Navigating Vocation and Ministry: A Panel Discussion Led by D. A. Carson (Part 2)

This panel discussion hosted by D.A. Carson focuses on how God directs individuals towards their vocations in ministry, featuring insights from Michael Horton among others. The discussion covers the speakers’ personal journeys into theological careers, their views on pastoral ministry, and the importance of being responsive to God’s guidance rather than strictly planning one’s life path.

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Ryan Kelly: How about this? Let’s start by each of you giving us something of just the headlines of how God in his providence has directed you to where you are in ministry. In other words, you are professors who write books and speak to churches, societies, and conferences like this and others. Why that and not pastoring, per se, or lawyering or carpentry? Can you just give us some headlines: not just the degrees (we know about that) but how God directed your steps to get to where you are?

Michael Horton: Well, let’s see. I thought that I would probably be a pastor and maybe teach in seminary on the side. I planted two churches with my good friend Kim Riddlebarger. He is the pastor of the second church that we planted together. Then I began to impersonate a professor at Westminster Seminary California. I stayed there; remarkably, they kept me there. It’s been 10 years.

We were just talking about this at lunch: how the kind of camaraderie you’re looking for in a seminary of colleagues is people who have to be dragged out of pastoral ministry and still see themselves as involved in pastoral ministry. We all have to be ordained by the church and appointed by the church to our call as a professor, and we are accountable to the church. So I still feel like I’m in pastoral ministry as an associate pastor, also, of a church.

Don Carson: Well, I like carpentry. I could have gone another way! Though I’m quite legalistic about how I do my carpentry. Will I be wasting time if I insert a 45-second story? When my son was about 15 (so it was quite some time ago).… He’s a violinist, but he’s always had the ability to pick up virtually any instrument and in a few hours is already making reasonable music out of it, even though violin is what he studied for many years.

Somewhere along the line, he picked up an Irish pennywhistle, got a book on it, got some videos, and pretty soon, he was really doing jig stuff. It was really quite impressive, you know? He came to me one day and said, “Dad, I’d like you to make me a box for this pennywhistle.” I said, “Nicholas, that’s seven bucks. I could buy you a crate of those things for less than it would be to make a really decent one. You don’t need me to make one.”

“Yeah, but it would be cool!” What dad can resist that? So I bought a piece of walnut, routed out the inside, and shaped it for this pennywhistle. I inlaid velvet and a hidden piano spring at the back. I inlaid magnets. I put a solid bronze latch on it and an inlaid bronze plate with his name on it: Nicholas Carson. I put this into a high-gloss, polished, waxed box and gave it to him.

When I gave it to him, I told him it was his anti-gospel box. He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, with the gospel, the treasure is on the inside, and outside we are just pots of clay. This is the reverse.” He’s a Marine and has served in Afghanistan and Iraq and so on, and he has always brought his anti-gospel box with him. So you see, there’s a place for woodwork somewhere.

In fact, my first degree was in chemistry and mathematics, and I had no intention of going into the ministry. I was heading for a PhD in organic synthesis at Cornell when the Lord got me in another direction. The story of how the Lord got me in that direction is too long; it would take up too much time.

When students come to me today and say, “Tell us how you got here. How did you plan out your life?” I just burst out laughing: “I didn’t!” Almost every one of the big turning points, the Lord dumped me into. I did not have a big strategic plan. It’s important to try to think strategically in the small-term, but I was in church planting (in French and English) in Canada and was planning on being a pastor. Then I was dumped into doing some teaching.

Eventually, I was dared, almost, while I was relatively young and single, to go and do a PhD. So I applied to Manchester. How I landed up in Cambridge instead was another surprise from God. All along, I had no intention of coming south of the 49th parallel. How I ended up at Trinity was another surprise from God.

At every point, what you really have to say is, “Hitherto the Lord has helped us. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Try to be responsible where you are and to ask how best you can serve, but don’t plan too much on a 60-year strategy. I think, “He who sits in the heavens laughs: the Lord should have them in derision.”

Ryan: Mike, is that your experience as well, that it doesn’t feel like you’ve even made the choices, almost, but that they just drop in front of you?

Mike: Yes, I think that since I was a little kid, I’ve always known that I wanted to be in some sort of ministry. I didn’t have as many twists and turns. It wasn’t because I’d done the 60-year plan but because I just didn’t have any talents. That’s just all I ever knew that I wanted to do. It’s all I read. It’s all I really thought about and talked about as a kid. That’s just all I ever wanted to do. But I never did feel like I was choosing it. I was, but because God had chosen it for me. It’s still the same feeling: that it wasn’t something that I just picked up.

Don: You heard it from Mike. If you don’t have any gifts, then become a theologian.

Michael: Why do you think the church is in the state it’s in?

Ryan: Is a lesson from this for young people to do the next thing instead of obsessing about the future? Just do the next thing. It relates to something that I think you said, Dr. Carson, yesterday to our staff, about the need for young men to be mature and grow up these days and work hard.

Don: To be men, work hard, do what you’re doing, do it well, and make decisions instead of just waiting and looking over your shoulder for the next superior woman, next superior job, or next superior something to come along. You steer a ship that’s underway; you don’t steer a ship that’s just parked in port. You have to have some leeway before it steers.

Even the Macedonian call. Do you remember where Paul was when he received the Macedonian call? He was in Troas. That shows he was already heading for Europe. He tried to get into Bithynia, but the Lord said, “No, no, no.” So he was heading for Troas. He was heading for Europe. If you go to Troas, there’s no place else to go but Europe! Then he received the call as a confirmation, rather than a brand-new sense of direction.

Think big, and certainly ask yourself how you can best serve. That might mean vocational ministry, and not just when you’re 25. Maybe you’re taking early retirement at 55. What gives you the right to be retired and spent the rest of the next 30 years of productive living wandering around the countryside visiting grandchildren and nothing more?

Get off your duff and do something really useful. That might mean vocational ministry. There are lots of things to be done out there. So think ahead in that sense. Plan. Be responsible. Figure out how to serve. But don’t worry about the fine points of which institution you’ll be teaching in someday. It doesn’t work like that.

Ryan: Here’s another personal question. Can you guys tell us what a typical day in the life of D.A. Carson or Michael Horton looks like? In addition to that, or as part of it, can you describe your reading habits?

Michael: I really want you to go first, Don.

Don: Wait, you want to follow me?

Michael: No! I want to go first. That’s right. I want to go first. Thanks, Ryan! Well, you can imagine with the triplet situation, the day’s schedule has sort of shifted around just a tad. I got in the habit of doing this, and now I can’t get out: I get up at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning and start writing if I’m on a project. Then I just go into various health issues at about 4:00 in the afternoon. I sort of collapse, have a cup of coffee, and try and make it until about 9:00 when I hit the sack.

My wife is amazing about giving me space to do a lot of this, even in my backyard with the kids running around. I’ve become used to that. I had a wonderful piece of advice from the late Robert Preus, who, along with his brother, really brought the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod from the brink of liberalism into the bulwark of orthodoxy on Scripture. That’s what the issue was over.

We were friends for years. He was on our board, and one thing that Robert Preus helped me on was this: I said, “How is it that you have nine children, all of whom are either missionaries or pastors or married to ministers?” Not that that’s the superior vocation. “How does somebody like you, who wrote so many books and did so much really grueling research, do all of that … oh, and save a denomination … with nine kids who still love the Lord?”

He said, “They crawled up in my lap while I was typing, and whenever they asked a question, I stopped what I was doing and explained it. Sometimes, I told them, ‘Daddy has to work,’ but it was their study, not just Dad’s study. They just grew up into that.” That just sort of changed my life thinking about kids. That was a long story. Sorry. It’s basically in and out during a day. It’s not a whole block of the day, but in and out of the day between these other things.

Ryan: Is the majority of your writing done at home?

Michael: Yes, the majority of my writing is done at home. I do the research at my office, and that’s when I get a block of the writing done.

Don: Do I have a typical day? The answer is no. Like Michael, I wear three or four hats. Two years out of three, I teach a more or less normal load at Trinity, but the third year, I don’t teach a normal load. I maintain my PhD students and have some other responsibilities, but on that third year, I could be on the road a little bit more.

I’m on one of those this year. This year I’m racking up something like 150,000 air miles, whereas most years, it’s closer to 100,000. We’re a big enough school that even when you’re teaching, you can be away for a bit and others will cover for you, and you cover for them too. It’s hard to speak of regular days when there is so much coming and going and that sort of thing.

I think, also, what Michael hinted at … he’s at the young end of it, and I’m at the other end … is that there are seasons of life. What you do with preschool kids is not quite the same availability you need for teenage kids. In case there are any young parents here who think that parenting stops when they turn 18, it doesn’t. That means another kind of availability and set of questions.

My daughter, who is in graduate school, sent me one of her papers a couple of nights ago, and said, “Dad, would you like to comment on this?” Well, everything stopped so I could help her with a deadline. I’m grateful that she still wants to talk to her dad and find out what he thinks. But that’s not that same as when they’re really young.

All along, when the kids were small and teenage and the whole lot, we tried to preserve the evening meal on our schedule. For some families, it’s another time of day. My wife, bless her heart, would always have the evening meal … unless there was a hurricane that hit or something … in the dining room with candles, proper cutlery, crockery, and the whole bit. It was serious, sit-down, and relaxed. So that’s when the kids’ stories came out from school. That’s when we had our family devotions. That’s when we had our endless laughter.

Inevitably, there were a couple of years when the kids were wondering if they wanted to be there, but our stance was, “This is family. As long as you’re under this roof, this is what you do. We’ll argue about it when you’re 25.” Eventually, it came to be, for them too (they would tell you that), their happiest memories. You have to preserve some time where there is interaction.

Likewise, in family devotions.… Nicholas went through a stage when he was questioning everything. We’d read through the passage and he would say, “Dad, God sure seems like a bit of a bully in that passage, doesn’t he?” You could just see him trying to get a rise. Then you have several options. “Don’t talk like that! Do you want lightning on your head?” Or does it kick off a discussion? You need to make some long-term decisions about availability and so on.

As a rule, with respect to family, the worst Christian family to grow up in is one where there are high spiritual pretensions and low spiritual performance. The best kind of family to grow up in is one where there are few spiritual pretensions and high spiritual performance. That’s the family I grew up in.

My dad went to his grave convinced that his children loved God better than he did, which was unmitigated balderdash, but any man who thinks that is less likely to alienate his children. I wish I could be as faithful with respect to my children as my parents were with respect to us.

When you start talking about schedule, those things change with stages of life. When I was a young man, I survived happily on four to five hours of sleep a night and did the kind of thing Michael is talking about. On the other hand, for one four-year gap when I had sarcoidosis I was sleeping 12 hours a night. So it’s gone up and down over the years with various illnesses.

My wife had serious cancer and a double mastectomy. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and we almost lost her. For a whole year, I canceled everything and just looked after her. What do you do with your writing and preaching schedules then? First things first. Those things come and go; they change with time. You just have to be sure you’re not so rigid in your use of scheduling that at the end of the day you just become another form of legalist.

You have to recognize that there are different strengths and different weaknesses. Some people are just more capable of high-energy work and some are not. You have to know who you are. If you are the sort of person that needs eight hours of sleep at night in order not to be grumpy, it is morally incumbent upon you to get eight hours of sleep at night. It’s not being spiritual to be grumpy. So partly it’s a question of knowing yourself, your own stamina levels, and being wise in that regard in your stewardship.

I know some really good and godly people who will never produce very much. What they produce is right, but they’re just not high-energy people. They’re not going to have the physical or emotional energy to pull it off. They mustn’t feel inferior or guilty. They are who they are. They need to be faithful where they are and know themselves.

As for reading habits, people ask that all the time and I’m always afraid to answer because it sounds so much better than it is. I read about 500 books a year, but on the other hand, there’s reading and there’s reading and there’s reading. If you’re breaking into a new subject where you don’t know anything, you read the same as anybody else, one sentence at a time, and it takes you a while to get through a book.

However, when I was writing the book on postmodernism, The Gagging of God, when I first started into that area (the first 30 to 50 books), I had to go fairly slowly. I was breaking into new turf. I didn’t know what I was doing. But the next 500 books that I read (and I did read them, but there’s reading and there’s reading), many of them got no more than half an hour.

You skim a bit to see where it’s going. What’s the new slant here? They’re all covering the same turf from slightly different angles. I’d enter that into the computer with a few notes. I know what’s in that book. Can I quote it verbatim? No. Have I read every cotton-picking page? No. Do I want to? No! But on the other hand, I’ve read it enough now within a certain matrix to know what it’s doing.

So there’s reading and there’s reading and there’s reading. I read about 500 books to know what they’re saying, but that doesn’t mean I read every cotton-picking line. If you’re trying to cover breadth, which is part of my job so that I can talk about them to others, then you have to start making some choices on how you read.

I read diversely just because I’m basically a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. Because of my background, I do read a couple of books on mathematics every year, a couple of books on physics, and, inevitably, three or four books on poetry and half a dozen novels. But then I read the theology and so on as well. I’m into breadth: just skin-thin, but breadth.

Ryan: All right. Theology questions. We’ve seen that adding something to the gospel is dangerous and changes the very nature of the gospel itself. What about taking away from the gospel? What can be or can’t be taken away? Knowing that’s a big answer … a lot of things can be taken away … can you just highlight some things that cannot be taken away from the gospel? Maybe specifically, popular examples today in which something is being taken away and essentially, is an alternation of the gospel?

Michael: Dr. Carson was talking about propitiation. That’s not a very big deal for a lot of people (for instance, the NIV has sacrifice of atonement), but it is a big deal. It’s a completely different concept, as we heard. What it means, basically, is that you can talk about justification until you’re blue in the face, but without propitiation, how is God just and the justifier of the ungodly?

Is it just that his love conquers his justice? Which, I think, is what a lot of people assume about salvation: the good news is that God is pretty upset with you, but he’s more loving than he is just. That’s taking away the element of propitiation that really makes the gospel not just okay news but astounding news.

Don: Yes, there are lots of examples. You could take away the exclusive sufficiency of Christ so that you preach Christ, but on the other hand, if you preach something else, that’s okay, too, as long as you’re sincere.

You can preach the resurrection, but if you don’t really believe in the resurrection.… A friend of mine has written an 800-page book on the resurrection. It’s a very, very good book. Shortly thereafter, he was on the radio in Australia (somebody told me about it and sent me the tapes afterward).

He was asked, in reference to a couple of very, very extremely liberal theologians who don’t believe in the resurrection or the deity of Christ or anything like that, “Do you think that they will be Christians if they disavow the resurrection like this?” He openly said, “Oh, yes, but they’re very sincere, so I’m sure God will have mercy upon them.” I thought, “Good grief, you’ve just written one of the best books on the resurrection in 150 years, and you say something as daft as that?”

It’s just too easy to be squeezed by the world’s expectations into patterns that really don’t find any justification at all. It might not be that each of those subtractions is, itself, personally damning. However, if it begins to set the course of a church toward more and more skepticism with respect to the Word of God, then at some point, the thing becomes damning for somebody. You just don’t want to do that.

Michael: Could I tack on one more thing? When Paul gets to the beginning of Romans 6, after he’s unpacked this wonderful argument for justification, he says, “Well, then, should we sin, that grace may abound?” God likes to forgive; I like to sin. It’s a perfect relationship! He says, “Heaven forbid! Don’t you know that as many as have been crucified with Christ have been raised with Christ?”

I think it is amazing that Paul automatically goes to the gospel. His default setting is to go to the gospel. The church is in trouble in Corinth. People are sleeping with their mother-in-law; there’s incest and all kinds of weird things going on at Communion. What’s the first thing out of Paul’s mouth? The gospel. That was his default setting. My default setting is, “What are your problems? Fix them. Grow up. What’s going on here?” Paul comes in and says, “Grow up,” but his first inclination is, “Do you really get the gospel? Are you really understanding the gospel here?”

So it’s significant to me that even in answer to the question, “Well, then, so sanctification doesn’t matter?” Paul doesn’t say, “No, the gospel matters for justification, but sanctification matters too, so now let’s go somewhere to talk about sanctification.” Rather, he says, “You don’t know this yet? You’re going to love this. This is going to blow you away. The gospel is not only that you are free from the condemnation of your guilt and righteous before Christ, but that same gospel is big enough to unhook you from having hitched your wagon to the dominion of sin and death.”

Seeing the gospel as big enough for that is really important because when we don’t, we end up saying, “If you’re asking how can I be saved, I’m going to talk about the gospel. If you’re asking about how you can live the Christian life, I’m going to talk about something else.” Paul says, “No, I’m going to the gospel in both instances because it’s big enough to handle both problems.

Ryan: Related to that, if we talk in terms of God’s pleasure of us being only through the acceptance we have in Christ … so he’s pleased with us because he’s pleased with his Son … what about verses like Ephesians 5:10 that say there are certain things we can do to please God. How do the things Christians to do please the Lord relate to that eternal, before-the-throne, justified kind of pleasure that God has of us?

Don: Well, both under the old covenant and under the new, we are often told that within the framework of each respective covenant relationship, there are things that please the Father and things that don’t. There are passages in the Bible that speak of God’s unconditional love, not dependent upon us, in sovereignty and election. “God set his affection on Israel because he loved them.” “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.” There’s a sovereign freedom in God’s love.

On the other hand, there are other passages (as in Jude) that say things like, “Keep yourselves in the love of God.” That is, within the family relationship, within the new covenant relationship, there are patterns of behavior that earn some kind of displeasure. It’s not too hard to understand that, so long as you don’t try to think too antithetically.

There is this sense in which, I think, I can tell you that I love my children unconditionally. If my daughter gave up her work on the West Coast and became a hooker in New York City, I think I could tell you that I’d still love her. She’s my daughter. If my son gave up his work and became a drug pusher on the streets of LA, I think I could tell you that I would love him in any case. I’m their dad, and I love them unconditionally.

On the other hand, if they were 19, living at home, and I said, “Get the car home by midnight,” and they came in at 10 past without a good reason, they would face the wrath of God mediated through their father. They would face the wrath of Dad. Keep yourself in the love of Dad. So you see, there’s another sense in which your love is conditional, in a sense.

The relationships that we have enable us to speak of love and conditionality in slightly different ways. When you try to absolutize any one of those ways and make that the touchstone for your entire theological system, you start introducing some really, really big errors.

In terms of our right standing before God, at the end of the day, the bottom line is that it’s secured by Christ. On the other hand, if we do sin, we are still told we are to confess our sins, remembering that “God is faithful and just.” God is not merciful, soft-hearted, and wishy-washy, but faithful and just to his own covenant promises, and thus, “he will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”

It doesn’t say that we are sanctioned, then, to start thinking, “Well, Christ has forgiven me, so it doesn’t matter if I sin,” and you’re back to the nonsense of Romans 5 and 6. Not that Romans 5 and 6 are nonsense (a point of clarification), but Paul dismisses some nonsense in Romans 5 and 6.

Related to this are the many passages that talk of rewards for Christians. One of the better illustrations that I’ve heard in that regard came from C.S. Lewis. Lewis pictures two men. One of them wants a woman, goes to the red-light district, pays his money, and has his woman. He’s had his reward.

The other falls in love with a young woman, courts her, woos her, treats her with immaculate respect and honor, and wins the security of the whole family. Eventually, there’s a whole joyous family wedding. It is a wonderfully happy and honorable occasion. They get married, and he has his reward. What’s the difference? They both have their reward. Lewis says that in the first case, the payment is so incommensurate with the reward that the transaction is obscene.

In the second case, the reward is nothing other than the consummation of a relationship. That’s not bad. That’s getting close to a lot of insight, because all the rewards of Christians are, finally, grounded in a relationship that is, itself, grounded in grace and the cross and the gospel. You can’t separate these things as if the gospel has brought us this far, an insurance ticket that gets us just inside the doors of heaven, and everything else after that really depends on my merit system. It doesn’t quite work like that.

Nevertheless, there is all of this incentive that even the rewards, according to Paul, are finally mediated by grace. So it’s a complicated structure, and yet simple in the sense that at the end of the day, it’s finally grounded in the cross and the gospel.

Michael: When I was a little kid, my dad … who always entertained the hopeless quest that I might know to change the oil in my own car … would try to get me to learn about cars. I just loved to hang out with my dad, but there was absolutely no connection with what he was doing. So while he was tinkering with that engine, rebuilding an engine, and all that stuff, I’d just stand out there watching him.

Toward the end of what he was tinkering with, he says, “Now push that.” I pushed that. We went inside, and my mom said, “What have you guys been doing all this time?” My dad says, “Well, we were out back, and Mike finished the engine.” I caught myself just before I divulged that I had done nothing of the sort, and I said, “Yeah. I finished the engine.”

This is what God delights in. This is where we really begin to see the inexhaustible, lavish, extravagant, silly liberality of God our Father. He is almost silly, on the verge of extravagant. No, not on the verge, he is extravagant in the way in which he goes beyond what is necessary to save us and just absolutely delights in us because of Christ. Now because of Christ, he really does take delight in us.

Even the sin clinging to our good works, because we’re not trusting in him, is forgiven by the blood of Christ, so that now, those that would be sins now really are good works. Because of Christ’s death, our sinful good works are good works. They really are good works. Because they don’t merit anything, they’re good. Now we’re free, for the first time, to really enjoy this relationship of complete liberality.

I think a lot of people on the rewards business go to the passage in 1 Corinthians that says, “Some will be saved, though, by fire, as their works are exposed on the last day, depending on what they’ve built on,” but that passage is talking about apostolic ministry and Paul having his ministry challenged by these super-apostles.

He’s basically saying, “No one can build a foundation other than the one that I and the other apostles have laid here. If people build on the foundation, then their ministries will be seen, on the last day, for what they’ve produced: whether gold or wood, hay, and stubble.” It’s talking about the last judgment and the revealing of true churches and false churches: what ministries stand and don’t stand. It’s not talking about individuals.

Now I’m not saying that we won’t have individual rewards on the last day, but I think it will be a lot more the case that once my ego is no longer under the effect of sin, I’m just going to say, “When does Corrie ten Boom get up there? I keep waiting for her on the list here.” Our hearts will be so delighted to see people getting rewards, finally, for what they were not rewarded for on earth.

Don: Meanwhile, God comes to you and says, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling …” Then he smiles and says, “… for it’s actually God working in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure,” and that sort of puts it all into perspective again.

Ryan: So it is an okay motive to say, “This thing is pleasing to the Lord and the Christian life; that thing is not pleasing.”

Don: Of course, as determined by Scripture and as determined by what the Lord himself says. Otherwise, you become amoral.

Michael: Which I did during my first three years of marriage. Not totally amoral, but on that point …

Don: That’s encouraging!

Michael: Yes, every birthday and Christmas, as they would roll around, Lisa would say, “Oh, isn’t that nice,” about what I gave her. I’d say, “What? It’s great. Isn’t it great? It’s terrific.” Finally, I think it was the fourth birthday when she said, “You know, why don’t I tell you ahead of time what I’d like for my birthday.”

I was crushed because, of course, it wasn’t about her. “What, you think this is about you?” “Well, it is my birthday.” No, it was about my ego. I wanted to be spontaneous. Of course, holding onto my spontaneity was one of the most immature, selfish, narcissistic things that I could do. It was wonderful to finally get that lesson with a two-by-four.

We do that all the time with God. God says, “He has shown you, O man, what is pleasing to the Lord. This is what he delights in.” We say, “Nope, nope. I’m not going to do this, and I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to go there. I’m not going to have friends like that over there.” God says, “How about these things over here that I actually have commanded? How about these weightier matters of the law?”

Thinking that we can please God because we’re being spontaneous and giving him what we want is actually what Cain did. “When you care enough to send the very best.” Well, God didn’t want flowers; he wanted a lamb! (Sorry if you’re in the florist business. It wasn’t a direct attack.)

Ryan: So is there a difference of opinion on the rewards issue?

Don: I haven’t heard one. If we talk longer, we’d probably find something! Ryan thinks that it’s his job to see if he can get us fighting.

Ryan: Well, let’s try this one. How about confession and broken fellowship, the issue of ongoing Christian confession for my sins. Feel free to point out the cultural, popular version of that, which is keeping a very clean account with the Lord so that you almost feel like if a sin didn’t get confessed, therefore, it’s not on my salvation count, but it’s somehow on my fellowship count, so I’d better keep up with it.

How do we both confess our sin in an ongoing way to the Lord, in the Christian life (assuming that you guys both think that we should), but then how do we do that in a way where we’re not falling back into self-righteousness so that now our righteousness is now based on confession?

Don: I think that there are two competing errors that are advanced by some strands of so-called evangelicalism today. One says that if justification is true and all sins past, present, and future have been forgiven, which is already secured by the cross, then there’s a sense in which to go and confess your sins before God is essentially pagan.

You don’t need to do that. They’re already looked after. How do you confess what has already been judicially looked after? So there is one brand of theology that says, “No, if you do something wrong, then you repent of it and go in the right direction again, but it’s already paid for, so you don’t have to actually confess it before God as sin because it’s already been forgiven.

The obverse of all of that tends to say that life is made up of whether or not you really are at the bull’s-eye of the will of God. God has a bull’s-eye will for each one of us, and if you’re out a little bit, then you’re missing God’s bull’s-eye. You’re not having God’s very best for you. What you need to do is determine what is God’s very best for you. Otherwise, you have his second best or his third best or his hundred-and-forty-third best, in my case, maybe!

In that case, the whole aim of the exercise is to get a little closer into the center, and until then, you ought to be confessing your sins until you really hit the bull’s-eye for God. The second is a form of legalism, at the end of the day, and the first is jolly close, practically, to a form of antinomianism. You find both forms.

What you want to say is that in God’s own mind, in God’s own eternal decree, in God’s own historic purpose by the unique, historic sacrifice of Christ, the sins of his people are looked after once and for all. However, that does not mean that there’s not the dynamic of a personal relationship in our space-time history where we do need to confess our sins.

There are just too many passages that keep speaking in those directions. Written to Christians, 1 John says, “Don’t pretend that you haven’t sinned. You have sinned.” That’s written to Christians. “If anybody says he hasn’t sinned, he’s a liar, and the truth is not in him.” He is kidding himself. He has made God a liar. What’s the proper solution? The proper solution is to confess our sins, remembering that “he is faithful and just …” That’s faithful and just because the payment has already been paid. “… to forgive us our sins.”

In the dynamic of our relationship, it’s worked out in our experience precisely in the relational repentance and confession and reception of forgiveness all over again. This is not because Christ has to suffer anew or there is some new sacrifice that has to be paid in Communion or anywhere else. It has been paid once and for all, but that is the dynamic in which God works out this confession in our own lives.

As for the bull’s-eye approach, there is no doubt that God knows what is best for us from before the foundation of the earth and all the rest. There is no doubt. I don’t want to suggest that God is sort of a quasi-deist being who sort of sits back there and says, “Well, Don, quite frankly, I haven’t figured it out for you yet. I can’t really be bothered by somebody that small and insignificant. You can go this way or that way, but just don’t contravene that particular moral law. Apart from that, I don’t really care. Be a good boy.”

There’s no way that you should understand God’s providence that way. If Christ teaches us that he actually knows the number of hairs on my head … a rapidly decreasing count, which means he has to keep up-to-date … then presumably, he’s concerned about whether I’m going here or there or doing something else too.

Nevertheless, what God actually reveals about all of that might be quite restricted. Surely we know that in the rearing of our own children too. When a child is 5, we make the decisions. The decisions we allow the child are relatively small. Somewhere around the age of 15, we try to put up barriers so that they don’t cross big barriers, but we start saying, “Well, if you take that course, these are the entailments. If you take that course, there are other entailments, but it’s your choice.”

Eventually, they’re turning 18 or 19 and start even asking questions, “What do I do here, Dad? I don’t know.” The right answer is, “Well, I’ll help you think it through, but it’s your choice; it’s your life,” because part of their maturation is coming to the place where they are making decisions for themselves.

There have been times in my life when, by providence or by clear sign or even by.… I don’t know what to call it but a mysterious weight on my mind and conscience that those in a more charismatic tradition would call a word from the Lord or a gift of prophecy.… I have been absolutely convinced that something was going to go in a certain direction, and it has. There have been other times in my life when I’ve asked the Lord, sought the Lord’s face, fasted, queried others (“Do I do this or do I do that?”), and the silence: the heavens are as bronze.

There was one really big determining factor.… It determined whether I would spend more time in Europe or move back to North America at one point, after spending years there. Do you know how it finally was resolved? I did everything to seek the will of God in all of this: lists of pros and cons, seeking Scripture, fasting, and the whole bit. At the end of it, the deadline for one of them slipped by, so I went to the other one.

I think God, who is a good heavenly Father, knows also that we must also take responsibility as part of our maturation and growth too. So I have no doubt that in the decrees of heaven, he knew what was happening and predicted infallibly in advance what was happening. It was under his sovereign sway and determinate will, but I suspect that, deep down, he may have been chuckling just a wee bit and thinking, “This one is going to blindside dear ol’ Don!” And it did!

It’s when you look back over the years that you raise your Ebenezer and say, “Hitherto the Lord has helped us.” But I don’t think that the kind of looking for the bull’s-eye center of God’s will … that presupposes that when you go into a supermarket and God whispers in your ear whether to take this potato or that potato … is the way to think about God’s providential guidance, and so on, in your life.

Michael: Once again, we could argue about these things among Christians until the cows come home. The problem is that while we’re doing that, our focus is taken off of Christ. That’s the greater danger of all of this stuff. The only way I can know in this moment whether I am in the saving will of God is to look to Jesus Christ. If we take our eyes off of that, in one direction or the other, we’re in trouble.

I was raised not with, “You can lose your salvation,” but with, “You can be out of fellowship with the Lord.” So not out of relationship (you can’t break the relationship), but you can break fellowship. So you can live … this was sort of the carnal Christian idea … as a carnal Christian, not a first-class or second-class Christian, but you’ll “get in.”

Although, as one author explains it, he believes that Jesus’ description of what we’ve always thought is hell (“weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth”) is actually a place where carnal Christians will spend eternity in heaven, which makes me not entirely thrilled about the possibility of going. It’s sort of the third-world region of heaven.

Ryan: The ghetto of heaven.

Michael: Yes, exactly! Great compensation for those who’ve suffered on earth. In some way, shape, or form … we do it as Protestants and as Roman Catholics … we’ll figure out a way, even if we say, “Well, we can’t lose our salvation,” we’ll say, “Yeah, but you’re going to lose your rewards” or “You’re going to not have as good of a life in heaven as you would otherwise.” Somehow, we have to pack that in there to really keep the teeth in things.

It’s not good news to distinguish between relationship and fellowship. Koinonia, in the New Testament, is every bit as strong as anything we think of in terms of relationships. You can’t break the fellowship, the koinonia, between the believer and the Godhead, and say that there’s any salvation there.

That’s why Paul says, “Who shall separate me from the love of Christ? Shall distress or persecution? Shall nakedness, peril, or sword? Anything in heaven or anything on earth? Anything in the present or anything in the future or anything in the past? No. I am convinced that Christ is sufficient. Nothing will separate me from the love of Christ.”

It’s exactly that … not the threats of anything … it’s that that actually gets a Christian to take more seriously what it is that we’re supposed to do in the world. It’s time for us to grow up and stop needing carrots and sticks. It’s time for us to realize that this is what he has done, and in the light of what he has done, this is what he has called us to do.

It’s not inventing new theological distinctions to try to protect grace over here but then scare people, just a little bit, into doing something over there. If we really understand the gospel, it will break our hearts when we offend our God. Even when it doesn’t break our hearts enough, God’s grace is enough to cover that too.

Don: May I put in two footnotes? One slight … not modification … just a footnote, and another reinforcement? It is, nevertheless, important to see that the Scriptures do.… I don’t think you would disagree … insist that there are degrees of punishment to be feared, for example, in hell. Some will be beaten with more stripes and some with fewer stripes, according to Luke 12.

There are also degrees of responsibility, according to Matthew 11:20–26, bound up with degrees of privilege, of knowledge, and things like that. So one does not want to discount any of those things, but one does not want, then, to use those things as the fundamental grounds for our acceptance. That’s the distinction you have to make. You pollute the ladder if you use the former that way.

Where I’m going to reinforce what Mike has said is when the culture starts going downhill and churches start going downhill … when you start getting statistics of Christians becoming so parallel to the world that their sleeping-with-others ratio is the same as the sleeping-with-others ratio in the world at large … when you start seeing these things, there is often an instinctive inclination to protect the flock by having more rules.

So as soon as you start seeing the problems, you immediately preach more law. Whereas, I would want to argue that, yes, there is a sense in which you need more law, because you need people to see what the consequences are, but at the same time, you need to preach the gospel more powerfully. Because, at the end of the day, what transforms is a better, deeper, more solid grasp of the gospel. You don’t finally transform by more law.

One understands why, when things are sliding, that people start putting in more rules against this. “Well, in our church, we don’t do that.” Fine. Why not? “Well, we’re protecting ourselves against …” Well, if the Bible says not to do it, then you shouldn’t really do it. That’s right. But the motivating power, the power behind the new impress forward toward more holiness is, finally, at the end of the day, not more law but more gospel: rightly, properly, deeply, biblical conceived and taught, preached, and lived out.

Ryan: Was there a second footnote or was that it?

Don: No, no. That was two. You weren’t counting!

Ryan: I’m sorry. I was enjoying it! How does this relate to assurance of salvation, then, particularly objective versus subjective? (Subjective would be including my own deeds: kind of a 1 John, here’s-what-Christians-do sort of a thing.)

Michael: Well, this is where there are some differences even within the Reformed camp. In the continental Reformed tradition (the Dutch, German, and French Reformed churches that subscribe to the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort), assurance is of the essence of faith. It’s a view that Calvin taught: to believe is to be assured. It is the same thing. When God promises us salvation in Christ, he does not just promise salvation to the elect, but he promises salvation to us individually and personally.

The problem, of course, with that, pastorally, arose when people started wondering, “Okay, I used to worry if I had enough works. Now I’m wondering if I really believe, because I don’t experience that assurance.” Then Calvin and everybody else would come back and say, “Well, we’re not saying the subjective experience of assurance is higher or lower. You can’t measure that. We’re saying you’re objectively assured.”

In the Westminster tradition, the Westminster Confession and Catechism (taught by most of the Puritans), being justified is distinct from knowing that you’re justified. Being one of the elect is distinct from knowing that you’re one of the elect, and it’s possible that you could go your whole life and not really have a persuasive assurance that you’re in Christ, but you are believing in Christ. You’re trusting in Christ. I think, early on, at least, the pastoral point there was to get people to stop looking at their assurance and just to focus on Christ.

At that point, both parts of the Reformed tradition are in total agreement. I think the differences are often overstated, but from my own perspective, I do think it is very easy, once you unhinge faith from assurance, to start having two levels of Christian existence. That, eventually, goes into the Wesleyan direction of this experience of justification and then a second blessing of sanctification.

That’s not at all what the Puritans were, but I think that it’s very possible to go down that road if we separate faith from assurance. I think we need to tell people, “You are assured.” This is what the Reformers would have said, and I think that it is, more importantly, what the apostles would have said. It’s what they did say: that the sacraments are signs and seals of God’s promise. So if you’re struggling with your assurance, remember your baptism.

Hold onto God’s promise through the bread and the wine that, as the Heidelberg Catechism says, as surely as you hold the bread and the wine are you assured that Christ’s body and blood are everlasting life. I think we have assurance by going out of ourselves, not looking within ourselves.

Ryan: What about the example of Judas holding bread and wine. Should he be assured as he holds bread and wine? Of course, that’s the Lord’s Supper and this is first Lord’s Supper with Christ that I’m referring to, but there are many Judases today, right?

Michael: Right, but it was still an objective sacrament, even if everyone in the room was unbelieving, but he was doubly under God’s judgment precisely because of that, precisely because, as Paul says, those who do not rightly discern the body are. He was receiving Communion unworthily, and was, therefore, doubly under the judgment of God.

Ryan: Dr. Carson, would you say someone’s baptism should mark their assurance?

Don: Well, in very large measure, I would say something quite similar. Because I’ve been working on a technical commentary of 1 John for some time, I’ve had to do some thinking in this area. I would argue that, of the Reformers, Luther is the one who makes the tightest connection between saving faith and subjective assurance. That is, if you lack in assurance, then what you really must do is focus your eyes on the objective reality, which is the ultimate ground of all faith.

In other words, he allows very little place for a disjunction between being justified and knowing that you’re justified. What you really must have is a greater grasp of what the gospel is all about. As you increase in the grasp of what the gospel is all about and trust God more, then it solves all your problems about assurance. It’s as simple as that.

Whereas with Calvin, especially, there is a change that does come. It has been misrepresented as being a three-legged stool (although one understands why this was invented): assurance based on the objective finished cross work of Christ, assurance based on the Spirit’s internal confirming testimony, and assurance based on the transformation of life. You have to have all three legs of the stool or it falls over. People have often worked it out, in the last century or so, along those lines.

However, I went back and re-read everything that Calvin had written on the subject. Especially in Institutes of the Christian Religion, there are a number of passages where he talks about assurance. Overwhelmingly, instead of this being a three-legged stool, he has one leg that really controls virtually the entire discussion, and there he’s lined up with Luther, but then he does have these other bits in, put in some footnotes, that are really there in the New Testament that I think Luther misses. Luther is a bit reductionistic.

What do you do with Romans 8:15, the Spirit which comes along and teaches us to say, “Abba, Father”? There is a subjective element in our conversion that is a confirming sort of thing. At the end of the day, Calvin was a good enough exegete that he knew how to handle 1 John. It mentions in 1 John 5:13, “… to those who believe in the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life,” which shows that you can have a distinction between a valid belief, all right, and assurance that you have a valid belief.

When you ask what, then, are the tests that are given by John, they are in three domains. There’s a truth test, which is bound up with proto-Gnosticism: really confessing that Jesus is the Son of God. There’s a moral test: whether you do what the Son says. There’s a love test: whether you love the believers. In all three cases, it’s not best two out of three or grading on a curve. It’s very strong language in all three cases.

However, Calvin is very careful not to make three legs, so that they’re all equivalent. At the end of the day, the gift of the Spirit is still the fruit of the gospel. The transformation of life is still the fruit of the gospel. Insofar as we miss it, even in 1 John, you’re driven back to the first chapter and a half of 1 John, which takes you to: “The blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanses us from all sin. We have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins.” You’re back to gospel-centeredness.

Even though, you still want to say that if somebody claims to believe and their life still shows no sign of being different, if they still live like the world and the flesh and the Devil … though epistemologically they’re convinced that they’ve believed, are convinced of all the truths, make public profession of faith, are actually baptized, and are members of the church but they live indistinguishably from the world … then I would want to argue (I think John is insisting) that they don’t have the right to Christian assurance.

We have every reason to undermine their Christian assurance. The person who is wandering far from God, we don’t know what their situation may be, as Paul doesn’t seem to know the situation of the man who is sleeping with his stepmother in 1 Corinthians 5. The discipline is to take place not only to preserve the church but in the hope that this man will be saved on the last day. It might be a case of terrible backsliding, and maybe the discipline itself will bring him back to renewed repentance and faith.

Or it might be that this is a case where, to use the language of 1 John 2 again, “They went out from us in order that it might be made clear that they never were of us. If they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that they were not of us.” In other words, genuine faith has a preserving element in it. If there is no perseverance in it, then, sooner or later, there’s a big question mark that goes over the whole thing.

So there is a performance-related aspect to this business of assurance. The problem comes, in pastoral ministry, from two or three fronts. That’s the theoretical framework (and it could be teased out at much greater length), but you’re not long in ministry when, sooner or later, there’s somebody that comes up to you and says, “You know, I accepted Christ when I was X, and I’ve tried to follow, but …” They’re careful enough and sophisticated enough not to say, “I don’t think I’m good enough,” because then you don’t know if they have the gospel at all.

“… I sin so often that I don’t know if I’ve displayed the works described in 1 John well enough to have assurance of faith.” Suddenly, they’re trying to ground their assurance in being good enough. In every case, the answer to that is always to go back to the big leg in the stool. It’s to go back to the way that even 1 John itself starts off, namely, with the insistence on the gospel as the primary source for absolutely everything.

I started developing some people like that when I was in pastoral ministry. Some of these people are chronic. They come back to you again and again and again. You sort of cool them down, and then they come back six weeks later and have the same old thing again. You just can’t get them by it. After a while, it’s as if they sort of rejoice in being insecure.

Eventually, what I did was make up a list of about 30 verses. I told them that I didn’t want to see them again until they had memorized all 30 of those verses and read them carefully, thoughtfully, and prayerfully a minimum of five times a day: when they woke up, before each meal, and when they went to bed. After they’ve done that for a month, then they could come and see me. Until then, I didn’t want to see them on this subject again.

At the very least, that meant they didn’t keep wasting my time when they’re not taking gospel promise seriously. In some cases, it really did solve the problem because it was going back to the clear promises of God, the unqualified promises, the grace-bound things that are tied up with the gospel itself.

On the other hand, I’ve had the odd situation where some deacon, who has been around for about 35 years, comes to me and says, “Pastor Don, I have to tell you that I’m going through a dark period of the soul where I’m doubting my salvation. It’s just been very, very gloomy recently, and I’m not sure anymore that I’m even a Christian.” Well, I have a whole checklist for them too: When did you stop praying? When was the last time you shared your faith? Whom are you sleeping with? How much time are you spending on porn?

In no case have I found any instance where there’s been a dark night of the soul of a fundamental sort where it hasn’t been tied to much deeper drifting and wandering off toward dark avenues. Pretty soon, you can nail down where each one is coming from. It’s rare that these things emerge merely as a theoretical problem because some people are wrestling with the doctrine of assurance in some theoretical sense. It just doesn’t work like that.

Ryan: This one can be a really quick answer. In Hebrews, when it says, “Without holiness no man will see the Lord,” is that holiness Christ’s holiness or is it my Christian-life holiness?

Don: Yes!

Ryan: Do you agree with that?

Michael: Yes, our holiness is definitive and progressive. First of all, I am completely holy … not partially holy, but completely holy … because I’m in Christ. He has become my righteousness, holiness, and redemption. Because of that, however, he’s also at work in me both to will and to do of his own good pleasure.

As a branch is attached to the vine, the fruit will be forthcoming. So it’s impossible for a branch attached to this vine … not because of the native resources of the branch … when it is attached to this vine, it’s impossible for it to be the dead branch that it was. It is a living branch. Because of that, there is going to be an expression of that holiness that we have, definitely, once and for all, by virtue of being attached to the vine itself.

Basically, without regeneration and sanctification there will be no glorification. All that is being assumed there is Paul’s order of salvation in Romans 8: “Those whom he predestined, he called; those whom he called, he justified; those whom he justified, he glorified.” It’s not that some of those he justified, he glorified or some of the justified are sanctified, but all of those who are justified also receive the additional blessing of the gospel, namely liberation from sin’s tyranny.

Don Carson: That text is often called, rightly, the golden chain. It’s a zero-sum game. You either have it, or you don’t.

Ryan: So back to the Hebrews verse, I don’t think either of you would say that they see the Lord based on their own holiness and Christ’s holiness, but that the actual reason for which they see the Lord (“Without holiness, no man will see the Lord”) is redemption, glorification.

Michael: Yes, this is the same writer who has labored, chapter after chapter, to show that the law could make nothing perfect and that the only intercession and mediation that prevails in the heavenly sanctuary is the blood of Christ, the intercession of Christ.

Don: Again, as my father would put it, “A text without a context becomes a pretext for a proof-text.” We read a text like, “Without holiness no man shall see the Lord,” and if you take it out of context and, then, introduce notions that are not in the context … about what is the proper ground of our assurance … then suddenly, we’re talking about ground in a way in which that text is not speaking.

That, then, leads you to Tom Wright or others who nowadays say that we’re finally justified at the end. There’s a justification now that’s forensic, but at the end we’re justified “on the basis of the whole life lived” (that’s his expression). He won’t back down from that. At the end of the day, you are trying to ground your assurance partly on Christ and partly on whether or not your life has been lived adequately as a result of Christ, in the train or wake of Christ.

That’s not quite what the text is saying. In the context, it’s warning against apostasy. That’s a whole other notion, but it’s in chapter 10 in the apostasy sequence. There the whole argument is (already from chapter Hebrews 3:14), “We have been made partakers of Christ if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end.”

In other words, as a definition of what genuine Christianity is, there is an element of perseverance that’s built into it. “We have been made partakers if we hold steadfast, to the end, the confidence that we had at first.” There are touches of “conversion” and approaches to the grace of God that see a leaf turned, apparent repentance, public profession of faith, and maybe baptized members in the local church.

That’s certainly what was going on in 1 John: “They went out from us …” From us means that they were baptized members of the church. “… because they never had been of us. If they had been of us, they would have remained with us.” In other words, it’s the lack of perseverance that finally exposes that their touch of conversion has been too shallow. It has a lot of stuff in it, but it doesn’t have the grace of perseverance.

It’s like the parable of the sower in that regard. The seed that falls on stony ground, because the topsoil is so shallow, germinates the fastest, grows up the quickest, and seems the most promising. Jesus says, “These are the ones who hear the Word of God and immediately receive it with joy.” They seem the most promising of the crop. But afterward, when trouble or persecution or whatever sets in, then they keel over and die. They have no real root.

We have some people like that, then, that can join a church and seem the most promising, but they don’t have the root of perseverance. Within that context, apostasy is talked about in Hebrews 10. The text does not talk, there, about the ground or the basis of our acceptance before God. Rather, it’s saying that at the end of the day, what God requires is holiness. Without holiness, you don’t see the Lord.

Then in the sequence of the whole argument, that holiness is provided by the priestly sacrifice of Christ that’s just been talked about, the new tabernacle and so on in chapters 8, 9, and 10, which then works out, precisely, in the holiness of pursuing faithfully until the very end. To talk about ground in that context is to introduce categories that we’ve become interested in without listening quite to what the text is saying. Does that make sense?

Ryan: You mentioned N.T. Wright. Can you first just give an introduction, to those who don’t know him? Dr. Carson, you can start this. He’s a leader in a theological movement called the new perspective on Paul. What is that, and why is it a problem? I know you’ve done whole weekends or more on this topic and edited two very big volumes on this issue, so I know it’s a hard thing to condense down to a quick answer, but what is it, why is it a problem, and how does it relate to self-justification?

Don: The titles of the two volumes to which he referred are Justification and Variegated Nomism. That just sort of tells the whole story right there, doesn’t it? There are 600 pages on second-temple Judaism and 600 pages on Paul. It’s not because any of us who were involved were so clever; it’s just because the discussion has become so incredibly convoluted.

For about a quarter of a century, you couldn’t write seriously on Paul anywhere in the English-speaking world without interacting with this stuff. It wasn’t just Tom Wright. It started with some of the work of E.P. Sanders, Jimmy Dunn, Tom Wright, and so on. It became a huge construction, but it’s dying down now, at least in academic circles.

Tom is hard to pin down because he has changed his views, too, as he’s faced criticism from time to time. Moreover, I hasten to add that on some topics, he has been superb. I’ve given away his books in university missions and this sort of thing on occasion. He’s a very gifted speaker, a very gifted debater, and a very gifted writer.

He’s been a great boon to the church on many, many, many fronts. Then with time he’s gotten into some discussions where you begin to feel that he’s losing the plotline somewhat. Moreover, we’re friends. We were exact contemporaries at Oxford and Cambridge while we were doing doctoral research 35 years ago. So you want to get it right when you say something about the man. He has been a great boon.

How you get here is too long a story to relate here, but for a long while, what he argued was that justification is God’s declaration that you are in the covenant. He still has it as God’s declaration (it’s a declarative thing; that’s right), but not God’s declaration that you are just, but God’s declaration that you’re in the covenant. So it’s an incorporative identity thing, what group you belong to rather than, first of all, a justice thing. That had implications for how we understood the cross.

Because he’s been challenged on that so many times (personally, in books, and in writing), nowadays, he’s more sophisticated. What he says is that it’s God’s declaration that you are just before God and, in consequence, are in the covenant community of God. In terms of the way he works it all out, however … in terms of what takes precedent in his thinking and preaching and teaching … it’s being in the right covenant community and acting in a certain way, in consequence of all of this, that has more focus in all of his utterances.

If you say, “Yes, but are you just in God’s sight because of the cross?” he would say, “Well, of course I believe that! I’ve said that.” However, the focus of where he’s going from there is not the gospel so conceived. The focus is on, in consequence, living out the implications of his understanding of what the kingdom demands today … in terms of his own understanding of how you go about social justices, being green, and all that kind of thing … in the light of the resurrection still to come.

It’s not even that all of his perceptions are wrong. Rather, it’s as Doug Moo (a friend of mine who, in my view, has written the best commentary on Romans) says about Tom’s views on some of these matters: Tom tends to foreground what the biblical text backgrounds, and he tends to background what the biblical text foregrounds. If you sort of latch into him and make him the focus, you start skewing what is the real center of reality.

Moreover, on the justification front … since I brought the topic up a few moments ago.… Tom now says, in effect, that there are two justifications. First, there is the justification that is yours when you become a Christian, and that, he acknowledges as forensic. But there’s further justification on the last day. Why should God let you into heaven?

He says that basis, the basis of that justification, the basis of your being allowed into heaven … in fact, he would insist not heaven, but the new heaven and the new earth, the resurrection existence on the last day (which is right) … the basis for being admitted to the consummated kingdom is the whole life lived, by which he includes the original forensic, or legal, justification and all the transformation of your life. That’s the basis of admittance.

Suddenly I have all my red flags going here. It’s why some have, then, accused him of retreating to a pre-Reformation form of Catholicism. If you don’t see the parallels, then I strongly urge you to pick up a copy of the 1993 Catholic catechism. It’s worth having a copy. It says some wonderful things, but it says some scary things too. Just use the index and look up the four pages that are on justification (and extra little pages here and there) and see what it says.

You will find that it scary: anathema on those who say that a person is justified exclusively on the basis of the cross work of Christ and so on. The works have to be figured in and so on. At the end of the day, that’s what Tom is saying. So although the way he gets there is very different from medieval Catholicism, it seems to me that where he ends up, in terms of his understanding of justification on the last day, is actually quite similar. It’s complicated. Don’t you wish this Q&A were over?

Ryan: Let’s just see a show of hands (and don’t be embarrassed by this at all): how many of you have heard of Tom Wright or the new perspective? Yes, a good bit. So that’s why it’s important, right? Mike, any thoughts on it? Do you believe in it?

Michael: No. There are so many different facets of it. The most important implication for the church is the one that Dr. Carson has just mentioned. Many writers in this circle, the new perspective (really, people are calling it the new perspectives … plural … because it’s so broad), believe that faith is a badge. It’s a badge of membership. Just as justification is the right community, faith is the right indication that you are in the right community. It’s all ecclesiology, not soteriology. It’s all the doctrine of the church, not the doctrine of salvation.

The question, “How can I be saved?” is Martin Luther’s introspective conscience that he’s bequeathed to the modern world. The Jews just didn’t ask that question. You get no real indication of a real question because the real scope, the real horizon, was cosmic.