A lot of Bible-believing Christians have trouble seeing the doctrine of the Trinity in Scripture. They see a verse here and a verse there that help prove the different parts of the doctrine (the deity of Christ, the unity of God, etc), but they don’t see the whole package put together in any one place.

Granting that the doctrine is not compactly gathered into any one verse (not even Matthew 28:19 or 2 Corinthians 13:14 are quite as complete or detailed as we’d like), we can take some steps toward thinking about the doctrine in a bigger-than-one-verse way.

Follow the whole argument of Galatians 4, for example, or 1 Corinthians 2, or of Ephesians 1, or of the Gospel of John, and you’ll see the Trinitarian profile of God’s self-revelation emerge clearly. You have to learn to think in bigger sections of Scripture than just a verse; the bigger the better.

This is the key to seeing what’s really there in Scripture: To get to the doctrine of the Trinity, you have to take three very large mental steps.

1. Read the whole Bible. Okay, maybe you can put off Habakkuk and Jude for a while. But you have to achieve some initial mastery of the long, main lines of the one story that is the Christian Bible. You have to be able to think back and forth along the canon of scripture, with figures like Abraham and Moses and David and Cyrus standing in their proper places, and with categories like temple and sonship and holiness lighting up the various books as appropriate. Get comfortable with the whole volume.

2. Understand the shape of God’s economy. The next step is to comprehend the entire Bible as the official, inspired report of the one central thing that God is doing for the world. He has ordered all of these words and events that are recorded in Scripture toward one end. It’s not good enough just to know the content of the whole Bible, if you misinterpret it as a haphazard assemblage of divine stops and starts. These are not disparate Bible stories, but the written form of the one grand movement in which God disposes all his works and words toward making himself known and present. (For details on what “God’s economy” is, see chapter 4 of Deep Things).

3. Recognize the economy as a revelation of who God is. There is still a third step, and it’s the biggest one of all. When you know the entire Bible, and understand that it presents to us God’s well-ordered economy, you still have to come to see that God is making himself known to us in that economy. After all, it is theoretically possible for God to do great things in world history without really giving away his character or disclosing his identity in doing so. This final step on the way to the doctrine of the Trinity is the recognition that God behaved as Father, Son, and Spirit in the economy because he was revealing to us who he eternally is, in himself. He wasn’t messing around with that Son and Spirit stuff. He put himself into the gospel.

That is the right way to interpret the Bible. It’s also the traditional way, recognized by the church fathers and the reformers. It’s also the Christian way. It yields the doctrine of the Trinity, not in scattered verses here and there that tell us a weird doctrine at the margins of the faith, but as the main point.

The standout tracks,I think, are the two that are also most obviously suited for congregational singing: the title song, “Here is Your God,” and “Light of the Lord.” But that’s just my impression; give them a listen and see what stands out to you. Some rock, some roll, some sound like musical theater, some are for singing along, and some are performances to be listened to.

What you can get from these mp3s is good worship music. But I want to point out that these recordings are only a byproduct of what’s going on at this church. They’re the sharable part, the downloadable part, of the life that’s taking place in a congregation in southern California.

What we’re trying to do is get the word of God into our souls in every way possible.

At Grace EvFree, the preaching elders take the congregation through entire books of the Bible, preaching week by week through book after book. Over the past several years, the church has developed some helpful techniques for getting the most out of these expository series. We start with a reading service, where the book we are about to preach is read aloud without any extended commentary. Then we preach through the book for as long as it takes: one week for Second John, a couple of years for Isaiah. Throughout the series, we meet every week in small groups in members’ homes, where we discuss the sermons and apply the word to our lives more personally. Finally, after the last sermon in the series, we gather for a congregational response service, where the people testify about what they have learned through this season of preaching, sharing stories about what has been happening in their lives.

You can see the plan: We grab hold of a book like Isaiah and internalize it any way we can. Dozens of hours of preaching, of small-group discussion, of congregational prayer and personal testimony.

And then there’s the music. How do you sing through Isaiah? Well, there are dozens of hymns on the book, and some of Isaiah’s language has pervaded traditional Christian worship since the book of Revelation.

But there’s also such a thing as “singing to the Lord a new song,” and that’s where this music comes in. We’ve got a lot of creative musicians in our church, and a core member of the elder team who pastors and oversees the extensive music ministry: Walt Harrah. Walt has written about a zillion songs, and has performed two zillion. He’s biblically saturated, theologically informed, and historically aware. He bleeds Spurgeon quotes if you cut him. He’s verbally playful, like Eugene Peterson with the mad lyrical flow, yo. He could whistle Handel’s Messiah backwards, but he doesn’t. This is the guy you’d want in charge of setting Isaiah to music.

So we’re experiencing the blessing of local, homegrown music at Grace. Local music is a great thing, and it’s usually a sign of health if the musicians and artists in a congregation are responding to the preaching by producing images and music. But most local music doesn’t need to be recorded or shared beyond its original setting. Maybe 98% of it doesn’t. With Walt and the team of musicians and technicians at Grace, though, we’re producing music of a quality that others should hear.

And music gets the word into a soul in a unique way. There’s nothing like it. You can preach and teach and argue and explain all you want, but singers can cheat: They can hold a note for three and a half seconds. They can underline, accent, and color a word in a way that speakers can’t. They can take a line you’ve just read in the book, or heard from the preacher, and sing it back to you in a way that makes you sit up and say, “OH! That’s what Isaiah’s getting at.”

How many times have I read or heard “Behold your God” from Isaiah 40? But when Walt paraphrases it to “Here is your God,” and those two strong male and female voices bring it out to us, the words open up rather shockingly. Here is your God. Is that evangelism, presenting the true God to the unsaved? Here is your God: Is that what you say when teaching children their spiritual heritage? Here is your God: Is that the conviction behind the true religion of caring for the orphans and the poor? Here is your God: Is that worship, exhortation, comfort? It’s everything all wrapped up together in one comprehensive word that holds together things we have begun to think of as somehow separate.

That’s how music gets the word into you.

At our church, we’re meeting God in his own word, in the book of Isaiah. An encounter with God will change us, revive us, and remind us what really matters. The people of God will respond with testimony and praise, with obedience and confession. And apparently, they’ll respond with word-smithing, pounding drums, sweeter tones, trickier fretwork, and other art forms. Maybe with architecture, maybe new forms of social organization, maybe new life in a dying culture. Who knows? Down through history, it’s been a vision of God that has called forth the best in the arts. We’re seeking to meet God in the place where he has promised to meet us, in his word. The byproduct is eleven sweet songs, and Grace EVFree is glad to share them beyond our own congregation.

Slavery was the original American sin.

I don’t know anyone who justifies race-based slavery, but I have known seemingly good folk with more than a dollop of sympathy for the Confederacy. Growing centralized government makes “states’ rights” look good, and self-determination is a popular modern cause.

If the South wanted to be free, why use brutal force to bring it back within the Union?

Lincoln makes the case for the Union better than anyone, but the slaves themselves wrote eloquent testimonies as to why the Confederacy does not deserve a moment of Christian pity. Harriet Jacobs (who wrote under the pseudonym “Linda Brent”) witnesses to the incompatibility of slavery with the Christian ethic of love. Her intelligent, calm account makes hash of the idea that there was anything ennobling about the “peculiar institution.”

The Old South is dead—for which all Americans should feel profound gratitude. The reason is instructive to some of our current political debates. Some crimes against humanity are so horrible that they taint every person associated with them. They bring down brutal judgment from God on any nation that tolerates their presence.

Take an evening and purge your soul of any sympathy for the Southern cause by reading the profoundly Christian story of an enslaved woman: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. There is no way for me to describe the ugliness of what was done to a Christian, to a woman, to a human, in the name of race based slavery. Often the evil was done by professing Christians who abused their religion as a cover for their abuse. Sadly, her story is not unique, but representative of hundreds of years of torment tolerated first by colonial Britain and then by the American Constitution.

A certain sort of conservative has too much sympathy for the Lost Cause, but no Cause that defends the institutionalization of violence and evil that slavery produced in the entire South deserves pity. For a Christian one of the most sickening aspects of Jacobs’ powerful book are the twisted justifications of immoral conduct by believers.

Make no mistake: Americans had created an institution that was peculiar to their particular time. It depended on the pseudo-scientific notion of “race” which is utterly incompatible with Christian understandings of humankind.

Race-based slavery is an assault on Christian anthropology, because it denies the basic equality of all human beings before God. While a person may be given a different function in the divine economy, this difference must be based on real distinctions and be implemented with charity. Slavery was based on an irrelevant distinction (skin color) made important through self-serving lies.

It had no basis in history, biology, or religion.

Slavery based on economics or warfare made a certain kind of sense for ancient times, but race-based slavery is utterly intolerable. Racism made a child of God less than human. The only possible moral justification for race based slavery collapsed the moment a slave was baptized. The only possible economic benefit from slavery became impossible with the application of the Golden Rule to slaves who wanted to be free.

How could a Christian brother deny liberty to a brother or sister who longed for it?

Enslaved women faced unique problems as this book’s powerful testimony makes clear.

Humanity cannot be trusted with the absolute power of one human being over another. Christians traditionally favor small government for this very reason, but there is no use keeping a tyrant out of the Capitol if one creates a worse one on the plantation. Limited government applies to family and to church as well as to the state.

Prelates and patriarchs cannot be trusted any more than potentates.

Nothing can justify the Southern cause, because the taint of race-based slavery pollutes the noblest motivations. Good men like Robert E. Lee should have known better, because Christian moral understanding had advanced to the point where there was no excuse for a reasonable man to miss the point. Of course, courage was shown in an ignoble cause and brave men died for an evil system, but that only makes it worse.

Slavery, hundreds of years of slavery, was so horrible it taints the American experiment. It made a mockery of the ideals in the Declaration. Our marvelous Constitution was polluted by slavers who desired votes in Congress for their slaves without acknowledging their humanity.

It is no shock that those who profited by slavery justified it. More horrifying in Jacobs’ book are those Northerners who tolerated it, profited from it, and allowed themselves to be used by it.

Why should we care today? We should care because 1865 was not so long ago . . . and Southern states wickedly imposed slavery in all but name for many for decades longer. Segregation could only be sustained by the force of law, and the law was misused in its name even in my lifetime.

What is worse is that this nation, so long hurt by the sin of slavery does so little to end the slave trade globally. Today Christian brothers and sisters are enslaved in the Sudan. All the many horrors, and more, that Jacobs wrote about are happening now. Some of the nations that perpetuate or justify such abuse receive huge amounts of American aid.

It is a crime so horrible; it taints all near it. Direct support for any regime that is implicated in the slave trade must end. The United States is not called to be the world’s policeman or pastor, but we are also not called to be the paymasters for slavers. Britain decided not to support Southern slavers for cheap cotton and we should deny any aid to soft-on-slavery sheiks with oil.

Advocacy of abolition is a particular moral obligation on Americans. Support for slavers or their willing accomplices would fatally taint any global work we do.

Our new freshmen often wonder which is the best approach, or perhaps expressed in a more nuanced way, what are the advantages and disadvantages of each?  Torrey was founded with the Morgan House curriculum, and more recently added the Johnson House.  I teach in the latter, but more students have gone through the former.

While the following is not exhaustive, here are some of the differences and how they affect each curriculum.  We highlight these in micro during our mandatory “Why You Read What You Read” lectures at the beginning of each semester, but here I outline them in macro:

Torrey students read about 200 books by the time they graduate.  The books differ by about 20% between the two Houses.  Sometimes when students go through four years of Torrey, they think they’ve read all the Great Books in the Western world.  Not even close!  For us professors, trying to come up with the reading list sometimes feels like having to select which of our children we love more.  To add one book means to leave another one out, often agonizing decisions.  With the two Houses approach, we can assign certain books to one House and other books to another House, so at least certain books are represented somewhere in Torrey.

What are some of the book differences?  The following chart will show the MH books that we don’t read in JH, and which ones we’ve substituted for them:

The above chart is not exhaustive, but it shows some of the major differences.  Also, some of the books that each House reads are not a “replacement” for the other, but merely a difference in books.  For example:

Morgan House exclusive reads are:

• Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War
• Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations
• Creeds of the Church
• Pseudo-Dionysius
• Abelard’s Ethical Writings
• Bonaventure’s The Soul’s Journey to God
• Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly
• Herbert’s The Temple
• Locke’s Second Treatise on Government
• Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre
• Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights
• Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities
• Franklin’s Autobiography
• Hawthorne’s short stories
• James’s Daisy Miller and Beast in the Jungle

[MH also reads more selections from]:

• Plutarch
• Apostolic Fathers
• Aquinas’s Summa
• Luther
• Calvin’s Institutes
• Wesley’s sermons

Johnson House exclusive reads are:

• Plato’s Phaedrus and Euthyphro and Apology
• Wilberforce’s A Practical View
• Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation
• Sartre’s Nausea
• Tertullian’s Apology
• Augustine’s Enchiridion and De Magistro
• Basil’s On the Hexamaeron
• Aquinas’s On Creation
• Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress
• Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment
• Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons
• Macdonald’s Back of the North Wind
• R.A. Torrey’s sermons

What accounts for some of these book differences?  In our JH Senior Spring curriculum, “On the Future,” it works better to have eschatological texts like MacDonald and Ezekiel for the sake of thematic comparison.  Or in our JH Junior Fall curriculum, “On the Cosmos,” it works better to have creation/origin texts like Basil and Aquinas, and the science texts like Newton and Bacon, also for the sake of thematic comparison.

Also, in the Johnson (thematic) approach, because we are the newer House, we like to get experimental and creative, diverting from the “traditional” curriculum.  For example, we do music (Bach’s Mass in B minor, Handel’s Messiah, Haydn’s Creation, Brahms’s Requiem, Rachmaninov’s Vespers), science (Bacon’s New Organon, Newton’s Principia Mathematica, though note that both Houses read Darwin’s Origin of Species), and rhetoric (we have students deliver speeches during Senior Fall in lieu of their paper).

Now, despite the differences outlined above, there are far more books that the two curricula share in common.  For example, both Houses read Plato’s Republic, Meno, Symposium, Phaedo, and Timaeus, despite the fact that JH reads a few more Platonic dialogues.  Both read most of the same epic poems, like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, though JH subsitutes Beowulf for Metamorphoses.  Both read Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding though MH has an extra Locke treatise.  Both read Augustine’s Confessions and City of God, though JH has two extra Augustine works.  Both read Shakespeare’s Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, As You Like It, Richard II, Henry V, though MH has two extra Shakespeare plays.  Both read Russian novels like Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, though JH has an extra Dostoevsky novel and a Turgenev novel.

Now that we’ve outlined the differences in the reading lists, back to the original question at hand:  what are the advantages and disadvantages to each curriculum?

MH (chronological) advantages:

• You read more Plato up front.  Plato is one of the foundations of Western thought, so without him, it is hard to understand a lot of other texts.
• You have more history texts, like Thucydides.  Though students complain about the boringness and density of that book, Thucydides is the second “Father of History” after Herodotus, and as such is inherently important.
• You have more texts from America (e.g. Franklin, Hawthorne, and James), though there is more England too (e.g. Dickens and the Bronte sisters).
• Because all the people of a certain period are read together, you intuitively get what they think like because you are immersed in their world.
• Because you read the texts chronologically, you also remember them in that order, so you will never make the mistake of thinking that Dante comes before Aquinas (though a JH student might, because they read them that way).  It is a great gift to be able to trace the chronology of Western thought in your mind.

MH (chronological) disadvantages:

• You read more Plato up front.  It is really hard for freshmen to understand Plato adequately, without mentioning the added burden of reading five Platonic dialogues back-to-back.  It’s like drinking from a fire hydrant.  Most don’t retain what they read, and forget it by Junior year.
• The curriculum is front-loaded (12 units per semester in the first two years, and then 4 units per semester in the last two years), so sometimes it feels like a “cult” during Freshman and Sophomore years (not in terms of wrong teaching, but in terms of total immersion into this program which consumes ¾ of your schedule), and then it peters out in your Junior and Senior years.  We as professors also miss having the MH upperclassmen in class because we hardly see them anymore.
• The 12 units in Frosh/Soph years also make it feel like you don’t have time to process it all.  You’re already on to another book before you even have time to digest the last one.
• It’s hard to compare previous texts to each other because you’ve forgotten them in the mists of time, so when you’re trying to compare the epic poems, for example, you have to think back to Homer in Freshman Fall, Virgil and Ovid in Freshman Spring, Dante in Sophomore Fall, and Milton in Sophomore Spring.  The texts have become so diffused in your mind by that time that it’s hard to trace the intentional road map from one to the other.
• Because you are so quickly immersed in early and medieval thought, you sometimes become convinced of Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy before giving the Protestant Reformers a proper hearing. I tell students to read the whole curriculum before making such a decision.

JH (thematic) advantages:

• Diversity of majors.  In Johnson House (unlike Morgan House which has standard humanities majors like English, philosophy, history, and Bible), we have music majors, science majors, intercultural studies majors, and art majors, among others.  This can make for some unique contributions from the students.
• There is a natural dialogue within the themes, for example we have the epic poets talk to each other (Freshman Fall), the theologians talk to each other (Sophomore Spring), or all the philosophers talk to each other (Junior Spring), or Oedipus and Freud, or Augustine’s On the Teacher and Aquinas’s On the Teacher, or Ezekiel and Revelation.  That makes for some fascinating comparisons.
• An Anglophone slant—so, Beowulf, because it is the earliest extant intact major work in English (though it is in Old English, aka Anglo-Saxon, not Modern English), made it into our curriculum.
• There is more text diversity within each semester.  For example, in Junior Fall, you’re doing music, science, philosophy, and theology, all pertaining to the topic of Creation, so that makes for a very interesting reading list!  It’s hard to get bored.
• Because it is a straight-8s curriculum (8 units every semester, instead of 12-12-4-4), it is more balanced.  You’re not having too much, or too little, Torrey at any given time, it’s just right.

JH (thematic) disadvantages:

• Diversity of majors.  In Johnson House, with people majoring in music, science, ICS, and art, etc., sometimes the discussions can be a bit chaotic because people are coming from all different angles and disciplines.  They also tend to be not as strong at writing, since all the English, philosophy, history, and Bible majors are in Morgan House.
• You don’t read Plato up front.  You miss out on so much underlying philosophy undergirding, say, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, if you haven’t read Plato.
• Sometimes texts can fall into more than one theme.  For example, Pride and Prejudice could be in the Freshman Fall “On Desire” (love) semester, but we placed it in the “On the City and Man” (politics) semester.  The Gospel of John could be in the “On Desire” semester as well, but we placed it in the “On Knowing God” (theology) semester.  Sometimes students think that these texts only belong in the semester we’ve placed them, rather than realizing that they could easily go in a number of different slots.
• We’ve replaced some of the crucial MH texts like Thucydides (see my comment above) and Ovid.  The Metamorphoses is the foundation of Greco-Roman mythology (mythology is one of the three pillars of Western thought, in addition to Plato and the Bible), and if you don’t read it, how can you understand Western society?
• Upperclassmen tend to be more apathetic about their schoolwork (it’s called senioritis).  This works well with the MH curriculum, since they are reduced to 4 units of Torrey by that point, but in JH, students sometimes wish for less work but are still doing 8 units, so they start trying to substitute out their units by doing study abroad trips instead of finishing off their normal curriculum.  There is the unintended consequence, then, of JH students missing out on a lot of their core books as a result.

Conclusion:

If students could read the curriculum twice through, I feel like they should do Morgan House first, then Johnson House second.  The former provides a proper chronology, the building of knowledge, and the constructing of foundations, while in the latter you can do more synthesis and analysis via the thematic groupings.  However, if you can only read the curriculum through once, I’d do it the Johnson House way, because of the interesting nature of the thematic groupings which provide guidelines for which authors dialogue naturally with each other.

P.S. Sometimes the question is asked of us, is a third House going to emerge at some point, and how will it be different from Morgan House or Johnson House?  That question is not for me to answer, so I punt that to the Director and Founder of the Torrey Honors Institute, Dr. John Mark Reynolds!  But rest assured, that is not a new question to him, and the wheels in his head are constantly turning…

When praying for Pentecost, sometimes we receive it and nothing is like it. Power comes to us not through any labor we have done, but by the power of the Holy Spirit. I have wept under the conviction of the Holy Spirit and laughed with great joy in the Lord.

We are tempted to demand that God always give us His grace in this same way. We know our effort can do nothing and so hope that He will never require us to do anything. But when it is not Pentecost, Pentecost will not come however hard we seek it. We cannot manipulate God with our sincerity or our many prayers.

Revelation is a great good, but it is not a good we can produce at will.

I have also done hard intellectual work that ended in a vision of God. Sometimes at the end of working through a hard passage of Plato, I have felt a rush of God’s glory. I have, by His grace, reasoned and felt His pleasure at the end of the process. In the joy of this moment, the temptation appears to do it again . . . to seek God in reasoning.

Reason is a great good, but the good of it cannot come to us at our command.

I have learned to trust no man who does not admit that both reason and revelation are necessary in the life of any sane person. Our Father delights to give us good gifts (revelation), and also delights to see us act in His image (reason). When we use our noetic capacities we glorify Him; when we accept His revelation we glorify Him.

Reason and revelation are two ways of knowing the good, the truth, and beauty. Plato, for example, recognized the importance of both and in his Timaeus provided a mechanism for finding both. The brain would bring reason to the soul and the liver would bring divine revelation.

That we need both reason and revelation is hard to understand. We tend to prefer one to the other and then demand that God act as we wish. If we find reason hard, we ask for revelation. If we enjoy thinking, we worry that “revelation” will make our “work” less important.

Sometimes we don’t love the good, the truth, or beauty as much as we love the mechanism that allows us to find the good, the truth, or beauty. This is a serious mistake.

There is nothing new in this dilemma. In many terms it is my duty to teach the Bacchae by Euripides. This play teaches me that the tension I have felt in my own life is real. In the play, a king of a city is faced with the god of wine. The god of wine takes his followers out and makes them ecstatic. His divine power is uncontrollable and highly erotic . . . not in some filthy sense, but in the sense of high passions.

A person in the power of the god is not irrational, but in no need of reason. His devotees learn what they must by direct revelation and experience of the god. The king of the city will not accept this truth and is punished through this folly.

There is something, however, to be said for the king. He wants a city based on law, not passion, and this is surely the safer path! But safe is not joyful, so those in a safe city want more joy while those in a libertine city long for the order that comes from law.

Both the god and the king are right, in a way, but the king does not recognize the need for balance. Reason and law are not enough. Love may have “reasons” that reason cannot recognize. Euripides reminds us that to be a city, there must be law, but also love or liberty. Liberty rejoices, but law protects. This side of paradise, the law is needed, but it can never be the highest thing in the city. The law exists for love and not love for the law.

And so the god is right to provoke the city to ecstasy by his revelation, because the city would otherwise become sterile. Love is fecund . . . law checks the danger of the fecundity. In the same way, a Christian finds reason checking the excess of false revelation, and true revelation adding insight to the blindness of reason. Logic cannot produce truth and revelation does not produce sound thinking. Taken together revelation gives data to reason’s program.

I need Pentecostal power and miraculous insight in a mind trained to think well. There is no faith without Pentecostal power and no faith without thought.

I can hear the songs of my childhood reminding me to seek Pentecostal power . . . not by might, not by power, but His Spirit. This Spirit is the reasonable, divine Logos, a conversation that is sensible and can be followed. We would not know what we know without God’s ecstatic revelation of Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, but we would not be able to do anything with this knowledge without reason.

This reason itself must be purified by God and our “revelation” must be checked by His divine reason.

Euripides was right: we need both the god of passion and the god of reason in the City. The good news of the Gospel is that logic became flesh and dwelt among us and that we beheld His glory and His truth.

Bloesch (whose oddly-spelled name is easy to pronounce: just remember that it rhymes with “keepin’ it fresh,” “nativity creche,” and “the word became flesh”) made his most influential contribution to theology by publishing the two-volume Essentials of Evangelical Theology in the late 1970s. Essentials stood alone for a long time in the evangelical field: where else could you find a comprehensive overview of all the major doctrines, written from an evangelical point of view, in dialogue with the great tradition and with recent mainline theology, and put forth in an active voice by a living theologian putting his own name on the line? Essentials may not have been perfect, but it became an inescapable reference point for serious evangelical theology for years to come. It was as if he wrote for an audience that didn’t exist yet, and when that audience came of age and started looking around for books of doctrine, there was Bloesch waiting for them.

Obviously a man with a rigorous work ethic, Bloesch wasn’t satisfied with writing one systematic theology. He went on to produce the seven-volume Christian Foundations series, a more elaborate account of the whole field of doctrine. Again, what evangelical theologian has produced seven volumes like this? What’s remarkable about Bloesch is not that he kept winning the theology races; it’s that he was often the only runner on the course. Evangelicals produced good single-volume overviews of theology, and good introductory textbooks, and good studies of individual topics. But who cranked out seven volumes of consistently high quality doctrinal studies as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first? Bloesch alone.

(Well, okay, maybe Carl Henry. But his project had a different focus, clustered around issues of authority and culture. Bloesch was a theologian’s theologian.)

Donald Bloesch hasn’t founded any school of thought, and there are no identifiable “Bloeschians” in the next generations. He is one of the most important evangelical interpreters of Karl Barth, cautiously and consistently interacting with Barth’s thought during the decades when the slightest whiff of Barth’s influence was enough to get a theologian invited to leave the Evangelical Theological Society. Bloesch’s attempted resolution of the quandaries of evangelical Barthianism was only satisfying to a small minority. Anybody who was worried about the way neo-orthodoxy destabilized the doctrine of Scripture was probably just as unsatisfied by Bloesch’s account as they were with Barth’s own (here I raise my own hand, as politely as possible).

But even when it comes to the influence of Barth, Bloesch’s main contribution was to mediate to evangelical readers the determined Christocentric impulse. From first to last, Bloesch was focused on Christ as the main thing. He brought this from his own evangelical background, cultivated and elaborated it in dialogue with Barth, and channeled it to evangelicals for decades.

Bloesch also planted his feet in a mainline denomination (the United Church of Christ) and stayed there for his whole career, even as that denomination continued its intentional move deeper into liberalism. Sticking with his liberalizing denomination was a major decision for Bloesch’s legacy: One could wish that every mainline denomination had an evangelical voice like Bloesch’s in it somewhere, bearing witness for decades. When the history of the UCC is written, it has to include the fact that its most distinguished theologian in the late 20th century was blatantly evangelical. On the other hand, staying in the liberal mainline ensured that Bloesch was always at the margin of the central institutions of evangelicalism, unable to benefit fully from those strategic alliances and cooperation.

Donald Bloesch had an intellectual style that focused on staking out positions and contrasting them with alternative positions. Page after page and decade after decade, he generated a lot of slogans and labels in an attempt to capture the sort of theology he was doing. At one point he dubbed his approach “fideistic revelationism,” and distinguished it from mysticism, rationalism, fundamentalism, experientialism, relativism, etc.

Refusing to choose between liberalism and fundamentalism, he nevertheless expressed his preference for a kind of Christianity that preserved the doctrinal deposit of orthodoxy: “In liberalism truth is dissolved so that only an amorphous experience remains. In rigid orthodoxy truth is frozen into a formula or credo. But there is hope that it can be brought back to life.”

Ultimately, Bloesch’s favorite name for his kind of theology was the one he gave to the first volume of Christian Foundations: A Theology of Word and Spirit. “To speak of Word and Spirit,” Bloesch said, is

to reintroduce in theology the critical role of the experience of faith, which is qualitatively different, however, from ordinary human or even religious experience. … To affirm a theology of Word and Spirit is to affirm that the experience of faith is correlative with God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Since faith is a work of the Spirit in the interiority of our being, the truth of the gospel is not only announced from without but also confirmed from within. In the theology presented here both revelation and salvation have to be understood as objective-subjective rather than fundamentally objective (as in evangelical rationalism) or predominantly subjective (as in existentialism and mysticism).

Today’s evangelical theologians may not be able to follow all of Bloesch’s theological moves, and we may have to make other decisions on important points. But without trying to land in his exact footsteps, we still have to run a lot harder if we want to catch up with the pace that Donald Bloesch set for evangelical theology. He leaped out to an early lead, kept it for decades, and finished still ahead of the pack.

But I’ve also learned that I knew a whole lot about the Trinity before I went on my twenty-year Trinitarian study binge. And it seems to me that most Christians know a lot more about the Trinity than they think they do. Especially if hearing the word “Trinity” makes your jaw tighten and your shoulders tense up, you need to know that if you’re saved by faith in Jesus, you already know the most important things about the Trinity.

If you know that God so loved the world that he sent his Son (John 3:16), you’re a long way into the Trinity. That’s because the Trinity is not just a set of mind-boggling facts about how God does calculus. Instead, it’s a super-condensed account of how God saves us: The Father sends the Son and the Spirit. I could go on and on about this. Oh, I did. You could read it in the book, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything.

I didn’t grow up with explicit Trinitarian theology ringing in my ears. I didn’t hear the word “Trinity” much in the Pentecostal church I grew up in in southern California. “Trinity” was kind of a big-church-downtown sort of word, a First Presbyterian word at least, if not downright Catholic. Out at the Foursquare church of my childhood, we talked a lot about Jesus (we were evangelical, after all), and about the Holy Spirit (we were Pentecostal, after all), but we tended to say less about God the Father, and I don’t remember hearing the big, Trinitarian picture put together very often when I was a kid.

Later on, when I did start hearing more about the Trinity (in a Methodist church in Kentucky that recited the Apostles’ Creed weekly and had the hymns of Charles Wesley in heavy rotation), it sounded almost exotic. And as I started into my own reading about the Trinity, I was almost in a panic about how much there was to know about it, how well it brought together all the main ideas of Christian faith, how much sense it made of the whole scope of the Bible. Who had been hiding this doctrine from the young me? And thus began the binge of studying. I wanted me some more of that Trinitarian doctrine. I had built up a hunger for it!

Looking back on my experience of growing up in that Foursquare church, though, a few things do echo in my memory. I have come to think that I knew a lot about the Trinity back then, without knowing how much I knew.

I’ll skip over the preaching and the Bible studies, because even though I can reconstruct them from tapes and from the notes in my Dad’s study Bible, I have to admit they don’t have much of a place in my childhood memories. I can’t distinguish clearly between what I really remember from then, and what I’ve read since then. I was a kid. I can tell you a lot about the texture of the carpet and the pew cushions, and how the staples under the pews held the fabric on, and how much gum was stuck under there. I can tell you which outside wall was best for catching lizards before the Wednesday night service. The Trinity? Not so much.

But I remember songs. I remember one song in particular that had me thinking Trinitarian thoughts in a powerful way. It was a little worship chorus that brought the big idea home to me as much as anything could have.

The song was “Father, I adore you.” It’s about as simple as a song can get:

Father, I adore you,
Lay my life before you,
How I love you.

Verse 2, replace “Father” with “Jesus.” Verse 3, replace “Jesus” with “Spirit.” So it develops a kind of serial Trinitarianism, with equal attention going to the three in turn. I suppose it would be possible to mis-interpret that, but since I knew there was only one God, the Father-Jesus-Spirit sequence of adoration and love all took place within a tidy monotheism. The nice thing was, a song that simple is perfect for singing as a round. The echoing Father verse wasn’t over before the leading Jesus verse began, and then the Spirit verse came in before the Jesus verse was done, and you could start over with the Father. It was southern California in the 70s, and these people were passionate about what they sang. The effect was haunting, and made a big impression on me.

It may not sound like much to go on for a Trinitarian theology, but it accomplished much for a kid who was going to grow up to think about the Trinity.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the song was brand new when we were singing it. I just figured Paul the Apostle or somebody wrote it, and that everybody had always sung it. But actually a twenty-year-old woman named Terrye Coelho Strom wrote it in 1972 right there in southern California. She had been a Christian for about a year, and was just driving in her car with her sister, making up songs and singing them to God on the way home to Fullerton from Newport Beach in a green Maverick. She got involved with Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, the Maranatha! music projects, and next thing you know this song is everywhere. She was just a new Christian praising God in a way that made sense. I think of it as the Jesus Movement finding its Trinitarian voice. We sang it, I got it. Loving God means adoring the Father, Jesus, and the Spirit.

The reason that made sense to me is that I knew the story of the Bible. I knew that God (think Old Testament) had sent his Son (think Gospels) and his Spirit (think Acts) to save us. When we sang serial doxology in a round to the one God, Father, Son, and Spirit, it made perfect sense and found lodging deep in my mind and heart. That’s the hook I would hang a heavy load of Trinitarian doctrine on later in life. And it was a peg that would hold all the doctrine I could hang on it. I knew a lot in knowing that song.

There are, of course, plenty of details to add to “Father, Jesus, Spirit, I adore you.” As a Christian grows into spiritual maturity, biblical literacy, and doctrinal understanding, there are things they need to understand. They need to avoid the heresies of modalism and subordinationism; they need to learn how to avoid “confounding the persons or dividing the essence,” as the old church fathers said.

But that’s easy. Any good intro to theology class can teach you that. Any good doctrine teacher can talk any alert student through that stuff in a couple weeks of class time, and wrap it up with a final exam combining multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and true-or-false questions. You can get an A on the theo test with a little bit of studying. Take a class, I’ll teach you.

The big lesson about the Trinity comes in even earlier, settles down even deeper, reaches further into the corners of your being, and may last longer than the doctrinal understanding.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the fully-elaborated doctrine. I’m glad I know more about it, and can teach it to others. But when the clever, well-prepared theologian show up to put all the parts in place, they ought to remember that they’re not starting from scratch, and in terms of spiritual apprehension, they’re not necessarily improving on what the faithful already know, whether they know they know it or not.

The full title of the work is

The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments: The Text carefully printed form the most correct copies of teh present authorized translation, including the marginal readings and parallel texts; with a Commentary, and Critical Notes, designed as a help to a better understanding of the Sacred Writings.

I don’t have the relevant statistics about it (page count, etc.), but it’s big. The online edition at studylight.org is of limited usefulness because of persistent font trouble in Greek and Hebrew. Much of it is available at Google books (volumes 1, 2, 3, etc., including the whole NT in one volume), and a reasonably-priced CD can be had from Logos Software. (If you know a better online source, e-mail me via my Scriptorium author’s page and I’ll update this post with the info).

Spurgeon had this to say about Clarke’s commentary:

Adam Clarke is the great annotator of our Wesleyan friends; and they have no reason to be ashamed of him, for he takes rank among the chief of expositors. His mind was evidently fascinated by the singularities of learning, and hence his commentary is rather too much of an old curiosity shop, but it is filled with valuable rarities, such as none but a great man could have collected. Like Gill, he is one sided, only in the opposite direction to our friend the Baptist. The use of the two authors may help to preserve the balance of your judgments.

Spurgeon even joked that he had to keep his John Gill (very very Calvinist, dare I say hyper?) and his Adam Clarke commentaries (quite Arminian, maybe more consistently so than Wesley) separated on the bookshelf so they wouldn’t wake him up at night with their arguing. He put the commentary of the more neutral Doddridge in between them as a buffer. Spurgeon goes on:

If you have a copy of Adam Clarke, and exercise discretion in reading it, you will derive immense advantage from it, for frequently by a sort of side light he brings out the meaning of the text in an astonishingly novel manner. I do not wonder that Adam Clarke still stands, notwithstanding his peculiarities, a prince among commentators. I do not find him so helpful as Gill, but still from his side of the question, with which I have personally no sympathy, he is an important writer, and deserves to be studied by every reader of the Scriptures.

Clarke knew so much that he sometimes lost sight of the forest temporarily as he pursued his interest in one of the trees. Spurgeon cites as an example of Clarke’s occasional lapses of judgment the odd digression on Genesis 3 where Clarke follows out some etymological arguments to the conclusion that Eve was tempted by an ape, not a serpent. It is a mark of Clarke’s overall sagacity that he presents this argument in a way that is ultimately helpful to his readers, and illuminating about the dynamics of Genesis 3, even for those of us (by which I mean everybody but Clarke) who think that was probably a serpent, not a monkey. Selah.

Another time besides the day of his death, I will write about Clarke’s mis-steps in the doctrine of the Trinity. All told, Clarke was solid on the doctrine of the Trinity, and held a very high view of the absolute deity of Christ in particular. However, he dropped the ball on one of the sub-doctrines that make up the doctrine of the Trinity, that is, the eternal sonship of Christ. Clarke believed that when the Scriptures talk about Jesus, they only call him “son” when they are referring to him as incarnate, and that Scripture never thinks of the pre-existent divine second person as being the “son” of the first person. “Son” only applies to the incarnation, not eternity past, according to Clarke.

But the great tradition of trinitarianism has always understood Scripture to be pointing to the fact that from all eternity, the second person is from the first, that “son” refers to the eternal second person, and that in the incarnation the eternal son became the incarnate son. In fact, without that argument, it’s hard to see how the church would have found a way to describe the incarnate son as divine. So Clarke position is an oddity, rejecting eternal sonship but affirming the doctrines of Christ’s deity and the Trinity. Sadly, Clarke’s view on incarnational sonship has had more influence than his idea about the monkey in the garden of Eden. But that is a topic for another day. I have nit-picked at a couple of problems in Adam Clarke’s monumental feat of scholarship in service to the church and the truth.

Take up and read Clarke on whatever passage of Scripture you are currently studying. You will find help and insight on every page of Clarke, for any page of the whole Bible!

When two students I greatly respect told me that I must read Franny and Zooey, I submitted to their wisdom. I not only wanted to read Salinger, I wanted to know why so many generations of my gifted students loved him. After twenty-six years of teaching Salinger fanatics, I wanted more than what I had.

Setting out to read all the printed Salinger is very easy. He wrote one great novel and several short stories, and his collected works can easily be read in a weekend. But soaking in Salinger took me an entire summer and left me well aware of how much more time would be required to say anything insightful about these works.

I was told that if I did not love Salinger as a young adult—and I certainly didn’t—then he would never make sense to me. Perhaps this is so, but my middle age self responded for the first time to him. He was pleasurable in a way that he was not when I was younger.

Why? Partly it was because my childhood was too happy for me to enjoy the books. It is an unfortunate truth of my life that I loved my parents, my country, my school, most of my teachers, and enjoyed almost every minute of childhood. Seeing the troubles of the world and shouldering some well-earned shame, brought on by my own grievous fault, has cured me of that inability.

So these are the comments of a mere reader of Salinger, pleading the indulgence of scholars. I read to learn and this is what I learned.

Salinger is steeped in sorrow and longing and a frustration with materialism of all sorts. The famously reclusive author may have tried to escape the world, but stories about his personal life indicate no monastic discipline in his pursuit.

His characters despise much of the culture, but are aware that they are not any better than the culture they (rightly) despise. A few of my students, though certainly not the two who got me reading Salinger this summer, have missed this point. They read Salinger for his critique of their parent’s culture, but miss his critique of the critic.

There is a subtlety in Salinger that reminded me of Nietzsche. The philosopher would despise Richard Dawkins as much as the Pope. My young atheist students sometimes enjoy Nietzsche’s writings on the Church, but forget the philosopher’s writings about the artist, the scientist, or the secularist. Salinger too seems torn by his criticisms, knowing that the very culture of material prosperity he attacks feted his Catcher and allowed him to live as he wished.

How much does a prophet suffer when his jeremiads are honored in his own home?

This is a profound sorrow. Salinger’s character Franny prays the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner”), but not as a Christian. She seems to love Jesus, but not the Jesus of the Gospels. Her brother points out her problem: Jesus is not Saint Francis. The Christ might inspire Saint Francis, but He is at once cruder and more sublime than that great saint.

I was left thinking that Salinger not only thought Christianity false, but was resentful that this was true. It is too bad that a Kingdom based on love is a chimera. It is too bad that the material world is both so attractive and so destructive to the soul of men. It is sad to be a man.

There is a longing at the heart of all Salinger. The young men and women at the center of the book want to be good. They wish to save children from danger, the meaning of the “catcher in the rye” image, by snatching them from a decayed culture. But Salinger never, so far as I can see, tells us to what they will be saved.

“You must,” he says, “change,” but there is no world in which a changed man could live and no clear picture of what a change would look like. In the secondary literature I read, there was much made of Salinger’s obvious interest in Eastern religions, but the published Salinger is deeply Christian and deeply disappointed in Christendom.

Being a Christian might be fine, but in practice Christian civilization (at least America) is wretched . . . except when it is not. Salinger is not even sure in his condemnations: doubt permeates everything. He is too insightful to buy any ready-made answer, but too noble to give way to total despair. I felt some hope for all his characters, even the one who killed himself, but no idea what it was that was the ground of my hope.

Salinger is angry with culture without confidence that his anger is fully justified and not just self-indulgence. His characters long for something better without any idea what better is. They are sad without being sure that even their sorrow is not a put-on or a residue of marketing.

Salinger left me with more sorrow, honest sorrow, than any writer of the late sixties. Hope without any hope of finding a reason for hope seems the worst sort of fraud. For the first time, I understood Peter Beagle’s suggestion (in a preface to Lord of the Rings) that the sixties were no fouler than the fifties . . . they simply reaped the fifties’ foul harvest.

Salinger proves this true.

Surely there is significance that he followed young “quiz kids” over the course of their lives. These “brightest and best” knew the answers, but they did not know the questions. Did Salinger ever find out the right questions? If so, I did not see it in his published works.

It could be that reading Lord of the Rings as a young man did me more good than I knew. They taught me hope tempered by realism, but no sense of despair. I had a longing for Middle Earth and the High Elves, but this longing did not lead me to despair. Because it was mythological, it caused me to seek for my true home in higher things. It never occurred to me that a career or success could make me happy, because there were no hobbits in the world!

I expected less of “reality” and so was less disappointed in reality. Salinger’s characters (and perhaps Salinger?) are disappointed that people are so trivial when they have eternity in their hearts. My “fantasy worlds” never suggested to me that eternity could be found this side of Paradise. What I wanted was so far removed from what actually was that I was spared that mistake, though I certainly fell into other errors.

Salinger captivated me, because he let me see what it would have been like to grow up in an America where prosperity and power were confused with virtue. As a pastor’s kid, I escaped this through no goodness of my own. It never occurred to me as I prayed for Pentecostal power to seek my happiness in “answers,” because any answer that came into my head was surely too small for a miracle-working God.

Salinger spent this summer reminding me that this world is not my home, that no external is anything but a vanity, and that I am wretched without a hope grounded in reality. Salinger made me read John’s gospel with a new passion and with less complacency, and so I am very thankful to him.

He can lift America beyond bigotry and beyond hate by speaking a prophetic word as he travels to the Middle East. If he submits to God and speaks justice, then he can witness to his faith in God. He can give meaning to these words:

. . . Stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to Allah, even as against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be against rich or poor: for Allah can best protect both. Follow not the lusts of your hearts, lest you swerve, and if you distort justice or decline to do justice, verily Allah is acquainted with all you do.

A few evil Americans hate this Imam simply because he is Muslim. Such people are certainly not living out the Christian faith which commands Christians to love even their enemies and to do to others as they would have done to Christians.

Christians who would deny any right to build an Islamic study center at this moment should think carefully about the implications for their own projects. We do not live in times friendly to any people, including those of the Christian faith, who refuse the libertine spirit of the age. The same arguments may someday be used to create “religion free” property zones, if someone can express offense.

Some of the opposition to the Islamic study center is incoherent. Certainly any society drunk on secular values cannot then claim that the ground of the World Trade Center is “holy.” The sacred and the secular are at war and some secularists who oppose the study center do so because they oppose all religious practice. They hypocritically use the screen of 9/11 to disguise their hatred of all religious practice.

However, most opposition to the center is not based on bigotry, but on reason and the experience millions of Americans have had with Islam in the rest of the world. It is hard to believe platitudes about Islam, when your grandparent’s priest was killed by an Islamic mob. It is difficult to be tolerant when your church’s medical workers are martyred by murderers never brought to justice in Islamic lands.

If Americans are to believe in a Western Islam, they have a right to be reassured that the past experience of Christians in Islamic lands will not be repeated.

It is difficult to see a study center raised near where other Muslims, even bad Muslims, killed Americans in God’s name. The Imam might be prudent to move the center he has a right to build.

The fact that he can do a thing does not mean he should.

A greater number of Americans fear for their future if Islam should grow in America. They do not do this out of unreasoning hate–rather, due to a sad history, they do not trust this man when he says that he respects the American ideals of religious freedom and the freedom to use private property to advance religious faith.

What is this sad history?

There is no nation where Muslims are a majority that Christians are not second class citizens. Christians have not always acted nobly or consistently with their own beliefs in respect to Islam, but it is a fact that no nation with Christians in the majority makes Muslims second class citizens by law.

The Imam can scarcely take a step in Islamic lands without walking by a church made a mosque or near a spot sanctified to Christians by the blood of martyrs.

All over the lands where Muslims are a majority, churches are taken over and turned into mosques. Other churches have been sacked and sit in ruins while their congregations are forbidden to rebuild. Christians, those of other faiths, and even those of no faith, are murdered for practicing their deeply held beliefs.

This is a shame and a crime against humanity.

There is no excuse for bigotry or unreasoning hatred against Muslims, but Arab Americans have history to guide them. Where Arab Christians have become a minority elsewhere, they have died.

So not all opponents of the study center are bigots, some have had parents and grandparents who fled from oppression to the United States. What many Arab American Christians see when they look at this situation is New York City’s Saint Nicholas Orthodox Church in ruins, not rebuilt, and an Islamic study center rising near where Islamic terrorists destroyed an Orthodox church. They want to believe that American Muslims are as committed to American values and justice as they are, but they also know their own history.

What, they might ask, is different? A church is in ruins, but a study center is built. Money from Islamic states that do not respect freedom of religion or the rights of private property flow, but nothing is given to rebuild what was destroyed by co-religionists.

Saint Nicholas is not the first Orthodox Church destroyed by Islamic extremists and then not rebuilt while an Islamic center rises in its stead. All over the Middle East churches have been looted by men the governments publically condemn as “extremists,” but the churches are never rebuilt and the blood of the martyrs cries out for justice in vain.

In Egypt, Indonesia, the Sudan, Lebanon, and Turkey Christians live in terror for their lives.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf can submit to the will of God and stand firmly for justice for those who have no power to speak for themselves. He can stand for the Jews of New York City, forced to protect themselves behind metal detectors. He can stand for the Christian Copts of Egypt, terrorized by extremists. He can stand for the Christians in southern Sudan who are enslaved by Muslims from the north.

If he does, then he will find many of us ready to stand with him for justice. We know that every American has a right to do as he will with private property, but we doubt, for good reason, the commitment of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to American values.

Christians know, to their shame, that there were times in the distant past when it was better to live in Islamic lands than Christian ones. By the standards of the times, Islamic lands were more tolerant than Christian countries. Jews, for example, had civil rights denied them in most Christian nations. But those days are long ago.

Christianity has learned the lessons of history, yet it is not obvious that Islam has. The United States has a huge, active Christian majority. It is politically potent, but individual Muslims still have greater civil rights than they do in most Islamic countries. This is certainly true of Islamic women.

My Muslim friends claim this is not because of Islam, but due to colonialism and other evils of history. Perhaps this is true, but it does not explain the treatment of the Christian “native” populations in nations like Turkey and Egypt. Christians have been in both regions longer than Muslims, but find themselves persecuted and embattled.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has the attention of the world at this moment. He can prove that he is not seeking extremist money or catering to the regressive elements in Islam. This religious leader can act prudently, help rebuild Saint Nicholas in New York while building a study center, and point the way to justice.

Non-Muslims are told Islam demands justice. Americans are committed to advancing justice and want to believe good of their fellow citizens.

Bad practices have often ended in America. A Christian majority learned to accept a Jewish minority as equal citizens. Women gained the vote without bloodshed or civil war. Now the wars of the Middle East can end here as an Islamic imam stands for justice in the nations where his voice is most likely to be heard.

This is a moment for greatness and one man can change everything.