Ray Bradbury on not thinking, on feeling, on mystery, myth, traveling to the stars, a lot of folly and a lot of wisdom . . . which is what makes the romantic temperament after all, that vast chaotic mix. I don’t know if people understand the fascination of the paradox of it. If you don’t, here’s another chance to try.

Don’t. You’ll miss things. If you don’t use Brown Driver and Briggs Hebrew Lexicon or one in the hardcopy, then you are missing things. Just had one of those moments with Genesis 33. Jacob it talking to Esau in those wonderfully detached, wonderfully ironic words of verses 10 and 11. Verse 10 ends with the verb whose triliteral root is resh, tsade, he. If you look it up on BDB you’ll see on the lower right of the page the triliteral root resh, tsade, het. Small, small difference. The former means please and the latter means murder.

I just stumbled on that using BDB, but if I hadn’t, how would I have known? Only if I were really fluent in Hebrew.

I think it speaks of the coolness of mind, the new detachment and wisdom of Jacob after his encounter. The episode with Esau is full of ironic parallels, and Jacob’s inflexible formality. He does not trust Esau and is no longer buoyantly overconfident as he was at the beginning of 32 before being punctured by the report of his messengers. I think chapter 36 vindicates Jacob’s procedure in 33. And I see a pattern: now that he’s a prince with God will it go to his head as it did with Levi and Simeon in 34? With Ruben in 35?

Anyway, it is curious how the form of the verb in 33:10 drops the he. Which is why I was looking generally in the dictionary. Wish I had a book of Hebrew morphology on hand to figure out if it was a guess as to which meaning to take or if the vowels give away the root.

There is a place that does what I said: they make translations of good theological works available. It is called FELIRE.

Here is what they do: you can download the books as pdf files or you can write to them from anywhere in the world and they will send you a free shipment of certain tomes. See how it works yourself. You can get Calvin’s Institutes in Spanish that way.

May their tribe and their catalogue increase.

What is it with Jacob? What’s going on in all those tangles, his conflict with Laban, his conflict with Esau? Things begin to go better for him in chapter 31 with Laban at least. That is behind.

In the beginning of Genesis 32 he meets a company of angels, talks about it, and then acts. What does it mean? I think he’s feeling cheerfuller than usual, things are going well. He has the big meeting with Esau ahead and this time he’s going to take the initiative, face Esau squarely, so he sends messengers to say he’s coming and glibly adds that he is very, very rich.

And the result is rather discouraging for him. Esau is coming to meet him and with 400 men. Jacob does not stop to think that in every encounter he’s had with Esau he has prevailed. He doesn’t look at things from Esau’s point of view. How would Esau prepare to meet his wily brother? How would Jacob prepare to meet with Laban if Laban unaccountably sent messengers to tell him he was returning? Jacob simply panics, and it is so bad with him that he actually starts praying; remember he has not, to date, been a praying man.

His idea to return started when Joseph was born. That is the midnight and turning point of the long night of Jacob’s exile. His dealings with the sticky and perfidious Laban get more difficult, but the determined Jacob, not one to shun hard work, deals with his problems with renewed vigor. (He’s passive about family life, but not passive about acquiring things. Some people find some hard work pleasanter than other hard work.) If it depends on him, he’ll do whatever it takes.

But he’s come out of this realizing gradually and increasingly that it doesn’t really depend on him. He keeps running into circumstances that bring God more clearly into relief. And his problem is that he wrestles with his problems, but he doesn’t take hold on God. He is serious about what is inevitable or he thinks he can deal with, but God is changing his circumstances with a view to changing thinking so that he becomes serious about the one behind all this.

His name is changed in the last darkness of that night of his exile. His name is changed from supplanter to prevailer, and Alter suggests it is kind of like parallelism: a synonym of intensification. He says it is a synonym because the change doesn’t stick. I think there’s more Biblical Theology behind that one, but I think Alter’s got a point.

We know Jacob was a strong man. His family knew him as a strong man, a muscular worker and a successful man: prevailing in exile to become rich, prevailing against the formidable, cunning, unscrupulous and masterful Laban. Now his family see his silhouette coming across the Jabbok with the sun behind him, and they notice something odd about their husband and father: his great frame, unmistakably, but he comes limping. What would they have wondered in those moments, as with the sun Jacob returns to the land of promise? No doubt that he’d been somehow overcome. It was an important moment. So deep is this event in them they never again touch that sinew when they eat an animal.

But Jacob had not been overcome, he had prevailed. All the blessings of God so far have encumbered him: wives, children, flocks and herds. They don’t make it easy to escape Laban or to face Esau. And now his great physical strength and ability curtailed, limited, encumbered. Because he had striven with God and prevailed. Because he had encountered seriously that without which he could not otherwise in anything prevail. He had looked face to face on the Real. He knew at last. He had won through.

In victory defeated at last, he crossed the brook with a triumphant limp, ready to humble himself before Esau, knowing that it was not his to take, but his to receive of God whatever almighty God was pleased to give his creature.

Go here and check out this allegory of Virtue and Vice at the British Museum. I found it searching for allegories of ignorance, as my Sunday was rather plagued with that persistent, loathsome and ubiquitous member of modern Christianity.

Hey, I got mentioned on a real blog! I’m checking the stats every hour.

Yes, and there is also a tendency of works on the mission field to develop a long-term dependency on cash from the USA. What I have found, living in a poor, third world country, is that they think they can’t support themselves while the conclusion is not altogether certain. Even while others around have solutions or are working on solutions. Even when the church benefiting from foreign cash could with sacrificing some superfluities get on by itself and let the burden rest on its own congregation. And learn to stand on its two feet as soon as possible.

And spare us your youth-group mission teams.

Part of the reason is that we are not spiritual. We measure our spirituality in terms of things that cost to put on: programs, decorations, special speakers. It looks good to have people going, and people coming, and hearing about 2000 Africans or 300 Philipinos for the first time getting solid teaching on: Dispensationalism or the Doctrines of Grace or Pragmatism in the Church, or name your pet theology. Is it the best way? If we were spiritual would we think that way? Are you sure there aren’t teachers here already and prepared to teach these things? Of course, they don’t have the magnetic celebrity pull, but how much of that is really productive?

And in countries where there are actually works on every corner in every religious flavor, every little enterprising chap wants to put up a building at the expense of US taxpayers. I know. I am in one of the wealthier small churches here, and they like the idea of sending someone to the USA to ask for money so they can build. Why not? They’re rich there. Aren’t we all in this together? I say: How about you get in this together by making sure you are supporting and sacrificing for your own local church there where you are? Are you paying your own pastors a decent salary? Do you have enough pastors on staff to attend to the spiritual needs of your congregation? Fix that one first, and quit meddling with the beam in another country’s eye.

Do you want to help on the missionfield? Here’s what strikes me as a really good way. Find a good translator and fund a translation project, then put the book in the public domain on the internet, or better yet, also make it available to the target countries at a good price well-bound. We don’t have anything of Edwards translated. We don’t need some enthusiastic missionary’s half-baked second language skills, we don’t need some semi-educated missionary kid’s ill-advised translation, and beware of the natives. We need good translations of enduring works. Find out who is translating Victor Davis Hanson, who translates Christopher Dawson, who translated Gerald Bray and commission a translation. All of John Owen is in laughable abbreviations as far as Spanish goes. No William Law. C.S. Lewis is held captive by a Spanish publisher (Rial) as is Machen–the last held by Vida, a subdivision of Zondervan–with a copyright and out of print. Want to help on the missionfield? Purchase the rights to Machen’s Greek in Spanish and put it in the public domain or put it into print again. Or other books like that. Like the bean-counter Greek approach? Get the books translated–though the public domain thing is probably more viable with older works. How about translating that work on Polity IX Marks puts out? It would be nice to have With Reverence and Awe. And let that take up your time and effort and money. Find a good translator in NYC and pay him cold hard cash for a decent translation to which you can give away all the rights. No glory to you, of course, but then, isn’t that the point?

There is a Spanish-Hebrew lexicon on the market right now. It costs 700,000 Colombian Pesos. The peso is a little less than 2,000 to the dollar; do the math. Want to help on the mission field? Check into that kind of thing and instead of sending money, use it to fund affordable solutions. Brown, Driver, Briggs and you my friend, in Spanish.

And quit sending missionaries who look down on language skills and hard theological tomes!!!!

A perfect man wd. never act from a sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people)–like a crutch at times: but of course it’s idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits, etc) can do the journey on their own!

–C.S. Lewis

Now the interesting bit would be to organize and clarify that statement according to Jonathan Edwards. How would The Puritan handle duty? Or rather, what is going on in the human will when the agent chooses according to duty?

Don’t miss this. Tou good tou be trou.

Here it is, clearly stated:

The answer was provided by a Canadian correspondent: these performers have adopted the style of the American stand up comic. The swaggering up and down; the conversational banter; the faux outrage; the mocking cynicism about anybody who might value decency and order as traditionally conceived; the studiedly slovenly dress style; the portentous pauses while waiting for a laugh; the ugly profanity; and, in some well-known cases, a preoccupation with talking about sex. All of this is, I am told, standard fare among the professionally controversial comics.

These stand up comedian preachers would not work in the church in other parts of the world because aesthetics of plausibility differ from culture to culture — they are not superior or inferior, please note, but merely different (I am not scoring patriotic points here). Confidence men in every culture need to find what idiom works in their locale in order to part the local gullible (or ‘marks’) from their money and their time. Here in the USA it is stand up; elsewhere it will be something different.

You probably didn’t need me to tell you. When I see them, as I did recently, I am filled with horror. It is not so clear to me what would keep me from being the way they are. It makes me wish I could write everything in my sermon out, examine it carefully, and then read it adhering strictly to saying only carefully considered things (mostly! not that writing something out makes it considered and that consideration leaves things well-considered enough). But because of the way things now are, it is hard to do that in the USA and it is impossible here.

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth is an excellent book that I shall one day want to re-read. It is narrated in an expansive, relaxed style. You have to let him lead you into each chapter, but lead you he does and go somewhere he does also.

I concluded it downtown this morning, at an internet cafe where they also served good coffee and in the echoing stairwell under the plastic bubbles at the library. It ended admirably.

What is it about? It is about honor, empire and their connection to human life. Whether it is honor and empire that are ephemeral, or human life, is hard to judge. It is that kind of book. It is humorously tragic, and if you know the march, it will be going to your head hollowly, ironically, splendidly, etc. Really. So much so, that if you aren’t familiar enough with the music, then put it on repeat and have it well in place before you finish the book.

The three main characters are three generations that do not outlive the last Habsburg Emperor. In fact, the first one saves his life. Each different, each characteristic, the whole thing brilliantly done. Who could dream up something as ingenious as the day of glory in the life of a bureaucrat and pull it off almost as if it were a suspense novel? It happens and it is worthy of earnest congratulation.