Cream of blog: 20 May 2009
May 20, 2009
- Ross Douthat in The New York Times on why the popularity of Dan Brown (author of The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons) provides insight into prevailing attitudes toward religion in America.
- David Brooks in the aforementioned periodical on why “organized, dogged, anal-retentive and slightly boring people are more likely to thrive” as CEO’s.
- Tullian Tchividjian has summarized some contrasts Tim Keller has drawn between “Religion” and “the Gospel.”
- Ray Ortlund has shared some penetrating insights into the sin of gossip.
- Today marks the 1,684th anniversary of the opening of the Council of Nicaea (and yes, I still doggedly hold to the “ae”. I also favor ‘aesthetic,’ ‘anaesthesia,’ ‘aeon,’ and ‘mediaeval.’ And, if I’m feeling especially peevish, I’ll use ‘aeroplane.’)
Flannery O’Connor: mercy in extremis
March 26, 2009
Ralph C. Wood of Baylor University has written a splendid short piece in honor of Flannery O’Connor’s birthday (b.1925). Best paragraph this:
The key to comprehending Flannery O’Connor’s life and work is to remember that, in her lexicon, divine grace is never synonymous with human graciousness. On the contrary, it is often abrupt and rude and disrespectful of ordinary proprieties, for the skin of human resistance is exceedingly thick. When asked why her characters meet such violent self-awakenings, O’Connor replied that it’s because their heads are so hard. Grace must wound before it can heal, she declared, and her fiction is filled with both woundings and healings. O’Connor wittily consoled readers that, while a lot of folks get killed in her fiction, nobody gets hurt. In her unsentimental reckoning, there are states of thriving but damnable life far worse than a grisly but saving death.
A word from the original Sweet Dropper
March 13, 2009
This is from Richard Sibbes‘ The Bruised Reed:
Christ’s work, both in the church and in the hearts of Christians, often goes backward so that it may go forward better. As seed rots in the ground in the winter time, but after comes up better, and the harder the winter the more flourishing the spring, so we learn to stand by falls, and get strength by weakness discovered—virtutis custos infirmitas (weakness is the keeper of virtue). We take deeper root by shaking. And, as torches flame brighter by moving, thus it pleases Christ, out of his freedom, in this manner to maintain his government in us. Let us herein labor to exercise our faith, so that it may answer Christ’s way of dealing with us. When we are foiled, let us believe we shall overcome; when we have fallen, let us believe we shall rise again. Jacob, after he received a blow which made him lame, yet would not give over wrestling (Gen. 32:25) till he had obtained the blessing. So let us never give up, but, in our thought knit the beginning, progress and end together, and then we shall see ourselves in heaven out of the reach of all enemies. Let us assure ourselves that God’s grace, even in this imperfect state, is stronger than man’s free will in the state of original perfection. It is founded now in Christ, who, as he is the author, so will he be the finisher, of our faith (Heb. 12:2). We are under a more gracious covenant.
Free ESV Online Study Bible
March 4, 2009
You can get free access to the recently-released ESV Online Study Bible. Here’s the press release:
Crossway publishing is pleased to make the ESV Online Study Bible available free–for anyone and everyone–for a limited time through March 31, 2009. For full access and free trial use of all the Online Study Bible features, users can create a login and password at www.esvstudybible.org/online. Email information will not be shared, nor will there be any obligation to purchase. Crossway invites you to share this information with others–with the hope that many will benefit from this online resource and further experience the timeless truth of God’s Word as a powerful, compelling, life-changing reality.
John ‘Rabbi’ Duncan
February 26, 2009
Today marks the anniversary of the death John “Rabbi” Duncan (1796-February 26, 1870), Scottish Presbyterian missionary to the Jews in Budapest and much-loved professor in New College, Edinburgh. He was known for his pithy sayings, as well as his knowledge of Hebrew and his Christian love for the Jews. His deep love for the Jewish people and his eminence as a Hebrew scholar earned the nickname ‘Rabbi’ among his students.
It’s hard to read any Reformed writer of the late 19th or 20th century without finding Duncan quoted. The Banner of Truth published a nice short paperback compendium of Duncan’s aphorisms about a decade or so ago called Just a Talker: Saying of John (“Rabbi”) Duncan. Among his sayings:
“I’m first a Christian, next a catholic, then a Calvinist, fourth an evangelical, and fifth a Presbyterian. I cannot reverse this order.”
“Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He was Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. There is no getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable.”
Thanks to the excellent blog, Scriptorium Daily, here are more samples of Duncan’s skill:
On Thomas Carlyle: Sham is a word often in the mouth of one who is a keen detector of other people’s shams, and a very earnest maker of his own.”
On Wesley’s Hymns: “I have a great liking for many of Wesley’s Hymns; but when I read some of them, I ask, ‘What’s become of your Free-will now, friend?’”
On Genius: “Genius lies very much in that region where the profound is simple, and the simple profound. The great thoughts of such men as Chalmers are very simple when expressed; but only a man of genius could think them.”
On Mysteries: “All the great mysteries are simple as well as unfathomably deep; and they are common to all men. Every Christian feels them less or more.”
Hyper-Calvinism and Arminianism: “Hyper-Calvinism is all house and no door; Arminianism is all door and no house.”
Aesthetic Religion: “There is no entering into the kingdom of heaven by a mere sense of beauty.”
Terminology: “There is a curious connexion between the success of a teacher and his possession of a fine terminology –a good store of words to express shades of meaning. Much wisdom has been stored up in men, and never diffused for want of the gift of speech.”
Reason in God: “Transcendentally, it is true that God has reason, but He does not reason; He does not draw syllogisms.”
Love: “Individual love, per se, is a centrifugal force; universal, cosmopolitan love, per se, is centripetal: combine them, and the revolutions of love are orderly.”
How and What: “All questions as to the ‘How’ are best answered by a more extended knowledge of the ‘What.’”
Old and New Covenants: “We must not unsaint the Old Testament saints, but we must not make Pentecostal Christians of them.”
Trinity: “The Trinity is my highest Theologoumenon. I reach it, and find in it the supreme harmony of revealed things. But it is equally irrational and irreverent to speculate on the nexus between the distinct Persons. That is not revealed, and is not revealable.”
More on the Trinity: “I exceedingly dislike that expression of some divines, that Christ purchased for us the blessings of the Spirit. I cannot but believe that the three things –the Father’s love, the sacrifice of the Son, and the influence of the Spirit– are each and all the unpurchasable blessings of grace. And I am driven to this, to hold my ground against the Socinians.”
Fighting Theologians: “Now, every unrenewed Arminian is a Pelagian, and every unrenewed Calvinist is a fatalist.”
Old Brazey: “Hezekiah broke in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made, because the children of Israel had made an idol of it; and he called it ‘Nehushtan’ –literally ‘Old Brazey.’ … There was no harm in keeping the brazen serpent; bu when they began to turn it to idolatry, it was proper to break it in pieces. ‘What! will you break in pieces a relic connected with our history –a historic memorial?’ ‘Yes, I’ll break it in pieces,’ and he called it ‘Old Brazey.’””
On the communion of saints: “Does no news go between earth and heaven? and if news goes, must there not be knowledge of events? God has put there a veil; Popery tries to bring us within it, and Protestants will not look at it for Papistical abuse.”
Pilgrim’s Progress anniversary
February 18, 2009
On this day in 1678 John Bunyan published the first edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Next to the Bible, Bunyan’s 
Pilgrim’s Progress is the best-selling Christian book of all time. It has never been out of print. In a decade when the fantasy genre has gained popularity in a “hip-to-be-square” kind of way in Christian circles, Bunyan’s work certainly deserves an honored place (if not a higher place) alongside the work of Tolkein and Lewis. J.I. Packer wrote in a conclusion to an analysis of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress,
When I ask my classes of young and youngish evangelicals, as I often do, who has read Pilgrim’s Progress, not a quarter of the hands go up. Yet our rapport with fantasy writing, plus our lack of grip on the searching, humbling, edifying truths about spiritual life that the Puritans understood so well, surely mean that the time is right for us to dust off Pilgrim’s Progress and start reading it again. Certainly it would be great gain for modern Christians if Bunyan’s masterpiece came back into its own in our day.
I did not read until compelled to do so in a Restoration Literature class in college. I was then devouring most any Reformed work I could get my hands on. During the 1990′s I read it nearly every year and have read through it again every two or three years during this decade. The book never loses its charms or its convicting power. Someone told me that Charles Spurgeon said that when he was tired and depressed to the point of utter exhaustion, Pilgrim’s Progress was the only book he could stand to have read to him. As the years go by, I am beginning to agree.
I’ll let English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge raise the final note of praise for Bunyan’s work. Coleridge appreciated both its theological and literary powers:
It is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision… This wonderful book is one of the few books which may be read repeatedly, at different times, and each time with a new and different pleasure. I read it once as a theologian, and let me assure you that there is great theological acument in the work; once with devotional feeling; and once as a poet. I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colors.
Francis Schaeffer’s birthday
January 30, 2009
I first was introduced to Francis Schaeffer’s works when Contemporary Christian Music magazine honored Schaeffer on the cover when he died in 1984. I was in high school and recently converted. It was not until college that I read Schaeffer at the urging of my campus minister Hal Farnsworth (he also was the first to urge me to read John Owen!). I think A Christian Manifesto was my first read. By the end of my junior year I had purchased the 5-volume The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer and was well on my way to reading it all. I can’t resist noting that Crossway omitted Schaeffer’s short work explaining and defending infant baptism from the ‘complete’ set–but hey, they’re selling books, and I guess we can’t have credo-baptists stubbing their toes over Schaeffer’s covenantal theology.
I am deeply indebted to Schaeffer’s work for the framework and earliest assembly of a Christian world-and-life-view in my own life. I still think True Spirituality and No Little People are some of the finest Christian writings of the 20th century. His work exhibits a breadth of knowledge and wisdom, uncompromising commitment to biblical truth, and a practical, loving concern for people. Schaeffer was an early model in the Truth-Authority-Integrity-Love philosophy of ministry.
Today is the anniversary of Francis Schaeffer’s birth in 1912. Fred Sanders pays homage and gives an assessment not unlike my own at Scriptorium.
Book review: Death by Love
December 2, 2008
But far be it from me
to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world (Galatians 6:14). Jesus’ death on the cross is the place where the justice, love, mercy and wisdom of God are most clearly displayed. The depth of our sin and the heights of God’s love cannot be grasped apart from the cross. Mark Driscoll, founding pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington, and Gerry Breshears, professor of theology at Western Seminary, have co-authored a book that seeks to apply the work of Christ to the real-life mess of people’s lives in their new book Death by Love: Letters from the Cross (Crossway, 2008).
Death by Love has an intriguing format. Each chapter begins with a brief profile of a real person whom Driscoll has counselled. Then follows a pastoral letter to that person in which Driscoll and Breshears apply biblical teaching about the person and work of Christ to the issues of sin and grace in that his/her life. The chapter concludes with an “Answers to Common Questions” about the theology presented in the letter. A look through the table of contents reveals a list of painful sins and problems:
Introduction: We Killed God: Jesus Is Our Substitutionary Atonement
“Demons Are Tormenting Me”: Jesus Is Katie’s Christus Victor
“Lust Is My God”: Jesus Is Thomas’s Redemption
“My Wife Slept with My Friend”: Jesus Is Luke’s New Covenant Sacrifice
“I Am a ‘Good’ Christian”: Jesus Is David’s Gift Righteousness
“I Molested a Child”: Jesus Is John’s Justification
“My Dad Used to Beat Me”: Jesus Is Bill’s Propitiation
“He Raped Me”: Jesus Is Mary’s Expiation
“My Daddy Is a Pastor”: Jesus Is Gideon’s Unlimited Limited Atonement
“I Am Going to Hell”: Jesus Is Hank’s Ransom
“My Wife Has a Brain Tumor”: Jesus Is Caleb’s Christus Exemplar
“I Hate My Brother”: Jesus Is Kurt’s Reconciliation
“I Want to Know God”: Jesus Is Susan’s Revelation
Appendix: Recommended Reading on the Cross
Driscoll speaks to each situation with candor and compassion. He is not afraid to say hard things. Best of all, he skillfully applies the person and work of Christ to each person’s needs: overcoming bitterness, rejecting self-righteousness, dealing with heinous sins of others, putting away malice and bitterness, turning away from sexual sin and addictions. The one theological objection I have is in “My Daddy is a Pastor,” a chapter written to his youngest son Gideon. He encourages his son not to take faith for granted (which is good) but does so in the context of a doctrine he calls “unlimited limited atonement.” Driscoll confuses the question of the power of the atonement with question of its design. He wants to safeguard the Reformed doctrine of “limited atonement” from the charge that it leaves no room for a sincere offer of the gospel to everyone without distinction or for a reconciliation of the world by the cross, but his explanation seems more confusing than enlightening.
Even with that bit of theological quibbling, I would recommend Death by Love without hesitation. It has given me fresh courage to speak of Christ and his finished work with greater boldness into the mess of people’s lives. It has refreshed my personal communion with God by enlarging the shadow of the cross in my own life. Take, and read, my friends.
God’s hard words
September 23, 2008
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer we petition God to bring his righteous and gracious reign to bear on our lives, right here and right now. How will this be accomplished? Will it not be accomplished through God’s intervention, either to change people’s hearts and minds or to frustrate and overthrow the schemes of the wicked? Jesus has promised that the gates of hell will not prevail against the advance of his Church.
Thirty-six psalms take up such cries. We have to come call the imprecatory psalms. This means they contain curses–the psalmist asking the Lord to bring destruction, shame, judgment, fear, silence, defeat, scattering, confusion and death to the enemies of God. What should we do with those prayers? Should we pass over them in embarrassment? Should we consider them sub-Christian, sinful venting? Or should we consider them as sharp weapons of righteousness in our spiritual warfare? Is praying this way part of loving what God loves and hating what he hates?
At breakpoint.org there is a helpful essay by Stanley Gale entitled “Praying the Imprecatory Psalms: God’s Hard Words”. It is well worth reading. With hearts full of love and zeal and wonder let us prepare to sing the ‘new song’ before God’s throne throughout eternity: Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for true and just are his judgments. He has condemned the great prostitute who corrupted the earth by her adulteries. He has avenged on her the blood of his servants; and he has avenged on her the blood of his servants shed by her! [Revelation 19:1-3].
Better for nothing than for a nuisance
December 21, 2007
Here’s a Sweet Dropper Christmas tradition [which, being interpreted, means, 'I posted this last Christmas and can't come up with anything better.']
It’s Friday. There must be another Christmas party to attend–I hosted one last night. There must be another little gift to buy. Who’s going to be so favoured as to receive one of my signature fruitcakes? C.S. Lewis wrote a short essay for the December 1957 edition of the publication, Twentieth Century. Under the heading, ‘What Christmas Means to Me,’ Lewis launches a scathing attack on the ‘commercial racket’ that overwhelms the season–NOT because it isn’t ‘religious,’ but because it drains our energies and undermines the merry-making, and hospitality that ought to characterize the season:
The interchange of presents was a very small ingredient in the older English festivity. Mr. Pickwick took a cod with him to Dingley Dell; the reformed Scrooge ordered a turkey for his clerk; lovers sent love gifts; toys and fruit were given to children. But the idea that not only all friends but even all acquaintances should give one another presents, or at least send one another cards, is quite modern and has been forced upon us by the shopkeepers. Neither of these circumstances is in itself a reason for condemning it. I condemn it on the following grounds.
1. It gives on the whole much more pain than pleasure. You have only to stay over Christmas with a family who seriously try to ‘keep’ it [in the commerical sense] in order to see that the thing is a nightmare. Long before December 25th everyone is worn out—physically worn out by weeks of daily struggle in overcrowded shops, mentally worn out by the effort to remember all the right recipients and to think out suitable gifts for them. They are in no trim for merry-making; much less (if they should want to) to take part in a religious act. They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.
2. Most of it is involuntary. The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It is almost a blackmail. Who has not heard the wail of despair, and indeed of resentment, when, at the last moment, just as everyone hoped that the nuisance was over for one more year, the unwanted gift from Mrs. Busy (whom we hardly remember) flops unwelcomed through the letter-box, and back to the dreadful shops one of us has to go?
3. Things are given as presents which no mortal ever bought for himself—gaudy and useless gadgets, ‘novelties’ because no one was ever fool enough to make their like before. Have we really no better use for materials and for human skill and time than to spend them on all this rubbish?
4. The nuisance. For after all, during the racket we still have all our ordinary and necessary shopping to do, and the racket trebles the labour of it. We are told that the whole dreary business must go on because it is good for trade. It is in fact merely one annual symptom of that lunatic condition of our country, and indeed of the world, in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things. I don’t know the way out. But can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers? If the worst comes to the worst I’d sooner give them money for nothing and write it off as a charity. For nothing? Why, better for nothing than for a nuisance.
From C.S. Lewis, “What Christmas Means to Me,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 304-305.
