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Bible reading for weekend May 9-10.  Numbers 17-19. "And the LORD said to Aaron, 'You shall have no inheritance in their land, neither shall you have any portion among them. I am your portion and your inheritance among the people of Israel.'" (Numbers 18:20)  AUTHORITY (Num 17). God confirms his choice of Aaron and his descendants for the priesthood. Clear delineation of leadership and authority is vital to the well-being of any community.  Who's in charge? Who has the right to say what's right and wrong? Even more fundamental: who has the right to tell us about God and who he is and what he wants? God gave miraculous confirmation to the nation as to his choice of Aaron as priest. In the New Testament God has also miraculously confirmed his Son to be Lord over all (John 20:30-31; Rom 1:4-5). And by sign and wonder he has also confirmed the apostles, whom he chose to be his representatives on earth (Acts 2:43; 2 Cor 12:12; Heb 2:3-4).  Several deca...

One of the most prized series of volumes on my shelf is Carl F. H. Henry's magisterial work, God, Revelation and Authority .  Here's just a snippet from volume 4...  The living God distinguishes himself from all false gods by his speech and acts.  He speaks creatively, and from the formless void the universe emerges to obey him.  He speaks redemptively, and amid chaotic pagan civilizations Israel arises to serve him.  He speaks to accredit Jesus Christ his sinless Son as Savior of the world.  At the end of this age he will speak final judgment upon Satan and his hosts, upon the beast empires of this world, and upon the impenitent wicked. The speaking God of the Bible towers evermore above fallen man's silent and fading idols (Jer. 2:28). The fact that Elohim-Yahweh speaks from everlasting to everlasting attests that he alone--and not impersonal fate or ghastly demons or man-made idols-- rules the silences of external reality.  God's speech--co...

"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. ... No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known." (John 1:14, 18 ESV) Philip said to him, "Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us." Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'"?  (John 14:8-9 ESV) In reflecting upon Jesus Christ being the ultimate revelation of God, here are a few highlights from the third volume of Carl Henry's magisterial work, God, Revelation and Authority :  "In Jesus Christ the source and content of God's revelation converge and coincide."  (III:9) [The Church is] "a transnational, transracial, transcultural beachhead for the transcendent kingdom of God." (III:68) ...

"Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory ."  (Matthew 24:30 ESV)  "But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells."  (2 Peter 3:13 ESV) History has a purpose.  History has a beginning and it has an end.  Christ, who is Alpha and Omega, shall come again.  His return shall be personal, visible, and glorious (underlined above in Matthew 24:30).  His coming, as Carl Henry notes below, is not primarily a catastrophic cosmic event, but rather it is the fulfillment of our deepest longings (and highest hopes) for a just and beautiful world.   "But, unlike current secular projections of the end, the final thrust of biblical eschatology is never catastrophe: what the Bible affirms is that the end of this age marks also the coming of a...

The following words are taken from "Surmounting the Clash of Worlds," a lecture delivered by Carl Henry on July 7, 1989, at the dedication of the new campus of Tokyo Christian Institute (which later became Tokyo Christian University).  This call to wholistic Christian thinking sets naturalism and biblical theism in the sharpest of contrasts...    "We are self-deceived if we allow naturalistic speculation to parade as something modern, when in fact it was repudiated almost twenty-five  hundred years ago by the great philosophers of Greece.  Pagan though they were, the classic Greek sages recognized that naturalism cannot bring  into being or sustain a stable society and, in fact, robs human life of distinctive value and meaning.  The Greeks insisted that if time and change  control all reality, and if truth and right are subject to ongoing revision, then human civilization becomes impossible; moreover human life loses  fixed meaning and spec...

The following words are taken from "Surmounting the Clash of Worlds," a lecture delivered by Carl Henry on July 7, 1989, at the dedication of the new campus of Tokyo Christian Institute (which later became Tokyo Christian University).  In many ways this is a mandate for Christian education -- that we should not teach Christianity in bits and pieces but toward a comprehensive way of thinking about all of reality.  Henry explains clearly the conflict of Christian theism and atheistic naturalism...  "The Christian outlook cannot be effectively maintained by piece-meal retention of a few selected and respected tenets and the surrender of other  important elements.  The fact is, the naturalism that now pervades many influential universities of the modern world is far less vacillating in what  it believes or disbelieves than are some so-called religious institutions.  Naturalism does not selectively dispute only the doctrine of creation, or  the h...

In no particular order... Reformation:Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow ,  by Carl Trueman (Christian Focus, Reprint 2011).  In this reprint, Trueman (professor of church history) gives a number of important applications for today's church from the Reformation.   How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds ,  by Alan Jacobs (Currency, 2017).  Hard to describe this little book, but it is profound. How community  affects the way we think.  I enjoyed two collections of sermons by Martyn Lloyd-Jones : Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled, (Crossway reissue, 2009). The Cross: God's Way of Salvation, (Crossway, 1986)  Awakening the Evangelical Mind:  An Intellectual History of the Neo-Evangelical Movement ,  by Owen Strachan (Zondervan, 2015)  Along with  Confessions of a Theologian, by Carl F. H. Henry (Word Books, 1986).  Strachan chronicles the rise of the new evangelicals in the 1950s and beyond.  Carl ...

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.  (Hebrews 1:1-2 ESV) God's self-revelation to us -- in nature, the Scriptures, and his Son -- is his own freely chosen act of self-disclosure, in the words of Carl Henry.  We did not seek or find God, but he himself takes the initiative to reveal his nature, mind, and will to us.  This includes historical acts and facts, but also includes the God-given meaning of those acts and facts.  Henry writes... "Only because God so wills is there a special revelation that centers in the redemptive acts of Hebrew history from the exodus to the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, and in the communication of the meaning of these saving acts in both the prophetic and the apostolic word.  Only because God so wills is the truth of God given in the speci...

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.  (Romans 11:36 ESV) I am studying the second half of the 11th chapter of Romans.  How much of the glorious nature and character of God is included in the doxology of 11:33-36!  I was also reading in Carl Henry's 6th volume of God, Revelation and Authority and came upon these words, a good overview of what it means that all things come from God, through him, and unto him, for his glory...  "The Bible depicts God as the providential sustainer of the universe by his omnipotent omnipresence and also the divine governor of all things. The  living God everywhere upholds and maintains the created universe; he does so, moreover, for the sovereign purpose and goal for which he initially  created it. "God who stands -- who eternally exists -- and who stoops -- first in voluntarily creating the finite universe and then in voluntarily redeeming his  fallen creation -- ...

"It seems far preferable to me to state the theology of the Bible on its own terms, and to reject it, if one must, than to conform it to alien principles that make scriptural truth something less than Moses, Isaiah or even Jesus recognized it to be.  The biblical insistence that the true and living God still speaks in universal general revelation, and that the fall of humanity requires special once-for-all revelation as well, illumines our world dilemmas, I believe, more consistently and coherently than any and all rival views.  Only the self-revealing God can lead us even now toward a future that preserves truth and love and justice unsullied; all other gods are either lame or walk backward."   ~ Carl F. H. Henry, Preface (Thanksgiving, 1982) of God, Revelation and Authority , Vol. VI. 

I have finished Carl Henry's exposition (in three volumes of the six in God, Revelation and Authority ) of his 15 theses about God's self-disclosure, or the "God who speaks and shows."  Masterful.   One excerpt today, regarding not just the truthfulness of God's revelation (corresponding to reality) but also its consistency (or, coherence).  Very helpful in presenting God's truth in a pluralistic (relativistic) society.   Thesis #4. "The very fact of disclosure by the one living God assures the comprehensive unity of divine revelation." "The polytheistic religions played off one deity against another.  On the presupposition of many competitive gods there can be no unified divine revelation.  The sense of the Hebrew Shema ('the Lord our God is one God') may well be that Yahweh cannot be split up into such multiple divinities.  From the very outset the self-revealing God of Scripture stands out as Creator and Lord of all.  God who m...

Over twenty-five years ago, Carl Henry gave a lecture, first to the Baptist Union of Romania (September, 1990), and later to the Tyndale Seminary faculty (the Netherlands) and at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, entitled "Christianity and Resurgent Paganism".  As with all of his writings I am continually amazed at Henry's prescient insight into Western culture and its trajectory.  Where Henry refers to "modernism" we can easily substitute the term "post-modernism." This is the second post with a few quotes from this talk.   "Modernity, therefore, needs to be liberated not only from the shackles of unbelief, but also from its bondage to wrong beliefs.  Prominent among these beliefs is the notion that science, as mathematical physicists ideally pursue it, is the only reliable method of knowing.  Modern empiricists sponsor an ideological totalism of their own when they confer explanatory crown rights on a theory of truth that cannot decide the ...

Over twenty-five years ago, Carl Henry gave a lecture, first to the Baptist Union of Romania (September, 1990), and later to the Tyndale Seminary faculty (the Netherlands) and at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, entitled "Christianity and Resurgent Paganism".  As with all of his writings I am continually amazed at Henry's prescient insight into Western culture and its trajectory.  In this post and the next I will highlight some quotes from this talk. "The unraveling strands of Western civilization are everywhere.  Not  simply at the future end of history, nor even only at the looming end of  this second Christian millennium, but already in the immediate present,  modernity is being weighed in the balances.  Dismay and distress follow  in the wake of the rebellious despiritualization of our once vibrant  civilization.  Secular hedonism has nurtured the disintegration of the  family and the desanctification of human existence. ...

Enjoyed listening to this 9Marks interview between Mark Dever and Carl F. H. Henry in 1997.  This would be six years before Henry's death in 2003.   Dever asked Henry to identify some differences that he sees in evangelicalism between today and earlier in the 1950 and 60s.  Two points came out:  1) Earlier there was a need to call evangelicals, who had largely withdrawn from the culture, to be more active in, and engaged with, the culture. Today the problem, Henry says, is to get the contemporary culture -- very much degenerated -- out of the evangelical.  2) In the 1950s and 60s evangelicals saw that they needed one another and so worked together.  Today, Henry said, they do not feel that they need each other the way they needed each other then.  Too many evangelicals and churches are pursuing their own agendas and individual ministries apart from a relationship to the wider body of evangelicalism.  Listen to the full interview here . ...

" [Christianity] insists upon a purposive and moral as over against a purely mathematical universe; it insists upon a personal God, as against impersonal ultimates whether of space-time or élan vital variety; it insists upon a divine creation as over against a naturalistic evolution; it insists that man’s uniqueness is a divine endowment rather than a human achievement; it insists that man’s predicament is not an animal inheritance nor a necessity of his nature but rather a consequence of his voluntary revolt against God; it insists that salvation can be provided only by God, as against the view that man is competent to save himself; it insists that the Scriptures are a revelation lighting the way to the divine incarnation in Jesus Christ as the Redeemer of mankind, as against the view that they stand among many records of religious experience without a difference in kind; it insists that history is bound up with man’s acceptance or rejection of the God-man, rather than that hist...

Carl Henry on why evangelical Christians should be concerned for public (social) justice...  "Jesus' insistent requirement of the new birth and of a new lifestyle was set within the larger context of the 'gospel of the kingdom' that focuses on his victory over all the wicked powers arrayed against the will of God."  ~ Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority , Vol. 3, p. 122. Click on full quote below...

"All Christian learning must be for the sake of worship and service of God in the world, and we are deceived if we think that our own schematic skills or speculative theories or politico-economic proposals make the Bible meaningful or credible to the contemporary world. The case for Christianity does not rest on our ingenuity; it rests upon the incarnate and risen Lord.  The Bible is meaningful and credible as it stands; it is we, not the Scriptures, that need to be salvaged.  Unless evangelical education understands Christianity's salvific witness in terms of the whole self -- intellect, volition, emotion, conscience, imagination -- and of the world in its total need -- justice, peace, stewardship and much else -- it cannot adequately confront a planet that has sagged out of moral and spiritual orbit." ~ Carl F. H. Henry, Confessions Of A Theologian (Word Books, 1986), p. 76. 

Here are some reading highlights from Carl Henry's God, Revelation, and Authority , Vol 3. "In Jesus Christ the source and content of [ God's ] revelation converge and coincide."  (III:9) "The regenerate church is a transnational, transracial, transcultural beachhead for the transcendent kingdom of God." (III:68) "The Christian fellowship knows that Jesus' incarnation, death, and resurrection are the turning point of the ages."  (III:73) "The gospel is good news, news of Gods' grace to the unworthy, news of a victory of righteousness and love in which the people of God forever share.  It is the only news that endures." (III:74) "The pledged work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of the apostles would involve a superhuman recalling of Jesus' teaching and a superhuman illumination in articulating it."  (III:92) "We have no way of returning to observe the historical Jesus except through the Bi...