An International Journal for Students of Theological and Religious Studies Volume 43 Issue 1 April 2018 EDITORIAL: The Postmodernism That Refuses to Die 1 D. A. Carson STRANGE TIMES: A Wiser Idiot 4 Daniel Strange B. B. Warfield and the Biblical Doctrine of the Trinity 10 Scott R. Swain Reversing the Gospel: Warfield on Race and Racism 25 Fred G. Zaspel A Theological Sickness unto Death: Philip Rieff’s Prophetic 34 Analysis of our Secular Age Bruce Riley Ashford Spurgeon’s Use of Luther against the Oxford Movement 45 Geoffrey Chang Burning Scripture with Passion: A Review of The Psalms 58 (The Passion Translation) Andrew G. Shead When (and How) English-speaking Evangelicals Embraced Q 72 Michael Strickland Book Reviews 87 DESCRIPTION Themelios is an international, evangelical, peer-reviewed theological journal that expounds and defends the historic Christian faith. Its primary audience is theological students and pastors, though scholars read it as well. Themelios began in 1975 and was operated by RTSF/UCCF in the UK, and it became a digital journal operated by The Gospel Coalition in 2008. The editorial team draws participants from across the globe as editors, essayists, and reviewers. Themelios is published three times a year online at The Gospel Coalition website in PDF and HTML, and may be purchased in digital format with Logos Bible Software and in print with Wipf and Stock. Themelios is copyrighted by The Gospel Coalition. Readers are free to use it and circulate it in digital form without further permission, but they must acknowledge the source and may not change the content.. EDITORS BOOK REVIEW EDITORS General Editor: D. A. Carson Old Testament Systematic Theology and Bioethics Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Peter Lau David Garner 2065 Half Day Road Malaysian Theological Seminary Westminster Theological Seminary Deerfield, IL 60015, USA Seremban, Malaysia 2960 Church Rd, Glenside, PA 19038 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Managing Editor: Brian Tabb New Testament Ethics and Pastoralia Bethlehem College & Seminary David Starling Rob Smith 720 13th Avenue South Morling College Sydney Missionary and Bible College Minneapolis, MN 55415, USA 120 Herring Road 43 Badminton Road [email protected] Macquarie Park, NSW 2113, Australia Croydon NSW 2132, Australia [email protected] [email protected] Contributing Editor: Daniel Strange Oak Hill Theological College History and Historical Theology Mission and Culture Chase Side, Southgate Jonathan Arnold Jackson Wu London, N14 4PS, UK Boyce College International Chinese Theological [email protected] 2825 Lexington Road Seminary Louisville, KY 40280 East Asia Administrator: Andy Naselli [email protected] [email protected] Bethlehem College & Seminary 720 13th Avenue South Minneapolis, MN 55415, USA [email protected] EDITORIAL BOARD Gerald Bray, Beeson Divinity School; Hassell Bullock, Wheaton College; Lee Gatiss, Wales Evangelical School of Theology; Paul Helseth, University of Northwestern, St. Paul; Paul House, Beeson Divinity School; Hans Madueme, Covenant College; Ken Magnuson, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Gavin Ortlund, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School; Jonathan Pennington, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Mark D. Thompson, Moore Theological College; Paul Williamson, Moore Theological College; Stephen Witmer, Pepperell Christian Fellowship; Robert Yarbrough, Covenant Seminary. ARTICLES Themelios typically publishes articles that are 4,000 to 9,000 words (including footnotes). Prospective contributors should submit articles by email to the managing editor in Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) or Rich Text Format (.rtf). Submissions should not include the author’s name or institutional affiliation for blind peer-review. Articles should use clear, concise English and should consistently adopt either UK or USA spelling and punctuation conventions. Special characters (such as Greek and Hebrew) require a Unicode font. Abbreviations and bibliographic references should conform to The SBL Handbook of Style (2nd ed.), supplemented by The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.). For examples of the the journal's style, consult the most recent Themelios issues and the contributor guidelines. 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 43.1 (2018): 1–3 EDITORIAL The Postmodernism That Refuses to Die — D. A. Carson — D. A. Carson is research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and general editor of Themelios. eople aren’t talking about postmodernism nearly as much as they were fifteen or twenty years ago. Thirty-five years ago, graduate students in English departments in many universities of the Western world spent more time reading Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault than Shakespeare, Keats, Pand Frost. Proof of mature reading of a text was tied rather more to creative deconstruction than to trying to understand the text in its historical and cultural framework. More important than the English texts was postmodern theory. Much of this has changed. Far fewer students are assigned major readings from Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. The founding writers of postmodernism (understood, for the sake of this brief editorial, as an epistemological enterprise) are largely sidelined from college curricula. But that doesn’t mean the impact of postmodernism has entirely dissipated. What seems to be taking place, rather, is something like this: some of the conclusions of postmodernism are now adopted with little question as cultural “givens” without a felt need to justify them. Why defend stances that large swaths of the culture accept as obviously true? So, what we find is substantial numbers of postmoderns who rarely think of themselves as postmoderns, and who know next to nothing of the literature and debates that occupied so much attention a bare generation ago. They understand neither the theory nor its critics, but they presuppose many of its conclusions. A couple of examples might help. Recently, Christian students at a fine West Coast university engaged in a thoughtful survey of their fellow students, focusing on what they thought about religion in general and Christianity in particular. Some of the questions focused on the afterlife: e.g., What would it take to know that there is a new heaven and a new earth to be gained? A not uncommon answer was, “How can you claim to know anything at all?” Or again, when asked how they understood the exclusive truth claims of Christianity (e.g., John 14:6; Acts 4:12), most responses fell into one of two pools: (1) “Christians are so bigoted. We all have our own distinctive approaches to spirituality. Christians don’t have the right to rule out of camp the claims of other religions.” Or: (2) “Deep down, all religions are really saying the same thing anyway, so why should one view others as distinctively different or in some way inferior?” Of course, the adoption of such stances should not be traced exclusively to the impact of postmodernism. Other competing streams have brought to bear important influences: contemporary understanding of what “faith” means, the shifting tides of “tolerance,” and the broader cultural developments that some wag has identified as “a thin crust of vehement hostility masking a vast sea of apathy.” Yet we would be avoiding the obvious if we did not sniff out something of the impact of postmodernism on contemporary epistemologies. 1 Themelios The students at that West Coast university kindly passed on to me the results of their survey as I was preparing for an evangelistic event at the university. Those stances, I soon discovered, characterized not only a substantial number of students who labeled themselves atheists or secularists or anything other than followers of Jesus, but also surfaced in the minds of many Christians who faced these questions in their own courageous attempts to share their faith, and did not quite know how to answer them. So here are a few of the answers I’ve found helpful in my responses to both groups. (1) Not a few of the discussions about what we can or cannot know depend on a misleading baseline. The argument is that unless we know everything about something, we cannot know anything certain about that thing. The logic depends on a rather antiquated form of the so- called “new hermeneutic.” That is an impossible standard. It means that we can legitimately speak of knowledge only if we enjoy omniscience—or, to put it another way, only Omniscience truly knows anything. Read a certain way, of course, that is true. Yet we human beings often speak of things we “know,” and implicitly we are not claiming omniscience; rather, we speak of a variety of human modes of knowing that are appropriate to the human condition. That is true of human beings in the Bible; it is equally true about all human beings everywhere. We “know” the earth will rotate on its axis, and there will be a sunrise tomorrow morning; I “know” that my United flight is scheduled to leave San Francisco in just over an hour. Of course, my “knowledge” of the latter turns on what I read on the United screen and on my United app, and I confess it is a bit disconcerting to sit here and listen to an audio announcement to the effect that what the big screen says about another flight is erroneous on the screen: maybe it will turn out that the posting for mine is erroneous, too. If I were omniscient, there could be no errors of that or any other sort. Nevertheless, we continue to make our plans on the assumption that the earth will continue in its rotation, and that my United flight will leave at 6:00 pm unless there is another notification. We “know” these things, as we know that King David reigned in Jerusalem and that Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, not with the knowledge that belongs exclusively to God, but with the knowledge that is appropriate to our human status.