http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14966310/paradise-lost
As a small index to how much our society’s attitude to Christianity has changed in the past half-century, in 1941 a Princeton University English professor published a book with Princeton University Press addressed specifically to Christian ministers. I have referenced this book throughout my half-century career as a teacher and writer, even using adaptations of its title, Poetry as a Means of Grace, to good effect.
In his opening chapter, the author offered a piece of advice for ministers (and by implication all church leaders and literary laypeople) that makes total sense: we should claim one author as our own, specializing in that author the way a literary scholar might. I would extend this bit of practical advice to include the possibility of choosing a single masterwork for detailed attention over a lifetime (though I do not thereby discourage wide reading).
With this advice in mind, I commend Paradise Lost as a candidate for lifelong acquaintance. Having written my dissertation on Paradise Lost, having taught Paradise Lost as many as two hundred times, having written articles and books on Milton, and having attended and spoken at Milton conferences, I love Milton’s masterpiece more now than ever. And it is a love I wish to share.
From Pulpit to Poetry
Paradise Lost was written by John Milton in the middle of the seventeenth century. From childhood, Milton was theoretically destined to become a minister. In anticipation of that, Milton stayed on at Cambridge University to earn a master’s degree. But then an obstacle derailed his intended clerical calling.
Milton was a Puritan by conviction, and as such he was not welcome as a pastoral candidate in the state church. Milton himself spoke of having been “church outed by the prelates,” meaning rejected for parish ministry by the governing Anglican hierarchy.
Milton scholars have long debated the question of when Milton abandoned his intention to become a minister, and the best conclusion is that he never did abandon his ministerial calling. As Jameela Lares argues effectively in her book Milton and the Preaching Arts, he simply changed its venue from the pulpit to poetry. In a prose passage where Milton discusses this, he places the vocation of the Christian poet “beside the office of the pulpit.”
And he bore some fruit of the pulpit. Out of the mass of commentary on Milton that I have read, my favorite sentence comes from the testimony of someone joining Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia who began his testimony with the statement, “I was led to the Lord by John Milton.” Paradise Lost was the work that had been instrumental in this person’s conversion.
Higher Than Real Life
Before I discuss the content of Paradise Lost, I need to begin where C.S. Lewis began his landmark book A Preface to Paradise Lost. The necessary starting point is the genre to which the poem belongs. That genre is the epic.
Epic was considered the most important literary genre from antiquity through the seventeenth century. It was an exercise in grandeur — a long narrative poem having the stature of a book. Its aim was scope — so much so that literary scholar Northop Frye dubbed epic “the story of all things” (The Return of Eden, 3). Similarly, C.S. Lewis claimed that an epic sums up what a whole age wants to say (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama), 339).
An epic tells a story (and in fact many stories), but its way of telling a story is different from what modern readers are accustomed to. The successor to the epic as a species of long narrative was the novel, and what was particularly new about the novel was its realism. The novel gives us a slice of life in the everyday world. Epic, by contrast, is myth — a story of supernatural characters, events, and places. So the first thing we need to expect as we come to read an epic is myth rather than realism.
One further way in which epic springs a surprise on us is that it is poetry. We expect long fictional stories to be written in everyday prose. In the history of literature, that is a recent development, coming on the scene with the rise of a middle-class reading public in the middle of the eighteenth century. Epic is a hybrid of poetry and story, and we need to give equal attention to both.
Milton’s Theological Story
In keeping with epic scope, the story that Milton tells is the entire span of history from eternity past to eternity future. The first main event is the war in heaven and the expulsion of Satan and his followers. This is followed by God’s creation of the world, Adam and Eve’s life in paradise, their fall from innocence, a survey of fallen human history, redemption in Christ as the means of reversing the destruction ushered in by the fall, and the eschaton. All of that looks familiar, of course, because it is the story of universal history as the Bible presents it.
“The story that Milton tells is the entire span of history from eternity past to eternity future.”
The first time I taught Paradise Lost, a student handed me a paperback copy of the Puritan Thomas Boston’s Human Nature in Its Fourfold State. He offered no explanation, apparently assuming that the relevance of Boston’s book would be evident to me. It was. Boston’s paradigm of human nature in its perfection, fallenness, redemption in Christ, and glorification in heaven gives shape to Milton’s story.
Milton famously said that he intended his epic to be “doctrinal and exemplary to a nation.” There is edification as well as enjoyment in reading Paradise Lost. The big ideas with which Milton’s imagination worked are as follows: the centrality and sovereignty of God; the great conflict between good and evil in both cosmic and human spheres; the necessity that all creatures choose between good and evil; humanity’s unavoidable dealings with God; obedience to God as the great requirement in life, with disobedience being the essential nature of sin; and the fact of human sinfulness and the atonement of Christ as the antidote to the fallen condition.
Those are the big ideas, but there are many localized ideas as well, such as the nature of the good life as pictured in Adam and Eve’s life in paradise.
Come and See
Many added helps for engaging this poem could be given.
I could tell you Paradise Lost is what literary scholars call an encyclopedic form — a collection of discrete units within a superstructure — and so it doesn’t need to be read straight through. Or, I could warn against discouragement from the poem’s abundant allusions to both the Bible and classical mythology, which the first-time reader may not (and need not) understand.
But my intention in this article has been to open a door and entice you to an in-depth encounter with Paradise Lost. And perhaps the final note to strike is that Paradise Lost is a world with beauty and horror to be seen.
“The literary impulse is to show rather than tell — to incarnate and embody rather than discuss abstractly.”
Milton’s epic deals with many theological ideas, as discussed above, but the literary impulse is to show rather than tell — to incarnate and embody rather than discuss abstractly. Theologian H. Richard Niebuhr correctly claimed that “we are far more image-making and image-using creatures than we usually think ourselves to be, . . . and are guided and formed by images in our minds” (The Responsible Self, 151).
This is how we need to read Paradise Lost — not as a collection of ideas but as a story with characters, settings, and events, and as poetry comprised of images, symbols, and metaphors to be seen and enjoyed. He did not expect us to read his epic in the same way we read the more than twenty volumes of expository prose (including a systematic theology) that he wrote. There is a “value added” aesthetic element to literary writing, and we need to relish it.
So will you take the effort to read it? If you do, you may share the sentiment of the towering literary scholar Frank Kermode. He wrote some fifty books on the major movements and authors (including Shakespeare) of English literature, yet reserved his highest praise for Paradise Lost, calling it “the most perfect achievement of English poetry, perhaps the richest and most intricately beautiful poem in the world” (Romantic Image, 196).
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How the Word of God Brings About Faith: 1 Thessalonians 2:13–16, Part 4
http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15461102/how-the-word-of-god-brings-about-faith
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How Do I Find the Main Point of a Psalm?
Audio Transcript
How do I decode the point of a whole chapter of the Bible? How do I summarize the main point of a whole psalm? Welcome back to the podcast. That’s the question we need answered today. And if you’re reading your Bible along with us, using the Navigators Bible Reading Plan, our reading schedule hits January 8 today. That means we’re reading Psalm 8 together. Psalm 8 is rather hard to make sense of, hard to summarize, so it’s a good time in our Bible reading to pause and ask Pastor John how he summarizes it and other whole chapters and whole psalms.
Philip asks this very question: “Dear Pastor John, I’ve really enjoyed the way you go through individual verses and explain them very clearly by breaking them down and explaining each part. I understand that meditating on small parts of Scripture can help us really suck all the nourishment from it, but sometimes my problem is in understanding entire chapters or larger sections of the Bible.
“I read something like Psalm 8, and although I can understand small parts of these texts, I really get lost and fail to follow the entire flow of argument or where the chapter is going. I’m often confused by a whole psalm. It seems disjointed to me, and I can’t follow how one line leads to the next. Could you help me to figure out ways to understand large sections of Scripture as a whole, rather than just small chunks disconnected from other parts? Thank you.”
Let me see if I can help, first with an analogy — namely, an analogy of a jigsaw puzzle — and then with an exhortation about the hard work of seeing a whole chapter. Then I’ll give an example from my own experience.
Scripture as a Puzzle
Think of a larger unit of Scripture, like a chapter or a few paragraphs or maybe several chapters — think of it as a jigsaw puzzle, a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle. There are five hundred pieces laid in front of you, and as you look at them, they do not look at all like the painting on the front of the box. They are just one big jumble.
That’s how the words and phrases and clauses might look to you in a chapter in the Bible when you try to think of the chapter as a whole. They’re just lots and lots of words and phrases and clauses that might say some nice things, but my oh my, they don’t make one big picture.
How do you go about seeing the whole picture instead of five hundred scattered pieces? Of course, the Bible doesn’t have a picture on the top of the box. You’ll work a little harder here. How do you see a chapter as a whole, with a main point, with all the pieces fitting together to make that main point, instead of just seeing sixty or seventy scattered clauses and phrases? That’s the goal.
You take one piece, right? (I love to do puzzles like this because I love figuring this out.) You take one of the pieces, and you look at the piece very carefully. You don’t just keep scanning your eyes over the five hundred pieces superficially while saying, “Oh, let me see something. Oh, let me see something.” No, no, no, no. You get nowhere that way.
You take one piece, and you examine it very carefully. You notice that half of this piece is solid red and the other half is gold, solid gold, and you notice that the little protrusion at the top is split in half. Half of it is gold and half of it is red. From this you infer, with careful thinking, that there is another piece somewhere here, somewhere, that will be half red and half gold, and instead of a protrusion there’s going to be an indention in the bottom of the piece, leading up into half red and half gold.
Now you’re looking very specifically for that piece. As you scan the five hundred pieces, this time you’re looking specifically for it. You find maybe six or seven or eight pieces that have this half red and half gold, and you slide them around, looking for how they can fit together.
You push them off to the side of the table in a corner, and you find one or two that fit, and then another and another, and pretty soon you realize that you’ve got five, six, seven, eight pieces all fitting together. You notice, “Oh my, this is a robe draped over the arm of a throne. So, that’s going to go here, probably.” You set that midsize unit aside now, and you do the same thing all over again with another piece and its peculiar characteristics, fitting the pieces together as you go.
That’s how you build little pieces into midsize units. We might call those two or three verses, or a paragraph, and we’ve got maybe five paragraphs to fit together. Now you’ve got several — maybe three, four, five, six, seven, eight — midsize units, and you should be able to ask of those three, four, five verses in each unit, “What’s the main point here?” because of how they fit together.
Resist the Urge to Quit
Now, here’s my exhortation. One of the reasons we don’t move from the part to the whole in reading the Bible is because it is very hard work. It is hard work to fit all the midsize pieces together so as to see the whole. For most of us, and I certainly include myself here, we simply cannot do this in our heads. There’s where people run into trouble. They’re reading devotions, and they’re trying to do this in their head.
Well, I can’t even begin to do this in my head. We have to do it on paper. We have to write it down. We have to jot down the main point: “The red-and-gold midsize unit means ‘robe over the arm of a throne’” — that kind of a thing. And then we jot down the next main point of the next midsize unit, and so on, until we’ve got on our piece of paper six, seven, eight sentences, each one now summing up the midsize unit in the chapter, in the larger unit we’re trying to understand. Finally, we try to go about seeing how those midsize units relate to each other.
And my exhortation is simply this: Don’t give up on that. Use a pencil and a paper. Draw lines between them. You just have no idea how they might all fit together. You’ll be amazed at what you’re able to see by trying to fit those midsize units and their main points together to make the larger piece.
Unpacking Psalm 8
Now, I’ve been baffled over the years by the main point of Psalm 8. It seems like the main point is the phrase “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” because it begins with that and it ends with that (verses 1, 9). That’s a wonderful structural thing to see.
But in the middle, you have these babies who cry out, and God who gets victory over his foes through the mouth of infants (verse 2). So, I jotted that down: “Okay, so the meaning of the first part of the psalm, just the first couple of verses, seems to be that God gets victory over his foes by babies saying things.” And I have no idea how that works — none. That’s just what it says, so I jotted that down.
And then I move on to the next unit, which seems just totally different: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers . . . what is man that you are mindful of him?” (verses 3–4). And through this man, who’s just “a little lower than the heavenly beings,” God governs the whole world filled with fish and birds (verses 5–8). Now, what’s the main point? I’ve put a few pieces together here. I wanted to jot down on my piece of paper the main point of this midsize unit, so I jotted down, “God exercises dominion over his earth through insignificant man, who, compared to the stars, seems like nothing.”
And as soon as I wrote it, I thought, “Oh, I get it. The babies are insignificant, and God works his victories through babies. Man is insignificant, and God exercises dominion through man.” And the psalmist ends by essentially saying, “How great is his glory and his majesty?” Surely, then, the point is this: one of the peculiar aspects of the majesty and glory of God is that he gets his victories, and he exercises his dominion, through the use of weak and insignificant things.
Amen. Praise God. And that’s exactly the use that Matthew makes of it on Palm Sunday, as Jesus enters the city where the babies are crying out, “Hosanna!” (Matthew 21:15) — and he’s on a donkey, of all things.
Look, Write, Pray to See
So, the point is to look at the pieces very carefully, to fit them together in midsize units, to jot down the main points of the midsize units until you have them all on a half sheet of paper, and then to think and think, and pray and pray, and think and pray and think and pray, and to organize and draw lines, and to try to fit them all together until they fall into place and you see how these five, six, seven, eight, nine points of the midsize units are in a flow that make one big overarching point. You will be surprised, if you take up pencil and paper and do this, what you will see.
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God So Loved Himself
What is the good that makes the gospel good news?
If the present, and especially the future, that the Christian gospel offers is undesirable, unimpressive, boring, bland, and unenjoyable, then how good is the good news? Is it only good in contrast with the active misery and punishments of hell? Or, does the good news positively reflect, and welcome us into, the very heart of the God who is Goodness himself?
At bottom, the good news that stands behind and beneath the Good News is what we might call “the God-centeredness of God.” Our Creator’s “supreme regard to himself” makes possible, solidifies, and guarantees his loving and gracious posture toward sinful creatures who are united to his Son by faith. And perhaps no other good news upholds the very foundation of good in the Good News itself like answering the question, What makes God happy?
Why Did God Create the World?
Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), remembered as “America’s Theologian,” authored books, essays, and sermons that have been read for generations, and freshly discovered in recent decades. But given its topic and its quality, Edward’s posthumously published Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World has yet to receive its due. As Stephen Holmes observes, and laments, “there is so little attention paid to this Dissertation in the secondary literature” (God of Grace and God of Glory, 45, note 45), and yet it addresses many of the same challenges we still face today.
Biographer George Marsden recognizes the dissertation as a “counterattack against some of the most prevalent assumptions of modern thought” (Edwards: A Life, 459). Edwards is “attempting to undermine the foundations of what had gone wrong in modern thought” (459) including its “fashionable scheme of divinity,” which still remain in the air we breathe.
In the final paragraph, Edwards mentions his concerns with “our modern free-thinkers who do not like the talk about satisfying justice with an infinite punishment” (God’s Passion for His Glory, 251). We still know the type. And with it typically comes a focus on the love or grace of God that is implicitly, if not explicitly, man-centered. In Edwards’s day, moral philosophers and writers — like Alexander Pope, whose Essay on Man was “the best-known popular expression” — were “increasingly speaking of the deity as a benevolent governor whose ultimate interest must be to maximize human happiness” (Marsden, 460). Edwards countered with the clear emphasis of the Christian Scriptures from beginning to end: the glory of God.
His response was not to reduce or minimize the love of God toward his people — including God’s grace and forgiveness and mercy and goodness — but to locate it properly in the full sweep of Scripture. And in doing so, we find that our God shows us a divine love and favor for his church that does not diminish but grows in the soil of God-centeredness — good news beneath the Good News, guarding the true gospel from the would-be poison of modern man-centeredness.
What Does Reason Teach?
The dissertation contains a brief introduction, to clarify terms, and only two chapters. Chapter 1 considers what human reason alone teaches; Chapter 2, God’s revelation in Scripture.
Reason alone, Edwards concedes, is not enough to make his case, but it can answer objections. Chapter 1 culminates with four objections and his responses — with the fourth being the one he will mention again at the end of the dissertation, and expound upon further in his companion work on The Nature of True Virtue.
What is this fourth objection? It is one that many still feel and voice today: that God’s supreme regard to himself takes away from (Edwards says “derogates”) his goodness and love toward his creatures. If God, goes the objection, “makes himself his end, and not the creatures, then what good he does, he does for himself, and not for them; for his sake, and not theirs.”
Here we are right at the heart of what Edwards means to make plain in this dissertation and in True Virtue: that God’s supreme regard to himself and his genuine love toward his creatures “are not properly set in opposition . . . these things, instead of appearing entirely distinct, are implied one in the other” (God’s Passion for His Glory, 176). Chapter 1 ends with Edwards acknowledging that revelation in Scripture, to which he now turns in Chapter 2, “is the surest guide” and yet “the voice of reason” can be valuable in showing “that what the word of God says of the matter is not unreasonable.”
What Does Scripture Teach?
In the second and longer chapter, Edwards turns to what Scripture teaches concerning God’s ultimate ends in creating the world. Note an important distinction here: that God has one supreme or chief end (singular) in creating the world does not mean that he does not have other ends (plural). Indeed, as Edwards will show from Scripture, God has multiple ultimate or last ends which he finds pleasing in themselves, including loving his people.
Edwards begins (Section 1) with the Alpha and Omega, first and last texts that show God making himself his own last end in creation. Section 2, then, takes a step back to lay out twelve positions for a right understanding of Scripture on this theme. Here he introduces key interpretive principles he will return to in dealing with particular texts in Section 3. For instance, God’s ultimate end in providence also would be an ultimate end in creation. So too would be God’s revealed end in the moral world (ethics), in his providential use of the world, in his main works of providence toward the moral world, in the goodness of moral agents, in what he commands of moral agents, in the goodness of the moral world, in what is sought by exemplary saints, in what is longed for in the hearts of saints in their best frames of mind, and what was sought by Christ. Section 3 then demonstrates that in these many ways God’s ultimate aim is his glory, or importantly, his name.
Section 4 turns to “places of Scripture that lead us to suppose that God created the world for his name, to make his perfections known; and that he made it for his praise.” Now Edwards expands the field of relevant texts to include not only God’s name but also his praise, as well as his perfections, greatness, and excellency which are spoken of like his glory.
Love as End and Means
Section 5 is the heart of the dissertation in addressing the modern question we still hear today: Does God’s supreme regard to himself undermine, and even ruin, his love toward his creatures? Edwards answers with texts of Scripture in which God’s goodness toward the creature (that is, his love, grace, mercy, forgiveness, salvation) is “one thing which God had in view as an ultimate end of the creation of the world.” The ten parts of Section 5 include, first and foremost, that God is pleased, in itself, to do his creatures good — which, he says, “is not merely subordinately agreeable, and esteemed valuable on account of its relation to a further end, as it is in executing justice in punishing the sins of men; but what God is inclined to on its own account and what he delights in simply and ultimately” (220–221). In other words, God genuinely loves his people. He is pleased in itself, not simply in service of his glory, to love them. He truly delights in his people “simply and ultimately.” And he loves them enough not to leave his love unrelated to his great “further end” but to love them both as end and means.
“Does God’s supreme regard to himself undermine, and even ruin, his love toward his creatures?”
So too (Part 2) God is pleased in the work of redemption itself as an ultimate end. Here Edwards visits the love of God, and love of Christ, texts we rehearse often in the modern world: John 3:16; 1 John 4:9–10; Ephesians 2:4; as well as Galatians 2:20; Ephesians 5:25; John 17:19. Edwards even presents Christ’s sacrificial work of “labors and extreme agonies” as satisfying in itself (Isaiah 53:10–11), “not merely as a means, but as what he rejoices and is satisfied in, most directly and properly” (223).
Third, forgiveness and salvation are for the sake of God’s goodness or mercy, meaning for his name. Fourth and fifth, Christ governs the moral universe and the whole creation for the good of his people. Sixth, God judges the wicked for the happiness of his people. Seventh, speaking again of the church (“them who are to be the eternal subjects of his goodness”) “the whole of creation, in all its parts is spoken of as THEIRS” (227). Eighth and ninth, all God’s works are good and merciful to his people, and have been preparing a kingdom and glory for them. Finally (Part 10), related to Christian ethics and the companion dissertation to come on true virtue, the good of men is an ultimate end of moral virtue.
That One Phrase
In Section 6, Edwards draws together the strands of what is meant in Scripture by the glory and name of God. To this point, he has been considering what Scripture speaks of as ultimate ends in creation; now he moves to ask what they are. First, glory of God can (1) refer to what is internal (excellency, dignity, worthiness; great possessions, or fullness of good), or (2) the (external) exhibition or communication of internal glory; or (3) the view or knowledge of God’s excellency (that is, in the sight of the beholder); or (4) signify or imply praise. “Name of God” often indicates his glory, sometimes his praise, and especially is used for the external manifestation of God’s goodness.
In the final Section (7), Edwards argues that the ultimate end of the creation of the world is one (not many), and that one end is best captured as the glory of God. “All that is ever spoken of in the Scripture as an ultimate end of God’s works, is included in that one phrase, the glory of God” — that is, the “true external expression of God’s internal glory and fullness.”
Given how many conceptual threads Edwards has drawn together (glory, name, praise, goodness, grace, mercy, love, Christ, church), we might ask why Scripture contains so many different expressions for one supreme and ultimate end. “It is confessed,” he writes, “that there is an obscurity which is unavoidable, through the imperfection of language to express things of so sublime a nature. And therefore the thing may possibly be better understood by using a variety of expressions” (242). Yet these do amount to “one thing, in a variety of views and relations” (243).
This one thing, to express it afresh yet again, is “God’s internal glory or fullness existing in its emanation.”
Good News: God Loves Himself
Why marshal such energy and focus, 250 years ago or today, to argue something so obvious to most faithful readers of Scripture? Surely, many would say with Holmes, “Scripture is constantly clear that God makes Himself His end” (50).
“Our God seeks our good in seeking his glory — and we seek his glory in seeking our full and final good in him.”
This issue is a watershed, not just then but now, and not just between the contrasting theological instincts of Arminians and Calvinists, but reveals how seriously we take the Scriptures — and how functional they are in our theology and lives. Edwards serves the church in his day, and ours, with his intellect, keen observations, insights, and logic, but most of all with his knowledge of the Scriptures and by compiling into one place, in such short space, the overwhelming testimony of God himself as to what makes him happy and why he does all that he does.
It is profoundly good news that the true God — the God who is and who loves his people — does have “supreme regard to himself” and that his own God-centeredness is not in opposition with his love and mercy, but the very foundation beneath and force behind it. Such a God, who really does make much of us through his goodness and grace, is also such a God who can be our supreme joy both now and forever.
And in an often-overlooked insight in Edwards’s dissertation — which he himself does not nearly make as much of as he could — our joy in such a God not only delights and satisfies our souls, but also glorifies him. In fact, as John Piper, captures it, God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.
Our God seeks our good in seeking his glory — and we seek his glory in seeking our full and final good in him.
