Doug Serven > Quotes

“The Bible speaks of beauty in Psalm 27 as a characteristic of God, greatly to be desired. In fact, David says that to “gaze on the beauty of the Lord” is the one and only thing he really desires (Ps. 27:4). In another hint, the first example of God filling someone with his Spirit comes about in Exodus 31 when men are filled with God’s Spirit in order to create beautiful things for the tabernacle. A third indirect reference is when the Bible speaks of the beauty of creation and how that beauty reflects the glory of God (Ps. 19:1). These may not give us a Ten Commandments of beauty (always do this, never do that; blue is beautiful, green is not; straight lines are more beautiful than curved ones; or similar nonsense), but what these examples do is require us to consider the nature of beauty because the Scriptures teach that God is to be the fulfillment of our desire for beauty. God intends and empowers us to make beautiful things, and his glory is reflected in the beauty of his own handiwork, giving us a model to follow as men and women created in his image.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“Disconnected preaching and preachers, where the thing spoken of finds little resemblance to the way one speaks or wears it, is commonplace. But it is truly remarkable, by which I mean, it is truly a work of Jesus’ grace, when in some incomplete but substantive measure, a person is actually in the world among his neighbors as Jesus was with his (1 John 2:6).”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“Our engagement with art (or anything else, for that matter) in a fallen world will be effectively shaped by the attitude we bring to it. Perhaps one of the reasons so many Christians react so defensively to movies is that they approach the topic of the cinema and the experience of film feeling apprehensive rather than grateful. Gratefulness allows our apprehension of God’s grace to take center stage in our view of things, reminding us that even in a fallen, secularized, postmodern society the tomb remains empty and so we have nothing to fear.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“Many who in this current life seem despised and cursed shall be proven God’s dear children. Conversely, many, who presently to our eyes look particularly blessed, shall go down into a hopeless darkness. This is the teaching of the prophets and the apostles. We are told that the creation itself is eagerly awaiting this revelation of the children of God, the setting of all things right. Only the Almighty God, who knows all things and sees all secrets is capable of this ultimate judgment and vindication. We are told to reserve judgment because we are so ignorant. We are told to postpone vengeance because this can only belong to God. Our generation has grown unsure and uncomfortable with the notion of God’s judgment, but it is both our fear and our only source of hope. It is no coincidence that a generation which ignores the judgment is also a generation that has real questions about life having meaning and purpose.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“Those who suffer for their faith are not necessarily more faithful than those who do not.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“Our beauty-less theological roots can issue forth in a fairly pragmatic value system. As mentioned above, we have even named ourselves based on one practical, measurable activity: getting out the good news.19 But are God’s values equally pragmatic? What if God really did set beauty on par with truth and goodness? Has our more utilitarian approach given us a skewed perspective on God and Christian duty?”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“What if apologetics addresses our sorrows and not just our skepticism? What if doubt and faith, our questions and objections, arise not only because we sin, but also because of the wretched ways in which we are, all of us, sinned against? After all, it was Jesus’ defense of hope against death that included tears. “See how he loved,” the mourners said of Jesus when he wept (John 11:35–36). Jesus taught that love is how they will know you are Christians (John 13:35). Love cries. Compassion makes visible. Tears give voice. Truth feels. If the goal of Christian apologetics “is to defend and commend the truthfulness of Christian belief,”7 an apologist’s way of being with other people is itself part of what defends and commends the Christian faith.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“Creation tells us who and where the characters in the story are, where they came from, what they are like, and what things were like originally. Fall tells us what went wrong, why tension and brokenness have occurred, how bad the problem is, and how this brokenness has disrupted the way things were originally. Redemption reveals the solution to the problem, the cost of that solution, rules out insufficient solutions, and defines what is needed to heal the brokenness and restore the relationships that have been so badly fragmented. Finally, Restoration tells us where the story is ultimately headed, what the end will be and whether the characters in the story have reason to hope for something better.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“There had to be two variables in this equation to find beauty, not one. There is the work itself, which can be good or not, but there is also our internal sensibilities themselves which are honed to perceive beauty in a work or not. Thus if a work is not called beautiful, it may be because it lacks internal excellence, but it also could be because the listener didn’t know what to make of it.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“Scripture frowns on those “who have eyes, but see not, who have ears, but hear not” (Jer. 5:21). Similarly if we prefer artwork which tells us what we want to hear, as opposed to helping us see what is actually there, such work may actually constitute “itching ears [gathering] teachers to suit their own passions” (2 Tim. 4:3). If our preferred art only tells us what we already know and does not challenge us to see what we never before perceived, it will not only fail to develop in us ears to hear, it may actually deepen our (culpable) deafness.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“The opening pages of the Bible reveal that human creativity and culture are rooted in creation. This means they are good gifts of God, an expression of his image in humankind, and pleasing to him. In the creation narrative we find the essential kernels of human creativity that have blossomed into science (Gen. 2:19–20), practical skills and crafts of all types (Gen. 2:15), and the arts (Gen. 2:23). Culture, creativity and art are not to be dismissed, disdained, or relegated to insignificance by God’s people because they are essential to the Creator’s plan for us, his creatures. After God had called all things into existence he determined what he had made was “very good” (Gen. 1:31). Christians may mean well when they look down on physical things as “less spiritual,” but in doing so they are substituting their own evaluation for God’s. Seen in this light, the sacred/secular dichotomy brings us perilously close to the sin of blasphemy.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“Cynicism can help us for a while. It has its place. But cynicism will never save us or bring us home because we would doubt any remedy that would come our way. The one thing in life that a cynic trusts is doubt. The cynic ultimately says to the rest of us, you can’t trust anything, except my cynicism, to get through life. Jerram writes, “Cynicism is corrosive—it works like a cancer taking over all that is healthy and hopeful, and we are all impacted by it.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“To become a consumer of music is not only to reduce the music to a commodity, which misses much of the point of music, but to abandon human beings to a sort of slavery to our limited preferences. To never question our preferences is to lift them to the ultimate authority and make an idol of ourselves. This is the assumption, for the most part, that I found in the Church whenever I heard Christians discussing music, and I longed to be able to express to believers what I had found music could be and had been for many Christians in the past.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“Usually when someone sees a film, the first thing friends ask is “Did you like it?” It’s not an inappropriate question. Art by its nature engages our imaginations and sensitivities, and so our personal response is as essential to its design as is our response to a delicate flower growing out of a tiny crack in a boulder high in the Rockies. I would argue, however, that though the question of whether we liked it is not inappropriate; it is not the most important question for the faithful Christian. The question with which we must be even more concerned is “Did I get it?” Why are people resonating with this film? Why do they identify with these characters or that plot? What have they seen and heard and why does it strike them as important?”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“If the original story behind the propagation of Israel begins with a man and woman meeting at a well, the story of the propagation of newly-defined Israel likewise begins with the one “greater than Jacob” and the woman at the well. If we wonder how this new Israel would self-perpetuate, the evangelist implicitly invites us to regard the events of John 4:1–42 as an ideal prototype.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“All humans suffer, but they do not do so equally.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“Seeing love as merely being nice or using an emoji reveals that we remain amateur in our biblical understanding of truth. Social media distance, up-close and personal coldness, or avoidance reveals our strangeness to love. True love costs us. It bends us into patience, humility, kindness, and tenderhearted esteem for the persons we encounter. They experience us as patient, kind, and tender people of deep conviction. No wonder we often want to reduce what love actually requires of us. After all, when Paul describes love as kind, patient, etc, he is ultimately describing who Jesus is!”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“If Christians today are made to feel that they need to “have all the answers” and “perfect theology,” the question is, Who or what is making them feel that way? We must realize the fact that our most effective witness within the gospels is a woman who actually has very little in the way of answers. She only has a question (“This couldn’t be the Messiah, could it?”) and a statement (“He told me all that I ever did”). We have every right to surmise that it is not the woman’s having the answers that provoked the response among the townspeople, but her willingness to speak publicly to her own struggle prompted by an encounter with Jesus, an encounter that ultimately demanded a new path in life.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“The golden calf was Aaron’s excuse to pander to the Israelites’ baser desires (Exod. 32:21–24) just as film directors insert bad language or nudity not because the story requires it but to increase box office receipts. Through the calf Aaron propagated lies, untruths about God and the Israelites’ own history (Exod. 32:4) just as many films present stories that do not reflect life as it truly is. And there is even a passage that shows how art can be trivialized (Amos 6:1, 4–5) so that it distracts us from faithfulness and wastes precious time and resources we were meant to steward and use for God’s glory.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“The reason why it is said that the Holy Spirit makes not simply “the reading but especially the preaching of the Word” an effectual means of grace10 is because of the liability toward self-deception, particularly when it comes to the need for reproof and correction.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“The Scriptures reveal an unfolding story in four parts: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration. Each part is essential to the entire plot and each part propels the story onward to its appointed end. As human beings we live in and take part in this drama, for blessing or for curse. It can be no other way, for this is the story of history, the narrative of reality, not a matter of choice. No one can say one day, “I think from now on I’ll live outside the story.” There is no outside for those who are called into existence by the word of God. God, as author and sustainer of the story who knows the end from the beginning and dwells in the eternal now, is outside.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“The fairness of karma can rob people of the incentive to help alleviate the suffering around them, because if you stop the hurt, you are only postponing the inevitable, even postponing what is needful: the suffering person needs to work off their karma because it is the one-to-one ratio of suffering and deserving it—and we mustn’t get in the way of that process grinding out moral justice by alleviating someone’s hardship. They have to work it off or it remains an unpaid debt.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“Cynicism doesn’t know how to stand, feisty with hope, staring at a tomb, or a leprous hand, or a Jesus apologist collapsing into a heap of tears out of love for neighbors and the longing for redemption. We are helpless to cure without God.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“If Enlightenment-style models of evangelism encourages the modern evangelist to assume a posture of mastery, certainty, and control (vis-à-vis both the evidence and our unbelieving interlocutors), the Samaritan woman models a posture of weakness, a good deal of uncertainty, and almost no control (as a social outcast she could hardly bully the townspeople intellectually over her claims). It is of course not only the Samaritan woman’s model, but also, implicitly, that of the gospel-writer himself.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“We do not accept suffering as always for the purpose of teaching us lessons—and yet we do not deny that we are to learn to trust God whatever situation presents itself to us. Success in an endeavor is to help us grow in faith; but so also is failure and disappointment.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“When St. John warns us not to love the world (1 John 2:15), he is not telling us to disdain art and culture. He is not denying what God’s Word already taught in creation. By “world” he means all those systems, institutions, and structures of a fallen humanity that, like the building of the ancient ziggurat in Babel (Gen. 11:1–9), trusted in human ingenuity and ability alone, thus arraying themselves against the reign and word of God. What St. John rightly warns against here are the schemes and organizations of worldly power that vandalize God’s shalom, carelessly destroy or thoughtlessly misuse his good creation, or oppress and dehumanize those Christ came to save. The Gospel is centered on a cross that promises salvation not just for souls but “far as the curse is found.”11 The fire in the earth’s future that St Peter speaks of is not one of annihilation but of purification.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“Without confession and without the keeping of short accounts with our personal sin, we will eventually lose our awareness of personal sin. In short order, we come to lose our sense of ourselves as sinners—simul peccator et justus (at the same time sinners and justified). “Sinners” become a category for the “other.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“The same forces which militate against rational thought have reduced our experience of community. Those nations enjoying the greatest technological development are the ones enjoying the least community.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“Evangelicalism has to contend for truth within an intellectual climate inimical to truth.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs

“The apprehension of music’s beauty has the effect of a certain “ordering of the soul,”2 (what Augustine refers to as ordo amoris) and that ordering leads to further and deeper appreciation. Roger Scruton refers here to Pythagoras’ understanding of harmony as the rational relation of physical pitches to one another. Plato also wrote about how important it was to introduce young children to beautiful music before they were able to reason because the heart attaches itself to beauty. Then, as maturity grows, the child looks for harmony in other things as well, such as the harmony of visual art, good business transactions, the harmonious marriage, and eventually in the application of justice in the city. Justice is the harmonious relation of reward and penalty to a citizen’s action.”
― Doug Serven, Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs