Stolen from Tim Nichols

“If we are going to be good interpreters of Scripture, it’s not enough to grasp the didactic literature. We need to learn to read the higher levels of language as well.”

A couple years ago, I read Paul Graham’s ruminations on higher- and lower-level languages in Hackers and Painters. Although he’s talking about computer languages, his insights have bearing on biblical language and hermeneutics. So bear with me while I lay out some of the basic points, and then we’ll look at the applications.

• The very lowest level of language has a very small number of things it can do. Every level up combines those basic instructions in increasingly complex ways to get tasks done.
• Anything a computer can do, you can do in binary. But you can’t do some things in Basic that you can do in C++, and you can’t do some things in C++ that you can do in Lisp (Graham’s examples; I wouldn’t know). Lower-level languages lack the abstractions and features that higher-level languages have.
• Perhaps equally important, many of the things you can do in all 3 languages take more steps in Basic than C++, and more steps in C++ than Lisp. The code is longer, the further down the hierarchy you go. Longer code tends to breed more mistakes, because humans don’t deal well with obsessive levels of detail.
• Conversely, the higher the level of language, the faster you can work. If it takes 3x longer to write in (say) C++ than in Lisp, and your competitor is writing in C++, he can’t keep up with you. A feature that takes you a month to program takes him 3 to duplicate. A feature that takes him 3 months to program, you can duplicate in 1. When you’re ahead, you’re way ahead. When you’re behind, you catch up quickly.
• A programmer thinks primarily in a certain language. Down the hierarchy, he can see that all the languages are lower level than his preferred one, because “they don’t even have [feature].” Up the hierarchy from his primary language, the languages just look weird, because he doesn’t think in them. So they have these higher-order abstractions that he can’t quite grasp, or he can’t see what anybody would ever want them for.

One other observation that is going to be important for this: good programmers often don’t solve a really difficult problem. They formulate another (easier) problem that is the practical equivalent of the hard one, and then solve that.

So given that, the analogy for biblical studies:

• Basic linguistic/textual analysis tools like sentence diagramming or outlining are like machine code. There’s a very limited number of options, and it’s very laborious to describe what’s happening in the text.
• Didactic literature is the next level up. It’s using the linguistic options available in a pretty basic, transparent way.
• Narrative comes after that. While narrative is often grammatically simpler than didactic (paratactic rather than hypotactic, and so on), there are some very complex things going on that you really can’t get at with a sentence diagram. The tools you use to decode didactic literature aren’t sufficient to interpret narrative well.
• Proverbs, parables and typology are very high-level, an order of magnitude beyond narrative.

So if you think in Didactic, and you do it well enough to really have it and know you have it, then you know you don’t quite have a handle on Narrative. Narrative operates with a whole set of signifiers that your interpretive grid doesn’t know what to do with. And you really have an awful time with Typology. (This was the case for the folks that trained me in exegesis. We had a great set of tools for didactic literature, and we knew we didn’t have a parallel set of tools for narrative. And for typology? Forget it! One of our hermeneutics texts seriously claimed that we could only identify something as a type if the New Testament (didactic) literature said it was!)

Conversely, if you can operate in Typology, you can certainly handle Narrative. And when you go to prove a point using Narrative, your argument makes no sense to a Didactic-speaker, because your reasoning just doesn’t translate into his language (and it’s worse if you use Typology!) You’re using higher-order abstractions that he simply doesn’t have. If we are going to be good interpreters of Scripture, it’s not enough to grasp the didactic literature. We need to learn to read the higher levels of language as well.

And then, because we are called to speak like God speaks, we need to learn to speak at higher levels of language, too. It comes in handy. I was having breakfast with a group of friends a while back, and one of the guys was making his case for education outside the home (and against homeschooling). His argument centered around the impossibility of sheltering your kids from the prevailing culture forever, and homeschoolers’ inability to cope with the culture when they were suddenly thrown into it at age 19 or so. He took maybe 10 minutes, and early on I told him I was going to rebut him. As he reached the end of his case, someone pointed out what time it was, and he said “Oh, crap! I gotta go!” As he was getting up from his chair to put on his coat, he said to me “But you were going to argue against that. I’m sorry about this, but can you say it fast?”

I said, “‘As arrows in the hands of a warrior, so are the children of one’s youth.’ You want to send your arrows out in the midst of your enemies — but you don’t let your enemies mess with the arrows while the glue on the fletchings is still wet.”

He got it. I was able to cleanly counterpoint his 10-minute speech in 2 sentences because I can operate at a parabolic/typological level of discourse. Of course, that’s not the same thing as winning the argument, and I’d have really liked to have more time. But I laid out a relevant objection to his point of view and gave us room for further discussion. Not bad for 2 sentences.

The waters closed in over me to take my life; the deep surrounded me… (Jonah 2:5)

The Errant Typology of Baptismal Sprinkling

The Bible is an incredibly complex book, however it is also an incredibly consistent book. Its symbolism is a language, which means that although it is flexible enough to allow for new combinations, it has a core which remains steadfast from Genesis to Revelation. This means that, just as we have no excuse for refusing to read this book of types for what it is, we also have no excuse for misusing its types to support any otherwise unsupportable dogma.

I have yet to figure out why some denominations are terrible at biblical typology and others are very good at it. In Sydney, Australia, the Presbyterians and Anglicans are both extremely solid and evangelical, and often work together. Yet, when it comes to typological studies and awareness, there is a world of difference. Talking to a Moore College graduate about typology is like having a conversation with a horse. In this case, it’s probably a thoroughbred, but it simply does not have the faculty for the language in its DNA. It will just look at you with those big horse eyes as if you have not said anything, or are from another planet where humans expect to have conversations with horses. However, if you speak to a Presbyterian, such as my learned friend Doug, tapping away at his PhD and tutoring university students in Hebrew, he will not only pick up the conversation and respond, he will even call out the minimalist Moore mentality as a form of gnosticism like my Presbyterian friends do in the USA.

They are not allowing the text to shape their doctrine. They are shaping the text to suit their doctrine.

So, my question is this: How can people who are so quick on the uptake when it comes to biblical types get things so wrong when it comes to baptism?

The answer is that they have a doctrine, a tradition, and they go looking for typological support for it. This is exactly what the Roman Catholic theologians do, and some of them are mighty fine, too.¹See Mother Of Invention. But they, like the Presbyterians, are not allowing the text to shape their doctrine. They are shaping the text to suit their doctrine. This is something of which we are all guilty at times, because it is impossible to read any text without coming at it with some assumptions. The good thing about the global Church is that when a theologian or theological school does this, there will be somebody else in Christendom who will stick it to them.

A fine example of the myopia of my Biblical Horizons friends begins with an article by James R. Rogers concerning the difficult subject of “baptism for the dead” in 1 Corinthians 15:29.²James R. Rogers, Baptism for the Dead, Biblical Horizons Newsletter No. 76, 1995. As I have written elsewhere, it is a good article, finding the solution to the problem within the Canon rather than outside of it. This awareness of the integrity of the Bible is something I have appreciated about the Biblical Horizons crowd very much. But what does Rogers do when he gets to Numbers 19? He focusses on the act of sprinkling the water of purification on the defiled persons, and entirely overlooks the washing of the clothes and bodies of the priests who carry out the rite!

How does he get this so wrong? The answer is that he is looking for evidence for a cleansing by sprinkling rather than a cleansing by submersion. He is blinded by the unsupported assumptions of Reformed Theology, and seems unaware of anything else in the text that might challenge those assumptions. This is exactly the kind of thing that the Biblical Horizons gents call out other theologians on. As David T. Gordon so succinctly describes in his Why Johnny Can’t Preach³Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers, we prevent the texts from speaking to us, and make them instead a “response,” an opaque source of support for what we already know,  an “Amen” bench. The Bible itself is censored by our assumptions. This is no more apparent than in the often bewildering statements concerning baptism from my theological betters. It is one thing to ignore an ignorant baptist (or Sydney Anglican) concerning the typology of baptism. It is quite another to ignore the Scriptures themselves. Numbers 19 supported part of what Rogers wanted to prove, but he moved his very selective spotlight before it could protest against his conclusion concerning sprinkling.

Baptism and Creation

If I still have your attention, the example I would like to deal with is a recent blog post by the formidable Joshua Luper over at Kuyperian Commentary, entitled Living Water: Foundations of Baptism in Creation.⁴Living Water: Foundations of Baptism in Creation and a comment by my friend Dustin Messer. Luper writes:

Why do we baptize with water? Since Scripture gives us a water ritual to perform, the element used in that ritual must contain some essential significance. How might we deepen our understanding of baptism by reflecting on the element of water?

One way to fill out our understanding of the waters of baptism would be to reflect on the import of water in our everyday experience, then apply those insights to baptism. Typically, reflection on the elements of the rite of baptism centers on the cleansing properties of water. Water washes away dirt and impurity. Water aids healing. This is quite true, and an important component of our understanding of baptism. This is also something readily discerned from Scripture (especially the law). However, the role of water as a cleansing agent doesn’t really emerge in Scripture until the time of the flood (at the earliest). Yet we read plenty about water in just the first two chapters of Genesis.

He goes on to note the connection between the Holy Spirit and water, the fact that life on earth is sustained and surrounded by water, that the waters are the first place that living creatures appear, and that water nourishes the Garden of Eden and the lands beyond.

Scripture has much to teach us about the role of water in the story of redemption, but our brief survey shows that the creational waters are a primal element, a source of life, and a subject of God’s special attention. Water is a gift, nurturing and sustaining the life of the world. And when we see water and the Spirit of God together, we should expect that the creative power of God is about to be unleashed. The Spirit hovering over the waters, forming structure and giving life – this is the rich creational and symbolic context of baptism.

There is a lot of wonderful truth here, and there are some excellent articles concerning baptism on that site by Joshua Torrey. But as was the case with Rogers’ article, some crucial relationships are either overlooked or their significance is not understood. Although Luper does not mention sprinkling, my friend Messer does. He writes:

Micah 5 is a good example of how water is used in Scripture. In 5:7 the remnant (i.e. Christians) are “like dew/rain on the grass” which doesn’t “wait on man.” I take Micah’s point to be that the New Covenant members are like dew/rain in that they are brought about by God, not by man. It is fitting, then, that this “water people” will be marked by water! In this passage, water is used to contrast the efforts of God with the efforts of man. Applied to baptism, this helps us see that the baptismal water does not find its power, authority, or origin in the efforts of any man, even the one administering the sacrament. No, it’s dew, it’s rain, it’s water, it’s from God!

This sounds wonderful, but Micah is dealing with the people of the Land. The relationship, and thus the typology, of water to the Land is very different from that of water to the Sea, at least where people are concerned.

Springs, Rivers and the Sea

Water “sprinkling” from above is definitely a sign of God’s pleasure, but it is related to the fruit of the Land and indirectly the fruit of the womb. According to His word, God would bless Canaan with “sprinkling rain” as a testimony to surrounding nations that Israel was cleansed from her idolatries. This is a favourite verse of “baptismal sprinklers,” but the context is clearly related to the fruitfulness of the Land.

Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. (Ezekiel 36:22-25)

To use this verse as support for a practice never described in the actual baptism passages in the New Testament is sloppy at best and dishonest at worst. We are called to better things, especially those of us who are teachers of doctrine. It is interesting that sprinkling is also related to idolatry in the details of the description of the death of Jezebel, which reveal the sacrificial nature of the slaughter.

He said, “Throw her down.” So they threw her down. And some of her blood spattered on the wall and on the horses, and they trampled on her. (2 Kings 9:33)

The blood of the source of Israel’s idolatry is spattered, or “sprinkled” on the very symbols of city and empire, that Israel herself might not be judged as a harlot, her walls bloodied and her offspring dashed against the rocks by foreign troops. The life which she had would be preserved, as is always the case with sprinkling. But baptism is not about preserving life, which is where Rogers, and all my friends at Kuyperian Commentary, go off the rails. Rogers writes:

A person who comes in contact with a dead person, or shares the same roof with a dead person, had death communicated to him, and so needed to undergo the baptism of the water/ashes before being permitted to rejoin the living in the assembly of God. This should be a familiar theme to Christians, because baptism in fact marks the Christian’s resurrection from death to life. This is the burden of Paul’s argument in Romans 6:3-9 and Colossians 2:12. That is, in baptism we are united with the death of Jesus Christ, and so partake of the resurrection of our Lord. We move from death to life in baptism, just as the Hebrews portrayed the movement from death to life in the baptism of the sprinkled heifer ashes.

Rogers identifies those sprinkled with New Covenant baptizands, when in fact it was those who had “passed through” the Laver (the sacrifices and the priests whom they represented) who were immersed, submerged, on their behalf, about whom Paul is likely speaking, because it is most consistent with the biblical types. This is not a small thing which has been overlooked. Although Israel was a priestly nation, being circumcised, that “sprinkling” of blood and the establishment of the Levitical sacrifices were related to the Land and the womb (which explains why Leviticus is so often strange to our ears). It was only the priesthood and sacrifices “washed” in the waters of the Laver, the Edenic spring, which were given access to the Sanctuary. The main point here is that the “movement from death to life” for those sprinkled in Numbers 19 is not the same as it is for those baptised in these Pauline texts. How can I say this? Well, it is obvious if we are not wearing the goggles of a sacramentalist. Sprinkling enables the preservation of the old life. Immersion is the instrument of its extinction.

Sprinkling enables the preservation of the old life. Immersion is the instrument of its extinction.

Preservation or Extinction?

In terms of sacred architecture, sprinkling has nothing to do with the Garden, which has its own source of water, the Laver, the waters above, picturing the Transcendent life of God, or with the World, the unconquered and unconquerable nations, which were a wild “Sea,” the waters below, an instrument of death.

Sprinkling is related to the Mediators between the Garden and the World, between God and the nations, the fruit of the Land, which is why sprinkling relates to the Abrahamic Covenant, and also almost invariably involved some kind of mediatorial death. The act of sprinkling is either the sprinkling of blood or of water containing “death” (the ashes of a heifer, Numbers 19) that life on the Land might continue. It is an act of preservation which temporarily purifies the flesh, halting the spread of death.

However, when Israel disobeyed God, the waters above were reunited with the waters below, symbolically-speaking, and at Yahweh’s command the Land was submerged beneath Gentile armies. When the Gentile armies were mustering, this was not an act of preservation but extinction. Sprinkled water brings cleansing that preserves life. A flood brings a cleansing that extinguishes it. Genesis describes the fact that the flood waters rose higher than the tops of the mountains for a reason: all flesh was extinguished, all life that had “breath.”

We can observe this symbolism in the Lord’s warning to Jerusalem concerning the invasion of the armies of Assyria, where the waters of life (from above) would be replaced with the waters of death (from below):

 The Lord spoke to me again: “Because this people has refused the waters of Shiloah that flow gently, and rejoice over Rezin and the son of Remaliah, therefore, behold, the Lord is bringing up against them the waters of the River, mighty and many, the king of Assyria and all his glory. And it will rise over all its channels and go over all its banks, and it will sweep on into Judah, it will overflow and pass on, reaching even to the neck, and its outspread wings will fill the breadth of your land, O Immanuel.” (Isaiah 8:5-8)

Only Jerusalem would be spared from trampling by Assyria, its walls being the level of the “neck,” above which the “breath” of Judah be preserved, and not be cut off. Only the mountain of God would remain above the rising waters of judgment.⁵Of course, when Israel crossed the similarly overflowing Jordan, it was Israel serving as Yahweh’s instrument of judgment upon the idolaters in Canaan.

This explains the strange symbolism contained in the prayer of Jonah (chapter 2), offered inside the fish. Why is it that “sprinklers” never relate this language to Jesus’ baptism, seeing as He Himself said His death and burial would be “the sign of Jonah”? The mind boggles. It is a chiastic song of death and resurrection. I quote it in full, not that you might skim over it, but that you might suffocate on the inescapable symbols of death-by-immersion:

Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, saying,

“I called out to the Lord, out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice.
For you cast me into the deep,
into the heart of the seas,
and the flood surrounded me;
all your waves and your billows
passed over me.
Then I said, ‘I am driven away
from your sight;
yet I shall again look
upon your holy temple.’
The waters closed in over me to take my life;
the deep surrounded me;
weeds were wrapped about my head
at the roots of the mountains.
I went down to the land
whose bars closed upon me forever;
yet you brought up my life from the pit,
O Lord my God.
When my life was fainting away,
I remembered the Lord,
and my prayer came to you,
into your holy temple.
Those who pay regard to vain idols
forsake their hope of steadfast love.
But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Salvation belongs to the Lord!”

And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.

The point of Jonah’s miraculous deliverance (and delivery!) is not merely that God could get him from the ship to dry land. The point is that God would preserve a faithful Israelite (Land) prophet in his ministry to the (Sea) nations. All the Sea Beasts are at His command, as He often reminds us in passages which pass right over the heads of not only Sydney Anglicans, but stubborn paedobaptists.

The New Testament moves the action from the Land to the Sea, from Israel to the nations, from shepherds to fishermen, from dominion over the Land to dominion over the Sea. The Gentile nations come from the Sea, but the obedient ones are Land animals (Daniel 7). Jesus walks on water, not to show off, but to picture His power over both the Social deep (the Gentile nations) and the Physical deep (the grave). When He says that “this mountain” (Zion) would be cast into the Sea, He was promising to do what He did when He brought the Babylonian armies against Jerusalem. The flood waters would rise above the neck, and all life in the old Jerusalem would be extinguished.

Under the Old Covenant, the water was in the vessel. Under the New Covenant, the vessel is in the water.

1 Peter 3:21 alludes to the Great Flood as a baptism. “Baptism now delivers you,” giving the baptizand a clear conscience before the God who looks upon the heart, as He did upon the blameless heart of His perfect Son at His own baptism. The only way it can achieve this for sinners is through the extinction of the old life, not through its preservation. Baptism is not about the mitigation of death, as was sprinkling.⁶Some will no doubt quote Hebrews 10:22, “…let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water,” but even this text differentiates between the “Adamic” heart (sprinkling) and the “Evian” body (washing). So they are merely seeing what they wish to see, and not really thinking in biblical typological terms. It amazes me that a denomination that speaks so much about “the baptised body” persists in sprinkling water on the head, and nobody bats an eyelid. As Joshua Luper describes, water is the source of life, but in biblical typology, the waters below the dove do not denote a preservation of life, but a testimony to the end of all flesh, and a new Creation.

The mediatory Land was cut off. All that remains of the Land is the resurrection body of Christ in heaven. Christ was the fruit of the Land and womb, and He now offers these to us as finished products, bread and wine from God’s table. Infant baptism and the sprinkling of water, however, are both Abrahamic, a fertility rite, a strange hybrid fusing the preservation of the fruit of the Land with the fruit of the womb — the old, carnal life. These have no place in the New Covenant, since the kingdom of Christ is all about His resurrection from the dead, and His dominion over the Sea.⁷See Walking On Water.

If your baptism, whether as an infant or an adult, was a sprinkling, you have not been baptised as Jesus was. You have not followed Him in what should be the first step of obedience.

Under the Old Covenant, the water was in the vessel (on the Land). Under the New Covenant, the vessel is in the water (in the Sea).

In the Bible, everything is confirmed by the testimony of two or three witnesses. (James Jordan notes that this is the basis for Hebrew parallelism and also verbal pleonasm. See Symbolism – A Manifesto.) An example of a “dual” witness from God would include the two dreams given to Joseph, and the two dreams given to Pharaoh. We see each Covenant confirmed by two witnesses as well. The Mosaic Covenant was a double witness at three levels: the two tablets of the Law, the second set of tablets, then a second giving of the Law in Deuteronomy.

A sign was given to Gideon to prove that God would save Israel by Gideon’s hand. He requested a second sign, and rather than chiding him, the Lord acquiesced. The Lord Himself asks us to prove all things. That explains the double sign, but not the ingredients of the signs, the fleece and the threshing floor. Fortunately, the consistency of biblical symbolism and structure not only gives us the answer, it reveals the events as a type of the events which followed, and, typologically, also shines light on the process of the first century apostolic witness.

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“…a mystery without a solution, a horror story without savagery, a nightmare in which all the watches stop at noonday…”

The Bestial Gardens of Men

Then they will say to the mountains, “Fall on us!”
and to the hills, “Cover us!”
(Luke 23:30)

The following lines by Edgar Allan Poe, slightly reshaped, are the first spoken words in the classic Australian film, Peter Weir’s Picnic At Hanging Rock:

What we see
and what we seem
are but a dream…
a dream within a dream.

Based on a novel by the enigmatic Joan Lindsay, the film is an experience that clings to you, not merely because it is so carefully and beautifully made, but also because it is a film with secret blades: it is a mystery without a solution, a horror story without savagery, a nightmare in which all the watches stop at noonday.

On Saturday 14th February 1900, a party of schoolgirls from Appleyard College picnicked at Hanging Rock near Mount Macedon in the state of Victoria. During the afternoon several members of the party disappeared without trace…

The picnic takes place on St Valentine’s Day. Although named for a saint, the date is a licence for the expression of natural impulses, the heart of paganism. Along with the use of “pipes of pan” in the film soundtrack, the culture of the schoolgirls is a scrapbook of Victorian fertility symbols. Yet, these passionate obsessions and an awakening sexual desire are strictly bound by the corset of Victorian religion. In one scene, recitation of a personal ode to St Valentine is censored for the sake of the memorization of the curricular Casabianca. Like first century Israel, Victoriana is indeed not one but two women, the bride and the harlot.

The golden icon is a blessed sylph named Miranda, likened to “the Botticelli angel” by one of her teachers. Both her appearance and her disappearance become elements in a sort of sacrificial ascension. Time stops and her potential is suddenly a flower pressed in a vice of tragedy. The end of her childhood is the birth of Venus. Though her purity is gone from the world, the memory of its fragrance fills the imaginations of those left behind, just as the mystery of the missing women corrupts, terrorizes and curses them, one by one.

This dichotomy between nature and nurture is  echoed in the quiet but unsettling tension between conflicting cultures and landscapes. The contrast of the rough Australian stablehand with the young English gentleman is humorous but telling. They do not lock horns but become friends—and possible suspects.

There is real discord, however, between the imported English culture and the dangerous and unforgiving Australian landscape into which its literature, dress and architecture have been confidently transplanted, entirely unadapted. Appleyard College is a manmade Eden, a temple and a greenhouse with boundaries clearly defined, its lush lawns giving way abruptly to brown fields. Moreover, the building in real life, Martindale Hall, was itself a deliberate reconstruction of the English home of the owner’s wife for the purpose of luring her to Australia. She never came, and he eventually lost the property in a gambling debt.

Visually, the picnic is also a hopeful transplant. It is a European painting, an English pastoral, carefully recreated in a foreign land. Moreover, the nature versus nurture theme is found even in the disparate “beauty and terror” approaches to the rock itself: the primeval eruptions described ominously by Miss McCraw and the Renaissance esthetic of Mademoiselle de Poitiers are both represented within the party of the missing. Victoria Bladen writes:

The juxtaposition of rational empiricism and emotive response, evident during the carriage ride, is continued with the girls’ proposed ascent of the Rock. For Miranda and Irma it is curiosity; they “wanted a closer view of the Rock” (p.33). By comparison, Marion Quade’s reason for wanting to go for a walk is to “make a few measurements at the base of the Rock”; she produces “some squared paper and a ruler” (p.25) yet it is not clear how such measuring would be done. In any event, no measurements are taken and the girls’ walk quickly takes on the quality of a mystic pilgrimage. Marion discards her pencil and notebook, “toss[ing] them into the ferns” (p. 38), before they fall asleep at the Rock.

While the natural space is a source of admiration and wonder, it is only superficially and temporarily idyllic, not the nurturing landscape of Virgilian pastoral. The girls become immersed in the landscape to a point where they are no longer in control but become subject to its magnetic, subsuming and devouring forces. The tragedy of Picnic is that the pastoral immersion in nature is taken to its extremity; the landscape takes and swallows up the heart of the human group.¹1 Victoria Bladen, “The Rock and the Void: Pastoral and Loss in Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Peter Weir’s Film Adaptation,” in Colloquy, Issue 23, Monash University.

Director Peter Weir gives the rock a brooding life of its own. The brutish, volcanic monolith with its totem-pole profiles, indigenous almost-faces, hangs over the idyllic scene, then tears and devours. Have the women been snatched from paradise and swallowed by an ancient hell? Or have they instead been rescued, released from the unnatural constraints—such as the timekeeping—of high culture by the eternal noon of a timeless land?

Marion: Whatever can those people be doing down there, like a lot of ants? A surprising number of human beings are without purpose. Though it is probable they are performing some function unknown to themselves.

Miranda: Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place.

Joan Lindsay’s novel was published in 1967. After the story came to her in dreams, she wrote the book in a matter of weeks. She was asked repeatedly if the story were true and repeatedly hedged the question. It seems much of it was based on her own experience in a girls’ college. Lindsay also refused to reveal the solution to the mystery. However, the original manuscript did have an ending, left out on advice from her publisher and not released until 1987. In this final chapter, the reader discovers the fate of the missing women, yet all it does is present a further enigma. The Aboriginal Dreamtime comes to the fore, with transformations into animal totems, falling rocks and the freezing of time, including, surprisingly, the mathematics and science teacher, Miss McCraw. It is beyond weird.

Many lovers of the book reject the final chapter as a fake, or at least as an ugly and unnecessary appendage to the ethereal beauty of this particularly strange and, for many years, “never-ending” story. Yet the reader is indeed given hints of the ending in the earlier chapters.²Chapter 3 shows signs of slightly clumsy editing once the contents of Chapter 18 are taken into account. See the commentary by Yvonne Rousseau published along with the missing chapter as The Secret of Hanging Rock.

This analysis is an excuse to recommend today (St Valentine’s Day, 2014), a stunning Australian film, but also to illustrate a point about the book of Revelation. The attitude of most Christians towards our own enigmatic “final chapter” resembles that of the headmistress of Appleyard College towards the Rock.

Good morning, girls.

Good morning, Mrs. Appleyard.

Well, young ladies, we are indeed fortunate in the weather for our picnic to Hanging Rock. I have instructed Mademoiselle that as the day is likely to be warm, you may remove your gloves once the drag has passed through Woodend.

You will partake of luncheon at the picnic grounds near the rock. Once again let me remind you that the rock is extremely dangerous, and you are therefore forbidden any tomboy foolishness in the matter of exploration, even on the lower slopes. I also wish to remind you, the vicinity is renowned for its venomous snakes and poisonous ants of various species. It is, however, a geological marvel on which you will be required to write a brief essay on Monday morning.

That is all. Have a pleasant day, and try to behave yourselves in a manner to bring credit to the college.

The Revelation of Jesus Christ is not a book intended to be observed but experienced, over and over. It is designed to resonate. It is offensive to the cultured sensibilities which shield us because it is supposed to transcend them, to speak not only to us but through us. Many of those who have given themselves to it wholeheartedly are seldom seen again. They are devoured. They become alien. They speak a new language, the “madness” of the prophets whose eyes see the chariots of God (2 Kings 6:17).

Although it appears to be a hostile and foreign landscape filled with confronting symbols, animal totems, virginal sacrifices clad in pure white, chosen, slain and ascending with a disturbing sexual undercurrent, the Revelation is in fact the authentic end of the story, a denouement of the natural world. The seed, flesh and skin of Genesis is everywhere in the Revelation, employed to express the bestial nature and hidden nakedness of institutions masquerading as gods and goddesses. The primeval world of Adam, a barren landscape of widows and orphans, is not a Dreamtime but a history. Ridiculed, ignored and neglected, it waits silently until the sixth hour, when time shall be no more. The fruits of culture are ripe, and it bites and devours, consumes and transfigures. Revelation is Genesis at full throttle, a bottle to be consumed and be consumed by, a fruit once forbidden but now freely offered. It is a book which removes inhibitions and exposes the hidden intents of the heart. The gardens of men are theft and nakedness, their lands are murder, and their cities are exile. The pungent, Dreamtime symbols are the hidden reality. The grotesque totems are a tangible exposure of “what we see and what we seem.”

Yet, as with the controversial Chapter 18 of Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Revelation contains nothing that is not contained either explicitly or implicitly in the earlier parts of the story. It simply describes the natural world condemned in Romans 1 and 2 in a different language, one which is impossible to explain or contain within the Victorian corset of Western Christianity. As John Taylor writes in his introduction to Chapter 18 in The Secret of Hanging Rock:

As anyone can see, the chapter is quite unfilmable. Film can only work with what God gives it, and God did not give it the same elasticity He granted the novel—though people keep trying, as the cutting-room floor shows.

It is little wonder that the “schoolgirls” of modern Bible colleges are constrained to the safety of the lower slopes by the prim widows of worldly academia.

This is a chapter from Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.

Here’s my all-time favourite joke in the Bible.

Jesus makes it clear that whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. This goes right back to the Garden of Eden. Adam did not humble himself under the Word and repeat it once more as a prophetic legal witness to the serpent and to Eve. In this refusal, he extended the exaltation of the serpent himself against the will of God. So Adam was humbled by God, and, very interestingly, the angel behind the serpent was exalted to a legal role in heaven. The serpent was lifted up, standing at God’s right hand as the accuser of Man.

If Adam had obeyed the Lord, he would have been worthy, as firstfruits of the Land (he was created in the Land and lifted up to the Garden) to “open the scroll,” in this case, the promises of dominion which the Lord had made to him. But the scroll remained closed. It would be a mystery to human eyes for four thousand years.

Joseph was a faithful firstfruits. Unlike Adam, he humbled himself continually and did not hide his relationship to God. This could have cost him his life, but he was eventually lifted up. He “opened the scroll,” the double witness God had sent to the Gentile king in dreams. Once vindicated as faithful and wise, he sat at Pharaoh’s right hand (with Pharaoh’s ring or seal) and became Pharaoh’s “living word.”

Daniel was another firstfruits carried into a Gentile court. He, too, humbled himself, and did not hide his Covenant identity. Again, this could have cost him his life, but he was eventually lifted up. He “opened the scroll,” the fourfold witness God had sent to the Gentile emperor in dreams. He, too, became the top wise man in the royal court, and it seems he may have had a hand in the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian armies (under God’s guidance, of course).

James Jordan runs us through these similarites in his lectures, and how they all point to Christ’s faithfulness, His exaltation to the right hand of the power (finally usurping the satan), and His worthiness to “open the scroll” of the New Covenant, and sends out the four gospels (the horsemen of the harvest).

This really unlocks the book of Revelation for us, but the one that made me laugh was the instance in the book of Esther, which is already funny, but becomes hysterical when we have prior knowledge.

Mordecai was the Jew living in a Gentile city. Instead of submitting to authority, he refused to bow. (Bowing to Gentile kings, or any other human being, was not sinful for Jews, only bowing to idols because they are not images of the true God.) Mordecai also told Esther to hide her Covenant identity. As a result, another satan, Haman, usurped the role God had obviously prepared for Mordecai (we know this because of all the previous patterns, and also because Mordecai eventually received this role, a terror to the nations.)

Mordecai thwarts an assassination attempt on the king, which leads us to the divine comedy. Instead of the king receiving dreams from the Most High, he can’t sleep. If we were watching a sitcom with such a well-established pattern, seeing the king tossing and turning would surely justify some laughter from the live audience. He calls for the royal records and discovers Mordecai’s faithfulness (which, in context, we must understand as a submission to authority which God can bless.) He calls the self-righteous Haman in and asks his advice on what to do to glorify a faithful man. Here, Joseph or Daniel would “open the mystery.” Adam would obey and understand God’s intention behind the test. The purpose of the trial was to qualify His right hand Man so that a much greater authority could be conferred upon him and a much greater blessing could be poured out through him. (Notice the correpondence between Joseph’s grain and Jesus’ Pentecostal Spirit! In Daniel’s case it was the conversion of the king, but that would take a little more explaining than is wise at this point.)

Of course, Haman misinterprets the king’s will entirely, which is very funny, and repeats a theme which, as you can see now, unites the entire Bible from the first book to the last. Haman is just like Adam. He has himself become a lying serpent. He desired to exalt himself and he would be humbled. His wisdom was not the wisdom of God. But of course, a much greater humbling for him, and his sons, was to come. The serpent would be lifted up (Garden), along with his sons (Land) and the entire brood gathered in his spirit across the World.

Now, there are many Bible teachers who say that a type is only a type if it is explained explicitly in the text of the Bible. Never read Shakespeare or watch a good movie with, or lend a novel to, such a person. He is in the ranks of the illiterati and must not be permitted anywhere near such exquisite entertainments, especially the Bible.

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James Jordan’s lectures are available from www.wordmp3.com

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.

English poet W. H. Auden wrote many reviews and critiques of other works. He makes some interesting comments on Melville’s use of the power of symbol, and the ironically Christian worldview undergirding Moby-Dick:

Don Quixote and Moby-Dick Auden treats essentially as he does Pickwick Papers, not as pure parables, but as mytho-poeic secular stores of parabolic religious significance… Auden contrasted Cervantes and Melville at length, interpreting Don Quixote as an ironically mad hero in a comic universe, and Ahab as a tragically made hero in a tragic universe…

Melville’s Ahab Auden treats as Don Quixote’s antitype, a religious hero who is demonic in a tragic universe, where Don Quixote is saintly in a comic one. The whole of Moby-Dick, he argues, is “an elaborate synecdoche” in which whale fishing becomes an image of all men’s lives and is full of parable and typology, including the characters and names of the nine ships.

The white whale, however, is an example of a symbol “in the real sense.” “A symbol is felt to be such,” Auden says, “before any possible meaning is consciously recognized; i.e. an object or event which is felt to be more important than the reason can immediately explain is symbolic.” “Secondly,” Auden continues, “a symbolic correspondence is never one to one but always multiple, and different persons perceive different meanings.” Ahab, who is defined by such symbolic thinking, declares, “All visible objects, man, are but pasteboard masks.” “To me,” he says, “the white whale is that wall shoved near to me. Sometimes I see there’s naught beyond. I see in him outrageous strength with an insatiable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate.”

The extremity of Ahab’s hatred Auden relates to Kierkegaard’s definition of defiant, as opposed to weak, despair in Sickness unto Death. “With hatred for existence,” Kierkegaard says, defiant despair “wills to be itself, to be itself in terms of its misery; it does not even in defiance or defiantly will to be itself, but to be itself in spite.” The defiant despairer “will not hear about what comfort eternity has for him … because that comfort would be the destruction of him as an objection against the whole of existence.” “Of this despair,” Auden comments, “Ahab is a representation, perhaps the greatest in literature.”

Ahab’s earlier loss of his leg to Moby-Dick and his subsequent accident, causing a wound, Melville says, that “all but pierced his groin,” would come at the end of a Greek tragedy, a punishment of the gods for hubris, Auden comments, but in Melville they come at the beginning, so that we watch what kind of individual Ahab becomes, exceptional because of “‘being what others are not,’” not “‘becoming what one wills or God wills for one.’” Auden particularly notes his reaction “when he breaks his leg, jumping off the Enderby, whose captain has lost an arm to Moby-Dick without despairing and whose doctor ascribes Moby-Dick’s apparent malice to clumsiness.” “The example of sanity with authority is too much for Ahab,” Auden says, “and he must again goad himself to his resolution,” vowing, “I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now then, be this prophet and the fulfiller one. That’s more than ye, ye great gods, ever were.”

We watch Ahab “enact every ritual of the dedicated Don Quixote life of the Religious Hero, only for negative reasons,” Auden observes. He throws away his pipe, not as an ascetic renunciation, but to prevent distraction from the task he has set himself. He sets up the Doubloon as a reward for the first person to sight Moby-Dick, though he has no intention of letting anyone but himself be the first, and at the same time, violating every spiritual condition of an oath, he coercively makes the harpooneers swear to pursue Moby-Dick to the death.

Later, he baptizes his harpoon, “a perversion of the Knight Errant’s act of dedicating his arms,” and he throws away the ship’s quadrant, cursing science as a “vain toy” that casts “man’s eyes aloft to the heavens,” “a defiant inversion in pride,” Auden remarks, “of the humility which resists the pride of reason, the theologian’s temptation to think that knowledge of God is more important than obeying Him.”

“Next,” Auden says, he places the child Pip in his place in the captain’s cabin and takes the humble position of the lookout, “an inversion of ‘He who would be greatest among you, let him be as the least.’” “Lastly,” Auden remarks, in refusing to help his neighbor, the captain of the Rachel, who asks for help in finding his young son, Ahab “counterfeits the text: ‘If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.’”

Auden’s analysis of Ahab, as of Moby-Dick as a whole, is exceptionally responsive to Melville’s peculiar amalgamation of metaphysical apprehension and concrete psychological and natural detail. It is tempting in interpreting Melville to make a one-to-one allegory of the former or to become immersed in the particulars of the latter. Auden does neither, and though in seeking to make Moby-Dick entirely intelligible in Christian terms he may to some extent ignore the reasons that led Melville … to call his novel a “wicked book,” he may also reveal its essential Christian foundation more clearly.

Excerpts from Arthur Kirsch, Auden and Christianity, pp. 99-105.
Art: Moby Dick by C. M. Butzer.

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

“And the soldiers twisted a crown of thorns and put it on His head.” (John 19:2)

Then the Lord God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.’” (Genesis 3:22)

“Then Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. And Pilate said to them, ‘Behold the Man!’” (John 19:5)

“I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore.” (Revelation 1:18)

“For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring usu to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit…” (1 Peter 3:18)

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.

Then we have Knife and Fire again at Conquest, or in the Covenant framework, applied Sanctions. Like the Tree of Wisdom, the kingdom wine is matured, alcoholic—“fully grown.” It is Knife-and-Fire-in-a-Cup, a two-edged sword that we swallow. The bittersweet wine cuts us to the heart, judging us from the inside out. Alcohol removes our inhibitions. It exposes the true “thoughts and intents” of our hearts (Hebrews 4:12). The sword of Solomon reveals the identity of the true mother.

Just as the sword-Word sanctified the Head, so now it sanctifies the Body. The Covenant oath which Adam swore to keep is being required of him by God. With his wife as one flesh, he is being forced to eat his words. Sanctions is the Spirit looking for internal Law. The outflow “from his belly” (Succession), whether blessing or curse, bondage or freedom, will transform the world.

For Covenant “infants,” those still under external Law, the cup brings death. On the Day of Coverings, their legal nakedness is dis-covered. They are seen. They and their heirs are cursed.

For Covenant elders, those who have obtained the knowledge of good and evil lawfully (by Grace), it brings joy and rest and continued life. They not only carry the Succession (Covenant success) into the future as an inheritance, their wisdom is a blessing to the nations. They are covered, robed with righteousness. They are wise judges: seers.

The Covenant Ethics are the tools of dominion. Adam was supposed to inherit these tools—Knife-and-Fire—freely from the hand of God. But instead of the Covenantal “there and back again” of the Trinity living in him by the Spirit for the Conquest of the Land, Knife-and-Fire was an external flaming sword flashing to-and-fro.

“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.

[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]

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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.

[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]

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