Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of New Testament Studies in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
For some of these, I’m not going to do much more than prime the pump, but perhaps, it will at least have the advantage of surveying the subject at some breadth.
3. Epistemological issues.
Some of what I say now will overlap just a wee bit with what I’ll tackle in a slightly different way this afternoon regarding the emerging church movement. Nevertheless, this much needs to be said now. Although the twin notions of modernism and postmodernism are variously defined, most people would acknowledge modernism moves from a way of looking at knowing things that turns to the I. It turns to the self-conscious knower.
At the risk of that oversimplification, pre-modernism, before the dawning of the Enlightenment in the Western world, commonly began with God. There were very few people in Europe before the dawning of the Enlightenment who would deny the existence of God, and this God was understood to be the God of the Bible even if he was not well understood.
That meant he was personal and omniscient. That meant, by definition, almost all human knowing was necessarily a subset of God’s perfect and exhaustive knowing, and that meant, in some sense, all human knowing is a function of revelation. If all of our knowing is a subset of God’s perfect and exhaustive knowing, you cannot escape the entailment that in some sense all human knowing is bound up with revelation at some level or another, whether this God discloses himself in Scripture or in what we now call nature. All human knowing is a function of God’s knowledge.
But the move to the I, often epitomized in the thinking of Descartes, “I think; therefore, I am,” establishes a certain putative, independent, finite knower, and in modernist assumptions, this finite knower can establish certain common axioms, certain foundations, certain methodological controls, and find out the truth about things, and even the truth about God in some forms of modernism so that God becomes not the assumption of our knowledge but, rather, the conclusion of our knowledge.
Within this framework, then, a lot of evidentialist approaches to knowing God were generated. Some of them had their advantages, as we’ll see. Probably the best known are the books of Josh McDowell: More Than a Carpenter, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, More Evidence That Demands a Verdict, and all of the proofs on top of the proofs on top of the proofs to force you to the conclusion that certain things about the Bible are true and so on. It is still worth reading those book. It is still worth reading them.
At a slightly more advanced level, John Warwick Montgomery, 30 or 40 years ago, was one of the gurus of the evidentialist movement. On the other hand, that same movement, the Enlightenment with its emphasis on I, the knower, inevitably established a kickback which generated what came to be called presuppositional apologetics.
People recognized this finite knower, from the Bible’s perspective, is not only finite but perverse. We twist knowledge. We’re fallen, and if we treat God as the object, if we think God becomes the conclusion of our analyses and our weighing of the evidences, then somehow he’s no longer God. We are standing in judgment of him.
Moreover, we twist so much of what we see, and the Bible itself insists the natural person does not understand the things of God but they’re spiritually discerned that at the end of the day it’s giving far too much credit to human reason, to human logic, to human ability to see the true entailments of the evidence to take a merely evidentialist approach to apologetics.
Therefore, you have to begin with a kind of presuppositional apologetics, and here, the idea is to challenge the socks off the very foundations and assumptions of evidentialism, to begin by showing how we are perverse. At the end of the day, there needs to be a kind of fundamental repentance that bows to the lordship of Christ and comes under the sheer godhood of God before you can begin to see anything in right proportion. The names that are associated with that movement include, of course, people like Cornelius Van Til and many others.
The problem is, having established those polarities within confessional evangelicalism, evidentialist apologetics, on the one hand, and presuppositional apologetics, on the other hand, we have to face the fact in some ways both of those forms of apologetics were themselves fed by the move to the Enlightenment that began with the I.
What postmodernism has done is taken the I and drawn out certain other conclusions than what modernism drew out. What postmodernism does is begins with the I and says, “In this sense, modernism is right. You do begin with the I.” It just hasn’t seen all the entailments. If you begin with the I, then you have to face the fact we’re all culturally located. We bring our biases. We look at things from a certain perspective. We can’t escape that.
Because of that, our evidences themselves are so slanted by our assumptions, by our culture, our language, our point of view that the evidences are not very convincing. You give a whole lot of McDowell-type evidences to a young person at university today, and that person is likely to say, “That’s very interesting. Is that what Christians believe? I’m sure that’s very convincing for you.”
It’s convincing for you or it’s true for you or it’s the frame of reference in which you think, but it has very little to do with public truth or with truth that is culture transcendent or anything like that, which is one of the reasons why an evidentialist apologetic today is becoming less and less and less convincing on a university campus.
On the other hand, if you begin with the other side and begin with a presuppositional apologetic.… My favorite story in this regard is of a young graduate from Calvin Seminary who was steeped in a presuppositional apologetic who eventually went up to the University of Toronto several years ago to do his PhD under Paul Ricoeur who has recently died, of course. Paul Ricoeur was a scholar of enormous profundity in the entire arena of interpretation on hermeneutics. Whether you agree with him or not, he was astonishingly influential.
This young Calvin graduate in this doctoral seminar realized early on he really ought, as a Christian, to declare himself, so somewhere in one of these seminars he admitted. He was speaking now. He was trying to reason things through out of his particular perspective, out of his sets of presuppositions. He was a Christian, and he tried to look at thing through a biblical lens, from a godly, Christian perspective. He was a presuppositionalist.
Then the student looked around the room. He had taken a courageous step and acknowledged he was a Christian in a secular university. He said, “They all looked at me as if I had just announced the pope was Catholic,” because whatever a postmodernist is, he or she is a presuppositionalist. The question is.… How do you warrant one set of presuppositions over another set of presuppositions? You have your presuppositions and I have my presuppositions. We’re all presuppositionalists, aren’t we?
A presuppositional apologetic, likewise, seems to fall flat in that kind of framework. Now where are you? I’m persuaded we are becoming rife for an approach to apologetics, the defense of the faith, that is far more comprehensive. There is plenty of demonstration in Scripture, on the one hand, that certain axioms in presuppositional apologetics are right. There’s plenty evidence in Scripture there are certain axioms in evidentialist apologetics that are also right. The question is how to put them together.
On the one hand, there are these texts that say, “Be ready to give an answer to everyone for the hope that lies within you.” Luke can go so far as to say he’s writing these things so you may know the certainty of what you have believed. Paul insists on going and chatting with the eyewitnesses themselves if you don’t believe in the resurrection, for goodness’ sake. All of which have at least some overtones of appealing to evidence and history in the open arena.
At the same time, Paul also insists the natural man does not understand the things of God. They are foolishness to him. They’re spiritually discerned. Unless you have the Holy Spirit of God, you’re just not going to understand them. If I go onto a university campus and explain as much as I possibly can, and at the end of the day, people get converted, is it because I’ve been so wonderfully creative in giving reasons? I don’t think so. Lots of other people have not gotten converted.
What makes the difference? There’s a sense in which you can’t even say the whole thing turns on whether or not somebody is bright enough, good enough, intelligent enough, spiritual enough, humble enough to understand it. No. You begin to understand after a while what the old songwriter meant when he said …
I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew
He moved my soul to seek him, seeking me.
It was not I that found, O Savior true;
No, I was found of thee.
The fact of the matter is, unless God discloses himself to us, we will remain blind. The fact of the matter is there are some jolly good reasons for believing that God himself gives evidences in the public arena and you ought to be aware of them, and if you don’t see them, it’s your fault, and if you do see them, it’s God’s grace. Put that in your theological pipe and smoke it.
At the end of the day, that’s part of the axiom of Scripture, and somewhere along the line, we need to develop forms of apologetic that handle these things together in tandem in mutually complementary ways so you’re not overturning the valid elements of both frames of reference. There is a place for undermining the false presuppositions of those who remove themselves from the way the Bible looks at things.
There is a way of giving all kinds of evidences, but at the same time, if you raise either of those sorts of approaches to a level of absolute preeminence and refuse to listen to what else the Scripture says in this regard, usually it’s because a person is still living in a modernist world where they have accepted unthinkingly the I object distinction, the self-object distinction that begins with a finite I instead of beginning with God.
That has a pretty big place in how we go about thinking about the authority and reliability of Scripture. There are reasons I’ll come to in due course for thinking about the truthfulness of Scripture within Scripture. Can I prove it in some sort of mathematical formula? No, because even in mathematics, there are a set of definitions that have gone into what is meant by the various operators and what is meant by the various symbols and so on, and we will not share enough common ground that I can prove these sorts of things beyond a reasonable doubt.
On the other hand, are there lots of reasons to make you think, such that if this were an ideal universe and nobody was fallen, you would be utterly overwhelmed by the evidences themselves? Yes, of course. There’s all of that, too. Within this framework, then, let me refer you briefly to various bits and bobs.
4. Evidence you find in Scripture.
Just a small smattering of the kinds of reliability you get. I could lecture here for several hours without even making a dent in the volume of material, but let me mention a few things. If you are interested in the larger questions of dating and authorship and reliability and you’ve never read anything in this arena at all, although it’s 30 or 40 years old, the little book by F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? is still worth reading. I still am happy to give that away to some undergraduates who have never read anything in this area. F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?
On the other hand, if you have read something in the area and you don’t find Bruce very satisfying anymore because it’s just too thin and you’ve become introduced to much more, in this instance there is a book by Carson and Moo called An Introduction to the New Testament. In the second edition, it’s almost 800 pages long, and it tries to work through a lot of these things in considerable detail with a lot of references.
By all means, work it through. Read other ones as well, but we tried really hard to work at those sorts of primary sources ourselves, and you can plow through that at your leisure. It might at least have the benefit of putting you to sleep at night. It’s heavy enough that it makes a good doorstop. The book has many advantages, so if you don’t want to read it, you can appeal to one of its other advantages.
On the connection between Scripture and history, again, it’s worth remembering how some authors compose their material. Here’s Luke. “Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Therefore ThereTh, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.”
That’s very interesting, isn’t it? If you track Luke’s movements, insofar as you can, in the New Testament, you can spot the occasions, for instance, when he’s actually traveling with Paul, at least on three occasions. The so-called “we” sections of Acts when, instead of Paul describing what they are doing, he’s now describing what we are doing because he has linked up with Paul and he’s traveling with the apostle.
That puts him in all of the major Christian centers. At some point, he was in Jerusalem. At some point, he was in Antioch. At some point, he was in Asia Minor which meant, when he says he looked into these things himself, you are to take him seriously. Do you know one of the likely reasons why he tells us more about the virgin birth than anybody else? He was a doctor, and he knew Mary. He chatted her up. He found out more about these things.
You can place him in Antioch, which is the first major Christian center outside of Jerusalem, so he had access to records that were already being kept. In this sense, there is a kind of research that has gone into these things, and he carefully distinguishes between those who were the eyewitnesses and those whom he interviewed as eyewitnesses. He’s not pretending to know something he doesn’t know.
He has looked at documents. He has looked at other reports other people have written up. He has been to the various centers. He has checked them out himself. He has been a companion of Paul. He certainly met the apostles. He has checked these things out. All of those things are worth comparing closely with, let’s say, the gospel of Thomas or the gospel of Judas or the gospel of the Nazarenes or whatever, these other documents that have come along later and made no such pretensions because they can’t.
Then, of course, there are countless, small, accidental bits. I don’t know what else to call them. Today, in North America, whether you are the chief officer, the executive of a small village or of Chicago, you’re called the mayor. That’s what a mayor is. A mayor is the chief executive officer of a municipality, regardless of whether the municipality is a hamlet or of a city the size of metro Chicago.
In the first century, there were different words used for city rule depending on the status of a city. The status of a city could vary enormously under the Roman Empire. It could be a senatorial city, ruled indirectly by the Senate. It could be an imperial city, ruled by the emperor directly or indirectly through governors and so forth. Then there were cultural categories that depended on the local language group and the local background. In other words, there was not one word for mayor.
To make matters even more complicated, these categories could actually change. If the status of the city changed from being a senatorial city to being something else, the chief executive officer also changed his title. That could change within one decade two or three times depending on the politics in Rome. It was pretty complicated.
Insofar as we can check Luke out, for example, by other sources, Luke gets the right label on each officer in each city he talks about. Let me just list some of them. Sergius Paulus and Gallio, mentioned in Acts 13:7 and 18:12. The Greek word is anthypatos. They’ve got it right. The magistrates at Philippi when Paul is in prison in Acts 16, they are stratēgos, from which we get our word strategists.
The city official at Thessalonica, the politarches. That’s exactly right. The town clerk at Ephesus. He was the mayor of Ephesus at the time. He was called grammateus. That’s exactly correct. Felix, the governor … Hēgemōn. That’s exactly correct. The chief official on Malta where Paul gets bitten by a snake, he’s prōtos. Exactly correct.
At every point, insofar as we can test (and we can’t test all of them as we don’t have enough external sources), Luke gets it right. That doesn’t prove Jesus is God. It does demonstrate Luke is a pretty reliable historical researcher. He has the little bits right. You can multiply that again and again and again. You can do that for other bits of the Bible. Eventually, you can make a pretty strong case for at least general credibility even if you are not a Christian and committed to seeing this is Christian Scripture.
A lot of those sorts of evidences, they’re evidentialist evidences. They’re not the sort of thing that make you a Christian (don’t misunderstand me); nevertheless, they are scattered there throughout all of Scripture, and it is worth becoming familiar with them and understanding what kind of documents we’re talking about even apart from the claim of inspiration and authority and the like.
5. We must think through the bearing on our doctrine of Scripture of who Jesus is.
I cannot say that too strongly. I know there’s a form of creating this argument that is merely a vicious circle. Scripture tells us who Jesus is. Jesus says Scripture is good. Scripture tells us who Jesus is. Jesus tells us Scripture is good. It’s a vicious argument you can’t get out of. I understand that, but there are circular arguments that are not vicious, so long as you don’t try to claim too much from them.
The multiplicity of Scriptural evidences about the identity of Jesus are remarkable in certain respects just as historical documents that come from the first century, even if you’re still not accepting them yet as Scripture. Amongst the things that are remarkable is what they say about who Jesus is and what his views of Scripture are.
I’m going to come to one of those passages in a few moments so you can look at one of them a little more closely, but it is worth remembering once you do come to grips with who this Jesus is, whether you’re appealing in the first instance to what Scripture says or to the way God has opened your eyes to see it by his Spirit to your repentance and faith in Christ.
Regardless of whether in the first instance you’re appealing to any of these things, nevertheless, you must see there are some entailments regarding Jesus’ view of Scripture, so he can say things like, “The Scripture cannot be broken. Not one jot or tittle shall fall from the law until all things are fulfilled.”
A jot is a yodh, the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the tittle is merely a blob of ink that distinguishes between two pairs of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. There are three such pairs. A little blob of ink distinguishes between, for example, what we call B and what we call K. Just a little blob of ink between what we call D and what they call R. Nothing shall be fallen until everything is fulfilled.
In other words, Jesus himself transparently has a very high view of Scripture, so if you come to have a high view of Jesus, what are you going to start doing? “Well, I like the fact he’s telling the truth about our sex lives, but I don’t really care for what he says about Scripture.” It turns out with Jesus, eventually, he becomes an all or nothing sort of person. It’s a zero-some game, and in that connection, the public witnesses of who Jesus is are really astonishing.
I want to take a few minutes on one such passage with you. The passage I’ve chosen you might think is a little irrelevant to begin with, but I hope you’ll see, in due course, it is very powerful. Matthew, chapter 11. If you have your Bibles, this is a good time to open them. Matthew, chapter 11, verses 2 and following. Let me remind you of the flow of argument. This is one of those passages where you won’t see the point unless you see the flow. It is a narrative text.
Beginning at verse 2, we read, “When John …” That is John the Baptist. “… heard, in prison, what the Christ was doing, he sent his disciples to ask him, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?’ ” If I were developing a sermon here, I would call this Portrait of a Discouraged Baptist. I am not speaking denominationally. John the Baptist, transparently, is having second thoughts about who Jesus is. Why?
At this point, he’s in prison. He hasn’t lost his head yet. That’s chapter 14. He hasn’t been beaten up. He has access to his own disciples. They’re running back and forth between him and Jesus conveying questions. There were Christians, believers in the Old Testament, who suffered far, far more than this without buckling under, so is John the Baptist a wimp?
No, no, no. The reason why John the Baptist has these doubts about who Jesus is is because Jesus is turning out to be different from his expectations of what the Messiah should be like. If you go back to Matthew, chapter 3, for example, and listen in on John the Baptist’s own teaching about who Jesus is, he says, amongst other things, for example, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he shall thoroughly purge his threshing floor, and cast the chaff into unquenchable fire.”
In other words, he was expecting a Messiah who would come along and make a clear distinction between wheat and chaff and burn the chaff and so on. He was expecting a big bang at the end of the age. That’s what he was expecting. In fact, what does Jesus do? He wanders around the countryside healing people, making them better, preaching on hillsides to nice people with lots of long sermons so everyone thinks he’s wonderful and tells some parables.
“Are you the one who should come, or are we looking for somebody else?” Then Jesus’ answer to this discouraged Baptist is also very interesting, isn’t it? “Jesus replied, ‘Go back and report to John what you hear and see.’ ” In verse 5, Jesus describes his own ministry in words very substantially drawn from the prophecy of Isaiah. “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.”
The two Old Testament passages from which Jesus is citing are respectively Isaiah 35 and Isaiah 61. Here’s Isaiah 35, verses 5 and 6. “Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy.” In Isaiah 61, this is the famous passage that begins, “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me …” and goes on to read, “… because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.”
Certainly, John the Baptist knew the text of Isaiah. Not only was he biblically literate, but elsewhere he identifies himself as the one crying in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord!” That’s drawn from Isaiah. He knew the text of Isaiah, but that meant he would have not only known these passages to which Jesus alludes, but he would have known their contexts. The interesting thing is both of those contexts in Isaiah also speak of judgment that Jesus does not quote.
Come back to Isaiah 35 again. Yes, we read Isaiah 35:5 and 6, “Then will the eyes of the blind be opened,” but read the preceding two verses, Isaiah 35:3 and 4. “Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way; say to those with fearful hearts, ‘Be strong, do not fear; your God will come, he will come with vengeance; with divine retribution he will come to save you.’ ”
“Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped.” Jesus didn’t quote that bit. Then there’s Isaiah 61. Yes, “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.” True. True. True. But also (verse 2), “… to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God …”
Jesus doesn’t quote that bit even though Jesus knows John the Baptist knows the context. Instead of quoting those bits, he says in Matthew 11, verse 6, “Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me.” Do you see what Jesus is saying? He is saying, “Report to John what you see and hear. The messianic blessings promised for the final age are dawning.
The poor hear the gospel. The blind see. The deaf walk. The anticipation of the consummation blessings are already here, and if the time of judgment is not yet, blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me. Hang in there. Judgment is coming but not yet.” That’s what he’s saying. Here’s a portrait of a discouraged Baptist.
In the next verses (verses 7 and following), you have the portrait of a defended Baptist. What Jesus now does is defend John the Baptist before the various hearers. Apparently, this conversation between Jesus and the disciples of John the Baptist takes place in front of some of those who were listening in to Jesus’ sermons and so on.
He turns on them, and he knows the human heart well enough to know, if John the Baptist has doubts, some of them will be right smart alecks and think they have the right to criticize John the Baptist, so Jesus says (verse 7), “What did you go out into the wilderness to see?” That is, “When you went out to hear John preaching, when you went out to be baptized by him, when you went out into the desert?”
We’re told Jesus began to speak to the crowd about John. “What did you go out into the desert to see? A reed swayed by the wind?” Somebody with no spine, pushed around by every puff of wind. “Is that what you went out to see?” They know full well that’s not why they went out to hear him.
He sounded like a prophet. He dressed like a prophet. He ate the traditional limited foods of a prophet. He was a man of courage. In fact, he had actually called down the annunciation on Herod and that’s why he was in prison. He was a man of great moral strength. They know what happened right now because he’s asking these questions to start raising fundamental issues about his integrity.
“If not, what did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes? Did you go out to him because he was posh? No, those who wear fine clothes are in kings’ palaces.” He wore the traditional garb of a prophet. “Then what did you go out to see? A prophet?” By this time, the crowd is a little nervous. They sort of had the skin taken off of them twice. This time, Jesus says, “Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet.”
In what sense was Jesus more than a prophet? The text tells us. That’s the point of verse 10. “This is the one about whom it is written: ‘I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you.’ ” This is a quotation from the prophecy of Malachi. Jesus is saying John the Baptist is more than a prophet in this respect, that he fulfills the prophecy of Malachi. He is the one about whom Malachi wrote, “Before the messenger of the covenant comes,” referring to Jesus, “there’s this messenger who prepares the way before him.”
In other words, it is given to John the Baptist to be this one who announces the messenger of the covenant. In categories John the Baptist knows that Jesus doesn’t use here, he is the one who prepares the way of the Lord. It is given to John the Baptist, not only to be a prophet himself but to be the one who prepares Jesus’ way.
Then Jesus says, in verse 11a.… It’s stunning! “I tell you the truth, among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist.” Do you hear this? Jesus is saying, in his estimation, John the Baptist is greater than Isaiah, John the Baptist is greater than Moses, John the Baptist is greater than Solomon, John the Baptist is greater than King David, and John the Baptist is greater than Abraham. Among those born of women? I mean that’s a pretty comprehensive category. I can only think of one exception myself.
“Among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist.” On what ground? He’s not saying John the Baptist is wiser than Solomon or a greater military leader than David. On what ground? It’s all in the flow of the passage. What has happened? What’s the point of verse 10?
Jesus says John the Baptist is greater than anyone born of women, in effect, because to him and to him alone was given the privilege of introducing Jesus. There is a sense, you see, in which Abraham announces Jesus. There is a sense in which Isaiah announces Jesus. There is a sense in which David announces Jesus. They’re pointing forward in some sense canonically, but it was given to only one man, and that was John the Baptist, to say, “There! That’s the one whose sandals I’m not worthy to unloose. That’s the one!”
On this ground, Jesus says he’s the greatest person born of woman. Supposing after Ted had finished introducing me this morning, I got up here and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I solemnly tell you the truth, Ted is the greatest man born of women because he just introduced me,” I suspect you’d either be looking for people in white coats to help me out of the place, or you’d be ushering me to the door, or Kevin DeYoung would be thinking about resigning.
It is the most astonishing thing to say, isn’t it? But that’s what Jesus says. It’s amazing. There’s a sense in which John the Baptist bears witness elsewhere to Jesus; now Jesus is bearing witness to John the Baptist. Boy, oh boy, is that witness ever different when you compare the two! John the Baptist bears witness to Jesus and says, “He must increase, but I must decrease.” He says, “I’m not even worthy to unloose his sandals. Why should I baptize you? I have need of being baptized by you.”
Humility absolutely everywhere. Jesus comes along and says, “I’m bearing witness to John the Baptist. Don’t you dare think he’s a wimp! Let me tell you how important he is. He’s the most important person ever born of a woman because he introduced me.” What do you do with a guy like Jesus?
In case we haven’t gotten the point, he makes it even clearer. Look at the last half of verse 11. “… yet the one who is least in the kingdom is greater than John.” Tell me, do you ever get up in the morning, look at yourself in the mirror, and say, “I am greater than King Solomon” or “I am greater than Abraham” or “I am greater than the prophet Isaiah”? Have you said that recently? What’s the matter? Are you sub-biblical? Because that’s what this text is saying, isn’t it?
If John the Baptist is the greatest one, greater than all of these, and we, the least in the kingdom, are greater than John, than in Jesus’ estimate, the least in the kingdom (that means people like you and me if you are a Christian at all) are greater than Isaiah and David and Solomon and the rest.
Don’t make any mistakes here, now. That doesn’t mean I can look in the mirror and think of myself as greater than David militarily or greater than Solomon in terms of administrative wisdom or greater as a prophet than Isaiah or greater as the father of the nations or a man of faith than Abraham. I can’t say any of those things.
The only way 11b makes sense is if it’s on the same axis as 11a. Verse 11a establishes John the Baptist is greater than all who come before because it was given to him most immediately and clearly to point out who Jesus was, but the least in the kingdom is able to point out who Jesus is more clearly and immediately than John the Baptist.
If you’ve been a Christian for three weeks, you can say, “Jesus died on the cross for my sins. He bore my punishment in his own body on the tree. He rose again. God declares me just because he has borne my sin and I wear his justice.” Can’t you say that? Even if you’re not a very articulate.… If you’ve been a Christian for three weeks, can’t you say that?
You point out who Jesus is more immediately and clearly than John the Baptist does because, with this progress of redemptive history, John the Baptist three chapters later is going to get bumped off. He never does see the cross and the resurrection, but the least in the kingdom see this. Our greatness is bound up with the remarkable privilege we have of being born this side of the cross and resurrection, and therefore, with our immutable privilege to point out who Jesus is. It’s spectacular, isn’t it?
The rest of the verses, I would be prepared to argue, all the way down to verse 19 are still developing this same theme. I’m not going to take the time to unpack them. The point of all this is merely to highlight again something that shows up in passage after passage after passage after passage. It’s something that has been pointed out apologetically by a lot of people including, very memorably, C.S. Lewis.
Whatever else you can say about Jesus, you can’t go around and relativize him as one of a good string of prophets or a string of good prophets. He’s a pretty nice guy along with some other good guys. I mean, there was Buddha. He was a pretty good guy. There was Muhammad. He was a pretty good guy. There were a bunch of good guys religiously speaking, but the fact of the matter is good guys don’t go around saying, “The one who introduced me is the greatest person born of women.”
The kind of person who says that is either a megalomaniac and needs to be dismissed forthwith or he is who he says he is and should be worshiped. There really is no other alternative. There just isn’t. You can go through text after text after text after text in the New Testament and come to the same conclusion.
Sooner or later, if he is who he says he is, the only appropriate response is not to stand in judgment of him but to bow the knee, to say, “I repent. I believe. Help my unbelief.” In other words, there’s a huge Christological dimension to all we think of the Christian faith including all we think of the Christian Scriptures and what Jesus thought of them.
6. The relevance of Christian Scriptures.
There is a profound sense in which I would not want you to believe anything the Bible says simply because Don Carson has taught it. If you think Don Carson or Ken DeYoung or anybody else has accurately taught what Scripture says so that you’re not believing it because we have taught it but because we have faithfully represented what Scripture says, then fine (I’m happy), but at the end of the day, the last thing any Christian teacher or preacher wants is to become somebody’s guru in some ultimate sense.
Despite the best efforts of some of our more ardent postmodern friends, we want people to believe what Scripture says because it’s the truth. I’m not claiming we have independent access to truth. I’m not claiming our knowledge of the truth is objectively obtained in an enlightenment sense. I’m going to come to that one again this afternoon, how you go about wording that sort of thing in a postmodern age. We’ll come back to that. I’m not claiming any of that.
I’m not claiming we have the knowledge of omniscience to weigh truth exhaustively and absolutely. All I’m saying is we do claim what Scripture says is the truth, and that’s why we want you to believe it. That establishes a frame of reference, a worldview. This is something I’m going to be dealing with a little more on Sunday morning from Acts 17. Do you remember in Acts 17 how Paul is dealing with various people in Athens, and there were certain people present (Stoics and Epicureans) who were called philosophers?
Today a philosopher is someone who teaches in a relatively small department at the big university to a handful of students who are generally viewed by the engineers as eggheads and whose discipline teaches them to doubt everything and to raise questions and to answer nothing. That’s slightly cynical but not much!
Whereas, in the first century, a philosopher by definition was a worldview portrayer. By definition, a philosophy was a worldview and the various philosophies aimed to teach others their worldview in order to establish meaning, in order to establish conduct and how to look on the whole universe and origins and destiny and purpose and how you cope with suffering and evil.
A worldview was a philosophy if philosophy was a worldview. There was a Stoic philosophy, and there was an Epicurean philosophy, and there were other competing philosophies in the marketplace. It’s one of the reasons why in the patristic period, Christianity was viewed by many pagans as another philosophy, because it was viewed as establishing a worldview.
In one sense, that’s what it is. It’s more than a philosophy because, for us, philosophy has all kinds of overtones that are probably not very helpful, and it’s too abstract, and it’s not sufficiently grounded in history, and nowadays it’s too negative and destructive and not sufficiently constructive. That’s why I don’t use the expression, but I understand why, in the first century, Christianity could be understood as a philosophy. It was seeking to establish a frame of reference, a worldview.
You cannot, finally, talk about the relevance, then, of the Bible without seeing that, in the first place. If it’s telling you the truth, it is actually seeking to establish an entire worldview, a frame of reference which includes not only who God is but where we come from and what’s wrong with the universe and where we’re going and how you put what’s wrong with the universe right.
That establishes a frame of reference, a worldview, a way of looking at all of reality, and that’s what the Bible is about. It establishes who God is, who human beings are made in the image of God with an eternal destiny, God’s vice regents in creation, an analysis of what’s wrong, and what’s wrong is not what’s wrong according to Gnosticism. It’s not our material being that is wrong just because it’s material.
No. What’s wrong is rebellion. What’s wrong is anti-Godism. What’s wrong is the de-Godding of God. What’s wrong is what the Bible calls sin. In one sense, therefore, what is against us is not merely some immutable moral principle of the universe or the like. What’s against us is God himself. Our biggest problem is God, according to the Bible, because he does stand over against us, but our biggest hope is also God because, despite his justice, he’s the only one who can fix us. He’s the only one who can reconcile us to himself, and that’s what he does in Christ Jesus.
Ultimately, we’re heading not to a kind of ethereal existence in the sweet by and by but to a new heaven and a new earth and resurrection bodies, the home of righteousness so that Christians are interested in every dimension of life, absolutely every dimension, for Jesus is Lord and will be acknowledged as such at the end of time. That’s our frame of reference. That’s how you see everything. It’s a worldview. It’s a philosophy in that sense.
To talk about the relevance of the Bible, really is to talk about absolutely everything. It’s not relevant to making me feel fulfilled simply, or relevant to how you make a happy marriage, although it does speak to those sorts of issues. The frame of relevance is as sweeping as the biblical metanarrative. It’s as sweeping as the universe. It’s as sweeping as God himself, and any other way of looking at the Bible’s relevance is simply myopic. It’s reductionistic. It’s too tiny.
We have about 17 minutes before we break for lunch, so this is the opportunity to come back at me with questions and comments and the like.
Male: I was curious, Dr. Carson, about the passage in Matthew 11 about those who are least in the kingdom being greater. I know that contextually it is having to do with our understanding of things post-cross, but do you think also there are other aspects of it bound up in terms of the Spirit’s coming and our union with Christ and the new covenant and things like that?
Don: None of that is mentioned here. In other words, if you want to ask me on dogmatic grounds, are there some new things that have come to Christians under the terms of the new covenant, they have to be carefully defined so you don’t introduce things that are so new that there’s no connection with the Old Testament.
On the other hand, this is not in view here, because the only way you can make sense of verse 11b is to see it’s on the same axis as verse 11a. Verse 11a establishes a comparison between John the Baptist and all who came before, and verse 11b establishes a comparison between John the Baptist and us. Unless those two axes are the same, the verse does not cohere.
While it is important on systematic or dogmatic grounds to construct a larger picture of things, in terms of understanding the particular argument of this passage, well, the local context prevails over the more remote context.
Male: You were just mentioning some things last night about Jesus’ pregnant sayings, and I was just curious.
Male: Dr. Carson, a couple of times you have referenced in your talk Gnosticism. Would you contrast for the group the difference in worldview between a Christian worldview and Gnosticism that would have been in vogue at the time?
Don: In part, I’ve done some of that already. There were different kinds of Gnosticism in the first century. C.H. Dodd once called Gnosticism a theological hodgepodge because it wasn’t sort of a tight system with clear dogmatic structures and confessional utterances. It just was very, very diverse, so there is a form of Gnosticism bound up with the Valentinians and another form bound up with Docetism and another form bound up with a chap named Basilides and so on. They all have small variations of one sort or another, so its’ very difficult to make universals out of Gnosticism.
What lies at the heart is bound up in the label itself. Gnosticism, from Greek, gnosis, which means knowledge. Really, they were claiming a certain kind of salvation that came out of insight (knowledge) into their very being. For example, in the Valentinian form (this is just an example of a much broader structure) human beings are of three sorts. They are the pneumatici, the psychici and the hylici.
The pneumatici have the Spirit. They understand, and when the message of Gnosticism reaches them, they immediately see who they are, they understand who they are, and they join the Gnostics. At the other end, the psychici are just animals. No matter what you teach them, they’re just animals. They’re never going to understand. In between are the hylici who might understand.
Do you see what this does in terms of worldview formation? Human beings are divided into three groups. There’s immense social pressure to belong to the group that really does understand. It’s not like what the Christian says. “I’m just a poor beggar telling other poor beggars where there’s bread.”
The Gnostics are saying, “I’m one of the pneumatici. I really do understand. I have the Spirit. If you really want to be amongst those who have the Spirit and really understand, then you must be like me and come and join our party. Otherwise, you could just be a glorified animal, a big ape.” That means, then, this ability to understand about which you pat yourself on the back over against other human being is what really saves you and to understand that virtually all forms of Gnosticism have to do with understanding also spirit is intrinsically good and matter is intrinsically bad.
The real problem is not moral rebellion against a God who holds you to account at every level of your being; it’s recognizing spirit is good and matter is bad. That’s why Gnosticism, then, divided into two camps. There was one camp that became quite acidic. That is, because matter is bad, therefore, whip yourself, flagellate yourself, and keep your body under because only spirit is good.
The other side said, in effect, matter is bad, but on the other hand, eventually it’s going to be put in the grave and molder away. It’s your spirit that lives forever, so you can show in fact just how free you are from this nasty view that matter matters by sinning like a trooper. If you destroy the body, who gives a rip? It’s just going to die and rot in the grave in any case. It’s the spirit that counts.
It became astonishingly, what we would call, antinomian. Your whole analysis of who human beings are, your relationship to God, what the problem is, what salvation is, is all very different. When you read the sorts of approaches of Elaine Pagels and so on who want the Gnostic documents to be part of a bigger Christianity, whereas, in fact, what we would call Christians in the second century universally call these things heresies without exception.
You must understand what is being offered is not some small variation in Christianity. It’s a categorically different universe. It’s a different worldview. Your knowledge of who human beings are, what God is like, how you get saved, what the gospel is, what the good news is, what the cross has to do with anything. It all changes. It’s a massively different religion, and to try to say anything else is just historically and remarkably distorted.
Male: A question relative to postmodernism and modernism and ancient times. You’ve laid out really nicely how I, the indication of an individual, figures in that, but I wonder if you would talk a little bit about evangelism to the imperial I of postmodern.
Don: I will say a bit more about that this afternoon in the study on the emerging church. If you don’t mind, I’m going to pick that one up a little later because it lies very close to one element of the emerging church’s self-understanding. The emerging church’s self-understanding is very big on the missional emphases, how you reach out in mission to other kinds of people, so that’s where I’d like to deal with that one, if you don’t mind. Do you mind if I duck it for now?
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: I see. The concern of Descartes and of the Enlightenment really had very little to do with I versus community because modernism equally would be happy to construct things out of we. The difference between modernism and premodernism does not turn on I versus we; it turns on I versus Thou. That is, whether you begin with God or whether you begin with the finite knower or knowers.
The kinds of differences I was dealing with did not have to do with individualism versus communitarian concerns. On that front, I would be more than happy to say you can go off the track either way. You could be so communitarian that, at the end of the day, there’s no place for individual faith. Whereas, even in the Old Testament, yes, you do have this whole covenant community of circumcised people, but at the end of the day, you also have a remnant that genuinely believes, too.
Whereas, in the New Testament, there is a lot of emphasis on individuals coming to faith. Yet, at the same time, you’re building up the church of the living God which is his body collectively, together. You can fall off the cliff, it seems to me, on either side on that one, but that particular debate has no necessary connection with the modernist-postmodernist debate.
Postmodernists who talk about the I sometimes talk about the autonomous I, but equally, others of them will talk about the hermeneutical we, the hermeneutical community so that the I speaks out of a frame of reference of a certain interpretive grid. You speak out of a certain cultural location. Thus, whether it’s I or the we of my culture, the point is, it’s cut off from God, and God is never more than an inference at the end of a whole series of chains in modernism that begins with a finite knower. Does that begin to answer?
Male: Dr. Carson, in light of the issues of modernism, postmodernism, and the changes in the past hundred years and, also, looking forward to the future in the next 10 to 20 years, would you care to speculate on the changing or progression of the church as it deals with culture? What will it look like in the next 10 to 20 years, and along with that, what is the necessity for the church to emphasize or to confront the things we’re going to face in the future?
Don: I find history hard enough. I find prophecy much more difficult. Walt Kaiser goes around saying, “I’m neither the prophet nor the son of a prophet, and I teach at a non-profit institution.” Not long ago in Australia, I had to give a lecture at the opening of a new school for preachers on The Challenges of the Pulpit in the Twenty-First Century. I thought my willingness to speak on this subject betrayed enormous arrogance.
This was in 2005. Cast yourself back to 1905. Supposing I had been asked to preach on the challenges of the pulpit in the twenty-first century, in 1905, would I have foreseen two world wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, the rise of Communism, the rise of Fascism, existentialism? Would I have foreseen global economy and globalization and the rise of tribalism? Would I have foreseen the breakup of the British Empire? Would I have foreseen nuclear holocaust? What would I have seen?
Changes are happening even faster now. All human predictions about the future are based in, one sense or another, on extrapolations of present trends or our best guesses at how people will react to them. The one thing you can be pretty sure about present trends is they won’t continue. This is something that makes me really nervous, but what I will tell you, even though I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet and I do work for a non-profit organization, is that Jesus himself says, “There will be wars and rumors of wars. Do not be dismayed. The end is not yet.”
We’ve just come through the bloodiest century in human history. I cannot think of a single reason why we should not expect the twenty-first century to be even bloodier. If Jesus tarries to the end of the century, there will be millions and millions and millions of people who will have become Christians, and there will be opposition because Jesus gives the parable of the wheat and the tares. “Let both grow until the end.”
Think back. Hardly more than a few tens of thousands of confessing believers in China in 1900. Now the best estimates begin at 90 million and go up. Look around the world. The Christian church is growing faster than Islam. On the other hand, there have been more Christian martyrs in the last 150 years than in the previous 1,800 years combined.
If the number of Christian martyrs over the last 10 years each year is killed each year in the future for our lifetime, then one in every 200 Christians alive today will die a martyr’s death. Of course, they’re not evenly distributed, but that’s the ratio about what’s going on at the moment. You bump off 2 million in 15 years in southern Sudan and it sort of pushes up the ratio. Not fewer than 9,000 in Indonesia in the last four and a half years.
Who knows? Great and glorious triumphs of grace. Maybe the West will go under. Empires have risen and fallen. Maybe the Lord will bless us with revival. How can I possibly predict that one? You look at Europe. There are only three countries in all of Europe (Eastern, Western, and Central Europe) where the gospel is advancing faster than the population. For most, it’s either holding its own or, more likely, declining.
There are more Muslims worshiping in France every weekend (about two and a half times more) than Catholics. If present trends continue (that phrase again), by 2050 France will be a majority Muslim. Will that take place? I don’t have a clue. Maybe there will be great revival. Who knows? I don’t know.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if some band of thugs gets a nuclear device and blows up either Tel Aviv or New York Harbor. It’s only a matter of time. Still, Christ is on his throne, and he reigns, and he calls the nations to himself, and it is part of his forbearance that he has not come back and ended it yet. Meanwhile, we are called to be faithful, whether in easy times or in hard. Christ will reign, and one day every knee will bow and every tongue confess Jesus is Lord. Beyond that, I’m not willing to predict too much, but it seems enough.
Male: Dr. Carson, I have a question. My question has something to do with the job of doing theology. How does one’s presupposition affect his entire theology? By presupposition, I mean whether you begin your theology with God or with the Bible, or others would tend to try to begin with both God and man. Also, I would like to grab this opportunity to ask you personally, because I don’t know if you are aware, Theopedia considers you as one of the advocates of New Advent theology along with others. Would you comment on that?
Don: On the second one first.… I rarely assign to myself any of those labels unless I have a lot of time to explain what I might or might not mean by them. For example, in some of the southern states.… Pardon? The question was two-fold. First, “What role do presuppositions play in the creation of your theology?” The second is, “The online theological dictionary Theopedia calls me a new covenant theologian. Would I comment?”
On the latter one first, which I think I’ve told you in principle and in private, I don’t use labels like that unless I have a very good idea of what everybody in the room means because labels like that are astonishingly flexible and have all kinds of overtones that I may or may not accept. In the southern part of the United States in Baptist circles, for example, Calvinist basically means you’re not interested in evangelism. Well, if that’s what it means, I’m not going to call myself a Calvinist. If that’s what it means in that sort of crowd, it’s not very helpful to go around …
What was I doing last night, for goodness’ sake? You discover these terms get laden pretty fast with all kinds of associations that are used, especially in a medium as instantaneous as web logs to cubbyhole people in ways that, on the long haul, I don’t find helpful or fruitful. It’s not because I’m afraid of talking about them, but I will only talk about them if I have a lot of time so I can explain what I mean or don’t mean by them.
On the first point, you want to avoid any sort of approach that denies we have presuppositions. I have sometimes said there are only two kinds of perspectivalists: those who admit it and those who don’t. We’re all perspectivalists. I’ll come to that one again this afternoon. You cannot avoid that. On the other hand, you also want to avoid giving the impression that because you’re a presuppositionalist, therefore, your presuppositions cannot be challenged, revised, or even overthrown.
In other words, you never come to any knowledge of anything to any study of anything tabula rasa, a blank slate, as if you are neutral. That was the danger of some forms of modernism. You never do. On the other hand, you don’t want to give the impression that because you have a set of presuppositions you cannot move out of that.
There are Hindu presuppositions over here and Muslim presuppositions over there and Christian presuppositions and secular presuppositions. Each one follows his or her own presuppositions, and that’s the end of it, and you don’t have the right to challenge beyond that, because quite transparently, even apart from theoretical considerations of epistemology, people do move and change their presuppositions.
Somewhere along the line, however you’re going to work through these difficult questions of epistemology, you have to admit your finiteness and fallenness and that means being a presuppositionalist, a perspectivalist. Yet, at the same time, you still have to say, it seems to me, that doesn’t mean they are so set in concrete that they can’t be overturned. Am I allowed in this elite group to quote Billy Graham? Am I allowed? “May the Lord bless y’all real good.”
