hughbiquitous

Précis

Joy in God is a duty enjoined upon Christians. Easily neglected because of sin’s opposition to and corruption of holy joy, it elevates our standard of delight beyond reach: we depend on God for its initiation and satisfaction. This creates existential dissonance; joy in God is insatiable and elusive. Yet, it is an essential property of new life in Christ: desires, not just decisions, really matter. Thus, joy in God must be fought for.

This joy, once realized and mature, sustains the hard, unnatural work of the Christian life: sacrificial love.

NB

Margin notes from chapter 1:

• There is a false dichotomy that is often set up between head and heart, between doctrine and affections. God is sovereign over the whole of a man; there is nothing mutually exclusive about “head-joy” and “heart-joy.” “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (Mt. 22:37)
• It is often observed that “love is a decision,” and it is. But if it is only a decision and is wholly removed from the affections, then something is wrong.
• Lewis said, “the less one has to “try to be good,” the better. A perfect man would never act from sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one” (see below); cf. Ps. 37:4, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” Properly aligned desires glorify God and satisfy the desirer.
• This joy is not merely to promote our good spirits. It’s to get us through the hard things God calls us to do. It must become the most basic motivation we have.
• The greatest commandment was to love God with the whole person; the second is to love your neighbor as yourself. The first fuels the second; joy in God makes sacrificial love possible no matter what the circumstances are, no matter who the neighbor is.

Quotes

• Christian Hedonism is a liberating and devastating doctrine. (p. 11)
• Indwelling sin stands in the way of my full satisfaction in God. It opposes and perverts my pursuit of God. It opposes by making other things look more desirable than God. And it perverts by making me think I am pursuing joy in God when, in fact, I am in love with his gifts. (p. 14)
• [Upon discovering Christian Hedonism] Manageable, duty-defined, decision-oriented, willpower Christianity now seemed easy, and real Christianity had become impossible. (p. 14)
• God [has] to transform my heart to do what a heart cannot make itself do, namely, want what it ought to want. Only God can make the depraved heart desire God. (p. 14)
• The truth and beauty and worth of God shine best from the lives of saints who are so satisfied in God they can suffer in the cause of love without murmuring. (p. 15)
• Salvation is the awakening of a new taste for God, or it is nothing… Conversion is the creation of new desires, not just new duties; new delights, not just new deeds; new treasures, not just new tasks. (pp. 15-16)
• If human happiness, whose perfection it is to be united with God, were hidden from man, he would in fact be bereft of the principal use of his understanding. Thus, also the chief activity of the soul is to aspire thither. Hence the more anyone endeavors to approach to God, the more he proves himself endowed with reason. (p. 16, quoting John Calvin)
• Persons need not and ought not to set any bounds to their spiritual and gracious appetites… [Rather, they ought] to be endeavoring by all possible ways to inflame their desires and to obtain more spiritual pleasures… Our hungerings and thirstings after God and Jesus Christ and after holiness can’t be too great for the value of these things, for they are things of infinite value… [Therefore] endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement… There is no such thing as excess in our taking of this spiritual food. There is no such virtue as temperance in spiritual feasting. (p. 17, quoting Jonathan Edwards)
• For there exists a delight that is not given to the wicked, but to those honoring Thee, O God, without desiring recompense, the joy of whom Thou art Thyself! And this is the blessed life, to rejoice towards Thee, for Thy sake. (p. 18, quoting Augustine)
• Provided the thing is in itself right, the more one likes it and the less one has to “try to be good,” the better. A perfect man would never act from sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people), like a crutch, which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it’s idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits, etc.) can do the journey on their own! (p. 18, quoting C. S. Lewis)
• Spiritual desires and delights are not commodities to be bought and sold. They are not objects to be handled. They are events in the soul. They are experiences of the heart. (p. 19)
• Love is not a mere choice to move the body or the brain. Love is also an experience of the heart. So the stakes are very high. Christ is to be cherished, not just chosen. The alternative is to be cursed. Therefore life is serious. (p. 19)
• When I address the question, “What should I do if I don’t desire God?” I am addressing the question: “How can I obtain or recover a joy in Christ that is so deep and so strong that it will free me from bondage to Western comforts and security, and will impel me into sacrifices of mercy and missions, and will sustain me in the face of martyrdom?” (p. 20)
• The key to endurance in the cause of self-sacrificing love is not heroic willpower, but deep, unshakable confidence that the joy we have tasted in fellowship with Christ will not disappoint us in death. (p. 21)

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.