No Other Boast

Readability:  2

Length: 240

Author: Tim Keller

The Reason for Godis a contender for one of the top 5 books I have read this year. Keller is a master at gracious, intelligent apologetics. This book will both give you some excellent ways to converse with non-believers and help generate a kind disposition toward them. In the first half of the book Keller responds to the most popular objections he has head in his pastorate of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. Here he answers statements like, “There can’t be just one true religion,” and “How could a good God allow suffering?” In the second half of the book he offers evidence for Christianity. I am defiantly going to reread the book several times hoping that Keller’s loving, patience, intelligent, conversational disposition towards unbelievers and doubters will infect me.

Most people who assert the equality of religions have in mind the major world faiths, not splinter sects. This was the form of the objection I got from the student the night I was on the panel. He contended that the doctrinal differences between Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism were superficial and insignificant, that they all believed in the same God. But when I asked him who that God was, he described him as an all-loving Spirit in the universe. The problem with this position is its inconsistency. It insists that doctrine is unimportant, but at the same time assumes doctrinal beliefs about the nature of God that are at loggerheads with those of all the major faiths. Buddhism doesn’t believe in a personal God at all. Judaism, Christianity and Islam believe in a God who holds people accountable for their beliefs and practices, and whose attributes could not be all reduced to love. Ironically, the insistence that doctrines do not matter is really a doctrine itself. It holds a specific view of God, which is touted as more superior and more enlightened that the beliefs of most the major religions. So the proponents of this view do the very thing they forbid others.

We say we desire it, but what is it?  It sounds attractive but once we really try to describe it we realize how nebulous our idea of it is.  For years my definition of revival was a lame as thinking that it consisted of being as excited about church things as I was about other things. 

Iain Murray excels as he demonstrates the transition of revival ideology from Samuel Davies to Charles Finney.  Up to and for some time after Davies revivals were regarded as wonderful surprises and yet as nothing new.  A revival consisted of God doing what He does every day, i.e. saving and sanctifying souls, but to an unusual degree such as we see in the early chapters of the books of Acts, the Protestant Reformation, and The Great Awakenings.  It is something we long for; it is not something we can work up on our own strength.  With Finney this changed, he thought he had the secret formula to begin a revival that turned out to be the death of revivals.  The counterfeit though initially appetizing came to be disdained, and with that disdain many lost their longing for the true article as well.  If you too suffer from an enigmatic idea of revival, this history of American revival and revivalism from 1750 to 1858 will help solidify the difference between the true and the false.

I have somewhere met the remark, that ‘the chariot of the gospel never has free course, but the devil tries to be charioteer’.  There is nothing he is so much afraid of as the power of the Holy Ghost.  Where he cannot arrest the showers of blessing, it has ever been one of his devices to dilute or poison the streams… With the obvious signs of the times in view, who does not see that this awful foe would enjoy his malignant triumph, if he could prejudice the minds of good men against all revivals of religion?  This he does, not so much by opposing them, as by counterfeiting the genuine coin, and by getting up revivals that are spurious and to his liking.  Revivals are always spurious when they are got up by man’s device, and not brought down by the Spirit of God.  – Gardner Spring

I was never fit to say a word to a sinner, except when I had a broken heart myself, when I was subdued and melted into penitence, and felt as though I had just received pardon to my own soul, and when my heart was full of tenderness and pity.  – Edward Payson

It may be that a generation of freshly-anointed preachers is already being prepared. Whether that is so or not, when such men are sent forth by Christ we can be sure of certain things. They will not be identical in all points with the men of the past, but there will be a fundamental resemblance. They will be hard students of Scripture. They will prize a great spiritual heritage. They will see the danger of ‘unsanctified learning’. While they will not be afraid of controversy, nor of being called hyper-orthodox, they will fear to spend their days in controversy. They will believe with John Rice that ‘the church is not purified by controversy, but by holy love’. They will not forget that the wise, who will shine ‘as the stars forever and ever’, are those who ‘turn many to righteousness’ (Dan. 12.2). They will covet the wisdom which Scripture attributes to the one ‘that winneth souls’ (Prov. 11.30). But their cheerfulness will have a higher source than their work. To know God himself will be their supreme concern and joy. They will therefore not be strangers to humility. And their experience will not be without trials and discouragements, not least because they fall so far short of their aspirations. If they are spared to live as long as John Leland they will be ready to say with him at last: ‘I have been unwearedly trying to preach Jesus, but have not yet risen to that state of holy zeal and evangelical knowledge, that I have been longing after’. Whether their days will be bright or dark they will learn to say with Nettleton that ‘the milk and honey lie beyond this wilderness world’.

More than any other subject I love to read books about the atonement.  Upon thinking of such books I pray my heart always be tenderly and freshly affected by such teaching.  I beg that I retain much of the truth presented, that it become the fondest treasure to me, and I never forsake it.  In My Place Condemned He Stood is such a book, a book of solid teaching from a solid teacher whom it is great to figuratively sit under and learn from.  Still I struggle with commending it to the average layman.  The best two chapters (of 4 total) can be found within J.I. Packer’s Knowing God and A Quest for Godliness.  These are great classics; everyone should read Knowing God, and if you have any interest in the Puritans A Quest for Godliness is a great introductory work.

Outside these two chapters it is fun to read Duncan, Mohler, Dever, and Mahaney’s brief introductory thoughts for those who are fans or theirs, but the reason why I would most recommend buying it even if you have the two previously mentioned books is Ligon Duncan’s annotated bibliography of books on the cross in the back.  Wondering what your next read on the cross should be, this is the place to go (and like Mahaney I think you should read at least 1 new book on the atonement [to you] and reread a great old one every year).

And this is righteous anger – the right reaction of moral perfection in the Creator toward moral perversity in the creature.  So far from the manifestation of God’s wrath in punishing sin being morally doubtful, the thing that would be morally doubtful would be for him not to show his wrath in this way.  God is not just – that is, he does not act in the way that is right, he does not do what is proper to a judge – unless he inflicts upon all sin and wrongdoing the penalty it deserves.

We who have believed have died – painlessly and invisibly, we might say – in solidarity with him because he died, painfully and publicly, in substitution for us.

Sometimes it’s nice to read a book when you leave unimpressed with the writing style and creativity of the author. I don’t think Ware a person personally devoid of creativity; I think he was very purposeful in his writing style. While many are looking for creative and innovative ways of expressing the Trinity (The Shack) it is refreshing to read a simple, biblical, historical, traditional, and creedal expression of the Trinity. Ware’s Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is written such that the ordinary layman will have no problems digesting it.

And the three members of the Godhead work together in harmony. Not in unison, but in harmony. “Unison” expresses a form of unity, yet it has no texture and richness. “Harmony,” however, communicates the idea of unified expression but only through differing yet complementary parts. You have different voices in different pitches. One carries the melody, but just one. Others carry the strains of harmony to fill out and complement the melody. If you think that only one part matters, you are sorely mistaken. For again, to achieve the kind of textured and rich unity that harmony accomplishes, all the parts are important. Yet each part has to be an expression of the same score, the same composition, expressing the mind of the composer.

The beauty of harmony is a beauty of diversity without discord, of distinctiveness without disarray, of complexity without cacophony.

So it is with the Trinity: it is God’s unified nature expressed richly and beautifully in the three equal and full possessions and manifestations of that one nature, with each “voice” contributing variously, yet with complete unity and identity of nature or essence. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not identical Persons, but they are harmonious in accomplishing the one undivided purpose, one undivided goal, one common work, since they each possess fully the one, undivided divine essence. So, unity and difference, identity and distinction-this marks the triune nature of God most centrally. Just how this identity and distinction gets worked out among the Persons of the Godhead, and what this means to the lives of us who are made in his image-these questions are what will occupy us through the remaining chapters of our study.

To insist on egalitarian relationships where God has designs structures of authority and submission is to indicate, even implicitly, that we just don’t like the very authority-submission structures that characterize who God is, and that characterize his good and wise created design for us. But when we see that this structure of authority-submission pictures God himself – that the members of the Trinity exist eternally as equal in their essence but distinct in the taxis that marks their distinct roles – then we realize that what we have chafed at is, at heart, the very nature of God himself.

We are images of God in order to image God…

No competition, no jealousy, no bitterness, and no dispute exist among these Persons. Here in the Trinity, rather, we see hierarchy without hubris, authority with no oppression, submission that is not servile, and love that pervades ever aspect of the divine life. Unity and diversity, identity and distinction, sameness and difference, melody and harmony – these are the qualities that mark the rich texture of the life of the one God who is three.