Justin Taylor's Blog, page 316

Where Is God?

Both high and low.

"For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy:

'I dwell in the high and holy place,

and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.'"

—Isaiah 57:15

Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith

Endorsements for Matthew Lee Anderson's new book Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith (Bethany, 2011):

"What does Christianity have to say about the body? Much more than you might think. Matthew Lee Anderson—one of evangelicalism's brightest young writers—is a serious student of God's Word and God's world, and in this book he patiently and insightfully explores a theology of the body from numerous angles. Rightly seeing the body as a gift from God for our good and his glory, Anderson insightfully shows us what a biblical worldview has to say about the body in relationship to community, pleasure, sex, sexuality, tattoos, death, prayer, and the church. Anderson's arguments deserve careful consideration. I suspect that many of us will think differently—and more biblically—about the body as a result of this very fine work."

Justin Taylor, Managing Editor, ESV Study Bible; blogger, "Between Two Worlds"

"We evangelicals don't think we care about the body, but we really, really do. And Matthew Anderson—one of the brightest lights in the evangelical world—helps us care, ponder, think and pray more wisely as we give our bodies as a living sacrifice to Christ."

Mark Galli, Senior Managing Editor, Christianity Today

"I love to think. I love to be challenged. Mission accomplished in reading Earthen Vessels. In it, Matthew Anderson takes on prevailing cultural assumptions about the human body that have been uncritically adopted into the church of Jesus Christ. This book is for the church who is in the world. It is a truth-balm for a broken culture addicted to body image. Be challenged to forsake your "quasi-gnosticism" and embrace the divine dignity of your body so that you can worship well."

Darrin Patrick, Lead Pastor at The Journey and author of Church Planter

"Matthew Lee Anderson makes an important contribution to the evangelical dialogue about the importance and role of the human body that is both scholarly and accessible. Too often evangelical discourse on this subject has been either defensive or simply followed cultural trends. Anderson is both robustly Christian and willing to listen when other traditions may have something to contribute. Christians will learn from this book that the body is important, but that we are not just computers made out of meat."

John Mark Reynolds (Ph.D.), Director of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University

"Ours is a befuddling age. We're "friends" with people we've never met, we read books that have nomaterial substance, and we store precious material in something rather ominously termed "the cloud."Physicality is out; incorporeality is in. Earthen Vessels is a needed contribution in such a time. Thetext is at once an elegant meditation on the body, a fresh study of Scripture, and a celebration of thewestern tradition. Here is philosophical theology that will foster debate, critical thought, and praise of the Savior whose physical sacrifice won our salvation."

Owen Strachan, Instructor of Christian Theology and Church History, Boyce College

"Earthen Vessels is a turning point in the evangelical conversation about the meaning of bodies. If you didn't even know such a conversation was going on, you are lucky to have Matthew Anderson introducing you to it. If you've already been listening in and are as confused as the rest of us, you'll appreciate the way this book sorts things out, settles accounts, debunks myths, digs for sources, raises neglected issues, and points out the way forward. On nearly every page you can find two virtues rarely combined: surprising new insights and good old common sense. Here is good counsel (solid, soulful, scriptural) about how to be humans, in bodies, under the gospel."

Fred Sanders, Associate Professor of Theology, Torrey Honors Institute, Biola University

Tattoos, cremation, abortion, gay sex, yoga, online church: No subject is off limits in Matthew Anderson's provocative book on the body. Anderson challenges us to deepen our understanding of what it means to be embodied. When it comes to body matters, the body matters. Though few will agree with all of Anderson's diagnosis and prescription, all who read this book will be challenged to consider how our views of the body line up with (or depart from) Scripture and Christian theology. This is a highly ambitious project that deserves careful consideration.

Trevin Wax, author of Counterfeit Gospels and Holy Subversion

"As one of evangelicalism's most insightful young intellectuals, Matthew Anderson is the ideal thinker for inspiring and developing a "theology of the body." Earthen Vessels is a splendid theological analysis of the issues that we face in attempting to live as incarnational beings in a technocratic culture. It should be required reading for anyone who wants to think more clearly about the importance of embodiment and the Christian faith."

Joe Carter, Web Editor, First Things

Nearly every strand of theology from postmodern to feminist to Catholic has a robust theology of the body—all except evangelicalism. Matt's new book works toward remedying this problem by restarting the conversation about how Christians talk about this fleshly creation into which Jesus himself was incarnated.

John Dyer, Director of Web Development at Dallas Theological Seminary

and author of From the Garden to the City

You can read the first two chapters online.

The Difference between "Plain Style" and "Classic Style" Prose

One professor says that Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose "is far and away the best how-to-write book I've ever read. It puts Strunk & White and everyone else in the shade."

A new edition was recently released and includes "a structured course of exercises for learning to write."

The authors illustrate the difference between "plain style" and "classic style" with the following sentences:

"The truth is pure and simple" is plain style.

"The truth is rarely pure, and never simple" is classic style.

The plain version contains many elements of classic style without being classic; the classic version contains all of the plain version without being plain.

They explain:

The concept of classic style assumes that plain style already exists. The classic version introduces a refinement, a qualification, a meditation on the plain version that makes it classic.

Classic style takes the attitude that it is superior to plain style because classic style presents intelligence as it should be presented: as a sparkling display, not weighed down by grinding earnestness.

The classic writer wants to be distinguished from others because she assumes that truth, though potentially available to all, is not the common property of common people, and that it is not to be perceived or expressed through common means unrefined.

The classic writer sees common sense as only an approximation which, left untested and unrefined, can turn out to be false.

The plain writer wants to be common because she assumes that truth is the common property of common people, directly perceived and expressed through common means. For the plain writer, common sense is truth.

Unlike plain style, classic style is aristocratic, which is not to say artificially restricted, since anyone can become an aristocrat by learning classic style. Anyone who wants to can attain classic style, but classic style views itself as an intellectual achievement, not a natural endowment.

You can read the first chapter of this book online. The book's website is classicprose.com.

Answering Ivan Karamazov: How Should We Respond to Horrible Sin?

On October 7, 2005, I interviewed John Piper for an hour about the sovereignty of God and the problem(s) of suffering and evil. (It was printed in the book Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, pp. 219-241.)

I read for him the famous section from chapter 4 of The Brothers Karamazov from Ivan to Aloysha, including this horrifying paragraph:

There was a little girl of five who was hated by her mother and father. . . . This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty—shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy [outhouse], and because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child's groans!

Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark in the cold and weep her meek, unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted?

I asked Piper for his answer to the question, "Where was God?"

The question where is metaphorical and hardly has an answer. "On the throne of the universe preparing a place for the little girl in heaven that will recompense her ten-thousand-fold for everything she is experiencing." "Preparing hell for her parents so that justice will be done perfectly." And those who look upon both the heaven recompense and the hell recompense will bow in sovereign wonder at the justice of God. Those are possible answers to where he is.

Later in his answer he offered one of the reasons such horrors are allowed to exist in the physical and moral realms: "to display the outrage of sin—the outrage of sin against the holy God." This is not the only thing that could and should be said, but it's an important and neglected aspect of the answer:

Let me see if I can help you feel what I'm saying here. When Adam and Eve fell by rebelling against God, God subjected the entire universe to corruption. You might say that's an overreaction. Well, if you bring your brain to the Bible and shape the Bible by your brain, that's what you're going to say. But if you let the Bible describe what's happening and shape your brain by the Bible, the conclusion you should draw is that sin is unfathomably outrageous. To turn your back on the living Creator God and prefer an apple to him is the ultimate outrage.It is infinitely outrageous. It deserves infinite punishment. And what God does in bringing the whole universe into subjection to futility—Romans 8:20—is to create a horrid parable of the outrage of moral evil. So that everywhere I look when I see outrageous physical evil—suffering—I want my response to be, "Oh how infinitely outrageous and repugnant is sin against the holy God." So I understand all the physical horrors of the world as symbolic of the horrors of the moral reality of sin against God.

Let me go a little step further. When Jesus died on the cross, you can come at that in one of two ways. You can say that not only was there Adam and Eve's sin, which was so evil it brought down the entire universe, but there have been in every one of us ten thousand of those sins. And multiply that by the number of people who have lived on the earth, or just take the church and multiply our sins—each one of which is no less grievous than choosing an apple over God—and therefore every sin that is committed should bring down the whole universe on our heads with physical horrors like this. And Jesus Christ hung on the cross and displayed the infinite value of God's worthiness to be treasured, not traded away. And now, stand and wonder at the value of the Son of God, that his suffering could match all of those universe-crushing sins for which he died. Or you could come at it from the side of Christ and see how gloriously supreme he is and how infinitely valuable he is, and then draw the conclusion about how terrible sin is.

What I'm saying in addition to those preliminary things is that every time we see something horrific, some horrible accident, our thoughts should be about the outrage of sin, not the injustice of God. These stories I've heard about people backing over their own children with their car. What would that mean? How would that feel—that bump, and you get out, and everything in you would scream. I knelt beside a man and put my arm around him about three weeks ago whose little girl was in the middle of Eleventh Avenue with a blue tarp over her. She had just walked across the road behind her dad. Hit. Got killed instantly right down the street from our house. And he just sat there staring at her. "I didn't mean to. I didn't mean to," he said.

So we've all tasted this. And when we see the horrific things that happen in the world, what should we feel?

I think instead of calling God into question, we should see them as evidences in our lives of the outrage of our sin and the horrific evil and repugnance of sin to a holy God. And God is displaying to us the outrage of our sin in the only way that we can see it, because we don't get upset about our sinning. We only get upset about the hurt. How many of you lose sleep—well, some of you are good saints and you do—over your own fallenness? Most of us get bent out of shape about things that hurt our bodies, but it's our sins that are the ultimate outrage.

So I think the kind of repugnance Dostoevsky is talking about is a display of how horrifically terrible our own sin is. And then Christ arrives, bears all that outrage, and by his own suffering undoes suffering. I want to summon people to Christ as the final solution to that problem.

Baptism: It's Kind of a Big Deal

Craig Blomberg:

I . . . want to insist that, if not normative, believers' baptism by immersion as soon as feasible after conversion was the normal practice of the New Testament church and it should be ours also. . . .

My concern here is rather the inordinate number of young adults (and a few older ones) I meet these days who seem to think baptism is just no big deal.  And if they weren't raised in a church that prescribed a certain way for it to be done, they may never have been baptized at all.  And if they have had faith in Christ for many years already, it really seems to them to be unnecessary.  Or, if they do go through with baptism, it is just, they say, " because Christ commanded it and we need to obey him."  But they can't give any particular reason for why he should have commanded it.

You can read the whole thing here.

HT: Scot McKnight

Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven"

"The Hound of Heaven" was first published by English poet Francis Thompson in 1893.

You can listen below to Richard Burton's reading of it, followed by a short excerpt from Ravi Zachiaras on Thompson's being addicted to opium and being the object of God's pursuit.

Wanderlust, Flights of Fancy, and the Goodness of God

From a post from my younger brother:

I have a confession to make. A lot of my fantasies don't turn out that great. Throughout middle school (and even high school), I always wanted to run away from home. Did I have a terrible home life and parents who beat me? No, in fact I had a great high school experience of being involved after a bad middle school experience of being excluded. I wasn't running from something—I was running to it.

Here was the vision. Leave in the middle of the night with a wonderful note to my family explaining everything, fly a helicopter made out of Popular Science magazine (the kit cost $195), take beef jerky and rations for 6 months to a year, fly into the deep forest and crash land my plane, read a lot of books and learn another language, lift logs in order to build a shelter, come back with a beard, tanned, and to the amazement of those who saw how fit I was, deeper, wiser, and more self-fulfilled. . . .

OK, so it was a combination of self-indulgent fantasy, one too many Gary Paulsen Hatchet books, and an immature romanticism. Mark Twain wrote poignantly of the difference between theory and reality in Life on the Mississippi. The Mississippi was better when it was mysterious and imaginative to the rough kid rather than scientific and dissectable to the seasoned gentleman pilot.

So it was with my adventure. Feeling overwhelmed with school, I almost got away in the night only to have a friend tell my parents what I was up to. They sent me with some harsh words, forgiveness, and $20 to Applebee's for milkshakes with my brother and sister.

In college in New York, I again caught that bug and traveled several hours upstate to probably one of the remotest places I found with wildly labyrinthine roads to a friend's cabin–it was in the middle of nowhere. Now I'm from Iowa so I don't use that phrase lightly. My goals were more modest: read a few novels, commune with God, be one with nature for three days.

What happened? Darn Reality raised her ugly head with knowing spectacles, furrowed brows, and the ol' school marm hairdo. The forest was magnificent but the black mosquitoes swarmed in my eyes, ears, and even tickled the back of my throat making it nearly unbearable. Knowing that if there was a bear, that would be the end of me, my tough guy Grizzly Adams, Nebuchadnezzar, Crocodile Dundee persona faded into Timmy the Pampered looking for mother. In the river, I slipped on a mossy rock and gravity, another rock, and my head made for a perfect storm of pain. At night, an eerie mounted deer head and the darkest black (yes, I have never ever seen pitch black like it), made my all-too-tiny heart palpitate. Velvet black air combined with weird visions of the curtains being drawn back and a hand coming in at the window. I couldn't see my hand in front of my face, but I could hear one. Was it my imagination? No—it was real! I was not alone in the room.The footsteps and the presence came closer as I frantically struggled to light the lantern to discover him there in the room as we were miles and miles from any living soul if he indeed had one…

A mouse. What would be the worst thing that could happen? Well, I suppose getting a few scampering fleshy pink feet up the old groin would be fairly uncomfortable. MacGyver-like, I filled a bucket with three inches of water, a board leading up to it, and a swab of peanut butter just inside the bucket. Ten minutes later, I heard a 'splash,' followed by thirty seconds of struggle, and then silence. I felt guilty all night.

It is good to be able to look back and smile at our flights of fancy and our foibles.

But it also made me think of this C. S. Lewis quote on Ray Ortlund's blog:

I think one may be quite rid of the old haunting suspicion—which raises its head in every temptation—that there is something else than God, some other country into which he forbids us to trespass, some kind of delight which he 'doesn't appreciate' or just chooses to forbid, but which would be real delight if only we were allowed to get it.

The thing just isn't there. Whatever we desire is either what God is trying to give us as quickly as he can, or else a false picture of what he is trying to give us, a false picture which would not attract us for a moment if we saw the real thing. . . . He knows what we want, even in our vilest acts. He is longing to give it to us. . . .

The truth is that evil is not a real thing at all, like God. It is simply good spoiled. . . . You know what the biologists mean by a parasite—an animal that lives on another animal. Evil is a parasite. It is there only because good is there for it to spoil and confuse.

—C. S. Lewis, They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963), ed. Walter Hooper (New York, 1979), p. 465. Italics original.

The Pleasures of Reading, Christianity, and the Future of the Book

Two videos below of Alan Jacobs.

In the first one he informally talks about his new book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. (The introduction takes 4.5 minutes.)

In the second he lectures on his work-in-progress thoughts on "Christianity and the Future of the Book." (The introduction takes 2 minutes.) He looks at reading in the time of Jesus, the transformation of scrolls to codex to e-Readers, how technology impacts reading, and more.

An Interview on the Myths of Calvinism

Tim Challies and David Murray interview Kenneth Stewart on Ten Myths About Calvinism: Recovering the Breadth of the Reformed Tradition and on what is going on in today's manifestation of the Reformed tradition. Even when I disagree with Dr. Stewart here and there, I find him to be a sagacious dialogue partner whose thoughtful articulation is always worth considering.

Sermon Transcribers

Update: The offer for a free sermon transcription if you mention this blog expires June 30, 2011. Also, they are now offering a straight verbatim option in their levels of transcription, if you are looking for a less expensive option than the version that includes editing. You can contact them at emily [at] sermontranscribers [dot] net for a quote.

To my knowledge there are not a lot of sermon transcription businesses currently available through the web. Some folks from our church have recently started one, and I'm happy to recommend their work. They have a love of God's word and a passion for accuracy and excellence, and they can have the transcriptions back to you in a few days. I think this is a helpful service if you're pastor doesn't write out a full manuscript and yet you want sermons posted online to be read. It can also be helpful for those who want to take a sermon and develop it into an article, book manuscript, etc.

A couple of deals:

If you mention my name, your first transcript is free (so you can "test drive" it).
If you sign up for a six-month contract, you get 10% off.

They offer various packages and levels of formatting. If you want to see a sample basic transcript, here's a PDF of a sermon I gave on Sanctity of Life Sunday.

Again, I'm happy to recommend their work.