no-girls-allowed-may-june-2012

20

Years of

Modern Reformation

vol.21 | no.3 | MAY-JUNE 2012 | $6.50

No Girls ALLOWED

FEED YOUR INNER THEOLOGY

GEEK VISIT THE STORE

Be sure to check out White Horse Inn’s online store. In addition to books, you’ll find mp3s, study kits, and videos for sale— everything you need to keep the conversation going offline.

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features vol.21 | no.3 | may-June 2012

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Theology for Children

by Simonetta Carr

A Grieving Mother’s Tribute to Thomas Boston

by Le Ann Trees

Reformed or Just Conservative?

By michael s. horton

A Gift of God Out of Adam

By Herman Bavinck

Evaluating Sermons

By Derke Bergsma

From the Hallway ›› Recovering the

Lost Treasure of Evening Worship

By Jon D. PaynE

Youth Ministry: By the Means of Grace

By brian h. cosby

Muscular Christianity

By MICHAEL S. HORTON

cover IMAGE COURTESY OF Henrik Sorensen/GETTY IMAGES

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anytime Did you know that White Horse Inn radio archives are available online? Recent topics include: A Mormon President, Faith & Experience, For or Against Calvinism Listen for free at your convenience. Comment, ask questions, and share the link with others.

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departments 06 08 12 49 60 62

Letter from the editor

By ryan glomsrud

interview ››

Hearing God’s Voice in His Word

Kathleen Niels on of the Gospel Coalition

Theology ›› Christian Chick-Lit

By brooke mintun

Book Reviews

N . T. Wright, Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert,

Thomas Albert Howard, and Simonetta Carr

Geek Squad ›› Biblical and Systematic

Theology, Both/And

by RYAN GLOMSRUD

BACK PAGE ››

Best-selling “Christian” Books Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Ryan Glomsrud Managing Editor Patricia Anders Marketing Director Michele Tedrick Design Director José Reyes for Metaleap Creative, metaleapcreative.com Department Editors Ryan Glomsrud (Letter from the Editor & Reviews), Michael S. Horton Designers Joshua Baker, Tiffany Forrester Copy Editor Elizabeth Isaac Proofreader Ann Smith Modern Reformation © 2012 All rights reserved. ISSN-1076-7169 1725 Bear Valley Parkway Escondido, CA 92027 (800) 890-7556 info@modernreformation.org www.modernreformation.org Subscription Information US 1 YR $32 2 YR $58 Digital Only 1 YR $25 US Student 1 YR $26 Canada 1 YR $39 2 YR $70 Europe 1 YR $58 2 YR $104 Other 1 YR $65 2 YR $118

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l e t t e r f r o m t h e ed i t o r

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Ryan Glomsrud executive editor

n this issue of Modern Reformation we encourage readers to ask some tough questions about the unity of our churches. We’re raising a hot-potato issue: Do women get the short end of the stick when it comes to the study of theology?

Scanning the evangelical landscape, it seems to us that women suffer from a paucity of doctrine and a disproportionate amount of material that can only be described as self-help. The subjects will all be familiar: practical living guides for this and that, advice for raising children, keeping the family together, dieting, strengthening relationships, and so forth. Lots of ToDo’s, lots of the Holy Spirit will help you do X, Y, and Z, but very little of the announcement that we all need to hear regardless of gender: Christ has done for you what you can never do for yourself. The effect of this avalanche of women’s content is all law and no (or very little) gospel.

Now the blame doesn’t rest on women alone; mostly, publishing companies and the evangelical “retail industry” are responsible for flooding the market with this material. But another contributing factor are the men on the conservative fringes who implicitly encourage this genderspecific niche marketing by implying that

theology is for men, the heads of houses, and leaders of families. It’s “No Girls Allowed.”

But there are encouraging signs, which is where we begin in an interview with Kathleen Nielson, director of women’s initiatives for The Gospel Coalition. Editor-in-Chief Michael Horton probes the topic at the foundational level with the help of Abraham Kuyper, asking whether our views have been properly reformed according to the Word of God or whether we are merely defending so-called conservative cultural mores. Le Ann Trees shares her personal story of how the study of an eighteenth-century Scottish theologian named Thomas Boston sustained her through personal tragedy, and regular contributor Simonetta Carr discusses the importance of teaching theology to children.

Assumptions need to be challenged and checked by Scripture, so this issue includes several provocative pieces, one by Mary Ellen Godfrey on Dorothy Sayers’ book, Are Women Human? Pastor Brian Cosby challenges us to think about the educational value of entertainment-driven youth ministry, while Professor Derke Bergsma offers practical advice about how to evaluate a sermon. Preaching and general observance of the Lord’s Day has fallen on hard times, but in a short essay Jon Payne encourages us to consider the importance of evening worship. Finally, Michael Horton offers a well-aimed criticism of the exaggerated emphasis on biblical manhood evident in some of our circles.

The study of theology doesn’t replace our study of Scripture but undergirds, strengthens, and extends it. Informed Bible study complements Word and Sacrament ministry and further develops our hearts and minds in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is something we all need: every man, woman, and child (Gal. 3:27).

“For you are all one in Christ Jesus”

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i n t e r v i ew

interview with KATHLEEN NIELSON of the Gospel Coalition Hearing God’s Voice In His Word

i n t e r v i ew

Hea r i n g G o d ’ s Vo i ce I n H i s Wo r d Q & A with Kathleen Niels on

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r. Kathleen Buswell Nielson has written numerous Bible studies as well as various articles, poems, and a book, Bible Study: Following the Ways of the Word (2011). Originally intended for women in her church, her Bible studies have now reached thousands. Kathleen serves as director of women’s initiatives for The Gospel Coalition. She also serves on the board of directors of The Charles Simeon Trust.

q The Gospel Coalition is hosting a conference this summer, and we’ve had an opportunity to ask a few questions of Kathleen Nielson, director of women’s initiatives for TGC. How is this conference unique? a. Women have always benefited from the

work of The Gospel Coalition, which is led by pastors committed to promoting gospel-centered ministry for the next generation. But TGC has recently begun a more formal women’s initiative—desiring both to edify women biblically and to benefit from women’s contributions, in the work of strengthening the whole church.

This is an encouraging example, I believe, of men and women with shared complementarian commitments working together for the sake of

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the biblical gospel. Women’s voices have joined TGC’s blog conversation. Last March, women offered several workshops at TGC’s national conference, and this June brings the first national conference for women on the theme, “Here is Our God! God’s Revelation of Himself in Scripture.” The conference will evidence TGC’s distinct commitment to clear expository teaching of the Word, with plenary sessions devoted to unfolding a series of texts in which God shows himself to his people, as well as a great array of workshops! One way to state the distinctive of this conference is to say that it’s for women but not all about women. Women need what every human being needs: to know Jesus

Women in particular are hearing all kinds of anti-gospel voices today—voices that tell us we should say and do everything, as well as voices that tell us we shouldn’t have or express thoughts of our own. Either extreme denies the clear teaching of God’s Word.

Photo by JOSH MEISTER

Christ through his Word, and to learn better and better how to live and speak that Word.

Are we growing together as Christians in our churches? Do men, women, teens, and children alike share the same faith these days when we aren’t sharing the same Sunday school lessons, devotional readings, books, or even Bibles? Should there be niche programs in the church and the Christian marketplace for women and men?

a.

Surely in the church we need a balance of gatherings for all, on the one hand, and gatherings for particular groups (such as women or men or youth), on the other. The regular gathering of all God’s people for worship under the preaching of the Word should be central, but other groups certainly can have benefit. I spend a lot of time with women’s groups because that is a natural (and biblically encouraged, as in Titus) venue in which women learn and share their lives together around the Word. Of course, in any church group surely the aim must not be to study Scripture through a particular interpretive grid but rather to hear God’s voice in his Word as clearly and comprehensively as possible. Teens can benefit from hearing sometimes about teen concerns, and women about women’s concerns—but the most fundamental and pressing need of all of us is to hear and follow God’s voice, as he reveals himself to us in Scripture from beginning to end, book by book.

stuff that has indeed too often been offered to women. The great thing about the time in which we live is that so many wonderful materials are available to anyone. My graduate work was in English, not theology; I’ve been ever so grateful for all the biblical study resources made available to me over the years, through faithful churches and other educational channels. The resources available just through the TGC website are magnificent, even overwhelming.

For over a decade, The Charles Simeon Trust has offered training in biblical exposition to pastors; last year’s inaugural workshop for women in ministry

TOP TEN BEST-SELLERS FOR CHRISTIAN WOMEN

1. The Love Dare by Stephen and Alex Kendrick 2. Calm My Anxious Heart: A Woman’s Guide to Finding Contentment by Linda Dillow 3. The Promise of Security by Beth Moore 4. The Resolution for Women by Priscilla Shirer 5. What Is He Thinking? What Guys Want Us To Know About Dating, Love, and Marriage

by Rebecca St. James 6. Made to Crave Participants’ Guide

by Lysa TerKeurst 7. My Journey to Contentment: A Companion Journal to Calm My Anxious Heart by Linda Dillow

Surveying the ten best-selling women’s books from an evangelical clearinghouse, it seems to us that women are bombarded with an inordinate amount of literature in the self-help genre.

There are principles, strategies, “how-to” tips, and personal therapy. As a result, do women get stuck with mostly law and little gospel?

8. So Long, Insecurity by Beth Moore

a. I’m discovering that a lot of women in

This was the current list taken from Christian Book

the church today haven’t just stayed “stuck” with the more topical, self-help, or “fluffy”

9. Lies Women Believe: And the Truth that Sets Them Free by Nancy Leigh DeMoss 10. Twelve Extraordinary Women by John MacArthur

Distributors in early 2012.

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The first priority is to take in the Word itself, and then with guidance and experience one begins to discern those voices that elucidate the Word with Spirit-filled humility, scholarly care, and attention to the Bible’s whole storyline had a waiting list, and a second, larger one took place in March. Actually, many people in all categories of the church today (sometimes even pastors!) reflect the shallowness of the culture around us in their reading and thinking and biblical study. As members of local churches and the universal church, each of us can play a part in encouraging Christ’s body to “consider our ways,” as Haggai puts it.

Does this tendency play a role, ironically, in driving women to spiritual exhaustion and even defeat?

a.

A focus on anything other than Christ and the biblical gospel will hurt, as opposed to help, anyone. Women in particular are hearing all kinds of anti-gospel voices today—voices that tell us we should say and do everything, as well

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as voices that tell us we shouldn’t have or express thoughts of our own. Either extreme denies the clear teaching of God’s Word. Ever since Eden, such denial has led in the direction of death as opposed to life.

What do you think is the solution? What do we need to change in our thinking or our practice to bring about a reformation of our churches for all members?

a.

I don’t think there’s any new solution to human dilemmas. According to the apostle Peter, “God’s divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises” (2 Pet. 1:3–4).

At the least, we can say that these words point us to focus on the Lord himself, through his Word, in order to find everything we need for life and godliness as God’s people. That’s a pretty oldtime solution. It’s one that involves hearts and wills to dig into God’s Word in order to know him and his great promises. Even as I write these words, I think of this not just as a “solution” but as the most amazing calling one could ever be given—and it is given to each one of us and all of us together as God’s people.

What criteria would you suggest for Christian women looking for solid resources for biblical and theological study?

a.

One’s own pastor(s) is a front-line resource.

Often God provides wise teachers and leaders who can recommend just the resources we need.

The first priority is to take in the Word itself, and then with guidance and experience one begins to discern those voices that elucidate the Word with Spirit-filled humility, scholarly care, and attention to the Bible’s whole storyline of God’s redeeming a people for himself through the Lord Jesus Christ.

a new old school

The story of how one seminary is advancing the gospel.

“Westminster Seminary California is vital in our effort toward a modern Reformation.”

–MICHAEL S. HORTON,

J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology

A new book telling Westminster Seminary California’s story– a small part of a very big story–the history of American Christianity and the history of the American West. Because of the seminary’s distinctive role and witness in history, this story is not only inspiring, but critically instructional for the life of the church in America.

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theology

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I recently moved (for the fifth time in two years) into a new apartment. My longsuffering brother, Mark, helped me schlep all fifteen of my book boxes. He’s a good kid, but his appreciation for the literary arts is tragically underdeveloped. He was scanning my shelves when he stopped and pointed at The Brothers Karamazov. “Who’s Doss-toe-ev-sky?”

“Duss-toy-ev-ski. He’s a writer, a great Russian novelist. Here, this is—” “If he’s so great, why do you have him next to Twilight and Nicholas Sparks?”

“Would you feel like reading Russian literature at the end of a twelve-hour workday?”

The ensuing banter was too dull to record. Suffice it to say, I called him a brute and he accused me of vanity, but it did turn into an interesting conversation on what people read and why. A cursory survey of the best-seller lists from Christian Book Distributors, Tyndale, Baker, and Zondervan reveals that Christian America’s literary tastes decidedly favor the sensational and romantic (e.g., Francine Rivers, Beverly Lewis, and Karen Kingsbury). While there’s nothing wrong with this—many “classic” authors (Dickens, Eliot, et al) started out as a pop-culture phenomenon, and every breathless, windblown romance heroine has an evil doppelgänger in the pompously didactic protagonist—it does make one wonder if this is the sort of steady diet on which we ought to be feeding.

I don’t want to categorically reject Christian women’s fiction. As night-table reading, it does

very well; the stories are arresting and interesting, and it’s pleasant to know that in the maelstrom of our mundane existence, we can find catharsis in the dénouement of characters whose struggles and triumphs mirror our own (or so we’d like to think). But are these books merely our entertainment, or have they become our education? Are women learning more about the God whom we worship from the Home to Hickory Hollow series than we are from the creeds and confessions?

If they are, it’s not purposeful. No one would pick up Redeeming Love and say that it contains the best articulation of the doctrine of God since the sixteenth century. It doesn’t contain any explicit theological discourse, nor was this likely the author’s intention. But in the absence of theologically sound, rigorous women’s Bible curricula—in a time where theologically sound sermons are becoming more the exception than the rule—if a woman is looking to develop her scriptural education, where else does she turn? Seminary is a luxury, and the sexual politics of church leadership has the potential to make attendance a sensitive subject.

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theology

“I wonder then if the answer lies not in our opinions of women’s abilities but in their tastes. Perhaps we don’t see more rigorous Bible studies by and for women because they’re not widely wanted.”

There are women’s Bible studies, of course; there’s no lack of books, courses, and groups designed to deepen a woman’s walk with God and change her life in thirty days—but therein lies my concern. More often than not, it’s a woman’s emotional struggles that are analyzed rather than the Scriptures per se. Many of them focus more closely on a woman’s need to overcome fear, anxiety, depression, and insecurity—with some help from the Lord, rather than relying on the Savior who has already overcome the world and freed her from condemnation by the Father.

This isn’t to degrade the suffering of women struggling with those issues, or to undermine the practical value those studies offer. As tools of our Lord’s providence, they do a great deal in strengthening the bonds of fellowship between sisters and encouraging them in their efforts to lead pious lives. But there is a strong tendency (as evinced by their very focus and language) for the reader to become ever more focused on herself and less on Christ. The end result is that the participant is left with a keen understanding of

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her own psychology (supported by dubious scriptural exegesis), but with a paltry understanding of her identity in Christ.

Why the dearth of textual women’s Bible studies? I don’t think it’s because we believe women incapable of intensive theological study. J. Gresham Machen credited his intellectual foundations to his mother’s training, and it was a farmer’s wife, Pietje Balthus, who instructed Abraham Kuyper in Reformed theology. Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Dorothy Sayers to Marilynne Robinson give ample evidence of the capacity of women to integrate scriptural fidelity and literary aesthetic. I wonder then if the answer lies not in our opinions of women’s abilities but in their tastes. Perhaps we don’t see more rigorous Bible studies by and for women because they’re not widely wanted.

If there is a lack of interest for works of this sort among women, it’s understandable. In the hectic schedules of a job, soccer practice, home maintenance, and family commitments, it’s difficult to find the time necessary for a personal education in the literary and theological beauty of Scripture. It’s a rare woman who can finish dinner at a reasonable hour, corral her rambunctious children into bed, finish her e-mails, and still have the mental fortitude to wrestle with Greek participles. My point is not that a woman must devote herself exclusively to postgraduate-level studies in hermeneutics in order to attain to a proper understanding of the Word of God, but to suggest that the inclusion of theologically sound, educational nonfiction alongside would prove a helpful and edifying supplement to our lighter reading.

It’s harder work, and not always an instinctive choice after a twelve-hour workday, but we read with endurance the tome set before us, that we may press on ahead toward our goal of the prize of the upward call of God (not the downward call toward ourselves) in Christ Jesus.

Brooke Mintun (BA, University of California San Diego) is the Social Media Director for Modern Reformation. She owns the entire Twilight series—in hardcover.

features

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THEOLOGY FOR

Children

by Simonetta Carr

W

hen Rev. Sutjipto Subeno, senior pastor of the Reformed Evangelical Church of Indonesia (GRII) in Surabaya, invited me to visit him for two weeks, I thought he was just being polite—but I realized he was serious when he sent me a detailed plan for my stay. In addition to book presentations in Christian schools, he scheduled me to speak at two seminars and some parent-teacher meetings on the importance of teaching theology to children.

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Photo by JOSH MEISTER

I first contacted Rev. Subeno about three years ago to let him know about my biography of John Calvin for children when I discovered that his denomination in Indonesia was holding a conference on him. Being supervisor of both a publishing house (Momentum Christian Literature) and a Christian school (Logos School), he has since been publishing all my children’s books in Indonesian.

When I asked him why he invited me to speak when he could have called someone else much more qualified, he answered, “I wanted you to come as a mother. If I tell parents to teach theology to their children, they are going to say, ‘Yes, you can do it; you are a pastor.’ It will mean much more if it comes from you.” This explanation was liberating. At every event, I introduced myself as a mother and spoke as a mother faced with the overwhelming task of parenting in the face of the reality of both my own and my children’s sin.

THEOLOGY FOR TOTS

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romoting the idea of teaching theology to young children has a strange ring in this day and age. It may seem pretentious, like one of many educational programs promising to raise true geniuses from an early age. We often forget that theology simply means “study of God” and that it’s his Word that exhorts us to grow (and help our children grow) in the knowledge of God and Christ (Col. 1:10, 2 Pet. 3:18). This is really the greatest motivation, pulling us through when our perplexities or our laziness kicks in. Knowing that God requires it of us silences all our arguments.

We should also consider the alternative. If we don’t teach our children to know God as he has revealed himself in his Word, the result will be conformity to other sets of “theologies.” As my pastor often says, if we don’t catechize our children, the world will. Their beliefs about God and life will be shaped by at least some of the many influences around them.

In Indonesia, they asked, “How can parents teach doctrine to their children if they themselves are not ModernReformation.org

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keeping it?” I directed them to the historical Reformed catechisms as tools for teaching theology to children. In this case, the Heidelberg Catechism— with its division into guilt, grace, and gratitude—provided the answer. The doctrine we need to teach our children includes all three categories: law, gospel, and our response to the gospel (see HC Q5, 12–15, 115, etc.). Some asked how early a child can understand doctrine. Again, I referred them to the catechisms. For example, the Catechism for Young Children (an introduction to the Shorter Catechism) is simple enough for a child who has just learned to talk. “Who made you? What else did God make?” Children are curious by nature, and many of them have similar questions, expressed or unexpressed.

Besides being pedagogical in nature, the question-and-answer format in the catechisms of the Reformation also makes doctrine very practical, since it normally starts with daily concerns and continues in a logical progression. The questions “Who made you?” and “What else did God make?” open up a world of discovery and generate discussions that can continue throughout the day, naturally leading to the next questions, “Why did God make you and all things?” and “How can you glorify God?” We should not discredit the value of rote memorization. It’s true that the goal of education is to help a student understand what he learns, but initially there has to be an input of facts that can be processed at a later time. I teach Italian, and I know this is true with languages. It’s best to first memorize a few sentences and use them, and then process the grammar later.

Contrary to common opinion, young children love to memorize. The first few years are an ideal time to teach them the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, some Scriptures, and a few catechism questions. Some parents, prompted by popular concerns, fear that their education will be dogmatic, but rote memorization is only dogmatic if it aims at teaching a system of belief without pointing to the underlying factual reality, or if it does so without welcoming critical thinking. Christian doctrine is based on historical facts and has particularly grown in understanding and clarity when challenged. In our children’s education, dogmatism is avoided by moving from the parroting stage of mimicking information by rote (to follow Dorothy Sayers’ definitions) to the pert stage (i.e., the logic-chopping and sometimes sassy stage evidenced by such questions as,

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“It was my son Jonathan, at the time five, who told me he liked the new church better. When I asked him why, he said that in the other church they were just teaching him the same stories over and over, but here he was actually learning something.”

“But why?”), and finally the poet stage, where a mature youth knows what he believes, why he believes it, and is able to communicate as much to others.

The Catechism’s Relevance

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told my Indonesian audience how I shared some of their perplexities when I moved from a generically evangelical church to a Reformed one. I wasn’t sure how my children would react. I was afraid they would be bored during the sermon, or they would end up parroting a catechism without understanding its meaning.

Over the years, I have seen how powerful these perplexities can be for parents. On occasion, I have seen families leave a Reformed church because of their children’s protests. God has been very good to me in this as in many other ways. It was my son Jonathan, at the time five, who told me he liked the new church better.

When I asked him why, he said that in the other church they were just teaching him the same stories over and over, but here he was actually learning something.

Children can easily understand the redemption story, which is anything but abstract. Equally concrete is the concept of sin. The forceful pull sin has on our wills is evident to a child, especially after he is disciplined a few times for the same offense. Children might spend a few years in denial (a Sunday school class of three- and four-year-old children once reacted with absolute shock to the teacher’s announcement that she sins all the time); but by the time they are five or six the ugly news has sunk in, and they are ready to embrace the catechism’s answer, “I am prone by nature to hate God and my neighbor.”

Anyone saying that theology is too abstract and impractical for children has never seen a child’s frustration over his or her constant wrongdoings.

One of my children was always a great visual illustration of the power of sin in our lives. He seemed to be hopelessly drawn to anything that was forbidden, sometimes literally crawling toward his desired object. Needless to say, he had to be disciplined more often than the others. I captured my Indonesian audience’s attention by telling a few stories from his early years, especially as they were eager to know how I reacted. Of course, my son was punished, but I was surprised to notice the reaction his repeated failures were causing in my heart. I am not sure how I would have reacted earlier, but being in a Reformed church I was now fully aware of my sinful condition. Instead of rage or despair, I felt compassion. I talked to my son often, about his sin and mine. We read Romans 7 together. I told him how he was struggling with disobedience and how I, at that moment, was dealing with sinful anger. Things didn’t get better overnight, but my attitude had definitely changed. Besides fostering compassion, a healthy view of sin also prevents some of the typical anxieties that afflict many parents.

When I didn’t have a Reformed theology, much of my parenting focus was on appearances, and the frequent disappointments my children dished out caused me much stress and discouragement.

Admitting our sins to our children was a new concept for some of my Indonesian listeners—something I was later told is rare for Asian parents. They are supposed to provide a perfect example and to expect perfect obedience. In further talks, I made it clear that I also expect respect from my children and that the parent/child distinction is very clear in our home. At the same time, in God’s eyes we are equally sinners and fellow pilgrims in this valley of tears.

Theology for Mothers

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know how difficult it is for mothers to find time to read and study when the children are small. I remember the days when reading a few Bible verses was a great accomplishment, but there was always little time to meditate on what I had read and to memorize. As the children grew, there were more chances to read, together and alone. Often I became so excited with my studies that I shared them with the children, regardless of their age.

Whether we stay at home or work outside, our influence as mothers is incomparable. It’s important that we grow in our understanding of doctrine so we can continue to lead our children on the correct path (borrowing from Michael Horton) from drama to doctrine to doxology to discipleship.

Skipping doctrine, which is the correct understanding of the biblical drama with its redemptive emphasis on the gospel of Christ, is an easy path but one that inevitably leads to moralism (if not outright unorthodoxy). Children need to have the gospel repeated to them on a daily basis, because it’s unnatural to human minds.

It is God Who Builds his Church I feel that my contribution to the seminars was comparably small since I only shared my experience as a mother and encouraged parents to use the catechisms; I am convinced that this trip was for my benefit more than anyone else’s. Seeing how God moves his global church to seek to know him and to lead their children in that knowledge has been a realization that brings encouragement when spiritual battles rage. It’s truly God who builds his church and keeps his everlasting covenant with us and with our children.

Simonetta Carr is a former elementary school teacher and has homeschooled her eight children. She is the author of the series Christian Biographies for Young Readers (Reformation Heritage) and of the fictional biography Weight of a Flame: The Passion of Olympia Morata (P&R). She also teaches Sunday school at Christ United Reformed Church in Santee, California.

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book

of th e

year

“Horton delivers the Reformed goods to a new generation.”

So say the judges of Christianity Today, who— we are proud to announce—have voted Mike Horton’s The Christian Faith book of the year for 2012 in the category of theology/ethics.

To order the award -winning systematic theology book today, v i s i t W h iteHo r seInn.o r g/ Th eCh r i st i an Fai t h.

A GRIEVING MOTHER’S

TRIBUTE TO THOMAS BOSTON

by Le Ann Trees

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heology matters. Since God is love, the study of God produces a correct understanding of the source and nature of love (1 John 4:8; KJV). Many Christians avoid answering the nagging question asked by nonbelievers and believers alike regarding why a loving God allows afflictions if he is indeed sovereign and could stop all pain and suffering. A proper answer to this monumental subject is critical to godly living in Christ Jesus (1 Tim. 3:12).

Six years ago, my sixteen-year-old son Benjamin died in a skiing accident. Following were the seemingly endless days of grief beyond imaginato uphold Reformed doctrine was cementtion along with questioning how God order ed by three incidences: his refusal to sign the could allow such a horrible thing to Oath of Abjuration in 1712 or its later altered verhappen to our family. While I had sion; his stand in the Marrow controversy in 1721 weathered the deaths of my father against the necessity of repentance preceding and his lone call at the Assembly of 1729 for when I was ten years old and my moth- faith; the disposal of Glasgow professor John Simson er and stepfather within a year of each for teaching the doctrine of Arianism.2 A graduother in my early twenties, my son’s ate of Edinburgh University, Boston saw himself death left me with no desire to live. I primarily as a preacher throughout his career, beordained at Simprin in 1699 and translated to could hardly bear to read the Bible as ing Ettrick in 1707 where he remained for the rest of its promises seemed to be empty. Was his life, delivering his final sermons from his God sovereign over all or only partly deathbed with his devoted parishioners listening so? Was he merely my comforter, as outside his window. Boston’s extensive writings on Christian doctrine, including his unique conone Christian counselor suggested, tributions to covenant theology and memoirs, and not Lord of all? How could God were mostly published after his death.3 I discovered that Boston had grieved over the love my family and allow my son to die?

Wandering over to my bookshelves in search of encouragement to trust God and keep on living in the months following the accident, I came upon my old copy of Thomas Boston’s Human Nature in Its Fourfold State, a summary of Christian doctrine written in 1720 and revised in 1729. It was reprinted more often than any other Scottish book of the eighteenth century with over a hundred editions. Rereading Boston’s treatise regarding the “states of creation, fall, grace, and glory,” made me curious to learn more about the author.1 Thomas Boston (1676–1732) was a minister and theologian in the Church of Scotland. Boston’s reputation as a staunch Scottish Presbyterian willing to stand against popular opinion in

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death of not just one child but six of his ten children. I came across his sermon series titled The Crook in the Lot.4 Boston wrote this treatise on the providence of God in 1737 to address the issue of life’s afflictions, called “crooks” in light of the Bible verse, “Consider the work of God: for who can make that straight which he has made crooked?”

(Eccles. 7:13).5 THE “crooks” of life Boston begins his treatise with the observation that crooks exist in everyone’s lot and they are of God’s making (Boston, The Crook in the Lot, 14).

He states that crooks are in the world because of

sin, and they can occur in a physical state such as deformities and disease, slights regarding what is rightfully due us, our stations in life, or in our relationships (16–28). God brings them about and has appointed the whole of them (30–31). There are pure sinless crooks such as the poverty of Lazarus and the barrenness of Rachel, and impure sinful crooks such as Tamar’s defiling and the attack on Job by the Sabeans and Chaldeans (32). Boston states,

The Belgic Confession, Article 13 We believe that the same good God, after He had created all things, did not forsake them or give them up to fortune or chance (1 Jn. 5:17; Heb. 1:3), but that He rules

Now, the crooks of this kind are not of God’s making, in the same latitude as those of the former; for he neither puts evil in the heart of any, nor stirreth up to it: “He cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man.” (James 1:13) But they are of his making, by his holy permission of them; powerful bounding of them, and wise overruling of them to some good end. (33)

and governs them according to His holy will, so that nothing happens in this world without His appointment (Ps . 115: 3; Prov. 16:1, 9, 33, 21:1; Eph. 1:11–12; Jas. 4:13–15); nevertheless, God neither is the Author of

A crook may be a “trial of one’s state,” regarding whether people are truly Christians or not (36– 37). It may stir us to our duty to wean ourselves from this world and fix our sights on the other world to come (39). Crooks can convict us of sin, be a correction or punishment of sin, or help us to avoid sin (40–44). Crooks in the lot, with the willing participation of the believer, exercise grace in God’s children (44–45). According to Boston, “The truth is, the crook in the lot is the great engine of Providence for making men appear in their true colours, discovering both their ill and their good; and if the grace of God be in them, it will bring it out, and cause it to display itself” (45). Boston consoles the believer that, since we know the crook is from God, we should “look upon it kindly” and remind ourselves that the Lord made it and can straighten it (51–52). Thus we are exhorted by Boston to be reconciled to it and not be angry at the creature by which it is brought about, but instead realize that God is the principal party (51–54).

While no one desires a crook, its design is to make us fit for heaven, and we have a Christian duty to submit to God’s will in our afflictions (55).

The reader is reminded by Boston that “God keeps the choice of every one’s crook to Himself; and therein He exerts His sovereignty. (Matt. 20:15)” (57).

God’s making of a crook cannot be mended by man until God allows it to be so. When men fight against SIDEBAR: GUIDO DE BRES, The author of the Belgic Confession, IN PRISON FOR HIS FAITH.

nor can be charged with the sins which are committed (Jas 1:13; 1 Jn. 2:16). For His power and goodness are so great and incomprehensible that He ordains and executes His work in the most excellent and just manner, even then when devils and wicked men act unjustly (Job 1:21; Isa. 10:5, 45:7; Amos 3:6; Acts 2:23, 4:27–28). And as to what He does surpassing human understanding, we will not curiously inquire farther than our capacity will admit of; but with the greatest humility and reverence adore the righteous judgments of God, which are hid from us (1 Kgs. 22:19–23; Rom. 1:28; 2 Thess. 2:11), contenting ourselves that we are pupils of Christ, to learn only those things which He has revealed to us in His word, without transgressing these limits (Deut. 29:29; 1 Cor. 4:6).

the yoke of the crook due to the unwillingness to tame their spirits and submit to God’s will, they make themselves more miserable. Furthermore, while earnest means to remove afflictions from our lives are not sinful if lawful, we must ultimately rest in absolute dependence on God and apply to him for the making even of the crook in his timing (58–60). God, who “loves to be employed in the evening of crooks and calls on us to employ him that way (Ps. 1:15),” made and mended notable crooks in some of his most ModernReformation.org

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favored children, such as Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph. Samson and John the Baptist were both born of formerly barren women (63–64).

so must we, if we will prove ourselves Christians indeed. (Matt.

11:29); (2 Tim. 2:11–12). (74)

The most important work of a crook in the lot, according to Boston, is the subduing of pride in our hearts (88). Those of lowly disposition are MICHAEL S. HORTON usually accustomed to affliction and In Part II, Boston explains that see themselves as sinful and filled A Place for Weakness: while the manner of a crook in our with imperfection rather than think Preparing Yourself lot and the timing of its removal are well of themselves as is encouraged for Suffering under God’s sovereign rule, we can by proponents of the health-and(HarperCollins, 2010) control our behavior and mind-set wealth gospel movement (91). They during times of affliction by praying magnify God for his mercies given to In a world of hype, we for the removal of the crook, humthem via crooks in their lot, submitmay buy into the idea bling ourselves under it, and waitting themselves to God’s will and that, through Jesus, we’ll ing patiently for the Lord (65–66). resting in him (92–95). be healthier, wealthier, Boston encourages us that if an afThe proud too have afflictions and wiser. So what fliction cannot be removed due to the due to sin in the world, but their happens when we natural workings of the world, such as reigning pride makes them unable become ill, or depressed, is the case in the death of my son Ben, to bear God’s yoke (95–96). “The or bankrupt? Did we do then we can ask God for relief from proud heart and will, unable to subsomething wrong? As a the pain until we are cured when we mit to the cross, or to bear to be conchild, Michael Horton pass from earth to heaven (66). When trolled, rises up against it, and fights would run up and down God removes some earthly thing that for the mastery, with its whole force the escalator, trying to is dear to us through a crook, he wants of unmortified passions. The design beat it to the top. As to replace it with some heavenly is to remove the cross, even the Christians, he notes, we thing, while the devil seeks to bend crook, and bring the thing to their sometimes seek God in and break our spirits through our own mind” (97–98). The proud perthe same way, believing crooks. God can supply us with son is more concerned with getting we can climb to him “streams running full where the crook his way than submitting to God’s under our own steam. has dried them” (66–70). We should will, and at times God gives him We can’t, which is why bear the things we cannot fix with paover to his lusts and passions with we are blessed that Jesus tience and Christian fortitude, look“Holy providence yielding to the descends to us, ing for spiritual profit in our trials man’s unmortified self-will, and letespecially during times (70). Boston poses the question: ting it go according to his mind,” and of trial. the man wins the day to his destrucWhere is our conformity to tion with the removal of the cross Christ, while we cannot submit and yoke (99). Christians should to the crook? We cannot evidence seek humility as it is part of the imourselves Christians, without conformity to age of God, whereas pride is the image of the devil Christ. “He that saith he abides in Him, ought (100). Boston rightly concludes: himself also so to walk, even as He walked.” (1 John 2:6) There was a continued crook in The subduing of our own passions is more excelChrist’s lot, but He submitted to it. (Phil. 2:8) lent than to have the whole world subdued to our “And being found in fashion as a man, He humwill: for then we are masters of ourselves, accordbled Himself, and became obedient unto ing to that. (Luke 21:19) Whereas, in the other death, even the death of the cross.” (Rom. 15:3) case, we are still slaves to the worst of masters.

“For even Christ pleased not himself,” &c. And (Rom.6:16) In the one case we are safe, blow what Dealing with the “Crooks”

24

storm will; in the other we lie exposed to thousands of dangers. “He that has no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls.” (Prov. 25:28). (105) Boston states that it is better to yield to Providence than fight it out and win for the time being such as when God gave Israel over to their lusts (106; Ps. 81:11–12). It is far more important for us to bend our hearts toward a suitable humbling of our spirits than to have an affliction removed before its sanctifying work is completed in our lives (108).

THE TIME OF HUMILIATION

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n Part III of his treatise, Boston gives guidance on how to humble ourselves to the glory of God. We should take notice of God’s mighty hand, sense our own worthlessness and guilt, silently submit under his hand, magnify his mercies, and hold “a holy and silent admiration of the ways and counsels of God, as to us unsearchable” (118–20). This life is the time of humiliation; there is no humbling after this, for in the next life “there the proud will be broken in pieces, but not softened; their lot and condition will be brought to the lowest pass, but the unhumbleness of their spirits will still remain, whence they will be in eternal agonies through the opposition betwixt their spirits and lot. (Rev. 26:21)” (124). Boston exhorts, “They that are so wise as to fall in humiliation under the mighty hand, be they ever so low, the same hand will raise them up again. (James 4:10) In a word, be the proud ever so high, God will bring them down: be the humble ever so low, God will raise them up” (126).

Christ is ready in all his offices to help us in our humiliation: as our Priest, Prophet, and King (136– 37). While Christians may receive only a partial lifting up or none at all from afflictions in this life, believers are assured of a total lifting up upon death (141). We will have not only a “heart-satisfying answer to our prayers” that may have seemed to go unanswered, but also “full satisfaction, as to the conduct of Providence, in all the steps of the humbling circumstances, and the delay of the lifting up, however perplexing these were before. (Rev. 15:3) Standing on the shore, and looking back to what they have passed through, they will be made to say, ‘He has done all things well’” (161–62; Mark 7:37).

Boston’s rock-solid theology and thoughtful exegesis of the Scriptures gave me a firm foundation upon which I could trust God, as contrasted with the well-meaning but empty platitudes so frequently offered up to grieving parents such as “time heals” and “God must have needed another angel.”

Boston practiced what he preached, seeking and struggling to grow in grace through great suffering in his life. Consumed by the battle between his conscience and the call to subscribe to the Oath of Abjuration in 1712 that upheld Episcopacy, Boston lamented on May 27 of that same year regarding his two-year-old son’s recent death, “The disorder of my own spirit woefully marred the kindly good effect it might have had. Satan watches to prevent the good of afflictions; much need there is to watch against him.”5 I carried The Crook in the Lot treatise with me wherever I went in the first year after my son’s death. Reading Scripture included in Boston’s sermons helped me to read the Bible again. I might not ever know the “why” of afflictions in this life, but I can completely rest in God’s sovereignty and perfect will. I can also trust God with my son’s soul. Because of Thomas Boston’s faithful service to the Lord, I have a clearer understanding of how God’s love is manifested in humbling afflictions with the purpose of bringing him glory and preparing his children for heaven. I shall always be indebted to Mr. Boston for guiding me through the darkest of hours and building my Christian faith when I felt I would surely sink from despair.

Le Ann Trees (BA, San Diego State University) is an academic tutor and a student at Westminster Seminary California where she is pursuing a thirty-year-old dream of earning an MA in theological studies. She and her husband Andy have four children.

P. G. Ryken, “Boston, Thomas” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004–11). See http://www.oxforddnb.com.

2 Thomas Boston, Memoirs of Thomas Boston (Oxford: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1988), xxxix–xxx; Philip Graham Ryken, Thomas Boston as Preacher of the Fourfold State (Carlisle: Paternoster , 1999), 3–5.

3 Ryken, “Boston.”

4 Thomas Boston, The Crook in the Lot, or, The sovereignty and wisdom of God displayed in the afflictions of men (New York: Robert Carter, 1848).

See http://openlibrary.org.

5 Thomas Boston, The Crook in the Lot, or, The sovereignty and wisdom of God displayed in the afflictions of men (New York: Robert Carter, 1848).

See http://openlibrary.org.

6 Boston, Memoirs of Thomas Boston, 263.

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R E FO or Just

C O N S E RV

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RMED AT I V E?

by Michael S. Horton

Abraham Kuyper spoke of the danger of a moribund conservatism in his own movement: the separation from the national Reformed Church in the Netherlands. In a sermon preached in Utrecht in 1870, Kuyper complained that a generic conservatism had replaced a genuine Reformed impulse in the church.

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Gradually recovering from a befuddled spirituality that vaporizes everything, people have ever more insistently called for the appearance of a Christianity with firm forms, and through a threefold struggle involving church elections, church property, and churchly baptism, the demand has been put with mounting urgency to our ecclesiastical apparatus either to give us back a church of Christ or to dissolve and so to disappear from the scene. (67)1

K

uyper referred to the Reformation where Christians returned to the source of Scripture in the face of struggle and suffering. We are called to hold onto what we have. “Hold on to it, but not in the spirit of a killing conservatism which, under the motto of ‘safe and sound,’ causes life to wither. This fallacious preservation has nothing in common with the true sort. Conservatism and orthodoxy, terms which are often confused, need to be most sharply distinguished today” (67).

Like Paul, Kuyper saw the source of the church’s life in the gospel itself. “Christianity came to save.

Salvation is the hope-giving word that it unfurls on its banner. Precisely as a power of salvation it militates against destruction” (67). It renews rather than obliterates nature. “Precisely because it seeks to save, Christianity detests a false conservatism that adorns itself with the name of Christianity but

“Precisely because it seeks to save, Christianity detests a false conservatism that adorns itself with the name of Christianity but is devoid of its power.”

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is devoid of its power. Who would save the sick by keeping the patient in the status quo? He will die before your eyes, with your false conservatism responsible for his death. To be conservative in that sense, to preserve in that sense, is to block Christianity from pursuing its goal. In a world of sin, that which is cannot remain as it is” (71).

It is true that a false progressivism closes its eyes to the past, but false conservatism falls into the opposite error: “Quenching life, we find our peace solely in the past” (72). This type of conservatism tries merely to hold on to the “ever-diminishing influence still left to us” from our forebears (72). This is an exercise in “repristination”: the mere repetition of past utterances as if this could magically preserve the truth for the next generation. Advocates of this approach alternate between triumphalism and despair.

They force themselves outside of their own time at the cost of having any influence on the life that surrounds them. In the end they turn against their own brothers, fragmenting even more the little power that remains. Worst of all, their own spiritual life has to suffer, and as a result of continual disappointment, the grave of their dearest wishes must become the grave of their faith itself. No, you men who honor the fathers: first seek to have for yourself the life your fathers had and then hold fast what you have.

Then articulate that life in your own language as they did in theirs. Struggle as they did to pump that life into the arteries of the life of our church and society. Then not being a dead form but a living fellowship will unite you with them, faith will be a power in your own life, and your building project will reach complete success. (74) Kuyper recalls the decline of many within his own circle toward false conservatism. First, they singled out a few slogans. “To save that, not to ask for more; to take a firm stand for that, not to reach for more, became the slogan of these folks. They venture not to create anything new; the old they cannot call back; what else can they do, then, but devote all their love to what has been preserved, firmly resolved to strike back every hand reaching out to rob them of that jewel?” (74).

New demands came, but these churches were not ready to meet them, for they did not even understand—and did not try to understand—them.

Then everyone began to swear by his own slogans and wander down his own paths, and all too cruelly the carefree circle of brothers had to pay the penalty for opting to be a circle of friends rather than a church. People now discovered that for public life spiritual affinity is not enough; one needs the bond of a confession.…“Hold fast to what you have” was still the rallying cry, but what people had in Christ remained uncertain for the heart and undecided for the mind.…From that moment on a nervous scrupulosity hindered every step; mutual distrust blocked every demonstration of power. People were doomed to inaction. They kept gliding over the surface, fearing that if they immersed themselves more deeply they would drown. And so, internally divided, now swinging one way, now another, they could not stand firm, much less show a character that compelled respect from the enemy.…Neither was there any power in it.…Not, beloved, it is not the frozen waters but the foaming streams which carry life and bring salvation! (75) A false conservatism, therefore, does not really take a stand. It threatens “this far and no further,” but when that boundary is crossed, it takes a step back and repeats the threat.

First it was the attempt to uphold the Confession. When that was lost, people were prepared to hold the line on Scripture. When that was lost, some six fundamental truths would serve as our shibboleths. When that too proved untenable, people were prepared at least to stand by the miracles. In the end they also surrendered those forward trenches and made the Resurrection of Christ the breastwork of Christianity, but that too was lost. Today the adversary has already laid hands on our Baptism—but people get used to everything and they still have not found “the formula for resistance.” Thus the line of defense was shrunk again and again. (76)

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n the conservative movement Kuyper discerned “no swimming against the current” in the totality of Christian faith and practice (76). “True: there is still a semblance of unity but it will last only as long as it pleases the enemy to unite us by his opposition” (78).

“It is not by nostalgia for a supposedly golden age (even the Reformation), but by returning to the founding events of Christ’s saving work that each generation can experience the liberating power of the gospel for its own time and place.”

The gospel, however, is not a series of “beautiful ideas.” Rather, it “strikes its roots into existing reality by a series of mighty acts. It is after all a historical phenomenon.” The church lives in the power of these historical acts of God in Jesus Christ. This means, says Kuyper, that the church cannot exist in the present, much less extend into the future, without going through the past that creates it. For that reason, we must indeed preserve the past, but we cannot return to it or recreate it. Instead, “the past lives on in the present.…The centuries are not juxtaposed to each other as airtight compartments; what was then works on now. The miraculous historical facts by which Christianity was begun have impregnated succeeding centuries with their power” (79).

It is not by nostalgia for a supposedly golden age (even the Reformation), but by returning to the founding events of Christ’s saving work that each ModernReformation.org

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“It is an orthodoxy that refuses a dead repetition of dull routine, but asks what it believes and why it believes it. It returns to the source of its life, not only for the church’s sake, but also for the benefit of the world.”

generation can experience the liberating power of the gospel for its own time and place. A false conservatism holds onto reality “as it is.” “True conservatism seeks to preserve what is in terms of what it will become in Christ, that is, resurrected from the dead.” Against all forms of salvation by human effort, “the battle for the Bible must necessarily end in suicide if it does not unconditionally yield to the Word of God and open its eyes to the totally unprecedented, totally other new life of which that Word shows us the beginning, the substance, and the final goal, the life whose typical patterns and movements it portrays for us, and for whose recognition it offers the only genuine touchstone” (80–81).

Modernism is radical, pioneering, and utterly destitute of the Word of God that brings genuine life.

False conservatism, however, is lazy and shallow

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and is content merely to hold on to remnants of its shattered heritage.

[Genuine Christianity] must be concerned to keep not just a few blossoms that have budded on the plant but the plant itself. The plant must be preserved not on the assumption that our hands must create the ripe fruit and then tie it to the branches but in the firm belief that the plant already contains that fullness of fruit within. It must hold on to Christ not merely to maintain a distinct life, not only as the absolute principle of that life, but equally as the Eternal One in whom the fullness of that life is already present, also for yourselves. Orthodoxy is unfaithful to that eternal principle if it shrinks from saying, as our fathers did, that in Christ we already have everything and need not first acquire it. (81)

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o be sure, genuine orthodoxy is continuous with the faith of our fathers and mothers in Christ. “Still it is our calling to hold fast what we have in Christ in our own time, not in theirs.…That labor is enormous, Congregation, especially where so much of it has been neglected” (82). It is an orthodoxy that refuses a dead repetition of dull routine, but asks what it believes and why it believes it. It returns to the source of its life, not only for the church’s sake, but also for the benefit of the world.

Kuyper concluded this final sermon to his Utrecht congregation, “Do not bury our splendid orthodoxy in the treacherous pit of false conservatism.…And now, Congregation, before I pronounce the Amen, receive my final ‘Farewell.’ May the Lord never take away the candlestick He so marvelously gave you, but may His light shine from it ever more brightly” (85).

Are we conservative or Reformed? Although many of his criticisms are based on caricatures, Brian McLaren correctly presses us to answer the questions: “So what happens when Protestants get tired of protesting? What happens when they want to protest their own protesting? If they simply form another elite sect that protests Protestant protesting, they’re still stuck in the cycle, doomed to become the next Protestant sideshow, superProtestants, nothing more. Is there an alternative?” 2 In an interview, the church historian Jaroslav Pelikan famously said, Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide.

Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.3

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ur calling is not to simply repeat slogans but to clarify and, on the basis of Scripture, at times even modify our understanding and practice in order to achieve greater precision in teaching and obeying God’s Word faithfully.

The past is not necessarily weighty because it is past. Arianism, Pelagianism, and other heresies also have an ancient pedigree. Rather, it is to the living stream of God’s Word that we step in the present, as did our forebears, to be washed from the accumulated superstitions and lies of our own time and place. False conservatism cannot even sustain its own irrelevant existence. Without a confessional consciousness and a confessing heart, the disintegration of a clear common enemy gives way to sectarian rivalry.

Churches today stand in need of a new reformation. There is no need to rehash the statistics here. Evangelicalism in the United States is plagued by ignorance of Scripture and confusion concerning the nature of the human plight and its solution in the gospel. Worship, church life, and outreach are determined by the whim of the market, just as the Word was buried under medieval innovations.

At the same time, many confessional churches seem content to live off of the capital of the past, without having to return for themselves to the streams that fed the great renewals of apostolic faith and practice in the past. It is not enough to invoke the slogans of the Reformation and to settle for the pristine confession of “the five points of Calvinism.” We need to recover the fullness of biblical faith and practice in our own time and place.

Like children, we need to ask anew even the most basic questions, in the light of the specific challenges and opportunities in our own age. We are not caretakers of a cemetery or guardians of a heritage, but ambassadors of the ever-living and everactive King in heaven, sent into our families, neighborhoods, and nations with the life-giving message of Christ. We cannot take this inheritance for granted. It is not merely a treasure to be guarded, but to be put on display each week, shared among the saints, and distributed to a world that lies under the domain of sin and death.

Michael S. Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation.

All Kuyper quotes from Abraham Kuyper, “Conservatism and Orthodoxy: False and True Preservation,” in John Bratt, ed., Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).

2 Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 127.

3 Jaroslav Pelikan, interviewed in U.S. News & World Report (26 July 1989), 25.

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A gift

of god

out of adam

by Herman Bavinck

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Adam had received much. Though formed out of the dust of the earth, he was nevertheless a bearer of the image of God. He was placed in a garden which was a place of loveliness and was richly supplied with everything good to behold and to eat. He received the pleasant task of dressing the garden and subduing the earth, and in this he had to walk in accordance with the commandment of God, to eat freely of every tree except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But no matter how richly favored and how grateful, that first man was not satisfied, not fulfilled. The cause is indicated to him by God Himself.

I

t lies in his solitude. It is not good for the man that he should be alone. He is not so constituted, he was not created that way.

His nature inclines to the social—he wants company. He must be able to express himself, reveal himself, and give himself. He must be able to pour out his heart, to give form to his feelings. He must share his awarenesses with a being who can understand him and can feel and live along with him. Solitude is poverty, forsakenness, gradual pining and wasting away. How lonesome it is to be alone! And He who created man thus, with this kind of need for expression and extension can in the greatness and grace of His power only choose to supply the need. He can only create for him a helpmeet who goes along with him, is related to him, and suits him as counterpart. The account tells us in verses 19 to 21 that God made all the beasts of the field and all the fowls of the air, and brought them unto Adam to see whether among all those creatures there was

not a being who could serve Adam as a companion and a helper. The purpose of these verses is not to indicate the chronological order in which animals and man were made, but rather to indicate the material order, the rank, the grades of relationship in which the two sorts of creatures stand over against each other. This relationship of rank is first indicated in the fact that Adam named the animals.

Adam therefore understood all the creatures, he penetrated their natures, he could classify and subdivide them, and assign to each of them the place in the whole of things which was their due. If, accordingly, he discovered no being among all those creatures who was related to himself, this was not the consequence of ignorance nor of foolhardy arrogance or pride; rather, it stemmed from the fact that there existed a difference in kind between him and all other creatures, a difference not of degree merely but of essence. True, there are all kinds of correspondences between animal and man: both are physical beings, both have all kinds of need and desire for food and drink, both propagate ModernReformation.org

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Are Women Human?

I

with the desire for education. Not all young men, she reminds us, want to study Aristotle any more than all young women do. What about clothing? Women as

n my own experience in academia I have sometimes

much as men should be entitled to wear trousers, not to

been asked, often in the context of an accreditation

usurp the authority of men, but because they are com-

visit, “Are women’s voices being heard on campus?”

fortable and warm. Clothing is a human issue. What

or “Do you think that women’s issues are being ad-

about work? Man’s work or woman’s work?

dressed?” I have been puzzled by these questions. Do

Sayers again points to the universal human dimen-

women speak with one voice? And what exactly are

sion. “Every woman is a human being…and a human be-

“women’s issues”?

ing must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a

In thinking about these ques-

nuisance in the world” (33). She

tions, a book by Dorothy L. Say-

bristled at being asked about be-

ers titled Are Women Human?

ing a woman novelist. She pre-

(Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1971)

ferred to be regarded as a good

gave me a more interesting

novelist, without reference to

question to contemplate. Sayers

her gender.

was a twentieth-century writer

Women, Sayers pointed out,

of detective fiction, essays, and

have a place in politics, but what

plays, as well as a gifted transla-

can be meant by “a woman’s

tor of Dante’s Divine Comedy

point of view”? While a woman

and the epic Song of Roland. She

may have something unique to

was one of the first women at

say about the education of chil-

Oxford University, graduating in

dren, or divorce, or town plan-

1915 with top honors in medieval

ning, on most issues women

literature. As one of the first

have different opinions just as

women students in that all-male

other people do. “But what in

world, surely she must have

thunder is the ‘woman’s point of view’ about the devaluation of

something to say about women’s voices and women’s issues. She does. In an address

the franc or the abolition of the Danzig Corridor?” (42).

given to a women’s society in 1938, she tackled questions

When asked how she could write such convincing male di-

about women in society and culture with astounding

alogue, she replied that men as well as women “talk very

good sense, intelligence, and wit.

much like human beings also” (49).

Her essay begins with a rejection of treating women

Dorothy Sayers’ little book would be a thoughtful en-

as a class. “A woman is just as much an ordinary human

couragement to readers of Modern Reformation, both

being as a man, with the same individual preferences,

men and women. Her essay helped me to realize that

and with just as much right to the tastes and preferenc-

questions about women’s issues can be demeaning and

es of an individual” (24). In fact she finds it “repugnant”

misdirected, and that women’s voices are often expected

to be thought of as part of a class rather than as an indi-

to speak a single language that is not authentic or their

vidual person (24). In other words, when it comes to

own. I appreciated Sayers’ reminder that the important

“women’s voices,” each individual woman speaks with

question is a question of our common humanity at the

her own voice as every human being does.

crown of God’s creation, a good place to begin any con-

And what are “women’s issues”? Sayers prefers to

versation about a woman’s place in the modern world.

think in terms of human issues. Is university education a “woman’s issue”? “I, eccentric individual that I am, do

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want to know about Aristotle and there is nothing in my

Mary Ellen Godfrey (MA, Case Western Reserve Universi-

shape or bodily functions which need prevent my know-

ty) is assistant professor of theological writing at Westmin-

ing about him” (27). Education is for women and men

ster Seminary California.

SIDEBAR: DOROTHY SAYERS (1893-1957). English writer.

The Granger Collection, NYC — All rights reserved.

offspring, both possess the five senses of smell, taste, feeling, sight, and hearing, and both share the lower activities of cognition, awareness, and perception. Nonetheless, man is different from the animal. He has reason, and understanding, and will and in consequence of these he has religion, morality, language, law, science, and art. True, he was formed from the dust of the earth, but he received the breath of life from above.

He is a physical, but also a spiritual, rational, and moral being. And that is why Adam could not find a single creature among them all that was related to him and could be his helper. He gave them all names, but not one of them deserved the exalted, royal name of man.

Then, when man could not find the thing he sought, then, quite apart from man’s own witting and willing, and without contributive effort on his own part, God gave man the thing he himself could not supply. The best things come to us as gifts; they fall into our laps without labor and without price.

We do not earn them nor achieve them: we get them for nothing. The richest and most precious gift which can be given to man on earth is woman. And this gift he gets in a deep sleep, when he is unconscious, and without any effort of will or fatigue of the hand. True, the seeking, the looking about, the inquiring, the sense of the need precedes it. So does the prayer. But then God grants the gift sovereignly, alone, without our help. It is as though He conducts the woman to the man by His own hand.

Thereupon the first emotion to master Adam, when he wakes up and sees the woman before him, is that of marvelling and gratitude. He does not feel a stranger to her, but recognizes her immediately as sharing his own nature with him. His recognition was literally a recognition of that which he had felt he missed and needed, but which he could not himself supply. And his marvelling expresses itself in the first marriage hymn or epithalamium ever to be sounded on the face of the earth: “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.” Adam therefore remains the source and head of the human race. The woman is not merely created alongside of him but out of him (1 Cor. 11:8).

Just as the stuff for making Adam’s body was taken from the earth, so the side of Adam is the basis of the life of Eve. But just as out of the dust of the earth the first man became a living being through the breath of life which came from above, so out of

“She belongs to the same kind and yet in that kind she occupies her own unique position. She is dependent and yet she is free.

She is after Adam and out of Adam, but owes her existence to God alone.”

Adam’s side the first woman first became a human being by the creative omnipotence of God. She is out of Adam and yet is another than Adam. She is related to him and yet is different from him. She belongs to the same kind and yet in that kind she occupies her own unique position. She is dependent and yet she is free. She is after Adam and out of Adam, but owes her existence to God alone. And so she serves to help the man, to make his vocation of subduing the earth possible. She is his helper, not as mistress and much less as slave, but as an individual, independent, and free being, who received her existence not from the man but from God, who is responsible to God, and who was added to man as a free and unearned gift.

Herman Bavinck (1854–1921), a contemporary of Abraham Kuyper and B. B. Warfield, is best known for his four-volume magnum opus, Reformed Dogmatics (Gereformeerde Dogmatiek). In 1902, he succeeded Kuyper as chair of systematic theology in the Free University of Amsterdam. This excerpt is taken from “The Origin, Essence, and Purpose of Man,” in Our Reasonable Faith (Compendium of Reformed Dogmatics, 1909).

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was once a member of a church whose senior pastor had retired. A search committee was appointed to do what was necessary to find a suitable successor. The task seemed daunting since the retiring pastor was a gifted preacher under whose ministry people of widely diverse nationality and social backgrounds had been incorporated into the life of a growing church.

When asked what it was that drew them to this church, the answer almost always focused on the biblically expository, Christ-centered preaching.

The search committee was determined to find a pastor who would continue the pulpit tradition that had so nourished and expanded the ministry of this congregation. That proved to be more difficult than any of us expected.

We discovered that the membership was quite capable of evaluating invited applicants in terms of personality, sensitivity for pastoral concerns, and

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communication skills. The last of these seemed to be of greatest importance to them. Applicants who were clear and skillful communicators and had captivating preaching styles enjoyed broad appeal regardless of their approach to the Scriptures or the substance of their messages. Since the content of the sermon was a primary issue with the search committee, it became necessary to instruct the congregation regarding the biblical substance which we have come to expect from our pulpit. I was asked to provide some general guidelines to

sensitize the congregation as to what it was that the search committee was so eager to identify when evaluating the sermons of applicants for our senior pastor position.

EVALUATING SERMON CONTENT There are three general categories into which sermons fall among preachers who take a text from the Bible as the starting point for their sermons. Many preachers don’t even make a pretense of beginning with Scripture or they may have a Scripture reading that really has little or nothing to do with the topic about which they intend to provide advice or encouragement. Their sermons are a form of “group counseling” as Harry Emerson Fosdick once described his sermonizing. We are not addressing that form of preaching. We are rather attempting to distinguish approaches to the preaching task that are taken by those who are serious about the Bible and its message. They are committed to the authority of the Scriptures but approach the task of preaching from the Bible differently. When a congregation is searching for a pastor, the membership should be aware of these differences, at least in general, so that intelligent, prayerful choices can be made.

Moralistic Sermons: Discerning Ethical Teachings from Biblical Examples

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his approach takes a passage of Scripture and uses it to help people understand how they should live as Christians. One might call this approach a search for biblical guidelines for godly living. It is motivated by a sincere desire to encourage people to be more pious, loving, kind, generous, and faithful in their Christian lives. It primarily addresses the will. Biblical examples are enumerated to serve as models of the way people should live, or bad examples are cited to warn against destructive patterns of living. Thus Joseph serves as a powerful model of one who resisted temptation even when it cost him a prison term. And David’s courageous confrontation with Goliath challenges us to a similar fortitude as we face life’s demanding situations. Absalom demonstrates the self-destructive

consequences of a rebellious youth, whereas Daniel provides us with an example of faithfulness to the true God in a pagan, unbelieving social environment.

Recently I heard a sermon by a local pastor entitled “Biblical Principles of Money Management.” Citing scattered references from Ecclesiastes, the pastor gave advice about earning, handling, and sharing money. It made good rational and responsible sense about stewardship. But there was no good news, no mention of Jesus, by whose grace and power alone we are able to receive and manage any of God’s gifts in a way that honors him and demonstrates our thankfulness. There was simply no gospel. A Jewish rabbi or a Protestant liberal could have spoken every word of that message.

There are pastors and congregations that prefer this approach. I would recommend against it for several reasons.

1. The Bible should not be treated as a source book for moral advice. That is not its purpose. It is the infallible revelation of God’s gracious determination to save a lost world. It records God’s saving purpose in real history, culminating in the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ in the light of whom all Scripture must be understood. Where moral admonition appears, as it certainly does, it must be clearly recommended as the response of gratitude from the Lord’s redeemed people.

2. Providing moral admonition presumably recommended by Scripture subtly implies that if people know what is right they will do it, and if they know what is wrong they will avoid it. This is the fundamental flaw with the liberal belief in the inherent goodness of human beings. People need always to be reminded that good works are only those that proceed from a heart renewed by the Spirit of God. The power to obey has its source not in our will, but in Christ living within us. It is through repentance for the sin of falling short of God’s demands, faith in Jesus Christ our Savior, and renewal by the Holy Spirit that our wills are driven to make a beginning toward living in obedience to God’s expectations for the Christian life.

3. All human examples are imperfect—even biblical examples. Therefore, we must be selective in identifying those qualities for which biblical figures can serve as examples. When using a human model, we risk coming to Scripture with preconceived ModernReformation.org

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notions of morality and searching for examples to support these notions. David often provides a bad example of conduct (adultery and polygamy), and perhaps Joseph did a little bragging when his dreams made him feel that he was somewhat superior to his older brothers. Who is to say that the moral of the story of Joseph’s dreams isn’t “Don’t boast. It may get you into trouble.”

4. If motivational examples of faith, courage, conviction, service to others, and so forth are needed, why restrict ourselves to the Bible? Perhaps this train of thought explains why many television preachers who are moralistic in their approach often conduct interviews with famous people on their programs. Examples of “success” through a positive mental attitude and “healing” through effectual prayer are popular. The implication is clear: follow these examples and you can expect similar results.

5. Moralistic preaching introduces a new legalism into the pattern of a Christian lifestyle. “If you do this and avoid that, God will be pleased with you.” To leave such an impression with a congregation can be especially tragic when there are unbelievers present. We must always emphasize that the Lord is pleased only by that which proceeds from a renewed heart empowered by Christ living within us.

6. The moralistic approach to preaching does not require the proclamation of the good news that through repentance for sin and faith in the Crucified One, the believer is reconciled to our merciful and loving God. If a call to repentance and faith is given, it often has a tacked-on character that is not integrally related to the sermon’s text.

“Doctrinalistic” Sermons: The Discovery of Doctrinal Implications of Biblical Text s This approach searches a text to try to clarify doctrinal teaching. It primarily addresses the intellect. In a “doctrinalistic” sermon the preacher is eager to have his congregation understand Christian doctrine better and leave a worship service with a clearer conception of what they must believe. Thus, for example, the biblical account of Joseph’s experiences demonstrates the doctrine of

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“We, too, are eager to please God as the response of gratitude for what he has done for us in Christ. Even our desire to do God’s will has its source in him whose will it is our delight to do.” providence. The providential arrival of a caravan of Midianite merchants changed the plans of Joseph’s brothers, which were to kill him. They sold him into slavery instead, thereby sparing his life.

And, providentially, a kindly gentleman named Potiphar, who recognized Joseph’s trustworthy leadership qualities, became his master. Providence is seen in all of Joseph’s experiences, right up to his appointment to leadership in government, which enabled him to save his father’s family from starvation. The application is obvious: Be aware of the reality of divine providence in your life.

Much preaching in churches that align themselves with the Reformed tradition has historically been of the doctrinalist approach. I would recommend against it, however, for several reasons.

1. It tends to view a clearer understanding of Christian doctrine as an end to itself rather than to provide a life-changing and God-honoring body of truth. It is in danger of implying that a better knowledge of Christian doctrine guarantees a closer walk with the Lord. We must remember that knowledge of the truth, crucially important though it is, may never be a substitute for the humble surrender of one’s heart to the Lord Jesus Christ.

2. The doctrinalist approach tends to identify individual doctrines in isolation from the larger body of biblical teaching. The truths of Scripture can be fully understood only in relation to him who is the truth.

3. This approach easily tends to lose sight of the organic nature of Scripture. The Bible is, after all, the infallible account of God’s saving acts unfolding in salvation history, from bud to flower, from promise to fulfillment. Distilling doctrinal teaching from individual texts treats the Bible as a static document for which the historical setting and the relation between prior and subsequent revelation is of little or no importance.

Redemp tive Historical Sermons: Christ- Centered Preaching from All S crip ture

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his approach begins with the recognition of the essential nature of the Bible.

The Bible is God’s revelation of his saving purposes in real planet Earth history, culminating in the life, death, and resurrection of his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. Every text in Scripture is part of the unfolding of God’s sovereign plan to redeem a lost world, a plan that reaches its fulfillment in the person and work of the Savior.

Therefore, the fullest meaning of a particular text can be discerned only in relation to him who is the Word made flesh. And obedience to the ethical demands of any text is possible only in dependence on the power and grace of our divine Savior. No sermon is complete unless its place in the history of redemption, which centers in Jesus Christ, is clarified. Only then will we consistently obey the apostle Paul’s injunction to preach Christ and him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2). Such preaching demands a heartfelt response because it addresses the heart, which is the core of a person’s total being, not just the intellect or will.

From this perspective, Joseph’s experiences become part of the grand drama of divine redemption. Joseph is himself an object of God’s grace, who is chosen by God to be an agent for the preservation of a covenant people through whom the Savior of the world, in the fullness of time, would be born. Joseph is thereby an imperfect type and shadow of Jesus, who is the ultimate preserver and deliverer of a covenant people. Joseph’s salvation—and ours—is secure only in Jesus. Whatever noble character traits he exhibits are the evidence of grace in his life, traits that are common to those

whose desire it is to please God and who are submissive to his providential will. We, too, are eager to please God as the response of gratitude for what he has done for us in Christ. Even our desire to do God’s will has its source in him whose will it is our delight to do. Why should we insist on redemptive historical sermons?

1. The nature of the Bible requires it. Such sermons reflect what the Bible is, namely, the very Word of God revealing his saving grace, unfolding from seed to mature flower, until it reaches its fulfillment in the person and work of his divine Son. Every text in the Bible is part of that progressively unfolding message. To do justice to a biblical text, therefore, requires addressing the place that particular passage fills in the divine revelation of God’s saving concern for a lost world. In short, every text must be understood as truth for those to whom God first revealed it, or truth to the first degree. It must also be understood in relation to him who is the truth, truth to the utmost degree.

2. The Bible sets the pattern for it. The Scripture interprets itself in terms of its testimony to Jesus.

New Testament references to the Old Testament make unmistakably clear that the message of the Law and the Prophets centers in Jesus Christ (cf.

Matt. 5:17; Luke 1:69, 70, 24:27; John 5:39, 40; Acts 13:27, 28:23; Rom. 15:7–13; Rev. 19:10).

3. One could argue that since the Bible is the authoritative Word of God, its moral and doctrinal claims must be obeyed; “Thus saith the Lord” applies to everything that is written in the Bible.

This is a valid argument. But if the ethical and doctrinal imperatives are not rooted in the gospel of repentance for sin and faith in God’s forgiving grace, the power to obey the moral demands and accept the doctrinal teachings is lacking.

4. Sermons that clarify and celebrate the divine initiatives at every point in salvation history concentrate the worshiper’s attention on what God has done.

The Spirit-touched heart response will be emotional (awe, wonder, and joy), intellectual (knowledge of the truth), and volitional (grateful commitment to Christian service and devotion).

Derke Bergsma is professor emeritus of practical theology at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.

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FROM the HALLWAY | by Jon D. Payne

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R E C OV E RING t h e LO S T TR E A S U R E o f e v e n i n g wo r s h i p

once heard of an elderly Christian woman who had difficulty walking due to chronic arthritis. Despite her condition, she faithfully attended morning and evening worship every Lord’s Day. When asked how she always managed to come to both services, she responded with, “My heart gets there first, and my legs just follow after.”

Unfortunately these days the heart attitude of this dear elderly woman is almost as rare as the evening service itself. Indeed, over the past twenty years the evening service in a variety of Christian traditions has either been turned into a kind of informal fellowship (attended by a mere 10–15 percent of the congregation), or it has been done away with altogether. Even within the Reformed

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ranks—where evening worship has been historically viewed as a nonnegotiable part of Lord’s Day observance and congregational nurture—the evening service is increasingly jettisoned. But why?

Perhaps we are more mature than our Reformed forebears and have less need of the ministry of the Word, sacraments, and prayer? I don’t think so. A better answer may be that, in general, the

church has become more immature, more disask ourselves why. Why is it so onerous to booktracted, and more consumed with earthly comend the Lord’s Day with evening worship? The forts, entertainment, and leisure. In short, our Sabbath was designed to be an entire day of devalues have changed. lighting in the Triune God and celebrating his I did not grow up attending Lord’s Day evening works of creation and redemption. Faithful atworship, and the churches I attended did not offer tendance to both morning and evening worship it. I can clearly remember my family’s Sunday roubookends this special day with God-centered tine: we attended the morning service and then worship and helps us not to turn the rest of the spent the rest of the day on the soccer field, watchLord’s Day into something God never intended. ing television, or doing menial tasks around the Evening worship guards the Lord’s Day from behouse. For all practical purposes, the Lord’s Day coming just like any other day of the week. was the Lord’s hour or at best the Lord’s morning. Like many evangelicals today, I don’t think my family was ever taught or encouraged to do things differently. After almost twenty years in the Reformed faith, however, I now believe evening worhe “evening service” in the context of Reformed churches ship is a vital part of Christian nurdoesn’t mean an alternative service for the young adults, or ture, growth, and discipleship. My perhaps the same sermon as the morning only with the achope is to convince you of the same. coutrements of contemporary worship. Based on the careful study The following are five reasons why of Scripture, Reformed churches are persuaded of the following: Christians ought to joyfully attend morning and evening worship on In his Word, God has specially appointed one day in seven as a the Lord’s Day.

KNOW WHAT YOU BELIEVE

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Sabbath to be kept holy to him. It is the duty of every one to re-

1. The Evening Service B ookends the Lord’s Day with Worship

member the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. From the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ, the Sabbath was the last day of the week, marking the completion of six days of work, anticipating eternal rest in the coming Messiah. By raising Christ from the dead on the first day of the week, God sanctified that day.

The Sabbath Day was instituted by God at Creation (Gen. 2:3), republished by God in the Decalogue (Exod.

20:8), and reaffirmed by Christ—the Lord of the Sabbath—in the Gospels (Matt. 12:8; Mark 2:28). Along with work and marriage, the Sabbath Day is a part of the very order of Creation.

Though it is true that the ceremonial and civil dimensions of the Sabbath are abrogated in Christ, the moral aspect remains in force. Thus God’s children are still obligated to sanctify the New Covenant Sabbath, or Lord’s Day, and keep it holy.

The Lord’s Day is meant to be a spiritual blessing to the church, not a burden. If it is a burden, we must

And from the time of the apostles, the church, accordingly, has kept the first day of the week holy as the Christian Sabbath, the Lord’s Day, and as the day on which it is to assemble for worship.

Now each weekly cycle begins with the people of God resting in Christ in the worship of his name, followed by six days of work. The Lord’s Day thus both depicts that the Christian’s rest has already begun in Christ, and anticipates the eternal rest of his sons and daughters in the new heaven and the new earth.

It is highly advisable that a congregation assemble for public worship at the beginning and the ending of the Lord’s Day. God established this pattern for his Old Testament people when he commanded morning and evening sacrifice and incense burning. Moreover, he sanctifies the entire Lord’s Day to himself and gives his people in it a foretaste of their eternal enjoyment of him and his people.

Excerpted from the Directory for the Public Worship of God as used by the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

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The Day of Worship: Reassessing the Christian Life in Light of the Sabbath

BY RYAN M. MCGRAW Reformation Heritage Books, 2011 196 pages (paperback), $12.00 Over the past fifty years, the faithful observance of the Christian Sabbath or Lord’s Day in the evangelical church has fallen on hard times. Whereas God ordained the first day of the week to be a sacred and glorious day of divine worship and Christian fellowship, a day of profound spiritual blessing and delight to his children and a veritable

2. The Evening Service Follows a Biblical Pattern of Worship The title given to Psalm 92 is “A Song for the Sabbath.” The psalmist begins by exclaiming, “It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to your name, O Most High; to declare your steadfast love in the morning and your faithfulness by night” (Ps. 92:1–2). This emphasis upon morning and evening worship is also underscored by the old covenant administration of the morning and evening sacrifices (Num. 28:1–10). The Sabbath Day is to be a “holy convocation” or sacred gathering of God’s people for the purpose of corporate worship (Lev. 23:3). Though the New Testament does not explicitly command morning and evening worship on the Lord’s Day, we do see proof that God’s people gathered in the evening for worship on the first day of the week (Acts 20:7).

foretaste of heaven, it is now considered a kind of Saturday with church in the morning. Few are willing to challenge

3. The Evening Service Is a Part of the Reformed Heritage

this unbiblical and culturally influenced status quo. In his new book, The Day of Worship, however, Ryan McGraw (pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church in South Carolina) skillfully draws out important biblical, historical, and practical implications concerning the Lord’s Day (chapters 1–4). He also helpfully answers many of the contemporary objections to Sabbath-keeping, objections that too often find their roots in worldliness and/or a faulty view of God’s law (chapters 5–9). His final chapter on the eternal Sabbath paints a beautiful picture of what every “temporal” Sabbath should reflect and joyfully anticipate: the hope and glory of heaven (chapter 10).

McGraw writes in the spirit of older saints who possessed genuine insight: “What fitter day to ascend to heaven, than that on which He arose from earth, and fully triumphed over death and hell.” One may not agree with all of McGraw’s analysis or conclusions, or that of the Westminster Confession of Faith for that matter; even so, The Day of Worship is a book worth exploring regarding a day worth recovering. —Rev. Dr. Jon D. Payne

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Until recent decades, the second service was an essential part of Lord’s Day observance for Reformed believers. In his book, Recovering the Reformed Confession, R. Scott Clark reminds us that the “classical Reformed practice was to hold two worship services on the Lord’s Day. In recent years, however, the second service or vespers has fallen on hard times.

It is becoming more difficult to find a second service.

Judging by anecdotal evidence, a significant number of Reformed congregations have eliminated the second service” (293).

The second service was established in the early stages (1520s) of the Protestant Reformation. It was put in place so that congregations would get more of the Word of God. In the more faithful expressions of the historic Reformed faith, the preaching of the Word and the right administration of the sacraments are highly esteemed. Having not one but two (and sometimes three) public services on the Lord’s Day reinforces belief in the power, efficacy, and sufficiency of the ordinary means of grace to save, sanctify, and comfort God’s elect. On the sacred day that God set apart for sacred worship and the building up of his church, why wouldn’t we want more—rather than

less—preaching, singing of the psalms and hymns, prayer, participation in the sacraments, and corporate worship and fellowship? Perhaps the tendency to marginalize (or cancel) the evening service in Reformed circles today discloses something about our loose ties to the Reformed tradition. It may also reveal something about our spiritual condition.

4. The Evening Service Is a Divine and Providential Call to Worship

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y favorite three words after Sunday morning worship are, “See you tonight.” Compared to the morning service, the evening service (if scheduled) is often poorly attended. Indeed, in most churches it is common for less than 25 percent of the congregation to return for evening worship. This forsaking of the evening assembly, however, can be remedied with a proper understanding of the call of God and of providence.

In the liturgical call to worship, through his ordained servant and by his living Word, God calls his covenant people to assemble for public worship. In some cases, the call to worship occurs in both morning and evening. The Westminster Confession exhorts believers never to “carelessly or willfully” neglect public worship “when God,

by His Word or providence, calleth thereunto” (Westminster Confession of Faith XXI, vi; cf. Heb. 10:25). Notice the two calls that are mentioned: the call of God by his Word, and the call of providence by the elders. Because the elders have, in God’s providence, set the times for public worship, and because at those designated times God himself calls the congregation to worship, Christians therefore ought to make every effort to faithfully attend both services. In short, unless one is hindered by proximity or poor health, to forsake Lord’s Day public worship is, in a way, choosing to turn a deaf ear to God’s call to worship and the spiritual leadership of the elders (Heb. 13:17). Attendance to both morning and evening worship not only demonstrates a hunger for God’s ordained means of grace, it also shows a willingness to take one’s membership vows seriously.

5. The Evening Service: A Double Portion Question: How does God, in the most concentrated and efficacious manner, communicate Christ and his saving benefits to the elect? Answer: Through the faithful proclamation of his Word and the right use of the sacraments (John 6:54; Rom. 10:17; 1 Cor. 1:21; 1 Pet. 3:21). Once again, our Reformed confession affirms this: What are the outward means whereby Christ communicates to us the benefits of his mediation?

The outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicates to his church the benefits of his mediation, are all his ordinances; especially the Word, sacraments, and prayer; all which are made effectual to the elect for their salvation. (Westminster Larger Catechism, Q. 154) By attending morning and evening worship on the Lord’s Day our families get a double portion of the means of grace. Indeed, when we put ourselves in the way of God’s ordained means of grace, in both morning and evening worship, we will on an annual basis worship God and receive His precious promises one hundred and four times rather than fifty-two. We will hear an additional fifty-two carefully prepared expository sermons, receive the Lord’s Supper twice as much (if served weekly, alternating services each Lord’s Day), sing hundreds more psalms and hymns, and pray myriad more prayers. Again, isn’t this why the Reformed tradition—with its high view of God and the means of grace—historically made Lord’s Day evening worship a nonnegotiable?

Dearest Christian believer, we have only lightly touched upon an important topic. Even so, perhaps these five reasons for attending Lord’s Day evening worship will cause you to reevaluate your current practice—maybe it’s time to consider instituting an evening service in your congregation. Perhaps, by God’s grace, when we are old and arthritic, we will be able to say along with that dear old woman, “My heart gets there first, and my legs just follow after.”

Rev. Dr. Jon D. Payne is minister at Grace Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Douglasville, Georgia.

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Youth Ministry b y t h e M ea n s o f G r ace

by BRIAN H. COSBY

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he number of young people leaving the church after high school is staggering—estimated somewhere between 60–80 percent. And yet, youth ministries across the nation continue to pack in more and more pizza parties, video games, and magicians—yes, magicians—to keep youth coming back, hoping that Jesus will somehow become the all-satisfying, allglorious treasure of teenage hearts.

In addition, more and more youth are seeing how the American Dream is leaving their parents and the “boomers” empty and still dreaming. Entertainment simply hasn’t provided meaning or answers to their deepest needs, their strongholds of sin, and their insatiable desire for acceptance and intimacy.

Whatever reasons may be given for the graduates’ great exodus, I contend that high school graduates are leaving the church because they have not been nurtured and established in the faith through a gospel-centered, means-of-grace ministry.

America’s youth not only need a ministry that seeks to communicate God’s grace through the intergenerational teaching of God’s Word, the administration of the sacraments, a life of prayer, gospel-motivated service, and grace-centered community—I have become increasingly convinced that they actually want such a ministry.

Kent and Barbara Hughes in Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome argue that faithfulness to the Lord should always trump success in ministry. Our task is not to have the greatest show on earth, but to faithfully plant and water the gospel of Jesus Christ—trusting God to provide the growth (1 Cor. 3:7). In other words, we should strive to have our theology inform and shape our methodology.

Realizing that our task is simply to be faithful in youth ministry brings an overwhelming sense of freedom and joy. But this begs the question: What does it mean to be faithful to God in youth ministry? This is the question that youth pastors, parents, and youth leaders should be asking.

Simply put, being faithful to God in youth ministry is demonstrated through the means that God has established in his Word—the historic means of God’s transformative grace. God has sovereignly ordained to use various means of saving and sanctifying his elect—especially h i s Wo r d , s a c ra m e n t s, a n d prayer. Why substitute entertainment for these ordinances? Why let the Word of God be lost in the haze of strobe lights and fog machines?

Let’s be clear. Just because a youth ministry teaches the Bible does not necessarily mean that it teaches the gospel. Many confuse the gospel with moralism: being a good person, praying, opening doors for the elderly in a self-righteous effort to earn God’s favor and acceptance. But the gospel is altogether different.

The law says that you and I are incredibly sinful—more so than we could ever imagine. Yet, through faith alone in Christ alone, we are accepted and loved and adopted into God’s family. In the gospel, God declares us “not guilty” on the basis of our sin being credited to Christ’s account and his righteousness being credited to our account. This, of course, is the doctrine of justification and lies at the heart of the gospel message.

God has given us means of grace, not just to reap the benefits of their content and application, but also to communicate and display them as the way we should go about our ministry to youth. In a world where youth are disillusioned by the gimmicks and fog of an entertainmentdriven world of empty pleasure, let us preach Christ crucified and display him as the all-satisfying Savior that he is.

Brian H. Cosby is associate pastor of youth and families at Carriage Lane Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Peachtree City, Georgia, and author of Giving Up Gimmicks: Reclaiming Youth Ministry from an Entertainment Culture (P&R, 2012).

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MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY by michael s. horton

mong the contradictions of my childhood experiences in churches was the fact that, on one hand, there was the famous portrait of Jesus by Warner Sallman—meek and mild verging on the effeminate—and, on the other hand, the appearance of various sports figures to remind us that Jesus was not just male but a man’s man who ran the moneychangers out of the temple with a whip.

It is hardly a newsflash that we’ve been living through an era of upheaval in gender roles. Churches have been divided over the role of women in ministry. In “Young, Restless, Reformed” circles, a new generation is discovering Jonathan Edwards and “masculine Christianity” in one fell swoop. Weaned on romantic—even sentimental—images of a deity who seems to exist to ensure our emotional and psychic equilibrium, many younger Christians (especially men) are drawn to a robust vision of a loving and sovereign, holy and gracious, merciful and just, powerful and tender King. As David Murrow pointed out in Why Men Hate Going to Church (2004), men are tired of singing love songs to Jesus and don’t feel comfortable in a “safe environment” that caters to women, children, and older people. His critique is familiar to many: men don’t like “conformity, control, and ceremony,” so churches need to “adjust the thermostat” and orient their ministry toward giving men tasks (since they’re “doers”). Men don’t like to learn by instruction; they need object lessons and, most of all, to find ways to discover truth for themselves.

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I get the point about a “soft” ministry, especially worship, with its caressing muzak and the inoffensive drone of its always-affirming message. It’s predictably and tediously “safe.” Get the women there and they’ll bring their husbands and children. Not only has that not worked, it’s sure to bore any guy who doesn’t want to hear childrearing tips or yet another pep talk on how to have better relationships.

Having said all that, where did we get the idea that men are insecure jerks who can’t learn anything or belong to the communion of saints as recipients of grace? And are we really ready to identify shallow sentimentalism with “feminization” of the church? Do godly women want this any more than men? In my experience at least, a lot of men and women alike are devouring good books of theology these days, especially in Reformation circles. Yet also in my experience, women—and men—are still being distracted from being immersed in the faith by countless exercises in “applied Christianity” (i.e., niche studies) without much “Christianity” to apply.

The stereotypes can be as belittling to men as to women. Jesus’ disciples were, well, disciples. They followed Jesus and listened intently to his teaching. Not incidentally, there were women, too. Mary broke the stereotype by being catechized

by Jesus when her sister Martha thought she should be making coffee for the next group.

Take the stereotype that men don’t like to be taught; they like to discover truth for themselves.

This is as cliché as saying that real men don’t ask for directions. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus may have some interesting generalizations, but a lot of gender differences are cultural. In a society bombarded by niche-demographic marketing, what may have appealed to just about anybody in another era is packaged specifically for men or women (or children or teenagers or older folks).

In the drive to make churches more guy-friendly, we risk confusing cultural (especially American) customs with biblical discipleship. One noted pastor has said that God gave Christianity a “masculine feel.” Another contrasted “latte-sipping Cabriolet drivers” with “real men.” Jesus and his buddies were “dudes: heterosexual, win-a-fight, punch-you-in-the-nose dudes.”

Real Christian men like Jesus and Paul “are aggressive, assertive, and nonverbal.” Seriously?

The back story on all of this is the rise of the “masculine Christianity movement” in Victorian England, especially with Charles Kingsley’s fictional stories in Two Years Ago (1857). D. L. Moody popularized the movement in the United States and baseball-playerturned-evangelist Billy Sunday preached it as he pretended to hit a home run against the devil. For those of us raised on testimonies from recently converted football players in youth group, Tim Tebow is hardly a new phenomenon. Reacting against the safe deity, John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart (2001) offered a God who is wild and unpredictable. Neither image is grounded adequately in Scripture. With good intentions, the Promise Keepers movement apparently did not have a significant lasting impact. Nor, I predict, will the call of New Calvinists to a Jesus with “callused hands and big biceps,” “the Ultimate Fighting Jesus.”

Are these really the images we have of men in the Scriptures? Furthermore, are these the characteristics that the New Testament highlights as “the fruit of the Spirit”—which, apparently, is not gender-specific?

“Gentleness, meekness, self-control,” “growing in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ,” “submitting to your leaders,” and the like? Officers are to be “apt to teach,” “preaching the truth in love,” not quenching a bruised reed or putting out a smoldering candle, and the like. There is nothing about beating people up or belonging to a biker club.

And what about the fact that women as well as men are identified as “disciples” in the New

Testament—something that was quite unusual for Second Temple Jews? Or Paul’s expressions of gratitude and greeting to the women who assisted him in his work? Not to mention that “there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). It was Dorothy Sayers who castigated the pale curates of England for serving up a thin soup of moralism instead of the serious, dramatic, and counterintuitive message of the gospel: “the greatest story ever told.” She wasn’t trying to “masculinize” or “feminize” the gospel, but to join the throng of Zion’s worshippers in all times and places. “In Christ,” not “in manhood” or “in womanhood,” is our ultimate location. One Lord, one faith, one baptism.

So enough with the beards (if it’s making a spiritual statement). Enough with the “federal husband” syndrome that goes beyond the legitimate spiritual leadership of the heads of households found in Scripture.

Enough of the bravado that actually misunderstands— sometimes rather deeply—what real sanctification looks like in the lives of men as well as women. And why does every famous pastor today have to write a book about his marriage and family? Beyond Scripture, there is godly wisdom and Christian liberty. Biblical principles focus on what it means to live in Christ by his Word and Spirit, and even in those few passages that speak directly to men and women, there will be legitimate diversity in application.

My point is that the larger goal here shouldn’t be to trot out more gender stereotypes from our culture, whether feminist or neo-Victorian, but rather to rediscover the ministry that Christ has ordained for making disciples of all nations, all generations, and both genders. We need less niche marketing and more meat-and-potatoes service to the whole body of Christ. There, men and women, the young and the old and the middle aged, black, white, Latino, Asian, rich and poor hear God’s Word together, pray and sing God’s Word together, and are made one body by receiving Christ’s body and blood together: “one Lord, one faith, one baptism.” In that place, at least, there are no women’s Bible studies and men’s Bible studies, distracted youth groups and child-free golden oldies clubs, but brothers and sisters on pilgrimage to a better homeland than those that have been fashioned for us by this passing evil age.

Michael S. Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation.

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Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

By N. T. WrighT HarperOne, 2011 256 pages (hardback), $24.99

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imply Jesus is simply wonderful. This is N. T. Wright’s best popular-level book since The Challenge of Jesus, eclipsing its sister publication Simply Christian in every way.

As a precursor to the highly anticipated How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels (HarperOne, 2012), Tom Wright first sets the stage with a full, yet entirely accessible, introduction to Jesus, the world’s rightful king who has come to reclaim God’s earthly kingdom. But while this is not a dogmatic work on Christology or theology, it is everywhere christological and theological. And that is the genius of Simply Jesus; it sets forth Jesus of Nazareth within biblical and extra-biblical narratives and texts in such a compelling way that the reader capitulates to the doctrines of the incarnation, substitutionary atonement, resurrection, and the ongoing reign of Jesus as requisite history. In his presentation of Jesus, dogmatic implications fit the story naturally. Classic Christian theology comports with the story and the story comports with real history.

Thankfully, Wright distances himself from some of the ideological commitments of other New Perspective advocates, such as James Dunn. Instead for him, in the fullness of time— specifically, the time of first-century messianicexpectant Judaism—the person and work of Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ of God, becomes manifest. He is the king, and being king

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means the fulfillment of astonishing prophesies and the culmination of Israel’s destiny that, again, comports with concrete history to which Wright constantly turns.

Simply Jesus typifies Wright’s masterful teaching style. In fact, this is N.T. Wright at his best. He does what so few since the days of C.S. Lewis have been able to do: distill for the widest spectrum of readers into common parlance matchless learning garnered in the upper stratosphere of academia.

The storyteller in Wright transports readers into the first century and gives them the experience of pursuing the prophet from Nazareth from his nativity through his ascension with the Old and New Testaments as well as extra-biblical authorities. The result is an altogether accessible, readable, and captivating portrait of Jesus, formed and informed by the literature of the intertestamental period and, supremely, the apostolic gospel witness.

Wright is frequently criticized for soft-peddling sin or, at least, minimizing its significance in New Testament soteriology. Not so in Simply Jesus. Conversations about sin are frank and yield correlations between the Passover lamb of the exodus and Jesus himself as “the great sacrifice by which God was to rescue his people from their ultimate slavery, from death itself and all that contributed to it (evil, corruption, and sin).…This would be the means by which ‘sins would be forgiven’” (180).

Correspondingly, within Simply Jesus, Wright offers his most encouraging statements on penal substitution, saying, “There is too…a massive sense in which Jesus’ death is penal.” He then fortifies this statement with an

explanation of how the biblical doctrine of representation (federal headship) climaxes with Jesus bearing the sins of many in divine judgment “literally, physically, and historically” (185), with unmistakable soteriological implications.

Through fourteen chapters, Wright effectively and didactically employs the metaphor of “the perfect storm” to heighten the impact of Jesus in his historical context as well as sustain dramatic tension-seeking resolution. The worldview claims of the Roman Empire collide with Jewish expectations concerning their own history, and at their most volatile intersection we find Jesus momentously challenging and revolutionizing both.

The fifteenth and final chapter, “Jesus: Ruler of the World,” sets forth a series of useful reflections on how to talk about “Jesus as king ” in the real world. The principal metaphor in Scripture, “kingdom,” just may be the most communicable point of contact with a contemporary culture that not only is unable recognize biblical vocabulary, but to whom the very categories of Scripture are utterly foreign. My students at the University of San Diego, for example, cannot comprehend why “the wages of sin is death.” Although they are unfamiliar with classifications of sin and divine wrath (or repulsed by both), they are fully conversant in categories of “treason,” for which they know the penalty to be death. High treason against the sovereign warrants the death penalty, and they understand it, even agree with it. Wright has found ways of leading people to understand the unwelcome message of Romans 6:23 by first articulating a powerful kingdom narrative around it that not only reestablishes the meaning and significance of the text, but constructs digestible points of contact for people of our time.

To be sure, Simply Jesus has deficiencies. First, Wright opts for his own translation of the New Testament reproduced from his The Kingdom New Testament: A Contemporary Translation (2011).

Sadly, his fashionable translation is dire at times and frequently stands as an obstacle to the richness of the text. This sometimes radical contemporarization of Scripture neither seems consistent nor necessary, nor warranted given Wright’s expressed purposes of introducing and acclimating persons to the kingdom community that has, as a defining characteristic, a unique vocabulary.

“Wright is frequently criticized for softpeddling sin or, at least, minimizing its significance in New Testament soteriology.

Not so in Simply Jesus.

Conversations about sin are frank and yield correlations between the Passover lamb of the exodus and Jesus himself as ‘the great sacrifice.’”

Second, Wright patronizingly regurgitates certain distinctives of his Anglican social-justice perspective that appears in most of his works. I need only mention the name Desmond Tutu and the picture is complete and understood by readers of N. T. Wright to be recycled goods from numerous other works.

Third, his statements on the coming judgment of Christ are weak at best. Perhaps this is part of his strategy to put the best light on Jesus, especially since this book is a gateway to further investigative or devotional commitments. Still, one has a sense that the topic of future condemnation of unbelievers is unsavory for Wright.

Likewise, conspicuously downplayed is the issue of “justification” or, indeed, as Wright so famously likes to treat the topic, “vindication.” This is a disappointing gloss over.

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“but the intent seems to be to draw our thoughts about poverty and social justice under the umbrella of the way of the kingdom, in which the rich need the poor as much as the poor need the rich, so that we might all hear the Word and behold the kingdom within the full body of Christ.”

One would do well, however, to remember Wright’s target audience and purpose in penning this book: to introduce at a popular level and in an apologetical way a true-to-history Jesus of Nazareth who fits the billing of the world’s ever-reigning king. Given such considerations, Simply Jesus, despite its shortcomings, will likely be your first-suggested reading to would-be converts or pop-cultural evangelicals undergoing Osteen detoxification.

There will be the temptation to lump Wright’s endeavors into the same basket of disapprobation

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found with Scot McKnight’s The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited (Zondervan, 2011). In McKnight’s work an anachronistic “soteriological Jesus” (reified by generations of theologians) is contrasted with the story of “King Jesus”: the latter being the original substance of gospel proclamation. To be fair, McKnight did make certain concessions that he overstated his case during his interview on the White Horse Inn. Wright, on the other hand, is attempting to contextualize Jesus as the Messiah both historically and biblically, and thereby further infuse traditional accounts of incarnation and atonement with substantial, real-world weight. In the author’s words, “My contention is that [understanding the death of Jesus within the context of the Bible’s total story] enables us to understand the original, historical reality for which those dogmas [of the incarnation and atonement] are later, often dehistoricized, abstract summaries” (176).

For Wright, just like McKnight, the atonement has a context. Wright’s gift to the church is articulating that context clearly, memorably, and much better than McKnight.

John J. Bombaro (PhD, King’s College, University of London) is parish priest at Grace Lutheran Church, San Diego, and the author of Jonathan Edwards’s Vision of Reality: The Relationship of God to the World, Redemption History, and the Reprobate (Pickwick, 2012).

When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty without Hurting the Poor…and Yourself

By Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert Moody Publishers, 2009 232 pages (paperback), $14.99

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n a helpful addition to the growing evangelical literature on poverty, Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert argue persuasively that many well-meaning attempts to help the poor end up hurting them, as well as those trying to help.

The book’s title is unfortunate, connoting an overall pessimism toward helping the poor,

when the authors are clearly passionate about the call to relieve the poor and oppressed. Corbett and Fikkert begin by laying out the biblical arguments that Christians are obligated to share what they have with those who have not, and to seek the welfare of whatever city they find themselves in, including (and especially) the least of its residents. The book is aimed primarily, however, at those who already understand and accept the biblical preference for the poor, but who have not yet heeded the full scope of biblical wisdom concerning how to help without doing greater damage.

The book’s primary strengths are twofold: a properly holistic definition of poverty, and a comprehensive review of practical strategies for Christians (including churches) to seek the welfare of their city. Following a review of the biblical concern for the poor, Corbett and Fikkert define poverty in terms of the effects of the Fall on what they refer to as four foundational relationships: our relationship with God, with self, with others, and with the rest of creation. Because all suffer under the effects of sin, all exhibit brokenness in these relationships—the rich no less than the poor. It is immediately apparent, then, that the authors’ definition of poverty alleviation does not describe something the rich provide for the poor. “Poverty alleviation is the ministry of reconciliation: moving people closer to glorifying God by living in right relationship with God, with self, with others, and with the rest of creation.” It is Christ who is the reconciler; we are never more than ambassadors of the king, bringing good news and working for the peace of his kingdom. There is a danger that this definition covers too much, making poverty alleviation identical with the ministry of the church itself; but the intent seems to be to draw our thoughts about poverty and social justice under the umbrella of the way of the kingdom, in which the rich need the poor as much as the poor need the rich, so that we might all hear the Word and behold the kingdom within the full body of Christ.

The idea that both the rich and the poor need restoration in their lives and that all exhibit brokenness in every facet of their lives is a constant theme of the book. Corbett and Fikkert criticize Christians (including themselves) who have sought to help the poor in ways that merely exacerbate the problem—those who are motivated by feelings of material superiority, which can make the poor feel inferior. They remind us that all humans are intended to image their Creator; but when we provide for others rather than seeking to enable them to provide for themselves (both individually and as communities), we detract from this end. Relief efforts can feed the self-righteousness of the rich and their enlightenment faith in reason and technology, while simultaneously discouraging the poor from solving their own personal and systemic problems.

This reasoning underlies the definition that Corbett and Fikkert provide specifically of material poverty alleviation (and they are clear that acknowledging the spiritual poverty of the rich does not erase the Bible’s clear and frequent admonishments to ease the physical poverty of the poor): “Material poverty alleviation is working to reconcile the four foundational relationships so that people can fulfill their callings of glorifying God by working and supporting themselves and their families with the fruit of that work.” This definition guards against two opposite dangers. First, it recognizes that material is important for spiritual formation: God has created the physical world and given us a mandate to cultivate it as those who bear his image. Poverty is both a cause and an effect of complicated and tragic obstacles to this call. Second, it also recognizes that merely providing material goods to the poor does not restore to them the image of their Creator. Christians seeking to help the poor must seek their ultimate good: to glorify God in the work to which they too are called, for themselves, for their families, and for their communities.

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The last half of the book draws together a wealth of experience- and research-based practical advice on helping the poor. It begins by distinguishing three types of aid: relief, rehabilitation, and development. Relief is immediate assistance of an emergency nature, for people or communities who find themselves in severe trouble from which they cannot extricate themselves. Rehabilitation, however, is aid designed to help those who truly can help themselves, and it may withhold material resources in order to encourage the poor to acquire them on their own or with the help of their own communities. Development is a longterm process of ongoing change, most of it originating from within the developing person and community as they further fulfill their call to glorify their Maker by bearing his image. Corbett and Fikkert point out that many of the mistakes Christians make boil down to offering relief where rehabilitation or even development is more appropriate. They advocate for a process that begins with discovering the assets, not the needs, of the person or community requiring help. They then apply this paradigm in three chapters focusing on short-term missions, domestic poverty, and microfinance and other international aid.

What emerges from this book is a distinct sense that helping the poor is more costly than we realize. It requires long-term investment in their lives. Indeed, it requires the rich to realize their need for the poor. It requires the humility to admit that the poor possess vital insights into their own problems, even when they do not appear to be seeking solutions; it requires an approach that enables them to apply these solutions themselves, rather than reinforcing their belief that they have none to offer. And it accurately identifies the source of poverty in the sinfulness of human hearts, rich and poor alike, which can be alleviated by nothing less than the atoning work and coming kingdom of Jesus Christ. We are called to love the poor, and we are called to repent and believe. These are not two calls but one.

For further reading filling in many of the details of how poverty and its alleviation work, I recommend the recent book Poor Economics by

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MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Although they do not write from a Christian perspective, they offer useful insights, backed largely by their own field research among the poor over the last decade, on how and in what circumstances aid can be helpful or harmful. Intriguingly, many of their results portray the poor in a similar light to When Helping Hurts: they possess diverse and powerful gifts, as well as a dignity to which we can do great violence if we are too quick to rush in with our efforts to help.

Nathan Barczi is an economist, and an elder at Christ the King Presbyterian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide

By Thomas Albert Howard Oxford University Press, 2011 272 pages (hardcover), $45.00

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n 1826, the Princeton theologian Charles Hodge traveled to Europe because he felt his facility in foreign languages was terribly deficient. During Hodge’s visit, Archibald Alexander warned him to “remember that you live in a poisoned atmosphere,” because of the rising tide of liberal Protestantism. “If you lose the lively and deep impression of divine truth, if you fall into skepticism or even into coldness you will lose more than you gain from the German professors and libraries.” Hodge later noted that Germany had more religious diversity than he had first imagined. Even so, Alexander’s remarks reflect the commonplaces of a centuries-old religious divide, one that is both geographical because of the massive Atlantic but also deeply ideological.

This same sentiment is still with us today since some conservative evangelicals have the same concerns about the theology coming out of Europe, as well as about American academic theology allegedly corrupted by German liberalism. But many Europeans have reservations

about American religion. How has this situation of mutual mistrust come about?

This is the focus of Thomas Albert Howard’s masterful historical study of European religious sentiments toward American religion. This book is timely and necessary because, despite a current explosion in technology that has made the world s e e m s m a l l e r, p e o p l e speak of a widening Atlantic gap without paying attention to the deeper historical sources, particularly the religious. To explain this religious divide, Howard draws theoretically on Charles Taylor’s notion of the “social imaginary,” defined as “the broader and deeper, often inchoate and prearticulate, environing backg r o u n d s o f t h o u g h t .”

Howard claims that without such a work in cultural and intellectual history of perceptions and interpretations, there will be a deficit in understanding the present situation.

The book has two components. First, Howard analyzes negative assessments of American religion to grasp the deeper currents of contemporary European anti-Americanism. Second, he retrieves a more positive view of American religion through the eyes of underappreciated European interpreters.

The first section comprises two negative critiques of American religion. The first arose from the Romantic, traditional point of view that regarded American religion as divisive, inorganic, populist, anti-institutional, indifferent, and commercial. He brings together a chorus of voices denouncing American theology for its failure to be truly religious, as well as to produce a “theologian of world renown.”

The second negative critique comes from a secularist vantage point. Under this critique, there are three different branches: 1) leftist historical

thought; 2) Marxist and Hegelian intellectuals; and 3) left-leaning European liberals. From these branches emerged the “secularization thesis,” which regards America as “a kind of oafish, pious misfit swimming against the (secularizing) tide of history.” Many readers will likely find this section unfamiliar and difficult reading, but it is worth the investment of time and critical for help digesting present debates about the secularization of religion and society.

Howard devotes the last section to two lesser known intellectuals: the Reformed Protestant historian Philip Schaff and the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Perhaps this section is the most interesting and original part of the book as it moves beyond the evangelical overemphasis on Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of American religion.

Howard argues that the pairing of these very different intellectuals provides an insightful and complementary understanding of American religion. They both had sympathy for America and its project of religious freedom. Unlike other European observers, they traveled across the Atlantic (Howard dubs them “transatlantic personalities”) many times and lived in the United States, so their commentary carries a degree of gravitas. Despite many sympathies, they criticized the cultural and religious life in American democracy. Nevertheless, their reflections caused them to reevaluate their European heritage and to defend American religious freedom and the virtues associated with it. Because of these factors, Howard persuasively contends, they have “a much broader relevance for modern intellectual history, generally, and for the history of European-American transatlantic exchanges, in particular”—even though they approached the question differently.

When Schaff first visited the United States in 1844, he voiced stereotypical traditionalist misgivings about American religion, describing it as highly individualistic in its approach to faith. He called it a ModernReformation.org

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“sect plague” since it rejected a catholicity and tradition. Over time, however, Schaff attenuated his critique. He eventually admitted that America might be “the cradle of a new and splendid reformation” for its disruption of church-state relations, principle of religious subjectivity, and religious toleration. Schaff wrote several works in German to explain American religion abroad, and they were rapidly published in English and ought to be ranked among the most informative evaluations of the religious divide by a foreigner.

As a Roman Catholic, the young Maritain thought the Reformation was an “immense disaster for humanity,” though he did not specifically comment on America. After moving to America in 1940, however, he began to see the New World as a place of religious progress for individuals made in God’s image, in contrast to European communism and fascism that swallows the individual. Denying the charge that America was anti-intellectualist, Maritain (himself a democratic theorist) argued that natural law and transcendence were more in focus in America.

In conclusion, Howard encourages us to recognize that “historical knowledge possesses at once the potential to serve and complicate” the “hard, high purposes” of pluralistic global democracy. Nevertheless, this is the context in which we live, namely, ever-expanding modernity. If we want to think more deeply about religion and democratic forms of government on an international level, then the historical knowledge presented in this book can be a vital tool to encourage dialogue.

Joshua Forrest (MAHT, Westminster Seminary California) is a doctoral student at the University of Oxford and fellow at the Institute for European History in Mainz, Germany.

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Athanasius

By Simonetta Carr Reformation Heritage Books, 2011 64 pages (hardcover), $18.00

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orth Africa was one of the leading centers of Christian thought for most of the first millennium after Christ. Near the heart of early North African Christian influence was a fourth-century Egyptian bishop named Athanasius—a churchman revered by Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians alike.

Simonetta Carr’s newest book in her Christian Biographies for Young Readers series depicts the life of this hero of the faith.

And again, in a way that is both engaging and informative, she has skillfully woven the main character’s biography with the doctrine for which he labored. The beautiful layout and art work by Matt Abraxas beckon readers to learn about this man who, though small in stature, looms large on the pages of Christian history.

One of the invaluable themes in this series is the honesty with which the author reveals the struggles of her subjects. To say that Athanasius lived a hard life is a serious understatement.

Even before his adult years, Athanasius had lost many friends in the final round of Roman persecution against the Christian faith under Diocletian. After entering the Christian ministry, Athanasius was constantly under attack from ecclesiastical and civil enemies. Before he died he was exiled five times for his defense of the faith.

Despite this opposition, Athanasius was a classic over-achiever. By the age of twenty, he had written two little books that have had a profound impact on the Christian faith (Against the Heathen and O n the Incarnation). As an

“observer” to the famous Council of Nicaea (a.d.

325), Athanasius argued vigorously against Arius and his doctrine that Christ is of a distinct substance from the Father. Although the council formally agreed with Athanasius, the christological controversy was far from over. Apart from his final peaceful years, Athanasius’ entire life was characterized by opposition, hence the expression, “Athanasius contra mundum” (“against the world”).

Carr’s work on Athanasius proves William Faulkner’s claim: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” As with the rest of this highly recommended series, Athanasius demonstrates that history is a rich vein of wisdom and experience that can yield great dividends in the present.

John Owen

By Simonetta Carr Reformation Heritage Books, 2011 64 pages (hardcover), $18.00

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imonetta Carr’s third book in her Christian Biographies for Young Readers series features one of the most famous and influential leaders of the seventeenth-century English Puritan movement.

John Owen was the son of a Welsh minister of princely descent .

When he was only twelve he began his studies at Oxford where he would earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees by the age of twenty-one. When Owen sided with Parliament at the outbreak of the English Civil War, he disinherited himself from the life and luxury of family nobility. At the same time he began a theological career that would earn him the well-deserved title “Prince of the Puritans.” Although Owen was a champion of Calvinist theology, he argued powerfully for the unpopular idea of religious toleration.

Despite what his nickname might suggest, the “Prince of the Puritans” was no ivory-tower theologian. He ministered “in the trenches” as personal chaplain to Oliver Cromwell on several military

“in being true to Owen’s life she has invited readers to glory in Owen’s God.” campaigns. Along with his wife of thirty years, he also endured the unimaginable heartache of burying ten of his eleven children in infancy. At one of the lowest points in his life, Owen was revived by a sermon on Jesus’ words from Matthew 8:26, “Why are you fearful, O you of little faith?”

Carr’s biography of Owen is a powerful life commentary on the great gift of saving faith in the midst of fearful circumstances.

As with the rest of this series, this colorfully told story is enhanced with beautiful, well-chosen photographs and original paintings. The book’s illustrator, Matt Abraxas, has provided the series’ best art thus far. John Owen manages to be informative without being dry, edifying without being moralistic. By avoiding the temptation to be either obtrusive or dispassionate, Carr succeeds in highlighting the value of a thoughtful, courageous, principled life. And in being true to Owen’s life she has invited readers to glory in Owen’s God. As my kids and I finished this book, I had the sneaking suspicion that we had concluded the first of many odysseys into this highly recommended introduction to the life of John Owen.

William Boekestein is the pastor of Covenant Reformed Church (URCNA) in Carbondale, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Faithfulness under Fire: The Story of Guido de Bres (Reformation Heritage, 2011) and The Quest for Comfort: The Story of the Heidelberg Catechism (Reformation Heritage, 2011).

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treasures of Reformation teaching out of the vaults. Our vision was for nothing less than a new reformation. The more deeply we were enriched ourselves, the more we wanted to share with others. Today, White Horse Inn is heard on radio stations across the U.S. and all over the world. More than 2,000,0000 podcasts have been downloaded in more than 120 countries. However, with the fiscal year end approaching, we’re experiencing a substantial deficit in our budget. So, I’m asking for your help as a reformation-minded friend to help us meet our needs.

Soli Deo Gloria

Michael Horton

g ee k squad

>> SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY

B i b l i ca l a n d S ys t emat i c T h e o l o gy, B ot h /A n d

T

by Ryan Glomsrud

he Bible is not a dogmatic handbook but a historical book full of dramatic interest,” argued the Dutch-American theologian Geerhardus Vos (1862–1949). But this is not to dismiss out of hand “dogmatics” or the enterprise known as “systematic theology.” Instead, serious students of the Bible should employ both methods as mutually supportive for growing in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Avoiding a handbook approach, Vos utilized the classic distinction between systematic theology that draws a circle and biblical theology that draws a line.

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Fall

>>

Creation KINGSHIP

PROTO-gosPEL (GEN. 3:15) PATRIARCHS JESUS’ RETURN

EXODUS & CONQUEST BIBLICAL THEOLOGY Explanation of geek-speak: This is the difference on Google Maps between the “Traffic” view and the “Terrain” view. Click on one button and you get a street map with the city plan, major and minor thoroughfares, and all their intersections (i.e., systematic theology). Toggle the switch and you get the full-color topography (i.e., the biblical-theological lay of the land). Circle and line, traffic and terrain, street and topographical map—that’s the difference between systematic and biblical theology.

Too often systematic theology gets short shrift, as if it is a kind of theological reflection further removed from the story of the Bible.

Not so—it is simply a complementary reading

In other words, as Christians we B strategy. have to consider both the unfolding drama

from one stage of redemptive history to the next, its peaks, valleys, rivers, and plateaus.

But navigating life east of Eden also necessitates a street map, as anyone who has tried to use a topographical map for cross-country travel can tell you. Systematic theology assumes a unified and coherent story and then organizes and categorizes themes to show logical connections. Pilgrims making their way through this life need both to fully grasp the richness of the Bible.

Ryan Glomsrud is executive editor of Modern Reformation.

ModernReformation.org

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b ac k PA G E

Bes t- S e l l i n g “C h r i s t i a n ” B o o k s

69%

16%

1. Chick Lit (23%) 2. Old West (23%) 3. Amish (23%)

8%4 %

3% KEY

ROMANCE

THE SHACK

CHRISTIAN BOOKSELLERS’ ASSOCIATION

THE HARBINGER

SUSPENSE

4. The Tehran Initiative,

2. The Harbinger, by Jonathan Cahn

by Joel C. Rosenberg

3. Into the Free, by Julie Cantrell

1. The Harbinger, by Jonathan Cahn

5. Redeeming Love,

4. The Chronicles of Narnia,

2. Longing, by Karen Kingsbury

by Francine Rivers

by C.S. Lewis

3. Courageous, by Randy Alcorn 4. The Maid of Fairbourne Hall,

5. The Shack, by William P. Young

CBD.COM

AMAZON.COM

by Julie Klassen

1. The Harbinger, by Jonathan Cahn

5. Redeeming Love,

2. Loving, by Karen Kingsbury

1. Into the Free, by Julie Cantrell

by Francine Rivers

3. The Fiddler, by Beverly Lewis

2. Jacob’s Daughter,

4. Downfall, by Teri Blackstock

by Samantha Jillian Bayarr

5. A Life of Joy, by Amy Clipston

3. Amish Winter Wonderland, Book

EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN PUBLISHER’S ASSOCIATION 1. Longing, by Karen Kingsbury

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CLASSICS

Two, by Samantha Jillian Bayarr

BN.COM

4. The Harbinger, by Jonathan Cahn

2. Courageous, by Stephen Kendrick

1. Amish Winter Wonderland, Book

3. Leaving, by Karen Kingsbury

Two, by Samantha Jillian Bayarr

5. The Shack, by William P. Young

SOURCES: CHRISTIAN BOOKSELLERs’ ASSOCIATION, EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN PUBLISHER’S ASSOCIATION, CBD.COM, BN.COM, AMAZON.COM

michael horton’s influential

trilogy Modern Reformation recommends this sobering yet hopeful trilogy by Michael Horton.

Christless Christianity diagnoses the problem facing our churches, The Gospel-Driven Life offers a solution and The Gospel Commission charts the way forward. Together they provoke Christians to rediscover God’s promises for our time.

P urch ase th em to day at W h iteHorse Inn.org/store ModernReformation.org

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