“Screw the truth into men’s minds.” – Richard Baxter

Doug Wilson, (in an interview a while back concerning Collision, I think), spoke about “copiousness.” It is the Christian’s practice of picking up striking thoughts and illustrations from reading, and from life, for future use. He advocates keeping a Commonplace book to jot things down.

“Keep a commonplace book. Write down any notable phrases that occur to you, or that you have come across. If it is one that you have found in another writer, and it is striking, then quote it, as the fellow said, or modify it to make it yours. If Chandler said that a guy had a cleft chin you could hide a marble in, that should come in useful sometime. If Wodehouse said somebody had an accent you could turn handsprings on, then he might have been talking about Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland. Tinker with stuff. Get your fingerprints on it.” [1]

He describes an incident that makes this book (or blog or mental practice) sound more like keeping caches of ammunition near at hand.

“When you collect phrases, points, metaphors, and whatnot in this way, you are, as Cicero used to put it, loaded for bear. By linking “loaded for bear” up with Cicero, incidentally, I am providing another example of the previous point. But this last point is an important part of what the ancient rhetoricians called copiousness.

One time G.K. Chesterton, the rolypologist, was patted on the stomach by his adversary, George Bernard Shaw, a beanpole of an infidel, and was asked what they were going to name the baby. Chesterton replied immediately that if it was a boy, John, if a girl, then Mary. But if it turned out to only be gas, they were going to name it George Bernard Shaw. Now we hear that story and marvel at his amazing quickness. And it may well have been such, a prodigy of the moment. But I also wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find out that Chesterton had that particular pistol loaded beforehand, and concealed on his person. When copiousness is active, you not only know how to respond in the moment, but you can also see the moment coming, and prepare for it beforehand.

Your commonplace book is just a staging area. You are collecting things in order use them, to get them into your mind and heart, and thence into your writing.” [2]

The writer’s life is a scavenger’s life. This should go also for pastors, teachers, dads and mums, and in fact any Christian: all our ministry is didactic and apologetic, discipleship and witness.

But then, isn’t this how God has always worked? What amazes me is our failure to recognize this practice in the wisdom literature and the prophets. The guns were loaded, the pumps were primed, well before they fired and gushed. All the writers had been young Timothys waiting for Paul to join the dots with the bloody stylus of the Spirit.

Jordan says Ecclesiastes is a meditation on the Feast of Tabernacles, ruminating on texts from Deuteronomy. [3] We won’t believe that without a footnote. How obtuse.

What about Isaiah’s reference to the wolf and lamb lying down together? The Restoration Covenant was a new ark, and the Gentiles submitted to Mordecai. [4] Peter’s trance predicted exactly the same thing: a peaceful, floating Covenant zoo resting on the mountain of God. And the exiles crossing the river dryshod? It was also a new conquest of the Land, as we see in Esther. That’s all Isaiah means, and the structure of the passage proves it.

Or Hebrews’ reference to Jeremiah’s New Covenant with Israel and Judah? Fulfilled in the Restoration. [5] It is simply a literary allusion to a similar process in rejoining the two sticks of Jew and Gentile through another fiery furnace.

Biblical copiousness is one thing we love about Spurgeon. The Bible was his muse. The biblical texts are high walls but they are not lonely, cold, disjointed bricks. Spurgeon preached from the fiery turrets of inspired literature with apparent ease. Yet uninspired, banal-retentive modern boffins do dog paddle in a moat of footnotes and call it scholarship. They classify everything with abstract nouns, squabble and nitpick over their own definitions and disappear in an inky cloud of superior irrelevance. To these illiterati, the “apostolic hermeneutic” is a marvel and a mystery, an impenetrable keep, when it is simply biblical copiousness. Is it any wonder they can make no sense of the details of the Revelation? Its cinematic Covenantal ironies are lost on them. Jesus and His prophets are far cleverer — and funnier — than Chesterton and Wodehouse. But we don’t get the jokes. [6]

Jesus created a world where everything is related Covenantally; every physical object is also mirror and metaphor and lyric and rant; every Covenant-historical event is a self-referential innovation. He is the Master of Allusion, and we, as we read the Bible, are to be His commonplace books.

“…always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear.”
(1 Peter 3:15)

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[1] Doug Wilson, Seven Basic & Brief Pointers for Writers.
[2] Doug Wilson, Uncommon Commonplaces.
[3] See How To Read The Bible.
[4] See The Wolf and the Lamb.
[5] See Jeremiah Was A Bullfrog.
[6] See Hermeneutics of Humour and Menu for the Dirty Birds.

From John Barach’s blog:

In the introduction to the sixth volume of G. K. Chesterton’s Collected Works, while working toward some explanation of The Man Who Was Thursday, Denis Conlon quotes Chesterton’s Introduction to the Book of Job (1907):

“God comes in at the end, not to answer riddles, but to propound them. The other great act which, taken together with this one, makes the whole work religious instead of merely philosophical, is that other great surprise which makes Job suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.” (Cited on p. 43).

For more on Leviathan, see SuperCroc.

Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless.

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses seeming to stoop this way and to sway that yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.

The church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would havemade it too unworldly.

The orthodox church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of th Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman; it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom — that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.

To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy , 146-147.