Beginnings and Endings

For this Advent, I've bought Maggi Dawn's new book of daily readings, "Beginnings and Endings", and whilst I don't want to spoil my Christmas preparation by peeking at the ending, it does look like it will be good value. Maggi is someone who does not  resort to the stock or fashionable statement. She is able to combine a huge wealth of theological knowledge, a proper appreciation of tradition and church history and a creative twist to make our faith root in today's world.

Maggi recently posted on "emerging christology" and shares some complex yet refreshing thoughts that are worth airing. Essentially, the emerging church has emphasised the incarnational roots of the Christian faith and thus advocated a missional theology. For Maggi, there is a danger that this tips the pendulum towards reducing our view of Christ  as he is always seen as within culture. This danger is especially apparent when the Trinity is expounded only as a model of sociality: of our interrelatedness and interdependence. This is all brain-ache stuff but I think I know what Maggi is getting at. Coming at this from a "theology of religions" perspective, it seems that we need a Trinitarian understanding that gives us a vision of what God looks like (the self-giving love of the cross) and how God moves (by His Spirit in the church and in the world). The very fact that God is God means that we cannot say all there is to say about God (the third part of this Trinity!), and as a consequence cannot say all there is to say about Christ. It's this tension between the universal and the particular that is enabled by a true Trinitarian understanding: ie how can you say you follow the God of the whole world if this God can only be known and accessed in this particular time and place?

This is the counter-balance that, perhaps, Maggi is touching towards. You reduce Jesus to being a relevant, contextual servant of God, and Jesus ceases to be God. You do that, and other gods rise up. You over-emphasise Trinity as a model of behaviour rather than as a life to participate in, and church becomes a dispensible extra as opposed to a sign and down-payment of what the God of covenant is doing in the world even in all (and because?) of its wearisome variety, tradition and brokenness.

There was a fab throw-away line of Bishop Graham Cray at this year's Greenbelt. He talked of holding the tension of God as present, absent and coming. God is here, active in the church and in the world; we don't need to conjure him up and signs of his goodness and his imprint are in every person, every situation and every place. God is also absent: absent because he is God and we are not, but absent because there is pain, sin, brokenness, suffering. God is also coming: there is a future, a hope, God does transform and heal. The church, broken, battered and bruised, are heralds of this new creation, this new future, where what is whole, we believe, will look something like the Christ we know. In many instances, for people that do not share our faith, the task will be what Rowan Williams describes as inviting the world to find "in the narrative and practice of Jesus and his community that which anchors and connects their human hopefulness". The challenge then remains to find the language to make sense of this hopefulness, without colonising and patronising. Here endeth the brain-ache session! Normal service will resume when we complete the Distinctly Welcoming iPod next week!!