Bully's Blog

“I began writing this book some ten years ago, although my interest in Hebrew literary structure goes back a decade before that. My fascination with the subject was kindled when I began teaching Old Testament courses in seminary. At that time I was struck by the apparent lack of order within many of the biblical books. Jeremiah seemed hopelessly confused in its organisation; so did Isaiah and Hosea and most of the prophets. Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes appeared to be in almost complete disarray, and even the more orderly historical books, such as Joshua and Kings, showed signs of strangely careless organisation. Why did the biblical authors write like this? I would never write a book, an article, or even a private letter with such carelessness of arrangement.

I was intrigued by the possibility that the Hebrew authors might have organised their compositions according to literary conventions that were different from ours. I began to discover, over a period of years, that several structuring patterns rarely used by us were remarkably common in the books of the Hebrew Bible, particularly chiasmus (symmetry), parallelism, and sevenfold patterns. I was increasingly struck by how often these patterns had been utilised to arrange biblical books…

It was my mother who gave me a love for literature. She read to my brother Stephen and me regularly, from as early as I can remember. I still have many fond memories of those wondrous bedtime stories, whose structures — like the Bible — were designed for the ear, not the eye.”

David A. Dorsey, The Literary Structure of the Old Testament, p.9-10 (Preface).

[from Auburn Avenue blog]

The Christian imagination

Each semester at the Bucer Institute we have a course we call “The Church and Culture” which is basically a catch-all for any topic we’d like to talk about. Our “Church and Culture” class for this semester was held this past Saturday on the topic of “The Christian Imagination” and it was outstanding. (Check out the MP3s when they are ready for downloading, you won’t regret it.).

Too many good things were said to repeat them all, but here are a few of them:

• A woman living on the frontier in the 19th century commented on the quilts she made: “I make them warm to keep my family from freezing; I make them beautiful to keep my heart from breaking.”
• Poetry humbles us by giving us more than we can understand. It’s “bigger” than we are.
• Why are the Reformed so unimaginative? Artists tend to arise from traditions that allow mystery, not from traditions that see mystery as a threat to the “system” and therefore always seek to explain (or define) it away.
• The literal is too skeletal and minimalistic to carry the grand load of truth that the poetic can easily transport.

Some of the things covered were: the importance of the imagination; the imagination and theology; how to cultivate a sanctified imagination; a primer on poetry; and the deeper meaning of watching the dead bodies of plague victims being catapulted over the walls of a besieged city. All in all, it was more fun than ought to be legal.

by Halden at inhabitatio dei

“One of the elements of theological discipline that has been lacking for a long time among theologians has been the consistent practice of doing commentary on Scripture.

Continue reading

Preach from the Bible, and from the Bible only. Again, does this need to be said? One thing’s for sure. The Bible is fascinating, disturbing, offensive, sweet, alarming, comforting, stretching, shocking, controversial, caressing, strengthening. No way are you and I that interesting. Let’s put the Bible front and centre and let it be itself and do its thing, whatever the impact. Submerging the Bible for the sake of our cool personas isn’t really cool at all. It’s a way of avoiding risk, chickening out.

Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr

Centered on recent events, preaching inevitably loses most of its transformative power. From apostolic times, the task of preaching has never been a matter of providing a “religious insight” into what’s going on, a new slant on what everyone already knows. The purpose of apostolic preaching was to announce an event that, according to Paul, no one could know without a preacher. The point of preaching is not to answer questions that are already circulating. The point is to challenge the entire worldview that gives rise to those questions, and to announce the reality of a new world in which all the old questions have to be reformulated or discarded altogether.

Peter J. Leithart, Of Preaching and Newspapers.

“What you are actually becoming in public is a public revelation of your true worship. What many call a ‘midlife crisis,’ for example, is simply idolatry catching up with a person.”

Doug Wilson, The Spirit of Accusation, Sermon Podcast, 7 January 09. Subscribe at www.christkirk.com

Peter Leithart comments on Ian McEwan’s remembrance of Updike: The Flight of the Spirit.

In C. S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, we are given a good example of a boy who was brought up poorly. Eustace Scrubb had stumbled into a dragon’s lair, but he did not know what kind of place it was. “Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.”

It is a standing rebuke for us that there are many Christians who have an open sympathy for the “true” books which Eustace read — full of true facts about governments and drains and exports — and who are suspicious of great works of imagination, like the Narnia stories, or The Lord of the Rings, or Treasure Island, because they are “fictional” and therefore suspected of lying. The Bible tells us to be truthful above all things, they tell us, and so we should not tell our sons about dragon-fighting. Our sons need to be strong on drains and weak on dragons. The irony here is that the Bible, the source of all truth, says a lot about dragons and giants, and very little about drains and exports.

–Doug Wilson, Future Men, p. 101.

The Bible was designed to be heard, repeatedly. That’s why scholarship is dangerous. That’s why theological seminaries are dangerous. That’s why an academic approach to the Bible is dangerous. Because it’s all silent, and the Bible becomes a thing…

“One of the problems with modern Bible readers is the deep influence of Greek thinking. Until we are able to think like Hebrews, we will not be able to understand the Bible on the level that God intended. Insightful Bible teacher James Jordan sheds light on the comprehensive story of the Scriptures in this six-part series. Jordan will challenge your assumptions, make you think, and will radically change the way you read God’s word. Your understanding of the Bible will never be the same.”

James B. Jordan, Reading the Bible (again) for the First Time (Audio series).

The difference between the wicked and the righteous is whether
or not we give thanks as we take hold of the world.

–James Jordan, Ritual and Typology. biblicalhorizons.wordpress.com