In these complicated days of geopolitical confusion, here is a straightforward question: What does the Bible say abut the Arab people? It’s a clear enough question, but who do you know who could put together more than a few sentences on the subject?

There must be only a handful of such people, and one of them is Tony Maalouf, a Lebanese Christian who has taught in Jordan and Beirut, and who is currently teaching at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. This weekend he has been at Biola University, giving a series of lectures and interviews on the neglected subject of the biblical theology of Arabs.
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John Mark Reynolds wrote recently about the relationship between education –especially the ability to use words well– and freedom. Verbal fluency is a mighty weapon to enslave or liberate people; it doesn’t take a Marx or a Foucault to spot the way education and miseducation direct the flow of power in a society. I have nothing to add but a couple of great passages on the subject, one from a hard-to-find work by Dorothy Sayers:

We must bring imagination to the task of communicating thought. The task grows harder every day because of the multitude of techniques, because of the proliferation of meaningless verbiage, and also because the younger generations have been steadily deprived of the four great traditional safeguards: formal logic and the Latin Grammar, which were a negative defence against fallacy and slipshod syntax; a dogmatic theology and the habit of good verse, which were a positive education in the handling of the magical images.

– Dorothy Sayers, “Poetry, Language, and Ambiguity,” in The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement, 1957.

and the other from Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian, found in his brilliant, offensive, hilarious first book Less than Words Can Say:

Truncheons are for louts. The great masters of social manipulation use language. They know, furthermore, that the establishment of a flexible and subtle language for the ruling classes is only half of what’s needed. The other half is the perpetuation of an ineffective and minimal language among the subjects. Ordinarily, the second half is assured by man’s natural propensity to bother himself as little as possible, but history occasionally requires that the rulers take some special pains to preserve the ignorance of their subjects.

A fluent command of English cannot exist as an isolated skill, a clever stunt. A person who speaks and writes his native tongue clearly and precisely does so because of many other abilities, and those other abilities themselves grow stronger through the fluent manipulation of language. The simple matter of being logical is a function of language. A million high school graduates capable of fluent English would be a million Americans capable of logical thought. What would we do with them[…] ? You think they’re going to buy those lottery tickets and lamps in the shape of Porky Pig?

I love weird old books, and the worse they are, the better I like them. One of my favorite bad books is a modest little volume from 1927 called Why Few Succeed and Many Fail, by Dr. R. A. Richardson. Never heard of Richardson? He was “A Graduate and Licensed Osteopathic Physician and Surgeon, Also Oculist and Optometrist.” In addition to this book (published by himself The Eyesight and Health Association Publishers, Kansas City, Missouri), Richardson wrote “Strong, Healthy Eyes Without Glasses” and “Removing Facial Wrinkles.”

I know what you’re thinking: WHY do few succeed and many fail? Well, put that thought out of your mind, because Richardson never clearly answers it in this 200-page rambler with no chapter divisions. He does complain a lot about how many failures there are in the world: 95 out of 100, to be precise. From page 20: “Only five out of every hundred people are successful, the other ninety-five are failures. Remember, you can have what you want if you want it badly enough.” And he lets us know of one who succeeded: Dr. R. A. Richardson, Osteopath and Oculist. He has learned the secret, or maybe he was a born winner, or maybe it’s a combination of secrets: salesmanship, positive thinking, impeccable haberdashery. I’ve read this book far too many times (”Honey, what’s got you so interested in that awful book,” asks my wife), and I can’t figure out if Richardson is a laissez-faire social Darwinist, a fatalist, or a bootstraps Pelagian. I think perhaps he’s all three at once.

Why Few Succeed has no structure that I can discern. Instead it churns on for page after page, changing subjects in mid-paragraph, and always circling back to a few loosely-related favorite subjects: One paragraph begins with men who are failures because they read the same kind of books too much, contrasts that unrelieved monotony with the way we treat our machines (clean, lube, rest), and then settles into Richardson’s favorite rut: health and why losers don’t have it. “He allows his human machine to become clogged and congested; he allows waste material to remain inside to decay and form a poison that eats its way through the tissues, finding its way into the heart, the liver, the lungs, and into the joints of the body, his blood stream carrying it on and on until it finds some point of least resistance.” (p. 13)

One thing is clear: Richardson is a champion of hate. His contempt for failures (that’s 95% of us) knows no bounds. Avert your eyes if you can’t tolerate the withering scorn of the self-made osteopath-oculist…

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On a make-shift stage with a pipe-and-drape backdrop, one man plays a portable keyboard while another brandishes a mean microphone. Put your hands together, people, I can’t hear you!

(I can’t prove it, but I believe this is a drawing of worship leader Walt and preacher Erik. At least that’s who was on stage when the drawing was made.)

William Tyndale (1492-1536) changed the world with a revolutionary Bible translation that moved straight from the original languages into English with no Latin middle-man. The very words of Scripture were thus unleashed to conduct their own sovereign interrogation of the sixteenth century church: Are you hearers and doers of the word? Aside from the theological earthquake this brought about, there was also a tremor in linguistics: bringing the English language directly under the influence of Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek, he was one of the major forces to give the English language its expressive range and cadences, as the best Tyndale biography argues. In addition to his epochal work as a translator, Tyndale was a powerful theologian, the author of a number of doctrinal and practical treatises suffused with biblical insight.

A real gem, one of his smaller pieces has just been published in the Southwestern Journal of Theology, along with an introduction and commentary by Malcolm Yarnell. (The whole article is available in .pdf form here). It is a treatise on the Lord’s Prayer, and there are several remarkable things about it. Tyndale writes a meaty introduction, and then he puts forth the theology of the Lord’s Prayer in the form of a dialogue between the sinner who prays the prayer, and the God who hears it. As the prayer is put on the lips of this character named “synner” (that’s 16th century orthography for “sinner”), each word takes on gravity and profundity. So the synner says to God:

Oure father which arte in heven
what a greate space ys betwen the and us:
How therefore shall we thy children here on erth
baneshed and exiled from the in this vale of misery and wretchedness
come home to the in to oure naturall countre?

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Mr. Bird returns from a morning of hunting and gathering, descending with a dramatic flourish and imposing wingspread. He has a wild look in his eye, and a few unkempt feathers that could use a good kemping. Though his beak remains tightly closed, he shouts a loud greeting at his dear spouse, who returns both the greeting and the gesture. Mrs. Bird fills up the cozy nest which is wedged snugly into the crook of a treebranch. It is not at all clear where Mr. Bird is going to land if the nest is drawn to scale.

In his upper wing Mr. Bird carries a transparent bag. You can see that it is filled with the two favorite foods of birds everywhere: seeds and worms, represented by dots and lines. In his other wing is a surprise.

Once a week I get to meet with Old Testament scholar Joe Henderson and a group of students to study one Psalm for one hour. We’re up to Psalm 56. Whenever we gather around one of these psalms, I’m aware that we’re not the first believers to get our grubby hands on it. There’s a long history of interpretation streaming off of these beloved old texts.

For instance, there is an iconographic tradition for many of the Psalms. This illustration is taken from the remarkable 12th century Anglo-Saxon book called the St. Alban’s Psalter. Inside of a giant letter M (from the word “miserere,” the first word of the Psalm in Latin: “Be gracious to me, O God”) a poor monk is getting kicked and beaten by an enemy (”man tramples on me; all day long an attacker oppresses me”). His response, as he falls to his knees, is to point to the Lord above (”When I am afraid, I put my trust in you”), who sees it all (”You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?”). These medieval illustrations are insightful commentaries on the psalms; a picture is often worth a thousand words of exegesis.

But there are other readers as well. Cyberhymnal.org has a great “scripture reference” index that lets you see if this Psalm has inspired any hymns. It has. The best (as usual) is by Isaac Watts:

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There’s a band called The Lost Dogs who just finished up a tour in support of their latest album, The Lost Cabin and the Mystery Trees, with a couple of shows in southern California. I caught their San Bernardino show on Saturday night at a Community Church. About 125 people showed up, many of them there to support the mission trip that this concert was serving as a fund raiser for. I couldn’t help wondering what some of the senior citizens were thinking about during the screaming guitar moments, but the Lost Dogs play such a wide range of music that I’m sure there was something there for everybody. And for those with ears to hear, we lucky few superfans in the audience, we got some of the best music being made these days from a group like no other.

The Lost Dogs are veteran musicians who each have their own bands and/or solo careers, but who come together to form a super-group with so much talent that it’s just sloshing around the stage. Never mind the hundreds of songs from their bands of origin, they’ve been working together as the Lost Dogs for so long now (since 1992) that they’ve got a deep catalog of classics to draw from. And on top of that, their music sounds ancient the minute it’s made: most of their work tends toward the deeply traditional sounds of Americana, folk, country, roots-rock, blues, and other forms so primal that they wheeze history and bleed heritage. There’s a river of music that runs through American history, and it occasionally splashes out into the pop consciousness in something like the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack, or Bruce Springsteen’s Seeger sessions. But the Lost Dogs are permanent residents on the banks of that river, and they are doing their strongest work right now.
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Paul has one shot at defending himself before Agrippa, and he throws everything he’s got at it. One of the things he’s got is the story of his own conversion on the road to Damascus, and in Acts 26 he re-tells the whole episode to Agrippa in detail. In some respects, Paul gives more detail here in this third re-telling (see earlier versions in Acts 9 and 22). For example, he gives us more direct quotation of what Jesus told him there on the road.

The most striking thing Jesus tells him is: “I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you as a servant and witness … delivering you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light” (Acts 26:16-18)

“A witness to the Gentiles, to open their eyes.” Remember that, and look over at the last thing Paul gets to say to Agrippa before Festus cuts him off, at the end of his speech in verse 22: “To this day I have had the help that comes from God, and so I stand here testifying both to small and great, saying nothing but what the prophets and Moses said would come to pass: that the Christ must suffer and that, by being the first to rise from the dead, he would proclaim light both to our people and to the Gentiles.”

Paul’s point is that according to the scriptures, Jesus Christ will rise from the dead and proclaim light to the Jews and to the Gentiles. But “opening the eyes of the Gentiles” is precisely what Jesus told Paul he was appointing him to do. Obviously, Jesus is appointing Paul to be the agent he carries out his work through. Who brings light to the Gentiles? Jesus Christ does: Either directly or through the witness of Paul, Jesus Christ speaks for himself. He is not a dead man who needs agents to go speak on his behalf. He is alive, present and active, speaking for himself, to Agrippa, speaking for himself to Bernice, to Festus, and all the great and small gathered there.

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Jesus Christ, risen and at the right hand of God, continues to speak for himself. The story of Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, retold in Acts 26, shows this in two different ways.

He speaks for himself directly, personally, in red print if your Bible prints things that way. This is special informatioon provided here in Acts 26. From the versions of the same story told in Acts 9 and Acts 22, we would have thought Jesus said only a few words to Saul and left the rest of his instructions for later. Look at Acts 9:6: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” That’s all. But our version in Acts 26 gives a much fuller account of the direct, personal instructions Jesus gave Paul about his ministry to the Gentiles. This is Jesus’ project, and Jesus speaks for himself in commissioning his apostles.
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