a (whole) story of creation

During the past couple months I've posted five poems, each with the title "a story of creation." Below is a brief explanation and defense of my work.

The five poems I constructed function at a number of levels. Most straightforwardly, each poem, I hope, stands on its own as a piece of work. I tried to write each poem in such a way that someone who does not see the other four, can still understand and appreciate the message of the individual poem – and hopefully its presentation is artistic. Toward that end, I wrote each poem with intention of clearly communicating its topic.

Concerning the topics of the poems, I have written five poems, and if I succeeded, the poems together also make up a single work. I tried to write a series of poems about creation, fall and redemption, and further, I attempted a chiastic structure. So poems “A1” and “A2” both speak of God’s creative acts, the first about nature and the second about God’s creating man in his image. Poems “B1” and “B2” speak of the fall of earth and sin’s consequences for human kind, respectively. And then for “C,” the center of the chiasm,[1] I placed a poem about Christ. Diagrammatically, my poem(s) follow(s) this structure:

A1(creation of nature)

B1(fall of nature)

C (Christ)

B2 (fall of man)

A1(creation of man)

My framing set of poems (“A”) each follows the same structure of three lines followed by four lines. The two poems together communicate God’s creating act as both beautiful and as a gift from a gracious God. At a different, yet perhaps more important, level, the two “A” poems function as the beginning of a sort of chronological and even left-to-right arrow, buried within my chiastic structure; quite obviously, creation is the beginning of all things, and specifically, God’s meta-narrative.

The two “B” poems each laments the fall of creation due to sin, the fall of the natural order and humanity, respectively. And so, together these poems function as a lament of the fall as a unit. Each poem is only four lines long. I intentionally wrote these as shorter pieces, symbolic of sin’s brief career (from a cosmic perspective). Also just as the first set, the two poems about sin focus the chronological arrow pointing toward Christ further – fall followed creation.

Finally, the center poem of my series celebrates Christ. Symbolically longer than the other poems, alluding to Christ’s lasting reign as King of creation, this poem plays with the upside-down relationship between Adam and Christ. Adam sought life, but brought death; Christ sought death, but bought life (Rom 5). Although in a linear sense, the “C” poem sits in the middle of my collection (rightly so in a chiasm), when the poem takes an arrow shape (chiasm), the Christ poems takes its place as the final and concluding poem in a chronologically directional sense. Creation and fall point to Christ; Christ brings resolution to creation’s fall. Of course, there are many different ways placing Christ as the center can allude to other things: Christ is the focal point of good theology, Christ is the peak of the Bible’s narrative, people are called to center their lives on Christ, etc. The list could continue.

In summation, I hope each of my five poems communicates lament and celebration of creation, creation’s fall and creation’s savior. I also hope as a unit, the poems tell the story of the world’s existence and its restoration in Christ’s reversing Adam’s sin.

---

[1] I am calling this series a chiasm, but usually chiasms are contained in a single piece of work. So in a sense, I deviated from traditional uses of the chiastic structure. But in another sense, I consider my five poems as a single work.

Christ as Tuning Fork

I have stacks of books sitting at my apartment, weighing down my backpack and peppering my desk. Between school, work and pleasure, my reading can be a bit overwhelming. And so, I've just gotten around to Leonard Sweet's 2010 book Jesus Manifesto. While orientating myself to the book, sifting through a few red-flag assertions (more coming), I came across a worthy statement about Jesus in its introduction:

The striking of the eternal, unchanging tuning fork of heaven took place when a young virgin gave birth to God's only Son in an obscure village in first-century Israel. It stuck again on a never-forgotten Friday, with the pounding of six-inch nails. The fork struck a third time -- on the third day -- when a meek and lowly Nazarene split a tomb wide open and came forth in Resurrection life.

Southern Seminary Magazine

Here is the latest Southern Seminary Magazine. And here is an explanation of the theme and an outline of the featured content. I've written three book reviews which appear in this issue: God's Glory in Salvation Through Judgment, 40 Question About Christianity and Biblical Law and The Faithful Parent (pages 17, 18 and 19). I also have a few other articles inside -- pretty standard stuff.

a story of creation, pt. 5

A bit like you, male and female created;

reasoning kind, with one another participated;

gifted with you name, the earth officiated.

Carrying your image, marching in likeness,

thinking as One and living as Three,

man stands at the height of your making

and a reflection of thee.

Come on, Chris

This past April, ardent self-proclaimed anti-theist Christopher Hitchens published his monthly article in Vanity Fair about the Old Testament's Ten Commandments. His article, "The New Commandments," leads with an intentionally evocative subhead: "The Ten Commandments were set in stone, but it may be time for a re-chisel. With all due humility, the author [Hitchens] takes on the job, pruning the ethically dubious, challenging the impossible, and rectifying some serious omissions."

Hitchens proceeds to work through each of the Bible's Ten Commandments (OT, Deuteronomy 5:6-21), giving various explanations about how that particular commandment came to be and its function within Ancient Israel. Then comes his grand conclusion:

What emerges from the first review is this: the Ten Commandments were derived from situational ethics. They show every symptom of having been man-made and improvised under pressure. They are addressed to a nomadic tribe whose main economy is primitive agriculture and whose wealth is sometimes counted in people as well as animals. They are also addressed to a group that has been promised the land and flocks of other people: the Amalekites and Midianites and others whom God orders them to kill, rape, enslave, or exterminate. And this, too, is important because at every step of their arduous journey the Israelites are reminded to keep to the laws, not because they are right but just because they will lead them to become conquerors (of, as it happens, almost the only part of the Middle East that has no oil).

As if this conclusion isn't convincing enough, Hitchens again rehearses the content from each commandment, this second time explaining what needs to be "pruned" from the commandments for a new context. And then after liberating his readers too-accepting minds, he offers a final verdict concerning one of history’s most recognizable teachings:

It’s difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words “Thou shalt not.” But who cannot summon the confidence to say: Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color. Do not ever use people as private property. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them? Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly. Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife. Turn off that fucking cell phone—you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us. Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions. Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above. In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

Since sometime during my college years, I've casually kept up with what Hitchens says. Naturally, I disagree with almost everything he propagates concerning Christianity and religion. But I have always appreciated Hitchens' breath of knowledge and his clever use of language in communicating his fervent dislike of any form of theism.

"The New Commandments" represents a fail by Hitchens. I expect more from this admired atheist. Aside from his surprisingly sloppy use of words, the author's conclusions about the intent and extent of the Ten Commandments are foreign to anything in the texts themselves, and Hitchens' lazy use of sources doesn't inspire much confidence in his research. Now, of course, an article in Vanity Fair isn't held to the rigorous standards of an academic journal. But if he intends to displace a body of teaching Jews, Christians and secular persons have embraced for thousands of years, then Hitchens should put a little more thought into his arguments. And where is that humility about which his subhead talks?

NY Times top ten of '10

Here is the New York Times top ten books published in 2010. An intriguing mixture of biography, collected writings and fiction, the list provides a nice spring-board to reading deep-and-widely.

a story of creation, pt. 4

Straining for life, for a place next to Him,

Adam tasted the inverse of his with.

Breath, which once anticipated an enduring career,

now kneels at the merciless feet of time.