Grace and then Law

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

Even if all you read from Wesley’s Standard Sermons is the table of contents, you can see the basic shape of the Christian life. There are two major blocks of material in the Sermons, just as there are two major factors in the Christian life. The collection begins with a loud, clear, trumpet-blast of grace. Wesley starts with the epochal Sermon 1, “Salvation by Faith,” and continues through “The Almost Christian,” “Awake, Thou That Sleepest,” and “Scriptural Christianity,” and then on to the great trilogy of salvation sermons (5-7): “Justification by Faith,” “The Righteousness of Faith,” and “The Way to the Kingdom.” Wesley could not be more emphatic: he begins with the gospel of grace, the atonement, faith, justification, and free forgiveness.

But around the middle of the collection, Wesley turns a corner and launches into an exposition of the Sermon on the Mount. This series of discourses “upon our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount” extends from Standard Sermons 20 to 32. It is by far the longest series of sermons in the collection. If you group it with a few other related sermons, such as the two-part “The Law Established through Faith” and the programmatic Sermon 34 on “The Original, Nature, Properties, and Use of the Law,” you have a block of sermons about the law that is the equally imposing counterpart to the opening sermons on grace. “One way and another,” comments Rupp, “within this definition, one-third of the standard sermons of John Wesley are concerned with the preaching of the law to believers.”

The law… to believers. First they must be believers; first they must believe in salvation by grace, then they begin hearing and applying the law to their lives. This is the inescapable order of Wesleyan spirituality. Some theologians talk as if grace and law are mutually contradictory, and can never mix. Law may come first to condemn and drive you to Christ, but it has no place in the Christian life itself. In contrast, Wesley insisted on preaching the law to Christians, because the law is God’s means of crafting a holy people. But Wesley knew the perils of the law as well as any Lutheran ever did. He was well aware that the preaching of the law brings with it certain dangers: legalism, condemnation, and pharisaic judgmentalism. So he placed his preaching of the law in the context of free grace. Grace first, then law. The result of this combination, in this order, is the dynamo that drives Wesleyan spirituality.

And though John Wesley and his tradition are the best at preaching this, it is not something unique to Wesleyanism. J. I. Packer testifies that “Holiness means law keeping as one’s way of love.” Packer claims that “The Wesleyan voiced this most vigorously… however, no evangelical Christian can ever have been wholly unaware that the heart of holiness is love.”

“How,” asks Packer, “is love to God and men to find expression? The answer is by keeping God’s commands and holding to his revealed ideals for human life—in other words, by keeping his law, as interpreted for Christians in the New Testament. Law keeping out of love is the true path of holiness.” Packer goes on:

But this is something biblical Christians have not always managed to grasp well. There have always been those on the one hand who have claimed that if the Spirit indwells you and the motive of love is strong within you, you do not need to study God’s law in Scripture in order to learn his will, for you will always be made immediately aware in every situation what it is that he wants.” “The way to show that you love God and men is to keep God’s law.” (Keep in Step with the Spirit, 165-166)

For Wesley, the priority and provenience of grace over law is critical. It is built into every sermon; in fact, it is built into the structure of the Standard Sermons. But if the Table of Contents of the Standard Sermons is too large a field to survey, you can also find the same point, and the same order, put into seven words by Charles Wesley, in the hymn that comes first in any decent Methodist Hymn Book, “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”

He breaks the power of cancelled sin.

First the sin is cancelled, then its power is broken. God’s order is to justify the sinner freely, and then go on to liberate the forgiven sinner from the power of sin. If we reversed the order, God would first break the power of sin in our lives, and only then cancel its guilt. But that would be a scheme of self-salvation, even if it were grace-empowered self-salvation. The Wesleys would have recognized it as a Roman Catholic ordering. Their whole evangelical breakthrough was to understand that God forgives and then empowers. We may even say that God forgives specifically so that he can go on to empower; that he cancels sin so that he can go on to break its power; that he says to the soul, “Be of good cheer, thy sins are forgiven: So forgiven, that they shall no more rule over thee.”

Want to Be the Next Apple? Lose the Bafflegab: Virginia Postrel

By Virginia Postrel
Bloomberg.com

Everybody, it seems, wants to be like Apple Inc. Google Inc. (GOOG) is buying Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc., many observers say, so it can integrate hardware and software to be like Apple (and to enlarge its patent pool).

Last week, Joel Ewanick, the global chief marketing officer at General Motors, declared that “it’s time to clearly differentiate our brand and align closer to a true global brand like Apple.” Translation: We want to be like Apple.

Apple has topped Fortune magazine’s list of “Most Admired Companies” four years running. This month it was briefly the most valuable company in the world. Even holding the No. 2 market capitalization is pretty amazing for a company that almost died in 1997, when it was valued at less than $3 billion.

To many people, Apple’s success seems like magic. Others attribute it to cool products, good marketing, and Steve Jobs’s charisma or presentation skills. Critics credit the Apple co- founder’s ability to project a “reality distortion field.”

In his new book “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters,” Richard P. Rumelt, a strategy professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, offers another explanation: the ruthless execution of good strategy.

Strategy is not what many people think it is. It is not a fill-in-the-blanks mission statement blathering about how XYZ Corp. will ethically serve its stakeholders by implementing best-in-class integrated sustainable practices to grow as a global leader while maximizing shareholder value. Such bafflegab is “Dilbert“-fodder that generates cynicism and contempt. It is, at best, a big waste of time.

Neither is strategy a declaration that the ABC Co. will increase sales by 20 percent a year for the next five years, with a profit margin of at least 20 percent. Strategy is not the resolve to hunker down and try harder -- what Kenichi Ohmae of McKinsey criticized in a 1989 Harvard Business Review article as “do more better.” Effort is not strategy. Neither are financial projections. And neither are wishes.

A strategy “is a way of dealing with a high-stakes challenge,” Rumelt told me in an interview. “It’s a way around the obstacles or problems in a difficult situation.”

Every good strategy, he writes, includes what he calls the kernel: a “diagnosis” of the challenge (“What’s going on here?”), a “guiding policy” for dealing with that challenge (the core idea often called a strategy), and a set of “coherent actions” to carry out that policy (the implementation).

For his friend Stephanie’s corner grocery, Rumelt writes, the diagnosis was competition from a large 24-hour supermarket, the guiding policy was “to serve the busy professional who has little time to cook,” and the coherent actions included stocking more prepared meals and opening an extra checkout stand at 5:00 p.m.

This strategy not only told Stephanie what to do but what she had to stop doing. Selling more prepared meals meant taking space away from the munchies for her many student customers. To focus labor expenses on the peak times for her professional customers, she closed earlier, meaning no sales from late-night study breaks. “Strategy is scarcity’s child and to have a strategy, rather than vague aspirations, is to choose one path and eschew others,” writes Rumelt.

A strategy is not a goal like maximizing shareholder value or keeping America safe from terrorism. It’s not even a plan. It is a design -- a coherent approach to defining and solving a particular problem, in which the different elements have to work together.

In this analysis, Steve Jobs is not only a connoisseur and sponsor of good design. He is himself a successful designer -- not of products but of business strategies.

Apple’s recent success has made people forget not only how close the company came to failing but also what Jobs did to turn it around when he returned as chief executive in 1997. He diagnosed Apple’s problem: It was hemorrhaging cash and its product lineup was too diverse, confusing and expensive.

In response, Rumelt explains, Jobs “redesigned the whole business logic around a simplified product line sold through a limited set of outlets.” He cut product offerings down to two: a desktop and a laptop, and no peripherals. He moved most manufacturing to Taiwan, cut software development, and eliminated all but one national retailer, opening a Web store to sell directly to consumers.

And, yes, Jobs also got Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) to invest $150 million in Apple and to commit to continuing to make Mac versions of key software. But that agreement wouldn’t have helped much without the rest of the strategy. “I don’t know how he learned that ruthlessness,” Rumelt says. But it worked.

What Jobs did not do, the book suggests, is equally telling. He avoided all the management responses that masquerade as strategies. “He did not announce ambitious revenue or profit goals; he did not indulge in messianic visions of the future,” Rumelt writes. “And he did not just cut in a blind ax-wielding frenzy.”

The organization’s new, coherent design bought the company time and gave it a clear identity on which to build. Apple’s gutsy decision to open its own retail stores in 2001 made sense only in the context of its new strategy.

Rumelt, who is a business consultant as well as one of the most-cited scholars in his field, met Jobs in 1998, while working for Telecom Italia SpA. (TIT) Rumelt congratulated Jobs on the turnaround but expressed skepticism about Apple’s chances of overcoming the Windows-Intel lock on personal computers. “What are you going to do in the longer term?” Rumelt asked. “What’s the strategy?”

Jobs, he recalls, “just smiled and said, ‘I am going to wait for the next big thing.’”

Jobs recognized that Apple couldn’t change the realities of the PC business. It needed a change in the environment that would make possible a new strategy, oriented toward growth this time rather than survival. He found that opportunity with the iPod and online music.

“Strategy is not a magic potion for overcoming any obstacle,” says Rumelt. “The part that’s hard to write about, that people reject, that they don’t want to hear me say, is that you may be facing an obstacle you can’t deal with. Choose a different obstacle. Play games you can win.”

Rumelt says he was motivated to write his book in part because he believes “bad strategy” -- or, perhaps more accurately, pseudo-strategy or even anti-strategy -- has become increasingly pervasive, not only in business but in all sorts of non-commercial organizations. Feeling obliged to articulate a “strategy” (or compelled to by orders from the board or Congress), people cook up statements that lack the clear-eyed analysis, real choices and coherent actions that good strategy demands.

For example, in 2008 the Los Angeles Unified School District adopted seven “key strategies,” including to “build school and District leadership teams that share common beliefs, values and high expectations for all adults and students and that support a cycle of continuous improvement to ensure high- quality instruction in their schools.”

That is a hope, a goal, or perhaps a prescription for North Korean-style totalitarian conformity. Whatever it is, the statement is not a strategy. It offers no guide to action. It is all too typical of “strategy” -- in the private sector as well as the government, in huge multinational corporations and small local charities.

Bad strategy, Rumelt writes, goes wrong in four common ways. Many bad strategies are just superficial nonsense expressed in big words, which Rumelt very politely calls “fluff.” Others fail to define the challenge. Some mistake goals or wishes, for strategy. And some set impossible objectives rather than focusing on modest but achievable ones.

Even when it doesn’t lead to bad decision-making, Rumelt argues, formulating bad strategy hurts organizations. “You use up the psychological and intellectual resources that could be used for figuring out what we should actually be doing around here, creating these things,” he told me. “If the very top management of the company puts together a retreat for the top 50 executives and what they come out with is a financial forecast, that’s a misuse of the knowledge and energy in the group.”

So if you really want to be like Apple, drop the fluff- filled vision statements and magical wishes. Pretend your company’s existence is at stake, coldly evaluate the environment, and make choices. Stop thinking of strategy as meaningless verbiage or financial goals and treat it as a serious design challenge.

Triune Name

By Peter J. Leithart
Leithart.com

Jesus promises to write a triple name on the pillars that are in the temple (Revelation 3:12). The three uses of the word ????? are the name of “My God,” the name of the city, which is New Jerusalem, and Jesus’ own new name. This has got to be a Trinitarian formula. “My God” is definitely the Father, and Jesus’ own Name is the Name of the Son. The sticking point is that the third Name is not the name of the Spirit but of the city. But there are reasons to think that the Name of the city is the Name of the Spirit, that New Jerusalem is a way of speaking about the presence of the Spirit.

At the end of the book of Revelation, the Spirit and the Bride speak with a united voice, calling on the Bridegroom to come (22:17). The seven Spirits of God have formed and inhabited a bride, so that the Bride speaks with the Spirit’s voice. The description of the Bride/New Jerusalem descending from heaven reminds us of the dove descending from heaven onto Jesus at His baptism (Matthew 3:16; Mark 1:10; Luke 3:22; John 1:32-33). In Revelation 3:12, the phrase “descending from heaven” is nearly identical to the phrase in John 1:32 . That the Spirit is pictured as a dove points to an association with the Bride, since the Bride is the “dove” of the Song of Songs (2:14; 5:2). By receiving the Spirit as a dove coming from heaven, Jesus is joined to the Bride.

Thus, it makes sense that the triple name of God would put the city where we would expect the Spirit. And that means that the city, the bride from heaven, is incorporated into the divine name. The Bride becomes part of the family and bears the family name.

Between Two Worlds: An Interview with John R. W. Stott

By Albert Mohler
AlbertMohler.com

[The funeral for John R. W. Stott, one of the most famous evangelical preachers of the last century, will be held today in London at All Souls Church, Langham Place, where he served with distinction for so many decades of ministry. In honor of John Stott, I here republish an interview I conducted with the great preacher in 1987. The interview was first published in Preaching magazine, for which I was then Associate Editor.]

John R. W. Stott has emerged in the last half of the twentieth century as one of the leading evangelical preachers in the world. His ministry has spanned decades and continents, combining his missionary zeal with the timeless message of the Gospel.

For many years the Rector of All Souls Church, Langham Place, in London, Stott is also the founder and director of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. His preaching ministry stands as a model of the effective communication of biblical truth to secular men and women.

The author of several worthy books, Stott is perhaps best known in the United States through his involvement with the URBANA conferences. His voice and pen have been among the most determinative forces in the development of the contemporary evangelical movement in the Church of England and throughout the world.

Preaching Associate Editor R. Albert Mohler interviewed Stott during one of the British preacher’s frequent visits to the United States.

Mohler: You have staked your ministry on biblical preaching and have established a world-wide reputation for the effective communication of the gospel. How do you define ‘biblical preaching’?

Stott: I believe that to preach or to expound the scripture is to open up the inspired text with such faithfulness and sensitivity that God’s voice is heard and His people obey Him. I gave that definition at the Congress on Biblical Exposition and I stand by it, but let me expand a moment.

My definition deliberately includes several implications concerning the scripture. First, it is a uniquely inspired text. Second, the scripture must be opened up. It comes to us partially closed, with problems which must be opened up.

Beyond this, we must expound it with faithfulness and sensitivity. Faithfulness relates to the scripture itself. Sensitivity relates to the modern world. The preacher must give careful attention to both.

We must always be faithful to the text, and yet ever sensitive to the modern world and its concerns and needs. When this happens the preacher can come with two expectations. First, that God’s voice is heard because He speaks through what He has spoken. Second, that His people will obey Him — that they will respond to His Word as it is preached.

Mohler: You obviously have a very high regard for preaching. In Between Two Worlds you wrote extensively of the glory of preaching, even going so far as to suggest that “preaching is indispensable to Christianity.”

We are now coming out of an era in which preaching was thought less and less relevant to the church and its world. Even in those days you were outspoken in your affirmation of the preaching event and its centrality. Has your mind changed?

Stott: To the contrary! I still believe that preaching is the key to the renewal of the church. I am an impenitent believer in the power of preaching.

I know all the arguments against it: that the television age has rendered it useless; that we are a spectator generation; that people are bored with the spoken word, disenchanted with any communication by spoken words alone. All these things are said these days.

Nevertheless, when a man of God stands before the people of God with the Word of God in his hand and the Spirit of God in his heart, you have a unique opportunity for communication.

I fully agree with Martyn Lloyd-Jones that the decadent periods in the history of the church have always been those periods marked by preaching in decline. That is a negative statement. The positive counterpart is that churches grow to maturity when the Word of God is faithfully and sensitively expounded to them.

If it is true that a human being cannot live by bread only, but by every word which proceeds out of the mouth of God, then it also is true of churches. Churches live, grow, and thrive in response to the Word of God. I have seen congregations come alive by the faithful and systematic unfolding of the Word of God.

The Text Means What the Author Meant

Mohler: You have pictured the great challenge of preaching as creating a bridge between two worlds — the world of the biblical text and the world of the contemporary hearer. That chasm seems ever more imposing in the modern world. How can the preacher really bridge that chasm?

Stott: Any bridge, if it is to be effective, must be firmly grounded on both sides of the canyon. To build a bridge between the modern world and the biblical world we must first be careful students of both. We must be ever engaged in careful biblical exegesis, conscientiously and continually, and yet also involved in careful study of the contemporary context. Only this will allow us to relate one to the other.

I find it helpful in my own study to ask two questions of the text — and in the right order. First, “What does it mean?” and second, “What does it say?”

The answer to the first is determined by the original author. I am fond of citing E. D. Hirsch in his book Validity in Interpretation, when he wrote: “The text means what its author meant.”

That is my major quarrel with the existentialists, who say that the text means what it means to me — the reader — independent of what the author meant. We must say “no” to that. A text means primarily what its author meant. It is the author who establishes the meaning of the text.

Beyond that, we must accept the discipline of grammatical and historical exegesis, of thinking ourselves back into the historical, geographical, cultural, and social situation in which the author was writing. We must do this to understand what the text means. It cannot be neglected.

The second question moves us from the original meaning of the text to its contemporary message — “What does it say?” If we ask the first question without asking the second, we lapse into antiquarianism, unrelated to modern reality.

On the other hand, if we leap to the second question, “What does it say today?,” we lapse into existentialism, unrelated to the reality of biblical revelation. We have to relate the past revelation of God to the present reality of the modern world.

Mohler: That requires a double exegesis — an exegesis of the text and also an exegesis of life. Is it your opinion that most evangelicals are better exegetes of the text than they are of life?

Stott: Oh, I am sure of it. I am myself and always have been a better student of scripture than of the present reality. We love the Bible, read it and study it, and all of our preaching comes out of the Bible. Very often it does not land on the other side of that chasm, it is never earthed in reality.

The attractiveness of liberal or radical preaching, whatever it is called these days, is that it tends to be done by genuinely modern people who live in the modern world, understand it, and relate to it. But their message often does not come from the Bible. Their message is never rooted in the textual side of the chasm. We must combine the two relevant questions.

Mohler: Most of us think of ourselves as modern persons, and yet we may lack a suitable hermeneutic of the contemporary. What have you found to be helpful as you seek to be a better student of the contemporary world?

Stott: I mentioned in Between Two Worlds how very helpful I found involvement in a reading group I founded about fifteen years ago. They are graduates and professional people — doctors, an architect, an attorney, teachers and so on. All are committed to Christ and the Scripture and yet anxious to be modern and contemporary people. We meet every month or so when I am in London.

We decide to read a particular book, or see a particular play or exhibition, and spend the evening discussing it. We give most attention to books. We go around the circle and give our immediate impression before eventually turning and asking “Now, what has the Gospel to say to this?” I have found it enormously helpful to be forced to think biblically about modern issues.

Mohler: So you would point biblical preachers not only to the biblical text, but to a very wide reading?

Stott: Absolutely. I think wide reading is essential. We need to listen to modern men and women and read what they are writing. We need to go to the movies, to watch television, to go to the theater. The modern screen and stage are mirrors of the modern world. I seldom go on my own. I go with friends committed to the same kind of careful understanding.

Mohler: You have made it clear that you see preaching as a glorious calling and vocation. What do you see as the greatest contemporary need in preaching? Where is biblical preaching falling tragically short?

Stott: Well, in the more liberal churches, it falls woefully short of being fully biblical. Amongst the evangelical churches it falls short by being less than fully contemporary. I can only repeat the great need of struggling to understand the issues of the modern world. Nevertheless, there is a tremendous correlation between the issues of the biblical world and the modern world.

People are actively seeking the very answers Jesus provides. People are asking the very questions Jesus can answer, if only we understand the questions the world is asking.

I Began with a Very Strong Commitment to Scripture

Mohler: Your service over many years at All Souls Church in London had a tremendous impact throughout much of the world. There, in the midst of London’s busiest retail area, you presented the gospel with great effectiveness and power. Did your preaching change at all during your ministry at All Souls?

Stott: I began with a very strong commitment to Scripture, a very high view of its authority and inspiration. I have always loved the Word of God — ever since I was converted. Therefore, I have always sought to exercise an expository or exegetical ministry.

In my early days I used to think that my business was to expound and exegete the text; I am afraid I left the application to the Holy Spirit. It is amazing how you can conceal your laziness with a little pious phraseology! The Holy Spirit certainly can and does apply the Word for the people. But it is wrong to deny our own responsibility in the application of the Word.

All great preachers understand this. They focus on the conclusion, on the application of the text. This is what the Puritans called “preaching through to the heart.” This is how my own preaching has changed. I have learned to add application to exposition — and this is the bridge-building across the chasm.

Mohler: You have recently published a major volume on the cross [The Cross of Christ, InterVarsity Press, 1986]. This has always been central to your preaching — and all genuinely Christian preaching. Do you perceive an inadequate focus on the cross in the pulpit today?

Stott: Indeed, so far as I can see, it is inadequate. I think we need to get back to the fact that the cross is the center of biblical Christianity. We must not allow those on the one hand to put the incarnation as primary, nor can we allow those on the other hand to put the primary focus on the resurrection.

Of course, the cross, the incarnation, and the resurrection belong together. There could have been no atonement without the incarnation or without the resurrection. The incarnation prepares for the atonement and the resurrection endorses the atonement, so they belong always together.

Yet the New Testament is very clear that the cross stands at the center. It worries me that some evangelicals do not focus on Christ crucified as the center. Of course, we preach the whole of biblical religion, but with the cross as central.

One of the surprises which came as a product of the research for the book was the discovery that most books on the cross focus only on the atonement. There is much the New Testament has to say about the cross which is not focused on the atonement.

We are told, for example, to take up our cross and follow Christ. Communion is a cross-centered festival. There is the whole question of balance in the modern world. The problems of suffering and self-image are addressed by the cross. These issues appear quite differently when our world-view is dominated by the cross.

We Belong in a Study, Not an Office

Mohler: You are probably as well known in America as in England. Furthermore, you know America — its churches and its preachers. What would be your word to the Servants of the Word on this side of the Atlantic?

Stott: I think my main word to American preachers is, as Stephen Olford has often said, that we belong in a study, not in an office. The symbol of our ministry is a Bible — not a telephone. We are ministers of the Word, not administrators, and we need to relearn the question of priority in every generation.

The Apostles were in danger of being diverted from the ministry to which they had been called by Jesus — the ministry of Word and prayer. They were almost diverted into a social ministry for squabbling widows.

Now both are important, and both are ministries, but the Apostles had been called to the ministry of the Word and not the ministry of tables. They had to delegate the ministry of the tables to other servants. We are not Apostles, but there is the work of teaching that has come to us in the unfolding of the apostolic message of the New Testament. This is our priority as pastors and preachers.

Jesus preached to the crowds, to the group, and to the individual. He had the masses, the disciples, and individuals coming to Him. He preached to crowds, taught the disciples, and counseled individuals. We must also have this focus. It is all in the ministry of the Word.

Evangelicals Recommending Books

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

A hundred years ago, in a 1911 issue of The King’s Business, the founders of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles made this proclamation: “Buying and selling books with some, is like buying and selling potatoes –a mere perfunctory business. With us, buying and selling books is a matter of as much spiritual import as teaching the Bible.”

Could these doughty, radical evangelicals, these proto-Fundamentalists, whose glory was their confession (contra liberalism!) that the Bible is the very word of God, really have meant to call book-selling “a matter of as much spiritual import as teaching the Bible?” Yes, they meant it. And evangelicals have long understood that the power of life and death is often in the recommendation of a book.

They were not, of course, suggesting that other books were on a level with Scripture. They said no such thing. What they said was that they considered their ministry of handling books (stocking them in their downtown bookstore, endorsing and recommending “Best Books,” distributing them free of charge when possible) to be a ministry as serious as their ministry of teaching Scripture. These aren’t just potatoes we’re moving here, these are words that form souls, move hearts, change minds. These are books!

We handle books for the glory of God and cannot buy or sell those that we do not believe will accord with the teaching of God’s Word.


The reading of one book might undermine the faith of a person or destroy his soul.


The reading of another book might lead a soul into the eternal light or arouse to a life of devotion.

It is almost a hallmark of evangelicalism to take book recommendations so seriously. Evangelical protestants don’t have nihil obstats or imprimaturs from a central magisterium, but in its place they have a network of endorsements and recommendations. Seen from this perspective, maybe one of J.I. Packer’s most important ministries has been his ubiquitous endorsing of good books for decades. I don’t know if blurbing could be a spiritual gift, but if it is, Packer may have been exercising it.

The book-network goes as far back among evangelicals as you’d care to trace it. The Reformation in England started as a network of book recommendations among the scholars at Cambridge: not just a covert circulating library for forbidden books by Luther, but a regular Erasmus Book Club meeting at the White Horse Inn.

In the great awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, the circulation and recommendation of best books was a driving force. Susannah Wesley recommended Henry Scougal’s The Life of God in the Soul of Man to her son Charles, who recommended it to George Whitefield, who said he never knew what true religion was until he was enlightened by that book. Another book these evangelicals circulated, Francke’s Nicodemus (now little heard of), provoked Whitefield and Wesley to stifle their fear of man and take to open-air preaching.

“Books from time to time bowled Wesley over,” says one historian, and a born influencer like John Wesley was bound to pass along these books which had become events in his life. Contrarily, when he read a bad book (especially by an author he had reason to expect better of), he warned people away from it as if it were poison. Though he had learned so much from William Law’s early works, when Law’s later works took a turn toward the mystical, Wesley denounced them in public and scolded Law in a personal letter.

In fact, after his evangelical awakening at Aldersgate, Wesley wrote to Law in the strongest terms, demanding to know why Law had never written more clearly about justification by faith. For all the good that Wesley had drawn from Law’s books, when he looked back on them he noticed that the most important thing was missing. He wrote to Law:

How will you answer it to our common Lord that you never gave me this advice? Did you never read the Acts of the Apostles, or the answer of Paul to him who said, ‘What must I do to be saved’? Or are you wiser than he? Why did I scarce ever hear you name the name of Christ; never, so as to ground anything upon ‘faith in His blood’? …If you say you advised other things as preparatory to this, what is this but laying a foundation below the foundation? Is not Christ, then, the first as well as the last? If you say you advised them because you knew that I had faith already, verily you knew nothing of me; you discerned not my spirit at all. I know that I had not faith, unless the faith of a devil, the faith of Judas, that speculative, notional, airy shadow, which lives in the head, not in the heart.

Wesley presses Law even further, asking him to “consider deeply and impartially, whether the true reason of your never pressing this upon me was not this — that you had it not yourself.”

These are harsh words, but Wesley strikes the true evangelical note when he talks of books as having the power of life and death in them. Once he came to experience saving faith in Christ, he looked back with shame and horror on some of the books he had recommended before. They were good books, but some of them (especially his favorite, Thomas a Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ) talked up obedience to the exclusion of faith, highlighted personal righteousness and obscured the righteousness of Christ. Little wonder that Wesley spent so much energy in later life in circulating “Best Books,” books he selected more carefully with an eye on the main things of the gospel: his Christian Library that he distributed through his network of preachers.

“Buying and selling books with some, is like buying and selling potatoes.” But evangelicals are in earnest about the books they recommend and pass around to each other. The simple question, “What’s a good book to read on subject X?” is not just a bibliographic query; It can provoke considerable soul-searching. On that book recommendation hangs serious responsibility, and the possibility of great blessing.

In addition to that Packeresque gift of blurbing, there is a more pastoral gift of discerning which book is good for a soul at a particular time. Fitting the book to the person and the moment is an art that demands prayerful consideration. It can be as serious as teaching the Bible. Brothers, be not many book recommenders.

The Wife of Pilate

By Patrick Henry Reardon
Touchstone Magazine

Since the story of Pilate’s wife is found only in the Gospel of Matthew (27:19), it seems reasonable to examine it specifically through the perspective of Matthew. What function is served by that very short narrative in that particular Gospel?

Commentators have remarked that Pilate’s wife, a Gentile woman who pleads the innocence of Jesus (“that just man”) serves as a literary foil to the Jewish leaders who clamor for his crucifixion (27:23). This comment is surely accurate, but it does not indicate a larger context, nor an intention specific to Matthew.

Indeed, this is the sort of story we might more readily have expected in Luke. The latter, after all, is rather preoccupied with showing that the Roman authorities regarded Jesus as innocent (Luke 23:4,14–15,20,47), and among the four evangelists, he is certainly the one who writes most often about women, whether in Jesus’ parables or among his actual associates.

It seems, then, that a closer examination of Matthew 27:19 is required. The text says that while Pilate “was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent to him, saying, ‘Have nothing to do with that just Man, for I have suffered many things today in a dream because of him.’”

This woman is portrayed, not only as resistant to the official plot to murder Jesus, but as having “suffered many things today in a dream because of him.” The most striking item here, I suggest, is her dream. The dream, then, is the place to start.

This Gentile’s dream near the end of Matthew clearly forms a literary inclusion with the dream of certain other Gentiles near that Gospel’s beginning. With respect to the Magi, we are told, “being divinely warned in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed for their own country another way” (2:12). That is the last appearance of the Magi.

The contexts of these two dreams are strikingly similar. In each case the dream takes place in connection with an official plot to kill Jesus. In the instance of the Magi, this plot includes the official representative of the Roman government, King Herod, who has “gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together” (2:4). In the instance of Pilate’s wife, the murderous plot involves “all the chief priests and elders of the people” (27:1,12,20; the scribes are included in 27:41). In both cases the dreams of the Gentiles are contrasted with the plots of Jesus’ enemies. Pilate’s wife near the end of Matthew stands parallel to the Magi near its beginning.

In each case, moreover, the plot to murder Jesus has to do with his kingship, his status as the Messiah. In the example of the Magi, these come from the East “to Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is he who has been born King of the Jews?’” (2:1–2). The usurping Herod, threatened by the suspected appearance of Israel’s true king, takes all the necessary precautions, including the murder of “all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all its districts, from two years old and under” (2:16).

The expression “King of the Jews” does not appear in Matthew again until the final plot against Jesus. It is while Pilate officiates in his judgment seat, and just before he receives the message from his wife, that he inquires, “Are you the King of the Jews?” (27:11). The source of Pilate’s question here is indicated in the next verse, which tells us that Jesus “was being accused by the chief priests and elders” (27:12). These chief priests and others correspond to the group that Herod summoned earlier when he made his own inquiry about the King of the Jews.

Matthew tells us that Pilate “knew that they had handed him over because of envy.” Indeed, he mentions this in the verse immediately preceding the message from his wife (27:18–19). This envy of Jesus’ enemies readily puts the reader in mind of the earlier envy of Herod, when he, too, was confronted with the real King of the Jews.

There is a special irony, then, to the title by which Pilate’s soldiers address Jesus in their mockery: “Hail, King of the Jews” (27:29). Pilate, moreover, apparently with a view to mocking the Jews themselves, attaches to the cross the official accusation against Jesus: “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews” (27:37). At last is answered that question first put by the Magi, “Where is he who has been born King of the Jews?” (2:2) He is on the cross, the just Man dying for the sins of the world.

Thus, the dream of Pilate’s wife, which had revealed Jesus to be a just Man, completes the earlier dream of the Magi. The testimony from the East is matched by the testimony from the West, both cases representing those regarding whom Jesus commanded his Church, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (28:19).

Divine Inspiration

By Jeet Heer
The Walrus

How Catholicism made Marshall McLuhan one of the twentieth century’s freest and finest thinkers.
Appropriately enough, a century after his birth in 1911, Marshall McLuhan has found a second life on the Internet. YouTube and other sites are a rich repository of McLuhan interviews, revealing that the late media sage still has the power to provoke and infuriate. Connoisseurs of Canadian television should track down a 1968 episode of a CBC program called The Summer Way, a highbrow cultural and political show that once featured a half-hour debate about technology between McLuhan and the novelist Norman Mailer.

Both freewheeling public intellectuals with a penchant for making wild statements, Mailer and McLuhan were well matched mentally, yet they displayed an appropriate stylistic contrast. Earthy, squat, and pugnacious, Mailer possessed all the hot qualities McLuhan attributed to print culture. Meanwhile, McLuhan adopted the cerebral and cavalier cool approach he credited to successful television politicians like John F. Kennedy and Pierre Trudeau, who responded to attacks with insouciant indifference.

Early on in the program, McLuhan and Mailer tackle the largest possible issue, the fate of nature:

McLuhan: We live in a time when we have put a man-made satellite environment around the planet. The planet is no longer nature. It’s no longer the external world. It’s now the content of an artwork. Nature has ceased to exist.

Mailer: Well, I think you’re anticipating a century, perhaps.

McLuhan: But when you put a man-made environment around the planet, you have in a sense abolished nature. Nature from now on has to be programmed.

Mailer: Marshall, I think you’re begging a few tremendously serious questions. One of them is that we have not yet put a man-made environment around this planet, totally. We have not abolished nature yet. We may be in the process of abolishing nature forever.

McLuhan: The environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.

Mailer: Well, nonetheless, nature still exhibits manifestations which defy all methods of collecting information and data. For example, an earthquake may occur, or a tidal wave may come in, or a hurricane may strike. And the information will lag critically behind our ability to control it.

McLuhan: The experience of that event, that disaster, is felt everywhere at once, under a single dateline.

Mailer: But that’s not the same thing as controlling nature, dominating nature, or superseding nature. It’s far from that. Nature still does exist as a protagonist on this planet.

McLuhan: Oh, yes, but it’s like our Victorian mechanical environment. It’s a rear-view mirror image. Every age creates as a utopian image a nostalgic rear-view mirror image of itself, which puts it thoroughly out of touch with the present. The present is the enemy.

It’s a measure of McLuhan’s ability to recalibrate the intellectual universe that in this debate, Mailer — a Charlie Sheen–style roughneck with a history of substance abuse, domestic violence, and public mental breakdowns — comes across as the voice of sobriety and sweet reason. Mailer once observed that McLuhan “had the fastest brain of anyone I have ever met, and I never knew whether what he was saying was profound or garbage.” Many others were similarly divided. It was easy to be overawed by McLuhan’s quick-wittedness, his startling erudition, and his ability to describe the familiar world in shockingly fresh language while remaining uncertain about the ultimate value of his ideas.

McLuhan has strong claims to being the most important thinker Canada has ever produced. In his first book, The Mechanical Bride, published in 1951, he established himself in the emerging field of cultural studies by offering a caustic survey of the dehumanizing impact of popular magazines, advertising, and comic strips. By the 1960s, he had widened his lens to examine the power of media as a whole. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, he offered a map of modern history by highlighting the hitherto-unexplored effect of print in shaping how we think. This was followed by Understanding Media, which prophesied that new electronic media would rewire human consciousness just as effectively as print once did, giving birth to a “global village” where people all over the world would be linked via communication technology.

McLuhan has also long been a fiercely polarizing figure, especially during the height of his fame in the 1960s and ’70s. For instance, the American novelist and social critic Tom Wolfe praised him in the most extravagant terms: “At the turn of the nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth there was Darwin in biology, Marx in political science, Einstein in physics, and Freud in psychology. Since then there has been only McLuhan in communications studies.” Meanwhile, the German essayist and poet Hans Enzensberger denounced McLuhan as a “reactionary” and a “charlatan,” a shallow theorist who attempted to “dissolve all political problems in smoke” and promised “the salvation of man through the technology of television.”

One of the most contentious aspects of McLuhan’s life and work was his devout Catholicism, which some critics saw as antithetical to his academic pursuits. In 1971, the British intellectual Jonathan Miller published a short monograph on McLuhan as part of Fontana Books’ Modern Masters, a series of pocket guides on important thinkers. Unrelentingly hostile, Miller argued that McLuhan’s ideas were rooted in a reactionary Catholicism and had little basis in science. According to Miller, the “hidden bias” of McLuhan’s work was that it was “strongly animated by Catholic piety.” He claimed that “McLuhan found it necessary to elaborate a psychological theory which owes considerably more to the unacknowledged authority of St. Thomas Aquinas than it does to any of the scientific sources he openly refers to.” A running theme of Miller’s book is that McLuhan’s ideas were cloaked in the impartial language of science, but carried with them implicit moral values based on his Catholicism.

Since McLuhan’s death in 1980, there has been an outpouring of biographical and exegetical texts, ranging from a hefty collection of his letters, to a superb biography by Philip Marchand, to insightful explications of his work by writers like Douglas Coupland. Arguably, this thriving book industry is paradoxical for an author associated with the death of print culture. But the benefit of this ever-growing body of literature is that it allows us to revisit the debates about McLuhan’s work with a fresh batch of evidence. As it turns out, his relationship with Catholicism was more complicated and layered than his critics allowed, serving not as a hidden bias but rather as a spur toward creativity. His faith provided him with special insights that enabled him to become the Marx of the media age and the Darwin of the digital revolution.

Critics like Miller are dead accurate on one point: the absolute centrality of Catholicism to McLuhan’s intellectual life. McLuhan was born in Edmonton to a generically Protestant family. His father, a good-natured but unsuccessful businessman, was a Methodist, while his mother, a strong-willed public speaker and actress, was a Baptist. He grew up in Winnipeg and would later claim that much of his personal life was shaped by his horrified reaction to that industrial city, which led him to search for a more humane culture in Europe.

In a 1935 letter to his mother explaining his increasing interest in Catholicism, McLuhan noted that “I simply couldn’t believe that men had to live in the mean mechanical joyless rootless fashion that I saw in Winnipeg.” The young McLuhan was a romantic anti-industrialist who came to conclude that Protestantism was to blame for the ills of the modern world. His thinking was much influenced by the Catholic apologist G. K. Chesterton, who advocated “distributist” politics that sought to restore the guild ideals of the Middle Ages as a counterforce to both capitalism and socialism. In the same letter to his mother, McLuhan noted that “I need scarcely indicate that everything that is especially hateful and devilish and inhuman about the conditions and strain of modern industrial society is not only Protestant in origin, but it is their boast(!) to have originated it.”

In converting to Catholicism in 1937, McLuhan was joining a Church he saw as a refuge from the ills of modernity, a litany of evils that included everything from sexual promiscuity to wives bossing around their husbands. At the time, the Church was under the sway of Pius IX’s “Syllabus of Errors,” an 1864 proclamation condemning the idea that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to reconcile himself … with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.” McLuhan admired the fascist Spanish dictator Francisco Franco as a necessary bulwark against godless communism and anarchism. He thought that feminism and the “homosexual cult” were working in tandem to undermine the natural authority of men over the family.

If he had remained so reactionary, his ideas would have been no more intellectually challenging than those of Michael Coren or Pat Buchanan, cartoon Catholics for whom Church doctrine is largely useful as a blunt instrument with which to attack political foes. McLuhan’s great saving grace, however, was his ceaseless curiosity, which led him to expand his intellectual framework. Even in the years before his conversion, he wrestled with theologians whose thinking challenged his own prejudices.

He made an extensive study of his contemporary Jacques Maritain, who was attempting to update the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas as a way of making a rapprochement between Catholicism and modernity. As a neo-Thomist, Maritain argued that Catholic social thought was compatible with pluralism and democracy (in the abstract) and contemporary North American society (in particular). These ideas were radical in the 1930s and ’40s, but they would eventually influence the direction of the Church in the great doctrinal revolution of the 1960s, Vatican II.

Maritain frequently lectured at St. Michael’s College, at the University of Toronto, whose faculty McLuhan joined in 1946. McLuhan was attracted to the “lucidity and order” with which Maritain expounded the ideas of Aquinas. If McLuhan had any critique, it was that Maritain did not go far enough to integrate Catholicism with developments in the social sciences. McLuhan also took inspiration from the avant-garde theology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit scientist who argued for a congruence between evolutionary theory and the doctrine of redemption. In a 1952 review of The Mechanical Bride, Father Walter Ong, a Jesuit intellectual who studied under McLuhan, drew connections between McLuhan’s theories and de Chardin’s concept of a “noosphere” where “the whole world [is] alerted simultaneously everyday to goings-on in Washington, Paris, London, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, and … Moscow.”

McLuhan’s pioneering studies of popular culture were part of a sea change in Catholic intellectualism, as the Church gave up the siege mentality of earlier decades and tried to offer a more nuanced and positive account of modern life. As well, the Church began to move away from its defence of authoritarianism to support pro-democracy political movements around the world. McLuhan underwent his own political evolution: the young man who admired Franco became the academic who engaged in a long correspondence with Pierre Trudeau. And while The Mechanical Bride condemns the comic strip Blondie for undermining the patriarchal ideal of the man as the natural head of the household, in later writings, such as Understanding Media, McLuhan deliberately eschewed traditionalist strictures, because he thought it was more important to understand the world than to condemn it. As he told an interviewer in 1967, “The mere moralistic expression of approval or disapproval, preference or detestation, is currently being used in our world as a substitute for observation and a substitute for study.”

On moral matters, he remained very conservative. He was adamantly anti-abortion, for example. But part of his achievement as a mature thinker was his ability to bracket off whatever moral objections to the modern world he might have had and to concentrate on exploring new developments — to be a probe. Indeed, although he joined the Church as a refuge, his faith gave him a framework for becoming more hopeful and engaged with modernity. This paradox might be explained by the simple fact that as he deepened in his faith he acquired an irenic confidence in God’s unfolding plan for humanity. In a 1971 letter to an admirer, McLuhan observed, “One of the advantages of being a Catholic is that it confers a complete intellectual freedom to examine any and all phenomena with the absolute assurance of their intelligibility.”

Indeed, his faith made him a more ambitious and far-reaching thinker. Belonging to a Church that gloried in cathedrals and stained glass windows made him responsive to the visual environment, and liberated him from the textual prison inhabited by most intellectuals of his era. The global reach and ancient lineage of the Church encouraged him to frame his theories as broadly as possible, to encompass the whole of human history and the fate of the planet. The Church had suffered a grievous blow in the Gutenberg era, with the rise of printed Bibles leading to the Protestant Reformation. This perhaps explains McLuhan’s interest in technology as a shaper of history. More deeply, the security he felt in the promise of redemption allowed him to look unflinchingly at trends others were too timid to notice.

A century after his birth, what is McLuhan’s status as a thinker? Much more robust than his critics would have expected. Consider again the statement that so shocked Mailer: “Nature from now on has to be programmed.” Living as we do in an age grappling with climate change and proposals to control the planet’s temperature through geoengineering, McLuhan’s observations seem like a sober recital of facts. His core insight was a simple one: technology isn’t just an external tool; it also changes how we think. “The medium is the message” means that each new technology humanity has invented, from the wheel to the alphabet to the Internet, creates new mental habits and new patterns of thought. Anyone addicted to Facebook understands what he meant: our tools aren’t separate from us but rather interact with us and alter, be it ever so slightly, who we are.

As a scholar, McLuhan had a multitude of flaws. He was often sloppy and made many factual errors. But to judge him simply in terms of whether all his quotations and citations are accurate is to misunderstand the role of a master thinker. Like Marx and Freud, he was an intellectual agitator, a conceptual mind expander, the yeast in the dough. After Marx, we can no longer ignore the reality of class difference; after Freud, we can’t pretend that our mental life isn’t saturated with sexual impulses; after McLuhan, we can’t imagine that technology is just a neutral tool. Moreover, like Darwin and Marx, McLuhan is no longer just one man but rather a living and evolving body of thought. The literary critic Guy Davenport once argued that McLuhan was a “half-mad genius” and “one of those strange figures whose brilliance can be articulated by others though not by themselves.”

Davenport may have gone too far: works like The Gutenberg Galaxy remain fertile reading. But it is true that to fully appreciate the profoundness of McLuhan’s thinking, you need to read books like Hugh Kenner’s The Mechanic Muse, Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. These sober, scholarly works about the interaction between technology and culture build on McLuhan’s work while avoiding his tendency toward blunt hyperbole. Kenner shows how modernist literature emerged out of industrial culture, and Ong demarcates how the shift from orality to literacy changed the way we think, a process Carr sees as being replicated as we move on to electronic communication. Taken together, they demonstrate the solidity of the intellectual framework McLuhan created. In this new century, countless other thinkers will find inspiration from his work; he has become an inescapable part of the world’s intellectual heritage.