John Piper: Radical Promoter of the Glory of God

2011

This dissertation aims to answer the question, How can the preacher complete the process of his expository sermon preparation to manifest God's glory and exalt His supremacy in preaching by studying Piper's life and methods? Based on an analysis of Piper's writings and selected sermons, this project investigates Piper's background and influences on his God-centered life and theological system. It then discuses Piper's principles and skills of biblical exegesis, and it looks into the major influence on Piper's biblical exegesis. It also describes Piper's philosophy of preaching: Piper's motivation and purpose of preaching, and it investigate great preachers who impacted Piper's preaching. It then discuses Piper's skills of expository preaching. Finally, it offers a summary of the findings and an application.

2016

“The glory of God is the ground of faith. It is a solid ground. It is objective, outside ourselves. It is the ground of faith in Christ and in the Christian Scriptures. Faith is not a heroic step through the door of the unknown; it is a humble, happy sight of God’s self-authenticating glory.” (p. 11, see also pp. 15, 18)

Call to Worship 47 (2) 3-10, 2014

In 2013 the Presbyterian Church (USA) published a new hymnal, *Glory To God.* As the theologian on the committee that put this hymnal together, and as the primarily writer of the committee's Theological Vision Statement, I sketch here the vision that guided the committee in the forming of this new songbook.

Polydoxy: Theologies of the Manifold, 2010

Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it might display? (Virginia Woolf) To convey the qualities of an elusive, luminous halo: this may be the aim of theology, as much as it was the goal of Woolf's fiction. 1 It is, indeed, what has led me to the image of glory. Not the blinding lights of its triumphalist counterfeits, the reflection of gold, or the glamour of celebrity, but a quality inseparable from life in all its fragility and ambiguities. Displaying both light and darkness, this halo is perhaps like the almond-shaped auras of Byzantine iconography-also called "glories." 2 It is the spectral luminosity of ordinary things, neither irresistible nor self-sufficient, but incessantly alluring. It is often barely perceptible, yet sometimes disconcerting-even terrifying. The apparent aberrations of its depictions do not diminish a theologian's zeal to convey its varying, hazy radiance. Drawn by passion to the glory that flickers in the midst of everyday life, theology speaks of its "unknown and uncircumscribed spirit." This is a spirit that cannot be confined to neatly defined theological concepts or categories. And yet theologians persist in our weak attentiveness, "resolute" (Keller) in our attempts to describe it, however inaccurately and distortedly. We seek, with feeble words and images to express the inexpressible, in a multiplicity of voices, languages, and genres. An uncircumscribed spirit perhaps lured the words of Irenaeus of Lyon: "The glory of God is the human being fully alive." A celebration of these words lies behind the work of liberation theologians such as Elizabeth Johnson and Leonardo Boff, whose works express a passion for divine glory perceived in fully alive human beings. 3 Rubem Alves rewrites Irenaeus in his unapologetic theopoetics of the body: "The glory of God is found in happy people." 4 Perhaps we recognize the efforts to convey it also in Emmanuel Levinas's allusions to the "gleam of transcendence in the face of the Other." 5 These witnesses to glory are not expressions of writers who are distant from adversity. Quite to the contrary, they are the poignant confessions of those who have been touched by dreadful realities of injustice and cruelty: sexism, abject

Great Commission Research Journal, 2011

This paper presents a theological foundation and a historical review of missional praise with examples drawn from the First Great Awakening to the present. Worship and praise are central to reorientation toward God. Over and over, people’s hearts realign with God, and then people’s voices express praise and thanks in song. Across history, revival has left a variety of spiritual markers in the form of hymns, camp songs, spirituals, and choruses that deserve to be highlighted as testimonies from Christians who have freshly connected with God and His mission.

The Purpose of God in Pauls Message to the Ephesian Elders, 1982

Religious Studies Review, 2010

Themelios, 2016