The Gospel and the Mind, Brad Green

Brad Green’s new book, The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life (Crossway) is now available. Since Brad is a good friend and colleague, I have had the privilege of hearing him discuss portions of this book along the way, and can testify that this will be a very helpful book. I look forward to reading it!

The Forgiveness of Sins Covers It All

A few days ago I saw this quote on Ray Ortlund’s blog. It has given me so much enjoyment and blessing that I wanted to pass it along. This is classic Luther!

It is the supreme art of the devil that he can make the law out of the gospel. If I can hold on to the distinction between law and gospel, I can say to him any and every time that he should kiss my backside. Even if I sinned I would say, ‘Should I deny the gospeI on this account?’ . . . Once I debate about what I have done and left undone, I am finished. But if I reply on the basis of the gospel, ‘The forgiveness of sins covers it all,’ I have won.”

Martin Luther, quoted in Reinhard Slenczka, “Luther’s Care of Souls for Our Times,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 67 (2003): 42.

Packer, What is the Gospel?

As we approach the Lord's day may we be faithful in proclaiming this message.

“I formulate the Gospel this way: it is information issuing in invitation; it is proclamation issuing in persuasion. It is an admonitory message embracing five themes. First, God: the God whom Paul proclaimed to the Athenians in Acts 17, the God of Christian theism.

Second, humankind: made in God’s image but now totally unable to respond to God or do anything right by reason of sin in their moral and spiritual system. Third, the person and work of Christ: God incarnate, who by dying wrought atonement and who now lives to impart the blessing that flows form his work of atonement.

Fourth, repentance, that is, turning from sin to God, from self-will to Jesus Christ. And fifthly, new community: a new family, a new pattern of human togetherness which results from the unity of the Lord’s people in the Lord, henceforth to function under the one Father as a family and a fellowship.” (44, emphasis added)

Packer, J.I. Serving the People of God: Collected Shorter Writings of J.I. Packer. Vol. 2. Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 1998.

Christ Victorious

I came back across this poem from Elizabeth Prentiss today. Mrs. Prentiss suffered much and deals with this topic well in her poems. I like the honest assessment of grief and the move to triumph through the gospel.

Christ Victorious

Oh, days of sickness, grief and pain,
What bring ye in your mournful train?
Gray hairs, old age before its time-
The breaking down of manhood’s prime,
The trembling hand, the fainting heart,
Bruises and wounds to throb and smart,
The nerve unstrung, the sleepless brain;
Oh, these come boldly in your train.

But days of sickness, grief and pain,
Do these alone make up your train?
Not so! Not so! The ranks between
Submission’s gracious form is seen;
Sweet Patience ventures hand in hand,
While Faith, Christ’s honor to maintain
Rides, dauntless, mid your hostile train.

Come, then, wild troop of griefs and pains
And riot on my Lord’s domains!
Where you lay waste, another Hand
A firmer fabric long has planned;
What you destroy, Faith’s radiant smile
Declares is for a little while;
And Christ Himself shall come to reign
Victorious o’er your helpless train.

- Elizabeth Prentiss, found in Golden Hours

The Gospel is Glad Tidings

“The Gospel is good news- glad tidings. To whomsoever it is glad tidings and good news, to him it is the gospel. It has come to make troubled consciences peaceful, and wounded hearts whole, and anxious distressed spirits glad. Sinner! does this doctrine of Christ crucified and risen to give repentance and forgiveness, make you glad? Then it is yours.”

- Melancthon Jacobus (1816-1876), p. 82 of his Notes Critical and Explanatory on the Acts of the Apostles (reprinted by Solid Ground Christian Books).

Proclaim the Forgiveness of Sins

I am increasingly mindful of the struggle Christians have to really believe that God loves them and forgives their sin. Part of our task as pastors in proclaiming the gospel is to remind the people of God that God does truly forgive sin. This is a crucial aspect of the gospel. But for some of our people it will be easy to believe that God hates sin, that God judges sin, and even that God forgives the sins of other people but not that he really & truly forgives their own sin.

Honestly, I am more accustomed to dealing with the error of minimizing God’s holiness and the horribleness of sin. This is a real problem in the church, but we must be wary of the error on both sides of the road here.

Eric Smith has a wonderful recent post on the task of proclaiming forgiveness individually to our people. He uses a great quote from Calvin on the fact that while we reject the Catholic practice of priestly pardon we do still as ministers of Christ, speaking as his heralds, proclaim the pardon of Christ to believers.

Eric then closes with these four searching questions which do truly get to the heart of pastoral ministry.

1) Am I striving to know my people in such a way that I can tell when they are burdened, and when they are rejoicing? Or am I content to prepare my sermons without thought to their needs and shake their hands on their way in and out of church on Sunday mornings?
2) Do I present myself as a knowable pastor, himself conscious of his sin and carried away by mercy? When my people think of someone who is approachable and sympathetic, do they think of me? Or do I come off as high-handed, demanding, and scolding?
3) Do I preach the Gospel beautifully, as the best news any sinner has ever heard, as sufficient to cleanse the deepest stains upon the conscience and heart? I personally find it much easier to preach legalistically about what we should do and not do, than to preach the Gospel of glorious free grace. My default mode is to try and modify our sinful behavior, rather than to exalt a merciful, life-giving Savior.
4) Am I able to personally apply the Gospel to the lives of my people when sitting across the table from them and listening to their stories as Calvin described? Or would I bungle this, able only to talk in generalities before a crowd? Have I thought through the sorts of sicknesses from which my people will suffer that will require tonic of the Gospel?

May we be the sort of faithful shepherds in view here.

Diluting the Gospel

“I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.”

- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, as cited in White & Yeats, Franchising McChurch: Feeding Our Obsession with Easy Christianity, 139.

Stetzer on Living the Gospel

Ed Stetzer was our speaker in chapel here at Union today. He did a great job preaching on living the gospel from 2 Cor 5:16-21. You can access the audio here.

He quoted Mark Twain saying that the church is good people standing in front of good people telling them how to be good people. This is indeed how the church is viewed too often- both inside and outside of the church. We so desperately need to become gospel-centered people- people who know our own deep need of the gospel, who have seen and experienced the beauty and power of the gospel , whose lives are increasingly shaped by the gospel, and who therefore seek to share this gospel with others.

Carson on Keeping the Gospel Central

Here is a lengthy quote once more from Carson’s Basics for Believers. It is long, but I think this is a good word for us today when many issues are crying out for our attention. This no doubt speaks to many situations, but I confess I am thinking primarily of my own denomination, the SBC. Far too long we have assumed people ‘get’ the gospel, and we may be tempted therefore to spend the bulk of our time on denominational distinctives, cultural engagement, etc. We must not make the error of assuming the first things. Let us be gospel-people first.

“In a fair bit of Western evangelicalism, there is a worrying tendency to focus of the periphery. I have a colleague in the Missions Department at Trinity whose analysis of his own heritage is very helpful. Dr. Paul Hiebert labored for years in India before returning to the United States to teach. He springs from Mennonite stock and analyzes his heritage in a fashion that he himself would acknowledge is something of a simplistic caricature, but a useful one nonetheless. One generation of Mennonites believed the gospel and held as well that there were certain social, economic, and political entailments. The next generation assumed the gospel, but identified with the entailments. The following generation denied the gospel; the ‘entailments’ became everything. Assuming this sort of scheme for evangelicalism, one suspects that large swaths of the movement are lodged in the second step, with
some drifting toward the third.

What we must ask one another is this: What is it in the Christian faith that excites you? What consumes your time? What turns you on? Today there are endless subgroups of confessing Christians who invest enormous quantities of time and energy in one issue or another: abortion, pornography, home schooling, women’s ordination (for or against), economic justice, a certain style of worship, the defense of a particular Bible version, and much more. The list varies from country to country, but not few countries have a full agenda of urgent, peripheral demands. Not for a moment am I suggesting we should not thin about such matters or throw our weight behind some of them. But when such matters devour most of our time and passion, each of us must ask: In what fashion am I confessing the centrality of the gospel?”

Carson next acknowledges the great cultural work of people like Newton and Wilberforce and others.

“But virtually without exception these men and women put the gospel first. They were gospel people. They reveled in it, preached it, cherished Bible reading and exposition that was Christ-centered and gospel centered, and from that base moved out into the broader social agendas. In short, they put the gospel first, not least in their own aspirations. Not to see this priority means we are not more than a generation away from denying the gospel.” (26-27)

Three Dollars Worth of Gospel

I always recommend to pastors that they purchase all of Don Carson’s little paperback expositions because I think they are some of the best expositional material available. They are models of exegesis, application, and preaching in general.

I just came back across this following quote from Basics for Believers: An Exposition of Philippians . This is piercing application. I am cut to the quick. I know the approach to life he is satirizing not simply by looking out at others but by looking within. I need to hear this word again. And, how we need this word in our churches! All too easily we warp the gospel into a way for securing the ‘good life’ for ourselves.

“I would like to buy about three dollars worth of gospel, please. Not too much – just enough to make me happy, but not so much that I get addicted. I don’t want so much gospel that I learn to really hate covetousness and lust. I certainly don’t want so much that I start to love my enemies, cherish self-denial, and contemplate missionary service in some alien culture. I want ecstasy, not repentance; I want transcendence, not transformation. I would like to be cherished by some nice, forgiving, broad-minded people, but I myself don’t want to love those from different races – especially if they smell. I would like enough gospel to make my family
secure and my children well behaved, but not so much that I find my ambitions redirected or my giving too greatly enlarged. I would like about three dollars worth of the gospel, please.” (pp. 12-13)

Brothers, we must preach this searching point. Many will be entirely content for us to “do our sermon”, but when you begin to press the call of the gospel to shape our lives, rebuke our sin, calling for repentance many will rebel. But without this we have failed to discharge our ministries (Col 4:17). Without this we are mere hirelings awaiting rebuke from the Master on the final day. There is no discount version of the Gospel. It is all or nothing. Let us wield the searching sword of the Spirit (Heb 4:12) as those who have first been pierced by it.

More from Vos Bio

Following on from my review of Letters of Geerhardus Vos , here are some more quotes from the biographical sketch. As I noted in the review, one of the best parts of the sketch is when Dennison addresses Vos’ dissatisfaction with cultural conservativism masquerading as Christianity. The last portion of the second quote is particularly sharp. By “Conservative Christianity” Dennison does not mean Christianity which is faithful to historic doctrine but a Christianity which parades its conservatism while operating according to the ways of the world. It certainly is a good warning.

“…it was the tepid, indeed vacuous, preaching that distressed him more. The gospel was crowded out from the pulpit and Sunday school in the interest of cultural relevance and contemporary moralizing.” (59, in footnote 164)

“The world he inhabited from 1881 to 1932 had been attenuated and acculturated by a ‘gospel’ that Christ and Paul and the New Testament world would not comprehend – the gospel of the self-consciousness of modern man: man, only man, nothing but man! Posturing, preening, manipulating, dominating, moneymaking, power brokering: these are the mantras that drive the influence of peddlers of contemporary Protestant orthodoxy. Such worldliness was incomprehensible to Vos; hence, he has remained incomprehensible to them. And perhaps Geerhardus Vos came to realize that what was stamped on the hearts, souls and behavior of these gurus was but another variety of that age-old depravity – tyranny. Conservative Christianity is provincial – pedantic, morose, dull – even soporific; it is Christian conservatism with very little brain, let alone heart. And perhaps that is why the brighter adolescents of that tradition grow up to become liberals. Liberalism is, at least, engaging.” (83)

The Letters of Geerhardus Vos, A Review

Letters of Geerhardus Vos , ed. James T. Dennison
(P&R Publishing, 2005), hb., 274 pp.

This is an interesting book. Before reading it I knew of Vos as a key figure in the development of biblical theology, but I knew little else. I was drawn to the book precisely because I knew little about him, because letters tend to reveal the man more than anything else, and because I saw that it included some of his poems (I had not known he had written poetry). I enjoyed reading the book.

The title of the book may mislead you because the contents are actually both more and less than what one might anticipate. It is more in that the book contains significantly more than letters. It includes a 75 page biography, a 20+ page bibliography, and 10 pages of poetry. It is less in that most of the letters contained in it are not that profound. You do not find here the sort of thing you find in Luther’s Letters of Spiritual Counsel, or Rutherford’s Letters, or Newton’s Letters for example. These are not typically letters of counsel but just regular correspondence. The letters still contain interesting material, but probably not much to hold the attention of the average theological reader.

Probably the most useful part of the book is the biographical sketch. The Preface states, “This volume contains the most thorough account of the life of Geerhardus Vos published to date” (11). I am not in the position to judge this claim, but this would make the sketch significant. Apparently, not much has been known about Vos personally. Dennison refers to Vos as “the mysterious premier Reformed biblical theologian of the twentieth century” (11). It becomes apparent fairly soon that one significant reason for interest in Vos has to do with his place in the split within the PCUSA and the exodus of some Princeton faculty to found Westminster. Vos had been the teacher of Machen, Van Til, Murray and others but he did not leave Princeton himself. Vos expressed his appreciation of and support for Machen and the others but did not follow them. Apparently this has puzzled some and various speculations have arisen to explain. Dennison clearly seeks to argue the view that Vos could see through the power agenda that truly underlay some of the pastors who were supporting Machen. According to Dennison, Vos could see this though Machen could not. Vos agreed with Machen theologically but could not support the worldly motives and objectives of these others. According to Dennison, the power agenda of these other pastors eventually came out.

Now, I must first admit that I do not know enough about this episode of Presbyterian life to adjudicate between these opinions. I can though make two observations. First, whether or not Dennison is right he certainly overplays his data at places. Various times he slides from simply suggesting possible motives of various people to asserting the motives as clear fact. At one point he even posits what Machen may have been thinking while laying on his deathbed! Of course this neither means that Dennison’s analysis is right nor wrong. It does mean that this is not a real objective analysis.

My second observation, is that if Dennison is just basically on track, there are significant parallels (and thus lessons) for other denominations, particularly my own- the SBC. The warning that work for theological fidelity will typically be mixed with lesser motives is a sane, realistic reminder. Vos then emerges as a reminder that our allegiance is to the gospel not any other agenda- even a conservative one. He is also a reminder that we cannot defend the gospel by acting in anti-gospel ways.

I found the biographical sketch interesting reading. The writing ranges from hagiographic, to melodramatic, to rousing prose. The best parts, in my opinion, are where Dennison shows Vos articulating the centrality of the gospel and the ways in which we so easily accommodate to another, cultural message. For example Dennison reports, “…it was the tepid, indeed vacuous, preaching that distressed him more. The gospel was crowded out from the pulpit and Sunday school in the interest of cultural relevance and contemporary moralizing” (59, in footnote 164). Surely this is true in far too many churches today as well. A key theme that emerges is the way in which a culturally or politically conservative message easily passes for the gospel. We need this warning in our day.

Well, this review is already too long by bloging standards. I have already posted one quote from this book and will plan to post a few more separately. Let me simply conclude by listing in summary what I think are the benefits of this book for people in my circle:

- Strong reminder of the centrality of the gospel and the danger of mere moralism
- warnings about accommodation with culture, particularly on the conservative side of things
- warnings about denominational politics and the compromises which allure so
easily
- greater awareness of a key figure in the history of biblical interpretation
- A picture of handling oneself in dialogue with others