Theology Central
Theology Central exists as a place of conversation and information for faculty and friends of Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Posts include seminary news, information, and opinion pieces about ministry, theology, and scholarship.Timothy George Writes about J. I. Packer
The essay is “Packer at Ninety,” and you’ll find it at First Things.
It has been my privilege to know and work closely with Jim Packer for the past thirty-five years, only a fraction of his long and still amazingly productive career. I have seen him buffeted by adversity, and criticized unfairly, but I have never seen him sag. His smile is irrepressible and his laughter can bring light to the most somber of meetings. His love for all things human and humane shines through. His mastery of ideas and the most fitting words in which to express them is peerless. Ever impatient with sham of all kinds, his saintly character and spirituality run deep. I love to hear him pray. Again and again, he has reminded us that we live our lives coram deo and in the light of eternity. He has taught us that theology is for doxology and devotion, that theology is always at its best “when it is consciously done under the eye of the God of whom it speaks, and when it is singing to his glory.”
MacArthur on Spirit Filling
He’s responding to the Charismatic theory.
As the New Testament makes clear, being a “Spirit-filled” Christian has nothing to do with uttering mindless gibberish, crashing to the carpet in a hypnotic trance, or any other mystical encounter of supposed ecstatic power. Rather, it has everything to do with submitting our hearts and minds to the Word of Christ, walking in the Spirit and not the flesh, and daily growing in love and affection for the Lord Jesus unto the service of His whole body, the church.
MacArthur, John F. Strange Fire: The Danger of Offending the Holy Spirit with Counterfeit Worship (p. 212).
McDonalds at the Vatican?
McDonald’s would like to open a franchise just off St. Peter’s Square in Rome. Some Cardinals don’t like the idea. How they would feel about a Starbucks we don’t know.
Religious Freedom or Religious Liberty?
They’re not the same thing, according to Stephanie Russell-Kraft at Religion Dispatches. And conservatives are tilting more and more toward liberty.
Political theorist Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, in her 1988 essay “Are Freedom and Liberty Twins?”, wrote that freedom “is more likely to be holistic, to mean a total condition or state of being,” whereas liberty “is more likely to be plural and piecemeal.” Another way of putting it: freedom is the capacity to do things in the world, while liberty is the absence of external institutional constraints.
In the era of the American Revolution, liberty reigned supreme. For the founders, liberty was the “fundamental American value,” and liberty remained the dominant word in the country’s political lexicon until the 20th century, according to Geoffrey D. Nunberg, a linguist who teaches at the UC Berkeley School of Information. Even today, liberty still has 18th century connotations. “It’s a word that wears a three-corner hat,” said Nunberg.
Leithart and Wilson on the Church
Not long ago Peter Leithart asked whether Protestantism had a future. Douglas Wilson didn’t like his answer. The exchange provides some valuable insight as to the nature and boundaries of the church. As Baptists, we would say some different things and say other things differently, but this is the kind of conversation we can learn from.
Here’s Leithart:
By “catholic” I do mean, first of all, universal. The future of Protestantism is to be, and to acknowledge itself to be, part of a global catholic communion of communions. Protestant churches will be one with all the rest of the churches, and contribute their gifts to the good of the whole. A catholic future for Protestantism means a future of unity with other families of churches.
And here’s Wilson:
At the beginning of Mere Christianity, Lewis describes the Christian faith as a large mansion with many rooms. He describes the rooms as various communions, and he includes Rome, which is distressing to some ardent Protestants. Why do they get a room? But it is equally distressing to any Roman Catholic who knows his onions. Why aren’t they considered the whole house?
Gerald McDermott on the SBL and IVP
Gerald McDermott is an Anglican professor at Alabama’s Beeson Divinity School. He weighs in on the banning of InterVarsity Press by the Society for Biblical Literature in an essay entitled, “Stranger than Fiction.”
Perhaps you notice the disconnect between SBL’s declaration of “tolerance” and its threat not to tolerate the age-old teaching of Christian marriage. Or the contradiction between claiming to want “unhindered critical discourse” but now threatening to hinder discourse by banning arguments for a particular position. Or “respect for diversity” while not wanting intellectual diversity in discussions of the most debated ethical issue of our day.
Michael Bird Responds to SBL Leadership over IVP
While we have not yet seen a formal announcement from the Society of Biblical Literature, their leadership is supposed to have banned IVP over its recent clarifications on human sexuality. Michael Bird has responded to the SBL leadership in an open letter
Fifth, and somewhat baffling, is what you [John Kutsko] wrote to IVP. You said that SBL was committed to: “a variety of critical perspectives … diversity of participation and unhindered critical discourse … free inquiry and expression.” John, mate, I don’t want to be confrontational, but can you explain to me how does banning a publisher from the annual conference increase the diversity, free inquiry and expression of SBL? It does the opposite, it cabines diversity, it censures certain elements of belief, and inhibits free expression. Let me be clear, to ban IVP from the annual convention does not safeguard the academic freedom of SBL members, it amounts to censorship, which many of us are very, very sensitive about..
Mind and Heart
According to the Scriptures, neither our emotions nor our experiences provide an adequate foundation for the Christian life. Only the truths of Scripture, understood with the mind and communicated through doctrine, can provide that sure foundation upon which we should establish our beliefs and behavior as well as determine the validity of our emotions and experiences. The mind is not the enemy of the heart, and doctrine is not an obstacle to devotion.
–Paul Washer. The Truth About Man – Biblical study of the Doctrine of Man (Kindle Locations 138-142). HeartCry Missionary Society.
China Gets Serious about Religious Enforcement
The government has a new reporting system on religious activities that is aimed at teachers and parents. Read about it here.
Do We Need Rhetoric?
Joel Zartman says that we do, partly because we cannot trust ourselves. Read the whole thing at Unknowing.
Which is why you need rhetoric. You have to be conscious of it if you want to do it at all well, unless you naturally do it well. It requires consideration, and consideration beyond what you considering can come up with. And even if you naturally do it well, it is well to consider what is proper and improper not only in the aesthetic realm—which is important—but in the moral realm. If you don’t think about whether you ought to achieve things by one or another effect, if you don’t label certain approaches and understand clearly what you are doing, how will you confront your deceitful heart when you are proceeding by sensationalism, fearmongering, omitting crucial details and such unscrupulous means?
It’s Not Just Evangelicals
Two nuns in Italy have entered a same-sex civil union. Pope Francis is reported to be disappointed.
Tozer on the Thought Life
Make your thoughts a clean sanctuary. To God, our thoughts are things. Our thoughts are the decorations inside the sanctuary where we live. If our thoughts are purified by the blood of Christ, we are living in a clean room no matter if we are wearing overalls covered with grease. Your thoughts pretty much decide the mood and weather and climate inside your heart, and God considers your thoughts as part of you. Thoughts of peace, thoughts of pity, thoughts of mercy, thoughts of kindness, thoughts of charity, thoughts of God, thoughts of the Son of God—these are pure things, good things, and high things.
–Tozer, A. W. How to Be Filled with the Holy Spirit (Kindle Locations 510-514).
Ghent Altarpiece Restored
The restoration of the famous painting depicting the “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” is now complete. Read the story here.
Al Mohler on Economics
Albert Mohler offers “Twelve Theses for a Christian Understanding of Economics.” Read them at the Washington Times.
Some economic systems treat the idea of private property as a problem. But Scripture never considers private property as a problem to be solved (see, for instance, the Ten Commandments). Scripture’s view of private property implies it is the reward of someone’s labor and dominion. The Eighth and 10th Commandments teach us that we have no right to violate the financial rewards of the diligent.
Eric Metaxas on Relativism
His personal reflections, stemming from his own university experience. At the Intercollegiate Review. By the way, Christian students who aren’t members of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute ought to be.
Of course, Christians do not believe only in moral laws and in doctrine. To treat truth as authoritarianism and fundamentalism is to set up a straw man. The Bible itself strongly condemns the Pharisees, who were full of moral rules and judgment but had no love and grace for those who struggled morally. People who try to turn the God of the Bible into an authoritarian figure who merely thunders judgment may rather quickly flip their wigs and worldviews when they encounter the figure of Jesus. He famously showed grace to the woman taken in adultery and did not condemn her as the Pharisees did. So Jesus was no authoritarian or fundamentalist. But neither was he a relativist. He said to the woman, “Go and sin no more.” He didn’t wink at sin; he acknowledged it as sin and then he forgave it.To have only half the truth is to have none.
Sticking His Neck Out
John MacArthur on D. A. Carson’s theory of tongues in Showing the Spirit:
If that interpretation did not come from one of the most respected academic authors of our day, it would probably gain no traction in any serious forum. But because of that particular writer’s reputation as a distinguished evangelical scholar, many charismatics cling to his idea as if it were a credible defense of their position. It’s not. It is a transparently desperate attempt to defend the indefensible. Implausible theories like that from respected sources only serve to legitimize a movement that, in reality, is built on untenable arguments and exegetical fallacies.
MacArthur, John F. Strange Fire: The Danger of Offending the Holy Spirit with Counterfeit Worship (p. 236).
Does the Pronoun War Matter?
According to Anthony Esolen, it’s not just a war over pronouns, but over reality. Read him here.
The sexual revolution always has been a war waged against the ordinary family, against the ordinary ways of men and women and children. The moral law as regards sex is meant to protect that family from threats without and within: from the pseudo-marriage that is fornication, from the betrayal of marriage that is adultery, from the rickets and scurvy of impure habits, and from the mockery of the marital act that is sodomy. If a man’s home was his castle, then the walls round that castle were his people’s understanding of the moral law and the customs that gave the law vigor and force. Who then would benefit by riddling the walls with holes? All people who could not, because of their own failings and vices, enjoy the good of family life; all people who saw the family as the great opponent in the way of their statist ambitions; all rebels against Nature and Nature’s God, who would be happier to see a man leave his wife and children to take up with another man than to see a young woman turn away from the hothouse of a lesbian relationship to become a wife and mother after the ordinary way of nature.
Conservatism Fiscal and Social
Can you have one without the other? Carlos Flores says NO.
The social conservative observes that nature has providentially provided such an environment for the formation of a virtuous people who are ready to participate in (or establish) a political project: the family, where the child can depend on the love of his or her mother and father (and on the love between his mother and father) for his or her formation into a virtuous person. The child’s mother and father do more than this, however: they provide a representative of the two halves of humanity, man and woman, for the child to come to know and have a relationship with. In this way, the child can learn how to form relationships with persons of either sex and how to conduct him- or herself in marriage and relate to his or her spouse later in life.
Thoughts on Imposing Beliefs
We often hear that we should not impose our beliefs upon others. In ways we agree with that statement–and in ways we do not. Ryan Dueck is not a fundamentalist. He is not even a conservative. He is a liberal writing for a liberal publication. But he has some useful reflections upon whether it is even possible to avoid imposing beliefs upon others. Read him at the Christian Century blog.
I think that if pressed most of us would say that responsible parenting requires at least some imposition of views, unfashionable as it might be to admit this and much as we might be pleased to imagine that the sum total of our parental duty is to present our young saplings with a smorgasbord of ideological options from which to choose for their independent selves. Whatever we might say, we all do this, even if only by the example we set (or fail to set). We are always indoctrinating our children into some vision of what matters and what doesn’t in the world. There’s no avoiding imposing our views.
Kindles and Civilization
If you ignore the references to Catholicism and substitute the word conservative for Catholic, Glen Arbery’s essay at The Imaginative Conservative has something useful to say. Here is his conclusion, but you will want to see how he gets there.
At present, clearly, inhuman rationalism and technology have us in their thrall. But with grace and the poetry of experience, we can make a start back into the given, back into the real. As I’ve said before, it’s the long game of education. That it has present rewards is evident in our students, but a cultural transformation is what we are about.
APPLICATION & AID