The Bible Salvages Broken People, Not the Other Way Around

I am reading Carl F. H. Henry’s autobiography, written in 1986.  So far it is a great read.  It is filled with humorous stories that had me laughing out loud, and even more stories that show his heart for evangelism, God, and the truth of Scripture.  At one point he is reflecting on the years he spent attending Wheaton College in the late 1930s and early 1940s.  In the following passage Henry explains a bit of what Evangelical higher education should be about: 

What I do maintain is that all Christian learning must be for the sake of worship and service of God in the world, and that we are deceived if we think that our own schematic skills or speculative theories or politico-economic proposals make the Bible meaningful and credible to the contemporary world.  The case for Christianity does not rest upon our ingenuity; it rests upon the incarnate and risen Lord.  The Bible is meaningful and credible as it stands; it is we, not the Scriptures, that need to be salvaged.  Unless evangelical education understands Christianity’s salvific witness in terms of the whole self–intellect, volition, emotion, conscience, imagination–and of hte world in its total need–justice, peace, stewardship and much else–it cannot adequately confront a planet that has sagged out of moral and spiriutal orbit. 
–Carl F. H. Henry, Confessions of a Theologian: An Autobiography (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1986), 76. 

His first exhortation is something we need to hear and believe.  The Bible is powerful and meaningful and credible as it is.  God doesn’t need us to make it relevant, or to salvage it for our postmodern world.  It is not up to our cleverness or ingenuity to advance the truth.  We must simply and faithfully learn and apply God’s word to every area of life.  When we do so, we will come to learn how God, through His word will salvage so many broken areas of our life and world. 

Henry’s second exhortation is less clear to me.  There are a lot of different ways his last sentence could be interpreted.  One of my goals for the summer is to get a better grasp of what Henry and other 20th century Neo-Evangelicals were advocating regarding Christianity’s engagement with culture and how Christianity’s “salvific witness” should be applied to the whole self and the total need of the world.  Maybe I’ll share some of my gleanings here.  Let me know if you have any thoughts.

An Open Mind With a Screen on It

E. Y. Mullins (1860-1928 ), former president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and influential Southern Baptist leader, is a difficult figure to get one’s mind around.  His life and theology present several complexities.  A student of both J. P. Boyce’s Princetonian Calvinism and Borden Parker Bowne’s Boston Personalism, Mullins’s theology presents several difficulties to the interested historian.  Another complexity presents itself in examining Mullins’s view of individual autonomy and the right of private judgment in religion and doctrine.  On the one hand, Mullins advocated a fairly extreme form of individual autonomy (albeit under Christ) in religion and Biblical interpretation.  On the other hand, he was the chief architect of the 1925 Baptist Faith and Message, and a strong defender of the need for Baptists to make doctrinal statements.  He even used the word “creed” positively. 

In his short essay, “Baptist and Creeds,” Mullins explains what a creed is and why some are opposed to them.  Here is an insightful section in which he lists several reasons people are opposed to the writing of creeds (statements of beliefs).  His words seem quite applicaple today as some Emergent leaders reject any clear doctrinal statements or creedal boundaries. 

“I name, first, the desire for license instead of liberty.  There are limits to the religion of Christ beyone which men may not go and claim to be Christian . . . .  The refusal to define limits may and often does indicate a desire to abolish all limits.

Another reason is the absence of opinions.  real thinking is hard work.  The indolent mind is impatient with strenuous doctrinal thought.  It does not enjoy the attendant headache.  The ‘open mine’ is the ideal of the indolent mind. I believe in the open mind, with a screen in it, like an open window.  The screen lets in the air and keeps out the mosquitoes and gnats.  The screen in the mind means discrimination, and discrimination means hard thinking and definite views.

Another reason for opposing creedal statements is unwillingness to declare one’s views.  Some, indeed many, who are really thinking hold views that they are unwilling to declare. . . .”
–This essay is housed in the E. Y. Mullins Collection at the James P. Boyce Centennial Library (SBTS).  It is published as Chapter Fourteen in the The Axioms of Religion (1997).

Encouraging and Reporting Revivals (A Missional Eschatology Part 4)

A while back I started a series on Jonathan Edwards’s eschatology, and specifically how his view of the end times influenced his missiological theory and practice.  I will post 3 more times in this series, with each post explaining one means Edwards used and advocated for the spread of the gospel.  We have much to learn from Edwards’s passion for the spread of Christ’s kingdom, and the efforts he made to advance the gospel.  If you want to catch up, here are the first three posts in the series:
Introduction
Edwards’s View of Future Prophecy
The Role of Revival in the Last Days

Edwards’s extensive chronology building and complicated exegesis and interpretation concerning the end times were not for merely speculative purposes.  His aim was to leverage this information in order to encourage and stir up others to promote further revival and use means for bringing about the glorious work of God he thought was imminent, and which would lead to the Millennial age.  Edwards steadfastly believed that an international revival must be a work of God.  ”There is very much to convince us, that God alone can bestow it, and show our entire and absolute dependence on him for it.  The insufficiency of human abilities to bring to pass any such happy change in the world . . . does now remarkably appear.”[1]  However, God had ordained that His people use means to bring this great work about.  The longed for revival would not be a miraculous and cataclysmic event, but instead a gradual work, which “will be accomplished by means, by the preaching of the gospel, and the use of ordinary means of grace.”[2]  Preaching and prayer were the main means by which Edwards thought the revival would be brought about, but he also pointed to other means, including a pastor’s public encouragement and endorsement of revival stirrings.    

In Part II of Some Thoughts, Edwards explained the duty of all Christians to acknowledge and promote the revivals occurring at the time.  If pastors failed to speak up in favor of the revival they would do great damage to their people, invite the judgment of God on themselves, and impede an even more glorious revival.  In fact, Edwards argues the failure to acknowledge the revivals as God’s work would even negate the effect of good preaching:

If ministers preach never so good doctrine, and are never so painful and laborious in their work, yet if at such a day as this, they shew to their people that they are not well affected to this work, but are very doubtful and suspicious of it, they will be very likely to do their people a great deal more hurt than good.  For the very fame of such a great and extraordinary work of God, if their people were suffered to believe it to be his work, and the example of other towns, together with what preaching they might hear occasionally, would be likely to have a much greater influence upon the minds of their people, to awaken them and animate them in religion, than all their labors with them.[3]

Edwards had long believed that stories of revival were a means God used to bring about further revival.  In 1736, Edwards preached, “The conversion of numbers can be a greater means to awaken greater numbers of souls to enlarge Christ’s church as a greater and finally irresistible force in the world.”[4]  This idea was probably fresh on his mind as A Faithful Narrative headed to wider publication to share with the world what God had recently done in Northampton.  This was likely a motivating factor in the publication of his other revival writings as well.  For example, in An Humble Attempt, Edwards looked forward to a movement of prayer which would lead to a “revival of religion . . . amongst [God's] professing people; that this being observed, will be the means of awakening others.”[5]  In the preface to The Life of David Brainerd, Edwards wrote that God uses two “ways of representing and recommending true Religion and Virtue to the World . . . .  The one is by Doctrine and Precept; the other is by Instance and Example.”[6]  One of the purposes of publishing Brainerd’s diary was to encourage others to seek a similar religious experience to that of Brainerd. 

In summary, Edwards agreed with Protestant evangelicals before him that God had promised to use revival as the means to bring about the conversion of the world before the Millennium.  This understanding of future prophecy contributed to his belief that the revivals of his day were a part of a bigger story, one that would lead to the fall of the Antichrist, the spread of the gospel to all nations, and the millennial reign of the church.  Edwards’s desire to promote the revivals and urge others to the same was stirred by his understanding of his place in history.  By using means to promote the revivals and defend their reality, they could help bring about that great and final revival that would spread the gospel to all nations.  Edwards spent himself in this work of promoting revival in his own congregation, region, and throughout the world.       

 

---

 [1]Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, WJE, vol. 9, 359.

[2]Ibid., 458-59.

[3]Edwards, Some Thoughts, WJE, vol. 4, 375.   

[4]Jonathan Edwards, from a sermon preached in 1736 on Matthew 5:14.  Quoted in Helen P. Westra, “Divinity’s Design: Edwards and the History of the Work of Redemption,” in Edwards in Our Time: Jonathan Edwards and the Shaping of American Religion, eds. Sang Hyun Lee and Allen C. Guelzo, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 138.

[5]Edwards, An Humble Attempt, WJE, vol. 5, 317-318.  

[6]Jonathan Edwards, Account of the Life of the late Reverend Mr. David Brainerd (Boston: D. Henchman, 1749), A2.  

 

The Joy of Life: an Art That Cannot be Bought

Eyewitnesses report that Martin Luther was holding a flower during the Leipzig Disputation of 1519.  He would sometimes smell it as the debate went on.  Luther biographer, Heiko Oberman observes:

It seems an unusual way of appearing at a disputation.  The fact is that Luher loved nature and observed and admired it with keen eyes.  He liked to relax in his garden, and, in defiance of the Devil, delighted in flowers, especially roses, as God’s gift.

Oberman goes on to pen some insightful words about joy:

Joy of life is not something that simply exists, it must be worked at.  Even in our century, with holidays and relaxation legally established as a human right, the joy of life is an art that cannot be bought.  Space and time can be provided, but joy needs practice.
–Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, 327. 

The Danger of Anti-Intellectualism

I came across a passage in Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind tonight that serves as an encouragement as to the usefulness of higher education.    He is quoting Charles Malik:

“The greatest danger besetting American Evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism.  The mind as to its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough.  This cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit.  People are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the Gospel.  They have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure in conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, and thereby ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking.  The result is that the arena of creative thinking is abdicated and vacated to the enemy” (26).

Reflections:
1. I would definitely be one of those guys who is in a hurry to get done with school so I can preach the gospel, serve the church, and earn a living.  Malik is probably right that I don’t understand the full value of these years of study.  However, I do somewhat understand the value of intensive study and interaction with great ideas and thinkers.  That is why I am here studying.  I think it is a useful equipping time.  Malik’s words are a helpful reminder that “ripening and sharpening and enlarging [one's] powers for thinking” is a worthwhile use of time.

2. He writes, “spending years of leisure in conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past.”  Sometimes doctoral studies don’t feel like “years of leisure.”  Especially at the end of the semester when I’m still up at 1:30am coming across passages like this.  But his words are a good reminder to me and maybe to any of you who are students or teachers.  We have an incredibely great privelege to converse with the greatest minds in history.  And while it is a privelege, we must be good stewards of this opportunity for the good of others and the glory of God.

3. Most people don’t get the chance to dedicate years to “leisurely” study.  But all of us can (and should) find some time each week to exercise our minds and grow our ability to think about the great truths of God’s word and God’s world.  Loving God with our mind is both obedient to God and deeply rewarding.   

Marsden and the History of Higher Education

Here is a book recommendation:
George Marsden. The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief.  New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. 

I am reading Marsden’s book right now and am thoroughly enjoying it.  I’ve been typing up a loose outline/summary with some reflections.  The summary is for my benefit, so it doesn’t explain all of the terms or people fully.  But I thought one or two of you might enjoy reading part of it.  Everything is drawn from Marsden’s book and so is not my voice.  There may be parts where I use his exact wording without identifying with quote marks.  Here is a summary of Part I.  I hope it will make you want to go out and buy the book.  It is a great read, and every helpful for anyone who works in education, is being education, or hopes to someday have children that go off to college.

Part I - The Establishment of Protestant Non-Sectarianism

Before the Revolution, Anglicans and Presbyterians competed for control of higher education.  After the Revolution, a third player-Liberal or Deistic thinkers-entered the equation, proposing state controlled schools, with Jefferson in the lead.  By 1820s there was an “all out war” going on between Jeffersonian Liberal Christians and more conservative denominational groups over control of higher educational institutions. 

Marsden, very helpfully shows how there were “two kinds of sectarianism” in the early struggles over higher education.  Jefferson and his followers wanted to start schools with more enlightened, scientific, and objective views of religion.  Presbyterians and others fought against this, saying they did not want sectarian views established that went against a large majority of the people.  Jefferson did not understand this since he only saw denominational views as sectarian and his own as objective and scientific.  Battles waged on several fronts in the 1800s.  One solution was for denominations to form their own divinity schools / seminaries separate from the liberalizing colleges like Harvard.  In the South, Presbyterians and others regularly pushed out faculty that were unorthodox, and were able to get more “sectarian” views taught by faculty in the colleges.  Marsden shows that they argued Jeffersonian views were just as sectarian, and he also says that nobody would tolerate one sect’s views dominating (especially not Enlightenment Liberalism).  Therefore, a common ground had to be found.  This common ground was a mixing of Christian and Enlightenment views.

Jeffersonian “infidelity” lost out in the 1800s colleges.  This is seen in the fact that the intellectual hotbeds were mostly divinity schools and seminaries which offered the only thing approaching graduate education.  However, Calvinism was under attack from all sides, and the increasing religious diversity and competitive marketplace caused denominational colleges to downplay their distinctives in order to appeal to a larger market.  New School Presbyterian “Whigs” advocated higher education in the frontier.  Men like Lyman Beecher advocated frontier education to help civilize the frontier, advance the American ideals of freedom and civilization, and hold back Catholic absolutism.  This was no sectarian kind of religion in the colleges, but an American Protestant education that downplayed sectarian differences.  This was parallel with the rise of the Common Schools in places like New York and Massachussets, where a non-sectarian kind of Christianity that emphasized morals and virtues over doctrine was on the rise.  Catholics and Old School Presbyterians opposed this non-doctrinal education and started many parochial schools.  But the non-sectarian approach, with its lowest-common-denominator religious instruction (looking much like Unitarianism) was winning the day.  This was a compromise between Enlightenment infidelity and untenable sectarianism in public education. 

 Sectarian differences were more common for a longer time in denominational colleges.  But even they began to defend Christian beliefs and Biblical doctrines based on an empirical method of research.  As Scottish philosophy won the day after the Revolution, Evangelicals argued that an impartial look at the facts backed up the Bible and its claims.  So they were “entrenching themselves as the voluntary religious establishment,” by showing that Biblical Protestantism and Enlightenment science worked together.  Their position was both biblical and scientific.  However, their claim that they would follow the facts wherever they led, in the generation after 1850, led to the downfall of the Evangelical voluntary establishment in education, Marsden claims.  When science started to explain things without reference to God, science and orthodoxy began to come into open conflict, undermining Evangelicals privileged place over higher education and the intellectual life of America. 

 

Reading Lists in Church History

Dr. Michael Haykin, over at Historia Ecclesiastica has begun posting reading lists for different periods of church history.  He started yesterday by recommending some books on Latin Christianity.  He plans to suggest important books for all of western church history, so keep checking his blog for more good reading material.

The Right Use of Knowledge

“Some seek knowledge for
The sake of knowledge:
That is curiosity;
Others seek knowledge so that
They themselves may be known:
That is vanity;
But there are still others
Who seek knowledge in
Order to serve and edify others:
And that is charity.”
-Bernard of Clairvaux

Brainerd’s Example of Prayer: Observation and Application

I am reading The Life and Diary of David Brainerd (1749).  This is basically a large portion of Brainerd’s journal edited and published by Jonathan Edwards.  Brainerd was a missionary the the Native Americans in New York from 1742-1747.  His journals reveal a single-minded life and passionate pursuit of God and His glory.  Brainerd’s Life has been influential on countless missionaries after him.  Guys like William Carey and Henry Martyn and Jim Elliot all read Brainerd’s life and considered a major formative influence on them.  I being challenged in many ways as I read of Brainerd’s pursuit of God, spiritual struggles, and passion to see the gospel spread. 

One of the instructive elements of Brainerd’s life is how much time he spent in prayer with other Christians.  During his mission to the Native Americans he battled loneliness and the isolation so often felt by frontier missionaries.  But in the years leading up to his mission he spent a great deal of time praying with friends.  Here are a few examples:

Sept. 10, 1742: “In the afternoon, prayed with a dear friend privately, and had the presence of GOd with us; our souls united together to reach after a blessed immorality.”

Dec. 11, 1742: “I rode to Bethlehem, came to Mr. Bellamy’s lodgings, and spent the evening with him in sweent conversation and prayer.

Dec. 23, 1742: “I rode to New-Haven, and there enjoyed some sweetness in prayer and conversation, with some dear christian friends.  My mind was sweetly serious and composed.”

Dec. 26, 1742: “In the evening, rode from New-Haven to Branford, after I had kneeled and prayed with a number of dear Christian friends in a very retired place in the woods.”

Feb. 17, 1743: “In the evening, spent some time with a dear christian friend; and felt serious, as on the brink of eternity.  My soul enjoyed sweetness in lively apprehensions of standing before the glorious God: prayed with my dear friend with sweetness, and discoursed with the utmost solemnity.  And truly it was a little emblem of heaven itself.”

March 19, 1743: “In the afternoon, rode to Newark, and had some sweetness in conversation with Mr. Burr, and in praying together.  O blessed be God for ever and ever, for any enlivening and quickening seasons.

Some observations:

1. Brainerd also spent a lot of time in secret prayer.  He records great struggles of soul and striving to stay focused in secret prayer.  However, during his prayer with friends he nearly always records a powerful and vibrant time of prayer.  Secret prayer is necessary and important and often powerful.  Most of our prayer will be done by ourselves with God.  But it is good to remember that praying out loud with others is often a means of God ministering to our souls and focusing our minds in a very special and powerful way.  Brainerd’s secret prayer was often more lively and focused after spending time together with friends in prayer.

2. It is probable that the many hours of prayer with friends before his solitary mission to the Indians helped give him the strength he needed once he was on his own.  It also probably knit the hearts of his friends together with his own, so that they were often compelled to pray for him as they thought of his mission work.

3. Brainerd went as a missionary, sometimes with a translator, but often with no friend but his horse.  He was working among tribes where there were no Christians.  He often struggled and was pushed to despair and horrible loneliness and despondency.  I wonder how much more fruitful his work would have been if he would have had a like-minded partner; someone to pray with and pour out his heart to and be encouraged by.

Some applications:

1. We should pray together.  Every single time Brainerd records staying with someone or seeing friends they had “spiritual conversations” and prayed together.  How much of our spiritual weakness stems from our silence about God, and toward God, when together?  If you have Christian friends and you get together, set aside some time and pray.  Be intentional about it.  I think if we are we will see great growth in godliness and nearness to Christ.

2. If you don’t have friends that you feel like would want to pray with you, find new friends.  Biblical community is not something that we fall into.  We need to seek it out intentionally.

3. I think we need to ask others to pray for us and with us if we hope to grow much in sanctification, or be used of God to spread the gospel and glorify His name.  Let us pray for each other. 

4. Don’t fly solo like Brainerd did the last few years of his life.  If you are in a rough work enviornment or feel alone or have a difficult ministry, you need friends to come alongside you.  Find ways to reach out to other Christians and initiate prayer with each other for the advance of Christ’s kingdom in your heart and in the earth.   The American way is very individualistic, but it isn’t the biblical way and it doesn’t work.

(By the way, I am planning to post 3 more times in my series on Edwards’s Missional Eschatology.  It has just been a bit busy the past week and I haven’t had a chance.  So for the 2 who are reading that series, be patient)

Standing on Shoulders

Standing on Shoulders is a great new blog dedicated to church history.  It started up just a couple weeks after this blog and has a similar purpose.  You should check it out.  Right now, five guys contribute; all are students at Southern Seminary and love church history.  With five contributors they have been able to post some good stuff fairly regularly.  I hope more blogs like this continue to pop up.  For now, go over to Standing on Shoulders and enjoy.