New Conference Audio: Reflecting on the Cross

Recently (the week of July 29, 2012), Dr. Haykin spoke at the Muskoka Bible Centre in Northern Ontario on the theme Reflecting on the Cross. I posted the audio of these lectures on our Audio page this morning. The links to Dr. Haykin's lectures are included below in the order in which they were delivered.

For more audio from Dr. Haykin, please see this site's Audio page.

Posted by Steve Weaver, Research Assistant to the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin.

Coming Soon from Dr. Haykin: Travel With Jonathan Edwards

Coming soon from Dr. Haykin and DayOne Publications is Travel With Jonathan Edwards. This is another in a series of very helpful travel guides related to important figures in church history published by DayOne. Written with Ron Baines, the book will not only include a biographical sketch of Edwards, but it will also include maps, directions, and color photos of many important Edwards' sites. From the Publisher:

In a world wracked by the clash of European powers, Jonathan Edwards, one of the most extraordinary theologian-pastors in the history of Christianity, sought to express by means of the spoken word and printed text his vision of the glory of God, sovereign over this world’s empires, and its practical implications for humanity. The pursuit of this calling was an instrumental factor in the revivals that reshaped the American spiritual landscape. Throughout all the changes of his life was his beautiful relationship with his wife Sarah, a model of Puritan marital piety and the hidden spring of much of his usefulness as a preacher and theologian.

Free Registrations Available for "Andrew Fuller and His Friends"

Currently enrolled, on-campus Southern Seminary students are eligible for free registration to this year's Andrew Fuller Center conference. Due to the generosity of friends, there are a limited number of free registrations available on a first come, first serve basis. To receive this free registration you must sign up for in person at the Events Production office on the campus of Southern Seminary. All you need is your Shield student ID card. For details about the conference or (if you are not a current SBTS student) to register, please visit events.sbts.edu/andrewfuller.

The seminary and piety: a surrejoinder

If we define a faithful minister of the Word along the lines of Acts 6, a man devoted to the Word and prayer, it seems to me that in the twentieth century faithful orthodox seminaries have done fairly well in training men in one half of this equation: the Word. But what of the other? Well, I think many leaders in former generations expected these things to be caught by osmosis even though Jesus responded positively to the disciples’ request that he teach them how to pray. Spirituality needs to be “taught” and handed on. And while all professors in a seminary need to approach their specific subjects with an answerable spiritual frame, it is not wrong for some to focus on spirituality. Given the fact that spirituality and spiritual formation are increasingly huge engagements for both our larger cultural “moment” and within the boundaries of the Church, it is not unrealistic to ask certain men to specialize in the praxis of spirituality and the history of biblical spirituality.

As an historian, I feel the latter is very important: during the course of the twentieth century for a variety of reasons many of those who loved the Scriptures as the inerrant Word of God and faithfully upheld biblical orthodoxy failed to pass on the rich piety of their forebears in the Reformation, Puritan, Pietist and early Evangelical traditions. And surely this is one of the reasons why certain communities within the broad stream of twentieth-century English-speaking Evangelicalism became enamoured of the Spirit and talked as if they were the first to discover him since the Pentecost: they looked around and saw a tradition that seemed to have little place for piety, experience, and dare I say it, rapture (no I am not talking about an eschatological item!). Incidentally, here is where a man whom Carl has been writing about in recent days, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, is so helpful: his balance of Word and Spirit is admirable (re other matters Carl has raised about the Doctor, this is not the place to go into those, though I agree with Carl that the recent collection of essays on the Doctor is by and large a welcome addition to the books on that remarkable servant of God).

Maybe, I need to take up Carl’s offer and we can do a book together on this subject of the seminary and piety—and maybe Dr Lucas, if he is so inclined, could also be involved!

Spiritual formation and the modern seminary

One of the classic introductions to theological studies is B.B. Warfield’s The Religious Life of Theological Students, where his primary concern is to argue for the necessity of personal piety in the life of those studying at a theological seminary. He expects that the seminary be a place of piety, where piety is inculcated and where the students experience what we call today “spiritual formation.” Reading my dear friend Carl Trueman’s recent post at reformation21 on “Witsius, Character and Cleaning Rosters” I was honestly surprised to find the following remarks in which he clearly disagrees with his distinguished Presbyterian forebear:

“I find the whole notion of ‘spiritual formation’ within seminaries to be somewhat problematic: seminaries impart knowledge and skills which are essential for ministry and which cannot be acquired with like ease in a practical mentoring situation; they also provide a context for developing important and useful friendships which will last a lifetime; but they cannot really engage in spiritual formation in any deep way.”

Trueman argues that this is because seminaries are not centers where the means of grace like the Lord’s Supper and the preaching of the Word are observed:

“Certainly, the professor can and should strive to model Christian behaviour; but the real, deep, lasting spiritual formation for ministerial candidates takes place in a church context just as it does for every other Christian. The church is where the word is preached, the sacraments administered and discipling takes place.”

To be sure, seminaries are not churches and I agree wholeheartedly that as such a seminary is not the place where baptism (albeit Carl and I differ somewhat about this ordinance/sacrament) and the Lord’s Supper are carried out. But surely the Word is preached at Westminster? What does Carl expect should happen as that Word is heard by students there? And surely the lifelong friendships formed are a central means of grace in the lives of the students—or maybe my dear brother has forgotten the way that our Evangelical (or should I say Reformed?!) forebears prized friendship as a means of grace? And would he disagree that part of the seminary professor’s role is to mentor the students (or some at least) under his care? Surely seminaries are places where more than places where “knowledge and skills which are essential for ministry” are imparted? If this is all our idea of a seminary, I would not be surprised if the long-term result were a hall of dry orthodoxy!

I am sorry, I think I shall stick with the perspective of B.B. Warfield, or one of my favorite models, D.A. McGregor (1847–1890), professor of systematic theology at and then principal of Toronto Baptist College. A former student said of his teaching: “He not only thought out the…doctrines upon which he lectured, but he felt their power, and falling tears often evinced his emotion while he spoke of some particular aspect of the truth. This made us all feel that we had before us not only a theological professor but also a Christian man whose life was swayed by the great principles about which he spoke… He not only made us see the truth, but he made us feel its power and perceive its beauty.” Were not lectures like this a rich vehicle of spiritual formation?

In fine, spiritual formation is a vital part of what should be happening at the seminary as well as the local church.

Audio interview with Dr. Haykin on The Reformers and Puritans as Spiritual Mentors

Dr. Haykin was recently interviewed on the podcast of the "New Books in Christian Studies" website. The subject of the interview is Dr. Haykin's recent book, The Reformers and Puritans as Spiritual Mentors (Joshua Press, 2012). The interview has been posted here and is available on iTunes as well.

Posted by Steve Weaver, Research Assistant to the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin.

Attend Andrew Fuller Conference for Credit

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is offering a ‎"History of the Baptists" (26100 MD) Hybrid course in conjunction with this year's Andrew Fuller Center conference. The course, which will be taught by Dr. Michael A. G. Haykin with Steve Weaver, will include registration for the 2012 conference. The class will meet for four hours on Thursday evening before the conference and for two hours on Saturday afternoon after the conference ends. Supplemental video lectures will be watched online via Moodle before and after the class meets on campus Septemer 20-22, 2012. To view the syllabus, click here. SBTS students can sign up for the class on Moodle using course # 26100 MD. For more details about the conference, please visit events.sbts.edu/andrewfuller.

Baptists and knowing the times

For Baptists, faithfulness to the Gospel in England during the period from 1660 to 1688 meant outright conflict with the Anglican Church and inevitably persecution and imprisonment for Baptist leaders. Not surprisingly, this produced a legacy of animosity between the two bodies of churches: to the Baptists, the Church of England was a false church; to the Anglicans, Baptist congregations were guilty of the sin of schism. Fifty years after the Act of Toleration, when revival began to come to the Church of England, Baptists understandably viewed things through the prism of their history of dealings with the Anglicans and either acted as if the revival was a “flash in the pan,” as we say, or rejected it out of hand. Far too many Baptists sought to hold the line against the revival, and one of the results was hyper-Calvinism, and Andrew Fuller’s famous quip that the Calvinistic Baptist denomination would have become “a very dunghill in society” (Works [1845], III, 478) if God had not brought renewal into their ranks. Nota bene: this revival of the Baptists did not take place till the 1780s, a full fifty years after the revival began in Anglican ranks.

There is a tremendous lesson in all of this: the form that our loyalty to the Gospel takes can never be divorced from the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves and thus we need to be astute as possible in “knowing the times.”

Christian classics: a list

This past week I had the privilege of teaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary a course on Christian Classics. I was asked at one point for a list of key works that I consider every Christian should read. Such lists are always eclectic to some degree. The following is no exception: I doubt many others would list Samuel Pearce’s memoirs by Fuller or Ann Griffiths. But here is my current list of Christian classics arranged chronologically. 

  1. The Odes of Solomon
  2. Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit
  3. Augustine, Confessions
  4. Augustine, On the Trinity
  5. Macarius, Spiritual Homilies
  6. Ailred of Rievaulx, On Spiritual Friendship
  7. Thomas Cranmer, The Book of Common Prayer
  8. John Calvin, The Institutes
  9. John Owen, On the Mortification of Sin in Believers
  10. Jonathan Edwards, On Religious Affections
  11. The Hymns of Charles Wesley
  12. John Newton and William Cowper, The Olney Hymns
  13. The Hymns and Letters of Ann Griffiths
  14. Andrew Fuller, The Memoirs of Samuel Pearce
  15. Adolphe Monod, Les Adieux
  16. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together
  17. C. S Lewis, The Weight of Glory
  18. John Piper, Desiring God

Claire Welch's Ontario

A slight emendation of Calixa Lavallée’s words familiar to all Canadians, “my home and native land”—from Canada’s national anthem—came to mind when I began to write this review.* Ontario has been my home since I was twelve, and it is now very much my “native land” by choice. Initially when I came to Ontario in December of 1965 I was none too thrilled: there was no rich history like my native England, few battles, fewer heroes, or so it appeared to a young boy raised on military heroes like Richard the Lionheart, Warwick the Kingmaker, Nelson and so on. But over the past forty-five years I have learned to love this land, which the dust-jacket of this book calls a “magical province.” No doubt, the main draw of this book is its stunning photographs, many of them places very familiar to me, such as the aerial picture of Niagara Falls (p.99). It is essentially a coffee-table book, to be picked up for a few moments in which one can savor some of the photographs in its pages. Alongside the photographs, though, there is also a textual narrative that sketches the history of the province. It begins with the first peoples, the Algonquians and Iroquoians, their encounter in the seventeenth century with the first European settlers, the French and the British, and goes on to more recent political and economic developments. This text gives a fair overview of the province’s history, but I felt that there was one striking lacuna that I have encountered again and again in recent histories of either Ontario or Canada: there was nearly nothing about the formative role that religion has played in Ontario’s development. I say “nearly nothing,” for there is a photograph of St Sylvester’s Roman Catholic Church in Nipigon (p.114). Beyond that, though, the impression given is that historic Ontario was as secular as the modern landscape. But nothing could be farther from the truth.

The historic strength of the part of Canada that I call home and now native land has been the Christian faith. While that is no longer the case—a fact that cries out for an explanation—we do Ontario’s past a grave injustice if we fail to recall all of its inner and outer architecture.

* Claire Welch, Ontario (Edison, New Jersey: Chartwell Books, Inc., 2008).

(This review first appeared on The Official Blog of the Sola Scriptura Ministries International. See here. Used by permission).

Math and the Future of Religion

In a recent piece entitled “Religion in Canada is going extinct as atheists come out of the closet” communications professional Daniela Syrovy argues that it “doesn’t take a scientist to figure out that religion [in Canada] is in decline.” She buttresses this remark with some impressions—church attendance noticeably in decline, church buildings being sold off—and stats from a recent study by three mathematicians (“Mathematicians say religion heading toward extinction”; for the actual piece of research, see Daniel M. Abrams, Haley A. Yaple, and Richard J. Wiener, “A mathematical model of social group competition with application to the growth of religious non-affiliation”) that seem to indicate that religion is headed for extinction in nine western democracies, including Canada. To a math ignoramus like me (I don’t think that my father, who nearly did a PhD in mathematics, ever got over having such a numskull for a son!), the stats, supported by a host of mathematical formulae, look very impressive. The one big glitch is that we are talking about human behavior. First-century Rome—things looked grim for organized religion. Just around the corner was the fervour of Christianity. As Barry Kosmin, a demographer of religion at Trinity College in Connecticut rightly noted, “Religion relies on human beings. They aren’t rational or predictable according to the laws of physics. Religious fervor waxes and wanes in unpredictable ways.” So true.

Actually, this study by Abrams, Yaple and Wiener is simply a mathematical variant of a model that has been employed and found wanting in historical studies, namely, the secularization thesis. In a nutshell, this thesis argued that as societies became more sophisticated technologically, religion waned and declined. The thesis sounds pretty convincing: as more is explained about the world in which we live, the less we need to rely upon religion and deities. Kind of like that episode of the first Star Trek, where the adventure-loving humans encounter the god Apollo, who sees an opportunity to reassert his control over mankind through superstition and fear. But Capt. Kirk—the quintessential rationalist—tells him that mankind had outgrown their need for such gods and such beliefs.

This view seemed to make sense in the 1960s, when humankind seemed on the verge of great advances and the future seemed so rosy because of science. But fifty years on, western men and women are not so sure, and, as Syrovy admits, “Faith exists and is evident in everyday life” [what she means by “faith” is not at all clear]. Or to put it in more (post-)modern jargon, spirituality is flourishing as never before since the sixties, replete with crystals, Buddhism meditation, vampires, and converts to Islam.

Syrovy notes that “an estimated 12% of the world’s population are atheists and if the mathematicians have it right, over half of Canada is headed in that direction. Today, it feels great to say it loud and proud: religion is going extinct. Thank goodness.” Of course, majorities this way or that are not what this issue is about: rather, it is about truth. If 90% believe one thing and 10% another, and the minority are right, what matters that I am in such plentiful company? And when I look back at the twentieth century with its great social experiments in atheism—Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, the Pol Pot regime—I confess I am not as thrilled at the prospect of nationwide atheism as she is!

Le pudeur and sex in the Song of Songs revisited

A couple of comments on my recent post on “la pudeur” have prompted disbelief: surely I cannot be saying there is no sex in the Song of Songs! Well, let me assure you, I am not. Of course, there is sex there. But what I am strongly suggesting is that the book is not a sex manual, which fascinates our culture’s mentalité where all is devolved into technique. And as such, I am extremely dubious about attempts to find certain sexual exploits in the book. I am not convinced, for instance, that there is anything in this text about fellatio, contrary to the arguments of certain recent commentators. The verses that were used to buttress this argument were as dubious to me as John Walvoord’s pointing to Revelation 4:1 as a reference to the rapture (if the dispensationalist rapture is true it must stand on better grounds than that!).

Moreover, without necessarily adopting the rampant allegorizing of our fathers in the Faith, surely they were right to argue this book is also about Christ and his church. And to read it as primarily a “holy” sex manual surely misses one of the rich reasons it is in the canon!

Of university and college bookstores

“If the college you visit has a bookstore filled with t-shirts rather than books, find another college.” —Al Mohler. Wise advice indeed! About a year ago, one of the best bookstores in the Greater Hamilton area in Ontario, namely McMaster University’s bookstore, decided to trade in most of its books for McMaster kitsch, including oodles of t-shirts and hoodies with the Mac logo. I was utterly horrified and, as I would say in British English, I was gobsmacked! I could not believe my eyes when I saw the transition taking place. Thankfully, we have Bryan Prince’s bookstore down the road in Westdale. Still it is quite amazing that a first-class University like McMaster has a piddly number of books in their bookstore—or whatever the store should be called now that it has denuded itself of books.

In this regard, I was glad to see the bookstore at the University of British Columbia, where I was last week, it is still the real thing—I hope it stays that way!

La pudeur and our sexualized culture

A good sign of the fact that we live in a hyper-sexualized culture is the way the term “sexy”—which used to have a distinct meaning of sexually alluring—has morphed over into a variety of spheres where the adjective has no business being used: course descriptions, cars, and cameras, for example, are all sexy—or not, as the case may be! Personally, I can’t stand this abuse of the adjective, and especially when even Christian authors routinely use it in such ways. But surely the latter simply indicates that even among Christians, the hyper-sexuality of our culture is re-shaping their world as well—witness the adoption of the frankly absurd eisegesis of the Song of Songs that sees in the ancient text all kinds of blatant sexual activities that titillate the modern palate. Here we need to step back and take a lesson from the French language (my Francophone friends will love this!). The French have a wonderful word to capture the veiling of one’s intimate feelings and doings, pudeur, a “holy bashfulness” (HT Alice von Hidlebrand, the Catholic philosopher). Surely, the time is ripe for such a response to this moment of our cultural sexualization. This is not Victorian prudishness, but—if I read the Puritans aright—a proper biblical approach to sex and the marriage bed.

William Carey and William Ward, and being indebted to the Moravians

At time it appears that the debate about whether or not William Carey is rightly called the Father of the modern missionary movement is a seemingly endless palaver: of course, anybody who has read anything about the eighteenth-century awakening knows the Moravians were there first. But it was Carey’s name that was remembered through the long century that followed. Yet, it should never be forgot—though one fears many of the Victorian admirers of the English Baptist did forget—that Carey and his colleagues knew the extent of their debt to the Moravians. As William Ward exclaimed in 1801, after reading some Moravian missionary journals: “Thank you, Moravians! Ye have done me good. If I am ever a missionary worth a straw, I shall owe it to you, under our Saviour.” (Periodical Accounts, 2 [Clipstone, 1801], no.VII, 5).

Honoring the Fundamentalists

The term “Fundamentalism,” for many in our culture a word with entirely negative associations, was birthed in the 1910s and 1920s in connection with a desire to affirm the Fundamentals of the Christian Faith in the face of the 19th- and early 20th-century liberal denial of various orthodox doctrines. As such, Fundamentalism points us to the important task that confronts the Church in every generation, namely, the vigorous assertion without compromise of such key truths as the Trinity, the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, his bodily incarnation and resurrection from the dead. A passion for Truth gripped the early Fundamentalists, and Evangelicals need to be thankful to God for those men and women who affirmed the Faith when so many professing Christian leaders were engaged in Esau-like compromise. Alongside a passion for the Truth, early Fundamentalism was also shaped by a desire to know the reality of that text in Ephesians 5, where we read that Christ’s great work includes the sanctification and purification of the Church (verses 25–26). Early Fundamentalists were keenly aware that purity of doctrine was a key part of our Lord’s sanctifying and purifying work and that Christians cannot walk hand in hand with those who flagrantly deny the essentials of the Faith. In this connection, they were also desirous of heeding another related text, namely, that “pure and undefiled religion in the presence of God, even the Father, is this…to keep oneself unstained from the world” (James 1:27). These desires—seeking purity of doctrine and church reform as well as living holy lives—should also be central to our Christianity.

Yet, as Fundamentalism pursued these passions, all too frequently it found itself getting sidelined in debates about tertiary issues and becoming a movement that fostered schism rather than reformation. At times it seemed to forget that theological orthodoxy in and by itself cannot revitalize Christian communities: the coals of orthodoxy are vital, but there must be the life-giving flame of the Spirit as well.

In recent days, though, it appears to this historian that Evangelicalism would like to conveniently forget the important role that Fundamentalism played in preserving the Faith in the early years of the twentieth century. Just as, up until very recently, the work of the British Empire’s Bomber Command was conveniently forgotten in the plaudits being handed out to those who made incredible sacrifices during world War II, so Fundamentalists have been conveniently put to one side and Evangelicals have sought to live as if they did not act as conduits of their Faith. But we cannot do this, and nor should we. We may not agree with all that Fundamentalism represented, but honor needs given where honor is due.