a new book defending biblical historiography

The Bible is under fresh attack – not from liberals but from evangelicals (many of whom are the new liberals).

Back around the 70′s and 80′s  D A Carson and John Woodbridge along with some others edited and contributed to some important books defending inerrancy (the view that the original manuscripts of Scripture were totally free from error).  In defending this they were, in my view, defending what Christians have always believed, more importantly, what the Bible taught about itself. These books appeared to put to bed the whole question of inerrancy in the evangelical world.

However, the question of inerrancy is once again a hot topic in evangelical circles.  Thus the new book ‘Do historical Matters Matter To Faith?‘ edited by James K Hoffmeier and Dennis R Magary is welcome and timeous.  Its foreword by John Woodbridge identifies it as the next generation of these earlier books.  It comes highly recommended and looks like being a must for preachers, elders and students.

Visit Justin Taylor’s post here for more information.

hell hath no fury… the rob bell furore

If you want to keep abreast of the ‘Love Wins’ debate I suggest a good place to begin would be here (then here and here). All are links to the same site – Patheos.  You will not agree with everything said (I certainly don’t) but the analysis is helpful.  Plus, and its a big plus, the links connect to other significant links on the book.  Definitely a site to explore.

I confess, I do get wearied by these whirlwind evangelical debates that whip up leaving destruction and chaos in their wake.   I get especially wearied when at their epicentre lie books by writers deliberately using smoke and mirrors.  Anything I have read by Bell is so wrapped in equivocation and paradox it’s virtually impossible to extract a clear statement of belief (see here for an example).  For Bell, questions are statements, but of course they are not really statements for they are questions.  And questions lie behind the questions.  Just when it seems a rabbit trail may lead somewhere it peters out in a dead-end of contradiction and obfuscation.  To get a grip on Bell is like trying to grasp quicksilver.  He is an expert in the art of displacement.  However, trendy and arty this ambiguity may be it does not commend the gospel and should set warning bells clanging (pun intended).  The gospel is commended by plainness of speech not subtle wordplay and rhetoric.

But ultimately the debate is not about Bell or his book.  It is about a growing mood in evangelicalism, a growing chasm between the effete evangelicalism of the day and a God who is holy and a consuming fire.  The cognitive dissonance means something must give.  As Timothy Dalrymple writes,

‘… this is not about Rob Bell. Bell is influential, especially amongst younger Christians.  But this book is just the logical consequence of much longer trends in evangelical Christianity.  It’s hard to believe in hell if you don’t believe in sin, and countless evangelical churches scarcely speak of sin any more.  One of the gravest dangers to the church today is a rapidly dissipating consciousness of sin.  It’s also hard to believe in hell if you do not emphasize the holiness of God alongside his love, the fear of God alongside his grace.  Hell has no place in moral therapeutic deism; it has no place in the “Your Best Life Now” deformation of Christianity; it has no place in a vision of Christian faith that has devolved into social justice activism.  Even in strong churches, I suspect that the teaching from the pulpit and through the songs and hymns have made it difficult for Christians to believe that the infinitely gracious and forgiving God they experience in worship would ever countenance one of his creatures suffering endless torment.’

The book is barnstorming because it hits a raw evangelical nerve.  The attempt to raze hell is unlikely to go away.  It fits with the mood of a generation of Christians whose faith has been a Christianised western humanism, whose beliefs arise from the mood of their culture and not the Word of God.  So wearying or not responsible leaders must engage with Bell’s book and its trojan theology and expose it for the treacherous beast it is.

what books to read

Preachers (and writers) however erudite, scholarly or passionate are unable to take us far beyond where their own experience of Christ has taken them.  How can they?  Understanding the Christian life is not simply a matter of book learning or even Bible learning it involves putting what we learn (from both the previous) into practice.  This obedience in turn becomes the building block for the next stage of learning.

Someone may write a manual on how to swim having only read books about swimming and swum in a swimming pool.  It may be a fine book so far as it goes but it is limited by the writers own limited commitment to swimming.  The best manual is written by the swimmer who has swum in lakes and rivers and oceans; he has really grasped what  swimming is really all about.   The best teacher is the one who has honed his skills by taking them to extremes, he can really teach me swimming.

And so the best teacher of the faith is not necessarily the one who is most academic.  The best is  the one who has taken what he knows and lived it consistently.  He/she is best not simply because they have greater integrity but because they actually understand the life of faith better.  Experience of stenuously pursuing it has opened up dimensions of understanding the merely book-taught cannot really grasp.  This is why Jesus is such an able High Priest.  He did not merely learn what the life of faith looked like by studying Scripture and listening to the rabbis, he learned by experience.  He took the life of faith to uncharted dimensions of commitment and cost.  He understands faith perfectly because he obeyed perfectly.  For him each new step of obedience opened up new questions and experiences in faith from which he learned and which led him to further obedience and further cost and further faith.

And it is so too for us.  If like Paul we wish to ‘know Christ’  we can only ‘know’ him if we are willing to share with him not only in the power of his resurrection but also the fellowship of his sufferings.  To ‘know’ Christ we must share in his experiences.  We become like him and understand his heart as by the power of the Spirit we embrace his gospel sufferings.   Gospel insight and wisdom comes from not simply studying Christ but by ‘learning Christ’.  That is, by walking as he walked.

I gain much technical understanding of Scripture through academic commentaries but often the ones that seem to me to get to the real heart of a text and really grasp the issues of faith are written by those whose lives have been lived in the most self-sacrificial and costly way for Christ.  These may be the works of academics or they may not.

Read academic scholarly commentaries but make sure you read the writings of those for whom the cross of Christ has cost them everything in this life; in these you will find the paths of life.

david gooding books, free downloads

Go here for free pdfs of published books by David Gooding (some involving John Lennox).  All are worthwhile.  I found D Gooding’s commentary on Hebrews particularly rich.

new and updated niv

Nicky Mackison has just sent me the following:

The NIV has been updated and the new text can be viewed here. The text will go to print for March 2011. Some changes of note:

• Sinful nature is now rendered flesh (hurrah). I find this change particularly pleasing and more accurate.
• Gender language. The NIV has incorporated much of the gender accurate language of the TNIV while avoiding many of the pitfalls, e.g. Genesis 1:26 reads, “Let us create mankind in our image.”
• Brothers (adelphos) is now rendered with a more accurate brothers and sisters.
• Righteousness from God in Romans 1:17 is now righteousness of God.

The updated text, I think, will serve to make the NIV a lot more popular across the board. It appears to have managed to become more literal and linguistically relevant at the same time; no mean feat.

Carson and the God who calls for worship

Below is an extract of an extract.  That is, it is a section of a PDF from a book just published.  The book is ‘Holy, Holy, Holy: Proclaiming the Perfections of God’ by a symposium of writers.  The PDF is the chapter contributed by D A Carson.  Below is an extract from this chapter based on 1 Peter 2.

I have been doing university missions off
and on for about thirty-five years. About a dozen years ago, I started
stumbling across a question from university undergraduates that I never
received when I was a young man. This relatively recent question is put
variously, but it generally runs something like this: “Amongst human
beings, anyone who wants to have all of the attention and garner all the
praise, anyone who wants to be the focus of everyone’s constant admiration,
with everyone stroking that person and fawning all over him, would
be thought of as massively egocentric. The God you are trying to push on
us looks to me to be very egocentric. He keeps demanding that we praise
Him all the time. For goodness sake, is He insecure? Isn’t He, at very least,

morally defective?”

What do you say to that? The reason I never heard that sort of question
in the past, I suspect, is because until fairly recently most of the
unconverted people I met in university missions had been brought up in
the Judeo-Christian heritage, which held that there is a sovereign, transcendent
God, and that He is unique and deserves special attention. But
now things have changed. Thirty years ago, if I were dealing with an atheist,
at least he or she was a “Christian atheist.” That is, the God he or she
disbelieved in was the Christian God, which is another way of saying that
the categories were on my turf. But I can’t assume that now.
So it’s difficult to respond. Of course it’s true to say something like
this: “Yes, but God is so much more than we are. He’s not just another
human being, slightly ‘souped-up.’ He is God. He is the Creator. He is
to be cherished and revered. He is our Maker and our Sovereign and our
providential King and our Judge.” All of that is true.

But there is more. It is one of the themes John Piper likes to preach
about. It is this: Because we have been made by this God and for this
God, because our very self-identity when we are right with God is to love
Him supremely, to adore Him and to worship Him, it is a supreme act of
love on His part to keep demanding it—because it is for our good. What
conceivable good would it do for us if God were to say: “Don’t give
Me too much worship. I’m just One of you guys. Slightly ratchet it up
maybe, but don’t focus on Me too much.” That might satisfy some idolater’s
notion of humility, but the humility that I see in this King of kings
is on Golgotha. That He keeps directing attention to Himself is an act of
supreme humility and grace, precisely because He stoops to remind us of
what we ought to recognize, and because it is for our good.

There is no insecurity in this God. After all, He is the God of aseity.
He has no needs. In eternity past, the Father loved the Son, the Son loved
the Father, and They were perfectly content. God is not demanding that
we love Him so that we can meet the needs of His psychological profile
this week. His focus on Himself is not only because He is God, but
because, out of love, that is what we need. That is what we must see. That
is the point to which our adoration must come. If it does not, we wallow
in idolatry again and again and again.

four books for summer reading

On holiday recently, I read four Christian books which I enjoyed and recommend to others.  Two were on the atonement, one on the Bible’s big story, and one on the gospel and the poor.  Below is a brief comment on each.

‘The Epic of Eden’ by Sandra Richter

This is one of a number of books published over recent years that relates for us ‘the big story’ of the Bible.  Richter’s expertise is on the OT and her aim is to show how the OT story finds its fulfilment in Christ.  She traces this story through the redemptive significance of some key OT characters – Adam, Abraham, Moses and David.

Richter writes clearly and aims at making her subject as accessible as possible to the non-specialist reader.  This I think she achieves admirably.  I have a few minor quibbles with her theology which I may interact with in future blogs but none that prevent me from commending this book as one rewarding to read.

If you are new to ‘big picture’ books attempting to grasp and communicate the Bible’s ‘big story’ then Richter’s book is a good place to begin.  If, like me, you have already read a number of these then you may still benefit from reading this one.  I find that each I read acts as a kind of refresher course and inevitably there are comments and angles that are fresh and stimulating.

‘Scandalous’ by D A Carson

This is the presumably fleshed-out book version of a series of addresses given by Carson at Mars Hill Seattle.  Carson explains the significance of the cross and resurrection of Christ as taught by the apostles.  As usual, Carson is thoroughly biblical and thoroughly contemporary in his engagement.

Carson undoubtedly represents the best and the most reliable of modern conservative evangelicalism.  I doubt if there are any matters of present theological significance about which he is not aware, has not considered deeply, and is not liable to be right.  He is a writer that I hesitate to disagree with and when I do have the (unusual for me) humility to think it is I who is more likely to be wrong.

Scandalous is no exception to this rule.  It is a first class read.  It educates the mind and warms the heart as it carefully interacts with Scripture and currently popular views regarding the atonement.  Carson is never light reading, nor however, is he heavy, jargon laden and scholarly abstruse.  He is above all biblical and intent on explaining the Bible to the rest of us.  This makes him accessible to all eager to interact intelligently with Scripture.

Foundational Christian literature.  Solid gold.

‘God the Peacemaker:  How atonement brings shalom’ by Graham A Cole

Cole attempts to write a biblical theology of the atonement.  That is he endeavours to show how Scripture gradually develops (reveals) its own multi-faceted theology of the atonement as its story unfolds.  He strives for this heroically, however, inevitably, a degree of systematic analysis creeps in; inevitable since the atonement is normally considered and addressed in systematic terms.

That being said, this is a fine survey of  what the Bible has to say about the atonement.  It seeks to engage with the text of Scripture while all the time it has an eye on present controversies regarding the atonement.  Its conclusions are all conservative and evangelical while here and there his conclusions may be acceptable to some conservative evangelicals and not to others (imputed righteousness for instance).  Personally I could have wished for more emphasis on the radical ‘newness’ of the new creation.  Cole is a little more given to the ‘back to Eden’ eschatology.

If you are looking for a good modern comprehensive survey of the atonement that engages with Scripture with an eye to modern debates then this book is for you.  It will inform and provoke worship.  It is written for the serious reader of Scripture while being useful to the scholar.

‘Good news to the Poor: The Gospel through Social Involvement’ by Tim Chester

This book for me was the dark horse among the four.  I expected to enjoy the other three and largely did.  I was suspicious of Chester’s book.  I expected it to be largely a left-wing, starry-eyed suspect theology driven by restorationist and post-mill misguided romanticism (let’s make poverty history, transform society and bring about the Kingdom of God).

I was wrong.  Very wrong.

This is a thoroughly biblical book.  That is, it presents very fairly and with a great deal of commendable nuance, the biblical position on the gospel and social involvement.  Okay, here and there I may dissent (I think Chester slightly overstates the grounds in Scripture for the imperative of socio-political engagement) but I am almost reluctant to mention this since this is the best popular presentation I have read on this topic by a million miles.  It avoids extremes.  It weighs evenly various concerns about social involvement.  It puts in the appropriate checks and balances.  It works hard at being biblically faithful.

Moreover it is written by someone who is not an armchair theologian but someone on the field.  Chester is himself passionate about his perspective and excites this passion in his readers.  He raises real questions about how to tackle social engagement and provides some real solutions. He asks questions about what kinds of projects do and should gain our evangelical enthusiasm.

I came away from this book humbled by the hardness of my heart.  I feel it is a book that all evangelicals should read, especially church leaders who are considering what the direction and priorities of their church should be.  For those fearful of social action he provides a vital challenge.  For those enthusiastic about social action he provides much-needed direction.

This is the oldest of the four books (published in 2004).  You may have read it.  Read it again.  If like me it slipped under the radar then buy it and read it.  It is biblical.  It is (as all good biblical writing is) visionary.

Enjoy your summer reading.

d a carson: trials of biblical studies

D. A. Carson’s article on ‘The Trials of Biblical Studies’ can be sourced via Euangelion.  It is an article well worth reading even by those of us who are not professional scholars.  Lessons are there for us all.  Moreover, he exposes with authority what instinctively concerns many of us.  Below are a few quotations to whet your appetite.

What shall it profit
biblical scholars to become experts on Greek aspect
theory and on the relationship between Jude and
2 Peter, and lose their own souls?

We do not always recognize that the mark
of true growth in the study of Scripture is not so
much that we become masters of the text as that we
are mastered by the text.

Manipulation of Scripture

All of us have witnessed some pretty amazingly ridiculous
interpretations of Scripture, undertaken by well-meaning
folk who are not much used to disciplined reading of any
texts. When biblical scholars engage in the same game, of
course, our tools are much more sophisticated. But make no
mistake: many of us really do continue to play the game.
The pressures come from many quarters. On the right, we
may want to come up with ‘safe’ exegeses that reinforce the
biases of our own confessional group. After all, we will gain
in infl uence and authority within that group if we maintain
the stances of the group’s elders. Interpretations that justify
all the details of one’s heritage are likely to be received with
approval by the leaders of that heritage. On the left, the
pressure to be seen to be academically respectable may push
some of us towards exegetical conclusions that are in line
with the kosher academic orthodoxies of our day, divorced
from any sense of a heritage of confessionalism. Especially
attractive for some is the deployment of newly developing
literary ‘tools’ that promise insights that no one has ever
had in the history of the church. Both of these pressures, of
course, have to do with our own identities within particular
groups, whether of the right or the left.

We must pursue (my words)

… a humble mind, learning from the past without
being chained to the past, persistent prayer for the
illuminating work of the Holy Spirit, willingness to
talk things over with others of greater experience
and skill, willingness to be corrected, a passionate
desire to bring glory to God by representing what
he says faithfully, living within the context of a local
church – all these disciplines and graces contribute
towards encouraging those in biblical studies to
avoid manipulation of biblical texts.

is the gospel in your church?

Over at Justin Taylor’s blog is a plug for a new book on evangelism  ‘Marks of the Messenger: Knowing, Living and Speaking the Gospel’ by J Mark Stiles.   It comes highly recommended by D A Carson which means it is likely to be good.  I certainly liked a few of the questions it asks.

Questions about preaching:

Was the gospel in the sermon Sunday morning?

Could you have preached that sermon if Christ had not died on the cross?

Could the uninitiated hear that sermon and come to real faith in Christ?

Questions about church decision-making:

Are gospel principles governing organizational decisions?

Could you have developed that leadership principle had Christ not been crucified?

These are, to my mind, urgent questions today.

Stiles asks other equally vital questions about the impact of the gospel on the church and its life.  Although a bit pricey (it may be cheaper as it becomes more widely available) this seems to be a book many should buy and read, not least church leaders.

some important modern books on justification

Over at Five Sided Christian, James Miller, a fellow Glaswegian, reviews a few recent and important books on justification.  These are excellent reviews, I recommend them warmly, even if, here and there, I may wish to quibble a little on conclusions.

peter hitchens and raging atheists

Peter Hitchens, the younger brother of Christopher Hitchens, has written a new book ‘The Rage Against God: Why Faith is the Foundation of  Civilization’. The book is apparently a polemic against the new atheists, including his brother.  Peter Hitchens is a British journalist, author and broadcaster.  His own story is one from atheism to belief.  This book promises to be a cracking read.  Hitchens’ Christian belief seems to be orthodox.

how people change

Tullian Tchividjian has a helpful blog drawing from Paul Tripp’s book ‘How People Change’.  He writes,

In one of his books (co-authored with Tim Lane), How People Change, he identifies seven counterfeit gospels—-”religious” ways we try and “justify” or “save” ourselves apart from the gospel of grace. I found these unbelievably helpful. Which one (or two, or three) of these do you tend to gravitate towards?

Read the rest for a summary of the seven counterfeits.  Well worth reflection.