While I was pastoring a small church during my seminary years, Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians was the firstbook of the Bible I ever preached. It is a testament to how little I knew then that out of all the books of the Bible, I would choose to preach this one first. And yet, as is always the case, the Lord’s strength was made manifest in myweakness. Sixteen years later, and still not really knowing what I was getting into, I was led to preach again through this letter to the people of Covenant Church of Naples. When I planned the series, “God’s Strength in Our Weakness,”

I had no idea of the events that would unfold in the year 2020. But God knew. And week after week he spoke to us through this holy and inspired text. In a year when I felt more keenly than ever my own weakness as a pastor, the Lordwas bringing forth his strength.

Many of these sermons were originally applied to the pressing issues of 2020, such as our individual and collective responses to the COVID19 pandemic, tremendous racial tensions, and a deeply contentious presidential election.Preachers of the Word must apply the truth of the gospel to the people in their local context with specificity. Interest-ingly, the sermons that packed the most powerful punch in real time because of their specificity tended to be the weak- est when I revisited them more than a year after the events they related to. In editing, I have sought to expand those applications for a more universal time and audience. I trust that in these general applications pastors will still see pathsto more specific application among your own people for the pressing needs of the day.

Additionally, I have sought to keep the text of each chapter of this commentary as close to the actual sermon I preached as possible, showing mostly only the fruit of my exegetical work rather than the work itself. But I have made use of footnotes where I thought it would be helpful for preachers and teachers to see why I came to the conclusions I did. Moreover, I have included some additional quotes in the footnotes that did not make it into my sermons, but may well be low-hanging fruit for your own purposes.

In my opinion, 2 Corinthians is Paul’s most intensely personal and pastoral letter of all. This fact makes it difficult in many instances to fully grasp what he is driving at, and also at times gives the letter a disjointed feel. Consequently,some excellent scholars believe that the letter should not be understood as one unified whole. While I acknowledge the difficulties, I will attempt to show in my exposition that 2 Corinthians is still best understood as one cohesive letter, asall the extant manuscripts indicate.

With this preface, I also offer this prayer for you who teach and preach God’s Word. May the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness” shine in your hearts “to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).

---

Trent Casto (MDiv, Covenant Theological Seminary; DMin, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) is the author of 2 Corinthians and senior pastor at Covenant Church of Naples (PCA) in Naples, Florida. He and his wife, Emily, have three children. Visit Trent’s blog at https://trentcasto.com/.

The following is an interview with Derek Cooper. He is the author of Christianity and New Religious Movements: An Introduction to the World’s Newest Faiths and Christianity and World Religions: An Introduction to the World’s Major Faiths.

• What led you to write Christianity and New Religious Movements? How did you become interested in exploring this topic and critiquing it from a biblical perspective?

There are two primary factors that led me to write this book. First, I had received so much positive feedback from my previous book with P&R titled “Christianity and World Religions: An Introduction to the World’s Major Faiths.” That book explored how Christians can and should engage major world religions like Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. A lot of readers appreciated the spirit of that book and asked me what book I could recommend for learning about and engaging newer religions like Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witness, and Scientology. I wanted to provide a book that would fill that void.

Second, I have been interested in newer religions for most of my life. As I mention about in the book, I grew up very close to the headquarters of the Branch Davidians, a new religious movement that captured national headlines in the 1990s during the so-called Waco Siege in Texas. Those events made me aware of religious traditions that had branched outside of mainstream world religions. I wondered where they came from and why they believed what they did. As I got older and entered the academic field of religious studies, I noticed that there were not too many book resources available that taught about new religious movements in a compassionate way yet remained committed to traditional Christianity. This led me to wanting to write a book about new religious movements from a biblical worldview.

• What are the main things you learned from researching your book; what do you consider the “big takeaways” to be?

I learned a lot as I researched for this book and met with countless practitioners of new religious movements. For me, I think it’s always important to combine both theory and practice. It’s one thing to know theoretically what people believe, but it can sometimes be another thing to see what they believe practiced in real life. I’m thankful for the leaders and practitioners whose personal experiences supplemented my academic research.

One of my major takeaways is that I’m thankful for the Christian Church as it has safeguarded, preserved, and defended traditional Christianity over the course of 2,000 years. The pressure to change, to compromise, and to evolve never goes away and remains a constant within Christianity. There are literally tens of thousands of different denominations or sects that claim a Christian heritage, demonstrating how difficult it is to stay on the narrow path. As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “the gate is narrow, and the way is hard that leads to life” (Matt. 7:14). While writing this book, I was reminded of this passage often. I also realized that other religious traditions encountered a similar phenomenon. How do we hold on to something when we are constantly in motion?

Another takeaway is that there are a lot of reasons why people join new religious movements, but one common theme I encountered was that people were ultimately seeking a sense of belonging. They wanted to be part of a community that valued them and gave them a sense of purpose and kinship. This saddened me to think about how the Church has not always been a place where people feel safe and valued and loved.

• What are some important truths that you would like readers to remember from reading CNRM?

First, I would like readers to remember that people are desperately hungry for truth and meaning. The fact that so many people throughout history have sought out a relationship with God, however imperfectly, is a testimony to how much humankind is searching. This provides the Church with a real opportunity to share the message of Jesus Christ and live out our calling to love God and love others.

Second, I would like to remind readers of Jesus’s plea for us to be “as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16). We need to cultivate wisdom because there are plenty of wolves in sheep’s clothing. For instance, there are many new religious movements that say one thing publicly but practice another thing privately. As such, being shrewd, discerning, and wise are essential in this day and age. But as a complement, Jesus urges us to be “innocent,” which is a rarely used Greek word in the New Testament (ἀκέραιος) that could be translated as “whole,” “honest,” “gentle,” or “harmless.” A lot of people in new religious movements have beaten up and are broken, and the last thing they need is for someone else to push them down even further. There are ways of coming alongside people and helping them up in a gentle way that does not do additional damage.

Finally, I would like to remind readers of Ecclesiastes, which tells us that “there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9). It’s tempting to be lured into something different because it is new. It may come across as more relevant, more sophisticated, or more authentic. I can empathize with this. And to state the opposite, something is not right just because it is old. But as a Christian, my study of new religious movements has pushed me back toward the core of our classic Christian beliefs and practices, which do not change, and which are not subject to the revolving door of our constantly changing culture. In fact, we have wonderful examples from Scripture and church tradition of Christians who remained innocent with regard to the truth yet wise in relation to the world. 

The following is taken from an interview with Valerie Elliot Shepard and Joy Woo. Valerie is the author of our upcoming release, Pilipinto: The Jungle Adventures of a Missionary’s Daughter, which will be available August 2, 2023.

1) Aside from sharing your story through writing, how do you currently spend your time?

Walking, cooking, gardening, reading the Bible and praying, attending a prayer meeting every Wednesday afternoon at our church, watching interesting movies with my husband, trying to write a few letters a week (as opposed to at least 75-100 as my mother did!), and reading some. 

2) How did you come up with the idea to tell your family’s story through Pilipinto?

It was my mother’s idea originally, back in the early ’90s, and she gave me a few clues to refresh my memory. But because of having my children at home and homeschooling, this project really didn’t “get going” until the 2009–2011 years, when all my children had left home. 

3) What was it like to reflect on your past for this project? Did you learn anything about your childhood or your family that you didn’t know before?

It was a fun project because I had such a happy childhood! I’m not sure I learned anything new about my childhood, other than discovering some notes my mother had taken in 1960-63, which were about things I said or did, and they were quite amusing.

4) What is something you hope parents and their children will learn about the Lord as they read Pilipinto?

I sincerely hope that the presence, help, and protection of our heavenly Father and Jesus our tender Shepherd comes out loud and clear. He obviously took care of and protected us in a very unusual setting, and I was oblivious to it, except by listening to my mother’s prayers every night and learning the beautiful old hymn “The Lord’s My Shepherd.” 

I think when parents speak lovingly and seriously about the presence and help of our Savior, it makes a huge impact on their children, and I am so grateful for my mother’s careful, loving, and truthful parenting. She never told me silly untruths or gave promises of what she would do for me that she didn’t follow through with, so I could trust her implicitly! I’m so thankful for that because it created a very secure and happy environment for me! 

5) Do you have a favorite page or illustration from the book?

That’s a very difficult question because most of the pages bring a smile to my face, so it’s hard to say, but one of my favorites is the page with my singing to my Daddy in heaven and the blue butterfly.

---

PREORDER PILIPINTO: THE JUNGLE ADVENTURES OF A MISSIONARY’S DAUGHTER

• Amazon: $17.99
• Christianbook: $15.99

“Young ones will learn about the Elliot family and their global influence, not only on the people of an ancient tribe but on Christians around the world. Thank you, Valerie, for telling your family’s remarkable story to yet another generation.”

–Joni Eareckson Tada, Founder, Joni and Friends International Disability Center

---

The following is an interview with Greg Welty. He is the author of Alvin Plantinga, the most recent release in our Great Thinkers series.

1. What led you to write Alvin Plantinga? How did you become interested in exploring his teaching and critiquing it from a biblical perspective?

My good friend James Anderson at RTS-Charlotte seminary let me know that a volume on Alvin Plantinga was likely in P&R’s Great Thinkers series. (Anderson himself wrote the David Hume volume, which I really like.) So, I put together a proposal and things proceeded from there. In the Preface to the book I relate how hearing of Plantinga when I was an undergraduate philosophy student at UCLA in 1991 led me to initially examine his writings. Navigating the conflict I later discerned between Plantinga’s positions and those of my Oxford supervisor, Richard Swinburne, led me to become a philosopher: to become aware of multiple views held by equally capable individuals, and to consider deeply who had the better argument.

I think it’s not only important to identify the strengths and weaknesses of a thinker in light of a biblical perspective, but to rank the importance of these as well, and I try to do that in the book. Some of the ways that Plantinga’s work isn’t fully or clearly in line with the Reformed confessions are easily remediable; others not so much. But overall I find a lot of value in Plantinga’s body of work, and I’ve taught through it for twenty years or so.

2. What are the main things you learned from researching Alvin Plantinga; what do you consider his main contributions to Reformed epistemology to be?

I learned that Bill Davis at Covenant College was the perfect person to write the foreword to the book! As one of Plantinga’s students and teaching assistants, who observed him up close for years, Bill is happy to commend Plantinga as a deep, genuine, sincere believer in Jesus Christ. Bill also makes the highly relevant observation that some Christian philosophers are mainly called to speak to fellow Christians about the world of philosophy, while others are mainly called to speak to fellow philosophers about Christian beliefs, and Plantinga is in the latter, almost evangelistic, category.

I also learned that Plantinga’s model of faith and reason, and of how we come to know the Bible is the word of God, is remarkably like John Owen’s view, something that I didn’t realize until I read Owen’s The Reason of Faith (1677) after writing the Plantinga book. In The Reason of Faith (1677: 169-76), Owen makes a series of points that are virtually identical to points made by Plantinga in Warranted Christian Belief(2000: 256-66) and Where the Conflict Really Lies (2011: 178-83). These include the idea that reason is composed of multiple cognitive faculties (both noninferential and inferential), that faith is trust in divine testimony, full-stop (no further arguments needed), and that faith and reason are two ways of knowing. Faith is not an intellectually substandard source of belief. Rather, it’s just a different way to get knowledge.

I learned a few other things. Plantinga found it very difficult to figure out what it means to be a Christian philosopher. He devoted a lot of time at the University of Notre Dame to thinking about this issue. There’s a difference between being a Christian philosopher and being a philosopher who happens to be a Christian. Plantinga wrote a lot about this question—by my reckoning, he articulates five methodological principles and four distinct activities of the Christian philosopher. But he found it hard to practice the integration of Christianity and philosophy. With two notable exceptions (Warranted Christian Belief and “O felix culpa”), most of his philosophical work is about “mere theism,” not Christian distinctives. In the book I offer a reason why that is.

I also learned that, surprisingly, only two of Plantinga’s seven replies to the problem of evil depend on libertarian free will. I learned that Plantinga’s extended “Aquinas/Calvin model” of faith is compatible with determinism about saving faith. Finally, I learned that Plantinga’s rejection of various elements of classical theism doesn’t affect the cogency of his arguments all that much. (As far as I can tell, you can just add these elements to his views if you’d like.)

In my view, Plantinga’s “Reformed epistemology” is neither distinctively Reformed, nor an epistemology. It is, however, a clever reply to the insistence of unbelievers that our belief in God must be based on argument to be rational! His later and much more developed theory of ‘warranted Christian belief’ gives a central role to the testimony of Scripture and the work of the Holy Spirit in producing faith, and deploys this model to deflect some influential unbelieving criticisms of Christian faith.

3. What are some important truths that you would like readers to remember from reading Alvin Plantinga?

In the providence of God, Plantinga influenced a generation of Christian philosophers to be rigorous and bold in their defense of distinctive Christian claims. Like all other uninspired-but-very-useful thinkers, he finds his proper place not above us or below us, but at our side, helping us think through—as he would put it—the antitithesis between believing and unbelieving ways of thought.

---

ORDER Alvin Plantinga

• Amazon: $15.13
• Christianbook: $13.29
• P&R: $12.00
• Reformation Heritage Books: $12.00
• WTSBooks: $12.21

The following is taken from a Zoom interview with Douglas Bond and Joy Woo. Doug is the author of many books, including our upcoming release, God’s Servant Ruth, which will be available August 2, 2023.

1) Tell us about yourself—your family, hobbies, and work.

I have six marvelous kids and 11 grandkids, and another grandchild on the way! I’m currently in the midst of caring for my mother. She’s 86 and has congestive heart failure and viral pneumonia. So that is weighing heavily on my heart and mind right now. It sort of reminds one of the woes that come up for Naomi and Ruth, you know—they experienced lots of loss, and that’s normal in the Christian life.

I’m a very eclectic-hobby person. I love sailing. I love salmon fishing. I love going out and gathering clams and mussels . . . and then eating them! I’m a lifelong renovator of old houses too, and in the last five years, I’ve gotten into building tiny houses!

As for work, I am working on three or four projects right now, and I also do a lot of copyediting and content and developmental editing. I also lead tours related to my books through Scriptorium Press. In fact, I’ll be flying to Rome this summer to lead one of those! I also teach an Oxford Creative Writing Masterclass twice a year in London.

2) How did this idea come about—to tell the stories of Scripture through poetry?

Well, obviously it’s not a new thing! I’ve read a lot of books to my kids and grandkids, and sometimes I read them and I think, “I would’ve put that a little differently,” or  “I would’ve emphasized this instead . . .” So when I wrote my book on Ruth, I wanted to focus the attention on the fulfillment of this whole story in Christ, because we should read the Word of the Lord looking for the Lord of the Word, as Edmund Clowney said.

So I want to figure out how to go to those Old Testament stories and kind of hit the refresh button. And kids love poetry; my mom used to sit on the couch reading Shakespeare out loud. I thought it was so cool—it sounds so wonderful. Part of the reason for that is that there’s rhythm and meter in poetry, and we like that. God gave us a heartbeat, and iambic pentameter echoes the rhythm of the human heart! And in poetry, you have to scrutinize words on many more levels than you do in prose.

So I gravitate to poetry for children because they love those parallelisms of sound: “Oh, that’s so delicious. Do that again. Read that again, Daddy!” I think it captivates them in its genre. Then, when I’ve got them where I want them, I can hopefully communicate truth.

3) What is something you hope children and their parents will learn from reading the story of Ruth together?

I think we’re intractable legalists. I don’t want antinomianism out there either, but legalism is a default for all of us I think, because it’’s so easy. I want mom and dad reading this out loud to their kids. I’m not just interested in the kids—I want mom and dad’s tendency toward legalism to be corrected too. I think the corrective to legalism is also the corrective to antinomianism: show them Jesus, the Savior. Keep him before them.

I hope the content of the book itself will dismantle that sense of legalism that says, “I checked that box; I read good stuff to my kids.” No, no, no. I hope the book exposes that tendency and presents the Savior afresh. We need to hear the truth of God’s grace from all angles. We need to be hemmed in behind and before. And sometimes that hemming in behind and before is really, really painful. It’s like breaking something in pieces. 
God is not capricious when he sends Naomi off. She and her family go to get food because they’re starving, and God doesn’t have a plan to harm them, but it looks like it to Naomi along the way. Sometimes it feels like it along the way for us too. Naomi experienced blow after blow after blow. She had nothing in the ancient semitic world—when your husband dies and then your two sons die and you’re in a foreign land far away from the place where the glory of God dwells, then you are really alone.

And Naomi felt that. “Don’t call me Naomi anymore,” she said, “Call me Mara . . .  Bitter. I’m abandoned, I’m empty. I’ve come back with nothing.” That’s how God wants us. That’s how God wants the parents reading this to their children. He wants them to feel that they are nothing: “I’m Mara, I’m Naomi. And I have nothing. Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to the cross I cling.” We are always trying to bring something with us. But the way of the cross is to break us from all the things we cling to. What’s the story of Ruth about? It’s about a purposeful and kind God breaking everything all to pieces and then graciously restoring and rebuilding Naomi’s shattered family—out of which he would give her a great, great grandson named Jesus!

My hope for parents as they read—and for myself as I retold the story—is that they would see our Savior more clearly.

---

Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

---

PREORDER GOD’S SERVANT RUTH

• Amazon: $19.99
• Christianbook: $15.99

Share now: