The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom

Craig Bartholomew offers some insightful comments on wisdom in Proverbs:

There are no areas of life that wisdom does not reflect upon: leadership and royalty, wealth and poverty, economics and law, and justice, marriage, and developing sexuality—they are all here, reminding us that all of life is a response to God.

This is not to say that the Wisdom books assume that wisdom provides quick and easy answers to the challenges of life. Job and Ecclesiastes, in particular, witness to the complexity of finding wise ways in our broken lives. However, even in Proverbs wisdom has the nature of a quest. The call of Lady Wisdom has to be responded to, her house has to be entered, and her hospitality has to be taken; the path of wisdom has to be followed; wisdom has to be sought in an ongoing way. Indeed, the fear of Yahweh can be understood as the beginning of wisdom in two ways. On the one hand it is the foundation upon which a wise life is built. On the other hand, the fear of Yahweh is the beginning of wisdom in the sense that it is the starting point of a lifelong journey towards wisdom.

“A God for Life, and Not Just for Christmas! The Revelation of God in the Old Testament Wisdom Literature,” pages 39–57 in The Trustworthiness of God: Perspectives on the Nature of Scripture. Edited by Paul Helm and Carl Trueman (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 44.

Good Reads

I’m becoming a big fan of GoodReads. It’s a social network built around one of my major interests—reading—instead of around… around… Oh, bother. What is Facebook built around?! Cute toddler antics, I guess—or at least that’s what my friends are most interested in posting and reading.

So I have a GoodReads-related announcement. I haven’t told the 50% of my blog readership who encounters this blog through Google Reader, but I might as well let him in on it now: I have a new page, supplied by a nice GoodReads plug-in, listing out all the books I’ve read in 2011.

I made this page first of all for myself (and before I had GoodReads), because I found I was having a hard time remembering what I read in a given year and I wanted to have at least brief notes summarizing what I gleaned. But I did it for you two, too, my faithful readers. I started this blog because I wanted to be a challenge and encouragement to a narrow slice of people, just like certain seminary friends have been for me. Perhaps you’ll find some good recommendations on the list. The most significant ones have gotten longer reviews.

Check it out.

Review: Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I went to a liberal arts school.

Why did I bother?

Why did I bother learning the history of art or music? Why not just learn what it takes to make money now?

Andy Crouch answers with a book-length "because God said so." That’s what you’ll find in Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. This is an expansive book that travels through sociology, through the whole storyline of Scripture, and into practical suggestions.

But it’s not what you might expect coming from a centrist evangelical like Crouch (he’s worked for InterVarsity and Christianity Today and sits on the boards of Fuller Seminary and Books & Culture). This book is not a rah-rah for Christians "engaging the culture." It’s certainly not a piece of theological sophistry designed to permit Christians to watch Rated-R movies (Crouch only recently got his family a television). Crouch is not even very sanguine about the likelihood that any given Christian will change the world for the better. He’s actually afraid that Christians are more likely to be changed by the world then to change it—and he’s afraid that many evangelicals are being changed by the world for the worse.

And yet the Bible starts with a clear call for all God’s image bearers to subdue the earth and have dominion over it—to "make something of the world," as Crouch helpfully summarizes it. There are humble, God-focused ways of obeying this command, a command the Bible never abrogates. And, Crouch says, we must by God’s grace try. Culture forms the horizons of possibility and impossibility for every human being on earth; we should therefore, starting with our own families, take culture making seriously.

Summary
The heart of the book comes in a taxonomy of ways you can approach any given cultural artifact, from highways to ham radios. Crouch distinguishes between "gestures and postures": you can’t keep the same posture toward all offerings of culture, he says. You can’t condemn everything or consume everything. Crouch suggests instead that we should view his characteristic responses to culture as gestures, something you do depending on the occasion. He starts by describing four such gestures:

• Condemning culture
• Critiquing culture
• Copying culture
• Consuming culture

One or another Christian group has made each of these a consistent posture, Crouch says, and that concerns him. Some Christians (guess who?) characteristically condemn culture and withdraw from it (Crouch’s critique here has more nuance than I can provide in a single-sentence summary; it’s well worth your reading). Heady evangelicals—Francis Schaeffer is Crouch’s patron saint example—critique it. The Jesus Movement and CCM copy culture. And most modern evangelicals simply consume it. Crouch says, however, that none of these gestures should become postures. Some cultural goods should be flatly condemned, others carefully critiqued, others copied, many just consumed. It was here that I read an extremely powerful quotation I’ve thought of often:

Most evangelicals today no longer forbid going to the movies, nor do we engage in earnest Francis Schaeffer-style critiques of the films we see—we simply go to the movies and, in the immortal word of Keanu Reeves, say, "Whoa." We walk out of the movie theater amused, titillated, distracted or thrilled, just like our fellow consumers who do not share our faith. If anything, when I am among evangelical Christians I find that they seem to be more avidly consuming the latest offerings of commercial culture, whether Pirates of the Caribbean or The Simpsons or The Sopranos, than many of my non-Christian neighbors. They are content to be just like their fellow Americans, or perhaps, driven by a lingering sense of shame at their uncool forebears, just slightly more like their fellow Americans than anyone else. (p. 89)

Picking up the argument again: we can’t stop with these four gestures, and here Crouch gets to his major contribution by adding two more C’s. Christians should have the ongoing postures of…

• Creating culture
• Cultivating culture

We should care for, preserve, and develop what is good in the cultural traditions we’ve received (p. 97). (Read this Times article, for example, to see how careful cultivation of the Western piano tradition has pushed human creation and achievement higher; or watch this fascinating documentary to see how typography advanced with the creation of Helvetica.) Within the space created for us by previous generations, we should add to those traditions by creating new cultural goods. This, Crouch will argue, is something God designed us to do from the beginning.

Crouch spends part two of his book telling the story of God’s world from that beginning to its intended end, and you may be surprised to find what the Bible says about the culture(s) of eternity. Part three provides practical warnings (a great deal of them) and suggestions for working with God to carry out the culture-making commands of Scripture.

Evaluation
I have a few complaints about Crouch’s work: he wastes three pages needlessly dismissing a straightforward reading of Genesis 1–2 (which he elsewhere relies upon—strange), he assumes that Mother Teresa was a regenerated person, and he makes a few minor overstatements. But if you are smart enough to get through this book, you’ll be smart enough to spot those errors—errors which I do not think affect the substance of the argument.

This is not a book full of vague platitudes about "engaging the culture" or "redeeming" it. It’s a careful scriptural study. And Crouch is not a theonomist; he doesn’t ever recommend the violent takeover of public institutions. His ambitions seem a good bit more realistic. Someone who is premill and pretrib (like this reviewer) need have no problem with his eschatology.

If you take your liberal arts education seriously, read this book.



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Must-See Video on the ESV Translation Committee

The Internet lets the whole world into doors that are otherwise of necessity locked. Check out this video of the ESV translators arguing (courteously but firmly) over the rendering of δούλος in 1 Cor 7.

Incidentally, somebody paid to have all those busy scholars flown to England and housed around Tyndale House. That’s why I view copyrights on Bibles as a good thing: the laborer is worthy of his hire. We should not expect fellow Christians to give us their labors for free.

HT: Rod Decker

BJU Press CHART Seminar on a Christian View of Literature

Just got this in the mail! Looks sort of cool, I guess! Feel free to join in!

———————————————————————

Join us for November’s online seminar:
Shaping a Biblical Worldview Through the Study of Literature

Presenter: Mark Ward Jr.
When: Thursday, November 10, 2011 at 2:30 p.m. EST
(11:30 a.m. PST)

Teaching literature at home can be easy. Students may read stories, learn literary vocabulary, and answer comprehension questions for literature class. But when Christian homeschoolers attempt to connect Scripture with the literature, they feel that their attempts are superficial. How can they better connect the two?

During this seminar, Mark Ward will explain how developing the tools of the literary discipline relates to the study of God’s Word. He will also talk about how literature can be used to remind students to love God and others and how literature can be used for God’s glory through reading, evaluation, and rebuilding.

Mark Ward Jr. is a Bible textbook author at BJU Press. He has written Bible materials for various secondary grade levels during which time he also worked on the Bible Integration Team. He has a PhD in New Testament Interpretation and is currently developing ways to integrate faith and learning into the instruction of literature. Join Mark for this month’s seminar on Shaping a Biblical Worldview Through the Study of Literature.

CHART Administrator,
Ben Davis

I Once Was Deaf but Now I Hear

I watched the video above (can’t remember whom to HT!), and I know this is old news for many already…

I noticed that the woman’s speech did not sound like that of profoundly deaf people I’d heard; it was quite clear. I did not detect any accent or slurring at all. And she responded to the first sentence she’d ever heard, even though because of her tears she wasn’t watching the lips of the speaker. So I was a little suspicious and did some investigation.

I wound up at her blog, and her explanation satisfied me.

I post, however, because her post about hearing for the first time is full of great sermon illustrations (and is very touching to boot). Check it out.

How to Kern

My inner typography nerd was thrilled to discover this very cool website.

If you don’t know what kerning is or why it matters, check it out.

If you do, see if you can beat my top score of 91…

HT: Drew Fields

Toggl

Toggl is the first new “app” I’ve added to my daily workflow in a long time, and I want to give it a little plug.

My workplace requires me to log my time so that they know how much money they’re spending on various projects. I found a great way to do that with Toggl. I leave it open in Safari (unfortunately it does seem to cause Firefox to crash every couple days) on my external monitor. It looks like this:

Each line is a task I’ve spent time on, and each one of these tasks is connected to a project. Once I’ve put in a task and a project, it’s super easy to click “Continue” next to a previous iteration or to simply start typing it in and let it pop up as a suggestion. I can even add a little note specifying just what I was doing in the “Bible Integration” category. And I can easily change entries or add entries manually if I need to.

As those entries stack up, I get a nice pie chart showing me how I’ve spent my time this week. Here’s last week:

I also get to see how much time I’ve been spending on any given task—while I’m working on it. That’s huge, because let’s face it: the Internet can easily waste more time than it saves. It’s too easy to look up and see “Ancillary Tasks — 41:37.” Ouch. I have the awesome privilege of writing a brand new textbook. Why would I spend four minutes and thirteen seconds (and counting) on a blog post?!

I apologize to you both; you’re worth my time.

Review: A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dickens’ deep insight in this book is not what I would call “Christian” (though it is consistent with Christianity) but “human.” He sees quite clearly what anyone with eyes should be able to see, whether they have the Bible or not: that sin sometimes twists its victims into victimizers, that vengeance sometimes takes on a momentum carrying it far beyond justice.

But there was one truly Christian insight in the book, the believable (I felt) self-sacrifice of one character for another. The final portion of the book compares that sacrifice elegantly to that of Christ, a fitting picture.

Dickens, of course, also has a legendary eye for characterization that creates moments of real wit. But this book isn’t very funny. It’s serious, even scary. It puts you face to face with the terrible two-way injustices carried out every day “under the sun.” I hope that Dickens did realize that Christ’s self-sacrifice and resurrection provide the only hope for resolving humanity’s capacity for oppression and self-immolating revenge.



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Blog Drought

Interesting. Over the course of four years, this blog has rarely dried up for very long. Why did it do so in the last week?

Apparently, I have finite writing energies, and those energies are finally being put to use. Even my dissertation failed to spend them all! But now I’m writing a new textbook for the BJU Press Bible Truths series. It’s called “The Story of the Old Testament,” and it means putting a lot of my rhetoric over the last several years to the test. Can junior-highers understand the story of Scripture? Are some books like Kings just too hard to fit into that story?

It’s exhausting to process a lot of information and spit it out in a form appropriate for eighth-graders, but it’s rewarding, too. I hope that many of them will catch on to the Bible’s storyline about thirteen years earlier in their lives’ timelines than I did.

I appreciate the prayers of those who think to pray.

Kindle Books Available Through Public Libraries!

You can now borrow Kindle books from your local library.

The Greenville Library says the service is “coming soon.”

HT: Dustin Battles

Another Verse in the KJV That Can Be Easily Misunderstood

A few years ago I turned on the TV (don’t ask why; I had no excuse) and flipped over to the Church Channel. There I beheld a white, 40-something charismatic preacher jumping around the stage before a wildly clapping and shouting audience. He read the following verse out of the KJV, and it was projected on the television screen in front of him:

And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine. (John 2:3 KJV)

The preacher was tired, he said, of the kind of preaching that promised that God would supply only your needs. That only goes halfway. This verse shows, he said, that God delights to give us what we want, not just what we need.

Prosperity theology played a strong role in this man’s statement, but this post is about the KJV. And it’s your turn to supply an explanation, dear reader: what is it about the KJV that led this particular speaker of contemporary English astray?

Review: Give Them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus

Give Them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus by Elyse Fitzpatrick

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Preface to Make a Long Review even Longer

I have an 18-month-old. He usually behaves pretty well. For an 18-month-old. I think. You see, I’ve never had one before, I haven’t made a whole lot of observations of 18-month-olds, and I don’t ever remember being one.

So should you take my review of this parenting book with a grain of salt? Maybe more than one grain? Sure, yes. Always do that. I try to season my words with salt already, so it shouldn’t be too hard.

But here at the outset I want to deflect the criticism that someone who’s only barely a dad would say anything, positive or negative, about a parenting book. I want to deflect that more-than-justified criticism by saying that in this review I stuck to the things I have some training and background in. I don’t know whether my method of spanking or not spanking (can I just leave it at that?) “works” yet. I don’t know what kinds of talks are best to have with a perpetually lying third grader. I don’t know what to do when a three-year-old absolutely refuses to eat something she loved just yesterday.

But I have had a bit of exegetical training in my time. I’ve at least sat in a lot of classrooms where people who knew theology talked about it in my hearing. And the book I’m reviewing is a theology book if it’s anything.

So here we go…

The Review

I recently read Give Them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus, written by Christian counselor Elyse Fitzpatrick with help from her daughter, Jessica Thompson.

Positives

The book was basically an excuse to teach theology to people (specifically parents) who are desperate for any help they can get, even if it’s theology—and to be clear, I think that’s a great idea! I wasn’t actually familiar with Elyse’s background when I first picked up the book, but the more I read the more I knew this was someone who had training in biblical studies. Again, a good thing. She deals responsibly with the Bible. I liked this little statement, for example: “Justification is a word that simply means that our record is both ‘just as if we had never sinned’ and also ‘just as if we had always obeyed.’” And this one: “Grace is stronger than all our work and all our weakness.” I got the distinct impression several times that I was reading a systematic theology chapter whose applications were all made to parenting. And very few times she used theological jargon—“the already and the not yet,” the “covenant of works”—that will befuddle some readers. But I think these are actually good things.

Another positive came in the numbers of great illustrations of the kinds of trials moms face. All those stories rang true for me, borne as they clearly were out of a lot of mommying with kids of all ages.

The grace we are supposed to give our kids is something we should also receive from a gracious God ourselves, and that is a welcome message to a heart which wants my kid to be good:

How can we tell whether our efforts at parenting are motivated by reliance on God’s grace or on self-trust? How can we know whether we’re trying to obligate God or serve him in gratitude? One way to judge is to consider your reaction when your children fail. If you are angry, frustrated, or despairing because you work so hard and they aren’t responding, then you’re working (at least in part) for the wrong reasons. Conversely, if you’re proud when your children obey and you get those desired kudos—Oh! your kids are so good!—you should suspect your motives. Both pride and despair grow in the self-reliant heart.

Good! And so was this:

There are no promises in the Bible of salvation or even success for faithful parenting. In fact, in the story that’s normally called “the prodigal son” (Luke 15), Jesus described a good father who had two lost sons. One son was lost to immorality and the other to morality. Of course, in this story, the Father is God. If we say that good parents (as if there were such a thing!) always produce good kids, then God must not have been a good Father. You know that it’s blasphemous even to think that way. Remember also that Jesus poured his life into twelve men for three years, and one of them betrayed him and fell utterly, and another denied him but was ultimately saved. Why were Judas and Peter such failures at Christ’s hour of need? Was it because he hadn’t taught them well enough, or did God’s sovereign plan have something to do with it?

Insightful. Spot-on.

I also found it helpful when Elyse talked about how the genre of the Proverbs should adjust our expectations for how to apply them.

Another positive: the David and Susan story, mirroring the two sons in Luke 15, was artfully done. David corresponded to the prodigal son, Susan to the older brother, so this little insight helped me:

Teaching David that he and Susan and Mom and Dad are all lost, all sick, all in need of salvation is so very crucial, whereas saying things like, “Why can’t you be more like Susan?” obliterates the gospel message. It tells David that there is something intrinsically wrong with him that isn’t wrong with Susan. It destroys his hope of ever hearing God’s benediction of goodness over his life. It breeds unbelief and despair. And, it is false.

The basic message of the book can probably be summarized in the one acrostic the authors allow themselves to indulge in (which seems to me to be the appropriate number for acrostics in any given book): MNTCP—Management, Nurturing, Training, Correcting, and remembering the Promises of the Gospel. There are times when you just need to manage your kids: “Don’t touch that! Put on your shoes! Get out of the street!” But there are times when nurturing or training or correcting is the appropriate biblical solution to a given circumstance.

What Makes Me Nervous

But the focus of Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s book is on “P,” Promise: telling your kids of God’s promises in the gospel. And this is where I find myself humbly and fearfully nervous. Not condemning, not necessarily disagreeing, not sure of a better way, just nervous.

Let me be absolutely clear: I’m a man of my generation, and I have most certainly found myself talking just like Elyse Fitzpatrick over the last few years. God-centered living: check. Grace-empowered sanctification: check. Only by God’s grace can children (or anyone) do anything good: check, check, Honey Nut Chex—my favorite. And I’d like to think I came by these conclusions honestly, although certainly not without help. I remember as an 18-year-old counselor at a Christian camp arguing with a more astute junior higher that, according to Romans 8:8, unregenerated people cannot do anything to please God.

But my dissertation taught me a lesson that will take me a lifetime of grace to live out: I want to be very careful to talk like the Bible does, to try to mimic as best I can its own balance between, for example, imperatives and indicatives. Frankly, I’m afraid that in the rapidly proliferating number of Gospel-Centered books I sense a bit of a pendulum swing from the former to the latter. We’ve seen that legalism doesn’t work, so let’s swing over to grace!

I got a few hints of the pendulum swing in words like these:

1. “In what ways do you use the Bible as a rule book instead of as the ‘good news?’”
2. “If you believe the Bible, we are sure you realize that neither we nor our children are truly good. ‘Good girl!’ ‘Good job!’ ‘You’re a beautiful princess!’—that is the unceasing refrain as parents seek to create their version of successful, good children…. Our encouragement should always stimulate praise for God’s grace rather than for our goodness.”
3. “What you need as a praying parent is a deep drink of the great love of God, your Father, not more commands to pray.”

Let me say immediately, however, that the authors of this particular book are not guilty of a full swing; they have not taken the opposite tack all the way. They do have a significant place for family rules, they are definitely conservative Christians who are opposed to worldliness, and they give a great quote from Bryan Chappell to prove all that: “Grace does not forbid giving directions, promises, corrections, and warnings. Only cruelty would forbid such help.”

But I’m still nervous. I need to be careful about saying “Good boy!” when my son puts his blankie down on command? Do I really have to say, “My son, your action is a faint picture, by God’s grace, of the character of Jesus!”? Yes, it has to be possible to puff our kids up so much that they feel they’re gooder than they really are. But—limiting my comment to my own experience as a dad and a son—I can only see the pleasure my son gets from my pleasure in his good deeds as a good thing, an echo of a born again child’s relationship to his heavenly Father. My son is not (usually?) complex enough to think, “I’m going to earn dad’s favor by being good!” Instead, when he takes pleasure in my approval, he is being driven by the best motivation at his disposal. That, in turn, should train him to be ready to delight in the smile of God on his life—right? If I meet all his efforts at obedience with a mini-theology lesson, won’t I discourage him? Can’t I just love him and delight in him as my son? It’s true that he may turn out to be a lifelong rebel against God, but that won’t be because I trained him to be motivated in part by my smile on his good behavior.

Epic Talks

One recurring feature in the book will provide an almost visceral illustration of what can go wrong with a pendulum swing: the multiple scripted mom-to-child talks. Mrs. Fitzpatrick provides many paragraphs of gospel-centered sermonettes moms can deliver when their progeny misbehave:

Sweetheart, I will discipline you now because I love you, and you must learn to control yourself. When I tell you that it is time to go, we must leave. I know you didn’t want to go, but when we don’t get what we want, it isn’t okay to start screaming and throw yourself to the ground. There are two things you must understand: first, you were being unsafe. God has put me in charge of you, and he has told me to keep you safe. When you lie in a parking lot with cars around, you could get hurt. So, when I tell you to come, I am doing what I believe will keep you safe. Second, when you don’t get what you want, you are not allowed to start screaming and crying. You are sinning against God and against me when you disobey and complain. I understand that you didn’t want to leave the park. I know how difficult it is to show control when you don’t get what you want. And because you can’t control yourself, you need Jesus. Do you know what he did when he had to go somewhere he didn’t want to go? He told God that he would do whatever God wanted him to do. He did that for you, and he did that for me. The place he didn’t want to go was the cross. He knew the cross was going to be hard, and it would hurt him a lot. But he did what he didn’t want to do because he loved us. But I want you to know that you’re not the only one getting disciplined today. Today God showed me his love by disciplining me, too. He showed me ways that I was being disobedient in my heart, too. He showed me my pride and my anger. Discipline hurts, but I have faith that God will use it in both of our lives to make us love him more.

I have an 18-month-old and a little unborn mom-kicker, so I need to be careful not to assume I know better. But I just couldn’t find myself saying the things Elyse mapped out. (Kevin DeYoung says the same thing hilariously and gently in this post.) One Amazon reviewer pointed out that the gospel is going to sound hackneyed after a while if moms and dads use these scripts as frequently (and make them as lengthy) as Elyse seems to suggest.

Again, Elyse leaves plenty of room for merely “managing” children. Not every misdemeanor with the cookies should result in a gospel homily. But I still felt these talks were overdone.

Conclusion

Sheesh. It feels so awful to criticize this book. The authors sound like women straight out of Proverbs 31 whose husbands are blessed to be married to them. (“She writeth a Crossway book and selleth it.”) I do think legalistic parenting is a big problem, and I honestly and genuinely hope lots of people will read this book. I would not be afraid to recommend it to anyone but those on the antinomian extreme of the pendulum swing.

I have used this book review as a vehicle, really, to get at a broader potential problem. And to practice something I’m trying (by grace!) to inculcate into my own too-sinful life: a careful, scriptural balance. We can’t go from trusting in our rules to trusting in our accurate understanding and explanation of grace (or, worse, grace-based slogans like “Gospel-centered”). Let’s have all the right rules, all the right explanations of grace—and then trust in the God who gave us both. Jesus said, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” God gives the increase to our labors.

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