Driscoll at Moore College ‘08

During his time in Sydney, Mark Driscoll dropped into college to give a seminar on pr

eaching/ministry in the 21st Century and took an hour of questions.

It was a great afternoon and it resulted in alot of people thinking hard and long about ministry and their own goals for gospel work. 

I wanted to write a post about it, but one of my college mates summarised the afternoon really well. 

So I direct you to Ben’s blog for the low-down on Driscoll at Moore College ‘08

That God should be a poet prt IV

Can We Describe God Outside of Poetry?

Metaphor not only provides a literary form that can express this transcendence, it is also foundational in the cognitive process of understanding the transcendent. In his essay Metaphor and Learning, Petrie argues “that metaphor is one of the central ways of leaping the epistemological chasm between old knowledge and new knowledge”. 

As C.S Lewis reflected; “poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible”. Indeed we must pause at this point and ask if there is any other way of effectively communicating the character and person of an eternal and holy God outside the use of metaphor?

It goes without saying that as finite, sinful beings we cannot comprehend in completeness the otherness of the one true God. We have no conceptual scheme that can accurately capture his greatness. Thus we must come to see poetry as a gift woven into our language so that we may bridge this epistemic chasm and come to a knowledge, limited as it is, of His character and personhood.

The overlaying of conceptual schemes that metaphors achieve are never precise. Yet it is this very imprecision that Jones & Wilson praise for its flexibility to ensure our language for the divine is never truncated or unnecessarily narrow.

 

 

Such an example is seen in Psalm 23. In seeking sheer precision, the poet could have recorded that ‘The Lord protests and provides”. Yet there is great significance in choosing to write;

The Lord is my shepherd,

I shall not want.

In grass meadows He makes me lie down,

By quiet waters guides me.

 

Craigie correctly identifies these opening verses as “pregnant with meaning”, for the metaphor works both ways between God and the poet.

It reveals a God who intimately leads his people, with clear exodus associations. As well as providing a sense of kingship, “since Near Eastern monarchs also described themselves as shepherding their people”. Whilst capturing something of the character of God it reflects the dependence and trust that exists between God and his covenant people.

Implicit to this psalm is the image of the poet as a sheep under the shepherd – completely reliant upon Him for rest (23:2), life (23:3), justice (23:3), safety (23:4) and discipline (23:5). The significance of the metaphor is its ability to express with much depth the life lived in relationship with the one true God who reaches out to his people in covenantal relationship.

That God Should Be a Poet prt III

How does poetry help this description of God?

The semantic building block upon which Hebrew poetry is built is Metaphor. Metaphor operates by taking two seemingly incongruent terms and placing them side-by-side in an attempt to force the reader to perceive something differently. Metaphors present a violent collision of language resulting in what Kearney labelled “semantic shock”.

This semantic shock teases the reader into active thought as it creates uncertainty of meaning. As the reader is forced to come to terms with how two such incongruent terms could be united they are driven into a deeper understanding of the text and indeed forced to move beyond the surface of the text to the deeper reality existing behind it. “Metaphors could be seen as peepholes through which we glimpse the meaning of a poem”. These peepholes exist in the frame of the imagination or as Vos aptly describes; “metaphors are sparks ignited by the imagination”. 

Our imagination is not a ‘passage into nothingness but the prerequisite of a redemption to the real’. That is, to create an image is to ‘renovate our power of seeing the world which for so long has been smothered in lazy familiarity’. As such the imagination is not un-reality as much as a sur-reality.

It has the power to surpass reality in order to change it.

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in Psalm 90 through which the poet sweeps the reader into the eternal realm of the God so that they may gain a healthy perspective to their own mortal existence. The opening 11 verses juxtapose the eternal God with mortal man.

O Master, You have been our abode

in every generation

Before the mountains were born,

before you spawned earth and world

from forever to forever you are God.

The poet builds this poem upon a cosmic scale upon where the largest mountains were ‘spawned’ or ‘given birth’ by God. This image certainly creates a ‘shock’ as our imaginations drift to the eternal God giving birth! Yet this single poignant picture the poet declares God’s size, power, authority and intimacy with this creation. Contrasted, is a the imagery of humankind as finite and limited.

You engulf them with sleep

in the morn they are like grass that passes.

In the morning it sprouts and passes

by evening it withers and dies.

Certainly this image ‘arrests’ the reader and drives them beyond the familiar to consider the transience of mortality.  A daily and well-known image for those who lived in the barren lands of the Middle East. With such contrasting and humbling imagery the reader is made ready to receive the imperative of verse 12

To count our days rightly, instruct,

that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

 True wisdom is not to ignore our mortality, not to lament over it. Rather the poem draws us to see our mortality with joy in the light of an eternal, loving creator God. In relationship with such a God we can have purpose and know that the ‘work of our hands’ can be ‘firmly founded’, a huge contrast to the imagery of wilting grass. 

Thus, one of the significant features of imagery and metaphor is its power to surpass reality in order to change it, as seen through the example of Psalm 90.

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