Andy Naselli

Thoughts on Theology

Historical Theology

Bob Yarbrough’s Evolving Faith and Crises of Faith

by

Steve Hays and James Anderson, eds. Love the Lord with Heart and Mind. 2nd ed. n.p.: n.p., 2009.

Excerpt from the interview with Robert W. Yarbrough (pp. 140–41)

9. Looking back over your life as a Christian, how would you say that your faith has evolved over time? How, if at all, does your lived-in faith differ from when you were younger?

In general, the older I get the more gratifying it becomes to know God through faith in Christ, not least because this enriches immeasurably all other areas of my life. At the same time, the difficulties of loyal service to Christ, to the extent that I may ever approximate it, seem to grow thornier. Jeremiah said the human heart is deceitful and sick [Jer 17:9]. I’m afraid that I become personally ever more acutely conscious of this about myself as time goes by. . . .

11. Since you’ve been a Christian, have you undergone a crisis of faith? If so, how did you work through it? [Read more…] about Bob Yarbrough’s Evolving Faith and Crises of Faith

Getting the Old Princetonians Right

by

Books like this are rare:

Paul Kjoss Helseth. “Right Reason” and the Princeton Mind: An Unorthodox Proposal. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2010. 257 pp.

Helseth destroys the fifty-years-old paradigm about the Old Princetonians (esp. Archibald Alexander, A. A. Hodge, B. B. Warfield, and J. Gresham Machen) that postconservative evangelicals continue to use today.

I’ve heard John Woodbridge rave about Helseth’s research on the Princetonians many times. Woodbridge initially encouraged Helseth to write this book, and Woodbridge’s foreword sets the historical stage for how unusual and bold this book is.

You can view a PDF of Woodbridge’s foreword (along with endorsements by scholars like John Frame, Roger Nicole, and Steve Nichols) here.

Warfield the Affectionate Theologian

by

The theologian B. B. Warfield was a scholar. One of the best. And he refused to separate theology and spirituality.

I write this in Let Go and Let God? A Survey and Analysis of Keswick Theology (p. 283, numbering added):

Pitting doctrine against devotion is a false dichotomy because God intends them to go together. They are not mutually exclusive; one without the other is incomplete.

[Note 199] Warfield strikes an outstanding balance in five articles reprinted in his Selected Shorter Writings , 2 vols., ed. J. E. Meeter (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1970, 1973), listed here chronologically:

  1. “Authority, Intellect, Heart,” 2:668–71;
  2. “The Indispensableness of Systematic Theology to the Preacher,” 2:280–8;
  3. “Spiritual Culture in the Theological Seminary,” 2:468–96;
  4. “The Religious Life of Theological Students,” 1:411–25;
  5. “The Purpose of the Seminary,” 1:374–8.

See also Andrew J. B. Cameron and Brian S. Rosner, eds., The Trials of Theology: Becoming a “Proven Worker” in a Dangerous Business (Fearn, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2010).

Those five articles by B. B. Warfield profoundly influenced me when I was in seminary. Hugely helpful and motivating.

Here’s a sample from “The Religious Life of Theological Students” (1:411–12): [Read more…] about Warfield the Affectionate Theologian

Historians’ Fallacies

by

I first learned about this book in class with John Woodbridge:

David Hackett Fischer. Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. xxii + 338 pp.

Woodbridge recommended it and said that it helped give Don Carson the idea to write Exegetical Fallacies , which references Fischer over a dozen times.

Here’s how Carl Trueman prefaces his chapter “A Fistful of Fallacies” in Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 141:

In this final chapter, I want to offer a brief survey of some of the more common fallacies that historians commit. It is by no means exhaustive, and the reader who wants to read more about these kinds of issues should consult the old but still very useful, and at times very funny, book by David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. Fischer deals with so many fallacies in such a devastatingly clear and ruthless manner that most, if not all, of us will blush as we read it, recognizing our own foolishness and ineptitude at various points in his narrative.

I don’t call myself a historian in the same way that most lay people don’t call themselves theologians. But nearly everyone’s a theologian; some are good ones.

A historian is someone (anyone) who asks an open-ended question about past events and answers it with selected facts which are arranged in the form of an explanatory paradigm. (Fischer, p. xv)

So nearly everyone’s a historian. This forty-year-old book will help you be a better one.

The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

by

“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”

That’s the opening line to Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).

Carl Trueman plays on that title in his latest book: The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Chicago: Moody, 2011). (This 41-page book is available only electronically in the Kindle format.)

Some excerpts:

Is there an evangelical mind active today? Nearly two decades ago Mark Noll concluded any evangelical mind had gone soft through lack of use. Today the question is whether a healthy evangelicalism exists to host such a mind. I am not sure, theologically, that such a thing still thrives. (p. 13) [Read more…] about The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

Explaining Anti-intellectualism

by

Bradley G. Green, The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 179–80:

If what I am arguing is true [pp. 175–78 summarize the book’s argument], then the anti-intellectualism that sometimes marks traditional Christianity needs to be addressed. If the gospel has within it the resources to promote the life of the mind, why do we see anti-intellectualism in portions of the Christian church? I can only offer three brief comments here.

First, it is likely that some persons have been unfairly written off as anti-intellectuals. Christians should be slow to believe what the secular media tells us about this or that Christian group.

Second, much of what passes for intellectual sophistication in contemporary culture is—if we are honest—undeserving of that description. If the acquisition of true knowledge requires—as I have argued in this book—that our hearts and wills be properly ordered, then much of what passes for knowledge is not, in fact, true knowledge.

Third, a pastoral word: C. S. Lewis argued in “Learning in War-Time” that certain Christians are called—by vocation—to apply their minds in a sustained way to the intellectual life. Christians who engage in intensive study should never forget the Christian church. . . . Christians engaging in scholarship should consider the moral obligation of their task. We engage in the life of the mind—at least partially—because we have a moral obligation to help and indeed to protect other Christians as we are able.

Green is not disingenuously generous here. He’s a gracious man, and his brief answer at the end of his book is just that—gracious.

Related: John Piper, “Facing the Challenge of Anti-intellectualism,” in Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 113–50.

Who Are Evangelicals?

by

Christopher Catherwood [grandson of David Martyn Lloyd Jones], The Evangelicals: What They Believe, Where They Are, and Their Politics (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 27, 71–72, 76:

This . . . is the major divergence between evangelicals and other Protestants: we still hold to those two Reformation truths of sola fide and sola scriptura . . . .

Who Are Evangelicals?

For many readers who might not know any professing evangelical Christians, the answer to this chapter’s question might seem a simple
one, if what you see in the newspapers is any guide. An evangelical is a white, middle-class male Republican from the southern part of the United States (or, as we now have to add, a white female Republican from the rural West of America).

Now, for sure, many evangelicals would indeed fit into this description, and they are the demographic about which the mainstream news media writes the most. But, in truth, this description presents a highly misleading picture, and also a dangerous one, as it confuses evangelicalism as a whole, which is a worldwide, global movement, with just a tiny segment of it, and gives it a political coloring that is utterly atypical of evangelicals in most countries today. For it is now widely said that the average evangelical is an economically poor black Nigerian woman with numerous family members suffering from HIV/AIDS.

So wrong gender, wrong skin color, wrong country, wrong social class—in fact wrong everything when it comes to the stereotype of evangelicals we commonly see on television or in the newspapers. For the fact is that the overwhelming majority of evangelical Christians today do not live in the West at all but in what most commentators refer to as the Global South, or the Two-thirds World, since most of the world live there. . . .

[I]t is now true: African Christians are more typical of twenty-first-century Christianity—and, I would add, of evangelical Christians—than those in the now predominantly secular West.