Invited in to the Dance of Love

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Andrew's Wickford this morning:

Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing; and he will show him greater works than these, so that you will be astonished.” (John 5. 17-30)

“God wants to communicate with humanity, and … Jesus represents the essence of that desire to talk,” says Mike Riddell. As God’s Son, Jesus was in a constant conversation with both God the Father and with God the Spirit. In these verses and others, the Son claims that he hears from the Father and speaks just what the Father has taught him (John 8: 26 – 29). He also claims that his relationship with the Father is not just one way, rather the Father also always hears the Son (John 11: 41 & 42). Similarly, he says that the Spirit will not speak on his own but only what he hears (John 16: 13). The Spirit is sent, like the Son, by the Father, but comes in the name of the Son to remind the disciples of everything that the Son said to them (John 14: 26 & 27). This interplay or dialogue within the Godhead between Father, Son and Spirit can be summed up in the words of John 3. 34-35: “For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God; to him God gives the Spirit without limit. The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands.”

Stephen Verney calls this interplay between Father, Son and Spirit, which he believes we are called to enter, ‘the Dance of Love.’ He writes: “”I can do nothing”, [Jesus] said, “except what I see the Father doing”. If he lays aside his teaching robes and washes the feet of the learners … it is because he sees his Father doing it. God, the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, is like that; he too lays aside his dignity and status as a teacher. He does not try to force his objective truth into our thick heads, but he gives himself to us in acts of humble service; he laughs with us and weeps with us, and he invites us to know him in our hearts through an interaction and an interplay between us. It is this knowledge that Jesus has received from the Father, and in the to and fro of this relationship he and the Father are one. They need each other. That is the pattern of how things potentially are in the universe, and of how God means them to be”.

The beginning of John’s Gospel can be read as saying that this kind of conversation, dialogue and partnership with God is actually what life is all about: “It all arose out of a conversation, conversation within God, in fact the conversation was God. So God started the discussion, and everything came out of this, and nothing happened without consultation.

This was the life, life that was the light of human beings, shining in the darkness, a darkness which neither understood nor quenched its creativity …

The subject of the conversation, the original light, came into the world, the world that had arisen out of his willingness to converse. He fleshed out the words but the world did not understand. He came to those who knew the language, but they did not respond. Those who did became a new creation (his children). They read the signs and responded.

These children were born out of sharing in the creative activity of God. They heard the conversation still going on, here, now, and took part, discovering a new way of being people.

To be invited to share in a conversation about the nature of life was for them, a glorious opportunity not to be missed.” (John 1: 1-14 revisited)

God wants us to be in conversation, in dialogue, in debate, with him so that we can find him for ourselves, find ourselves in him, and embody his characteristics and interests in ourselves. The philosopher, Martin Buber, has argued that “God is not met by turning away from the world or by making God into an object of contemplation, a “being” whose existence can be proved and whose attributes can be demonstrated.” Instead, we can know God only in dialogue with him and this dialogue goes on moment by moment in each new situation as we respond with our whole being to the unforeseen and the unique.

Our dialogue with God interrogates the very nature of what we are, and how we understand our identity, as it is from the art of conversation that truth emerges and our identity is constructed. It is through this conversation that the Father loves us, showing us all that he is doing. Truth emerging and identity constructed are the greater works which he shows to us through this conversation and which astonish us.

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U2 - Invisible.

Entering the interplay within the Godhead

Here is my reflection from today's Choral Eucharist at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing; and he will show him greater works than these, so that you will be astonished.” (John 5. 17-30)

“God wants to communicate with humanity, and … Jesus represents the essence of that desire to talk,” says Mike Riddell. As God’s Son, Jesus was in a constant conversation with both God the Father and with God the Spirit. In these verses and others, the Son claims that he hears from the Father and speaks just what the Father has taught him (John 8: 26 – 29). He also claims that his relationship with the Father is not just one way, rather the Father also always hears the Son (John 11: 41 & 42). Similarly, he says that the Spirit will not speak on his own but only what he hears (John 16: 13). The Spirit is sent, like the Son, by the Father, but comes in the name of the Son to remind the disciples of everything that the Son said to them (John 14: 26 & 27). This interplay or dialogue within the Godhead between Father, Son and Spirit can be summed up in the words of John 3. 34-35: “For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God; to him God gives the Spirit without limit. The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands.”

Stephen Verney calls this interplay between Father, Son and Spirit, which he believes we are called to enter, ‘the Dance of Love.’ He writes: “”I can do nothing”, [Jesus] said, “except what I see the Father doing”. If he lays aside his teaching robes and washes the feet of the learners … it is because he sees his Father doing it. God, the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, is like that; he too lays aside his dignity and status as a teacher. He does not try to force his objective truth into our thick heads, but he gives himself to us in acts of humble service; he laughs with us and weeps with us, and he invites us to know him in our hearts through an interaction and an interplay between us. It is this knowledge that Jesus has received from the Father, and in the to and fro of this relationship he and the Father are one. They need each other. That is the pattern of how things potentially are in the universe, and of how God means them to be”.

The beginning of John’s Gospel can be read as saying that this kind of conversation, dialogue and partnership with God is actually what life is all about: “It all arose out of a conversation, conversation within God, in fact the conversation was God. So God started the discussion, and everything came out of this, and nothing happened without consultation.

This was the life, life that was the light of human beings, shining in the darkness, a darkness which neither understood nor quenched its creativity …

The subject of the conversation, the original light, came into the world, the world that had arisen out of his willingness to converse. He fleshed out the words but the world did not understand. He came to those who knew the language, but they did not respond. Those who did became a new creation (his children). They read the signs and responded.

These children were born out of sharing in the creative activity of God. They heard the conversation still going on, here, now, and took part, discovering a new way of being people.

To be invited to share in a conversation about the nature of life was for them, a glorious opportunity not to be missed.” (John 1: 1-14 revisited)

God wants us to be in conversation, in dialogue, in debate, with him so that we can find him for ourselves, find ourselves in him, and embody his characteristics and interests in ourselves. The philosopher, Martin Buber, has argued that “God is not met by turning away from the world or by making God into an object of contemplation, a “being” whose existence can be proved and whose attributes can be demonstrated.” Instead, we can know God only in dialogue with him and this dialogue goes on moment by moment in each new situation as we respond with our whole being to the unforeseen and the unique.

Our dialogue with God interrogates the very nature of what we are, and how we understand our identity, as it is from the art of conversation that truth emerges and our identity is constructed. It is through this conversation that the Father loves us, showing us all that he is doing. Truth emerging and identity constructed are the greater works which he shows to us through this conversation and which astonish us.

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Gungor - You Have Me.

Our Holy Scriptures: an invitation to share in a conversation about the nature of life

This evening I spoke on 'Our Holy Scriptures' at the East London Three Faiths Forum where I said the following:

In a context where we are attempting to dialogue about our different faiths and where the strapline is that “there can be no peace between the religions without religious dialogue,” I thought it may be appropriate to speak about the Christian scriptures as a site for dialogue.

‘Scriptural Reasoning,’ which is championed in the UK by the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme sees Jews, Christians and Muslims meeting to read passages from their respective Holy Scriptures together. Together they discuss the content of those texts, and the variety of ways in which their traditions have worked with them and continue to work with them, and the ways in which those texts shape their understanding of and engagement with a range of contemporary issues. The goal is not agreement but rather growth in understanding one another's traditions and deeper exploration of the texts and their possible interpretations. 

What I would like to explore is why, from a Christian perspective, it is possible to do this with our holy scriptures and to do that I need to begin by talking about the form or shape of the Christian scriptures.

When we think about the form and shape of the Christian scriptures we need to remember that we are not speaking of one book but a collection of books. Maggi Dawn has, for example, written that the Bible’s: "stories are not laid out chronologically, and it is the work of so many different authors, in different genres and from different times, that although it seems like a book it would be more apt to call it a small library." Similarly, James Barr has said that the Bible needs “to be thought of not so much as a book but as a cave or cupboard in which a miscellany of scrolls has been crammed."

Other images for this diversity of form and content which I have found helpful include Mike Riddell’s description of the Bible as "a collection of bits" assembled to form God’s home page or Mark Oakley’s more poetic image of the Bible as "the best example of a collage of God that we have.” Riddell and Oakley both develop their images of the Bible from the recognition that the whole Christian Bible contains, as Oakley says, “different views, experiences, beliefs and prayers” drawn “from disparate eras, cultures and authors” which are not systematic in their portrayal of God. As Riddell states:

“The bits don’t fit together very well – sometimes they even seem to be contradictory. Stories, poems, teachings, records, events and miracles rub up against each other. They come from all over the place, and span at least 4,000 years of history.”

This is not surprising when there are in the New Testament, for example, four Gospels not one, when there are at least two different accounts of St Paul’s conversion and ministry, and when the principal form of the New Testament – the letter – is the form of long-distance, written conversation where we don’t have all the letters which originally formed that conversation.

To ignore the disparate nature and form of the Christian scriptures is to run significant risks as Riddell warns us:

“ … let us be aware that the assembled parts of the Bible are collected in a somewhat haphazard fashion. To push them into chronological order requires a great deal of scholarship, and runs the danger of doing violence to the material.”

The Christian scriptures, then, do not move forward in the smooth linear style of, for example, a nineteenth century novel, an academic thesis, a sermon or a systematic theology. Reading the Bible in terms of linearity or chronology is a stop-start process involving multiple perspectives on the same key events or characters and extensive wastelands where little or nothing of significance happens or is recorded.

The literary critic Gabriel Josipovici describes well how this works when he writes of the Hebrew scriptures. He suggests that the scriptures work “by way of minimal units laid alongside each other, the narrative being built up by slotting these together where necessary”. This form then affects the content because “events are laid out alongside each other, without comment, and we are never allowed to know whether the pattern we see emerging at one point is the true pattern”:

“This is an extraordinarily simple and an extraordinarily flexible system, which can lead from what could almost be described as shorthand to rich elaboration … Each new element … helps to bring into focus prior elements which we would have overlooked had we not been alerted to them by what follows.”

Despite the Christian scriptures having this form there is also a clear story which is threaded through the disparate and fragmented books and genres of the Bible. Josipovici also writes:

“It’s a magnificent conception, spread over thousands of pages and encompassing the entire history of the universe. There is both perfect correspondence between Old and New Testaments and a continuous forward drive from Creation to the end of time: ‘It begins where time begins, with the creation of the world; it ends where time ends, with the Apocalypse, and it surveys human history in between, or the aspect of history it is interested in, under the symbolic names of Adam and Israel’.”

So, what we have in the Christian scriptures is a both/and. A linear narrative thrust is combined with fragments of writings or story that are laid side by side so that each fragment adds to and challenges the others.

The biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, similarly, suggests that the Bible has both “a central direction and a rich diversity” which means “that not all parts will cohere or agree” although it has a “central agenda.”  The Bible is, therefore, structured like a good conversation with a central thread but many topics and diversions. On this basis, Brueggemann emphasises that “the Bible is not an “object” for us to study but a partner with whom we may dialogue.” In the image of God, he says, “we are meant for the kind of dialogue in which we are each time nurtured and called into question by the dialogue partner.” It is the task of Christian maturing, he argues, “to become more fully dialogical, to be more fully available to and responsive to the dialogue partner”:

“… the Bible is not a closed object but a dialogue partner whom we must address but who also takes us seriously. We may analyze, but we must also listen and expect to be addressed. We listen to have our identity given to us, our present way called into question, and our future promised to us.”

It is not only the form of the Bible, however, which makes it a site for dialogue but its content as well. Again writings about the Hebrew scriptures can help open our Christian eyes to aspects of the scriptures we may have overlooked. For example, Jonathan Sacks commenting on Midrash Raba in his fascinating series of Faith Lectures, states that:

“Abraham says: God, why did you abandon the world? God says to Abraham: Why did you abandon Me? And there then begins that dialogue between Heaven and Earth which has not ceased in 4,000 years. That dialogue in which God and Man find one another.”

“Only thus,” Sacks says, “can we understand the great dialogues between God and Abraham and Moses and Jeremiah and Job”

Similarly Mike Riddell has noted that for Christians “Jesus represents the essence of God’s desire to communicate with humanity.” Jesus is “the self-communication of God.” This is why he is ‘the Word of God’ and this is why Erasmus, in his 1516 translation of the New Testament, translated ‘logos’ as ‘Conversation’ not ‘Word’. A contemporary paraphrase of the Prologue to John’s Gospel based on Erasmus’ translation reads as follows:

“It all arose out of a conversation, conversation within God, in fact the conversation was God. So God started the discussion, and everything came out of this, and nothing happened without consultation.

This was the life, life that was the light of men, shining in the darkness, a darkness which neither understood nor quenched its creativity.

John, a man sent by God, came to remind people about the nature of the light so that they would observe. He was not the subject under discussion, but the bearer of an invitation to join in.

The subject of the conversation, the original light, came into the world, the world that had arisen out of his willingness to converse. He fleshed out the words but the world did not understand. He came to those who knew the language, but they did not respond. Those who did became a new creation (his children). They read the signs and responded.

These children were born out of sharing in the creative activity of God. They heard the conversation still going on, here, now, and took part, discovering a new way of being people.

To be invited to share in a conversation about the nature of life was for them, a glorious opportunity not to be missed.” (John 1: 1-14 revisited)

Rowan Williams makes a similar point in his book ‘Christ on Trial’ where he writes:

“All human identity is constructed through conversations, in one way or another. The gospel adds the news that, in order to find the pivot of our identity as human beings, there is one inescapable encounter, one all-important conversation into which we must be drawn. This is not just the encounter with God, in a general sense, but the encounter with God made vulnerable, God confronting the systems and exclusions of the human world within that world – so that, among other things, we can connect the encounter with God to those human encounters where we are challenged to listen to the outsider and the victim.”

So, for Christians, to be able to enter into the conversation initiated by God by encountering the subject of the conversation – God made vulnerable – is what forms our identity. This puts dialogue at the centre of our faith and our holy scriptures which can then mean that the kind of dialogue between scriptures which occurs in processes like Scriptural Reasoning can be seen as a significant expression of something which is at the very heart of Christian faith.  

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Sufjan Stevens - All The Trees Of The Field Will Clap Their Hands.

A self-subverting tradition

'In troubling times, the church is in danger of betraying its roots by becoming a cultural fallout shelter – a place for those bruised and broken by fractured foundations to immerse themselves in a warm bath of nostalgia. The water is scented with a faint whiff of Christendom, from days of glory past. While all this might provide some temporary respite and comfort, we would have to wonder if providing an ecclesial day spa is the intended role for a community that bears the name of Jesus. It would pay to take some interest in the waters in which we’re bathing. That foul soup carries the stench of the torture and oppression of innocents; the diminution of women; the theme song for the holocaust; the sexual abuse of children; the legitimation of war; the oppression of every sort of minority; the persecution of dissenters; the abuse of authority and the accumulation of power.

The challenge before us is to overcome the fear of the future, and give up our museums of cultural power for the sake of risking authenticity. It may well be that the storm we resist is God’s invitation to partnership. We travel across the border, or we stop travelling altogether. If we are to regard the future with hope and anticipation, and cross the threshold, it will bring cultural and theological dislocation. Like Peter, we will need to confront our own resistance to the rules being changed part way through the game. Our encounter with the surrounding world and with God must allow new insights. We have a self-subverting tradition that at least provides a model for such a strategic evolution.'

Mike Riddell, The Ferguson Lectures August 2011 - Forbidden Flesh: Subversion & Encounter, Lecture One: A Brief Fling with an Open Future

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Chagall Guevara - Escher's World.

The Bible: Backward and forward influences

For T. S. Eliot, Malcolm Guite writes (in Faith, Hope and Poetry), "there was a sense in which all poetry is contemporary" as what is written now "is not only influenced by what has been written in the past but in itself modifies the way we read the poetry of the past."

Guite gives as example:

"a powerful moment in The Waste Land when Eliot describes London commuters walking mechanically in a great dull crowd all looking down and seeming to breathe in unison and he says: ‘So many, I had not thought death had undone so many.’ When I first read this poem I felt this line simply as a poetic insight into the ‘nightmare life-in-death’ that modern living had imposed upon ‘lost’ souls, but later I came to read Carey’s great nineteenth-century translation of Dante’s Inferno and came to his harrowing description of his first sight of the dead, the crowd of souls in Limbo who had just drifted through life neither struggling to the heights of real virtue nor sinking to the depths of real depravity. Looking on them in horror as they trudge in step together endlessly round and round in a circle, Dante exclaims, ‘… I should n’ere / Have thought that death so many had despoiled’."

Guite then asks, "what happens at such a moment of echo and allusion, congruence and connection?" His answer is that:

"At one level I am remembering The Waste Land and suddenly realising that Eliot had been alluding to Dante and seeing what a brilliant thing it was to compare the rush-hour crowd to the crowds in Limbo. But at another level, at the level of the effect that Dante’s poem is having on me now, it is Dante who is alluding to Eliot, Dante who is brilliantly comparing the crowds in limbo with the London rush hour! There is a profound sense in which, after Eliot, Dante’s poem is changed forever. Each poem subtly modifies all the poems with which it is connected running backwards and forwards through time across the great web of Poetry itself."

Maggi Dawn has noted in The Writing on the Wall a similarity between the middle style of Dante which moves between different modes of expression and the way "the Bible tells its stories, moving backwards and forwards between primitive and sophisticated forms, and covering a wide range of genres, again conforming to Dante’s ideal of an unmediated accessibility to God." Dawn uses the standard image of a small library to describe the diversity within which this movement occurs: "It’s stories are not laid out chronologically, and it is the work of so many different authors, in different genres and from different times, that although it seems like a book it would be more apt to call it a small library." Other helpful images for this diversity of form and content include Mike Riddell’s description of the Bible as "a collection of bits" assembled to form God’s home page or Mark Oakley’s more poetic image of the Bible as "the best example of a collage of God that we have".

Similarly, Gabriel Josipovici, in The Book of God, quotes James Barr’s comment "about the Bible needing to be thought of not so much as a book but as a cave or cupboard in which a miscellany of scrolls has been crammed." He notes that "many modernist works might well be described as more like cupboards or caves crammed with scrolls than like carefully plotted nineteenth-century novels or even fairy stories and romances." As a result, a "generation which has experienced Ulysses and The Waste Land (to say nothing of Butor’s Mobile and Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi)" should be to view this image of the Bible positively more easily than would a generation "whose idea of a book and a unity was a novel by Balzac or George Eliot."

One key aspect of what Josipovici is referring to is the modernist generations’ ability to recognise the diversity of scripture and to note the significance of the movement backwards and forwards within its form that Dawn mentions which also has synergies with the way in which contemporary poems subtly modify all the poems with which they are connected running backwards and forwards through time across the great web of Poetry itself.

Josipovici has described how this effect occurs within scripture. The Bible works, he argues, "by way of minimal units laid alongside each other, the narrative being built up by slotting these together where necessary":

"This is an extraordinarily simple and an extraordinarily flexible system, which can lead from what could almost be described as shorthand to rich elaboration ... a narrative which can spend nine chapters getting from the Creation to Noah and his descendents, or else cover the ground in just four verses, as in Chronicles: ‘Adam, Sheth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalaleel, Jered, Henoch, Methusalah, Lamech, Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth’ (1 Chron. 1: 1-4)."

Each new element or unit "helps to bring into focus prior elements which we would have overlooked had we not been alerted to them by what follows" but, because the events are laid out alongside each other without comment, "we are never allowed to know whether the pattern we see emerging at one point is the true pattern."

As a result, he concludes that "the Hebrew Bible … chose not to stay with the fulfilment of man’s desires but with the reality of what happens to us in life. We all long in our daily lives for an end to uncertainty, to the need for decisions and choices, with the concomitant feeling that the choices we have made may have been the wrong ones. Yet we also know that life will not provide such an end, that we will always be enmeshed in uncertainty. What is extraordinary is that a sacred book should dramatize this, rather than be the one place where we are given what we desire. But that is precisely what the Hebrew Bible does …"

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Bob Dylan - Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Deep Heat).

“Ten Questions About the Bible” - a meme

I was tagged with this meme by Paul Trathen. The interest of memes is found in the diversity of responses generated, so this is my attempt to add to the variety:

1. State briefly what you believe about the Bible.

I believe that the Bible was inspired by God in its content and form. It reveals God within the limitations of human language, genres and imagery and through a collage-like form.

2. How is the Bible inspired?

People were inspired when, out of their conversation with God through prayer, their scriptures, other people and the natural world, they shared stories, experiences and insights reflecting on the nature and actions of God. Others, recognising the authenticity of what had been shared, either passed on, wrote down or collated them building up a canon of scriptures in the process.

3. So is the book of Judges inspired, or only the Gospels?

The whole of the Bible is inspired.

4. How is the Bible authoritative?

N.T. Wright describes the Bible as being like a five act play containing the first four acts in full (i.e. 1. Creation, 2. Fall, 3. Israel, 4. Jesus). He writes that:

"The writing of the New Testament ... would then form the first scene in the fifth act, and would simultaneously give hints (Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end ... The church would then live under the 'authority' of the extant story, being required to offer an improvisatory performance of the final act as it leads up to and anticipates the intended conclusion ... the task of Act 5 ... is to reflect on, draw out, and implement the significance of the first four Acts, more specifically, of Act 4 in the light of Acts 1-3 ... Faithful improvisation in the present time requires patient and careful puzzling over what has gone before, including the attempt to understand what the nature of the claims made in, and for, the fourth Act really amount to."

Wright concludes that he is proposing "a notion of "authority" which is ... vested ... in the creator god himself, and this god's story with the world, seen as focused on the story of Israel and thence on the story of Jesus, as told and retold in the Old and New Testaments, and as still requiring completion."

5. Is the Bible a human book?

Yes. It is a revelation of God in and through the oral histories, writings, and canonizations of human beings expressed within the limitations of human language, genres and imagery.

6. Are there aspects of the Bible that are not divine?

The Bible is not divine. Only God is divine. As Paul Trathen wrote in his answer to this meme: “The Bible is never to be allowed to become an idol. The ‘words of God’ are of a lesser-order than the Word of God, God-as-man, in the person of Jesus Christ.”

7. Why do you call the Bible a conversation?

Walter Brueggemann suggests that the Bible has both “a central direction and a rich diversity” which means “that not all parts will cohere or agree” although it has a “central agenda.” The Bible is, therefore, structured like a good conversation with a central thread but many topics and diversions. Brueggemann emphasises that “the Bible is not an “object” for us to study but a partner with whom we may dialogue.” In the image of God, he says, “we are meant for the kind of dialogue in which we are each time nurtured and called into question by the dialogue partner.” It is the task of Christian maturing, he argues, “to become more fully dialogical, to be more fully available to and responsive to the dialogue partner”:

“… the Bible is not a closed object but a dialogue partner whom we must address but who also takes us seriously. We may analyze, but we must also listen and expect to be addressed. We listen to have our identity given to us, our present way called into question, and our future promised to us.”

8. What do you believe about canonization?

That those involved in canonization were also inspired by God is the way described above.

9. Do you reject the inspiration of some books?

I assume you mean books of the Bible, in which case my answer would be, no.

10. Anything else you want to say?

The Bible is the record of the dialogue in which God and humanity find one another. Jesus says in John 8: 28 that he speaks just what the Father has taught him and in John 11: 42 that the Father always hears him. These two verses indicate that Jesus and the Father are in a constant dialogue or conversation. Stephen Verney called this the ‘Dance of Love’, into which we are invited to enter:

“”I can do nothing”, [Jesus] said, “except what I see the Father doing”. If he lays aside his teaching robes and washes the feet of the learners … it is because he sees his Father doing it. God, the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, is like that; he too lays aside his dignity and status as a teacher. He does not try to force his objective truth into our thick heads, but he gives himself to us in acts of humble service; he laughs with us and weeps with us, and he invites us to know him in our hearts through an interaction and an interplay between us. It is this knowledge that Jesus has received from the Father, and in the to and fro of this relationship he and the Father are one. They need each other. That is the pattern of how things potentially are in the universe, and of how God means them to be”.

Mike Riddell has noted therefore that “Jesus represents the essence of God’s desire to communicate with humanity.” Jesus is “the self-communication of God. This is why he is ‘the Word of God’ and is why Erasmus, in his 1516 translation of the New Testament, translated ‘logos’ as ‘Conversation’ not ‘Word’:

“It all arose out of a conversation, conversation within God, in fact the conversation was God. So God started the discussion, and everything came out of this, and nothing happened without consultation.

This was the life, life that was the light of men, shining in the darkness, a darkness which neither understood nor quenched its creativity.

John, a man sent by God, came to remind people about the nature of the light so that they would observe. He was not the subject under discussion, but the bearer of an invitation to join in.

The subject of the conversation, the original light, came into the world, the world that had arisen out of his willingness to converse. He fleshed out the words but the world did not understand. He came to those who knew the language, but they did not respond. Those who did became a new creation (his children). They read the signs and responded.

These children were born out of sharing in the creative activity of God. They heard the conversation still going on, here, now, and took part, discovering a new way of being people.

To be invited to share in a conversation about the nature of life was for them, a glorious opportunity not to be missed.” (John 1: 1-14 revisited)

The Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, notes that conversations with God characterise the relationships of those closest to him:

“Abraham says: God, why did you abandon the world? God says to Abraham: Why did you abandon Me? And there then begins that dialogue between Heaven and Earth which has not ceased in 4,000 years. That dialogue in which God and Man find one another.”

“Only thus,” Sacks says, “can we understand the great dialogues between God and Abraham and Moses and Jeremiah and Job.” The Bible is the record of these dialogues.

11. Is your theology “inconsistent?”

God has not chosen to communicate with us systematically instead his communication is diverse and diffuse - creation, incarnation, scripture etc. To try to tidy up God's revelation into harmonious, systematic categories is to say that we know better than God and distorts the diverse revelation which he has gifted to us. To live in God we need to live with the creative tensions of his revelation instead of resolving it all to our liking.

I tag Morag, Tim, Peter, Elwin, and Huw.

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Mumford & Sons - White Blank Page.

Steve Scott dialogues 2: Networking

JE:

I've very much enjoyed reading 'Crying for a Vision' and particularly liked the breadth of your frame of reference - essentially, what Rupert Loydell notes as you linking "a number of fields of inquiry that are usually perceived as unrelated." This, it seems to me, is linked to your interest in collage and I appreciated the way in which this interest was explored and expressed through the chapters describing your collaboration with Gaylen Stewart and ways of giving 'voice' to the multicultural reality of the 21st century church in the arts.

This is a real encouragement to me as it has also become foundational to my understanding of both the arts and the bible but without finding many others who share those connections and interests. The way I came to what I think of as a reconciliatory approach to art and faith was via 'The Waste Land', the work of David Jones and the paintings of Chagall (http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2010/01/airbrushed-from-art-history-15.html).

My sense was that in each fragments of materials were being linked and combined in ways that made emotional and artistic (although not necessarily logical) wholes or harmonies but which also multiplied references and resonances between the fragments that were being reconciled. I was helped enormously in understanding the work of these artists in this way by the writings of Nicholas Mosley who, although not referring to Eliot, Jones or Chagall, was explicit about his attempts to write in an elusive and allusive style in order to make similar connections and who linked his attempts to do so to his understanding of Christianity (http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/search/label/mosley).

This thinking about the arts was then combined (via my ministerial training) with exploration of post-modernism and reading of the likes of Walter Brueggemann, Gabriel Josipovici, Mark Oakley and Mike Riddell on the Bible to arrive at an understanding of the Bible as fragments collaged together into an endlessly resonating harmony. (See http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2008/02/allusive-elusive-1.html, http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2008/02/allusive-and-elusive-2,%20http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2008/02/allusive-and-elusive-3.html,%20http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2008/02/allusive-and-elusive-4.html,%20html,http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2008/02/allusive-elusive-5.html)

Another area of interest was in your links with the likes of Nigel Goodwin, Andy Piercy, and Steve Fairnie. I hadn't realised the extent to which there had been links between these from a relatively young age which presumably supported the work that they went on to do as pioneers in the UK in expressing faith through the Arts. It wasn't until I did my ministerial training that I found a network of like-minded Christians with interests in the arts to which I could relate and it is interesting to get a glimpse of the fact that similar networks of support have been important for others too in support of their development. Rupert Loydell once included one of my poems in a Stride publication and critiqued an article that I wrote for 'Strait' on Ted Hughes but I didn't have sufficient confidence in myself or my work at that time to forge the kind of connections that you made. I now really value the networks that I do have and hope that commission4mission as it develops can provide that kind of incubation for new generations of artists.

SS:

Of deep roots and family trees ... Rupert Loydell is now senior lecturer in creative writing in the University of Falmouth. He connected with me in the late 1980s, as referred by Steve Turner. He is also related, I think, to Bev Sage, who at one point was Bev Fairnie. Bev I met in the late 60s/early 70s, she was part of a singing trio called Soul Truth (with Judy, who became Judy Piercey). We all met up in 1969ish at a Youth for Christ event in Torquay. Soul Truth, the Canon Harry Sutton (speaker) the young Nigel Goodwin (pre Arts Centre Group), Steve Fairnie, an undergraduate from Bristol (and Steve Rowsie), Andy Piercey who was to be part of Ishmael and Andy prior to After The Fire. Goodwin went on to begin the ACG in South Kensington attracting the likes of poet Stewart Henderson, poet/journalist Steve Turner, graphic designer/filmmaker Norman Stone (and so on, names too numerous to mention etc.). Fairnie did grad work at the Royal College of Art/married Bev.

All this is to say that networking, facilitation, encouragement and support to artists, thinkers, emerging etc. is very important and often times you don't see `fruit' outside of just the support-at-the-time, for years. But looking back over the years (decades!) there's all kinds of primary and secondary impact not just on the church but also on the culture at large. All this is to say that the gift of networking is an underrated charism.

JE:

It was a remarkably fruitful period from which I certainly benefitted. Reading 'Buzz' and then 'Strait' was what introduced me to the work of many of those that you mention. I read Steve Turner, Stewart Henderson and Rupert Loydell and had poetry and reviews published in 'Strait' while Stewart Henderson was its Editor. Rupert Loydell included one of my poems in a Stride compilation (although he wanted to excise the word 'God' from the poem) and he critiqued an article that I wrote for 'Strait' on Ted Hughes in which I concluded that elements of Hughes' writings were dangerous (which raised Rupert's hackles). I've been a ACG member for some years without ever having gotten deeply involved. I listened to ATF and The Technos and was at the Dominion for ATF's final gig. Their originality, it seems to me, was in writing contemporary worship songs using contemporary imagery (lazers, jet planes etc.), something that those, like Delerious?, who have followed in their wake have generally been unable to achieve (Delerious' imagery being drawn generally from the pool of scriptural imagery). All of this fed my imagination, kick started my fascination for the differing ways artists express their faith in and through their work, and demonstrated that it was possible to be Christian and creative.

SS:

Yep. And prior to `Buzz' was Vista. I recall Buzz as almost a broadsheet, or at least somewhat diminutive in its first issues. My only or main recall of Strait was when Garth Hewitt was in the loop. And there was an ACG magazine THE CUT that became or later resurfaced as ARTYFACT.

Speaking of the early 70s, I can recall the first issues of TIME OUT. I mention this because I linked on Facebook to a TIMEOUT HK edition interview with artist Makoto Fujimura who, if youre not thoroughly acquainted with him already, then i suggest becoming so.

Yes to ATF's use of contemporary imagery. Also to Fairnie and co's use of media. I also recall around thebeginning of the 2000s (2001 or 2) someone giving me a link to something called `smallfire' alt: worship in UK. It was from there I got into a brief Edialog with Jonny Baker.

Whilst an art student I went to the Cambridge Poetry Festival (73) and saw Ted Hughes reading live. Also Lee Harwood, Eric Mottram. John Ashbery from NY read terribly, but I later got into his stuff `on the page' Got to chat with Nathaniel Tarn who turned me on to a magazine called Alcheringa, a journal of Ethnopoetics co edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Goerge Quasha. Rothenberg is a poet and a justly famous anthologist of world ethnopoetry/poetics 'Technicians of the Sacred'. To my everlasting regret I did not buy the just published first edition of John Heath Stubbs `Artorius' even though he was there, reading and perhaps signing, although his vision was possibly shot by then. 'Artorius' (from what I've read of it) does Arthur/Britain a bit like David Jones and Wales (or pre Roman Britain).

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Writz - Private Lives.

The Art of Life

In one translation of Exodus 31. 6 God says, "To all who have an aptitude for crafts I've given the skills." Creativity, this passage suggests, is a gift of God.

This phrase however can sound as though it is only certain chosen people who have the aptitude for creativity but that is not the witness of the Bible, taken as a whole. God's Spirit gives each person gifts, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12, but the gifts that we are given differ from person to person. This means that we are all creative but in differing ways. As the Archbishop of Canterbury has said, "artists are special people and every person is a special kind of artist."

Ultimately, creativity is a gift of God because God is creative and we are made in his image. He is the Creator, the one who said "Let there be" and life came to be; the One whose glory is proclaimed by the heavens and the work of whose hands is proclaimed by the skies. We are made in the image of the Creator God and therefore we too are creative.

God is the ultimate creator, who created from nothing, and we are sub-creators, able to, as Dorothy L. Sayers put it, "rearrange the unalterable and indestructible units of matter in the universe and build them up into new forms."

Does this mean that we should all strive to be 'artists' in the sense of being musicians, novelists, poets, painters etc? Edith Schaeffer, in her useful book Hidden Art, answers that question by saying no, of course not:

"But it does mean that we should consciously do something about it. There should be a practical result of the realization that we have been created in the image of the Creator of beauty ... the fact that you are a Christian should show in some practical area of a growing creativity and sensitivity to beauty, rather than in a gradual drying up of creativity."

She continues by writing that, "it may be helpful to consider some of the possibilities all of us have for living artistically, but which are often ignored." This is what she calls 'Hidden Art'; the development of our talents (whatever they are) and their use in a way which will enrich othr people's lives. By doing so, we express the fact of being creative creatures made in the image of our Creator God.

Just as the expressions of our creativity will be diverse because we all have differing gifts and differing contexts for the use of those gifts, so creativity itself often also results from diversity. This is increasingly being recognised within society as, for example, in the recent sixth Brussels Debate where participants argued that cultural diversity enlarges and values the different ways of seeing and doing things in other cultures and that this opennes gives the capacity to select and absorb elements of other cultures, helping to produce new ways of thinking, seeing, imagining and creating.

Each photo in my weekly Windows on the world series (see examples above) aims to tell a similar story. Each photo has both a foreground object which acts as a frame through which we glimpse something beyond. This mirrors the way in which each of us view life both from our own individual perspective and are able to see and engage with the perspective of others and, even, of God. These photos are, therefore, an attempt to see ordinary scenes from different perspectives and through fresh eyes. This is what art at its best does for us and, through seeing differently, we are opened up to new possibilities.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has argued that human being is possibility; that we are constantly changing by constantly exploring the possibilities of who we are and who we can become. This exploration occurs as we imagine possibilities that help us clarify the essence of who we are. We come to know the essence of a thing by exploring its various possibilities through imaginative variations. The philosopher Edmund Husserl gave an example of this in identifying the 'Essence' of a table. By 'free imaginative variation' we can alter the form, colour or material of the table. WE can also imagine possible uses of a table: we can eat a meal on it; we can write letters or do a jigsaw puzzle on it; we can stand on it to fix the lightbulb etc. By then looking to see what there is in common among the various examples, we can determine the essence of the table.

We see this happening too in what is otherwise a rather strange Bible story. In Genesis 2. 18-25, God brings all the animals in the Garden of Eden to Adam for him to name and, at the end of this naming process, Adam recognises Eve as his soulmate. The key to this story is that names in ancient times described the essence of the thing that was named. So Adam looks and listens in order to understand the essence of each different creature and then creates a name that reflects that essence. By so doing, he also sees what is different between himself and the creatures, so that when he sees Eve he is able to immediately recognise her as his soulmate.

This is also what I understand the Bible as doing for us. The Bible is a diverse book. In fact, it is more of a library than a book; a library of 66 different books containing biography, drama, history, law, letters, prophecy, poetry and proverbs. Mike Riddell calls it "a collection of bits" assembled to form God's home page while Mark Oakley uses a more poetic image in writing of the Bible as "the best example of a collage of God that we have." They use these images because the Bible contains, as Oakley writes, "different views, experiences, beliefs and prayers" drawn "from disparate era, cultures and authors" which are not systematic in their portrayal of God. As Riddell states: "The bits don't fit together very well - sometimes they even seem to be contradictory. Stories, poems, teachings, records, events and miracles rub up against each other. They come from all over the place, and span at least 4,000 years of history."

The point is that the Bible gives us many different perspectives on God and on human beings. These different perspectives produce new ways of thinking, seeing, imagining and creating in us. As we see God and human beings from different perspectives and through fresh eyes we are opened up to new possibilities. As we see and imagine possibilities we have the same experience as Adam and come to know ourselves better - we see the essence of who we are - and we change to become more like the people that God created us to be.

This is living creatively, living artisically, and it is something each of us are called to do and be. The art of life is to be open to the diversity of life in order to see life's possibilities from different perspectives and, as we compare and contrast these possibilities, to identify the essence of who we have been created by God to be and to become. By understanding ourselves and by responding to the essence of otherws, we are able to develop and use our talents for the enrichment of other people's lives. In doing so, we express the fact of being creative creatures made in the image of our Creator God.

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The Call - Uncovered.

Bible books meme

I've been tagged by Philip on this:

"Name the five books (or scholars) that had the most immediate and lasting influence on how you read the Bible. Note that these need not be your five favourite books, or even the five with which you most strongly agree. Instead, I want to know what five books have permanently changed the way you think."

I enjoyed Philip's autobiographical approach to this meme and will try to do something similar.

1. A Way Through the Wilderness by Jamie Buckingham - This is the book that I think most influenced my late teens and early twenties after recommitting my life to God. I read Risky Living and Where Eagles Soar before this one but this was the one that grounded Buckingham's talk of being led by the Spirit most firmly in scripture as he created parallels between his experiences and the people of Israel's wilderness wanderings. I didn't know it at the time but what I was responding to was Buckingham's paradigmatic reading of the wilderness wanderings. It was reading Christopher Wright's Living As The People of God later that set out the value of this way of understanding scripture. What has stayed with me particularly from A Way Through the Wilderness is the background that Buckingham gives to Deuteronomy 32. 10-12. The image of the mother eagle pushing her chick out of the nest, catching it in the small of her back and then tipping the chick off until it learns to fly is a wonderful image for the way in which God is always seeking to disturb our complacency and move us "farther up and farther in" as C.S. Lewis puts it in The Last Battle.

2. The Book of God by Gabriel Josipovici - This book helped confirm in my mind a hunch about the Bible that I had developed out of thinking about the use made of fragments of materials and images in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the poetry and paintings of David Jones, and the paintings of Marc Chagall. Each of these combines and holds together a series of fragments in such a way that a relation is established between the fragments and, often, a non-linear story told. Eliot is explicit about this at the end of The Waste Land when he writes: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." The diversity of texts, genres, and voices in the Bible seemed to me to be similarly fragmented but held together by the narrative developed by means of the canon. Three books that I read around the same time - The Collage of God by Mark Oakley, God's Home Page by Mike Riddell, and Josipovici's The Book of God - seemed to understanding the form of the Bible in a similar fashion. Josipovici was the most significant as he unpacks both the fragmented form of scripture and the implications for interpretation of scripture being fashioned in this form. As a result, in order to be serious about scripture I think we have to take account of the form as well as the content of scripture and recognise that the fragmented nature of scripture militates against approaches to scripture, such as harmonisation, which view scripture as being essentially linear and consistent when that is not actually the case.

3. Old Testament Theology: Essays on Structure, Theme and Text by Walter Brueggemann - The first of Brueggemann's books that I read and it remains my favourite for its exploration of the dialectic of the Old Testament between its core/majority/structure legitimating testimony and counter/minority/pain embracing testimony. Brueggemann's insights revealed the extent to which the diversity of materials in the Bible enable a conversation to develop between these two testimonies. His conclusion, like that of Josipovic, is that in the Old Testament this dialectic is essentially unresolved and open. This understanding of dialogue within and between the texts made sense of the fragmentary form of scripture and developed a sense that, rather than being an instruction manual, reading scripture is actually more like participating in a debate or going on a journey of exploration.

4. The New Testament and the People of God by N.T. Wright. This book helped me to understand Jesus as 'a one-man Temple/Land/Torah-replacement movement' i.e. what Israel had been waiting for! The implication of all this is that God, through Jesus, is in dialogue with scripture reinterpreting and re-enacting the story of Israel through his life, death, and resurrection. Wright also provides a means for understanding the authority of scripture when scripture is understood in the more dynamic and open sense that I have been writing about. He describes scripture as being like a five act play containing the first four acts in full (i.e. 1. Creation, 2. Fall, 3. Israel, 4. Jesus). "The writing of the New Testament ... would then form the first scene in the fifth act, and would simultaneously give hints (Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end ... The church would then live under the 'authority' of the extant story, being required to offer an improvisatory performance of the final act as it leads up to and anticipates the intended conclusion ... the task of Act 5 ... is to reflect on, draw out, and implement the significance of the first four Acts, more specifically, of Act 4 in the light of Acts 1-3 ... Faithful improvisation in the present time requires patient and careful puzzling over what has gone before, including the attempt to understand what the nature of the claims made in, and for, the fourth Act really amount to." Going back to my first book (and confusing metaphors), this is a description of us, as eaglets, learning to flap its wings in order to fly up to ride the thermals of the Spirit in order that our improvisations are Spirit-led. As Wright concludes, he proposes "a notion of "authority" which is ... vested ... in the creator god himself, and this god's story with the world, seen as focused on the story of Israel and thence on the story of Jesus, as told and retold in the Old and New Testaments, and as still requiring completion."

I see Satan fall like lightning by René Girard - "Girard brings our attention to three facts without which we will never make sense of our lives, our world or our faith, namely: the role violence has played in cultural life, the role mimesis plays in psychological and social life, and the role the Bible plays in revealing both of these things and showing us how to deal with them." Girard also reveals how the developing dialogue and narrative of scripture can critique, deconstruct and expose societal norms such as the scapegoat mechanism. Girard's thesis then gives us both an understanding of the way in which the fragmented, dialectical narrative of scripture can speak to our world (not just the interpretive community, for whom it is normative) and a basis/focus for our improvisations in Act 5 of the play.

Should anyone want to think more about these ideas of and approaches to scripture, I posted a series last year called 'The Bible - Open or Closed?' exploring them in more detail in dialogue with Philip and they can be found by clicking here.

I tag Interim Mutterings, one of the St John's housegroups, for this meme.

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Igor Stravinsky - Symphony of Psalms I.

The Bible - open or closed? (2)

Thanks again to Philip for his helpful response to my post and for the conversation that we are having on these issues and ideas. I’m certainly finding it stimulating.

On changing the argument by moving from 'wrestling' to 'conversation' and 'dialogue', I did this because I had been asked to give my views on the issue. In my original post I was trying to summarise the arguments made by John Richardson and Peter Rollins in order to contrast them and show that an ‘open’ approach to theology was no less serious about scripture than a ‘conservative’ one.

When I was asked for my view on the issue of wrestling with God then I have to broaden the discussion because I think that conversation is the best descriptor we have for the form in which we have received the Bible and for the way in which that form works within the whole canon of scripture.

Wrestling with God is one element within this broader picture. It is by no means the whole, although it can be a useful entry point into the argument that I am making in these posts and have made previously in other posts and in my NTMTC essays. I think too that I am framing the argument in a way that I have not encountered in quite the same way in the writings of others.

My understanding of being in dialogue with the scriptures goes beyond seeking “to build the bridge between the context/contexts of the passages and our context/contexts today” and beyond those bits of the Bible that we might wrestle with and struggle to make sense of. As a result, I am arguing for making conversation the primary hermeneutic and this why the argument is about the broader form of scripture and not just about particular passages.

This is also why I referred to passages from John’s Gospel as they reveal that Jesus was part of an ongoing conversation within the God into which we too can be drawn. Sometimes this involves wrestling with God, as it did for Jesus in Gethsemene (and also for Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Job, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Jonah, Peter in the vision of non-halal foods, and Paul in his prayers over the ‘thorn in his flesh’), but it also involves conversation, dialogue, sharing and exchange which is not about wrestling and may well be about submission and love.

This is particularly apparent in John’s Gospel where we have particular verses that reveal the ongoing conversation between Jesus and the Father within the Godhead together with Jesus’ teaching being characterised in this Gospel by conversation e.g. the conversations with Nicodemus and the woman of Samaria. Even in the other Gospels, where by contrast narrative is the primary medium for Jesus’ teaching, the parables that Jesus tells often arise out of dialogue with those he encountered. A parable will often be told in response to a question and will be the means by which Jesus asks a question of his questioner.

My argument though is not solely based on the content of particular passages but also about the forms of particular passages/books and the form that the whole canon of scripture takes. Virtually all the Psalms, for example, are conversations where it is assumed that the hearer is either God or the people of Israel. Some of the Psalms are actually written as conversations e.g. Psalm 12. In verses 1-4 the Psalmist cries out to God for help, in verses 5-6 God answers and in verses 7-8 the Psalmist responds by expressing confidence in God. Psalm 77 is the record of a similar conversation with God. In verses 1-6 the Psalmist tells us how he cried out to God, in verses 7-9 he tells what he cried out, in verses 10-12 he tells us how God answered his cry, and in verses 13-20 he tells us of his response to God’s answer.

Similarly, all the Epistles are one side of a conversation in that they are either responses to the writers having been in particular churches and feeling the need to contribute to ongoing discussions within those churches when absent from them or specific responses to letters received from those churches. Revelation is also structured with a significant element of conversation with the writer being questioned by various characters in the vision and in turn asking questions of those same characters.

Conversation therefore features strongly in the content of passages/books and in the form of many passages/books. However, it has been strangely overlooked as a hermeneutic for theology and it is primarily postmodernism that is revealing it as an significant tool or lens for understanding scripture.

The argument does not stop there however because we have set to consider the overall shape or form in which we have received scripture. If we are going to be honest about that overall form in which we have received the Bible then we have to describe it as Mike Riddell, for example, does as “a collection of bits” assembled to form God’s home page or as Mark Oakley does when he uses a more poetic image to speak of the Bible as “the best example of a collage of God that we have”. Riddell and Oakley both develop their images of the Bible from the recognition that the whole Christian Bible contains, as Oakley says, “different views, experiences, beliefs and prayers” drawn “from disparate eras, cultures and authors” which are not systematic in their portrayal of God. As Riddell states: “The bits don’t fit together very well – sometimes they even seem to be contradictory. Stories, poems, teachings, records, events and miracles rub up against each other. They come from all over the place, and span at least 4,000 years of history.”

This is not surprising when there are four Gospels not one, when there are at least two different accounts of Paul’s conversion and ministry, and when the principal form of the New Testament – the letter – is the form of long-distance, written conversation.

The Bible, then, does not move forward in the smooth linear style of, for example, a nineteenth century novel, an academic thesis, a sermon or a systematic theology. Reading the Bible in terms of linearity or chronology is a stop-start process involving multiple perspectives on the same key events or characters and extensive wastelands where little or nothing of significance happens or is recorded. We can learn about the Church in Ephesus, for example, from Acts, Ephesians, 1 Timothy, Revelation and, possibly, the Johannine letters but nowhere do we find a full, chronological telling of the story of that Church. The same can be said of all the Churches which Paul founded, including the Church at Corinth. The founding of this Church is recorded in Acts and the story then jumps to Paul’s letters to this Church. These letters are a debate or conversation (not a story) between Paul and the members of the Corinthian Church about issues of concern to Paul and matters on which the Church had written to Paul for advice. We don’t have the letters which Church members wrote to Paul or all the letters which Paul wrote to the Corinthian Church so the conversation as we have it is a little one-sided and incomplete, although we can infer some of the points made by the Church members from Paul’s record of and response to them.

To ignore the disparate nature and form of the Christian Bible is to run significant risks as Riddell warns us: “ … let us be aware that the assembled parts of the Bible are collected in a somewhat haphazard fashion. To push them into chronological order requires a great deal of scholarship, and runs the danger of doing violence to the material.”

What we have in scripture is, as Gabriel Josipovici has pointed out, “a collection of miscellaneous ‘writings’ … laid alongside each other, the narrative being built up by slotting these together where necessary”. Josipovici describes this as “an extraordinarily simple and an extraordinarily flexible system, which can lead from what could almost be described as shorthand to rich elaboration … Each new element … helps to bring into focus prior elements which we would have overlooked had we not been alerted to them by what follows.” In other words, the texts are in conversation with each other within the overall canon of scripture.

I tried to highlight this in my second post by writing about the way, for example, that Jesus’ ministry, as Tom Wright has set out so well in his major writings, involves the retelling of the story of Israel in terms of himself and his ministry. This means that Jesus’ actions and teaching are, in full, a conversation with the narratives of the Jewish scriptures which involves a reinterpretation of those stories in terms of himself and his ministry. This dialogue with the Jewish scriptures and the retelling or reinterpretation of its narratives continues throughout the New Testament with Paul’s reworking of the Hagar and Sarah narrative, Hebrew’s reinterpretation of the sacrificial system, and Revelation’s reworking of apocalyptic narratives in terms of the politics of the day being some of the stand-out examples.

What holds this collection of miscellaneous writings and the conversation between them in the canon of scripture is the narrative thread which is weaved through them. As I have been saying above this is not a linear or chronological narrative. As I wrote before, I think that it is vital to be real about the non-linear, non-chronological, circuitous and fractured way in which the story in the Christian scriptures is actually told because that is where the openness in scripture is found. The story, the meta-narrative, is embedded in the conversation and can only be understood by taking part in the conversation.

When the story is extracted from the form in which it has been given to us in order to make it linear, chronological and consistent then “violence is done to the material” and it becomes something other than the narrative as God revealed it us. This is actually something that Wright and Richard Burridge have both written about in criticising our Christmas and Easter traditions of (through the Nine Lessons, Seven Last Words, Stations of the Cross/Resurrection etc.) taking bits of the different stories told in the Gospels and elsewhere and fitting them together using a chronology taken from only one of the Gospels to tell the birth, passion or resurrection narratives in ways that ultimately are not those in which those stories have been given to us. Creating systematic theologies by harmonisation or using historical criticism to create ‘the Historical Jesus’ does, I think, similar violence to the text and the key issue is that by doing so we are not reading the narrative in the form in which it was given.

The final move here is to set out in what way the form of scripture keeps the story open. In doing so, it may be helpful to use an analogy. 1408 is a film in which the grieving central character visits haunted hotel rooms in order to deconstruct the narratives that these hotels are using to sell rooms. His motivation for doing so is his unresolved grief over the death of his daughter. When he enters Room 1408 he encounters a room that uses his unresolved grief to terrify and overwhelm him. The way in which film tells the story deliberately operates on two simultaneous levels so that we are never sure whether the central character is fighting real demons or the demons of his own mind. The resolution of the story maintains this ambiguity in that the central character destroys Room 1408, and in doing so also destroys himself, but we are left unsure whether the torment he has faced dies with the physical destruction of the room or continues in the lives of those he has impacted. 1408 therefore combines a narrative which reaches resolution with dual levels of interpretation which leaves us questioning what we have seen and which send us out from the film continuing to reflect on the effect of bereavement in contrast to the sense of satisfaction that comes from a narrative with a resolution that ties up all the loose ends and answers all our questions.

My contention is that the Bible works in a somewhat similar way because its narrative is embedded in a similarly open form. What we have in the Bible, I think, is a both/and - a linear narrative thrust combined with the laying of fragments side by side so that each fragment adds to and challenges the others. We cannot understand one without the other because this is the form in which God has chosen to give us the scriptures.

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Stravinsky - Symphony of Psalms III.