CogitoCredo Interview on God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment

Thanks to Calvin Moore for conversing with me about God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology.

We had a good time talking about how this book joins the battle to save the west, about how the most serious books are the most devotional (HT C. S. Lewis), about how the issues Rob Bell has raised are really about the character of God, about how the Song of Songs teaches the center of biblical theology, and about how these things should affect our lives today.

To hear the interview, head on over to CogitoCredo, and Jacob Sweeney contributed an engaging reviewed the book for the thinking-believing site.

Amazon Marketplace has several copies of the book for $22.something, which is the lowest price I’ve seen.

Dynamic Equivalence: The Method is the Problem

When I was studying at DTS, my Hebrew prof, who is fairly well known, was really excited about dynamic equivalence translation. I heard his lectures and saw his work. It made me uncomfortable, though I wasn’t in position to show why. I suspected that the logical outcomes of the method he was teaching would be bad. I also suspected that if I was uncomfortable about what the teacher was doing, it would probably be worse when applied by the students to whom he was teaching this method, students with less expertise and experience.

Let me be clear: the particular practitioner of the method of dynamic equivalence is not the problem. My beef here is not with my prof. I only mention him and my experience in his class to say that I have been taught by a real live proponent of the method. I have heard his arguments. I am not reacting against “those anonymous people out there” with whom I have no real acquaintance. I disagree with him, but it’s nothing personal. I once gave him tickets to a Rangers versus Yankees game at The Ballpark at Arlington.

Moreover, my concern about this issue does not primarily arise from the treatment of gender language. This post is not me ranting against the NIV 2011. This post is me stating that I reject dynamic equivalence translation theory because of the logical outcomes of the method. The method is the problem.

The method bothers me because God inspired the biblical authors to write certain words, and translations can only be identified as the word of God insofar as “they faithfully represent the original” (Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, Article X). No translation is perfect. No theory is perfect. But let me give you an example of the logical outcomes of dynamic equivalence.

I preface this example with the simple observation that the gospel of John makes heavy use of the words “truth” and “glory.” In How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler teaches that we must come to terms with the author we’re reading. What this means is that we want to understand how the author uses his words. Truth and glory are both major themes in the Gospel of John, and in order to understand how John uses those words, we will want to pay careful attention to where they occur and recur. In order to come to terms with him as an author, we must be able to see his distinctive use of significant language. That is, the commonplace uses of significant words are going to provoke less thought than the out of the ordinary uses of significant language.

Thus, it is interesting that when the Jews are going after the man born blind after Jesus has healed him, they say to him in John 9:24,

“Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner.”

This is an interesting assertion, is it not? John presents the Jews assuming that God is on their side, that Jesus is clearly not from God, and that God will receive glory when the man supposedly born blind states what, in their view, accords with reality: that Jesus is a sinner.

We learn a lot from John about the Jews in that phrase “give glory to God.” They clearly think they are honoring God, which in turn implies that they think Jesus is not honoring God.

Now how would someone who has embraced dynamic equivalence translation philosophy render that phrase? We don’t have to guess. Here is John 9:24 in the NET Bible:

“Promise before God to tell the truth. We know that this man is a sinner.”

The problem here is not that the translator failed his vocab quizzes. It’s not that he has confused the meaning of doxa (glory) with aletheia (truth). The problem is that the translator has decided to render what (he thinks) the text means rather than translate the words of the author. In doing this, the translator has eliminated one of John’s key words, removing this occurrence of glory, and created a non-existent instance of another one of John’s key words by putting truth in the text when John did not have it there.

The NET Bible is heavily footnoted, and in their footnotes they tell you what they’ve done. They put John’s actual words in the footnote. Why not put John’s actual words in the text and what they think it means in the footnote? In this case, the inspired words are in the footnote, and the translator has put the fallible interpretation in the text. Backwards, no?

People may have to give some thought to the phrase “give glory to God.” Human beings are made in the image of God. They have enormous capacity. Give them a literal, wooden translation, and they might be forced to slow down and think as they read. They might ponder. They might begin to recognize certain Johannine styles of phrasing things–if translators would give them John’s actual words.

“Promise before God to tell the truth” sounds like something we would say. It doesn’t sound like John. That is the problem.

Another example? R. G. Bratcher thinks that some references to Jesus being glorified in John are pointing to the resurrection of Jesus. On the basis of this interpretation, Bratcher suggests that rather than translating John’s words so that the reader can interpret them, the translator should embed his own interpretation in the translation. Thus, Bratcher argues that instead of rendering ἐδοξάσθη as “glorified” in John 7:39 (“Jesus was not yet glorified”) and 12:16 (“when Jesus was glorified”), the translator should communicate that “Jesus’ resurrection shows his divine status” (R. G. Bratcher, “What Does ‘Glory’ Mean in Relation to Jesus?: Translating doxa and doxazo in John,” Bible Translator 42 [1991]: 407).

Contra Bratcher, since the reference to Jesus’ glorification is not explained in these texts, readers of John’s gospel should have the opportunity to determine what “glorification” means in John 7:39 and 12:16 by “coming to terms with John,” that is, by analyzing for themselves what “glorification” means in the rest of the Gospel. This will be a matter of dispute, but it could be that these references to Jesus’ glorification point to the cross rather than the resurrection. If Jesus’ glorification in John 12:23, 28; 13:31–32; 17:1, 5 is the cross, his glorification in 7:39 and 12:16 may also be the cross rather than the resurrection.

These two examples come not from novices but from supposed experts. These experts have decided that rather than rendering what John wrote in his gospel, it is their place to render what they think John meant. Note, too, that this is not a case of these words or concepts being overly technical. These are not recondite vocables that most people have never before read. The terms “truth,” “glory,” and “glorification” are all over the place in the Bible and in every-day speech.

If I am going to read the Bible in an English translation, I want to read the words of the biblical author.

And I know the kinds of examples that are going to be thrown at me about necessary adjustments going from language to language. But changing something like the very literal “a name to him John” in John 1:6 to “his name was John” is not the kind of thing anyone is rejecting. Nor is that kind of thing represented in the examples above. I am rejecting the change of one understandable phrase, “give glory to God,” to another, “promise before God to tell the truth.” I am rejecting the change from “Jesus was not yet glorified” to “Jesus was not yet resurrected.”

One final example. A stock expression in the Psalms is an idiom that, rendered literally, would be something like “to tread the bow” or “to walk the bow” (e.g., Ps 7:12; 11:2; etc.). Even the most literal translations render this along the lines of “bend the bow.” But stop and think about the expression “tread the bow.” What does that mean? Doesn’t it give a visual image? Can you see the warrior placing one end of the bow on the ground, holding the other end in his hand, and stepping on the bow in the middle to string the bow? Can you see the warrior tread the bow?

Now what does poetry do? Doesn’t poetry enable us to see the world as it really is by describing it to us in fresh ways? The removal of the visual image of the warrior treading the bow removes color and life from David’s poetry.

Learn the Biblical languages if you can. If you can’t, stick with the literal translations, and be suspicious of the experts who tell you that words like “literal” really aren’t that helpful.

The Heresy of Explanation

Alan Jacobs joins in Robert Alter’s lament of “the heresy of explanation” at work in dynamic equivalence translation theory. Here’s how Jacobs opens his review of Alter’s The Five Books of Moses:

As the Italians say, traduttori, tradittori: translators are traitors. But the translator who shrugs and—cheerfully or resignedly—agrees that “every translation is an interpretation, after all” has too readily embraced the way of the tradittore. The translator who strives for strict fidelity, even knowing its elusiveness, will be less treacherous. In translation, fidelity is the ultimate imperative and trumps every other virtue: even clarity or readability.

Translators of the Bible seem often to forget this, if indeed they believe it at all. In the introduction to his extraordinary recent translation, The Five Books of Moses, Robert Alter points out that modern translations operate under the (perhaps unconscious) “feeling that the Bible, because of its canonical status, has to be made accessible—indeed, transparent—to all.” Alter is certainly right that modern translators have this feeling, and obey it, but the Bible’s “canonical status” is less to blame than a particular conception of how the Bible functions in the lives of believers.

Read the whole things, which Jacobs has appropriately entitled, “Robert Alter’s Fidelity.”

Can Dostoevsky’s Translator Weigh in on Bible Translation?

Mirra Ginsburg translated Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, including a three page meditation “On the Translation.” I would love to transcribe the entirety of these three pages, but won’t take the time to do so. This paragraph (p. xxviii) gets at the heart of what I want to emphasize–I put the final sentence in bold for emphasis:

“As always, however, translation is a struggle with impossibility, and there are losses that must be accepted as inevitable. Thus, the Russian ‘deyateli,’ which is rendered here as ‘men of action.’ The literal meaning of the word is ‘doer,’ and in Russian it is used to denote a ‘leading figure’ active in a given field–politics, the arts, science–with the field usually specified. To the Russian reader it is entirely clear that Dostoevsky’s (or his character’s, for it is sometimes difficult to disentangle the author’s voice from the narrator’s) mockery of the obtuse, limited ‘doers’ or ‘men of action’ (field unspecified) is aimed primarily at the liberals, the ‘public citizens,’ the ‘do-gooders’ of his time. This, alas, disappears in translation, unless the translator arrogates to himself the entirely inadmissable right to interpolate.

See also Earle Ellis’s objections to dynamic equivalence translation philosophy:

To my mind the ‘dynamic equivalence’ approach to biblical translation has serious deficiencies.

(1) It rejects the verbal aspect of biblical inspiration.

(2) It gives to the translator the role that rightly belongs to the preacher, commentator and Christian reader.

(3) It assumes that the present-day translator knows what contemporary words, idioms and paraphrases are equivalent to the prophets’ and apostles’ wording.

(4) It advocates conforming biblical language and concepts to the modern culture rather than conforming the modern culture to biblical language and concepts.

(5) It appears to discard the Protestant principle that Christian laity should have full access to the Word of God written without interposition of clergy or of paraphrastic veils.

Patrick Schreiner has posted the article where Ellis discusses these points: E. Earle Ellis, “Dynamic Equivalence Theory, Feminist Ideology and Three Recent Bible Translations,” Expository Times 115 (2003): 7–12.

Justice and Mercy Planned by Jesus and the Count of Monte Cristo

In Alexandre Dumas’s novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmund Dantes is about to marry his beautiful beloved Mercedes. On the night before he is to be married, Dantes is falsely accused by one man who wants his woman, and another who wants his job. It so happens that the judge is implicated in the circumstances, in response to which he sentences Dantes to life in prison without trial.

While imprisoned for 14 years, Dantes is befriended and instructed by Abbe Faria. Faria also tells Dantes of a treasure hidden on the isle of Monte Cristo. Faria dies, and Dantes becomes the only prisoner ever to escape from the prison of Château d’If.

Dantes goes to the island of Monte Cristo, finds the treasure, and plots vengeance, astonishingly elaborate in its detail and poetic justice. The justice that Dantes accomplishes is so perfect and so complete and so elaborate that if we do not willingly suspend our disbelief, if we back away from the fictional dream, we begin to question whether this is credible. Could a man pull this off?

An innocent man, falsely accused, taken from his betrothed the night before their wedding, and unjustly imprisoned for 14 long years.

The world needs justice. Who can give perfect justice?

The world needs redemption. Who can give perfect redemption?

Can we have justice and redemption?

In Mark 14:1–25, we see Jesus bring to fulfillment an astonishingly elaborate plot that upholds justice and accomplishes redemption. On Sunday, June 26, 2011, it was my privilege to preach this text at Kenwood Baptist Church.

The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmund Dantes, achieved a limited, human justice. He ruined the lives of those who ruined his life. He even forgave one mortal enemy who repented of his sin and plead for forgiveness. Dantes could not, however, win back Mercedes. While he was imprisoned, she married another, one of those who falsely accused Dantes. Dantes takes vengeance on the man, but he cannot redeem his lost bride.

Jesus is a better avenger and a better redeemer than Edmund Dantes. No real man could take the vengeance Dantes accomplishes. Only a fictional hero could pull it off. Jesus achieves a perfect justice, and Jesus doesn’t lose his bride. Jesus will redeem all those who belong to him. Jesus will never fail you.

This hyperlinked title of my sermon on Mark 14:1–25 will take you to the audio file: “Justice and Mercy Planned by Jesus and the Count of Monte Cristo.”

Review of Paul Barnett’s “Paul: Missionary of Jesus”

Paul: Missionary of Jesus. After Jesus, vol. 2. By Paul Barnett. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008, xvi + 240 pp. $18.00 paper.

Published in The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 15.1 (2011), 112–13.

In this book Paul Barnett asks whether the mission and message of Paul the Apostle was the mission and message of Jesus of Nazareth. Having introduced the question, Barnett devotes a chapter that surveys both those who have driven a wedge between Jesus and Paul and the information about Jesus in Paul’s letters. He then takes the reader on a chronological flyover of Paul’s life, concluding that “He was from an aristocratic Diaspora family and a Roman citizen by birth, yet conservatively Jewish in nurture (in Tarsus) and education (in Jerusalem); he was an eminent younger Pharisee, yet bilingual and an accomplished scholar of the Greek Bible” (44). Barnett then asks why Paul persecuted the church, when his teacher, Gamaliel, advised against it (Acts 5:33–39). Barnett argues that the combination of the conversion of numerous priests and Stephen’s preaching that touched on the role of the temple and the law (Acts 6:7–13) catalyzed Paul’s violent opposition, forcing him into action in spite of Gamaliel’s earlier advice (48–49). The significance of the Damascus event in Paul’s life and thought is examined next, with Barnett arguing that “the core elements of Paul’s doctrines that he was to preach were formed in Damascus” and that what happened there “represented a complete relational and moral turnabout that was accompanied by a radical new vocation” (75).

Barnett then takes a close look at what can be known about the so-called unknown years, from the time of Paul’s conversion at Damascus (Acts 9) to his first westward mission starting from Antioch (Acts 13). He notes that the details from Acts and from Paul’s narration in Galatians agree in the sequence of locations (77). In chapter 7 Barnett asks what he considers “the most critical question of all”: “Was Paul’s mission to the Gentiles according to the mind of Jesus and an authentic extension to his own ministry in Israel?” (99). He shows that a two-stage “Israel first, then the nations” trajectory can be seen in Mark and Matthew’s portrayals of Jesus. This matches Paul’s to the Jew first and also the Gentile mentality. Further, Paul regarded himself as seized by Christ, and leading apostles confirmed Paul’s call to preach to the Gentiles (114–15). Interacting with Donaldson and Sanders, Barnett discusses the way that “Paul appears to have regarded himself and his life’s work in fulfillment of a number of OT texts” (118).

Barnett’s final chapters deal with Paul’s mission and what he calls the countermission. He writes, “Paul’s mission immediately provoked the rise of a Jerusalem-based countermission in churches that insisted Gentile believers be circumcised. This countermission was active throughout the decade of Paul’s mission in the provinces, and it was the major problem Paul faced during those years” (135). Barnett holds that most of Paul’s letters come in the decade of AD 47–57. Though there is no mention in Acts of Paul being imprisoned in Ephesus, Barnett posits an Ephesian imprisonment and claims that Philemon, Colossians, and Ephesians were written while Paul was imprisoned in Ephesus it in AD 55 (136­–37, 215–17). Barnett suggests that apocalyptic ferment, the hardening of Israel, and the political stability under Claudius opened the door for Paul to move beyond the God-fearing Gentiles in synagogues to the intentional evangelization of Gentile idolaters. Barnett sees this as a paradigm shift that provoked a Jewish countermission (137–42). The only evidence he has for this is Paul’s letters, and in my judgment he over-reads that evidence at several points. For instance, somehow he knows that as Paul was laboring on the collection of funds for the poor in Judea, the difficulties culminated “in the revelation in Corinth of a Jewish conspiracy for a shipboard interception of the money” (154). Perhaps Barnett is drawing an inference from Acts 20:3, but he gives no scripture references and cites no other evidence for this event. He also over-reads the evidence when he makes a bizarre suggestion about why Paul wanted to collect money for the famine-struck poor in Judea in the first place: “Implied, perhaps, is the underlying motive that the Gentiles sent such gifts to secure a place in the covenant in lieu of circumcision” (155). So now a financial gift in time of need is something like a bribe? Calling this grace-based does nothing to ameliorate this problematic suggestion. Barnett continues his foray into fiction when he writes of how this bribe was received, “So far as we can tell, the collection was not successful in fulfilling Paul’s hopes. His cool reception from the elders of the Jerusalem church suggests that, initially at least, his hopes for strengthening the fellowship between Jews and Gentiles with consequent recognition of the Gentile churches were not realized . . . . In short, they are unimpressed with Paul’s Gentile companions and their money!” (155–56). I think this is a total misreading of the texts that rehearse this situation, and I doubt very much that Paul would have countenanced the suggestion that he was using a financial contribution to smooth the way for his law-free gospel. Barnett writes, “the collection . . . was to secure unity within the new covenant people of the Messiah” (158), but Paul sees the gospel, not monetary gifts, as securing that unity (cf. Rom 14–15; Eph 2:11–22).

There is more over-reading of the evidence in Barnett’s discussion of the relationships between Apollos and Paul and Peter and Paul as reflected by the Corinthian correspondence (166–70), culminating in this totally unwarranted statement: “We infer that Cephas prompted questions about Paul’s apostleship but that Paul did not reciprocate regarding Cephas” (170). This is little more than slander directed at Peter! The book concludes with a chapter arguing that Romans was Paul’s comprehensive answer to the Jewish countermission, a final summary of “Paul’s Achievement” (198), and appendices on Paul’s name, Acts and Paul’s letters, how Paul made decisions, the provenance of Philemon, Colossians, and Ephesians, and Paul’s names for Jesus.

I have noted several things with which I strongly disagree, and those concerns registered, the historical perspective makes this is a stimulating book. Barnett rightly argues for the historical reliability of Acts and for a harmonious reading of Luke’s narrative and Paul’s letters. In view of the way he sometimes slides into the writing of historical fiction, readers will want to test Barnett’s claims against the actual evidence, holding on to what is good.

Available for Pre-Order: Revelation (Preaching the Word)

An ancient dragon.
A vulnerable bride holding fast to a promise.
An immoral temptress and her consorts.
And the King, coming on a white horse.

John writes to small, scattered churches with little worldly influence, urging them to hold fast to the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.
Sexual immorality lures them toward destruction.
False teaching threatens to undermine their standing before God.
An ancient dragon wages war on their souls.
But the King is coming on a white horse.

Revelation: The Spirit Speaks to the Churches in the Preaching the Word series is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

Is Eve a Type in 1 Timothy 2:15? Some Thoughts on Typology and Biblical Theology

A colleague asked me about Mary Kassian’s post “Women, Typology, and 1 Timothy 2:15,” which has now been reposted at the CBMW blog. My colleague’s concern was whether the appeal to typology was fanciful or legitimate. Here’s my response:

Earle Ellis (in the preface to Goppelt’s Typos) states that typology consists of historical correspondence and escalation. If I’m trying to determine whether there’s a typological relationship, I’m looking to see if the later biblical author is making a comparison with something earlier in the Bible by pointing out items of historical correspondence. From there I’m asking whether there is some escalation of significance, some kind of fulfillment, that the later biblical author is highlighting by reusing the earlier Scripture.

In 1 Tim 2:13–15 Paul is not pointing to a pattern of historical correspondence that is having its significance increased because of what is happening in the church at Ephesus. He’s giving a reason for the prohibition in 1 Tim 2:12.

So Paul is not teaching that Eve is a type of the church in 1 Tim 2:15, though he may be assuming that she is. This assumption can, and I think does, inform what he says, and it’s these kinds of assumptions that biblical theology is seeking to uncover, exposit, and use to get at what the biblical authors meant.

Paul made a comparison between Eve and the church in Corinth in 2 Corinthians 11:3, “But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.” The typological connections in 2 Corinthians 11 include the church playing the role of Eve, while Satan’s servants play his role and disguise themselves as servants of righteousness the way he disguised himself as an angel of light (2 Cor 11:14–15).

Paul’s point in 2 Corinthians 11:3 is that he doesn’t want the church in Corinth to fail the way that Eve did, and he is assuming they know the story from Genesis 3. So he makes these comparisons between Eve and the church and between Satan and his servants (historical correspondence), and the assumption is that by re-living the pattern the church will heed the gospel, stick with Paul rather than the “super-apostles,” and be saved. The escalation comes in the church’s experience of the realization of what was promised in Genesis 3:15.

In 1 Timothy 2, having just referenced Eve in verse 14 with the words “the woman, having been deceived, fell in transgression,” Paul continues first with a singular in verse 15, “but she shall be saved,” apparently referring to Eve, before switching to the plural in the next statement, “if they continue in faith . . .”

By maintaining the singular, “she shall be saved,” Paul keeps Eve in view, and I think this invokes the word about the seed of the woman in Genesis 3:15, by whom Eve would be saved (if she embraced her role as a woman and gave birth to him). The switch to the plural indicates that what was true of Eve is true of all women. All women must embrace their role as women and bear children, and if they do so in faith they will be saved. The mention of salvation coming through childbearing may also invoke the OT theme of barren women giving birth to those who continue the line of promise.

Bottom line: while Paul isn’t teaching that Eve is a type fulfilled in the church, I do think (particularly on the basis of 2 Cor 11:3) that he is assuming that kind of relationship, and understanding that helps us see what he is saying.

And I agree with Schreiner and others on the point that Paul wants women to embrace what it means to be female, and he has chosen childbearing as an example of something that only women can do. This doesn’t mean that single women or barren women can’t be saved, but they should by faith embrace what it means for them to be women. If Eve and the other women in the line of promise had not borne children, the Messiah would not have come.

Be on Guard: The Point of Mark 13, with some thoughts on ‘this generation’

Mark 13 is not in the Bible to provoke debates about when all things will be consummated – what Jesus meant by “this generation.” Mark 13 is in the Bible to prepare disciples of Jesus against deception, fear, sleepy inattention, persecution, and uncertainty.

In Mark 11 Jesus entered Jerusalem on a colt to cries of Hosanna. He then cursed the fig tree and cleansed the temple. In Mark 12 he gave a narrative interpretation of Israel’s history in the parable of the wicked tenants, which culminated in the murder of the son of the owner of the vineyard. He escaped the traps set by Pharisees and Sadducees, answered an honest question about the greatest commandment, and then taught on the Christ, hypocrites, and sacrificial giving.

In Mark 13 Jesus teaches his disciples about the end of the world.

Jesus warns his disciples not to be deceived by those who will come claiming to be him (Mark 13:5–6).

All false religions and all mythological accountings for the world—from materialistic evolutionary darwinistic atheism to moralistic therapeutic deism—all of them—from the ancient Near Eastern fertility cults to the Greco Roman Pantheon, all forms of animism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam—all are Satanic imitations of Christianity. All offer some other path to some other heaven under some other god.

As Paul says in 1 Tim 2:5, “there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”

Do not be deceived by gurus offering some snake-oil remedy for your problems. Do not deceived by politicians promising Utopia.

Jesus will bring in the Kingdom. He’s the only one who can. Hold out for him.

He tells his disciples that they will be persecuted in Mark 13:9.

Jesus spoke these things to those who follow him so that they would be able to tell the difference between the real gospel and satanic false promises made by those who want to “change the world” into a Utopia where Jesus is not Lord—a dream world where the good news is not that Jesus died and rose to bring us to God, but that people are now healthy because the messiahs have fixed the health care system, differences reconciled because the thought police enforce correct speech; peace in our time, world hunger ended, and third world debt relief accomplished: kingdom come without Jesus.

To all these false hopes Jesus says: don’t be deceived. These people are going to go on starting wars with each other; don’t be surprised when that happens (Mark 13:7). Further, the fact that you don’t worship the false messiahs is going to prompt them to persecute you. Be prepared for that (Mark 13:9).

Mark then presents what Jesus says about the rise of the antichrist and his own coming (Mark 13:14–27).

What does the coming of Jesus mean?

Here is the consummation of all pomp and circumstance. Here the realization of everything anticipated by armies marching in formation on the parade ground. Here the true arrival. Here the moment when all will rise to honor the one who comes, when the one to whom every knee will bow will make his entrance.

Every attempt at greatness eclipsed. Every notion of the meaning of the words conqueror, hero, deliverer, savior, messiah, king, lord enacted—all these words will then be understood.

Have you heard the word “doomsday”? Have you heard that the generals and the kings and the slaves and the captains will call for the mountains and rocks to fall on them to hide them from the wrath of the Lamb? Have you heard that there’s a glory to which our sufferings are not worth being compared?

Consider what we will feel on that day: we will wish we had loved more, given more, studied the Bible more closely, spoken more earnestly to those who will face the wrath. We will wish that we had thought of the glory of Christ when we were tempted. We will regret the cheap baubles that we took to please ourselves as we betrayed him. We will rue the harsh words we spoke, the days we gave up, quit, stopped hoping, believing, watching.

O lift up your eyes, church, your redemption draws nigh. O bride pledged to thine husband, he will come. With power and great glory he comes. He will gather all his own.

Mark 13:28–37 shows Jesus applying these things to his disciples lives, telling them how they should live.

Jesus says everything he has described will take place before “this generation” passes away. What does that mean?

Some take “this generation” to refer to the historical generation of people alive at the time of Jesus, and those who take this view are forced to one of two conclusions. One conclusion is that Jesus was wrong. He didn’t return during the lifetime of that generation. The other conclusion is to see the fulfillment of what Jesus describes in AD 70.

I think there’s a better solution. I think “this generation” should not be taken to refer to the historical generation alive at the time of Jesus. Rather, “this generation” refers to the generation of the end. Both the generation of the flood (Gen 7:1) and the generation of the wilderness (Num 32:13) are types of the end time generation on which God’s wrath will fall. And the biblical authors can also speak of “the generation of those who seek your face, O God of Jacob” (Ps 24:6).

So there is an evil end time generation that will face judgment, and there is a righteous generation that seeks God’s face. I take this statement of Jesus, then, to be typological. It does not deal with the next 20–40 years of a historical generation.

On Sunday, June 12, it was my privilege to preach Mark 13, “Be on Guard,” at Kenwood Baptist Church.

The whole block lost power near the end of my sermon, so the recording ends in the middle of my comments on “this generation.” Basically what I’m arguing is that Jesus is talking about the “end time generation” the same way that there’s a flood generation and a wilderness generation. There is a typological relationship between these earlier generations on which judgment fell, and the generation that will experience the typological fulfillment of those earlier judgments. Jesus means that the generation from which Peter urges people to be saved (Acts 2:40), “on whom the ends of the ages has come” (1 Cor 10:11), the “crooked and twisted generation” in which his followers will “shine as lights in the world” (Phil 2:15) is the one that will not pass away before all that he has prophesied comes to pass.

I learned this view from the excellent book by Evald Loevestam, Jesus and ‘this Generation’: A New Testament Study.

Whittaker Chambers on C. S. Lewis

As I read Whittaker Chambers’ Witness, at several points the story drove me to look things up online, where I found a page that links to many of Chambers’ other writings. Somewhere I read Solzhenitsyn say that his writing resulted from his having been thrown headlong into hell and attempting to describe the experience. Chambers’ experience with communism gives his writing that quality. He writes as a man who knows that the souls of men and the destinies of nations turn on the ability to love truth, goodness, and beauty, while evil forces try to present cheap knockoffs that steal, kill, and destroy.

Here are some gems from a piece Whittaker Chambers wrote on C. S. Lewis:

Lewis leaving class

“The lecturer, a short, thickset man with a ruddy face and a big voice, was coming to the end of his talk. Gathering up his notes and books, he tucked his hornrimmed spectacles into the pocket of his tweed jacket and picked up his mortarboard. Still talking—to the accompaniment of occasional appreciative laughs and squeals from his audience—he leaned over to return the watch he had borrowed from a student in the front row. As he ended his final sentence, he stepped off the platform.

The maneuver gained him a head start on the rush of students down the center aisle. Once in the street, he strode rapidly —his black gown billowing behind his grey flannel trousers—to the nearest pub for a pint of ale.

Clive Staples Lewis was engaged in his full-time and favorite job—the job of being an Oxford don in the Honour School of English Language & Literature, a Fellow and tutor of Magdalen College and the most popular lecturer in the University. To watch him downing his pint at the Eastgate (his favorite pub), or striding, pipe in mouth, across the deer park, a stranger would not be likely to guess that C. S. Lewis is also a best-selling author and one of the most influential spokesmen for Christianity in the English-speaking world.”

Lewis on sex in heaven

“Sex in Heaven? Bachelor Lewis is no man to be afraid of that one either: “The letter and spirit of Scripture, and of all Christianity, forbid us to suppose that life in the New Creation will be a sexual life; and this reduces our imagination to the withering alternative either of bodies which are hardly recognizable as human bodies at all or else of a perpetual fast. As regards the fast, I think our present outlook might be like that of a small boy who, on being told that the sexual act was the highest bodily pleasure, should immediately ask whether you ate chocolates at the same time. On receiving the answer no, he might regard absence of chocolates as the chief characteristic of sexuality. In vain would you tell him that the reason why lovers in their carnal raptures don’t bother about chocolates is that they have something better to think of. The boy knows chocolate: he does not know the positive thing that excludes it. We are in the same position. We know the sexual life; we do not know, except in glimpses, the other thing which, in Heaven, will leave no room for it.””

Delivered from the steep descent

“When he was about 18, Lewis bought a book called Phantasies, by George Macdonald, a Scottish Presbyterian best known for his Princess & Curdie and other children’s fairy tales. In the introduction to his recent anthology of Macdonald’s work (TIME, June 2), Lewis confesses the importance of that day’s purchase: “I had already been waist-deep in Romanticism; and likely enough, at any moment, to flounder into its darker and more evil forms, slithering down the steep descent that leads from the love of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to that of perversity. Now Phantasies was romantic enough in all conscience; but there was a difference. . . . What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptise . . . my imagination. It did nothing to my intellect nor (at that time) to my conscience. Their turn came far later and with the help of many other books and men.””

Reaction of unbelieving colleagues

“Outside his own Christian circle, Lewis is not particularly popular with his Oxford colleagues. Some resent his large student following. Others criticize his “cheap” performances on the BBC and sneer at him as a “popularizer.” There are complaints about his rudeness (he is inclined to bellow “Nonsense !” in the heat of an argument when a conventionally polite 25-word circumlocution would be better form). But their most serious charge is that Lewis’ theological pamphleteering is a kind of academic heresy.

On this score, one of Lewis’ severest critics insists that his works of scholarship, The Allegory of Love (on Spenser), and A Preface to Paradise Lost, are “miles ahead” of any other literary criticism in England. But Lewis’ Christianity, says his critic, has brought him more money than it ever brought Joan of Arc, and a lot more publicity than she enjoyed in her lifetime. In contrast to his tight scholarly writing (says this critic), Lewis’ Christian propaganda is cheap sophism: having lured his reader onto the straight highway of logic, Lewis then inveigles him down the garden path of orthodox theology.”

The whole thing is definitely worth reading, not least for references to the possibility of revival and the comments on Dorothy Sayers and others.

Tenants, Traps, Teaching, and the Meaning of Melville’s “Moby Dick”

In Herman Melville’s novel, Moby Dick, a massive white whale named Moby Dick has bitten off Captain Ahab’s leg. In response to this, Ahab commits himself to killing the whale Moby Dick.

Captain Ahab bears the name of an idolatrous king of Israel.

Captain Ahab refuses to accept what has been done to him by a higher power.

Rather than accept the loss of his leg and move on with his life, Captain Ahab vows revenge and seeks to take it.

Melville is showing us how people who refuse to submit to God Almighty engage in a hopeless attempt to kill God and have their own will be done in life.

Melville has one character identify the whale as God incarnate. Ahab rebels against his fate and seeks vengeance for what has happened to him. Along the way Melville shows that Ahab’s quest has ruined him, destroyed his ability to enjoy life, and left him a boiling cauldron of hatred.

The story is Melville’s dramatic depiction and exposition of what life is like for those who refuse to submit to God and seek to establish their own will in place of his.

In the parable of the wicked tenants in Mark 12, Jesus tells a story that summarizes Israel’s history and explains why he is being rejected by the religious establishment. The religious establishment is like Melville’s Captain Ahab – they don’t want the Messiah God has given to them, so they declare war on the Lord and his Christ like Ahab trying to harpoon Moby Dick.

Then the Pharisees and Sadducees both try to trap Jesus.

The Pharisees come with a question about whether they should pay taxes to Caesar. These guys are more outmatched than a first year law student trying to take on Antonin Scalia. It’s like they’re trying to outrun a motorcycle on a tri-cycle.

The Sadducees come to Jesus with an argumentum ad absurdum that will show how ridiculous belief in the resurrection is. Jesus shows the fallacy of their argumentation on two points. First, he shows that there are factors about the resurrection they have not considered. What they think is a problem is not a problem because things will be changed in such a way that the problem goes away. Second, Jesus shows that the Torah, which they accept, implies the resurrection.

Jesus then answers an honest question about the greatest commandment, and the discussion of loving God and neighbor is a stark contrast with the traps Jesus has evaded. The Pharisees and Sadducees are like King Ahab of Israel, rejecting God’s Lordship and rebelling against him, seeking to establish their own will rather than submit and obey. And they are like Melville’s Captain Ahab, refusing to accept the Messiah God has given to them and instead seeking to harpoon Jesus.

You try to harpoon the whale, to kill God and take the vineyard for yourself, and you will ruin your life and destroy the lives of all around you. Melville depicts this as Captain Ahab’s quest for the whale results in the whale attacking the ship and the death of the whole crew—with the exception of the one named Ishmael (a name of one who did not partake of God’s covenant with Israel).

Mark 12 then concludes with Jesus teaching on the Christ, hypocrites, and sacrificial giving.

On Sunday, June 5, 2011, it was my privilege to preach Mark 12, “Tenants, Traps, and Teaching,” at Kenwood Baptist Church.

Don’t play Ahab’s part. Don’t go to your grave with his bitter words to the whale on your lips:

“to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”

I had a great time listening to Moby Dick, and if you’d like to beguile a little less than an hour with my sermon on Mark 12 it’s here.

Whittaker Chambers on James Joyce

In the conclusion of his review of Finnegan’s Wake, Whittaker Chambers wrote this telling description of James Joyce,

“Nono. In appearance Joyce is slight, frail but impressive. He stands five feet ten or eleven, but looks as if a strong wind might blow him down. His face is thin and fine, its profile especially delicate. He wears his greying, thinning hair brushed back without a part. Joyce reads and writes sprawling in bed or on a couch but he does not like it known. He is very formal in public, in restaurants prefers straight-back chairs in which he sits bolt upright.

He dresses with conservative elegance, never goes out without a slender walking stick, which he manipulates expertly, accenting the delicacy of his beringed hands (he has a passion for rings). His voice is soft, rich and low with a gentle, melancholy brogue. He is rather vain of his tenor, which he likes to join with his son’s bass at small family celebrations.

Joyce’s curious glasses give him a somewhat Martian appearance. The left lens is so thick it is almost a hemisphere, and to focus it is necessary for him to throw back his head slightly when looking at people. Ten years ago, Joyce could not see with his left eye at all, and a cataract was beginning to form on the right eye. Every operation on the left eye caused a hemorrhage. Finally Dr. Alfred Vogt of Zurich succeeded in making an artificial pupil for the left eye, set in below the position of the normal pupil. The cataract on Joyce’s right eye has meanwhile developed. He has had eleven major operations on his eyes, all without anesthetics, faces another soon. But he sees far better than he did ten years ago.

The Joyce family consists of amiable Galway wife Nora, née Barnacle; a son, Giorgio, 33; a dancer-illustrator daughter, Lucia, thirtyish. Giorgio, who married American Helen Gastor, has one son, Stephen James, lives in a Paris suburb where Joyce and his wife frequently visit him. Grandson Stephen is adored by his grandfather, calls the author of Ulysses “Nono.”

Among Joyce’s closest friends are Eugene Jolas (editor of transition), Paul Léon, his secretary, and Stuart Gilbert, who wrote an exhaustive exegesis of Ulysses. With Eugene and Maria Jolas, the Joyces dine every Saturday night.

Joyce is constantly jotting down overheard phrases, is especially interested in dialects, Midwestern American, British colonial, newspaper jargon. He speaks Italian as smoothly as English, flawless French, fluent German, knows some dozen other tongues, including outlandish Lapp. At present Joyce is not writing. His wife is trying to get him started on something, because when he is not working he is hard to live with.

Though he has been away from Ireland since 1904, returning only briefly in 1912 to start a motion-picture house, the Volta, which quickly failed, Joyce has an unrivaled knowledge of Dublin and its current life, keeps his recollections green by subscribing to Dublin newspapers, pores over their gossip and chitchat.

But no observer of his life and works can fail to note that James Joyce is a typical Irishman. Born in Dublin, he remains as Irish in Paris or Trieste as he was in the city of his birth. His friends believe that nothing short of a European war could drive him back to the “little brown bog” and the haunting Liffey.”

The Whole Thing.

 

 

The Monster in the Hollows, by Andrew Peterson

It was a lovely May morning under the arbor on our bricked back porch. We love family time. We love being out in the morning before the sun has climbed high and grown hot. And we love a good story.

We had been waiting for this story for months. To our great delight it finally arrived, and there in the early cool of the day we read its final pages. Our hearts were thrilled with the song of the stones, the terrors of the deeps of throg, a family fighting through affliction, heroes and villains, friends and foes, laughter and tears.

There’s much to ponder in The Wingfeather Saga, much about the way the Maker moves, about the way it’s always too early to quit, about the way the Maker takes a failure and makes a flourish, about how singing for love rather than power will make a bent song beautiful, and on and on . . . And this isn’t just a book for the kids to think about, though think on it they should and will.

The Monster in the Hollows isn’t what you think, but it is Book Three in the Wingfeather Saga. Reading these stories as a family has been made more fun as we follow Andrew Peterson’s progress on his blog and twitter updates, as we see the way other readers react in song and form to the tales he tells, and as we pray that the Lord will continue to cause his gaze to pierce into the way things really are.

Andrew Peterson is a lover of language, a poet with a heart full of melody. And hope. And joy. And faith. And love. More than once as I read this book aloud to my boys my voice choked with emotion. More than once I paused to read and re-read lines for their loveliness. And as we slowly savored the sorrow and joy, the triumph and tragedy in those final pages of the book, I found it more beautiful than I had hoped it could be. In the night, hope lives on. We read those final pages slowly, then read them again, and again.

What would it have been like to have read The Chronicles of Narnia as old Clive Staples finished them? What would it have been like to read along with Tolkien as he produced The War of the Ring? We won’t know, but if you jump in right now, you can read along with Andrew Peterson as he moves toward the completion of The Wingfeather Saga, and you can join us in asking the Maker to bless Andrew as he seeks to be used to seal the song in the soul, to write the word on the heart, and to fill the sight with the form of the beauty of a better world.

Mitch Maher’s Hole in One

I just received this in an email from Mitch and thought you’d like to join me in rejoicing with him:

Mitch Maher, pastor at Redeemer Community Church in Katy, TX, and author of www.clarifyingthebible.com , recorded a hole in one at Monday’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) Ray Dorr Golf Classic held at Pebble Creek Country Club in Bryan, TX. In doing so, the pastor won a 2011 Toyota Venza donated by Atkinson Toyota of Bryan. On the 17th hole, playing 199 yards downwind, Maher hit a 5-iron that landed about 20 feet short and rolled into the hole. “This is such a blessing. My wife and I have often wondered what we would do if my 1999 Mazda broke down. Well, now we don’t have to find out!” What’s more, this won’t even be the most exciting event of the Maher’s week, as Tara Maher will deliver by C-Section their third girl this Saturday morning.

http://www.kbtx.com/local/headlines/Golfer_Wins_Car_at_College_Station_Golf_Tournament_122474034.html

Shepherd the Flock of God: The Ordination of Ross Shannon

On Sunday, May 22, 2011, it was our pleasure and privilege to ordain Ross Shannon to gospel ministry. Ross has been serving as the Assistant Pastor for Discipleship and Evangelism at Kenwood, and he just graduated from SBTS and was called to serve at First Baptist Church, Lapeer, MI. I had the honor of preaching Ross’s ordination. Ray Van Neste’s recent post on a good shepherd laying down his life for the sheep provided my introduction, and Floyd Doud Shafer’s phenomenal 1961 Christianity Today article inspired the conclusion.

We had a number of members of Kenwood graduate from SBTS, and as I was sitting there watching them cross the stage on Friday, reflecting on Ross and some other dear friends moving on to new ministries, I started this poem for Ross’s ordination.

Commission You Do We This Day

There is, my friend, no higher call
Than this we send you on with all
Our hearts, our souls, our minds we join
Both to rejoice and also mourn

The moving on of these so dear,
You’ve loved and served us so well here
That this sweet sadness deepens now
As though the grief is right somehow

We’d love to see your children born
Watch them grow and sing and learn;
And old together we might grow,
But there’s a deeper joy we’ll know

As you answer the call and go,
Our joy and grief together show
That there’s a love worth more than life,
A truth that merits sacrifice,

So join we now the ranks of those
Whose love in leaving deeper grows
Commission you do we this day
Giving God the thanks and praise.

Saturday, May 21, 2011
Begun during graduation on Friday, May 20, 2011
For the Ordination of Ross Shannon

Here’s the link to the sermon: Acts 20:17–38, “Shepherd the Flock of God: The Ordination of Ross Shannon“