It has always struck me as worse than perverse that I attended church for decades but only encountered basic useful tested instruction about how to live with these curious minds we have in a course I took at Harvard. After all, you can't easily open a Bible at a random page that does not, as the Quakers say, "speak to our condition," and it is hard to see how one could possibly succeed at the many demands of an intentional Christian life without some idea of how to marshal the mental resources to do it.

Indeed, many don't have the ideas they need and they don't succeed. I think of a woman who was deeply embittered by a wrong done to her early in life that had undeniably tragic consequences for her life as a Christian. Many of us thought that we were wise to tell her that she needed to forgive-- to "let go and let God"-- to recover the full use of her wonderful mind and heart. But we would have been truly wise if we could have better explained to her how to get her anguished and angry mind to actually do it. It seemed to her that everyone to whom she confided had become a parrot chattering "Forgive! Forgive!," not fully knowing or caring what he was asking her to do. Forgive an evil that stained the soul? It was like suggesting that she flap her arms and fly to Cockaigne to sip an elixir from some spring hidden there among black orchids atop a high purple mountain. We were babbling rumours of a foreign country that we had never seen ourselves. In her darkest moods, she suspected that we only said such things to solve the problem that she had become for us, rather than to help her to actually do this mysterious thing. Such an isolating thought only made her darkness darker.

Sitting in Sanders Theater taking notes on Positive Psychology, I realised, among several other things, that some stimulus to study forgiveness in itself apart from her painful schema was part, though not all, of what she had been missing. That study need not have been Psychology, experimental or otherwise-- certain moral philosophy and belles lettres have done the trick for others-- but it did need to be study of the psyche that could help her observe and detach herself from thoughts that wander into the mind like neighbourhood animals through an open kitchen door. And she needed to have some sense of what her mind could be like if it were free.

At the moment, such psychologists in the experimental tradition as Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ellen Langer, and Barbara Frederickson among others have the clearest syllabus of ideas about the mind as it is at its best. So it does not surprise me that just a few days after she acknowledged her struggles with depression, the "ABCD," Katharine Welby spoke about a brief course in happiness for churches that sounds like a small cousin of the course that I myself took, though I suspect that when it's over the participants will remember a bit more fun in class and have fewer binders of scientific articles on the shelves. The Positive Psychology on which such happiness courses are based is not to be confused with therapy for actual mental disorders, though it may be that in helping people to buffer themselves against the shocks of life it makes potential disorders less likely, less severe, or less long. About that we do not really know for sure. All I know is that droves of people find the courses to be immensely helpful, and course reunions are very popular.

Here I see would be customs officers setting up imaginary roadblocks to search the traffic for contraband. A few (especially over here) may worry that psychological ideas will be smuggled into Christendom. A few more (especially over there) may worry that archaic Christian ideas may be smuggled out into decent secular society. But Wisdom is the Church's business, as zealots on either side of the line can find it hard to accept. And whilst there was nothing religious about the Harvard course, it was hard to deny that the Christians in the course brought a certain fluency to its discussion groups that thoroughly secular students less often had.* Evangelical students who excelled at certain exercises (eg forgiveness, gratitude, journaling) could not have been more effective at shattering certain stereotypes about what Christians are like. So, I am inclined to say to any planning such courses for churches--  "Never mind the customs officers and their roadblocks. Just fly over them. Wisdom is the Church's business."

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* Interestingly, the students from Christian or Jewish families who practised Buddhism were the other group that seemed to have an inside understanding of what was going on.

On this thread, I am still engaging the articles that Andrew has posted on kephale, and arguments dealing with the choices we make among the options discussed (eg "source," "preeminence," "master," etc). At this point, my interest in kephale is motivated by Roger's thread on the atonement. For those unclear about the connection, a brief note.

To those of us influenced by Tom Wright's reading of St Paul, the apostle seems to have wrapped the familiar "vertical" message that Christ died for on the Cross for our sins with another "horizontal" message that because Christ has done this, we can all be joined to the covenant of Abraham of Genesis 15 through which God means to set the aright the many problems exhibited in the preceding chapters. For individuals, both the forgiveness and the covenant are given through a relation of union with Christ which is itself given in the Spirit through Christ's relation to the Father. St Paul uses kephale to describe both of these relations-- soul : Christ, Christ : God--  hence my current interest in the word.

This interest is related to Roger's thread. The notion of the soul being saved through a transforming relation to the Person of Christ, though not absent from theology descended from the Reformation, has been relatively neglected, and has usually been associated instead with the Orthodox theology of "theosis." This is the reason for the "East and West" in the title of Roger Hurding's thread.  I agree with Roger and many others that the retrieval and rethinking of our transforming relation to the Person of Christ is urgently needed in the "West" (which now includes much of East Asia), and think of his fascinating thread as an "open evangelical" site for doing so.

Of course, there has also been a spirited discussion of another, evidently dependent use of kephale to describe the relationship between husband and wife. Reasoned positions on that topic rely, not only on positions taken on the word questions discussed here thanks to Andrew's diligence, but also on the question how St Paul is using kephale for the higher relationships discussed on Roger's thread, which depends on what those relationships actually are. Failure to recognise this has caused discussion of the husband : wife relation to be unnecessarily tinged by ideological interests. Perhaps it will resume when there is more actual light on the matter. I am glad that Phil brought the whole question to light, but, in my mind at least, it remains a question that will not yield to anything but patient study. Perhaps it requires a thread of its own.

Villagers acquainted with the debates surrounding Tom Wright's readings of St Paul may be puzzled by the quotations from Luther and Calvin just below. As Wright reads St Paul, union with Christ entails both "vertical" forgiveness of sin and "horizontal" acceptance into the covenant with Abraham, but pauline "justification" is just the latter half of this. His critics have feared that this "sociological" understanding of "justification" was a grave departure from the Reformation teaching, which they took to have been founded on a correct reading of St Paul. And of course Wright himself has criticised both Luther and Lutheran exegesis and the scholasticism of much Reformed exegesis both past and present. Yet here we have the reformers themselves in the C16 saying much the same thing that Wright insists in the C21 that St Paul said in the C1. If we want to explore the further implications of Wright's reading of St Paul, we could do worse than to re-read the reformers with its insights in mind.

These reformers got to their results by following different influences down different exegetical paths that have been tracked by different scholars. For Luther, Tuomo Mannersmaa and his Finnish School have found explicit metaphysical reasoning in Luther that was not recalled in the later neo-Kantian understandings of Lutheranism (eg Ritschl). The impetus for much of this study among Lutherans was a searching dialogue with their Orthodox neighbors in Finland, though there have long been those who defied Lutheran scholasticism to read Luther as a mystic. For Calvin, several scholars including Richard Gaskin and J. Todd Billings have seen that Calvin was influenced by St Thomas a Kempis and St Bernard of Clairvaux more than had been thought, and that the Westminster divines had followed him less in this than his Continental and Scottish colleagues had done. There has always been a tradition of Reformed theology (eg Germany, Scotland, and in America, Mercersburg) that dissented from the Westminster hegemony, insisting on a Calvin who stressed even sacramental union with the Person of Christ, not just mental appropriation of the Work in an ordo salutis. As the ecumenical reintegration of theology progresses, theologians in both tendencies find themselves in a dialogue with St Maximus the Confessor and, indirectly, with St Thomas Aquinas.

Which leads us to the title of Roger's thread. Though the East-West dialogue is all the more fruitful with clearer and better developed positions on all sides of it, we now see that the Western parties have plenty to discuss among themselves, and that as this dialogue approaches writings of St Paul we will have to reckon with Tom Wright's reading of them. That may be of interest to a few villagers.

Being admitted to participation in him, though we are still foolish, he is our wisdom; though we are still sinners he is our righteousness; though we are unclean, he is our purity; though we are weak, unarmed, and exposed to Satan, yet ours is the power which has been given him in heaven and in earth, to bruise Satan under our feet, and burst the gates of hell (Mt. 28:18); though we still bear about with us a body of death, he is our life; in short, all things of his are ours, we have all things in him, he nothing in us. On this foundation, I say, we must be built, if we would grow up into a holy temple in the Lord.

--John Calvin, Institutes, III, 15, 3. Beveridge translation of the Latin 1559 edition.

Andrew Goddard was already a master of fast yet precise composition, but with Rowan Williams: His Legacy he may have taken his art to a new level of smooth "readability." As usual, good art is less simple and more interesting than it looks. John Martin's review testifies to how much work has gone into four months of writing and a compact 192 pages of reading. The book is available online as an inexpensive ebook. You could read it tonight.

Taken as a whole, the book tells about half a dozen stories-- Rowan Williams himself; his theology of ministry; evangelism and public witness; sexuality; the Anglican Communion's inner strains and outer relationships-- shedding light on familiar events with context and anecdote. Through it all, one is reminded, as John Martin also does in his review, that the incumbent in Canterbury may carry more responsibility with less assistance than any other patriarch in Christendom. Close observers of these topics should be thankful that Goddard's perspective on his 70 interviews does protect them from knowing more about Williams's work than was ever actually true. The book could be said to empathise with the 104th ABC, as most in the village do, but even harsh critics of Williams have quoted it online as a reliable source. And the virtue of an account as sturdy as this one is that one can go on from it to ask better questions about things that really matter. 

For example, what are we to think of the work of the Archbishop of Canterbury as an informal strategist for mission in the Church of England? Williams had hoped that Fresh Expressions would be one of his two main contributions, and Goddard gives the archbishop's overall advocacy for the faith an ample three chapters. His account clears the ground for some searching discussion of George Carey's Springboard, Rowan Williams's Fresh Expressions, and whatever Justin Welby does about sustainability and growth. Whether these highly visible initiatives work or not-- and either way, how? and for whom?-- are questions that really matter, both in England and in other countries and communions where Christians are adapting to social and cultural change.

Most discussions of these efforts, especially in newspapers, have been opinion pieces or human interest stories. Alas, these genres are not adequate to the reality.  They tell us more about the commentators' feelings about "religion" or "the Church" or "evangelism" than about what is actually happening among the participants in their contexts. Or initiatives are seen more as expressions of an archbishop's temperament or leadership style than as policy choices meant to do some actual good for living souls in some underchurched corner of society. If the writer likes the ABC, the initiatives are successes just because they show his admirable initiative, and if the writer dislikes the ABC, they are flawed because they reflect personal traits that are seen to be flaws. Goddard says more about the reasoning behind Fresh Expressions than we have had before, and takes some note of critics. More than this we cannot ask of a first biography, but as a thoughtful biography it does supersede much of the too-subjective and personalising writing that preceded it.

Many journalists in the UK see the big story behind all statistics on religion or churches as the old secularisation hypothesis, long after the best social science research has ceased to take anything like that for granted. If you believe in secularisation, the Fresh Expressions looked a little desperate-- settling for less than real church because one can no longer get it. But if you believed rather in a rapid diversification of taste to which churches had paid too little attention, then Fresh Expressions made sense as a hands-on way to learn something about ministry to parts of the society not deeply attracted to Bach cantatas. Goddard does not delve into such questions, but he does make explicit the belief of his subject: Rowan Williams thinks that the quantifiable success of Fresh Expressions has shown that there are segments of English society open to new sorts of evangelism that should lead to new sorts of church.

To take further steps-- whether in old England or here in New England-- good accounts of Spingboards, Fresh Expressions, and whatever follows them would be useful. Ideally, the next accounts should have the virtues of the best research on politics, which uses many tools-- historical, interpretative, ethnographic, quantitative, comparative, experimental-- to get at what is happening in hearts and minds of a place and time and to relate such happening to the institutions that act on a larger scale. Of course, there is interesting evangelism happening elsewhere in England and the world that should be brought into any discussion. And since an ABC's public image to some degree influences the reception of a strategy that has to be sold if it is to be funded and implemented at scale, it would not be amiss to examine the constraints and opportunities of charisma. All of that is far beyond Goddard's purpose in this brief book, but his selection of detail nudged this reader toward questions like these--

Is it evangelism to open a space for self-reflection in the presence of a firm believer?

Is it inevitable that the flow of cultural ideas will be from the margins to the centre?

How is evangelism outside normal institutional arrangements related to the spin-off effects of internal renewal with an evangelistic element?

What role should theology play in the creative process that leads to Fresh Expressions?

Who should fund further initiatives, how should that relationship work, and how much more money is needed?

Who is (or should be) studying and comparing these initiatives?

Can we know anything about a new approach that is never replicated elsewhere and studied again?

Are there Fresh Expressions that are "scalable?"

Are there instructive similarities between the church practise of Fresh Expressions and the business practise of the "lean start-up?"*

How does one recognise the marks of the Church in the activities of, say, a Fresh Expression?

What are the strengths and weaknesses of an archepiscopal impetus for field experiments in evangelism?

And, the classic questions-- what works? how does it work? for whom does it work? how do we know?

Readers more interested in any of the book's other grand topics would find a similar list of questions about that one. Indeed, I hope that they will answer them. For about a decade, and around the world, Rowan Williams has been discussed as a sort of passtime. Now, Andrew Goddard has written a compact, reliable, and enjoyable book about him that sums up his years in Lambeth Palace. It's a good book, and even if written in just four months, it would be a pity if it were read only as entertainment.

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* "Lean start-up" is a method of entrepreneurship that starts a firm, not with a grand plan and full capitalisation, but by testing a good or service at small scale and then scaling-up the supply chain through a series of experiments with control samples on real customers. The successful entrepreneur has, not just a pretty good product, but a capability for learning from imagnative and unrelenting experimentation. This is similar in spirit to what social scientists have called "action research," except that the results sought are more often quantitative, a model for growth as well as a product is being tested, and the experimental knowledge acquired is valued as a business asset. It is intentionally dissimilar to the old dot-com start ups that were heavily funded, fully staffed, and ostensibly thoroughly planned, but in practise very slow to get and use strong enough knowledge of the market in which they operated to make a profit. The similarity in style and attitude of the young entrepreneurs around Harvard and MIT and the young evangelists one meets at conferences is not just a coincidence; they have discovered some of the same things about leveraging limited funds for ventures seeking social results.

Lord of the Journey comes recommended by Swithun, Roger Hurding, and Angela! Pooley & Seddon may somewhere be pleased. And I shall order it. Publishers please take note.