“Few books are so needed as this. Recapturing the vision of the pastor as scholar and the scholar as pastor is crucial for the health of the church. Who would not want to read John Piper and D. A. Carson as they reflect on this calling? This is one of the most encouraging and helpful books I have seen in a long time. If you are a pastor, read it. If you have a pastor, put it in his hands.”

R. Albert Mohler Jr., President, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

“These are important chapters by two of evangelicalism’s most important thinkers. In an age that has largely forgotten the native connection between theology and the church, Piper and Carson remind us that these two worlds belong together. There can be, of course, no turning back the clock; the modern research university is here to stay. But here they offer us two good examples of how to navigate the contemporary terrain with a view to producing ecclesial theology—theology in service to the church. This short book is a great beginning to a conversation that has been long overdue.”

Gerald Hiestand, Senior Associate Pastor, Calvary Memorial Church, Oak Park, Illinois; Executive Director, Society for the Advancement of Ecclesial Theology

“Who could count how many of us have had our lives changed by the ministries of John Piper and D. A. Carson? How many more have come to Christ or have been discipled in the gospel by pastors and teachers influenced by these leaders? This book is a riveting breed, granting us a candid, personal, and behind-the-scenes look at what the Lord has used to shape these men and their ministries. As you read this book, pray that the Lord Jesus would raise up, even now, the next generation of pastor-theologians and theologian-pastors to carry on the great work of Christ exaltation and kingdom mission.”

Russell D. Moore, Dean, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

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“How we need pastors and professors who love God with their minds and their emotions. Two of the preeminent evangelicals of our day reflect here on what it means to love Christ with all our heart. I was encouraged, convicted, and challenged by this book. It is a treasure well worth reading and rereading.”

Thomas R. Schreiner, James Buchanan Harrison Professor of New Testament Interpretation, The Southern Baptist

Theological Seminary

“I’m deeply encouraged by the growing number of pastoral scholars and scholarly pastors. Probably no living Christians have done more to bring about this trend than D. A. Carson and John Piper. In this book, they will inspire you with stories from their journeys and challenge you with seasoned advice. Most of all, they will lead you to thank God that he gives you the privilege of leading and teaching his church.”

Collin Hansen, Editorial Director, The Gospel Coalition; coauthor, A God-Sized Vision: Revival Stories that

Stretch and Stir

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The Pastor as Scholar

&

the Scholar as Pastor

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The Pastor as Scholar

&

The Scholar as Pastor

Reflections on Life and Ministry

John Piper & D. A. Carson

edited by Owen Strachan & David Mathis

W h e a t o n , I l l I n o I s

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The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor:

Reflections on Life and Ministry

Copyright © 2011 by Desiring God Foundation and Donald A. Carson Published by Crossway

1300 Crescent Street

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Josh Dennis

Cover photo: Bill Walsh

First printing 2011

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations marked AT are the author’s translation.

All emphases in Scripture have been added by the authors.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-2647-3

PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-2648-0

Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-2649-7

ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-2650-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Piper, John, 1946–

The pastor as scholar and the scholar as pastor : reflections on life and ministry / John Piper and D. A. Carson; Contributing Editors, David Mathis and Owen Strachan.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4335-2647-3 (tpb)

1. Pastoral theology. 2. Theology—Study and teaching.

3. Clergy—Post-ordination training. I. Carson, D. A.

II. Mathis, David, 1980– . III. Strachan, Owen. IV. Title.

BV4011.3.P58 2011

253.071'5—dc22 2010045336

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

LB 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

1 3 1 2 11 1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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To

Harold John Ockenga (1905–1985)

pastor, writer, seminary founder

and

Carl F. H. Henry (1913–2003)

theologian, writer/editor, churchman

Remember your leaders,

those who spoke to you the word of God.

Consider the outcome of their way of life,

and imitate their faith.

Jesus Christ is the same

yesterday and today and forever.

—Hebrews 13:7–8

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Contents

Acknowledgments 11

Introduction 13

The Return of the Pastor-Scholar

Owen Strachan

C H A P T E R O N E

The Pastor as Scholar:

21

A Personal Journey and the Joyful Place

of Scholarship

John Piper

C H A P T E R T W O

The Scholar as Pastor:

71

Lessons from the Church and the Academy

D. A. Carson

Conclusion 107

The Preacher, the Professor, and the True

Pastor-Scholar

David Mathis

Notes 113

General Index

117

Scripture Index

123

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Acknowledgments

Before it was a book, The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor was originally a single-evening event sponsored by the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding

at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, held on Thursday,

April 23, 2009, at Park Community Church in Chicago. We

thank Doug Sweeney, Director of the Henry Center; Jackson

Crum, J. R. Kerr, Joe Riccardi, and Whitney Anderson

of Park Community Church; Ben Peays of The Gospel

Coalition; and the title sponsor of the event, BibleMesh.com.

We also thank John Piper and Don Carson for their

willingness to add this event to an already full week of meetings with The Gospel Coalition, as well as for putting their

messages to paper and investing the extra energy to expand

the original versions into these chapters.

Thank you to our wives, Megan Mathis and Bethany

Strachan, who didn’t begrudge our initial phone conversa-

tions or the time it took to bring this book together and

guide it through the editorial process—Bethany, in addition

to caring for Owen while he was injured, and Megan, in

addition to carrying the twin boys toward their summer

2010 due date.

Most importantly, we thank Jesus, in a sense the true

pastor-scholar. May all praise and glory and honor and

power be his.

David Mathis, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Owen Strachan, Deerfield, Illinois

June 1, 2010

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Introduction

The Return of the Pastor-Scholar

Owen Strachan

“What do you want to be—a pastor or a scholar?”

It’s a common question in some circles. Many young

leaders-in-training have wrestled with its binary nature. I must, they think to themselves with some anguish, be one or the other. Surely I cannot be both. So the wrestling begins and uneasy conversations follow. For many, tidy resolutions

prove evasive.

Perhaps it isn’t meant to be so. What if the question,

though well intended, suffers from a potentially fatal flaw?

What if—hold your breath—one could be both? What then?

This book stems from more than a sneaking suspicion

that this rather mischievous counter-question might be

onto something. This suspicion does not proceed from a

vacuum but from the history of God’s church. Unlike our

more recent history, when pastors were urged by some to

busy themselves with the pragmatic matters of everyday

ministry and some scholars focused less on the church and

more on high-level academic questions, pastors and scholars

throughout the larger span of church history have blended

these roles. Pastors worked out of a burden to bless their

people with rich biblical theology even as scholars labored to nourish, strengthen, and captivate the church through their

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14 Introduction

scholarship. Often the roles of pastor and scholar were filled by the same person. The pastor was a scholar; the scholar

was a pastor.

This is particularly true of the Reformed tradition, the

guild whose trans-denominational movement continues

to grow in the current day. In Augustine, Luther, Calvin,

many Puritans, Edwards, Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones, and many

more, we find men who loved the church and excelled as

theologians. Though our more modern binary categories

of “pastor only” and “scholar only” might seem justified, when one turns to the actual history of the church, one finds countless examples of the scholarly pastor and the pastoral

scholar. Neither role is a cop-out; both require that their

adherents perform all the usual duties of the biblical local

church pastor and teacher. We must not make the mistake

of making evangelism the enemy of theology, discipleship

the enemy of edifying scholarship. Whether in the form of

a Calvin, an Edwards, or many others, this simply does not

ring true. These examples reveal that robust theology, so far from hindering the practice of ministry, actually enriches it, even as the practice of ministry enhances and increases one’s appreciation for theology.

These models of pastor and scholar thrive in the cur-

rent day, contrary to what some might think. John Piper

and D. A. Carson are two of evangelicalism’s best-known

figures. Each has provided leadership for the movement

in distinct ways. From his iconic position at Bethlehem

Baptist Church, Piper has modeled the theologically minded

pastor. Throughout his long and distinguished career at

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Introduction 15

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Carson has exemplified

the ecclesially concerned scholar. Each man has published

dozens of books, marking them as a leading voice for evan-

gelicals of varying backgrounds. Both have published on a

variety of levels, whether for popular, churchly, or scholarly reading.

The giftings of each man have rendered them an exam-

ple for fellow ministry leaders and believers. Because they

have proved able to speak both clearly and profoundly, and

always with a sovereign God and a salvific gospel in view,

Piper and Carson represent a contemporary starting point

for a much wider discussion of ministerial calling.

It was for this constellation of reasons that the Carl F.

H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding at Trinity

Evangelical Divinity School asked Drs. Piper and Carson to

speak at a special event geared toward future pastors and

scholars on April 23, 2009. Coming on the heels of The

Gospel Coalition national conference, the event was entitled

“The Pastor as Scholar, the Scholar as Pastor: Reflections

on Life and Ministry with John Piper and D. A. Carson.” It

attracted a capacity crowd to Park Community Church in

downtown Chicago. The auditorium and two floors of over-

flow classrooms were filled with attendees who had come to

hear the two leaders speak on their callings. For three hours, the audience listened to the scholarly pastor and the pastoral scholar. Thousands more streamed the media after the event,

which created quite a buzz on numerous blogs and other

forms of social media.1

This book, we hope, serves the growing conversation

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16 Introduction

on the identities of ministry callings. In addition to the

aforementioned event, the Society for the Advancement of

Ecclesial Theology, based in the Chicago area, convened in

2007 and is bursting with applications from interested pas-

tors who have a concern to engage the life of the mind in

their pastoral work. Theologian Kevin J. Vanhoozer gave the

Page Lectures at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

in late 2009 and commented at length on the necessity of

the pastor-theologian, evangelicalism’s “public intellectual”

according to Vanhoozer.2 On the publishing front, R. Albert

Mohler Jr.’s He Is Not Silent includes a chapter on the pastor as theologian.3 David Wells’s The Courage to Be Protestant argues that historically, “scholar–saints” led the church,

pastors who were “as comfortable with books and learning

as with the aches of the soul.”4 Douglas Sweeney’s Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word includes important content about Edwards’s ministry as a pastor-theologian.5

An insightful article on the topic by Gerald Hiestand ran

in the Westminster Journal of Theology in 2008.6 The

recent systematic theology for the church by Daniel Akin,

A Theology for the Church, features chapters by leading theologians and scholarly pastors that are aimed at the local church and its leaders.7 In these and other texts, Christian

thinkers are mulling over an enhanced pastorate and an

engaged academia.

The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor serves as a short, readable introduction to these callings. It suggests by way of experience and meditation an answer to the

question posed earlier: “What do you want to be—a pastor

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Introduction 17

or a scholar?” Perhaps we will be forgiven if, like Pastor

Piper and Professor Carson, we want in some small way to

be a realistic combination of both, in order that we might

use our gifts in service to God for the health of our brothers and sisters. This, and no mere rearrangement of ministerial

furniture, is the aim of this text: the strengthening of God’s church for the greater glory of its Lord.

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The Pastor as Scholar

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C H A P T E R O N E

The Pastor as Scholar:

A Personal Journey and the

Joyful Place of Scholarship

John Piper

This chapter has two parts. First is the story of my pilgrim-

age to the pastorate, and second is the way “scholarship”

relates to the overarching theme of my ministry—that God

is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

The story I tell, from the time I was a boy in high school to the stage in life where I am now, has an angle to it, namely, highlighting the factors along the way that shaped me into

the kind of pastor I am today, for good or for ill. The very

fact that I am approaching the topic of pastor-scholar this

way is immediately part of what you should learn about

what makes me tick as a pastor, and how this relates to

scholarship. Don’t hold your breath waiting for me to say

something about making room for academic scholarship in

the busy life of a pastor.

Part One: The Making of a Pastor-Scholar

From one angle this approach is typically American—we

Americans, in general, more quickly bare our souls to the

world than many cultures do. For example, F. F. Bruce, rep-

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22 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

resenting the British of a generation ago (and perhaps much

like today’s), said at the end of his autobiography:

While some readers have observed that in these chapters

I have said little about my domestic life, others have

wondered why I have been so reticent about my religious

experience. The reason is probably the same in both

instances: I do not care to speak much—especially in

public—about the things that mean most to me. Others

do not share this inhibition, and have enriched their fel-

lows by relating the inner story of the Lord’s dealings

with them—one thinks of Augustine’s Confessions and

Bunyan’s Grace Abounding. But it calls for quite exceptional qualities to be able to do this kind of thing without

self-consciousness or self-deception.1

So now you can see I am trapped. My first reaction when

I read this was to say, “No wonder I have found his com-

mentaries so dry”—helpful in significant ways, but person-

ally and theologically anemic. My second reaction was to

say (this was in 1980, the year I left academia and entered

the pastorate), “Good grief! You say, ‘I do not care to speak much—especially in public—about the things that mean

most to me.’ I say, ‘The only thing I care to speak about—

especially in public—are the things that mean most to me!’”

Zero Empathy

Both his and my statements are probably overstatements.

But seriously, this is one of the differences between me and

many scholars, and it is part of what pushed me out of the

guild. I am regularly bursting to say something about the

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Piper: The Pastor as Scholar 23

most precious things in the universe—and not in any disin-

terested, dispassionate, composed, detached, unemotional,

so-called scholarly way, but rather with total interest, warm passion, discomposure, utter attachment, and fully emotional, and, I hope always, true. At least true is my goal.

I am with Jonathan Edwards all the way when he says:

I should think myself in the way of my duty to raise the

affections of my hearers as high as possibly I can, pro-

vided that they are affected with nothing but truth, and

with affections that are not disagreeable to the nature of

what they are affected with.2

Of course, my assumption is, for Edwards and for myself,

that in our aim to raise the affections of our hearers, we

have experienced authentically raised affections ourselves.

And these affections are in synch with what is true and in

proportion to the nature of the truth.

So I have zero empathy with F. F. Bruce and others when

they say (sometimes in the name of personality, and others

in the name of scholarly objectivity), “I do not care to speak much—especially in public—about the things that mean

most to me.” Nor do I care if they say a theological lecture

or a critical scholarly commentary is not the place for that.

But now you can see that he has me trapped, because he

says, “Others do not share this inhibition, and have enriched their fellows by relating the inner story of the Lord’s dealings with them—one thinks of Augustine’s Confessions and Bunyan’s Grace Abounding. But it calls for quite exceptional qualities to be able to do this kind of thing without self-Pastor as Scholar.26473.i03.indd 23

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24 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

consciousness or self-deception.” So, to follow the course

I have set for myself, I must think myself in the possession

of “exceptional qualities” and perhaps be in the ranks of

Augustine and Bunyan! What shall I do?

There is another possibility—in fact, there are several.

One is that I do not have “exceptional qualities,” and I may

just be stupid to take this approach. Another possibility is

that I may be egotistical and vain. The Internet world we live in today is awash in narcissism and vanity, with some people

taking their clothes off literally, because exposure gives them a rush, and others doing it spiritually—because the addicting power of talking about yourself, where anyone in the world

can read it, is overpowering.

I put Philippians 2:3 before me regularly with its pierc-

ing word kenodoxian (vainglory): “Do nothing from rivalry or vainglory [ kenodoxian], but in humility count others more significant than yourselves” (Phil. 2:3 at). The love of human praise—human glory—is universal and deadly.

Jesus said, “How can you believe, when you receive

glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes

from the only God?” (John 5:44).3 You can’t. You can’t

believe in the crucified Messiah as your supreme treasure

and hero, and then love the exact opposite of the mind-set

that took him to the cross.

So, in pursuing an autobiographical approach in this

chapter, I may be stupid, or I may be vain. Or another pos-

sibility is that I may be Pauline.

We do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, of the

affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly

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Piper: The Pastor as Scholar 25

burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life

itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of

death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but

on God who raises the dead. (2 Cor. 1:8–9)

I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you

and for those at Laodicea and for all who have not seen

me face to face, that their hearts may be encouraged.

(Col. 2:1–2)

I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened

to me has really served to advance the gospel, so that it

has become known throughout the whole imperial guard

and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ.

(Phil. 1:12–13)

In other words, Paul repeatedly talks about his personal life and experience with God with a view to helping his listen-ers. So, yes, this approach is risky. But there are reasons

for it.

Maybe I’m Not One

One of my reasons involves a huge assumption. I assume

that one of the main reasons I was asked to contribute to

this book with Don Carson is that somebody thinks I am one

of these—a pastor-scholar. Depending on the definition, I’m

not sure I am. And so I thought maybe I should tell my story

about how I got to be the way I am, and you could decide if

I am or not. Or in what sense I am or am not. And if that’s a good thing or not. And what the implications are for you

and for the church.

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26 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

So I’m going to look at six chapters of my life through

the lens of this question: What were the impulses toward

scholarship and the pastorate? And along the way you will

pick up on what I mean by scholarship and pastoring.

Early Youth

When I was six years old at a motel in Florida on vacation

with my family, I prayed with my mother and affirmed my

faith in Jesus as my Savior. My parents were Christians, and

my father was an evangelist. I loved them, admired them,

and embraced the truth that they taught me. The influence

of my father was huge, and I admired him as a preacher.

But very quickly I knew that I would never be a preacher

because by the time I was in junior high school, I could not

speak in front of any group. I was paralyzed with anxiety

about it and trembled so terribly and choked up so com-

pletely that it was physically impossible to read or speak

before any size group. Don’t imagine your average person

with butterflies. Imagine physical impossibility. So preaching and the pastorate were totally ruled out of my dreams.

Moreover, there was no apparent vision for scholarship

in my home. It was not even a category in our minds, or a

word in our vocabulary. My father had a library and a study

at home, but I never thought about it. I saw my father’s Greek New Testament, but I never saw him use it or heard him refer

to using it—though I noted that it was marked up and that it

was used once upon a time.

So pastoring was not an option because of my disability (or whatever it was), and scholarship was a nonexistent Pastor as Scholar.26473.i03.indd 26

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Piper: The Pastor as Scholar 27

category when I went to high school. But I was a believer. I

loved Jesus. I hated sin. I feared God in a good way. I took

heaven and hell and salvation and the gospel very seriously.

They were dominant realities in my life. And so the seeds

of ministry were there. But there was no dream to be a pas-

tor and no awareness that there even was such a thing as

scholarship.

High School Days

In high school, there was a double awakening; one was

intellectual and the other was emotional and expressive. On

the intellectual side, there was advanced biology and tenth-

grade geometry. These stand out as very significant.

The process of reasoning from axioms and postulates

and corollaries in order to turn theories into proofs was

explosively exciting to me. I loved the ability to draw right conclusions from true premises. Geometry class marked a

serious awakening of my love for right thinking. From that

time to this, I have had an ear and an eye for non sequiturs

in what I hear and read. If a politician or preacher says, “All cows have four legs; Fido has four legs; therefore Fido is a

cow,” I’m all over it. From that class on, I have had a self-

conscious expectation that I will never knowingly be illogi-

cal or incoherent.

Then there was Mrs. Clanton’s advanced biology class

where we dissected worms and frogs and fetal pigs and bred

tsetse flies. Many of you have heard the story of Agassiz’s

Fish,4 about the naturalist who demanded of his student that

he sit and stare at a fish for a week to learn all he could. Well, Pastor as Scholar.26473.i03.indd 27

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28 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

Mrs. Clanton was like that. The point of all this dissection

was to awaken in us the crucial discipline of accurate and

thorough observation. Do you see what’s really in the pig?

All the sharp reasoning in the world will simply lead you

astray if you start with observations that are inaccurate or

incomplete.

It was no surprise to me then in seminary when Agassiz’s

Fish was used in a hermeneutics class,5 and when in Germany

I read the New Testament scholar Adolf Schlatter, “Die

Wissenschaft ist erstens Beobachtung, zweitens Beobachtung,

drittens Beobachtung” (“Science/scholarship is first observa-

tion, second observation, third observation”). So what hap-

pened in Mrs. Clanton’s biology class was the awakening of

a self-conscious awareness that dependable knowledge—of

the world or the Bible or anything else—depends on seeing

what’s really there for the mind to work with.

These were two huge impulses feeding into who I am in

ministry: painstaking observation of texts and the demand

for precise thinking—from myself and from others.

Two other awakenings in high school have never gone

away. One was the passion to write, and the other was the

bent toward poetry. My father sowed the seeds of poetry,

because he wrote poems for special occasions, and he read

poems to the family. Even in the months before his death at

87, I would ask him to read his poems to me, and he would

weep at certain points as he read about his six-year-old son.

But all of that lay dormant until the spring of 1963

during my junior year. In my English class, the desire to

read serious books and the desire to write serious essays

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Piper: The Pastor as Scholar 29

and poems was born. This has never gone away. Writing

has been an almost daily habit since then—in one form

or another—notes, letters, journal entries, poems, ideas,

reports, essays, sermons, and more.

Writing became the lever of my thinking and the outlet

of my feelings. If I didn’t pull the lever, the wheel of thinking did not turn. It jerked and squeaked and halted. But once a

pen was in hand, or a keyboard, the fog began to clear and

the wheel of thought began to spin with more clarity and

insight. And when the feelings that rumbled around in my

heart as an introverted, insecure adolescent needed form, I

turned to poetry and writing. So along with the disciplines of precise thinking and painstaking observation came a passion

for conceptually clear and emotionally moving expression

in writing.

Two last things remain to be underlined about high

school. I knew when I was done that I could not speak in

front of any group, and I was deeply troubled and anxious

about my future—what kind of job would help me avoid

that? And I knew also that I read painfully slowly. To this

day, I cannot read faster than I can talk. Something short-

circuits in my ability to perceive accurately what’s on the

page, when I try to push beyond that—probably some form

of dyslexia. Those two disabilities, paralysis before people

and painfully slow reading, I knew would keep me out of

any profession that demanded great quantities of reading

and any public speaking.

But Jesus was real to me. I turned to him in my sorrows.

I loved my church. I hated sin. I feared God. I believed in the Pastor as Scholar.26473.i03.indd 29

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30 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

Bible and in heaven and hell. Somehow, my life had to count.

But I did not know how.

Wheaton College

The season at Wheaton was enormously influential in fan-

ning the flames that had been lit in high school—the intel-

lectual stimulation, the emotional deepening, the passion to

write. In one sense, my college and seminary days relate to

each other as form and substance. The college days solidi-

fied passions and habits of mind; the seminary days defined

what the focus of those habits would be, namely, God and

his Word and his people.

The influences of these days can be grouped under the

mind, the heart, the synthesis, and the bridge to ministry.

Mind

Arthur Holmes and Stuart Hackett were both in the phi-

losophy department at Wheaton in the late sixties. Holmes

embodied two things I had never seen before: (1) the quest

for a comprehensive worldview that helped make sense of

everything—and that had Christ as the integrating center—

and (2) the life of the mind as vocation. In other words,

Christian scholarship as a vocation came onto my horizon

as a possibility for the first time in my life.

Stuart Hackett was probably one of the two most influ-

ential teachers I had at Wheaton, not because of the theol-

ogy he held but because of the way he thought. I had only

two classes with him, and the content of every class session

seemed to me to be the same—and never boring. He was the

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philosophical embodiment of what geometry had meant to

me in the tenth grade.

The point of every class seemed to be: any system of

thought that denies truth denies itself. In other words, he

modeled the universal significance of the law of noncontra-

diction: if you say there’s no truth, then you’ve just spoken something that doesn’t count. That simple insight has been

life-saving and life-illuminating for over forty years. It

spared me from being enamored by all the ludicrous post-

modernism that was already rampant in the late 1960s.

Thank you, Dr. Hackett.

Francis Schaeffer burst on the scene in the fall of 1965

and had the effect of taking all the intellectual awakening

and showing us that it could be culturally and evangelisti-

cally engaging. In other words, he seemed to embody a

way of taking all the scholarly impulses of the ivory tower

and putting them to personal and social use for the sake of

Christ in the world. So his particular way of doing apolo-

getics had the effect of helping many of us believe that the

intellectual awakening we were experiencing at Wheaton

could really be a blessing in the world more broadly than

we thought.

Another influence at Wheaton was the students. Never

had I been around so many intellectually engaged young

people. It had a double effect. One was to pour gasoline on

the fires lit by the professors. The other was to remind me

of my weaknesses. Because of this kind of expectation in the

classroom, I was not an outstanding student at Wheaton.

My GPA, if I remember correctly was what today would be

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32 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

about a 3.2. I was a B student, not an A student. Therefore,

I never thought of myself as becoming a front-ranking any-

thing. I was not superior in any way at Wheaton.

Heart

Along with these intellectual springs bubbling up, there

was another river flowing. My love of reading and writing

led me to be a literature major. The literature faculty was

renowned. I took every poetry class that Wheaton offered.

And I avoided every novel class that was offered. I could not read fast enough to get through the novels in a semester, but I could write and analyze poetry. So I carefully navigated

my way through a lit major as one of the slowest readers

on campus.

Mainly poetry was chosen because the emotions of a

young man can run deep in the river of poetry. Clyde Kilby

was a giant in the lit department in those days, and his book Poetry and Life was lived in front of us in class. Kilby took the passion for observation and breathed a kind of life into it that biology never could. He taught me that there is always

more to see in what I see. There is always wonder. There is

always something to be astonished about. There is mental

health in learning to look at a tree or a cloud or a nose, and to marvel that it is what it is. This then became poetry. When you finally see the wonder of what you have been looking

at for ten years, what you do with that seeing is try to say

it—and that is what poetry is.

One of his resolutions for being a healthy person reads

like this:

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I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day, I shall sim-

ply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are, but simply

be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mys-

tery of what Lewis calls, “their divine, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic existence.”6

When you are being shown what you’ve always looked at all

your life and never seen, it is absolutely revolutionary. Kilby was one of the greatest influences of my life, and I scarcely know what he thought about anything—politically, psy-chologically, theologically. It was the way he saw the world and spoke of the world. He was so alive to the wonder of

things. This was incalculably valuable preparation of soul

for the vision of God that would come just a few years later

at seminary.

In this section on heart belongs Noël Henry. She has

been my wife for over forty years. But in those days, start-

ing in the summer of 1966, she was this ravishing object of

desire. Oh, how I wanted to be married to Noël. Falling in

love is very powerful. Not in vain does the Song of Solomon

say, “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that you not

stir up or awaken love until it pleases” (Song 8:4). The

effects of finding a wife are so pervasive and long lasting that they are immeasurable, so here is where she entered my life,

and nothing has been the same since. I owe her more than

anyone else in the world.

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34 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

Synthesis

The synthesis of mind and heart was embodied in C. S. Lewis.

Lewis became for me in my college days what Jonathan

Edwards became in my seminary days—a towering figure

of intellectual and emotional influence. He was a “roman-

tic rationalist”—that was the name of a small book about

Lewis that got me very excited because it summed up what I

thought I was (which may be very akin to “pastor-scholar”).

His influence on me is great and varied.

Lewis embodied the fact that rigorous, precise, pen-

etrating logic is not inimical to deep, soul-stirring feeling and vivid, lively—even playful—imagination. He combined

what almost everybody today assumes are mutually exclu-

sive: rationalism and poetry, cool logic and warm feeling,

disciplined prose and free imagination. In shattering these

old stereotypes for me, he freed me to think hard and to

write poetry, to argue for the resurrection and compose

hymns to Christ, to smash an argument and hug a friend, to

demand a definition and use a metaphor.

Lewis was the main influence on Clyde Kilby, and Lewis

had the same effect on me as Kilby did. He gave me an

intense sense of the “realness” of things. To wake up in the

morning and be aware of the firmness of the mattress,

the warmth of the sun rays, the sound of the clock ticking, the sheer being of things (“quiddity” as he called it). He helped me become alive to life. He helped me see what is there in

the world—things which if we didn’t have, we would pay a

million dollars to have, but having them, ignore.

Finally, he has made me wary of chronological snobbery.

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That is, he has shown me that “newness” is no virtue and

“oldness” is no fault. Truth and beauty and goodness are not

determined by when they exist. Nothing is inferior for being

old, and nothing is valuable for being modern. This has freed me from the tyranny of novelty.

These were immeasurable gifts and had the effect of

synthesizing my Wheaton experience. The intellectual stimu-

lation, the emotional deepening, the stirring of imagination, the passion to write—all of these came together in C. S.

Lewis and made me wonder if I should teach English litera-

ture as a vocation.7

The Bridge to Ministry

There were other key factors that God was putting in place

that were going to determine the direction all this energy

would take. I’ll mention four. Together these are the bridge

that God built to seminary and the ministry of the Word.

First came the momentous summer of ‘66. Not only

did I meet Noël, but chaplain Evan Welsh asked me to pray

in summer school chapel. For reasons I cannot recall or

imagine, I said yes. That meant standing in front of about

five hundred students and faculty and praying for about

one minute (maximum). Never in my life had I been able

to do such a thing in front of ten, let alone five hundred. I vowed to God on front campus: If you will get me through

this without my choking and becoming paralyzed, I will

never again say no to a speaking opportunity out of fear. He answered that prayer, and I believe something broke. And I

think I have kept my vow.

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36 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

Harold John Ockenga came to preach in chapel in the fall

of 1966. I was lying in the campus health center with mono as I listened to him on the radio. And God created in my heart at that time a desire to study and understand and teach the Word of God that has never died. It is as alive and strong today as it ever was. So the bridge to seminary was being built. I was on my way to a clear biblical focus for all the intellect and emotion and imagination and writing that were being awakened

and deepened at Wheaton.

Then came John Stott and Men Made New, a little yel-

low paperback of an exposition of Romans 5–8. I loved it.

It was fuel on the flame that Ockenga had lit, and it showed

me the kind of careful attention to the text that, for me,

made it live.

Then came Urbana ’67 where Stott again opened

2 Timothy in a week of messages and where the utter indis-

pensability of global missions hit home.

With all of that (the anxiety breakthrough, the call of

God through Ockenga, the modeling of John Stott, the

impulse of missions), the bridge was built to pursue the

study of God’s Word in seminary. I did not know what I

would do with it vocationally. All I knew is that everything

that God had done in my life was getting me ready to study

his Word and somehow use it for the church and missions.

Fuller Seminary

When I went to Fuller, I was detached from the local

church. In college I had not seriously engaged with one

local church. That was foolish and immature. It continued

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for a few months in seminary, and then I got married and

knew I needed to grow up. Noël and I went to Lake Avenue

Congregational Church where Ray Ortlund Sr. was the

senior pastor. There we fell in love with the church—

the local church of real people with real relationships.

By the time we were done, Noël was caring for the mentally

disabled, and I had taught seventh grade, ninth grade, and

young marrieds. We were in five different small groups.

Eventually, four years after I left to go to graduate school, I was ordained at that church. Never again did I play fast and

loose with my attachment to the local church. To cut your-

self off from a local church with a sense of self-sufficiency is, in the long run, suicidal.

In seminary, explosive things were happening in my soul.

I was watching the agony and the ecstasy of the new evangeli-

calism struggling to break free from the anti-intellectualism and cultural distance of fundamentalism into an intellectual

and cultural engagement that would be respected in the guild.

Some of these men paid with their lives and their families

and their health in the struggle to find scholarly credibility.

George Ladd was almost undone emotionally and profes-

sionally by a critical review of his Jesus and the Kingdom by Norman Perrin of the University of Chicago. And when his

New Testament Theology was a stunning success ten years later, he walked through the halls shouting and waving a

$9,000 royalty check.

The scholarly discipline of Geoffrey Bromiley, who

translated all of Kittle’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, was awe-inspiring. But the sophomoric belittling Pastor as Scholar.26473.i03.indd 37

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38 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

of fundamentalists in some classes by younger faculty was

disappointing. This faculty was on a quest to put orthodoxy

on the map intellectually. So it was a heady place in the late sixties.

For me it proved to be the most decisive time of my life

theologically and methodologically. And the key living per-

son under God was Daniel Fuller. Emotionally and person-

ally, he was as imperfect as the rest of them. (Now I would

say, “the rest of us.”) But in his brokenness, he put so many things together for me.

Nobody thought more rigorously than Dan Fuller.

Nobody was more riveted on the biblical text in his exegeti-

cal method than Dan Fuller. We called his approach “arc-

ing,” and it has been the methodological key for much of

what I have seen in the Bible for the past forty years. Nobody was more jealous to think the author’s thoughts after him,

because that’s what meaning was—the author’s intention

(E. D. Hirsch’s Validity in Interpretation was compelling).

Nobody was more practically committed to the truth

and authority of Scripture than Dan Fuller. Nobody com-

municated a greater gravity of the ultimate things at stake

in biblical truth. Nobody was more vulnerable to students’

questions or took them more seriously than Dan Fuller. He

would linger for hours after class with us. And he would stay up late writing answers to our questions and then bring the

paper the next day to try out his fresh thoughts on us.

Nobody was more committed to showing that much

reading is not the essence of scholarship, but that assiduous, detailed, meticulous, logical analysis of great texts can lift Pastor as Scholar.26473.i03.indd 38

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Piper: The Pastor as Scholar 39

you to the level of the greatest minds. Nobody pierced to

the essence of true scholarship the way Dan Fuller did. In

partnership with Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book, he taught me that the task of the true scholar, whatever his

vocation, was:

•  to  observe his subject matter accurately and thoroughly;

•  to  understand clearly what he has observed;

•  to  evaluate fairly what he has understood by deciding what is true and valuable;

•  to  feel intensely according to the value of what he has evaluated;

•  to  apply wisely and helpfully in life what he understands and feels; and

•  to  express in speech and writing and deeds what he has seen, understood, felt, and applied in such a way that

its accuracy, clarity, truth, value, and helpfulness can be

known and enjoyed by others.

By all of this singularly blood-earnest scholarship, he

introduced me, through Scripture and through Jonathan

Edwards, to the truth that God is most glorified in us when I am most satisfied in him. This was the seed from which has grown all the books I have written and all the sermons I

have preached. The fact that God pursued his glory and my

joy in the same act of worship was the most explosive truth

I have ever learned. The sources were the Bible and then

Jonathan Edwards.

I recall the day in class when Fuller was accused of being

too rational by a student from the new school of psychology.

Fuller responded by saying, “Why can’t we be like Jonathan Edwards, who in one moment could be writing a devotion

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40 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

that would warm your grandmother’s heart and in the next

give a philosophical argument that would stump the chief

thinkers of his day?” My heart leaped. I went straight to the library after class, knowing almost nothing of Edwards, and

checked out his Essay on the Trinity. That’s what I read first.

Then I bought a stapled photocopy of The End for Which

God Created the World at the bookstore.

Meanwhile, my exegesis and systematic theology classes

were undoing my Arminian presuppositions with biblical

facts. By the end of three years, not only was I a romantic rationalist, but the romance and the rational labor were now firmly focused on the Word of God. An absolutely sovereign God of

grace was at the center. He had planned the death of his Son

for my salvation before the world was made. And if the worst

and best things were planned, all was planned. He “works all

things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph. 1:11).

All of this was being forged while I was teaching Sunday

school, and while I was falling in love with the church under Ray Ortlund’s shepherding, and while I was hearing Ralph

Winter describe the explosive new realities of missions

around the world. Nothing about my emerging theology felt

artificial or academic or detached or irrelevant to life. It all felt real and personal and relevant for church and home and

the culture and all the nations of the world.

But what to do with my life? The advice I got was, if

you have the energy and a wife who’s willing, go ahead and

get your final degree (a doctorate), and then all the doors

will be open to you. So, after I was rejected at Princeton and Pastor as Scholar.26473.i03.indd 40

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accepted by Leonhard Goppelt at the University of Munich,

we headed for Germany in July 1971.

Doctoral Studies at the University of Munich

What I saw in the theological educational system and state-

church life in Germany confirmed most of what I did not

want to become. Here were world-class scholars, whom

everyone on the cutting edge in America were oohing and

ahhing over, teaching in a way that was exegetically non-

transferable, insubordinate toward the Scriptures, and indif-

ferent to the life of the church. I attended university classes where nineteen-year-old ministerial students were soaked in

every form of faddish criticism, while the tools for mining

the gold of Scripture were untouched and the taste buds for

enjoying its honey were unawakened.

I recall one appalling illustration of the fruit of this

folly. I attended an ordination service where most of the

people in the church were older women. The visiting church

official stood and announced his text from “Q.” I kid you

not. If you don’t know, “Q” is the scholarly name given to

a hypothetical document containing the parts of Matthew

and Luke not shared by Mark. I was not impressed with

the theological and academic life in Germany in those days.

I wrote my dissertation on Jesus’s love command8 and

worshiped in a lively Baptist church and led a small dis-

cipleship group every Friday night, and stoked the fires of

my faith with Jonathan Edwards and God’s Word. But the

exegetical methods I saw in Germany could not come close

to the theological and methodological goldmine that I had

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42 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

found in seminary. I used my Fuller-taught method of obser-

vation and analysis to research and write an acceptable dis-

sertation, and then left Germany as quickly as I could. I did not have to work hard to protect myself from this system. I

saw it up close, and from the inside, and found early on that this global king of biblical scholarship had no clothes on.9

I was disillusioned with such scholarship. It seemed driven by the need for peer approval. It used technical jargon that only insiders could understand and that often concealed ambiguity. It put enormous weight on speculative methodologies ( Formgeschichte, Traditionsgeschichte, and Redaktionsgeschichte, and Sachkritik) that gave rise to scholarly articles which began in the mode of Wahrscheinlichkeit (probability) and by the end had been transformed into the mode of Sicherheit (certainty) by waving the wand of scholarly consensus.

There was the use of linguistic skills to create vagueness

and conceal superficiality. Few, it seemed to me, would press the real question of meaning until it yielded the riches of

theological truth. The whole enterprise lacked the aroma of

heaven or the odor of hell, and there did not seem to be any

burden for the lostness of the world.

Exultation over anything glorious was not allowed into

their explanations—which meant that the greatest realities

were left unexplained, because there are realities that are so great they can only be illumined in the light of exultation. By and large, there seemed to be little apprehension of the incoherence between the infinite value of the object of the study and the naturalistic nature of their study. The whole atmo-sphere seemed unplugged from the majesty of the object.

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I earned my doctorate. They mailed it to me a few

months after I left. I took it out of the mailing tube in the fall of 1974 to see if it was real. I put it back in and have not looked at it since. It’s still in the tube in a bottom drawer at home (I think), and no one has ever asked to see it. But, by

God’s grace, it did get me my first job.

Bethel College

I had a wife and child and needed a job. I wrote to about

thirty churches, denominations, missions, colleges, and sem-

inaries. One door opened in the fall of 1974 for a one-year

sabbatical replacement teaching New Testament at Bethel

College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Thank you, Walt Wessel. I

took the job and have been in Minnesota ever since.

The one-year sabbatical replacement turned into six

happy years teaching New Testament book studies and

Greek and New Testament introduction. I thought this was

my calling. Be a teacher and a scholar. So I set about to publish my dissertation in the SNTS Monograph Series, and I wrote a handful of articles in scholarly journals. These were heady days as I stretched my academic wings. I loved the

writing. I loved the teaching.

But gradually things began to change inside of me. God

was stirring. I knew I would never be a great scholar. I simply could not read fast enough. I could take a small issue or an

article or book and apply the severe discipline of analysis

and criticism. But I could not be comprehensive. I could not

read all that was written on anything.

Moreover, I was teaching in college, not seminary, and

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44 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

so the trickledown effect of my teaching for the good of the

church had farther to go than if I had been teaching seminary students. That felt frustrating.

I became very restless with the work of grading papers

and teaching such a limited slice of the pie of humanity:

middle-class, mainly white eighteen- to twenty-two-year-

olds. All the while, I was hearing good preaching on Sunday

and feeling a fire inside: Oh, Lord, I would love to do that.

And if I heard a bad sermon, I would feel, Oh, Lord, we’ve got to do better than that.

Then came the sabbatical of May through December

1979. I wrote the book The Justification of God: An

Exegetical and Theological Study of Romans 9:1–23. While I was living and breathing the air of Romans 9 for eight

months, the Lord spoke to me very powerfully through

the words of that chapter. He said, in effect, “I, the God

of Romans 9, will be proclaimed and not just analyzed or explained.” By the end of that sabbatical, the battle was

over, and I had resolved to leave teaching and seek a pastoral position.

I longed to see the Word of God applied in preaching to

the whole range of ages and life situations. I wanted to watch the absolutely sovereign God of Romans 9 build his church. I

wanted to see what would happen if the supremacy of God in

all things was made the centerpiece of a local church through the Word of God.

I knew what this would mean to leave the world of

academia. It would mean no more summers free to read

and study and write; endless administrative pressures and

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Piper: The Pastor as Scholar 45

challenges; an uncontrollable schedule; an audience who

would not want or reward academic prowess but pastoral

warmth and presence; funerals and weddings and baptisms

and counseling and hospital visitation and emergencies and

conflict resolution and staff management; relentless pressure to write a sermon or two or three every week; and that the

days of publishing articles in NTS and Scottish Journal of Theology and Theologische Zeitschrift—the days of being on the cutting edge of any scholarly discipline—were over.

But knowing all that, I could not resist any longer. The

passion to preach and to see God shape and grow a church

by the Word of God was overwhelming.

Bethlehem Baptist Church

So I was called to Bethlehem Baptist and began in June 1980.

I was thirty-four years old, married with three children. The church was 110 years old, and there were three hundred

older people and almost no youth. What I have done is try

to preach the whole counsel of God from his written Word,

with a passion for Jesus and a love for my people. I have

tried to structure things so that the people are cared for in their needs and so that they learn to care for each other and reach out to the lost.

The impulses from my high school days and from

Wheaton are very much alive. I am a (very slow) reader, a

thinker, a feeler, a writer, a lover of poetic power, and, I hope, in all these ways, a loyal shepherd who does not forsake the

sheep when the enemy comes. I have written all my sermons

in manuscript form (with very few exceptions), and I try to

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46 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

write them with manifest rooting in the text of Scripture,

with clear thinking, with strong feeling, and with imagina-

tive surprise.

Part Two: The Scholarly Roots of Christ-Exalting Joy

It may well be asked, in what way have these thirty years of

pastoral life been the work of a pastor-scholar? Let me try

to answer like this—so that it has the broadest relevance and usefulness to others. At the heart of my ministry has been

the conviction (which I have called Christian Hedonism) that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

It Is Not New

This summary statement has been the overarching theme of

my life and ministry. It is the trumpet call sounding through all I say. It is not new. All I did was make it rhyme. And I’m probably not the first to do that. Jonathan Edwards said,

“God is glorified not only by His glory’s being seen, but by its being rejoiced in.”10 That is what I am trying to say for our day: the glory of God is magnified when we rejoice in him.

C. S. Lewis says exactly the same thing even more

clearly. In his book on the Psalms, he writes:

The Scotch catechism says that man’s chief end is “to

glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” But we shall then

know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to

glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy him.11

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The implications of this for ministry are all-pervasive. I

have tried to spell them out in most of my books. That is

the main reason I write—to spread this conviction and this

experience.

Fresh Old Language

One way the pastoral team at Bethlehem has tried to keep

this issue central in all our ministry has been to develop the vocabulary of treasuring. Treasure is a wonderfully helpful word because it is both a noun and a verb in English—as it

is in Greek ( thesaurus and thesaurizo). God is infinitely valuable as the greatest treasure of the universe. If you find the kingdom of God, Jesus says, it is like finding a treasure hid-den in a field (Matt. 13:44). Our calling in life is to manifest the greatness of the value of that treasure. The way we do it is by treasuring the Treasure above all things. Jesus said, “In his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field”

(Matt. 13:44). This joy—as we lose what the world has to

have—is the baffling way of life that would make the world

ask, “Where’s your hope?” (see 1 Pet. 3:15).

In other words, at the heart of magnifying God’s worth is feeling God’s worth. Treasuring the Treasure. Enjoying the glory. Admiring the greatness. Savoring the feast. All this is the necessary precursor to behavior that glorifies God. If you try to do deeds “for the glory of God” without treasuring the glory of God in your heart, it is a sham. The word hypocrisy was created precisely for the effort to say with deeds what

we do not feel in our hearts.

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48 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

Nonchipper, Blood-Earnest Joy

So my ministry is driven by the effort to abolish this hypoc-

risy. It focuses on the glory of God and the joy of the soul.

And, of course, this joy cries a lot. There is nothing chipper about it. We do not live in a chipper world, and Jesus did not accomplish a chipper salvation in a chipper way. Everything

is blood-earnest, even our play. Even our belly laughter that lasts so long it makes our eyes red. Paul’s phrase “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor. 6:10) is the banner that flies

over the house of Christian hedonism.

The flavor of our God-glorifying joy in God tastes like

this:

All gracious affections that are a sweet [aroma] to Christ,

and that fill the soul of a Christian with a heavenly sweet-

ness and fragrancy, are brokenhearted affections. A truly

Christian love, either to God or men, is a humble broken-

hearted love. The desires of the saints, however earnest,

are humble desires: their hope is a humble hope; and

their joy, even when it is unspeakable, and full of glory, is a humble brokenhearted joy, and leaves the Christian more poor in spirit, and more like a little child, and more

disposed to a universal lowliness of behavior.12

So for thirty years I have tried, with much imperfection and

manifold failures, to live up to my own message, to penetrate the heart and awaken the kind of affections for God that

would accord with his glory, and create lives that would

make him look great. This has been based on the conviction

that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

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The Downside of the Scholarly Bent

Now, how does this relate to the pastor as scholar? On the

one hand, its first effect is to protect the church from the

dangers of a scholarly bent. Many pastors, especially those

who love the glorious vision of God’s being and beauty and

plan of salvation, have a scholarly bent that threatens to

over-intellectualize the Christian faith, which means they

turn it mainly into a system to be thought about rather than

a way of life to be felt and lived. Of course, it is a system as well as a life. But the danger is that the whole thing can be made to feel academic rather than heart-wrenchingly real.

That’s what Christian hedonism helps us to avoid.

Where the faith is over-intellectualized, many ordinary,

authentic saints can smell the error. Rightly, they start drifting away, but sadly, often into the worst extremes of emo-

tionalism. But if Christian hedonism is alive—that is, if true joy in God is alive for the glory of God—I have found that

many starving saints make their way home to a place where

head and heart are more in balance, and the reality and

power of the Holy Spirit are craved and cherished.

But this also assumes something about the head as well

as the heart. If head and heart are to be in biblical balance, what is the function of the head in Christian hedonism? This

is where the pastor as scholar begins to take on relevance.

The Link between Christ-Exalting Joy and

Scholarly Effort

The question here is how the life of the mind relates to treasuring Christ—how thinking relates to joy in God. I would

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state it like this: Right thinking about God exists to serve right feelings for God. Logic exists for the sake of love.

Reasoning exists for the sake of rejoicing. Doctrine exists for the sake of delight. Reflection about God exists for the sake of affection for God. The head is meant to serve the heart.

So knowing truth is the proper means to admiring truth.

Both thinking and feeling are indispensable. But they are not both ultimate. Thinking exists to serve admiring. Thinking is meant to serve worship and delight and satisfaction in God.

The Devil himself has many right thoughts about God.

My guess is that the Devil, on some doctrines, is more

orthodox than us—more correct than we are. But none of

these doctrines, in the mind of the Devil, gives rise to any

love for God, any worship of God, any delight in God. The

Devil believes that Jesus died for sinners. The Devil believes that Jesus rose from the dead. The Devil believes that Jesus

is coming back. And the Devil hates him! So knowing right

things about Jesus doesn’t automatically produce right

affections. But knowing those right things about Christ is

essential for having right affections for God.

What I am getting at is that Christ-exalting joy depends

on right thinking about God. If God is going to be glorified

in our being satisfied in him, then our satisfaction in him

must be based on truth. And truth is what we find by the

right use of the mind—by scholarly effort.

Gladness without Grounds Does Not Glorify

Let me try to illustrate why it is that a well-founded, well-

reasoned delight honors Jesus. Suppose that you are walking

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down a street and a total stranger comes up to you and gives

you a bag with $10,000 in it and asks you to deposit that

money in his bank account and gives you his bank account

number and his Social Security number and all his pass-

words. And suppose you don’t know this man at all.

You ask him, “Who are you and why are you trusting

me with $10,000 in cash to deposit in your bank account?

Why don’t you think I will steal it?”

And he says, “I don’t have any reason at all for trusting

you. I just feel this warm feeling in my heart that you are a trustworthy person.”

Now the question is, do you feel honored by that warm

feeling in his heart? No. You don’t feel honored. He’s crazy!

He’s irrational! He has no reason to trust you. He doesn’t

know you. He is not using his mind. He is not being a

good “scholar.” We are not honored by good, deep feelings

toward us if they don’t have any basis.

But, suppose when you ask him, “Why are you trust-

ing me?” he says, “You don’t know me, but I have been

watching you at work for over a year, learning about your

character. I know you very well, and I have found you to be

a reliable person. Therefore, I have a joyful confidence that you will not steal my money. You are a person of character,

and I have reasons for believing that.”

Now, do you feel honored by the joyful feeling in that

man’s heart? Yes, you do. Because his emotions toward you

are well-grounded. These joyful feelings of confidence and

trust have reasons. They are an honor to you. They glorify

you. The stranger has used his mind well—he has been a

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good “scholar”—and that rational effort has produced a

joy in your character and trust in your reliability. This joy honors you. You are glorified, so to speak, in his being satisfied in you.

So, when I say that God is most glorified in us when we

are most satisfied in him, I am referring to a well-grounded satisfaction. I see real things in Jesus and in God the Father; I see real reasons for being satisfied in him. And therefore my emotions are truly an honor to him because they are based

on real reasons.

So the mind is supposed to be engaged in seeing reality for

what it is, and awakening the heart to love God for all that

he is. If I were to claim the role of pastor-scholar, this is what I would mean by it. Think rightly and deeply about the Word

and the world with a view to seeing the greatness of God and

his works (especially the work of Christ) so that the affections of our hearts might rest on a true foundation and God might

be honored by how we feel toward him and by the behaviors

that flow from this heart.

The Biblical Basis for the Scholarly Service of Joy

What I would like to do in the rest of this chapter is show

from the Scriptures that God’s purpose for right think-

ing (scholarship) is to awaken and sustain satisfaction in

God that glorifies him. There are at least nine pointers in

Scripture to this conviction.

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1) Zeal according to Knowledge

Consider the first two verses of Romans 10: “Brothers, my

heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may

be saved. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for

God, but not according to knowledge.” Here is a group of

people that have a zeal for God, and it is doing them no

good at all! They’re not even saved! We know that they’re

not saved, because in verse 1 the apostle Paul is praying for their salvation.

So clearly, the problem is, according to verse 2, that

their zeal does not accord with knowledge. So even though

Christian hedonism puts a huge weight on zeal (passion) for

God, now we can see how worthless that zeal is if it’s not

based on true knowledge. So the use of the mind to come to

true knowledge is necessary so that our satisfaction in God

will be an honor to him.

2) Understanding in and through Thinking

Next consider 2 Timothy 2:7. Paul says to his young disciple

Timothy, “Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you

understanding in everything.” Understanding is a gift of

God. There it is in the second half of verse 7: “The Lord

will give you understanding in everything.” Many people believe that. And they think that the understanding will be

given to them without thinking. But that’s the opposite of

what Paul says!

Did you notice the word “for” at the beginning of the

second half of the verse? “ . . . for the Lord will give you understanding.” In other words, because God gives under-Pastor as Scholar.26473.i03.indd 53

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standing, therefore think over what Paul says! Don’t say,

“Because God gives understanding, I don’t need to think.”

And don’t say, “Because I’m thinking, God doesn’t need to

give it to me; I can get it on my own.” It’s both-and, not either-or.

Think over what the apostle says because in and

through your thinking, God gives understanding. So when

I am preparing a sermon, I open my Bible, or I turn on

my computer Bible program, and I begin to think about

the words, conjunctions, and phrases and the order of the

propositions.

Every few minutes, I pause and I say, Oh God, open my

eyes, grant me light! Grant me to see what is really here! I know that I am dependent on the Holy Spirit to see the truth that is really here. But that does not stop me from thinking!

Because Paul says, “Think over what I say.” Thinking hard

about biblical truth is the means through which the Holy

Spirit opens us to the truth.

3) Life Given through Reasoning

Now we turn to Acts 17. The apostle Paul repeatedly entered

into the synagogue in order to persuade Jews to become

Christians. Now, how did he do that? Acts 17:2–3 says,

“Paul went in, as was his custom, and on three Sabbath days

he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and

proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, ‘This Jesus, whom I proclaim

to you, is the Christ.’”

Paul knows that these unbelievers are blind and deaf

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and dead in their trespasses and sins. So you might wonder,

well, if all these people are blind and deaf and dead, why is he arguing with them? So the question is, if Paul believes that these unbelievers are blind—spiritually blind—and deaf and

dead, why would he even talk to them?

The answer is that God has ordained to use means to

give life. He has designed that life would be given, and truth would be imparted, through Paul’s reasoning. Paul knows

that, according to 1 Peter 1:23, we are born again through

the message of God in the gospel. And so the new birth is

a supernatural Holy-Spirit–caused miracle. But God does it

through reasoning over the gospel.

Do you recall what Luke said about how Lydia, in Acts

16, was saved? Paul finds a group of women beside a river,

and he shares the gospel with them. He reasons with them

from his mind and his mouth. And Lydia is listening, with

her mind, to a rational presentation of the gospel. And Luke

says, “The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what

was said.” So we must have both— both Paul’s mind imparting the gospel in understandable words to Lydia’s mind and the Holy Spirit opening Lydia’s heart to receive it. There

would be no joy or hope that glorifies Jesus if there were no work of the mind in Paul and Lydia.

4) Jesus Assuming Logic

We go now to Luke 12. My point here is that Jesus assumes

that human beings use logic, and he holds them account-

able to use their logic well. Sometimes I have been told that Aristotelian-like logic is Western and Greek, not Hebraic or

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biblical, and therefore doesn’t belong in the presentation of the gospel.

Let me explain briefly what I mean by Aristotelian-like

logic. We all know what a syllogism is. Premise number one:

All men are mortal. Premise number two: Plato is a man.

Conclusion: Plato is mortal. That’s a syllogism. Aristotle is famous for noting this. And, I believe, it came from God.

Now, you have to decide: does God hold you account-

able to think clearly like that? Would God be pleased if you

used a syllogism like this: Cows have four legs. My dog has four legs. Therefore, my dog is a cow. I don’t think God would be pleased if you really thought that way. That’s bad

logic. It’s the sort of logic thugs use to put you in a dictator’s jail, and it gives you no recourse to “reason.” Might makes

right when logic is relativized.

Now, of course, you should care little about my opinion

about logic. But you should care a lot about what Jesus

thinks about logic. So listen carefully to Luke 12:54–57:

[Jesus] . . . said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud

rising in the west, you say at once, ‘A shower is coming.’

And so it happens. And when you see the south wind

blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat,’ and it

happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the

appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know

how to interpret the present time? And why do you not

judge [that is, use your minds] for yourselves what is

right?”

Notice the syllogism implied in verse 55. Jesus is saying

to these people, you are really good at using your minds

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when it comes to matters like weather. So here’s the syl-

logism. Premise number one: It always gets hot when a

south wind blows. Premise number two: A south wind is blowing. Conclusion: It will be hot today. Now that is Aristotelian-like logic, which I believe, rightly construed,

is straight out of the mind of God and confirmed by the

example of Jesus and Jesus’s holding these people account-

able to use it well.

What do you think he means in verse 57? “Why do you

not judge for yourselves what is right?” Your minds are so

effective when they’re dealing in natural things! But when

your minds are applied to spiritual things, you don’t think

clearly at all! It would be like contemporary secular people

being able to do amazing scientific things—create medicines,

create computers, put people in space. Secular man, without

the gospel, uses his mind in amazing ways. I think Jesus

would say to a university-educated secular person, “Why

do you not use your brilliant mind to understand and know

me?” That’s what the mind is for—to know the truth and to

awaken affections for God that correspond to his greatness.

5) A Use of the Mind That Jesus Hates

Now consider Matthew 21:23–27. There is a use of the mind

that Jesus hates. And I want you to ask as we look at this para-graph, What are these people doing with their minds that Jesus abominates?

And when he entered the temple, the chief priests and

the elders of the people came up to him as he was

teaching, and said, “By what authority are you doing

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these things, and who gave you this authority?” Jesus

answered them, “I also will ask you one question, and if

you tell me the answer, then I also will tell you by what

authority I do these things. The baptism of John, from

where did it come? From heaven or from man?” And

they discussed it among themselves, saying, “If we say,

‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why then did you not

believe him?’ But if we say, ‘From man,’ we are afraid of

the crowd, for they all hold that John was a prophet.”

So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And he said

to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do

these things.”

What are they doing with their minds? These are very bright

people. And they say, “Well, if we give him this answer,

we’re trapped because we didn’t believe. But if we give him

the other answer, we’re also trapped because the people are

going to be angry with us. So how can we get out of the trap?

Let’s use our minds to get out of the trap. Here’s a good way to get out of the trap. We will say, We don’t know.”

Frankly, that behavior makes me angry. We are sur-

rounded in America by people like that. Instead of using

their minds to come to strong convictions and let the chips

fall where they will and suffer for what’s true, they are

repeatedly angling to get out of traps. Don’t be like this, if for no other reason than because it is bad scholarship! If

your mind, in studying the truth, leads you to a conviction

that will get you into trouble, believe it! Speak it! There are so many pastors who conceal their convictions from their

people because they are afraid of conflict.

Here’s one verse that is the exact opposite of the way

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these people use their minds—2 Corinthians 4:2: “But we

have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse

to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by

the open statement of the truth we would commend our-

selves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.” That is a beautiful description of a godly pastor. I want to be that

kind of preacher. I want to stand before God on the last day

and say, I tried to be faithful and let people think of me what they wanted to think. I don’t want to be the kind of pastor

who’s always watching what people are going to say and

then governing what comes out of his mouth by what the

people are going to say.

So good scholarship—good use of the mind in seeking

and finding truth—stands in the service of honest, coura-

geous ministry. And the goal of that ministry, whether it

succeeds or not, is to put people’s souls on a solid footing.

The aim is that great affections for God would be awakened

by clearly seen and courageously spoken truth.

6) Paul’s Rhetorical Question

Thirteen times in Paul’s letters, he uses the rhetorical question, “Do you not know?” Let me just give you a few

examples. Do you not know that your body is the temple

of the Holy Spirit? (1 Cor. 6:19). Do you not know that we

will judge angels? (1 Cor. 6:2). Do you not know that when

you lie with a prostitute, you become one body with her?

(1 Cor. 6:15). Do you not know that a little leaven leavens

the whole lump? (1 Cor. 5:6). Do you not know that the

unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom? (1 Cor. 6:9). Do

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you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?

(1 Cor. 6:15).

Thirteen times Paul uses that question. What is he

thinking when he does that? He’s thinking, “If you knew, you would be acting differently! If you knew these things, your hearts would be different!” He is writing his letters to help them have the kind of knowledge that will change their lives. This is the way we transform our churches. We don’t

manipulate them and coerce them into trying to act certain

ways. We seek to awaken affections in the heart, for out of

the heart the mouth speaks and the body acts.

My wife and I visited a church in North Carolina once

while we were on vacation. My wife, who is very tolerant,

left the church saying, “I don’t think we will ever go back

there.” That’s pretty verbal for her. The preacher had spent

his whole sermon hammering on his people to come to the

midweek meetings on Wednesday nights! And hammering

on them to give money!

We sat there thinking, This isn’t working. We just

wanted to go away. And the people were going away. And the only thing he knew to do to help them not go away was

to tell them, Don’t go away! Going away is not right! Which is not what Paul did. Paul said, “Don’t you know that it is more blessed to give than to receive? I want you to know the

joy of giving. I love you. I want you to know the blessing.”

Don’t try to manipulate people. Don’t try to coerce

people and make them do things. It has to come from

inside, from their hearts. And that means they need knowl-

edge that awakens love. People’s affections are changed

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by what they know. Knowledge itself is, of course, not

sufficient, as we have seen (the Devil has plenty). But it is necessary. The Holy Spirit uses it to awaken new desires

and new wonders and joys. That is how God is exalted in

changed behaviors.

7) Pastors Able to Teach

The Bible tells us in Ephesians 4:11 that Jesus has given to

his church pastors and teachers. And it tells us that these

pastors and teachers should be “able to teach” (1 Tim. 3:2).

They should be good teachers. So all of us pastors should be

thinking, God is giving me as a gift to my church. And he is

telling me, The way you will be a gift to your church is if you are an effective teacher.

I think that implies that ordinary folks in the pew need

help understanding their Bible. If the sheep did not need help understanding their Bibles, God would not have given shepherds who had to be apt to teach. The shepherds would just

read the Bible on Sunday morning, and the people would see

and feel all they need to. No teaching or preaching required.

But that’s not how Jesus set it up.

So the pastor’s job is to look at the Bible and work hard

to understand what’s in it, and then work hard to make it

understandable and attractive and compelling to our people.

The story in Luke 24:32 should ignite in every pastor a pas-

sion for Bible exposition that captures the mind of his people and makes their hearts burn. The men on the Emmaus road

said, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to

us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” A few Pastor as Scholar.26473.i03.indd 61

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62 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

months ago when I read that, I wrote in my journal, “O God,

make me that kind of teacher. I want the hearts of my people

to burn as I open to them the Scriptures.”

That’s what thinking and understanding and teaching

(scholarship) are for: burning hearts for God.

8) Mental Effort Needed for the Whole Council of God

There is a phrase in Acts 20:27 that is very important in

this regard. Paul says, speaking to the elders of Ephesus,

“I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel

of God.” Now, what is this “whole counsel of God”? We

don’t have the space here to work out all of that, but one

implication is clear: in order to give to our people the whole counsel of God, it takes tremendous mental effort to find

it in the Bible.

In one sense, the Bible itself is the whole counsel of

God. But that’s not what Paul meant here. This is too big.

He didn’t just read the whole Bible to them. He taught them

from the Bible (Acts 19:9). There must be a faithful way to

sum this up in what’s called a coherent and unified whole

counsel of God. And my point is, it takes mental work to

find what that is and to work it out in understandable, shar-

able ways.

We don’t read through our Bibles once or twice or ten

times and suddenly know the whole counsel of God. We

have to ask hard questions about how the different parts of

revelation fit together. That’s called “scholarship.” It doesn’t have to be in school. It just has to be careful and honest and Pastor as Scholar.26473.i03.indd 62

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observant and synthesizing and constructive. It’s head work.

And it’s meant to serve the heart of our people.

I think this is why in 2 Timothy 2:15 Paul calls the

expositor “a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.” A “worker.” It takes hard

mental work to rightly handle the Word of God. Don’t let anybody ever tell you that hard mental work is unspiritual.

We are using our minds to understand God’s Word, and we

are depending in prayer upon the Holy Spirit to guide our

minds.

9) The Hard Mental Work of Book Reading

The Bible is a book. Jesus came in the flesh and was called

the Word of God. He taught many things, and he did many

things. He died for sins, and he rose again. He founded the

church and poured out the Holy Spirit. All that foundational

speaking and doing is preserved in a book. My ninth point

is simply this: reading a substantial book well is hard mental work.

You learned your native language when you were very

young—before you were five years old. You didn’t know you

were working when you did it. And so most of us assume

that reading just comes naturally. But there is more than one kind of reading. One kind is passive and involves very little aggressive effort to understand. We just take what comes and

let it happen to us.

But there is another kind of reading that is very active,

and digs down into the author’s mind, and wants to under-

stand everything it sees. It may sound strange to say it, but Pastor as Scholar.26473.i03.indd 63

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64 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

one of the most scholarly things I ever learned was that many parts of the Bible (like Paul’s letters and Jesus’s sermons)

are less like strings of pearls and more like chains of steel.

That is, the authors don’t just give a sequence of spiritual

gems; they forge a chain of logical argumentation. Their

statements hang together. They are linked. One connects to

another, and those two connect to another, and those three

to another, and so on as the unbreakable argument of glori-

ous truth extends through a passage. And, when the Holy

Spirit enlightens our minds, this chain of argumentation is

on fire.

Rigorous reading—scholarly reading—traces these

lines of argumentation. Consider Romans 1:15–21. I have

reproduced this passage with each proposition on a sepa-

rate line along with the verse numbers to the left. Each

proposition begins with a logical connecter (“for,” “that

is,” “as,” “because,” “ever since”), which appears in bold

type. These small words are among the most important in

the Bible. They tell us how the statements are related to

each other.

For example, verse 16b gives us the reason that Paul is not ashamed of the gospel (16a)—namely, because it is the

power of God for salvation. Verse 19a gives us the reason

that God’s wrath is justly revealed against all ungodliness everywhere in the world, even among peoples who have not

access to the Bible (v. 18)—namely, because what they need

to know to be held accountable is plain to them. And verses

19b–20b tell us why it is plain to them—namely, because

God has revealed it in the things he made.

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15 I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in

Rome.

16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel,

16b for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes,

16c [that is] to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

17a For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith,

17b as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their

unrighteousness suppress the truth.

19a For what can be known about God is plain to them,

19b because God has shown it to them.

20a For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived,

20b ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.

20c So they are without excuse.

21a For although they knew God,

21b they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him,

21c but they became futile in their thinking,

21d and their foolish hearts were darkened.

On and on the chain of argumentation grows. Words become

statements, and statements are linked to form larger units.

And these larger units are linked to build the whole book

of Romans. The point here is simply this: since much of

the Bible is written this way, pastors are called to trace

these arguments with active, careful, rigorous reading, and

explain statements and the connections and the larger units

to their people, and then apply them to their lives. This kind of reading is exceedingly demanding, and it is a large part of what I would call “scholarship.”

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All this is involved in the fact that God revealed himself to the church through the centuries in a book. He did not have

to give the church a book. He could have done it another way.

He could have just given daily dreams to his people. He could have caused dramatizations to appear in the sky. He could

have communicated to a select few with secret knowledge and

made them memorize everything and pass it on to another

select few in each generation. He could have communicated

to us any way he wanted to. And he did it in a book.

This is one reason that everywhere the Christian church

has spread, there have been not only churches and hospitals,

but also schools—places of rudimentary and then advanced

scholarship. It’s because we’re dependent on a book. Since

our faith is rooted in the understanding of a book, we want

people to learn how to read, and then to have the Bible in

their language, and to learn how to think carefully and doc-

trinally about the book.

So the very existence of the Bible as a book signals that

the pastor is called to read carefully and accurately and thoroughly and honestly. That is, he is called to be a “scholar.”

Summing Up

One way to make sense of this chapter is to say that its

two parts reflect the two things that were happening to

me in the first thirty-four years of my life—on the way to

the pastorate. That story is the story of the emergence of a

pastor with a desperate desire for joy in God and a rational

bent that makes him less useful in many settings, and more

useful in a few. Then the second half of the chapter is the

fleshing out of those two traits—joy and thinking.

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It seems to me, from my very biased and finite perspec-

tive, that what God was doing in my whole life was prepar-

ing me to see, and think about, and savor, and proclaim the

truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most

satisfied in him. The first half of the chapter describes the emergence of a sinful soul who thinks and feels deeply and

loves to speak and write about it. The second half of the

chapter describes how the thinking serves the feeling in the

ministry of the Word.

If I am scholarly, it is not in any sense because I try to

stay on the cutting edge in the discipline of biblical and

theological studies. I am far too limited for that. What

“scholarly” would mean for me is that the greatest object of

knowledge is God and that he has revealed himself authori-

tatively in a book; and that I should work with all my might

and all my heart and all my soul and all my mind to know

and enjoy him and to make him known for the joy of others.

Surely this is the goal of every pastor.

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The Scholar as Pastor

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C H A P T E R T W O

The Scholar as Pastor:

Lessons from the Church and

the Academy

D. A. Carson

To prove how wonderfully I can mangle fundamental hom-

iletical principles, I shall proceed with an introduction

divided into five parts, followed by a main body with an

apostolic number of points. For my purposes, I will not

count Paul, so there are only twelve points. But first:

Part One: Introduction

1) The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor—to begin by criticizing the title is usually a cheap shot, but in this case, there is an ambiguity that needs to be exposed. In England,

where I lived for nine years, this title might be thought pre-sumptuous. Over there, scholar is a not a word by which you would usually define yourself; rather, it is a word that

someone else might use of you, if you are exceptionally

gifted in your field. In other words, over there scholar tends to be a measure of one’s competence; the word for the corresponding role is probably academic. So could the title of this book morph easily into The Pastor as Academic and the Academic as Pastor?

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72 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

Now you can see that there is an issue at stake beyond

the word preferred by one side or the other of the Big Pond.

An “academic” is normally thought of as someone with a

post in an academic institution. In that sense, an academic

is not a pastor, unless a bi-vocational, part-time pastor;

conversely, a full-time, vocational pastor is not an academic, except perhaps in the sense of offering some part-time

courses in an academic setting.

Immediately the discussion becomes still more compli-

cated when we recall how some larger churches, not least

Bethlehem Baptist Church where John Piper serves, begin

their own parallel training schools, in this case The Bethlehem Institute, currently morphing into Bethlehem College and

Seminary. Is this department of Bethlehem Baptist Church

rightly called an academic institution? If so, when we speak of academic pastors or pastoral academics, must there be some

kind of institutional affiliation for the categories to take on meaning?

Lest we wallow in a semantic quagmire, we abandon

academic and retreat quickly to the word scholar and acknowledge that, even here in North America, it can refer

to either an academic role or a relatively advanced degree

of competence in a particular field. The title may sound

self-promoting to British ears, but the lovely ambiguity

means that when we talk about, say, a pastor-scholar, we

are not reduced to talking about institutional affiliations and the like (though we may include such reflections),

but about pastoral work in the framework of rather more

advanced technical competence than is customarily the

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Carson: The Scholar as Pastor 73

case—a competence that may or may not have an institu-

tional outlet.

He Gives Different Gifts

2) This is the time, I think, to recognize that God assigns

hugely different gifts, so that one of the things this book

must not do is give the impression that there is only one legitimate path to working out pastoral and scholarly voca-tions. Arnold Dallimore was a Baptist pastor who studied

theological training with my dad. His only degree, his ter-

minal degree, was a bachelor of theology. For forty years

he served one church in the small Ontario town of Cottam.

Nevertheless, he also set himself the task of mastering mate-

rial on George Whitefield. It became a hobby, a summer

challenge, a life goal. He traveled frequently to England, ran-sacked archives, found material that no one had ever used

before and wrote his magnificent two-volume biography of

Whitefield.1 Few books make me weep, but on occasion that

biography did. For all its technical competence and heavy

documentation, it made me pray, more than once, Oh, God,

do it again!

But no one insists that every pastor has the intellectual

gift and long-term stamina to do the research and writ-

ing that that magnificent project entailed. John Piper has

advanced training from Munich. He has been known to

write poetry in German. Few of us can claim similar research and writing skills. Tim Keller has taught in a seminary but

for years has served as a pastor—but which of us does not

admire his The Reason for God,2 probably the most impor-Pastor as Scholar.26473.i03.indd 73

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74 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

tant apologetic for outsiders since C. S. Lewis penned Mere Christianity?3 So are these the sorts of examples one should call to mind when one reflects on “the scholar as pastor”?

My purpose in listing these men is twofold: first, more significant than the formal education are the gifts of intellectual curiosity and rigor, of focus and stamina, of lonely

research and writing, that some have and some do not; and

second, although some of these gifts can be cultivated and nurtured, precisely because some have these gifts and some

do not, it would make no sense to set up an arbitrary stan-

dard as if all could and should attain them. It makes no sense to pretend you are something you are not. Some scholars

will never display great pastoral gifts; some pastors will

never function as gifted scholars.

A Frequently Abused Text

3) We should not proceed much farther without some

brief reflections on one frequently abused text that is often applied to our topic. There is an evangelical tradition that

treats what Jesus calls the “greatest” or “first” command-

ment as authorization for all Christian intellectual endeavor.

Does not Jesus himself instruct us on this matter? He says

that the most important command is this: “Hear, O Israel:

The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God

with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your

mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:29–30).4 Here, surely, is a dominical mandate for evangelical scholarship.

Well, yes and no. Certainly Jesus’s words lay a heavy

emphasis on thought, on engaging our whole person, focus-

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Carson: The Scholar as Pastor 75

ing on how we think as we love God—more so than our

English translations always allow us to perceive. In English, to love someone with our heart (as in “I love you with all my heart”) bespeaks emotion: The heart becomes the focus of

emotional engagement, while the head becomes the focus of

mental or cerebral engagement. But in the Bible, the “heart”

is the center of our entire being, not just of our emotions. In other words, it is very close to what we mean by “mind,”

except that it includes emotion, will, and value system.

So to love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength includes a huge emphasis on what and how we think; the other two words— soul and strength—bespeak intensity, total engagement. Transparently, this means that using our minds and

wills in a lazy, slapdash, or arrogant way is not only pathetic, but it verges on the blasphemous. And since all truth is God’s truth, we are not far from the inference that all Christian

intellectual endeavor offered cheerfully and wholeheartedly

to God—that is, all Christian scholarship—lies close to the heart of our calling. Whether you are tackling the exegesis

of Psalm 110 or examining the tail feathers of a pileated

woodpecker, you are to offer the work to God and see such

intellectual endeavor, such scholarship, as part and parcel

of worship.

Yet we cannot forget that Mark 12 and Deuteronomy

6, from which Jesus draws the first commandment, do not

tell us to exercise heart and soul and mind and strength in

order simply to understand God better. The commandment is to love him. Indeed, in the context of Deuteronomy 6, this Pastor as Scholar.26473.i03.indd 75

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76 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

love is expressed in knowing and following his words, not

least in passing them on to the next generation. Love for God must never degenerate into protestations of passion without

thought, into sentimental twaddle. It must be shaped by

thinking God’s thoughts after him, and loving him precisely

in and through and by means of knowing and delighting in

his words—which is precisely why there is so much emphasis

on mind and volition.

So just because I study the half-life of a quark, a pileated

woodpecker, the consistory records of Geneva in the years

after Calvin’s death, the destructive influence of Richard

Simon, or a Hebrew infinitive construct does not guarantee

that I love God better. In fact, it may seduce me into think-

ing I am more holy and more pleasing to God, when all I

am doing is pleasing myself: I like to study. After all, plenty of secularists are fine technical scholars who enjoy their

work and make excellent discoveries and write great tomes,

without deluding themselves into thinking that they thereby

prove they love God and deserve high praise in the spiritual

sphere. Nothing is quite as deceitful as an evangelical scholarly mind that thinks it is especially close to God because of its scholarship rather than because of Jesus.

Nevertheless, as soon as this warning has been delivered,

we must immediately repudiate the pendulum swing that

favors anti-intellectualism. We are to love God with our hearts or (in the biblical sense) with our minds. Or again, the very business of training others involves the closest use of the mind: “The things you have heard me say [which surely entails texts understood by mind] in the presence of

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Carson: The Scholar as Pastor 77

many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be

qualified to teach others [which certainly requires the life of the mind, though it requires more than that]” (2 Tim. 2:2).

In short: biblical warnings about how knowledge puffs

up but love builds up (e.g., 1 Corinthians 8) do not condone

anti-intellectualism; conversely, biblical mandates to love

God with our minds do not grant scholarship an elevated

status that exempts it from adoration, faith, obedience, and

love. At some level, scholarship without humility and obedi-

ence is arrogant; talk of knowing and loving God without

scholarship is ignorant.

Focusing on Biblical and Theological Scholarship

4) So far I have been painting with a broad brush. I have

referred to a wide sweep of scholarly disciplines, from orni-

thology to European history to biblical exegesis. But in the

rest of this chapter, I shall focus on biblical and theologi-

cal scholarship, including those disciplines, such as church

history and historical theology, that may most directly

strengthen the pastor’s grasp. Institutionally, therefore, I

am not thinking primarily about universities, Christian and

otherwise, but about seminaries and similar institutions;

topically, I am not now focusing on every discipline but on

those most tightly related to faithful pastoral ministry. The reason, of course, is that I am supposed to be talking about

the scholar as pastor, and I doubt if the Henry Center, when

it issued its invitation, was thinking about how theoretical

physicists might be faithful bi-vocational pastors.

This is the place where I should probably offer one fur-

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78 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

ther clarification. In this address, I am not unpacking all the disciplines and habits that go into how a Christian scholar

ought to function as a scholar. That is a hugely important topic, but it is not the one I am addressing here. I am thinking, instead, of the biblical-theological scholar as pastor.

My Own Pilgrimage

5) Probably I should say a word about my own pilgrimage.

As an undergraduate, I went to Canada’s McGill University

and studied chemistry. My intention was to pursue a PhD

in organic synthesis; my dream was to do it at Cornell. The

steps the Lord took to move me toward vocational ministry

were multiple. For a start, the pastor of the church I attended in Montréal approached me one spring and told me he

wanted me to intern with him that summer. I told him that,

owing to the significant number of college-age students in

the church, he was doubtless confusing me with someone

who was planning to head into ministry. As for me, I was

heading for a life in chemistry. He persisted, and so did I.

We had a two-hour scrap, and I won: I went to another city

that summer and worked in a chemistry lab. Nevertheless,

this pastor, doubtless working out of 2 Timothy 2:2, was the

first person who got me to wonder about whether I should

be thinking of vocational ministry.

Some time later I was working in a chemistry lab in

Ottawa, Canada’s capital. I thoroughly enjoyed the work.

Nevertheless, I soon discovered that most of my colleagues

in the lab could be divided into two groups. On the one side

were those who hated their jobs and were hanging on until

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Carson: The Scholar as Pastor 79

retirement saved them from it; on the other side were those

for whom chemistry was god. I didn’t fit into either group.

Meanwhile, I was helping a young minister with his Sunday

school in a fledgling work up the valley where he was trying

to plant a church, and the challenges of that minor ministry

began to capture more of my imagination than the chemis-

try. Somewhere along the line, the words of a chorus I had

sung as a boy played incessantly in my mind:

By and by when I look on his face—

Beautiful face, thorn-shadowed face—

By and by when I look on his face,

I’ll wish I had given him more.5

Of course, I knew full well that some people are called

to chemistry, or to become plumbers, nurses, or garage

mechanics. The old sense of vocatio is important: all of us, in whatever vocational calling we have, are to offer up our

work gratefully and faithfully to God as a component of our

adoring worship, whether we are collecting garbage or mak-

ing violins. Still, in my case I could picture approaching the judgment seat of Christ and saying, “Here, God, here’s my

chemistry,” without having given adequate thought to what

else I might have offered.

And then, early that autumn, I heard a missionary by

the name of Richard Wilkerson preach on Ezekiel 22:30: “I

looked for someone among them who would build up the

wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so

I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one.” It hit me very hard. It was as if God by his Spirit was compelling me

to say, “Here, please send me!”

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80 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

When the Lord called me into the ministry—the potted

biography does not do justice to how this was a strange

and complicated time in my life—my aim was to preach,

pastor, and plant churches. I had no intention of pursuing

advanced degrees in biblical studies or theology. But some

years later, while serving a church in the metropolitan

Vancouver area, I was asked to fill in from time to time at

a small, local Baptist college. I was merely covering for a

few faculty members when they were ill or providing input

as a local pastor.

When a normal vacancy turned up on their faculty,

however, the dean asked me to apply. I declined. I was a

pastor and enjoying the ministry; this was the front line.

Nevertheless, the invitation served to make me wonder if I

should get more training while I was still young and single.

Our church was growing; we had bought property next

door, a precursor to expansion. I realized that if I stayed

another year, I would have to stay for five because, all things considered, it is the part of prudential wisdom not to leave

in the middle of major expansion.

To cut a long story short, I resigned and went to

Cambridge University, where I had three very happy years

working on a PhD and speaking on occasion. Afterward,

I looked at my records and discovered I had preached or

taught the Bible an average of 2.6 times a week for the

years I was there, so at no point had I been entirely disen-

gaged from pastoral ministry, even though I was a full-time

research student. By the end of that time, I was married, and my wife and I returned to Vancouver where I took up a post

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at that same college, while my wife and I helped to plant

another church.

Some years later, in another providential twist, I found

myself at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS). I had

not sought the post, but in God’s providence it came to me,

and I have served there for more than thirty years. So far,

the most serious temptations I have had to leave my present

post and go elsewhere have not been to join another fac-

ulty, whether at a seminary or a department in a university

(though I have had both), but to return to full-time pastoral ministry. I was very close to heading in that direction some

years ago when Carl F. H. Henry and Kenneth S. Kantzer

descended on me with prophetic fervor and told me in rather

intense ways that if I left TEDS at that point, I would be

defying what God had called me to do.

By saying this, they were not—emphatically not—

relegating pastoral ministry to some second tier. I have seen both of those men steer PhD graduates into pastoral ministry. Both were churchmen; they had the highest regard for

the priority of pastoral ministry. Perhaps they thought I was not very qualified for it and thought I would be better at a

quartermaster’s job than on the frontline. But the reason

they gave me was that they thought, at the time, that some

of the material I was writing met certain needs, and they

did not want me to take a post that was likely to reduce my

output. To be perfectly frank, I still wrestle occasionally with whether they were right.

So much, then, for the five points of my introduction. I

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82 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

the theme of the pastor as scholar, but John Piper has done

that more ably than I could, and, not surprisingly, I have

been asked instead to address the theme of the scholar

as pastor. Perhaps I should revise it to read “The Scholar as (Frustrated) Pastor.” Out of the lessons I have learned, I

offer a dozen.

Part Two: Lessons for the Scholar as Pastor

1) Take Steps to Avoid Becoming a Mere Quartermaster

Now, any army needs quartermasters. They are the ones

who provide the supplies to the frontlines. By all means,

give appropriate honor to those who devote themselves to

equipping and supplying—with books, training, courses,

modeling, answering questions—those who will be on the

frontlines. Yet it is possible to write learned tomes on

apologetics without actually defending the gospel in the

current world; it is possible to write commentaries without

constantly remembering that God makes himself present, he

discloses himself afresh, to his people, through the Word.

If you are an academic, you need to put yourself into

places where, as it were, you take your place with the

frontline troops from time to time. This means engaging

the outside world at a personal level, at an intellectual and cultural level; it means working and serving in the local

church; it means engaging in evangelism. Avoid becoming a

mere quartermaster.

I suppose I was at least somewhat shielded from initial

temptations along these lines because I had been a pastor

and was still preaching and teaching. My research area

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had to do with some elements of theology in John’s Gospel

against assorted Jewish backgrounds. My Doktorvater was a brilliant man who on many fronts had become convinced

of what was essentially a naturalist approach to most bibli-

cal texts.

After I had been in Cambridge for several months and

the initial glory of this spectacular university had faded at least a little, one Tuesday afternoon I was in my mentor’s

office for a supervision on the background to the notion

of “new birth” in John 3. It was all very interesting, and

impossibly uncontrolled, as I was finding my way around

Jewish mystical texts, gnostic texts, Philonic thought, and so forth. But deep inside I was sort of grinning. For the previous weekend, I had preached in a chapel in the market town of

March, and one of the village constables, a man known to be

a bit of a brute, had got converted, rather dramatically. He

was born again. I could not at that point read John 3 with-

out thinking of that man. My point is that by continuing in

forms of pastoral ministry, even while engaging in technical

scholarship, you will not only avoid some pitfalls, but you

will avoid becoming a mere quartermaster.

Perhaps more importantly, one of the effects of such

discipline is that you will become a better teacher. Elsewhere I have told the story of how I came to write The Gagging

of God.6 It was the direct result of speaking at university

“missions”—series of evangelistic addresses on university

campuses—and observing firsthand the changing face of

student questions. When I first began to do such work, even

the atheists I met were “Christian” atheists—that is, the

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84 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

God whom they disbelieved was recognizably the Christian

God, which is a way of saying that the categories were still

on my turf.

Eventually, however, the depth of biblical illiteracy

among undergraduates changed that; more dramatically,

postmodern epistemology meant that the approaches stu-

dents were taking to “knowing” God and “knowing about”

God and to exclusive claims for God and the like were so

different from what I had been brought up with that I was

doing more and more reading in these areas to make sure I

could stay engaged with these new generations of students.

At some point, an undergraduate young woman in the

English department at the University of Cambridge asked me

to address some of her friends. The meeting grew, and the

evening turned out to be electric—and it suddenly dawned

on me that I ought to put a book together on the subject, not only to clarify my own thinking but also to help others who

were negotiating the same changes.

In short, take steps to avoid becoming a mere quartermaster. Unless you are actively involved in pastoral ministry in some sense or other, you will become distant from the

frontlines and therefore far less useful than you might be.

2) Beware the Seduction of Applause

This can come from at least two directions. First, it can come from an academic direction. To be seduced by applause

means that for you it becomes more important to be thought

learned than to be learned. The respect of peers who write

erudite journal articles becomes more immediately pressing

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than the Lord’s approval. Obviously there is no grace in sim-

ply irritating academic colleagues, in confusing contending

for the faith with being contentious about the faith. Yet if it becomes more important to you to be published by Oxford

University Press or Cambridge University Press than to be

absolutely straight with the gospel, if you shy away from

some topics for no other reason than that these topics are

unpopular in your guild, then you are in the gravest spiritual danger.

When I first arrived in Cambridge in the autumn of

1972, I suppose I reacted in the same way as do many post-

graduate students who first arrive in the United Kingdom

from the United States or Canada. Canada’s oldest cities

are only four or five hundred years old; I had been living

in Vancouver, barely a hundred and fifty years old. There

I was in Cambridge with parts of one church building, St.

Benet’s, going back a thousand years. Cambridge was at one

time a Roman camp: they built a bridge over the river Cam;

hence, “Cambridge.” The university itself was then almost

eight hundred years old, steeped in traditions; by contrast,

my undergraduate university was founded in 1827, and that

made it the oldest in the Commonwealth outside the British

Isles. I was walking on stones where John Owen walked; my

college, Emmanuel College, boasts a chapel designed by Sir

Christopher Wren, who also designed St. Paul’s Cathedral in

London. The College Library—quite apart from the glories

of the intoxicating treasures of the University Library—

boasted the second-best Puritan collection in the world. It

was easy for a young and inexperienced Canadian pastor to

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86 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

feel massively intimidated. It was easy to be more concerned

about being accepted in this glorious environment, about

not sticking my foot in it, than about being faithful.

In God’s providence, he helped me steer clear of some of

the worst excesses by the means of a serendipitous conversa-

tion I had some months after I first arrived. My Doktorvater was, like me at that time, single. He was high Anglican—so

high that he belonged to an Anglican order of monks, the

Society of St. Francis. He wore the monkish habit, had a

rope around his middle instead of a belt, and, in addition to his faculty job in the university, presided over a local high Anglican church. He was also the head of the local chapter

of the Society of St. Francis.

Because we were both single, we sometimes ate meals

together, usually either at the chapter house or at the resi-

dential research library, Tyndale House, where I was then

living. One evening after a meal together at Tyndale House,

we retreated to my room for coffee. I inquired as to whether

he would mind if I asked him about his spiritual pilgrimage,

and he assured me he wouldn’t.

I had become perplexed by his stance on all kinds of

things. Usually Anglo-Catholics are pretty conservative on a

wide range of critical issues, while being theologically akin to traditional Catholics on many points of doctrine. But by

this time I had learned that my mentor, though very Catholic

in his theological views—for instance, he had a very “high”

view of the Mass—was just about as liberal as you could

get on most critical issues. By “critical issues” I’m including not only matters of what is called “critical introduction”—

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details about, say, the authorship of the Pastoral Epistles and of 2 Peter—but also matters concerning the historical Jesus

and his person and work. So I asked him, in effect, “How did

you get to your present stance on historical and theological

matters? How do you become a liberal Anglo-Catholic? Isn’t

that an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms?”

He responded graciously by telling me something of his

story. His father had been an Anglo-Catholic bishop. At the

age of five, my Doktorvater had started learning Greek and Latin at his father’s knee; Hebrew was added at the age of

eleven. He had been sent along to a fine prep school. At the

age of eighteen, instead of going to university he chose to go to an Anglo-Catholic training college because he wanted to

enter ministry in the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of

England and work with the poor. On graduation he joined

the Society of St. Francis and worked with the poor in

London for almost twenty years.

Toward the end of his thirties, he was sent by his order

to work with students—and thus he came to Cambridge.

He decided that the best way to work with students was

to become one, so he enrolled in the university to study

theology. For the first time, he came across liberal-critical views, and he bought into the lot, becoming more and more

creative himself in this respect. By his own account, he went through a revolution in his own thinking and approach to

the Bible. He did so well in his studies that the University

asked him to teach, and his Order gave him permission.

Here he was, fifteen years later, at the height of his intellectual powers, supervising my work. He loved university life

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88 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

and delighted in the teaching, research, and writing. His own academic star was still on the ascendancy.

I told him I appreciated his frankness, and I could see

how he had arrived at his stance, but I couldn’t quite see how he put it all together. For instance, I could see how someone who has a high view of Jesus, who believes that he truly is the God-man, might take the next step and have a very high view

of the “host” in the Mass, seeing that somehow the deity of

Jesus is present in the elements. That wasn’t my view, but I

understood how the connection might be made. But how

could a theologian with a “low” view of the historical Jesus, an essentially naturalistic understanding of who Jesus is, then take a “high” view of the elements in Holy Communion?

I never get quite as enthusiastic in debate as John Piper,

but in my plodding yet fairly intense way I was getting into

the discussion, with several responses and inquiries back and forth, when it suddenly dawned on me that my mentor was

becoming red-faced and sweaty and was beginning to stutter.

He simply did not have a clue how to put this together. It

was not my role to embarrass him, so I backed off. I’m sure

I can be a smart-mouth in debate, but on that occasion I was

not trying to score points but merely to understand. And in a flash, I knew that I would rather have, in God’s grace, what I had than what he had; I’d rather have the gospel, knowledge

of forgiveness of sins, and a reverence for God’s Word than

all the academic applause in the world. I wasn’t sure the two were necessarily incompatible; but at least I was sure that if you had to choose one or the other, academic applause can’t

compare with Jesus.

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Some years later I again witnessed, but from a slightly

different angle, the danger of being seduced by academic

applause. John Woodbridge and I had come to the conclu-

sion that we ought to edit a couple of tough-minded books

on the doctrine of Scripture, books that ultimately became

Scripture and Truth 7 and Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon.8 In my recruitment of writers for this project, I approached a friend I had known since Cambridge days

who was then teaching at another university, and who, I

knew, shared our views on how Christians are to think about

Scripture and what the long-sustained history of the doctrine is. He replied that although he wished our project well, he

did not want to write on a subject like that, since he thought it would queer any chance he might have of getting a post

at Oxford or Cambridge, where he could eventually do a lot

more good. My response was that if he took that approach

to confessional matters, it would not be long before he

distanced himself not only from defending the doctrine,

but from the doctrine itself. And that, I regret to tell you, is exactly what happened over the ensuing years. Beware the

seduction of academic applause.

The second direction from which seductive applause

may come is the conservative constituency of your friends, a

narrower peer group but one that, for some people, is equally ensnaring. Scholarship is then for sale: you constantly work

on things to bolster the self-identity of your group, to show it is right, to answer all who disagree with it. Some scholars are very indignant with colleagues who, in their estimation,

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peers, yet these indignant scholars remain blissfully unaware of how much they have become addicted to the applause of

conservative bastions that egg them on.

On the last day, we stand or fall on the approval of one

person, one master, the Lord Jesus.

3) Fight a Common Disjunction

Fight with every fiber of your being the common disjunc-

tion between “objective study” of Scripture and “devotional

reading” of Scripture, between “critical reading” of the Bible and “devotional reading” of the Bible. The place where

this tension first becomes a problem is usually at seminary.

Students enter with the habit of reading the Bible “devo-

tionally” (as they see it). They enjoy reading the Bible, they feel warm and reverent as they do so, they encounter God

through its pages, some have memorized many verses and

some chapters, and so forth. Seminary soon teaches them

the rudiments of Greek and Hebrew, principles of exegesis,

hermeneutical reflection, something about textual variants,

distinctions grounded in different literary genres, and more.

In consequence, students learn to read the Bible “critically”

or “objectively” for their assignments but still want to read the Bible “devotionally” in their quiet times.

Every year a handful of students end up at the door of

assorted lecturers and professors asking how to handle this

tension. They find themselves trying to have their devotions, only to be harassed by intruding thoughts about textual variants. How should one keep such polarized forms of reading

the Bible apart? This polarization, this disjunction, kept

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unchecked, may then characterize or even harass the biblical

scholar for the rest of his or her life. That scholar may try to write a commentary on, say, Galatians, where at least part of the aim is to master the text, while preserving time for daily devotional reading.

My response, forcefully put, is to resist this disjunction,

to eschew it, to do everything in your power to destroy it.

Scripture remains Scripture, it is still the Word of God before which (as Isaiah reminds us) we are to tremble—the very

words we are to revere, treasure, digest, meditate on, and

hide in our hearts (minds?), whether we are reading the Bible at 5:30 am at the start of a day, or preparing an assignment

for an exegesis class at 10:00 pm. If we try to keep apart

these alleged two ways of reading, then we will be irritated

and troubled when our “devotions” are interrupted by a

sudden stray reflection about a textual variant or the precise force of a Greek genitive; alternatively, we may be taken off guard when we are supposed to be preparing a paper or a

sermon and suddenly find ourselves distracted by a glimpse

of God’s greatness that is supposed to be reserved for our

“devotions.” So when you read “devotionally,” keep your

mind engaged; when you read “critically” (i.e., with more

diligent and focused study, deploying a panoply of “tools”),

never, ever, forget whose Word this is. The aim is never to become a master of the Word, but to be mastered by it.

4) Never Forget People

Never forget there are people out there, people for whom

Christ died. We don’t have mere colleagues in our institu-Pastor as Scholar.26473.i03.indd 91

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92 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

tions—we have brothers and sisters in Christ. We don’t have

mere students, organic sponges whose primary function is to

soak up data and then squeeze it back out again on demand.

Rather, in our classrooms are blood-bought children of the

living God. Many of them will become vocational ministers

of the gospel, cross-cultural missionaries, evangelists. They are never mere sponges; they are creatures made in the image

of God, human beings who have been born again, justified

by grace, organically members of the church of the living

God, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit.

Of course, a seminary is an academic institution and an

educational institution. Our job is to teach, and teach well.

Yet not only should a Christian scholar in a seminary envi-

ronment remember what any Christian scholar in any academic environment should remember—that these students

have been created in the imago Dei—but such a scholar should also recognize the ministry potential of the students

and detect all the more the enormous potential found in each

classroom.

Every day former students spring to mind who once sat

in my classroom and who are now serving challenging and

fruitful ministries. I would love to take the time to tell you of a couple, for instance, whose names I dare not divulge, both

of whom graduated from both Princeton and Trinity with

a 4.0 GPA, and who are now serving in a Muslim country,

working with refugees. Another couple I taught twenty years

ago is currently working diligently at translating the Bible

into eleven languages in Papua New Guinea.

Many hundreds of pastors serve faithfully, week in,

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week out, who once sat in my classroom. Some have become

pastor-theologians themselves, producing outstanding mate-

rial that benefits others in turn. All of us stand on the shoulders of others—the Lord has ordained it that way (2 Tim.

2:2). Just as a good pastor will not treat the sermon as an art-form that is an end in itself, but a means of extending grace in the re-revelation of the Word of God, so the seminary

professor will not treat lectures, papers, quizzes, and assignments as nothing more than formal hoops through which to

jump in the necessarily painful passage toward a degree, but

as means of grace, wisely and rightly administered, as part

of a larger mentoring and shaping designed to encourage a

student to be a servant of the gospel, a herald of the Word,

rightly interpreting this Word of truth, a worker who does

not need to be ashamed.

Moreover, at least some of your students will be car-

rying enormous emotional, moral, guilt baggage. Can you

so handle the Word of God and apply it to their lives that

you sometimes observe spectacular transformation taking

place? If not, what makes you think you are qualified to

teach others?

This also means that just as a pastor must be more

than a preacher, but must develop warm and trusting rela-

tionships with the people he serves, so the scholar-pastor

must be more than an information-generating teacher who

tests nothing more than content acquisition. I repeat, the

seminary is an educational institution, and we should never

downplay that mission. But because of the content we teach,

because of the Lord we serve, we who teach in such institu-

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tions must also be eager for relationships with students, with mentoring, with the whole person.

Of course, there are only so many hours in a day. It is

impossible for one teacher to have the same sort of mentoring relationship with each student. That is why most seminaries

foster chaplaincy groups or spiritual formation groups (or

whatever they might be called). The students in my group will be the first ones to be invited to our home, the first ones in my office, the ones who might come along for a Saturday hike,

the ones who take priority on my prayer list, and so forth. I will get to know their spouses, and sometimes their children.

An occasional student has become a prayer partner.

Whatever the diversity of relationships you develop and

cherish, you must see that a scholar with pastoral concerns

will be more than a dispenser of information.

Never forget, there are people out there.

5) Recognize Different Gifts

Happily recognize that God distributes different gifts among

scholar-pastors, as he distributes different gifts among other groups. Some will be able to teach and write, but not preach; others will be able to teach and preach, but writing may

be more of a challenge. Some will be excellent writers, but

perfectionists, such that their output is small but superb;

others are more slapdash but gifted popularizers; some are

narrowly focused specialists, while others are scholarly jacks of all trades. Some are more personable than others.

Obviously we are wise to hone and develop the gifts

God gives us, but we should not slip into the trap of think-

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ing that all scholar-pastors must be similarly endowed. As

the green-eyed monster can rear its head among pastors, so

also among scholars; as pride and triumphalism can cripple

pastoral ministry, so also scholarly ministry. What have you

but what you received? Rejoice in the service to which God

has called you, and eschew both arrogance and jealousy.

Having said that, however, I must hasten to add a few

lines about the importance of listening to and learning

from scholar-pastors who have preceded us or who exercise

wider ministry or differently focused ministry than our own.

Certain habits and priorities are worth careful emulation.

On my own horizon, I happily acknowledge a sense of

indebtedness to an array of scholars on whose shoulders I

stand rather inadequately.

Leon Morris was in many ways a straightforward con-

fessional New Testament scholar whose gifts were steady

and wisely marshaled. He was not utterly extraordinary.

Nevertheless, at certain junctures in his life, he perceived

crucial needs and wrote works that were prescient, pro-

phetic, and hugely stabilizing for the next generation. One

thinks especially of his The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, still worth buying and reading more than four long decades

after its publication.9 He taught a generation of students that they are not necessarily selling the scholarly pass if they hold that the Gospel of John is far more historically framed than

commonly held today. He produced a handful of technical pieces that responded to temporary, influential false steps in his day. One thinks, for instance, of his little book The New Testament and the Jewish Lectionaries.10

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I learned quite different lessons from Kenneth Kantzer.

Kantzer’s breadth of learning was extraordinary; his gift of

analysis and synthesis was sometimes breathtaking. He had

the potential to become one of the great Calvin scholars

of the twentieth century. Yet he chose to marginalize these

gifts in his life in order to build Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, which until very recent years was more the product,

humanly speaking, of his gifts of vision and administration

than of any other agent. Yet he remained astonishingly

accessible to colleagues and students alike. He was a scholartheologian-administrator-pastor.

It would be easy to add the names of another twenty or

thirty scholar-pastors who have largely shaped me, and of

course the diversity of their gifts and callings attests to the truth of the point I am making: happily recognize the diversity of gifts that God gives scholar-pastors.

Perhaps this is the place where we should recognize

another aspect of diversity—diversity in reading habits. A

new generation has come along that turns reflexively to the

web for information and reads fewer books. I don’t care

whether you read books in print or digital form; I am quite

happy with my Kindle reader. But for all that the web makes

information gloriously accessible, it has two huge shortcom-

ings. First, it is so democratized that it is more difficult than ever to distinguish between truth and error, between authori-tative opinion and fatuous opinion, between speculation and

learning. Second, it swamps us with brief information and

opinion; it entices us into endless worthless discussions even on blogs that may themselves be valuable.

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One of the things that thoughtful scholar-pastors will do

is preserve time for reflective reading of the best books. You can find out what those books are by having probing conversations with a variety of scholar-pastors who are more

mature than you are—but be sure you seek out the opinions

of several people, not just one. Through their books, get to

know some epochal thinkers reasonably well. Slow down;

read, take notes, think, evaluate.

Yet having said these things—things that must be said

as a kind of foil to the temptations of reading exclusively on the web—I must quickly add that in this domain of reading,

there is, and there should be, quite a diversity of legitimate reading practices. Some, more focused than others and perhaps slower readers and sharper thinkers than others, want

you to restrict your reading to very good books that you

must read slowly. For some readers, I suspect that that is the wisest choice; for all readers, reading some books slowly and analytically is mandated. But I doubt that it is wise to suggest that every scholar should read only good books and only

slowly, for once again there is a diversity of gifts and graces.

If you can develop the habit of reading different things

at different speeds, you might be wise to read some books

slowly, evaluatively, and often; to read some books briskly,

once but comprehensively; to skim other books to see what

they are saying; to dip into still other books to see if they add anything to a discussion or merely say the same old

things with a minor twist here and there. All that is apart

from reading some poetry, some serious literature, and

even occasional pieces that have no enduring value but that

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98 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

everyone is reading at the moment—not because you want

to spend much time there, or should spend much time there,

but so as to offer penetrating firsthand comments on mate-

rial that virtually every literate person in your world knows something about.

Not every scholar-pastor should attempt to do all these

things, but those who have the gift, the time, and the energy to do so, and who then offer their “take” on a broad array

of literature, become a great gift to those of us who read

more narrowly or at more limited speed. Precisely because

there is a diversity of gifts, the perspective of Roger Bacon is memorable: “Reading maketh a full man; speaking maketh

a quick man; writing maketh an exact man.”

What is virtually never justified, however, is never reading anything slowly, seriously, analytically, and evaluatively, for such reading of good material not only fills our minds

with many good things, but teaches us how to think.

In short, happily recognize that God distributes different

gifts among scholar-pastors.

6) Recognize What Students Learn

Recognize that students do not learn everything you teach

them. They certainly do not learn everything I teach them!

What do they learn? They learn what I am excited about; they learn what I emphasize, what I return to again and

again; they learn what organizes the rest of my thought.

So if I happily presuppose the gospel but rarely articulate it and am never excited about it, while effervescing frequently

about, say, ecclesiology or textual criticism, my students may Pastor as Scholar.26473.i03.indd 98

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conclude that the most important thing to me is ecclesiology

or textual criticism. They may pick up my assumption of the gospel; alternatively, they may even distance themselves

from the gospel; but what they will almost certainly do is

place at the center of their thought ecclesiology or textual criticism, thereby wittingly or unwittingly marginalizing the gospel.

Both ecclesiology and textual criticism, not to mention a

plethora of other disciplines and sub-disciplines, are worthy of the most sustained study and reflection. Nevertheless,

part of my obligation as a scholar-teacher, a scholar-pastor, is to show how my specialism relates to that which is fundamentally central and never to lose my passion for living and

thinking and being excited about what must remain at the

center. Failure in this matter means I lead my students and

parishioners astray.

If I am then challenged by a colleague who says to me,

“Yes, I appreciate the competence and thoroughness with

which you are handling ecclesiology or textual criticism, but how does this relate to the centrality and nonnegotiability of the gospel?” I may, regrettably, respond rather defensively,

“Why are you picking on me? I believe in the gospel as

deeply as you do!” That may be true, but it rather misses

the point. As a scholar, ecclesiology or textual criticism

may be my specialism; but as a scholar- pastor, I must be concerned for what I am passing on to the next generation,

its configuration, its balance and focus. I dare never forget that students do not learn everything I try to teach them but primarily what I am excited about.

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7) Make the Main Thing the Main Thing

The principle I enunciated in the previous point needs

thoughtful application in quite a number of domains. In

every area of a biblical-theological scholar’s work, it is important to keep asking what is at stake, what related

issues constitute the main thing. Permit me three examples.

First, consider some of the various ways scholars teach

systematic theology. Some trained in philosophical theology

help students work through complex notions, such as “per-

son,” when explaining patristic Trinitarian formulations:

one substance but three persons. Others trained in histori-

cal theology may construct their systematics largely out of

the trail of theologians who have gone before them. Both

may be effective teachers; both may never open their Bible from the first class period in the semester to the last. That means a “main thing” has been overlooked: students with

a high view of Scripture must be trained in how theological formulations ought to be grounded in and derive from

what Scripture says. Otherwise, what systematicians are

really teaching is that the structures of systematic theology not only do not spring from Scripture but need not spring from Scripture. In that case, how is Scripture the “norming norm” of the discipline? In propagating one aspect of the

complex discipline of systematic theology, such scholars are

sacrificing what is essential to the discipline: self-consciously drawing the connections, for the sake of the student, from Scripture, through historical/philosophical/hermeneutical

grids, to confessional formulation.

Second, the drumbeat of our themes may do unwit-

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ting damage, even when every point we make is right. For

instance, those who teach Bible, theology, and historical

theology sometimes (and rightly) point out weaknesses,

aberrations, and assorted blind spots in contemporary evan-

gelicalism. This may work its way out in students who become more and more critical of confessional evangelicalism, and pretty soon even of the evangel itself. They are in

danger of becoming smart-mouths. Their superciliousness

guarantees that they cannot minister effectively anywhere.

Instead of becoming believers whose lives fruitfully foster

change within the church, these students become conde-

scending critics. Not only are they less fruitful than they

might have been, but they are in great spiritual danger.

All this has occurred because their teachers have not

been as careful in fostering a sense of indebtedness to those who have come before as they have been in fostering what

they think of as discernment. Jesus nowhere says, “By this

shall all know that you are my disciples, if you are scintil-

latingly critical and condescending toward evangelicals

who have some things wrong.” I do not mean to hint for a

moment that we who teach can afford to duck the responsi-

bility of teaching discernment. I mean only to say that even

discernment must be nestled into the bigger “main thing” of

love for the brothers and sisters in Christ.

Third, scholarship inevitably cares about innovation,

fresh discoveries, new insights. Such strengths are not to

be dismissed. But if a scholar makes that sort of pursuit his or her primary passion, it will become easy to overlook or

marginalize the gospel once for all delivered to the saints;

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it will be easy to stand loose with respect to what must be

proclaimed in every culture, to the gospel of Jesus who stands athwart the tides of history and cries, “Come to

me!” In all our legitimate concern for the innovative, what is of greater importance is the changeless—and this is what

has dominant pastoral importance. Let the main thing be

the main thing.

8) Pray and Work for Vision

Specifically, pray and work for vision beyond that of pub-

lishers. A well-known scholar has boasted that he has never

had to submit a book manuscript to any publisher, asking if

they might be interested. In every case—and he has written many books—publishers have approached him and asked

him to write something. This happens far more often than

people realize, especially once a scholar has published an initial book or two. I suppose the scholar in question takes this as a point of strength, almost a matter of self-congratulation.

At one level, it is powerful attestation that what he writes

will be purchased, and that is why publishers want him on

their lists. But what this also means is that this scholar has entertained no vision for research and writing beyond what

publishers have asked him to tackle. That is almost unbear-

ably sad.

If you are a pastor-scholar, you ought to be asking your-

self what might be especially helpful at the present moment,

what work of scholarship is crying out to be tackled, what

popularization would benefit the Lord’s people. Sometimes

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coincide with your interests and priorities. Where you think of certain topics first, however, part of your job is to “sell”

a publisher on the idea, so the material can be published or

achieve prominence on a better website or the like. If you

write only what others ask you to write, I fear you may be

displaying a want of scholarly imagination, and, still worse, a lack of pastoral care.

9) Love the Church

Love the church because Jesus loves it. Let your students

know you love the church; make sure that the fellow members of your church are deeply aware that you love the

church, that you love them. This will work out in many dif-

ferent ways, but such love for the church must find outlets in your prayer life, your priorities, your willingness to partici-pate (with the elders? in a small group? in teaching a class?

in taking your turn on a preaching rota? in helping with the

cleaning? in drafting a new constitution?).

Loving the church is not only important to balance out

the rugged individualism that is often part and parcel of

having grown up in America and that is sometimes in dan-

ger of neglecting both communal life and strong personal

relationships with brothers and sisters in Christ, but also to stamp our students. If we are training a preponderance of pastors and others who will serve in the local church, it is

essential that the faculty members truly love the church that Christ loved and for which he gave himself. Many students

will learn to love what their professors truly love. So love

the church.

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10) Avoid Lone-Ranger Scholarship

Every scholar knows that part of the task of scholarship is

bound up with long, lonely hours of disciplined study and

writing. Some projects, however, are better undertaken

with collaboration. No less important, if you are begin-

ning to press into arenas of thought that are not your

first area of competence, you are wise to run your work

by others in the field, to solicit criticisms and suggestions.

Better yet, it is often good to seek out a new generation of

younger scholars and embroil them in new research and

writing projects, giving them books to review, soliciting

their opinions, interacting with their suggestions. Not only

do you yourself benefit—it is much better to receive criti-

cism for a work before it goes to press than in the reviews

after it has been released—but you are involved in a kind

of scholarly mentoring that is the fruit of essentially pastoral commitments.

I once knew a scholar (he has gone to his reward) who

produced, among other books, a remarkable reference vol-

ume that covered vast areas. It was “remarkable” because its

entries ranged from the brilliantly insightful to the mediocre, then all the way down to the painfully ignorant. The volume never did have the kind of influence its author hoped

it would have. He could easily have avoided such a mixed

work if he had taken the time to collaborate with other

scholars who legitimately claimed overlapping areas of

competence and could have saved him the embarrassment

of so many mediocre and ignorant entries mingled in with

the brilliant.

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11) Be Interested in the Work of Others

Be at least as interested in the work of others as you are in your own. This is wise not only because you do not want

to become the party bore who turns every conversation and

discussion toward his or her own work—a peculiarly nasty

form of narcissism—but because the commandment and

example of Christ compels you to seek the other’s good,

to love your neighbor as yourself, to promote scholarship

insofar as it is explicating and promoting the truth and not

just because it is your scholarship. Be at least as interested in the work of others as you are in your own.

12) Take Your Work Seriously, but Not Yourself

Make sure you have some people around you who feel free

to laugh at you. I have no idea how many times at dinner

parties and the like my wife has enjoyed poking fun at

some of my titles: Justification and Variegated Nomism, for instance.11 Isn’t that one a winner? Walk humbly—you have

far more to be humble about than you realize. Take your

work seriously, but not yourself.

Concluding Comment

I have been talking about the scholar-pastor. It would take

only a little imagination to see how the kinds of virtues

I have been promoting have analogues in virtually every

sphere. Is it only the scholar, for instance, who must avoid

the seduction of applause? Is it only the Christian scholar

who wishes to serve pastorally who must be urged to love

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106 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

the church? Is it only the scholar who must constantly

check to ensure that the main thing is still the main thing?

In short, most of what I have been urging has correlative

application in the lives of all Christians. Because the virtues and graces that go into pastoral care are essentially Christian virtues and graces, the application is as broad as the number of Christians.

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Conclusion

The Preacher, the Professor,

and the True Pastor-Scholar

David Mathis

The post–World War II baby boom began in 1946 and

brought with it John Piper and Don Carson. It was only

eleven days into that year, on January 11, that Bill and Ruth Piper met their newborn American boy, and roughly eleven

months later, on December 21, when Tom and Marg Carson

brought their new little Canadian into the world.

Both the Carson and Piper homes were ministry homes.

Bill Piper was a traveling evangelist; Tom Carson was a

church planter and pastor on the difficult soil of Quebec.

Both homes could be described as warm-hearted fundamen-

talist—the kind that have often produced strong evangelical

leaders.

As Piper and Carson came of age in late 1960s and ven-

tured beyond their native fundamentalist spheres, they did

not encounter the plethora of evangelical pastor-scholars

our emerging Millennial generation is discovering today.

F. F. Bruce (interestingly mentioned by both Pastor Piper

and Professor Carson in the previous chapters) stood as an

evangelical model in the scholarly world, along with the

stateside forerunners of the modern evangelical movement

Carl Henry and Kenneth Kantzer, but pastor-scholars were

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108 Conclusion

tough to find. Harold Ockenga, seminary president and

pastor of Park Street Church in Boston, may have been the

closest thing in the mid-twentieth century to what we’ve

called in this book a pastor-scholar, but there weren’t many

like him. So when Piper and Carson earned their doctoral

degrees in the 1970s, it still appeared that they would even-

tually come to a fork in the road where they must decide to

be either pastor or scholar.

It is interesting that Piper first took the scholar’s path,

soon finding a growing heart for the pulpit, while Carson

began on the pastoral trail and soon cultivated his world-

class mind as a scholar. Piper is the scholar turned pastor;

Carson is the pastor turned scholar. In 1978, Carson took

an assistant professorship at Trinity Evangelical Divinity

School; in 1980, Piper went to Bethlehem Baptist Church

to pastor. Both have now invested in those locales for over

three decades.

But as we saw in the previous chapters, Piper’s mind

never fully left the academy (at least with respect to a serious engagement of the life of the mind), and Carson’s heart never left the church. This once rare, now increasingly common,

blending of heart and head produced two extraordinarily

fruitful ministries in the last thirty years that have conspired, along with others, to wean a new generation of thoughtful

and pastoral evangelical leaders ready to plant and develop

the churches and institutions of the twenty-first century—

a new generation of spiritual leaders increasingly uneasy

about leaving behind rigorous thinking for the pastorate or

abandoning a pastor’s heart for the academy.

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Conclusion 109

From Where Has This Impulse Come?

Why has there arisen this impulse in our day toward pas-

tor-scholars and scholar-pastors? Why are so many in the

younger generation reluctant to let the pastoral and scholarly roads diverge? Among many factors, it is worth pointing to

the amazing half-century explosion of the evangelical move-

ment in the United States that is paving a two-lane road where once stood a fork. Not only have we seen a stunning advance

in evangelical publications but also a proliferation of preaching and teaching via the Internet (written, audio, and now

video). Combine this with the number of models the previous

generation has produced—one thinks not only of Piper and

Carson, but of others like Tim Keller, Al Mohler, Mark Dever, Ligon Duncan, Gordon Hugenberger, Sam Storms, and others—and, under God, you have a recipe for the revival of a

new generation of Jonathan Edwards–like pastor-scholars.

Beyond these contemporary examples come the more

distantly historical examples of Athanasius and Augustine,

Luther and Zwingli and Calvin, along with John Bunyan,

Andrew Fuller, and the Puritans.

And beyond these stalwarts is the apostle Paul, a man

with both a manifestly first-rate intellect and a heart big

enough to feel “the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for

all the churches” (2 Cor. 11:28).1

Beyond Paul is the example of the truest pastor-scholar

of all, who even at age twelve gave evidence of both his

scholarly mind and his pastoral heart. Like a scholar, “all

who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his

answers” (Luke 2:47) while he responded to his parents, like

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110 Conclusion

a pastor, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s

house?” (Luke 2:49). When fully grown, as a scholar, he

knew the Scriptures better than any and could silence the

learned Pharisees with a word; and as pastor, he called chil-

dren to himself and lovingly trained his disciples through

their sluggishness and chronic incompetence.

Jesus, the God-man, is the ultimate model of engaging

both heart and head, not compromising either for the other.

He is both “the chief Shepherd” (1 Pet. 5:4) and the one

whose wisdom is greater than Solomon’s (Matt. 12:42). He is

not only “the great shepherd of the sheep” (Heb. 13:20) and

“the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls” (1 Pet. 2:25), but

also in Luke 24, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets,

he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27) and was the master professor who

with his teaching, by the work of his Holy Spirit, “opened

their minds to understand the Scriptures” (Luke 24:45).

This new generation of Christian leaders does well to

look to Piper and Carson and Keller and the others. We

may do even better, in some senses, in looking to Luther and

Calvin. We do better still looking to Paul. And we do best

looking to Jesus.

The Importance of the Center

The temptations are great, in the life of both the pastor-

scholar and the scholar-pastor, to give greater and greater

attention to the peripheral things, to the multitude of mar-

ginally important subjects. The peripheral and marginal no

doubt at times do need our attention, at times even great

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Conclusion 111

attention. But as a Christian leader, whether pastor-scholar

or scholar-pastor, the servant of the Lord comes back again

and again to the old, old story that is the very heart of the faith. It is the gospel that apostle Paul says is of “first importance” (1 Cor. 15:3). It is the gospel that is “the power of

God for salvation” (Rom. 1:16). It is the gospel that not only saves the lost but is “at work in you believers” (1 Thess.

2:13), the gospel that is “bearing fruit and growing” (Col.

1:6), not only worldwide but in us and in our church com-

munities. So it is the gospel that Paul leaves with the spiritual leaders of Ephesus in his farewell address to them in Acts

20: “I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified” (v. 32). It is the gospel that builds up and makes us holy.

So in charging pastors to be more serious about the life

of the mind, and in challenging scholars to be more engaged

with the life of the church, we conclude with this prayer,

that all our thoughtful shepherding and all our pastoral

scholarship may be to the great end of having the gospel

message about Jesus dwell richly (Col. 3:16) both in us and

in our people; that knowing Jesus would be the great end of

all our pastoring and our scholarship; that we ourselves, in

all our preaching, writing, studying, and counseling, would

continue to see ourselves as the great beneficiaries of his

great grace; that into eternity we would be followers of Jesus more and more shaped, saturated, and transformed by his

person and work. To Jesus, the great pastor-scholar, be the

glory. Amen.

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Notes

Introduction: The Return of the Pastor-Scholar

1. Media from the evening, including both talks and a question-and-answer session, may be found at http://pastortheologian.com, the specially created website for the event.

2. These lectures were given November 10–11, 2009, at The

Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. They were entitled “Doing Faith: Seeking (and Showing) in Company with Christ” and can be accessed at http://thegospel coalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2010/03/18/vanhoozer-on-redrama tizing-theology/.

3. “The Pastor as Theologian: Preaching and Doctrine,” in

R. Albert Mohler Jr., He Is Not Silent: Preaching in a Postmodern World (Chicago: Moody, 2008), 105–14.

4. David Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 40.

5. Douglas A. Sweeney, Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 197–200.

6. Gerald L. Hiestand, “Pastor-Scholar To Professor-Scholar:

Exploring The Theological Disconnect Between The Academy And

The Local Church,” Westminster Journal of Theology 70 (Fall 2008): 356–72.

7. Daniel L. Akin, A Theology for the Church (Nashville: Broad-man, 2007).

Chapter 1: The Pastor as Scholar

1. F. F. Bruce, In Retrospect: Remembrance of Things Past (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), 306.

2. Jonathan Edwards, “Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival,”

in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 4, The Great Awakening, ed.

C. C. Goen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 387.

3. Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations in this chapter are from the ESV® Bible ( The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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114 Notes

4. See Appendix 2 in John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010).

5. Peter Stuhlmacher, Vom Verstehen des Neuen Testaments: eine Hermeneutik (p. 170), echoes Schlatter: “Wissenschaft is ertstens Sehen uns zweitens Sehen and drittens Sehen und immer und immer wieder Sehen.”

6. To read the rest of Kilby’s resolutions for mental health, see John Piper, The Pleasures of God (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2000), 95–96.

7. My biographical tribute to Lewis, titled “Lessons from an Incon-solable Soul: Learning from the Mind and Heart of C. S. Lewis,” is avail-able at http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Biographies/4503.

8. John Piper, “Love Your Enemies”: Jesus’ Love Command in the Synoptic Gospels and the Early Christian Parenesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

9. I do want to honor my late professor Leonhard Goppelt. He was, as far as I could discern, a truly godly man with a high view of the gospel and of the Lord Jesus. He was extraordinarily courteous and solicitous of me as a foreign student. His untimely death in December 1973 was tragic, and it was because of his high esteem in the eyes of his colleagues that I was able (with the help of Georg Kretch-mar) to finish my degree.

10. Jonathan Edwards, “Miscellanies,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 13, ed. Thomas Schafer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 495, miscellany #448.

11. C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Har-court, 1958), 97; emphasis added.

12. Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, ed. John Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 348–49.

Chapter 2: The Scholar as Pastor

1. Arnold A. Dallimore, George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth-Century Revival, vols. 1

and 2 (Banner of Truth, 1970, 1980).

2. Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Dutton, 2008).

3. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (repr. San Francisco: Harper-One, 2001).

4. Scripture quotations in this chapter are from the Holy Bible, Today’s New International Version. tniv®. Copyright© 2001, 2005

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Notes 115

by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

5. Lyrics from “I’ll Wish I Had Given Him More,” words and

music by Grace Reese Adkins, 1948 (renewed 1976, Lillenas); online at http://hymnal.calvarybaptistsv.org/393.html.

6. D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1997).

7. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge, eds. Scripture and Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1983).

8. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge, eds., Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1986).

9. Leon Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956).

10. Leon Morris, The New Testament and the Jewish Lectionaries (London: Tyndale Press, 1964).

11. D. A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid, eds., Justification and Variegated Nomism, vols. 1 and 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2001, 2004).

Conclusion:

The Preacher, the Professor, and the True Pastor-Scholar

1. Scripture quotations in this chapter are from the ESV® Bible ( The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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General Index

Akin, Daniel, 16

Carson, D. A., 14–15, 17, 107,

Anglo-Catholics, 86–87

108; calling of to be a pastor,

anti-intellectualism, 37, 76–77

78–82; at Cambridge Univer-

Apostolic Preaching of the

sity, 80, 83, 85–88; education

Cross, The (Morris), 95

of, 76; experience of with

Athanasius, 109

university “missions,” 83–84;

atheism, 83–84

friendship of with his Dok-

Augustine, 14, 23, 109

torvater, 86–88; at Trinity

Evangelical Divinity School

Bethlehem Baptist Church,

(TEDS), 81

45–46, 72, 108

Carson, Marg, 107

Bethlehem College and Semi-

Carson, Tom, 107

nary, 72

Christians, 106

Bethlehem Institute, 72

Confessions (Augustine), 23

Bible, the, 64, 65; revelation

Courage to Be Protestant, The

of God in, 66, 67; rigor

(Wells), 16

required in the reading of,

63–66; as the whole counsel

Dallimore, Arnold, 73

of God, 62–63

Dever, Mark, 109

Bromiley, Geoffrey, 37

Devil, the, 50, 61

Bruce, F. F., 21–22, 23, 107

discipleship, 14, 41

Bunyan, John, 23, 109

Duncan, Ligon, 109

Calvin, John, 14, 109

Edwards, Jonathan, 14, 34,

Cambridge University, 85

39–40, 41, 46

Carl F. H. Henry Center for

Emmanuel College, 85

Theological Understanding,

End for Which God Created the

15

World, The (Edwards), 40

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118 General Index

Essay on the Trinity (Edwards),

hedonism, Christian, 46, 49;

40

and zeal, 53

evangelicalism, 37, 101; growth

Henry, Carl F. H., 81, 107

of in the United States, 109

Henry, NoÎl, 33, 35, 37

evangelism, 14

Hermeneutics, Authority, and

Canon (Carson and Wood-

Fuller, Daniel, 38–40

bridge), 89

fundamentalism, 37

Hiestand, Gerald, 16

Hirsch, E. D., 38

Gagging of God, The (Carson),

Holmes, Arthur, 30

83

Holy Spirit, the, 49, 54, 55, 59,

God: fear of, 27, 29; God’s

61, 63, 64, 92, 110

distribution of gifts, 94–95;

Hugenberger, Gordon, 109

God’s granting of under-

standing to believers, 53–54;

Jesus, 24, 47, 48, 50, 54, 55;

knowing God, 84; our cre-

“first commandment” of,

ation in God’s image ( imago

74–77; and human logic,

Dei), 92; our love for God,

55–57; Jesus’s hatred of those

74–77; pursuit and revela-

who lack the conviction of

tion of Gods glory through

their beliefs, 57–59; know-

our joy, 21, 39, 46–47, 48,

ing Jesus, 111; as a model

49, 50–52, 67; revelation

for pastor-scholars, 109–10;

of in the Bible, 66, 67; right

presence of in the host, 88; as

thinking concerning God, 51;

the Word of God, 63

righteousness of, 65; sover-

Jesus and the Kingdom (Ladd),

eignty of, 40, 44; treasuring

37

of God’s glory, 47; worth and Jonathan Edwards and the Min-value of, 47; wrath of, 64,

istry of the Word (Sweeney),

65. See also Bible, the, as the

16

whole counsel of God

joy, biblical basis for the schol-

Goppelt, Leonhard, 41, 114n9

arly service of, 53; and the

grace, 40, 43, 88, 92, 93, 111

Bible as the whole counsel

Grace Abounding (Bunyan), 23

of God, 62–63; calling

of pastors to be teachers,

Hackett, Arthur, 30–31

61–62; having zeal accord

He Is Not Silent (Mohler), 16

with knowledge, 53; and the

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General Index 119

importance of Pauls rhetori-

New Testament and the Jewish

cal questions, 59–61; Jesus’s

Lectionaries, The (Morris),

assumption of human logic,

95

55–57; Jesus’s hatred of

New Testament Theology

those lacking the conviction

(Ladd), 37

of their beliefs, 57–59; and

Ockenga, Harold John, 36, 108

life given through reason-

Ortlund, Ray, Sr., 37

ing, 54–55; and the need for

Owen, John, 85

rigorous reading of the Bible,

63–66; understanding arrived pastor-scholars, 13–14, 71–73,

at through thinking, 53–54

105–6; and the ability to

Justification of God, The: An

teach, 61–62; centrality

Exegetical and Theological

of the gospel to, 110–11;

Study of Romans 9:1–23

influences for a revival of

(Piper), 44

pastor-scholars, 109–10; and

the over-intellectualizing of

Christian faith, 49. See also

Kantzer, Kenneth S., 81, 96, 107

pastor-scholars, lessons for

Keller, Tim, 73, 109

pastor-scholars, lessons for:

Kilby, Clyde, 32, 34

avoid becoming a quar-

termaster, 82–84; avoid

Ladd, George, 37

lone-ranger scholarship,

Lake Avenue Congregational

104; beware the seduction

Church, 37

of applause, 84–90; fight the

Lewis, C. S., 34–35, 46, 74

common disjunction between

Lloyd-Jones, Martyn, 14

the “objective study” of

logic, Aristotelian, 55–56

Scripture and the “devotional

reading” of Scripture, 90–91;

Luther, Martin, 14, 109

importance of stressing the

Lydia, 55

“main thing” in teaching

different subjects, 100–102;

Men Made New (Stott), 36

love the church, 103; never

Mere Christianity (Lewis), 74

forget people, 91–94; pray

Mohler, R. Albert, Jr., 16, 109

and work for vision, 102–3;

Morris, Leon, 95

recognize different gifts in

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120 General Index

others, 94–98; recognize

influences on the synthesis of

what students learn, 98–99;

mind and heart at, 34–35

show interest in the work of

Piper, Ruth, 107

others, 105; take work seri-

Poetry and Life (Kilby), 32–33

ously, 105

postmodernism, 31; postmodern

Paul, 25, 62, 64, 109; use of

epistemology, 84

reasoning by, 54–55; use

of rhetorical questions by,

reading: diversity in, 97–98;

59–61

importance of in scholarship,

Perrin, Norman, 37

38–39

Piper, Bill, 107

Reason for God, The (Keller),

Piper, John, 15, 17, 66–67, 73,

72–73

82, 88, 107; at Bethel Col-

lege, 42–45; at Bethlehem

Schaeffer, Francis, 31

Baptist Church, 45–46, 72;

scholars: as “academics,”

childhood of, 26–27; disil-

71–72; tasks of, 39. See also

lusionment of with technical

pastor-scholars

scholarship, 42; doctoral

scholarship, 21, 26, 39, 42, 62,

studies of at the University

65; biblical and theological

of Munich, 41–43; faith of

scholarship, 77–78; evangeli-

in Jesus, 26, 29–30; at Fuller

cal scholarship and Jesus’s

Seminary, 36–41; high school

“first commandment,” 74–

experiences of, 27–30; opin-

77; and innovation, 101–2;

ion on speaking about what

linkage between Christ-exalt-

means most to him, 22–25;

ing joy and scholarly effort,

as a pastor-scholar, 25–26,

49–50

108; publication of his dis-

Scripture and Truth (Carson and

sertation, 43; as a romantic-

Woodbridge), 89

rationalist, 40. See also Piper,

Simon, Richard, 76

John, at Wheaton College

Society of St. Francis, 86, 87

Piper, John, at Wheaton College, Spurgeon, C. H., 14

30; as the bridge to a career

Storms, Sam, 109

in ministry, 35–36; influences

Stott, John, 36

on his heart at, 32–33; influ-

Sweeney, Douglas, 16

ences on his mind at, 30–32;

systematic theology, 100

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General Index 121

Theological Dictionary of the

Wells, David, 16

New Testament (Kittle), 37

Welsh, Evan, 35

Theology for the Church, A

Wessel, Walt, 43

(Akin), 16

Westminster Journal of Theol-

Trinity, the, patristic formula-

ogy, 16

tions of, 100

Whitefield, George, 73

Trinity Evangelical Divinity

Wilkerson, Richard, 79

School (TEDS), 96, 108

Woodbridge, John, 89

Wren, Christopher, 85

Validity in Interpretation

(Hirsch), 38

Zwingli, Ulrich, 109

Vanhoozer, Kevin J., 16

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Scripture Index

Deuteronomy

24:27 110

6 75

24:32 61

24:45 110

Psalms

110 75

John

3 83

Song of Solomon

5:44 24

8:4 33

Acts

Ezekiel

16 55

22:30 79

17:2–3 54

19:9 62

Matthew

20 111

20:27 62

12:42 110

20:32 111

13:44 47

21:23–27 57

Romans

1:15 65

Mark

1:15–21 64

12 75

1:16

65, 111

12:29–30 74

1:16a 64

1:16b

64, 65

Luke

1:16c 65

2:47 109

1:17a

65

2:49 110

1:17b

65

12 55

1:18

64, 65

12:54–57 56

1:19a

64, 65

12:55 56

1:19b

65

12:57 57

1:19b–20b 64

24 110

1:20a

65

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124 Scripture Index

1:20b

65

1 Timothy

1:20c

65

3:2

61

1:21a

65

1:21b

65

2 Timothy

1:21c

65

2:2

77, 78, 93

1:21d

65

2:7

53

10:1

53

2:15

63

10:2

53

Hebrews

1 Corinthians

13:20

110

5:6

59

6:2

59

1 Peter

6:9

59

1:23

55

6:15

59, 60

2:25

110

6:19

59

3:15

47

8

77

5:4

110

15:3

111

2 Corinthians

1:8–9

25

4:2

59

6:10

48

11:28

109

Ephesians

1:11

40

4:11

61

Philippians

1:12–13 25

2:3

24

Colossians

1:6

111

2:1–2

25

3:16

111

1 Thessalonians

2:13

111

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Table of Contents

Part One: Introduction

Chapter 1: The Pastor as Scholar

Chapter 2: The Scholar as Pastor