I have recently finished reading a series of books by John Piper called The Swans Are not Silent. You may have read the several excerpts I have posted as I read. In my mind, nothing short of Scripture serves to inspire and encourage like the biographies of great saints of the past. This series has been especially good that way.

These books are a great entry-point into the history and theology of the Christian church. Rich in theology and fascinating in history, yet written on a level that should be easily understood by anyone of high school age and up, they will whet your appetite for more—more history, more theology, more of God’s working through the ages.

Titles in the series are:
• The Legacy of Sovereign Joy: God's Triumphant Grace in the Lives of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin
• The Hidden Smile of God: The Fruit of Affliction in the Lives of John Bunyan, William Cowper, and David Brainerd
• The Roots of Endurance: Invincible Perseverance in the Lives of John Newton, Charles Simeon, and William Wilberforce
• Contending for Our All: Defending Truth and Treasuring Christ in the Lives of Athanasius, John Owen, and J. Gresham Machen

The thumb-nail sketches of great theologians of the church from Augustine and Athanasius to J. Gresham Machen show us that the struggles we face are not greater than those that Christians have faced since the beginning of the church; that the heresies that are prevalent today are the same attacks on the truth that Satan has been using for centuries; that the truth that has sustained God’s people is the same truth that sustains us today; and that the one true God upon whose grace we rest is as faithful today as he has always been—“Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.”

I have, in the last few years, begun avoiding controversy. I’ve lost the formerly-urgent desire to have my say about the latest hot topic. I’ve lost interest in blogs that thrive on controversy. I seldom engage in internet forum debates anymore. I no longer rush to buy the latest books on the popular heresies of the day. I would rather think on things that are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report (Philippians 4:8).

To be honest, however, there is still a part of me that is spoiling for a fight. There are two reasons for this: first, as a fallen sinner, there is a desire to shut the mouths of idiots and demonstrate my own brilliance; second, there is a legitimate desire to stand up for the truth, to be “Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;” (2Corinthians 10:5). But I have difficulty engaging in controversy without allowing the former motivation, which is none other than pride, to come to the forefront, exalt my own cleverness, and steal God’s glory.

In short, I have difficulty speaking the truth in love. John Piper shows how Francis Schaeffer, a man who did not shrink from controversy, addressed this problem:

Francis Schaeffer: Sweet-Singing Twentieth-Century Swan

One of the swans who sang most sweetly in the twentieth century was Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984), the founder of L’Abri Fellowship. He was a wise and humble apologist for the Christian faith, and the model for many of us. In 1970 he wrote an essay called The Mark of the Christian. The mark, of course, is love. He based the essay on John 13:34-35 were Jesus said, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
   Schaeffer spent most of this essay exhorting the church to disagree, when it must, lovingly. Schaeffer’s view of biblical truth, like the swans in this book, was so high that he would not let the value of truth be minimized in the name of a unity that was not truth-based. Therefore, he dealt realistically with two biblical demands: the demand for purity and holiness on the one hand and the demand for visible love and unity on the other hand.

The Christian really has a double task. He has to practice both God’s holiness and God’s love. The Christian is to exhibit that God exists as the infinite-personal God; and then he is to exhibit simultaneously God’s character of holiness and love. Not his holiness without his love: this is only harshness. Not his love without his holiness: that is only compromise. Anything that an individual Christian or Christian group does that fails to show the simultaneous balance of the godliness of God and the love of God presents to watching world not a demonstration of the God who exists but a caricature of God who Exists.

Schaeffer knew that, in general, the necessary controversies and differences among Christians would not be understood by the watching world. You cannot expect the world to understand doctrinal differences, especially in our day when the existence of truth and absolutes are considered unthinkable even as concepts.

You cannot expect the world to understand doctrinal differences, especially in our day when the existence of truth and absolutes are considered unthinkable even as concepts.
   We cannot expect the world to understand that on the basis of the holiness of God we are having a different kind of difference, because with are dealing with God’s absolutes.

This is why observable love becomes so crucial.

Before a watching world, an observable love in the midst of difference will show a difference between Christians’ differences and other people’s differences. The world may not understand what the Christians are disagreeing about, but they will very quickly understand the difference of our difference form the world’s differences if they see us having our differences in an open and observable love on a practical level.

Therefore, Schaeffer called controversy among Christians “our golden opportunity” before a watching world. In other words, the aim of love, in view of God’s truth and holiness, is not to avoid controversy, but to carry it thorough with observable practical love between the disagreeing groups. This is our golden opportunity.

As a matter of fact, we have a greater possibility of showing what Jesus is speaking about here, in the midst of our differences, than we do if we are not differing. Obviously we ought not to go out looking for differences among Christians; there are enough without looking for more. But even so, it is in the midst of a difference that we have our golden opportunity. When everything is going well and we are all standing around in a nice little circle, there is not much to be seen by the world. But when we come to the place where there is a real difference, and we exhibit uncompromised principles but at the same time observable love, then there is something that the world can see, something they can use to judge that these real are Christians and that Jesus has indeed been sent by the Father.

—John Piper, Contending for Our All, 163-166

It has been said by some (Phil Johnson, for one) that Postmodernism is little more than Modernism warmed over. John Piper draws the same conclusion from the following series of quotes by J. Gresham Machen as he opposed Modernism.

“It makes very little difference how much or how little of the creeds of the Church the Modernist preacher affirms, or how much or how little of the Biblical teaching from which the creeds are derived. He might affirm every jot and tittle of the Westminster Confession, for example, and yet be separated by a great gulf from the Reformed Faith. It is not that part is denied and the rest affirmed; but all is denied, because all is affirmed merely as useful or symbolic and not as true.”

“This temper of mind is hostile to precise definitions. Indeed nothing makes a man more unpopular in the controversies of the present day than an insistence upon definition of terms. . . . Men discourse very eloquently today upon such subjects as God, religion, Christianity, atonement, redemption, faith; but are greatly incensed when they are asked to tell in simple language what they mean by these terms.”

“The improvement appears in the physical conditions of life, but in the spiritual realm there is a corresponding loss. The loss is clearest, perhaps, in the realm of art. Despite the mighty revolution which has been produced in the external condition of life, no great poet is now living to celebrate the change; humanity has suddenly become dumb. Gone, too, are the great painters and the great musicians and the great sculptors. The art that still subsists is largely imitative, and where it is not imitative it is usually bizarre.”

“In view of the lamentable defects of modern life, a type of religion certainly should not be commended simply because it is modern or condemned simply because it is old. On the contrary, the condition of mankind is such that one my well ask what it is that made the men of past generation so great and the men of the present generations so small.”

—J. Gresham Machen, quoted in John Piper, Contending for Our All, 134-136

It is relatively easy to learn facts. It is more difficult to apply them personally. It often takes considerable time for lessons to become embedded in our minds and be consistently reflected in our lives. John Owen was a man who excelled in personal application.

Commending in Public Only What He Experienced in Private

One great hindrance to holiness in the ministry of the Word is that we are prone to preach and write without pressing into the things we say and making them real to our own souls. Over the years words begin to come easy, and we find we can speak of mysteries without standing in awe; we can speak of purity without feeling pure; we can speak of zeal without spiritual passion; we can speak of God’s holiness without trembling; we can speak of sin without sorrow; we can speak of heaven without eagerness. And the result is an increasing hardening of the spiritual life.
   Words came easy for Owen, but he set himself against this terrible disease of inauthenticity and secured his growth in holiness. He began with the premise: “Our happiness consisteth not in the knowing the things of the gospel, but in the doing of them.” Doing, not just knowing, was the goal of all his studies.
   As a means to this authentic doing he labored to experience every truth he preached. He said,

I hold myself bound in conscience and in honor, not even to imagine that I have attained a proper knowledge of any one article of truth, mush less to publish it, unless through the Holy Spirit I have had such a taste of it, in its spiritual sense, that I may be able, from the heart, to say with the psalmist, “I have believed, and therefore I have spoken.”

So, for example, his Exposition of Psalm 130 (320 pages on eight verses) is the laying open not only of the Psalm but of his own heart. Andrew Thomason says,

When Owen . . . laid open the book of God, he laid open at the same time the book of his own heart and of his own history, and produced a book which . . . is rich in golden thoughts, and distinct with the living experience of “one who spake what he knew, and testified what he had seen.”

The same biographer said of Owen’s On The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded (1681) that he “first preached [it] to his own heart, and then to private congregation; and which reveals to us the almost untouched and untrodden eminences on which Own walked in the last years of his pilgrimage.”

—John Piper, Contending for Our All, 109-111

John Piper on the humility of John Owen:

Owen Humbled Himself Under the Mighty Hand of God

Though he was one of the most influential and well-known men of his day, his own view of his place on God’s economy was somber and humble. Two days before he died he wrote in a letter to Charles Fleetwood, “I am leaving the ship of the church in a storm, but while the great Pilot is in it the loss of a poor underrower will be inconsiderable.”
   Packer says that “Owen, [though] a proud man by nature, had been brought low in and by his conversion, and thereafter he kept himself low by recurring contemplation of his inbred sinfulness.” Owen illustrates this:

To keep our soul in a constant state of mourning and self-abasement is the most necessary part of our wisdom . . . and it is so far from having any inconsistency with those consolations and joys, which the gospel tenders unto us in believing, as that it is the only way to let them into the soul in a due manner.

   With regard to his immense learning and the tremendous insight he had into the things of God he seems to have a humbler attitude toward his achievement because he had climbed high enough to see over the first ridge of revolution into the endless mysteries of God.

I make no pretence of searching into the bottom or depth of any part of this “great mystery of godliness, God manifest in the flesh.” They are altogether unreachable, unto the [limit] of the most enlightened minds, in this life, what we shall farther comprehend of them in the other world, God only knows.

This humility opened Owens’s soul to the greatest visions of Christ in the Scriptures. And he believed with all his heart the truth of 2 Corinthians 3:18, that by contemplating the glory of Christ “we may be gradually transformed into the same glory.” And that is nothing other than holiness.

—John Piper, Contending for Our All, 103-104

I’ve watched more than one pastor work himself to exhaustion tending to one congregational need after another, while giving little time to study and delivering mediocre teaching from the pulpit. Not to be too hard on the pastor, that seemed to be what the congregation wanted—demanded, even. Is that the way it should be? Should the teaching ministry play second fiddle to other pastoral duties? John Owen didn’t think so.

   Under normal circumstances Owen believed and taught that “The first and principal duty of a pastor is to feed the flock by diligent preaching of the word.” he pointed to Jeremiah 3:15 and to the purpose of God to “give to his church pastors according to his own heart, who should feed them with knowledge and understanding.” He showed that the care of preaching the gospel was committed to Peter, and in him all true pastors of the Church under the name of “feeding” (John 21:15–17). He cited Acts 6 and the apostles’ decision to free themselves from all encumbrances that they may give themselves wholly to the Word and prayer. He referred to 1 Timothy 5:17—it is the pastor’s duty to “labor in the word and doctrine,” and to Acts 20:28 where the overseers of the flock are to feed them with the Word. Then he says,

Nor is it required only that he preach now and then at his leisure; but that he lay aside all other employments, though lawful, all others duties in the church, as unto such a constant attendance on them as would divert him from his work, that he give himself unto it. . . . Without this, no man will be able to give a comfortable account of his pastoral office at the last day.

—John Piper, Contending for Our All, 94-95

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

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.