As I thought about what might be edifying for you in talking about the ministry of Wayne Grudem and our relationship, it seemed to me that it might be interesting and helpful to probe down into the root of our friendship and the root of Wayne’s amazingly edifying and extensive productivity.

So, I have two questions.

First, how has a friendship, sparked in 1971 during our one-year overlap at Fuller seminary, lasted for half a century, when we’ve only lived in the same place for a total of five years, and in spite of the fact that there are a few potentially explosive areas of disagreement? What is the root of such a friendship? Because, to speak for myself, I do count it as precious — not professional, but precious.

Second, what is the root of Wayne’s half-century of teaching and writing, which, perhaps more than any other contemporary theologian, has had such a widespread, edifying impact on the church? Nobody else in the last fifty years has written a systematic theology 1,586 pages long, weighing five pounds, and which won’t fit in anybody’s briefcase, and wonder of wonders, can be understood by thoughtful high school students, and has sold one million copies in nineteen languages. Nobody else has done that. The impact — and I believe edifying impact — of Wayne’s Systematic Theology during our lifetimes is unparalleled. It’s one of a kind. That’s not to mention substantial books on ethics, politics, poverty, manhood and womanhood, and the magnificent ESV Study Bible. What is the root of such extensive and edifying productivity?

There are my two questions: What’s the root of this enduring friendship? And what’s the root of Wayne’s edifying productivity?

The longer I have thought about this and the deeper I have probed, the more it has seemed to me that there is only one root, not two. The root of the friendship tree and the root of the productivity tree is the same. And even if I am mistaken about this, the effort to explain it will provide some interesting and, I hope, edifying insights into the way our minds and hearts work.

If I were to give a name to this common root — a provocative and negative name — it would be that Wayne and I have a similar allergy to Jell-O. I know that communicates nothing, but it is provocative. You might remember it. “Oh yeah, Piper was the one who talked about the Jell-O.” So let me tell you a story to try to explain what I mean.

Distaste for Theological Jell-O

Go back with me twenty years to the heyday of the emergent-church movement, whose spokesmen were folks like Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, and Tony Jones. If you don’t know what that is, then you should thank Don Carson and Kevin DeYoung and others who wrote books to show how bankrupt that movement was biblically and spiritually. Well, I was so baffled as a pastor in Minneapolis by what was going on that I asked if I could have lunch with Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt because they both were in the Twin Cities. So we met.

About half an hour into our conversation, I shook my head and said to them, “Talking to you guys is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” And they laughed, and one of them said, “That’s not what Jell-O is for.”

And to this day, I think that sentence (“That’s not what Jell-O is for”) captures the essence of (I want to say) the epistemology of the movement, but that might not communicate it. So let me say, that sentence captured the way they envisioned truth. They didn’t respond by saying, “Oh, you’ve misunderstood. Our vision isn’t Jell-O. It has sides: left, right, front, back. It has shape and form and firmness and stability.” That’s not what they said. They said, “That’s not what Jell-O is for.” In other words, “You’ve got the wrong set of tools for dealing with Jell-O. John Piper is sitting there with a toolbox, and in it is a hammer, some nails, a saw, a plane, a square, and some two-by-fours, and you don’t know what to do with Jell-O.”

The vision of the emergent-church movement was relational warmth, creativity, and activity untethered from the forming, shaping, clarifying, stabilizing boundaries of objective truth.

“We love truthfulness and clarity. We have found it in the Bible.”

And what made this vision Jell-O was not that they were rejecting precious biblical reality, like Christ’s substitutionary endurance of the wrath of God on our behalf — which many of them were — but that they were doing it in a fog of imprecision and lack of clarity, and shapeless, so-called creative alternatives to traditional doctrine, which felt so freeing but were so destructive.

And I realized afresh that day, over that lunch, that I have a deep, strong allergy to theological Jell-O — epistemological Jell-O, church Jell-O. And so does Wayne Grudem. The allergy is in our DNA. It’s in our temperamental and theological DNA. The hair stands up on the back of our necks when the shepherds of God’s people begin to feed the sheep Jell-O.

Love for God-Given Truth

Now, it would be true but misleading to say that our common allergy to Jell-O is the root that produced a precious, rich, lifelong friendship and the root of Wayne’s lifelong edifying output of books and articles and lectures. The reason it would be misleading is that this allergy is the negative side of something very positive, and negativities don’t build healthy friendships or lifelong edification. Allergies are not productive. They are symptomatic of what a certain kind of productivity and friendship avoids.

So, what is the positive side to this allergy? What is the sap flowing with such energy and joy up into our friendship and into Wayne’s edifying productivity? It is the God-given truthfulness and clarity of the Bible, forming our instincts and convictions about truth and clarity. This is not a simple thing. It is complex. Wayne and I inherited genetic traits, and we were influenced from the womb by our natural and relational environment. So, when we first encountered the Bible, we brought all that to the Bible. But as soon as we encountered the Bible and spent years and years immersed in the Bible, it began to exert its influence with its own DNA on our temperaments and our instincts and our convictions. So, it is not simple to sort out how much of our dispositions, our allergies is owing to inherited nature or to biblical formation.

But what is clear is that Wayne and I, from our earliest days, were immersed in the Bible, saturated with the Bible, so that whatever instincts and temperament we brought to the Bible, it exerted on us its forming power concerning its God-given truthfulness and clarity.

Precious Truth and Clarity

Listen to Wayne writing in his Systematic Theology:

Long before I had ever heard of this doctrine, the clarity of Scripture was implicit in my assumption, as a young boy of about seven or eight, that I could begin to read the King James Version of the Bible with some understanding of its message. I simply sounded out the hard words and plowed forward, no doubt with some nourishment to my soul. I simply assumed that God had given us a Bible that could be understood! (130)

Whatever temperament or genetic disposition Wayne Grudem brought to the Bible at age seven, what we know is that between the age of seven and thirty-seven (when he began to write the Systematic Theology), the God-given truthfulness and clarity of the Bible had gone deeper and deeper and deeper into forming Wayne Grudem’s instincts and convictions, until he had developed a very strong allergy to what is untrue and unclear.

To put it positively, the God-given truthfulness and clarity of the Bible ignited in Wayne a pervasive instinct and conviction that the Bible can be understood and communicated to ordinary people with truthfulness and clarity. He continued,

The doctrine of the clarity of Scripture has had a pervasive effect on my own life. . . . [It] led me to think that I could actually use the Bible as the basis for teaching theology to students. . . . I wondered if it might be possible to imitate the clarity of Scripture rather than the opacity of Berkof in writing about theology. The result was that I wrote the first edition of this book, Systematic Theology. . . . The clarity of Scripture tells me that doctrines can be taught in a way that ordinary people are able to understand. (131)

Combine this powerful influence of the clarity of Scripture with a conviction about the God-given truthfulness of it, and you have a disposition and a force that surges up into the tree of friendship and into the tree of lifelong edifying productivity. And nobody doubts the profound effect on Wayne’s life of the God-given truthfulness of the Bible. Wayne wrote,

By whatever process, every word written was exactly the word God wanted written, so that Scripture is not only the words of men, but also the words of God. . . . To say that Scripture is truthful in everything it says is to say that it is “inerrant”; it does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact. (Scripture and Truth, 58)

The God-given truthfulness and clarity of Scripture have created our allergy to all that is vague, obscure, foggy, evasive, deceitful, dishonest, misleading, unclear — all Jell-O. It had given us a joyful confidence and desire to speak and write with truthfulness, clarity, precision, accuracy, honesty, and an open and transparent declaration of the truth. We love 2 Corinthians 4:2: “We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.”

God’s Own Book

I think this is the root of your edifying productivity, and I think it is the root of our half-century of friendship. We love truthfulness and clarity. We have found it in the Bible. And we have found it in each other. And we have sought to embody it in our lives. It is an unusual and precious camaraderie.

And to be faithful to Wayne’s own instincts and convictions, I should trace it all the way up into its original source — namely, the nature of God. Here’s what you wrote:

The theological reason for affirming the clarity of Scripture is found in the nature of God. He is the omnipotent God who created the marvelous gift of human language so that he could use it to communicate clearly with us. He is the infinitely wise God who knows the most effective way to communicate with us. He is the infinitely loving God who cares for his people and desires to communicate clearly with us. He is the truly personal God who delights in interpersonal communication. He is the omnipresent God who remains ever near us. (Systematic Theology, 123)

Indeed, he does. And he will all the way to the end.