Dear Friends,
I have a correction to make. Last week’s newsletter subtitle said “No. 49,” but it was, in fact, “No. 50.” I’ve now changed it on the website version. I realize that no one cares that I mis-numbered one of my missives. But I do because the numbers mean something to me. Next Friday will mark the one-year anniversary of The Square Inch! Fifty-two straight weeks of delivering to your inbox. It’s been quite a year.
Honestly, part of the motivation for starting this newsletter was to simply challenge myself to faithfully write something of interest once a week, whether I had anything interesting to say or not. I took on this discipline as a way of trying to break what is now a longish-term case of “writer’s block” in which a blank computer screen paralyzes me and I can’t write a sentence without immediately back-spacing to delete it. I’m pleased that I’ve very nearly accomplished this little goal of mine, and I am honored that you’ve been along for the ride. Thank you for your attention and your encouragement. The other day I was flipping through a notebook and ran across my very modest initial target goal for number of subscribers. I hit it, so at least I had realistic expectations.
If you think about it, this is by far the noisiest and most crowded media environment in the history of the human race. That makes me appreciate you all the more.
Bigger Isn’t Always Better
That all assumes I’m going to have something interesting to write this week. Of course I should have known that patting myself on the back would result in an instant case of having nothing to say!
So, let’s give this a try…
I’ve been emphasizing quite a bit over the past year the importance of tending your own garden, for lack of a better phrase. I mean serving God faithfully in your own little sphere of influence with the gifts and resources you’ve been blessed with. We are constantly being whipped into a frenzy about things most of us can do very little about (how about we not have a “national conversation” about everything?). We are under constant pressure to be “activists.” Moreover, ours is a “platform” building age, and to be properly outraged and to be a proper activist must mean constant effort and ambition to expand our spheres of influence. We must turn our gardens into mass industrial farms, so to speak.
But the bigger things get, the shallower they become. I think mega-church pastors know this and struggle with it. “Broad appeal” means, well, broad appeal. It means lower common denominators. Growth and influence does not always mean you’re growing in influence; it can mean you are being influenced by the lure of bigger crowds and harvests. Pastors and teachers can put their fingers in the air to see which direction the wind is blowing just as well as politicians do. As Frenchman Alexandre Ledru-Rollin famously said: “There go the people; I must follow them for I am their leader.”
I’m thinking about this because—and I know that this “train” of thought won’t seem interesting or going anywhere, so hang with me—last night on Twitter a guy was wondering why “very, very little Protestant systematic theology produced by someone writing after 1940 is essential reading.” That’s a really niche question, I know—I follow quite a few nerds. I’m not pondering the answer to that narrow question, but it brought to mind this larger question of the size of our gardens and the extent of our influence.
[I shouldn’t neglect to say that the narrow question assumes quite a lot. Has this relatively young man actually read all Protestant systematic theology from 1940 onward? Doubtful. Second, what constitutes “essential” reading?]
But his own proposed answers (the information age has watered down the depth of our knowledge and recall, and academic writing standards have stifled originality) got me to thinking. I know a gentleman who tended a very small intellectual garden of his own for over 40 years at a small(ish) theological seminary. As you might imagine, he taught a lot of students over those decades, myself included. Some of those students went on to big things and have biggish platforms, but most of them went on to pastor small churches. By the world’s standards, this was a pretty small garden. He even wrote really small books—not the kinds of impressive tomes that capture everybody’s attention. And he published them with a really small publisher—no mass marketing campaigns or book tours!
At any rate, I responded to that Tweet:
It was initially the technology thing that struck me (and, granted, this is not really related to the point the Twitter thread was making). I had the privilege of seeing with my own eyes the manuscripts of Dr. Gaffin’s teaching lectures. They were typewritten, with handwritten additions and annotations scrawled all over the margins, horizontally and vertically. Things he added from time to time over the years. He would literally rotate the page during the lecture to read whatever was scrawled in whatever direction. His career was pre-Internet and basically pre-PowerPoint. He used an old-fashioned overhead projector, on which he would place a lengthy passage of Greek text and then proceed to mark it up with a red dry-erase pen. Pretty low tech. Nothing flashy.
He was not a polished orator in the classroom, but he was precise. His most famous rhetorical device was to say the same thing three or four times in three or four different ways: “Or, if I might put it another way…” By the time he finished piling up all the ways to say something, every brain in the classroom lit up with an, “Aha!” Every student of Dr. Gaffin knows what I’m talking about. He writes that way, too.
The content of those classes and the content of those obscure little books was and is nuclear-strength—that’s true because they are faithful expositions of scripture, yes, but also because of his gifting in wisdom, knowledge, and insight. I happen to be teaching a couple of classes this semester that he himself taught many times, and in preparation I picked up those slim volumes and read them again for the third or fourth time. Every time I read them I feel like I’m learning the Bible again for the first time. I get the “Aha!” every single time, as though these things I know already need a periodic booster shot.
In sum: a Protestant theologian writing after 1940 did, in fact, produce essential reading. And can I tell you the best part? Justin Taylor of Crossway Publishing liked my Tweet and added his own:
What does that mean? It means that a man who just faithfully tended his small garden writing his small books for his small publisher has—and I’m stunned—a very big book scheduled to be published by a very big publisher that will water a very big garden. Didn’t Jesus say something about faithfulness in the little things leading to bigger things? I cannot express my delight that, at age 86, we are going to get what I fully expect will be a magnum opus from Richard B. Gaffin, Jr.
As I said in a newsletter not long ago, stop carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. “So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God made it grow” (1 Cor. 3:7). You cannot do everything and you cannot fix everything. But God has given you a garden, something to tend. Be an activist about that; work at it with faithful, dogged determination, for decades and decades if need be. Leave the size and scope to the one who gives the increase.
Miscellany
As I indicated, I’ve been teaching two classes and, as a result, I’ve been paying less attention these days to current affairs. That means less miscellany content for you! But I’ll rustle up a few things.
A mature, grown, presumably sane man who happens to be the leader of the free world said this:
BIDEN: "There's not a single thing a man can do that a woman can't do as well or better. Not a single thing."I can, um, think of a few things.
Remember how fragile everything is? Snowstorms in Texas, a teensy little virus in China, and now… a cargo ship stuck in the Suez Canal. I think we’ll be very surprised at how that “little” thing affects the entire globe.
Larry McMurtry passed away. He wrote a lot of novels, almost none of which I could really get into. But, Lonesome Dove. Worthy of its Pulitzer Prize. Unforgettable book, and unforgettable film adaptation. RIP.
I recently watched the Netflix true crime series, “Murder Among The Mormons.” It’s about the Mormon antiquities market, possible forgeries, and so forth, and was just really engaging and well done.
This is my friend Honest, or better known in his home country of Malawi, “Masomphenya,” which means “Vision.” He’s a seminary student, super cool guy, and a hip-hop/rap artist. Here’s a short video about his ministry:
I’ll let him close it out with a “lyric” video that… won’t help you one bit! But you’ll figure out he’s talking about Jesus, anyway.