Justin Taylor's Blog, page 283

Q&A with Jonathan Edwards

Dane Ortlund lands an exclusive interview.

Gospel Fluency

This is very much worth two hours of your time: Jeff Vanderstelt, a pastor at Soma Communities and Vice President of Acts29, explaining what it means to have "gospel fluency."

If you want a snapshot first, listen to the first minute of this video:

Here is the teaching flesh out at a seminar for Grace Covenant Church in April 2011:

You can also listen to this in audio: part 1, part 2.

If you only have five minutes, fast-forward to around the 27:00 mark of the first longer video to see how Jeff applies the gospel to pornography.

Courageous

The movie Courageous hits theaters tomorrow. I haven't yet seen it, but here's a bullet-point review by Andy Naselli.

John Piper writes:

I watched Courageous with my wife and was thoroughly engaged. I like action, and I like reflection, and I like affection—explosive moments, wrack-your-brain moments, and break-your-heart moments. Rarely do movies combine them all. For me this one captured me. Does the movie preach? Well, it sure has a point. But about the time you think you might get preached at, a bullet may cut through your car door. I would willingly take anyone to see this film, assuming they can handle suspense. And I think the conversations afterward would not be superficial.

Randy Alcorn has also written an authorized novelization of the film.

Here's the trailer:

One-Day Conference on Adoption in Chicago

For those in Chicago and Chicagoland, here's a one-day conference to consider:

On Saturday, November 12th, Together for Adoption Chicago is offering a one-day conference on regional and global orphan care.  Our hope is that you'll leave with a unique sense of God's adopting love for you and a heart and desire to love and adopt the orphan.

You can find more information at chicagoadoption.org.

What Was It Like to Hear Luther Lecture?

A student of Luther's described his teacher, who used a more succinct style in the classroom than he did in his writings:

He was a man of middle stature, with a voice which combined sharpness and softness; it was soft in tone, sharp in the enunciation of syllables, words, and sentences. He spoke neither too quickly nor too slowly, but at an even pace, without hesitation, and very clearly, and in such fitting order that each part flowed naturally out of what went before. He did not expound each part in large labyrinths of words, but first the individual words, then the sentences, so that one could see how the content of the exposition arose, and flowed out of the text itself. . . . For this is how he took it from a book of essential matter which he had himself prepared, so that he had his lecture material always ready to hand—conclusions, digressions, moral philosophy and also antitheses: and so his lectures never contained anything that was not pithy or relevant. And, to say something about the spirit of the man: if even the fiercest enemies of the gospel had been among his hearers, they would have confessed from the force of what they heard, that they had witnessed, not a man, but a spirit, for he could not teach such amazing things from himself, but only from the influence of some good or evil spirit."

Source: H. Boehmer—H. Bornkamm, Der junge Luther (Hamburg, 1939), p. 367, as translated by Gordon Rupp in Luther's Progress to the Diet of Worms, 1521 (Wilcox and Follett, 1951), p. 44; cited in Wilhelm Pauck's introduction to Luther: Lectures on Romans, Library of Christian Classics (Westminster John Knox, 1961), pp. lxi-lxii.

Not Your Grandpa's Anti-Trinitarianism: An Analysis of Oneness Pentecostalism

Fred Sanders re-posts an excellent article introducing and critiquing the anti-Trinitarianism of Oneness Pentecostalism:

It is a disturbing fact that the most vigorous form of anti-trinitarianism currently on the market is to be found within the sphere of conservative evangelicalism. In the nineteenth century, the dominant variety of anti-trinitarianism was the old-world Unitarianism which found fertile soil in America. . . . For evangelical Christians of a conservative temperament, Unitarianism as a theological movement was as easy to ignore as any version of liberal theology. It offered a pervasively non-supernatural interpretation of Christianity, and thereby rendered itself irrelevant to churches which were committed to a range of traditional doctrines such as incarnation, atonement, miracle, revelation, the inspiration of scripture, and heaven and hell.

Today, however, there is an altogether different kind of anti-trinitarian teaching putting itself forward, one which bears no relation to the old liberal Unitarianism, and requires a completely different response from either Unitarianism or the more obviously non-Christian Jehovah's Witnesses movement. In this brief analysis, I would like to describe the movement known as Oneness Pentecostalism, identify its theological core, and explain what is at stake in arguments over Oneness doctrine. I will not cite Oneness authors at length nor interact with their arguments directly. Instead, speaking as an evangelical trinitarian to other evangelical trinitarians, I would like to recommend the strategic direction that evangelical engagement with Oneness groups should follow.

I'd encourage you to read the whole thing.

For a judicious response to James MacDonald's defense of inviting T.D. Jakes to the next edition of The Elephant Room, I would recommend Carl Trueman's blog post, Is Nicene Christianity that Important? An Historical-Ecumenical Note. An excerpt:

. . . To place Nicene orthodoxy in the category of over-scrupulous doctrinal precisianism is, in effect, to declare the entire church (except for strands of American evangelicalism, apparently) from 381 to the present day to be wrong-headed. True catholic Christianity has always regarded Nicene orthodoxy as vital. An evangelicalism which argues for the basic irrelevance of such is simply not part of that catholic tradition; rather than being generously connected to other believers, it effectively isolates itself from the mainstream Christian tradition. Maybe there are consciences here bound to scripture. I would certainly never demand that a man subscribe to something which he does not see in scripture; but for myself, I need more than a few brief blog comments to understand why I should abandon Nicaea as crucial to salvation, revelation and my doctrine of who God is and what he has done. I want to know how and why Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin and Owen, to name just eight representatives of Trinitarianism, considered this to be more than a matter of over-scrupulousness. A humble listening to the past is important for the church in any circumstance; in the context of the creeds, such listening is absolutely non-negotiable.

Not Your Grandpa's Anti-Trinitarianism: An Analysis of Onenness Pentecostalism

Fred Sanders re-posts an excellent article introducing and critiquing the anti-Trinitarianism of Onenness Pentecostalism:

It is a disturbing fact that the most vigorous form of anti-trinitarianism currently on the market is to be found within the sphere of conservative evangelicalism. In the nineteenth century, the dominant variety of anti-trinitarianism was the old-world Unitarianism which found fertile soil in America. . . . For evangelical Christians of a conservative temperament, Unitarianism as a theological movement was as easy to ignore as any version of liberal theology. It offered a pervasively non-supernatural interpretation of Christianity, and thereby rendered itself irrelevant to churches which were committed to a range of traditional doctrines such as incarnation, atonement, miracle, revelation, the inspiration of scripture, and heaven and hell.

Today, however, there is an altogether different kind of anti-trinitarian teaching putting itself forward, one which bears no relation to the old liberal Unitarianism, and requires a completely different response from either Unitarianism or the more obviously non-Christian Jehovah's Witnesses movement. In this brief analysis, I would like to describe the movement known as Oneness Pentecostalism, identify its theological core, and explain what is at stake in arguments over Oneness doctrine. I will not cite Oneness authors at length nor interact with their arguments directly. Instead, speaking as an evangelical trinitarian to other evangelical trinitarians, I would like to recommend the strategic direction that evangelical engagement with Oneness groups should follow.

I'd encourage you to read the whole thing.

For a judicious response to James MacDonald's defense of inviting T.D. Jakes to the next edition of The Elephant Room, I would recommend Carl Trueman's blog post, Is Nicene Christianity that Important? An Historical-Ecumenical Note. An excerpt:

. . . To place Nicene orthodoxy in the category of over-scrupulous doctrinal precisianism is, in effect, to declare the entire church (except for strands of American evangelicalism, apparently) from 381 to the present day to be wrong-headed. True catholic Christianity has always regarded Nicene orthodoxy as vital. An evangelicalism which argues for the basic irrelevance of such is simply not part of that catholic tradition; rather than being generously connected to other believers, it effectively isolates itself from the mainstream Christian tradition. Maybe there are consciences here bound to scripture. I would certainly never demand that a man subscribe to something which he does not see in scripture; but for myself, I need more than a few brief blog comments to understand why I should abandon Nicaea as crucial to salvation, revelation and my doctrine of who God is and what he has done. I want to know how and why Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin and Owen, to name just eight representatives of Trinitarianism, considered this to be more than a matter of over-scrupulousness. A humble listening to the past is important for the church in any circumstance; in the context of the creeds, such listening is absolutely non-negotiable.

You Export What You Are Manufacturing

A good word from Doug Wilson for both missions "goers" and "senders":

What you practice at home is the show you take on the road. What you grow in your fields is what you load on the trucks. Compassing sea and land doesn't generate a new message. The way you live when you get on the plane is going to be the single best indicator of how you live when you get off the plane. In short, don't expect geographical location to fix anything.

You can read the whole thing here.

Sin: Not the Way It's Supposed to Be

Cornelius Plantinga:

In the 1991 film Grand Canyon, an immigration attorney breaks out of a traffic jam and tries to drive around it. He doesn't know where he's going and he's alarmed to note that each street seems darker and more deserted than the last. Then, a nightmare. His fancy sports car stalls. He manages to call for a tow truck, but before it arrives, five local toughs surround his car and threaten him. Just in time, the tow truck shows up and its driver—an earnest, genial man—begins to hook up to the sports car. The toughs protest: the driver is interrupting their meal. So the driver takes the group leader aside and gives him a five-sentence introduction to sin:

Man, the world ain't s'pposed to work like this. Maybe you don't know that, but this ain't the way it's s'pposed to be. I'm s'pposed to be able to do my job without askin' you if I can. And that dude is s'pposed to be able to wait with his car without you rippin' him off. Everything's s'pposed to be different than what it is here.

The driver's summary of the human predicament is just about perfect.

Clash of the Titans: Amazon's Shot at Apple

Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic has the breakdown:

Let's start with the bottom line: Amazon's announcements this morning were the most important in the gadget world since Apple announced the iPad on January 27, 2010. With the announcement of a $79 regular Kindle, $99 touch-enabled Kindle, and $199 Kindle Fire tablet, Amazon set itself up for a Christmas clash with Apple's iOS juggernaut. While many tablet contenders have come at Apple, few can throw as many punches as Amazon.

He goes on to look at the pros and the cons.