Jonathan Martin’s Prototype: Salvation as the Restoration of Humanity

It’s a strange and beautiful thing to hear someone preaching your own thoughts in a sermon. That’s what happened for me last summer when I heard Pentecostal preacher Jonathan Martin‘s sermon series “The Songs of Ascent” about King David and the Psalms. My whole life, I have been on a journey of trying to understand the nature of worship. Growing up Baptist, I was instilled with a zeal for sincerity in worship. What is the difference between truly worshiping God and putting on a performance? In one sermon last summer, Jonathan said that King David’s worship was to delight in the discovery of God’s delight in him. This beautiful way of framing things is at the heart of Jonathan’s new book Prototype, which I would buy and ship to every Christian who has been wounded or disillusioned by the church if I had the money.

Beauty will save the world #2: On regaining wonder

The second chapter of Beauty Will Save the World is about rediscovering the concept of wonder. Brian Zahnd writes: “We wonder at two things–the beautiful and the mysterious. A life stripped of beauty and mystery is a life barren of wonder, and a life without wonder is a kind of deep poverty” (33). Zahnd thinks that the greatest wonder of all is Jesus’ incarnation: the claim that “the Logos, the Word, the Idea, the Reason, the Reflection, the Meditation, the Self-Understanding of God became human flesh and blood” (40). The problem is that we’ve tucked the wonder of Jesus’ identity into systematic theological propositions so that His divine/human nature is something matter of fact rather than a cause for wonder. It becomes part of the formula that has to be fulfilled for God’s equation to work. But God’s truth is better captured in poetry than mathematics.