Justin Taylor's Blog, page 244

Pitting Brother against Brother

Thabiti Anyabwile has an insightful post today about some of the difficulties for African Americans when it comes to Black and White Evangelical cooperation.

You can read the whole thing here, but note this in particular for White evangelicals:

Danger of division. I also want my non-African-American brothers to realize the harmful dynamic of pitting one African American against another. When two white brothers disagree publicly over a theological issue, there's likely not a community "back home" trying to decide which brother is "black" and therefore which brother to follow. Historically, some white leaders have intentionally played one African American leader against another with the aim of dividing and weakening the community. That's a history well-known and a strategy much hated in African-American communities. So, when a conflict between two African American religious leaders takes place publicly, care must be taken not to walk into this troubled narrative and trap. Inevitably, pitting two African-American leaders against one another is going to result in (1) one of those leaders losing "black" authenticity in their community, (2) one or both of those leaders being marginalized for their cooperation with "outsiders" to the community, and (3) the White brothers who do the pitting being seen as unconcerned about the Black community and unrighteously attempting to anoint the next Black leader. No one wins. If you're from outside the African-American community, think very long, hard, and carefully about ever calling some African Americans to take your position in defense against other African Americans. It's disastrous for everyone, and, frankly, you won't begin to pay the deeper costs over the longer period that your African American friend will.

After 20: Modern Reformation Redesigned: Free Giveaway Contest with Some Serious Prizes

Only eternity will tell all of the secondary causes and means that God has used to spark a renewed interest in our day for the recovery of God-centered, Christ-exalting, gospel-depending, life-transforming reformational doctrine. But I suspect when the final chapter is written, many will thank God for the gift of a magazine that named itself after its goal: Modern Reformation.

It began as a newsletter in 1986 when Michael Horton was 22 years old and a senior in college. That may sound young—until you remember that his first book, Mission Accomplished, had already been published for two years, and that he actually wrote it when he was 15 years old!

In 1992 the magazine appeared in print for the first time. So now, in 2012, Modern Reformation is celebrating its 20th year in print.

With their 20th anniversary, they've redesigned the magazine to make it more user-friendly, including the fulling new features:

full-color printing;
more charts, graphics, and side bars;
an easy-to-carry tablet size;
matte paper for highlighting and taking notes.

I suspect not enough readers of this blog take advantage of this great resource, so when I heard about the redesign, I wondered if they might consider some sort of giveaway contest.

So here's what we came up with: in the comments section below, simply leave a comment about MR. Here are a few suggestions for comments:

Wish MR a Happy Anniversary!
What do you like best about MR?
Where do you like to read MR?
When did you first hear about MR?
Why would you like to start reading MR?
Or, anything else you may like to say.

Winners will be randomly selected (though see Prov. 16:33!).

The Grand Prize will be an autographed "Horton Library," which includes the following books::

The Christian Faith (CT's 2012 book of the year in theology/ethics);
For Calvinism ;
Putting Amazing Back Into Grace , new edition, which includes a DVD with Mike teaching on each chapter;
Christless Christianity ;
The Gospel-Driven Life ;
The Gospel Commission ;
A Place for Weakness ;
Introducing Covenant Theology ;
A Better Way ;
Where in the World Is the Church? ; and
a 1-year subscription of Modern Reformation magazine for the winner and 5 friends!

If my math is right, that's at least worth $335!

In addition, 10 people will will free 1-year-subscriptions to MR.

You can only enter once—here. But you can also enter once at the White Horse Inn contest blog post. We'll close the comments Thursday night at midnight (PST).

After the jump below, you can read some Q&A with Michael Horton about the magazine, along with a brief video talking about the vision and the redesign:

When did you start Modern Reformation, and most importantly, why?

. . . It grew out of the experience of a number of us, first at Biola University, and then when I became a student at Westminster Seminary California. It was sort of a cottage project of a bunch of folks who were learning Reformed theology on the fly. It became interesting to other people, and then we included, actually right from the very beginning, Lutheran writers, and people from Calvinistic Baptist backgrounds, as well as Reformed and Presbyterian. So right there at the outset, Modern Reformation established itself as a cross-pollinating conversation among the various Reformation traditions.

The reason we started it was because we thought that there was a real place for this cross conversation between various representatives of the Reformation churches. Not because we want to create some sort of united church, but because we want to take the treasures from all of the different traditions that hail from the great rediscovery of the gospel in the 16th century, and bring them to bear on the topics of interest to us as Christians today. It's not just going back to the Reformation. It's sort of like finding all sorts of cool things in the attic from your grandparents, and bringing them downstairs and trying them on. And then really learning how the great contributions, the conclusions out of important debates can really help us think through the controversies and challenges and opportunities of our own day. As Dr. Bob Godfrey says, we often try to reinvent the wheel, and it's never round. A lot of people have gone before us, and hashed out a lot of issues that are still of great importance to the church today. We saw a place out there for a magazine like this, because really there was nothing in the same category out there. . . .

Where does Modern Reformation fit in the world of Christian publishing?

When you think about what Modern Reformation's place is out there in the marketplace of magazines, it's odd. We kind of straddle the fence between a popular magazine and a theology journal. It's clearly not a theology journal—we don't have a bunch of footnotes, we don't go into great detail, we don't explore some of the more obscure themes and figures in church history. At the same time, it's not really just a popular magazine that focuses on news of the day, or a Christian take on this issue or that issue. It's really more serious than that. So it's sort of a serious magazine. And that is not exactly a place that's occupied out there in the marketplace. There are great magazines and periodicals out there that do what Modern Reformation does not do, like TableTalk, Ligionier's publication. But Modern Reformation is an attempt to take Christians to the next step, as far as a magazine goes, into exploring what they believe and why they believe it.

There are great resources out there for devotional use and edification from a Reformation perspective, but Modern Reformation, I think, is distinct in that it is an attempt to really rebuild the furniture, or the categories of Christian faith and practice, to remind ourselves once again what we believe and why we believe it.

Who reads Modern Reformation?

That's interesting—we think that we know the readership of Modern Reformation until we actually conduct surveys, and of course they're not scientific surveys; we ask people to respond who read the magazine. What we get is really quite a cross section of people from different traditions: mainly Reformed and Presbyterian, but also Lutheran, and also Baptist, Evangelical Free, even Pentecostal, and Roman Catholic subscribers, and certainly people from the Anglican churches. So it's really exciting to see the diverse discussions across the traditions that are happening today. People are looking for something deeper than a few thoughts for the day.

Why do you still write Modern Reformation articles after 20 years, and is there still a place for the long form essay in a magazine in our bit-driven world?

I've been writing in the magazine for these 20 years regularly because I find that it is a really important outlet for me in my teaching ministry. I'm always encouraged when people tell me that they're going over it in their family devotions, or they're working through it as a couple, or with their family, or that their teenagers are getting excited about theology, and wanting to graduate from reading an article on a subject in Modern Reformation to reading a book that was recommended in that issue. That's such an encouragement to keep on writing for it. I've learned so much also myself from this conversation. I learn a lot from reading the articles of other contributors from other traditions. It really helps us—iron sharpens iron, and sometimes we don't even know our own tradition very well, until someone outside of it comes to us and says something that we haven't heard before, and we go back and we find that actually, our folks did say some things about this. So that's been a really exciting journey for me personally.

I do think that there is a place still for the long essay form. Again, if it's not technical, if it is clear, if it is addressing the questions that people are asking—not just giving them the truth in the form that we think we would like to give it, but asking the questions that we think are on their minds, and then forming articles around that. . . .

What makes a good conversation for Modern Reformation?

I think there are lots of factors that go into making for a good conversation for Modern Reformation. One is selecting the topics that are of interest to a wide spectrum of Christians. The other is to find writers who are gifted in communicating that to people in the pew. You have to really be motivated to read Modern Reformation. It's not the sort of thing that you can just pick up and digest in five minutes. You have to make a commitment to it—not because it's difficult to understand, but because it requires patience and investment of time and energy in poring over. That, I think, creates a good conversation. You put good topics, important topics, together with good communicators, and I think that's one of the things that make Modern Reformation really distinctive.

What roles does Modern Reformation have in the theological pilgrimage of its readers?

One of the funny things that I hear from time to time is that people who are in churches that are not, let's say, exactly in the Reformation camp, get their Modern Reformation and walk out of the office with it in a brown paper bag. Then they go home and digest it, and are excited about it, and then they start passing it around to their fellow pastors and elders and people in the church. We've heard about wonderful things happening, reformation happening in churches as a result of people having the conversations in person that we have in the pages of the magazine.

Modern Reformation is passed around a lot. We know that a lot of people who don't subscribe read it, that it does get passed around. We have a lot of anecdotes regularly coming in along those lines, and that's exciting, because it means that kindling is being placed in fireplaces all over, and hopefully fires are burning, and people are talking about these transformative doctrines again, in ways they haven't, perhaps, in the past. It's something that really is a great gift to give to pastors, to give to elders, to give to people in the church you know who are interested in digging a little more deeply into their faith. It kind of shows that you have confidence in them as gifted spiritual leaders, that you value their ability to pore over a magazine like that. . . .

A Catechism of the Heart

Sinclair Ferguson:

Q.1. What is the heart?

A. The heart is the central core and drive of my life intellectually (it involves my mind), affectionately (it shapes my soul), and totally (it provides the energy for my living).

Q.2. Is my heart healthy?

A. No. By nature I have a diseased heart. From birth, my heart is deformed and antagonistic to God. The intentions of its thoughts are evil continually.

Q.3. Can my diseased heart be healed?

A. Yes. God, in His grace, can give me a new heart to love Him and to desire to serve Him.

Q.4. How does God do this?

A. God does this through the work of the Lord Jesus for me and the ministry of the Holy Spirit in me. He illumines my mind through the truth of the gospel, frees my enslaved will from its bondage to sin, cleanses my affections by His grace, and motivates me inwardly to live for Him by rewriting His law into my heart so that I begin to love what He loves. The Bible calls this being "born from above."

Q.5. Does this mean I will never sin again?

A. No. I will continue to struggle with sin until I am glorified. God has given me a new heart, but for the moment He wants me to keep living in a fallen world. So day by day I face the pressures to sin that come from the world, the flesh, and the Devil. But God's Word promises that over all these enemies I can be "more than a conqueror through him who loved us."

Q.6. What four things does God counsel me to do so that my heart may be kept for Him?

A. First, I must guard my heart as if everything depended on it. This means that I should keep my heart like a sanctuary for the presence of the Lord Jesus and allow nothing and no one else to enter.

Second, I must keep my heart healthy by proper diet, growing strong on a regular diet of God's Word — reading it for myself, meditating on its truth, but especially being fed on it in the preaching of the Word. I also will remember that my heart has eyes as well as ears. The Spirit shows me baptism as a sign that I bear God's triune name, while the Lord's Supper stimulates heart love for the Lord Jesus.

Third, I must take regular spiritual exercise, since my heart will be strengthened by worship when my whole being is given over to God in expressions of love for and trust in Him.

Fourth, I must give myself to prayer in which my heart holds on to the promises of God, rests in His will, and asks for His sustaining grace — and do this not only on my own but with others so that we may encourage one another to maintain a heart for God.

This — and much else — requires development, elaboration, and exposition. But it can be summed up in a single biblical sentence. Listen to your Father's appeal: "My son, give Me your heart."

You can read the whole Tabletalk article here. For more, see Ferguson's book, A Heart for God.

The Satanic Power of Porn

Russell Moore:

Pornography is a universal temptation precisely because it does exactly what the satanic powers wish to do. It lashes out at the Trinitarian nature of reality, a loving communion of persons, replacing it with a masturbatory Unitarianism.

And pornography strikes out against the picture of Christ and his church by disrupting the one-flesh union, leaving couples like our prehistoric ancestors, hiding from one another and from God in the darkness of shame.

And pornography rages, as Satan always does, against Incarnation (1 Jn. 4:2-3), replacing flesh-to-flesh intimacy with the illusion of fleshless intimacy.

You can read the whole thing here.

Seeing and Delighting in the Hand of Providence

One of my favorite Charles Spurgeon quotes:

I believe that every particle of dust that dances in the sunbeam does not move an atom more or less than God wishes—

that every particle of spray that dashes against the steamboat has its orbit, as well as the sun in the heavens—

that the chaff from the hand of the winnower is steered as the stars in their courses.

The creeping of an aphid over the rosebud is as much fixed as the march of the devastating pestilence—

the fall of sere leaves from a poplar is as fully ordained as the tumbling of an avalanche.

The biblical evidence strongly confirms this.

At the same time, we remember what the Puritan John Flavel so wisely observe: "Some providences, like Hebrew letters, must be read backward."

Phil Johnson shares a story that reminds of us both truths. It's an entertaining story, but with some important lessons about how we respond when life doesn't go the way it should (with also a lesson about how to treat people who are working to serve us). The upshot?

All the trials we go through would be a whole lot easier to endure if we had more trust in the workings of Providence. If we would just bear in mind that God is fully in control of everything that happens to us—both "good" and "bad"—we would be far less frustrated, and far more confident that He is in charge, working all things (including the "bad" and merely inconvenient things) together for ultimate good.

A New Presbyterian Denomination Is Formed

Don Sweeting, President of RTS-Orlando:

This past weekend, a new Presbyterian denomination was formed. From January 18-20 approximately 2,100 Presbyterians gathered at the Fellowship of Presbyterians Covenanting Conference. Over 500 Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) congregations were represented (of the 10,600 congregations in that denomination). Most of those in the room covenanted to form a "new reformed body" and join the new denomination called The Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians (ECO for short). This is not to say that all who attended immediately joined. While many were resolved to leave, some are still deciding, and some will stay within the PC (USA) and maintain a joint affiliation.

Read the whole thing for background, distinctives of this new denomination, and how this fits into Presbyterian history in the United States.

The Gospel Coalition: New Features and New Bloggers

The Gospel Coalition has redesigned their site with some new features. Collin Hansen explains. I encourage you to check it out. With 23 million pageviews last year, I'm glad they keep working to make this resource more and more user-friendly.

It's especially exciting for me to see three of my favorite theological-journalists (if that's the right label for them) joining the website: Trevin Wax, Jared Wilson, and Joe Carter. I have come to trust this guys as Christ-centered faithful advocates for Christianity and insightful commentators on church and culture.

One of the things Joe will do is compile the "You Should Know" feature, which links to stories around the web, providing quick background info and briefly explaining why this matters.

Is Evangelical Christianity the New KGB?

January 22, 2012 | Joe Carter

Why some Iranian leaders believe "evangelical Christianity is the most horrifying intelligence and security organization in the world."

Read More

The Child Fashion Model with Down Syndrome

January 22, 2012 | Joe Carter

When Target included a model with Down syndrome in a recent ad they "didn't make a big deal out of it." For many parents of children with mental disabilities, that's a sign of progress.

Read More

From John Calvin to Hare Krishna

January 22, 2012 | Joe Carter

A Reformed Christian philosopher makes a surprising conversion to Hinduism.

Read More

 

 

 

Healing after an Abortion

David Powlison talks through how to heal from guilt and shame in light of abortion:

You can read online the Personal Liturgy of Confession.

Roe v. Wade: Radical, Legally Untenable, and Immoral

Law professor Michael Stokes Paulsen has a remarkably helpful and concise explanation of what Roe v. Wade (especially combined with Doe v. Bolton) actually means: "The Unbearable Wrongness of Roe."

Here are excerpts from his three critiques:

(1) Roe's Radicalism

"I suspect that if more people understood Roe's and Doe's actual holding fewer would support that constitutional regime. Roe was a truly extreme decision, creating an effectively unrestricted constitutional right to abort a living human being for any reason the mother might have, throughout pregnancy right up to the point of birth."

(2) Roe 's Legal Untenability

"[Roe] has absolutely no basis in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution. No rule or principle of law fairly traceable to the text, discernible from its structure, or fairly derived from evidence of intention or historical understanding of an authoritative decision of the people, remotely supports the result reached in Roe. In terms of fair principles of constitutional interpretation, Roe is perhaps the least defensible major constitutional decision in the Supreme Court's history."

(3) Roe 's Immorality

"The result of Roe and Doe has been the legally authorized killing of nearly sixty million Americans since 1973. Roe v. Wade authorized unrestricted private violence against human life on an almost unimaginable scale, and did so, falsely, in the name of the Constitution."

Professor Paulsen does not quote Augustine—or Martin Luther King's approving quotation of the same—to the effect that "an unjust law is no law at all." But that's essentially what he argues:

The Court's decision in Roe v. Wade should not be accepted as law, in any sense. It should be resisted by legislatures and it should be refused enforcement by executive officials because it is not the law. It should be resisted by all citizens, with all the resources at their disposal, and perhaps even with resources not (yet) at their disposal. Anything less is holocaust denial.

Read the whole thing here.

The Need and Goal of Systematic Theology

This simple observation, from the opening paragraph of Louis Berkhof's Introductory Volume to Systematic Theology, has always struck me as profoundly right:

God certainly sees the truth as a whole, and it is the duty of the theologian to think the truths of God after Him. There should be a constant endeavor to see the truth as God sees it, even though it is perfectly evident that the ideal is beyond the grasp of man in his present condition.

—Louis Berkhof, Introductory Volume to Systematic Theology [orig., 1932], in Systematic Theology: New Combined Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), p. 15.

I've read every word of Berkhof's ST, and lately I've been rereading portions of it. In many ways its a distillation of Herman Bavinck's magisterial work, which at the time had not been fully translated into English. So it's not surprising to find similar sentiments in Bavinck's prolegomena:

The imperative task of the dogmatician is to think God's thoughts after him and to trace their unity. His work is not finished until he has mentally absorbed this unity and set it forth in a dogmatics.

Accordingly, he does not come to God's revelation with a ready-made system in order, as best he can, to force its content into it.

On the contrary, even in his system a theologian's sole responsibility is to think God's thoughts after him and to reproduce the unity that is objectively present in the thoughts of God and has been recorded for the eye of faith in Scripture.

—Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics Vol. 1: Prolegomena (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), p. 44.