Author: Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.

Publication details: Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2002

            “ … Christian education is for the kingdom of God.”
                                                                        Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
              “Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed, to consider well [that] the maine end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternall life, Jn. 17: 3. and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning.”
                                                            The Founders of Harvard College, 1643

Engaging God’s World is a primer for students beginning college. In it, Plantinga, now President of Calvin Theological Seminary, exhorts his young students embarking on their college careers to regard their higher education in the light of their Christian faith and ideals. Plantinga spells out the main themes of the Christian faith (from a Reformed perspective) and shows how crucially God-centered and Christ-centered higher learning can shape and direct our worldviews. In Calvin College, he says, “faculty and staff would knead the yeast of the gospel through everything that happened on campus,” to the end that students’ lives and imagination would be “permeated with the spirit and teaching of Christianity.” Such a thoroughgoing vision of Christian higher education (in Calvin College) is derived most directly from Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper’s understanding of the Lordship of Jesus Christ over “all things” (Eph. 1: 22).

Clearly in view is God’s redemptive purpose for the restoration of this material reality we call our world. When thoughtful Christians join in God’s great mission to make “all things new,” we are declaring two things. Firstly, the Lordship of Jesus Christ over all things; and secondly, the determination of God to bring about the message of shalom to the world he created and loved. Corrupted by evil and distorted by the terrorism of God’s hostile enemies, creation now suffers from a dis-ease, characterized so typically by a lack of peace and harmony and justice. Returning shalom to such a world entails the thoughtful Christian’s dedicated service “For Christ and His Kingdom.” Plantinga explains the significance of the word for peace. Shalom in the OT meant precisely this “restoration of peace, justice and harmony,” and in the NT it referred prophetically and hopefully to “the coming of the kingdom” of heaven. Shalom means much more than maintaining or ushering in times of political peace and the absence of war: “In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight—a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, all under the arch of God’s love.” God’s restoring redemption has abundance in mind, abundance of life, abundance of joy and happiness, abundance of blessing. In this view, we understand that life is truly sacred: “the whole of it stands under the blessing, judgment, and redeeming purposes of God.”

The thoughtful Christian’s presence in the broken world reminds it of its own inexpressible yearning for an eden long lost. The world’s deep longing (sehnsucht) for shalom is perhaps most properly (if not completely) articulated in human culture: “the visual arts, music, drama, landscapes, poetry, and friendships that can arouse human desire for sheer goodness …” The point of all such yearning, of course, is that it is an “inconsolable secret.” Our desires are passionate and strong when that which we long for is unfulfillable. Plantinga quotes usefully from C.S. Lewis and Augustine, two persons who understood full well the tragic meaning and feelings behind such a word as sehnsucht. But even if we finally get what we long for, we discover that all earthly dreams and aspirations are not final: “something in us keeps saying ‘not this’ or ‘still beyond’.” Beyond the earthly thing we long for, Lewis says, is a greater longing for the ultimate reality that Christians know to be God. Augustine hit on the term summum bonum, the “supreme good,” to express what all earthly joys simply point toward. In his Confessions, Augustine addresses the summum bonum of the world: “O Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” If it were not that our human sehnsucht drove us to God as the true and eternal Beauty who can be found by the earnest seeker, we would not have such a hopefulness in view. Such hope and hopefulness directs all Christian enterprise toward the renewal and restoration of the earth.

Plantinga details what this hope means in his chapters on Creation, The Fall, and Redemption, providing for his readers the basis and foundation for Christian faith and faithfulness in the world. Plantinga’s chapter on Vocation in the Kingdom of God takes the college reader through thought-provoking discussion on exactly what it means to engage with God’s world in the way we work and live “For Christ and His Kingdom.” Christian readers are to discern and derive principle from the brush strokes of God’s story so that their application in the nitty gritty details of untidy and contemporary human life reflects insightful consideration of the demands of their faith. Thinking, reflective, deliberate Christians are in view here.

While Engaging God’s World was intended originally for college students embarking on their college careers, Plantinga’s reflection of the Christian’s role in God’s restoration project of the earth is a must-read for the larger Christian readership. It is not a loud or angry book. It is rather quietly challenging, both informing and inspiring the reader to articulate and work out his faith in authentic ways by first reorienting his mind and perspective to the viewpoint of the good news of God.      

Author: Marva J. Dawn

Publication details: Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2002

                          “We live in a world that makes a god of strength and power …”

 Joy in Our Weakness invites our attention and attentiveness to God’s message in the book of Revelation. It is not a commentary, exactly, and it is certainly not fictionalized panic concerning the end times. It is, instead, a theological reflection of the timely message of Revelation to the churches today. In it, Marva Dawn asks the questions that dog our broken humanity, such as why we suffer affliction in the midst of a society given over to the ideals of strength, power and invulnerability. Rather than rework old and tired dispensationalist speculations of the end of the world, Joy in Our Weakness reminds us of the original purpose of John’s Revelation, which was written to comfort suffering and afflicted Christians marginalized by the power brokers of the Roman empire. Never forgetting for a moment the prophetic edge of John’s Revelation, Marva Dawn draws us to consider what it means to be overcomers in Christ while undergoing trials and afflictions in the now of our lives.

While Marva Dawn writes sensitively about suffering and those who suffer, the underlying reason for rejoicing in these imperfect meantimes of life is simply because we recognize how powerfully God has intervened in human history. His dramatic incursions into human history and life mean that we really have not been left alone. God has acted to restore and redeem us. Believing this means that we no longer need to despair; we can be reoriented to God’s great future for us—and realizing this enables us to patiently endure. We are, after all, not orphans but hopeful participants in God’s new paradigmatic construct called “the kingdom of God.”  The musterion or mystery of which scripture often speaks is that one day, God will right all wrongs; one day, he will come for us; one day, all his guarantees for us will be made good; one day, we shall no longer weep. Today though, we see the purposes of this musterion “as in a glass, darkly.” But even with the partial things that we see and have been given to know, we rejoice at so great a hope and salvation!

What is redeeming about our human brokenness is that we see in our Son of Man who is our Savior that God’s attitude toward us is one of compassion. Jesus’ identification with those who are weak and have a little strength is boldly underscored by his title as the “firstborn from the dead.” No one who goes through the ultimate human weakness and defeat—death—can possibly rise again to reign only with power. So Christ’s reign is, and was always intended to be, a reign of compassionate empathy, of restoration and redemption for his brothers and sisters. Considering Revelation in this way opens our eyes wider to the prospect of our future hope and life with Christ. In him, we find God’s guarantees fulfilled. We follow after him who is the Pioneer in the kingdom of the resurrected ones. In his death, he walks with us in our lameness and blindness and illness; in his resurrection, we experience in ourselves his invigorating Spirit’s life of strength and vitality and joy. While today we may still hobble on crutches, we know that Christ triumphs over all. This is the vision or musterion that will sustain us until all evil is ultimately defeated, as Jesus tells the seven churches of the Revelation.

Engaging in overly literalistic and sensationalized readings of the prophetic element in Revelation erodes this pastoral message of Christian hope that John intended for the afflicted churches under his care. Therefore, Marva Dawn encourages us not to chase after end time “revelations” in the book of Revelation. Rather, Revelation exhorts us to rejoice and endure because Jesus assures us that he is coming again soon to restore all things to himself! It is the faithful character of God that is foregrounded; Jesus is called the “faithful witness” for this reason. There is thus no time or reason for his children to be discouraged, or to despair as if they had no hope: “Because Jesus is Lord in spite of the powers of evil, we yearn for a greater willingness to endure suffering patiently. We have learned a new meaning for patience in situations that cannot be changed.” In answer to his seven churches’ doubts and fears concerning their future, Jesus gives them a reason for rejoicing while they endure: he is watching them! Thus he rebukes, warns and praises them. And to each the promise is the same: the one who endures will overcome.

Marva Dawn’s take on Revelation is a much-needed respite from the unfortunate populist reading that seems to have overtaken the Church. Speculations about the Antichrist and the significance of 666 preoccupy us as we try to figure out the future events and apocalyptic symbols of Revelation. The truth is that the fallen world exists even today under the rule and spirit of Antichrist (symbolized by 666), and functions according to a worldly system that has directed worldly affairs from the time of the Fall. All of human history without God works according to a human-centered and purely empirical and materialistic view of life that elevates Man over all: that is Babylon the harlot. It is only the Church that recognizes her own helpless need of a Messiah-Christ and the value of his deliverance: that is the Bride.

Being handicapped, Marva Dawn says, is one way by which we can learn to acknowledge and admit our essential woundedness as humans: “… we need the gifts of those who depend on God in their limitations so that we might … [participate] in the sufferings of Jesus in a culture of power.” Is there really a place in Christ’s kingdom for those who make a god of strength and power? In John’s time, 666 was an instance of gematria to indicate the numerical value of a historical person’s name (Nero?). In our time, antichrists will doubtless arise, carrying different symbols of worldly power and strength. Our response to such times when Christians will suffer, says Marva Dawn, must be the same: genuine and constant rejoicing while we endure, for God’s guarantees will surely come to pass (Habakkuk 2: 1-4).

However, patient endurance is not the same as a stoic obedience and gritting of the teeth, such as the Ephesian church was doing. Christ’s rebuke of them, in spite of their dogged obedience, was that they had lost their “first love” for him. Keeping our joy in the midst of living out a theology of weakness is crucial for the Christian to avoid extremes of cynicism and despair. The solution is not to focus on either the need for patient endurance (“How long, O Lord?”) or the strong opposition of Satan and evil. The answer lies in a theocentric focus, on concentrating on “the hope that is ours because Jesus is Lord.” In the midst of difficulty and struggle, we can know the “joy of the sovereign Christ’s infinite love for us and of our relationship with him.” Keeping our passion burning for Christ nurtures our Christian joy as we learn to live now in the coming victory of Jesus Christ.

Joy in Our Weakness invites us to see life’s challenges and struggles with new eyes. In a triumphalist age in Christianity, Marva Dawn guides readers to deal with the realities of present suffering and the value of our struggles in toughening our faith and strengthening our hope.