Happy Reformation Day!

In honor of, an old paper on Justification.

Bauder on Pillsbury

Ht: Andy Naselli

Earlier this week Pillsbury Baptist Bible College, a fundamentalist college in Owatonna, Minnesota, published this announcement:

The Pillsbury Baptist Bible College Board of Trustees has announced that the college will cease academic activities on December 31, 2008. National economic conditions combined with deficits caused by declining enrollment have exhausted Pillsbury’s financial reserves, leaving the college without funds to complete the school year.

Pillsbury is committed to help current students complete their educational goals. Several sister institutions are working with the college to facilitate the transfer of credits and academic programs for those who choose to transfer.

Pillsbury will invite college representatives from sister schools to the campus to inform students of the academic and financial assistance programs they are making available to Pillsbury students affected by the closure.

The Registrar’s Office and Financial Aid Office will assist current students transferring to other colleges. Transcripts and academic records will be maintained for perpetuity at a sister college. The campus will be sold and the proceeds used to meet obligations to creditors as well as assist faculty, staff and students with the transition.

Kevin Bauder’s essay this week is entitled “Reflections upon Hearing the Announcement.” Here are some significant excerpts:

In a way, Pillsbury Baptist Bible College is a microcosm of what is happening within institutional fundamentalism everywhere. The fundamentalist movement has never been really cohesive, but during the past decade it has shown significant deterioration. Whether the overall numbers of fundamentalists are increasing or decreasing is hard to say. What is clear is that the mainstream of historic fundamentalism is dwindling.

The question is not whether fundamentalism is collapsing. The question is how we should respond to the collapse. More fundamentally, the question is how we should even be thinking about these events. What ought to occur to us first is that God does not need fundamentalism. . . . We ought humbly to recognize that God’s work in the world is much larger than institutional fundamentalism. Some days I wonder whether all of fundamentalism put together accounts for more than a footnote in the book of God’s present dealing with humanity. Much as we might prefer to think otherwise, wisdom will not die with us.

Not all of fundamentalism is worth saving. Fundamentalist structures have not infrequently been used to perpetrate abuses or to perpetuate silliness. If those districts of the fundamentalist movement were to disappear, we would be none the worse.

The fundamentalism that I value is not essentially a movement or a collection of institutions. It is an idea. It is a good idea, even a great idea.
If we are going to talk about saving fundamentalism, then let us be clear that the thing we need to save is the idea. All of our associations, colleges, seminaries, mission agencies, preachers’ fellowships, networks, alignments, and coalitions are of value only to the extent that they maintain and perpetuate the idea. If they are not propagating the idea, then let them perish.

This much is clear: nobody ever was simply a fundamentalist. Every fundamentalist has also been something else, and that “something else” has defined the quality of every variety of fundamentalism.

Arcing: a tool to read good and not use the Bible like a magic book

Germaine to other discussions:

John Piper:

It was a life-changing revelation to me when I discovered that Paul, for example, did not merely make a collection of divine pronouncements, but that he argued. This meant, for me, a whole new approach to Bible reading. No longer did I just read or memorize verses. I sought also to understand and memorize arguments. This involved finding the main point of each literary unit and then seeing how each proposition fit together to unfold and support the main point. (Biblical Exegesis: Discovering the Meaning of Scriptural Texts, pg. 18, my emphasis)

If you want to learn this method of biblical interpretation (which works especially well in Pauline texts), there is now a website devoting to the art of biblical arcing.

HT: Johnathon Bowers

Really Sorry...

But I couldn't resist. Rod Dreher is on fire: 1 2 3

When Love Goes to Sleep

When our loves goes to sleep, we grow cold and unfeeling toward people. We love material possessions and person comforts more than people. We love our work more than people. We become bitter toward people because our feelings have been hurt. We become weary in serving, selfish, ungrateful people and become content to show love only to those who are agreeable to us. We become lazy and complacent about love. We neglect our duty to love the unlovely and the disagreeable. Like the priest and Levite in the story of the Good Samaritan, we become apathetic to the suffering of others.

...

So when you sense your love falling to sleep, take corrective action immediately. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to awaken the spirit of love. Turn to the Scriptures and let them revive your sleepy soul. Pray for a fresh awakening of gratitude for the free grace of God and for the costly sacrifice of Christ at Calvary's cross. Pray earnestly that the Lord would fill you anew with the first fruit of the Spirit which is love (Gal. 5:22; Eph 5:18). Repent of any sin that dulls your love for God or his people. Stop thinking about yourself so much. Follow the great examples of those who have modeled the life of love God desires. Remind yourself of your first Christian duty to love God and neighbor. Start doing outward acts of love for others and pray that soon the desire and joy of loving others will follow.

Alexander Strauch, Love or Die, pg. 62-63

Piper on Charles Simeon

He grew downward in humiliation before God, and he grew upward in his adoration of Christ.

Handley Moule captures the essence of Simeon's secret of longevity in this sentence: "'Before honor is humility,' and he had been 'growing downwards' year by year under the stern discipline of difficulty met in the right way, the way of close and adoring communion with God" (Moule, 64). Those two things were the heartbeat of Simeon's inner life: growing downward in humility and growing upward in adoring communion with God.

But the remarkable thing about humiliation and adoration in the heart of Charles Simeon is that they were inseparable. Simeon was utterly unlike most of us today who think that we should get rid once and for all of feelings of vileness and unworthiness as soon as we can. For him, adoration only grew in the freshly plowed soil of humiliation for sin. So he actually labored to know his true sinfulness and his remaining corruption as a Christian.

-John Piper, The Roots of Endurance

ht: Zach Dietrich

Blogging

A particularly fitting picture for 10,000 site hit. Proof that you to can start a blog that only you and your sister read and get to 10,000 hits.

Palin

A rare political post, but this was really interesting to me. As cited by Rod Dreher from David Brooks:

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

Quotes on the Church

When the world thinks you are worthless, no one can build you up as well as a church family can. No one is more likely to pick you up when you fall than those who share in the forgiveness of God with you. No one will listen more patiently and compassionately to the stories of your pain than the people of God in the church. No one will pray for God to heal you or guide you or provide for you as will the church. No one will stick by you when you are alone as the family of God will. No one will help you when you are in trouble or in need as those with whom you have koinonia."

Spiritual Disciplines Within the Church, Donald S. Whitney

The Christian is not meant to be, nor called to be, a radical and solitary romantic, wandering in isolated loneliness through the world; rather, the Christian is called to be a member of a community."

Spirituality in an Age of Change, Alister McGrath

A Good Word for Today

Josh Daggett shared this with me this morning:

Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you,
1Peter 5:5-6 ESV

It is a frightening thing to consider that when I am proud God actively opposes me. But when I am humble (remembering my need for the gospel), instead of actively opposing me he is there to give grace on top of the grace he has already given, grace to desire and to carry out his will (Phil 2:13). Oh, how I need to receive grace from God’s hand today! Oh for humility!

Pray for Love

The secret of the early Christians, the early Protestants, Puritans, and Methodists was that they were taught about the love of Christ, and they became filled with a knowledge of it. Once a man has the love of Christ in his heart you need not train him to witness; he will do it. He will know the power, the constraint, the motive; everything is already there. It is a plain lie to suggest that people who regard this knowledge of the love of Christ as the supreme thing are useless, unhealthy mystics. The servants of God who have most adorned the life and the history of the Christian Church have always been men who have realized that this is the most important thing of all, and they have spent hours in prayer seeking His face and enjoying His love. The man who knows the love of Christ in his heart can do more in one hour than the busy type of man can do in a century. God forbid that we should ever make of activity an end in itself. Let us realize that the motive must come first, and that the motive must ever be the love of Christ.

D. Martyn Lloyd Jones, The Unsearchable Riches of Christ, 253: cited in Love or Die by Alexander Strauch, pg. 35

I bow my knees before the Father...that...he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, ... that you...may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth (of Christ's love), and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. (Eph. 3:14-19)

Woship: What's the Issue?

Perhaps my favorite part of a football game is when a defender who is totally fooled by a quarterback will come crashing through the line of scrimmage to tackle the running back only to find out he never had the ball. The quarterback had it all along. The defender has put an incredible amount of effort into his goal only to realize he totally missed the point. Those who would pour forth incredible amounts of effort into arguments over musical styles in the worship wars are much like this defender, they miss the point.

The Pharisees asked Jesus in Matthew 22 which was the greatest commandment of the law. He responded by quoting The Shema, Deuteronomy 6:4, which says, "Hear, O Israel, The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might." Jesus's response to this is significant for two reasons: 1) I think he was making a statement about the Pharisees and 2) I think he was making a statement about the nature of faith, the true core of the Deuteronomic law.

First, Jesus was making a statement about the heart condition of the Pharisees. When one goes through the New Testament record of Jesus's interaction with the Pharisees, the volume and tone of his harsh words against them are overwhelming. They were the religious crowd of the day. And they would have expected Jesus to be pleased with them. Many of them had large portions (if not all) of the first five books of the Bible memorized. Doctrinally, they would be the "supernaturalists", the ones who believed in the resurrection and angels. As for practicing what they preached, they kept the law so exactly that they even tithed on their spice rack. Yet, it is clear from Mark 7 what Jesus thought of their 'religion': "And he said to them, 'Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me;' ' " Jesus was saying that 'keeping of the law' was more than simply doing what it said, or believing what it wanted them to believe. He summarizes toward the end of Mark 7:

And he said to them, "Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?" (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, "What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."

The condition of their hearts was of supreme importance to Christ, that is, what they loved. The Pharisees did many good deeds, but they had little love for God. They may have quoted the Shema twice a day, but they did not heed its words. They loved the recognition of men, but they loved God very little. The Pharisees missed the point.

Second, I think Jesus was making a statement about the nature of Biblical faith. Paul makes a very interesting statement in Romans 10 where he quotes Moses to be speaking of a righteousness that is based on faith. There are debates surrounding the full extent of what Paul was saying with the quote, but the point seems clear, Paul thought Moses was talking about a righteousness by faith. Throughout Deuteronomy (Deut 6:4-6, 10:12, 11:13, 30:6 for example) the heart of the matter from Moses is that the nation would "love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live" (Deut 30:6). My point is that The Shema (Deut 6:4) is not only the center of all the Old Testament law, but it is also at the center of what Jesus meant when he said "believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved." When Moses said love, he was saying faith (Romans 10:6). When we say faith, we should be thinking love. It is at the center of what it means to be a Christian. And the worship wars miss the point because they center their discussion on style and form rather than on what God is seeking, true worshipers (John 4:24), those who love him with all their heart, soul, and might. The point is, are you a worshipper? Do you love him, or merely act like you do?