After preaching "The Gospel According to Moses" from Exodus 14 this morning, I jumped on a convoy to the nearby post from which my departing soldiers will be taking off. I am grateful to have seen many of our dispersed soldiers the past couple days, as most of our dozen or so soldiers spread around the country are part of this first departing group. I will be at the post for the next couple of days to care for these couple of dozen soldiers as they congregate and then see them off with blessings and prayers.
I continue to read, though without the preoccupation garnered by other recent books. I read a short biography on Luther as well as Calvin. With both men, there is plenty to inspire the weary Christian heart. They were not superheroes. In their latter days, Luther became increasingly bitter and anti-semitic and Calvin became increasingly irritable. But both knew the value of the Gospel and the value of suffering for the sake of the Gospel. Luther's three primary aids to truly comprehending God's Word: prayer, meditation, and suffering. Calvin's brilliant Institutes of the Christian Religion was continually revised against the backdrop of his students going to France to suffer and die for the faith.
I also read Carl Truman's short but significant The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. This title is clearly an allusion to historian Mark Noll's decade-old work, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Noll's contention was that evangelicalism had embraced anti-intellectualism to its own detriment, as evidenced by a retreat from the academy and uncritical embrace of certain fundamentalist doctrines. Truman's surprising contention (with its own enjoyable British flavor) is that the real scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is no such thing as an evangelical.
While the term is semantically derived from the evangel--the good news--it is worthless as an historical term because it is rooted in subjective experiences rather than objective doctrines. When heretical doctrines like open-theism (belief that God changes and can be surprised by history) are tolerated within evangelical camps, or movements like the Emergent Church (postmodern liberalism that denies central truths of the Christian faith) are given the label "evangelical," than the term has become worthless. At this point, orthodox Protestants may have more in common with Roman Catholics than with many evangelicals.
While Trueman's point is well-made, it might be useful to distinguish between semantic and historical understandings of the term "evangelical" here. For historical purposes, the term "Christian" has become relatively worthless as most use it as a superlative to describe the quality of one's character or works rather than its objective and historical meaning, which pertains to belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. That doesn't mean that the term is not still valuable when rooted in its objective, semantic context. I think it's fair to say that there's no longer such a thing as "evangelicalism," but there are still "evangelicals"--those who believe that Jesus Christ is their savior from sin as He is revealed in His inerrant Word.
I also just read Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts, which chronicles the life of the American ambassador to Germany and his family during the rise of Hitler. It is fascinating to watch an ordinary and advanced Western society descend into sheer madness through the eyes of an old fashioned, freedom loving public servant from America. The story is laced with tragedy as European appeasement and American isolationist monasticism prevent the greatest international agents for good from nipping the evils of Hitler's socialist-fascism in the bud.
It brings to mind that line about evil prevailing when good men do nothing. People were still irrationally swept up in the progressive notion that modern man was inherently good and rational and society was tending toward utopia. It took a Holocaust, where women were gassed with poisons made by experts and babies were dashed against walls by university graduates, for a delusional West to realize that no amount of education or technology can alter a depraved human nature.
I am now dividing time between Paul Tripp's Dangerous Calling, warning pastors of the pitfalls of the ministry, Albert Einstein's Out of My Later Years, a collection of articles on various topics--all of which thus far lack the sophistication of his scientific work, a brief history on the Vietnam War, and C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, a Christian classic that bored me to tears the first time I tried to read it, but was instrumental in my wife's salvation and thus deserving of another try.
One of the surprises of this deployment has been the number of books I have devoured. I work long days, but with time with my wife typically relegated to an hour a night and no TV in my room, I am left with several hours to read. (By the way, I also love reading my magazines--National Review, The Economist, and Runner's Word--with a sprinkling of Modern Reformation and Table Talk.) Deployment life also delays sleep as the pace is often so frantic and the need for vigilance so pronounced that it takes a much longer time to wind down, even with fatigue setting in. Even amid trials and hardships, God provides unexpected blessings in His gracious providence.
