Title: Untitled (#2,621 in a series)
Artist: Freddy
Size: 11″ x 17″
Medium: Marker on high-acid paper
Provenance: Southern California, early 21st century
Now in the collection of: Private owner

The paintings of the artist known only as Freddy reflect, especially during his ongoing “knights” period, reflect the influence of the 11th century Bayeux tapestry and related works from medieval Europe, although he subjects his work to a strict discipline of simplification more in line with sumi-e brush paintings. The astonishing directness with which his images are constructed conceals the hours of research behind each drawing. In “Untitled” (#2,621 in the Knights series), the helmet is Freddy’s own modification of a traditional conical helmet with the addition of the descending nose guard and cheek guards modelled on the centaurs from the Narnia film.

From John Updike’s The Carpentered Hen, published 1958.

Professor Varder handles Dante
With wry respect; while one can see
It’s all a lie, one must admit
The “beauty” of the “imagery.”

Professor Varder slyly smiles,
Describing Hegel as a “sage;”
But still, the man has value - - he
Reflects the “temper” of his “age.”

Montaigne, Tom Paine, St. Augustine:
Although their notions came to naught,
They still are “crucial figures” in
The “pageantry” of “Western thought.”

Who is the Holy Spirit? What is his characteristic personhood, which distinguishes him from the Father and the Son? How is it that he isn’t simply interchangeable with the ascended Jesus Christ, or on the other hand interchangeable with the invisible Father, or on the other other hand, identical with the one divine essence? He is God, but he is not the Son and not the Father. Who is he?

In De Trinitate 5.11.12, Augustine is trying to talk about the Holy Spirit, and wondering what he should do with John 4:24’s declaration that “God is Spirit.” It’s a problem: Does “Spirit” refer to the Trinity as a whole, or to the third person of the Trinity? In the first volume of Robert W.Jenson’s Systematic Theology, Jenson puts it this way: “Is invocation of the Spirit anything distinctive over against simply invocation of God?” and then he adds, “Is Pentecost a Peer of Easter or does it merely display a meaning that Easter would any case have?”

The rest of this post gets pretty theological, but read on if you want (more…)

Thoughts after six hours of discussing Søren Kierkegaard’s beautiful, terrible little book Fear and Trembling, which puts forward Abraham as “the knight of faith,” who is greater than all the wise and strong of the world:

great with that power whose strength is powerlessness, great in that wisdom whose secret is folly, great in that hope whose outward form is insanity, great in that love which is hatred of self.

What Kierkegaard (or rather, Johannes de Silentio, the authorial pseudonym who we are supposed to think of as responsible for the text) admires in Abraham is precisely his inconceivable and indefensible act of binding Isaac for sacrifice. The rest of Abraham’s life is shoved aside, and our attention is focused on this one act in which his obedience to God is conspicuous because it is outrageous. Abraham may have been obeying God all his life, but that obedience always conveniently tracked right along with the universal rules of right conduct. In the binding of Isaac, Abraham had to obey God in a way that stood out from the binding demands of the ethical. This is the test for the knight of faith.

But there is another knight of faith in Fear and Trembling, besides Abraham. The other knight of faith is not named, and is described in such excruciatingly normal terms that when I asked a class (hi, Homer group!) about him, one of my students responded, “Oh yeah, that one guy, the guy of faith.”
(more…)

I’m into the Trinity, my son’s into knights. So imagine the thrill of finding this image which brings our interests together. It’s a picture of a knight preparing to go into battle against an array of evils and vices. It is from a 13th-century illuminated manuscript in the British Library. The knight himself is a big fellow, well covered in mail and a helmet, armed with a spear and sword. And his shield has on it the diagram (a version of which I featured in yesterday’s post) of the Trinity:

The circle at the center represents the divine essence, and the three circles at the shield’s corners represent (in heavily abbreviated Latin: pr, spc, fili) the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

I can’t read most of the (fascinating!) stuff on this page, but what’s crucial in the traditional Trinity shield is that each divine person is connected to the divine essence with the affirmation: IS. So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God. And each divine person is connected to the other persons with the denial: IS NOT, recognizing that the Father is not the Son, nor the Son the Spirit, and so on.

The doctrinal diagram emblazoned on a shield, it seems to me, makes exactly the same point as the elaborately trinitarian prayer of St. Patrick, known as Patrick’s Breastplate:

I bind unto myself today
The strong Name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same
The Three in One and One in Three.

Cited here in Cecil Frances Alexander’s almost singable English versification.

In Old Testament terms, God is a refuge and a shield, and that God who is our shield is Father, Son, and Spirit.

Charles Wesley wrote:

O Love divine, what has thou done!
The immortal God hath died for me!

- - which is a bold thing to say, because it claims so much. “God…died.” The Bible itself says it that bluntly in a few places, such as Acts 20:28, “God purchased the church with his own blood.” This is how the voice of faith speaks when it confesses what God has done. This is a good Christian sentence.

When theologians get ahold of stark, paradoxical statements like “God died,” we have an instinct to clarify what is being said. We don’t want to remove the shock or the force, but we do want to make sure that the true paradox is being communicated rather than something else. We want to rule out misunderstandings that either take away the shock, or substitute for it a fake shock.
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Lean to me, Teddy,
As brown as the line of earth,
As I lean to you.

The marker runs out
Burnt umber, then sepia,
At last, sienna.

The negative space
Into which we both impinge
From left and from right.

Jonathan Edwards:
“Being’s consent to being
Is the true virtue.”

You fold your fat paws
And the lines of my green leaves
Turn in on themselves.

Beast with no straight lines:
All the lines you are are all
Curvilinear.

My stalk is one line
But my poor sunflower head
Totally ’sploded.

Freddy age five did the marker rendering. Fred age thirty eight did the pseudo-haiku.

What the resurrection proves is more important than proving the resurrection.

R. A. Torrey (1856-1928), at the height of his fame as world-travelling evangelist, published a book called The Bible and its Christ. Of the book’s ten chapters, the first four provided reasons for believing the Bible to be God’s word, the next four were about the resurrection of Christ, and the final two were about “Infideliity: Its Causes, Consequences, and Cure.”

Of the four chapters on the resurrection, the first three argue that it is reasonable to believe that Christ rose from the dead, and that an impartial handling of the evidence will drive an honest inquirer to admit that, historically speaking, there are better reasons for affirming the resurrection than denying it. Torrey advances numerous lines of argument about the nature of historical judgements, the state of the documents, and so on, and he peppers the presentation with his characteristic declamations:

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is in many respects the most important fact in history. It is the Gibraltar of Christian evidences, the Waterloo of infidelity. If it can be proven to be a historic certainty that Jesus rose from the dead, then Christianity rests upon an impregnable foundation.

All of this has become standard apologetic fare, partly due to the labors of Torrey and the other founders of the fundamentalist coalition. Some of Torrey’s arguments don’t exactly hold up, or don’t prove as much as he hopes, but a great deal of his argument is solid. The current conversation on this subject is much more sophisticated, and anybody who wants to cull the evidence would be better served to check out something by apologist Gary Habermas or, rather definitively and with golly-gee acumen, N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. (If you haven’t read Wright before, prepare to read most of it barefoot… because he’ll knock your socks off in the opening chapters).

But what particularly drew my interest in Torrey’s book was that fourth chapter (Chapter VIII) on the resurrection: “What the resurrection of Jesus from the dead proves.”
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After posting about Cheynell’s 1650 Trinity book, I looked again at the title page and realized he didn’t publish it as a book about The Divine Triunity, but about the Divine TriNunity. As far as I can tell, he meant to spell it that way. Later readers who wrote about his book sometimes got the name right, and sometimes unconsciously corrected it (as I did), to Trinity. I haven’t read Cheynell’s book (still resting from the title), but I wonder if he uses the unconventional “trinunity” term throughout. And if he coined it himself. And if he did it just to mess with my head.