The Gospel Coalition

1. Read Slowly.

Joseph Epstein:

Most people ask three questions of what they read:

(1) What is being said?

(2) Does it interest me?

(3) Is it well constructed?

Writers also ask these questions, but two others along with them:

(4) How did the author achieve the effects he has? And

(5) What can I steal, properly camouflaged of course, from the best of what I am reading for my own writing?

This can slow things down a good bit.

2. Read a Lot.

Stephen King:

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut. . . .

It’s hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written, but I know it’s true. If I had a nickel for every person who ever told me he/she wanted to become a writer but didn’t have time to read, I could buy myself a pretty good steak dinner. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

3. Write to Think.

Some people won’t write until they first know what they think about a subject. But good writers write in order to find out what they think. Here are a few examples:

Calvin, citing Augustine: “I count myself one of the number of those who write as they learn and learn as they write.”

Ed Welch: “I find that there are three levels of clarity. When I only think about something, my thoughts are embryonic and muddled. When I speak about it, my thoughts become clearer, though not always. When I write about it, I jump to a new level of clarity.”

John Piper: “Writing became the lever of my thinking and the outlet of my feelings. If I didn’t pull the lever, the wheel of thinking did not turn. It jerked and squeaked and halted. But once a pen was in hand, or a keyboard, the fog began to clear and the wheel of thought began to spin with clarity and insight.”

Arthur Krystal: “Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person. In fact, I am smarter when I’m writing. I don’t claim this merely because there is usually no one around to observe the false starts and groan-inducing sentences that make a mockery of my presumed intelligence, but because when the work is going well, I’m expressing opinions that I’ve never uttered in conversation and that otherwise might never occur to me. Nor am I the first to have this thought, which, naturally, occurred to me while composing. According to Edgar Allan Poe, writing in Graham’s Magazine, ‘Some Frenchman—possibly Montaigne—says: ‘People talk about thinking, but for my part I never think except when I sit down to write.’ I can’t find these words in my copy of Montaigne, but I agree with the thought, whoever might have formed it. And it’s not because writing helps me to organize my ideas or reveals how I feel about something, but because it actually creates thought or, at least supplies a Petri dish for its genesis.”

4. Write and Rewrite.

“Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.” — Roald Dahl

“Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.” — Raymond Chandler

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” — Elmore Leonard, Newsweek, 1985

“I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.” — Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 1966

“Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away. It’s a nice feeling, and you don’t want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.” — Helen Dunmore

“Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in the edit.” — Will Self

Sam Storms, lead pastor for preaching and vision at Bridgeway Church, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, writes:

I’m inclined to think the best way to respond to the tragedy that struck our community today is simply to say nothing. I have little patience for those who feel the need to theologize about such events, as if anyone possessed sufficient wisdom to discern God’s purpose. On the other hand, people will inevitably ask questions and are looking for encouragement and comfort. So how best do we love and pastor those who have suffered so terribly?

I’m not certain I have the answer to that question, and I write the following with considerable hesitation. I can only pray that what I say is grounded in God’s Word and is received in the spirit in which it is intended.

Here is an outline of his seven observations:

(1) It will not accomplish anything good to deny what Scripture so clearly asserts, that God is absolutely sovereign over all of nature.

(2) God is sovereign, not Satan.

(3) Great natural disasters such as this tell us nothing about the comparative sinfulness of those who are its victims.

(4) Events such as this should remind us that no place on earth is safe and that we will all one day die (unless Jesus returns first).

(5) We should not look upon such events and conclude that the Second Coming of Christ and the end of history are at hand, but neither should we conclude that the Second Coming of Christ and the end of history are not at hand.

(6) We must learn to weep with those who weep.

(7) Pray that God will use such an event to open the hearts and eyes of a city and a state immersed in unbelief and idolatry (and I have in mind not merely Oklahoma, but also America as a whole), to see the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and turn in faith to him, lest something infinitely worse than a tornado befall them: Eternal condemnation. Eternal suffering.

You can read the whole thing here. And pray.

A thoughtful piece from John Piper, offering ten disavowals and ten corresponding affirmations regarding adoption and birth families, in response to recent criticism.

In recently reading through Robert Louis Wilken’s The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, I noted some “firsts” that he points out.

First Christian writer to use literature as an instrument of peaceful labor within the church itself, not simply as a tool to combat heresies.

Clement (c. 150-c. 215).

First life of a Christian saint.

Passion and Life of Cyprian, by Pontius (mid 200s).

First Christian poet.

Prudentius (348-c. 413).

First treatise on Christian ethics.

The Tutor, by Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-c. 215).

First treatise in the history of the church on a specific virtue.

On Patience, by Tertullian of Carthage (c. 160-c. 225).

First thinker in Western culture to defend freedom of religion on religious grounds.

Lactantius (c. 240-c. 320).

First treatise to deal in depth with the relation of Christianity to social and political life.

Augustine, The City of God (414-426).

First Christian to discuss Muhammad in his writings and to cite passages from the Qur’an.

John of Damascus (676-749).

The fourth-century church father Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 – c. 395) asks, “What is that we will obtain? What is the prize? What is the crown?” He answers:

It seems to me that for which we hope is nothing other than the Lord himself.

For He himself is the judge of those who contend, and the crown for those who win.

He is the one who distributes the inheritance, he himself is the good inheritance.

He is the good portion and the giver of the portion, he is the one who makes riches and is himself the riches.

He shows you the treasure and is himself your treasure.

—Gregory of Nyssa, The Beatitudes Homily 8 (GNO 7,2:170; 78, Ins 3-9); my emphasis.

A couple of years ago I answered a question for “Ask TGC” where I tried to give a brief overview of my understanding of biblical reward. I’ve reprinted it below:

In its most general sense, “reward” (Greek, misthos) is the appropriate consequence or consummation of a course of action. Sometimes it is rendered as “wages” (Matt. 20:8; Luke 10:7; John 4:36). Negatively, Judas’s blood money is called “the reward of his wickedness” (Acts 1:18).

Positively, “reward” (which is always in the singular in the NT) refers to entering eternal life. And the greatest joy of heaven will be seeing God face to face (Rev. 22:4). Every believer longs for the day when “we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2), when we shall “enter into the joy of [our] master” (Matt. 25:21, 23). “They shall see God” (Matt. 5:8) and “your reward is great in heaven” (Matt. 5:12) are ultimately referring to the same thing. Jesus frequently appeals to reward as a motivator for righteousness—whether he is talking about persecution (Matt. 5:12) or love (Matt. 5:46) or giving (Matt. 6:4) or prayer (Matt. 6:6) or fasting (Matt. 6:18).

Five key passages reference believers receiving a “crown” (1 Cor. 9:25; 1 Thess. 2:19; 2 Tim. 4:8; James 1:12; 1 Pet. 5:4). Though it is popular to see these as different types of reward (crown of righteousness, crown of gold, crown of life, etc.) a majority of commentators believe these are different ways of referring to the one reward of eternal life. Space does not permit a detailed examination of these and related passages, but I would commend the careful analysis of Craig Blomberg.

While Professor Blomberg is largely convincing with regard to the exegetical issues, I think he takes a misstep in his theological objections to varying degrees of reward. Even though I don’t think any passages explicitly teach this idea, it is not inconceivable, not is it incompatible with any teaching in the NT. If there are degrees of reward, they would likely revolve around increased capacities and responsibilities.

Jonathan Edwards explains the former: “Every vessel that is cast into this ocean of happiness is full, though there are some vessels far larger than others; and there shall be no such thing as envy in heaven, but perfect love shall reign throughout the whole society.” Could the parable of the ten minas (Luke 19:11-27) imply that some believers will rule over more cites in the new heavens and earth? If so, this would mean that under our “great reward” (enjoying God himself) there are various roles and responsibilities. I am not certain this will be the case, but I see nothing inherently problematic in holding to this as a possibility.

In summary, all true believers will receive the great reward of seeing God face to face, and this should motivate all of our actions. The NT nowhere clearly and explicitly teaches varying degrees of reward, though this may indeed be true. If so, some may have greater capacities as well as greater responsibilities, but all of us will experience “fullness of joy” and “pleasures forevermore” at God’s right hand (Ps. 16:11). Maranatha—come quickly, Lord Jesus!

Philosopher William Lane Craig shares the paradox of the Grand Hotel (a veridical paradox developed by mathematician David Hilbert in the 1920s):

Craig uses illustrations like this to show that actual infinities are impossible, supporting the second premise of his version of the Kalam Cosmological Argument:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

David Berlinski, a philosopher and mathematician who is agnostic about God and does not speculate on the origins of life, is the author of The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions (2011).

From a Puritan prayer in The Valley of Vision:

Christ was all anguish that I might be all joy,
cast off that I might be brought in,
trodden down as an enemy that I might be welcomed as a friend,
surrendered to hell’s worst that I might attain heaven’s best,
stripped that I might be clothed,
wounded that I might be healed,
athirst that I might drink,
tormented that I might be comforted,
made a shame that I might inherit glory,
entered darkness that I might have eternal light.
My Savior wept that all tears might be wiped from my eyes,
groaned that I might have endless song,
endured all pain that I might have unfading health,
bore a thorned crown that I might have a glory-diadem,
bowed his head that I might uplift mine,
experienced reproach that I might receive welcome,
closed his eyes in death that I might gaze on unclouded brightness,
expired that I might for ever live.

Sam Storms’ new book is Kingdom Come: The Amillennial Alternative (Christian Focus, 2013). It’s currently 50% off. You can read online for free his introduction and his first chapter, “The Hermeneutics of Eschatology: Five Foundational
Principles for the Interpretation of Prophecy.”

Here are a few commendations of this work:

“This is a remarkable book which will surely become the standard bearer for Amillennialism for years to come. Storms is particularly adept (and gracious) at critiquing premillennial positions, especially dispensationalism. His interaction with postmillennialism and preterism is equally intelligent and insightful. This is a book I will return to many times in my personal study and in pastoral ministry. Storms has given us a model for accessible, relevant, warm-hearted scholarship in service of the church.”
—Kevin DeYoung, Senior Pastor, University Reformed Church, East Lansing, Michigan

“If Christians in the past were guilty of obsessing too much over the end times, evangelicals today may face the opposite problem of caring too little. The writings of Sam Storms are exactly what we need: faithful theology and careful exegesis served with a pastoral spirit and reverent worship. In these pages you will find Dr. Storms’ mature reflections on the end times, honed over decades in the classroom and in the church. There is something in here to challenge and to encourage all of us, no matter our persuasion. I pray this book will help others in the same way it has helped me.”
—Justin Taylor, author and blogger, “Between Two Worlds”

“Evangelicals continue to be divided over eschatology, and such divisions will likely continue until the eschaton. For some, premillennialism is virtually equivalent to orthodoxy. Sam Storms challenges such a premise with a vigorous defense of amillennialism. Storms marshals exegetical and theological arguments in defense of his view in this wide-ranging work. Even those who remain unconvinced will need to reckon with the powerful case made for an amillennial reading. The author calls us afresh to be Bereans who are summoned to search the scriptures to see if these things are so.”
—Thomas R. Schreiner, James Buchanan Harrison Professor of New Testament Interpretation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky

Matthew Levering, in his celebrated new introduction to The Theology of Augustine using his seven key works, writes:

Augustine wrote over one hundred treatises, countless letters and sermons, and more than five million words in all. Although few scholars can become acquainted with all of his writings, there are certain pivotal works that one simply must know if one is interested in the development of Christian theology, biblical exegesis, and Western civilization. . . .

In order to engage later Catholic and Protestant theology—and in certain cases Eastern Orthodox theology—one must know these works.

Even more important, one must read these works to gain an appreciation for why such a great thinker gave his life to the realities proclaimed by Christian Scripture.

And, lastly, it is by reading these works that one will be able to evaluate the development and present intellectual impasse of Western civilization.

Augustine speaks as powerfully today as he did sixteen hundred years ago.

Levering then explains the seven works he has chosen. I’ve added links below to the translations from The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (New City Press), an ongoing project to render the complete works of Augustine in English.

My task in this book is to present these seven pivotal works of Augustine. Here we find the themes that Augustine plumbed most deeply: how to interpret Christian Scripture, the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, the unity of the Church in charity, God’s eternity and simplicity, grace and predestination, conversion, the meaning of history, the two “cities,” the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the divine Trinity.

The first two works, On Christian Doctrine and Answer to Faustus, a Manichean, set forth the central components of Augustine’s theology of Scripture and of scriptural interpretation.

The next two works, Homilies on the First Epistle of John and On the Predestination of the Saints, explore the grace of the Holy Spirit and the charity that unites the Body of Christ.

The final three works, Confessions, City of God, and On the Trinity, form a triptych that shows how human life (individual and communal) is an ascent to full participation in the life of the Triune God, who descends in Christ and the Holy Spirit to make possible our sharing in the divine life.

You can read Dr. Levering introduction and his first chapter (about On Christian Doctrine) here.

Evidence is emerging of another abortion mill where illegal abortions are performed and where full-term babies are regularly born alive and brutally murdered. This one is run by Dr. Douglas Karpen, who appears to be a doctor in good standing with the state of Texas.

The Texas Department of State Health Services plan to investigate.

Three women have come forward to testify about what they witnessed there as workers.

Please be aware that the descriptions are very graphic and viewer discretion is highly advised:

Michael Kruger has a helpful post at TGC this morning making a helpful distinction about the relialibity of the original text of Scripture:

But the original text is not a physical object. The autographs contain the original text, but the original text can exist without them. A text can be preserved in other ways. One such way is that the original text can be preserved in a multiplicity of manuscripts. In other words, even though a single surviving manuscript might not contain (all of) the original text, the original text could be accessible to us across a wide range of manuscripts.

Preserving the original text across multiple manuscripts, however, could only happen if there were enough of these manuscripts to give us assurance that the original text was preserved (somewhere) in them. Providentially, when it comes to the quantity of manuscripts, the New Testament is in a class all its own. Although the exact count is always changing, currently we possess more than 5,500 manuscripts of the New Testament in Greek alone. No other document of antiquity even comes close. [my emphasis]

You can read the whole thing here.

On this latter point, Dan Wallace once explained to me that:

The average classical author’s literary remains number no more than twenty copies. We have more than 1,000 times the manuscript data for the NT than we do for the average Greco-Roman author. Not only this, but the extant manuscripts of the average classical author are no earlier than 500 years after the time he wrote. For the NT, we are waiting mere decades for surviving copies. The very best classical author in terms of extant copies is Homer: manuscripts of Homer number less than 2,400, compared to the NT manuscripts that are approximately ten times that amount.

Here’s a chart adapted from something Dr. Wallace compiled:

Histories	Years	Date of Oldest Manuscripts	Number of Surviving Manuscripts
Livy	59 B.C.-A.D. 17	4th century A.D. (300s)	27
Tacitus	A.D. 56-120	9th century A.D. (800s)	3
Suetonius	A.D. 69-140	9th century A.D. (800s)	200+
Thucydides	460-400 B.C.	1st century A.D.	20
Herodotus	484-425 B.C.	1st century A.D.	75
New Testament	c. 5 B.C.-A.D. 90	c. 100-150	c. 5,700 (counting only Greek manuscripts) (+ more than 10,000 in Latin, + more than a million quotations from the church fathers, etc.

R. Laird Harris once offered an illustration to show that “the doctrine of verbal inspiration is worthwhile even though the originals have perished”:

Suppose we wish to measure the length of a certain pencil.  With a tape measure we measure it at 6 ½ inches. A more carefully made office ruler indicates 6 9/16 inches.  Checking it with an engineer’s scale, we find it to be slightly more than 6.58 inches.  Careful measurement with a steel scale under laboratory conditions reveals it to be 6.577 inches.  Not satisfied, we send the pencil to Washington, where master gauges indicate a length of 6.5774 inches.  The master gauges themselves are checked against the standard United States yard marked on a platinum bar preserved in Washington.

Now, suppose that we should read in the newspapers that a clever criminal had run off with the platinum bar and melted it down for the precious metal.  As a matter of fact, this once happened to Britain’s standard yard!  What difference would this make to us?  Very little.  None of us has ever seen the platinum bar.  Many of us perhaps never realized it existed.  Yet we blithely use tape measures, rulers, scales, and similar measuring devices.  These approximate measures derive their value from their being dependent on more accurate gauges.  But even the approximate has tremendous value—if it has had a true standard behind it. (R. Laird Harris, Inspiration and Canonicity of the Bible, rev. ed. [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1969], pp. 88-89)

For more reflections on this, See Greg Bahnsen’s fine essay on “The Inerrancy of the Autographa.”

Matthew J. Franck:

In statements issued immediately after the Gosnell verdict, the slave-dealers’ lobby—Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America—reacted as though the real problem with Gosnell is that he preyed on women and endangered their health. To be sure, he did just that. But Gosnell victimized these women as the logical extension of these groups’ moral reasoning and public policy goals, which they have advocated for decades. They have devoted themselves to teaching American women that their unborn children simply don’t count in any moral calculus, and horrors like Gosnell’s clinic are the fruit of their diligent work.

There is no alchemy, no magic spell that can tell us how to distinguish, in terms of their moral claim on us, between the children aborted in Gosnell’s Philadelphia abattoir and the ones who were delivered and then killed. In certain respects, Kermit Gosnell has a right to be the most surprised man in America right now. We, on the other hand, who have not wanted to notice the slave-dealers in our midst, have no such excuse.

Read the whole thing here, where Franck explains the slave-dealer analogy by using a quote from Lincoln.

When asked, here are the first five books that come to mind for J. I. Packer:

1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (2 vols.)
2. J. C. Ryle, Holiness
3. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
4. Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (+ others)
5. John Owen, Indwelling Sin and The Mortification of Sin (+ his books on Justification, The Holy Spirit, and The Death of Death in the Death of Christ).