Book Write-Up: The Pillars of Christian Character, by John F. MacArthur

John F. MacArthur. The Pillars of Christian Character: The Basic Essentials of a Living Faith. Crossway, 1998. See here to buy the book.

In this book, John MacArthur discusses nine foundational and essential attitudes that Christians are to have. These include faith, obedience, humility, love, forgiveness, self-discipline, gratitude, and worship.

Here are some observations and rambling reflections:

A. As is often the case, MacArthur helped me to understand certain details of Scripture better. When Habakkuk 3:19 states that God makes Habakkuk’s feet like the feet of a deer, what does that mean? According to MacArthur, the feet of the deer securely grasp onto rocky surfaces, and faith, likewise, provides people with a secure footing as they confidently grasp onto God’s faithfulness, righteousness, and sovereignty in the midst of life’s uncertainties. What does Paul mean when he tells Timothy that soldiers do not get entangled in civilian pursuits but seek to please their commanding officer? MacArthur says that Christians are involved in spiritual warfare, and their primary goal in life is to encourage people to become free from darkness and reconciled to God through Jesus Christ. They may be in the world, but they are not entangled in worldly affairs, for they have a spiritual purpose.

B. Related to Habakkuk 3:19, this book focuses significantly on what believers do for God. Habakkuk 3:19 affirms that God makes Habakkuk’s feet like those of a deer, perhaps through strengthening and encouraging him. MacArthur, however, interprets it in reference to the act of faith itself: faith enables believers to have a secure hold. The role of God in sanctification could have been highlighted more in this book. At the same time, MacArthur does well to offer practical steps that one can take: his chapter on self-discipline is an excellent example of this, as are his chapters about possible reasons for discontent and attitudes one can have instead. Moreover, some Christians can get so preoccupied with their inability to keep God’s law, that they lose sight of the beauty of the law and the reality that Christian attributes are righteous, admirable, wholesome attributes to possess, as well as requirements to follow. All of that said, as I have said in other reviews of MacArthur’s work, the only way that I can read MacArthur without becoming discouraged about my flaws is to employ a Lutheran law/Gospel paradigm: the law challenges me with my inability to keep it, and that is why I need Christ as my savior.

C. A point that MacArthur makes more than once is that, if you are not joyful, there is a possibility that you are not saved. That sort of thought can put people’s minds into a tailspin. I do not think that I would go as far as MacArthur here. At the same time, there is nothing wrong with continuous repentance, humble turning towards God after being confronted with God’s standards, and ongoing recognition of one’s need for a savior.

D. MacArthur fails to deal sufficiently with the implications of the negative Psalms and other negative biblical passages in his larger discussion of the pillars of Christian character. MacArthur says that Christians have faith and joy, and they are to put away sinful attitudes when they come before God in worship. There are, indeed, biblical passages that suggest that: for instance, I Timothy 2:8 exhorts men to lift up holy hands without anger or disputing. At the same time, there are numerous passages of Scripture in which godly people are angry and disappointed with God and do not hesitate to complain to God. Some people, of course, can appeal to those passages as an excuse to be continually negative, when Scripture does want people to have and exhibit positive attitudes towards God and their fellow human beings. Still, the fact is that no one is going to be pure all of the time, or even anytime.

E. MacArthur at one point says that trials humble people and make them more compassionate towards others. Yet, he also says that bitterness and unforgiveness can hinder one’s relationship with God and effectiveness in God’s work. MacArthur defines forgiveness as putting aside the feelings of pain and loving the offender. This creates a paradox, in my opinion: pain can enhance people spiritually by helping them to develop humility and compassion, yet it also can be a destructive force that leads them to isolate and sulk and to fail to love others.

F. MacArthur tells a story about a woman whose husband left the ministry after a bad experience and refused ever again to darken the doors of a church. MacArthur says that what he should have done was ask God what God wanted him to learn from this experience. This passage is noteworthy, since MacArthur strikes me as the sort of teacher who wants people to stick with the Bible rather than “God told me” experiences. Yet, if there is a real God, would not God want to guide his children? Where I stumble over this kind of teaching is that, first, I am afraid that God will ask me to do something I do not want to do, or find myself unable to do. Second, I am hesitant to define any sentiment in my mind as divine revelation, when it very well may be just my idea. My own ideas, I have to live with, but I am not willing to take risks over them.

G. Some of what MacArthur talks about is difficult for me to conceptualize, let alone practice. MacArthur defines love as thinking about others over oneself, and it is not just having positive feelings about people but entails doing actual good to them, even at sacrifice to oneself. Forgiveness, for MacArthur, entails love towards the offender. I have questions about this. For one, can people be totally free of ego—-and here I do not mean pride but more a desire for one’s own needs and wants to be met? I can picture myself putting others first in specific incidents: letting someone else have that last piece of pizza, etc. But I cannot picture myself having an all-encompassing attitude that places other people ahead of myself, like my needs do not matter. Second, why do people need to show love to their offenders? Why should everybody have to be friends? Even those who act as if that is God’s command do not practice that in real life, since they are busy with their daily tasks in life.

H. This book had good personal stories, such as MacArthur not granting some students an extension on their assignment to teach them the importance of preparation, and MacArthur visiting his sister on her deathbed and marveling (in a positive sense) at her hope as a Christian.

‘Diversity Training’ Doesn’t Work. This Might.

“One need not, for instance, internalize left-progressive views on inequality and identity issues in order to effectively collaborate with a colleague on a project (not the least because colleagues who are minorities or immigrants often won’t subscribe to such views themselves). Insofar as training seeks to push controversial moral and political ideologies onto participants in addition to (or at the expense of) providing them with practical knowledge or skills, this often lowers employee morale and generates blowback against colleagues who are women, people of color, LGBTQ, etc.”

https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/diversity-training-doesnt-work-this-might/

Book Write-Up: Julian of Eclanum’s Commentaries on Job, Hosea, Joel, and Amos

Julian of Eclanum. Ancient Christian Texts: Commentaries on Job, Hosea, Joel, and Amos. Translated and edited by Thomas P. Scheck. IVP, 2021. Go here to purchase the book.

Julian of Eclanum was the bishop of Eclanum in Italy. He lived from 386-455 C.E. Julian was a leader of the Pelagians, and Pelagianism was opposed by Augustine and eventually became marginal within Christianity. As the title indicates, this book is a new translation of Julian’s commentaries on the biblical books of Job, Hosea, Joel, and Amos.

The back cover of the book states that “Julian’s Pelagianism does not fundamentally affect the commentaries presented in this volume[.]” Overall, that is a fair assessment. The book of Job, however, does coincide with Julian’s Pelagianism, as the editor’s scholarly introduction to this book acknowledges. In the Book of Job, God affirms that Job is righteous in his behavior, whereas Job’s friends, who claim that humans are morally and spiritually rotten to the core, turn out to be wrong. Job sounds like Pelagius, whereas Augustine sounds like Job’s friends!

Another topic of interest is Julian’s approach to prophecy, specifically the question of how the prophets were addressing their own times while also speaking about Christ, who would come centuries later, as well as eschatology. Julian addresses this issue most explicitly and systematically in his discussion of Joel 2:28-32, where God promises to pour his spirit on all flesh, and the moon will be turned to blood. Peter in Acts 2 asserts that this found some fulfillment at the day of Pentecost, yet the moon was not turning to blood at that time. Julian wrestles with this.

Julian’s interpretation of the biblical books is literal, moralistic, and focused on minutiae, in areas. The book was edifying to read while I was reading it but, with the exception of Julian’s comments on Joel 2:28-32, Julian’s discussions do not stand out in my mind. The editor’s introduction to the book is strong, though, as Thomas Scheck addresses the Pelagian controversy, what Augustine may have gotten right and wrong about Pelagian beliefs, and how Julian believed the Hebrew prophets spoke to their own time while also predicting the far-off future.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher. My review is honest.

 

Book Write-Up: The Gospel According to God, by John MacArthur

John MacArthur. The Gospel According to God: Rediscovering the Most Remarkable Chapter in the Old Testament. Crossway, 2018. See here to buy the book.

The Gospel According to God is about Isaiah 53. Isaiah 53 describes a suffering servant, and Christians historically have interpreted that servant as Jesus Christ.

Here are some thoughts and observations about this book:

A. MacArthur believes that Isaiah 53 speaks about Jesus Christ’s vicarious, atoning suffering and death, as well as Christ’s resurrection. But is not Isaiah 40-55 about Israel’s restoration from Babylonian exile? How would Jesus Christ fit into that? MacArthur states that Isaiah 40-48 discusses Israel’s restoration from Babylonian exile, Isaiah 49-57 concerns redemption from sin, and Isaiah 58-66 speaks of Christ’s millennial reign and deliverance of creation from the curse of the Fall. Indeed, Isaiah 40-48 does explicitly refer to Babylonian captivity, with its statements about Cyrus and the Babylonian gods Bel and Nebo (see Isaiah 44:28; 45:1, 13; 46:1). But the themes of national exile and restoration are present in Isaiah 49-57 as well (see Isaiah 49:22; 51:2-3, 11), for Isaiah 49-55 talks about Israel coming to Zion from Gentile nations and becoming populous. MacArthur does not explicitly engage this, but what he says pertains to it. MacArthur treats Isaiah 53:1-10 as the words that Israel will speak at the eschaton. All Israel will be saved at Christ’s second coming (Romans 11:26), and Israel will confess that, as a nation, she was wrong to reject Jesus Christ. She thought that Christ was weak, a far cry from the strong Messiah many Jews anticipated, but she comes to realize that Christ was smitten for her transgressions. MacArthur may believe that Isaiah 49-55 is still about national Israel, but that it concerns the restoration of national Israel in the eschaton, not from Babylonian exile in the sixth century B.C.E.

B. Isaiah 53:9 states regarding the servant: “And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth” (KJV). MacArthur interprets that as an allusion to Jesus’s burial in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy man. I checked scholarly and Jewish commentaries to see how that would be interpreted from a non-Christological perspective. Indeed, scholars struggle with this, for why would Isaiah 53:9 say that the servant will be buried with the rich? Is that not a notable contrast with the suffering of the servant in Isaiah 53? I found a variety of explanations. One is that the servant’s enemies intend to bury him with the wicked, but God, in rewarding the servant’s righteousness, ensures that he is buried with the rich instead. Another view is that the wicked and the rich are both participants in the servant’s death. Rashi goes this route, and John Oswalt, in NICOT, appears to go this route when he says that the servant “is not even buried with the poor, who had been his most faithful companions, but is surrounded in death by some of those whose sins he had carried, but who had oppressed and despised him.” A related view is that the rich are oppressors, so they are appropriately coupled with the wicked in v. 9: the servant would be buried in the tomb of a wicked oppressor, or God punishes the servant as if the servant is a wicked oppressor (when he is not). Still others emend the text, saying that “ashir” was originally “osei rasha,” “doers of wickedness.” In that scenario, the servant’s grave is with the wicked and the doers of wickedness.

C. Isaiah 53:11 states: “He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities” (KJV). How does the servant justify people by his knowledge? MacArthur interprets this to mean that people have eternal life by knowing God (John 17:3), meaning the knowledge is not the servant’s knowledge but people’s knowledge of God (“his knowledge”=”knowledge of him”). There are commentators who agree with MacArthur, but, doing a search of “daat” with a possessive suffix, I could not find it used in the sense of “knowledge of” someone or something. Rather, it refers to knowledge that is possessed by someone (Job 10:7; Proverbs 3:20; 22:17; Isaiah 47:10; 48:4), in which case interpreting the knowledge as the servant’s own knowledge makes more sense. In what sense does the servant’s knowledge justify people? How does the servant knowing something serve to justify many? A variety of explanations have been proposed. One view is that the servant’s knowledge is his experience of suffering, meaning that his suffering is what justifies many (vicarious penal suffering). Another view is that the knowledge is the servant’s knowledge of God (Hosea 4:1, 6), or God’s will. The servant knows God and God’s plan to save sinners and, by submitting to that, he does what is necessary to justify sinners (suffering and dying); or, according to Keil-Delitzsch, the servant uses his own knowledge of God to make people practically righteous, as the servant reveals his knowledge of God to others (Matthew 11:27). Rashi interprets Isaiah 53:11 to mean that the servant will judge people’s court cases in knowledge and wisdom (cp. Isaiah 11:2-4). Another approach is to correct the MT’s punctuation so that the verse reads: “He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied by his knowledge. My righteous servant shall justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.” The knowledge does not justify, in this case, but reinforces the servant seeing the fruit of his toil.

D. The book concludes with a stirring sermon by Charles Spurgeon about Christ being a man of sorrows. Spurgeon observes that the disciples in Mark 4:36 take Jesus as he was into a boat, where he falls asleep. Spurgeon says the disciples had to carry and place a sleepy Jesus into the boat because Jesus was continually weary, with all his labor and his sadness. That is a detail I had never noticed.

While the book’s focus is largely on penal substitution, the book had thought-provoking insights, here and there. MacArthur also brings into the discussion Jewish beliefs about the Messiah, the suffering servant, and Jesus. He may be uncritical in assuming that the Talmudic references to Jesus represent the Jewish establishment’s side of the story from the first century, but the passages inspire questions. Why, for example, do the passages overlap with yet diverge significantly from details in the Gospels? They overlap with the Gospels and even accept some Christian presuppositions (i.e., Davidic descent, in some cases), yet the story that they tell differs in key details, such that some question that it is the same Jesus. MacArthur also attempts to integrate Isaiah 53 into the larger context of Isaiah, demonstrating the importance in the Book of Isaiah of sin and the need for forgiveness, a need that the servant meets. MacArthur did this fairly effectively but perhaps could have acknowledged the significance of Israel’s national restoration throughout Isaiah and shown how the Gospel relates to that.

Book Write-Up: Nine Men Against America, by Rosalie M. Gordon

Rosalie M. Gordon. Nine Men Against America: The Supreme Court and Its Attack on American Liberties. 4th edition. 1961. See here to purchase the book. See here to read the book for free.

Nine Men Against America is a conservative critique of the U.S. Supreme Court, specifically the court that President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed as well as the Warren court. The edition that I read was the fourth edition, which dates to 1961, but the book was originally published by the conservative Devin Adair publishing house in 1958. The John Birch Society published it in 1966. The most that I could find about Rosalie Gordon herself was that she was a writer and a research assistant to John T. Flynn, a journalist who wrote anti-FDR books and other conservative works.

Here are some thoughts about the book:

A. Some of what Gordon says will be familiar to people who have read other conservative critiques of liberal judicial activism. I think of Robert Bork’s The Tempting of America (1990) and Phyllis Schlafly’s The Supremacists (2004). Like Bork and Schlafly, Gordon holds that the Roosevelt court misinterpreted and misapplied the Interstate Commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution to justify a grand, sweeping federal intervention into the U.S. economy. Unlike Bork and Schlafly, however, Gordon seems to trace the origins of judicial activism to the Roosevelt court. Bork and Schlafly traced it further back, to the Dred Scott decision in 1857, which treated Dred Scott as property to be returned to his former master. Bork also criticized the conservative U.S. Supreme Court decisions of the nineteenth century that struck down state regulations of businesses.

B. The book profiles the justices of the FDR and Warren courts. Gordon gets into their temperaments, backgrounds, and professional records. Some of her analysis is personal: she argues, for instance, that one of the justices, Frank Murphy, was unsuited for the quiet, solitary, reclusive life of a Supreme Court justice. She also evaluates their backgrounds, noting such factors as Hugo Black’s draconian (even McCarthyite, though she likes McCarthy) anti-business record before his appointment, Black’s time in the KKK, Earl Warren’s support as California Attorney General for confining Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II, and William Douglas’s strange propensity for attending celebrations by the Soviet embassy, even when that was controversial (i.e., after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt in the late 1950’s). She critiques their decisions on the bench, as when she argues that Felix Frankfurter’s decisions have been inconsistent with each other and lack a clear standard. Her overall conclusion is that the justices, by and large, lacked experience as judges when they were appointed to the Supreme Court, so they did not know how to interpret law as opposed to making it.

C. How does Gordon believe that the U.S. Supreme Court has attacked American liberties? She believes that the New Deal attacked private property rights in an authoritarian manner. She thinks that segregation, right or wrong, should be decided by the states rather than the U.S. Supreme Court, so she opposes the 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education decision. She opposes a Supreme Court decision that required a school for orphans to admit African-Americans, even though the man who established the charity wanted it to be for whites only. More prominently, she maintains that the U.S. Supreme Court has hampered governmental and private attempts to fight Communist subversion. The Warren Court undermined states’ acts against Communism because there was already an anti-Communist national law, the Smith Act, then the court went on to undermine the Smith Act. Public schools can no longer inquire if a teacher is a Communist, the ABA cannot disbar Communist lawyers, and legislative committees must inform possible Communists at the outset of the nature of their investigation and the purpose of their inquiry. Gordon sees such decisions as unreasonable: how can committees tell Communists what the nature of the investigation is, when the committees do not know beforehand what they will find? She also argues that the decisions flagrantly violate and disregard judicial precedent and original intent: according to Gordon, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment and courts before Brown never interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to be inconsistent with racial segregation.

D. This book was written before many of the Warren Court’s decisions about the rights of the accused, but she does comment on the Mallory vs. U.S. decision. Gordon finds that decision to be unreasonable, for it fails to establish a clear standard as to when the police can actually question a suspect. She quotes Senator William Tenner: “a suspect cannot be questioned before his arrest unless he agrees, and if he is arrested he cannot be questioned afterwards.” Gordon also notes that the suspect in that case was not unduly pressured to provide a confession.

E. Gordon actually praises the liberal justice Louis Brandeis, seeing him as different from the liberal justices of the Roosevelt and Warren courts. Brandeis not only opposed big business, for which liberals love him, but he also opposed big government and wanted to protect individual rights from government infringement.

F. Something else that I learned from this book is that the renowned African-American author, Zora Neale Hurston (i.e., Their Eyes Were Watching God), was a staunch critic of the Brown decision. I then read wikipedia’s article about her and learned that she was a conservative and supported Robert Taft in his presidential run.

G. William Rehnquist, who would later serve as the conservative Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, has a cameo in this book. Gordon argues that Supreme Court justices rely heavily on their clerks, who lack judicial experience and tend to be liberal. She quotes Rehnquist, then a lawyer in Arizona, to support that point. Rehnquist had previously served as a clerk to Justice Robert Jackson and was relaying his own experiences.

H. As Phyllis Schlafly would later do in The Supremacists, Gordon offers suggestions as to what can be done to restrain judicial activism. Some of what she said overlapped with what Schlafly later wrote: her observation that Article III allows the U.S. Congress to set restrictions on the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, the idea of term limits for judges, etc. Some things were different. Gordon, for example, proposes that the U.S. Senate, not the President, appoint justices. Senators would represent their states, lessening the possibility that justices would infringe on states’ rights, plus Senators would be less inclined to make political appointments (i.e., Earl Warren being rewarded for delivering California to Dwight Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican Convention). Gordon supports relying on judicial precedent, but she proposes that the Court only look at precedents prior to the Roosevelt and Warren courts. Gordon believes there are some things that can legally be done now, whereas some things may require a constitutional amendment. But, as she notes, constitutional amendments have been passed in the past, so it is possible.

I. In terms of my evaluation of the book, it is elegantly written, informative, and interesting. Gordon’s portrayal of the liberal justices is negative but it is not a caricature, for they come across as real people, with complex motivations and disagreements with one another. Gordon is adept as a storyteller, in terms of her narrative style. Gordon also gets into the details of particular cases. Some questions deserved more consideration. For instance, while Gordon believes that the Supreme Court should respect Plessy vs. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” decision, what if the facilities (i.e., schools) are manifestly unequal?

Book Write-Up: The Gospel in Ezekiel, by Thomas Guthrie

Thomas Guthrie. The Gospel in Ezekiel Illustrated in a Series of Discourses. Go here to download the book.

Thomas Guthrie was a Scottish preacher in the nineteenth century. The Gospel in Ezekiel contains discourses, each of which uses a verse in Ezekiel as a launchpad for a broader discussion about the Gospel. By “Gospel,” Guthrie essentially means penal substitution, God giving believers a new heart, and God keeping believers in the faith.

Wikipedia says that Guthrie had “a remarkably effective and picturesque style of oratory.” I found that to be true in this book. As far as doctrine goes, I cannot say that the book taught me anything new. But Guthrie had a compelling way of illustrating concepts. He draws from Scriptural examples of parents seeing their children die to depict God’s agony at Christ’s crucifixion, as well as Roman incidents of a ruler reluctantly putting to death his child for the sake of justice in society. He tries to get into the mechanics of the new heart, as he depicts the Spirit influencing and dwelling in the human heart. In talking about God keeping the saints in faith, Guthrie paints a picture of how life is unpredictable and vacillating, which serves as a foil for God’s preservation of the saints.

The book has a lot of Scriptural allusions, from both the Old and New Testaments. Guthrie’s approach in this book is not so much to offer a detailed exegesis of biblical passages but rather to illustrate Gospel concepts, in part by referring to biblical stories and ideas, and also by referring to nature. Often, he does this so quickly that it is difficult to keep up, but this book can keep readers on their toes as they attempt to follow Guthrie’s argument.

The book is not exactly apologetics, but Guthrie occasionally presents arguments, as when he defends the doctrine of original sin, showing it to be reasonable in terms of how we and the world around us are: beautiful, yet flawed.

While the book did not teach me much in terms of doctrine, it did shed light on some of Guthrie’s views. Guthrie did seem to reject baptismal regeneration—-that baptism was necessary for salvation and was where people became regenerated—-as well as any necessity for infant baptism. On baptismal regeneration, Guthrie overlaps with the Westminster Confession. He also speaks in favor of treating people of different races with dignity.

Like a lot of Reformed books, this one vacillates between confrontation and comfort. By “confrontation,” I do not mean that Guthrie comes across as mean, for he has a folksy, conversational manner of communication. What I mean is that he comes across as somewhat of a perfectionist: your heart needs to be in your prayer for God to listen, a little sin spoils everything, and a true Christian will have a sweet rather than a bitter nature. (I read that last one when I was in a bad mood. My reaction was, “Yeah, wouldn’t that be nice!”) Yet, Guthrie also tries to comfort those who feel that their Christian walks are substandard, presenting God as one who is loving and who wants people to come to him.