Justin Taylor's Blog, page 151

The. Internet. Is. Changing. The. World!

Alan Jacobs, after quoting another author who says, “the internet really has changed the world completely—and us along with it,” bemoans that authors like this

rattle on in seeming obliviousness to how drearily they are repeating what a thousand other authors have said in almost exactly the same terms.

And the lofty heights from which they address us, the vast wooly abstractions they use to describe “our” condition! “Technology is shifting our way of seeing the world.” “The internet really has changed the world completely.” Pray tell, what is “the world”? Seriously, I want to know what people mean by this. If “the world” has been changed completely, why does the silver maple outside my window still stand as it has for decades? Why is the gazpacho at Emilio’s as good as it was when I first tasted it, twenty-five years ago? Why does the prose of Sir Thomas Browne still delight me as it did when I first encountered it at age nineteen? Why do I still love my wife?

If you answer, “Well, that’s not what they mean by ‘the world,’” I counter, “Then what do they mean? Because all those things I just mentioned are in the only world that I know.”

And if it’s “technology” that is changing everything, which technology is that? Drugs that treat AIDS? Unmanned bomber drones? Sous vide machines?

Oh, it’s none of those? It’s “the internet”? That seems like an abstraction about as vague as “the world,” given that “the internet” allows people to find out how those AIDS drugs work, to purchase sous vide machines, and to manipulate drones remotely.

No more, please. No more essays about how “technology” or “the internet” is “changing everything.” They all say the same thing, which in the end amounts to: absolutely nothing. So let’s get down to cases. What technologies did you rely on today? What did they help you do? What did they allow you to avoid doing? What did they prevent you from doing that you wanted to do? Specify. As the proverbs tell us, both God and the Devil are in the details.

You can access the whole article here.

HT: Sam Storms

Render to God the Things that Are God’s

Luke 20:22-26:

One day, as Jesus was teaching the people in the temple and preaching the gospel, the chief priests and the scribes with the elders came up and said to him, “Is it lawful for us to give tribute to Caesar, or not?”

But he perceived their craftiness, and said to them, “Show me a denarius. Whose likeness and inscription does it have?”

They said, “Caesar’s.”

He said to them, “Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

And they were not able in the presence of the people to catch him in what he said, but marveling at his answer they became silent.

D. A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited, p. 57:

When Jesus asks the question, “whose image is this? And whose inscription?” biblically informed people will remember that all human beings have been made in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26).

Moreover, his people have the “inscription” of God’s law written on them (cf. Exodus 13:9; Proverbs 7:3; Isaiah 44:5; Jeremiah 31:33).

If we give back to God what has his image on it, we must all give ourselves to him.

Far from privatizing God’s claim, that is, the claim of religion, Jesus’ famous utterance means that God always trumps Caesar. We may be obligated to pay taxes to Cesar, but we owe everything, our very being, to God. [Quoting David T. Ball:] “Whatever civil obligations Jesus followers might have, they must be understood within the context of their responsibilities to God, for their duty to God to claims their whole selves.”

A Google Map of Jonathan Edwards’ World

Here is a map I’ve tinkered with marking some of the major locations in the life of the great theologian and pastor Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). Thanks to Ken Minkema’s authoritative chronology and Tony Reinke’s helpful notes.

View Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) in a larger map

Feel free to add corrections or further details to the map. I’ve made it public.

Other historical Google Maps I’ve done are Augustine’s World and Jesus’ Final Week.

I hope this encourages others to try their hand at something similar using the best historical resources.

I Don’t Stand with Wendy Davis

From an excellent piece by Kirsten Powers:

It’s amazing what is considered heroism these days.

A Texas legislator and her pink sneakers have been lionized for an eleventh-hour filibuster against a bill that would have made it illegal for mothers to abort babies past 20 weeks of pregnancy, except in the case of severe fetal abnormalities or to protect the life or health of the mother.

People actually cheered this.

But the fight is not over. The bill will be reintroduced, and supporters of the ban are optimistic it will pass. For now, Wendy Davis has achieved the dubious victory of maintaining a very dark status quo. Texas women will still be able to abort a healthy baby up to the 26th week of pregnancy for any reason, as the current law allows.

According to the Parents Connect website, if you are in the 25th week of your pregnancy, “Get ready for pat-a-cake! Baby’s hands are now fully developed and he spends most of his awake time groping around in the darkness of your uterus. Brain and nerve endings are developed enough now so that your baby can feel the sensation of touch.” Let’s be clear: Davis has been called a hero for trying to block a bill that would make aborting this baby illegal.

In addition to the limit on late-term abortions, the Texas legislature sought to pass regulations on abortion clinics similar to what was passed in Pennsylvania in 2011 after the Gosnell horror. The New York Times warned that the Texas bill “could lead to the closing of most of Texas’s 42 abortion clinics.” That sounds familiar. In 2011, the Pennsylvania ACLU claimed a post-Gosnell bill “would effectively close most and maybe all of the independent abortion clinics in Pennsylvania.” Last month, a Pennsylvania news site reported that “several” abortion clinics have closed, which isn’t quite the Armageddon the abortion-rights movement predicted.

So no, I don’t stand with Wendy. Nor do most women, as it turns out. According to a June National Journal poll, 50 percent of women support, and 43 percent oppose, a ban on abortion after 20 weeks, except in cases of rape and incest.

One can assume I am also not the only woman in America who is really tiring of the Wendys of the world claiming to represent “women’s rights” in their quest to mainstream a medical procedure—elective late-term abortion—that most of the civilized world finds barbaric and abhorrent. In many European countries, you can’t get an abortion past 12 weeks, except in narrow circumstances. Gallup reported in January that 80 percent of Americans think abortion should be illegal in the third trimester, and 64 percent think it should be illegal in the second trimester.

Read the whole thing.

You can get a taste for how the media has been grilling Wendy Davis about her extreme views by reading this.

What Happens When You Deprive Children of Scary Stories

Alasdair MacIntyre:

It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words.

—Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3d ed. (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), p. 216.

G. K. Chesterton:

Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

—G. K. Chesteron, “The Red Angel” (1909)

C. S. Lewis:

The fantasies did not deceive me: the school stories did. All stories in which children have adventures and successes which are possible, in the sense that they do not break the laws of nature, but almost infinitely improbable, are in more danger than the fairy tales of raising false expectations.

. . . Do fairy tales teach children to retreat into a world of wish-fulfillment—’fantasy’ in the technical psychological sense of the word—instead of facing the problems of the real world? Now it is here that the problem becomes subtle. Let us again lay the fairy tale side by side with the school story or any other story which is labeled a ‘Boy’s Book’ or a ‘Girl’s Book’, as distinct from a ‘Children’s Book’. There is no doubt that both arouse, and imaginatively satisfy, wishes. We long to go through the looking glass, to reach fairy land. We also long to be the immensely popular and successful schoolboy or schoolgirl, or the lucky boy or girl who discovers the spy’s plot or rides the horse that none of the cowboys can manage.

But the two longings are very different.

The second, especially when directed on something so close as school life, is ravenous and deadly serious. Its fulfillment on the level of imagination is in very truth compensatory: we run to it from the disappointments and humiliations of the real world: it sends us back to the real world undividedly discontented. For it is all flattery to the ego. The pleasure consists in picturing oneself the object of admiration.

The other longing, that for fairy land, is very different. In a sense a child does not long for fairy land as a boy longs to be the hero of the first eleven. Does anyone suppose that he really and prosaically longs for all the dangers and discomforts of a fairy tale?—really wants dragons in contemporary England? It is not so. It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new ‘dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. This is a special kind of longing. The boy reading the school story of the type I have in mind desires success and is unhappy (once the book is over) because he can’t get it: the boy reading the fairy tale desires and is happy in the very fact of desiring. For his mind has not been concentrated on himself, as it often is in the more realistic story.

—C. S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1946)

See also:


David Mills, “Enchanting Children: Training Up a Child Requires a Well-Formed Imagination” (Touchstone)
Vigen Guroian, Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination

Five Longings of a New Father

Pastor Steve DeWitt reflects on the longings of his heart as a new and first-time father. Here is an outline of his five longings:

By God’s grace, to be a biblical father to her
By God’s grace, to love her despite her (and my) imperfections
By God’s grace, to cultivate biblical femininity by modeling robust masculinity
By God’s grace, to be a godly example to her
By God’s grace, my ultimate goal for her is faith and maturity in Christ

Here are his working definitions: a biblical father provides, loves, and nurtures the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of his child with the goal of the child’s faith and maturity in Christ; and biblical masculinity is tender and loving headship that shows itself through sacrificial servant leadership of the home.

You can read the whole thing here.

Gospel Doctrine Creates a Gospel Culture

Ray Ortlund is a man who exudes grace, and I love to hear him teach on it:

Why the Church Needs Cranky, Cynical Historians

From an older piece by Carl Trueman:

Some years ago, Phyllis Tickle likened Brian McLaren to Luther and the Emergent Church to the kind of paradigm shift that happens only once a millennium. The amazing thing was not that she said this; in a world shaped by the continual escalation of sales rhetoric, this kind of language is to be expected in advertising. No. What was truly amazing was that people actually took her seriously, friend and foe alike. Such people are in urgent need of help to stop them saying or believing things that are very, very silly and absurdly self-important.

Enter the church historians. Any intellectual historian of any merit will tell you that the last 1,000 years in the West have only produced two moments of paradigm shifting significance, and neither of them was the Reformation.

The first was the impact of the translation into Latin of Aristotle’s metaphysical works. This demanded a response from the thirteenth century church. The response, most brilliantly represented by Thomas Aquinas, revolutionized education, transformed the philosophical landscape, opened up fruitful new avenues for theological synthesis, and set the basic shape of university education until the early eighteenth century. Within this intellectual context, the Reformation was to represent a critical development of Augustinian anti-Pelagianism in terms of the understanding of the church and of salvation, but it did not represent quite the foundational paradigm shift that is often assumed.

The second major moment was the Enlightenment. Like the earlier Aristotelian renaissance, this was a diverse movement and the singular term is something of a scholarly construct; but the various philosophical strands covered by the terms served to remake university education and to demand new and fresh responses from the church in a way that the Reformation had never done.

In this light, to hear that the work of some trendy representative of the angst, insecurities and obsessions of middle America somehow represents the kind of paradigm shift that comes along once in a millennium in self-evidently laughable. He may have an enviable gift for writing popular books and speaking (the musical talent is, I fear, more questionable) but he is not bringing about a comprehensive revision of the whole of theology, establishing a comprehensive framework for understanding the world, or reshaping the very foundations of knowledge as either the church or the wider world understands it. Further (and here is the real historical rub) even if he were doing so, it would be a hundred years or so before anybody would really be able to make that judgment with any confidence. . . .

And that is why church historians play such an important role and our cynicism is such a boon. Church history keeps things in perspective. Through reading the texts and studying the actions and events of the past we can truly say that we have seen it all before. Thus, whatever it is that the latest guru is suggesting, it definitely will not work as well as expected, probably will not work at all, and anyway it will be a hundred years or more before we can say whether it made a real difference or not.

Thus, the next time someone comes along and tells me that a movie by Mel Gibson is the most significant contribution to church culture since the Apostle John laid down his stylus and parchment, my eyes can glaze over in confident knowledge that what I have just been told is complete drivel. When I am informed that a book by the Rev. Tommy Tweedlethumb is the most important piece of Christian literature since Augustine’s Confessions, I can politely stifle a yawn behind my hand and go back to reading the newspaper, for I know full well that in a hundred years time Tommy’s complete works will be as long-forgotten as genre-shattering pop bands such as ‘Men Without Hats.’

The old saying has it that the cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Whether or not that is entirely accurate, it is certainly true to say that cynicism is one of the historian’s great gifts to the church. To put it bluntly, cynicism serves to keep things, especially us, in proper perspective. After all, most of what goes on today in the name of earth-shattering paradigm shifts has no value, whatever the price tag.

You can read the whole thing here.

If You Are Hesitant to Come to Christ, Jonathan Edwards Would Like to Ask You Some Questions

What are you afraid of, that you dare not venture your soul upon Christ?

Are you afraid that he cannot save you, that he is not strong enough to conquer the enemies of your soul?

But how can you desire one stronger than “the almighty God”? as Christ is called, Isa. 9:6.

Is there need of greater than infinite strength?

Are you afraid that he will not be willing to stoop so low as to take any gracious notice of you?

But then, look on him, as he stood in the ring of soldiers, exposing his blessed face to be buffeted and spit upon by them!

Behold him bound with his back uncovered to those that smote him!

And behold him hanging on the cross!

Do you think that he that had condescension enough to stoop to these things, and that for his crucifiers, will be unwilling to accept of you, if you come to him?

Or, are you afraid that if he does accept you, that God the Father will not accept of him for you?

But consider, will God reject his own Son, in whom his infinite delight is, and has been, from all eternity, and who is so united to him, that if he should reject him he would reject himself?

What is there that you can desire should be in a Savior, that is not in Christ?

Or, wherein should you desire a Savior should be otherwise than Christ is?

What excellency is there wanting?

What is there that is great or good; what is there that is venerable or winning; what is there that is adorable or endearing; or, what can you think of that would be encouraging, which is not to be found in the person of Christ?

Would you have your Savior to be great and honorable, because you are not willing to be beholden to a mean person?

And, is not Christ a person honorable enough to be worthy that you should be dependent on him?

Is he not a person high enough to be appointed to so honorable a work as your salvation?

Would you not only have a Savior of high degree, but would you have him, notwithstanding his exaltation and dignity, to be made also of low degree, that he might have experience of afflictions and trials, that he might learn by the things that he has suffered, to pity them that suffer and are tempted?

And has not Christ been made low enough for you? and has he not suffered enough?

Would you not only have him possess experience of the afflictions you now suffer, but also of that amazing wrath that you fear hereafter, that he may know how to pity those that are in danger, and afraid of it?

This Christ has had experience of, which experience gave him a greater sense of it, a thousand times, than you have, or any man living has.

Would you have your Savior to be one who is near to God, that so his mediation might be prevalent with him?

And can you desire him to be nearer to God than Christ is, who is his only-begotten Son, of the same essence with the Father?

And would you not only have him near to God, but also near to you, that you may have free access to him?

And would you have him nearer to you than to be in the same nature, united to you by a spiritual union, so close as to be fitly represented by the union of the wife to the husband, of the branch to the vine, of the member to the head; yea, so as to be one spirit?

For so he will be united to you, if you accept of him.

Would you have a Savior that has given some great and extraordinary testimony of mercy and love to sinners, by something that he has done, as well as by what he says?

And can you think or conceive of greater things than Christ has done?

Was it not a great thing for him, who was God, to take upon him human nature: to be not only God, but man thenceforward to all eternity?

But would you look upon suffering for sinners to be a yet greater testimony of love to sinners, than merely doing, though it be ever so extraordinary a thing that he has done?

And would you desire that a Savior should suffer more than Christ has suffered for sinners?

What is there wanting, or what would you add if you could, to make him more fit to be your Savior?

(Jonathan Edwards, “The Excellency of Christ” [1738])

Christology in the 21st Century: A Discussion

Below is a panel hosted by Ligonier at the 2013 PCA General Assembly, with Sinclair Ferguson, Robert Godfrey, Ligon Duncan, Richard Pratt, and R.C. Sproul, moderated by Steve Nichols. They talk through the following:

What is the biggest theological battle today and for the next generation? (00:00:00)
What advice would you give to the next generation of pastors, especially church planters, as they try to address contextualization, Christology, and similar issues? (00:08:30)
What might we learn from history about the parallel rising of Christianity and Islam? (00:11:35)
What role does Christology play as we see the needs of the global church? (00:16:00)
How do we guard against the various distortions when it comes to the person of Jesus? (00:22:40)
Discussion on the work of Christ pertaining to justification and imputation. (00:30:45)
The panel shares thoughts on substitutionary atonement, and how it is going to be an issue in the next generation. (00:41:52)
Is the church in danger of reductionism when it comes to the gospel? If so, how do we guard against it? (00:48:45)
Sinclair Ferguson, how has John Owen shaped your pastoral ministry? (00:51:32)

HT: Ligonier blog