Exegesis, or "Extra Jesus"?

My wife once related to me a humorous story from her seminary days. It seems a certain young woman at her seminary, on fire for the Lord but new to the seminary environment and unfamiliar with theological vocabulary, overheard some students discussing their "exegesis" class. Only she didn't hear "exegesis" - she heard it as "extra-Jesus". The gall of those students!, she thought, Thinking they have extra Jesus just because they take this class!


The story is humorous, and yet it's tragic. It's tragic because I identify with it. I have a tendency to believe that engaging in spiritual disciplines like prayer and Bible reading in some way earns me more of God's favor. Yes, I tend to believe that exegesis earns me extra Jesus. In the name of "discipline" or "passionate pursuit of God," we can become legalists, basing our acceptance with God on our ability to engage in rigorous spiritual activity. We can turn the means of grace into the basis of grace.

As a new husband and full-time graduate student, I simply don't have the free time I once had to pursue spiritual disciplines to the degree I would like. It's easy to spend hours a day studying Scripture when you're a single guy with few commitments in your life. Those in such situations can easily acquire an aura of spiritual superiority (What, brother?!? Thou only spent an hour in the Word today? Such sloth! I shall intercede for thee). But what of the graduate student cramming for finals? What of the single parent, working two jobs and raising kids? What do you do when real life intrudes on your bourgeois theological leisure time?

I'm not suggesting that time in the Word, in prayer, etc. is unimportant - in fact, the busier we are, the more important it is. But what I am suggesting is that we (I) must not let the necessity of these things become a legalistic burden. If, in the midst of studying for a midterm, I miss a meal, my stomach will let me know. But I don't condemn myself for missing a meal - rather, I run to the fridge, where the food is! In the same way, if in the midst of our busy lives, we find that we don't have all the time we would like for spiritual disciplines, rather than beating ourselves up, we should appreciate the hunger that we do feel. Hunger is good - it points us to food! If we miss a devotion, a prayer time, a Bible study, we'll feel a gnawing hunger. And that hunger isn't meant to drive us from the Bread of Life - it's meant to drive us to Him!

Yes, pursue spiritual growth. Yes, seek God with all your heart. Yes, become a student of the Word. But don't fall for the lie that exegesis equals "extra Jesus."

Theological Perfectionism and Translation Wars

Lee Irons, whose blog The Upper Register I've recently discovered, has the following to say in his post, "The Problems of Theological Perfectionism." The whole post is worth reading, but I'm particularly struck by his comments on Bible translation debates:

There are many other examples which show the problems with theological perfectionism.

English versions of the Bible. It's easy to nit-pick at a translation of a particular verse. It's fun to mock someone else's Bible. Some scholars have even written whole books against particular versions, as if to save people from the damaging effects of a bad translation. But would to God that more evangelicals did in fact read and study their TNIVs or their New Living Translations. It would do more good than all the self-help books being cranked out by the evangelical publishing companies. Just as the Spirit can bring people to saving faith through imperfect presentations of the gospel, so he can use flawed translations of the Bible to help us grow in spiritual maturity.

Would that all God's people read more of their "paraphrased" Messages and "wooden" NASBs and "archaic" KJVs and "liberal" NRSVs and "Calvinist" ESVs and "feminist" TNIVs!

God states, "Is not my word like fire, declares the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?" (Jer. 23:29). 

Would that God would break our rocky hearts of pride with the hammer of His Word (in whatever imperfect translation we read it)!

Save a Life - Chip Stam

For those of you who know or are familiar with Chip Stam, professor in the School of Church Worship and Music at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (and music minister at my wife's former church in Louisville, Clifton Baptist), he needs help. Click below to find out how you can help.

Save a Life

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D'Souza, Lewis and the Proper Role of Apologetics

What is the appropriate role of apologetics? Dinesh D'Souza, in a Christianity Today interview about his latest book Life After Death: The Evidence, provides a great reply to the question:

What is the role of [your] kind of apologetics in convincing someone to become a Christian?

D'Souza replies:

Apologetics is a very powerful tool, but it's ultimately janitorial. Many people encounter obstacles to the faith. Think of the Christian, for example, who loses a relative and is assailed by the question, Why did God allow that? Even the believer can be haunted by difficulties that get in the way of building a relationship with God.

Apologetics can come in and help to make important distinctions and clarify some of the difficulties. You are doing no more than clearing away debris that blocks the door to faith, and ultimately it is God's love that has to work its way into a heart. Conversion ultimately comes from that; apologetics only clears the driveway.

This is a good reminder that while apologetics can be helpful to faith, they are never the object or ground of faith. That belongs only to Jesus Christ.

C.S. Lewis warns about the danger of our faith becoming overly dependent on apologetic arguments, rather than on Christ himself:

I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist…. That is why we apologists take our lives in our hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments, as from our intellectual counters, into the Reality – from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself. ("Christian Apologetics" in God in the Dock, p. 103)

Adrian Warnock Wants It All!

I stumbled across a link to an old post from British blogger-extraordinaire, Adrian Warnock. In the post, entitled "I Don't Want Balance, I Want It All!", Warnock states that he's tired of merely seeking to be "balanced" spiritually - he asks, "Why can't we have it all?"

In our desire for respectability and "balance" (from the point of view of our respective groups), we have a tendency to set up oppositions between Word, Spirit, doctrinal fidelity, passionate encounters with Jesus, outreach to the world, inreach to the Church, social action, faithful gospel preaching, strategic leadership, missional zeal, heartfelt worship, rigorous study, and Book-of-Acts signs and wonders. But why?

Why pick and choose?

Why can't we have it all?

Review of Bart Ehrman's "Jesus, Interrupted"

Michael Kruger of Reformed Theological Seminary has a fantastic new review of Jesus Interrupted, Bart Ehrman's latest popular attempt to discredit the Christian faith he rejected. One repeatedly gets the sense in Ehrman's writing that he has not so much rejected fundamentalism as simply shifted from a Christian form of fundamentalism to an agnostic form of it.

Kruger notes,

Ehrman's inability to accept the natural verbal flexibility in ancient literature suggests that he (ironically) still may be reading the gospels in the same way he did in his fundamentalist days, placing modern expectations of precision and rigidness on the gospel texts that they were not meant to bear.

In a review of Ehrman's previous book, Misquoting Jesus, Daniel Wallace noted,

It seems that Bart’s black and white mentality as a fundamentalist has hardly been affected as he slogged through the years and trials of life and learning, even when he came out on the other side of the theological spectrum. He still sees things without sufficient nuancing, he overstates his case, and he is entrenched in the security that his own views are right.

Wallace has noted that most theological liberals started out as fundamentalists, and simply shifted their views from a Christian fundamentalism to a liberal (or atheistic) fundamentalism. Ehrman is a good example of someone whose "black and white mentality", particularly in regard to the phenomenon of Scripture, led to an either-or dichotomy between "Bible-as-a-magic-book" and "Bible-as-a-fraud." He serves as a sobering reminder of the need to think Biblically about the Bible, deriving our doctrine of Scripture from Scripture rather than unexamined pre-assumptions about what the nature of the Bible must be. I'm afraid Ehrman has essentially built his career on the claim, "The Bible isn't the way I think it ought to be - therefore, it's a fraud."

Gluttony As an Appetite Suppressant

In Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, Cornelius Plantinga highlights the corruption that sin unleashes in our lives. One of the primary ways in which sin corrupts, he notes, is by dulling our appetite for the things we should desire. He writes

...Self-indulgence tends to suppress gratitude; self-discipline tends to generate it. That is why gluttony is a deadly sin: oddly, it is an appetite suppressant. The reason is that a person's appetites are linked: full stomachs and jaded palates take the edge from our hunger and thirst for justice. And they spoil the appetite for God" (p. 35)*.

So, what are you glutting yourself on today?


* Plantinga, C. (1995). Not the way it's supposed to be: A breviary of sin. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's