“Less naive, the Puritans centered their elegies about adults on life this side of the grave and only conventionally and briefly mentioned the afterlife. Their elegies, like their sermons, were rarely eschatological. The meaning of a man’s life was to be found in the details of that life, not merely in the confidence that he …
The Troubling Role of Artistic Theory
“In the arts, theory comes after the fact of original creation and, far from improving future work, usually spoils it by making the artist a self-conscious intellectual, crippled or mislead by ‘ideas.’ Not everything that is good can be engineered into existence” (Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve, p. 19).
How Christ Arranged It
“The canonical books of the Old Testament are thirty-nine in number. Our Lord referred to this canonical range when He spoke of the death of certain martyrs from the Old Testament . . . (Matt. 23:35). Abel was killed toward the beginning of the book of Genesis, the first book of the Jewish canon, and …
Gods of Nature
“Before considering Puritan work in other genres, I wish to examine the casual classicism of Puritan poetry. Like most education people of the Renaissance, the Puritnas had a solid grounding in the classics. Had anyone taken their divinity seriously, the classical deities might have seemed false gods to the Puritan. As it was, however, the …
No Metaphor Mechanics
“The other use, direction, or bent, Pascal called the esprit de finesse—we might call it ‘intuitive understanding.’ . . . It does not analyze, does not break things down into parts, but seizes upon the character of the whole altogether, by inspection. Since in this kind of survey they are no definable parts, there is …
Churches, Not Doctrine Clubs
“The headship of Jesus Christ over the church has a very practical application in issues of reformation. If a church is a Christian church at all, this means that it does not ‘have a right’ to its own doctrinal traditions. The headship of Christ means that He is the final authority, and he has set …
Metaphor Blindness
“Even Cotton Mather, in his sermon at Wigglesworth’s funeral, identified Wigglesworth’s poetry as catechism and his audience as simple people and children . . . One reason for its failure, and one difference between Wigglesworth and most other Puritan poets, is Wigglesworth’s dismissal of the natural world, his inability to perceive, and hence to use, …
Where Scholarship Gets Underfoot
“We are mistaken when we believe that culture and the humanities are being served by scholarship. The truth is that art and culture do not belong in a university. It cannot be a home for them, because culture proper and scholarship proper are diametrically opposed” (Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve, p. 10).
Not An Abstract Principle to Affirm, But a Concrete Task to Complete
But who gave any of us permission to be an eschatological pessimist? Not Jesus Christ. He said that all authority in heaven and on earth was His, and that our job was to disciple the nations. He wasn’t giving us something to shoot for; He was giving us something to do” (Mother Kirk, p. 42).
Some Caricatures Really Lived
“So closely does Michael Wigglesworth approximate the unhappy popular conception of our seventeenth-century forbears that he seems more plausible as a satirical construction than he does as a human being. In their descriptions of a Puritan so obsessed with himself, with his own quest for salvation, that he suppressed or ignored all purely human experience, …