Friday - the Church of Reconciliation and the start of our conference

Friday, The Church of Reconciliation and the start of our conference

 

It’s been some day!

 

We headed straight for the church of Reconciliation.

 

Our journey by underground led us to a station that was sealed off when the wall was built – stories were disturbing and moving.

 

Emerging into a wet Berlin we found ourselves at the start of what has become a memorial park marking the place of the wall.  Some stretches of the wall have been preserved, one in particular in its entirety re-creating the wall and the stretch of no man’s land as a memorial to those who had died.  A viewing platform gave us a panoramic view.

 

And immediately beyond the church of reconciliation.

 

I first encountered it long ago when I read Eric Burton’s ‘No Walls Within’.  When Eric arrived as minister of Highbury he wrote this little book outlining his vision of a church without walls where all were welcome.  It is very much the ethos of Highbury that this very month we have been celebrating.

 

On the front cover was a picture of the church of reconciliation; over the door a statue of Christ as if Christ is saying, Come to me …

 

But preventing access to the door is a wall – the Berlin wall.  Published in the mid 60’s the horror of the wall was very much in everyone’s minds.

 

When I arrived in Highbury in 1991 the wall had just come down and that story was still very much in everyone’s minds.

 

I wanted to find out what had happened to the ‘walled’ off church!  Eric hadn’t given it the name it is known by and so I failed to find out anything about it.

 

It was when Rene Nixon and then Anne and Malcolm Hopkins visited Berlin that both tracked down the church and I found out its moving story.

 

I was here to visit the church myself and it was wonderful.

 

Outside I spotted the sculpture by Josefina de Vasconcellos, Reconciliation – I read again the poem she had written in the mid 50/s when creating her small sculpture, Re-union.  Two refugees kneeling and embracing each other.

 

Quakers in the early 70’s in setting up the Bradford School of Peace studies at what was then the new Bradford University commissioned a larger version of the sculpture and renamed it reconciliation.

 

In the late 90’s Richard Branson funded another version of the sculpture that was placed in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral.

 

And then he also funded the placing of another version in Berlin – they wanted it to be on the site of the wall.  And in exploring a possible venue learned the story of the church of reconciliation.

 

J de V herself came to dedicate the sculpture and added something to this one – a cast of the bible that had been found in the ruins of the old church surrounded by barbed wire.

 

It was wonderful to be there.

We went into the wonderful, earthen chapel of reconciliation as it is now known, and at mid-day shared in a most moving time of worship led by a member of the Parish.

 

Stefan met friends and I suddenly realised I had missed my opportunity to chat with the leader of the service.  I left the church and some him on the other side of the park.  I raced across to catch him, and out of breath asked if he had five minutes.

 

He gave me twenty.

 

And I have our conversation on camera.

 

He told of the demolition of all the houses around the church of reconciliation at the building of the wall leaving it a solitary building in no man’s land butting up tio the wall.  He told of its demolition in 1985, of the people’s defiance, and of the wall’s demolition in 1989.   And he spoke of the re-building of the Church of Reconciliaion, the story of the sculpture.

 

It was wonderful to present him with a copy of Eric’s book and to draw attention to the wonderful vision Eric shares at the very end when he speaks of the church in the picture and expresses the hope that church can truly be church when there are ‘no walls within’.

 

I wrote an inscfription in the cover and presented it to the one who had led worship in my name, the name of Highbury Church … and also from Eric.

 

He shared with us the vision the church of reconciliation has that wherever there are walls that divide they can come down and the church can play its part in that work of reconciliation that is so fundamentally important.

 

The memorial to the victims of the wall was in the parish rooms built by the congregation on the west of the wall.  A wonderful exhibition with ‘walls’ you could walk through.

 

Our visit over, we had a traditional German sausage with a traditional German bun for lunch.

 

We then headed into central Berlin, visiting the Brandenburg Gate and seeing a demonstration outside the American embassy about people held in Iran – only to be reminded of the walls there are in our world today.

 

We arrived back in time for tea and the start of our conference.

 

Over tea I got talking with an Old Testament specialist, an American teaching in Belgium, developing an on-line course.  He has just completed work as a consultant on a new translation of the Bible published by Nelsons, called ‘the Voice’.

 

Written by people from the world of the arts, writers, poets, song-writers and the like, it attempts to bring the bible to life.  When asked to write advertising blurb he quoted an article he had just read about Keith Richards.  The Rolling Stone had been asked what he thought of the Bible and had replied he had tried reading it but gave up because he found it boring.

 

In his blurb my friend suggested this was the kind of bible Keith Richards would be able to read and so he said, Don’t give up Keith.  With a smile he said the advertisers for the Voice had picked on this quotation and it has become the strap line for the advertising of this new translation.  Try googling ‘Don’t give up, Keith,’ he suggested.

 

Our conversation ended up as he shared reflections on the way in which there will always be variety in translation, and it is not possible to arrive at a definitive translation.  And yet within all that variety we can see and hear God’s word.   Christianity is quite different from those other faiths whose holy book is said to have come straight from heaven.  Our Scriptures are not only brought to us through people, but also people who are creative in the way they write.  And that creativity means a definitive translation will always be impossible.

 

On to the first of our sessions.

 

A welcome and introduction by Prof Pierre Berthoud from Aix en Provence, France.

 

He whetted our appetite for the theme of the conference … Beyond the Bible – moving from Scripture to Theology and Practice.  It was a theme prompted by comments and a recently published book by Howard Marshall.

 

The first session proper was a paper read by Dr Richard Briggs who had taught New Testament, more recently teaches Old Testament and is now at the University of Durham.

 

Beyond the Bible – Within the Canon: Scripture as Canon in Evangelical Hermeneutics Past and Present.

 

Quite a mouthful … and quite something to digest at the end of a long day.

 

He ended up at a thought provoking point suggesting he had moved from feeling that it should be possible to arrive at a clear single interpretation of a text.  But even on matters of key doctrine there will be different ways of reading a text.  How important it is to live with that variety.  That’ snot to say ‘anything goes’.

 

He suggested there was something special about Scripture as the Word of God and therefore it called for a special way of interpreting it.

 

Often, he suggested, the church has got it right in its worship while those who seek to be analytical in their reading of a text miss its richness.

 

 The lecture and question time over, I found myself in conversation with a Hungarian scholar who had won a scholarship from the Hungarian state to study at Cambridge in pursuit of his research.

 

He was studying the way the book of Job, or at least Job 3, was interpreted in antiquity.  He was studying Jewish readings of the Scripture, Syriac, Greek and Latin readings too.  A fascinating conversation

 

I asked in antiquity whether any writers had considered Job to be a drama.  Yes, one had.

 

Theodore of Mopsuestia.  An interesting comment I will no doubt come back to some time.

 

It was absolutely fascinating to see what had become for me the theme of the evening emerge and take shape.  He spoke of the way there were very many different readings in antiquity of the book of Job.

 

Greek writers drew on the Greek translation, one sixth shorter than the Hebrew the Jewish writers used.  What’s more an additional handful of verses at the end identify Job as a figure in patriarchal times descended from Esau in the Greek text shaping the reading of those who used that text.

 

He spoke of the difficult of translation the Hebrew because there were so many words that occurred only in the book of Job.

 

He spoke of the rich variety of readings.  And then spoke of his frustration that many modern scholars simply disregarded the scholarship of the ancient church.  He seemed to suggest again there could be no definitive reading of such a book.

 

That led on to my sharing my explorations into the way the history of art touches the history of the interpretation of the bible.

 

Maybe for my friend from Hungary and for the speaker this evening there is value in learning today from the wisdom of the ancient interpreters of the Bible how to live with a variety of ways of reading the bible.

 

Evern Orign with his determination to read the scripture allegorically and to see its spiritual meaning honoured the historical, was systematic in his study of the text and with his production of an edition of the Bible setting out six translations side by side (sadly now lost) he was a great scholar.

 

There were rich pickings here for future reflections too!

 

But now is not the time at the end of a busy, but fruitful day.

 

An early start in the morning with prayers at 7-30 and then a full programme through till 9-00 at night.