Category Archives: Religion and theology

The gospel war in our hearts

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The gospel of Christ’s painful death on our behalf has a way of breaking our pride and our sense of rightful demands and our frustration at not getting our way. It works lowliness into our souls. Then we treat each other with meekness flowing out of that lowliness. The battle is with our own proud, self-centered inner person. Fight that battle by faith, through the gospel, in prayer. Be stunned and broken and built up and made glad and humble because you are chosen, holy, loved.

—John Piper, This Momentary Marriage

I have nothing to add to that; I just want to lift up the truth of this this evening.

HT: Of First Importance

Reading a book second-hand

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Now, there’s really no such thing as second-hand reading; it’s not like second-hand smoke, where you get to breathe the smoke that escaped someone else’s lungs. But there are times when someone else is so involved in a book that you get some of the effect—they keep reading you sentences or paragraphs, it keeps coming up in their conversation, and the book seems to be everywhere present.

Such has been my experience with my lovely wife and N. D. Wilson’s book Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World. She chose it to review as part of Thomas Nelson’s “Book Review Bloggers” program, and her capsule review is now up—I think she gives it 6.5 stars out of 5—but I think I can safely say that that won’t be the last thing she writes about it. Nor, I feel equally safe in saying, will this be the last thing I write about it. It’s an amazing book in what’s been a pretty good year so far for amazing books, full of godly wonder . . . which is a glorious thing.

Let it slide?

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 10
Q. Will God permit
such disobedience and rebellion
to go unpunished?

A. Certainly not.
He is terribly angry
about the sin we are born with
as well as the sins we personally commit.

As a just judge
he punishes them now and in eternity.1
He has declared:
“Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do
everything written in the Book of the Law.”2

Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.

God will not let sin slide, because he cannot; it would be unjust, it would be against his nature, it would be wrong, and it would be inherently contradictory. At its core, sin is the assertion of our own self-will against God’s will in a declaration of mistrust: it is the insistence that God neither knows nor truly cares what is best for us, and that we’re better off going our own way. That is a defiant falsehood in the eye of the one who is Truth, a falsehood straight from the pit of Hell; he could not simply ignore it without ceasing to be true, nor would he be doing us anything but ill if he could. Nor, in truth, would his doing so be welcomed; having rebelled against God, why would we want him to come crawling to us to take him back?

The leaven of the Pharisees

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I was reading back through Ray Ortlund’s blog this afternoon, trying to remember where I’d read something, when I came across this post that I’d missed three weeks ago—I have no idea how, because it certainly grabbed my attention this time:

Moral fervor is our deepest evil. When we intend to serve God, but forget to crucify Self moment by moment, we are capable of acting cruelly while feeling virtuous about it.

Let’s always beware that delicious feeling that we are the defenders of the holy. Christ is the only Defender of the holy. He defends us from persecutors. He defends us from becoming persecutors. We can take refuge in him. But that esteem of him also means we regard ourselves with suspicion, especially when judging another.

He’s dead right. I’d actually go a little further and say that what he’s talking about is a combination of moral fervor and spiritual pride—that moral fervor combined with deep humility (as in a man like William Wilberforce) is a very different matter, because that’s a fervor which is rooted in our understanding of our own sin and our own need for grace, and thus is ultimately focused on Jesus Christ; spiritual pride, however, is focused on ourselves, it is self-exalting, and thus when combined with moral fervor puts us in a position which rightly only belongs to God—that of being the defender (which ultimately means the arbiter and the dictator) of the holy. Spiritual pride tells us that we’re already good enough to please God, and that therefore God is on our side as we judge all those people down there who aren’t; when combined with moral fervor, this makes the tyrant and the Inquisitor.

I agree with Dr. Ortlund that moral fervor, if not absolutely directed toward God, if not combined with deep humility and the dedication to “put to death the deeds of the flesh by the Spirit” (as Paul says), is our deepest evil; and that illustrates why, as I’m becoming increasingly convinced, spiritual pride is our most invidious evil, because the subtlest and the most corrupting. It is spiritual pride which turns the greatest desire for holiness into the greatest deeds of darkness, which warps and blights every aspiration of the soul toward sainthood and twists them toward corruption; spiritual pride produces ungodly people who think themselves godly, and there is not much worse than that.

Reflections on John Piper and the tornado

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In case you somehow missed it, there was a tornado in Minneapolis earlier this week—or perhaps we might say, there were two tornadoes in Minneapolis, one of winds and one of words; the original storm inspired a blog post from John Piper, “The Tornado, the Lutherans, and Homosexuality,” which caused quite a storm of its own.

Piper’s post begins with this description of the circumstances:

A friend who drove down to see the damage wrote,

On a day when no severe weather was predicted or expected . . . a tornado forms, baffling the weather experts—most saying they’ve never seen anything like it. It happens right in the city. The city: Minneapolis.

The tornado happens on a Wednesday . . . during the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America’s national convention in the Minneapolis Convention Center. The convention is using Central Lutheran across the street as its church. The church has set up tents around its building for this purpose.

According to the ELCA’s printed convention schedule, at 2 PM on Wednesday, August 19, the 5th session of the convention was to begin. The main item of the session: “Consideration: Proposed Social Statement on Human Sexuality.” The issue is whether practicing homosexuality is a behavior that should disqualify a person from the pastoral ministry.

The eyewitness of the damage continues:

This curious tornado touches down just south of downtown and follows 35W straight towards the city center. It crosses I94. It is now downtown.

The time: 2PM.

The first buildings on the downtown side of I94 are the Minneapolis Convention Center and Central Lutheran. The tornado severely damages the convention center roof, shreds the tents, breaks off the steeple of Central Lutheran, splits what’s left of the steeple in two . . . and then lifts.

He then proceeds to lay out an argument from Scripture—I won’t quote it all here; you can follow the link—leading to this conclusion:

The tornado in Minneapolis was a gentle but firm warning to the ELCA and all of us: Turn from the approval of sin. Turn from the promotion of behaviors that lead to destruction. Reaffirm the great Lutheran heritage of allegiance to the truth and authority of Scripture. Turn back from distorting the grace of God into sensuality. Rejoice in the pardon of the cross of Christ and its power to transform left and right wing sinners.

Now, as you can probably imagine, a lot of people aren’t very happy with that last paragraph—and not all of them are liberals, by any means. Scot McKnight, in a comment on this post, asked,

The text points us away from the specific sins of some persons or some group and to the fact that we are all sinners. Piper points to the specific sins of the ELCA and only then generalizes. Don’t you see the tension of these two approaches?

My wife, for her part, had a similar reaction, arguing that the concluding paragraph quoted above doesn’t really follow from the preceding five points.

From where I sit, I’m not sure Dr. McKnight is reading Dr. Piper’s post quite correctly, but I do agree with David Sessions that the certainty of Dr. Piper’s final paragraph is overreaching. I’ve pointed out elsewhere (not sure if it’s up on the blog or not) that biblically, whenever God sends a disaster as judgment, he always sends a prophet first so that you don’t have to waste time wondering if the disaster is judgment from God—he’s already told you it is. As far as I’m aware, nobody predicted this; it just happened, which makes me very dubious about efforts to put any sort of specific interpretation on this tornado.

And yet, as uncomfortable as I am with Dr. Piper’s conclusion (and particularly the absolute way in which he presents it), I think his argument has more force than his critics (including my wife) want to admit. If we believe in the sovereignty and the providence of God, then we have to conclude that that tornado did exactly what God wanted it to do—and it couldn’t have been more precisely targeted on the ELCA’s national assembly, and in particular their consideration of that study paper (which they subsequently approved), if it had been a Tomahawk cruise missile. It appeared where no tornado was expected, took a perfectly precise route, hit the target, doing noticeable but (as far as I can tell) superficial damage, and then lifted. Short of actually forming right above Central Lutheran and just yo-yoing down and back up again, I’m not sure how its behavior could possibly have been more suggestive.

But suggestive of what? I think it’s going a step too far to try to answer that question as outsiders. Certainly the passage Dr. Piper quotes from Luke 13 is apt, as the call to repentance is always apt; but I also think Dr. McKnight’s point here is well-taken, if not quite correct: Jesus’ words in that passage point us, not to the fact that we are all sinners, but to the fact that we ourselves are sinners, and that the deaths of those on whom the tower fell should inspire each of us to get right with God. Certainly the Minneapolis tornado, with its reminder that in God’s hands, even the weather is a precision weapon, should similarly inspire us.

Anything more than that, though—anything specific to the ELCA and why God might have hit them, at that particular point in their deliberations, with a tornado—is, it seems to me, between God and the ELCA. He didn’t see fit to tell us what to think in advance, nor does anything in Scripture give us warrant to make any judgments about them from the fact that they were hit with a tornado. There may well be a specific message to the leaders of that denomination in the behavior of this tornado, but if so, it’s for them, not for us. Jesus doesn’t talk to us about others and what they need to do—as Aslan tells Lucy in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, that’s not part of our story; instead, he talks to us about ourselves and what we need to do.

I agree with Dr. Piper that approval of homosexual behavior by the church is contrary to Scripture and the revealed will of God; but I also note very carefully that in Luke 13, when Jesus referenced those who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them, he said, “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No.” This is where I think my wife was right, because if we really consider this tornado in the light of those words, what we would have to say is this: no matter how bad we might think the ELCA is, no matter how bad we might think it was for them to take the step they did, Jesus says to us, “Do you think that they were worse offenders than anyone else—including you? No; you too must repent.”

 

Thought on Christian leadership

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To be a leader in the church—and really, to be a Christian in leadership in any organization—is not to be an independent agent, but rather, to be a leader under God. Unfortunately, too often, we don’t realize that. As human beings, we tend to look at leadership positions as a chance for people to make sure things are done their way, to realize their own vision and make their priorities everyone else’s priorities. That’s certainly how we see things done time after time in our politics—frequently with disastrous results, especially for politicians who are unwilling to listen to those who disagree with them and take their concerns seriously. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you see leadership as a form of self-expression and self-actualization.

In God’s view, being a good leader is first and foremost about being a good follower—specifically, a follower of God. Godly leadership isn’t about imposing our will on our circumstances, but about seeking and following God’s will in our circumstances, and doing so in a way that makes the way clear to others so that they can follow us in turn. It’s the sort of thing Paul’s talking about in 1 Corinthians 11:1 when he says, “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ.” That’s it in a nutshell.

In the Christian view, leadership is mimetic—which is to say, it’s all about imitation. We learn to follow Christ by imitating others who have learned to follow him more closely than we do, who in turn are following others who are yet further along in their Christian walk, who in turn are following others who went before them; and each of us, as we learn to follow Christ more nearly, lead others in turn to do the same. That’s leadership; that’s also discipleship. For the Christian, the two are inseparable.

(Excerpted from “Fitness”)

It’s not enough to be against sin

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Listen, I’m against sin. I’ll kick it as long as I’ve got a foot, I’ll fight it as long as I’ve got a fist, I’ll butt it as long as I’ve got a head, and I’ll bite it as long as I’ve got a tooth. And when I’m old, fistless, footless and toothless, I’ll gum it till I go home to glory and it goes home to perdition.

—Billy Sunday

I live in the home of Billy Sunday. Not literally in his house (that’s a museum), but in his hometown, and his hometown church. People don’t usually associate traveling evangelists with Presbyterianism, yet he was indeed a Presbyterian minister, ordained in 1903; as he explained it, it was because of his wife Nell, a formidable figure in her own right who’s still remembered around here as Ma Sunday. (In fact, in our church’s row of photos of past ministers, hers is first in line.) Billy said of his wife, “She was a Presbyterian, so I am a Presbyterian. Had she been a Catholic, I would have been a Catholic—because I was hot on the trail of Nell.” They were instrumental in the construction of our church building, and there are photos from his ministry in various places around the church; more than that, when his tabernacle by the shores of Winona Lake was torn down in the early 1990s, members of the congregation rescued some of the benches, and they sit in the entrance area of our building.

I’ll be honest, before I came here, I had more of an awareness of Billy Sunday the baseball player (a dangerous baserunner but a poor hitter, he was the man who first occasioned the observation, “You can’t steal first base”) than Billy Sunday the revivalist; I have a strong interest in the history of revivals, but I’ve mostly studied earlier ones, so I hadn’t really read much on his career. Obviously, that has changed, and is changing; even this late on, it’s important to understand the Sundays and their ministry to understand this community. The quote at the top of this post, for instance, is one which I first read on the front of one of the local tourist brochures (when I said his house is a museum, I meant that literally); and I’ve been interested to find some of his messages on YouTube.

In checking out some of his sermons, it’s clear that that quote is completely accurate: Billy Sunday was against sin. He was powerfully and insistently against sin; he painted it in stark colors, described it in no uncertain terms, and called his hearers to repentance, firmly and uncompromisingly. This is not to say he was a Hellfire-and-brimstone preacher—he recognized that trying to scare people into salvation is unbiblical and ineffective—but he didn’t stint talk of Hell, either, and he strove hard to make his hearers feel the badness of their sin and their need to repent.

The thing is, while I hear Sunday preaching hard against sin (most famously, against alcohol; the man preached Prohibition)—while I hear the bad news that tells us of our need for Christ—I don’t hear much of the good news. I don’t hear the gospel of grace. I don’t hear anything about the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. All I hear is works righteousness, with repentance held up as the chief work. It could be that this is from an unrepresentative sample of his messages, to be sure, but somehow I don’t think so; and even if that’s the case, it certainly suggests that his preaching wasn’t driven by the gospel of Jesus Christ, but rather by something else. It suggests that he didn’t really preach grace, he preached moralism and teetotalism.

That’s too bad, for reasons Ray Ortlund’s son Eric laid out well in a recent post titled “Grace or Moralism”:

Except that’s not the right title for this. It’s not this one or that one. It’s grace or nothing; grace or death. What I mean is, I was thinking about a great video I saw recently which talked about how important young men are for churches, and how feckless and wandering most young men are—and it’s true for me too. . . .

But then I thought, What if I were a pastor and I had a 20-something male who was into video games and porn and not much else, and I started to pound him and tell him to get his act together, and become a noble and valorous warrior? (I say that last phrase without any irony whatsoever.) If I were to morally exhort him that way, two results are possible: (1) He would fail to change and improve. (2) He would succeed to change and improve. Both options lead to death.

If #1 happens, shame would be added to sin, and he probably would be inclined to hide from further contact with the church.

If #2 happens, he would turn into a Pharisee. Moral exhortation made outside of the larger controlling context of grace and the gospel, if heeded and acted upon by its audience, produces Pharisees.

Read the whole thing—it’s great—and think about it. This is why Paul says that human rules and regulations “have an appearance of wisdom . . . but . . . lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence”; the most they can do is redirect that indulgence into other channels, which may well be even worse in the end. It’s important to be against sin—too many these days who consider themselves Christians aren’t, and that’s scandalous—but it isn’t enough by itself; we need to be against sin because we’re for Jesus Christ.

Note on the cultural history of Islam

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In defending Islam to the West, it’s common to hold up early Islamic culture as far superior to the Christian cultures of the time for its advances, its supposed tolerance, and so on; the usual implied message is, “Islam isn’t as bad as you think it is, or else it couldn’t have produced all these great things!” The principle is sound—it’s basically the same one articulated by Jesus when he told his disciples, “A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Thus you will know them by their fruits.”

The only problem is that the picture we’re usually given is significantly askew from the historical reality. As Robert Spencer put it in Jihad Watch,

The idea that Islamic culture was once a beacon of learning and enlightenment is a commonly held myth. In fact, much of this has been exaggerated, often for quite transparent apologetic motives. The astrolabe was developed, if not perfected, long before Muhammad was born. The zero, which is often attributed to Muslims, and what we know today as “Arabic numerals” did not originate in Arabia, but in pre-Islamic India. Aristotle’s work was preserved in Arabic not initially by Muslims at all, but by Christians such as the fifth century priest Probus of Antioch, who introduced Aristotle to the Arabic-speaking world. Another Christian, Huneyn ibn-Ishaq (809-873), translated many works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato and Hippocrates into Syriac. His son then translated them into Arabic. The Syrian Christian Yahya ibn ‘Adi (893-974) also translated works of philosophy into Arabic, and wrote one of his own, The Reformation of Morals. His student, another Christian named Abu ‘Ali ‘Isa ibn Zur’a (943-1008), also translated Aristotle and others from Syriac into Arabic. The first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in 683. The first hospital was founded in Baghdad during the Abbasid caliphate—not by a Muslim, but a Nestorian Christian. A pioneering medical school was founded at Gundeshapur in Persia—by Assyrian Christians.

In sum, there was a time when it was indeed true that Islamic culture was more advanced than that of Europeans, but that superiority corresponds exactly to the period when Muslims were able to draw on and advance the achievements of Byzantine and other civilizations. But when the Muslim overlords had taken what they could from their subject peoples, and the Jewish and Christian communities had been stripped of their material and intellectual wealth and thoroughly subdued, Islam went into a period of intellectual decline from which it has not yet recovered.

One starfish at a time

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Earlier this week, I went along with the youth and kids of our church on a trip to the Fort Wayne Children’s Zoo. While walking the path through the Indonesian Rain Forest exhibit, I came upon a display with this quote from Edmund Burke:

No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

My first reaction was amusement to see a quote from one of the intellectual founders of modern conservatism so prominently displayed at a pretty liberal institution. (That’s not a complaint; it’s probably inevitable that zoos end up mostly staffed by folks on the liberal side of the spectrum. I can let the agenda slide, and it’s a good zoo.) My second was that Burke, as so often, had hit the nail on the head—both in identifying the problem, and in identifying it as a problem.

The mistake he names there is a common one, and all too easy a mistake to make. The problems of our world are large, and most of us can do little about any of them. Indeed, most of us, even only doing a little at a time, can only really try to do anything about a few of them. We are small beings, and limited. Doing anything can easily come to seem pointless. And yet, even the little we can do is well worth doing.

Why? Well, for one thing, we can never be sure that what we can do is truly as little as we think. Yes, we are small beings—and yet the course of history has many times been affected by individuals who gave it their best shot at the right place at the right time. To take but one example, how many people today remember the name of the man who converted D. L. Moody in a New England shoe shop?—but his boldness in that encounter changed the course of history, as it was multiplied many, many times over in the boldness of the great evangelist.

If we only change the lives of a few people, is that really so small a thing? You may well have heard the story of the old man, the little boy, and the starfish, which is one of my favorites. If you haven’t, well, it seems that one day a tired, cynical old man decided to walk down on the beach. As he walked, he saw a little boy walking ahead of him, picking up starfish that were high and dry on the sand and tossing them back into the water. The little boy walked slowly, so after a while, the old man caught up with him; when he did so, he asked the boy, “Why are you doing that? There are too many starfish for you to save—what you’re doing can’t possibly matter.” The little boy looked down at the starfish in his hand a moment, then looked back up and said, “It matters to this one”—and threw it in.

We tend to underrate the value and importance of individual lives; we never know how much it will mean that we help that one person, or what they will go on to do as a result. We think that only big things are meaningful, and that the only people who really matter in this world are those who have the power and position to do big things; and we forget that the good we do has a way of multiplying, and if we do the little good things that are in our power to do, they can help and inspire others to do the same, and cumulatively that adds up after a while.

And perhaps even more significantly, we forget that the people whose lives we touch are infinitely valuable in and of themselves, which is why an infinite God offered an infinite sacrifice for their sake, for ours, for each of ours. Whatever we can do for the good is worth doing, however small it may seem to us, because if even one person knows love, and hope, and joy, and peace because of us, that’s enough to justify all our efforts; that’s enough to make it worthwhile.

Photo © Jocelyn.  Free use.

We are systematically sinful

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Our sins are connected deep inside us, more than we see. We compartmentalize. We tell ourselves we can sin in one area and it will stay contained in that area. It’s easier to rationalize that way. But the reality of what we are and how we work is more subtle, more interrelated, more inevitable.

Ray Ortlund is right on with this. As a colleague of mine whom I greatly respect was noting the other day, we tend to have a very superficial view of sin that doesn’t go any deeper than “Well, I did this thing this afternoon and that was wrong”; we think of sin only in terms of discrete acts that are bad in themselves, and we miss the deeper attitudes of our hearts that are opposed to God.

In so doing, we miss the ways that that thing we did this afternoon affects all the rest of life, and the attitudes that corrupt even the “good” things that we do, and the fundamental orientation of our hearts toward self rather than toward God . . . we focus on individual acts and ignore the part of ourselves that has to die if we are to be faithful followers of Christ. In medical terms, we focus on the symptoms and miss the disease.