Books: On and In

Beautiful review by Bierce: "The covers of this book are entirely too far apart."

Dedication from Wodehouse: "To the critics: these pearls."

Ouch.

Safire the Leech

Here is the best of our memorized declamations, by Timothy van den Broek, one of our two friends from the far side of the great wetness (he's a Brit).

A bit of quick background: Safire's Lend Me Your Ears is a huge tome of great boredom (the "world's best speeches," except they weren't half as good as our average Rhetoric declamations), and there is a leech that "stands" on bushes waiting for people to pass by, to whom it shall form an attachment.  In their sinuses.  They remain blissfully unaware.  No, I'm not joking, and yes, God made it too; why, I don't know.

Timothy van den Broek

Lend Me Your Noses

Frinds, Latinists, honorary countrymen, lend me your noses; I come to bury Safire, not to praise him.

No score and sixteen years ago, Safire wrote a book, and many scores before that, God made South American leeches.  They shoot out of a good looking bush, and fight against the established travel conventions of your nose, slinking up past all the hair and debris into the more hospitable parts of your nasal territory.  You flinch, you go "eww," but kudos to the leech, for it does at least make its intrusion pain free.

Ask not what pain Safire will withhold from you.  He came out of that lovely bush that is the rhetoric reading list, and in the style of such wormy ambushes, went straight for the nose.  Fat, slimy, slowly, wiggly--and with no anaesthetic.

I had a dream--and my dream was wrong.  In my dream, when I bought the 1,150 page book I was paying for two things: speeches and good judgment.  And don't get me wrong, there is good in Lend Me Your Ears.  I am an ardent lover of nature, and I cannot help but have warm fuzzy feelings when I hear about South American leeches.  I cannot but adore St. Francis' sermonette to the birdies.  Yet so many bad speeches!  And so many hacked up good speeches!  And what made it all so dashed awful was the way the anthologist made every possible reference he could to his own wit, skill, knowledge and general splendificoriousness.

Here I stand, I can do no other.  Vale, amici.

It was amazing.

Blessings,

Jesse

Roll Them On Your Tongue...

"Sorry Al (Gore), for repeatedly calling you a fascist twinkie and intellectual dolt.  It's nothing personal.  I just think you have repulsive totalitarian inclinations and the brains of a King Charles spaniel."--P. J. O'Rourke, All the Trouble in the World

"Communists worship Satan; socialists think perdition is a good system run by bad men; and liberals want us to go to hell because it's warm there in the winter."--ibid

"(And memo to Generation X: Pull your pants up, turn your hat around, and get a job."--ibid

"How do you stop a Canadian tank?  Shoot the guy that's pushing it."--George Harrell, on the pressing subject of the growing Canadian threat.

"Aut insanit homo, aut versus facit."--Latin proverb

"Aut amat aut odit mulier, nihil est tertium."--ibid (ask me or Brooke, or better yet, look 'em up.)

"Heck is the place you go if you don't believe in gosh."--Stephen Sproul

"It is not really your reviewer's place to suggest that Christians who have serious ethical problems with the Bible may actually be Christians who have been smoking some imported vegetation.  So he won't."--D. Wilson, Contours of Post-Maturity

"He tried, He really tried, but those 250,000 people were just too slippery when wet."--unnamed teacher, intro to Westminster Term

I'm going to do homework.  Enjoy.

Capon Paragraph

Man's real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are...If an hour can be spent on one onion, think how much regarding it took on the part of that old Russian who looked at onions and church spires long enough to come up with St. Basil's Cathedral.  Or how much curious and loving attention was expended by the first man who looked hard enough at the insides of trees, the entrails of cats, the hind ends of horses and the juice of pine trees to realize he could turn them all into the first fiddle.  No doubt his wife urged him to get up and do something useful.  I am sure that he was a stalwart enough lover of things to pay no attention at all to her nagging; but how wonderful it would have been if he had known what we know now about his dawdling.  He could have silenced her with the greatest riposte of all time:  Don't bother me; I am creating the possibility of the Bach unaccompanied sonatas.

That was Capon in a magnificent section on loving things for what they are, not what we would have them mean to us.

And yet we kill the bird to dissect it--do we not know it better on the branch than under the knife?

"Even in your world, little one, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of."

The Chesterton of the Keith Gilbert

I have seen a man by shouting

Seek to orphan all the stars.

--from Fish

update

The Sproul stayeth.

Against Christianity: review

Peter Leithart has written more books than I have read (if you count all series that I have read as one book, this is coming dangerously close to being true), and they vary in terms of prose and quality.  Most of them are somewhere around average on the former count while being well above on the latter.  Against Christianity is different: the prose is very good, and the content shattering.  It is a delight to read, and yet I feel almost sacrilegious turning each page, as I know that I could spend a lifetime attempting to apply the one I just read, and that I will forget what it was about when I'm flattened by the next one.  

Against Christianity is amazing.  The book is a collection of short essays, parables, and even simple phrases marshaled into a massive assault of "Christianity," which Leithart describes as "biblical religion disemboweled and emasculated by (voluntary) intellectualization and/or privatization," and "worldliness that has become so much our second nature that we call it piety."  The primary objection that Leithart appears to have with what we call Christianity is the lack of effect that it has on the world around us.  In one of his parables, a religious consultant is approached by John, Peter and Paul, who desire to "start a new religion," and it ends with the consultant saying the following:  

Gentlemen, I'm very sorry.  I can't help you.  You have completely misunderstood what we're doing here.  I don't think you're starting another religion; you're doing something else entirely.  I am a religious consultant, not a political revolutionary...

Yet Leithart would not define Christianity as a political ideology; that is actually one of the opinions that this book was written to critique.  The mentality that views Christianity as a fundamentally political thing still makes the lethal and heretical mistake of calling the New Creation a subset or facet of the old.  Christianity is a New World competing in the land of the old world, it is, oddly enough, more like a virus or parasite than anything else; it's job is to methodically transform the host into itself, until it is all that is remains.  

Christ will gladly take His place in the temple of Dagon--it is, after all, His--but Dagon will not like it.  No god may remain in the presence of Christianity, as it defines not just how we worship, but how we eat, how we tie our shoes, and how we view all other things.  All that exists is a subset of Christianity, not the other way around.

And this book makes that explicitly clear.  It revives the all too often dying antithesis, spurns cowardly compromises, and embodies the words of God to Isaiah:

Do not call for a treaty every time that these people call for a treaty; do not fear what they fear, and do not dread it.  The LORD All Mighty is the one you are to fear, He you shall dread, and He you shall call Holy...

Creations, First and Second

Understand: I am not a prophet nor the son of a prophet; closest my dad's come to "being in the Spirit" is when he used to get so full of spirits that he'd black out, and the closest I've come to prophesying is when I correctly called a coin toss ten tosses in advance.  Useful for gambling income, but not quite Elijah material.  So nothing that I say is inspired or even necessarily correct--I believe that it is, or I wouldn't say it, but I also believe that HIV and AIDS are two entirely different things, and that William Shakespeare wasn't the author of all those plays and poems, so keep one eye on me and one on the text.

The three persons of God were involved in the creation of the world: the Father planned and spoke it, the Son did it (as the Word, see John 1), and the Spirit was the Agent, the one actually guiding the bees and holding the electrons and planets in orbit.  Adam was placed in the garden and charged with dominion of it, then Eden, then the surrounding lands, then all the earth.  To help him in this task, he was put into a coma, his side was opened, and from his side a helpmeet was built.  The two of them were to grow and fill the earth, transforming all of it into a garden, Adam ruling as he submitted to Christ.

The three persons of God were involved--past tense--in the re-creation of the world: the Father planned and commanded it, the Son did it (incarnation), and the Spirit is the Agent, still guiding bees, but now, not only bees, but also the Church.  The second Adam (Christ) was placed in the garden (where He prayed and was raised) and charged with dominion--first to Jerusalem, then Judea, then Samaria and the surrounding regions, then the nations.  To help Him in this task, He was put to death, his side was opened, and from his side a helpmeet was built--the blood of the Eucharist and the water of Baptism.  He bestowed this task of dominion upon us in the Great Commission, and in Pentecost, He gave us the Agent by which it is to be done.  We are now to grow and fill the earth, transforming all of it into the garden city of the New Jerusalem, while Christ is seated and rules, submitting at the right hand of His Father, Who, through us and the Spirit in us, puts all of Christ's enemies underneath His feet.  The last enemy to be conquered is death, which will be done when Christ returns to judge the living and the dead, but all other enemies will be under His feet by that time.

We are in the new heavens and the new earth: we are the new Eve.  Let us therefore make Eden.

Logic, Nature, and the illogical Nature of God.

Reason is a useful tool, but we in Reformed circles tend to idealize or even idolize it (this coming from one who aced his Logic term while forgetting what Alexander the Great did).  Reason is not our saviour, and the reality is that we cannot, however we may try, even use reason to demonstrate the existence of God.  Moreover, it does not appear to be something that we should attempt to do--if God wanted it to be done, He would have made it possible.

Allow me to quickly (logically) prove what I just asserted.  If you agree already, feel free to skip this next paragraph.  

In logic, it is a fallacy (circular reasoning) to assume what you are attempting to prove, and to use it in the argument.  For example: Scripture is infallible, because Scripture says that it is.  Likewise, we cannot logically prove the validity of logic.  We cannot give reasons for believing in reason, and if we illogically prove logic, then we have just falsified it.

Why is this?  Why did God make the world in such a fashion that every belief must rest firmly on air?  If we are questioned enough as to why we believe anything, we will end up in a corner where we can only say "Cause I want to."  Every belief rests upon a foundation of assumptions: The Triune God of Scripture lives (Why?  Cause He says so).  The world reflects His Nature (Why?  Cause He says so).  He is a logical God (Why?  Shut up and quit whining), therefore, logic is valid (to an extent--apply it to the Trinity or dual Nature of Christ, or even the death of immortality, and everything goes boom--you have a zero in the denominator, and "i" doesn't exist).

Well, if it is this way, and it is, it must be because God wants it to be this way.  But why?

Because He hates formulaic, stainless steel, small minded people who stare studiously at the ground as they trod on towards sanctification.  Look at His response to Job: He made bugs.  Where is the logic in a centipede that hangs upside-down on cave roofs and eats bats?  How is that rational?  There are butterflies that, as grubs, emit a chemical making them smell identical to ant larvae.  They are then collected and raised by the ants.  However, there is a wasp that has the ability to tell the difference between ant and caterpillar larvae (though the ants can't), and lays its eggs inside the caterpillar larvae by invading the anthill and releasing a pheromone that causes the ants to attack each other, instead of the wasp.  The wasp's young are then studiously raised by their mortal enemy, the ants, until they hatch, and the entire process repeats.  

How, in any contortion of the mind, is this formulaic?  How is this neat and clean?  This makes no sense at all.  Look at the duck-billed platypus, at narwhals, and learn the nature of our God--it is logically absurd.  Where is the efficiency, the cleanliness?  How many cockroach young are laid, and how many survive (thank God that the ratio is that low; why does the cockroach even exist?)?  We serve a God, Who--without being disrespectful at all--wears white socks and Dockers with His tux.  He makes no sense to our little reformed logical minds, which we all too often forget.  We somehow manage to--God forgive us--grow bored with His predictability, as He is meticulously planting flowers (of an astonishing complexity and a staggering beauty), and then happily making bugs eat them before they bloom.  Then something else eats the bugs.  And He does this on purpose.  He creates one of the most brilliant composers the world has ever seen, and makes him go deaf.  He creates one of the most patently evil, demonic dictators that the world has ever seen, then, laughing like an irreverent schoolboy, pencils in that mustache that simply cannot be taken seriously.

So forget logic.  Go lie on your lawn and watch bugs.  Let a cow suck on your fingers, and explore the nature of this world.  Logic does have some small part in our lives, but it is not the part that we give it.  Let us delight in the absurdity of God--let us appreciate Him for Who He Is, not who we would have Him be.  "He is not, after all, a tame lion."

Matthew 20

Matthew 20 tells the story of a landowner hiring workers for his vineyard.  He hires them in five different groups, and none but the first group had an agreed upon wage.  Each of the different groups end up being paid the same amount, despite the fact that they all worked different amounts of time.

This appears to be a picture of the Jews and Gentiles, as the Jews had the initial covenant (the Abrahamic), which is then inherited by the late-coming Gentiles.  Also, the vineyard is a common picture of the people of God (faithful or not).

Checking Our Woods for a Lamp Post

It has snowed every day for the past week and a half, and is expected to snow all this upcoming week.  Moscow's idea of Spring differs greatly from mine.

Grades

Well, they're out.  CL in Rhetoric, MCH in Lordship (ouch), and M in Math (by literally one point on a quiz).  So, I am now four full terms behind.  My roommate Travis has dropped completely, Luke is down to two classes, and that is the general trend of the school.  Approximately half of the Latin class failed this last term, and no one failed Rhetoric, which is very odd.

Keep Sproul in mind--he is going home and probably not coming back.  He leaves on Monday, despite all that I could do to keep him.

Blessings.

Commonplaces

Augustine:  A spirit is that which is everywhere the whole.

Graham: Some people say, "I could never receive Christ, because I couldn't live up to what God expects of me."  That is like a person saying, "I can never fly on an airplane, because I don't think I have the strength to keep it in the air."

P. G. Wodehouse, via Bertie Wooster to Jeeves:  You can't be a successful dictator and design women's underclothing...it's really one or the other.

My rhetoric teacher:  I don't know why they're even in churches, because they're ordaining homosexuals...  They've thrown out all of Scripture; they must just like the outfits.

Ibid:  A certain turn of (unpoetic) mind is unhappily literal... over the last century or so, a certain school of hermeneutical interpretation has turned this failure of soul into an interpretative virtue.

Lewis:  For the church has no beauty but what the Bridegroom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely.

Supper of the Lamb: Book Review

I usually do not actually post my book reviews, so allow this to emphasize the joy that I am receiving from being forced to read Rober Farrar Capon's Supper of the Lamb (click on my title to purchase).  It is a small, wry, Chestertonian "cookbook,"  and worth the spare money and time that you nonchalantly leave lying around.

I have enclosed a small sample of the prose from this book dedicated to his wife: "The lightning behind all this thunder."

"The world may or may not need another cookbook, but it needs all the lovers--amateurs--it can get.  It is a gorgeous old place, full of clownish graces and beautiful drolleries, and it has enough textures, tastes, and smells to keep us intrigued for more time than we have.  Unfortunately, however, our response to its loveliness is not always delight: It is, far more often than it should be, boredom.  And that is not only odd, it is tragic; for boredom is not neutral--it is the fertilizing principle of unloveliness."

Enjoy.

Compelled to agree...

From St. Anne's Public House (just click on my title):

"Smoking kills.  If you're killed, you lose a very important part of your life."

--Brooke Shields

The Sign of Jonah

Matthew 12:40 has Christ condemning his generation for seeking a sign, and then stating that the Son of Man will be in the depths of the earth for three days and three nights.  

Three days and three nights has long plagued me, but never too seriously, as I would generally allow the balm of apathy to soothe my doubts: "I'll figure it out after this next beer and bag of Kettle Chips."  We know that Christ was crucified the eve of the sabbath from the text itself, and we know that He rose on Sunday from church history as well as many, many external sources.  The problem should seem pretty obvious: Friday night burial to Sunday morning resurrection can be stretched into three days by desperate men bending over backwards in an attempt to "save the phenomena," as Plato said, but no amount of hand waving can add a third night into the mix.

The solution is also obvious, or at least obvious enough to make me feel really stupid.  But hey, my pastor at least is smart, which is apparently what I pay him for, except I actually don't.  It's what I would pay him for if I was making money instead of spending it on Kettle Chips, beer and cheese.  The crucifixion of Christ took place the eve of the Passover, the annual sabbath.  This was apparently on a Wednesday, and He rose Saturday night (following the pattern of eve then morn outlined in Genesis), leaving the tomb empty for the spectators on Sunday morning.

Excerpt from Westminster Rhetoric Lecture II

"IV. For Instance

In Matthew 16, Jesus answers those who say they want a sign.  He says no sign will be given except the sign of Jonah.  A little later in the chapter, Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ.  Jesus pronounces a tremendous blessing on him--on Simon, son of Jonah.  A little later, Peter pulls a Jonah and rebukes Jesus for His prediction that He will spend three days and three nights in the heart of the earth, thus fulfilling the sign of Jonah.

Fascinating, but we still want to stay closer to shore.  We simply want to know that something is the direct object here because it is in the accusative case and in the same sentence."

Included interspersed throughout this section were other points: Jerusalem was Ninevah, and did not repent, etcetera.  It was quite interesting, with our teacher's usual touch of hilarity.  A bit later on, the following topic merrily lilted itself into the lecture:

"V.  Read Carefully and Broadly

Last week, I said that you should ransack Scripture for its figures and metaphors.  What else, you might wonder.  Actually, this will take you the rest of your life, and the task is not as narrow as you might think.

Picture the main street of a desolate Western town, mid day, one hundred and fifty years ago.  The street is deserted, except for a few blowing tumbleweeds.  Some townspeople are looking out the windows of the shops.  Now, what is about to happen?  And how do you know this?  This is a particular motif, with which we are all familiar.

Now picture a man dressed in a biblical manner.  He is standing next to a well.  In the distance, a woman is approaching with a jar on her shoulder.  What is going to happen?  Now, what is the meaning of Christ's encounter with the Samaritan woman?  His father is seeking worshipers, that is to say, a bride for His Son."

Food...

Let us eat food, and not small children.

Have I Mentioned that I Love Rhetoric?

Behold my shameless boasting: it knows not how to blush.

I was one of four students in a class of forty-six to score an SCL on the rhetoric written final, which is the highest possible grade.  On my paper, I was given a CL, along with twelve others, and there were two SCL papers.  

Needless to say, I am delighted.  Grades come out on Friday, which I will post as soon as I receive them.

Blessings,

Jesse Broussard

Yup yup yup.