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When the Bible Is Silent

1 Corinthians 3

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Biblical Interpretation from 1 Corinthians 3


“Brothers and sisters, I could not address you as people who live by the Spirit but as people who are still worldly—mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere humans? For when one says, ‘I follow Paul,’ and another, ‘I follow Apollos,’ are you not mere human beings?

What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task. I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.

The one who plants and the one who waters have one purpose, and they will each be rewarded according to their own labor. For we are co-workers in God’s service; you are God’s field, God’s building. By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as a wise builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should build with care. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.

If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward.

If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames. Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple.

Do not deceive yourselves. If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become ‘fools’ so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written: ‘He catches the wise in their craftiness’; and again, ‘The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.’ So then, no more boasting about human leaders! All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God.

This is the Word of the Lord. Let us pray.

We take great comfort, heavenly Father, from that Word which tells us that if anyone lacks wisdom, we are to ask of you because you love to give it without upbraiding, without criticizing. So we do ask for it, not only tonight, but in the churches that are being planted represented here, in the host churches, in decisions that are not spelled out specifically in Scripture, that we may nevertheless have the mind of Christ and act in conformity with what is revealed. Grant, Lord God, that we may be slow to speak, swift to hear, humble as we learn from one another, and eager to conform our lives to your most Holy Word. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

On some things, the Bible really is truly silent. For example, how to cut a dado joint in a nice piece of walnut, how to crochet, how to use a Garmin 1000 when flying a small aircraft, how to build a surfboard. You can’t find a word about it anywhere, not a word. Usually, when we talk about domains that interest us where we say the Bible is silent, in fact, it’s only relatively silent. It’s relatively silent in one of three ways.

1. The Bible speaks about something only once or twice, so we are uncertain what is meant or how to apply it exactly.

Thus, there are some Christians who come to 1 Corinthians 11, where Paul seems to want women to have something on their heads, and they say, “This is the Word of God. Women should have something on their heads when they worship.” I look around tonight, and there are not many in compliance.

Others say, “Well, yes, but it’s only a cultural artifact. The point is not whether you have something on your head or not. The point is deeper than that.” Then the reply comes back, “Well, yes, it’s exactly the same thing with homosexuality. It’s a cultural matter that is there, you see. In a different culture it might work out a little differently.” How do you sort that one out? Or …

2. The Bible says quite a lot on a subject, but historically, fine Christians have understood the passage in quite different ways.

It’s not as if the Bible is silent absolutely, but for whatever reasons, we have not come to a common mind, even amongst Christians who have an equally devout reverence for Holy Scripture.

I suspect that there are both Baptists and paedo-baptists here tonight, and some of you are really quite informed about this debate. Some of you have studied Scripture on the matter for quite some time, and you can’t agree. It’s not as if Scripture doesn’t say anything. It’s we, the readers of Scripture, have understood Scripture so differently, so that in our own experience, Scripture is not speaking with a clear voice. We may say that it’s our fault; nevertheless, the result is still the same.

If you don’t like that one, how about church government? Believers church tradition, congregational government, Presbyterian government, Episcopal government.… How about divorce and remarriage? It’s not as if the Bible doesn’t say anything about it, but historically, Christians have sometimes differed amongst themselves as to what Scripture actually does teach.

3. The Bible may say nothing directly about a subject, but it does lay down some important principles that bear on the subject.

This is another way the Bible may be relatively silent. For example, there’s not a word anywhere about multisite ministry and using videos, not a word. Yet there are some things the Bible does say that we have to take into account.

What is the nature of the church and fellowship? What about our mission commitments to evangelize? Is this going to reach more people? Supposing those two principles seem to conflict. What do we do with them? What’s the place of parachurch ministry? The apostle Paul never speaks of Sunday schools, never mentions Moore College … not once … let alone Campus Crusade, AFES, military chaplaincies, digital church, or you name it.

So how are we to think our way through these matters? In no particular order of importance, here are some suggested principles, an apostolic number of them. That’s 12, in case you didn’t know. Now some of these I’ll go through very quickly. I’ll try to give you an example or two. Three or four of them we’ll spend a little more time on, and we’ll have lots of time at the end for questions. This is not an exhaustive treatment, nor a completely satisfying one. It’s not much more than priming the pump so that we are forced to think through these matters.

1. Discern what is theologically attached to relatively obscure passages.

For example, I’ve heard people say, “The Word of God says, ‘Greet one another with a holy kiss.’ Some of you people live in cultures where you think J.B. Phillips’ paraphrase will get you by. ‘Give a hearty handshake all round.’ You’re unbiblical, and if you think it’s all right to give a hearty handshake all around, and that’s an adequate response to this injunction from God himself, then surely you can be a little more flexible on other issues about, for example, whether women may teach men in a local church.”

One of the criteria that we need to bear in mind is we need to see in every passage what is theologically attached to the injunction, what is theologically attached to the topic that is only brought up once. In this case, “Greet one another with a holy kiss.” It’s only mentioned once. It’s very easy to teach that in France. It’s very easy to teach that in the Arab world. Believe me; you’re not going to have a ghost of a chance of getting it across in China.

The question is.… Is there a kind of theology of kissing? Believe it or not, I’m not trying to titillate. I just want to know. Is there a theology of kissing, or is the kissing merely a way, in that culture, for expressing hearty acceptance, warm welcome, care for one another, and love for one another? What is theologically attached to that passage?

The same thing, I would argue, with respect to women and hats. That is to say, there is only one passage that actually mentions that subject in the Pauline writings, just one. The question is.… Is there a theology of hats?

There is certainly a theology of head with respect to another head, of one party with respect to another party, which is symbolically represented in this wearing of hats or not wearing of hats. But is there, attached to hats themselves, a certain kind of theology? Now that may not answer all questions, but it’s at least an important question that has to be asked in these debates.

2. Nothing exempts you from the obligation to engage in careful exegesis and wide reading.

So you’re wrestling through with questions of church government, you’re wrestling through with questions of divorce and remarriage, you’re wrestling through questions of eschatology, and you’re wrestling through with questions of authoritarianism versus almost a democratic congregationalism.

What’s the first thing you do? The first thing you do is study Scripture for yourself. It sounds so obvious, but it is not always done. What happens instead is we start reading the debates, we start reading our preferred authors, or we start getting on the blog sites and do some Google searches.

The first thing you must do, if you’re serious about forming your opinions by the Word of God, is study the Word of God. Do your exegesis. You’re a pastor! Study the Bible, and within that framework you may come to a convincing line. If not, you will at least find out where the real cores of the debate lie, what the differences of opinion consist in.

3. The pragmatics of ministry require you to make some decisions.

Now I teach at a seminary called Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Let me briefly compare Trinity with Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas. Westminster Theological Seminary is a Presbyterian, Reformed school, so it teaches a Presbyterian form of government and paedo-baptism, that form of paedo-baptism well represented in high Presbyterianism.

Dallas, by contrast, is historically a dispensational school, though very often, on the ground, it follows what is often called today a progressive dispensationalism. However, it allows both Baptist views and paedo-baptist views. On the other hand, its eschatology is quite fixed. At Westminster, most of them over there are amillennialists. There are no dispensationalists at Westminster, none. There are a couple of historic premillennialists, but they’re slightly weird dudes.

Then at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where I teach, we have some Baptists and some paedo-baptists. We have lots of Reformed theologians, a couple of dispensationalists, quite a lot of historic premillennialists (the weird ones), and a lot of five-point Calvinists. We’re all at Trinity, and we all claim inerrancy. Now what happens to the students in these three schools?

Well, if you graduate from Westminster, the chances are overwhelming you’ll come out with Presbyterian theology and praxis … overwhelming. You will have been exposed to some Baptist arguments and some dispensational arguments, but always taught by somebody who doesn’t hold them, which means that the way they’ve been presented to you is inevitably, no matter how fair-minded the professor is, inevitably there’s a bit of a slant. So it takes a Baptist student at Westminster a certain amount of courage and determination to graduate still a Baptist.

Then you go to Dallas. Well, at Dallas they graduate Baptists and they graduate paedo-baptists, but they graduate premillennialists, and a lot of them are premillennial dispensationalists. There, it takes quite a lot of schmaltz to graduate an amillennialist. Yeah, it does.

Then you come to Trinity. Ahhh. “Free from the law. Oh, happy condition!” The problem, of course, is that our students face another danger, a danger that many of them don’t even recognize at first. They’re in danger of saying, “Well, Professor A doesn’t agree with Professor B, so who am I to decide?” Therefore, they don’t decide, and they come out with a lowest-common-denominator theology.

Now if our students come out strongly formed in one tradition or another, they will be ahead of the other guys because they really will have heard the best arguments from another perspective. That’s Trinity’s strength. Trinity’s weakness is that you can, if you’re not careful, come out with a lowest-common-denominator theology.

On issue after issue, you can get graduates coming out who can tell you all about the debates about everything, but who haven’t made up their own minds. The trouble is, when they graduate, eventually they’re going to have to get into a church. Churches will have made up their minds, and they don’t like too many pastors who, in fact, haven’t made up theirs. Presbyterian churches are not real keen on taking on their staffs lovely evangelicals who say, “I don’t know yet. I’m still making up my mind.”

In other words, the pragmatics of ministry really demand that you’ve come down somewhere or other, and ideally, you want to come down in an informed way, in a defensible way, and in an intelligent way. Within that framework, you may then very carefully say that there are different items in the denominational statement to which you adhere that you hold with different degrees of tenacity.

When I moved from Canada near Chicago to teach at Trinity, it had one or two statements of faith in it where I could sign on with a clear conscience, but I said to the powers that be (when I first went there in 1978), “About the deity of Christ, I’m prepared to die for that one. About the doctrine of the Trinity, I’m prepared to die for that one. About substitutionary atonement, I’m prepared to die for that one. About historic premillennialism, I think it’s on balance of probabilities. I can sign onto it.”

The dean at the time said, “As long as, on balance of probabilities, you don’t take the opposing view, that’s okay.” We all recognize that in any statement of faith, we will hold onto different sectors of the statement of faith with different degrees of tenacity. That’s all right. What we can’t tolerate, is somebody who, on balance, takes an opposing view.

So, what I’m really saying, especially to younger men who are still sorting these things out in their minds, is don’t think that endless open-endedness marks, necessarily, a great open spirit. It may simply mark indecision, and sooner or later, it will trip you up in the ministry. Sooner or later, in a local church, you have to follow this structure or that structure. It may be that you’ll only come down to balance of probabilities about what you think Scripture teaches, but you must come down somewhere.

4. Most decisions in these disputed areas have both good and bad defenses, and they need to be discerned.

Now most of you folks know that by ordination, I’m a Baptist. Let me tell you, there are some horrid defenses of baptism by immersion … horrid, horrid. All kinds of Baptists say, for example, that first you accept Jesus as your personal Savior, and then when you’re ready to accept him as Lord, then you get baptized because then you’re serious. I can’t find any sanction for that anywhere in Scripture. It’s an abomination. It doesn’t understand the gospel.

There are all kinds of Baptists who offer defenses of baptism along other lines that, in my view, are equally repugnant and without any justification, but I’ve heard some pretty ridiculous defenses of paedo-baptism too. In other words, you want to be very careful when you do defend one side or another on a disputed matter, that you offer up the best defense you can possibly martial with the best knowledge of Scripture and how it’s been understood and thought through in times past.

Just because you come out on a certain side of a disputed matter doesn’t mean all those who come out on the same side are your friends. In fact, I’m so ashamed of so many Baptist positions on baptism, it’s almost enough to make me a paedo-baptist. Mercifully, there are some Reformed Baptists around who seem to get things right, in my view, which I hold with a certain minor degree of tenacity. In that connection then, part of discernment on these disputed matters is recognizing that there are good and bad defenses of almost any position.

5. Most such decisions have entailments down the road.

It’s rare that you make decisions about church government, parachurch, egalitarianism, complementarianism, or many, many other issues without there being entailments down the road. So part of thinking things through is learning to project into the future if you possibly can. If you’re young, one of the ways of doing that is talking with senior saints who have been around for a few decades. Now there are entailments of this one that I’ll come to in a moment, to unpack it a little bit more.

6. Most decisions about church structures are grounded, in part, on reading a variety of biblical texts a certain way (getting the balance of things lined up a certain way), and it is the part of humility to recognize that there are other ways and your arguments are rarely beyond dispute.

I’ll spend a little more time on this one.

For example, I know one well-known preacher (many of you would recognize his name if I mentioned it, but I refrain) who loathes, with a passion, anything that falls under the label of congregational government. He says, “No justification for it in Holy Scripture. It’s an abomination. It is part of the independence of the age instead of submitting to what Scripture says.

Scripture says, ‘Obey those who have the rule over you’ in Hebrews 13. Those who have the rule over you in that context are not government officials. In the context, they’re clearly church leaders. That’s what it says. ‘Obey those who have the rule over you.’ The Bible says it; I believe it. Go and obey it, and stop arguing.”

Others will say, “Yes, the Bible does say that. Yes, it does. In fact, there are quite a lot of texts that insist that the church is to submit to the judgment of the elders on all kinds of matters. On the other hand, Matthew 18, in certain matters, says, ‘Tell it to the church.’ In 1 Corinthians 5, when there is someone to be excommunicated from the church, it’s an action that is taken by the whole church. Now I know how those passages are explained away by one side or the other, but nevertheless, there is an emphasis on church wholeness, church discipline, and not merely elder discipline.”

Therefore, those who listen to both sets of texts say there is some kind of tension here in Scripture. It’s not quite like IBM, where all the authority comes down from on high, nor is it exactly like Athenian democracy, where every male in the city has exactly the same vote and clout. It’s neither one nor the other. In the New Testament there’s a certain kind of tension between the church and the authority of elders/pastors/overseers in the church, because either side can go bad.

The church in Corinth, for example, in 2 Corinthians, chapters 10–13, that church is told again and again by the apostle Paul to get rid of the leaders in their church whom Paul dismisses as false apostles masquerading as apostles of light. In fact, he says in chapter 13, “This is the third time I’ve written to you, the third time I’ve come to you, and when I come this next time, I’ve got to warn you: if you haven’t gotten rid of them, I’ll get rid of them.”

In other words, the church has responsibility, on occasion, for getting rid of false teachers, just as there are lots of teachers in the New Testament church who are responsible for teaching things, gently correcting in righteousness, and ultimately, if necessary, disciplining those who are disruptive in teaching false doctrine in the church. There’s a tension there. Either side can go bad.

Some of the disputes about how things will be done amongst us, then, turn in part on where we see the biggest danger is in our context; or they turn, in part, on where we lay the maximum emphasis when there’s a tension in the text; or they turn, in part, even on our own personalities.

What that means, then, is that it becomes the part of humility to recognize that where there are such tensions and balancing acts in Scriptural texts regarding structure and the like, it’s the part of humility to realize that how we have aligned these texts depends on a number of judgments that may not be infallible. We need to walk with a certain kind of humility, learn from one another, and be careful especially not to consign opponents to the bottom level of Dante’s Inferno.

Likewise, other ways in which we may read differently, some of the evidence of Scripture.… In the New Testament, with only one exception from Acts on, the word church in the singular refers to the church of a city. So, the church in Ephesus, the church in Jerusalem, the church in Laodicea, the church in Hierapolis.

The trouble is, we know well some of those churches had thousands and thousands of people. The church in Jerusalem, for example, saw 3,000 converts on the day of Pentecost. Not too long later there were 5,000 (though 5,000 men, plus the women and children), which meant you have 20,000 people. For a while they could meet not only from home to home, where they studied the apostles’ doctrine, broke bread together, and so forth, but they could also meet in Solomon’s colonnade, part of the old temple complex.

However, once there was enough antipathy between unconverted Jews and the Christians, who were all converted Jews, then they were doubtless banned from Solomon’s colonnade. Therefore, they only met, at that point, in house churches, but that doesn’t mean that the text immediately started talking about the churches in Jerusalem. They still spoke of the church in Jerusalem.

The only time you find the plural word churches for certain empirical churches is at the provincial level. It’s the church in Jerusalem, the churches in Judea; the church in Ephesus, the churches in Asia; the church in Rome, the churches in Italy. Now that’s very interesting.

If you come to a small place like Hierapolis, and there’s only one church at the beginning, well, that’s fine. No difficulty. However, supposing you have a place like Ephesus where the church grew very rapidly, but there was enough opposition that the only place they could have met that was big enough was, in fact, in the arena.

You can still go and see it today. It’s wide open. I’ve taken pictures of it. You can see the arena, but that’s the place where eventually they threw Christians to be eaten by lions. It wasn’t the place where they could have evangelistic rallies, so the church in Ephesus, therefore, was meeting in homes. Still one church.

So what do we talk about today? The church in Sydney? Never, never. It’s the churches in Sydney. By church in Sydney, we may mean our denomination, the Anglican Church, or if we’re slightly misinformed, we might speak of the Baptist church, although informed Baptists never speak of the Baptist church because Baptists strictly do not belong to a denomination. They belong to an association, because they believe in the independence of the local church.

So Baptist churches, Anglican Church; but that means we’re using church in a denominational sense, which never crops up in the New Testament either. So suddenly we begin to realize that our use of words is different from New Testament use of words. The question is.… How do we make the transfers?

Well, if you’re a high Presbyterian, one of the reasons why you justify Presbyterian government, the government of presbyters, of elders, over more than one local church is because of this nomenclature usage that I’ve just described. There is the church in Jerusalem, and undoubtedly at some point they’re meeting separately in different homes. They’re almost like small churches that we think of today. The 30 here, 70 there, 60 there, and 100 there. Maybe each one had an elder or two, but all the elders together of Jerusalem meet together in some sense.

That’s why, for example, when Paul is coming back from his second missionary journey, he stops in Miletus to meet with the elders of the church in Ephesus. It’s not just the elders of the church on Front Street. It’s the elders of the church in Ephesus, you see. You have elders extending beyond the local assembly who are nevertheless collectively ruling all of these assemblies in Ephesus. So the Presbyterians say, “That justifies our form of government.”

Then the Baptists come along, and they say, “Yes, we acknowledge the terminology is a wee bit different, and there is a place, surely, for house groups, small groups, family groups, home groups.” What do you call them in your church? I don’t really care what you call them. “There’s a place for that within the larger congregation. There’s a place for small groups, but if you have a big enough small group, it really has become a small de facto church. At that point, you will have leaders in it who are functioning as elders.”

Now that’s still different from the usage of the term church in the New Testament, but it doubtless shows that you could have separate churches with elders leading individual units that really have become de facto independent churches. If the assembly is big enough, then they might have two elders, three elders. There’s nothing in the Bible that prescribes how many elders you must have in a local church, nothing.

Then along come the Anglicans. Whoa! I think, in fact, even most evangelical Anglicans think that in the New Testament there are really only two offices: elder, pastor, overseer/bishop (three different names for one office) and deacon. Now I would be prepared to justify that at great length. So the question is.… How do you get three offices so that bishops, archbishops, primates, and things like that are at a separate tier to the leaders of local churches and to deacons? How do you justify that?

Well, not too long ago I went for a long walk with the archbishop of Sydney. (The story isn’t connected to Peter Jensen; it was one of the preceding four.) I’ve known these men, and they’re interesting and good men. On this particular occasion, we were going for a long walk in the Blue Mountains. We came back to the car sweaty and hot. We had talked theology and shop all the way. It’s what people like us do.

Somewhere along the line, I had got to know this man well enough over enough years that I said to him, “My dear brother, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’d really love to know how you justify your job.” You know, where do you find archbishops in the New Testament? I know you believe the Bible. You teach the Bible. How do you justify archbishops in the New Testament?”

He said to me, “Well, if you get over the difference in name.… The name archbishop isn’t there. Nevertheless, there is an apostle like Paul, and there are churches out there, and between the apostle like Paul and the churches out there, there is someone like Timothy or Titus who is commissioned to be Paul’s representative, to teach these churches, appoint elders in various places, and do various things. I’m sort of like a Titus or Timothy in the structure of things. That’s what I am.”

I could think of alternative explanations for Titus and Timothy, but I wasn’t trying to have an argument, so I said, “Well, that’s very interesting.” He said, “You know, Don, I think you’d make a good bishop.” I think the blighter was trying to recruit me! I said, “Almost thou persuadest me to be an Anglican.” He said, “But such will have trouble in the flesh, and I would spare thee.” Thus we continued quoting King James Version back and forth at each other, and then we went our separate ways.

Now my only point in telling you this story is to show that there are good men with deeply reverent approaches to Scripture who may use the same exegetical phenomena to configure things just a bit differently. Now I could tell you in every one of those cases how I would respond, but on the other hand, if they were here talking with me, they could tell you how they would respond to me. Then I would tell you how I would respond to them, and you’d have a real ding-dong up here.

At the same time, it might be that quite a lot of us would go to our places feeling justified by our own traditions after all, and we might not have proceeded very far in the discussion. It takes a long time to have the kind of discussion that penetrates through that superficial level of defenses. So my general point is very simple. Most decisions about structures of church government and the like are grounded in part on reading the Bible’s texts a certain way, and it is the part of humility to recognize that there are other ways and your arguments are rarely beyond dispute.

7. Some decisions turn on competing values, and that means being forced to hierarchize those values.

Let me explain it. I’ll mention two names in this case. Many of you have heard of both of them. Both the men have been here in Australia, but I’ll take it off your patch by talking about people elsewhere.

If you consider the ministry of Mark Dever, Mark Dever has considered church matters close and central. He runs what he calls an ecclesiological boot camp lasting six months for young pastors to teach them how churches ought to operate, what things are non-negotiable in Scripture, principles of church discipline, and the like. Within that framework, because he’s thought so much about what a local church should be like, he’s come out pretty strongly against multisite ministries.

Far better to plant more churches. Multisite ministries, he thinks, are breaking down how a church ought to operate, with fellowship, people knowing one another. He says all the kinds of things you can do to compensate, like small groups and the like, don’t really address the central problem of.… What is the nature of the church? That’s Mark Dever, whether you follow him or not.

On the other hand is someone like John Piper, who has also been out here. Bethlehem Baptist Church has three or four sites. I can’t remember which. He manages to preach at one or two of them on a Sunday, and then a video recording gets preached in one. There might be an associate pastor that preaches in another. Some of these videos are simultaneous; they’re just streamed through. Sometimes they’re an hour or two later in various multisite ministries.

From his point of view, although on paper he agrees with the ecclesiology of Mark Dever to a pretty large extent, he nevertheless says that the mandate of evangelism, of reaching out to people under ministry that really does seem to be anointed, is so great that you become a little more flexible in how you organize things.

Then you can see how the argument goes. If you were in the days of Whitefield, you could only preach to a certain number of people at once because there was no audio magnification. If I want to preach to a bigger crowd, all I have to do is get a little closer to the microphone, or somebody cranks it up somewhere, and I could preach to 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 without raising my voice.

Suddenly you have Spurgeon preaching regularly to 5,000 and on some weekends 25,000. That’s not exactly an intimate little church. Shall we forbid him to do that? Okay, supposing then it is two services in a 5,000-seat congregation, or break it down to smaller units. You have a 500-seat congregation. Now you have two services of 500 each. Supposing you have a 250-seat congregation. Is there something wicked about having two services and still calling it one church? All right, supposing you have three services.… How about four?

Supposing you have two in this site and one in another site that is live-streamed. Now, it’s still the same amplification system. You’re still using microphones, and you’re still using speakers and big screens. Is that going beyond something that is forbidden in Scripture? Then supposing you delay it an hour. Does that make it less holy because it’s been delayed an hour? Do you see?

On the other hand, you can keep whittling away and whittling away until you suddenly start scratching your head saying, “At what point does this become sort of mass-produced entertainment?” These things become really difficult, and they all stem from two very simple principles.… What is the church and how does it function as a body, holding together cohesively, each part doing its work? And.… How can we maximize evangelistic outreach?

Both are biblically-rooted principles, deeply biblically-rooted principles. At the end of the day, when you have a division of opinion between two good men on that matter, in fact, one has hierarchized one above the other, and the other has hierarchized the other one. They’re saying, in effect, it’s more important. So some of our disputes in such matters turn on how there are different principles in Scripture that have to be seen as offering competing, complementary values, and hierarchization is simply an inevitability.

8. Be very, very suspicious of guru solutions.

That’s why I read 1 Corinthians, chapter 3. “I am of Paul.” “I am of Apollos.” In chapter 1, “I am of Peter” and the most sanctimonious of the lot, “Not me. I’m just a Christian. I’m of Christ.”

“I am of Driscoll.” “I am of Jensen.” Be very suspicious of guru solutions. Nobody has all the truth in such pragmatic matters. In this case, very frequently what happens when you latch on to one guru in a kind of exclusive way is you rob the church you are serving of other complementary insight.

You see, after Paul warns in the first part of the chapter here how you really must not say, “I am of Paul, I am of Apollos, I am of Driscoll,” or whatever, he comes to the end, and he says, “The wisdom of the world is foolishness in God’s sight.” He says, “Don’t deceive yourselves. If you think that you’re wise because you’re following one particular guru …”

In the context that’s what it means. “If you think you’re wise by the standards of this age because you’re following a particular guru, you should become ‘fools,’ for the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. God catches the wise in their craftiness. The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile. So then, no more boasting about human leaders!”

Deal with principle, deal with text, and deal with theological reflection. They may be exemplified in leaders who articulate them in certain ways. We need to learn from one another, but be careful of gurus. “So then, no more boasting about human leaders!” See how it ends up? “All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours.”

In other words, if you’re Reformed there are some things to learn from Wesley. Likewise, in the domain of church government and elsewhere, it really is very important to recognize that there is a heritage of godliness, insight, and so on. People don’t always agree. Then you have to bring things back to the test of Scripture. That’s using your head, learning to be discerning, and so on, but be careful of simple guru solutions. They are almost always dangerous.

9. Try to think strategically, including thinking through potential, unforeseen consequences.

Now that’s asking for a contradiction in terms. I know that. How can you think through unforeseen consequences? If they’re unforeseen, how can you think them through? If you’re thinking them through, they’re not unforeseen. I know that, but I’ll leave it the way it is just the same.

Try to think strategically, and that includes casting up in your mind.… What is likely to be the result of this decision or another decision? The danger of unforeseen consequences is simply huge. You’re never just building for today. The blessings and discipline, the encouragement, the structures, the accountability, and the way you train leaders will get magnified when those people then train other people.

Now there are lots and lots and lots of historical examples of this. For example, there have been many Mennonites in the past who interpreted the gospel in a certain pacifist tradition with certain social structures. The next generation then assumes the gospel and magnifies the social structures. The generation after that largely ignores the gospel and maintains and identifies with the social structures. The generation after that denies the gospel and still maintains the social structures.

Somewhere along the line, part of our job, if we’re thinking strategically, is how you make the main thing the main thing, how it gets passed on in individuals, in leaders, and in structures, so far as it’s possible. Oh, I know that the wheel can come off in any case, unless God blesses us with renewal.

You’re never more than two or three generations away from extinction anyway. That’s why there must always be renewed evangelism, outreach, and people who are genuinely converted. That’s the way it is. That’s the way God has ordained it to be. Nevertheless, it still means that we who are in positions of leadership must be trying to think through the entailments of our decisions. Now there are lots of questions that could be raised about that one, but I’m going to press on.

10. Many questions about levels of fellowship with other groups (whether we should work with this group or that group) would be greatly helped by clear thinking about two things: the next generation and center-bounded sets.

Let me deal with the second one.

There are, at the risk of reductionism, two ways of organizing something, whether a church, a parachurch organization, or whatever. You can define it as a boundary-bounded set. When you have a boundary-bounded set, then everybody within the boundary is in the set. Everybody outside the boundary is outside the set.

So let’s take the boundary of evangelicalism. Everybody who is an evangelical, then, is to be called evangelical and belongs to the world of evangelicalism. Everybody who is outside the world of evangelicalism is not an evangelical. However, that sort of way of defining things means that there is a lot of pressure to keep pushing the boundary farther out.

You don’t exclude somebody who really does trust Christ even if they have some screwball ideas about what Scripture is. You don’t want to eliminate somebody just because they come from a different religious tradition, even though they’re not really all that keen on substitutionary atonement. They might acknowledge that it’s possibly there in the New Testament, but it’s not that big a deal.

So you push it out a little farther, a little farther, and a little farther. Everybody inside is this evangelical, and the pressure is constantly pushed out, pushed out, pushed out, pushed out to include as many people in this rubric evangelical.

Now I’ve used evangelicalism, but I could have said church-planting organization or Reformed Baptist pastors’ fellowship. I mean, it can be all kinds of things, you see, but it’s a boundary-bounded set, and there are constantly pressures to push it out a little farther.

In some separatist groups, with a boundary-bounded set, there are pressures instead to shrink it as much as possible. To paraphrase, “Everybody’s off except me and thee, and I have my doubts about thee.” Then there are pressures to bring this thing in closer and closer and tighter and tighter, and everybody outside, you know, belongs in some lower range of Dante’s Inferno again.

There is a completely different way of organizing an organization. That is, a center-bounded set. With a center-bounded set, you don’t try to define who’s in and out at the margins. You don’t worry about that. You can’t do it, because it just gets too hazy out there in any case. There are too many exceptions.

What you do is you define the center tightly, richly, thickly. What you do at the center is say, “This is the evangel, this is the gospel, this is the biblical justification of it, and this is what the Word of God says.” You make sure all your leaders in this center-bounded set are on board. That’s where your discipline is, at the center.

Then if there are others who say they belong to you but don’t sign onto everything, or if there are others who sort of drift in and drift out, you don’t worry about it. They’re not at the center. They don’t have the control. So at that point, it becomes possible for this center-bounded set and this center-bounded set to mesh in certain kinds of ways and overlap in shared responsibilities and shared vision without pretending that everybody in this set also belongs to that set and vice versa, so long as you have a very strong, well-defended, well-defined center-bounded set.

If you don’t have that, you drift toward the boundary-bounded set with all kinds of rules, legalism, and constant push for expansion or the like, which, in my experience, leads in due course to a certain kind of lowest-common-denominator theology that has not much power or life left to it.

In North America, for example, there is an organization called the National Association of Evangelicals, and there is constant pressure in that organization to make sure the boundaries are low enough that every conceivable evangelical can get inside, including some who are not really so much evangelical as “evangelies.” Evangelical becomes so loosely defined that there are many evangelicals today who no evangelical of 50 years ago would have recognized as such.

It becomes problematic because it’s no longer defined at the center, with confessionalism based on the Word of God. The stomach of it has been ripped out. The heart of it, the mind in it, it’s constantly playing games with the boundaries, and that means that eventually your whole set is defined by sociological categories rather than by the Word of God. One of the ways you handle that is, even with a boundary-bounded set, you need to maintain the center.

However, there are some organizations that are best thought through by making them center-bounded set to begin with, and there you don’t look for lowest-common-denominator theology. You look for strength, for maturity, for thick theology, for fat theology, and for theology that is enmeshed, tight, coherent, and based on genuine exposition of and submission to Holy Scripture. Now I’m sure that can kick up some discussions too, but we’ll give you the opportunity for that in a few moments.

11. Learn to think theologically about cultural phenomena.

Now there are a lot of examples in Scripture itself. Acts, chapter 17: “While Paul was waiting for Silas and Timothy in Athens …” As far as we know, his first time there. “… he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” Here is Paul, having been brought up in Tarsus, probably the third most intellectual center in the Roman Empire. The first was Athens, the second was Alexandria, and the third was Tarsus. That’s where he was brought up.

For the first time, he’s in Athens. You know, it’s like people like you and me (Canadians, Australians, and so on) going to Oxford or Cambridge for the first time. Now, they may not be any better than the University of Sydney for all I know, but nevertheless … it’s Oxford, it’s Cambridge.

So you get there, you look around, and these buildings are so old. You know, I’ve spoken in St Bene’t’s Church. The nave was built in 1200. You go to Oxford, and you can stand on the place where Ridley was burned to death. There’s a feeling of history, and within that framework you can be so impressed by the city, the stone (in Oxford, all that Cotswold stone and in Cambridge, all the granite), the architecture, the little statue of Henry VIII, and on and on and on.

King’s College Chapel.… When we first brought our little kids there, because there are such excellent echoes in there, we had to be careful with them. They’d come in and found out there were such wonderful echoes there. They’d make a noise, and then there was the reverberation all around because, you know, it’s a fine example of perpendicular architecture. That’s what all the guidebooks say. It also makes a good echo chamber.

You go in there, and you can’t help but be slightly intimidated by what’s going on. That’s just the architecture. Then all of these posh dons with their thick, plummy, silver-spoon-in-the-mouth accent, you know. They have so many ways of putting you down. They’re really good at it; they practice. They practiced on all the colonials. So you can feel really a bit intimidated by the whole game.

So what was Paul doing in Athens? Was he admiring the Parthenon? By the time Paul got there, the Parthenon had been built for 500 years, but he looks at Athens, and he’s distressed by the idolatry. He’s thinking theologically. I’m not speaking against sociology. It’s a great discipline, useful for all kinds of analysis and uncovery of trends, demographics, belief systems, and all the rest.

I read quite a lot of sociology. The danger of reading too much sociology, however, is that the sociological categories become the categories by which you think. However, your first job, as a minister of the gospel, is to convert the categories of horizontal analysis, not least sociology, to theological categories. Then you’re better equipped to think through culture from a biblical point of view, and with it, matters of application, apologetics, structure, and a whole lot of other things.

For example, there are rising numbers of thinkers today who speak of this, in the Western world, as the age of possibilities. I think it’s very insightful. This sort of millennial generation thinks of the age of possibilities. That is, it’s really difficult to say no to anything because you’re looking over your shoulder all the time in case a better one’s coming along.

You don’t want to say no to anything because there are more options out there. Why should I foreclose on anything? But in the age of possibilities, there’s no age of commitment. There’s no commitment because you’re still examining the possibilities, so you have young people at the age of 35 not being able to figure out which way to grow up because they’re still figuring out the possibilities.

A number of years ago, I was speaking at a medical society in North America, a Christian medical society. There were 300 or 400 there, and after a day or two of this conference, a group of them came to me sort of surreptitiously after a meeting, sidling up to me as if it were somewhat dangerous to say anything to me. I may have the gift of intimidation. I’m not sure, but that’s the way they approached me. They said, “Could we have a private conversation with you?” I said, “Who’s we?”

“Oh, a bunch of us medicals.”

“Okay. When?”

“Tomorrow for breakfast. We’ll take you to breakfast, okay?”

“Okay.”

The next morning I met for breakfast a little extra early. They went to a restaurant, and they hired a separate room that was closed off. Once the waiters had gone, they were sort of shifting in their seats and looking around. Nobody had spoken up yet. I said, “All right, why did you guys invite me here?” They’re all men, all medical doctors. There were maybe 20 or 24 of them.

Finally one of them blurted out, “Why can’t we get married?” I said, “Come again.” “None of us are married. We haven’t quite figured out how to get to that point.” I said, “You’re doctors. You must know something about the biology.” These were really bright people who knew absolutely nothing about commitments beyond their medicine, absolutely nothing. Really bright people, Christian people. They live in the age of possibilities.

Now convert that into theological thinking. We follow the god of possibilities … well, possible gods. It might be this god; it might be that god. Depends on your point of view. Depends on the culture in which you were brought up, you see. This god may say this to one person, may say that to another person. He’s quite a flexible god, you know. As the French Canadians say, a super-grandpapa, a super-granddaddy.

The age of possibilities means that at the end of the day, there is no commitment, there is no submission, there is no faith, there is no resolution, there is no dying to self that I might live for Christ for all eternity, and there is no weighing of the values of this life over against the things of the next life. Theologically, the name of the game is open-ended selfishness, massive immaturity.

One of our jobs as we try to think through the Word of God and how to apply it to peoples lives, and what it might mean, then, for structure, apologetics, and all the rest is to understand our age as best we can (and you’re going to understand Australia a lot better than I ever will), but then to think through cultural, demographic, sociological, and political phenomena in theological categories, and then when you preach the theology out of Scripture, the theology that is grounded in Scripture, to pass it back across the line the other way so that people can see how it applies and calls a nation in a time to repentance. Lastly …

12. Ask God for wisdom.

Many, many, many decisions depend on what many call simply prudential wisdom. It might sound slightly repetitious. I like the expression … prudential wisdom … for Christ himself offers it to us. God himself, in the epistle of James, tells us that if anyone lacks wisdom, we’re to ask. God loves to give it.

So instead of jumping on our horses and following off every passing comet that seems to draw us to its light, sometimes it’s better to slow down, quietly seek God’s face, and ask him for wisdom to spare us from our own worst follies, that we may be wise in the proclamation of the truth as well as bold and faithful.