Tim Chester's Blog, page 23

A review of John Piper, A Peculiar Glory: How the Christians Scriptures Reveal Their Complete Truthfulness, Crossway, 2016.

Available from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk.

I’ve just finished a manuscript for a book on the doctrine of Scripture – provisionally called Bible Matters: Meeting God in his Word – which is due out next year. So I recently read A Peculiar Glory, John Piper’s latest book.

A Peculiar Glory is a sustained argument of the self-authenticating authority of the Bible.  That is, the belief that the authority of the Bible is not established through a scholarly investigation of historical evidence, nor is it conferred on the Bible by the church. Rather it shines from the pages of Bible as it displays the glory of God. So God is the source of its authority. We recognise this not just because we trace the process by which the Spirit worked through the human authors, but because the content of the Scriptures captures our hearts. A distinctive slant of this argument is Piper’s emphasis on this approach making confidence in the Bible accessible to all people, not just those with the time and ability to explore questions of historicity.

This is a really important truth for the church. A strange thing can happen when we’re faced by hostile questions from unbelievers. We forget all about why we believe the truth and suddenly think we need some clever intellectual answer. But the reality is most Christians believe the Bible is reliable because they’ve found it to contains words that bring life, hope and glory.

There is a slightly odd vein to the book. While Piper emphasises the pedigree of his argument with plenty of references to the Westminster Standards and (of course) Jonathan Edwards, he also keeps emphasising the newness of what he’s saying to his hearers. Perhaps this reflects an American context.

What John Owen calls ‘the self-evidencing efficacy’ of the Bible is an important, confidence-building truth and Piper tackles it with his usually clarity and passion. Although I believe this may be the first book by John Piper not to have originated from sermons, all the characteristics of a Piper book are here: a chapter of autobiography, a chapter on Jonathan Edwards, a big central idea involving the glory of God, and every angle explored and every implication pursued.

UPDATE: Justin Taylor tells me he estimates about half of Piper’s books did not begin life as sermons – and he should know because he’s recently finished editing the Collected Works of Piper for publication in March 2017.

In a future post I’ll provide a quote from John Owen.

A Peculiar Glory is available from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk.

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There’s a fascinating article in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph by Mary Loxley, written in reponse to the release of the latest Bridget Jones movie. She begins by describing a brief fling she had when she was 27.

It’s a story that, as I turn 46, I feel I could be looking back on – almost fondly – as part of growing up. Except it isn’t. Turns out there wasn’t anything progressive about it, lesser still something to think fondly about, because there was way too much more of the same to come. Not just for me, but for very many now middle-aged women who’ll see real tragedy, hardly comedy, in Bridget.

Ten years later she had an affair with the same man, except that he was now married. In the article she contemplate telling his wife so that he shares the pain he has inflicted on her.

He told me he didn’t want to ‘ruin my life’ with our affair. It’s a bit late for that, I thought. You and your like already have. I’m well over 40; I may never have my own family and my life is dominated by the many harsh personal and practical realities of remaining single.

She comments:

Culturally, the sexual permissiveness of the ‘60s – made possible by the Pill – is a major cause of my situation. Before then, the danger of unwanted pregnancy had ensured a woman withheld sex from a man until she got him to commit. By the time I reached adulthood, men could get sexual intercourse with unprecedented ease and women provided it freely.

The story our culture tells of the sexual revoltuion is one of liberation, especially for women. The reality for most women, however, is very different. Marriage is a God-given mechanism through which men are forced to grow up and take responsibility in life. Commitment-free sex is bad news for women – maybe not all women all the time – but for most women most of the time. ‘In an era of strong women,’ says Foxley, ‘it’s not fashionable to admit that … I am now very vulnerable.’

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Make sure that the home that really matters to you is the home you have in Christ.

This quote is from my latest book, Exodus for You. Exodus for You is available here from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk as well as thegoodbook.com, thegoodbook.co.uk and thegoodbook.com.au.

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Reading: Genesis 37

Here is another extracts from The Glory of the Story , my father’s devotional introduction to biblical theology in the form of 366 daily readings which show how the Old Testament story is fulfilled in Christ. The Glory of the Story is available as a Kindle book for $2.99 from amazon.com and £1.99 from amazon.co.uk. I’m posting extracts from the chaper on the story of Jacob, usually on the first Monday of the month.

1. Joseph’s dreams (1-11)

Just as there had been jealousy between Jacob’s wives, Leah and Rachel, now there is hatred from Leah’s sons towards Rachel’s son, Joseph(4-5, 8). This strong feeling is aggravated by Jacob who transfers his special love for Rachel to Joseph and makes no attempt to hide the fact. His gift of a beautiful robe has the effect of elevating Joseph above his brothers. It is Joseph’s dreams, however, that not only inflame the present situation, but set the whole course of future events – the brothers’ malice; Jacob’s grief; his own suffering and elevation; and the migration of the family to Egypt.

The first dream implies that Joseph’s brothers would bow down to him and the second that Jacob and Leah would do so. According to Genesis 41:32 duplicate dreams imply certainty and prompt fulfilment. While Jacob is irritated by the dreams he knows firsthand how amazing God’s ways can be and sensibly keeps an open mind (11). Notice how the dreams have thrown the spotlight on God as the main character in the drama. Neither the indiscretion of Joseph nor the murderous intent of his brothers will thwart God’s purposes.

2. God’s providence (12-36)

The ill-feeling of the brothers comes to a head at Dothan. The sight of Joseph so far from home leads to a murderous plot and a plausible explanation: ‘a ferocious animal devoured him.’ (20) Reuben’s plan only gains a reprieve until Judah proposes the sale of his brother to a passing caravan of Ishmaelites, the descendants of Ishmael, the son of Abram and Hagar (25-27). Ishmaelite was an overlapping term with Midianite (28; cf. Judg. 8:22-24).When the news of Joseph’s apparent death reaches Jacob he is totally devastated and refuses to be comforted (34-35). It is surely a poignant irony that it was by the use of a goat (31) that Jacob had earlier deceived his father (Gen. 27:16, 23).

At the last moment in the story our eyes are lifted from a bereft Jacob to Egypt (36). In the sovereignty of God’s providence, Israel’s nomadic cousins become the means of Joseph’s survival. His transfer to Egypt makes possible the ultimate preservation of Jacob’s whole family. Though Joseph is reduced to a slave, God has not abandoned the dreamer or his dream.

Closing thought

Let us renew our trust in a God whose goals are always certain even though his ways are often mysterious.

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We’re no longer confronted by God’s power; we are indwelled with it.

This quote is from my latest book, Exodus for You. Exodus for You is available here from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk as well as thegoodbook.com, thegoodbook.co.uk and thegoodbook.com.au.

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Tomorrow sees the launch of Life Explored – an exciting new resource from the Christianity Explored team.

Here’s the commendation I wrote for it …

Life Explored starts with the longings and fears of modern people to accentuate the contemporary relevance of the gospel. Each sessions begins with a beautifully-filmed story with amazing production values. These stories create the opportunity to demonstrate how the gospel powerfully fulfils our hopes and heals our wounds. It shows how the Bible story is our story. It adds up to a compelling presentation of the glorious, liberating news of God’s love to us in Christ. There’s no fudging the issues of sin, shame and judgment. But they’re connected to our experiences of frustration and disappointment. As a result the good news of God’s love shines bright and clear. By engaging our imaginations, Life Explored appeals not only to intellect, but also to our longings, hopes, frustrations and fears. The seven sessions walk people through the key moments in the Bible story – creation, fall, Abraham, exodus, Jesus, cross and resurrection, and the new creation. But each session works as a stand alone study so it doesn’t matter if people miss a session – plus Life Explored can be re-purposed for one-off events. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal once said that we need to make people wish the gospel was true before they’ll consider whether it is true. This is precisely what Life Explored does. It’ll make many people wish Christianity is true, creating the space for them to consider whether it is true.

Each session starts with a 7-8-minute mini-movie to get participants thinking and appeal to their imaginations. You then look at a passage from the Bible before watching a second 10-minute video which presents the gospel in an engaging way. This is followed by a look at a second Bible passage with plenty of opportunity for discussion and Q&A.

I’m very excited about this for all the reasons I give in my commendation above.

Life Explored is available from thegoodbook.com, thegoodbook.co.uk and thegoodbook.com.au along with more information.

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In April I delivered a talk on the image of God to the Acts 29 Europe conference in Rome. In my previous post base don this talk we saw that in our culture reality is viewed as malleable. So I am who I want to be. Noe we move on to consider a related characteristic of our culture’s view to identity.

2. In our culture desire is sovereign (I do what I want to do)

Transgenderism is just one expression of a trend that pervades our culture in which we’re all complicit: the sovereignty of desire. I do what I want to do.

So we choose leisure instead of duty, anger instead of self-control, adultery instead of restraint, prolonged adolescence instead of responsibility, self-promotion instead of humility, debt instead of patience, back-biting instead of reconciliation. What they all have in common is the sovereignty of desire. I will do what I want do. I will be who I want be. None of this new. What’s new is that unrestrained desire is praised. It’s seen as a moral good.

Consider these four terms: self-fulfilment and self-expression, self-denial and self-restraint. A hundred years ago self-denial and self-restraint would have been seen as virtuous. People may not often have lived up to the ideal, but it was the ideal. Now it’s self-fulfilment and self-expression which are virtuous. More than that, self-denial and self-restraint are seen as repressive, harmful, evil. What Christianity considers virtues are now considered vices in our culture.

Professor Daniel Yankelovich of New York University has documented this shift in social attitudes (Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfilment in a World Turned Upside Down, Random House, 1981.). The old rules, Yankelovich says, stressed duty to others, particularly your family. Obviously people weren’t sacrificial all the time. But it was embarrassing to be seen to be selfish. The norm was self-denial. But all that’s changed. It’s been replaced with what Yankelovich calls ‘the duty to self ethic’ in which our primary responsibility is our own self-fulfilment. Everything else fits round that.

James Davison Hunter used Yankelovich’s questionnaire among evangelical students and discovered they were more committed to self-fulfilment than their secular friends.

If you don’t believe self-expression is a primary virtue, go into central Rome. The only thing being sold by the street-sellers are selfie sticks. The glories of ancient Rome are not enough. We have to be in the picture!

What are some of the results of a view of life focused on yourself?

Self-expression has replaced self-restraint

This new world is all about me. So naturally what I want to talk about is me. I want opportunities to share, to talk about my feelings, to express myself, to ‘process’ everything, to be understood. This isn’t about gospel counsel in which we point one another to Christ. No, this is about pointing to me. This is ‘therapy’ by talking about my feelings. Any sense that you might control your emotions for the sake of others is seen in terms of ‘repression’.

Excitement has replaced virtue

What’s good – or what constitutes a good life – is now defined in terms of experiences that bring self-fulfilment or enable self-expression. So we’re all chasing excitement. David Wells says:

By the 1980s … a large majority had begun to think that what was worthwhile in life had nothing to do with its normal routines such as getting up each day and going to work. Nor with the traditional responsibilities of marriage and the raising of children. Rather, life is about its more exotic moments. It is not about what happens on Monday through Friday, but what happens on the weekends. Its real meaning, and its real rewards, are found when the self, unencumbered by routine and responsibility, can be found, nurtured, and satisfied. (David Wells, The Courage to be Protestant, IVP, 2008, 136.)

This describes our world. We don’t value the routines of work. We don’t value jobs that are mundane. It is not enough that a job should serve other people. We want the job itself to be fulfilling. We want a job that serves us. Instead of a life of virtue – doing the right thing, self-denial, sacrificial love – we chase excitement.

Self-promotion has replaced character

Think about the kind of life these two options create – self-denial verses self-fulfilment. After all, they’re what do in the moment. But what happens when they shape your life or becomes the pattern of our life? The answer is you develop ‘character’. And you can have a good character or bad character. Good character is the result of repeatedly doing the right thing. We develop a habit, an instinct, a taste for goodness.

But in a world focused on self-fulfilment our focus is not good character, but being an attractive person, magnetic, exciting. So our culture no longer has ‘heroes’ – people with the courage to do the right thing at personal cost. Instead we have ‘celebrities’ – people who are famous because of the way their express themselves. Heroes do self-denial. Celebrities do self-expression. So in a culture in which self-expression matters more than self-denial you get celebrities instead of heroes.

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Division becomes diversity when we are united in Christ.

This quote is from my latest book, Exodus for You. Exodus for You is available here from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk as well as thegoodbook.com, thegoodbook.co.uk and thegoodbook.com.au.

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In April I delivered a talk on the image of God to the Acts 29 Europe conference in Rome. In part one we saw that we are defined by realities outside of ourselves, especially our relationship to God. Here’s part two.

I’m defined by realities outside of myself, especially my relationship to God. To be human is to be in the image of God, defined by God. But this shifts radically with the Enlightenment. Instead of a call to ‘know thyself’ in relation to God, we have a call to know oneself independently of God. Alexander Pope says: ‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; the proper study of mankind is man.’ Francis Quarles, another early Enlightenment thinker, said, ‘There is none that can read God aright unless he first spell Man.’ The order has been switched. Knowledge of self comes first. God is defined in relation to us. So Enlightenment theology (most famously in Friedrich Schleiermacher) becomes the study of human spiritual experience.

These two trajectories have created a stark tension in contemporary culture. Modern science says man is the product of our sub-subconscious (Freudian psychology) or our genes (evolutionary theory) or our society (sociology). We are nothing more than advanced animals. Yet the same time the legacy of a Christian worldview means human beings are still seen as special, creative, rational. For some unspecified reason, people have ‘human rights’. This tension is pulling in opposite directions and so the fabric of our humanity is fraying at the edges of life. The unborn child and the unproductive elderly are having their rights taken away. The baby in the womb is not a person, but a foetus.

But let me highlight two ways in which our generation has gone even further – one this post and one in a future post.

1. In our culture reality is malleable (I am who I want to be)

The idea that our desires should confirm to reality has been turned on its head. We’re the generation which thinks reality should be shaped to match our desires. We’re the generation of self-expression, self-fulfilment, and increasingly self-definition and self-creation. I am who I want to be. One of the first people to point this out was C. S. Lewis in his book The Abolition of Man way back in 1943. Lewis takes as his starting point a recently published school textbook. The textbook describes a famous incident in which the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge heard a man describe a waterfall as ‘sublime’. The authors of the textbook comment: ‘When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall … Actually … he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really … I have sublime feelings.’ C. S. Lewis comments:

Until quite modern times … all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it – believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.

You can say that something was beautiful or ugly, terrifying or comforting, right or wrong. Until recently the purpose of education, argues Lewis, has been to teach people the right responses to objective realities – even if people disagreed on what a right response was.

But in modern times feelings are self-validating. We can’t talk about whether they are an appropriate response to reality. No-one can judge my feelings. In contrast Lewis says:

Because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it).

‘To say that a shoe fits,’ says Lewis, ‘is to speak not only of shoes but of feet.’ In other words, to speak of feelings is to speak not only of feelings, but also of the realities which evoke those feelings. My anger is right is it is a response to an objective injustice. It is wrong if it merely reflects my selfishness or pride. It is not self-validating.

So Chaz Bono, the child of Sonny and Cher, says: ‘Gender is between your ears and not between your legs.’ In other words, it’s what I choose to make it, not what is objectively the case. Chaz was born ‘Chastity’, but is now known as a ‘transgender male’. Gender is becoming self-determining. I found a critique of the McHugh article (which was circulated in the email) from a transgender-Catholic group. The article says, ‘He assumes that transsexuals seek to change their gender … instead of conform their body to their mind or soul.’ That’s very revealing: gender is being defined in the mind and they’ll change their bodies to match their self-perception.)

This is riddled with inconsistencies. At the same time that Bruce Jenner, the former Olympic gold medallist, was lauded for appearing as the woman Caitlyn Jenner on the front cover of Vanity Fair, the civil-rights activist Rachel Dolezal was heavily criticised for posing as black when she has white parents. You can’t pretend to be black when in fact you’re white. But you can pretend to be a woman when in fact you’re a man. This is a confused culture!

Francis Quarles, Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man, 1638, i, 1.1.

Cited in Jesse Bering, ‘The Third Gender,’ Scientific American, Oct 1 2012, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-third-gender-2012-10-23. Accessed March 24, 2016.

https://catholictrans.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/a-critique-of-paul-mchughs-surgical-sex.

 

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Let Jesus be enough for you, and there will never, ever come a day when he is not enough.

This quote is from my latest book, Exodus for You. Exodus for You is available here from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk as well as thegoodbook.com, thegoodbook.co.uk and thegoodbook.com.au.

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