Retired Pastor Ruminates: March 2009

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Colin Gunton on Language for the Trinity

The late British Reformed Theologian Colin Gunton (1941-2003) wrote brilliantly about a variety of theological subjects, including the Trinity, which he called “the Church’s primary resource against idolatry.” Here he wrote about the language of the Trinity in a review of David Cunningham's These Three Are One in the Scottish Journal of Theology:

“Dr. Cunningham's proposal is that the words 'Father', 'Son' and 'Holy Spirit' are to be replaced by 'Source', 'sole Wellspring of God' and 'Living Water'. This turning of what has historically been a vestigium trinitatis into the conceptual heart of the Trinity has a far more dehumanising affect that even the perils of sexism it is meant to avoid. Quite apart from the problem that it makes it impossible to take scripture's way of speaking seriously - would one ever want to pray to a Source, even capitalised; can one grieve Living Water? - we see here again the problem of the economy and its implications. Are we or are we not as Christian people incorporate by the Spirit in the relationship with Jesus had with his Father? Lose that, and you lose gospel.” For more on Colin Gunton

Monday, March 30, 2009

Where I Ruminate on Preaching to Folks Who Don't Know Their Bible

In my thirty years as a preacher I often had the feeling, when confronted by the fact that even the most committted churchmen in my congregation had scant knowledge of the Bible, that I had just missed some golden age when the pews were chockablock with folks who read their Bible daily. But listen to this from P.T. Forsyth's Yale Beecher Lectures from 1907, published as Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind:

“The Bible may be his (the preacher's) text book, but it has ceased to be the text book of his audience. The Bible is not read by the Christian, or even by the churchgoing public, as a means of grace greater even than churchgoing. Our people, as a rule, do not read the Bible, in any sense which makes its language more familiar and dear to them than the language of the novel or the press. And I will go so far as to confess that one of the chief miscalculations I have made in the course of my own ministerial career has been to speak to congregations as if they did know and use the Bible. I was bred where it was well known and loved, and I have spent my ministerial life where it is less so. And it has taken me so long to realize the fact that I still find it difficult to adjust myself to it. I am long accustomed to being called obscure by many whose mental habits and interests are only literary, who have felt but a languid interest in the final questions of the soul as the New Testament stirs them, who treat sin as but lapse, God’s grace as if it were but love, and His love as if it were but paternal kindness.”
Does that strike a chord with any of you preachers?

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Where I Ruminate on Why St. Anselm Is Still Worth Reading

On my blog list of theologians I read I have put St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), whose book on the atonement, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Human), remains an important witness to the center of the Christian faith. My own little book on the atonement, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: Reflections on the Atonement, has a strong Anselmian objective flavor, although with some qualifications.

Karl Barth was strongly influenced by Anselm. What impressed Karl Barth so much when he delved into Anselm's “proof” for the existence of God in the early Twentieth Century was that it took the being of God seriously. In the late medieval world in which Anselm lived the existence of God was presumed by most scholars, yet Anselm struggled to articulate what was widely believed in a rational, or at least reasonable, way. Barth's context couldn't have been more different, modernity itself being defined as the time when God is not a factor, but Barth found in Anselm a model for doing theology which took God as God seriously and not as some extension of human knowing or being. This was a key in Barth's radical rethinking of the theological project of his time.

At the point at which Barth was digging into his life project, the magisterial Church Dogmatics, Anselm provided a model. The humility of Anselm before the mystery and majesty of God, yet his confidence in the reality of God, are reflected in Barth's great work. And the ironclad Chalcedonian conviction that in Jesus Christ we are dealing at the same time with God and man is seen in both theologians throughout their respective work.

Anselm was an original and innovative thinker and he is still worth studying. His “proofs” may not quite get from here to there, but one could do worse than ponder them, and his much maligned atonement theory, whatever its liabilities, still puts its weight where it belongs, on God's free and sovereign activity in and through the cross of Jesus Christ, which does something rather than shows something (as per Abelard), something we can not do for ourselves.

When I visited Canterbury cathedral in 1993 there was a chapel dedicated to St. Anselm with votive candles burning away. I had a rare Protestant devotional moment of gratitude and awe for this man who lived over nine hundred years ago, and whose work still quietly witnesses to God in Christ.

Friday, March 27, 2009

Mind Your Head

Natasha's Richardson's shocking death from a head injury last week after what seemed like a minor fall on the bunny slope of a Canadian ski resort highlights how fragile our brains can be.

I have a traumatic brain injury (TBI) that I acquired in a catastrophic cycling accident in 2000, which is why I am the retired pastor who ruminates and not the still active pastor too busy to blog. I wrote a memoir of my crash called “I Lost My Marbles on the Mohawk Trail.”

Unlike Richardson I was wearing a helmet when I fell, which may have saved my life. Dr. Robert Cantu, a director of the Neurological Sports injury Center at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, is quoted in yesterday's New York Times, “Had she (Richardson) been wearing a helmet she would have been alive.” Cantu said, “Helmets, although they do not prevent concussion, have a virtually 100 percent record of preventing skull fractures.”

So wearing a helmet is a good investment in your health. I ride on our local bike path, the Ashuwilticook Rail Trail , quite frequently, and am amazed at how many people ride bicycles without wearing a helmet. Here in Massachusetts there is a law that children must wear them, but I see mom and dad helmet-less while the kids wear them, which sends the message that helmets are for kids. It's like the parents who drop the kids off for Sunday School but don't go to church. Children get the message. And people have told me they don't wear one because they are only on the trail and don't go very fast, but it only takes a minor bump to do the damage, as Richardson's injury shows.

And though a helmet can't guarantee that you won't sustain a TBI, it will likely lessen the impact and resulting damage and disability. We are seeing thousands of cases of TBI from troops returning from Iraq, and the human and social cost of these injuries is profound. TBIs can cause memory loss, focus and attention issues, personality changes, chronic tiredness, severe depression, inability to multitask, sleep problems, and many social problems. A psychiatrist who fell from a ladder and hit his head had to quit his practice. He told me that having a brain injury is “an exercise in patience and humility.” I have found that to be true.

So do what you can to avoid getting a TBI. If you ride or ski or participate in any sport where your head is at risk, do yourself and those you love a favor. Wear a helmet.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Where I Ruminate on the Several Meanings of the Lord's Supper

I think when people differ over the meaning of the Lord's Supper it is like the old Jain parable of the six blind men and the elephant, where each one is holding onto a different part, and so, not being able to comprehend the elephant in its fullness, cannot agree on just what an elephant is.

This is where I have found the Eucharist section of the historic World Council of Churches document, Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (BEM) so helpful, because it lays out all the parts at once. In the past I would share this with the deacons whenever we got into a muddle over what the Supper was all about, and I relied heavily on this material for my section on the sacraments in my A Course in Basic Christianity.

So, for example, these questions:

Is the Lord's Supper a thanksgiving to the Father? Sure, that's what eucharist means, and why the liturgy needs a Great Thanksgiving.
Is the Lord's Supper a memorial to the Son? Of course, it is at least that, which is why the liturgy needs the Words of Institution.
Is the Lord's Supper an invocation of the Holy Spirit? You bet! Which is why the liturgy needs an epiclesis. (Notice the Trinitarian shape of these first three affirmations!)
Is the Lord's Supper a Communion of the faithful? Yes, there is the congregation embodying the church.
Is the Lord's Supper a meal of the kingdom? Yes, it is a foretaste of the Great Heavenly Banquet, which is why several of our liturgies say, “This is the joyful feast of the people of God.” (Notice the eschatology!)

In these five affirmations you have the Trinity, ecclesiology, and eschatology. All of them need to be kept in view synoptically, or we go back to holding onto only one part of the elephant. Often it is not so much that we have been wrong in our affirmations about the Lord Supper, just unbalanced in emphasizing certain aspects and ignoring or neglecting others.

That is where ecumenism can be so helpful, when the mutual affirmation and admonition of fellow Christians enriches our understanding.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Lifelines

A lifeline is literally a rope tossed to a drowning person, and figuratively something that provides escape from a dire situation. Sometimes we get thrown theological and intellectual lifelines!

One of the persistent features of my three plus decades in ministry has been my conviction that a pastor must be a theologian, and my own experience as a pastor-theologian has included several salient moments when I was thrown a theological life-line enabling me to carry on my work.

One was certainly in my first parish, where at twenty-six I was called to preach to two small congregations in rural Maine. After using up most of my seminary material in about a month the question loomed, what shall I say now?

To complicate matters, one of my congregations had a committed group of warm-hearted Jesus Freaks (this was 1975) who lamentably knew nothing about Paul Tillich's “ground of all Being” or “ultimate concern,”and insisted on talking about matters liked being saved and the rapture. I felt like I had been dropped off on the far side of the moon, and often went back to my empty parsonage to pray and wonder if I was really a Christian.

Early lifelines came from books like Helmut Thielicke's “Waiting Father” and “A Little Exercise for Young Theologians.” The first real rescuing lifeline was Karl Barth. A neighboring young pastor, Charlie Ford (about 25 miles away) had just returned from Bonn after working on a Ph. D. in New Testament. We would meet and read Karl Barth and study Greek.

Here was a towering intellect taking the tradition seriously, and now I finally had a common tongue to speak with my pietist friends of sin and grace, of righteousness and salvation. The first Barth I read was not the massive “Church Dogmatics,” but the short work, “Word of God and Word of Man,” translated and edited by Douglas Horton.

Horton's preface includes his own lifeline narrative of seeing the little book at the Harvard Divinity School library and reading it in German. Horton found this “strange new world” a powerful alternative to the dry desiccated humanism in which he had been trained.

Another lifeline narrative comes from my friend Browne Barr, who died on February 1 of this year at 91. Browne had been a homiletics teacher at Yale, and for many years in the turbulent 60's and 70's he was the pastor of the big UCC church in Berkeley, California, where he was known for his engaging attention to both Word and World.

In the 1981 Pickwick Press reprint of P. T. Forsyth's 1907 Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale, entitled Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, Browne wrote an essay called “The Preacher's Theologian.”

A generation after Douglas Horton, Browne Barr tells a similar tale. The setting this time is not a divinity school library, but his recently deceased predecessor's study in the old parsonage where Browne, a young minister, comes across Forsyth's book on preaching.

It is 1944, and as he puts it, “In Europe the hinge of history had not yet yet shown which way it was going to swing its door.”

Reared and trained after the First World War on prohibition, pacifism, and “the integration of personality” he wondered what he would preach on his first Sunday. It was hard to say much about Christian pacifism when most of the men were at war. “The integration of personality? It was also hard to say much about that to a congregation absorbed with news of the nightly bombing of London and weary with their work on airplane propellors and parachute cloth. They really appeared fairly well integrated.”

Browne Barr's lifeline was P. T. Forsyth, 33 years dead, but whose words on preaching still carried the ring of truth. And over the decades how many of us have had this same lifeline thrown to us, so that at difficult times in our ministry we were put in touch with the living Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Holy God he called Father?

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

A Hymn for Lent

You won't despise a broken heart

or spirits made contrite.

You lift the downcast, stay the proud,

and ancient wrongs make right.

The humble look to you for strength,

for comfort and for peace.

They know you'll go to any length,

to give their souls release.

Through the days of strong temptation,

and in the time of trial,

you have always gone before us,

you're present all the while.

When danger comes in any hour,

no matter what the test,

you come in presence and in power,

to those who seek you best.

On dark Golgotha's lonely hill,

our hearts were filled with dread.

Bright Easter turns the dread to thrill,

Christ's risen from the dead.

Richard L. Floyd, 2004

Monday, March 23, 2009

Where I Ruminate on How Communication Technology has Changed the Scholarly Life

My friend and former parishioner Martin Langeveld has been encouraging me to start a blog, so here goes. Martin, the former publisher of the Berkshire Eagle, our daily paper here in Pittsfield, is himself a blogger for the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, where he has regular insights into the rapidly changing fate of newspapers.

I have been a sometimes blogger for several years on the site of The Confessing Christ movement in the United Church of Christ. There I have limited myself to matters theological, so here I can expand the lens a bit and include other interests.

I have been reflecting on how information has become available during my adult lifetime. This is the 20th anniversary of my first sojourn to Britain to study. I went to the University of Oxford to study the British Theologian, P. T. Forsyth (1848-1921) at Mansfield College. All my arrangements were made by phone or mail, and letters often had a turnaround time of two months. Phone calls meant waking in the wee hours to catch people in the UK during business hours.

To study Forsyth's writings I had to go one of the libraries, and the books for the most part had to remain there, so I spent a great deal of time in reading rooms. I also scoured secondhand bookshops, most notably Blackwell's, for Forsyth's books.

The card catalogue at the Bodleian library was in huge leatherbound ledgers, and you had to fill out a call slip for items to come out of the bowels of the library. I remember one of the books, a collection of Forsyth's prayers, had the name of a former reader on the list in the back of the book: Robert McAfee Brown, who did his Ph. D. Dissertation at Union Theological Seminary under Reinhold Niebuhr and John Bennett. It was dated 1949, the year I was born. Sitting in the Duke Humphrey room at the Bodleian, built in 1488, four years before Columbus hit the Americas, made time slow down.

Six years later I went to St. Andrews University to do more on Forsyth, and that time there were fewer letters and more e-mails, and I brought a laptop with me, a Mac PowerBook, albeit with a very slow dial-up connection through CompuServe, remember them?

Six years later (another sabbatical) I was in Cambridge University and most communications were done by e-mail. Today most (perhaps all) of P. T. Foryth's writings, once so hard to find, are available on-line, and also many have been cheaply reprinted by Wipf and Stock Publishers.

Today I wouldn't have to drag my family across the Atlantic to study Forsyth. I can sit in my kitchen in my pajamas and read his stuff on-line, which is so much more efficient, but also way less cool than sitting in the Duke Humphrey room.

So by the new communications technologies distances of time and space get compressed, and one finds interlocutors as never before. Twenty years ago a number of my United Reformed Church friends at Oxford thought I was just a little off to have come to study this old theologian from their tradition that most of them didn't really know or care about. But today I have a handful of on-line interlocutors I have never met, in the flesh, but who share a passion for this insightful figure from our past. And now a blog, a word I never heard until a few years ago!