Justin Taylor's Blog, page 97

David Platt Elected President of the Southern Baptist International Mission Board

Earlier today the trustees of the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board elected David Platt to serve as president.

This seems like a historic occasion—God putting things in place to put one of our generation’s great missions mobilizers at the helm of one of the great sending institutions for fulfilling the Great Commission.

Russell Moore comments:

I have been praying for a long, long time that he would be elected. Our IMB president must be one who can drive our missions focus in a new way for a new era. It’s not enough that Southern Baptists’ global missions leader motivates us all to give and to go (although he must do that). He must be someone who can connect from the Scriptures how the Great Commission, and especially our global Great Commission responsibilities, are the urgent concern of all of us, Most Christians know that Matthew 28 and Acts 1 command us to go, to reach the unreached with the gospel. We need though to be constantly reminded how every text, from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22 is connected to the mission of reaching the nations.

In a rapidly shifting American culture, this means modeling a vision of why it is that cooperating together for this task is connected to everything else that we do. We need to activate and enthuse a new generation for the adventure of reaching the world with the gospel.

You can read Moore’s full comments here.

Update: Here is Platt on video talking about the transition:

Whitefield and the Great Awakening: Two Things to Watch for This October

This October—two months before George Whitefield’s 300th birthday—the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies will hold a conference on George Whitefield and the Great Awakening at Southern Seminary in Louisville. Several excellent historians, including David Bebbington, Thomas Kidd, Lee Gattis, Steve Nichols, and Bruce Hindmarsh—will give presentations on Whitefield and his significance. You can find the schedule and register online.

That same month Yale University Press will publish Kidd’s George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father. Mark Noll says that ”This superb chronicle of George Whitefield’s life is now our fullest biography for the much-studied and much-debated eighteenth-century evangelist. It combines unusual empathy with unusual comprehension.” And J. I. Packer calls it ”Thoroughly researched, and rooted in an exact knowledge of Whitefield’s times; critically perceptive while remaining appreciatively sympathetic; this is the best balanced and most illuminating chronicle of the Anglo-American Awakener’s career that has yet been produced.”

How Can Smaller Churches Partner with Other Churches for the Kingdom?

I recently sat down with Matt Dirks, co-author with Chris Bruno of the new book, Churches Partnering Together: Biblical Strategies for Fellowship, Evangelism, and Compassion (foreword by D. A. Carson).

00:10 – Where do you serve?
00:39 – What was the one thing that Paul dedicated much of his life to?
02:16 – How do you bridge the gap between the first century and the twenty-first century in terms of church partnerships?
03:37 – What is a “kingdom church partnership”?
06:03 – Can you share a few concrete examples of church partnerships from your own ministry?
07:33 – Why can’t this vision be handled by a denomination or parachurch ministry?
09:54 – If a small church pastor picks up your book, he will get ______.

You can learn more about the book and download an excerpt.

What Is a Good Historian?

The latest edition of the excellent Credo Magazine (which is devoted to George Whitefield at 300) asks four Christian historians what makes a good historian. Here are their answers:

Thomas J. Nettles, Professor of Historical Theology, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary:

A good historian must have confidence that the past can reconfigured in the present to a credible degree of accuracy.

A good historian should not be afraid of affirming that sometimes there is sufficient evidence to interpret events as manifestations of merciful as well as judgmental works of divine providence.

A good historian will let people have the place of primacy in his effort to understand the past.

A good historian must not shrink from seeking to deduce beneficial lessons, of a variety of sorts, from a faithful narrative and analysis of the past.

Mark A. Noll, Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame:

A good historian must above all be curious—about the world at large, about how records reveal (and obscure) the past, and especially about the whys and wherefores of human interaction.

For public purposes, a good historian should be able to

write clearly,
organize complexity,
explain significance, and
avoid either mythologizing or debunking the past.

Good Christian historians, in addition, should cultivate

empathy for their subjects (since all humans are made in the image of God),
charity toward the judgments of other historians (since believers recognize their own fallibility),
trust in divine providence (since God in the end controls all things), and
humility about their own humanity (since only the authors of Scripture are infallible)

Herman Selderhuis, Professor of Church History, Theological University Apeldoorn (The Netherlands), and Director of Refo500:

A good historian is a good listener who listens carefully to facts and words, especially the small ones.

A good historian is also a good composer who puts these facts and words harmoniously together to make history a profitable pleasure to hear and read.

A good historian must be a good colleague who is willing to learn from and share with other historians.

A good historian must have some good self-knowledge to understand how people from the past were human beings just as historians are.

Doug Sweeney, Chair of Church History & History of Christian Thought Department, and Professor of Church History and the History of Christian Thought, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School:

A good historian is someone with

enough patience, love, and diligence to develop a fine-grained and sympathetic understanding of the lives of people in other times and places;

enough insight, artistry, and attention to detail to recreate those lives (in context) for contemporary audiences; and

enough passion, cogency, and analytical skill to interpret the significance of those lives in relation to contemporary realities.

Race, Power, and Innocence in America

I do not hear much from or about Shelby Steele these days—perhaps because his last book constituted a colossal failure of prediction.

But his first book, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (1990) remains provocative reading that repays visitation.

Steele is especially eloquent and insightful about the psychology of race in America. I have long wished for someone to take his insights on guilt, power, and innocence and apply them with a thoroughgoing gospel perspective. Such analysis must await the work of someone more gifted and skilled then I, but let me offer a few quotes from his opening chapter—the original version of which can be read for free here—in order to whet your appetite:

I think the racial struggle in American has always been primarily a struggle for innocence. White racism from the beginning has been a claim of white innocence and therefore of white entitlement to subjugate blacks. And in the sixties, as went innocence so went power. Blacks used the innocence that grew out of their long subjugation to seize more power, while whites lost some of their innocence and so lost a degree of power over blacks.

Both races instinctively understand that to lose innocence is to lose power (in relation to each other). Now to be innocent someone else must be guilty, a natural law that leads the races to forge their innocence on each other’s backs. The inferiority of the black always makes the white man superior; the evil might of whites makes blacks good. This pattern means that both races have a hidden investment in racism and racial disharmony, despite their good intentions to the contrary. Power defines their relations, and power requires innocence, which, in turn, requires racism and racial division. (p. 6)

Further:

Historically, blacks have handled white society’s presumption of innocence in two ways: they have bargained with it, granting white society its innocence in exchange for entry into the mainstream; or they have challenged it, holding that innocence hostage until their demand for entry (or other concessions) was met. A bargainer says, I already believe you are innocent (good, fair-minded) and have faith that you will prove it. A challenger says, If you are innocent, then prove it. Bargainers give in hope of receiving; challengers withhold until they receive. Of course, there is risk in both approaches, but in each case the black is negotiating his own self-interest against the presumed racial innocence of the larger society. (pp. 10-11)

Finally:

 I believe that . . . what divides [the races] in the nation can only be bridged by an adherence to those moral principles that disallow race as a source of power, privilege, status, or entitlement of any kind. In our age, principles like fairness and equality are ill-defined and all but drowned in relativity. But this is the fault of people, not principles. We keep them muddied because they are the greatest threat to our presumed innocence and our selective ignorance. Moral principles, even when somewhat ambiguous, have the power to assign responsibility and therefore to provide us with knowledge. . . .

What both black and white Americans fear are the sacrifices and risks that true racial harmony demands. This fear is the measure of our racial chasm. And though fear always seeks a thousand justifications, none is ever good enough, and the problems we run from only remain to haunt us. It would be right to suggest courage as an antidote to fear, but the glory of the word might only intimidate us into more fear. I prefer the word effort—relentless effort, moral effort. What I like most about this word are its connotations of everydayness, earnestness, and practical sacrifice. No matter how badly it might have gone for us that warm summer night, we should have talked. We should have made the effort. (p. 20)

Chesterton: Nothing Can Be Irrelevant to the Proposition that Christianity Is True

“You cannot evade the issue of God . . . if Christianity should happen to be true—then defending it may mean talking about anything or everything. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true.”

—G.K. Chesterton, Daily News (December 12, 1903)

HT: Jonathan Morrow, whose new book is Questioning the Bible: 11 Major Challenges to the Bible’s Authority.

A Statement from Mark Driscoll

A statement from Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill Church in Seattle:

America in Black and White: Why Do So Many of Us Respond to Ferguson So Differently?

One of the confusing things about the fallout from the shooting of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, is the differing perspectives of many blacks and whites, even those who are united in the gospel and share the same theology.

There seems to me to be four basic positions one could take—and have been taken—at this point:

We know that the shooting of Michael Brown was morally unjustified (i.e., murder).
We know that the shooting of Michael Brown was morally justified (i.e., self-defense).
We do not know whether the shooting of Michael Brown was morally justified or unjustified because we do not yet have enough clear and official information to form any settled conclusions with confidence.
Whether positions 1, 2, or 3 are the correct positions to take at this time, Christians should be concerned with the larger systemic pattern of injustice in America that occurs when a predominately white law enforcement interacts with African Americans in particular, as borne out by similar cases and by social science studies.

There are African American brothers like Thabiti Anyabwile who want to focus upon #4, while he is being understood to say (incorrectly, it turns out) that he holds to #1.

Many white evangelicals, on the other hand, want to focus upon #3 before it can be determined if this is actually an illustration that substantiates #4.

I do not know all of the answers. At times I don’t even know how to ask questions or attempt answers for fear of misunderstanding or being misunderstood. There is an enormously complex constellation of presuppositions, history, psychology, inclinations, suspicions at play here.

What I do know is that we all can learn from one another on this, and that interacting without understanding is counterproductive.

It would be the height of folly to pretend these can be sorted out in a blog post. But let me point to one factor as illustrative of others, well expressed by Pastor Bob Bixby:

Whites are confused by the outcry of blacks from all over the country when a black boy is killed. This is because whites do not value their white collective in the same way that blacks value their black collective. The black culture values the black community. They value the black collective. It was through community that the blacks prevailed through the Civil Rights Era. In fact, it is through community that African Americans survive still. They feel much more dependent on community than we whites do.

Whites, on the other hand, simply do not see themselves as a collective. We are the proverbial fish in the water that sincerely asks, “What is water?” We see ourselves as Missourians, Bears fans, cowboys, motorcyclists, Democrats, evangelicals, and countless other possibilities, but we do not feel ourselves to be part of a white collective. Thus, when our black friends feel the impact of Ferguson even though they are three states away we scratch our heads and wonder how in the world this whole affair became a white/black thing when it just happened to be a white office that killed a black youth while in the line of duty. How, we wonder, can this be so visceral to them? As one black pastor friend said, he was vicariously traumatized. Honestly, I was not similarly traumatized. I went to bed that night without the feeling that one of us had killed one of them because as a white I don’t even get the feeling of a white us. In the same week a white teenage girl was shot and killed by the police three blocks away from my home. Naturally there were questions about the police procedures and an investigation is taking place, but no white person felt like one of us had been eliminated by a large impersonal other. It wasn’t until I consciously chose to respect the understanding and interpretation of black Christians that I sorrowfully recognized my slowness to sympathize with them.

White Christians trust too much their initial feelings, not realizing that feelings are shaped by understanding. I do not say that black Christians do not have the same temptation. I am speaking, however, as a white Christian preacher, trying to model ambassadorial effort. We have to understand that our instincts and knee-jerk analyses are products of our culture.

The reason for this is in the question of value. The fact that trumps all other facts emotionally in the culture that values the black collective as a minority community is that there is one less black boy of an already too-few number, dead at the hands of a white system that seemingly does not share that value. This assumption that a white system does not value black life seems proven when the force seems more trigger happy when the black youth is the target or when the force leaves his body on the street for hours before picking it up. As the value of a child would call up from deep within me a visceral, passionate, death-defying lurch toward the street in the flash of an eye, in the same way the devaluing of a chicken fails to to call up the visceral reaction in my soul and body to do something about it. In the same way, the black community senses from whites who calmly munch on their sandwich and say, “We don’t have all the facts yet” a devaluation of a black life. They do not see what whites think they are conveying, a calm deliberation that waits for due process and accepts the rule of justice. Instead, they hear from our inability to sympathize, “It’s just another black thug with sagging pants that wasn’t respecting authority.”

White evangelicals need to learn that it is not enough to have a black friend or to love a black person. One must love the black community. We who are white have grown up in a world where blacks must learn to live with us but where we have never had to learn to live with them. We love to go to a black church as tourists, but we do not want to go there as members. One must love the community that an individual comes from to truly love that individual, especially if the culture of that community places such a high value on its community.

That this is just one presupposition at play here illustrates the messiness and complexity of understanding one another.

Let me add one more encouragement (to myself as much as to anyone). In his book Bloodlines John Piper addresses a common the temptation in these difficult discussions:

Of all the moral issues that challenge the church from decade to decade, this one we are tempted to abandon more often, because in this battle we get more quickly and deeply wounded along the way. If you have thin skin, or if you have a bigger sense of rights you are owed than mercies you need, or if you have small faith in God’s preserving grace, you will set out on the road of racial harmony and then quit. Because you are going to be criticized. You will try to say something or do something that you thought was helpful, and the first thing you hear is: you said it wrong, or you should have said it a long time ago, or you should have also said such and such, or it was not the time to say anything. . . .

Will we “stay on the table”? Stay on the road? That is what the doctrine of perseverance is for—to keep us faithful in the kind of obedience that is sustained by the foretastes of heaven and leads to the glory of heaven. Christ has purchased our perseverance. The Holy Spirit applies the purchase. None of us will persevere perfectly. But getting up when you are knocked down is a mark of Christ’s followers. We know life is short and eternity is long. This eternal perspective does not take us out of the world. It gives us freedom from self-pity. We are about to inherit the earth (Matt. 5:5). We don’t need to have it now, or the ease and comfort that go with it. We can work at this till we drop. For our labor is not in vain in the Lord.

Why Can’t All Historians Write Like This?

From the opening pages of David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3-4.

* * *

In our mind’s eye we tend to see Paul Revere at a distance, mounted on horseback, galloping through the dark of night. Often we see him in silhouette. His head is turned away from us, and his features are hidden beneath a large cocked hat. Sometimes even his body is lost in the billowing folds of an old fashioned riding coat. The image is familiar, but strangely indistinct.

Those who actually knew Paul Revere remembered him in a very different way, as a distinctive individual of strong character and vibrant personality. We might meet the man of their acquaintance in a portrait by his fellow townsman John Singleton Copley.

The canvas introduces us to Paul Revere at about the age of thirty-five, circa 1770. The painter has caught him in an unbuttoned moment, sitting in his shirt sleeves, concentrating on his work. Scattered before him are the specialized tools of an 18th-century silversmith: two etching burins, a steel engraving needle, and a hammering pillow beneath his arm. With one hand he holds an unfinished silver teapot of elegant proportions. With the other he rubs his chin as he contemplates the completion of his work.

The portrait is the image of an artisan, but no ordinary artisan. His shirt is plain and simple, but it is handsomely cut from fine linen. His open vest is relaxed and practical, but it is tailored in bottle-green velvet and its buttons of solid gold. His work table is functional and unadorned, but its top is walnut or perhaps mahogany, and it is polished to a mirror finish. He is a mechanic in the 18th-century sense of a man who makes things with his hands, but no ordinary things. From raw lumps of metal he creates immortal works of art.

The man himself is of middling height, neither tall nor short. He is strong and stocky, with broad shoulders, a thick neck, muscular arms and powerful wrists. In his middle thirties, he is beginning to put on weight. The face is round and fleshy, but there is a sense of seriousness in his high forehead and strength in his prominent chin. His dark hair is neatly dressed in the austere, old-fashioned style that gave his English Puritan ancestors the name of Roundheads, but his features have a sensual air that calls to mind his French forebears. The eyes are deep chestnut brown, and their high-arched brows give the face a permanently quizzical expression. The gaze is clear and very direct. It is the searching look of an intelligent observer who sees much and misses little; the steady look of an independent man.

On its surface the painting creates an image of simplicity. But as we begin to study it, the surface turns into mirrors and what seems at first sight to be a simple likeness becomes a reflective composition of surprising complexity. The polished table picks up the image of the workman. The gleaming tea pot mirrors the gifted fingers that made it. We look more closely, and discover that the silver bowel reflects a bright rectangular window that opens outward on the town of Boston. The artisan looks distantly toward that window and his community in a “reflective” mood, even as he himself is reflected in his work. As we stand before the painting, its glossy surface begins to reflect us as well. It throws back at us the lights and shadows of our own world.

To learn more about Paul Revere is to discover that the artist has brilliantly captured his subject in that complex web of reflections. . . .

Liturgy and Culture

Frank Senn:

The liturgy is transcultural in that it includes orders and symbols that witness to the church as a worldwide communio.

It is contextual in that it always admits the use of natural or cultural elements in worship in each locality.

It is countercultural in that the gospel it proclaims and celebrates always holds out the vision of an alternative worldview and lifestyle.

It is cross-cultural in that it uses expressions from different cultures.

—Frank C. Senn, Christian Liturgy: Catholic and Evangelical (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997),  678.