Down and Out at Del Mar

by Mark Bauerlein
First Things

The most dismaying thing I have read in this year of crummy happenings was a one-page vignette in Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance’s tale of growing up an Appalachian expatriate in southern Ohio. Most of this super-successful book covers family life—quarrels, drugs and drink, obscenity, and assaults, sprinkled with genuine acts of love. But the incident that struck me transpires in the workplace, not at home. No national events are involved, no big money at stake, no death or disaster, just a small conflict of personalities.

Vance works in a tile warehouse, saving up for law school in the fall. For all of her filthy language and endless grudges, Vance’s grandmother has planted in him a solid work ethic. He may be surrounded by screw-ups, but he shows up on time and does his job. The pay is decent, $13 an hour, and Vance pulls as many overtime shifts as he can.

 

He gets along with others, too, even nineteen-year-old Bob, who started before Vance but has a different attitude. Vance sees the job as a way out of the dysfunction of his past, and he finds no reason why Bob shouldn’t as well. Bob has a pregnant girlfriend and he needs money and health care. The small company provides them; it even hires her to answer phones. Nothing stands in the way of a stable working-class existence for the couple.

 

But they can’t keep it together. The girlfriend misses every third day and Bob one day a week. He arrives late and takes long breaks. Vance and a coworker make a game of it, setting a timer when Bob leaves his post for the bathroom and shouting updates to the crew: “Thirty-five ­minutes! . . . Forty-five minutes! . . . One hour!”

 

The boss is forbearing and urges Bob and his girlfriend to shape up or else he’ll have to let them go. Vance watches in bemusement, knowing the outcome. The boss fires the girlfriend after a few months and Bob soon after. Bob’s response: “How could you do this to me? Don’t you know I’ve got a pregnant girlfriend?”

 

Bob’s story sets a theme for Hillbilly Elegy. Why can’t these people straighten up? The usual answers don’t apply. Bob doesn’t need more access to healthcare, better benefits, or more education. He can do the job just fine if he puts in the effort. He doesn’t lack a “living wage”; his pay covers expenses. A nice apartment nearby runs only $500 a month, and a regular workload after a year on the job yields $32,000 plus benefits.

 

Bob may end up on welfare, but public assistance won’t help. His problem is internal. Only a change in character will fix him. The state doesn’t distinguish deserving poor from undeserving poor, and it can’t reach into people’s hearts and transform them. Bob needs moral reform, which the state cannot provide. In many discussions of human behavior and social policy with well-meaning friends who care about making society more just, I’ve realized that only people with direct experience of dysfunction in the underclass accept this truth.

 

Mexican Ray was one of a bunch of guys around the Del Mar Racetrack in 1980 and ’81. For two months each summer, I did nine hours a day, six days a week in this world all its own. I sold the Herald-­Examiner racing edition in the plaza outside the grandstand, my brother in the clubhouse. Horse racing has its glamor among owners and breeders and high-end gamblers who never showed whether they were winning or losing. Those were my brother’s customers. I was on the seamy side with cleaning crews, workers in the stables, and “stoopers,” vagrants who collected hundreds of tickets off the ground in hopes that someone had mistakenly tossed a winner.

 

I made a dime for every paper I sold, and arrived each morning with an empty wallet so that I could run through the betting windows only the money I’d made that day. Cigar Eddy, a tall old man with a lump on his forehead, managed the Pasadena Star-News, with fifteen-year-old Alex and his brother working the stands for him. Hippie John was a wiry thirty-year-old with stringy hair who always kept a deck of cards handy. He’d draw you into a quick game of blackjack, but get jumpy and wild-eyed if you won three hands in a row. Cadillac hung in the shadows, dealing dope to teenage track workers.

 

I never knew where Mexican Ray got his money. He didn’t have a job at the track, but he showed up every day and hung around the newsboys with the ease of a down-and-out man of the world. He looked forty years old, with a genial smile and dark clothes that were threadbare but had the semblance of sharp tailoring. He had a wary air about him, but he could be relaxed and kind. One time, after Eddy got so mad at his workers that he fainted to the ground, Ray pulled him to a bench, put one arm around his shoulders, and fanned his face with a paper, repeating, “Take it easy now, keep quiet, Eddy.”

 

You could tell that none of the young guys hustling papers and whatever else they could sell would ever be anything but what they were then. I mingled with them knowing that I had college waiting once the season ended. Their next step was Hollywood Park and Santa Anita, tracks where the horse racing moved in its annual cycle through Southern California. You might think that if these stragglers only had more Earned Income Tax Credit and free transport to health clinics they could have risen out of instability and grubbing and sleeping on the beach now and then. But that would only show you didn’t really know guys like Ray and the rest.

 

One day, Ray hit an exacta for three or four hundred dollars. There were a few cheap motels nearby that charged $20 per night. Ray could have bargained with one of them and rented a room for the rest of the summer. A hot shower and clean sheets every night, TV and coffee in the morning.

 

Instead, Ray disappeared for three days. We wondered what happened to him, but not too much. People came and went all the time; no one at the track followed anybody very closely.

 

But when Ray returned one afternoon, we all noticed. He strolled with a big smile and clean-shaven chin. His black hair was cropped and oiled neatly off his forehead. He had a bright new shirt and shoes that looked right out of Guys and Dolls. He sidled to the bench next to Cigar Eddy and mumbled, “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.” Someone asked him where he’d been and he replied, “Tee-Zhay.”

He loved our reaction, but played coy. It took a while to gather that he’d taken his winnings to Tijuana and had a heckuva time. Now he was back, broke, ready to start up his regular life. But he was happy. Only after a few days did the glow wear off.

 

What do you with Mexican Ray? If he’d won more money, he just would have stayed in Tijuana longer, then resumed his pattern of hustling day to day. Inevitably, though, Ray would reach a crisis point. He had a kind of devilish innocence, but that wouldn’t save him from jail, illness, hunger, or worse. When I think back on those characters who made the grandstand at Del Mar such an education for a kid like me, I’d rather not know what happened to them.

 

We have to accept that there is no explanation for Bob and Ray, not one that we can plug into a government program. Nobody ever taught them a work ethic; parents were drunks; they’re depressed . . . maybe that’s true. But it doesn’t explain why Bob can’t be on time and Ray gets on that bus for T-J.

 

I asked my friend David, an attorney with underclass clients, to account for Bob. He replied, “The guy has no sense of an order higher than himself.” That sounded too conceptual, so I asked for specifics. “Bob has no idea that the company he works for has to have people do things or it can’t survive. To him, it’s just some force telling him what to do.” The company has to operate on a long-term plan, he said, but Bob can’t see it and he has no plan of his own.

 

That clicked as soon as he said it. Bob and Ray will remain who they are until they realize there is an order to existence, and that it is rational and good. A higher plan would prompt Bob to devise a “lower” plan of some kind. It would make Ray seek the stability of the motel across the street. Without it, company demands are ­unreasonable to Bob, and Ray sees the motel as a sad alternative to three wild days down south. Secular minds don’t make this connection between metaphysical order and daily habits. The lure of prosperity should be enough to ensure good behavior, and welfare programs should work. But they don’t, not for Bob and Ray and others in the underclass. That’s why secularists say, “They just need more education.” They suspect that some kind of moral reform is needed, but they don’t want it to be ­metaphysical.

 

In truth, for people at the margins, the bourgeois virtues of thrift, delayed gratification, cleanliness, and moderation must have a deeper rationale: An orderly life is called for by an orderly universe. Call this the social argument from design. Bob and Ray are mysteries of dysfunction. They mark the limits of material solutions to it. Their salvation must be equally mysterious and sublime.

Do I need a Job or Vocation?

By Greg Peters
Scriptorium Daily

Every year some untold numbers of students enter their senior year in colleges and universities across the nation. They’ve done it! They have successfully navigated the complexities of earning a bachelor’s degree in their chosen field of study. They have masteredthe art of reading, listening, note-taking, test-taking, and essay-writing and demonstrated some amount of competence to their professors. Diploma mills aside, they have earned an education, perhaps even a good one if they went to the right school. Proverbially the world is their oyster!

Yet the future is often uncertain and before long a general anxiety tends to set in among this population of university students. What will I do after I graduate, they ask? Should I go to graduate school? Should I get a job? Where should I live? Who should I live with? Moreover, these students have parents who are (at least) middle-aged and (likely) have been taught by a fair number of middle-aged professors. Recently a talk with a student brought up the reality that I have been a university professor long enough that she wondered why I wasn’t tired of it, perhaps especially since I too am middle-aged. She was concerned about the prospects of her own future and she expressed that she did not just want to have a job but invest her life in something more meaningful.

Now, many forms of employment can be meaningful to some people at some times but there are way too many people who appear to be only working for the weekend or working for their next vacation. They do not necessarily enjoy their jobs but they enjoy some of the side benefits: summers off for teachers, generous retirement contributions or good medical coverage, for example. Mostly they are unhappy with the day to day realities and rhythm of their life so they attempt to compensate by being materialistic (a “at least I make lots of money” mentality as they accumulate more and more stuff), by being negligent (“I’ll do my job but not too well because this place sucks”) or being discontent (jumping from one job to another, chasing an elusive dream perhaps). Let’s face it, it would stink to study accounting to find out that you hate being an accountant and it would be a miserable experience to find out that you studied to be a nurse but then realized you hated being at a hospital, clinic or doctor’s office day after day.

So what is it that might make someone happy over the long duration of a job? What may stave of the discontentment of yet another day at the office? Many folks who are happy in their jobs will tell you, “I do not have a job, I have a career.” Fair enough. Some people do find meaning in their jobs by realizing that this is a career, something that they have striven for and worked hard to achieve. But sometimes, perhaps often, even this sentiment will not redeem a rather harsh job situation. If you are a teacher and you hate the rhythm of your life due to the school year, realizing that your job is a career will likely bring no more happiness once August comes around again.

Theologically, however, there is something more: vocation. Now, “vocation” is not just another word for “career.” Rather, it has a divine connotation and weight to it. It has been said that the greatest contribution that the Protestant Reformation made to the Christian church was the re-affirmation of the Apostle Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith and that the second greatest contribution was a theology of vocation. And talking about vocation was something that the Protestant Reformers did with regularity and to great effect. For example, Martin Luther once preached that “Our foolishness consists in laying too much stress upon the show of works and when these do not glitter as something extraordinary we regard them as of no value; and poor fools that we are, we do not see that God has attached and bound this precious treasure, namely his Word, to such common works as filial obedience, external, domestic, or civil affairs, so as to include them in his order and command, which he wishes us to accept, the same as though he himself had appeared from heaven. What would you do if Christ himself with all the angels were visibly to descend, and command you in your home to sweep your house and wash the pans and kettles? How happy you would feel, and would not know how to act for joy, not for the work’s sake, but that you knew that thereby you were serving him, who is greater than heaven and earth.” (“Sermon for Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity,” preached on October 3, 1529). On another occasion he preached to Christian rulers, “The prince should think: Christ has served me and made everything to follow him; therefore, I should also serve my neighbor, protect him and everything that belongs to him. That is why God has given me this office, and I have it that I might serve him. That would be a good prince and ruler. When a prince sees his neighbor oppressed, he should think: That concerns me! I must protect and shield my neighbor… The same is true for shoemaker, tailor, scribe, or reader. If he is a Christian tailor, he will say: I make these clothes because God has bidden me do so, so that I can earn a living, so that I can help and serve my neighbor. When a Christian does not serve the other, God is not present; that is not Christian living” (“Sermon in the Castle Church at Weimar,” preached on October 25, 1522).

In the Scriptures there are two primary meanings of “calling” or vocation (vocare = to call): 1) the call to membership in the people of God (e.g., Is. 41:8-9); and 2) particular callings by God toa special work, office or position of responsibility within his covenant community. To illustrate, the word for “church” in the New Testament is ekklesia, which is derived from ek (from, out of) and klēsis (calling). Thus, the Greek word for church literally means “calling out of” or “called out ones.” This etymology demonstrates a general call to membership in the people of God. Yet, God calls some individuals out of the church (literally, out of the called out ones) to be apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:11-12). This illustrates God’s practice of calling out to a special work, office or position of responsibility. Some callings are to specialized roles in church and society and others are to particular duties within these spheres. Theologian Douglas Schuurman sums it up well when he writes that “the Bible has two basic meanings for vocation or calling. Each of these has two forms. The first is the one call all Christians have to become a Christian and live accordingly. Of this there is a general form, where the proclaimed word echoes the voice of creation calling all away from folly and into the wisdom that is Jesus Christ, and there is a specific form, where this call becomes existentially and personally felt. The second meaning is the diverse spheres of life in and through which Christians live out their faith in concrete ways. Of this there is a more general form, such as being a husband, wife, child, parent, citizen, preacher, etc., ‘in the Lord.’ And there is a specific form, where it refers to the actual duties each of us takes on in our concretely occupied places of responsibility ‘in the Lord’” (Vocation: Discerning Our Callings in Life, pp. 40-41).

Thus, for the Christian believer there is already the call to be a Christian. But there is also the call to be something else, to live into other callings that are just as divine as one’s call to be a Christian. And this is where one’s “job” fits into God’s economy. If X is my calling then I will hesitate (or, at least should hesitate) to see it only as a job to be regretted or a burden to carry until the weekend or my next vacation. Rather, it is God’s special calling on my life and therefore worthy of my best attitude and my best efforts. It is the task that God has given me to do. In the words of the Book of Common Prayer’s Post Communion prayer: “And now, Father, send us out into the world to do the work you have given us to do, to love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.” First and foremost we are sent out to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul and mind to love our neighbor as ourselves. But we are also sent out, I think, to do that work that God has called us to do by way of our other divine vocation; that is, to our particular callings by God to a special work, office or position. In other words, we are called by God to love and to live into both of, all of our vocations. Thus, today’s university students do not need jobs, they need vocations and may God call them and may they hear this calling.

Love Your Neighbor Enough to Speak Truth: A Response to Jen Hatmaker

By Rosaria Butterfield
The Gospel Coalition

If this were 1999—the year that I was converted and walked away from the woman and lesbian community I loved—instead of 2016, Jen Hatmaker’s words about the holiness of LGBT relationships would have flooded into my world like a balm of Gilead. How amazing it would have been to have someone as radiant, knowledgeable, humble, kind, and funny as Jen saying out loud what my heart was shouting: Yes, I can have Jesus and my girlfriend. Yes, I can flourish both in my tenured academic discipline (queer theory and English literature and culture) and in my church. My emotional vertigo could find normal once again.

Maybe I wouldn’t need to lose everything to have Jesus. Maybe the gospel wouldn’t ruin me while I waited, waited, waited for the Lord to build me back up after he convicted me of my sin, and I suffered the consequences. Maybe it would go differently for me than it did for Paul, Daniel, David, and Jeremiah. Maybe Jesus could save me without afflicting me. Maybe the Lord would give to me respectable crosses (Matt. 16:24). Manageable thorns (2 Cor. 12:7).

Today, I hear Jen’s words—words meant to encourage, not discourage, to build up, not tear down, to defend the marginalized, not broker unearned power—and a thin trickle of sweat creeps down my back. If I were still in the thick of the battle over the indwelling sin of lesbian desire, Jen’s words would have put a millstone around my neck.

Died to a Life I Loved

 
To be clear, I was not converted out of homosexuality. I was converted out of unbelief. I didn’t swap out a lifestyle. I died to a life I loved. Conversion to Christ made me face the question squarely: did my lesbianism reflect who I am (which is what I believed in 1999), or did my lesbianism distort who I am through the fall of Adam? I learned through conversion that when something feels right and good and real and necessary—but stands against God’s Word—this reveals the particular way Adam’s sin marks my life. Our sin natures deceive us. Sin’s deception isn’t just “out there”; it’s also deep in the caverns of our hearts.

How I feel does not tell me who I am. Only God can tell me who I am, because he made me and takes care of me. He tells me that we are all born as male and female image bearers with souls that will last forever and gendered bodies that will either suffer eternally in hell or be glorified in the New Jerusalem. Genesis 1:27 tells me that there are ethical consequences and boundaries to being born male and female. When I say this previous sentence on college campuses—even ones that claim to be Christian—the student protestors come out in the dozens. I’m told that declaring the ethical responsibilities of being born male and female is now hate speech.

Calling God’s sexual ethic hate speech does Satan’s bidding. This is Orwellian nonsense or worse. I only know who I really am when the Bible becomes my lens for self-reflection, and when the blood of Christ so powerfully pumps my heart whole that I can deny myself, take up the cross, and follow him.

There is no good will between the cross and the unconverted person. The cross is ruthless. To take up your cross means that you are going to die. As A. W. Tozer has said, to carry a cross means you are walking away, and you are never coming back. The cross symbolizes what it means to die to self. We die so that we can be born again in and through Jesus, by repenting of our sin (even the unchosen ones) and putting our faith in Jesus, the author and finisher of our salvation. The supernatural power that comes with being born again means that where I once had a single desire—one that says if it feels good, it must be who I really am—I now have twin desires that war within me: “For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do” (Gal. 5:17). And this war doesn’t end until Glory.

Victory over sin means we have Christ’s company in the battle, not that we are lobotomized. My choice sins know my name and address. And the same is true for you.

The Cross Never Makes an Ally with Sin

A few years ago, I was speaking at a large church. An older woman waited until the end of the evening and approached me. She told me that she was 75 years old, that she had been married to a woman for 50 years, and that she and her partner had children and grandchildren. Then she said something chilling. In a hushed voice, she whispered, “I have heard the gospel, and I understand that I may lose everything. Why didn’t anyone tell me this before? Why did people I love not tell me that I would one day have to choose like this?” That’s a good question. Why did not one person tell this dear image bearer that she could not have illicit love and gospel peace at the same time? Why didn’t anyone—throughout all of these decades—tell this woman that sin and Christ cannot abide together, for the cross never makes itself an ally with the sin it must crush, because Christ took our sin upon himself and paid the ransom for its dreadful cost?

We have all failed miserably at loving fellow image bearers who identify as part of the LGBT community—fellow image bearers who are deceived by sin and deceived by a hateful world that applies the category mistake of sexual orientation identity like a noose. And we all continue to fail miserably. On the biblical side, we often have failed to offer loving relationships and open doors to our homes and hearts, openness so unhindered that we are as strong in loving relationship as we are in the words we wield. We also have failed to discern the true nature of the Christian doctrine of sin. For when we advocate for laws and policies that bless the relationships that God calls sin, we are acting as though we think ourselves more merciful than God is.

May God have mercy on us all.

Rosaria Butterfield is a former tenured professor of English at Syracuse University and author of The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (Crown & Covenant, 2012) and Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ (Crown & Covenant, 2015).

The funeral for John R. W. Stott

[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.

What is Faith? A Proper Understanding

by Lenny Esposito
Come Reason Ministries

What is faith? As I discuss issues like the existence of God I find that much of the time people have misunderstood the Christian concept of faith.  Bertrand Russell, the famous early 20th century atheist defined faith as, "the firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of 'faith.' We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence."1 Sam Harris defines it this way: "Religious faith is simply unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concern."2 Both of these definitions miss the mark, erecting a straw man instead of a robust understanding of what faith is.

This misunderstanding is not limited to unbelievers, though; many Christians are also confused on what biblical faith means. They have an underdeveloped view of faith, assuming that it is some kind of trust without evidence or they think that faith is exclusively defined by a single Bible verse, like Hebrews 11:1. That verse reads, "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."  While the writer to the Hebrews was trying to give one aspect of what faith means, this verse is no more an exhaustive definition of faith than the statement "God is a consuming fire"—which is found in the following chapter—defines all aspects of who God is.

The Biblical Understanding of Faith

When you look at all the different ways faith is mentioned and expressed in the Bible, you'll find that faith in God encompasses three components: a proper understanding of the object of our faith, an assent or agreement with the claim of faith, and an exercise of trust that is the outworking of that assent.

First, in order to have faith, you must properly understand what it is you're asked to have faith in. The Christian no more believes in a cruel, vindictive God than the atheist does.  This is not the kind of God a Christian could have faith in. True faith in God means that one must at least understand what we mean when we say "God."  God has certain attributes and qualities.  Christians believe in an eternal God, a God from whom all goodness stems. The Christian God is not capricious, but unchanging, gracious, long-suffering and holy. If one doesn't understand these concepts, then the faith that one has would rightly be suspect. This is where many atheists go wrong.  They hold to an image of God that is inaccurate and they then reject that type of a God.

Beyond the mere understanding of the object of faith, the believer must give intellectual assent or agreement to the claims of faith. So, in our example, once you understand what the concept of God entails, then it is necessary for you to hold that such a being either exists or doesn't exist. Thus, faith is tied to belief. To have faith in God is to believe that He exists. But belief is not enough, for James said that even the demons believe in God and tremble!3To have faith means we must go beyond mere assent and exercise a level of trust in Him.  Trust is a necessary feature of faith.

The Evidence for Faith

All these components, understanding, assent, and trust, don't happen in a vacuum. We take the propositions we know to be true, such as everything that begins to exist has a cause, the universe shows evidence of design, for absolute moral values to exist they must originate from a moral lawgiver, and we use our reasoning ability to weigh them as evidence for the Christian God. We also have the internal witness of God and we have historical testimony such as the fact that Jesus was raised from the dead. Because we have all of this, we can more easily place our trust in God as not only being real, but as one who is trustworthy to guide our lives. As J.P. Moreland states, "Belief in rests on belief that."

Even in Hebrews 11, this pattern shows itself. To clarify his definition of faith, the writer to the Hebrews follows up verse one with over thirty verses of examples of how God actually worked in the lives of those who had trusted Him in the past. He recounts how those in the past trusted God and their faith was rewarded, as they  "conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, 34 quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight."4He then says in the first verse of chapter twelve that these examples provide evidence for the faith that we should have. He exhorts the Christian, writing "since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us."5

Christian faith is not a leap in the dark.  The concept of "blind faith" is completely foreign to the Bible. Instead, when the Bible speaks of faith, it means a trust based on past history and evidence. Christianity has always grounded itself to a specific historical event, hanging the faith of its followers on the actuality of Christ's resurrection. In 1 Corinthians 15:14-19 Paul says that Christianity should be dismissed if the resurrection is not a reality. Therefore, it should be no surprise that the Christian view of faith is more measured and rational that others may have you believe.

References

1. Bertrand Russell as quoted in Introducing Philosophy of Religion by Chad Meister.
(New York: Routledge, 2009). 158.

2. Harris, Sam. The End of Faith.
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2004). 65.

3. James 2:19. ESV.

4. Hebrews 11:34-35. ESV.

5. Hebfrrews 12:1.ESV.

Moral Grounding and Confederate Money

By Lenny Esposito

Come Reason Ministries

Sometimes abstract ideas are hard to communicate. The moral grounding problem, for instance, can be easily misunderstood. When arguing for God's existence, many Christians will point out that God is necessary for objective morals and duties to exist. Since morals and duties are real (torturing babies for the fun of it is truly wrong always), one can therefore conclude that God exists. This argument turns on the concept of moral grounding, that is that in order for values and duties to be considered moral, they must be objective and therefore be anchored in something higher than humanity.

Whenever I have discussed this point, atheists usually misunderstand my position. They will normally respond with "How can you say that atheists are immoral because they don't believe in God? I'm a very moral person and I know all my atheist friends are moral, too." However, I've not claimed that atheists are immoral. I know several atheists who are indeed very moral individuals. So, in order to help clarify the idea of moral grounding, I'd like to use an analogy.

After the Civil War broke out in 1861, the Confederacy was eager to show themselves as an independent government. That means they had to have an elected leader (Jefferson Davis), a representative congress, and they needed to have some form of currency so that the government and its citizens could do business. Thus, they began to print Confederate currency in the same month as the start of the Civil War: April 1861. The Confederacy printed about $1.7 billion in paper bills.1 However, in that time currency was normally understood to be redeemable for some hard asset, like gold or silver.2 Since precious metals were hard to come by, the Confederacy's currency wasn't backed by any hard asset. The notes were basically a promise to pay after the war was completed. Because there was no hard asset to back the currency, it devalued rapidly and by 1864 was considered practically worthless, even though the Confederacy was still in existence.3

Now, I'm sure the Confederate States had some very good economists in their colleges and businesses. They understood finance, trade, and supply and demand. However, their skill as economists mean nothing if they are plying their trade with Confederate bills. It isn't that they cannot recognize value it's that they basis of their currency is not grounded in anything outside their own system. Confederate money wasn't based on gold, which offered an objective and definitive value. It was based on whatever number the Confederate society chose to print on the bill. Because there was no objective standard, the currency became worthless.

Moral principles work the same way. A person can have a very skilled and nuanced understanding of morality and truly be a good moral person, just like our skilled economist or businessman. But if you are trying to say that moral values themselves should be followed, then there must be something beyond the agreement of men saying so. If not, morality collapses into relativism. And as we saw with the Confederate dollar, it can quickly become completely worthless.

References

1. "The Story of Confederate Currency." Virtual Gettysburg. http://www.virtualgettysburg.com/exhibit/currency/main.html Accessed 4/9/2014
2. Bordo, Michael D. "Gold Standard." The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GoldStandard.html Accessed 4/9/2014
3. "Confederate States of America dollar." Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_of_America_currency Accessed 4/9/2014

There Are No Blind Forces worth Speaking about in Nature

By Lenny Esposito
Come Reason Ministries

Sir Fred Hoyle was an amazing scientist, knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his contributions to theoretical astrophysics. Hoyle was not a theist, but he had grave doubts about life coming into existence on earth by itself. In his 1981 paper "The Universe: Past and Present Reflections" he laid out some of the evidence pointing to the fine-tuning of the universe and why he felt that the explanation of natural processes simply didn't work. Here are some excerpts from that paper:

The big problem in biology, as I see it, is to understand the origin of the information carried by the explicit structures of biomolecules. The issue isn't so much the rather crude fact that a protein consists of a chain of amino acids linked together in a certain way, but that the explicit ordering of the amino acids endows the chain with remarkable properties, which other orderings wouldn't give. The case of the enzymes is well known. Enzymes act as catalysts in speeding up chemical reactions that would otherwise go far too slowly, as in the breakdown, for example, of starch into sugar. If amino acids were linked at random, there would be a vast number of arrangements that would be useless in serving the purposes of a living cell. When you consider that a typical enzyme has a chain of perhaps 200 links and that there are 20 possibilities for each link, it's easy to see that the number of useless arrangements is enormous, more than the number of atoms in all the galaxies visible in the largest telescopes. This is for one enzyme, and there are upwards of 2000 of them, mainly serving very different purposes. So how did the situation get to where we find it to be? This is, as I see it, the biological problem - the information problem.

It's easy to frame a deceitful answer to it. Start with much simpler, much smaller enzymes, which are sufficiently elementary to be discoverable by chance; then let evolution in some chemical environment cause the simple enzymes to change gradually into the complex ones we have today. The deceit here comes from omitting to explain what is in the environment that causes such an evolution. The improbability of finding the appropriate orderings of amino acids is simply being concealed in the behavior of the environment if one uses that style of argument.

…

The potentiality of a cosmic system of life was so enormous compared to an earth-bound system that it was possible to rest content with the situation for awhile. But eventually I came to wonder if the potentiality of even a cosmic system was really big enough. In thinking about this question I was constantly plagued by the thought that the number of ways in which even a single enzyme could be wrongly constructed was greater than the number of all the atoms in the universe. So try as I would, I couldn't convince myself that even the whole universe would be sufficient to find life by random processes - by what are called the blind forces of nature. The thought occurred to me one day that the human chemical industry doesn't chance on its products by throwing chemicals at random into a stewpot. To suggest to the research department at DuPont that it should proceed in such a fashion would be thought ridiculous. Wasn't it even more ridiculous to suppose that the vastly more complicated systems of biology had been obtained by throwing chemicals at random into a wildly chaotic astronomical stewpot? By far the simplest way to arrive at the correct sequences of amino acids in the enzymes would be by thought, not by random processes. And given a knowledge of the appropriate ordering of amino acids, it would need only a slightly superhuman chemist to construct the enzymes with 100 percent accuracy. It would need a somewhat more superhuman scientist, again given the appropriate instructions, to assemble it himself, but not a level of scale outside our comprehension. Rather than accept the fantastically small probability of life having arisen through the blind forces of nature, it seemed better to suppose that the origin of life was a deliberate intellectual act. By "better" I mean less likely to be wrong.

… A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."1

References

1. Hoyle, Fred, "The Universe: Past and Present Reflections." Engineering and Science, November, 1981. 8–12. Web. http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/527/2/Hoyle.pdf