The following is a portion from an interview about PROOF found in the May 2014 issue Towers Magazine, the campus magazine for The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
MD: So, proof of what?
TPJ: The focus of PROOF is the unassailable proof of grace that God has provided through the cross of Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ, all that God’s justice demands has already been delivered, and nothing remains for us to do to earn God’s favor. To make this point about God’s grace, we unpack a simple acronym throughout the book: planned grace, resurrecting grace, outrageous grace, overcoming grace and forever grace.
MD: What was your aim in writing the book?
TPJ: The point of this book is to provide people with a fresh reminder that our salvation doesn’t depend on us and to present this reminder in a way that highlights the beauty of God’s plan and the joy of sharing this good news with others. In his book Killing Calvinism, Greg Dutcher notes that “Reformed theology is not an end in itself; it’s a window to the awe-inspiring universe of God’s truth, filled with glory, beauty and grace.” That attitude and approach to Reformed theology is what we wanted to exemplify throughout this book.
Geerhardus Vos says something to the effect that God’s work of grace in the life of a sinner is meant to be a mirror that reflects God’s glory to the world. Sometimes, presentations of Reformed theology express all the right facts about how God’s grace works, but they miss the grandeur and joy that God intends to display through the workings of his grace.
MD: For whom did you write PROOF?
TPJ: Although I certainly hope that professors and seminary-trained pastors read the book, we didn’t aim this book at scholars and specialists. As I wrote portions of this book, I thought often of my father — a small-church pastor who read voraciously but who never had the opportunity to finish high school, college or seminary — and I asked myself, “Would this have made sense to him?”