I should think myself in the way of my duty, to raise the affections [emotions] of my hearers as high as I possibly can, provided"—then he gave two qualifications—"provided they are affected with nothing but truth, and with affections that are not disagreeable to the nature of what they are affected with."

Piper cites an old book of Edwards excerpts, but I wanted to track the quote down in the Yale series lest it prove to be abridged or even apocryphal. If Jonathan Edwards really said this, I wanted to know exactly what he said.

Piper was right. Edwards did say this, and a good deal more (as was his wont…). It’s in volume 4 of the Yale edition of his works, entitled “The Great Awakening.”

An appearance of affection and earnestness in the manner of delivery, if it be very great indeed, yet if it be agreeable to the nature of the subject, and ben’t beyond a proportion to its importance and worthiness of affection, and there be no appearance of its being feigned or forced, has so much the greater tendency to beget true ideas or apprehensions in the minds of the hearers, of the subject spoken of, and so to enlighten the understanding: and that for this reason, that such a way or manner of speaking of these things does in fact more truly represent them, than a more cold and indifferent way of speaking of them…. I don’t think ministers are to be blamed for raising the affections of their hearers too high, if that which they are affected with be only that which is worthy of affection, and their affections are not raised beyond a proportion to their importance, or worthiness of affection. I should think myself in the way of my duty to raise the affections of my hearers as high as possibly I can, provided that they are affected with nothing but truth, and with affections that are not disagreeable  to the nature of what they are affected with.

In other and fewer words, the whole truth of God includes the feelings that should go along with that truth. I’m reminded of a quote from Edwards’ friend and contemporary, George Whitefield:

Would ministers preach for eternity . . . They would endeavor to move the affections and warm the heart, and not constrain their hearers to suspect that they dealt in the false commerce of unfelt truth.

By no means would I call for heat without light. Edwards of all people, whose head was bursting with light, is a good model here—we need all the light and all the heat God will give us. We need by His grace not just to obey but to obey with zeal (Rom. 12:11), to give with cheerfulness (12:8), to love and forgive from the heart (Matt. 18:35).

He pointed to a sentence he had just read in a student paper:

“At the extreme were men like Alexander Campbell…”

He objected to the student’s use of “like” instead of “such as,” saying,

I know exactly what [the student] means. And from my reading experience, it’s a widely used expression. Am I wrong for marking this and insisting that it should be “such as”? I’m with you on the basic concept (obviously), but some examples demonstrate that [usage determines meaning] can be (may be?) easily abused and/or subjectively applied; can usage sometimes undermine meaning?

Here’s my answer: I put “like” vs. “such as” in the category of language’s social function. Using “such as” shows that you are one of the initiates into the club of people who know “the rules.” That has a not insignificant value, because if I live in a world where most of my readers will tsk-tsk me if I violate a supposed rule, I might as well not cause them to demote me by my employment of usages they don’t approve of. So a teacher provides his students a useful service if he is telling him: “Most educated people don’t think you should write this way. You must prove to me while you are still in training that you are able to heed them, no matter what you choose to do later.”

But a teacher does his student a disservice if he says, “You can’t use like here because that word means ‘similar to’ and therefore excludes Alexander Campbell, the person you actually meant most to include.” The fact that the teacher understood his student perfectly shows that this line of reasoning doesn’t work. If everybody understands a usage and uses it, it’s English. Usually I find that such “rules” have been around for many decades, often even centuries, and that both usages were used by premier writers of English before the rule even existed. That’s the way “peruse” is, I believe, according to the OED.

Sometimes enough of a chorus arises from little boys that the emperor has no clothes that a rule fades mostly away. I gather that “split infinitives” have gotten there, or almost.

There are a few times I feel sympathetic to those demanding a stop to the supposed relativism of descriptive lexicography. One example is this website, which notes that “begging the question,” a technical term in philosophy/logic (known in Latin as petitio principii), is now commonly used to mean something like “raising the question” instead of what it has always (?) meant. But I say the website is fighting a losing battle and that there will always be ways for them to get their idea across.

It’s a losing battle because we can’t insist that all speakers of English remember and use arcane rules. Language just refuses to be as precise as scientific modernism wants it to be, because it needs to serve people who simply can’t maintain such precision. God is the one who chose not to make language perfectly precise, because in His Word there are instances of ambiguity. Does Christ’s love for us constrain us, or our love for Him? No one will ever know for sure until glory, and I’m convinced God meant it that way. The Bible is absolutely true without being exhaustively precise.

The best stuff I’ve read on the English side comes from John McWhorter (though he uses a title I don’t want to put on the blog), and the biggest advance I ever made in the field came from reading a BJU–required writing textbook, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. Joseph Williams, one of the authors of the how-to-write section at the beginning of the latest Turabian manual, discusses “like” vs. “such as” explicitly in that work. Vern Poythress is also really good, and his book is free online (see especially chapter 6, “Words and Precision“).

I just got to write a fun article for a brand new BJU Press online publication, Modern Pilgrim.

Feel free to check it out!

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.)

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.

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.

“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’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.

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.