Here’s an odd lot of books at hand in our basement, books I’ve picked off the shelf for a turn-through . . . except, that is, for the last one, to which I paid more detailed attention, as part of the Vanderbilt alum online reading group.)

The Bay Psalm Book (Imprinted 1640), Intro by Diarmaid MacCulloch—Hymns were once a radical innovation in the church since, as the thinking went, God had already provided a songbook for worship, namely the Psalms. This particular “Psalter” was the work of a group of Massachusetts Bay Colony ministers, one of them Cotton Mather’s grandfather. Coming out twenty years after the Pilgrims landed, it was the first book printed in British North America. 

You’ll probably recognize these opening words to a favorite Psalm:

The Lord to mee a shepheard is,

Want therefore shall not I,

Hee in the folds of tender-grasse,

Doth cause mee downe to lie;

Fatherhood, by Bill Cosby—Cosby has notoriously “crashed and burned,” but, as with others who’ve blown it big time, we don’t need to discount everything or even most of what he said. I first heard him on the Tonight Show when he cracked up host Johnny Carson and the rest of us with his portrayal of Noah dealing with the Lord over his Ark assignment. In the 1980s, on The Cosby Show as Cliff Huxtable, he played a thoughtful father and successful doctor, modeling a healthy black home, which fed into his cause, pressing blacks to up their game and to quit blaming others for their troubles. Of course, this earned him a lot of criticism from Jesse Jackson and his cohorts, but he stood his ground. Understandably, there was great delight in some circles when it was revealed that he had taken sexual advantage of a number of women through the years. And indeed, his own “game” had been far less than admirable. Nevertheless, he had some good things to say, and with humor, as in this volume, with an introduction and afterword by Harvard medical school prof, Alvin Poussaint.

It’s hard to resist reading down through chapters that begin with sentences like this: “When your fifteen-year-old son does speak, he often says one of two things: either ‘Okay,’ which, as we know, means ‘I haven’t killed anyone,’ or ‘No problem’”: “The father of a daughter, especially one in her teens, will find that she doesn’t like to be seen walking with him on the street”; and “Nothing separates the generations more than music.”

My Favorite Illustrations, by Herschel H. Hobbs—Hobbs was called “Mr. Baptist” for his great presence and influence in the SBC. As pastor of FBC Oklahoma City, president of the convention, voice of The Baptist Hour radio program, and lead author of the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message, he was a natural for inclusion in a book on Baptist theologians, edited by David Dockery and Timothy George back in the 1980s, and I got to write the chapter on Hobbs. I was pastor of FBC El Dorado, Arkansas at the time, and I was delighted to be assigned a living subject, one I could interview. (Others had men from years past, like Andrew Fuller, C. H. Spurgeon, and B. H. Carroll.) I scheduled a visit to his Oklahoma home, hoping to get as much as an hour on tape. Turns out, I had to excuse myself after several hours for the drive back. He was so personable and gracious. 

This compilation of his illustrations, upwards of eight hundred, covering about seven dozen topics, from conversion to hypocrisy to Satan to worship, include aphorisms, stories, and choice quotes. Here are a few selections:

A gossiper usually knows where to take his garbage. Avoid making your ears someone else’s garbage cans.

The parable of the Good Samaritan gives three philosophies of life. The robber’s philosophy was “What you have is mine, and I will take it.” The priest and Levite had the philosophy that “What is mine is mine, and I will keep ti.” The Samaritan’s philosophy was “What is mine is yours, and I will share it.” Jesus endorsed the Samaritan’s philosophy and said, “Go, and do thou likewise” (Luke 10:37).

“The beginning of anxiety is the end of faith; and the beginning of faith is the end of anxiety.”—George Muller.

Droll Stories, by Balzac—I had only a passing familiarity with the French novelist and playwright, Honore de Balzac, so when I spotted this book in a used/cheap setting, I bought it for $2.45 for a look. I did a little outside (Wikipedia) reading on the man and found him celebrated for his eye-for-detail realism in describing nineteenth-century French life. Flipping through the table of contents, I found a piece called “The Vicar of Azay-Le-Rideau,” and from the first sentence on, I saw he could be less than reverential toward the church of his day and place: 

In those days the priests no longer took any woman in legitimate marriage, but kept good mistresses as pretty as they could get; which custom has since been interdicted by the council, as every one knows, because, indeed, it was not pleasant that the private confessions of people should be retold to a wench who would laugh at them, beside the other secret doctrines, ecclesiastical arrangement, and speculations which are part and parcel of the politics of the Church of Rome

FUBAR: Soldier Slang of World War II, by Gordon L. Rottman—In my Army days, I became familiar with a host of expressions likely unfamiliar with the civilian population. Every time I arrived on post for my annual training, I had to brush up on once-familiar expressions and then learn some new ones. Some were wholesome acronyms, e.g., WWMCCS, pronounced “wimmicks” (Worldwide Military Command Control System) and POMCUS (Prepositioning of Materiel Configured in Unit Sets). Some not so much, as in this book title, FUBAR (the cleaned up version being “Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition” and SNAFU (again, cleaned up, “Situation Normal, All Fouled Up”). Some things were named for their role designations—Jeep from “GP” (general purpose vehicle) and Huey from UH (utility helicopter). Some derived from their letters in the phonetic alphabet, which started, “Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta . . .” So we got “Victor Charlie” from “VC,” which stood for Vietcong, and “40 Mike Mike” from 40 mm/millimeter, the size of a round of ammunition for a grenade launcher. And then there’s “Wilco,” from a radio response, “Will comply.” (BTW, when you hear someone in a movie say, “Roger Willco Over and Out,” they show that they don’t understand that ‘Willco’ assumes ‘Roger,’ in that the latter means “I understand,” and, when you say you’ll comply, it’s assumed to understand that with which you’re complying; Also, ‘Over’ means “I’m passing our communication over to you; it’s you turn to talk” and ‘Out’ means “Signing out,” so the two terms are contradictory.)

This book had hundreds of these expressions, including some from Britain (e.g., “squaddie,” a new recruit, in a drill squad) and Germany (e.g., “Esak,” for Evangelische Sunden-Abwehr-Kanone, or “Protestant Anti-Sin Gun,” i.e., a chaplain).

The Cotton Patch Version of Luke and Acts: Jesus’ Doings and the Happenings, Translation by Clarence Jordan—My dad, Dr. Raymond Arthur Coppenger (PhD, church history, Edinburgh), was a 1937 classmate of Clarence Jordan at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, back when they got a BD instead of an MDiv.  Jordan went on to found Koinonia Farms at Americus, Georgia , a Christian, racially-integrated commune of sorts in the Jim Crow South. While there, he contributed to the hatching of Habitat for Humanity, whose work is better known today.  Koinonia (which is Greek for “fellowship”) is still in existence, to which Sharon and I can attest, having visited there awhile back on a tour of the region, a tour that took us to the National POW Museum at Andersonville, FDR’s “Summer White House” at Warm Springs, my Fort Benning “alma mater,” Jimmy Carter’s church in Plains, and then, over in Alabama, son Caleb’s college church and pastor (Al Jackson at Lakeview BC) in Auburn and Tuskegee Institute and the Tuskegee Airman National Historic Site in, well, Tuskegee. An historically rich circuit.

Jordan (pronounced “Jerdun”) covered the New Testament with what’s described as “a modern translation with a Southern accent, fervent, earthy, rich in humor,” one more readily accessible to the locals. These translations inspired the musical, Cotton Patch Gospel, with music and lyrics by Harry Chapin, best known for his song, Cat’s in the Cradle. Here’s a sampling of Jordan’s treatment of the biblical text: “It will be hell for you rich people, because you’ve had your fling” (Luke 6:24); “. . . while Annas and Caiaphas were co-presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention (Luke 3:2); “Then the Confuser said to him,’So you’re God’s man, huh? Well, then, tell this rock to become a pone of bread.” (Luke 4:4); “Well, the apostles in Atlanta heard that ‘Harlem’ had come over to the Word of God, so they sent Rock and Jack there.” (Acts 8:14).

Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—This novel is one of the books we’ve read together in the Vanderbilt alum book club. It’s built around the Nigerian civil war which raged during my college years. The battle cry of the secessionists was “Biafra is born!” But it wasn’t to be, so the southeast coastal region, populated mainly by Igbo people, remains in Nigeria today. The book struck a particular chord with me since I’d been working with a variety of Nigerians, both Baptist and Anglicans, including Peter Akinola (the Anglican archbishop of the nation), Gbenga Gbesan (who wrote Akinola’s biography), Mel and Lillian Wasson (missionaries back the the FMB days), and an SBTS Legacy Center driver in the early 2000s, of the Nupe tribe (whose name slips my old mind at the moment). Akinola provided me a suitcase of PAL-format tapes on the Muslim violence against Christians in the north (with a concentration of Housa people, as distinct from the Yoruba region of the south), and I was able to edit them into a video presentation to a Kairos Journal event in NYC.

In the Vanderbilt program, we pitch in comments as we work our way through them. Here’s my end-of-book comment:

I’m glad I read it, though I wish it hadn’t been so long, keeping me from other things I needed to read. I’m more a fan of essays, but I do enjoy book-length accounts, e.g., Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. This one ran on and on, and I ended up skimming the last half, at about 50 pages an hour rather than the 15, with which I began. That being said, here are my first takes:

1. I’ve never been to Nigeria, but I’ve had a lot of face-to-face contact with Nigerians and missionaries who’d lived there for decades. The book got me deeper into the culture, at least part of it. There are so many godly Christians in Nigeria, and Adiche seems to have scant acquaintance with or appreciation for them. So much promiscuity. So much superficial, nominal, and yes, phony association with the faith. And, as usual, the clergy come off like jerks, e.g., Pastor Ambrose; Fathers Marcel and Jude, who start out well enough but prove to be morally squalid. Only Father Damian comes through as admirable. As an evangelical and a pastor, I got used to American literature consigning us to the land of deplorables and inscrutables. I used to get depressed over Hollywood’s failure to do us justice, more apt to produce an Elmer Gantry or a Max Cady (the scripture-tatted thug in Cape Fear, played by DeNiro) than a bio of Peter Marshall, as in the 1955 A Man Called Peter. But then I realized they hadn’t a clue about or heart for the sort of people and culture you find in Bible-Belt pews. Same old same old.

2. I love to pick up new vocabulary, the sort of thing I tormented my students with through readings quizzes in my philosophy classes. They knew I might give them a multiple-choice quiz question on ‘calumny’ (from Hume) or ‘otiose’ (from Wollheim), telling them it was important to look up words you didn’t know. In this book, for instance, I learned ‘harmattan’ (sandy wind from the Sahara to the NE) and ‘green george wrapper’ (using “george” cloth, which originated in India for saris [and whose etymology I can’t find]), dress involving several pieces, including a blouse and headdress. And as an old ROTC product (commissioned in 1970), I was interested in the “ogbunigwe” land mines. Turns out, this was a family of Biafran-developed weapons, beginning with surface to air missiles. It derives from the word for “a killer in the heavens.”

3. Tribalism is decisive in Nigeria, as it is in Sudan, where I’ve spent a fair amount of time among the Dinka, Nuer, Beja, Fur, Kababish, etc. This obsession flies in the face of scriptural teaching on the universal image of God in man, of the NT teaching that there is, in Christ, neither Jew nor Greek, and that biological family ties are not trump cards against the rule of law (think of Saddam Hussein’s flight to his people in Tikrit, where he knew he would be safer). I lament the growth of tribalism in the US, with identity politics and hatred of the “melting pot” ascendent. It’s toxic in the developing world, and now we’re falling in love with it.

4. There were some cool quotes, including the one on p. 457, which said that Ugwu “was not living his life; life was living him.” And on 540, where, having turned to animism for luck, Olanna said, “I do believe in it. I believe in everything. I believe in anything that will bring my sister home.” A nice encapsulation of the modern amalgamation of pluralism and syncretism and pragmatism, popular in the US.

5. I’d not heard this argument for the moral superiority of the colonized (501): “The white man brought racism into the world. He used it as a basis of conquest. It is always easier to conquer a more humane people.” For one thing, Nigerian tribalism seemed to have generated a fair amount of racism among the black people themselves of the region, and Arab slave traders in Africa definitely thought themselves superior to the indigenous, sub-Saharan people they took captive. And I thought Kainene had a good retort, “So when we conquer the Nigerians we will be the less humane?” I’m not arguing for the moral superiority of the colonizers, but appreciating the unmasking of a conceit.

6. An observation by Aunty Ifeka on p. 283 brought to mind a conversation I had with my wife. Aunty said, “You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man . . .” I’m having a jeweler in Evanston, IL, create a piece based on the “seven species of Deuteronomy 8:8,” this for our 50th wedding anniversary. The jeweler asked me for an inscription on the back, and I suggested, a dedication “to my fruitful daughter of Israel.” (She’s not Jewish, but rather a child of Abraham in faith.) I began to wonder if she’d prefer “a fruitful daughter,” but she assured me that the use of ‘my’ was just fine with her. And coming upon this passage, I was struck by how far this book’s marriages were from the biblical ideal. And yes, I’d be happy if my wife had given me something with ‘my fruitful son of Israel.’

Well, I’m sure there’s something to offend everyone here. But that’s what I have.

Thanks for your observations, both in writing and in the Zoom gathering we had earlier.