There are some peculiar footnotes in the 1845 edition of Calvin’s Institutes translated by the industrious Henry Beveridge. The weirdest ones are the result of Beveridge double-checking his translation work by turning from the Latin Institutes to the French translation (much of which is by Calvin’s own hand). My favorite example is in Book I, chapter 11, when Calvin is ridiculing the practice of venerating statues. Since there are religious statues everywhere, Calvin asks, why is that people “fatigue themselves with votive pilgrimages to images while they have many similar ones at home?” At this point, Beveridge notices that the French translation offers a slightly different wording (”Pourquoy est-ce qu’ils trotent si loin en pelerinage pour voir un marmouset, duquel ils ont le semblable à leur porte?”), so he puts that, in English, into a footnote: “Why is it that they trot so far on a pilgrimage to see a marmoset, when they have one like it at their door?”

A marmoset? Um, you mean the South American monkey? What are 16th-century Europeans doing taking pilgrimages to bow down to South American monkeys, or for that matter keeping them at home? How many New World monkeys were there in Switzerland by that time? Were there constant marmoset runs being made between 1492 and 1559?
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At the top of a steep green hill, we see a momentary lull in the eternal battle for the teddy bear. The tall purple knight represents the Bearhead Clan, known for the severity of their discipline, the unornamented armor, and their total devotion to the face of the bear, whose emblem marks his shield. Over against him stands the smaller blue knight of the order of Ursus Corpus, who pride themselves on adhering to the entire bear from ears to toes. His stylized helmet even includes a flowing feather crest. Between them, the Teddy Bear they each claim for themselves. A moment more and the fighting resumes.

Dorothy Sayers was not a theologian, and she availed herself of every opportunity to make some version of this denial public. “Playwrights Are Not Evangelists,” she wrote in 1955, and in later life she drafted a form letter of rejection to send to people who invited her to come speak on theological topics. She called the form letter NMR (No More Religion). However, most often the place where she chose to declare her untheological vocation was right at the beginning of a theological essay, so perhaps it is understandable that her readers continued to construe her as a peculiarly theological non-theologian.

In fact, Sayers wrote so much about doctrine and the Christian life that she provided plenty of fodder for theological analysis. With the appearance of Laura K. Simmons’ 2005 book Creed Without Chaos, we now have a book-length exercise in Exploring Theology in the Writings of Dorothy L. Sayers.
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Last night, trying to figure out how to vote my way through that long list of court of appeal judges, I resorted to the web for guidance. As a last ditch effort to check my work, I logged on to the Daily Kos to see who they recommended voting for, on the assumption that voting the exact opposite of that would probably put me in the neighborhood of the truth. Somewhere in the bowels of the Kos reader forum I found an odd thing: somebody making a recommendation for how to cast judicial votes, based on checking a right wing lobbyist website on the assumption that voting the exact opposite of that would probably put them in the neighborhood of the truth.

A better web researcher could probably track the meme. Who made the first list of recommendations which was reversed by their evil opposite? How many steps back does the double-negative trick go? What if there is no beginning point, and the whole “vote the opposite” mirroring trend is an infinite regress? Is it possible that there’s no original action, just reaction all the way down? Whoa dude, that could be in the next Matrix movie.

“Man is a political animal,” said Aristotle, and in our media-saturated bestiary there are some critters whose habitat is chatterati TV and whose steady diet is news analysis served hot off the news cycle. And what’s the news cycle down to these days, about seven minutes? At the other extreme are people whose actions defy Aristotle’s claim, who don’t even manage the bare minimum of democratic participation, voting.

I’ve tried to stay sane and reasonable about politics by alternating between seasons of engagement and seasons of withdrawal. Now that I’ve voted (and then scrubbed my hands as clean as I can get them) for another round, I’m looking forward to fasting from political analysis for a while (after the returns come in tonight, of course). Voting responsibly (in California at least) is like adding a part-time job for the week leading up to the election.

This year I discovered the best reason for voting early by absentee ballot. It lets you get the political binge out of your system before the media enters its pre-election zone of maximum irresponsibility. For at least three weeks before election day, reporters seem unable to report without editorializing about the effect of their own report on the coming election. Gas prices go up: that will swing the election! Somebody gave John Kerry a microphone, the Republicans are going to stay in power forever! Saddam is sentenced, that’s good for Bush! It’s kind of hot today, the Democrats will take the House! Rush Limbaugh insulted Michael J. Fox, the court of appeals is shaken! Madonna is adopting a kid, impeachment is imminent! These are not buried in the editorial speculations of the opinion page, but built into the headlines.

As a political amateur, I’d expect myself to get lost in the house of mirrors and have a hard time with the multiplex images: “Is that a reflection of a reflection, or a reflection of a reflection of a reflection?” But when journalists at large are having the same problem, it’s time to plug your ears.

Why do so many people use the word “just” when they are praying aloud? Have you noticed how ubiquitous this word is in extemporaneous prayer? “Lord, we just want to just thank you for just blessing us.” What does the word “just” add to such a prayer?

When you consider that the word “just” is a minimizing word, meaning “merely” or “nothing more than,” it makes no sense for it to be the seasoning word sprinkled throughout our prayers. “Lord, we merely want to simply thank you for doing no more than blessing us.” Why do we minimize every other word in a prayer? It’s just a flesh wound! It’s just praying! I just sinned and just need forgiveness, that’s all! It’s no big deal, all I’m doing is bringing my life before the face of God.

So goes the gripe, and the stand-up comics of devotion have an easy target to shoot at when mocking the habits of the simple believer at prayer. I admit to having such thoughts myself while trying to pray along with a brother or sister whose words wander too far into the “Lord just Lord just Lord just Lord” range. Of course I blame myself for having such a hyperactive inner critic that when I ought to be saying “amen” to the prayer of a friend, instead I’m saying “bad sentence, man.” But beyond legitimate self-reproach, are there any steps to take that might actually make me better disposed toward such a widespread speech pattern?

Recently I found some help in the novel Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s 2005 Pulitzer-winner. A few pages in, the novel’s narrator (an old preacher) pauses after telling a story, to reflect on the way he’s been using language:

In writing this, I notice the care it costs me not to use certain words more than I ought to. I am thinking about the word “just.” I almost wish I could have written that the sun just shone and the tree just glistened, and the water just poured out of it and the girl just laughed –when it’s used that way it does indicate a stress on the word that follows it, and also a particular pitch of the voice. People talk that way when they want to call attention to a thing existing in excess of itself, so to speak, a sort of purity or lavishness, at any rate something ordinary in kind but exceptional in degree. So it seems to me at the moment. There is something real signified by that word “just” that proper language won’t acknowledge. It’s a little like the German ge-. I regret that I must deprive myself of it. It takes half the point out of telling the story.

Robinson’s old narrator is right, and I’m embarrassed to admit that before reading this passage it had not occurred to me how “just” is used as an intensifier. It isolates and emphasizes the word that comes after it, with a kind of preliminary down-beat to exalt the following word as “a thing existing in excess of itself” in a “purity or lavishness.” The word can’t work that way in print, but whenever somebody is speaking aloud freely, they may reach out for a figure of speech to raise their words to the level of their thoughts and feelings… well, that’ just fine. JUST fine.

With this image, our accomplished 6-year old artist, fully capable of illustrating chivalrous derring-do on the grand scale, intentionally curtails his normal rendering style. He sets aside the conventions of detailed description and gestural representation, and opts for a simpler, looser style. Why, you might ask? He is following in the footsteps of the great masters, who knew better than to impose their personal style on every phenomenon, and instead allowed their subject matter to declare for itself how it should be portrayed. In this case, the pulsing regularity of the keyboard is the center of attention, with a visual rhythm of rectangles evoking the percussive rhythm of the song. The artist is making the recalcitrant medium of pencil-on-newsprint find within its own resources an expressive counterpart to piano music. Ekphrastic!

Three figures are seated on a dangerously sloping piano bench, their backs to the viewer. Before them, indicated by one undulating loop of a line, is a piano. It is an upright piano, but the sweep of its curve calls to mind the form of a grand piano.

The figure to our left is a beginner. His arms, mere nubs sticking out from his blockish torso, splay in two directions in a wild effort to coax something musical from the great machine. The central figure seems to float above the bench, his blockishness distending into a more lyrical grace. But they must all be judged by the maestro, the figure on the right. This figure draws the keys out of their wonted grid and into her own musical center of gravity. The keys seem to rise up, one after another, to come to her. Or perhaps they flow from her, down and leftward across the piano. The bench tilts, the piano’s base curves, as all music starts and/or stops with her. This is the one who makes the upright grand! This is the one who gives sense to the scale and turns repetition to rhythm. She alone knows the secret, but it is one she shares.

Once upon a time, the people most committed to the gospel were the people most inclined to serious theological thought. The deepest doctrines of Christianity, the ones which are not on the surface of the scriptures but lie waiting in its depths, were quarried through disciplined theological meditation and patient discernment. It was not academics or aesthetes with too much time on their hands who did this work, but busy pastors, suffering martyrs, and bishops overseeing the evangelization of entire cities. As they preached and taught and suffered for the gospel, they worked out the deep logic of the revelation of the Trinity, the incarnation, and redemption.

The more seriously they took the life-changing power of the good news, the more concentration they devoted to the details of sound doctrine.

In modern times, things have been different: we take for granted that there must be an absolute divide between vital Christian experience on the one hand, and careful doctrinal theology on the other. To us, action and reflection seem mutually exclusive, especially when it comes to Christian faith. The last thing we would expect to find is gospel and theology flowing from the same passionate commitment. But in the long flow of Christian history, that is how it has usually been, from the church fathers and the medievals through the reformers and puritans. All of them recognized that simple, saving faith could and should be elaborated into the trinitarianism of Nicaea and the incarnational theology of Chalcedon. It took the crafty liberal theologians of the nineteenth century to invent the argument that central Christian doctrines were, in Adolf Harnack’s words, “a work of the Greek spirit on the soil of the gospel” and a betrayal of the simplicity of Jesus’ message.

One of the great ironies of modern theological history is that the heirs of those conservatives who opposed high liberalism have become the chief bearers of the Harnackian bias against doctrine. Whenever they assume that the best way to embrace the simple gospel is to eschew the difficulties of doctrine, evangelicals are unconsciously adopting the position of their opponents and standing in contradiction to their own best interests. In doing so, they take themselves out of the very stream of power which made their movement possible in the first place: the gospel stream of doctrine and devotion that flows from the fathers to the first fundamentalists. J. I. Packer once defined evangelicalism as “fidelity to the doctrinal content of the gospel,” taking care to not to bypass the “doctrinal content” in the rush to get to a gospel. Fidelity to the gospel requires recognition of doctrinal content, and those who would preach the gospel must make use of the tools of theology.

The marks on the left could be read as railroad tracks converging at a distant vanishing point, but they are in fact the goal net. This young goalie has all the right moves, not even condescending to use his hands in blocking this shot. With such a kick you think to score on me? Ha! With my head I knock away your so-called “shot.” Leaning easily into its trajectory I cause it to bounce into the banner of my triumphant team, BIOLA! Do not waste our time again with such a meager effort at scoring.

The publishers of the English Standard Version didn’t just produce a highly usable translation of the Bible. They also worked hard to make their work easily available on the internet. They’ve got a whole ESV blog full of nifty techie tricks that their version can do. But here’s one I discovered on my own:

When you Google a Bible verse by itself, you often get a whole lot of junk hits. So these days when I search for a Bible verse, I start my search with the letters ESV. For example, searching ESV Psalm 23 gets you, as the top hit, the 23rd Psalm in the English Standard Version.

Once you’re on an ESV page, notice that there’s a little “Listen” tab available. Just click it and it’ll start playing an audio file of that passage. Nice and tidy, without opening a new media player or a new window or anything.

Together, these two features have changed the way I wash dishes. I can just Google ESV + whatever chapter I want to hear, and then hear it read aloud while I scrub the pots and pans. In the future, I’m sure I’ll just be able to shout a Bible passage at my robot housekeeper (the Scourby-Bot 3000), but for now I’m pretty thrilled with the few clicks it takes me to get ESV Bible audio on demand.

What’s better than Playmobil? I’m not trying to be controversial here, and I don’t want to pick any fights with my Legocentric brethren, but the Playmobil toys are wonderful things. If you don’t have children in your house, it’s a real challenge to think of excuses for playing with these amazing little plastic figures. But those of us with younguns underfoot are free to swear that we’re just doing it for the kids. You know… for kids! O

Well, the good volk at Playmobil.com have a series of advertisements free cartoons available, and I’ve seen them all. But here’s a hot tip for those who want to be in the in crowd: The German site has even more cartoons, including a brand new one about Roman gladiators: The Wooden Sword. The cartoon supports their well-done new toy line on ancient Rome.

The Wooden Sword is a tiny epic, a tale of barbarian Gladiators captured by Roman forces and fighting in the arena to win their freedom. All acted out by Playmobil figures instead of Russell Crowe. You also get to fight hungry lions, jump over battle wagons, and dodge arrows in the interactive part of the show. Summa cum laude = ausgezeichnet!

I’m no expert on ancient Rome, but I do get to teach my way through some of the primary texts every year in the great books cycle here at Torrey. And it looks like the animators at Playmobil have done some research to get the decorations and battle formations right. So while you’re enjoying the happy land of Playmobil, you can also pick up some good glimpses of the less happy land of Rome.

Sprechen sie Deutsch nicht so gut? Not to worry: Even with no German reading knowledge, you can probably navigate your way around the site. So go ahead, treat yourself to Das Hölzerne Schwert, The Wooden Sword.

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