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Thought he doesn’t connect these ideas specifically in his book, I was struck by several passages in Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Poetry where the power of the text is manifest through the relative smallness of Hebrew vocabulary and grammar.

Studying Ethiopian Amharic lately made me much more aware of this. For example, in English we have the words “stick”, “cane”, “staff”, and “club”. Look up any of these in Amharic and you get the same single noun: “dula”. Hebrew, being a Semitic language like Amharic shares many of its traits.

In discussing various biblical poetic passages, Alter draws attention to how the author uses the vagueness of the words he has at his disposal to great effect. This is light-years away from English, where we have by far the most vast dictionary of any civilization in history – stealing words from everyone and incorporating them into our lexicon. On the one hand, this makes English the most potent and flexible of all mediums for poetry but it also PREVENTS it from working the sort of magic that is sometimes going on in scripture. This doesn’t work so well with an audience that expects more exactitude.

Here are a few notable examples of what I’m talking about:

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In Jeremiah 4, the Hebrews are warned that the land will be made desolate. The word for “land” is ‘eretz, which is also the word for “earth”. So is the prophet talking about something small and local or grand and eschatological? Perhaps both at the same time.

By contagion, the land is not dissociated from all the earth, and the desolation that will overtake it is a terrifying rehearsal of the utter end of the created world. Thus, the very attachment to hyperbole and the intensifying momentum of the poetic medium project the prophet’s vision onto a second plane of signification.

p.155

—

For then I would have lain down and been quiet;
I would have slept; then I would have been at rest,
with kings and counselors of the earth
who rebuilt ruins for themselves,
or with princes who had gold,
who filled their houses with silver.
(Job 3:13-15)

Our English translation is actually quite a bit more exact than the original. The translators made a lot of decisions about the meaning.

Kings and counselors rebuild ruins in the cycle of creation and destruction that is the life of men – or perhaps, since Hebrew has no “re” prefix, the phrase even suggests, more strikingly, that what they build at the very moment of completion is to be thought of as already turning into ruins.

p.81

Do you rebuild ruins or BUILD ruins? In Hebrew – it’s the same thing. The irony is preserved.

—

A false balance is abomination to the Lord: but a just weight is his delight.
(Proverbs 11:1 KJV)

Alter describes this passage from proverbs as being more “disturbing” in the original. I have to agree.

“Two kinds of weights, two kinds of measures” [in other translations] (literally, “weight and weight, measure and measure”). God’s decisively negative judgment against crooked business practices is paramount in both versions, but the riddle form makes it possible for us to apprehend more immediately the disturbing contradiction inherent in double standards, weight and weight, measure and measure.

p.178

I had a few other excerpts from Henri de Lubac’s Paradoxes of Faith that I liked. I was tired though and didn’t want to write individual blog posts for them though so here they are in scrapbook format.

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Advice to all young writers of memoirs and of various forms of philosophy at the very least. It is most of all advice to myself.

All serious thought is modest. It has no hesitation in going to school and staying there a long time. It is by dint of impersonality that it makes a conquest of itself and, without seeking to do so, becomes personal.

p.112

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This passage makes me think of the public mania over brain scan imagery and how the “neuro” prefix has been attached to nearly everything lately to try and lend an argument some sort of illusionary legitimacy.

We do not know what man is, or rather, we forget. The farther we go in studying him, the greater our loss of knowledge of him. We study him like an animal or alike a machine. We see in him merely an object, odder than all the others. We are bewitched by physiology, psychology, sociology, and all their appendages.

Are we wrong, then, to pursue these branches of learning? Certainly not. Are the results bogus, then, or negligible? No. The fault lies not with them, but with ourselves, who know neither how to assign them their place nor how to judge them. We believe, without thinking, that the “scientific” study of man can, at least by right, be universal and exhaustive. So it has the same deceptive – and deadly – result as the mania of introspection or the search for a static sincerity. The farther it goes, the more fearful it becomes. It eats into man, disintegrates and destroys him.

p.119

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Any authority is necessarily a teacher. It is only because we are still en route and our future state is not yet unfolded that, int eh voice of God our Father, we come to discern the Master commanding us and so have a strict feeling of obligation. It is for the same reason that there is a hierarchical authority in the Church. When God will be whole in everyone, in the Church Triumphant, the City of the Elect, there will no longer be any other hierarchy than that of charity.

Authority is ultimately based on charity, and its raison d’etre is education. The exercise of it, in the hands of those who hold any part of it whatever, should then be understood as pedagogy.

p.26

I’m actually still trying to make sense of this. Not sure if it’s profound or not!

—-

We do not want a mysterious God. Neither do we want a God who is Some One. Nothing is more feared than this mystery God who is Some One. We would rather not be some one ourselves, than meet that Some One!

p.214

Scary!

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Professors of religion are always liable to transform Christianity into a religion of professors. The Church is not a school.

p.224

This makes sense coming from someone from a liturgical and sacramental tradition. Protestantism, on the other hand, has been dominated by the giant mondo teaching sermon. Honestly, I still very much enjoy the latter when done well, but I am less convinced that it’s place is in a worship gathering, rather than a school of sorts.

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The passion of wanting to reform everything in the Church is for the most part in inverse proportion to the supernatural life; that is the reason why authentic and beneficial reforms almost never begin with such passion.

p.231

More argument for the slow burn of reform versus the mess of revolution.

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“How can I present Christianity, you say?” – There is only one answer: as you see it.
“How can I present Christ?” – As you love him.
“How can I talk of faith?” – According to what it is for you.
There is in questions of this sort, when they encroach too far, not a positive duplicity, no doubt, but at least artifice, a lack of sincerity; because there is a lack of faith.

p.215

I wish someone would have given me this line a lot more in all those evangelism training sessions I went to while in college.

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Christianity, it is said, owes this, that and the other to Judaism. It has borrowed this, that and the other from Hellenism. Or from Essenism. Everything in it is mortgaged from birth…
Are people naive enough to believe, before making a detailed study, that the supernatural excludes the possession of any earthly roots and any human origin? So they open their eyes and thereby shut them to what is essential, or, to put it better, to everything: which has Christianity borrowed Jesus Christ? Now, in Jesus Christ, “all things are made new”.

p.215

Fan-flippin’-tastic. The secularist says our roots are all in man. The literalist fundamentalist says they are all in God – as if the bible were penned by men in a trance. But we have roots of both kinds. Naturally.

Many people always see only the disadvantages of the present state of affairs and only the advantages of the one that ought to replace it. What is more, they think that all you have to do is destroy what exists and The Ideal will at once arise from its ruins – and they don’t give a thought to how this might occur. Anyone who shows himself ready to offer practical help to the present reality, with all its defects, is defamed for supporting injustice, for opposing the kingdom of justice.

-Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, p.167

Revolution often seen as the way forward instead of reform to our modern eyes. (“Let’s ditch this lame church institution and cook up our own awesomeness!”) or in foreign policy (“Let’s undermine that dictator and install a democracy in that country. That will fix everything!”) There are a ton of examples in the past century, decade, or even in the past year that have been disasters. Our model of disposable materialism even supports this. You don’t ever repair your iPhone when it dies – you get a new one of course. Same with clothes that wear out. An old world tailor is a reformer. Cheap retail textiles from east Asia offer us an endless stream of clothing revolution.

But this is not the wise way, which always seems to demand some kind of heavy patience. It is not God’s way either.

What is the answer to _____ (fill in the blank) problem of the world? The answer, once again, is some kind of slow burn. Some people denounce the Bible for not denouncing slavery proper at the first opportunity. Shouldn’t there be something about in on about the 2nd page of Acts? But the seeds that grew into freedom were all there – they just needed to be watered and they were.

What we see in scripture is a patient progression. God saves his people in time – sometimes a really LONG time. What happened to all those individuals in the meantime? They didn’t see the day of the Lord, but they were still part of the salvation. They had to be. The prophets were holy men, but they didn’t get to see it.

For verily I say unto you, That many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them. (Matthew 13:17)

Some of them died in exile in Babylon. But were they not still part of God’s salvation? Of course they were. They still count even though they passed out of the story before the last page.

WE in fact are not on the last page either, even if the climax has already occurred. It doesn’t seem too hard to extend Jesus’s parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) to this “slow burn salvation” as well. The people there from the beginning AND the latecomers both got paid full wages! So we are rewarded for being faithful, even if when we pass from this life, everything is still seems to be a big mess. Our part in the story was still played and it wasn’t trivial.

The resurrection is like a big full-cast Bollywood dance number played while the credits role. Everyone who died is back in the chorus with the surviving hero from the last scene. They may not have even known each other in life, but they all know the same steps now.

This is a fantastic passage with regards to the study of scripture and one of my favorite passage from de Lubac’s book.

When we are faced with a very great text, a very profound one, never can we maintain that eh interpretation we give of it – even if it is very accurate, the most accurate, if need be, the only accurate one – coincides exactly with its author’s thought.

The fact is, the text and the interpretation are not of the same order; they do not develop at the same level, and therefore they cannot overlay one another. The former expresses spontaneous, synthetic, “prospective”, in some fasion, creative knowledge. The latter, which is a commentary, is of the reflective and analytical order.

In a sense, the commentary, if it at all penetrating, always goes FARTHER than the text, since it makes what it finds there explicit; and if it does not in fact go father, it is of no use, since no light would then be shed by it on the text. But in another and more important sense, the text, bits concrete richness, always overflows the commentary, and never does the commentary dispense us from going back to the text. There is virtually infinity in it.

-Paradoxes of Faith, Henri de Lubac, p.109

Our ideas grow old with us, that is why we pay no particular attention to them, and we are quite astonished at younger minds not falling in love with them in their turn, as we did.

-Paradoxes of Faith, Henri de Lubac, p.98

Why do our our ideas grow old? The answer I think is that they are utterly wrapped up in context and more context. The context changes: we grow old, nations come and go, technology shifts, culture changes, and the rich meaning of our ideas is obscured. We deceive ourselves if we think we deal completely in “timeless truths”, the way a mathematician deals with pure numbers. Even the very words we use to express our ideas reveal the century, even decade, and geography in which they were forged, among other things.

If we really desire to pass our best ideas on, we could do better than to just write them down cleverly in books. This puts (though we or our contemporaries or editors cannot perceive it) a great burden on the reader years later to figure out what the heck we were trying to say. We need to teach our children and grandchildren how to decode them and adapt them. This means being a teacher and ideally, a father.

Paradox is the reverse of what, properly perceived, would by synthesis. But the proper view always eludes us. Each of us contributes by his existence to the weaving of a wonderful tapestry but it cannot yet be comprised entirely within our range of vision. In the field of facts as of spirit, syntheses can only be sought. Quamdiu vivimus, necesse habemus semper quaerere. (“As long as we live, we deem it essential ever to seek.”) Paradox is the search or WAIT for synthesis. It is the provisional expression of a view which remains incomplete, but whose orientation is ever towards fulness.

-Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, p.9

Some people ask me: Am I reformed? Perhaps they mean Reformed with a big ‘R’. Am I a Calvinist? Well, yes, sort of. I am because I believe in a model of the sufficiency of Jesus Christ that consistently maximizes His role and minimizes ours. But what is my view on election? My answer must ultimately be vague because of the reasons de Lubac gives above. Predestination and free will are a paradox. They are awaiting the eschaton to be resolved, or explained, or “synthesized”. Until then, we get to sit down, (and to some degree) shut up, and be patient.

This is why I am not fond of long confessions like the Westminster, whatever it’s merits or accuracy or logic. It tries to strap booster rockets on to our humble ship and blast it off into orbit, escaping the gravitational field of mystery. But I don’t think we can or were ever meant (destined?) to do such a thing. It’s no wonder there is plenty of frustration when the ship fails to reach escape velocity in many minds. No idea is so powerful as to effectively swallow up all others. Christ has promised to do that with death, but not yet. We must be patient and let things stand as they are now. We can let this (and many other things) remain partially unexplained. I pray that I always err on the side of magnifying Him disproportionately, if such a thing is possible.

Today is Epiphany. This picture, depicting the adoration of the Magi, is from an illuminated manuscript from the Netherlands, early 1500s.

“In 567 AD, at the Council of Tours, the church tried to reconcile a dispute between Western Europe and Eastern Europe. The West celebrated the feast of Christ’s birth on Christmas day, December 25th as it’s major holiday, and the East celebrated this day, January 6th as Epiphany, remembering the visit of the Wise Men and Jesus’ baptism. Since no agreement could be reached on a specific date, the decision was made to have all 12 days between December 25th and January 6th designated “holy days” or as it was later pronounced “holidays.” These became known as the “Twelve Days of Christmas.”

One of Chesterton’s better pieces of verse:

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost – how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky’s dome.

This world is wild as an old wives’ tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

Here in the pacific northwest United States, we have a high concentration of breweries. Around Christmas each year, Deschutes releases a winter ale called “Jubelale”. The best part about it is the artwork –  it’s often full of light! That, along with the Christological name makes this, in my mind, a very festive Christmas beverage indeed.

By the way, happy new year!

Here, in his introduction, Alter spells out clearly what nearly everyone in any field at some point attempts in their writing.

After three chapters on the system of biblical verse, I try to extend and refine my generalizations by applying them to major poetic texts, and through such applications to see something of the difference poetry makes in the Bible. I have not attempted a comprehensive treatment of every subgenre of biblical poetry or of all the various poetic insets in the narrative books, but the main genres and texts – psalms, prophetic poetry, Wisdom poetry from Job to Proverbs, love poetry – are all scrutinized. Indeed, one of the many gaps in the understanding of biblical poetry is a failure of those who generalize about it to make sufficient distinctions among genres, and this study represents an initial effort to correct that tendency of amalgamation.

-Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, p.ix

That last sentence could be rewritten for a thousand topics:

Indeed, one of the many gaps in the understanding of _______ is a failure of those who generalize about it to make sufficient distinctions among ______, and this study represents an initial effort to correct that tendency of amalgamation.

Man is always categorizing things. That’s how our minds work. It’s utterly natural. It’s the only way our brains can contain larger ideas. Our memories can’t hold and manage a deluge of details, so we have to name things (like Adam). Go us! But there is the rub. Close inspection finds that we are always grouping things too hastily or in too large of groups. Depending on the context, these categories may be helpful, but that can suddenly turn out to backfire on us and derail our thinking when they are not done carefully. In Alter’s case, he is annoyed at the number of bible scholars who group all poetry in the Bible in one bucket and talk about it as if it has this or that characteristic or meaning. Good job distinguishing the poetry in the bible from the other things, but that’s not far enough. The same may be said for a doctor who throws all children with autism under the same heading, or an agronomist studying a fertilizer technique and only distinguishing between “trees” and “flowers”, and not making more meaningful slices and calling things “grasses”, “broad-leafs”, “vines”, “evergreens”, etc.

It seems nearly every well-done academic study should start out with this plain statement: I am writing this book because you are using too blunt an instrument. Let me introduce you to some sharper tools. Watch me use them for a while to see how nicely they slice, dice, and explain. At least, that is the sort of study I want to read. N.T. Wright’s big books follow this style very well. In doing so, most of the really useful stuff is up front where he lays out and sharpens the tools. In the later chapters, you get see them at work and learn by example. Wright’s popular books, on the other hand, take a meandering and narrative approach. He tries to engage his reader with potent thoughts early on. He often doesn’t tell you where he’s going and sometimes, it’s not entirely clear when he’s arrived (or if he ever does arrive!). A popular work like Blue Like Jazz also falls into this category.

I’m not going to say one is better than the other. Both of them can be done well or poorly. Certainly, the context of the reader (who is reading it) will determine which is most effective. I have found that in my learning and persona reading, I greatly prefer the former. I think it’s worth noting that the presence of highly technical language doesn’t determine which is which. Some memoirs are awash in jargon. Some plain academic studies are surprisingly easy to read, even for an outsider.

What am I trying to say? It’s not that I dislike one or the other so much. Many academic-style studies are terrible. What makes the difference? (Besides the obvious – writing skill, force of argument, etc.) I think it’s the part where they show how the sausage is made. I don’t like being in the dark about what the author is doing. I like to see under the hood of the machine, not just watch the machine work. The “making of” is often better than the movie.