What is a Teacher?

“Students who work together learn from each other, and a teacher is ultimately nothing more than a student who has gotten a head start on the rest of the students.” – Carl Conrad

One Life

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life." - Steve Jobs

Where Did the Real Men Go?

When I speak to people of my parent's generation, I cannot think of one of them that complains about serving in World War II. I have never heard one of them lament how the best years of his life were taken from him by the war. Yet today, there is a news story on ABC News (yes ABC News) about a Baldness Breakthrough. Amazingly, men losing hair are described as suffering with hair loss. Brothers, there are men suffering with cancer. There are men suffering in prison for the sake of the gospel. But if you are suffering from hair loss, you are not much of a man.

Wise Words On Turning 65

From John Piper:

"Eleven days after I return to ministry, I turn 65. One could look at this two ways:

1. It's the age that most people retire; or
2. It's the age Winston Churchill became Prime Minister and led England and the Western world to victory over Hitler's aggression.

I find Churchill much more inspiring than retirement."

A Profile in Courage

Zondervan has recently released a book with the title: How I Changed my Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals. One oddity about the book, which I haven't read, is that it seems all the authors changed their minds in the same direction.

This made me recall a conversation I had about 15 years ago with a young woman who was about to graduate from Princeton Theological Seminary. A graduate of Davidson college, she spoke of how she had fully embraced modern secular feminism in her late teens that was fully supported by her professors and peers in these convictions throughout her college years. Her family sacrificed financially to help her attend Princeton Theological Seminary in order that she could be trained to serve as a Minister of Word and Sacrament. Yet, as she studied Scripture she came to the conclusion that Christ had restricted the ordained offices in his Church to men only.

Talk about being between a rock and a hard place: What could she possibly do in such a situation? At the time we spoke, this woman was in the process of transferring her membership from the PCUSA to the PCA precisely over this issue. This young lady personified courage. Men are sometimes branded as bigots or neanderthals for opposing the ordination of women, but this young lady was essentially seen as betraying the cause. She had to live with fact that she had received generous financial support to prepare for a vocation that she no longer believed she was free to pursue. And, she had to figure out how to graciously navigate her personal life in an environment where many of her closest friends were women who were about to be ordained to calling that she was explicitly saying no woman should enter into.

Where does a person get the courage to take this sort of stand? When I asked her how she was managing she replied: "I simply ask anyone who questions me to show me from the Bible that God's word authorizes women pastors." That is a profound answer for all of us. Courage is not something that she nor we need to seek. If we seek to cling to Jesus and to His word, courage is merely the byproduct of putting Christ first. That is why Luther taught us to sing: "Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also; the body they may kill: God's truth abideth still; His kingdom is forever."

Making the Cut

Of the making of New Testament commentaries there appears to be no end. With the launch of the Zondervan Exegetical Commentary series the field has become even more crowded. My working theory is that a pastor only needs three solid commentaries on any particular book of the Bible. If a pastor is reading more than three commentaries he is probably spending too much time following the judgments of other men and insufficient time digging through the Greek or Hebrew text for himself. That's the rub. There are more commentaries on the New Testament competing for the pastor's time than he can productively use. To name just the major series which are up to date in terms of scholarship, we have:

1. The Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament
2. The New International Greek Testament Commentary
3. The New International Commentary on the New Testament
4. The Pillar New Testament Commentary
5. The Word Biblical Commentary
6. And now, the Zondervan Exegetical Commentary

This list doesn't even consider the less academically demanding series such as The New American Commentary nor the many outstanding commentaries on individual books.

This leaves us with an obvious question regarding any new commentary: Can it make the cut and move into the top three available choices? This challenge is particularly daunting for Paul's letter to the Ephesians which is well served by outstanding commentaries by Peter O'Brien (PNTC) and Harold W. Hoehner as well as highly regarded commentaries by Andrew T. Lincoln (Word), Ernest Best (ICC), along with a less than fully satisfactory commentary by F.F. Bruce (NICNT). Additionally, Frank Thielman has just released his commentary on Ephesians (BECNT) which I haven't read. Where does this leave Clint Arnold's ambitious commentary?

Professor Arnold's commentary on Ephesians makes the cut by simply offering a superior commentary. Strengths of the commentary include:

1. Professor Arnold is a mature scholar who has been working with Ephesians for a quarter of a century. With Arnold the student has a sure footed guide who has been down this path many times before. He knows how to keep the student aligned with Paul's thought including where further explanation is helpful.
2. The commentary is exceptionally well written and edited. It is simply a delight to read.
3. The Introduction is excellent. Arnold addresses the common belief that Ephesians wasn't written to deal with concrete concerns and concludes that "Paul therefore speaks in a pastoral and apostolic manner to a variety of real needs of which he had become aware through Tychicus and others." By the nature of the case, Arnold's arguments cannot be fully compelling. Nevertheless, this alerts the reader at the outset that although Arnold has a mastery of the secondary material he is actually writing a commentary on Ephesians and not a commentary on the other commentaries.
4. The format of this commentary (and presumably the entire series) is the best that I have ever seen. The large clear fonts and attractive layout are a joy to my middle-aged eyes. The inclusion of the author's discourse analysis is so helpful that I wonder why no other commentary series has done this before.
5. Close attention is paid to the Greek text of the letter throughout the commentary. One concern I had in first looking at the commentary is that it printed the English translation before the Greek text. I was concerned that this pointed to the commentary being essentially a commentary on the English text with bits of Greek thrown in. This concern was entirely unfounded.
6. Professor Arnold makes excellent use of excursuses throughout the commentary to help pastors and students bridge the gap between the original text and application to the modern world. For example, on pages 407-410 he offers an extensive excursus: "In Depth: Why It Is Legitimate to Apply the Teaching of This Passage to Marriages Today." Later, he offers two shorter excursuses on "The Distinctive Features of Roman-Era Slavery" and "Was Paul an Advocate of Slavery?" In the later he concludes: "It is therefore inappropriate to compare the institution of slavery to the male leadership in the home and label both as unjust social institutions. Such a conclusion fails to take into account the essential difference between the two social structures and the fact that one is theologically grounded and the other is not." This is precisely the type of answer that pastors must be able to clearly explain when dealing with the questions our culture raises regarding this passage.
7. There is a nice 22 page "Theology of Ephesians" at the back of the commentary. It would be helpful for pastors to read this section before they preach through the epistle rather than discovering it at the very end.

Normally reviewers try to point out a few problems with the book under review to show that they are careful critics. In this case, I simply have nothing worth pointing out. This commentary does exactly what it set out to do and it achieves this in a manner that is simply a delight for the reader to work with. I could not recommend this commentary more highly.

You can find this commentary here.

Specialists in the Bible

"One outstanding difficulty in theological education today is that the students persist in regarding themselves not as specialists, but as laymen. Critical questions about the Bible they regard as the property of men who are training themselves for the theological professorships or the like, while the ordinary minister, in their judgment, may content himself with the most superficial layman's acquaintance with the problems involved. The minister is no longer a specialist in the Bible, but has become merely a sort of general manager of the affairs of a congregation.

... If, on the other hand, the minister is a specialist - if the one thing that he owes his congregation about all others is a thorough acquaintance, scientific as well as experimental, with the Bible - then the importance of Greek requires no elaborate argument." - J. Gresham Machen (February 7, 1918)