We Need Him Every Day

The title of this article carries with it a simple message that was kneaded into the dough of my soul this past Friday. I’m sure I could’ve preached a sermon or two about it before this episode, but an experience of it is worth much more to me than a sermon, memories and tears so much more than maxims and syllogisms. For you, my reader, who must take it in second-hand, I pray God gives you some measure of what I have tasted and seen.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THIRD PERIOD, while my kids were taking a test and I was doing the rounds, a student raised his hand to ask for a sharpened pencil—a common request from those who are about to be caught with no classwork done. I padded my right side. Nothing but my keys. I reached into my rarely used left pocket and found a pencil, which I removed quickly, pulling along with it a few shredded Kleenexes, once wet with tears but become crusty. A potent thought popped up. I handed the student the pencil and continued my rounds, fingering the Kleenexes. They reminded me of something that I thought I ought to write down. From the podium I grabbed the clipboard on which I’d been keeping a rough record of my students’ behavior throughout the day. In the middle of the top sheet was a prayer, or maybe a note-to-self: “My God, my God, your mercy is so great.” (When did I write that? It must have been during first period.) I recorded the left-pocket discovery just below it, and then threw the Kleenexes away discreetly. Why jot down this event? Why bother continuing to recall this morning’s tears when I could just destroy the evidence of them and move on?

Because these had been the tears of God.

EARLIER THAT MORNING, when I entered the copy room, I encountered one of my colleagues whom I would often find in this very place before school. Despite efforts to appear ready to tackle the day, she could tell that I had been crying.

“Oh! What’s wrong?” she asked feelingly.

I told her that I had been crying all morning, but that my tears were a good thing. “I don’t know if you’re a believer or not, but God speaks, and when he speaks it can be hard to hear.” After a moment I added, “The tears are a good thing, this morning.”

She nodded silently. Not a believer. We went about our business.

EARLIER THAT MORNING, I stood in my kitchen dressed for work. It must have been just before 06:00. I slowly poured coffee into my travel mug. In the dimness, it looked like ink. The half-and-half, next, softly trickled in, forming at first little storm-clouds against the blackness. They billowed and grew. Eventually these clouds overcame the whole sky in the mug, even the unseen realms behind the sky, and transformed the little world in there from night to day.

Suddenly, after the coffee whitened, a prayer escaped the trap of my fleshly mind: “God, if you don’t give me grace today, I won’t make it.”

By the time I had the lid on the mug, I was crying. So little time had elapsed. I had not spilled my coffee. I had not remembered some past frustration. I had not thought ahead to a dreadful future.

These were the tears of God.

I cried because God spoke.

To tell the story well and rightly, I should not yet put what he said into quotation marks, because I didn’t sort it out or force an articulation of it until later. In short, he impressed upon me my weakness and foolishness for such a prayer. “God, if you don’t give me grace today, I won’t make it.”

Weakness. My flesh raged at this. The first tears were hot and angry, aware of my inadequacies, waiting at the edge of my eyelid and threatening to announce my failures to the world. I couldn’t make it on my own, not even for one day, a Friday.

Foolishness. My spirit broke at this. Those first tears were pushed off the edge into the oblivion on my cheeks, followed now by genuine, liquid sadness. Of course I couldn’t make it without him! Fool!

These first words from God and the corresponding tears threw me into darkness. And then, just as suddenly, a drop of cream. A new word poured into me, forming at first little storm-clouds against the blackness. They billowed and grew. They mushroomed until all of me was changed, homogeneously tainted by grace as coffee is whitened by cream.

This is the picture of revelation.

These were the tears of God.

Beatitude. My spirit revived. The rest of my tears spoke of mixed gratitude and pleasure. Not a day goes by that his grace isn’t here with me; every day that I “make it” is a day that he has made.

Eventually my housemate noticed me in this state. He had been waiting on me for a ride to school. He tried to comfort me, and then the whole matter burst out of me in a few words: “We need him every day.” He agreed. We shared this thought for the next thirty minutes on our way to school. I cried the whole way there and tried to sop up my tears with those Kleenexes. He prayed before we  went into school to make copies. And I knew without a doubt that these were the tears of God.

Jesus Christ said, “I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing” (John 15.5).

Summer Gone

I haven’t posted much recently on this blog, but I do intend to use it more frequently once I start teaching for the academic year.  My summer school obligations were very stressful, and I was crushed in more than one way.  But I am ready to go back to the basics of my faith, pray, do some planning, and launch myself into my new career.

My reading plans for the summer didn’t turn out so well.  I was going to read Fear and Trembling quickly, and then move on to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.  Turns out I haven’t finished the former.  Oh well.  I will finish it this week, and likely put the latter on hold indefinitely—unless I can do an insane amount of planning before Day 1 at my high school.

In other news, I started translating Leibniz’s Monadology for fun.  Leibniz is the best of all possible rationalists. I’m not keen on rationalism, to put it gently, but he seems to be a bit more familiar with the Bible than many of the others who worked on the Enlightenment project of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  He may even have had a genuine faith in Christ, though it’s not immediately clear in the works of his with which I’m familiar. All the same, the translation has been fun, and challenging.  I’ll post it once I’m done with the first draft.

Finished My Paper

I have finished my project on Augustine’s Confessions. It looks almost nothing like what the discrete chunks posted beforehand might suggest.  In some way, I had to cut myself short of where I wanted to go.  I didn’t have time to flesh everything out, so I had to leave off my inquiry at a good stopping point and allow for the rest to be summarized in speculations.  The final title is “Developing the Hermeneutic for the Whole.”  Even though some details are best understood in light of the whole inquiry, I’ve decided to post the final section on the blog:

We return, then, to the project of finding the wholeness of the Confessions.  Clearly, those last two Books, in which Augustine displays his relationship to the Bible as a text, cannot be dismissed or read as an addendum.  And clearly his autobiography can be structured around his learning how and why to approach the Bible in this way.  Even the middle books on memory and time, though not at first glance, have to do with Augustine’s “spiritual interpretation”: as much as the Bible is the expression of the unchanging and eternal Word in time, he must come to terms with the rule of the whole that extends over all he parts, including all the parts of his particular life.

Given another long inquiry into the Book on time and more details from the last two Books on Genesis 1, this might ultimately suggest that hermeneutics is not limited to texts.  Maybe it is the case that Augustine is not only trying to show us his relationship to the Bible, but also that he holds the same relationship to the Bible as to his past, to his present, to the whole world.  So the wholeness of the Confessions that we found when examining the texts may only itself be a part of a greater wholeness. He has spent his life learning how to achieve this iconic relationship to Genesis 1, and in the process has learned also how to read these other things.  Maybe there is a hermeneutic for the whole.

This is even more intriguing when we consider Augustine’s peculiar spiritual hermeneutic.  It seems that he is reading the texts, his memories, and all time with the mediation of Jesus Christ.  The healing of our distension may depend upon our effort to apply the spiritual hermeneutic to all of the compartments and distinctions and divisions that we make.  Just as we would approach the Bible as an icon, in this way also would we approach everything else.  To have the spiritual hermeneutic is to read the entire world as an icon, and to destroy all the idols of our distension.

A Maxim: criticism

Criticisms often come without council; a person breathes out accusations to knock down another’s “house of cards,” but almost never teaches his tongue to edify.

On a related note, Ephesians 4.25-32, English Standard Version, italics added:

Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

Part of a Dialogue about Psychology

Two university students, Frank and John, in a coffee shop.

F. There are no norms. What he describes only seems dysfunctional because we are so used to talking about the functional, the ideal. We always talk in terms of norms, and things like that. But a really accurate description doesn’t need norms.
J. What you’re saying makes sense, as far as he is concerned. But is it not possible to find the best, even if it isn’t a norm?
F. That’s what Christians do with Jesus.
J. Yeah. That’s a good example. If we are describing without reference to norms, couldn’t we still look for the highest, the best, the good, no matter how abnormal it all is?
F. I suppose. But in the realm of psychology Jesus just won’t do?
J. Why not?
F. Because there’s not enough of him. Where’s his childhood? Where’s his education? Where’s his own writing? In the same way that Aristotelians ruin Aristotle, Platonists abuse Plato, Buddhists walk all over Siddhartha,—of course Jesus’s disciples were no different.
J. Well fine. But what about literary Jesus?
F. What do you mean?
J. I mean Jesus as he is written down by those disciples you distrust. There’s still not enough revealed there?
F. No. Like I said, his childhood and education, and most of his social interactions, are not recorded.
J. But those would be necessary to find the best, in psychology?
F. …
J. You seem to be making a lot of assumptions here.
F. Well, I am assuming that knowledge about his education, et cetera, would tell us more than what the disciples’ narratives did.
J. What if they didn’t?
F. Then psychology has a long way to go.

On Augustine’s Confessions: the first steps toward accepting biblical authority

Augustine before his conversion had a strange relationship to the Bible. His thirst for “the immortality of wisdom” that he got from Cicero’s Hortensius, as in Book III Chapter iv, encouraged him to take up the Bible after years of disdaining it, but he could not bring himself to appreciate it at the time, for he came to the text already distrusting the content.  Diverse Manichæan teachings had undermined Christian claims about biblical authority, and he also found the style “far unworthy to be compared to the stateliness of the Ciceronian eloquence” that had led him to approach the text again. As long as anyone despises both the content and the style of a text, it has nothing to offer him. So Augustine was repelled from it.

How would it be possible for him to approach the Bible and read it successfully? He could admire its style if he would radically alter his taste, or else forsake, or forget, his highly technical knowledge about literature and style. But even if he achieved admiration of its style, this would make the text enjoyed in the same way that a painting is enjoyed, as Socrates describes in the Phædrus; it would offer nothing to him but light pleasure, being unable to answer its questioners or teach any new knowledge. Words read as merely pleasing sounds are themselves mute. By this Augustine might have come to admire the Bible, even its writers, and even the personages of its stories, but admiration falls short of the required adoration. The Gospel Accounts repeatedly tell of how Jesus Christ tries to draw a distinction between mere fans and his faithful disciples: to love Jesus Christ for his eloquence would be an ironic failure to hear what he says.

Again, how to approach the Bible and abide? He would need to find a way to apprehend its content without Manichæan contentions before he could ever honestly examine it, let alone be content with it. This is precisely what the books of some astronomers and philosophers did for him. He found in them claims to the wisdom that he craved from Cicero’s exhortation, and also highly plausible accounts that ran against the mystical teachings and fables of the Manichæan books. Against the astronomers, Faustus, the great Manichæan preacher, fell short and was forced to acknowledge so much. And then the skeptics gave young Augustine a place to stand suspended; now the Manichæan fables were as dubious to him as the Bible. The end of Book V, Chapter xiv, describes how he loses his love for the one, but does not thereby gain an appreciation for the other:

[I judged] in that very time of my doubt, that I could not safely continue in that sect, before which I now preferred divers of the Philosophers: to which Philosophers notwithstanding, for that they were without the saving Name of Christ, I utterly refused to commit the curing of my languishing soul. This therefore I determined, so long to be a catechumen in the Catholic Church, (which had been so much commended unto me by my parents) till such time as some certain mark should appear, whereto I might steer my course.

His participation in the church as a catechumen is the intriguing detail here that will be explored in another article with the help of Blaise Pascal.

From the Notebook: scattered thoughts about Isaiah 6

When Isaiah was watching Uzziah die, he saw the King of kings on his throne.  The temporal king was weak.  The eternal king is always in power.  This changed Isaiah’s life and altered his whole worldview.

When Isaiah saw the Lord on his high throne, he did not calmly reflect on his own imperfections.  He felt crushed under the weight of glory.  He was sure that dissolution of his being was imminent.  He became anxious about nonbeing.  He did not celebrate God’s holiness.  He despaired at his wretchedness.

Isaiah noted his unclean lips.  It is Isaiah’s lips that God will use most powerfully in his ministry.  Where are you conscious of sin?  Your sin is forgiven in Christ.  Now expect that God will take that part of you to do his greatest works.

God and the Soldier

An apologist who was in Annapolis recently was asked some questions about justice and how a Christ-follower would relate to such a concept. Through some story-telling and illustration, she said that we should never seek justice on our own behalf, but always do so for our neighbor. If a man is being beaten, he should not retaliate. If he sees someone else being beaten, he should rise up to go protect him. When I heard this, I didn’t bother going through the consequences and hairy nuances involved in the scenarios, but I immediately thought about my many friends in the military. This apologist did not have anything about the military in mind when she said it, but I thought her argument would work well to support a follower of Christ in his decision to join the military.

It has been a question for me for some time, whether believers belong in military service. When I first came to the College, I would probably have said, unqualifiedly, “No. Christianity and war should not mix,” and I had my verses to show for it. But since living with a U.S. Marine, living near the Naval Academy and meeting many believers there, and seeing a dear friend in the military come into a relationship with Jesus Christ, this “issue” is very much muddled for me. What did Jesus say to the Roman soldiers who came to him asking what they needed to do? “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or by false accusation, and be content with your wages,” Luke 3.14.* He does not say, “Throw down your swords and repent of your murderous ways.” The soldier, as a type, has varied significations in the New Testament:

• The men who abuse the Lord before his crucifixion are soldiers.
• The man of whom Jesus says, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith,” is a soldier.
• Anyone who takes up the sword will perish by the sword.
• Paul’s main theme in the letters to Timothy is soldier-like ministry.
• We of the faith do not have a battle of flesh and blood, but a spiritual battle.  Etc.
  

May the Lord, the God of peace and the Architect of all the nations, help me and teach me in all this, and show me above all how to fulfill the commandment to love my enemies and overcome evil with good, and how to teach others to do the same.

*Bible citations so marked come from the English Standard Version.

Untimeliness

Nietzsche in his short work On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life describes his own studies in the Greek classics as “untimely” and giving him “untimely experiences,” and he also names the book in which that work was published Untimely Meditations.  The study of the classics is untimely insofar as it is “acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.”  I find this altogether fascinating.  He thinks that his untimely education is producing in him untimely meditations for his present time and making him an untimely person.  He thinks that by writing he is counter to his own time, reshaping his own time, and benefiting a time to come.  I will hijack this term for the following meditation, acknowledging that what I say is an oversimplification and only a tangent off of Nietzsche’s meaning.

An underlying notion of untimeliness is that we are the children of our time, and that some oddballs by various influences become the estranged children of other times.  I feel as though I have met a few people, here and there, whom I would call “untimely” in this sense, either because of their education or their upbringing or unusual experiences.  They are like the children of a different time, good or bad, and will always stand out in that way to me.  But as I considered this untimeliness more, I began to meditate on a song by Jason Upton called “Dear John,” which takes the tone of Jesus speaking or writing to John the Baptist about their lives.  The following is the third verse:

Do you remember how it made us feel
To be traded for a foolish lie?
I was the song that danced
You were the song that healed
But neither song could satisfy
Wisdom was fighting for her life
We were the children of our time

Commenting on this song, Upton repeated the last line saying, “We were the children of our time, and they killed us, John!”  As at Luke 7.33f., no matter what extreme form the gospel takes—whether coming from John the ascetic wild-man, or Jesus, who eats and drinks and talks with sinners—it will not be appealing to the world and those who live by its principles.  Jesus and John preached the same message through two radically different lifestyles, and both were rejected.  The excuse for this rejection was on the basis for their lifestyles, but in truth it was the message, which was altogether untimely in the sense mentioned above.  Why they did not fit had to do with where they came from and who sent them, not what they looked like or where they lived.  This kind of untimeliness is all about the internal, and nothing to do with what the world looks at on the outside.

When Upton says of John and Jesus that they were the children of their time, this should be colored by the first verse of the song:

Do you remember when our mothers met?
Mama told me that they laughed
Was that a sign for us?
Or a sign for them?
When unborn babies testify
Carried between the earth and sky
Sons of eternity in time

He calls John and Jesus “sons of eternity.”  This is where my meditation led me: they were indeed the children of their time, and all who are a children of this time are, for all times, untimely.

This is now a far cry away from what Nietzsche was claiming about his own work, and I don’t mean to make too much of a comparison.  I only offer some questions evolving from the language that I have stolen:

• Are all followers of Jesus, those who take upon themselves the name of the sons and daughters of the living God, called to be untimely as he was?
• How does such untimeliness come about regardless of lifestyle, regardless of asceticism or (comparative) sybaritism, regardless of the outward appearance?
• What should the untimely meditation look like which comes about from studies in eternity?

On Augustine’s Confessions: hermeneutics with love

In Book XII of the Confessions, Augustine acknowledges the large variety of interpretations that arise from the first few sentences of Genesis. In the midst of discussing these, he takes a whole chapter, xxv, to propose a fundamental rule for Bible teachers: in no way should they compromise love in discussions about the meaning of the written word.

Behold now, how foolish a conceit it is, in such plenty of most true opinions, as may be fetched out of those same words, rashly to affirm which of them Moses principally meant: and thereby, with pernicious contentions to offend charity itself; for whose sake he spake everything, whose words we go about to expound.

When I first read this I found it a little surprising. Augustine himself had some very strong opinions about Genesis, for the most part supporting an allegorical hermeneutic for the whole creation story. This kind of interpretation he thought was instrumental in combating some, like the Manichæans, who used peculiar literal readings of passages in Genesis as a means to discredit the Old Testament, to maintain that its putative contradictions render it useless for any instruction. So it is conceivable that, because of his success in combating the Manichæans, he would have highly valued his own opinions. Augustine, however, appears very sensitive to the verse, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble,”* from James 4.6, 1 Peter 5.5, Proverbs 3.34 Septuagint. This he cites in the second sentence of Book I, and then he repeats it many times throughout the whole. He acknowledges his own great intelligence and skill as a writer, but he fears the fruit of these excellences if his pride should get hold of them. So he would rather be contradicted than stand firm in his conceit. To this point he writes about the proud who love their own opinions and assert them too strongly:

Whereas they are so earnest, that Moses did not mean what I say, but what they say; this I neither like nor love: for even if it is so, yet is this rashness of theirs no sign of knowledge, but of over boldness; nor hath seeing further, but swelling bigger, begotten it. And therefore, O Lord, are thy judgments to be trembled at; seeing that thy truth is neither mine, nor his, nor a third’s; but belonging to us all, whom thou callest publicly to partake of it: warning us terribly not to account it private to ourselves, for fear we be deprived of it. For whosoever challenges that as proper to himself, which thou propoundest for all to enjoy, and would make that his own, which belongs to all; that man shall be driven from what is common to all, to what is properly his own; that is, from truth, to a lie. For he that speaketh a lie, speaketh it of his own.

That last sentence, qui enim loquitur mendacium de suo loquitur, is a fairly literal translation of the Greek, ὅταν λαλῇ τὸ ψεῦδος ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων λαλεῖ, of Joh. 8.44, which is in reference to the devil, who is often associated with pride and prideful men, as at III.vi and X.xliii. Augustine believes that human conceit runs together inextricably with the devil’s deceit. On this premise alone we could consider the healthy fear of our own pride justified. But Augustine’s main point, getting back to that rule for Bible teachers mentioned above, is that pride leads to discord and upsets love. If we believe what Jesus Christ said about the two greatest commandments at Matthew 22.37-40—especially this last verse, “on these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets”*—then we believe that our treatment of Genesis is also swallowed up by the commandment to love our neighbor, and therefore we should conduct ourselves in love and never let our reading cause discord, undue argument, or strife. To this point Augustine rightly cites Paul at 1 Corinthians 4.6: “Let us not therefore be puffed up in favor of one, against another, above that which is written.”

*Bible citations so marked come from the English Standard Version.