England Pastoral/Looking Toward Liberia | SL 2.8 (May 2021)
In this newsletter
- England Pastoral/Looking Toward Liberia
- Work & Ministry Update
- Janeia
- A Moment of Exegetical Euphoria: God's Character and the Triumph of Grace (Exodus 33–34)
- Pray With Us
You can always read this newsletter in your browser.
Springtime in England family tradition: Going to see the baby lambs at Sherbern House.
England Pastoral
At the beginning of April, it had been over a year since we saw any of our family. We meant to be home last November for Thanksgiving, teaching, and conferences. We wanted Meghan's mom, Rebecca, to be here for Janie's birth. But none of that happened.
At long last on April 22, Rebecca ("Grammie") made it to us through a fog of COVID regulations. When our car pulled in the back drive and Rebecca came through the gate into our little back garden, Rue charged out the back door with the biggest smile on her face that I have ever seen. "Grammie!" she half shrieked, a quaver in her voice. She ran down the sidewalk and embraced her and just held on for a few minutes—I think she teared up. I know Meghan and I did. I don't think either one of us expected such a strong response. The last time she saw Grammie she wasn't really even talking.
Just this morning I took Grammie to the airport to fly home. It was a beautiful two-week visit, a welcome and needed break and change of pace for all of us. There still isn't much "to do," but we saw all the beauty that England has to offer in the Spring—brand new baby lambs and the bluebell forests. Meghan and I got to go to dinner/brunch together a couple times (we barely knew what to do with ourselves!) But most of all Rebecca got to reconnect with Rue and build a connection with Willa and Janie. We are thankful.
Monrovia, Libaeria. West Africa (photo credit: trainingleadersinternational.org).
Looking Toward Liberia
Watching Rebecca travel put our future travel plans back on our minds. It was manageable for her to come solo as an adult, but the restrictions will have to change before we're able (financially and logistically) to schlep a family of five with three under four back to the US for a visit. There's a missions analyst named Justin Long, who writes an excellent blog and produces a weekly newsletter "roundup" of global news with relevance to missions (if you want to be globally informed way beyond the toxic American news cycle—highly recommended). He writes,
Many in the West seem to be anticipating ‘the pandemic is [nearly] over.’ But the risks of Covid in less-developed (and ‘less-reached’) places will almost certainly continue for the short-term future, and likely for the medium-term future as well. This will continue to significantly impact mission activity. Link to short article & other links
For example, India's health system is collapsing. The US has banned travel to and from India as of this week. There are mass cremations in parks and patients are being treated two to a hospital bed. I read one estimate that if COVID continues there unchecked, 32 million deaths is a low estimate. Meanwhile, we are feeling smug and impatient because we've got it "under control," but for much of the rest of the world they will just have to ride it out.
This means that long after travel between the UK and USA, for example, becomes less complicated, travel to places like Liberia (where I am supposed to go in November) will be challenging. I am not even sure what to pray for here, but please do pray. Not only does this effect our work, but it will heavily impact missions more broadly. Beyond that many many people are dying, even as we might feel like the threat is overblown.
O God, make speed to save us. O Lord, make haste to help us.
Students at GraceLife Seminary in Monrovia, Liberia (photo credit: trainingleadersinternational.org).
The Work in Liberia
Here's a snapshot of the work Training Leaders International is doing in Liberia, which I hope to be a part of in November. (I cribbed/reworked most of this from the TLI website!)
Monrovia, Liberia is the home to TLI's largest training site. Our national partner, Dyonah Thomas, has been involved with training pastors and church leaders throughout the region long before partnering with us. Dyonah is a rockstar. First time I meet him at the TLI offices in Minneapolis, he was on his way to Columbia University in NYC where he was going to present a special report on faith and Ebola for the United Nations (if my memory serves me right—the engagement was highly prestigious!). The Ebola crisis of 2014-2015 caused a country that was outwardly Christian to seek the Lord in earnest. The result was a massive growth in serious new believers. But they had few trained pastors who could lead, encourage the growth, and plant healthy churches.
Dyonah saw an opportunity to respond by using his church as a base for pastoral training. Since 2016, GraceLife College and Seminary has sought to make theological training available to as many pastors and church leaders as possible, drawing students from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Their mission is to help shape leaders of godly character who are above reproach and have the skills and knowledge necessary to plant and care for gospel-centered churches. The need was clear Over 200 pastors made the need clear when they signed up. But even with the help of TLI, limited resources meant that Dyonah had to restrict initial enrollment to 100 students. Dyonah works hard to bring the highest quality training that he can to the pastors he serves. He offers both informal training (certificate) as well as formal degrees (MDiv), in order to serve pastors in different contexts with different educational backgrounds. TLI supports both programs by providing consulting and coaching for the Liberian leadership as well as supplementary instructors.
The acute need and lack of comparable opportunities in Monrovia means that GraceLife College and Seminary is poised to have a strategic impact in this war-torn and hungry region. I'm looking forward to being involved. See below...
You are Training Pastors to be Faithful to Scripture & Strengthening the Global Church
- Thank you for praying with us for ministry opportunities. I'll be teaching Exegesis of Proverbs for the MDiv students at GraceLife Seminary in Monrovia, Liberia with Training Leaders International in November. I'm truly thankful for this opportunity and eager to get back out there. Please pray for global stability re: COVID and the travel corridors to open responsibly, so that we can pull this off.
- When Scripture Gets Weird: Understanding Agur in Proverbs 30. My article on Proverbs 30 was published on The Gospel Coalition! Thanks again for your help.
- Some articles I wrote for this newsletter are now being translated into French and posted on Sola.org, Quebec's branch of The Gospel Coalition website. I'm really pleased that my writing for you all is able to serve the church more broadly. Massive thanks to my v. good friend, Jacques Boulet, for making this happen.
- My paper proposal, "Wisdom & Prophecy Without Borders: Reading Isaiah 13-14 & Proverbs 30 as massā' (משׂא) Texts," was accepted for the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in November. This is set to take place in San Antonio, TX. Thank you for praying.
- Writing, writing, writing... a lot.
Thank you. Your prayers and support empower everything we do.
Rue looks over a sheep-proof foot bridge at Sherbern House.
Janeia
I'm finally getting around to reading Jane Austen. Fancying myself a literary person this was a glaring omission in my personal reading history (there are many!). Inspired when we named our third daughter Janie, I bought the complete Jane Austen in the gorgeous and surprisingly affordable Everyman's Library editions. These are the kinds of books you want on the shelf in a house where three young ladies will be growing up.
Persuasion in the Everyman's Library edition—highly recommended in any edition.
So far I've listened to this wonderful recording of Persuasion and read Mansfield Park. I thought I'd start with some of the titles where I haven't seen the movie five times. Honestly, I was floored by her wit, clarity of expression, and moral vision.
Austen was not an enemy of passion, but she was an enemy of marriages founded entirely on passion. Austen was not an enemy of wealth, but she was an enemy of marriages contracted for advantage. The best marriages in Austen's novels are marriages of minds and temperament, marriages that make both husband and wife more fully themselves. Compare Austen to the latest "chick flick," and the difference is apparent in an instant (Leithart, 60–61).
That quote is from the theologian Peter Leithart's charming little biography, which I thoroughly enjoyed last weekend. Not only do I enjoy her novels, but I'm fascinated by Austen's place in literary history. She wrote largely for her family, without recourse to a literary circle, and yet most critics say that she invented the modern novel. I mean, can you even name a novel that was published before 1811 when her Sense and Sensibility came out? I tried and everything I Googled actually came out a generation later. What's more, she had finished Northanger Abby, Sense & Sensibility, and Pride & Prejudice by her mid twenties though she had published nothing.
Jane Austen by Peter Leithart, an excellent and brisk biography.
Leithart is especially good on Austen's sense of humor and her Christian faith:
Biographers minimize Austen's Christianity mainly because they cannot believe that her acerbic, sometimes childishly cruel wit, her satires of the clerical imbecilities of Mr. Collins and Mr. Elton, and her playful silliness are compatible with deep Christian faith. The prim, formal Miss Austen may have been a parson's daughter, but critics cannot believe Jenny was a Christian. This is partly an optical illusion. Austen's clerical ninnies are more vivid and memorable than the faithful, but of the dozen clergymen in her novels, only three (Dr. Grant, Mr. Collins, and Mr. Elton) come in for any sort of criticism; and even they are described as being diligent in their clerical responsibilities.
More fundamentally, the assumption that Christian faith is incompatible with a satirical spirit is entirely wrongheaded. Nietzsche's lie that Christianity is a killjoy religion is a demonstrable falsehood. English satire was, after all, the creation of clerics. Austen was hardly the first Christian writer to look skeptically at the clergy. Chaucer did before her, and so did a host of late medieval writers, including William Langland, whose commitment to Christianity no one seriously questions. Reformation satirists mocked the fat friars. Jonathan Swift—the Reverend Jonathan Swift—combined wit and religion, as did Laurence Sterne, also a reverend. Samuel Johnson was not a cleric, but he was a serious Christian and yet one of the most sharp-witted men of his time. And who can deny the combination of boisterous cheer and profound faith in Lewis and Chesterton? They were Austen's children as she was Johnson's. Not every wit has been a Voltaire (Leithart, 73–74).
One of only two surviving paintings of Jane Austen, both are by her older sister, Cassandra. Here's the other one.
Jesus told his disciples to become like children. This has often been understood, sentimentally, as an encouragement to naivete, as if Jesus wanted His disciples to go through life with eyes wide in undiscerning simplicity: to be a child is to be a beautiful soul, quavering timidly before a hard and indifferent world. This is precisely the opposite of what Jesus intended. A child's ability to see through cant and pretense is proverbial, and this native shrewdness is what Jesus is after. Adults take pretense far too seriously. To "become like a child" means not to take the world as seriously as it takes itself. Jesus knew that it takes a child to notice the emperor has no clothes. Children see through pretense because they know how to pretend (Leithart, 124).
Austen wanted her novels to be a training ground in moral discernment, and to train her readers well she needed to avoid the reassuring clarities of Gothic romance and melodrama. She wanted readers to distrust the smooth French manners of Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park, but she made him so winning and attractive that readers hardly know whether he is going to turn out to be a transformed lover or an unreformed cad. Mary Crawford, Henry's worldly and seductive sister, is an even more impressive and risky creation, a villainess who, like Milton's Satan, leaves a far more powerful impression than the book's heroine (Leithart, 128–29).
At her best, Jane Austen wrote out of laughter. Her art came from the impish glee of a precocious teenager amused by the follies of the world around her, wanting us to get in on the joke. Her final voice is modulated, deepened, matured by life and its losses ... It is the playful voice whose resonance is enriched by the piety that is always in, with, and under it (Leithart, 153).
For further reading:
- Here's a great short article by Leithart on Jane Austen's humor.
- Here's a really long article by Leithat on Jane Austen as public theologian. A very interesting idea.
- In the short story "The Janeites," by Rudyard Kipling, he writes about a group of men who survive World War I by clinging to their love of Jane Austen. C.S. Lewis called it "Kipling's worst story," and it is pretty smarmy, but it did popularize the term for her best fans, so that's cool.
- Here's C.S. Lewis's essay "A Note on Jane Austen," in which he analyzes the moral core of her writing and says some wonderful things about humor.
And did you know that Meghan has a beautiful Etsy shop with some v. cute Jane Austen swag? She does. She even has a Janeite t-shirt. Be the envy of all your literary-minded friends. ;)
OK, that'll do. Hope you find something to enjoy.
So fresh and so green.
Exodus 33–34: God's Character and the Triumph of Grace
(Part VI in The Theology of the Pentateuch)
Goodness All the Way Down
In the last newsletter, we saw that God revealed his name to Moses in Exodus 3 as Yahweh, “I AM,” and that the meaning of God’s name is bound up with God’s presence to save his people, “I AM with you.” Toward the end of the book in Exodus 33–34, God explains the meaning of his name by proclaiming his own character. This is a watershed for knowing God.
While Moses is on the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments, the people below craft a god out of gold and stage an idolatrous, orgiastic feast. They break the first commandment before the tablets are down the mountain. This is the nation’s foundational “failure narrative” and originally God resolves to consume the people with fire and make a new nation out of Moses. But Moses initiates a series of intercessory prayers calling on God to remember his name, i.e., his reputation before the nations, and his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, i.e., the relationships he has committed to (Exod 32:11–13). Finally, Moses makes this unprecedented request to know more of who God is.
Exod 33:18–19
18 And Moses said, “Reveal to me, please, your glory!” And he said, “I will pass all my goodness before you and I will call out by my name, YHWH, before you. And I will show favor upon whom I show favor and I will be compassionate upon whom I am compassionate.
Moses asks for glory, God volunteers his goodness. This is his glory and his most fundamental characteristic. His other attributes are just the working out of his goodness. God’s freedom and his sovereignty are characterized by his ability to act lovingly toward whomever he wishes—even toward the kind of people that cheat on their wedding night, that cannot watch and pray one hour, that seem programmed to fail.
God’s Name Means God’s Attributes
To make good on this promise, God shelters Moses in a rocky cleft and “calls out by his name” while his presence passes by:
Exod 34:6–7
Yahweh, Yahweh:
God of compassion and favor,
Slow burning,
and overflowing with devotion and faithfulness,
Guarding devotion for thousands [of generations], Bearing iniquity, and guilt, and sin,
But as for acquittal—he does not acquit—
Visiting iniquity of parents on children and children’s children to three or four [generations].
The first two attributes, compassion and favor, clearly display God’s goodness. The descriptor “slow burning” is literally “long of nose.” In Hebrew this expression means God has a long fuse, he’s long-suffering (the idiom for anger in ancient Hebrew is “to burn in the nose,” because it is imagined as red-hot when outraged). The next pair of attributes, devotion and faithfulness, are covenant attributes. Though you walk all over him, he will never break the covenant on his end. He guards devotion. He bears with human sin in patience. This is the practical outworking of his slow burning.
But we struggle more to see God’s goodness in the last two lines where judgement surfaces in what appears to be a vengeful and unjust way. The fact that God visits iniquity, i.e., punishes sins, is not in itself a problem. A father who does not care enough to discipline a child abuses them, and a society where there is no justice for true criminals is unlivable. We all relate deep within our bones to the knowledge that true evil must be dealt with. What is unsettling is the idea that children will be punished for their parents’ sins. But is that what this passage is truly communicating?
No. First of all, such a reading would fly in the face of other biblical texts where God clearly maintains that each person is punished for the right or wrong that they themselves do (Deut 24:16; Jer 32:16–19; Ezek 18:20). Elsewhere in Exodus, we find this same language with some clarifying clauses.
Exod 20:5–6
5 You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
The idea here is that sin will surely have consequences and those consequences negatively affect generations in the same way that blessings positively affect generations. If you learn from your father to treat women as objects it doesn’t make you any less guilty of treating women as objects. In the same way, if you learn from your father to be hardworking and committed, you are no less virtuous for it. The point of the passage is found in the asymmetry that highlights the imbalance in the numbers: God is gracious to thousands (i.e., to generations long after Abraham, who don’t deserve it), but he visits the consequences of sins only for three or four generations (i.e., a relatively short period of time).
For Moses leading the rebellious Exodus generation, this is the flame burning in the bush. Only because of God’s character can the bush survive; and through this relationship the bush will be refined and purified. Yahweh’s character is the triumph of grace through justice. And that triumph of grace is what allows us to know God.
The Theology of Knowing God’s Name
Knowing God’s name is a deep privilege. When Scripture alludes to this description of God’s character, the context emphasizes God’s mercy and seeks his forgiveness (e.g., Num 14:17–19; Jer 9:23–24; Mic 7:18–19). My favorite example comes from Jonah where comic-genius-level irony draws a stark contrast between our character and God’s. When God graciously forgives the evil Ninevites, whom Jonah hates, he rails against the LORD by quoting Exod 34:6–7 back at him. It’s as if Jonah is shouting, “I know that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love—it’s what I hate about you the most!” (Jon 4:1–4). Jonah is rebelling against the very attributes of the LORD that enable him to know God. It’s hilarious.
The New Testament authors believed that the description of God’s character as revealed in his name was precisely what Jesus Christ himself made known.
John 1:14–18
14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. ... 16 For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. 17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.
John sees Jesus’s ministry as a fuller picture of the same God that revealed his name and his character to Moses. Jesus adds grace to grace because we can experience God more clearly in Christ. In fact, John is implying that God’s “grace and truth” were not yet fully on display to Moses—an incredible statement when you see the mercy and patience of God toward Israel.
If the LORD redeems us through relationship and for relationship, his presence to save us in Christ deepens this truth.
John 15:13–17
13 Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. ... so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. 17 These things I command you, so that you will love one another.
Christ’s death and resurrection is the ultimate expression of his character, the ultimate display of grace triumphing through justice. This is how he draws us into a relationship. He tells us his name so that he can call us “friend” and we can learn to love like him.
LORD, grant us a real, experiential knowledge of your name. May we hear you proclaiming your goodness to us in Scripture. May we feel your presence with us to save. Lord hold us in your friendship, that we might not fall into sin or any manner of idolatry. We are in awe of your grace and your goodness toward us.
Willa walks a lot now.
Pray With Us
- Praise God for the opportunity to teach in Liberia in November. Pray that nothing derails this work and pray that the various initiatives of TLI will be able to move forward again.
- Pray for my continued progress on the PhD, my goal is to finish a draft of the whole thing by Christmas, 2021. This month I need prayer to finish writing on humor and to finish organizing my material on v. 1 into a coherent chapter.
- Please continue to pray for our family and our spiritual growth. Praise God that Summer is coming and lockdown restrictions are easing. Praise God that we have a wonderful preschool Rue can attend right across the street. Pray that the LORD would continue to use this time to bind us together and to teach us about ourselves in light of the gospel. We have so much work to do.
