Music Video of the Week: Chris Tomlin

Chris Tomlin - "How Great is Our God (World Edition)"

Eric Metaxas: I Am Second

Music Video of the Week: Hillsong Live

Hillsong Live - "Man of Sorrows"

Kevin DeYoung: Parenting Does Not Create the Child

Kevin DeYoung:

Parenting has become more complicated than it needs to be. It used to be, as far as I can tell, that Christian parents basically tried to feed their kids, clothe them, teach them about Jesus, and keep them away from explosives. Now our kids have to sleep on their backs (no, wait, their tummies; no, never mind, their backs), while listening to Baby Mozart and surrounded by scenes of Starry, Starry Night. They have to be in piano lessons before they are five and can’t leave the car seat until they’re about five foot six. 

It’s all so involved. There are so many rules and expectations. Parenting may be the last bastion of legalism. Not just in the church, but in our culture. We live in a permissive society that won’t count any sin against you as an adult, but will count the calories in your kids’ hot lunch. I keep hearing that kids aren’t supposed to eat sugar anymore. What a world! What a world! My parents were solid as a rock, but we still had a cupboard populated with cereal royalty like Captain Crunch and Count Chocula. In our house the pebbles were fruity and the charms were lucky. The breakfast bowl was a place for marshmallows, not dried camping fruit. Our milk was 2%. And sometimes, if we needed to take the edge off a rough morning, we’d tempt fate and chug a little Vitamin D. 

As nanny parents living in a nanny state, we think of our children as amazingly fragile and entirely moldable. Both assumptions are mistaken. It’s harder to ruin our kids than we think and harder to stamp them for success than we’d like. Christian parents in particular often operate with an implicit determinism. We fear that a few wrong moves will ruin our children forever, and at the same time assume that the right combination of protection and instruction will invariably produce godly children. Leslie Leyland Fields is right: “One of the most resilient and cherished myths of parenting is that parenting creates the child.” 

Excerpt from Crazy Busy, A (Mercifully) Short Book About a (Really) Big Problem

Nancy Guthrie: "Why Do We Say, 'God Told Me?'"

Nancy Guthrie:

When someone begins a sentence with "God told me . . ." I have to admit a silent alarm goes off somewhere inside me—unless the phrase is followed by a verse of Scripture. I know that many see this as the way the Christian life is supposed to work—that if we are really in fellowship with God we will be able to sense him speaking to us through an inner voice. But I'm not so sure. And it's not because I think God is incapable of or uninterested in speaking to his people today. In fact I resist this language precisely because God is speaking to his people today. He speaks to us through the Scriptures.  

 When we read the Scriptures we are not just reading a record of what God has said in the past. God actively speaks to us in the here and now through the words of this amazing book. The writer of Hebrews makes this point clear when he quotes Old Testament passages and presents them not as something God said to his people sometime in the past, but as something God is currently saying to his people (Hebrews 1:6,7,8, 2:12,3:7, 4:7). He writes that "the word of God is living and active" (4:12). It is exposing our shallow beliefs and hidden motives. This word is personal.  You and I hear the voice of God speaking to us—unmistakably, authoritatively, and personally—when we read, hear, study, and meditate on the Scriptures. 

Something More, Something Different 

But many of us want something more, something different. We read the Scriptures and witness God speaking to individuals in amazing ways throughout the history of redemption. Job heard God speaking from the whirlwind. Moses heard him calling from the fiery bush. Samuel heard him calling in the dark. David heard him speak through the prophet Nathan. Isaiah felt the burning coal and heard assurance that his guilt was taken away and sin atoned for. Saul and those traveling with him on the road to Damascus heard Jesus asking why Saul was persecuting him. Prophets and teachers at Antioch heard the Holy Spirit tell them to set apart Barnabas and to send out Saul. John felt the glorified Jesus touch him and heard his assurance that he didn't have to be afraid. 

Many of us read these accounts and assume that the Bible is presenting the normal experience of all who follow God. But is it? Graeme Goldsworthy speaks to this question in his book Gospel and Wisdom. He writes, "Every case of special guidance given to individuals in the Bible has to do with that person's place in the outworking of God's saving purposes." He adds, "There are no instances in the Bible in which God gives special and specific guidance to the ordinary believing Israelite or Christian in the details of their personal existence." 

Are there instances in the Scriptures in which people describe a sense of God speaking to them through an inner voice? We read accounts of God speaking in an audible voice, through a supernatural dream or vision, a human hand writing on a wall, a blinding light, or a thunderous voice from heaven. This is quite different from the way most people who say that God has told them something describe hearing his voice—as a thought that came into their mind that they "know" was God speaking. One prominent teacher who trains people on how to hear the voice of God writes, "God's voice in your heart often sounds like a flow of spontaneous thoughts." But where in the Bible are we instructed to seek after or expect to hear God speak to us in this way?

Read the rest.

Hershael York: "For Such a Slime as This"

Hershael York preached an absolutely fantastic sermon on Esther 2 the other day in chapel. I highly recommend taking some time to listen to this.

For Such a Slime as This from Southern Seminary on Vimeo.

Music Video of the Week: Andrew Peterson

Andrew Peterson - "Carry the Fire"

Russell Moore's Inaugural Address as President of the ERLC

VERY worth the 21 minutes to watch this.

Peter Leithart: Hermeneutics of the Open Ear

This is really good stuff from Peter Leithart. Some excellent reminders for people in seminary like me, and all Christians who want to know their Bible better.

I have occasionally given students a “pop culture” survey that tests their knowledge of movies, music, and TV. They do scarily well. Some of them remember advertising jingles and silly sitcoms from my childhood. Then I give them a Bible trivia quiz, asking them to identify the daughters of Zelophahad or give the weight of Goliath’s armor or identify Jeremiah’s birthplace. On that test they typically do, shall we say, less well. 

My punch line is: Earlier generations of Christian students and intellectuals treated the Bible as their “pop culture.” Without concordances, much less search engines, they had the whole Bible at their fingertips. I imagine Origen riffing away on snatches of the Bible, just as today’s teens and twenty-somethings talk for hours quoting movies or imitating their favorite hip hop artists. 

We shouldn’t idealize premodern interpretation of Scripture. We’ve learned a lot about ancient languages, history, and culture over the past few centuries, and that new information has immeasurably deepened our understanding of the Bible. Yet, as more and more theologians have discovered, patristic and medieval commentators knew things that we have forgotten, much to our detriment. 

They knew that biblical hermeneutics was a hermeneutics of the open ear. They trained themselves to be attuned to every inflection of God’s voice, to ponder the slightest twist of phrase, to hear every reverberation and overtone of Scripture’s music. A single verse of the Psalms could lead Augustine through the prophets to the gospels and epistles, with a side tour of the Song of Songs along the way. 

They were as saturated in Scripture as we are in entertainment and advertisements. They read the Bible, of course, but because they studied Scripture in the liturgical setting of a church or monastery, they also heard the Bible, over and over. Monks sang through the Psalter each week. Spend a lifetime doing that, and you’d have the Bible on the tip of your tongue, too. 

Just as important, they knew that technique and mastery of content don’t make a good interpreter. Only the good can be good teachers; only the obedient can hear. In this sense, too, premodern hermeneutics was a hermeneutics of the open ear. Eyes are organs of judgment, and therefore organs of mastery. As we scan a text, we subject it to our gaze. Ears are the organs of obedience. Eyes put us in positions of authority. But when we open our ears, we concede authority to the speaker. It’s significant that patristic and medieval students didn’t confine themselves to looking at the page. They heard the word, and so exercised the sense of humility, subjection, and service. 

According to the book of Exodus, a slave who loves his master and decides to remain with him marks his status by having his earlobe bored with an awl at a doorway. After that, his ear is forever open to the master’s voice. This institution becomes a metaphor of the consecrated life. Psalm 40 dismisses the sacrifices of the temple and teaches that God is pleased with the sacrifice of the open ear, the offering of prompt and heartfelt obedience. The same symbolism is taken up in the rite of priestly ordination, in which blood was smeared on the priest’s earlobe. Priests are permanent household servants to Yahweh, their ears bored open to signify obedience to their divine master. 

By “obedient” I don’t mean only an appropriate response to commands. A hermeneutics of the open ear reacts rightly to the full range of God’s speech acts. The seventeenth-century Westminster Confession of Faith captures this brilliantly when it says that “a Christian believes to be true whatsoever is revealed in the Word, for the authority of God himself speaking therein,” and immediately adds that a believer responds differently to the Bible’s different ways of communicating: He or she obeys God’s commands, trembles at God’s threats, rejoices in God’s promises, believes God’s assertions. His ears are open so he can sing along when God plays a tune. 

Above all, premodern interpreters knew that both good reading and good living are gifts from God. Again and again, Israel closes herself to God’s word. Isaiah preaches to the deaf and dull of heart, and Jeremiah’s audience closes its ears to his stern message of doom. Jesus, the last prophet, hears and does his Father’s will, and he spends his days making priests. With a touch, he loosens tongues to sing his praise. By the finger of his Spirit, he bores into our ears so the Father’s word can enter and capture our hearts.

HT: Patrick Schreiner

The Getty's New Live Album from The Gospel Coalition

The last couple days I have really been enjoying the new live album from Keith and Kristyn Getty, which was recorded live at the last Gospel Coalition conference. They write simply fantastic songs, and the quality of the recordings is great. I highly recommend it.

A Helpful Resource for the Church: The ERLC

Russell Moore, explaining the purpose of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention:

Music Video of the Week: Coldplay

Coldplay - "Atlas"

The Atonement (as Viewed in the 2nd Century)

Is the common Protestant view of the atonement and justification simply a product of the Reformation (Luther and Calvin)? Or was it the common understanding of the church from the beginning based on Scripture, in particular Paul's letters?

We get a hint from the Letter to Diognetus, written somewhere around AD 175-200, by an unknown author to an unknown recipient named Diognetus, to explain in further detail the Christian faith.

9:2 And when our iniquity had been fully accomplished, and it had been made perfectly manifest that punishment and death were expected as its recompense, and the season came which God had ordained, when henceforth He should manifest His goodness and power (O the exceeding great kindness and love of God), He hated us not, neither rejected us, nor bore us malice, but was long-suffering and patient, and in pity for us took upon Himself our sins, and Himself parted with His own Son as a ransom for us, the holy for the lawless, the guileless for the evil, the just for the unjust, the incorruptible for the corruptible, the immortal for the mortal. 

9:3 For what else but His righteousness would have covered our sins? 

9:4 In whom was it possible for us lawless and ungodly men to have been justified, save only in the Son of God? 

9:5 O the sweet exchange, O the inscrutable creation, O the unexpected benefits; that the iniquity of many should be concealed in One Righteous Man, and the righteousness of One should justify many that are iniquitous!

Tom Schreiner on the Role of the Law and Parenting

Tom Schreiner, commenting on Galatians 3:19-25:

Most secular people, and even many religious people, believe that moral education is the pathway to humane living. If we can only succeed in teaching "morals," justice and truth will prevail. The Pauline view of the law and the goodness of human being is much less optimistic. The law is not the solution but part of the problem... 

...Let's remember this with children. Rules and commands with immediate punishments can civilize children, and they need civilizing. We can teach them manners and insist that they obey and do the right thing when they are small. But let's not equate that with the changing of their hearts. I heard somewhere this analogy: the law is like a cage. If it has bars, it can keep a lion from eating the lamb, but it can't prevent the lion from wanting to eat the lamb. Let's not think that a polite child (which is a good thing) who says "Yes, sir" and "Yes, ma'am" is the same thing as a child who is born again. 

-Tom Schreiner, Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament: Galatians, p. 251-2

Music Video of the Week: Dustin Kensrue

Dustin Kensrue - "It's Not Enough"