Tom Steller: We’re open to any questions that you would like to direct to one or more of the people up here. What we’d ask you to do is to stand and ask your question. Maybe I will begin with a question that was handed to me and then give you a chance to think of some of your questions, but this is a question directed to John Piper. One person asks, “As a young pastor who only in recent years has embraced Reformed theology, I would like to know how one moves a congregation toward Reformed theology without causing panic, suspicion, and even church splits. The presupposition is that most American congregations are more non-Calvinistic than Calvinistic.”

John Piper: I think Don Carson has given us good counsel in doing expository preaching so that your people grow in their confidence that you are getting everything you give them from specific biblical passages that you can point to incontrovertibly. Instead of starting with theology or quoting Calvin or Wesley or Whitfield or anybody, you start from texts, and systematically you work through text. You don’t need to use the buzzwords for a long time unless they’re right there in the text. I don’t think I mentioned the word “Calvinism” the first five years I was in this church. They heard God a lot and they heard the sovereignty of God a lot and they heard prayers.

I was talking to a guy the other night on the phone. He was a candidate for our business administrator position, I think. And I said, “Well, can you tell me where you are theologically?” I didn’t even know I could use the word theological with this person. That might be a wrong word. And he said, “Well, I could tell from last Sunday, we visited, we snuck in last Sunday, and I could just tell from the way you prayed, you’re probably a Calvinist, aren’t you?” From the way I prayed. I didn’t know what I said. I probably used the word, “God, would you cause us to love you,” or something like that, and people kind of think, “Does God have the right to do that?”

So you can pray it as well. Evidently people hear it in prayers. But mainly, you take the Scriptures, and over years of faithful exposition, make God central. If Spurgeon is right, that Calvinism is simply putting God way at the top and putting man way down here, what you say you want your church to be known for is being a God-centered church. I’ve never heard anybody say, “Oh, that’s a bad idea.” But as soon as they buy into that, a God-centered church where the supremacy of God and the glory of God is what’s breathed, when you get to the key texts, like Romans 8:30, and you decide to do a series on that verse, it’s a done deal. I mean, if they’re spiritually ready to submit to the supremacy of God and you come to that text and you spend four or five weeks unpacking each of those statements and showing how it is inevitable that those who are justified will be glorified and therefore the perseverance is there.

Here’s one other tip. When I wrote my little booklet for the church called the Five Points of Calvinism. We just started calling it what it was after a while. I start with effectual call. I start with the power of grace. I don’t start with predestination, because I found pastorally it was most helpful. I’m going to give you an illustration, and then I’ll stop talking. A woman came up to me after some sermon, years ago. She was so upset with me. She said, “I just can’t believe you think God chooses some and not others. I just can’t believe you believe that. It just doesn’t fit with my view of God at all.” And she lived down in Phillips. And I was walking home and I said, “Why don’t we just walk together and I’ll stop at my house and you keep going?”

As we crossed the bridge, I asked her, “Tell me how you got saved?” I said, “What was the key moment or thing?” And she said, “Well, I was a little girl. I was nine years old. And I was coming home from school one day. I was very tall. These friends of mine started making fun of me and made up a song about me. And something happened inside of me. I was in a Christian home. Something happened inside of me that I didn’t get mad at them. I actually felt love for them. And I was so surprised at what I was feeling, I went home. And I date my conversion from that moment.”

And I said, “Do you think you did that? Do you think you just created that thing in you, that moment of love and authenticity?” And she said, “Oh, no, no, I wasn’t like that.” I said, “That’s all I’m trying to teach. That’s it. That’s all I’m trying to say.” God did that. Don’t you think God did that? She said, “Yes.” Now, I didn’t press her at this point. What I would’ve said theologically was, “Did he plan to do it? When did he plan to do it?” You see? So I think if you start where people are, you find that seed of grace that’s in every born-again person, and their theology is all confused. They don’t know what they believe, but God’s there. And you take the seed of submission to God and then you show them his work in their life. And little by little they want to give him credit for that because they’re born of God. And as they give him more and more credit for more and more things, they wind up in eternity and they’re a Calvinist.

Questioner: Dr. Carson, I agree with your statement the first night that every text ought to point to Christ. How far we should take the message of Christ? For example, we have people in our congregation who feel that unless we give them the three or four gospel points and a seven-minute altar call at the end, we haven’t preached Christ. How do you approach that question?

D.A. Carson: Well, there are really two questions there, I think. The one question is how to deal with people of limited expectations with respect to what the gospel is or the flagships that identify the gospel — do you have an altar call or not, and that sort of thing. And on that score, it seems to me if you go into a church with that kind of situation, I agree with John’s advice. You start pushing the envelope. When I first became pastor of Richmond Baptist Church, I started off, believe it or not, with 25-minute sermons. After about two years, by which time I was doing about 45 minutes, the deacons came to me and quietly asked, “How much time would you like?” But it takes a while to get there, and then you have to change the anticipation as to what the gospel is. What people mean by “the gospel” is what is sometimes rather derogatorily referred to as “the simple gospel.”

Well, there’s a sense in which the gospel is simple, but evangelion is the whole good news of the dawning of the kingdom, the coming of Jesus Christ to fulfill the antecedent Scriptures and bring about the effectual calling of his people to prepare them for glory, the gift of the Spirit which comes down upon us in anticipation of the great day. I mean, that’s the simple gospel, and so you have to change people’s perspectives and expectations and categories. Now, I think that was probably the more important of the two questions that you were raising. Is that fair?

Questioner: When you were talking about types in the Old Testament, you made a comment that there are rules whereby a person can identify and understand these types. Could you give us just a little window into some of the basic rules of picking up on Old Testament types and interpreting them correctly?

Carson: If you recall, what I also said is I would need to bump up the 20 hours I wanted to 30. There is a long discussion in the literature amongst evangelicals, let alone amongst others, as to whether or not it is ever legitimate for a believer to find a type that is not virtually explicitly referred to as a type; or to put it another way, can we reduplicate the exegesis of the Old Testament found in the New? So in a very significant book by Richard Longenecker, for example, argues that basically when the New Testament interprets the Old, in terms of what we call grammatical-historical exegesis, the answer is yes. When it does typology, generically, however you define it, you can’t. That’s what he argues.

So for him, the control for typology is simply placed in the New Testament where the New Testament uses the Old in such and such a way. And so you are simply faithful to the text by articulating that way, but you can’t read any other part of the Old Testament that way. Now, I know what he’s trying to protect against. He’s trying to protect against the red cord of Rahab really referring to the blood of Christ, and you name it — the kind of speculation that at the end of the day may be wonderfully edifying, but it leaves the text so far behind you need field glasses to see it.

At the end of the day, I think that what he has done has fallen into the trap of reading the New Testament use of the Old purely in terms of Jewish appropriation techniques, what are called the rules of appropriation of texts. And he thinks that they are so arbitrary from anything that we can understand with our mindset that at the end of the day, because we’re Christians, we take Scripture seriously. The New Testament says that’s what it means; okay, that’s what it means, but I don’t have a clue how it gets there. You can’t justify it.

That was exactly the view, for example, of John Broadus in his Matthew commentary in 1886. Matthew is one of the more difficult books in this respect because it has so many quotations. And some of them are really very interesting: “Out of Egypt, have I called my Son.” What on earth do you do with that? And again and again and again when it comes up to the hard ones, what John Broadus says is simply, “I don’t have a clue why they should cite this sort of text. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but because we believe it’s the word of God, therefore it must be true,” and he moves on to the next point. And I prefer that to saying what modern scholarship says. It says the exegesis is arbitrary and we can’t possibly do that. Or the in-between position of a Longenecker that says the exegesis is arbitrary, it follows Jewish rules and it’s not grammatical-historical exegesis, so we can’t reduplicate it, but we’ll accept this one.

I think that instead you can, by examining enough of them, discover that there are principles operating — principles, structures, types — so that you can push the envelope, and without the same authority as when Scripture does it, interpret other Scriptures the same way. And I suggest to you that there are texts in scripture that warrant you doing it. For example, in Hebrews 9–10 you get the description of the tabernacle and this sort of thing, you start getting this little description of this. He says, “And there are many other things that we give you, only we don’t have time to give it to you now.” I mean, don’t you start saying, “Boy, I wonder what he’d do with the silver sockets?” Don’t you start asking some questions like that? Do you see?

So it’s that sort of question that has interested me a great deal in recent years to try to understand the patterns and paradigms and so on and so on and so on. And then I think you can do it with other Scriptures as well by following the same sorts of principles. Now, to lay those out inductively and convince you of them takes some time. And I don’t have them all straight in my own mind. I’ve got quite a few of them that I’m very convinced of, some that I’m not quite sure of. But I’m still working my way through these sorts of things, so I’m not ready to write a book. But some of the ones that I gave you yesterday were at least some of the easier ones, in that you’ve got passages where you have a before and after pattern where something comes along and because it’s later, but in the same sphere as something earlier, calls the permanent existence of that earlier thing into question.

Now, there are eight or 10 of those in the New Testament, so you start looking for them. Then if you find that feast after feast after feast points to Jesus in John’s Gospel — Passover, Feast of Tabernacles, and so on, so on, so on — then you start asking, “What is the function of the other feasts? How do they operate? How do they operate in the Old Testament? How are they related to the central temple rights? What do they prefigure? What is their point? How do they work?” The Feast of Tabernacles is not to be picked up only in Exodus, but it’s picked up in the reconstitution of the temple in Nehemiah 9. And it’s Nehemiah 9 that is picked up by Jesus in John 7, with respect to the Holy Spirit. The connection between Feast of Tabernacles and Spirit is found in Nehemiah.

So you start finding the inter-canonical connections through the Old Testament passages. And you’re drawing trajectories through. If you start finding that you’re able to draw the trajectories, you’re beginning to develop some controls, do you see? But always, always, always, always, at the end of the day, the thing must be textually defensible. It is never arbitrary. It is always textually defensible and principled. And otherwise, at the end of the day, it becomes so speculative that we revert to a sort of Arthur Pink exegesis, bless his heart.

Questioner: I have two questions for Dr. Carson, relative to postmodernity. Number one, can you recommend any books which might deal with it from an evangelical perspective? And then secondly, would you tell me how would a postmodernist respond to the criticism that it’s self-referentially absurd to speak of the fact that there are no objective truths in that that would undermine the very thing the person is saying? Would you respond to that?

Carson: On the first question, it’s a very difficult question to answer, not because there aren’t a lot of books on various facets of postmodernity, but because there are so many facets of postmodernity that there are very few books that give you an overview that are really good. For example, on deconstruction, which is an element of postmodernity, there are many deconstructionists. If you’re reading their primary sources, then you have to look them up, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, and so forth. The best single volume response that I know of to the Jacques Derrida form of deconstruction is by a chap called John Ellis, Princeton University Press, Against Deconstruction. He’s not a Christian, so there’s some parts of it that I don’t accept, but it’s an extremely lucid, rigorous critique of the Derridaian form of deconstruction that I found very useful to pass off to some people.

On postmodernism in literature, there’s a book that’s not bad by Lundin, at Wheaton College. I’ve forgotten the exact title. I tend to remember books by authors. And it’s not bad. My bibliography in this area is something like 60 or 70 pages long, and the problem is choosing the best of it. It will all be in print late summer, and you can choose from amongst those sorts of sources. The problem is that postmodernism is such a big category nowadays that there’s almost nothing that is dealing with it across its breadth.

Someone like Tom Oden, who’s a very interesting chap, very fresh, and precisely because he’s come out of various liberal camps and has moved in our direction, has many insightful things to say. In my view, he is miscuing badly on this one. He has all kinds of interesting things to say at the small level, but he sees the period of modernity from 1789 to 1989, that is, the French Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall. And it’s a nice 200-year period, and so on. But that misunderstands the fact that at the end of the day, the 1789 French Revolution was not an epistemological crisis. Undoubtedly, there were various epistemological crises that led up to it, but it was not revolutionary, in that sense. And the modernity/postmodernity debate is all about how you know anything. It’s all about epistemology. And 1989 has more to do with economics that brings down the Berlin Wall than about epistemology. So it seems that the categories are wrong. So there’s endless discussion where you pick up good points on details, where in my view, the vision of it is wrong.

One of the better writers in the whole area now is Dr. Kevin Vanhoozer and his lectures. There are only three or four lectures, but it was amongst the shrewdest and most lucid material I’ve been exposed to in recent years on postmodernity. I think he has it right. Now, he used to teach at Trinity. He’s a graduate ThM from Westminster. He did evangelism for two or three years in France, did a PhD at Cambridge, came to Trinity. He’s now lecturing at the University of Edinburgh. And he’s godly and he’s Reformed. I think he understands contemporary culture. He’s very shrewd. I might start there actually, when I stop to think about it, not with a book, but with his essays.

Questioner: Isn’t there something “self-referentially absurd” to say that there is no objective truth because it undermines the statement that there is no objective truth? How would the postmodernists respond to that critique?

Carson: Many popular postmodernists can’t, which means that when you’re dealing with them, you start having to do a Francis Schaeffer on them and destroy their system internally. And that’s often the first point. I remember teaching a joint Chicago-area seminary course. We sometimes run evening courses by the different seminaries, just to see what would happen when you put these different perspectives together. It was on hermeneutics a number of years ago. I had my three or four nights and others had their three or four nights. And there was a woman, a doctoral student in the course, I think from Seabury-Western, which would make Bultmann look like a flaming conservative. She came and she heard me do my thing. And this was eight or 10 years ago, when I still hadn’t thought enough of this stuff through. I probably wasn’t handling it very well. I was trying to make a place for the new hermeneutic, but not let it run free, and still to insist on objective truth, but the problems of subjectivity fully acknowledged in how you approach truth asymptotically, and all this kind of thing.

In the first long question period, she told me in no uncertain terms that she thought I was a 19th century modernist and probably bigot as well, hopelessly conservative, and that I didn’t really understand what was going on in the realms of epistemology, and on and on and on. So I tried coming back at her. And after 15 minutes of very frustrating give-and-take, in a moment of sheer intellectual perversity on my part, I said to her, “I think I finally understand now what you’re saying. You are using irony in order to affirm the objectivity of truth.” She said, “I am not. I’m not doing anything of the sort.” And she let me have it again. I said, “This is terrific, to add passion in order to increase the irony, in order to affirm the objectivity of truth. It’s a great device.” She said, “I’m not doing anything of the sort. You’re twisting everything I’m saying.”

And then she came down and I said, “But that’s how I’m reading you.” Now, it wasn’t kind and it wasn’t true, and I acknowledged it, but my point was not that I was telling the truth about how I was reading her or that I was being kind or otherwise. My point simply was that, interestingly enough, she was tying her meaning to authorial intent. So my question to her was, why wouldn’t she extend the same courtesy to Paul or to God? And at the end of the day, there are many people, even very confident people, who really haven’t thought that problem of the self-referential destruction through very clearly. But there are some people who have.

David Tracy, University of Chicago, and Langdon Gilkey have. These people have, and they openly acknowledge it. They acknowledge it’s a problem, but say there is no way out. Thus, at the end of the day, you make your own meaning, or you absorb certain kinds of cultural signs and make certain values normative, such as a war against sexism and so on. Tracy has got a long essay that argues exactly along those lines, perfectly candid, perfectly gentlemanly. But at the end of the day, there is no way out, and he would insist on that point and say that anybody who thinks there is a way out is self-deluded.

Questioner: I suspect that if Charles Spurgeon were to see his personal physician today, they would have recommended maybe two prescriptions for antidepressants and therapy. What’s your view when that knee-jerk reaction from the medical community — and many evangelicals are buying into it — is that it’s almost a badge of honor to say that you have a therapist or that you happen to be taking antidepressants? Just what’s your view and how do you think Spurgeon would have responded to that?

Piper: I think antidepressants should be a last resort, and therefore I don’t want to write them off. I don’t know the way the brain works. I don’t know how hormones work. I don’t know the seasonal dimension of things relating to depression, and therefore I want to maintain an openness toward the possible correction of chemical imbalances in the body. I think of menopause as a significant illustration of how that probably is not an illegitimate thing to do for many women.

However, having said it’s a last resort, I would want to then put in place, and I think Spurgeon would too, as many of the things that I mentioned up front. The Lord is a good physician, and not simply that he can touch a leper and take it away or do miraculous things, but that he has made bodies to need vitamin C. You get scurvy if you don’t have it. There’s nothing supernatural or weird about that. And my guess is America sleeps wrong, eats wrong and exercises wrong, and that accounts for probably 90 percent of our emotional problems.

I would stress this, especially in the case of teenagers. We have a structural issue in Minneapolis that creates depressed and suicidal teenagers. It’s called school starting at 7:00 a.m. Every teenager needs nine hours of sleep. They need it. To get up and go to school at 7:00 a.m. and catch the bus at 6:15 a.m. is difficult. If you’re a boy, you can probably get up at 5:45 a.m. If you’re a girl, it would probably have to be a little earlier. That means to get nine hours of sleep, you’ve got to go to bed at 8:30 p.m. at the latest. No teenagers get enough sleep in Minneapolis, none of them.

We all think it’s a natural thing to be moody as a teenager, to be moody and negative and rebellious. A huge percentage of it is owing to the fact that none of them get enough sleep. So you want to get on a crusade? Don’t fight for Prozac, fight crazy schedules that keep kids from getting the sleep they need. God designed these crazy bodies to need sleep. If we deny it, we will pay. And none of them eat right. They overdose on sugar and fats and carbohydrates. The statistics of overweightness in teenagers is that it’s about 13 percent ahead of 10 years ago right now. That’s going to kill us. That’s going to have all kinds of psychological effects. And then exercise. It’s a lazier group of Americans than it ever has been, lazier than it ever has been. We used to work on the farm, and you’d get those things going in your brains. There’s names for them that come when you do exercise, and they have antidepressant effects.

Now I don’t have any idea whether Spurgeon would because he was so fat, I don’t know whether he overate or not. I’ve looked everywhere to explain Spurgeon’s weight problem. Do you know his weight problem? I never saw a sermon on gluttony, but he did counsel against overeating before you preach because it does bad things for the mind. But he probably lived pretty high off the hog. He had a mansion, and he had a carriage and horses, and he didn’t take any money from his church, but he lived off his royalties and went to France whenever he wanted and bought his wife expensive gifts. I read one letter where he said, “There’s nothing I wouldn’t buy for you.” I probably would have a big critique of Spurgeon, that lifestyle level. So if you were here, he may not be saying the same thing I’m saying. He would probably say pray more, and that certainly is right.

But now let me go back and end where I started. Noël and I went to see marriage counselors for 33 months about four years ago because we’d hit the wall. And one of the big burdens we have at Bethlehem right now is what I experienced in those 33 months a layman could have done for me. A loving, mature, spiritually-sensitive, wise layman could have sat, listened, and counseled and loved like this good counselor did. Therefore, in our churches at Bethlehem, we want to figure out how you can get a professional who would partner with you, to begin to equip your people to do what probably 90 percent of the counseling situations need.

Most marriages need a third party to lovingly arbitrate the communication issues, to give them some space and some time to say what they need to say, to send them home, do a little homework and think and come back and to talk. Because if it’s just the two of you, you’ve worked on the thing for so long and you’ve hit your head against the wall so many times. Noël and I used to say one, and she’d say two, and I’d say, “Three,” because we knew the 10 sentences which were meant by each of those. We’ve been through this 80 times. I’m starting to feel discouraged about this. Well, she knows all the sentences that would follow, and I’d know which ones would follow after I gave my sentences, and she’d know which ones would follow. It was a dead-end street. And what you need at that point is a third person with wisdom to listen, catch a few things, pray with you, and bring you through the season. And there are other things. So last resort, yes, I’m open to Prozac and the new one I just read about, but there are so many things we haven’t done yet to help our people.

Carson: Could I add something to that? I’m not adding to what you’re saying. I’m just informing you that there are some churches that have set up situations exactly like that. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them. In Cambridge, England, for example, Eden Baptist Church, and two or three others, all with high gospel values have set up free hours by men and women who have some time to give and who are wise, experienced Christians under the control of a board that is made up of two pastors and a medical doctor. And they screen certain people and funnel people into that, so that the long-term people who need counseling and the kind of thing can be taken out from under the immediate pastoral responsibility but with medical help. There are a number of models like that going on in various corners.

Questioner: John Armstrong, you mentioned ministry as a lonely place. Would you counsel pastors to have a few close friends in the body or to have closest friends as other pastors, etc.?

John Armstrong: Just a comment before I answer that or respond to that. I want to agree with both what Dr. Piper and Dr. Carson have said and to encourage you if you can get ahold of it, two resources that have helped me quite a lot have been Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cures, which is a very wise book and particularly helpful because, as I think most of you know, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones was a medical doctor, and he has some of the best balance I think on the medical, chemical issues as well as he takes seriously the demonic concerns and also the normal emotional ebb and flow of personal experience. So you have real balance and real wisdom, I think, in that.

There is also an essay he did. I can’t remember the title of the book. It was published by Baker. It was on issues that dealt with healing and medicine and so forth, and it’s an essay on depression. I wish I could give you more bibliographic help than that. I’ll send you off looking for it, but it was of immense help to me personally. So just those two comments.

Now regarding the question about friends, I’d be very interested especially in Dr. Piper responding to this too because he’s in quite a bit of a different situation than my own. My church ministry for the previous 16 years was pastoring a small church. I can remember in seminary days being told, “Do not get close to people in your congregation. You will regret it. You will make mistakes. You will get hurt,” and so forth and so on. I’m sure some of you received the same counsel. I think that changed. Somewhere in the 1960s and 1970s, the ethos of the situation changed, and the counsel seemed to change with it, and it almost went the other way, as is often the case. The pendulum swung, and the counsel I kept hearing was, “Oh no, if you’re really a caring pastor and you love your people and you’re vulnerable and you’re transparent, then you will get close to at least some of your people. You will share your soul, you will be accountable, you will open your heart and life up to them,” and so forth and so on.

Well, I can only speak autobiographically at this point to say that in a small church, I was and I think still am hopefully with some maturity from experience, very transparent, very open, and very emotionally vulnerable with my people, and I went through a period of time where it almost ruined me. It almost ruined me because in the vulnerability of the relationship, I am not sure I chose wisely who to be vulnerable with at certain points, but I chose several individuals that seemed to encourage me at the depth of my soul and my being, and I shared some of my struggles with them.

When moral crises arose in the church, when an elder went off after another woman and it had to be dealt with, when another man was pursuing the gospel ministry and had five times tried to start a church or pastor a church and had five times failed, and not only had my patience run thin, but my realization that he was not called to the ministry was pretty apparent. I finally took the position, “Look, I’ve encouraged you all I can. I think you need to consider doing something else. Your ‘GPC’ means go plow corn, not go preach Christ. So you need to reevaluate your experience of the call you’ve shared so powerfully for the last six or eight years with this church.” And he turned against me as well and found allies in people who were nurturing their feelings about this discipline of this elder and how it had been handled.

All of that to say that in that mixture, one of the brothers who I had been the most vulnerable with, who wept with me, prayed with me on our knees, and I would have said at the time of three or four years in my life that I’ve never had a man I was closer to in the face of the earth than this brother, and he ended up hurting me more deeply than any man I’ve ever ministered to or with precisely because I would share my own humanity with him. And then when he took the offense that was circulating through the congregation, my humanity was used to destroy me. He turned it back on me.

I learned from that a lesson that you can share, and I think you must be vulnerable in a certain way, but I think you have to guard yourself. And this is where it was difficult. This man actually was an elected leader and should have known better, but that was a mistake in judgment too on my part in the church. I should have known better, I think. You have to share with your leaders. I’m sure Dr. Piper would say that with his elders here there’s a closeness and a bond and a sharing of the difficult task and burden of ministry that’s very close that you wouldn’t have with the rest of the church. But I would caution you to share the struggles that you may have with your wife with a larger group of people, or your struggles with someone in the leadership or their wife, and how things have happened with another person in the congregation.

So at 45 almost 46 years of age, I would say that from that I have learned to share with a group of pastors who are now my dearest friends, who share and bear with me their burdens and mutual trials and struggles at a level that is different than I have with the church. Though I’m not pastoring now, I still have a relationship with people I had in those last years in the church that was very close, but I had to walk away from that. When I left the church, I went into the ministry I’m in now. I stayed in the same home, stayed in the same town, and still saw the people who had been my congregation for 16 years. But I knew in my heart of hearts that this small church could not thrive and succeed if I stayed involved emotionally and spiritually in their lives.

Some people said, “Oh, you can stay, and they’ll get another pastor and you’ll be co-elders,” and all these kinds of idealistic things that sound so very good, but I’m convinced I made the right choice with the help of others. I walked away from it. On the 19th of February, for the first time in almost three years, I’ll go back into that church to preach. And that was very hard. But I have personally seen very few cases in my travels across the country where a man left the church and didn’t go to another church as pastor or stayed in the proximity that didn’t have problems if he had any ongoing relationship with that church. That’s just reality. That’s the way it is. Your idealism may say it ought to be different than that, but it really is that way. John, you might have something to say because in a larger church there are perhaps some differences, but that would be my counsel.

Steller: In a large church where you’re pouring your life into the church, I think it’s just inevitable that you develop relationships. I have developed relationships within the church, both staff-wise as well as with others, and have found great help from that, but also pain from it. I think that’s part of what was so hard about this last year is that people that were closest saw things very differently, and I think our relationships have survived. I think one’s in question. I am in a stage right now where I really don’t know, I don’t think I have the distance to give any wise counsel. But what I think I did realize this year is that it was peers outside the church that have come alongside me that have provided a stabilizing, strengthening dimension to my life, and we appreciate that very much.

Armstrong: Since I use the word “being alone” and “loneliness” as part and parcel of the preacher’s work, I want to elaborate one more thought that reflects on this question. Aloneness is not bad. It’s not bad. The Lord made us sociable and social beings for a good reason, but our Savior experienced the kind of aloneness that I think I was referring to yesterday, that his servants, especially his servants who preach the Gospel in labor in his Word, will experience. And I would urge you not to run away from aloneness. Loneliness is different. I think you ought to have friends, good friends, close friends, intimate friends. There’s every reason for that, but in the stress on social relationships in our present culture, it’s almost as if it’s a curse for you to experience loneliness and aloneness. In fact, it’s a place of ministry, of weakness, and out of that weakness you will find greater and greater opportunity because this world, as busy as it is, is filled with lonely people. And to experience and live some of that aloneness and loneliness is not a bad thing.

Questioner: Doug, could you maybe give us some ideas of some innovative things we could do at our churches to maybe reach out to people and get the people excited about doing things in our town so it could spill over and we’d be more excited about missions?

Doug Nichols: I have a hard time answering questions like this because I’ve never been a pastor. I’ve worked in a third world setting all my life, and I worked in a little church in California for three months, and I am very limited in that. All my exposure to churches is coming to a conference or a local fellowship. I love to go to small churches and work with the pastor for a while, like in the conference ministry for a week or a week and a half, and meet the people and so forth. As far as innovative ways, sometimes we forget about the old ways that we have thrown out simply because they’re old. You could simply have a missions meeting, a declaration of the truth of what the gospel says and the word of God says about missions, and then question-and-answer and mealtimes together. Let people ask questions and what the Scripture says about this. They might ask, “How can I personally be used around the world? How can I personally be used in planting a church or working with a street child or ministering to a child prostitute or whatever? What can I do?”

But it’s just basically being with people and ministering the word of God and letting people hear about what’s happening. So often, we are so worried about having a missions speaker or talking about missions that everybody’s going to run, but it doesn’t happen that way. Our people are very forgiving when they hear something genuine and truthful and hear about what’s happening around the world. It’s amazing what God does. I was in a church recently in Montana, Sunday morning, and there were 140 people. Sunday night there were 140 people. Monday night there were 140 people. Everybody in the church was there every single meeting. It was exciting. Now, you wouldn’t have that in some churches, but that church had prepared for this conference for a year. They were excited about it, and it wasn’t just tacked on. It was talked up, it was prayed over, it was budgeted for and prayed over some more. Now, that’s not an innovative way but it’s a good way.

I’m a member of a local church, 30 people. Let me back up a little bit. I would encourage you pastors to have best friends and to meet with a weekly Bible study, early morning. Start at 6:30 a.m. and study the word together. Just read the word together and discuss the word of God together. Let a layman lead it. You don’t lead it. Let somebody else lead it. Build up a group of men and friends. It doesn’t have to be just from your church, and study the word of God for an hour every once a week with people not only from your church but otherwise, another pastor, not to get together and discuss your problems with your church, just to minister the word of God and build up one another in the word once a week. I’m in a study like that.

We have 12 men from 12 different churches every Wednesday morning, 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. We eat from 7:30 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. and we still discuss the word. We leave at 8:00 a.m. And that’s the high point of my week aside from Sunday morning. I wouldn’t sleep in for that day. I don’t care. I’d have to be dead before I missed that service. I said to my wife coming to this conference, the only reason I hesitated coming to this conference is because I had to be here on Wednesday because it’s so significant. Now, you need to be in fellowships like that. Don’t be lonely on purpose and then complain about it, saying, “God, why haven’t you given me friends?” He that has friends must show himself friendly. And build your life. You have a lot to offer men. You give it and let your life benefit from the laymen that can minister to us God’s grace.

Steller: Maybe I could just answer one thing real quickly about innovative things. I think one of the things that has proved most fruitful in stimulating missions at Bethlehem has been an awareness on the pastor’s part of what God is doing among the people. And the way we found that out initially was we kind of heard a few reports here and there, but then John and Noël opened up their home. This is something that’s transferable to any church, big or small. They opened up their home on a Friday night, announced it from the pulpit the week before, and they said, “If anybody is thinking about missions either seriously or just remotely, come to my home and we’ll just have a time of sharing and prayer and vision.”

We started doing that back in 1984 and that has been sustained over the years. It’s not quite as strong now as it was back then, but God used that to bring people forward into the pastor’s home. And John and Noël committed to pray for them on a regular basis throughout the rest of that year. And that has been a real symbolic and very important thing. I think it’s something any of you could do is have a pastor show interest in those in whom God is stirring.

Questioner: This is for Dr. Carson. Last night, you were talking as you were talking about building a worldview, and you used Acts 17:25 where it says that God is not served by men’s hands. But then as you were defining the concept of sin, it sounded like you were saying that the people who were sinners are the ones who were saying that God serves them. If God is not served and God doesn’t seem to be the server, what’s left in there or was I misunderstanding you last night?

Carson: God does not need us in the sense that somehow he’s lacking in joy or fulfillment or satisfaction of his being unless we give him something that he’s otherwise missing. In fact, I would argue that one of the important elements in the doctrine of the Trinity is precisely that according to John 5, the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father. That has always been the case. So that God, though he is one, has never been solitary and thus in the perfections of his being, he doesn’t need us. In that sense, he is not served, but only in that sense. He does not serve us in the sense that we set the agenda and he is our servant. In other words, what I was really after was that form of evangelicalism in which the value of religion is measured by how much it improves me or makes me enjoy it or entertains me or the like.

Though most people who go by the name of evangelical would not be so crass as overtly to say God exists in order to serve me, that is nevertheless how they operate. And that is really another form of idolatry. So in that sense, I would say that God does not serve us. On the other hand, I would want to say that we do serve God and that He is the Lord and all of our lives ought to be orientated to his being and so on. So that in my model of sin, I tried to paint it that way. And God does serve us not because he is lacking anything and is not feeling fulfilled unless he does, or because we are the center of the universe and he exists for our good, but because he is that kind of God. So if I were fleshing things out in fuller detail, I would’ve put in more of the footnotes, but I was already pushing the 9:00 p.m. envelope and was probably saying too much too quickly, a fairly common sin on my part, I confess.

Questioner: At some point, Dr. Carson used an analogy — the entailments with the assumption of the gospel and pretty soon the gospel is denied. I’m wondering if any of you have any thoughts about that. It was mentioned that “evangelical” is a more and more plastic term. I tried “Orthodox” for a while, but that confuses people. Reformed is another thing, but there are sort of non-evangelical parts of that. As you look at our end of evangelicalism, are we sometimes assuming the gospel and concentrating on entailments? Are there some things that may be leading us almost to the point of being careless about central things because we’ve assumed them?

Carson: I think, again, there are two questions pushing there. First, how useful is the label evangelicalism? And second, are we in danger of falling into some of these same traps about losing what is central? On the first one, I had a long chat with Carl Henry about a year ago on how long the term “evangelical” would be useful. And his view of the matter is that he just doesn’t know, but he has no great confidence it’ll be useful, very long. Part of the problem is because there’s a new generation of historians who call themselves evangelical, who insist on using the term only as a social category. That is, it’s a social grouping, but they refuse to give a distinctive doctrinal content. So as a result, there are more and more people who use the term “evangelical” as a kind of social-religious grouping with certain commonalities. But in point of fact, because their writings are so prestigious and so widely circulated, and because in any case it’s a postmodern age that doesn’t like doctrinal definitions of anything anyway, as a result, it’s becoming a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s getting harder and harder and harder to insist on a doctrinal definition for bonafide evangelicalism.

As a result, you start getting contradictions in terms like “evangelical Catholic.” It’s incoherent if you have a doctrinal definition. It’s not incoherent if you have a purely social functional one or an organizational one or an emotional tie one or you don’t mind fundamental inconsistencies or whatever. So the time may come, in fact, where it’s not a term I would want to be identified with, but that happens to a lot of terms. Fundamentalism has gone through either three or four shifts since 1909. In some circles in this country, I still would admit that I’m a fundamentalist in a low voice in narrow circles, but in other parts, if I were being interviewed by somebody from “Time Magazine,” I never would because it’s got no doctrinal content at all. It simply means that in the area of religion, I’m a bigot and I hate people regardless of the religion. And so one has to realize that there are different communities of discourse where words are used in different ways.

In terms of our loss of the center, it depends how big “our” now is referring to. I think in part because there’s so many reformed Christians who are trying to refine the gospel, to re-articulate it, to see its wholeness and beauty and its God-centeredness and so on and so on and so on. In some ways, that may not be our first sin or the like. On the other hand, most of us belong to associations or denominations or something where an awful lot of agendas are set for us and how to work them out is very difficult. Sometimes some of these agendas, which at one level are singularly insignificant, become significant because they are being made by some others to be the center. I think that about the women’s issue.

At one level, it is not the most significant issue on the face of the earth. At one level, I have very strong views about what’s right or what’s wrong, but I can tolerate quite a bit. On the other hand, when the other side suddenly can’t tolerate anything and wants to squeeze me out of everything and is making it the center of spirituality, godliness, truth, coherence, relevance, and so on, then sooner or later I have to stand up and say, “Hey, wait a minute.” And then suddenly I can spend years of my life on an issue that’s taking me away from the gospel. And to be relevant in some context means I have to fight some issues that I really would prefer not to fight. But it’s part of what I have to do because of where God has called me to serve. But if I deploy all my energies along those lines, then I fall into the same trap and the devil’s got me through the back door.

So I think that those are things that you have to examine yourself over again and again and again and again and again, and there are no formulaic answers. There just are none. You go back to the cross, you go back to the gospel, you go back to the centrality of God, and you read and reread and reread and reread and reread your Bible.

Piper: I wish John were here. He had to leave to catch a plane. But he told us about a group that will probably be more public in a few months that have come together several times, and they’re going to use the term “confessing evangelicals.” But anyway, they are adding the term “confessing” to bring out the doctrinal commitments as opposed to a sociological. So we will find probably more adjectives put over it, like “conservative evangelical” or “confessing evangelical.”

Carson: In England, the category is “conservative evangelical,” but in the book that I’ve just about finished now, The Gagging of God, when I’m trying to talk about genuine believers who are evangelicals, I use the term “confessing evangelicals.” We don’t have any choice. You can call them the gobbledygooks for all I care, as long as everybody knows what you mean. The trouble is nobody does. And the trouble is when you start putting adjectives on, then you’re open to the charge from the other side. It’s not a fair charge, but you’re open to the charge from the other side, “You see, you’re trying to narrow the categories. We’re just evangelicals. You have to be hyphenated evangelicals.” And you don’t want to just defend terms at the end of the day, but on the other hand, you have to use terms to communicate. It’s a painful business.

Questioner: Doug, you mentioned that you started out with OM and then with OMF and later on to CGM and now with the Action International, which I know are connected. But I’d like to know just a little bit more about your pilgrimage from OMF into CGM and leading that and now as the International Director of Action International Ministries. How did God bring you up into leadership and into those areas?

Nichols: I went with OM because, as I said, they were the only ones that would take me. And that’s the truth. You can laugh about it, but that’s just the way it happened. I wanted an opportunity to serve the Lord and they were the only ones that took me out of 30 missions I applied to. I forgot to say that the first book I ever read was when I was 22. That was the first time I ever read a book. It was a missions book, Let Europe Hear by Robert Evans. And the reason I chose that book was because it had a lot of pictures.

I came back with OM after that, I went for a year. I came back and my wife and I were married. We worked for a union gospel mission in downtown Seattle while we were applying to OMF. And I really didn’t think they would accept me, but because of Margaret, they did accept us. We went with OMF (Overseas Missionary Fellowship). It was a wonderful mission. I mean, Hudson Taylor and the history of that mission. It is an amazing work of God. While we were with OMF, they tried to find a place for me to fit in, to do. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t learn the language. It was embarrassing. They loaned me to a group in Manila called “Christ for Greater Manila.” It was ran by a senior missionary that could do everything, Will Bruce. He was an amazing missionary. I mean, he ran “Christ for Greater Manila,” which was a “Youth for Christ” type ministry. They started youth work. And when I came with him, it was because he needed some assistance. He had one secretary and that was it. And then my wife and I came and we began to work with him. He knew everybody in town. He could name streets of metro Manila. There were 6 million people at that time. He knew every Christian leader. He could do anything. He was an amazing missionary. Then he became sick and had to leave.

My wife and I were the only other ones in the CGM, so they put me in charge. The Filipino board put me in charge. Me. I didn’t know anything. I recognized right away that I didn’t know anything, and I began to ask God to bring help. God brought us someone to take over the film ministry. We’ve traded the tent for a projector and the Billy Graham film, His Land. We started showing films in churches, began to rent the films. Now we have 150 films, 24 projectors, only about half of them work. There were 87,000 people who professed Christ through film showings this last year in local churches like yours. You would do it. We would train you how to do this film work in your church, and 87,000 people last year.

We started to work with street children. I don’t know anything about street children. Margaret doesn’t know anything about street children. But they had a street children camp once a year. Well, it was so profitable, beneficial in the lives of these kids, we said, “Well, why don’t we have more? These kids aren’t in school, so why don’t we have a camp anytime? Anytime we have enough money, let’s have a camp.” Typhoon, kids are getting wet on the street. Typhoons wouldn’t wreck our camp. Might as well be wet with us at a camp then on the street of Manila being wet. Nothing will keep us from having a camp as long as we have enough money. And we started street children camps. We began to pray for God to bring people to run these camps. And CGM grew. National workers and Filipinos grew to 30 missionaries and 160 Filipinos in just a few years.

I was just the janitor asking God, “Oh Lord, help me to serve these people of God that are working for you.” God raised up workers. That’s how CGM grew. And then with Action International. Action didn’t go over to the Philippines and start CGM, but with these other missionaries who came with independent missionaries, they formed a fellowship called Action Ministries, which later became Action International Ministries, they started a board in Chicago to handle their support legally with the IRS. Very simple. It was a needful thing to do. Well, as more missionaries came with us and so forth, I was the director of CGM, therefore I was over them, but I wasn’t with them, and I was still with OMF. OMF finally, because of the situation, released me to work under Action and I became one of the three directors, and now I’m called the international director.

We have 150 missionaries now in five countries. We’re just starting in Africa this year. It was the grace of God. It was simply the grace of God. That’s all it was. It was as God raised up various avenues to display his glory by using these people in these various tasks. That’s all it was. I remember going to the camp, one of the first times. We had enough money to have a camp for 75 kids. Margaret and I remember one of our board members said, “Doug, if you’re going to put a Filipino in charge, really let him direct the camp.” So this was the camp that this Filipino was going to direct. I was not going to go to the camp. I’ve never directed a camp for street kids, but I wanted to go and say goodbye to him to encourage him as they went off the camp.

So we went. And Margaret went with me very early in the morning at about 5:30 a.m. All the kids gathered outside the bus station. Can you imagine these kids coming? We told them to bring a change of clothes in a bag. And they would come. They only had the clothes on their back. Some of them didn’t even have a shirt. And these little kids got on the bus to go to camp, and they were getting on the bus and we loaded the bus with 75 kids. Lito Acerio was the director of the camp, and he was so excited about getting these kids on the bus. My wife came over and tapped me on the shoulder and she said, “Doug, what about these other kids?” And I turned around and there were about 35 kids up on this mound just kind of squatting down and looking at these kids going to camp. She said, “What about these kids?” And I said, “Margaret, if God would’ve wanted those kids to go to camp, he would’ve given us some money.” It’s always nice to blame the sovereignty of God, isn’t it? If God would’ve wanted those kids to go to camp, he would’ve given us some money. We only have money for 75 kids, and I know what she meant. She’s a very compassionate woman. She said, “I know that, Doug, but what about these kids?” We argued for a while. Finally, I walked over to Lito. I was going to put the thing on him. He’s the director now. I said, “Lito, what about these kids?” He says, “Doug, if God wanted us to have those kids again, he’d given us some money.” I said, “What about these kids?” And we argued. Finally, he said, “Okay, I’ll get another bus.”

So we got another bus. The bus pulls up and 75 kids get on this bus. The bus is pulling away. Margaret tapped me on the shoulder and said, “What about those kids?” We sent 240 kids to camp and 180 of those kids trusted Christ. Now, why I tell that story is that’s the way God works many times. He pushes us in these situations so that we have to trust him. I recognize the fact that I had no abilities. God brought help to enable us to do the work that he had planned, the good works that he had planned for us to walk in.

Questioner: Dr. Carson, in the shift that you were talking about last night and this morning, I wonder if you’d be willing to comment on the place of signs and wonders. Does that help, in a sense, people to consider a new worldview? Or is this shift actually generating an interest in signs and wonders and particularly the Toronto movement?

Carson: I don’t know how to answer that one very briefly. I don’t think that it’s directly related to the shift between modernity and postmodernity at all. In other words, I think that you can find a good use for signs and wonders under both modernity and postmodernity. So I don’t think that it’s integrally tied to either of those things. If you’re asking me about the Toronto movement in particular, am I allowed to step on any toes here, John?

Piper: Yes, go right ahead.

Carson: It’s a good thing this is the last session because probably no matter what I say, some of you aren’t going to want to talk to me afterwards I suspect. I’m not a cessationist. I don’t belong to that camp. And both in my personal experience and in travels to various parts of the world, I’ve seen some remarkable activities of God. I have about two megabytes of testimonies from the Toronto group. I haven’t been up to it myself. I have a lot of friends who’ve gone and some of my students who have gone. That’s about 1,000 pages of testimony from people who have been there, and I haven’t read all of it. It’s just too much data. It was all on the internet. The files have been cleaned now, but it was on the internet and I downloaded it.

Whenever any movement came along, I wish I could say it was all from God or all from the devil. It would simplify a lot of things, but it’s usually not the way it works. I have also read the justifications of the whole thing from John Wimber and from a number of other leaders and some local assembly leaders. I have to say that at the level of their defense of it, I’m singularly unimpressed because most of the proof texting is abstracted from any kind of biblical theological frame. When you get Saul’s experiences of being flooded with the Spirit as an exemplification of the kind of phenomenon that are being experienced here, I’m not sure I want to end up where Saul ends up. There’s no sort of understanding of how spirit works under the old covenant or the new. And when I read the use that is made of Edwards, the picky attestations are correct, but it’s so torn out of Edwards that I don’t think they’re being quite fair to Edwards either. I worry.

On the other hand, I can introduce you to more than a few people who have been genuinely helped by the movement, have become bolder in witness, more prayerful, and more godly. I could also introduce you to many who have been to it and have felt manipulated and have been made to feel second class or too intellectual if they raise any questions. I can introduce you to all of them. Now, what do I do with that? Is there something of the Spirit of God in it? Probably. Almost certainly. I think there’s a lot of other stuff too.

Let me give you an adjacent account, if I may, to show you what worries me about some of it. I was in Papua New Guinea a few months ago speaking to a group of people in Ukarumpa. And because I was there for quite a long period of time, I ate a lot of meals with missionaries and so on. And this particular couple, I had stepped on their toes somewhere in a sermon and they wanted to have a wee go at me. Somewhere along the line, I had said something about alternative visions of spirituality that included rebirthing techniques and things like that. And this particular chap said that he came out of a broken home. He had been sexually abused by his father. When he eventually became a Christian in his teen years, the notion of the fatherhood of God was of no value to him. It had only notions of repulsiveness. He believed the truth but didn’t feel loved by God. Their marriage had its rough spots. He really felt he hadn’t learned how to give and receive love.

And then Chuck Kraft had been out there and had emphasized these rebirthing techniques and he had those who came from troubled backgrounds shut their eyes and meditate and imagine themselves being born again from their mother’s bellies. I mean born again literally, in their imagination, recasting the whole thing. And there was Jesus standing, catching them as they fell from their mother’s womb, and stroking them, cuddling them, and cleaning them off. In some of these rebirthing techniques, Jesus has to stand there naked to do it too, but that’s another issue. Kraft doesn’t do that. One of the big prayer leaders in InterVarsity has done that, but that’s another matter.

And at the end of the day, this chap said he wept and he cried. It was a very cathartic expression and emotion for him and he said that it transformed his life. He said he felt that he could improve his relationship with his wife. He felt that for the first time, he knew what the love of God felt like, and so on and so on. Now he says, “What are you going to criticize about that? It’s brought me closer to Jesus.” What I said to him was, “Well, look, my dear brother, if you really are closer to Jesus, if you’re better able to love your wife and be loved by your wife, I’m not going to start off by throwing a whole lot of stones, but at best, you’ve got second best. And there’s a worst. Because in the Bible, the supreme demonstration of the love of God in Christ Jesus for his people is in the cross, not in a naked Jesus standing at your mother’s open belly to catch you as you fall from it.”

So the truth of the matter is you could have had all the catharsis, all the emotion, all the healing by meditating long and hard on Ephesians 3:14–21, where Paul says:

[I pray] that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:17–19).

You might have had all the catharsis by focusing on what is real, historical, and God-given. But instead, you tie the catharsis to a stretch of the imagination, and therefore when you counsel the next person, you will not immediately start saying, “Ah, there’s power in the gospel. It healed me.” You’ll say, “There’s power in rebirthing. It healed me.” So even if there has been some psychological wholeness that’s come out of it, what I want to know is the associational links, how you structure it, what it does in terms of the whole structure of biblical theology in your mind, how you value things, what you’ve cherished out of it, and whether at the end of the day your theology has become more biblically grounded or not. Or have you been, at the worst, deceived?

Now, I’m not saying that there’s no psychological good that’s come to you, but the devil isn’t going to come along and say, “Here’s a great big wad of lies. Go ahead. Believe it.” It is always going to be cast in terms of something that is just a bit distorted now, so that when you get a few million miles out, you’re a million miles off. Now, tell me, was this movement of God?

A number of years ago, I said some things about the VCM — which I’m not against, and which I acknowledge has done a lot of good — and that’s gotten me into all kinds of trouble. I probably had more hate mail on that publication than on anything I’ve written since the King James version debate where I got the funniest hate mail in my career. The end of a review on the King James version debate ended by saying, “If all the people in America that held Carson’s views had their brains put together, they wouldn’t fill one good-sized American trash can.” I loved it. I posted it all over the place.

But I had a lot of hate mail on some of this one too, and I quoted verses like, “Deceiving, if it were possible, a very elect,” and responses came in. They said, “Yes, but the whole point is the elect can’t be deceived because it’s deceived if it were possible, and it can’t be because they’re the elect. If we’re really sincere in our love for God, we cannot be deceived.” I want to say, “Hey, wait a minute. Don’t you guys read the New Testament? About a third of the New Testament at a minimum, maybe more, is written precisely to un-deceive people. Are you suggesting that none of those people loved God? Isn’t Galatians written to un-deceive people? Isn’t 1 Thessalonians and 2 Thessalonians written to un-deceive people? Isn’t Colossians written to un-deceive people? Isn’t 1 Corinthians, half of it, written to un-deceive people?” You go on and on and half of the New Testament is written to un-deceive people. The elect!

Of course, the elect can’t finally be deceived. That’s true. They won’t be deceived to follow every snookered, so-called Messiah that comes along. That’s true. But the devil goes about not only as a roaring lion. He goes about as an angel of light, and people can be deceived for a short period of time or taken off base for a short while or lose what is central. I’m not saying they’ve lost their salvation or they’re doing the devil’s work or whatever. All I’m asking is that from a point of view of whole-life strategy, how is all this stuff related to the gospel? And there I find very mixed reviews.

Now, I know some people that went to Toronto from Kansas City who were heavily influenced by Sam Storms. Sam Storms is a good brother. He’s steeped in theology. He loves the Lord. He’s steeped in Edwards. He’s a good preacher and he’s a good thinker. And because they had been so stamped by him, I think that the emotional and spiritual energy out of their Toronto experience was funneled in more or less biblical lines. I have fewer problems with that.

But on the other hand, I’ve just met too many for whom this has become the criteria of a new wave of spirituality, the vanguard of revival and all the rest, and I say the associations I’m hearing aren’t right. It’s off-center. It’s losing its connections. And historically, revival sometimes is accompanied by some rather spectacular phenomena and sometimes not, which only goes to show that the phenomena themselves are not essential and therefore not criteria of anything! So the associations are wrong.

So whereas I’m not a cessationist, I have to say I’m not mightily impressed by Toronto. Not yet. I don’t know where this thing’s going to end up.

Questioner: This is somewhat of a follow-up question to that, but it’s more on the pastoral level. When I became convinced of Calvinistic soteriology in the 1970s, I had a big issue of how to get along with my Arminian brethren and I had to wrestle through that to come to the conclusion that they were not the enemy, that we were on the same side, and that I was going to spend eternity with them. I’m in that same scenario again. I think I’ve worked through that. I’m in a ministerium in our church in Vermont, which is about an hour south of Montreal. And as a result, this Toronto Blessing is very central in this ministerium. It’s made up of several Pentecostal and charismatic pastors who have made pilgrimages to the movement. I’ve gone to Toronto once to observe it myself.

My question really is, I don’t know how to get on with these fellows, at least in our ministerium. It’s very difficult to try to bring it to an issue of what the Scriptures are saying and keep it on that kind of objective level. And it caused me to think that there was a relationship between what you were saying about postmodernity and the phenomena here. I’m really asking for advice, for counsel as to how to co-labor with these brethren and try to talk about these issues when it seems like our epistemologies are really fundamentally very different.

Carson: There is a connection with postmodernism in this sense, in that the culture at large is looking for spirituality, for feeling-based stuff, for a sense of self-authentication and so on. Now, in part, that’s not all bad. Almost any movement in culture can be used for good or for bad. And in some ways, it’s a terrible indictment on our churches that are so sterile, that are merely formal, or that have a truth in abstract forms, but are not full of life and worship and love and the joy in the Lord and so on. So yes, there are connections with postmodernism. I don’t don’t deny that at all.

In terms of advice on how to get on, I don’t have a formula. What one has to do, it seems to me, is come back to Scripture again and again and again and again in a loving sort of way. Well, that’s what one has to do, whether one is hurt or not. Where else do we go? At the end of the day, we don’t have anywhere else to go. So one has to come to Scripture without being condemning, without being close-minded, without being too narrow, trying to understand and reading widely in history to understand what God has done in the past. But at the end of the day, I don’t have anywhere else to go but scripture again and again and again and again and again and again and again. And if some people think that my exegesis is wrong, then I hope that they’ll show me where it’s wrong, but they’re not going to convince me that it’s wrong primarily by telling me how wonderful somebody has felt as a result of this experience because that was exactly the argument of my friend in Papua New Guinea.

I still want to ask, what are the associations and controls that structure the whole system of thought and life down into the future? Is it sanctioned finely by Scripture or is it slightly adjacent? Is it slightly skewed that, as a result, domesticates the gospel in some ways or relativizes it? And I think the jury’s out. I think for some people who go through this particular form of the experience, it has probably done some genuine good and strengthening in gospel terms. I think for many others, it’s been a bit of a sidetrack.

I do know that different revivals have been handled historically in different ways. The Welsh Revival went amuck after about a year and a half because it focused more and more on experience and they never did capture a school, they never developed solid preachers out of it, they never had a vision for theological education to use that kind of energy to be God-centered, word-centered, and gospel-centered. It became more and more experience-centered with time, and the whole thing ended in disarray — even though, when I was first in England, I met many elderly Christians who had been converted through the Welsh Revival when we went on our honeymoon in Southern Wales.

Am I allowed one story before we have lunch? My wife and I were visiting castles, the sort of thing you do when you’re on your honeymoon in Southern Wales. And we went to this castle near Tenby, and there was a Methodist church just outside the castle that was offering tea and crumpets in the afternoon. So we went in there to have tea and crumpets, and there was this woman. Just looking at her, I could see she had to be 75 or 85, that sort of range. And I thought, “Well, if she’s in the upper end and of that, you take away 70 years, she would’ve been alive here during the Welsh Revival.” So I started looking around the building and looking at what kind of building this was. And I could see by the posters and stuff it was as liberal as could be.

And I said to her, “Have you been in this church long?” She said, “Oh, yes, all my life, right in this valley.” I said, “You must’ve seen a lot of changes here over the years.” I’m not very bold in witness like some people. I have to sort of work into it. She said, “Oh, yes, a lot of changes.” I said, “Who’s the minister here now?” She said, “Oh, he’s a young man. Some of the young people seem to like him.” And I thought, “Enough of this, Carson. Come right out with it.” I said, “Were you alive during the Welsh Revival?” And she said, “You know about that?” And I said, “I’d like to know whether it’s true that the miners had to change their vocabulary because the pit ponies couldn’t understand them anymore since the miners lost about a third of their vocabulary when they got converted.” She said, “Oh, yes, that was exactly true. My father was a miner right up the valley here,” and she went on and on and on. And we talked about the Lord and grace and so on and so on and so on.

After about 20 minutes of this, I said, “My dear sister, where on earth do you go to get fed today?” Oh, she patted my hand and said, “I listen to ‘Back to the Bible’ broadcasts from Trans World Radio in Morocco.”

You see, I have no doubt, I’ve met too many converts at the tail end of this sweep, you see, that God did a mighty work there. At the end of the day, the leadership was bad. The direction in which it was funneled was atrocious. They captured no theological school. Liberalism controlled all the churches. It was a whole lot of individual converts, but at the end of the day, it didn’t do anything of lasting significance in Wales, and it might have. So one has to ask those sorts of questions as well, it seems to me.

Piper: Let me make a comment by way of closing our time together that the lunch is ready. I want to thank you all for coming. It’s really an encouragement to us here at Bethlehem to have you here. But my response to the question is that I think when you move into a setting with charismatic people or Pentecostal people or people who are new wavers, you should get on the offensive and out-passion them from the start. Why are we responding, saying, “Oh, how shall we figure out this passion that began with laughing on the floor?” Why not start with a statement about the Trinity and just lay them low with your passion and leave them questioning how come they don’t have your passion because they don’t understand the Trinity?

That’s what this conference is all about. Why should we Calvinists move into a situation and try to explain the joy of the Lord that they got from laughing? They should be trying to figure out how we got joy because we understand predestination, and one of the problems is we don’t have joy and we’re not authentic people, and that’s why this conference exists. So I hope that when you leave, your burden will be not to figure anybody out, except why we are not flaming with the joy of the Lord that puts them on the defensive and Toronto trying to come to your church to figure out why you as a pastor are so happy.