Justin Taylor's Blog, page 10

Why Teenage Girls Want to Become Boys

Ten years ago, you probably didn’t know anyone who identified as transgender.

Today, you almost certainly know someone who identifies as transgender—especially if they are teenage girls.

In the 5-minute video above, Abigail Shrier—author of the important book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters—analyzes this disturbing trend, why it is happening, and why it will lead to harm instead of help.

Shrier—a Jewish author—has done outstanding reporting on this phenomenon. Do note, though, that her primary critique is not against transgenderism per se but rather on the social phenomenon of contagion among teenage girls who never reported experiencing gender dysphoria growing up.

The best overall general book critiquing transgenderism is Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement.

The best book that tells the cultural history of how we has a society came to accept the notion that a man could be a woman trapped inside a man’s body is Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. (Coming in February 2022 will be a shorter, more accessible version of Trueman’s book, entitled Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution.)

 

A Biblical Theology (And Some 3D Renderings) of the Temples in Jerusalem

The video above, from the Bible Project, admirably summarizes the biblical storyline of the temple theme. What a gift to have sophisticated biblical theology made so clear and accessible!

Here is how they start their summary overview article on the theme.

Temple

Israel’s temple in the Bible is described as the place where God’s space and humanity’s space are one. In fact, the whole biblical drama can be told as a story about God’s temple.

The temple is a place where heaven and earth meet.

The ancient Israelite temple was a gigantic symbol that visualized God’s desire to live together with his human creatures and rule the world through them.

If you were to ask any ancient Israelite to tell you the most important place on earth, you would get a clear and consistent answer: the temple in Jerusalem. It’s the place where heaven and earth meet, where the creator God has chosen to take up residence among his people. It’s a sacred place where Israel’s priestly representatives enter into God’s presence on their behalf to express thanks, confession, and praise. This building attracted Israelite pilgrims for centuries and was a cornerstone of their covenant relationship with God.

Was the temple just a building?

But this amazing building did even more. It told a story through its visual symbolism, a story that reaches back to the beginning of humanity’s story as told in Genesis chs. 1-3. There God appoints humanity as his royal and priestly representatives to rule the world on his behalf. And when the biblical authors start describing creation and the garden of Eden, any ancient Israelite reader would have understood these as temple images.

Read the rest here.

For a book-length work on this, see J. Daniel Hays, The Temple and the Tabernacle: A Study of God’s Dwelling Places from Genesis to Revelation.

These videos, using replicas and computerized animation, do a nice job of visually orienting readers to the tabernacle and the subsequent temples in Jerusalem in the redemptive plan of God. Note two things: (1) Having worked closely with Leen Ritmeyer (one of the world’s leading experts on these reconstructions) on the ESV Study Bible, I think these renderings are quite accurate. (2) These videos are produced by Mormons. So I would not recommend subscribing to the videos at the end, as you are invited to do.

My Worth Is Not in What I Own – Feat. John Piper, Keith & Kristyn Getty, We Are Messengers

“My Worth Is Not In What I Own (At the Cross)” – Keith & Kristyn Getty, Darren Mulligan (@We Are Messengers​), and John Piper (@Desiring God​) Part of the new Sing! Global LIVE Album | singglobalalbum.com

Sermon excerpts from John Piper taken from the Sing! National City Tour at the SSE Arena in Belfast, Ireland.

We are unworthy of the cross. Yet, because of the cross, we are worthy. That is the paradox at the heart of the Christian faith: our worth is not in what we own, what we do, or how hard we try. It is found only in the death of Christ. The Worthy One, the Son of God, laid aside his glory to take our sin upon him. He was crucified for the unworthy, the undeserving. By his sacrifice, he crowns us with worth, showing that he loves us at the infinite cost of his own life.

In this new edition of the song “My Worth Is Not in What I Own” (featuring We Are Messengers), John Piper points us again to the foot of the cross, where we find our worth in the Savior who gave himself for us.

Questions for David French on the Connections between the Atlanta Killer and Purity Culture

Over the weekend David French wrote a piece, “Why the Atlanta Massacre Triggered a Conversation About Purity Culture.”

I would like to commend it, in a qualified way, while critiquing the actual argument.

I trust readers know how much I admire David. He is a bright legal mind and a deeply principled and courageous man. He is one of the few Christians who is able to bring gospel-centered arguments into the public square. (You have to admire a man who writes a weekly column for a non-religious publication and includes a worship song at the end of every post!) He is regularly and shamefully maligned and slandered, even though he is usually on the side of the angels!

I know you don’t need to see these kinds of things about everyone you critique, but I want to say it.

Before I go further, it’d probably be helpful if you read the whole thing first if you haven’t. (And while you’re at it, consider subscribing to the Dispatch—they have great writers offering conservative fact-based reporting in a hyper-partisan age.)

David begins by noting that when there’s a mass murder, we all immediately want to know why.

He makes the following points:

(1) This impulse is understandable and good.

(2) This impulse, in practice, can be toxic and destructive if we use it to spike a political football or to dunk on our ideological opponents.

But . . .

(3) It is still necessary to know why such evil happens, even if our sacred cows are harmed in the investigative process.

On the sexual angle, David writes: “the evidence of the shooter’s sexual confusion and dysfunction continued to mount. And so it’s important to focus on what we do know, on where the evidence is leading us now.”

No argument from me so far.

So what’s the evidence?

David writes:

(1) The shooter is a Christian young man, baptized in a local Baptist church.

(2) He struggled so deeply with sexual sin that he was a patient at a local Evangelical treatment facility, called HopeQuest.

(3) He reportedly told a former roommate at a different recovery center that his “very salvation was at stake” if he couldn’t overcome his sexual sin.

We can add to the evidence a quote from earlier in David’s essay:

(4) He shot the women because “they were a temptation for him he wanted to eliminate.”

(David adds: “we don’t automatically take a killer’s word as the final explanation for his motives.” David says this about the racial angle—don’t take this as evidence that there was nothing racial in his motives; the act speaks for itself. But I think it should also apply the sexual angle as well.)

Now keep these four things in mind as we go, because they do an enormous amount of work as the foundation for what follows in the essay.

David writes: “The shooter’s stated beliefs and deadly actions represented a hyper-violent and extreme manifestation of a toxic theology that long corrupted a slice of Evangelical Christianity.”

So at this point he’s drawn a connection, based on the purported evidence, between the shooter’s beliefs, actions, and a toxic form of evangelicalism.

The rest of the piece elucidates this “toxic theology,” namely, “purity culture,” which he distinguishes from mainstream / normal / conventional traditional teaching on sex.

Again, keep that distinction in mind.

David does acknowledge that “some purity teaching was both orthodox and beneficial, other teaching kept lurching towards the same extremes.”

I could quibble with some of the analysis in this section, mainly at the level of prevalence—simply because I don’t know. Were “hundreds of thousands of families” hanging onto Gothard’s teachings? Maybe. I’d just like to see some data for that at some point, not just anecdotal evidence. The piece also sort of lumps Josh Harris and Bill Gothard together. I think Josh was more on the orthodox side (though certainly not without blindspots!), and Gothard was obviously on the extreme side.

But suffice it to say: I agree with all of the critiques of Gothard-level toxicity. That’s not my concern at all about the article.

My questions are about the overall argument of the piece. Does it hold together? More formally, Is the argument sound? Is it a valid argument with true premises that lead inevitably to the conclusion?

To answer that, we have to ask: What is the connection between the killer and toxic purity theology and culture? The piece assumes a connection but never gets around to demonstrating one. And that leads to the weird experience of reading something where I agree with virtually every single word and yet find that the actual argument doesn’t hold together.

I think a barbaric act of murder requires a healthy dose of epistemic humility when we have such fragmentary evidence. It’s okay to acknowledge how much we don’t know. And yet within minutes or hours of the sheriff quoting that the killer said he wanted to “eliminate temptation,” there were prominent Christians writing stern warnings to Southern Baptist pastors and seminary presidents and people who had criticized Beth Moore about the life-and-death repercussions of their theology.

There were prominent Christians writing news articles and opinion pieces quoting a boilerplate evangelical sermon the pastor of the killer’s church had delivered the previous Sunday on the second coming of Christ.

There were prominent Christians writing about reckoning with our role in shaping the culture that gave rise to these events.

There were prominent Christians connecting the killer’s motives to the teachings of John Piper and Nancy Leigh DeMoss Wolgemuth on modesty.

One professor at a Christian university even tweeted a link to the name and address of the church and simply declared, “He was radicalized here.”

David approvingly quotes Karen Swallow Prior’s line, “Culture cultivates,” and elaborates:

A culture that defines a person by their sexual sin cultivates misery. When it places women in a position of guarding a man’s heart, it cultivates abuse. And sometimes, when a man’s heart is particularly dark, it can even cultivate murder.The problem with purity culture is not Christianity. The problem with purity culture is that its extremes are not Christian at all.

Another thing I agree with!

But what’s the evidence that the shooter, who would have been in youth group during the presidencies of Obama and Trump, was taught the toxic purity culture that peaked in the 1990s?

My argument is not “no evidence will ever or could ever exist,” but rather “no one actually knows, and therefore we shouldn’t draw that connection until and unless evidence emerges.”

If I was a betting man, I would actually put a hefty wager on this young man having heard the normative / traditional / orthodox teaching on sexuality that David French taught his youth group instead of the toxic legalism that Bill Gothard taught.

And if that’s true, then the argument of this piece basically falls apart. It could become a good standalone article on purity culture, but not a very illuminating one of the killer and his theological culture.

(By the way, if you want to hear from the church itself, you can read their statement.)

So my encouragement to everyone: let’s slow down on drawing connections that might seem obvious but are actually quite tenuous.

While I’m at it, let me commend a brief post by Samuel James, offering a few thoughts. Here are the first two as a teaser:

1. When a mass murderer tells police that he was “eliminating temptation,” I don’t think the right response is to assume he is telling the truth even by his own perspective. Maybe he really thinks that’s what he was doing. But maybe he killed eight people because he despaired at life and was angry, and decided later that “eliminating temptation” was a rationale that made sense and kept him from committing suicide.

2. In any event, it is definitely the wrong response to assume that his parents, friends, or pastors taught him—explicitly or implicitly—to do this. If you’re tempted to think this way, imagine that the group that mentored him are not someone you dislike such as “purity culture evangelicals,” but somebody different.

You can read the whole thing here.

 

Dane Ortlund: Showing Honor to Whom Honor Is Due

The Bible commands us to demonstrate brotherly affection and honor to whom honor is due (Rom. 12:10; 13:7). I want to take a moment to publicly honor my friend and former colleague, Dane Ortlund.

Dane and I met when he was a college student and I was a seminary student, working at Desiring God. We sat together at a table surrounded by older, wiser godly people: Ray and Anne Ortlund (his grandparents), Ray and Jani Ortlund (his parents), John Piper (my pastor and boss at the time), and Dane’s siblings.

After that, Dane sent me occasional handwritten letters by snail-mail, encouraging me to press on in the faith. Dane wasn’t into calligraphy or expensive pens. The letters were written with cheap pens on notebook paper. But there was something endearing about a young man who still believed in such things even in an age of email.

I started at Crossway in early 2006. Dane started in the summer of 2010. So we worked together for ten years—first as colleagues, and then he eventually became my boss.

In October of 2020 he left to take his very first pastorate—in the midst of a global health crisis that introduced countless challenges into the world and the church.

Dane is a world-class New Testament scholar, able to operate at the highest level. (Maybe he’ll complete and publish some day his technical monograph on Markan eschatology.) But it says something about the man that he went into Bible publishing, and then to pastoring a local church, when he easily could have been a full-time academic.

When I would walk into his office, I was less interested in what was on his bookshelves than what was on his desk. It was always an ESV Bible, a Greek New Testament, a Hebrew Old Testament, and an unabridged work by an old dead Puritan like Thomas Goodwin or John Owen or John Bunyan, replete with his enthusiastic pencil underlinings and marginal notations.

In August of 2018, Crossway’s book publication committee (on which Dane sat) formally considered his proposal for a book entitled, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers. Dane recused himself from the discussion.

Dane and I had talked about the book’s possibility months before. But his inclination was to let the ideas marinate—for decades. He thought he’d finally be ready to write it when he was in his sixties. I reminded him that none of us knows his day or hour, and thus it might never be written. And why not help the church now rather than making it wait that long? He agreed.

For every book that reaches this level with our committee, the acquisitions editor writes a memo. I don’t think I’ve ever shared one of these publicly before, since this is proprietary internal information not for public distribution. But I can share with you some of what I wrote that summer, nearly two and half years ago:

I genuinely enjoy writing these memos. But they are not always easy. We try to be relatively objective, representing the author (as an advocate for the project) but more fundamentally, representing Crossway (as an analyst of the project).

So how do I introduce or review a book written by someone who is not only a friend but also a beloved colleague? How do I avoid the appearance of hyperbole when I think the proposed work is not only the most important thing he has written but also has the potential to be a classic that serves and instructs and encourages and chastens and edifies the church for years to come? . . .

The prospects of publishing a book like this is the kind of thing that gets me up in the morning. I think it will have very strong sales and will be a breakout book by Dane.

He officially submitted the book to us on May 9, 2019, with — as he put it in his cover email — “fear and trembling.”

I was right about the sales and the ministry effect of this work—not because I have some prophetic insight, but because the book is that manifestly good and true and right.

As Reformed theologian Michael Horton put it: “Dane Ortlund leads us into the very heart of God incarnate—not only what Jesus did for us, but how he feels toward us. That’s right: feels toward us. Anchored in Scripture and drawing on the Puritan Thomas Goodwin, this book is medicine for broken hearts.”

Lord willing, Crossway will have printed over 1.5 million copies of the book by the end of this summer. I have heard from countless people that they are buying multiple copies of the book and that it has deeply impacted their lives for good. (My colleague Samuel James wrote about what the book’s popularity tells us about our view of God’s love.)

I love Dane Ortlund.

I miss him at Crossway—he had the loudest laugh, often offered penetrating spiritual and exegetical and theological insight, and had a buoyant spirit that is contagious. (And I’m told he is also the fiercest ping pong player.)

I thank God for Dane Ortlund.

I am deeply honored that he is a Crossway author and that Crossway had the privilege of publishing this modern classic.

How My Mind Changed about End-of-Life Care

Unless Christ returns first, I am going to die. (This is a general truth: as far as I know now, I do not have a terminal illness.)

I was created in the image of the living God.

By his grace, I have been rescued from slavery to sin and am now a bondservant of the Lord Jesus Christ.

My identity as an image bearer of God gives me dignity.

My identity as a redeemed servant of the Lord, united to Christ, comes with covenantal obligations, including how I think about my life and my death.

The principles and presuppositions of the Word of God require that I reject active euthanasia (directly and intentionally taking one’s own life or the life of another). It is never an act of love or faithfulness to use medical means (or any other means) to hasten human death.

In addition to this—and this is perhaps more disputed among Christians—I have now come to believe that that one can in faith (that is, without sin) decline ineffective or excessively burdensome medical treatment.

Dr. Kathryn Butler articulates the principle in her book, Between Life and Death: A Gospel-Centered Guide to End-of-Life Medical Care (Crossway, 2019):

We can:

1. seek aggressive treatments when they offer hope of recovery but
2. decline aggressive treatments

a. when they only prolong death, or
b. when they inflict suffering without commensurate benefit.

Many Christians—myself included—have assumed that being pro-life means extending life as long as possible. If, for example, a feeding tube can provide the food and water, or a ventilator can pump oxygen, then we should always use all the means at our disposal to preserve a human life.

Professor Bill Davis, a Christian philosopher at Covenant College and a PCA elder, makes an interesting observation about this in his thorough and helpful book, Departing in Peace: Biblical Decision-Making at the End of Life (P&R, 2017), showing that the answer to this question—Should we do everything medically possible to sustain life?—has changed even though God’s Word has not changed.

CPR and breathing machines changed death and dying.

Before these life-sustaining measures became common in the 1960s, doing everything medically possible did not result in long periods of unconsciousness before death. If someone’s heart stopped beating, there was nothing to be done. If someone’s breathing stopped, there was no way to breathe for that person. Someone who was unconscious might wake up, but if his or her heart or lungs stopped working, the person was dead.

Now, fifty years into the age of life-sustaining medical treatment, “do everything” covers a much wider range of medical possibilities. It is now possible to keep someone’s heart and lungs working for months even when the person is unconscious and his or her organs are too weak to function without help. When life-sustaining treatments are used to help in curing an infection or an injury, the treatments are a great blessing even when they are quite expensive.

Often, however, life-sustaining treatments do not contribute to a cure, at least not humanly speaking. Ventilator support for someone who is unconscious from a massive head injury is not part of a medical plan to cure the injury. God can always intervene supernaturally, but life-sustaining treatments may be extending physical life only by imposing serious burdens on the person who is sick. . . .

Here is the biblical principle that Professor Davis argues for:

God’s Word permits us in some cases to say no to life-sustaining medical treatment.

He continues:

If I had written on this subject one hundred years ago, I would have rejected this key principle.

Yet the Word of God has not changed.

What has changed is the range of medical options.

I was born in 1960, four years before CPR became a standard part of a medical-school education. Kidney dialysis, defibrillators, and ventilators (machines to support breathing) were developed even later than CPR. In 1960, people who are today kept alive “by machines” would all have died from their diseases. The medical advances of the last sixty years have been exciting, but they have also made it harder to think through our obligations about medical care. The Bible teaches that we must accept medical attention that is likely to cure us of our diseases. As Christ’s servants, we are called to maintain our health so that we can serve him well.

Before the development of life-sustaining medical treatments, this obligation to use medical means to maintain our health would have meant that we were obligated to use all available medical means to stay alive.

God’s Word commands us to defend life, but it does not command us in every circumstance to use medical techniques to extend it as long as possible.

Butler also reminds us—based on her years as a trauma surgeon—that in some scenarios, end-of-life interventions can actually cause harm. For example, ventilators cause pneumonia; CPR breaks ribs; tube feeding increases mortality among people with advanced dementia. Such adverse effects can warranted if the condition is reversible and the interventions can be a means of ushering someone back to health and bringing them home. But in cases when such care is futile, continued medical interventions can be a failure of stewardship and neighbor love.

What Should You Do Next?

I recommend the following steps:

Determine to complete an advanced directive. This allows you to put in writing, in a legally recognized document, your desires in advance. This is an act of love for your loved ones to make your wishes known. Don’t wait until you are sick or until you are retired. Everyone age 18 or older should have one.My first choice would not be the standard state forms, which require you to check a box, yes or no, for various scenarios. The logic on the forms can be a bit confusing and have led some readers to misinterpret what it is asking. If, however, this is what you want to use, make sure to use this invaluable resource from Bill Davis, where he has filled out each state’s form in a biblically acceptable way.I personally recommend instead the Five Wishes Document, which has written by a pro-life leader in consultation with the American Bar Association’s Commission on Law & Aging and is recognized in all 50 states. It is written in plain language, allows you to add your own narrative, and to express your wishes for more than just the hard cases.For help in thinking through the issues, I highly recommend consulting Butler’s book and Davis’s book. They are both wise and mature Christians, with different expertises, but complementary perspectives. You could start with this article by Dr. Butler for the general idea and biblical orientation. The biblical principles collected in the back of Davis’s book, which he argues for throughout the book, are incredibly thoughtful and careful.(If you want something thorough, philosophical, and biblical on active euthanasia, consult a book like John Feinberg and Paul Feinberg’s Ethics for a Brave New World , chapter 4).If you are an elder or teacher in the church, consider teaching a Sunday School or Wednesday evening class on this. Bill Davis has done all of the hard work for you. See his free four-week-long study guides and lesson plans for personal and group study available here.

A Tale of Two Liturgies

An insightful excerpt from Matt Merker’s new book, Corporate Worship: How the Church Gathers as God’s People, 9Marks, Building Healthy Churches series (Crossway, 2021).

What Is Liturgy?

Many theologians have called the order of service a “liturgy.” The Greek term leitourgia referred to work done for the good of the public. When used in the context of a church gathering, “liturgy” refers to the “work” or ministry of exaltation and edification for which God gathers his people—or better, that God himself performs in and through his people.

Let me disclose that I’m ambivalent about the word “liturgy.” It’s become trendy, and I’m not sure if writers who use it always mean the same thing. I usually prefer to speak of the “order of service.” But for the sake of joining and hopefully contributing to the conversation, I’ll use “liturgy” in this chapter. For me, liturgy refers to the order of the worship service, particularly how it reveals and reinforces the nature of the service itself.

To be sure, some may associate the idea of liturgy with high-church formalism and rote tradition. But in reality, every church has a liturgy. No matter how simple or complex, how short or long, each church’s order of service expresses a set of theological values. And in turn, the liturgy gradually inculcates those same values in the church’s members.

Liturgy as Corporate Discipleship

We should see the church’s worship service—the whole thing, not just the sermon—as a mass discipling activity. Mike Cosper says it well: “The gathering isn’t simply a single spiritual discipline; it’s a host of them. It’s a way of taking the experiences of prayer and worship, which we so often compartmentalize and individualize, and unifying them in the life of the congregation.”

Since the gathering is such a powerful corporate discipling tool, we should treat liturgy with care. Here’s how Bryan Chapell puts it:

Whether one intends it or not, our worship patterns always communicate something. Even if one simply goes along with what is either historically accepted or currently preferred, an understanding of the gospel inevitably unfolds. If a leader sets aside time for Confession of Sin (whether by prayer, or by song, or by scripture reading), then something about the gospel gets communicated. If there is no Confession in the course of the service, then something else is communicated—even though the message conveyed may have not been intended.

Imagine a diamond ring. The order of a worship service acts like the prongs that hold up the gleaming jewel of the gospel. Our liturgy should support and undergird the message of God’s grace in Christ that we proclaim. Ideally, like the best prongs, the liturgy is unobtrusive—it gets out of the way so that the gospel shines bright and unhindered. Conversely, a poor liturgy is like a set of prongs that overshadow the diamond. The gem may still be present, but it’s obscured. If a church isn’t careful, its order of service can muddle rather than illuminate the good news.

Two Examples

To see how this works in practice, imagine two different church gatherings. Each congregation is the same size. They use the same musical instruments: keyboard, guitar, bass, and drums. More importantly, they affirm the same basic theological beliefs. But their liturgies differ in consequential ways.

The first was typical at the church I served at in my early twenties. It’s a common evangelical liturgy. It begins with an energetic gathering song. Next, a pastor welcomes the church and invites everyone to greet those sitting nearby. He then offers a brief prayer asking God to bless the meeting. After that, the band leads a “set” of three praise songs, often in a sequence moving from an upbeat song about God, to a medium-tempo song reflecting on what God has done, and concluding with a slow song of adoration to God. The worship leader closes the set in prayer, echoing the words of the previous song. A video clip introduces the theme of the sermon. The pastor then steps up to a bar table, reads a text of Scripture, delivers his message, and prays. He invites the congregation to sing a closing song, after which he gives a benediction. The band launches into the chorus of the final song as folks get up and leave their seats.

The second gathering is a service at Igreja Presbiteriana Barra Funda (Barra Funda Presbyterian Church) in São Paulo, Brazil. An elder begins the service by reading a call to worship from 1 Peter 2:9-10. He then offers an opening prayer. The congregation sings the hymn “The Church’s One Foundation” in Portuguese. Next comes a scripture reading from Leviticus 26:1-13. The congregation sings a song entitled “Your People,” and then a member leads a prayer of praise. Another song, “Across the Lands,” follows. Then the pastor preaches from Acts 2:42-47. On this particular Sunday, the congregation reads their membership covenant aloud and sings the hymn “Wine and Bread” to prepare for the Lord’s Supper. A pastor leads in a prayer of confession, then the church celebrates communion. Finally, the pastor offers an intercessory prayer before concluding the service with a benediction.

What do these different liturgies communicate? What values do they reveal?

Let’s start with the second one. At Igreja Presbiteriana Barra Funda, the order of service intersperses Scripture readings, prayers, and songs, which allows these various elements to interpret and shed light on one another. Notice how the readings from 1 Peter 2 and Leviticus 26 focus on the people of God. The titles of the songs show the same theme. These hymns and texts were chosen to set up the sermon text from Acts 2, which describes the fellowship of the Jerusalem church. We can see from the different prayers that various parts of the service center on praise, or confession, or petition. In sum, this liturgy deliberately guides the church through an engagement with God centered on his Word. God speaks to begin the gathering; his people respond in prayer and song. God speaks in other Scripture readings and in the sermon, and his people respond by celebrating the Lord’s Supper and bringing their intercessions to him in another prayer.

Contrast the gathering at Barra Funda with the first order of service I mentioned. That liturgy isn’t sinful or wrong per se. But I wouldn’t classify it as wise, healthy, or commendable. It has at least four weaknesses.

First, this service—presumably unintentionally—divides worship through song and worship through sermon. In fact, folks who attend services like this all too often describe the singing as the worship, as if the other parts of the service aren’t also part of how we glorify God. The structure reinforces this misunderstanding. There’s a staging change (from music stands to bar stool and table) and a video clip as a sort of liturgical buffer between the singing section and the sermon section, making them feel separate and disconnected.

Second, this liturgy begins with us speaking to God in song followed by him speaking to us. That order is confusing. God first reveals himself to us by his Word. As we saw earlier, God works in and through us in corporate worship. He empowers our response to him. So, although this service may be designed to appear casual and approachable, it ironically asks too much of congregants. It expects them to be ready to jump into energetic songs of praise without hearing a reminder of who God is and what he has done for us in Christ.

Third, this order of service leaves two of the most essential elements of corporate worship out to dry: prayer and Scripture reading. There is no other Scripture reading in the service, aside from what the pastor might read in his sermon. And the prayers serve as transitions, not as substantive elements of worship in their own right.

Fourth, aside from within the set of songs, the service doesn’t develop any broader narrative or theme. There’s no sense of movement from considering God’s character to praise, or from hearing God’s law to confession, or from meditating on the gospel to thanksgiving. The best meals come in multiple courses that build upon each other in succession. This meal, however, lacks such a deliberate progression. It feels like the burger and fries from a drive-thru.

Look at the structure of your church’s most recent gathering. What is the “story” that it tells through the arrangement of the various elements? Is it a story worth instilling in your congregation, week after week?

If the liturgy emphasizes God speaking in his Word and his people listening, it fosters a congregational attitude of submitting to Scripture. If the service includes substantive prayers of praise, confession, petition, and thanksgiving, it will both teach folks to pray and reinforce the church’s identity as a people of prayer. If the liturgy regularly underscores the depths of our sin before exulting in the heights of God’s love in Christ, it trains the congregation to value Jesus’ sacrifice. If the liturgy makes the sermon central, it teaches the church to esteem preaching as vital to its life and health.

A Word of Caution

At this juncture, though, I need to add a warning. Some theologians and leaders seem to talk about liturgy as if it is the primary tool that will bring greater health to Christian churches. They treat liturgical reform as The Answer to any number of problems in evangelicalism today. The argument goes something like this: since the order of our worship shapes our desires, then getting liturgy right is the key for Christian formation and growth. Are believers materialistic? The pattern of the liturgy will train their hearts to desire God’s kingdom more than this world. Are believers individualistic? Liturgy shapes their identity as part of the community of faith. Are believers unconcerned with justice? The right order of service will awaken in them a passion for equity and righteousness. And so on.

I agree that liturgy is a powerful force to shape our hearts. That’s why I’ve spent this whole chapter encouraging you to be as thoughtful as possible about the order of your church service. Liturgy provides a skeleton, and it matters to have a skeleton as strong and well connected as possible. But you need more than a skeleton to have a living, breathing body. The actual content of each element of the service matters more than the order in which they are arranged.

Recall the excellent order of service from Igreja Presbiteriana Barra Funda we surveyed earlier. What if the hymns were changed to songs that lack key truths about God’s grace for us in Christ? What if the prayers and the sermon no longer had a distinctive evangelical message but instead obscured or even conflicted with the gospel? You’d still have the Scripture readings, yes. But other than those, the service would be devoid of truth. The Word of God might be read, but the gospel would never be preached. What I’ve just described is the case in many mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic churches today. They serve a meal that may be artfully arranged, but the food on most of the plates is rotten.

To switch analogies, a liturgy is like a pipe through which the water of the gospel flows. Pipes matter. Indeed, although it’s sometimes barely perceptible, the material of the pipe adds its own flavor to the water. But water quenches thirst. Water gives life. Better to have leaky pipes flowing with pure water than amazing pipes hooked up to an empty well. If we care more about the order of service than the content of each element of the service, we may ironically end up neglecting the proclamation of the gospel.

We should strive to fill our services with the life-giving water of the Word of God. The Word, rightly proclaimed—through Scripture and sermon, through song and prayer, illustrated through baptism and the Supper—is what gives life to the church (see Rom. 10:17, Col. 1:5–6, James 1:18). Scripture insists that God gives life to the dead through the declaration of a verbal pronouncement—so much so that he called Ezekiel to preach to a valley of dry, dead bones (Ezekiel 37). Our liturgy will flavor how we understand the message, but ultimately it’s the message itself that God uses to save and transform his people.

Kirk Franklin’s Tiny Desk Concert on NPR

Because we all need some gospel music today.

C. S. Lewis on the Ubiquitous Fallacy that Lies at the Foundation of Modern Thought

In a recent piece, Brad Littlejohn wrote:

Analyses like Whitehead and Perry’s turn out to be little more than exercises in institutionalized “Bulverism.” Instead of showing why someone is in fact wrong, they attribute objectionable beliefs to some identity and thereby, illogically, dismiss them.

Bulverism, coined by C.S. Lewis, is that ubiquitous logical fallacy that consists in the charge, “You’re only saying that because you’re a _____ (man/woman/Democrat/Republican/Christian/atheist/etc.).”

The worst forms of Bulverism are those that trade on constructed labels or identities like “Christian nationalism.”

They begin by observing some set of correlations (people who believe X are also more likely to believe Y), and then construct a label to describe that correlation.

Then, they turn around and propose that this label is the cause of the beliefs it describes, thus confusing correlation and causation and at the same time reasoning in a circle.

Since they’ve decided in advance that they don’t like some element of this belief matrix, this causal connection becomes the justification for dismissing the entire system.

Lewis explained his coining of the term in his 1941 essay, “Bulverism”:

You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong.

The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.

In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism.” Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father — who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third — “Oh you say that because you are a man.” “At that moment,” E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.”

That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.

Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is “wishful thinking.” You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance or not. If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant—but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must first find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological causes of the error.

Once you understand the “Bulverism” fallacy, you start to see it everywhere. (Especially, one might add, in books and hot takes about contemporary “evangelicalism.”)

Here is a creative way to work through Lewis’s argument:

 

John Piper’s Magnum Opus on the Providence of God

In this new video above, Joe Rigney sits down with John Piper about his magisterial new book on Providence, a volume over 700 pages that is a culmination of his life study and work.

If you order the book from WTS, you get the hardcover for 50% off and the eBook immediately for free.

An overview:

From Genesis to Revelation, the providence of God directs the entire course of redemptive history. Providence is “God’s purposeful sovereignty.” Its extent reaches down to the flight of electrons, up to the movements of galaxies, and into the heart of man. Its nature is wise and just and good. And its goal is the Christ-exalting glorification of God through the gladness of a redeemed people in a new world.

Drawing on a lifetime of theological reflection, biblical study, and practical ministry, pastor and author John Piper leads us on a stunning tour of the sightings of God’s providence—from Genesis to Revelation—to discover the all-encompassing reality of God’s purposeful sovereignty over all of creation and all of history. Piper invites us to experience the profound effects of knowing the God of all-pervasive providence: the intensifying of true worship, the solidifying of wavering conviction, the strengthening of embattled faith, the toughening of joyful courage, and the advance of God’s mission in this world.

Read Chapter 1

Some endorsements:

“In what is perhaps his most important book so far, John Piper demonstrates with great cogency and exegetical skill that God’s providence ‘is his purposeful sovereignty in which he will be completely successful in the achievement of his ultimate goal for the universe.’ This book will enlarge your vision of God and thereby strengthen your faith.”
D. A. Carson, Cofounder and Theologian-at-Large, The Gospel Coalition

“John Piper, with his characteristic clarity and focus on the biblical text, shows us the pervasiveness of God’s providence in the Scriptures. Piper lingers over the biblical text, and we see in text after text that God rules over all of reality, from the smallest atom to horrific disasters. As we have come to expect from Piper, he turns our eyes to the infinite greatness and beauty of God, while reminding us that God’s providence constitutes amazing good news for those of us who know Jesus Christ.”
Thomas R. Schreiner, James Buchanan Harrison Professor of New Testament Interpretation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

“There are many books by John Piper that I would recommend to believers because of the depth and freshness of thought in his writings. Providence will rank among the highest on the list. The breadth of God’s providence that is covered here is breathtaking. Piper leaves no stone unturned! Read it and see for yourself. This is a landmark work!”
Conrad Mbewe, Pastor, Kabwata Baptist Church, Lusaka, Zambia

“While some see God’s hand only in miracles, and others don’t see his hand at all, providence is the wonderful truth that God is sovereign in and over everything that happens. Combining passion with a curious spirit, John Piper has cherished and proclaimed this truth throughout his ministry. This engaging book is not just about one doctrine, but ranges throughout the alpine vistas of God’s work in our world, our redemption, and our lives today. It is deeply faith invigorating.”
Michael Horton, J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics, Westminster Seminary California

“In this remarkable book, John Piper reveals the personal side of sovereignty, helping us glimpse the intricate complexity, winsome beauty, and ultimate purpose of God’s plans in action. Piper is able to write about a multifaceted doctrine in a way that is easy to grasp and so practical!”
Joni Eareckson Tada, Founder, Joni and Friends International Disability Center

“John Piper’s magisterial book is a robust antidote to the weak view on God’s providence held by many Christians today. His exposition of the subject is thorough in scope and saturated with biblical insight. Piper is a model of the pastor-theologian as he not only describes providence but also shows how our understanding of providence can deepen our lives.”
Tremper Longman III, Distinguished Scholar and Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies, Westmont College