White Horse Inn Blog

The following is by Rev. Andrew Compton, associate pastor of Christ Reformed Church in Anaheim, CA. Rev. Compton is one of the bloggers at The Reformed Reader

I recently read Kevin DeYoung’s latest book, The Hole in our Holiness: Filling the Gap between Gospel Passion and the Pursuit of Godliness. I had two reasons for doing so. First, I like DeYoung’s writing. His is a popular writing style that embodies a winsome presentation of the Reformed tradition. Second, I have been reading and studying piety and the pursuit of godliness for the past year or so. In addition to various Puritan works and books by Jerry Bridges, DeYoung’s book was a logical addition to my growing shelf of books focusing on Christian piety.

In general, I really enjoyed this book. I share DeYoung’s belief that the gospel as described in the Reformed confessions not only supports training oneself for godliness (1 Tim 4:7) and growing in the grace and knowledge of Christ (2 Pet 3:18), it is the only gospel that can lead people to a true and noble pursuit of godliness. Apart from the careful distinction between justification and sanctification, a firm affirmation of the imputation of Christ righteousness, and a confident embracing of sola fide, any so-called pursuit of godliness will be only a pursuit of civil decency (at best) or a pursuit of salvation-by-works (at worst).

DeYoung seems on track in noticing that there is a younger generation of Christians who have been liberated from the shackles of legalism and isolationism when they encounter the Reformation’s recovery of the biblical gospel. They find freedom in the Reformation’s bold assertion that vocation and cultural engagement (e.g., the arts, music, sport, etc.) are things that bring great glory to God. And yet they wind up pursuing any and all cultural endeavors with little to no critical reflection about whether the “lawfulness” of their actions overrides their “helpfulness” (1 Cor 10:23). This new-found liberty slips from its moorings in Christian gratitude and becomes a perceived liberty to neglect worship, prayer, sexual purity, humility and the like.

Positives

In a book that could easily become an overly prescriptive list of do’s and don’ts, DeYoung is modest and careful with what the pursuit of godliness will look like. He reminds us that God is a loving father to his children, delighting in even our most crude and remedial steps of godliness. He draws a nice parallel between the love a father has for the homemade birthday card his daughter makes, and the love our heavenly father has for our far-from-perfect good works (pg. 70). He notes that there are numerous “cheap imitations” of godliness (e.g., rule keeping and generational imitation; pgs. 33-38) which do not begin to plumb the beauty and delights of true godliness.

DeYoung does an exceptional job of expounding the difference between our union with Christ and our communion with him. He shows that our union with him, whereby we receive all the blessings of salvation, is infallible and unbreakable (pgs. 73-74). Our communion or fellowship with him, however, can ebb and flow, sometimes due to misplaced priorities, other times due to outright sinful behavior which is not befitting of God’s children and brings about his fatherly frown (cf. Heb 12:7-11). This distinction provides the categories for Christians to cultivate a closeness with God without seeing their works as gaining or sustaining their right standing before him. His “four practices for oneness with Christ” (pgs. 128-133) avoids the individualism that the spiritual disciplines usually breed and focus on several very corporate activities: prayer, reading/hearing the word, the fellowship of believers, and the Lord’s Supper.

Finally, DeYoung drives a stake in the heart of holiness and perfectionist movements, reminding believers that their growth in the grace of Christ happens over the long haul. He explains, “when it comes to sanctification, it’s more important where you’re going than where you are. Direction matters more than position…. So cheer up: if you aren’t as holy as you want to be now, God may still be pleased with you because you are heading in the right direction” (pg. 138).

Once the book got rolling, it steamed along delightfully. Chapters 5-10 were wonderful. They were pastoral, sensitive and encouraging, even as they exhorted Christians to strive against the world, the flesh, and the Devil in their pursuit of godliness. Their concrete suggestions for the exercise of godliness were reasoned and biblical. And what was most refreshing was the reminder that God intends the pursuit of godliness to be a joyful goal of our Christian life, not
a chore for us to slog through grudgingly. God has not only saved us from something, he has saved us to something and he is in the business of conforming us to the likeness of our glorious savior Jesus Christ even now!

Negatives

Though as a whole I recommend this book, I am not wholly pleased with how DeYoung navigated these shoals. The ship did not run aground, but it did scrape bottom on a couple of occasions.

The first four chapters did not strike me as being as careful and nuanced as they ought to have been for a topic as easily misunderstood as this. Though my copy does have marginal notes reading “yes,” “n.b.,” and “nice!” in these chapters, I found myself writing “hmmm,” “yes & no,” and “needs nuance” more often than I would have liked.

While I do not believe that DeYoung is a biblicist (one who uses explicit language of scripture even though such language can be misunderstood apart from careful distinctions ) the way he articulates several points in chapters 1-4 sound biblicistic. In chapter 2, for example, DeYoung emphasizes that good works are “necessary” for salvation. He does not, however, parse out the different kinds of “necessity” that exist and the different ways in which we can speak of good works as being “necessary” for salvation. (E.g., our good works are a necessary fruit of our salvation, but not necessary as the ground for our salvation.) While he is careful to note that the “necessity” of personal holiness should not undermine our confidence in our justification (pg. 28), he still plays a bit fast and loose with expressions that have a long history of misunderstanding.

A few other topics have a biblicistic ring to them. When DeYoung says that “holiness is a possibility for God’s people” (pg. 65), he relies on the bare biblical assertion that Zechariah, Elizabeth and Job could be called this even though we know they weren’t sinless. And yet scholars in the past have written carefully of these three figures, noting in what sense they can be called “holy.” (Francis Turretin notes four kinds of “perfection” that are predicated of Zechariah, Elizabeth and Job. See his Institutes of Elenctic Theology 17.II.IV.)

Likewise, chapter 4, “The Impetus for the Imperatives” does not, in my opinion, tread carefully enough when using expressions like “there is grace in getting law” (pg. 53). Again, older theologians often used grace both to mean “unmerited favor” and “demerited favor,” but they were careful in doing so not to confuse the “grace” that God shows when giving good things to unfallen man (better described as benevolence) and the grace that God shows to fallen man when he gives them the opposite of what they have merited. And though DeYoung is right that as Christians, we begin to view God’s law as a precious gift to his children, calling the law “gracious” begins to muddy the categorical waters.

Conclusion

In spite of these criticisms, after reading The Hole in our Holiness, I was quite pleased with the book. I believe that DeYoung has written a fine book on the topic of the Christian pursuit of Godliness, though I don’t think that he has written the final word. To be fair, I’m pretty sure he didn’t intend to. And though I would recommend it to people interested in studying the topic, I’d be quicker to recommend Jerry Bridges’ books Growing Your Faith and Respectable Sins for a popular and gospel-centered approach to godliness and piety.

Lest this review sound too tepid, let me conclude by expressing my gratitude to Kevin DeYoung for his efforts on behalf of an oft neglected topic. He’s absolutely right; in many circles, holiness is the new camping: “It’s fine for other people. You sort of respect those who make their lives harder than they have to be. But it’s not really your thing” (pg. 10). What is sad is that a good many Christians enjoy the benefits of their union with Christ, all the while bearing the misery and discomfort of a sickly communion with him. They neglect to strive against besetting sin. They are inconsistent in availing themselves of the means of the grace. They wallow in their desires or frustrations, all the while missing out on the glorious gift of comfort and contentment that God is holding out to them in Christ.

In The Hole in our Holiness, DeYoung reminds us that justification and sanctifications are not two extremes in need of balance, but two equally wonderful truths – two equally exciting parts of our salvation. He is in good company. The Apostle Paul certainly seemed to think this too: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that on one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph 2:8-10).

Zondervan is celebrating Reformation Week with an e-book sale (which is an arguably better way to do it than the let’s-get-bombed-on-six-kinds-of-sugars-and-additives tradition).  We think it’s a pretty sweet deal (pun totally intended) – $20 for The Christian Faith!

Go to www.amazon.com (or any other major e-book retailer) and stock up – just make sure you do it before November 5th.  

Happy Reformation Day!

Modern Reformation editor-in-chief Michael Horton asked Steve Bruce, University of Aberdeen sociologist and leading international authority on secularization, to discuss some of the major issues he raises in his new book, Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

MR: What is the “secularization paradigm” and why has it come under fire in recent decades?
SB: The SP is often taken to be the prediction that, with the passage of time, religion will die out. This is wrong. I take the SP to be an attempt to explain the changes in the nature and social position of religion in western industrial democracies that have accompanied modernization (say, from the end of the eighteenth century). Those changes are complex but they do form a common pattern. At the level of social structure we see the removal of the economy and polity from religious control (for example, religious precepts no longer hinder economic rationality and we allow unbelievers the vote), the gradual marginalization of religion, and the rise of toleration. At the level of culture, religion loses the power to provide the most convincing explanations and the best remedies. For the individual, the key changes are religion’s shift from necessity to choice and the decline of dogmatism. Modern societies have ‘fundamentalist’ enclaves but most of us now accept that religion is a matter of private preference. Those changes are accompanied by a decline in the proportion of the population that takes religion seriously. Note that despite changes in intellectual fashion, the decline in religious adherence continues apace.

There are very many reasons why the SP has lost status in the academy. One is that the social sciences are driven by fashion: revisionism is always more popular than accepting that by and large one’s predecessors got it right. One oddity is that many avowed critics of the SP actually support key elements of it. For example, I cannot think of anyone who doubts that modernization has been accompanied by a social-structural differentiation that sees the economy and polity becoming free from religious precepts. What Western polity now denies Catholics the vote or prevents unbelievers from holding government office? And it is widely accepted that in most states religious pluralism produces increasing toleration and a gradual shift from religion as necessity to religion as choice.

MR: Critics of the secularization thesis often emphasize the intentional factors in the process—whether of secularists with a program to marginalize religion or believers with a program to choose their spiritual “products” in the marketplace. On the other hand, you underscore ways in which the process is driven largely by unintended consequences that make further development of modernization inevitable and secularization therefore plausible. Could you give some examples of how that works?
SB: The largely secular state long predates ‘secularists’, whose main role is generally to articulate what everyone else has intuitively grasped long before. One of the greatest unintended consequences is the rise of toleration. Most Protestant sects (the Quakers are the exception) were not initially in favour of toleration. They split from national churches because the state church was not pure enough to justify being imposed on everyone. They initially wanted to do the imposing themselves (consider the New England Puritans!). Only when they failed to win over enough people did they start to think that toleration might just be to their advantage. And gradually they persuaded themselves it was also virtuous. When urbanization and industrialization created an obvious need for better education and social welfare, the British state initially wanted to channel tax funding through the state churches but that did not work because the state churches faced too much opposition from Presbyterians, Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists etc. So the state gradually had to make secular provision. That is, the rise of secular provision was a consequence, not of aggressive secularism, but of the internal divisions of the churches.

For another example consider the US Constitution. If the 13 colonies had all had the same established church, the USA could have had a state church. It was the fact of religious diversity and the fears of the minority sects that created neutrality, not the campaigns of secularists.

MR: One of the compelling arguments in your book is that even the type of religion or spirituality that remains personally engaging in the US, for example, is privatized and subjectivized. Could you explain how this fits rather than counts against the secularization paradigm?
SB: Privatized and subjectized religion is evidence of secularization. In the Christian West, traditionally religious people supposed that there was one God and it was our job to obey him and that usually meant trying to impose our vision on everybody else. We no longer expect that everyone will worship the same God in the same way and we lack the certainty and the power to impose our views on others. In turn we fail to pass on what faith we have intact to our children. Instead we encourage them to think for themselves. We solve the problem of competing visions by allowing that apparent contradictory things can all somehow be ‘true’. There is what is true for you and what is true for me. That sort of religion is inherently weaker than the traditional kind because there is no longer a strong psychological dynamic to ensure our children share our perspective.

MR: Some have attributed decline in church attendance in Western countries as “believing without belonging.” What do you make of that interpretation?
SB: ‘Believing without belonging’ is a fairy story church people tell themselves so they don’t get too depressed. There is no evidence for it. We have good longitudinal measures of religious activity, popularity of religious beliefs, and sense of religious identity. The three measures start from different heights: claiming a religious identity is more common than holding some religious beliefs which in turn is more common than engaging in religious activities. But – and this is the crucial point — all three measures decline pretty much in tandem.

MR: Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism are growing in many parts of the developing world. How can the secularization paradigm account for this?
SB: The secularization thesis argues that a series of specific changes (not the passage of time) undermines religion. Large parts of the world are not yet experiencing those changes. So why expect those societies to secularize? For example, religious diversity only weakens commitment when it is underpinned by an essentially egalitarian ethos that puts a high premium of personal liberty. Societies have to first work through the alternative of trying to re-impose a single religious culture through extermination, expulsion, and forced conversion. In Europe we tried that for two centuries before we gave it up.

Actually, far from being a surprise, the shift of many cultures from an organic communal Catholicism to an individualistic Protestantism is largely a repeat of what happened in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There are many parallels between the current appeal of Pentecostalism in Latin America and the appeal of Methodism in England in nineteenth century.

MR: Is it really secularization that we’re seeing across Europe or the march of militant Islam through the vacant ruins of Christendom?
SB: Your question does not actually pose competing alternatives. The ruination of Christendom is what we mean by secularization. And the suggestion that we are being over-run by jihadis is the paranoid fantasy of a few right-wing newspapers and muppet political parties. Four bearded men and a dog with a bomb is still four men and a dog. Muslims are a very small part of the population of most European societies. Militants are a very small pat of the Muslim population. They are easily out-numbered by liberal and ‘secular’ or ‘heritage’ Muslims. The Muslim influx has made religion more controversial because some Muslims wish their faith to enjoy the public presence and prestige it had in their home country but the net effect has been to make Europe even more secular. For example, the UK had blasphemy laws that had long fallen into disuse (last Scottish case in the 1830s) but we left them on the statute book rather than bother to argue about their repeal. When Muslims claimed that parity required that Islam also be protected against insult, we levelled the playing field by repealing the blasphemy laws.

MR: From a sociological perspective, what would have to happen if secularization were to be reversed?
I am not sure I understand this question. If you mean, what would we make of the UK or France becoming more religious, then the answer would depend on what changes brought that about. If religion became more popular while the social forces that we believe weakened it were still in play, then that would suggest the SP was mistaken. If some of the causal secularizing forces changed, that would just tell us that the social world is understandable but not (in the physics sense) predictable. If you mean ‘Can secularization be reversed?’, I would have to say it is as unlikely as the reversal of the slow road to gender or racial equality. Precisely because we now lay such store by personal liberty I cannot see the degree of religious diversity being reduced, I cannot see state imposition of religious uniformity being accepted, and I cannot see economic rationality giving way to religious precepts. Show me the advanced industrial economy that will shut down continuous production machines to respect the sabbath or the democratic polity that will deny the vote to heretics!

We sat down to chat with Dr. Rosenbladt about his article in this month’s issue of Modern Reformation, ‘What Drove Luther’s Hammer’, and learned about sleeping on concrete floors, a ruined gastrointestinal tract, and the stupidest decision ever made in Western Christianity.  If you know of anyone who thinks they can earn their way to heaven with good behavior, share the video.

Dr. Horton was asked to review the new book by Gentry and Stephen Wellum titled Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants (Crossway, 2012) over at The Gospel Coalition. Here is an excerpt of the review:

However, their argument assumes that the mere presence of commands indicates a mixture of unconditional-conditional aspects in the basis of the covenant itself. At this point, Reformed theology has traditionally appealed to a distinction between basis and administration. The mere presence of commands says nothing about the basis of a covenant itself. Circumcision (like baptism) identifies the members of the covenant, so if one is not circumcised, he is “cut off.” Nevertheless, one is not justified because he is circumcised, as Paul indicates in Romans 4:11. That would turn conditions into the basis rather than the administration of the covenant. Commands function in a law-covenant as the basis for blessing or curse: the swearer’s perfect, personal, perpetual obedience is the ground, ratified by a public assumption of the covenant obligations on one’s own head. In the covenant of grace, however, commands function as the “reasonable service” that we offer “in view of God’s mercies.”

Click here to read the rest of the review

We’re sending off the summer with two great interviews with Dr. Adam Francisco of Concordia University.  In this interviews, Dr. Francisco gives us great insight into the historical development and theological influences on the Koran, the Islam PR re-vamp, and the difference between Muslims and Islam.  Watch, learn, and be edified.

Happy Viewing!

In the third and final installment of Michael Horton’s reflections on the relationship of Christianity and Islam, he turns to the personal nature of our relationship with our Muslim neighbors.

You can watch the previous installments here and here.

Be sure to read Dr. Horton’s article, “Loving Muslim Neighbors,” in the July/August issue of Modern Reformation (subscription required).

How does the message of the Bible and the message of the Koran differ? In this video (2 of 3), Michael Horton continues his discussion of the differences between Christianity and Islam.

Part 1 can be found here.

You can also read Dr. Horton’s article “Christ and Islam” from the July/August issue of Modern Reformation, on which these discussions are based.

“Islam is all law. There is no good news.”

Curious about Islam? Want to dig a little deeper after reading Michael Horton’s article in the July/August issue of Modern Reformation? This is the first of three video conversations that Dr. Horton recorded to help us understand the differences between Islam and Christianity.

First up: Salvation.

Our good friend, J. Todd Billings, was recently featured in Christianity Today. His critique of “incarnational ministry” continues to ring true for many people. We were proud to feature that critique back in 2009, Incarnational Ministry and the Unique, Incarnate Christ.

Here’s a brief preview of Billings’ article in Christianity Today.

In recent decades, scores of books, manuals, and websites advocating “incarnational ministry” have encouraged Christians to move beyond ministry at a distance and to “incarnate” and immerse themselves into local cultures. Some give a step-by-step “incarnation process” for Christians crossing cultures. Some call us to become incarnate by “being Jesus” to those around us. Indeed, many of these resources display valuable insights into relational and cross-cultural ministry. But there are serious problems at the core of most approaches to “incarnational ministry”—problems with biblical, theological, and practical implications.

I encountered these problems myself as a practitioner of “incarnational ministry.” At a Christian college, I was told that just as God became flesh in a particular culture 2,000 years ago, my job was to become “incarnate” in another culture. Eight months later, equipped with training in cultural anthropology, I set about learning the language and culture in Uganda. But I quickly ran into doubts about the “incarnational” method. Would the Ugandans necessarily “see Jesus” as a result of my efforts at cultural identification? Was I assuming that my own presence—rather than that of Christ—was redemptive? Is the eternal Word’s act of incarnation really an appropriate model for ministry?

My questions multiplied as I continued my theological education. Biblical scholars and theologians assured me that the Bible and orthodox Christian theology taught nothing about us “becoming incarnate.” Going back to my professors of missiology and ministry, I heard a quite practical response: If not the Incarnation, what is the alternative model for culture-crossing ministries? Over the past decade, I have come to see that incarnational ministry actually obscures the much richer theology of servant-witness and cross-cultural ministry in the New Testament: ministry in union with Christ by the Spirit.

You can read the whole thing here.