Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Contemporary Theology in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
We confess, Lord, how easy it is to misinterpret things or become unbalanced. We need one another, as wisdom tells us. “As iron sharpens iron, so one person’s countenance sharpens the countenance of his friend.” We pray this session will be dedicated to that end, so that by thinking through things together we may become that bit more faithful to your most Holy Word. We pray in the name of him who is the Word incarnate, the Lord Jesus. Amen.
Male: I had a question you alluded to briefly on Monday, really about prayer. I wondered if you could talk for a little bit on prayer, petitionary prayer, and why we do it, how we do it, and what happens when we do it. I hope that’s not going to take up the whole time. You were talking about open theism and petitionary prayer. I wondered if you could comment on that; it would be helpful.
Don Carson: This question concerns prayer, especially in the context of open theology because in the view of open theology prayer becomes more significant, it is argued. How can you speak of prayer actually effecting something if everything is already determined in advance? If it’s already determined in advance, why bother praying? With petitionary prayer in an open theology, then you might say prayer is actually doing something.
Before I try to answer the question, it is important, nevertheless, to realize the open view of prayer, it seems to me, is in danger of being deeply insulting to God. Dear ol’ God doesn’t have enough goodness, enough intelligence, unless a whole lot of people badger heaven and somehow talk him into something which otherwise he would not have done? Although it may remove the problem of any form of determinism, it seems to me it introduces another set of problems the open theologians do not take nearly seriously enough.
Here is a God who.… Well, okay, he loves us enough to send his Son, but on the other hand, he may or may not do something decent and probably won’t unless you ask him. So you have more place for prayer, but at the end of the day, God is diminished. I would go further and say there are some things, then, in the openness theology that you can’t pray for.
It’s very difficult to pray for the salvation of your friends in openness theology since it’s entirely their decision. God has done all his bit. Why pray for the salvation of anybody? You could pray that God might send somebody (I suppose that’s still within his domain), but to pray that God would actually save somebody.… You can’t pray that anymore, because God himself doesn’t even know how that one is going to turn out. So I do want to say that the openness view of prayer has at least as many problems as it resolves, and I would say even more so.
If we, then, adopt classic theism, which in my view you must to be anywhere near faithful to Scripture, then that still leaves you with the old tension that is often cast in lectures on prayer as to whether or not “prayer changes things,” as the slogan puts it that we sometimes put on our walls and so on, or we are changed by prayer. On the face of it, when you start to look at this question in Scripture, you can find some pretty good examples of both in some ways, can’t you?
When you find Jesus praying in the garden, “If it be possible, take this cup away from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done,” or “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” There is a sense in which you keep praying for God’s will to be done and bow to it, submit to it, rather than something else. So there must be a sense, surely, in which when you’re praying for God’s will to be done, you are praying also, implicitly, for the heart to accept that will.
It seems to me the very nature of the God-human being relationship, granted that we are not to think of God as sovereign will only but as transcendently sovereign and personal and, therefore, one who interacts with us in such a way that his personal interaction does not diminish his sovereignty but in such a way, also, that his sovereignty does not diminish his personal interaction with us so that all of God’s perfections are always brought to bear, then it is simultaneously true that prayer effects things. Prayer does change things.
While if we pray in such and such a way, such that things are effected, this too is a sign of God’s grace in our lives, ultimately directly attributable to God. We see in Philippians, chapter 2, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God working in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” So part of your working out of God’s good pleasure is your prayer life. James can say, “You have not, because you ask not.”
On the other hand, if you do pray, and in consequence have, praying in line with God’s promises and God’s sovereignty so that you do have, well then, be reminded that if you pray in this way, this too is a sign of God’s grace in your life, because God is working “to will and to do of his good pleasure,” even in your prayer life.
If you start saying, “Well, this is getting very close to the very mystery of God’s sovereignty and personhood.” Yes, exactly. That’s exactly right. You see, all of those things trace back, eventually, to the very mystery of God, such that God is presented as both sovereign and personal. They track back to the same thing again and again and again, but in my view that is simply the given of Scripture. Then these other things all flow from it.
Some of the debates on prayer, in my judgment, are sterile because what people are doing is drawing inferences from one side of what the Bible says about God and not the other side, or they’re pitting one side against the other side. They are raising hypothetical case. We come up to a certain juncture and say, “Now if I pray, might that change something?” The assumption behind that question is, “If I pray as an independent being.… If I pray in such a way that God has got nothing to do with my prayer when I pray it …”
In fact, if I do pray it (on a classic view of God), that’s a sign of God’s grace working in me such that I am praying in accordance with God’s will, in line with his promise, motivated by his Spirit, empowered by his grace. I do pray, and it effects things. Is that God doing it or not? I’m still morally responsible to pray, but at the same time, it is still God working in me both to will and to do of his good pleasure.
It seems to me that once you accept the mystery at the very heart of the being of God with respect to his transcendent sovereignty on the one hand and his personhood on the other, then although those other things are complicated, they make sense. There’s an internal cohesion to them that you simply do not get once you lose either of those two polarities.
Male: You had spoken a little bit about compatibilism …
Don: It’s the same thing. Let me, if I may dare, give an illustration. This one’s a bit personal, but it might help. When I was an undergraduate, I worked for the Canadian government for a while in air pollution. One summer when I was working up in Ottawa, there was a pastor at a church nearby who was single as well. I had known him for some years. He took me aside and said, “Come on, Don. Every Monday night you come out to my place, and we’ll pray.”
So Monday night, I borrowed the car and went out to this chap’s. Sometimes we prayed for an hour or two and sometimes for a good part of the night. I have to tell you, it was like pulling hens’ teeth. Now maybe you’re all so spiritual that you find it easy to pray for five hours on the trot, but let me tell you, it can be a real challenge. You feel you’re doing your duty, but that doesn’t mean it’s fun. It was not easy.
After three or four weeks of this (he was setting me up, of course), he said, “Okay, next week we’re going to do things a little differently.” So we came in the next week, and we spent half an hour, initially, thanking God for who he is and quietly praising him back and forth because of his attributes, names, self-disclosure in Scripture, and that sort of thing. Then this friend, Ken, said, “All right. What things should we be particularly praying for? Let’s make a list.”
It just so happened (that was Monday night), I had received a letter that day from a young woman whom we both knew. Her name was June. We had known her in Montreal. She was born on the wrong side of the tracks. Her life had been a mess, just one unholy mess, but not long before, she had been converted in the church we were both familiar with in Montreal, gloriously turned around. She was a nurse, and she was just transformed by the gospel.
Now a few months later, she found she had a vicious melanoma and had only weeks to live. She sent me this letter; it was full of bitterness. “Why is God picking on me? After years and years and years of abuse and hardship, not knowing who my father was and all the rest, finally I get my life in order, and then God does this to me. Why doesn’t he pick on somebody his own size?” and on and on and on. It was full of pain and outrage, and because Ken knew her, I showed him the letter. “What shall we pray for June?”
So that’s the question now, isn’t it? What do you pray? “God, bless June”? It’s not a bad prayer. The trouble is no matter what God does, you can assume he’s done it, then; it’s so general. It’s not all that specific. How about, “God, rebuke her sharply for her unbelief”? Undoubtedly in some sense, that’s necessary, but it seems a little lacking in compassion under the circumstances.
How about, “God, heal June”? Well, I have no doubt that God can, and it’s right to ask. Occasionally, God gives you special faith to believe it, but you can’t claim it as a promise, as the right. We are all going to die one way or the other. You might ask it as a favor, but you certainly don’t have the right, according to New Testament terms, to simply claim it.
After going back and forth, we decided we would pray along these lines: “Lord, you have promised that if you begin a good work in someone, you will complete it till the day of Jesus Christ. You have said that Christ Jesus came into the world to do his Father’s will, and his Father’s will is that he should lose none of those whom the Father has given to him. If, in fact, you have given June to the Lord Jesus.… If you have, in truth, begun a good work in her, and we believe that you have, then keep your own word. Do what you yourself have said.”
We arranged as many biblical texts as we could think of in this regard. It took us half an hour just to figure that one out. Now he knew where he was going; I didn’t know. He was trying to teach me. Then there was a second item and a third. In two hours of discussion, we sorted out eight things along these lines. Then he prayed for the first, I prayed for the second, he prayed for the third, I prayed for the fourth. We were done in another half an hour. I walked out feeling as if I had done business with God. That was Monday night.
Thursday, I got a letter from June. She had written it Tuesday morning. She said, “I cannot tell you what happened, but I woke up this morning and everything was changed. I am so sorry I wrote that first letter. How could I conceivably talk of God this way when he sent his Son to die for me? In a few weeks, I will see him. You know what, Don? I’ll see him before you will. If he wants me in heaven, it can only be for my good and for his glory.” There were pages of this stuff. I still have the letter.
So do you not think, therefore, that when we met the next Monday, we had something to pray about? Of the original eight things, three, if I recall, were answered as decisively, though not as quickly. Two of them, we changed. That is, with further reflection and thinking about what Scriptures apply, they changed.
Two or three were the kinds of things you can attach Scripture text to, the kinds of things we should be praying for constantly: that the Lord would raise up workers for his harvest field. There’s a text, “Pray that the Lord of the harvest will send forth laborers.” So we should be praying for that. We should be praying for it all the time.
Take that one instance. What are we doing there? Would God have done this anyway? The question surely is, “Did not, rather, God move in the heart of Ken Hall to get Don Carson going in prayer that summer and move in us, also, to learn how to pray in line with his Word, so that we did do it, and all of this is to the praise of God’s glory?” It’s not as if we thought up a suggestion God didn’t know about in advance. Or God, poor chap, he was so busy that week he didn’t think of it himself until we reminded him.
So there is a sense in which God has done it, but it’s God working in me both to will and to do of his good pleasure, isn’t it? Yet, he dares, because he’s a person and interacts with me, his image-bearer who is also a person, to incorporate me into the whole business. Which means we can get on our knees, pray, and recognize that God, in his great mercy, is incorporating us into the whole business of the kingdom. God, then, can actually blame people if they don’t pray, as in Ezekiel 22. “I sought for a man to stand in the gap before me for my people, but I found none.”
There’s this kind of interaction that when we don’t pray, it’s our fault. When we do pray, it’s God’s doing it. This is because God’s sovereignty stands behind good and evil asymmetrically. There is nothing that takes place, even evil itself, outside the outermost bounds of God’s sovereignty. Nevertheless, his sovereignty stands behind good and evil asymmetrically.
It stands behind evil such that the evil is always attributable directly and in a blameworthy way to the secondary causalities, but the good is always attributable to God, ultimately himself, directly. If I do good, it is God working in me both to will and to do of his good pleasure. If I do evil, or fail to do good, it’s my fault. If that sounds too convenient for God, I would say, “It’s the way it is.” Does that help at all? It doesn’t remove all mystery, but it seems to me that it puts it within a kind of biblical framework.
Male: Continuing with open theism, it has to do with, you had mentioned, the connection of Arminianism. Then Socinianism though.… You didn’t mention much in the connection, but you made a connection with it to open theism. How do those things work into this discussion of open theism?
The reason I ask is because the country we’re in seems to be quite predominantly Arminianism, yet the discussion of open theism hasn’t necessarily formally reached us. So I’d like help to know how to anticipate or prepare for it. It’s kind of two questions in one: define it and then give any advice on how to deal with it.
Don: The most common form of Arminianism holds to what’s called the libertarian view of the will. That is to say, a view of the will in which freedom means holding absolute power to contrary. In other words, in an Arminian view of the will, in a libertarian view of the will, what makes human beings morally responsible is we have freedom to do the opposite. Otherwise, you cannot be held accountable.
What openness theologians say is they are merely taking the libertarian view of the will and making it more consistent. So to somebody who’s already deeply committed to a libertarian understanding of the will, then it’s possible for openness theology to seem more self-consistent. The fact of the matter is, however, the overwhelming majority of Arminians (and all Arminians historically) have, nevertheless, insisted on God’s perfect knowledge of the future.
So they make distinctions between his determinative will and his decorative will or say, “God knows in advance what you’re going to do because he knows how you’re going to choose it,” or something, but there’s some way of handling it. Whereas the openness theologian holds to a libertarian view of the will but then tries to ensure it really is entirely free by insisting God doesn’t know. What they would say is if God does know and he knows it’s a bad decision, and he doesn’t do anything about it, then it still remains his decision.
That’s why a Reformed type would come back and say, “Yeah, yeah. That’s exactly why the Arminian position isn’t very strong.” That’s also why, then, the openness theologian would say, “Well, let’s make the libertarian view a little stronger,” but the price they pay is in a diminished God. Now in Socinianism, it’s a bit different. There you’ve got a different view of God, in any case, and the closest alignment then, historically, with anything I can find is Socinianism to an openness theology. There’s a fairly good treatment of that in John Frame’s book on the subject.
Whereas, there are different Reformed understandings of the will, but in my view, the one that’s most defensible on this point is Edwards’ voluntarism. In other words, human beings are morally accountable for what they choose to do, because it’s what they want to do. That’s why. It’s got nothing to do with determinism or non-determinism, per se. It seems to me that human beings are held morally accountable for their choices because they are doing what they want to do, regardless of whether there is necessity involved or not. That’s another whole dimension.
Male: Knowing that and knowing that the country where I’m in is strongly Arminian and that what you’re saying is open theism is not something you would want in your surroundings, so how to prepare against it or ward against it?
Don: Which country?
Male: The Czech Republic.
Don: At the end of the day, the only way to confute bad theology is with good theology. The only way to confute bad Bible teaching is with good Bible teaching. It’s not enough simply to refute. One must also put in place something better. Richard Baxter used to say in his book, The Reformed Pastor, “When somebody comes into your area and starts teaching a false doctrine of justification, do not begin by refuting. Begin, rather, by preaching up [that’s his expression] justification better than they.”
He’s not saying there is no place for refutation, don’t misunderstand me, but it is a great deal easier to refute something once you’ve got a whole lot of other things increasingly in play. I wouldn’t go in there and start saying, “Quite frankly what we’ve got to have here is a lot more Reformed theology.” That would be waving a red flag to a bull. What you do instead is you preach what the Scriptures say in regard to compatibilism and things like that.
You just preach it up in biblical terms, in biblical categories, without the historical labels that are usually the red flags. Preach up what the Bible says again and again and again. Then when somebody comes in with a bad view, you have an increasing number of people already who have heard an articulate defense of a reliable view. So they have something to bounce it against. If you only start your defense after the trouble has started, it’s too late, because then you’re on the defensive.
Male: I don’t want to interrupt this discussion, but my questions are different from this. I have worked for 30 years now, but at the same time, I’ve been a pastor. I turn back to when you talked about John Wong and made a strong point that salvation should never be cut off from creation and that the effects of what sin and the results of sin are cannot fully be understood if you do not start with Genesis and the creation.
Now here we are; this morning we were on the other side: the future, expectation, the coming kingdom. In the chapters we read together, you get a description of the future kingdom, starting with the new heaven and the new earth. I would like to add something in connection with what you said before. That is, isn’t this exactly also a portrayal of re-creation? In your reading, the glory came out magnificently and as the heart of our future expectation: the encounter and seeing him face-to-face. I am no different, of course, on that point. I would say the same thing.
At the same time, I like it so much that in Revelation 21 and 22, it is dressed in the language of creation that you have there. The nations come in and bring their treasures. You have there a river flowing with fruits each month and leaves for the healing of the nations. There is, I agree, a lot of symbolism in Revelation 21 and 22, but the symbol refers to something, even the river and the trees and the fruits. The nations and the kings are harder. Is it all symbolic?
Anyhow, my addition is I love it that the future expectation is dressed, that God is dressed, with his creation when he appears, that the creation is not shaken off as something past station, like a rocket that drops the first stages of the rocket when it goes up, but that the whole creation comes with him and behind him, renewed. I wonder whether that is part of your vision. This has everything to do with the book. That leads to the second question.
The book is The Gagging of God, and it has chapter 10, in volume three, on the vision; therefore, I do not ask outside the circle of this workshop. Maybe you can help me find more in the book on that, but my question on the book is on the title. I have a computer with, happily, a translation program, easy to comprehend, so I typed in the computer translation, gagging. “No translation available.” To gagg. “No translation available.” Then I went into the book. I thought, “Where did he say that?” I have the page here. Is it only one time, the little question?
You said it one time, at least, in the book, at the end of the last chapter. Then I saw it was with one g. G-a-g, so I typed into it, gag. “No translation available.” Then I thought, “Well, that’s true. It’s not translated in Dutch at all, the whole book. Maybe it’s a message that this book should be translated into Dutch.” At least my question to you is, “What does it mean?” Connected with that, I would love it if you could expand a little bit in 10 sentences about the main content of the book with the translation of the title. Thank you.
Don: I think I can probably make my answer shorter than the question, which may be the first time in my entire life when that has been possible. I congratulate you, sir. On the first question, I agree, with a couple of caveats. Let me say where I agree first. I agree first of all that we’re not merely heading for immortality. We’re heading for a new heaven and a new earth, and that includes the resurrection body, and so on. I gave some indication of that this morning by talking about the return to Eden that, nevertheless, transcends Eden. So I agree with all of that.
On the other hand, although I was dutifully warned I should probably try to keep my sermons to 50 minutes, I regularly went to about an hour and 10 minutes, which was stretching the patience of the leaders of this conference already. I didn’t feel I should stretch it any further, partly because I had already referred to it, and I had talked about creation. So I’ve left out some bits; I acknowledge that.
Likewise, somebody chastised me on the first day for handling Genesis 3 without adequately saying enough about Genesis 1 and 2, and so on. It is just too sketchy. So I agree with you in large part. The caveat, nevertheless, is I’m not sure one can infer too much from that symbolism. One has to be careful. I think the nations coming in and out does not mean.… One has to be careful about making apocalyptic symbols walk on all fours.
The point is the city is already the people of God, so to have nations coming in and out does not mean there are some who are not the people of God who are coming in, and then they go out. That’s not the idea. The idea of all the nations coming in and bringing their treasures is another way of saying what is said in the great vision of chapters 4 and 5, that there are people there from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. The gates being open day and night is a way of saying it is perfectly and utterly secure. There is no danger. There is no oppression.
One has to be careful about not trying to build whole cities out of this that look exactly the same way. If you say, “There will be physicality of the spiritual body sort described by Paul in resurrection frame in a new heaven and a new earth.” Yes, I agree, but I would also agree that because there is no more sea, you can’t talk about hydrology, and because the sun and the moon are displaced by the glory of God, you can’t talk about stars.
I just don’t know what the shape of things will be, though I do insist it will be not simply non-material. There’s a resurrection body. So one has to be careful how one goes about affirming what you are affirming. I agree with it, but one has to be very careful of how one bleeds those symbols or, it seems to me, one can be undoing what apocalyptic imagery does by making the symbolism walk on all fours.
As for the title, The Gagging of God, I fear your electronic dictionary is terribly weak. In fact, most electronic dictionaries are. In fact, at Trinity with our international students, many of them have asked when they’re writing comps and so on if they may be permitted to use bilingual dictionaries themselves.
We’ve done some tests on all kinds of them. There isn’t a good one out there for German, for French, for Dutch. There just isn’t a good one. We’ve checked again and again and again. There are a lot of them that are fast, efficient, have nice little windows, and things like that, but in terms of really being comprehensive, I’m not impressed by any of them.
It might be a good idea, in this regard, to look up a large Dutch-English, English-Dutch dictionary. I know what they are in German and French; I just don’t know what to recommend in Dutch. I can read Dutch slowly, but I don’t know what’s out there. I’m sure you would find the verb, to gag, in that connection, and you would find the noun, gagging, in that connection. It is not all that unknown in English.
There is a pun in my book that is finally explained about chapter 10 or 11. The thing is, when you speak of the gagging of God, it could mean putting a gag on his mouth so he can’t speak, shutting God up. To gag God is to silence him. To put a gag on somebody’s mouth means they can’t speak.
The problem with postmodernism is once you are convinced you have no access to objective truth, then even if there is a God out there who can speak and does speak, you can’t know it. So while postmodernism has been very good at debunking the arrogance of a modernist epistemology, the fact of the matter is, it has its own arrogance as well.
The pun is gagging can mean retching, on the edge of vomiting. I’m feeling sick, and I retch. That’s gagging. You see, you’re choking and gagging. There you have the glorified Christ saying of the church in Laodicea, “I could vomit you out of my mouth.” So you’ve got a double gagging of God. In other words, we are trying to gag God by our postmodern epistemology, and God looks at us as a culture, and even a church, and is so disgusted with us that we make him sick. That’s where the title is coming from.
Male: If I could just pick up on the first point as a related point. I’m working in student ministry in Belgium. I know in French-speaking Europe, we’re quite influenced by a sort of (I have no idea what the term means) neo-Calvinist theology about the worth of culture, and it’s couched in terms that it will be reflected in heaven. I understand the biblical warrant for that is entirely on this verse, “The glory of the nations will be reflected in the new heaven and the new earth.”
Somehow this raises our cultural activity such as our appreciation of art, our appreciation of a good French wine, or whatever it might be, to an equivalent level as of preaching the gospel, because not only will there be converted people in heaven but also there will be culture reflected in heaven. I feel that rings immense alarm bells in my head, but I’d just like to know what your immediate response would be. Is it fair to put that much weight on that single verse in Revelation? How do we respond to that?
Don: In all fairness to those who belong to that heritage, it rests on more than that verse, after all. It rests on the Bible’s storyline, likewise, in terms of God being sovereign over all things in the first place, not merely in some sort of proto-Gnostic sense of only in the spiritual dimension. So you want to give that kind of heritage a certain clear hearing, and it stands over against what can become a kind of escapist theology. “Just let me worry about my spiritual life, and the culture can go to hell in a handcart. It doesn’t really matter because that’s where it’s heading in any case.”
Then you start putting over against that texts like, “Do good to all men, but especially the household of faith.” Then there are struggles over exactly what it means to be light and salt in a dark and decaying world, and on and on and on. So I’m very leery of merely kind of escapist spirituality. I think that’s a big mistake. That’s why historically, likewise, Christians have been involved in all kinds of good things.
In 1740, in Britain.… Now you’ll excuse me if you come from countries I have visited but I don’t know intimately. There are some countries that I know their history well, and there are other countries where I don’t. So forgive me if I use illustrations from some part of the world you don’t know well but I do. In 1740, in England on Easter Sunday, only six people showed up for communion in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. There were 280 crimes on the books that demanded capital punishment, including stealing a loaf of bread.
The Industrial Revolution was on the way, and now children as young as 5 were being sent down to the coal mines. The poor were getting poorer. The rich were getting richer. Disease was rampant. There was smoke-filled air. You could be thrown into a debtors’ prison and starve to death because the state was not going to feed you. There was no education except for the rich, and on and on and on.
Then in 1734, six years earlier, in anticipation of what God was going to do, God raised up a man in Wales called Howell Harris who began preaching the gospel. In 1738, George Whitefield began preaching to the coal miners outside Bristol at 5:00 in the morning, tears running down their faces, wiping the coal dust off from the overnight shift. In 1740, John and Charles Wesley began preaching the gospel.
In the great evangelical movement that followed (for 60 years that movement went on), trade unions were invented by Methodist ministers. The first three trade unionist organizers were Methodist ministers who were then transported to Australia for their pains. John Birch, who started prison reform and other kinds of things, was a convert of Whitefield.
Laws were changing. Eventually, Shaftesbury and Wilberforce ran through the abolition of slavery in the early 1800s, and it cost one of them the prime ministership. How was the slave trade stopped across the Atlantic? British gunboats. So we have to recall that it was the gospel that was changing things socially.
What was so interesting about these people, whether it was the Countess of Huntingdon or whatever, is they were traditional evangelicals in many respects. They were having their devotions. They were evangelizing. Wilberforce was as interested in street preaching, personal evangelism, prayer life, and training up his children in godliness and confessing their sins and that sort of thing, as he was in the social issues of the day. Eventually, his son, then, becomes a bishop.
It’s really important to understand that again and again the gospel, precisely because it’s believed by transformed people.… People do good as well as hold to the gospel. In the second century, Tertullian writes to the empire in one of the great sweeping movements of persecution when there was famine in the empire. Tertullian said, “Do you not know that we Christians are not only feeding all of our own people but a third of the empire as well?”
It is important to recognize, it seems to me, that there is a Christian commitment to doing good. In many, many parts of the world, even yet, the only hospitals are Christian hospitals. The only social agencies are Christian agencies. Almost all the roots of all the hospitals, of all the educational systems, in the English-speaking world began with Christians, even though nowadays, of course, they’ve been taken over by government and social democratic structures. It’s a very interesting heritage.
We need to be careful about pooh-poohing that, it seems to me. One of the reasons why we began to do so is because the liberals at the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s, in the beginning of the twentieth century, began so to emphasize that and deemphasize the gospel that those who were committed to the gospel began to emphasize the gospel and deemphasize that kind of thing. “They’re doing the good works, and we have the gospel.” It added a kind of bifurcation that eventually became dangerous. That’s one side.
Now let me go to the other side, because I also agree with what you said. There’s a danger in this stuff as well. Let’s begin with another Dutchman, Prime Minister Abraham Kuyper, a century ago. Abraham Kuyper had a very, very broad vision, but in my view, he also made a big mistake. He had a broad vision for what the state should be, what culture should be, what education should be, the whole domain of Christ’s sovereignty. We often quote his words, “There is not one square foot where Jesus does not say, ‘I am Lord.’ ” We quote that.
There’s a part of me that wants to agree with that. The danger is, if you hold that view and not certain other views equally strongly, pushing them equally hard, you build up a whole lot of people whose emotional attachments become attached to the structural changes. You hold to a kind of utopianism you can manage if you only get Christian values in place, and you forget there is no utopia until Jesus comes back. You are never more than one generation away from an accursed, damned society. You have to keep getting conversions.
Unless you preach the gospel, you don’t have a Christian culture. Even if you have the institutions in place, unless the gospel is preached, you don’t get conversions. Now let me take an example out of Europe. If you go to South Africa, the three large white churches before the legal abolition of apartheid all believed in what’s called various things … a presupposed regeneration. That is, if Christians are brought up in a Christian home, they’re baptized as infants, and they become children of the covenant, you have a kind of presupposed regeneration.
The churches were, by and large, pretty conservative theologically, too. There were some hiccups, but they were pretty conservative. They were pretty strong in their numbers. That’s the way it was. This side of apartheid, however, it transpires that many of these presupposedly converted people really were finding their self-identity as whites in a dark society in the context of the church.
With apartheid gone, the churches are emptying. The churches aren’t there. You don’t have a lot of converted people because, in fact, people were not preaching, even though they were conservative, for regeneration. It was part of presupposed regeneration. As a result, now once the pressures change, the structures change in the society, and apartheid is dismantled, at least legally, then suddenly the churches are emptying.
You look around in the churches in South Africa, and the white ones are not the ones that are carrying the bag anymore, especially not the great big Reformed ones. There are some lessons to be learned from that, too. When you think how fast things fell apart after Kuyper; that is really scary. By contrast, in America, which has made all kinds of other mistakes, but which keeps on preaching a kind of regenerational theology, you do still keep getting people converted.
Now America’s got all kinds of other mistakes and problems, but there is the danger with this kind of societal-dominion theology sort of view that you start hoping for a kind of structure that will bring in a kind of proto-utopia that may actually take your vision away from the gospel itself, with the result that you’re not more than two generations from death warmed over.
What I really want to see is a restoration of the Evangelical Awakening where you’ve got both, where you’ve got a deep passionate commitment to the gospel itself. It’s the gospel: “It’s the power of God unto salvation to all who believe. To the Jew first, also to the Greek.” Just going on and on, seeing men and women who are lost. Then within that framework, “Doing good to all men, especially to those who are of the household of faith.”
Let me put it in another small example, if I may. I have a friend on the Trinity faculty. He comes from Mennonite stock. He summarizes his own historical tradition this way.… It’s not quite fair. He would be the first to acknowledge it’s not quite fair, but it’s still a good illustration. He’s not talking about some other group; he’s talking about his own group.
He says the first generation of Mennonites believed and preached the gospel and saw there were certain social implications. Now whether you think those are the right social implications or not is immaterial. The next generation presupposed the gospel and focused their energies on the implications. The third generation disowned the gospel and only had the implications. That’s the danger.
Male: I have two parts to my question; I think they are quite connected. In the media in the last weeks, in some areas of Europe, was an ongoing debate about the mentioning of God’s name in the European constitution. There are some strong movements against and for it, so I would like to know your opinion and position … how far to go with the name of God and which one should be mentioned in the so-called European constitution.
There was a debate a couple of months ago in Le Monde diplomatique about the explosion of the Pentecostal movement in Latin America and also in some African countries. The analysist was mentioning a point about big traditional churches which gave up their emotional challenges, and they were not attractive anymore for the population over there.
On the other hand, the emotional upheaval Pentecostalism was offering to these traditional communities, mostly Roman Catholics, for example in Brazil, tends to become a sort of an “opiate of the masses” as Marx put it in the end of the nineteenth century. How do we bring this balance, evangelizing new cultures and not being focused only on that emotional upheaval to that opiate that we are going to forget everything, all our sorrows, all our difficulties, and God’s grace, or this emotional feeling good, will resolve all kinds of difficulties?
Don: Both questions are good ones, and they require quite lengthy answers, it seems to me. They’re not easy questions. Or they’re easy questions; they’re just difficult answers. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Africa and spent a fair amount of time in Latin America. It is just too easy for Le Monde to offer critiques like that without knowing much up close.
If you want to say there are a lot of things in Latin America that I don’t like in the churches, that’s true, but I have also seen some wonderful churches with spectacular faith, people living in the humblest circumstances who are loving Christ and whose lives have turned around and become full of integrity. I’ve seen growing Bible colleges and seminaries.
So if you ask, “Is there some sort of cargo cult mentality in some of it?” Oh, yeah, people thinking that by miracles and so on they’re going to get their new washing machines. Are they exploited by North American televangelists? God help us, yes they are. What can I say? On the other hand, I also see a movement of God. This tells me something that is, in fact, confirmed by history as well. Indeed, it’s confirmed by the New Testament. When God does something, usually counterfeits are not far away.
Now if you are going to become a counterfeiter, will you counterfeit a one durum piece? Are you going to counterfeit a one dollar piece or a one Euro piece? Or are you going to counterfeit a hundred Euro piece? In other words, you only counterfeit that which is worth something. So if there is a lot of counterfeit Christianity around, one of the reasons is precisely because Christianity is worth something.
You find that already in the pages of the New Testament. You find an Ananias and Sapphira wanting a counterfeit form of it. That’s not uncommon. That happens in every age. That’s also why, eventually, you need leaders with discernment, and you also need a church that exercises discipline. So that it happens should not surprise us. That we want to distance ourselves from the worst forms of it and, where necessary, discipline it should not surprise us either.
That doesn’t mean everything the secular world disowns in the movement is all bad. That is just too sweepingly condescending. One suspects, in fact, that Le Monde is actually operating out of a naturalist philosophy, in any case; therefore, its opinion isn’t worth very much. One has to be careful in those sorts of areas.
In Africa, it’s compounded by another factor. There’s a lot of it there, too, in all fairness, but everywhere you go in Central, East, and West Africa, in sub-Saharan black Africa, you hear the common complaint, “The pew is higher than the pulpit.” The reason for this, of course, is that education and urbanization are fairly recent phenomena.
Nairobi, which is often called the Geneva of Africa, until 1963 had no university. It now has four. That’s not talking about University Nakuru, and so on. There are a lot of people going through universities in Kenya. They’re not all very strong. They’re not all first-rank, but there’s tertiary education now increasingly available.
The trouble is many of the Christian pastors have primary school education, a couple of years of Bible school in some institute in the bush somewhere, and they’re trying to speak to these people. There’s a huge hiatus; the pew is higher than the pulpit. Therefore, one of the cries over a great deal of sub-Saharan black Africa is, “We need teachers.” There is a huge need for teaching preachers, preachers of the Word, who will bring stability, growth, and maturity to this area.
Moreover, at the risk of a generalization that’s not quite fair, until fairly recently in Europe and in North America, the vast majority of those relatively few preachers who did engage in expository ministry tended to focus on discourse texts. Most of us were not really very competent to handle narrative texts.
In Africa, it’s just the reverse. I’ve heard many Africans preach narrative in a way that would curl your hair. It’s brilliant stuff. I can only think, myself, of a handful of African preachers who really handle Romans well. I’m sure there are a lot more whom I don’t know of, but in terms of the people I know, I don’t know many. I would want to say that a church comes into its maturity in this regard when it does expository preaching well and can handle all the genres of Scripture, because God has given them all to us for our good.
The trouble with narrative is it can appeal to the emotions very fast, but narrative is more open-ended in its interpretation; therefore, it’s less stabilizing. So when it links well with discourse and so on, you have a wonderful mix, but where you have one or the other, it’s a bit narrow. So there are compound problems in Africa as well.
Insofar as the critique of Le Monde is right, and in part it is right even though their reasons for the critique may be profoundly wrong and narrow and naturalistic, then it seems to me that what we, as Christians, have to do, whether we’re Africans or from Latin America or from Europe, whether we’re here, whether we’re there, whether we’re crossing borders or becoming missionaries, or whatever, what we must do is ask, “What does faithfulness to the Word of God, what does faithfulness to the gospel, what does love for Christ’s church, mean in terms of what we ought to be doing about it?” instead of just complaining about it.
What we do not want to do is become so suspicious over the corruptions and the counterfeits that, therefore, we become nervous about engaging in evangelism, nervous about engaging in ministry, and nervous about demanding that people change and warning of the wrath to come. You don’t want to do that; that’s neither courageous nor faithful.
On the other hand, you begin to realize that different cultures have different kinds of dangers. One of the dangers in a more sort of Latin temperament is precisely that the emotions can go out of bounds, just as over here in many, many of our cultures.… In Germany, it’s not primarily that people are going to go over bounds; there can be a sort of set of cubbyhole categories that are brilliant and all the rest, but where’s the fire? That’s a generalization too; it’s not fair. It’s not fair, but it’s a generalization that has some truth to it, just the same.
Indeed, speaking of generalizations, Paul himself indulges in one or two when he says, “Cretans are evil-bellies and liars.” There are sometimes some sort of social matrices where there are certain kinds of things, and a wise Christian leader will try to understand where he or she serves in order to build compensating strengths.
As for the first question, that is a hard one. The reason why it’s a hard one is because we, by and large now in Europe and in North America (with some exceptions), are the inheritors of a view that wants to preserve democracy in a time when our democratic states are increasingly pluralistic. I don’t mean philosophically pluralistic; I mean empirically pluralistic, with many different peoples in them. Therefore, to affirm the existence of God in our foundation documents might seem to exclude naturalists or pantheists or whatever.
On the other hand (before I come to Scripture itself), there is a whole heritage of what might be called natural philosophy or natural theology that says, after all, that God’s existence, God’s power, God’s greatness, are already self-disclosed in the created order. Not to recognize it is already idolatrous; it’s already bringing us back to Romans 1.
Most of the founders of the American state and the writers of the American constitution, then later the Bill of Rights, were not Christians. They were on the theist-deist borders. Some of them were Christians, but most were on the theist-deist border. They still believed passionately, because they were inheritors of the Judeo-Christian religion, that unless you have a commonality of moral perspective you cannot have large-scale freedoms.
In other words, the more empirical diversity you have, the more government control you must have to preserve peace. You can have minimal government only when you have maximal agreement already in the culture. In something called The Federalist Papers (James Madison was one of the editors), this was discussed at great length by the Founding Fathers in this regard, and this was one of the conclusions that was promulgated again and again.
To this I want to add one further dimension. I think one of our problems, both in Europe and in North America, is we are inheritors, too, of the god progress, and because we are inheritors of the god progress, we seem to think if we just get our government right or if we have the right party or the right system then we will be on the edge of utopia.
Whereas, I would want to argue that one of the things the Bible does teach us is there is no utopianism until Jesus comes back. I think it’s high time Christians abandon that view. “There will be wars and rumors of war; be not dismayed. The end is not yet.” There will be struggle. There will be hate. I am neither the prophet nor the son of a prophet, and as I like to say, I belong to a non-profit organization, but let me tell you what’s going to happen in Europe unless Christ comes back first.
Within the next hundred years, there will be major war on this continent again. I don’t know how that’s going to happen, but you can’t read the history of the last 500 years without seeing that it’s happened again and again and again. Do we think we’re so good now it’s not going to happen because we’ve got the EU? Give me a break! Of course it will happen again. I don’t know when or how, and I know we ought to be trying to do whatever we can to stop it, but the fact of the matter is “The human heart is deceitful and desperately wicked.”
Whether God visits us in war or in famine, that is what’s going to happen. There will be wars in Africa. There will be wars outside.… That’s what’s going to happen. To think any other thing, it seems to me, is still to drink at the great god progress, which really does believe we’re getting better morally. It seems to me all of the Bible is against that. We’re a lost and damned breed. The Lord may bring about great reformation and revival so that things get delayed for a long time.
In my view, one of the reasons why England did not go through the equivalent of the French Revolution is because the French Revolution was prepared for by getting rid of all the Huguenots, who were a remarkably just people; whereas, what saved Britain was, in large part, the Evangelical Awakening. It transformed social society so there were not all the pressures. Who knows what God will do, whether he will visit Europe with reformation and renewal and moral transformation, or he will come upon us in judgment again.
So I want to oppose any view of a utopianism. Do we need God in the foundation statements? I would like him to be there because anything else, it seems to me, is to overthrow what Scripture says in Romans 1. It is to continue upon our self-declaration of independence. That’s true. On the other hand, do I think it will make a great difference? No. What will make a difference is only the preaching of the gospel so that men and women are transformed, not whether or not God is in the constitution. It’s why I cannot, finally, get terribly upset by it one way or the other.
Male: I can continue the press into double questions which others have used. Question, first of all, relating to the book, The Gagging of God, particularly the parts where you talked about the inroads into broader Christianity with pluralism and then the “within the camp” issues. If you were writing the book today, six or eight years down the pike, where would you go with some of the inroads? The second question, which I think is really linked with it, is are you optimistic as you look at the evangelical world?
Don: Those are both very good questions as well. I wouldn’t change the general thrust of the argument, but I would give more diverse illustrations, because there are more diverse things going on. I would talk more about openness theology. I would also talk increasingly about the influence of Stanley Grenz and a number of others who are buying into a kind of … well, they’re calling it a postmodern evangelicalism … in which they are trying to say modernism is now so passÈ that the only form of coherent Christianity that addresses the contemporary Western world is precisely a postmodern form.
What that does is change your view on evangelism, change your view on who’s in and who’s out, what conversion means, crossing the line. They don’t want to say you need to repent and come to Jesus; rather, they want to have social structures that are easy to join so you feel at home, and gradually there’s a kind of osmosis that turns you around, because that’s the way the postmodern world thinks, and so on.
There’s a chap called Brian McLaren who has now written two books on the emerging church tradition, which is entirely postmodern. I would spend much more time on that if I were doing it today. It’s fairly recent, but it is growing big time in North America. If it hasn’t hit you yet, cheer up; it will. America catches a cold, and the rest of the world catches the flu, because we spread our germs quite nicely all over the place. So that’s coming whether you like it or not, I’m afraid. I would spend a lot of time on that.
I wrote about a 40-page essay on Grenz, reviewing one or two of his crucial books, that is published on the web. You can find it on the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (ACE) website: www.alliancenet.org. You can download it from there. That might be of help to think through some of these things. It’s also in print in the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology. It was printed there afterwards.
In fact, Stanley Grenz was so upset with me that he replied. The Alliance published his reply on the website as well, so you can read his response. I could have replied to his reply, but I just think his reply is so thin it wasn’t worth it, to be quite frank. Judge for yourself. There are some replies you reply to, and I just didn’t think that one was worth replying to.
I like Stan personally. I’ve known him for years and years. I like him personally; I just don’t think he understands what he’s doing. He’s so busy condemning Christianity for being too tied to modernism that he does not see he’s doing exactly the same mistake by tying Christianity too tightly to postmodernism. I would want to say the thoughtful Christian will want to say, “A plague on both your houses.”
That is to say, I don’t think Christians, epistemologically speaking, should either be modernists or postmodernists. I think there are some differences. There’s a sense in which a Christian epistemology should stand both in appreciation for God’s gifts of common grace that emerged through both systems but also stand in judgment against them, too, so we’re not shanghaied by temporary movements that come along.
Optimism or pessimism. I’m very loath to speak in those terms, for the simple reason that both optimism and pessimism presuppose that you’re making projections into the future. The way most projections into the future work is you observe certain kinds of trends, extrapolate further, and then draw your conclusion, but if there’s anything that is quite certain, it seems to me, it’s that projections into the future are really nasty, risky business. God turns them around.
We would be in a very different place in our thinking about things in the Western world if September 11 hadn’t happened. There’s a sense in which September 11 did more to overturn postmodern views of evil than about a hundred books. On the other hand, not all those reversals have been good. There have been a lot of hate-filled things that have not been very shrewd either.
It’s easy to imagine a few little things that could put hiccups into all kinds of things. I don’t know. I can see some things that are getting a lot worse and are extremely dangerous. I can also see some things that are signs of hope. What can I say? We’ll win? I don’t know. There’s lots of stuff to pray for, isn’t there?
Male: I was wondering if you could comment a bit on annihilationism and eternal punishment and whether we should be thinking about whether annihilationism is what we traditionally call a secondary issue in terms of how we go about preaching the gospel. So we’ll traditionally say it’s the preaching of the gospel that matters, and we can agree to disagree on secondary issues, but how much does the doctrine of annihilationism actually start coming into the primary category of what the content of the gospel is?
Don: Again, that’s a very difficult question. I did write a chapter in The Gagging of God on that issue, so what I think about the relevant passages you can find there. I won’t go over it all here. Part of the problem is there are different kinds of annihilationism. Annihilationism has become a very broad category that covers really very, very different perspectives.
There is a form of annihilationism like that of John Stott, with whom I disagree in the book and interact with him as gently as I possibly can. John Stott’s form of annihilationism leaves lots and lots of place for horrible suffering and torment; it’s just that it doesn’t go on endlessly. Moreover, he holds that view only tentatively. He’s not even sure it’s right. John Stott, for those who know him, has always been a kind of Anglican Mennonite. He comes from a certain kind of passive …
His father was a four-star major general, and he’s a passivist or just about the next best thing. So John Stott has always been a bit of an enigma, even from the point of view of an evangelical Anglican heritage. John’s a good friend. I’ve known him for years and years and revere the man. He’s a great man, so I don’t want to destroy him. I can interact with him, say what I think is wrong, and the next time I see him, we’ll still give each other a bear hug.
The trouble is, people have used John’s name and John’s openness on this area, it seems to me, therefore, to let in not only a whole lot of other things but a much, much broader tolerance so there’s no place for torment at all. You die like a dog. That’s it. Suddenly you have a very different sort of pattern of things. Somewhere along the line, it really does become an issue, indeed. It’s not only an interpretive hermeneutical issue; it becomes an issue on how seriously you take the wrath of God.`
What do you do with a passage, moreover, like Revelation 14: “The smoke of their torment goes up before the Lord forever”? I know what people say, but it’s very difficult to duck that sort of passage. So with the best will in the world toward those of my friends who are either conditional immortalists or who are annihilationists, I disagree with them, and I think the issue is becoming more important in certain circles.
In Britain, at the upper levels of broad-speaking evangelical scholarship.… I haven’t done a survey, but my guess is at least half now would belong to some form of annihilationist camp. What can I say? It must be the last days. It’s complex. On the other hand, I know John himself would, with whatever degree of tentativeness he defends his view exegetically, also say it’s a more believable view when you preach it.
Let me come in on a parallel issue. If I’m in a university mission, and I’m expounding Genesis 1 and 2, or Genesis 3, in a secular campus today, I don’t have any problems from the non-Christians. They don’t know enough to ask any tough questions. The right pains in a university mission are the Christians who want to use the open Q&A sessions to get all their theology sorted out. You just want them to stay home or shut up or ask separately in some other meeting somewhere.
I’ve been in a university mission, would you believe, in a major American university where, after expounding some of these things, you have an open Q&A time and then some undergraduate will stand up and say, “Dr. Carson, are you a supralapsarian or an infralapsarian?” Good grief. No evangelistic smarts at all. I’m quite happy to answer that question, but not there.
I want to say, similarly, that when I talk about judgment and the wrath of God on a university campus, I don’t have any problems from non-Christians on passages in this regard. They might not like it, but I don’t have problems about making it believable. The problems I have are with Christians who then want to sort out all the problems about conditional immortality. So even where John says annihilationism is better apologetically before the watching world, I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think it’s true. At least it hasn’t been my experience.
Male: Just thinking from my non-Christian friends’ point of view, I know it makes a big difference to them. If they’re being told they’ll just be snuffed out, that’s what they’re believing already. That doesn’t worry them.
Don: Yeah, that’s right, but that’s not what John holds, too. If you’re going to talk about annihilationism, in one sense, you need to talk about it at its position of “strength,” not the easiest form to refute.
Male: Yeah, and I know I’ve seen the likes of John Wenham, etcetera. It never stopped them from evangelizing right up until the day they died.
Don: That’s right. I disagree with them. John Wenham was a good friend, too, and his sons are friends to this day. Speaking of John Wenham, the dear man.… Some of you people would know John Wenham merely from his book, The Elements of New Testament Greek, with which many people have been afflicted over the years.
Do you know how his wife died? After he retired, he and his wife were driving home from speaking to a university CU, and as he was driving home a truck driver who was drunk crossed the median. There was a head-on collision, and the truck driver killed his wife. John woke up in the hospital in the next bed and led him to the Lord. That’s John Wenham too. So one just has to be very careful about.… One has to deal with the issues, but let’s not forget there are people out there who still know the gospel.
Male: I would like to see your view on irony. In theology, in teaching, is there any place for irony?
Don: That’s a very interesting question. I would love to stick you in a corner and ask you a whole lot of questions about where this is coming from. My guess is at least some of such questions are culturally related, but I would be prepared to argue at some length that the Bible uses irony. A lot of it. Now, different writers more or less, but …
For example, there’s irony, is there not, in the account of Nathan confronting David after his sin in 2 Samuel 12 and telling the story about the rich man, the poor man, and so on. Then David says, “Who is this man? I’ll sort this out.” Is there irony there? You bet there is. In that irony, God knows what’s going on and Nathan knows what’s going on and the reader knows what’s going on, but David does not know what’s going on.
Irony can become, from a literary point of view, a device for penetrating deeply to the heart of something. I have sometimes preached a sermon on Matthew, chapter 27, verses 27–50, under the title The Ironies of the Cross, because Matthew writes regularly with a great deal of irony. In the New Testament, Matthew and John, it seems to me, are most given to irony; whereas, other writers much less so. Paul does not use a lot of irony … a little, but not much.
There are whole doctoral dissertations on irony in John’s gospel, but think of what that passage says. “Come down from the cross, and we will believe.” Supposing he had come down from the cross; would they have believed? Yes, in a sense they would have, and in a sense they would not have.
“If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross,” but he’s the one who says, “Do you not know that even now I could call twelve legions of angels?” They say, “He saved others; himself he cannot save.” What they mean by that is he can’t physically save himself. Now they’ve got him; he’s tied up there. But that’s not what he means.
There’s a sense in which they speak the truth. There is a sense in which he cannot save himself and others, not because he is physically incapable of doing so, but precisely because he is so morally committed to doing the will of his Father that if he comes down from the cross, he will save himself and not others. He will save others only by not saving himself. In that sense, they are exactly right, though it’s not what they mean. That’s irony. Again and again and again in Matthew’s discussion of what happened. It’s just filled with irony.
The problem is irony can cross over into sarcasm or condescension or mean-spirit. So if a preacher is using irony, the preacher had better understand the culture very well, because in some cultures, anything that smacks of irony/sarcasm will just be a smart-mouth that is undermining the gospel, whereas, in other cultures, it may be precisely opening things up.
Let me give you an illustration in a slightly adjacent way. I’m a Canadian. I was brought up in French Canada, but my parents were both born in the United Kingdom. One was born in London. The other was born in Northern Ireland. I’ve lived in many different parts of the world.
English humor, at the risk of generalization, runs at two levels. English humor at the popular level, is Benny Hill stuff. It’s gross, it’s clever, but it is dirty. Then there’s a more sophisticated track of English humor. A lot of things in English society are hierarchicalized. You have to talk about different levels of the society. English humor tends to be elusive, self-deprecating, rather clever, and witty.
Now you go to Australia. The first time I went to Australia (I’ve been there about 40 times) was in 1985 to give the Moore College Lectures. At the Moore College Lectures, you give a different lecture every two or three nights. The first night, I was introduced very generously. “Dr. DA Carson is this distinguished.…” The next night, a different faculty member introduced me, and he felt he had to outdo the chap who introduced me the first night. By this time, I was one of the greatest scholars who had ever lived.
By the third night, I was approaching apostolic status. It was really, really disgusting, but by this time I had been in Australia long enough to recognize that’s not the way they talk to each other. There they have an expression, “Cut down the tall poppy.” They insult each other. English upper-level humor is self-deprecating. Australian humor laughs at the other person. They can be immensely critical and, from an English perspective, mean-spirited, nasty, insulting, but they think it’s outrageously fun to sit around and insult each other and fall off their chairs laughing.
By that time I had been there enough days that I could see how they talked to each other, and they weren’t talking to me that way. So I knew they were still trying to protect the foreigner. After the third time I had been introduced, I said, “I don’t know who the bigger sinner is here: this man for telling all these lies or me for enjoying them.” They all fell off their chairs laughing. From then on in the Moore College Lectures, I was introduced only by insults, and I knew I had arrived.
So now when I go to Australia, the former principal of Moore College (he’s now the archbishop of the Sydney archdiocese), Peter Jensen.… People would come and listen to us just insulting one another. “Don Carson.… Wait till you see what Peter Jensen says.” They knew this was going to happen. I’m going back to Australia, in fact, next week, and I’m sure Peter Jensen will introduce me somewhere.
I’m sure he’s prepared some insults. I’ve certainly prepared some insults for him, because that’s Australia, but I would not do that with Dick Lucas at St. Helen’s Bishopsgate, and I would not do it in Romania with you. It’s a different culture. One has to begin to read cultures properly and understand that.
Then exegetically, one has to understand that in Scripture some of the cultures and the way language, figures of speech, and metaphors are used might be different from the way we use them. So it becomes important to read in to understand how they’re being used and then make appropriate transfers as we preach them.
It’s also why some preachers, it seems to me, are not transportable. I know some preachers.… I know one or two English preachers who are very, very able, godly, spirited-anointed expositors. First class. They bomb out in Wales. They bomb out in Latin America. They just seem dry and dead. Whereas, partly because I was brought up in French Canada, so that despite all my English roots, I’ve got a certain sort of Latin side to me as well, I can let fly.
When I’m in England, I try to restrain myself a little. In fact, I’ve gone back to England after being away for a year or two, and I’ve had somebody come up to me and say, condescendingly, “Well, once you’ve been back here a little while, you’ll be a little more sober again,” and I know I’ve been properly rebuked.
On the other hand, when I go to Latin America, I let it fly, because it’s just another culture. It seems to me that is no more than doing what Paul says. “I become all things to all men so that by all means I may win some.” Some preachers are transportable; some are not.
Male: You already touched the main purpose of my question. It’s about diminishing the message of the gospel, how far you can go.
Don: The larger question, really a question of humor in sermons. Is that the question?
Male: About irony not humor.
Don: In some cultures, irony in a sermon could diminish it. In some cultures, it explains it. Deal with humor for a moment. C.H. Spurgeon was much criticized for being too funny. He replied, “If you knew how much humor I had cut out from that sermon, you would praise me for my restraint.” There is a danger, always …
Consider a sermon I preach on Genesis 3. I have had Chinese people tell me (indirectly) if Adam and Eve had been Chinese there never would have been a fall. Do you know why? They would’ve eaten the snake. Now there’s no way I would ever tell that joke preaching from Genesis 3, just because the subject is so serious (sin, rebellion, idolatry) that I’m not anxious to get a lot of laughs. There is always a danger in using the kind of humor that actually depreciates from what you’re talking about.
On the other hand, one of the things that is part of good preaching, it seems to me, is the gospel, the truth, the Word, comes through human personality. There will be different personalities with different kinds of strengths. You don’t want to make a whole lot of cubbyhole rules. I have a friend who simply cannot preach without being slightly funny, no matter how much he restrains himself. If you knew the man, he is just funny all the time. What can I say? It’s the way he thinks. It makes him, in fact, a very, very effective youth preacher. Not my style.
Thank God there are diversities of cultures in the world, but to argue that irony would always be sinful would surely be a mistake when the Bible itself has irony and uses irony. That would surely be a mistake, even though I would still acknowledge that in certain cultures, irony may be misleading or deceptive or insulting or something, depending on the culture.
Male: This is just a brief comment not a question. It’s on the subject of eternal torment and annihilation. In my last secular job, I had two separate conversations with two separate colleagues on the subject of heaven. Both colleagues said to me, “I deserve to go to the other place.” We delude ourselves when we think that by downplaying the subject of hell we are making the gospel more believable.
Don: I agree with that, and that is the final word on the subject. Let me close in prayer.
Our Father, we thank you that by listening to one another, learning from one another, we may expand our horizons and grow in grace and in appreciation of the glorious diversity of the church for which Christ shed his blood.
Help us to be faithful in our own small corners, to understand, to be faithful, to bow before the lordship of your dear Son, to grow in grace and in knowledge of him, and so to love men and women, so to love the gospel, so to anticipate the glory to come, that, as Paul enjoins Timothy, “Men and women will look at us and see our progress in both doctrine and life.” For Jesus’ sake, amen.
