How to Write a Sentence

On today's Talk of the Nation, host Neal Conan interviewed Stanley Fish on his new book How to Write a Sentence. Fish's emphasis on the intuitive learning of style is helpful and insightful, although he commits the blasphemy of suggesting Strunk and White's The Elements of Style is not entirely helpful. To that, one can only note that perhaps some are, sadly, beyond help.

You can read more and listen here.

Ring of Fire

Social Distortion delivers an urgent and powerful cover of the Johnny Cash classic, itself (properly speaking) a cover of June Carter Cash's original vision.

Whatever. It rocks. Download and listen repeatedly.

Deep insights on marriage

from Rich Bledsoe at the Biblical Horizons blog. He not only recognizes that the phrase "marriage problems" is a redundancy, he knows what to do about it. Read.

"The Anti-Hank"

was what Kinky Friedman called Garth Brooks, and over the years I've come to realize Friedman wasn't just being funny, but also tremendously profound. One ought remember Garth Brooks did not only produce abominable pop treacle like "The Dance" or "Standing Outside the Fire," harbingers of the adolescent nonsense heard all over "country" music stations in metropolitan areas even here in the great American West. And while his blatant manipulation of album sales and introduction of heavy metal-style theatrics into country concerts are certainly tasteless, they're also not the root of his perfidy.

Pause to remember Garth Brooks gave us two great contributions to the "cheatin' is a real bad idea" genre: "Papa Loved Mama" (sub-category: humorous) and "The Thunder Rolls" (sub-category: ominous). Besides the truly awesome song, he was also more than capable of delivering the bread-and-butter wry irony possible only within country music, as "Not Counting You" so ably demonstrates.

His great gift for what is truly country makes his lewd proselytizing for pop shallowness and arena extravaganzas truly objectionable. "They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us." The anti-Hank, indeed.

What marriage is

As court orders and legislation authorizing civil marriage for homosexual couples multiply, many Christians are uncertain as to what position they ought take on the question. As a controversy within the Orthodox Presbyterian Church a few years ago illustrated, one can simultaneously object to violations of the 7th Commandment and believe that marriage is a civil right to which all are entitled, regardless of whom one chooses to marry. Thus, a much deeper question lies beneath that of homosexual unions: namely, what is marriage?

In thinking through this question over the last number of years, I have been greatly helped by essays appearing in First Things. As a Protestant, I think these can occasionally lean too much on Roman Catholic natural law assumptions, but generally I find them useful guides to getting past the rhetorical exaggerations which pass for public debate today. The most recent of these was recently posted on the First Things website: "Deciding Not to Decide What Marriage Is." It helps us see the real problem is not gay marriage, but no-fault divorce and the entirely self-centered assumptions of Americans who enter into marriages in these dark days.

The case against homosexual marriage can't be conveniently summarized on a bumper sticker, which is why it behooves Christians, today more than ever, to begin reflecting on their own contributions to the cultural decay which has led us to this pass.

On not setting up the sheep for heresy

I recently received an e-mail from a reader of my 2008 essay in Modern Reformation, "Setting Up the Sheep for Heresy," asking me to explain when I thought it appropriate to bring the fruits of grammatico-historical exegesis into the pulpit. Here's my reply, slightly edited.

Dear Astute Pastor,

Thanks for writing. It's a great encouragement to know my writing is even being read, let alone provoking thought a couple years on!

I don't have much of a concrete answer for you, as I believe much of the act of preaching is a matter of wisdom. Exegesis is, by comparison, straightforward: one must determine what the text means. But when shaping the sermon, the preacher must determine how best to communicate this particular text's meaning to this particular group of people on this particular day. Thus, I might decide not to mention a particular text-critical issue to my congregation, but you know that raising it will help your congregation better grasp the point.

Having said that, the general rule is that preaching follows exegesis, and so the sermon should only contain whatever information is necessary to get the text's main point across. So to take your examples, do the Roman confession "Caesar is Lord" or the current understandings of 1st-century gnostic thought help to get that point across? And even if so, is there information gleaned directly from the Scriptures which will do the job equally well? While the tone of my essay was confrontational, I should say quite clearly that I don't believe every preacher who mentions archaeological findings is prideful. I do think, though, we must all get into the habit of presenting our congregations with arguments clearly derived from the Bible itself.

You might want to consider the role of commentaries in your preparation. For example, as I work with 1 & 2 Corinthians, I am struck by the quantity and variety of theories on who was opposing Paul and why, and am even more struck by how unimportant resolving that question is to conveying the implications of Paul's responses to his critics in the sermon. My rule is to exegete the text and sketch out the basic sermon outline before consulting any commentaries. It would be impossible to do the extensive research commentators do here in my study, so my exegesis depends on the Bible and perhaps a Bible dictionary &/or atlas, not the latest archaeological dig. I think most of us tend to bring whatever we needed to understand the text into our explanation of it from the pulpit; if that's right, then those who begin with commentaries and their extensive background information will be more likely to incorporate that information into sermons.

As I found when preaching Isaiah's prophecies against the nations (let alone against Israel), it's impossible to entirely avoid bringing background information into one's sermons; that's the nature of grammatico-historical exegesis. But I do believe that if we follow Jay Adams' rule and preach only the purpose of the text, we'll have much fewer occasions to dwell on that background information at any great length.

That was kind of rambling, but I hope helpful. Again, thanks for writing, and do feel free to write back. May the Spirit work through the preaching of the Word to convict and convert sinners!

grace & peace,
The Presbyterian Curmudgeon

Theodicy & idiocy

Theodicy is the theological discipline which seeks to reconcile the goodness of God's character with the realities of sin and suffering in the world. All ecclesiastical and theological Christian traditions have a history of theodicy, and (not surprisingly) their answers to its questions are more or less satisfying. Because suffering is an especially personal question, we should expect that even the most theologically airtight theodicies will fail to satisfy at least some in the midst of their struggles; this is a simple pastoral reality.

The serious nature of theodicy makes the "contributions" of modernist scholars to the field extraordinarily aggravating. A parishoner picked up a copy of "Bible scholar" Bart D. Ehrman's God's Problem at a dollar store. From the dust jacket flap:

In times of questioning and despair, people often quote the Bible to provide answers. Surprisingly, though, the Bible does not have one answer but many "answers" that often contradict one another. Consider these competing explanations for suffering put forth by various biblical writers:
• The prophets: suffering is a punishment for sin
• The book of Job, which offers two different answers: suffering is a test, and you will be rewarded later for passing it; and suffering is beyond comprehension, since we are just human beings and God, after all, is God
• Ecclesiastes: suffering is the nature of things, so just accept it
• All apocalyptic texts in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament: God will eventually make right all that is wrong with the world

Notice the presumption: different answers are necessarily contradictory. He seems not to have entertained the possibility they might be complementary: that is, one is true in this situation, another in that situation, and one or more will come into play at the Last Judgment. But of course, one would have to believe the Bible might be true, and that there will be a Last Judgment, in order to entertain said possibility.

I suppose this sort of "reasoning" is to be expected among those who have rejected the authority of Scripture and its account of God. I am continually astonished, however, that this quality of work is rewarded with doctorates and faculty appointments. Moreover, I am wonderstruck at the magnitude of idiocy in anyone who thinks such facile and sophomoric logic should persuade thinking adults.

On the Matter of Notes in Preaching

In his lead article for this month's Ordained Servant, Gregory Reynolds defines the essential nature of preaching, which sadly is often overlooked, in just one sentence.

The sermon is the Word proclaimed in the presence of the congregation.

The Church-integrated family, etc.

The current issue of Ordained Servant includes a response to my December contribution, "The Church-Integrated Family." G.I. Williamson and several other signatories take exception not to my essay's central argument, but to one of its building blocks: the contention that child-bearing is not a requirement Biblically imposed on every marriage. As I note in my response to the response, I think our disagreement is centered more precisely on eschatology; that is, the extent to which the present age is conditioned by what will be, and has already been inaugurated through the Cross and Resurrection, in the age to come.

While I wish G.I. Williamson would more thoroughly appropriate the insights of Geerhardus Vos into his Biblical theology (this is not a new disagreement between the two of us), I would never note a disagreement with him without also clearly stating my steadfast admiration for his profound Biblicism. I cannot think of another man whose public persona is so closely associated with the confessions of the Reformed and Presbyterian Churches. Nonetheless, he has always been prepared to critique those standards wherever he finds them inadequately representing the Scriptures, to the point of suggesting they be amended (something anathema to most of the confessional reformed establishment in our time); his turn to paedocommunion is only one instance of this. I'm sure G.I. Williamson and I will disagree on any number of particular questions until we are both ushered into glory, but I hope I might imitate him in submission to God's Word until that time.