fall apart a century, perhaps more, before that. By the time we get to the middle of the twentieth century, there is something of a prevailing assumption that theological scholarship will destroy piety and that practiced piety is at least an impediment to proper theological scholarship, and assumption that has begun to be overcome in the decades since, but that is still sometimes visible. What happened? I can think of various explanations. Perhaps St Bernard’s fulminations over Peter Abelard’s Sic et Non were well-directed, and the founding of the European university system was all a catastrophic mistake? (I don’t think this, by the way, but any academic theologian needs to reflect on it from time to time.) Perhaps theology should be done only within the local church (memorably, the Black Rock Address on ‘theological schools’: ‘In every age, from the school of Alexandria down to this day, they have been a real pest to the church of Christ’)? (I don’t think this either, but the authors were Baptists, and I accept that the challenge is as much mine to prove them wrong, as theirs to carry the point.) I have an alternative explanation, not quite so easy, which relies on some genealogical reflections. Doctrine, we should remember more often, is – or at least used to be, and should still be – the science of reading Scripture well. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation is a contribution to an ongoing exegetical debate. (I assume we all know by now that the whole debate over the Trinity in the fourth century was exegetical? The ontological schemes and logical distinctions that Athanasius and others worked out were proposed to offer ways of reading certain disputed texts that made better sense of the whole of Scripture than other proposals.) Calvin’s Institutes are written as a simple and easy textbook to give his readers the crucial concepts and distinctions they will need to make sense of Scripture when they read it for themselves. At some point (Hegel? Schleiermacher? Around then,...
Read MoreThe objectivity of theology
This post passed largely unremarked for some while, then Shiva added a comment suggesting that if the claim that theology was necessarily built on a discipline of prayer, and submissive to exegesis, it was ‘not very objective’. This struck me as interesting enough to warrant some reflection, not least because it captures something that is a persistent worry for most of us who study theology in a university, a worry that expresses itself in two distinct directions. On the one hand, we worry that, because of its nature, theology is not a ‘proper’ university subject – not adequately wissenschaftlich. On the other, we worry that we compromise something of the true nature of theology if we conform to broader standards of what it is to be academic that are present within the university. Somehow, the word ‘objective’ captures all this quite nicely. We all recognise the notion of ‘objectivity’ implied: the scholar checks his (the idea dates from a time when the scholar was almost certainly male) own particular views at the door, presenting to the students a carefully-reasoned and unbiased account of all the differing positions on this or that subject, with a dispassionate evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of each. I have several problems with such an account, but even if it holds, I am not sure that theology that is based on prayer and submitted to exegesis falls foul of it. My problems first. The first – and for me, most telling, which says something about what I care about, no doubt – is that such presentations are almost inevitably boring. I have never met a good teacher who was not profoundly passionate and opinionated, deeply invested in what she was teaching. The best teachers start to make you entertain the possibility that Mozart or Milton or Maimonides matters because, from sentence one of the class, it is vibrantly clear that they are convinced of this. I know this in my own teaching. Three times now, in three different academic contexts, I have found myself having to teach a class on ‘Modern Christology’. Two times out of three I prepared assiduously (the third was at a time of fairly major personal crisis, and I relied on the fact of the earlier preparations). I know that each class was rather poor, and I know the reason. I think modern Christology is unbearably tedious. I offered the classes in each case a wealth of knowledge – I had an interpretation of Kant’s Religion… that I believe to be both original and convincing – but no excitement. Result? They were as bored as I was. Inevitably. The good classes, and the good lectures and seminars within those classes, come from shared excitement, a conviction that this or that is worth arguing about. And that has to start with the instructor. But, let us assume some bizarre parallel universe where good teaching and interested students are not relevant considerations for a university. Should we, in this world, expect university instructors to offer a dispassionate presentation of all views with a fair consideration of the evidence for each? No. Let me, for once in my life, invoke Kant: I cannot be required to do that which is impossible to me. This old notion of ‘objectivity’ presupposed the existence of some hypothetical neutral stance, from which a privileged account of the actual value of all possible evidence may be offered. It does not, however, exist – for each of us, the evaluation of evidence and arguments is profoundly, if not entirely, determined by our own convictions and experiences. So in my own teaching I routinely disclose to my students my own convictions and assumptions, inviting them to challenge them, and assuring them that there will be no bias whatsoever in the assessment of their work (my observation is that, if anything, I routinely err on the side of generosity to those I disagree with in summative assessment, but I aim to err on no side, but to apply the written criteria scrupulously). I invite the students, armed with the necessary knowledge, to spot and discount the inevitable biases and blindspots that my own location introduces into my teaching, and rest content that, as a member of a diverse and passionate faculty, they will be exposed to other positions elsewhere. Third, and this is probably a result of the first two points, I observe that this criterion of ‘objectivity’ is not applied in university life generally. I was speaking to someone before Christmas who commented, reflecting on teaching in a university system overseas, ‘why shouldn’t I preach my lectures? The feminist literary critics and the marxist historians...
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