Bonhoeffer Debriefed

Some notes after reading Life Together.

• Idea of a dialectical theology.
• Sometimes called Neo-Orthodoxy
• The idea of dialectic–transcendence of God and man’s limited ability to understand God–God as the holy other. 
• God is completely sovereign and man has an ability to get to know God. 
• Sold out dependency on Christ. 

(Paper on the Beatitudes and tie in readings?)

•  humans as sinful yet free
• Eternity entering time
• How is it possible to have a Holy other God who reveals himself?
• How can one speak of faith as God’s gift?
• Dealing with paradox and using the literary imagination. 
• Framed in silence
• New Monasticism

Pg 18– “Christendom is a scattered people”

Pg 19 — physical presence of other believers is a joy and strength

It is not in our life that God’s help and presence must still be proved, but rather God’s presence and help have been demonstrated for us in the life of Jesus Christ (54)

By sheer grace, God will not permit s to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream (27)

Then we deplore the fact that we lack deep certainty, the strong faith, and the rich experience that god has given to others, and we consider this lament to be pious. We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small(and yet not really small) gifts. How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from Him the little things? (29)

 (link to Hopkins)

Our song on earth is speech (59)

 What does literature learn from theology?

 74-75: On sleep. 

“the prayer that god may dwell with us and in us even though we are unconscious of His presence, that He may keep our hearts pure and holy in spite of all the cares and temptations of the night, to make our hearts ever alert to hear His call and, like the boy Samuel, answer Him even in the night: “Speak, Lord; for thy servant hearth” (I Sam 3:9).

Pgs 76+

The Day Alone

Many speak fellowship because they can’t stand being alone. 

Silence is the simple stillness of the individual under the Word of God. (79)

Silence is nothing else but waiting for God’s Word and coming from God’s Word with a blessing. (79)

 “There are three purposes for which the Christian needs a definite time when he can be alone during the day: Scripture meditation, prayer, and intercession” (81). 

 “Where Christians live together the time must inevitably come when in some crisis one person will have to declare God’s Word and will to another” (105).

The basis upon which Christians can speak to one another is that each knows the other as a sinner, who, with all his human dignity, is lonely and lost if he is not given help. This is not to make him contemptible nor to disparage him in any way” (105-106). 

 

I have a right to my self, my hatred and my desires, my life and my death. The mind and the flesh of man are set on fire by pride; for it is precisely in his wickedness that man wants to be as God (114). 

To Guard or Not to Guard: All About Kierkegaard

Kierkegaardian Key Concepts:

• Agent/Agency–he’s a “secret agent” in every sense of the word “agent.” He changes things– inside/outside. Things change. He’s a catalyst– provoking. He’s illusive and ironic and writes under pseudonyms. Dissatisfaction with his corrupt church.
• Either/Or: When you say you’re not making a choice, you’re still making a choice. The Either/or is rooted in existentialism– you have to make a choice. (Sartre–we’re condemned to be free). Ironic, paradoxical. He’s reacting against something from Heigl–that things can be both/and, a gray area (postmodernism). Kierkegaard is hard line in that you have to make a choice. You’re either for Christ or against him.
• Existentialism–existence is more important than essence. In reaction to real life concerns and events. Existence precedes essence. The Father of Existentialism.
• Stages Along Life’s Way: Stages about choice. We have to choose. There are essentially three stages.

1. The Aesthetic – it’s about pleasure through the senses and the arts. The aesthetic man seeks pleasure–self-gain. What am I going to do today that pleases me? But eventually you are going to face a choice beyond the aesthetic life.
2. The Ethical – you have to make a choice. Are you going to be ethical and think about others above yourself? Then comes the altruism/hedonism dilemma–do you do things for others just for yourself to feel good?
3. The Religious – It’s for God and God alone. That’s where you find irony. There are demands there that seem to go contrary to what is best for you and maybe even for others. It’s a choice– the leap of faith that is demonstrative. Agency. To change people, you have to change. There’s a point where you will it.  [Possibly also the stage of religion beyond the religion]

• The concept of irony: there are dual meanings. Say one thing and mean another. It’s a way of thinking, a category of thought. Overall, it’s linked with life stages. You turn to a higher form of irony that you can really live with.
• The teleological suspension of the ethical: Abraham and Isaac. sometimes there’s a higher end. Linked with stages along life’s way. The ethical “norms” revisited. There’s an end beyond. The dangerous flipside is that you end )up nowhere or you create your own (like churches).
• Truth is subjectivity. You can think individual versus church. Danish church was corrupt–it’s own indulgences. Truth is not subjective–truth is subjectivity. If something is really true, you have to appropriate and make it own–it’s not just intellectual assent. His church didn’t give him much in terms of substance or worldview. This gets to be a circular thing that makes sense over a while–God is true because you believe and because you will yourself to be obedient to him. Kierkegaard here messes with people–provocation to make people aware.
• Leap of Faith: Likened to Pascal and some of the wager stuff. You accept the scandal of being a Christian. Something can push you to the precipice. You still have to will to jump, however. Physicality and agency is involved here.
• Knight of Faith: the individual who takes the leap and finds himself in a battle. Accepts the either/or, growing into agency. Maybe if you’re a Christian writer, and you’re a knight of faith, maybe you’re seeing yourself not just as someone who leaps but also as one who provokes. If you’re going to be a Christian, you’re going to have to do battle.
• Concept of Dread: Dread is an existential category. Nausea. Sickness unto death. That’s the modern age. That makes you make choice sometimes. It’s a condition, a filter. It does make you empathize.
• Fear and Trembling: The core of the Christian life from the inside. It’s so much better than the other type of fear and trembling. Whether or not to submit to entropy or resurrection. To will one thing–the good.
• Indirect Communication: the via negativa Kierkegaardian-style. The closer you get to God, the more you need a new language to express this (apophasis through transhumanar).
• The Role of Agape: agapaeistic– love is at the heart of all of this. Neighbor love is important. Despair from loving yourself can be rectified with love for others. Generalizable love–love looking for favors or a return is another type of perspective entirely.
• Purity is Willing: Purity of heart is to will one thing. The Good. The summum bonum. This is submitting to resurrection instead of empathy and inertia. The good exists (Tolkien again–the triumph of good).
• Proof is Obedience: I submit, therefore, God is. It’s an existential proof for the existence of God. The Anselmian argument that God is that than which is greater than anything that can be conceived.
• The Parabolic Impulse: The Christian writer is a parabolist of necessity. Christian writers use parable to convey deep spiritual proof. Submitting to all this means that you believe in resurrection, and you see resurrection rather than destruction.

Finally, here are some quotes I pulled out of the introduction of Plough Books’ Provocations.

Kierkegaard also criticizes the philosopher who is solely concerned with ideas – intellectual systems that leave the thinker unchanged.

Aesthetic freedom is really enslavement to the passions and as such leads a person to the brink of despair.

First, it means to stand alone before God and come to an awareness of God. The sooner I realize that I stand naked before God, the more authentic I will become. Second, an individual is a unified, integrated self ordered by a single purpose. “Purity of heart,” Kierkegaard explains, “is to will one thing.” Third, an individual is a responsible self, who in freedom gives account for one’s decisions or failures to decide. One’s true self is constituted by the decisions one makes. Lastly, to be an individual is to exist as a unique self that possesses a dignity above the race, the crowd.

Believe the key to happiness lies outside ourselves. We are thus obsessed with material benefits and results. We make our happiness dependent on situations outside ourselves and blame others in the process if things don’t turn out well. “In all our ‘freedom,’ we seek one thing: to be

Allow yourself to undergo self-examination. As Kierkegaard reminds us: “It is true that a mirror has the quality of enabling a person to see his image in it, but to do this he must stand still.”

And yet the separation of cowardice and pride is a false one, for these two are really one and the same. The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man but with God. He wants to have a great task set before himself and to carry it through on his own accord. And then he is very pleased with his place. Many have taken the first leap of pride into life, many stop there. But the next leap is different. How? The proud person, ironically, begins looking around for people of like mind who want to be sufficient unto themselves in their pride. This is because anyone who stands alone for any length of time soon discovers that there is a God. Such a realization is something no one can endure. And so one becomes cowardly. Of course, cowardice never shows itself as such. It won’t make a great noise. No, it is quite hidden and quiet. And yet it joins all other passions to it, because cowardice is very comfortable and obliging in associating with other passions. It knows very well how to make friends with them. [LEAP OF FAITH]

Or consider the person whose advantages are few. Cowardice is now quick to sing a different tune: “What you’ve got is far too little to make a good beginning.” This, of course, is particularly stupid. If we always need more to begin with we would never begin. But “God does not give us the spirit of cowardice, but the spirit of power, and of love and of self-control” (1 Tm. 1:7). Cowardice does not come from God.

What does it matter to the young lover to take inventory of all the outstanding qualities of her fiancé if she herself cannot choose? And, on the other hand, whether others praise her beloved’s many perfections or enumerate his faults, what more magnificent thing could she say than when she says, He is my heart’s choice! A choice! Yes, this is the pearl of great price, yet it is not intended to be buried and hidden away. A choice that is not used is worse than nothing; it is a snare in which a person has trapped himself as a slave

Beware! The “Yes” of promise keeping is sleep-inducing. An honest “No” possesses much more promise. It can stimulate; repentance may not be far away. He who says “No,” becomes almost afraid of himself. But he who says “Yes, I will,” is all too pleased with himself. The world is quite inclined – even eager – to make promises, for a promise appears very fine at the moment – it inspires! Yet for this very reason the eternal is suspicious of promises.

[Soren Kierkegaard. Provocations – The Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard. Plough Publishing.]

“It is true that a mirror has the quality of enabling a person to see his image in it, but to do this he must stand still.”

Hedgehogs and Foxes

Tolstoy and Dostoevsky

Distinction between hedgehogs (knows one big thing and relates all to it) and foxes (chase after all sorts of ideas, more spread out). Isaiah Berlin devised the distinction in a book on Tolstoy to distinguish types of thinkers.

Narrative–Storytelling—Parable (parabole–throwing one thing by another)

• Parabolic reasoning.
• Existentialism and precursors
• Very philosophical; both thinkers are interested in the connection between art and life.
• Bakhtin–on the Russian mentality-it’s easier to do art without being responsible to life, and it’s easier to live a life without reckoning with art.

Tolstoy–the quintessential hedgehog. A monist. The problem of the one and the many (especially when Tolstoy is in doubt).

• “When in doubt, simplify” explains his outlook.
• Gospel truth.
• Monastic idealism
• The Kingdom of God is within you
• You start to appreciate day to day existence
• Don’t try invent all over again–let things happen
• Where love is, God is. Martin the Cobbler. Parable like–the kingdom of God is born within Martin. Takes a holy man at face value.
• Omni-response.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: “Stories and Prose Poems”

“Freedom to Breathe”

“The Elm Log”

Anamnestic solidarity

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Dostoevsky–quintessential fox. Many voices, complex stories, difficult os rot out philosophically. “When you’re too sure of yourself, complicate.”

• Almost systematically uses his doubt in a consistent way.
• The function of literary art–helps us to accept suffering and to learn to be redeemed through it.
• Literary art gives us the particulars of this (accepting suffering)
• Literary artist has to complicate his work to reflect this reality in the world.
• Art on a macro level accepts that beauty is a battleground. Almost Manichean, but it’s not. Beauty is where God and the devil strive for mastery of the hearts of man.
• literature helps us sort things out
• Art answers to life, takes to the fact that men desire alternately to be apart and together (link to Bonhoeffer). Love pulls you back into community. General vs. particular, sacrificial love. Hell as a condition of being unable to love. Something about being unable to love in this life assures you of hell.
• Art needs to consistently ironize worldly freedom. (It is for freedom that Christ set us free).
• Art accepts, incorporates paradox as a mode of theological thinking. Apparent contradiction that leads to higher truth. The Dostoevskian Paradox–the true heros come from the lowliest of conditions.
• Art accepts folly. Prince from “The Idiot”
• Literary art accepts and incorporates pilgrimage. Peregrination, etc. Someone really seeking God on the move.
• Art accepts doubt as the dialectical necessity of faith–you have to have doubt to have faith. Everyone doubts, but for how long and what do you do with it? Doubt is the anvil on which Dostoevsky hammered his faith.
• Polyphonic–many voicedness. Bakthtin.
• Suspicion of monologue
• Dostosevsky–view from everywhere– varied backgrounds viewing the same truth but each perspective is important.
• Seeing Christ or the potential Christ from everywhere. Causes a paradigm shift–you begin to live your life differently.

Final Paper Ideas

Thematic

• Christology, for instance
• Heresy and orthodoxy
• literary mind or imagination
• poetry we’ve read and what it can do
• East/West
• Literary containers/genres
• one specific tropological figure
• review essay with salt/peppering from other works
• the pilgrim or the pilgrimage
• iconoclasm
• The dialectic between faith and doubt

On Narratology

Narrative theology–often pitted against propositional theology. The old-school claim is the basic idea that narrative is the literary form that dominates the literary topography of the Bible. Stories about God that contribute to The Story, God’s Story, the story that God has for us.

Book-Mimesis-Auerbach–there’s something deeper and broader about bible stories. There’s a greater depth the the history, the time, and the consciousness. Compares it to Homer–something runs deeper. No book tells the story of love better than the Bible. People start to resonate with them and start to hear God–an inner consistency of reality (Tolkien), whereas at one time it looked like folly.

 

Exclusive/Inclusive. To show inclusivity is to look at Scripture as a whole–meta truth and the cross and the Savior that makes sense. But it has to complete all the other incomplete.

 

Narrative theology at its best:

• It’s the enlightenment that causes the emphasis on proposition alone as it influences theology. Head without a heart (even though stories can have both). Hijacked Christian theology.
• Push toward narratology can become postmodern, but (according to McGrath):

1. Narrative theology reminds us that there is story behind most biblical language (Mark Turner–“The Literary Mind”-story is fundamental).
2. Narrative theology help us avoid the dulling sense of abstraction that can come from propositional theology by itself. Brings the imagination back to the forefront to apply propositional truths (and even commands).
3. Narrative theology gives us a focus on history. God actually meets us in history. Especially with the incarnation–myth become fact. Makes us cognizant that history matters.
4. Narrative theology accepts the irony of limited knowledge.

 

Narrative is something that segue ways into postmodern culture. A story behind art–a metaperspective. Adding some to Tolkien–there are different types and stages of narrative.

Primary, secondary and anti-narrative:

• Primary–God’s story writ large. The Story.
• Secondary–sub-creation. We have a chance to create and to tell stories. Point back to God (the good ones do–others maybe run neutral. Others seem to slide down……)
• Anti-narrative-What you find in postmodern cultural. Storytelling that tries to attack narrative.

Pulls people away from primary narrative, takes away the narrative impulse that is part of the literary mind. The way out is through the transnarrative. Something a little more radical–go simple. Tell a simple story that reminds people of a good story with a happy ending–stories matter–they make a difference. No one can deconstruct it–you really can’t read it at its margins or turn it on itself. invigorates the narrative impulse. But now a lot of people are afraid of it.

Poetry Night Debriefed

Sorry for the scattered nature of this post. Here are some bullet points based on class discussion post Poetry Night.

Poetry Night as a text

•  Lacan–the psyche of mind in poetry.
• The distinction less apparent overall between Christian art and the Christian creation of art. Maybe we got to the crux of that chasm. Art qua art–it’s about Jesus. The chasm went into one–that’s Northrup Frye’s definition of poetry–babble and doodle to charm and riddle (Refer to James Joyce– a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man).
• Author and Orality and intention and response.
• The relative success of the part relating to the whole. Derrida’s paragon–the frame around the artwork. A fluid frame, however.
• Hermeneutics==did you hear and connect with people? Attentive to irony?
• Theodicy-Providence–Narrative bringing healing
• It became one-on-one, ability to love through cultural boundaries.
• Catharsis- purging of emotion and maybe intellectual things, too, and it can lead to purification.
• In the collective, forces you to see each other.
• Diversity

Irony & Orality

Erasmus–the irony/orality pairing. The poetic imagination, the literary mind.

We Are Fools

We look like fools because others do not hear, but we are also fools in the way that we practice our theology. That makes us all responsible for each other in terms of our inheritance–our sin. “Meta”–metalinguistics, point of view (God’s point of view, but we don’t have that–but how can we get to it?). Irony is not so much a literary achievement as it is a Biblical thing. Real irony is Biblical–the kind that blows your mind. Often manifested through chasm. To a point, Kenneth Burke and Erasmus see it’s a healthy place to be, but there’s a limit. Kierkegard isn’t a postmodernist because there’s a limit to his irony.

Bonhoeffer’s Ethics–Part one. Allowing ourselves to be open–interpret charitably. The love of God and the decay of the world. The knowledge of good and evil at the core of ethics. God knows. But there are ways to get to that point of view through scripture. “Man at his origin only knows one thing: God.”

Orality–idea from Luther–no matter how beholden to the age of literacy we have become, there’s still a residual orality–there’s a tenaciousness, and it’s important.

• It allows us to address a second order hermeneutical question–not what should we read, but why do we read at all?
• A good poem is a good poem because it says something, and it can’t always be articulated. It resonates, it sounds good. The Word does, too, on a grand scale. The visualist culture may cause us to lose our ears. If we lose our ears, we can’t communicate–it would be information without call.

Another second order thing: Reading right is also connected with self-understanding. In order to have a good hermeneutic, you must understand yourself (what Augustine calls the inner teacher).

Art, Ontology, & Quadriga

Coleridge–noasphere. Omnific, transumar oneness. Heakens back to early heresies trying to get the trinity right. A little bit of the mystic in him. His more technical treatises come from the literary cpm addressing bibliotry (people worshipping the Bible more than the God behead Him). No longer organic or ongoing or critical.

We have to all interpret for ourselves at some point and there’s great pressure there. Our own hermeneutic.

The modernist ideal of wandering, drifting. The artist on a journey, taking in different experiences. Especially in cityscapes (the flaneur). You may see some things you don’t want to see.

566– “We become an anarchy of spirits toy bewitched made blind…”

Form and content–beautiful language and less beautiful things. Later they would match more, but they became debased. Something redemptive in using beautiful language to discuss something low because beauty leads to God.

Gerard Manley Hopkins–Sprung rhythm. In some ways fashioned after Welsh poetry. Inscape and instress. There’s a lot of instress in the world– the world is booming and buzzing and colliding. It’s almost atomic. When you start to understand the world at the atomic level, you are amazed at how it all holds together. Instress shoes also how God holds it all together–it would fly apart if it were not for the logos. Inside of us is an inscape– a should, personality, a psyche. The more instress we get into our inscapes, the more we grow as people. A poetry that itself reflects the stress of the world, bumpy and energized= sponge rhythm.

Alliterative, cacaphonic, staccato. A lot of hyphenated words. How does that tie into ontology (being)? The medium is the message– it’s about the medium as much as what he says about God’s grandeur. Natural theology.

• The reformation moving into modernity and then into postmodernity.
• Techniques coming from the literary world.
• Luther– oral though he emphasized the literary.
• A type of ironic thinking that comes from Scripture. (Kenneth Burke.)
• 2 things came out in an interpretation of Scripture

Quadriga— 4fold method. A secular, more or less, literary idea from the middle ages. Luther picked up on it. With any given text, the Bible included, you could see a literal phase, an allegorical phase, a moral phase, and a an anagogic phase (the highest spiritual meaning–could come out of allegory but you might have to milk it more-push the allegory). Noah’s Ark, for instance. Anagogically, the ark begins to look like Christ and the work of the cross–typology, wood. There’s something bigger. The apex of human history and scripture. Conversely, this strategy, remember, can be applied to any text–not just the Bible. (Reference Northrop Frye).

Sensus Plenior– what is the full meaning?

Kenneth Burke: A Grammar of Motives– Four Master Tropes

• “Relativism is got by the fragmentation of either drama or dialectic” (512).
• “And in relativism, there is no irony” (512)
• People can confuse the dialectic with the relativistic.
• “Irony is never Pharisaic, but there is a Pharisaic temptation in irony” (513).
• Not being smug in salvation. Folly in the world, yes, but also outside looking in.

Poets Divine: The Renaissance Framework

Gerard Manley Hopkins, sketch

Castle ruins, which crown the hill, were punched out in arches and half arches by bright breaks and eyelets of daylight. We went up to the castle but not in: standing before the gateway I had an instress which only the true old work gives from the strong and noble inscape of the pointedarch [sic ].

Introduction/Preliminary Definitions

• “What we’re reading is so familiar and yet unfamiliar.” Today, the ideas expressed in many of these Christian classics are commonplace, but we don’t always think back to their origins. Things start to get even more familiar in Reformation texts and after.
• One of the problems we face in this class is that in reading these works, so much is assumed that we know about both history, literary theory, and theology.
• For example, Reformation thinkers were steeped in Renaissance. If we want to understand Reformation writings, we should understand the Renaissance, and a main characteristic of the Renaissance was humanism.
• What do you think of when we say “humanism”? Perhaps the dichotomies of sacred/profane and individual/church (the stress of the individual due to the Reformation i.e. priesthood of the believer); however, Humanism also has as much to do with going back to classical works of literature and philosophy, going back to the past. It’s less about the connotation of “secular.”
• This “going back” became possible for readers of the Bible because of translation, while society at large was  leaving the oral-based tradition and entering the age of literacy.

The Reformation(s)

1. Lutheran – doctrine of justification by faith alone

• Sensipleniar(sp?) – interpreting a text in terms of the fuller, whole meaning; individual parts always refer back to the whole; This literary notion was being applied to biblical interpretation; Homeric question
• Quadriga – four ways to interpret Scripture (the literal, the moral, the allegorical and the anagogical)

2. Calvinist – The church is important. “You can’t have God as your father without the church as your mother.” Outside of the church, there is no remission of sins; Anabaptists > Kierkeguard; TULIP format was a response to Armenian beliefs

3. Radical – Distrust of external authority

4. Counter Reformation – Response by the Catholic church

 

Erasmus, In Praise of Folly

• Religious reading of texts vs. reading of religious texts
• What does he mean it’s folly to be doing philosophy, etc. in the world, yet that Christians are fools as well? This is an irony that comes from the Bible, a deep Biblical irony. In this sense, Christians can relate to folly.
• The work is also satirical, as he is poking fun at theologians who believe they know everything. Keillor / Erasmus – satire – Lake Wobegon effect – “the powerful acids of satirical thought”
• Erasmus and Luther had a falling out. Luther wanted to be less humanist.

 

Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

• Knowledge of God as Creator and redeemer
• Related to Gerard Manley Hopkins – Homophony between knowledge of God and knowledge of self (pg. 329); Man never attains to true self-knowledge until he’s contemplated the face of God.- The mutuality of knowing and being known – interrelationship of instress and inscape, terms used by Hopkins (more on this to come)

* Side Note*

• Dichotomy: There’s the living word (what God says to you), and then there’s the written word (Scripture). Our personal experience is like a movement that brings assurance of what is written.
• We read Scripture THEN fan it out to the whole meaning (Think back to what Luther said about interpreting each passage of Scripture in light of the whole text.) THEN what we experience in life resonates with the truth therein. There’s a necessary balance between here.
• Truths have remained in different circles of the tree. Literary imagination helps us understand.

 

Spenser, “The Hymns of Heavenly Beauty”

• Relates to Escapism – Tolkien – consolation – being disenchanted through fairy – Essentially, there are two realms, and there is a higher, more real realm.
• Sublime – goal of art is not “art itself”; It is not an end unto itself.
• Aquinas’ theory of metaphor is that metaphor in and of itself could be bad, but it’s meant to lead us to a higher truth.

 

Sir Walter Raleigh, “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage”

• This work has a feel of a spiritual audit (as if the author has had a near death experience), as well as of peregrination.
• “’Gainst our souls black verdicts give,/ Christ pleads his death, and then we live” – How can we get away from clichéd “God talk” in our writing and speaking? Avoid overused words, continue to improve, without words that are theologically unsound yet new.

 

Lancelot Andrews, “Sermon XIV”

• In a sermon, he would be a poet. He would choose one image and carry it throughout the sermon. Ex: Star – Nativity star, “daystar of the heart,” star of David, star brings people together – people looking heavenward at the same thing
• T.S. Eliot considered him a tour de force. He loved Andrews’ passage about the birth of Jesus, when God Himself was speechless for a while = logos unable to speak.
• While using a singular image, he weaves in and out with Scripture. In this way, the image kinda carries itself and spreads like crab grass. – This reminds us of Postmodernity, as the work seems to write itself.

 

Shakespeare, “Sonnet 146”

• Ruminations of death / the death of death
• Symmetry and beauty of the pattern, a perfect sonnet
• In a Platonic sense, beauty coming through symmetry leads us to truth, to God.
• Beautiful/sublime
• Writing to his soul, he asks the question, “Why am I so concerned with the outward?”

 

John Donne, Divine Meditations

• Understanding his metaphor – Pg. 413 denotation, connotation – metaphor of “wings of power” – Because we’ve experienced His power, the metaphor makes sense.
• Metaphysical poet – using “conceit” (forced violent metaphor meant to take us somewhere/clash of images like a partridge on the tip of a volcano) – We can assume that he’s using his tune to a higher spiritual domain to help create moments, sparks of words that take us to the realm. It is intended to get us to the heart of the matter.

“Death, be not proud”

• Clear connection to Shakespeare
• Image of snake eating its own tail
• Creation of Christian art vs. Christian creation of art
• Shock effect of Death’s death – Others such as Flannery O’Conner and existential writers have used shock to help us see things in their suchness.

“Batter my Heart”

• Why is it necessary for God to batter the poet’s heart? It’s their vocation of advocacy, feeling things more deeply. It is a dangerous thing to offer to be a poet. Being a poet in the name of God – voice for the voiceless, exposure to suffering, “poetry of witness”
• “Batter me, because I want to represent you” – poet’s theme
• Romans 7 – Two laws at work in him/understanding human inability/relates to total depravity – We become intimately acquainted with this. (Back to Calvin quote about knowledge of God)
• Worldviews to work through – You think you’re talking clearly about one thing, but it’s interpreted as something else by the hearer. This is NOT just an issue of art, but the church. We can use literature to enter the door.

 

George Herbert, A Priest in the Temple and The Temple

• “The greatest and hardest preparation is within: For, Unto the ungodly, saith God, Why dost thou preach my Laws, and takest my Covenant in thy mouth? Psal. 50.16.” Isn’t this so? Writer’s block/incongruity/confusion/debate about intentional “witness,” theological writing which must be exact and well thought-out and the more natural yet “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth) into a poetic sort of writing AND what about finding our own voice in writing
• In writing, we fill up the sufferings of Christ. We expose ourselves to suffering and feeling. (Relates back to Donne)
• Temple – architecture in the middle ages (cathedral) – What would the best place to worship God look like? Following that, what’s the best architecture for literature?
• Dichotomy: theological and more poetic writing
• His poems are almost like holy places. The word poetry as meaning “word temple.”
• The shifting to the poetic pulpit = not being preachy with your poetry, but using poetry in your preaching.

Mimesis Project: Finding Your “Theological Voice”

Directions: Pick one of our various literary forms, study it, “get to know it” intimately. See if it seems a good place to find your “theological voice.” Proceed to mimic the form (mimesis), filling it (the container metaphor) with theological/Biblical content of your own choosing. The length will, of course, vary widely here, given the type of form used.

Think in terms of where you are going. This can be something you go back to. Imagine it as a chapter of your dissertation.

*Do not feel confined to one single form. Combine, revive, invent.

List of major forms:

Epistle

Sermon

Apologia – Tertullian

Lorica – St. Patrick

Peregrination

Confession – Augustine

Satire

Creed

Poetic prayer – Anselm

Extended personification

Hymn

Hagiography

Biblical commentary

Etc.

Key Terms

A boon for those trying to figure out where to start studying for the midterm. This is a list of key terms or concepts discussed in class, though it is by no means comprehensive. Each has been mentioned at least once on this blog. Hope it helps you!

• Iconoclasts
• Iconophiles
• the metaphorical imagination- to link art with sacrament
• anamnesis
• empathy
• confession
• 1st, 2nd, 3rd rate criticism
• Augustine
• Patristic Period
• Culture
• Fideism-faith more important than reason.? McGrath
• Literary theology
• Pelagian controversy
• incarnational theology
• liberal arts
• the inner teacher
• christianity and oral culture
• heresies
• peregrination
• catechism
• poetry
• illusory superiority/ Lake Woebegone effect
• gnosticism
• aeons
• happy endings
• Paradox
• manicheasm
• dichotomy of the secular and sacred–false?
• Importance of literature in Christianity
• Defamiliarization
• poetry/theology
• Logos
• Parable
• the hermeneutics of suspicion
• ekphrasis
• Platonism/Aristotelian
• Missionaries
• The celtic cross
• chiasm
• new monasticism
• celtic christianity
• oral tradition
• via positive versus via negative
• discretion vs. censorship
• “practical wisdom” and exploration vs. “the caution necessary to avoid all danger and ensure complete safety” (Vann)
• freedom vs. restriction/contrivance
• originality vs. regurgitation of old forms and content
• faith seeking understanding vs. understanding seeking faith
• heresy vs. orthodoxy – (“At one time, one man’s heresy was another man’s orthodoxy.” – Dr. Bruce)
• individual vs. church
• apophatic
• cataphatic versus apaphasis
• Thomas Akempis
• Cloud of Unknowing
• Orthodoxy
• Argument for God/theodicy
• Erasmus/satire
• Mysticism
• concrete universal
• Medieval
• Reformation
• East/West
• scholasticism
• transhumanar
• Fides quaerens intellectum
• Sola Scriptura

Update: Some people have asked about what to expect for the midterm. Here’s some advice I wrote down to get you started:

Basically, all the tests are the same; it will be a list of about 15 words (might be an authors name or work, but more likely to be a concept such as “love” or something theological–maybe “heresies” or more likely something specific like “iconoclasm” or “peregrination”).

Dr. Bruce knows you probably don’t know all 15–so, all you have to do is choose 10 of the 15. You want to write a paragraph about each term (I try to average half a page, but this will depend on how fast you write, how wordy you are, and how small your handwriting is). Don’t worry about structure. Simply identify the term (what is it, who talked about it/ or how did it come up?). Then, what Dr. Bruce wants you to do is “think with literature”– ask yourself what other things or works or authors we read that might connect with that term/concept. “This reminds me of this because of this,” “this is similar to this” etc. Tip: Don’t use up all your ideas on on one ID (identification)!

So, how to study?
I try to think up of possible terms/topics and remember which author wrote what and what the basic gist of the work is. This is failproof, because no matter what is on that test, if you can go off what you chose to study, you should do just fine. Just show what you know and fudge or omit what you don’t! (Don’t tell anyone I said that 🙂 )

Afterthought: This midterm I decided to try something new: a graphic organizer. It is quite ghetto–I taped up the blank sides of an old paper to my dorm wall and put down the authors in colors by period, and sometimes arranged them according to ideas (or used arrows. Later, as I neared the end of studying, I filled in additional info to test my memory and to think of more connections. I think it worked pretty well for a test like this! I could see the colors in my mind and remembered drawing certain things.

Proving God & Why I Didn’t Bother

Following are some thoughts inspired from a contemplative perspective of God. Everyone in Christian Classics wrote essays on this–email me yours and I’ll post it! wendy.greve@ngu.edu

As a child, I remember asking my mom, “What if this whole God thing isn’t real?” All it would take, in my mind, was for the Bible to be untrue, or the things my teachers told me to be wrong, for me to live however I wanted. I had to make sure. A few years ago, I remember writing about how it seemed (more and more) that people were willing to buy into anything that would explain away their fears. I didn’t want to pursue something because I was afraid, but because I could hold on to something steadfast even when my fears were at their greatest. I came to a place, through many a book and prayer, where I felt assured of life’s basic question: “Who am I and why am I here?” Of course, I have met Muslims who might say the same thing, which brings me to my next point. Everyone thinks he is right.

I hardly think an academic, heavily theological argument on the trinity would be the epiphanic moment for the non-Christian any more than an imam’s lengthy article on Tawhid would floor the average Evangelical Christian. The madness of the academy is hardly ever backing for sudden conversion; more often the reason is personal in nature.

After all my young angst, I came to believe that access to the “proper” doctrines and the “right” dogmas seems to somehow miss the spirit of Christian heritage. What religion does not have self-righteous polemics? I think this is what fascinates me about the person of Christ. Jesus allowed children—of all people—to come to him, for the “Kingdom of Heaven” belonged to such as them (Matt. 19:14). He chose the most unlikely of disciples: fishers and tax collectors. He condemned the religious hypocrites of the day (Matt. 23:29); he spoke to lepers and prostitutes and soldiers. Even the commoners, judges, prophets, prophets, and kings of the Old Testament failed. Noah fell to nakedness and drunkenness, Gideon tested God, Job questioned God, Moses disobeyed and struck a rock, Achan looted Jericho, David was an adulterer and murderer, and Solomon married hundreds of foreign women and kept many more concubines. Essentially, the Biblical ‘heroes’ are the sort the modern church would likely have nothing to do with. But they were real people, and it was said of some of them that despite their failings they were men most righteous, most wise, and even were after the heart of God. No, the richness and reality of God is not most profound in the polemic rhetoric of the Greeks, but in the more basic transformative power of God’s unearned love.