Reading Retreat

Once a year I slip away for a few days to do nothing but read. On a hotel desk I spread out a large stack of reading, unpack snacks and drinks, pray the God would bless my time, and then dig into my books with unusually focused attention. I find these experiences to be spiritually invigorating.

As you can imagine a retreat setting like this provides me with many hours to focus on one particular area of study, normally one that is so complex that I really need the extended concentration. At the same time this practice helps me to combat the brain fragmentation that I experience in the world of social media.

By the time this blog post goes life (it was auto-saved) I will be into my next retreat. In this retreat I will be focusing on theme of “inaugurated eschatology,” or the already in the already/not yet of God’s sweeping historical plan of redemption and cosmic restoration. My interest in this topic was sparked a little over a year ago when I began to seriously study the implication of Christ’s resurrection as the dawn of the new creation. God used that season of focused study just before Easter of 2010 to help me begin to see the cosmic scope of the gospel, leaving me with a greater desire to know more about this topic and to read more carefully on a cluster of related themes of the Kingdom of God in the gospels, the two-ages in Paul, the resurrection as the inauguration of the new creation, and the eschatological significance of the arrival of the Holy Spirit. As I see Easter approaching it makes this whole topic more attractive to me for sustained study.

So why this topic? It seems a bit abstract and vague. In many ways inaugurated eschatology is complex, which is why I need the focused time to read. But it’s also a very important topic with consequences for the Christian life. Balanced eschatology is necessary for a balanced Christian life. An imbalanced eschatology can lead to disastrous consequences. For example, to concentrate on the already without the not yet leads to an over-realized eschatology which tends to lead people down the path of moral perfectionism, diminishing the need for future/final transformation. On the other hand, a concentration on the not yet to the exclusion of the already causes us to overlook what God has already accomplished in Christ in past history and to fail to grasp the eternal consequences of his cross and resurrection. In this way sanctification tends to become man-centered moralism in an unhelpful way that fails to appreciate the role of Christ’s finished work in personal renewal. Balance in the Christian life requires some level of equilibrium between living in the already and the not yet, the finished and the unfinished, the started and the yet uncompleted. This retreat will help me appreciate those areas where God’s eternal purposes have been already inaugurated in time and history.

The literature on inaugurated eschatology is expansive and rich, but the literature will also continue to collect dust on my bookshelf unless I take the time to pursue this theme. And that brings me to my reading retreat. With an open Bible, a tall stack of books, and an iPod loaded with some related seminary lectures, I plan to spend my days kicking back and reading, listening, and having my horizons broadened.

As is typical I will bring far too much material than I have time to work through. But my goal is never to exhaust all of my reading. In fact only one or two of the books will be read entirely with great care, some books will be read in parts, other books will be scanned carefully, and a majority of the books will be scanned quickly. In case you’re interested, here is a list of the 18 books and 27 lectures I have packed into a Rubbermaid tub:

• Herman Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology (Eerdmans, 1975), pages 14­–100, 183–184, 205–252, 487–562. This is an impressive book and I suspect much of my retreat will be focus here. In his survey of Bible commentaries, Don Carson writes, “of all the books that wrestle with Pauline theology, in some ways the best is still Herman Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology.” Hard to argue with that. Most relevant for me at this point is Ridderbos’s firm grasp of inaugurated eschatology in Paul.
• Herman Ridderboss, The Coming of the Kingdom (P&R, 1962). A classic on the kingdom theme in the gospels.
• Herman Ridderboss, When the Time Had Fully Come: Studies in New Testament Theology (Eerdmans, 1982).
• Herman Ridderboss, Paul and Jesus (P&R, 1977).
• George Eldon Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1993), pages 31–211, 351–378, 555–575.
• George Eldon Ladd, The Presence of the Future: The Eschatology of Biblical Realism (Eerdmans, 1974).
• Gordon Fee, Paul the Spirit and the People of God (Hendrickson, 1996), pages 49–62.
• Gordon Fee, 12 lectures, “The Life and Teachings of Jesus” (Regent College).
• Gordon Fee, 11 lectures, “Biblical Theology of the New Testament” (Regent College). Of special interest will be his two lectures on the eschatological framework of Jesus and Paul.
• Gordon Fee, four lectures, “Kingdom, Spirit, and the People of God” (Regent College).
• C. Marvin Pate, The End of the Ages Has Come: The Theology of Paul (Zondervan, 1995).
• Anthony Hoekema, The Bible and the Future (Eerdmans, 1979), pages 3–75.
• Paul Beasley-Murray, The Message of the Resurrection: Christ Is Risen! (IVP, 2001).
• Geerhardus Vos, The Pauline Eschatology (Eerdmans, 1952).
• Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments (Banner of Truth, 1975), pages 372­­–402.
• Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Zondervan, 2011), pages 535–547.
• Michael Horton, Covenant and Eschatology: The Divine Drama (WJK, 2006). I’ll give this a scan.
• N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Fortress, 1996). I plan to give this a scan as well.

I make time for fun reading in these retreats as well. This year I’ve packed baseball books that focus on my favorite era, from the birth of American professional baseball in the early 1870s up until the year 1918. On my previous retreat I read Cait Murphy’s delightful book Crazy ’08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History (Collins, 2008). This time around I’ve packed this trio of titles:

• Timothy Gay, Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend (Lyons Press, 2007). Perhaps the best all-around baseball player in Boston Red Sox history (and the Cleveland Indian’s history for that matter), I simply want to learn more about his life and career.
• Edward Achorn, Fifty-Nine in ’84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had (Harper, 2011). This appears to be a colorful account of one of baseball’s greatest pitching feats set in the first 15 years of the professional sport at a time when players fielded the ball without gloves!
• Mike Vaccaro, The First Fall Classic: The Red Sox, the Giants, and the Cast of Players, Pugs, and Politicos Who Reinvented the World Series in 1912 (Anchor, 2010). Tris Speaker (the AL MVP) and his Red Sox won the World Series in 8-game showdown (game 2 ended in a tie). The Sox somehow beat the Giants and their unhittable pitching staff (the Giants ERA in the series was 1.59!). I look forward to reading more about the 1912 World Series.

In a previous life I wanted to be a baseball historian. In this life I have the privilege of serving the church. In either case I am a reader, and I pray that this reading retreat will match my previous retreats in education, edification, and delight.

Approach My Soul, The Mercy Seat

The new album from Sojourn Music is very good, especially the opening song that was inspired by an old hymn written by John Newton. The original hymn lyrics were tweaked and then recorded and released by Jamie Barnes. The song is titled “Approach My Soul, The Mercy Seat” and it was released online on JT’s blog this past week (where you can download the mp3 for free). I find myself listening to it over and over again.

You can listen to the beautiful hymn here:

Approach My Soul, The Mercy Seat

Approach my soul, the mercy seat
Where Holy One and helpless meet
There fall before my Judges’ feet
Thy promise is my only plea, O God

Send wings to lift the clutch of sin
You who dwell between the cherubim
From war without and fear within
Relieve the grief from the shoulders of crumbling men

O God—Pour out your mercy to me
My God, Oh what striking love to bleed.

Fashion my heart in your alchemy
With the brass to front the devil’s perjury
And surefire grace my Jesus speaks
I must. I will. I do believe. O Lord.

Milk, Meat, and Biblical Theology

This week at work I have the privilege to sit in on Dr. D.A. Carson’s lectures on Hebrews. Carson is a brilliant theologian and a very capable exegete for a tricky book like Hebrews. With all of its complex Old Testament quotations it does require a competent biblical theologian who understands the sweep of the biblical narrative to make sense of the book. Dr. Carson is known for this type of thing.

I was particularly interested in his treatment of Hebrews 5:11–6:2:

About this [the connection between Christ and the OT figure of Melchizedek] we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.

Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, and of instruction about washings, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment.

Up until this point many themes in the OT have been tied to Christ including the themes of the Davidic King and God’s rest. The writer of Hebrews has been pulling quotes from several OT sources. Here in this text the writer of Hebrews begins to explain now how Melchizedek in the OT is related to Christ, but due to a lack of maturity the OT connections may be lost on the readers. In Carson’s view the milk here is not the A, B, Cs of the Christian faith, but the elemental themes of the OT, which would have been familiar to the Jewish audience. Thus, Carson says, the writer of Hebrews mandates that Christians are so maturing that they can put their Bibles together and grow from elementary ‘givens’ of the Bible and press on to see how the OT points forward to Jesus. And that is exactly what the writer has been doing up to this point, working out OT texts to show how thematic strands culminate in the Savior. And thus the Melchizedek context fits what we read in 5:11–6:2. Hebrews really makes it clear just how important the salvation-historical self-consciousness was to the early Christians.

In Carson’s view, the writer of Hebrews is not only encouraging Christians to deepen their biblical knowledge of Scripture in general, but to read the OT carefully and to trace out the many ways in which the OT trajectories find their fulfillment in the Savior. This is, at least in part, what it means to feast on steak. Today we call this biblical theology, the discipline that seeks to restore this awareness of progress along the salvation-historical line. Carson seems to prove the value of biblical theology exegetically from this passage.

So where does one begin the study of biblical theology? There is no replacement for reading and re-reading the text of the Bible, listening for the themes that echo throughout the Bible. For me one of the most helpful supplementary books is the New Dictionary of Biblical Theology (Carson recommended the book in class). Also, The Ways of Our God: An Approach to Biblical Theology by Charles H. H. Scobie is very useful, but not for its depth or for its reliability on all exegetical points. I like Scobie as an introduction to the broad sweep of OT themes that find their fulfillment in the NT.  I commend these books to you, especially if you find your diet lacking in protein.

Where The New Creation Has Come To Light

From Herman Ridderbos’s classic book Paul: An Outline of His Theology, page 57:

Paul’s kerygma [message] of the great time of salvation that has dawned in Christ is above all determined by Christ’s death and resurrection. It is in them that the present aeon has lost its power and hold on the children of Adam and that the new things have come. For this reason, too, the entire unfolding of the salvation that has dawned with Christ again and again harks back to his death and resurrection, because all the facets in which this salvation appears and all the names by which it is described are ultimately nothing other than the unfolding of what this all-important breakthrough of life in death, of the kingdom of God in this present world, contains within itself. Here all lines come together, and from hence the whole Pauline proclamation of redemption can be described in its unity and coherence. Paul’s preaching, so we have seen, is “eschatology,” because it is preaching the fulfilling redemptive work of God in Christ. We might be able to delimit this further, to a certain extent schematically, by speaking of Paul’s “resurrection-eschatology.” For it is in Christ’s death and subsequent resurrection that the mystery of the redemptive plan of God has manifested itself in its true character and that the new creation has come to light.

New Biographies For Little Kids, And Big Kids, And Parents

In the mornings before I leave for work, we take time to read as a family. Of late we have been working through the Christian Biographies For Young Readers series (Reformation Heritage Books). We first read the John Calvin bio (2008) then moved on to Augustine (2009) and now finally on to John Owen (2010). The series is beautifully illustrated and the storyline (by Simonetta Carr) provides quite a lot of detail, just enough to provide historic context for the value of these three men in Church history. The publisher anticipates adding future bios to this series that will include Lady Jane Grey, Athanasius, John Knox, Jonathan Edwards, and others [John Bunyan please!]. The books are around 64-pages in length and can be read in about 30–40 minutes or 50 minutes if you gawk at the excellent paintings and random historical pictures. In that brief time the family gets a poignant introduction to the men and women God has used in building his Church over the centuries—which is especially helpful when most of your kids are named after dead preachers to begin with.

Make Use of Any Human Author

Puritan Richard Sibbes, in a short book titled A Christian’s Portion [Works, 4:2–38], fleshed out 1 Corinthians 3:21–23. At one place he makes the point that the Church possesses all truth, even that of non-Christian authors. In one passage Sibbes writes [page 18]:

Again, ‘all things are ours’ [1 Cor. 3:21]. Therefore truth, wheresoever we find it, is ours. We may read [a] heathen author. Truth comes from God, wheresoever we find it, and it is ours, it is the church’s. We may take it from them as a just possession. Those truths that they have, there may be good use of those truths; but we must not use them for ostentation. For that is to do as the Israelites; when they had gotten treasure out of Egypt, they made a calf, an idol of them. So we must not make an idol of these things. But truth, wheresoever we find it, is the church’s. Therefore with a good conscience we may make use of any human author. I thought good to touch this, because some make a scruple of it.

Yes, some do even to this day.

Justification, The Future Become Present

George Eldon Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1993), pages 483–484:

Justification, which primarily means acquittal at the final judgment, has already taken place in the present. The eschatological judgment is no longer alone future; it has become a verdict in history. Justification, which belongs to the Age to Come and issues in the future salvation, has become a present reality inasmuch as the Age to Come has reached back into the present evil age to bring its soteric blessings to human beings. An essential element in the salvation of the future age is the divine acquittal and the pronouncement of righteousness; this acquittal, justification, which consists of the divine absolution of sin, has already been effected by the death of Christ and may be received by faith here and now. The future judgment has thus become essentially a present experience. God in Christ has acquitted the believer; therefore he or she is certain of deliverance from the wrath of God (Rom. 5:9) and no longer stands under condemnation (Rom. 8:1). …

Justification is one of the blessings of the inbreaking of the new age into the old. In Christ the future has become present; the eschatological judgment has in effect already taken place in history. As the eschatological Kingdom of God is present in history in the Synoptics, as the eschatological eternal life is present in Christ in John, as the eschatological resurrection has already begun in Jesus’ resurrection, as the eschatological Spirit is given to the church in Acts (and in Paul), so the eschatological judgment has already occurred in principle in Christ, and God has acquitted his people.

Pastoral Perseverance

From a seminary lecture by J.I. Packer to class of pastors:

You can define fellowship as toing and froing. That’s as good as definition as any. Fellowship is a two-way street not just a one-way street. [As pastors] we should look to those for whom we minister to give us what they have got. What that means will vary from one situation to another, but at the least one trusts it will be love and good will, which we should humbly receive.

If we are not thinking of fellowship as a two-way street then the chances are that, in our constant giving out, we shall become, in our mindset, conceited rather than humble, and self-sufficient rather than God-reliant, and maybe we will become Christian workaholics because we so love the feeling of giving out right, left, and center. Then we have burnout and breakdown, and we shall thoroughly deserve it. Are you with me? It’s the two-way street of fellowship that keeps us going. It’s the receiving of love and support from others as we seek to share with them. Maybe they have more than love and support to give us—maybe they have some wisdom to give us, too.

Go into every relational situation with Christians expecting to receive as well as to give and you will get through your 40s, and your 50s, and your 60s, and your 70s and you will still be rejoicing in the Lord. It’s a mindset thing, but it’s very foundational.

Resurrection and Eschatology

Gordon Fee, God’s Empowering Presence (Hendrickson, 1994), pages 803 and 805:

Probably the one feature that distances the New Testament church the most from its contemporary counterpart is its thoroughly eschatological perspective of all of life. In contrast to most of us, eschatology—a unique understanding of the time of the End—conditioned the early believers’ existence in every way.

The first clue to this outlook came from Jesus’ own proclamation of the kingdom—as a present reality in his ministry, although still a future event. But it was the resurrection of Christ and the gift of the promised (eschatological) Spirit that completely altered the primitive church’s perspective, both about Jesus and about themselves. In place of the totally future eschatology of their Jewish roots, with its hope of a coming Messiah and the resurrection of the dead, the early church recognized that the future had already been set in motion.

The resurrection of Christ marked the beginning of the End, the turning of the ages. However, the End had only begun; they still awaited the final event, the (now second) coming of their Messiah Jesus, at which time they too would experience the resurrection/transformation of the body. They lived “between the times”; already the future had begun, not yet had it been consummated. From the New Testament perspective the whole Christian existence—and theology—has this eschatological “tension” as its basic framework.

A little later Fee focuses his attention on the eschatological significance of the resurrection.

The resurrection of the dead is for Paul the final event on God’s eschatological calendar, the unmistakable evidence that the End has fully arrived. For Paul the resurrection has already taken place when Christ was raised from the dead, this setting in motion the final doom of death and thereby guaranteeing our resurrection. Christ’s resurrection makes ours both inevitable and necessary—inevitable, because his is the first fruits which sets the whole process in motion; necessary, because death is God’s enemy as well as ours, and our resurrection spells the end to the final enemy of the living God who gives life to all who live (1 Cor 15:20–28). Believers therefore live “between the times” with regard to the two resurrections. We have already been “raised with Christ,” which guarantees our future bodily resurrection (Rom 6:4–5; 8:10–11).

God is Patient and Kind

At the end of one of his lectures, Gordon Fee recalled a time when he was writing his commentary on 1 Corinthians, especially the morning he arrived at the famous words in 13:4, “Love is patient and kind.”

I remember the morning when I came to this passage: “Love is patient, love is kind.” It’s actually a verb: “Love does patience.” Or better yet, the KJV: “love suffers long.” Patience is what you show when your computer doesn’t work. Long-suffering is what you show when people don’t work, and you’ve been around them a long, long time. That’s what it means to suffer long. And I looked at those words and then realized that Paul was here describing God’s character. Those are exactly the words he uses of God back in Romans 2. Then it dawned on me, the first (long-suffering) is the passive side of His love; the other (kindness) is the active side of His love. And then I started to cry for a long time. It took me a long time to return to my computer. What if God was not like this toward us?