Category Archive: Uncategorized
Borges and Blindness
Later on in his “Autobiographical Essay,” Borges talks about going blind:
My blindness had been coming on gradually since childhood. It was a slow, summer twilight. There was nothing particularly pathetic or dramatic about it. Beginning in 1927, I had undergone eight eye operations, but since the late 1950’s, when I wrote my “Poem of the Gifts,” for reading and writing purposes I have been blind.
Blindness ran in my family; a description of the operation performed on the eyes of my great-grandfather, Edward Young Haslam, appeared in the pages of the London medical journal, the Lancet. Blindness also seems to run among the directors of the National Library. Two of my eminent forerunners, Jose Marmol and Paul Groussac, suffered the same fate.
In my poem, I speak of God’s splendid irony in granting me at one time 800,000 books and darkness. One salient consequence of my blindness was my gradual abandonment of free verse in favor of classical metrics. In fact, blindness made me take up the writing of poetry again. Since rough drafts were denied me, I had to fall back on memory. It is obviously easier to remember verse than prose, and to remember regular verse forms rather than free ones. Regular verse is, so to speak, portable. One can walk down the street or be riding the subway while composing and polishing a sonnet, for rhyme and meter have mnemonic virtues (p. 250).
Mark Twain on Jane Austen
In his “Autobiographical Essay” at the end of The Aleph and Other Stories, Borges mentions how much he dislikes his first seven books:
In fact, when in 1953 my present publisher — Emece — proposed to bring out my “complete writings,” the only reason I accepted was that it would allow me to keep those preposterous volumes suppressed. This reminds me of Mark Twain’s suggestion that a fine library could be started by leaving out the works of Jane Austen, and that even if that library contained no other books it would still be a fine library, since her books were left out (pp. 230-231).
I don’t agree with Twain, and I don’t know that Borges does either, but I found that comment amusing, and all the more so since Borges is applying the comment to his early works.
Which Theologian
| “God will not suffer man to have the knowledge of things to come; for if he had prescience of his prosperity he would be careless; and understanding of his adversity he would be senseless.” |
A creation of Henderson
Actually, I kinda like being Augustine (though I have to admit that the questionnaire asks some odd questions and I didn’t like all the options).
Two or Three Gathered
In a small church, you certainly notice when a few families are away. This Sunday, most of the Barendregts (all but Alex), several Soleses, the Morins, and Steve were all in Moscow. Another family, the Wattels, are away on a vacation.
As a result, the service was a bit different. For one thing, the volume was much lower when it came to singing and to the congregational Amens. It’s also a bit easier to preach to a larger group (I know now a bit better how Mark feels!).
As well, all of our musicians were away, so I had to lead singing a capella, going down to the piano before each song to plunk out our opening note(s). I also led the singing time before the afternoon service and managed to pick out the alto, tenor, and bass lines (one at a time, mind you!) to help us learn to sing harmonies on a couple of songs.
I’m looking forward to having everyone back home. Still, as promised, the Lord was present with us. We ascended into heaven together, entered God’s presence, heard his Word, and prayed and sang with as much enthusiasm as we could muster (though sometimes our enthusiasm wasn’t matched by our ability: funny how familiar songs become difficult when you have to lead them).
Bitterness
Courtesy of David Cassidy, here’s another quotation from Charles Simeon: “Being bitter is like drinking poison and waiting for the other guy to die.”
Washers and Dryers
A laundry question for you: Why is it that dryers have buzzers to let you know that the load is done, but washers don’t?
It can’t be because washers make so much noise that you’ll know when they’re done. After all, dryers make noise, too. Is it perhaps because there are certain clothes that have to be taken out of the dryer right now or they’ll be wrinkled, but clothes never have to be taken out of the washer immediately?
Opening Sentences
Recently, I’ve been reading a collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges. This particular collection, The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969, contains some commentary by Borges on each of his stories. In his comments on “The Dead Man,” Borges writes:
Here, as in other cases, I have begun with a long opening sentence. My feeling is that first sentences should be long in order to tear the reader out of his everyday life and firmly lodge him in an imaginary world. If an illustrious example be allowed me, Cervantes apparently felt the same way when he began his famous novel (p. 272).
Perhaps there’s something to be said for this approach. But surely there’s also something to be said for the short punchy opening that catches the reader before he can catch his breath. Something like “Hale knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours.” (Recognize that one?) How could you not keep reading?
Jane
Peter Leithart hasn’t mentioned it yet on his blog, but First Things recently published his article “Jane Austen, Public Theologian.” Most of the essay focuses on Mansfield Park. Here’s a sample:
Austen was not an unthinking defender of traditional social order. Not uncommonly, her heroines are upwardly mobile, particularly through the agency of matrimony. Yet she sensed the corrosive effects of individualism, and her uncanny intelligence and attention to the details of social surface enabled her to give us one of literature’s sharpest portraits of this emerging reality. That she also recognized the absence and failure of the Church in combating this decay makes her a public theologian to reckon with.
If you like Austen (and this includes you, Gideon), this ought to whet your appetite for Peter’s Miniatures and Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen, forthcoming (someday) from Canon Press.
“Timeless Truths”?
When I was in seminary, I was introduced to “redemptive-historical preaching,” as exemplified by men such as Klaas Schilder and Benne Holwerda. These men insisted that we must read the Bible historically, taking into account that, for instance, Abraham is before Moses and that David is after Moses. There’s progress and development and change throughout the history of God’s covenant.
It’s crucial for exegetes and theologians to take that development into account. For instance, if you’re theologizing about angels, you need to be aware that since the coming of Christ there has been a change in man’s relationship to the angels. The Torah was given through angels, we’re told, and in the Old Covenant angels appear as tutors for men. In the Old Covenant, the Second Person of the Trinity appears as the Angel of Yahweh. (Question for you: What’s the personal name of the Angel of Yahweh?) But with the coming of Christ, we are no longer under the angel tutors. Angels don’t function today in exactly the same way they did in the Old Covenant. And therefore, in developing a theology of angels, we shouldn’t simply grab a bunch of verses from the Bible higgledy-piggledy and use them as prooftexts for the doctrine we’re developing; we have to take into account their context in covenant history.
So, too, with Jesus. Sometimes Jesus gets presented as if he were simply going around saying and doing things that anyone could have said and done at any time, giving good moral instruction, for instance, or calling people to trust in God. Rather, through his words and deeds, Jesus is inaugurating something new. There is both continuity and discontinuity between Jesus’ teaching and God’s previous revelation in the Old Covenant.
When Jesus announces that the kingdom of God is “among you” (or perhaps: “within your grasp,” but not “inside you,” as some thing) or when Jesus proclaims that the kingdom of God is “at hand,” he’s speaking about something which is being introduced and embodied in his ministry, in his own words and actions, in the meals he has (with all the wrong people!) and the parables he tells. Jesus wasn’t preaching about something that had been there all along. He talks about “entering the kingdom,” but no one entered the kingdom of God before Jesus came.
One of the features I’ve appreciated most in N. T. Wright‘s Jesus and the Victory of God is his emphasis on history and the progress and development of redemptive history. He writes:
… the announcement of the kingdom of god could never, in the nature of the case, be heard as a “timeless” message, an incidental example or occurrence of some general truth. The whole point of it was that Israel’s dream was coming true right now. Equally important, it could never be divorced from the person and deeds of the proclaimer. This will have been as true for John the Baptist as for Jesus. This baptism is the “getting-ready-for-the-kingdom” baptism; this proclamation is the one that is actually inaugurating the kingdom. The two are, it seems, very closely linked; Jesus regarded the work of John as the launching-pad for his own work, and it is historically probable that he saw John’s arrest as the appropriate time to begin his own independent career of kingdom proclamation. The link of message and messenger is, of course, part of the scandal: the scandal of particularity (that YHWH should act here and now rather than at other times and places); the scandal that this was how the kingdom was coming; the scandal, too, of just who it was that YHWH was using, and the methods that he was employing. Like Salieri in Shaffer’s Amadeus, scandalized that his god should choose the disreputable Mozart as the vehicle for divine music, Jesus’ hearers could not but be struck, if they realized what was going on, at his extraordinary and shocking implicit claim (p. 228).
In a footnote, Wright clarifies what he means when he insists that Jesus wasn’t going around preaching “timeless truths”:
By “timeless” truth I do not mean necessarily a lofty philosophical abstraction. I mean something conceived to be a generally valid principle — e.g., “God is love” or “oppressors must be overthrown” or “brokered empires are bad for you” [Dominic Crossan’s view] — which could lead to political and/or revolutionary activity, and could indeed suggest some theological underpinnings for such activity, but which, crucially, would not carry the sense that the story of Israel was reaching its climax (p. 228n110).
Again, this helps us approach some of the questions I raised — or, rather, the questions Wright raised — about why Jesus lived. In his teaching, Jesus wasn’t simply going around saying things that were true. He wasn’t simply passing on some good moral instruction. In the things he did and said, he was bringing Israel’s history — covenant history — to its climax.
His teaching and his actions are thus fully historical. That is not to deny that they have relevance for today. But it is to say that if we are going to understand their relevance, we must not try to abstract them from their moment in covenant history.
TV, VCR, DVD
If you were purchasing a 27″ TV, a DVD, and a VCR, what models would you buy? What models would you flee from? Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated, especially if they contain links to the items you’re recommending!
Why Did Jesus Live?
For the past few weeks, I’ve been working my way through N. T. Wright‘s delicious Jesus and the Victory of God. This book really ought to be required reading for New Testament courses in seminary. I can’t imagine preaching the Gospels without at least interacting with Wright.
I was struck by this comment in the introduction:
In one sense, I have been working on this book on and off for most of my life. Serious thought began, however, when I was invited in 1978 to give a lecture in Cambridge on “The Gospel in the Gospels.” The topic was not just impossibly vast; I did not understand it. I had no real answer, then, to the question of how Jesus’ whole life, not just his death on the cross in isolation, was somehow ‘gospel’ (p. xiv).
That comment struck me because, though I’ve been reading the Gospels all my life and have even preached from them, I’m not sure I’ve ever really asked that question myself: How is Jesus’ whole life gospel? Our creeds pay little attention to Jesus’ life. The Apostles’ Creed, for instance, jumps straight from “born of the virgin Mary” to “suffered under Pontius Pilate.” The various Reformed confessions and catechisms do mention his teaching and his suffering, but say little about his life.
Later on in his book, Wright says:
The reformers had very thorough answers to the question “why did Jesus die?”; they did not have nearly such good answers to the question “why did Jesus live?” Their successors to this day have not often done any better. But the question will not go away. If the only available answer is “to give some shrewd moral teaching, to live an exemplary life, and to prepare for sacrificial death,” we may be forgiven for thinking it a little lame. It also seems, as we shall see, quite untrue to Jesus’ own understanding of his vocation and work.
It would not, then, be much of a caricature to say that orthodoxy, as represented by much popular preaching and writing, has had no clear idea of the purpose of Jesus’ ministry. For many conservative theologians it would have been sufficient if Jesus had been born of a virgin (at any time in human history, and perhaps from any race), lived a sinless life, died a sacrificial death, and risen again three days later…. The fact that, in the midst of these events, Jesus actually said and did certain things, which included giving wonderful moral teaching and annoying some of his contemporaries, functions within this sort of orthodox scheme merely as a convenience. Jesus becomes a composite figure, a cross between Socrates defeating the Sophists and Luther standing up against the Papists. His ministry and his death are thus loosely connected (p. 14).
Whatever we may think about Wright’s own answers to the question “Why did Jesus live?” it seems to me that it is a question well worth asking. Certainly part of the answer is that he lived in order to die for our sins on the cross, but that cannot be the whole of the answer. By itself, that answer makes Jesus’ life little more than the necessary precursor to his death — but then his life itself isn’t good news.
We need to ask ourselves: Why did Jesus live that particular life? Why did he have to be a Jew in first century Palestine and not, say, a Japanese man in eighteenth century Tokyo or a twentieth century Canadian? What was his calling and how did he carry it out? Why did he teach the particular things he taught? Why did he perform the particular signs he performed (e.g., calming the sea and healing the sick)? What is the connection between his life and his death? And how is all of that — all of his words and deeds, and not just his death — good news?
The questions are probably easier to ask than to answer, but they must be answered. I find Wright’s answers very helpful indeed. But I’m grateful to him, not only for giving some answers, but also for raising the question: Why did Jesus live?
The Lord’s Service
On my recent trip to Moscow, I received a copy of Jeff Meyers‘ new book, The Lord’s Service: The Grace of Covenant Renewal Worship. The book looks great. I read the earlier spiral-bound edition a couple years ago with great profit and now I’m looking forward to working through this revised and expanded version, newly published by Canon Press.
Jeff will likely not trumpet the publication of this book on his own blog, but I’m delighted to be able to do it. This is the best book on corporate worship from a Reformed writer period. More than that, it may well be the best book on corporate worship period. Jeff’s understanding of biblical theology and symbolism, as well as his years of work on the doctrine of the Trinity and his wide reading in liturgical studies, make this book a masterpiece. Buy several copies for yourselves and your friends and catapult Jeff to teenage stardom (albeit a bit late).