Entailments

In quite a lot of Western evangelicalism, there is a worrying tendency to focus on the periphery. I have a colleague in the Missions Department at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School whose analysis of his own heritage is very helpful. Dr Paul Hiebert laboured for years in India before returning to the United States to teach. He springs from Mennonite stock, and analyses his heritage in a fashion that he himself would acknowledge is something of a simplistic caricature, but a useful one nonetheless. One generation of Mennonites believed the gospel, and held as well that there were certain social, economic, and political entailments. The next generation assumed the gospel, but identified with the entailments. The following generation denied the gospel: the entailments were everything.

Assuming this sort of scheme for evangelicalism, one suspects that large swathes of the movement are lodged in the second step, with some drifting toward the third.

What we must ask one another is this: what is it in the Christian faith that makes you excited? What consumes your time? What turns you on? Today there are endless subgroups of confessing Christians who invest enormous quantities of time and energy in one issue or another: abortion, home schooling, the defence of a particular Bible version, pornography issues, women’s ordination (for or against), economic injustice, a certain style of worship, and much more. The list varies from country to country, but not a few countries have a full agenda of urgent, peripheral demands. Not for a moment am I suggesting we should not think about such matters and throw our weight behind none of them. But when such matters devour most of our time and passion, each of us must ask, in what fashion am I confessing the centrality of the gospel?

D A Carson in Basics for Believers (reflections on Philippians) pages 26-7

The double-love commandment

First, especially in our culture where sentimental or romantic notions of love have sometimes masked the richness of the biblical treatments of the subject, we must constantly remind ourselves that the double-love command [Luke 10:27] is deeply constrained by the double object. So far as the greatest command is concerned, we are not simply to love, to love in the abstract, but to love God. Nor does this mean that we are to love any god or the god of our choosing, but the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. To love this God means, among many other things, that we will be hungry to get to know him better; conversely, in learning his words and ways, his attributes and his glory, what he loves and what he hates, we will find that our understanding of what it means to love God, what it means to love enemies, what it means to love brothers and sisters in Christ, will all be progressively modified and enriched. Precisely because, as created, dependent, and redeemed creatures, we are called to love our Creator, our Sovereign, our Redeemer with heart and soul and strength and mind, we will be firmly led to think robustly about what he is like, how he views evil, what rights and responsibilities he gives to the state in a fallen world, his role both in making peace and in judgment, and, above all, his commitment to his own glory as God. That is what forces us to avoid mere sentimentality. The fact that we are called to love this God and not, say, Allah, Shiva, or Marxism constrains the way we think about everything, including love.

Second, we dare not forget that although in his teaching the two love commands hang together, the Lord Jesus himself makes a distinction between the first and the second commandment. The first is to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength; the second is to love our neighbor as ourselves. The latter is neither the equivalent of the first nor a replacement for the first; nor should it be confused with the first. This is not a matter of mere counting, of mere prioritization. It is a matter of the structure of reality. God alone is God; God alone is our Maker and Redeemer; to God alone we acknowledge our absolute dependence. And then this God insists that we must love other creatures who have been made in his image as we love ourselves.' To reverse or confuse the first and second commandments is to return to idolatry by another route: it is to love the created order more than the Creator himself, who is blessed forever.

D. A. Carson in Love in Hard Places, page 187

Laziness

I could almost say that I need two secretaries. I do hardly anything else all day long than write letters. I am monastery preacher; I am obliged to read at table; I am expected to preach daily in the parish church; I am head of the monastery school; I am vicar of the monastery Order which means a Prior eleven times over [because there were eleven cloisters in the district]; I am the officer responsible for the fish-pond; I act as substitute; I lecture on Paul and am studying the Psalms; and then all the correspondence which takes up the greater part of my time; I have scarcely any left for my private prayers, never to mention the special temptation of the flesh, the word, and the devil.  All this shows what sort of a lazy fellow I am. 

Martin Luther writing to a friend – quoted in D A Carson’s Love in Hard Places, pg 31/2

Intellectual Christianity

There is a danger of thinking that we are obeying this first commandment if we live and work in the domain of Christian intellectual endeavour.  It is easy to understand how this comes about.  Anti-intellectualism still inhabits a wide swath of evangelicalism, and sometimes serious thought is mocked and dismissed by those who prefer sentiment and emotion. Both tendencies have called forth biting denunciations, and these certainly have their place. They have also called forth prophetic appeals to young Christians to devote themselves, for God’s sake and for God’s glory, to the life of the mind.

But we should not ignore a converse danger, the danger of intellectual arrogance. Biblical scholars, theologians, and other Christian academics are easily tempted to think that they are obeying this first command simply because they working the intellectual arena and happen to be Christians. After all, studying distinctively Christian themes can be all-absorbing, in precisely the way that studying almost anything can be all-absorbing, provided you have the right sort of temperament and education.  I know first-rate scholars who are absorbed in the study of the metal alloys in the blades of jet propulsion engines and others who devote themselves to the properties of recently discovered quarks with unbelievably short half-lives or to the finer points of Sahidic Coptic. The only difference between these scholars and theologians is that the latter may delude themselves into thinking that the effort they put into their disciplines demonstrates that they are fulfilling these words of Jesus, while those who study the sex life of sea turtles are unlikely to be similarly deluded.  We cannot ignore the brute fact that this first command of Jesus is not a command to think but a command to love, even if that command to love includes the modifiers, “with all your heart...with all your mind.”

D A Carson, discussing Mark 12:28-34 in his book, Love in Hard Places, pg 22. 

A Jacobean Age

Coriolanus represents this old, Elizabethan order, and Coriolanus, which was written in 1605-1608, reflects very strongly the move into the Jacobean Age, which was pragmatic without understanding the imaginative romanticism that had gone before....

If there has ever been another Jacobean age since, there is one now: it's Jacobean in the sense that the virtue of heroes, which is the virtue of serving something above and beyond, is no longer fashionable. We've become more and more secular and efficient, and we're not interested in that service at all.  There has been a loss of faith, and to a degree a loss of imagination. We live in a godless society. All our gods have failed us. The golden age of the Elizabethan time has passed, and we are now into the dark age of the Jacobean era. 

pages 216-7 of Living with Shakespeare, edited by Susannah Carson