The Far Green Country

One of the best side benefits of being back in school is that it has forced me back into the discipline of reading. I love to read, so the motivation has not lacked.  However, when I was not in school, I did not read nearly as much as I should have.  The reason for this is simple: I would wait to read until I had time, rather than making time to read each day.  Now, however, that has changed: it is part of the responsibility of my education now that I make a few hours’ worth of time to read every day.  This has already been a great benefit.

So what am I reading now?  In addition to daily readings from Scripture, I’ve got a whole raft of books going for my various classes. For Ancient Church I am reading The Story of Christianity by Justo Gonzalez and Early Christian Doctrines by J.N.D. Kelly. For Reformed Missions & Evangelism I am reading Tell the Truth by Will Metzger, Ministries of Mercy by Tim Keller, The Pastor-Evangelist edited by Roger S. Greenway, God-Centred Evangelism by R.B. Kuiper, and Today’s Evangelism by Ernest Reisinger.  For Presbyterian History I’m reading Seeking a Better Country by Darryl Hart & John Muether, and for Introduction to Reformed Theology I’ll be reading Christian Baptism by John Murray and The Apostolic Church: Which is It? by Thomas Witherow.

In addition to these text books, I’ve also started reading a few new books in my personal reading.  These are Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish by Margarita Madrigal, and Njal’s Saga translated by Magnus Magnusson. Both of these are nice breaks from the regular stream of theological reading, and both serve secondary goals of: 1) learning Spanish, and 2) improving my ability to writing fantasy.

I encourage all who like to read to quit making excuses about not finding the time to sit down with a book.  Time to read won’t find you, you must find it.

“The Plan of Union [of 1758] stamped the Presbyterian Church as a communion that would encourage and benefit from revivals. Although that form of piety could lead as it did to new members and greater godliness among its ministers and members, it was also a form of devotion that was in tension with the covenantal faith of the Reformed tradition that stressed children growing up and inheriting the faith of parents rather than having to undergo a religious experience as a Christian rite of passage.”
(Hart & Muether, Seeking a Better Country, pp. 68-69)

“Assuredly, when the word of God is despised, all reverence for him is gone. His majesty cannot be duly honored among us, nor his worship maintained in its integrity, unless we hang as it were upon his lips.” (Calvin, Institutes, II.1.4)

This week is the fourth full week of Fall Term at GPTS.  So far, I have found each of my classes to be edifying and informative.  The lectures are engaging, the professors are knowledgeable, and the reading material is ‘healthy.’  I choose this latter word deliberately, because by it I mean to compare the reading load at GPTS to eating one’s spiritual vegetables.  Not all of the books we are reading are as “tasty” as a novel, and very few of them are as easy to read as a modern book on the same subject. Nevertheless, they are good for us to be reading - and for this reason are enjoyable on their own terms.  Kinda like being given a large helping of carrots.

The benefit of reading older books - or modern works that focus on old personalities and problems - are twofold.  The first thing one learns in so doing is that there really is “nothing new under the sun”: nearly every contemporary issue out there has an historic parallel.  For example, how much would the debate surrounding the New Perspective on Paul be helped by rereading a bit of the history of the Neonomians and their involvement in the Marrow Controversy?  If nothing else, both the Neonomians and the New Perspective-ites (a clumsy term, I admit) have found their leadership - as well as their doctrinal abberations - in charming, warmly pastoral English ministers.  I can’t help but wonder how much of the popularity of each was based on this factor: “But look at how helpful he’s been… how could he possibly be as wrong as you say?”

The second benefit one acquires from reading old stuff is that one find helpful insights.  It’s symptomatic of my generation that we scoff at this notion - that we waste our time reading The Shack, when we should be investing our time in more profitable exercises.  As an example of the latter, I came across the following quotation in an historical essay I was reading last night.  The context was a discussion of Gilbert Tennent, an 18th century Presbyterian revivalist whose life & ministry was infected with a dangerous strand of pietism.  Speaking of how Tennent & his pal Theodore Frelinghuysen (it’s Dutch, don’t ask) evaluated Christian professions, the author writes:

“He placed every Christian testimony under the scrutiny of his pietistic conversion paradigm.  First, there had to be the testimony of a ‘law work’ in the individual. Here the individual Christian recounted his misery at the consciousness of his violation of God’s law. Second, the individual testified of his conscience experience of the new birth, which freed him from the misery of the ‘law work.’ Finally, the pietistic conversion resulted in the pious acts of a truly converted soul. One had to possess this testimony in order to be considered credible and communing.  In other words, the testimony of a covenant child, having grown up loving the Lord Jesus Christ, trusting Him alone for salvation, and having never known a day when he did not believe in Christ, could not pass the pietists’ three-step conversion gauntlet.” (C.N. Willborn, “Gilbert Tennent - Pietist, Preacher, and Presbyterian” in Colonial Presbyterianism: Old Faith in a New Land, edited by S. Donald Forston III)

Having written numerous times on the matter previously, I won’t wax prosaic on benefit I derived from this quotation beyond briefly saying this: I fall into the category of the last sentence - and yet for a long time have been subjecting myself to the futility of the pietist “gauntlet.”

So reading old stuff is worthwhile.  The above example is merely a snapshot of what I’ve found so far, after only four weeks. Were I inclined, I could provide many other examples: John Calvin says excellent things in his Institutes, and there are passages in the Confessions of St. Augustine that should move all of us to weeping.  But I think the point is clear without further belaboring: reading old stuff is worthwhile.

There are times in the life of a Christian when we experience a lot of “noise” in our spirits.  We live in a bustling, busy world.  We get distracted.  Or we are tempted.  Myriad indeed are the lusts of our flesh, the things of earth, and the wiles of the devil - and it seems that we are always surrounded by malicious legions of avarice.  There are days when too much of the world seeps into our souls; times when we cannot seem to hear God’s voice in the Scriptures; times when we feel like there is nobody on the other end of our prayers. The only thing we can perceive is discordant static.  Noise.

In such times, it can feel like we are trapped in a small room with a blaring television set.  Remember the old days before “smart sound,” when the volume of commercials was approximately one hundred times that of the programming?  The screen flashes a succession of badly-produced commercials for local car dealers, and the volume has been turned way, way up.  The controls on the TV itself won’t work.  What’s more, you cannot seem to find the remote control in order to to turn it down.

The thing most needful to be rid of this sort of spiritual noise is perspective.  What we need most is to remember that there is a world beyond the four walls of the small room - that our own circumstances and selves are not the center of the universe.  Sometimes this is difficult to do.  Sometimes we have paced around the perimeter of that room for so long, that we feel sure we have circumnavigated the globe.  Sometimes the TV has droned on for such duration that we cannot seem to recall it ever being otherwise.  We can lose any memory of peace, and any hope of escape.

But the Scriptures offer a different perspective. The Gospel tells us that it is Jesus, and not ourselves, who is the center of all creation.  Moreover, the Gospel tells us that no amount of noise can separate a Christian from Christ’s love.  If our trust is in him, then there is absolutely nothing that can take him away from us - or us away from him:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35-39, ESV)

This is a powerful comfort to the Christian.  When my oldest son had his first bad dreams, I taught him this: “If you trust Jesus, you don’t ever have to be scared of anything.”  He repeats it back to me now.  Now the noise we face as adult believers might be much more involved than a simple bad dream, but the answer is the same: if we trust Christ, we need fear nothing - even in all the noise.  Let us learn this simple truth, and like children find comfort therein.

For those whose trust is in Jesus Christ, the four walls fall away.  The noisy TV may still be blaring, but no longer does it hold us prisoner in a small room.  Rather, both we and the TV are now set on a long beach.  The golden sand stretches away in either direction as far as our eyes can see, and all along the shore the surf is washed by waves.  Loud, rhythmic waves.  Powerful, unceasing waves.  As the awareness of our new locale sinks in, the cadence of the water rises in our ears: a constant, deafening, glorious roar before which the insistent cacophony of the TV seems mute.  Christ has more than sufficient power to silence all noise - with grace upon grace.

So how do we mute the TV when we’ve lost the remote?  What do we do when our spirits are soiled by the incessant noise of world, flesh, and devil?  We stand by faith in the cleansing surf of Christ’s power, and we listen.  We listen for the sound of the Savior’s waves.

Just a quick note to my regular readers… yesterday, while moderating some spam comments, I accidentally deleted about twenty of my recent, good comments!  My apologies to those whose remarks have been so hewn from their prosaic bodies.  I assure you, the decapitation was not intentional!

“It is important to emphasize the fact that saving faith involves an object which is objective to ourselves.  That is, it is not sufficient that one just exercise an attitude of faith without some object.  Rather, the saving faith is directed to the object of Christ.  This object is presented in several ways in the Scripture.  For example, John 3:16 simply speaks of our believing in him; 2 Tim. 3:15 speaks of the Scriptures making us wise unto salvation “through faith which is in Christ Jesus”; Rom. 3:25 specifies the shed blood of Christ as the object of our faith; Rom. 10:9 makes the object of faith the resurrection of Christ.  The object of our faith then is the Person of Christ and his saving work on the Cross and in the Resurrection.  Warfield says, ‘The Saving Power of Faith resides not in itself, but on the Almighty Saviour.  It is not faith that saves, but faith in Jesus Christ.  It is not strictly speaking even faith in Christ that saves, but Christ that saves through faith.’(1)  Faith, then, as trust in Christ means that we look away from self, and find our whole interest in the object, namely, Christ and his saving work in our behalf.”  (Morton H. Smith, Systematic Theology (GPTS, 1994), p. 452)

(1) Biblical and Theological Studies (Philadelphia: P&R, 1952), p. 424-5.

My third book, Rustling Leaves, is now available for purchase on Amazon.com via the following link:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0979612233

The official release notice is available on this site at: Rustling Leaves. For those who purchase a copy, be sure to pay attention to the special offer.

After a long day of driving yesterday, I finally this morning set foot for the first time on the campus of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary (GPTS). The seminary is located in a renovated former public school.  This school year will be the first year of operation out of the new facilities (click on the picture below for a larger view):

Stepping inside the doors shortly after taking this photograph, I was met almost immediately by the head of the maintenance department.  We had met lastnight after evening worship at the local church, and he complimented me on my hat.  Then he gave me a tour of the facilities.

After seeing the campus, I spent some quality time in the bookstore, poking through the myriad shelves and assembling a small pile of the required texts for this Fall.  During this process, I had the opportunity to meet and converse with a handful of other students and a few of the seminary’s administrative assistants.  Everybody down here is genuinely gracious and seems very thankful to be a part of this institution and its mission.

Once the required mound of books was acquired, I spent a few hours in the seminary library (again, click below for a larger shot):

Although the picture may not look like much, the library was also fairly impressive to me. So I sat there and reviewed my Greek (those are my hat, briefcase, and books on the table) until it was time to return to my hotel to eat a late lunch and pick up my computer and textbooks prior to the beginning of class this evening.

The first session of class this evening was great. I was very impressed by the professor’s clear articulation of the subject matter, the wisdom he seems to have accrued from many years in the ministry, and his passion for spreading the Gospel to Muslims - both here and abroad.  Most of all, however, I was deeply moved by his transparent love for the Lord Jesus and the way that love spilled over into both his personal piety and his heart for missions to a group too often neglected by the Western Church.  As he said, Muslims bear the image of God just as we do - and their need to know God’s redeeming, loving grace in Christ is just as real as ours.

I can tell there is much I have to learn.

Just lastnight I sent the manuscript for a new book off to the publisher.  The new volume - which will include ten essays from this blog and two previously-unpublished essays, is titled Rustling Leaves.  Here’s a shot of the cover (click on the image to see a larger version):