Category: Writing

Imaginative Reading

On July 14, 2009

I have not updated this blog for several weeks. Instead, I have been reconnecting with my family after nine weeks of separation. But I have also been participating in a class at Calvin Theological Seminary called “Imaginative Reading for Creative Preaching.” It is led by Calvin Seminary President Dr. Cornelius (Neal) Plantinga and Truett Theological Seminary Professor Hulitt Gloer. (Truett is connected with Baylor University, a Baptist institution in Waco, Texas). This course is producing profound enjoyment, and hopefully, stirring up my brain to creatively and effectively tell the story of God’s love from the pulpit.

In the first week we read an American classic, The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. This is a story that many young American students are assigned to read in highs school or college, long before they are able to appreciate it. One enduring image is that of Ma Joad, who is the bulwark of strength, a citadel of endurance during times of extreme scarcity and trouble; she holds the family, including the menfolk, together when they are at the breaking point. It is a story of hope, and how persons can only thrive when they work together. The (ex-) preacher in the story, Jim Casey, is also very interesting, because he only truly discovers his calling after he gives up preaching in the conventional sense (in this case, whipping up the faithful into a frenzy of emotion and glossalalia). He begins to find the holy everywhere, and in everyday things. And ultimately he gives his life defending the rights of the poor Okie immigrant farmers. It’s no coincidence that he shares his initials with Jesus Christ.

Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy

By Raymond Blacketer

On June 22, 2009

In Books, Writing

“The world turns and the world spins, the tide runs in and the tide runs out, and there is nothing in the world more beautiful and more wonderful in all its evolved forms than two souls who look at each other straight on. And there is nothing more woeful and soul-saddening than when they are parted. Turner knew that everything in the world rejoices in the touch, and everything in the world laments in the losing.”
Gary D. Schmidt, Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, 215-216.

This is the gist of a book I recently finished, alleged to be a children’s book, but moving to any moveable soul however old. It’s about a boy, Turner Buckminster, the son of a preacher, who moves to cold, hard Maine, and has his life changed in the meeting of a young black girl, Lizzie Bright. His life is transformed in the encounter with unchristian Christians who want to remove Lizzie and “her kind” from the island community in which they live, and who in fact did so (both in the novel and in fact, in 1912). His life is transformed by looking straight into the eye of a whale, and into the eyes of a father who in his last moment finally takes a stand for what is right. And he is transformed by the loss of all that is dear to him, or nearly all. There are important things he does not lose, an understanding parent, an enemy-turned-friend. This is a book that, though profoundly sad in a number of ways, is also hopeful, and definitely worth reading and discussing.

Gary D. Schmidt is also the author of The Wednesday Wars, which, though not quite as sad, moved me deeply as well.

Neerlandia Librarians…take note!

In the Thick of It

By Raymond Blacketer

On May 8, 2009

In Biblical Interpretation, Church History, John Calvin, Reformed Theology, Sabbatical, Writing

This first week of my sabbatical I have been up and down like a roller coaster, trying to get back into the rhythms of being a scholar. It has been a while (like a decade) and things have changed…older books available online, the ability to scan microfilm and microfiche into computer-readable pdf files. The paper is expected (by the Academics in Geneva) to be done on Wednesday and a copy sent to the chair of my session. This gives me a bit of anxiety, and I have had a number of days in the Library (in the H.H. Meeter Center for Calvin Studies) during which I read a lot, but wrote not a word. Today was one of those days.

As of tomorrow (Friday, May 8 ) I will have an office in the Meeter Center that will help somewhat.

Martin Bucer (1491-1551)

But last night I had an epiphany; things started coming together; an outline formed in my head, and now I should be able to start making progress. I have a new introduction, which opens up the topic with a the story of how one of the leading Protestant princes in Germany, Landgrave Philip of Hesse–a man on whom many Reformers pinned their hopes–threw a wrench into things by getting married. That’s isn’t so bad, except when you’re already married. He took on a second wife. Because Reformers like Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, and especially the leader of the Reformation in Strassburg, Martin Bucer, had pinned their hopes on this guy, it presented them with a real problem. Luther said, basically, “Lie. Tell a boldface lie. A whopper.” Bucer, however, advised the prince to tell a “holy lie,” like the kind of fibs Abraham and Rahab told. Calvin would have never given the prince this kind of advice. Calvin was not in the Landgrave’s inner circle (Calvin was, after all, French, not that he had any say in the matter), but if he had been, he never would have counseled any kind of lie, deception, or cover-up. He would have demanded that the Landgrave admit that his second marriage was null and void, give up his seventeen year old second bride, and remain contented with his first and legitimate wife.