The January 2007 issue of First Things is already available, and in the “Briefly Noted” section you’ll find my review of Alexander the Corrector, a book about Alexander Cruden of Cruden’s Concordance fame. The editors at First Things snipped a few words here and there to make it fit better, generally improving the review. If you don’t subscribe to First Things you’re missing a lot of great stuff. But since we’re among friends here, I’ll let you have a peek at the longer version of my review.

Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius who Unwrote the Bible. Julia Keay. Overlook, 288 pages, $23.95

When Cruden’s Concordance was first published in 1737 in London, it was immediately recognized as a revolutionary research tool. In the American colonies, Jonathan Edwards read a magazine ad that same year for a work “more useful than any book of this kind hitherto published,” and soon had his own copy. One man had undertaken this monumental task of indexing the entire Bible, and he had done it working for a dozen years, unassisted and uncompensated. That man, Alexander Cruden, was what we might today call focused and detail oriented. We might also call him eccentric or obsessive. In his lifetime he was interred in madhouses four times, and in subsequent biographies has developed a reputation for having been mad. The rumor is an easy one to spread: after all, only a crazy person would index the whole Bible so minutely.
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As a young man around the year 1723, America’s greatest theologian, Jonathan Edwards, wrote out a series of personal resolutions, usually published as “Resolutions of a Saintly Scholar.” These 70 numbered resolutions are soul-searching commitments to lead a life of which he would not be ashamed. #6 is, “To live with all my might, while I do live,” and #70 is “Let there be something of benevolence, in all that I speak.” Edwards stands head and shoulders above the crowd of American theologians of his generation or any other, because he was a profound thinker, a powerful preacher, a missionary, and a culture builder. He combined all these roles in one seamless ministry which baffles onlookers.

Tonight I commend to you another saintly scholar, Mark Hopson. Upon graduating from the Torrey Honors Institute last year, Mark was awarded the Angela Good Service Award, given to the student whose life is most characterized by giving, self-sacrifice, and strategic service to others. Along with this service, Mark also excelled in his academic work, as a humanities major and in his Torrey classes. He did both at once in a seamless college career that baffled onlookers.

How many students do you meet who rise to the high standard set by Jonathan Edwards? One in a thousand? One in ten thousand? One in a million? Who is a student who rises to such a level?

Mark Hopson is not that student.

I mean, let’s be realistic here. Even Jonathan Edwards wasn’t that good at this age.

But Mark is a student who I can get away with naming in the same breath as Edwards without provoking peals of laughter. And he is the student who consistently reminds me of the standard set by Jonathan Edwards, and that is high enough praise. We need more saintly scholars good enough to call the standard back to our minds. Mark is no Jonathan Edwards, but he is devout enough, brilliant enough, and effective enough in ministry that he shows us all how these things can go together seamlessly.
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“Hello,” says the tall stick figure whose top hat is white and black.

“No te entiendo,” responds the short stick figure whose top hat is black and white. His words strike the other stick figure like a sack of doorknobs, knocking him off balance. The words are jumbled and disorienting.

It’s so hard to communicate with each other. But we’re both smiling in a way that’s charming and disarming, so let’s keep trying. After all, we may be different kinds of stick figures, and our arms may be connected to our bodies at very different points, but nevertheless we are both stick figures sharing the same sheet of paper. You have feet and fingers, but I have a neck. Our top hats may have opposite decorations, but don’t you think it’s worth reflecting on the fact that we’re in a special little club of stick figures who wear black and white striped top hats? I mean, how many people like that could there be in the world? Or on this sheet of paper?

What’s a little language trouble compared to that?

The late Colin Gunton (1941-2003), in a flurry of productivity just before his untimely death, put out a bunch of books that are remarkable for containing enough ideas that they could each have been expanded into more books. Looking for a half-remembered quotation, I recently skimmed back through my copy of his book The Triune Creator. I never did find the quotation I was after, but I found these four thought-provoking statements about the Christian doctrine of creation:

…the view of creation as deified conflict is perpetually renewed in human culture, most recently perhaps in Hegel and Marx, as well as in many of their disciples. Violations of the peace of creation are an offense against the God of the Bible, in complete contrast and opposition to the fact that they are a rational response to the gods of mythical and philosophical paganism. p. 26

The choice is inescapable: either God or the world itself provides the reason why things are as they are. To ‘personalise’ the universe or parts of it, particularly inert substances like molecules, is to succumb to crude forms of superstition. As we shall see, only a theology which distinguishes God from the world ontologically justifies the practices of science without succumbing to a pantheism or crypto-pantheism which effectively divinises the temporal. p. 39

The incarnation implies a certain freedom in the relations between God and the world, and so is the basis of the doctrine that God creates ‘out of nothing.’ The act of creation is accordingly seen to be grounded in an anterior richness in God. pp. 67-68

We are created not to ascend through the material to the spiritual, but to be perfected in time, through Christ and the Spirit, in and with the created order as a whole. p. 170

If those get your mind going, treat yourself to the whole book some time. It’s a couple hundred pages just like that.

And who wouldn’t like sheep? With a cloud for a body and nub for a tail, this ovine citizen has a distinctive strut. He throws his sloping hooves out in front of him and pulls himself along the green pasture beside the still waters - - his posture suggests he’s walking backwards, but be not deceived, this sheep maketh progress. The still waters are not pictured, and the green pastures are represented by a continuous zig-zag line like a tide chart. The constant diet of grass has lent its color to his green voice (what color is your voice?), which belts out his future plans: “I’M GOING TO EAT SOME GRASS ! ! ! ! !”

Sub conditione Jacobi, lamby, “under the condition laid down by James: “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.” For what is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. If the Lord wishes, you will indeed EAT SOME GRASS ! ! ! ! ! !

In 1927, the second Dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, John Murdoch MacInnis, wrote a book called Peter the Fisherman Philosopher: A Study in the Higher Fundamentalism, published by Biola Book Room. The alarmed reaction to this book ignited a controversy that led to MacInnis’ resignation, the recall and destruction of the book, and the banning of the book from the Bible Institute’s library collection. What was in that book, and what was at stake in this controversy?

To read the rest of “Biola’s Banned Book: Peter the Fisherman Philosopher,” which I presented on September 25, 2006 at a Banned Book colloquium in Biola’s library heritage room, click for more.

Three fundamental categories for theologizing are nature, grace, and glory. These terms indicate things you’ve already thought about before, but they don’t quite map onto other terms you might already know.

Nature is what a thing is in itself. Human nature is a created good, a thing with its own integrity and a recognizable completeness in itself. You can’t quite call it independent, because every nature you’ve ever encountered is a created nature which owes its being to God. But nature, the realm of created goods, has to have a relative independence from God in that it genuinely has existence as something distinct from the creator. You didn’t have to exist, and it’s worth thanking God for the gratuity and bonus of your sheer existence.
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I have a half-baked theory that evangelicalism was a much greater spiritual force about a hundred years ago. I’m not a historian or sociologist, and I don’t have a lot of interest in figuring out exactly what went wrong between our time and the golden age. It’s enough to know that sometime around the first quarter of the twentieth century, somebody obviously spent the family fortune, and later generations of evangelicals have been born poorer (in terms of spirituality, confidence, historical sense, academic heft, biblical literacy, ecumenical credibility, cultural impact, theological orientation, and clues). There are plenty of fine moments and good books from 20th century evangelicals, but if you just leap over the whole sorry century and land back at the end of the nineteenth, you come into contact with a stream of spiritual power that does not feel familiar - - it feels better. Evangelical theology and spirituality one hundred years ago were palpably better.

Now and then I check my half-baked theory by opening the oven door and sticking a toothpick in it. Minus the tortured culinary metaphor, here’s how I actually do that. I read a few pages from The King’s Business, the monthly magazine that Biola published beginning in 1910. The first decade of the magazine is available online here. Help yourself!

Once you learn how to learn from these old founders of fundamentalism, almost any page will do. Here’s the trick: You’re not just looking for somebody who was writing in 1910; instead you’re trying to get a sense of the atmosphere they were living in, the things they were reading, and the things they took for granted as belonging to them.
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Words from J.H. Jowett, written in 1910:

It is possible to evade a multitude of sorrows by the cultivation of an insignificant life. Indeed, if it be a man’s ambition to avoid the troubles of life, the recipe is perfectly simple — let him shed his ambitions in every direction, let him cut the wings of every soaring purpose, and let him assiduously cultivate a little life, with the fewest correspondences and relations.

By this means a whole continent of afflictions will be escaped and will remain unknown. Cultivate negations, and large tracts of the universe will cease to exist. For instance, cultivate deafness, and you are saved from the horrors of discords. Cultivate blindness, and you are saved from the assault of the ugly. Stupefy a sense, and you shut out a world. And, therefore, it is literally true that if you want to get through the world with the smallest trouble you must reduce yourself to the smallest compass.
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The turkey on the table is roasted red, and Freddy age six gives a wave so exuberant that it might take as many as six fingers to get the message across.

Happy Thanksgiving from the Middlebrow gang. We’ve been on the road this week at an annual conference and are giving thanks to be back home, ready to get back to blogging.