Matthew 13. 52: Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.
I remember very clearly the last time I preached on this text. It was some years ago at Holy Trinity, Finchley Road, and there were present two mirthless hefty ordinands from an evangelical college. During the sermon I said that God was ready continually to inspire us with new ideas, as Jesus had suggested. They were horrified, and gave me a very long talking-to after the service, explaining that new ideas had to be bad ideas, and that God had told us everything he wished us to think some time ago, in the Bible and in their favourite traditions of the evangelical church. This was not an argument I could win; I just managed to get away without being beaten up. But they left my mind sufficiently bruised to recall the occasion without difficulty.
The position they represented is quite orthodox. The Church of England asks us to believe that Scripture contains everything necessary for salvation; that content has not changed since the Canon of Scripture was fixed at Rome in 382, though our interpretation of it may have. The Church also teaches that new religious ideas are not valid unless they are widely accepted by the people of God, that is, they are subject to reception. But I do not believe that we are forbidden to indulge in lateral thinking to see how it goes down in the Church. I do not see how the Creator can have given up his creativity and I find it difficult to believe that he wants to stifle ours. My vocation is preaching, that is to produce new ideas to enliven your appreciation of the Gospel; it is not surprising that I believe in creative and dynamic theology. I want you to share in this calling, even on the basis that ideas may have to be discarded later.
I want to encourage you to use your Christian imagination. Let us begin by trying to identify with a Gospel character on the lines recommended by S Ignatius Loyola for prayer in the sixteenth century. Take the encounter between Mary Magdalene and Jesus in the garden on Easter Sunday morning. I think the traditional view is that Jesus was still in that garden simply because he hadn’t yet gone away. But if you put yourself in Mary’s shoes, miserable at his disappearance and longing to clasp his body, and if you try to feel as she felt that morning, you will suppose that he came back there on purpose to see and reassure her. It was perhaps her need that secured his appearance. If that was the case, there are many conclusions we might draw about God’s responsiveness to our necessity. There are also questions to ask about the objectivity of Mary’s vision and how the record we have of it got to John. Are we to think of the disciples’ experiences of the risen Christ as subjective? It seems to me that Paul’s, at least, can be described in those terms.
Let me offer you a different example of the use of imagination, drawn from an article I read recently. We are accustomed to think of the Creator as separate from his world. There are people pantheists who assert that God and his creation are one, so that Nature is somehow divine; but that is not a Christian position, because we attach importance to the idea that God is greater than, and different from, us and the world. But supposing the whole created world, including ourselves, is all contained inside God? This theory, which is called Panentheism, has had the support of a few distinguished modern thinkers. It could help us to visualize how everything can be in his hands while, at the same time, his creatures follow their own rules, that is, how we can be dependent on him and yet have freedom of action in our universe, and how we can pray for his intervention and yet maintain that nature is governed by laws. I am not urging you to believe this theory. Since it has few practical consequences, I do not think it vital to take up an attitude to it. What I want you to do is to consider enlarging the potential of Christianity in your mind, so that it offers a greater variety of ideas.
As a third example of imagination in religion, let us glance at S Augustine’s book On the Trinity. The second half of the book is taken up by an exploration of what ‘the three in one’ means by a series of analogies drawn from human psychology. Augustine saw the human mind as made in the image of God; in the end he saw the Trinity in the intimate unity of thinking, speaking, and willing, and in the affinity between knowing and loving. Now, you may get nothing from these comparisons, but they worked for Augustine. I suggest that you make your own pictures of the Trinity and see what will work for you.
My principal point is that, far too often, I believe, we frustrate the rich possibilities of the grace of God by confining it to narrow conventional channels, instead of flinging open the windows of the mind for the enlivening wind of the Holy Spirit to enter. We should not restrict that wind; we must not deny the infinite variety of the Creator God. Jesus seems to have thought of the scribes as teachers of his ideas in terms of being sometimes traditional and on other occasions imaginative, He was not interested in being merely an exponent of received wisdom. That is what those two bullies were, trying to limit God’s activity, and activity on his behalf, to what they had learnt and could understand and approve of. This is quite a common Christian practice. In contrast, I believe that we must not try to cut God down to our size; we must not try to keep him under our control by opposing new ideas. We might quote C S Lewis, who was insistent that his Christ-like hero, Aslan, was ‘not a tame lion.’ Amen
Alan Goodison