Justin Taylor's Blog, page 126

Why We Are All Influential Theologians, for Good or for Ill

J. I. Packer:

The Puritans made me aware that all theology is also spirituality, in the sense that it has an influence, good or bad, positive or negative, on its recipients’ relationship or lack of relationship to God.

If our theology does not quicken the conscience and soften the heart, it actually hardens both;

if it does not encourage the commitment of faith, it reinforces the detachment of unbelief;

if it fails to promote humility, in inevitably feeds pride.

So one who theologizes in public, whether formally in the pulpit, on the podium or in print, or informally from the armchair, must think hard about the effect his thoughts will have on people–God’s people, and other people.

J. I. Packer, A Quest for Godliness (Wheaton: Crossway, 1990), 15.

David Powlison’s “Idols of the Heart and Vanity Fair” Revisited

David Powlison’s 1991 essay, “Idols of the Heart and Vanity Fair,” has been widely influential. It is a beautifully written and insightful article.

In the latest edition of CCEF’s Journal of Biblical Counseling, Powlison revisits the article 20+ years later. In so doing, he offers some introductory comments, orienting the reader to the main question the essay tries to answer (How is sin more than behavior?) and addressing a misunderstanding or misapplication of the original piece (whether the article encourages people to go on an “idol hunt”).

For one week, the original article and the new introduction are available here for free.

An Interview with Stephen Meyer on “Darwin’s Doubt”

Eric Metaxas of Socrates in the City interviews Stephen Meyer on Darwin, the scientific method, and the book Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. Filmed at the Union League Club in New York City on September 12, 2013.

HT: @LeeStrobel

15 Ways to Bless Your Missionaries This Christmas without Paying Postage

Here are 15 post-office-free ideas to get you started, most of which you could do right now from your desk, written by an anonymous 30-year-old missionary:

Pray specific Scripture for them and their ministry, and then email it to them.
Call or email their parents—Christmas might be just as lonely for the ones at home as the ones away.
Purchase credits on Skype so they can stay in touch with family and friends.
Donate frequent flier miles to them.
Ask them if you can host an evening of prayer of them and the local people who work with them.
Purchase an iTunes gift card for them. You can send these through email or if you buy a physical card simply email them the code on the back.
Commit to pray for them on a specific day of the week for a year.
Write a song or poem or story for them. Email them the text and a recording of you reading or singing it.
Get friends and family together to create a holiday video greeting for them on YouTube or Vimeo. Include lots of people you know they miss. (If people are working in sensitive locations you may want to make this a “private video.”)
Make a year-end gift through their missions board or agency.
Paypal—the fastest and easiest way to send money.
Call their local florist (not everyone is in the jungle these days) and have flowers delivered, or their local Pizza Hut and have pizza delivered—with corn and shrimp as toppings!
Send them a gift card for a Bible Study platform like OliveTree or Logos.
Donate to a charity that means a lot to them.
Make a monthly commitment to support them financially.

An Interview with Doug Moo on His New Galatians Commentary

Douglas Moo, the Kenneth T. Wessner Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College Graduate School, has a new commentary on Galatians in the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. We recently sat down to talk about how it is that he was teaching at the seminary level just five years after his conversion, his process for writing commentaries (it’s the opposite of how most scholars do it), the big issue where he has changed his mind while studying Galatians (it has to do with justification), how he understands the relationship between the law of Moses and the law of Christ, and what projects are next for him.

Tweeting Himself to Death: On the Rise and Fall of @ProdigalSam

Sammy Rhodes is back from his hiatus on Twitter and shares some of what he learned from his rise and fall.

Here is an excerpt:

In my wildest dreams I never thought I’d have as many followers on Twitter as I did. 130,427 to be exact. But who’s counting? I was. It was my self-worth stock market, and I followed it hard. Counting your followers on Twitter is like counting your money in Monopoly: you know it’s not ultimately worth anything, yet in that moment it feels like everything. Your card may have just been declined at Chipotle, but guess who owns Boardwalk and runs that town like Rihanna and Jay-Z?

Becoming internet famous did buy some cool things. Brunch with Flynn Rider in LA. Texting with the Bachelor. Disney’s Jessie sending a birthday message to my girls. Dwight from The Office giving me a shout out. These are moments I will work into as many conversations as possible for years to come. “This rain is really coming down. Speaking of rain, did I ever tell you about that time Rainn Wilson defended me on Twitter?”

But it also cost me some things too. Namely my integrity and identity. Sometimes people ask, “How did you do it?” and I typically shrug my shoulders, give some important tipping points and say, “I honestly don’t know it just sort of happened.” What I should say is that all you have to do to get a lot of followers on Twitter is figure out who’s cool and desperately align yourself with them. Because it’s about perception, not reality. It’s the “he’s with us” of the internet.

Jonathan Franzen warns about this danger in his recent essay“What’s Wrong with the Modern World.” He writes, “One of the worst things about the internet is that it tempts everyone to be a sophisticate – to take positions on what is hip and to consider, under pain of being considered unhip, the positions that everyone else is taking.” Integrity is about being the same person, with the same convictions, in any and every situation, with any and every crowd. But it’s hard to have convictions when you’re constantly wondering if they’re cool.

The other danger is looking to the internet for your identity, instead of the other way around. That’s why Jaron Lanier likes to say, “You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.” The internet cannot hold the weight of your identity; only reality can. Twitter became a place for me to be someone else, someone I struggled to be in real life. It’s what I call pulling a sad Batman. You change into your alter-ego at night, but instead of fighting crime you’re fighting for retweets. Also you don’t wake up in a mansion with an amazing car and a butler.

A wise person I know once said, “Fame is a great consequence but a terrible goal.” The problem of fame, even the internet kind, is that you sacrifice knowing yourself for being known. In turn you sacrifice friends for fans. And the reality is all the love in the world means almost nothing when it comes from people who know who you are but don’t really know you.

You can read the whole thing here. And while you’re at it, don’t miss his insightful post on 6 Ways to Love a Depressed Person.

9 Ways to Pray for Churches and Pastors

Found in the 9Marks 2013 report:

1. Expositional Preaching: pray that more pastors will commit to preaching the whole counsel of God, making the point of the passage the point of their sermons.

2. Biblical Theology: pray that more pastors will preach about the big God from the big Story of the Bible, protecting the church from false teaching.

3. The Gospel: pray that pastors will faithfully proclaim the gospel every chance they have. Pray their churches will ask for nothing more than the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ.

4. Conversion: pray that more churches would grasp the doctrine of conversion rightly, and shape their practices to promote born-again believers, not nominal believers.

5. Evangelism: pray that churches will be bold and faithful in proclaiming the Good News of Jesus.

6. Church Membership: pray that churches will take the biblical call to church membership seriously, and encourage the whole body of Christ toward holiness and active participation.

7. Church Discipline: pray that churches will grow in purity and holiness as they seek to warn, rebuke, and admonish lost sheep.

8. Discipleship and Growth: pray that Christians will grow in their knowledge of the Word, and their commitment to discipling one another.

9. Biblical Leadership: pray that God will raise up many faithful shepherds to guard, teach, and encourage his flock.

George Whitefield in Three Sentences

J. I. Packer likes to say of himself “Packer by name, Packer by nature.” By this he means that he can pack a lot into one sentence. We all know this is true theologically, but it is less recognized in his biographical summaries. (See, for example, his punchy descriptions of Francis Schaeffer and Martyn Lloyd-Jones.)

Here is his summary of George Whitefield, whose 299th birthday is today:

The ‘Grand Itinerant’, as his contemporaries called him, was, more than anyone else, the trail-blazing pioneer and personal embodiment of the eighteenth-century revival of vital Christianity in the West, the revival that shaped English-speaking society on both sides of the Atlantic for over a hundred years and that fathered the evangelical missionary movement which for the past two centuries has been taking the gospel literally round the world. . . .

First to preach the transforming message of the new birth, first to take it into the open air and declare the world his parish, first to publish journals celebrating God’s work in and through him, and first to set up societies for the nurturing of those who came to faith under his ministry, Whitefield proclaimed Christ tirelessly throughout Britain and colonial America, drawing huge crowds, winning thousands of souls, impacting myriads more, and gaining celebrity status. . .

Wesley’s influence as a renewer of popular religion is sometimes credited with saving England from an upheaval like the French revolution; if there is substance in such reasoning, Whitefield should receive greater credit, for his ministry ranged wider and his pulpit power was greater.

(This quote is from Packer’s introduction to Henry Scougal’s The Life of God in the Soul of Man.)

Keep your eye out next year for Thomas Kidd’s biography of Whitefield, to be published by Yale University Press in time for the 300th anniversary of his birth. I expect it to be the definitive treatment of the man and his time.

Sinclair Ferguson on the Conditionality and Unconditionality of Grace

From Sinclair Ferguson’s response to Gerhard Forde in Christian Spirituality: Five Views on Sanctification, edited by Donald L. Alexander (IVP, 1988), pp 34-35:

Reformed theology is as anxious as Lutheran thought to safeguard grace. It has wrestled very seriously with the whole question of conditions. The term conditions has a certain infelicity about it. But there is a difference between what we might call “conditionality” (which compromises grace by saying, “God will be gracious only if you do X or Y“) and the fact that there are conditions for salvation which arise directly out of the gospel message and do not compromise its graciousness.

These conditions do not render God gracious to us, but are the noncontributory means by which we receive his grace.

Our Lord himself says, “Unless you repent, you too will perish” (Lk 13:3).

Only if we suffer with Christ will we reign with him (Rom 8:17).

“If we confess out sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins” (1 Jn 1:9).

There is a sine qua non to forgiveness and to justification. They cannot be received apart from faith. This is a biblical condition that does not compromise grace, but arises from it. The important thing is not to deny condition, but to underscore that “It is not faith that saves, but Christ that saves through faith” (B.B. Warfield).”

Christmas in Dark Places

Another good poem and video from Glen Scrivener:

HT: Sam Alberry