Justin Taylor's Blog, page 105

Embracing the Strangeness of Christianity with Clarity

From Russell Moore’s recent interview with Jon Ward:

I often tell people in churches and at Christian conferences is about a conversation I had with a lesbian activist, a secularist, about a Christian view of sexuality. She said, ‘I don’t know anybody who believes the sorts of things that you people believe about marriage and sex and it sounds incredibly strange to me.’

And my response was to say, ‘Yes, and we believe even stranger things than that. We believe a previously dead man is going to show up in the sky on a horse.’

In order to try to say to our people, ‘You know, Christianity didn’t emerge in Mayberry. Christianity emerged in a Greco-Roman environment that found the Christian sexual ethic just as shocking and strange as American culture increasingly does now.’

So what do we do? We don’t run from strangeness. We instead learn to articulate it with clarity and with mission. And also to say you can’t find a shelter to keep you from having to engage these issues.

. . . I don’t think we should ever transition from strangeness. I think we should have a strangeness with clarity. What I see happening in the New Testament is very different from the sort of dime store prosperity gospel that we often see in evangelicalism, which wants to say that Jesus is a means to living a normal Christian life, with all of that and heaven too, which doesn’t make sense of what the New Testament model is. Every time that Jesus is preaching the gospel, and people are starting to respond to his message, Jesus always turns around and clarifies, not clarifying in order to remove the strangeness of his message, but clarifying in order to reveal the strangeness of his message. He says, ‘I don’t think you understand what I’m talking about. I’m talking about taking up a cross and following me.’ I think that’s what has to happen, where we’re not quarrelsome, we’re not seeking to demonize our opponents, we’re seeking to be persuasive and we’re seeking to articulate the gospel, but we’re articulating that gospel without trying to evacuate it of its strange otherworldly message, which is what we believe is the power to save. That’s how people are transformed. Coming into contact with something that is radically different from what they’ve otherwise experienced.

You can read the whole thing here.

John McWhorter on the Best Way to Learn a Foreign Language at Home

Noted linguist John McWhorter once wrote:

For years, I have been amazed at how an obscure series of books published by the Assimil company in Europe can give the solitary learner a decent conversational competence in any language in just six months of home study, so cleverly are the lessons arranged to impart what is really needed to speak the language in real life.

In another piece, he explained further:

As a linguist, I get a letter or message about once a month asking me what the best way is to learn a foreign language at home. I always answer “The Magic Books,” by which I mean the wonderful Assimil series. I’ve been giving people Assimil sets for 20 years now. It’s the With Ease series you may have seen — Russian with Ease, Dutch with Ease, and so on.

These are some of my favorite Christmas gifts because they’re the only self-teachers I know that work. In just 20 minutes a day — if you do exactly what they tell you to with the books and accompanying recordings — then presto! You will be talking like, roughly, an unusually cosmopolitan three-year-old. No, you won’t be “conversing like a native” the way the ad copy says, unless you already are one, which would presumably make one’s use of the set somewhat peculiar. And, they can only give you so much vocabulary. But the magic is that you will be able to carry on a decent conversation, instead of just being able to count to 100 and say things like “My uncle is a lawyer but my aunt has a spoon.”

I did the German one a long time ago, and when I got to Germany and had finished explaining to a waitress that I didn’t want onions in my salad because they might make me throw up, a guy told me “You speak German better than anyone I’ve ever known who has only been here a week.” Or, after I did the Hebrew one, an Israeli said “Hey, you can actually talk!”

Both of these faintly hedged compliments were right on the nose. Fluent? Of course not, nothing can get you there short of speaking the language all day for months. But at least I could converse sparklingly with toddlers, while faking it well with everybody else, instead of quietly hoping somebody would ask me what kind of silverware my aunt had.

The With Ease books don’t get around much in the United States, actually. They’re translated from French originals, and are mostly sold in the United Kingdom. But they’re available online and in specialty bookstores, and they’re well worth the cost. Their pages even smell good. (One caveat: Unfortunately, the Arabic one is a complete wash-out, and so avoid it.)

The materials aren’t easy to find, but here’s what you can get through Amazon.

10 Ways to Avoid Sinful Self-Promotion Online

Some wise counsel from Mark Sayers (author of the new book, Facing Leviathan: Leadership, Influence, and Creating in a Cultural Storm):

Avoid being a fame-vampire.
Don’t add to the Hubbub.
Real life Followers>Online followers.
Platform never beats spiritual authority.
Promote resources not yourself.
Avoid humblebrags.
Ask the dangerous question ‘why?’
Take breaks.
Be patient with God.
Track your time.

You can read an explanation of each point here.

You Probably Don’t Even Know His Name

There’s nothing fancy about the man. He’s not famous. In fact, unless you’ve watched the Dispatches from the Front DVD series, you’ve probably never heard of him—and even if you have, you probably didn’t catch his name. He’s quiet and unassuming. He’s humble and without guile. He’s a faithful and ordinary man who serves an extraordinary God. His name is Tim Keesee, author of the new book, Dispatches from the Front: Stories of Gospel Advance in the World’s Difficult Places.

There’s a certain world-weariness etched onto his face as he has spent years crisscrossing the globe, visiting and supporting and documenting the church around the world. But if you look closer, there is unmistakable joy. You can see it in the warmth of his smile and the twinkle of his eye and the welcome of his embrace as he greets a new brother and a new sister on the other side of the world and worships with yet another outpost of the global family of God. If the new heavens and the new earth will be filled with the redeemed from “every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9), then Tim Keesee has gotten a foretaste of the world to come.

In his new book you will have a front-row seat to the most important work in history, as the great news of a bloody sacrifice turned risen King transforms lives around the world. You’ll follow along with Tim’s journeys over the past several years as he travels from the former Soviet Republics to the Balkans, from China to Southeast Asia, from Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan to Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, from the Horn of Africa to Egypt, from Afghanistan to Iraq. You’ll see the joy and the sorrow, the pleasure and the pain, as he sees the glory of the gospel revealed afresh and yet still mourns the danger and bondage of soul-destroying sin.

No one will be reached with the gospel unless we go to them. Because no one will “hear without someone preaching” (Rom. 10:14), we must “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations [Greek, ethnē, or people groups]” (Matt. 28:19). In order to do this, some of us are called to “send them on their journey in a manner worthy of God” (3 John 1:6). But whether you are a go-er or a send-er, none of us can see it all. We can only get a small glimpse of the kingdom based on where God has called us to serve. That is why I am excited for you to read this book. You can read it straight through or skip around according to your interests. But as you do, you will see the curtain pulled back on the glorious and unstoppable advance of the gospel. This is a dangerous book to read, for you may never be the same.

Come and see.

Here is a video preview of the book’s introduction:

Go here for more information about this captivating book.

Why I Love Bethlehem College & Seminary

I have the honor of serving as a Trustee for Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis, a small and unique Christ-centered, church-based undergraduate school and seminary nestled in the city center of Minneapolis, adjacent to some of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the nation. They pursue worship, study, love, and discipleship with serious joy.

Their graduates have gone on to pursue numerous vocations, with many seminarians now serving pastorates, and many graduates going on from BCS to study at Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Aberdeen, Southern, and elsewhere for doctoral work.

Now into their fifth year of existence, they are on track toward accreditation next year with the Association for Biblical Higher Education. And they are still accepting applications for their Fall 2014 Undergraduate programs and Fall 2015 Seminary cohort.

If you are looking to contribute to the training of young men and women in the gospel, I believe it would be a very wise investment.

For a flavor of the type of faculty God has brought to the school, watch this short profile of Dr. Andy Naselli:

Eric Metaxas Interviews Rod Dreher on “The Little Way of Ruth Leming”

Eric Metaxas of Socrates in the City interviews Rod Dreher (April 9, 2013) on his book about the death of his sister and his reconciliation with a small town, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming:

George Marsden Lecture: “Jonathan Edwards for the Twenty-first Century”

If George Marsden only had 45 minutes to talk about Jonathan Edwards, what would he say? He answers that in the following lecture (November 3, 2010) for the Jonathan Edwards Center and the Henry Center for Theological Understanding at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Here’s an abstract:

What are the most helpful insights that we can gain from Jonathan Edwards’s theology today? This lecture uses the contrast between Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century to reflect on some of the most characteristic traits of later American culture to which Edwards’s ‘theology of active beauty’ provides particularly helpful alternatives.

Professor Marsden is the author of the magisterial biography, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University Press, 2003) and A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards (Eerdmans, 2008), which is a shorter and fresh retelling, not an abridgment. I highly recommend both books. Most recently Dr. Marsden has written the foreword for Dane Ortlund’s Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God (forthcoming from Crossway in August 2014).

The lecture begins around the 4:00 mark and goes until around 50:00, and then Colin Smith (of The Orchard Evangelical Free Church) offers a response. Then for the final 20 minutes there is some Q&A.

Marsden Lecture from Trinity International University on Vimeo.

5 Things Churches Can Do to Help Those Who Struggle with Same-Sex Attraction

Wise counsel from Sam Allberry, drawn from his book  Is God Anti-Gay? And Other Questions about Homosexuality, the Bible and Same-sex Attraction (The Good Book Company, 2013), 

Make it easy to talk about
Honor singleness
Remember that church is family
Deal with biblical models of masculinity and femininity, rather than cultural stereotypes
Provide good pastoral support

You can read an explanation of each point here.

 

Why Defend Inerrancy?

Ligon Duncan, Kevin DeYoung, and Albert Mohler answer this question for a new website, Inerrancy, which provides an ongoing stream of helpful resources:

You can also follow the Twitter feed at @theinerrantword.

Evangelical Narratives of Declension

Timothy Larsen, professor of Christian thought at Wheaton College:

[E]vangelical historians have tended to overdo narratives of declension. These have limited utility in the wider academy because they simply feed into a secular assumption that Christianity is defeated or in the process of breaking down and therefore can be ignored. (Some evangelical historians need to put the following verse in front of the computer screen when they do their writing: “Do not say, ‘Why were the old days better than these?’ For it is not wise to ask such questions.” Ecclesiastes 7:10).

My own experience is that secular scholars are very comfortable with grumpy, fearful, defeatist evangelical scholars documenting the rapid rate of the loss of all they value and rise of all they despise, but they are rattled and unsettled by witty, confident, urbane, evangelical scholars. Far from this being a tactic or form of capitulation, such a posture, at its best, can be an expression of faith—of confidence in the victory of God and the lordship of Christ. Who but Christians really believe that the story we inhabit ends as a comedy and not a tragedy?

—Timothy Larsen, “Evangelicals, the Academy, and the Discipline of History,” in Beyond Integration? Inter/Disciplinary Possibilities for the Future of Christian Higher Education, ed. Todd C. Ream, Jerry Pattengale, and David L. Riggs (Abilene: Abilene Christian University Press, 2012), 118.