Justin Taylor's Blog, page 122

Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

John Eliot Gardiner’s new book, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (Knopf, 2013), is garnering high praise.

Amanda Foreman writes, “Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven is a unique portrait of one of the greatest musical geniuses of all time by one of the greatest musical geniuses of our own age. John Eliot Gardiner uses his extraordinary immersion in Bach’s music to illuminate Bach the man more brilliantly than in any previous work, and has created his own deeply moving work of art.”

Philip Pullman says, ”John Eliot Gardiner’s book is, apart from anything else, a tremendous feat of narrative: he has the rare gift of always putting the camera in the right place. He tells this long and richly involved story in a way that makes everything clear, and sets the life and the music in a historical perspective where every detail is relevant and every comment illuminating. Simply as a biography this is splendid, but the fact that it comes with such a wealth of musical understanding and experience makes it invaluable.”

Mr. Gardiner recently hosted a BBC documentary on the life and music of Bach, which you can watch below:

HT: Horst Friebig

D.A. Carson: How Can We Reconcile the Old Testament God and the New Testament God?

An answer from Dr. Carson:

David Powlison on Struggling with Singleness

Wisdom from one of the wisest men I know, CCEF‘s David Powlison:

A Conversation on Abortion and the Gospel: Francis Chan and John Piper Talk with John Ensor

John Ensor is the president of Passion Life and the author of several books, including Stand for Life: Answering the Call, Making the Case, Saving Lives (co-authored with Scott Klusendorf), Answering the Call: Saving Innocent Lives One Woman at a Time, and most recently, Innocent Blood: Challenging the Powers of Death with the Gospel of Life.

He recently sat down to talk with Francis Chan (whose mother died giving birth to him) and John Piper (who has spent time in jail for peaceful pro-life protest)

Chan talks about his struggles to stand up for life. Piper talks about the need to expose evil, standing up for and defending the voiceless victims of injustice. They view depictions of abortion and talk about the need to respond with the cleansing power of the gospel of grace.

WARNING: Graphic Images.

A Thought Experiment to Help Understand the Pro-Life Position

Francis Beckwith, author of the outstanding book, Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice (Oxford University Press, 2007), offers a thought experiment in a recent interview:

Imagine that an abortion-choice scientist wants to harvest human organs without harming human beings that are persons.

In order to accomplish this, he first brings several embryos into being through in vitro fertilization.

He then implants them in artificial wombs, and while they develop, he obstructs their neural tubes so that they may never acquire higher brain functions, and thus they cannot become what the typical prochoice advocate considers “persons.”

Suppose, upon hearing of this scientist’s grisly undertaking, a group of pro-life radicals breaks into his laboratory and transports all the artificial wombs (with all the embryos intact) to another laboratory located in the basement of the Vatican.

While there, several pro-life scientists inject the embryos with a drug that heals their neural tubes and allows for their brains to develop normally.

After nine months, the former fetuses, now infants, are adopted by loving families.

If you think what the pro-life scientists did was not only good but an act that justice requires, it seems that you must believe that embryos are beings of a personal nature ordered toward certain perfections which it is wrong to obstruct.

This is why pro-life advocates would say that human embryos are not potential persons, but rather, that they are persons with potential.

41 Years of Roe v Wade

An overview from the Texas Alliance for Life:

An Interview with Paul Miller on “A Loving Life”

Paul Miller’s new book is A Loving Life: In a World of Broken Relationships (Crossway, 2014). (The book is on sale for 50% off for the next 72 hours, or 62% off if you buy three or more copies.)

Miller deconstructs our modern views of love and replaces them with a thoroughly biblical one rooted in the gospel and the mind of Jesus. He’s writing into a world that increasingly demands of love but is increasingly unable to offer it. More specifically, he is writing to our modern “widows and widowers” who live without a covenant of love (single women), who live with a broken covenant of love (divorced men or women), or who live with a burdensome covenant of love (trapped in a loveless or uneven marriage). And this is not an abstract topic for Miller. He has said, “I know what it is like to repeatedly trudge out alone in a foreign land into a barley field afraid and unnoticed for the sake of love.”

Scotty Smith writes:

I’m not exaggerating when I say that this is the most honest, timely, and helpful book I’ve ever read about the costly and exhausting demands of loving well. And at the same time, A Loving Life is the most faithful, alluring, and encouraging presentation of God’s love for us in Jesus I’ve fed on in years. These two themes go hand in hand. Through the biblical story of Ruth, Paul Miller gives us hope, not hype—the freedom to suffer well, stay present, and live expectantly in all of our relationships. Thank you, Paul, for making the gospel more beautiful and believable to me.

Here’s a conversation I recently had with Paul Miller:

You can find out more about the book (with sample material) here.

How to Make a Pro-Life Argument

Scott Klusendorf, author of The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture and president of Life Training Institute:

John Piper on Why You Should Read John Owen

From John Piper’s foreword to an unabridged edition of John Owen’s Overcoming Sin and Temptation, which I edited with Kelly Kapic:

As I look across the Christian landscape, I think it is fair to say concerning sin, “They have healed the wound of my people lightly” (Jer. 6:14; 8:11, ESV). I take this to refer to leaders who should be helping the church know and feel the seriousness of indwelling sin (Rom. 7:20), and how to fight it and kill it (Rom. 8:13). Instead the depth and complexity and ugliness and danger of sin in professing Christians is either minimized—since we are already justified—or psychologized as a symptom of woundedness rather than corruption.

This is a tragically light healing. I call it a tragedy because by making life easier for ourselves in minimizing the nature and seriousness of our sin, we become greater victims of it. We are in fact not healing ourselves. Those who say that they already feel bad enough without being told about the corruptions of indwelling sin misread the path to peace. When our people have not been taught well about the real nature of sin and how it works and how to put it to death, most of the miseries people report are not owing to the disease but its symptoms. They feel a general malaise and don’t know why, their marriages are at the breaking point, they feel weak in their spiritual witness and devotion, their workplace is embattled, their church is tense with unrest, their fuse is short with the children, etc. They report these miseries as if they were the disease. And they want the symptoms removed.

We proceed to heal the wound of the people lightly. We look first and mainly for circumstantial causes for the misery—present or past. If we’re good at it, we can find partial causes and give some relief. But the healing is light. We have not done the kind of soul surgery that is possible only when the soul doctor knows the kind of things Owen talks about in these books, and when the patient is willing to let the doctor’s scalpel go deep.

What Owen offers is not quick relief, but long-term, deep growth in grace that can make strong, healthy trees where there was once a fragile sapling. I pray that thousands—especially teachers and pastors and other leaders—will choose the harder, long-term path of growth, not the easier, short-term path of circumstantial relief.

The two dead pastor-theologians of the English-speaking world who have nourished and taught me most are Jonathan Edwards and John Owen. Some will say Edwards is unsurpassed. Some say Owen was the greater. We don’t need to decide. We have the privilege of knowing them both as our friends and teachers. What an amazing gift of God’s providence that these brothers were raised up and that hundreds of years after they have died we may sit at their feet. We cannot properly estimate the blessing of soaking our minds in the Bible-saturated thinking of the likes of John Owen. What he was able to see in the Bible and preserve for us in writing is simply magnificent. It is so sad—a travesty, I want to say—how many Christian leaders of our day do not strive to penetrate the wisdom of John Owen, but instead read books and magazines that are superficial in their grasp of the Bible.

We act as though there was nothing extraordinary about John Owen’s vision of biblical truth—that he was not a rare gift to the church. But he was rare. There are very few people like this whom God raises up in the history of the church. Why does God do this? Why does he give an Owen or an Edwards to the church and then ordain that what they saw of God should be preserved in books? Is it not because he loves us? Is it not because he would share Owen’s vision with his church? Great trees that are covered with the richest life-giving fruit are not for museums. God preserves them and their fruit for the health of his church.

I know that all Christians cannot read all such giants. Even one mountain is too high to climb for most of us. But we can pick one or two, and then ask God to teach us what he taught them. The really great writers are not valuable for their cleverness but for their straightforward and astonishing insight into what the Bible really says about great realities. This is what we need.

The Bible is God’s word. Therefore, it is profound. How could it not be? God inspired it. He understands himself and the human heart infinitely. He is not playing games with us. He really means to communicate the profoundest things about sin and hell and heaven and Christ and faith and salvation and holiness and death. Paul does not sing out in vain, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” (Rom. 11:33, ESV). No. He summons us to stop settling for pop culture and to learn what the Bible really has to say about the imponderable depths of sin and grace.

Owen is especially worthy of our attention because he is shocking in his insights. That is my impression again and again. He shocks me out of my platitudinous ways of thinking about God and man. Here are a few random recollections from what you are (I hope) about to read. You will find others on your own.

“There is no death of sin without the death of Christ” (Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers, chapter 7). Owen loves the cross and knows what happened there better than anyone I have read. The battle with sin that you are about to read about is no superficial technique of behavior modification. It is a profound dealing with what was accomplished on the cross in relation to the supernatural working of the Holy Spirit through the deep and wonderful mysteries of faith.

“To kill sin is the work of living men; where men are dead (as all unbelievers, the best of them, are dead), sin is alive, and will live” (chapter 7). Oh, the pastoral insights that emerge from Owen! As here: If you are fighting sin, you are alive. Take heart. But if sin holds sway unopposed, you are dead no matter how lively this sin makes you feel. Take heart, embattled saint!

“God says, ‘Here is one, if he could be rid of this lust I should never hear of him more; let him wrestle with this, or he is lost’” (chapter 8). Astonishing! God ordains to leave a lust with me till I become the sort of warrior who will still seek his aid when this victory is won. God knows when we can bear the triumphs of his grace.

“Is there the guilt of any great sin lying upon you unrepented of? A new sin may be permitted, as well as a new affliction sent, to bring an old sin to remembrance” (chapter 9). What? God ordains that we be tested by another sin so that an old one might be better known and fought? Sin is one of God’s weapons against sin?

“The difference between believers and unbelievers as to knowledge is not so much in the matter of their knowledge as in the manner of knowing. Unbelievers, some of them, may know more and be able to say more of God, his perfections, and his will, than many believers; but they know nothing as they ought, nothing in a right manner, nothing spiritually and savingly, nothing with a holy, heavenly light. The excellency of a believer is, not that he has a large apprehension of things, but that what he does apprehend, which perhaps may be very little, he sees it in the light of the Spirit of God, in a saving, soul-transforming light; and this is that which gives us communion with God, and not prying thoughts or curious-raised notions” (chapter 12). How then will we labor to help people know much and know it “in a right manner”? What is that?

“[Christ] is the head from whence the new man must have influences of life and strength, or it will decay every day” (chapter 14). Oh, that our people would feel the urgency of daily supplies of grace because “grace decays.” Do they know this? Is it a category in their mind—that grace decays? How many try to live their lives on automatic pilot with no sense of urgency that means of grace are given so that the riches of Christ may daily be obtained with fresh supplies of grace.

The list could go on and on. For me, to read Owen is to wake up to ways of seeing that are so clearly biblical that I wonder how I could have been so blind. May that be your joyful experience as well.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: Letter from Birmingham Jail

A great overview, starring Corey Jones, taking us back to Birmingham 1963: