The Weekly, April 8, 2024
Hi all,
Recently I read this piece from Justin Taylor about the missions ministry at Bethlehem Baptist Church over the course of John Piper and Tom Steller's ministries in that congregation. It is well worth your time.
Reading it drew me back to the peak of Piper's popularity and the galvanizing effect he had on the evangelical movement in America. Though my debts to Keller are the greatest of any evangelical of that generation, there is something singular about Piper that I think has been lost today. Take a clip like this:
I don't think we have many people who preach that way now. It's the combination of Piper's single-mindedness and passion. Our political obsessiveness and need to be entertained both make it very hard for us to match Piper's focus and single-mindedness, I suspect. That political obsessiveness also breeds in us a sense of anxiety and fear that undermines the zeal that runs through Piper's preaching ministry.
Or consider this brief clip which highlights the particular way that Piper was anti-American; Piper's anti-Americanism had very little to do with a certain reading of the place of 'cultural Christianity' in the US or our nation's political trends and everything to do with the avarice that Piper rightly detected in so much of American evangelicalism:
My sense of our moment is that some of the fevers of the past several years are beginning to break. We are seeing a turn against gender ideology, for example. We are also finally seeing prominent figures on the young right willing to speak plainly about the racism that has long infested their movement. Certainly, there are reasons to question the genuineness of both these trends—First Things is now publicly defending secretive right wing networks with para-military aspirations, after all. But we can still be hopeful, I think.
But it is not enough for the madness on both the right and left to finally be meeting some internal resistance, which in itself is perhaps too optimistic a reading in the first place. We ourselves will need to return to our first love, rightly anchoring our public advocacy and institutional endeavors not in vibes or political aspirations or technological fads, but in the plain setting forth of what is true as revealed to us by God. And if that is what we must do, then I can think of few recent models that offer more than that of Minneapolis's ascetic, zealous, focused Baptist preacher.
Books
I'm reading a history of Nebraska's Indian nations right now. It's quite sobering. I also picked up a library copy of the new Melissa Kearney book. It's heartening to see more books like hers appearing.
Articles
Julia Steinberg on the classical school boom
Alex Byrne on Judith Butler
Miles Smith on Bishop James Theodore Holly, the first Black Episcopalian bishop
Jessica Winter on a Massachusetts middle school that sounds like the most exhausting place in the world
Jonathan Haidt on teens and phones
Adam Gopnik on baseball and New York
Erik Hoel on online history
Myles Werntz on seeing God
Elsewhere
I finally found a Rest is History episode I didn't like: The third through fifth episodes of their Martin Luther series are terrible. They are so desperate to make Luther the fountainhead of modernity that they completely lose track of Luther's doctrine of the Word of God. As a result, they end up regurgitating the tired anti-Protestant arguments made by both trad Catholics and secular liberals regarding the Reformation. The series has its moments—the depiction of Karlstadt as a contemporary woke professor who ragequits academia was hilarious and actually pretty accurate to my knowledge. That said, the bad plausible trajectory for Tom Holland is "the Christian revolution has no fixed destination and is simply an ever-widening movement of liberal expanse" and this series definitely has me more worried that that's where he'll end up. But we'll see.
Under the Mercy,
~Jake