Justin Taylor's Blog, page 261

What's the Most Important Issue in Voting?

I offered my answer to that question—though I cheated a bit—at this forum.

Gospel Unity and Gospel Purity

David Mathis, from the introduction to Thinking. Loving. Doing.:

Part and parcel of the central Christian message is an impulse toward purity and an impulse toward unity. The purity instinct resists the compromise of the message, while the unity instinct is eager to link arms with others also celebrating the biblical gospel.

The reason purity and unity are, in this way, 'built into' the gospel is that the God of the gospel is himself both a purifier and a unifier. No one cares more for the purity of the gospel—that his central message to humanity not be altered or tainted—than God himself. And, mark this, no one cares more for the unity of his church around her Savior, his own Son, than God himself. God is the great purifier and unifier.

So likewise, his gospel—which not only saves and sanctifies but is the richest, deepest, and fullest revelation of who God is—has both a purity impulse and a unity impulse 'pre-packaged' into it, as it were. It's quite simple on paper and gets terribly messy in real life.

HT: Trevin Wax

Some Expositional Preachers Worth a Careful Listen

Tim Raymond:

This is the blog post I didn't want to write.  In my recent series, "How Can Seminarians Learn to Preach to Normal People" (part 1, part 2, part 3), I encouraged those of you who desire to grow in your ability to connect biblical exegesis with the person in the pew to schedule time to regularly listen to the sermons of preachers who excel at both exegesis and heart-searching application.  At that time, I mentioned that I didn't want to name specific living preachers as examples of the type of preaching I was advocating (with the single exception of Dr. Joel Beeke), for fear of encouraging that "celebrity pastor" mentality so prevalent in America.  The last thing I want to see is an "I am of Paul; I am of Apollos" attitude among my brother-pastors today.

However, since that series went public, I've received a surprising number of requests to point our readers to some examples of the types of preaching I believe is most helpful to the church.  And I've come to realize that some people are simply unaware of good models and are sincerely looking for helpful sermons to listen to.

So, with a bit of fear and trepidation, in today's post I'd like to mention seven living preachers I believe are worth a careful listen.

You can read the whole thing here.

As D. A. Carson has said, "If you listen to only one preacher, you become a clone. If you listen to two, you become confused. If you listen to fifty, you're on the edge of wisdom and beginning to become yourself."

The Theology of Jonathan Edwards

Michael McClymond and Gerald McDermott's new book, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, has just been published by Oxford University Press.

It's massive (784 pages) and expensive ($60)—but apart from Edwards's own writings, this is (to use Alistair McGrath's words), "unquestionably the best starting place for anyone wanting to grapple with the ideas of America's greatest theologian."

Kenneth Minkema, executive editor and director of the Works of Jonathan Edwards at Yale University, writes, "With interest in Jonathan Edwards at an unprecedented high around the world, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards is a truly useful and unmatched digest of his times, thought, and influence. Edwards is one of the most-written about religious figures of the eighteenth-century, and with such a mountain of literature to navigate, this volume provides the single best entry point into Edwards' writings and ideas for the specialist and general reader alike."

The book has also been highly praised by George Marsden, Mark Noll, and David Bebbington.

Later this week (DV) I'll have an interview with Drs. McClymond and McDermott, but for now, you can get a good overview of the topics covered by simply scanning the table of contents:

Part One: Introduction: Historical, Cultural, and Social Contexts

1. Overture to a Symphony

2. Jonathan Edwards: A Theological Life

3. Edwards's Intellectual Context

4. Edwards's Spirituality

5. The Question of Development: Did Edwards Change?

Part Two: Topics in Edwards's Theology

Section One: Methods and Strategies

6. Beauty and Aesthetics

7. Metaphysics

8. Typology: Scripture, Nature, and All of Reality

9. Revelation: Scripture, Tradition, and Reason

10. Apologetics

11. Biblical Exegesis

12. The Concept of a History of Redemption

Section Two: The Triune God, the Angels, and Heaven

13. God as Trinity: Father, Son, and Spirit

14. The End of God in Creation

15. Providence and History

16. The Person and Work of Jesus Christ

17. The Role of the Holy Spirit

18. The Angels in the Plan of Salvation

19. Heaven is a World of Love

Section Three: Theological Anthropology and Divine Grace

20. The Affections and the Human Person

21. Edward's Calvinism and Theology of the Covenants

22. Free Will and Original Sin

23. Salvation, Grace, and Faith: An Overview

24. Conversion: A Divine and Supernatural Light

25. Justification and Sanctification

26. The Theme of Divinization

27. The Theology of Revivals

Section Four: Church, Ethics, Eschatology, and Society

28. The Church

29. Edwards On (and In) the Ministry

30. The Sacraments: Baptism and the Lord's Supper

31. The Voice of the Great God: A Theology of Preaching

32. Public Theology, Society, and America

33. True Virtue, Christian Love, and Ethical Theory

34. Edwards On (and In) Missions

35. Eschatology

36. Christianity and Other Religions

Part Three: Legacies and Affinities: Edwards's Disciples and Interpreters

37. Selective Readings: Edwards and the New Divinity

38. Mixed Reactions: Princeton and Andover Seminaries, and Nineteenth-Century American Culture

39. New Beginnings: The Twentieth Century Recovery of Edwards's Theology

40. Interpretations, I: Edwards and Modern Philosophy

41. Interpretations, II: Edwards and the Reformed Tradition

42. Interpretations, III: Edwards and the Revival Tradition

43. Interpretations, IV: Edwards and the Catholic and Orthodox Traditions

44. Interpretations, V: Edwards and Contemporary Theology

45. Conclusion: Edwards as a Theological Bridge

Seeing Some of the Unreached Peoples of the World

The Story Behind the Story of Christmas

This might be good to watch as a family sometime during the Advent season:

Does the Public Have the Right to Know about a Politician's Deceit and Infidelity?

Whether or not the latest accusation against presidential candidate Herman Cain is true—namely, has he until recently been engaged in a 13-year extramarital affair—it's very interesting to note the perspective of Mr. Cain's lawyer, who wrote:

Mr. Cain has been informed today that your television station plans to broadcast a story this evening in which a female will make an accusation that she engaged in a 13-year long physical relationship with Mr. Cain. This is not an accusation of harassment in the workplace —this is not an accusation of an assault—which are subject matters of legitimate inquiry to a political candidate.

Rather, this appears to be an accusation of private, alleged consensual conduct between adults—a subject matter which is not a proper subject of inquiry by the media or the public. No individual, whether a private citizen, a candidate for public office or a public official, should be questioned about his or her private sexual life. The public's right to know and the media's right to report has boundaries and most certainly those boundaries end outside of one's bedroom door.

In contrast to this compartmentalization view—where covenant deceit and infidelity are irrelevant to one's character and leadership—Marvin Olasky writes in The American Leadership Tradition:

The Bible repeatedly attacks adultery, not because it is necessarily the greatest sin, but because it shows a breaking of vows that regularly leads to other ruptures.

People, of course, are not always of a piece. A statesman with a good marriage might not be able to run a good government. A statesman who worships sex rather than God is not always more likely to seek immediate gratification in public policy areas as well.

But it is unusual for lifelong recklessness and lifelong discipline to be combined in one leader, and when they appear to be, shouldn't we watch for Jekyll to turn into Hyde?

In an article Olasky wrote:

Faithfulness to a wife is no guarantee of faithfulness to the country; look at Richard Nixon. Nor does faithfulness guarantee a strong presidency: Jimmy Carter's anti-adultery bent accurately forecast an administration that was also open and aboveboard—but sometimes incompetent.

We need all the information we can get about candidates. The Founders established the electoral college, instead of creating a direct democracy, because they wanted individual voters to choose electors whose character they knew—and those electors would then select a president whose character they knew. Today, we depend on media representatives to tell us the truth, even when it means exposing a candidate playing footsie with falsehood.

Memorizing and Reciting Scripture

Ryan Ferguson, John Piper, and Trevin Wax let the Word hidden in the hearts overflow:

See also Max McLean's moving rendition of the entire Gospel of Mark.

New App for Seminary Lectures

Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS) has a new app where you can listen to course lectures for free. Just search for "RTS Mobile" in your app store. Or here's the direct link for the iTunes app version. It's also available for the Android.

Reconstructing the Pooh Community

Many readers will know Richard Bauckham as the author of the groundbreaking work Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. But few know of his years spent in the Winnie-the-Pooh books, reconstructing the community behind the texts. In this unpublished paper he summarizes the "major methodological breakthrough which virtually all Pooh scholarship now takes for granted." Here is a snippet:

The stories afford us a fairly accurate view of some of the rivalries and disputes within the community. The stories are told very much from the perspective of Pooh and Piglet, who evidently represent the dominant group in the community—from which presumably the bulk of the literature originated, though here and there we may detect the hand of an author less favourable to the Pooh and Piglet group. The Pooh and Piglet group saw itself as central to the life of the community (remember that Piglet's house is located in the very centre of the forest), and the groups represented by other characters are accordingly marginalized.

The figure of Owl, for example, surely represents the group of children who prided themselves on their intellectual achievements and aspired to status in the community on this basis. But the other children, certainly the Pooh and Piglet group, ridiculed them as swots. So throughout the stories the figure of Owl, with his pretentious learning and atrocious spelling, is portrayed as a figure of fun. Probably the Owl group, the swots, in their turn ridiculed the Pooh and Piglet group as ignorant and stupid: they used terms of mockery such as 'bear of very little brain.' Stories like the hunt for the Woozle, in which Pooh and Piglet appear at their silliest and most gullible, probably originated in the Owl group, which used them to lampoon the stupidity of the Pooh and Piglet group. But the final redactor, who favours the Pooh and Piglet group, has managed very skilfully to refunction all this material which was originally detrimental to the Pooh and Piglet group so that in the final form of the collection of stories it serves to portray Pooh and Piglet as oafishly lovable. In a paradoxical reversal of values, stupidity is elevated as deserving the community's admiration. We can still see the point where an anti-Pooh story has been transformed in this way into an extravagantly pro-Pooh story at the end of the story of the hunt for the Woozle. Pooh and Piglet, you remember, have managed to frighten themselves silly by walking round and round in circles and mistaking their own paw-prints for those of a steadily increasing number of unknown animals of Hostile Intent. Realizing his mistake, Pooh declares: 'I have been Foolish and Deluded, and I am a Bear of No Brain at All.' The original anti-Pooh story, told by the Owl faction, must have ended at that point. But the pro-Pooh narrator has added—we can easily see that it is an addition to the original story by the fact that it comes as a complete non sequitur—the following comment by Christopher Robin: "'You're the Best Bear in All the World," said Christopher Robin soothingly.' Extravagant praise from the community's major authority-figure.

Professor Bauckham is parodying liberal Johnannine studies, but the godfather of Pooh paradoies should be mentioned: Frederick C. Crews's 1965 classic, The Pooh Perplex: In Which It Is Discovered that the True Meaning of the Pooh Stories is Not as Simple as Is Usually Believed, but for Proper Elucidation Requires the Combined Efforts of Several Academicians of Varying Critical Persuasions , and his sequel, Postmodern Pooh .

See also this essay, applying Pooh studies with the methodology of Old Testament studies:  "New Directions in Pooh Studies: Überlieferungs- und religionsgeschichtliche Studien zum Pu-Buch."