Reading

Books for the Beach

Tony Reinke Reading

The blog has been quiet recently. Last week I was busy making final edits to the Lit! manuscript. On Friday I stuffed the manuscript with all my handwritten edits into a FedEx envelope and shipped it back to my editor. The last 18 months have been a lot of fun and I hope to reminisce a bit on the blog later this summer about the writing experience, what I learned, the interesting books I read, the interesting people I met along the way, etc.

This week the blog will be again quiet since I’m enjoying some time with the family at the beach (obx). It has been quite a lot of fun and I have enjoyed quite a lot of time to read on this trip. Anticipating this free time I brought two books with me: Jonathan Edwards’ Charity and Its Fruits (Gerstner edition) and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (Rose translation).

Don Carson calls Les Miz “magnificent” and an illustration of how “God’s love so transforms us that we mediate it to others, who are thereby transformed” [Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God, 82].

Edwards and Hugo work nicely together. Edwards expounds love, Hugo models love. The one explains from Scripture the importance and value of love, the other reveals the radical life of one loving man. Edwards encourages me to love because of God’s value on love. Hugo encourages me to love because of Monseigneur Bienvenu’s loving life. Edwards does what great sermons are intended to do: biblically illuminate, convince, and then move to action. Hugo does what great literature can do: delight the reader and then instruct.

Edward is direct, Hugo is indirect, yet both authors are working on my hard heart, softening it one line after another, pulverizing my pride, dulling the edges of my self-centeredness, just like the ceaseless ocean waves rolling and smashing the hardest rocks, broken glass, and the sharpest shells, by first taking off the edges and then breaking them down again into sand with its peaceful violence.

Reading for Pleasure

Tony Reinke .Lit!, Alan Jacobs, Reading

Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford University, 2011), 17:

For heaven’s sake, don’t turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens, or (shifting the metaphor slightly) some fearfully disciplined appointment with an elliptical trainer of the mind in which you count words or pages the way some people fix their attention on the “calories burned” readout—some assiduous and taxing exercise that allows you to look back on your conquest of Middlemarch with grim satisfaction. How depressing. This kind of thing is not reading at all.

Substitutionary Atonement and Classic Lit

Tony Reinke Herman Bavinck, Reading

Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck was well versed in classic literature, a point made clear in an excerpt from Reformed Dogmatics, 3:402–404 (abridged p. 444).

In this section he responds to those who claim that Christ’s substitutionary atonement is morally nonsensical (an objection that remains to this today). Yet,

…the idea of substitution is deeply grounded in human nature. Among all peoples it has been embodied in priesthood and sacrifices and expressed in various ways in poetry and mythology.

Origen already compared Christ in his death to those who, according to classical traditions, died for their mother country to liberate it from a plague or other disasters, for, conforming to hidden laws, it seems to lie in the nature of things that the voluntary death of a righteous person in the public interest breaks the power of evil spirits

Christian theology, accordingly, frequently cited the examples of Codrus, Curtius, Cratinus, Zaleucus, Damon, Phintias, and the hostages to illustrate the vicarious suffering of Christ. These examples have no other value, of course, than to show that the idea of substitution occupied an important place in the intellectual world of the Greeks and the Romans.

The same is true of tragedy, whose basic idea can certainly be conveyed not always by “guilt and atonement” but often only by “passion and suffering.” In many tragedies the death of the hero is not a true atonement for sins committed but yet is always a deliverance made necessary by some mistake or error, hence finally reconciling us and giving us satisfaction. But even viewed that way, tragedy proclaims a great truth: all human greatness walks past abysses of guilt, and satisfaction occurs only when what is noble and great, which for some reason has gone astray, perishes in death. The downfall of Orestes, Oedipus, Antigone, Romeo and Juliet, Max and Thekla, Iphigenia, and others reconciles us with them and their generation. “Pure humanity atones for all human weaknesses” (Goethe). …

All these examples and reasonings are undoubtedly somewhat suited as illustrations of the substitutionary suffering of Christ. Against the individualism and atomizing tendencies that tear humankind apart and know nothing of the mysticism of love, they are of great value.

Still, they cannot explain the suffering of Christ. …

Bavinck’s knowledge of Greek mythology and poetry is impressive. It is to this well of literature that he turns to find fitting illustrations of substitution in history, illustrations that have “great value” in cultures where people increasingly live self-sustained and isolated lives (hint, hint).

Yet the classic literature has significant theological limitations. In order to make sense of the unique sacrifice of Christ we must turn to Scripture (2 Cor. 5:21; Rom. 4:25, 8:3; Gal. 3:13). Classic literature cannot explain the sacrifice of Christ. Illustrate? Yes, to some degree. Substantiate? No.

Book Recommendations Needed: Sibling Friendships

Tony Reinke Books, Reading

This request is much different than the last one. In this instance I’m looking for books that were written to help parents foster healthy sibling friendships among their children. I know books on this topic exist because I recall hearing about them long ago in the past, long before I became a parent. It is now apparent that I am a parent.

Special thanks to one well-read friend who suggests that I read the fiction book Enemy Brothers by Constance Savery. It looks really promising, especially for my boys.

Any other suggestions, fictional or otherwise, that will help my wife and I build sibling friendships in our home?

Reading, Thinking, and the ‘Violent Visual Impact’

Tony Reinke Reading

Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word (Eerdmans, 1985), page 221:

We are arriving at a purely emotional stage of thinking. In order to begin reacting intellectually, we need the stimulus of an image. Bare information or an article or book no longer have any effect on us. We do not begin reflecting on such a basis, but only with an illustration. We need violent visual impact if thought is to be set in motion. When we jump from image to image, we are really going from emotion to emotion: our thought moves from anger to indignation, from fear to resentment, from passion to curiosity. In this manner our thought is enriched by diversity and multiple meaning but is singularly paralyzed with respect to its specific efficacy as thought.