For Your Encouragement

I want to be sure any followers of this blog are aware of three other blogs by men I respect and love: my two brothers and my dad.

My older brother Eric teaches Old Testament at Briercrest College and Seminary in Saskatchewan--I wonder if I spelled that right--after grad school at TEDS and the University of Edinburgh. His site Scatterings is updated a few times a week with substantial and thoughtful posts concerning what life in Christ looks like in a fallen world with forays into music and literature. (Eric is by far the wittiest of any of us.)

My younger brother Gavin just finished at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis and is now doing the internship at Capitol Hill Baptist with Mark Dever before looking for a pastorate next Spring. His blog Soliloquium is largely reflections on Scripture, analysis of stuff he is reading, and quotes from favorite writers such as Lewis and Tolkien.

And my dad is pastoring a young Acts 29 church he's recently planted in Nashville. If you want to hear some gospel-riveted preaching that is wonderfully disruptive and strengthening all at once, download the podcast--or see here for a taste. He blogs at Christ Is Deeper Still, updating roughly daily, mostly with life-giving quotes and occasionally addressing gospel living and questions about the Bible from his own store of wisdom.

I mention these guys to spread joy. If you follow them you will be helped. Enjoy, with me!

'A room without books . . .

. . . is like a body without a soul.'

--Cicero

Life is Short

Archibald Alexander was the first president of Princeton Seminary in the 1800s. His student Charles Hodge held his teacher in such great respect that he named his own son Archibald Alexander Hodge--you might of heard of A. A. Hodge, a Princeton theologian in his own right. Alexander's most well-known work is Thoughts on Religious Experience, in which he says things like this:

[S]o short is the time of man's continuance upon earth, and so infinite the joys or miseries of the future world, that to make much of these little differences would be like estimating the weight of a feather, when engaged in weighing mountains. Who thinks it a matter of any concern, whether the circumstances of persons who lived a thousand years ago were affluent or destitute, except, so far as these external enjoyments and privations contributed to their moral improvement, or the contrary? If we could be duly impressed with the truths which respect our eternal condition, we should consider our afflictions here as scarcely worthy of being named.

--Thoughts on Religious Experience (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1844), 218

The Capacity and Cravings of Our Souls

The favor of God procured a soul-satisfying happiness answerable to the capacity and cravings of our souls. Good meat for the nature of man. . . . Every part of good that nature craves--honor, wealth, pleasure--he has provided.

--Jonathan Edwards, 'Jesus Christ Is the Shining Forth fo the Father's Glory,' in The Glory and Honor of God: Vol 2 of the Previously Unpublished Sermons of Jonathan Edwards (ed. M. McMullen; 2004), 235

Berkouwer: Justification and Sanctification

The following sentence on justification in the reformers, while perusing Berkouwer's Faith and Justification on Google Books, sorely tempted me to immediately order a used copy from amazon. Berkouwer's Faith and Sanctification was critical for me this past spring in coming to understand how justification ignites holiness.

The basic issue is whether justification is the ground of sanctification so that sanctification is continually rooted in justification . . .

Justification . . . was not one specific phase among many on the way to salvation. It was the sweet word of pardon, which was and remained of all-embracing significance for the wholeness of life. Justification may never become a station along the way, a harbor which, once passed through, may be forgotten. On the contrary, only in intimate connection with justification does talk of sanctification make any real sense.

The Reformation, in its defense of the forensic, declarative justification that points us always to the free favor of God, has not endangered, but rescued the confession of true sanctification.

--G. C. Berkouwer, Faith and Justification (Eerdmans 1954), 100

Thanks for pointing me to this book, Brian Martin.

Wesley and Spurgeon: Reading

Two good reminders lately, from pastors, on the importance of reading for the church's teachers and preachers, here and here.

Idols and Trust

Up till recently the main verb I associated with idolatry was worship. A better word, I'm becoming convinced, is trust.

Certainly, an idol is something we worship. As Keller puts it, a good thing that we turn into an ultimate thing. A legitimate joy or pursuit that we do not use to funnel up into the glory of God but into which we funnel the rest of our lives. Our emotional north star.

But a better way to describe these things is trust. In what do we trust? It is hard to see how I worship my reputation among academic peers; it is easy to see how I trust in my reputation. It's not intuitively obvious that I worship the idol of a swelling bank account; it's easy to see that I trust that as my deepest functional security. A stronghold of psychological refuge.

I've been helped to this by the Heidelberg Catechism, which makes this explicit. In its treatment of the 10 commandments, it explains the first commandment ('you shall have no other gods before me'--a question of worship, right?) like this:

Q 95. What is idolatry?

A. Idolatry is having or inventing something in which one trusts in place of or alongside of the only true God, who has revealed himself in his Word.

Now there's a group of people who understand the human heart. And their Bibles--I was fascinated to discover this week how Psalm 115 speaks of idolatry. After a litany of descriptors of the impotence of idols, the psalmist sings:

Those who make them become like them;
so do all who trust in them.
O Israel, trust in the LORD!
He is their help and their shield. (vv. 8-9)

Luther was right: the first commandment, the call to worship no other gods than Yahweh, is a call to justification by faith alone. Psychological security by God, rather than psychological security by _________.

Bavinck: Imputation

[I]t is said in Rom 4:5 and 5:6 that God justifies the ungodly. It is impossible, in this connection, to use stronger language. The opponents of imputed righteousness should not lodge their objection against Luther and Calvin but against Paul. (Reformed Dogmatics, 4:213)

Bavinck's whole discussion of imputation, if we replace the name Bellarmine with some modern ones, is strikingly relevant today. The same objections leveled today against imputation were given a century ago. Bellarmine argued that imputation is nonsensical because it does something only external to someone, and therefore the person is not in fact righteous, and not, therefore, to be called actually righteous if imputation is the controlling concept. See Bavinck deconstruct this false line of thinking on pages 212 to 214 of volume 4 of the Dogmatics. Here's the bottom line:

If God justifies the ungodly, that is not a fiction, a putative imputation, but a present and future reality. . . . For when God justifies the ungodly, he does it on the basis of a righteousness that he himself has effected in Christ. By Christ's sacrifice, against all hostile powers, he has acquired the right to acquit the ungodly. . . . And a justifying faith consists above all in an unshakable trust in that God of miracles with whom all things are possible.

Thank you Herman! I don't think you were nearly as grouchy as you look in all the pictures.

Schlatter on the Galatian Problem

The usual combination of penetrating psychological awareness/theological profundity, on the one hand, with recognition of the crucial social/ethnic questions of first-century Christianity on the other:

The mainspring of the controversy was not national interests or ecclesiastical ambition, but the central question: What does God require of man and how can man be justified before God?

. . . Now the union between Church and Jewry was Paul's ultimate hope. . . . He looked upon the breach between the Church and the Jewish people with deep sorrow and knew better than anyone what a great hindrance it was even to his work among the gentiles. But he brushed aside all ecclesiastical and national considerations. . . . He was solely concerned with the purely religious aspect of the matter in its deepest sense. As he saw it, his opponents had altered the substance of the Gospel by repudiating what had been accomplished by the Cross of Christ.

. . . The God who acted in Jesus was not a God who commands and demands, but a God who gives. Hence Christian piety involved the resolute rejection of every human claim to merit, and an equally resolute acceptance of reconciliation with God. These were the aims which made Paul enter the fray with might and main.

--Adolf Schlatter, The Church in the New Testament Period (1926), 169-71; emphasis original

Is Your Heart Salivating Yet?

Herman Bavinck on the new creation and the new Jerusalem:

All that is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, and commendable in the whole of creation, in heaven and on earth, is gathered up in the future city of God--renewed, re-created, boosted to its highest glory.

The substance [of the city of God] is present in this creation. Just as the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, as carbon is converted into diamond, as the grain of wheat upon dying in the ground produces other grains of wheat, as all of nature revives in the spring and dresses up in celebrative clothing, as the believing community is formed out of Adam's fallen race, as the resurrection body is raised from the body that is dead and buried in the earth, so too, by the re-creating power of Christ, the new heaven and the new earth will one day emerge from the fire-purged elements of this world, radiant in enduring glory and forever set free from the "bondage to decay". . . . The state of glory will be . . . a re-formation that, thanks to the power of Christ . . . presents the entire creation before the face of God, brilliant in unfading splendor and blossoming in a springtime of eternal youth.

--Reformed Dogmatics, 4:720