This book had its beginnings in a letter addressed to the Principals (or, for American eyes, ‘Presidents’) of the six colleges in membership with the Baptist Union of Great Britain. It came, in 2004, from the Baptist Union Retreat Group (BURG), and asked whether the Principals could devote themselves to writing on the theme of spirituality among Baptists. They were glad to take up the challenge, and their gratitude for the invitation is shown in the dedication of this book. It is thoroughly fitting here to acknowledge the contribution of BURG over many years to the fostering of contemplative prayer among Baptists.
During the past fifteen years or so the Principals have committed themselves to various joint writing projects, as an expression of the companionship they enjoy together and as a public sign of the partnership between the colleges.1 The colleges in London, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, Cardiff and Glasgow value an increasing closeness of working together in formation of men and women for ministry and in serving the churches. They have a common concern for the central place of spiritual growth in the development of ministers, and have been glad of the opportunity of this particular writing project to reflect on the theme together. It should be stressed that this is not, therefore, a collection of disparate essays. The book is the result of five meetings, some overnight and all including prayer together, in which each chapter was planned, read and revised corporately. It is hoped that the reader will pick up many connections between the chapters, some explicit and some silent, which bear witness to the sharing in mind and heart that lies behind the finished book. In addition, the Principals tried out their chapters at the 2006 Consultation of ‘Baptists Doing Theology in Context’ held at Luther King House, Manchester, and comments from participants there have also shaped the whole.
There have, of course, been changes in the group of Principals from time to time over the past fifteen years, and this project has proved to be no exception. Christopher Ellis left the Principalship of Bristol Baptist College to accept a call to a local church pastorate as the project was in mid-stream. The group is delighted that he has nevertheless offered a completed contribution to the book, and at the last hour his successor at Bristol, Stephen Finamore, has shared in the first chapter. Aptly, his piece draws upon his experience as a minister in a local Baptist congregation.
The preface illustration shows the painting ‘White Crucifixion’ by Marc Chagall. It depicts a world ‘under the rule’ of Christ, in two senses. The cross carries the inscription in both Latin and Hebrew, ‘Jesus Christ, King of the Jews’, indicating rule as power and authority; but the crucified figure also acts as a rule in the sense of a ‘ruler’ to measure things, laid flat over the landscape of turbulent events beneath it. This is Christ, the measure of all things, Christ as the rule of a life which—as the picture makes clear—is often marked by suffering.
This book proposes that the spirituality of Baptists, in all its diversity, is characterized by living ‘under the rule of Christ’. All Christian spiritual traditions, of course, affirm this truth, but this book suggests that there is a particular sense of being under Christ’s rule which has been shaped by the story of Baptists and by their way of being church through the centuries. Spirituality has been moulded by an ecclesiology where the local congregation stands under the direct rule of Christ without intermediate authorities. Such an understanding of church has had an impact on all the dimensions of spirituality which are shared with other Christian traditions, and even on those which have been fostered within more monastic ‘rules’ of life. It has shaped the particular kind of attention to the ‘other’ and to the triune God as the infinitely ‘Other’ which this book also proposes is characteristic of spirituality.
It would be a misuse of Chagall’s painting, however, not to be aware of the circumstances in which it was created. It was Chagall’s reaction, as a Jew, to the terrible events of the Kristallnacht of 9 December 1938—the ‘night of broken glass’—when many thousands of Jewish homes, shops and synagogues were destroyed in Nazi Germany. The painting depicts also the stories of other attacks on Jews in the past, including those in Chagall’s home town of Vitebsk on the borders of the Russian empire. The painting shows houses overturned, synagogues desecrated, scrolls of the law burnt, refugees fleeing, and Jews forced to wear shameful signs of identity.
Much of this anti-semitism was fuelled by the Christian church, and so there is a deep irony in using a symbol—the crucified Christ—taken from the persecutors to express the suffering of the artist’s people.2 But Christ, we notice, wears the tallith or Jewish prayer shawl as a loincloth. Chagall thus presents the crucifixion as a universal symbol of suffering, whether Jewish, Christian or of any other kind. It would be invidious to compare the much smaller story of Baptists under persecution with that of the Jewish people, for there can be no comparisons in suffering, but there is nevertheless a fellowship in suffering through the ages. This book suggests that the Baptist sense of being under the rule of Christ has been strongly marked by the experience of oppression, especially in the early days of Baptist life.
Finally, however, Chagall presents the rule of the crucified Christ as a symbol of hope as ‘a shaft of light enters the painting and we are led to believe that there is a path of hope to be discovered among the wreckage of this world’s events’.3 There is a stillness about the figure of Christ which compells attention, amid the turmoil of events and the journeys of life which surround him. Spirituality ‘under the rule of Christ’ must be connected, this book affirms, with the mission of God in the world to bring about peace and justice for all. These chapters will have succeeded in their aim if readers rediscover, through them, that Christ is truly the rule or measure of all things.
Notes
1 Previous joint publications have been Paul S. Fiddes (ed.), Reflections on the Water. Understanding God and the World through the Baptism of Believers. Regent’s Study Guides 4 (Macon: Smyth & Helwys Publishing / Oxford: Regent’s Park College, 1996); Richard Kidd (ed.), Something to Declare. A Study of the Declaration of Principle of the Baptist Union of Great Britain (Oxford: Whitley Publications, 1996); Richard Kidd (ed.), On the Way of Trust (Oxford: Whitley Publications, 1997); Paul S. Fiddes (ed.), The Baptist Way of Doing Theology (Oxford: Whitley Publications, 2001).
2 This irony has been well explored in the study of Chagall by Graham Sparkes which is included in Richard Kidd and Graham Sparkes, God and the Art of Seeing. Visual Resources for a Journey of Faith. Regent’s Study Guides 11 (Macon: Smyth & Helwys Publishing/ Oxford: Regent’s Park College, 2003).
3 Graham Sparkes, ‘Marc Chagall: Playing with Fire’ in Kidd and Sparkes, God and the Art of Seeing, p. 49.
