The Word of God is not Bound

"The word of God is not bound. God speaks, and the world is made; God speaks and the world is remade by the Word Incarnate. And our human speaking struggles to keep up. We need, not human words that will decisively capture what the Word of God has done and is doing, but words that will show us how much time we have to take in fathoming this reality, helping us turn and move and see, from what may be infinitesimally different perspectives, the patterns of light and shadow in a world where the Word's light has been made manifest. It is no accident that the Gospel which most unequivocally identifies Jesus as the Word made flesh is the Gospel most characterised by this same circling, hovering, recapitulatory style, as if nothing in human language could ever be a 'last' word. 'The world itself could not contain the books that should be written' says the Fourth Evangelist, resigning himself to finishing a Gospel that is in fact never finishable in human terms." - Rowan Williams, The Martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer - Sermon at Service to Commemorate the 450th Anniversary

The Elizabethan Divines

This is just a theory of mine, but it feels like this second Elizabethan reign has been a golden age for British theology. Not that a British Institutes or Church Dogmatics has been written during this time - don't would be totally un-British. But over the past few decades, they has been an amazing group of theologians lecturing, publishing and serving the church in the UK and around the world. They are all theologians born during or in the period immediately after WWII: Rowan Williams, NT Wright, Oliver O'Donovan, Richard Bauckham, Colin Gunton, John Webster, Jeremy Begbie, Alister McGrath and so on. Building on the work of the like of Moule, Caird, Torrance and Chadwick, they've all contributed to the growth of the church in their own unique way.

As they start to retire, it will be interesting to see who replaces them in the church and the academy.

What Heaven Wants

I've been reading an article for college by William H. Willimon (of Resident Aliens fame) on the power of the Spirit of the Risen Jesus to create unity amongst cultural diversity and plurality.

The gospel is deferential and accommodating to no particular culture; rather, it is indoctrination, inculcation into a new and oddly based culture, namely the church. Thus Peter remembers Joel's prophetic vision of the crossing of gender, age, and social barriers (2:17-18). The result of Pentecostal empowerment by the Sprit is baptism (2:38), adoption by and enculturation into a new people, a holy nation, a light to all other nations, cultures, clubs, and means of human gathering. Thus many interpreters have seen Luke's list of hearers as an echo of the list of nations in Genesis 10. Pentecost is a day in which the linguistic divisions of Babel (Gen. 11) are healed. The same God who scattered the nations in order to prevent a united nations against God, now gathers and unites the nations in a new nation convened by God. The church is a sign on earth (2:19) of what heaven wants.

Willimon concludes the article with these heavy hitting words:

Acts says we are right to see the multicultural composition of our congregations as a kind of test of the fidelity of our preaching. I think Acts would also tell us that, whenever by the grace of God our preaching overcomes some cultural boundary, we are right to rejoice that God continues to work wonders through the word. Whenever we hear "multicultural" we are supposed to think "church," that peculiar cross-cultural people gathered by nothing other than the descent of the Holy Spirit.

It makes we wonder if we in increasingly diverse Sydney would meet this standard. "...[T]he multicultural composition of our congregations as a kind of test of the fidelity of our preaching."

Tremble

I've been working on a sermon for church on Jesus crucifixion. On reflection, I can't think of any other event that has been so consistently mediated upon. This one moment in human history has been the subject had been reflected in poetry, in prose and in paintings. I find that quite incredible. I've had the song "Where you there when the crucified my Lord?" rolling around my head this week - I remember singing it at an early morning church service at Easter a few years ago. But when it's in my head, I always imagine Johnny Cash singing it: