Except to don my merry secularist and call it a cosmic coincidence. So I still check Facebook once in a while to see what's going on with old acquaintances. One of my classmates from days of yore had this on her page:
I almost never waste my time with these things, but since I was just getting going on the day and was getting our youngest up for school, I thought I'd do it on a lark.
As it happened, he's getting ready to read The Merchant of Venice as his next lit assignment, so that was right here on my desk. I know, that was cruel of me to assign that. Him being in seventh grade and all. I could have chosen Macbeth or Hamlet, but he knows those to well. I wanted to challenge him with a Shakespeare yarn he's unfamiliar with.
It's one of the Signet Classics versions, BTW, with academic notes and writes ups, plus vocabulary and footnotes to help the modern reader though some of the terms and phrases that seem strange to us today. I recommend those versions whenever possible.
Anyway, I picked up the book, and turned to page 18. Now, as a qualifier, let me say I skipped the intro as it was numbered with Roman numerals, as such intros often are. I went to the pages numbered in Arabic numerals, since that was used in the above image, which began with the play proper. From there, I went to the eighteenth page. Then I read down to line four, and this is what it said:
"The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose."
Wow. Given my musings on salvation and getting hung up on numbers that I posted today, I thought that was a bit ... odd. Certainly odd timing. It also made me wonder. Funny, we dismiss such things today in a very secular way. Dumb luck. Cosmic coincidence. Just weird that I posted that and suddenly this turned up in a goofy Internet exercise. And yet there was a time in ages past when such a thing would make even the most hardened theologian rub his chin and ponder.
Not that everything has to be demons and angels doing it. In even the most superstitious age, people were able to discern between the natural and the supernatural. It's just sometimes I think we've moved the bar too far in the direction opposite of superstition.
With that said, I'm not going to delete the post. Nor am I going to assume it must be confirmation that all those other people are misusing Scripture. I'll likely have a good chuckle as I have now, and then move on. But it is worth noting that I'm doing this because I've been very well trained by our secular age. I've been taught to hold the bar very high indeed for any idea that something could be nothing other than natural cause or mere coincidence.
Ha! A similar post showed up on my Facebook feed a couple of months ago. In my case, the closest book (besides a first aid book which wouldn't really have worked) was Augustine's Confessions, and when I opened to the page and sentence, it was one of these from his conversation with a wise old man: 'Of whom when I had demanded, how then could many true things be foretold by it, he answered me (as he could) "that the force of chance, diffused throughout the whole order of things, brought this about. For if when a man by haphazard opens the pages of some poet, who sang and thought of something wholly different, a verse oftentimes fell out, wondrously agreeable to the present business: it were not to be wondered at, if out of the soul of man, unconscious what takes place in it, by some higher instinct an answer should be given, by hap, not by art, corresponding to the business and actions of the demander.' Of course I was highly amused, but it's also interesting given that later in his famous conversion experience, he "takes up and reads" the first Bible verse he comes across. So God can use a random verse or sentence, but context and hindsight are probably helpful in these cases. ;)
ReplyDeleteThe Merchant of Venice is a good one - my older kids and I read it together a few years ago. I know some make it out to be ant-Semitic, but I think the characters are a lot more complicated. I felt sympathy for Shylock and sometimes thought the "good guys" were being cruel. I'll have to read it again with my younger kids.
I think that's a good way to see things, and perhaps a way we should see things more often than we do. I remember back in the day we used to say coincidence is the faith claim of atheists. I fear sometimes we use it as our own.
DeleteOh, and I read the Merchant of Venice ages ago in a college Shakespeare class. I don't think I've read (or watched) it since. I'm looking forward to it.
Don't forget today is PIE day, Dave!
ReplyDeleteThanks! Corrected! I got the makings for a couple fine pies. I tell you, this world has ceased to be a joke when so much is going on that I almost forget PIE day.
DeleteThe Surgeon's Mate, by Patrick O'Brien. Page 18, line 4: "And most of all he wanted to see Sophie's hand and to hear her voice at one remove: her last letters, dated before the American War, had reached him in Java and he had read them until they cracked at the folds, had read them again and again until they, with almost all his other poses sessions, had been lost at sea."
ReplyDeleteI've never read the whole series. Years ago, on Mark Shea's blog, we had a discussion about what books we were reading. At the time I was going through Forester with my sons. Someone recommended O'Brien's books (saying they were actually better). I read Master and Commander, but stopped there. I may pick up the rest someday.
DeleteThat is a quote, by the way, that doesn't seem to apply to me, which makes the one I found all the creepier!
I'm glad to know that, dispite his many flaws, somebody in Mark's fandom has good taste in literature. Be warned: if you decide to read O'Brien's whole series, be sure to have a world atlas (or Google maps), as well as all the Wikipedia articles dealing with the Nepoleonic period (Wikipedia tends to have a Left-Leaning bias when it comes to more current events, but their stuff on Napoleon is fairly objective).
DeleteI've always enjoyed the Colonial/Napoleonic period of history. Medieval studies has been my focus, though I started my history studies because of WWII. That's why I enjoyed Forester's novels. But I've heard O'Brien's is a work that benefits from a certain external knowledge of the context (and some have said, is more accurate than Forester).
DeleteAs for Mark's fandom, that was from another age, when such conversations were as much the rule as anything about politics or social issues.