Andy Naselli

Thoughts on Theology

Worship Traditions

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John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God (A Theology of Lordship; Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2010), 237–38:

[The Protestant Reformers] used a very broad brush to eliminate from their theology and worship anything they considered contrary to Scripture or supplementary to Scripture. So the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture has served as a weapon against the imposition of extrabiblical notions on the conscience of the believer.

Nevertheless, nearly five hundred years have passed since the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, and during that time Protestantism itself has accumulated a large amount of tradition. Some of this is good, some bad. My present point is that it is just as important as ever to distinguish human tradition from the norms of Scripture and to fight any attempt to put the two on the same level of authority. Some cases in point:

. . . . Many traditions have also developed concerning worship and other aspects of church life. These concern the style and instrumentation of worship songs, the order of events in worship, degree of formality or informality, and so on. Many of these are not commanded by Scripture, but many are in accord with broad biblical principles. The problem is that church people will sometimes defend their particular practice as mandatory on all Christians, and they will criticize as spiritually inferior churches that use different styles and patterns. Often the criteria used are not scriptural, but aesthetic. People argue that this style of music is more dignified, that that liturgy is more ancient, and so forth. These aesthetic and historical criteria are often used in place of Scripture, leading to the condemnations of practices that Scripture permits and commanding of practices that Scripture does not command. That, too, in my judgment, violates the principle of sola Scriptura, the sufficiency of Scripture.

Related: John MacArthur on How to Serve Christians Who Are Needlessly Restrictive

Five Lessons from Churchill’s Life

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Paul Johnson, Churchill (New York: Penguin, 2010), 122–25 (numbering added):

Winston Churchill led a full life, and few people are ever likely to equal it—its amplitude, variety, and success on so many fronts. But all can learn from it, especially in five ways. . . .

  1. Always aim high. . . . He did not always meet his elevated targets, but by aiming high he always achieved something worthwhile. .  .
  2. There is no substitute for hard work. . . . The balance he maintained between flat-out work and creative and restorative leisure is worth study by anyone holding a top position. . . .
  3. Churchill never allowed mistakes, disaster—personal or national—accidents, illnesses, unpopularity, and criticism to get him down. His powers of recuperation, both in physical illness and in psychological responses to abject failure, were astounding. . . . He had courage, the most important of all virtues, and its companion, fortitude. . . . In a sense his whole career was an exercise of how courage can be displayed, reinforced, guarded and doled out carefully, heightened and concentrated, conveyed to others. . . .
  4. Churchill wasted an extraordinarily small amount of his time and emotional energy on the meannesses of life: recrimination, shifting the blame onto others, malice, revenge seeking, dirty tricks, spreading rumors, harboring grudges, waging vendettas. Having fought hard, he washed his hands and went on to the next contest. . . . There is nothing more draining and exhausting than hatred. And malice is bad for the judgment. Churchill loved to forgive and make up. . . . Northing gave him more pleasure than to replace enmity with friendship, not least with the Germans. . . .
  5. The absence of hatred left plenty of room for joy in Churchill’s life. His face could light up in the most extraordinarily attractive way as it became suffused with pleasure at an unexpected and welcome event. . . . He liked to share his joy, and give joy. It must never be forgotten that Churchill was happy with people. . . . He got on well with nearly everyone who served him or worked with him, whatever their degree. . . . He showed the people a love of jokes, and was to them a source of many. No great leader has ever laughed at, or with, more than Churchill. . . . . He liked to sing. . . . He was emotional, and wept easily. But his tears soon dried, as joy came flooding back.

You can get a good flavor of what Churchill was like by watching Into the Storm: Churchill at War (HBO, 2009). (Warning: It has some strong language.) HT: Owen Strachan.

Paul Johnson, Churchill (New York: Penguin, 2010), 94:

Britain alone was not capable of crushing Germany. . . . However, he [i.e, Winston Churchill] clinched matters by persuading Roosevelt and his advisers that priority should be given to defeating Germany first. This was perhaps the most important act of persuasion in Chuchill’s entire career, and it proved to be absolutely correct.

Indeed . . . Churchill had an uncanny gift for getting priorities right. For a stateman in time of war it is the finest possible virtue. “Jock” Colville, his personal secretary, said, “Churchill’s greatest intellectual gift was for picking on essentials and concentrating on them.”

“Getting priorities right”—picking and concentrating on essentials—is also a virtue for theologians.

Prioritizing

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Paul Johnson, Churchill (New York: Penguin, 2010), 94:

Britain alone was not capable of crushing Germany. . . . However, he [i.e, Winston Churchill] clinched matters by persuading Roosevelt and his advisers that priority should be given to defeating Germany first. This was perhaps the most important act of persuasion in Chuchill’s entire career, and it proved to be absolutely correct.

Indeed . . . Churchill had an uncanny gift for getting priorities right. For a stateman in time of war it is the finest possible virtue. “Jock” Colville, his personal secretary, said, “Churchill’s greatest intellectual gift was for picking on essentials and concentrating on them.”

“Getting priorities right”—picking and concentrating on essentials—is also a virtue for theologians.

Who Are Evangelicals?

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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.

The Structural Difference between Matthew and Mark

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T. Desmond Alexander, Discovering Jesus: Why Four Gospels to Portray One Person? (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 20–21 (cf. 61–63):

While Matthew has much in common with Mark, there are two important structural differences. First, Matthew adds new material to the beginning and the end of Mark’s account.

Chart 1.3

. . . Second, Matthew adds into Mark’s mainly action-packed story five blocks of teaching by Jesus.

Chart 1.4

Although Matthew takes over almost all of Mark’s material, he is not constrained by Mark’s order. Matthew adopts a more topical arrangement and sometimes significantly changes the order in which Mark describes things.

Related: See my interview with Desi Alexander on biblical theology.

The Past Is a Foreign Country

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“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” –L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between

Carl Trueman’s Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010) devotes chapter 3 to the problem of anachronism (pp. 109–40) and concludes the book with this useful insight:

One notable thing about immigrating to a foreign country is that the very difference of the culture to which one moves allows one to see both the idiosyncrasies of one’s new culture and of that from which one has departed. When one only ever lives in one culture, the assumption is that everything one sees and experiences is nature, the norm, and that everybody else, to the extent that they do not conform, is deviant, subnormal, etc. Cross-cultural experience is excellent for disabusing one of such instincts.

History can be like that . . . .

I have already mentioned my childhood antipathy to the Welsh rugby team, but many other things in my life, from taste in music to personal political convictions, are all more comprehensible in the light of wider historical factors. (pp. 172–74)

Jim Hamilton’s Whole-Bible Biblical Theology

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“We live in an age of increasing specialization (owing in part to the rapid expansion of knowledge), and disciplines that a priori ought to work hand in glove are being driven apart.”

Don Carson wrote that in 1983. The fragmentation in theological disciplines almost two decades later is palpably worse.

So it’s not surprising that few people are writing whole-Bible biblical theologies these days. And it’s refreshing to see the recent release of this one:

James M. Hamilton Jr. [SBTS bio] God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology. Wheaton: Crossway, 2010.  640 pp.

  • Sample 36-page PDF and 1:45-minute video
  • Endorsements by Tom Schreiner, Kevin Vanhoozer, Desi Alexander, and Steve Dempster
  • Time-line of this book’s history
  • Audio of Jim Hamilton presenting the book’s argument (along with the book’s TOC)
  • Guest-posts on the Crossway blog: Part 1 | Part 2
  • Guest-post for the ShareFaith blog
  • Interview with Matthew Miller: Part 1 | Part 2
  • Interview for 9Marks Blog
  • Steve Dempster’s review for the 9Marks eJournal

Jim gave me the honor of reading through his manuscript last Christmas break, and I profited immensely from both his big-picture connections and his more detailed exegetical observations. He impressively demonstrates how the whole Bible coheres.

If a big book like this seems too daunting for you to read, soberly consider what the Internet (and TV, movies, video games, etc.) might be doing to your brain. (I just read Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, and I’m convicted about how frequently I check email and Google Reader.)