Justin Taylor's Blog, page 228

Yahweh of Armies: The Battle Belongs to the Lord

Woodcut by Gustave Doré

Have you ever wondered why the title "LORD of hosts" appears more frequently in the book of Malachi than in any other OT book, or why the title appears more often in the prophetic books than in other other time period of the OT? Gordon Hugenberger has, and in the ESV Study Bible he makes an interesting observation:

In the period of Isaiah, the northern kingdom was overrun and destroyed and the southern kingdom almost destroyed by the "hosts" (armies) of Assyria. God's people had so few troops that the Assyrian King Sennacherib could mockingly challenge King Hezekiah with the offer of a gift of 2,000 horses if Hezekiah could find enough soldiers to ride them (Isa. 36:8).

Similarly, in the period of Jeremiah, the southern kingdom was wiped out by the hosts (armies) of Babylon.

In the postexilic period of Malachi, the postage-stamp-sized Judah, as a tiny province within the vast Persian Empire, had no army of its own. It is precisely in such times, when God's people are painfully aware of how limited their own resources are, that there is no greater comfort than the fact that the Lord has his invincible heavenly armies standing at the ready.

It is like the comfort that Elisha prayed for his servant at Dothan when they were surrounded by the Syrian armies: "'O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.' So the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha" (2 Kings 6:17).

Perhaps it is like the comfort felt by Jesus before the cross: "Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?" (Matt. 26:53).

Image used by permission of Crossway.

The Emergence of Fun Morality

Ken Myers, from the new, long introduction to the republication of his classic book, All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Pop Culture:

* * *

In a 1951 essay called "The Emergence of Fun Morality," social scientist Martha Wolfenstein called attention to signs of a new morality displacing traditional concerns with doing the right thing. The advent of fun morality—and the cultural institutions and artifacts that enabled it—soon meant that not having fun was an occasion for anxiety. As Dr. Wolfenstein observed: "Whereas gratification of forbidden impulses traditionally aroused guilt, failure to have fun now lowers one's self-esteem."

As this moral inversion has gathered momentum, cultural institutions previously unconcerned with promoting fun gradually succumbed to the assumption that unless they could be entertaining, they would be be left in the dust. By the time of the last two or three decades of the twentieth century, numerous cultural institutions—once committed to being sources of moral meaning, definition, and authority—had surrendered. Political candidates felt compelled to appear on Saturday Night Live and on jokey talk shows. University professors emulated stand-up comics. Many clergy supervised the overhaul of worship services to make them more like variety shows. Art museums (and many artists) outdid one another in seeking to make art fun. Journalism—first on TV then in print—traded depth and moral seriousness for flashy superficiality. The idea of cultural authority and the sorts of limits and disciplines it would promote capitulated to the claim that all of life is market-driven, a claim that makes sense in a purpose-free cosmos.

It's not that good things couldn't still happen within these institutions. But they increasingly saw themselves not as exercising authority but as begging for attention. They could no longer articulate "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots," they could no longer sustain taboos or offer exhortation about duty and obligation. In short, these institutions effectively abandoned the task of articulating the contours of a purposeful and morally ordered universe within which individuals might seek to conform their souls. Modernity's sovereign individuals were best understood as consumers not as disciples, apprentices,  or heirs.

The advent of fun morality was not simply a displacement of seriousness. It represented the institutional loss of confidence that there was anything worth being serious about. It was (in Allan Bloom's memorable formulation) the confirmation of nihilism without the abyss.

Admiration of Jesus without Love for Jesus

Maxim Gorky on the faith of Leo Tolstoy:

When he speaks about Christ, it is always peculiarly poor, no enthusiasm, no feeling in his words, no spark of real fire. . . . although at times he admires him, he hardly loves him."

—Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (New York: B.W. Heubsch, 1920), 5.

If this is accurate, it's one of the more damning statements I've read. May God keep us from benign admiration of Jesus rather than true love and adoration for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

"If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed."

—1 Corinthians 16:22

Alistair Begg: "Inadequacy: The Surprising Secret to Being Useful to God"

In October 2011, Alistair Begg delivered a talk to the Carl F. H. Henry Center at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Here's a description:

The NBA champions this year was a team made up of fewer stars and less glitz than their opponents. We might say that humility triumphed over hubris. There are lessons-a-plenty in this for an evangelical church that routinely produces all-stars. Such an approach endangers the recipients of such adulation and discourages those who are by-passed in the process. In this lecture, Alistair Begg will consider God's pattern of using unlikely and ordinary characters and address the possibility that what we regard as a hindrance may be the key to usefulness in God's service.

The day following the lecture, Hans Madueme and Stephen Farish interviewed Begg.

You can listen to the talk and the interview in iTunes, or watch both below.

For related reading on this, see Kent and Barbara Hughes's important book, Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome.

On Navigating through Culture

Kevin Vanhoozer offers some navigational advice on steering the ship of the church between the Scylla of cultural withdrawal and the Charybdis of cultural accommodation:

The most important thing is to be aware that culture is always, already there—something in which we live and move and have our historical being—and that it is always actively cultivating, always forming habits of the heart and habits of perception.

Of course, it also helps when the first mate-one's pastor theologian-is a competent seahand. "Competence" here means knowing both one's ship (the church) and the sea (the world). The image of the church as maritime vessel is a good one. Throughout Scriptures, water is often a symbol for powers that can engulf us. But the church should not be wholly anti-world either, for the sea, as part of the created order, is in another sense what sustains us.

Ultimately it is the wind—the breath of the word-ministering Spirit—that allows the church to be counter-cultural and to set her course against the prevailing intellectual currents.

But I must leave off with that as I fear some readers may become seasick. . . .

The Church AS Culture

Ken Myers, from the new, long introduction to the republication of his classic book, All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Pop Culture:

In the years since I wrote this book, I have come to appreciate the theological arguments (and the various historical studies) which insist that the Church should properly understand itself as a people: not a club or a clinic or a show or a service provider, but something more like a nation, a polis.

The Church is not simply in the business of getting individuals saved. The Church's task is to nurture and shape its members into disciples, who observe everything their Lord—the Lord of heaven and earth—has commanded.

Of course, the Church must be eagerly active to bring in new members. But it must deliberately be a body the membership in which makes a difference. It must offer a way of life—a culture—which is distinct from the world's ways. And it must seek to baptize its new members into Christ and into his body, which means that they must be exhorted to abandon their old memberships and allegiances.

In a conversation I had several years ago with D. H. Williams—now a professor at Baylor University who teaches the work of the early Church fathers—we talked about how seriously the early Church's supervision of new converts took this process of enculturating its members.

In the process of teaching, or catechizing new Christians . . . it was taken with great seriousness that the commitment that they were making was a corporate one, and an exclusive one. And that it entailed a body of meaning that in many ways was inviting them to become members of a counterculture, from the one in which they had converted from. And even the catechetical process itself begins to raise important questions about the church as culture. That you are de facto encouraging the new Christian to learn a new vocabulary, a new sense of what is the highest, the good, and the beautiful; that there really are true things and false things; that there really are certain moral lines to be drawn in the sand, and that you may struggle with these, and part of the struggle is very good."

Church historian Robert Louis Wilken made a very similar case in an interview given (not, sadly, to me) in 1998 in which he reflected on the early Church's posture toward its cultural surroundings. Wilken pointed out that the principal way in which the early Church leaders sustained cultural influence was by discipling its members, by conveying to them that the call of the Gospel was a call to embrace a new way of life. The Church was less interested in transforming the disorders of the Roman Empire than in building "its own sense of community, and it let these communities be the leaven that would gradually transform culture." The Church was not a body that "spoke to its culture; it was itself a culture and created a new Christian culture."

To speak of the Church as a culture is to use the word "culture" in a thicker way than it is often used today.

When Robert Louis Wilken writes of a Christian culture, he is referring to (in his words) the "pattern of inherited meanings and sensibilities encoded in rituals, law, language, practices, and stories that can order, inspire, and guide the behavior, thoughts, and affections of a Christian people."

By referring to "a Christian people," Wilken is reminding individualistic Americans that the Gospel is about the calling of a people, not the making of discrete and separate converts.

This view permeates the New Testament; using language that echoes texts in the Torah, St. Peter addresses Christian exiles in Asia Minor (and future generations of Christian believers) this way:

You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light, Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Theologian Peter Leithart has picked up on this theme in arguing that

In the New Testament, we do not find an essentially private gospel being applied to the public sphere, as if the public implications of the gospel were a second story built on the private ground floor. The gospel is the announcement of the Father's formation, through His Son and the Spirit, of a new city—the city of God.

If this is the case, Leithart argues, then "The Church is not a club for religious people. The Church is a way of living together before God, a new way of being human together."

This was surely the perspective of the early Church, though one wonders how common it is today. The assemblies of believers in the First Century and long after were not perceived to be resource centers for the promotion of merely private spirituality, they were not religious branches of the larger Greco-Roman project. Rather, the early Church lived with the formative conviction (in Leitharts's phrase) "that God has established the eschatological order of human life in the midst of history, not perfectly but truly."

Therefore, the Church's life—the shared relationships and practices of the redeemed community—was truly a matter with public consequences. Leithart argues that these public consequences reflect the eschatological character of the Church.

The Church anticipates the form of the human race as it will be when it comes to maturity; she is the "already" of the new humanity that will be perfected in the "not yet" of the last day.

So conversion necessarily led to discipleship that had extensive consequences.

Conversion thus means turning from one way of life, one culture, to another. Conversion is the beginning of a "resocialization," . . . and "inculturation" into the way of life practiced by the eschatological community.

Ross Douthat's Next Book: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

I find Ross Douthat's writing invariably interesting, so I am especially looking forward to the release next month of his book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics.

Here is the publisher's description:

As the youngest-ever op-ed columnist for the New York Times, Ross Douthat has emerged as one of the most provocative and influential voices of his generation. In Bad Religion he offers a masterful and hard-hitting account of how American Christianity has gone off the rails—and why it threatens to take American society with it.

Writing for an era dominated by recession, gridlock, and fears of American decline, Douthat exposes the spiritual roots of the nation's political and economic crises. He argues that America's problem isn't too much religion, as a growing chorus of atheists have argued; nor is it an intolerant secularism, as many on the Christian right believe. Rather, it's bad religion: the slow-motion collapse of traditional faith and the rise of a variety of pseudo-Christianities that stroke our egos, indulge our follies, and encourage our worst impulses.

These faiths speak from many pulpits—conservative and liberal, political and pop cultural, traditionally religious and fashionably "spiritual"—and many of their preachers claim a Christian warrant. But they are increasingly offering distortions of traditional Christianity—not the real thing. Christianity's place in American life has increasingly been taken over, not by atheism, Douthat argues, but by heresy: debased versions of Christian faith that breed hubris, greed, and self-absorption.

In a story that moves from the 1950s to the age of Obama, he brilliantly charts institutional Christianity's decline from a vigorous, mainstream, and bipartisan faith—which acted as a "vital center" and the moral force behind the civil rights movement—through the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s to the polarizing debates of the present day. Ranging from Glenn Beck to Barack Obama, Eat Pray Love to Joel Osteen, and Oprah Winfrey to The Da Vinci Code, Douthat explores how the prosperity gospel's mantra of "pray and grow rich," a cult of self-esteem that reduces God to a life coach, and the warring political religions of left and right have crippled the country's ability to confront our most pressing challenges and accelerated American decline.

His urgent call for a revival of traditional Christianity is sure to generate controversy, and it will be vital reading for all those concerned about the imperiled American future.

Prophecy, Interrupted

I recently reread Richard Pratt's essay, "Historical Contingencies and Biblical Predictions," which was his inaugural address presented to the faculty of Reformed Theological Seminary (Orlando) upon his installation as professor of Old Testament in 1993. Operating from a confessional, Calvinistic perspective, he explores "the role of historical contingencies intervening between Old Testament predictions and their fulfillments." His study has implications for hermeneutics and for theological debates like open theism.

Here is a summary of one of his key sections:

To sum up, we have seen that intervening historical contingencies had a bearing on all

three major types of prophetic predictions.

Some predictions explicitly told the original listeners that their actions would effect outcomes.

A few passages assured that a prediction would be realized, but precisely how that outcome would look still remained subject to contingencies.

Beyond this, unqualified predictions, the bulk of the prophetic material, always operated with tacit conditions. In all cases, significant responses preceding fulfillments had

the potential of effecting to some degree how Yahweh would direct the future.

I find Pratt's exegesis largely convincing and am happy to commend the essay. I would suggest one caveat, however: if you read it substituting the term "prophetic proclamation/announcement" instead of "prediction," I think it makes a lot more sense.

Onward and Upward: A Great Project to Support

I love the Elisha Foundation, a Christ-centered, no-cost ministry to families with special-needs kids.

"In March of 2013 twenty adventurers will support The Elisha Foundation (TEF) by trekking from Lukla, Nepal to Everest Base Camp at the foot of the highest mountain in the world. This team, including two able bodied disabled participants, will push themselves to trek 16 days to more than 18,000 feet to raise money for TEF's ministry to the disabled community and their families."

Here's a video:

Here's how you can help.

The Earliest Audio of John Piper Preaching

In seminary, John Piper mainly earned A's, with a few B's. He did get two C's: one for a class on the atonement, and one for a class on homiletics.

Nevertheless, his senior year his classmates voted to give him the Clarence Roddy Preaching Award, and he delivered his senior sermon in the Fuller Theological Seminary chapel on March 24, 1971. Piper was 25 years old.

Desiring God has now posted the audio of this message, as well as a transcript. The sermon is on Ephesians 1:6 and Christian hedonism.