Twentieth Century Baptists
Personal impressionistic reflections on Twentieth Century Baptist life, beginning with a response to Shakespeare’s vision and limitations and leading to an evaluation of his long term influence on the Union, the Baptists and the Gospel. Part history, part anecdotal, highlighting significant personalities, events, and shifts in emphasis on doctrine, ecumenism, and contemporary biblical and theological scholarship, and raising specific questions, some of relevance to today . . . or tomorrow.
An extension of a Paper read to the AGM of the Baptist Historical Society at Woodbrooke College, Birmingham, July 16-19, 2019.
The Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones started life as a best-selling novel in 2002, followed by a film version and a stage version which did the rounds in the UK in 2019. I made a point of seeing it, drawn purely by a professional interest — violence, trauma, loss, bereavement and adjustment — the basic stuff of ministry all rolled into one. What follows is my reflections on the content, the issues and the mode of presentation in the light of ministerial experience. 'Susie . . . Writing the Other Way' does little more than recount the story and first impressions, leading me (where I never expected to go) to a fresh look at the Resurrection with ’Susie . . . a Presence, not a Body', and finally (equally unintended) to Sebold, Susie and Paul', looking again at the Crucifixion and Resurrection with my regular question after watching a serious play, What Happened Next? Subconsciously, an attempt to 'write the other way’, and published here in the hope that it might stimulate others to think again and improve on it.
Biblical Wilderness and the Wild Places of the Earth
Two Old Testament scholars, Robert Barry Leal and Terry L Burden, unpacking what the Bible understands by 'wilderness' coming to the conclusion that far from being an arid desert it is ’the very crucible of life', almost a cauldron in which all life takes places. John Muir, growing up in a wilderness of bad religion imposed by a tyrannical father, fled to another (different) wilderness where he explored and experienced the natural world long before it was fashionable, preferring natural religion to creeds and doctrine and constructing his own 'theology of wilderness' with striking resemblances to the work of Barry and Burden, thereby raising the question as to whether his journey was simply an escape from the claustrophobia of his father’s faith or a rediscovery of his father’s faith in places his father had never thought of looking?
Paper read to the Faculty and Postgrad Workshop at the International Baptist Theological Seminary, Prague, 2006 and subsequently published in Journal of European Baptist Studies,vol 7, No 1, September 2006.
The Gospel According to Ibsen
An exploration of Ibsen’s life and work against the background of the Gospel, beginning with Ibsen, the Man. Despite the absence of religion in his life he still retained 'a good deal of the Christian spirit,’ underlying a high sense of calling and reflected a Herculean determination to restore mankind. This paper seeks to identify and locate that 'Christian spirit' in Ibsen and to explore how his plays can help us to appreciate it in relation to our own society on the one hand and to the Christian gospel on the other.
Paper read to the Faculty and Postgrad Workshop at the International Baptist Theological Seminary, Prague, 2009 and subsequently published in Journal of European Baptist Studies,vol 10, No 2, January 2010.
To Kill a Mockingbird
Otherness is a natural part of our humanity. In infancy it is the way we begin to understand our world. As we mature it is the way we perceive and relate to the people around. It is a means of understanding ourselves. Caution, suspicion and fear are natural ingredients. But what happens when we become involved in ‘a non-existent other’, the figment of imagination or the fruit of manipulation? We explore the themes and emotions of otherness in us all as presented in the variety of characters in To Kill a Mockingbird, especially the ‘other’ that we all fear but cannot leave alone, to the point where in Atticus we find an ‘other’ of a different order and find ourselves surprised by the ‘other’ whom we feared.
Paper read to the Faculty and Postgrad Workshop at the International Baptist Theological Seminary, Prague. For the full version (with documentation) see Michael J Meyer (ed), Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. New Essays, Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Toronto and Plymouth UK, 2010, Chapter 15, pp 231-248.
Maximising Our Inheritance
A Broad Brush Approach to Biblical Hermeneutics with two starting points. One, a couple of recent books on reading the Bible and the other a plethora of new readings and interpretations in the last 20-30 years — feminist, liberationist, third world, African-American, ecological, and so on — leaving many people wondering what the Bible really says, what they can believe and who is right. Merging the two 'starters’ sets the issues in a wider context, beginning in the Ancient Near East, traversing the landscape with Jewish Readings, Early Church Fathers, the Middle Ages, Reformation and Post-Reformation interpretations and ending up with the Oedipus Myth.
Paper read to the Faculty and Postgrad Workshop at the International Baptist Theological Seminary, Prague, 2009 and subsequently published in Journal of European Baptist Studies,vol 9, No 3, May 2009.
Music as Midrash
An experiment in using Music as Midrash to add a new dimension to biblical interpretation with a group of students from Eastern Europe at the International Baptist Theological Seminary in Prague, based on a paper by Helen Leneman, entitled ‘Music and Librettos as Midrash: a New Methodology’, with particular reference to the Book of Ruth, addressing questions rarely addressed by biblical scholars and preachers but which have to be tackled when adapting a story for the stage, and penetrating other layers of the narrative to see what further insights can be brought to the story and to the interpretation when starting in a different place