hughbiquitous

I’ve been discouraged a lot lately.

Here’s the latest link in my dark chain: yesterday, I was mildly irritated to wake up and discover one of my kids in the bed. Not a big deal by any means, but still, it was one of those “that’s not right” moments that gets your day off on the wrong foot.

A few hours later, I got a prayer request for a family whose only child—a sixth-grader—died. Her grieving mom wrote, “i held my precious baby today as she drew her last breath… to know that my precious girl is not sleeping in her bed, won’t be coming down this morning to jump in my lap, kiss me good morning, tell me she loves me, is killing me. i am rocked to my very core.”

While this poor mother will never again wake up to her daughter’s greeting, I’m getting annoyed at mine for being there when I woke up. Stupid, blind, ungrateful, proud, selfish fool! I hold myself in contempt… I repent… God have mercy on me, a sinner!

It’s not supposed to work that way… parents shouldn’t have to bury their children. It’s not supposed to be this way! Death is entirely alien, unnatural, and unwelcome. We have eternity in our hearts, but mortality in our flesh. The tension is unbearable. Chalk it up to sin, folks, and it’s a far bigger problem than any of us realizes. “The wages of sin is death,” and there’s a grieving mother and father paying up this week.

But John Piper—God bless him—gives me a handhold at times like these. He’s offered the following advice on how to fight for joy, advice which closely mirrors the content of his excellent book, When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy…

1. Realize that authentic joy in God is a gift.

2. Realize that joy must be fought for relentlessly.

3. Resolve to attack all known sin in your life.

4. Learn the secret of gutsy guilt - how to fight like a justified sinner.

5. Realize that the battle is primarily a fight to see God for who he is.

6. Meditate on the Word of God day and night.

7. Pray earnestly and continually for open heart-eyes and an inclination for God.

8. Learn to preach to yourself rather than listen to yourself.

9. Spend time with God-saturated people who help you see God and fight the fight.

10. Be patient in the night of God’s seeming absence.

11. Get the rest, exercise, and proper diet that your body was designed by God to have.

12. Make a proper use of God’s revelation in nature.

13. Read great books about God and biographies of great saints.

14. Do the hard and loving thing for the sake of others (witness and mercy).

15. Get a global vision for the cause of Christ and pour yourself out for the unreached.

But for now I think it’s sufficient to quote another line of Piper’s… “Hug and cry first, give God-centered explanations later.“

William Lane Craig has a new audio blog in which he offers short (10-20 minute) recorded commentaries on current events. It sounds like it’s drawn from his “Defenders” adult Sunday school class at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church.

 Melinda Penner described Al Mohler’s talk at GodBlogCon:

Al Mohler spoke about his intellectual loneliness as a child asking the big questions that don’t seem to come up often in church, even though they’re well within the intellectual heritage of Christianity. He was rather odd.  And I think a lot of us in our congregations who think about some of these questions we talk about at STR have felt lonely at times because it doesn’t seem like too many other people around us are thinking along the same lines.  They have different interests.  That’s why the Body is so important and that’s the beauty of the internet and blogs because it allows to connect beyond our physical boundaries.

This reminded me of the following quote from Harry Blamires’ The Christian Mind, which is featured on Keith Plummer’s blog banner:

If Christians cannot communicate as thinking beings, they are reduced to encountering one another only at the shallow level of gossip and small talk. Hence the perhaps peculiarly modern problem—the loneliness of the thinking Christian.

I’ve written before about the web rotting the mind. This reminds me that for all its downside, the Internet can be a means of grace too.

With all the attention J.P. Moreland’s ETS paper is directing at issues of natural theology and the proper sort of commitment to the Bible, I’m looking for some boundaries on these questions.

Ten years ago, Michael Horton wrote on Calvin’s take on the limits of natural theology and concludes that unbelievers are not bereft of reason or truth; God’s common grace should not be discounted in these matters. But it is only when the Holy Spirit "notarizes" revealed truth in the heart of unbelievers that there is power to save:

Calvin also insists that [knowledge of God implanted in the conscience] is legal rather than evangelical in character. This is crucial especially for Reformed believers today, when this distinction seems to be fading. Everyone knows God, but as Creator, Law-Giver, and Judge. "There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity [sensus Divinitatis]." Calvin argues that there is a great deal of common ground in creation for agreement on general principles of morality, justice, beauty, and even truth. One does not require special revelation in order to create a reasonably just society, a beautiful work of art, or even a common sense of morality based on the law written on the conscience (2.2.15). Surely, Christians and non-Christians could agree on many issues related to the common good. And, we can infer (given his positive evaluation of many of the advances of philosophy in secular matters) that Calvin would approve of appealing to philosophical arguments in apologetics…

Calvin finds the inscripturated Word to be the only rock in a whirlpool of subjective opinion. "Hence the Scriptures obtain full authority among believers only when men regard them as having sprung from heaven, as if there the living words of God were heard" (1.7.1). The Word and the Spirit belong together, and thus Calvin moves to the role of the Spirit’s witness, "stronger than all proof." Credibility in doctrine depends on our full confidence in God’s Word. The prophets invoke God’s name for their writings with great care and purpose. Again, the central concern for Calvin is pastoral; he seeks to care for those whose consciences would vacillate and find no comfort. We must rise above human reasoning, judgments and conjectures and this can only be done when the Holy Spirit joins the Word as its "notary public." This is no capitulation to fideism in the face of poor arguments, an evasion of the critical questions…

We have some common ground with unbelievers. In nature, there is some revelation about God. But nature can only tell us that he is a Judge; it does not tell us of his fatherly kindness in the provision of Christ. Nature provides legal knowledge of God, but only Scripture reveals the Gospel, the evangelical knowledge of Christ.

Over a decade ago, Greg Koukl wrote the paper I wish J.P. Moreland had given last week.

Back in 1993, Greg wrote Is Biblical Counseling Biblical? Insight from Scripture and Classical Readings to the Current Anathematizing of Psychology. While its primary thrust is addressing some excesses of the Biblical Counseling movement (which may no longer be characteristic of what’s going on there; I confess ignorance), Greg makes a solid, biblical argument that defeats the narrow "Bible-only" view of sola scriptura that Dr. Moreland was addressing. He goes on to offer some absolutely brilliant things about the right use of natural theology in a solidly Reformed tradition.

While I encourage you to read the whole thing, I’ll highlight three key ingredients.

1. Reformers all the way back to Calvin recognized the value of man’s wisdom, depraved though it is. Quoting Calvin:

Therefore, in reading profane authors, the admirable light of truth displayed in them should remind us, that the human mind, however much fallen and perverted from its original integrity, is still adorned and invested with admirable gifts from its Creator… How then can we deny that truth must have beamed on those ancient lawgivers who arranged civil order and discipline with so much equity? Shall we say that the philosophers, in their exquisite researches and skillful description of nature, were blind?… Nay, we cannot read the ancients on these subjects without the highest admiration; an admiration which their excellence will not allow us to withhold… Therefore, since it is manifest that men whom the Scriptures term natural, are so acute and clear-sighted in the investigation of inferior things, their example should teach us how many gifts the Lord has left in possession of human nature, not withstanding of its having been despoiled of the true good.

2. Writing off all human virtue as sin is unbiblical. "Something is wrong with any assessment of human behavior that forces us to label all human virtue — love, kindness, mercy, patience, gentleness — as sin simply because none are expressed perfectly. This conclusion is not a biblical one," Koukl says.

3. The Formula of Concord, which dealt with certain errors among Lutherans following Luther’s death, addressed the nature of depravity with care and precision. Koukl puts it this way:

Concord makes a distinction that is lost on much of modern evangelicalism: man does not have a sinful nature, strictly speaking, but a nature that is corrupted by sin. This comports with Augustine’s view that evil is a privation of good and not a thing in itself. As such, the fall doesn’t create in man an ontologically new nature… but merely robs his human nature of its original righteousness.

These are weighty topics that need to be assessed carefully. Greg Koukl did a superlative job surveying the biblical data and the wisdom of the ages to make the very important point that sola scriptura does not entail an abandonment of truth found outside the Bible.