Justin Taylor's Blog, page 138

Why It Will Not Work to Pit the Old Testament God of Wrath against the New Testament God of Mercy

Don Carson:

As for the cries for vengeance, the Apocalypse provides stunning counterparts to the psalms.

“How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” (Rev. 6:10), cry those who had been slain because of the Word of God and the testimony they had maintained.

“Give back to her [Babylon the Great] as she has given; pay her back double for what she has done. Mix her a double portion from her own cup. Giver her as much torture and grief as the glory and luxury she gave herself. In her heart she boasts, ‘I sit as a queen; I am not a widow, and I will never mourn.’ Therefore in one day her plagues will overtake her: death, mourning and famine. She will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her” (Rev. 18:6-8).

“Woe! Woe, O great city, where all those who had ships on the sea became rich through her wealth! . . . Rejoice over her, O heaven! Rejoice, saints and apostles and prophets! God has judged her for the way she treated you” (Rev. 18:19-20).

And there is much more of the same.

The factors we weighed when we considered similar Old Testament passages apply here as well. But the point to be made is that if we take seriously the eternal perspective that is laid out in the New Testament, then it simply will not do to write off the Old Testament witness as intrinsically harsher and therefore not something we need worry our heads about today.

Note especially Carson’s conclusion:

I think it is closer to the truth to say that in the coming of the Lord Jesus and the new covenant he sealed with his own blood, both the justice of God and the mercy of God appear in sharper relief than ever before, leaving us with correspondingly less excuse, and with great grounds for praise and worship.

—D. A. Carson, How Long, O Lord? Reflections on Suffering and Evil, 1st ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1990), 105.

A (Slightly) Awkward Interview on Crazy Busy

Kevin DeYoung’s new book is Crazy Busy: A (Mercifully) Short Book about a (Really) Big Problem. (You can learn more about it here.)

I recently sat down with him to talk about busyness and tried to make it as practical as I could:

50 Years Ago This Sunday: The Bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham

This Sunday is the 50th anniversary of the reprehensible bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where four young girls were killed while attending Sunday School.

The victims are pictured above. Going clockwise (from the top left) are Addie Mae Collins (age 14), Cynthia Wesley (age 14), Carole Robertson (age 14), and Denise McNair (age 11—a friend and schoolmate of 8-year-old Condoleeza Rice, who could hear the bomb down the street from her father’s church).

No one was convicted of the crime at the time, though Klansman Robert Chambliss (1904-1985), nicknamed “Dynamite Bob,” was a suspect. Eight years later, in 1971, the case was reopened, and in 1977 he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He died at the age of 81, proclaiming his innocence.

In 2001-2002, three co-conspirators were also declared guilty: Herman Cash died before he could be charged; Bobby Frank Cherry died in prison in 2004; and Thomas E. Blanton Jr. is still serving a life sentence at the age of 82.

Timothy George narrates the story of one young woman, Carolyn Maull McKinstry, who was in the church when the bomb ripped through the building:

It was gray and overcast on Sunday morning, September 15, 1963. Some rain had fallen in the night, but no one knew that the heavens would weep again before the day was done. It was “Youth Sunday” at the church, and Pastor John Cross had announced that he would preach a sermon titled ”A Love that Forgives” based on the Gospel text in Luke 23:34, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Carolyn Maull, 14, the Sunday School secretary, hurried to fulfill her responsibilities. She greeted visitors, counted Sunday School offerings, and reported the day’s attendance. In the brief interval between Sunday School and the morning worship service, Carolyn stopped by the girls’ restroom and spoke to her friends, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, and Carole Robertson, all 14, and Denise McNair, who was 11. She left the restroom, walked up the stairs to the church office, and answered the ringing phone. A man’s voice said simply: “Three minutes.” He hung up.

Carolyn felt confused. She walked into the sanctuary, where the clock hanging on the wall indicated that the time was 10:22 a.m. Then she heard the blast. Boom! For a second, she thought it was thunder or a lightning strike. Then she realized—it must be a bomb. She vividly remembers two things from that horror-filled moment: the sound of feet scurrying past her to get to the exits, and looking up at the stained glass window—the same one that had brought her such comfort when she looked into the face of Jesus at her baptism. The window was still intact . . . all except the face. Jesus’ beautiful face was gone.

George writes:

This coming Sunday, September 15, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church will commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the bomb that shook the church and changed the world. The theme for the service will once again be “A Love that Forgives.” The clock on the wall has been left as it was at the moment of the bombing, a lasting reminder of what happened fifty years ago at 10:22 a.m. But the face of Jesus in the church window, shattered by hate fifty years ago, has since been restored, so that the Savior looks down in mercy and love once again.

You can read his whole piece here.

On September 18, 1963, three days after the attack, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. offered his “Eulogy for the Young Victims.” King said that “These children—unoffending, innocent, and beautiful—were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.” He argued that “in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death.” He insisted that “they did not die in vain. God still has a way of wringing good out of evil. And history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive. The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as a redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city.”

King also pastorally addressed the bereaved families: “I hope you can find some consolation from Christianity’s affirmation that death is not the end. Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into life eternal.”

You can listen to the entire eulogy below:

You can also watch Spike Lee’s 1997 Academy-nominated documentary, 4 Little Girls, here:

Vanhoozer on Sanctified Imagination

Kevin Vanhoozer on the role imagination plays in sanctification:

First, I find that the imagination is a vital ingredient in my sanctification. I need to keep the big biblical picture (creation-fall-redemption-consummation) in mind as I attempt to live day by day, minute by minute, as a follower of Jesus Christ who desires above all to have one’s thought and life correspond to the gospel. To do that, I have to keep the gospel story (together with its presuppositions and implications) in mind, and I have to connect my story to that of Jesus. That requires imagination.

Second, the imagination is “sanctified” because it is “set apart” for the purpose of making just these kinds of connections.

There are vain imaginings, of course. These tend to be the ones that encourage us to see our lives as part of some other picture where God is either absent or other than the Father of Jesus Christ.

As for practical helps for cultivating a sanctified imagination, let me mention two.

First, reading. Reading is the way we learn to inhabit the world. Not the natural world, but the cultural world: the world of meaning. Martha Nussbaum has some wonderful essays in her book Love’s Knowledge on how the novels of Henry James train us to attend to the moral significance of the details of human life. If we can learn moral sensitivity from Henry James, how much more can Christians learn, say, about speech ethics from the epistle of James, not to mention all the Old Testament narratives, Jesus’ parables, and the Gospels themselves.

My concern is that many Evangelicals are suffering from malnourished imaginations. This impedes their ability to live coherently in the world—that is, according to a meaningful metanarrative. We want to believe the Bible, but we are unable to see our world in biblical terms (this is a major theme of my Pictures at a Biblical Exhibition that I mentioned above). That leads to a fatal disconnect between our belief-system and our behavior, our faith and our life. If faith’s influence is waning, as two-thirds of Americans now think, I believe that it is largely because of a failure of the evangelical imagination.

Reading, then, is a kind of strength-training that flexes the muscles of our imagination. Those who read widely are often those who are able to employ metaphors that connect ordinary life to the wonderful real world of the Bible.

The second way I exercise my biblically rooted, theologically formed imagination is by viewing myself as part of the ongoing action that the Bible recounts. My task as a disciple of Jesus Christ is to continue the theodramatic action-the plot of salvation history-in a manner that is consistent with what the Father, Son, and Spirit have already done and are still doing. To some extent, the theologian is a worker in dramatic fittingness whose task is to help us understand the drama of redemption, both theoretically and practically. We need practical understanding of the gospel so that we can speak and act faithful and orthodox lines in new cultural scenes. It is by seeking to live by the word in the power of the Spirit that our imaginations become sanctified. I need a sanctified imagination as I seek each day to improvise my life to the glory of God.

David Platt Interviews Mark Dever on Evangelism and Discipleship

David Platt (author of Follow Me: A Call to Die. A Call to Live.) talks with Mark Dever (author of The Gospel and Personal Evangelism) at the Church of Brook Hills for a substantive conversation on Mark’s own conversion, how he seeks to live missionally, and how to help others learn to evangelize and disciple.

HT: Tim Brister

21st Century Writers of Faith: A List of 25

Gregory Wolfe of Image writes:

Over the years we had received a great deal of positive feedback for our list of twentieth century writers of faith, so now that we’re over a decade into the twenty-first century, we thought we’d provide this list of twenty-five authors at work today.

We solicited nominations from the public and received around 250. The list below is taken from those nominations. The selection is not based on the number of nominations but on our collective editorial judgment.

Lists like this are enormously popular, but they are also deeply flawed and to some extent even arbitrary. For one thing, it is very difficult to make such a short list fully representative of every group and genre that deserve representation. We apologize in advance for these shortcomings.

Still, we believe the twenty-five writers on this list demonstrate that the rumors of the death of literature addressing faith are without substance—the result of people with ideological blinders on, leaving them oblivious to the rich literary experience going on around them.

You can read further explanation here, and the full list (with links) here.

 

What Fyodor Dostoyevsky Can Teach Us about the Christian Life

David Powlison talks about the role Dostoyevsky’s works can play in helping us understand sin and sanctification:

And here is J. I. Packer:

Dostoyevsky is to me both the greatest novelist, as such, and the greatest Christian storyteller, in particular, of all time. His plots and characters pinpoint the sublimity, perversity, meanness, and misery of fallen human adulthood in an archetypal way matched only by Aeschylus and Shakespeare, while his dramatic vision of God’s amazing grace and of the agonies, Christ’s and ours, that accompany salvation, has a range and depth that only Dante and Bunyan come anywhere near. . . . [H]is constant theme is the nightmare quality of unredeemed existence and the heartbreaking glory of the incarnation, whereby all human hurts came to find their place in the living and dying of Christ the risen Redeemer.

—The Gospel in Dostoyevsky: Selections from His Works (Orbis, 2004) vii.

The Contemporary Footprint of the American Prosperity “Gospel”

From Larry Eskridge’s CT review of Kate Bowler’s Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (Oxford University PRess, 2013):

As the size and number of their congregations, TV ministries, and bestselling books confirm, the contemporary footprint of the American Prosperity Gospel is large, indeed. This buttresses Bowler’s larger argument that the Prosperity movement is no religious sideshow. Citing studies, Bowler shows that 17 percent of all American Christians openly identify with the movement; that every Sunday, over a million people attend Prosperity-oriented megachurches—43 percent of which boast multiethnic or multicultural congregations; and that two-thirds of all Christian believers are convinced that God, ultimately, wants them to prosper.

Death by Living

John Wilson:

Pardon me for quoting myself, but here is the way I started a book review for Christianity Today magazine in 2007: “Remember, you read it here first. N. D. Wilson (no relation, I hasten to add) is a name that will soon be widely known. He will write many books, Lord willing, in many genres for our instruction and delight. His first is Leepike Ridge (Random House).”

Six years later, and now in his mid-thirties, Wilson has already written a bunch of books, in several genres, not to mention a bit of screenwriting. His latest, Death by Living, is his second work of nonfiction and (so I think) his best book yet.

Read the whole review here.

What a Biblical Humblebrag Looks Like

Russ Ramsey:

Right now that faith is being tested in ways I never saw coming and I’m doing my best to pay attention. I’m standing out on the ledge I’ve trusted all these 25 years since that winter day, tapping it with my foot, feeling for the slightest tremble, wondering if it will hold. Will this season of needles, bacterial infection, open-heart surgery, stroke, MRI’s, CT scans, syrupy IV treatments, rehab, setbacks, and progress expose that boy as a fool? Will my faith tuck its tail and run now that I’ve come face to face with my own mortality? Will I feel alone and abandoned by God? What will come of my faith now that I am more like the bird than the boy?

These are the questions I’ve been asking and here at the four-month mark I have a confession to make—a testimony. Through the pain, uncertainty, and grief, God’s grace has been sufficient for me (2 Cor 12:9). His grace is a gift and so is the faith through which it comes (Eph 2:8), so I can’t take credit for either. But I can tell you this: they are at work in me.

If this sounds like a boast, it is.

I boast in my God because I am neither smart enough nor tenacious enough to construct this faith. I would ruin it with conditions, demands, and near-sighted expectations. Don’t misunderstand. I can fear with the best of them, and question, and worry over things beyond my control. But that has not defined this season of sickness and suffering for me. I have rested in the confident hope that my Maker cares for me—and that by grace through a faith that has proven again to be real. He has not left me alone, abandoned, or betrayed (Deut 31:8, Heb 13:5). In my sorrow and in my tears, he has comforted me (2 Cor 1:4). In my weakness, he has been strong. (2 Cor 12:9) I’ve only known his nearness, never his absence (Heb 4:16, Jas 4:8). For this I give thanks. I remain a man of faith.

Read the whole thing here.