The Green Good News | A review

What drew me in to reading this was that this description rang important bells for me as someone who since my teens in (winces) the 1970s when I joined what was then the Ecology Party and shortly afterwards, became a follower of Christ, The latter in part because my understanding of what was needed for a just and sustainable lifestyle implied, to my mind, also challenging and dealing with the inner life that drives or supports unsustainable living. We need people to become less materialistic in the sense of seeking after more consumer goods and more materialistic in the sense of valuing the material of the world that God has made and upholds, and co-operating with the systems of sustenance that God has caused to be: cycles of water, gases, bacteria, fungi and all the rest; networks of mutual living and dependence. For us to live otherwise is to sin against neighbour and so against God.

The description that got my attention was this:

The Green Good News |  The Green Good News finds a fresh take on the Gospels, painting a picture of Jesus as a humorous and subversive teacher, an organizer of alternative communities and food economies, as a healer of bodies and relationships, and as a prophet who sought to overturn an empire and restore a more just and joyful way of life.

I think this is a fair, accurate, summation of what the book does and the kind of perspective it generates in a willing reader.

One of the things I've been enjoying in reading this book is that it feels like it is developing with or out of a reading of the gospels which resonates strongly with Ched Myers' Binding the Strong Man (which is explicitly drawn on and referenced) or the historical background work on the gospels that we can see in Dominic Crossan's work. This is so nicely reworked with attention to the ecological implications and interweaving. Much of the book is, in effect, an extended meditation on the linkage between exploitative systems which impoverish many and their extractive effect also on the environment. This is a critique on the current models of doing business and distributing resources: they are unsustainable environmentally and murderous in their slow-burn effects on humans.

The long look at parables (and I like the phrase "the pedagogy of the parables" to capture the way that parables in general open up issues by implication and reading them against Empire context) and helping us to unpick them from being sewn to authoritarian and exploitative habits of interpretation, and that's really helpful because we have a lot of unpicking to do.

I also enjoyed the insight about gardening being referred to Jesus in the Garden (of Gethsemane). It made me think of the strand of interpretation of Genesis 2 which reminds us that the best understanding of where the Garden of Eden was supposed to be is north east Palestine -and Gethsemane would be part of that. Then there is the play with the figure of the risen Christ -mistaken by Mary for the gardener -except that it's not a mistake for he is, in a sense, the prototypical gardener, it's just that it's not the gardener she thought it was.

Quotes I liked

to dwell with Jesus as a branch of the vine will require the loss of certain parts of themselves — the loss of their illusions of independence, the loss of the promise and security offered by the Empire, the loss of their numbing agents, the loss of the rhythms of their past life. But as both the images of pruning and cleansing underline, this loss is an addition by subtraction. It is a loss that makes possible fruitfulness and that is made possible by self-giving love (p.59)

We are called not just to teach a man to fish rather than simply giving him a fish. Teaching him to fish will not feed him for life if the lake is polluted and his community is decimated (p.62)

By telling them that they will fish for men Jesus is not recruiting them into the shirt-and-tie, door-to-door business of saving souls. Rather he is taking a repeated image out of the prophetic tradition and telling them that they are going to overturn the whole imperial order. In Jeremiah the Lord, in disgust at the idolatry and iniquity of the elite of Israel says: “I am now sending many fishermen, says the LORD, and they shall catch them... For my eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from my presence, nor is their iniquity concealed from my sight” (Jer16:16–17) ... So to be made “fishers of men” is to be agents of justice who will fish out and remove the elite who have oppressed the poor and broken covenant with God. [p.67]

I enjoy the prayerful task of getting on my knees in the bulk food aisle and filling up our reusable containers with organic grains, beans, and flour. During the summers our small town holds a farmers market where we can purchase produce grown locally and regionally  [p.72]

Handing the hungry person a box of processed foods is a bit like the Roman Empire pretending they are feeding the fishermen by giving them back a small fraction of their catch in the form of fish sauce. These acts of charity that are taken to be the solution to the problem rely on the unsustainable food systems that are producing enormous ecological debt for future generations and are built on the backs of impoverished food workers [p.85]

What effect does it have on our understanding of the Creator, creation, and creatures, when we repeatedly hear stories that portray the divine as a vengeful slave owner, a profit-seeking businessman, a condescending rich man, a petty and murderous king, or a capriciously forgiving ruler?Alternatively, what vision of God and creation leads us to read a story of terrible violence and exploitation and assume that the perpetrator is ametaphor for the divine? And yet, this is how the parables are too often still read. [p.116]

By looking around, instead of up, we can come into different relationships of trust, solidarity, and love that help us find wholeness together [p134]

Link-Love for this Review

The Green Good News on Amazon
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T. Wilson Dickinson on Facebook 

#TheGreenGoodNews

Canary in a Coalmine? A missional meditation on university statistics.

I was looking at the religious-related statistics for my university and it seemed a significant milestone had been passed. For the first time, this year the number of those who ticked the ‘Christian’ box as they enrolled at the University fell below 30%. A bit of context will show the significance. Last year there were just over 30% registered as Christian. In 2012, when these figures were first collected, the figure was just over 36% (and the national universities figure was 43% in that year). Let’s remember that the census in 2011 showed 59% ticking the Christian box nationally -that figure includes a higher proportion of older people as well as a smaller percentage among younger people.

It shows quite starkly that there is a declining proportion of young people identifying as Christian. It alerts us to a significant cultural shift taking place.

Our response is crucial. It can be disheartening to see such figures but we need to recognise that and work through our grief.

Christendom is now largely gone and we haven’t yet properly begun to wrestle with what it means to be church in post-Christendom times. And the Church of England, pillar and bulwark of Establishment is perhaps in the worst position of all. So it’s little wonder that we’re struggling; no wonder we are showing, collectively, signs of being in the first stages of grief.

We are called through and beyond our grief to a profound re-orientation of mindset -and that’s something that an aging population are less likely to be good at! (And the Churches are older proportionally than the general population).

So let’s start by making room for lament: to recognise all the things we have valued that are now gone; to lay to rest our assumptions that were formed in Christendom and  let go of our nostalgia for it. It’s hard but unless we do this work of letting go, we cannot truly enter God’s future and we cannot connect with solid hope. Let’s allow ourselves to feel our shock, despair and sorrow at the passing of the things we have loved and hoped for or at least grown used to. Maybe we should do this as churches: liturgically mark the end of the era and commit ourselves to discovering our calling in the era that is beginning. Services of laying down and lament are called for. A season of lament is needed.

We might then ask what these figures could suggest to us. I suggest that perhaps one thing that is happening is that people are giving up the label ‘Christian’ as they recognise their own realities and experience less cultural gravity pulling them towards that label. Perhaps it’s mostly a cultural identification that is passing. Perhaps it is that people now see more clearly the gap between their life-commitments and following Christ. But perhaps too, there as just as many people who are responding the sanctuary of their own hearts to the first wooing of the Holy Spirit. It’s just that they don’t associate that with what the churches seem to offer?

Our approach to mission now requires a re-orientation like the one I see played out in a modern secular university. In Christendom, the church and the Christian story was part of the cultural centre of gravity in our society. This meant we didn’t even know the word ‘mission’ except as something that happened overseas. The church simply occupied a place where it naturally drew in people who developed an interest in spiritual things and there were well-worn occasions of interaction around life-events, seasonal happenings, parish groups and community use of buildings.

Now people who develop a spiritual interest are more likely to join a yoga class, go along to a meditation group or diy-construct their own customised spiritual path borrowing resources from the internet, books and occasional events. And in this cultural moment, the church does not seem especially attractive or credible. It sits alongside other offers in the marketplace of ideas and causes and may even be held in suspicion because of scandals and newsworthy groups like Westboro Baptists not to mention the newsworthiness of sociopathic Christian groups.

So we have to learn to reach out without the cultural heft and social power that characterised our previous 1000 (or more) years. And that’s hard: so much of what we do and how we think and how we imagine possibilities is wrapped up with an imagination created by that social and cultural power. Imagining and thinking differently is disturbing and difficult. To borrow insight from the sending of the 72 in the gospels, we are now called to learn how to be guests rather than hosts. To do that we will need to join ‘their’ things and discover God at work where we do not control the agenda… or the building… or the purse. And then we can work with them and find Church growing ‘out there’.

In Advent we recalled the ministry of John the Baptiser. He dressed in camel-skin and belt and so looked the part of a prophet calling people to God. We are called to look the part of a people in touch with God, so that when they develop an interest in the things of God (prompted by the Spirit -and they do and will) we will look like we can help them connect with the love, hope and power of God. What does that mean for our church life, our outreach and our discipleship?

A Wrath-less God Has Victims

[I]t’s actually the non-angry god who appears morally distasteful, for ‘a non-indignant God would be an accomplice in injustice, deception, and violence.’

Maybe, I can’t help but wonder, we prefer that god, the one who is a passive accomplice to injustice, because, on some subconscious level, that is what we know ourselves to be.

Accomplices to injustice is an important phrase in this. I would connect this insight up with CS Lewis' noticing that wrath is (or at least can be and in God's case is) something driven by love. When we love someone or something, we are affronted, outraged and/or saddened by abuses and disparagement of the object of our love. If we are not affronted or outraged, do we really love? I think probably not. So if we believe God to be love, then something like wrath must be part of God's reaction to wrongs done to beloved creatures (and I know that begs all sorts of philosophical questions around the relationship between time and eternity). 'Beloved creatures' -that would be all of us.

That last line, though, is something to take away and use to reflect on our own being in the world and indeed on God's call.

A Wrath-less God Has Victims (by Jason Micheli):

The gods, corporisations and the politics of a Psalm

Psalm 82 has been intriguing me for some months now, each time it turns up in the daily readings for morning prayer. Here it is in the translation the CofE uses for worship.

God has taken his stand in the council of heaven; •   in the midst of the gods he gives judgement:2  ‘How long will you judge unjustly •   and show such favour to the wicked? 3  ‘You were to judge the weak and the orphan; •   defend the right of the humble and needy; 4  ‘Rescue the weak and the poor; •   deliver them from the hand of the wicked. 5  ‘They have no knowledge or wisdom;      they walk on still in darkness: •   all the foundations of the earth are shaken. 6  ‘Therefore I say that though you are gods •   and all of you children of the Most High, 7  ‘Nevertheless, you shall die like mortals •   and fall like one of their princes.’ 8  Arise, O God and judge the earth, •   for it is you that shall take all nations for your possession.

I guess the central move, for me, is to read 'the gods' as corporisations -what commonly gets called 'principalities and powers' (based on NT language). I've had a look at some commentaries and a number of them favour this sort of interpretation.So I notice, if we take it that way, that this passage implicitly asserts a divine mission for corporisations to do justly, do well by the marginalised and to lighten their darkness with wisdom and knowledge. It also strengthens the 'originally good but fallen' understanding of them. I'm also thinking that in those days, pretty much the only corporisations would have been imperial admin and religious networks -often two sides of the same coin. Nowadays we would start to include branded corporations and NGOs etc.

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Screens change how we read scripture

I considered putting a question mark at the end of the title of this post. It's substantially the title of the CT article I'm about to comment on. However, I don't want to question the proposition of the title. I do want to question an implication and a supposed remedy of the article.

The suggested remedy seems to be to encourage Christian readers to return to using paper Bibles. The implication of the article is that Christians have always read the written word on paper and so we should return to that. I'm more interested in the matter of returning to supposedly ancient practice and so would then go on to question the reading on paper issue.

What concerned me was the unnoticed and materially poor consumer of God's word before rag-paper and moveable type kicked in to make a bible in every home or hand a possibility. You see, the remedy mentioned above elides most Christian interaction with the bible before then. I think we need to properly reckon with the preliterate experience before assessing the effects of the digital revolution. But before I say more about that, let me interject another concern.

There's a concern I have about the research that this is all based on. Basically, I'm unsure how much stock we should place in it at the moment. We are in a process of cultural reception and there are a number of variables that we don't yet know how to assess, so are we testing the right things, the right people and in any case what will things look like in 20 or 30 years (assuming that civilisation still supports such things) when/if people have evolved strategies of reading around screen use? I'm not sure how far this is an issue for digiborigines and how far for non-native digital tech-users. Which kinds of users have we been testing and how does a long background in different ways of reading affect the particular experimental packages of the studies? I'm not doubting that effects have been found, I'm just not sure whether other factors have been properly controlled for and whether what we are seeing are, in a sense, transitional effects of cultural change on particular groups as they adjust. It's not just about cognitive processing as the article seems to imply, it's also about cultural reception. We should also bring to the table the actual reading practices of recent and contemporary Christians with access to printed bibles. I think that the writer may be comparing the actual digital experience with an idealised analogue experience; not comparing like with like in significant parameters. I worry that this is a kind of sophisticated, low-key, moral panic.

So what about the longer-historical point? It's not new, but the writer of the referenced article hasn't weighed it heavily enough, I think. I was, frankly, a bit surprised that it wasn't considered more when the mention of icons was made. There, we were told, many icons have figures with open books and their fingers rest on open pages pointing to particular scriptures. (I found intriguing the link with Thomas with the resurrected Christ, btw, but that's another matter). That should have been the cue, in my opinion, to consider the reception of scripture within those kinds of cultural milieus (indeed, why icons and not written texts?), but instead the writer switches in short order to the post-Caxton era situations.

So, what I think we need to recall in this is the experience of an ordinary non-literate or barely-literate Christian in late antiquity or early medieval Mediterranean society or similar societies beyond and after. 'Similar', I mean, in the sense of the technologies relating to reading and their cultural embedding. In such societies, books and scrolls are expensive both in the materials they are made of and in the time that it takes to produce them. Partly as a result literacy levels are low. Most Christians and Jews would experience Scripture as oral/aural, not as something legible; ie not as something that they read themselves. They wouldn't be able to afford to have written copies of scriptures in their own possession. So, for them, interacting with scripture involved hearing someone else reading it, probably at a local house where they would meet for worship and fellowship. That might be once a week, perhaps more often in some situations. It probably wouldn't involve access to the whole of what we think of as the Bible but only whatever books their community had managed to save for and collect. In such a situation, what you do is hear passages read -probably a whole book at a time. You might also request to hear some parts again and you would commit to memory some passages. There would be likely some discussion, question and answer which would help recall as well as living out the message.

That's in many respects very different to how we experience scriptures nowadays. We read passages on our own, silently. We might journal about them. On our own. We rarely hear the words spoken except in church and even there often in paragraph-sized chunks but with a pew bible to hand if we want to check things out. And if we are honest, so many contemporary western Christians read small, decontextualised, chunks with a 'devotional' gloss which often does not really expound the passage or put it in context but rather reinforces popular spiritual tropes giving the impression of biblical engagement without it actually happening. So, I wonder whether some of what the digital research is picking up is in fact mirroring that and therefore it's not the digital reading that's the problem but a cultural habitus reinforced by certain bible reading artefacts which is also reflected in popular Christian culture. To be clear, Every Day with Jesus has long offered paper-readers decontextualised devotional nuggets and I think that what may be being tested is this way of using scripture transferred to screen. But it may not be inherent to screen reading.

All of which makes me wonder whether the suggested remedy is right. If earlier Christians 'fed' on God's word by aural means and oral exploration, is it so concerning that contemporary Christians may be retrieving some characteristics of pre-pan-literate culture? Does not the history encourage us to think that the new technologies may open up new opportunities (and re-open up old ones) as well as new dangers in bible-encounter? In spirituality? I'm concerned that the apparent remedy is about doubling down on what we have just been doing and not engaging with the new situation. This reminds me of the 600 year old laments about the printing press changing the way people read, think and write, implicitly calling people to eschew the mass printed book and retain the habits of listening and memorising.

Surely our task should be to understand well what is happening and to begin to craft spiritual habits that work with and through the emerging screen cultures? -Not simply resisting and damning them? The question of the article's title remains, "How will we process the Bible differently?" -and we need to discover the opportunities as well as name a few concerns.

I do think also we should not let the idea that reading the Bible should always be "deep reading" become too fixed in view. To be sure sometimes it should. But what I think the history of Christian interaction with the Bible tells us is that often the kind of deep reading seemingly in mind in the article has not been the main strategy. Rather, reflective reading, Christological reading, communal reading, prayerful reading has been predominant but I'm not sure that these add up to or compose the deep reading in view in the article. And I'm not sure that any of the research or interpretations of it make those sorts of reading less possible or intrinsically harder. In fact, I wonder whether they may be helped by screen presentation of texts.

The article tells us,

that the habit of superficial comprehension developed in digital reading transfers to all reading such that “the more you read on screens, the more your mind shifts towards ‘non-linear’ reading—a practice that involves things like skimming a screen or having your eyes dart around a web page" 

I think we should consider things behind and around that. I think I want to see more longitudinal studies on that assertion. I think I would want to see that correlated with the difficulties of many readers of conventional paper-based texts not least various forms of dyslexia. I would also note that many speed-reading courses attempt to wrestle with and train the phenomena mentioned in that quote. Would it be too much to ask for us to go back to Walter Ong's seminal book 'Orality and Literacy' before we try to discuss this more?

The article also reinforces the assertion that,

the physical layout of the biblical text is important for comprehension, memory, and “correct interpretation.”

That is my experience, but then I should remind us that this is not something necessarily to panic about. Recall, again, the experience of most Christians for over a thousand years. They would not have built a visual memory of the text or relied on printed text for comprehension or correct interpretation. Let's learn from them some tricks for the post-paper culture we may be heading into.

Screens Are Changing the Way We Read Scripture | CT Pastors | Christianity Today: As digital reading habits rewire our brains, how will we process the Bible differently?

Will AIs pray for us?

One of the motifs that stays with me from early adulthood reading science fiction is robots worrying about whether they have souls. I think I tended to think that if they worried about it, that probably proved they had one. But back in those days it was an interesting theological, philosophical thought experiment which had more traction in getting us humans to think about what spirituality, personhood and human nature are really about than being a 'live' question. No longer, perhaps.

It is starting to seem like perhaps we do have to face those questions after all. Self-driving cars, machines beating the best humans at chess, algorithms getting great at predicting human behaviour -better than fellow humans, the threat of 'white collar' jobs being taken by machines all seem to raise a related bunch of questions about the place of artificial intelligence in God's providence.

It is important, as we begin to think about that to be a bit careful about what we mean by the various aspects of the issue. What might we mean by 'artificial intellingence', what constitutes 'praying'. And then, we might want to recognise that some dimensions of the matter are already entangled with human technologies and could help us to think more about it.

You may be surprised by the idea that human technologies are already in the picture but is so, and some have been involved for a very long time. Perhaps your imagination has already taken you there: what are people doing when lighting a candle in a church or temple? What are prayer flags and rotating prayer gadgets in some versions of Buddhism? Written notes on prayer trees or boards? These all invite us to think about what we mean by prayer in our low-tech strategies.

I month or two back, the Church Times published an article I wrote as part of a special edition on artificial intelligence. It's relevant to put its 700 words here as they address some of the issues raised just.

Will AIs pray for us?

The film Bladerunner (based on Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) dramatically portrays the question of the humanity of artificial humans. I think I’d want to ask, do AI’s pray to Jesus's God?  And if they do, might we pray with them? Will they pray for us?

“Pray for us” could mean ”in our stead” as if we could outsource the work of prayer to relieve us of the task; a religious version of AIs taking jobs. It could, however, mean “intercede for us”: to ask them to hold us before God with concern for our wellbeing.

As we start to consider this, let's notice that we tend to think of artificial intelligence as a new issue, but maybe it is not. Amos Young following Walter Wink, interprets the Powers and Principalities as integral social entities having their own mission in God’s economy and having their own intelligence. If that is right, then we have had with us artificial, that is human-made, intelligences for a very long time. We collectively and unwittingly provide the substrate for these beings which emerge from our social interactions with purposes of their own and also a share in the fallenness of humanity. They process information, affect the environment and marshall human effort and allegiance. Scripture, names them “angels” as well as “dominions”, “thrones” and so on. So perhaps when we more purposefully make thinking artefacts, in these principalities, powers and angels, we already have a paradigm to consider their providential provenance.

Perhaps too, prayerful acts such as lighting candles might help us think about AIs praying. Votive lights in some traditions symbolically ask something of God. Presumably, without a human-generated intent, these are merely flames fed by a human artefact. But with a human desire motivating the lighting, they symbolically make that prayer. However, do they continue that prayer when the human has gone away and no longer focuses on it? Similarly we might appraise prayers written and put into a prayer wall.

Perhaps an AI praying might be like a candle or a slip of written-on paper. Either it is a mechanical and ‘soulless’ remainder of a once-live (and human) prayer or  the prayer remains in some way alive and active through the burning candle or the script. If there is some way it persists, then maybe that gives reason to think an AI could carry forward a human petition to God even if it didn’t ‘think’. 

If we believed that an AI could indeed think and so, perhaps, pray, I hope that we wouldn’t think that it relieves us of having to pray. That suggests a disturbing view of prayer as simply onerous work. Certainly, sometimes, prayer might be hard work, but surely more importantly prayer is the joyous cultivation of relationship with God. Why should AIs have all the fun praying?

Whether they might intercede for us is a different question. This would imply they could relate to God in such a way as to  form a request or to hold ‘in mind’ a situation before God (and how would we know?) It would assume Deity would listen, that is in practice, seek to enlist it in God’s mission. It would imply that the AI could seek to align itself with God’s purposes and become aware of what the divine agenda might be. Without these things, I do not think an AI would be capable of prayer in the fuller way we hope for ourselves.

We need also to consider that an AI may not be bodily like us -unless they really were like the replicants in Bladerunner. Without a human-ish body, an AI would sense and live in the world differently and have different priorities. Would it, then,  have the capacity to empathise with us to motivate intercession? Would it assess opportunities and threats to God’s reign differently or similarly to us? Would it ‘feel’ that we humans are a major problem and seek to pray and work for our reform or conversion? And what would that look like? Would we catch a glimpse of how an intelligent other might see us?

Some further reading on AIs praying

Clarke, Arthur C. The Nine Billion Names of God. https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html accessed 7 July 2019

Another possibility is that AI will teach us new things about spirituality that we never considered 

Istvan, Zoltan. When Superintelligent AI Arrives, Will Religions Try to Convert It? https://gizmodo.com/when-superintelligent-ai-arrives-will-religions-try-t-1682837922 accessed 7 June 2019

If Christians accept that all creation is intended to glorify God, how would AI do such a thing? Would AI attend church, sing hymns, care for the poor? Would it pray?  

Jonathan Merritt.    Is AI a Threat to Christianity? https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/artificial-intelligence-christianity/515463/ accessed 7 July 2019

Siri basically responded, “I’m not programmed to do that.” But if a more advanced version Siri were programmed to pray, would such an action be valuable? Does God receive prayers from any intelligent being—or just human intelligence? 

Jonathan Merritt,   https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/artificial-intelligence-christianity/515463/ accessed 7 July 2019 -this in commenting on a classroom thought-experiment by Alistair McGrath.

“they will have such a different Umwelt that we will be completely unable to relate to it from our own subjective, embodied perspective. ”

Penha, Rui and Carvalhais, Miguel, If Machines Want to Make Art, Will Humans Understand it? https://aeon.co/ideas/if-machines-want-to-make-art-will-humans-understand-it?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss-feed accessed 1 July 2019

Further resources

http://www.religionlink.com/source-guides/god-in-the-machine-artificial-intelligence-and-religion-templeton-1/

As Artificial Intelligence Advances, What Are its Religious Implications? | Religion & Politics: Religious communities and thinkers are debating AI's moral and ethical issues.

Redeeming Evangelism

Gotta say: this is one of the best articles on mission that I've read for a long time.

Redeeming Evangelism: Authentic Mission in the Church of England | Salisbury Cathedral: A lecture by The Very Reverend Professor Martyn Percy, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, on Saturday 13 July 2019

I warmed to it because it says a number of things that I've been saying and thinking for a while and draws them all into a bundle and sprinkles in a few insights more. It pulls out a few salient points of mission history as they affect the recent experience of the CofE. Most of all it unrelentingly takes a Misso Dei perspective: the idea that God is at work in the 'secular' and our role is to learn to spot it and to work out how we make common cause with it. 

It also discusses the concept of obliquity (look it up on this blog's search window and you'll find it's been of interest to me) and uses it to note how we tend to mishandle the church's approach to mission and especially evangelism.

There's a Harry Smart poem called ‘A Fool’s Pardon’ quoted towards the end which is very much to the point. It's challenging in language and in concepts, here's the first verse:

Praise be to God who pities wankersand has mercy on miserable bastards.Praise be to God who pours his blessingon reactionary warheads and racists.

Ouch -but I recognise in it a loyal characterisation of the grace of God.

I'm thinking very seriously about where I can put this into the essential reading for 'my' students of mission and ministry ...