Interview with P. J. Williams

Click here for an informative interview with P. J. Williams, Warden of Tyndale House.

Stay with Clive and Carmel

Hey, readers! Check this out. Clive and Carmel, owners and hosts of Cumberland House near Gatwick have launched their new web site and they have included comments by yours truly and have even linked to my Tyndale House Journal.

Next time you have a stopover at Gatwick, please do call upon Clive and Carmel if you find yourself in need of a comfortable bed, friendly hosts, a good rest, and a hearty English breakfast all for a modest price. Mentioning my name probably won't get you any discount, but it may prompt a few memories.

Enjoy!

ETS President, Francis Beckwith Resigns, Returns to Catholic Church

See the entry on my blog, Biblia Theologica, for the story.

David Instone-Brewer in Wall Street Journal

Dr. Instone-Brewer, senior research fellow in rabbinics and the New Testament at Tyndale House in Cambridge and the author of "Divorce and Remarriage in the Church" (InterVarsity Press), has published an essay in the Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal title, "Evangelical Separation Anxiety--What the Bible says about divorce."

Last Day at Tyndale House: Sad Ending. Joyful Anticipation.

After I arrive home and have an opportunity to settle back into the routines of our home life, then I will offer some reflections upon studying and research in Cambridge at Tyndale House. For today, I simply offer this simple observation. It is a day of sadness mingled with joyful anticipation, sadness that long days (8:00 AM to 10:00 PM) dedicated to research in a superb biblical studies library had to come to a close, but joyful anticipation of embracing my wife, Lois, at the airport in Minneapolis tomorrow afternoon and being reunited with our sons, their wives (John & Naomi, expectant with our second grandchild, and David & Renae) and our granddaughter, Anna.

Toss a measure of disappointment into the mix of sadness and joyful anticipation, too. Today, as I was leaving Tyndale House, Martin Hengel was arriving. The good folks at Tyndale House hosted Martin Hengel who will be honored tomorrow now in his eightieth year. Dr. Peter Head, New Testament Research Fellow at Tyndale House and Fellow at St. Edmund's College (Cambridge University), kindly arranged for Tyndale House to host Martin Hengel during morning tea time. Regrettably, when I made my travel arrangements I had no knowledge of the special event tomorrow. Had I known, I almost surely would have extended my stay by at least one day. The bright side is that I have an even greater event awaiting me tomorrow, I will see my wife again. Sorry Dr. Hengel.

The Georgian pediment and familiar red door, the front door to my residence for the past several weeks, welcomed me when I arrived and bid me goodbye as I departed. Truly, it is a doorway to biblical studies.

As the bus rolled out of Cambridge I looked upon a number of scenes that had become quite familiar during my stay in the old city--bicyclists wending their way to lectures, children walking to school, athletes practicing with a ball on the green, scholars carrying their bags as they walk to their colleges, and a man with sunken eyes and no teeth scrounging for food in a refuse can on the green as people of all walks of life busily pass by taking no notice of him.

After leaving Tyndale House by Panther Taxi to Dummer Street, I boarded a National Express bus bound for Gatwick airport by way of stops at Stansted and Heathrow airports. About four and half hours later we arrived at the south terminal of Gatwick airport. I called Carmel at Cumberland House, and in just a short time she was there to pick me up. (If you need a room near Gatwick, I commend Cumberland House. Carmel and Clive are wonderful hosts.)

For dinner, I trudged through the rain under my umbrella down to Ye Olde Six Bells pub, where the aroma and warmth of flames in the fireplace welcomed guests. I'll have you know that I did not make the same mistake about ordering water as I did last time. I decided this evening to celebrate the close of several weeks of intensive research and my anticipation of being home tomorrow. So it was neither bottled 'still water' nor tap water on ice for me.

As I sat alone, enjoying my meal quietly celebrating an end and a beginning, I observed others in the pub. Two couples, in particular, were of interest, and both were Americans, as I surmised by overhearing their manner speech and content of conversation. One was a married pair of 'seasoned citizens.' The other was an obviously unmarried couple early in middle age. The married couple barely conversed. Oh, I suppose that they care for one another, but no one would have made the mistake of thinking they did, given their demeanor. The other couple, quite obviously not married to one another but speaking of their spouses or former spouses and children, were also obviously enjoying one another. They talked continuously and with noticeable gestures of affection. "What a situation!" I thought. Two couples, one married but barely speaking to one another, another not married to one another but clearly romantically involved with one another, and there I sat, married but without my wife. We would have been speaking with one another, romantically involved with one another, and married to one another. Tomorrow, I will hug her and kiss my wife. One more night, then I'm home.

Update: While at Gatwick Airport, I happened to see both couples that I had seen the night before at the pub. The younger couple were airline flight attendants walking together toward the gate for their flight. The older couple were as detached from one another as the night before.

A Pleasant Discovery at Tyndale House Library

Today has been preparation day for my departure from Tyndale House tomorrow. One of my tasks has been to replace the stacks of books that I have been using for research. (The library is a self-serve resource center. Use a book and replace it when finished with it. The design is efficient and saves on paying someone to do what we researchers can do ourselves.) Well, as I was replacing a Ph.D. dissertation, I spied another dissertation that I could not resist taking back to my study carrel.

I sat down and began to read the dissertation. After reading the introduction

and preliminary pages, one chapter in particular, Chapter X, caught my attention. So I devoted a fair amount of time to give it a careful reading. The chapter is titled "Justification by Faith." Oh, I didn't tell you whose dissertation it is. It is J. I. Packer's Ph.D. dissertation. Packer gave the copy as a gift to Tyndale House in May 1957. It is titled, "The Redemption and Restoration of Man in the Thought of Richard Baxter: A Study in Puritan Theology," presented for the degree of D.Phil. in the University of Oxford, Trinity term, 1954. Packer's dissertation is extremely long; it is 499 pages. Yet, to look at it on the shelf, one would think that it was only 150 to 175 pages. How does it look so thin? It is typed on onion skin paper. Imagine a dissertation that is 499 pages. No supervisor today would allow such length.

My friend and fellow Ph.D. student and candidate at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Tim Beougher, now Billy Graham Professor of Evangelism and Church Growth at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, wrote his dissertation on Richard Baxter. I know that he accessed J. I. Packer's dissertation, and Dr. Packer was his External Reader for his dissertation. As I recall from several conversation with him, Tim Beougher focused his dissertation on Baxter's beliefs concerning justification. Hence, I was eager to read Packer's treatment of Baxter's view.

Richard Baxter forges his beliefs concerning justification on the anvil of controversy with men called "Antinomians," particularly men such as Tobias Crisp (Christ Alone Exalted) and James Saltmarsh. Whether they were justly called "Antinomians" is disputable. Nevertheless, Baxter took a view of justification by faith that he distinguished from the view articulated by Crisp and others. Baxter saw his own view as in agreement with that of the Puritan Divines, such as William Perkins, Samuel Bolton (True Bounds of Christian Freedom), Thomas Hooker, and others. Baxter's views roused several critics and caught the sharp point of John Owen's pen as they engaged one another. This, then, is the focus of Chapter X of Packer's dissertation.

It seems suitable to quote a portion of J. I. Packer's commentary on the controversy stirred by Richard Baxter's beliefs.

But in fact Baxter's alleged heterodoxy amounted merely to this: he had assimilated the four characteristic Protestant positions concerning justification (that it is a forensic act, done in this life; that it is grounded on Christ's satisfaction; that it is secured through faith; and that a dead fait justifies nobody) to his 'political' doctrine of the new covenant as a legal instrument for its conveyance; and he had distinguished two decisive moments in justification, one present and one future, where other Protestants recognize only the first. The charges brought against him were ludicrous. But we can see why they were made. His readers were completely bewildered by the 'political method'. It involved re-definition right and left: terms like law, works, merit, righteousness, justification, imputation, instrument, all meant something different in Baxter from what they meant in the rest of Protestant literature. Few had the patience or the ability to master his method and definitions; consequently, a great deal of breath and ink were wasted in confuting what he would have meant had he been using these key words in the accepted sense. The controversial wranglings between Baxter and his critics on justification make tedious and unprofitable reading, for the two side make no intellectual contact at all. Both Baxter and the orthodox Calvinists had perfectly consisten positions granted their first principles, and constructive discussion between them could only take place at the level of their first principles. But their endless acrimonious dissections of each other's statements never got down to this level. The only issue of these exchanges was that each side learned to state its own position more accurately. The root difference between Baxter and orthodox Calvinism, from which all their other disagreements sprang and to which they can all be reduced, may here be pin-pointed. It concerned the idea of law. . . .

To orthodox Calvinism, the law of God is the permanent, unchanging expression of God's eternal and unchangeable holiness and justice. It requires perfect obedience from mankind, on pain of physical and spiritual death, and confers salvation and eternal life only upon those who perfectly obey it. God could not change this law, or set it aside, in His dealings with men, without denying Himself. When man sins, therefore, it is not God's nature to same him at the law's expense. Instead, he saves sinners by satisfying the law on their behalf, that He might continue just when He becomes their Justifier. . . .

Baxter's 'political method' led him to a very different idea of God's law. To him, God's justice is merely a rectoral attribute, a characteristic quality of His government, and His laws are no more than means to ends. Like all laws, they may under certain circumstances be changed, if the desired end is attainable by other means. When man had fallen, and God purposed to glorify Himself by restoring him, He carried out His plan, not by satisfying the law, but by changing it. . . . Where orthodox Calvinism taught that Christ satisfied the law in the sinner's place, Baxter held that Christ satisfied the Lawgiver and so procured a change in the law. Here Baxter aligns himself with Arminian thought rather than with orthodox Calvinism. And from this source, as is now clear, all his differences with orthodoxy on the subject of justification took their rise.

We may think that Baxter was wrong; we may even judge him wrong-headed; but we must recognize that it was not gratuitous pedantry that drove him to new ways of stating old truths. He was sure that they were Scriptural and necessary for the Church's holiness and peace ("The Redemption and Restoration of Man in the Thought of Richard Baxter," 302-306).

I quote these words at length because they seem quite relevant to the controversy that swirls in the church today. Another Englishman is at the center of the current vortex, N. T. Wright. One may disagree with N. T. Wright, but wouldn't it be wonderful if disagreement would bring about more than the controversy of the seventeenth century yielded in Puritan times?

Crocuses and Daffodils

Spring has sprung in green England. Since I had to take my laptop computer to the University Computing Center this morning, I took the opportunity to enjoy the colors bursting forth. Crocuses, which have been pushing up for some time, are now in full and variegated bloom. Daffodils, too, have broken out in their yellow dress. Shrubs and trees are blossoming. It seems that the blossoms precede the leaves on many of the shrubs and trees.

I leave England's spring on Saturday to enter snowbound Minnesota. According to my wife, Lois, they received about 15-18 inches of snow in the past few days and expect 11-13 more inches by Saturday morning. Well, I am enjoying spring while here in Cambridge. And, when I return home, I will enjoy the final gasps of winter and enjoy the return of spring all over again.

Here are some flowers at Queen's College, daffodils and crocuses. Tulips are also blooming.