I know David "got it." However, I don't see how Keats did. You'll need to explain more to me. Keats wrote in one of his letters: "I find I can have no enjoyment in the World but continual drinking of Knowledge." I don't see David with the same view of the world. My understanding is that Keats died rejecting the Bible and Jesus Christ. Whatever he got out of his observation of creation, it wasn't the same that David did.

Oh, I don’t say Keats and David had the same view of the world at all; I said they read the same books. (Seems Christopher Hitchens and I have read many of the same books.) I’m not even saying they both learned the same lessons from those books. I’m just contrasting those quite disparate observers of creation with today’s believer—who really cannot be said to have ever cracked that book.

Your comment is very telling, I think. I never suggested that “getting it” had anything to do with salvation.

We were discussing the place of culture, this shared body of belief which provides us a metaphysical dream or metaphysical anchorage, to use Weaver’s terms: a scale by which we measure all other beliefs. We were discussing a culture that has a place in the whole of society [Eliot]. You seem to conflate that with conversion or salvation. I can’t think of many things worse than a “Romans Road Culture”. I think this is atrocious theology, but even that is not my point here. My point has to do with a certain scale of values to be shared among many people, including “saved” and “unsaved”, both acceptors and rejecters of saving grace. And for many reasons, not the least of which is that God’s creation speaks to both. The creation that reveals God to the unregenerate had better be a part of my culture.

That is a very different thing.

What we have now is, again, a crippling reduction of the Christian faith where one’s culture—or one’s immersion in culture—can be reduced to or comprehended by salvation status.

That’s the problem. That is why we don’t have poets and it is why we are not embarrassed by our obsession with sports and entertainment.

Interestingly, most who revel (and I do not include Regulative in this number - I wouldn't know) in the "culture" of soteriological status seem to gravitate toward the football field, basketball court, or boob tube (on which these things are viewed). A few read books on leadership. Fewer still read anything in theology. Fewer than that read anything serious on philosophy, culture, or aesthetics.

I grant that some will find the assessment above to somehow denigrate the grace of salvation, but I would counter with the question; what salvation have you if,in less discursive leisure, you cannot give shape to what grace is?

Are the "good works" for which we are saved merely to proclaim the gospel and promote good behavior? Or is there something more to bringing glory to God? I think the artisans of the Solomon's temple understood what they were doing.

I think I understand what you are saying - we have no shared texts in today's culture. The people of Keat's day would have been familiar with the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, and perhaps even Paradise Lost. But that was a long time ago.

"Romans Road Culture"? That javelin sailed wide.

Two men witnessed the rising and setting of the sun, one concluding "all is vanity," and the other, "great is thy faithfulness."

Is Keats' use of "bless" anthropomorphic or pantheistic?

WLJ:

And not just texts. Images, metaphors, similitudes, habits, attitudes, relationships, correspondences, valuations…in painting, architecture, myths, märchen, music, tradition, ritual, institutions….

Regulative:

The diurnal nature of our existence has been used to make many different points, a truth generally recognized by those who have one.

I do think, though, that any money you spend on a remedial course in poetry reading would not be entirely wasted.

Scripture reveals a spiritual aptitude to forgo discharging insult that I hope you possess (James 3:10-11).

In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:22-23, Jesus says, "The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!"

The unbeliever has his spiritual blinds down and so perceives the world differently. Eliot doesn't take this into account, perhaps couldn't.