Psalm 64

I have prepared these psalms for our liturgy, trying to be as accurate in my translation as possible. The alternation between plain text and bold is for responsive reading. I invite feedback on the translation!

For the director.
A psalm
By David.

Hear, God, my voice in my meditation;
From the terror of my enemy guard my life.
Hide me from the counsel of evildoers,
From the tumult of the troublemakers,

Who have sharpened like the sword their tongue,
Have aimed their arrow, a bitter word,
To shoot in hiding places at the blameless;
Suddenly they shoot and they do not fear.
They strengthen themselves with an evil word;
They report hiding snares;
They have asked who will see them.
They search out iniquities: “We have perfected a searched-out plan.”
And the inward part of man and the heart is deep.

And God has shot them, with an arrow, suddenly;
There are their wounds,
And they make their tongue stumble against them.
They will shake — all who look upon them.
And all men will fear and declare the work of God,
And his act they will understand.
The righteous will rejoice in Yahweh and take refuge in him,
And they will boast, all the upright in heart.

A multitude of comments about the translation of this psalm:

(1) In line 1, the word translated “meditation” can include anything that occupies one’s attention, and so Holliday suggests such things as “thought, consideration, (object of) concern.”  It can refer to a complaint, as it probably does here, but it may be broader than that.  Hirsch suggests that the phrase here means “When I give expression to … my inner agitation.”

(2) In line 2, the word translated “terror” can also refer to “trembling.”  Here, “the trembling of my enemy” is the trembling brought on by the presence of the enemy.

(3) In line 3, the word translated “counsel” here has the sense of “secret counsel” (Hirsch; cf. Amos 3:7) can also refer to a circle of confidants (Gen 49:6) and can be used in a good sense (Ps. 25:14; 55:15: “sweet counsel”).

(4) In line 5, Hirsch and some others have “whet” instead of “sharpened,” which is fine, but I am preparing these psalms for reading out loud in church.  Read out loud, “whet” in connection with “tongue” will probably be heard as “wet.”

(5) In line 7, “hiding places” uses the same root as “Hide” in line 3.  Many translations have “in secret places” or just “in secret.”  NASB has “from concealment,” which probably captures the idea.  It’s not the blameless man who is in hiding, but the attacker.  As for “blameless,” the word tam includes the sense of integrity, wholeness, maturity, completion.

(6) In line 8, “strengthen for themselves an evil word” is a bit awkward.  The verb can be used for strengthening in the sense of encouragement (2 Sam 11:25), and perhaps the meaning is that they encourage themselves with an evil word (plot, plan).  But it seems more likely that it is the word which is being strengthened, the bitter word being shot like an arrow.

(7) In line 10, “they report hiding snares” may mean that they talk about all the snares they’ve hidden, boasting about what they’re doing (Alexander).  But Hirsch may be right in taking this phrase to mean that as they tell or report (about whatever), they are laying snares.

(8) In line 11, in the phrase “Who will see them,” is the pronoun “them” a reference to the snares (line 10) or to the people themselves (Alexander)?  The latter is how some of the early versions took it, changing the question to “Who will see us?”

(9) With regard to line 12: Okay, you try translating this.  Literally: “They search out iniquities.  We have perfected/completed a searched-out searching-out.”  Alter emends the verb (from “we have completed” to “we have hidden”), but if we go with “completed,” Alter’s reading is something like this: “We have completed the utmost search.”  But Hirsch thinks it means something like “Let them investigate inquities.  We will be gone when a search is made.”  But that seems like a stretch to me.

(10) Line 15 is pretty tough, and this is an attempt at a rendition.  It seems to say “They are, their wounds/blows.”  Hirsch has something closer to “their blows came to be.”   NASB margin: “Their wounds happened.”

(11) Line 16 is extremely tough.  The verb is third person plural, with a third person singular suffix: “They make him totter/stumble.”  But many translations render this line as if the subject is God (“He makes them stumble”) or as if it is passive (“They are made to stumble”).  Hirsch in his commentary says that the subject is most likely the blows/wounds from the previous verse and the object is the tongue (which can be masculine or feminine, BDB), but in his translation, he appears to take the subject as the enemies: “They made their own tongue a stumbling block unto themselves.”  I’m not persuaded that the verb can have that sense.  Perhaps the AV is closest: “They will make their own tongue to fall upon themselves,” or, better, “against themselves.”

(12) Line 17 contains a verb that is often taken to be from ndd (“to flee”), so that it reads “All will flee….”  But it’s possible that whatever the root is, possibly nud, it refers to the sort of thing we find in Jeremiah 18:16 (“shake the head,” but there “the head” is explicitly mentioned) or Jeremiah 31:18 (“bemoan”).  Hirsch suggests that it refers to inner agitation, to being deeply moved in some way, but nud itself has the sense of shaking and so that’s what I’ve used … for now.

The psalm seems to me to be structured as a chiasm (and thanks to Jeff Moss for his contributions as we talked about this today):

A. Hear, God, my voice in my meditation;
From the terror of my enemy guard my life.

B. Hide me from the counsel of evildoers,
From the tumult of the troublemakers,

C. Who have sharpened like the sword their tongue,
Have aimed their arrow, a bitter word,

D. To shoot in hiding places at the blameless;
Suddenly they shoot and they do not fear.

E. They strengthen themselves with an evil word;
They report hiding snares;

F. They have asked who will see them.

E’. They search out iniquities: “We have perfected a searched-out plan.”
And the inward part of man and the heart is deep.

D’. And God has shot them, with an arrow, suddenly;
There are their wounds,

C’. And they make their tongue stumble against them.
They will shake — all who look upon them.

B’. And all men will fear and declare the work of God,
And his act they will understand.

A’. The righteous will rejoice in Yahweh and take refuge in him,
And they will boast, all the upright in heart.

The A sections both deal with the voice of the righteous and with Yahweh’s protection.

The B sections contrast the counsel of the evildoers which leads to tumult and trouble with God’s work and God’s act.

The C sections deal with the tongue.

The D sections have arrows being shot.

The E sections are the words of the evildoers and their confidence.

The turning point, F, then is their question “Who will see us?”

Festa More than Fuel

The other day, I was driving somewhere and heard a woman on Christian talk radio explaining her discoveries in relation to dieting.  She said that her strategy works like this: We have to go back to the Bible and see what food is for.  God created food for fuel.  And so for the first several weeks, we want to take the enjoyment out of meals and plan our meals only as fuel for our bodies.  After that time, when we have this perspective firmly in our minds, we can begin to add in some of the ingredients that make our food more enjoyable, but the fundamental thing we have to remember is that food is fuel.

Well, who can deny that food is fuel?  But is that all food is?  Is that all that the Bible tells us about food?

This blog entry is hardly sufficient for a complete biblical theology of food, but notice that in the Bible food is first presented without any reference to fuel at all.  It is simply given to Adam and Woman:  “See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food” (Gen 1:29).  I suppose one might argue that God gave the herbs and the fruit to Man and Woman as fuel, but notice that that’s taking a step beyond what is actually said.  Yes, fuel is part of what’s in view here, but we cannot conclude that it’s the only thing in view.

Similarly, in Genesis 2, we hear that God filled His Garden with “every tree … that is pleasant to the sight and good for food” (v. 9).  Does “good for food” mean that the fruit is good as fuel?  Undoubtedly that’s part of it.  But notice how the context emphasizes enjoyment: These trees are “pleasant to the sight.”  And that suggests that the goodness of their fruit as food includes not just their ability to give us the energy and nutrients we need, but also their ability to give us pleasure as we eat them.  Fruit tastes good, and Genesis 2 doesn’t warrant approving the sugars in fruit for their ability to give us energy while disapproving of the way those sugars taste in our mouths.

Jumping ahead in Scripture, we find that food, far from being only fuel, is also reward.  After Abram conquers an army of invaders, Melchizedek gives him “bread and wine” (Gen 14:18).  In fact, if you want to work this out further, you can think of food (following James Jordan, who has written extensively about this) as Alpha Food, the kind of food that gives you fuel and helps to strengthen you, and Omega Food, the kind of food that gives you rest and pleasure after your labors.  Bread is a good Alpha Food: you start the day with bread.  But wine is Omega Food: if you try to start the day with a couple of glasses of wine, you’re not going to get to work, but at the end of the day, wine and the relaxation it brings is a good reward.  Interestingly, Scripture also tells us to give wine to certain people for comfort (Prov 31:6-7).  We shouldn’t think that there’s something bad about “comfort food.”

The use of food in connection with offerings in the Bible teaches us something else about food: Food is communion.  Think, in this connection, of how Paul presents the Lord’s Table and the table of demons — that is, the food eaten at the table of the idols.  In both cases, communion is taking place as one eats and drinks, either communion with the Lord or communion with the demons who are “behind” the idols.  Food is communion: When you eat together, you commune together.

There’s a lot more that could be said about food, but already we see that if we really go back to Scripture to learn about the purpose of food, we won’t conclude that food is merely fuel.  Food is also for enjoyment, for rest, for comfort, for reward, for communion.  While it may be necessary for some Christians to diet, it seems to me that an approach to dieting that depends on eliminating all these other aspects of food in favor of presenting food only as fuel is wrongheaded.

Around the same time that I heard this advice on the radio, my bedtime reading with my children was Valenti Angelo’s The Hill of Little Miracles, which contains some great passages about food, passage like this one, describing the festa after the main character’s little sister is baptized.  The Italian family is gathered around the table when the Irish policeman stops by:

The group shouted with joy when a huge platter of rice, cooked to a golden brown in a rich sauce of olive oil, mushrooms, tomatoes, chopped onions, and chicken livers, was brought in.  Soon after that, a large round platter of fritto misto, a mixture of chicken, zucchini, celery, young artichokes, eggplant, all fried in egg batter, took the place of honor on the table.  So Patrick stayed a little longer, just to praise Mamma Santo’s fritto misto.  Incidentally he washed the fritto misto down with another glass of zinfandel.  The Santo house was filled with friendliness, and everyone praised and enjoyed the good food….

Papa Santo sang happily as he went down into the cellar.  He returned with three bottles of wine.  And Patrick stayed just a little longer.  The fritto misto had disappeared.  The salad was brought in.  Romaine lettuce with chopped red onions, sliced tomatoes, stalks of young celery, sprinkled with black olives and fillets of anchovies, with dressing of olive oil mixed with vinegar and garlic.  After each plate was scraped clean of chicken bones, everyone took a large helping.  Salami and soft white cheese, called Monterey cream cheese, was placed on the table.  A ponderous pot of black coffee sent out a steady thin stream of steam from its spout (49-50, 51-52).

Now, isn’t that a good and biblical way of looking at food?  Loads of it, tasting good, with family and friends all rejoicing around the table.  I suppose that I shouldn’t have been surprised when I finished the chapter and turned out the light, only to hear my kids say, “I’m hungry!”  (Incidentally, a lot of the great books for children in the past were full of glowing descriptions of food, and the best essay on the subject can be found in Annis Duff’s “Bequest of Wings.”)

The Power of Optimism

At first sight it would seem that the pessimist encourages improvement.  But in reality it is a singular truth that the era in which pessimism has been cried from the house-tops is also that in which almost all reform has stagnated and fallen into decay.  The reason of this is not difficult to discover.  No man ever did, and no man ever can, create or desire to make a bad thing good or an ugly thing beautiful.  There must be some germ of good to be loved, some fragment of beauty to be admired.  The mother washes and decks out the dirty or careless child, but no one can ask her to wash and deck out a goblin with a heart like hell.  No one can kill the fatted calf for Mephistopheles.  The cause which is block all progress to-day is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. . . .  Things must be loved first and improved afterwards. — G. K. Chesterton, “In Defense of a New Edition,” The Defendant, pp. 7-8.

Family Chamber Music Societies

Successful family living strikes me as being in many ways rather like playing chamber music.  Each member of the ensemble has his own skills, his own special knack with the part he chooses to play; but the grace and strength and sweetness of the performance come from everyone’s willingness to subordinate individual virtuosity and personal ambition to the requirements of balance and blend.

The great difference between ensemble playing and ensemble living is that for the one you have a prescribed pattern that shows you where to come in and how to weave your own part in and out among the intricacies of the other players’ notes; when to take the leading part, and when to twitter away quietly in the background.  But living together is a perpetual exercise in improvization.  Most of us senior members of family chamber music societies have some idea of what the general form and finish of the composition should be — heaven help us if we have not!  But we direct the proceedings without rehearsal, and with players who are feeling their way, sometimes timidly and sometimes with comical forthrightness, through the unwritten score.

Not for us is the satisfaction of retrieving our errors as actual players do, with, “Let’s take that passage over again and this time do it right.”  What’s gone is gone, and the worst of our case is that sometimes in the surge and press of our performance we are not even aware of the nature of our mistakes and are troubled by discords that we are powerless to remedy.  We can only play resolutely on, hoping that by practice we shall learn to execute similar passages with skill and assurance and so, perhaps, make amends for our earlier blunders.  Nor is there any counterpart in our experience of that other prerogative of real ensemble players: never on coming to the end of a beautifully played movement can we exclaim, “That was marvelous! Let’s do it again!” Families can never count on repeating the joys of success: they can only remember. — Annis Duff, “Longer Flight”: A Family Grows Up with Books, 11-12.

Magia Bona

Said Shakepeare’s Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  But what do we do with things, experiences, powers that we can’t explain? J. Douma’s book on The Ten Commandments is helpful in this regard.

In his treatment of the First Word, Douma brings up the question of  “unusual” powers, such as clairvoyance, along with such things as acupuncture, reflexology, yoga, and so on.  How are we to view such things?  He points, first, to the type of people described in Deuteronomy 18:10-11:

If they are indeed false prophets who seek to predict our future and tell us how we should arrange our lives in terms of that future, then they certainly do belong in that category.  If not, however, then although we might still have many other reasons for criticizing acupuncture, reflexology, and the like, we should not allege that they come from “the domain of the Devil.”  If a clairvoyant can help solve a murder, or if a technician applying unorthodox treatments can ease someone’s pain, then we could view these as special abilities that can obviously be used to a good end.  In any case, these have nothing to do with false prophecy (26).

One might think that only a modern ethicist would deal with things such as alternative medicine and clairvoyance.  But Douma goes on to cite the distinction made by the seventeenth century Reformed ethicism, Gisbert Voetius: “He spoke first of magia bona, referring to the art of knowing the hidden properties of natural things.  Using that knowledge, people with deeper insight into nature could effect wonderful things.  But even though they appear supernatural, these are phenomena of nature” (26).

Voetius distinguished this sort of “magic” from magia vana (playful, slight-of-hand magic: the kind of thing that a stage magician does for entertainment) and from magia superstitiosa (superstitious sorcery; the sort of thing condemned in Deuteronomy 18, Leviticus 19, and Acts 13:10, which identifies “Elymas the sorcerer” as a “son of the devil”).

Nor is Voetius alone.  Douma also cites the great Reformed theologian Klaas Schilder, who pointed out that many people condemn these sorts of things “because of their inherent mysteriousness, albeit fallaciously, as nothing short of the work of the devil.”  Schilder’s own view is quite different:

Many individuals seem to have an immediate certainty about something that happened far away, a certainty too remote and too exceptional for the ordinary, everyday paths of knowledge.  Everything in the domain of the so-called “occult,” insofar as it makes use of potentialities present in God’s creation, is nothing more than a very normal employment of what God has put in creation.  In many cases the intention with which people in so-called occult circles operate with such divinely given potentialities may well be wrong, and people may well pursue those things for selfish purposes, so that for these reasons such use and pursuits are worthy of condemnation, but we are dealing here ultimately with things that belong to nature itself (cited 26).

In short, there’s a lot about God’s world and about the capabilities of humans (to say nothing of animals!) that we don’t understand. Used wisely and used well, such things may be received with thanksgiving as good gifts from God.  Or they may be rejected as unhelpful.  But our inability to explain things doesn’t mean that we should view them with suspicion, as if they’re probably evil.

Theologia Reformata Reformanda Est

As it is true that ecclesia reformata reformanda est so also is it true that theologia reformata reformanda est.  When any generation is content to rely upon its theological heritage and refuses to explore for itself the riches of divine revelation, then declension is already underway and heterodoxy will be the lot of the succeeding generation.  The powers of darkness are never idle and in combating error each generation must fight its own battle in exposing and correcting the same.  It is light that dispels darkness and in this sphere light consists in the enrichment which each generation contributes to the stores of theological knowledge.

Much of the pleading for adaptation of the gospel to the needs of this generation is suspect. For it is too often a plea for something other than the gospel.  Far more important is the reminder that each generation must be adapted to the gospel.  It is true, however, that the presentation of the gospel must be pointed to the needs of each generation.  So it is with theology.  A theology that does not build upon the past ignores our debt to history and naively overlooks the fact that the present is conditioned by history.  A theology that relies upon the past evades the demands of the present.

The progressive correction and enrichment which theology undergoes is not the exclusive task of great theologians. It often falls to the lot of students with mediocre talent to discover the oversights and correct the errors of the masters. In the orthodox tradition we may never forget that there is yet much land to be possessed, and this is both the encouragement and the challenge to students of the wonderful works of God and particularly of his inscripturated Word to understand that all should address themselves to a deeper understanding of these unsearchable treasures of revelation to the end that God’s glory may be made more fully manifest and his praises declared to all the earth. — John Murray, “Systematic Theology,” Collected Writings of John Murray, 4:8-9.

Updike and Schmemann

In the “I know you don’t care about this at all, but it interested me, for whatever it’s worth” department, apparently John Updike read Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World.  In a book review of Still, a recent memoir by Lauren Winner (which I haven’t read, by the way), I came upon this paragraph:

She stumbles on a scribble in a copy of For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, by the Orthodox writer Alexander Schmemann, that belonged to late novelist John Updike. In the margins, Updike had penciled “God gives us many gifts, but God is He Who gives God,” a quote from Augustine.

 

Productivity vs. the Bramble Man

In an election year, there are a number of temptations we need to beware of.  We may be tempted to think that the only way to avert catastrophe is by getting the right man elected as president. We may begin to think that what’s happening with the candidates is the “real action,” as if the race to the White House is the most significant thing that will happen this year in the battle between right and wrong, good and evil, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man.  We may even begin to wonder about other Christians who don’t seem to get as excited about politics as we do, who carry on with their ordinary lives as if they’ve never heard of any of the candidates:  “Don’t they care?  Don’t they see how important this stuff is?”

In Judges 9, Gideon’s son Jotham tells a parable.  His half-brother Abimelech has murdered all of Gideon’s other sons and is in the process of being acclaimed king, but Jotham wants Israel to know that Abimelech is a bramble.  The trees, says Jotham, wanted a king and so they asked the olive tree, the fig tree, and the vine, but each time the tree they wanted turned them down.  Why?  Too busy with productive work and no desire to “go and wave over the trees.”  Finally, they ask the bramble — Abimelech — and he’s only to glad to “wave over the trees.”

We learn a lot from this parable, and it’s surprising to me that there’s no reference to it in the works of political theology I’ve consulted.   Jim Jordan summarizes the teaching of the parable this way, and I quote it because it explained a lot for me:

The point of the parable is that good men do not desire to lord it over others.  Good men are happy being productive for God and for their fellowmen.  They realize that the road to greatness is the way of the servant, as their Lord taught (Mark 10:42-45).  The only kind of men who desire political authority for its own sake are bramble men — unproductive men who seek to attain fame and fortune by taking it from others who are productive.

The political inactivity of Christians and of their sometime fellow travellers, the conservatives, in our modern society is partly explained by this parable.  Christians are oriented to serving God and  man through work in the marketplace.  Their satisfaction comes through productivity.  They believe that the solution for modern social problems is faith in God and hard, productive work.  Unfortunately, most modern men look to the state, to the bramble, for answers.

Those who greatly desire to be kings are usually the least qualified for the post.  Far wiser government generally comes from those who only reluctantly shoulder the heavy burdens of office.  The good wise trees were reluctant; the bramble was anxious to rule.  — James B. Jordan, Judges: A Practical and Theological Commentary, 166 (emphasis added).

While all three paragraphs here are important, the second one in particular jumped out at me.  Why aren’t more Christians worked up about politics?  Why don’t more Christians run for office?   One answer may be that they’re involved in other important stuff.  Christians are doing their jobs, but their time and strength is also taken up with worshiping God, teaching their kids, playing with their kids, working in the garden, reading a good story, taking care of the needy, cooking meals, cleaning up messes, having coffee with friends  — doing all kinds of things that bring joy to God and man (like the vine in the parable, whose wine makes God happy when poured out in worship and makes man happy at a feast).

 

Books I Enjoyed Most in 2011

Here’s my annual list of the books I enjoyed most in 2011, listed alphabetically by the author’s last name. Enjoy!

* Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God (all three available in one volume now). Great novels by a Nigerian novelist. The first, especially, should not be missed for its presentation of the effects of the gospel and of the way in which it was presented on prechristian Nigerian culture.

* Esther Averill, Jenny and the Cat Club and its sequels, in particular, The Hotel Cat and Captains of the City Streets (which is actually a prequel). I read these to my kids and they enjoyed them.

* Jeffrey Barlough, Dark Sleeper. Okay, the ending was a bit weak, I thought, but I forgive it easily for the atmosphere, the great writing, the many laughs, and the Blaylockian love of good food and pints of porter in cozy inns with the cold and fog outside. Tim Powers recommended the book and I agree with him: “When you’ve finished you’ll want to go back again soon.”

* Owen Barfield’s The Silver Trumpet. I don’t know how much of Barfield’s unique philosophy is present in this fairy tale; someday I’ll read some of Barfield’s nonfiction and perhaps I’ll discover that I already understand what he’s saying because I read this one first. But I read it with my kids as a fun story. Tolkien’s kids loved it, and so did mine.

* Ruth Beechick, Adam and His Kin. Very interesting. She’s wrong on a lot of points (e.g., dispensationalism, demons marrying humans in Genesis 6, drawing on Hislop’s The Two Babylons). So why did I enjoy this book? Because she takes the biblical chronology seriously. We need something like this, drawing on the work that Jim Jordan has done on biblical chronology, etc., and without the weird stuff Beechick throws in. I’ll add that I also very much enjoyed her The Language Wars and Other Writings for Homeschoolers, which includes balanced and helpful essays on phonics (and the erroneous claim that it can solve all reading problems), the teaching of history (following biblical chronology), how homeschooling magazines choose their articles and review books (often based on who advertises in the magazine), and more.

* Wendell Berry’s The Memory of Old Jack. Very well done.

* James P. Blaylock, The Digging Leviathan. What a strange but enjoyable book. Laughed out loud at points. Can’t even begin to describe it.

* Walter R. Brooks, The Story of Freginald. The fourth Freddy the Pig book. Lots of fun.

* Bo Caldwell, The Distant Land of My Father. Reads like a memoir, to the extent that it was hard to imagine that the author wasn’t writing about her own life; very enjoyable.

* Bruce Campbell, The Secret of Skeleton Island. Okay, this isn’t what you expected me to read this year. I understand that. Yes, this is a boy’s adventure novel, written back in the ’40s, the first in a series of novels starring Ken Holt. I hadn’t read any of the Ken Holt novels when I was a boy, but they were the kind of stuff that I gobbled up. I came across a reference to these books online, identifying them as one of the greatest and best written of the old “series books,” so I decided to give this one a try. Loads of fun for your inner boy.

* Milton Caniff, The Complete Terry and the Pirates, 1934-1936. Lots of fun; early comic strips by one of the great cartoonists.

* Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Compelling: Carr argues that the internet — and especially Google, social media, and hyperlinks — are a “technology of distraction,” requiring constant decision making (click this link or not?) and thereby exercise our brains in such a way that the decision-making areas of our brains develop while our ability to read, concentrate, be attentive, think deeply, and exercise empathy and compassion deteriorate so that our thinking becomes shallow. Lots of interesting stuff here about neuroplasticity, computers, and more. Is it accurate? The more I surf the web, the more I‘m persuaded.

* Rebecca Caudill, Happy Little Family, Schoolhouse in the Woods, Up and Down the River, and Schoolroom in the Parlor. Read this series to my children, who enjoyed it immensely.

* G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday. What can I say? This is a great book, but it’s not one that I fully understand.

* Joan Chittester, The Gift of Years: Growing Old Gracefully. Not my usual fare. The author’s theological stance is quite different from my own. But there’s some great stuff here, mixed with some junk. Chew carefully and spit out the bones.

* Clay Clarkson, Heartfelt Discipline: The Gentle Art of Training and Guiding Your Children. I do not necessarily agree with everything Clarkson says. In particular, his treatment of the “rod” in Scripture needs careful evaluation. But it’s one of the best treatments of wholistic discipline I’ve come across, and the only one I’ve seen yet that deals with, e.g., sympathy as part of discipline.

* Sally Clarkson, The Mission of Motherhood: Touching Your Child’s Heart for Eternity. I didn’t agree with everything and found some things in the book a bit sentimental, but there’s a lot of good stuff here about raising children and about the attitude parents — and not just mothers — need.

* Barbara Cooney, Miss Rumphuis. What list of great books would be complete without some picture books? This is a particularly beautiful one.

* Meindert DeJong, The Wheel on the School. One of the great things about being a dad is getting to read to your kids, and one of the great things about that is that you can read old favorites. But another great thing about it is that you can read books you missed when you were a kid. For some reason, I never read DeJong, classic those his books are. I’m making up for that now. My children and I loved this one.

* August Derleth, The Moon Tenders and The Mill Creek Irregulars: Special Detectives. Remember how I sounded almost defensive when I talked about reading the Bruce Campbell novel above? Well, these are the first two of another series of boy’s books, perhaps the best written such series ever, and so there’s no need for me to sound defensive here. These books are simply wonderful, not so much for the plots, which meander enjoyably but for the historic details, the atmosphere, the sense of place, the recollection of a boyhood in Wisconsin in the ’20s. The whole set is available here, and I think I’ll start saving my pennies to buy it.

* Eilis Dillon, A Family of Foxes and The Sea Wall. I had never heard of this author before last year and had never read anything by her when I was growing up, more’s the pity. I read these two to my children, who loved them. Excellent writing, great adventures.

* David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America. The author’s suggestions at the end are weak, but the book is very, very helpful in understanding the “deep change” that took place with regard to the American attitude toward the elderly and the shift to a “cult of youth.”

* Tim Gautreaux, The Next Step in the Dance. Gautreaux is a very good Cajun writer.

* Charles Boardman Hawes, The Great Quest. Reminded me a lot of Robert Louis Stevenson.

* Thomas Howard, The Novels of Charles Williams. Don’t venture into the deep waters of Williams without this guidebook. In fact, the guidebook would be great reading even if you weren’t reading Williams. There is so much here about Williams’s themes: self-sacrifice, our mutual dependence, the symbolical nature of everything in life, the glory of hierarchy, the demand of faith in every small decision — I could go on and on.

* James B. Jordan, Judges: A Practical and Theological Commentary.  At the risk of being accused of overstatement, I will say this: This is the only really good commentary on Judges.  Sure, it could be improved.  Jordan himself has written more about Judges since this commentary, and the commentary was written before Jordan really understood chiasms so he says nothing here about the chiasm that structures the book.

But even though there is some helpful stuff in many other commentaries, none of them come close to this one.  Why not?  For one thing, none of them deal much with the symbolism of Judges.  Look, there are easier ways of setting a Philistine field on fire than catching three hundred foxes and tying them tail to tail with a torch between each pair.  But that’s what Samson did.  In fact, many of Samson’s actions are full of symbolism, but most commentaries do little to nothing with that symbolism.

Perhaps that’s because they think of Samson as wicked or stupid or both.  And that’s another problem that’s widespread in commentaries on Judges.  Most do not regard the judges as men of faith.  Daniel Block, for instance, helpful though he is for Hebrew stuff, refuses to let Hebrews 11 influence his reading of the judges and ends up seeing almost all of them as compromised or faulty or even wicked in some way, so that the message of Judges becomes that God saves His people not just through the judge but actually more in spite of the judge.

I see, by the way, that George Schwab has a new commentary on Judges (Right in Their Own Eyes: The Gospel According to Judges).  The link will take you to the opening pages of the book, including the introduction, which has some good things in his introduction about Samson and the honey in the lion but … I can tell by the chapter titles where he’s going.  The chapter on Ehud is entitled “Soiled Southpaw, Rotund Ruler.”  Ehud soiled? In what way?  Perhaps, like Block, Schwab thinks that Ehud shouldn’t have assassinated Eglon, but that’s simply wrong.  In any case, it seems to me that it was Eglon who was soiled — who, in fact, soiled himself — and that Israel was meant to laugh about it as they read the story.  But keep reading Schwab’s chapter titles: The one on Barak calls him a “sissy,” the one on Jephthah speaks of him as jaundiced (whatever that could mean).  Sigh.

If you want commentary recommendations on Judges, here are mine: Start with Jordan, supplemented with his other essays and lectures on Judges (e.g., “Samson the Bridegroom”).  Move on to Davis for a few more insights and perhaps use Block for some help with the Hebrew.  But you’re not going to find too many other people who approach Judges the way Jordan does, and that’s too bad.

* Jan Karon, At Home in Mitford. Rereading this series. Sure, there are some overly sweet and sentimental parts, but on the whole I’m enjoying it.

* Frank O. King, Walt and Skeezix: 1923 & 1924. Old enough to remember the comic strip Gasoline Alley? I’m not. But I love these old strips, especially because little Skeezix reminds me of my son.

* Eleanor Frances Lattimore, More About Little Pear. The fourth and final volume in a series that my children and I enjoyed.

* C. S. Lewis & E. M. W. Tillyard, The Personal Heresy: A Controversy. High quality debate. Just when you think Lewis has won, you read Tillyard’s contribution. It’s great to see men of this caliber disagreeing with each other and working out their similarities and differences in the course of this debate. In the end, I think Lewis wins, but Tillyard’s essays, too, are worthwhile reading.

* C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair and The Horse and His Boy. I’m reading these to my children. I knew I’d enjoy them, but I had forgotten how good the Narnia books really are.

* George MacDonald, David Elginbrod. Odd theology throughout, though worth carefully thinking through because MacDonald often forces us to confront how we present our doctrine and how some wrong presentations become entrenched and do great damage (e.g., when people say that God doesn’t see as “as we really are” but sees us only in Christ, that can lead to the conclusion that God doesn’t really like us but simply tolerates us for Christ’s sake).

* Jack McDevitt, Seeker. The third in McDevitt’s novels about Alex Benedict. Very well crafted science fiction.

* Patrick O’Brian, The Surgeon’s Mate, The Ionian Mission, Treason’s Harbour, The Far Side of the World, The Reverse of the Medal, and The Letter of Marque. Not a weak novel in the series yet. My neighbor in Oregon read straight through the entire series with barely a pause and when I asked him if it didn’t start to get repetitious, he assured me that it did not. He’s been right so far!

* Les & Leslie Parrott, Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts. Quite helpful. I drew on this for my premarital counseling this year.

* Rousas John Rushdoony, Intellectual Schizophrenia: Culture, Crisis and Education. Some stuff wrongheaded — e.g., family as the central institution; parochial schools necessarily bad — but lots of good stuff. It was interesting to discover stuff in this early Rushdoony book that I associate with and learned from later writers. Rush was talking about it all the way back in 1961!

* C. S. Spurgeon, The Complete John Ploughman: John Ploughman’s Talk and John Ploughman’s Pictures. Great stuff, full of rich language.

* James Thurbur, The 13 Clocks. Wonderful fun.

* Cornelius Van Til, Psychology of Religion. There are books I want to read and books I want to have read, and Van Til usually falls into the latter category. This book isn’t particularly fun reading, but what made me appreciate it were the occasional flashes of great brilliance, such as Van Til’s obliteration of the exaltation of reason over emotion or any other faculty.

* H. Gilbert Welch, Lisa M. Schwartz, and Steven Wolshin, Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health. One of the most important books I read this year and one which I highly recommend. Welch, et al., argue (convincingly) that most “preventative” testing is unnecessary, along the way showing how pharmaceutical companies affect the “numbers” — e.g., acceptable vs. dangerous cholesterol levels — so that more people are diagnosed as being in a danger zone than before and warning about the dangers of proceeding with treatment based on an overdiagnosis. If you enjoyed Rob Maddox’s lectures at the recent Auburn Avenue Pastors Conference or wanted to know more about the kinds of things he was saying when he talked about the hubris of medicine, check out this book.

* Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter and Little Town on the Prairie. Read these books as a subversion of Pa’s individualism. The West wasn’t settled by rugged individuals, try as Pa will to be one, but by people banding together, forming towns, helping each other in crises.

* Charles Williams, Descent into Hell. Weird and wonderful.

* Gene Wolfe, The Sorcerer’s House. Perhaps one of the easier Wolfe novels to understand, but it left me turning over this and that and the other thing in my mind afterwards, which is half the fun of reading Wolfe (“Wait a minute! If he said that, then …?!”).

Objectivity and Common Prayer

In his provocative (and sometimes wrongheaded) Why Catholics Can’t Sing, Thomas Day stresses that the liturgy is not only corporate, as opposed to individual, but that it is also to be carried out with objectivity rather than subjectivity.  In the ritual, he says, individuals surrender to something bigger than themselves, so that instead of emphasizing their own individuality or their subjective experience they are taking part in something corporate.  Worship is “common prayer,” not a bunch of individuals who are each praying their own prayers.

Take the Scripture reading, for example:

A good example of objectivity in place or removed for purposes of de-ritualization can be found in the manner of proclaiming scriptures aloud at a liturgy.  According to the traditional method, someone chants the words from the Bible or reads them in a neutral tone of voice; that is, objectively.  The words themselves might tell of something joyful or horrible or ecstatic, but the voice of the reader remains steady and objective.  According to the latest de-ritualizing technique, the reader dispenses with all efforts to remain objective and, instead, colors the story with little, personal touches: dramatic pauses, emphasis on certain words, quotations spoken “in character,” and so on.  The reading takes on the style of one of those novels or children’s stories on tape; everything is all very vivid, to be sure, but, without the objectivity, those words of scripture disappear behind the display of personality.  We do not hear the words of Genesis or Matthew or Paul; we hear (and watch) Bob or Suzy or Joe give us a personal interpretation of scripture.  Bob, Suzy, and Joe do not want to be participants in a collective action; they want us to remain aware that, above all, even above and beyond the words of scripture, they are Bob, Suzy, and Joe (45-46).

I hasten to add that Day is not saying (and I certainly am not) that liturgical reading of Scripture ought to be monotonous, robotic, with nary a trace of emphasis anywhere and never a change of pitch.  What he is saying (and what I want to stress) is that the Scripture reading is not a time for the reader’s own individuality to come to the fore, not a time for him to draw attention to himself.  It’s not appropriate to dramatize the reading, giving the various disciples their own distinctive voices or sounding as if you’re weeping when you’re “being” Mary and Martha at Lazarus’s tomb or raising your volume to shout “Lazarus, come forth!” or … adding … dramatic … pauses and emphases and changes of pitch.   All of that may be fine and appropriate when you’re reading a novel to your kids at home — by all means, give Long John Silver a distinctive voice when you’re reading Treasure Island — but in the liturgy the reading ought to draw attention to the text, not to the reader.

What about some other aspects of our common worship?  Take the phrase “common prayer,” which is the term used to describe the whole liturgy in the Anglican tradition (The Book of Common Prayer).  The liturgy is full of prayer, but these prayers are not the time for the display of one’s own personality or one’s own experience.  The prayer of confession in the Sunday morning service is not the time for weeping and gnashing of teeth as one mourns one’s sin.  The prayer for the needs of all Christendom (often called “the long prayer”) is not the time for the minister to launch into flights of eloquence (“Oh, Pastor, you pray so beautifully!” someone says). The various prayers the congregation prays are not the time for the members of the congregation to express themselves with overly dramatic enunciations, which rank up there with lagging behind the congregation or rushing ahead of them as a liturgical annoyance.  Such things draw attention away from the prayer itself and to the pray-er, and may (at least in the case of the eloquent pastoral prayer, give the congregation the impression that to truly be able to pray well, one must be able to come up with sponteneous tour-de-force prayers the way the pastor seems to every Sunday).

Add one more thing: the pastor’s clothing.  It’s possible that some people think that distinctive clerical garb is a way of drawing attention to the pastor, and it certainly can be.  If the clothing is garish and gaudy or even if the minister wears it out of pride, then it doesn’t serve its purpose.  But its purpose is not to emphasize the personality of the minister.  Quite the opposite: The purpose is to de-emphasize his personality, to cover him up so that no one can see what sort of tie he’s wearing today or wonder why his wife let him out of the house wearing that, and instead to emphasize his office and the role that he’s performing during the service.

The Lord’s Service is corporate, and so it ought to be objective.  The focus ought to be, not on me and my experience or my abilities or my personality — even if I’m the minister. Rather, the focus ought to be the liturgy itself, on the text of Scripture, on the words we’re singing or praying, on what the group is doing together and on what God is doing to us as we draw near to Him.

Deschooling Society

Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society is, in many ways, a disappointing book.  The problem is not just that it’s outdated.  The problem is that the flashes of insight that impressed me at the beginning of the book were reduced to a trickle midway through and that, while I appreciated a lot of Illich’s critique of compulsory government schooling, his own suggestions for a “deschooled” society struck me as quixotic and utopian, bordering on ludicrous.

That said, there was stuff I appreciated, stuff that (even if you don’t agree with it) makes you say “Huh!  I need to think about that some more,” beginning with the opening paragraph:

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them.  They school them to confuse process and substance.  Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success.  The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.  His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value.  Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.  Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question (1).

Educating the Whole Child

Between the two concepts of education, the Calvinistic and that of the Enlightenment and contemporary thought, there can be no compromise.  They are in hopeless contradiction.  The modern concept, with its cosmopolitanism and its clean-tablet ideal, is erosive and destructive of all aspects of culture except the monolithic state, which is then the ostensible creator and patron of culture.  When it speaks of the whole child, it speaks of a passive creature who is to be molded by statist education for a concept of the good life radically divorced from God and from all transcendental standards.  The goal of such education will only be reached when man ceases to be man, and, this being an impossibility, the only outcome of such education can be the increasing resistance of the child to its radical implications.

Modern education thus is statist education, and the state is made the all-embracing institution of which all other institutions are but facets.  The state and the person, government and individual, become thus the two realities of such a world-view.  both demand freedom and power for themselves.  The state recognizes no law beyond itself and the individual insists on his own autonomy and ultimacy.  But the child of the state, being a man without faith, has no vital principle of resistance and thus even in his rebellion is statist.  Every philosophy of autonomous man from the Greeks to the present has foundered on the problem of the one and the many, universality and particularity.  If the one is affirmed as the ultimate reality, the individuals are swallowed up in the whole.  If the many be affirmed, then reality is lost in endless particularity and individuality, and no binding concept has any reality.  Thus, the one and the many are in perpetual tension.  The individual and the state, for example, can only each affirm themselves at the expense of the other.

Against this, the consistent Christian philosophy, as developed by Calvinistic thinkers such as Kuyper, Bavinck and C. Van Til, by beginning with the biblical revelation and the ontological trinity, begins thereby with the equal ultimacy and the fundamental congeniality of the one and the many in the trinity, three persons, one God.

The concept of the covenant furthers this unity in that the self-realization of the individual is the advantage of all and is advanced by and integral with the self-realization of others.  In the modern conception, the fulfilment and self-realization of the individual are at the expense of others and may involve their sacrifice.  For the orthodox Christian, self-realization apart from the covenant is an impossibility, and it involves life in an organism, the true body of Christ.

This latter concept, the body of Christ, asserts emphatically in all its biblical statements that individuality is not monotonous repetition but the fulfilment of varying functions and callings as individuals who are yet part of a common whole.  The service of the body requires the fulfilment of the individual; the eye must fulfil itself as an eye that the entire body as well may prosper. — Rousas J. Rushdoony, Intellectual Schizophrenia: Culture, Crisis and Education, pp. 9-11.