Q&A 4 (D. A. Carson and Mark Dever in South Africa)

Listen 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 it biblical to teach love in terms of the agape concept?

Terry Martin: It’s interesting that the word for erotic love does not appear in the Greek New Testament, so many Christians become quite concerned about that. What I’ve done in the church I’ve pastored up until the last Sunday was we put a tool together using Song of Solomon as the driving pattern for counseling in this area because, remember, the Scriptures don’t stutter on the whole issue of this dimension of love, the sexual dimension.

For singles, we teach up to about chapter 5 in this particular tool. Then for those who are going on for premarital counseling, because they are going to be getting married pretty soon, we’ll take them right through. I think you need to still understand the whole aspect of sexual love under the big umbrella of agape love, the love which is a giving love, which only God can implant in our hearts as an altruistic giving kind of love.

Question: What does God really think about wives in the workplace who are mothers too?

Terry: I think just reading that passage of the Scriptures in Titus 2, those 10 verses, raises a number of issues. The fact that you read it publically in church may already, just in and of itself, be controversial. I guess whichever way I answer this question, there would be those on either side who are going to agree and disagree, but let me just give it a shot.

There are many contingencies, I think, that can enter into the life of a woman. I mean, she could lose her husband; he could die. So the single-mom scenario is a very real one, and moms have to move into the workplace. But I want to encourage you as you read through the Pastorals that you’ll discover some very good advice. Single moms, Scripture says, “Get married.” Of course, as I suggested earlier, we always think we know better than God, so we rather want to come up with our own ways of doing these things.

If you look at Proverbs 31, you see a very interesting picture there. Wisdom is epitomized and sort of brought to its full expression in the picture of the wise woman in Proverbs 31. You notice that she uses her home as a base. She’s deeply involved in business ventures, isn’t she? But it’s still from the home base. It’s always admirable for me to watch single moms work from their base and make a living, because they have to be extremely creative, especially in our own cultural situations as we watch the single mom problem.

I told you a little earlier that the divorce and separation statistic in Weltevredenpark at the high school is 76 percent. So we’ve got a big problem on our hands because we generally, most times, deal with single mothers. The daddies are either nowhere to be found or they’re too busy to get to the school. These moms have a real hard time keeping house and home together.

I would still opt for the getting married option and encourage women to use the home base, launching business ventures from the home while still keeping the home intact. As I said, you probably would have so much disagreement around this issue either way, so we can check after the meeting if you have any further comments or questions on that.

Question: If you will allow me to play Devil’s advocate.… If expository preaching is the way to go, why don’t we see it being done in the Scriptures themselves, and especially how can Christ be our example if he didn’t do it and yet we must?

Mark Dever: You may have been playing Devil’s advocate, but you were also playing Dever’s advocate, because I put that question to Don about a year ago on the phone. Do you remember that phone call, Don? I took careful notes. I can’t remember everything Professor Carson told me, but I do know, just from my own memory of reading Scripture, that certainly one of the jobs of the Levites is to teach the law in the Old Testament.

You look at the wonderful account at the end of Nehemiah about Ezra’s reading of the law and explaining it to them. If you look at Jesus as he begins his ministry in Mark 1 in the synagogue, he takes a passage of Scripture and reads it, and we know from synagogue practice that Scripture was exposited. So we assume that’s what the practice was in the New Testament church.

You’ve got to remember also, when you’re reading the New Testament, we don’t have any complete manuscript of somebody’s sermon. What we have are summaries of sermons. If we knew our Old Testaments better, I think we might appreciate how much more teaching we were getting from the Old Testament in these New Testament sermons than we sometimes appreciate. Really, an even better answer will now be given by Don Carson.

Don Carson: In some instances where the New Testament is setting out to explain Old Testament texts, you get very close to remarkably detailed exposition of set pieces. Think, for example, of the passage Hebrews, chapter 3, verse 7 to chapter 4, verse 13. It really is a detailed exposition of one paragraph of Psalm 95; that’s really what it is.

It not only understands the argument within Psalm 95, it picks up on the today word and explains it and a couple of other phrases and explains them. In other words, there’s more exposition of Scripture in the New Testament than you stop to think.

Moreover, even in the Old Testament where you come across a passage like Nehemiah, chapter 9.… There’s this great Bible conference that’s organized. They read the text, which almost certainly was in Hebrew at a time when the people were speaking Aramaic. That’s like Afrikaans and Dutch or Spanish and Portuguese; you’re going to lose a lot of people somewhere.

Then “they gave it sense,” almost certainly means they translated it, and then they explained its meaning. So you have exposition. You can even see pretty closely what the texts were in those cases, too. There’s a lot of patterning from the Old Testament.

Moreover, as Mark has explained, exposition does not necessarily mean you have to restrict yourself to explaining only one text. In other words, you can have a sermon that groups together several texts and explains them, and it still is fairly called exposition. That is to say, as long as all the points in the message actually emerge naturally and forcefully from the biblical text itself, it is still exposition, and quite a lot of that goes on in the New Testament as well.

Mark: Two other things. On the practice of the early church, it’s interesting from the second, third, and fourth centuries how much exposition we have. Apparently the preaching that was going on there was (I don’t know totally) largely exposition of Scripture. So I would take it that was the practice also going on in the first century.

One practical thing I’ve done to help me in this in the way Don is saying using different passages of the Old Testament.… You know in our study Bibles, in the New Testament there are always footnotes telling you when it’s quoting the Old Testament? I don’t know of any Bible that tells you in the Old Testament where that text is dealt with in the New Testament.

What I’ve taken to doing, starting years ago, is just with a red pen, I always mark an allusion or quotation in the Old Testament so that, if I’m studying from Isaiah 61, I can go to where it’s dealt with in the New Testament. Then when I’m reading in the Old Testament, I can have a Holy Spirit-guided commentary about what the Lord is doing in that text. I find stitching it together actually helps my expositional preaching, and I think it’s probably more like the expositional preaching we’re seeing in the New Testament.

Don: There’s no Bible that puts it together exactly like that, though there are quite a lot of Bibles with central references, and so on, which do make the connections forward. The NIV central references section often goes forward like that, for example. But I’ve done the same thing with my Bibles over the years again and again and again, marking them up in the margins for all the biblical references and allusions back and forth. That’s just a jolly good habit to get into for linking your Bibles together.

On the early church.… It is still worth reading today some of the sermons of John Chrysostom, for example. There are many, many superb sermons. Also, by the end of the second century, unambiguously, you find churches often using liturgical years (that is to say, having cyclical patterns of reading set texts over one, two, or three years). Now almost certainly that was learned in the synagogue. There’s a big debate about how far that goes back into the first century but, on the other hand, early on the teaching of the whole counsel of God was mandated in one fashion or another.

Question: If Christ in his resurrection is the fulfillment of the temple, what is to be said of a system of theology that looks for a rebuilding of the temple for sacrifices during the alleged earthly millennium?

Don: Not much. In all fairness to the best exponents of that view, however, they would argue the sacrifices of the temple they envisage taking place are not atoning or proleptic but function a little bit at least in the way most of us as Christians would see the Lord’s Supper functioning; that is, looking back on something. I still think it makes no sense whatsoever after you’ve really read and understood the epistle to the Hebrews, but nevertheless the answer is, “Not much.”

Question: In Titus 1, verse 6, “having children who believe.” How exactly should one understand this?

Terry: It’s interesting that during the break we had quite a heavy discussion on this already because some of the guys who are kind of falling into this issue, the whole issue of election.… “Just become a pastor, and your kids will be saved, because if you want to stay an elder they need to see your kids are believing.”

I think there’s another issue here, though, that we need to look at. We tend to confuse office with function, don’t we? I function as a pastor. Do I need an office to execute that function? For example, I’m going to the high school situation now, so I’m no longer a pastor, right? In some people’s minds, that is pretty much the way they think, but I’m executing my pastor/teacher gift within a different scenario now.

If you fuse office with function, then you do have a situation here where people say, “Well, just become a pastor, and your kids obviously will get saved.” You have a great difficulty in the fact that if you are an elder and kids under your own roof don’t embrace the faith of their fathers, how do you sell that once you get out there?

As I said to you early on, I only know of two elders in my ministry experience who have stepped away because of that issue, so I do tend to take it in more of its broader sense, having believing children, because how do you sell something that’s not a reality in your own family? That would be the question to answer.

Mark: That’s certainly an important question. It, of course, comes from Titus where Paul is laying out qualifications of elders for Titus to appoint in Crete. He says, “An elder must be blameless, a husband of but one wife, a man whose children believe and are not open to the charge of being wild and disobedient.”

Well, that believe is a form of pistis, or faithful, and I don’t understand Paul meant there that they must be Christians. It would seem strange with other things we see in the New Testament about election to have been assured the person who himself is godly will always have godly progeny. In fact, if you look at David and his line in the Old Testament, God seems to almost deliberately, in his election, make a point of the fact that the children of flesh are not always the children of promise.

I certainly think positively what that’s meaning there is an elder would need to be able to be someone who shows that he can lovingly exercise authority in the home and whose authority will be followed insofar as earthly authority can mandate something. So certainly, if an elder had children who were unruly and disrespectful regularly, and particularly publically, that in my mind would clearly be violating this qualification Paul gives here to Titus.

Question: “First establish a correct view and appreciation of church membership before you apply church discipline,” quoting Mark from this morning. What do you do when coming to an un-Reformed church with regard to biblical membership and discipline where there is obvious sin without repentance?

Mark: I assume that’s many of the churches we come to. I think what you do is five things, mostly beginning with the letter P.

First, pray. Remember this is ultimately the Lord’s battle; it’s God’s flock.

Second, preach. You just slowly but surely begin setting the temperature by your preaching. You preach and you teach what it means to be a Christian, what a church is, the entailments of that in our lives.

Third, personal relationships. Just begin establishing personal relationships throughout the congregation so people know your life and doctrine so you’re a credible source for them to be able to hear difficult things from.

Fourth, patience. Be patient. It is amazing the reformation God’s Spirit will work by his Word. If you’re just there for three years to gun up the numbers of the church and then go to what you think is a better church for you.… I’m sure that doesn’t happen in South Africa, but certainly in America we see that happening sometimes.

If one were to be in that situation, then there’s no good way to answer this because it takes too long, often. If you’re willing to be in the place where you are for 10, 20, 30, 40 years, then I think that might help you to be able to exercise the kind of patience that will be useful to seeing that kind of reformation happen.

Lastly, it really helps if you have elders or other church leaders who understand and agree with what you think the New Testament teaches on this. They’ll give you wisdom about when to do what, practically. Don’t act alone.

Don: May I add a story to the patience one? This is not disagreeing with any part of it. When I was a seminary student, which was several decades ago, I was taught by a man from another country (not from Canada, not from South Africa, not from the US; a country that shall remain nameless), and his first charge as a young man in the 1930s had been in a Baptist church where it was really the only church in town. It was a small country town in a fairly rural tough situation, and this Baptist church was sort of the regional church.

When he got there, although nominally a Baptist church stands in the Believer’s Church Tradition, in fact a quarter of the town went. A lot of the heavyweights in the town were there, but they were often public sinners and would get drunk and sleep around. It was just a rough place. He didn’t know where to begin. He preached his heart out and taught. He was just a young man in his mid-20s. He tried to bring up questions of discipline and all; he was just choked down. There was nothing to it.

He was single, which probably contributed to his sense of isolation and loneliness. There were certainly no elders. He prayed. He preached. He did what he could, and he became more and more discouraged. He said he prostrated himself before the Lord in tears every day for three years pleading with God either to clean up this church or take him out of there. He wasn’t a strong enough man to handle it.

After about six months of this, in the next six months, they had 22 deaths, all of leading men in the church. The next year he baptized 200. Now I’m not suggesting you start this way. Who knows, you might be the first to go. We still serve a God who says, “I will build my church,” a Christ who says, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

Question: In what kinds of ways is the modern church suffering as a result of inattention to the doctrine of the incarnation?

Don: That’s a good question. In different ways, I think. There are some who stand broadly within confessional Christianity who are so keen to defend the deity of Christ that, in fact, they have an almost docetic view of the deity of Christ. “Jesus really is God, but we’re not quite so sure he’s a human being. I know he walks and things like that; nevertheless, he’s God.” We’re so keen to emphasize he’s God that we have not thought through all of the implications, for example, of the epistle to the Hebrews in which he identifies with us. He takes on the flesh of human beings.

Has it ever crossed your attention that there has arisen a Redeemer for fallen human beings and not for fallen angels? That’s exactly what Hebrews 2 says, isn’t it? It wasn’t the nature of angels he took on but the nature of human beings, and “tempted in all points as we are, yet without sin.” You can spend a long time working through the implications of that one trying to get it right, thinking it through.

So on the one hand it is important to understand his humanity and work out all the Scripture says in that regard. It is important to remember Jesus Christ is still a human being. He will always be a human being. It’s astonishing, isn’t it? Yet on the other side, it’s important to understand he is genuinely God and not only to combat the liberals but to see this is God in flesh. Here is the center of our worship. God’s whole purpose is all should honor the Son, even as they honor the Father.

This itself is then tied to not only the fulfillment of prophecy, the streams of the Old Testament that make out the coming One not only as the son of David, but also as the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. The whole Davidic expectation is ratcheted up from Isaiah on. It’s really quite remarkable.

Then coming the other way, to understand how all of God’s sovereignty is mediated through Christ. Christ is God’s agent until he turns over the entire conquest to his Father and all the kingdoms of this world become “the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever,” and so forth. The incarnation is the hub on which everything takes place.

There is one use of the incarnation you have to be careful of when you say it’s important. The whole Eastern branch of the church, in my judgment, ratchets up the incarnation too much, too much with respect to other things. How can you ever ratchet up the incarnation too much? But there’s a sense in which you can have an emphasis on incarnation that does not see the purpose of the incarnation is toward the cross, resurrection, exaltation, and so forth. So somehow the incarnation itself becomes the great turning point, and it stands too much in isolation.

I don’t think you can ratchet up your understanding of the incarnation too much provided it’s tied into the whole purpose of redemption and the whole storyline and don’t focus too much on it as an object of meditation in itself. So I wouldn’t want to encourage people to think of themselves or their churches as getting stronger by a whole lot of meditation on the incarnation for three years, but rather, it’s the incarnation in the whole sweeping purposes of God’s redemptive plan leading to the cross, and so forth.

There are lots of texts in the New Testament that say wonderful things about the incarnation, but it is also important to remember Paul can write, “I determined when I was with you to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified,” not “… and him incarnated.” Now, of course, you have to have the incarnation to get the crucifixion but don’t stop there.

Question: What is your stance on the cessation or non cessation of the sign gifts?

Terry: This is probably a yes or no one for me. I tend to lean more into the direction of cessation of sign gifts. If you want to talk a lot more about that, please see me afterwards.

Question: I have people (Christians) telling me church membership is unbiblical, for nowhere in the Bible you will find a membership roll. I found they love this loose association, for it gives them freedom to do what they want, believe in their own way, and they dislike the truths of accountability, stewardship, and structure of the congregation. Can you please comment on this?

Mark: Interesting. You do find the Lamb’s Book of Life. You do find widows on a roll. Anyway, I assume you’re wanting something more than I said this morning, because I think I talked about that this morning. I am happy to talk about that just for a moment, because I do think all of us who are pastors find people like this all the time.

We don’t want to start preaching the gospel of church membership. Our gospel is Jesus Christ; it’s what we heard about the ironies of the cross today from Matthew’s gospel. We want to be able to take a Christian brother or sister who clearly is trusting in Christ, from everything we can tell, regardless of their views on church membership, and love them and appreciate them, but we would like to win them around.

We would like to help them see it’s Christ who founded the church, and the church is not just there to be used at their own discretion, like an author they like. Sometimes they’ll pick up books by this author or a musician they like to listen to.

We should teach Christians that to mature means we don’t sort of manage our own spiritual portfolio all by ourselves, but we are intended to follow Christ congregationally. So we should put ourselves in a congregation of Christians with elders who we trust biblically, not that we think are infallible but that we think are competent teachers of God’s Word.

As you get to know this person, and you befriend them and you encourage them in this, finally at some point I do think as a pastor you have to say to them, “Look. Whatever it is that is stopping you from formally committing to us, asking us to hold you accountable, and you saying you will be here for us, you will help support us, that you’re committed to doing it, would you please go and find a ministry you would trust enough in order to do that, for your own sake and for the sake of that ministry?”

Question: Can you elaborate and explain the phrase where Jesus cried out about God forsaking him? What is the meaning of it? Could it mean there was a break in the triune God’s unity and fellowship because of my or our sin?

Don: I tried to address that in some measure this morning, and it is important to respond with great care here. I tried to make it clear this morning that I utterly reject the contemporary notions in which this cry means nothing more than Jesus, pushed to the limit, feels abandoned, and we can feel abandoned too. That’s not what’s going on.

Clearly, this is a sign of judicial judgment that is bound up with the theme already established in Matthew that, after all, he came to save his people from their sins. This is bound up also in Matthew 20:28 with the fact that he came “not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many,” which means he himself understands his death as paying off this sin debt.

At the same time, the words of the Lord’s Supper in the words of the institution are already saying a great deal about what the cross is about. It’s a new covenant in his blood. The phrase in his blood is in Matthew’s gospel. All of these things combine toward a whole picture in which there is, unmistakably, a judgment falling on Christ on our behalf. That is what his death is about.

So I tried to show that in the irony of the whole situation, the point is he is trusting his Father, which is precisely what brings him to this agony, this anguish, in which he is suffering judicially. If that’s what you mean by some kind of rupture in the Trinity, I can just about live with the language, but …

You don’t want to suggest there is actually a kind of de-Trinitarianizing of the Trinity. You don’t want to suggest, either, that the Father has it in for us, and the Son comes along and bears the wrath and that’s it. Because actually, it’s the Father who sends his Son, and the Son understands in Gethsemane that he’s going to bear this guilt and die our death by the Father’s will. It is the Father’s will that is bringing him there.

The way the thing must be worded must protect the unity of purpose in the Godhead, lest somehow you end up pitting the Son against the Father, which you really must not ever do. Yet at the same time, you must see the enormity of the guilt and the judgment that is falling on the Son by the Father’s own decree and the Son’s willingness to obey the Father’s decree for the salvation of men and women. Now it’s within that access the exact wording has to be worked out.

Question: A pastor who is called to a new church as a senior pastor, does he need to undergo a membership class or is he automatically granted church membership?

Mark: A question not quite as difficult. “O to see ourselves as others see us. O to hear ourselves as others hear us.” Well, I’m going to make the assumption that the investigation he has undergone in order to be called to your congregation as the pastor is even more thorough than the most faithful membership practicer and, therefore, an inherent part of the call is an offer of membership in the congregation.

Question: Jesus never sinned but came in the likeness of sinful flesh. He felt the effects of sin before the cross in hunger, thirst, sorrow, and tears. I think he did not feel the effects of sin in sickness before the cross? When taking our sins upon himself on the cross, did the effects of sin accompany it, pains of cancer, horrible feeling of flu, etcetera?

Don: The really interesting element in this one, it seems to me, is the fact that the effects of sin in terms of sadness, tears, hunger, tiredness, and so on, are in some way a part of the cursed universe of which he is now part. Yet at the same time, the Bible is unambiguous in terms of its insistence that, though Jesus was tempted in all points like as we are, yet he was utterly without sin. Utterly without sin.

So the question then arises, I suppose, did Jesus ever have the sniffles? Ever have a cold? Short answer, “I don’t know,” but if he did, it would not be because he was bearing the results of his own sin but so identified already with this broken human race that, just as he stood in line and was baptized in a sinner’s line that was proclaiming repentance, just as he could weep and know hunger, so this was part of the Father’s plan in his identification with us.

In other words, that sort of thing must be kept carefully worded once again so you preserve the sinlessness of Jesus, otherwise you’re going to have a great deal of difficulty understanding how he could pay for our sins by his death in a substitutionary sort of way.

Question: How do you deal with homosexuals who want to take membership in the local church?

Mark: That’s a very good question. Paul says in 1 Corinthians, chapter 6, beginning in verse 9, “Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor male prostitutes, nor homosexual offenders, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor slanderers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”

Certainly the church is only for sinners, as we observed earlier today, but it is also only for repenting sinners. So if someone comes to you identifying a certain sin they struggle with, well in my mind, that’s a sign of spiritual health or some self-knowledge. If someone comes, though, unrepentant of the sin, then I think we have no alternative there. Church membership is not for them. Membership is for those people who are Christians who have taken up the cross to follow Christ; they’ve denied themselves.

If we will take our sins part and defend it against God and his Word and his convictions, then we can’t be claiming to follow Christ. But if we will take God’s part against us when he convicts us of our sin, but then we continue to struggle with sin.… Well, yeah. That’s the way it is in a fallen world. We will certainly know victory if we’re Christians, but we will certainly find continuing struggles.

It’s much more difficult if you make the question, “What about someone who says homosexuality is a sin, but they feel tempted toward it and regularly fall into homosexual practice?” Now you’re getting a bit more fine, because now you’ve got them saying they understand the Bible as you do, that it is sin. And they are at least testifying with words that they are attempting to repent.

Here, this is again why you need elders, and you need the Holy Spirit’s guidance as you work and you pray, discerning the sincerity of someone’s attempts to repent and the public nature of sin and the nature of the church. All of these things require great wisdom.

Question: What a great evil is a spiritless Reformed Christian, something to spit out of your mouth. A Reformed Christian should be more on fire than an Arminian Christian. How can we set this right? This is not to the glory of God.

Don: The truth may be one and comprehensive but errors are many, so it’s possible to have zeal without knowledge. It’s also possible to have knowledge without zeal. Neither is particularly commendable. How can we set it right? It’s important to recognize the setting of things right, in some sense, has got to be God’s doing in revival and reformation.

So the first thing you do is to set your face in prayer and earnestness for such a renewing of the Spirit that we take knowledge that God has been among us. Practically, this regularly works out in leaders who not only speak the truth but who exemplify real love for the Lord and for one another. That often is reflected in the little things.

Let me back off just a wee bit and say it really is important to see different cultural streams here, too. Some groups express passion with a great deal of enthusiasm, and others, their intensity is expressed in other ways. I lived for nine years in the United Kingdom, and what is viewed as an intense, moving sermon in England, especially in the south, is not what is viewed as an intense, moving sermon in Wales.

In Wales, with that Celtic blood and Celtic background, you’ve got to have at least a bit of yelling and a bit of thumping and enthusiasm or, quite frankly, the Spirit is not in you. Which means someone like Jim Packer or John Stott is just never going to cut it in Wales, and meanwhile some of the Welsh preachers renowned for their enthusiasm are not very highly respected in England. They’re sometimes viewed as over the top. At least part of that is cultural again. It just is cultural.

When I heard the group singing last night.… We have all kinds of people in North America who clap their hands, but there aren’t an awful lot of people who sort of sway back and forth just in exactly that lovely African way. It’s a certain kind of lilt that happens here. Well, I could think of quite a lot of churches in North America where that would be looked upon with a certain kind of disapproval.

Even in this assembly, there must be some of the black and colored Africans here who do find some of our hymns stuffy. There must be. Isn’t that the case? I know you’re not supposed to say it in public, but it is the case. Similarly, I’m sure there are some white South Afrikaners who look on some of the worship styles of some of the black and colored folk as a bit over the top on some occasions. At least some of that is cultural, isn’t it?

So you want to avoid identifying what is spiritual with your preferred cultural slant, too, and that takes a bit of time and patience and forbearance. Having said all of that, nevertheless, I take the questioner’s point here that there is a form of confessionalism that is really dry as dust, and that is just not godly. At the end of the day, the first commandment according to the Lord Jesus is to love the Lord your God with heart and soul and mind and strength, not simply to understand him.

Question: In your definition of church, you mention that a church is made up of correct preaching, correct practice of the sacraments, etcetera. Furthermore, in understanding the church is made up of regenerate believers who have their sanctifying work of the Spirit operating in them and guiding them, is it correct today to refer to the Roman Catholic Church, from its arguable beginning in around 300 AD, as the church or part of it? Thus, is the Roman Catholic Church’s history church history or should we look to the Pilgrim Church, which was persecuted under the Catholics till the 1500s, as a true church history? Thank you.

Mark: This is a really long-answer-demanding question, but it’s not the time of day to give a really long answer. So just a couple of observations: Words obviously have multiple legitimate uses in any language. So in English, by the word church we can mean, according to the Bible, those communities of regenerate believers. We can also mean the universal church, all Christians everywhere before Christ, part of the body of Christ.

We can also mean a building. I know the Bible doesn’t teach that, but it’s not wrong for that word and words its equivalent in so many languages to have begun to be used that way. There may be some unfortunate things that result from it, but it’s not morally wrong to point to an assembly hall and call it a church.

Well then, is it all right in academics, in settings of universities, for us to refer to the organized history of those people who called themselves Christians as church history? Yeah. I, for one, think it’s fine as long as you understand what we mean. I do not mean a history of what is today the Roman Catholic Church is a history of organized local communities of regenerate believers. I don’t mean that for a second.

In that sense, I think the Roman Catholic Church fails to meet the biblical test for what a true church is. I think what Paul says to the Galatians in Galatians 1 about another gospel is a test the Roman Catholic Church, as the Roman Catholic Church, fails.

Having said that, I assume there are many Roman Catholics who are my brothers and sisters in Christ, but it’s not because of what their church officially teaches. It’s because God’s Word has been read in their hearing, God’s Spirit has moved to give them the gift of faith, and they are trusting in Christ alone for their salvation. I would understand it to be an inconsistency that they remain in a church that, at least officially, is committed to another gospel.

I take it by the second part of that question about the Pilgrim Church who was persecuted under the Catholics till the 1500s.… Protestants have always sort of wondered about that, and especially the Anabaptist wing. The one caution I would have to give you as a Baptist myself and a church historian is be careful about assuming whoever was not Roman Catholic in 1300 or 1100 or 900 are the good guys, that they’re our parents in the faith.

There’s a stream of teaching among Baptists in America and in England, I know, which has adopted that, particularly in the nineteenth century. It’s not an accurate teaching. It’s not a good teaching at all. A lot of people the Roman Catholic Church persecuted in the Middle Ages were heretics by our standards as well, and we do not want to assume that in a theological sense my enemy’s enemy is my brother. That is not a good way to think of it at all.

Having said that, in the West we should realize.… Now those of you who are Greek heritage, Russian, or something else, would be a little different, but in the West or if you heard the gospel first from Westerners, it’s true that in 1500, that Roman Catholic Church.… In a sense, that’s our church. It’s not yet what we call the Roman Catholic Church. That doesn’t happen till the response to Luther.

So, for example, the books of the Apocrypha.… Do you know those were never accepted by the entire church? Never. In fact, the Roman Catholic Church never had any official statement calling those deuterocanonical, a second canon of books, until after Luther had said they’re not. Then in the 1560s, the Roman Catholic Church, for the first time in 1500 years, has an organized statement of a group of Christians saying, “These are part of God’s revelation to us in Scripture.”

So many doctrines are like that. You can find Italian bishops in the 1400s who sound amazingly like Martin Luther in their understanding of justification by faith alone. So it’s better to think what happens at the Reformation divides a church. I don’t think that church before was a pure church in any way at all. I don’t assume the gospel was much preached. I think there was lots of confusion with earthly power.

I think there were lots of problems with it, but I don’t think it’s quite accurate to say Protestant history is the history of New Testament Christians and everybody Rome persecutes, and then Luther and company. I think it’s actually more accurate to say after the Reformation, yes, we’ve fallen out into these separate streams. But when you’re talking about 1300, you’re talking about somebody who is my kind of genetic string theologically.

Even if they might not be regenerate, they might not be my brother in Christ or they may be, but their theological reasoning was not done, necessarily, in opposition to Protestantism. I am so sorry if I’ve just confused you or bored you, but it didn’t do it for long. For whoever asked that question, I hope that was helpful.

Don: There are lots of good examples to flesh that one out some more too. The doctrine of the bodily assumption of Mary.… Do you know when it was promulgated as a doctrine? In 1950. I was born in 1946. I was just a little gaffer, but when that was promulgated.… I was brought up in French Canada. I can remember (it’s one of my early memories) the consternation in a monastery about 150 kilometers away where they had a relic that purported to include one of Mary’s bone chips. What can I say? Although the notion of Mary’s bodily assumption was certainly around a lot earlier … 1950!

The doctrine of the infallibility of the pope was 1870. On the other end, meanwhile, don’t we still sing today, “O sacred head, now wounded …”? Bernard de Clairvaux, a medieval monk whose doctrine of substitutionary atonement was superb, and so on. There are so many examples that can be used to flesh out what Mark has just said.

Question: The flood came when Noah was 600 (Genesis 7:6). Lamech died five years before his son Noah (5:30). Methuselah outlived Lamech by five years (5:26 and 31). Thus, Methuselah died in the year the flood came (Noah’s 600th year). Would that mean Methuselah was wicked and died in the flood, or godly and died in the nick of time and, thus, a blessing in disguise? Or can we only speculate?

Don: Believe it or not, I remember when I was at seminary an Old Testament lecturer working through that very question. We had weird Old Testament lecturers. The short answer is, “Yeah, we can only speculate.”

On the other hand, you can read texts in what the Latins call in bonam partem or in malam partem. That is, you can read them in a way that assumes the worst or assumes the best, because, undoubtedly, people were dying in the normal course of events up until the flood.

Therefore, Methuselah’s death, if you read the text in a happy way.… Well, it was about time. He was 969. It was about time to go. There’s no earthly reason to think badly of the poor chap and say, “Well, he got what he deserved.”

Question: Are the poems you recite your own and are they available in print or Internet, other than those printed in your books?

Don: One I quoted this morning I assigned to Stuart Townend because it was his, but if I don’t tell you where it’s from, then I’m afraid it’s mine. Most are not available on the Internet, per se. About 15 years ago, I published a little book called Holy Sonnets of the Twentieth Century. That book has nicely gone out of print, but there are about 80 copies left. They’re all at Trinity and are available through the bookstore.

If you’re interested, google Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, find the bookstore, find Carson, find Holy Sonnets of the Twentieth Century, and you can order it that way. I’m afraid because it’s out of print, that’s messy, but it’s the only way to do it. The ones I was quoting are more recently written, and they are ones that are part of a long-term project going into CDs. The one I quoted this morning at the end is on a second CD of a dozen new hymns. They’re all meant for corporate worship.

I thought you had to get them through ChristWayMedia.com that I’m associated with in the US, but somebody came up to me after the first conference and gave me this little piece of paper that said my hymns on CD are available from Christian Book Discounters with two branches at St. James Church Kenilworth and Christ Church Pinetown. Now that’s clearly the Anglican connection or the Church of England in Southern Australia connection because of their connection with Australia, and in Australia they’re singing a lot of these things over there.

Mark: So you’ve got a long-term project to write hymns?

Don: Yes. We’ve published now about 24 or 25 on those CDs.

Mark: Why are you doing that? Shouldn’t you be writing commentaries?

Don: They’re supposed to be asking the questions.

Mark: But they’re curious. They want to know. Shouldn’t you be writing commentaries or something?

Don: You have to do something in your spare time. Partly, I’ve always loved literature and poetry. Partly it’s just that. But then, in due course, I became concerned with the fact that, for those of us who are not exclusive Psalm singers, it’s important to develop good hymns. We’re better off today than we were 20 years ago. Some of the things of Stuart Townend and the best of Kendrick and so on, these are great hymns, as good as anything in the whole history of the church.

Inevitably there is a lot of rubbish, and there tend to be some themes that are not handled very well. I think part of the problem is in the past, most of our hymns were written by pastor theologians because they were the ones who usually had most education, too. Whereas today, for many complex reasons both good and bad, our pastors don’t write poetry and our musicians write the hymns, but our musicians often don’t know much theology. Some of them don’t know much music either, but we’ll let that pass.

The best of them know quite a lot of music, and yet most of them don’t know an awful lot of Bible or theology. So you get endless pieces with the same sort of cheek phrasing coming back again and again and again. Moreover, a lot of them, especially because of the North American influence again, where there’s a lot of “entertainment music” (they don’t call it that), performance music in church services, special music (sometimes not special and sometimes not music), and because we have a whole lot of Christian radio and all that, you’ve got to keep feeding it.

So there’s an awful lot of stuff that’s done for performance and not an awful of.… Some very good pieces by Green, for example, really excellent pieces I love to sing personally just can’t be sung congregationally. They’re too complex. Congregational music is a subgenre of music, and you cannot make transfers. It becomes important, therefore, for Christians who don’t do anything well (like me) but like to dabble at a lot of things (like me) to try to mix some of those things together and produce hymns. I’m one of a team that is doing that.

I don’t write all the music, either. I’m scared of that. I don’t know enough. So I’ve got a team of musicians I work with, a couple in England, a couple in Australia, a couple in America, and so on, so that it doesn’t all sound the same, trying to get some diversity out of it. This is part of a long-term project; I keep poking at it. To be honest, none of us who are involved take money out of the project. It costs a lot to do this reasonably well, to put on CDs, and that sort of thing.

I had hoped it would go faster. We had seed money for the first round, and then that began to feed the second round. What’s holding us up for the third round now is money. If you want to help the project, buy a lot of CDs. The more CDs that come out.… No money is going to go into my pocket; it’s going to go into producing the next round.

Question: How closely should we link baptism with subsequent membership and permission to attend the Lord’s Table? How soon should a baptized 13-year-old become a member? Do you discourage the unbaptized and nonmembers from the Lord’s Table?

Mark: Excellent questions. Don and I were talking about these very things just this afternoon. The last one, I think, is the easiest one, “Do I discourage the unbaptized from the Lord’s Table?” Yes, because Jesus commanded baptism. All sins are not intentional sins, and we know from the Old Testament there were sacrifices for unintentional sins. So while Jesus goes to the heart about our intention, wrong intentions being sin, we can sin even when our intentions are good but we disobey what God has objectively commanded.

We have been commanded to baptize. The New Testament Christians clearly did that. They were baptized. Paul can write to the Roman church, where he’s never been, assuming that all of them who are in Christ have been baptized. That was the universal practice of the church. Therefore, I understand someone who says they’re trusting in Christ alone for their salvation but who refuses to be baptized to be in continuing sin, in unrepentant sin.

Now if that’s most of you I’m talking to because you’re paedo-baptists and you and I have a disagreement on infant baptism, I don’t for a moment think you’re intending to not follow the Lord. I well assume if you were convinced, you would do nothing more quickly than go and immediately be baptized as believers. So I don’t think you have to assumes any bad will; it’s just in the same way where there are errors in my theology and I don’t know those, I don’t recognize them, there’s nothing I can do about it until I recognize them.

But because I do, and the congregation I’m a part of does, understand baptism to be commanded by Christ, and whether or not your intention is to have fulfilled it, if you’ve not been baptized (to me I would understand that to mean as a believer), then no, I would feel it would be wrong for us as a congregation to admit you to the Lord’s Table. Now that’s my official consistent answer.

In practice, what I always say at the Lord’s Table is, “This is for the members of this congregation in good standing, but if you’re a baptized believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and you’re visiting with us here from some other congregation where the same gospel you’ve heard here is preached there, and you’re allowed to the Lord’s Table there, then in recognition of the unity of the body of Christ, you are welcome to this Table here this evening.”

If some of my paedo-baptist friends who are visiting (and we always have them in the service, and they’re very welcome) parse that and say, “Now Mark is a Baptist. When he says baptism, he means believer’s baptism; I’d better not partake,” that’s fine. They know it’s no lack of love for them. In fact, we’ll invite them back to preach many times.

On the other hand, if they think, “Look. I understand myself to have been baptized and fulfilled that command. This is Christ’s Table. I’m allowed to in my own congregation. The only difference we have with these brothers and sisters is baptism; therefore, I’m going to go ahead and participate.” I’m not going to stop them from doing that, and there’s part of me that really appreciates that picture of the unity of the body of Christ. So I have given you my hard and consistent answer and sort of my practical meaning-to-be-charitable sort of answer.

As far as nonmembers, no. We would understand that we do admit visitors to the Lord’s Table. Now if I had somebody who was regularly coming to the Table who was at our church for two years and didn’t join, I would certainly say something to them about that. I might not know if they even claim to be a Christian. Maybe they’re just doing this out of a sense of what’s socially appropriate because everybody else is doing it. So I would want to pursue that with them as individuals.

Question: Is it right to exclude a person from membership because of a different view on baptism? For example, why do most Baptist churches exclude godly paedo-baptists from membership? Why can Baptists be welcomed to become members of paedo-baptist churches?

Mark: First of all, the majority of people around the world who call themselves Christian understand that baptism saves you regardless of your own faith. I think all of us would agree that we would divide over that understanding of baptism, right? So Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and, sadly and inconsistently, some Anglicans (and even Lutherans) these days will affirm a kind of baptismal regeneration that no evangelical Protestant Reformed person could accept as being consistent with biblical Christianity.

We, in this room, are a minority on the planet of those people who call themselves Christians in our understanding of baptism and its relation to salvation. So let’s just begin with that. All of us will divide over baptism in that sense. What about all of us who we think understand the gospel the same way: justification by faith alone in Christ alone, no merits of our own?

Then you find, from Jesus till now, there has never, ever that I’m aware of been a debate over whether or not to accept believer baptism. For that matter, the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox churches accept their own understanding of believer’s baptism. The debate has only ever been about paedo-baptistism, about the baptism of infants, and Christians have, obviously, disagreed on that and have done so very consistently now for the last five centuries.

Among those of us who conclude that infant baptism is not an appropriate representation of the covenant today, that is not a part of God’s intention, that, say, from Colossians 2, the parallel Paul draws is not with physical circumcision but it is with spiritual circumcision of the heart. Therefore, while we like the parallel with circumcision, we would say the Christian baptism is paralleled in the New Testament with spiritual circumcision of the heart. Then we would understand that we are obedient to Christ’s command in requiring believers to be baptized.

Even inside our Baptist ranks, though, we have a division. There are those who would agree with, I think, the sentiment of the questioner that we should not divide membership over this. A church that has this conviction about baptism should freely, of course, continue to teach it, but it is wrong to be exclusive on a matter that you recognize is not salvific.

While there have been other Baptists who have always thought, “No, in fact, we don’t have the option of not obeying what we think Jesus clearly teaches. So with all due respect and love, we have to have membership exclusively for those who will be baptized as believers.”

Throughout the history since the Protestant Reformation of Baptists that division has gone on, from Benjamin Keach who was for a closed membership, to John Bunyan who was more open, to Andrew Fuller who was more closed, to John Ryland who was more open, to (in these days) John Piper, who would be more open, to me, who would be more closed.

How can I maintain a closed position like that and have Presbyterians and Anglicans preach in our church, which happens regularly? Because my paedo-baptist friend would also exclude from membership in the church someone they understood not to be baptized. Do you see that? Of course, they’ll accept me because they think I’m baptized. I honestly don’t think my paedo-baptist friend has been baptized. So what can I do? I’m put in a very hard position.

My paedo-baptist friend is in the same position if they have, let’s say, an evangelical salvationist, a Salvation Army person or a Quaker, who may be trusting Christ alone for their salvation but who thinks the physical ordinances were just for the first century. So they have, in no sense, been baptized with water and don’t think they need to be because the Holy Spirit baptism of conversion is all they really need.

Then my paedo-baptist friend, you who feel so tolerant against us mean exclusive Baptists who won’t let all Christians into their churches, my guess is you might find yourself thinking that is your brother in Christ and refusing to admit them to the Lord’s Table and into membership in your church if they refuse to be what you understand the Bible teaches baptism is. There’s so much more we could say on that, but that’s probably more than enough.

Don: Mark and I were talking about some of these questions this afternoon, and in a couple of points, we probably don’t see exactly eye-to-eye. Pretty close. The questions were.… How closely should we link baptism with subsequent membership and permission to attend the Lord’s Table? How soon should a baptized 13-year-old become a member? Mark’s answer is delay baptism prudentially and then, when they become baptized and are interviewed for church membership, that becomes the process there.

My answer runs on the other side. When I was a pastor of a Baptist church in Vancouver, quite some years ago, this was something I just really badly wanted to get sorted out in my own ministry. There are some Baptists who solve the problem by simply saying, “We will not baptize anybody before the age of 18.” Let’s be quite frank, there’s no biblical sanction for 18. So it’s prudential judgment, and you’re not quite sure it’s fair.

Supposing somebody gets converted at 17–1/2. Do we automatically delay it? You start having problems like that. At the same time, the church I served had a lot of college and careers and young 20s in it, and quite a lot of them were getting converted. So we had baptisms pretty often. Because we had baptisms pretty often, inevitably you had a lot of little kids coming up to you, “Pastor Don, could I get baptized, please?” Then the whole thing is kicked off again.

There are some Baptist churches, so-called, in the US where baptisms of kids 3 and 4 is pretty common, and it’s pretty scary. I didn’t want to go down that route either. I found some help in the writings of Balthasar Hubmaier, who was an Anabaptist bumped off as a young man. Some say he might have been a theologian the caliber of Calvin if he had lived long enough, but he didn’t.

He developed the theory amongst Anabaptists that went something like this: When a child in a Christian home in an Anabaptist church asks for baptism, then instead of the elders saying, “Yeah. Sure. Fine. No sweat,” or alternatively, “Wait till you’re 18,” they developed the habit of a careful interview with the elders to determine if the child, regardless of age, had, in the judgment of the elders, felt the attraction and tug of the world, the flesh, and the Devil and had self-consciously rejected it for Christ’s sake. Then they’d baptize him.

So I developed a series of questions that were designed to handle precisely that sort of challenge. The first one who came up, I still remember her well. Her name was Nancy. She was 8 years old. She came to me after one of our baptismal services, and she told me she wanted to be baptized. By this time I had thought it through.

So I said to her, “The question you are asking is really important, and that’s why I want to come and see you in your home. This isn’t a ‘yes,’ or ‘no’ sort of thing. We need to be careful and prayerful to honor Christ. I want to come and visit you. Not your parents; I want to come and visit you.” Of course, I told her parents and said, “I don’t mind if you listen in.” But I didn’t want them to interrupt, and I’d prefer it if they were in the next room and listened from there.

When I got there, we chatted about things and her school work. I had known her for several years. She was a delightful little kid, very bright, a strong Christian home. Then I set out the case for her, saying, “When someone asks for baptism, the leaders of the church can do one of three things. They can say, ‘Yes, we think it’s right that you should be baptized.’ They could say, ‘We don’t think that you should be.’ Sometimes they say, ‘We’re not quite sure, to be quite frank, and we’d just like to wait a bit, because we’re not sure.’ Do you understand that?” “Yes.”

Then I asked her the kinds of regular questions that any kid who’s been decently catechized or brought up in a Christian home is going to get right. She was a bright lass, and she answered all the questions aright. If you judge whether or not she’s converted just by such things, she’s converted. Then I had prepared in my mind a whole lot of curveballs. That’s a baseball term. You throw a ball with a curve on it so batters can’t hit it quite so easily.

I asked questions like, “If your mommy tells you to clean up your room, and you do it, you do what you are told, you obey your mommy, then if you die tonight and God asks you why he should let you into heaven, would it be a good answer to say, ‘I have tried to be good. I do clean up my room when my mommy tells me’?” I tried to put it in categories she would understand, and I had about 10 or 15 of these questions.

She blew them all. She didn’t get any of them. If she had answered, “Yes” to that one, there was no way on God’s green earth I was going to baptize her. So she could give a formal answer that was correct but still obviously had not thought things through. I also asked not just, “What is sin?” where she could give a catechetical answer, but I was trying to draw her out to see what interested her, what was attracting her, what was fun to her.

At the end of the day, then, I said, “I never give answers right away. I want to talk them over with the leaders of the church, and I’ll get back to you.” Again, you’re cooling the thing off, having some more time there to work it all out. In due course, then, I got back to her with another meeting and said, “The elders love you a great deal and want what’s best for you, and we think at the moment it’s best if we wait a little longer for your own good. Do you think that’s fair?”

“Oh, yes.” She was happy as a lark. I was probably more tensed up at that point than she. In due course, I refined these things and passed them on to the elders in the church, and that’s the way we handled everybody. Years later, I was back. She was baptized at 18, eventually married a French Canadian, and became a missionary to French West Africa. Now obviously they don’t all work out that happily, but nevertheless that one did.

That made me think very early on that if it is true that the Bible really does link conversion and baptism and membership together, I’m really reluctant to say to a child, “Yes, we really do think you are saved (in this case the girl was 13), but we’re unwilling to baptize you for a few more years because that marks entrance into the church.”

Eventually that’s sending up a signal that says there are two tiers. First you get converted, and then baptism is a mark of entrance into the church, as opposed to being connected with conversion. I don’t want to do that either. At the same time, I don’t want a whole lot of church members who are 13 voting and things like that. So what I prefer is a prudential judgment the other way.

That is, if I really am convinced someone who’s 13 is genuinely converted, I’m happy to baptize them and to receive them into membership in the church and to have them partake of Communion, but I nevertheless insist that they don’t have the full rights of members in terms of voting or anything like that. They do come under the judicial responsibility of the church so that if their behavior comes off the tracks, not only do we expect their parents to get involved, but if their parents don’t, we’ll get involved too.

In other words, it becomes a whole package. Just as a child in the home is a member of the family (there is a sense in which the family is a kind of mini-church within the church) yet the child does not have the full rights of an adult, so also I would want to argue a younger member in the church doesn’t have the full rights of voice, articulation, influence, and voting, but nevertheless remains under the discipline of the church. That’s what we were talking about his afternoon, and I haven’t answered my question. I’ve only answered yours.

Mark: I had several questions on children, and I think it’s a fruitful area to think about. Particularly, it’s a great thing for paedo-baptists and Baptists to talk about together because I think sometimes there’s misunderstanding.

I remember I was sitting in a hotel room outside of Leningrad, as it then was (St. Petersburg, Russia) a number of years ago. The Intourist guide had been landed on me for some reason. He was in my room. He was sitting there, and we read quietly in the same room for about two hours. Then in the middle of this quiet time of reading, he looks up at me.… We had talked about the gospel. He knew I was a Baptist minister.

He said, “Mark, is it true that Baptists eat their children?” He was very serious. You could tell by his tone he was apologetic to ask the question, because he didn’t want to be offensive. I don’t think he wanted to find out our cultic greatest secrets that.… I said, “Sasha, where did you hear that?” He said, “When I was in the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, that’s what other people told me, that Baptists ate their children.”

Well, it may be some of you dear folk here have thought in the past that we Baptists do eat our children. In fact, we don’t. It’s true we don’t baptize them. At least I don’t; Don may. We don’t eat our children. We love our children, and we intend to care for them spiritually. We understand that children born into Christian homes have particular blessings given them that children not born into those homes do not have in the same way.

I remember asking a good friend of mine who was moderator of the Presbyterian Church in America if he thought our children lacked any covenant blessings by not having been baptized. He responded, “I don’t think so. You’ve taught them the gospel. You’ve lived the Christian life in front of them. You’ve loved them. You’ve taken them to church. You’ve held out the gospel promises to them. They lack the sign of it in infant baptism, but they don’t lack any of the substance of the reality of it.” You may or may not agree with that, but that was his assessment.

As a local Baptist church, what we do in our membership directory is we have whole separate section on children. So we have all the children in the church listed, and we pray for those as much as we do the other members. Except for baptism and the Lord’s Supper, we would get very close to trying to offer the same kind of care for the children as we would the other members of the church.

Don: I have quite a number of questions here, and they cover a wide range. I thought I’d pick one out that is entirely off these topics and in another domain now because it really is quite interesting.

Question: To what extent can or should we imitate the interpretive method of the apostles and writers of the New Testament when they interpret some Old Testament passages in a way that seems inconsistent with their original and contextual situation? Also, when Paul discusses Abraham, Hagar, etcetera, in Galatians 4:21–31, is he engaging in allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament or in allegorical application of a literal interpretation?

Don: Well, that question is huge, and it’s very important. It can come from one of two sources, in my experience. It sometimes comes out of reading books from a more liberal track that simply assume the New Testament writers are manipulating the Old Testament, and that’s been fed in with their interpretation of text after text after text until eventually you believe that’s true.

Sometimes it comes just because, as you’re reading the New Testament, there’s a footnote reference to the Old Testament. You look it up and you think, “Good grief. What’s going on here?” We’ve all had some of that experience too, haven’t we? The trouble with this question is you’ve pushed my button. I teach two PhD seminars at Trinity to students who have Greek and Hebrew and are working on PhD dissertations just on the questions of how does the New Testament treat the Old Testament. It really is a very important question.

The ways in which the New Testament treats the Old Testament are quite diverse. Sometimes the New Testament quotes the Old Testament simply using the language of the Old Testament without meaning to bring the Old Testament passage across. My father did that all the time. My father, both in English and in French (we were brought up bilingually), often responded to situations (he was a man of relatively few words) with one-liners from the Bible.

So if we were whining or complaining, he would look at us and say, “This is the day which the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.” My dad knew exactly where that came from and knew it was in a messianic context, and so on. So he was not saying, “This is the literal fulfillment of this passage in your life today.” Nevertheless, his mind was so steeped with biblical language that an awful lot of his thought processes used the language that sort of way.

If we were pontificating on something we knew absolutely nothing about, absolutely nothing, then he would simply look at us and say.… King James Version in those days. Unless it was in French, in which case it was Louis Segond which was equally obsolete. We were obsolete on both sides of the fence. He would say, “He wist not what to say, so he said …” If you haven’t read King James recently, you don’t even know what that means because wist is such old English. “He didn’t know what to say, so he said …” which is Peter, of course, on the Mount of Transfiguration.

So we’re busy pontificating, and he simply quotes, “He did not know what to say, so he said …” which is not suggesting we were having another transfiguration moment. It was merely using biblical words to get across a set of ideas in which those ideas were expressed in my father’s mind in biblical language. Sometimes you actually find that kind of use of the Old Testament in the New Testament, too.

There are far, far, far, far fewer instances than is purported of even difficult passages from the Old Testament quoted in the New Testament or a difficult method of interpretation. When I set myself to write my Matthew commentary.… It’s commonly known amongst neutestamentler that the two books of the New Testament that seem to be most difficult in their quotations of the Old Testament are Matthew and Hebrews, and here I was writing on Matthew, still quite a young man.

I actually approached it with a fair bit of fear and trepidation. One of the reasons was one of the commentaries I read early on was John Broadus, 1886. In many ways, that’s a great commentary. It’s a very good commentary. But when he got to all of those difficult quotations from the Old Testament in Matthew, again and again and again what he said was “I don’t have a clue what’s going on here, but this is the Word of God. We accept it as God’s Word. No doubt Jesus knew what he meant. We hope the apostles did, but I don’t have a clue,” and passed on.

At least it’s more reverent than saying, “Well, clearly Matthew is twisting the Old Testament,” which is what my Doktorvater did when I was at Cambridge. Barnabas Lindars, my Doktorvater, had written a book called New Testament Apologetic, and his whole thesis was that the New Testament writers just proof texted the Old Testament and twisted it in every which way.

So I set myself countless hours to work on these Old Testament passages to see how they were being used. “Out of Egypt have I called my Son.” Jesus fulfills this when he’s brought out of Egypt, when Hosea 11:1 makes it jolly clear it’s really talking about the exodus. What do you do with that?

If you want to see what to do with that, I spent about five or six pages of small print trying to explain how it does work. There is a whole theology of how such things work. What you really have to do is start developing the practice of reading the books and the expositions that really do take these things seriously.

What I will do is simply answer this last one on allegory. To do anything else, I would have to give you example after example after example. That’s what we do in a PhD seminar. The one in Galatians 4:21–31 is particularly interesting. It’s the only place in the New Testament where the word allegory is used, in Greek, hatina estin allēgoroumena; that is, which things are allegorical. But one of the things you have to understand is even the literary categories that were used in the ancient world weren’t quite the same as the literary categories that are used today.

What they meant by allegory isn’t exactly what we mean by allegory. That’s worth bearing in mind. What is meant by allegory in the ancient world is something like “to say things in parallel,” but the nature of that parallel can be enormously diverse. And it’s the only place in the New Testament where that expression is used, so you don’t have a lot to go on by the New Testament documents.

Whereas today, the best literary theorists define allegory as something like this: to interpret a text, to assign meaning to a text, with a grid that is itself extrabiblical or extratextual. So, for example, when Philo is interpreting Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he says Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are real people, but the allegorical meaning is they are the three fundamental principles of a Greek education.

Now it is very hard to get the three fundamentals of a Greek education out of the book of Genesis. The point is his reading of those three depends on a grid that is not found in the text itself. So you have an allegorical interpretation when the text says one thing, and now you’ve got a meaning assigned to the text, which meaning is determined not by the text but by an extratextual grid.

In that sense, what Paul is doing in Galatians 4 is not allegorical. It’s not allegorical in the sense that we are speaking of allegory. Paul gives structural reasons for showing why, in the text itself, Hagar’s child cannot possibly be the child of promise. Now he spins some things out of the text that are not simply on the superficial level of the storyline.

Nevertheless, when you put the storyline together to see where God’s blessing falls, and if God’s blessing falls on the children of promise as opposed to those who are merely generated, then you still do have to ask the question today, “Who are the children of promise today and who are not?” Suddenly the whole typology begins to fall into place.

Oops. Typology? Yes, yes, although it’s called an allegoria (the participle is used allēgoroumena); nevertheless, what Paul is doing is one form of biblical typology rather than allegory. So sometimes it takes a while to explain those sorts of differences so people see the way the New Testament writers are using the Old Testament is sensible. It’s faithful.

I regularly teach the epistle to the Hebrews in Greek. It is a wonderful book, and its handling of Old Testament texts, in my judgment, is profound. It’s insightful. It ought to stamp the way we read the Old Testament. Far from undermining my faith or raising in my own mind a whole list of insurmountable texts, one-by-one, one-by-one over the years, I’ve come to discover there is a unity that is glorious and can be explained and make sense.

After all, the New Testament writers are constantly quoting the Old Testament to Jews who are not Christians, saying, “Don’t you see this is what the text says?” They expect to be believable in that regard, to be credible.

Then, as I have more recently done more work in church history, I’ve also found periods of the church when a lot of this work has been done before. I’m always worried when I find a solution to something that I haven’t spotted in the commentaries, because anything that is that new is probably wrong.

Then when I’ve started to do some more digging, almost always I’ve found, “Oh, yeah, yeah. Taylor sorted that one out.” Taylor wrote a two-volume work on the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament in the nineteenth century, long since out of print. Nobody reads it anymore. I stumbled across it in second-hand bookshop and discovered an awful lot of what I discovered was promulgated quite nicely in the nineteenth century.

I think the contemporary generation has not produced many books in this area because we’re so suspicious toward the biblical texts all the time. What we’ve got to do is recapture the wholeness and give good solid explanations that become part of the heritage for the next generation. Let us pray.

Our Father, it has been well said that your most holy Word is like a pool in which a child may wade and an elephant may swim. Its substance is the sort of thing that even the youngest child, brought along by your Spirit, can in substantial and true measure understand, believe, and obey. It is the sort of thing, also, that is so profound the angels desire to look into it and men and women who give their life in study of it find that at the end of their threescore years and ten they are still just nibbling at the margins.

Why should we think this strange? This is your most holy Word. Grant, Lord God, that we may hide your Word in our hearts that we may learn not to sin against you. Help us to remember the charge given to Joshua, “This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth; but you shall meditate on it day and night. Then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall have good success.”

“To this man will I look, to him who is of a contrite spirit, and who trembles at my Word.” May it be so with us, Lord God, in all of our confusion, in our uncertainties, even in our uncertainties of interpretation, draw us back to your Word with listening ears so that, although we do not know as much as we ought to know, we may, over the years, look back and confess with gratitude that we have learned a little more than we did.

We remember that Paul writes to Timothy, “Watch your life and doctrine closely. Let all see your progress.” May it be so of all ministers of the gospel in this room, that both in life and doctrine, the churches they serve may see their progress and glorify God. For Jesus’s sake, amen.