Beautiful words

John Piper’s The Swans Are Not Silent series (Crossway) takes its name from a mournful concern in A.D. 426 when Augustine at age 72 retired from church leadership: His successor mourned, “The swan is silent.” Happily, Augustine still strides the world with his books, and Piper—a current swan who last year preached his final sermon as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis—is still writing up a storm.

Each Swan book has three short biographies of famous Christians: truth-defenders Athanasius, John Owen, and J. Gresham Machen; gospel-bringers William Tyndale, Adoniram Judson, and John Paton; suffering-transformers John Bunyan, William Cowper, and David Brainerd; sovereignty-focusers Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Calvin; and perseverers John Newton, Charles Simeon, and William Wilberforce.

Piper’s sixth in the series, Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully (2014), emphasizes “the power of poetic effort” in the work of George Herbert, George Whitefield, and C.S. Lewis. He describes Herbert’s “long, focused, prayerful, Bible-saturated brooding over a single glorious reality” and Whitefield’s refusal to “pause in his preaching to have a little drama off to the side—like some preachers do today, a little skit, a little clip from a movie—that would have missed the whole point. … Preaching was the drama. … When he warned of wrath, pleaded for people to escape, and lifted up Christ, he wasn’t playacting. … The house is burning. There are people trapped on the second floor. We love them. And there is a way of escape.”

Piper describes three ways to speak. One is like an actor in a play, speaking of an imaginary world as if it were real. Another is like a half-hearted preacher who preaches about spiritual reality in such an abstract, dry way that it seems unreal. And the third is Whitefield’s way, describing that real spiritual world in all its glory and horror.

Piper doesn’t give us plaster saints: He examines Whitefield’s apologetic for slavery but shows how he told slave owners, “God has a quarrel with you,” when they treated slaves “as though they were Brutes.” (Whitefield noted that if slaves were to rebel “all good Men must acknowledge the judgment would be just.”) Piper also critiques some of Lewis’ doctrinal views but praises his forthrightness, in contrast with the “many tentative, hidden, vague, approval-craving intellectual Christians” who care more about praise for their artistry than prying from Satan’s subjugation the great art works of God, human souls.

Son of a preacher man

When I was in middle school a friend had a locally famous dad who was the play-by-play announcer on Boston Bruins broadcasts. Hoping for some reflected glory, I wished my father were prominent. Barnabas Piper’s The Pastor’s Kid (David C. Cook) showed me what a mixed blessing that is, even when the father is a godly man. John Piper wrote the foreword to his son’s book and notes that reading it was painful for him, but a stream of grace runs through it. Unlike authors who have mocked Francis Schaeffer and others, Barnabas is respectful throughout as he realizes the tugs on time that are inevitable when God makes a parent a leader both inside and outside his home.

Pastors and PKs will want to read The Pastor’s Kid, but so will BKs and their business parents, EKs and their editor dads, and others. Barnabas Piper pleads, “Don’t counsel, converse,” because pastors often counsel others rather than having conversations that include two-way admission of past and present failings: “Leave sermons in the pulpit.” He advises honesty, even when it stings: “We must, we must, speak of what has made life hard—especially to our parents.”

Some PKs rebel, but they have benefited from immersion in biblical stories and teaching—and “for PKs to be filled with biblical content even when we are not filled with passion or understanding still puts the pieces in place for God to build something later.” —M.O.