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In this chapter of Dug Down Deep entitled “Humble Orthodoxy” Joshua Harris talks about the importance of not only loving and defending truth but also being humble and compassionate toward those with whom we disagree. Truth matters but so does our attitude.

Apparently you can read the book online at crossway.org. Here is the link for the chapter by Richard Gaffin on “The Glory of God in Paul’s Epistles.”

DugDownDeep_Carnahan.mov (by Covenant Life Church)

So I have seen this floating around the web and everyone talking about how good it was. I finally decided to give up 2 minutes of my life and watch it. And it was very, very good.

There is a very different way to look at the Reformed faith, and I would recommend it as an alternative to Clark’s. We begin with Jesus himself, who by his atoning death and resurrection built one true church (Matt. 16:18, Eph. 2:19-20). After the time of the apostles, he continues to rule that one church from Heaven, granting authority to elders and deacons (1 Tim. 3:1-13, Tit. 1:5-9, Heb. 13:17). He has left no alternative method of ordering the church. Nobody is given the right to leave the one true church and start his own denomination. Nevertheless, the one true church eventually divided. Groups broke away from the fellowship: west broke from east, Protestant from Catholic, Protestant from Protestant. These divisions grieve our Lord, who prayed before his death agony that all his people would be one (John 17:21-23). The blame, of course, is not on everyone equally, but these divisions always resulted from someone’s sin—either the sin of those who illegitimately left the one body, or that of those who illegitimately forced them to leave, or, in most cases, both.

So the one true church is now broken up into thousands of denominations and varying traditions, contrary to our Lord’s will. The church is still one in that it has one Lord, one faith, and one baptism. But there are divisions of theology, practice, ethnicity, of which the Reformed tradition is one.

Christians are committed first to Christ, then to the one body of Christ, and only then to a particular form of the church. They must make the third commitment only because history has made it necessary. Because of the tragic division of the church, one may not be a “mere Christian.” He must join a congregation that does not have fellowship with all other congregations. So he must be Reformed or non-Reformed, not both. But a believer ought to be at least a little sad about this historical necessity. There should be in his heart a purpose to do something, even if he can only do a little bit, to lessen the divisions of the church and to make progress toward the reunion of the church.

If a believer is Reformed, he should give due appreciation to the achievements of that tradition in theology, church government, and other ways. But the focus of his life should not be on his denomination or tradition. It should be on Christ and the Scriptures. He should feel deeply the errors of Reformed chauvinism, the attitude that celebrates and seeks to preserve the distinctiveness of Reformed Christianity from the influence of other branches of the church. He should learn from other traditions [59] and recommend what he learns to his Reformed friends. He should do what he can to avoid the practices I mentioned earlier that are spiritually debilitating.

His church home, contrary to Horton’s “village green” model, is the whole body of God’s elect. His relation to non-Reformed Christians is spiritual oneness with Christ, not “shared interests.” (Shared interests! What a trivializing of the unity of Jesus’ body!)

A Reformed community that maintains its biblical heritage while seeking to grow in its love for the church as a whole is well worth supporting and recommending to others. That is not Clark’s vision of the church, and that I take to be the most serious criticism of the book under review. But it is one I heartily recommend to my readers. [60]

Frame-poythress.org

A helpful calendar to read Calvin in a year (there are a couple online, but this is the only that first I saw that can be done without breaking the Sabbath).

My latest post over at Living Within God’s Story…

From J. Dennison 

Excerpt:

John 3:16

How does John use this term “cosmos”? Cosmos has no personal force. In John’s gospel the word “world” does not refer to individuals as in the paraphrase “God loves each and every person in the world.” No. rather cosmos has an ethical force in John’s gospel. It means the arena of ethical hostility to God and his kingdom. In other words God’s love is directed to the area rebelling in ethical hostility against Him. It is to this arena that He sends his Son and to this arena whoever believes has life from another arena; the arena of eternity. Therefore all the arguments whether “cosmos” is universalistic or particularistic are muted by tracing John’s use of the term throughout his gospel, his epistle and his apocalypse. Cosmos for John is ethically specific. This arena of sin and rebellion was the object of God’s love. Not the angelic arena, not the infernal arena. This cosmic arena was loved so that believers, however they come to believe, may not perish but have the life of the non-cosmic arena. Who are these believers? They are all the ones who receive heavenly things not earthly things (Vs 12 & 31). They receive the one lifted up as the serpent in the wilderness. They do not take their eyes off of Him. (vs. 14. 15). They receive the Son of God as the Son of Man (Vs. 13, 14, 16, 17, 18). They do not receive those who reject Him (Vs. 33). The receive salvation. They do not receive judgment/condemnation (Vs. 17-19). They receive the light (Vs. 19-21), they do not love the darkness (v. 19). They receive the witness of the Son who the Father has sent. They do not receive the witness of those who deny or ignore Him. (Vs. 11 & 32). They receive eternal life. They do not abide in eternal wrath (v. 36). The eschatological birth brings one into Christological union, soteriological union, eschatological union and the sweetness of that union is as the joy of the friend of the bridegroom, John the Baptist. Christ is better than all suitors. Union with Christ is the soteric ecstasy. Identification with Christ in the eternal heavenly places is the presence of eschatological finality.

The new way to get Rick Roll’d

via i.imgur.com

George Orwell has earned the right to be called one of the finer writers in the English language through such novels as 1984, Animal Farm, and Down and Out in Paris and London, and such essays as “Shooting an Elephant.”

Orwell expressed a strong dislike of totalitarian governments in his work, but he was also passionate defender of good writing.  Thus, you may want to hear some of Orwell’s writing tips.*

 A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

One can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.   

* From Orwell’s essay“Politics and the English Language”