Life of R. L. Dabney--in verse

Robert Lewis Dabney

Offspring of seeds sown on warm Virginia’s rich soil,
Of fierce sons of Covenanters and Huguenots,
Awakened by Whitefield’s and Davies’ preaching toil,
Steeled by free men’s fire until glowing red,
Fanned to flames by the taxed souls of the patriots,
In wilderness land where rough men plowed, buried, and bled.
Born in 1820, facing childhood’s pain and delight,
Weaned on ancient classics–balanced on Bible lines,
From sprinklings on an infant’s head to youthful height,
Robert Dabney–warrior for God and southern land;
From the cross, the past, the soil, the contour aligns,
Building, shaping, molding him for the distant stand.

Dabney, your battles would be fought and lost and won.
Dabney, long ago set apart to see God’s Son.

How did that Sabbath-keeping father shape the twig?
How from a mustard seed did grow a tree so big?
How did the praying mother raise a holy man,
Built on Calvinist rock; not loose free-thinking sand.
What walks along the path, what lessons late at night,
What books, what songs, what catechism, gave such light?
Did tears on his father’s grave consecrate his life?
Were there fists against heaven, or dark nights of strife?
Sovereign winds blew in the new birth in ways unknown,
A blood covenant—old and new--became his own.
From college, the boy heard the inner call to preach,
To theological peaks, he began to reach.

Dabney, your battles would be fought and lost and won.
Dabney, you were set apart to proclaim God’s Son.

The plowman’s hands pulled up to the old oak pulpit,
Called to the desert life, to eat honey and locusts;
The Word, to plant and plow and harvest, and make fit,
Twisted-shaped weak plants to make heavenly perfect.
With the prophet’s anger and the fisherman’s net,
Laboring on Jerusalem’s south wall to build.
The planters and merchants that in the smooth pews sat,
And slaves in the balcony--all were in God’s field.
From Sabbath to Sabbath to the joys of Heaven,
That voice cried out, “Free grace from God, freely given.”
You planted corn and raised a crop of young preachers:
The light to shine on all of God’s elect creatures.

Dabney, your battles would be fought and lost and won.
Dabney, your boys would bring a harvest to the Son

Dabney saw the blood that would flow from war-like words,
With images of plowshares beaten into swords,
Sons of Yorktown and sons of Saratoga,
Rekindling the fight of Athens against Sparta.
With pointing finger and hoarse voice and angry ink,
He spoke and wrote and felt that Virginian heart sink.
With abiding grief of two small graves in his soul,
Ezekiel ate and ached from the bitter scroll.
Rebuking secession till night fell on the land,
With Virginia, he took the Confederate stand.
Seminary boys marched away—away to die;
The aging prophet lived—the cause to justify.

Dabney, your battles would be fought and lost and won.
Dabney, in death the South would find life in the Son.

Dabney’s War Years

Armed with Bible, catechism, and umbrella,
With faith that every bullet shot was foreordained,
Dabney rode off to serve with the Southern soldiers,
Seeking that lost souls be saved and states’ rights maintained.

Chaplain Dabney preached under the trees and bright stars
To death’s tempters--farm boys who would die in corn rows.
Giving seed or water until the Spirit tugged
Rebirthing the soldiers, wooing the Gospel’s foes.

Soon Dabney became Stonewall Jackson’s chief of staff,
Making the camp a Calvinist presbytery.
The parson waged war with a theologian’s zeal,
His uniform style out of the ordinary.

But Dabney served best with the bold swath of his pen
Where Jackson’s faith and fast movements were set in print.
From preacher to deacon-soldier a testament–
Two Christian Southerners bonded in covenant.

Jackson died after Chancellorsville, Lee surrendered;
Davis ankled with chain and threat, the cause ended.
The army, paroled and fed, sent home to poor farms,
But Dabney’s war, in his soul, raged unsuspended.

Dabney fought on with Rebel stubbornness with his pen,
During Reconstruction’s cold and harsh winter years.
Books, letters, and poems from the warrior-preacher flowed,
As he waited the next century’s grateful cheers.


Dabney’s Last Duties

Dabney, with piercing sight, surveyed and understood:
Burned towns, weed-filled fields, crying children, hollow eyes;
The drag-footed march of a solitary man
To home, a fresh grave, empty barns, no victor’s prize.

Dabney, with war’s hardened hands, lectured through his notes;
The boys—some older now—backs still feeling cold nights,
Hard ground, with Bibles, borrowed books, scraps of paper,
War and faith--blurred in the Wilderness’s fire lights.

Dabney, still defending slavery, secession,
And Calvinism; face hard set, holding old creeds;
The ache of lost sons; Tom Jackson’s biography;
The cold ordained blade, warming and filling his needs.

Dabney, the South’s Elijah of pen and pulpit,
Cutting throats of Baal’s Yankee priests at Brook Kishon;
Unrepentant, unreconciled, seething and hot,
With threats to leave his torn land for some home beyond.

Dabney, exiled in soul, to a prophet’s watch called,
Writing sons to be birthed in existential times,
That “The sum of the gospel is Christ crucified”;
Constructing institution toppling paradigms.

Dabney, when blinded by age, but able to see,
In Texas, grasped the pulpit, standing with the Word;
Before Appomattox’s cave led to the dark age,
When his voice would for a long season not be heard.

Dabney died the winter of 1898;
Interred at Hampden-Sidney Seminary;
His books, sat idle for decades on faithless shelves;
Until spring’s warmth followed that cold January.

Recent Readings

Last night I finished A Light in the Window,the first volume in the Mitford series by Jan Karon. For several years I endured my wife laughing and then crying as she read along in this series of books. All too often she would stop reading...and interrupt my reading...to inform me that Father Tim was just like me. My sister-in-law and mother-in-law also read and loved the books. "Mere posh and shere puff," I concluded since these books were loved by women. But then George Grant liked the books. So I finally took the time to go visit Mitford and meet the folks there. This book was my daily desert reading--meaning, the book(s) I am allowed to read once I have my daily allowance of theology, history, and literature.
I fear I will have to press on with the series.

Before I return to Mitford, I have to sidetrack back to Narnia. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, one of the volumes of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, is being read as part of the assignments for my junior high class. I will work on reading it during spring break. And since it is a break, I will be able to cease Eusebius for a short spell. My junior high students and I are about half-way through reading that church father's Church History.

And speaking of half-way, my high school class is now approaching the half-way point in Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitious 14th Century. This book is so encyclopedic, so panoramic, so all encompassing that it is a springboard to all kinds of things Medieval. Other Medieval readings include a volume of Phillip Schaff that I have been occasionally plodding along in and a book on the Crusades by an author named Madden that I started and put aside and need to resume reading from.
And yet more plodding, Ralph Smith's Trinity and Reality is my source for my (mostly) adult Sunday school class. We are completing chapter three this week and will be dealing with the unity of the Trinity.

Rodney Stark's excellent historical study The Victory of Reason is proving to be a useful survey of the topic of what made Western Civilization different, more free, more advanced than the rest of the world. The answer is Christianity. This same theme was also developed in Thomas Woods's book How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.

In other readings, my high schoolers and I will be reading Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves, which is actually book one of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene during spring break. Now I was not going to give an assignment for spring break but they insisted. A student asked, "Isn't there something short that we can read over spring break." I exploded in a five minute tirade against kids these days. Back in my day, when the teacher did not give an assignment, we kept our mouths shut and did not do an assignments. These young rebels I have to teach are much harder to control.

For Lenten readings, I am reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Cost of Discipleship. Bonhoeffer, I understand, had or developed some incredibly warped and unorthodox ideas. I believe that such theological deviancy was the chaff and that The Cost of Discipleship was the wheat of his spiritual journey. His book is quite powerfully revealing to me how little my commitment is, how paltry my faith is, and how beggardly my sacrifice is.

Perhaps next week I will also start on a beautiful new book titled Holy Week Sonnets by Philip Rosenbaum and published by Posterity Press. This small collection of Bible readings and poems would be most apt for this time of year.

So many books, so little time. But at least this is spring break.

Giving Students Hell

When we resume class after spring break, I expect to give my students Hell.
After Hell, being the good Protestants they are, I expect to give them Purgatory. And only after all that, I think they will be ready for Paradise. I am excited about this for it all means that we are embarking on a great journey, a quest, a adventure into the soul of Man and into the nature of salvation. We will be reading Dante's Divine Comedy, one of the greatest of epics ever written. When my class read this work a few years back, we read the Allen Mandelbaum translation. That was my first complete reading of Dante. (I have a degree or two, but very little actual education.)At that time, I bought the three volume Dorothy Sayers translation, but school ended and my interests turned elsewhere.

This year I mentioned to my class that I wished we had the Sayers translation. A riot erupted in my class with students demanding to read Sayers and with threats from them of their buying personal copies of the book. I gave in. I ordered Sayers, and I will soon give them Hell--to begin with.

Joseph Pearce's book Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief (Ignatius Press, 2000)contains some interesting insights on Dorothy Sayers's experiences with Dante:

‘I am to speak to you tonight,’ Sayers began, ‘about the Arts in this country—their roots in Christianity, their present condition, and the means by which (if we find that they are not flourishing as they should) their mutilated limbs and withering branches may be restored by re-grafting into the main trunk of Christian tradition.’ It was the desire to cultivate culture in the post-war desert that inspired Sayers to embark on her translation of Dante.
“Prompted to re-read the Divine Comedy after reading Charles Williams’s The Figure of Beatrice, published in 1943, Sayers removed a copy of the Inferno from the shelf during an air-raid in August 1944 and took it to the shelter with her. The next few hours changed her life. Inspired by the depth and permanence of Dante she resolved to work on a new English translation…. According to Barbara Reynolds, Sayers ‘saw this job of interpreting Dante’s view of the world, of human behavior, of salvation and so on, as …part of her social concern to educate people’s minds in readiness for social reconstruction after the war.
“For Sayers, as for Dante, the possibilities and practicalities of social reconstruction were rooted in theology: ‘As an intellectual study it was something that she had read pretty widely…In her writings on the Christian faith, on social concerns and on human behavior, she had taken a line which was very similar to the allegory of Dante. And when she came upon Dante she found there, writ large by a master hand, what she herself had been trying to say to people.’
Sayers believed that Dante still spoke with a power capable of changing individuals and therefore society. This appears to be borne out by the profound influence of Dante’s Divine Comedy on many of the century’s converts to Christianity. Eliot, Lewis, Chesterton, and Baring all professed a major debt to Dante, who spoke to them across the abyss of six centuries in a language of permanent relevance.”
[Pages 254-255]

“That the Inferno is a picture of human society in a state of sin and corruption, everybody will readily agree. And since we are today fairly well convinced that society is in a bad way and not necessarily evolving in the direction of perfectibility, we find it easy enough to recognize the various stages by which the deep of corruption is reached. Futility; lack of a living faith; the drift into loose morality, greedy consumption, financial irresponsibility, and uncontrolled bad temper; a self-opinionated and obstinate individualism; violence, sterility, and lack of reverence for life and property including one’s own; the exploitation of sex, the debasing of language by advertisement and propaganda, the commercializing of religion, the pandering to superstition and the conditioning of people’s minds by mass-hysteria and ‘spell-binding’ of all kinds, venality and string-pulling in public affairs, hypocrisy, dishonesty in material things, intellectual dishonesty, the fomenting of discord (class against class, nation against nation) for what one can get out of it, the falsification and destruction of all the means of communication; the exploitation of the lowest and stupidest mass-emotions; treachery even to the fundamentals of kinship, country, the chosen friend, and the sworn allegiance; these are the a---too-recognizable stages that lead to the cold death of society and the extinguishing of all civilized relations.”

(As quoted on pages 367-368 of Pearce from Sayers’s Introductory Papers on Dante, published in 1954.)

I love the image of Dorothy Sayers huddled up in a crowded, dark air-raid shelter reading away at Dante. Her vision of this work being something that could contribute to a cultural and spiritual renewal of her fellow British people says much for her keen intellect. Dr. Louise Cowan has repeatedly spoken of literature as being a mode of knowledge. If literature is a mode of knowledge, a way of understanding the world, man, and reality, then Dante's Divine Comedy is a useful route to follow. We will keep you posted on our progress.

The Agrarians--A Poem

Theirs was a confederacy of poetry;
They searched for that field of Southern ground
where the plowed furrow intersected relics of Homer’s epic,
where Rebel yells echoed Beowulf’s vaunted triumph.
Literary critics, shrouded in a prophet’s mantel,
receiving the prophesied prophet’s scorned welcome from home.
Blind poets, whose vision reached past the slow summers,
with flies buzzing around the screened-in porch door,
beyond the plain dry hum of the combustion engine
as the old trucks rattled a load of crops to market.

Sword weary soldiers paused in battle with puzzled looks:
the uncertain trumpet confused the orders;
the light appearing across the lake
left those on the bank to wonder.

Did Forrest’s cavalry still pound the dirt,
with lathered horses and Bedford’s angry cursing,
and the hungry blade still red and dripping Yankee blood
outside the faculty office where amidst walls of books,
they sat at desks, in shirts, white and stiff,
smoking cigarettes, discussing novels and fine whiskey,
with bulky drafts and scribbled notes scattered around?

Or was it a dim haze lifting around the river’s bend,
where Saul’s armor and David’s sling both ill fitted,
but some line, some unrhymed measure, some stray thought,
would slide against modernity creating a tinder?

Separate and united the twelve Southerners stood;
their tracts outlasted both New South rage and communism.
Some trekked north and were respectfully tenured;
their journals satisfied the academic dragons.
Meanwhile their land of collard green-fed farmers with fiddle songs
gave way to concreted franchises with grass breaking through cracks seeking a light;
Their land lost, shipped as raw materials to a brute factory,
returned, unrecognized, standardized, matched, cataloged.
With only the occasional chimney and hearth and burned out cabin
grazed by cattle and crowded by highways and banks.

Yet even now those books, that scholarly dream, that poetic vision,
the young men’s daring each other and raging with delight,
still stands like St. Andrew’s Cross, still stands throughout the land.

More fugitive now than agrarian, with pages worn, marked, underlined,
generations of faithful hearts gather,
holding that knowledge carried to the heart,
standing at the same gate, long past that desolate autumn,
even past the dead overcast winter
when the ideas hung like frozen parsnips,
past the feeling of isolation; now feeling an attraction
by the Confederate graves on an expectant April day,
calling for Lee to come down from the mountains,
reconstructing the type of regiment to lead,
envisioning converging lines of gray toward tree-lined hills,
with rest in the shade on this side of the river
with Christendom, honor, and a republic of letters—
the kingdom of glory—all God’s earth now Southern land.

Machen Got It Right Again

"Are then Christianity and culture in a conflict that is to be settled only by the destruction of one or the other of the contending forces? A third solution, fortunately, is possible - namely, consecration. Instead of destroying the arts and sciences or being indifferent to them, let us cultivate them with all the enthusiasm of the veriest humanist, but at the same time consecrate them to the service of our God. Instead of stifling the pleasures afforded by the acquisition of knowledge or by the appreciation of what is beautiful, let us accept these pleasures as the gifts of a Heavenly Father. Instead of obliterating the distinction between Kingdom and the world, or on the other hand withdrawing from the world into a sort of modernized intellectual monasticism, let us go forth joyfully, enthusiastically to make the world subject to God."

- J. Gresham Machen, September 20, 1912

From The Victory of Reason

I am plodding through a marvelous new book called The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success by Rodney Stark. This book is a great supplement or possible replacement for any texts on Western Civilization that ignore, defame, and demean the Christian faith. More can and will be said about this book later, but for now, let me enter into some real scholarship: I am going to quote a quote from the book.

For many non-Europeans, becoming a Christian is intrinsic to becoming modern. Thus it is quite plausible that Christianity remains an essential element in the globalization of modernity. Consider this recent statement by one of China's leading scholars:
One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world. We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had the more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West is so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don't have any doubts about this.

Stark's source was Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming china and Changing the Global Balance of Power by David Aikman. I don't have that book, but I have and have read Philip Jenkins's excellent study titled The Next Christendom.Jenkins refers to a short story by Evelyn Waugh (British author and Catholic Christian and a man in spite of the name Evelyn) where an Englishman is transported 500 years into the future. He and other Englishmen in the story are primitive barbarians who are being evangelized by missionaries from Africa.
Romans 11 has some useful insights on limbs being cut off and others being grafted in. Of course, the context refers to the situation of the Jews in Paul's time, but the greater application can be seen today.
Chinese scholars can see what the American academics and media cannot--the overwhelming influence of Christianity on our civilization.

Who is Ryan Setliff?

Of the making of blogs and comments on blogs, there is no end. I envy those big guys whose blog entries elicit enough commentary to fill a huge volume. Blogging can be quite lonely. "Hey, everyone, listen to my unsolicited opinion on T.S. Eliot's study of Rudyard Kipling's economic theory." And who listens or reads, and how do we know?
I have received several and mostly kind comments from a variety of people. Grace McCool comments quite often and quite nicely. Grace was a student of mine at Veritas for some years and she remains a true student of God's Word and world. Her thoughts are often complimentary and yet full of insight. (Of course, if you compliment me, I believe you are full of insight.)
Ryan Setliff has recently left several comments on my blogging entries. THE Ryan Setliff. And so, who is Ryan Setliff?
Ryan and I are e-friends. I have never met him in person, but was pleased to make his acquaintance a few years ago upon reading a book review he did on Amazon. I was impressed at this Southern gentleman's intellectual insight and was pleased to learn that he was a Christian of Reformed persuasion. Christian, Confederate, Calvinist, & Conservative wins a person an instant friendship ticket with me.
Ryan and I have swapped book reviews, essays, autobiographical insights, and prayer requests since we became acquainted.
He is ranked as one of the top reviewers at www.Amazon.com. His blessing on a book guarantees its conservative/libertarian viewpoint or its Reformed theological perspective. His curse upon a book, in many cases, relegates that book to the fate of such ignoble works as 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Happen in 1988 and Dirt Roads and Confederates.
Besides a shared cameraderie that bridges the geography between Arkansas where I am and old Virginia where Ryan resides, I enjoy his friendship because of our differences.
Keep in mind that I am an arch-conservative. I swung far to the right while in college and continued to move to the right long after that. I have at times advocated such extreme measures as moving the nation's capital to the middle of Kansas and housing it in metal buildings. There is hardly a right wing cause that I have not espoused.
For years I was against socialist security because I believed that the system would not last. Now at age 50, I question whether I will last.
When I entered the Christian school ministry, my right wing extremism moderated. I still believed most of what I had always believed, but my focus changed. I am patiently postmillenial, so I am happy with a Bush presidency and believe that even under Queen Hilliary the First that Christian institutions would continue to progress.
Ryan has an ideological bent that I no longer have.
In short, compared to Ryan, I am a liberal, a leftist, a big government, establishment man. Remember--compared to Ryan.
I welcome this difference. My previous post--A Republic and an Empire--is just the sort of thing to rile a fanatic like Ryan. Some of what he writes and posts riles me. Iron sharpens iron, we read in Proverbs, and one man sharpens another.
I can be a pretty dull Christian (in several senses of the word). I need the sharpening I get from those I agree with most of the time and those I often disagree with.
In the Christian world, and alas in the Reformed community, we too often love the "Circled Wagons for Jesus" approach to cultural conquest. Don't read Christopher Dawson because he's Catholic; don't read Lewis because he has witches in his story; don't read Rushdoony because he's a theonomist; don't read N.T. Wright because he allows for the ordination of women; don't read Gordon Clark because he didn't agree with Van Til; don't read Van Til because he didn't agree with Clark; and don't read any Christian who writes a best seller.
Christians are the ones who first created universities where ideas could be thought through and exchanged and sharpened, but all too often we fear the clash of ideas.
We need more Christian disagreement, but it must be done with civility and with the aim of edifying the body of Christ.
For more on Ryan Setliff, who was at some point the focus of this essay, visit his blog at http://puritanhead.blogspot.com/