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Baptist Bloggers say Happy Birthday Prof Fiddes

Bloggers from the Baptist community have joined together in bringing birthday greetings to Paul Fiddes.

Steve Holmes

Sean Winter

Steven Harmon

Simon Woodman

Andy Goodliff

Rowena Wilding

Glen Marshall

Catriona Gorton

Ed Kaneen

Louise Polhill

Neil Brighton

 

Happy Birthday Paul Fiddes! 65 today

When it comes to Paul Fiddes this facebook conversation from December 2011 is probably spot on:

The problem with studying at Regent's Park is the repeated realisation "anything you can do, Fiddes has done better"!

(Student Baptist minister)

'That's my whole career in eight words.'

(British Baptist theologian)

'Too true. I've likened it to hacking through the jungle, every so often you reach a clearing and think to yourself that you have made a contribution. Then, just as you are ready to move on you spot an empty wine bottle with a note in the top. You open the note to discover it reads "visited here in 1995 - regards Paul".'

(British Baptist minister)

Paul Fiddes is perhaps what many of us think a theologian should look like. Paul has the same look that Colin Gunton had (beard, no moustache), which perhaps should become the non-conformist theological trademark (come on Steve Holmes, I dare you!). Paul also shares the commitment Colin had to the local church and their wider bodies (Baptist and URC respectively). I note their similarities (although their theologies were quite different) because for us nonconformists we don't have many of the like of Fiddes and Gunton.

It doesn't happen often, not even in every generation, but sometimes the church is gifted by God with someone with immense theological wisdom and ability to grasp the historical tradition of the church, and in Paul's case, the skill to relate and connect it all to the issues of and questions of contemporary culture. For us Baptists, at least in the UK, Paul Fiddes is the theological voice, at whose feet we listen.

Today is Professor Paul Fiddes' sixty-fifth birthday. Here's a quote from an essay on Baptist identity:

I have stood with fellow Baptists at a service in Sam Sharpe Square in Montego Bay, Jamaica, a place named in memory of the Baptist deacon and slave who was executed for his protest against the British slave system. I have prayed with fellow Baptists by the side of the Han river in Seoul, Korea, and witnessed several thousand young people being baptized - not in a media spectacle, but each one greeted personally by his or her pastor. I have lectured with fellow Baptists in the University of Timisoare, Romania, near the square where more than fifty young people were killed in the revolution of 1989 as they demonstrated for freedom, shouting 'God exists'. I have talked with Portuguese Baptists in Lisbon, where the great earthquake of 1755 is still remembered as the event which shook people's faith in a good creator, and destroyed a whole system of natural theology. I have shared in a Sunday morning service in the black township of Tembisa near Johannesburg where the previous night Zulu Inkata terrorists had massacred nearly a hundred people, and I have experienced Zulu and Chosa Baptists worshipping together in acceptance of each other. I have sat with Baptists in Cuba, listening to the way that they understand mission in their neighbourhood, led by a pastor who was serving as a Deputy in the government of Fidel Castro, and suffering rejection by fellow Christians because of this involvement in politics. I have received hospitality from Baptists in Myanmar, and admired the way that their ethnic groups express their faith, and their hopes for a common society, through their different styles of song and dance. Through these experiences, my thinking has been shaped in a way that would not have been possible without a shared identity as Baptists.

Identity, I suggest, is more about identification than about being identical. It is an identification which is not a mere human effort, but is enabled by that identification of God with humanity that we call incarnation ... I want to make clear that my appeal to the act of identifying does not conform the church to the secular model of a voluntary society, though there will always be something intentional about it; nor am I ignoring the truth that we share a common identity as members of the body of Christ through baptism. However, a theology of identification will be bound to envisage visible unity as covenantal at heart, rather than (say) a recovery of any particular structure of episcopal oversight which has precedent in history ... It is not that we share an already-existing identity through establishing a common list of agreed items, but we willingly identify ourselves with others who want to make or keep covenant with us because they catch an echo of their story in us.

('The Question of Identity' in Tracks and Traces: Baptist Identity in Church and Theology, Paternoster, 2003, pp15-16)

Beyond 400: 'A Mixed Economy' and the future of the church

My final suggestion in my contribution to the beyond400 conversation asked

What if Beyond400 we understood that the most pioneering work might be to hold on to established ways of being church, that what we need is not necessarily all new, ‘fresh’, novel, but old practices (revived) to ‘sustain Christian community in an unstable age’ (this phrase comes from Gerald W. Schlabach, Unlearning Protestantism, Brazos, 2010).  This is potentially more risky in a climate when the clarion call is we must change, change, change.

In response to one comment I offered this

The concluding comment (or final point) is deliberately provocative and is a challenge that it might be pioneering to not do new, alternative, fresh, novel, but to recover and renew the old ... I'm all for 'mixed economy', I've argued its the future elsewhere ... I guess when all the criticism goes at the old forms of church, I want to push, in a friendly way, some in the other direction too ... It obviously needs expanding and developing and nuancing.

What was behind this final suggestion?

Stanley Hauerwas' argument to the anabaptists (which I think extends wider to all free churches) that

'too often voluntary church membership is translated into the right to make up one's own mind. Accordingly, the church as a disciplined body becomes a community of like-minded individuals who share the conviction that they should respect each other's right to make up his or her own mind' (p.71)

and

'"voluntary church membership" was a prophetic challenge against mainstream Christianity, but once Christendom is gone the call for voluntary commitment cannot help but appear as a legitimation of the secular commitment to autonomy. In a Christendom world it took conviction to be a pagan or an Anabaptist, but given the world in which we are now living it is hard to distinguish pagans from Anabaptists ...

The habits of Christendom churches may now become a resource for their members and for Anabaptists to resist letting their church become just another community in a world desperate for community' (p.73)

(Stanley Hauerwas, 'Whose Church? Which Future? Whither the Anabaptist Vision?' in In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame, 1995), pp.65-78)

In agreement with Hauerwas, Gerald Schlabach argues that free churches need to become more catholic and that it is time to unlearn some of our Protestantism. In where we find ourselves, our catholicity matters more than ever. By our catholicity I mean our connectedness with one and with our tradition which for us is Baptist. This will need to challenge some of the ways our tradition has developed or been understood - so Paul Fiddes' work on covenant theology. Rather than 'liquid church', which just adapts and accomodates wherever it is, we need, says Schlabach, stability in the face of the constant flux.  We acknowledge that Christ is not immediate to us, but always mediated through scripture and tradition (John Colwell, Promise and Presence). With Mark Medley (see his chapter in Tradition and the Baptist Academy), I think we need to faithfully interrogate and be inventive with the Baptist tradition, alongside being stewards. Here perhaps the jazz anaology is helpful. I guess the point being made here is new is not necessarily better than old, and much that claims newness is just old in a different key. There is also something about Sam Wells comments on where we are in God's story - i.e., post-Jesus ... Jesus is God's newness, and so our task as the church is to be saints not heroes (Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics, 2004).

In an ecclesiological 'mixed economy', we don't prize the newer ways of being church as being 'better' and vice versa we don't dismiss the new as lacking substance; we don't see 'older' churches as something tolerated because they provide finance and funding and vice versa we don't see the existence of newer churches as our excuse for not engaging in mission; and we don't see structures and instituion as not worth anything and as church gone wrong and vice versa we don't think if we can just get the strucutures and insitution right everything else will follow.  

To go back to comment above, it is perhaps more 'pioneering' to trust in a way of being Baptist that values what we've been given in our buildings, our worship, our accredited ministry, our Union and Associations, rather than just abandon them because they don't quite cut it in a new age. Somewhere beneath all our Baptist pragmatism - which has led us to succumb too easily to the ways of the world, is a rich theological tradition that we need to discover and allow to speak to us once again. Both the newer churches and the older ones are both failing to rediscover a way of being church that can nourish and sustain the church as a covenanted group of disciples. The current situation does not value a 'mixed economy', with suspicion and partial truth on both sides: from the new to the old there is suspicion that the 'old' has moved too far from the missionary movement of the early church (they are too inward looking and not far from death); and from the old to the new, there is suspicion at whether the developing ecclesiogies will or can survive beyond a few years (they are too outward looking and will not live long enough to see another generation).

A mixed economy demands that what we need is a rigorous and honest converastion between those wanting us to engage a postmodern culture and those wanting us to cling on to a tradition so we don't lose our soul and this takes back again to Glen Marshall's description of a church that is theological, religious, sectarian, worldly, modest, bold and nuanced.  

Beyond 400: Baptist Catechesis Required

In a conversation on a recent blog, I wrote the following comment:

most of us resist the idea that we need formation, that we need to unlearn and relearn … and subsequently I would claim or tentatively suggest (depending on mood) that our churches are now not places now for formation, but consumption … here I think Hauerwas' complaint that the free church understanding of church has ceased to be distinctive and offer opportunities to create disciplined communities … instead they mirror society in practising church as autonomous individual persons who resist any notion of authority or obedience in the name of a skewed understanding of rights and freedom.

I believe that somehow we need to rediscover church as a community of character, where we are formed and schooled in living the Christian story. This requires that we rediscover ways of discipling, of catechesis, where the implications of our baptism are repeatedly being explored and lived out. The challenge is one that is perhaps near impossible because we have so throughly formed by the world (see Michael Budde's powerful claims in 'Collecting Praise' in Hauerwas and Wells (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, 2004 and James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 2009, ch.3).

Walter Brueggemann puts the challenge this way:

Discipleship is not just a nice notion of church membership or church education, but it entails a resituating of our lives. The disciples of Jesus are the ones who follow their master and who are able to follow their master because they have been instructed in his way of life, both his aim and his practice of embodying that aim. Note well that the disciple is one who is in sync with the master-teacher, a profoundly undemocratic notion, for the relation consists in yielding, submitting, relinquishing to the will and purpose of another.

Discipleship fundamentally entails a set of disciplines, habits and practices that are undertaken as regular, concrete, daily practices. Such daily  disciplines are not very exciting or immediately productive, but like the acquiring of any new competence, require such regimen, not unlike the learning of a new language by practicing the paradigm of verbs, not unlike the learning of piano by practicing the scales, not unlike the maintenance of good health by tenacity in jogging, not unlike every intentional habit that makes new dimensions of life possible. The church is a community engaged in disciplines that make following the master-teacher possible and sustainable' (Brueggemann, The Word that Redescribes the World, 2011, p.107)

Brueggemann offers this as a possible set of disciplines: teaching (catechesis), fellowship, eating together, prayer, fasting, recovery of Sabbath. He goes on to say that first, 'it is clear that these disciplines, if taken seriously, are immensely inconvenient ... The disciplines function to inconvenience us enough that we become conscious, self-conscious, and intentionally aware of who we are and what we doing with our lives' (p.109). And second, 'even in a consumer society discipline is not unknown' - think about the discipline of buying the same brand, of shopping at the same shop, or our commitment to never miss Eastenders, Mad Men or Match of the Day - these don't seem demanding disciplines, and 'on the contrary, it is the disciplines of counterculture that seem to us demanding, because they break deliberately with the seeming givens of dominant faith' (pp.109-110).

None of this is new to those that have read the work of Stanley Hauerwas, Dorothy Bass, Richard Foster, or the new monastics to name a few (and their work is only a recovery of the historic traditions of the church, including Baptist). It is not even new to those that haven't read the above, as I have discovered in the local church in which I serve in recently acquainting myself with the list of responsibilities for church members'. The issue we don't know how to translate this into practice, or we are afraid to demand it in the face of an understanding of belonging to church which is voluntary, consumerist, autonomous and therapeutic.

One response might be to say is that in the church's history not everyone has been called to take up holy orders. For many in the past their Christian life was a commitment to worship God on a Sunday, tithe, work hard, raise a family and pray before bedtime (can we say this is still true of many in the pews today?). Others - those called into ministry or to the monastic life - sought to practice their faith in more disciplined ways. What this is suggesting is that a more disciplined Christian life may be something that some within our churches commit themselves to, and their a wider group whose faith is practiced in more simple ways. I recognise that this suggestion may be seen as creating a two-tier Christianity.

Beyond 400 we require a new Baptist catechesis and the courage and faith to practice it. Only out of a church engaged in serious discipleship will emerge a commitment to mission and evangelism, for mission and evangelism are the overflow of lives ordered by the gospel.

Book Review: Tradition and the Baptist Academy

Roger A. Ward and Philip E. Thompson (eds.), Tradition and the Baptist Academy (Paternoster, 2011), xviii + 225pp (with thanks to Paternoster for a review copy)

This is the thirty-first volume in the excellent Studies in Baptist History and Thought Series. This important Baptist series is still alive. This latest volume is a set of essays arising from the 2006 conference of Young Scholars in the Baptist Academy, which is based in the United States and where the scholars who participate do not always seem that young! As its title suggests, the topic of the book is that thorny question (for Baptists anyway) of the role and place of tradition - Philip Thompson comments that 'Baptists have made 'a tradition of rejecting tradition (p.58)! The popular Baptist claim to sola scriptura means historically Baptists have appeared either to have been not that sure about tradition or not that bothered. Mark Medley makes the comment in a footnote that from a study of leading American Baptist theologians, past and present, only two - Grenz and McClendon - 'offer constructive theological reflection on tradition' (p.67n.3). He also makes the comment in a previous essay that his theological education spent as little as five minutes on tradition! (p.48n.7) Here it would be interesting to do a comparison with the British and European experience, which I would contend has not been as suspicious or as indifferent to the place and role of tradition (a recent example study would be Stephen Holmes' Listening to the Past, Paternoster, 2001). This set of essays is focused on offering an argument of why tradition is vital to Baptist churches and theology and the claim that Baptists are part of the historic catholic tradition - that while the early Baptists separated ecclesiologically, they did not, in large part, separate theologically. 

After a 'Preface' by Paul Fiddes, which sets the book partly in the contecxt of the recent BWA-Roman Catholic theological conversations (which we await with interest for the published report) and an 'Introduction' by the editors Ward and Thompson (which feels it could have done with some editing - it refers to a paper by Curtis Freeman, not included in the book), we are offered four good papers by leading North American Baptist theologians. Barry Harvey claims Baptists have 'been caught up in alien disciplinary regimes' that have failed to form us as 'citizens of God's pilgrim city in the way of the cross' (pp.8-9). The answer says Harvey is for Baptists to learn again that we are dissenting Catholics: 'fellow travellers with a host of sisters and brothers in a communal way of life' (p.20) and to escape what he calls the 'authorial void', that is, the stress on the individual and soul competency as made each person an authority unto themselves. He wants to encourage Baptists to see how much they have learn from the the catholic tradition and also what they have to offer other communions (p.27).

E. Glenn Hinson, a Baptist historian (and a former student at Regent's Park College) makes the same argument with Harvey that Baptists need to see themselves as part of a larger Christian tradition and have contribution to make. This is followed by exploring how this might happen in Baptist academies. I think a lot of this is directed at the Southern Baptists. From a UK perspective, there is no where near the suspicision of the wider church. We may not always like the way the Church of England sometimes throws its weight around, but there is denying that many Baptists feel a loss with Rowan Williams retiring at the end of the year.

Philip Thompson explores the relationship between memory and tradition and its impact on Baptist identity. (One conversation partner is Charles Pinches' A Gathering of Memories: Family, Nation and Church, which from this and Hauerwas mentioning it in his recent War and the American Difference, I've ordered). The chapter should be seen as building on his earlier work which explored the 'myth of changelessness' in Recycling the Past or Researching History? In this present chapter, Thompson distinguishes between two ways of considering history. While the first way might be characterised by the present controlling the past, where history becomes fictitious, sentimental - 'creates a world its writers wish for but doesn't exist' (p.61), the second way is more 'genuninely critical', its treats the past as strange and other at the same time as being part of our story (p.63). It is the latter he favours, following Rowan Williams, claim that this is 'good history' compared to the former which is 'bad history'.

The final paper of the four is by Mark Medley (a version can also be found in the journal Pro Ecclesia). After describing tradition as it has been understood by two Catholic theologians, Terrence Tilley and John Thiel, Medley makes his own contribution to the practice of tradition, by arguing for the foundational skills of stewardship, interrogation and invention, which are all required if engagement with, and living out of, the Christian tradition is to be done well. Stewardship is about tradtion being received with 'charity and cherishing its wisdom' (p.83), interrogation asks questions of the tradition and calls us 'to think again about the consensus of the tradition' (p.84) - Medley gives the example of interrogating the Baptist claim to soul competency and indepedence. The last skill, invention, perhaps appears incompatible with the practice of tradition, but Medley argues that if tradition is to be kept alive it must also engage invention - in constructive theology - of course the other skills are necessary here to correct unfaithful inventions. Medley pulls the three skills together around the idea of improvisation, borrowed from the work of Sam Wells.

The later essays explore transubstantiation, a theology of beauty, the Barmen declaration, the work of A. T. Robinson, the Regula Fidei and preaching and Baptist baptismal theology.

This is a strong collection of essays. There are some minor editoral niggles, which probably are the result of the book taking a long time from the original conference to publication. It certainly contributes to the wider renewed interest in tradition from Baptists (see the work of Holmes mentioned above, Steven Harmon, D. H. Williams and others) and provides a positive view of tradition not just as that which is handed down, but that which is alive, that which is inevitable (however we strong we disavow it) and that which when engaged with keeps faithful in the present and to the names Baptist', 'catholic' and 'Christian',

Alan Spence, Justification and a Cambridge Theology Day

Alan Spence's most recent book Justification: A Guide for the Perplexed is the subject of a theology day at Westminster College, Cambridge on the 13th June, 10-4pm. The day is free. To book a place, contact Hannah Bones [email protected] or: Westminster College Office [email protected].

 

John Briggs reviews The 'Plainly Revealed' Word of God?

John Briggs has reviewed The 'Plainly Revealed' Word of God? Baptist Hermeneutics in Theory and Practice edited by Helen Dare and Simon Woodman in the Journal for Theological Studies (April 2012). He ends his review by saying

'But lest it be thought that the essays here presented represent just a celebration of distinctively Baptist perspectives, John Colwell emphasizes the purpose of the exercise must be ‘with the goal of enriching the whole rather than further entrenching the past’, that is, the search is to make a contribution to the catholic rather than to defend a particular confession. At the end of the day fine words are not enough and so one of the external observers questions whether there is a mismatch between Baptist ideals and much Baptist practice, noting that ‘the disjunction between the radical ideals of the Baptist churches and their concrete realisation on the ground’ lead him to conclude that Baptists are too often ‘a people of unfulfilled promise’, a criticism which he turns into a challenge that Baptists serious about their identity should read this book and act upon it.'

Between Cross and Resurrection

Between cross and resurrection*
There is only silence
A body dead in a closed tomb

Between cross and resurrection
There is only sorrow
Grief caught in the horror and the loss

Between cross and resurrection
There is only looking
For a sign of hope, a sign of life

Between cross and resurrection
Is where we find our lives
Trapped in the space between death and living
Struggling to believe another world is possible
Seeking to make sense of the whys and the wheres

Between cross and resurrection
Is where we wait
Wedged in the space between despair and hope
Where time stands still
Where reality plays games with our senses
Where a chapter is ended
And no possibility of a new one beginning

Between cross and resurrection
In silence, in sorrow, looking
Struggling, seeking, waiting

*This phrase is borrowed from Alan Lewis' brilliant book of the same name: Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy saturday

Beyond400: Unlearning (the myth of) Baptist Independence

There is I believe a pervasive sin amongst Baptists that champions individualism and independence.  It has embedded itself deeply into our ordinary theology and practice partly because we live in such an individualistic society. There are two particular Colin Gunton quotes that have lodged themselves into my theological psyche, which I think are helpful in naming this Baptist sin. The first one says this: ‘individualism is a non-relational creed, because it teaches I do not need my neighbour to be myself’.[1] Individualism champions self-sufficiency, it believes we are complete in our selves. So the popular version of Baptist ecclesiology believes in the self-sufficiency of the local church; the local church is complete in itself, any relationships with other churches are a second-step, they are an added extra, perhaps important, but not necessary.  In many ways perhaps our Home Mission grants system encourages this belief. The aim is to be self-sufficient, to be independent of your grant – that’s success.

The second Gunton quote says: ‘[the Spirit] liberates us by bringing us into community: by enabling us to be with and for the brother and sisters whom we do not ourselves choose’.[2] The saving action of the Holy Spirit saves us from individualism and says our being in relationship with others is what is it is to be in Christ. We can only fully be ourselves, we can only be fully what God created humanity to be as persons in relation. This presents us with an understanding of being church that says there is no other way of being a church apart from being a church in relationship with others. The isolated independent local church is without warrant theologically. Gunton also wants to claim that this community we now belong to is not one we might necessarily choose, instead we find ourselves placed into set of relationships with other churches, which sometimes cause us to test the truth of whether the gospel really does reconcile!

A sin named is still not easily left behind, but its recognition means that we know that the gospels summons us into relationship, in which, we discover there is no space for the isolated local church. The gospels sets us free, but this is not a freedom from others, but a freedom for Christ and his church (Rom 6.18, 22).  

---

[1] Colin Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many (Cambridge, 1993)

[2] Colin Gunton, Theology Through the Theologians (T & T Clark, 1996)

Twystematics

Steve Holmes is producing a systematic theology in tweet form. See here - went live today.