It’s the Blue Knight vs. the Yellow Knight in a jousting match. Normally the victor is determined by whose lance breaks into splinters, signifying that they have struck a mighty blow against their opponent’s breastplate or shield. But in this case, the blue knight has managed a direct hit on the yellow knight’s own lance, breaking it in two. Let’s hope the judges are sharp-eyed enough to call this round accurately! (If they’re not sure, maybe they could ask the big-eyed horses how it looks from down there.)

“I’ve made a very conscious effort to train myself in the visual tradition of the church. I’m stocking my head with the symbols that Christian artists have used to portray the mystery visually.”

Jane Redmont is the author of When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Everyday Life (HarperCollins, 1999), a readable and wide-ranging exploration of the practice of prayer in modern lives. Jane is part journalist and part theologian (she is now an assistant professor of religious studies at Guilford College), and her books are always woven together using threads of case studies, life stories, interviews, and reportage. When In Doubt, now out of print, is a little bit like a printed episode of This American Life on the topic of prayer, in which you meet all sorts of people who tell you about their prayer lives.

One of the people you meet in the book is me, because Jane is a friend of mine from grad school days in Berkeley, when (in addition to studying for our doctorates) I was drawing comic books and Jane was working on this book. My wife Susan and I both get nice thank yous in the preface. There were three different topics in the life of prayer that Jane interviewed me about: the use of images, the role of praise, and memorizing Scripture.

Images and prayer make a funny combination for most evangelical Protestants, and that includes me. In the overall flow of the chapter (on “Gazing”), my point of view is introduced fairly late, after a Greek Orthodox historian (hi Jim!), a latina Roman Catholic theologian talking about the virgin of Guadalupe (hi Nancy!), and a scholar whose interdisciplinary work has focused on this exact topic (hi Margaret!). So I show up among all these iconophiles as the Protestant who’s more than a little bit squeamish about the religious use of pictures, but who has properly evangelical reasons for bringing visual experience into the presence of God. Need I add that When in Doubt, Sing is not mainly addressed to an evangelical audience? But Jane’s the best sort of liberal, and gladly made room for my point of view along with the rest.

Here is what I said on the subject of images in Jane’s book, When In Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life, pages 80-83. (more… )

There are some people whose lives incline you to listen seriously to whatever they say. Samuel M. Zwemer (1867-1952) was such a person and lived such a life. So his little book, Taking Hold of God: Studies on the Nature, Need, and Power of Prayer (Grand Rapids, Mich: Zondervan, 1936), had my attention simply due to Zwemer’s credibility as a missionary. Reading it, I was delighted to find that it contained an account of prayer which would have been moving no matter who penned it.

The title, Taking Hold of God, comes from a phrase in Isaiah 64 –a chapter which Zwemer tantalizingly calls “one of the five great chapters on prayer in the Bible” (what are the other four??? ). Isaiah begins this chapter by saying that noone has heard or seen what God has prepared for those who wait on him, and moves through confession that human righteousness is like filthy rags. Then in the seventh verse comes what Zwemer call’s Isaiah’s “definition of prayer:”

There is no one who calls upon your name,
who rouses himself to take hold of you

“It is a bold definition,” says Zwemer. “Literally (in the Hebrew text) he says that prayer means to rouse oneself out of sleep and seize hold of Jehovah.” Prayer, calling on the name of the Lord, is waking up and grabbing hold of God. What we have here is “the pathos of a suppliant who is in deadly earnest; the arms, the hands, the very fingers of the soul reaching out to lay hold of God; man’s personal, spiritual appropriation of deity! No wonder Paul calls Isaiah very bold!”

I am intrigued by the part about waking up, but Zwemer instead develops the image of “taking hold,” exploring how we reach out to God and take hold of him with all of our faculties: our mind, affections, will, memory, imagination, and conscience. “Taking hold of God,” in other words, is about the total and all-consuming nature of prayer, and the way it involves all that we are.

Our minds: We should “study to know God with all our mind,” rising above all created things no matter how great and godly, to God himself. “By the exercise of our intellects, illuminated by His Spirit, we must strive to understand His being and attributes, to adore Him for our creation and preservatin and his daily providence.” Zwemer notes rightly that many long passages of the Psalms and the book of Job “consist almost entirely of this intellectual adoration of God.”

Memory: “Thanksgiving is the exercise of our memory in the presence of the source of all blessings.” Amen.

Emotions: In the presence of God, we can express all of our feelings with the confidence that God knows them anyway, so here at last is someone from whom we can hide nothing. “I used to think I could fool God,” said a man I studied the Bible with in college, “but now I see that I can’t even fool my friends.” It is in secret prayer before God that we can exercise all of our emotions safely and properly. “Here they need not be stifled. The only cure for hypocrisy is to lay hold of the source of all sincerity –secret prayer. This is what David meant when he said, ‘Pour out your heart before Him.’ The scum, and the dregs!”

Zwemer could have said, “what is highest and what is lowest,” or “the top and the bottom,” but instead he followed the liquid imagery of “pouring out,” and went for the top layer (scum) and the bottom sediment (dregs).

In his 1965 book How to Be Rich: The Success Secrets of a Billionaire Businessman, J. Paul Getty (1892-1976) tells the story of how he quit smoking. On a vacation in France, he woke up at two A.M. in his hotel room, craving a cigarette. Finding none in his pack, none in his jacket, none in his luggage, he decided to make the hike to the nearest all-night vendor, at the train station six blocks away. It was pouring rain in the middle of the night in a small town in France. In Getty’s own words:

But the desire to smoke gnawed at me, and, perversely, the more I contemplated the difficulties entailed in getting a cigarette, the more desperately I wanted to have one. And so I took off my pajamas and started putting on my clothes. I was completely dressed and reaching for my raincoat when I abruptly stopped and began to laugh –at myself. It had suddenly struck me that my actions were illogical, even ludicrous.

There I stood, a supposedly intelligent human being, a supposedly reponsible and fairly successful businessman who considered himself sensible enough to give other people orders. Yet I was ready to leave my comfortable hotel room in the middle of the night and slosh a dozen blocks through a driving rainstorm for no other reason than that I wanted a cigarette –because I felt that I “had” to have one.

Thus J.P. Getty took a step back from himself, saw the situation from outside, and had to laugh at the little tobacco sticks that were somehow in command of the great businessman. The comedy of the situation came from the contrast in scale, because this silly little habit just did not measure up to the stature of the intelligent, responsible, successful, sensible commander of men. Getty crumpled up his empty pack of cigarettes, and with it he crumpled up the tobacco habit in one decisive movement, a triumph of will power over the force of habit.

C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) never did kick his own tobacco habit, and probably stayed home a lot precisely to avoid getting in desperate situations like Getty’s midnight foreigner nicotine fit. (more… )

The editorial staff at Middlebrow regrets to inform our readers that a picture published here recently does not meet our own high journalistic standards. We are issuing a retraction and correction of that image and are currently investigating our policies for accepting images from freelance contributors.

The image in question was provided by our freelance contributor Grendal B. Firedrake, and was published with the caption “Unidentified knight attacks city for no apparent reason, causing giant clouds of smoke to billow into the sky.” (more… )

“Worldliness is an immense number of allowable details issuing in an unallowable end.”
— Frederick W. Faber (1814-1863), Self-Deceit: A Comedy On Lies, A Way Of Overcoming Them

In Colossians 1:10, Paul prays that the Colossians would be able to “walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him.” In its original Greek, it’s a a rougher sentence, reading something like this: “to walk worthy of the Lord in all pleasing.” Most responsible translations do something to smooth that out, because even to make sense of the phrase, we readers need to know what the word “pleasing” is pointed toward. Clearly it’s pointed toward the Lord who was just mentioned: Walk worthy of the Lord, with the maximum possible amount of pleasingness to him.

“Pleasingness” — Not a word. In Greek it’s areskeia, and it is used to describe the way underlings behave toward kings. “It is used especially of ingratiating oneself with a sovereign or potentate,” notes one commentator, which explains why Aristotle does not consider areskeia to be a virtue. The comportment of underlings toward overlords is not generally a pretty picture. We have a lot of words for this behavior: obsequious, sycophantic, servile, fawning, toadying, smarmy, truckling, unctuous, etc. Most of these words have dropped out of common English usage, to be replaced by the decidedly crude term “brown-nosing.” It is bey0nd me, by the way, how we could surrender a half-dozen perfectly good words to oblivion and accept in their place a scatological vulgarism as our primary way of referring to this behavior. But I digress.

It’s easy to see why the moral vocabulary of the ancient world would use “pleasingness” or “eagerness to please” in a negative sense. It’s bad enough to see a yes-man just waiting eagerly for the next command, but areskeia goes to the next level: It implies a servant whose attentiveness to his master’s will is so all-consuming that he tries to anticipate his master’s desires and fulfill them before they are even spoken. Not only is every one of his master’s wishes this servant’s command, but the forecast of an inclination toward the possibility of some future wish is enough to get this servant hopping. Having a co-worker like this is just too much to bear.

And areskeia exercised toward humans, no matter how legitimate their human authority may be, is always bound to degenerate into sycophancy. In fact, Paul combines areskeia with the word for human, anthropos, to refer scornfully to an inferior kind of servanthood in Colossians 3:22: “man-pleasing,” anthropareskeia.

Of all this Paul is quite aware. But somehow he is capable of using “eager to please” (or “in all pleasingness”) in a solid, positive sense as well. What transforms the word is its object: the Lord. With such a Lord as Jesus Christ, how is a believer to “walk worthy?” By walking “in all pleasing,” with the eagerness to please which expresses itself in attentive devotion to the will of the Lord. Paul’s vision of Christian maturity, the completeness which he prays the Colossians would experience, rises above simply obeying individual commands as they come. It rises to the level of earnestly inquiring after the Lord’s will and being eager to please him.

While this positive sense of areskeia is not unique to the New Testament, it does make more sense in a Christian setting than in its pre-Christian uses. Before Christianity, who had a lord worthy of such obedience? A Greek lexicon from a previous generation, Herman Cremer’s Biblico-Theological Lexicon of New Testament Greek (4th edition 1895), is organized around “the language-molding power of Christianity,” tracing the way Greek words “received a new meaning, impress and a fresh power” from the Gospel. Cremer loved to trace the way the same words could mean such different things in the transition from pagan to Christian usage, as “the spirit of the language expands, and makes itself adequate to the new views which the Spirit of Christ reveals.” This is what happens with “eager to please.”

(Aside to Professor Nietzsche: Yes, yes, we know all about the genealogy of Christian morals and the dark workshop where these values are forged. And we also know about the darker workshop where you carried out your transvaluing. If all the Christians you ever met were toadies (and I’m not sure I trust your testimony on this score, given your interesting relationship to truth), that does not prove that they invented a lord to truckle up to. Perhaps they had in fact a true Lord but served him unworthily, with an obsequiousness they learned from human relations? They stand condemned on that ground. But in that case there is a standard against which to judge them, and yourself.)

Some things are worth thinking about, and some things just aren’t. Some subjects repay closer examination, and the longer you spend meditating on them, the more they reveal their own richness and unfold their conceptual complexity. Other things have the opposite effect: the more time and effort you put into pondering them, the more you realize you shouldn’t have wasted the effort.

Most TV shows are not worth thinking about: get your entertainment value from them and then back away. Pop music is usually not worth thinking about. Whatever its merits may be (”It had a good beat, I could really dance to it,” as every guest on American Bandstand remarked as soon as Dick Clark put the mic in front of them), pop music just doesn’t have lyrics that will leave you any better off if you invest your valuable chin-tugging time in them. If you suffer from an analytic turn of mind, you may have caught yourself reflixively over-interpreting overheard song lyrics: “Gee, I wonder what Nelly Furtado means when she tells Timbaland that ‘Roses are red / Some diamonds are blue / Chivalry is dead / But you’re still kinda cute.’” By the time you’ve asked that question, you’ve already put more time into thinking about the lyric than did its composer.

A good poem, on the other hand, just keeps being worth thinking about, and spins out new insights and connections every time you run it through your mind. Truly great poems are so fruitful, for so long, for so many audiences, that we call them classics and use them to educate our little minds that need a good stretching. In fact, the best way to determine whether a book or artwork is approaching classic status is to ask whether it has proven itself to be worth thinking about. Has it been worth thinking about for a hundred years? Have diverse types of keen minds rendered their independent judgements that, agree with it or disagree with it, this work is Worth Thinking About?

There’s no single English word for this quality, but I just ran across a German word for it: Denkwürdig. Badly Englished, that would be Think-Worthy, worth thinking about. If you feel the need to say it out loud, try pronouncing it something like “DANK-vyoord-ish,” and if you say it loud enough you’ll always sound precocious.

German dictionaries tend to offer more pedestrian meanings like “notable” or “memorable.” But what do dictionaries know? German has better words for both of those, and denkwürdig adds something beyond them. The denser meaning of “worth thinking about” is used on the cover of a book I’m reading a few chapters from, a celebration of theologian Eberhard Jüngel’s 70th birthday, entitled Denkwürdiges Geheimnis, which wouldn’t sound as cool in English but could be translated something like A Mystery Worth Thinking About. In Jüngel’s work, the mystery that deserves our attention and which calls for the best theological concentration is of course the mystery of God, and more specifically the Trinity: the mystery worth thinking about.

The Middlebrow team also runs a click-through site called The Scriptorium that points to three great articles somewhere around the web each day. The redoubtable Dustin Steeve, our managing editor, linked recently to a Christianity Today review of the book Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul, by John and Stasi Eldredge. The reviewer, Agnieszka Tennant, doesn’t recognize herself in the descriptions of woman offered by this book, decked out in “pop psychology, sentimentality, eisegesis, and clichés borrowed from Harlequin paperbacks.”

As off-putting and weird as the Eldredge’s portrait of The True Woman may be, I think there’s something even wilder at the heart of this Eldredge book. From what I’ve read of Captivating, the real driving force of the book is explicitly theological: it is a doctrine of God, and a methodology for how to arrive at that doctrine of God.

The keenest theologically-informed review of this book that I’ve seen is by Torrey Honors Institute’s own Dr. Donna Thoennes, whose analysis of Captivating grabs ahold of it by the theological handle and gives it a good worrying. Thoennes quotes this line from the book: “After years of hearing the heart-cry of women, I am convinced beyond a doubt of this: God wants to be loved.”, and adds this comment:

One would expect the sentence to say that after counseling women, the authors are convinced that women want to be loved. Somehow the needs of women become the needs of God in their worldview. The authors have flipped the process of understanding who God is and who we are. Because women are made in God’s image, they are like him and represent him. Therefore, they can look to God to infer things about themselves, but they should not assume that conclusions can be drawn in the opposite direction. Just because we have certain tendencies or desires does not necessitate that God shares those. God is high and lifted up; he is transcendent as well as immanent. In Ps 50:21 God corrects man with a strong accusation, “You thought that I was one like yourself, but now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you.” We must look to God to learn who we are, not the other way around.

I especially appreciate the way Thoennes situates her (really quite stinging) critique inside of a gracious and inviting –biblical– doctrine of God:

Our God is relational: the Bible says he has emotions and he responds to our moral status. Certainly his relational nature is evident in Jesus. But he does not need us! The Eldredges seem to assume that if God does not need us, he does not really love us. But God’s love is more secure and provides more hope and stirs more obedience when it grows from his eternal, unchanging, loving character.

Read it all here.