D. A. Carson dreams about the local church!
Adrian Warnock has a good video interview with D. A. Carson filmed during the recent New Word Alive conference. Beginning at minute 2 is a discussion concerning the role of the local church and the role of the seminary and why professors should dream of being pastors. Here's a few lines:
- "The front line is the local church, and there's a sense in which the seminary is a back up slot."
- "The first impetus toward ministry and toward stamping people for what ministry ought to be ought to be within the context of the local church."
- "A good seminary, a good theological college, helps to provide the kind of training, and further exposure, more technical knowledge, grasp of the language, this sort of thing, that virtually no local church can produce."
- "Yet it's really important for those who teach in such places, nevertheless, to be pastors first, because if they think of themselves as teachers and scholars first, then they tend to produce teachers and scholars. So there's a stamping not simply from the course materials, but from your own values, what you think about, what you dream about."
- "So at our seminary, we always hire a certain percentage of faculty who wish they were in the pastoral ministry or else, quite frankly, we don't want them. Now, they have to be academically competent and all the rest. But we don't want people who just want to be in a seminary.We want people who, in many ways, would prefer to be in the local church."
I think it is good to have pastors who train pastors. But the danger is that attched to this is a dualism wherby the church is the dominant sphere. Could not God be calling scholars, academic philsophers, and academic theolgians to research and teach in seminaries?
The church is simply not the 'front line', its important no doubt, but is reductionistic to highlight the church as the major part of God's kingdom.
Posted by: Jon Swales | May 15, 2008 8:41:36 AM
Surely God calls people to live out their faith in all spheres of life. But "God's intent was that now, through the church"--not the academy--"the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms" (Eph. 3:10). This role was ordained by God for the church "according to his eternal purpose" (v. 11). To highlight the primacy of the church seems to me not reductionistic but biblical.
Posted by: Nathan Lugbill | May 15, 2008 1:08:09 PM
Thanks for this. It was great to visit this weekend. The weekender was fantastic.
Posted by: Blake White | May 20, 2008 2:31:40 PM
Jon, your comment assumes that the academic realm isn't an extension of the local church. What are Bible Colleges and Seminaries doing? They are equipping the saints for the work of the ministry, and only the church has been authorized to do that. Even beyond that, Profs. must be elder qualified and in elder standing, as they are presiding over the teaching of sound doctrine. Your dualistic approach doesn't seem to be correct, it’s not an us versus them for the church and the school. Jesus is building His church and surely what is taking place in Seminaries is Christ building His church.
In response to your comment about the church not being the front line, I must disagree with that too. Dr. Dever said in a recent interview that the church is where people see what Jesus is like. The church is not only the front line, it’s the only line. The church is where God manifests His glory. Last year in John Piper’s series on marriage he said that within the context of a Christian marriage is the best place to disciple children. This is because marriage is the closest place on earth where one can see a display of how Christ and His church interact. And in Dr. Jay Adam’s (Westminster Prof.) book on marriage and divorce, he says that the marriage and the household are the smallest sub-group of the church. The church is where God moves and where sound teaching comes from and where the gospel goes forth.
Posted by: Matthew Cunningham | May 24, 2008 2:03:56 PM