Beckwith Back With Rome

Frances Beckwith, former president of the Evangelical Theological Society, has converted back to the Roman Catholicism of his youth. That’s old news as the blogosphere counts slackness.

It’s becoming old news, too, that Dinesh D’Souza, who a lot of people thought was Catholic, recently became the president of the—a lot of people thought—evangelical Protestant King’s College.

What I found most interesting was Beckwith’s response to the ensuing dustup. Beckwith, who knows evangelicalism and Catholicism about as well as anyone could, points to clear differences between the two groups. He denies firmly that D’Souza was right in calling those differences an intramural, denominational debate.

I was particularly struck by this paragraph, in which Beckwith quotes the King’s College doctrinal statement and then adds some comments of his own in brackets:

The salvation of man is wholly a work of God’s free grace and is not the work, in whole or in part, of human works or goodness or religious ceremony. God imputes His righteousness to those who put their faith in Christ alone for their salvation, and thereby justified them in His sight. [{Beckwith:} This is a distinctly Protestant presentation of justification, especially the use of the odd phrase "religious ceremony," which apparently does not include altar calls, reciting the sinner's prayer, or "rededicating" your life to Christ. However, there is a Catholic understanding of these concepts—grace, works, and sacrament—that are consistent with believing that salvation is wholly a work of God's free grace, though Catholicism does not believe that a believer's grace-infused cooperation detracts from or adds to God's free grace. Just as the cooperation of the human writers of Scripture does not make the Bible only half the Word of God, our grace-infused cooperation with God's work in us does not make it less wholly His work.]

Notice two things:

• Ouch. Beckwith has to be right that Protestants have their own religious ceremonies with as little background in Scripture as Marian Devotion. Protestant traditions may not be written down in codes of canon law housed in the secret vaults at Christianity Today headquarters, but they are stubbornly persistent. We have to be willing to admit this and to change if we are to continue to make the Bible our final authority. But at least we’re being inconsistent rather than purposefully making the commandment of God of none effect by our tradition (Matt. 15:6).
• Beckwith said the opposite of what many Protestants assume Catholics believe. He is no Pelagian; he doesn’t believe that being good enough will save him. He actually said that salvation is “wholly a work of God’s free grace,” something even many Protestants are chary about. It’s typically nominal Catholics (and there are millions of them) who get caught saying that God will let them into heaven for being good people. Evangelical evangelists need to know this.

I encourage you to read Beckwith’s whole piece. The differences between Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism are very serious. (I also encourage you to listen to some Catholic radio; it is very enlightening about what faithful American Catholics believe.)

How to Get Married

Every few months I take a detailed look at my blog stats, and for several years I have had one unexpectedly popular post: “How to Get Married.”

The post was actually a joke. My advice was to get Parallels Desktop for Mac software; pretty soon you’ll be married (worked for me).

But as I kept seeing this post near the top of my hits rating, I got a sense of sadness that so many people (guys? girls?) would be turning to the Internet for advice on this topic.

So imagine I’m not the Internet but an actual person sitting down with you and giving you some counsel. It’s better than nothing. I have a very happy marriage and a beautiful child. Maybe my advice will help you. It’s pretty simple. Three points.

1. God invented marriage, so learn what He has to say about it. Genesis 2:18-25 is the main passage, but you would do well to study the first three chapters of Genesis. I’m reading a book right now on the history of marriage, and I can tell you that without God’s direction people come up with all sorts of crazy ideas about how marriage ought to work. (Supplementary advice: Boundless.org has a lot of good articles on how to apply God’s design for marriage to your situation, and Josh Harris’ two dating books contain a lot of good scriptural advice, too.)
2. There are some things you can do to your world that will help you prepare it for a dating relationship: work out your dating philosophy in advance, writing down what your motives, goals, and standards will be (another Harris book, the one on lust, is very helpful here). Talk openly with your parents about that philosophy—and your desire for their involvement in any dating relationship you have. Rarely can you honor your parents without obeying them (Ex. 20:12), so discussing expectations in advance would help. Also, practice now the kind of courtesy toward the opposite sex which your spouse will appreciate in the future: be a masculine man or a feminine woman (here’s a book for that, especially John Piper’s chapter!).
3. Opposites don’t usually attract. Quechuas rarely go for Canadians. Usually it will be someone like you who likes you. So you have to be the kind of person you want to marry, and check back to point 1 to see what kind of person that should be. Jesus said in Matthew 22 that the most important commandment in Scripture is to love God with all of you and the second most important is to love your neighbor as much as you love yourself. If you’re that kind of person—something only God through Christ can make you into—you’ll attract that kind of person.

Random Free Cartoon Friday

I know this is obscure. I’m not trying to be elitist; I just couldn’t shake this idea. Don’t try too hard to figure it out. It’s not really very funny.

I’ll just give one hint: I spent a lot of time this week reading one of the hugest, strangest, bestest festschrifts I’ve ever run into.

ICM

Islamic Contemporary Music was profiled recently in the NY Times. This line jumped out at me (where he says “music” I think you can safely read “pop music”):

“People say you can’t mix God and music,” Tamer said. “But we’re trying to show you can.”

Interestingly, the story features author Timil al-Fishra, an opponent of ICM, and his book The Jihad for Islamic Music. A younger upstart also opposed to ICM is Faroud “Scott” Al-iol and his book No Sounds in Worship.

I See Where They’re Going with This!

AutoHotkey

One of my favorite little programs is AutoHotkey. You can write nearly any macro script you can think of to perform nearly any task you do often.

I’ll give one example. I found that I was regularly having to find my tagged link for Amazon books, copy it, and paste it into a blog post or e-mail.

So I wrote a little script that would just print it out for me, and I assigned it to Alt+F10:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/ISBNHERE/?tag=marklwardjr-20

When I needed the link, I would go to Amazon, grab the ISBN for the book I was linking to, and manually put it where the link says “ISBNHERE.”

Then I realized that I might as well grab the ISBN first, then have AutoHotkey paste it in for me:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/^v/?tag=marklwardjr-20

Notice that instead of “ISBNHERE” I have “^v”—that stands for Ctrl+V, which pastes whatever’s in the clipboard into my link. So now I get this when I hit Alt+F10:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0876633963/?tag=marklwardjr-20

Here’s the AutoHotkey script:

!F10::Send http://www.amazon.com/dp/^v/?tag=marklwardjr-20

I have scripts for creating em dashes and other common symbols, switching Unicode keyboards, and lots of other common tasks.

Kindle Investment

A reader writes,

I have a question about e-readers. Going into the ministry, and seeing the great number of books that I am already collecting, I am considering making an investment into an e-reader mainly for convenience and a smaller book shelf! My main concern however is that my choice in a reader would lock me into that particular brand for all eternity. For example, if I choose the Kindle and I choose to upgrade 5 years from now to a Sony Reader, would I have to start over again in building my library, or can the electronic library be carried over the different models. Is there one brand in particular that is more flexible in accepting e-book formats? What is your opinion?

Thanks!
a-reader

Good question. And I’ve done a lot of thinking about this as a Kindle owner and Logos Bible Software devotee.

A Few Things to Keep in Mind

E-readers are best for fiction or other relatively easy (or at least brief) material. I have read portions of Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections on my Kindle (I converted the online edition at Yale’s JEC site into Kindle format), and I found that it was just too substantial for e-reading. I needed to mark up the book, to have physical reminders of where I was in the argument—such as highlighting and even the thickness of finished pages versus those yet to come. I needed to flip back and forth sometimes. That’s tough with an e-reader. You simply can’t remember how many “pages” back that little tidbit was… And e-ink readers don’t have anything like the refresh rate of an LCD screen (laptop or iPad), so if you somehow did know that you wanted to go back ten “pages,” it would take a while.

For those reasons e-readers just not very good for long-form, careful reading.

But for long-form fiction and other easier reading like narratival history, e-readers are great. I read Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick, 1776 by David McCullough, and Stalingrad by Antony Beevor and loved them all. The Kindle was perfect for them because I always had it with me and could snatch a few pages (“pages”) whenever I wanted without losing my spot. The reading experience was immersive, I usually forgot I was holding something other than a “real book.”

Careful reading can be accomplished on the Kindle—but I find it has to be short. That has been one less-expected benefit of the device for me. Between my hard drive and Logos’ Theological Journal Library I have thousands of articles worth reading. If I run across something valuable I stick it on my Kindle and it waits for me to get a chance to read it. I finish it without the distractions provided by my computer, I highlight (and therefore file away automatically) worthwhile passages, and I can even make annotations.

Ministerial Book-Buying

How does this all apply to a seminarian and future minister of the gospel?

I think you need to plan to get more difficult books in paper form, easier ones in the cheapest way possible (e-reader or tree pulp), and as many good Logos Bible Software commentaries, reference works, and theological journals as you can get and will use.

Will your Kindle books be unreadable in 50 years, or even 10? Quite possibly. So I don’t buy many of them at all. I mainly use the device to read what I already have in other formats. But it is indeed handy for books I need right away, and Amazon is a serious company with a lot better chance of providing a wide selection than Sony since it’s already been in the book business for a long time (that stands to reason, anyway, though I cannot substantiate it).

I do hope there will be a standard e-reading format someday, and epub looks like a contender, but companies will use proprietary formats if it makes more money for them. The Kindle actually does read a great number of formats, including open ones; but still, if you want your grandson to read a book you buy, don’t buy a Kindle book. If you even want a book to be accessible to your wife and kids, buy it in paper form.

I love my Kindle and I use it a lot, but most of what I read on it I put there myself. That is one of its advantages: it will display practically any document on your hard drive, and you can send that document to the device wirelessly if need be.

We are in a time of transition in some respects not unlike Gutenberg’s. There are real uncertainties. But there are also real opportunities: information is cheaper and more plentiful than ever. God help us to access the good stuff, read it in submission to Him, and apply it by His grace.

Logos for Mac Leaving Beta

Logos for Mac has done a lot to catch up with Logos for Windows in the last few months. I am really liking it. It is now about to leave Beta, and you should check it out (note their cool giveaway, too!).

A reminder: BJU students and F/S may use this link to get a special deal on Logos Bible Software products.

Pogue Rules

David Pogue is the best tech columnist I’ve come across. Sensible. Funny. NY Times.

He just wrote an article you should read if you are paying someone to filter your Internet for you.

In the article he recommends Open DNS, the service I personally use to do my Internet filtering. It is installed directly on the router, and it couldn’t be easier—or freer.

Big Red Machine in the Championship

Tonight, the Big Red Machine ultimate squad faces off with Team Duncan for the Greenville Summer League Ultimate championship. Come on out to Gary Pittman Park at 6:30 to watch the showdown!

(Photo by Ethan Burns)

Preaching Ruts

I don’t preach incredibly often. Maybe an average of once or twice a month. But I still find that it’s easy to fall into ruts. I’ve been taught better, but my wheels still tend to press into the mud.

I need help sometimes to see how wide the road is, how many biblical ways there are to accomplish some goals, how rich is the diversity of biblical themes, how many different angles the Bible gives us on God’s glory.

Carson has a helpful article doing just this in the latest Themelios. Like his excellent (highly recommended!) little book, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (free PDF here), the article mines the biblical evidence for his theme and shows the various ways the Bible discusses it.

In this case Carson makes application especially to people like me who do most of their preaching to non-Christians. Read it for yourself!

Boomerang for Gmail

If you’re not using Gmail for all your e-mailing needs, you should be.

• Gmail archives your messages instead of automatically trashing them. That means it keeps all your e-mails forever, so you won’t lose messages or addresses or file attachments. And if you need to reconstruct the history of some conversation from two years ago, you can do so easily.
• Gmail can actually send and receive e-mail from multiple addresses, even non-Gmail addresses. I check and send from seven different addresses (some are rarely used, others are used for specific purposes like design work) all within Gmail.
• Gmail is “in the cloud,” so you can access it from anywhere.
• Gmail uses labeling and starring (a Labs feature you should check out) very effectively.
• Gmail has flexible automatic filtering.
• Gmail rarely lets spam through to my inbox, even though I get a lot of it.
• Gmail integrates with Google Calendar, Google Docs, and even Remember the Milk (a task manager—it also has its own to-do list feature).
• Gmail has a great set of keyboard shortcuts for easy navigation.
• Gmail keeps your e-mail threads together in “conversations.” Once you try it, you’ll never go back to any other method.

And now someone has finally created the one feature I have been missing in Gmail for a long time: delayed sending. A new feature called Boomerang for Gmail is the latest nerd’s hero. Boomerang even added something I didn’t know I wanted, delayed receiving. I use my inbox as a to-do list, and some items simply aren’t actionable for a few days, so this is a feature I plan to use. Definitely check it out.

One more Congratulations

My best man and ever “former roommate” got back to work today after a two-week honeymoon. I had the real privilege of serving as his best man, in fact. My arms and legs almost fell off standing up there waiting for the official hitching to take place, but it was all worth it.

Congratulations, Brian and Joy!

Joy, in four years you will pass me as Brian’s longest-term roommate. I know for a fact that you got the best-read student at Bob Jones Seminary. Now will you please take up some more of his time so someone else has a chance at that title?

Congratulations!

My congratulations go to Matt Hoskinson on a very favorable review of his dissertation (published by BJU Press!) by a guy who knows what he’s talking about.

And the Winner Is!

The grand prize winner of my recent drawing, selected by random number generation, is…

Drum roll, if you please!

C. Howard of G., South Carolina!

No, that’s too obvious. Let’s try “Chris H. of Greenville, SC”!

Chris gets a Bible and a big collection of theological and other articles going back probably seven or more years.

Runners-up, who get just the articles, include John Mark S., Meg J., Josh Y., all of Greenville, SC; and Andrea G. of the great state of Ohio. You’ll get your prizes relatively soon.

I’ll do my best to honor everyone’s requests for blog topics—except the suggestion of one “B. the Conqueror” who wrote, “Give me tips on how to get dates with cute babes.” I suspected B. was a Russian spammer until I found out that he has the same level of education as D.A. Carson! Wow! But no such tips here, B. Already got the last cute babe. Sorry.

Other suggestions were a little more practicable: more usage-determines-meaning “ranting” (!), “variety is good,” “short is good,” “more of your cultural/musical thoughts & recommendations,” “articles that deal with technology,” and “keep doing what you are doing.”

Ok!

I’m really thankful that someone in Greenville won this Bible, because my cute babe and I just rejiggered our budget, and mailing prizes to blog readers failed to get any funding this year.

Prizes Reminder!

Today is the last day you can enter to win an innovative Bible and/or a massive set of collected articles.

You just have to be a more or less regular reader of this blog (no subscribing just to win a prize).

Click here before the stroke of midnight tonight!

Marsden on Darwin and Evangelicalism

Before the latter part of the 19th century, evangelicalism could have great confidence in man’s ability to discover through the scientific method the order inherent in God’s creation. But when Darwin hit, evangelicalism was tested. Would it continue to accept the validity of what science was saying, finding some compromise with Gen 1? Or would it reject science in favor of the Bible? Evolution, then, cut evangelicalism into two.

Prominent historian George Marsden describes it well in Fundamentalism and American Culture:

When Darwinism brought about the second scientific revolution, evangelicals who had adopted this method of reconciling science and religion were faced with a dilemma. If they kept their commitment to autonomous scientific inquiry now, the very foundations of theistic and Christian belief seemed to be threatened. Moderates…attempted to steer a middle course. For most educated American evangelicals, however, the commitment both to objective science and to religion was so strong, and the conflict so severe that they were forced into one of two extreme positions. They could choose to say with Hodge that Darwinism was irreconcilable with Christianity—a new form of infidelity—and that it was speculative and hypothetical rather than truly scientific. The alternative solution as a redefinition of the relationship between science and religion. The basis for this redefinition was already well developed in the philosophical tradition of Kant and German Idealism and in the theological work of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl. Religion would no longer be seen as dependent on historical or scientific fact susceptible of objective inquiry; religion had to do with the spiritual, with the heart, with religious experience, and with moral sense or moral action-areas not open to scientific investigation. Thus science could have its autonomy, and religion would be beyond its reach. Since mid-century some American evangelical theologians, especially in New England, had been moving in this direction under the influence of romanticism and Idealism. This solution also appealed to the strong sentiment and moralism of American Protestantism. (pp. 20-21)

Language As a Tool of Theology

John Frame is someone from whom I’ve learned a great deal, and the learning continues. I found his chapter on language in his Doctrine of the Knowledge of God to be so helpful that I wanted to share the material with you.

Frame begins the little section I’ll excerpt by noting something that may sound jarring at first: “Although evangelicals have always insisted that Scripture is true, they have generally agreed that Scripture is not necessarily, never completely, precise. Human language may be used to state truth, but it does not speak with absolute precision” (pp. 216-217).

Frame says that vagueness in human language comes from a number of sources (and if you don’t have time for all of them, read the last one!):

1. Different human languages may “cut the pie in different ways.” The border between red and purple, for example, may be different in Bantu and Mandarin (217).
2. There is no official rule book for determining the borders between natural kinds. “Should fish include or exclude the whale?” Who gets to say? Could we name the beluga a fish for one purpose and a mammal for others? “Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Biologists tends to answer the question one way, chefs another. Who is correct?" (p. 218).
3. There are family resemblances among objects. Games, for example, can be competitions between two people, between two or more teams, or just a self-challenge like Solitaire. The word games might share a family resemblance without demanding that a specific set of components of meaning be present every time the word is used (218-219).
4. Language unites sense and reference, meaning and use in a way that isn’t always transparent. What is time? We all know, but who can define it? "If someone asks for its ‘essence’ or its definition—we shrug our shoulders." If someone can use a word to communicate, he knows sufficiently what it means. "Demands for definitions are not always legitimate. Sometimes, someone will suggest that I cannot really understand or use a term unless I can define it. That idea is clearly wrong. Learning to use a word, in most cases, precedes our ability to define it. We all know how to use time, but few of us—possibly none of us—could come up with an adequate definition of that concept. And that is often the case with theological language" (219-220).
5. Simply put, language changes. Vagueness in theology is sometimes the result of such change (220).
6. It is impossible to have a completely concrete language. Sometimes abstraction, and an accompanying vagueness, are necessary (220-221). Humans don’t know enough about everything to be perfectly concrete in all their utterances.
7. In addition, language is often intentionally vague. Wittgenstein offered this illustration: “A photographer tells a model, ‘Stand roughly there.’ He says exactly what he means. His command is not a sloppy way of saying, for example, ‘Stand exactly 2.8976 feet from the wall.’ The photographer is not intending to be as precise as that. If you ask my age and I give it down to the minute and second, I am (in most cases) being silly and defeating the purpose of our communication. This in most cases I will intentionally avoid that level of precision. We habitually use round numbers, metaphors, and other vague expressions as linguistic shortcuts…. Though Scripture is true and though it says exactly what God wants to say through it, it is not ‘absolutely precise.’ It contains round numbers, imprecise quotations, nonchronological narration, and so forth." This isn’t bad and doesn’t undermine inerrancy. Some vagueness is necessary for communication. We can’t be exhaustibly precise with every statement (221). "There is no way of escaping vagueness in theology, creed, or subscription without setting Scripture aside as our ultimate criterion. Theology does not dare to try to improve the preciseness of Scripture. Its only role is to apply what Scripture teaches. Let us be satisfied with that modest task, for it is glorious" (226).

In my case, I’ve been spending a good deal of time trying to formulate definitions of affections and emotion for my dissertation. From the beginning I knew that if Scripture doesn’t define these words—and what words does it define, exactly?—I can’t say with authority what they are. Perhaps they are fish sometimes and mammal at others. Who can say when God hasn’t? And the collection of sounds “a-fec-shun” and “ee-mo-shun” don’t have any intrinsic meaning; the Chinese have a different set of sounds for those ideas, if they have them at all. It’s not as if the words have an original meaning that, if discovered, will yield the truth about the things they name.

For purposes of a dissertation, I have to establish some model of the human person and his affective capacities, and I think I have scriptural reasons for much or most of mine. But I take comfort from Frame’s counsel not to be more precise than Scripture. I don’t have to nail down an air-tight definition of emotion. Some things—like the division between soul and spirit—only God knows.

“Decker,” Etymologically Speaking, Means “One Who ‘Decks’ Linguistic Errors in Exegesis”

Rod Decker nails it in this brief paper he delivered at the recent Bible Faculty Leadership Summit, a get-together of professors from Fundamentalist Protestant schools. Decker knows whereof he speaks, having published a work on linguistics (pictured) in Carson’s Studies in Biblical Greek series.

His comments in the article are all worth reading, but perhaps especially these:

Unfortunately, much conservative theology of the past century focused on word studies, probably due to a truncated understanding of verbal inspiration. Yes, the words are inspired—the exact words God wanted used and all the words of the original texts (i.e., verbal plenary inspiration)—but those words are only the building blocks for the syntax and the larger literary structure—which are equally inspired. Words, syntax, and structure are essential to communicate propositional truth. Yet theology is too often done by discussing individual words. This methodological error is perpetuated and encouraged by the frequent citation in the theologies of individual Greek words, usually parenthetically and seldom with comment. Doing so contributes to the perception that theology is based on the individual words.

. . . .

I would make one final appeal to my friends in the theology department: stay reasonably current in discussion of the languages. Don’t rely on your seminary training from many years ago. If you get the impression somewhere that you missed a relatively recent grammatical revolution, be advised that there have been no revolutions in the understanding of the languages in the last 50 years, but progress is steady, if slow. But progress it is. We do understand the languages better than did the generation before us, for by standing on their shoulders, we can see just a bit farther—enough farther in some cases to avoid some mistakes and misconceptions of our fathers. We are also a bit more modest these days (or at least ought to be) in what we can “prove” with the biblical languages. In a sincere effort to reflect an inspired, inerrant text, our predecessors sometimes overstated their case with a maximalist approach to grammar and word studies. Though grammar and lexicon are indispensable, we must be cautious not to push them beyond what their weight will bear.

I couldn’t say a louder amen. Read the whole thing.

Spiritual Health

Why ever disagree with anyone—much less battle him or her—over theology? Does it really matter so much whether or not people believe in God’s sovereignty as long as they’re saved? Do they really have to understand and uphold the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity? Is it all that important for them to believe in and understand inerrancy, progressive sanctification, and the host of other things Christians are unceasingly busy discussing and teaching and even fighting over?

Yes. Good theology is for our own good.

Paul several times in his letters uses phrases like “sound doctrine” or “sound words.” Interestingly, all of these appear in the Pastoral Epistles—the books concerned with telling pastors how to shepherd. He tells Timothy to “follow the pattern of the sound words” he heard from Paul (2 Tim. 1:13). He warns that there will be a time when people won’t endure “sound doctrine” (2 Tim. 4:3). An overseer is required to “be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it” (Titus 1:9; cf. 1 Tim. 1:10; 6:3; Titus 2:1, 8).

It is well known that the Greek word rendered “sound” (ὑγιαίνω) has another sense, “healthy.” I’m not saying it somehow really means “healthy” in these passages I’m discussing. I don’t think it does. It means “sound.” Whether or not Greek speakers in Paul’s day would have thought of “healthiness” when they heard the word, I don’t pretend to know. But the fact that English translations have almost universally gone with either “sound” or “wholesome” suggests to me that the word was a bit warmer than BDAG’s suggestion of “correct.” There’s a taste of “healthy” in both “sound” and “wholesome.” To be “sound of mind and body” is indeed to be healthy, and to eat things that are “wholesome” is to promote health.

One of my major purposes in teaching truth carefully is that it is what helps people the most. Believing, really believing, that God rules—really rules!—is wholesome when a mother has lost her unborn child in a miscarriage. It’s spiritually healthy to think right thoughts about God. God even said that it is by beholding Him in His Word that we are changed to be like Him (2 Cor. 3:18). Thinking and believing sound words about God promotes a soundness that gives us strength against spiritual diseases—worry, anger, envy, strife. I will fight, when necessary, to protect the pattern of sound words in Scripture not because I want my theological party to have political power in the church (God help me!) but because good theology is for my brother’s good.