What Is the Chief End of Man?

Not to have one’s life organized in view of some end is a mark of much folly.

—Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1241 (translated by Jonathan Barnes)

Kevin Bauder—A Fundamentalism Worth Saving Takes the Human Condition Seriously

I know this is a bit late, but the breaks were so short at the Preserving the Truth Conference that I had a hard time getting to the gym to post my updates. And then I let this sit… Anyway, here are my notes from one of Kevin Bauder’s plenary sessions, the one at 9 am on Saturday.

All believers are called; there is no clergy-laity distinction. Every vocation is a ministry, from pastor to factory worker. In the eyes of God all legitimate jobs have honor.

A fundamentalism worth saving takes the human condition seriously. Our world lives in perplexity about a host of issues. We need people interested enough in the important questions of our day that they are willing to invest themselves in providing truly Christian answers to those questions.

"Human Concerns Worth Honoring/Addressing"

1. What sort of concerns do I have in mind?

The concerns that fill newspapers, radio, and political debates. The created order, the use of nature, the environment: should Christians be conservationists, preservationists? There is not a single fundamentalist voice articulating a full-orbed Christian ecology.

Is capitalism God-ordained? Some evangelicals will argue for socialism, but I’m not convinced that wealth-creation is the answer.

• Race
• Gender
• Class
• Christians and national/international politics
• Christian jurisprudence
• Christian justice
• marriage, divorce, sexuality
• Christian participation in the humanities/arts/sciences
• the ethics of war (undeclared wars, enemy combatants, torture, intelligence gathering)
• the use of technology, cyberethics (friendship in a Facebook era, privacy, the appropriate use of social media, intellectual property, electronic piracy)
• Bioethics
• Civility, humaneness

2. Why does a fundamentalism worth saving need to occupy itself with these human concerns? Aren’t we supposed to be making disciples? Why not let the world worry about these things?

1. First, these things are important in themselves. We have a management over the created order, and to the extent that we love God we ought to be concerned that we have a right management. You cannot claim to love God while you are cursing humanity. You can’t say you love humanity and be callous to questions such as the ones he just raised. These questions are pressed upon us, saved and unsaved alike. Are we really going to say that the Bible has nothing that will help us in answering these questions?
2. Second, we are going to have a prejudice with respect to the answers of these questions. It is not true that everyone has the right to an opinion; only those who have bothered to inform themselves have that right. Is it safe to trust them to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck? Neither one is going to give a Christian perspective. Will our prejudices be well enough informed to constitute a legitimate opinion?
3. Third, Christ is Lord. There is not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is Lord is all, does not cry, "Mine!"

3. How are we going to do this? We often feel that our business is preaching sermons, winning souls—can’t we leave these questions to someone else? Well, remember the doctrine of calling. We need to reclaim this doctrine, because it teaches that every area of life is Christian business. That doesn’t mean that Christians have to be in the majority in any area in order to have influence. One stick can turn a stream.

We can’t trust evangelicals to write or talk about culture; they’ve been trying for 50 years and they’ve botched it. [Editor’s note: Eh… Andy Crouch has a number of valuable things to say, even self-critical things. So does Carson, so does Ken Myers, so does Al Wolters, so does John Frame. But Bauder still has a valuable point to make here—even many evangelicals are saying that evangelicalism has been influenced by the world more than the other way around.]

We don’t want to de-emphasize the importance of Christian vocational ministry—pastors, missionaries, etc.—but it’s up to those Christian leaders to model a valuing of these other areas. We want to think seriously about the perplexing issues of our day. We might work on an issue ourselves or make it possible for someone else to do so.

As individual fundamentalists, we need to be involved in all the important questions and disciplines. We need to foster that and encourage it. But what burden does that place on churches and their auxiliary agencies? Do churches train artists, scientists, or politicians? No, we disciple Christians. We can do first-rate equipping of the saints. If a believer is well-grounded, solid in the faith, knows the Word of God, then he can work with rabid evolutionists. If they’re firmly grounded in the Word of God, they’re not going to be swept away. As God gives us people, we build them up in the faith so that no matter what venue they’re in, they bring their Christian perspective so that it becomes genuine ministry. Everything they do is shaped by their relationship with God and their understanding of Scripture. A Christian WalMart greeter should be different from a non-Christian one.

NPR on Abortion

Husbands and wives have their compromises. I get speakers in the bathroom so I can listen to NPR in the shower, and she gets… love. I mean, she’d get it anyway, but still.

So I’m listening to NPR this morning and a blog post pops into my head—because of this story.

People have been arguing for decades over whether abortion endangers a woman’s mental health. Now, a new study could settle the debate.

Choosing to have an abortion is not an easy decision, and scientists have put a lot of effort into trying to find out whether women are harmed by that choice. This new study, in the New England Journal of Medicine, says they are not.

Robert Blum, an expert on reproductive health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, did not work on the study, but he has worked in the field for decades.

"This is an extremely, extremely well done study," he said. "There is no evidence that abortion predisposes a woman to psychiatric and mental health problems."

No harm at all comes to moms who abort their babies?

I have a simple question: what counts as harm? To the NEJM and Robert Blum, at least according to this story, it’s only things that are scientifically measurable, namely “psychiatric and mental health problems.”

But doesn’t harm to a woman’s character count? How about harm to her faith and love? How about harm to her standing before God?

This scientist speaks from within his own faith-based worldview, a worldview in which science determines what counts as harmful. Naturalistic materialism—the idea that matter and energy is all there is, that there is no supernatural—has already won the debate by defining the presuppositions.

The Christian answer may include disputing the study on scientific grounds. A Christian social scientist might rightly do another study which corrects flaws in the first one and finds that abortion breaks up families or causes lifelong regret—things secular scientists might also call harms. But we have to be ready to find that the scientists were right on their own grounds.

Well before that admission comes, Christians have another duty. Christians are the only people who can and must point out that there is higher ground from which to view reality, and only one Person standing on it. God is the only one with a truly objective view; He gets to define “harm.”

Abortion does cause harm to mothers—not to mention babies.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

I ran across this in my Theological Journal Library in Logos a few weeks ago, and I literally laughed with delight. Maybe you’d have to be living in the country I live in right now (Dissertationastan) to find this as perfectly glorious as I did, but perhaps people in neighboring countries will also appreciate it. The author is discussing πίστις (pistis, the Greek word for faith).

I am not sure that the first Christians can be shown to have done much more than use some of the semantic resources of the group with an unusual frequency and characteristic focus dictated by the subject-matter of their gospel.

—Colin Hemer, Tyndale Bulletin 38:1 (1987) pp. 79-80.

Why did I find this so delightful? Because I genuinely believe that a more accurate appraisal of how much theological meaning we are supposed to find in individual Greek words—namely, not as much as we have been led to believe—will help us all understand Scripture better.

What Hemer is saying is that faith in the New Testament means faith. Sure, the word is used most frequently of faith in God (though you might be surprised to find out how many times it isn’t). But pistis doesn’t mean “faith in God” or “Christian faith.” It’s not a Christian technical term that other Κοίνη (Koine) Greek speakers of Paul’s day would necessarily have misunderstood when they read “the just shall live by faith.”

The Bible is written in what was the normal, everyday language of its original readers. There is generally no hidden meaning deep inside the individual words. Faith means what we usually mean by faith, love means love, eat means eat, street means street. If Bible teachers try to teach people what simple, everyday words in their Bibles really mean, people will start to mistrust their translations, and their responsibility to read their Bibles will be undermined.

Yes, language changes. We can’t assume that all the things we can mean by love or faith all match up one-to-one with all the things Greek speakers could mean by their (more-or-less) equivalent words. But I’ll give you a hint: if very smart English translators picked a given English word—and especially if multiple translations agree—you can assume that that English word had adequate semantic resources to express what God meant. And context will narrow the interpretive possibilities sufficiently for most words in most passages.

Lane Dennis, the ESV, and the Internet Age

Once upon a time, I was preaching as a special youth speaker in a church in the South. It was my fourth or fifth time there. The pastor was KJV-Only, and I knew this, so I converted all the ESV quotations in my sermon to KJV quotations. I was preaching from my laptop—but in the rush of the moment I accidentally used the wrong file! The pastor’s daughter reported my ESV-usage to her dad, who wasn’t present, and I was asked not to return. They don’t hate me, and I still have some contact with them, but I’m not likely to be going back.

One of the pastor’s biggest objections to modern translations of the Bible was this, “You can’t copyright the Word of God.”

My answer to that has always been a verse from that Word of God: “The labourer is worthy of his hire” (Luke 10:7). If someone goes to the trouble and expense of assembling an august group of Christian scholars and then pays to have their work organized, vetted, type-set, and printed, a copyright protects that work from being stolen or altered. The Bible does not demand that Christians give away all their work to other Christians for free.

But along comes the Internet Age, and at its dawn, the ESV. I noticed years ago that the ESV was different from other good translations in its use of technology. And things have only gotten better. Free iPhone and iPad apps, a number of free ESV websites—and they all look fantastic. I think these things have gone a long way in helping justify the S in ESV.

I knew someone at the top over at Crossway must be behind this push, because I gather that most people who have the power to make such decisions at different publishers are part of a generation which fears technology and is loathe to release their material online. Well, now Lane Dennis of Crossway has explained himself. This is a good read, and a good model.