Seminary is Not a Church

This is a good article from my prof James Hamilton about what seminary can and can't do, as well as perhaps should and shouldn't try to do. Here are the opening paragraphs. 

In my humble opinion, seminary students should seek from the seminary what the seminary exists to give them, and the seminary exists to give them the Bible. Let me be quick to add that the seminary’s main purposes include systematic theology and church history, but God has revealed himself in the Bible. Let me say that again, because it’s that important: God has revealed himself in the Bible.

Seminaries exist to teach people the Bible, which means seminaries exist to teach people Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, introduce them to the Bible’s big story, and teach them how to read that story parts and whole.

This means that there are many jobs the seminary does not exist to do: the seminary is not a church. The seminary is not an evangelistic crusade. The seminary is not your small group, your missions and evangelism coordinator, or even your pastoral internship.

I have often heard preachers comment on some pastoral difficulty then say, “They don’t teach you that in seminary!” I usually think to myself, “nor did they intend to; nor were they supposed to.”

Cars don’t sprout wings and fly, and they don’t teach you to pilot a plane in Driver’s Ed. Evaluate a car, or a Driver’s Ed. class, according to what it is intended to do. The seminary is built to prepare people for ministry, yes, but it’s a school. That bears repeating: a seminary is a school. This means, by definition, that a seminary is not a church. So the seminary is preparing people for ministry, but it can’t do everything necessary to prepare people for ministry. It’s not built to do everything necessary to prepare people for ministry. It’s built to be a school.

-James M. Hamilton,  http://jimhamilton.info/2012/03/26/use-the-right-tool-for-the-right-job-gospel-maturity-for-seminary/#comments

What I Found Written on the Bathroom Stall Yesterday

We stopped to use the restroom at a Panera Bread on Bardstown Road, the hipster capital of the world. On the stall, some white person in skinny jeans had carved:

Question the status quo.

Beneath it, in an obviously different hand, someone had replied,

But do you have an answer? 

Sexual Immorality: The Downward Spiral of Our Rationalizations

"Consider sexual promiscuity. The official line is that modern people do not take sex outside of marriage seriously any longer; mere moral realists say this is because we no longer realize the wrong of it. I maintain that we do know it is wrong but pretend that we do not...

...Another tactic is inventing private definitions of marriage. Quite a few people 'think of themselves as married' although they have no covenant at all. Some even fortify the delusion with 'moving-in ceremonies' featuring happy words without promises. Unfortunately, people who 'think of themselves as married' refuse the obligations of real marriage, but demand all of its cultural privileges. Rationalization is so much work that they require other people to support them in it. Such demands make the cultural protection of marriage more difficult. 

Yet another ruse is to admit that sex belongs within marriage but to fudge the nature of the connection. By this reasoning I tell myself that sex is okay because I am going to marry my partner, because I want my partner to marry me, or because I have to find out if we could be happily married. An even more dangerous fudge is to divide the form of marriage from its substance--to say 'We don't need promises because we're in love.' The implication, of course, is that those who do need promises love impurely, that those who do not marry are more truly married than those who do.

This  last rationalization is even more difficult to maintain than most. Love, after all, is a permanent and unqualified commitment to the true good of another person, and the native tongue of commitment is, precisely, promises. To work, therefore, this rule requires another: having deceived oneself about the nature of marriage, one must now deceive oneself about the nature of love. The usual way of doing so is to mix up love with the romantic feelings that characteristically accompany it, and call them 'intimacy.' If only we have these feelings, we tell ourselves, we may have sex. That is to say, we may have sex--if we feel like it. 

Here is where things really become interesting, because if the criterion of being-as-good-as-married is sexual feelings, then obviously no one who has sexual feelings may be prevented from marrying. So homosexuals must be able to 'marry;' their unions, too, should have cultural protection. At this point suppressed conscience strikes another blow, reminding us that marriage is linked with procreation. But now we are in a box. We cannot say 'therefore homosexuals cannot marry,' because that would strike against the whole teetering structure of rationalizations. Therefore we decree that having been made marriageable, homosexuals must be made procreative; the barren field must seem to bloom. There is, after all, artificial insemination. And there is adoption. So it comes to pass that children are given as a right to those from whom they were once protected as a duty. The normalization of perversion is complete."

--Jay Budziszewski, The Revenge of Conscience

 

Can We Be Too Christ-Centered?

"There is no such thing, in Christian life and thought, as being too Christ-centered. But it is certainly possible to be Father-forgetful and Spirit-ignoring. At their best, and from their roots, evangelicals have avoided that. In recent decades, though it requires vigilance to make sure we are presenting the evangelical message with recognizable Trinitarian connections. What Would Jesus Do? He would do the will of the Father in the power of the Spirit. He would send the Spirit to bring us to the Father."

--Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything 

Christianity is Christ

"Christianity is Christ. The person and work of Christ are the rock upon which the Christian religion is built. If he is not who he said he was, and if he did not do what he said he would come to do, the foundation is undermined and the whole superstructure will collapse. Take Christ from Christianity, and you disembowel it; there is practically nothing left. Christ is the center of Christianity; all else is circumference."

--John Stott, Basic Christianity (1958 A.D.) 

Knowing God and Knowing About God--Both...And

"Unfortunately, some have erroneously concluded  that--because knowing God is more than intellectual familiarity with the facts about God--we may get along well enough without them. Thus, what for many passes as the knowledge of God is in fact a mindless, contentless, self-generated feeling of spiritual exultation. Indeed, on occasion I have actually heard it said that theological propositions concerning the nature of God are actually an obstacle to knowing him in any real and lasting way. One almost gets the impression that for such people theological ignorance is heavenly bliss! But we must guard against such careless extremism lest we think that because intellectual apprehension is not sufficient for a genuine knowledge of God, it is not necessary. It is, in fact, the foundation upon which all valid Christian experience and godly fervor are built. In the absence of biblical information concerning who God is and what he is like, we may find ourselves worshiping "foreign gods," if if not a "god" fabricated from our own self-absorbed imaginations. The point of this warning is simply to emphasize that knowing God is a 'both...and' endeavor. It is both thinking great thoughts about him and living in such a way that those thoughts spark loving, joyful, exhilarating obedience."

-Sam Storms, The Grandeur of God (1984 A.D.) 

Away with Tropical Icebergs! Shamrocks Begone!

"When most Christians hear the word Trinity, their immediate mental response is to reach for an analogy: Is the Trinity kind of like a shamrock, or like the three states of matter (solid, liquid, gas), for instance, the one substance H20 being ice and water and steam? They do this, I think, because of a mental habit of associating the Trinity with a logical problem, the problem of reconciling three and one. But while there is a time and place for coming to terms with that problem, and while analogies can offer some limited help on that occasion, we have learned something different from the shape of the economy of salvation. We have learned to associate Trinity with the incarnate Son and the outpoured Spirit. 

When we talk about Jesus, sent by the Father to work in the Spirit, we should know that we are talking about the Trinity. Our thoughts and affections should jump to the Gospels and the gospel, the story of Jesus and the present encounter with him, rather than to shamrocks and steaming icebergs. The whole point is that the presence of the Son and the Spirit themselves, sent by the father into the economy of salvation, is the Trinity. The eternal Trinity is the gospel Trinity. These person in the gospel story are not what the Trinity is like--they are the Trinity. We will see how this changes everything about how we look for the signs of the Trinity in the various elements of the church's life and work. For now, it is enough to underline the new mental associations...that we gain from attending to the economy [of salvation]. Away with tropical icebergs! Shamrocks begone! In the gospel we have God the Trinity." 

-Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything 

Something that C.S. Lewis and Charles Darwin Agreed On

This excerpt is an excerpt within an excerpt. The author is James Sire, and he quotes both Charles Darwin and C.S. Lewis.

For naturalism nothing exists outside the system itself. There is no God...there is only the cosmos, and humans are the only conscious beings. But they are latecomers.They 'arose,' but how far? Can they trust their mind, their reason?

Charles Darwin himself once said, 'The horrid doubt always rises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?' In other words, if my brain is no more than that of a superior monkey, I cannot even be sure that my own theory of my own origin is to be trusted. 

Here is a curious case: If Darwin's naturalism is true, there is no way of even establishing its credibility, let alone proving it. Confidence in logic is ruled out. Darwin's own theory of origins must therefore be accepted by an act of faith. One must hold that a brain, a device that came to be through natural selection and chance-sponsored mutations, can actually know a proposition or a set of propositions to be true.

C.S. Lewis puts the case this way:

'If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us--like the color of our hair. If Naturalism is true, we have no reason to trust our convictions that Nature is uniform.'"

--James Sire, The Universe Next Door

C.S. Lewis

James Sire

Charles Darwin

 

 

 

He Loved Us Because He Loved Us

"(H)e is being itself, and as such must necessarily be infinitely happy in the glorious perfections of his nature from everlasting to everlasting; and as he did not create, so neither did he redeem because he needed us; but he loved us because he loved us."

 -Susanna Wesley (1738 A.D.) quoted in Fred Sanders' The Deep Things of God

The Gospel and the Trinity

"These two problems, our forgetfulness of the Trinity and our feeling of shallowness, are directly related. The solutions to both problems converge in the gospel, the evangel which evangelicalism is named after, and which is always deeper than we can fathom. Our great need is to be led further in to what we already have. The gospel is so deep that it not only meets our deepest needs but comes from God's deepest self. The salvation proclaimed in the gospel is not some mechanical operation that God took on as a side project. It is a 'mystery that was kept secret for long ages' (Rom. 16:25), a mystery of salvation that goes back into the heart of God, decreed 'before the foundation of the world' (Eph. 1:4, 1 Pet. 1:20). When God undertook our salvation, he did it in a way that put divine resources into play, resources which involve him personally in the task. The more we explore and understand the depth of God's commitment to salvation, the more we have to come to grips with the triunity of the one God. The deeper we dig into the gospel, the deeper we go into the mystery of the Trinity. The puritan theologian Thomas Goodwin taught that the proclamation of the gospel was the 'bringing forth and publishing' of a mystery that God had treasured from all eternity and that 'the things of the gospel are depths--the things of the gospel...are the deep things of God.'"

-Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything (2010 A.D.)

 

John Adams Sailing to France

John Adams, member of the Continental Congress and pioneer of the Declaration of Independence, was sent to France in the midst of the American Revolution in order to help Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee broker an alliance with the French. All of this was much to his wife Abigail's sorrow. Biographer David McCullough describes Adams' sacrifice in the following paragraphs:

"Adams was leaving his wife, children, friends, his home, his livelihood, everything he loved. He was risking his life and that of his small son, risking capture and who knew what horrors and indignities as a prisoner, all to begin 'new business' for which he felt ill suited, knowing nothing of European politics or diplomacy and unable to speak French, the language of diplomacy. He had never in his life laid eyes on a King or Queen, or the Foreign Minister of a great power, never set foot in a city of more than 30,000 people. At age forty-two he was bound for an unimaginably distant world apart, with very little idea of what was in store and every cause to be extremely apprehensive. 

But with an overriding sense of duty, his need to serve, his ambition, and as a patriot fiercely committed to the fight for independence, he could not have done otherwise. There was never really a doubt about his going.

If he was untrained and inexperienced in diplomacy, so was every American. If unable to speak French, he could learn. Fearsome as the winter seas might be, he was not lacking in courage, and besides, the voyage would provide opportunity to appraise the Continental Navy at first hand, a subject he believed of highest importance. And for all he might have strayed from the hidebound preachments of his forebears, Adams remained enough of a Puritan to believe anything worthy must carry a measure of pain." 

-David McCullough, John Adams

We're All Going to Die

“Much more to be condemned is that form of theology that tells believers they ought to be healed, and that if they are not, it is because they lack faith. As far as I have been able to observe, those who propagate such theology die at no slower a rate than those who do not adhere to such theology. The sad fact is that this triumphalist theology is not only theologically ungrounded, it is pastorally cruel. Thoughtful Christians must come to grips, not only with the truth that God can and sometimes does heal, but also with the truth that this side of Jesus’ return “people are destined to die (Heb. 9:27).” 

-D.A. Carson, How Long, O Lord? Reflections on Suffering and Evil 

Beneath the Surface of "Ordinary" Homes

"You have no idea how many instances of domestic nastiness come before me in my mail: how deceptive the smooth surface of life is! The only 'ordinary' homes seem to be the ones we don't know much about, just as the only blue mountains are those 10 miles away."

-C.S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady 

The Dignity of Praying

“First, when a person prays, he represents the whole created order, of which he is the conscious, self-reflective part. It is in the prayer of human beings that creation becomes conscious of its relationship to God. Man is the thinking part of the cosmos. In the entire material world, the only thing that even thinks to pray is man. Human thought is the only place where the cosmos is self-reflective.”

-Patrick Henry Reardon, The Jesus We Missed: The Surprising Truth about the Humanity of Christ

 

James Q. Wilson (1932-2012)

"James Q. Wilson died early Friday morning at a hospital in Boston. The public policy intellectual who published a staggering number of books and articles on all manner of issues, including crime, politics, character and marriage, was 80.

Wilson was not a household name, but in the scholarly world he was a rock star. The first of his 17 books was published 52 years ago, and the 12th edition of his classic text on public policy, American Government, came out in 2010. He advised Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in 2003. He also taught government and public policy at Harvard, UCLA, Pepperdine, and Boston College.

His impact made its way to the local level. Last week, my town paper included a long letter from a resident who was protesting the city's plan to distribute surveys in search of advice on the community. The writer suggested that it's pretty obvious what needs improvement, including better public safety. What we need, he went on -- and I'm paraphrasing -- is to address the small violations, which when left unaddressed contribute to an atmosphere of lawlessness. It would make sense for our policy makers to adhere to James Q. Wilson's "broken windows" theory of policing, he wrote.

Powerful ideas shape events, and Wilson's brainstorm altered the style of policing in American and European cities. Who knows how many individuals he saved from mugging or murder by virtue of this enduring principle of public safety? He probably received few letters of gratitude from those who were never attacked, but he changed the arc of their lives nonetheless.

This is Wilson's legacy. His decades-old idea is so ingrained in how we think about public safety that a good citizen in Summit, NJ, nearly 30 years after the theory was introduced in the Atlantic Monthly, alludes to it in the town paper. Wilson's original and public-spirited ideas continue to resonate, even today, among people he never knew or met.

A few years ago, a close friend introduced me to Wilson's daughter Annie. For months, I talked about meeting James Q. Wilson's daughter, and found myself asking about her in relation to her famous father. Since then, Annie has found her own place in my heart, and made plain her own distinctive identity. She has a dazzling mind and a soft soul, as well as a killer wit that must be useful to her as head of the School Committee in a cash-challenged town. Annie is the flesh and blood reminder that a person's legacy, even someone with the resume of James Q. Wilson, goes well beyond his professional achievements.

In The Moral Sense, Wilson thanked his wife Roberta for informing the thinking that went into the book. "She taught me by example what the moral sense is," he wrote. That example lives on in their children, and for the rest of us who admired his work. It may be too late to say so, but we thank you."

-Linda Flanagan,  

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-flanagan/james-q-wilson_b_1317386.html

Alvin Plantinga on How We Believe in God

From my reading for Christian philosophy class.

"According to Calvin, everyone, whether in faith or not, has a tendency...in certain situations, to apprehend God's existence and to grasp something of his nature and actions. This natural knowledge can be and is suppressed by sin, but the fact remains that the capacity to apprehend God's existence is as much part of our natural noetic equipment as is the capacity to apprehend perceptual truths, truths about the past, and truths about other minds. Belief in the existence of God is in the same boat as belief in other minds, [belief in] the past, and [belief in] perceptual objects; in each case God has so constructed us that in the right circumstances we form the belief in question."

-Alvin Plantinga (b. 1932), "Reason and Belief in God" 

Mission to Read All of C.S. Lewis

If it appears that this blog is turning into a C.S. Lewis fest, here's why.

Having already read a good number of Lewis's books, and having noticed that he can make almost any subject interesting, the thought occurred to me: "What if I were to set a goal of reading all of C.S. Lewis's published writings?" After all, I've often thought of choosing some author and reading his or her entire corpus. Several reasons suggested Lewis as a good candidate for this goal:

(1) I already have a fairly good start on him (it's not as though I'd be starting from scratch).
(2) He's extremely readable (it's not as though I'd be reading John Owen for 40 years).
(3) His entire corpus is manageable (it's not as though he wrote 50 massive volumes like Spurgeon or Luther or Augustine).
(4) He would provide variety: his work is a unique mixture of theology (admittedly not always the best), fiction (almost always the best), and literary criticism.
(5) Since I can read Narnia and the Space Trilogy out loud to my kids, I'll be able to kill two birds with one stone with several of the volumes. :-)

So there it is. Sounds like a good idea. I'm young yet. I think I'll do it.

I've got a list of his published works, and the toughest part will be the three big volumes of personal letters, although I could argue that those shouldn't count since they weren't written for publication anyway.

I close with an excerpt from the man himself.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But the on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development: When I was ten I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

-C.S. Lewis, "On Three Ways of Writing for Children" 

A Foolish Brand of Nostalgia

"In most places, oral traditions eventually gave way to writing. Later, ordinary writing was transformed by the printing press. As great a blessing as writing and the development of affordable printing have been to human culture, even these changes came with trade-offs. People in oral cultures tend to memorize much more than people with written languages; but only a very foolish brand of nostalgia would wish all the printing presses destroyed and the secret of writing forgotten. The real question, here as with all technological innovations, isn’t whether there is a downside. There almost always is. The question is whether the overall benefits outweigh the costs.

It is easy to wax nostalgic about the "sacramental" value of working with the land to produce food and to conjure up an image of Hobbits peacefully tending their crops in the Shire. Appreciating the genuine good in such work is itself a good. But nostalgia is another matter. The danger in such nostalgia is seeing the past only benefits, and in the present only costs.  

--Jay W. Richards, Money, Greed, and God (2009 A.D.) 

 "It is not improbable conjecture that the feeling that humanity was becoming over-civilized, that life was getting too complicated and over-refined, dates from the time when the cave-men first became such. It can hardly be supposed- if the cave-men were at all like their descendents- that none among them discoursed with contempt on the cowardly effiminacy of living under shelter or upon the exasperating inconvenience of constantly returning for food or sleep to the same place instead of being free to roam at large in wide-open spaces"

--Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, quoted in Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, (45).

Jay W. Richards

Arthur Lovejoy

George Boas