Dear Alumni,
The arrival of Westminster Seminary
California’s 26th Commencement reminds me of a time
long, long ago (34 years, to be precise) when a young seminary
grad and his wife packed all their earthly belongings (not much)
to move from Philadelphia to Fair Lawn, New Jersey. This new
“master” of divinity (or so the diploma claimed) had been called
to pastor Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He was, frankly,
apprehensive and overwhelmed by the awesome responsibility of
proclaiming the Word of God and shepherding the people of God.
Knowing her husband’s insecurities, my wise
and lovely wife inscribed and framed for me a poem by George
Herbert, a 17th-century Anglican pastor who had faced my fear
and found its only remedy. For years this poem hung by my study
door, the last thing I glimpsed as the elders and I left our
time of prayer before the worship service:
Aaron
Holiness on the head,
Light and perfections on the breast,
Harmonious bells below, raising the dead,
To lead them unto life and rest.
Thus are true Aarons drest.
Profaneness in my head,
Defects and darkness in my breast,
A noise of passions ringing me for dead,
Unto a place where is no rest,
Poor priest thus am I drest.
Only another head
I have, another heart and breast,
Another music, making live not dead,
Without whom I could have no rest:
In him I am well drest.
Christ is my only head,
My alone only heart and breast,
My only music, striking me ev’n dead;
That to the old man I may rest,
And be in him new drest.
So holy in my head,
Perfect and light in my dear breast,
My doctrine tun’d by Christ (who is not dead,
But lives in me while I do rest)
Come people, Aaron’s drest. Here is rich biblical theology, notably the
glorious Pauline doctrines of union with Christ in his death and
resurrection, applied to us in the imputation of Jesus’ perfect
righteousness to us, the unfit and unworthy. And here are these
majestic gospel truths applied to a pastor’s constant inner
tension between the majesty of his calling and the insufficiency
of his person. The only answer is to look away from ourselves to
Jesus, our head and final high priest.
The purpose of this brief “reflection” is
to commend to you the passionate and skillfully-crafted poetry
of George Herbert, as nourishment for your own soul delivered
through a brother who served the church in an earlier time.
In his 1670 Life of Herbert Izaak
Walton reported that as Herbert was dying of consumption in
1633, just one month shy of his 40th birthday, the
preacher-poet had entrusted a slim collection of verse to a
friend, to deliver to a trusted editor, with this message:
Sir, I pray
deliver this little book to my dear brother Ferrar, and tell him
he shall find in it a picture of the many spiritual conflicts
that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject
mine to the will of Jesus my Master; in whose service I have now
found perfect freedom; desire him to read it; and then, if he
can think it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor
soul, let it be made public; if not, let him burn it; for I and
it are less than the least of God’s mercies. 1 We can be grateful that Ferrar had the
godly good sense to convey Herbert’s “little book” not to the
flames but to the press!
Along with his more famous and prolific
clerical contemporary, John Donne, Herbert and others were
categorized by the 18th century literary critic
Samuel Johnson as “Metaphysical” poets. Their verse is complex,
with multiple wordplays and paradoxical metaphors. The
Metaphysicals exulted in intelligent design, sometimes
approaching showiness in displaying the wordsmith’s skills and
cleverness. It is about as far as one can get from syrupy
sentimentality delivered in the predictable, lilting meter and
cliché-laden vocabulary of greeting cards and some later
hymnody. Reading it is hard work—not as rigorous as
exegeting the Psalms from the original Hebrew, but challenging
nonetheless. But in Herbert and in Donne, at least, there is
theological substance behind the show. And there is a passionate
love for Christ, grounded in the truth of the gospel, that turns
poetry from word-play into a transparent and moving engagement
with the God who knows us straight through, and yet loves us
with a costly and everlasting love.
Twentieth-century poet (and adult convert
to Christian faith) T. S. Eliot wrote about Donne, Herbert, and
other Metaphysical poets:
The poets of the
seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the
sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could
devour any kind of experience. They are simple, artificial,
difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were…. In the
seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from
which we have never recovered…. While the language became more
refined, the feeling became more crude…. The sentimental age
began early in the eighteenth century, and continued. The poets
revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they
thought and felt by fits, unbalanced… 2
The “dissociation of sensibility” that
Eliot saw setting in at the end of the seventeenth century was a
divide that kept “wit and passion in separate compartments,” a
tragic divorce of reason and emotion that Eliot sought to
reconcile in his own poetic work, in which he sought to engage
the mind as well as move the heart. 3
In Eliot’s lament over the disintegration
of thought from feeling under the influence of Romanticism, no
doubt WSC alumni can hear echoes of the polarization that is all
too evident in contemporary church life. Should our songs and
sermons instruct minds in sound doctrine? Or should they
move hearts to wonder, sorrow, joy, and reverent awe? I
would contend that the Scriptures (and the Psalms
specifically—but that’s a topic for another time) show this to
be a false choice, and one that we must refuse to make: holy
passion or orthodox doctrine? Both! It is the
association of sensibility—the interwoven unity of
intelligent design and transparent feeling before the face of
God—that draws me, again and again, to Herbert’s poetry.
Let me offer three more samples, to whet
your appetite:
First, “Easter Wings” is almost too clever
visually on the page, since it looks like two butterflies
floating side-by-side. But notice how Herbert’s rich theology of
our fall in the first Adam and its concomitant miseries, and
then our redemption in the Second Adam, is actually reflected in
the varying lengths of the lines that speak of those profound
realities.
Easter Wings
Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poor:
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.
My tender age in sorrow did begin:
And still with sicknesses and shame
Thou didst so punish sin,
That I became
Most thin.
With thee
Let me combine,
And feel this day thy victory:
For, if I imp 4 my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.
Second, consider Herbert’s meditation on
“Sunday.” I’m not precisely sure where Herbert might have come
down on the observance of the Lord’s Day as the Christian
Sabbath, as that would be articulated by the Westminster
Assembly a decade or so after his death. 5
Nevertheless, here he has captured the Sabbath’s origin in
creation and its eschatological destination, as well as
something of what it means to “call the Sabbath a delight”
(Isaiah 58:13-14). Notice also, in stanzas 6-8, how Herbert
links both Christ’s resurrection and his atoning death to the
change of the day of rest and worship from the seventh day of
the week to the first.
Sunday
O day most calm, most bright,
The fruit of this, the next world’s bud,
Th’ endorsement of supreme delight,
Writ by a friend, and with his blood;
The couch of time; care’s balm and bay:
The week were dark, but for thy light:
Thy torch doth show the way.
The other days and thou
Make up one man; whose face thou art,
Knocking at heaven with thy brow:
The worky-days are the back-part;
The burden of the week lies there,
Making the whole to stoop and bow,
Till thy release appear.
Man had straight forward gone
To endless death: but thou dost pull
And turn us round to look on one,
Whom, if we were not very dull,
We could not choose but look on still;
Since there is no place so alone,
The which he doth not fill.
Sundays the pillars are,
On which heav’n’s palace arched lies:
The other days fill up the spare
And hollow room with vanities.
They are the fruitful beds and borders
In God’s rich gardens: that is bare,
Which parts their ranks and orders.
The Sundays of man’s life,
Threaded together on time’s string
Make bracelets to adorn the wife
Of the eternal glorious King.
On Sunday heaven’s gate stands ope;
Blessings are plentiful and rife,
More plentiful than hope.
This day my Saviour rose,
And did enclose this light for his:
That as each beast his manger knows,
Man might not of his fodder miss.
Christ hath took in this piece of ground,
And made a garden there for those
Who want herbs for their wound.
The rest of our Creation
Our great Redeemer did remove
With the same shake, which at his passion
Did th’ earth and all things with it move.
As Samson bore the doors away,
Christ’s hands, though nail’d, wrought our salvation,
And did unhinge the day.
The brightness of that day
We sullied by our foul offence:
Wherefore that robe we cast away,
Having a new at his expence,
Whose drops of blood paid the full price,
That was requir’d to make us gay,
And fit for Paradise.
Thou art a day of mirth:
And where the week-days trail on ground,
Thy flight is higher, as thy birth.
O let me take thee at a bound,
Leaping with thee from sev’n to sev’n,
Till that we both, being toss’d from earth,
Fly hand in hand to heav’n! Finally, no piece for preachers about
Parson Herbert’s poems can close without the last poetic
dialogue in his “little book” (which was entitled The Temple:
Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations and which bore on its
title page as a theme verse Psalm 29:9: “In his Temple doth
every man speak of his honour”). Three poems in The Temple are
entitled “Love,” but the third is, appropriately, the finale of
the entire collection.
WSC alumni know that our homiletics
instruction by no means follows the shopworn “three points and a
poem” formula. In view of our culture’s discouraging trends in
education and the influence of mass media, inserting a poem in a
21st century sermon in America may run the risk of
seeming to speak some ancient, all-but-forgotten language (Koine
Greek? Biblical Hebrew?). Besides, the Metaphysical Poets’ verse
is, as I said, tough enough to slog through when one sees it on
paper, let alone trying to get its message by hearing it spoken
orally. So I hardly ever put a poem in my sermons.
Herbert’s “Love (3)” is the exception, and when I have used it,
consistently people beg afterwards for a copy of my sermon
notes—not to retain the insights in my exposition, but to take
home Herbert’s wonderful words.
Here Herbert speaks for us all, I think.
Christians need to be persuaded, over and over again, of the
sweetness of the gospel of grace and the sufficiency of Jesus,
and so convinced again and again to rest our hearts in his
finished work. Even after being seized by God’s amazing grace,
still our deeply-ingrained instinct is to try to work, to find a
way to be worthy, rather than to rest in the worthiness of the
One who loved us. It feels fitting if we serve before we “sit.”
But Jesus will not have it! I called this piece a “dialogue,”
but is more akin to an argument. There are throughout two
speakers, the guilty and insecure believer and Love—that is,
Jesus—the invincible, inexorable Host who insists on meeting our
every need and will accept none of our excuses for refusing his
gracious hospitality. At the risk of giving away the ending, I
must tell you: Jesus wins the argument—to God be all the
glory!
Love (3)
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew
back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack’d anything.
A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:
Love said, you shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my
shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat. 6 Dennis E. Johnson
Academic Dean and Professor of Practical Theology
Footnotes
1 Izaak Walton, Life of Herbert
(1670), in George Herbert, The Complete English Works
(ed. Ann Pasternak Slater) (Everyman’s Library 204; New
York: Knopf, 1995), p. 380.
2 T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical
Poets,” cited in M. H. Abrahams, gen. ed., Norton
Anthology of English Literature: Revised (New York:
W. W. Norton & Co., 1968), 1819. 3 Abrahams, ed., Norton Anthology,
p. 1771. 4 “Imp” = to repair a bird’s broken
wing by ingrafting strong feathers from another.
5 It does appear from his pastoral
handbook, The Country Parson, His Character, and Rule
of Life (first published in 1652) that his personal
practice as a pastor would have pleased the Westminster
Divines. In chapter 8, “The Parson on Sundays,” he notes
that after corporate worship with his family, “having
read Divine Service twice fully, and preached in the
morning, and catechized in the afternoon…. The rest of
the day he spends either in reconciling neighbours that
are at variance, or in visiting the sick, or in
exhortations to some of his flock by themselves, whom
his sermons cannot or do not reach.” Herbert,
Complete English Works, p. 207. Herbert’s Country
Parson is worth comparing with classics such as
Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor (1656),
Charles Bridges’s The Christian Ministry (1830),
and Patrick Fairbairn’s Pastoral Theology (1875)
for challenging and wise counsel regarding the
responsibilities and opportunities of pastoral ministry. 6 Collections of Herbert’s poems are
available in paperback, but it’s worth the money to get
the hardback Complete English Works of Herbert in
Knopf’s Everyman Library (see footnote 1), since this
edition includes The Country Parson as well as
other treasures besides the poems contained in The
Temple itself. Anthologies of well-selected poetry
pertaining to biblical themes are: Robert Atwan and
Laurenance Wieder, edd. Chapters into Verse: A
Selection of Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible
from Genesis to Revelation (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000) and James H. Trott, ed. A
Sacrifice of Praise: An Anthology of Christian Poetry in
English from Caedmon to the Mid-Twentieth Century
(Nashville: Cumberland House, 1999).
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