Andy Naselli

Thoughts on Theology

John Piper

Two Piper Illustrations

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Two illustrations from John Piper‘s four-part series on Ruth (September 2008) are noteworthy:

1. Don’t plan your life.

In part 2, Piper gives a six-minute autobiographical sketch (10:20–16:45 in the MP3). It includes how he met his wife, went to seminary, and became a professor and then a pastor. The author of Don’t Waste Your Life here underscores another theme: Don’t plan your life because God already has! One could add qualifications to this (e.g., don’t inflexibly plan your life), but I think the main point is sound. (Indeed, Piper qualifies this in part 3.)

2. Learn to see the hidden hand of God when it looks like he is dealing you bitterness day after day.

In part 3, Piper recounts in 4.5-minutes (2:20-6:50) a dark cloud in the pilgrimage of Bethlehem Baptist Church. In 1993, Piper heard a romantic recorded message from one of the BBC staff members to another on staff. After a “hellish” six weeks, the male staff member finally confessed to seven years of adultery. The upshot was that 230 people left the church, which merely survived and didn’t grow for three years. “It was horrible, and the Lord’s hand was on us for good.”

A Quibble with John Piper

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On December 17, 2008, John Piper warmly recommended Leif Enger’s novel Peace Like a River. Jenni and I read it together over the last month and finished it last night.

Enger is a gifted writer who crafts words like an artist, and his novel has several redeeming qualities. The problem, however, is that the story’s plot is far too thin. It starts well but then fizzles. We kept waiting for it to get better, but it never did. Perhaps this says more about us than it does about Enger—sort of like how the only thing being evaluated at fancy art museums is the people looking at the paintings, not the paintings themselves!

Should you read Peace Like a River? A cheeky side of me wants to answer, “No, don’t waste your life.” :-)

Abortion

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I just listened to Justin Taylor’s Sunday morning sermon on abortion that he preached at his church on January 18, 2009. Three words come to mind:

  1. Sobering
  2. Convicting
  3. Motivating

After listening to Justin’s sermon, I have the kind of feeling that I might have felt if I could have watched Schindler’s List while living near Nazi concentration camps while WWII was still in progress. How can this unspeakably horrific evil legally be happening all around me? What am I doing about it?

Cf. these posts on abortion by Justin Taylor and John Piper this month:

Justin Taylor’s Recent Posts on Abortion

  1. Number of Abortions Since 1973
  2. How Support for Abortion Became Kennedy Dogma
  3. Conversation on the Gospel, Abortion, and Politics
  4. World Magazine on Abortion
  5. On Abortion and Gay Rights, Evangelicals and Liberals Join to Advise Obama
  6. Why I Hate Sanctity of Human Life Sunday
  7. An Open Letter to Barack Obama
  8. Life
  9. A Sermon on Abortion
  10. Roe No More
  11. One Simple, Practical Way You Can Make a Difference for Women and the Unborn
  12. The Case for Life, Around the Web
  13. Four Reasons You Might Be Aborted
  14. Abortion and the Early Church
  15. Moral Accountability
  16. Abortion and Obama’s First Few Days
  17. Amusing or Sad?
  18. Piper Responds to Obama on Abortion
  19. Being Pro-Life in a Culture of Death

John Piper’s Recent Posts on Abortion

  1. Being Pro-Life Christians Under a Pro-Choice President
  2. Lincoln’s Logic on Slavery Applied to Abortion
  3. Holding A Miracle
  4. Fifteen Pro-Life Truths to Speak
  5. The Baby in My Womb Leaped for Joy

See also John Piper’s resources on abortion.

Look, Lord. See my shells.

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John Piper‘s Don’t Waste Your Life (Wheaton: Crossway, 2003) includes this convicting paragraph (pp. 45–46):

An American Tragedy: How Not to Finish Your One Life

I will tell you what a tragedy is. I will show you how to waste your life. Consider a story from the February 1998 edition of Reader’s Digest, which tells about a couple who “took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their 30 foot trawler, play softball and collect shells.” At first, when I read it I thought it might be a joke. A spoof on the American Dream. But it wasn’t. Tragically, this was the dream: Come to the end of your life—your one and only precious, God-given life—and let the last great work of your life, before you give an account to your Creator, be this: playing softball and collecting shells. Picture them before Christ at the great day of judgment: “Look, Lord. See my shells.” That is a tragedy. And people today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream. Over against that, I put my protest: Don’t buy it. Don’t waste your life.

(Don’t Waste Your Life and the study guide are available for free as PDFs.)

I just became aware of a related 32-page booklet:

John Piper. Rethinking Retirement: Finishing Life for the Glory of Christ. Wheaton: Crossway, 2009.

Rethinking Retirement is already available for free as a PDF. (I must have missed it when Desiring God highlighted this on October 7, 2008.)

Do Calvinists really believe in human responsibility?

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Justin Taylor’s gentle, respectful response to John Piper notes this:

(1) The fact that God ordains all things (i.e., his secret will) has a limited effect on our decision making. It can’t prescribe how we act, but it can prevent us from having the wrong perspective (e.g., anxiety, fear, despair, misplaced trust, etc.). But in terms of interpreting events, the main way to read providence is backwards (as John Flavel wrote: “Some providences, like Hebrew letters, must be read backward”).

(2) The fact that God ordains means ensures that our actions have significance. The ordained outcome can never be seen as an excuse for complacency or fatalism.

Calvinists believe in God-ordained means. This is not merely a platitude. John M. Frame says it well in Apologetics to the Glory of God: An Introduction (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1994):

The relation of divine sovereignty to human responsibility is one of the great mysteries of the Christian faith. It is plain from Scripture in any case that both are real and that both are important. Calvinistic theology is known for its emphasis on divine sovereignty—for its view that God “works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will” (Eph. 1:11). But in Calvinism there is at least an equal emphasis upon human responsibility.

An equal emphasis? Many would not be willing to say that about Calvinism. . . . God’s sovereignty does not exclude, but engages, human responsibility. Indeed, it is God’s sovereignty that grants human responsibility, that gives freedom and significance to human choices and actions, that ordains an important human role within God’s plan for history (pp. 14-15, emphasis added).