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Should Theology Shape our Bible Reading?

08 Mar

A friend and former student contacted me this week. He had listened to a lecture I delivered a few years ago at a conference in Rockford, Illinois. (Unrelated: the conference there is held annually, and if you can make it, it is well worth your time and money.)

After listening to what I said, he requested some clarification on this point: how much should we allow our theology to shape our reading of the Bible? Is there wisdom in coming to the text with no preconceptions, so that we can read it more accurately?

The text below is from that reply, reproduced here in the hopes that someone else might find it helpful.

In general, the tension that you’re feeling here is a tension that we should be feeling. What I mean is this: when you read a text that conflicts with what you believe that the Bible says, your first impulse should not be to simply chuck whatever you already believed.

I’m not sure what examples I used in the Rockford sermon, so I’ll use this one. The Bible tells me that our Lord shelters us under his wings. Upon reading that verse, I shouldn’t immediately discard my conviction that God is a spirit, and therefore that he has no wings.

But we also need to (always!) be willing to change our doctrinal convictions under the weight of biblical evidence. The reality is that there a numerous passages which refer to body parts of God. Maybe there is something to the idea that God has a body. And so we explore the idea, taking into account all that the Bible says. What we’ll find is that there are certain passages that are *foundational* to the question, and other passages that are less clear, so that they could be read either way.

In this case, for instance, I would consider the second commandment (the prohibition against making any images of God) as definitive. We cannot make images of God, because God is *incapable* of being portrayed as an image. He is *unseen*. (Check the context for the argument in the text.) For this reason, then, I have very good reason to believe that all of the verses that speak of God’s body parts are not to be taken literally, but as figures.

In this way, then, my theology is always shaping my reading of the text. Remember, by the grace of God, your theology isn’t something that is just made up out of nothing. Your theology comes from the knowledge of the Bible. Because God does not contradict himself, what you know about God (your theology) from one part of the Bible must shape your understanding of every other part of the Bible.

But it also remains true that my reading of the text is always to be shaping my theology as well. This process always goes both ways. We must always be willing to reexamine our understanding of Scripture by what the text in front of us actually says.

As to the idea that we can read “with no prior thoughts”: I think this notion is both impossible and ungodly. It is impossible because, as you read, you always are going to assume certain things are true. Should you pick up and read a passage, for instance, with no conviction one way or another as to how many gods exist? Or whether the Bible is in fact the Word of God? Honestly, we will always have certain convictions that must be in place for us to read the Bible faithfully. Indeed, the idea that “reading the Bible is better without any preconceived notions” is itself a preconceived notion that must be examined; I think it is one that will be found wanting, when compared to Scripture.

Not only is it impossible to be a blank slate, I’m convinced it is also ungodly. Over and again, we see in the NT that the teachers and pastors in the church are gifts to us from our risen Lord (Ephesians 4). The idea that we should completely disregard what we have been taught previous is never considered a virtue: rather, it is a mark of ingratitude, not only to our teachers, but to Jesus, who gave us the gift of pastors.

Now, I’ve spoken strongly here. There is, of course, a more minimal and limited sense of coming to the text with fresh eyes. This, in itself, isn’t a problem. But what we shouldn’t do is think that this kind of careful honesty about the text happens in a complete vacuum, as though we’ve really succeeded in cutting ourselves off from any previous commitments.

In summary, then, the key point is that Scripture shapes my theology. Inasmuch as my theology has been shaped by Scripture, that theology will help me read other Scriptures more accurately. When I’m reading, however, my theology is always becoming *more informed* by Scripture. So it is not that theology trumps Scripture, or that Scripture is best read without any consideration of theology, but that they form a spiral, each influencing the other, so that we come to a fuller understanding not only of each individual passage, but also of the bigger themes taught in Scripture.

 
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Posted by on March 8, 2017 in Pastoral, Theology

 

Spurgeon: The Kings of the Earth Are in the Hands of God

26 Jun

The kings of earth are in the hands
Of God who reigns on high;
He in their council-chamber stands,
And sees with watchful eye.

Though foolish princes tyrants prove,
And tread the godly down;
Though earth’s foundations all remove;
He weareth still the crown.

They proudly boast a godlike birth,
In death like men they fall;
Arise, O God, and judge the earth,
And rule the nations all.

When shall Thy Son, the Prince of Peace,
Descend with glorious power?
Then only shall oppression cease:
Oh haste the welcome hour!

 
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Posted by on June 26, 2015 in Society

 

The Necessity of Church Membership

17 Jun

A sound church must be committed to meaningful church membership.

This is not a popular topic in our day, for at least a couple of (related) reasons. The first is the widespread individualism of our society. Many factors of life today have turned people inward: it is not unusual for people to barely know their neighbors. So much of life today is customizable: not only your burger, but also your news sources, your entertainment, and your shopping are designed to let you have everything your own way.

And so, second, this individualism spills over into people’s view of religion, and churches have often encouraged people to think just this way about Christ. Many (a majority of?) folks today believe that their religious beliefs are simply between them and God. The common suggestion that Christianity is primarily, or even exclusively, about one’s “personal relationship with God” has fed this idea. Church, for most people, is considered to be an optional tool to aid a person’s spirituality—if that person thinks that it might be helpful. Membership in a church, on this view, is entirely irrelevant to true spirituality.

To begin, then, I need to make an argument for the biblical importance of church membership. I want to acknowledge, right up front, that there is no one clear and obvious text in Scripture that teaches church membership, but I do think that the idea is definitely found in the Bible.

Let’s begin with a couple of simple assertions. In the book of Acts, Luke observes that after Peter’s initial gospel message, “those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls” (Acts 2:41). On this point, see also Acts 2:47 and 4:4, which express the same kind of idea. This suggests (but obviously does not demand) that the early church was tracking, in some way, those who had become followers of Jesus.

Another indication of this is 1 Timothy 5:9. There, Paul gives instructions about the care of widows in the church, and says, “Let a widow be enrolled if” she meets certain qualifications. The idea here is that the church is to keep records of specific widows in the church who meet certain qualifications, so that they can be cared for. Thus, the notion of official lists of “who’s in” is not foreign to the Bible.

As I say, these passages do not prove church membership; they only suggest it. The stronger argument for the biblical importance of church membership works backwards, from the passages that speak of church discipline. For the sake of clarity, I’m going to make my outline here very obvious, so that it can be easily followed.

The Biblical Case for Membership

1. There are some cases in which a church is biblically obligated to remove a person from the church.

Consider two key passages. The first, from Jesus’s own teaching, is in Matthew 18:15–18: “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

The second passage, in 1 Corinthians 5, has to do with an issue of immorality in the Corinthian church. The situation concerned a man whose immoral relationship with his stepmother was known to the church. Paul, in no uncertain terms, tells them what they must do: “Let him who has done this be removed from among you.” These passages reward additional study, but their basic message is clear enough for our point here: there are occasions that call for certain people to be removed from the church.

2. It doesn’t seem that being removed from the church meant being barred from attendance.

But what does it mean to be removed from the church? Jesus’s teaching in the passage above is our clearest indication: the person removed from the church is to be considered “a Gentile and a tax collector.” In the Jewish context in which Jesus was teaching, this would mean that the person would be considered outside the people of God. In the broader New Testament, it is clear that these kinds of people are always welcome to attend to the church. For instance, 1 Corinthians 14:23 gives specific instructions about unbelievers who come to the church. Thus, the kind of “removal” outlined above does not demand that a person be barred from attending the church.

3. If we can “remove” a person without barring him from attending, we must have some other way to say who is “in” and who is “out” of a church. That is church membership.

This should be mostly clear at this point. If we can say that someone has been put “out” of the church, it follows that we must know who is “in” the church. It can’t simply be attendance, because anyone can attend, even those put “out.” Therefore, because church discipline is clearly biblical, church membership is clearly implied by the Bible.

The Purpose for Membership

Let’s conclude, then, by discussing two reasons that membership is important.

Membership is important because church discipline is designed by God as a way for you to grow spiritually. As we have already seen, discipline only makes sense if membership exists. Your theology might be deeply opposed our church’s, and your decisions might violate our church covenant at every point, and yet I won’t be coming to your house to ask you about it—if you are not a member of our church. And while you might think that it would be better not to have that kind of accountability, the Bible says otherwise.

The Bible makes it clear that our pursuit of Christlikeness is not supposed to be an individual endeavor. That’s exactly why discipline passages like Matthew 18 and 1 Corinthians 5 exist: they teach us how to help one another be faithful to Christ. That’s why we are told to “stir up one another to love and good works,” and that this is to occur as we meet together (Hebrews 10:24–25).

Membership creates accountability; to become a member of a church is to agree that allow the other believers in the church to hold you to your confession of faith. We often seek to avoid that kind of responsibility, but let’s be honest: our avoiding accountability simply shows us how much we need it.

Membership is important because it demonstrates that God’s plan in salvation is always bigger than individuals. This is the kind of truth that only becomes apparent when we spend time in the Bible, trying to see the big picture. The Bible as a whole tells a story; it is not simply a collection of random bits of inspiration or wisdom for living. The story of the Bible always involves God saving a people. I say it this way to make a distinction: God is not merely saving people, but he is saving a people.

In the Old Testament, for instance, it is obvious that the nation of Israel is God’s people. And a major point of the New Testament is the people of God has now expanded to include those of us who are not Jews. Paul spends a lot of time on exactly this point in Ephesians chapters 2–3. His point there is that one of the most important things that God is doing in this day is building a church that includes every kind of people. If we get his point here, it should become apparent that we can’t say that we’re Christians if we’re quite opposed to the very thing that God is doing in this world.

For those unconvinced, I offer this challenge: read Paul’s letters, and see how often he talks about the church. What you’ll find is that, for him, being part of a church isn’t an optional part of being a Christian; it’s essential. Furthermore, nearly every letter Paul wrote is addressed to a particular local assembly. Despite the cliché, the Bible is not a love letter to individual believers.

In this matter, as in all things, Christians must follow the teaching of their professed Lord. To intentionally do otherwise is to draw into question the robustness of that very profession.

 
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Posted by on June 17, 2015 in Pastoral

 

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The Resurrection in music: an exercise

16 Apr

Here are two attempts to picture the power of the Resurrection in music. The first takes a bit longer to develop; give it about a minute and a half. The second is quicker; give it about thirty seconds.

Both begin with a measure of solemnity, attempting to portray the death of Christ, then both build to a triumph in the Resurrection.

The question: are they doing the same thing? Are there differences in what they communicate?

 
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Posted by on April 16, 2015 in Music, Worship

 

Love: feeling or choice?

24 Mar

Against my better judgment and normal practice, I involved myself in a Facebook theology discussion last night. Because I maintain a view that, for those participating in that discussion thread, is more than a bit outside the norm, I felt it worthwhile to offer a clarification and expanded defense of my position.

The debate question was of the basic nature of love: is it a feeling or a choice? I offered a briefly sketched defense of the view that love is a feeling. As expected, my position was a distinct minority in that thread, but as my theological convictions aren’t formed by counting Facebook affirmations, I remain undaunted.

Let me begin here by commending what I take to be the core concern of those who define love as a choice. Characteristic of our time and place is a lack of loyalty to anything outside a decidedly rosy image of self. This is a narcissistic astigmatism, a self-love that sees no real faults in the hero of our autobiographical epic. People thus afflicted value other people only inasmuch as they reinforce their narcissism. Unsurprisingly, then, relationships ride surges of passions.

Those who insist that love is a choice rightly understand that love grounded in this way is no love at all. There is no constancy here; commitment exists only insofar as the one loved affirms the lover. That is to say, then, that commitment doesn’t exist at all. And if commitment doesn’t exist, biblical love doesn’t exist there, either.

This, I say, is an admirable critique of a certain kind of distorted feeling. However, the reduction of love to mere choice and pure volition is an unbiblical overreaction to a real problem. I say reduction here because there are many who will flatly say that love is a choice and not a feeling.

Let’s begin with a point of clarification: the word feeling, like the parallel term emotion, is far too broad to be useful here. Love, biblical love, is more properly an affection. The distinction is important, even in this discussion. First, let’s let Jonathan Edwards sketch the difference, and then we’ll apply it to our present topic:

The affections and passions are frequently spoken of as the same, and yet in the more common use of speech, there is in some respect a difference. Affection is a word that in the ordinary signification, seems to be something more extensive than passion, being used for all vigorous lively actings of the will or inclination, but passion for those that are more sudden, and whose effects on the animal spirits are more violent, and the mind more over powered, and less in its own command.

First, note that Edwards defines affections as “lively actings of the will.” Already, the distinction between love as a feeling and as a choice is blurred here, and rightly so. But even more that this, Edwards wishes to distinguish affections from passions; the latter are the kind of sudden and overwhelming feelings that overrun the mind. Because many people do not distinguish between affections and passions, lumping them together as emotions or feelings, and because living by passions is in fact decidedly unbiblical, the assumption is that feeling is itself suspect. This is a category mistake.

Why then did I take the side that love is a feeling? Because it was a discussion on Facebook, which as a medium is unserious and discourages nuance. Do you see how many paragraphs I’ve already written here? I skip Facebook comments that look like this, and so do you.

Let’s begin to cash this out. I was asked, “On that inevitable day when the feelings just ain’t a-coming with respect to your wife, will that mean you have stopped loving her?” We now have categories to clarify, first, what is meant by feelings in this question. If we’re talking about an absence of fluttery butterflies in the belly, something rightly identified as a passion, then I can certainly love my wife without those. In fact, mature love isn’t characterized by passions.

But if we frame this in terms of the affections, the question (I think) becomes more revealing: “So on the day in which you no longer cherish your wife, you do not value her, you do not wish her good, have you stopped loving her?” The only answer I can see to this question is “Yes, if that accurately describes my case, I could not be said to love her.” And what must I do if I were to reach such a deplorable situation? I must repent, because I have covenanted to have that affection for her; I have vowed to cherish her. The choice that I have made (and continue to make) isn’t the love, but it establishes the obligation to love. This is the point of Bonhoeffer’s aphorism, “It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”

To illustrate this further, allow me to bring it into the realm of sanctification. The first and greatest commandment is love for God. Is love for God merely volitional? If I obey God by rote choice, have I loved him?

I think we all recognize that, in our progress in sanctification, we have truly advanced only to the degree that our values have been re-inclined. Suppose I decide that I have been slacking in daily Bible reading, and purpose to rise each morning a half-hour earlier than usual to read the Word. When the alarm sounds, I grumble, but drag myself out of bed and read the Word. And it is better to have chosen to do so, even absent any positive inclinations, than to be unfaithful in this matter. But suppose my reaction to my time in the Word remains similarly bitter and loathsome to me for decades. We might admire the persistence involved in such a life, but there is something deeply amiss here. Such a person could never rightly affirm Psalm 119, what Kevin DeYoung calls a “love letter to Scripture.” Do we not see that the Psalmist here not only chooses the Word, but delights in the Word?

One more Scriptural appeal:

Philippians 1:9–11

And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.

Here is a prayer of Paul for the Philippian church. The climax of the prayer suggests its importance: if his prayer is answered, the Philippians will be “pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.” It’s hard not to read this as a summary of the entire goal of the Christian life.

What might accomplish this goal? Paul’s prayer is that the Philippians would abound in discerning love, so that they give their approval to truly excellent things. Does it not seem evident that Paul’s prayer is for a certain inclination of heart, and not merely a set of choices?

Once again, I understand the suspicion attached to love as feeling, especially if we make no effort to distinguish kinds of feelings. But to advocate a definition of love that is absent feeling is to run counter to what it is that we must pursue.

 
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Posted by on March 24, 2015 in Pastoral, Theology

 

Preaching wisdom to the Greeks

05 Jan

In recent weeks, my thoughts have been coming back time and again to the opening chapters if 1 Corinthians. The church at Corinth was quite a piece of work. The church was founded by Paul, but after Paul left to continue his ministry elsewhere, the Corinthian believers were apparently joined by a motley group of false teachers. This introduced all kinds of divisions into the church, with different factions pledging their loyalty to this or that teacher—and not just the false teachers, but Paul, or Apollos, or Peter, or even Jesus himself (1 Corinthians 1:12).

So Paul begins 1 Corinthians by addressing these divisions. His key idea is this: the gospel of Jesus Christ runs completely contrary to worldly wisdom. You see, the message of this world has always been the same: seek to get ahead. Winners conquer. The message of the gospel turns this on its head, and this inversion is seen most clearly at the cross. At the cross, we see the great King dying. Let that sink in: God comes to earth in human form, and is put to a shameful death by his own creatures. Could there be a more humiliating defeat?

The application to the factionalism at Corinth is this: true ministers of Jesus Christ don’t operate according to the worldly wisdom of self-promotion. To the degree that they are driven by ambition, they are evidencing that they aren’t following their Lord, who humbled himself to death. Thus, the notion of “celebrity” pastors is directly counter to the gospel, and the Corinthians who aligning themselves as followers of men are missing the point of the faith rather badly.

And so worldly wisdom and the gospel are directly opposed to one another. Paul illustrates that by talking about his own gospel preaching. He observes that unbelieving Jews want to hear about a conquering Messiah, and unbelieving Gentiles want to hear about a great wisdom teacher. Now get this: Jesus is in fact a mighty conqueror (read Revelation) and he is a great wisdom teacher.

But Paul realizes that if he preaches Jesus as a conqueror to the Jews or a wisdom teacher to the Greeks, he will simply be propping up their idolatries. So he preaches Jesus as the opposite of their expectations. “For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:22–24).

There is much to say here, but let me offer you one reflection: Paul’s example of ministry indicates that we should avoid allowing the values of those who don’t believe Jesus to determine the shape of our preaching. We should be uneasy about an approach to ministry that asks what people want to hear, and then preaches Jesus as the answer to their desires. To do so, according to this passage, is to make worldly wisdom and the gospel compatible with each other—and they never are.

 
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Posted by on January 5, 2015 in Newspaper Article

 

Obamacare and me

12 Dec

I’m not prone to political rants, especially online. To say this, however, obviously means that a political rant is forthcoming.

It is a sign of a deeply broken system that a relatively tech-savvy person could inadvertently enroll his family in public assistance. I created an Obamacare account last year to check prices for health insurance. Our family was among those who liked its coverage, but couldn’t keep it. Because of the requirements of the new law, our monthly premium was going up about $150, which was beyond what we could swing. Thus, the visit to healthcare.gov (which remains broken; when I log in, I invariably am greeted with “Error ID:500.000888,” which allows me to do nothing else).

All things considered, we opted to go without coverage this year. In nearly every scenario, we would come out ahead financially. This remained true even with the birth of our third child, who was delivered (quite expertly, with the aid of a midwife) at home.

Here’s my complaint: apparently, the process of creating a healthcare.gov account (with financial information, etc.) is also counted as an application for public assistance, if you qualify. And I created my account in the early days of Obamacare, when you were required to enter your information even to be able to see the prices. So my wife and children are now enrolled in Medicaid.

This was never my intent. I’m not debating the merits of these programs themselves, but simply asserting that, by the kindness of God, our family is not in position to need this help, even if we meet the qualifications. It simply shouldn’t happen that a person can acquire a DHS case worker for his family by accident. That is a bad system.

It further occurs to me that we are likely among the statistics of those who have been helped to get insurance because of Obamacare, despite the facts that 1) we had workable insurance prior to that law and 2) I didn’t even realize that we had been enrolled in Medicaid and 3) that I never wanted to be enrolled in Medicaid.

OK, just wanted to get that off my chest.

 
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Posted by on December 12, 2014 in Personal, Society

 

Salvation in the Church

13 Oct

I have a weekly column in our local newspaper. What follows is this week’s essay.

There’s no point in avoiding the obvious: I’m biased in favor of the church. For the cynical reader, the reason for my bias is obvious: I draw my paycheck from the church, and so promoting the church is in my own interest. But may I suggest another, less insidious reason that I love the church? I believe that I love the church because Christ loves the church and gave himself up for her (Ephesians 5:25). If I love Christ, I will love what Christ loves.

In our day, the church is a suspect institution. Some of this is of her own doing. But some of it is in our national DNA. We Americans are an independent people. And as I’ve told our church before, many of us who live here in the UP do so because we’re especially independent people. Generally speaking, you don’t live in New York City if you like to be left alone, and you don’t live in the Upper Peninsula if you like the constant buzz of society.

This independent streak shows up in how people view the church. For many professing Christians, the church is thought to offer a service. The church provides help to people with spiritual needs. And therefore, if these folks don’t view themselves in particular need of that assistance, they don’t feel any need to connect themselves to a church. They can love God on their own, thank you very much.

The problem I see with this approach to Christianity is that it is strikingly unbiblical. Let me point you to one passage that highlights this.

In Ephesians 2, Paul talks about our salvation in two ways. The first is very familiar to us. In verse 1–10, he reminds us that, before we came to Christ, we were “dead in the transgressions and sin” in which we once walked. But God intervened in mercy, and because of Christ’s work (received by faith alone), those of us who were once dead have now been made alive by grace. This is salvation viewed individually.

In verses 11–22, Paul talks about our salvation again, but this time corporately. Here, he reminds us that before we were saved, we were “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel.” Why does this matter? Because, in biblical terms, to be cut off from the people of God was to be cut off from God himself.

So here Paul observes that Christ’s work makes us “no longer strangers and aliens, but…fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.” Again, this is simply another way for Paul to talk about our salvation. In one metaphor, we were dead but are now alive. In another, we were foreigners to God’s people, and now we have been made part of the people of God.

The bottom line is this: we cannot rightly understand the work of Christ in our salvation while intentionally cutting ourselves off from the people of God. To do so is to reject one of the major reasons that Christ came to die: so that we, who once were far off, could be brought near. Therefore, come near to God’s people!

 
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Posted by on October 13, 2014 in Newspaper Article, Theology

 

Christianity: The Mannequin

08 Sep

I have a weekly column in our local newspaper. What follows is this week’s essay.

In these last couple of months, our church has spent our afternoon services studying American church history. I find it hard to overestimate the importance of a study like this. Churches are what they are today because of decisions that have been made in the past. Ignorance of that past almost inevitably means that we view “the way we do church now” as “the way that it’s always been done.” Only when we see that many of our contemporary church practices are innovations are we in position to ask whether those practices are biblical.

I’ve jokingly subtitled our series “From Jonathan Edwards to Joel Osteen.” Jonathan Edwards is widely considered to be the most brilliant American theologian (though he lived before the Revolution). He is best known for his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and he represents the last flourish of Puritanism in America. Osteen, on the other hand, is a contemporary megachurch pastor, known for his bestselling work Your Best Life Now. He preaches a God who desires, above all things, that we be happy and have our ambitions fulfilled. The difference between these two men and their messages is gaping. The question is, how did Christianity in America transition from one to the other? Regardless of which vision of Christianity you prefer (and I definitely have a preference), the shift itself is intriguing.

One thing becomes readily apparent: whether consciously or not, ministries often view Christianity like a department store mannequin, capable of being outfitted in contemporary fashions as the seasons change. This tendency to re-form Christianity to meet the taste of culture has at least two consequences.

The first is that it cheapens Christianity. Think about it: nothing looks as silly as that which has just gone out of fashion. Try getting a thirty-something to show you her senior pictures, for an example. Churches doing ministry by chasing trends are at a distinct disadvantage, because they will almost always be a step behind the real culture-makers. The folks making the movies and music will always be edgier than the church, and therefore the cheap knock-offs the church offers will tend to look just like that: cheap knock-offs.

And Christianity, which is supposed to be timelessly true, ends up looking like the most dated thing going.

I think that this cheapening of Christianity is a serious issue, but the second consequence is of even greater importance. As Christians seek to re-dress the mannequin to meet the tastes of the culture, they almost inevitably change the message itself. Think back to Edwards and Osteen. For Edwards, our basic problem is sin against God, and our need is to be forgiven through Jesus Christ. For Osteen, our basic problem is a lack of self-worth and success, and our need is to believe that God wants to supply all these things. By any measure, these aren’t the same messages.

Let’s choose instead to follow Paul’s example. Disregarding the pressures of culture, he said, “But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:23–24).

 
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Posted by on September 8, 2014 in Conservatism, Newspaper Article

 

A couple of thoughts on the Cabrera signing

28 Mar

This post will be a bit off the norm for this blog. I’m a big fan of Detroit sports. The Miguel Cabrera signing was big news yesterday, and nationally, it was largely panned. Many compared it to the Albert Pujols signing, which is indeed looking rather albatross-like.

Here’s why I think that’s a bad comparison: Miggy’s already a Tiger. Why does that matter? Most of the time, if a team signs a pricey free agent from another team, they are paying for the premium numbers that he already amassed for the previous team. That is to say, in terms of baseball economics, super-duper-star players are often underpayed during their prime years.

(I’m not going to address the issue of athlete salaries.)

So when an Pujols-like hitter goes from the Cardinals to the Angels, the Angels are paying the high dollar salary, but much of Pujols’ production is already in the past.

In the Tigers’ case, by contrast, their overpayment for Miggy is likely not going to be so utterly outside market prices as one might imagine, even taking into account the inevitable decline that is part of such a long contract.

Look at it this way: statistically, a win in baseball is worth somewhere between $5–7 million. To date, the Tigers have paid Cabrera somewhere in the neighborhood of $107 million. In exchange, Miggy has delivered something in the neighborhood of 36 wins (using baseball-reference.com WAR). This works out to a bargain: the Tigers have paid approximately $3 million per win.

With the contract extension that he just signed (which includes the years he was already under contract in 2014–2015), he is now slated to make $292 million over the next ten years. All told, then, he will have made about $400 million dollars from the Tigers when this contract expires.

At the low estimate ($5 million/win), Cabrera would need to deliver a total of 80 WAR to make his overall contract worthwhile. This would require him to average 6.4 in wins for the next 10 years. This is, of course, not totally likely. For the sake of context, he had exactly a WAR of 6.4 in 2010, when he hit .328/.420/.622, with 38HR and 126RBI. Those are huge numbers.

At the higher estimate ($7 million/win), he would only need to produce a total of 57 WAR to justify his deal. Since he has already produced 36, an additional 20 is almost a given. Also, with the rising salaries in baseball, it is reasonable to expect that the cost of a win is simply going to continue to rise.

All this to say, Cabrera’s contract would be monumentally awful if he had just signed with some other team. But because the Tigers have already received value beyond the dollars for Miggy’s previous years, the inevitable overpay at the end of his new contract is much less objectionable.

 
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Posted by on March 28, 2014 in Uncategorized

 
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