An International Journal for Students of Theological and Religious Studies Volume 35 Issue 2 July 2010
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An International Journal for Students of Theological and Religious Studies Volume 35 Issue 2 July 2010 MINORITY REPORT: Not in the Public Interest 195 Carl Trueman B. B. Warfield on Creation and Evolution 198 Fred G. Zaspel Why Evangelicals Should Ignore Brian McLaren: How 212 the New Testament Requires Evangelicals to Render a Judgment on the Moral Status of Homosexuality Denny Burk A Member of the Family or a Stranger? A Review Article 228 of Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology Stephen Dempster Parallels, Real or Imagined? A Review Article of Jeffrey 238 J. Niehaus, Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology William Edgar How to Write—and How Not to Write—a Review: 245 An Appreciative Response to Reviews of Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology by Dempster and Edgar Jeffrey J. Niehaus PasTORAL PENSÉES: Motivations to Appeal to in Our 258 Hearers When We Preach for Conversion D. A. Carson Book Reviews 265 DESCRIPTION Themelios is an international evangelical theological journal that expounds and defends the historic Christian faith. Its primary audience is theological students and pastors, though scholars read it as well. It was formerly a print journal operated by RTSF/UCCF in the UK, and it became a digital journal operated by The Gospel Coalition in 2008. The new editorial team seeks to preserve representation, in both essayists and reviewers, from both sides of the Atlantic. Themelios is published three times a year exclusively online at www.theGospelCoalition.org. It is presented in two formats: PDF (for citing pagination) and HTML (for greater accessibility, usability, and infiltration in search engines). Themelios is copyrighted by The Gospel Coalition. Readers are free to use it and circulate it in digital form without further permission (any print use requires further written permission), but they must acknowledge the source and, of course, not change the content. EDITORS BOOK ReVIEW EDITORS General Editor: D. A. Carson Old Testament Systematic Theology and Bioethics Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Daniel Santos Hans Madueme 2065 Half Day Road Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie— Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Deerfield, IL, 60015, USA CPAJ 2065 Half Day Road; D-632 [email protected] Rua Maria Borba, 15 Deerfield, IL 60015, USA Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil 01221-040 [email protected] Consulting Editor: Carl R. Trueman [email protected] Westminster Theological Seminary Ethics (but not Bioethics) and Pastoralia Chestnut Hill, P.O. Box 27009 New Testament Peter Comont Philadelphia, PA 19118, USA Alan Thompson Magdalen Road Church Sydney Missionary & Bible College 41a Magdalen Road Managing Editor: Charles Anderson PO Box 83 Oak Hill Theological College Oxford, OX4 1RB, UK Croydon, NSW 2132, Australia Chase Side, Southgate [email protected] [email protected] London, N14 4PS, UK Mission and Culture [email protected] History and Historical Theology Daniel Strange Nathan A. Finn Administrator: Andrew David Naselli Oak Hill College Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary Grace Bible Church Chase Side, Southgate P. O. Box 1889 107 West Road London N14 4PS Wake Forest, NC 27588, USA Moore, SC 29369, USA [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] EDITORIal BOARD Gerald Bray, Beeson Divinity School; William Kynes, Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church; Ken Magnuson, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Jonathan Pennington, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; James Robson, Wycliffe Hall; Michael Thate, Durham University; Mark D. Thompson, Moore Theological College; Garry Williams, The John Owen Centre, London Theological Seminary; Paul Williamson, Moore Theological College; Stephen Witmer, Pepperell Christian Fellowship. ARTIcleS Articles should generally be about 4,000 to 7,000 words (including footnotes) and should be submitted to the Managing Editor of Themelios, which is peer-reviewed. Articles should use clear, concise English, following The SBL Handbook of Style (esp. for abbreviations), supplemented by The Chicago Manual of Style. They should consistently use either UK or USA spelling and punctuation, and they should be submitted electronically as an email attachment using Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx extensions) or Rich Text Format (.rtf extension). Special characters should use a Unicode font. ReVIEWS The book review editors generally select individuals for book reviews, but potential reviewers may contact them about reviewing specific books. As part of arranging book reviews, the book review editors will supply book review guidelines to reviewers. Themelios 35.2 (2010): 195–97 MINORITY RepORT Not in the Public Interest — Carl Trueman — Carl Trueman is Academic Dean, Vice President of Academic Affairs, and Pro- fessor of Historical Theology and Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. uffering, marginalization, and the abuse of power are now the stock in trade not only of literary theorists but also of many theologians, of whom the Liberationists of the sixties and seventies are but the most obvious examples. Indeed, the influence of such academic emphases now finds Sits place frequently in the classrooms of Protestant theologians of more orthodox and traditional bent. One example that came my way recently was from one of my students who recently commented to me that he had heard a lecture by a certain African American scholar who claimed that the Puritans had little grasp of suffering or what it meant to be marginalized. The comment had intrigued the student, and he asked me what I thought. My instinctive reaction was to be utterly dismissive of the claim; and while my instinctive reactions are not always correct, they are generally pretty good when it comes to boneheaded comments that others make about my chosen field of expertise. Indeed, as my boneheaded forays into the scholarly territory of others usually merit instant derision, so I am happy to return the favour when opportunity presents itself. In this instance, I not only thought the comment by the lecturer was wrong; as I reflected upon it, I also realized it gave important insights into the different priorities or sensibilities of the world in which we now live and that of the seventeenth-century Puritans. Contrary to what this lecturer claimed, the world of the Puritans was one peculiarly marked by suffering. Of course, their lives would have been subject to all of the typical physical difficulties of the time: medical conditions untreatable by anything approaching modern medicine; illnesses from poor hygiene; dentistry of a kind which would have made even the British Dental Association of my childhood an object of envy; no antibiotics, analgesics, anesthetics, or flushable toilets, with all of the resulting physical horrors. Thus, the typical life of a seventeenth-century figure would probably have been marked by far more natural physical suffering than would be the typical experience of even the poorest members of society in the developed world. To this medical nightmare we can then add the matter of persecution. Certainly in the decades following the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Puritans had two basic options: get on board with the program of a vigorously enforced Anglican conformity, or face the consequences of losing status and property, and quite possibly jail. Many chose the latter option, with men like John Bunyan and Richard Baxter being only the most high-profile men to suffer imprisonment for their stands against the Establishment. Then there were the decades of social marginalization—decades that turned 195 Minority Report into centuries—where English non-conformists were prevented from attending university, sitting in Parliament, or holding civil service positions. Indeed, if Catholics were legislated to the margins of society until the early nineteenth century, the same went for Baptists, Independents, Quakers, Presbyterians, and anyone who refused to conform. On these grounds alone, I think we can generally assume that the typical post-1662 Puritan knew more about suffering and marginalization than the typical 2010 professor, with tenure and a full benefits package, in a bog-standard Lit. Crit. or Minority Studies Department at a common or garden University. What makes the difference, it seems to me, is not that these men did not know about suffering and about being on the wrong end of terrible abuse of power; it is rather that they did not see the need constantly to refer to their sufferings in their public ministries, whether from the pulpit or on the printed page. One of the most notable examples of this silence is surely John Owen. Owen had eleven children. Ten of them died before adulthood. The daughter who did survive was then involved in an unhappy marriage, returning to the parental home and then dying before her father. In other words, Owen lived to see the funeral of every single one of his eleven children. It beggars belief to think that such trauma did not have a huge impact on his life and thought: indeed, man-made persecution, horrible as it is, is arguably somewhat easier to accommodate than terminal illness within the context of faith since God is at least not the obvious, proximate cause; but death from illness has that random quality to it where God sometimes seems to be the only available culprit. Yet traumatic as these eleven deaths must have been, Owen makes no substantial