Bully's Blog

Auden on Melville

Because all of Creation is arranged “Covenantally,” order is achieved through relationships. There are natural relationships and spiritual relationships.

The Son and the Spirit communicate truth to us using symbols. Symbols themselves are relationships. God uses natural relationships to describe spiritual relationships. Natural sonship (objective, hereditary) is to become spiritual sonship (subjective, voluntary). Our children represent us physically, but we train them to represent us, and our God, spiritually. An ambassador must at the very least speak the language of the nation he represents.

Rebellious sons are still bound by the relationships created by God. The worst that godless actions can achieve in the long run is to throw the Law of God into relief, vindicating that thing exactly which they set out to destroy. Even in the negative, man is the image of God.

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“Cursed is the ground for your sake…
Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you.” (Genesis 3:17-18)

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or Knife and Fire

From Bible Matrix II: The Covenant Key.

James Jordan observes that the tools required for Adam to produce bread and wine in the Land were “Knife and Fire.” In God’s kitchen, Knife is Division (guarding cherubim), and Fire is Testing (purifying seraphim). The ascension of the Head allows the holy fire to descend upon the nearbringing sacrifice and raise up a fragrant Body of smoke from the Altar.

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“Surf weasel Leithart’s out there getting barreled
and Carson doesn’t find it ‘convincing’?”

Some more on the Bandwidth of the Bible:

Don Carson has written a chapter in “Theological Commentary: Evangelical Perspectives.” It’s called, Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Yes, But… (see Carson’s Evaluation of Theological Interpretation of Scripture. There is a link to the chapter in PDF.)

Very briefly, his assessment is that the revival of biblical theology is a good thing, but anything in this revival that is new is bad. Whatever his assumptions, the bottom line is that no new ground of any consequence has been broken.

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One problem with modern conservative scholarship is its reluctance to deal with types that are not explicitly described in the text. This means that a lot of what is considered interpretation is merely application.

Aside from those types which are explicitly explained, the typological nature of Biblical history is rejected. Thus most of its “bandwidth” remains unheard. The result of this severe “downsampling” is that a lot of that application is off-the-mark because a clumsy search for a moral to the story has taken the place of the typological message. The principles drawn from the histories are not universals but abstracts, because we are looking for morals, not looking at men made in the image of God.

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1 Peter 2:4-10  |  Sermon Notes

The Stoning of Israel

I think it’s worth looking at the literary structure of this passage. Here’s a revised version of the sheet I handed out after the sermon.

As I’ve written before, modern readers (and commentators) only look at the content of the text, but the authors of Scripture also communicate to us through where they place that content within that text, i.e. how it is arranged.

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In a universe of types and symbols, everything is self-effacing. Everything created points to, speaks of, something else in creation, and all creation ultimately points us back to the Trinity, the Perfect Unself.

Vance and his girlfriend wondered whether attending Bully’s Bible study was as safe as they’d been led to believe.

When I first read some James Jordan, I found it a little strange. He forced me to think in new ways. Now I wonder why nobody else seems to think this way. I make a glib reference to “knife and fire” and get strange looks. Has no one before Jordan realised the process of barbecue as an illustration of reality?

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William Booth’s eldest daughter, Founder of the Salvation Army in France and Switzerland, known later in life as “the Maréchale,” said, “Go for souls, and go for the worst.” So should we. After all, Jesus does.

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More than thirty years after the release of their hit song, “Down Under,” (1978) Australian rock band Men at Work were hauled into court for ripping their flute riff from a nursery rhyme. The issue came up after discussion on a popular rock quiz TV show. [1]

Most Aussies of my generation knew the original (really uncool) song, and the use of it as a motif in a rock song was, well, really cool. The very fact that it didn’t have a big yellow sticker on it saying “This bit is from Kookaburra,” and the listener picked it up, was gratifying. All good music does this. All good movies do this. TV shows also use subtle allusions to past episodes as a nod to faithful viewers (and no show does it with the concrete-cracking understatement of Mad Men).

In this case of the flute riff, any dunderhead could pick it up. While I think that the current owners of the copyright, Larrikin Records, are a bunch of opportunistic bastards (and though they were once considered indie and cool, I guess they are now really uncool), it pains me that modern teachers of the Bible are too cautious to read the Scriptures in this way, too conservative to pick up the motifs, phrases and structural allusions that are obvious once they are pointed out. They are looking for the big yellow sticker, and it ain’t coming.

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