Tag Archives: Mystical Bedlam

Mystical Bedlam.4

16 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in Ecclesiastes, Puritan, Thomas Adams

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The prior three entries summarizing and outlining this sermon by Thomas Adams may be found here:

https://memoirandremains.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/mystical-bedlam-3/

https://memoirandremains.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/mystical-bedlam-2/

https://memoirandremains.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/mystical-bedlam-1/

PART TWO: Madness

Prologue:  Having left his heart full of evil, we come to his madness. No marvel if, when the stomach is full of strong wines, the head grows drunken. The heart being so filled with that pernicious liquor, evil, becomes drunk with it. 269

Outline:

A tenant, madness

            What madness is

            Types of madmen

A tenement, the heart

A tenure, while they live

I) Madness

A) Adams begins with an extensive explanation of the difference between madness of a physical nature with a physical cause and a “spiritual madness”. To do this he works through the current anthropology. He discusses the differences between imagination, reason and memory; between frenzy and madness.  This discussion is interesting in its own right, but is not necessary to understand the discussion of the spiritual condition.

B)  The madness which I would minister to is thus caused: a defective knowledge; a faith not well formed, affections not well reformed. Ignorance, knowledge and refractory desires make a man mad.

1) “Ignorance:  Anoia {Greek: no mind} and anomia {Greek, no law} are inseparable companions. Wickedness is folly; and ignorance of celestial things is either madness, or the efficient cause, or rather deficient, hereupon madness ensueth. Psalms 14:1, All workers of iniquity have no knowledge.” 271

a) “Beyond exception, without question, the authority, patronage, and original fatherhood of spiritual madness is nescience of God.” 272

b) “The true object of divine knowledge is God; and the book wherein we learn him is his word. How shall they scape the rocks that sail without this compass?” 272

2) “Unfaithfulness is a sufficient cause of madness. Faith in the Christian man’s reason.” 272

a) “Now the privation of reason must needs follow the position of madness.” 272

b) If God speaks , how can that not be good enough for you? “Surely you are mad, haplessly made, hopelessly mad, unmeasurably out of your spiritual wits.” (273)

c) Shall the Lord threaten judgments? Woe to him that trembles not! Hell was not made for nothing. 273.

d) But we see those that are as ripe in lewdness draw long and peaceable breaths; neither is it the disposition of a singular power, but the contingency of natural causes that thus worketh. Take heed; it not the levity but the lenity of God, not the weakness of his arm, but the mercy of his patience that forbeareth thee. 273

e) Infidelity in God’s judgments is madness; unbelief of his mercies hath never been counted less. 273

f) Thou dost not lack faith because God doth not offer it, but because thou wilt not accept it.

g) If, then, distrust of God’s mercy be not madness; what is? …Is he not made that will give credit to the father of lies rather than to the God of truth. 274

3) Refractory and perverse affections made a man frantic. This is a speeding cause and fails not to distemper the soul whereof it hath gotten mastery. 275

a) How many run made of this cause, inordinate and furious lusts!~ If men could send their understandings, like spies, down into the well of their hearts, to see what obstructions of sin have stopped their veins, those springs that erst derived health and comfort to them, they should find that their mad affect have bad effects; and the evil disposedness of their souls arisesth from the want of composedness in their affections. 275

b) This is that which Solomon  calls the wickedness of folly, foolishness, and madness, Ecclesiastes 7:25, a continual deviation from the way of righteousness, a practical frenzy; a roving, wandering, vagrant, extravagant course, which knows not which way to fly, nor where to light except like a dormouse in a dunghill; an opinion without ground, a going without a path, a purpose to do it knows not what ….So madly do these frantics spend their time and strengths, by doing and undoing, tying hard knots and untying them ….275

c) Every willful sin is madness. 276

4) Types of madmen

a) The Epicure 276: what is the flesh which thou pamperest with such indulgence? As thou feedest beasts to feed on them, dost thou not fat thy flesh to fat the worms?  …Thou imaginest felicity consists in liberty, and liberty to be nothing else but a power to live as thou list. Alas, how mad thou art! Thou wilt not live as shouldst, thou canst not live as thou wouldst, thy life and death is a slavery to sin and hell. 277

b) The Proud: ….Admiration is a poison that swells them till they burst ….277….There is mortality in that flesh thou so deckest, and that skin which is so bepainted with artificial complexion shall lose the beauty and itself….278

c) The Lustful:  ….A father contemplating in his meditations how it came to pass that our forefathers in the infancy of the world had so many wives at once, answers himself, Whiles it was a custom, it was scarce a fault. We may so no less in our days. Lasciviousness is so wonted a companion for our gallants that in their sense it hath lost the name of being a sin. 278-9…Thou art made whiles incontinent. 279 I would mention the loss of his soul too; but that he cares not for; the other he would seem to love, then how mad is he to endanger them? …279

d) The Hypocrite plays the madman under covert and concealment. 279 ….He mourns for his sins as a hasty heir at the death of his father. 280.

e) The Avarious is a principle in this bedlam. ….covetousness …It is the great cannon of the devil, charged with chain-shot that hath killed charity in almost all hearts. A poison of three sad ingredients, whereof who hath not tasted?  Insatiability, rapacity and tenacity. 280

f) The Usurer would laugh to hear himself brought into the number of madmen. 281

g) The ambitious man must be also thrust into this bedlam, though his port be high, he thinks himself indivisible from the court. Whiles he minds the stars, with Thales, he forgets the ditch….282.

h) The drunkard: It is a voluntary madness, and makes a man so like a beast that whereas a beast hath no reason, he hath the use of no reason; and the power or faculty of reason suspended gives way to madness. 283

i) The idle man you will say is not made, for madmen can hardly be kept in, and he can hardly be got out. You need not bind him to a post of patience, the love of ease is strong fetters to him….He that lives by the sweat of other men’s brows and will not disquiet the temples of his head. 283

j) The swearer is ravingly mad; his own lips pronounce him; as if he would be revenged on his Maker for giving him a tongue. 283

k) The liar is in the same predicament as the swearer. ….Ps. v. 6, ‘Thou shalt destroy them that speak lies.’ This  is his madness. He kills at least three at once (himself, the one who hears, and the one of whom he lies). 284

l) The busbody will confess a madman; for he fisks up and down like a nettled horse, and will stand on no ground….He loves not to sleep in his own doors. 284

m) The flatterer is a madman….He displeaseth his conscience to please his concupiscence; and to curry a temporary favor he incurreth everlasting hatred. 284.

n) Ingratitude is madness. …He is not worthy of more favors that is not thankful for those he hath.

o) the angry man none will deny to be a madman. 285

p) The envious man is more closely, but more dangerously mad. 285. …He whets a knife to cut his own throat….Others strike him and like a strangely penitential monk, as if their blows were not sufficient, he strikes himself. Is not this a madman? …If you miss in in a stationer’s shop jeering at books, or at a sermon caviling at doctrines, or amongst his neighbor’s cattle grudging their full udders, or in  the shambles plotting massacres, yet thou shalt find him in bedlam. 285

q) The contentious man is as frantic as any….Look upon his eyes, they sparkle fire; mark his hands, they are ever sowing debate. 285 So he makes work for lawyers, work for cutlers, work for surgeons, workd the devil, work for his own destruction. To bedlam with him. 286

r) The impatient man is a madman. …Bear one affliction from God well and prevent a greater. 286

s) The vain-glorious man is a mere madman, …By seeking fame he loseth it, and rushs made upon it. Put him into bedlam. 286

t) False religion: 286….

5) Consider the nature of your tenant. 289

a) He is a usurper, intruding himself into God’s freehold, which, both by creation and re-creation he may challenge for his own inheritance…What a traitor is man to let into his landlord’s house his landlord’s enemy! 289

b) That he doth not pay rent of God’s house. God, rich in merices, lends, and, as it were, lets to farm divers possessions; as the graces of the Spirit, the virtues of the mind, gifts of the body, goods of the world, and for all these he requires no rent but thanksgiving: that we praise him heart, tongue and conversation. 289

c) That he doth suffer God’s tenement to decay; he doth ruinate where he dwells. For the outhouses of our body, madness doth strive to either to burn with lusts or drown them with drunkenness or starve them with covetousness. 289

d) That he doth employ the house to base uses. 289.

 

II) The Tenement, the heart: The heart is a mansion made for God, not for madness. God made it and reserved it to himself.

III) The Tenure, while they live.

A) Alas! What gain we by searching further into this evidence? The more we look into it, the worse we like it. While they live. Too long a time for so bad a tenant.

B) Who then can be saved?

1) Will God give the kingdom of heaven to madmen?

a) Fear not; all are not madmen that have madness a tenant in their hearts, but they have it for their landlord….sin may well dwell in your hearts, let it not reign there. It will be a household servant, it must not be a king…It is one thing to have madness, another thing for madness to have thee. 290

b) Though sin, the devil’s mad dog, hath bitten thee, and thou at first beginnest to run frantic, yet apply the plaster of the blood of Christ to thy sores. This shall draw out the venom and grace shall get the mastery of madness. Be of good comfort, thou shalt not die frantic. 290

c) Happy is he that learns to be sober by his own madness, and concludes from I have sinned! I will not sin! Madness may be in his heart, like a tenant; it shall never be like a tyrant…..291

PART THREE: The Period (the conclusion)

After that they go to the dead….If a man looks into what life itself is, he cannot but find, both by experience of the past and proof of the present age that he must die. As soon as we are born, we begin to draw to our end.

….If we must be sinful, we must die; if we be full of evil, and cherish madness in our hearts, we must to the dead. We have enough sins to bring us all to the grave. God grant they be not so violent and full of ominous precipitation that they portend our more sudden ruin! 292.

We live to die; let me a little invert it: Let us live to lie; live the life of grace, that we may live the life of glory. Then, though we go to the dead, we shall rise from the dead, and live with our God, out of th reach of death forever. Amen. 293

 

 

Mystical Bedlam.3

15 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in Ecclesiastes, Faith, Good Works, Keep the heart, Mortification, Preaching, Puritan, Thomas Adams

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(This analysis of Thomas Adams’ sermon “Mystical Bedlam” (Adams, collected works, vol. 1, 254 is continued from https://memoirandremains.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/mystical-bedlam-2/)

In this section he demonstrates that humanity has been infected extensively with death. The objection stated, as to original sin will become a much more heated debate in the generations which follows Adams.  Edwards’ treatise on original sin will consider that objection at much greater length than Adams does here.

“Our corruptibleness is here demonstrated: A moral father cannot beget an immortal son” (256).

i) Objection: Why should the children die for their father’s sin?

I) “I answer, Adam is considered as the root of mankind; that corrupt mass, whence can be deduced no pure thing” (257)

II) “Thou shalt die, O son of man, not because thou art sick, but because [thou art] the son of man….Who happened to come into the world, must upon necessity go out of the world” (257)

ii) “It is no new thing to die, since life itself is nothing else but a journey to death” (257).

iii) “This should teach us to arm ourselves with patience and expectation to encounter death. – Often we ought to prepare for death, we will not; at last, we die indeed, and we would not….What bad memories we have, that forget our own names and selves, that we are sons of men, corruptible men!” (257)

II. The vessel which contains such madness is the heart.

A) How mad is it that man would have all his vessels good but his own heart! 258

B) Adams next develops a doctrine of the heart.  He calls it “the receptacle of life” (258).  The heart being the center of the microcosmus which is the human being.   To place the heart in the center of the human being as the vital point is good biblical theology. However, Adams references humanity in light of contemporary understanding:

[The human being] had the unique function of binding together all creation, of bridging the greatest cosmic chasm, that between matter and spirit….Man was called a little world, not because he is composed of four elements …but because he possess all the faculties of the universe…E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, 66.

The heart, of all places, seems to be the seat of all such faculties and of the bridge between physical and spiritual.

C) He next develops a line of argument based upon the observation that the heart is “hollow”.

1) “It is a spiritual vessel, made to contain the holy dews of grace, which make glad the city of God, Psalm 96:4. It is ever full, either with that precious juice, or with the pernicious liquor of sin.”

2) The heart is right only when it rightly relates to God:

a) “The Father made it, the Son bought it, the Holy Ghost sanctifies it; therefore they all three claim a right to the heart. …The world cannot satisfy it: a globe cannt fill a triangle. Only God can sufficiently content the heart” (258).

b) “The heart is the chief toward of life to the body, and the spiritual citadel to the whole man: always besieged by a domestical enemy, the flesh; by a civil, the world; by a professed, the devil. Every perpetrated sin doth some hurt to the walls; but if the heart be taken, the whole corporation is lost ….All the faculties of man follow the heart ….”

3) God has done good for the heart: “Spiritually, he hath done more for the heart, giving th blood of his Son to cleanse it, soften it, when it was full both of hardness and turpitude. By his omnipotent grace he unroosted the devil from it, who had made it a stable of uncleanness; and now requires it, being created new, for hi sown chamber, for his own bed. The purified heart is God’s sacrary, his sanctuary, his house, his heaven” (259).

D) Therefore we must protect the heart: accordingly, we must know who will seek the heart.

1) Four will seek it:

a)  “He that begs the heart is the pope ….He begs thy heart, and offers thee nothing for it, but crucifixes, images, etc” (259-260).

b) “He that would buy this vessel of us is the devil….” (260). He offers us anything to gain it. “If any man, like Ahab sell his heart to such a purchaser, let him that it …he doth buy it to butcher it” (260).

c) “The flesh is the borrower and would have this vessel to use, with promise of restoring. Let him have it a while, and thou shalt have it agin; but as from an ill neighbor, so broken, lacerated, deformed, defaced … .and then sends the heart, like a jade, tired with unreasonable travel” (260).

d) “The world is the thief ….The world hath two properties of a thief

i) First, it comes in the night time, when the lights of reason and understanding are darkened;

ii) Secondly, it makes noise in coming …terrifies us not with noise of tumultuous troubles … but pleasingly gives us the music of gain, and laps us warm in the couch of lusts….Fraud is more dangerous than force” (260).

E) How to respond to those who would seek the heart:

1) Turn the beggar from thy door (260)

2) “Then reject the buyer; set him no price of they heart, for he will take of any reckoning” (261).

3) “The borrower …lend him no any implement in thy house, any affection in thy heart” (261).

4) Be wary of the thief, “Lock up this vessel with the key of faith ….Trust not thy heart in thine own custody; but lay it up in heaven with any treasure” (261).

III) The liquor this vessel holds is evil.  261

A) “He that feels not his miseries sensibly is not a man; and he that bears them not courageously is not a Christian” (261).

B) “God created this vessel good; but man poisoned it in seasoning….Man was created happy, but he found out tricks to make himself unhappy” (262)

C) Solomon’s reference in Ecclesiastes 9:3 is not a regenerate heart.

1) “Oh, ingrate, inconsiderate man! To whom God hath given so good a vessel, and he fills it with so evil sap …..When the seat of holiness is become the seat of hollowness; the house of innocence, the house of impudence; the palace of love, the place of lust; the vessel of piety, the vessel of uncleanness; the throne of God the court of Satan, the heart become rather a jelly than a heart … that custom, being a second nature, the heart hath lost the name of heart, and is become the nature of that it holds, a lump of evil” (263).

2) “It is detestable ingratitude in a subject, on whom his sovereign hath conferred a golden cup, to employ it to base uses” (263).

3) Shall the great Belshazzar, Dan. v. 2, that tyrant of hell, sit drinking his wines of abomination and wickedness in the scared bowls of the temple, the vessels of God, the heart of men, without ruin to hose that delightfully suffer him? 263

4) I am willingly led to prolixity in this point [Adams has been working at great length to create emotional response in the hearers by means of amplification in his description of ingratitude toward God in sin. He seeks to make sin unthinkable, seeing what damage it does the heart.] Yet in vain the preacher amplifies, except his hearer applies. 264

5) What is lust in thy heart, thou adulterer….[lists several sins] Is this wine fit for the Lord’s bowel, or dregs for the devil to carouse of? 264

6) “Sin is beneath a Christian: How ill it becomes it such a heart to have hypocrisy, injustice, fraud, covetousness seen in it!…To the master of malediction, and his ungodly ways, we leave those vices; our heart are not vessels for such liquor. If we should entertain them, we give a kind of warrants to others’ imitation” (264).

7) “But how can this evil juice in our hearts be perceived? What beams of the sun shall ever pierce[] into that abstruse and secret pavilion?…I say not that works determine a man to damnation of bliss – the decree of God orders that – but works distinguish of a good or bad man. The saints have sinned, but the greatest part of their converted life hath been holy” (265).

V) The measure of this vessel’s infection – full. 266

A) He “tells man plainly that his heart, not some less principal part of it, is evil, not good, or inclining to goodness; nay, full of evil, to the utmost dram it contains” (266).

B) “Indeed, man quickly fills this vessel of his own accord; let him alone, and he needs no help to bring himself to hell” (266)

C) “Then the more men act, the more they affect; and the exit of one sin is another’s hint of entrance, that the stage of his heart is never empty till the tragedy of his soul be done” (266)

VI) The “repair” of the heart

A) “There is first a necessity that the heart, which is full of evil by nature, must be emptied by conversion, and replenished by grace, or not save by glory; what scuppet have we then to free the heart of this muddy pollution?  Lo, how happily we fall upon repentance: God grant repentance fall upon us!” 267

B) The heart thus emptied of that inveterate corruption, should fityly be washed before it be replenished. …In vain were all repentance without this: no tears can wash the heart clean, but those bloody ones which the side of Christ and others parts wept, when the spear and the nails gave them eyes, whiles the Son of eternal joy became a mourner for his brethren. 268

C) All is not done with this vessel when washed. Shall we empty it, cleanse it, and so leave it?… If God be not present, Satan will not be absent….Humility must take up the room which pride had in the heart; charitableness must step into the seat of avarice; love extrude malice; mildness, anger; patience, murmuring; sobriety must dry up the floods of drunkenness; continence cool the inflammations of lust; peace must quiet the head from dissensions; honesty pull off hypocrisy’s vizor; and religion put profaneness into irrevocable exile.

1) Faith is the hand that must take these jewels out of God’s treasury to furnish the heart.

2) If our former courses and customs, like turned-away abjects, proffer us their old service, let us not know them, not own, not give them entertainment, not allow their acquaintance.

3) Let us now only frequent the door of mercy, and the fountain of grace; and let faith and a good conscience be never out of our society (269)

4) We have now done, if, when our hearts be thus emptied, cleansed, supplied, we keep them….Yet here we have not a patent [guarantee] of security and negligence sealed us, as if God would save us whiles we only stood and looked on ….

Prayer: Yea, O Lord, since thou hast dealt so graciously with these frails vessels of flesh – emptied them, washed them, seasoned them, supplied them – seal them up with thy Spirit to the day of redemption, and preserve them, that the evil one touch them not. Grant this, O Father Almighty, for thy Christ and our Jesus’ sake.

 

Mystical Bedlam.2

28 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by in Genesis, Luke, Preaching, Puritan, Thomas Adams

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Mystical Bedlam.2

The first entry on this sermon can be found here: https://memoirandremains.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/mystical-bedlam-1/

Puritan sermons typically follow a logical structure. The most common logical mechanism was to state a proposition and then break the proposition down into component parts. Adams’ structure follows that basic scheme.

The first major proposition: Man’s heart is a vessel. This proposition is developed in four subpoints:

I.          Man’s Heart is a Vessel.

            A.  The possessor: the sons of men.

            B.  The vessel is a heart.

            C.  The heart holds evil.

            D.  The vessel is full.

 

IA: The possessor: the sons of men.

            1. General discussion re: “sons of men”         

            2. Note on corruptibility

                        a. Spiritual corruption

                        b. Natural corruption

IA1: General discussion re: “sons of men”. 

Adams takes the proposition from Ecclesiastes 9:3, “The heart of the sons of men” and proceeds to define the term, “sons of men” by referencing Luke 3:38, “the son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.”  The movement from “sons man” to son of Adam may not be immediately apparent. The warrant for the move lies in the use of the word “adam” for man in Ecclesiastes 9:3: all the sons of adam (sons of Adam) possess hearts full of evil.

In making the move from Adam, the individual to adam the generic man, Thomas Adams has good exegetical grounds: Ecclesiastes as a whole concerns itself with the effects of the Fall which resulted from Adam’s sin. Thus, even though he speaks generically about “man” with the word “adam”, he has in view the unity and catastrophe of humanity in the first Adam.

Thomas Adams does not explain all the basis for his reference to Luke 3:38. This is a good model for a preacher: not exegetical decision can or should be laid bare before a congregation. While showing the point from the text is necessary, it is not necessary to explain the basis of every cross-reference.

From the reference to Adam, Thomas Adams draws the following point: “All his posterity [Adam’s posterity] [being] the sons of men; we receiving from him both flesh and the corruption of flesh, yea, and of the soul too”( 255).

Thomas Adams draws out two elements of corruption: spiritual and physical.

IA1a: The Spiritual Corruption we Inherited From Our Parents [Adam and Eve].[1]

i. The problem:

A. Our corruption begins at the very first moment of conception: Psalm 51:5. “I was born a sinner, saith a saint” (255).

B. Gen. 5:3: Adam begat Seth in his own likeness. “Adam could not propagate that which he did not have in himself; virtues are not given by birth, nor doth grace follow generation but regeneration….[the image of Adam means] that corruption which descended to Adam’s posterity by natural propagation” (255.). Further proof, Rom. 5:12.

C. “This title, then, ‘the sons of men,’ puts us in mind of our original contamination, whereby we stand guilty before God, and liable to present and eternal judgments” (255).

ii. The solution: From this flow of thought, Adams runs straight to the Gospel: If this is so, if I have necessarily inherited corruption, then we must ask “Who can be saved?” Note that Adams does not force the movement to the Cross (as is done too often by lesser preachers). Rather, merely by telling the story inherent in the text (because it lies in the overarching stream of the Bible’s narrative), Adams presents the problem which compels the response. The Bible tells the story for which only Christ is the answer.

A. “I answer, we derive from the first Adam sin and death; but from the second Adam, grace and life” (256).

1. The question is then whether we live after the flesh or afte the Spirit? Adams works with both 1 Cor. 15:50 and Romans 8:1, 13-14: “if we are led by the Spirit … with love and delight, we are the sons of men made into the sons of God” (256). Note that Thomas Adams uses the original phrase “sons of men” in contrast to the new status, “sons of God”. By referring back to his original topic, “sons men”, Thomas Adams keeps the hearer oriented. The similarity of sound between the phrases makes it easy for hearer to understand and remember the movement from first to second birth.

B.  “It is our happiness, not to be born, but to be new-born, John 3:3. The first birth kills, the second gives life”( 256). Adams returns to the general theme of his answer, this time working it in a slightly different manner. The repetition helps to drive home the point. The variation makes it interesting and helps to expand the understanding. Note the clever balanced sentences he uses to make the point clear and memorable, “Generation lost us; it must be regeneration that recovers us” (256).

C. He then considers a possible objection: But certainly not everything about our first birth is worthless. To this he answers, “Merely to be a son of man is to be corrupt and polluted” (256).

D. “There is no ambition good in the sons of men, but to be adopted the sons of God: under which degree there is no happiness; above which, no cause of aspiring” (256).

[1] Incidentally, the question of whether “Adam” was a symbol or a man plainly played no part in Thomas Adams’ theology – nor the theology of those in church.

Mystical Bedlam.1

26 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ecclesiastes, Meditation, Preaching, Puritan, Spiritual Disciplines, Thomas Adams

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Mystical Bedlam, or the World of Madmen

Thomas Adams, collected works, vol. 1, p. 254.

(The text of the entire sermon can be found here: http://books.google.com/books?id=4qM_AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA254&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false)

The heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live: and after that, they go to the dead. Ecclesiastes 9:3.

In the introduction, we will see how Adams draws out the points of the sermon and works to create an emotional and logical effect in hearers. He does not seek to waste any time in his effort to make sin hateful and absurd.

Adams notes three elements of the verse:

1) The heart of the sons of men is full of evil,

2) and madness is in their heart while they live:

3) and after that, they go to the dead

The tripartite division follows the normal grammar and structure. He notes the relationship between the parts: “Wickedness in the first proposition, madness in the second, the ergo [therefore] is fearful: the conclusion of all is death” (254). Taking the first proposition he notes that the heart of the sons of men is full of evil.

At this point, he has done nothing more than make observations from the English text. Having made the observations, he then interrogates the text: What does this mean? Consider each element of the proposition:

How are the actors, the owners in this drama? “Sons of men.” This becomes the first proposition for the first division of the sermon: “The owners fo the this vessel, men, and derivatively the sons of men.”

What is the place of action? If the sons of men own something, what do they possess? A heart. What do I know about the “heart”? That become the second proposition: “The vessel is earthen, a pot of God’s making, and man’s marring, the heart.” How does he get to earthen? 

If the action takes place in a vessel, a container, what does it contain? Evil. This becomes the third proposition: “The liquor it holds is evil; a defective, privative, abortive thing, not instituted, but destituted, by the absence of original goodness” (254).[1]

Look back at the first proposition, what can we know about this vessel and its contents: It is full. This becomes the fourth proposition: “The measure of this vessel’s pollution with evil liquor. It not said sprinkled, not seasoned, with a moderate and sparing quality; it hath not aspiration, but imbution, but impletion; it is filled to the brim, ‘full of evil’” (255).

            Figures of Amplification

Note that on this final element [to be fair, he has used related techniques in each of the prior sentences] he uses figures of amplification to create an emotional effect.  Poor writers typically seek emotional effect by piling superlative adjectives before or after the noun, This is the greatest, most excellent, extraordinary, awesome X.  Write like that and you will bore people.   You have merely told people what to think and feel, but that will not cause them to think or feel in such a manner.

Rather than merely tell the hearer what to experience, Adams, by means of the amplification, creates a basis for the hearer to come to a decision. First, the repetition of balanced phrases creates an auditory effect by which the voice can create a sense of tense and urgency which breaks in the final phrase, “full of evil” – with the weight coming down on the final word, “evil”.

Second, he creates a reasonable basis for the emotional disgust at the heart being filled with evil.  Adams uses the figure of exergasia, “Repetition of the same idea, changing either its words, its delivery, or the general treatment it is given. A method for amplification, variation, and explanation.”[2]

Hebrew poetry uses this structure as a basic building block: one statement which creates an expectation to be fulfilled by a second (or third) statement (See, Theodore H. Robinson, The Poetry of the Old Testament, 21. Take, for example, Ecclesiastes 9:3

1) The heart of the sons of men is full of evil,

2) and madness is in their heart while they live:

3) and after that, they go to the dead

The first proposition is repeated, with variation in the second proposition. The effect of the first two is given in the third. Delaying the conclusion through the repetition and amplification of the second phrase, increases the emotional tension and creates more weight to the sad condition of humanity. To understand this better, consider a rewrite, “The heart of all people is full of madness and evil.  In the end, everyone dies.” While most of the logical building blocks are present in the rewrite, the disgust is missing: you may agree that it is true, but it somehow doesn’t seem as important.

This does not mean that one does not use adjectives or evaluative language in a description. Adams makes repeated valuations, however, he does it through verbs: sprinkled, season. Even the latinate abstract nouns (typically a bad move) work for him because they imply the action and they are also given in a series of near-rhymes.

At the end, Adams then tells the hearer/reader what to think, “Thus, at the first putting forth, we have man in his best member corrupted.” Adams has been explaining for several sentences (going through his four points) the dismal state of humanity. Having run through the elements, he draws up the conclusion.

Dickens performs this move masterfully. For example, in the beginning of A Christmas Carol, Dickens tells us stories about Scrooge and Marley:

Marley was dead: to begin with.  There is no doubt whatever about that.  The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner.  Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.  Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Scrooge knew he was dead?  Of course he did. How could it be otherwise?  Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years.  Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner.  And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

The repetition; the comic play upon the word “dead”; the story of the absolute loneliness of Marley (no one cared he was dead, except for Scrooge – and Scrooge didn’t care); the ease with which Scrooge turned to business; all tell us that Scrooge was very covetous and one we should hate.  Dickens plays out the nastiness of Scrooge with other tangible examples of his bad conduct.

It is not until the fifth paragraph that Dickens tells us as opposed to shows us: “Oh!  But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind- stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!  Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”

By the time the delay is resolved with the name calling, we are ready to join Dickens in hating Scrooge.  Moreover, Dickens verbs to describe Scrooge: squeeze, wrench, grasp, scrape, clutch, — only then do we get the adjectival “covetous old sinner”.

He then tells more stories about Scrooge, we see Scrooge so that we heartily agree with Dickens that Scrooge is “solitary as an oyster” (bringing together December and cold seawater should make one shiver).

            How Did Adams Think to Ask the Questions of the Text

Most exegetical works will look at the parts, note various syntactical elements, grammatical elements. Adams did note grammatical features (his three-part division of the verse) but then brought out aspects which don’t seem to flow directly from a sentence diagram.

Adams merely does what one should do when meditating upon a text. Donald Whitney in Simplify Your Spiritual Life[3] quotes ten questions gathered from Joseph Hall’s 1607 The Art of Divine Meditation. I am not saying that Adams read Hall’s book, but that Adams and Hall came from the same religious and intellectual world and thus would think about texts in the same manner.

Whitney’s restated questions are

1.  What is it (definition)?

2.  What are it divisions or parts?

3.  What causes it?

4.  What does it cause, that is, what are its fruits and effects/

5.  What is it place, location, or use?

6.  What are its qualities and attachments?

7.  What is contrary to, contradictory of, or different from it?

8.  What compares to it?

9.  What are its titles or names?

10. What are the testimonies or examples of Scripture about it?

Adams does not merely break apart the text and say it means 1,2,3, therefore apply. Instead, he has spent a great deal of time meditating upon the text – only then does he proceed to teach it.

The care he spent in writing the sermon, the careful balancing of phrases for sound and meaning, and breadth of scriptural comparison (matters which would not be brought together by a topical index) and even examples from classical literature all bespeak of an extraordinary care to the matter he preached.

 

[1] Destitute as a transitive verb is not terribly common in modern English. In the early 17th Century, English underwent a great deal of expansion and experimentation.

[2] This definition comes from the Forest of Rhetoric, at http://rhetoric.byu.edu/

[3] Whitney’s book is quite good.  This would be a very fine place for some with little spiritual discipline to begin. The chapters are short, the material is clear and well organized, the wisdom is accessible, the benefits are tremendous. The undisciplined Christian will likely have trouble working through Whitney’s more detailed Spiritual Disciplines. This book is an outstanding gateway to the topic.

Herman Bavinck on Human Nature

23 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by in 1 Timothy, Herman Bavinck, John, Thomas Watson

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The Christian celebrating the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth, does well to contemplate the wonder of the human being (see Thomas Watson, http://www.fivesolas.com/watson/humilia.htm ).

 

The Christian concern for human beings as human beings, whether of human beings unborn or human beings at advanced age and weakness seems striking strange to other people who don’t hold the same premise. Once a student in one of my classes let the States to go to Pakistan to bring supplies to people, most of whom were Muslim, suffering from the earthquake of 2005 (Kashmir earthquake).  He reported that many of the international supplies were pillaged before they could make to victims. While most of the help actually being delivered was delivered by Christians — which is strikingly odd considering the difficulty that Christians routinely face in Pakistan.

 

The atheist Matthew Parish famously stated that Africa needs Christianity (for an interesting take on this by an atheist, see, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2008/12/27/does-africa-need-god/)

 

Now, I am not so silly as to say as that everyone who claims Christianity acts remotely like a Christian. Nor do I do deny the decency and good that some atheists have done. Kurt Vonnegut the atheist novelist who penned many lines which made me think and shirk and laugh had a character quip in God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, There’s only one rule I know of babies, …you’ve got to be kind!

 

What I am stating is that Christianity rightly understood thinks the human being to be the pinnacle of God’s creation — the very image of God himself. And thus, the Christian must honor human beings as valuable because the human being exists.

 

In John 16:21, Jesus of the movement from pain to joy when a woman gives birth:

 

When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world.

 

Note that, she rejoices because a “human being has been born in the world.”  The nature of this valuation of human beings often places Christians at marked disagreement with other human beings when it comes to political decisions.  And surely any number of inconsistencies between practice and theology could be waved as hypocrisy.

 

But only a Christian would be a hypocrite when it comes to matters of oppression or slavery or other misuse of human beings. Unless there is a greater moral context to make a judgment, a condemnation of slavery (say) is a matter of taste, not a matter of evil. Hatred of oppression may be a real subjective motive, but the subjective distaste does not make it “evil”.

 

One may argue that the Christian valuation of human is delusional (because it is a mere “preference” – as are all valuations), but it is the basis upon Christians base their understanding of ethics, morality and salvation.

 

The Christian must love another because they are human — such love is required to supersede even personal considerations and the response of the other:

 

44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,

45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

 

Matthew 5:44-45. Christian love is grounded in the nature of God and the nature of humanity. It is not bound in the nature of a particular immediate personal relationship.

 

Indeed, Christians would do go further in their practical love to other human beings were we to more fully consider our doctrine.  The Dutch theologian Bavinck writes (vol. 3 of his systematic theology) put this well:

 

Man is a rational animal, a thinking reed, a being existing between angels and animals, related to but distinct from both. He unites and reconciles within himself both heaven and earth, things both invisible and visible. And precisely as such he is the image and likeness of God. God is most certainly “spirit,” and in this respect also the angels are related to him. But sometimes there is reference also to his soul, and throughout Scripture all the peculiar psychic feelings and activities that are essentially human are also attributed to God. In Christ, God assumed the nature of humanity, not that of angels. And precisely on that account man, rather than the angels, is the image, son, and offspring of God. The spirituality, invisibility, unity, simplicity, and immortality of the human soul are all features of the image of God.

 

Thomas Adams put it thus, “Man as God’s creation left him was a goodly creature, an abridgement of heaven and earth, an epitome of God and the world; resembling God, who is spirit, in his soul; and the world, which is his body, in the composition of his. Deus maximus invisibilum, mundus maximus visibilium — God the greatest of invisible natures, the world the greatest of visible creatures; both brought into the little compass of man” (Mystical Bedlam, Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 255).

The human being, the human, body and soul, is the great cross-roads of Creation. Jesus Christ as the human being is the point of intersection between God and human beings. It is for this reason he said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me” (John 14:6).

 

For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time.

           

(1 Timothy 2:5-6 ESV).