Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Culture in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
Are we shaping the culture or is culture shaping us? The question is important because the answer tells us either that the gospel is still the power of God unto salvation and we’re transforming the culture or it tell us that many of us are merely playing religious games while Western culture crumbles into self-destruction and decay.
The question of the title has one or two ambiguities built into it that need addressing before we try to answer the question itself. First, begin with the word we. Are we shaping the culture or is culture shaping us? Does we refer to Christians worldwide? What does it mean with respect to Christians in Saudi Arabia? Are we shaping the culture? What does it mean to Christians in Iran?
What does it mean to Christians in China? And there are many Chinas. Almost anything you say about China is true somewhere and false somewhere else. Christians in the Three-Self Patriotic Movement or Christians in rural communities in underground churches. How about just Christians in the US? Where in the US? How about Tulsa, Oklahoma, the buckle in the Bible Belt? How about the Pacific Northwest?
If we refers to evangelicals in the West or something like that, then the question becomes.… What are evangelicals? I hope to address this in a small book and in a long lecture at ETS later this year, God willing, because the question is surprisingly tricky. If evangelicals are determined sociologically, then you’re an evangelical if you belong to a group that calls itself evangelical, which includes everything from snake handlers to who knows what.
That means there will be some people who are theologically evangelicals who don’t call themselves that. Confessional Lutherans, for example, almost never call themselves evangelical, but nevertheless, historically speaking, theologically speaking, they are. Or are evangelicals merely those who come from a certain kind of descent or those who espouse a certain kind of creed, and if so, what is it?
This question of “What is an evangelical?” is becoming one of the more crucial issues in our time. If I adopt a confessional stance for the definition of evangelicalism (an evangelical is one who holds to the Evangel), and then a biblical theological attempt to define Evangel, gospel (filtered, no doubt, with some understanding of the historical influences that have brought us to this place), I’m getting closer to the kind of definition I can live with.
I would nevertheless be amongst the first to insist that if I were in New York City and somebody were interviewing me and asked me, “Are you an evangelical?” I wouldn’t be quick to say, “Yes,” just because an awful lot of people in New York City understand evangelical to mean something like Protestant jihadist. Just as in the Deep South I’m not likely to confess myself a Calvinist, because basically that means “doesn’t do any evangelism.”
Once again, it’s not just what you understand the term to be; it’s how it’s understood in the broader culture when you start holding these sorts of conversations. There’s a deeper issue yet when you start thinking about we. Aren’t we part of the culture? “Are we influencing the culture?” we ask. “Is the culture influencing us?” As if we refers to some group that is separate from the culture when, in fact, inevitably, we’re part of the culture.
You cannot be acultural. If you are temporally restricted, if you are finite and you live somewhere and you talk a language, any one of those is enough to say you’re culturally delimited. The question is cast antithetically, “Are we shaping the culture or is the culture shaping us?” as if we’re not part of the culture and they over there are culture and bad, which also raises questions about what place common grace has in the discussion.
Suddenly it becomes just a little more complicated than a yes or no to the question raised. All of these things are recognized by Scripture in one fashion or another without using those words. Doesn’t Isaiah own himself to be part of the culture when he says, “I’m a man of unclean lips, and I live amongst a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King”?
When Christians are changed by the gospel as part of the culture, inevitably they are de facto changing the culture. If they are changed and they are part of the culture in some sense, their conversion means the culture is at least that far changed, but are we changing the culture outside of the church, the confessional church, the gospel-centered, cross-preaching church? Are we changing the culture more broadly or is the culture changing us?
Here we need to be careful of various analogies that can be drawn. You could argue pretty strongly, for example, that between about 1880 and 1930 there was an awful lot of influence from the surrounding fairly optimistic, sin-denying, education-loving, social-transformation theory that began to infiltrate the church, so the church redefined its mission less in terms of conversion, regeneration, and power and more in terms of education, social structural renewal, and this sort of thing. Yes, you can argue that.
This is a pretty good example, in generalizing terms, of the non-church culture influencing the church itself, them influencing us. We’re part of the culture too but distinguishable from it because we’re Christians and yet being influenced by them pretty severely. On the other hand, if you go to the Great Awakening, as it’s called in the US, the Evangelical Awakening, as it’s called in England, that remarkable movement from about 1740 that went on for about 60 years (you can tease the arguments out a wee bit) …
Beginning with Howell Harris in 1734, and then George Whitefield starting to preach in 1738, and John Wesley beginning to preach in 1740, and going on decade after decade with massive social transformation. That was a singularly remarkable movement. At the beginning of that period, on Easter Sunday 1740, there were precisely six people who showed up at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London for Holy Communion. That’s how far religion had gone down.
There were 240 crimes on the books for which you could be executed by hanging, including stealing a loaf of bread. Slavery was arise in the empire. The Industrial Revolution meant that some were getting very rich and some were getting very poor. Some of the first trade union organizers were, in fact, Methodist ministers, who then got banished to Australia for their pains. Debtors’ prisons could see people dying for lack of food, and on and on and on.
By the time that period was over, by the time you get to the Great Reform bill of 1832, you have seen the abolition of the slave trade, then the abolition of slavery in the empire, the first organized unions, the first child care, the first abolition of children in the mines below a certain age, the first beginnings of social reform for old age pensioners and people like that (just the beginnings of it), almost all of it spearheaded by people who had been converted under this remarkable movement.
Did you see the film Amazing Grace? There was a lot in that film to rejoice over. That one-liner by John Newton. John Newton really did say this too. “I know two things: I am a great sinner and Christ is a great Savior.” You could kill for that line, couldn’t you? Worth the whole film just for that line. But at one level, the film was a massive distortion.
It pictured Wilberforce giving up, as it were, not only vocational ministry but any real focus on Christian theology and understanding (in some sense, the gospel) so that he could focus on this one thing, the abolition of the slave trade. That’s the way the whole film came across. Historically, of course, that’s nonsense.
He was interested in a vast range of social issues, but even more, he wrote whole essays on how important it was to preach the gospel first. He had his devotions in the morning and in the evening, led his family devotions, did street preaching, was evangelizing pretty incessantly. He was, above all, a gospel Wilberforce, but you don’t get any of that in the film. You don’t see that.
Nevertheless, the movement as a whole under the Countess of Huntington and people like Wilberforce and others had remarkable effect on the entire culture, but as Lloyd-Jones used to say, it happened in part because of a lot of microcultural change, all the conversions. Today, often we want to speak of cultural change absent a lot more conversions. There may be some social things we can do that are good. Nevertheless, we need to understand there are historical paradigms we appeal to, good ones and bad ones, that affect our discussion of all of these things.
So the question of the title really is asking the extent to which we who believe in Jesus Christ are wrongly taking too many cues and direction from the subset of the culture that is Christ-less over against the extent to which we, by the power of the gospel, are changing the culture by being changed ourselves and then by influencing those outside, whether with gospel preaching that actually sees people converted or by influencing things so that the tolerance levels change and the direction changes in one fashion or another in the broader culture. That’s the question. A little more complicated, but it’s a little clearer. Now let me offer some reflections on the title so understood.
1. It is important to discern contradictory trends.
By and large, I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy. My wife is a glass-half-empty kind of person. We get along, but when we start off on almost any topic we don’t see things the same way, and we have to argue them out to somehow figure out which way things are going. It’s not that I’m holier than she is or she’s more discerning than I am. Both stances reflect the limitations of our perceptions and our own character, background, family, and all kinds of things. They make us acknowledge that we’re finite. We don’t see the whole picture.
When you start doing this sort of analysis, you have to try. If you’re a glass-half-empty sort of person, I’m sure you can give me all of the statistics on how this culture is going to hell in a handbasket. You know, compare the marriage rates and divorce rates over the last 50 years. Compare what’s happening in the educational systems. When I was a young man, you couldn’t find a couple that would talk openly about the fact they were shacked up together. Now they do talk about it very openly. They have for 30 years. There’s no shame to it anywhere.
When I was a child, there was still an assumption that self-sacrifice was a good thing. Now self-promotion and self-identification issues are far more central to pursuing the public good. Then we can talk about social mores, the amount of sexual abuse, the amount of hidden abuse in the home, and the amount of biblical illiteracy. When I began to do university missions, if I met an atheist, the atheist would be disbelieving in my God.
In other words, he or she was a Christian atheist. The God she or he disbelieved in was the Christian God, which meant the categories were still on my turf. Nowadays, if I’m doing university mission, I can’t even assume that. Even a lot of people who think they’re Christians don’t know anything about the Bible, let alone the atheists themselves. So there have been many, many signs, many measurable metrically defined signs, from a Christian point of view, of turning away from the Bible, the heritage of the Judeo-Christian West, and so forth.
On the other hand, when I was a young man, it was very difficult to find a really first-class theologically rich exegetical commentary on a biblical book written by anybody who was still alive. F.F. Bruce, bless his heart, was churning out a few, but on the other hand, almost all of the books that were coming from evangelical publishers were devotional things. Some of them not bad, some of them reprints of older works, some of them just sentimental twaddle, to be quite frank.
But that’s about it. We weren’t producing major theologies. We weren’t producing cultural analysis. We weren’t producing commentaries. We weren’t producing much that was rigorous at all. We really weren’t. In comparison with that, there have been some huge gains. Can’t you allow me at least a little bit of glass half full? One of the reasons we perceive so much that’s negative is because in the 1930s and ‘40s the mainline denominations had lost their direction, by and large, in their confessional gospel.
There were still a lot of people who were converted in them. Therefore, the leadership was being taken out, and the directions were full of foreboding, but not all that many people saw it. Now two generations on, it’s harder to find many genuinely converted people in a lot of mainline denomination churches. So the whole perception of things has changed quite a lot.
On the other hand, it has clarified some things. You begin to see a little more clearly who’s genuinely a believer and who’s not. Not from what they say. Not from their foundation documents but from how they behave. That at least begins to clear things up. It’s not all bad. Moreover, as I’ve said before, in the country there are such diverse trends that generalizations are a wee bit troubling.
2. Current evangelical fragmentation is in process of changing.
People have talked about the fragmentation of evangelicalism for 30, 40, or 50 years. As the movement expanded in one fashion or another, from Newsweek’s “Year of the Evangelical” in the mid-70s.… As the movement expanded, more and more people called themselves evangelical who no evangelical of 30 years earlier would have recognized as such.
More and more people get under this big evangelical umbrella who are more and more dilute on the most elementary form of confessionalism. People have been talking about that fragmentation for a long time. I’m not saying anything new. If I were to announce fragmentation of the evangelical movement to you, you would have every right to yawn and say, “What decade does he come from?”
I think what’s happening now is a bit different. I think what we’re beginning to face now.… I don’t know what else to call it but fragmentation in clumps or fragmentation in tribes. Instead of a gray bland fragmentation and diminution and dilution right across the board, more or less evenhandedly, people are coagulating into clumps. If you don’t like that metaphor, they are gathering into tribes.
There is a kind of evangelical Wesleyanism or a Wesleyan evangelicalism. There’s sort of a modified prosperity evangelicalism. There are various Pentecostal evangelicalisms. There is a kind of openness of God evangelicalism. There are various Reformed evangelicalisms. There’s certainly an emerging church evangelicalism, and so forth.
It’s not just that there are different parties. There have always been different parties. That’s not the issue. But people now tend not to identify themselves so much with evangelicalism but to one of the clumps. So when Zondervan and NAU and whoever else is involved organizes a large pastors’ conference, the National Pastors’ Conference if you please, and tries to ensure that the house is very big and brings in representatives from all of these different clumps, it’ll draw, give or take, 2,000 pastors. Not bad.
T4G with five guys brings in 5,500. We’re on track in The Gospel Coalition at our conference in April to have 4,000, which is our cap for that particular conference. We’re only a clump. The clumps are being bigger than the whole. The clumps are now taking over. Then if you begin to ask the further question, “Which of these clumps is likely still to be around in 30 years?” that changes the discussion hugely.
I’m neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet and, as I’ve learned to say from Walt Kaiser, I work for a nonprofit organization. Nevertheless, let me predict that in 30 years nobody is going to be talking about the emerging church. People are still going to be talking about the gospel. So where do you want to tie your hat? You start asking, “Who’s teaching the Bible? Who is square with the gospel? Who exalts Christ?” and those clumps at least have the potential in God’s good grace, unless God raises up completely new clumps we have not yet even seen, for taking over the center all over again.
So although statistically the broadly Reformed Bible teaching clumps of expositors are still a small breed compared with the vast numbers out there, despite the fact that we have some rather substantial conferences, nevertheless, from my point of view, it’s hugely encouraging to find 70 or 80 percent of the people who attend under the age of 45 and taking the Bible seriously, thinking theologically, and wanting to bring glory to Christ. That, to my mind, is hugely encouraging. Only, statistically speaking, in the light of all the needs, a cloud the size of a man’s hand, but don’t despise clouds the size of man’s hands.
3. As usual, the most dangerous trends are the ones most people don’t see.
Hence the problem with merely being orthodox. You may be quite orthodox, but orthodoxy is always measured by the articulations and standards of yesterday. It’s inevitable. People work hard to produce a good statement of faith. People fight over and divide over it. The truth is maintained. It’s upheld. Institutions are formed. Seminaries are formed. Denominations are formed. Local churches are established. That becomes the standard.
Fifty years go by. People still uphold the standard. They’re orthodox. But by then the questions are different. The denials are different. The shadings are different. There are very, very few evangelicals today who would be tempted to absorb 1920s bald-faced liberalism. Some are closer to it than they think, but not intentionally saying, “I have decided I will become one of these broad-minded liberals.”
What happens instead is a lot more subtle. There’s a book by James Burtchaell called The Dying of the Light. It’s probably about 800 pages. What Burtchaell is doing is examining some of the confessional institutions, universities and seminaries, to figure out if there was a pattern in their decline. Princeton University was, after all, once an institution for training ministers. Harvard started that way, Andover, and on and on and on. Many of them started as such institutions. What happened to them and why?
Was it at some point that a president came along and said, “I don’t like orthodoxy. I’m going to be liberal”? It never happened like that. There were a lot of different things he points to, but one of the big things he points to is almost all of these institutions were begun by scholar/pastor/theologian/entrepreneurs. They saw the theological need. They saw the spiritual need. They had an entrepreneurial gift, and they got something going. It started small, but it began to grow and prosper. That’s the way it started.
Eventually, they prosper enough that the kind of people you need to lead them must have really good administrative skills. So somewhere along the line you look for an administrator. Of course, because you’re orthodox and your board is orthodox and your faculty orthodox, you look for an administrator who’s orthodox, but his orthodoxy is going to be defined by 50 years ago or 100 years ago, 150 years ago, 200 years ago. They’re not going to find somebody who’s a heretic.
Nevertheless, if they find somebody whose orthodoxy is defined by 75 years ago, who himself has no demonstrable track record of spiritual theological discernment with respect to what’s going on in today’s culture, then gradually things begin to shift, and in two or three generations the board has been replaced and the student tolerance levels have changed and the faculty tolerance levels have changed, and now you’re on a decline that takes a remarkably heroic figure to reverse. Such reversals have taken place, but they’re not common.
In other words, the most dangerous trends are the ones most people don’t see. Let me dare mention a few. That sounds just a bit presumptuous. I’m now claiming that I’m seeing some things other people don’t see. Well, somebody has to stick his neck out, so here I go. Some of these you do see, I’m sure, because they have become discussed, so I will discuss some things that are more understood and well grasped, and then I’ll talk about some things that perhaps are not seen quite so well.
Let me begin with some of the more powerful ones that just about everybody has seen, at least everybody in this crowd. Not everybody in all of the churches we represent. This is a bit of a self-selecting crowd, I suspect. Justification. Modifications in the understanding of what justification is and gentle circumventing of a genuinely biblical, defensible, exegetically rigorous, theologically cohesive view of justification.
Nowadays, there are responses, books, and debates that are ongoing. At least the thing is out in the open. You can argue about it. You can think about it. You can work through the texts. They’re not all coming from one side. That one is seen at least by leaders. Second, Scripture has been going through another round in my view. It’s not quite so clearly seen. Everybody saw it 25 years ago when Jim Boice started the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI). They produced some books, ran some conferences, produced some statements, and so forth.
In some ways, some of us have thought, I suspect, “Well, we went through that one. Thank God we don’t have to do that one again.” But another generation, more questions, partly of a historical nature, partly of a hermeneutical nature, partly of an epistemological nature coming out of postmodernism. There’s just a vast array of these questions rising again. Some of them overlap with issues 25 years ago.
What is happening, however, is that many, many people, not only in this country but around the world, who openly call themselves evangelicals are becoming a little embarrassed about anything that has too high a view of Scripture, and they feel that they are in the inside track, the upper sophisticated knowledgeable edge of the leaders, if they adopt that stance. Well, that is one we’re going to have to face again. It has already gotten into some of our Christian colleges and seminaries. It has gotten into some of our churches.
I will tell you this for your encouragement. Some of us have put together a two-volume proposal, 37 essays, all pitched at the highest level we can manage. The first drafts of the essays are due in my office in about a year and a half’s time. Then the Henry Center is going to pull together all of these people into one week-long conference off camera just to work through all of the papers together.
Then they’ll get revised. Then they’ll come back to me. I hope to have the essays ready for the press in late 2011, which means they’ll probably come out in late 2012 … if things go well, and they probably won’t, but that’s the aim. We call the thing simply “The Scripture Project.” Once the books are out there, we would also like to start organizing some conferences so we can address some of these things more widely.
I say that for your encouragement. This one is a biggie. We’re not going to duck this one. This is not being done in a corner. We’ve used up so much emotional and intellectual energy on justification and one or two other issues that we’ve let this one slip in without beginning to grasp it again. Of course, as has been mentioned, family, men and women issues, but that could be extended more broadly to issues of abortion and porn.
The Internet does not invent porn. What it does do is make it universally and privately accessible. What this is doing to men/women relationships is just about beyond finding out. These are issues we all know about, but there are not many yet who are doing concrete things to try to address it. There are programs around like Covenant Eyes and one or two others that have some power to them, but that one is a big one.
I don’t think I’m telling you anything out of school if I say that my dear friend Tim Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City says that in his congregation, where 70 percent are unmarried and the average age is 32, the biggest challenge in terms of needed transformation by the gospel when people make profession of faith and close with Christ.… The biggest transformations amongst the men (I’m just talking about the men now) are all to do with how you think about marriage and women.
We live in a generation where a lot of young men have such distorted views of marriage, partly foisted by mental images and porn and Madison Avenue, that they’re always looking over their shoulder to see if there’s a nicer one coming along behind and often unable to make decisions except in their own field of expertise but slower growing up to take responsibility, not least in the area of marriage and children, especially if you can have sex without taking any responsibility. Then why not postpone marriage as long as possible?
So the whole thing has become extraordinarily complex. You point out the wonderful Christian virtues of some young woman or the other, and the response is, “Yeah, but there’s no spark,” which usually has to do with body type more than anything else. This is a huge one, because it’s right through many of our churches.
The notions bound up with what a Christian family is are not easily being absorbed by the new generation. They’re not easily being transferred to the new generation. I could say something similar about young women, but I will let them pass. I’ll pick on the men this time. Bound up with this also are questions of DINK-ship (double income, no kids) and often the kind of self-focus and self-identification that is bound up with this. Whatever else children teach you, it’s some elements of maturity.
Race relations, not least in our big cities. I look for MDiv students every year who can talk to anybody. We have some African-American students who are going to be great on the South Side of Chicago. We have some white dudes who are going to be great in one of the suburbs of Lincoln, Nebraska, and I’m not despising either of their ministries. They’re both needy places. But I look every year for people who can talk to anybody, and I want those people for our cities, because we need to be at the front end of this one.
This is increasingly a multicultural world, whether you like it or not. To be at the front end of this one precisely because we believe that the consummated kingdom is made up of men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. That means we have to work hard at this kind of thing. It is not easy. We need to be at the front end of it.
Time management. I don’t know what else to call that one. It’s tied up in part with the incessant demand of a digital world. Most of us are not too far away from our cell phones most of the time, and if we are, we’re probably not too far from our open computer. I notice it in myself. Here I am trying to write some manuscript on something or other. Bing! You got an email. Do I look at it? Do I read it? Do I shut it off? Do I answer it right away?
If I answer it right away, then it’s done and I have a reputation for being quick with my emails. Not bad. Then another paragraph didn’t get written, and it has broken up my chain of thought and my concentration. It used to be that the temptation was you’re sitting in your office as a pastor, and you’re trying to get something done. The mail arrives. Now you’re tempted to read TIME magazine for a bit or Christianity Today just to find out what’s going on. I mean, you have to find out what’s going on in the world, don’t you? After all, it’s part of your responsibility.
Then the denominational rag arrives the next day. There’s always something. Now that’s multiplied quite literally a million billion-fold. There is always digital input somewhere, unless you actually self-consciously cut yourself off from it, so time management to allow yourself time to read and think and meditate and pray is becoming a really crucial issue. It’s not just that we’re sacrificing the important on the altar of the urgent. Most of this stuff is not urgent.
We’re sacrificing the important on the altar of the noisy or the digitally visual, on the altar of that little bing, on the altar of our BlackBerrys. Somewhere along the line, if you’re going to be committed to ministry that is suffused with intercession and meditating on the Word of God, you are going to have to turn off a whole lot of switches. It’s becoming a crucial thing to maintain integrity in ministry.
Let me mention a couple more. I’ve talked about the different understandings of tolerance on one occasion or another. We need some more wrestling with the nature of tolerance and intolerance. We don’t want to be intolerant, but we have to think through what tolerance looks like. I’ve written about that and talked about it in the Christ and Culture book. I’m going to skip it here.
One more just for interest’s sake. Others could be mentioned. Those who work in the digital world are now talking about groundswell. Is that a term you’re familiar with? There’s a book by that title. It’s not written by a Christian. It’s written by two digital experts, a man and a woman. It’s just called Groundswell. It’s must reading. I don’t think it has all of the answers, but it is saying some very important things that we need to think about.
In the past, we (the we in this case being companies or local churches or almost any social entity, ETS or the Bethlehem Academy or whatever), to some extent, could control our self-image by the kinds of things we put out, the kinds of things we announced, the kinds of things we did, the kinds of things we talked about. We controlled our own self-identity in some ways. In the digital world, that’s all changing, because people respond to it in all kinds of ways, and they pick up some things that might be true and some things that are not true.
It goes to a blog, and instantly it’s almost everywhere in the whole world, and suddenly the perception of who you are, if you don’t respond to the blogs, can itself be very detrimental to you. You’re haughty and arrogant because you don’t respond to blogs, but if you do respond to blogs, then are you wasting a whole lot of …? What do you do with all of this? This pressure from groundswell and what is adequate response to a watching world and what is simply a waste of time and defensiveness … those are really complicated issues.
The book Groundswell does not give you any answers at all. It does raise all the right questions, and I do think that many of us, not least those of us who are involved in the digital world with our own blogs and our own institutions and organizations, need to give this one a great deal of thought, because it is going to affect how we do witness in years to come, whether we like it or not.
4. There is a thoroughly commendable trend among younger Christians today to be socially concerned, but, as usual, wisdom and care are needed.
Be especially careful about the nasty antitheses that are being bandied about. The nasty antithesis that says, “Well, the generation of evangelicals before mine were just interested in preaching the gospel, and then the liberals were all interested in social justice. My generation is interested in both.” The arrogance. In fact, the historical stupidity. It just isn’t true.
There was some truth to it in the period from roughly 1920 to 1950 … not a huge amount but some truth … when confessional evangelicals got so burned by losing so many theological institutions that some did back off and just wanted to preach the gospel and didn’t want to get too involved in too many other things. That’s when Carl F.H. Henry came out with his extraordinarily important book in 1947, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.
But in studies that have been done of Christians from 1960 to the end of the century (done by the Acton Institute, for example, in this country, and corresponding studies in the UK) that have merely asked the question, “What kinds of people make up those who are involved in a leprosarium in North Africa or working with Oxfam or UNICEF, let alone the distinctively Christian missions?”
All of them have been surprised to discover that, overwhelmingly, the percentage of people, proportionately, involved in those sorts of things are conservatives, many of them evangelical Christians. They didn’t talk about it; they just did it. The liberals tended to get the highfalutin boss jobs in UNICEF and Oxfam, but it was often the Christians at the bottom who were doing the work. That’s not a slanderous piece of information. That comes out of their research.
I’m not bad-mouthing anybody. I’m merely citing all the objective sociological research, often done by non-Christians. So be careful that you don’t bad-mouth the previous generation as if none of them cared and now you suddenly have the corner on caring. Moreover, how do you ever pit a confessional stance for what the gospel is over against liberalism that denies the gospel but does some good works? How do you say you’re marrying those two things? That’s just a huge mistake in categories.
Having said that, there are some wonderful instances of ordinary Christians, not least the young, who are concerned to preach the whole gospel unabashedly and do good, first to the household of God and then, as much as is possible, outside as well. That has biblical mandate behind it. If you want to see a good defense of how that should be done and put through in pretty good biblical exegetical terms, read the essay by Tim Keller in the latest fascicle of Themelios.
Themelios, some of you may know, was a print journal for theological students until, for various reasons, it went belly up a year ago. The Gospel Coalition has taken it over, and we produce it now only in digital form. We’ve had three issues out. We produce three a year. In the most recent fascicle that came out in November/December, the lead article (it’s only 11 pages by Tim Keller) tries to work some of these things through. Go to thegospelcoalition.org and find Themelios and you’ll find it pretty quickly.
My warning would be.… It’s not a warning to Tim; he has this one straight. It’s not a warning to Sandy Willson who’s doing some wonderful stuff that I like in Memphis. My warning would be to those who are coming along and talking a lot about, “I want to be faithful to the gospel, but I also want to do social justice or good works.” My warning would be it’s not just what you do; it’s what you’re excited about. If I’ve learned anything in 35 or 40 years of teaching it’s that students don’t learn everything I teach them.
What they learn is what I’m excited about, the kinds of things I emphasize again and again. That had better be the gospel. If the gospel, even when you’re orthodox, becomes something you primarily assume but what you’re excited about is what you’re doing in some sort of social reconstruction, you will be teaching the people you influence that the gospel really isn’t all that important. You won’t be saying that. You won’t even mean it, but it’s what you’ll be teaching. Then you’re only half a generation away from losing the gospel.
Make sure that in your own practice and excitement what you talk about, what you think about, what you pray over, what you exude confidence over, joy over, what you’re enthusiastic about all the time with your next generation of people whom you’re influencing is Jesus, the gospel, the cross. Out of that framework, by all means let the transformed life flow. I wish I could tell you some examples in this connection, but I press on for want of time.
Let me just end this way. It is thus utterly crucial to maintain the primacy of the teaching of the whole counsel of God, centering on the gospel of Christ crucified and risen again, and especially of seeing that this and this alone is the power of God unto salvation and thus to transformation. That stands at the heart of all that we believe, all that we teach, all that we live for, all that we’re prepared to die for, determining not to know anything except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
Male: The context of women teaching Sunday school. Is all teaching of the Scripture authoritative or are there some contexts in which it would not be considered authoritative?
Don Carson: Instead of simply telling you what I would or wouldn’t do, let me tell you what some people who call themselves unqualified complementarians would or wouldn’t do, because they’re quite diverse in how they reason it out. It’s the way they reason it out that’s interesting. For some people, the Sunday school class is more or less viewed like a kind of extended family situation, and they will allow it.
Others will allow it when there’s a couple. I know one situation, for example, where husband and wife teach. In fact, in her case she has a ThM. He doesn’t. He’s a shrewder individual in terms of application, but she has more technical background, and they team teach together and have worked it out that way. Other kinds of pairings might be possible. Still others are simply absolute and think that this best honors Christ.
My own inclinations are to be as flexible as conscience allows without budging from the nonnegotiable. The restriction, if I had to put it in a one-liner, is this, but it doesn’t solve all of the problems. It’s the church-recognized teaching authority over men that is questioned, and then how that works out in seminary contexts and local church contexts. Some say it’s allowed so long as they’re under the authority of the elders, and on and and on.
There are some genuine Christian believers who are as committed to the principle of Scripture as you or I who are nevertheless prepared to work out the applications in slightly different ways. I simply will not divide on those issues. One on one I am willing to debate what I would do and why. In this sort of setting I tend not to, because anything I say could be blogged and all over the world tomorrow morning, and that’s not helpful, because it’s creating exactly the lines I don’t want to make. So I don’t want the principle questioned, but I do want people to try and reason it out in a way that’s thoughtful and principled.
Male: The question has to do with translating the words man and woman instead of husband and wife in Timothy.
Don: That pair can mean either, so it is always a judgment call. Always. So then you have to give reasons for it in a particular way, particular fashion or not. You just have to. One of the reasons for doing it the way it’s mostly done in that passage is because in the immediately preceding verses you’ve talked about women wearing jewelry or not wearing jewelry, and it certainly isn’t talking about wives only.
That doesn’t prove an absolute. The referent could still change in the next verses, but you’d have to argue the case. So it is a bit complicated. When it says, however, that they have to learn with submission, clearly it does not mean submission to all men. The presupposition in the context is it’s a married woman. She’s going to have children in the last verse, and the presupposition is to her husband. I think that’s correct.
If you’re trying to create an entire theology of the subject from this set of five verses, you’re in big trouble. I worked through this passage to give one instance of working through the flow of a passage, but to create an entire biblical theology in this area you’d have to work with passage after passage after passage.
Male: The question is that given Don’s comments about time management, he’s marveling at how much Don gets accomplished when he himself gets so little done by comparison. He’s seriously asking does Don have some tips about how to manage one’s self regarding time?
Don: First, people can get a reputation for doing more because of the kinds of things they do. You preach a lot of sermons and people get converted, and then I produce a book. My book goes all over the world, and it’s something concrete, so obviously Carson is working hard. He has a book. Sometimes we’re doing different kinds of things. You can’t draw comparisons like that.
The second thing I would want to say is people do have different energy levels, and you mustn’t try to be somebody you’re not. If you’re a person who gets cranky unless you get eight hours sleep at night, it’s your God-ordained responsibility to get eight hours of sleep at night, because you don’t have the right to be cranky. Whereas if you’re the sort of person who can get away with six and a half hours of sleep a night, you just got an extra hour and a half.
That’s partly a question of knowing yourself and knowing your energy levels. They can change with time depending on how old your children are and all that. Part of it is not pretending that you’re somebody else. There’s Mark Dever back there. He gets an awful lot done, but he’s far more gregarious than I’ll ever be. He has to be one of the most gregarious souls on God’s green earth.
He can do all kinds of relational things with his little finger that takes me real concentration even to begin to do. There are different gifts and graces. You have to be really careful not to fall into the trap that Peter falls into in John 21. “What shall this man do? I’m going to suffer martyrdom, and this guy? He can live a long life.” You just have to be very careful of the comparing service records thing.
Having said that, there are a few tips. Learn how to use the little bits of time, when you have 15 minutes here or 20 minutes there. It’s not worth starting something, because you’re going to be doing something else. Learn how to use the little bits of time. That means you need to have the kinds of projects or the kind of reading or the kind of something you can usefully slot into those times, but that really is important.
Second, work hard and play hard and never confuse the two. There are a lot of people who work long hours, but it’s diluted by all kinds of interruptions and the arrival of CT. Beep! You got an email. So they put in the hours, but when you actually calculate what actual productive time they’ve put in, it’s not all that much.
Then when they play, they’re going to take time off to watch a football game or go to a movie or whatever. They’re feeling guilty, so they’re sitting in the back row doing their emails. They’re not playing hard and getting the benefit of relaxation, and they’re not working hard and being effective in their work. An awful lot of it is learning to be efficient at doing one thing at a time. A huge amount is that.
Male: [inaudible] overreaching eschatology and gospel of the kingdom, how much work can be done now to influence culture? How much focus and energy should be put there?
Don: The question is really important, but it’s nestled into two or three others. First, let me say that regardless of whether or not the critics are right in seeing an over-realized eschatology behind 1 Timothy, I would say that most Christians in the Western world have an under-realized eschatology. That’s another whole discussion. You can have mistakes both ways on that one.
Moreover, in both cases, both with over-realized and under-realized eschatology, you can have an inadequate anticipation of the glory still to come. If you work through all of the passages of the kingdom and waiting for the kingdom and longing for the kingdom and all of that, and even some of the gospel of the kingdom ones, a very high percentage of them have in mind the consummated kingdom, and this is not a generation, by and large, that is really homesick for heaven.
I’ve been in parts of the world where people are homesick for heaven. I know pastors who take an average of seven funerals a weekend from AIDS. Some of them are homesick for heaven. We’re so materially well off that most of us don’t have that side of things right. So there’s a part of me that wants to get that side of things right before I start arguing about exactly what is meant by the gospel of the kingdom.
Now that’s not a rebuke. It’s just when I hear the discussions all around me, that’s far more central in the New Testament. Where is the generation that’s coming along and saying, “Yes, even so, come, Lord Jesus”? The next thing I would say, much closer to your question, is the notion of kingdom is astonishingly plastic or astonishingly diverse. In one sense, you’re in the kingdom whether you like it or not. The Psalms say God’s kingdom rules over all. It’s equivalent to his sovereignty. You’re in that kingdom whether you like it or not.
In the parable of the wheat and the tares, the kingdom is likened to.… Then the story is told of the wheat and the tares. In that sense, the kingdom has dawned. It’s already here, but there are both wheat and tares in this kingdom. You don’t want to be part of the tares, but both are here. In that sense, the kingdom has dawned in some sense, and you’re in that kingdom too. The question in that use of kingdom is whether you belong to the wheat or the tares.
But in John 3, for example, unless you’re born again you don’t see or enter the kingdom. In that sense, you’re not in the kingdom unless you’re born again. You start working through passage after passage, and you discover that the locus of who’s in the kingdom varies enormously even from parable to parable. There is a sense in which in a lot of parables the kingdom is the king dominion. It’s God’s sovereign reign.
In one sense, God’s sovereign reign is over everything and everybody is in it whether you like it or not, but then there is that subset of God’s sovereign reign under which there is life, and you may or may not be in that kingdom. So in some of the passages that are talking about building up the kingdom or living like the kingdom or living in the light of the Sermon on the Mount because the kingdom of heaven and its righteousness is what we’re supposed to pursue, it seems to me that question gets tied very quickly to how you put together ecclesiology.
It’s not just a kingdom question. It’s the relationship between kingdom and church. In some of those passages, the transformation of life you expect is precisely the transformation of life you expect under that subset of God’s universal kingdom in which there is born-again regenerating life; that is, in the confessional church.
In that sense, we are certainly to create a new society, a new relationship. It’s a new brother and sister thing. It’s a new creation. Of course. But that’s not talking about the transformation of the broader culture. It’s talking about what ecclesiology teaches. One of the doctrines that is, in my view, pretty vastly underappreciated is ecclesiology, to see how that gets tied to the notion of the kingdom.
Male: In terms of women teachers, what do you do with the Joyce Meyers and the Beth Moores? Do you restrict them to just women students and tell the men not to go or what?
Don: In the case of one or two women teachers I would tell nobody to go, but that’s another issue. I do that for some men teachers too. I probably should not create a list right here. The way I’d want to respond, especially nowadays that anything you say is going to get blogged and clipped and be all around the world the next morning, is to think through the principles that are involved.
Some of the best of these teachers would not want, because of conscience bowed before Scripture, to be pastors of a church, but they think what they’re doing is acceptable and helpful and useful and are used by pastors, and men are in some of their studies. Others of tighter interpretation come out a slightly different way.
All I am saying is that in terms of principle, give me the principle of what Scripture says unambiguously, un-embarrassingly, gladly because God says it, and then if we have to argue a bit about how it works out in particular contexts here and there, I am prepared to allow some flexibility.
Male: Second Timothy 2:15, further exegesis, especially on the latter half of the verse.
Don: Actually, I left out quite a lot of clauses in those verses, but I certainly did leave out that one. I’ll tell you how I understand that last clause. I think it belongs to quite a lengthy nest of verses in the New Testament that make perseverance one of the defining criteria of genuine Christianity. In Hebrews 3:14, for example, “We have been made partakers of Christ if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end.” It’s almost a definition of what’s real.
The same is true, for example, in the parable of the sower. Some seed falls on stony ground, and in Jesus’ own interpretation, that’s ground that has a thin layer of topsoil. The seed germinates the fastest and promises to be the best. These are those who hear the Word and immediately receive it with joy, but afterward when tribulation comes, then.… They don’t count because they don’t endure.
Or read Colossians 1:21–23 or John 8:30–31. “Many put their faith in Jesus. Then Jesus said to those who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, then you are my disciples indeed.’ ” In other words, it seems to me that what that passage is saying is this is the context in which normally women are saved, assuming, of course, they’re persevering in the gospel.
Male: Speak to 1 Corinthians 11 about head coverings being rooted in creation and compare that with the Timothy text which has its explanation grounded in creation.
Don: That’s a very good question. Let me nestle it in a slightly bigger question. Clearly there are many things that are cast in a peculiarly cultural frame of reference in Scripture. “Greet one another with a holy kiss.” I was brought up in Quebec. I can manage that quite nicely, thank you. When I was working with World Evangelical Fellowship, I’d meet Arab Christians. In French Canada it’s two kisses. In the Arab world it’s three usually, and I never remember which side to start on, which is always a bit embarrassing as you get closer.
Along comes J.B. Phillips, and he renders it, “Give a hearty handshake all around.” Am I mandated to kiss? If I do that in Japan, I’m in big trouble. So now the question becomes, it seems to me, is there a theology in the act of kissing or is kissing merely the external manifestation of the theology that is actually being worked out, namely the theology of mutual love, mutual acceptance, part of the family, and so on? Isn’t that really what the theology is?
It’s tied also to how frequently something is brought up, in what context something is brought up, but also whether the act itself has a theology to it or whether it is the external representation of that thing. When you come to head coverings, you don’t have a lot of passages in the New Testament on head coverings, so you always should be a little cautious about how you pontificate in exactly the same way that you have to be a little bit cautious about what baptism for the dead means in 1 Corinthians 15.
Although I know some Christians who really do argue that because the head coverings are themselves tied to creation order and that sort of thing, therefore you have to manifest it this way, I would argue that, strictly speaking, there is no theology of head coverings per se, but the head coverings are the manifestations of the order Paul is trying to wrestle with. If somebody wants to take that another way and has a real conscience about it, God bless you. Go in peace.
I can remember one or two families in Britain I knew quite well. It’s a former generation. I’m thinking of one particular woman who wouldn’t be caught dead in any ecclesial assembly without an appropriate head covering, but there was no doubt who wore the metaphorical trousers in her household. I’m sure she thought she was obeying the letter of the law. I think she missed the point.
Male: The question has to do with the church influencing the state to be a cultural change agent. Speak to that.
Don: A crucial question clearly. At the risk of sounding like a peddler, I do talk about that at some length in my book Christ and Culture Revisited, so if I give you a hopelessly inadequate answer now, go buy the book or borrow it. The best examples people cite historically are often from the Evangelical Awakening, where you do get these people like Wilberforce who actually changed the social face of an entire nation, indeed of the British Empire, in many respects, by the passing of laws.
That’s what Lloyd-Jones was addressing when he said that it was also a period of microcultural change, a lot of people getting converted. With a lot of people getting converted and more and more people seeing the need to do something about the evils around them, and with more and more things being written and produced, more people seeing what the issues were, it was easier eventually to ram these sorts of things through Westminster.
But if you live in a time when there is movement away from the high water of Christian influence in a culture, when many, many people in the larger secular world see Christianity as the bad guy, as the enemy, then often the most you can reasonably hope for is to delay the decay with certain kinds of legislation. In certain small issues you might win some, but that’s often the most you’re really going to get until you get a turnaround in the whole culture.
Moreover, I worry about those who are so concerned to turn around the culture by means of legislation they forget there are other factors. You ram through something with a cleverly built party structure, and what that can do, unless you’re actually convincing the populace at large that it’s a good thing, is invite a reaction at the next election going the other way. I think we’ve just seen some of that.
That’s because you haven’t really changed many hearts. You haven’t really changed many minds. In America, far more people, if push comes to shove, are concerned about how the economy is going than about abortion. It’s the way it is. That’s not new. It has been like that for a long time. There’s a lot of evidence about that. You can get a whole lot of heat going for a moral issue so long as it’s not costing anything.
So somewhere along the line you want to keep saying it is important for Christians to be involved, and we need good legislators and good people in the executive branch and good judges, and we would like a lot of them to be genuine believers who trust Christ and live in the light of the gospel. That’s all true, but never, ever, ever think that by electing the right people or appointing the right people you are on the edge of introducing utopia. That awaits the return of Jesus.
What that does is lower the expectations just a wee bit so that even while you’re trying to do good in culture, you don’t become artificial about what you can think, as if your whole being turns on this and your self-identity and where you put all your energy and your money and your passion and all of that. Be good at it, but understand we wait for the new heaven and the new earth.
We’ve just come through the bloodiest century in human history, 170 million people killed by their government apart from war, and I cannot think of a single reason why the twenty-first century shouldn’t be bloodier. It may not be, but why should we be surprised? Tim Keller likes to say, “For Christians, optimism is naÔve but pessimism is atheistic.”
