Category Archives: Christianity

Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology

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I’ve recently begun working through G.K. Beale’s A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New.  I have the sense of being drawn into a deep, expansive ocean.  In just a few chapters I’ve already been shown new facets of the Biblical revelation that is not only intellectually satisfaction, but imagination enriching.  It makes my Bible feel thicker.

Kuyper on Wealth Inequality

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“God has not willed that one should drudge hard and yet have no bread for himself and his family. Still less has God willed that any man with hands to work and a will to work should perish from hunger or be reduced to the beggar’s staff just because there is no work. If we have food and clothing, then the holy apostle demands that we should content ourselves with that. But where our Father in heaven wills with divine generosity that an abundance of food grows from the ground, we are without excuse, if through our fault, this rich bounty is divided so unequally that one is surfeited with bread while another goes with an empty stomach to his pallet, and sometimes must even go without a pallet.”

– Abraham Kuyper

“True, the gospel lacks visibility if we merely preach it, and lacks credibility if we who preach it…”

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“True, the gospel lacks visibility if we merely preach it, and lacks credibility if we who preach it are interested only in souls and have no concern about the welfare of people’s bodies, situations and communities. Yet the reason for our acceptance of social responsibility is not primarily in order to give the gospel either a visibility or a credibility it would otherwise lack, but rather simple uncomplicated compassion. Love has no need to justify itself…”

– John Stott, Christian Mission in the Modern World

Carson on Serving in Declining Times

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In The Call of the Prophet in Declining Times, D. A. Carson has some excellent points about courageously remaining faithful to the whole counsel of God, especially when it is unpopular.  I find the historical perspective particularly encouraging:

It was true in Britain in 1740. It was the worst of times. At the height of the Industrial Revolution before the introduction of trade unions or any counter-balancing force, the rich were getting richer, and the poor were being crushed. Children were being sent into the mines at the age of five or six, putting in fourteen to sixteen-hour days. There were two hundred eighty crimes on the books for which you could be executed by hanging, including stealing a loaf of bread. In some parts of London every building was either a brothel or a pub. In fact, religion had sunk so low in the British Isles that on Easter Sunday, 1740, only six people showed up for communion at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. It was the worst of times. And yet in 1734 God had raised up a young man by the name of Howell Harris in Wales. In 1738 George Whitefield began to preach to the coal miners in Bristol. In 1740 the Wesley brothers started, and over the next sixty years there came such a mass of social overturn out of the preaching of the gospel that Britain was not the same beast by the end of that cycle as it was at the beginning. It was the best of times. Out of this came the abolition of slavery. Out of this came new laws on child labor. Out of this came the beginning of trade unions that counter-balanced some of the power of capitol unleashed without discipline or accountability. Out of this came the beginning of prison reform. Out of this also came the beginnings of welfare hospital care and the like. It was the best of times.

– D.A. Carson, The Call of the Prophet in Declining Times

“We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is…”

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“We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory