Author: Jonathan Dodson

Uncomfortable providences have a way of awakening us to God’s kind providences, better yet even to God himself. Over the past five months my family of four has been contentedly yet eagerly anticipating escape from our small two bedroom apartment into a 2,100 square foot home. The last three days have been housecentric. Negotiating, Closing, Painting, Boxing, Cleaning, Moving, Unpacking, Settling…well we haven’t reached the last stage yet.

In the midst of the first-time thrill of purchasing a home, my son was diagnosed with bronchitis and my wife with a flu. Just before closing, our fence line was moved to a very awkward location, and our first day in the house, we had flooding that destroyed the flooring in a bathroom, study, and part of the living room. As i write this “Total Restoration” is downstairs ripping up our soppy carpet and pad and setting up an industrial dehumidifier and those big fans that look like a seashell.

Fortunately, we have a two year warranty on the home, so all repairs will be covered. Fortunately, we had generous family and friends help us in the move. Fortunately, we can afford good medicine to nurse our family to health. Fortunately, we have a home, at an outstanding interest rate. Fortunately, we ended up with a home much nicer than we could have afforded. With all this fortune amidst some unfortunate circumstances, shouldn’t we praise God? Well, yes and no.

Certainly, the super-intending God who ordains calamity (Isa 45.17) and orders our days (Ps 139; Prov 20.24) should be praised, but should I praise him simply because the good providences outweighed the bad ones? Is the way we glorify God in adversity analgous to tallying the plus and minus columns of life, and the praising him on the condition that there are more pluses than minuses, more dry carpet than wet carpet?

This kind of “praise” is conditional, relative to the terms of life’s pluses outnumbering life’s minuses. This puts me in the driver’s seat of praise, making me the determiner of when God should be praised. It hardly rings of Scripture. What if, like Job, my house gets flattened (along with my family) and no restoration is in sight, what will I do? I hope that I will praise the sovereign Creator, not just because I had a house and a family, but because my Creator is sovereign, wise, and good; because my Creator is also a repairing Redeemer; because my Redeemer is a cosmic Consummator, bringing all things to a purposeful, God-glorifying end.

I guess what I’m getting at is the idea of conditional praise–that we praise God on our terms, not his, which is rather backwards. It’s like a pilot telling air traffic control that he is going to land when he wants to. In so doing, he smugly tosses the authority and wisdom of air traffic control to the side, to his own and others’ detriment and danger. I am prone to be this pilot, to conditional praise.

Instead of making the story of my life the controlling narrative for God’s praise, I will be much happier if I locate my story within the wider providential story of the Creatior-Redeemer-Consummator. By acknowling his purposeful and good rights to my life, I can bank not on pluses outnumbering minuses in this life, but a God who will be with me in the minuses and will eventually redeem them to bring about soul-satisfying, glory and praise in the consummation of the creation project. Triune Total restoration will far exceed teh power of industrial blowers; it will redeem and renews, cleanse and create again, not just my life, but lives of all who hope in Jesus, agent of new creation.

It’s starting in Germany. with Eva Herman.

Check it out here.

Eleven years ago, famed evangelical church historian and Wheaton professor, Mark Noll published a book entitled The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, in which he indicted the superficial mindset of Evangelicals who, in pursuit of “souls,” belittled the life of the mind. The result, Noll argues, was an atrophy of serious biblical and theological thinking that engages the world and the spectrum of the disciplines. In all of this shallow thinking about God and His world, Noll claims that the greatest scandal of all is the scorning of “the good gifts of a loving God.” He writes: “For an entire Christian community to neglect, generation after generation, serious attention to the mind, nature, society, the arts – all spheres created by God and sustained for his own glory – may be, in fact, sinful.”[1]

Now, I suppose it is possible that renegade sub-groups within Western evangelicalism could have escaped this scandal. Perhaps you and your church are some of them. However, there is another scandal which, according to statistics, no Christian sub-group has escaped. Earlier this year Ron Sider published a short book entitled, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience. It is a simple book with a simple but profound message – on matters of biblical morality such as marriage and divorce, sexual promiscuity, racism and neglect of the poor, evangelicals rank no better, if not worse, than non-Christians. Read more…

What is theology? As a seminary student, I was exposed to various explanations of theology, good and bad. Helmut Thielicke’s, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians and David Wells’ article entitled “Theologians Craft,” in Doing Theology in Today’s World were among the better, well-balanced essays.

However, while reading last night I came across one of the most stimulating essays on theology I have read. In an address to the Free Protestant Theology Faculty in Paris in 1934, Barth said:

Of all the sciences that stir the head and heart, theology is the fairest. It is closest to human reality and gives us the clearest view of the truth after which science quests…It is a landscape, like the landscape of Umbria or Tuscany in which the distant perspective are always clear. Theology is a masterpiece, as well-planned and yet as bizzare as the cathedrals of Cologne and Milan…but of all the sciences there is none which is so beset with difficulties, none which is so beset with dangers, as theology.”

First the masterpiece, then the dangers.

Note that Barth joins head and heart, intellect and affection, in the quest for truth and knowing God. Elsewhere Barth has written, “the theologian that does his work without joy is no theologian at all.” True theologizing requires more than a half man, no head or heart. In knowing God we do well to steer clear of cold intellectualism and directionless emotionalism. God demands that we know him with all our faculties, including our wills, and seeks to enliven our affections through the organ of truth.

Barth is also aware of the dangers when man tries to articulate God. He writes that theology does not exist in a vacuum…but “in that providence between baptism and communion, in the realm between the Scriptures and their exposition and proclamation.” In other words, theology is not inspired, and theologians must eat and drink God, as well as read of Him.

Theology is not inspired, though there are traditions that cling to their confessions so tightly, one wonders if this has truly dawned upon denominations. Divine inspiration is reserved for the Bible, and interpretation relegated to humans. As a result, in the movement from Text to theology, from Scripture to proclamation, the way is fraught with perilous precipices and breathtaking vistas. Therefore, theology should always be “an act of repentant humility, which is presented to men through this fact.”

Thus, theology requires rigorous mental energy, a tender heart and eager hands. It demands and produces humility and repentance before an awesome and holy God. It is not to be confused with the God-revealing Word, though it can draw us into the finest of settings.

Thoughts?