Canter Bridge

Order is not a given. It is rather an achievement.

Revolutions fail because they do not understand that the removal of an oppressive status quo does not by itself achieve a more agreeable order. Chaos too often ensues. Continue Reading »

The psalmist spars with God like friend to old friend over a beer at table in their pub. It is an unsettling frankness that speaks the truth about one’s circumstance without endangering the long association that is the cement that joins such friends.

Psalms 42 and 43 are held together by this verbal link:

Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. (Psalms 42:11 and 43:5 NIV) Continue Reading »

Contrary to what Paul might have expected upon his return to the mother city Jerusalem, the Jewish leaders of the Jesus movement greeted his report of God’s work among the gentiles with jubilation and prudence. Capable of welcoming the complexity of a generous redemption that included the unwashed and impious in its broad embrace, they nonetheless advised Paul to take precautions against the arousal of zealous violence by Jerusalemite Jews of a less ecumenical spirit.

Arguably, such generosity of spirit and tactical posturing kept the Jesus movement intact as it was buffeted by the early crosswinds of ethnic complications. The reader is well advised to linger over it, to palpate the absence of rigidity that it implies, to sense the shrewd care of it all in the face of multiple threats to the movement’s integrity. Continue Reading »

The reader of Job must be prepared for complex turns and important nuance.

For example, Job’s bitter complaint against a God who does not watch over the poor as their lives are dismantled by the unjust rich suddenly turns at 24.22 into an assurance that God will in the end give the unjust their due. This is the very judgment whose absence Job has decried in 24.1. He is not, it would seem, quite the pure antagonist of conventional wisdom that he is so often made out to be.
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The graceless beauty of Elihu’s words should unsettle all readers of religious vocation or temperament. There is beauty in such crystal. Cold glass and steel, skillfully wrought, erect buildings and monuments that are breathtaking in scope and brilliance.

Elihu may be a fool. He is not a dullard.

His verbal artistry erects a theodicy that is intimidating in its self-confidence. Anyone who can speak like this, it seems for a moment, must know what he is talking about.

Yet Elihu does not.

Paul’s edifying words, delivered at the invitation of a synagogue leader in Pisidian Antioch, take up the theme of sophisticated error by rehearsing the enmity that the custodians of Israel’s legacy displayed towards Jesus. Continue Reading »

The book of Job lurches to an unexpected conclusion, one that troubles the logic of scholars and challenges the shape of the piety we know.

YHWH’s rhetorical tour de force persuades Job that he truly knows nothing. Job responds to this conviction by ritual humiliation. So far, somewhat conventional.

But then, a startling turn ensues. It turns out that Job has spoken ‘what is right about YHWH’ and the friends have not. Crucially, the reader is given to understand that Job’s right standing before YHWH depends not on the visceral enthusiasm of his confession, but rather on his aggrieved confrontation of a God who seemed both absent and condemning. Job had maintained his integrity in good times and in those that had famously become very, very bad. He does not fear to say so to God himself. Continue Reading »

It is easy for the man or woman who is easily impressed by the majesty of deity or nature to conclude that humankind is a footnote. Man seems a mere scratch on a mountainside, woman a murmured vowel in an epic cantata that celebrates greatness as largeness.

It is true that biblical poetry is capable of celebrating Leviathan’s immensity at humanity’s cost. Yet only mankind is glorious in a way that imitates its Maker. Only man and woman stride like gods—admittedly small ones—across the landscape. Only human beings are easily mistaken for their Creator in a manner that honors rather than belittles the Designer of this oddly self-reflective species.

The eighth psalm is an ode to the Ruler’s majesty. ‘How majestic is your name in all the earth!’, the speaker exudes God-ward in the opening and closing lines of the hymn. There is no mistaking who occupies center stage in this singing out of creation’s architecture. Continue Reading »

Those biblical psalms that begin plaintively nearly always end in confidence and intelligent resignation. A subtle but sure movement carries such prayers towards the closure of response.

‘To you I call, O Lord my Rock’, the writer of the twenty-eighth psalm tells his Creator, ‘Do not turn a deaf ear to me. For if you remain silent, I will be like those who have gone down to the pit.’

No theatrical poser, the pray-er spells out a life or death situation and the impotence that defines his inability to do anything but address Heaven. Yet, irresistibly, he is drawn towards what seems an antithetical or dubiously pious security.

The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him and I am helped. My heart leaps for joy and I will give thanks to him in song. Continue Reading »