I propose to take a biblically led orientation on the matter of truth, and from that perspective try to elucidate the particular glory of imaginative, literary, and artistic historical truth telling in God’s world. I am self-consciously not presuming to present a universal approach, and I realize my tack as an octogenarian academic is shaped by a certain earthy, philosophical faith-thought tradition called reformational that, with relaxed seriousness, takes the Ruling ordering of God (Bασιλεῖα τοῦ θεοῦ) as a driving focus for communal reflection and action.1
The exclamation “Amen!” best signals for me a biblical affirmation of when truth happens. Truth means God’s blessing presence is in evidence. That is why revelation of truth 
in scripture is surrounded by mention of God’s covenantal love 
, God’s doing justice 
, the occurrence of fullness of peaceful existence 
, joyfulness 
, and flourishing life 
. “True” in the Bible designates what you can trust to actually come through with God’s justifying mercy 
in creaturely affairs.
To catch this guiding idea, here is a declaration from the LORD God2 in an abbreviated paragraph found in Ezekiel 18:5, 7–9:
v5 If a person proves to be true 
, that is, enacts justice 
and 
[Martin Buber translates the Hebrew as Wahrhaftigkeit (“truthfulness”)] – v7 does not deal harshly with anybody, lets a debtor get his or her loan security back, does not rob the unsuspecting, gives one’s own bread to a hungry person and covers a naked person with a garment, v8 does not lend to get interest, does not grab for profits, pulls one’s hand back from what is deceitful, works at performing reliable 
justice 
in man-to-man affairs, v9 [that is,] walks within my providential ordinances 
and takes care to keep my justice intact 
by working out what is truly trustworthy 
– that is a tried-and-true person 
, one who shall surely live, be alive: this is what my Lord, the LORD God declares.
Human obedience to God’s multifaceted ordinances and Word result, I hear, in what is true, a deed filled with God’s promise to work blessing. No wonder Jesus Christ could say, “I am the Way, that is, the truth, veritably life!”3 recalling God’s “I am” in Exodus 3:13–15 – God’s promised blessing present in fleshly human corporeality.
Truth is not presented as a self-subsistent entity or as an abstraction in the Bible, but instead characterizes whatever manifests God’s ongoing gracious, justifying mercy. For example, the inscription over the arch of Victoria University’s campus chapel building, partially obscured by vines – “The truth shall make you free” – in its original biblical thrust means that God’s blessing presence (in Jesus Christ, in the Holy Scriptures, in Holy Spirited acts of just-doing and wisdom) will save you from sin and from the Lie that harbours waste, crookedness, suffering, and death.
This peculiarly biblical note of sanctifying holiness as an integral mark of truth, I think, enriches our understanding of what is at stake in the whole range of human cultural undertakings. In his insightful fragment on ethical truth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer argues that it is a betrayal of truth to disclose correct states of affairs to those who are evil-minded and untrustworthy.4 Goudzwaard, Vander Vennen, and van Heemst show how political-economic truth – bringing a thrifty, generous justice into citizens’ lives – is threatened by a militaristic ideology bent on distorting “freedom” into a security guaranteed by being stronger in weapons.5 Lambert Zuidervaart’s careful affirmation of propositional truth as assertoric correctness notes the decontextualizing role of logical analysis in our human understanding, and so points out the limits and responsibilities of justifying valid statements in our overall task of knowing truly what we should do in the societal matrix we inhabit.6
That is, it seems to me there are various irreducible, interrelated kinds of truth waiting proleptically for us humans to embody as we try to enact or default in passing on the blessing of God’s 
(justifying mercy) in ordinary affairs.
The Bible itself is uniquely true, in the sense I am using the term. The Holy Scriptures are veritably God-speaking literature, credo, given to us humans historically in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek languages (as Jesus Christ once walked upon the earth as a Jew) to compel our hearing by faith the one true story of the LORD’s Rule coming, and providing the contours to inform our task 
of multiple obedient responses.7
I will focus now on the kerygmatic Bible’s literary character, and note the significance of that artistic defining quality to mediate notice of God’s saving revelation. I will then take that prompt, especially by looking at the older first Testament texts of “wisdom” writings, to elucidate the good creational structure which makes such imaginative disclosure of God’s will possible and trustworthy.
As Martin Buber writes, the Bible asks to be taken as one book in which its different sections are not closed but open and reverberate with one another.8 Robert Alter cites as “an intrinsic feature of the original texts – their powerfully allusive character.”9 We could well think of the Bible as a literary collage of written texts meant to become oral, to be read aloud, voiced, a story told, and counsel being spoken by God to us humans. The scripted form is not a curse of indeterminacy but is a wonderful, colourful mnemonic with artistic finish and cohesion. The Bible is more like a gargoyle-encrusted cathedral or a cinematic documentary film edited by the Holy Spirit than bulletin announcements from headquarters.
God used an Egyptian university-trained scribe like Moses,10 popsong composer and sinful king like David,11 and a born-again Jew with a thorn in the flesh like Paul12 as living ventriloquist dummies, and so the biblical historical and promising narrative with poetry stutters, comments Buber.13 Yet even its verbal stumble is a very artistic, convicting stuttering of God’s creating the temporal world by speaking, selecting a disappointing people to witness to the shalom of obedience, and offering God’s own self bodily to act as pivot in history, I might add, which tempts all readers and hearers to join the motley band of Canterbury pilgrims on the Way to the eschaton.14
Alter’s many studies document the finely tuned intersectional ironies throughout the Bible that highlight its literary makeup: the story of Jacob deceived by Laban with Leah critically alludes to Jacob’s deceit with Isaac to get Esau’s blessing, so that later we hear the pathos of Isaiah’s quoting God’s agonizing reference to the people of Israel in terms of “Jacob” the deceiver,15 which intensifies the later good news – preposterous – that God loves deceitful sinners!16
The whole laconic biblical tale from Genesis to Revelation, assembled over a thousand years, is replete with near repetitions: Ruth’s sojourn echoes patriarch Abraham’s leaving home to become a progenitive link in the Messiah’s redemptive role on Earth17; Judges 19 even repeats sentences of Genesis 19 in describing a typical scene of hospitality brutalized.18 Joseph flees Potiphar’s wife, but Judah begets a child with his sister-in-law Tamar who Matthew puts in the genealogy of Jesus.19 The key gospel parable of the wicked tenants of the Father’s vineyard20 harks back to Isaiah’s song of God’s vineyard that produced only sour grapes.21 Hebrews 8:8–13 quotes Jeremiah 31:31–4 to make a literate tie in, and is not the result of slipshod redaction. Minute details like the Israelite atrocity of cutting off Canaanite king Adonibezek’s toes and thumbs anticipate the similar end of Israel’s wicked king Zedekiah,22 and give literal historical detail to the narrated events. Such exquisite, subtle, recurrent connections in the one long story intimate an overall providential pattern of sin and deliverance, of grace and judgment under God’s omniscient authorial eye, that proves the recounting is booked with more than an interest in literal fact.
The sure literary intensification and configuration of the biblical writings becomes particularly evident in pieces like Proverbs, The Song of Songs, Job, and Ecclesiastes. The dialogue feature of Satan with God, Job, and his erstwhile friends, and between Job and God, asks listeners to discover the meaning in between the set speeches. If you fail to catch the import of the LORD’s final literary flourish, the tribute to animals – birds of prey, the monstrous hippopotamus herbivore, the formidable reptilian Leviathan – then you default on the point of God’s Word, which smashes the overly neat universe of rational moral discourse bounded by rewards and punishments Job’s interlocutors uphold. You have also missed the good news that evil is as darkly uncanny, suggests the provident God, as the inscrutable, marvelous, and terrible animal world.23
The book of Ecclesiastes, too, is as synoptically composed a chorus of voices as is The Greatest Song 
, and it requires a literary intelligence to plumb its meanings in the parry and thrust of radical questions juxtaposed to a sevenfold refrain that bespeaks God’s providing care in the deepest shadows of life’s failures, death, and cruelty. Even a calculating “wisdom” is called into question by Qoheleth,24 if the wise person thinks to figure out and resolve the unfathomable meaning of mortal creatures subject to God’s mysterious guidance, which reality is best held and confessed in a carefree literary suspension – “Throw your bread out on the face of the water!”25
When the book of Proverbs, headed up by the poem of chapters 1 to 9, is understood to be composed in what I call the “yes, but” rabbinical mode of teaching wisdom26 – not as a list of maxims to be memorized and put into practice – we do more justice to the literary office and focus of the God-breathed, educated court counselors and poets who booked these aphoristic texts. For example, to mine the message of the conundrum found at Proverbs 26:4–5, in the large twelve-verse pericope that assesses foolishness, we need to recognize the allusive “yes, but” catch to its covert literary cast:
Never begin to respond to a godless fool like a godless fool; otherwise you will start to be like a God-damning fool yourself. Yes, but! [understood]
Answer a godless fool with what befits his godless foolishness, lest he seem to become wise in his own eyes.
The directive wisdom presented is this: remain innocent of joining godless foolery, but flummox fools with canny speech. Jesus’ updated version was: be as prudent as snakes, but remain as innocent as doves.27
The collocated paragraphs of riddles in Proverbs are not contradictory logical puzzles so much as far-reaching literary truths that provide playful, imaginative knowledge for the good of those with ears to hear.
The defining literary finish of the biblical writings – whether narrative, poetry, or instruction – banks on our responding first of all believingly to its artistry in kind, with an imaginative receptivity. Otherwise we violate the nature of the biblical texts that simultaneously protect God’s mystery yet issue sound authoritative directives with soft edges for our learning how to live, holding onto God’s hand. The ludic, enigmatic quality of the booked revelation is also peculiarly apt for disclosing God’s gracious dealings with us faulty, sinful creatures because our potholed history is not straightforward but continues by fits and starts. Guilty deeds and human repentance are prone to irony, and trusting the Lord whose acts are often beyond our ken begs to be satisfied by only inklings of knowledge. That is, the booked disclosure of God’s great deeds among us is multivocal and roundabout as befits literature – you can recite Israel’s history by both upbeat Psalm 105 and downbeat Psalm 106, as well as by ballad-like Psalm 78, without being duplicit. Literary expression can be truly intimate and present bona fide nuanced knowledge of the deepest sort while remaining elliptical.
In the reformational faith-thought perspective of an ordering Word-of-God creational ontic setting,28 given the existing phenomena of texts with a special literary identity, I take the cue and posit that there is a specific creational ordering for distinguishing literary scripts from non-literary dicta or expostulations. Literature, like graphic art, poetry, and music, appeals, in my judgment, to an order in God’s world, a creational ordinance for suggestion-rich allusivity (as there is an order for promise keeping, for generous thrift, for assertoric correctness) – one that can be approximately discovered, is historically formulated and re-formulated, and will be followed in human acts, poorly or well, that will mark such cultured deeds and products typically as artworks. The fact that the biblical writings bear this artistic quality means that truth – God’s gracious working presence – can show up also in this particular creatural channel, what I will call an aesthetic way of being creaturely extant. It would be a mistake to try to take this rich metaphor-sparking kind of literary/artistic truth telling and force its multi-splendored, winsome, if not sometimes whimsical, glory flat to a bare residue of non-imaginative deposits.
To work with the philosophical hypothesis of an irreducible creational aesthetic ordinance that calls for its own kind of limited prehensive knowledge can correct several misleading ideas. For example, lingual clarity may not always be the summum bonum for communicating knowledge: a silent twinkle of a wink with a gentle hug and a lingering kiss may say “I love you” more deeply than words could, so you know the troth is certainly true. To think an exact, frontal passport photo – both ears showing – provides literal identification, while a portrait is a distorting, honorific compliment, fails to recognize that Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro rendition of his own face may truly depict the searing depth of his makeup in a way that no replicating description ever could. To pursue a conclusive argument for the existence of God against which there could be no credible retort, and to suppose that a novel like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is merely “fiction,” could be a misguided trust in and hope for the power of human reasoning while being blind to the imaginative truth a novel lays bare about the reach of the Holy Spirit to sanctify sinners.29
In other words, artistic truth has its own ontic legitimacy that is not in competition with other modes of knowledge that may also bode epiphanies of God’s blessing to those who are busy thinking, speaking, or doing just deeds. Allusive imaginative knowledge exemplified, Paul Ricoeur would say, in parables like ones Jesus told, with all their complicated, indirect, surprising twists and turns, harbours an arresting potential for telling reliable truth peculiar to its particular aesthetic configuration.30
To give a little more definite substance to the nature of artistic truth, I will contend that the translation of literature is primarily an aesthetic activity in the medium of language, and therefore will be a true translation if the new (home) language version is a faithfully allusive, in-depth echo of the original foreign language piece voiced again. Such a translation honours God’s presence, insuring an abiding imaginative replica, and the translator’s diaconate service deserves praise.
Any language provides idiomatic clarity for a person whose mother tongue it is and who has learned its vernacular. But when the connotative element within a language spoken rises like cream to the top of the bottled milk of lingual communication, lacing even the denotative feature of language with a rhetorical accent, the talk thickens to poetry, which is not ordinarily “clear.” A text can be a record of speech or be directly composed as a document, such as a musical score, architectural blueprint, or written diary to be read. A literary text has a dated and located setting like a speech act, but literary texts seem somehow to bury their authorial historical placement inside the per-during artistic text that is conceived to invite a free-wheeling imaginative reading. The tricky task for a translator of poetry or literature then is to carry over and transpose, recreate the earlier nuance-ridden text anew in a different set of worded syntactical language that hosts the source text, and to do the metaphorical transference with equity.
Language, and especially literature, has a different nature than formal logic or mathematics, and so good translation does not attempt to get isomorphic equivalence, a literal imitative restatement, but to do justice to the earlier piece. Better, it aims to recapitulate its gestalted body with love – its inimitable nuanceful tenor, purportive thrust, and continuing literate significance. A good translator, says George Steiner, remains selflessly submerged within the original foreign tongue, yet produces a new translucent text in the second language marked by a “deliberate strangeness.”31 The current lingual idiom of the targeted translation deserves to be a little unfamiliar, and could well sport an archaic displacement of the current idiom, so that the foreign import does not seem so strange, but sounds somewhat like a voice remembered out of our own past.32 You may also need dare, adds Buber, in obedience to the task of inventing an allusive reference, to coin new words that the younger generation will adopt and own.33
The principle guiding translation of literature is reciprocal enhancement: you give the primary foreign text outreach and afterlife, and vivify your own lingual-literary culture with supplemental knowledge stretching your home language with unfamiliar rhythms, vocabulary – there are no actual synonyms even within one language – odd emphases, alternative human tempers, and tastes. A true translation of literature honours the original fully, letting its unusual light shine on our doorstep but not be dimmed to our current visibility.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetic rendition of Sappho’s lyric about “the sweet apple . . . a-top on the topmost twig” is a true translation: poem for poem.34 I always found W.H.D. Rouse’s racy, “holy moly”35 prose translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (1938/1937) to be much more imaginatively faithful to the rambunctious original Greek story than Richard Lattimore’s (1951) “free six-beat line” sonority. The gracious rolling British English exposition of Tolstoy’s Russian garrulity in War and Peace by Louise and Aylmer Maude (1942) is also a classic journeyman achievement.36
It is easy, of course, to be unfaithful in a translation of a literary text.37 A translator may misconstrue the primary text through ignorance, haste, or personal insensibility; and if one diminishes or inflates the meaning of the primary source, or settles for a paraphrase, one has defaulted on the arduous task. The critical guideline, however, is to maintain that translation artistry of literature is true when its struggled-for product redeems the original in kind, resurrects an imaginative hologrammic similation of the piece’s spirited, slanted insight, and is permeated by intriguing obliquity.38 It is not untrustworthy for the translated piece to present a range of meanings limited by the order of allusivity.
I believe this thesis also holds for translating the Bible and other texts considered sacred, like the Qur’an. Many adult Bible readers – somewhat like M. Jourdain in Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme, who was surprised to find out he was speaking prose (II,4) – will be taken aback to hear that God’s Word is booked as literature. However, the Reformation dogma on the perspicuity of scripture does not mean the book is a simple sentence telegram. Even the fisherman apostle Simon Peter complained in the Bible that some of Paul’s letters were difficult to understand.39 The dogma of the “clarity” of scripture means its principal message is of the LORD’S loving the world so much God sent the Messiah Jesus to save us from our sinfulness, and calls us to thank God together by following Christ’s Way of reclaiming and caring for God’s creatures till the end40: that truth can be heard and accepted by a childlike faith. The core message of the Bible – God’s cosmic creation, our historical human sin, Jesus Christ as Saviour of the world, and the Holy Spirit call for creatures to respond willingly to the Covenantal LORD God’s ordinances – is clear; but scripture is still literature, unique for its God-speaking nature, demanding our obedient response.
Martin Buber took the God-speaking oral character of the Bible so seriously that he translated it from Hebrew to German by having a rabbi read God’s Word out loud to him so he could hear the sensed articulation of mouthed words, the breathing pauses, the paranomastic Leitwörter sound, and the paragraphing of the text. Buber’s written Hebrew Bible translation is in crabbed, Hebrew-based, contorted German, but Buber squeezes strictly into the German text the minutest iota shade of meaning the Hebrew original brings into play. Written Bible translation tries to park and prime active speaking of the text in a definite nuanced way.
One could say that Jerome’s amazing work in translating the Bible into Latin and the subsequent Vulgata, Luther’s brusque folk language version that helped set German writing style, the quietly magisterial King James translation birthed by Tyndale (1611), minding with italics what was absent in the Hebrew, the Revised Standard Version (1952), and Buber’s contribution are all true with wobbles, failings, and weak spots. Each is a varied, imaginative attempt to keep the surrogate biblical narrative integrated literately, nuanced within the bounds of an allusive intelligence that knew they were transmitting vital, deep knowledge in a parabolic, symbolical convicting form true to the core original message couched in and constrained by a rhetorical order.
How to translate Exodus 3:14 truly into English, 
? “Taking advantage of the ambiguity of Hebrew verb tenses”41 and approaching the amazing burning-yet-not-incinerated bush episode commissioning Moses to lead God’s descendants from Abraham out of Egyptian slavery: with an aesthetically relaxed care for the context and a nose for nuance, I should like to improve on the traditional rather stentorian, Parmenideian “I AM WHO I AM” translation. Buber is correct, I think, to tone down this revelation of God’s proper name – the Bible does not encourage an exercise in theo-ontology – to “I will be who I was, who I always am,” as the next verse says, the everlasting faithful LORD of your fathers’ and mothers’ generation, which recalls Genesis 15 and anticipates Exodus 34:6–7. This revelatory incident, notes Buber, exorcizes any move to make God’s name magical.42 Moses could tell God’s faithful ones, “Was-Am-I-Will-Be-With-You” sent me. Remember? And believe.43
The tone of reading scripture can make or break the truth of a translated text, since voice inflection is the primal interpretation of a text. We should not read Psalm 104 as if it is Wordsworthian nature poetry, and an English speaking person should have in mind Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sprung rhythm rather than Walt Whitman’s rolling lines while proclaiming Isaiah. A person goes wrong too, for example, to think conflicted administrator Pilate was starting a deep philosophical discussion with Jesus in John 18. Pilate, in my reading, said, “What’s truth?” the way Hamlet dismissed the verbose Polonius with the line, “Words, words, words.” The ordinance of allusivity admits a penumbra of “itineraries of meaning,” to use Ricoeur’s phrase, but not “anything goes.”44 Whether it be formulating the written version of a biblical translation or speaking it, the operative disciplinary discernment called for is of an imaginative sort which hones in on precise nuances of the insight that stay aesthetically open.
In this chapter, I have made two main suggestions: (I) Beginning with a biblical orientation, we should consider truth to be a gift of God’s blessing of shalom experienced temporally, consonant with our historical nature, rather than conceiving truth as an ontic substance or something humans can achieve which becomes eternally fixed, beyond revision;45 and (2) we should recognize the enrichment and wonderful credibility of artistic truth with its playful elasticity, providing certain imaginative true knowledge next to other kinds of truth, such as the argued correctness of analytic truth or the verified factuality of legal truth.
There are also two implications I should like to pose for discussion. First, if the quality of being true will stigmatize human efforts that obey God’s ordinantial injunctions to be allusive, just, consequent, clear, faithful, and the like, that is, to be holy in the whole panoply of modally varied ordinary living circumstances, then it is philosophically erroneous to assume truth is a religious ultimate to which we aspire. Elaine Scarry’s Plato-inspired book On Beauty and Being Just epitomizes what I think is a misdirected attempt – to pull in James Elkins’ deserving project – to re-enchant our post-post-Enlightenment culture with “spirituality.”46 Writes Scarry: “What is beautiful is in league with what is true because truth abides in the immortal sphere.”47 When we pursue beauty, she says, and “other enduring objects of aspiration – goodness, truth, justice,” we “unself-interestedly” enhance ourselves.48 Jaroslav Pelikan’s judgment, however, I find more trenchant: humans intent not on following Jesus’ Word in God’s ordained world, but keen to relate themselves constructively to the Holy One by affirming transcendentals like truth, beauty, and goodness (or striving to experience the wordless Numinous of Rudolph Otto), unfortunately fall into a self-deceptive moralism.49
Second, if the quality of being allusive does indeed define literature and artworks, and their truth is genuine imaginative disclosure of significant meaning that carries God’s presence of blessing, then human responses to literature and artworks should be informed, competent, and willing to “read,” interpret, and critically judge the dated/located artistic contribution, its structural integrity and import,50 first of all imaginatively. Artistic truth is not confined to God’s children, since the LORD’S grace is not restricted to confessing Christians (or monopolized by sinful saints).
Although I cannot here spell out a complete hermeneutic, I posit that in our community of aesthetic interpretation, as we absorb and comment on a given artwork or artistic event’s proffered meaning, we do well to stipple in the spirit and perspective found lodged in the object under scrutiny. A visual reader, the interpreter with words, or reflective critic, can honour the ordinance of suggestion-rich allusivity, especially by comparing the piece at hand to the artist’s oeuvre and to other artworks.
For example, Inuit carver John Tiktak (1916–1987) from Rankin Island, Canada, sculpted humans out of stone in the 1960s – hardy, ordinary, vital fellows, nonchalant even, hands in pockets, unapologetic mouth – worlds away from the 1968 Paris student revolution or turbulent Chicago. Mother with Child (ca. 1962) strapped to her back is an ancient rite of workaday love, the figures clothed with respect. Tiktak’s Bent Man (1970) exemplifies the corpus of his ’60s artwork: a sincere expression of the burden-bearing chore of life in the cold North. But Tiktak’s artistic testimony to that truth is not fraught with the conflicted Piqtoukun’s sharper struggle lamenting the loss of the Inuit shaman culture and the mythology of polar bear able to morph into whiskered human power. Tiktak’s world is not out of joint: the weather-beaten wizened face (1965) may not even be six inches tall, but its indomitable archaic presence has the incredibly dense mass of wise human perseverance. My favourite Tiktak sculpture (1963), still untouched by any debilitating souvenir commerce, symbolizes the painful joy connecting generations in God’s world: the long-faced mother has a vulnerable but strong, bony, mute glory plodding along with her child trundled like a humpback. The piece makes me remember Psalm 131, where the psalmist is humbled and calmed, imagining himself like a weaned child near the neck of God.
Swedish-born Dutch sculptor Britt Wikstrom (born 1948) produced a plaster cast of a man gently cradling an older sick child in his arms, an image which tells with artistic truth that human holding can be healing. Wikstrom’s bronze piece of two wrestlers, placed in a psychiatric sanatorium, shows exquisitely how the struggle of patient and mentor, Jacob and the 
, is like a dance where you have to hold on to one another as you seek to prevail and win a blessing. Henry Moore’s world-class brown Horton stone Reclining Figure (Leeds, 1926) discloses the quiet Mother Earthy reserve and strength of woman – restive, majestic, alone. Wikstrom by contrast usually embeds the social dimension of neighbours into her artwork, like simply helping a younger grateful man put on his coat – this 2010 piece is placed in the village square of Deurne, the Netherlands, and commemorates Anna Terruwe’s life work of an affirming psychiatry with troubled persons. Wikstrom’s tombstones (1979) also bring the truth of resurrection life, reuniting loved ones, and triumph over our mortality obliquely to the fore. The graphic artistic truth of the dove returning with a sprig of olive leaf after a world disaster (1993) promises the bereft loved ones a softly cheerful solace, with the grace note of a birdbath of rain water cut into the granite top, to be kind, meanwhile, almost like a lay baptism to the birds of the air who flutter around wishing to be clean.
Though they are quite different graphic artists, Tiktak and Wikstrom both illustrate, in my view, artistic truth. My interpretive reading reflecting with words on their nuanced sculptured offerings tries to honour their true pluriform presentation of meaning. I claim my reading is true because it recognizes and reaches down to the committed spirit and visionary faith depth of their artwork, and so invokes its coram Deo dimension. There can be other true interpretations too, just as there can be two good sermons from the same Bible passage. Heidegger’s grappling with truth matters as art’s providing a temporary clearing in which we humans are ecstatically open to things’ showing their being, a kind of ungrounded epiphany hiding their mysterious source,51 is at the keyhole of knowledge, I think, but lacks the key. The truth of God’s blessing presence is real and can be historically disclosed and experienced by artists, interpreters, and theorists (and by statespersons, medical doctors, journalists, and leaders in other fields of investigation), always in our earthen-clay-jar fallibility,52 and so would-be truth tellers as artists or interpreters need to be humble enough to be not hesitant, not uncertain, but tentative in their production, especially if their judgment upon occasion must be as severe as the prophetic calls of a Jeremiah.
Our day characteristically promotes living without any sense of obligation, said Buber,53 and so it does seem to be important for more academics, teachers, and leaders at large to pay attention to the enriching existence of artistic truth in God’s world, which not only gives wise direction but refreshes life, to use Isamu Noguchi’s phrase, since rightly experiencing bona fide artworks is “like falling in love again for the first time.”54
1 An earlier version of this essay was published as “Import of Biblical Wisdom Literature for a Conception of Artistic Truth,” in Calvin G. Seerveld, Biblical Studies and Wisdom for Living, ed. John Kok (Sioux Center, IA: Dordt College Press, 2013).
2 In this chapter I capitalize the entire word “LORD” when it serves as an equivalent for the Hebraic “YHWH,” to distinguish it from “Adonai,” another Hebrew word for which I use “Lord,” in small letters. This follows the convention used in The New International Version of the Bible and in many other English translations.
3 John 14:3.
4 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “What Is Meant by ‘Telling the Truth,’ ” in Ethics, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: MacMillan, 1955), 326–34.
5 Bob Goudzwaard, Mark Vander Vennen, and David van Heemst, Hope in Troubled Times: A New Vision for Confronting Global Crises (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 115–23. Also see by way of comparison the position taken by Thrasymachus in Plato, Republic, book 1.
6 Lambert Zuidervaart, “Unfinished Business: Toward a Reformational Conception of Truth,” Philosophia Reformata 74 (2009): 10–12, 15–18.
7 Calvin Seerveld, “Preface,” in How to Read the Bible to Hear God Speak: A Study in Numbers 22–24 (Sioux Center, IA: Dordt College Press; Toronto: Tuppence Press, 2003), xi–xiii. See also Calvin Seerveld, “A Contribution of Christian Aesthetics toward Reading the Bible,” in Rainbows for the Fallen World (Toronto: Tuppence Press, 1980/2005), 78–102.
8 Martin Buber, “Zur Verdeutschung der Preisungen,” in Die Schrift und ihrer Verdeutschung, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1936), 169.
9 Robert Alter, The World of Biblical Literature (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 50.
10 Exodus 17:14, Hebrews 11:23–7.
11 II Samuel 11, Psalms 3–41, and others.
12 II Corinthians 12:1–10.
13 Buber, “Der Mensch von heute und die jüdische Bibel,” in Die Schrift und ihrer Verdeutschung, 28.
14 Hebrews 11:32–40.
15 Isaiah 40–4, 48–9.
16 Matthew 9:10–13, Ephesians 2:1–7, I Timothy 1:12–16.
17 Matthew 1:5.
18 Judges 19:22–4, Genesis 19:4–9.
19 Genesis 38, Matthew 1:3.
20 Mark 12:1–12.
21 Isaiah 5.
22 Judges 1:4–7, II Kings 25:1–7.
23 K.J. Popma, De Boodschap van het Boek Job (Goes: Oosterbaan & Le Cointre, 1957), 228–35. Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, 76–110.
24 Ecclesiastes 7:23–9.
25 Ecclesiastes 11:1.
26 Seerveld, “The Relation of the Arts to the Presentation of Truth,” in Truth and Reality, Festschrift dedicated to H.G. Stoker (Braamfontein: De Jong’s Bookshop, 1971), 190–3.
27 Matthew 10:16.
28 Seerveld, “Dooyeweerd’s Legacy for Aesthetics,” in The Legacy of Herman Dooyeweerd, ed. C.T. McIntire (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), 61–2, 76 n 59.
29 Many in the church have been misled by reading Romans 1:21, as the King James Version has it: “but became vain in their imaginations.” The Greek, ἀλλἀ ἐματαιώθησαν ἐν τοῖζ διαλογισμοῖσ αὐτῶν, might more carefully be translated, “but became foolish [cf. Proverbs 26:4–5] in their reasonings.”
30 Paul Ricoeur, “The Bible and the Imagination,” in The Bible as a Document of the University, ed. Hans Dieter Betz and Ann Arbor, trans. David Pellauer (Ann Arbor, MI: Scholars Press, Poleridge Books, 1981), 54–65.
31 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 310, 319.
32 Ibid., 333–53.
33 Buber, “Über die Wortwahl in einer Verdeutschung der Schrift,” 142–3.
34 This is best seen by laying out the original and the translation side by side:
οἷον τò γλυκύμαλον |
Like the sweet apple |
ἐρɛύθɛται ἅκρωι ἐπ’ ὕσδωι |
which reddens upon the topmost bough, |
ἅρον ἐπ’ ἀκροτάτωι, |
A-top on the topmost twig |
λελάθοντο δὲ μαλοδρóπηεζ, |
which the pluckers forgot, somehow – |
οὐ μάν ἐκλελάθοντ’, αλλ’ οὐκ |
Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, |
ἐδύνάατ’ ἐπíκεσθαι |
for none could get it till now. |
35 μῶλυ δὲ μιν καλέουσι θεοί, Οδνσσειαζ, 10, 305.
36 Margaret Lesser, “Taking on Tolstoy,” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5598 (16 July 2010), 14–15.
37 George Steiner’s wry comment, “Ninety percent, no doubt, of all translation since Babel is inadequate and will continue to be so” (After Babel, 396) could be; but he at least struggles persistently with the noble difficulty to alleviate ignorance. The Italian bon mot traduttore traditore (translators? traitors!) seems to me to be simply a trite putdown.
38 Seerveld, “Imaginativity,” in Faith and Philosophy 4 (1987): 50.
39 II Peter 3:14–16.
40 John 3:16–17, Galatians 5:25–6:2.
41 Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, 131.
42 Buber, “Königtum Gottes,” excerpt in Die Schrift und ihrer Verdeutschung, 341.
43 Van Leeuwen writes: “A direct translator will in a learned and aesthetically appropriate way use the resources of the target language to richly capture the details of the original, even though readers may be challenged by some of the Bible’s foreignness.” Raymond C. Van Leeuwen, “We Really Need Another Bible Translation,” Christianity Today, 22 October 2001, 34.
44 Buber wisely rejects “Gesetz” as a good translation of 
and settles on “Weisung.” Buber, “Über die Wortwahl in einer Verdeutschung der Schrift,” 158. A good English translation could be “guidance.” God’s law is like an embrace to keep us safe, and is not an ominous threat against misbehaving. Edip Yuksel’s reformist translation of the Qu’ran deals with the same problem of nuanced multiple-meaning words, for example, iDRiBuhunne in Qu’ran 4:34; see, by way of comparison, QURAN: A Reformist Translation, trans. Edip Yuksel, Layth Saleh al-Shaiban, and Martha Schulte-Nafeh (Brainbow Press, 2007), 17–20. If, as Derrida says, certain words that cannot be decided are “untranslatable into a single word,” this does not entail for me that meaning must remain permanently ambivalent. See Jacques Derrida, “What is ‘Relevant’ Translation?” trans. Lawrence Venuti, Critical Inquiry 27 (2001): 196 n 8.
45 This would be my way of understanding “truth is both structural and directional.” Zuidervaart, “Unfinished Business,” 10.
46 James Elkins and David Morgan, eds., Re-Enchantment (New York: Routledge, 2009), vii–x.
47 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 31.
48 Ibid., 87.
49 Jaroslav Pelikan, Fools for Christ: Essays on the True, the Good, and the Beautiful (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1995), 80.
50 Lambert Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 125–34.
51 Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth (Pentecost Monday, 1926),” in Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910–1927, ed. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 285; “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1957), 41–4; Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1943), 15–19, 25.
52 John H. Kok, Vollenhoven: His Early Development (Sioux Center, IA: Dordt College Press, 1992), 233–50, 260–72, 280–90.
53 Buber, “Der Mensch von heute und die jüdische Bibel,” 14.
54 Reported by Diana Apostolos-Cappadona in Elkins and Morgan, eds., Re-Enchantment, 239.