Book Review: Christ and the Desert Tabernacle by J. V. Fesko

I have had a growing conviction that one of the keys to Christian discipleship is solid biblical hermeneutics. This is just a funny way of referring to the practice of interpreting Scripture. The notes in the ESV Study Bible (p. 2567) state that "Scripture is no ragbag of religious bits and pieces...rather, it is a tapestry in which all the complexities of the weave display a single pattern of judgement and mercy, promise and fulfillment." As a believer learns to discern that pattern, trust in God's promises throughout Scripture, and hence the believer's assurance in walking with Christ, grows ever deeper.

The interwoven nature of Scripture was a basic interpretive principle for much of church history, for the Fathers of the first few centuries as well as for the seventeenth-century Puritans. More recently, however, critical biblical scholarship has led to a more cautious and even suspicious stance toward such interpretation. My own seminary training, for instance, often favored a more fragmentary approach; my sense of where Christ could be found in the Old Testament grew confused.

Because of this, I was pleased to review Christ and the Desert Tabernacle by Dr. J. V. Fesko, Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at Westminster Seminary, California. Dr. Fesko aims to help ordinary readers recognize the "entire world of references, allusions and foreshadows of Christ and the church" to be found in descriptions of the Old Testament tabernacle. Surveying the building materials, the Ark of the Covenant, the various furniture, and even the consecration of the priests, Dr. Fesko describes the purpose and function of each element of the Tabernacle, then examines it again in light of the New Testament. He shows how each element not only provided the means by which God dwelt among his people in the long-ago desert, but may also be read as shadowing forth the future realities of Christ and his church. Each chapter concludes with reflections connecting aspects of the desert tabernacle with our Christian lives, both individually and corporately. A few examples that I found especially striking:

• The blood-smeared horns of the altar represent the costly sacrifice of Christ to which we cling for mercy.
•  The priests' garments point to those of Christ, our High Priest, who robes us in His own righteousness.
• The altar of incense reminds us of Christ's ongoing intercessory prayer for us.
• The bronze basin is a figure of the waters of baptism and the washing of regeneration by the Holy Spirit.

My favorite chapter, however, was the final one on the Sabbath--the subject with which Exodus' tabernacle instructions end. The cessation of labor on the Sabbath was meant to be a visual sign that God had placed himself in the midst of his people and was sanctifying them, making them holy. It showed that the Israelites could not enter God's eternal rest by their own labor, but only by the labor of another. For Christians, the Sabbath continues to serve as a sign. Through the work of Christ, we have already begun to enter into the Sabbath rest of God (Hebrews 4:3). Just as God was present among His set-apart people in the desert tabernacle, so His Holy Spirit dwells among believers in Lord's Day worship, conforming them to the image of the Son. "When we absent ourselves from church. . .we are tacitly admitting that we do not need the sanctifying work of God in our lives [...] How often do we long for heaven itself but pass by the Lord's Day as an opportunity to get a taste of heaven?" (131)

Dr. Fesko's book made me better appreciate both God's otherness and how close He has come to us in Christ. The sights and smells of the tabernacle are mostly quite foreign to us--animal blood, burnt offerings, incense, golden cherubim. Yet they are assuredly part of our story, because they show the lengths to which God has always gone to dwell among His people--first in the desert tabernacle, later incarnate in Jesus Christ, and now in us, through His Holy Spirit. And the layers of that story are already embedded in these seemingly obscure passages of the Pentateuch.

I thought the book would have been much enriched by examples drawn from the church's long history of Old Testament interpretation. The connections Dr. Fesko draws are part of a centuries-old tradition; even though this is not a study in historical theology, I would have loved to hear more of his expertise in that area. Also, it should be pointed out that there is not a simple, one-to-one correspondence between Old and New Testament in every case. But, particularly for Christians unfamiliar with these passages of Exodus, the book serves as a helpful introduction and could be used profitably for individual or group study. Learning to read the Old Testament in this way, "We can look forward to the day when faith will give way to sight. Christ will not only indwell us spiritually but we will dwell for all eternity in the presence of our triune Lord...[W]e will know completely and fully what Israel only knew in shadows and in a manmade tent. . .the eternal abiding presence of God." (56)

The publisher provided me with a review copy of this book, and I was under no obligation to give a favorable review.

Wowed by an Unlikely Book

When you stand as close as we have to real life miracles, you will get roughed up. . .Splinters fall from the cross. They travel a long distance and they pierce the skin -- maybe even the heart. And wrapped in this risk and danger is God's embrace and promise to work all things (even evil ones) to the good of those who love him. . .[W]e are not to be Pollyanna about this. Many of the "things" we will face come with the razor edges of a fallen and broken world. You can't play poker with God's mercy -- if you want the sweet mercy then you must also swallow the bitter mercy. And what is the difference between sweet and bitter? Only this: your critical perspective, your worldview. One of God's greatest gifts is the ability to see points of view that exceed your personal experience. That is what it means to me to grow in Christ -- to exceed myself as I stretch to him.

-The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, pp. 124-125.

Rarely have I finished reading a book and thought, "I want to buy a stack of these to hand out to people." But The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, is on that short list. Since I can't buy it in bulk right now, I wanted to at least say something about it here. I first heard about the book through reviews (there's a good one here) and bought a copy directly from Crown & Covenant Publications. You can also get it from Amazon, and apparently there's now a Kindle edition.

The thing about this book is that there's probably something in it that will nettle or disturb virtually any reader. I'm not normally drawn to books like that; they're too exhausting. But the story of Rosaria's conversion is never provocative for its own sake -- it always points to Christ. So even though I wouldn't call it a leisurely read (I finished the book in two sittings because it was too hard to put it aside for long), it has a hard-edged beauty that will stick with you.

Rosaria was a tenured professor of nineteenth-century literature specializing in queer theory at Syracuse University. In the process of researching a book on the American religious right, she was welcomed into the home of a Presbyterian minister and his wife. Through many conversations with them and others, her whole world was upended as she came to accept the precise claims of Christianity that she had set out to critique. By the end of the book, Rosaria herself is a Presbyterian minister's wife with experience in Christian college teaching, church planting, classical homeschooling, and foster care. But, as you're probably guessing, there is a lot more to the story than that -- and it's the messiness amidst all those things that made the book especially beautiful to me.

I finished Secret Thoughts with unanswered questions and points of disagreement, and I'm sure that in subsequent readings, I would find more; but what the book emphatically did was make me think differently about the power of the gospel. Even if you're not sure you would like Rosaria's story, I'd encourage you to give yourself the opportunity to be surprised by it. I was. And if you do read it, I'd love to hear what you think.

State of the Dissertation update

One of the purposes of this blog is to provide a glimpse of what an academic's life looks like. To be honest, I'm not sure that's a picture I'm eager to share with you right now (at least not of this academic's life!). But I can at least tell you what I'm working on these days.

In my program, after all coursework and exams have been completed, the third year is devoted to writing something I've heard variously referred to as the "programmatic essay," the "dissertation proposal," or the "dissertation prospectus." Our program has undergone so many changes in recent years that I'm not entirely certain which of those terms I'm "supposed" to use, but for now, we'll just call it the proposal.

The dissertation proposal is what it sounds like: a document (in this case, no more than 25 pages) that proposes my chosen topic to a committee of faculty, including a justification for that topic (demonstrating that the field needs my research), my tentative argument, and an outline of the means I will use to prove that argument. Of course, at this stage, many aspects of this will be tentative. However, I need to satisfy the committee that my project is really something I can write a 200-page dissertation about.

One of my worst nightmares about this program was that I would arrive in my third year not knowing what I wanted to write about. It would be way too dramatic for me to claim that nightmare has come true. At no point have I been completely lost. Still, it has taken much longer, more discouragement, and more revisions to arrive at a topic than I had hoped (about six months). My topic is not yet at a stage that I'm prepared to unveil it publicly, but hopefully soon. :-)

I think there are several reasons it's been disappointingly hard to narrow down my topic; I won't delve into them all here. One conclusion I've reached, though, is that my dissertation will not be my dream project (and likely shouldn't be). The goal of the dissertation is to prove that I can undertake independent scholarly research on a high level. So the topic should be 1.) achievable and 2.) something I am content working on for two or three years. I don't expect to be in love with it (and it's a little late for that)...but I do hope I can sustain a reasonable amount of interest in it, for obvious reasons.

So, to break it down less wordily, the coming year should look like this:
Now-December: Drafting dissertation proposal
Sometime early in 2013: Presenting and defending proposal to a small committee
The remainder of Spring semester 2013: Completing research and starting to write the dissertation in earnest.

As for the nuts and bolts of it...it's really weird not being in classes anymore (with the exception of a seminar that meets Mondays to help us third-year students write our proposals). I think it takes a rare, exceptionally driven and disciplined student to manage the transition from coursework to dissertation gracefully. I can already tell you that is not me. I've had many more discouraged days than hopeful and productive ones, so far. But with God's grace I persevere. :-)

Grace for Dirty Dishes (and other daunting obstacles)

When I was newly married, one of the biggest obstacles in my household was dirty dishes. I simply couldn't stay on top of the ever-accumulating pile in our tiny kitchen. No sooner would I triumph over one stack than the sink would fill up tauntingly, and I'd be faced with hours of washing once again. Filled with resentment and a mounting sense of defeat, I would procrastinate to the point that there was barely space in the kitchen to scrub effectively, much less cook meals. Things grew ugly. At some point, I virtually surrendered to the dirty dishes.

It sounds so ridiculous now. But it's hard to overstate how defeated I felt. Somehow, the dirty dishes were a metaphor for all my failures as a wife, my aimless non-student status, the ugly sin in my heart, everything. All of it coiled tightly in my chest and spilled out in tears whenever I summoned the nerve to tackle the dishes. I remember standing in the kitchen thinking about what our pastor had preached on Sunday. I knew that my domestic failures said nothing about my identity in Christ. The thought that my existence was defined more by my disastrous kitchen than by the beauty of Christ was an insidious lie. I agreed with that. It just didn't change what I saw before me -- or my sense of utter powerlessness in the face of it. Considering that I allowed a simple household task to become freighted with so much, it's little wonder that I gave up.

Nowadays, I can praise the Lord that He's brought me to the other side of much of that. It's taken the better part of four years, a relocation, consistent effort toward fresh starts in habit and attitude, and the aid of a beautiful dishwasher (!). What it hasn't been is automatic. In wrestling with the meaning of grace for my life, I've wondered if I've operated under wrong assumptions about how grace changes things.

For example, as I discussed with my husband recently, grace is not some sort of "positive-thinking alchemy" that instantaneously transforms my circumstances. Sometimes it does work in plainly miraculous ways. Other times, I've looked at apparently unchanged circumstances as evidence that I'm just not believing hard enough, or that I haven't sufficiently humbled my heart to "get it." Even if that were true, it's missing the point. It risks twisting grace into another form of works-righteousness, something that I muster up on my own behalf. Such "grace" would be no grace at all.

For another, grace is too big for my heart to receive all at once.
The truth about my soul's union with Christ may take awhile, may take a long time, to work itself out in forms that I can confidently perceive and put words to. There's much walking by faith, not by sight, and waiting on the Lord to work as He has promised to do. This can be painful and pretty messy in the in-between. That doesn't make His grace a bit less objectively real.

I can say that, even though I no longer struggle in the same way with chores like washing dishes, dirty dishes scenarios linger in my life. So how to confront them? I'm still struggling. One thing the Lord has been teaching me is that it's hard to let others be party to those scenarios, but that sometimes He calls us to do this, and with excellent reason. Not that we need to be transparent about them to whomever will listen. That's not necessarily God-glorifying or helpful. Yet opening up about the shameful things, to trusted brothers and sisters, can be a thing the Lord uses to make His grace powerfully seen and felt in daily life. Insurmountable situations begin to look survivable, and burdens more bearable, in the fresh light of such grace.

You'll likely find that you are loved and prayed for more than you'd guessed, and that you'll be received with more grace than you'd dared hope for. That's all Jesus. He knows the depth and cost of our sin better than we do, and He has already obtained an undiminishing supply of the grace we need. I'm preaching to myself here: we can trust Him to give it to us in the time and through the means He knows to be best for us, and for His glory.

Book Review: Delighting in the Trinity: Why Father, Son and Spirit Are Good News by Tim Chester

One of the most influential courses in my M.Div. program (and not just because I sat next to my now husband!) was a seminar titled Patristic Trinitarian Doctrine. Whenever I happened to mention the name of this class to a non-academic, or even to some seminarians, I often got a laughing response -- something like, "Better you than me," or "What's the point of that?" I remember feeling dismayed that just because it had a lot of syllables (or maybe included the word "doctrine"?), people assumed the subject matter was difficult, obscure, or not "useful."

Nowadays, I think there was likely self-righteousness in my response. No doubt I thought I would get my degree and promptly begin authoring books that set everyone straight about the importance of the Trinity! I have a better appreciation now for just what a difficult task that truly is. What's more, I was far from the first to notice a need for such books -- and there have been an increasing number of them, from the capable minds of teachers like Fred Sanders (The Deep Things of God), and now from U.K. pastor and church planter Tim Chester.

Delighting in the Trinity is Tim Chester's attempt to answer the question, "How is the doctrine of the Trinity good news?" The book emerged from Chester's conversations about the Christian faith with two Muslim friends. Their questions prompted him to consider how, rather than being a source of panic and embarrassment, queries about this doctrine should instead provide "a lovely opportunity to share the heart of our faith" (9). I appreciated this missional framing for the book.

This book is divided into three parts: "Biblical Foundations," "Historical Developments," and "Practical Implications." Part One outlines the scriptural basis for Trinitarian belief, paying closest attention to the events of Calvary. Especially helpful here are the common mistakes Chester identifies about what happened at the cross: that an unwilling Father was placated by the Son, and that an unwilling Son was victimized by the Father. He convincingly shows that we must make sense of the Cross in light of the Trinity: "The cross alone reveals the radical, gracious freedom of God...Only God is so gracious that He freely chooses to be God-forsaken to reconcile Himself with those who have rejected Him. Nothing demonstrates the 'godness' of God so much as the godlessness of the cross" (79).

As a doctoral student, I was most interested in Part Two. Chester devotes considerable space to summarizing how the doctrine of the Trinity was articulated in light of the biblical material and the concerns of the early church, tracing developments in Trinitarian theology through the medieval and early modern periods to the present day. He provides a quick, but by no means cursory, survey of the thought of Tertullian, Origen, Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, Calvin, and more recent theologians. I even learned some tidbits I'd been unaware of, such as that the sixteenth-century Anabaptist, Menno Simons, authored a work on the Trinity in which he tried to prove the doctrine through exegesis alone, without reference to earlier controversies and creedal formulations. While advanced students will find these chapters unavoidably simplified at points (such as that the Eastern patristic tradition focused on the threeness of God, the Western tradition on the unity of God), I appreciated that Chester devotes as much space as he does to historical theology. While many writers for laypeople might be tempted to minimize such details, Chester takes pains to show what was at stake for the church in earlier ages. The interested lay reader will find plenty of footnotes to encourage deeper reading of primary sources.

Language about the "practicality" of doctrine always makes me a little nervous, but Part Three of Chester's book might better be titled "The Trinity: a matter of life and death" (137). The survey of various "theories" of the atonement is quite good; my biggest takeaway from this section is Chester's strong argument that substitutionary atonement is "the truly trinitarian view" because only in this view is the atonement "a transaction between God and God...an event within God" rather than something transacted between God and the devil ("dramatic" view) or between God and humanity ("exemplary") view. "Salvation starts with God, is achieved by God and is applied by God." (149) Later, he argues, "Once you abandon a trinitarian understanding of Christ, it is difficult to make sense of the cross except as an ideal to which we should aspire or an example of the transforming power of self-giving love." (152)

The book closes as it began, with further pastoral, missional, and apologetic applications of Trinitarian doctrine. I noticed some points that could have benefited from further elaboration; for example, Chester appears to favor a Free Church ecclesiology (168) but doesn't spend much time defending his claim that this view accords with robust Trinitarianism. I also would have liked to see an even more frequent and explicit emphasis on union with Christ. For example, I would have enjoyed hearing more about worship as participation in the Trinitarian life (13).

On the whole, though, I very much appreciate Delighting in the Trinity and would certainly recommend it to any Christian who wants to better understand the roots and critical importance of this doctrine. I am thrilled that books like this one are being written, and I hope to see Chester (and others) continue the trend of accessible theological writing.

The publisher provided me with a review copy of this book, and I was under no obligation to give a favorable review.

Cross Focused Reviews Blog Tour

Fighting against Providence

To my limited sight, sometimes providence doesn't look so wonderful.

For instance, this summer, I've really been struggling to work on my dissertation. There are several reasons for that, and not all of them are bad, much less sinful. But I've come to realize that one of the reasons is that I've been angry at God.

Earlier in the summer, I had told myself, piously, that I don't really get angry at God, that it just isn't a thing I struggle with. But I'm no longer so sure. At least, in my case, it seems to take the form of a sullen, distracted, foot-dragging resentment that covets what others have instead of praising the Lord for what I've been given.

See, I've been feeling restless in the seemingly endless student phase of my life and coveting the season of life that many of my friends and peers are in--growing families and putting down roots and just, well, living real, grown-up looking lives. Sometimes it truly feels like we're never going to arrive there. While it might not be wrong to long for those things, at times I've allowed the longing to spill over into discontentment and ingratitude.

I know that plenty of people would love to be in the position I am in, of getting to study theology and history full-time, and working towards producing something publishable in the field. Honestly, right now my response to that is, "I promise, this is not as fun as it looks." But I've felt convicted of the need to repent of an entitled, thankless attitude. It's failing to recognize the privilege of advanced study and the goodness of the decade's journey that's led here. What's more, it's God's loving provision for me, and it's wrong for me to grumble about it. He has a purpose for it. Thankfully, it's not my job to discern that purpose right now!

I don't doubt that God could shake things up in such a way that academia doesn't end up being my primary focus in future years; but for right now, it's what's right in front of me, and every indication I have is that it's what He intends for me to pour my heart and soul into indefinitely. So my prayer is that I can get to a place where I am pursuing it joyfully once again. Including on the days when it's unpleasant, "just a job," and when the temptation is to fixate on other things.

There's part of me that's still crying angrily, "This is a crummy provision! This isn't what I want to be devoting these years to anymore. Can't you just give me what I want right now? Maybe give me an easy out?" But the Lord has shown me again and again that He knows far better than I do what I need, and how He wants to be glorified in my life. And it's for me to trust Him and learn (over and over again, however painfully) to be satisfied in Him above all else. Please pray for me as I struggle to believe and to show forth in my life that His providence is indeed wonderful.

Seminary and Spiritual Growth

This week a particular blog exchange caught my attention. First, one of my favorite church historians, Dr. Carl Trueman, wrote this post in which he remarks that the primary job of seminaries is to impart the skills needed for future ministry, but that seminaries "cannot really engage in spiritual formation in any deep way"; such formation takes place in the context of the church, where the Word is preached and the sacraments administered, just as it does for every other Christian.

Later, another respected church historian, Dr. Michael Haykin, responded with his own blog post in which he agrees with Trueman that the seminary is not the church, but argues that Trueman downplays the formative role of preaching, friendship, and faculty mentorship in seminarian formation. Trueman comes back with an interesting and appreciative response here.

This has been a fun exchange for me to read because it's a question I have considered before myself--exactly a year ago, wouldn't you know!

You might recall that one of my disappointments about my own seminary experience was that, as I wrote before, "there is little shared sense of how, or for what end, students are to 'formed,' or shaped, for service." Of course, it was a different issue for me than for the kinds of seminarians with whom Trueman and Haykin are mainly concerned, in that I wasn't attending seminary with the goal of ordained ministry. Plus, my situation was a little unique in that I was of a different theological stripe than most of my classmates (something I hadn't quite expected coming in), and it had been some years since I had been really immersed in the life of a local church. For both those reasons, I leaned on my church much more heavily than the seminary in order to grow in my faith--I needed a refuge, and I needed to learn how to be in the church in the first place! It was only in church that I learned to submit to the teachings of Scripture, to come to the Lord's Table, and to walk with brothers and sisters in Christ. The same kinds of accountability, kinship, and grace were not at work in the seminary classroom, generally speaking.

With that in mind, I incline toward Dr. Trueman's perspective on this. The question he poses--"what does the church do that the seminary cannot?"--is vital and needs to be considered in light of the historical development of seminaries and their relationship to the church. Still, I'm intrigued by some of Dr. Haykin's comments, particularly on Christian friendship as a means of grace! It's always exciting to follow a rigorous and respectful exchange between world-class historians, and I hope to see further discussion of this important subject from them and others.