Under Pressure
Written by Nicholas T. Batzig |
Wednesday, December 1, 2021
If we are in the habit of thanking God for everything that He gives us, we will continue to thank Him! When we rest on God’s word, care about the needs of others, and continually thank God for His provisions, we can remain calm in the midst of the greatest trials.
How can I remain calm under pressure? This has to be one of the most significant questions we find ourselves asking throughout our lives. What is the secret to pressing through the challenges and trials of life without fretting or being overwhelmed by constant anxiety? The answer is found—at least in part—in what Luke tells us in Acts 27 about Paul’s experience when he was shipwrecked while a prisoner of the Roman army.
Paul had warned, to no avail, that they were going to suffer a tragic loss (Acts 27:10–12). The centurion who was guarding the apostle rejected Paul’s warning about the turbulent voyage. Instead of acting in frustration, Paul rested on the word of God. An angel had revealed to him that God was going to carry him along in his ministry, so that Paul would ultimately stand before Caesar. The Lord had also promised to protect those who were with Paul (vv.21–26). Paul reminded the soldiers and the others on board the ship, “take courage, men, because I believe God that it will be just the way it was told to me” (v.25). When we rest on the word of God in Scripture, we can confidently go through every circumstance of life in which He places us with a calmness.
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John Witherspoon, Protestant Statesman
Written by Christopher W. Parr |
Wednesday, June 22, 2022
As a Protestant, Witherspoon understood that the sure foundation for a Christian civilization is not an established state church imposing generic morals on a population; it is the presence of actual Christians with converted hearts and minds.Christian Political Action at America’s Founding
Introduction
In October of 1753, John Witherspoon wrote a discernment blog. What the anonymous Ecclesiastical Characteristics lacked in the pugnacity and inaccuracies of today’s discernment blogs, it made up for in its pointed satirical critique of the leaders of his own Church of Scotland (the Kirk). Having been a pastor for eight years in “North Britain,” Witherspoon (1723-1794) was jumping into the fray of denominational and political conflict in a Kirk divided into two warring factions. He was a leader in the Popular party of evangelicals who affirmed the faith of the Westminster Standards and prioritized personal regeneration. His opponents in the Moderate party, who made up Scotland’s theological and philosophical elite, defined Christianity as the pursuit of ethical ideals and rhetorical excellence which could lead their provincial nation into enlightened greatness. These theological battles would prepare Witherspoon for his second career as the president of what would become Princeton University, where he would train many younger American founders including Aaron Burr, Henry Lee, and James Madison. The only minister to sign the Declaration of Independence, he set forth a uniquely Protestant understanding of the American Revolution, insisting on personal regeneration for the war’s success and the new nation’s public virtue.
The same Moderate theologians with whom Witherspoon battled throughout his ministerial career led the burgeoning Scottish Enlightenment. Many adopted the views of Francis Hutcheson, who proposed an enlightened natural law theory in which all humans possess a pre-rational moral sense which guides them toward virtue and sociability. In such a system, natural depravity and the need for individual regeneration take a backseat to societal improvement through cultural refinement. Rather than trusting in the common morality of all people to cultivate civic cohesion, Witherspoon and his compatriots in the Kirk preserved a heritage of confessional Calvinism which reached back to the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant. Because of the ravaging moral effects of human depravity, Witherspoon insisted, moral improvement was not sufficient to bring about Scottish national flourishing; regeneration of human hearts by the Holy Spirit was essential.
Witherspoon’s first career as a pastor raises the question as to why ehe used the terminology and categories of Scottish Enlightenment philosophers (including Hutcheson) as a part of his teaching and political advocacy. Examining Witherspoon’s corpus of undergraduate lecture notes, sermons, and congressional addresses, most recent scholarship has posited that Witherspoon underwent a “sea change” after his move to America. Historians such as Mark Noll, Douglas Sloan, and Jeffry Morrison previously asserted that Witherspoon served as a transmitter of a positive view of man’s nature and capacity for moral action, and that this was significant in paving the way for American independence.
Gideon Mailer’s John Witherspoon’s American Revolution, published in 2017, questions the decades-long assumption that Witherspoon was “a simple conduit for enlightened sensibility in America.”1 An Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, Mailer is an accomplished historian of the early modern Atlantic World. In an extensive study of both Witherspoon’s writings and his intellectual and political contexts on both sides of the Atlantic, he proposes that Witherspoon continued to believe in the necessity of personal conversion for Christian faith and civic virtue throughout his time at Princeton, eventually applying his reformed orthodoxy to the political debates surrounding the American Revolution.
Having experienced Parliament’s overreach in Scottish church life, Witherspoon worried, Mailer writes, “that the civic realm would impose barriers to the Kirk’s encouragement of spiritual salvation” (4). Later, perceiving the potential turmoil of the American Revolution, Witherspoon persisted in his conclusion that Hutcheson’s sensory natural law was insufficient to preserve American democracy’s moral convictions: personal faith in Christ was required. By examining the theological currents in Scottish and American Presbyterianism, as well as the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, Mailer presents a Witherspoon who is concerned for theological fidelity in a New World more open to the spread of the gospel than an Old one paralyzed by theological controversies and political obstacles.
Witherspoon the Enlightened Philosopher?
In chapters on the various intellectual challenges that Witherspoon faced, Mailer attempts to demonstrate how Presbyterian orthodoxy influenced his positions. While Chapter 1 and part of Chapter 2 lay a groundwork describing the state of the Kirk in the mid-eighteenth century, the book’s title indicates its American-centeredness. In his adopted country, Witherspoon sought to transform Princeton into a modern institution that could contribute to a developing political theology for the new nation. In both of these, Mailer convincingly demonstrates that Witherspoon lost none of his Scottish confessional fervor. The perceived conflict between the philosophical idealism of Jonathan Edwards, Princeton’s president ten years prior, and Witherspoon’s affinity for Thomas Reid’s common sense realism has long confounded scholars. But Mailer suggests that Witherspoon’s realism aided his theological vocabulary: “a philosophical language that focused on sentiments and perception helped Witherspoon explain how individuals might come to terms with their sin through a passionate religious conversion and how a new sense of revealed morality could be implanted through grace in the regenerated heart” (147). While Edwards and Witherspoon disagreed on the philosophical principles of realism and idealism, both were theologically committed to the necessity of conversion.
As one of the most prominent religious leaders in colonial America, Witherspoon supported the Revolution with theological caveats not emphasized in either New England Puritanism or Lockean liberalism. Whereas many founders such as Benjamin Franklin used Hutchesonian moral sense theory to defend the superior virtue of the patriots against their British oppressors, Witherspoon maintained that all people, regardless of their nation, are naturally in bondage to sinful depravity. Thus, personal regeneration is essential to beneficial civic religion and public virtue (a note Witherspoon would sound again and again throughout his American sermons and political writings).
Further, just as he disliked Parliament’s meddling in the ecclesial affairs of his native Scotland, he supported the provincial desire of Americans to live apart from heavy-handed British rule, which he saw as limiting the free spread of Christian evangelism. After the 1707 Act of Union, which brought Scotland under the control of the British Parliament, ministerial appointments would be made by the local nobility who tended to prefer Moderate, enlightened ministers in their parishes. For this reason Witherspoon would spend much of his time in Scotland challenging the “patronage controversy,” and the way it prevented the Kirk from focusing on the important work of evangelism.
Witherspoon Among the Moderates
Throughout the book, Mailer explains the historical context behind the era, places, and people which influenced Witherspoon. While these diversions are occasionally drawn out, they almost always provide essential nuances to Witherspoon’s intellectual influences, which other works do not adequately acknowledge. Chapters 1 and 2, “Augustinian Piety in Witherspoon’s Scotland” and “Kirk Divisions and American Prospects at Midcentury,” explain how an orthodox, popular minister like Witherspoon interacted with a Scottish intellectual culture which was rapidly changing during the Enlightenment.
Most twentieth century treatments of Witherspoon’s moral philosophy merely highlight the similarity between his statements in Lectures on Moral Philosophy, delivered at Princeton, and ideas developed by Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, and other Moderate philosophers. However, John Witherspoon’s American Revolution begins by noting the great diversity in Scottish higher education when Witherspoon was a student at the University of Edinburgh. Future Moderate ministers like Alexander Carlyle, a classmate and future fierce opponent of Witherspoon, would claim years later that his friend had abandoned the Moderate, refined education they received. However, Mailer notes that the Augustinian theology of the Westminster Standards, with its skeptical view of human nature, maintained a strong hold on some Scottish divines well into the eighteenth century. Samuel Rutherford’s regency a century earlier and the transmission of Reformed scholastics like Francis Turretin and Benedict Pictet through Dutch professors into Scotland ensured continuity with continental Reformed convictions.
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We Are Both Job and Job’s Friends
The book of Job is difficult to understand and tiring to get through. But some of its profoundest lessons are very simple. To the extent that we identify with Job, we learn that all God wants from us in a Job-like ordeal is to stick with him—just don’t give up on God. He’s not angry with us or trying to teach us a lesson. We only wait for his comforting presence (Job 42:5) and restoring mercies (Job 42:10). The ordeal will do its purifying work on its own. And to whatever extent we identify with the friends, we are instructed to repent of our tendency to pontificate, to solve someone’s problems for them, to blame them when their lives collapse.
One important question in reading any biblical text is who you, as a reader, identify with. This is easier for some texts than for others, of course. In Genesis, for example, it is not difficult to identify with the patriarchs as they struggle and endure in trusting God’s promises to bless them and redeem creation. But who do we identify with in the book of Job? Job’s spirituality and level of blessing are so impressive (Job 1:1–4) that probably few readers would think themselves equal to Job—and his suffering is so extreme, so nightmarish, that few would want to. On the other hand, the friends are so bombastic, tiresome, and quick to condemn Job that probably most of us think I hope I’m not like that!
Strange as it might sound, however, I think we are meant to identify both with Job and his friends. You can see this in several ways. With regard to Job, the first chapter of the book portrays Job-like suffering as something every saint will have to go through at some point. You can see this in the background of the conversation between the Almighty and the Accuser in Job 1:6–12,; Job 2:1–6. Comparing these passages to chapters like 1 Kings 22, Isaiah 6, and Revelation 4–5, it is easier to see that the Bible portrays the heavenly throne room as one where the Sovereign sits on his throne, receiving reports from his angelic servants, and making policy decisions as he rules creation (I think that’s in the background of the sons of God “presenting themselves” before God in Job 1:6). This means that the decision God makes about Job—allowing the Accuser to ruin his life, even though Job has done nothing to deserve it—reflects his policies for the whole world. The first chapter of Job is showing us that God’s normal policy with his saints is generosity both in spiritual blessings and earthly ones (Job 1:1–4)—but that God reserves the right to interrupt that policy in order to prove the reality and sincerity of our relationship with him.
Sobering as it is to consider, it must be so. After all, the issue of whether a Christian loves God for God’s sake, irrespective of what secondary blessings we gain or lose in our earthly lives (Job 1:9), is deeply relevant to every Christian. In a way, it is the issue of our lives. If we love God for some reason external to himself, we’ll be bored in heaven. I don’t think the book of Job is implying that our suffering will be as extreme as Job’s (having to bury all of our children, sick to the point of death, financially ruined, all in one day). But God will sometimes allow an ordeal which has a Job-like quality. Because God loves us and is fitting our souls for eternity, he will sometimes put us in the position of having every earthly reason to give up on him as a way of purifying our motives for being a Christian in the first place. In other words, probably every Christian will, at some point, find themselves echoing the question of Job’s wife in Job 2:9: Why hold on to integrity with God when all I get is pain? And through the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit, the only answer possible in that situation will come to us: God, and God alone.
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An Important Reminder About Death
What does that make death for the saved person? Death is 100% not your enemy. There is no fear in death. When you die, you simply pass from this life to the next. As Dr. Bob Smith used to teach: Death is a door from here on earth to God’s presence in heaven.
This past week I have had the privilege of being with Bill and Mary Ann Piatt and others at a conference in Mobridge, South Dakota. At that conference, I spoke about serving those who have a medical illness. In those notes, I refer to victory from the illness. My friend, Dr. Bob Smith, initially talked me through this concept. Essentially, there are only two types of victory from illness: either you heal from the illness or you die from the illness. Only two options. But, in both instances, you get victory.
While at the conference, I have also been praying for a friend who was in the hospital in Springfield. Many of his family, friends, and acquaintances have been praying for him to get victory from his illness. The medical doctors performed surgery. Even before the surgery, the doctors explained the risky nature of it and the potential of his not living as a result of it. The surgery itself was a success. However, the surgery did not provide my friend victory from his illness; death did. In the early hours of the morning today, my friend experienced victory from the illness. You might think, “He succumbed to the illness; that is not victory.” But, no friend, not for the Christian. He experienced victory in death.
What About Death?For the person who has placed his or her faith in the forgiveness of sin by God through Jesus Christ, death loses its fear and power. The Apostle Paul writes:
“O Death, where is your sting?O Hades, where is your victory?”The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
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