Table of Contents

Title Page

From the Editor

Conflict Resolution in the Church, Part 1

Beza on the Trinity, 21 Theses, Part 1 (1–15)

A Way Out and a Way To: Intertextuality and the Exodus Motif: A Review Article

A Remarkable Season of Change: A Review Article

Memory and Hope: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Challenge of Exile: A Review Article

ServantHumor

ServantPoetry

Ordained Servant Online

A Journal for Church Officers

E-ISSN 1931-7115

CURRENT ISSUE: CONFLICT RESOLUTION

November 2019

From the Editor

The Bible is full of conflict, but God’s grace always calls for resolution when conflict is in the church. Alan Strange brings his considerable pastoral experience with this problem to explain biblical motives and methods of resolution in the first of a two-part article, “Conflict Resolution in the Church.”

David Noe continues his translation of Beza’s twenty-one theses on the Trinity (10–15). Next month Beza’s letter, published earlier this year in Ordained Servant Online, will be published with the complete twenty-one theses. This work should help to clarify this foundational doctrine amidst debates that sometime reflect a woeful ignorance of the church’s theology hammered out during the early centuries of its history.

Meredith M. Kline reviews Old Testament professor Bryan Estelle’s new book, Echoes of Exodus: Tracing a Biblical Motif. He provides a detailed analysis of this fine work of biblical theology in “A Way Out and a Way To: Intertextuality and the Exodus Motif.” This book elucidates the time-honored hermeneutical principle, “compare Scripture with Scripture.” Its rich exploration of biblical typology in the exodus motif will be a great help to the thoughtful preacher.

In “A Remarkable Season of Change,” I review a new history of the Internet, How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone, by Brian McCullough. This fascinating narrative documents the dramatic change in the American social structure and economy generated by the Internet. No technology in history has had such a sudden and pervasive impact on culture. While this work is largely descriptive, its detailed overview of the Internet’s development and effects helps in the development of a critical assessment.

John Somerville Jr.’s review article, “Memory and Hope,” on Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, gives us insight into one of the great writers of the last century. Solzhenitsyn’s critique of the spiritual and moral decline of the West proved to be a source of suffering during the early years of his exile from Soviet Russia. His novel-like narrative is a study in different forms of oppression, reminding me of the differences between Orwell’s warnings against the oppression of the state control of communism and Huxley’s warnings against the oppression of pleasure. Solzhenitsyn might add the oppression of the press. Freedom is an elusive concept except when the truth of the gospel sets men free.

Just when you thought Eutychus II had disappeared, voilà, he has returned. In case you have forgotten his role, “From the Back Pew” with Eutychus II continues the tradition of Eutychus I, Ed Clowney’s pen name in the initial issues of Christianity Today (1956–1960). As Clowney explained in his later anthology, Eutychus (and his pin):[1] “Eutychus was summoned to his post as a symbol of Christians nodding, if not on the window-sill, at least in the back pew.” Like his namesake, Eutychus II aims at “deflating ecclesiastical pretense, sham, and present-day religiosity.” This nom de plume will remain a cover for this ecclesiastical sleuth—to maintain his anonymity, and thus his freedom to poke fun. So, don’t miss “Rome’s Biggest Convert.”

Finally Ann MacDonald, who taught English for many years in Maine, offers a very encouraging poem, “Reason for Rejoicing,” based on Isaiah 25:7–8a, “On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever,” from Isaiah’s Little Apocalypse.

Blessings in the Lamb,

Gregory Edward Reynolds

CONTENTS

ServantWork

• Alan D. Strange, “Conflict Resolution in the Church, Part 1”

ServantClassics

• David C. Noe, Beza on the Trinity, 21 Theses, Part 2 (1–15)

ServantReading

• Meredith M. Kline, “A Way Out and a Way To: Intertextuality and the Exodus Motif,” review article on Bryan Estelle, Echoes of Exodus: Tracing a Biblical Motif

• Gregory E. Reynolds, “A Remarkable Season of Change,” review article on Brian McCullough, How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone

• John N. Somerville Jr. “Memory and Hope: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Challenge of Exile,” review article on Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

ServantHumor

• Eutychus II, “Rome’s Biggest Convert”

ServantPoetry

• Anne MacDonald, “Reason for Rejoicing”

FROM THE ARCHIVES “CHURCH CONFLICT and DISCIPLINE”

http://opc.org/OS/pdf/Subject_Index_Vol_1-25.pdf

• “‘That Offends Me!’” (Larry Wilson) 8:2 (Mar. 1999): 36–38.

• “Biblical Theology and the Session, Part 2: Redemptive History and the Church Discipline.” (James S. Gidley) 9:3 (Jul. 2000): 50–54.

• “Discipline is Not a Dirty Word.” (Geoffrey Smith) 2:1 (Jan. 1993): 23.

• “Editorial [on Church Discipline].” (G. I. Williamson) 2:2 (Apr. 1993): 25–26.

• “Feedback.” (Peter Stazen II) 3:1 (Jan. 1994): 22.

• “Perennial Pastoral Pitfalls.” (G. I. Williamson) 4:4 (Oct. 1995): 82–84.

• “Taking Action in Time.” (Thomas E. Tyson) 1:1 (Jan. 1992): 3–4.

• “Unbiblical Erasures.” (Peter Stazen II) 4:3 (Jul. 1995): 67‑70.

Ordained Servant exists to help encourage, inform, and equip church officers for faithful, effective, and God-glorifying ministry in the visible church of the Lord Jesus Christ. Its primary audience is ministers, elders, and deacons of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, as well as interested officers from other Presbyterian and Reformed churches. Through high-quality editorials, articles, and book reviews, we will endeavor to stimulate clear thinking and the consistent practice of historic, confessional Presbyterianism.

[1] Edmund P. Clowney, Eutychus (and his pin) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960), 6.

Conflict Resolution in the Church, Part 1

by Alan D. Strange

ServantWork

We might properly think of conflict resolution in the church in two main ways—informal and formal resolution of difficulties. Informal resolution of conflict is what ordinarily does and should occur, needing no elder intervention, private parties resolving matters among themselves. Formal resolution is what occurs in church discipline, which itself has its ordinary and extraordinary expressions: the former occurs in the ongoing making of disciples through a use of the ordinary means of grace; the latter occurs when there’s been a breakdown of ordinary discipline and the church must resort to censure, such as rebuke, suspension, and excommunication.

Conflict arises due to our sin. In the garden before the Fall, there was neither conflict between our first parents nor between them and their maker. But when Adam and Eve disobeyed God by eating the forbidden fruit, all of that dramatically changed. The once innocent pair now covered up, each seeking to hide from the other in newly-discovered shame, and both hiding from the God whom they had formerly adored and welcomed as he walked with them in the garden in the cool of the day (Gen. 1–3).

Now man in his sin is in rebellion against God and at war with each other. It’s hardly a surprise that if fallen man is in conflict with God, his maker and ruler, he would be in conflict with his fellow fallen man. We’ve witnessed this conflict through the ages both between persons and within the institutions of the family, the state, and even the church. Conflict has characterized our race since the Fall as Paul’s indictment in Roman 1–3 proves.

Christ came to set to rights all that Adam and we, as his guilty and polluted offspring, have marred (Rom. 5:12–21). He kept the whole law for us, never at fault in any situation of conflict, perfectly patient, perfectly honest, and, in fact, perfectly righteous in all things. He lived for us, as we say. One can think of Christ as the one who truly embodied all of the virtues of the righteous man in the Old Testament, especially the Psalms (He is the righteous man of Psalm 1; the one who “speaks the truth in his heart” of Psalm 15, and so forth).

And he died for us, to pay the penalty for all of our rebellion against God and conflict with each other (Rom. 5:1–11) and to break the power of reigning sin in our lives so that we begin to live, though but a small beginning even in the godliest, according to all his commandments (Heidelberg Catechism, 114; Rom. 6). Those who trust in Christ alone can begin to move away from conflict as those in Christ and no longer in Adam. Because of remaining sin, however, we still have rebellion with respect to God and conflict with each other (Rom. 7).

Much of the hortatory material of Scripture deals with this, calling us as believers to die to all that separates us and to live to that which makes for our peace and unity. Our Lord (in passages like Matt. 18 and Luke 17), Paul (in passages like Rom. 12, Gal. 5–6, Eph. 4–6, Col. 3–4, etc.), and others exhort us to live at peace as believers, and to resolve any conflict that we have by repenting of our sin against one another and by forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave us (Eph. 4:32).

This informal conflict resolution that is to be a regular part of the Christian life, because of the strength of remaining sin, needs supplementing with more formal conflict resolution; this is the concern of what we commonly refer to as church discipline. The rest of this essay will concern itself with the workings of church discipline, both as that is expressed in the ongoing exercise of the ordinary means of grace and in the more extraordinary censures of the church, when the ordinary means proves insufficient to resolve conflicts among the saints in the church. The word “discipline” seems formidable to many, evoking for even some, perhaps, abusive connotations. But discipline is one of the three marks of the true church (along with the pure preaching of the Word and proper administration of the sacraments), and is not a mark of God’s disfavor, but of his love for his people.

What is discipline? It comes from the Latin word “disciplina” which in turn comes from the word “discere,” meaning “to teach” (with its cognates/derivatives): It means to be a disciple, follower, pupil, student, etc. We use it today when we ask someone at university, “What is your discipline?” It is that to which one gives oneself, as in “My discipline is history.” Thus a disciple of Christ is one who is (as Matt. 28:18–20 indicates): baptized (initiated into the faith); catechized and further trained; taught to obey whatsoever things the Lord has commanded. In short, a disciple is one who gives himself to Christ, who trusts and obeys, who believes the gospel and walks in obedience to Christ. Discipline, then, is the act of such self-giving and believing obedience.

This definition and understanding highlights something of a popular misconception of discipline. We tend to a reductionist view of discipline and automatically equate discipline with censure or punishment (as in “I am being disciplined”). But censure occurs only when discipline in this fuller sense has been absent and/or has failed in its intended purposes. Censure comes when one fails to walk in the obedience that discipline entails. Think of disciplining our children. Such discipline involves the whole task of filial training, not merely corporal punishment, which occurs when there is a failure of obedience. It is necessary to have this fuller view of discipline, that it means being a faithful disciple, as we seek to examine discipline in the church.

How then is such discipline, in this fuller sense, to be carried out in the life of the church member? Discipline is ordinarily effectual and formative in the lives of those who pursue and seek it—who want lives characterized by trust and obedience. The ordinary public means of the formation of Christian character are the public means of grace: The reading, and especially the preaching, of the Word of God (Westminster Larger Catechism 155); the sacraments, the improving of our baptisms, and the realization of the fellowship and communion of God with his people; and prayer, especially for the spiritual growth of ourselves and others (note especially the prayers of Paul).

Coupled with this is faithfulness in the private duties of religion, each in his own closet (personal devotions), as well as Bible reading and prayer in our families (family devotions). Deuteronomy 6 well illustrates this—“as we walk along the way”—parents talking to their children about school, church, relationships, and what they learn in personal and family devotions, etc. (address this all on elders’ visitation). Such private and public discipline forms Christian character and largely involves learning to live with each other so as both to avoid and resolve conflict.

Discipline can, and does, however, also include censure from others when disobedience manifests itself (thus not merely self-imposed and internalized, which is the goal of all training/discipline). This, in terms of church members, can occur at two levels. First, informally—a friend challenging, encouraging, even rebuking (“Should you speak to your wife that way?”), obviously with all the care encouraged in Matthew 7 and Galatians 6. Remember—do not seek to play the Holy Spirit. Or, an elder or pastor speaking in this way. This is still informal but carries a little more weight. Elders are to seek to resolve such matters before bringing them to the consistory or session. Even the elders, as a whole, speaking to an offending party is informal, as long as they are not in judicial session.

Second, formally, church discipline may be enacted by a court of the church, the consistory or session, acting in a judicial capacity. This generally presumes that informal approaches have failed or that it is a public sin of such consequence as to require formal action. From this point forward the OPC Book of Discipline (BD) will be regularly referenced in addition to the URCNA Church Order (CO), the latter of which devotes Articles 51–66 to Ecclesiastical Discipline. The OPC BD contains a fuller approach to church discipline than is found in the URCNA CO, and most other continental Reformed church orders have a fuller approach as well.

The judicatory (consistory or session) may issue lesser censures—admonitions and rebukes (these, as well as those that follow, are more fully described in BD 6; CO Article 55). Graver censure includes suspension in or deposition from office, and suspension of the privileges of church membership (CO Article 55). Finally, the gravest censure is excommunication, when someone remains persistent and impenitent in sin (CO Article 56).

Discipline throughout church history is itself an interesting study. It is, as noted above, one of the three marks of the true church, along with the pure preaching of the Word and a biblical administration of the sacraments. Church discipline is, as are the other two marks, a further incarnational reality of that church whose attributes are unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity. The Reformation added the three marks of the church to the four attributes which, while necessary, were no longer deemed sufficient properly to identify a true church.

Church discipline as a mark of the true church means that the church is to be faithful to her Lord: each member personally and all the members together and as a whole are to live in submission to the Spirit of Christ. The body as a whole implicates itself when it fails to exercise discipline and censure sin (Josh. 7, 1 Sam. 2–4 and 1 Cor. 5); the body as a whole vindicates itself when it exercises discipline and censures sin (Josh. 8; 2 Cor. 7). This is no easy task, though, as seen in Galatians 6 and 2 Corinthians 2:5 and following, and must be done with great humility and charity.

Discipline has often, in the history of the church, either been neglected or abused. Calvin lamented its neglect in Geneva where open adulterers were coming to the Lord’s Table. For barring the table to libertines, among other things, he was sent into exile from 1538–41 in Strasbourg. The reluctance of the Genevan council to leave the question of admission to the table to the consistory stemmed from medieval clerical abuse of excommunication/interdict, etc. Even as the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages claimed, ultimately in every sense, to be over the state (Caesoropapism claimed the opposite—the state over the church), so churches touched by the Reformation sometimes did the opposite and espoused Erastianism (a Protestant form of the state over the church).

Excommunication, as well as deposition from office, has been abused throughout the history of the church, used as a tool to get one’s political enemies. We see such political abuse even in the early church (Athanasius, Chrysostom) but particularly in the Middle Ages with the rise and zenith of the papacy. The pretense of the church to exercise hegemony over the state made many reforming princes and governments gun-shy and tending toward Erastianism.

We can do either—neglect or abuse church discipline—in our churches today. Winking at sin (as may be done in many liberal and seeker-sensitive Protestant churches) is one way to neglect church discipline. Alternatively, we can go after those we regard as our enemies, in a political use of church discipline, which is a manifest abuse of discipline. Rather we need a humble, godly use of church discipline.

The basis of church discipline: God himself chastens us (Prov. 3; Heb. 12), so it is appropriate that such discipline should appear in the life of the church. He chastens us so as to enable us to die to sin and live to righteousness; to put off the old man and to put on the new man (Eph. 4:17 ff; Col. 3:5 ff.). Without chastening we go astray, even as do our children. Without chastening, sin is not checked in our hearts and lives, and we are treated not as sons but as illegitimate children (Heb. 12:8—it is the legitimate sons who are groomed by chastening to receive the inheritance; no chastening, no such grooming, and thus no inheritance). No son is then without chastening.

Even the Lord Jesus was not without discipline (Heb. 5:8): As Charles Haddon Spurgeon said, “God had but one Son without sin but he never had a son without chastisement.”[1] This makes it unmistakably clear: God chastens us not because he hates us but so that we might be sanctified (Deut. 1 and 8). Thus we are to be disciplined: by the Lord himself working in us; by trials and afflictions; by the self-examination that he requires at the table; by enabling us to put sin to death (“have salt in yourselves,” Mark 9); by others in our lives, in the “one-anothering” of the church, formally and informally, and by private counsel.

We are also disciplined by the governors appointed by God in the appropriate spheres: in the family—fifth commandment; in the state—Genesis 9; and in the church—the Matthew 16 and 18 grant of authority to the governors of the church. In each of these spheres, God has appointed governors to act on his behalf.

The nature and limit of church power in its discipline, as well as the purpose, is ministerial and declarative. Positively, that means that the power given to the church is to serve and to teach, like our Lord in John 13. Negatively, that means the power is not magisterial and legislative (as in hierarchical or some fundamentalist churches). Church power is, in other words, moral and suasive, not legal and coercive. As moral and suasive, it is concerned with sin and righteousness and seeks to persuade unto obedience; unlike the power of the state, which is legal and coercive—concerned with crime and has the power to punish such with the sword. Church power is spiritual (CO Article 51), meant to minister to and recover the erring soul.

The limits, or boundaries, of church power are also important to understand: All earthly power, as seen in the WLC exposition of the fifth commandment (WLC 123–133), derives from the fifth commandment, but is differently held and exercised according to the grant and ordinance of God. The family is given the power of the rod, and not the power of the keys or the power of the sword. The state is given the power of the sword and not the power of the rod or the power of the keys. The church is given the power of the keys and not the power of the rod or the power of the sword.

In other words, the power of the family extends even to wisdom and discretion (certainly for minor children), and the power of the state extends even to the death penalty (but the state does not physically punish sin that is not crime: speaking hatefully, for example, may be a sin but is not a crime, although speaking hatefully, at least if it makes someone feel threatened, may punishable as a crime in some places.). Church governors are analogous to parents but have no power to compel with regards to discretion or wisdom as do parents: e.g., “no, you may not have ice cream; no, you may not purchase that car stereo.” Church governors are also analogous to civil rulers but do not spank, jail, or otherwise physically punish. Rightly understood, the spiritual power that the church exercises is the most fearsome and awesome power there is, even more so than the death penalty, because it is a spiritual death penalty, though there is always the prayer for and hope of restoration in the exercise of even the gravest of church censures.

Classically, church discipline has a three-fold purpose: The glory of God—scandalous sin not addressed and repented of detracts from the glory of God, bringing dishonor upon his sacred and holy name (Gen. 39:9, Ps. 51—it is God against whom we sin, above all, and it is he who must be vindicated); the purity of the church—scandalous sin that is tolerated in the midst of the congregation has the effect of contaminating the whole body (Acts 5); and the reclamation of the offender—we hand over to Satan, even, that the offending party may “learn not to blaspheme” (1 Tim. 1).

I think that a fourth reason is also significant though often overlooked: justice for the offended party. If a seriously offended party is faced with a judicatory that is unwilling to press for repentance on the part of the offender, this opens up the offended party to bitterness and rancor. It is not love for the victim on the part of the church to exhort him to “get over it.” Rather, we are the ones charged to carry out the vengeance of the Lord, as it were, in the sphere of the church (tempered with much mercy and grace, in the church setting especially), even as the state is in its sphere. We can properly counsel the offended that vengeance is the Lord’s only when we are thus willing to act to do our duty (Rom. 12:14–21). To fail to do so because of misguided sympathy for the offender is unloving and potentially quite destructive for the offended party (think of the innocent party in a divorce case).

One of the primary principles of church discipline is that offenses should be dealt with as privately as possible (CO Article 52). This is the dynamic that we see in Matthew 18:15–20 and Luke 17:3 and following: If your brother sins against you, go and seek to reclaim him. Let me urge a few considerations, though, even before the allegedly offended party goes to the offending party. Look to yourself (Matt. 7:1–5): What may be your part in this? Have you sinned against your brother (Matt. 5: 23–4)? Then, determine what the offense is: What commandment has the offender broken? How serious is this offense? Does it disrupt your fellowship and communion? Cannot love cover this sin (1 Pet. 4:8)? If it is a true offense that disrupts your fellowship and communion and thus must be addressed, then go in meekness and humility (the spirit urged in Gal. 6) and seek to regain your brother.

When dealing with Matthew 18, we are looking at an offense against you, not you seeking to play the Holy Spirit or otherwise set this person to rights (that is the job of the “spiritual” and of the governors of the church). One may, well before going, find it helpful to seek non-gossipy advice from your pastor or elders, who would be part of the solution. Resist the ever-present urge to gossip/slander/murmur/complain and be humbly ready to hear the answer of the alleged offender. Try your best to resolve the matter personally and do not count one visit as having necessarily “done your duty.” This should be done if at all possible in person and not by mail, phone, etc. This should be done as personally as possible and as locally as possible. Any desire on your part to tell the church, the Supreme Court, the world about alleged personal, private offenses (and even ones that aren’t “tell it not in Gath”) needs to be repented of. Stay local (CO Article 53).

If the private is not successful, ask local witnesses to accompany you, local witnesses who are spiritually discerning. Why would you not ask elders? Certainly the two or three witnesses spoken of in Matthew 18 are not a gang of your friends to accompany you to beat up your enemy. What is the purpose of the witnesses? To give an unbiased, objective hearing of, and to be able to give testimony to, what is said by all parties, and to facilitate communication if necessary (and possible) between the parties. Even to intervene and seek resolution: perhaps one (or both) of the parties manifests an unreasonable, uncharitable spirit; the witnesses may urge forgiveness if it is not properly being offered or otherwise help along to reconciliation.

If the offender will not listen even at this point to the offended (together with the witnesses), tell it to the church. That is to say, bring it to the consistory or the session, the governors of the church, who represent the church (CO Article 54). The elders then advise and act (the details of this will be discussed in Part 2, the final part of this article, which will be published next month).

Alan D. Strange is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and serves as professor of church history and theological librarian at Mid-America Reformed Seminary in Dyer, Indiana, and is associate pastor of New Covenant Community Church (OPC) in Joliet, Illinois.

[1] Charles Haddon Spurgeon, sermon on Isaiah 42:18, “Joyful Transformations,” Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Vol. 14 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1868).

Beza on the Trinity, 21 Theses, Part 1 (1–15)[1]

by David C. Noe

ServantClassics

Theses or Axioms on the Trinity of Persons and their Unity of Essence as Derived from Theodore Beza’s Lectures

Thesis I. True knowledge[2] concerning God is the principal aspect of truly calling upon God. This is because we cannot worship what we do not know.

Thesis II. We must seek our conception[3] of God from his Word, because in it, and nowhere else, does he fully disclose himself to us for our salvation, and he does so such that the one who gains knowledge[4] of God outside his Word gains no knowledge for his salvation.[5]

Thesis III. Because God has not only fully disclosed himself to the world in the writings of the Prophets and Apostles in the most true fashion,[6] but even, most of all and especially, in their very suitable words and phrases, we must devote our effort not only to confining ourselves within the boundaries of Scripture (as regards the main point), but also observe the customary formulas of Scripture down to the finest little bit.[7]

Thesis IV. Nevertheless, the stubbornness of heretics made it necessary sometimes to fashion terminology in order to avoid their petty objections. But the Holy Fathers of the church did not do this carelessly. Instead, they used the greatest reverence so that the meaning of the Scriptures was not in any way whatsoever diminished, nor was any innovation introduced into God’s Word.

Thesis V. This was why, long ago, the Greek terms οὐσία (ousia) and ὑπόστασις (hypostasis) were adopted against Sabellius Afer, who confused the persons with the essence, and against Samosatenus of Antioch,[8] who destroyed the Son’s divine nature. Nevertheless, the author of the letter to Hebrews in chapter 1 employed the second of these terms. Nearly the whole controversy regarding these topics depends upon the explanation of these two terms.

Thesis VI. Therefore, we must understand that when the Fathers are discussing the divine mysteries, they have borrowed these terms from natural phenomena.[9] This is not because they thought that subjects so distinct could properly be explained using the same terms. Instead, they did this so that, in some way, they might by a kind of comparison of things unequal set before our eyes divine realities. And with these as their weapons they resolutely silenced those who were transforming theology into mere philosophical wrangling.

Thesis VII. Therefore, we will state what οὐσία (ousia) and ὑπόστασις (hypostasis) mean when it comes to natural phenomena,[10] at least as much as the present argument will require, and then explain in what respect the same terms are applied to the divine mysteries.

Thesis VIII. There are some designations of a type of universal and indeterminate meaning. These by similar reasoning[11] are attributed to a whole host of predicates in which we note there is something shared. This element is in fact present in the very many different subjects concerning which, by similar reasoning, it is predicated. But still, it does not subsist outside of those subjects, just as likewise those subjects do not subsist except in that common shared element. When, for example, I say “person,” I do not conceive of anything that is properly subsisting per se, but I note in my mind a certain shared nature apart from any particular demarcation. By a similar reasoning Peter, Paul, Timothy, and other individual subjects like these subsist. Therefore, “person” is a term that indicates οὐσία (ousia), a concept expressed by the designation “person.”

Thesis IX. Furthermore, because this conceptualizing afterward descends from that aforementioned universal to the individual and particular instances through which those subjects are distinguished—I mean those in which that common notion was previously conceived and which subsist fully delineated[12] by those properties—therefore, designations have also been found that are adapted to expressing these distinctions. Thus we say Peter, Paul, and Timothy, which are expressed as names of these ὑπόστασεις (hypostaseis) or ὑφιστάμενοι (hyphistamenoi), i.e., names of subjects defined by their own properties and subsisting in their own, shared οὐσία (ousia).

Thesis X. The word “God” denotes an essence infinite, eternal, supporting itself by its own power, omnipotent, creating and conserving all the things that it has made, and thus an essence in which all perfection dwells. When I say the word “God,” I understand that essence indeterminately, which by a shared reason is predicated of its own hypostases that subsist in it.

Thesis XI. The subjects designated by these titles—Father, Son, Holy Spirit—are hypostases. That is, they are distinct in their properties, and subsisting from eternity in that common and eternal essence, because they are distinguished by their own properties. For the Father is unbegotten, begetting the Son. The Son is begotten from the Father. The Holy Spirit is neither begetting nor begotten, but from the Father and the Son proceeding.

Thesis XII. I am not concerned about a more subtle distinguishing characteristic between proceeding and begetting. And certainly those who have wrangled back and forth about this have ignorantly twisted the Scriptural passages that have no bearing on the issue. For the fact that the Holy Spirit is someplace said to proceed from the Father and the Son refers to his manifestation and gifts. Let it be adequate that he is the Spirit, and common to the Father and the Son, and on that basis has reference to each.

Thesis XIII. Because created substances have a finite essence, they necessarily therefore are finite, and consequently are distinguished not only by their individual properties, but their hypostases also have been truly separated. Therefore, Peter, Paul, and Timothy, although by a shared reasoning are called men, nevertheless in reality they are not one man but three men, even with respect to their very humanity. For because fathers cannot communicate their own complete essence with their sons, but it is only some portion which possesses the nature of the seed[13] that takes its origin from their fathers, the sons’ essence is derived from this. And so the sons do not possess that same singular humanity which belongs to their fathers but only a similar one that has flowed forth from it. Consequently, the particular humanity, inasmuch as it is finite, cannot exist in diverse subjects. And so, I claim, in all respects there are three: Peter, Paul, Timothy, not one.

Thesis XIV. But the consideration is quite different when it comes to things divine. For because divine essence is infinite, most simple, and eternal, therefore the three hypostases subsisting in it—although they are truly three in number—because these individual hypostases are distinguished by their own incommunicable properties, they are nevertheless not three gods nor are they said to be three gods in the same way that there are three men. This is because the Son is not begotten from the Father nor does the Holy Spirit proceed from Father and Son by some “cutting off”[14] of a portion, i.e., by division,[15] as when anything is divided into three pieces. Nor is this by some effluence,[16] that is, by ἀπόρροια (aporroia),[17] such as the procreation of children from the father’s seed. Nor is it by extension, i.e., περιβολή (peribole), which we see in the propagation that takes place in grafting of vines. But instead, in the divine this happens by an indescribable communication of the whole essence from eternity, in which no point of beginning, middle, or end can be stated.[18]

Thesis XV. Therefore, there is one and precisely the same essence of begetting, of begotten, and of proceeding, although it is not the case that the Father who begets is the Son that is begotten or the Spirit who proceeds. Nor that the Son is the Father who begets or the Spirit who proceeds. Nor is the Spirit the Father who begets nor the Son who is begotten. Nor is God himself thrice-named,[19] since the properties of persons are not imaginary accidents that can be present or absent, either actually or conceptually. But they truly reside in persons and distinguish them from others. And God is not a kind of accumulation[20] either, and this for two reasons. First, because these three persons are so distinguished as not to be separated. And second, because in any given person there is not some part of God’s essence but the whole essence, and this is unable to be separated into parts[21] because it is infinite.

David C. Noe is an elder at Reformation OPC, Grand Rapids, Michigan, a licentiate in the Presbytery of Michigan and Ontario, and serves as an associate professor and chair of the Philosophy and Classics Department at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He also serves on the OPC Committee for the Historian.

[1] From Tractationes Theologicae Bezae, Volumen I (Geneva: Jean Crespin, 1570), 651.

[2] de Deo scientia.

[3] dei cognitio.

[4] sapit.

[5] Beza here both recognizes the existence of natural theology and limits its efficacy.

[6] verissime.

[7] mordicus.

[8] Also known as Paul of Samosata, c. AD 200–275, who was Bishop of Antioch 260–68.

[9] a rebus naturalibus.

[10] in rebus naturalibus.

[11] pari ratione.

[12] circumscripte.

[13] seminis rationem.

[14] resectione.

[15] Beza employs a Greek expression, κατὰ μερισμὸν, which he then glosses in Latin.

[16] Here Beza reverses this practice, giving first the Latin fluxu then a Greek gloss.

[17] The ancients (e.g., Thales, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius) explained the effects of a magnet, the “Hercules Stone” which attracts iron, by its ἀπόρροιαι, “things that flow out from it” or effluvia.

[18] dari, i.e., cannot be stated or supplied because it does not exist.

[19] trinomius, a very rare word.

[20] aggregativus; this could be translated “aggregated.”

[21] insecabilis.

A Way Out and a Way To: Intertextuality and the Exodus Motif: A Review Article

by Meredith M. Kline

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Echoes of Exodus: Tracing a Biblical Motif, by Bryan D. Estelle. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2018, xiv + 392 pages, $40.00, paper.

The alliterative title of this book is ambiguous. In Echoes of Exodus the word “exodus” refers primarily to the deliverance of God’s people from bondage in Egypt plus their journey towards the Promised Land, and only secondarily to the second book of the Pentateuch. The journey from the Nile to the Jordan is treated as a complex literary configuration whose components reoccur throughout Scripture, resulting in repeated evocations of the whole pattern in a manner that helps readers appreciate the unity of the Bible. Academics can profit from this massive project because myriad footnotes document the many monographs that the extensive research is based on; pastors can benefit from the helpful introduction to the topic of intertextuality (or inner-biblical exegesis) along with the discussion of a wealth of biblical materials; and congregational members will increase their knowledge of Scripture because the book is very readable with translations of biblical texts included, while Hebrew and Greek are presented only in transliteration in parentheses. (Typos and word duplications exist in the book, but most interrupting are some omissions that obscure the sense of a sentence.) One of Estelle’s goals is to increase the reader’s “allusion competence.” Academics and pastors can attempt to accomplish this by striving for a rabbinic-like immersion in biblical languages and texts, while with lay readers they can strive for an intimate familiarity with the Bible in translation. Because the book’s primary intended audience is the academic guild, one of Estelle’s goals is to demonstrate the fruitfulness of typology. Since readers of Ordained Servant already employ this method, they can, thus, profit from the many thematic correlations presented in the book, which reinforce responsible use of the method. Echoes of Exodus also occasionally mentions issues of concern within Ordained Servant circles, but illumination of the issues requires pursuit of materials relegated to footnotes.

Bryan Estelle, professor of Old Testament at Westminster Seminary in California, is an accomplished mountain climber. In Echoes of Exodus he follows themes associated with the exodus motif throughout the biblical landscape, aware of the underlying covenantal and redemptive geological structure, as he reports on expeditions that include ascents of various versions of God’s holy mountain.

After an introduction that maps the territory the book will cover, the author lays out a methodological base camp from which his ascent will commence by clarifying definitions associated with intertextuality. This is important because current scholarly practice of the method is often imprecise, and its results limited or misleading. (Estelle includes an appendix with a more technical discussion of how contemporary secular literary theory influences practitioners of biblical intertextuality.) Then the author begins with creation in Genesis and explores the trails of the exodus motif in ten chapters, traversing in the Old Testament the books of Genesis, Exodus, the Psalms, Isaiah, and later prophets, then progressing in the New Testament through the synoptic Gospels, Paul’s writings, and 1 Peter, while culminating in Revelation. A conclusion discusses implications of the exodus motif for biblical theology. The book also contains a bibliography along with author, subject, and Scripture indexes.

The last thirty years have produced mountains of scholarship on intertextuality. Estelle’s book reflects an impressive scholarly effort of traversing an immense range of academic hills, including N. T. Wright’s formidable Everest of written/published works, in order to map the exodus motif as part of the terrain of Scripture. While previous works primarily concentrated on limited portions of biblical literature, Estelle attempts the daunting task of following the trails of exodus themes through the whole Bible. The author interacts with previous monographs that described local peaks of the scriptural range while he graphs the biblical trajectories of deliverances through ordeal waters from Egypt, Satan, and sin; of wanderings through the wildernesses of Sinai and the world; and of ascents up the Horeb, Jerusalem, and Zion mountains. Estelle’s contribution is to indicate the direction changes taken by the exodus motif mountain ranges as one proceeds over the topography of the biblical landscape.

Since there are textual allusions to the creation in the Pentateuchal accounts of the deliverance of Abraham’s descendants from Egypt and their journey to the Jordan, those events can be pictured as a re-creation. So, Estelle appropriately begins his investigation of the biblical text by covering aspects of the creation account which will be echoed in subsequent chapters, such as the deep waters the Spirit constructs into a divine temple, the Edenic mountain where Adam enjoys the divine presence, and the projected Sabbath goal of the Adamic covenantal tasks.

Estelle then defines the exodus motif as comprising four major themes: a cosmological battle, the worship of the divine presence at the cosmic mountain, the wilderness wanderings, and the Promised Land. Each theme contains a number of topics and subsequent chapters reveal how biblical authors select particular topics from the exodus motif for their own purposes.

The author next turns to selected Psalms that highlight the divine warrior who conquered his people’s enemies, depicted as chaotic waters. But the Psalms also comment on the contemporary state of the covenant community by comparing them to the disobedient wilderness-wandering generation. The chapters on the prophets (plus Ezra-Nehemiah) reflect exilic realities with Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel projecting a new exodus from Babylon with intimations of a coming new kingdom associated with a messianic king, a new way through the desert, and a fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise of his descendants being a blessing to the nations.

Chapters on the synoptic Gospels take the exodus motif in an eschatological direction, treat Jesus as the new exodus, and focus on the identity of true Israel. The Pauline materials utilize exodus themes to warn church members about disobedience (1 Cor. 10) and to exhort them to journey with the Spirit who makes believers adopted siblings of Christ, heirs entitled to the world to come (Gal. 4–6, Rom. 8). Since the exodus motif is pervasive in Paul, new topics such as sonship, adoption, inheritance, suffering, and light are introduced into the discussion. The church as a new royal priesthood in 1 Peter reflects how Israel should have functioned, while Revelation echoes themes like the divine warrior defeating the adversarial dragon in order to deliver the Lord’s suffering pilgrims.

Echoes of Exodus is replete with examples of biblical allusions and typology. Estelle’s practice of inner-biblical exegesis recognizes links between texts, evokes a larger context from texts alluded to, and reminds readers of a whole complex motif. When 1 Peter and the Apocalypse collocate “kingdom” and “priests,” thus alluding to Exodus 19:6, Estelle notes the correlation and elaborates the significance of the textual echo for the history of redemption: an attribute of Israel is applied to the church (302). Even though textual variants in the wording of the allusion are discussed, this is a small-scale project. While typology may be a natural extension of noticing literary links between texts, identifying the connections between persons or situations is a larger-scale process involving more subjectivity on the interpreter’s part. Though one of Estelle’s goals is to revive typological exegesis, humans are inveterate pattern-seekers, so interpreters have slipped into allegory in the past; therefore, he also includes a section on typology in the chapter about the intertextual method and provides examples of types throughout the book. What might make Moses a new Adam? Mountaineer Estelle is attracted to the facts that Adam, Moses, and Christ are ascenders and descenders of the mountains of God: Eden, Sinai, and Zion (101)!

Estelle’s exodus motif project, however, is humongous in scale. His definition of the exodus motif is a complex, hierarchical configuration of motif, themes, and topics. If the exodus motif is correlated with the Genesis 1–2 account, which describes the “week” of divine activity that is a pattern for the totality of history from creation to consummation, any biblical text might allude to the motif; the context of any echo could become all of Scripture and history; the project approaches the scope of a whole biblical theology. Estelle’s organization of tracing the exodus motif sequentially through the Bible was naturally suggested by the numerous volumes previously published on the exodus motif, even if defined in various ways. This approach does demonstrate how concepts associated with the exodus evolved during the progress of redemptive revelation. Estelle’s covenant theology is implicit in providing explanations for the varying biblical uses of particular topics. Since the biblical books are means of God administering his covenant community, changes in the nature and state of the covenant community, such as Israelite kings defying their covenant suzerain or the covenant community changing from a theocracy to a church, clearly reveal the significance of the changing functions of the exodus motif in the Bible.

The complexity of the exodus motif, however, means only some of its topics occur in any biblical text and discussion of one topic may be scattered over several of Estelle’s chapters, so a unified understanding of a topic may not result. Some topics, like the Feast of Booths, one of the means God designed for Israel to remember the exodus, are mentioned early on in Estelle’s account but not picked up subsequently. Initially, the Passover is not mentioned as a topic under his first theme, the deliverance of Israel from Egypt in terms of a cosmological battle, but subsequently in the discussion of 1 Peter it is employed as a relevant aspect of the exodus motif. For a pastoral audience, an alternative volume, perhaps, could be produced that delineated the themes and topics but then traced them individually through Scripture.

How should the exodus motif be defined? What themes and topics should it include? This is important since the motif is a large-scale feature of the biblical narrative. Previous investigators have proposed a variety of reverberations of this complex motif. That poses a challenge when one attempts to synthesize the results of previous scholarship or to creatively reconfigure the motif. Properly patterning the richly complex biblical models of salvation and tracking their modulations through Scripture is a monumental challenge. Estelle provides lots of data to stimulate refined mappings of the biblical topography.

Comparison with the creation narrative and prophetic portrayal of a new exodus as a return to the promised land, a type of God’s day-seven rest, indicates it is appropriate to extend the exodus journey from Egypt to Canaan. Since that decision involves inclusion of a wealth of material from the Pentateuch, disagreements about what to include in the motif are inevitable. For example, why is the topic of God’s presence associated only with the Sinai episode? God was also present for Israel while combating the gods of Egypt and protecting the Israelites who were covered by the blood of the sacrificial lambs; plus he was present in the cloudy and fiery pillar at the Red Sea crossing; he guided Israel through the wilderness; and he dwelt in the tabernacle. Why, in the discussion of Estelle’s third theme, the wilderness wanderings, are the pre-Sinai and post-Sinai wilderness episodes not distinguished? Despite the grumbling of Israel on the trip to Sinai, the Lord’s provision of water and food as blessings establishes an Edenic environment for the mountain experience. In contrast, the wilderness wanderings between Sinai and the Promised Land are a cemetery-curse for a rebellious people afraid to engage in holy warfare. Also, should the Sinai wilderness wanderings, even if transformed by Isaiah’s variation on them as a way through the desert, serve as the paradigm for use of “The Way” in Acts as a designation for the early Christian community as a sect within Judaism? Better is to understand “The Way” as a reference to Jesus, the way, the truth, and the life; he is the one pictured by the symbol of divinity traversing the way through the split carcasses at the ratification of the covenant of grace with Abraham or the one who passes through the flaming-sword crucifixion on the way back to the garden-mountain of God and the presence of the Father. If attaining the Promised Land, Estelle’s fourth theme, is part of the exodus motif, why is the second water crossing ordeal at the Jordan not included in the motif? Or, similarly, if the land of Canaan is part of the motif, why is the second dragon combat, the conquest, not a component of the motif?

In Estelle’s second theme, the worship of God at a cosmic mountain (Sinai), the topic of making a covenant is submerged, even though it surfaces when discussing the book of Exodus as a genre model for the gospels. Covenants are ratified at Sinai with the generation that came out of Egypt and in the steppes of Moab at the banks of the Jordan with the second generation, as recorded in Deuteronomy. Including covenant ratification in the exodus motif would, of course, involve a totally different kind of book. The covenant topic, however, would be a crucial element for Estelle’s secondary interest in elucidating the current controversy over forensic and participationist versions of justification. While his suggestion that the dragon-combat topic should be considered as a forensic component in the justification discussion is helpful, the topic would have to be appropriately included in an analysis of the covenant of redemption in order to resolve the current impasse.

While participating in the Echoes of Exodus mountaineering expedition is an arduous endeavor, the experience should support the conviction of readers of Ordained Servant that properly practiced typology is helpful for redemptive-historical preaching, should encourage them that the complexity of the biblical narrative and covenant history, nevertheless, strengthens belief in the unity of the Bible, and should stimulate them to continue to pursue ways of making the gospel message clear.

Meredith M. Kline is the director emeritus of the Goddard Library at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts. His PhD thesis was on Ecclesiastes, and he is a member of First Presbyterian Church, North Shore (PCA) in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

A Remarkable Season of Change: A Review Article

by Gregory E. Reynolds

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How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone, by Brian McCullough. New York: Liveright, 2018, 372 pages, $28.95.

The technological change over the past three decades is nothing short of phenomenal, in fact, it is a phenomenon like no other. Over the years of lecturing on this topic many people have asserted that this change is no different from other historical changes initiated by inventions such as the printing press and the telephone. However, Canadian scholar Arthur Boers observes that modern technological change is unique in five ways.[1] 1) Change is occurring at an unprecedented rate, leaving little time to adapt discerningly, and thus technology is overpowering culture. By contrast the change from handwritten manuscripts to the printed word took several centuries. 2) Change is artificial, separating us from nature and the real world. Matthew Crawford demonstrates the importance of the integration of manual and mental competence for living in the actual world.[2] Wendell Berry contends that the Bible is an “outdoor book.”[3] 3) Change is pervasive, dominating everything from communication to irons, restaurants to family. It tends to intrude on vacations and the Sabbath. 4) Change is not related to personal skills; rather, change is marked by such things as self-driving cars and automated airplanes. In contrast, on January 15, 2009, Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger landed an Airbus A320 in New York’s freezing Hudson River by human skill that no automated system, at least at the time, could replicate. 5) Change demands universal conformity, tending to eradicate the unique, local, and diverse. The title of James Howard Kunstler’s book emphasizes this point: The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape.[4]

How the Internet Happened is a fascinating narrative that carefully documents the dramatic change in the American social structure and economy generated by computing as it is connected with the Internet. No technology in history has had such a sudden and pervasive impact on culture. The book acquaints us with the actual history that is the backdrop to the dramatic TV series “Halt and Catch Fire.” While this history is largely descriptive, its detailed coverage of the Internet’s development and effects is of considerable assistance in the formation of a critical assessment.

McCullough begins by stating that

The Internet is the reason that computers actually became useful for the average person. . . . that is what this book is about: how the web and the Internet allowed computers to infiltrate our everyday lives. . . . It is about how we allowed these technologies into our lives, and how these technologies changed us.” (3)

There are many interesting factual surprises throughout the narrative, like learning that the “i” in Apple products is not the tribute to the individual I always thought it was, but rather refers to the Internet, since prior to the iMac, Apple was a losing player on the Internet. But the “innovative and beautifully crafted computers” (208–9) designed by Jonathan Ives were part of the Steve Jobs’s overhaul of Apple that saved the company at the turn of the century.

The linking of computers took place in the highly technical world of the US government and academic research in 1969. The earliest computers were built at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1951. The ARPANET linked four academic nodes together to become the grandfather of the present Internetwork. By 1990 the World Wide Web democratized the Internet by providing the graphic user interface (GUI) and connecting households. Computers were enabled to search sites through the first search engine, Gopher (3–4). In 1995 Netscape, a simpler means of navigating the Net, “was the big bang that started the Internet Era” (8). Prior to Netscape the search engine Mosaic transformed “the Internet into a workable web . . . instead of an intimidating domain of nerds” (16). Between the launches of Mosaic and its morphing into Netscape, the number of websites expanded from hundreds to tens of thousands (14). McCullough reminds us of the vastness of the change that has taken place since then, commenting: “Today, the phone in your pocket is more powerful than every computer involved in the moon landing” (8).

Along the way McCullough goes into great detail to describe the various inventors and investors who made the modern Internet a reality. Coding geniuses were cranking out new web products on Netscape in a single day and finding “hundreds and thousands of users the next” (31). One of the main themes of the history is the millions of dollars that were suddenly being made by web companies. Beginning in 1995 the dot-com era ushered in a host of overnight millionaires the like of which Wall Street had never seen (35). The competitive drama became intense, as seen in the opening sentence of chapter 2 (“Bill Gates ‘Gets’ the Internet),” which asserts, “Netscape was right to fear Microsoft” (38). Microsoft’s software and operating system (Windows 95) connected to the web through Internet Explorer proved an unbeatable combination. The goal was to make the web as mainstream as TV. The information superhighway was becoming a reality. The web by contrast with TV allowed users to consume, but also create content. Now, because Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with every Windows machine, Netscape was outmaneuvered and soon to become extinct (38–51). Demonstrating how ruthless the competition could be, Microsoft threatened legal action when Compaq replaced Internet Explorer with Navigator on some of it models (52).

McCullough continues his narrative with a history of the development of early online services such as America Online (AOL). The discovery that people wanted to interact with each other, especially in sharing special interests, proved revolutionary, as chat rooms and electronic mail became popular (55). The advent of actual pictures on AOL in the nineties reminds us of how rapidly electronic communication developed. Meanwhile, millions were paying monthly fees for Internet access.

In chapter 4 McCullough explores big media’s discovery and use of the web. The main challenge was how to make money by providing online content (75). Print media like Wired and Rolling Stone, embraced the web as the means to technological utopia (75–6). Advertising, a centuries old business model, has proved to be largely the way online content is paid for (79). This in turn brings another major theme of Internet history to the fore: attention. Much of the web and its software are designed to capture and keep our attention (81). Chapter 6 explores the development of e-commerce. Physical reality kicks in. Jeff Bezos started with books. His idea was to become a profitable intermediary through the computer network between buyers and sellers of goods (95). Amazon soon became one of the largest companies in the world.

Chapter 5 deals with the importance of search engines. What we take for granted was not obvious or easy to invent. Google has become a verb due to its dominating search power. It opens up the world to us, but not in a neutral way, as we shall see. Notice that the ads that come with most applications can only be eliminated for a fee; it’s almost all about commerce. But what is remarkable about the ethos of this new reality is the combination of what McCullough observes: “Silicon Valley has always been equal parts egghead libertarianism and acid-tinged hippie romanticism” (108). Access to the proper means of liberation will set us all free as the Whole Earth Catalog promised to my generation of the counterculture. The Internet search engine simply enhanced this possibility exponentially (122). The irony is that even what appears to be free content contradicts the basic tenet of the romantic because free web services “make their money by whoring out our personal information to marketers and advertisers” (130). I have warned people for decades that one of the hidden dangers of social networks is that they make people surreptitiously participate in the largest focus group in history.

Fred Turner, author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture, summed up the philosophy of Stewart Brand, the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, who

“suggested that computers might become the new LSD, a new small technology that could be used to open minds and reform society.” Indeed, Steve Jobs came up with the name “Apple Computing” from living in an acid-infused community at an Oregon apple orchid.[5]

The aspiration of Silicon Valley gurus is to change the world according to their vision of the way the world ought to be. Absent of a biblical anthropology and worldview, this is a dangerous project indeed.

Chapter 11 covers the development and dominance of Google. Recognizing the importance of relevance in web search was revolutionary in terms of the power of finding what one is looking for. The gathering and appropriate ordering of search results was key. This discovery at Stanford University was named Google after the word “googol” which means 1 followed by 100 zeros (189). As hard drive capacities grew so did search ability.

McCullough explores the dot-com era and the bubble that burst in the early part of this century. The gold rush frenzy of new dot-com company IPOs caused investment in companies that made no profit. The word “Internet” had achieved an almost magical power of attraction, often blinding investors to their lack of profit. Chapters 8 and 9 tell the sad story with a happy ending: many wild speculative investments failed, but the Internet forged ahead (180). In 1999 Time named Amazon’s Jeff Bezos its Person of the Year (157). But to realize the profits that were actually made, consider this: through the 1990s AOL’s stock appreciated 80,000%, and that’s not a typo (167–9).

“Mix, Rip, and Burn” (chapter 12) demonstrates the fruition of Apple’s aspiration to make its computers digital hubs (209). Digitizing music through iTunes and the mobile iPod proved to be the doorway to success (210–11). “Jobs was convinced that ease of use and customer choice were the key to competing with the lure of the free” (213). Linking iTunes and iPods to Windows put Apple on the path to becoming the most profitable company in the world (214).

Every other chapter throughout this book deals with the commercial aspect of the Internet. Chapter 13 covers the inception of virtual banking vehicles like PayPal. Meanwhile when Google was searching for greater profitability, it discovered the importance of getting companies to pay for search result priority (229–32). Suddenly search results became not a consequence of users’ search priorities but rather of paying advertisers.

Then there’s Web 2.0 (2004). Now the more personal and democratizing dimension of the web’s potential came to the fore with web-logs (blogs), Wikipedia, YouTube, and the social networks. Now the idea of participation dominated. Creation of web content became pervasive on the Internet (255). “Web 2.0 was about people expressing themselves—actually being themselves, actually living—online.” The boundary between online and real life was blurred and broken (258–59).

Enter the social network (chapter 15) and its biggest player, Mark Zuckerberg.[6] He was already used to stealing content and violating privacy during the nascent development of his social network ideas and skills at Harvard. One of his inventions for Harvard students, Facemash, was shut down because he had stolen student profile pictures from Harvard’s internal network. Zuckerberg was placed on probation then (267), and now, years later, he seems to be under the scrutiny of Congress. In the early days of Facebook observing the server logs and discovering user behavior enabled Zuckerberg and others to call what they observed “the trance” (281). To put it crudely, cultivating addiction is the best way to increase profits. McCullough observes that the genius of Zuckerberg’s discovery is that “finding out what is happening with your friends and family is a core human desire, right smack in the middle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs” (283). The “Facebook trance” lead to the proliferation of content, including feeds like News Feed (288), which included a certain degree of biased curation.

Chapters 16–17 conclude the body of the book with an exploration of the rise of mobile media, especially the iPhone. The PalmPilot was the first mobile device to be widely used. Then the Blackberry moved into first place with the slogan “Always on. Always connected” (299). I can still remember my adult children doing business on vacation with their Blackberries. Of course, there were more limited early mobile devices like pagers and MP3 players, but the Blackberry was the first true “heroin of mobile computing” (300). I say first because the smartphone outpaced them all.

The history of the iPhone’s development within Apple is fascinating, and I’ll leave that topic to interested readers. The combination of Jonathan Ives’s stunningly elegant design, the enormous computing power, and connection to the App Store and iTunes, of what is far more than a mere phone, make the iPhone a large component of the culture-changing influence of electronic media. “Rather than arrive too soon, the smartphone+social media represented a moment when two world-changing technologies arrived at just the right moment” (320).

McCullough’s conclusion, “Outro,” sounds a warning about the lofty utopianism that has fueled much of the Internet’s development. J. C. R. Licklider, an early developer of the ARPANET wrote a philosophically foundational paper titled “Man-Computer Symbiosis” in which he asserts: “Preliminary analyses indicate that the symbiotic partnership will perform intellectual operations more effectively than man alone can perform them” (322). After summing up what the Internet Era has astonishingly accomplished, McCullough asks: “But are we better off? Are we truly thinking as no human brain has ever thought, just as Licklider supposed? That’s the open-ended question as the Internet Era continues” (323). This question reminds me of the first electronic message sent by telegraph, “What hath God wrought!” I have proposed turning it into a question, “What hath God wrought?” We need to be like people of David’s troops, “men who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do” (1Chron. 12:32). “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:2). This comprehensive history can aid the technology navigator in wise stewardship of the new environment in which we find ourselves. I highly recommend this book.

Gregory E. Reynolds is pastor emeritus of Amoskeag Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Manchester, New Hampshire, and is the editor of Ordained Servant.

[1] Arthur Boers, “Open the Wells of Grace and Salvation: Creative and Redemptive Potential of Technology in Today’s Church” (lecture at the conference From the Garden to the Sanctuary: The Promise and Challenge of Technology, Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, June 6, 2013).

[2] Matthew B. Crawford, The World beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).

[3] Wendell Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (New York: Random House, 1993); reprinted in Cross Currents 43, no. 2 (Summer 93): 149, https://www.crosscurrents.org/berry.htm.

[4] James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Free Press, 1994).

[5] Jon Askonas, “How Tech Utopia Fostered Tyranny,” The New Atlantis, no. 57 (Winter 2019): 6–7; quoting Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

[6] See my review of the film The Social Network, “Dis-integrated?: The Social Network,” Ordained Servant (2010): 62–66, https://opc.org/os.html?article_id=222.

Memory and Hope: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Challenge of Exile: A Review Article

by John N. Somerville Jr.

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Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by Peter Constantine. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018, xv + 451 pages, $35.

For those whose formative years have come since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the singular menace of the Soviet empire is perhaps little more than a vague prologue to our current geopolitical circumstances. But for others, those who came of age at the height of the Cold War, who remember the deep worry created by Soviet communism, that nation’s aspirations to worldwide domination, and the prospect of nuclear annihilation, that era certainly continues to inform their view of the world.

Such individuals were also inevitably and keenly interested in the fate of those Russian citizens living under the brutal weight of the Soviet system and were captivated by accounts of resistance within that population. Among those dissidents, one who achieved international celebrity, even as he suffered intense persecution in his homeland, was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He had first come to the attention of the world in 1962 when his novel about the Soviet prison labor camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in a leading Russian literary journal. In the following years he engaged in a long struggle to get other works published and found himself increasingly at odds with Soviet authorities. He suffered continual harassment and an attempted assassination at the hands of the KGB, and in 1974, four years after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, was deported from the Soviet Union.

Between Two Millstones, Book 1, is Solzhenitsyn’s account of life in the first four years after his expulsion and is, in a sense, a sequel to his earlier memoir, The Oak and the Calf. The new volume, the first English translation of the book, will be followed at a later date by a further installment covering the years from 1978 to 1994, or up until his return to Russia.

For those who were aware of Solzhenitsyn’s plight during the late 1960s and early 1970s, his every publication, his conflict with state authorities, and his being awarded the Nobel Prize were cause for great interest. The circumstances of his life after 1974, however, tended to receive less attention. In fact, apart from the publication of new books and his 1978 Harvard graduation speech, Solzhenitsyn kept a fairly low profile. For those curious about his first years in the West, as Solzhenitsyn negotiated the challenges of living in a different world, this volume goes a long way to filling out the story.

His deepest yearnings were, it seems, to acquire the time and quiet to pursue his research and writing, and to find a place—a home—for his family and himself. He remarks early in the book that, delivered from the constraints he endured in the Soviet Union, “I was free to discuss whatever I liked” (8). Many pages later, however, he reflects on the Harvard address, saying that “I naively believed that I had found myself in a society where one can say what one thinks, without having to flatter that society” (287). But it is not just this one episode that troubles Solzhenitsyn: the book contains, in fact, a long series of incidents where Solzhenitsyn laments the failures of words—in pirated or poorly translated editions of his books, but most often as a result of his own miscalculations, misunderstandings, and hotheadedness in making public statements. It is hard at the end of his narrative not to recall his words to reporters on arriving in Germany after his expulsion: “I said enough in the Soviet Union. I will be silent for now” (3).

True, Solzhenitsyn finds periods during which he can, without interruption, gather information for his Red Wheel cycle of novels about the Russian Revolution. He also notes with pleasure those moments in Switzerland and later at his new home in Vermont when he found the opportunity to write. Much of his time, however, is spent on the necessary, but tiresome business of dealing with visitors, invitations, speeches, interviews, and thousands of letters. He must deal also with the exasperating details related to the ownership, translation, and publication of his books, concerns that inevitably draw Solzhenitsyn into seemingly endless legal battles. These, he writes after many such episodes, are “a profanation of the soul, an ulceration. As the world has entered a legal era,” he continues, “gradually replacing man’s conscience with law, the spiritual level of the world has sunk” (202).

If Solzhenitsyn encounters a sort of “noise” in the law, he finds something no less disturbing in the Western press, which becomes a constant nemesis to the liberated novelist. Indeed, he shouts at a group of reporters soon after his arrival in the West, “You are worse than the KGB!” Solzhenitsyn adds immediately, “My relations with the press grew worse and worse” (13). Perhaps as telling as any moment in his dealings with the press occurs in relation to his Harvard speech, during which he singles out journalists for criticism, and after which he laments their misreading of his message. In their many attacks on Solzhenitsyn in the days after the address, he complains that “they had completely missed everything important” while “invent[ing] things that simply did not exist in my speech” (286).

The cause of Solzhenitsyn’s greatest distress, however, of which the legal system and the press are symptoms, is the West’s moral decline and cowardice before the communist menace. He voices these thoughts most famously in the Harvard graduation address, where, among other things, he complains that in the West “the notion of freedom has been diverted to unbridled passion” and “a sense of responsibility before God and society has fallen away” (285). The West, he adds, adrift in its “excesses and carelessness” (50), has its origins in “irreligious humanism,” and has, with the rest of humanity, no hope or “way left but—upward” (286).

Despite such unhappiness with the world he finds in freedom, Solzhenitsyn also conveys some sense of promise. In its simplest form, this occurs in reports of his travels through Europe, Canada, and the United States, all previously inaccessible to him. These passages, at the least, provide some of the more interesting and amusing episodes in the book, including the Nobel laureate’s story about receiving a speeding ticket during a trip from California to Vermont and his blunt descriptions of the ugliness of cities such as Montreal and New York. More significant, though, are the places where Solzhenitsyn seeks and then finds a home, a location where he and his family can settle during their life in exile. Solzhenitsyn describes their first stop in Zurich, his later search in Canada and Alaska, then finding a comfortable spot in rural Vermont. There, aided by the tireless labors of his wife, Solzhenitsyn can focus on his writing and other projects, and together they can raise their sons. Though he rarely mentions them, one short section of the book describes the boys coming to his writing cottage for instruction in mathematics, to swim in the pond, and to pray with their father. In this place Solzhenitsyn can find some of the quiet he craves, a refuge with his family from the ruined world, East and West, that he knows so well.

Since the fourth of the book’s five chapters—although it also recounts the turmoil associated with his Harvard speech—pays particular attention to Solzhenitsyn’s domestic retreat in Vermont, it is jarring to read the last chapter, a long response to a book that attacked Solzhenitsyn. He devotes page after page to the book’s accusations and to his defense against those charges. The seeming purpose of the chapter—or to the chapter’s placement in the narrative—is that it underscores the truth that for Solzhenitsyn, although he has found his refuge, the world with which he has engaged has not finished with him.

Here, as elsewhere in the book, Solzhenitsyn shapes his narrative with the care of a novelist. And it is in this unhappy closing chapter that he embeds his single most moving passage, a message addressed to his childhood friend Kirill, one with whom the young Solzhenitsyn shared a passionate love for literature, but who as an adult betrayed the writer by contributing his own lies to the book attacking Solzhenitsyn. “Kirill! . . . Kirochka!” Solzhenitsyn writes, “What have you done? How could you have gone over to them?” (327). The plaintive tone of heartbreak that saturates Solzhenitsyn’s words in this brief section eloquently expresses the spirit of sadness that is never far from the surface in the book.

Despite this strain of unspoken sorrow and the ceaseless battles that Solzhenitsyn fights, even in the relative freedom of the West, Between Two Millstones testifies above all to the author’s immense courage and resilience, invaluable reserves gathered to some degree from his Russian Orthodox faith. We can now look forward to the second volume, to observing Solzhenitsyn, having obtained some degree of quiet and a place of his own, as he negotiates his final years in exile.

John N. Somerville Jr. is a professor of English, Barbara Longway Briggs Chair in English Literature, at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan.

ServantHumor

Rome’s Biggest Convert

by Eutychus II

Several recently published books have sought to explain the popularity of the road to Rome that some Evangelicals have walked over the past few decades. Among the best are Darryl Hart’s Still Protesting[1] and Ken Stewart’s In Search of Ancient Roots.[2] As helpful as these two studies are in analyzing the attraction of Rome to discontented Evangelicals, both of them seem to have overlooked the real headline event of confessional mobility, indeed the Silver Tuna of Evangelical conversion stories. Begun in 2012 but completed and dedicated just last July, the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California is now the Christ Cathedral of the Roman Catholic Church, after an aging church demographic and a mishandled succession plan rendered Robert Schuller’s showpiece bankrupt. (Language purists will happily observe that this conversion finally renders it a genuine cathedral, because it is now the seat of the bishop of the diocese of Orange County, California, of the Roman Catholic Church.)

Designed by the renowned architect Philip Johnson and completed in 1981, the Crystal Cathedral was dubbed the “largest glass building in the world.” I visited it once, over thirty years ago. The hot and dry Santa Ana winds were putting on an impressive show that January morning, so powerful that they blew off one of the 10,600 silver-tinted panes of glass, which fell one hundred feet to the ground and shattered. Security wisely closed down the campus immediately for safety reasons, but not before dozens of postmodern pilgrims, your reporter among them, scurried to collect souvenir shards, the icons for the New Reformation.

The building’s scale, of course, is breathtaking. It has no flying buttresses, but plenty of room for flying angels in the lavish theatrical productions that were staged. Ninety-foot high doors open the worship experience to the bright California sunshine, evoking memories of the church’s earlier life in drive-in format (“worship as you are . . . in the family car!”). This feature particularly facilitated the conversion process as it allowed for the fluid substitution of idols, when a half-ton steel crucifix replaced an eighty-by-fifty-five-foot American flag.

I realized the true genius of Schuller’s designs during an Hour of Power recording, when it became plainly evident that the cavernous interior really served as a gigantic television studio. The building actually did not seat that many: 2,500 is modest by Evangelical megachurch standards. Willow Creek accommodates 7,500 and Lakeview Church (nee The Summit of the Houston Rockets), can pack in over 16,000. To his credit, Schuller never replaced its pews with theater seating.

But how, one might ask, could Evangelical kitsch be recycled into Catholic worship? Anyone who doubts that Catholics have become comfortable with American pop culture would do well to read Thomas Day’s 1990 book, Why Catholics Can’t Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste.[3] While it took seven years to fully complete the transformation into a Roman Catholic cathedral, the theological transition may not have been that arduous. A life-size statue of Father Fulton Sheen, the Roman Catholic pioneer of the electronic church, had already adorned the building grounds. Before retirement in 2006, Schuller would often boast of his numerous audiences with Pope John Paul II. And one would search in vain for anything vaguely Protestant in the church’s mission statement. As church historian Dennis Voskuil aptly described the Pelagian logic of Schuller’s “theology of self-esteem,” confession of sin in the worship of the church “would be like a physician’s prescribing whiskey for an alcoholic.”[4] (Yes, the church was a congregation of the Reformed Church in America, but that was an affiliation that Schuller actively advertised only after the Jonestown massacre of 1978.) Who knows? Perhaps the Roman Catholic affiliation will render the teaching of the cathedral more Augustinian.

When Robert Schuller purchased ten acres in Garden Grove in 1955, he claimed it would be the key to ministry in the twenty-first century. Instead, the remarkable odyssey of the Crystal Cathedral is a testimony to how dated is the gospel of church growth that Schuller so aggressively touted and how non-sustainable are the empires of American Evangelicalism.

Even more importantly, it should remind us of what truly constitutes gospel success. Edwards E. Elliott (1914–1979) was an OPC minister who labored from many years in the shadow of Schuller’s conglomerate that eventually expanded to forty acres of prime southern California real estate. Elliott arrived in Garden Grove a year after Schuller, and twenty-three years later he died tragically in a plane crash (returning home from General Assembly), a year before the grand opening of the Crystal Cathedral. The last of many articles he wrote in the Presbyterian Guardian, entitled “Success—True and False,” reflected on Schuller’s ministry at the height of its popularity.

God is the “author and evaluator of genuine ecclesiastical success,” Elliott insisted. It cannot be reduced to “the erection of larger buildings, to house the latest crop of admirers.” Rather, success in the church

is to be measured by a divinely given reed (Rev 11:1). “Rise, measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein.” It is not counting, so much as measuring. There were many out in the court who could have been counted, but they were only temple-treaders, and not worth measuring. Heresies, said Paul, actually are necessary, that they which are approved may be made manifest. The draining off of those who are merely temple-treaders is an important function. What is left is measured for eternity.”[5]

Eutychus II, the son of Eutychus I, serves as a comedian in Troas.

[1] D. G. Hart, Still Protesting: Why the Reformation Matters (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage, 2018).

[2] Kenneth J. Stewart, In Search of Ancient Roots: The Christian Past and the Evangelical Identity Crisis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2017).

[3] Thomas Day, Why Catholics Can’t Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste (Chestnut Ridge, NY: Crossroad, 1990).

[4] Dennis Voskuil, Mountains into Goldmines: Robert Schuller and the Gospel of Success (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 103.

[5] Edwards E. Elliott, “Success—True and False” Presbyterian Guardian 47 (Sept. 1978): 7.

ServantPoetry

Reason for Rejoicing

Anne MacDonald

“On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever.”

—Isaiah 25:7–8a

To cover people everywhere—

no rush—in soft and muffling folds,

it still is waiting, ready there

to wrap each body that it holds

throughout the coming night; this sheet

which winds so silently is strong;

no human hands have strength to rip

this cloth from those who sleep so long.

But now a body comes whose flesh

is lacerated, bleeding, torn,

a curtain opened wide when wrapped

in death (the reason He was born).

His hands, though pierced, are powerful

enough to tear this shroud from top

to bottom, opening the way

to life, for He now lives to stop

the winding power of death destroyed

forever; you that He will raise,

released, unbound, and made alive,

oh, stand, come forth and shout His praise!