We need a clearer understanding of what theology is. Many, I think, regard theology as discovering something within the Bible, sometimes called a “system.” On this view, the challenge of theology is to see who can reproduce this system in the fullest detail. In our circles, many assume that Calvin and the Westminster Standards did it best; they got the system right. So our theology must be a reproduction of theirs. This concept of theology encourages, I think, the “golden age” view of things and the necessity of holding rigidly and in detail to past models.

Let me suggest instead that the work of theology is the work of application. It takes the Scriptures and uses them to answer our present questions and to meet present needs. This is Paul’s concept of doctrine: teaching that is sound (health-giving) (1 Tim. 1:10, 6:3, 2 Tim. 4:3, Tit. 1:9, 2:1). Thus, as Jones says, its focus is upon the present and future, not only the past. And so theology is bound to the mission of the church.

Read the whole thing.

(As an aside, Frame really needs to start publishing these articles directly to his blog!)

The mark of true godliness is an anxiety to have our faults pointed out.

Charles Bridges

Better is open rebuke
than hidden love.
Faithful are the wounds of a friend;
profuse are the kisses of an enemy.

Proverbs 27

A few months ago I read this great essay by Piper on J. Gresham Machen’s life and contribution to the church. As I was recommending it to a friend the other day, I thought I would follow through with a long held intention to post it here.

The essay, which is a transcript of a 1993 talk by Piper at the Bethlehem Pastors’ Conference (where it seems he often gives these biographical talks), serves as a great introduction to modernism and liberal theology, and a background to the battles that are still being fought in the Presbyterian church in the USA. These issues are seen through the prism of Machen’s life, in his opposition to liberal theology, and his founding of Westminster Theological Seminary and a new Presbyterian denomination.

Piper also draws out several lessons for Christians from Machen’s achievements and possible weakness, all written in a very engaging style. Well worth a read or a listen!

J. Gresham Machen’s Response to Modernism

Let me know what you think of it!

One way to approach this is to go for a very focused approach - ruthlessly working out which books and which sections of books are the most useful, and reading this with full engagement. An example of that is this guide ‘How to Read‘ by David Field, a lecturer at Oak Hill Theological College.

One problem with this is that by examining books to see which parts of them are worth reading we only ever read the parts that we think will be helpful to us before we actually reading. In other words, there is a danger that what we read may simply become self-reinforcing.

This thought was provoked by a fairly chilling example of focused reading:

Hitler was not only an avid reader but also an inveterate underliner. Perhaps the most chilling example of that is in Paul de Lagarde’s “German Essays”. Underlined is: “Each and every irksome Jew is a serious affront to the authenticity and veracity of our German identity.”

Hitler had a magpie mind. He speed-read books looking for material that he counted as useful—meaning anything that fitted into his mosaic of misplaced historical analogy and pseudoscience. What didn’t fit was discarded. This was the essence of Hitler: “Not a profound, unfathomable distillation of the philosophies of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, but instead a dime-store theory cobbled together from cheap tendentious paperbacks and esoteric hardcovers, which gave rise to a thin, calculating, bullying mendacity.”

There is something to be said for reading a book (perhaps that is recommended by someone you trust), and letting it take you somewhere else, in its own way.

During the period when the voice is changing we do not sing.

More here:
Jesus Creed

And David Field has picked it up too.

What do you think? Should ‘young theologians’ blog?

BBC finally experiments with in-text ‘links’ | Internet Marketing News and Blog | E-consultancy.com

Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation!
O my soul, praise him, for he is your health and salvation!
Come all who hear:
brothers and sisters draw near,
praise him in glad adoration!

Praise to the Lord, above all things so mightily reigning
keeping us safe at his side, and so gently sustaining.
Have you not seen:
All you have needed has been
met by his gracious ordaining?

Praise to the Lord, who shall prosper our work and defend us;
surely his goodness and mercy shall daily attend us.
Ponder anew
what the Almighty can do,
who with his love will befriend us.

Praise to the Lord - O let all that is in me adore him!
All that has life and breath, come now with praises before him!
Let the ‘Amen’
sound from his people again,
gladly with praise we adore him!

I love the way this song links the power of the Creator with his care for his children, enjoining us to ‘Ponder anew / what the Almighty can do / if with his love he befriend thee’.

There have been several weekends where it has been real joy to spend time enjoying God’s creation and to return to church on a Sunday evening to praise with my brothers and sisters the living God, the King of Creation.

And as I look back over a year living in London, I am amazed and thankful for God for the way he has amply met all my needs by his ‘gracious ordaining’.

We sing it with a slight lilt, like this recording of the hymn from a Mars Hill band, but more upbeat.

My prayer for this week is that my worship would be acceptable to him:

Praise to the Lord, O let all that is in me adore him!
All that has life and breath, come now with praises before him!
Let the ‘Amen’
sound from his people again,
gladly with praise we adore him!

I was skeptical about the quality of prayer this would produce, and only signed up out of curiosity, but I’ve been fairly impressed. There certainly are plenty of selfish prayers, but the majority of the prayers I have seen have been people thanking God or expressing deep desires for others’ spiritual, physical and mental health.

Most of the praise points concern various physical and relational blessings where God’s provision is felt, but there also lots of prayers that praise God’s character:

All glory be to you Lord, for you are the head over all! Thank you for loving us, and walking with us every moment of our lives!

As I’ve read through the prayer requests, I’ve been struck by how many of the more selfish prayers (I use the term selfish loosely) are about work. 13 of the 100 prayers on the front page mention ‘job’ or ‘work’. Here’s a sampling:

NEED a full-time job. Please pray for God’s blessing. Thank you.

On Monday I have THE most important job interview of my life! Please pray for me.

I made the cut for the final 3 for a new job. Thank you, God! Please let me be the final 1 now!

Thank you, God, for a possible job for July.

From what I’ve seen work-related requests comfortably outnumber any other category of personal petitions, including relationship with God, relationships with people and health.

Made me wonder whether in my life and in my advice to others I am giving work the respect it deserves. I know from a short time being unemployed how difficult and depressing it can be to be out of work. However, I think I probably focus too much on the Genesis curse side of work than the pre-Fall created-to-work idea.

When we are talking about wise places to work, or wise careers to follow, do we need to take care that we are not making the options too black and white?

I take a page from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death and define sin as building your identity—your self-worth and happiness—on anything other than God. That is, I use the biblical definition of sin as idolatry. That puts the emphasis not as much on “doing bad things” but on “making good things into ultimate things.“

Instead of telling them they are sinning because they are sleeping with their girlfriends or boyfriends, I tell them that they are sinning because they are looking to their romances to give their lives meaning, to justify and save them, to give them what they should be looking for from God. This idolatry leads to anxiety, obsessiveness, envy, and resentment. I have found that when you describe their lives in terms of idolatry, postmodern people do not give much resistance. Then Christ and his salvation can be presented not (at this point) so much as their only hope for forgiveness, but as their only hope for freedom. This is my “gospel for the uncircumcised.”

My questions were:

• What does Scripture say about different presentations of the gospel for the circumcised and uncircumcised?
• Does Keller’s ‘gospel for the uncircumcised’ tally with a Biblical gospel presentation? Specifically,
• 1) is the Biblical definition of idolatory really ‘building your identity on anything other than God’?
• 2) is Christ and his salvation ever presented as freedom from idols?

This week I thought I’d try to answer some of those. I hope these questions don’t seem like nitpicking. Firstly, I think it’s great practice whenever you hear something to think ‘well great, but is it Biblical?’

Secondly in this case, Keller is specifically alluding to something Biblical with his ‘gospel for the uncircumcised’. I think it’s important to ask whether that actually exists in the Bible, and if so whether it’s the same gospel as Tim Keller outlined.

I hope in this post to imitate the behaviour of the Christians in Berea in Acts 17, who examined the Scriptures daily to see if what Paul told them was true.

First, let’s take a look at the passage Tim Keller alluded to when he mentioned his ‘gospel for the uncircumcised’.

Galatians: unity in the gospel, division in labour

Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me. I went up because of a revelation and set before them (though privately before those who seemed influential) the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles, in order to make sure I was not running or had not run in vain. [...] And from those who seemed to be influential (what they were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)—those, I say, who seemed influential added nothing to me.

On the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel to the circumcised (for he who worked through Peter for his apostolic ministry to the circumcised worked also through me for mine to the Gentiles), and when James and Cephas and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given to me, they gave the right hand of fellowship to Barnabas and me, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. Only, they asked us to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do.

I know we have some Galatians experts in the readership so I’ll keep this short. My summary of the passage would be that Paul and Peter (=Cephas) agree that they are teaching the same gospel, but that they are called it to different groups of people - Peter to the Jews (circumcised) and Paul to the Gentiles (uncircumcised). Now it’s possible that teaching the gospel to these two groups requires different presentations of it, but that doesn’t seem to be the point of this passage, which emphasises unity in the gospel among the apostles, even as they preach to different groups.

To establish whether the gospel is presented differently to the Gentiles in the Bible, and if so how, it seems we need to go elsewhere.

To answer that question I’ve gone through the book of the Acts of the Apostles and looked at all the places where the gospel is presented to an unbelieving, predominantly Gentile audience to see what themes were emphasised.

I’m assuming that when the apostles spoke to Jewish hearers they emphasised the law and prophetic fulfilment.

Acts: turn from death to the God who judges and forgives
Firstly Peter in Acts 10 after he realises that the Gentiles are also to be evangelised:

Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. [..] And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead. To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.

So here we see judgement and sin mentioned (though there is also something about freedom that I’ve cut out).

The next episode that I think is relevant is in Acts 14. Paul and Barnabas get taken for gods when they heal someone:

“Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men, of like nature with you, and we bring you good news, that you should turn from these vain things to a living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. In past generations he allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways. Yet he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness.”

This is the best passage for a ‘freedom from idols’ gospel presentation that I’ve found. It’s a short section, and arguably the context makes the use of the ‘turn from idols’ theme essential! There is only a hint of a law/judgement theme here; if God has born witness to himself through nature in past generations, then he might fairly judge them.

Next we come to Paul’s Areopagus address in Acts 17. I think the key section is:

Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

In the longest recordered and most famous address by Paul to the Gentiles, judgement is more of a theme than freedom.

Finally, in Acts 26, we find Paul before King Aggripa, who appears to not be Jewish, though Paul says he is familar with the ‘customs of the Jews’. Paul doesn’t directly make a gospel presentation, but he does recount his own conversion, and includes within it this quote from Jesus on the Damascus Road:

Rise and stand upon your feet, for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you as a servant and witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, delivering you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’

Arguably this could be said to be presenting a liberation theme obliquely to Aggripa.

In summary, I think this set of passages shows that the apostles did include liberation from futile idolatory in their gospel presentations to Gentiles, but even here it seems that this is not the main theme.

Is that a fair conclusion?

I now want to see look at what the Bible says about turning from idols more broadly, not just whether the theme is used evangelistically.

The Bible: Yahweh hates idols, we should hate idols
Is ‘freedom from idols’ as ‘freedom from futiltity’ a Biblical way to describe the gospel? I think we’ve seen some hints from the passages in Acts that it might be.

Tom U in the comments for the last post pointed out two relevant passages:

For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God (1 Thessalonians 1:9)

Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods. (Galatians 4:8)

My reading would be that these certainly show that something that happens when God saves us is that we cease to be enslaved to idols, but whether that idolatory is presented biblicallly as futility is not clear here.

It is clear that idols are described as futile and worthless in the Old Testament. Particularly helpful is Isaiah 44:

All who fashion idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit. Their witnesses neither see nor know, that they may be put to shame. Who fashions a god or casts an idol that is profitable for nothing? Behold, all his companions shall be put to shame, and the craftsmen are only human. Let them all assemble, let them stand forth. They shall be terrified; they shall be put to shame together.

Also, hear Isaiah 57:

When you cry out, let your collection of idols deliver you!
The wind will carry them off,
a breath will take them away.
But he who takes refuge in me shall possess the land
and shall inherit my holy mountain.

This is perhaps quite a thin line, but from a skim through all the references to idols in the ESV, I would say that the Biblical emphasis is not ‘oh you poor things stop following silly idols, they won’t help, come and follow the sovereign Yahweh’, but more ‘you foolish people who follow worthless idols deserve judgement, fear Yahweh!’

I guess my questions are:

1) Is redemption as freedom from futile idol-worship a big biblical theme? If not, should we use it often evangelistically?

2) Is presenting the gospel to non-believer simply or mainly in terms of freedom from futility done in the Bible? If not, should we do it?

3) If you’re a non-Christian and you’re reading this, you’re probably the sort of person to whom Tim Keller would like to appeal. Read his quote again; is that a message that resonates with you?

And let’s listen to Isaiah, and be shocked at how we can worship such vain things, and resolve to take refuge only in Yahweh.

Yahweh says:

“What profit is an idol
when its maker has shaped it,
a metal image, a teacher of lies?
For its maker trusts in his own creation
when he makes speechless idols!
Woe to him who says to a wooden thing, Awake;
to a silent stone, Arise!
Can this teach?
Behold, it is overlaid with gold and silver,
and there is no breath at all in it.
But the Lord is in his holy temple;
let all the earth keep silence before him.” Habbakkuk 2