Hamilton Family Worship

Recently I’ve been exposed to a number of families who do “Family Worship.” When I first heard of this, I was both intimidated and uninterested. I had little desire to try to replicate what I think of as a worship service (prayers, hymns, sermon, etc.) on a nightly basis at home with my family. Don’t get me wrong, I love prayers, hymns, and sermons, but it seems like an awful lot to pull together on a nightly basis.

As I’ve reflected on this, however, I think this is probably not what my friends mean when they speak of “Family Worship.” Actually, I’m not sure what they mean, but I thought I would describe what we do at our house. This is intended to be suggestive for anyone interested in this type of thing (in other words, I’m not being prescriptive), and if you have something that you do differently with your family or that you think we would benefit from I would love to know about it.

Disclaimer: We are new at parenting, and we make no claim to having it all figured out. We have a 2 year old and a 3 week old, and I pray that the Lord will give them mercy and overcome the errors and deficiencies of their Dad (their Mom doesn’t have any errors and deficiencies). Also, these things don’t happen every day. Sometimes I leave in the morning before the kids get out of bed. Sometimes we're lazy. Sometimes I’m not home for dinner. Sometimes we have family in town or friends over. Sometimes I’m out of town, etc.

When we rise up:
We sometimes read a collect (i.e., a prayer) from either the Book of Common Prayer or a book called The Collects of Thomas Cranmer, which is a compilation of the prayers Thomas Cranmer wrote for the Book of Common Prayer. The third collect for morning prayer is the one we use when we do this, and it reads as follows:

O Lord our heavenly Father, Almighty and everlasting God, who hast safely brought us to the beginning of this day: Defend us in the same with thy mighty power; and grant that this day we fall into no sin, neither run into any kind of danger; but that all our doings may be ordered by thy governance, to do always that is righteous in thy sight; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

(This basically hasn’t happened since the new baby was born).

As we walk by the way:
Our 2 year old has the answers to the first two questions of The Baptist Catechism memorized, and we’re working on the answer to the third. He doesn’t know what the words mean, but he can memorize them now and one day he’ll understand. I copied the text of the catechism with the Scripture references, pasted it into a word document, and as we move to the next question I paste the text of the Scripture references that go along with the question onto a word document so we can print that question and answer with its verses and hopefully learn the verses too. We have 18 years or so to work on it, and I’m pleased with our progress so far.

At the Lunch Table:
My wife has a stack of pictures of family and friends, and after the meal, she and Jake take up the next photo and pray for the people in the picture (I’m often not around for lunch).

At naptime:
Our two year old loves hymns. If we’re singing one, he can usually surprise us with how much of it he can sing along with us. His favorite song is “How Firm a Foundation,” and he knows almost all the words to it. He also loves “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” and many others. So at naptime we often sing several hymns from the hymnal by the rocking chair next to his bed (he loves to “sing from the red hymdal,” as he calls it).

When I get to put Jake down for his nap I sometimes read the Creed of Athanasius to him. I’m hoping this great Trinitarian Confession will become part of the fabric of his brain, and it’s blessing me as I read it over and over too!

After Dinner:
At then end of our meal I read a portion of the Bible. We’ve read the whole book of Psalms after meals, and soon we’ll finish Hebrews. I usually read 10 to 15 verses. This is a good time for a Bible reading since we’re already all gathered together. Our two year old is used to it now, and so when we finish the meal he says, “Daddy read Bible!”

At Bedtime:
Every night we sing at least one hymn, and when I’m organized and have one picked out, we have a “hymn of the week.” Singing the same hymn every night helps us all memorize the words.

Sometimes if we have time we’ll read the Big Picture Story Bible before we sing.

Every night when we finish everything else we pray the Lord’s Prayer together. Jake knows all the words to this, but he doesn’t always say them all. He loves these routines, and I pray God gives us grace to continue in them. How I hope that my children will bleed Bible, that they will trust the Lord with their whole hearts, and that God will make me faithful to those entrusted to my charge, especially those most dearly and closely entrusted to me, my sweet wife and our boys.

Criswell College and Criswell Theological Review on the Emerging Church

In my opinion, one of the most exciting developments in evangelicalism in recent years has been the presidency of Jerry Johnson at Criswell College. Dr. Johnson seems to have Criswell going in a very positive direction, and I pray that the College will be used powerfully in the reformation that I hope the Lord will bring. May this school train many who are ready to give their lives to and for the Gospel.

One of the main reasons I’m so high on Criswell is that they have one of the clearest thinking scholars in all of evangelicalism in Dr. Denny Burk. Dr. Burk is a dear friend whose insight into both the Bible and the culture I deeply appreciate. If I were a parent sending a child off to college, I would be so happy to have my kid taught by the likes of this man.

Another aspect of the turnaround at Criswell resulting from the Johnson presidency has been the resurrection of the Criswell Theological Review. They have produced timely journals on the Kingdom and the New Perspective, and the most recent issue focuses on the Emerging Church.

May God continue to bless Dr. Johnson and amplify his voice and his ministry, and may Criswell and its ministries indeed play a major part in an awakening in the Dallas area. May many trust Jesus to the glory of God!

President of ETS Denied Tenure at Baylor

Justin Taylor summarizes Francis Beckwith's accomplishments, and First Things has an extensive reflection by Joseph Bottom. Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News suspects that Beckwith's openly conservative stance "is what did him in."

I guess the president of the Evangelical Theological Society has no place at Baylor. I guess Baylor has pretty well staked out its territory, and with Roger Olson's recent blast against inerrancy, it doesn't look like evangelical ground.

American, This Man Gave His Life for Your Freedom

Jesus died to justify those who would trust him, and Paul Smith died to preserve freedom in this land. Jesus deserves our worship and our lifelong obedience. Paul Smith deserves our honor, and we should pray for his wife, who is now a widow, and his kids, who will never again feel their earthly father's embrace. You will want to read the Wall Street Journal’s account of how Paul Smith gave his life for you here, and may we praise God, trust Jesus, and live in a way that makes this man’s death worthwhile.

Why is the church in America Dying?

Thom Rainer gives a summary of his findings here. The gist of it is that the church in the USA is not reproducing itself, and, if things continue as they are, Christianity in America will go the way of Christianity in Europe, where it’s all but gone.

Here’s a summary:

1. Churches are doctrinally ineffective.
2. Church leaders are less evangelistic—half the pastors Rainer surveyed had made no evangelistic efforts for 6 months.
3. The minor distractions (such as budgets and furniture) are effective in distracting us from major tasks, like evangelism and discipleship.

Read the whole thing here.

What we need is another great awakening. We need a move of God’s Spirit like what we see in the book of Jonah, where in spite of his sinfulness the man of God is forced to minister to the Ninevites. May God use many of us like Jonah, who in spite of his disobedience was heard first by the sailors, who feared Yahweh and sacrificed to him in response to Jonah’s message (Jon 1:16). And then on his arrival in Nineveh, Jonah’s proclamation results in everyone repenting (3:5), and the king and his great ones even proclaim a fast (3:6–9): “Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish” (3:9).

O God, please do again in our day what you did in Jonah’s: force the one who speaks your word to proclaim it! And please, Lord, let not the word fall on deaf ears, let not those who speak your word meet the response found by Jeremiah. O God, in mercy, send your Spirit and kindly lead many to repentance, for the glory of your name and the good of these people. O God, please pity Houston like you pitied Nineveh (Jon 4:11), for like them, we don’t know our right hand from our left and there is much cattle!.

A Tribute to John Hannah, and where to find him on the web

There was a time in my life when I had doubts about whether orthodox Christianity was derived exegetically from the Bible or illegitimately forced on a Bible that meant to communicate no such system. I had spent too much time around some “exegetes” who claimed that they were “just interpreting the Bible.” As they went about “just interpreting the Bible,” they scorned Systematic Theology, and some of them even flirted with open theism. God mightily used two men named John at that time of my life—one John is a first class exegete who also loves theology (John Piper); and the other John is a church historian whose love for Christ rings all through the profound thoughts expressed as he teaches. Walking into Dr. John Hannah’s classroom in those days when the doubts of some were giving me pause was like stepping out of shifting sand onto solid rock, and the rock was Christ.

If you’ve never met Dr. Hannah, you can get a taste of his ministry online here (http://djchuang.com/hannah/), where you can read snippets of transcribed lectures and listen to some sermons.

I must also mention that the semester in which Dr. Hannah so profoundly helped me was not a semester in which I was actually enrolled in one of his courses. I had taken all the Church History classes I needed, but because of the lingering questions in my mind I decided to audit Dr. Hannah’s course on the History of Doctrine. The class, however, was full. All the seats were taken. So I went to the administration and asked if the class could be moved to a bigger room. No. So I went to Dr. Hannah and asked if I could sit on the floor, and, don’t tell the fire department, he gave me permission. So for half the semester I showed up for a class I didn’t need for a degree to hear lectures I needed for my soul. I didn’t stop going half-way through the semester, but enough other students either dropped the class or stopped attending to allow me to have an actual chair to sit on.

Praise God for John Hannah.

The Future of Baptist Theology according to Timothy George

Timothy George ranks with Al Mohler as one of the SBC’s leading intellectuals. In a volume co-edited with David Dockery titled, Theologians of the Baptist Tradition, George writes the opening essay entitled “The Future of Baptist Theology.” The whole thing is worth reading, and I give you these snippets to whet your appetite:

“What are the benchmarks for shaping Baptist theological identity in the new world of the third millennium? Rather than put forth subtle speculations or a new methodology, I propose that we look again at five classic principles drawn from the wider Baptist heritage. These five affirmations form a cluster of convictions that have seen us through turbulent storms in the past. They are worthy anchors for us to cast into the sea of postmodernity as we seek not merely to weather the storm but to sail with confidence into the future God has prepared for us” (p. 5).

The “Identity Markers” George then identifies are as follows (he writes more on each of these points than I will quote—what I transcribe is just to give the flavor, from pp. 5–10):

1. Orthodox Convictions. “Baptists are orthodox Christians who stand in continuity with the dogmatic consensus of the early church on matters such as the scope of Holy Scripture (canon), the doctrine of God (Trinity), and the person and work of Jesus Christ (Christology).”

2. Evangelical Heritage. “Baptists are evangelical Christians who affirm with Martin Luther and John Calvin both the formal and material principles of the Reformation: Scripture alone and justification by faith alone.”

3. Reformed Perspective. “Despite a persistent Arminian strain within Baptist life, for much of our history most Baptists adhered faithfully to the doctrines of grace as set forth in Pauline-Augustinian-Reformed theology. . . . Baptists would do well to connect again with the ideas that inform the theology of such great heroes of the past as John Bunyan, Roger Williams, Andrew Fuller, Adoniram Judson, Luther Rice, and Charles Haddon Spurgeon.”

4. Baptist Distinctives. “One of the most important contributions that Baptists have made to the wider life of the church is the recovery of the early church practice of baptism as an adult rite of initiation signifying a committed participation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In many contemporary Baptist settings, however, baptism is in danger of being divorced from the context of a decisive life commitment. . . . We must also guard against a minimalist understanding of the Lord’s Supper. . .”

5. Confessional Context. “Baptists have historically approved and circulated confessions of faith for a threefold purpose: as an expression of our religious liberty, as a statement of our theological convictions, and as a witness of the truths we hold in sacred trust.”

Timothy George and the SBC

Would that Timothy George’s voice would be heard loud and clear in these days. His recent piece in First Things titled “Evangelicals and Others” is a must read for any Southern Baptist in these troubled days. Can we hold tenaciously to our theological positions while maintaining a cooperative ecumenism? George suggests that we can learn how to do just this from our Southern Baptist forbears such as Carl F. H. Henry and W. A. Criswell. Warning us against those who follow the father of Landmarkism, J. R. Graves, George writes,

“But I suggest that ecumenism is a central portion—a core concern—of the evangelical faith and the evangelical church. Such a vision is rooted in the holy scriptures, in the great tradition, in the deepest insights of the Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century, in the renewal impulses of the Spirit-anointed awakenings, and, yes, even the sectarian roots of the movement shaped by the likes of Carl McIntyre, Carl F.H. Henry, and W.A. Criswell.”

The whole piece is worth reading. May the tribe of Timothy George increase, and may we pursue the unity for which Jesus prayed.

The OT in Light of Progressive Revelation: The Epistle of Barnabas

The Epistle of Barnabas is not part of the New Testament canon, though it was included in Codex Sinaiticus and Origen referred to it as a catholic epistle! Eusebius and Jerome, however, categorized it as a disputed writing and it was classed with the apocrypha.

Modern scholars label it “anonymous,” even though early church tradition (Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Jerome, Serapion of Thmuys, Codex Sinaiticus) attributes it to “Barnabas.” This attribution, along with its inclusion in Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Hierosolymitanus, and Codex Corbeiensis, appears to point to a belief that the Barnabas described in the book of Acts is the Barnabas in view. Modern scholars cite internal evidence against the view that Barnabas wrote the epistle, but it seems to me that this internal evidence is not altogether conclusive. As for it being “anonymous,” it is “anonymous” in the same way that the Gospels are “anonymous,” and I think Martin Hengel has shown pretty conclusively that these Gospels never would have been circulated without a title, nor would the titles of the Gospels be so uniform if they were not original (or at least practically original) to the first production of the respective Gospels. So, I think it is as plausible as not that the document we know as The Epistle of Barnabas was written by the sometime companion of Paul in Acts.

All these prefatory comments prepare the way for what I am about to say about the way that Barnabas cites the “Let us make man in our image” statement in Genesis 1:26–28. Twice in the Epistle of Barnabas, at 5:5 and at 6:12, the “let us” statements are cited as words spoken by the Father to the Son.

Barnabas 5:5
There is yet this also, my brethren; if the Lord endured to suffer
for our souls, though He was Lord of the whole world, unto whom God
said from the foundation of the world, Let us make man after our
image and likeness, how then did He endure to suffer at the hand
of men?

Barnabas 6:12
For the scripture saith concerning us, how He saith to the Son; Let
us make man after our image and after our likeness, and let them
rule over the beasts of the earth and the fowls of the heaven and
the fishes of the sea. And the Lord said when He saw the fair
creation of us men; Increase and multiply and fill the earth.
These words refer to the Son.

I have heard people I love and respect describe the first person plurals here as “plurals of majesty,” and this is a valid category in Hebrew grammar (at least it’s in GKC). But I wonder if what we have in Barnabas 5:5 and 6:12 doesn’t fall nicely in line with early Christian “wisdom Christology”—“wisdom” pointing to God’s work in creation (cf. Prov 8:22–31), and “wisdom Christology” pointing to the consistent teaching of the NT that God created through the Son (see, e.g., John 1:3; Col 1:16; Heb 1:2).

If this is correct, then just as John, Paul, and the author of Hebrews speak of Jesus as the agent of creation, the Epistle of Barnabas speaks of Jesus as active in creation and reads Genesis 1 in a way that comports with early Christian wisdom Christology.

In the light of progressive revelation, this early Christian writing, perhaps written in the first century (but probably no later than AD 135), perhaps written by a companion of Paul, reads the words of Genesis, “Let us make man in our image,” as words spoken by the Father to the Son. I have no quarrel with such a reading.

Spurgeon on Elders

I recently bought Spurgeon's Autobiography and hope to read it soon, and that prompted me to look up this Spurgeon quote from Mark Dever's Baptists and Elders:

“To our minds, the Scripture seems very explicit as to how this Church should be ordered. We believe that every Church member should have equal rights and privileges; that there is no power in Church officers to execute anything unless they have the full authorization of the members of the Church. We believe, however, that the Church should choose its pastor, and having chosen him, that they should love him and respect him for his work’s sake; that with him should be associated the deacons of the Church to take the oversight of pecuniary matters; and the elders of the Church to assist in all the works of the pastorate in the fear of God, being overseers of the flock. Such a Church we believe to be scripturally ordered; and if it abide in the faith, rooted, and grounded, and settled, such a Church may expect the benediction of heaven, and so it shall become the pillar and ground of the truth.” Spurgeon, “The Church Conservative and Aggressive” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, volume 7, pp. 658-659.

Yeah! What he said!