Hannah Roorda writes,

I just finished reading A Serrated Edge , a book by Doug Wilson in defense of Biblical satire. While I have grown up in a cheerfully sarcastic family and am quite familiar with Christians using satire, the book made it clear to me that most Christians are either unfamiliar or completely uncomfortable with this approach. This is a crying shame, and I would recommend the book to anyone with a couple of hours to read it in.

If you are already familiar with “Biblical Satire and Trinitarian Skylarking” I have a list of links for you. Most of these are copied shamelessly off of Doug Wilson’s blog, but I added one to the magazine that inspired the book I just completed reading.

Credenda/Agenda Magazine
Lark News
Purgatorio
Tom in the Box
Indexed
Demotivators

Happy reading.

Composed by Philip Hilton. (So you’ll just have to suffer through it. :P) Per request of Mr. Ahern.

When I was young, there was a girl

Her hair had just a little curl

But mostly she was just plain pretty

And when she wished, then she was witty.

Now, if you are of delicate sort

I warn you, I shall now report

Something which may unhinge your mind

So I sure hope you aren’t that kind.

Because, you see, there was a stranger

And he was not an hon’rable ranger

But oh! he was of dreadful sort

And not an object of light sport.

He was an Ogler – do not faint, I pray!

For in the end he turned to the right way!

One day approached he to our heroine’s door

Ogler disguisèd like a Spanish Moor.

But with no doubt, the nasty dark intention

Of adding pics of her to his collection

Of which desire she did not have knowledge

When she allowed that Ogler in her cottage.

Now mark, my reader, how the story grows

Now swells the plot, and now the action flows!

He saw at once, the nasty Ogler did,

That Miss -*-*-*- was quite a pretty kid;

The Ogler saw, he wished, and he desired!

He saw, he wished, and to the prize aspired!

But our heroine was a spiffy girl

For ’round her neck she wore a holy pearl.

This pearl, of course, was magic, silly,

‘Twas rather smooth, and rather pretty

Shaped like a cross, in fragile fashion,

A snow-white image of the passion.

The Ogler tried his trade, I say,

During a drowsy summer’s day;

But chainèd pearl rousèd her then

She did the Ogler’s purpose ken!

“Oh ho! Mean monster, stand and fight!

I am Amázon; destructíon is my delight!”

Then speaking thus, she ript the pearl

From off her neck, purposing to hurl –

And as she swung, she said a prayer:

“O Queen of Heaven, Mary Fair

Speed this pearl well and let it find

Its proper place on his behind!”

Thus did she speak, and thus Queen Mary heard,

Urg’d on the pearl with some celestial word,

And when that holy pearl touchèd the Ogler

Then he became a nice and gentle Ogre.

So let all bow their heads to Mary Queen

The friend, the sponsor of the female tween!

THE END

Gabriel Bertilson writes,

Gothic is the Germanic language spoken by the ancient Goths, one of the invaders of the Roman Empire in the 3rd to 5th centuries AD. It is classified as East Germanic (the only language of that class that we know much about), as contrasted with West Germanic, the main members of which are English, Frisian, Dutch, and all the varieties of German, and North Germanic, which contains all the Scandinavian languages except for Finnish.

So why is it classified as a different language group from the other Germanic languages? Here I’ll explain two of the main differences that distinguish the sound system of Gothic from that of other Germanic languages.

The first is the absence of i-mutation in Gothic. In all other Germanic languages a vowel that in Proto-Germanic was followed by an i or j in the next syllable would change by i-mutation. In Gothic, however, this would not occur. So, for example, we have Gothic f?tjus vs. Old English fét, feet, and Gothic nazjan vs. Old English nerien, to save.

The second is that Gothic retains the original Proto-Germanic z between vowels, but in other Germanic languages this z changes to r. (This process is known as rhotacism, a change to a rho- or r-sound; a word also used for a peculiar pronunciation or excessive use of r.) So we have Gothic dius, diuzis vs. Old English deor (from which we get Modern English deer), German tier, and Icelandic dýr, animal, and Gothic huzda vs. Modern English hoard.

This change is similar to the change of intervocalic s to r that occurred in Latin honos/honor, hon?ris, honor, distinction and arbor/arb?s, arboris, tree. The genitive form originally ended in -osis, but the intervocalic s changed to r (in this and all forms besides the nominative singular). Then the nominative form changed to -or from -os to become more like the rest of the forms of the word.

Other examples of Latin rhotacism are tempus, temporis, time, and (what I just read about with astonishment) eras, you were vs. es, you are. The stem for all the forms of sum, Latin to be (except for the ones beginning with s- and f-) is es-; but the s changes to r when it happens to be between vowels. So this explains the occurrence of er- in the imperfect and future of sum, what I would have wondered about had I thought about it a bit.

And so endeth my post. A good day to you all.

Hannah Roorda writes,

Despite feeling a bit intimidated about posting after John’s last challenging post (and indeed I am intimidated by almost all the posts on this blog, save mine) I have decided to “grace” this page once again with my poor attempts at poetry.

This is a brief alliterative poem. In alliterative verse, the lines are tied together by alliteration, rather than rhymes. At first this sounds easy and rather appealing, but good alliterative poetry may well be much harder to write. I make no claims about mine, though I have given myself a few more rules to follow, to make my path easier.

1. My alliterative words will start with only the letters appearing in my full name.
2. The poem will be an alliterative acrostic, because I will use the letters in the order and number of times they appear in my name, and I will begin each line with the object of alliteration. This is not vanity, I assure you, but the delight in a personal challenge (I have an inordinate number of repeated letters in my name).
3. The poem will address a personal botheration.

That by Any Other Name Would Still Smell
Ho, Hope! Hast thou held my heart high?
A more amicable association would be absence!
Now, thou art neither necessity,
Nor have I need for thee.
Abhor I thee, then? Absolute aspersion!
How I hope, yes Hope, to have thy sweetness.

Great genius I am not gifted with,
Rare resourcefulness, O reader, I require.
And albeit so, I admire if you understand–
Can you collect from my casting about?
Even empty fools face my common enigma

Right, I’ll relate to you my regular riddle:
On all occasions I own odd joy,
Or even offensive optimism!
Rest assured I require reason and resolution, and
Doubt desires I pay my debt.
Ah, but an absurd and airy girl remains so.

I would challenge you to try this also, especially if you enjoy time with a thesaurus. For more alliterative poetry, I recommend Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

John Ahern writes,

I’m a little confused about this idea of apologetics. I can only blame my confusion on the “theological bricolage” of Against Christianity by Peter Leithart, as well as several other similar works with much the same point in mind. I can’t say Leithart would agree with me at all, but I will say that he was the font of my doubting waters. I, for one, don’t necessarily agree with everything I say here, or believe that all my arguments are valid (or well thought out). Be that as it may, I still have the following questions unanswered.

I.

First of all, my claim: the Bible never really mentions apologetics, and none of the figures in the Bible use anything recognizable or close when “giving an account for the hope that is within them” (paraphrase of 1 Peter 3:15). It would appear that survival of apologetics without theology and theological doctrine is impossible. Being connected to theology, apologetics can never work in a Christian setting, because theology doesn’t either.[1]

What come to mind are Lewis’ Mere Christianity and his systematic proof of the groundwork of Christianity, the impossibility of the contrary for presuppositionalist Calvinists, the ontological proof, the argument from design, the Thomistic proofs, etc.

II.

This of course begs the question, what do I mean by theology, apologetics, etc., and as well, what is the alternative? We are indeed commanded to give a defense of the hope within us (1 Peter 3:15 again), but how are we to do this without getting into theology and apologetics?

The Catholic Encyclopedia says apologetics is, “A theological science which has for its purpose the explanation and defense of the Christian religion.”[2]

The problem with the above definition is that theology is concerned with timeless truth and realities about the transcendental God. But in giving a defense for the hope that is within us, we shouldn’t apply any “timeless truths”[3] or realities concerning the transcendental God. The hope within us is made of made of no different a reality than the one we are a part of. This reality is made of the story of Creation, the Fall, and the story where God redeems and sanctifies his people through the life of His body, the Church.

A theological science, since it is concerned with timeless truths, would be Gnosticism and Platonic because it is concerned with getting rid of the real and only concentrating on the ideal, timeless, transcendental reality. (Yes, I, still a Platonist and Mediaevalist, really did say that.)

The hope that is within us is the story of redemption: so all consuming that theology becomes something less than true, and hence, less than God, in comparison with the Story. When we apply any “theological science” to the hope that is within us, we are giving defense very poorly indeed.

III.

The Bible speaks of showing, not telling. Instead of a lecture where the apologist tells us about the transcendental God, the true apologist should throw us into the Great Dance. Like a good poet, the true apologist involves us in a game of catch with the Living Word as the ball. The ball is a story that involves humanity at every level. Theology, to the contrary, is a bland, clinical introduction, where no dirt gets on the fingers.

Take the building blocks of story: plot, tension, characters, of which theology has none. Theology may prove the impossibility of the contrary or the existence of God, but it will not have Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Theology squeezes Abraham and Isaac out of the story like lemon juice out of the lemon (all you have is a contorted lemon and sour juice), and theology only concentrates on this story’s ramifications in the realm of the abstract.

IV.

So, let’s take the Bible and look for an instance of showing, not telling, through story.

When St. Paul goes to Agrippa, that masterful instance of giving an account for the hope within him, he doesn’t stand up offering some Summa Theologica citations nor any of Greg Bahnsen’s non-neutrality declarations; he, like a good old charismatic, gets up and offers his “personal testimony”.

V.

Where stands the so-called apologetics of St. Thomas Aquinas? I begin to wonder if he actually meant to refute any form of atheism with his proofs of the Existence[4]. In the Mediaeval setting, that was a no-brainer. Atheism, like apologetics, has arisen from Enlightenment fancies and limitations. They fancy that logic is confined to human invention, or is only a human tool. If we really are presuppositionalists, we should get away from the Enlightenment confinements, presupposing “story” and meaning of the Latin apologus[5]. We should not presuppose the Enlightenment notions.

What Aquinas was doing exactly is for others to explore, not I. My point here is that Thomists aren’t correctly applying Thomistic philosophy with an emphasis on apologetics. Any emphasis on apologetics is an emphasis in the wrong place – in the abstract rather than in the Incarnation.

VI.

The greatest refutation of theology and apologetics is the problem of evil and pain. Notice C. S. Lewis, in Till We Have Faces, chooses to answer the problem of evil not by telling us any evidences for a reasonable explanation, but by telling us a story, and showing it indirectly to be reasonable. Wherever did he get such a fresh, new idea?

The book of Job seems to follow much the same line of thought; I would go so far as to say that one can’t really answer the problem of evil with timeless truths and abstract ideas. Maybe it’s because evil is so wound up with those timeless truths that it is impossible for us to understand it without sympathy. <
/p>

But theology is escapism: neat and clean. Theology, in short, is not talking about the same reality as the Bible is. In the first 50 chapters of the Bible you have several murders, Oedipian incest, sodomy, financial dishonesty (which, I believe, the Bible places on the same level as the latter), rape, harlotry, etc.; those are all sinful things, but we mustn’t forget that God himself causes a rather decadent human race to wiped off the face of the earth, He causes disaster to befall Sodom and Gomorrah, and a lot of the flesh of animals were slain in anger. The Bible presents a view of reality that shocks the Victorian sensibilities right out of us. With those sensibilities goes apologetics.

VII.

Look at the example of Abraham and the Covenant God makes in the Old Testament.[6] A Hebrew covenant is an awesome thing. I’ve heard it explained this way – the two parties involved would dig a trench, slaughter animals, and put them on either side of the trench. The blood would then flow into the trench, and the two parties would walk through, touching the blood with their feet, and pass in the middle. The agreement was that if either party did not meet the specifications of the deal, the guilty party would need to give a death sacrifice. God puts Abram to sleep and passes through in the forms of a “burning oven” and a “torch”[7] – He’s both parties. If Abraham makes a mistake, it’s still his fault, but not his problem (if you catch my meaning).

Now, how more amazing can you get? God is showing the reader an act of His grace, and in a beautiful way showing the whole history of redemption in a quaint, rather graphic story of blood and uncooked meat. In the New Testament, when one of the epistles will elaborate on Old Testament stories, it isn’t a matter of saying “this means this”; they’re showing us that this story of Abram applies to us. That’s a bigger picture, not a smaller one. We are the party that was taken over by horror and put into a deep death-like sleep in Genesis 15. We were the party that broke the terms, and the Divine torch was put out by Death for our sakes. It never in the New Testament ceases to loose its value as a story. It only becomes a bigger one.

The timeless truths and human reality are connected by the story of the Incarnation. Look too hard on the timeless truths and lose touch with reality. That isn’t a good idea when trying to give an account and a story for the hope within.

*******************************

These are my thoughts. These truly are questions, not blatant declarations. As always, I’m seeking to throw off Modernity’s taints and put back on the clothes of (gasp) Medievalism.

Oh, and comments, please, your comments!