I have become increasingly interested lately in the history of the Church and in the lives and writings of the pastors and theologians to whom we owe our great heritage. Among the books I have had my eye on recently is Devoted to the Service of the Temple: Piety, Persecution, and Ministry in the Writings of Hercules Collins, which I discovered at Pastor Steve Weaver's Blog (Steve is co-editor). (Who can resist Reformed Baptist theology from a guy named "Hercules"?) Steve has become one of my favorite Bible expositors (listen here), so whatever he is reading is of interest to me. Pastor Weaver has provided the following information on the new book:

The new book exploring the spirituality of 17th century Baptist pastor Hercules Collins is now in stock at Reformation Heritage Books and available for order online here.

Description:

While largely forgotten in modern times, Hercules Collins (1646/7-1702) was highly influential among the late 17th and early 18th century Calvinistic Baptists of London. Through a biographical sketch and 35 sample selections collected from Collins's writings, Michael A. G. Haykin and Steve Weaver introduce us to the vibrant spirituality of this colossal figure.

Product Details:

ISBN: 9781601780225
FORMAT: Paperback, 160 pages
RETAIL PRICE: $10.00

Commendations:

"Hercules Collins is one of the great figures from our Baptist heritage—a pastor who suffered much for the cause of Christ and left a great legacy for generations that followed. There is something especially compelling about the witness of a man who was oppressed and imprisoned for his faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. The witness of Hercules Collins as pastor, prisoner, and preacher is worthy of the closest attention in our own times. We are indebted to Michael Haykin and Steve Weaver for bringing Hercules Collins to life for a new generation." —R. ALBERT MOHLER, JR.

"The secret of Collins's courage and strength lay in his relationship with the Lord Christ. The enormous contemporary value of reading his life and writings is not just in its exposition of his evangelistic methodology, and its indirect comments on today's broader theological scene, but in the inspiration it gives to the heart of each Christian for growth in grace and deeper spirituality." —GEOFF THOMAS

"We are indebted to Michael Haykin and Steve Weaver for these carefully chosen selections …. For too long Baptists have had little access to the richness of their theological tradition. We have a great past, and many able servants have given their lives to the cause of our churches, and yet so few of their works have been reprinted. This book continues a very encouraging recent trend, in which the best works are being restored to print. May the Lord bless this book, and the efforts of its editors." —From the FOREWARD by JAMES M. RENIHAN

Authors:

MICHAEL A. G. HAYKIN is Professor of Church History and Biblical Spirituality, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky & Research Professor of Irish Baptist College, Constituent College of Queen's University Belfast, N. Ireland.

STEVE WEAVER is the pastor of West Broadway Baptist Church in Lenoir City, Tennessee.

Previews:

Front Cover
Back Cover
Foreward by James Renihan
Excerpt #1: "God is the Gospel"
Excerpt #2: "Plain Preaching"

After receiving several books for review purposes, I have learned a couple of things. First, I would rather choose my own books. Second, I don’t like reading books for the purpose of reviewing them. I would rather read for my own education and edification. My hope is that this will benefit some beyond myself. With that said, I hope you’ll understand if this is not a particularly well-written review. It is, after all, my first book review, as well.

The Grand Weaver: How God Shapes Us through the Events of Our Lives is the first book I have read by Ravi Zacharias. I had, of course, heard of him as an author, apologist, and conference speaker. By all reliable accounts, he is fairly sound theologically, and well spoken of by others whose work I do know and respect; so my expectations going into this book were high. Perhaps those high expectations colored my thinking as I read and made me too susceptible to disappointment, and disappointed I was. I want to state clearly that this is not a bad book. It simply did not, in my opinion, demonstrate biblically “how God shapes us through the events of our lives.”

Throughout the book, especially in the first half, Dr. Zacharias depends on anecdotes that illustrate the providential hand of God in directing our lives. These stories, for the most part, serve that purpose well, although, at times, I wondered if Zacharias was not leaning a bit too far toward the mystical. Too little was added by the author, however, to draw that conclusion—and that is a major complaint I have about this book. Have you ever had a conversation with someone who drops the ends of sentences and, with a meaningful look, expects you to get it? That’s how I felt reading this book. Zacharias would almost make his point, and then offer an anecdote, poem, or quote intended to convey the message. It was like . . . you know?

The second half of the book contains two chapters that are really quite good and could easily stand alone, Your Will Matters and Your Worship Matters. The following quote from the latter is the kind of solid, straight-forward writing that is lacking elsewhere in the book:

Teaching must become the center of worship again, and the ideas that shape our expressions must be biblically induced and shaped. I am not for a moment suggesting that right teaching will guarantee a throbbing, lively church. It may not. But I am suggesting that displaced and misplaced teaching will guarantee a heretical church.

The message of the book is that God is directing the circumstances and events of your life to make you who he wants you to be, and that you will never see this until you begin to look at your life from his perspective. And that’s an important message. It is a message that is conveyed, after a fashion, through the stories in this book. I only wish it had been conveyed more through biblical exposition.

You may enjoy the style of this book. I didn’t. If you are easily moved by poignant stories, this book is for you. If you are a pastor looking for fresh illustrations to spice up your sermons, this book might be for you. However, if you are looking for a biblical exposition of the sovereignty and providence of God, this is not that book.

Devoted to the Service of the Temple: Piety, Persecution, and Ministry in the Writings of Hercules Collins is a collection of the writings of seventeenth-century Particular Baptist pastor Hercules Collins edited by Dr. Michael Haykin and Pastor Steve Weaver. At 139 pages, including a bibliography, it is a short, easy read, but one that is packed full of rich pastoral theology.

The book begins with a thirty page introduction, providing a brief biography of Hercules Collins and the historical setting of his writings, followed by thirty-five short chapters, which are excerpts of his writings. This book can easily be read in one sitting, as I did, or one chapter (2–3 short pages) a day, as a devotional. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find such rich theology in any devotional book written today.

We owe considerable gratitude to Dr. Haykin and Pastor Weaver for bringing us this collection of writings from this great, though lesser known, “dead theologian.” I heartily recommend it to you, and leave you with this quote from chapter five, titled God is the Gospel:

There are many good objects in heaven and earth besides thee. There are angels in heaven and saints on earth. But, soul, what are these to thee? Heaven, without thy presence, would be no heaven to me. A palace without thee, a crown without thee, cannot satisfy me. But with thee can I be content, though in a poor cottage. With thee I am at liberty in bonds. . . . [I]f I have thy smiles, I can bear the world’s frowns. If I have spiritual liberty in my soul that I can ascend to thee by faith and have communion with thee, thou shalt choose thy portion for me in this world, “For in the multitude of my thoughts within me, thy comforts delight my soul.”

Devoted to the Service of the Temple is available to purchase from Reformation Heritage Books.

From The Hidden Smile of God by John Piper:

The fruit of William Cowper’s affliction is a call to free ourselves from trite and chipper worship. If the Christian life has become the path of ease and fun in the modern West, then corporate worship is the place of increasing entertainment. The problem is not a battle between contemporary worship music and hymns; the problem is that there aren’t enough martyrs during the week. If no solders are perishing, what you want on a Sunday is Bob Hope and some pretty girls, not the army chaplain and a surgeon.
   Cowper was sick. But in his sickness he saw things that we so desperately need to see. He saw hell. And sometimes he saw heaven. He knew terror. And sometimes he know ecstasy. When I stand to welcome the people to worship on Sunday morning, I know that there are William Cowpers in the congregation. There are spouses who can barely talk. There are sullen teenagers living double lives at home and school. There are widows who still feel the amputation of a fifty-year partner,. There are single people who have not been hugged for twenty years. There are men in the prime of their lives with cancer. There are moms who have risked all for Jesus and bear the scars. There are tired and discouraged and lonely struggles. Shall we come to them with a joke?
   They can read the comics every day. What they need from me is not more bouncy, frisky smiles and stories. What they need is a kind of a joyful earnestness that makes the broken heart feel hopeful and helps the ones who are drunk with trifles sober up for greater joys.

—John Piper, The Hidden Smile of God, 167.

In his Preface to The Roots of Endurance, John Piper wrote:

   As I write this Preface I have just preached to my people several messages in which I pleaded with them to be “coronary Christians,” not “adrenal Christians.” Not that adrenaline is bad, I said; it gets me through lots of Sundays. But it lets you down on Mondays. The heart is another kind of friend. It just keeps on serving—very quietly, through good days and bad days, happy and sad, high and low, appreciated and unappreciated. It never says , “I don’t like your attitude, Piper , I’m taking the day off.” It just keeps humbly lub-dubbing along. It endures the way adrenaline doesn’t.
   Coronary Christians are like the heart in the causes they serve. Adrenal Christians are like adrenaline—as spurt of energy and then fatigue. What we need in the cause of social justice (for example, against racism and abortion), and the cause of world missions (to plant churches among the unreached peoples of the world), and the cause of personal holiness and evangelism (to lead people to Christ and love them no matter what) is not spurts of energy, but people who endure for the long haul. Marathoners, not sprinters.

—John Piper, The Roots of Endurance, 11-12

Jonathan Moorhead recently asked (although I have searched in vain to find it on his blog, I’m sure it was he*) what epitaph we would like on our grave. I think I’ve found mine.

John Newton died on December 21, 1807, at the age of eighty- two. A month previously he wrote:

It is a great thing to die; and, when flesh and a heart fail, to have God for the strength of our hearts, and our portion forever. I know whom I have believed, and he is able to keep that which I have committed against that great day. Hence forth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the lord, the righteous judge, shall give me that day.

—Quoted in The Roots of Endurance by John Piper, 52.

Another quote from John Piper:

   When [John Newton] wrote his Narrative in the early 1760s he said, “I know not that I have ever since met so daring a blasphemer.” The hymn we know as “Amazing Grace” was written to accompany a New Year’s sermon based on 1 Chronicles 17:16, “Then King David went in and sat before the Lord, and said, ‘Who am I, O Lord God, and what is my house, that you have brought me thus far?’”

Amazing grace!—how sweet the sound—
That saved a wretch like me,
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.

   The effect of this amazement is tenderness toward others. “[The ‘wretch’ who has been saved by grace] believes and feels his own weakness and unworthiness, and lives upon the grace and pardoning love of his Lord. This gives him an habitual tenderness and gentleness of spirit. Humble under a sense of much forgiveness to himself, he finds it easy to forgive others.”
   He puts it in a picture:

A company of travelers fall in to a pit: one of them gets a passenger to draw him out. Now he should not be angry with the rest for falling in; nor because they are not yet out, as he is. He did not pull himself out: instead, therefore, of reproaching them, he should show them pity. . . . A man, truly illuminated, will no more despise others, than Bartimaeus, after his own eyes were opened, would take a stick, and beat every blind man he met.

   Glad-hearted, grateful lowliness and brokenness as a saved “wretch” was probably the most prominent root of Newton’s habitual tenderness with people.

—John Piper, The Roots of Endurance, 72-73.

John Piper on William Wilberforce:

   But he was practical with a difference. He believed with all his heart that new affections for God were the key to morals and lasting political reformation. And these new affections and this reformation did not come from mere ethical systems. They came from what he called the “peculiar doctrines” of Christianity. For Wilberforce, practical deeds were born in “peculiar doctrines.” By that term he simply meant the central distinguishing doctrines of human depravity, divine judgment, the substitutionary work of Christ on the cross, justification by faith alone, regeneration by the Holy Spirit, and the practical necessity of fruit in all life devoted to good deeds.

The Fatal Habit of Nominal Christians

He wrote his book [A Practical View of Christianity] to show that the “bulk” of Christians in England were merely nominal because they had abandoned these doctrines in favor of a system of ethics and had thus lost the power of ethical life and the political welfare. He wrote:

The fatal habit of considering Christian morals as distinct from Christian doctrines insensibly gained strength. Thus the peculiar doctrines of Christianity went more and more out of sight, and as might naturally have been expected, the moral system itself also began to wither and decay, being robbed of that which should have supplied it with life and nutriment.

   He pled [sic] with nominal Christians of England not to turn “their eyes from the grand peculiarities of Christianity, [but] to keep these ever in view, as the pregnant principles whence all the rest must derive their origin, and receive their best support.”
   Knowing that Wilberforce was a politician all his adult life, who never lost an election from the time he was twenty-one years old, we might be tempted to think that his motives were purely pragmatic—as if he should say, “If Christianity works to produce the political welfare, then use it.” But that is not the spirit of his mind or his life. In fact, he believed that such pragmatism would ruin the very thing it sought, the reformation of culture.

—John Piper, The Roots of Endurance, 119–121

More John Piper on William Wilberforce:

The Decisive Direction of Sin: Vertical

Take the example of how people define sin. When considering the nature of sin, Wilberforce said, the vast bulk of Christians in England estimated the guilt of an action “not by the proportion in which, according to scripture, [actions] are offensive to God. but by that in which they are injurious to society.” Now, on the face of it that sounds noble, loving, and practical. Sin hurts people, so don't sin.
   Wouldn't that definition of sin be good for society? But Wilberforce says, “Their slight notions of the guilt and evil of sin [reveal] an utter [lack] of all suitable reverence for the Divine Majesty. This principle [reverence for the Divine Majesty] is justly termed in Scripture, ‘The beginning of wisdom’ [Psalm 111:10].” And without this wisdom, there will be no deep and lasting good done for man, spiritually or politically. Therefore, the supremacy of God’s glory in all things is what he calls “the grand governing maxim” in all of life. The good of society may never be put ahead of this. That would dishonor God and, paradoxically, defeat the good of society. For the good of society, the good of society must not be the primary good.

—John Piper, The Roots of Endurance, 121–122

I’m presently reading Contending for Our All by John Piper, the fourth and final volume in his The Swans Are Not Silent series. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting some excerpts from this book. While all four are excellent books, this one—at least the first section that I have read, on Athanasius—is one of the most important and (for you emergent types), the most currently relevant.

And now I am going to break one of my cardinal rules (#7 here) by quoting C. S. Lewis* simply because I like the way he expresses the following principle:

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. . . . [Students are directed not to Plato but to books on Plato]— all about ‘isms’ and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. . . . But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. . . .
   Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an excusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and a its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light. . . .
   It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at east read one old one to every three new ones. . . .
   We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. . . . We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?"—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness. . . . The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries bowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

—C. S. Lewis, quoted in Contending for Our All by John Piper, 10-11

*Since the principle expressed is not theological, I think I can get away with it this time.

As I said yesterday, I believe John Piper’s book Contending for Our All is exceedingly relevant for our day, especially in light of attacks on truth by the emergent movement, as I think the following excerpt will demonstrate. Piper’s study of Athanasius and the Arian heresy 1700 years ago demonstrates the truth that “there is nothing new under the sun.”

Loving Christ includes loving true propositions about Christ

What was clear to Athanasius was that propositions about Christ carried convictions that could send you to heaven or hell. Propositions like “There was a time when the Son of God was not,” and “He was not before he was made,” and “the Son of God is created” were damnable. If they were spread abroad and believed, they would damn the souls who embraced hem. And therefore Athanasius labored with all his might to formulate propositions that would conform to reality and lead the soul to faith and worship and heaven.
   I believe Athanasius would have abominated, with tears, the contemporary call for “depropositionalizing” that we hear among so many of the so-called “reformists” and “the emerging church,” “younger evangelicals,” “postfundamentalists,” “postfoundationalists,” “postpropositionalists,” and “postevangelicals.” I think he would have said, “Our young people in Alexandria die for the truth of propositions about Christ. What do your young people die for?” And if the answer came back, “We die for Christ, not propositions about Christ,” I think he would have said, “That’s what the heretic Arius said. So which Christ will you die for?” To answer that question requires propositions about him. To refuse to answer implies that it doesn’t matter what we believe or die for as long as it has the label Christ attached to it.
   Athanasius would have grieved over sentences like, “It is Christ who unites us; doctrine divides.” And sentences like: “We should ask, Whom do you trust? Rather than what do you believe?” He would have grieved because he knew this was the very tactic used by the Arian bishops to cover the councils with fog so that the word Christ could mean anything. Those who talk like this—“Christ unites, doctrine divides”—have simply replaced propositions about Christ with the word Christ. It carries no meaning until one says something about him. They think they have done something profound and fresh, when they call us away from the propositions of doctrine to the word Christ. In fact they have done something very old and worn and deadly.

—John Piper, Contending for Our All, 63-64

Yesterday’s post on Athanasius and the Arian heresy got me started thinking again about something that has been on my mind a lot lately—the Trinity. In particular, I was thinking about a statement made by someone in one of the large apostate denominations attempting to remove “sexist” language from our understanding of the Trinity. The proposal was to refer to the members of the Godhead as “Creator,” “Redeemer,” and “Sustainer.” While I immediately rejected the discarding of “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit,” I saw no problem with “Creator,” “Redeemer,” and “Sustainer.” At least they weren’t calling God “Mother.” However, since then I have been prompted to consider the nature of the Trinity more carefully (thanks, Jonathan), and I have concluded that these designations lack the necessary precision for describing the individual persons of the Godhead. I present the following propositions:

1a. The Father alone is not the creator—

1b. The Father is not only the creator—

2a. The Son alone is not the redeemer—

2b. The Son is not only the redeemer—

3a. The Spirit alone is not the sustainer—

3b. The Spirit is not only the sustainer—

The persons of the Trinity are inseparably bound together in all things. They do nothing independently of the others. Therefore, they cannot be described in terms of individual roles, but only by their names—the names given in Scripture.