Jeremiah Q & A

Listen as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Old Testament studies in this address from The Gospel Coalition sermon library.

Male: We’re going to start off with a few questions about Jeremiah. First of all, on what do Christians place their hope? What bearing does this have on their approach to politics, to personal priorities, and to utopian expectations?

Advertise on TGC

Don Carson: That’s part of the discussion question that you didn’t get because the speaker this morning rabbitted on for such a long time and that part of the proceedings got dissolved. There is always a danger for those of us who try to get involved in our culture in beginning to think that if only we can get the government right or pass the right legislation or put the right people into positions of authority then we will introduce something like utopia.

We actually start having a blame culture, too. If something goes wrong, the first thing you do is hold an inquiry to figure out what person you can heap the blame upon. People should be held accountable. There are things that we can do in society. We should be doing good to all people. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I’m not suggesting that we withdraw from society, but never ever, ever come to the place where you think that if only we can get our politics right, we’ll have utopia. We’ll have the Promised Land. We’ll make everything right. That is the perennial expectation of people who don’t believe the Bible and what the Bible says about the endemic nature of sin.

No matter what system you have in place, we can corrupt it. We can corrupt democracy. We can corrupt oligarchies. We can corrupt dictatorships. We can corrupt it. So that although there are better and worse forms of government and yes we should be interested in justice and al the rest, at the end of the day, one of the things that Jeremiah’s book teaches us is, “Only God finally brings in hope for the consummation.”

Utopia is, literally, ou-topia; that is, no place. It’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen until Christ himself returns at the end of the age. Our obligation is to do good and be good and be faithful but not to think that if we just get our politics in line properly then everything will be light and justice and truth and peace. It just doesn’t happen. Do not put your faith finally in politics.

Male: This is a little bit technical. If you can expand some of the terms in your answer. The LXX version of Jeremiah is significantly shorter than the MT version. What should we take as the final inerrant authoritative Word of God?

Don: MT stands for Masoretic Text and it’s the Hebrew that stands behind our printed English Bibles. The LXX, which is Latin for 70, is the Septuagint, so called, because it was widely believed (though it’s not true) that the early Greek translations of the Old Testament were done by 70 scribes in 70 days.

In any case, the old Greek translation of the Old Testament, which was first written in Hebrew and Aramaic, is often today just referred to as the LXX. The LXX of Jeremiah arranges some things a bit differently. For example, chapters 46–51, which are the oracles to the nations against Moab and Ammon and Nineveh and all of that, they’re actually not there in the LXX.

They’re after about 25:13 and so on. There are other little bits that are moved around. The whole of the LXX is about 8 percent or so shorter than the whole of the text that we have in the Hebrew Bible. People have struggled with that one for a long time and said, “Yeah, well that LXX came from somewhere. It’s translating some kind of manuscript somewhere. So maybe it represents an earlier and original text and the one we’ve got in our Hebrew Bible maybe is later.”

The question here is, “Which one represents as close as we get to the original, the true Word of God?” For many reasons, I opt for the MT, but it’s a difficult question. Most such text-based questions are not really all that difficult. This one is harder. On the other hand, Paul says to the Hebrews, “We’re given the oracles of God.”

When he uses the expression, I think that he is really referring to their heritage in the Canon as originally given, written in Hebrew, written in Aramaic. Where it is possible to test the Masoretic Text (the Masoretic Text is actually a form of the Hebrew that only goes back to about 1000 BC) with discoveries in the Dead Sea Scrolls, 150 years before Christ, the Masoretic Text, the text that we use that comes from about the tenth century AD, is astonishingly close and reliable.

The Jews who actually copied the Hebrew over again and again and again were just very, very, very careful people, much more so than the way many of the New Testament documents were copied. In other words, there’s lots of reason for putting a lot of confidence, it seems to me, in the Hebrew, in the Masoretic Text, whereas the Greek versions of the Old Testament vary between being pretty good and being notoriously sloppy.

In any case, I suspect that this is a notorious case of slop. One suspects that one of the reasons why the LXX is so messy is precisely because the structure of the book of Jeremiah is so difficult. People are saying, “Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s not in chronological order here. We can move some bits around.”

True, it’s not in chronological order, but some writers prefer some topical order sometimes. Let me take you to an example that is safer. Mark’s gospel is regularly in more or less chronological order. But if you look at Matthew, for example, where he parallels Mark in Matthew 8 and 9, he puts together a whole string of miracles that are scattered throughout Mark’s gospel in chronological order.

Matthew dumps them together into one topical array. He has a block of teaching, chapters 5, 6, and 7. Then he has a block of miracles and special signs and so on, chapters 8 and 9. Then he has the block of mission, chapter 10. Matthew, in other words, though he has a broad chronological order, he imposes a certain kind of topical order, and provided you see that that’s the case, you’re not going to be lead astray by it.

Modern writers do the same thing. If you ever read Antonia Fraser’s Cromwell, Our Chief of Men, she follows a chronological order for much of Cromwell’s life. Then you get to the years of the Protectorate, and for five chapters everything is ordered topically. I suspect that somebody didn’t like the topical arrangement, as difficult as it is, of Jeremiah and we get the LXX.

Male: Jeremiah, chapter 33, verses 17–21. How is God’s covenant promise of an everlasting position for the Levitical priesthood fulfilled?

Don: Yes, so many of the promises in the Old Testament that promise something bound up with the old covenant to be unending are fulfilled, it seems to me, precisely in that to which they point. In other words, the fulfillment is not simply in the continuation of the thing itself, but precisely in that to which they point.

The ultimate significance, for example, of Passover.… It’s not like you have Passover, Passover, Passover, Passover. You can’t have it anymore. The temple’s gone. It’s ultimately in that to which it points.… Christ, the ultimate Passover. Thus, the law continues along these lines. The Levitical priesthood does point forward. In one sense, the Levitical priesthood comes to an end.

In fact, today it would be very difficult to have a pure Levitical priesthood, even if you did have a temple in Jerusalem, just as it’s impossible to have someone in David’s line. Down to the time of Jesus, the records were kept as to who was genuinely a Levite and who was genuinely from the tribe of Judah, and who was genuinely in David’s line.

Now there are breaks in the genealogies in Jewish life. If you meet a Jew by the name of Cohen, which means priest in Hebrew, probably he comes from a Levitical line, but on the other hand, it’s pretty hard to prove Levitically. That’s gone, but the continuity of the priesthood is in the ultimate priest to whom Levi points, namely in Christ Jesus.

In other words, I would be prepared to argue at length that already in the Old Testament and very clearly in the New, there is often a typological ordering that means that the continuity of those old structures is precisely in that to which they point, namely Christ and his priesthood in this particular instance.

There’s no problem with that so long as there is textual warrant for grounding it. It’s not just made up, a fairy tale sort of pulled out of the air. That’s why I tried to spend some time on showing how these things do cohere in the Bible. That is, there is reason in the Old Testament itself for seeing that these things point forward and that the form of the old covenant is already announced to be obsolete in the time of David and again in the time of Jeremiah as it points forward to something other than itself.

Male: What was the procedure for Jeremiah to speak on God’s behalf to the people? Did he just stand on the street corner or apply to address the king or undergo a credibility check?

Don: Yes. It looks, on the face of it, as if he did quite a lot of those things. That is, in those days people often spoke in the marketplaces. That was a public forum. In some cases, transparently, he had private interviews with the king. In other instances, clearly once he had written materials, they started to circulate more copies, too.

Clearly, he had to gain some credibility over against other preachers at the time, other prophets who were claiming that they were prophets, because there were prophets saying other kinds of things. What should’ve happened, and didn’t, is that with time as Jeremiah’s prophecies are borne out in reality again and again and again and the other guys, what they’re saying is precisely disproved again and again and again, his credibility should’ve gone up and theirs gone down. But people tend to believe what they want to believe regardless of the evidence.

Male: In session one on Friday night, you spoke on fearing God. What does it mean to fear God? It is difficult to understand this when we often talk of God the Father. Should we do things out of love for God or out of fear?

Don: If by fear you mean something cringing because you have an abusive father and you’ve seen him come drunk just too many times and you’ve grown up learning to fear him, clearly that’s not what’s at stake. On the other hand, it’s not quite adequate simply to speak of the fear of God as respect or reverence or awe. It’s not quite enough.

When my kids were younger, I wanted them to love me and I wanted to love them. On the other hand, if I said to my 18-year-old, “Make sure the car is back by midnight,” when my kids were 18 and the car wasn’t back by midnight, they would face the wrath of Dad. I expected them to fear me because they knew that there were sanctions.

In other words, fear and love are not necessarily mutually antithetical. Fear, where there is the potential for sin and disobedience, in addition to having an element of awe in the whole thing, rightly constrains us to do good. It’s not a bad thing. First John says that perfect love casts out fear.

That’s true. If you perfectly love God with heart and soul and mind and strength, then you’ll never sin, and so then there’s no punishment to fear. That’s true. But until you love God perfectly with heart and soul and mind and strength, then some of the fear is reverence and awe, which will go into eternity, and some of it ought to be fear of God’s justice and punishment, even if it’s only temporal here, because a good father knows how to rebuke an erring child.

That’s not antithetical to God’s fatherly care. It’s precisely part of the very nature of it. A good father knows how to invoke not only trust and love, but also precisely because we children are wayward, a certain amount of the right kind of fear. Not the cringing fear of an abusive parent, but the fear nevertheless of God’s justice. It’s right that we should so fear.

Male: While we’re on the subject of fatherhood, recently you wrote a book about your father. Apart from the fact he was from Carrickfergus, what other good attributes did he have?

Don: Are you sure that being from Carrickfergus is already a good attribute? I’m sure it is too. Absolutely. In fact the very name Carson is so Northern Ireland. The first time I preached in Dublin, which was maybe 25 years ago, I’m sure you’ve heard this little ditty. I spoke to a group of university students in Dublin maybe 25 years ago and some joker came up to me afterwards with an absolutely straight face and said, “Your name is Carson?” I said, “Yes.” He said:

Sir Edward Carson had a cat.

It sat upon a stool.

And every time you pulled its tail,

The cat cried, “No home rule!”

Then he turned around and walked away. I knew where I stood in the hierarchy of things. The book is called Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson. You can sometimes go to a big conference and hear the John Pipers of this world speak. On the one hand, you’re impressed, you’re encouraged, you’re rebuked, you’re brought into the presence of God, you’re grateful for his gifts. If you are another preacher, you might also go away thinking, “I can never do that.”

Let’s be quite frank. Even among preachers, 98 percent, 99 percent, maybe 99.99 percent are not John Pipers. Most of us are quite ordinary blokes. There is a sense in which inevitably we get to know the big guys. They are the people who are at the front of the big conferences and all of that. You thank God for their ministries, but they can also make you feel a little discouraged, too.

Somewhere along the line, it’s important to be encouraged by ordinary blokes, and my father was an ordinary pastor. He worked cross-culturally. He learned French as an adult and planted churches in French-Canada. That’s why I was brought up in French. For him, for most of his life, a big congregation was 30 people.

He lived during the time when Baptist ministers were often put into jail or beaten up. Their kids were beaten up as maudits Protestant, damned Protestants. It’s changed today, but it’s the way it was when I was being brought up. He saw church planting at its hardest and most severe. He saw times of discouragement, faced something close to clinical depression.

Then ultimately, when times close to revival times did come, by that time he was already 62 and another generation was beginning to take over. Then my mother succumbed to Alzheimer’s and for 9 years he looked after her. When she died at the age of 78, he started preaching and teaching again. He lived in some ways …

He never wrote a book, never spoke at a national conference, and was never a big political figure or anything like that. At the same time, he kept this journal, which I have now. The best parts of it I have incorporated, because he was an honest man. He didn’t write it for publication. About 18 months after Mum had gone, by this time Dad was about 80.

He wrote in it, “Lord God, keep me from the sins of old men, the tendency to look backward instead of forward, the temptation to resent younger men coming along. Too quick to turn on the television, the sin of self-pity in my loneliness, too little time set aside for intercessory prayer for my grandchildren. Save me from the sins of old.” He was not among the giants, but don’t you understand there are just ordinary pastors who encourage ordinary pastors too. That’s the aim. It’s meant to be an encouragement to other ordinary pastors.

Male: We’ve spoken a lot this weekend about judgment on a national level for Israel, Babylon, Syria, and Judah. To what degree can that be applied to an individual for repeated negligence to the repentance of sin in their hearts? To what extent will that judgment come to individuals or blessing be withheld?

Don: Transparently, there is some sort of crossover. It is nevertheless important to recognize that Christians this side of the consummation will continue to sin. That doesn’t mean we should ever get used to it or make an excuse for it, but this side of the consummation, that’s what will happen.

So when John the apostle writes to Christians, to believers, not to outsiders, not to unbelievers, not to people who haven’t yet become Christians.… When he says, “If we say that we have not sinned, if we say that we do not sin, we’re kidding ourselves. We’re making God out to be a liar,” he’s saying that we do sin.

Thus in the Bible, we face the tension between yes, having sins forgiven and having the gift of the Spirit to enable us in very substantial measure not to sin, but still succumbing in all kinds of ways and then being ashamed of it and going back to the cross all over again. Because we live in this tension and will live in this tension until the new heaven and the new earth, then God, precisely because he is a good heavenly Father, he does chasten us as a good heavenly Father does with temporal judgments of one sort or another. Yeah, he does. He does.

That’s a bit different from the kind of massive apostasy that simply turns its back on God. A Demas, who has forsaken him, having loved this present evil world. Or a Judas, who is numbered with the apostles even, but then opts to turn away entirely. At that point, you have a closer parallel to what is happening to Judah, just wiped out as a nation as Judas Iscariot is wiped out from any further association with Christ.

“It would’ve been better for him,” Jesus says, “if he had never been born.” One must not talk oneself into perpetual discouragement and despair precisely because one continues to sin as a Christian. One should never, ever get used to it. Every sin that we commit is always without excuse.

Yet God’s word is sufficiently realistic that it also says, “Nevertheless, this is what’s going to happen.” Our only solution is to go back to the cross again and again and again until the consummation. I like the lines of John Newton, who was a slave trader. He estimates that he transported 20,000 slaves across the Atlantic. Then he was converted.

He wrote, at one point, in his journals, “I am not what I want to be. I am not what I ought to be. I am not what I one day will be, but I am not what I was. By the grace of God, I am what I am.” So we live in that kind of tension: waiting for the consummation but still aware of the grace that has brought us this far. That is qualitatively different from the kind of rebellion anarchy apostasy of a Judas Iscariot or a Demas or something like that where you find the closest parallel to the destruction of the entire nation.

Male: In Job, Job questions God as to why he is suffering and is soundly rebuked by God with a response along the lines of, “Were you there when I created the world?” However in the Psalms, we see the psalmist questioning God. Is there a place where it is right for us to question God?

Don: It’s important to remember that even in Job, although he is rebuked finally because in his questioning, he begins to stand in judgment of God, God commends Job for the general tack that he takes over against the tack of the so-called miserable comforters. The miserable comforters have their theology all tapped, but at the end of the day, they’ve got no place for innocent suffering. Eventually Job, at the end of the account, has to pray for them because they’re the ones that are really wrong, whereas God still refers to Job as his righteous servant.

Although Job does need to be rebuked in measure because in his questioning of God he’s beginning to sound as if God’s got it wrong and only Job is right. He’s beginning to head there. Nevertheless, he’s got more place for affirming God’s justice and God’s sovereignty and God’s mystery than these miserable comforters with their nice little theological categories that finally don’t explain anything and are completely lacking in compassion.

So Job is not finally rebuked for questioning God anymore than the psalmists are rebuked for questioning God. The rebuke comes only when the questioning becomes disrespectful, when it begins to question God’s justice. To say that we don’t understand when we hurt and when we cry out, that’s within the range of the experiences of a Habakkuk or a Job or whatever.

Yet I would also say that one of the reasons why God has given us the book of Job, one of the reasons why God has given us the experiences of Jeremiah, one of the reasons why God has given us the book of Habakkuk, one of the reasons why God has given us these psalms where people do question God is not simply to say, “So if these blokes can question God, you can too. Go ahead.”

One of the reasons why a book like Job is given to us is precisely so that we will hear God’s responses to Job and not have to question God in quite the way that Job does. In other words, we should learn from these people. Not just learn that people do questions God, that’s transparently obvious, but also to learn some lessons.

We live, moreover, this side of the cross so that when you face your hardest, deepest, darkest questions about suffering and evil, even when we don’t understand, even when we plead the mystery of God, even we know that he alone has made the hippopotamus and we haven’t, we also can go one stage farther and say, “But the final demonstration of God’s love for us, even in the midst of all the uncertainties, is a little hill outside Jerusalem.”

We go back to the cross again and again and again. How can anyone finally doubt the love of God, even in the midst of the mysteries of suffering and evil, when he stands beside the cross? In other words, it seems to me that a right study of Job and other similar books and of the cross, and so on, is to give us a kind of prophylactic, a kind of preventative medicine before we hit the evil day of suffering so that when the evil day of suffering does come, we’re a little more stable, a little more able to handle it than would be the case if we’ve never thought deeply about these things before we get kicked in the teeth.

Sooner or later, if you live long enough, you will suffer. If you live long enough, you’ll be bereaved. The only alternative to that is to be grieving somebody else. You don’t live long enough. In this fallen world, sooner or later you will get kicked in the teeth. Part of the reason why the Word of God is given to us is to put in our minds and hearts all the allegiances and understanding and loyalties to Christ and recognition of our limitations so that before the evil day comes, you already have a whole lot of biblical theological structures in your head.

Otherwise, when the evil day comes, you not only face the suffering from the cancer or from the bereavement, but you also face the suffering of wondering where God is. Otherwise, if those things really are well and truly in your mind when you face those things, you find that you have the biblical, theological, and spiritual resources to carry you through it a lot more supplely than would otherwise be the case.

Male: Could you comment on this generational aspect of sin and judgment, how in Jeremiah’s day there was some idea of the sins of the forefathers being visited on the children and if that takes place today?

Don: There’s a sense in which it does and a sense in which it doesn’t. The sense in which it does is that sin is social. It’s the sort of thing you find, likewise, even in the Ten Commandments. God remembering wrath to the third and fourth generation of “those who hate me and despitefully use me.” Sin is social. Sin is never private.

Even in a really private sort of sin, like pornography, it is so affecting your relationships with other people that ultimately it affects your family and your spouse and your children. Something gets transmitted on to another generation. How about bitterness? That affects other people. Lust, pride, arrogance, unbelief. All of those things get passed on to another generation.

Sin is social. It’s why there are innocent victims to sin as well as perpetrators of sin. Some people are abused by other sinners, whether in a military sense or in an abusive home or in bad relationships. Sin is social. That can affect other sinners who then affect other sinners who then affect.… Do you see? That’s what happens.

Because of that, one of the things that ought to take place when people are genuinely converted and restored is that you’re supposed to be building up Christian homes and Christian families. That doesn’t guarantee that everybody in the family will be a Christian, but it does build up social structures and relationships of godliness and God centeredness and godly fear and this sort of thing that, even looked at statistically, far numbers of those people will be brought up in a faithful, steady way and so on.

Now of course God can reach down into the most awful social situation and save people. Sometimes kids brought up in a really godly home in a good environment nevertheless choose to go off the trail. There is no automatic connection. It’s not a kind of ruthless determinism. Nevertheless, God has put us into social relationships and into families, and these things continue.

All of that is a bit different from recognizing that the old covenant was itself a distinctively tribal social covenant. It was bound up with families and representatives, kings, priests and so on, who stood in for the people and had a certain kind of special mediating relationship with God, and when they went off the skids then the whole system broke down.

There were entailments for the clan, for the tribe, for the nation. Whereas by contrast, there is more individualism under the new covenant such that for example, Jesus can say, “If anyone loves his father, mother, sister, brother more than me, he’s not worthy of me.” There can be a breach in family this way because people are drawn out and called to be faithful to God even in the midst of that new covenant structure that God has imposed.

Male: In personal devotions, what applications should I be making when reading oracles of destruction against the nations?

Don: Well in one sense that belongs to a larger question of, “How do you read the Bible in such a way that it speaks to you in your own quiet time and quiet life?” The wrong way to do it is to look for a blessed thought. (A verse a day keeps the Devil away.) Some people read through their Bibles just skimming along until they can find a phrase or a clause they can meditate on, sort of the blessed thought for the day.

Then there are some parts of the Bible which seem to be a little less fruitful in producing blessed thoughts as they’re talking about the number of acres or hectares that belong to the tribe of Benjamin or endless genealogies or something until you stumble across some verse in the midst of the genealogy that says, “So and so who went down to a pit on a snowy day and slew a lion.” Deep, deep. Then you go on to the next.

That’s not the way forward. Even in the midst of all of these judgments on the nations, looking for some little phrase you can meditate on and feel blessed by. Rather, it is important to see such texts in the sweep of what the book is about, what’s being argued. There are many things that fall out of that.

One of them is, “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” God holds the nations to account. Is there any empire that exists for all that long? The thousand-year Reich lasted for 12 years. The British Empire lasted a little longer. But all nations crumble. I don’t care whether you’re talking about the ancient Hittites or the power of America today.

The end of the day, God holds all nations to account, every single one of them. They might not all be held to the covenantal standards of ancient Israel, but “Righteousness exalts a nation; sin is a reproach to any people.” And, “Justice will be done and will be seen to be done.” It behooves us to look at world politics a little differently from other people who look at world politics.

“To whom much is given, from them also shall much be required.” That’s another deep-seated biblical principle. Within that sort of framework, we are obligated to look at history and the rise and fall of nations under the hand of a God of whom Isaiah says that, “The nations to him, the empires to him, are nothing but the fine dust of the balance.” That is, they’re so small in comparison with him.

He can move them around, raise them up, and put them down. We don’t fear international struggles the way others do. We still commit ourselves and the nations to the grace of God. We still remember to pray for our leaders, which we are commanded to do. We still recognize that God’s justice prevails.

In other words, the devotional value, it seems to me, of chapters 46–51 is not that we read of the destruction of Moab and go away and say, “Now the direct application to me is …” It’s just too individualistic. On the other hand, if it reinforces us in our recognition that God is sovereign and he’s over the nations, there’s a sense in which we read our newspapers and watch BBC and recognize, “He who sits on the throne in the heaven shall laugh. The Lord shall have them in derision. He raises up empires and he puts them down.”

We look at things with different eyes, and the cash value of such reflection is to cry out, “Also, even so, come, Lord Jesus,” because we would like to see justice done and seen to be done at the end. We look forward to the time when, “The kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ and he will reign forever,” to use the language of the Apocalypse.

In other words, the cash value is to put this in the context, not only of Jeremiah, but of the whole Canon and the purposes of God so that our thinking is conformed to Christ rather than simply looking for an immediate individualistic personal application. “What does this mean about whether I should take this job, or something?” It’s not the way the Bible works.

Male: Something you’ve just alluded to in that answer, it does seem that Europe as a continent is rebelling against God. As Christians, sometimes in isolated parts of the country, how do we respond?

Don: The first way to respond always is to pray for the part of the world in which you live and the sector, the continent in which you live. Also, to evangelize. Europe is sliding in all kinds of ways. On the other hand, sometimes God brings in reformation and revival precisely when the hours are most dark, too.

I don’t want to predict whether or not Europe will slide into a new dark age or will become a center of reformation and revival. God has done it in the past. He could do it again, too. Who knows? I don’t. So meanwhile we remember that Christ says, “I will build my church and the gates of hell should not prevail against it.” We witness faithfully.

We try to think strategically, to plant churches, to promote the interest of Christ faithfully, courteously, to care for men and women regardless of their background, and to be on the forefront of doing good while still being gospel-centered in everything we say and do. That’s what we do. Who knows what God will do with all of that? I don’t know. He may surprise us in all kinds of ways. He may surprise us.

Male: Who are the false prophets in our day? I never heard any mention of them during this weekend. They cause a lot of damage to God’s people and are misleading them today.

Don: Well, in fact I have alluded to quite a lot of false prophets. I’ve talked about Islam. I’ve talked about health, wealth, and prosperity gospel. I’ve talked about people who don’t listen to the Word of God or obey it. People who forget the heritage of the gospel that they have received and so on.

If you mean that the only faithful preaching is that which names them, “What do you think of Joel Osteen?” Or whatever. You put in any name you like. Then I would remind you that Jeremiah himself doesn’t go naming a whole lot of false prophets. It’s more important to be discerning about the movements and the tendencies than simply to attach names.

Now in certain, particular local circumstances, then local pastors often do have to attach names to what is going on in their particular patch. On the other hand, there is also a kind of desire to be faithful that spends almost all of its time and energy denouncing all the things that are judged to be false. Some of that has to be done. Paul can actually name false teachers.

“I have handed over Alexander and Hymenaeus to Satan that they might learn not to sin.” Yeah, yeah, it does have to be done in the right context, in the right local situation and so on. Discernment is learned in part by thinking through the peculiar teachings of particular people. I wouldn’t want, at any time, your own assessment of fidelity to turn on how many people you’ve denounced in a particular sermon.

You’ve just got to be careful of that, too. Because if a person develops that particular habit, then eventually they’re in danger of becoming the perennially angry young man, sort of thing. Their fidelity is measured by how many people they rebuke. Then there is a danger of falling into the sins of arrogance, of misdiscernment, and of a new form of legalism.

We’re caught between the two: how to be faithful to the Word of God but how not ultimately to become merely demeaning and judgmental. In particular context where I’m dealing with particular issue, I’m more than happy to take on particular “false prophets.” It’s one of the reasons why I write lengthy 6-, 8-, 10-page book reviews, four, six, eight of them a year from various perspectives and see them published on the net all over the place.

It’s one of the things that you have to do. You also have to do it in such a way that you’re not simply becoming one arrogant character who’s constantly projecting an image of being intrinsically superior. Somewhere along the line, you still have to do it with a certain kind of contrition and humility. Within that framework, if I had more time, I’m happy to talk about various dangerous philosophies that are leading us off the track. Partly I was constrained by the priorities of Jeremiah.

Male: Hannah prayed for a child. Was this not just like using God as a good luck charm or an Aladdin and the lamp scenario?

Don: There is a way of approaching God so that you simply want God to give you your wish. With Aladdin, the genie is very powerful, thank you very much, and he can give you anything you want, but ultimately the real god is whoever holds the lamp. Whoever holds the lamp and rubs it, then tells the genie what to do.

There are people who try to approach God that way. God is simply the supplier of what we want and if we want it badly enough and we go to him desperately enough then he’s the genie and we rub the lamp. On the other hand, it does not follow, therefore, that we do not have the right, the invitation to cast all our cares upon God. Isn’t that what Peter says?

“Cast all your cares upon God for he cares for you.” If Hannah is concerned that she’s childless, then it would be disobeying Scripture if she didn’t cast this care upon the Lord, recognizing that at the end of the day, he is perfectly capable of answering such a prayer. Or you have cancer. It’s right to ask that the Lord will heal you. He may, he may, he may not.

It’s not grounded in the sure promises of God that among the things that he will certainly do now he will certainly cure all of us from any disease in our resurrection bodies in the last day, but there’s no guarantee that he will provide all of this now. There is nothing intrinsically evil or merely manipulative about taking our requests before the Lord provided it is within the framework and context of a relationship with God that wants his way, that wants his authority, that is satisfied with his wisdom, that wants his glory.

Within that framework, then we ought to be casting our cares upon him. At that point, instead of whoever is holding the lamp being god, it’s (to push the analogy) Aladdin himself who is the god. It’s the god who can do things that is the center. In other words, Hannah is not being manipulative if this is a heart cry offered up before God in the context of a relationship of a covenant child who is beseeching God to look after her and pouring out her own heart needs in request before the Lord.

It’s right. If on the other hand, this is the only time she ever prays to God and the only thing she wants from God and it is not within a framework and relationship in which she trusts God regardless of the outcome, then at some point there is something nasty and cheap about her request. Obviously God, judging by his response, thought it was a wonderful request and gives it to her, too. In other words, this sort of question can only be worked out within a much larger framework of the entire relationship of the individual, in this case Hannah and God.

Male: Could you summarize what the emerging church actually is just so I don’t have to read the book?

Don: Cheapskate. In brief, it is a category invented about 1993 by two guys who have now gone in opposite directions to talk about the need for a church that responds to what they then called an emerging culture. As the culture changes and is emerging in new ways, so we need a new emerging church.

It became such an “in” word that eventually was applied to almost everything. Some of the people in this tradition now speak of emerging friendship and emerging theories of the atonement and emerging preaching and emerging hospitality. If they like it, it’s emerging. If they don’t, it’s traditional. “That’s traditional preaching. We do emerging preaching.” It becomes sort of a bless word after a while as opposed to a curse word, which is traditional.

The movement itself is so incredibly diverse that it’s hard to be fair to it in one session. Insofar as the movement is missional (now that word was invented by a friend of mine, and that’s now come to mean a whole lot of other things), is concerned with the mission of the church, in some sense, an outreach to people who do belong to a shifting culture, I kind of have a lot of problems with it. It is right that we have to read our times.

Paul does not speak, for example, to the pagan Athenians in exactly the same way as he speaks to synagogue people in Acts 13. On the other hand, for some people being emerging means that you do things exactly the same way you’ve always done them plus you add a few more candles and have a little journaling center off on one side and make sure that you don’t wear a tie when you’re speaking and you prefer to sit around in chairs rather than in pews.

That’s what emerging means. For other people, emerging actually means a kind of theology that is very akin to 1920s liberalism. It’s all called emerging. It’s really extraordinarily difficult to answer this question without writing a book or something.

Male: What is an evangelical?

Don: In 25 words or less. The question actually is a very good one. There’s a conference run by ELF, European Leadership Forum, that I go and speak at about every 3 years. The last few years, it’s usually been held in Hungary. About a year and half ago when I was last there, I ran a 3-hour seminar just on that one question, “What is an evangelical?” It’s on the website for ELF, so you can download that stuff and get 3 hours worth. It’s almost worse than a book. Because the issue is complex.

Let me just say this. There are some people who try to define evangelicalism in social science categories. So evangelicals are those people who call themselves evangelicals. What you do is you go around the country or the world or whatever your patch is and you find out all the people who call themselves evangelicals and find out what they believe and how they live and so on. That’s an evangelical.

What you discover is the category is so broad that it’s immensely wide open in theology and practice and so on. Someone like David Bebbington has then come up with a certain kind of four-point grid to define who evangelicals are. It is a hopelessly inadequate grid. I could give you the reasons for it, but it really doesn’t work very well.

On the other hand, if you start throwing in narrow historical roots, not just social science roots, but, “Where do evangelicals come from? What has dominated them?” then you get a slightly different matrix. If you throw in a biblical framework, evangelicals are people who, first and foremost, uphold the evangel. Evangel is simply a synonym for gospel. It’s another way of saying gospel.

Then they’re gospel-based people, and now you’re asking theological questions, “What is the gospel?” which is one of the reasons why I’m going to be speaking on that at Glen Abbey tonight. You have to keep going to those basics. As a result, historically and theologically the best definitions of evangelical that I am aware of (and there’s a vast literature on this) turn on what is called a formal principle and a material principle.

The formal principle is, “What is the principle of authority that answers the question?” That is the finality of Scripture. What is the material principle? That is, “What is your understanding of the gospel itself?” Evangelicals, therefore, are those who hold to a certain formal principle and a certain material principle of what the evangel is.

That means that there are some people who are evangelicals who don’t call themselves that. For example, there are some conservative confessional Lutherans who just call themselves Lutherans. They don’t like to call themselves evangelicals because that associates them with a whole lot of American kooks that they don’t like. So they’re Lutherans.

But if you operate with the grid of the formal and material principle then, in fact, they’re evangelicals. There are all kinds of people who call themselves evangelicals who would fail the formal and material principle and shouldn’t be called evangelicals at all by the social science definitions.

In other words, the label is becoming so sloppy that some people just refuse to use it or they add adjectives in front. “Are you an evangelical?” “Well I’m a confessional evangelical.” Good, what does that mean? That’s another word we have to define. You realize that one of the Devil’s tricks, in any case, is to keep redefining terms so that it makes it harder and harder and harder to communicate.

What we’re really saying is we’re coming back to the authority of the Bible and to the centrality of the gospel as defined in the Bible. That means that evangelicals at their best are simply biblical Christians in a long history that goes back to different denominations and labels all the way back to the early church. You don’t look for the particular denominational or cultural label. You look for fidelity to the Bible and a deep understanding of the gospel itself. That’s what you look for. But you can have it in three hours if you prefer.

Male: In terms of gospel work, what does it mean to say, “The medium is the message.” Do you agree with this and how does it affect our evangelism?

Don: Yeah, that expression was first coined by actually a Canadian philosopher in media studies called Marshall McLuhan, who’s long since gone to his reward. That was one of his slogans, “The medium is the message.” What he was really saying (he was talking about TV, especially) was that the medium itself becomes so powerful that it not only shapes the message, it somehow takes over the message, it subverts it, it becomes the message in itself.

You can see how this works if you have something that is purely oral and verbal in presentation as compared to a book. For example, The Lord of the Rings. First you read the book and then you go and see the three films. What do the three films do to the book? At what point does the fact that it’s a video production actually take over? For people who are brought up in a video age, they might actually prefer the video.

But for people who are really good readers, even where the films are good, and I think the first film is very good. The third one isn’t bad. The second one’s a bit of a disaster in terms of allegiance to the book. Yet there is something for good readers that finds the film at least a bit minimizing. It fires the imagination, but now it’s locked you into too narrow a grid. The imagination itself can’t roam quite as free.

Apocalyptic literature in the book of Revelation is the sort of literature that you could not possibly put into a film faithfully. You could not do it, because apocalyptic literature likes to use mixed metaphors and mutually contradictory metaphors to get something across. So that in the vision, for example, of Revelation 5, Jesus has announced, “Look, the Lion of the tribe of Judah. He has prevailed to open the scroll.”

“So I looked,” John says, “and I saw a Lamb.” In the vision, you don’t have two animals parked side by side, one lion and one lamb. In the vision, the language means that the lion is the lamb. So now you put that in film. You’re going to have sort of a half-lion, half-lamb? It’s going to be bizarre. Then after you’ve got this lamb, it’s a slaughtered lamb, a sacrificial lamb.

Then we’re told it has seven horns on its head because it has the perfection of all kingly authority. You ever seen a lamb with seven horns? That’s bizarre. Elsewhere, it has the face of one like a burning noonday sun with a sword coming out of his mouth. Now incorporate that into the vision. It’s bizarre. You can’t do it.

There are certain kinds of text, of vision, of reality that are well done in a certain genre of literature and if, instead, you now transmute it to another medium, the medium itself becomes the message and has stripped something of the power of the apocalyptic. Do you see what I’m saying?

So that means Christians are inevitably required to ask, as more and more media come along to enable us to communicate, “What is good about using iPods to circulate the gospel and what is not good? What is good about reading sermon notes on your computer screen versus hearing them in an open hall?” Those questions have to be asked.

If we simply fly into every new medium without consideration of the impact of the medium on our lives, we may forget that in some ways the media actually begin to control us for good and ill. Even at a very superficial level, something like the Internet today is a wonderful medium for securing information. It’s a pretty awful medium, as far as I can see, for holding discussions.

Because every ignorant opinion has the same value as every other opinion. People hide behind their computers and say things that they would never say face to face, scurrilous things, ignorant things. The same medium that provides wonderful and instantaneous access to information, for which I am so grateful, is also the medium that has made porn so readily accessible.

Do you realize in North America (I’m sure the same statistics apply here) there is more money spent on porn every year in North American than on cigarettes, hard liquor, hard drugs, and all forms of alcohol, including beer, combined? What’s that doing to our families? It’s not the medium itself, but the medium has made this sort of thing possible, for there is a certain privacy to this medium that makes certain kinds of things possible, and suddenly the medium itself has taken over things and given us almost a statutory right to be private.

The medium becomes the message itself. These are things that Christians need to be thinking about a great deal as we try to figure out how best to promote the gospel and articulate Christ. To give a whole theology of this, I would still want to elevate the Word to a primary place. That’s a slightly different discussion.

Male: One last question. Is it right to say, “Allah is not God,” in English since the Arabic word for God is Allah? If a Muslim is converted, is it right for him to still call on Allah?

Dr. Carson: The question is not just a linguistic one. It’s one of the reasons why it becomes so very, very difficult. Even Christians with many, many years of working amongst Muslims divide over this one. I would say that there’s no problem with it, provided this converted Christian now has been given such a redefinition of God that what he or she means by Allah is, in fact, shaped by the biblical revelation.

The problem is not the word. The problem is if the person has a merely superficial connection with the gospel and has made some sort of profession of faith, but his or her entire thinking is bound up with previous understanding of what kind of deity is referred to by the word Allah. Then it might in fact become confusing. For Allah is not so much to be loved.

Muslims don’t speak of knowing Allah. You are obedient to Allah. You bow to Allah’s will. Allah is the all-merciful, but not loving in a personal sense, certainly is not triune, and certainly hasn’t sent his son to die on the cross on our behalf out of deep compassion, bearing our sin in his own body on the tree. The whole notion of merit theology that is bound up with Islam is bound up with the whole notion of Allah. Suddenly the word itself may be carrying a whole lot of baggage.

The issue is a lot more than merely a linguistic one. It’s much more complicated than that. So when people say, “Well, it’s a monotheistic religion. We’re a monotheistic religion. We all serve the same God. One person calls him God, another person calls him Allah.” What I want to say is, “Somebody is talking rubbish because they haven’t understood the freight, the theological and visionary freight, that’s bound up with any reference to deity.” It is simply a sloppy thought, I’m afraid.