I just learned a new grammatical term: synesis. You can find definitions of it here or here. When a sentence does not have subject/verb or noun/pronoun agreement, but the sentence is still correct because the words chosen fit its sense, that is a synesis. An example from the KJV of the Bible is Romans 6:23. “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

The Suicide Club is a trilogy of short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson. The first of which is the Story of the Young Man with Cream Tarts. The Suicide Club is the place where dissipated, young men go to conclude their downward spiral. You know the type — gamblers, drunkards, philanderers. They have reached the bottom and have lost all hope. Many still cling to some odd notion of honor that precludes suicide while others do not possess the determination to kill themselves. And so enters the Suicide Club. It handles arranging the details of an “accidental death” and until then provides a stimulating atmosphere for conversation, gambling, smoking, and drinking.

You'll have to read the story if want all the details (here or here), but one piece of information that is vital to what I want to write about is this: the member who will die on any given evening is selected through the dealing of cards. The ace of spades is the sign of death. This adds an additional thrill for the young men and perhaps a sense of Fate.

My character of interest is, of course, the young man with the cream tarts. He inherited quite a good living from his family, but is not exactly frugal. Why don't I let him speak for himself:

I can play the violin nearly well enough to earn money in the orchestra of a penny gaff, but not quite. The same remark applies to the flute and the French horn. I learned enough of whist to lose a hundred a year at that scientific game. My acquaintance with French was sufficient to enable me to squander money in Paris with almost the same facility as in London. In short, I am a person full of manly accomplishments.

In the story we meet him as he is squandering his last available forty pounds by giving away tarts in the pubs of London. He had met a girl, fallen in love, and then realized he did not have enough money left to marry her. He chose to rapidly blow the rest of his money and join the club.

On his second night at the club (I'm skipping a lot of the back story), someone else is dealt the ace of spades. The young man goes up to him and says, “I would give a million, if I had it, for your luck.” There is an interesting observation about human nature here (whether intentional on Stevenson's part or not). When man loses hope — when he is drowning in life's ocean — he loses the ability to reason or see his way out. The young man of the tarts was at this moment willing to give a million pounds for death when those same million pounds would certainly suffice to support a wife.

The following is a public service announcement from the Society for Literal, Context-Free Hermeneutics:

We know why God gave us the Good Book. It serves as a guidebook to life — a set of rules to be obeyed. There is no part of life that is not directly addressed by at least one verse if we will only look for it. And yet when we go looking for a car to get us to church potluck dinners and committee meetings, we ignore the wisdom that God has for us.

Let us consider 2 Chronicles 1:16-17: “And Solomon had horses imported from Egypt and Keveh; the king’s merchants bought them in Keveh at the current price. They also acquired and imported from Egypt a chariot for six hundred shekels of silver, and a horse for one hundred and fifty.”

So we see that the Scriptures are crystal clear on this topic. We must purchase foreign cars even as Solomon imported foreign horses and chariots. For what were horses and chariots in those days but means of conveyance as automobiles are to us today. And remember that it was only two paragraphs ago that God gave Solomon great wisdom and knowledge so we should not doubt his judgement. The parking lots of America's churches ought be filled with Honda’s, Toyota’s and Volvo’s.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging.

You may have read an article at one time or another that talked about the large number of words that the Eskimos have for snow. It probably said that this shows how important snow is to their culture. I recently read an essay by Geoffrey Pullum called The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax that deals with this topic. It turns out that these claims are based on shoddy research and a misunderstanding of languages. Inuit is a synthetic language (you can combine words to form new words). Since it is a synthetic language there is not really any limit to the number of words one can make about snow. Snow that fell last week could be a single word in Inuit as could snow that sounds crunchy when you walk on it. Using the reasoning that Pullum derides in his article, anything and everything is important to the Eskimos except maybe refrigerators.

Karl Barth, one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century, was once asked to summarize all his writings on Christianity. He answered,

“Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

I skipped this verse on my way through the first chapter because I did not feel prepared to comment on it then. I was surprised by it because it seemed too theologically deep for Christians who were described by Paul as infants in Christ. If anything, it reminds us that it is probable that there were members of the Corinthian church who were not spiritually immature. It is very easy to lump all of them into a group and then give them a blanket label rather than considering the likely diversity of the members’ spiritual states.

Here is the text from the NASB:

“But by His [God's] doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption”

There is significant depth in this verse due to the usage of such terms as righteousness, sanctification and redemption. The verse also sparks questions like what does it mean to be “in Christ Jesus” or what does it mean that Christ became wisdom for us. Now the first question may not seem like much to someone who grew up in a church and knows “church language”, but to many others it is probably difficult to define what is meant by being in Christ. The second question can only be understood within the context of the first few chapters of this letter alongside the culture of Corinth. I prefer to write about the three terms I mentioned earlier so I will leave these questions unanswered here.