You Shall Have Strength Enough

William Bridge, preaching in 1648 on union with Christ out of Galatians 2:20:

If Christ be in you, then why should you not venture upon any work or service for God, although it do lie beyond you, and beyond your strength, and expect large and great things from him?

You say, sometimes, you would do such or such a thing for God, but you have no strength to do it.

But if Christ be in you, and really united unto your soul, then surely you shall have strength enough, and you may expect large and great things from him.

Therefore, venture upon work and service for God; yea, although they do lie beyond your present strength, be not unwilling thereunto, but expect great things from God, because Christ is really in you. 

–William Bridge, "The Spiritual Life and In-Being of Christ in All Believers, in Works, 1:380

Who He Is

I am gentle and lowly in heart. –Jesus

In summer 2013 I read Thomas Goodwin on the heart of Christ. I still haven't picked myself up off the ground.

Over these past seven years I've been immersed in the Puritans, especially Goodwin but also extended seasons in Sibbes and Bunyan. I've done this alongside my dear friend Drew Hunter, who has been my constant companion on this journey into the heart of Jesus under Goodwin's coaching.

When the pressure hits a certain point, volcanoes have to erupt; and I hit a point a few years ago when I couldn't hold back the urge to put on paper what Goodwin and Co. have given me--messy, faltering, fearful me.

Crossway was willing to rally around it, and today the result is released. I called it Gentle and Lowly because those are Christ's almost unbelievable words in the one place in all four Gospels where he describes his heart. It's a short book with extremely short chapters, five or six pages each, because it needs thinking time. Time for wonder. For rejoicing and repenting. For tearing down the false Jesus we've erected and letting the real Christ stand forth in glory. I was astounded in my own life at how I could do a PhD in New Testament and write books and preach sermons and yet have a profoundly domesticated view of who Jesus is without realizing it. 

Basically the book is me joining some 400-year-old men in celebrating who Jesus most deeply, most naturally is, not for the innocent but the guilty, all according to the surprising testimony of Scripture.

This book is the answer to the question, So Dane, what were your 30s all about? What did you learn? 

It is not hard to find this wondrous teaching in the Puritans, and I've found it also in Edwards, Spurgeon, Warfield, and others. But we don't know it today. It's easy to find teaching on justification or adoption or the deity of Christ or the incarnation or a hundred other historic, vital doctrines.

But who's talking about his heart?

Perhaps you'd like to reconsider Jesus. Or maybe you're barely holding on. If so you can find the book at Amazon, Christian Book, Barnes and Noble, Reformation Heritage, or Westminster Bookstore (temporarily half off), or whatever retail outlet you use. Crossway has made available the introduction and chapter 1 if you'd like to take it for a test drive. I recorded the audiobook for it and that's now available too if you prefer to listen to books. Crossway also created a 14-day podcast, adapting the content.

Fatherlike he tends and spares us

Well our feeble frame he knows 

In his hand he gently bears us

Rescues us from all our foes

H. F. Lyte, 1834

The All-sufficiency of Christ Everywhere We Look

I am relishing the works of the Puritan William Bridge. I had never really known anything about him, other than the sole Banner publication of his sermon series on Psalm 42 in the Puritan Paperbacks line, A Lifting Up for the Downcast, which is an amazing book.

I'm working through volume 1 of his collected works now, and am in the midst of six sermons on John 1:16 and specifically the phrase "grace upon grace." The burden of the whole series of messages is to commend the all-sufficiency of the grace of Jesus Christ for all our needs and desires.

Here's a quote from the fourth sermon.

Beloved, if Jesus Christ were not the great Lord-Keeper of his Father's wardrobe, why should those names and titles be given to him, which you find so frequently in Scripture? Cast your eyes where you will, you shall hardly look upon any thing, but Jesus Christ has taken the name of that upon himself.

If you cast your eyes up to heaven in the day, and behold the sun, he is called "the Sun of Righteousness," Mal 4:2.

If you cast your eyes in the night upon the stars, or in the morning upon the morning star, he is called "the bright Morning Star," Rev. 22:16.

If you behold your own body, he is called the head, and the church the body, Col. 1:18.

If you look upon your own clothes, he is called your raiment; "Put ye on the Lord Jesus," Rom. 13:14.

If you behold your food, he is called bread, "the Bread of Life," John 6:35.

If you look upon your houses, he is called a door, John 10:9.

If you look abroad into the fields, and behold the cattle of the fields, he is called the Good Shepherd, John 10:11; he is called the Lamb, John 1:29; he is called the fatted calf, Luke 15:23.

If you look upon the waters, he is called a fountain; the blood of Christ a fountain, Zech. 13:1.

If you look upon the stones, he is called "a Corner Stone," Isa. 28:16.

If you look upon the trees, he is called "a Tree of Life," Prov. 3:18.

What is the reason of this? Surely, not only to way-lay your thoughts, that wheresoever you look, still you should think of Christ; but to show, that in a spiritual way and sense, he is all this unto the soul.

 --William Bridge, Works, 1:261–62

8 Reminders in These Days of Panic

These are strange days, days of fear, days of hysteria—in other words, days that simply bring all our latent anxieties up to the surface, anxieties that were there all along and are now made visible to others. 

What do we need to remember in these days of alarm?

1.     The World of the Bible. Now we know how the people of God felt throughout the Bible, especially the Old Testament. The prophets and many of the psalms speak to people who are caught up in mass hysteria or subject to pandemics. Maybe the current cultural moment is precisely the hermeneutic we need to read the OT deeply for the first time, which can otherwise feel so foreign.

2.     Our True Trust. Times of public panic force us to align our professed belief with our actual belief. We all say we believe God is sovereign and he is taking care of us. But we reveal our true trust when the world goes into meltdown. What's really our heart's deepest loyalty? The answer is forced to the surface in times of public alarm such as we're wading into now.

3.     Neighbor Love. When the economy is tanking, opportunities to surprise our neighbors with our confidence and joy surge forward. Now, now is the time to be outside more, to be loving more, to be showing more hospitality. Love stands out strongest when it is needed most, rarest, expected least.

4.     Family Discipleship. Our kids’ teachers are telling them to wash their hands longer. Why? Their teachers won’t tell them but it’s because they may die otherwise. Heaven and hell are staring every fourth grader in the face. That’s why they’re being told to wash their hands for 20 seconds. We have an opportunity to instill in our kids a deeper awareness of eternity than they have ever known. There is a salutary effect to all this because heaven or hell awaits every fourth grader, either taken out by a virus next month or taken out by old age decades away--10,000 years from now, the difference between dying at age 10 or age 80 will seem trivial. This is an opportunity to disciple our families into the bracing reality of eternity.

5.     Eschatological Hope. Maybe this is the end. I doubt it. But maybe. Jesus said no one knows the day or the hour. Maybe the sight of Jesus descending from heaven, robed in glory, surrounded by angels, is right around the corner. If so, hallelujah. If not, hallelujah—we’re being reminded that he will indeed return one day. Either way, let us rejoice our way through the chaos, certain of the final outcome.

6.   Invincible Providence. No infected molecule can enter your lungs, or your three-year-old's lungs, unless sent by the hand of a heavenly Father. The Heidelberg Catechism defines God's providence as "The almighty and ever present power of God by which God upholds, as with his hand, heaven and earth and all creatures, and so rules them that leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and sickness, prosperity and poverty—all things, in fact, come to us not by chance but by his fatherly hand." That truth is like an asthmatic's inhaler to our soul--calms us down, lets us breathe again.

7.     Christ's Heart. In times of turmoil, in seasons of distress, Jesus is more feelingly with his people than ever. Hebrews tells us that Jesus experienced all the horror of this world that we do, minus sin—so apparently he knows, he himself knows, way down deep, what it feels like for life to close in on you and for your world to go into meltdown. We can go to him. We can sit with him. His arm is around us, stronger than ever, right now. His tears are larger than ours.

8.     Heaven. From heaven’s shore we will see how eternally safe we were all along, even amid the global upheaval and anxieties that loom so large as we walk through them. The dangers out there are real. The cautions are wise. Our bodies are mortal, vulnerable. But our souls, for those united to a resurrected Christ, are beyond the reach of all eternal danger. How un-harm-able we are, we who are in Christ. Be at peace. All is assured.

The Covenant of Redemption

John Flavel (1627–1691), with biblically infused imagination, supposes what transpired between Father and Son to accomplish our rescue.

Father: My Son, here is a company of poor miserable souls, that have utterly undone themselves, and now lie open to my justice! Justice demands satisfaction for them, or will satisfy itself in the eternal ruin of them. What shall be done for these souls?

Son: O my Father, such is my love to, and pity for them, that rather than they shall perish eternally, I will be responsible for them as their Surety: bring in all thy bills, that I may see what they owe thee; Lord, bring them all in, that there may be no after-reckonings with them; at my hand shalt thou require it. I will rather choose to suffer thy wrath than they should suffer it: upon me, my Father, upon me be all their debt.

Father: But, my Son, if thou undertake for them, thou must reckon to pay the last mite, expect no abatements; if I spare them, I will not spare thee.

Son: Content, Father, let it be so; charge it all upon me, I am able to discharge it: and though it prove a kind of undoing to me, though it impoverish all my riches, empty all my treasures, yet I am content to undertake it.

Flavel concludes:

Blush, ungrateful believers, O let shame cover your faces; judge in yourselves now, hath Christ deserved that you should stand with him for trifles, that you should shrink at a few petty difficulties, and complain, this is hard, and that is harsh?

O if you knew the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ in this his wonderful condescension for you, you could not do it.

--John Flavel, "The Fountain of Life," in Works, 1:61

I reflect on this heart of the Father and the Son in this book, releasing in two months. 

What Else Is There?

A Few Passing Thoughts on "God and the Faithfulness of Paul"

I ordered the 2017 volume God and the Faithfulness of Paul--the title of which is a little too cute as a response to N. T. Wright's 2013 magnum opus Paul and the Faithfulness of God--only so that I could read one essay, the one by Seyoon Kim critiquing Wright yet again on Wright's alleged anti-imperial polemic in Paul, which is relevant to a research project I'm working on. But I got sucked in as I began skimming a few of the other chapters. And reading Wright's response at the end of the book made me want to go see what the contributors had actually said. So I began reading the essays one by one.

What a fascinating book. The editors have done a good job bringing together a diverse collection of authors to engage with Wright. They deserve our thanks.

A few reflections, amid broad appreciation for this volume.

The Key Critique of Wright

It was striking to see a consistent refrain coming through from this very diverse group of contributors. The common thread of critique throughout the essays, amid much deep appreciation, was as follows:

Wright's brilliant and creative connecting of the dots, his shaping of the master-story of which Paul believed himself and his readers to be participants, refreshingly resists the staid categories within which the New Testament has been read for the past several generations (law/gospel, the objectivity of justification vs the subjectivity of the Spirit, covenant vs dispensational theology, etc) and rethinks Paul from the ground up; and yet the very creativity of Wright's schema of monotheism/election/eschatology, all reworked around Jesus as Messiah and the spirit (he doesn't like capitalizing the third Person of the Trinity), is itself at times imposed onto the text to fit neatly with Wright's broader reading of Paul.

In other words, his gift for seeing the forest makes one wonder if he is misreading some of the trees.

I find this critique accurate, time-tested, and confirming of my own reading of Wright over the years.

Why No Historical Theology?

One of the temptations and weaknesses of the New Testament guild is to neglect church history and historical theology. This is understandable; as Wright laments in his closing essay, one cannot possibly master even the contemporary literature on Paul, let alone what others over the centuries have said. Even to master the literature on a single Pauline letter is itself a full-time job--and of course, as soon as you feel on top of the secondary literature, a fresh wave of journal articles and monographs appears and the mastery instantly vanishes!

But it does not follow that just because one cannot cover all the contemporary perspective therefore one should say nothing about historical perspectives. In his 2009 justification book, Wright repeated aligned himself with Calvin as over against Luther. But the way he cast the two key reformers bent both of them out of shape, especially Luther. Why not have a chapter in the 2017 volume on Wright's reading of the reformers, or just of Calvin? Someone like Mike Allen or Mike Horton or Gerald Bray or Tony Lane could have provided a fascinating essay. The essay on a postmodern reading of Wright could easily have been dropped to make room for such a chapter.

Befitting the current academic climate, there's a chapter putting Wright in dialogue with Barth--but Wright doesn't engage with Barth in his books. He does engage with Calvin and others. And Barth's own historical hero was Calvin. Go to Calvin and see what he and the reformers would say of Wright's vision of Pauline theology. (This volume did just this.)

One way we can learn from Wright without letting him set all the terms in such discussions (putting us in danger of missing key questions that Paul probes but Wright doesn't) is to ask what thinkers 200 and 500 and 900 years ago were saying about Paul's letters.

As C. S. Lewis put it, there are two ways to get out of your own time and thus expose your generation's blind spots: (1) Get in a time machine and travel into the future and see what writers are saying about Paul; (2) Get in a time machine and travel into the past and do so. We can't do #1, but we can do #2, and we miss a great opportunity for fresh insight if we don't.

The Cappadocians and the Puritans and the Princeton School didn't have the Dead Sea Scrolls or SBL. But their insight into what Paul was saying often outstrips our own, sometimes in surprising, refreshing ways.

Why Ignore the Evangelicals?

Several of the contributors are pretty obscure, with some not even working in New Testament. In his closing response essay, Wright points this out more than once. While he appreciated the response from Gregory Sterling on the need to bolster Wright's reading of Paul through engagement with philosophy, Wright was rightly mystified by the essays of a few others who simply were not tracking with his argument (see Andrew McGowan's comments about Wright's use of "symbol" language as an example).

More broadly, I was surprised at how little evangelical scholarship was engaged, by which I mean the work of those who teach at confessional Protestant institutions and who take all 13 letters attributed to Paul as authentically Pauline. Some of the best Paul work is being done by evangelicals--Doug Moo, Greg Beale, Frank Thielman, Don Carson, Clint Arnold, Bob Yarbrough, and others. Tom Schreiner's contribution to Paul study was discussed in the opening essay, but that was about it.

Perhaps if Doug Moo's Pauline theology (in the big Zondervan series that Andreas Kostenberger is editing) had been available, Doug's work would have been more involved in the discussion--it would have been a fascinating exercise to put Moo and Wright in dialogue. But aside from the few pages putting Wright in interaction with Tom Schreiner, there is almost no interaction with evangelical scholarship. One reason that's striking to me is that Wright himself in more than one place has identified Doug Moo as among the most incisive of his critics--"a truly great Paul scholar" were Wright's words. So why not make him a major dialogue partner?

A Few of the More Interesting Chapters

Some of the essays were less useful, connected only glancingly with Wright's project. But a few are worth pointing out as particularly worth reading.

Benjamin Schliesser opened with an essay of impressive breadth as he placed Wright's Paul work among others. The discussion of Dunn vis-a-vis Wright was fascinating. As just mentioned, too bad there wasn't more engagement with evangelicals.

Seyoon Kim's essay built on John Barclay's strong critique of Wright's reading of Paul in which Rome looms large as a foil to Paul's gospel and the proclamation of Jesus (not Caesar) as Lord. Kim incisively shows why Wright's claim is overdone. It is not Rome and Caesar in themselves that are the threat to the church--it is Sin and Death and the Flesh that are the problems, problems which manifest themselves through Rome and in many other earthly constructs, but the problem is deeper than a particular imperial construct in itself.

Dunn's essay was a real chuckler. He's in the "scholars-who-have-nothing-left-to-prove-and-simply-say-what-they-think" bucket. Wright lamented in his closing essay Dunn's "schoolmasterish" tone, but I found Dunn's comments right on, with the exception of Dunn's continued skepticism toward the recent consensus building around an early high christology championed by Bauckham and Hurtado.

Sigurd Grindheim was masterful in treating Wright on election and showing that Israel's basic failure was not so much that they were not a light to the nations but, more deeply, that they did not trust and love the Lord above all.

The elderly Peter Stuhlmacher is always a joy to read, representing (with Martin Hengel) the best of German NT scholarship in my view, appreciating the New Perspective but retaining the deep and right anthropology that understands the perversity of fallen humanity and Paul's solution to it in the gospel as lying deeper than ethnic exclusivism and corporate inclusion, respectively.

Eckhard Schnabel's engagement with Wright's understanding of "mission" helps fill out and at points correct Wright's explications of conversion, evangelism, and the saving nature of the gospel. It is a firm, clear, and needed essay--though the objection to Wright calling Paul's travels "endless" and "restless," asserting that Paul's travels did come to an end and that surely Paul rested from time to time, was bizarre.

And then there's Wright's lengthy closing essay, filled with the usual elegant prose and gentlemanly appreciation of most of the essays, combined with annoyance at others caricaturing him (despite his own caricaturing of others) and, at times, magically melting away substantive disagreements with a wave of his monotheism-election-eschatology wand and Voila, all objections go poof!

In Closing . . .

Fascinating book. Interesting to see how others are understanding Wright, and good to keep benefiting from Wright himself, who is a gift to the church when read duly critically. But I hope collections of essays like this one don't reinforce the impression that NT scholarship doesn't need the insights of pre-Enlightenment readers of Paul.

And Doug, please get that Pauline theology in our hands quick as you can!

Reflections on TGC19

What a rich time.

A few thoughts, offered of course with the inescapably partial view of reality that we are all operating out of, and therefore needing to be filled out and supplemented with the thoughts of others...

1. The Gospel Coalition has to be one of the most striking examples of the Lord's care for his church in our generation. When leaders are asked about the state of the church today, the immediate reaction is often hand-wringing and lament. But TGC represents a wave of blessing and health and vitality and spiritual hunger and theological fidelity and evangelism fostering that is a big reason for celebration.

2. It's a particular pleasure, for me, to be there with my Crossway colleagues. I am just so proud of them. They are both humble and professional, instead of one or the other. They are not only colleagues but friends. How awful to do ministry alone. And we operate out of a deep well of shared theology and vision and commitments that makes our work together not only meaningful but fun.

3. Books. Books, books, books. I love books, and apparently so do other Christians. The swelling book lines in between sessions is itself a sign of spiritual health. Apparently people want to read, to grow, to learn. The day people come to conferences to hear sizzling preaching but don't care to take home books will be a sad day, if it ever comes. It isn't here yet.

4. Really appreciated Matt Boswell's leadership of the singing. That was one of my favorite things about the event. Don Carson on John 11 was rich indeed. Tim Keller on the new birth: typically insightful. Paul Tripp on suffering: deep wisdom. The best thing I heard all week was my dad's talk 'Pastor, Your Church Can Become Healthy Again.' I wish everyone at the conference could have heard it. Searching, deepening, eye-opening, emboldening.

5. One of the blessings of these conferences is to see friend-ministries we wouldn't otherwise--for me, talking to those representing Covenant Seminary, Rafiki Foundation, WTS, WTS Books, Christian Focus, Bethlehem Seminary, Third Mil, Indianapolis Theological Seminary--not to mention the many individual friends from seminary, grad school, etc one runs into. All these are impromptu conversations that have a way of bearing fruit as time passes; they're just as important, I find, as the planned meetings.

6. I'm grateful for denominations, including my own, and I'm glad to belong to one. But something isn't right if we evangelical denominations never come together. TGC provides that beautifully (as does T4G). I know something like TGC can't exercise church discipline, and that the leadership structure doesn't fit neatly onto what the New Testament prescribes for the local church, and so on--so what? It isn't trying to. It was conceived to provide an opportunity to come together around a theologically clear gospel of grace in a day of increasing fracturing. It's healthy to rally around the vital gospel doctrines we all revere deep in our hearts, even if that reverence clothes itself in denominationally distinct ways back home.

7. One final thought. I wonder what all of us who support TGC can do to consciously work against this great enterprise being quietly taken down by the flesh. Human nature being what it is, it seems to me virtually inevitable that an event such as this, with well-known speakers, and a big crowd, and a green room, and preachers quickly and quietly escorted around, provides a unique venue for venting the flesh, for schmoozing, for preening and parading--unless we deliberately fight against it. Left in neutral, we will slide toward worldliness; church history, the Bible, and honest self-knowledge all confirm this, unpleasant as the thought is.

What might God do if TGC and all of us went into an event like this with Francis Schaeffer's essay 'No Little People, No Little Places' emblazoned across our mental horizon? Schaeffer wrote:

The Scripture emphasizes that much can come from little if the little is truly consecrated to God. There are no little people and no big people in the true spiritual sense, but only consecrated and unconsecrated people.

Later in the same book but in a different essay ('The Lord's Work in the Lord's Way'), Schaeffer reflected:

If we have the world's mentality of wanting the foremost place, we are not qualified for Christian leadership. This mentality can . . . fit us for being a big name among men, but it unfits us for real spiritual leadership. To the extent that we want power we are in the flesh, and the Holy Spirit has no part in us. Christ put a towel around Himself and washed His disciples' feet. We should ask ourselves from time to time, 'Whose feet am I washing?'

Schaeffer himself had learned this secret of walking in the Spirit rather than in the flesh, and he knew how imperceptibly and naturally we can slip from doing the Lord's work animated by the Spirit to doing the Lord's work animated by the flesh. His close associate Udo Middleman wrote of Schaeffer:

He was not slick. He revolted against false appearances of leadership, growth statistics, and any show, in which he saw the dangers of pretense, performance, and praise of men. He had been there and found it dishonest, dangerous, and finally condemning.

What a joy, an honor, to participate in and support TGC. Now, as we return home, may we celebrate a thousand blessings flowing from that great event and all that it represents, doing so with sober-minded realism about how quickly we can all slip into fleshly motivations, and with ongoing prayer, and with an insistence on spotlighting Christ himself in all we do and say and desire. If we don't, what began as gospel rallying 12 years ago will, in another 12, become one more venue for Christian fracturing, thus denying the very gospel that TGC came into existence to hold high.