The Gospel Coalition

I am not what I ought to be —
ah, how imperfect and deficient!

I am not what I wish to be —
I abhor what is evil, and I would cleave to what is good!

I am not what I hope to be —
soon, soon shall I put off mortality, and with mortality all sin and imperfection.

Yet, though I am not what I ought to be,
nor what I wish to be,
nor what I hope to be,
I can truly say, I am not what I once was;
a slave to sin and Satan;
and I can heartily join with the apostle, and acknowledge,
“By the grace of God I am what I am.”

- John Newton, as quoted in The Christian Pioneer

Seven links for your weekend reading:

1. The Limits of Tolerance: To Kill a Mockingbird at 50

2. 12 steps to identifying your functional saviors

3. John F. Kennedy in Houston, fifty years later

4. When to quit reading a book

5. I’m shocked to find out that Andrée Seu (along with David Barton and others) are claiming Glenn Beck as a born-again Christian.

6. There are so many rumors about Coca-Cola that the company has pages on its website devoted to dispelling myths.

7. John Starke has an excellent review of Alister McGrath’s The Passionate Intellect. I did a mini-review of this book for Christianity Today in which I expressed my sympathy for what McGrath is trying to accomplish while questioning some of his conclusions. I highly recommend you read John’s review, as it lays out in more detail the good and the not-so-good aspects of this important work.

Notes on two books I’ve read recently:

Entrusted with the Gospel:
Paul’s Theology in the Pastoral Epistles
Andreas Kostenberger & Terry Wilder
Broadman & Holman, 2010

Earlier this year, I spent some time studying the Pastoral Epistles. As a young pastor, I treasure the practical and pastoral insights that come from 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus. But digging deep into these letters will unearth a number of thorny issues:

• Why is authorship disputed?
• What did Paul mean when he said women should be silent in church?
• Who fits the qualifications for an overseer?
• How was the early church structured?

Entrusted with the Gospel is a collection of essays that provide clarity on these and other issues. The book lays out the purpose and structure of these letters. The authors write convincingly about authorship, women’s roles, God’s sovereignty, and the doctrine of the church. The result is a helpful primer for deeper study in the pastoral letters of Paul.

Science and Faith: Friends or Foes?
C. John Collins
Crossway Books, 2003

Last Christmas, a good friend of mine gave me this book, a helpful guide to issues found at the intersection of faith and science (with a little philosophy thrown in for good measure). With an eye to scientific research and a hand on the biblical text, Collins explains the different views regarding the age of the earth and the creation of humans. The book also records the way the Intelligent Design movement has reinvigorated the debate over science and providence.

Science and Faith is certainly academic in its tone, but the chapters are short and include plenty of subheadings, making it easy to navigate the contents. I don’t agree with all of Collins’ conclusions (particularly animal death before the fall), but I still found Collins to be irenic and thoughtful as  he addresses issues that deal with our faith in the Bible and our knowledge of recent scientific discoveries.

A strong apologetic:

In the July 1954 issue of Reformation Review, Francis Schaeffer published “How Heresy Should Be Met.”  He proposed that, to neutralize the heresies defrauding people in our time, what is needed is a three-fold strategy.

Culturally Focusing on the Family: How Hipster Evangelicals Have Fallen into the Same Consumerist Traps as Their Parents:

The family might be, in fact, the strongest bastion against the consumerism that pervades American life. While we might choose movies, music, and art that we want to appreciate and understand—and the friends or church we enjoy them with—we do not have the same freedom to choose our family. It is an arrangement formed almost by accident, or as G. K. Chesterton would have it, by magic. In his lively image, the day we are born, we are dropped into a house of strangers we did not choose and forced to learn to love them. The family’s unique power resides in the fact that the ties that bind are not ties we choose—a fact that does not easily fit souls shaped by consumerism.

Excellent review of James K.A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom:

Smith’s book is something of an amalgam of Abraham Kuyper and Stanley Hauerwas, or, to use Richard Niebuhr’s well-worn categories, between Christ transforming culture and Christ against culture. This can be seen in his reference to the church as “a new polis - a new sociopolitical community constituted by God in baptism” (p. 196). Although this is in one sense an Augustinian insight, Smith needs to clarify whether he here envisions the church as a specific differentiated institution (structure) with its own task in God’s world or as the body of Christ or corpus Christi (direction) called to live out the kingdom in every area of life.

Ed Stetzer interviews Darrin Patrick about his book, Church Planter:

What kind of man should plant a church?A man who is a Christian, who has forsaken being his own Savior and King and has trusted Christ with his life. He is a man who has a calling from God to a specific place with a elder-qualified life to back it up. He should be determined to prevail and dependent on God as he plants. He should be a man who loves his family more than his church and is secure and smart enough to share leadership with a team who leads the mission.

During the past few months, I’ve been enjoying The Essential Edwards Collection, an accessible introduction to the work of Jonathan Edwards compiled by Owen Strachan and Doug Sweeney and published by Moody. In the volume on True Christianity, the authors put together a series of questions to help us discern the true state of our hearts and expose the reality of nominalism.

Take a look at these questions about our loves:

Do you love God?

• In your heart, do you desire to follow Him, worship Him, and obey Him?
• Does your professed love for God stretch into action?
• Does it have any practical effect on your life?
• Would others characterize you as one who loves God?
• Do you adore God?
• Do you want to adore Him?

Do you love the Bible?

• Do you want to follow the One whom it reveals, Jesus Christ, and follow His commandments?
• Do you enjoy reading the Bible and take nourishment from it?
• Do you struggle to read it and possess little desire to obey it?
• Do you care about the Bible?
• Do you seek to understand how it should be interpreted, or do you care more about how it fits or does not fit with your natural prejudices and opinions?
• Do you believe that the Bible is true? Is it all true, or are only parts of it true?

Do you love living out and sharing the gospel?

• Do you monetarily support other Christians in need?
• Do you share the gospel with lost people?
• Do you care if someone is lost? Is that a concern that comes quickly into your mind when talking with another person?
• Do you pray much for the salvation of lost sinners? Do you want people to be saved?
• Do you attempt to live out a Christian life in front of other people?
• Do you inconvenience yourself to present the gospel to others?
• Do you suffer in any form for the sake of the gospel? Or is your life free of the sting associated with vibrant Christianity lived out in a pagan world?
• Do you seek to win family members to Christ? Or do you assume they’re fine?
• Do you ask them penetrating questions or do you simply assume that they are saved?
• When dealing with others, are spiritual concerns first in your mind?

Do you love Christians?

• Or are they like any other group of people out there?
• Does your love take on a practical form?
• Do you desire to serve other Christians?
• Do you care when you hear about suffering Christians in other countries?

Do you enjoy church and draw nourishment from it?

• Is church endlessly boring you?
• Do you like biblical preaching?
• Do you see the need to be confronted about your sin?
• Do you avoid church in order to avoid being “judged” or “condemned”?
• Do you love interaction with other believers?
• Do you want to support the local church?
• Do you want to support missionaries?
• Does the spiritual good of other people concern you?
• Is it more important for you to do your favorite things on Sunday or to worship God with other believers?
• Do you continually struggle with finding the motivation to go to church?
• Do you want to go to church?

Does the matter of eternity concern you?

• Do you want to go to heaven? Do you not want to go to hell?
• Do you believe in heaven and hell? If so, does your belief take and actional form?
• Do you desire to go to heaven to worship God for eternity?
• Do you want to go to heaven because that’s where your favorite people and things are?
• Do you think about hell? Do you live as if eternity is real?

Does the Bible shape your ethics and morals?

• Or do you just go with what you feel at a gut level?
• When there is conflict between your natural inclinations and what the Bible says, which side wins?
• Do you ever change your mind as a result of reading the Bible?
• When making political, ethical, and moral decisions, do you consider scriptural teachings, or do you base your decisions on your moral sense?
• Do you want the Bible to shape your ethics?
• Does the Bible affect what you watch, read, and listen to? Do you ever avoid or turn off content that is biblically offensive? Do you care if content is moral or immoral in an explicitly biblical sense?

If used well, these questions could provide a starting point from which to engage people we love on the question of their Christianity. If we listen well, show empathy, and share the gospel, we may see the Holy Spirit bring true faith to those who desperately need it.

Tim Challies critiques Rhonda Byrne’s The Power:

Needless to say, The Power is a bad book. A really bad book. It’s so utterly stupid, so unbelievably vapid, that it boggles my mind that anyone could read it and believe it. If you could package foolishness, if you could slap stupidity between two covers, you’d end up with The Power. Read it if you must, but as you do it, you’d better generate some good feelings toward brain cells; you’ll need to attract a few to yourself if you’re replace all the ones that are sure to die as you give hours of your life to all of this drivel.

Temptations of a Shepherd: Hiding from God

Many pastors use their shepherding ministry to hide from their own sins, deficiencies, and flaws.

Ambrose of Milan on Christian fortitude:

Ambrose, bishop of Milan between c. 374, and 397 A.D., was a man of extraordinary courage and wisdom. He confronted emperors and soldiers, apparently unconcerned with the consequences for himself, so long as he could glorify God and protect his flock. His treatise on “The Duties of the Clergy” was distributed in about 391. Ambrose urges pastors to fortitude (courage), warns them of their responsibility to protect those in their care, and advises how courage may be fostered. To be courageous, you must understand what is valuable.

Southeastern Seminary announces addition of Schaeffer collection to library:

The collection includes select unpublished papers and correspondence, source materials, notes, and recorded discussions of Schaeffer, one of evangelical Christianity’s most prominent 20th century voices and the author of 27 books.

Suppose someone asked you to sum up the teaching of Christianity in just three words. What would you say?

Perhaps it is impossible to summarize all the essentials of Christianity in so short a space. So picture the words as an umbrella under which the rest of Christian theology can stand. Better yet, imagine the three words are the fountainhead from which the waters of Christian theology can flow.

I have heard a number of suggestions:

• the good news that “Jesus saves sinners”
• the gospel imperative to “repent and believe”
• the sovereignty of God in the message that “Jesus is Lord”
• Bible verses such as John 3:16.

All of these suggestions have their merit (although using a Bible verse reference to count for the three words seems a bit like cheating to me!).

But I recommend three different words. If I had to sum up all of Christian teaching in one statement, I would quote directly from 1 John 4:8. “God is love.” Those three words stand at the very heart of the Christian faith.

Some of you may bristle at the thought that “God is love” could be at the very heart of Christianity. Perhaps you have come across Precious Moments bookmarks with the phrase scrawled on the bottom. Or maybe you have seen too many gaudy collectible items in Christian bookstores that have sentimentalized (and feminized) the idea that God is love.

Hear me out first. These three words may surprise you.

“God is love” is not some mushy, saccharine version of what our culture would like to be true: “Love is God.” Not at all. The Apostle John’s statement carries radical implications.

Saying that “God is love” is claiming something about who God is in his essence. The statement points us to the Trinity, and the truth of the Trinity throws open the windows, revealing to us the nature of a God who chooses from eternity past to provide salvation for sinful rebels like you and me. “God is love” is not a sappy statement for teary-eyed dreamers; it is truth about God that leads to a bloody cross.

“God is love” is not a generic tip of the hat to a watered down civil religion that pushes tolerance to the top of our “most-desired virtues” list. When understood correctly, “God is love” represents an exclusive claim that can only be true about the Christian God. The statement seems utterly simple upon first glance, and yet all of Christian theology is, in some sense, an unpacking of who God is and what he has done.

Along these lines, let me recommend Fred Sanders’ new book, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything. Sanders says “the Trinity is the gospel” and here is what he means:

When I say the Trinity is the gospel, I mean that the Father sent the Son to redeem us, and the Spirit of the Son to adopt us (Galatians 4:4-6).

When we hear about the Trinity, we should think first and foremost about that event, that history, that saving action that God performed for us. It’s pretty sad when Christians hear the word “Trinity” and the dominant idea in their mind is some kind of abstract analogy about shamrocks or the three states of matter.

I think the early church pondered its way to the doctrine of the Trinity by figuring out how to condense the whole gospel story into the shortest form. That form is the name that Jesus gave us: the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, into which we are baptized.

R.R. Reno on John Chrysostom, the Golden-Mouthed Preacher:

It is fitting, perhaps, that the golden-mouthed preacher should know so well the dangers of an undisciplined tongue. With rhetorical gifts come rhetorical temptations. It is difficult to know how to say what needs to be said, and when not to say what needs not to be said. St. John Chrysostom found a solution: speak of Christ, and your tongue will serve that which gives life.

I like this. The Ordinary Pastors Project

The pocket notebooks of 20 famous men

Scot McKnight asks a good question for those of us associated with The Gospel Coalition. How close to the gospel is complementarianism? Or how close is the gospel to egalitarianism? The comments are worth perusing.

“Don’t pit systematic theology against biblical theology. We need them both.”

“Don’t divorce Story and propositional truth. The Bible contains both.”

“Don’t separate academic and devotional study of Scripture. They go hand in hand.”

I hear these kinds of statements often, and I offer a hearty “Amen”. But what is needed today is not another slogan about how to hold these components together. Instead, we need better examples about how this kind of fusion is done. Enter D.A. Carson.

Carson’s newest book The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God’s Story (Baker, 2010) successfully accomplishes what some may think is impossible. He brings together narrative and propositional truth, systematic and biblical theology, academic exegesis and personal devotion. Then he tops it off by providing us with a great introduction to Scripture that also serves as a discipleship manual for long-time Christians.

Let’s begin with the last accomplishment. Carson is forthcoming in his desire to welcome sincere seekers to open the Bible and examine its contents. At one level, his book is serves as an evangelistic introduction to the plot line of the Scriptures. And yet, it doesn’t feel introductory. Christians who have walked with Christ for years will, perhaps for the first time, be able to connect the dots of the Christian Storyline, seeing how all the stories and genres fit the grand narrative.

Secondly, Carson implicitly dismisses the idea that there would be a chasm between biblical and systematic theology. It has become commonplace in some circles to critique systematic theology for imposing foreign paradigms upon the Bible. In other circles, leaders laud systematic theology as a fortress against new insights, as if careful exegesis has nothing left to offer when it comes to biblical interpretation. In The God Who Is There, Carson exegetes biblical texts and then summarizes their truth. His book happily marries systematic and biblical theology in a way that drowns out to the protests of people rooting for their divorce.

Third, though Carson’s book is academic in its tone, it pulsates with personal devotion. Several chapters end with prayers of worship and practical application. Carson also sprinkles the text with his poetry – the fruit of his meditation on these truths. He finishes the early chapters by pointing ahead to Jesus, never once letting the centrality of the gospel disappear from his writing.

I rarely gush over a book, but I will make an exception for this one. The God Who Is There is an excellent introduction to Christianity for those (believer and unbeliever alike) who want to know more about the Bible. Get a copy for yourself and then give a few away.

(If you want to listen to the lectures this book was based upon, click here.)

Map of the U.S. showing what people call soda / coke / pop. I find it strange that so many people call a soft drink something other than a coke. My surprise must be an indicator of where I live.

Fred Sanders posts Tweet-sized quotes from his excellent new book on the Trinity:

The most interesting phenomenon is in the tweeting and microblogging, where people have to choose very short quotes to post. Far from gutting the book while scavenging around for the tiniest possible quotes, these Twitter-quoters have a sharp eye for the best summary lines in the book.

Devin Brown on the purpose of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia:

Lewis intended the details in the Chronicles of Narnia to add up to something. Lewis’s storytelling in the Chronicles of Narnia, and in all his fiction, was intended to provide insight into the human condition—penetrating insight, I would claim—and to reveal truths about life, our life. In a world were fewer and fewer works seek to do this, and fewer and fewer critics find merit in those that do, I would argue that perhaps one reason these books and their film adaptations are so widely popular is because they are so widely needed.

Five important events in the 1950′s that no one in the 1950′s noticed