Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson answers questions on the topic of Revival in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
Don Carson: We’ll throw this open to questions and answers now.
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: I’ve not written a book on the micro and macro gospel, though I’ve alluded to it a number of times. I’ve talked about it in my sermon on 1 Corinthians 15 that is posted … audio, video, and text … on The Gospel Coalition’s website. It’s titled, Just What is the Gospel?
There’s a recent Festschrift, a book of essays, in honor of John Piper, where in a slightly different way I’ve talked about what the gospel is again in a chapter in that book. The title of the book is For the Fame of God’s Name: Essays in Honor of John Piper. There’s a lot of stuff on The Gospel Coalition’s website that works out of the same sort of vision. That’s the sort of vision Tim Keller is working out of all the time.
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: I don’t think my father, had he lived to read Keller, would have disagreed with him, but don’t forget that even in the Bible.… The Jeremiah 29 passage about seeking the good of the city is within a certain kind of context; namely, it’s the people in exile. If you were to talk to underground church leaders, house church leaders, in inland China up near the Mongolian border about seeking the good of the city as necessary preparation, they would wonder what sort of planet you’re on.
If you explained it, they’d probably agree with it. Christians in China have gradually developed a reputation for being such hard workers and people of integrity that, at certain upper levels of government, they’re actually inviting Christians to go and lecture on Christianity so they can make good workers. So some doors are open in China precisely because of the fact that Christians are so transformed they are seeking the good of the city, but they’re not thinking of it as a philosophy; it’s just that they’re transformed thereby.
Now in French Canada when I was growing up, seeking the good of the city … good grief! The city was putting us in jail. It’s not that we were against it; it’s that it was a “hanging on by your fingernails” sort of existence. It was a persecution world, and still you tried to work with integrity and all of this. In that sense, you were seeking the good of the city.
It’s not that we had the resources or the money or the people or the numbers to do anything about slums in Montreal. We had William Frey and Tom Carson in all of the city of Montreal. What does seeking the good of the city …? What it means is start planting some churches, for goodness’ sake. So there are contextual variations in all of this too, and Tim would be the first to acknowledge that the first nonnegotiable is, after all, the proclamation of the Word of God.
Now within that framework he also wants to insist, as the Bible insists, “Do good to all men, especially those who are of the household of faith.” When you’re transformed by the gospel, there is going to be greater adherence to the second commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself. That’s all Tim is saying, and he’s trying to say it in a context in which he is not losing the priority of the gospel.
But there are movements going on that run history like this: “There are liberals; they seek social transformation. There are conservatives; they just believe in Word-based ministry. Then there’s us. We’re the new generation. We put it all together. We have holistic ministry.” Now there’s just enough truth in that that you have to be careful about what you say regarding it, but at the same time, first, it is extremely self-righteous. Whenever you find any movement that says, “Everybody has it wrong until me,” raise some historical questions.
Secondly, historically it’s not quite fair. I don’t know about Australia, but there have been massive sociological studies done by non-Christians, both in America and the UK, as to what kinds of so-called Christians are involved in hands-on ministry with the poor or digging wells in the Sahel, or whatever. All of these studies have shown, overwhelmingly, that it’s the conservative Christians who are much more involved in social transformation than the liberal Christians.
SIM (what was Sudan Interior Mission; now it’s Serving in Mission) have been planting churches in Africa since 1880. They’ve been evangelistic, Bible-based, and so on. They have a long track record. On the other hand, you don’t have to talk to them about, “Oh, maybe you have it wrong. You need to do some more holistic ministry.” Virtually all of the best hospitals they built, and many of them they still run. That was before anybody thought of holistic ministry.
So when you get the young whippersnappers coming along saying, “Everybody has gotten it wrong until me,” there’s some distortion going on there that is really unkind to a former generation that bore the heat of the day. Meanwhile, what I observe in many of these holistic.… We have a bunch of students at Trinity who have decided to take on a holistic ministry project.
At one level, I want to say, “Yes, yes, this is good. This is terrific.” They’ve gone into a really poor part of North Chicago. They’ve rented a house. A bunch of guys have moved in there, and they’re trying to do good in the city. I applaud it on so many fronts. After they’d been there about a year and a half, I took some of them aside one day and said, “So how many people have you gotten into a Bible study?”
“Oh, we haven’t gotten there yet.”
“How many people have you explained the gospel to?”
“Oh, we haven’t gotten …”
I mean, they’re good at taking out garbage and they’re good at helping people who are poor and so on. I’m grateful for all of that. But what I finally told them was, “You don’t have holistic ministry. You don’t even have ‘half-istic’ ministry. You have about ‘quarter-istic’ ministry. Grow up. This isn’t the gospel.” So in the name of being more righteous than others, at the end of the day they end up sacrificing the gospel itself.
I want to see gospel, Bible-based, evangelistic ministry that is holistic in a full sense. I’m all for that. How that is going to look will be different in New York and French Canada, or French Canada then and French Canada now. Of course. That’s all right and good. But at the end of the day, the sloganeering that’s going around in the current discussion I find insulting to an earlier generation, historically inaccurate, full of self-righteousness, and, on the ground, often pretty distorted. Is that too harsh? Now let me tell you the bad stuff. No, just kidding.
Male: I was just wondering if you could tell a little bit more about your teenage years when things were really hard. Like how you dealt with that. Any regrets?
Don: Oh yeah. I mean, I have all kinds of regrets. I wish I had been more mature than I was, and all that. The Lord did give me one friend. My dad’s church at that point was a bilingual church. We went to all of the services, English and French. On the English side, I did have one friend who was a year or two older than I was. He had virtually none of my interests. He quit school early and went and joined the army. Obviously, I didn’t quit school.
So they were lonely years in all kinds of ways, and it took me a while to sort of grow up and figure out how to interact with things. Moreover (both a blessing and a curse), I was ahead in school. I finished high school at 16 and then went to university at 16, so I skipped some stuff. That meant I was not as emotionally mature in handling things, probably, as I might otherwise have been. None of my friends read the books I was reading. So I was lonely for other reasons than gospel reasons. I was an odd duck.
But as I look back on our family.… I have an older sister and a younger brother. We all reacted to the pressures of those years in different ways, but that’s something you see in retrospect. I responded to it on the long haul by becoming stubbornly enduring. My sister responded to it on the short haul (she has grown out of it now) by saying she wanted a form of Christianity that had a lot more power than that did.
She was tired of all of this empty futility, and she went into the Apostolic Church for a while. Eventually her eyes were opened and she left the deceit of the claims. My brother went into another kind of mode entirely. My brother is in the ministry today. My sister is married to a fine Christian man who’s retired now. They’re a good deal older than I am. So these things have come out in the wash, but sociologically, we all responded in slightly different ways.
If you read the book I wrote about my father, Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor, you will know he struggled with depression for much of his life in this sort of ministry, but there is something to be said for growing up in a home where you do see something of the discouragements and the defeats and all of that, but we did see some interesting conversions too.
There is a great deal to be said for growing up in a home.… Well, I sometimes say that the worst kind of Christian home to grow up in is one where there are large spiritual pretensions and low spiritual performance. The best kind of Christian family to grow up in is one where there are low spiritual pretensions and high spiritual performance.
When I got my dad’s journals after he had died, I found passages in it that said things like, “I bless you, heavenly Father, that my children are all more spiritual and love you more truly than I do.” What a load of rubbish, but the fact he could think that means we weren’t rebelling against him. Whereas you get high-profile dads who are a bit controlling, and that’s a great target to rebel against.
My dad never spoke at a national conference, never wrote a book, never traveled internationally, worked in a little corner of the world, and thought he wasn’t up to much. Why should I rebel against that? On the other hand, I can’t remember a single day when he didn’t pray for 45 minutes out loud in his study. He loved his wife all through the Alzheimer’s years. He never slept around.
When he was so discouraged and left the Drummondville church, he wouldn’t leave Quebec even though he had to take a secular job, because God had called him to French Canada and he loved French Canadians. Those things leave a stamp on you too. I worry about my kids for different reasons. What do they know of their dad? He flits around the world, writes a lot of books, and everybody is trying to get ahold of him. There’s a lot to rebel against there, thank you.
So there are not formulaic answers to this sort of thing, and if I started telling you, “This is what I did in my teenage years; by the grace of God, these are the steps I took …” I mean, I could tell you those things, but those aren’t formulas. Different kids, different dynamics, different families, different times. You go after the basics instead: gospel-centeredness, integrity of life, family ties.
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: I don’t know if you heard the question. He read some of my stuff on suffering. There’s a book on that stuff, if you want to read a book, called How Long, O Lord? We grew up in some of the suffering in French Canada, but, you know, I’ve had typhoid because I went to Africa. I came within death’s door. I’ve had two or three other diseases that have almost taken me out. My wife has had cancer that has almost taken her out. She didn’t expect to live to 50. She just turned 59. But that’s part of the stuff of life, isn’t it?
If you’re a Christian leader, then sooner or later, you go through situations in churches and relationships and so on that are really tough. The most painful things I’ve ever borne are betrayals by Christian friends. Some of you will know the name Roy Clements. On the Tuesday of this particular week, we got the diagnosis of my wife’s cancer, and it was bad. On the Thursday of that week, five others and I got the letter from Roy Clements telling us he was leaving his wife and was going to proclaim himself a homosexual.
Let me tell you, my wife and I cried much, much more over Roy than we ever did over the cancer. What can you do? Those things are also part of the making of the ministry, aren’t they? All you have to do is read the Epistles to find that out. You don’t have to learn from me.
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: It’s a very difficult conversation. The question you’re raising is very important, and I don’t have formulaic answers once again. Moreover, my intuition is to argue on two fronts. On the one hand are all of the guys who are doing cultural analysis who are basically saying, in the extreme case, “You cannot possibly be fruitful in this particular culture unless you accept this cultural analysis.”
McLaren is doing that all the time. The odd thing is that the McLaren form of the emerging church is not actually seeing many converts from actual secularists. The people actually seeing a lot of converts from raw secularists in the North American context are Tim Keller on one coast and Mark Driscoll on the other coast, with very different patterns of ministry but both of them doctrinally robust over against McLaren.
So even when you have a lot of cultural analysis, the cultural analysis may be wrong, or as you say, it may be so domesticating the gospel that you don’t have much gospel left to proclaim, which is what McLaren has done. He’s really a 1920s liberal with an overdose of postmodernism piled on top. It really is a bit disheartening in that regard.
To see cultural analysis well done, read someone like Keller. He would acknowledge that he thinks city. I’m not sure all of his theses are entirely right. One of his theses is all really big cities, megalopolises, have much more in common with each other today around the world than they have with non-city parts of their own country and culture. I think there’s an element of truth to that. I think it’s overblown. I think it’s overstated. Nevertheless, he is certainly fruitful, and there are some things to learn from him.
On the other side of the whole coin, however, I love the work of Mack Stiles. Does that name mean anything to you? Okay, you now have a book assignment: J. Mack Stiles, Marks of the Messenger. It came out this year. It’s the best book on evangelism I have ever read, bar none. There are so many books on evangelism that are talking about cultural analysis and techniques and programs and all this kind of stuff.
At the end of that book, I don’t come out thinking I know a whole lot more than I did before. I come out of that book wanting to do evangelism. What you need to know is the gospel, and you need to know it well and thoroughly, and then you can apply it to different people’s lives, but if you’re evangelizing, you are “gospelizing.” What you need to know is the gospel and keep on explaining what it means and explaining what it means, and when they object to something or other, they are objecting out of their framework and you answer in your framework.
So there is a sense in which there is a danger in constantly trying to think, “The thing that’s preventing me from evangelizing more thoroughly in Australia is because I don’t understand enough about secular culture in Australia.” Well, there is the element of truth. There’s the Tim Keller side of that that wants to say, “Yeah, yeah, keep your eyes alert. After all, it’s the twenty-first century; listen well,” and so forth. But there’s another side of me that wants to keep saying, “Yeah, but what you have to know first and foremost is the Bible.”
What a revolutionary thought: You have to know the gospel. You have to think through how to present that winsomely and truly and not put people down and really love people and all of the other kinds of things the Bible itself says, but at the end of the day, you don’t want to feel so crippled in your evangelism and church planting that you can’t possibly do anything until you read the next sociological analysis from the pen of James Davison Hunter or something, as much as I do read James Davison Hunter and enjoy him.
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: It’s hard to answer that sort of question with a formula once again, but I’ll say two or three things. First, the question might get transposed if you really believe that the gospel itself is the big category. As long as you’re thinking of the gospel as the little category, then you’re saying, “Now that they’ve gotten converted, do I keep on teaching them a little deeper stuff in this little category before I go on to How to Be Happy Though Married and 16 Ways to Bring Up Your Children and How to Concern Yourself with Money and the Poor, and so on?”
But if, in fact, the gospel is the big category, then the answer is you always go deeper in the gospel, because all of the categories about marriage and money and all of these other kinds of things actually flow out from a really deep understanding of the gospel. So the gospel is something we should be preaching to ourselves.
We become Christians, and we really do trust Christ, but we still commit all kinds of sins. What addresses our sins? What gives us forgiveness? What gives us motivating power still to be conformed to the likeness of Christ? What bows us before the lordship of Jesus? What gives us a hunger for the new heaven and the new earth? All of that is the gospel. We ought to be gospelizing it all the time. We do the work of an evangelist. So in one sense, what I want to say is you never stop doing that.
Now once you’ve agreed to that, then I hear your question, and I say obviously there might be some place for courses on how to bring up a family in a church and things like that. But even then, when you do it, you want to make jolly sure you’re doing it within the framework of the outflow of the gospel, so you need a course for young Christians on something or other on ecclesiology because they’re joining a church, but you don’t have a course of rules of ecclesiology.
I mean, what is the church but the blood-bought community of the living God, which then is shaped by the Word of God in a variety of ways in terms of its leadership and responsibility? But all of that flows out of the gospel again. So everything you’re teaching is going back to reinforce the gospel again and again too. You don’t have so much of a problem once you see that to be the case.
What I do think, however (and this is the third point), is that because so many people are biblically illiterate today, a lot of the teaching of the gospel needs to be cast in terms of understanding the whole Bible. Now I don’t want to become sort of a book peddler of my own stuff, but that’s why I put together the book The God Who Is There.
It’s pitched at about first-year university level, but it’s written for complete biblical illiterates. It explains big numbers and little numbers, you know, chapters and verses. It’s for people who don’t know anything about anything. It goes through the whole Bible in 14 chapters, and it’s openly evangelistic.
With it there is another little book called The God Who Is There Leader’s Guide, and now there’s a video series you can either buy as a DVD set or download for free from The Gospel Coalition’s website, which can be used in a kind of Alpha-type setting, a small-group setting, where you have one program a night and talk about it, Q&A.
The leader’s guide has Q&A discussion questions and more bibliographical resources, and all this kind of thing, for leaders to deal with as they’re leading people through this thing. It’s so new it hasn’t been field tested in a lot of places, but where it has been field tested, what we’ve discovered is that all kinds of Christians are perhaps even more grateful for it than non-Christians, because it’s actually enabling people to put their Bibles together.
The first one is The God Who Made Everything. It’s Genesis 1–2. The next one is The God Who Does Not Wipe Out Rebels. It’s Genesis 3. But in each case we’re running forward to Jesus and where this is all heading. The next one is The God Who Writes His Own Agreements. It’s basically the Abraham covenant. The next one is The God Who Legislates.
You keep going through until you get to The God Who Becomes a Human Being. It’s John 1. You’re going through the whole Bible storyline and bringing in more and more Scripture each time, and each time is primarily based on one or two chunks of Scripture that we’re unpacking, but at the same time it’s putting together the big picture.
But is that gospelizing? Well, yes and no. I keep saying there’s the big category into which the other things go. The other danger is that you say that the gospel is everything in the Bible. That’s not quite true, because then you start saying, “So if you’re giving to the poor, which the Bible tells you to do, that’s also gospel.” That’s not true.
The gospel is the good news about what God has done in Jesus, especially in the cross and resurrection and accession to the right hand of God, to bring about the transformation that finally climaxes in the new heaven and the new earth. Something like that. It includes justification on the one hand and transformation by the new birth on the other hand and communal living and relationships on the third hand and ultimate transformation and resurrection existence on the fourth hand, and so on.
That’s the core. The whole Bible is funneling into that. That’s the organizing center of everything. So you want to teach the whole counsel of God, but you want to do it in such a way that it is worldview-building while focusing on the gospel. Do the work of an evangelist. Teach the evangel. In that sense, it seems to me that you can cover a whole lot of other things on the fly while still teaching the whole counsel of God all the time, pushing in that direction all the time.
My wife is using this stuff, believe it or not, in one of her Bible studies at the moment. They’re using it in a way that I never, ever envisaged. My wife thought it was a screwball idea too, but nevertheless the group took a vote and that’s the way it came out. I thought people would either use the books for Bible study or they would use the video, because a lot of people don’t read books. They would listen to me rabbiting on.
It’s stuff I gave at Bethlehem Church. It’s basically the same material in a talky fashion rather than in an essay fashion, and the questions and answers for discussion groups can serve either one or the other. I thought people would either lock into this one or lock into that one. Her women have bought the books. They read the books in advance, then come together as a group and listen to the same material represented in preaching form for an hour, and then discuss the questions, and then have their prayer time.
Now to me that’s sort of doubling up and it’s in danger of vain repetition, but nevertheless, that’s what they’re doing with it. I’m just interested to see how this stuff is beginning to be used in different places. If you have criticisms of it, I’d like to know too, because second editions will eventually come out, and I want to know how it’s being used and abused.
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: You have to simultaneously affirm that gospel, by its very nature, is news. It’s news about what God has done. That’s what makes it such great news. If you ask, “Are there inevitable entailments of that?” then the answer is yes, but if you start fastening on the entailments, “This is, therefore, what you must do about it,” and calling it the gospel, then you’re only a whisker away from constantly saying, “The gospel is, ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, love your neighbor as yourself, love your wife as Christ loved the church,’ ” and so on. Then you’ve lost the news of what God has done. That’s the constant problem.
So in the essay I wrote for the Piper Festschrift, I wrestle with that question a little bit and say you cannot properly preach the gospel without seeing that the gospel by its very nature, by the form of its announcement.… I mean, if you made an announcement that said, “Owing to the rains, the River Such-and-Such is going to be cresting at such-and-such a time,” well, whether you actually said, “Please evacuate the area if you live in such-and-such a quadrant” or not, that’s the implication.
So there are implications all right with the gospel, and they’re quickly and universally made, but nevertheless, the gospel still remains news about what God has done supremely in Christ and certain events, and so on. That’s what the gospel is. Now the entailments are rich and thick and all over the place, but unless you make the distinction in principle, it is so easy to start using this sort of argument. “Yes, we haven’t done enough for the poor. There’s a big hole in our gospel.” I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that.
Well, there might be a hole in your obedience. There might be a hole in your understanding of the entailments of the gospel, but is there a hole in the gospel itself? Well, there might be if you don’t understand that this gospel concerns both spiritual matters and natural matters and how we live today as well as how we live in eternity. There might be, but just because you’re selfish does not prove there’s a hole in the gospel.
So it really is important while saying that you cannot preach the gospel without showing the entailments.… When I preach the gospel, I’m not just saying, “This is what Jesus has done; let us pray,” but I also implore people to repent and believe. Nevertheless, I’m imploring people to repent and believe on the ground of the gospel. I’m not saying that the repentance and the belief is itself the gospel. You do have to keep thinking through how that works out, and I tried to wrestle with some of it, as I say, in the book for the Piper Festschrift.
But today, because of so many pressures to make the gospel all-embracing in the sense that it includes all of the demands of Scripture (such that ultimately what is lost, in fact, is what the Bible calls the gospel, the good news of what God has done in Christ Jesus, because that is such a widespread danger), it is important to get some of these things thought through pretty clearly, it seems to me, before we unwittingly lose sight of things.
Male: It is relevant to where we are. You spoke about the good news of the gospel, and we often talk about the gospel as news, sometimes bad, sometimes good.
Don: That’s a Broughton Knox thing. I think he has got it not quite right, but that’s another issue.
Male: Under that, you do talk about having a holistic gospel. I appreciated that a lot. I’m wondering, does the goodness of the news focus just on what Christ has done or what he is also doing through community?
Don: The problem, again, is the gospel itself in the New Testament, when you look at where the gospel words are used, are focused again and again and again on incarnation, crucifixion, atonement, resurrection, accession to the right hand of the Father, his high priestly ministry, and so on. That is what the gospel word group is regularly connected with. It just is.
So when people say, “The Bible says the first commandment is to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself, and Jesus lived that out, and he came to announce the kingdom, and this is part of the good news,” I want to say, “It’s never connected there at all. Never. Not once in the New Testament.”
Now I don’t want to say the gospel is the good news about what Jesus has done hanging on the cross. Full stop. End of discussion. It is what he has done to bring about all of his purposes for redemption and judgment, world without end. Then the entailments are implicit in it. You can’t duck it. All you have to do is your own word study to see how the gospel words are connected in the New Testament.
That’s why I began with a word study in the Piper Festschrift essay, to find out how these things actually work in their context. It is so easy, it seems to me, to get that one wrong. There’s not time to go down another track. I was going to go down another track to unpack that a little further, but to me it is a huge danger that you really do have to become aware of.
Male: Let us pray with thanks to God for the fellowship and encouragement we’ve enjoyed. So let’s pray together.
Loving Father, we thank you for our brother in Christ and servant who has blessed us so well in these two hours with great wisdom and insight, both of testifying to what you’ve done in the past and calling on us to respond to that in the present. We thank you that a constant theme has been a reminder of what you have done for us in the Lord Jesus. So beyond thanking you for Don Carson, we glorify you for the Lord Jesus and what he has done for all of us. We pray this in Christ’s name, amen.
