Part 2

My academic "conversion" has driven me to serve the church rather than merely the academy. Although I am a full-time professor of Old Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary, I also serve as Senior Pastor of Ballantyne Presbyterian Church (ARP) in Charlotte. The latter position provides me with the opportunity to put my studies into action. It gives me an appropriate outlet for and application of all the study and teaching I do at the seminary. In reality, the work at the seminary and at the church feed off of one another: I teach what I preach, and I preach what I teach. Over the years, the teaching and the preaching have begun to resemble one another more and more. Again, I am a disciple who happens to be a scholar.

This second "conversion" has also greatly affected my writing. My desire at this point in life is to write books that bridge the gap between the technical and the popular. I believe that one in my position ought to take all the exegetical skills to the text, but then explain the text in very practical and understandable terms. I believe our preaching ought to do that as well: do all the labors on the text, and then translate it for the people. This is what George Whitefield said was "preaching the market language." And, so, all my effort is to glorify Christ and to teach his church through my scholarship. I am a disciple who happens to be a scholar.

Academic Conversion Part 1

On a personal note:

David Hubbard of Fuller Seminary once made the comment, "I am not a scholar who happens to be a disciple, but I am a disciple who happens to be a scholar. That statement reflects my philosophy and sentiments exactly. Academics and scholarship are a means to serve Jesus Christ. Teaching, and all that goes with it, is a vocation and a calling to be used to help build the kingdom of God.

I have not always thought that way. Soon after my conversion, I entered college with little direction or idea of what I wanted to do with my life (note: I did not say "what the Lord wanted me to do with my life" -- such a concept was quite foreign at that time). My first college class was Old Testament Survey taught by Marvin Wilson -- when I left that class on the very first day, I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Again, I did not necessarily see this as the Lord's hand, but rather a personal desire and decision. But as John Flavel once said, "some providences are like the letters of the Hebrew language, they must be read backwards." I look back now, of course, and I see God's hand in all of it.

Along with my conversion came an insatiable desire to learn, a yearning that I had heretofore been wholly unfamiliar with. So at nineteen years old my education truly began: I had to learn how to read properly, how to write properly, and how to speak properly. An all-consuming desire to be an educated/civilized person took control of everything. By the time I finished my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, in my own mind I had become an academic. This was the driving force: I wanted to be accepted in academia, not as a Christian scholar, but merely as a scholar. My early writings reflect such a drive: such stellar pieces as "Storehouse Construction in Iron Age Israel," "Building 5900 at Shechem Reconsidered," "Beehive Buildings of Ancient Palestine," and "Iron Age Pits in Israel" (in which I deal with the topic of ancient mouse droppings!) just flowed from my pen. In some ways, I had become the academic technician writing stuff for the academic community, and for that community alone.

Teaching college students for thirteen years at Grove City College helped to take some of the luster off of the academic/professorial image, but, in reality, it was not until I came to Reformed Theological Seminary that I had an academic conversion. In an interview at the time of his retirement, I. Howard Marshall was asked if he regretted anything regarding his vocation as an academic. He said, "I think looking back I would like to have done more to bring together the academic study of the New Testament and the problems expounding Scripture and using it in the church." That is my vocational conversion: I do not want to come to the end of my teaching and writing career and have a similar regret. We need not hide or compromise our scholarship, but we must serve the kindgom with it -- we must drive our scholarship to the church.

End Part 1

The Tavern Keeper

I recently ran across the story of a profane, ungodly tavern keeper in England during the 17th century. He was dead and lost in his sin. His one redeeming quality is that he loved music. And so he decided to attend one of John Wesley's meetings so that he could hear the singing. He had, however, decided not to listen to the sermon. And so he sat through the sermon with his head down and his fingers in his ears.

But when God wants to speak to a soul he can do it and use means that seem very strange to us. As the man stubbornly refused to listen to the sermon, a fly landed on his nose. For a moment he moved his hand to drive it away, and as he did he heard nine words of the sermon: "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." From that moment on the man had no rest in his soul. He came to the next meeting, listened eagerly to the gospel, and was saved.

Saward

Michael Saward makes the following comment as he surveys the decades that laid the foundation for today's post-modern church:

"This is the disturbing legacy of the 1960s and 1970s. A generation brought up on guitars, choruses, and home group discussion. Educated, as one of them put it to me, not to use words with precision because the image is dominant, not the word. Equipped not to handle doctrine but rather to 'share'. A compassionate, caring generation, suspicious of definition and labels, uneasy at, and sometimes incapable of, being asked to wrestle with sustained didactic exposition of theology. Excellent when it comes to providing religious music, drama, and art. Not so good when asked to preach and teach the Faith."

Puritan Richard Rogers

J. I. Packer tells the story of the Puritan Richard Rogers as he calls his audience to value the Word of God more highly. Rogers personates God to the people, telling them, "Well, I have trusted you so long with my Bible; you have slighted it, it lies in such and such houses all covered with dust and cob-webs; you care not to listen to it. Do you use my Bible so? Well, you shall have my Bible no longer." And he takes up the Bible from his cushion, and seemed as if he were going away with it and carrying it from them; but immediately turns again and personates the people of God, falls down on his knees, cries and pleads most earnestly, "Lord, whatever thou dost to us, take not thy Bible from us; kill our children, burn our houses, destroy our goods; only spare us thy Bible, only take not away thy Bible." And then Rogers personates God again to the people: "Say you so? Well, I will try you a while longer; and here is my Bible for you. I will see how you will use it, whether you will love it more . . . observe it more . . . practise it more, and live more according to it." By these actions . . . Rogers put all the congregation into so strange a posture that . . . the place was a mere Bochim, the people generally . . . deluged with their own tears; and . . . he himself, when he got out was fain to hang a quarter of an hour upon the neck of his horse weeping before he had the power to mount; so strange an impression was there upon him, and generally upon the people, upon having been expostulated with for the neglect of the Bible.

Mather on Preaching

"Exhibit as much as you can of a glorious Christ. Yea, let the motto upon your whole ministry be: Christ is all. Let others develop the pulpit fads that come and go. Let us specialize in preaching our Lord Jesus Christ."
--Cotton Mather

Kuyper

Abraham Kuyper, the great Dutch theologian, once made the point that the reformation creed is not simply Deo Gloria ("to God be the glory") but Soli Deo Gloria ("to God be the glory alone"). That is an important distinction that we need to keep in mind.