Kevin Gillispie – Read Apologetics

Systematic Theology as the Foundation for Personal Change

The schools of thought on human psychology are numerous. But the proponents of such, like behaviorism or psychoanalysis, are at best ineffectual, at worst harmful, without an ideal on which to set the patient’s eyes. For the Christian, the ideal man is the Christ Jesus. And systematic theology is a means by which to know Him.

In the book Biblical Doctrine: A Systematic Summary of Bible Truth, John MacArthur and Richard Mayhue describe in powerful brevity the pathway to personal change.

It begins with informing the intellect (knowing and understanding). The intellect shapes what we believe and love in our heart. Our will desires what we love and repudiates what we hate. Our actions then accord with what we want most. The mind shapes the affections, which shape the will, which directs the actions (MacArthur and Mayhue 2017).

The mind rules the heart; and what the mind is filled with, the heart will love. What we love is what we desire, and desire is what fuels and directs our actions. I would go further to say that our actions then reverberate back through the chain of causation above; amplifying, reinforcing, and conditioning each layer of our psyche.

If you want a better you, fill your mind with the knowledge of the good. Fill your mind with Christ.

MacArthur, John, and Richard Mayhue, eds. 2017. Biblical Doctrine: A Systematic Summary of Bible Truth. Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway.

The Craft of Research

As a recommended requisite to my seminary journey, I’m reading The Craft of Research (Booth et al. 2016). Chapter three introduced the three-step process of turning “a question into a problem” (49) when asked to make the fruit of your curiosity enticing to others.

Learning for its own sake is edifying in and of itself. When we begin with a fear of the Lord (Ps 1:7), we lay the foundation for true understanding and unassailable wisdom. This in turn enriches our souls, even if we never share the knowledge we’ve acquired.

However, anything worth knowing is worth sharing. This leads to the question: how do we present the knowledge in an engaging way? The authors believe that rephrasing into a problem the question that sparked your curiosity is the best way to engage an audience.

Topic: I am studying ________
Question: because I want to find out what / why / how ________
Significance: in order to help my reader understand ________.

This takes a creative mind, but anyone curious enough to learn can do this. Simply reverse-engineer a conceptual context — Jeopardy! contestants do this on each episode when they’re given an answer from which they must extrapolate a question. The authors use the example of contextualizing a menu from an historic, dirigible balloon to prove that open-flame cooking was allowed on such airships. (I can not attest to the veracity of their example, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Whatever you happen to research, ask yourself why? Why do you want to learn about it? Then, ask how the knowledge will help someone. Some people will simply enjoy hearing about what you’ve learned; but to maximize the information’s appeal, imagine a problem, no matter how inconsequential, that the knowing will resolve.

Booth, Wayne C, Gregory G Colomb, Joseph M Williams, Joseph Bizup, and William T Fitzgerald. The Craft of Research. Fourth. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Whoever Resists Authority

We are quickly approaching the two-year mark for “two weeks to flatten the curve”. People around the world have become vocally suspicious of their governments’ motivations. Christians in particular have been questioning how to apply their obligations set forth in the book of Romans chapter 13. Do we continue to humbly submit to the directions and decrees of our government as an act of obedience to God? Do we sit back and take comfort that the Almighty will punish the powers and principalities that exercise unjust authority over His people? Or do we take up the cause of speaking out and actively disobeying the fiats of governmental officials with a history of hostility towards the proclamations and precepts of the source of their own authority?

Romans 13 begins with a very clear directive: “Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities.”¹ Whether the verb hypotassesthō is translated using “is to be” or “let”, the word is in the imperative mood; and, therefore, it is a command we are obligated to heed. But there is a prerequisite for the repositories of power that qualifies this ordinance in a very necessary way:

For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil.²

Governments are to be respecters of the good, defenders of the righteous. They are to be arbiters of the Laws of God on earth. And as long as they are in subjugation to God’s laws, we have no excuse for not being in subjugation to their judgments. What then is our obligation when the authorities defy what God has ordained as good? The most relevant example comes from Daniel chapter 3 when Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego refuse to obey a clearly-worded command from a duly-appointed authority. At risk of fiery death, they refused to kneel down before a golden idol. They did not actively and openly revolt against king Nebuchadnezzar; they didn’t change their normal behavior in any way. They committed an act of what modern times calls noncompliance or civil disobedience.

For the men in Daniel chapter 3, the line drawn that could not be crossed was obvious. Far us modern believers, the line between obeying the ministers of health and welfare as an act of fealty to God and refusing to violate our bodily autonomy at the behest of an untrustworthy authority is far and away not as distinct as Nebuchadnezzar’s hasty proclamation. As such, there must be something practical that can help us make Godly decisions when the available information is unclear or completely absent. The apostle Paul who admonished us to obey the authorities as as a means of living life without fear also pressed the issue as a matter of conscience. We are not only called to live peacefully in community with other people, we are also called to live peacefully with ourselves. When all is said done, the state of our consciences, as a barometer of our relationship with God, will be the feather that tips the scales of indecision to one side or another.

New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update (La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995), Ro 13:1. ↩︎
Ibid., Ro 13:3. ↩︎

First, Start at the Beginning

The hardest part about beginning anything is finding the beginning. Knowing how to begin and where to begin are often synonymous, but they are rarely explicit. Sometimes, the journey’s beginning is shown; and sometimes, found. In light of this generalized binary, I see two categories, two spectral endpoints, of journeys as defined by the nature of their beginnings.

Deterministic journeys, wherein the beginning, middle, and end all have predetermined and unequivocal locations, expectations, and outcomes. They are to be performed like invocational rituals in hopes of receiving or attaining whatever was promised at the outset. The Good Witch of the North gave Dorothy the location of the beginning of her deterministic journey and instructed her not to waver from the path/ritual, if she wants to reach the Emerald City.
Personalized journeys, wherein the beginning materializes wherever your feet happen to be standing, and the direction in which it takes you is in whatever direction you happen to be facing. Christopher McCandless set out on a journey from the happenstance of his home and wandered hither and tither until his desire landed him unprepared in the back of the school bus. He may have had a destination in mind when he began, but the sum of the parts of his journey had no obligation to ever take him there.

The journey for the Christian is a hybrid of the two. It is best encapsulated by The Pilgrim’s Progress. Christian begins in a field near his own home where he first reads the Good News, but the destination is the same for everyone transformed by the Gospel. Of course, not all of us live in an allegorical town. Where then is the real beginning of each of our real journeys?

As the humble booklet 52 Words Every Christian Should Know states on page five, “Christians begin with the Scriptures”. John Bunyan’s Christian began with the scriptures; in similar fashion, all of us who have set out on the Christian journey can trace the beginning back to the truths stored in ancient writings delivered to us quite often by way of word-of-mouth. This blog will be a record of my Christian journey through books related to the Christian Way, beginning with the Scriptures and He who was in the beginning.

“In the beginning, God…” (Genesis 1:1a)
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” (John 1:1-2)

This blog is also meant as a platform for didacticism. I want to teach what I learn, because a hidden light is selfish and wasteful (John 8:16). I do not claim any expertise in the sense that a doctor of philosophy might have framed upon the wall. I read, I learn; I look, I discern. And that’s a great thing we can do in the company of others.