From The Briefing:
I’ve just read an article that I agree with, but can’t relate to. The article, by Carl Trueman, is about the problems with hagiographies (a hagiography is a ‘saint-biography’: an account of somebody’s life that treats them as a hero of holiness and leaves out the naughty bits).1 He argues that hagiographies are bad for multiple reasons: they’re not good history, they promote an unhelpful black-and-white view of the world, and they make readers feel depressed and inadequate when they don’t measure up. I think he’s right. But I just don’t feel his pain.
I’m not blaming Carl. It’s just that he and I come from opposite sides of the world. Carl is writing in an American context, where the common impulse is to praise heroes and aspire to greatness. So he needs to warn people about the dangers of hero worship (like Paul does in 1 Cor 3:4-9). But I’m an Aussie: my gut instinct is to sledge heroes and cut down tall poppies.2 So I need to learn more about how to affirm and praise examples of holy living and ministry (like Paul in Col 4:7-13). Hagiography is an American problem, not mine.
Okay, by now you might be protesting that I’m making wild stereotypical and racial generalizations. I’ll come clean, and admit that indeed I am. Americans and Australians aren’t that different, are we? We share a lot of culture. We even speak similar languages. Ultimately, both of us need to hear each of these messages. Whatever country we’re born in, we need to learn to affirm and praise great examples of holy lives, and we need to avoid the danger of hero worship. But how can we do both of these things at the same time?
I learned the answer from a wise and godly man—my former ministry trainer and the founder of this publication. He taught me this: when we see people persevering, growing, working, preaching, loving, praying and dealing with sin day by day, we should rejoice. But when we rejoice, we should remember that we’re not rejoicing in the holiness of people. We’re rejoicing in the holiness of the Holy Spirit, who makes all God’s children holy. That is, when we talk about the great deeds of ‘saints’, we’re not praising the saints. We’re praising the sanctifier: the Holy Spirit, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified.
No matter what our cultural tendencies are, the task is the same for all of us. If you’re inclined to cut down tall poppies, praise the God who made them grow tall. If you’re inclined to worship heroes, then praise God and not the person. In both cases, we’re doing what we were created for: praising and worshipping God, who alone is perfectly holy.
1 You can read Carl’s article at http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2011/06/writing-on-athanasius-a-genera.php.
2 Translation: insulting heroes and criticizing successful people who distinguish themselves
Comments at The Briefing.
The causes of famine in Somalia are many and complex: politics, corruption, war, greed; the list goes on. At this particular moment, however, what is needed most urgently is funds to buy food. Unicef says that if they can buy food, they can get it to where it’s needed.
Apparently we haven’t taken this crisis seriously enough because we’ve been distracted by other news stories; stories about foam pies thrown at Rupert Murdoch, for example.
If you’re in the UK, you can donate to Unicef here. If you know of any other charities or channels through which funds can be given to get food urgently to Somalia, please comment.
If you’re anywhere in or around Sydney in August, don’t miss Brian Rosner’s lecture series. This is a very important topic. I’m guessing the lecture series will touch on issues like: What does the Old Testament law have to do with Jesus? Will God judge me based on whether I keep the law? What does the Old Testament law have to do with the way I live day by day? Brian is a world-class scholar in the field and I’m sure his answers will be worth hearing. Wish I was there!
PAUL AND THE LAW: KEEPING THE COMMANDMENTS OF GOD
Public Lecture (overview)
August 9 @ 8pm: Paul and the Law: Keeping the Commandments of God
Five Lecture Series
August 15 @ 10am: “Circumcision is nothing”: The Puzzle of Paul and the Law
August 16 @ 9am: “Not under the law”: Paul’s Repudiation of the Law as Legal Code
August 17 @ 9am: “Under the law of Christ”: Paul’s Replacement of the Law
August 18 @ 9am: “Witness to the gospel”: Paul’s Re-appropriation of the Law as Prophecy
August 19 @ 9am: “Written for our instruction”: Paul’s Re-appropriation of the Law as Wisdom
Lectures will be held in the Broughton Knox Lecture Theatre, 15 King Street, Newtown. All welcome and there is NO CHARGE.
“The debate is over” – this is an argumentative gambit I’ve noticed quite a few people using recently around the web. It’s a subtle rhetorical device, designed to make people who disagree with you sound petty and ill-informed.
The three debates that I’ve noticed it being used in are as follows:
- The debate concerning the place of faith and works in the Christian life, related to the so-called “New Perspective on Paul”
- The debate concerning God’s sovereignty and human responsibility in evangelism, related to mission strategy in the Diocese of Sydney
- The debate concerning evangelism and good deeds in mission, related to the Lausanne Conference
Here’s how the device is used:
- You raise the issue
- You declare with authority that “the debate is now over”
- You observe that nevertheless, certain people are still debating the issue
When you use this device, you are implying two things:
- You belong to a privileged circle of people who are properly qualified to talk about the issue (i.e., in the cases I mentioned above New Testament scholars, a group of Sydney Anglicans, missiologists), and who are no longer interested in talking about the issue.
- Those who are still debating the issue don’t belong to the privileged group. They are therefore ill-informed, or petty, and clearly not qualified to talk about the issue, and not worth listening to.
I don’t like this device, and I think it should should stop. Why?
- It’s elitist. Just because your own circle claims to have worked out the issue, doesn’t mean that other areas of discussion about this issue are irrelevant.
- It’s illogical. If people are still debating the issue, then the debate is not over.
I notice Tom Wright has re-released his book, Scripture and the Authority of God (first published in 2005).
I guess that gives me an excuse to re-post my review of the book [PDF], originally published in The Briefing 330, March 2006.
HT Scot McKnight.
Thanks Wordle:
A great post from Michael Jensen today about Abraham, Sarah, doubt and faith (I’m presuming it was originally a Moore College chapel sermon):
The Doubting Believer I – Abram & Sarai
An excerpt:
The story of Abram illustrates for us that faith is not heroic. It might seem strange that the New Testament presents doubting Abraham as an exemplar of faith. In Romans 4, his faith is offered as the great outflanking manoeuvre in the historic pattern of God’s justification of his people – he believed, and his faith was credited to him as righteousness. In Hebrews 11, he is listed in the roll call of the faithful forerunners of those who now believe.
But in being an example of faith, Abraham is not a hero of faith. Faith is not some virtue like courage which deserves credit by being righteousness. Biblical faith is a hearing of the word of God as the word of God. Now this word of God is always spoken to us in the midst of a life in which it is contested and disputed, and even flatly denied. It is a word about ninety-year old women having babies, or bedraggled slaves becoming great nations, or about the dead coming back to life. There is always with this word of God that we receive another way of looking at it. As word about the future, as a promise, it never comes to us as a completely fulfilled word. There is always a gap. And so we should not be shocked or dismayed when our questions start to fill that gap: how is God going to bring his word to pass? What is God’s plan in this bleak circumstance? Why are so few people responding to the gospel at the moment? What proof can I have of God’s commitment to his promises? This side of the end of all things, Christian faith will always be attended by these questions.
So why believe? In his shambolic way, against all hope, Abraham believed, though the evidence of his body ‘as good as dead’ contradicted the promise he heard. Why?
Because the character of God has its own inner logic. The word of God rings true to who God is as he reveals himself to us in the history of salvation. It is the evidence of what God actually does that compels us to believe. The truth that we receive when we belief is not deducible in the ordinary sense, or calculable, or even possible as we recognise it. It does not follow natural laws. But it is consistent with the miracle that there is something rather than nothing. Abraham was ‘fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised’.
It seems to me that certain American preachers like John Piper have recently been eliciting a strangely disproportionate fascination and emotional commitment amongst Aussie evangelicals. So I thought I’d reiterate my previously published misgivings about Piper’s view of justification.
Please don’t read this and assume I’m pitching my tent in some kind of “anti-Piper” camp against some kind of “pro-Piper” camp. That would be an infantile and foolish way to think (1 Cor 3:1-4). Rather, I’m just saying that Piper isn’t the bees knees on the doctrine of justification. He’s worth listening to for his passion, his graciousness, his pastor’s heart, his deep piety, his commitment to God’s glory, and his desire to defend the biblical gospel. However, at this (very significant) point, I think he’s confused. So you need to be careful about his theological discussions of righteousness and justification. Often he’s spot-on, but sometimes he can be very confusing.
Here’s what I said in my post:
John Piper, for example, in his otherwise excellent and very insightful book The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright, when speaking about forensic passages in Romans, says, “the deepest meaning of God’s righteousness is his unwavering commitment to act for the sake of his glory” (p. 68).
I can see why John Piper might say this. God’s righteousness is inextricably caught up with God’s glory; God’s glory demands that he act righteously; indeed, God’s righteousness is a (if not the) key means by which God acts for the sake of his own glory. But it’s not actually what the word “righteousness” means. God’s righteousness—particularly in the forensic context—is his commitment to setting the world to rights—primarily by judging individuals perfectly according to his created standards of righteousness.
In the discussion on this post, I also commented:
Indeed, it’s pretty hard to take issue with a man who is seeking to ascribe as much glory to God as possible, and who sees God’s glory as the centre, purpose and ground of righteousness!In fact, Piper makes a more detailed and thorough case for his view of God’s righteousness in his earlier book on Romans 9. The great insight and strength of Piper’s work in both of these books (the one on Romans 9 and the response to Tom Wright) is that he highlights that God’s glory is a profoundly central but often neglected topic in discussions of Romans.
Nevertheless, I still think he has been imprecise, and that this imprecision is very unfortunate. Piper has highlighted for us the deep and inseparable connection between God’s righteousness and his commitment to his own glory. But he has mistakenly identified the two.
To put it another way, Piper has failed to distinguish between what God’s righteousness is and what it is for. Yes, God is righteous because he is committed to his own glory – he makes a good argument that this is the chief end of God’s righteousness. Nevertheless the standard to which God’s righteousness refers in the Old Testament is not merely “whatever will lead to the glory of God” (which in fact isn’t a standard but a means to an end), but good old plain “justice”, particularly in vindicating the righteous person and punishing the ungodly person. This justice does indeed lead to the glory of God – in fact, you could argue convincingly that the glory of God is the ground and cause for God’s righteousness. But the two are not the same.
And in a further comment:
Piper doesn’t merely say that righteousness always glorifies God because it is consistent with his character (I agree with that 100%). Piper goes too far by saying that righteousness means being committed to glorifying God. That is taking two connected yet distinct concepts (i.e. righteousness and commitment to God’s glory), and making them equal. The two are inseparable, granted. But we still need to distinguish them, not to collapse them into a flat equivalence.
…
Of course, this definition isn’t my own. I’m just trying to reflect and summarise what any decent Biblical lexicon could tell you. Piper’s definition of righteousness, while exhilarating and interesting, won’t be found in a lexicon. That’s because, while he has seen the profound theological connection between righteousness and God’s glory (yay for Piper!), he has made the mistake of turning this connection into a lexical equivalence.
Nobody could every seriously accuse John Piper of lacking a passionate commitment to God’s glory. The church should be deeply grateful to him for this aspect of his preaching. However, John Piper is not the person to turn to when trying to come to grips with key soteriological doctrines like justification.
See also my articles: Nowism and Countering Nowism.
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