Don Williams’ Blog

Don December 1st, 2009

XCIV

Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”

            Anyone seeing the influence of George Herbert here gets an official brownie point.

The Will

When our Lord chose the Church to be his bride,

                                                He did not chide,

But took her sins as dowry, though it bled

His heart’s blood out to bear them, and he died,

Bequeathing his estate.  The will was read

And published throughout all his kingdoms wide.

“I here leave all to her whom I have wed:

Forgiveness, life, myself no longer dead,”

                                                Was what it said.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don November 27th, 2009

XCIII

Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.” I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”

The Shakespearean sonnet lends itself to the standard three points and conclusion format of the essay or sermon. By itself that fact might not be too inspiring, but neither is it to be despised. Here I combine it with anaphora and epanodos (in other words, each sentence/quatrain begins just the same except different).

Ascriptions
Sonnet XXX

The son’s a servant; so’s the Lord a king
Who, when a dragon had usurped his lands
And led his people captive, down did fling
The gauntlet, slew the foe with his own hands.
The Lord’s a king, but so’s the Son a lamb
Led out to slaughter as a sacrifice.
See how the bright blood stains his side! One dram
Were richer far than ten Cathays of spice.
The Son’s a lamb, but so’s the Lord a lion;
The church, the tribe of Judah, is his pride.
He leads them by still waters there in Zion,
But their best drink flows from his hands and side.
King, servant, lion, lamb; he who’s adored
By all these names deserves one more: my Lord.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don November 23rd, 2009

EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY ANNUAL MEETING, new Orleans, LA, November 18-20, 2009: a REPORT

It was a pleasant (as far as the weather went) half-mile walk from my affordable hotel to the main one where the Evangelical Theological Society Meeting was held in New Orleans, about a quarter mile of it down Bourbon Street. This was an interesting, er, cross-cultural experience, especially when returning in the evening. For then the tourists were milling about trying to “earn their beads” (flung down from the out-jutting balconies above as a reward for people who “flash” publicly various body parts intended to be shared only privately in intimate moments), and the clubs were sending their exotic dancers out into the street to entice passers by into their establishments by, shall we say, displaying their wares. As is my wont in such situations, I waxed objective and scientific, yea, clinical, as an observer, regarding my own reactions with the same cool and detached eye as I was using for the phenomena to which I was being “exposed” (what a fortuitous choice of words!). I was not tempted (at all) nor even disgusted (very much), but saddened (mostly), thinking what a poor substitute all these shenanigans were for a real relationship, such as two people who had known True Love might enjoy with one another.

The conference itself I make bold to pronounce a success. My paper (on the validity of Lewis’s “Trilemma” argument) was well attended and enthusiastically received, the response including two editors (Global Journal of Classical Theology and Southwest Theological Journal) fighting over the right to publish it. I had to say that Touchstone had beaten them to that privilege (scheduled for spring of 2010), but that if Touchstone required sufficient cutting to make a more scholarly version justifiable, and then agreed to it, I would be in touch with them. And so I departed with their cards safely tucked away in my pocket.

Several of the other papers were worth hearing. A young Indian scholar, Ashish Varma, spoke of Calvin on Virtue: Forensic Justification and Imputed Righteousness seem like a mere legal fiction leading to license to those who do not realize that Calvin goes out of his way to tie them to Union with Christ. When they are seen as flowing from that Union, then rather than hindering Virtue they become the only things that make it truly possible for fallen men, since the only Virtue that matters flows to us from Him. We can only be joined to Christ if we are righteous, and the only righteousness that makes this possible is His imputed to us, since, if we waited until we had attained our own, not an eternity in Purgatory would suffice. But it is imputed to the end that, being joined to Him, we may be conformed to his image as His Spirit brings His life into our own. It was encouraging to hear such things being said so well in clipped Indian English.

Gene Fant explicated the sacrament of Communion by means of the biological concept of Homeostasis. Our bodies cannot exist without exchange with things outside of us. It is a picture of Sola Gratia, a reminder of our total dependence on that which is other, turned into a synechdoche for the things of the Spirit.

While Michael Travers was expounding the use of anthropomorphic imagery as a way of revealing the nature of God (one fourth of all the references to ears and eyes in the OT are to God’s!), I suddenly found himself cross-referencing this discussion with the absolute prohibition of images in Yahweh worship, which is grounded in the observation that on Sinai Israel saw no form. If visual images are verboten, why are verbal ones OK? There is certainly a kind of tension there, from which some great fruit of understanding ought to be born. Then I realized that all the verbal images are anthropomorphic. God brings Israel to Himself on eagles’ wings, but He himself has no wings; He gathers us like a Hen, but it is always a simile, not a metaphor when the comparison is to an animal. Only when the images are human is full metaphor allowed; and then only to one part at a time, not to the whole image of a Man, lest we think God a man that he should lie. Whence all this if not to prepare us for (and shut us up to) the Incarnation, the only adequate Image? That was the tangent I hurtled off on, more interesting perhaps than the paper itself.

Dorian Coover-Cox quoted Walter Eichrodt to the effect that all the other NE religions are nature religions; that is, the god is a personification of the natural powers of a given land and its people whose power flows from below, i.e., from them; but Yahweh is the opposite. He is wholly from above, the Suzerain from another country who elects Israel as his vassal. She noted the many OT passages that use the form of the ancient NE suzerainty treaty to convey what it means to be in covenant with God; the Covenant is precisely a suzerainty treaty. But what a difference! Suzerainty treaties are imposed by a conquering overlord, while Yahweh invites men into covenant with Himself; normal suzerains rule from a distance, but Yahweh comes to dwell with his people in the Tabernacle; other suzerains exact tribute to support their rule, but the Tabernacle is built with freewill offerings; other suzerains rule for their own benefit, or at most that of their own people (the angels in God’s case?), not that of the vassal people; but Yahweh feeds his people with manna and then with milk and honey Therefore, instead of resenting this Suzerain and rebelling against Him when we get the chance, as we would with any earthly one, we ought to realize that He deserves our obedience and devotion because of His grace.

I don’t want to be unfair to New Orleans. Just a few blocks from Bourbon Street the French Quarter is delightful, with wonderful little restaurants and Dixieland bands. The locals say that they never go to Bourbon Street; it is too “trashy” (their word) and only for tourists, and the better food and music is elsewhere. They are right. There is nothing but Rock and Country on Bourbon Street itself; no Dixieland, no Cajun! What would Pete Fountain and Al Hirt say? But off Bourbon it gets interesting. The beignet at the Café du Monde are the snacks of the gods. And Old Man River rolls on toward the sea, reminding one of history as well as nature, two endless topics of fruitful rumination.

If anyone would like a copy of my paper, write me at dtw@tfc.edu and just ask.

Toccoa Falls College, Georgia

• Apologetics , Theology
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Don October 12th, 2009

I will spend next week lecturing for SUMMIT Ministries at their Snow Wolf Lodge site near Pagosa Springs, Colorado. 

My week of lectures in a nutshell: Theology is the Queen of the Sciences and Philology is her Handmaid in Chief. (Philosophy is on the staff, but Philology is in charge.)

You can’t do Theology properly at all without knowing Lit. Why? Three reasons.

First, Methodology: Theology is the exposition of a Text, and you can’t learn to do that from Theologians, especially those trained in German Rationalist Criticism. You can’t learn it from the Modern and Postmodern Litcrits either, but only from classical Philologist Dinosaurs like Lewis and Tolkien.

Second reason: Context. The Greek and Roman classics were the lit read by the (Gentile) people for whom the NT was written. You can’t fully hear it the way it was meant to be heard without knowing the classics as well as the OT.

Third reason: Content. The Bible has the answers, but only from the great classics of Lit can you learn to ask the questions well.  Only from the great classics of Lit. will you gain sympathetic insight into the human condition Theology addresses.

(For the etymologically challenged: Philology is phileo plus logos, the love of words.  More specifically, it refers to an older approach to literature, especially literature studied in its original languages.) 

Philosophy is important, but I think Philology in its most humane sense has been even more neglected, with even more deleterious consequences.  Just pick up any systematic theology text and try to read it.  I rest my case.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don October 1st, 2009

A correspondent on a philosophy forum that I frequent notes accurately that “many people on this board agree that certain aspects of Christianity require faith, and faith alone, since our human mind cannot grasp it.”

I am not one of those people. The phrase “faith alone” applies strictly to soteriology (how we are saved), not to epistemology (what and how we know). That is, we are justified by faith in Christ alone, not by faith plus works or human merit. But there is nothing that we believe by faith alone, i.e., by faith divorced from experience, reason, and evidence. People who say they do are simply too unaware of their own mental processes to realize that their experience and their personality are contributing tons to what they believe and why.

I personally try to believe in true things for good reasons in so far as I can. Whether I succeed or fail, faith and reason are working hand in hand at every point of the process.

 It’s all in Augustine, it’s all in Augustine.  What do they teach in those schools?

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Don September 10th, 2009

LXXVIII Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

Cassandra was a character from Greek legend, a prophetess who carried the curse that she would always tell the truth but never be believed.  As what was once a Christian civilization slips back toward barbarism with seeming inevitability, one cannot help but identify with her.  What would she say if she were with us today?

 Epistle from the Limbo of the Righteous Pagans

(Cassandra Speaks)

We were very ignorant, but there were some things we knew.

We knew that life is a narrow Bridge of time,

That both ends lie beyond the sight of men,

And the fathomless abyss lies before, and behind, and beneath.

The rails on the Bridge are Morality and Custom,

And they are all that stand between us and Chaos.

Freedom is found only on the Bridge,

For there is no freedom in chaos and destruction.

We also tried to find the thing that you call freedom.

On the other side of the rails there is Nothing.

Would you also be free from earth, and sea, and sky?     

Would you walk without the earth beneath your feet,

Breathe without air, swim without water?

Breath apart from air is suffocation:

Such is freedom from morality and custom.

So I say to you, get married and have children,

And teach them that doing right is the only thing that matters,

But that all the right they do will be insufficient

To cover all the wrong.  This is why

The sacrificial blood must always flow.

We did not know from Whom it had to flow,

But the blood that splashed our altars was far wiser in its way

Than your sky-topping prayer-towers of glass and steel and concrete

Dedicated to the praise of perfectible Man.

Raise your children, then, and teach them,

Carefully and painfully,

By precept and example that freedom cannot be found

Elsewhere than in the man who does his duty,

Who is faithful unto death, though it be hard,

And then that even this is insufficient.

That was all the freedom we knew how to find.

I will not say that there is nothing better than this

(You perhaps have heard strange stories of a Hope we did not have),

But we tried also all the gods that you are looking to

And found them nothing, Nothing, dust

And ashes,

Dust and ashes.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don September 9th, 2009

LXXVII Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”  

I think I must have been glad to be back in Northeast Georgia near the mountains, especially with Fall coming on.  (Those who have been paying attention to my complaints about the pitiful lack of Spring and Fall in the upper Midwest will recognize the deft use of understatement in that remark.)

 The Southern Appalachians:  Commentary, 1 Cor. 13:12 

The Southern Appalachians

In their Autumn glory dressed

Are all the beauty we can bear

Or in which we can rest.

The mighty hills of Heaven,

With their oppressive weight,

Would crush out spirits into dust

Seen in our present state.

But when they burst upon us

In sudden majesty,

We will be given souls to match

And purer eyes to see.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don September 3rd, 2009

LXXIV 

Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”

Narrative poetry has all but disappeared from the modern world.  The closest thing we have to it is the dramatic monolog, done to perfection by Robert Browning.  It seems a sneaky place to start in reintroducing what was once an honored genre. 

SOLILOQUY

I was never before a man of many words.

What I had to say could be expressed

In curses mumbled at the wayward herds

Or loudly shouted at the boys from town.

The buyers of mutton might just be addressed

Not much more civilly, as up and down

We haggled over whether I wold die

Of hunger or live yet another year.

The sky at night was simply the night sky,

A thing to be ignored.  I knew to fear

Then only hunger and the hungry wolf.

I’ve learned a lot since those days of both fear

And hunger, and had more of both than ever.

There was no moon that night, and yet the stars

Shone with a light the like of which I’d never

Seen before.  Not since I was a child

Had I taken notice of the way their light

On a clear, frosty night, out in the wild,

Can fill you up with hunger–no, with fright–

Well, something else that’s both, and yet is neither.

They’d seemed then like a thousand eyes, whose sight

Could see clean through a man and leave no secrets.

Their piercing gaze had never bored as deep

As it did on that night.  They seemed so near!

I told myself it was just lack of sleep,

That they could not be really getting closer.

But as I tried to explain that to the sheep,

The endless blackness which is seen to lie

Between the stars to keep them separate

Was in a moment squeezed out of the sky,

And I was knocked flat on m y face by light

That thundered like the sea–or by a choir

Of voices that shone brighter than the sun,

And burnt me to the bone with searing fire.

I’d always joked that when Messiah came

I’d ask him what he meant to do about

The price of sheep.  If that was not his game,

I’d know he was a Christ of no concern

To me.  But I was in no way prepared

For angels, with their messages that burn

Behind them after they are gone, and drive

You down the dark, deserted roads at night

To see a baby lying in the hay.

Still less was I prepared for such a sight

As that was.  Yes, he had to do with sheep

Alright (the Lamb of God the prophets called him!),

And with their price.  The one he paid was steep:

It was himself, and I purchased the sheep.

Of course, I didn’t find that out ‘til later.

That night I only knew I was afraid,

And hungry for I knew not what.  But listen!

I’ve seen forty summers bloom and fade

Since then, and I would rather know that fear

Than all the ease that Caesar now enjoys

In his bright palace.  Soon–perhaps this year–

I go to join my fathers, hungry still

With an eternal hunger.  But the bread

I found that night in Bethlehem will fill

Me then as earthly meat has not.  I am

Invited to the Supper of the Lamb!

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don September 2nd, 2009

Leland Ryken, The Word of God in English: Criteria of Excellence in Bible Translation.  Wheaton:  Crossway, 2002, 336 pp., pb., $16.00.   This is a book that every reader, teacher, or preacher of the English Bible needs to read.  Leland Ryken, chair of the English department at Wheaton and a prolific writer on both literary and biblical topics, challenges the direction in which Eugene Nida’s “dynamic equivalence” theory of translation has taken modern translations, charging that they have robbed God’s revealed Word of much of its power and authority.  Ryken argues that one cannot take a book written for intelligent adults and limit it to a sixth-grade reading level without misrepresenting its content and its very nature.  He demonstrates the strong tendency of many modern translations to substitute abstractions for the concrete imagery of the original text, to substitute explanations for the figurative language of the original text, and to eliminate the technical theological vocabulary which the original authors of the text chose to use.  Thus they offer their helpless English readers a text that has been predigested, a text that has already been preemptively interpreted for them without their awareness or consent. 

Dynamic equivalence begins from the truth that idioms differ from one language to the next, so that a “literal” translation does not always make sense.  Therefore one tries to find the structure in the receptor language that would have an equivalent effect to the one used in the original text.  Such an approach is, at least at points, unavoidable.  But Ryken shows that, when combined with the anti-intellectualism and evangelistic pragmatism of contemporary Evangelicalism, this theory has been the excuse for a confusing and bland array of renderings that give us a very different Bible from the one God actually inspired, which was a concrete text full of poetry and mystery and not bashful about making demands upon its readers.  He raises the question how Evangelicals can continue to hold to plenary verbal inspiration as opposed to “thought” inspiration, and yet tolerate an array of translations that do not feel obligated to convey anything more than what their scholars take to be the “thoughts” of the biblical writers, ignoring the forms by which the writers chose to convey those thoughts.  This, he convincingly argues, robs the text of its power and beauty and robs its readers of the opportunity to interpret it for themselves. 

Of Ryken’s many excellent books, this one may be the best, presenting passionate and lucid argument on a topic whose importance cannot be overemphasized.  He supports his contentions with an array of quotations comparing “essentially literal” translations such as KJV, RSV, NASB, and ESV with their dynamic equivalent counterparts such as LB, NLT, CEV, NIV, and TNIV.  The unity and faithfulness of the one tradition versus the variety and sometimes even capriciousness of the other becomes starkly apparent in cumulative effect, lending credence to Ryken’s claim that dynamic equivalence as actually practiced by contemporary versions has “destabilized the text” as well as confused translation with interpretation.  If Ryken is right, the translation we use for preaching and teaching is not a matter of indifference, for it will have a great influence on how and what we teach.  All who care about the Word and who want to read it accurately will want to wrestle with this book.   Donald T. Williams, Toccoa Falls College

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Don August 31st, 2009

LXXIII Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

            Poetry consistently pursued has a way of marking the passages of life.  For the writer at least, and maybe to a lesser extent for his public if he is any kind of a communicator, it leaves a psychological record: what he was reading, where he was hiking, what it was all doing in his head.  The next poem marks a far more significant event than most, though unfortunately it does not necessarily follow that it is a more significant poem.  My daughter, Heather, was born on April 5, 1978.

A METAPHYSICAL CONCEIT

Strange things are taught by Christianity:

That God was born to live a human life;

The mystery of the Holy Trinity

Reflected by a husband and his wife

When, by becoming one, two are made three.

It is an awesome thing to slowly see

The growth of one whose coming was prepared,

The Scriptures say, from all eternity—

This, as all others.  But this one we’ve shared,

Yes and will share:  the holy mystery

To be a copy of the Trinity.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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