Walking is probably not the fastest way to get there, but getting there may not be the goal of the trip. Poetry is probably not the fastest way to communicate propositional truth, but it is possible that merely learning propositional truth is not the goal. In fact, it is likely that “riding” to attain propositional truth is the route to becoming an arrogant legalist. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of becoming theologically literate, but becoming theologically literate is not the goal of Christianity; the goal of Christianity is to make us like Jesus—to make us godly. When a person “walks” in his pursuit of godliness, he encounters ways of thinking that contribute essential elements of character development. Enoch walked with God. Walking is not running. Some foods are improved with age. You can eat a steak from a beef that has been butchered that very day, but if the steak is properly aged it acquires flavors that make it even more delicious. Certain experiences help to flavor a Christian’s character, and some of those essential flavors are imparted through poetry—or at least poetic thinking. To use a poetic turn of phrase, reading poetry develops the heart as well as the head.
I think I can make a strong case that one of the main reasons Jesus was crucified by the religious leaders of his day is that they had altogether neglected to read poetry, and they had focused exclusively on reading systematic theology:
Jesus said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?”
Jesus said, “Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old?”
Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”
Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” The Jews said, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
Jesus often spoke figuratively, like a poet; his antagonists listened to him as if he were speaking literally. One can find examples of this sort of misunderstanding on virtually every page of the gospels. In fact, Jesus took advantage of their poetic incompetence to speak to them cryptically. Jesus said, “To you [my disciples] it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand’” (Luke 8:10). Just in case you ever wish to say something that only a select few in your congregation or class will understand, quote a poem that illustrates the point that you want to get across.
An Illustration that Makes the Point
I think I have harvested about 100 wild turkeys since I killed my first jake in the spring of 1996. Prior to 1996, I had been hunting turkeys for seven years, but due to a scarcity of turkeys and my own rank incompetence, I had killed only one turkey before 1996, and that was a hulking, brown, domestic tom who wandered off a nearby farm to investigate the calls I was making in the woods. That is a story for another time. I never killed a wild turkey until 1996, and I had hunted hard during the previous seven seasons. At that stage in my hunting career, I was highly motivated to bring home meat, and consequently, I experienced a lot of discouragement during those seven seasons that I came home empty-handed.
One spring day when I had once again been thwarted by the turkeys and I was driving home, I drove past a farm where I had permission to hunt. I pulled over and peered down the gravel road that led along the ridge of the farm. Not far from where I sat, I could see that there was a big gobbler strutting right beside the road, the late-morning morning sun glinting off his iridescent feathers, his head and neck changing colors from red to white to blue. The thought quickly passed through my mind, that I could probably load my shotgun and figure out a way to sneak around and bushwack that turkey. Just as quickly, I shunned the idea, thinking, That is not why I hunt. And I drove home.
There are hunters—usually old guys—who say, “When I go hunting, I don’t care if I get anything; I just enjoy getting out in the woods.” My unspoken response to that is to think, Then why do you take a gun? It is a lot easier to stroll through the woods with a walking stick than with a gun. But in spite of their apparent inconsistency, those old guys have a point: while turkey hunting is about killing a turkey, that is not what it is all about. It is also about hearing a gobbler on the roost in the pre-dawn darkness, sitting in the early springtime woods as they come to life, seeing the Virginia bluebells in the bottoms and the larkspur and the fire pinks on the hillsides, finding morel mushrooms, feeling the sun warm your cold, sleepy body, and smelling the rich, forest dirt and the fragrance of the pines. Sure, I want to kill a turkey, but harvesting a turkey is just one part of a much bigger and much more glorious experience of being immersed in the life of the wild woods in the spring.
To put the contrast starkly: if you just want to eat a turkey, it is far more practical to go to your local grocery store and buy a frozen turkey. But if you want to get caught up in the swirl of springtime and the thrill of fair chase, go to the woods, sit back against an ancient oak tree, and call a turkey in so close that the hair stands up on your neck when you hear him spit and drum, and he gobbles so loud you can almost feel the ground shake.
Now, at this point, you might be asking yourself, “What does all this have to do with poetry?” And the answer is, this is a very poetry-like illustration of how poetry works and the way we experience truth through poetry.
What Makes Poetry Poetry?
Through the years, people have often asked me to read and critique poems that they have written. If I know the person well enough, and if I think that he truly wants me to give him critical feedback on his poems, the first question I will probably ask is, “What makes this poetry?” The answer that I am most likely to get is, “It rhymes.” While rhyming is a pleasant feature of many English poems, rhyming alone will not make a good poem. Much English poetry does not rhyme, and the Hebrew poetry found in the Bible rhymes only incidentally, if it rhymes at all. Neither is poetry merely verse that follows a particular metrical pattern. I really enjoy poetry that rhymes and poetry that does follow a particular metrical pattern, but those features are not essential to poetry. The poetry of the Bible usually follows a pattern, but it is not a metrical pattern. The essential quality of poetry is that the poet skillfully uses metaphor. Metaphor is a figure of speech where one thing is named but another thing or idea is meant. In the case of the foregoing illustration, I have described various aspects of turkey hunting that make it an enriching, immersive experience, and now I am saying that the immersive approach to harvesting a wild turkey is similar to harvesting truth through poetry. If your goal is simply to learn the facts, there are ways to do that. Go to the grocery store and buy yourself a frozen turkey. But you will miss all that leads up to successfully harvesting a wild turkey, and what you miss is more important than having turkey for supper.
I can just imagine someone saying, “Well, isn’t this just cute. You sound so touchy-feely that if you had not bragged about killing 100 turkeys, I would say you were a tree-hugger for sure. I don’t have time for all this poetry stuff. Give me a good theological tome from the Puritans. Let’s break out Steve Wellum’s Systematic Theology and whack a few liberals over the head. That’s the kind of hunting I like.” May I say that I love systematic theology? I wrote Mere Calvinism, a book that takes a systematically theological look at the Doctrines of God’s Sovereign Grace. I am re-reading John L. Dagg’s Manual of Theology right now just for the fun of it. Most of my food comes from the grocery store! But as much as I love systematic theology, I must point out that the Bible is not one. Instead, the Bible is a collection of various literary genres, and while literature communicates truth, it does it in a way that is different from a math textbook or a book of systematic theology. Literature is writing that is deliberately crafted to engage your emotions as well as your mind, and poetry is literature that has been finely tuned to an emotional crescendo.
Every Christian Ought to be Reading Poetry
Every Christian who can read ought to be reading poetry because every Christian ought to be reading the entire Bible, and a significant portion of the Bible is poetry. Quickly page through any modern translation of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and you will notice that roughly one third of the Bible is poetry.[1] I will not dogmatically insist that every Christian ought to be reading poetry outside of what he encounters in the Bible, but I hope to convince you that acquiring skill in reading poetry will at least help you to understand the Bible better. Reading the Bible along with meditation and prayer is the key to spiritual maturity.
Using your Imagination Is Essential
John Milton is one of the few English poets who can justly be placed among the world’s great poets. He is in the same class as Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. Milton’s most famous poem is Paradise Lost, which is a retelling of humanity’s fall into sin. Through the years, I have taught through Paradise Lost many times, nearly always to students who are preparing for some kind of ministry. I assign them to read Paradise Lost and then discuss it with them. Sometimes students express concern that Milton takes three short chapters in Genesis and turns them into an epic poem that approaches 300 pages in many editions. Is he attempting to improve scripture? Is he adding to scripture? In addressing this concern, I make the point that Milton is doing something that is inescapable for anyone who wants to understand the Bible. It is impossible to understand the Bible without using one’s imagination because the Bible is filled with metaphors. There are multiple metaphors on virtually every page of scripture. A metaphor is not meant to be taken literally. As mentioned earlier, a metaphor is a figure of speech in which one thing is named and another thing is meant. A writer who uses metaphors expects his readers to use imagination to get the point of the metaphor. For example, the Bible says that God is a consuming fire. God is not literally a consuming fire. But in some ways, he is like a consuming fire. There are qualities of a fiercely burning fire that will help us to understand something about God. For the metaphor to make sense, the reader must have some idea of what a consuming fire is, and then decipher how God is like a consuming fire. The Bible says that God’s arm is not shortened. Does God have arms? He turns his face toward the righteous. Does God have a face? He is a rock. Literally? Of course not. Yahweh is my shepherd. Am I a sheep? Jesus says, “I am the bread of life. I am the light of the world. I am the vine.” All of this is meaningless unless you make the required imaginative associations between Jesus’s character and bread, light, and vines. To illustrate the point that the Bible is full of metaphors that require imaginative development, I often perform a simple demonstration in front of my students. Without looking at my Bible, I open it randomly. Then, still without looking, I place my finger on a random place on the open pages. About 90% of the time, unless I happen to land in one of the genealogies, my finger will be within one inch of a metaphor. This proves to be true even in the parts of scripture that are narratives or letters. The Bible is chock full of metaphors, and therefore, even in the non-poetic sections, the Bible is a very poetic book.
Poetry Comes with an Unavoidable Danger
There is, of course, a danger inherent in all this metaphorical, poetic language. The writer might use a metaphor with which his reader is entirely unfamiliar. Not every language around the world uses the same metaphors for the same ideas. “I have a frog in my throat” will be meaningless to some cultures. Only this morning in my Bible reading I read, “In the night my heart instructs me” (Psa. 16:7) but the Hebrew says, “my kidneys instruct me.” As an older man, I smiled to myself, and mused, I can relate to the Hebrew reading, but the writer of the Psalm is not making the point that made me smile. Neither is he saying that his literal kidneys were the source of important theological information. He is saying that—well, what is he saying? How does your heart or, if you are an ancient Hebrew, how do your kidneys instruct you in the night? The metaphor is something that must be figured out. The fact that we must put some contemplation into it is one of the reasons that it is a powerful means of communication. If you simply pop a piece of hard candy into your mouth and crunch it up and swallow it as quickly as possible, you get the flavor of the candy, but that is not the way the candy was meant to be eaten. You may be able to guzzle down a cup of boiling hot coffee, and you will get your jolt of caffeine, but most of us would say that it is better to get your dose of caffeine while leisurely sipping a cup of freshly roasted coffee that has been brewed just right.
It is possible to misunderstand a metaphor. As a safeguard against this, among other things, any interpretation of a biblical metaphor must be consistent with what the rest of the Bible teaches. And it must be consistent with what the poet himself is saying. The concern expressed by my students in response to Milton’s Paradise Lost is that one’s imagination can go wild, and the result will be ridiculous or even heretical nonsense. That is a very real possibility, and it often happens. Watching a few minutes of Christian television or listening to a few minutes of Christian radio will prove that. But Milton was not claiming to write scripture, and he did not think that his poetic reimagining of the Fall was infallible. I hope that reading an essay like this one is a warning signal to keep the train from going off the rails of orthodoxy, but it can and does happen. But the fact that something can be abused does not mean that it cannot be helpful when properly used. Anything can be abused, including imaginative developments of metaphors. But apparently God thought it was worth the risk. He did, after all, inspire the Bible.
Characteristics of Poetry
The fact that he did inspire the Bible, and that the Bible is full of poetry and poetic imagery has some significant implications. We must grant that God knows how to communicate well. Who could deny that he is the most skilled communicator of all? This being the case, then surely there is something about poetry that is essential as a means of communication and as an avenue of understanding. I mean, God gave us one book to teach us all we need to believe and practice to please him, and one third of it is poetry. I think some of the benefits of communicating through poetry will begin to unfold when we consider a few more characteristics of poetry.
Concise Language that Often Tells a Little Story
First, poetry is usually phrased in concise language, and very often, even a short poem tells an interesting story. Consider this little gem:
“Sometimes” by Thomas S. Jones Jr.
Across the fields of yesterday
He sometimes comes to me,
A little lad just back from play –
The lad I used to be.And yet he smiles so wistfully
Once he has crept within,
I wonder if he hopes to see
The man I might have been.
This recaptures a contemplative moment when the poet examines his life from the perspective of his younger, optimistic self. It is a little story. It also prompts the reader to consider his own life from a similar vantage point. I think it would be easy for almost anyone to write a short story about what led the poet to write this poem. To most of us, this poem is more likely to prompt self-examination than would the simple statement, “You ought to practice self-examination.” Stories are so powerful.
And speaking of stories, have you ever considered how much of the Bible consists of narrative? Take your Bible and put your finger between the end of Job and the beginning of Psalms. Now put your thumb between the end of Malachi and the beginning of Matthew. You will be holding the Old Testament. Nearly everything to the left of your finger is stories. It is over half of the Old Testament. Now do the same thing with the New Testament. Put your finger between the end of Acts and the beginning of Romans and put your thumb at the end of Revelation. Nearly everything to the left of your finger is stories. It is over half of the New Testament. So over half of the Bible is historical narrative, or historical stories. Now factor in our estimate that the Bible is one third poetry, and that means that five sixths of the Bible consists of narrative and poetry! How incongruous it is that so many preachers and Christian writers put so little effort into style (like a poet) and never really learn how to tell a story well. Psalm 73 is a good example of a short poem in the Bible that encapsulates a really good story.
Poets Use Words that Will Produce Affections in the Reader
So, poets use concise language and often summarize the essential elements of a thought-provoking story or experience. Poets also use words and phrases that will arouse emotion in the attentive reader. Any good poem will serve to illustrate this, so I will choose one of my favorites:
“To a Waterfowl” by William Cullen Bryant
Whither, ‘midst falling dew,
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,
Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way!Vainly the fowler’s eye
Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,
As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,
Thy figure floats along.Seek’st thou the plashy brink
Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,
Or where the rocking billows rise and sink
On the chafed ocean side?There is a power whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,—
The desert and illimitable air,—
Lone wandering, but not lost.All day thy wings have fanned,
At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere,
Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
Though the dark night is near.And soon that toil shall end;
Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest,
And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend,
Soon, o’er thy sheltered nest.Thou’rt gone, the abyss of heaven
Hath swallowed up thy form; yet, on my heart
Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given,
And shall not soon depart.He who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.
I will not explain the entire poem here, but I will just point out that Bryant carefully chose his words and phrases to engage us emotionally. In plain language the first stanza might be phrased, “Hey, goose! (or duck!) Where are you going all by yourself so late in the day?” Second stanza: “No hunter can reach you way up there.” Third stanza: “Are you going to a lake, a river, or the ocean?” Fourth stanza: “A power is guiding you.” And so on until in the final stanza we have, “The same person who guides you will guide me.” Summarized: “I saw a goose flying all alone the other evening, and it made me think, If God guides a goose, surely he will guide me.” That is true, but there is no emotion in that.
Poetry is a way of understanding truth. Really understanding truth involves more that just the mind; it also involves the emotions and affections. In the Bible, the Lord teaches us not only what we need to know, he also teaches us how we ought to feel about it. There is heat as well as light. This combination of heat and light is also the power of real preaching. The preacher is both to proclaim the truth and to model for his hearers how they ought to feel about the truth. You can read the sermons of George Whitefield, but I promise you, when you read his sermons you will not even come close to feeling what you would have felt if you had heard Whitefield preaching that same sermon.
I think I can summarize the main theological and ethical ideas of the book of Job in four or five propositional statements. But, thank God, we have not just four or five theological propositions; we have forty-two chapters of gut-wrenching, soul-searching, self-justifying poetry from Job mixed with finger-pointing, accusation-making, pontificating poetry from his four friends, capped off with an appearance from God who never explains a thing to Job but asks him a series of questions mostly centered around the wonders of creation. When we read the book of Job, we are supposed to feel the apparent injustice of what happened to Job. We are to put ourselves in Job’s place and consider how we would feel in his situation. We are to put on Job’s ears and hear what his worthless comforters say. Like Job, we are to put our hands over our mouth and stop complaining when God shows up with his searching questions. What are we to make of this method of teaching? Answer: We have not understood the truth unless we have felt the truth.
And so, poets deliberately use words and phrases to affect their readers. Consider David’s word choices in the opening verses of Psalm 32.
Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.
Blessed is the man against whom the LORD counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.
Note that he uses three different words for sin: transgression, sin, and iniquity. We tend to just lump all three into the category of sin, but there is nuance of meaning in all three words. It is possible for us to read this verse and just think, sin, sin, sin, and that is the way most people do read it, never letting the poetry do its work. We want to grab that frozen turkey and move on to justification by faith. But if we do not feel the deep darkness of transgression, sin and iniquity, then it is less likely that we will feel the warm sunlight of forgiven, covered, and counts no, which are the three words David uses to describe how God dealt graciously with him. David proceeds to describe how he felt when he was attempting to hide his sin:
When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all the day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.
Any preacher who preaches from this text has promptings for illustrations just handed to him. And really, if he does not develop these ideas so that his distracted people see and feel the power of these metaphors, he is not being faithful to the text. God inspired David to write a poem about his experience, and we fail to do it justice if we treat the poem as if it were a prose piece written by someone with a penchant for using a thesaurus. Slow down, and let the poetry do its work.
A baby learns to trust his mother, not because she stands beside the cradle and says, “You can trust me.” She holds him, she sings to him, she nurses him, she rocks him to sleep, and she comforts him. It takes time. This is what God does through the poetry of the Bible. We are to respond:
O LORD, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me (Psa. 131:1-2).
Getting Started
You can learn to appreciate poetry even if you never take a class on the subject. I do not remember having a single literature class in which poetry was emphasized until I went to graduate school. I never seriously read poetry until I was in my early twenties. Once I started trying to read poetry, I discovered that I had a real head start over most of my peers because I had been earnestly studying the Bible since I was a teenager. But I remember being completely baffled by poems and by poets that I now read with pleasure.
If you will just slow down and carefully consider the word pictures that are used in the poetry of the Bible, you will make progress in understanding poetry.
Reading old hymns will help you make progress towards reading more challenging poetry. As a general rule, even the old hymns are not great poetry, but many contain elements of good poetry. Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley had some real poetic talent.
I did not know of a good book that teaches the basic skills needed to read and enjoy poetry, so I wrote one. In my book, A Year with George Herbert, I carefully annotate fifty-two of Herbert’s poems and explain what he is doing as a poet. Herbert’s poetry is difficult, but it is rich with theological truth and well worth the effort to understand. Richard Baxter loved Herbert’s poetry, as did C. H. Spurgeon and C. S. Lewis.
Finally, get a good anthology of English poetry and start looking through it to discover poems that you can understand. I like A Treasury of Great Poems, compiled and selected by Louis Untermeyer.
Is that Why you Hunt?
One of the classes that I have enjoyed teaching through the years is a class on Great Books. In this class, I have the students read great works of literature, philosophy, and theology, and then we discuss them in class. In order to determine whether or not the students have done the reading, I will give them a multiple-choice quiz over the assigned book. I tell them, “I realize that my class is not the only class you have, and I know that there is a lot of reading required for this class. There may be times that you simply will not have had the time to do the reading. You will still have to take the quiz with the rest of the class. You are welcome to read Cliff Notes or Spark Notes, and doing so may help you to avoid failing the quiz. But look, if you do that all the time, while you might be able to squeak out a passing grade in this class, you will miss what is probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to interact with the books we read and the ideas we discuss in this class.”
If we read the poetry of the Bible as if it were prose, it is unlikely that it will automatically set us on a slippery slope towards heterodoxy. You will be able to pass the class without reading the poetry as poetry. You will get the flavor of the candy. You will get the caffeine. You will have turkey for Thanksgiving. But is that why you hunt?
