I will be leaving town tonight for the thanksgiving holiday and will not return until Monday.  So I will not write anything new until Monday.  Here are some helpful insights on thanksgiving that will help you not waste it.  See you Monday!

Albert Mohler’s theological thanksgiving.

John Piper’s advice on who to invite for thanksgiving dinner.

Nathan Hoag’s pie advice.

“Is God more than what His Word says?”

This may not seem like a common question to some of you, but it is for many.  On of the first things you hear in a theologically liberal seminary is this question.  The professor hears some answers and then says the answer to the question is yes.  But, he (or she) then adds that because this is true, how can we trust the Bible to tell us what God is like?  You see why this question matters so much now?  It undercuts the authority of the Bible.

I don’t have issue that the answer to this question may be yes.  God may indeed be more than what His Word says.  Many people have said that the Bible is God’s “baby talk” to us, because we could not understand any more than what is in it.  But I do take issue when we answer yes to this question, and don’t keep moving further into the question.  We cannot answer yes to that question and simply stop there.  If we answer yes, we’re saying the Bible does not have a monopoly on the information about God in it.  Some people will therefore go to another source to try and find more information about God.  I don’t recommend that, it will fail every time.

I do recommend answering yes to this question, followed by the belief that the Bible is fully inspired, authoritative, inerrant, and infallible.  This means that everything in the Bible was inspired by God, has authority, cannot be wrong, and will never fail.  Then comes the crucial next step: God can be more than His Word says, only in the sense that His “more-ness” will never contradict what His Word says.  God may indeed be more, but the fullness of His character will never contradict what is written!  We may have it all in the Bible, and not fully get it.  We may not, God could be more, but what is more will not contradict what is written in the Bible.  This is honoring to God, and makes much of Him indeed.

A group of Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians have joined together to create The Manhattan Declaration.  The main points in the declaration are:

Christians, when they have lived up to the highest ideals of their faith, have defended the weak and vulnerable and worked tirelessly to protect and strengthen vital institutions of civil society, beginning with the family.

We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them. These truths are:
the sanctity of human life
the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife
the rights of conscience and religious liberty.

Inasmuch as these truths are foundational to human dignity and the well-being of society, they are inviolable and non-negotiable. Because they are increasingly under assault from powerful forces in our culture, we are compelled today to speak out forcefully in their defense, and to commit ourselves to honoring them fully no matter what pressures are brought upon us and our institutions to abandon or compromise them. We make this commitment not as partisans of any political group but as followers of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

You can sign the declaration here.

You can see who has signed here.

Read why Albert Mohler signed here.

Read why John MacArthur didn’t sign here.

I signed, will you?

I know I have written a lot recently about the German Philosopher Immanuel Kant and his categorical Imperative (post 1, post 2), but I saw something this morning that stunned me from John 15:11 and I must tell you about it.

For those of you just coming into this discussion, Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative is this: an action can only be moral and virtuous, if the person doing the action gains nothing from it.  So, to the degree that you gain anything, from doing any action, to that degree, it is an immoral action.  If Kant had his way, he would have us all be disinterested in the things we do.  This is not Biblical, but I am writing about this again because I think so many of you believe this!  Now to John 15:11.

John 15:11 says, “These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full.”  This statement gives the purpose for the previous 10 verses.  That means 15:1-10 were spoken by Jesus for our joy.  Think about how the purpose statement in 15:11 applies to 15:9-10.  Jesus says, “Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love.   If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.”  Jesus clearly teaches that keeping His commandments is the way to remain in His love; this is describing obedience.

TOO OFTEN, Christians think of obedience to God in a KANTian manner.  We say, we think, we believe, and act upon this thought: “If I am to obey God, I must put pleasure and delight aside.  If I am to have pleasure and delight, I cannot obey God.”  Does Jesus believe this?  NO!  John 15:11 teaches us that this idea about putting pleasure aside to obey God is a lie.  Rather, Jesus told us that obedience to His commandments (15:9-10) for the purpose of making our joy full (15:11).  What does that mean?  Jesus told us to obey Him so that we could have the fullness of joy!  This means that obedience to Jesus is the fullness of joy, not the absence of it.  Kant’s imperative is again….wrong.  Pursue your joy in Jesus with all the might you can muster, by obeying His commandments.

(This was originally posted by Justin Taylor on his blog Between Two Worlds.  You’ll find this very useful!)

Gerald Bray is Research Professor at Beeson Divinity School at Samford University, and director of research for the Latimer Trust. This fall he is Scholar in Residence at Union University. He has taught theology for 30 years, is the author of numerous books, and is the editor of IVP’s Contours of Christian Theology series, penning its inaugural volume on The Doctrine of God. He is also the author of a large volume introducing the history of Biblical Interpretation. (Just to give you a sense of his learning and global interests, he is fluent in French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek and Russian.)

He’s graciously answered a few questions for us on the basic questions to ask when interpreting Scripture.

What are the questions we should ask when approaching a passage of Scripture?

The first question we must ask of every biblical text is simply this—what does it tell us about God? What does it say about who he is and about what he does? The second question is: what does this text say about us human beings? What are we meant to be and what has gone wrong? The third and final question is: what has God done about this and what does he expect of us in the light of what he has done? Asking these questions and seeking answers to them will help us interpret the Spirit’s message to Christ’s people and to each of us as individuals.

What about sections of Scripture that seem hard to apply? I’m thinking, for example, of the genealogies of 1 Chronicles.

These genealogies bring us a message from God even if they appear on the surface to be barren and unprofitable. All we have to do in order to understand them is to ask the right questions about them and their meaning will be quickly opened up to us.

Let me ask you, then, to answer the three questions you posed above. What do they teach us about God?

They tell us that he is a faithful God, who keeps his covenant from one generation to another. Whoever we are and however far we may be from the source of our human life in Adam, we are part of his plan. Over the centuries we may have developed in different ways, lost contact with one another and even turned on each other in hostility, but in spite of all that we are still related to one another and interconnected in ways that may go beyond our immediate understanding or experience.

What do they tell us about ourselves?

They say that most of us are nobodies from the world’s point of view. We live and die in a long chain of humanity but there is not much that anyone will remember of us as individuals. At the same time, without us, future generations will not be born and the legacy of the past will not be preserved. We are part of a great cloud of witnesses, a long chain of faithful people who have lived for God in the place where he put them. Even if we know little about them we owe them a great debt of gratitude for their loyalty and perseverance when they had little or nothing to gain from it or to show for it.

What do they tell us about God’s dealings with us?

They tell us that we too are called to be obedient and to keep the faith we have inherited, passing it on undiminished to the next generation. They tell us that there is a purpose in our calling that goes beyond ourselves. Even if we are not glorified and leave little for posterity to remember us by, we shall nevertheless have made an indispensable contribution to the purposes of God in human history.