bible-and-emotions-sept-oct-2018 by Modern Reformation

MODERN REFORMATION VOL.27 | NO.5 | SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2018 | $6.95

“When we fix our eyes on Jesus, we see a variety of emotions that perfectly reflect his Father.”

WITH GRATITUDE... W E C E L E B R AT E T H E 4 0 0 T H A N N I V E R S A RY OF THE CANONS OF DORT Join as we commemorate the birth of key reformational doctrines.

SEE PAGES 60-61 FOR MORE

V O L .2 7 | N O. 5 | S E P T E M B E R- O C T O B E R 2 0 18

FEATURES 24

“Nothing More Than Feelings”? A Biblical-Theology Primer on the Emotions BY BRIAN BORGMAN

Jonathan Edwards: The Theologian of Joy B Y M AT T H E W E V E R H A R D

The Last Enemy and the Final Victory: Singing the Blues with Jesus B Y M I C H A E L S. H O R T O N

Think about These Things: Five Christian Questions on Art B Y J O S E P H W. S M I T H I I I

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY DÁNIEL TAYLOR

ONE SUBSCRIPTION, 25 YEARS OF ARCHIVES. A S A S U B S C R I B E R , YO U R E C E I V E A C C E S S T O T H E E N T I R E M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N A R C H I V E F O R F R E E . Requires a one-time free registration at whitehorseinn.org. Log in any time and visit the MR archives at whitehorseinn.org/issue.

WHITEHORSEINN.ORG/ISSUE

V O L .2 7 | N O. 5 | S E P T E M B E R- O C T O B E R 2 0 18

DEPARTMENTS 5

BOOK REVIEWS

GEEK SQUAD

Recommended Reading on the Eternal Generation of the Son

“By Feeble Sense”?

INTERVIEW

Where Do We Go from Here? A THEOLOGICAL-HISTORICAL DISCUSSION ON CHRISTIAN S L AV E R Y W I T H AY R I A N YA S A R A N D K AT H A R I N E G E R B N E R

10 C H R I S T & C U LT U R E

The Art of My Reformation

REVIEWED BY CHARLES LEE IRONS

Recommended Reading on Dementia R E V I E W E D B Y JA M E S L U N D

B Y S T E V E N KO Z A R

14 T H E O LO GY

BY SHANE LEMS

Recommended Reading on the Relationship between Divine and Human Freedom

76 B A C K PA G E

How to Disagree Agreeably BY ERIC LANDRY

R E V I E W E D B Y N OA H J. F R E N S

Reflections on the Reformed Resurgence BY CARL TRUEMAN

MODERN REFORMATION Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Eric Landry Managing Editor Patricia Anders Associate Editor Brooke Ventura Marketing Director Michele Tedrick

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

Creative Direction and Design Metaleap Creative Review Editor Ryan Glomsrud Copy Editor Elizabeth Isaac Proofreader Ann Smith

Modern Reformation (Subscription Department) P.O. Box 460565 Escondido, CA 92046 (855) 492-1674 info@modernreformation.org | modernreformation.org Subscription Information: US 1 YR $32. 2 YR $50. 3 YR $60. Digital Only 1 YR $25. US Student 1 YR $26. 2YR $40. Canada add $10 per year for postage. Foreign add $9 per year for postage.

LETTER from the EDITOR

sisters tend to focus on the joy of the Christian life so much that those who are suffering or struggling are sometimes marginalized, and fellow reformational believers so emphasize the sobriety and gravity of the God we worship that those who wear their faith and piety easily (or worse, have a sense of humor about it) are suspected of not being truly faithful. In this issue, we try to find the balance. First, Rev. Brian Borgman sets the stage with a biblical theology of emotion, helping us contextualize our feelings in light of our natures as imagebearers. EPC minister Matthew Everhard then n Southern California—the birthplace introduces us to the permeating theme of joy of the Calvary Chapel movement and in the work of the Puritan revivalist preacher home to multiple “burned-over” disJonathan Edwards. Through the Gospel story tricts, where the fire of evangelical zeal of Lazarus’s resurrection, Editor-in-Chief consumed (and disappointed) many a newly Michael Horton shows how Jesus walked with converted soul—the reformational church has his disciples in their grief and suffering—not long been having a PR crisis. Small, straitsteamrolling over their pain with verses, not laced, and unsexy, it lives on the outskirts of wallowing with them in sorrow, but comfortthe Protestant world, too confessional to be ing them with his presence as the Living accessible and too small to be visWord. Teacher/writer Joe Smith ible. We’re frustrated by openly concludes by tackling the pracemotional and expressive wortical question of our emotional ship that almost excludes biblical reaction to art. “ OUR FEELINGS orthodoxy; and I’ve sometimes To quote the late great B. J. ARE PART wondered if we haven’t swung to Thomas: We’re not “hooked on a the other side of the spectrum by feeling,” but our feelings are part OF WHO formulating an orthodox liturgy of who we are as humans, and we WE ARE that leaves no room for emocan take them seriously without AS HUMANS.” tional expression, as if emotion being overcome by them. We may itself (and not the abuse of emonot be “high on believing,” but we tion) was the problem. Are we so can (and should) be excited for driven by the negative examples of the day when our faith becomes worship that we’ve overshadowed the beauty sight, and joyful in our assurance that the of true worship? Are overwhelming joy and same Holy Spirit who raised Christ from the exuberant gladness incompatible with reverdead is the same Spirit who lives in us now, ence and awe? Where exactly do emotions fit blessing our troubles and sanctifying us even in the grander scope of individual and corpoin our deepest distress. rate Christian life? The Protestant Church (reformational and nondenominational) seems to be somewhat schizophrenic when it comes to this question. Our nondenominational brothers and BRO OKE VENTURA assoc iate editor

INTERVIEW

Where Do We Go from Here? A Theological-Historical Discussion on Christian Slavery with Ayrian Yasar and Katharine Gerbner

t’s not exactly a revelation to say that racial tension is part of American existence. The fact that the recent deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Alton Sterling, Charleena Lyles, and others have elicited such polarizing responses and reactions is evidence of this. The tension isn’t new—the social and legal boundaries separating black and white Americans were drawn clearly from the moment the first African stepped onto the shores of Virginia in 1619—but that it has continued for so long is, in a sense, perplexing. After all, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution abolished slavery, established citizenship for all persons born in the US, and granted persons of color the

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

right to vote. The Civil Rights Voting Acts of 1964 outlawed unequal application of voter registration rights and racial segregation in schools, employment, and public facilities, and the Civil Rights Voting Act of 1965 prohibited legislation that resulted in the discrimination of racial and language minorities. So what’s the problem? The problem is that legislation counteracting a racially biased system doesn’t automatically result in the eradication of a racially biased society. Enacting laws is a good, necessary, and foundational first step—but establishing a nation where all citizens of every cultural and ethnic heritage enjoy equally unfettered use of their right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness takes much, much longer. When the separation of white citizens from the black

INTERVIEW

population is written into a nation’s government, societal, and religious institutions from its inception forward, it takes more than a presidential signature to undo its effects. While it’s true that the church has contributed significantly to that reparation through the efforts of abolitionists such as William Wilberforce, John Wesley, Charles Finney, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, it’s also true that the church has participated in its continuance through slaveholders such as George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and Richard Fuller. What do we do with this? How does the church acknowledge and own its past—both good and bad—without falling into either unconstructive guilt or superficial virtue signaling? To better understand the history of the relationship between black and white Christians, we asked a black theologian, Ayrian Yasar, and a white historian, Katharine Gerbner, to talk about Dr. Gerbner’s recently released book Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

A Y : In your book, you write (p. 267) that this

project began as a study of Quaker antislavery thought. What motivated you to focus instead on the Protestant influence of pro-slavery thought?

KG: I began by researching the 1688 Quaker

Protest against slavery, the first antislavery petition in American history. I was interested in the emergence of antislavery thought and how it took root. I thought I would mostly write about the German influence on abolition. As I looked closer at the 1688 Protest, however, I became less interested in the petition itself than in the fact that it was rejected—even among Quakers, who later become so involved with antislavery and abolitionism. Why did Quakers and other Protestants accept slavery in the seventeenth century? How did they justify slavery within their theological worldview? These became the questions that fueled my research.

AY: As you explain the Protestant theological and legal thought of the seventeenth century, the picture painted is one of uncertainty with the relationship between Protestant conversion and manumission. Why were these such difficult issues for Protestant nations who regarded themselves as “free soil”? KG: The underlying issue was how to legally justify keeping Christians as private property. Virtually all Europeans in the seventeenth century—both Protestant and Catholic—believed that slavery could be legal and good, as long as

How does the church acknowledge and own its past—both good and bad—without falling into either unconstructive guilt or superficial virtue signaling? 6

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

it was practiced correctly. For example, most Christians would have agreed that enslaving non-Christians in a “just war” would have beneficial effects by expanding Christianity. The problem is that once they had slaves, most Christian slave owners did not want to give up their human property—even when their slaves converted to Christianity. This wasn’t as much of a problem in Catholic regions such as the Spanish and Portuguese empires, where the law was clear that conversion would not affect a slave’s status as property. But in Protestant empires, such as the Dutch and English, there was no such law. The idea of “free soil”—which stated that any slave would become free upon arriving in a place such as England or the Netherlands—added uncertainty to the question of Protestant slavery. So Protestant slave owners reacted, in most cases, by preventing their slaves from converting to Christianity.

AY: When writing about “Protestant Supremacy,”

you say that it defined mastery through religious belonging and excluded most enslaved people from the established Protestant churches (p. 31). In light of the fact that imperial nations touted evangelization as a major justification for expansion and used slave baptism to mobilize support for a regime (p. 92), where did the breakdown occur? How were Protestant sacraments coopted to create an atmosphere that restricted the religious opportunities for enslaved and free Africans in the Dutch, English, and Danish colonies (p. 14), while using the term “Christianity” as an ethnic category in opposition to the categories of “Negro” and “slave” (p. 45)? K G : The quick answer is that the justification for imperial expansion—i.e., spreading Protestantism—largely turned out to be an advertising ploy. Once Protestants relied on slaves to produce cash crops such as sugar and tobacco, their priorities became (1) protecting their income (i.e., slave labored-produced materials) and (2) security (i.e., preventing slave revolts).

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

They excluded slaves from Protestant churches and used religious difference to justify both enslavement and cruel treatment.

In the seventeenth century, most Protestant slave owners believed that allowing slaves to become Christians would endanger both their income and their security. They feared that Christian slaves were more likely to rebel and would refuse to work. So they created the ideology of “Protestant Supremacy,” which I argue was the forerunner of White Supremacy. They excluded slaves from Protestant churches and used religious difference to justify both enslavement and cruel treatment. This is why missionaries tried to argue that Christian slaves would be more obedient. They were trying to counter the ideology of “Protestant Supremacy” and encourage slave conversion. But really, it wasn’t until the development of race—the idea that people of African descent could be legally enslaved solely because they were black (rather than non-Christian)—that slave owners gradually allowed more slaves to convert to Christianity.

AY: When you write about the different mission-

aries sent to evangelize slave populations, you

INTERVIEW

recount how the slaves desired and highly valued the skills of reading and writing and the possession of books. You write: “The governor worried that learning how to write and converting to Christianity would make slaves believe that they were free, break down the social hierarchy, and destroy the work schedule.” Why did slaves pursue reading and writing, and why did slave owners believe that reading, writing, and—in some cases, school meetings—were dangerous (p. 182)? KG : Enslaved people recognized that reading and writing were important and powerful skills, and they actively sought out missionaries so that they could become literate. Aside from learning to read the Bible, enslaved men and women could use reading skills to learn more about the government, their enslavers, the empire—really anything. Writing was even more powerful; if enslaved people could write, then they could communicate over long distances, even over oceans. In fact, a group of enslaved people in Virginia did write a letter to the bishop of London in the 1720s, arguing that they should not be enslaved. Slave owners saw all of this as a threat and, partially, they were right. Writing could be used to plan a revolt, to build closer ties between

enslaved people, or to become more informed about religious and political matters. During this period, not all Europeans were literate, so learning how to read and write was also a claim to class status.

AY: In what ways did slaves use religion and edu-

cation to benefit their lives socially and legally, in contrast to the missionaries who stressed spiritual freedom over physical freedom and were intent on pacifying plantation owners with their arguments? KG: Even when missionaries stopped teaching

literacy, enslaved and free blacks continued to teach one another how to read and write when possible. This was an important and consequential benefit, though it could also be dangerous, since most slave owners did not want literate slaves. Joining the church also provided enslaved people with an opportunity to advocate for their family members. I’ve found numerous examples of enslaved people asking to live closer to their families and citing the church congregation as a primary justification for their request. Being part of a church community furthermore provided an institutional venue that, while sometimes rigid, still provided a new way to create community.

AY: How do you think the singular focus on evan-

nslaved people recognized E that reading and writing were important and powerful skills, and they actively sought out missionaries so that they could become literate.

gelization by the missionaries proved to be both a positive and a negative force for the slave populations they sought to reach? KG: Literacy education—when offered—had

an important and mostly positive effect. Missionaries also, in many cases, advocated for enslaved and free black families. Even if most missionaries were intent on pacifying slave owners, many also tried to keep enslaved families together and to help congregants who wanted to visit or live closer to their spouse, children, or siblings.

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

On the negative side, missionaries did real and lasting damage by creating the ideology of “Christian Slavery.” They argued that Christianized slaves would be more obedient and pliant than others and that Christianity was a beneficial force on slave plantations. This depiction of Christianity formed the cornerstone of pro-slavery theology in the nineteenth century. It has also, I think, painted an inaccurate picture of how Christianity actually functioned within slave societies. Christianity played a complex role for enslaved people, offering both opportunities and new restrictions.

Being cognizant of the history of oppression within Protestant churches can, I hope, help Christians today recognize the historical roots of these inequities and overcome them.

AY: Are there ways you see religion and education used now to create social barriers between ethnic groups, and do you have any thoughts, based on your study of history, about how to overcome any such barriers? KG: Slave owners absolutely used religion to

legalize slavery and to create a social and legal barrier between themselves and their slaves. In the seventeenth century, religious difference (i.e., not being Christian) was the primary justification for slavery. By the nineteenth century, most slave owners allowed their slaves to become Christians, but they erected new barriers at the same time—forcing slaves and free blacks to sit in the balconies of churches, for example. This type of racism led free blacks such as Richard Allen to found separate institutions, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In my opinion, the way to overcome these barriers is quite simply by breaking them down. Even when churches have been integrated, there are still barriers erected (intentionally or not) that make it difficult for minorities to claim leadership positions. Being cognizant of the history of oppression within Protestant churches can, I hope, help Christians today recognize the historical roots of these inequities and overcome them. It is especially important for churches to understand the role that Christianity played in supporting slavery. Instead of avoiding this

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

history, or pretending it didn’t happen, an unflinching examination of history can provide perspective and strength for people to do the right thing, which is usually the hard thing. I hope that my book shows that individuals made decisions that led to “Protestant Supremacy.” They allowed religion to become a tool for oppression. It did not have to be this way. Evangelical Christians and Quakers also played a central role in the abolitionist movement, showing that Protestant Christianity could be used to support emancipation. These divergent stories show us how religion can be used as a force for division or as an opportunity to break down barriers. AYRIAN YASAR holds an MA in biblical studies from Westminster Seminary California and is an associate editor at www.beautifulchristianlife.com. KATHARINE GERBNER holds a PhD from Harvard University

and is assistant professor of history at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

C H R I S T & C U LT U R E

The Art of My Reformation by Steven Kozar

or the past thirty years, I’ve worked as a professional realist, specializing in the hyper-realist style. My artistic education nurtured my affinity for the paintings produced during the Reformation, but my understanding of the theological developments from that period took somewhat longer to develop. Like most Bible-believing Christians in our day, I began my spiritual life under the guidance of the experts who ran the megachurches and published the best-selling Christian books. Without even realizing it, I adopted a foundational cluster of beliefs that caused me to accept aspects of my life and my church that were at best counterproductive and at worst sinful. I have spent a great deal of time

thinking about the parallels between my growth as an artist and as a Christian, how the various instructors and pastors helped me to clarify my own vision and informed my understanding about who God is and who I am, and the various challenges that God was pleased to use to stimulate my studies. The journey from popular evangelicalism to the Reformation tradition was for me (as it is for many) a long one, and the similarities between that and my growth as an artist have always struck me as an interesting example of God’s providence. When I think back on my early days as a Christian (I was converted in high school), I’m very thankful for the many things I learned, the lifelong Christian friends I made, and the high regard for Scripture that was instilled in

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

I loved art that was beautiful and well-crafted, art that hints at the transcendent reality in the limited materials of its medium.

me from the beginning of my faith. I knew that I needed Jesus to forgive my sins, so I naturally began to try to “show” him that I was a good enough servant. I had “made Jesus my Savior,” and now I would work hard to “make him my Lord” in all areas of my life. Although I had always displayed artistic ability and competence, I had some difficulty understanding the role that art might play in my life as a Christian adult. The impression I gleaned from my church and fellow believers was that the evangelism and conversion of the lost was the highest and holiest vocation any believer could aspire to, so much so that anything else seemed superficial and almost unworthy. Nevertheless, I decided that I really wanted to be a painter more than anything else. Because I had been reading books by C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, I developed a fairly healthy understanding of the role the arts could play in the life of the Christian and in the church, although I never had any formal discipleship or theological training. I enrolled in a big state university and took as many art classes as I could, as well as some courses in philosophy, music, and history. In college, I was confronted with non-Christian viewpoints and had to really think through my beliefs in

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

order to maintain my faith. At the same time, interestingly enough, my desire to be a realist artist was being challenged by my art professors. Even my instructors in my introductory courses (Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture) considered the traditional mediums largely unnecessary (perhaps even harmful) in the drive to move art progressively into the future. I remember the day some fellow students in my Drawing 101 course gathered around my desk to watch me sketch something. Our professor remarked that my work wasn’t that good, and that artwork with obvious mistakes was more interesting. He advised me to “loosen up,” and I became so frustrated by the lack of clear training that I violently scribbled across my drawing and ruined it. The professor pronounced it “much better.” These and other similar experiences in my art classes showed me that the definition of “art” was completely different from what I’d understood it to be. It seemed that modern art wasn’t about accurately representing what we see and experience in the world, but more about making a sociopolitical or philosophical statement, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go that route. I loved art that was beautiful and well-crafted, art that hints at the transcendent reality in the limited materials of its medium. As I was struggling with the confusion and frustration created by my art classes, I was also taking courses in art and European history. I became more acquainted with the Renaissance and the Reformation, which gave me a solid reference point to work from. Reformation artists, such as Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein, became role models for me. My preferred style of realism was practiced by time-honored artists, and that encouraged me. I had read Francis Schaeffer’s How Shall We Then Live? I therefore had a passing familiarity with the Reformation, but discovering the work of these men who did wonderfully detailed and lifelike works was a revelation. They used their art to say something about the human condition and God, not through the symbolism and spiritualistic execution of previous generations, but through a realistic

C H R I S T & C U LT U R E

representation that pointed toward a heavenly reality. Since I had found a style of art that resonated with me, I rather offhandedly decided that I would ignore the modernist ideas about art being propagated by much of the university staff, and I would attempt to paint in a realist style. It appears to me that modern art theory was so busy trying to be progressive, open-minded, and intellectual that it unhelpfully jettisoned the historical and structural underpinnings of the discipline that gave it its power. When I asked questions about what certain abstract and crudely crafted pieces were trying to communicate, I often received abstract and superficial answers: “This unattractive metal sculpture is exploring the sense of place that ugliness has in public spaces.” “These poorly crafted and unimaginative giant boxes are a statement about how capitalism puts people in boxes.” Although I understood and could speak the language of this kind of art, I didn’t find it compelling enough to pursue. I noticed how university art students often spent little time on craftsmanship because they were encouraged to be radical and avantgarde, which meant that eventually no one was radical or avant-garde. As I look back on this

I t appears to me that modern art theory was so busy trying to be progressive, openminded, and intellectual that it unhelpfully jettisoned the historical and structural underpinnings of the discipline that gave it its power.

period in my education, I see that I really just wanted to be left alone to make good realist art, and the philosophical issues I saw informing modern art at the time were simply not interesting to me. I had found my style and I wanted to hone it. After a year and a half, I entered a more traditional art school and received training that greatly accelerated my technical skills as an artist. Although I learned a lot in a short amount of time, I wanted to pursue an extremely detailed style of painting, which was generally frowned upon by most of the staff. Eighteen months later, I ran out of money, and my new wife and I decided it was the perfect time for me to take a chance on an art career, since we had no children or large expenses yet. Shortly thereafter, an exclusive gallery began selling my paintings. My art career (like my theological growth) was a hundred times more difficult than I imagined, but by the grace of God we survived. Looking back, I can see a connection between my need to show God that I was a good enough servant and my need to make ridiculously realistic paintings—almost as if I could validate my faith to the world through my art. (It’s also true that, like most people who have something they’ve worked hard to display, I’m a show-off and I like the attention my paintings bring me.) I raised my family as a faithful evangelical until I found myself (along with many others) the father of adult children who had largely abandoned Christianity. I watched an entire generation raised on Veggie Tales and Adventures in Odyssey reject the faith of their parents as if it were a bad nineties sitcom. I think at least part of what has caused them to reject Christianity is the pandering that characterizes some evangelistic methods. When church is marketed like a weight-loss program or new coffee shop instead of the fellowship of Christ’s body, it’s not surprising that those raised in that environment get bored and begin to want something new. It’s no longer a church; it’s a fad. When the church emphasizes

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

e can and should meet unbelievers wherever they are, W but we can and should be faithful to meet those unbelievers with good news, not just good advice.

the gift of salvation in the person and work of Jesus Christ, and not just moral improvement and earthly success, it frees itself from the burden of fulfilling expectations it was never able to fulfill and becomes what it was always intended to be. In my late forties, I came to realize that I had been skimming across the surface of Christianity. As I surveyed the damage dealt by shallow theology, cultural assimilation, and broken promises, I decided to dig into the study of theology and the history of the church. One of the best things I did was to deliberately ignore the popular “super pastors” and seek out better sources of information—not because they were all wrong, but because I just wasn’t sure who to trust anymore. It was a difficult time: I was excited to learn what exactly the church was and more about the relationship between my faith and Christ’s work, but I was also angry at the continual upheaval I experienced, as each erroneous foundational idea (usually gleaned from one of the super pastors) was confronted. Just as I had felt no compulsion as a young man to adopt many of the assumptions about modern art, I eventually discovered that many modern evangelical ideas weren’t nearly as new and innovative as they appeared. My studies of church history showed me that many of the bad ideas currently undermining the gospel message in today’s modern church are often just rehashed examples of revivalism, pietism, mysticism, and individualism all mixed together with a dab of pragmatism and a side of postmodernism. While the desire to reach unbelievers is a noble and worthy goal, I noticed that our eagerness to accommodate the surrounding culture

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

was resulting in a church that assimilated into the culture instead. I became convinced that “doing life together” and “being the only Bible your friends will ever read” could only be done rightly if the gospel of God’s salvation in Christ applied by the Holy Spirit was clearly preached through word and sacrament. We can and should meet unbelievers wherever they are, but we can and should be faithful to meet those unbelievers with good news, not just good advice. My wife and I are happy to be attending a Confessional Lutheran Church where we participate in historical, liturgical worship that is saturated in Holy Scripture, along with brothers and sisters of every age and phase of life. I love the reverent music and profound hymns; the centrality of God’s word where Jesus Christ, the Risen Savior, is clearly taught and proclaimed every single Sunday as the Good Shepherd who gave his life for his sheep. I now come to Christ to receive something from him (namely, the assurance of my unmerited forgiveness), as opposed to offering him a worthy sacrifice of praise (or a painting). Whether my paintings will have some deep spiritual impact or just be seen as beautiful works of art is not as closely tied to my faith as it once was. Christ’s atoning sacrifice has made a way for me to be at peace with God, and my need to prove something through my art has faded. But it’s also true that I still like to show off a bit by making the best paintings I can, because showcasing the beauty of creation is, in a certain sense, a form of worship. STEVEN KOZAR is an artist, musician and blogger/podcaster at Messed Up Church.

THEOLOGY

Reflections on the Reformed Resurgence by Carl Trueman

t is now over a decade since Collin Hansen coined the term “young, restless, and Reformed” (YRR) to characterize a rising generation of Christians who had rediscovered the vitality of the central doctrines of the Reformation: Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, and so on. What Hansen (then a journalist with Christianity Today) had noticed was that while much of the trendy Christian media attention focused on the emerging/emergent church, there was another vibrant strand of evangelical Christianity gaining momentum in the United States and beyond. While the emergent gurus, such as Brian McLaren and Tony Jones, were moving in a more non- and even perhaps anti-doctrinal direction, other church

leaders—John Piper, Tim Keller, and so forth— were doing the opposite. They were offering their churches solid, historic, doctrinal teaching, and (perhaps counterintuitively given the dominant relativist ethos of the times) they were gaining large audiences and having influence well beyond the walls of their own churches. Over a decade later, there is no doubt which movement had the greater chronological stamina. The emergent/emerging phenomenon—described with staggering hyperbole and self-importance by one of its leading lights as the most important church happening since the Reformation—has all but vanished. Meanwhile, many of the personalities, institutions, organizations, and churches that were involved in the Reformed resurgence remain and have arguably

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

stabilized. Now, therefore, seems to be a good time to assess the movement with at least some of the historical distance from its origins and early exuberance.

THE DISPARATE ORIGINS OF COALITIONAL CHRISTIANITY There is no single point of origin for the Reformed resurgence. Perhaps ironically, Presbyterianism and the historic Reformed churches are probably the least important factor in the narrative. Hansen’s book did highlight the role of the Presbyterian Church in America’s remarkable Reformed University Fellowship—a network of college campus ministries run by ordained ministers—in fostering Reformed churchmanship and spirituality among students. There were other Presbyterians and Reformed who also played a role. R. C. Sproul had been popularizing solid Reformed theology for decades and had a huge impact within broadly Reformed circles through his books and Ligonier Conferences. Michael Horton and White Horse Inn have been working hard to make thoughtful Reformed theology accessible and, more importantly, interesting to a new generation. Tullian Tchividjian, Billy Graham’s grandson and successor to D. James Kennedy’s pulpit in Fort Lauderdale, found a wide audience through the immediate profile that his family connections brought him and through his accessible and attractive presentation of a gospel of unconditional forgiveness. But the most significant figure from this traditional Reformed church context has been undoubtedly Tim Keller, the PCA pastor of Redeemer Church in Manhattan, whose preaching ministry, conference speaking, and writings have had unparalleled cross-over appeal to those outside of the immediate Reformed/Presbyterian world. If Keller was the cross-over giant that Presbyterianism gave to the wider evangelical world, then there were others who also pressed home the importance of traditional

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

Many of the personalities, institutions, organizations, and churches that were involved in the Reformed resurgence remain and have arguably stabilized.

Calvinist doctrine from outside the bounds of normal Reformed church life. John MacArthur spent years preaching a form of dispensational Calvinism from his pulpit and inculcating it in the pastoral students at the Master’s Seminary. The conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention, while in no way a specifically Calvinist movement, served to revitalize Southern Seminary which, under the leadership of R. Albert Mohler Jr., took on a distinctively Calvinist theological ethos in the 1990s. Mark Dever, pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, eschewed the megachurch model; and as his own congregation in Washington grew to fill its worship space, he refused to go to multiple services or engage in dramatic building expansion. Instead, he chose to adopt a strategy of church revitalization by sending good men to pastor vacant and sometimes dying churches, and thus spread Calvinistic theology through the medium of the local church. Then there were the Sovereign Grace Churches whose mothership was the congregation in Gaithersburg, Maryland, where the outgoing and cheerful C. J. Mahaney was pastor, succeeded some years later by the young and talented Joshua Harris. John Piper, longterm pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis with his own very influential

THEOLOGY

Desiring God ministry, has also been a key figure. And then there was the controversial church leader and erstwhile emergent insider Mark Driscoll, whose communication skills, media savvy, and larger-than-life personality served to make his ministry at Mars Hill Church in Seattle one of the most fascinating and controversial phenomenon in a notoriously secular city. He also oversaw Acts 29, a church planting network now led by Matt Chandler. What brought these various people and churches together was the formation of a number of important parachurch and transdenominational organizations facilitated by the rise and influence of social media. While a number of these men had their own ministry organizations, it was as they came together that the Reformed resurgence gained strength and national profile. Reformed coalition parachurches had existed before: the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, for example, had formed in response to the Evangelical and Catholics Together agreements of the 1990s, but it was and is a relatively small operation, focused on modestly sized conferences hosted by local churches. While many of the figures associated later with the Reformed resurgence served at one time on the Alliance council, they almost all migrated to the Gospel Coalition and left the Alliance behind. The Alliance simply did not have wide enough appeal to carry the movement forward in terms of the expansive ambition the leadership desired. The two most significant organizations in this regard were The Gospel Coalition (TGC) and Together for the Gospel (T4G). TGC was and is undoubtedly the flagship organization of the movement and remains the most visible and influential forum for the resurgence. Led by Tim Keller and D. A. Carson, a New Testament professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, along with a council consisting mainly of pastors, it hosts a biennial conference and over the years has developed a significant social media presence via its attractive website and its ability to recruit many talented writers and

speakers. With its listing of affiliated churches and the organizational loyalty it inspired among its followers, it has many of the trappings of a denomination. Many of the key figures in the churches and organizations mentioned above—such as Mark Dever, Mark Driscoll, Albert Mohler, and C. J. Mahaney—served on the council alongside other younger men of rising prominence, such as Kevin DeYoung and Josh Harris. Tullian Tchividjian, while never a council member, wrote a popular blog hosted on TGC’s webpage. T4G, by contrast, was a more modest enterprise. It too ran a biennial conference, on the TGC off year, but this was aimed specifically at pastors. Indeed, encouraging pastors was essentially all the organization was intended to do. Again, many of the names associated with T4G are also TGC stalwarts: the “four” are Mark Dever, Ligon Duncan, C. J. Mahaney, and Albert Mohler; and Kevin DeYoung, Matt Chandler, and Thabiti Anyabwile are regular plenary speakers, all of whom serve on the TGC council. If TGC and T4G provided dynamic leadership and some focus to the various disparate Reformed churches, ministries, and personalities, then there was one other important organization that helped galvanize the movement: Crossway Publishers. There had been publishers of Reformed literature before— Banner of Truth did sterling work in reprinting Puritan volumes and publishing the sermons of men such as Charles Haddon Spurgeon and Martyn Lloyd-Jones, but it had a somewhat staid and dusty reputation. Eerdmans and Baker had at one time been synonymous with solid Reformed publications but had intentionally broadened their catalogue over the years and lost the automatic confidence of many traditional pastors and churches. Presbyterian and Reformed (P&R) published good material but was a small family firm with limited resources. Crossway (originally Good News Publishers), based in Wheaton, Illinois, stepped into the gap. Under the innovative leadership of Al Fisher,

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

ooking back on the history of the Reformed resurgence, it L is clear that many of the problems it experienced over the years were there in seed form in its origins. Perhaps the most obvious of these was the matter of authority.

who had previously worked for both Baker and P&R, Crossway soon became the central publishing house for the literature of the Reformed resurgence, something that gained even more momentum through the work of Justin Taylor, a former associate of John Piper, who also wrote an influential TGC blog. The remarkable success of the English Standard Version Bible, along with many attractively produced volumes, helped make Crossway the publishing success of the Reformed resurgence. It produced and promoted works by the movement’s key leaders, recruited new talent, and thereby provided thoughtful literature to Christians who wanted sound theology in an accessible form. If TGC was the institutional powerhouse of the movement, then Crossway was its most important publisher.

SO WHAT WERE THE PROBLEMS? Looking back on the history of the Reformed resurgence, it is clear that many of the problems it experienced over the years were there in seed form in its origins. Perhaps the most obvious of these was the matter of authority. The movement was a broad coalition, a network; but as with all networks, a hierarchy rapidly emerged because some members of the network were better connected than others. Attach that hierarchy to powerful organizations, such as TGC, and there is the clear potential of quasiecclesiastical power and influence being exerted on the church lacking biblical warrant and structures of accountability.

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

Central to this problem were the larger-thanlife personalities who were the movement’s public face. Celebrity authority is, of course, a large part of the wider culture in America, as evidenced by product endorsements and the media’s endless appetite for commentary from Hollywood stars on all manner of topics on which they are clueless. The Young, Restless, and Reformed (YRR) movement produced its own analogous subculture of micro-celebrity. Thus the same faces tended to show up on all of the high-profile stages, thereby developing a kind of charisma that extended and fortified their influence well beyond any congregation or denomination to which they belonged. Twitter accounts served to foster the faux intimacy on which celebrity authority depends, and—given that the conferences associated with the movement were not modest local church affairs but took place in sports arenas and conference centers—the celebrity aspect of the movement both made positive sense and constituted a real problem. It made sense because it really did help to create an atmosphere of can-do optimism and encourage local church members to believe they were part of a much bigger phenomenon. When your local congregation is less than a hundred souls on a Sunday, it is immensely encouraging to be at a conference and sing hymns and hear preaching with five thousand other believers. But there was a problem: when your movement books such places, and presumably does so years in advance, it needs to make sure it can fill the seats when the conference time actually comes around. And that requires big-name speakers, of whom there is only a limited supply. It also

THEOLOGY

means one cannot afford to lose the goodwill of said big names. To this we might also add that ambition thing: when your ambition is to be the biggest show in town, you need the biggest names in town. In retrospect, it is arguable that the dependence on big names meant that too little discernment was used in the way certain figures were given central roles. Mark Driscoll was perhaps the classic case in point. Without a clear grasp of the doctrine of the Trinity, and with a carefully cultivated crude “frat boy” image and frankly disturbing views of guidance (which even involved him having visions of congregants engaging in illicit sexual activity), he was clearly an unwholesome maverick from the very start, ill-qualified to provide the movement with theological direction or ecclesiastical leadership. Yet he was still given a platform and influence by those who should have known better. To TGC’s credit, he did leave the organization after the T. D. Jakes/Trinity debacle, along with the equally problematic James MacDonald; but the problems had been evident long before then, and he also continued to influence the broader movement until he finally left Mars Hill in the wake of bullying accusations. That the church closed within weeks of his departure is ample testimony to the fact that it was built almost exclusively on the power of his personality and nothing deeper. Tullian Tchividjian was similarly problematic. Another figure given great prominence within the movement, in retrospect, his fall now seems to have been almost inevitable. Many had warned of the dangerous antinomian tendencies of his theology long before he left TGC, but such critics were either ignored or excoriated as legalists. Yet his thinking had always seemed superficial and trite, and had he not been Billy Graham’s grandson, he would probably not have received the attention he did or been given the authority he enjoyed through conference platforms and his blog. The later sexual sin seemed to confirm what some had suspected all along: his grasp of theology and his commitment to

biblical teaching on holiness were tenuous at best, and what he had really done was nurture a cult of personality. Institutionally, the story has had its problems too. The Sovereign Grace Churches became engulfed in a scandal about child sexual abuse and alleged cover-ups. This led to a public outcry and to some significant self-examination among its own leaders regarding polity and the authoritarian ethos of the denomination. The leadership structure of Sovereign Grace had been hierarchical and top-down, a fact that served to make the allegations of a cover-up at least plausible in the public mind, whether actually true or not. And TGC itself often gave the appearance of dealing with criticism simply by ignoring it and by marginalizing or maligning the critics. In addition to the celebrity factor, there were also more subtle but no less significant problems. The ambition of the movement as a whole to be the dominant force in conservative evangelicalism in the United States also created its own distinctive issues. For example, this would clearly require a dominant social media and print presence, which meant there was a need for constantly recreating the literary market of the Reformed resurgence. Publishers and websites need a constant supply of new books and new material to generate the money and the traffic to keep themselves in business. They do not simply respond to market demands; they actually help to create those same demands. That places pressure on editorial policy, pushing toward a preference for the light and the popular that will sell quickly and just as quickly cease to be relevant, and even creates the temptation to be less discerning in the material that is published. The same applies to websites. When copy needs to be generated on a daily basis, it seems one has two choices: a team that takes turns and produces perhaps one or two quality pieces a day; or a mass of material that will inevitably vary markedly in quality and press toward an overall dumbing down of discourse. When authors become brands, with

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

I n practice, “Reformed” in the context of the YRR basically meant (and still means) “broadly Calvinist” in the sense that its adherents hold to some form of antiPelagian, predestinarian soteriology. Everything else appears to be up for grabs.

their names more important than the content they produce, many blogs became trite or repetitive or superfluous, and some leading figures were damaged by plagiarism and rumors of using ghostwriters. To these problems we should add perhaps the most significant one of all: a national (and now international) movement with big ambitions ultimately required a highly eclectic theological basis. To characterize figures—as disparate as John Piper, Mark Driscoll, and Tim Keller—as “Reformed” is to indicate that the word is really being used equivocally with regard to its historical and typical ecclesiastical meaning, referring to those churches that subscribe to one or more of the historic Reformed confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is not to denigrate its use in the context of the YRR, but simply to say that we should not allow the term to imply a deeper theological coherence than actually exists among the constituent members. In practice, “Reformed” in the context of the YRR basically meant (and still means) “broadly Calvinist” in the sense that its adherents hold to some form of anti-Pelagian, predestinarian soteriology. Everything else appears to be up for grabs—baptism, the Lord’s Supper, cessationism, polity, and eschatology. That made the

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

rather denominational-looking ambitions of a group such as TGC somewhat worrisome to those for whom agreement on these matters was not of the same order of importance as, say, the incarnation, but was still vital if the church was to teach the whole counsel of God to congregations. Of course, parachurches are always going to be somewhat complicated in terms of theological confession. The key to whether this is a serious problem or not lies not so much in the organization’s confession as in the organization’s mission. Thus it does not really matter if a Christian anti-abortion society takes no position on baptism, because baptism is irrelevant to its fundamental mission. But the situation becomes more complicated the closer the organization’s mission is to that of the church. The point at which a parachurch becomes a quasichurch may not be obvious, but once it starts to supplant the local church or denomination in the imaginations of those involved, the danger is obvious. And when a quasi-church movement is built around coalitions and parachurch ministries, the problem of theological identity and the temptation to relativize those things that might strain the coalition but cannot be relativized without ecclesiastical cost can be great indeed. Evangelical coalitions always tend toward lowest-common-denominator theology and, in practice, congregational polity and a credobaptist view of baptism. In short, Baptists surrender little or nothing in being wholeheartedly involved in such groups, while Presbyterians and Anglicans need to surrender everything that makes them distinctive.

FUTURE PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES Looking back, a number of points seem obvious. Did the movement benefit from being the latest cool thing at the time it emerged? Undoubtedly. Was it overconfident and perhaps even somewhat arrogant about its success and overall importance? Arguably. Did it promote

THEOLOGY

individuals who should never have been allowed into a pulpit? Definitely. But as failings go, these are not unique to the Reformed resurgence. They afflict all populist movements riding high on a wave of early excitement and enthusiasm. The big questions are not “Were mistakes made?” but “Has the movement learned from its mistakes and become better as a result?” and “Has it strengthened not itself and its own brands but the local churches that it claims to serve?” For the first question—learning from mistakes— it seems (at least from my somewhat outsider perspective) that the main problem of the celebrity cults that the early Reformed resurgence fostered has ameliorated somewhat. The scandals involving the superstars seemed to have sobered the leadership and many (if not perhaps all) of the ground troops on this issue. That is a good thing. If the focus now moves away from the conference-headlining figures to the serious content of theology and to the local churches that provide the movement with its only really legitimate reason for existence, then the future is brighter. Yet even as the cults of celebrity seem to have abated somewhat, the problem of theological eclecticism and diversity looks set to emerge in ways that might well fracture and even shatter the movement. There is evidence to suggest that the charismatic issue may well return to the foreground of discussion—and in a way that puts strain on alliances. Yet far more difficult, however, is the emerging tension within the ranks over matters of “social justice”—a term many people seem to use as if its meaning were a given and yet few have taken time to define with any nuance. The YRR was never unified on matters of the church’s role in cultural engagement. The 9Marks men, along with figures such as Kevin DeYoung and traditional Presbyterians, tended to emphasize the church’s primary task in the proclamation of the gospel of the forgiveness of sins, locating the center of the church’s life in the Sunday worship services and the preaching of the word. If the world was to be transformed, then it would come about through the transformation

of individual believers via the ordinary means of grace: believers who went about their worldly business in a manner shaped by their Christian character. Yet there were always elements within the movement pushing for a more comprehensive notion of the church’s role, involving not simply the typical diaconal mercy ministries but also the transformation of wider society through direct intervention. Such is, of course, a position with a considerable pedigree even within the more traditional Reformed churches, with Abraham Kuyper often being regarded as the most significant intellectual figure in this regard. Often the two streams can live peacefully together, but at moments when the stakes seem high, the rhetorical temperature can quickly rise. We live in such a time. In recent years, as the United States has become engulfed in another of its periodic seasons of soul-searching on matters of race—exacerbated this time by the rise of the politics of sexual identity and the divisive presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and, of course, Donald J. Trump—this fissure within the YRR over cultural and political issues has rapidly widened to become a visible and potentially unbridgeable gulf. Whether a group such as The Gospel Coalition can survive in its current form, given the way in which social justice issues are beginning to define the evangelical landscape, remains to be seen. The battle within the movement—and even within its flagship organization, TGC—is unlikely to be a traditional struggle over matters of doctrine, but rather one over how those doctrines relate (or not) to changing the world politically here and now. Having said that, a group such as The Gospel Coalition has thus far proved very capable of maintaining itself as a unified body, despite the fact that it contained serious theological disagreements from its very inception. Whether it can do so in the heightened political atmosphere and polarized discourse of today’s America remains to be seen. I am not personally optimistic on that score. As to the second question—has the movement strengthened the local church?—this is difficult

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

to quantify. In my own experience, most of the congregants at the church where I pastor are too busy doing their regular jobs to have a lot of time for reading blogs and attending conferences. Yet among the seminary students whom I teach, enthusiasm for TGC and T4G seems to be holding strong. That a proportion of the literature produced by the movement is poor in quality does not detract from the fact that there is today probably more good Christian literature addressing a wider range of subjects than at any previous point in history. Groups such as 9Marks have produced much excellent material for guiding local church pastors, elders, deacons, and members with regard to their respective duties and responsibilities. What will strengthen the movement in this regard will be a self-conscious acknowledgment on the part of the big organizations and the big personalities of the power they wield and a consequent effort to make sure this is kept within legitimate bounds. One cannot truly serve the church while functionally supplanting the church either directly, through making conferences and the online community a substitute for local congregational life, or indirectly by providing literature and teaching in such a way that the significance of local teachers and elders is subverted. This is not a new problem. From the moment the printing press was invented, it became increasingly easy to detach teaching from real human relationships. With the Internet, this has reached unprecedented levels. The problem facing groups such as TGC is therefore not unique to them. How they manage it—if indeed they can—will reveal to what extent they can make good on their ambition of being the handmaiden, rather than the master, of the local church. Perhaps more emphasis on small, local conferences, the promotion of the work of pastors and elders in congregations of modest—and thus more typical—size, and a conscious rejection of the need to produce material on whatever is currently trending in pop culture in favor of the tried and true classical loci of Christian theology and pastoral concern might help.

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

For all its faults, the excitement it generated for good theology was— and remains—most welcome at the very point in time when it seemed that a postmodern relativism was set to dissolve the church into the wider culture.

CONCLUSION Ten years on, only the most cynical of commentators would argue that the YRR has done no good. For all its faults, the excitement it generated for good theology was—and remains—most welcome at the very point in time when it seemed that a postmodern relativism was set to dissolve the church into the wider culture. The emergent church has gone the way of the pigs in Animal Farm—as corrupt and worldly as the American megachurch evangelicalism it originally sought to critique. The YRR is still here and, for all of the past problems and present strains, it could yet have a decent future. It is now middle-aged and more sedate than restless. But that is hopefully merely a part of the process of growing up. The key to the movement’s success will ultimately be the ability of its leaders to realize when its constituent organizations have served their purpose and can be allowed to disband and disappear. CARL TRUEMAN is the author of Grace Alone: Salvation as a

Gift of God (Zondervan, 2017) and Luther on the Christian Life (Crossway, 2015), and cohost of the podcast Mortification of Spin. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and two sons.

TELL US YOUR STORY. What have White Horse Inn and Modern Reformation meant to you, your family, or your church? Your stories encourage us in our work, and weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d love to hear them.

WHITEHORSEINN.ORG/TELL

V O L .2 7 | N O. 5

FEATURES

“When we are out of joint with our purpose in being, we will feel a great longing in our souls that beckons to be satisfied. Our hearts will ache for satisfaction. This is because joy is not merely incidental to our being; it is vital.” — M AT T H E W E V E R H A R D

“NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS”? A BIBLICALTHEOLOGY PRIMER ON THE EMOTIONS

JONATHAN EDWARDS: THE THEOLOGIAN OF JOY

THE LAST ENEMY AND THE FINAL VICTORY: SINGING THE BLUES WITH JESUS

THINK ABOUT THESE THINGS: FIVE QUESTIONS ON ART

illustration by

BRIAN B ORGMAN

DÁNIEL TAYLOR

“ NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS”? A B I B L I C A L-T H E O L O GY P R I M E R ON THE EMOTIONS

EELINGS, nothings more than feelings,” so sang Perry Como. For my wife’s sake, I’ll throw in the Bees Gees as well: “It’s just emotion that’s taken me over.” We could go on—and on. In our pop culture, emotions are really nothing more than strong feelings we b asically cannot control. On the other hand, they are often presented as the best part of life. Yes, “I’m hooked on a feeling.” “Hooked on a feeling…” That that sounds good, I think. Nevertheless, our culture also recognizes the toxicity of emotions (Emotions Anonymous is actually a real organization). Emotional health is the goal for many people, and it is frequently seen as crucial for attaining success. From our culture’s perspective, we love emotions, even when they seem to be tossing us around like a Ping-Pong ball in a windstorm. We also blame emotions as those villainous feelings that cause us pain. Frankly, since nothing helpful emerges here, perhaps the church can provide some helpful perspective on the emotions. Unfortunately, what the church has often said about emotions isn’t much better or more helpful than what culture says. When I was a new believer in the early 1980s, it seemed I was in a constant tug-of-war. I read and heard that emotions are just the caboose; the engine is fact. The coal car is faith, and the caboose is feelings. The train will run fine on fact and faith; feelings are optional. But feelings never felt optional. On the other side of the rope, emotions were a

requirement. If you were “touched by God,” you would feel it. And you should want to feel it. You were supposed to feel God’s presence and power. After all, we would sing, “Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place; I can feel his mighty power and grace.” Even more amazing: “I hear the brush of angel’s wings; I see glory on each face”! Doctrine and the mind were on one side; emotions and experience were on the other. To say I was confused is an understatement. If my emotions could not be trusted, if they were optional, nonessential to faith, and yet God’s presence could be, indeed should be felt, then what was I to do? Faith needed to be felt. After all, wasn’t assurance simply feeling saved? Most certainly, a feeling-driven faith proves unstable, and “feeling saved” is no foundation for full assurance. But then again, a Joe Friday intellectualism that focuses only on “the facts, ma’am, just the facts” falls short of a robust Christianity filled with gratitude, fear, joy, peace, and love. The ultimate answer to the role of emotions in the Christian life needs to be searched out in God’s word. If the Bible addresses the whole person, then the Bible can at least give us a framework for understanding the emotions.

FEELINGS, EMOTIONS, AFFECTIONS

We are made in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26–28), and our emotions should be viewed as a part of that image of God in us.

here are a few words in the Bible that can convey the concept of “feelings.” For instance, in the Song of Solomon: “My beloved extended his hand through the opening, and my feelings were aroused for him” (5:4 NASB). The Hebrew word mēĕh generally means “belly, stomach, entrails, intestines, or more figuratively, the inner being (seat of the 1 emotions).” There is a similar concept with the Hebrew word kilyāh, meaning the “kidneys; or 2 as the innermost, the most secret part of man.” An example of this usage is found in Jeremiah 11:20, “But, O Lord of hosts, who judges righteously, who tried the feelings and the heart.” The ESV says, “Who tests the heart and mind.” The New Testament also has words that convey similar ideas. Feelings or emotions are sometimes

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

expressed in visceral terms. Jesus “felt compassion [Greek, splanchnizomai]” on the crowds (Matt. 9:36), and Paul longed for the Philippians with “the affection of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:8). Although these are helpful, the Bible does not give us a clinical definition of emotions. The Bible does, however, frequently describe emotions. Some might argue and even make distinctions between emotions and affections. For this article, I will not be maintaining these finer distinctions and will basically use the terms “emotions” and “affections” interchangeably. Matthew Elliott gives a helpful definition of the emotions: Emotions are not primitive impulses to be controlled or ignored, but cognitive judgments or construals that tell us about ourselves and our world. In this understanding, destructive motives can be changed, beneficial emotions can be cultivated, and 3 emotions are a crucial part of morality. Emotions are cognitive: they reflect our values and judgments, and they are vital in relationships. Far from being merely the caboose, emotions appear to be more important than an optional feature to our humanity. But how do we go about understanding them? This is where good, biblical theology can help us.

EMOTIONS AND THE IMAGE OF GOD good biblical anthropology will not allow us to simply relegate emotions to the baser part of our nature. Rather, a biblical anthropology will give us a framework for looking at emotions: first as seen in God himself, and then as seen in the Son of God in the incarnation. We are made in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26–28), and our emotions should be viewed as a part of that image of God in us. In Scripture, God has and expresses perfect, holy emotions: God grieves over sin (Gen. 6:5–6), God hates certain things (Prov. 6:16–19), God delights in his Son (Isa. 42:1), and God takes joy in his people (Zeph. 3:17). While there are hundreds of

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

examples, these are sufficient to make our point. Some people immediately object because the Westminster Confession says that God is 4 “without passions.” It is beyond the scope of this article to explore in depth the heated debate regarding the doctrine of divine impassibility (i.e., God is without passions). However, affection in God is not inconsistent with “without passions.” God is never subject to emotions. He cannot “feel blue.” God’s affections are never out of control. He never “loses it.” In a word, when we speak of God’s emotions or affections, we are not referring to them in the same way as our own human emotions. As Michael Horton notes, God is the transcendent Lord of the covenant who is never a passive victim but is always the active judge and justifier. Even if God is revealed in Scripture (analogically) as responding to the world and especially to human beings in a covenantal relationship, it is 5 not in the same way we respond to each other. As Horton and others have pointed out, however, to say that God is not subject to emotions, or that he doesn’t experience them as humans do, doesn’t mean that God does not have real affections, such as love, joy, wrath, compassion, and so on. God’s affections are not only pure, holy, and perfect, but they are also eternal and immutable. They are real affections, but eternal and immutable because ultimately the delight and joy he has is in himself. The wrath he manifests is ultimately rooted in his unchanging holiness. Horton again notes, God does feel, but not as one who depends on the world for his joy. God responds to our sorrows with compassion, to our sin with anger, and to our obedience with delight. Yet he does 6 so as a generous rather than a needy lover. Jonathan Edwards helps us here. Edwards brings together God’s eternality and immutability and his real affections exercised toward his creatures in time, by stating that the real pleasure God receives from his creatures is simply the pleasure he already has in himself:

God may delight with true and great pleasure in beholding that beauty which is an image and communication of his own beauty, an expression and manifestation of his own loveliness. And this is so far from himself, that ’tis an evidence that he is happy in himself, or 7 delights and has pleasure in his own beauty. Charles Hodge also affirmed the reality of emotions in God: The schoolmen, and often the philosophical theologians, tell us that there is no feeling in God. This, they say, would imply passivity, or susceptibility of impression from without, which it is assumed is incompatible with the nature of God. . . . Here again we have to choose between a mere philosophical speculation and the clear testimony of the Bible, and of our own moral and religious nature. Love of necessity involves feeling, and if there be no 8 feeling in God, there can be no love. Benjamin B. Warfield echoed Hodge’s view in a sermon on God’s immeasurable love: We shall not stop to dwell upon this somewhat abstract discussion. Enough for us that a God without emotional life would be a God without all that lends its highest dignity to personal spirit whose very being is movement; and 9 that is as much as to say not God at all. My point in briefly bringing up this hot topic is to demonstrate that in the Bible human emotions do not simply arise out of our physical bodies, nor are they the result of the Fall. Our emotions are a dim reflection of the image of God. While acknowledging fundamental and profound differences, we can also affirm that our emotions are a legitimate and good part of our nature, because they reflect the image of God. Our ability to feel—our ability to exhibit love, hate, joy, compassion, awe, gratitude, delight, and even anger—is a reflection of being made in the image and likeness of God. Therefore, far from being the caboose, our emotions are an integral part of what it means to be a human

being made in the image of God. While emotions are not all of what it means to be human, they are a significant part of our human nature and our human experience. Matthew Elliott does not overstate the case when he says, “Everything we do, say, and think, is, in some sense, emotional. We enjoy it, we dislike it, or we just don’t care. We describe our experiences and ourselves by describing how we feel. Life without emotions 10 would be in black and white.”

THE GOD-MAN nother helpful angle from which to think about emotions is seen through our Lord Jesus Christ, who is God in human flesh, the Word who became flesh (John 1:14). The Bible teaches us that Jesus Christ is the perfect reflection of his Father and of the divine nature. The apostle Paul says, “He is the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15; cf. 2 Cor. 4:4), and “in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col. 2:9). The writer to the Hebrews states the same truth, “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Heb. 1:3). Our Lord Jesus could say to Philip, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). When the Second Person of the eternal Godhead became man, he became man in a way that reflected his deity: he was God in human flesh. Consequently, when our Lord Jesus showed emotion or expressed his feelings, we can assume he did so in perfect harmony with his deity. In the incarnation, however, Jesus is also perfect humanity, without sin or defect (Heb. 7:26). This means that not only is there a reflection of the divine nature in Jesus’ emotions, it also means that the Lord Jesus had a perfect human emotional constitution and perfect emotional expressions. B. B. Warfield said, “It belongs to the truth of our Lord’s humanity that 11 he was subject to all sinless emotions.” If our view of emotions is skewed to begin with, then we end up missing this glorious aspect of our Lord’s person and the rich example he is to us. To say, as one author does, that “Jesus

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

“HERE AGAIN WE HAVE TO CHOOSE BETWEEN A MERE PHILOSOPHICAL SPECULATION AND THE CLEAR TESTIMONY OF THE BIBLE, AND OF OUR OWN MORAL AND RELIGIOUS NATURE. LOVE OF NECESSITY INVOLVES FEELING, AND IF THERE BE NO FEELING IN GOD, THERE CAN BE NO LOVE.” —CHARLES HODGE

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

Christ could not control his emotions when he walked Planet Earth” not only blasphemes the flawless character of our Lord, but also robs God’s people of the beauty and example of our Lord’s emotional life. When we fix our eyes on Jesus, we see a variety of emotions that perfectly reflect his Father as well as his full deity and perfect humanity. Therefore, the character of Christ stands as another biblical and theological pillar for understanding our emotions. If Christ, perfect God and perfect man, displayed perfect emotions, then we must pay special attention. “Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked” (1 John 2:6).

EMOTIONS: CREATION, FALL, REDEMPTION y proposition so far has been that we should see emotions as an integral part of our human nature. Our emotions are a part of the image of God in us. In that primal sense, they were good and holy. Although the Bible does not give us explicit information about the preFall state, it seems safe to assume that Adam and Eve had all their faculties working in harmony. Their minds, wills, and emotions would have been upright, functioning without sin or corruption. Although we don’t know how long that state lasted, what a state it must have been! When Adam fell, every faculty of his humanity fell; every part of his being became tainted and corrupted by sin. This corrupt state was then passed down to all his descendants. Adam and the whole human race now had “a bad record and 12 a bad heart.” The image of God, although still there, became vandalized by sin. The mind was darkened (Rom.1:21, 28; 8:6–7; Eph. 4:17–18). No longer would human beings perceive truth with clarity or with acknowledging God. Rather, intellectual autonomy and mental impurity would plague Adam’s children; the will became infected by sin, stained and enslaved; and our ability to choose became enslaved to a fallen nature and fallen desires (John 8:34; Rom. 6:16). Nor would our affections escape Adam’s

When the gospel comes to us in the power of God’s Spirit, it impacts the whole person: the mind is enlightened to behold the glory of the Lord Jesus (2 Cor. 4:6), and the will is empowered to turn from idols to serve the living and true God.

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

fall into sin and death. Our emotions—our likes, our dislikes, our loves, our hates—became hijacked by sin (Jer. 17:9; John 3:19). God’s image became corrupted by sin. Thomas Boston captured this radical depravity of our emotions with unforgettable language: The natural man’s affections are wretchedly misplaced; he is a spiritual monster. His heart is where his feet should be, fixed on the earth; his heels are lifted up against heaven, which his heart should be set on. His face is towards hell, his back towards heaven; and therefore, God calls him to turn. He loves what he should hate and hates what he should love; joys in what he ought to mourn for and mourns for what he should rejoice in; glories in his shame and is ashamed of his glory; abhors what he should 13 desire, and desires what he should abhor. Our emotions received the fatal infection of original sin and a fallen human nature. Like a few drops of dye into a pitcher of water, every molecule of our nature has been colored by the toxic dye of sin. Emotions, which were designed to be good and work in tandem with the mind and will, now either dominate or become dormant. On the one hand, they can dominate our thinking so that what controls us is how we feel, how we determine what is true is based on how we feel, and how we relate to others is based on how we feel about them. The chaos of such life can be painful. On the other hand, trying to ignore or repress our emotions (and be like a Star Trek Vulcan rather than a human) is also a recipe for disaster. Truth and beauty in God and in life become black and white, and we fail to be whole people. What we need in our mangled humanity is full restoration. Only redemption in Jesus Christ can begin this restoration project and rebuild the ruins caused by sin. This reconstruction begins with the new birth and is carried forward in sanctification. When the gospel comes to us in the power of God’s Spirit, it impacts the whole person: the mind is enlightened to behold the glory of the Lord Jesus (2 Cor. 4:6), and the will is empowered to turn from

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

idols to serve the living and true God (1 Thess. 1:9). But the gospel also impacts our emotions: there is conviction of sin (Ps. 32:3–4), and there is joy in believing in Jesus (1 Pet. 1:8). Jesus is the satisfaction of our souls (John 6:35, 38). The image of God in us, which was corrupted at the Fall, now begins a renovation project. We are being restored to the true image, which is God’s own Son (Rom. 8:29; Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10). This restoration to the image of God’s Son is the ultimate goal of our sanctification. The process of sanctification entails the whole person, which includes our emotions. The Spirit of God through the Word of God is working in us, transforming us, into the image of Jesus. So in sanctification we look to Jesus (2 Cor. 3:18; Heb. 12:1–2).

YOU CAN’T TELL ME HOW TO FEEL! CAN YOU? t this point, if we were to follow conventional Christian wisdom, then we would have to make two faulty assumptions: “I cannot help the way I feel; I am not in control of my emotions”; and “So when the Bible tells me to feel a certain way or to have a certain emotion, those commands can have nothing to do with the emotions.” I recently did a sermon series on joy and was surprised to see how many Bible scholars and theologians want to eviscerate all affection from joy, since we are commanded to have joy and obviously God cannot command the way we feel. In this thinking, joy is stripped of all its emotional elements and reduced to a quality or an action! This kind of logic must be rejected. The Scriptures do in fact command our emotions. Scripture commands us to “forgive from the heart,” to “rejoice,” to “love with brotherly affection,” to “mourn with those who mourn,” to “fear,” to be “zealous,” to “yearn,” and to be “tenderhearted.” While obedience to these commands is more than just the way we feel, obedience to these commands is also not devoid of how we feel. As God is sanctifying us, he is sanctifying our emotions. Our emotions come under the

“TRULY TO SEE THE TRUTH MEANS THAT YOU ARE MOVED BY IT AND THAT YOU LOVE IT. YOU CANNOT HELP IT. IF YOU SEE TRUTH CLEARLY, YOU MUST FEEL IT. THEN THAT IN TURN LEADS TO THIS, THAT YOUR GREATEST DESIRE WILL BE TO PRACTICE IT AND LOVE IT.” — M A R T Y N L L OY D - J O N E S

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

authority of his word and the Lordship of Jesus, and sanctification comes through the word and the Spirit. Sanctification transforms the emotions. Martyn Lloyd-Jones explains the process: Truth comes to the mind and to the understanding enlightened by the Holy Spirit. Then having seen the truth the Christian loves it. It moves his heart. If you see the truth about yourself as a slave of sin you will hate yourself. Then as you see the glorious truth about the love of Christ you will want it, you will desire it. So the heart is engaged. Truly to see the truth means that you are moved by it and that you love it. You cannot help it. If you see truth clearly, you must feel it. Then that in turn leads to this, that your greatest desire 14 will be to practice it and love it. The process of sanctification, then, involves putting to death emotional sins that drag us down, while also cultivating Christlike emotions such as love, compassion, joy, righteous anger, grief, and gladness. The cultivation of these God-honoring emotions happens when we are sanctified by big, glorious, magnificent truths that serve as ballast for our hearts and minds. Right thinking leads to right feeling. What I think about God—who he is and what he is like—is the most important thing about me. What I believe about how I am made right with God, and how I am justified as a sinner before God, is crucial to the stability of my mental and emotional life. What I believe about this present age and the coming age, and what is promised now and what is promised only in the future, is foundational for dealing with this life. Bad teaching about God’s character—about justification and about the now and the not yet—can twist us up, turn us upside down, and destroy the emotional ballast in our souls. As Christians we have a responsibility to handle our emotions through the truth, and we see this repeatedly exemplified in Scripture. For example, how does Jeremiah deal with the devastation and loss in the sacking of Jerusalem? As he doubles over with grief (Lam. 3:19–20), the winds of emotion shift when he says, “But this I call to mind,

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lam. 3:21–23). Jeremiah is rescued from the pit of emotional despair by right thinking about God! He sets the Lord before him and he is not shaken (Ps. 16:8–9). This is the experience of psalmist, sage, apostle, and saint as truth triumphantly transforms emotions. As Christians being conformed to the image of the One who redeemed us, we cannot afford to dismiss our emotions as “feelings, nothing more than feelings.” Nor can we afford to be governed or controlled by our emotions, tossed around by every feeling. A biblical view of humanity must reject both the dismissal of the emotions and the undue exaltation of them. Instead, Christians should strive for the restoration of the image of Christ in them, which can be attained only through God’s word and God’s Spirit. The joyful hope of this pursuit is a sweeter and deeper communion with our God. BRIAN BORGMAN (MDiv, Western Seminary; DMin Westminster Seminary California) is founding pastor of Grace Community Church in Minden, Nevada, and the author of Feelings and Faith: Cultivating Godly Emotions in the Christian Life (Crossway, 2009).

Ludwig Koehler, et al., The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994–2000), 609–10.

Koehler, 479.

Matthew A. Elliott, Faithful Feelings: Rethinking Emotion in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2006), 54.

The Westminster Confession of Faith, 2.1.

Michael S. Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims On the Way (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 248.

Horton, 249.

Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 8, Ethical Writings, ed. Paul Ramsey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 446.

8 Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), I:428–29. 9

B. B. Warfield, The Saviour of the World (1916; repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1991), 117.

10 Elliott, 12. 11 B. B. Warfield, “On Emotional Life of Our Lord,” in The Person and Work of Christ (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1950), 93. 12 This is a sermon title from Pastor Albert N. Martin, published by the Chapel Library. 13 Thomas Boston, Human Nature in Its Fourfold State (repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1964), 127. 14 D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Its Cures (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), 61.

illustration by

MATTHEW EVERHARD

DÁNIEL TAYLOR

JONATHAN EDWARDS T H E T H E O LO G I A N O F J OY

searching for joy my entire life, and I believe I am not alone. If pastor and theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) is correct, then we are all on the same quest. The reason is because we were created for joy. Yet the quest to find it—that is, true spiritual happiness—often leads us to seemingly innumerable dead ends. Some men and women seek joy in romantic relationships or in wealth. Others pursue it in thrill-seeking adventures such as rock climbing, base jumping, and sky diving. Still others seek joy in far more nefarious places: illicit drugs, alcohol, unrestrained sexual expression, even the absurdities and banalities of Facebook or hours of television. Despite the universality of our search, many of us have discovered the brutal fact that finding joy—lasting happiness— is more difficult than it would first appear. My own confessional heritage reminds me in the first answer of the Shorter Catechism that “man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever” (emphasis added). So also, Holy Scripture is replete with references to joy. A simple word search for “joy” and a few of its variants (enjoy, rejoice, and so on) returns hundreds of occurrences. But if joy is so ubiquitous in Scripture, then why does it seem so elusive in real life? And if we find it, how can we maintain it? Part of the problem in my own search for joy, ironically, was my job of pastoral ministry. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve loved being a pastor. But HAVE BEEN

often instead of being content, I found myself more stressed out, agitated, and irritable than I had been in my whole life. I lacked joy. I started to gain some ground on my quest when I began to seriously read Jonathan Edwards for my doctoral dissertation. As I read, I noticed that this bewigged Puritan spoke of joy more copiously and profusely than any writer I had ever encountered before. Whatever joy Edwards saw in his relationship with Christ, which he described in his writings, I wanted. Edwards’s ability to rejoice in the praise of our Trinitarian God was captivating enough for me to want to study it deeply. What follows is my attempt to summarize the ideas of Jonathan Edwards, the theologian of joy. Let me briefly introduce the three main themes I’ve encountered in his works. First, Edwards argues in many places that joy is an attribute of God himself, and that it can be discerned in and among the three persons of the Trinity. This explains why joy is so common, even central, to Edwards’s theology as a whole. Second, Edwards is clear in many places that humanity was created with a great capacity for joy. Consequently, we pursue joy aimlessly until we find it in Christ alone. Third, Edwards believed that heaven will be the great domain in which joy is most fully realized. Because of this, we can expect to continue to find ourselves ever longing for joy in this life. Let’s explore each of these concepts more fully.

1. ETERNAL JOY WITHIN THE TRINITARIAN GODHEAD First, Edwards believed that joy is rooted in the character and nature of God: “It is evident, both by Scripture and reason, that God is infinitely, eternally, unchangeably, and independently 1 glorious and happy.” Before we can even speak about joy as a “religious affection” (his famous term) we humans experience, Edwards would have us begin at the true source of joy: God himself. “There is an infinite fullness of all possible good in God, a fullness of every perfection, of all excellency and beauty, and of infinite

happiness.” He says simply that “God is selfsufficient. His happiness is in Himself. As His being is necessary and underived, so is his hap3 piness and glory.” Just as holiness, love, justice, and other attributes are proper to the nature of God intrinsically, so too is joy. Describing God in his essence, Edwards says, He is powerful and He will be powerful; He is glorious and he will be glorious; he is infinitely honorable, but he receives honor from himself; he is infinitely happy and he will be infinitely happy; he reigns and rules over the whole universe and he will rule and 4 do what he pleases. Two illustrations or analogies Edwards uses quite often (actually for a variety of theological doctrines) are that of the light emanating from the sun and refreshing water springing from its fountain source. One cannot read broadly in his works without seeing these analogies used in various contexts. In order to discuss the effects of a thing (the light), we must press further to come to understand the source of that thing (the sun). Or, when we want to drink refreshing spring water, we will be drawn to trace out and discover its source—the very fountain from whence it flows. In the following quotation from The End for Which God Created the World, Edwards applies (and even mixes) these familiar analogies to joy within God’s own nature: There is an infinite fountain of light and knowledge that this light should shine forth in beams of communicated knowledge and understanding: and there is an infinite fountain of holiness, moral excellence and beauty, so it should flow out in communicated holiness. And that as there is an infinite fullness of joy and happiness, so these should have an emanation, and become a fountain flowing out in abundant 5 streams, as beams from the sun. On several significant occasions, Edwards argues that joy is a proper attribute of God himself, and that joy can be discerned in and

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

between the three persons of the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 6 In a lesser-known work, Observations Concerning the Scripture Oeconomy of the Trinity, Edwards 7 discusses the Trinity. Edwards’s goal for this work is to describe the “covenant of redemption” in which the Father and the Son agreed, before the creation of the world, to redeem a particular people for God from among men. For our purposes, we are interested in how Edwards incorporated joy and delight into this covenantal framework. At the beginning of this treatise in a passage critical to the argument of the whole, Edwards expresses the Father’s delight and enjoyment of the Son:

It is impossible for us to ignore the way Edwards frames the whole doctrine of the Trinity around the mutual joy of the three persons.

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

[The Son] is the brightness of [the Father’s] glory; the very image of the Father, the express and perfect image of His person. And therefore, the Father’s infinite happiness is in Him, and the way that the Father enjoys the 8 glory of the deity is in enjoying Him. In a way, the whole essay depends on this happy premise. The Father enjoys the Son and rejoices in him. All that they will do as a Trinitarian One, they will do for their own joy. For the rest of the essay, Edwards works off of this important premise: God is a God of joy. The Trinity, Edwards says, is a “society” by which the three persons are in complete agreement and harmony in “carrying on the great design of glorifying the deity and 9 communicating its fullness.” Throughout the next twenty pages or so, Edwards then discusses the intricacies of the various roles within the Godhead in redeeming the world: the Father is “economically the king of heaven and earth, lawgiver and judge of all”; the Son “voluntarily and freely subjected Himself to from [sic] love to sinners, and engaged to perform for them in the covenant of redemption”; and the Holy Spirit, “till the work of redemption shall be finished, will con10 tinue to act under the Son.” It is impossible for us to ignore the way Edwards frames the whole doctrine of the Trinity around the mutual joy of the three persons. In short, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit agree together in mutual

beneficence to redeem a particular people, for the sake of God’s own delight and pleasure, which he holds in his divine unity. God wants us, too, to experience his joy.

Happiness is the end of the creation, as appears by this, because the creation had as good not be, as not rejoice in its being. For certainly it was the goodness of the Creator that moved him to create; and how can we conceive of another end proposed by goodness, than that he might delight in seeing the creatures he made rejoice in that being 14 that he has given them?

approaches this topic through another route: the universality of our longing for joy. In this sermon, Edwards asks an important rhetorical question: “What is it that the soul of every man naturally and necessarily craves?” He immediately answers his own question: “The soul of 15 every man necessarily craves happiness.” Logically, he holds, we crave that for which we were created. We naturally long to do what we were designed to do and to experience what we were created to experience. Just as butterflies were created for flight, so also human beings were created to experience joy. Humanity loves happiness. We need joy, and we know this to be the great pursuit of life. In this sermon, Edwards says that this craving for happiness cannot be easily dismissed: “This craving of happiness must be insuperable, and . . . never can be changed; it never can be 16 overcome, or in any way abated.” We cannot merely pretend this urge is not there, nor can we easily satisfy this urge with replacements or counterfeits. Edwards discusses the fact that this longing for happiness is universal to all humans, regardless of age, gender, or moral condition. Striking an Augustinian note, he adds that “every creature is restless till it enjoys 17 what is equal to the capacity of its nature.” At this point, Edwards begins to build his case more forcefully. Since the capacity of humanity’s joy is great, there must be an object of infinite worth that alone can fill it. While food, water, air, and sex fill longings in the physical body, they do nothing to abate the longings intrinsic to the soul. In an important statement, crucial to his overall argument, Edwards writes: “Man is of such a nature that he is capable of an exceedingly great degree of happiness; he is made of a vastly higher nature than the brutes, and therefore he must have vastly higher happi18 ness to satisfy.” Continuing to unfold this line of argumentation, he adds:

To fill out our discussion on the centrality of joy in humanity’s being, we will look briefly at Edwards’s 1728 sermon “Safety, Fullness, and Sweet Refreshment in Christ.” Here, although he speaks of the chief end of humanity, he

It must therefore be an incomprehensible object that must satisfy the soul; it will never be contented with that, and only that, to which it can see an end, it will never be satisfied with 19 that happiness to which it can find a bottom.

2. HUMANITY CREATED FOR JOY Second, Edwards clearly states that humanity 11 was created to participate in God’s own joy. One of his simplest definitions of happiness is this: “When the creature is in that state that is most agreeable to the proper perfection of its 12 nature, then it is in its most happy state.” And since humanity has a massive capacity for happiness, Edwards held, then we are happiest in Christ. Happiness is not just peripheral to our understanding of our general purpose in being; it is central. When we are out of joint with our purpose in being, we will feel a great longing in our souls that beckons to be satisfied. Our hearts will ache for satisfaction. This is because joy is not merely incidental to our being; it is vital. Since “to glorify God and enjoy Him for13 ever” is our chief end, as Jonathan Edwards recognized, he commonly discusses joy as our great design in creation, inextricably bound to our duty and purpose in existence. Edwards argued forcefully from logic and Scripture that joy is central to God’s very purpose for creating intelligent creatures. In his Miscellany #3, Edwards specifically states:

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

CHRIST ALONE, WHO PRESENTS THE OFFER OF ETERNAL PEACE AND ENJOYMENT IN THE PRESENCE OF GOD THROUGH THE GOSPEL OF HIS CROSS, CAN FULLY BRING “FULLNESS AND SWEET REFRESHMENT” TO THE HUNGRY SOUL.

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

Finally, he progresses toward the inevitable conclusion, which is so obvious now to those who have studied his writings: “The excellency of Christ is an object adequate to the natural cravings of the soul, and is sufficient to fill the 20 capacity.” Christ alone, who presents the offer of eternal peace and enjoyment in the presence of God through the gospel of his cross, can fully bring “fullness and sweet refreshment” to the hungry soul.

3. THE BELIEVER’S ETERNAL JOY IN HEAVEN AND THE BEATIFIC VISION Finally, Edwards believed that heaven would be the great domain in which joy is most fully apprehended and experienced by the redeemed of God. It was almost impossible for him to write about joy without also mentioning heaven; or conversely, for the great Puritan to write about heaven without also speaking of its incomparable joys. In fact, the closer Edwards comes to heaven in his writings, the more the affections— especially joy—are stirred up in his writings. In a key text in Religious Affections, he states: If we can learn anything of the state of heaven from Scripture, the love and joy that the saints have there is exceeding great and vigorous; impressing the heart with the strongest and most lively sensation of inexpressible sweetness, mightily moving, animating, and engaging them, making them like a flame of fire. And if such love and joy be not affections, then the word 21 affection has no use in language.

Edwards reserved the believers’ experience of eternal joys in heaven as the highest of all possible joys, because there redeemed humanity will behold the face of God.

Edwards reserved the believers’ experience of eternal joys in heaven as the highest of all possible joys, because there redeemed humanity will behold the face of God. This is often called the “beatific vision,” which Edwards defines in Miscellany #1137: “The beatifical vision of God in heaven consists mostly in beholding the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, either in his work or in his person as appearing in the glo22 rified human nature.” This great event takes

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

place in redemption history when the saints pass into the glorious presence of our Heavenly Father either at death, or after the return of Jesus and the judgment of the world. Once commenced, the beatific vision will carry on for eternity as the saints continue to rejoice in the glory of God. The beatific vision often fueled and empowered Edwards’s preaching. With a reputation of being a fire-and-brimstone preacher, Edwards was barely able to steer his mind away from the fires of hell, much less temper his pulpit rhetoric. Of course, based on the much wider survey of his writings, we can see that this reputation is ill-deserved. One of the places in which Edwards describes the glories and realities of heaven both attractively and winsomely is in his 1738 sermons “Charity and Its Fruits,” a sixteen-part series that he preached on the text of 1 Corinthians 13. This series proves once and for all that Edwards spoke of the glories and joys of heaven even more forcefully and convincingly than he spoke of hell’s horrors. Probably the best-known sermon in the series is the conclusion of the whole, a sermon on 1 Corinthians 13:8–10 titled “Heaven, a World of Charity or Love.” The title alone is refreshingly clear. In this sermon, Edwards describes the glorious nature of heaven in a way that artfully foils (or even surpasses) the terrifying images he conjured up to describe hell in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” For this reason, the two sermons should probably be more frequently read as a pair. Edwards begins: The God of love himself dwells in heaven. Heaven is the palace or presence-chamber of the high and holy One, whose name is love, and who is both the cause and source of all holy love. . . . Heaven is a part of creation that God has built for this end, to be the place of his glorious presence, and it is his abode forever; and here will he dwell, and gloriously manifest himself to all eternity. And this renders heaven a world of love, as the sun is the fountain of light. And therefore the glorious presence of God in heaven fills heaven with love, as the sun, placed in

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

the midst of the visible heavens in a clear 23 day, fills the world with light. In this grounding paragraph, central to his view of heaven, Edwards draws on allusions to Revelation 21:1–8 and 22:1–5 (with special reference to 22:5), employing of course his favorite illustrations of sun/light and fountain/water to describe the outflowing of God’s glory in heaven. Central to the doctrine of the beatific vision is the unmitigated presence of God himself shining on and filling up his saints with the glory of his manifest presence. There, we will look upon God without being destroyed as we would be now in our unglorified state. Throughout the whole sermon, Edwards’s majestic language never flags, consistently boiling over in cheerful and joyful praise: “There, even in heaven, dwells the God from whom every stream of holy love, yea, every drop that is, or 24 ever was proceeds.” God is not merely incidentally present in heaven but also gloriously and dominantly overpowering. Consistent with the whole of the sermon series, Edwards shows how this joyful love that fills heaven with God’s glory and peace is reflected, not only back to God but also to other believers—even the angels: And the saints and angels are secondarily the subjects of holy love, not as those in whom it is as in an original seat, as light is in the sun, but as it is in the planets, that shine only by reflected light. And the light of their love is reflected in the first place, and chiefly, back to its source. As God has given the saints and angels love, so their love is chiefly exercised 25 towards God its fountain. Heaven is ultimately about God, and only penultimately about us. True enough, Edwards discusses the ways that we will more fully love one another than ever before possible on earth, the ways in which we will admire the beauty and strength of the angels, and even how the saints will rejoice in our own state of existence more purely than ever before. For instance, Edwards conjectures that we will take joy even in those who have a capacity for more joy than we ourselves

EDWARDS WORKS HARD IN HIS WRITINGS TO INSPIRE US TO GREATLY ANTICIPATE HEAVEN, WHERE JOY WILL REACH THE FULLEST, ULTIMATE, AND EVERINCREASING MEASURE OF DELIGHT.

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

possess. Since heaven is a place in which all of the creatures are humble and without pride, having entered a glorified state of existence, there is no place for jealousy, even for those whose eternal 26 reward is greater than our own. Yet he never detracts from his all-encompassing, all-thrilling joy in and of God, both as the source and the sustainer of the saints’ everlasting happiness. Edwards closes out the sermon series as a whole by imploring believers to consider often the joys of love in heaven’s state of perfection, to stir up a desire to be there in our own hearts, to be patient through our trials and tribulations on our way to heaven, and to fix our eyes on Jesus whose glorious face we will see once there. And oh! What joy will there be, springing up in the hearts of the saints, after they have passed through their wearisome pilgrimage, to be brought to such a paradise as this! Here is joy unspeakable indeed, and full of glory—joy that is humble, holy, 27 enrapturing, and divine in its perfection. CONCLUSION I cannot say just yet that I truly and fully apprehend Edwards’s view of joy. In fact, if he is correct in his understandings of happiness, I won’t be able to completely do that until I reach heaven. But I do believe that drinking deeply from this Puritan’s understanding of real happiness greatly aids my quest for it here in this mortal life. In this article, we noted three broadly identifiable themes in the works of Jonathan Edwards in relation to his theology of joy. While these three themes certainly do not exhaust the doctrine of Jonathan Edwards on joy, they do seem to encapsulate the primary constructs and trajectories in his writings on this topic. By way of recapitulation, we covered first Edwards’s insistence that the Holy Trinity is a joyful union of the three divine persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Tied to this, we saw in Edwards a proclivity to speak of joy as a capacity written into the very fabric of humanity, since intelligent creatures were created for the pleasure of beholding

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

God. Finally, Edwards works hard in his writings to inspire us to greatly anticipate heaven, where joy will reach the fullest, ultimate, and ever-increasing measure of delight. MATTHEW EVERHARD is senior pastor of Faith Evangelical

Presbyterian Church (EPC) in Brooksville, Florida. He is a graduate of Malone University, Ashland Theological Seminary, and Reformed Theological Seminary. His unpublished RTS doctoral dissertation is titled “A Theology of Joy: Jonathan Edwards and Eternal Happiness in the Holy Trinity.” He is the author of Hold Fast the Faith: A Devotional Commentary on the Westminster Confession of 1647 (Reformation Press, 2012). 1

Sean Michael Lucas, God’s Grand Design: The Theological Vision of Jonathan Edwards (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011), 26.

Owen Strachan and Doug Sweeney, Jonathan Edwards: On Beauty (Chicago, IL: Moody, 2010), 53 (emphasis added).

3 Jonathan Edwards, The Salvation of Souls: Nine Previously Unpublished Sermons on the Call of Ministry and the Gospel by Jonathan Edwards, ed. Richard A. Bailey and Gregory Wills (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2002), 163. 4

Strachan and Sweeney, 27 (emphasis added).

Strachan and Sweeney, 54 (emphasis added).

For instance, in “Safety, Fullness, and Sweet Refreshment in Christ” Edwards says, “God necessarily loves the Son; God could as soon cease to be, as cease to love the Son. He is God’s elect, in whom his soul delighteth; he is his beloved Son, in whom he is well pleased; he loved him before the foundation of the world, and had infinite delight in him from all eternity.” Jonathan Edwards, Sermons of Jonathan Edwards (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2005), 25.

7 Jonathan Edwards, Treatise on Grace and Other Posthumous Writings Including Observations on the Trinity, ed. Paul Helm (Cambridge: James Clark & Co., 1971), 77–94. 8

Edwards, Treatise on Grace, 77.

Edwards, Treatise on Grace, 78.

10 Edwards, Treatise on Grace, 88–89. 11 This is one of the main points of The End for Which God Created the World, if not the main point of the treatise, second only to the supremacy of God’s glory. Edwards also makes this same point in The Miscellanies, 3, 87. 12 Stephen Nichols, Heaven on Earth: Capturing Jonathan Edwards’s Vision of Living in Between (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006), 93. 13 Westminster Shorter Catechism, Answer #1. 14 Jonathan Edwards, The Miscellanies, The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online, The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, http://edwards.yale.edu/research/misc-index. 15 Edwards, Sermons, 29. 16 Edwards, Sermons, 29. 17 Edwards, Sermons, 29. 18 Edwards, Sermons, 29. 19 Edwards, Sermons, 30. 20 Edwards, Sermons, 32 (emphasis added). 21 Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections (1746; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 2013), 43. 22 Edwards, The Miscellanies. 23 Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits (1852; repr., Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth, 2005), 326. 24 Edwards, Charity, 327. 25 Edwards, Charity, 333. 26 Edwards, Charity, 335–38. 27 Edwards, Charity, 352.

MICHAEL S. HORTON

FPO

illustration by

DÁNIEL TAYLOR

THE LAST ENEMY AND THE FINAL VICTORY SINGING THE BLUES WITH JESUS

turn to preach in chapel. I was given John 11:1–44 at the beginning of the semester, and since, in God’s providence, it was just two days after my father finally died after a long year of tremendous suffering, we held a memorial service in conjunction with chapel that day. I had long been impressed with Jesus’ raising of Lazarus and commended it to our seminary community (as well as family and friends), all of whom were gathered here for different reasons but each with his or her own challenges in life. America likes winners, not losers—triumph, not tragedy. Friedrich Nietzsche and Ted Turner have argued that Christianity is for losers, but pop Christianity in America has been trying for years to convince everybody that this just isn’t the case. Become a Christian and you’ll be unfailingly happy, upbeat, in charge, with health, wealth, happiness, and self-esteem, and victory over debt and bad marriages and families. Meanwhile, we put our elderly, the terminally ill, those caught in the cycle of poverty, and others who remind us of our mortality where we can’t see them, or at least where our lives do not ordinarily intersect. Unlike the old churchyards that served as the final resting place for deceased members, our churches today are likely to avoid T WAS MY

contact with the tragic side of life. We call death “passing away,” and we change the name “graveyard” to “cemetery” with euphemistic names (Forest Lawn) that also sound, eerily enough, like the names of the convalescent hospitals they were in before they “passed.” They are not the dead among us, awaiting the resurrection, but those who have “crossed over” and have thereby been good enough not to have done something more disturbing and unpleasant, such as dying (or at least if they die, they do not hang around). Often, before we can really feel the force and pain of sin and death, we are told to be happy and look on the bright side. One church-growth guru cheerfully announces that we have gone from having funerals to memorial services to “celebrations,” not realizing that this is a fatal index of our inability to face the music, whether we’re talking about the tragedy of sin itself or the suffering, death, and ultimate condemnation that it brings in its wake. Why is it that in our churches—whether in the preaching that avoids sin, suffering, the cross, and death; in the music that is always upbeat and seems so alien to the sorrow one finds in the Psalms; or in the “celebrations” that cannot seem to come to grips with the tragedy of death and the common curse that invoked it—we seem to follow the world in refusing to face the music? When we take sin, suffering, and death seriously as Christians, we aren’t being morbid. We’re (after our right grief and sorrow) confidently acknowledging tough realities because we know that they have been decisively conquered by our captain. They have not lost their power to harm, but they have lost their power to destroy us. This biblical piety is not morbid because it doesn’t end at the cross, but it also doesn’t avoid it—it goes through the cross to the resurrection. This is why the Christian gospel alone is capable of refuting both denial and despair. The hope of the gospel gives us the freedom to expose the wound of our human condition because it provides the cure. We see this in John’s remarkable retelling of the story of Lazarus’s resurrection.

THE DEATH OF A LOVED ONE e learn from John 11:1–16 that Lazarus and his sisters were close friends with Jesus. I’ve walked that shor t distance between B e t h a n y a n d Je r u s a l e m i n roughly an hour, so we might say that it was the ancient equivalent of a suburb, where Mary, Martha, and Lazarus made their home a base for Jesus’ Jerusalem-area mission. “It was that Mary who anointed the Lord”—that is, the prostitute who met the only person whose love was greater than her sin. Jesus was entreated to come to his ill friend’s side when Mary identified him to Jesus as “he whom you love” (v. 2). The assumption here is that Jesus and Lazarus are so close that all Jesus needed was an announcement of his condition. Surely Jesus would come running. Their plea for Jesus was not wrong, but it was shortsighted in its motivation. They appealed to him for Lazarus’s healing, while Jesus anticipated using his friend’s death as an opportunity to signify his person and work. It was not about Lazarus but about Jesus: “I am the resurrection and the life.” This showcases the difference between the theology of glory and the theology of the cross. It is not wrong to anticipate glory— both God’s and our own participation in it—but the problem comes when we think that our own immediate concerns are ultimate. God must provide for us or our loved ones in such and such a manner if he is really our friend. Mary and Martha knew that Jesus could heal their failing brother, and they simply assumed that, given his love for Lazarus, Jesus would want to. Here we return to that conundrum: Is God both sovereign (able to heal) and good (willing to heal)? If the healing doesn’t occur, then one of those affirmations comes into question. If Jesus really loves Lazarus, he’ll come quickly. “God, if you really care about me, you’ll __________” —fill in your own blank. In the thick of trouble, this is not so bad a response. In fact, it is a sign of faith: God can and will heal. The problem is in the timing and the terms. “It is for the glory of God,” says Jesus, “so that the Son of God may

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

Jesus’ cryptic remark— “For your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe”— could not be discerned this side of the events in Bethany.

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

be glorified through it” (v. 4). Lazarus is a character in the unfolding drama of Jesus’ story, not vice versa. The glorification of the Son as the Messiah is the real “show” here, as was the case with all of the miracles. They are signs, not ends in themselves. Jesus deliberately delays his return to Bethany two more days. What could have been happening in the sisters’ minds during that time? They had no idea that Jesus was going to do something far greater than they had asked. With the wisdom and data at their disposal, they could only have been utterly depressed at the apparent lack of response on Jesus’ part. Jesus, of course, had acted promptly before: in the healing of Jairus’s daughter (Luke 8) or in the raising of the widow’s son in the middle of the funeral procession (Luke 7). How callous could he be if he healed perfect strangers but refused to rush to the aid of one of his closest friends? Out of love for Lazarus and his sisters, Jesus finally decided to go to Bethany. “The disciples said to him, ‘Rabbi, the Jews were just now seeking to stone you, and are you going there again?’” He tells them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him,” to which the disciples (no doubt concerned about their own safety—see verses 7–16) reply, “‘Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will recover. . . . ’ Then Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus has died, and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.’” Besides Jesus, nobody—not the disciples, Lazarus, Mary, or Martha—knew why he had allowed Lazarus to die in the first place, especially if he had been planning to visit him all along. It simply did not make sense, given what they knew of him. Jesus’ cryptic remark—“For your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe”—could not be discerned this side of the events in Bethany. It could be clear to them only after the completion of the episode, not within it. This is a crucial point for our own application in such circumstances. From their perspective, in terms of their own experience, the sisters (and Lazarus in his final hours) and the disciples would have logically concluded that Jesus, whom they had seen as perfectly capable of healing,

was simply uninterested and unconcerned. Their experience was not irrational or illogical but rather incomplete, and as such inadequate to sit in judgment upon God’s ways. Just as the disciples could not recognize what God was going to do through the cross, nobody could understand why Jesus had allowed his friend to die. But Lazarus had to die in order for the greater miracle to occur. There is something more important here than the healing of his friend. Jesus knew the great work he would accomplish in the power of the Spirit when he came finally to Bethany. It was like Elijah pouring water on the fire pit, just to make sure that God’s glorious power would be manifest. As the greater Elijah, Jesus was engaged in a cosmic contest between Yahweh and the serpent. That was the larger story behind all of these other stories.

THE CONFRONTATION WITH HIS LOVED ONES (VV. 17–27) fter a four-day interval between Lazarus’s death and Jesus’ arrival in Bethany, Martha displayed the sort of frustration one would not have expected a woman of her day to show toward a man (much less a rabbi) in public. Yet after scolding Jesus for his tardiness—“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”—she immediately added, “But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you” (vv. 21–22). Martha’s faith in Jesus is unfailing. He can still turn things around, despite her brother’s entombment: “Even now…” (v. 22). It is important to see here how Martha reflected that combination of heart-wrenching disappointment and faith we find in the Psalms. She did not believe that even death had the last say in the presence of Jesus, which was far more faith than we saw in the disciples. Martha’s theology was right: as a Pharisee, she believed in the resurrection of the dead. But it was like Philip saying to Jesus, “Now show us the Father,” and Jesus replying, “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:8–14). In fact, the scene

[Martha] did not believe that even death had the last say in the presence of Jesus, which was far more faith than we saw in the disciples.

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

here is similar in that Jesus announced he is the way, the truth, and the life. He is not simply someone who can lead to truth and life, but he is the truth and the life in person. Philip asked for something more, but Jesus replied, “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (v. 9). Jesus is the resurrection and the life. He is the source of life beyond the grave. Jesus replied, “Your brother will rise again” (v. 23). “Do you believe this?” (v. 26). Jesus pressed Martha to commit herself not just to the theological question of the resurrection of the dead, but to him as the resurrection and the life! To claim to be “the resurrection and the life” as “the way, and the truth, and the life” is to claim nothing less than equality with the Father. Now the stakes of Martha’s confession were raised considerably. In the presence of witnesses, she was called not only to confess that Jesus could raise the dead—as Elijah had done—but to acknowledge that he himself is the God upon whom Elijah called. He not only can give life; he is Life. That is an enormous step. One of the marvelous clauses here is “though he may die” (v. 25). It is one thing to halt the processes of decay and death; it’s quite another to reverse them entirely and bring someone back to life. Jesus declared of himself, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (v. 26). Jesus was not simply asking Martha to confess that Lazarus will live, but that those who trust in Jesus Christ—even though they die—will be raised to never die again. It was no longer about Lazarus per se. Jesus was calling Martha into the circle of that cosmic trial between Yahweh and the serpent, calling her to be a witness (the Greek word for “witness” being the same for “martyr”). Lazarus’s resurrection would be a sign—in fact, proof—of that reality to be inaugurated with Christ’s own resurrection from the dead. Even though people will still die despite the arrival of Messiah, they will not remain dead forever. They will be raised not in the likeness of Lazarus’s mortal body, still tending toward death, but in the likeness of Christ’s glorified body.

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

We recall that many centuries earlier, in the midst of his agony, Job cried out, “I know that my Redeemer lives and that in this flesh I shall behold God” (Job 19:25). And on the witness stand, Martha—wracked with myriad thoughts and feelings of desperation and hope—brought Job’s exclamation up to date: “She said to him, ‘Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world’” (v. 27). That is the big event in Bethany this day. Without discounting the resurrection of Lazarus still to come in the story, we cannot forget that, as with all of Jesus’ miracles, the most amazing thing is the reality the sign merely announces and the confession it draws from our lips. This is the faith that perseveres through the contravening evidence of his experience, and it is Martha’s as well. They do not know why God has allowed this or that temptation, trial, disaster, or pain, but the confession is the main thing: “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.”

THE RESURRECTION OF THE LOVED ONE ary, who had been sitting in the house, joins Martha at this point (vv. 28–32). Perhaps even more despondent than Martha both at her brother’s death and her beloved master’s apparent failure either to care or to be powerful enough, Mary—the one who had lavished Jesus’ feet with expensive perfume—has to be called out to the scene by her sister (“The Teacher has come and is calling for you”). Furthermore, upon meeting Jesus she reiterates the charge, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (v. 32). Mary is not to be blamed here, but to be respected for having brought her doubts as well as her faith to the Savior. Living in denial of tragedy, too many Christians live schizophrenic spiritual lives: outwardly smiling and brimming with trust and joy, but inwardly filled with doubts and anger. They often do not know where to turn, but Mary—like Job and the psalmist—says, “To God, of course.” Bring him your doubts, frustration, and even

anger. He can handle it. Remember the cross and God-forsakenness of the Beloved: God, too, knows how to sing the blues. Jesus’ own soul now began to be drawn into turmoil as he saw the mourners and recognized the wake that death leaves. Suddenly, he himself was one of the mourners. Here he was not simply a miracle worker who walked on the sea and calmed the storms, but a man suddenly overtaken by troubled emotions. His own love for Lazarus and his hatred for death overwhelmed him, even though he knew what he was about to do. It is in verses 33–35 that we capture a glimpse of what the writer to the Hebrews meant when he said that Jesus was made like us in every respect: Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Heb. 4:14–16) Here at his friend’s tomb—moments before he knew he would raise Lazarus—we see Jesus’ anguish of soul in the presence of sin’s most gruesome banner: death. Jesus did not come with a cheerful homily on how better off Lazarus was now that he had “slipped the bonds of earth” or “shuffled off this mortal coil,” for these are pagan views that would never have been countenanced by the Hebrew mind. There was no “celebration,” where mourning was considered out of place. Already emotionally unhinged by Mary’s weeping at his feet, Jesus came to the tomb, and we read those two words that deserve their own verse: “Jesus wept” (v. 35). The bystanders were not sure what to make of it. “See how he loved him!” said some. “But some of them said, ‘Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?’” (v. 37). But let’s pause for a moment at the remarkable report that “Jesus wept.” Here Jesus overthrows the various pagan conceptions of life and death

that are still prevalent in our day: stoicism and sentimentalism. Some influences are more Stoic in orientation. Famous for their stiff upper lip, the ancient Stoics believed that the best souls were those completely free of emotion. Stirred neither by friendship nor treachery, the Stoic aimed at perfect rest. If one depended on others, then one would soon be disappointed. In order to avoid disappointment, one should resolve never to develop attachments, except to oneself. Utter freedom from desire would make the soul a fortress against distress. For them, as for Greek thought generally, death was liberation from the body, which was after all the seat of emotion— that weak part of human nature that would drag the soul down into the messiness of the world. By contrast, Westerners such as myself are often astonished to the point of embarrassment to witness Jews and Palestinians mourning their dead with wails and desperate gestures, but this is the culture from which Jesus came, and he was not embarrassed by it. Sentimentalism, as I’m using the term here, refers especially to the Romantic philosophers, poets, artists, and theologians who emphasized the heart rather than the intellect as the proper seat of human dignity. Far from resisting emotional expression, sentimentalism celebrates it. Yet, unlike the Romantic Movement itself, sentimentalism in its contemporary degenerate but pervasive form seems capable of wearing only a happy heart on its sleeve. Ironically, although sentimentalism seems like the opposite of stoicism, it shares some intriguing parallels in that they both seem intent on avoiding the messiness of life—particularly, the tragic aspect. They want to ignore the bad news, although their solution is different. While the Stoic realizes that to abandon negative emotions one must banish all emotions, the sentimentalist believes in admitting only the good emotions and always looking on the bright side of life. One sympathy card I saw has a line from Thoreau: “Every blade in the field, every leaf in the forest, lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up.” Even more troubling was the maxim of my father’s convalescent hospital that was unfortunately enshrined in

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

The setting of the sun is not as beautiful as its rising, as anyone close to the end can tell you.

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

giant tapestries hanging in various parts of the complex. With scenes from childhood to old age, walking toward a sunset, it read, “The setting of the sun is as beautiful as its rising.” However well-intentioned the maxim may have been, I wondered at how offensive this must have been to those who were suffering to see their pain trivialized. Compare for just a moment any experience you might have had with the joy of childbirth and family and friends standing around to celebrate this new life, with the declining years, months, and days of a person’s life. One stage is full of hope in a way that the other simply cannot be made to be. The former is attended with high expectations for one’s future; the other with talk of prolonging life in the face of eventual death. One attracts visitors, family, and friends who cannot keep themselves from holding and doting on the little one, while the other draws visits more often than not out of a sense of duty. We do not enjoy spending a lot of time with those who are suffering, especially with those who are dying. At least for those closest to us, we do not mind being there for the farewell, but sometimes it is just too long. For many, both the aged sufferers and their families, there are just too many verses to sing. I know this firsthand from my teen years, when our family cared for fifteen elderly residents. Each Christmas my mother would write letters to area churches asking for groups to bring some holiday cheer, and the same two churches made the annual appearance, neither of them evangelical despite the fact that most residents or their children were members of various large evangelical churches in the area. Even more difficult, especially in retrospection, was the fact that each year my parents would buy presents for the residents and write the name of the person’s children on it, since some would not be receiving even a phone call from them. I recall in a couple of instances when elders of a big church in town simply dropped off their parents, all the while holding up themselves and their churches as “pro-life.” The setting of the sun is not as beautiful as its rising, as anyone close to the end can tell you.

Another sign of our culture’s inability to handle death is when we hear how “death is a natural part of life.” This assumes the “cycle of life” approach to reality. According to this picture, life and death are just two sides of the same coin. However, the biblical picture could not be more opposite: life everlasting was the goal of creation in the beginning; death is the curse for human sin. It is part of the Fall imposed on humanity as a result of disobedience, not an inevitable circumstance to be taken in stride. Death stands against God, against the world, against life, against hope, against possibilities. So now we return to Jesus as he crumples at his friend’s grave: “Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb” (v. 38). Look at Jesus’ face, hear his scream here—“deeply moved” hardly captures the emotion of the original language: enebrimesato, meaning to snort like a horse in anger; or “troubled,” etaraxen, meaning agitated, confused, disorganized, fearful, surprised, as when Herod was “troubled” by the wise men (Matt. 2:3); or when the disciples were “troubled” and “cried out in fear” when Jesus walked on the sea (Matt. 14:27). Now it is Jesus who is thrown off his horse, as it were. The Lord of life—he by whom and for whom “all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities” (Col. 1:16)—now found himself overtaken by grief. More than grief, in fact: anger. And why not? There he stood face to face with “the last enemy” he would defeat in his crusade against Satan, and he “wept.” The marvel in this scene is that Jesus responds in this way even though he knows he will shortly raise Lazarus from the dead. One would expect his countenance to reveal a knowing grin that invites the crowd to anticipate his miracle, but all it shows is anguish. How much more are we allowed to weep when such an interval exists between the death of loved ones and the final resurrection! Theologically, it is the appropriate response to death—not simply because of our own sense of loss or our mourning for the survivors who are dear to us, but because of the loss to the beloved who has died. While we do not grieve “as others do who have

There he stood face to face with “the last enemy” he would defeat in his crusade against Satan, and he “wept.”

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

no hope” (1 Thess. 4:13), we do grieve. Death is not a benign passageway to happiness, but a horrible enemy attempting to keep us in the grave. Death’s sting has been removed, but its bite remains. It does not have the last word for believers, but it remains the believer’s antagonist until the resurrection of the body. The good news is never that one has died, but that death has been ultimately conquered by the Lord of life. At the graveside, neither optimism nor pessimism or sentimentalism nor stoicism tell us what is happening here; only Jesus’ cross and resurrection define the event for us. Martha trusted Jesus when she had the stone at the tomb removed at his command. Perhaps she had even heard and recalled Jesus’ promise: “For the hour is coming in which all who are in the graves will hear his voice and come forth” (John 5:28). Jesus’ own resurrection would be the “firstfruits of those who sleep” (1 Cor. 15:20), but this resurrection of Lazarus was in a sense the prelude to that great inauguration of the last day. This was the climactic sign because “the last enemy is death” (1 Cor. 15:26).

THE GLORIOUS PARADOX he good news in all of this indeed is that “the last enemy is death.” This means that Jesus accomplished everything in his mission on earth for our complete redemption and glorification. “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.” That is the bad news. “But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 15:56). Triumph at last outruns, outspends, and outstrips tragedy. But it does so at a painful cost. Death is not a portal to life. Death is not a benign friend, but a dreaded foe. It is not a natural part of life, but the most unnatural part of life you could imagine. But in his death and resurrection, Jesus crushed the serpent’s head, vanquishing the “last enemy” of every believer. This last enemy will one day be overcome for believers in the final resurrection of the dead, but that is because it has already

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

objectively been vanquished in the resurrection of our Living Head. Look at him and see what the whole harvest will be like in the end! In Christ, the end has already begun; the head will not live without his body. The shape of the future is already present. Lazarus was raised from death, but he eventually died again. His body thus raised for a time continued where it left off in its surrender to decay and death. One day, mourners would gather again at Lazarus’ tomb, but this time with no expectation of resurrection until the last day. And yet, precisely because of that confidence, precisely because Lazarus’ next funeral occurred this side of Easter, they would not mourn that day as those with no hope. After all, word would have reached them by then—perhaps some of them had even been witnesses—of the greater resurrection of Jesus himself, which would take a stand against death on its own territory, so that those united to him by faith would not remain dead. Their bodies will be raised to worship in God’s renewed sanctuary. Death is still an enemy, not a friend, but it is “the last enemy,” and it is already defeated so that now death is not God’s judgment upon us for our sin but the temporal effects of our participation in Adam’s guilt. And because the guilt and judgment are removed, we can cry out with our Lord in troubled anger at death and yet also sing with the apostle, “Where O death is your sting? Where O hell is your victory?” (1 Cor. 15:54–55). What we need again is a church that can sing the blue note in a way that faces the real world honestly, recognizing the tragic aspect of life as even more tragic than any nihilist could imagine, while knowing that the One who raised Lazarus is now raised to the right hand of his Father, until all enemies—including death—lie in the rubble beneath his feet. MICHAEL S. HORTON is the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.

This article originally appeared in the January/February 2005 issue of Modern Reformation under the title “Singing the Blues with Jesus.”

illustration by

JOSEPH W. SMITH III

DÁNIEL TAYLOR

THINK ABOUT THESE THINGS FIVE CHRISTIAN QUESTIONS ON ART

leave a movie feeling totally bowled over— only to find that the next day you can’t quite explain why you thought it was so great? Have you ever dragged friends and family to a film you loved, and then suddenly realized with horror that it wasn’t appropriate or worthwhile? If so, then you’ve probably allowed the emotional power of art to overcome your better judgment, and you aren’t alone. We all need guidelines to modulate our reaction to various kinds of art: movies, books, music—even video games and YouTube clips. Following below are five questions to ask O YOU SOMETIME S

when responding to these experiences from a Christian perspective.

1. EXACTLY WHAT IS DEPICTED? Blaise Pascal insisted that the first of all moral obligations is to think clearly, which will apply to our reception of art as well. We must receive the material on its own terms and make an honest effort to understand exactly what it says and does—even if we dislike it. “Your beliefs will be the light by which you see,” wrote Flannery O’Connor, “but they will not be what you see, and they will not be a sub1 stitute for seeing.”

2. DOES IT OFFER GOODNESS, TRUTH, AND BEAUTY? Try weighing the work against Paul’s famous dictum in Philippians 4:8: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” Not only does this make a terrific template for analyzing art, but it also suggests that we need not limit ourselves to works produced only by Christians. The terms in this list do not reflect the overt Christian virtues listed, for example, in Matthew 5:3–11 or Galatians 5:22– 23. Rather, they are taken from ancient Greek philosophy, and thus they establish ground on which Christians can enjoy “the best values that 2 the world has to offer.” As John Calvin famously said, “All truth is from God.” Because of this, we can receive and ponder truths about nature, about human experience, and even about the different beliefs of others. If this helps us understand the world around us, then it may also enable us to meet that world where it is—and to preach the gospel in terms it can grasp. Perhaps that’s why the apostle Paul wandered around the Areopagus, carefully studying its offerings, before he preached his first sermon to the pagan world.

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

And lest we are tempted to dismiss beauty as negligible in comparison to truth, recall that even God’s holy book is not a bare list of theological propositions, but a rich tapestry of stories, poems, biography, parables, and history. Likewise, Jehovah’s Old Testament dwelling was a palace of gold and cedar, crammed with carefully made furniture, paintings, tapestries, and sculptures—as well as tangible object lessons such as blood sacrifices, lampstands, and a loaf of bread. As for goodness, we need to ask whether the movie, book, or song makes us more likely to act in a holy, loving fashion. Or, by contrast, does it encourage selfishness and immoral behavior—perhaps through unnecessar y profanity, violence, or sexuality? It may also endorse bad conduct by making sin seem fun, by getting us to root for patently evil characters, by belittling upright behavior, or by not offering worthwhile characters as a contrasting baseline.

3. HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH? One key word in the foregoing paragraph is unnecessary. Since every Christian wonders where to draw the line in terms of sex and violence, we might start by asking whether the graphic content actually reveals anything important about the characters, the storyline, or the theme. This handy question eliminates a vast majority of today’s explicit material, most of which exists out of mere laziness or a desire to grab the viewer’s attention. In fact, as Gene Veith has observed, outrageous content often kills attention rather than ensuring it: When we turn away in disgust, or become sexually aroused, this actually breaks the aesthetic spell, jarring us out of the created world and back into our own. For any artist, this should 3 be a no-no. At the same time, even Scripture sometimes finds it necessary to be graphic and explicit. If you doubt this, try reading Judges 3:20–24, Ezekiel 23:20, or Song of Solomon 7:7–8. I’ve examined such material at length

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

in my book Sex and Violence in the Bible (P&R, 2014), observing that God’s word is sometimes astoundingly frank; yet such passages compose only a small percentage of the Bible’s overall content—much less, shall we say, than a film by Quentin Tarantino or Lars von Trier. As Scripture itself demonstrates, it isn’t always wise to judge a work solely on its graphic content. Doing so tends to reduce a film or book to a bald list of murders, swear words, and sex scenes, rather than engaging its overall worldview. As Leland Ryken writes in The Liberated Imagination: The question that a Christian must therefore answer is, Does the moral or intellectual significance of a work exceed in value the possible offensiveness of any of its parts? The answer will vary from individual Christians with individual works, and it will even vary for the same person 4 from one occasion to another. As this quote suggests, it’s risky to make hardand-fast rules about what we can and cannot watch. As with alcohol, games of chance, and other permissible but problematic issues, some folks are naturally more sensitive than others. In my own case, past struggles with pornography make it imperative that I avert my eyes during almost any scene involving nudity or graphic sex. I won’t make a similar rule for you, but I will say this: If you’ve never had to draw the line—to say to yourself, “This is something I just can’t watch”—then you probably aren’t doing it right.

4. CAN WE SEPARATE ARTISTIC EXCELLENCE FROM ABSOLUTE TRUTH? C. S. Lewis once insisted that he could appreciate certain works even if he disagreed with what they were saying. Someone who truly loves literature, he wrote, should be like a college professor grading tests “prepared to give the highest marks for the telling, felicitous and well-documented exposition of views

LET US STRIVE INSTEAD TO CREATE AND PROMOTE ART THAT SPREADS AROUND SANITY, PROMOTING COMMUNITY, AND COMPASSION THAT ISâ&#x20AC;¦HONORABLE, PURE, EXCELLENT, NOBLE, AND WORTHY OF PRAISE.

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

he dissents from or even abominates.” 5 We can recognize, for example, the skill that goes into a dazzling visual feast such as Ang Lee’s 2012 Oscar-winning film Life of Pi, even while we acknowledge the falseness of its message that all religions are equally valid. If we cannot make this separation between skill and content, then when we come to a work of art made with undeniable excellence, we fail to exercise the wisdom and discernment 6 requisite to properly engage with art. This would be the ultimate exercise in allowing feelings to trump what you otherwise know to be true.

5. DOES IT MAKE YOU MORE LOVING, JOYFUL, PATIENT, PEACEFUL, GENTLE, THOUGHTFUL? OR LESS? Careful readers will recognize the Galatian fruits of the Spirit in this final heading. It is indeed worth asking whether the book, movie, or song helps foster these qualities—perhaps even in unbelievers. To phrase this question differently: Does the work refine our sensibilities rather than blunt them, as so much contempo7 rary culture tends to do? I once heard a composer state that the function of art was to spread around as much sanity as possible. It seems to me a lot of what passes for “art” nowadays has basically the opposite effect. According to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the word amuse originally meant “to divert the attention so as to deceive.” I fear this is what much modern “amusement” does—whether it’s a pop song whose polished, tuneful noise precludes understanding the lyrics, or an over-the-top action movie with so much chaos that you can’t even stop to figure out whether the plot makes sense. Like the “idle songs” condemned in Amos 6:5, much of the ambient culture we live in has the effect of preventing thought rather than fostering it. As one MTV executive put it, “We rely on mood and emotion. We make you feel a certain way as opposed to making you walk away with a par8 ticular knowledge.”

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

CONCLUSION So we’re back to where we started. In a culture that increasingly refuses to think clearly, it’s getting harder to communicate effectively, to understand one another, and of course to share the gospel. As Ken Myers puts it, “The aesthetic of immediate and constant entertainment does not prepare the human consciousness well for recognition of a holy, transcendent, omnipotent, and eternal God, or to responding to his 9 demands of repentance and obedience.” If the work of art contributes to this spiritual and aesthetic deafness, then it is not helping make the world a better place. Let us strive instead to create and promote art that spreads around sanity, promoting community, and compassion that is—in Paul’s words—honorable, pure, excellent, noble, and worthy of praise. We simply must apply these scriptural principles to everything in life—including what we watch, listen to, and recommend. In the well-known words of Abraham Kuyper, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, 10 ‘Mine!’” And that includes the arts. JOSEPH W. SMITH III has been a teacher, writer, speaker, and OPC officer for more than twenty-five years. His latest book is Open Hearts: Recovering the Lost Christian Virtue of Transparency.

1 Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, 1969), 91. 2 James Montgomery Boice, Philippians: An Expositional Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1971), 285. 3 Gene Edward Veith, State of the Arts: From Bezalel to Mapplethorpe (Wheaton: Crossway, 1991), 231. 4 Leland Ryken, The Liberated Imagination: Thinking Christianly about the Arts (Wheaton: Shaw, 1989), 241. 5 C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 86. 6 Kenneth A. Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture (Wheaton: Crossway, 1989), 95. 7 Ryken, 254. 8 Quoted in Quentin J. Schultze, et al., Dancing in the Dark: Youth, Popular Culture and the Electronic Media (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 203–04. 9 Myers, 132. 10 “Abraham Kuyper,” Wikiquote, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/ Abraham_Kuyper.

SALVATION BELONGS TO THE LORD! LAST YEAR, we celebrated the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.

As we approach this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Reformation Day there is another significant anniversary to mark: the 400th anniversary of the Synod of Dort (161819). So, what does this have to do with us today? One of the results of that synod is the Canons of Dort. The canons are a carefully crafted and nuanced document that provides one of the richest explorations of what we often refer to as the Doctrines of Grace: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints. The Reformers did not invent these doctrines. They recovered and clarified the rich truths of Scripture that had been obscured by sinful men. We stand in the rich tradition of receiving the faith passed down from the apostles to the church throughout the ages, and we have the privilege and responsibility of passing this faith along to the next generation. Join us as we celebrate the glorious reality that God not only provides a way of salvation, but he also saves his people to the uttermost!

MODERN REFORMATION

AMAZING GRACE S A LVAT I O N B E L O N G S T O T H E L O R D

AMAZING GRACE SALVATION BELONGS TO THE LORD

HELP US TELL THE WORLD ABOUT GODâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S AMAZING GRACE Get the Amazing Grace collection for a donation of any amount. Your gift now will help us continue our work. Visit whitehorseinn.org/grace to download the collection today. This digital collection contains ten White Horse Inn episodes and eleven Modern Reformation articles.

WHITEHORSEINN.ORG/GRACE

STAY CONNECTED BETWEEN ISSUES. Sign up for our e-newsletter and receive monthly MR extras.

WHITEHORSEINN.ORG/MODREFNEWS

BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviews 64

Recommended Reading on the Eternal Generation of the Son

Recommended Reading on Dementia

Recommended Reading on the Relationship between Divine and Human Freedom

REVIEWED BY

Charles Lee Irons

James Lund

Noah J. Frens

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

BOOK REVIEWS

RECOMMENDED READING ON THE ETERNAL GENERATION OF THE SON n the Nicene Creed, the Christian church confesses that the Second Person of the Godhead is not a creature made by God but the eternally begotten Son of God. The creed affirms the church’s belief “in the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very 1 God, begotten not made.” Translated from Latin into modern theological terminology, this is the 2 doctrine of the Son’s eternal generation. One might be tempted to dismiss this concept as a remnant of Greek philosophy, or at best a human theological construct devised by the church fathers to express the faith in terms accessible to their cultural context. But nothing could be farther from the truth. The doctrine is simply saying what the Scripture says, using Scripture’s own words. The adjective “only begotten” (monogenēs in Greek) was lifted by the framers of the creed directly from the Scriptures. In the writings of the apostle John, the preincarnate One sent by the Father is called the “only begotten” Son (John 1:14, 18; 3:16, 18; 1 John 4:9). Most modern English versions obscure this by rendering the word monogenēs in these verses as “only” or “one and only,” but the traditional rendering “only begotten” better captures the way the church fathers 3 understood the term. The participle “begotten” (gennēthenta), which is used twice in the creed (“begotten of the Father before all worlds . . . begotten not made”), is derived from a number of verses in both the New Testament (“he who was begotten of God”; 1 John 5:18) and the Greek translation of the Old Testament, commonly called the Septuagint (LXX), where the verb “beget” (gennaō) is used three times in reference to the Son’s being begotten before creation (LXX Ps. 2:7; 109:4; Prov. 8:25).

In order to do battle in the fourth and fifth centuries with the Arians, who taught that the Son was a creature whom God made, the church fathers made much of these scriptural statements that the Son is begotten. Athanasius explained that, unlike creatures who are made out of nothing and therefore distinct from and alien to the divine nature, the Son does not possess a substance different from the Father, since he 4 is eternally begotten of the Father’s own being: “Whereas it is proper to men to beget in time, from the imperfection of their nature, God’s off5 spring is eternal, for His nature is ever perfect.” It may seem strange that the Bible uses the analogy of human procreation (fathers begetting sons) to describe the Father’s begetting of the Son. In human experience, fathers are older than their sons; and prior to their generation, sons don’t exist. But such temporal qualities do not apply to this begetting, which, as Gregory Nazianzen said, is “beyond the sphere of time, and above the grasp 6 of reason.” Augustine used the analogy of “fire” (Father) and “shining” (Son). As the fire begets the shining and yet the fire does not precede the shining temporally, so the Father begets the Son and yet does not precede him temporally. The 7 Begetter and the Begotten are coeternal. Why is the doctrine important? Historic Nicene Trinitarianism holds that relations of origin are the only revealed distinguishing characteristics of the three persons of the Trinity. The Father is unbegotten, the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, and the Spirit eternally 8 proceeds from the Father and the Son. Thus eternal generation is a key structural support for the doctrine of the Trinity that cannot be removed 9 without endangering the whole structure. Unfortunately, throughout most of the twentieth century, the eternal generation of the Son suffered serious neglect. A theological malaise or lack of conviction about it seemed

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

to have prevailed. Worse, some evangelical and Reformed theologians of stature published influential books and systematic theologies in which they questioned whether the doctrine is really taught in Scripture. Recently, however, there is renewed interest in the doctrine, and it is now receiving the sustained attention it deserves. Within the past six years, two books have been published that fill in this gap and provide solid defenses of the doctrine from a Protestant position: The Eternal Generation of the Son: Maintaining Orthodoxy in Trinitarian Theology by Kevin Giles; and Retrieving Eternal Generation, edited by Fred Sanders and Scott R. Swain. Below are reviews of both.

The Eternal Generation of the Son: Maintaining Orthodoxy in Trinitarian Theology by Kevin Giles IVP Academic, 2012 270 pages (paperback), $27.00

he strength of Giles’s book is in how he traces the historical development of the doctrine from the church fathers to the modern era.

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

After an introduction and two chapters on theological method (to which I’ll return in a moment), Giles shows how the doctrine first emerged with second-century apologist Justin Martyr and was then further developed by Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen. Next, he surveys the Arian controversy and the response of the Council of Nicaea and Nicene fathers, such as Athanasius. As we move into the later part of the fourth century, Giles gives due attention to the Cappadocian fathers (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa). Giles also describes Augustine’s views, as well as the teaching of the so-called Athanasian Creed. (Despite its name, that creed was not written by Athanasius but represents a fifth-century summation of Augustine’s teaching on the Trinity.) Next in Giles’s historical survey is the Trinitarian thought of Thomas Aquinas, who represents the high point of medieval theological reflection on the doctrine. After Aquinas, Giles deals with the Reformers, Luther and Calvin, as well as some representative postReformation Protestant theologians. He then shows how the doctrine fared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After completing that survey of key theologians throughout church history, Giles devotes a chapter to a lively question in evangelical circles today—namely, “Does the eternal generation of the Son imply or necessitate the eternal

BOOK REVIEWS

[ Giles] argues that the doctrine is biblical, not in the sense of being taught explicitly in Scripture, but in the sense of being a legitimate inference from the total teaching of Scripture.

subordination of the Son?” The context behind this question is that some evangelical theologians have made the following argument: The eternal generation of the Son necessarily implies the eternal subordination of the Son; but the eternal subordination of the Son is unacceptable theologically; therefore, the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son should be rejected. Giles rightly argues that the doctrine does not imply the eternal subordination of the Son. However, the weakness of Giles’s argument shows up in chapters 2 and 3 on theological method. Here he argues that the doctrine is biblical, not in the sense of being taught explicitly in Scripture, but in the sense of being a legitimate inference from the total teaching of Scripture. He argues that it is a “human attempt” (16, 68) to explain what differentiates the three persons of the Trinity. This understanding of the doctrine as a human theological inference colors his reading of the church fathers. He reads the church fathers through the lens of his own theological method, claiming that they did not appeal to any scriptural verses that speak of the Son as “begotten” but rather inferred the doctrine from the Father-Son relationship. He even claims the scriptural term monogenēs

was understood by the church fathers to mean merely “unique” or “only,” and that they did not use the Johannine verses where the term occurs as textual support for the eternal generation of 10 the Son (64–69, 81, 144–48). In spite of the problems with Giles’s theological method, however, the book is a valuable contribution. His survey of the history of the doctrine demonstrates that it has a solid claim to being an essential part of the historic consensus of the church.

Retrieving Eternal Generation by Fred Sanders and Scott R. Swain, eds. Zondervan, 2017 304 pages (paperback), $34.99 f the weakness of Giles’s book lies in his theological method, then this volume edited by Sanders and Swain provides a much-needed corrective. This multiauthor work is divided into three parts. “Part I: Biblical Reasoning” has seven chapters. In chapter 1, Scott

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

Swain provides a wonderful theological exegesis of Hebrews 1:2, which speaks of the Son as “the radiance of the Father’s glory.” In chapter 2, Matthew Y. Emerson analyzes the patristic appeal to the mysterious figure of Wisdom in Proverbs 8:22–31. He looks particularly at verse 25: “Before the mountains were established and before all the hills, he begets me” (LXX). Emerson shows that “the patristic interpreters had clear exegetical and theological grounds for interpreting [this passage] as both referring to Christ and as teaching the eternal generation of the Son” (56). In chapter 4, veteran Johannine scholar D. A. Carson takes a deep dive into John 5:26, which does not use “begetting” language per se but nevertheless affirms that the Father has granted the Son to have “life in himself”—that is, divine selfexistence. Carson draws the conclusion: “If such [self-existent] life is ‘granted’ to the Son, the conclusion of Augustine—that this is an eternal grant—is the only one that makes sense of the text” (85). In chapter 5, I defend the traditional rendering of monogenēs in the five Johannine texts as “only begotten.” The translation committees of the modern English versions that have “only” (e.g., ESV) or “one and only” (e.g., NIV, CSB) relied on outdated scholarship that can now be shown to be incorrect in light of more abundant comparative data. Other key passages dealt with in this section include Madison N. Pierce’s exegesis of Psalm 2:7 as quoted in Hebrews 1:5, and Mark S. Gignilliat’s defense of John Owen’s appeal to Micah 5:2 (“whose goings forth are from of old, even from eternity”). This part also contains an interesting chapter by R. Kendall Soulen on John 17:11–12, in which he refers to the Father’s eternal grant of the divine name to the Son. “Part II: Historical Witnesses” covers some aspects of historical theology that Giles either does not cover or covers in a cursory manner. Here we find superb treatments of the doctrine in Origen (by Lewis Ayres), Augustine (by Keith E. Johnson), Jonathan Edwards (by Christina N. Larsen), and Karl Barth (by Michael Allen).

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

Chapter 10, “Post-Reformation Trinitarian Perspectives,” deserves special notice. In this chapter, Chad Van Dixhoorn gives us a fascinating snapshot of the status of Trinitarian theology among Reformed theologians at the time of the Westminster Assembly. Finally, “Part III: Contemporary Statements” completes the circle of retrieval by providing contemporary theological constructions of the doctrine that are in harmony with the ecclesiastical and conciliar tradition. Mark Makin’s chapter explores three philosophical models for construing the doctrine: a causal model, a grounding model, and an essential dependence model. The two final chapters, which grapple with the doctrine’s place in systematic theology, provide a fitting conclusion that puts everything together and shows how the doctrine relates to the larger fabric of the Christian faith, such as the loci of soteriology (by Fred Sanders) and the doctrine of the image of God, from creation to new creation (by Josh Malone). CHARLES LEE IRONS (PhD in New Testament, Fuller

Theological Seminary) is senior research administrator at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, and adjunct professor at California Graduate School of Theology in Garden Grove, California.

1 This is from the version of the Nicene Creed adopted at the Council of Constantinople in AD 381. 2 The English word generation is from the Latin word generatio (“the action of producing offspring; begetting”), which in turn is from the verb genero (“beget”). 3 See my chapter contribution in Retrieving Eternal Generation, which I summarize in this article. 4 Athanasius, Defense of Nicene Definition §19. 5 Athanasius, Against the Arians 1.14. 6 Gregory Nazianzen, Third Theological Oration §3. 7 See Augustine’s Sermon 117 on John 1:1 and his Sermon to Catechumens on the Creed §8. 8 Cf. The Westminster Confession of Faith II.3 and Larger Catechism Q. 10. 9 Notable theologians who question the doctrine include J. Oliver Buswell, Lorraine Boettner, John Feinberg, Wayne Grudem, William Lane Craig, Millard Erickson, Paul Helm, Robert Reymond, and John Frame. 10 I survey the patristic biblical warrant in my article “Begotten of the Father before All Ages: The Biblical Basis of Eternal Generation according to the Church Fathers,” in Christian Research Journal 40.1 (2017): 41–47.

BOOK REVIEWS

RECOMMENDED READING ON DEMENTIA Finding Grace in the Face of Dementia by John Dunlop Crossway, 2017 208 pages (paperback), $18.99 n August 2017, country music legend Glen Campbell died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. Diagnosed in late 2010, Campbell subsequently commenced his “Goodbye Tour” with a film crew in tow. Their footage became the documentary Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me, which is a heartfelt and oftentimes shocking log of his deteriorating faculties—and his caregiver and wife, Kim Campbell, as she holds on and yet lets go. Campbell’s struggle has brought the suffering of dementia patients and their caregivers into the public eye. Dr. John Dunlop (whose parents both endured dementia) brings a medical point of view to his book Finding Grace in the Face of Dementia. Dunlop, an evangelical, begins with six brief descriptive chapters on dementia: terminal diseases and God; the diagnosis; prevention and treatment (there is little as the disease is terminal); and the

patient and caregiver experience of the disease. These chapters are immensely helpful to those with little or no exposure to the disease. Dunlop writes succinctly and with unnerving honesty about what lies ahead. The middle chapters address the practice of care for the caregiver and how the church may assist, although Dunlop readily admits the needs of the afflicted may exceed the church’s ability and resources to adequately provide care. The best chapter, as morbid as it may be, addresses end-of-life issues. Here is where Dunlop shines as a physician-ethicist. He advises the reader on the recommended level of care that should be provided at each stage: early stages (seven to ten years of life) with life-sustaining care to support meaningful activities, and later stages with quality of life care versus care that strips away precious time spent in long recovery. Finally, he addresses euthanasia—which is a significant temptation for those with a terminal diagnosis. Being an evangelical, Dunlop believes it is counter to the Christian faith, and he upholds the sixth commandment. Suggestions for further reading and a comprehensive general and Scripture index close out the book.

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

She locates human personhood in the relational aspect of the imago Dei or the image of God.

Sustaining Persons, Grieving Losses: A Fresh Pastoral Approach for the Challenges of the Dementia Journey by Dianne Crowther Cascade Books, 2017 246 pages (paperback), $30.00 ianne Crowther’s book Sustaining Persons, Grieving Losses: A Fresh Pastoral Approach for the Challenges of the Dementia Journey provides a more clinical approach, drawing from the fields of psychology, sociology, and theology. The book is based on her dissertation with voluminous footnotes citing her interaction with interdisciplinary professionals. Crowther’s audience is professional Christian clergy, in contrast to Dunlop’s experiential-theological approach that focuses on the family. While grinding through current research in dementia care, Crowther helpfully pauses to devote a significant amount of thought to personhood. She locates human personhood in the relational aspect of the imago Dei or the image of God. As the three persons of the Trinity share a personal relationship expressed within the Godhead, so humans also reflect that image in relationships—vertically with God and horizontally with humanity. As those with dementia lose the capability to form and retain their own relationships, it becomes the role of caregivers to create new relationships as the old relationships slip away. This is a daunting task for caregivers! The central chapters introduce numerous case studies for direct caregivers and offers firsthand accounts of the “long goodbye.” The final chapters engage in a theological tussle with published research and her case studies. All of this leads to a pastoral approach focused on caring relationships that mirror the “body” metaphor in 1 Corinthians 12. The church’s ministry to those with dementia is grounded in being a community committed to creating new loving memories and embracing past memories, while individual members form new

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

relationships to uphold the sufferer’s personhood as an image-bearer of God. The strength of Crowther’s book for the Modern Reformation audience is not in her Barthian pastoral advice and psychobabble ecclesiology, but in her comprehensive bibliography and frontline account of real-life stories of suffering caregivers.

Grace for the Unexpected Journey: A 60-Day Devotional for Alzheimer’s and Other Dementia Caregivers by Deborah Barr Moody, 2018 296 pages (hardback), $14.99 devotional by Deborah Barr, G ra c e fo r t h e U n e x p e c t e d Journey: A 60-Day Devotional for Alzheimer’s and Other Dementia Caregivers, is written specifically for Christian dementia caregivers. Although the sixty devotions are not theologically profound, they are quite thoughtful and reflect how caring for a loved one suffering

BOOK REVIEWS

from dementia quickly becomes life altering. Simply turning to the table of contents gives us a quick look into what emotional struggles caregivers experience: irritation, anger, guilt, depression, and weariness. These emotions are countered by redeeming virtues of gratitude, laughter, faithfulness, shalom, peace, and opportunity. This devotional is intended for a par ticular audience, but anyone providing care for the terminally ill will find it enriching.

Conclusion Both Dunlop and Crowther end their books with letters to their families: Dunlop, to his wife anticipating that he will succumb to dementia as did his parents, and Crowther with a poem to her mother after a culminating visit

in her late stages of dementia. These are difficult letters to read: Dunlop offers instructions on the care he wishes to receive in his anticipated future state of dementia; and Crowther, in sheer frenzy, pours her heart out in disbelief on what has happened to her mother. Both books are highly personal. Most of us will eventually be affected by dementia as family caregivers, church members, neighbors, and perhaps by our own diagnosis. As an elder in our local congregation who has made a number of care visits to those suffering from dementia, I found each of these books to be deeply human and profoundly helpful. May our congregations embrace members suffering from dementia and their caregivers—providing hope, comfort, forgiveness, and grace as is found only in the gospel of Jesus Christ. JAMES LUND is an elder in the United Reformed Church and

librarian at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.

RECOMMENDED READING ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DIVINE AND HUMAN FREEDOM Divine Will and Human Choice: Freedom, Contingency, and Necessity in Early Modern Reformed Thought by Richard A. Muller Baker Academic, 2017 336 pages (hardcover), $45.00 or the past decade, there has been an ongoing debate tucked away in academic journals and monographs concerning how Reformed theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries understood human freedom and how that freedom interacted with God’s providential will. A group of scholars, largely based in the Netherlands, argue that the Reformed

developed a sophisticated concept of human freedom that has largely been forgotten. These scholars maintain that the Reformed held that all things happen according to God’s will, and that in each mundane act of choice (such as eating an apple) human beings could have refrained from the act, chosen not to eat the apple, or could have chosen an entirely different object, such as eating chocolate instead. Human freedom, they argue, consists in the power to either choose or refrain from choosing an object, termed “liberty of contradiction,” or to choose a completely different object, termed “liberty of contrariety.” This present book by Richard Muller, the historian of post-Reformation Reformed theology, is a response to the ongoing debate. The opening two chapters present a thorough introduction and

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

summary of the debate. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the development of concepts such as necessity and contingency and their relation to freedom in Aristotle and how he was interpreted on these matters in the Middle Ages, particularly by John Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas. Chapters 5 and 6 trace these views within the Reformed tradition. Muller contends that the Reformed, following the medieval theologians, understood free choice in terms of liberty of contradiction and contrariety. The last two chapters move from the human perspective to the divine: chapter 7 examines the nature of divine power; and chapter 8 looks at divine concurrence, how God’s determination of all things and human freedom coincide. With regard to the latter, the Reformed argued that human freedom can never frustrate the will of God or operate independently of God’s providence. How exactly this occurred was a debated issue. A majority preferred the concept of “physical premotion,” which was borrowed from their Dominican contemporaries. This view held that for all human actions, God moves the human will to act. This divine motion cannot be frustrated, but it also moves things according to their nature. Since the nature of the will is to be free, the will is moved by God in a way that preserves its freedom. One can hear echoes of this view in the Westminster Confession of Faith 3.1. Though this is a technical and dense academic book, there is much that lay readers can learn from it. First, the discussion of divine and human freedom within the Reformed tradition occurred in deep dialogue with the Christian past and with contemporary Roman Catholic scholars. While the Reformed were in sharp dispute with past and present Roman Catholic teachings on matters of salvation, the sacraments, and the church, they were in deep continuity on other doctrinal points,

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

such as the relation between the divine will and human freedom. Second, the view of human freedom presented in the book is quite different from some presentations of the Reformed view found elsewhere. As Muller mentions here, and has developed at length elsewhere, there has been a tendency to take Jonathan Edwards’s Freedom of the Will as the benchmark for Reformed understandings of freedom when, in fact, Edwards arguably departed from the Reformed tradition on these matters. Edwards followed a different and contrasting understanding of freedom, developed by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, which defined freedom as doing what one wants to do, termed “liberty of spontaneity,” with the added condition that one is not forcibly coerced (29–30). Readers are likely more familiar with this understanding of freedom than the one expounded in the book. Third, Muller, along with a number of other scholars, cautions against using modern terms such as “compatibilism” and “libertarianism” or “determinism” and “indeterminism” when discussing these matters. He believes these terms do not do justice to the views of the past and we should instead use the terms they used, such as “liberty of contradiction” and “liberty of contrariety.” Lastly, it should be noted that Muller is concerned here with the relation between human and divine freedom in providence, and that his discussion is separate and distinct from matters of salvation and predestination. Although for some this book may prove highly technical and complex, for those interested in the topic of human and divine freedom, it is a must-read. NOAH J. FRENS is a graduate student at Vanderbilt University.

GEEK SQUAD

“By Feeble Sense”? by Shane Lems

t’s not uncommon to hear comments such as “Don’t suppress your feelings—get in touch with them.” And a popular modern theory is “If it feels good, it must be right—do it!” Identity issues today are argued based on feelings—that is, what you feel about yourself determines your identity. One reason people check their smartphone hundreds of times a day is because doing so produces a brief “feel good” moment, a dopamine shot. Some people even choose their religion based on feelings and emotions. Our culture is one that follows feelings. But what are feelings? One dictionary says that a feeling is “an emotional state or reaction; the emotional side of someone’s character.” Feelings also have to do with opinions and beliefs. For

example, we say, “I feel like you’re being cruel.” Another meaning of this term is related to the sense of touch: we talk about an object feeling hot or cold. We all know what feelings are, but it isn’t easy to define the concept in a short sentence. Holy Scripture doesn’t have a word for “feeling” that is exactly like ours. However, the Bible does talk about the inward parts (bowels) being moved or stirred (cf. Song of Sol. 5:4; Isa. 16:11). In John 11:33, Jesus was deeply moved in spirit (NASB) which means something like feeling “intense indignation.” One Greek dictionary says that the term for “bowels” or “kidneys” metaphorically refers to “the psychological faculty of desire, intent, and feeling.” More could be said, but it is safe for us to say that feelings are part of what it means to be human.

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

As Christians we have feelings too. When God powerfully breathes new life into our dead hearts, giving us repentance and faith, we don’t become unfeeling creatures. Rather, when God regenerates and sanctifies us, he renews even our feelings and emotions. No doubt “godly sorrow” has something to do with our feelings (2 Cor. 7:9–10 NIV). Christian joy is also related to our feelings (1 Thess. 3:9). Instead of feeling delight in sin, the Christian begins to feel delight in the things of God, such as his law (Ps. 119:174). At the same time, Christians are not yet totally sanctified, so they will still have sinful feelings. When Christians are at a low point, they may feel like doing something wrong. Or they may not feel like doing what they should do, such as being kind to their neighbor. When the prophet Elijah was depressed, he didn’t even feel like living another day (1 Kings 19:4)! We should note that our feelings fluctuate quite frequently. If I’m tired and hungry, I might not feel well. If my favorite baseball team won in the bottom of the ninth and five minutes later my boss texted that I got a raise, I’d feel really good! If my diet is poor and I get little or no exercise, my feelings will be affected. When my friend calls and says he’s getting a divorce, I feel badly for him. Though we all have feelings, not many of us experience them in the same way at the same time or circumstance, since we’re all quite different. Sometimes our feelings affect our spiritual life. If I yell at my son and say something terrible to him, I don’t feel very strong in the faith afterwards. During a busy week, I might look back and painfully realize I didn’t pray very much. That fact would make me feel miserable, like a pathetic Christian. On the other hand, when I obey God and show genuine love to someone, I feel good about it. After I finish memorizing a portion of Scripture, I feel like I’ve accomplished something worthwhile. The list goes on. Our feelings and spiritual life are related. So what about feelings and assurance of salvation? What do my feelings have to do with my

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

assurance? I believe it’s helpful to talk about subjective assurance and objective assurance. By using this terminology, I’m not suggesting there are two different assurances. Instead, I see these as two sides of the same coin or two aspects of a Christian’s assurance.

THE SUBJECTIVE ASPECT OF ASSURANCE “Subjective assurance” is what I call assurance based on internal factors. We can know we’re Christians by the work of the Spirit in our hearts and minds. When the Spirit gives new life to a person, that person has faith, repentance, obedience, hope, joy, and so forth. The apostle John said that we can know that we know the Lord if we keep his commandments (1 John 2:3; see Heidelberg Catechism Q/A 86). He also wrote that we know we have been given new life when we love fellow Christians (1 John 3:14). In Reformed theology, we talk about the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit. This is when the Spirit witnesses in us and to us that we are children of God (Rom. 8:15–16). Here’s the problem: sometimes Christians don’t feel like they have joy or hope. Sometimes I feel like my obedience is pretty dismal. I repeatedly sin and feel miserable about it. We can’t always “feel” the Holy Spirit at work in us. When going through a trial, we don’t always feel God’s love. When these things happen, our assurance sometimes wanes and weakens. Abraham Kuyper said this is like winter coming to the soul, bringing heavy layers of ice. The subjective aspect of assurance often falters when our feelings falter. Here are two things to remember when struggling with the subjective aspect of assurance. First, our feelings are not always stable, nor are they always trustworthy. I may feel like God doesn’t love me, but my feeling doesn’t mean that’s true. It’s not good when I don’t feel like praying today, but that doesn’t mean I’m reprobate. Puritan Thomas Brooks put it this way:

GEEK SQUAD

Though there is nothing more dangerous, yet there is nothing more ordinary than for weak saints to make their sense and feeling the judge of their condition. . . . If you will make sense and feeling the judge of your state and condition, you will never have peace or comfort all your days. Your state, O Christian, may be very good, when sense and feeling says it is very bad. Second, we need to remember that when we struggle, our response to the gospel is not the gospel. My emotions and feelings about the faith don’t define the faith. How much I treasure Christ at a particular moment in life is not the “good news.” The truth of the empty tomb doesn’t depend on how it makes me feel. When we mix the truths of the gospel with our feelings and emotions, our assurance loses stability.

THE OBJECTIVE ASPECT OF ASSURANCE “Objective assurance” is based on external things like Jesus’ saving work and the gospel truths of Scripture. To use the words of the Westminster Confession, this assurance is “founded upon the divine truth of the promises of salvation” (18.2). I can be assured of my salvation by remembering the historical and biblical fact that Christ died and rose again to save me from my sins. Assurance comes when I look to Scripture and see the precious promises of God sealed by his Spirit: he will forgive all my sins through Christ’s blood, he will never leave me, he will take me to glory, and so on. These are objective truths, and they are outside of me. They are certain promises of God that have to do with historical facts. These truths and facts don’t change when my feelings do. I would argue that objective assurance has priority over subjective assurance. They do go together, like faith and repentance; they cannot be separated. But as Charles Hodge said, “The grounds of assurance are not so much within, as without us.” In critiquing

seventeenth-century Pietism, Louis Berkhof said that the movement focused far too much on the “subjective experience of believers.” The emphasis was within, which was divorced from the word and ended up in “morbid introspection.” It caused doubt, uncertainty, and despair, since it was primarily focused on the subjective aspect of assurance. If we want a firm place to stand when it comes to assurance, then we need to stand on the gospel. Our anchor holds in heaven even when the storms of life rage and make us feel miserable (Heb. 6:19). For example, when Job’s life completely crumbled around him, he said, “I know that my redeemer lives . . . even after my skin is destroyed, yet from my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:25–26 NASB). Or in New Testament terms, we walk by faith in God’s truths and promises, not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7). William Cowper, who suffered bouts of depression, put it this way in his 1774 poem “God Moves in a Mysterious Way”: Judge not the Lord by feeble sense But trust Him for His grace Behind a frowning providence He hides a smiling face The “frowning providence” may be hard to bear, but based on biblical truth, we know behind it is the fatherly “smile” of God.

CONCLUSION We all have feelings. It’s part of being human. But as Christians, we understand that our feelings are not always reliable. They should not rule us, nor should they be the primary thing on which we ground our assurance of salvation. Instead, as we consider the work of the Spirit in us, we’re directed outside of ourselves to the firm promises of God. “This is the promise which He Himself made to us: eternal life” (1 John 2:25 NASB). SHANE LEMS is the pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church

(OPC) in Hammond, Wisconsin.

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

KNOW WHAT YOU BELIEVE. With over twenty-five years of radio broadcasting and magazine publishing, and our Campaign for Core Christianity, our mission is to help Christians “know what they believe and why they believe it.” Create a free account at whitehorseinn.org to access free content.

WHITEHORSEINN.ORG/MEMBER

B AC K PAG E

How to Disagree Agreeably by Eric Landry

t is one of the inevitable facts of life that at some point you’ll find yourself disagreeing with a friend, family member, authority figure, or institution. How you disagree is often more important than the actual disagreement itself. Unfortunately, too many of our disagreements have become disagreeable. Although we may want to blame all this on social media, the blame probably lies more in how quickly we can post our disagreements—thereby removing any serious time to reflect on our disagreement before going public! The Bible describes our disagreeable nature as being “quarrelsome” (Prov. 26:21), and James tells us that it arises from desires that are in competition with Jesus (James 4:1). Quarreling is condemned repeatedly in the New Testament; for example, in 1 Timothy 3:3, Paul says that a quarrelsome person is not fit to serve the church. (If that’s the case, then how many current officers in our churches would qualify after a review of their online presence in the past week?) All of us will sometimes disagree with something or someone, so the question remains: How do we disagree agreeably? First, be slow to anger (James 1:19). Not every disagreement is worth the time and effort. A Christian should be quick to overlook offenses, eager to put the best spin on another person’s words and deeds, to forgive when we have been sinned against, and to always remember that love covers a multitude of sins (1 Pet. 4:8).

If it is impossible to avoid the disagreement, then we must take a second step: Evaluate the seriousness of the disagreement (not how passionate you feel about it!). Instead, we need to ask how close we are to this situation, what influence we have, and what might be the lasting effects of expressing (or not expressing) our disagreement. At this point in my life and pastoral career, I am convinced that few disagreements actually require a personal response. They don’t rise to the level of importance that should compel any of us to express our disagreement. When we do, we can be seen as petty, wasting time and resources on insignificant issues, or trying the patience of those with whom we disagree. Assuming our disagreements are serious enough to elicit a response, we must deal with them properly. That means going to the particular person with whom we disagree or expressing our disagreement with the proper authority figure. It means resisting every impulse to “try out” our arguments with others or to create a bloc of influence to lend credibility to our disagreements. Once expressed, our disagreement must rest in its own strength. If it’s rejected after various appeals, then we need to submit or leave in peace. The person who disagrees agreeably will have far more influence than the one who is a constant source of complaint. Our measured actions and demonstrated wisdom have a great opportunity to shape life around us—that is, when we disagree agreeably. ERIC LANDRY is executive editor of Modern Reformation.

VOL.27 NO.5 SEP/OCT 2018

CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION. Join the conversation for a modern reformation online.

FIND US ON TWITTER @MODREF AND ON FACEBOOK AT FACEBOOK.COM/MODREFSOCIAL