If all people sin—even Joseph—there are no great people. Some may object that Joseph and others like him are great by comparison. That is, they are greater than Haman or the Pharisees. This is a faulty argument. It is no more logical to say that a rotten apple is fresh just because it is less rotten than another apple. A less rotten apple is still rotten. Its lesser degree of depravity does not make it fresh. In the same way, Joseph’s lesser degree of sinfulness does not make him great.

Paul Washer, the great man of God, often says, “There is no such thing as a great man of God, only weak, pitiful, faithless men of a great and merciful God.” Is he right? Before we seek to answer that question from a biblical perspective, we should recognize the importance of the question. This question is important because, if true, it releases us from an immense burden. Many, many people feel that they need to do “great” things for Christ if their lives are to matter.No one could make a legitimate argument that people cannot do things that are great for God. The Apostle Paul’s letters are great. Augustine’s and Aquinas’s works are great. The martyrdoms of the Reformation were great acts of love for God’s truth. These are great things, but are the people great? It would seem necessary to say that people are great if they can do great things. Is it not best to say Babe Ruth was a great baseball player, rather than, “Babe Ruth did great things on the baseball diamond”? Would not we do well to say, “The Apostle Paul was a great man of God” rather than, “The Apostle Paul did great things”?
The Apostle Paul helps us understand an important distinction when he says, “I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me” (1 Cor 15:10b). Paul does acknowledge the greatness of his work ethic. But, he does not attribute the greatness to himself. In this way, we see that Paul’s greatness was not really Paul’s. This statement strongly refutes the notion that there can be great people because it also refutes the idea that people can do great things in and of themselves.
If the greatness of Paul’s actions (which were genuinely great) are actually gifts from God, it will make no sense to make the larger statement, “Paul was a great man.” Maybe we would have an argument if Paul’s great actions were really a result of something he was able to muster up. But he rejects that notion. He says, on the contrary, “I know that nothing good dwells in me” (Rom 7:18b). If nothing good dwells in Paul, yet he was able to do good things, the only logical conclusion is that those things arose from Someone else.
If that is true, we have no biblical grounds to say, “Paul was a great man,” properly speaking. Of course, we can mean that in the sense that Paul had extremely admirable characteristics, like the love of God, zeal for truth, and willingness to sacrifice. But, we must remember, all of those things did not come from Paul’s flesh (which has nothing good), but they came from God’s grace. If we want to be precise with our language, therefore, we should say, “Paul was a man who God greatly used.” Paul leaves us no room to describe him in any other way. If his work ethic was not from him but God’s grace, how much more his works? If his works were from God’s grace, how much more him?
This concept is borne out in the rest of Scripture. We are hard-pressed to find any true heroes in the Bible. The “greatest men” in the Bible are often people who have committed adultery and murder (Paul and David, for example)! Great men do not kill innocent people and cheat on their wives. Though we may want to describe David as the great king of Israel or Paul as the great Apostle, this would be to describe them in ways that run contrary to Scripture. Indeed, this would run contrary to David and Paul’s self-descriptions (Ps 51 and Rom 7)!
What about other “great men”? Joseph is commonly referred to as the least sinful good guy in the Bible. Abraham was a liar, Moses was cowardly and angry, we heard about David, and right up through the Apostles, all the key figures in the Bible display radically not-great characteristics. But Joseph seems to be an exception. Was Joseph a great man?
Not quite. First of all, it is very likely that his presentation of his dream to his brothers was an act of prideful boasting. If God gave you a dream that you would rule over your siblings or coworkers, you probably would not tell them, at least not right away.
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We should never glory in trials and persecutions, as though these were good things–they are not, especially when others commit acts of evil toward us, or belittle us because of our faith in Christ, or mock us because we refuse to indulge the sinful flesh as they do. Rather, in the midst of trials, we give glory to God, because Jesus has suffered for us and in our place to save us from our sins.

Peter’s Desire to Comfort His Readers
Peter’s purpose in writing this epistle is to comfort persecuted Christians in Asia Minor, many of whom who have been displaced from their homes because of a decree from the Roman emperor Claudius. Peter reminds them that despite their struggles, in God’s eyes, they are elect exiles, citizens of heaven, and when worshiping together they compose God’s spiritual house (the church), even as they sojourn upon the earth until the day of final judgment when God will dispense his covenant blessings and curses.
Through a lengthy series of imperatives (commands), Peter told these struggling Christians how they are to differentiate themselves from the Greco-Roman pagans around them–through their profession of faith in the Triune God who sent his Son to die for his people’s sins, and through their honorable conduct before the pagans. Christians are to think and live as God’s people. They must live a life of self control, in contrast to their pagan neighbors who live to indulge every urge of the sinful flesh.
But even if Christians do all of the things Peter exhorts them to do, they should not be surprised if their struggles continue and the persecution they face remains intense. As Peter has stated in verse 4 of chapter 4, the pagans “are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you.” Evil-doers want nothing more than for professing Christians to join them in their self-indulgence. Having made this point in the first part of the chapter, Peter describes their troubles as a fiery trial, and a time of judgment. Yet, this is also a time in which God’s purposes will be realized, and through which these struggling Christians will grow in their faith.
We Should Not be Surprised by Trials
We conclude our time in chapter 4, as Peter acknowledges that his readers and hearers have been through very difficult times. So much so, that in verse 12, Peter writes, “beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.” Some commentators take Peter’s statement as a warning of an impending calamity, and that extending this warning is the reason why Peter sends this letter to Christians of the Diaspora in Asia Minor [1]. On this reading, for those hearing/reading Peter’s letter, things have been bad, but they are about to get a whole lot worse. Peter is understood to be writing to warn them in advance so that his readers and hearers can prepare themselves for what is about to come.
Most commentators take the view–I think correctly–that verse 12 of chapter 4 begins a new section of the letter in which Peter is not warning of an impending trial, but is instead making the point that Christians must realize that professing faith in Christ, as they have been doing in the midst of a pagan culture, is itself a fiery trial [2]. In fact, Peter made this point clear back in chapter 1 vv. 6-8 when he wrote, “for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory.”
The Christians to whom Peter is writing are being put to the test. They are undergoing a fiery trial–yet a trial with an important purpose. The time of trial is difficult in itself, but such trials are much worse if they are random with no discernible purpose to them. Peter’s point is to remind the Christians of Asia Minor that the fiery trial they are currently experiencing has a purpose, and that keeping this in mind will help them endure their trying circumstances.
Trials Are Part of God’s Purpose for His People
Peter knows that Christians who expect the Christian life to be a bed of roses, and one in which everyone will love them and think it wonderful that they are believers in Jesus Christ, are being utterly naive. Being a Christian while living among the pagans is a fiery trial in its own right. As Peter has already stated, God allows these trials to test us, so as to refine our faith like a metal worker uses a furnace to purify and strengthen the metals with which he works. Therefore the trials facing the Christians of the Diaspora are not random acts of a universe out of control. Rather, these trials are sent by God (in the sense of God allowing them), to test these Christian’s faith, and to refine them to even greater purity (holiness). Christians should keep in mind that all such trials have a purpose.
This is why Peter can tell his readers that Christians should “not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.” There is no prosperity gospel taught by the Apostle Peter. Peter is convinced of the reality that suffering and trials are often part of life in a fallen world. As our Savior endured his trial, so must we.
Although no one wants to suffer–and Peter is not teaching a form of masochism (finding joy in pain and suffering), or the Eastern Orthodox notion that we are saved from our sins to the degree we suffer and are purified from them in this life (as in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov)–suffering is one of the means God uses to strengthen our faith. Let me put it this way. Do you tend to seek God more when times are good, or when things go bad? Do you tend to pray more during times of trial or uncertainty, or in good times? God is not being mean to us, or punishing us, when he allows us to suffer and endure trials. Because God is with us in such trials, he uses them to draw us to himself, and so that we learn over the course of our lives to trust him more and more for those promises which we cannot see. The consequence from enduring these trials is that we will appreciate the good times and blessings and give thanks for them with the same fervor with which we seek God when things go wrong. This is how trials strengthen faith and draw us close to God.
Peter is not alone in using language of fiery trial. John warns of the fiery trials to come upon Babylon (Rome) in Revelation 18. There the image of a fiery trial is one of God’s judgment upon unbelievers. But Peter instead is using the metaphor as in Proverbs 27:21, where we read, “the crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold, and a man is tested by his praise.” The refining fire draws out the dross and purifies us from the guilt and power of sin. This process increases our praise for God. The trials these Christians were experiencing were a refining process which reveals the genuineness of their faith and should not be seen as something unexpected. Christians know that such things will come because we live in a fallen world, and we should prepare for them well in advance.
Sharing in Christ’s Suffering
There is also another consequence of such trials. As Charles Cranfield reminds us, “those whose Christianity is not real vanish from the ranks at the approach of danger.”[3] This fact, no doubt, explains the decline in the vitality, numbers, and theological commitment among American evangelicals, now that American culture is increasingly secularized and Christians are losing some of our privileged status. Those who identify themselves as Christians, but who are truly not, will drop out quickly when they first encounter even a hint of persecution, or when someone criticizes them for their Christian beliefs.
But since Christians are believers in Jesus, who himself experienced suffering unto death upon the cross before being raised to glory on Easter Sunday, Christians cannot expect to follow a different path from that of their master. What is more, the degree to which we share in his suffering, is the degree to which he shares in ours [4]. This is why Peter can exhort his readers in verse 13, “but rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.” Here, the critical question is, “what does it mean to share in Christ’s suffering?” Throughout the New Testament, the phrase the “sufferings of Christ” refers to Jesus’ entire life–from the moment of his miraculous conception in the womb of the virgin until the moment of his death upon the cross. Because it is Jesus’ suffering which saves us from the guilt and power of sin, his suffering is said to be once for all. This is what theologians mean when speaking of Christ’s state of humiliation. Of course, we do not share in Christ’s redemptive work, except in the sense that because we are in union with Christ through faith, we share in the sense of receiving all of his saving benefits.
But there is a profound sense then that we share in Christ’s suffering because we share in his humiliation. If Jesus was hated because he was without sin in a world of sinners, we can expect the same treatment when we profess Jesus as Lord and trust in his suffering to save us from our sins. The irony is that Jesus encountered far more opposition at first from the self-righteous Jewish religious leaders than he did from the Jewish people. Yet, many of the people too eventually turned on Jesus when they realized that he had not come to deliver them from their hated Roman occupiers, whose soldiers were billeted adjacent to the Jerusalem temple and were constantly seen throughout the city and the nation.
Caesar Is Not A God
In the situation in which Peter’s audience finds itself–Greco-Roman paganism of Asia Minor–Christians are distrusted by the political authorities because they would not worship Caesar as a god, nor would they participate in the worship of the pantheon of gods, which dominated Greco-Roman life.
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Written by Craig A. Carter |
Monday, October 18, 2021
The biggest obstacle to a recovery of confessional Protestant faith today is that, as moderns, we are cut off from our heritage by the philosophical naturalist metaphysics that we have unconsciously and uncritically absorbed from our environment. We desperately need to step outside of modernity long enough to perceive its weaknesses and limitations. But we only absorb contemporary media and read recently-published books and we rarely encounter premodern thought. Even more rarely do we encounter premodern thought that is profound and deep. Perhaps stepping into a Gothic cathedral or listening to Handel’s Messiah evokes that same longing for beauty and truth that we sense in Scripture on the rare occasion that we meditate on it without distraction.

Protestantism has been in crisis mode since the early nineteenth century. The effects of the Enlightenment began to affect Protestant theology in the eighteenth century, but after Kant, knowledge of God became increasingly problematic and Christianity, in general, began to pall as a result of the philosophical naturalism that settled over Western culture like a blanket snuffing out faith. This trend accelerated after the Darwinian revolution in the mid-century and Protestantism was most affected. The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the result.
Another Religion Altogether
Protestant liberal theology was a desperate attempt to save as much Christian content as possible from what Walter Lippmann would later term “the acids of modernity.” The liberal project involved restating Christianity within the constraints of modern metaphysics and modern metaphysics was essentially the rejection of the broadly Platonist metaphysics that had formed the mainstream of the Western philosophical tradition for well over 2000 years.
As the philosopher Lloyd Gerson has demonstrated with great scholarship in a series of books, the main alternative to Platonism historically has been philosophical naturalism and, in the nineteenth century, philosophical naturalism triumphed decisively over Platonism. This was the context in which liberal theology attempted to preserve at least some elements of the Bible and theology. Even though many Christian words such as “sin” and “redemption” were retained, their meaning was dramatically changed. The definitive judgment of the failure of the liberal project was pronounced by J. Gresham Machen in 1923 when he said that liberalism is not Christianity, but another religion altogether.
From Fundamentalism on through the period of Neo-orthodoxy to the rise of Evangelicalism, the search for a Biblical and orthodox expression of Christianity has been intense. If liberal theology is no answer, what is to be done? If modernity excludes Christian orthodoxy how can we live in the modern world as Christians?
What it Means to be Protestant
Our problem today is that we do not understand the Protestant confessions and so we do not really understand what it means to be Protestants. We believe that the Reformation recovered biblical teaching after centuries of decline in the late Medieval Roman church but we cannot give an account of how the content of the confessions expresses biblical truth. Contemporary Evangelicals are not really Protestants; for most of them, Protestantism is a movement in history.
That in turn means that the great Evangelical movement in the Anglo-Saxon, trans-Atlantic world is cut off from its own heritage. Some of us may read John Calvin and John Owen occasionally, but we do not comprehend them on certain points and much of their depth escapes us. We do not grasp what some have termed “reformed catholicity.” In what sense are we in communion with Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas? We cannot say.
Soft Theistic Mutualism
If you doubt me, consider the sad decline in the doctrine of God that we have seen over the past 50 years as documented in James Dolezal’s little book, All That is in God (Reformation Heritage Books, 2017). There Dolezal shows that “soft theistic mutualism,” a view of God in which God is in time and affects and changes the world and the world, in turn, affects and changes God. This is essentially a pagan, mythological understanding of God and yet it has wormed its way into otherwise orthodox and evangelical writers. This is astonishing!
It indicates that something very deep and fundamental is malfunctioning in contemporary theology and the danger is that this view of God will – if not corrected – metastasize into a spiritual life-threatening cancer in a generation or two. Every confession of the Reformation and post-preformation period, including the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Augsburg Confession, the Westminster Confession and the Second London Confession, teaches that God is immutable and impassible. And none see any contradiction between affirming those attributes of God and simultaneously affirming that God speaks and acts in history to judge and save. Moderns cannot, for the life of them, comprehend how they can be so inconsistent.
Moving Forward
My contention is that conservative Protestant theology today needs to undertake an alternative to the liberal project that is comparable in scope. We need to channel a great deal of time, energy and resources into a project of ressourcement. This French term brought over into English means a return to the classic sources of Christianity including the church fathers, Thomas Aquinas and other forms of premodern faith. Recently, in an encouraging development in the work of a number of theologians, many inspired by John Webster, the project of ressourcement has taken the form of looking back to the post-Reformation, Reformed scholastic tradition.
This movement is growing and spreading among many who find the shallow biblicism and ahistorical forms of evangelical faith that are so common today to be unsatisfying. Scholars like Richard Muller and Carl Trueman have led the way in recovering the riches of seventeenth-century continental and English pastors and theologians who utilized the metaphysics of the Great Tradition to do theology and write and expound the great confessions of Protestantism. We may not understand their philosophical assumptions, but we can see that they took the Bible seriously and wrote doctrinal treatises that need to be taken seriously by believers. CLICK TO TWEET
The biggest obstacle to a recovery of confessional Protestant faith today is that, as moderns, we are cut off from our heritage by the philosophical naturalist metaphysics that we have unconsciously and uncritically absorbed from our environment. We desperately need to step outside of modernity long enough to perceive its weaknesses and limitations. But we only absorb contemporary media and read recently-published books and we rarely encounter premodern thought. Even more rarely do we encounter premodern thought that is profound and deep. Perhaps stepping into a Gothic cathedral or listening to Handel’s Messiah evokes that same longing for beauty and truth that we sense in Scripture on the rare occasion that we meditate on it without distraction. But how do we get from here to there?
One practice John Webster urged on his students was that of reading sympathetically the great texts of the tradition. Even better, he suggested, was the practice of apprenticing ourselves to one of the great masters for a time by seeking to immerse ourselves in their thought. C. S. Lewis pointed out that reading old books is important, not because ancient writers never made mistakes, but because they tended to make different mistakes than our contemporaries do. We can spot those mistakes because they stand out to us, whereas the mistakes we and all our contemporaries commonly make seem like common sense to us.
So what to do? I believe that we need to do whatever it takes to break out of the cave of modernity and breath the free air of the premodern period where philosophical naturalism is not stifling the truth. But how? One way to do it is to engage in the study of ancient philosophical texts so as to be initiated into the great conversation that has gone on between the greatest minds in the Western tradition for 2000 years.
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