Exegesis and Theology

The Blog of Brian Collins

John Newton on the Relationship between Devotional and Church Life and Cultural Activity

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John_Newton_Tony_ReinkeA simple desire to please God, to walk by the rule of his word, and to do all to his glory; like the famed philosopher’s stone, turns all the gold, consecrates the actions of common life, and makes everything that belongs to our situation in duty in civil in domestic life is part of our religion. When she is making our mending the children’s clothes, or teaching them, and when her maid (if serious) is cleaning the kitchen, or making a sauce, they may be as well employed, as when they are upon their knees or at the Lord’s Table. It is an unpleasant mistake to think all the time as lost which is not spent in reading, or hearing sermons, or prayer. These are properly called means of grace; they should be attended to in their proper season; but the fruits of grace are to appear in our common daily course of conduct. It would be wrong to neglect the house of God; it would be equally wrong to neglect the prudent management of her own house. It is chiefly as a mother in mistress of a family, that she can let her light shine to his praise. I would not have her think that she should serve the Lord better in any other station, than in the one to which his providence has placed her. I know that family cares are apt to encroach too much, but perhaps we should be worse off without them.

John Newton, Letters (Coffin), 159 in Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life (Wheaton: Crossway, 2015), 169.

Bavinck on the Relationship between Devotional Life and Cultural Activity

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The religious life does have its own content and an independent value. It remains the center, the heart, the hearth, out of which all [the Christian’s] thought and action proceeds and from which it receives inspiration and warmth. There, in fellowship with God, he is strengthened for his labor and girds himself for the battle. But that hidden life of fellowship with God is not the whole of life. The prayer room is the inner chamber, but not the whole dwelling in which he lives and moves. The spiritual life does not exclude domestic and civic, social and political life, the life of art and scholarship. To be sure, it is distinct from these things. It also transcends them by far in value, but it does not constitute an irreconcilable opposition to them; rather, it is the power that enables us faithfully to fulfill our earthly vocation and makes all of life a serving of God.

Herman Bavinck as cited in Jan Veenhof, Nature and Grace in Herman Bavinck, trans. Albert M. Wolters (Souix Center, IA: Dordt College Press, 2006), 29-30.

Tensions: Living for God in the Interior and in Cultural Life

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bavinck-on-the-christian-lifeWhile these nineteenth century Christians [pietists] forgot the world for themselves, we run the danger of losing ourselves in the world. Nowadays we are out to convert the whole world, to conquer all areas of life for Christ. But we often neglect to ask whether we ourselves are truly converted and whether we belong to Christ in life and in death. For this is indeed what life boils down to. We may not banish this question from our personal or church life under the label of pietism or methodism. What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, even for Christian principles, if he loses his own soul?

 

Herman Bavinck, The Certainty of Faith, 94 as cited in John Bolt, Bavinck on the Christian Life: Following Jesus in Faithful Service, Theologians on the Christian Life, ed. Stephen Nichols and Justin Taylor (Crossway, 2015), Kindle Locations 228-233.

Tensions: The Goodness of Creation and the Danger of Idolatry

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The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. . . . For all the ill that Satan can do, when God describes what keeps us from the banquet table of his love, it is a piece of land, a yoke of oxen, and a wife (Luke 14:18-20). The greatest adversary of love to God is not his enemies but his gifts. And the most deadly appetites are not for the poison of evil, but for the simple pleasures of earth. For when these replace an appetite for God himself, the idolatry is scarcely recognizable, and almost incurable.

John Piper, A Hunger for God, 14

[In the sentences that I excised Piper was actually contrasting blatant and less blatant worldliness. I think he’s right that the latter may often be more dangerous because our consciences are dulled to to the latter, but it is confusing to bring up “the prime-time dribble of triviality” in this context lest “the prime-time dribble of triviality” be read as a gift of God.]

Tensions in the Puritan View of Culture

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Puritanism and its Reformed-pietist successors constantly vacillated between whether they were rebuilding Christendom by making towns and eventually nations into virtually Christian societies, or whether they were advocating a pure, called out church. Edwards had strong commitments to both ideals. Heir to the Puritan establishment and part of a powerful ruling class, he was jealous of the privileges of ministerial prestige in town and province. He looked forward to a worldwide Reformed Christendom as the millennium approached.

Yet he was also a luminary among the international awakeners whose insistence in conversionism could—like earlier Puritanism—be disruptive of the standing order. The awakeners worked on the premise that many church members, including many clergy were unconverted. The implication seemed to be that true churches should be made up of true believers only. . . . Some had become Baptists, applying the logic of converts-only purity to both sacraments. It is easy to see why Edwards’ opponents would accuse him of moving toward separatism.

Edwards wanted rather to resolve the old conundrum without resorting to separatism. He would show how to maintain both the purity of the church and the establishment.

George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 350-51

Creation and Social Structures

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Greg Forster has some helpful comments on how social structures are rooted in Creation while also being shaped by human action. This means that social structures are rooted in the creational order but human action can twist them in accord with the Fall or press them back toward something that conforms to God’s law.

We must avoid two errors when thinking about social structures. The first error is thinking of them as arbitrary constructs of individual human decisions. This implies that there are no limits on how social structures can be changed. We raise children in families now, but if we all decided to live differently, we could just as easily create massive nurseries and drop off all our babies there at birth. We have an economy based on ownership and exchange now, but if we all decided to live differently, we could just as easily redistribute all property to the people we think should have it, or abolish property and live communally. This is the error I described earlier as naiveté about the social nature of human beings. . . . Admittedly, there is something mysterious about this. It certainly seems like social structures ought to be infinitely changeable if they are only the result of human action. But in fact, they make no sense to us if they’re arbitrary. If we can rearrange parenthood or ownership at will just by deciding to do so, then really there is no such thing as parenthood or ownership. The reason is simple: social relationships are embedded permanently in our nature as human beings. They’re like reason and morality, which are also embedded in our nature. You can’t think logically unless you first assume, without argument, that logic is valid. You can’t think morally unless you first assume, without argument, that there is such a thing as right and wrong. Similarly, you can’t think socially unless you first assume, without argument, that social systems are real and not arbitrary. The other error to avoid is treating social structures as though they were not a result of human action at all. This implies they can’t be changed, that they’re mechanical forces that stand outside our world. They control us, but we have no power to control them. I’ve already hinted at this error, when I commented that there’s no magical force outside human will that makes people live this way.

Greg Forster, Joy for the World: How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It (Crossway, 2014), 178-80.

Culture and Creation

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Culture is what we make of creation. Literally we take the stuff of creation and shape artifacts and institutions. We build things from stone and steel. We make art by arranging colors and textures, sounds and words. And our social institutions are shaped by taking into consideration the nature of human nature. Figuratively, we make something of creation—we project an appraisal in our cultural forms of the kind of world that God has made and the kind of creatures he’s made us to be. Cultural disorders often come from inadequate or false readings of creation. Many people today deny the very existence of a given human nature, arguing that cultural institutions are simply social constructions, arbitrary and freely chosen patterns guided only by human willing.

Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Journal 78 (Jan/Feb 2006): 00:08-00:57

Thomas Boston on the Vanity of Life

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A meditation for turning our eyes toawrd eternal realties, in preparation for the Lord’s Day:

If we look on our life, in the several periods of it, we will find it a heap of vanities. ‘Childhood and youth are vanity,’ Eccles. xi. 19. We come into the world the most helpless of all animals, young birds and beasts can do something for themselves, but infant man is altogether unable to help himself. Our childhood is spent in pitiful trifling pleasures, which become the scorn of our own after-thoughts. Youth is a flower that soon withered, a blossom that quickly falls off; it is a space of time in which we are rash, foolish, and inconsiderate, pleasing ourselves with a variety of vanities, and swimming, as it were, through a flood of them. But ere we are aware, it is past, and we are in middle age, encompassed with a thick cloud of cares, through which we must grope; and finding ourselves beset with pricking thorns of difficulties, through them we must force our way, to accomplish the projects and contrivances of our riper thoughts. And the more we solace ourselves in any earthly enjoyment we attain to, the more bitterness do we find in parting with it. Then comes old age, attended with its own train of infirmities, labour, and sorrow, Psal. xc. 10. and sets us down next to the grave. In a word, All flesh is grass, Isaiah xl. 6. Every stage, or period of life is vanity.”

Thomas Boston, Human Nature in Its Fourfold State, 287.

The Most Important Question According to Jonathan Edwards

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There is no question whatsoever, that is of greater importance to mankind, and that it more concerns every individual person to be well resolved in, than this, what are the distinguishing qualifications of those who are in favor with God, and entitled to his eternal rewards? Or, which comes to the same thing, What is the nature of true religion? and wherein do lie the distinguishing notes of that virtue and holiness, that is acceptable in the sight of God.

WJE 2:84 (Preface to Religious Affections)