D.A. Carson

So biblical theology is interested not only in the particular formulations and biblical contributions of particular books, so people can speak of a Johannine theology. That is the kind of emphasis that John's writings make, but also how they fit into the sequence of God's ongoing revelation until the whole canon is complete with a high mark in Jesus Christ himself, the word made flesh. Now, to do that, in other words, you must not only know a lot of text, you must know something of their historical sequence. And Calvin managed in the commentaries not only to be a good dealer in text. a faithful interpreter of text, but to preserve the historical sequencing of things that we call biblical theology today and would not be pushed into reading the Bible anachronistically in order to buttress his systematic theology. Now, I've given you an overview of what I want to say. Now, let me unpack it just a wee bit. You see, it's possible to make some huge mistakes this way. What is the relationship between Calvin's commentaries and his institutes? One person writes. The institutes contain all of Calvin's theology, whereas his commentaries contain the application of such theology. Huge mistake. Because what that does is elevate the institutes to the primary place and the commentaries become the application, whereas in Calvin's own view, the commentator is first in taking that which is God revealed. The institutes are not God revealed. The scripture is God revealed and the commentator is commentating on scripture. Now, insofar as the commentator is right, he is re revealing all that God has said in the first instance. But necessarily, the institutes are a second order thing because they are bringing things together from from many, many other parts of the Bible, rather than the text that is being commented on at a particular point. This is one of the arguments, as Joel Beakey said last night, that Calvin had with Butzer. Butcher wrote these long, long, long commentaries, all right, but not only were they long and verbose and difficult, he really followed an Aristotelian model of how you go about creating arguments. What he looked for in each text that he was expounding was what he called the locus, the chief point. And these loci, these things he then expounded at length so that he began with biblical text and then went at great length to unpack that point. And thus, in the unpacking of that point, which he found to be so central, pretty soon he was bringing on all of the systematic theology. So in Butzer, as you have alleged commentary on text, what you actually have is systematic theology imported into the text, at least those parts of the text that are in Butzer's view, the locus, the most important point. Whereas what Calvin does is say it's wrong on two points. It's wrong, first, because Bucer does not actually comment on everything in the text. He only comments on the low side. He only comments on the points that he thinks are are the most important. And as a result, there are many, many things in the text that Bucer doesn't even look at. He just comments on the things that he thinks are the most important. Whereas a commentator has got to comment on everything. So in one sense, although, although in his commentaries, Calvin is much shorter than then. He is also more comprehensive. He doesn't want to let anything slip by so that you read Calvin's commentary. And he's briefly reflecting on introductory comments and the language of quotation and historical details. And so he's pretty comprehensive in his view, because all of it is God's word. You cannot afford simply to leap from text immediately to systematic theology. You have to see the flow of the whole thing, do you see? And then, secondly, he doesn't like what Butzer is doing, not only because it is so long and complicated that the ordinary people can't understand it. He doesn't like what Butzer is doing also because he is becoming anachronistic. That is, he's developing the entire systematic theology and putting it back in the text and losing the historical specificity of what is actually in the text.

For a while, my sister and her husband served as missionaries in Papua New Guinea in a tribe that was pre-Stone Age in its technology. That is to say, they did not even use stone on their arrowheads. They used a hardwood like ebony on bamboo shafts, ebony or teak. So, from a technological point of view, this was a very primitive people. Suppose, for argument's sake, one of those people came out, one of those tribe's people came to your hometown, and you buckle down with that tribal person and learn the language. You spent five years at it, and you learned to speak the language fluently. And now let us suppose that you have the assignment to go back into that tribal area, and without using any visual aids, explain to the tribals exactly what electricity is, using only their language and no visual aids. How will you proceed? Well, you will begin in their language by saying something like this, I am here to tell you about... well, you don't have a word for it, we'll make one up, in your language we shall call it electricity. Electricity is like a powerful spirit that runs along hard things like vines. Only these vines are not something that grow, they're something that we make. And we string them from tree to tree. Actually, we cut down the trees and take off all the branches and plant them in the ground again, but then we string these vine-like things, and we pump in a whole lot of this powerful spirit at one end, and then this vine comes into our mud huts. And it goes into square things that we also make with round bits on top. And this spirit-like thing, electricity, goes around so fast, it makes something like a fire, so that you can boil water without actually having any smoke in your mud hut. And then it goes into other round things near the top of your thatch roof that makes many suns. so that you can stay up late at night, if you wanted to. Now how am I doing in my explanation of electricity? You see, so far I have not mentioned the molecular nature of matter. I have certainly not introduced anything about atomic weights. I haven't introduced alternating and direct current. I haven't introduced microchips. I haven't introduced storage facilities, generating capacity. I haven't introduced measures, ohms, watts, volts and so forth. Now what's the trouble? Are these people stupid? No, of course not. If they emigrate to Canada, their children will probably beat ours. They're not stupid. The children of immigrants often beat the Westerners for a while. It takes us two or three generations to slow them down. Immigrants often try harder. So what's the problem then? The problem is their complete want of experience. They have no categories to understand these things.

Pharaoh may decide to wipe out the Jews, but he himself is wiped out. The Assyrians decide to wipe out Israel. Have you ever met any Assyrians? There's a small community of 300 of them. That's about it. Mighty Babylon decides to wipe out the people of God? Is Babylon a great threat today? Rome decides to take on the people of God? Hitler establishes a thousand year Reich?

When I went to England in 1972 for the first time, within a short while I got to know Sir Norman and Pat Anderson. Norman and Pat Anderson had been in Cambridge University, and went out as missionaries to Egypt before World War II. He learned Arabic pretty fluently. In World War II, the British Army co-opted him so he would be involved in counterintelligence work. After the war, he went on with his education. He eventually became Professor of Oriental Studies at London University. and was knighted by the Queen for establishing a couple of magnificent institutions. He wrote very important books on world religions, all from a Christian point of view. His understanding of Islam was profound. At the same time, though he was a layman, he was a very faithful university evangelist and so on, he became an astonishingly influential layman in the Church of England. But not everybody knows that Sir Norman had three children. The first was a woman who became a medical doctor herself and then in the revolution that turned the Belgian Congo into the Congo which became Zaire and which is now the Congo again, she was gang-raped. She was sent home and as she was recovering she came to California to do some further medical training preparatory to going back to Africa. While she was here she tripped and fell down some stairs, knocked herself out and drowned in her own spittle. The second daughter died in circumstances almost as bizarre. And the year that I arrived in Cambridge, the third child, a son, Hugh, a brilliant student, already being touted as a potential future Prime Minister of England, since so many of them go through Oxford or Cambridge. He died at the age of 21 of a brain cancer. And in all the years that I knew Sir Norman and Pat Anderson. And in their closing years, my wife and I spent a lot of time with them. Not once, not once did I hear a word of complaint.

He sees further that this book is sealed. In certain kinds of legal documents, once the scroll was glued to the two posts, and the two posts were twiddled in so that the seal was closed, one further single sheet of papyrus was wrapped around the outside. And then, with this single sheet around the outside, a drop of wax was melted onto the overlap, and thus the book was sealed. Now, as the wax was drying, you might take your signet ring, or your official seal if you were a government authority, and stamp it in the drying wax. And now the book is not sealed merely at the substantial level, the material level, it is sealed at the symbolic level. And only the right authority has the sanction to break the seal and open the book. And if you were an extremely important authority, then you sealed it with a lot of seals. For example, the last will and testament of the Roman emperor Vespasian, we are told, was sealed with seven seals. So along the join of the overlap of this surrounding piece of papyrus, they dropped seven blobs of wax and then sealed it seven times with seven seals to make official, doubly official. Now, this book of God's purposes is sealed with seven seals. It is perfectly sealed, if you like.

One is drawn from C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis pictures two men. One of them wants a woman. So he goes to the red light district, pays his money, and has his reward. The other also wants a woman. But in fact he falls in love. Courts this woman with integrity and honor. Earns the trust not only of the woman herself but of her family. Treats her with great respect. proposes to her, and in due course, there's a wonderful wedding. Not only the two people are joined together, but two families come together, almost. And he has his reward. So both of the men have the reward. What's the difference? The difference, Lewis says, is that in the first case, the reward is so incommensurate with the payment that the transaction is obscene. In the second case, the reward is nothing other than the culmination of a relationship. That's an accurate picture of a great deal of Christian rewards. It's nothing other than the culmination of the relationship. established by God himself, through grace, received by faith.

I have sometimes given lectures on public university campuses on this topic. It's great fun. There are some campuses, you see, that put aside money for public addresses by scholars from here or there on just about any topic, provided it's connected with some club on campus. So the physics club might bring in somebody to talk about quantum mechanics or something. And then every once in a while, a Christian club manages to get someone on like me. And you can't use those sessions for direct evangelism. They're supposed to be public lectures for public address and so on. So I always choose the nature of tolerance. And in every case, because the topic is such a hot one, people come out by the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds on secular campuses around the country. And you can see light bulbs go on. Is this joker really saying that me and my pristine tolerance, I'm actually intolerant? And then the question comes, what do you do? What's the next step, do you see? And in fact, this is becoming so strong that there's a reaction beginning to set in in the country that is crying out for a little more civility in dialogue and less for labeling of people. Nowadays, argumentation by labels, intolerant, victim, this sort of thing, is so endemic that it's got rather silly. And unless that breaks, we will see ourselves in increasing legal problems down the road.

I've been doing university missions now for about 25 years, and the whole approach to university missions has changed enormously during that time.

Even if they've heard of Jesus, the game rules have all changed. When I was a boy, if there was one verse that was known throughout the culture, it was John 3.16. Nowadays, if there's one verse from the Bible that people know about, what is it? Not John 3.16. They don't even know where it's from. But they know, judge not that you be not judged. That's the best-known verse in the whole Bible in Western culture today. From Matthew 7.1. Judge not that you be not judged. Who are you to tell me what to do or what to believe in? Doesn't your own Bible say, judge not that you be not judged? Who are you to tell me not to sleep around? I mean, judge not that you be not judged. Of course, a text without a context becomes a pretext for a proof text. A little farther on, in the very same paragraph of Matthew 7, there you find Jesus also going on to say, don't cast your pearls before swine, which means somebody's got to figure out who the pigs are. You see, in the context, what is at issue is, don't be judgmental, don't look down your long, self-righteous nose at other people. It is not saying, be completely morally indifferent, and it doesn't really matter whether you respect Mother Teresa or Hitler. I mean, judge not that you be not judged. The whole of the Bible is against such rubbish. So what people are using, therefore, is a text ripped out of its context in order to have a complete abandonment of a moral perspective whatsoever. That is about the extent of biblical knowledge in many, many, many Canadian and American families today, isn't it? So, like that sort of stance, Paul, likewise, faces a situation with massive biblical illiteracy.

Let me give you an illustration. When I was a boy in grade seven in school, I had a teacher by the name, well, I probably better not even tell you his name. We'll call him Smith, Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith was a World War II veteran, and he had a gammy leg in consequence, and somewhere along the line he got into teaching, and teaching was not his métier. He should never have become a teacher, especially of grade 7 boys. Dear old Mr. Smith was way out of his league. And when he was losing the class entirely, then he would do something really stupid to try to get our attention back. He'd sort of hobble to his feet, and then you could see him doing it. Go over to the corner of his desk and lift it up a few inches like this, you see, and then slam it down with a fantastic crash! And then he'd say, that's only one-tenth of my strength, as if that had anything to do with anything. Dear old Mr. Smith was not God's gift to teaching, I have to tell you. But he had one particular trick that I shall recall to this day. Mr. Smith hated gum chewing with a passion. He hated it, loathed it. It was part of his military background. Everything had to be cut and dried and clear and obey the rules and no fudging and so on. So if he found somebody chewing gum in class, he would pick up the wastebasket and hobble over to them. And if it was a girl, let us say, he would stick it under her nose and he would look at her very severely and say, A gum-chewing girl and a cud-chewing cow look so much alike, yet different somehow. What is the difference? Ah, I see it now. Tis the thoughtful look in the face of the cow. SPIT! That was Mr. Cooper. You see, what Mr. Cooper was saying, if I may paraphrase him, was this. You cannot chew gum here. But by saying you cannot chew gum here, he was not making an ontological statement. So the little Josephine in the third row began to say, you're wrong, I'm doing it. The point is, you cannot chew gum here. And if you do, you are so much out of line, you are heading into a big confrontation.

If you read in this area, read, for example, Calvin's Institutes, who thought about these things a great deal, his section on accommodation. He speaks of God lisping in our language. Let me put it this way. Imagine an eternity past. How did the Father and the Son communicate? Did they speak in Hebrew? Did they speak in any sense the way we speak? See, all of our notions of speaking in any language entail passage of time and sequence. What does God look like as the Father communicates with the Son in eternity past? And don't give me the answer that a lot of Christians give at this juncture and say, well, to God, everything is eternally present. How do you know that? Present is a temporal category. I don't know that everything is eternally present to God. I don't know what it looks like to God. I think it's far better to admit what we don't know. But that means, you see, that when God does speak to us in space-time so that we can hear it at all, he must do so in sequence. He must do so with words. But we don't understand what he's talking about. And he must do so in a language that we understand. All of that is accommodation. Not because God could not communicate intratrinitarianly in eternity past without all of our limitations. But because God is now, to use Calvin's language, lisping our language. Talking baby talk to us. Do you see?

And it's not just wealth, it's wealth that's here, but I know some smug people because they went to Ivy League schools. Or conversely, I know some smug people just because they were born in the South. I know some smug people who are really smug about not being smug. And then there are the Canadians. We're so average and against anybody sticking up their necks. Do you know? Why did a Canadian cross the road to get to the middle? And we're proud of it. I mean, we're not like the Brits with their empire, the Americans with their colonial power and their nuclear arms. We're Canadians. Hulking down under the protection of the American nuclear umbrella, thank you. But nevertheless, we are Canadians and definitely superior. We're quite superior about not being superior. And thus, we become smug about almost everything, don't we?