Daniel W. Doerksen. Picturing Religious Experience: George Herbert, Calvin, and the Scriptures

George Herbert's own comment to Nicholas Ferrar-that Ferrar would find in The Temple, "a picture of the many spiritual Conflicts that have past betwixt God and my Soul" (6)-holds the key, for Daniel Doerksen, to interpreting Herbert's poetry in the light of Calvin's biblical commentary.Indeed, Picturing Religious Experience: George Herbert, Calvin, and the Scriptures, might just as appropriately have been titled, Picturing Spiritual Conflicts, for the depiction of the experience of "spiritual conflicts" is the central theme that binds together Doerksen's three subjects: Herbert, Calvin, and Holy Scripture.A "schema" (61) or pattern "of recurrent [spiritual] conflict and resolution" (7) in the Psalms provided a model, for Herbert and Calvin, of a literary depiction of the lived experience of an individual's relationship with God (65) through life's "vicissitudes" (200-9).Afflictions, Doerksen argues, are never accidental, but are "from God" (153-54) and are at the heart of the Reformation Christian's experience of struggling and abiding in faith.Building on Barbara Lewalski's discussion in Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (1979) of "the long slow process of sanctification" (Lewalski 287, Doerksen 61), Doerksen traces a path of "continual" (142) repentance in The Temple.For Doerksen, "introspection" is the first movement towards repentance and "leads to a sense of personal need and a desire to call upon God" (68).That process of turning inwards and upwards, although interrupted by afflictions (152-69), eventually leads to mortification: "the actual, though mystical participation in the death of Christ" (137).Afflictions interrupt the relationship between God and man and yet, dynamically, are the means by which God "tempers" and "tunes" the individual soul (201-5).Doerksen finds "resolutions of…conflicts" (198) in The Temple that inspire praise and thanksgiving (198)(199)(200), but these are always only glimpses of the (as yet unattainable) perfect and final subsuming of the self into the godhead.Juxtaposing The Temple and Country Parson with the Institutes and Commentary on the Psalms, Doerksen draws compelling parallels

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