William Tyndale

I'm reading a lengthy biography of William Tyndale's life and I am finding it humbling and highly educational. The excerpt below is taken from a work Tyndale wrote called The Obedience of a Christian Man. He is offering an apology, yet again, for why a literal translation of the scriptures in English from the original languages was so necessary. It is not difficult to see why his considerable rhetorical skill rocked the boats of the ecclesiastical powers that be. It reads beautifully out loud:

"The greatest cause of which captivity and the decay of the faith and this blindness wherein we now are, sprang first of allegories. For Origen and they of his time drew all the scripture unto allegories. Whose ensample they that came after followed so long, till at the last they forgot the order, and process of the text, supposing that the scripture served but to feign allegories upon. Insomuch that twenty doctors expound one text twenty ways, as children make descant upon plain song. Then came our sophisters with the Anagogical and chopological sense, and with an anti-theme of half an inch, out of which some of them draw a thread of nine days long. Yea thou shalt find enough that will preach Christ, and prove what some ever point of the faith that thou will, as well out of a fable of Ovid or any other Poet, as out of St. John's gospel or Paul's epistles. Yea they are come into such blindness that they not only say that the literal sense profiteth not, but also that it is hurtful, and noisome and killeth the soul. Which damnable doctrine they prove by a text of Paul, 2 Cor iii where he saith the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life. We must therefore, say they seek out some chopological sense." ~ David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography, 240.

I love "ensample," the wonderful musical analogy, and of course, "chopological"! This is the man who gave us the KJV!

First Chronicles, the Shorter Version

David:  Dear God, I think it's pretty lame I live in this fancy house and the Ark is in a tent.  I'd like to build you a house.
YHWH:  Dave, don't worry about it.
Dave:  No, Sir, I really mean it, I want to build you a house.
YHWH:  I understand.  I'm flattered, and I'd let you build me a house--but remember all that blood on your hands?  Remember Uriah's wife?  Tell you what--you can't do it, but I'll let your son do it.  Deal?
Dave:  DEAL!

David proceeds to get all the wood, all the gold, all the bronze, all the silver, and all the jewels that could possibly be used on the temple together.  He draws the plans.  He figures out who will play the harp on what day, the cymbal on what day.  Who'll guard the north door on this day.  He makes all the plans.  He can't build God's house, but he's too excited and too in love with God not to do something to praise him with all of his might (do we, friends, praise God with all of our might?  Or do we wait for the "perfect" opportunity, the really magnificent thing we can do for Him?  I think He wants us to be like David, and praise Him as best as we can, while accepting that there are some things we just can't do). 

And then, in Chapter 29, he sings a song of praise that has serious echoes of our Lord's Prayer.  And then he crowns Solomon king.  And then, the thing that hit me so hard when I read it this morning:

²⁷And the time that he reigned over Israel was forty years; seven years reigned he in Hebron, and thirty and three years reigned he in Jerusalem.

Read that again friends; not just forty years he reigned, but seven in Hebron and thirty-three in Jerusalem.

7 and 33.  7 and 33.

Oh praise Him, friends, for His mysterious and profound symmetry.  

Dissonant Strains

A small shudder and a shaking of my head... The Song of Solomon in the KJV was apparently the source for at least three songs I heard and probably sang as a kid in church, the strains of which leapt unbidden to my mind as I read the words. His Banner Over Me is Love... Altogether Lovely...I am my Beloveds and He is Mine, which as I recall was one of the forty eleven verses of the first, and slightly adjusted in yet another...I am His and He is Mine. I'm not saying these were my favourite songs or anything, but I regret to find the strains still in my mind, taking up limited space! I resent this.

The mystery of suffering

Reading through the book of Job has been enriched by my having a friend who is currently suffering a heinous mess of a life largely thrust upon her by someone else's sin and the ineptitude (i.e., painstaking slowness/inaccessibility) of the court system. Job understood many things, things about the justice and righteousness of God and his claims upon him as a sinful man, even about resurrection in the last day, but it seems that suffering was not on his radar. Is this part of the mystery revealed in Christ, that suffering is a necessary part of the path to glory? Not to say that we embrace it any more willingly this side of the cross. I am most challenged by the ineptitude of Job's three friends who seek to comfort Job, but end up only condemning him. Indeed I feel uncertain if there is any way to comfort a person who is acutely suffering. I say that not to get myself off the hook, for God knows that I continue to try, but when there is so little I can do to alleviate the suffering, encouraging someone to wait patiently for the LORD to act, to keep their view on His final justice, where justice will be done and will be seen to be done, seems so inadequate. There is this interesting character of Elihu, a younger man, who weighs in late in the story, a prelude to the LORD's own appearance, who expresses his disappointment with the level of discourse he has heard from the four men. I don't quite know what to make of him, but feel his drawing attention to the unknowableness of God and our posture of humility in His presence, even when it looks like absence, is a good word. I'm really glad this story, with all its conundrums, is in the scriptures.