A Life Worth Living Order Printed Copy

Author: Joseph Prince
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About the Book

"A Life Worth Living" by Joseph Prince emphasizes the importance of living a life grounded in the grace and love of God. The book explores the transformative power of understanding and applying God's unconditional love and forgiveness, and how this can lead to true freedom, joy, and purpose in life. Prince encourages readers to trust in God's promises, release guilt and shame, and live in alignment with their true identity as beloved children of God. Ultimately, the book offers hope and inspiration for living a life filled with hope, peace, and meaning.

George Eldon Ladd

Ever used the phrase “Already / Not Yet” to describe the timing of God’s kingdom? If so, you’re indebted to George Eldon Ladd, longtime professor at Fuller Seminary and one of the most influential evangelical scholars of the 1900’s. Ladd broke through the sterile debates about whether the kingdom of God was a present, spiritual reality or a future, earthly reality. He popularized a view of the kingdom as having two dimensions: “already/not yet.” Ladd was also one of the first solid evangelical scholars to go outside the fundamentalist camp in order to interact with liberal scholars in the academy, men like Rudolph Bultmann. For a biographical overview of Ladd’s life and work, I suggest A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America. See my review of this book here: A Place at the Table is much more than a biographical sketch of Ladd’s life. D’Elia cautiously enters into the theological discussion he describes in order to spotlight Ladd’s contributions to evangelical scholarship and his interactions with scholars from outside the evangelical world. Those who read D’Elia’s book will receive an education, not merely regarding the historical aspects of Ladd’s interesting life, but also regarding the theological debates of the time. I’ve also interviewed Ladd’s biographer, John D’Elia, about his work and his legacy: Ladd’s legacy within evangelical scholarship is hard to overstate. I argue in the book that he carved out a place for evangelicals in what was then the threatening and bewildering world of critical biblical scholarship. By demystifying the methods of critical scholarship, Ladd made them available to evangelicals who wanted to use them in their study of the Scriptures. Historic premillennialism, then, is really an incidental part of Ladd’s story. The real achievement in Ladd’s career can be found in the wide range of biblical scholars who sat at his feet and then went on to make their own mark. Those scholars are as diverse as John Piper and Robert Mounce on the one side, and Eldon Epp and Charles Carlston on the other. If you’re going to start reading Ladd, let me suggest his book, The Gospel of the Kingdom: Scriptural Studies in the Kingdom of God. Check out my review here: The Gospel of the Kingdom is illuminating, clarifying and (thankfully) brief. It is amazing that Ladd manages to fit all of this great theological teaching into 140 pages. There is a reason this book is still in print. It is unmatched in its clarification of what the kingdom of God is, and how the kingdom of God can be already present but not yet here in its fullness. I’ll close this post with Ladd himself. Here are two ways Ladd defined “the gospel,” one personal and the other in light of God’s kingdom: “I can only bear witness at this point to what Heilsgeschichte means to me. My sense of God’s love and acceptance is grounded not only in the resurrected Christ but also in the Jesus of history. He taught something about God that was utterly novel to his Jewish auditors: that God is not only gracious and forgiving to the repentant sinner but is also a seeking God who, in Jesus’ person and mission, has come to seek and to save the lost… God has shown me that he loves me in that while I was yet a sinner, Christ died for me (Rom. 5:8). This is not faith in history; it is not faith in the kerygma; it is not faith in the Bible. It is faith in God who has revealed himself to me in the historical event of the person, works and words of Jesus of Nazareth who continues to speak to me though the prophetic word of the Bible.” – George Eldon Ladd, “The Search for Perspective,” Interpretation 25 (Jan. 1971), 56 and 57. “This is the good news about the kingdom of God. How men need this gospel! Everywhere one goes he finds the gaping graves swallowing up the dying. Tears of loss, of separation, of final departure stain every face. Every table sooner or later has an empty chair, every fireside its vacant place. Death is the great leveller. Wealth or poverty, fame or oblivion, power or futility, success or failure, race, creed or culture — all our human distinctions mean nothing before the ultimate irresistible sweep of the scythe of death which cuts us all down. And whether the mausoleum is a fabulous Taj Mahal, a massive pyramid, an unmarked spot of ragged grass or the unplotted depths of the sea one fact stands: death reigns. “Apart from the gospel of the kingdom, death is the mighty conqueror before whom we are all helpless. We can only beat our fists in utter futility against this unyielding and unresponding tomb. But the good news is this: death has been defeated; our conqueror has been conquered. In the face of the power of the kingdom of God in Christ, death was helpless. It could not hold him, death has been defeated; life and immortality have been brought to life. An empty tomb in Jerusalem is proof of it. This is the gospel of the kingdom.” – from The Gospel of the Kingdom

An Excellent New Book on Justification

If a thoughtful layman asked me what he should read to understand the doctrine of justification in relationship to the New Perspective on Paul, I would send him to Stephen Westerholm’s new book, Justification Reconsidered: Rethinking a Pauline Theme (Eerdmans, 2013). I enjoyed this book so much I found it difficult to put down. It is constructive. That is, it builds a clear and positive view of what justification is, rather than simply criticizing other views. For that reason, it provides a good introduction to the doctrine of justification itself for those who may not be clear on what Paul taught. According to the New Perspective But it is obviously written with a view to explaining and criticizing the so-called New Perspective (including Krister Stendahl, E.P. Sanders, J.D.G. Dunn, and N.T. Wright). The gist of that perspective is that the Judaism of Paul’s day was not a religion of legalism but of grace, and so, contrary to the historic view of Paul, legalism can hardly be what Paul found wrong with Judaism. His doctrine of justification must have had a different target. Therefore, the New Perspective says, justification “was not about how sinners could find a gracious God (by grace, not by works), but about the terms by which Gentles could be admitted to the people of God (without circumcision, Jewish food laws, and the like). A new Perspective was born” (26). The problem, Westerholm points out, is that the views of grace in contemporary Judaism did not exclude the merit of works alongside it. E.P. Sanders himself shows that the Rabbis “did not have a doctrine of original sin or of the essential sinfulness of each man in the Christian sense” (33). It follows, Westerholm argues, that “humanity’s predicament must be more desperate than Jews otherwise imagined” (33). Desperate for Grace This means that Paul’s “depiction of humanity’s condition required a much more rigorous dependence on divine grace than did Judaism’s” (34). Therefore, to show that Judaism had a doctrine of grace “is no reason to deny that Paul could have understood justification in terms of an exclusive reliance on grace in a way that was foreign to the thinking of contemporary Jews” (34). Therefore, Paul’s doctrine of justification did target not only a Jewish view, but any human view, that presumes to make good works any part of the ground of our being found righteous before God. “For Paul, God’s gift of salvation [i.e., justification] necessarily excludes any part to be played by God-pleasing ‘works’ since human beings are incapable of doing them” (32). “Paul sees the only righteousness available to sinful human beings to be that given as a gift of God’s grace, ‘apart from works’ (Romans 3:24; 4:2, 6; 5:17) — distinguishing grace from works in a way other Jews felt no need to do” (98). What the Doctrine Means In a statement that summarizes the whole book, Westerholm writes that this historic view of justification, shared by the Reformers and most Protestants, cannot be dismissed by the claim that the ancients were not concerned to find a gracious God (how could they not be, in the face of pending divine judgment?); or that it wrongly casts first-century Jews as legalists (its target is rather the sinfulness of all human beings); or that non-Christian Jews, too, depended on divine grace (of course they did, but without Paul’s need to distinguish grace from works); or that ‘righteousness’ means ‘membership in the covenant’ (never did, never will) and the expression ‘works of the law’ refers to the boundary markers of the Jewish people (it refers to all the ‘righteous’ deeds required by the law as its path to righteousness). (98) And, Westerholm observes, it is, of course, right to “emphasize the social implications of Paul’s doctrine of justification . . . in his own day and . . . draw out its social implications for our own” (98). But we should not identify the meaning of justification with its social implications (for example, table fellowship between Gentiles and Jews in Galatians 2; and multi-ethnic implications today). No. “The doctrine of justification means that God declares sinners righteous, apart from righteous deeds, when they believe in Jesus Christ” (99). Confusing the root with the fruit will, in the long run, kill the tree. Article by John Piper Founder & Teacher, desiringGod.org