Blogging in Christ — Issue 17

Meat, Not Milk

A writer who has finished one piece soon faces the same question again: what shall the next piece be about? The easy answer is to look outward. What are men asking? What is being discussed? What subject would draw attention or fill a gap in the archive? The list grows quickly, and it feels like diligence. Yet a list of subjects is not a piece, and a subject found outside the text has no joint in it for the writer to open. He may still write around it, gathering verses that share a word with the subject, but the result will be an arrangement of his own making, not a testimony the text itself yields. The piece will sound full and prove empty.

The passage that names this danger also names the remedy. "For although by this time you should be teachers, you again need to have someone teach you the rudiments of the first principles of the revelations of God. You have come to need milk, and not solid food." (Heb 5:12) The rebuke is not that milk exists. Milk is food, and a newborn needs it. The rebuke is that time has passed and growth has not. Those who should be teachers need teaching again, because they have stayed where they began. A writer in that condition does not lack subjects. He lacks exercise. He can repeat the first principles, but he cannot yet handle a text that requires him to discern.

For the distinction is drawn not by difficulty of vocabulary but by experience. "For everyone who lives on milk is not experienced in the word of righteousness, for he is a baby." (Heb 5:13) The milk-fed man is inexperienced in the word of righteousness. He has heard the word, but he has not lived with it long enough for it to train him. Therefore he reaches for what is already familiar, what can be said without cost, what no one will dispute. His pieces repeat the beginnings because the beginnings are all he has practiced. They are true, as far as they go, but they do not go far, and they cannot carry a reader further than the writer himself has gone.

Against this stands the grown man, and the mark of his growth is given in a single mechanism. "But solid food is for those who are full grown, who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern good and evil." (Heb 5:14) By reason of use. The senses are not exercised by collecting subjects, nor by reading widely for novelty, nor by learning new methods for finding ideas. They are exercised by use: the same word handled again and again, until the hand knows its weight and the eye knows its joints. Use is slow work. It is reading a chapter a second time after the first reading gave nothing, and a tenth time after the ninth gave only a phrase, and finding on a later reading that a connection the writer had missed now stands plain. The discernment does not come from the search for a topic. It comes from the practice, and the practice produces the topic.

This is why milk has its proper place, and why staying on it is a failure. "as newborn babies, long for the pure spiritual milk, that with it you may grow," (1 Pet 2:2) The newborn is commanded to long for milk, because milk makes him grow. But growth is the point, and growth means leaving the condition in which milk alone suffices. The same apostle who fed milk to babies names the shame of remaining a baby. "I fed you with milk, not with solid food, for you weren't yet ready. Indeed, you aren't ready even now," (1 Cor 3:2) Not yet ready, and even now not ready. Time alone did not make them ready. Use would have. A writer who writes only what he already knows, in the same form, for the same easy approval, will find himself in the same place a year later: still fed, still unready, still asking others for a subject because he has not learned to find one in the text before him.

The practice that trains the senses is older than any method for finding ideas. "but his delight is in Yahweh's law. On his law he meditates day and night." (Ps 1:2) Meditation is not skimming for a quotable line. It is staying. "How I love your law! It is my meditation all day." (Ps 119:97) And the fruit of that staying is named without apology. "I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation." (Ps 119:99) Understanding came not from a better source of subjects but from meditation on the testimonies themselves. The writer who meditates does not need to hunt for ideas. The text, dwelt in, begins to open its own doors, and the writer's task becomes to walk through the door that is open rather than to force a door of his choosing.

Ezra gives the order in which this work proceeds, and the order matters for the writer. "For Ezra had set his heart to seek Yahweh's law, and to do it, and to teach statutes and ordinances in Israel." (Ezra 7:10) Seek first, then do, then teach. The writer is a learner before he is a teacher, and a doer before he is either. A piece written in the reverse order, teaching first and seeking afterwards, will borrow its certainty from somewhere other than the text. The herald's first audience is the Lord, and his second is himself, because the piece must first teach and convict its writer before it can honestly teach anyone else.

The same discipline appears in the Bereans, praised not for curiosity but for daily examination. "Now these were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so." (Acts 17:11) A candidate subject must survive that examination. If the verses offered for it do not actually say what the writer wants them to say, the subject is a temptation to invent a connection.

That test is the candidate standard, and it can be stated plainly. A text qualifies as the ground of a piece not when it is interesting, timely, or popular, but when it carries a mechanism or a joint inside itself that opens the passage. A joint may be a cause and its consequence, a command and its promise, a contrast held together in one verse, a warning and the assurance that belongs beside it, a pattern in the older Scriptures that the newer Scriptures themselves name as fulfilled in Christ. "Beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he explained to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself." (Luke 24:27) Christ Himself opened the Scriptures in this way, showing the things concerning Himself, not imposing a subject from outside upon them. The writer follows that pattern in miniature: he looks for the joint the passage itself supplies, and he builds only there. Where no joint appears, he waits, reads again, and does not manufacture one.

Let the practice, then, be plain. Take one passage and stay with it. Ask what it contributes that no other passage has yet established, and what follows from it. Refuse any verse that shares only a word with the subject. Verify every quotation from the text itself, not from memory. "Give diligence to present yourself approved by God, a workman who doesn't need to be ashamed, properly handling the Word of Truth." (2 Tim 2:15)

The reward of that diligence is not a larger list of ideas. It is a text that has become usable, and a writer who has become usable with it. "Every Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness," (2 Tim 3:16) "that each person who belongs to God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work." (2 Tim 3:17)

Meat, then, is not harder milk, and it is not milk with more words added. It is the word handled until the senses are trained, the joint found and followed, the piece built where the text itself opens. Milk feeds the newborn. Solid food belongs to those who, by reason of use, have learned to discern. Write from the use, not from the list, and the next piece will not need to be found. It will have been given, in the handling, by the word itself.