Tim Keller and Poetry

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A few weeks ago, I finished Tim Keller’s The Reason for God. His practical knowledge, gained over many years of talking to atheists, really shines, especially on things philosophical and historical (and matters categorical). On the other hand, his perception of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, is dim. His sympathy with evolution and old-earth creationism appears in several places throughout the book, but one argument stuck out to me, since it was purportedly based on the Bible itself.

In a nutshell, Keller argues that Genesis 1-2 follows the pattern of Exodus 14-15 and Judges 4-5. In both the latter passages, the author relates a historical event, then follows it with a song recounting the same thing in poetic form. The exodus from Egypt is followed by the Song of Miriam, while the battle with the Midianites is accompanied by the Song of Deborah.

According to Keller, this is what’s happening in the first two chapters of the Bible. Genesis 1 is a poetic treatment of Creation. Genesis 2 is the real deal. The seven day thing is metaphorical. The real story begins in Chapter 2, verse 4, with what I suppose is an ancient Hebrew explanation of the Proterozoic period (a term I just learned from Wikipedia). There are several problems with this, which I’m sure many fine Christians have explained online. I’ll just point out two that occurred to me while I was reading.

  • First, if Keller is correct in thinking that Genesis 1-2 follows the same structure as Exodus 14-15 and Judges 4-5, wouldn’t Genesis 1 be the historical treatment and Genesis 2 the poetic one? History followed by poetry, right?
  • Second, the Bible does have poetic descriptions of Creation (Job 38, Psalm 33 et al., Proverbs 30), none of which resembles Genesis 1. If anything, Genesis 1 has the same spare style we see throughout most of the Old Testament books of history.

Any argument based on style supports the idea that Genesis 1 is, in fact, describing what actually happened.

Trees and Time

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I encourage you to explore Alan Jacobs’s redesigned website, The Gospel of the Trees. As it says on the About page:

The Bible is a story about trees. It begins, or nearly enough, with two trees in a garden: the Tree of Life, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The pivotal event in the book comes when a man named Jesus is hanged on a tree. And the last chapter of the last book features a remade Jerusalem: “In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” If you understand the trees, you understand the story.

Start by clicking on the leaf icon in the upper right corner. From there, clicking “Explore” will take you to a random page, containing a photo, a poem, or a quote about trees, usually with some kind of spiritual dimension. The experience of going smoothly from an arresting image to an insightful thought is a little like walking through the woods with a clever, well-read friend at your side. In my few minutes clicking through, I saw photos of trees, part of Auden’s Hora Canonicae, the lyrics to “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree,” a passage from Deuteronomy, and an excerpt from a news article about the difficulty of arboreal classification — creating a family tree for trees, as it were.

I had something like this website in mind when I started my time Tumblr, The Escapement. Perhaps one day that, too, will be a beautiful “coffee-table website.”

Potato 5

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Day after day, hour after hour, on this unyielding horizontal surface, marked by the gashes of hard labor and punctuated by such objects as books, paperclips, and a lamp, I, a red potato of humble origin, desirous of nothing more than a comfortable place to sleep and perhaps room to stretch out a tentative shoot or two, which may, Deo volente, someday grow to become fat and healthy tubers in their own right, after accruing much water and the nutrients necessary to prosperity, lie on my back and wait.

Potato 1

Potato 2

Potato 3

Potato 4

Potato 4

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A vast country spreads out in front of me, brown and barren. Ahead, in the distance, a fat, dark line rests against the horizon. I walk for what feels like an entire day, though the sun never moves across the sky. It’s odd. Here, the sun operates as though on a switch, blinking on suddenly and darkening in the same way. My boots scuff the dirty ground, kicking up large flakes that float on the air before settling down behind me that marks my path. Eventually, I come to a collection of towers, hard as mountains and rising up out of the ground far beyond my head. The towers are the deep pink color of Himalayan salt. Several miles beyond them, a cliff rises out of the ground, a cliff of such immense proportions it’s hard to believe that this world has not been split in two.

Potato 2

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If I didn’t already know what a potato was, I could easily mistake this object for a rock. On closer inspection, however, it becomes easier to tell that what I’m looking at is, or was, alive. One clue is that it has clearly grown: there are wrinkles in its surface, which you would not normally find on a rock this size. Next to those wrinkles are small divots, and, inside each divot, the light red color that covers the object in patches grows darker, suggesting that pigmentation is gathered in those spots. Again, this is not something you would see on a rock, rigidly structured. Even the brown color is not uniform. Small spots of green and yellow are scattered throughout. And, as I said yesterday, it has some give to it. When I squeeze, the skin bends, ever so slightly. I push my thumbnail through the surface. The skin splits with the sound of a boot stepping into wet grass.

Potato 1

Potato 1

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Every day this week, my students will spend a few minutes in class describing the same… potato.

I decided it was only fair that I do the exercise along with them. So, Monday:

It sits in my palm like a baseball, but weighs slightly more. I can feel it tugging groundwards. Large for a red potato, it is covered with eyes, mostly on one half. On the very end, six eyes are arranged in a triangle pattern, like the tip of an arrow. I said it’s a red potato, but it’s more brown than red, whether with dirt or natural coloring, it’s hard to tell. The skin feels like the bottom of a foot, not rough so much as calloused. A tap on the skin tells me the interior is tight and full, not hollow nor squishy. Holding it to my nose, I smell old water, like what you might find in a tire swing. If I found this buried in the dirt somewhere, I wouldn’t immediately think, “Delicious!”