After a lapse of a couple of weeks, today I am back reading - and tracking down stuff to read - so that my forthcoming week in Wales will result in an essay fit for presentation when I next go to Manchester.  Hmm, yes, well, never mind.

Today I've read a couple of papers, by two suitably erudite Baptists (Paul Fiddes and Rob Ellis) each entitled 'God and History.'  They were good papers, I enjoyed reading them - but they left me feeling an odd mixture of 'well at least I haven't found out that someone else has done it yet' and 'why this enormous great gap?'

Each of these papers set out to explore something about how God acts in, and is revealed in, human history, most notably in ways that may appear 'special.'  Much of what they said was useful grist to the mill of what I'm researching and thinking about but, ultimately, each of them turned to the historicity of the resurrection - something that is problematic for historians because it doesn't fit any schemes or methods they may have.  That is fine, it's a good topic to turn to undoubtedly, but it doesn't help me very much, since the kind of events I am interested in are much more 'common or garden.'

It seems that what we have is people mooting that God acts in history - now as then - but leapfrogging everything that lies between the resurrection (or certainly the Acts churches) and now.  The fact that if God was active in the first century and if God is also active now means that God was active - and to some extent being revealed - all along doesn't seem to get connected very much.  Whilst both writers note the dangers of trying to discern HOW God's activity might have been at work in such diverse situations as the Falklands conflict or the assassination of JFK, they still seem to be fixed on 'big' world-stage events.  What about the relatively humdrum machinations of the dear old Baptist movement in Blighty?  Surely we think God is/was active in that too?  I'm not so sure it matters that I can discern the HOW or even the WHAT of God's activity in Baptist history, so much as that it surely happened, in so far as frail and failing humans could 'tune in' to it.  But, unless somehow this can be written into the tale, tentatively, do we just end up perpetuating the gaps in the story?  Hmm.  Tricky.

Ah well, back to work!