Justin Taylor's Blog, page 56

Peter Berger on the Rise and Fall of Secularization Theory

Sociologist Peter Berger gives a 5-minute overview of how he changed his mind:

7 Sentences Every Evangelical Congregation Should Take to Heart

Timely words from Gideon Strauss:

The political sentiments reported in polls like these suggest a dismal but unsurprising possibility: that very few American evangelical churches offer their members the opportunity of a discipleship that gives attention to the history of Christians over the past two millennia struggling to follow Jesus in their times and places.

Dismal because such a discipleship—alongside sacramentally-centered worship and Jesus-centered public proclamation of the good news of the reign of God—is what constitutes the life of a church.

Unsurprising because shallow and misguided discipleship is a persistent reality in the life of churches recorded already in the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of Paul and his fellow epistolators.

This possibility does not call for pride (in the superiority of my own political judgment), scorn (towards morally misguided evangelical voters), disgust (at the pandering polemics perpetrated by Messrs. Trump and Cruz), or despair (at the dismal state of discipleship in so many Christian congregations).

Instead, it calls for repentance (of my own arrogance), compassion (towards the many people bereft of congregations with a long memory of Christian discipleship), intercession (for the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of all of America’s present and aspiring political officeholders), and catechetical resolve (to contribute to discipleship in those congregations where I am able to make a difference).

At depth the problem is not the politics of evangelicals or the nominalism of many self-identified Christians or the secularization of America in our times.

The problem is the perennial distraction of Christian churches from the core practices that make them churches, or perhaps more accurately, the distortion of these practices by personal, communal sins and cultural pressures.

As someone intimately familiar with the tremendous power of such sins and pressures, I also know what a grace it is to be exposed to the work of God in the celebration of baptism and the eucharist, in public prayers and worship songs, in preaching and communal Bible study, and in the dear and demanding friendship of fellow followers of Jesus.

You can read the whole thing here.

 

What Should Evangelicals Make of Karl Barth?

Tony Reinke recently asked D. A. Carson the following:

Dr. Carson, you’ve edited what I think is one of the year’s most important books, titled, The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures (Eerdmans; 2016), a 1,200-page feast of insights, an incredible achievement. I was drawn to the concluding FAQ, which you wrote, where you take up, among many other things, Karl Barth’s doctrine of Scripture. I’ve wanted to ask you about Barth more generally, maybe now is the time. Quite frankly I find Barth bewildering. On one hand his works seem to be littered with theological question marks, so I am cautious. Yet he is voluminously articulate when it comes to God’s majesty, and he is a rare theologian who seemed to operate with a robust appreciation for the spectrum of human affections. So on the other side I find Barth impossible to ignore. And over the years I’ve met half a dozen prominent theologians who actively read Barth devotionally, but they wouldn’t dare admit it in public. So help me out. What is a discerning Evangelical to do with Karl Barth?

Here is a transcript of his response:

Some people idolize Karl Barth as entirely in line with the heritage of John Calvin. Others demonize him as clearly emerging from one of the lower rims of Dante’s Inferno. In my judgment the truth of the matter is far more complex. There are many parts of Karl Barth’s writings that are luminescent. They are wonderfully evocative when he speaks of the glory and the greatness and the majesty of God and when he speaks of the importance of Christ. On so many, many fronts Karl Barth really was the premier theologian of the twentieth century in terms of volume of writings, profundity of analysis and so on. It would be nice if every movement that came along was right from the throne room of God or right from the pit so you could bless it or damn it and get on with life, but that is just not the way life is.

And so it is sad if knowledgeable pastors don’t make use of Barth, but it is even more sad if they make a wrong use of Barth. Barth has the capacity to say contradictory things without embarrassment.

There is a very famous story — I don’t know if it is apocryphal or not — in which somebody wrote to Barth and said: Professor Barth, I have discovered the following contradictions in your writings, what do you say about these contradictions? And Barth ostensibly wrote back and said: Well, here are some others. And lists a few more contradictions. Yours faithfully.

This is often called dialectical thinking, this sense of pushing to the extreme some element Barth finds in Scripture, and then pushing to other extremes some other element. It leaves him saying things that are sometimes not very well integrated, even when they are wonderfully evocative. And nowhere is this truer than in his treatment of the doctrine of Scripture.

Barth says many things that shows him affirming the truthfulness of Scripture, the reliability of Scripture, the authority of Scripture and if you take those things at face value, without reference to anything else that he says, then it is easy to imagine that he is essentially an evangelical in the history and tradition of the whole mainstream of the church. But he really isn’t. Part of it is because when he talks about inspiration and the truthfulness of Scripture, he wants to integrate both how God gave the Scripture, as Scripture, and how that Scripture is received by human beings, which requires the Spirit’s work in us to illumine us. He puts all those things together in one package and refuses to separate them.

By contrast Calvin separates them so that he insists that the Scripture is true and given by the Spirit of God even if nobody accepts it. Whereas they are so tied together in Barth’s thinking that he is uncomfortable talking about the truthfulness and reliability and Spirit inspiration of Scripture simply as Scripture without integrating it, as well, into the need for that Scripture to be accepted and received as it is the Word of God by virtue of the Spirit’s work within us to see that it is the Word of God.

And that has led many Christians trying to formulate Barth’s view as something like: The Scripture becomes the Word of God when it is received. Well, that is not quite what Barth says, but I understand why they want to say things like that. Moreover, there are a few passages — I listed some of them in the FAQ section of the book of Scripture — where Barth does say explicitly that there are concrete errors in Scripture. So on both of these fronts he is really different from the mainstream of the Church of Jesus Christ across the ages in affirming the truthfulness, reliability and inerrancy of Scripture.

Here are Carson’s FAQs on Barth and Scripture, summarizing the David Gibson’s chapter, “The Answering Speech of Men: Karl Barth on Holy Scripture,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures.

9.1 How come Karl Barth’s views of Scripture have come back to be the focus of so much attention today?

There are at least three reasons.

First, Barth was certainly the most prolific and perhaps creative theologian of the twentieth century, so it is no wonder that people study his writings.

Second, Barth’s thought is profoundly God-centered, profoundly Christ-centered, profoundly grace-centered.

And third, his view of Scripture, though not quite in line with traditional confessionalism, is reverent, subtle, and complex, so scholars keep debating exactly what he was saying.

9.2 Doesn’t Barth say that the Bible isn’t the Word of God, but becomes the Word of God when it is received by faith?

In fact, he can affirm both; the question is, What does he mean? The “becoming” language is for Barth tied up with his insistence that the initial revelation of the Word and its revelation to the individual believer are tied up together in one gracious whole. The same is true with Barth’s treatment of inspiration. He refuses to speak of the Bible as itself inspired, but links together what is traditionally called the inspiration of Scripture and the illumination of the believer into one whole.

9.3 Doesn’t Barth claim to stand in line with the Reformers, so far as his view of Scripture is concerned?

Yes, he does, but he is clearly mistaken. Comparison with Calvin, for example, casts up not a few instances where Calvin happily speaks of the inspiration of Scripture, the text itself being God-breathed, regardless of whether or how believers receive it. Barth prefers to speak of the out-breathing of the Spirit of God in both the text and the believer, thus distancing himself both from the exegesis of Scripture and from the Reformed tradition. He appears to recognize his distance from Calvin in CD II/2, §3e.

9.4 Does Barth allow that there are errors in Scripture?

Yes, he does, though he refuses to identify them (but cf. his treatment of the fall of angels in 2 Peter and Jude, CD III/3, §51, where he finds a theological error in Scripture). For Barth, this seems to be part of the humanness of Scripture, though he insists that God’s revelatory authority encompasses the whole, errors and all. That in turn inevitably raises questions about how passages of Scripture that include errors (not identified) can be said to carry the revelatory authority of God.

If you want to learn more about Barth, here—to my knowledge—would be the best entry points.

1. Read Michael Reeves’ chapter on Barth in Introducing Major Theologians: From the Apostolic Fathers to the Twentieth Century (Crossway, March 2015; IVP-UK).

2. Read David Gibson’s chapter, “The Answering Speech of Men: Karl Barth on Holy Scripture,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures.

3. Get this introduction and reader of Barth’s flawed but magisterial Church Dogmatics.

4. Consider David Gibson and Daniel Strange’s edited volume, Engaging with Barth: Contemporary Evangelical Critiques (2009). Here are a couple of commendations for the book:

“Karl Barth was the most dominant theologian of the twentieth century, at once brilliant and baffling, majestic and frustrating. His influence, though, has scarcely waned. That is why this book is important. What we have here are some of the best essays I have read on Barth. They combine sure-footed knowledge of his ideas with critical insight into what those ideas mean. They are appreciative but also tough-minded and this combination is rare today. I commend this book highly.”

-David F. Wells, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

“The house that Karl Barth built continues to loom large in the neighborhood of evangelical theology. The authors of Engaging with Barth are not content to admire it from the outside but survey it from within, carefully moving from room to room, noting both positive and negative features. They do a particularly good job examining the structural integrity (read ‘orthodoxy’) of Barth’s house, detecting here and there both worrying cracks and uneven surfaces. At the end of the day, they neither raze nor condemn the dwelling, but offer a fair and sober assessment that is invaluable for potential buyers—even for those thinking of staying only overnight.”

-Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

 

Monty Williams’ Gospel-Centered Eulogy at His Wife’s Funeral

Watch Monty Williams, the 44-year-old associate head coach for the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team, bring the gospel to bear on the “loss” of his beloved wife, Ingrid:

For a reflection on Williams’ remarks, see Marshall Segal’s “What Would You Say If Your Wife Was Ripped Away?”

Below is the video of Monty Williams being interview after he was fired last year as the head coach of the New Orleans Pelicans:

May the Lord make each of us more like this man: even when hurt and in deep pain, he is fixed on God-centered hope, with an eternal perspective, freely offering forgiveness and freed from bitterness and complaint.

Eric Metaxas Talks with Walter Hooper on the Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis

In July 2015, Eric Metaxas of Socrates in the City sat down for a lengthy conversation in Oxford with Walter Hooper (b. 1931).

You can watch it below:

In a Books & Culture review of the final volume of Lewis’s Collected Letters, Michael Ward pays tribute to the herculean literary endeavor achieved by Hooper:

Editing a lifetime’s letters is no easy undertaking: it is almost a lifetime’s work in itself. First, the collecting of the letters is a Herculean labor. In the 44 years since Hooper served briefly as Lewis’ secretary, he has steadily accumulated from all corners of the globe the material which makes up these volumes, namely 3,228 separate items of correspondence. . . . Hooper notes in his preface that “the occasional letter will be popping up for the next 100 years,” a useful reminder that this aspect of the editorial task is akin to catching autumnal leaves in a wood, a game which requires first dizzying energy, then inexhaustible patience. No one could play that game perfectly, but Hooper has come darn close.

After the collecting comes the deciphering. Having studied for my own doctoral research many of the originals of Lewis’ letters in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, I know that his hand, especially in later years when he began to suffer from rheumatism, was not always easily legible; he frequently apologizes to recipients for writing unclearly. The effects of wear-and-tear in the mail and the fading and dirtying which some letters have suffered over the decades mean that Hooper has had to exercise considerable analytical skill in determining what Lewis’ hieroglyphics actually denote. The beautifully crisp presentation of the correspondence in this volume is the result of hours spent puzzling over smudges.

But even after the text has been established, the end of the editorial road is still a long way off. It is not enough, after all, simply to print the letters without explanatory comments. Given that usually we have only Lewis’ half of his various correspondences (he almost never retained letters sent to him), it is sometimes difficult to understand what he is talking about. This is where Hooper shows his real mettle. Lewis’ brother, Warren, once compared Hooper to a ferret—a harsh remark, but one with just a grain of truth inside its harshness, for Hooper demonstrates a voraciousness and fixity of purpose in hunting down explanations which is definitely not unferret-like. Tirelessly he has sought to discover the actual people behind the names of the salutees, many of whom were strangers even to Lewis (such as a certain Father George Restropo, SJ, a seminarian in Maryland, to whom Lewis wrote a single letter, but whom Hooper has managed to locate) and many of whom have long since died. Tracking down these people or their descendants has enabled Hooper in large part to reconstruct both sides of the conversation and therefore to illuminate remarks by Lewis that would otherwise have remained mysterious or misleading.

In addition to the detective side of this hermeneutic endeavor, there is the straightforwardly academic side: giving the sources of the quotations with which Lewis liberally sprinkled his sentences; identifying the (sometimes extremely obscure) allusions to Euripides or Mrs. Humphrey Ward or the Second Book of Kings or what you will; translating the frequent phrases in Latin, Greek, French, or Italian. And so on and so forth. The amount of help that Hooper gives to the reader on every page is deeply impressive.

I emphasize the editor’s role here for two reasons. First, because it is more evident in this collection than in the two previous volumes which cover the years when Lewis was less famous and writing to a smaller circle of people. There were 775 letters in Volume 2 and only 457 letters in Volume 1, but Volume 3 contains almost exactly 2,000; inevitably then, Hooper’s function as epistolary circus-master becomes much more important. He has to give due weight to big-name interlocutors such as J.B. Priestley and Mervyn Peake and Austin Farrer, without overlooking the numerous minor figures who have no other literary memorial.

What B. B. Warfield Got Wrong in His Doctrine of the Trinity

The brilliant confessional theologian B. B. Warfield (1851-1921) once wrote a long and  influential essay arguing that the doctrine of the Trinity can be summarized in three statements:

 ”There is but one God.”
“The Father and the Son and the Spirit is each God.”
“The Father and the Son and the Spirit is each a distinct person.”

“When we have said these three things,” Warfield declared, “we have enunciated the doctrine of the Trinity in its completeness.”

But Scott Swain, Professor of Systematic Theology and Academic Dean at Reformed Theological Seminary (Orlando), in his inaugural lecture below, points out that Warfield omits any mention of the so-called “personal properties” which distinguish the divine persons from one another, namely:

The Father’s eternal begetting of the Son (“paternity”).
The Son’s eternal generation from the Father (“filiation”).
The Spirit’s eternal procession from the Father and the Son (“spiration”).

This is a somewhat surprising omission, Swain says, given that

The personal properties reflect a broad ecclesiastical consensus in interpreting the revealed names into which we are baptized. On the basis of the revealed names “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit,” the church confesses that within the eternal depths of God’s being there is one who stands in the relation of a father to a son, one who stands in the relation of a son to a father, and one who is breathed forth in the mutual love of the other two.

It is not, however, an accidental omission:

It is the result of reasoned interpretive judgment. According to Warfield, the Son’s eternal generation and the Spirit’s eternal procession “are not implicates of their designation as Son and Spirit.”

Swain’s argument in his inaugural lecture proceeds in four steps:

He summarizes Warfield’s biblical argument against the personal properties.
He locates Warfield’s argument within the historical-theological trajectory of which it is a part.
He responds to Warfield’s argument by (a) pointing to patterns of biblical teaching that challenge his interpretation and (b) by addressing what seems to be Warfield’s primary worry regarding eternal generation and eternal procession.
He makes some observations on the importance of the traditional interpretation of the revealed names for trinitarian theology.

You can watch the entire lecture here:

In the conclusion, Dr. Swain argues that “The personal properties of paternity, filiation, and spiration further enrich and expand our understanding and experience of this “one seeking and saving love of God'” in these ways:

They help us see that the eternal covenant of redemption—the foundation of all God’s saving works in time—flows from and expresses the deep, mutual, and eternal delight of the blessed Trinity.
They help us see that the Father who has eternally begotten an eternally beloved Son also wills to bring many other sons to glory.
They help us see that, at the Father’s sovereign behest, the Father’s only-begotten Son has willed to become our kinsman redeemer, assuming our creaturely nature, satisfying our twofold debt to God’s law, in order that he might become the firstborn among many redeemed brothers and sisters.
They help us see that the Holy Spirit who eternally proceeds in the mutual love of the Father and the Son has equipped the Son with all things necessary for redeeming his brothers and sisters; and, that redemption being accomplished, the Spirit now applies the blessings of adoption to us, uniting us to our incarnate elder brother and welcoming us into the fellowship which the Spirit has enjoyed with the Father and the Son from eternity and which we, in, with, and by the blessed Trinity, will enjoy for eternity as well, to the glory of our great God and Savior: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Dr. Swain’s arguments here, I’m sure he’d be the first to say, should not dissuade students from reading and studying Warfield’s essay on the Trinity. In fact, if you want to do so, the best way is to download Fred Sanders’ annotated Warfield Trinity Study Edition.

Sanders writes:

One thing you may notice about the drift of the annotations: They start out with enthusiastic agreement and then tend toward disagreement. The reason is that, in my judgement, the early parts of the essay are magnificently helpful, while the conclusion swerves off course in a few ways. When I think of this essay, my immediate response is gratitude: the way Warfield describes the revelation of the Trinity in the economy of salvation and its canonical witness in Scripture is revolutionary. My first reading of it was an intellectual and spiritual event for me. I probably can’t even fathom all the ways this aspect of the essay has helped me put together my own approach to teaching the doctrine of the Trinity in a way that is transparently biblical and keyed to the main, central points of the gospel.

But if I reflect further on the entire essay as it stands—that is, not just on what it did for me, but more objectively on what it contains and on what others might therefore take from it—I wince to recall that Warfield bends his powers to keep the exegetical case from supporting the traditional Nicene doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit.

He pulls his punches on the meaning of the terms Son and Spirit;
he cordons off the economy of salvation as the only place where we can be certain that the second and third persons come from the first;
he gets stingy with how much is revealed in the order of operations among the three;
he overloads covenantal categories in order to bypass ontic categories;
he comes within a hairs-breadth of affirming a merely messianic sonship; and
for the life of him he can’t imagine how anybody could reconcile eternal relations of origin with absolute equality of persons. Never mind that the Nicene Creed and the Westminster Confession of Faith both instruct him otherwise; here he forges his own way ahead, and his overall trinitarianism fares the worse for it, more anemic than it needed to be after the vigor of his biblical proof.

For all that, I can’t stay mad at Warfield and his essay. I do recommend the essay itself, and I will continue to make constant use of the lessons I learned from it. One reason I’m making this annotated version available is to disseminate Warfield’s own work with a few helps. The other reason is to attach a little bit of cautionary guidance in the form of my longer notes, which I hope may help as a prophylactic against the devolutionary tendencies of some of his conclusions.

A Scholar on the Prosperity Gospel Talks about Her Stage IV Cancer

35-year-old Kate Bowler, assistant professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke Divinity School and the author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, has penned an insightful and moving piece in the New York Times Sunday Review about her stage IV cancer.

The prosperity gospel tries to solve the riddle of human suffering. It is an explanation for the problem of evil. It provides an answer to the question: Why me? For years I sat with prosperity churchgoers and asked them about how they drew conclusions about the good and the bad in their lives. Does God want you to get that promotion? Tell me what it’s like to believe in healing from that hospital bed. What do you hear God saying when it all falls apart?

The prosperity gospel popularized a Christian explanation for why some people make it and some do not. They revolutionized prayer as an instrument for getting God always to say “yes.” It offers people a guarantee: Follow these rules, and God will reward you, heal you, restore you. It’s also distressingly similar to the popular cartoon emojis for the iPhone, the ones that show you images of yourself in various poses. One of the standard cartoons shows me holding a #blessed sign. My world is conspiring to make me believe that I am special, that I am the exception whose character will save me from the grisly predictions and the CT scans in my inbox. I am blessed.

The prosperity gospel holds to this illusion of control until the very end. If a believer gets sick and dies, shame compounds the grief. Those who are loved and lost are just that — those who have lost the test of faith. In my work, I have heard countless stories of refusing to acknowledge that the end had finally come. An emaciated man was pushed about a megachurch in a wheelchair as churchgoers declared that he was already healed. A woman danced around her sister’s deathbed shouting to horrified family members that the body can yet live. There is no graceful death, no ars moriendi, in the prosperity gospel. There are only jarring disappointments after fevered attempts to deny its inevitability.

The prosperity gospel has taken a religion based on the contemplation of a dying man and stripped it of its call to surrender all. Perhaps worse, it has replaced Christian faith with the most painful forms of certainty. The movement has perfected a rarefied form of America’s addiction to self-rule, which denies much of our humanity: our fragile bodies, our finitude, our need to stare down our deaths (at least once in a while) and be filled with dread and wonder. At some point, we must say to ourselves, I’m going to need to let go.

CANCER has kicked down the walls of my life. I cannot be certain I will walk my son to his elementary school someday or subject his love interests to cheerful scrutiny. I struggle to buy books for academic projects I fear I can’t finish for a perfect job I may be unable to keep. I have surrendered my favorite manifestoes about having it all, managing work-life balance and maximizing my potential. I cannot help but remind my best friend that if my husband remarries everyone will need to simmer down on talking about how special I was in front of her. (And then I go on and on about how this is an impossible task given my many delightful qualities. Let’s list them. …) Cancer requires that I stumble around in the debris of dreams I thought I was entitled to and plans I didn’t realize I had made.

But cancer has also ushered in new ways of being alive. Even when I am this distant from Canadian family and friends, everything feels as if it is painted in bright colors. In my vulnerability, I am seeing my world without the Instagrammed filter of breezy certainties and perfectible moments. I can’t help noticing the brittleness of the walls that keep most people fed, sheltered and whole. I find myself returning to the same thoughts again and again: Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.

You can read the whole thing here.

3 Books for Those Wanting to Prepare for and Thrive in College (Debt-Free)

Here is an endorsement I recently wrote for Alex Chediak’s latest book:

After writing for college students (Thriving at College) and for parents of prospective college students (Preparing Your Teens for College), Alex Chediak has now written a book that all of us need: Beating the College Debt Trap.

Readers can trust Alex. He knows the college world inside out (both as a student and as a professor) and he is able to cut through the confusion, break down what you need to know, and present the results in a wise and accessible way.

Learning the information in this book is an exercise in stewardship. Ignore it at your own risk!

You can find each title below with the author’s description.

Preparing Your Teens for College: Faith, Friends, Finances, and Much More (Tyndale House, 2014)

Preparing Your Teens for College is about getting teens ready to leave the home and enter the adult world with the faith, character and maturity to be successful. It’s about training them not just for college but for the totality of their lives.

You don’t have to look far to see that many teens are having a tough go at it. In school, their teachers will tell you about short attention spans and superficial interests crowding out their appetite and even capacity for learning. Out of school, even part-time jobs are hard to come by, depriving them of the chance to develop a work ethic, build skills, and earn money. At home, one in three is being raised without the love, protection and security of a father. After high school, the link between higher education and professional success has never been stronger. Yet higher education has never been more expensive, and the U.S. now has the highest college dropout rate in the industrialized world: 44 percent of those who enter a four-year college will not graduate in six years. And 71 percent of those who start two-year degrees will not finish them within three years.

The message of Preparing Your Teens for College is that thriving at college begins before they get there–with what you do as Moms, Dads, youth pastors, mentors, and guidance counselors. Academic and professional success flow from character and maturity. And as Christians we know that character and maturity flow from a God-mastered life, from the heart of a person who has bowed the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ. Preparing Your Teens for College is about helping you raise teens who understand the biblical message and are committed to putting away childishness, embracing responsibility, pursuing godly relationships, practicing moral purity, aiming for academic excellence, working unto the Lord, and honoring God in every aspect of their lives. If that describes the kind of teen you want to see leave your home someday, then this book is for you.

Thriving at College: Make Great Friends, Keep Your Faith, and Get Ready for the Real World! (Tyndale House, 2011)

College is this glorious, crucially significant “in between” stage. You’re on the threshold of adulthood. Most enter college under their parents’ care and financial support. But if it’s done right, they’ll graduate as men and women ready to assume an adult role in an interdependent society and as a functional, contributing member of a local church.

In short, college should be a launching pad into all that goes with Christian adulthood. Yet for some it’s a time when they abandon the Christian faith, never to return, giving evidence that they never really belonged to Christ (I John 1:19). For others, their faith remains intact, but college is a somewhat frivolous season of entertainment, recreation, and amusement–an expensive vacation funded by Mom, Dad, and student loans. And many learn to privatize their Christian faith, worshiping God on Sunday but never seeing their academic life as an expression of their devotion to God.

I was particularly prompted to write this book by the widespread phenomenon of delayed adolescence—young adults failing to launch. A third of all 22-34 year old men are still living with their parents. Many college students have an entitlement mentality, as if a high GPA, a summer job, money, and success are all supposed to come easily (like the trophy in Little League they got for showing up). There’s an inflated sense of self-worth, a sense of personal greatness not grounded in actual accomplishments. Thankfully, that doesn’t describe all young adults or college students, but the trend is sufficiently common in our day that many commentators, Christian and otherwise, are taking notice.

I wrote Thriving at College to help young people transition well—to not just keep the faith, but to dig deeper than they ever thought was possible. To not just stumble upon a major, but to wisely discover their calling. To not just have a blast with friends, but to cultivate lifelong relationships of substance with those who most provoke them to trust and love God. To put away childishness, to make wise choices, and as missionary William Carey once said, to “expect great things from God and attempt great things for God.” In short, to make the very best of their college years.

Beating the College Debt Trap: Getting a Degree without Going Broke (Zondervan, 2015)

Does the cost of college seem maddeningly out of reach? Have your parents told you they can’t afford to help?

Join the club: millions of students these days have no idea how they’re going to afford the education they know they need to have a shot at landing a decent job. But what if I told you the “I can’t afford college” line is mostly an illusion?

In Beating the College Debt Trap, I present an optimistic, empowering, and counter-intuitive message: Americans from all socioeconomic backgrounds, including first generation students, don’t have to be totally dependent on Mom, Dad, or Uncle Sam to get through college. You can get the training you need to launch a meaningful career without going broke in the process. Graduation on a solid financial foundation is possible. But it will require knowing how the system works, intentionality, creativity, and delayed gratification.

I start the book by debunking the myth that a four-year college is right for everyone. There are less well-known, equally valid paths that can lead to a variety of high-paying jobs. Then I explain (in simple terms) why college is expensive and why it’s so important that you take full responsibility for how you pay for it. From there, I move into three crucial decisions every student makes – choosing a college, picking a major and looking discerningly at loan opportunities. Then I give some practical advice on how to spend less and save more during college. Lastly, I look beyond the college years to the hurdles new graduates face in a slow-growth economy.

Whether you’re a parent filling out the FAFSA and getting ready for that first tuition bill, a student wanting to make wise financial choices (and understand what the financial aid office is telling you), or a graduate trying to launch a career, pay the bills, and dig your way out of debt, you’ll want to check out Beating the College Debt Trap.

How Not to Be a Christian Hack

Russell Moore:

 If your principles change based on whether it helps your “tribe,” then it’s your tribe you believe in, not your principles.

Christians who talk about religious liberty, for example, but are silent (or worse) when religious freedom is compromised for unpopular religious minorities, don’t really believe in religious freedom.

They believe, at best, in a majoritarian kind of special pleading.

They believe, at worst, in the identity politics of victimhood.

Principles stand regardless of the politics of the moment. If we stand up for the First Amendment when our side is harmed (and we should), then we should stand up for the First Amendment even when our side will be angry with us for doing so.

You can read the whole thing here, which is a meditation on three lessons the church can observe in the life of Antonin Scalia.

 

Marco Rubio Addresses Issues of Race and Justice and Black Lives Matter

I am grateful that Marco Rubio is addressing these issues with empathetic and insightful articulation: