For those of us who struggle from time to time with the value of living faithfully for Christ, may I suggest watching the following video. It will bring a bounce back into your step.

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=2266364712230

Albert, or Alby as he is called, has been blinded by gas in the trenches and cannot see but just as Joey senses that his master is near so Alby, despite his impaired vision, knows it is Joey who is near. The doctor is sceptical. This blind man is suffering from some sort of shell shock. He has not found his long lost horse. “This is a random horse, Narracott, and too badly injured” he says. Alby argues his case, declaring that although he cannot see, he knows this is his horse and can describe it.

“He’s not random at all, sir!” he says “He’s my horse. I raised him, in Devon. Sir, look at his legs! He’s got four white socks, he’s brown all over – and he has a white mark here – like so ….” He makes the shape of a diamond with his hands and points to his own head. The Doctor looks at the horse. He is now convinced that this is a random horse and that Narracott is delusional.

Then the soldier who found Joey on the battle field and rescued him realises the problem and speaks up “Wait!” he says “You can’t see ’cause of the mud.” He spots a bucket water, grabs it and uses a rag to clean Joey’s legs, revealing the white socks. He looks at the doctor. “Four white socks!” he declares. The doctor now takes a rag himself and wipes Joey’s snout and reveals the tell tale white diamond marking. The Sergeant takes this in and puts his pistol back in his holster.

No illustration is perfect but isn’t this a little like the experience of the Christian at times? Not that our Master is ever blind, of course. Satan does raise questions, however. “This is a random individual” he declares “and too badly injured to be allowed to live”. “He’s not random at all!” says our Saviour “He’s mine. I raised him. Look at him – he’s like any man in some ways but he has my Spirit within him, my marks on him and my name and seal on his forehead – like so ….”

Yet to look at us sometimes we are so much besmirched by the mud and gore on us through our many falls and failures that these things are hardly seen. But then the water of the Word is applied and what do we see? There may be doubts at first but then the distinctive marks are seen to be there after all. The Holy Spirit is still within. Christ is still at work in us and through us. And so Satan is denied. The pistol is back in the holster as it were. We are his; we are Christ’s. And so we are spared to live a little longer and to serve again, by grace, in the Lord’s own army.

The campaign is still open and we would welcome your support. We have approximately 1000 copies of Small Talks left or 50 cases. We are seeking to recover the production cost of the books so for every $10 donated 1 copy will be forwarded to Christian Salvage Mission. To express our heartfelt appreciation for your help we have established a number of incentives as gifts to donors.

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The God Who Draws Near: An Introduction to Biblical Spirituality. 

(Webster, NY: Evangelical Press, 2007), xx + 120 pages.

Reviewed by Brian G. Najapfour

Michael A. G. Haykin, currently Professor of Church History and Biblical Spirituality at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky, is undoubtedly one of the authorities when it comes to the subject of Christian spirituality. He knows the subject very well both scripturally and historically, as evident in his book—The God Who Draws Near. Packed with biblical references, and sprinkled with illustrative stories and quotations from Reformed, Puritan and Evangelical writers, this small book is an outstanding primer to biblical spirituality.

In The God Who Draws Near, Haykin reclaims the word “spirituality” from people who have lost the essence of the term. He says that believers should not hesitate to employ this term, “for it reminds us of something very basic about the Christian life”—that Christians live by the Holy Spirit.[1] Etymologically, the word “spirituality” comes from the word “spirit” or “Spirit.” Thus, “[t]rue spirituality,” explains Haykin, “is intimately bound up with the Holy Spirit and his work” (Rom. 5:5; 1 Cor. 12:3; Gal. 4:6; 5:25; Eph. 2:18; Phil. 3:3; and 2 Tim. 1:14).[2]

Having established the basic thesis of the book,—that Christian living is absolutely inseparable from the Spirit,—Haykin enumerates nine essential aspects of biblical spirituality by which the Spirit draws us near to God. These nine elements, discussed chapter by chapter in the volume, are the following:  the doctrine of the Trinity, knowledge of God and of ourselves, Christ, the cross, the Word, prayer, meditation, spiritual friendship, and mission. The inclusion of spiritual friendship here is fascinating, for many people do not look at it as an important area of Christian spirituality.

Readers should realize, however, that the above list is not meant to be exhaustive. Haykin himself admits that other means of sanctifying grace can be added such as the Lord’s Supper.[3] But given the nature of the book as only an introduction to the subject, he decides to concentrate on those nine means. I wish, though, he included in the list the singing of psalms and hymns, a vital vehicle of piety.

For the sake of brevity, I will only consider the first of these elements which to me is the foundation of Christian spirituality: the doctrine of the Trinity, which states that there is only one God with three persons—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Along with other trinitarian passages (like Titus 3:4-6; 2 Cor. 13:14; and Rev. 1:4-5), Haykin particularly picks Matthew 28:19 to support his understanding of the Trinity. He rightly observes in the words of Benjamin B. Warfield (1851-9121) that this verse is “the nearest approach to a formal announcement of the doctrine of the Trinity which is recorded from Our Lord’s lips.”[4] How is this doctrine then crucial to Christian spirituality? According to Haykin, this teaching must shape our spirituality. He laments that some evangelicals tend “to focus on Christ to the exclusion of the other persons of the Godhead.”[5] Some Pentecostals and charismatics, on the other hand, pay too much attention to the Spirit, and unknowingly neglect the other persons of the Trinity. The point—our spirituality must be trinitarian. This means that we need to have a balanced view of God. We need to allow each of the divine persons to draw us near to God. The God Who Draws Near, by the grace of God, can help us do this. I therefore heartily recommend this work.

The birthday celebrations lasted three days. On the final evening, the guest speaker was General Dwight Eisenhower who had been the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in World War II. Presently, he was President of Columbia University but in three years he would become the thirty-four President of the United States.

Such acclaim for Dr. John Dewey was far removed from his birthplace—a small rural New England town of Burlington, Vermont; he was born on 20 October 1859. The next month on 24 November, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published. The ideology of this book would indeed play a significant role in his religious life.

In 1933, John Dewey signed the Humanist Manifesto I. Of the 34 signatories, his name was by far the most illustrious. At that time, the United States had been paralyzed

by the Great Depression. During this difficult period, many Americans were radically reassessing their belief systems. Capitalizing upon the growing skepticism and agnosticism, Dewey reasoned that, by aligning himself with the Manifesto, he could use his celebrity status to promote and enhance Religious Humanism across his country. 2

A year later, Professor Dewey was afforded a highly favorable opportunity for publicizing his naturalistic worldview. President James Angell of Yale invited Dewey to give three presentations at the Terry Lectures on the topic: ‘Religion in the light of science and religion’. These lectures were published in a small book titled, A Common Faith—“Dewey’s most comprehensive statement about religion and religious phenomena.”3

Admitting that “all the peoples we know anything about have had a religion,”4 Dewey began his treatise by differentiating between ‘religion’ and ‘religious’. From Dewey’s perspective, “religions have traditionally been allied with ideas of the supernatural and often have been based upon explicit beliefs about it.”5 This close association of supernaturalism and the institutionalized church was the basis for his rejection of both.

Dewey never saw himself as an atheist; in his mind, such a designation engendered nothing but negativity. Nevertheless, “God was not a Being and had no independent

existence.”6 In reality, ‘God’ was a concept or a human ideal. As a professional philosopher, he “would prefer to reconstruct the concept of ‘God’ rather than eradicate it.”7 A metaphorical construct best suited his purpose.

‘Religious’, on the other hand, was something experiential; it could be analogous to viewing a beautiful painting or listening to a symphony orchestra’s rendition of Handel’s ‘Messiah’. The act of civil disobedience by Rosa Parks (1913-2005), a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama on 1 December 1955, would most definitely be a ‘religious’ act. Even though Dewey had died three years previously, he would have applauded this courageous woman for not making room for a white passenger on a bus.

Not wanting to be an ‘ivory tower philosopher’, Dewey believed that his Religious Humanism should demonstrate faith in action. In 1909, John Dewey was one of the founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). At the inaugural meeting held in the same year, he was one of the conference speakers. He argued that there were no inferior races and that, in America, all citizens should enjoy equal opportunity in every facet of life.8 In a similar vein, he worked to establish the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Its initial purpose was to defend men

who did not want to participate in World War 1.

Underlying Dewey’s naturalistic faith system was his commitment to evolutionism. In 1909 on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species (and his own fiftieth birthday), he gave a lecture on “Charles Darwin and His Influence on Science.” He wrote that this book would introduce “a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics and religion.”9 Now more than a century later, Dewey’s prophetic statement has come true.

On 1 June 1952 at the age of 93, Dr. John Dewey died. With him, Religious Humanism also expired. In its place, Secular Humanism arose. One of its main declarations has been to either divorce itself from its religious roots within Religious Humanism or deny that they ever existed.

Footnotes:

1. K. Seigel, “World Cheers Dewey at Lively 90,” The New York Times, 21 October 1949, front page.

2. H. Mowat, “The Concept of God in John Dewey’s Thought” (MA thesis, McMaster University, 1968),19-20 at www.///digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/opendisserations/5685.

3. D. Hildebrand, Dewey: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 187.

4. J. Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 8. Italics in the original.

5. Ibid., 1.

6. Ruth Anna Putnam, “Dewey’s Faith,” in Dewey’s Enduring Impact,

eds. J. Shook and P. Kurtz (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2011), 186.

7. Hildebrand, Dewey: A Beginner’s Guide, 197.

8. Susan Carle, “John Dewey and the Early NAACP,” in Dewey’s Enduring Impact, eds. J. Shook and P. Kurtz, 257.

9. John Dewey, “The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy,” The Middle Works, 1899-1924, ed. Jo Ann Boyston, vol. 4 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), 6.

Normally we place the full text of book reviews directly into the blog post so you can immediately see it when the blog is updated. Recently, we received a rather lengthy book review on one of David Herbert’s books, Charles Darwin’s Religous Views by Marc-Andre Lachance who is professor of biology at Western University located in London, Ontario. The article officially appeared in a journal called Reports of the National Center for Science Education. The mandate of the National Center for Science Education’s motto is “Defending the teaching of evolution in the public schools”. I particularly like the second paragraph. It is official. I am now certifiably preposterous.

Divine Discourse: The Theological Methodology of John Owen (Texts and Studies in Reformation and Post-Reformation Thought).

Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002, 215 pp.

Reviewed by Brian G. Najapfour

Divine Discourse is a revised version of Rehnman’s dissertation (1997) which seeks to understand the basics of Owen’s theological thought through Owen’s discussion of issues pertaining to prolegomena. Rehnman is convinced that prolegomena, which he defines as “the technical foreword that sets out the principles, premises and presuppositions of what is to come” is a fruitful area of study in understanding Owen’s thought (p. 15). He argues that it is in this prolegomena where Owen’s intellectual position is most clearly seen. Hence, for Rehnman, anyone who desires to comprehend Owen’s mind should begin with the study of his prolegomena.

To avoid vagueness, Rehnman wisely decides to focus only on three of Owen’s important prolegomenous writings: Theologoumena pantodapa, sive, De natura, ortu, progressu, et studio, verae theologiae (1661), The Reason of Faith (1677), and Causes, Ways, and Means of Understanding the Word of God (1678). It is around these three works that Rehnman’s book revolves.

Concerning his contribution, Rehnman’s volume itself can be regarded as his great bestowal to the growing field of Owen study. Henry Knapp observes: “The work of John Owen (1616-1683) has been almost entirely neglected in the past two centuries. Thankfully, scholarship in recent decades has begun to correct this glaring deficiency, and Sebastian Rehnman’s contribution toward this cause should be well received and appreciated—both for its historical accuracy and for its clarity in defining Owen’s theological methodology.”[1]

Another contribution of Rehnman can be found in his footnotes and bibliography. These footnotes provide his readers an opportunity to engage in further study on a particular subject of interest. What he does in the footnotes is gather all the relevant materials about a particular subject he is treating. Readers should not then disregard these footnotes—they are like a cave full of treasures. His bibliography also serves as a reference tool for Owen study. It shows that his work is well researched, and his intensive use of primary sources validates the strength of the book.

One more contribution is Rehnman’s research style by which he tries to put his subject matter into its historical framework. Thus, though his book centers on Owen, it also discusses some figures from patristic, medieval, Renaissance, Reformation, and post-Reformation periods. Even Carl R. Trueman, a respected scholar of Owen, acknowledges the importance of this research style. He comments: “It [Divine Discourse] also underscores the need to set English Puritan thought within the wider context of the European intellectual scene.”[2] Consequently, this book is a good textbook for serious students interested in the history of the development of post-Reformation Reformed thought.

Given the mention of many technical words, however, lay readers may find this work difficult to read. The inclusion of a glossary is therefore advisable.