The Gospel Coalition

I would rank R.C. Sproul’s The Holiness of God as one of the few modern classics of evangelical literature, along with books like J. I. Packer’s Knowing God and John Piper’s Desiring God.

I don’t know the date of the following video (20 years ago?), but it’s well worth the 20 minutes to watch:

The Holiness Of God – R.C. Sproul from LuMeL on Vimeo.

You can also listen to Sproul’s recent talks from the Desiring God Pastors Conference from 2007:

1. The Holiness of God

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2. The Holiness of Christ

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3. Holiness and Justice

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(You can download the files here.)

I’ve mentioned more than once on this blog that the two living men who have influenced my theology most are John Piper and John Frame. Frame’s writings, in my opinion, are always worth reading, even when I disagree with them.

His latest review is quite lengthy: 20,000+ words (!) on R. Scott Clark’s Recovering the Reformed Confession (P&R, 2008). It’s worth the time to read for at least two reasons: First, as Frame mentions, “Clark presents here a view of what it is to be ‘Reformed’ that is very different from mine, and it may be good for the two of us, and other readers, to have the differences set forth and analyzed.” It’s an important discussion worth having. Secondly, it affords an author the opportunity to point out in some detail when his positions are being misunderstood and misrepresented, and therefore can be a service to all of us in a quest to become more careful readers. An excerpt:

Clark, as often in this book, is appalled by my conclusions, but he seems quite unable to describe them accurately, and he is completely unaware of my arguments for them, and of the problems that have led me to rethink these issues. In contrast, I have tried in this review to consider carefully, not only Clark’s conclusions, but his arguments. I will not let myself reject any of his conclusions without considering and evaluating his arguments. Criticizing an author’s conclusions without considering his arguments is a very common error in theology, and it is especially common among those who, like Clark, develop their theology out of history, rather than seeking to apply (!) biblical principles to our present questions and situations.

Again, the whole long thing is worth the read.

Update: I should add one qualifier as a general principle: when you read a negative book review, it’s good to treat the analysis as provisional subject to your own review of the book. After all, perhaps it is the reviewer who is misunderstanding things. (E.g., that’s what Walton claims in this recent response to Poythress.) Reviews can be helpful in guiding our reading and helping us to think through arguments, but they are no substitute for reading the book for ourselves.

Update2: Clark offers a very brief response.

Here’s a recent marriage seminar by Dave Harvey, author of When Sinners Say “I Do”: Discovering the Power of the Gospel for Marriage . It was held at Metro Life Church in Orlando, FL, on January 29-30, 2010.

You can download the messages here, or listen to them below.

Talk #1: Marriage and Sin

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PDF lecture notes.

Talk #2: Marriage and Mercy

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PDF lecture notes.

Talk #3: Marriage and Grace

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PDF lecture notes.

You can also listen to a talk he gave that weekend, Parenting in Weakness:

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PDF lecture notes.

HT: Todd Augustine

Here’s an audio interview that Marvin Olasky did with Michael Card:

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You can download it here.

They took a bit about his most recent book, A Better Freedom: Finding Life As Slaves of Christt (IVP, 2009). You can read the Introduction and chapter 1, My Master, online for free.

One of things he talked about is how his father never learned the lesson in life that “you are not your gift.”

Russell Moore, affected by the story of Card’s father, gave a recent sermon called “You Are Not Your Gift: Finding the Freedom to Fail in Ministry,” which you can listen to below:

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John Piper says this sermon by Rick Gamache, delivered yesterday (2-7-10), was the best he’d ever heard on the Fatherhood of God and his adoption of us. The text was Ephesians 1:4-5. You can listen to it below:

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You can download the file here.

For more sermons by Gamache—pastor of Sovereign Grace Fellowship—go here.

John McCormack writes:

The LA Times reports that the president of the National Organization for Women is still outrageously outraged over the incredibly tame Focus on the Family/Tebow ad last night:

NOW president Terry O’Neill said [the Tebow ad] glorified violence against women. “I am blown away at the celebration of the violence against women in it,” she said. “That’s what comes across to me even more strongly than the anti-abortion message. I myself am a survivor of domestic violence, and I don’t find it charming. I think CBS should be ashamed of itself.”

The “violence against women” O’Neill refers to occurs when Tim Tebow tackles his mom Pam in an attempt at slapstick.

The offending ad is below. No word yet on whether or not NOW is equally outraged by the hyper-sexualized objectification of women in many of the other Super Bowl ads. Or whether or not they are bothered by the actual violence that is done to women who are just being born.

Here’s the fuller video of the Tebows from Focus on the Family telling their story of why they chose life for their son.

Congratulations to Drew Brees and the Saints!

I did a little digging and found a high school picture of Brees (above right).

Can anyone guess the guy on the left? It’s Brees’s all-state wide receiver from Westlake High School in Austin, Texas, where they won the state championship together.

Update: It’s Ben Peays, executive director of the Gospel Coalition.

For a limited time Jonathan Aitken’s recent biography of John Newton is available at the Kindle store for free.

HT: Jeff Brewer

I’m one of those guys who always reads the Acknowledgements section in books, where the author thanks all the people who helped him or her in some small way. One of the lines you almost always see, especially in more academic tomes, is that the author asked other experts in the field to read the manuscript, thanks them, then says something like, “of course they should not be blamed for any errors that remain.” (Would that really happen without this disclaimer?)

Another frequent feature of acknowledgements—again, this seems to occur more often when the writer is an academic—is the apology to thos who have been inconvenienced by the writing of the book. I think the saddest one I ever read was from a handbook on interpreting a particular book of the Bible. The acknowledgments ended like this:

I have seen more than one author’s preface include apologies to children who frequently asked during the writing of the book, “When is Daddy going to be finished?” This book has taken so long from start to finish that my children have all grown up and moved away during that time. Maybe they asked about it in former days, but they gave up long ago if they did. My apology is aimed at others—at those editors, colleagues, family members, employers, students, and ultimately readers whose lives have been made at least somewhat uncomfortable by the book’s delay. At least it finally got done.

Wow. Leaving the reader depressed by the misery this book has caused is not exactly the best way to start said book!

But sometimes a writer breaks the mold and decides to have a bit of fun with the acknowledgements. Matt Labash, the enormously talented and entertaining long-form journalist for the Weekly Standard, has a new book out this week: Fly Fishing with Darth Vader: And Other Adventures with Evangelical Wrestlers, Political Hitmen, and Jewish Cowboys—a collection of his published profiles.*

I’m not, generally speaking, in the habit of acknowledging others’ contribution to my work. Not that I have anything against it in principle. It’s just that doing so takes away from valuable time in which I could be talking about myself. Still, in the interest of maintaining cordial relations with my family, friends, colleagues, supporters, and saboteurs, some thanks are owed:

I should start by thanking those whom I won’t be thanking by name down to space, time, and national security concerns. . . . You never know where the next idea will come from or how the current idea will be fertilized. But often as not, it comes by accident through interaction with you, the unsung heroes. I suppose I could recite everyone, but then you’d lose your special unsung-hero status and would be just like the sung-hero riffraff. Personally, I think you’re better than that.

He goes on later to thank the man who wrote the foreword:

There is only one man I ever considered to write the foreword to this book, but I figured Tom Wolfe was probably busy, so I asked my great friend Tucker Carlson to instead.

He also thanks his “trusty, gimlet-eyed editors”:

You develop an attachment to people who unsplit your infinitives and untangle your participles. I owe each of them in different ways for guarding my flank and making my pieces better. Still, whatever mistakes are in this book, go ahead and blame them. They’re the editors, the last line of defense. I’m just a lowly, undisciplined writer. They really should’ve been more careful.

[Fair warning to evangelical readers who may be interested in Labash's book: some colorful language is used in the various pieces.]

What is the central theme of 2 Corinthians? I think Scott Hafemann is exactly right when he writes in the ESV Study Bible introduction to the letter that Paul’s primary emphasis is on “the relationship between suffering and the power of the Spirit in Paul’s apostolic life, ministry, and message.” Paul sees his own physical suffering and spiritual renewal—”though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day” (2 Cor. 4:16)—as a presentation of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Paul again and again hits on the theme that the weakness of his frame is designed to magnify the power of God’s name. Perhaps the most powerful section of the letter is in chapter 4 (vv. 8-12) where he talks about the purpose of his suffering:

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you.

Do you see what Paul’s saying? His being beaten and beleagured is a picture of Jesus’ dying; his endurance and perseverance is a picture of the resurrection reality of Jesus’ life. Paul’s suffering and sanctification are designed to be walking advertisements for Good Friday and Easter Sunday:

Paul saw the purpose of his suffering as a means to mediate, manifest, and magnify the resurrection power of his Savior.

We can see Paul’s radical other-centeredness in 2 Cor. 4:15, as he talks about why he endures such pain:

It is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.

Paul is willing to endure incredible hardship as long as it means more grace leading to more gratitude leading to more glory for God.

In 2 Cor. 11:23-28 Paul reluctantly recounts his resume of suffering, which included imprisonments, countless beatings, and near-death experiences:

• whipped with 39 lashes (5 different times)
• beaten with rods (3 different times)
• pummeled with stones (1 time)
• shipwrecked (3 times)
• adrift at sea (one night, one day)
• journeys (frequent)
• danger from rivers
• danger from robbers
• danger from his own people
• danger from Gentiles
• danger in the city
• danger in the wilderness
• danger at sea
• danger from false brothers
• toil and hardship
• sleepless nights (many)
• hungry and thirsty (often)
• cold and exposed
• the pressure of anxiety for all the churches (daily)

And yet given his radically God-centered worldview, Paul calls such suffering “light” and “momentary”!

For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. (2 Cor. 4:17-18)

Paul knew that no matter how much it hurt in the hear-and-now, it was as nothing compared to the hope and healing that he would experience for eternity in the presence of his Savior. We “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7), knowing that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). So from Paul’s perspective, the comparison and contrast of now and then—here and there—looks like this:

May God give all of us grace to suffer well, as living advertisements for the death of Christ and the life of Christ, as we live in light of eternity.

George Packer:

Who doesn’t want to be taken out of the boredom or sameness or pain of the present at any given moment? That’s what drugs are for, and that’s why people become addicted to them. . . . Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my son go hungry.

More:

Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they’re being honest–including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books. It’s no less true of me, which is why I’m trying to place a few limits on the flood of information that I allow into my head.

Jedd Medefind—President of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, former Special Assistant to President George W. Bush and leader of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives—has an article in CT on what we can learn from the arrest of several American Christians who were trying to take orphans out of Haiti. Here’s his main point: “Fellow Christians embarrassed by the incident should have the grace to withhold the abuse many observers are now piling on the group, but we can still take a strong lesson on the need to match zeal with knowledge in every effort to ‘care for orphans in their distress.’”

As a freshman undergrad in a study of religion program at a state university, I was deeply challenged in my faith. Though my adviser was a sort of “Protestant atheist,” liberalism had zero appeal to me. I knew the choices were full-blown Christian orthodoxy or agnostic nihilism, with no ground in between.

God helped me through books like William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith and J. P. Moreland’s Scaling the Secular City. My own approach to apologetics has ended up being a bit different (for an introduction, see John Frame’s excellent book Apologetics to the Glory of God, but there is still tremendous value in the works of philosophers like Craig and Moreland.

Craig has a new, 30-page essay online, which you can read in PDF or HTML. He interacts with Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Craig makes five arguments for God’s existence: (1) the cosmological argument (from contingency); (2) the kalam cosmological argument (based on the beginning of the universe); (3) the moral argument (based upon objective moral values and duties); (4) the teleological argument (from fine-tuning); (5) the ontological argument (from the possibility of God’s existence to his actuality). So if you’re looking for a concise introduction to these arguments from a first-rate philosopher, this is a great place to start.

Here’s a word from J. P. Moreland about William Lane Craig and his significance:

It is hard to overstate the impact that William Lane Craig has had for the cause of Christ. He is simply the finest Christian apologist of the last half century and his academic work justifies ranking him among the top 1 percent of practicing philosophers in the Western world. Besides that, he is a winsome ambassador for Christ, an exceptional debater, and a man with the heart of an evangelist. I know him well and can say that he lives a life of integrity and lives out what he believes. I do not know of a single thinker who has done more to raise the bar of Christian scholarship in our generation than Craig. He is one of a kind and I thank God for his life and work.

Five Arguments For God

Here’s a PDF of Edmund Clowney’s classic 39-page essay, A Biblical Theology of Prayer, courtesy of Beginning with Moses. It was originally published in Teach Us to Pray: Prayer in the Bible and the World, ed. D. A. Carson (Baker/Paternoster, 1990), 136-76, 336-38. (HT: TGC)

Below is an outline of Clowney’s essay:

I. PRAYER ADDRESSES THE PERSONAL GOD

A. God’s glory is personally revealed

1. In his works

2. In his name

3. In his presence

B. The response of prayer is personal

1. Prayer by persons in God’s image

2. Prayer by the whole person

C. The response of prayer is effective

II. PRAYER ADDRESSES THE COVENANT GOD

A. Prayer in the bond of the covenant relation

1. Prayer is grounded in God’s covenant

2. Prayer pleads the covenant relation

3. Prayer and the ceremonies of covenant worship

4. Prayer in the community of the covenant

B. God’s covenant Lordship shapes prayer

1. God’s zeal for pure worship

2. Our zeal for our Lord

a. Expressed in submission to his will

b. Expressed in confession seeking forgiveness

c. Petitions

d. Thanksgiving, praise, and hope

C. The renewal of the covenant restores and renews prayer

III. PRAYER ADDRESSES THE TRIUNE GOD

A. The renewal and fulfillment of prayer in Christ

1. Fulfillment of the petition of the faithful remnant

2. Fulfillment in Christ transforms prayer

a. Christ comes as Lord to receive prayer

b. Christ comes as Servant to offer prayer

3. Christ’s teaching renews prayer

a. Prayer to the Father

b. The prayer of trust

c. Prayer in the name of Jesus

4. Christ the Mediator of Prayer

a. The Mediator foreshadowed

b. His mediatorial office

c. His mediatorial sacrificed.

d. His mediatorial ministry

B. Prayer in the Spirit

1. The presence of the Spirit

2. The gifts of the Spirit

3. Union with Christ in the Spirit

C. Prayer to the Father

1. Prayer to the First Person of the Trinity

2. Prayer to the Father in the Son through the Spirit