By Faith We Understand

Must-Read Articles by Roger Olson

May 20, 2013 — Leave a comment

Fascinating. Roger Olson (annoyingly clearheaded at times for someone I disagree with so frequently) argues that evangelicalism as a cohesive movement no longer exists. It took a figure with the stature of Billy Graham to hold it together, and with Graham off the scene, fissures have turned into canyons—and soon perhaps, I would add, great gulfs fixed.

I think Olson is right to say, however, that there is still an evangelical ethos that informs every stream of evangelical identity:

So what is this evangelical ethos? Each group of evangelicals will give it a somewhat different description. One evangelical party will emphasize its experiential dimension—“conversional piety.” Another one will emphasize its doctrinal dimension—usually then with emphasis on a distinctive view of Scripture that includes inerrancy. Yet another one will emphasize its culture-transforming dimension with stress on changed people changing culture toward the Kingdom of God.

If this is an accurate diagnosis I can’t help but see John Frame’s triperspectivalism in it:

Conversional piety is clearly Frame’s existential perspective.
The doctrinal fidelity stream emphasizes, pretty obviously, Frame’s normative perspective.
The last group is a little more difficult to peg, but the culture-transforming stream is aiming at a particular situation, so it fits in the situational perspective.

If you haven’t read Frame, I recognize that this will sound esoteric or maybe just weird or OCD. But read Frame and you’ll see that there’s Bible behind this tri-way of viewing the world. Frame says that the three perspectives mutually cohere, so part of our job as Christians would be to hold them together. Ideally, we could have an evangelicalism that 1) cultivates genuine piety (let’s just call it love for God and neighbor), 2) holds tightly to God’s norms in Scripture, and 3) aims for God’s glory through every-nation disciple-making.

In ChurchLife

The Best Cellphone Service I Could Find

May 20, 2013 — 1 Comment

I kind of obsess about tech purchases. Having a wife has made me a bit worse, because it’s harder to change my mind once I’ve already clicked “Confirm.” Girls—or at least the ones at my house (or at least the adult one)—don’t care to switch from iOS to Android and back unless there’s a really good reason.

Girls have a point there, actually.

So I tried Republic Wireless starting in January of 2012, and the idea was awesome: $44.06 a month including tax for two half-hearted but unlimited Android smartphones (which were very reasonably priced at $100 each). Never worry about how much data or minutes or texts you’re using. All calls that can be routed over WiFi are so routed, and that’s how the company can afford to let you have unlimited everything.

But our service just wasn’t any good. We frequently couldn’t make or receive calls, even though a friend with the same service didn’t have that problem. So after a year of saving money but not being able to get ahold of people reliably (and vice versa, which wasn’t 100% bad), a small straw came floating from the sky and landed on the back of the camel. I was trying to make an important business call and I simply couldn’t connect.

After a good deal of shopping and re-education—the cellphone market has changed since I last shopped—I bought two used Android phones and went with Ting. Look at their “plans”:

If you have two phones, that’s 12 bucks a month to start with. If you use 0 minutes, 0 messages, and 0 megabytes (XS—Extra Small), you only pay that $12. If you you a Small amount of minutes, messages, and data, you pay $12 + $3 + $3 + $3 = $21. If, like me and my wife, you use almost 500 minutes, over 100 texts, and fewer than 100 megabytes, you pay $12 for the phones, $9 for minutes, $5 for texts, and $3 for megabytes = $29. (My wife uses FaceTime or Skype at home as much as is convenient; that saves minutes.)

Let me lay out the pros and cons of Ting.

Pros:

Every plan is a “family” plan—every phone on the plan shares all the minutes, messages, and data with all the other phones. To add a phone is just $6 per month.
Pay for what you use in easy-to-understand “tiers” (see below).
There’s no contract; you own your phone and can suspend service any time.
Awesome customer service; best of any company I’ve ever encountered. You call, and you reach a real person who actually helps you and follows up just like he said he would.
Set alerts if you want to make sure you’re aware before going over a usage line.
Set caps so that you can’t go into another usage tier.
Tethering and hotspot are free—Ting doesn’t care how you use your megabytes of data.
Excellent website. That matters a lot to me. A chintzy website says “low quality.”

Cons:

The only con I can really think of is that you do need to stay somewhat conscious of how much of your minutes, messages, and data you’re using. But they make it super easy: use a Ting app, check the website, or set caps/alerts. And in what area of life do you not need to stay conscious of your consumption? “Unlimited” plans may have some appeal for some users, but the cost for a high-quality unlimited plan is ridiculous. Verizon wanted $140/month minimum for one smart phone.

Now, click my referral link and we both get $25 of free service. That amount lasts me almost a month.

In Tech

Shame on South Carolina Republicans

May 8, 2013 — 6 Comments

I was only a teenager, but I remember the outcry among conservatives when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. Demands for impeachment were not limited to irate housewives on the Concerned Women for America blog (if there had been such a thing at the time). The real-live House and Senate took up the matter. Even a few Democrats voted against Clinton in some of the related perjury proceedings. For the first and last time ever, C-SPAN was the top-rated channel among the coveted 18- to 34 -year-old demographic.*

Being a little more interested in Mega Man X than in national politics at the time, I don’t remember all the wrangling. But one thing rings clearly in my memory from half a lifetime ago: conservatives insisted then that there is a necessary link between someone’s private and public moralities.

Unfaithful in Much

And there is. Jesus said so. “One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much” (Luke 16:10). He states this as a general principle, though the particular focus of the context is money.

Leon Morris explained the verse this way: “What one does with the small things of life one does also in the big things. Faithfulness or dishonesty appears throughout. Life is a unity.” (TNTC, 267) I. Howard Marshall is similarly straightforward: “A person who is unfaithful in small things cannot be trusted in big ones.” (NIGTC, 623)**

I’m tempted to call marital fidelity and paternal responsibility big things and running the state of South Carolina, comparatively, a small thing. The vows you make to a wife are pretty sweeping compared to the minimalistic oath you take as SC governor. And let’s be clear: Mark Sanford made an utter, international, public mockery of his marriage vows. As Doug Wilson recently—and provocatively—put it, because marriage is a picture of Christ’s relationship to His church (Eph. 5:25ff.), “every marriage is … a proclamation of the gospel. When marriages go wrong, or blow up, or go cold, they are the marital equivalent of false teachers.” Or as John the Baptist put it: Sanford, it is not lawful for you to have someone else’s wife.

I understand the lesser-of-two-evils argument—but when does abstaining from a vote become the least of three evils? For me, it’s when I feel forced to preserve my ability to say what is most important to our country: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” It’s when my moral authority is undercut and even eliminated by measly dollars that moth and rust will corrupt. This would have been a perfect opportunity for Christians to say to the world, “We’re not just hung up on homosexuality; divorce is wrong, too. Both are deviations from God’s created norm.”

Liberals Crowing

The liberals are already crowing, just hours after the election. This Slate piece, in fact, could have been written the day Sanford won the Republican primary and simply saved for today:

South Carolina conservatives may still say a candidate’s sins matter, but they aren’t voting that way. In fact, if you weren’t privy to the state’s strong social conservative history, you could almost mistake South Carolinians for city folk—people who vote for experience, policy, and political leanings and show a sophisticate’s relativism toward personal moral failings. These days, South Carolinians seem almost Parisian when they enter the voting booth.

Sanford was running only in his Charleston-area district, but the Slate writer is justified in speaking of this as a state-wide phenomenon because

this wasn’t the first time the Republican voters of South Carolina put fidelity to party over fidelity to fidelity. In the 2012 Republican primary, voters were reminded of Newt Gingrich’s admitted adultery and three marriages. His second wife spoke out just days before the vote. Gingrich won by 12.5 percentage points over the morally pure Mitt Romney. He won 45 percent of the evangelical vote, a group that has at times shown more than a passing interest in the morality of public officials. He won 46 percent of those who said that the religious beliefs of a candidate were very or somewhat important.

Saved by Grace

Sanford was, when he was my governor, known in part for his religious beliefs (he’s some sort of evangelical [?] Episcopalian). And he was quick to tell his victory speech crowd, “I am one imperfect man saved by God’s grace.”

I take no delight in saying this, but I say it on the authority of the God who knows where He sends that grace: no, Sanford isn’t. God commands all men everywhere to repent. And Paul mentions Mark Sanford, now engaged to his mistress, in a list of people who “will not inherit the kingdom of God.”

Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. (1 Cor 6:9–10)

An unrepentant sinner cannot claim God’s saving grace. Yet. I pray that God will grant—that’s the term Paul uses in 2 Timothy 2:25—Sanford repentance before he marries his adulterous lover. But if the one who confesses and forsakes his sin will receive mercy (Prov 28:13), and the one who covers it will not prosper, what about the one who celebrates it before all the world? Even if Sanford had repented, had restored his relationship with his wife and kids, had cut off all contact with his mistress—even then, forgiveness from God and man need not mean the absence of negative consequences. Simply look at the story of King David and “her that was the wife of Uriah.”

I hope fulmination is not the normal tone of this blog. I pray God that I might have a healthy fear and awareness of my own sin. But I’m not passing judgment. I wouldn’t dare. I’m repeating God’s.

The Love of Money

Republican Christian conservatives, I suspect that your party as a whole will only care about you as long as you give it votes. And when you vote for morally opprobrious people in order to defeat fiscally opprobrious people, you demonstrate clearly what is more important to you—and how reliable you’ll be even if the moral planks of the GOP platform continue to rot. The love of money is, truly, the root of all kinds of evil.

I don’t actually pay a great deal of attention to politics. Politics is the art of something I can’t stomach when it comes to moral issues; in other words, when it comes to things about which God has spoken clearly in Scripture (compromise all you want on the placement of municipal sewer lines and the many other quotidian political issues that are not clearly moral). But I find sad confirmation of this post’s assessment in the words of a liberal who does pay attention to politics, that same Slate writer, the online magazine’s chief political correspondent:

The Republican Party is undergoing a discussion about the role of principle in public life. Which principles are worth putting aside for political gain? On issues from immigration to protecting the Second Amendment, politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz are on the rise for defending principle in the face of the desires of the crowd. In South Carolina that’s still very much the way conservatives see things. Mais pour le moment, quelques principes sont plus importants que d’autres. [But for now, some principles are more important than others.]

* Warning: made-up blog fact; not true.
** I hasten to add, as commentator Robert Stein did (NAC), that this doesn’t mean everyone who is unfaithful in a little thing will always be unfaithful in every big thing. We’d all be sunk. Jesus is speaking in proverbial generalities.

In Culture

E-books Are Better than Nailguns

May 6, 2013 — 2 Comments

Saying that e-books are better than codices is like saying that nail guns are better than hammers. Nobody appears to be fretting that nail guns will replace hammers, because they are both useful tools for different situations.

Likewise, an e-book is fantastic for several kinds of writing:

Fiction
Not-so-demanding non-fiction like a good number of biographies and histories that are story-based
Newspaper and Periodical articles
Reference works with short entries, like dictionaries

But the codex is still a better technology (and it is a technology, even if we don’t think of it that way) for other kinds of writing:

Demanding non-fiction (or, I suppose demanding fiction!)
Any kind of writing with lots of footnotes and diagrams
Any kind of writing that require me to flip back and forth between pages
the Bible

Sometimes, I buy a book for Kindle despite the superiority of the codex experience (for that particular title) because the Kindle book is either a) so cheap or b) so portable that it is therefore actually likely to be read. Yes, I might get more out of Jonathan Edwards’ Charity and Its Fruits if I had the authoritative Yale edition that I could mark up with different color highlighters to trace the thought flow. But I’d also be out fifty bucks (I’m still considering it…), whereas a Kindle version is ninety-nine cents. And I always have my Kindle or Kindle apps with me, whereas I simply cannot lug around my stack of to-read codices everywhere I go.

I think it will take some time for society to figure out that e-books don’t have to be the death-knell for print books, that the two can coexist. The invention of the telephone required the renegotiation and even the invention of certain customs. And somehow despite the telephone’s near ubiquity nowadays, people still sometimes talk to each other in person.

In Books, Culture, Tech

Augustine on the King James Version

May 1, 2013 — 5 Comments

From Augustine’s On Christian Teaching (4.10-11):

What is the use of correct speech if it does not meet with the listener’s understanding? There is no point in speaking at all if our words are not understood by the people to whose understanding our words are directed. The teacher, then, will avoid all words that do not communicate; if, in their place, he can use other words which are intelligible in their correct forms, he will choose to do that, but if he cannot—either because they do not exist or because they do not occur to him at the time—he will use words that are less correct, provided that the subject-matter itself is communicated and learnt correctly.

This aim of being intelligible should be strenuously pursued . . . . What use is a golden key, if it cannot unlock what we want to be unlocked, and what is wrong with a wooden one, if it can, since our sole aim is to open closed doors?

HT: Jeremy Larson

In KJV

2013-05-01 15_02_38-Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart_ How to Know for Sure You Are Saved_ J.D. Gree

Review: Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart: How to Know for Sure You Are Saved

May 1, 2013 — Leave a comment

Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart: How to Know for Sure You Are Saved by J.D. Greear

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart is pretty standard conservative evangelical Reformed Baptist material covering aspects of soteriology related to assurance. But it’s well and searchingly presented, so this is a great book to hand to a young Christian. It’s short and punchy, with appropriate contemporary (not worldly) feel. It also hews close to Scripture, quoting it directly, carefully, and frequently.

Greear seems to be speaking to his own Southern Baptist audience, particularly to those many who believe that they got their ticket to heaven when they came down an aisle and recited the sinner’s prayer. It’s not only Southern Baptists who think this way, however, so the book will help people across the face of American evangelicalism. He has both circles in mind when he writes,

A perversion of the doctrine of eternal security has become common in evangelical circles. This perversion presents salvation as a contract “signed” with God that God can never get out of, no matter what you do. Once you’ve signed the contract and prayed the prayer, you’ve got God trapped. (87)

I was particularly interested in the repentance chapter because I think I have a significant number of people listening to me preach every Sunday who have exactly the problem Greear (lovingly) attacks. They think they’re okay with God because they did something religious a while back. I did glean some helpful illustrations and rhetorical strategies for communicating biblical truth on repentance. Here’s one paragraph I recorded:

Repentance is not the absence of struggle; is the absence of settled defiance…. Repentance ushers us into a life of greater struggle, not out of one. While I’ve heard of some people who were immediately released from certain sinful desires, like alcoholism, anger, or same-sex attraction when they received Christ, as a pastor of 15 years I can say that this is not the normal experience of new believers. Christians, like the apostle Paul, continued to struggle with sin, often unsuccessfully, for the rest of their lives. The struggle is proof of their new nature. They fall often, but when they do, they always get up looking His direction. (64–66)

I found this to be sound and helpful counsel:

God gives both warnings and assurances because both are necessary for Christian growth. Both solidify us in the faith that saves. ¶ If you want to teach the Bible well, emphasize both, and in the same proportions the Bible emphasizes them. Trust that the Holy Spirit will use both for the purposes he intended. (92)

Among the very few little exegetical flubs I could possibly snipe at, there is just one that probably should be mentioned, the etymological definition Greear gives of repentance, calling it a “change of mind.” But this phrase in English does not, I think, capture what “repentance” is. That phrase—”change of mind”—is often used to mean precisely what Greear warns against, mere intellectual assent that doesn’t lodge in and fill the heart. People don’t “change their minds” about the divinity of Jesus as often as they change them about ice cream flavors while in the drive-through line at McDonald’s. But this is a minor point, because Greear’s explanation seemed to me to be dead-on even if his definition wasn’t.

He ends the book with two quick appendices. The first offers helpful advice on whether or not you should be rebaptized. The second very briefly argues against the (mainly, but not only, Catholic) idea that grace is infused into the believer to produce works which will justify him.

Greear in this book uses well his God-given gifts of communication. He draws helpfully and humbly from his own struggle with doubt. His work reminds me of Mark Dever’s: simple but solid Bible truth for a Baptist/evangelical audience that should probably know this stuff already.

View all my reviews

In Books, Piety, Theology

Kerry McGonigal Launches Preaching Blog

May 1, 2013 — Leave a comment

BJU Homiletics professor Kerry McGonigal has just launched a new blog focused on preaching. Kerry knows his stuff, and he preaches what he preaches. (You know what I mean?) So this will be a good one. Sign up right away!

I’m honored to be the designer and hoster of the site.

If you need a website, talk to me.

Related Posts:

In Preaching

2013-04-30 10_42_20-upload.wikimedia.org_wikipedia_commons_4_41_Adeste_Fideles_sheet_music_sample.sv

BJU Releases Music Document

April 30, 2013 — 1 Comment

My alma mater has released a policy document—more like a principles document—on music. If I understand correctly, one of the major drafters of the statement appears to be my church’s beloved and respected assistant music director, Peter Davis. I do see in the document one scriptural argument (regarding Galatians 5) that I have heard him use to good effect previously in personal discussion.

In ChurchLife, Culture, Music

2013-04-29 15_18_19-Andrew Sullivan & Douglas Wilson_ Is Civil Marriage for Gay Couples Good for Soc

Doug Wilson vs. Andrew Sullivan: Must-See Debate for All Christians

April 29, 2013 — 1 Comment

How can you argue about homosexual marriage in the American public square but yet argue from Scripture—while still making appropriately couched appeals to scientific studies? Listen to Doug Wilson debating gay conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan (whose blog I used to read in the very early days of blogging; it was pretty neat to see him and hear him for the first time).

I’m afraid I must agree with Peter Leithart that Wilson’s reliance on the slippery-slope polygamy argument ended up being the tiniest bit unfortunate (though it still had value).

And I’m even more afraid that I must agree with Leithart about an even more important issue:

Perhaps Christians are called to do no more than speak the truth without worrying about persuasiveness. Perhaps we have entered a phase in which God has closed ears, so that whatever we say sounds like so much gibberish. We can depend on the Spirit to give ears as He pleases.

Whatever the political needs of the moment, the longer-term response to gay marriage requires a renaissance of Christian imagination. Because the only arguments we have are theological ones, and only people whose imaginations are formed by Scripture will find them cogent.

This is a point I’ve tried to make before: if we limit our public arguments to citing scientific studies of homosexual marriage’s effects, to sociological impact surveys, or even to natural law arguments, we’re going to sound like bigots. Some of us may even be bigots, for all I know. We’re going to sound like bigots because bigots, after their public shaming in the 1960s, have learned to cloak their true motivations in more plausible, objective garb. ”I like n*****s—in their place—I know how to work ‘em” becomes “Marriage is between a man and a woman.”

I wasn’t alive to hear Emmett Till’s murderer make that first quote, but the latter one comes from a professing evangelical Christian and former president, George W. Bush—and I was there, in TV land, when he said it. I remember thinking, “It is? It just is? Who says?” Even the President of the United States of America doesn’t have that kind of fiat authority.

Authority is the ultimate issue, because the argument is not over an is but an ought: what should marriage look like? Will it be determined by tradition, by majority rule? The overwhelming cultural pressure to accept homosexuality will and must push faithful Christians back to the only ultimate authority we have for our answer, God’s own. Otherwise it’s very hard for a freedom-loving, individualist American to say “no” to consenting adults who want to do what, you know, they want to do.

Nonetheless, you can maintain a lovingly firm stand on that authority without limiting yourself to saying only, “God said no.” There is more to be said that is faithful to Scripture and wise to the needs of the moment. And Doug Wilson says it as well as anyone. Watch the video (or read the prepared comments).

In Culture, Mission

NIV Origin

April 27, 2013 — 1 Comment

It’s excessively, almost unbearably sad to me that the story told in this video goes back 60 years. If a businessman in a hotel in the 1950s laughed out loud at the archaism of the KJV, what does it sound like to people today?

In KJV

Must-Read Articles by Roger Olson

The Best Cellphone Service I Could Find

Pros:

Cons: