Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is widely recognized as the greatest theologian America has yet produced. He wrote epochal books and preached sermons that still echo in our cultural memory from the Great Awakening. One of the least important things he ever wrote is a fun bit of juvenilia known as “The Spider Letter,” a descriptive essay about spiders which can be seen soaring through the air. Recent scholarship has established the date of this letter as 1723, when Edwards was 20. But for generations, readers believed Edwards’ biographer (and great-grandson) Sereno Dwight who reported that the letter had been written when Edwards was only 12! The image of a pre-teen Jonathan Edwards roving the woods of colonial New England solving The Mystery of the Flying Spider, like some kind of Puritan Encyclopedia Brown, struck me right in the funny bone. So a long time ago I did a cartoon adaptation of the Spider Letter, which I now present for your amusement and edification. This version is edited down, but you can read the full text here)

Check out this cartoon-illustrated edition of young (but not that young!) Jonathan Edwards’ The Spider Letter.

Freddy age 6 has crossed a line with adventure stories. Knights still dominate, of course, but now they are permitted to come into contact — and, as you can see here, into conflict — with vikings, as well as pirates, the police, and an occasional astronaut. “History” is a mental space where these characters jostle with each other and with cave men, presidents, pioneers, and Roman soldiers. In that regard, Freddy age 6 is pretty similar to most people.

It’s club-mace vs. morning-star-mace in a fight to the finish. The scribble on the viking’s lower face is not an open mouth, but the curly beard of a northman.

“Devotional book” is not usually a term of approval, even among those of us who use them. “Devotionals” can connote fairly lightweight religious reading, a thought for the day, a little something that fits on one page and reminds you to keep the right attitude. But the Dutch Reformed pastor Andrew Murray wrote almost nothing but devotional books, and he wrote them like his hair was on fire. Muscular, searching, and shot through with the numinous, Andrew Murray’s books all tend to be 31 chapters long so you can take them one day at a time for a whole month. And unlike most devotionals, with Murray’s you actually need to stop after one day’s worth, because your mind is full to bursting. In the future, all devotionals will be by Andrew Murray, with Oswald Chambers and Mrs. Cowman thrown in to lighten the mood occasionally.

In the second chapter of With Christ in the School of Prayer: Thoughts on our Training in the Ministry of Intercession, Murray looks at Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus teaches the woman that there are three kinds of worship:
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Every theologian who wants to think biblically has to believe in providence. Like it or not (and after all, why not like it?), the Bible is about a God who rules and governs world events, from geopolitical reversals to the fate of little birds. This God is not surprised by how things turn out, is not just doing his best with the materials at hand, and is not too distracted to care about details. On the contrary: He’s got the whole world in his hands.

But there are some people who approach the doctrine of providence in an abstract way, and follow their abstraction out to bizarre and unacceptable results. Instead of studying scripture to get a sense of how God works his will through immediate causes, and along with the decisions of human agents, they begin with an axiom as rigid as one of Euclid’s: “Everything That Happens is Done By God.” And they develop that axiom as deductively as a ninth grader who has just learned the word “ergo.” The abstract notion of providence they end up with renders them incapable of getting the right interpretation of (for instance) un-abstract books about providence like Isaiah, and they do even worse at interpreting the course of events in their own lives. What eats away at a soul worse than “pastoral” advice from the school of abstract providence?

Some people teach about providence in a way that suggests that God chose each event and put it into play directly, such that it is a lack of faith to seek explanations anywhere outside of the will of God. Faced with any event, no matter how atrocious, they think the right question is, “Why did God do ______.” Fill in the blank with your favorite tragedy. Soften it to “Why did God allow _____” if you will, but as long as the abstraction haunts you, the question doesn’t really soften.

Who are these “some people” who are teaching this “abstract providence?”
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Jesus died for me.

Anyone who believes this simple sentence has entered the sphere of Christian faith, and has learned the one thing that God is concerned to teach his human creatures, in order to bring them into his school for all further lessons. “Jesus died for me” is knowledge that can be grasped by anyone. It is not a truth restricted to the leading intellects of an age, or scholars with enough leisure time to include theology among their academic pursuits. It is truth which proves itself by its ability to “come to the unlearned, the young, the busy, and the afflicted, as a fact which is to arrest them, penetrate them, and to support and animate them in their passage through life.” At the same time, Christian faith does not exhaust itself at the level of simplicity, and so there are depths in this confession which invite further search and inquiry. The prepositional phrase “for me” is loaded with possible meanings, and the verb “died” is not normally the carrier of good news outside of this strange sentence. What, asks faith, is the secret of this sentence’s active subject, Jesus? That is the crucial question, because he is the one who establishes the meaning of “died” and “for me.”

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I’m beginning my fifth trip through Calvin’s Institutes this semester, which is my third trip with a group of students. I am always amazed at the power of Calvin’s writing, which is designed to bring the reader into direct confrontation with God. From the opening page, Calvin aims to make the reader conscious that theology is not a matter of cobbling together texts or concepts, but a matter of worship which requires an obedient intellect. He has written a book which is relentless in setting the young theologian coram Deo, before the face of God, so that doctrine is what one is bold enough to say about God while God is listening. Too often, theology is perpetrated as if we are merely talking to each other, perhaps with God eavesdropping. The best theologians of the Reformation reverse this: Calvin’s book, for instance, gives the uncanny sense that God is the primary auditor and that we the readers are the ones doing the over-hearing. The Reformers were animated by this sense of theology as the Christian community giving an account to God. Better leave out the silly stuff; better quash speculation; best not to trifle here. This is part of what they meant by the special sense they gave to the term confession, as in, a church’s “confession of faith.”

Where did Calvin learn to write like this? Where did he get the ability to teach doctrine in a way that doesn’t just fill out a topical outline, but leaves his readers stranded in the presence of God, forced to make a decision on doctrine after doctrine? Some of the techniques, no doubt, come from his Renaissance humanist training and close study of classical rhetoric. Another source is his immersion in the language of Scripture, so that he is able to transmit some of the tone of the Biblical writers as he puts his own project in their service. He also knows some of the best writing and preaching the Christian church ever produced: Augustine, Jerome, and Bernard of Clairvaux are frequently the stylists behind the scenes.

But I think the immediate source of Calvin’s coram Deo theological style can be found in his biography, in the person of William Farel. Farel (1489-1565) was an older Reformer who had already started a work in Geneva before Calvin got there, and invited Calvin to join him in the project. Okay, “invited” is too weak a word. What Farel actually did was announce to Calvin that the will of God called for Calvin to join the pastoral work in Geneva, and that if Calvin tried instead to sneak away and hide in the world of scholarship, that God would blight his future work. John Calvin knew how to stand up to bullies, but he interpreted Farel’s speech as something different from spiritual bullying. He took it to be the voice of God calling him to a life’s work. He believed that Farel’s exhortation (an “alarming adjuration” or “dreadful imprecation” Calvin later called it) was a form of speech which placed him in the presence of God where he was forced to a decision.
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Here is the third and final excerpt from Jane Redmont’s 1999 book When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life. This excerpt includes some brief remarks I made about memorizing Scripture as a form of prayer. There are many other reasons to memorize Scripture: for information, to have key doctrines ready for quick recall, etc. But what I talk about here is the way memorizing Scripture is actually a means of directly communing with God.

Jane uses my remarks at the very beginning of chapter 18 to set up the much better remarks of “Matthew the Poor.” The overall chapter is not focused on memorizing Scripture in particular, but deals with the broader technique of memorization and recitation, and examines how these un-modern practices can inform the prayer lives of contemporary believers. So the chapter, which Jane cleverly entitles “Mantras for Modern Christians” (because rote memory sounds positively retrograde, but mantras sound eastern and cool), ranges through liturgy, the daily office, and praying the rosary. But I’m making a narrower point: memorizing Scripture can itself be a form of prayer.

“This memorization-prayer is a big part of my own disciplines,” said Fred one day when we were discussing the practice of memorizing Scripture passages. “I find it especially helpful because it’s one of those exercises that, as my charismatic friends would say, ‘you can start out in the flesh and finish up in the Spirit!’ That is, sitting down (or walking or working out on a treadmill) to commit words to memory does not require any intimidating gathering of spiritual energy, like the frightful prospect of actually beginning to address God with confessing and petitions in mind. But in the midst of the activity itself, you often find yourself already at prayer. It is,” he pointed out, “not quite the same thing as praying Scripture.”
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Thoughts on praise and thankfulness, taken from my contribution to Jane Redmont’s 1999 book When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life. This excerpt (pages 188-190) is from the chapter entitled “Daring to Raise the Alleluia Song.”

“Everything I know about praise and joyful prayer goes back to the very beginning of my Christian life,” Fred wrote to me. “There is of course the remarkable atmosphere of a living, thriving, charismatic congregation: a loud crowd, lots of emotion, and people just glad to be in church together in the presence of God. There’s a celebratory atmosphere there that’s really something magnificent when it’s going right. Jubilant music, clapping hands, and the more outgoing members of the group feeling free to dance, wave hands, sing too loud, shout, and just generally express joy physically. Not to be underestimated as aerobic exercise, either,” he joked. “That’s stamped in my consciousness from before I was reflective. It’s the matrix for all further understanding I ever got around to.”

He added: “Praise can take over the entire enterprise of prayer, and invade the rest of life as well. This is a hard thing to talk about because the last thing I can stand still for is Norman Vincent Peale happy-talk about having an attitude of gratitude. But ‘the power of praise’ is a big deal in my upbringing.
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Soon I would like to introduce and recommend the unduly neglected Adolph Saphir (1831-1891), but for now I’ll just quote him. Here is the voice of evangelical Christianity from a little over 125 years ago: clear, passionate, artful, scriptural, doctrinal, and comprehensive. If you know anybody who can still talk like this (or grow a beard like that), hang around them as much as you can.

Let us ever with adoring hearts believe in the three unions which the Church of Christ has confessed in all ages.

First, we behold Jesus, God and man, two natures in one Person; the Lord of Glory, Immanuel, God with us. Beholding Christ, God and man, we see the Father and receive the Spirit.
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