From Dane Ortlund’s blog, Strawberry-Rhubarb Theology:
Corinthian factionalism is in our blood today no less than the mid-50’s A.D. ‘I am of Cephas,’ ‘I am of Paul,’ ‘I am of Apollos’–‘I am of Wright,’ ‘I am of Piper,’ ‘I am of Barth,’ ‘I am of _______.’ But all things are ours. Learn from them all, filter it through Scripture, be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, blend humble love with conviction-fueled courage, and emerge helped. Let’s be mature in our thinking (1 Cor 14:20).
From Charles Spurgeon, sermon 3369 (“Man Humbled, God Exalted”):
Conviction of sin is a wondrous puller-down. When a man begins to feel his sin lying heavy upon his heart, when his iniquity is continually before him, as David puts it in Psalm 51, then his high looks are gone.
Have you ever seen a rich man in the anguish of conviction? You would not know him from a beggar then. His purse-pride has gone; all his wealth gives him but little comfort. “My sin! My sin! My sin!” saith he. “Would to God I were as poor as the paupers in the workhouse, if I were but rid of my sin! What is my wealth while I have my sin?”
Have you ever seen the man of knowledge, the man who knows everything, the sharp, quick, critical man, who takes everybody up, and thinks he can set all the world right—have you ever seen him under a sense of sin? He feels himself to be a fool at once, and would sit down on a form with the infant class in a school if there he might learn of a Savior, being content to give up all his wisdom, and to be a babe in Christ.
Have you never observed the man who was naturally of a high and haughty disposition, who reared up among his fellows, have you never seen how he acts when God’s hand is on him! Why, he would fain hide himself anywhere, and he envies even the meanest and most obscure of the children of God.
Once get a sight of sin, and those things which now prop us up will all give way, and we shall be beggars in the face of all the world, when once we see how exceeding sinful a thing our sin is.
Mark Dever’s latest interview features Mez McConnell, whose testimony is incredible. McConnell authored a short autobiography Is There Anybody Out There?: A Journey from Despair to Hope (Christian Focus, 2007). You can listen to the autobiographical interview here:
For the next four days I will have the joy of spending some time with my wife and kids in Cape Cod, the place where New England flexes its arm to the heavens, or salutes England. Whatever it represents, we are balanced on the top of the shoulder. For all my years of being a Boston Red Sox fan (over 15), this is the first time stepping foot in the wonderful state of Massachusetts, just in time for their elimination from the playoffs, which makes this trip something like a surprise homecoming that bursts triumphantly into an empty house. But it was still quite a lot of fun throwing a ball of leather and yarn along the seaweed-strewn shoreline with my son and shagging poor tosses from the saltwater bath. We closed the evening by filling ourselves with lobster. Not a bad start to our trip.
This trip will double as an educational trip for the kids (the greatly anticipated Great Awakening trip being postponed until at least November—greatly anticipated by me, mostly). But this trip to the cape will focus on the Pilgrims, Plymouth plantation, etc. While driving up today we listened to the first 5 hours of the audio book version of my favorite Pilgrim book, and one of my top-10 favorite historical books, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick. It’s a brilliant book and a fair and honest treatment of the Pilgrim’s story, their motives, aspirations, and the means they used to survive.
But this trip is not all games, lobster, and history. This time away will triple as my second writing/editing retreat and it will afford me the time to read carefully through my entire book manuscript. The due date is fast approaching and much work is undone. However, the project is progressing nicely and recent feedback on the manuscript has been encouraging. Yet it sits there on the table next to me, a 218-page manuscript and 3 red pens. I do hope I brought enough ink.
This week I have been reading quite a lot on the Church/politics topic. For anyone interested, here are four thoughtful quotes I come across in my reading:
Michael J. Gerson and Peter Wehner, City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era (Moody, 2010; pre-press edition), pp. 35-36:
Individual Christians and the corporate body of Christ are not synonymous. To act otherwise is to get both into trouble. Moreover, to recognize the distinction between the responsibilities proper to the church and proper to the individual is to dignify the role of the layperson and ennoble the call of the citizen. How so? Individual Christian layperson may well possess special competence in a policy area—like health care or welfare, national security affairs or overseas development, legal philosophy or immigration policy—that the church simply doesn’t possess and shouldn’t be expected to possess. In this context, the role of the church, at least as we interpret it, is to provide individual Christians with a moral framework through which they can work out their duties as citizens and engage the world in a thoughtful way, even as it resists the temptation to instruct them on how to do their job or on which specific public policies they ought to embrace.
David VanDrunen, Living in God’s Two Kingdoms: A Biblical Vision for Christianity and Culture (Crossway, 2010; pre-press edition), p. 163:
I hope that readers will find the conclusions of this chapter (and the book as a whole) to be both liberating and weighty. The conclusions are liberating, I believe, because they claim that Christians’ consciences cannot be bound by the extrabiblical demands of fellow believers who seek to impose the “Christian” way of teaching mathematics to our children, running our businesses, or supporting political candidates. The conclusions are also weighty, however, because this Christian liberty, which unshackles our consciences from other people’s nonbiblical demands, puts the responsibility back upon ourselves. Our pastors and elders have not been called to micromanage our cultural activities, though sometimes we might wish that we could shift to somebody else the responsibility of deciding how to educate our children, whether to fire a difficult employee, or whether to support a candidate’s political campaign. In the end these are decisions that we must make as individuals and as families with the wisdom God gives us as we live out our Christian faith in our own particular life circumstances.
Herman Bavinck, “Christian Principles and Social Relationships” in Essays on Religion, Science, and Society (Baker Academic, 2008), p. 143:
So that everything may revive and may become again what it ought to be and can be, the Gospel tests all things–all circumstances and relationships–against the will of God, just as in the days of Moses and the prophets, of Christ and the apostles. It considers everything from a moral point of view, from the angle in which all those circumstances and relationships are connected with moral principles that God has instituted for all of life. Precisely because the Gospel only opposes sin, it opposes it only and everywhere in the heart and in the head, in the eye and in the hand, in family and in society, in science and art, in government and subjects, in rich and poor, for all sin is unrighteousness, trespassing of God’s law, and corruption of nature. But by liberating all social circumstances and relationships from sin, the Gospel tries to restore them all according to the will of God and make them fulfill their own nature.
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics (Baker Academic, 2008), 4:437:
The relationship that has to exist between the church and the world is in the first place organic, moral, and spiritual in character. Christ—even now—is prophet, priest, and king; and by his Word and Spirit he persuasively impacts the entire world. Because of him there radiates from everyone who believes in him a renewing and sanctifying influence upon the family, society, state, occupation, business, art, science, and so forth. The spiritual life is meant to refashion the natural and moral life in its full depth and scope according to the laws of God. Along this organic path Christian truth and the Christian life are introduced into all the circles of the natural life, so that life in the household and the extended family is restored to honor, the wife (woman) is again viewed as the equal of the husband (man), the sciences and arts are Christianized, the level of the moral life is elevated, society and state are reformed, laws and institutions, morals and customs are made Christian.
By request.
From James Davidson Hunter, To Change the World, pages 231–232:
Even in the context of late modernity, suffused as it is by failed ideologies, false idolatries, and distorted ideas of community, joy, and love, one can still find much good. Life still has significance and worth. What is more, people of every creed and no creed have talents and abilities, possess knowledge, wisdom, and inventiveness, and hold standards of goodness, truth, justice, morality, and beauty that are, in relative degree, in harmony with God’s will and purposes. These are all gifts of grace that are lavished on people whether Christian or not. To be sure, there is a paradox here that perplexes many Christians. On the one hand, nonbelievers oftentimes possess more of these gifts than believers. On the other hand, because of the universality of the fall, believers often prove to be unwise, unloving, ungracious, ignorant, foolish, and craven. Indeed, more than any Christian would like to admit, believers themselves are often found indifferent to and even derisive of expressions of truth, demonstrations of justice, acts of nobility, and manifestations of beauty outside of the church. Thus, even where wisdom and morality, justice and beauty exist in fragments or in corrupted form, the believer should recognize these as qualities that, in Christ, find their complete and perfect expression. The qualities nonbelievers possess as well as the accomplishments they achieve may not be righteous in an eschatological sense, but they should be celebrated all the same because they are gifts of God’s grace.
Tony Reinke 