First Things RSS Feed - Richard J. Mouw

Happy Birthday, Christianity Today!

Mon, 17 Oct 2016 12:00:00 -0400

Christianity Today is sixty years old this month. I remember clearly the day the first issue arrived in our mailbox. My dad was a pastor, and in its earliest years the magazine was sent to clergy for free. That inaugural issued, dated October 1956, showed up on a day that I—sixteen years old—was home alone. As I sorted the mail, I glanced over the new magazine’s cover. Seeing Billy Graham’s name, I sat down to read his article on biblical authority.

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Voting Is Only a Moment

Mon, 22 Aug 2016 06:00:00 -0400

Some of my friends are saying that they will not cast a vote for president this November. I understand the factors that influence their decision. I am not happy with the choices presented to us, either. But I do plan to vote for one of the candidates.

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Every Day an Armageddon

Fri, 05 Aug 2016 00:00:00 -0400

During the mid-1970s I spent an academic year as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow in the Sociology Department at Princeton University. The memos that I received from my sociology hosts always began with this greeting: “Dear Visiting Humanist.”

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Alone in the Garden?

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 00:00:00 -0400

A dozen years ago, historian Mark Noll and I published a volume of essays—papers that had been given at a Wheaton College conference—on evangelical hymns. Noll is the real expert on the subject. I know a lot about evangelical hymns primarily because I sang so many of them in my early years, and many of the lines have stuck with me. My immediate predecessor in the Fuller presidency, David Allan Hubbard, once said that hymns function as “the compacted theological memories of the church in poetic form.” They certainly function that way for me, and I often reflect theologically upon specific lines. Here’s one I have been thinking about recently in relationship to a theology of disabilities, from “Crown Him with Many Crowns,” in a reference to the eschatological visio Christi : “Behold His hands and side— / Those wounds, yet visible above, / In beauty glorified.”

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Calvin, Kuyper, and God's Aesthetic Purposes

Tue, 03 May 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Abraham Kuyper was fond of appealing to John Calvin’s authority on various subjects, but when he turned to the subject of art in his 1898 Stone Lectures at Princeton Seminary, he did so in a rather odd way. He said that he was going to look for insights from the Genevan Reformer on the subject precisely because “Calvin himself was not artistically developed.” Since Calvin obviously had no informed opinions to offer regarding artistic specifics, Kuyper argued, we can trust him to have offered his insights purely “from his principles,” which means that “he may be credited with having expounded the Calvinistic consideration of art as such.”

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Mormons Approaching Orthodoxy

Sun, 01 May 2016 00:00:00 -0400

In the spring of 1836, a few weeks before his Kirtland, Ohio, baptism into the Mormon Church, Lorenzo Snow met with Joseph Smith Sr., the father of Mormonism’s founder. Snow was deeply impressed by this encounter. He came to see it as a turning point in his spiritual journey, especially because of a prophecy the elder Smith pronounced, one that both moved and “confounded” him. “You will become,” the prophet’s father told him, “as great as you can possibly wish—even as great as god, and you cannot wish to be greater.” Snow did not know what to make of the notion of becoming as great as God, something that struck him as “approaching blasphemy.” Nonetheless, he reported that this disturbing declaration did not in any way counter “all my favorable impressions of the Patriarch.”

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Trigger Warnings and Academic Consumerism

Thu, 24 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0400

I have been reading a lot of back-and-forth about “trigger warnings” lately. Students who see themselves as victims of discrimination and abuse are demanding that professors issue warnings about materials in courses they are teaching that might cause strong negative emotional responses in student psyches. And some administrators and faculty members are quite open to accommodating these demands. This willingness to comply is often motivated by a recognition of a significant shift in higher education, as expressed by student groups who are announcing their intention to “take back the university.” In the past, faculty decided what kind of course content constituted quality education. These days students are insisting that they, the consumers, ought to be making these decisions, and they will only “buy” those courses and programs that meet their self-defined needs and interests.

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Fatima

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0400

My first sustained interfaith dialogue was with Mary Jane, when we were both in eighth grade in a public school in a town near Albany, New York. I had a mild crush on Mary Jane, a very smart Italian Catholic. Our romance—in so far as it was carried on outside of school activities—consisted of long bike rides interspersed by theological arguments about the role of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Mary Jane was a Fatima enthusiast, and she talked a lot about how the Blessed Virgin had appeared in 1917 to three shepherd children in the countryside on the outskirts of the Portuguese town where they lived, delivering to them some important prophecies that would soon come to pass.

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The Third Temptation

Tue, 02 Feb 2016 00:00:00 -0500

In the mid-1970s, the famous Mennonite theologian and ethicist John Howard Yoder visited Calvin College to give a lecture explaining the Anabaptist perspective on political authority. His opening comments offended many in his audience (including me). Referring to the Gospel account of the third temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, Yoder said that in refusing to bow before Satan in order to receive authority over the governments of the nations, “Jesus was refusing to be a Calvinist.”

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Worship Wars

Tue, 26 Jan 2016 00:00:00 -0500

I listened in on a conversation recently on “the worship wars” in evangelical-style congregations and I heard some interesting observations. My main dissent, which I did not express, was that the discussants were treating the battles about worship as a relatively recent phenomenon—several references were made, for example, to “the last two decades.” If I had decided to chime in I would have recommended reading Ian Bradley’s fine book Abide With Me: The World of Victorian Hymns (1997), where he details the heated debates in 19 ^th century England over whether to have choirs, and if so, if they should be kept at the rear of the sanctuary in order to “back up” the congregation in its worship rather than being a visual distraction in the front. I could even have pointed them further back in church history to Oscar Cullmann’s review in his little book Early Christian Worship of the arguments conducted by the Church Fathers about when the catechumens should be sent off from the worship service to engage in their own “youth” activities.

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