Reading Journal - Entry #60
Le Morte D'Arthur, Vol.1 and The Christ of the Covenants
Welcome back to the Reading Journal! These entries are short weekly posts in which I share some of the main ideas or stories from two books I’ve been reading.
This week, I finished Sir Thomas Malory’s, Le Morte D’Arthur, and I continued working my way through O. Palmer Robertson’s, The Christ of the Covenants. These are two very different books and they’ve both helped me grow in my perspective. Let’s go ahead and dive in.
Le Morte D’Arthur, Vol. 1
As I continued my reading through this collection of stories about King Arthur, the last several chapters primarily centered around Sir Tristram. His first act as a knight is to fight Sir Marhaus of Ireland on behalf of the king of Cornwall (who is also his uncle). He defeats Sir Marhaus, but not before suffering a severe wound from him. Sir Marhaus flees the battle after Sir Tristram gives him a serious wound on his head. Marhaus dies soon after getting back to Ireland.
After some time, Tristram still hasn’t recovered from the wound Sir Marhaus gave him. He’s told that, to be healed, he needs to go to the place from which the weapon that wounded him came. He goes to Ireland, seeking healing, but changes his name so that people won’t realize that he’s the one who killed Marhaus, who was the king of Ireland’s brother-in-law. Tristram is taken care of by the king’s daughter, who falls in love with him and he with her.
Tristram stays in Ireland for some time. He fights in a tournament set up by the king to find someone worthy of marrying his daughter. He wins the tournament but shortly after that victory, they find out who he is and he’s forced to leave Ireland. The king’s daughter, though, promises to marry whoever Tristram wishes and, eventually, he arranges for her to marry his uncle, the king of Cornwall. However, there are still lots of stories regarding Tristram and this woman and they maintain their love for each other for the rest of their lives.
Most of these final stories focus on Tristram and his interactions with the knights of the round table. He and Sir Lancelot have a lot of interaction and it’s said throughout Britain that Sir Lancelot and Sir Tristram are the two greatest knights in the world. Having finished this book, I recommend it, especially if you enjoy stories of knights and kings and their adventures.
The Christ of the Covenants
This week’s reading in this book has covered the Noahic and Abrahamic covenants. Robertson has helped me better understand the covenants, even outside of his specific perspective on how they work together. For example, when discussing the Noahic covenant, he very clearly explained what the covenant was, why he believes it fits his definition of a covenant (a bond in blood, sovereignly administered), and what effect it still has today. Something he focused on a good deal for this covenant was that part of the purpose of the covenant was to preserve an order and provide stability so that the promised Seed could come. If every time mankind descended into severe sin on a grand scale God wiped everyone out, it wouldn’t be conducive to bringing about the birth of the promised Savior.
Regarding the Abrahamic covenant, Robertson focused on the fact that Abraham was promised a great deal but a lot of it he had to wait for. He had to live his life in faith, without seeing much of what He’d been promised. This was a good reminder to me to not base my perspective only on what I can see; God’s word carries much more weight than that. Robertson also spent some time showing how all of Israel was bound by the covenant with Abraham and linking this covenant with the Mosaic and later covenants, showing that it was an administration of the Covenant of Redemption. Some of his arguments, particularly regarding other covenant passages in OT prophets, were somewhat intricate, so I’m not going to try to explain them here.
I’ve appreciated Robertson’s perspective in this book and have found it helpful. His dedication to making sure that he’s not arguing anything except that which he can argue from Scripture is refreshing. He considers potential objections to his ideas and deals with them from the text of Scripture. There is another chapter dealing with the seal of the Abrahamic covenant that is up next, and I’m interested to see what he has to say on that topic. But that will have to wait for next week.
That concludes this entry!
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In Him and For His Glory