Extract from Seeing the Psalter, page 78
The opening
psalms place some emphasis on fire and brimstone as punishment for the enemies.
you will set them
as a fiery oven
of the time of your presence
יהוה in his anger will swallow them
and fire will devour them
Speaking
personally and subjectively, the Psalter draws me away from the traditional
objectivized view of Hell. The traditional imagery for Hell is drawn in part
from such psalms, but traditional Hell over-determines their intent. Jesus (Matthew 10:28, Luke 12:5) tells his disciples to fear him who can destroy both body and soul in
hell, and this fear has been transposed in our traditions to a fear of
judgment after death or fear of an apocalyptic day of wrath (Dies Irae). The psalms speak to me about a present
fear that knows the reality of psalms like 6 and 38, where the wrath being
known now is faced. Then, as John 5:24 explains, we are past the judgment.
The wrath endures but a moment (Psalm 30:6).
In Psalms 20 and 21, each of us,
male and female, is to identify with the king. And the enemies which are
destroyed in the second half of the psalm are our own self-destructive
impulses. They are swallowed up in fire, but we, each, are saved and crowned
and filled with joy not of our own
making.
What is our heart’s
desire? This is scarcely expressible, but when the gift is known, the
receiver of such a gift recognizes that this was the prayer being prayed, as
Paul says, the Spirit
prays in us with groaning that can not be uttered (Romans 8:26). It would seem that we are not even aware of it.
Can such a
claim be made with appropriate knowledge in a scientific age? The psalms are
prayer. Prayer is not subject to the categories or assumptions of science. Its
mode is subjective. Yet the unmeasurable and inexpressible is a truth even in
science. If I tell you that you cannot know at the same time both the colour
and the spin of an elementary particle, am I not expressing something oddly
that is unmeasurable? Or if I speak of bosonic string theory in 26 dimensions focused
on cubic Open String Field Theory in the presence of two parallel D24-branes,[1] as do doctoral students in
science such as Longton, am I not speaking with metaphor? It seems to me that
both disciplines, prayer and science, require appropriate inference from
evidence, even when the evidence is inexpressible.
There are
things that we can know but cannot pin down in so many words. What if, for the
sake of example, the presence of יהוה was a real benefit and was sensed by
faith. It has been said by many people that there is a reality to the
experience of this presence of God. Are their words not to be counted as
evidence? So the poet writes in Psalm 21, you have cheered him with the gladness of your presence.
[1] Brane, short for
membrane; 24 indicates the number of dimensions.
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