Q&A 1 (D. A. Carson and Mark Dever in South Africa)

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks with Mark Dever on the topic of church issues in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library.

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Question: Is there time to briefly comment on the new perspective on Paul and tell what following it is gaining?

Don Carson: The new perspective is not just one perspective. It’s a multiplicity of perspectives with certain commonalities, but at the heart of the issue, from a pastoral point of view, is a shift in justification that has wandered along several lines depending on which particular proponent of the new perspective you’re dealing with.

For example, Tom Wright, who is perhaps best known in the area.… And a friend, I should say. We were at Oxbridge together. He was at Oxford; I was at Cambridge. We were there for exactly the same years. We used to meet in the summer and have long conversations about things. We’ve gone back 35 years together, and we have talked about these things face-to-face. So anything that I am about to say to you about him, I assure you I’ve said to his face, too.

He argues, now, that on the last day when God says, in effect, “Why should I let you into my heaven?” you will be justified not simply and exclusively on the ground of Christ’s sufficient meritorious cross work on your behalf, but “on the whole life lived.” By that he means to include the grace of God in your life that has transformed you and changed you, but so much so that your whole life lived becomes part, not only of the evidence of Christ’s cross work, but part of the ground of your final acceptance.

The pastoral implications for that, in terms of assurance, in terms of prayer, in terms of gratitude, in terms of what part you think works righteousness has to do with anything, and so on, are just huge pastorally. The underlying structures that have generated all of that are very complex, and they vary from person to person.

It’s for that reason that I think the new perspective is not merely something for the academic marketplace. It’s coming all the way down to the street, and it affects, ultimately, how you preach the gospel. In some cases, there is a heavy emphasis on the place of the exile and how you understand the exile.

If you’ve never read anything in the whole area and you want to read one book that will expose you to these things in an exegetically polite way that, nevertheless, comes down on the side of historic orthodoxy, I suggest the little book by Stephen Westerholm called Perspectives Old and New on Paul.

If you have already read a great deal in the area, and you want to read something at a more technical level, then the two volumes that Peter O’Brien, Mark Seifrid and I edited, Justification and Variegated Nomism, will give you far more detail than you’ll ever want. In fact, they’re too expensive. Don’t buy them. Borrow them from the library or find a rich pastor or something. There’s another little book by Guy Prentiss Waters that theologically is quite sharp too, though it’s not quite so good at the exegetical level. Those are the places where I’d start.

If you’re asking how far the movement has gone, in academic circles it has now peaked and is coming down. In the Anglo-Saxon world, it was perceived to be on the cutting edge for about 25 years, and you couldn’t write anything in the academic world on Paul without taking some sort of stance with respect to the movement.

Nowadays in the academic world, there have been so many pretty good books written to challenge the whole movement that it is not more than one minority voice. That’s all it is. Unfortunately, it is still expanding in its influence in evangelical seminaries, not least of a Reformed persuasion, for all kinds of reasons, so at the level of seminaries, it’s still increasing in power and influence, and battle lines are being drawn of various sorts.

It’s like a lot of other movements that have come along. Just about the time the world is abandoning it, some evangelicals jump on board and say, “Whoopee! Isn’t this fun?” which thereby shows not only that they’re wrong but they’re late.

Question: Speaking of intergenerational teaching in our own churches, could you please comment on age divisions for Sunday school or Bible studies in the church context?

Terry Martin: I encouraged some of the guys during the break and the supper to do some study in the area of the Hebrew wisdom model and look at that quite a bit more intently, because you understand from Deuteronomy 6 that teaching primarily took place in the home, though not at the expense of the broader community.

The broader community wasn’t cut away from that process, but the key was still the home with parents directly involved in the lives of their children, teaching them the critical skills that were needed to face the real world. I think this is something that’s really been lost today because we’re so committed to ordered learning.

Everything is so age-specific we never allow these children to sit in discussions or in the bigger service, the broader teaching block in the church, and become familiar with what church looks like on a Sunday morning when the teaching is done church-wide. I’m not advocating in any way that we bomb our Sunday schools either. I think at this stage there are some realities we are working with that are here to stay.

I think forums need to be created where there can be that sort of intergenerational kind of interaction, where children can ask the adults questions, not in smaller groups but also in bigger groups, in larger groups, because they develop the confidence of speaking up. I know one of the problems when we got overseas was, “These American kids.… Can’t they keep their mouths shut?” Just frothing at the mouth.

I think the one exciting things about it was it teaches the kids to develop and ask the critical questions. I think most of us in the South African context have sort of grown up with a, “Sit down. Shut up. Children are seen and not heard” kind of scenario. I would call for a balance on this one.

Some of the thinking that has greatly impacted my own mind comes from Lawrence Richards. Now, of course, his writings are very old. They are a bit dated at this stage, too, but in his book, A Theology of Christian Education, there are very helpful probe sections at the end of every chapter of that particular text that will get you thinking a lot more specifically through this issue of intergenerational teaching: what age-group specific teaching looks like or ought to look like and how you can combine these two models. He comes up with some very exciting models that I think it would be great if you could look at them.

Question: Two questions, one admirably brief and the other frighteningly long, but they’re in the same general domain.

Question #1: Why is the emerging church a dangerous phenomenon?

Questions #2: I appreciate the constraints restricting you from spending time on all the layers fully; however, there is one aspect I would ask you to comment on. It has to do with the light symbolism. In the context of the emerging church conversation, they say Scripture is unclear and too deep for us to understand.

By so doing, they attack the light of Scripture, the clarity of Scripture. It is the light to our paths … sufficient, authoritative, and inerrant. In the light of 2 Timothy 3:16, etcetera, can you kindly comment on the emerging church’s conversation where Scripture’s clarity is being questioned? This certainly attacks expositional preaching and, consequently, the church’s health.

Don: The emerging church phenomenon is extraordinarily diverse, once again. If you go in with a broad brush and make generalizations, then probably your generalization is wrong. It would be nice if every movement that came along was either directly from the throne room of God or right from the pit of hell so you could either bless it or damn it, and then walk on with your life, but, in fact, a lot of movements that come along are messy, aren’t they?

In part, sometimes they are reacting against bad things we’re doing. Then there’s a pendulum swing that goes too far in another direction. Then one group sees only the bad things over there and doesn’t see what is being corrected. The emerging church movement is.… I don’t know what your background understanding is of these matters, so let me take a moment for a prefatory word.

In the past, missiologists have used emerging church to describe the church as it is emerging in the so-called Two-Thirds World. That’s not what these people have in mind. Some people have used emerging church to talk about the churches that emerged in the first century, in which case it’s the book of Acts and other first-century documents. That’s not what these people have in mind.

What these people have in mind is the church as it is emerging in an emerging culture. That is, largely in the Western world (although with tentacles way beyond the Western world), the culture is changing to a new emerging culture, and the church needs to change to respond properly to this new emerging culture. So the argument runs.

Part of the analysis is an attempt to understand how postmodernism and other movements are affecting how we think, how we look at things, even how the Internet plays on human acquisition of knowledge and interaction, the place of human relationships over against propositional truth, and so on. Many of the questions they raise are legitimate things that need to be addressed and rightly understood.

It is especially worth noting how many of the early emerging church leaders (the movement is only about a decade and a half old) came from culturally extremely conservative churches. In other words, they came out of really buttoned-down culturally conservative churches. I don’t just mean doctrinally conservative churches; I mean culturally conservative churches where they found they could no longer communicate the gospel effectively, or even talk responsibly, with people who are on the secular left or on the postmodern left. They didn’t know how to talk with them.

Haven’t you had some of those experiences? You try and talk about something with somebody, and you’re just going by each other like ships in the night. You’re not even on the same page; you wonder if you’re on the same planet. Aware of these things, these people then took a kind of pendulum swing.

One of their most famous writers said, in a phrase I wish I had thought of first (it’s a wonderful expression), he was perched on “one of the most conservative twigs of one of the most conservative branches” of the evangelical tree. What he did, unfortunately, was sort of jump on a vine and swing way off to the other side. As a result, instead of trying to find out where the trunk is somewhere, he’s perched on the far left branch somewhere. In fact, he might have toppled off here and there.

About 70 or 80 percent of the early leaders came from this sort of background, and it’s a cultural reaction. Out of this, however, then has come a wide diversity of emphases. For some in the movement, they’re broadly evangelical and orthodox but with a few more candles, changing style of worship, and things like that.

Others have become (people like Mark Driscoll) very dogmatic, in-your-face Reformed Baptists but with forms of “public worship” where they give you earplugs as you enter into their meetings as an option, which tells you probably all you need to know about the forms of their corporate worship. What can you say? I still want him on board as a friend. I want to have some influence in his life, and I want to hear what he’s saying, partly because the man has really become doctrinally very robust and is really trying to be submissive to Scripture.

As Mark Dever was saying this afternoon, if you find people who really are genuinely committed to Scripture, to understanding it and to teaching it, give it time and other things tend to get sorted out after a while, too. So you want to give a chap like that room to make a few mistakes, nurture him along, come alongside, and not just write him off.

On the other hand, the movement goes all the way to the far left and is full of a lot of postmodern assumptions about how relationships are more important than truth, as if you are wisely advised to make a dichotomy? Which is more important, the left wing of the airplane or the right? That sort of comparison is never very helpful. Certain doctrines in Scripture are downplayed (wrath, hell), or some are openly mocked.

Two or three writers, a very important one in America and a very important one in Britain, speak of the substitutionary atonement of Christ as a form of cosmic child abuse. At what point do you start saying, “You’re so far out of the camp; we’re not even on the same page. We’re not heading in the same direction. A plague on your house.”

Somewhere along the line, still in the emerging camp, that is also there. At that point, I don’t want to have anything to do with them. I don’t want to be on the same platform with them. I don’t want to pretend we’re heading in the same direction, because we’re not. So it is really difficult to generalize about the whole movement.

On the other hand, the movement does stress the importance of relationality, of integrity in worship and in speech, of understanding the culture, and all of those things I am all for. I might not come out with their conclusions exactly, but after all, Paul sounds a little different when he’s preaching in Athens to complete secularists than he does when he’s preaching in a synagogue in Pisidian Antioch.

Compare Acts 13 and Acts 17. Without changing his message, he knows how to adapt to different contexts, and part of living in a fast-paced, fast-changing culture is being able to read the times as well as understanding the Scripture. Part of the right application of Scripture is the kind of study in Scripture that helps you to understand it, but part of it is understanding where people are and making those connections without, in any sense, compromising the truth. At the same time, the movement is dangerous because it has so few categories for objective truth.

So that brings me to this last question, this question of what historically has been called claritas Scripturae, the clarity of Scripture, the perspicuity of Scripture. It is important to understand what claritas Scripturae says. It does not say every human being or every Christian can understand all there is to know about the Bible. It is not saying that. It is not saying human rationality is so untouched by sin that all you have to have is a decent education and you can figure out what the text says. It’s not saying that.

Claritas Scripturae is saying God’s self-disclosure in Scripture is entirely adequate for getting across the truth of what God intends to get across, the gospel and all that’s entailed (gospel in a broad sense), for the transformation of men and women by the power of God as illumined by the Spirit of God. So it’s important not to make claritas Scripturae into something that it isn’t.

One of the best books on the clarity of Scripture I have read in a long time.… There have been two or three important ones that have come out in the last five years, but the best one by far is written by a young church historian and theologian at Moore Theological College in Australia, Mark D. Thompson, called A Clear and Present Word. It’s in a series I edited called NSBT, New Studies in Biblical Theology. The NSBT series is now 21 or 22 volumes strong, with another 8 that are signed up.

His volume on the clarity of Scripture is now, in my view, hands down the best thing because it’s got the historical rootedness, it’s got a large section of biblical theology in it to hear what Scripture is saying on the subject, but it understands the times as well and addresses them very, very powerfully. So if you’re going to do more reading in that area, that’s where I suggest you turn.

Question: How does the Holy Spirit lead or guide the believer today? Is there an aspect of listening to the Spirit through the Word?

Mark Dever: I think the short answer to your clarifying question, “Is there an aspect of listening to the Spirit through the Word?” is yes. I think the prime communication we have, the sure and certain communication we have, is Scripture. I think a secondary line we are instructed in the Old and the New Testaments to also take to understand what the Lord would have us to do in particular situations is through wisdom and prudence.

If your mind has been shaped by Scripture, you may not find a Scripture passage teaching you exactly about whether or not you should move to Cape Town, but you may find there are principles that have been taught you that affect the decision you would make. There are people who are in authority in your life … perhaps fellow elders; the pastor of the church, if you’re not the pastor; or, if you’re a younger person, your parents … who would have wisdom you should listen to and heed.

Then, one of the main things people who ask questions about guidance these days, in my experience I would say, need to learn or need to be reminded of is the wonderful category of liberty in Scripture. I think many Christians today feel if they don’t feel specifically led to do something, then they shouldn’t do it. I think that’s satanic bondage. It is not what the Bible teaches at all. You can have a hyper-conscientiousness that does not represent the liberty of the gospel we have in Scripture.

So if it’s not either by explicit or by implicit reasoning from Scripture, if it’s not sin, brothers and sisters, you have liberty to do it, and you should enjoy that liberty. Now there may be prudent reasons why you choose not to at certain times or.… That’s fine, but that’s the way the conversation needs to be had.

What you want to avoid is misunderstanding the idea of guidance and leadership. I was speaking to a group of missionaries in Poland one time, and this one young man comes up and tells me that for this organization he’s in charge of evangelizing Warsaw. He said the Holy Spirit had told him he was to plant churches based only on the words of Jesus.

Well, I was taken aback by that. He was putting those words in God’s mouth to him, saying the Holy Spirit of God had told him he was to plant churches based only on the words of Jesus. After being taken aback for a moment, I said, “Actually that wasn’t God you heard from; that was Satan, because God’s Holy Spirit inspired 23 other books of the New Testament, written specifically to churches to instruct us in these things.

It’s a satanic misunderstanding to think somehow your personal devotion to “Saint” Jesus is supposed to override what the true Spirit of Jesus has done, which is inspire 27 books in the New Testament for our guidance in these matters. So I think there’s a kind of sentimental piety that looks okay at the beginning but really is destructive to the authority of Scripture and the liberty we have in the gospel that it is not pious to succumb to.

If you’d like to know more about this, our church has written a special course on guidance, because we have found so many young Christians saying so many stupid things and blaming it on God, saying, “God told me to do X,” when.… He could have. He’s a sovereign God, but I don’t think so. So we’ve written a course specifically on guidance. If you want to go to our church website, capitolhillbaptist.org, search around for what we call our Core Seminars. You can download for free all the teaching material there on guidance.

Another thing on the Internet you could go to is 9marks.org. We have one whole section you may never have noticed there called Reviews (book reviews). In that, there’s one whole section of reviews of books on guidance, because we find so many books on guidance out there saying things that are bad. Now there are a lot of books that say good stuff, but there you can read reviews of a lot of the popular books on guidance. You’ll get a summary of what they’re saying and then some critical interaction with it. Very brief reviews.

If you’d like to know more about 9Marks, when you’re on the website you can sign up for a free e-newsletter you can get. For that matter, you can do that here. We have the 9Marks booklet and a CD you can have, particularly for pastors. I don’t know if we have enough for everybody. So pastors, if you want to check in the bookstore and if you’d just give us your name and address, you can take that for free, that book and that CD, as long as they last. If I’ve said things that are offensive in this (I almost always offend somebody on this topic), I’m happy to talk to you afterwards.

Terry: Here’s another interesting comment and then a question.

Comment: We seem to be living in an age where parents see no importance in having their children attend church with them. Some opt for having Sunday school during morning service, while others opt for babysitting.

Question #1: Is it important for children to attend church services? Why or why not?

Question #2: How can we teach this to parents (particularly as young pastors who do not have children yet)?

I think something you need to keep in the forefront of your mind as you read through the Scriptures is the focus is really andragogical. In other words, it’s adult-centered, it’s parent-centered. It is to the adults, because who teaches the kids in turn? The adults do. You will know that in this country the shift is child-centered education. The child is at the center. It’s the be-all; it’s the end-all. There are great problems tied to that.

There is a book that was written by a Jewish rabbi.… There were only a thousand copies printed; I’ve got one of the thousand copies. A Danish rabbi did what has been considered within Judaism, at least in Denmark, to be the most definitive work on the whole issue of andragogy: the issue of how adults learn, why adults need to learn, and the importance of adult-centered education within the Hebrew wisdom model.

He does some tremendous work in this area, because he shows even how that within Judaism there has been a shift away from that. Very soon, within Hebrew culture, the focus was the child; yet the Scriptures constantly call the parents to be, because they are really the keys, because they are to be passing on the baton to the next generation. That really does impact this particular issue, “Is it important for children to attend church services. Why or why not?”

If you go to some churches and you look at what they do on a Sunday morning, I don’t think you would want your kids in there. In other situations, you’d very much want your kids in there, because you want to give them a feel for what part of this intergenerational teaching aspect looks like. That puts great challenges on the preacher, doesn’t it?

Some teachers/pastors say they are wired only to teach adults, and they really have a struggle when you put them into a Sunday school class because they just can’t seem to cut the bologna thin enough. They’re only there to feed the giraffes; they can’t feed the sheep. So that puts great challenges on the teacher/preacher at the same time, to understand something of how kids learn as well and how to present truth in a simple way.

I think it was Billy Graham who said, “Study to be simple.” That’s not the easiest thing for professor types, for seminary types, because the danger is we can be talking to ourselves, isn’t it? So keep it simple. Again, here’s a situation where I’m not advocating bombing the babysitting aspect where the little ones can’t be taken care of but to expose those little ones as early as you can.

My exposure growing up in a very biblically-sound Presbyterian outfit as a kid was we sat in church with the parents. Of course, you sat in front of the parents so that if you were fiddling with something you shouldn’t be fiddling with, you could get a smack from the back row. I’m not just advocating tradition. I think there was a lot of sense in that, because we sure learned some of the disciplines of that, when to sit still and when to listen.

Now for the second question. It’s amazing what happens when you have your first child when you’re in your first ministry, some of the things you become cognizant of and some of the things you learn as you go along. I think generally if you’re told from the front how to do it, you tend not to listen until you get there and your own son or daughter cries in the service. Then that changes things quite a bit.

I think this is, again, the beauty of the mentoring situation where you have those older folk around you who can graciously just coach you along, because we’re very dogmatic in those early stages, aren’t we? It’s an either shape up or ship out kind of scenario. Then you learn, you mellow. Some tough experiences teach you to be a little more flexible.

I would encourage younger pastors to listen to some of those old men, those old pastors who’ve summered and wintered in the changes and have been through.… They’ve forgotten what it’s like to have kids, but once you talk to them, they remember all of that very well. So be in dialogue over this, because there’s a gap there for a young pastor. Be open and continue learning because that’s the concept of Hebrew wisdom, lifelong learning, to be a learner across your lifetime.

Don: I just have to say something about this intergenerational stuff. My next question is so short that I’m going to use some of my time. We’ve all seen young preachers with one baby, and all of their illustrations suddenly revolve around that baby. “Desiring the pure milk of the Word.” They talk about how Christians ought to be hungry for the Bible the way that little baby just latches onto the bottle.

Then at the other end, you see some preachers who are 78 or 79 and every third sermon, maybe every second sermon, talks about death. You have some hint why, maybe. I would have thought one of the things preachers ought to be doing is something that was well-recognized in the first book on preaching ever published in the English language. It was by Perkins, and he very carefully works through the categories you should be thinking of as you envisage the people to whom you’re preaching.

Now a lot of his categories are theological, but by extension it works in a lot of areas. He’s got categories like this: “To the learned unbelieving despiser. To the learned unbelieving non-despiser. To the unlearned unbelieving despiser.” He’s got all these categories, and you’re supposed to be thinking out your application for all of these different groups. There is a sense in which the same thing needs to be said …

The danger for all of us is we start preaching the Word of God and the illustrations we use, without changing what the text says, the kinds of things that come foremost to mind are the things in our immediate background. When we’re 26 with a brand-new baby, guess what comes to mind? When you’re 76 and have great-grandchildren around, there are other things that come to mind, whereas, part of being a good pastor is remembering every different group in your congregation … the single mom, the recently bereaved grandfather, and so on.

Although you remain closely tied to your text, the working out of the application of the Word of God in terms of the illustrations you use, and so on, can be overcome in this intergenerational way Terry is helpfully telling us about by a little bit of imagination and a good love for your congregation. So you think through how justification is going to play out in the life of a central business manager type who is facing enormous pressures on work for more productivity and less time at home, and so on.

Question: Can you comment on the significance of the fact that the same things said of Jesus by John in his prologue are said of the Torah in rabbinical writings (e.g. Genesis Rabbah, etcetera)?

Don: They are similar things; they’re not exactly the same things. Genesis Rabbah is part of the great tradition of rabbinic Midrashim or commentaries on biblical texts, and Genesis Rabbah is probably one of the earlier ones, although dating it is not all that secure. At the written level, it is way beyond Jesus, but probably it preserves a lot of oral traditions that go back to Jesus’ time.

It says similar things in the sense that it talks about the word in very dynamic terms. I do not think there is any place in Genesis Rabbah that speaks of the word in the personal terms of the personal revelation of God manifested in the One whom we confess as Jesus, both God and human being, today. That there should be parallels surely is a wonderful thing. It’s an obvious thing. It’s a happy thing. For it’s a reflection of the fact that a lot of devout Jews who were reading their Bibles saw the importance of the category word of God in the Scripture themselves.

Thus, they often made connections between word and wisdom, for example. Because they made that connection, then because of the kinds of things that are said about wisdom in Proverbs 9 and elsewhere and the fact that Isaiah speaks of God’s word eternally settled, you have this personification of word that is not, nevertheless, the hypostasizing of word.

That is to say, it recognized the linguistic use of word and word of God in the Old Testament goes so far that personal kinds of functions are used in a metaphorical way of that word. God’s word exists with God, it goes out, it comes back, it accomplishes things, and so on, but that’s still one step short of saying this word is personal, the second person of the Godhead, or the like.

That there is an overlap shows the kind of matrix out of which, doubtless, John, led by the Spirit of God, comes to use that word as an immensely appropriate title for Jesus. It’s not quite the same thing as trying to say the two documents are exactly the same or use the categories in exactly the same way.

Question: Would you please share with us how you prevent the ministry keeping you from Jesus? How do you prevent that busy program from harming you spiritually?

Mark: Well now, that’s a very personal question, but of course, as an American, I like personal questions. I’ve been warned about this for a long time. I remember when I was a first-year undergraduate, a friend’s father warned me, saying, “What you must never do is turn your devotional life into your ministerial work or let your ministerial work supplant your devotional life.”

I’ve never found that the case. I have my quiet times every morning in the text that is going to be preached on that coming Lord’s Day, whether I’m the preacher or somebody else. Wherever I’m going to be on the Lord’s Day, whoever is preaching, whether it’s me or somebody else, that’s what I study in my quiet time every morning the week before. So I have never found.… For some reason in God’s kind providence, I have found the ministry he has called me to fires up my heart for him.

Question: Please share with us your method of sermon preparation.

Mark: I take two days. If it’s a shorter passage, I begin with the original language. If it’s a longer passage, I do not. Then after I compare different translations, I will go to the original to find where there are differences and why. My first full day, I’m just working with the text. I’m reading it and rereading it and rereading it and rereading it and making all kinds of notes.

Maybe near the end of that day, I will look at a few commentaries on issues that are sort of unclear to me, if there’s anything that’s not clear. Then I try to make sure by that evening I’ve got an exegetical outline. Before I go to sleep that first night, I want a homiletical outline. I want the outline of my sermon. Now I would like that to be the same thing as my exegetical outline, but it’s not always.

Sometimes an exegetical outline is just saying what’s there, but I’ve chosen to preach on a passage of Scripture that wasn’t just written by itself; it’s part of something else. I am choosing to preach on just those 10 verses, so the way I communicate just those 10 verses may not be in that exact order. I may decide it’s best that the real crucial point that needs to be communicated is in the middle of the passage, and I need to do that first or last. So anyway, I have a homiletical outline I come up with for the sermon.

Second morning, that’s when I’m looking at commentaries a lot. Now that I have made myself a conversation partner, so I’m not just going to be blown away or just become a photocopy of the commentaries, now that I can sit there and “talk” with a Don Carson or Matthew Henry or Peter O’Brien or whoever I’m speaking with, now because I’ve looked through the text, I know what I think about things. Then I’ll “talk” with them. I’ll read the commentaries for a few hours.

Then I come up with an application grid where I lay out the points of my sermon this way.… Sort of like William Perkins inspired different categories. What is unique salvation-historically about this passage? What does this passage mean for non-Christians? Are there any public implications of this? How does this point to Christ? What does this mean for the individual Christian?

I think that category is all most people every really preach, by the way, from my listening. The last category is what does this mean for my congregation? What is the implication of this right now for us as a church? Every point of my sermon, I’m trying to think through all of those things. It’s a kind of structured meditation.

Not all of that will come out in the sermon, or my sermons would be even longer, but enough comes out, I think. I go to lunch, then, with a friend of mine who’s a layman. I’ll take a member of the church who’s a layman, and they will work with me through the text and filling out this application grid. So I can sort of ask them about things and talk with them about things.

Then I go home and, after lunch on that second day, then I just literally am writing the sermon. I write out a full manuscript. That’s pretty much it. That application grid, by the way, is to be found at 9marks.org. We’ve got copies of that over there. Feel free and use them.

Question: The Trinity situation while Jesus was on earth, fully human and fully God. Explain please.

Don: It’s a good question. When we interview candidates for teaching posts at Trinity, regardless of what department they’re going to be in, whether it’s systematic theology, historical theology, New Testament, Old Testament, or whatever, then some of us have developed over the years patterns of questions they jolly well better get right or else they’re off the grid right to begin with.

One of the questions that I regularly ask is something like this: “So you’re teaching in your subject and some bright young seminarian comes to you afterwards and says, ‘In the Old Testament we’re told God neither slumbers nor sleeps. There is Jesus having a snooze at the back of a boat. So how do you say he’s God?’ Now how are you going to answer?”

It’s the same question as this; it’s just put with a hard case. It’s important to understand that Christians have been wrestling with issues like that from the very, very beginning, because the biblical evidence is so strong for the deity of Christ and the biblical evidence is so strong for the utter humanity of Christ. How do you confess both of those things simultaneously?

We have our one-liners, but the one-liners sometimes obscure massive debates. “I believe that Jesus is 100 percent man and 100 percent God.” Well, the mathematician in me gets nervous. I know what’s being said by that. I understand. I certainly don’t want to say he’s 50 percent man and 50 percent God. That’s pretty disastrous. But 100 percent plus 100 percent, in any mathematics I’ve every studied, leads to 200 percent. I know what’s being said, but that needs to be tied into a larger discussion.

In the history of the church, this was worked out, then, in terms of the fact that he had two natures. Of course, as soon as you start speaking of two natures, then there is a danger of a kind of schizophrenic presentation. Most of the analyses of how Jesus is simultaneously a human being, genuinely a human being, and God are in danger of falling off the cliff one side or another.

On the one hand, to have a kind of de-Godded Jesus (it’s bound up with kenosis theory; that is, what is meant by the self-emptying spoken of in Philippians, chapter 2) or, on the other side, having almost two persons, not only two natures but two persons. Warfield comes very close to that. He works through the entire Synoptic Gospels, and he’s saying, “Here it’s the deity of Christ that is manifesting itself. Here it’s the humanity of Christ that is …”

There’s some truth to all of that, but if you just keep having all of your discussions along those lines, pretty soon you get the feel that there’s a schizophrenia going on somehow. How to preserve that in faithfulness and still in worship is not the easiest thing. I’m more than happy to talk about this at great length, but let me suggest a couple of pastoral ways forward rather than trying to outline the whole history of the discussion of this crucial dogma.

It’s important, first of all, to listen to all of the biblical texts in all they have to say and not let any one of them take over the agenda. For example, if you come out of an Arian background like Jehovah’s Witnesses, one of their great proof texts is John 14 at the end where Jesus says, “The Father is greater than I.” Well, if the Father is greater than I, then he’s got to be a bigger God somehow, more God-ish and I’m less God-ish. But again, what does greater mean and in what context?

I can say President Bush is greater than I. He’s greater militarily. He’s greater in terms of political clout. He’s certainly far greater in world renown. I don’t think he’s more articulate in Q&A. Moreover, whatever else I say, with all due respect, to President Bush or any other leader, he’s not more of a human being than I am.

In other words, the issue is not ontological. In the context of John 14, Jesus says the Father is greater than he in his state of humiliation, and he’s returning to the Father (to use the language of John 17) to share in “the glory which he had with him before the world began.” In other words, his “greater than I” is a reflection of his self-humiliation, “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see,” as we sing in our Christmas carols. It’s not a denial of Christ’s deity at all.

This is the gospel, after all, which finds Thomas at the very end saying, “My Lord and my God.” It’s the gospel which begins with “The Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Yet it’s also the gospel which finds Jesus weeping at a tomb, eating food, being tired, and all the rest. So however you proceed in this discussion, you must proceed on the basis of a careful, close reading of all of the evidence rather than just some of the evidence or making one bit of the evidence your turning point, your crux, your “I will die here” sort of a line.

The second thing to recognize is this has been debated again and again and again in the history of the Christian church. You are not the first generation to think of these things. A friend of mine was flying back to Trinity from some weekend ministry not too long ago, and the chap next to him in the airplane saw that my friend, my colleague, was reading his Bible. He perked up some interest and said, “You know, I’ve been trying to understand the Bible for some time too. I think I’ve finally got that Trinity figured out.”

My friend was really impressed and wanted to find out what this chap had come up with. What the chap had come up with was frank, old-fashioned modalism, another heresy. If you don’t know what it is, you’re blessed. Don’t worry about it. On the other hand, the slightest bit of historical theology would have shown that one had been tried, thought through, condemned, and handled in text after text after text. Do you see?

Sometimes when you come up with the hardest doctrines of the Christian church, a little bit of careful reading in historical theology is a jolly good thing, not because historical theology has the authority of Scripture, but because historical theology discloses to you how earlier generations of Christians have already wrestled with these things and tried to think carefully and prayerfully and reverently about them.

If you’re brand new to this area and you want to read a pretty good book on Christology that answer some of these things, read the book by Millard Erickson called The Word Became Flesh. It’s only about 240 pages. It’s not too, too detailed, but it’s detailed enough to help you to think through these things as carefully as possible.

Finally, as important as it is to understand these sorts of passages, here as much as anywhere in the reading of Scripture, it is important rather more to be mastered by the text than to be masters of the text. There are some people who want greater doctrinal clarity so they can lord it over people with less doctrinal clarity. It becomes a game of one-upmanship. One of the things I appreciated about what Mark was saying a moment ago about how in the ministry he wants the ministry itself to be firing zeal, so also in academic life.

I don’t want an academic component to my life and then a pious component to my life, so when I’m having my devotions I stop thinking critically and when I’m thinking critically I’m anything but pious. God help us! How does that correspond to loving God with heart and soul and mind and strength? You need to be devoted to God in every domain, in every dimension of life. In that connection, then, it really is important to remember the place of reverence and worship in coming before a God who, not surprisingly, is a little beyond what we can understand.

Now it’s important not to appeal to ignorance the wrong way or to mystery the wrong way. It’s important not simply to throw up your hands and say, “Well, it’s mysterious. I believe it anyway,” and then construe it as basically illogical. Part of the heritage of Christian doctrine has tried to understand the biblical texts in ways that involve no necessary illogicality, even while understanding that there are all kinds of things we don’t understand because we don’t have enough information.

So the formulations of Christology at Chalcedon, Nicaea, and elsewhere are efforts to understand all the Bible says about Christ being God, about Christ being a man and yet, at the same time, not to word this in a way that involves a necessary contradiction and in a way that still preserves a careful place for what we don’t understand and must say we are ignorant about. Which means at some point, not too surprisingly, God is way beyond what we …

We don’t even understand human beings very well. Just ask anthropologists about the mind-body problem and see how much we don’t understand in that area. Why should it be too surprising that we don’t understand the Trinity or the incarnation fully and exhaustively? Somewhere along the line, while we’re exploring all of these things as rigorously as possible with the background tools we have, we also need to be humming in the background …

Thou art the everlasting Word,

The Father’s only Son;

God, manifestly seen and heard,

And heaven’s beloved One.

Worthy, O Lamb of God, art Thou,

That every knee to Thee should bow!

Question: Once you have discovered the main point of a passage, is it okay to package this point in terms and ways that unchurched non-Christians would understand?

Mark: Yes, definitely do that. You are not telling the world what they want to hear, but you are packaging God’s message in a way they can understand.

Question: What do you think of a question and answer session in church after preaching?

Mark: I’ve actually been a part of a church that did that. The church I went to as an undergraduate had a great pastor. He was a good preacher. It was the 70s. Everybody thought that was a good idea, so we actually did it. It was a disaster. Don’t do it.

What happened is the brother would preach a good sermon from the Word, and 500 people are going to be gathered there and moved in one way or another. Then the same three people, as it turned out over the weeks, would have a few questions. “Ed, when you said this in verse 7.… Now, my Bible says …”

Then Ed has to talk about translations, and he just misses the whole thing the Holy Spirit had been doing in the service. If you want to have a separate thing afterwards in another room for everybody who is interested, that’s great. It’s fine to dialogue, but I wouldn’t put dialogue right after a sermon.

Don: By and large, I agree, especially in the context of the local church, but I do think there are at least some potential exceptions. If you’re preaching evangelistically on a university campus where 40 or 50 percent of the people showing up are unbelievers, either right after or some time else, you need some time for questions.… I’ve always called it “Grill a Christian.” You need some places where they can get back at you.

What you try to do is get to the Christians first and tell them to keep their mouths shut, which answers part of this problem, because it is true that you.… The worst people for asking questions in a university mission are the Christians who are trying to get all of their answers in biblical theology sorted out and are trying to show off at the same time. “Dr. Carson, do you believe in infralapsarianism or supralapsarianism?” Just give me their neck, and I’ll wring it.

So you try and get to some of these people in advance and say, “My dear brother and sister in Christ, if you have some theological questions, I’d be glad to see you on another occasion but not this occasion. Please, exercise the gift of restraint.” In other words, “This is a word from the Lord for you: ‘Shut up.’ ” I’ve done that in universities all over the country, because the aim of the exercise is to try to get some people who ask serious questions who are really unbelievers.

I do think there is a really important place for that. Or in the context of the local church, sometimes it’s in small groups, well-run small groups. The ministry of the Word is not only public preaching. The ministry of the Word includes counseling, using a Bible. It includes small groups that are properly constrained by elders who are being careful with how the small groups are run, and so on. I’m not saying anything against what Mark has said; he would agree with all of that.

That means sometimes in the small group venue there is a place for Q&A and discussion that is not appropriate after the Word of God publically heralded. I agree with Mark 100 percent in this regard, that when the Word of God is powerfully heralded and there is a powerful sense of the presence of the Spirit of God hovering over a congregation, to have some idiot asking about a Greek participle is just not the most helpful thing on God’s green earth. I couldn’t agree more.

Question: Dr. Carson and Dr. Dever, please comment on your view of Bible translations for expository preaching. In the process, comment on: dynamic equivalence, essential literalness, sinister agendas, exposing people to the actual words of God, the relevance today of the KJV, some modern gender-neutral translations, and the extent to which the Bible in English is actually the Word of God.

Don: In many parts of the world this is such a hot subject that it is really difficult to say much that’s useful in few words without stepping on a whole lot of toes. People have just enormous sensitivities in this area. But just as many people in this country were brought up with at least two languages, and often more, so I was brought up with two. I was brought up with English and French.

At the same time I was memorizing, in those days, the King James Version, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son …” and thus I stumbled across begotten, so I was also learning, “Car Dieu a tant aimÈ le monde qu’il a donnÈ son Fils unique.” Fils unique? Unique? Sooner or later, if you’re brought up in a Christian family (my father was a pastor in a bilingual church), you start asking questions, don’t you?

When I first started preaching, just in small contexts in my late teens, one of the principles I developed early on was.… This was before I had much Greek. I was really studying chemistry and mathematics at the university, but I started taking classical Greek on the side. One of the principles I adopted early on was this: If my sermon I was preparing, let’s say in English, worked only in English out of the text but didn’t work out of my Louis Segond French Bible, it was probably too clever.

That is to say, if the cleverness of the sermon and the way it was organized depended on particular lovely phraseology from the time of King James, and it didn’t work when it came out of Louis Segond, then probably it was a badly structured sermon, not because every translation is perfect but it means I’m relying just too heavily on the peculiar phraseology of one particular translation.

Whereas the truth of God in that passage as a whole (granted the Louis Segond wasn’t a bad translation, but it was almost as old-fashioned in French as my King James was old-fashioned in English), you can understand the possibilities for aberration. I could work with that the other way too. So I early avoided sermons that depended, in some narrow sense, on just a particular translation.

Moreover, while it is true that I want to insist on verbal inspiration (that is, God’s inspiration extends all the way down to the product of the words as originally given), there are some people who treat that inspiration, all the way down to the level of words, as if it excludes inspiration at the level of syntax; that is, how words come together to form sentences.

For example, “In blessing I will bless you, and in multiplying I will multiply you.” If you’re brought up in the King James Version, you’re familiar with those words. It’s a great literal translation of Hebrew. It makes no sense in English. Now it has come to make some sense simply because we’re so familiar with that sort of language today, if we’ve been brought up with the King James Version, that it’s come to make sense.

But there is nobody on the streets of Johannesburg who is biblically illiterate who would ever say, “In blessing I will bless you” or “In running I will run” or “In eating I will eat.” It’s not how you say it, is it? It’s not English. The same God who inspired the words inspired the syntax. Moreover, words as they are used in one language rarely have exactly the same semantic domain (that is, the domain of meaning) of words in another language.

You who speak Afrikaans and English. You know that. Sometimes you have to say things in a very different way. Let me take some examples from the languages I know. There is no French word for home. Home is a big word in English; it’s huge. It’s used sometimes as a noun and sometimes as a sort of quasi-adjective. Homeschooled. There’s no word for home. How do you say homeschooled in French when there’s no word for home?

“I’m going home.” In French you say, Je vais chez moi (to my place) or chez nous (to our place) or au foyer (to the hearth), but there’s no word for home. You can multiply that sort of thing a thousand times over. So you realize, suddenly, that those who want simply one word in the donor language always to have exactly the same word in the receptor language may, in fact, be forcing something mistaken. You cannot always do that.

The trouble is sometimes there’s a pun that’s operating in the original language which you then lose in the receptor language. That’s one of the reasons why we still insist, where possible, to train men for the ministry in Greek and Hebrew.

Within that frame of reference, then, if people of more conservative temperament like the extra-literalness you get from the NASB or from the ESV, I’m not going to throw brick bats at them. If, on the other hand, they prefer something like the NIV, I’m not going to throw brick bats at them either. Sometimes when people prefer the additional literalness it’s because they don’t know their Greek and Hebrew very well and the extra-literalness shows them the structure of the Greek and Hebrew. What they often miss is the power of idiom, just the same.

On the long haul, what I really want for most is to train people to a better level of language capacity. In this sense, then, the last part of the question (there are a couple of these I’ve skipped over; they’re too lengthy), “… the extent to which the Bible in English is actually the Word of God,” that’s a very, very good question. It’s just a huge question.

I tell the graduating students coming out of Trinity that if at any time in the first five years of their ministry I hear them saying in the pulpit, “Now the Greek says …” I will personally come and throttle them. I expect them to work with the Greek and Hebrew. Don’t misunderstand me. But there are ways of saying that sort of thing without sounding a bit condescending or as if, “You need my specialized priestly knowledge before you can understand the Bible the way I understand the Bible.” It’s really scary.

The Bible, in any translation insofar as it reflects the truth of what God has disclosed, is genuinely the Word of God, but all the best formulations of the doctrine of inerrancy have somewhere in there toward the end, “as originally inspired,” or something like that, precisely because one of the things we insist about the Bible is God did not give a generalized universal linguistic revelation.

He gave a revelation that was time-space historically particular. He didn’t give it in Chinese. He didn’t give it in Afrikaans. He didn’t give it in Kamba. He gave it in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Not only Hebrew generically.… Mishnaic Hebrew is not quite the same as tenth-century-before-Christ United Monarchy Hebrew, just as English has changed over the years. When I was at university, I did some Chaucer.

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote.

Nobody talks like that anymore, but Chaucer did. The language changes. Hebrew changes across the length of the Bible. That is part of the glory of the fact that God disclosed himself in the words of human beings in specific space-time historical contexts.

Part of our effort to hear the Word of God, as it was given in space-time history, is to understand how the language was used then, and then make the appropriate transfer to our language and our situation, being as faithful as pardoned sinners can be, led by the Spirit of God to what the Word of God truly says.

What I’m really pleading for in this regard is care not to exaggerate a particular position on translations. If you prefer one above another for some reasons, God bless you. Go in peace. The only time I’ll quarrel with you is if you start saying that unless we have your particular views on the matter, we’re flirting with heresy. Then you and I are going to have an argument. God bless you.

Mark: On translations in English, I think it’s always good to use a number of translations when you’re trying to understand a text. Even if you begin from the original language, it’s good to see how others have wrestled with that language, putting it into English. It think the sort of main committee translations are good to always consult before you preach the King James Version … the New American Standard, the NIV, or out of the RSV family you can pick the ESV because it’s been theologically corrected.

I also think it’s good, then, to consult some idiomatic translations where you’ve had one hand sit down and look at it, because every once in a while, I think they come up with a great way to put something, whether its J.B. Phillips or Robert Bratcher with the Good News Bible or even Kenneth Taylor with The Living Bible. I’m never going to tell somebody to take something like The Living Bible as their Bible; it’s more like a commentary. But still, as I preach, it’s useful to know they’re there.

There are also other newer committee translations that are not as widely known, everything from the Holman Christian Standard Bible, which is surprisingly good, to the NET Bible that a lot of faculty at Dallas have done. There are always translations that are being worked on. I would encourage you, particularly if you are a preacher of God’s Word, to become familiar with those translations.

There are wonderful old translations. The Geneva Bible is great to look at. That’s the Bible the Puritans used. They wouldn’t use the new “liberal” King James. They wanted to stick with the good ol’ Geneva. All of the English translations are basically the work of William Tyndale. Get a copy of William Tyndale’s translation, and you’ll be holding in your hands about 70 percent of the NIV, the ESV, or the NAS right there from almost 500 years ago. So get William Tyndale’s New Testament and look at that.

Onto the interactive stuff, one more thing on Q&A. Every week at our church, our Wednesday night meeting is Q&A. So I believe in dialogue. I don’t want it in any way to replace the sermon, and I wouldn’t say small group ministry is required in the way that preaching ministry is required. I would say it’s allowed and it is the ministry of the Word, but I think there’s a requirement for preaching ministry that there is not for your church to have small groups. Though, effectively, every society will have small groups in one way or another, and that’s great.

On Wednesday night, what we do is we work through a book of the Bible. I’m working through 1 Corinthians. We’ll have a verse or two written up on the board, and I will begin asking the assembled congregation (about this size) some questions. “Okay. Here in verse 12, what’s the subject?” Somebody will yell it out, and I’ll say, “Who is Paul talking to in this? Can you remind us of the situation?” Then they’ll talk about that. “What does Paul say to them?”

“Well, he says …”

“What’s the difference between this and this?”

“Well, there’s not one. It’s really used in parallelism, and it’s just amplifying the same point.”

We’ll get into conversations, and then finally we’ll get down to 20 minutes on or 30 minutes on, “What does this mean for us? What’s the significance? Does this have anything to do with us here at CHBC? Ideas? Anybody?” Then we’ll talk.

So I have a conversation like that every week for an hour with the congregation. I love Q&A and dialogical talking with the congregation. I just am not going to replace the preaching of the Word with that.

Question: How do you choose elders for a church that does not have any?

Mark: Very carefully. Slowly. With great consent. Let me tell you four things I use. You obviously take the biblical qualifications, but inside that, what we did in our church because when I came.… Most Southern Baptist churches in the US have not had a plurality of elders. It is a new movement to have a plurality of elders. Well, we’re part of that new movement.

Eight years ago, we moved to having a plurality of elders. It took us two years to rewrite our constitution. A nonbelieving neighbor of mine lovingly but mockingly said, “Mark, you realize it only took the American framers of the Constitution a few months. It took you guys two years.” What we wanted to do was, particularly, to have an idea of how elders would function vis-‡-vis the congregation as a whole.

In trying to choose this first batch of elders, I had to be very explicit with the congregation about what I would be looking for, because they all agreed that I, as the one recognized elder, should nominate the elders to the congregation, and the congregation would have that up or down vote. As I looked at it, thought about it, prayed about it, and took counsel I came up with four things I wanted to look at that are more specific than the biblical qualifications.

The biblical qualifications are essential, but that’s not everything you might want to think of. So, for example, it doesn’t mention having a quiet time. Paul, in writing to Timothy and Titus, doesn’t mention that you regularly read the Bible. There are just all kinds of things that.… There are specific reasons Paul is writing those letters and what he says is all true, but in a particular situation, there may be some other things you need to take into account in who you pick to serve as an elder at any given time in your church. Here are the four things I also look at …

1. Core doctrines

Do they have a firmer-than-normal grasp of the core doctrines of the Christian faith? They can be a fine member of our church without that, but if they’re going to be an elder, do they have a firmer-than-average grasp of those core doctrines?

2. Distinctive doctrines

 Do they have a core grasp of those doctrines that set us off from other churches, other groups of Christians? So, for example, we’re a Baptist church. I don’t need an elder wondering about infant baptism. All right? I can have members of my church who have Presbyterian or Reformed friends who begin to question that. We can have dialogue about that. We sometimes will lose people to a Presbyterian church over that, or we’ll gain some from a Presbyterian church. That’s fine.

But in the elders, I want people who have thought through why, as a congregation of Christians, we have made those choices that are distinctive over and against other Christians, because we don’t need to take up the elders’ time with those first questions. So I want somebody who has a firmer grasp on those distinctive doctrines.

3. Doctrines that are under pressure socially

I want somebody who has a firmer-than-average grasp on those areas of doctrine that are under particular cultural pressure. So right now anything related to gender is incredibly hot, certainly in the United States. Whether you’re talking male-female roles, male leadership in the church or in marriage, or homosexuality, that whole basket of issues is very hot, socially, publically. We don’t need that on the eldership. I want somebody on the eldership who understands these things so that it will not be divisive in the church.

4. A heart for the congregation

 I want to see somebody who has an unusual heart for the congregation. I want to see them there on Sunday night (because that’s when we have our prayer meeting), not because they know they have to be there to be an elder but because they love these people, they love this congregation, and if there’s any way they can be there to learn more, to pray more intelligently for this flock they love, that’s where they will be.

Don: Because Mark has particularly stressed the additional distinctives; that is, distinctives that are particularly urgent in the context of Washington, DC, and in much of the Western world today, he himself would not want in any way, as he reiterated, to downplay the things Paul explicitly sets forth.

Amongst those you need to keep in mind, it seems to me, is not only an exemplary life but the ability to teach. If you can’t teach the Word of God you can’t be an elder. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean you can be a great preacher or something, but in my judgment, this business of teaching as part of the qualification for the Word of God, whether it’s one-on-one or small groups or in some context, is really critical.

I know there are some who make a large distinction between ruling and teaching elders. That’s another whole discussion. That distinction only comes up in one passage, and I’m not sure the distinction is quite as absolute, even in that passage, as some people think. But we’ll let that one pass. If he wants to come back and correct me one more shot after this, that’s fine too.

Question: Here’s another two-part one.

Question #1: What does the word world in John 3:16 refer to? Only the known world or everyone?

Question #2: If it comes to church discipline, what sins need to be disciplined? What about smoke and drink? (I think I’m overlapping with Mark here again.)

I tried to say briefly what world means in John’s gospel. It is important to understand that words, generally, have what’s called lexical semantics. That is to say, a range of meaning you can find in dictionaries which tend to be additive. They find all the different usages and all the different meaning they can have in all kinds of places. Then they have particular meanings in particular contexts. That is, the contexts limit them in some ways to one small subset of the full potential.

It is wrong to look up a Greek word in Bauer, Arndt, and Gingrich, or the latest exemplification therefrom, track down all the meanings you can find, and then find all of them in every use of that word. So in John 21 (the last two or three verses, as I indicated), world is simply a big place for keeping a lot of books. There’s no moral overtone to it at all.

It’s merely part of a more extended way of saying Jesus really just isn’t a human being; he is the Word who is one with the Father from all eternity. If everything he’s ever done could ever be put down in books, the world itself could not contain the books that could be written. In that context, world has no heavy theological freight.

Equally, in every context where world shows up in the New Testament, you need to keep asking yourself, “How does this author use the term, and how is he using it in this particular context?” In principle, you raise that sort of question with every word that comes along. My father, who was a Baptist pastor, used to say, “A text without a context becomes a pretext for a proof text,” and it’s true in the study of words, too, isn’t it?

If you’re interested in that sort of question at a methodological level, a few years ago I wrote a little book called Exegetical Fallacies, and there’s one whole chapter in there on how to study words. If you want a slightly longer book, there’s a book by Moises Silva called Biblical Words and Their Meaning. It’s a lovely little book that helps you to work through these things in very systematic careful ways. If you haven’t read either of those things, to be frank, I think you will improve the care of your exegesis of Scripture quite a lot if you take the time to work through them.

With respect to world in John when he’s using the term theologically, the choices offered me here are “only the known world” or “everyone.” That’s already presupposing quite a lot about how much people in the first century knew or did not know. Clearly, the first-century writers knew about Africa. They’re on the Mediterranean, for goodness’ sake. You’re introduced to the Ethiopian eunuch very early on in the early church. The church extended south into Africa at least as rapidly in the first three or four centuries as it did north and west into Europe.

There is very good evidence that Thomas got as far as India. There is at least some evidence that the gospel, by the end of the second century, got as far as China. People knew a lot more about the “known world” than is sometimes thought. In any case, John’s interest is not in encapsulating the exterior boundary of geography. His interest is in saying, “Not Jews only, but the whole world.” That’s a core interest for him.

Then whether or not, as he wrote that, he knew about North American Indians is irrelevant. It’s already subsumed under it, even if he didn’t think of that particular people group in particular. Usually with John there is this additional freighting of this created world order.… Jew and Gentile but under God’s curse because of its rebellion against the Creator himself. So world normally has a negative overtone of dirt, rebellion, darkness, lostness. That’s the world we’re born into.

As we saw in John’s gospel, the whole world does not know him and then some do receive him … not because they’re different from the world. As Jesus later says, “I have chosen you out of the world.” That means they began in it. They were part of it. In that context, we should think of the world not merely in sort of creational terms but in creational fallen terms, not only Genesis 1 but also Genesis 3.