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R. Albert Mohler, Jr.
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Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking In Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.
I’m Albert Mohler, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
O. Carter Snead is the Charles E. Rice Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Professor Snead is one of the world’s leading experts on bioethics. His research explores the issues of neuroethics, human reproductive technologies, abortion, euthanasia, and many others. Professor Snead received his baccalaureate from St. John’s College and his law degree from Georgetown University. He’s the author of or contributor to 13 books. It’s his most recent book, What It Means To Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics, that is the topic of our conversation today. Professor Snead, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Carter Snead:
It’s great to be with you.
Albert Mohler
Your book, What it Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics came out in 2020, and in one sense that’s yesterday. And another sense, it’s a generation ago.
Carter Snead:
Absolutely. An awful lot has happened since then. It came out in the midst of Covid, and it was a different world back then. The world was dramatically changed as a result, and I completely agree. It really does seem like an awful lot’s changed. It’s a different place.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I think that’s going to make this conversation all the more interesting because the book was written pre-Dobbs. And so we’ve learned a lot, frankly, upside and downside since the Dobbs decision in 2022. But let’s go backwards for a moment because I think your book is brilliant and quite honestly, I think a lot of it has to do with the reality that in public bioethics, the body has not only been neglected, it’s been strategically, intentionally neglected. But that requires some background in the history of bioethics, which you lay out, I think just wonderfully in this book. So I think most people will be surprised to know that bioethics wasn’t a discipline, it wasn’t a thing, it wasn’t an ordered conversation until well into the second half of the 20th century.
Carter Snead:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, most folk in the United States at least, most people don’t think of the birth of bioethics until around the late 1960s, early 1970s. There were a lot of public events that corresponded with its rise both in the academic sphere, but also in the public sphere as well.
Albert Mohler:
And a part of that was that interestingly, the political game just isn’t the same as it was then. The landscape’s not the same because you had people like Senator Edward Kennedy, actually very involved in dealing with questions of bioethics in a way that you can’t imagine the same conversation taking place now.
Carter Snead:
No, there’s a complete polarization now that didn’t exist in the late sixties and early seventies with the narrow exception of possibly assisted suicide, where there’s still some interesting, unlikely coalitions of left and right. But no, as you say, in the late sixties and early seventies, it was in fact one of the signal events, was the Kennedy family, beginning with Eunice Kennedy Shriver, noticing that the NIH was funding research involving babies who had just been aborted but were imminently dying. And this troubled her so much as a pro-life woman, and her daughter Maria Shriver at the time, that they organized. And then they also, I’m sure were in conversation with Senator Kennedy who convened hearings. And nowadays that would be unimaginable. In fact, if you go back in time, not that long ago, in 2005 or 2004 when we were trying at the President’s Council on Bioethics, where I served as general counsel under Chairman Leon Cass, we were trying to convince liberals in Congress, including Ron Wyden, that it would make sense to change the regulatory framework for assisted reproductive technologies and IVF. Because they had passed a law in the early nineties – a consumer protection law – that was protective of patients and by extension unborn babies to a certain extent, not strong protections, but at least more than there is now. And the answer we got from Senate Democrats, almost uniformly, was we can’t do anything that would be seen as pro-life, because there’d be so much political blowback, even if it were nested in the principles of consumer protection that animated the statute in the first place.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, that just tells you a whole lot. Well, if the field of bioethics didn’t exist and then it did, if at one point it wasn’t imaginable, and then at the next point it became absolutely necessary, what was the catalyst for this? What happened?
Carter Snead:
Well, there was a series of events that I detail in the book. I focus on three particular events, scandals in bioethics as an intellectual field or discipline. I’m not really sure if it’s a discipline or a field. We can talk about that if you want to. It’s a field of inquiry that is at its best interdisciplinary rather than a specific discipline. But there were a series of scandals including a publication by a man named Henry Beecher, who was an anesthesiologist from Harvard, detailing 22 experiments undertaken at the most eminent institutes of research around the world, including the United States, the results of which been published in the most important journals, peer reviewed journals, detailing how horrific violations of human dignity and abuse occurred in the name of scientific research involving very vulnerable human subjects. The most shocking example – to me at least – were the intellectually disabled children of Willowbrook and Staten Island who were deliberately infected with hepatitis, so that they could study the progress of the disease untreated. And an argument that we recognize even now and the bioethical debates is the scientists who did this said, “Look, these kids already were in terrible circumstances, we didn’t make the situation worse, we just took advantage of the circumstances to try to bring something positive out of it.” And of course, that’s not a persuasive argument. They did more than just observe. They deceived, they acted, and infected these children’s hepatitis.
And it’s actually the same argument structurally that the Nazi doctors made. They said, “We didn’t, these people were going to die anyway in concentration camps, we merely took them and tried to bring something positive out of it.”
And that’s an argument you hear an awful lot in the public bio space. We’re sort of trying to take a tragic circumstance and bring something positive out of it, when in fact what’s going on is something much more active and concerning than that.
So you had the Beecher articles that came out, you had the Tuskegee experiments, which your listeners may have heard about, began in the early parts of the 20th century, where poor African-American sharecroppers in Macon County, AL – I’m from Alabama myself – in Macon County, Alabama, where there was a high rate of syphilis, these folks were systematically deceived about why the US Health Service or public health service was going in there to observe them, observe the progress of the disease untreated. They didn’t treat them. They didn’t tell them about what treatments were available, including when antibiotics became standard of care in the middle of the 1940s.
And this went on for decades and decades and decades. These poor people were systematically taken advantage of in a shocking way. And then the third example, I’ve already mentioned, the example of American researchers going to Scandinavia, possibly with federal funds, to find women who were getting abortions and then taking their newborn babies who had just been aborted, who were still alive outside their mother’s bodies and doing horrific experiments on them.
And so these three different kinds of examples of scandals provoked a public backlash that led to the creation of public bioethics, which is the governance of science, medicine and biotechnology. While at the same time there were academic conferences being convened to talk about the worry that doctors were being perceived, rightly or wrongly, as more humanly distant from their patients, as they became more technically proficient, they started to see their patients as something less than another person to really minister to, or even the whole family and a kind of holistic way to being a kind of technical problem to solve a reduction of the person to parts and holes. And so all of this together provoked a great array of really interesting people from a wide variety of backgrounds, including theology. Obviously the great Protestant theologian, Paul Ramsey was at the table, with an array of other really important thinkers, from different disciplines and backgrounds to talk about how to think about medicine, the ends of medicine, the ends of science and scientific research. And that’s really what gave rise to bioethics and public bioethics in this country.
Albert Mohler:
I guess a background question to me, you mentioned the Nazi doctors. So supposedly enlightened Westerners after the war were horrified by what they saw in terms of the death camps, but also the Nazi medical experiments and they blamed it on Nazism. I did a project a few years ago in which to my surprise, I discovered the roots of all of this in Weimar Germany, in the liberal German culture before the rise of Nazism. In other words, the Nazis took advantage of arguments that had already existed, including the statement that Lebensunwerten Lebens, “Life unworthy of life.” That is not a Nazi origin expression, that goes back to the Weimar Republic.
Carter Snead:
Hoche and Binding coined that phrase, as you say, long before the Nazis came into power. And it wasn’t Nazism that came up with those horrific ideas. It was, in fact, progressive ideology that was trying to think about social hygiene.
Albert Mohler:
It came from the left.
Carter Snead:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, in the progressive era in the United States, John Dewey and very famous progressives, Margaret Sanger and others thought about eugenics in a very positive light. They thought about eugenics. Now, in fact, it was a funny thing because – not funny, but it was peculiar – that the Holocaust and the terrible experience of the backlash to the Holocaust set back the progressive cause of eugenics, because it was associated with totalitarian regimes and the atrocities of World War II. But the fundamental principle that some people don’t deserve to live, or don’t deserve to be fed or cared for because their quality of life falls below a threshold, that the strong and privileged regard is not worthy of life – is a much older idea, and it’s an idea of the left.
Albert Mohler:
I think a lot of things get submerged in cultural discourse, but also in academic memory and in academic citation. And I think it’s the post-abortion experiments that are most likely to be missing from any history of bioethics. I really appreciate you making certain that’s well documented.
Carter Snead:
Well, I appreciate that very much. You’re exactly right. Everybody’s heard of Tuskegee, everybody heard of Beecher’s article, but not many people were familiar with the contemporaneous terrible events, which led the Washington Post for, It was on the front page three days in a row. And it’s in part because our sensibilities weren’t so coarsened yet, by an abortion culture that made it impossible for us to have a sort of cross ideological conversation about these things.
Albert Mohler:
Carter going back, just in terms of more recent memory, to make your point, a lot of the horror about the post-abortion live baby – I’ll just put it that way – experiments, it’s the horrible things are done to their bodies, including dismemberment. Horrible things were done to those tiny human bodies.
Carter Snead:
Decapitations.
Albert Mohler:
Yes, absolutely. And hard to even say. But then we get to, for instance, the Planned Parenthood controversy over the sale of fetal parts, and wow, the presses completely flipped on that issue, where you say The Washington Post thought it was a scandal, put it in three front page, three days in a row, back in terms of the European experiments. Now all of a sudden, this is just like a problem. What problem?
Carter Snead:
No, that’s right. And there’s a kind of euphemism, and there’s really a manipulation of language to try to obscure the horror of these. You talk about things like products of conception, as opposed to human bodies. And I actually was an expert witness in a case in Texas in 2017 or 2018, involving the state of Texas’s effort to defund Planned Parenthood, precisely because they had these videos of this incredibly coarse discussion of baby body parts and how much for this, how much for that, we manipulate the procedure to preserve this part of the body. And normal people, their conscience are shocked by these things. And I think those in the mainstream media who are so committed to abortion themselves, I mean, if it just takes a second to look and see the LinkedIn pages where people have worked or where their spouses worked, it’s like a complete and utter overlap between the abortion rights movement and the mainstream media. They were working overtime to try to keep from the American people the truth of the matter. I mean, you even had more recently than that, an effort to claim that there’s no such thing as a fetal heartbeat, that that’s not a real clinical reality, that you can’t talk that way.
Albert Mohler:
Pneumatic echo.
Carter Snead:
Yeah. Right, exactly. I mean, in the same way that you and I aren’t actually hearing each other’s voices right now, we’re hearing electronic translations of our voices. So it’s mind blowing how intellectually dishonest and what the consequences of that dishonesty are.
Albert Mohler:
So the next stage in the argument and the next stage in the historical progression is that all of a sudden something that didn’t exist now does, and that’s a field that you identify, or again, field, discipline – It’s an intellectual enterprise with moral and political import that you call bioethics. And that’s now a staple part of our vocabulary, but it wasn’t always so.
Carter Snead:
Oh, that’s exactly right. It is very much in the mainstream of public discourse and not just academics, but everybody. You can’t open a newspaper and turn a television on without some bioethical issue coming to the fore. And of course, the abortion issue is the most consistent and prominent over the past 50 or so years.
Albert Mohler:
And as it has developed, your main argument in the book is that what is most problematic is not what was there, but what isn’t. If something was absent from the beginning of this conversation, what was so tragically absent?
Carter Snead:
So it’s a fundamental confusion, or mistake, or misdirection perhaps depending on how you want to ascribe motive and intention about the fundamental identity of the human person. There is a sort of reduction of human identity to a part of who we are, that is humanity. And persons are described simply in terms of their capacity for intellectual or cognitive functioning. Human beings are fundamentally understood through the lens of will and desire. If you’re talking about – I’m a scholar of the law – all law is built on presuppositions about what human beings and what persons are. Even though those are contested questions, there’s no way around having to at least operate from a provisional sense of what a human being is, because the whole point of law is to protect persons and to promote the flourishing of persons.
So you have to have an operating principle as to what a person is, and in the context of public bioethics, where the question of the personhood and identity is right to the fore and essential for all these vital conflicts that I talk about in the book, the architects of American public bioethics have adopted a vision of the person that is so flattened and reduced that it describes you and I only in terms, as I said before, in terms of our will.
And everything else about our existence, in particular our bodies, our organic bodies, are reduced to an instrumentality. The idea of the body itself is simply an instrument or a tool to be harnessed and used by the real you, which is your mind in pursuit of those projects of your will. And one of the deep problems with that is that it leaves behind essential aspects of human identity. And then if you’re formulating policy and law, it leaves behind entire swaths of our brothers and sisters at every stage of development, who are not capable of the kind of cognitive or intellectual activity that is definitive for what a person is in this false and confused framework.
Albert Mohler:
When you take the self abstract from the body, you then have the question as to who is really a self and who’s not here of human beings.
Carter Snead:
Exactly.
Albert Mohler:
Carter, is this a form of modern gnosticism? Is it the old ancient heresy reborn in terms of the denial basically of the material and its meaning?
Carter Snead:
I think there’s a lot to that. Absolutely. I mean, a lot of folks have written about gnosticism and the connection, sort of the modern ideology, anthropology, if you will, in its original sense, an account of what it means to be and flourish as a human being. It is very close to gnosticism in that way.
The concept that I use in my book is a concept borrowed from the romantic literary movement called expressive individualism, and the idea is that it’s a sort of account of the person that again, reduces the person exclusively to their mind. It’s dualistic, it distinguishes the mind and the body in this way, and it’s profoundly – to take sort of a technical phrase – anti teleological, in the sense that it doesn’t take the natural world our own natural configuration, our relationships to others, as constituent of our identity or even as a tool to understand what to do.
So I can’t know what to do by studying the natural configuration of the world. Everything is a blank slate. Everything is a sort of a canvas onto which I paint my own original authentic ideas. And as a result, every relationship is characterized strictly by consent. There’s no such thing as an unchosen obligation. There’s no such thing as an unearned privilege. No one has a claim on me except for those that I have built into my internal projects and I can form relationships or break relationships apart depending on how they affect my goals as I conceive them. And it really even dissolves familial relationships. The relationship between parent and child is strictly a creature of consent, a creature of the will.
Albert Mohler:
Well, that plays right into the abortion controversy in a way we can immediately understand. It’s underneath all of this. And you have figures like Charles Taylor, Robert Bellah, and so many others. I thought of several that you cite in the book and others who have been very much a part – Alasdair MacIntyre – of course, very much a part of this conversation.
Carter Snead:
Absolutely.
Albert Mohler:
What has been the interest of those prophets of, let’s say, expressive individualism? What has been their relative interest even in the field of bioethics?
Carter Snead:
It’s been very sparse. Charles Taylor doesn’t write about bioethics. Alasdair MacIntyre doesn’t really write about bioethics. Alasdair of course, is a colleague of mine at Notre Dame and is a fellow of The de Nicola Center, where I served as director and a mentor of mine. And the only person in the book that I talk about who is adjacent to these questions of expressive individualism was Michael Sandel.
Michael was a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and wrote a short book about enhancement and the sort of ethic of giftedness, which was based on an article that he wrote, which was also based on a white paper that he did for the President’s Council on Bioethics. But for the most part, it’s been pretty – there’s not much of a connection between the critique of expressive individualism and bioethics. That was really – I think that was an original contribution of the book.
Albert Mohler:
And to underline that, that’s something I deeply appreciate. But let me just speak of personal frustration. I’ve been reading these guys for decades, and part of my frustration is: their very, I think, perceptive description of the cultural shift in terms of expressive individualism, It hasn’t led most of them – I’ll just put it that way – It hasn’t led most of them towards any actual proposals that would do anything to reverse this, other than some kind of vague humanitarianism. There’s nothing there’s in this, that would in itself lead them to say “no” to abortion right.
Carter Snead:
No, that’s frustrating. I find that I have the same frustration that you do. Now in the case of Michael Sandel, he, I think, is a self-consciously, self-conscious supporter of abortion rights. He said so as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, so he’s not cagey about that, but you’re right. What I would like to know, and this is true, a lot of thinkers, including a lot of very interesting feminist thinkers on the questions of disabilities, you have all these, you see so clearly the corrosive nature and the reductive nature of expressive individualism and what it means for out relationship to our less fortunate brothers and sisters. But somehow there’s just a block on seeing our brothers and sisters in the womb to understand how corrosive it is.
In the book, I try to make the case that there’s a way of thinking about the unborn child and her mother, a sort of dyadic fashion. You think about them in terms of their natural relationship. And so the solutions that you have to unplanned pregnancy, or crises, or installers, not simply to atomize them and figure out which one gets to kill the other one, but rather think about them as a unit. I mean, I say in the book, if someone were to say to us right now, there’s a mother and a child outside that need our help, we would stop what we’re doing and we’d go outside and try to help immediately. We wouldn’t ask, well, who is the property or the entitlement? We wouldn’t talk about them as who is a member of the moral community?
Albert Mohler:
Who is a person?
Carter Snead:
We certainly wouldn’t say, we wouldn’t treat the unborn child as a stranger to her mother.
Albert Mohler:
Right. Well, one of the examples I use in lecturing on moral theology is that if you take the left-right distinction, both, and I think this is by God’s grace, both if they’re confronted by a hungry child, know what to do, and that is feed the child.
Carter Snead:
Right, exactly.
Albert Mohler:
But their explanations of what the act is and who the child is are fundamentally different.
Carter Snead:
Or what a child is.
Albert Mohler:
The moment you get right. I was actually trying to avoid that, but I’m glad you said it. Yeah, what the child is? I mean, the moment you do that, you enter into two different moral universes.
Carter Snead:
It’s impossible to make sense of children as a category, if you operate from the ground of expressive individualism, because they don’t and can’t, or are incapable of the kind of cognitive actions that define flourishing within expressive individualism. So you end up treating them, either you ignore them or you treat them as little adults, and your only goal is to maximize their autonomy. And anybody who’s ever been around a child understands that’s the last thing you should ever do to a kid, is to maximize their autonomy. I mean, the word paternalism has become such a pejorative, in the world of bioethics. The sort of dichotomy is between, sort of autonomy on the one hand, and paternalism on the other. But children need parents, and there are a lot of people in our human community that need to be cared for and can’t care for themselves.
Albert Mohler:
By the way, reading a book such as yours, leads to some catalytic moments and also just some favorite things, you say, “Well, I’ve seen that, but I don’t think I’ve seen it that way before.” I think it’s Juvenile you quote – you’re saying that certain things are only possible because of moral assumptions made by a man who doesn’t have children and has forgotten what it was to be a child. That’s a brilliant line.
Carter Snead:
Yeah, it’s an amazing line, and I was glad to be able to remind readers of that extraordinary passage from Juvenile.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, and it’s so true. I mean, the difference in a man’s life about having a child or not having a child. Having a child, you are reminded constantly of the absolute dependency of that child. That child is not capable of expressive individualism as an autonomous individual.
Carter Snead:
No, that’s exactly right. And it changes the way you see everyone. Since becoming a father has been more transformative of my way of seeing the world and other people and my obligations chosen and unchosen transformative. And that’s why it’s such a tragedy to see the declining in the birth rate, and the people waiting to have children. I don’t want to speak for other people, but if I didn’t have children, I would be a terrible person if I didn’t have children.
Albert Mohler:
Most men would be, and I think it’s men and women. But in particular, I think somebody like Pitirim Sorokin, I tend to quote him a lot because he’s so blunt on these issues, Pitirim Sorokin says a society that does not produce fathers produces Hellions.
Carter Snead:
No, it’s bad. And it seems to me that expressive individualism, blinds, and the thing that’s so frustrating is that the claims of progressive left to try to make arguments for why we should care for one another, you drill down the argument, you never get to a foundation that actually is persuasive of a natural obligation that we have to one another. There’s no such thing as a natural obligation in that framework.
Albert Mohler:
Let’s talk about abortion for a moment, and I really appreciate the way you deal with all the different major issues in the book, but abortion has been frontline in the American conversation for all of my adult life. And I was 13 years old when Roe v. Wade was handed down.
And my mother was an early voice for the pro-life argument and was involved in early organizing. And I look at that, and it was unthinkable to a 13-year-old boy that this could be possible. Partly because at 13, and with little brothers and sister, I was aware of the reality of the child. I was one myself, although at 13, and even in my 13-year-old logic, Carter, I could just hear the arguments that pro-abortion side was making, and I thought, “Well, birth is an arbitrary moment in all of this.” I mean, even at 13, I’m thinking, well, if that’s not a human being until that baby is born, then it’s not much of one after it’s born by your logic.
Carter Snead:
No, it sure. And in fact, the most consistent philosophers, pro-abortion philosophers bite the bullet on that. And they say absolutely, like Peter Singer, and Michael Tooley, and David Boin and, Mary Anne Warren, and all of them, say infanticide obviously is justified because those aren’t persons yet. If your account what a person is, is cognitive capacity presently active then, yeah, absolutely. But this is another problem. People that don’t have siblings, people that aren’t around pregnant women, and you understand immediately that we’re talking about another life, another human being, a separate and distinct human being, albeit one that is a deep relationship with that mother and those siblings, you lose that. Everything’s an abstraction. Everything is a kind of intellectual problem to solve on the way to some kind of results oriented outcome that you want. In fact, if you look at the scholarship around personhood theory, which is a very pernicious thing in public bioethics, it’s always about constricting the circle of humanity. It’s always about creating – this is going to sound very blunt, but I mean for it too – It’s about a permission structure about who you can kill is what personhood theory is about.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely.
Carter Snead
And it all arose in the early 1970s, in response to the abortion question. It was an effort at reverse engineering their arguments to get to the conclusion, to gerrymander the boundaries of humanity, to try to exclude those people that were an obstacle to what they wanted to do.
And for those who have studied the question, who are I think, clear-eyed about it, you say, well, anytime you have the strong and privilege dividing the world up into who counts and who doesn’t count according to their own principles and to own their own benefits, that’s a corrupt endeavor from the very beginning.
Albert Mohler:
I think your background in ethics and your background in law, kind of equip you to write this kind of book in a way that slices and dices – there’s not a better way of putting it – in a way that others do not. So for example, the pro-abortion side, you have only two positions, either the baby is a person or the baby is not. And the pro-abortion movement included people making both arguments, but both of them still supported abortion.
Carter Snead:
Right.
Albert Mohler:
That’s pretty astounding. I think the average American has no clue of that.
Carter Snead:
No, that’s right. I mean, there are two principal arguments for abortion. One is called the sort of, and they’re always made, frequently made in combination with each other, they kind of depend on each other, if you think about the terms of the arguments themselves. But Judith Jarvis Thompson, the most famous, modern, philosophical, ethical argument of all time arguing that even if you grant that the unborn child is a person, she actually doesn’t grant in the piece, but we don’t need to get into that. She says that a mother has the right to reject the maternal relationship, if it’s not part of her life plan, because she’s not bound or obliged to make sacrifices. And in fact, she goes as far as to say that of a mother or a husband and a wife – If a mother and a father do everything they can to avoid conception, and they don’t have to even take the baby home from the hospital, the relationship doesn’t begin because it’s strictly a creature of consent, and that’s the sort of bodily dependence argument. Then you have the personhood argument, which reduces human persons to cognition, which ends up, sort of inconveniently for those making the argument, to exclude disabled people, newborns, the elderly, those suffering from dementia. It turns out there are an awful lot of human beings that aren’t people. If you adopt that framework.
Albert Mohler:
How convenient. Let’s put Peter Singer, Michael Tooley to the side for a moment.
Carter Snead:
Sure.
Albert Mohler:
Most of these people are not brazen enough to come out and say they believe there could be an ethical argument for killing three-year olds.
Carter Snead:
No, they don’t. They don’t.
Albert Mohler:
But the argument you laid out there, if the mother rejects the relationship, that’s the term you used, the mother rejects the relationship, Why is it different at three or 13 than three months of pregnancy?
Carter Snead:
No. And Mary Anne Warren saw the political downside of making the pro-nfanticide argument. She says, yeah, it’s not infanticide. So she goes along with the Singer’s of the world and the Tooley’s of the world, but she is careful to say, but that baby might have value for somebody else, and it might create all these downstream other sort of prudential concerns. So we probably shouldn’t do it. But it’s not murder, which is a very kind of a weasily way to get out of the problem.
Albert Mohler:
Why is it not, forgive my interruption, but why is it not murder?
Carter Snead:
She claims it’s not murder for the very same reason that Tooley and Singer say it’s not, because she doesn’t recognize the personhood of the newborn.
Albert Mohler:
What about a 10-year-old?
Carter Snead:
Well, so I suppose you would argue that, the short version of the argument they make is, in order to be a person, you have to have the cognitive architecture and function to be able to formulate desires for human rights. If you can’t desire to be protected or to be benefited by some kind of rights based framework, then you’re not a person, which requires you have memory, a self-understanding. So they would argue, and this is also silly if you’ve ever met a five or 6-year-old, but they have a kind of coherent sense of their own identity within a narrative that has before and an after. So it’s all hand waving. I mean, at the end, you kind of drive yourself crazy, if you try to respond to these arguments as if they’re made in good faith, to be perfectly honest with you. Because, and I’m not trying to be charitable, but if you see the twisting and turning, it’s clearly a political exercise. It’s clearly just, all they’re trying to do is to get onto paper an argument that is just good enough to give you a sort of level of permission to do the thing you want to do.
Albert Mohler:
Conversation along these lines I had in private, that I wish had been in public, so I could respond in a public way, was with someone who made the argument very much like Peter Singer. And Singer actually, at one point says, that one of the criteria to be applied here is the ability to conceive of the future and the future of the self. And I said, so when does that happen? Because that’s going to be different ages for different people.
Carter Snead:
Yep, Absolutely.
Albert Mohler:
You even mentioned some of the famous ice cream studies. At what point does a child say, “Okay, I’ll forgo ice cream today for two scoops tomorrow.”
That comes later than people think and more erratically than people think. And so the child has some idea, okay, I will grow up one day, but that’s not very operational in an ice cream store. So is the child a person or not?
Carter Snead:
No, you’re exactly right. I mean, it’s silly. All these are abstractions, all of these. And the other thing to notice about it, it’s, it’s not an accident that these are professional philosophers who are privileging cognition of a particular kind as the marker of personhood, right? These aren’t athletes, these aren’t blacksmiths, these aren’t people who live a much more embodied life. These are people who prioritize certain kinds, I mean, you even have Peter Singer talking about appreciating Woody Allen movies. They are using incredibly bourgeois examples that are more appropriate to the Princeton faculty lounge than would be most people’s lives.
So again, it’s all about the strong dividing the world up to exclude the weak that are somehow an obstacle to their wishes. And you would think that those who – the progressive left – are constantly talking about the people versus the powerful and sort of totalitarian regimes. There’s nothing more, there’s nothing graver example of the abuse of the weak by the powerful, than the kind of dividing the world of persons up into who counts and who doesn’t count based on what the privileged and powerful want.
Albert Mohler:
Your background in terms of involvement on the issue includes the fact you were general counsel to the President’s Council on Bioethics in a very crucial time. You mentioned Professor Leon Kass, who was the chairman of that commission or task force. And let me tell you of a personal experience back when the president, that was President George W. Bush was going to announce the policy on research on embryos – already existing embryos, I was scheduled to be a guest that night on Larry King Live to discuss the issue. And so there were several of us all ready for the discussion, but the president did not make the announcement when we expected him to because of another news story that pressed everything back, upset the schedule. So when we were in the awkward position – and it was very interesting, I don’t want to go back to it frankly, but it was very interesting – because we were all live on TV not knowing what the report was going to say. What was it like to be a part of the deliberations of that task force?
Carter Snead:
Well, it was extraordinary, and I had the great privilege of being chosen by Leon to be the general counsel. A month after that August 9th talk came out, so my wife and I were watching, and I went to St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, sort of great books, background history and philosophy of science. And Leon and his wonderful late wife Amy, were tutors there in the early 1970s, actually before I was born. But we came from a very similar background, and I had not yet ever met him, but I knew who he was and was a huge admirer of his work. And we’re watching that August 9th talk by President Bush. And it’s funny, because the knock on President Bush was, he wasn’t very articulate, he wasn’t very intellectual, but this is one of the most extraordinary talks I’ve ever heard, where he literally goes through the arguments for and against the use and destruction of embryos and research and what the federal government’s role is with respect to those kinds of activities. And you didn’t know until the very end of his talk what the policy was going to be. You heard rumors that it was going to be bad or good or whatever. And it was a very unusual and very elaborate kind of intellectual and moral reasoning that went into the policy itself. We don’t need to rehearse what exactly the policy was, but it was very complex, and it related to material cooperation with evil, very old sort of Catholic Jesuitical concepts of moral theology.
Albert Mohler:
Not that you’re against those.
Carter Snead:
No, no, no, no. I’m definitely not against those, although Jesuits can be good or bad, but no. I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. Of course. But we have wonderful Jesuits, but the bottom line is, he announced the policy and we’re like, okay, okay. I can see why that’s the policy. It’s a policy designed to avoid any federal incentives for the use and destruction of embryos going forward. That was the theory, we could argue with whether it was effective or not, but that was the theory. It was designed not to create federal incentives for the use and destruction of embryos after August 9th, 2001. And then he said, “But I’m also creating a President’s Council on Bioethics with the chairman Leon Kass.” And my wife and I literally jumped out of our seats, “We’re like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe what a great outcome that is.”
And I had no idea I was going to be involved with that council after the fact. And so became involved very shortly thereafter in September, a month after the announcement of the policy, and it was an amazing experience. It was bioethics done the way it’s supposed to be done, the way it was done originally, with a genuinely interdisciplinary group of people who disagreed fundamentally on important questions. But you had theologians, you had philosophers, you had legal scholars, you had social scientists, James Q. Wilson, and Frank Fukiama, you had physicians. And it was an amazing group of people and genuinely intellectually diverse, ideologically diverse, which made it difficult actually, because it would get bogged down in stalemate a lot of the time. But it was an amazing experience. And Leon Kass was a great chairman, and Ed Pellegrino – wonderful Catholic physician and philosopher, passed away some years ago – was his successor.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I followed that very, very carefully with a lot of interest. My own assessment is, the bottom line is that it really aided a lot of conservative thinkers across a range of boundaries. What difference did it make in public policy long term?
Carter Snead:
So as you pointed out earlier, we are in such a polarized moment, and there’s so much gridlock. There was a moment that you’ll appreciate. The fact that Sam Brownback – Senator Brownback was identified as the principle champion for pro-life policies on embryo research and so on – made it, and this wasn’t his fault, but it made it impossible functionally for anyone on the left to join with him on these kinds of questions. Even though he himself was quite bipartisan in his own work, he ended up actually endorsing Kathleen Sebelius for HHS Secretary, which I actually, I wouldn’t have done that myself, but as an illustration of his kind of open-mindedness on these matters.
And so there wasn’t a lot of direct payoff. I will say a couple of things that come to mind. One was President Bush shifting the focus of the embryonic stem cell funding policy to pluripotent cells, which are embryonic stem cells are one kind of pluripotent cell, but there are others as well. And they developed, around 2007, they developed this new way of reprogramming somatic cells, skin cells to behave the way embryonic stem cells would, so you could get the same benefit without using and destroying embryos. We wrote a white paper arguing for the uses of alternative sources of pluripotent cells, and that became an important part of President Bush’s 2007 executive order, which prioritized those and prioritize those approaches that had the best promise of short-term clinical benefit, which were again, were the adult stem cells and the induced pluripotent state stem cells. Even now sitting here right now, 20 plus years after the fact, 24 years after president’s Bush’s policy, 27 years after the derivation of human embryonic stem cells at the University of Wisconsin, the first time that was ever done was 1998. There’s still not any clinical applications of the use of embryonic stem cells, not one.
There may be a few clinical trials here or there. But the promise was, Christopher Reeve’s going to get up and walk, and all these amazing things are going to happen. None of them happened. And so President Bush wisely prioritized the non-embryo-destroying types of research. Also, there was a law passed called the Fetus Farming Prohibition Act of 2006, which forbids the initiation of a clinical pregnancy solely for research purposes. It doesn’t actually forbid the initiation of the pregnancy, it forbids the receipt of any tissue in interstate commerce – that’s a complex way of the federal government getting at the problem. But basically it prevents line crossing between human and non-human in the reproductive space, and there’s a statute that forbids the patenting of embryos.
So those are three concrete things that we did, but mostly, as you said, we shaped the public conversation. We put in on paper the arguments that were used by pro-life people and other public and private figures and in educational settings, that I think really did have a salutary effect on building up a culture of life.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I often use the Council as an example of the importance of elections, electoral decisions.
Carter Snead:
Oh my goodness, yes.
Albert Mohler:
At that point, who was president of the United States meant everything.
Carter Snead:
Absolutely.
Albert Mohler:
If it had been Al Gore, we would’ve ended up in a very, very different place.
Carter Snead:
No, absolutely we would’ve. In fact, one of the last, right before President Clinton stepped down as president, he was making arrangements to fund research involving the use and destruction of embryos, and even put together an NIH panel, and had regulations ready to go. And the election of 2000 changed all that. And President Bush came in and he said, I don’t want to promote the use and destruction of embryos with federal money. And so he crafted a policy meant to get at that goal.
I will say though, it’s interesting that despite all the accomplishments of the Trump administration on life issues, this is one that they did not, that did not correct. They kept in place President Obama’s policies on embryo destructive research and federal funding of stem cell research.
Albert Mohler:
Now, at least one theory of why that’s so is because President Bush, George W. Bush was surrounded by some very prominent intellectuals as well as officials in his administration who said, we need to bring Leon Kass into this. We need to bring Carter Snead into this. We need to bring Robbie George into this. I don’t think we have that in the Trump administration. I don’t think we have anything close to it right now.
Carter Snead:
Yeah, there’s trying to think about the people that were associated with the President’s Council on Bioethics and the Bush era. And so the more I think about it, I can’t think of anyone who is a part of that group that’s involved in the Trump administration.
Albert Mohler:
I think President Trump has shown himself persuadable on many of these issues, but someone’s got to be there to make the persuasive argument.
Carter Snead:
And I’m hoping – and again, I don’t have any inside information – I’m hoping it’s the case that they take a pause and think carefully about their IVF policies, because that’s something that is much in the news lately. And I think, if they look at it carefully, they’re going to realize this is a much bigger and more complex problem than simply saying “yes” or “no.” I mean, you have to think carefully about what you’re doing, and you have to think about what the IVF industry is like, what it does, and how it operates now before you give them a blank check.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been writing in this area for three decades.
Carter Snead
Absolutely.
Albert Mohler:
And a co-author of the position adopted by the SBC, I think very courageously. The SBC adopted this before the election in June of 2024. And I can just hope that there are some opportunities. I do think with the vice president, there are some opportunities, because he has been a part of some of these conversations. And so I hope over time, and I was encouraged by the fact that on behalf of the administration, he did speak up on the March for Life and other events like that, where obviously that was something that wasn’t automatically expected. So I saw that as encouragement.
Carter Snead:
I agree. I agree with that.
Albert Mohler:
Speaking of IVF, the fact is that most Americans don’t give this much thought as an ethical or moral issue. That’s one of the frustrations for those of us who’ve been trying to awaken, I’ll say, the evangelical conscience on these issues. I think the same thing in parallel is largely the case about birth control and specifically contraception in general. And I think it demonstrates the fact that we’re not very good at thinking about these things in anticipation of these developments. And once the horse is out of the barn, so to speak, it is very, very hard to get that back in. And I think that’s part of the problem we have on IVF. There was not enough sustained attention to it when it first developed, and now it’s just become a part of the landscape for many people.
Carter Snead:
I agree with you. And there are some incredibly powerful human motivations to not think too hard about it. There are people who are desperate to have children, these, they’re all good things. People are desperate to have children.
Albert Mohler:
Well, they’re good in the proper context.
Carter Snead:
Exactly. The desire for children is good. Yeah. The desire for a child is good. You can understand the physical, emotional, financial exhaustion of people who are desperate to be parents. But again, I don’t want to be too dramatic, but many instances, and this is context of abortion as well, where you feel like you’re in a crisis and someone offers you a way out. We’re going to do this one thing, this one time, and you never have to think about it ever again. I’m going to fix this problem for you. It’s how the devil operates actually. I mean, I don’t want to become too theological, but these are temptations that are understandable.
Albert Mohler:
This is a safe place to do that, by the way.
Carter Snead:
Yeah, no, exactly. Well, it’s definitely the devil. The devil is the one that says to you, “Look, I can make this problem go away, just get an abortion, just do this, I know that you really want this, you don’t have to tell anybody, don’t worry about it, once you’re done with this, you can just move on and everything will be great.” And that is, it’s in those moments of weakness that we most need our Lord, and we most need one another to keep us on the path. But the other problem is people don’t even know what IVF is. They don’t even know how it works. They don’t know, they confuse it with all sorts of, you may remember that Governor Waltz was claiming that he and his wife had done IVF, but they didn’t do IVF. They didn’t even know.
Albert Mohler:
Didn’t even know. Yeah,
Carter Snead:
They did IUI, which is completely different. It’s a completely different thing. And people don’t understand what an embryo is. Or although people that do IVF though, and have spare embryos – that’s a terrible way to describe another human being that’s in a cryo storage situation – they sort of, in their gut understand that they’re dealing with something that’s not just a part of a person, but this is actually, and they have very ambivalent dispositions and social science evidence backs that up. Most people who have IVF babies in freezers or they don’t want to get rid of them, they don’t quite know what to do. And it’s a huge question.
One of the brilliant moments in President Bush’s tenure was when he vetoed the congressional effort to liberalize his embryonic stem cell funding policy. And what he did is in the east room of the White House, maybe you were there, he had a group of the “snowflake babies.” He had a group of little kids. Little kids and babies, who had been adopted as embryos, and were now on stage to illustrate the continuity of identity between the embryonic stage of development and later stages of human development and the same organism. These are not spare human beings. These are our little children. And they were embryos. Everybody, you and I, Al were embryos in a way that we were never an egg or a sperm. I know you know this, but to your listeners, it bears reiterating that we’re talking about that the developmental life trajectory begins at the embryonic stage of development for everybody.
And this is something that people, I mean, the debate right now over IVF makes me feel crazy, because I feel like nobody remembers what we were talking about in the early two thousands. We were arguing about embryonic stem cell research, talked about what an embryo is. You have people like Orrin Hatch saying, “Life doesn’t begin in a lab.” I’m like, well, of course it does. Now that we have the capacity to achieve fertilization outside the body, yes, it does begin in a laboratory. And so in any event, people are talking as if we didn’t, these conversations 20 plus years ago, where we actually had a national discussion about the moral status of the embryonic human being.
Albert Mohler:
Well, we had a discussion and it was at the national level, and it was at the White House. I was asked for a written statement on the legitimacy of snowflake adoptions. And that’s not something, that’s not two sentences that requires some contextualization and reasoning.
Carter Snead:
Careful, no, that’s complex question.
Albert Mohler:
But I think a lot of that just didn’t filter down to the popular consciousness at all. I don’t think the average American, not only did they not know that event didn’t take place, the average American still doesn’t know that it’s a thing, that it’s a reality, that the moral stakes are even present.
Carter Snead:
No, you’re exactly right. And it’s true. Most people, and most people don’t want to think about these things as well. But you’re exactly right. This is not in the level of discourse that you and I are used to, and the public spaces that we’re used to working in, most people don’t even know. And then the other problem is that given the fact that there are so many people who know babies who are conceived by IVF, when they hear any kind of even moderate critical argument about IVF, what they hear is condemnation of the parents. You don’t care about this baby. And nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, in the book, I argue that the kind of wide open, wild west of no regulation and no limits that we have in the American context of IVF and ART, that’s a framework designed for needs and wants of very different kinds of people.
People that are going to get fertility treatments aren’t going to maximize their unencumbered will. They’re going, because they want to be parents, which means they want to be in a relationship with a child. And so it’s very different. The framework you can criticize, and I do in the book very strenuously, the framework of non-regulation of IVF based on the proposition that what people need is radical freedom to do whatever they want. But that’s not even what – no one who’s ever been sick or gone to a doctor for any reason is going because they want radical freedom. That’s not what’s happening. That’s an anthropological mistake. It’s a mistake about the presupposition of what a person is and what they need to flourish.
Albert Mohler:
But even on the snowflake adoption issue, just to take this one illustration, it points to the fact that the context changes continually. And so you say, okay, I’ve made a statement on that. I think I can live with that statement. Well, okay, everything changes. But a part of what I wrote in my statement was, this cannot be subversive of marriage and family, but that’s exactly what it’s become.
Carter Snead:
Yeah. So I make a similar argument in the book. I say, “If you think about…” — and people sort of came to me and said, “Why didn’t you just say in the book that IVF is immoral and should be banned and blah?” — and I don’t say that in the book. I don’t say the opposite. But what I say in the book is, to think about any form of procreation, you have to think about what parents are, what children are, and you have to think about what it means to bring a child into the world and how a child is begotten and not made, and a child is a mysterious stranger that you welcome and love unconditionally. Fundamentally, what a child is, is a gift. And any form of procreation, whether it’s natural, or enhanced, or using technology that moves you away from the idea of what you’re doing is you’re welcoming a gift with gratitude to love unconditionally, to care for as a coequal human being that’s begotten, not made is something that should give us pause. And that applies to a wide array of things. And I don’t draw the conclusion for the reader and say, “And therefore…” – I just try to say, this is how you think about it.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I’m involved in a writing project right now, and one of the parts of that project that most fascinates me is the shift in Western thought from the family as the base unit of society to the individuals as the base unit of society.
Carter Snead:
Absolutely.
Albert Mohler:
And that’s absolutely massive, because if we’re talking about IVF and all we were talking about is the family as the basic unit of society, that would be defined one way. The moment you make it the autonomous individual, you’ve got two gay guys having an embryo created and then a surrogate mother in Ukraine. This is something that, again, the beginning, those who start asking the question, they ask the question, and it’s in my context, I’m almost always asked, okay, here’s a husband and a wife. They’re struggling with the ability to have a baby. Why isn’t this just an un alloy good?
Carter Snead:
It’s just like a marginal departure from what the normal course of affairs would be, as opposed to, I mean, one of the most common interventions in IVF is sex selection. Right? And you think about that for a minute and you’re like, well, what does that mean? What happens to the embryos that are of the wrong sex? They get destroyed. You know what I mean?
Albert Mohler:
What about the catalogs?
Carter Snead:
Right. No, no. You got batches of embryos, absolutely.
Albert Mohler:
If you’re a consumer of embryos, you can now look through profiles of sperm donors and egg donors. It is eugenics all over again.
Carter Snead:
They conceive batches of embryonic siblings that you choose from, and they have polygenic risk scores for IQ, and hair color, and eye color, and all these nonmedical circumstances.
Albert Mohler:
But they can also put in subtle things now, which I don’t think really existed 15 years ago. Now, if you look at these databases, you also have things that are subtle, such as hobbies.
Carter Snead:
Of course. Yeah, absolutely. No, it’s mind blowing.
Albert Mohler:
You want your kid to be a pitcher? You want a sperm donor whose hobby is first baseball, that tells you something.
Carter Snead:
Right. No, of course. And in fact, the first sperm bank like this, I can’t remember the name of it, but it was like – the Nobel Laureate sperm bank. And there was only one Nobel laureate, who donated his sperm. Most of the sperm was perfectly normal, average sperm or worse, which is not obviously how we talk about it, but you know what I mean. And it turns out it was the guy who was like a white supremacist Nobel Prize winner. So he was like a radical.
Albert Mohler:
Oh my goodness. I have to say, is this kind of a macabre twist on all of this. I’m just going to guess that the baseball list and the Nobel Prize list are not the same list.
Carter Snead:
Who knows what they’re, they’re probably all the same guy. But it is a total commodification and commercialization. And one of the most disturbing examples is where you have couples who use a surrogate and then it turns out the baby has down syndrome, and they identify it in utero and they demand that the baby be aborted. And there’s no legal way you can do that in this country, to compel an abortion, but you can certainly terrify a young woman and make her absolutely use terrible things.
Albert Mohler:
And well, not only that, you see how dark this is because now you have an entire field of tort litigation, which is about failed promises or failed contracts in terms of IVF and the two cases in the headlines in the last month in which women have said, “This is not the baby that I ordered.”
Carter Snead:
Right, exactly. And then you have the entire Republican legislature and Governor Alabama, rushing to immunize the entire IVF industry from any lawsuits whatsoever that involve the use and destruction of embryos. Because in a case where the IVF parents sued the clinic, because the clinic mishandled their embryos and ended up destroying their embryos. So in that case, the Alabama Supreme Court decision that said, yes, you’re entitled to sue under the Wrongful Death Act pursuant to a very straightforward reading of the statute, which included the unborn and utero. And so why can’t we make an exception for ex utero human beings? That became this terrible theocratic decision, that was attacked relentlessly by Republicans and Democrats. And then you had this sort of rush of panic, where they all said, “Okay, we’re going to immunize the IVF industry.” And if there’s any industry that doesn’t need immunity, it’s the IVF industry. These folks are the least regulated and least self-regulated industries in this medical space.
Albert Mohler:
Carter, I had a hard lesson in the midst of all of that because I was at least involved in being cited and drawn into the conversation there in Alabama and responded to it. But I have a lot of ties to Alabama, wasn’t born there, but I have an awful lot of ties to Alabama, including to prominent political leaders in Alabama, and many of them who are Christians, deeply committed Christians, showed evidence of that over time. And I was absolutely confounded by the fact that so many of them said to me, as a serious moral argument in their minds, but these are very nice people. And I went to school in Birmingham. You grew up in Birmingham. That is a lousy moral argument.
Carter Snead:
There are a lot of nice people in the world that, including myself, that have done terrible things and think terrible things.
Albert Mohler:
That is not a basis for normative law.
Carter Snead:
And you would think that a Christian understanding the concept of original sin and our fallen nature, you can’t rely on the beneficence of others when you’re talking about lives being at stake.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I appreciate your book so much. I’m looking forward to the next one. I believe it, at least conceptualizes, Ethics at the Edges of Humanity.
Carter Snead:
Absolutely. It’s a book about the boundaries of the moral ontological and ultimately legal community. Who counts as one of us, who gets to do the counting, and according to what criteria? And that’s something that you and I have been talking about already this hour. It’s a question that you can’t avoid when you talk about bioethics, but there are some recent advances in biotechnology and bioengineering that bring this question into very sharp relief. And it’s not simply beings that we encounter and wondering what our relationship with these beings are, but these are beings that we create in the laboratory, so-called synthetic embryos. Animal humans – particularly chimeras, non-human animals that have either human brains or human reproductive organs. And then third, and strangest of all are called neural organoids, which are mini brains. So the question, it’s a book about the markers of humanity, about parts and wholes and obligations of stewardship and how to think about who we are and what we owe to each other in that context.
Albert Mohler:
So how fast can we get a copy? When are we going to see it?
Carter Snead:
The manuscript is due to Harvard University Press on December 31st, so I’m hard at work on it. And in fact, right now, today I was working on a chapter that’s horrifying. It’s about, there’s a whole chapter dedicated to what I call the failure of personhood theory. You and I have been talking about, this effort by bioethics people to gerrymander the world in a way that according to their goals and purposes, and I try to show how that’s a failure. But I also get into this whole dehumanization literature efforts, to try to exclude members of the human family. If you begin with the indigenous cultures in the 16th century in the Americas, you talk about obviously the Holocaust, talk about African slavery, talk about the Rwanda genocide, talk about efforts to eliminate disabled people. There is a dark and extensive history of trying to constrict the circle of humanity to exclude those who are burdens to us or who sort of frustrate our own purposes.
Albert Mohler:
Well, Carter, I’m very thankful for you, for your courageous tackling of these issues and for the wisdom you bring to these conversations. I’ll just have to tell you, I’m looking forward to the next one.
Carter Snead:
Thanks, Al. Thanks so much. It’s great talking to you, and thank you for all of your extraordinary work as well.
Albert Mohler:
God bless you.
Carter Snead:
God bless you.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Carter Snead for thinking with me today.
If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 200 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab Thinking In Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. For a realm of materials, just go to my website at albertmohler.com. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.
Until next time, keep thinking.
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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
1 Corinthians 8:1–13
May 11, 2025
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I greet you all this morning in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is a glorious day and I just want you to pause with me for a moment and take a look round at what is taking place here. Look at these graduates and representing so many nations, so many states, so many places, so many families, so many hopes; the realization of so many of those hopes on this day and the launching of even greater and further hopes on this day; the faculty and administration and trustees of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and behind us, so many Christians in the Southern Baptist Convention and in the larger Christian world. They know what is taking place here and celebrate what is taking place here. I welcome family and friends and all those gathered on this occasion.
This is the day, as we said, that the Lord is made and we are going to rejoice and be glad in it and I want you to note something: you don’t get to hear this in an indoor commencement. I want you to hear the birds and the creatures around us and recognize that they too, in their own way, are rejoicing in the day that the Lord has made. They have no understanding of what is going on here and are probably perplexed. I don’t think we’re interrupting them all that much, but we do know what is taking place here. We do know the significance of this. We can’t look at these graduates without seeing promise. We also can’t commemorate this day without thinking God for accomplishment.
We need our thoughts to be guided by Scripture. I would direct our thoughts this morning to the end of Romans chapter 11 and the beginnings of chapter 12. Just a few verses. Beginning in Romans chapter 11, verse 33: “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?’ ‘Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?’ For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
My mind is drawn to this passage when I think of this day, when I look at these graduates, when I consider this assembly. My thoughts are drawn to this passage, this hinge passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans. It begins with a testimony to why we are here in the first place. How is it that such a school as Boyce College would exist? What is the warrant? What is the charter? What’s the constitution? What’s the charge? What’s the stewardship? Well, it all begins in the conveyance of truth from one generation to another. This is the perpetual mission of the Christian Church until Jesus comes, we are to pass on the faith once for all delivered, but it’s not just a matter of some kind of neutralized, autotomized transmission of the truth. It is through the consecrated process of Christian teaching and we find this already in Scripture.
Paul here is teaching the Romans. In his apostolic ministry to the Romans, he is defining the Christian faith and thus not only for the church at Rome but for the church until Jesus comes. And these truths are eternal and unshaken. Paul comes to this transition in the book of Romans. He’s going to turn to more practical affairs. The background of the first 10 chapters going into the 11th chapter have to do with the weightiest matters of the gospel of Jesus Christ and in chapter one, Paul declares, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe to the Jew first and also to the Gentile.” He’s not ashamed of this gospel. He’s been defining this gospel. He’s been offering expositions of this gospel, detailed teachings of this gospel. But at the end of all of this, as he’s transitioning to more practical matters of concern to the church, he offers what is here a doxology, a statement of praise to God.
It is so apt for our consideration this morning, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” There’s absolutely no purpose for this college, but for the fact that truth is real, that truth is objective, that truth is substantial, that truth is eternal. That truth can be transmitted from one heart to another, from one mind to another, but the source of all truth is not this faculty. The source of all truth is no human authority at all. Riches and wisdom, the knowledge of God are his alone. It is by his grace and mercy that he shares his riches of wisdom with us. He loves us. His grace towards us is shown not only in the fact that when we were yet sinners, Christ died for us, but that from the very beginning God loves us to reveal himself to us. He speaks to us in His word and in His word are revealed true wisdom, true riches, the true knowledge of God. His judgments are unsearchable. And an acknowledgement from the apostle Paul. His ways are inscrutable.
It’s not a word we use every day. When you see a word like inscrutable, it implies scrutable. Let me just put it this way. It is not our business to figure God’s ways out. We have no independent standpoint from which we judge the ways of God. He is not obligated to reveal all things to us. He rather gives us, which by his grace he would have us to know. His ways are inscrutable. And then questions, rhetorical questions from the Old Testament that Paul recites here for “Who has known the mind of the Lord?” Obvious answer to that question. “Or who has been his counselor or who has first given a gift to him that it might be repaid?” Our position is made very clear. We are the recipient by God’s grace of all that he gives to us and of all that he reveals to us, including the wisdom that he has imparted to us. We have nothing to give to him. He owes us nothing. He does this out of his grace and mercy.
“Who has been his advisor?” Around every earthly court, around every White House, around every premier’s or prime minister’s office, there is a retinue of advisors and their job is to advise. There is no such body of advisors around the throne of God. No one has ever given something to him in order that he is indebted to them and then in the hinge verse here, we have one of the most classic, one of the most crystallized and clear statements of the comprehensiveness of the Christian worldview. What is it that we teach on? What authority have we taught? What kind of education has been conveyed at Boyce College? What is the authority for any of these things? Look at verse 36: “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.”
We’ve been about the business of teaching Christian truth. We’ve been about the business of considering all things on the basis of the authority of Scripture. We’ve been seeking to weigh all and, in the classroom, and in the totality of the student experience at Boyce College, we have sought to bring all things captive to Christ. But behind all of this is the reality that all that should be known, all that is true, all that is revealed to us comes from him and it is through him. We didn’t search him out. He revealed himself to us. It is not our initiative that leads to learning. It is his initiative that leads to learning and at the end of all things, the conclusion, the promise of all things, the fulfillment of all things is of Him, from him and through him and to him are all things. Not most things. Not some things. The world wants to at least at its greatest moment of concession, perhaps admit, “Well, there are secular things and there are holy things.” But what does the Scripture say? We are told that there is no distinction. “From him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.”
Four years of study and a baccalaureate degree. We didn’t invent that. It’s been around since the emergence of the medieval university and that university emerged out of the church and that university was based upon the unity of the universals—the good, the beautiful, the true, the real. And the university in its beginning was established upon the fact that there is one from whom all these things come. The Giver of all that is true. The Giver of all that is beautiful. The Giver of all that is good. The modern university has lost the “uni” part of the university. What is left is a glory of secular learning devoid from any kind of unifying vision. Our task in this college has been to present a unified vision, a comprehensive vision based upon not only the reality of the one true and living God, not only in the worship of the one true God—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—but also in the promise of the gospel and in the unity of all things in the comprehensive revelation of God.
The audacity of this educational mission is that the graduates of this institution would know the will of God, would know the truth of God. Now, of course, we as human beings can know only in part. But we can know in part. Four years is a big part. The whole point of Boyce College is that there will be a faithful transmission of this part. It’s an urgent part. It’s a very timely part, the period of life generally in which you have young people in college. It is in itself a turning point—childhood behind, adulthood ahead. I think it’s fair to say that in the experience of almost every graduate, and there are parents and loved ones here to witness to this, there are faculty to witness to this, there are peers to witness to this. There’s been an enormous amount of growth just over the course of the last four years. The graduates of this college are the same as when they came and not it’s an awful lot of work. If they’re absolutely in every way the same as when they came, it’s been a waste of time. They’re not the same as when they came. By God’s grace we pray, they have been well armed for the calling ahead, the battles ahead, the challenges ahead, the joys ahead. Even the sorrows ahead.
This transition in the passage “From him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever.” It leads to the first two verses of chapter 12. Paul writes to the Romans saying, “I appeal to you therefore brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Alright? We watch our language carefully. Here we are here this day to celebrate lives sacrificed to the glory of God. That’s not my language. I don’t think, if it were just left to me, I would even think of that language.
Brothers and sisters, and I speak particularly to the graduates, is that not shocking language? Believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, Paul appeals to us by the mercies of God to present our bodies as a living sacrifice wholly and acceptable to God, which is our spiritual worship. The great promise of this class, the great promise of every one of these graduates, and we look out at you and we’re not ready to say goodbye. That is nonetheless in one sense what is happening here. We want you to think of this campus always as a home for you. We hope that when you remember your years on this campus, you not only remember them with thankfulness but commend the same to others. We look forward to seeing you come back. We look forward to seeing what the Lord does in your life. We look forward to hearing how the Lord is using you in mission and work and ministry and to the glory of God and the church. We look forward to seeing future classes of Boyce College brought in your arms and pushed in your strollers. We look forward to hearing how the glory of God is being manifested in your lives and in your work, in your marriages, in your homes, and your calling in your careers.
This morning I’m not urging you to sacrifice all that and yet I guess I am. And this text is addressed to every one of us at every point in our life, to every Christian. We are to live lives as a living sacrifice. Our discipleship is as a living sacrifice unto God and thus everything that we have, everything that we are given, everything entrusted to us is a temporary stewardship to be exercised by a living sacrifice, dead to self and alive to God. That’s all. If we weren’t a Christian assembly, this text would seem absolutely bizarre. But we are a Christian assembly and that is how we are gathered here.
Finally in this passage, even as we are told that these living sacrifices must be holy and acceptable to God, we have the exhortation Paul gives to the church: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” My charge to you is the graduates of Boyce College of 2025 is that you be not conformed to this world, but show the world what it means to be transformed by the wisdom of Christ.
Paul straightforwardly speaks here of being transformed by the renewing of your mind. We certainly hope and pray that your years spent in study at Boyce College has prepared you for an even greater transformation of your mind to the glory of God as a living sacrifice. We hope and pray that all that has been invested in you and all the toil you have put into this degree—this is a moment of real accomplishment. You should feel the glory of this. You should feel the stewardship of this. You should understand this as also a day not only of accomplishment, but of commitment and also stewardship. You have received much. Now, it is your task to transmit much to others and furthermore to have a mind that is not conformed to this world, but transformed by the power of God, transformed by the gospel, transformed by the Scripture, transformed by truth.
Quite honestly, I think some people look at higher education and they say, “Well, okay, they’re just different kinds of higher education and that’s not entirely wrong. I mean, you have public universities, you have private colleges, you have universities that have different traditions and they come from different commitments.” There are some people that say, “Well over here is secular education and over here is Christian education.” They do see that Christian education must be different. I mean, after all, we’re pretty serious about this. We are here as the inheritors of a very serious commitment to this calling over. Well more than a century, but the thing is they really have no idea how different this is. They really have no idea how subversive we intend to be. They really have no idea how ambitious you are for the gospel of Jesus Christ. They really have no idea how your education is so different than their education and we’re not here today to confirm ourselves in institutional pride.
We are here today to remind ourselves of the stewardship entrusted to this school—it’s a stewardship we take very seriously. This faculty has taught faithfully this faculty has taught passionately. This faculty has taught personally, as you know in the classroom and elsewhere. You have also learned a great deal, but you have also taught each other and that’s a part of the college experience as well. You’re not just graduating as individual units of accomplishment. You’re graduating as a class together and there’s something very sweet about that. But even as my charge is that you be not conformed to this world but transformed by the renewing of your mind throughout the entirety of your lives, I want to tell you that this is no small moment for Boyce College, for this faculty and administration and for all those who are gathered here, including parents and families and friends.
For us, this is a day yes of the recognition of accomplishment and for that we are thankful. It is the day, yes, for an exercise in gratitude for there are many who would wish for this opportunity who will never have it. But it is also a moment in which we recognize that some of the most wonderful faithful Christian young people on planet Earth are about to be dispersed into the world, to the glory of God and to the glory of God. We just need to look at this day and look at these graduates and have a picture in our mind, not only of what has been done, but what God is about to do. To God be the glory, great things he has done.
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A Discussion of Matthew Bates’s Beyond the Salvation Wars: Why Both Protestants and Catholics Must Reimagine How We Are Saved
With: Dr. Tom Schreiner, Dr. Jim Hamilton, & Dr. Steve Wellum
Albert Mohler:
Have we been wrong about the biblical teaching concerning salvation all along? Have we misconstrued the gospel for two millennia? All these issues come up from time to time and, since we are a gospel people, nothing’s more important than our understanding of the gospel. So we’re going to be looking at a contemporary challenge to our understanding of the gospel, and I have asked three professors to join with me: Tom Schreiner, professor of New Testament, Jim Hamilton, professor of Old Testament, and Steve Wellum, professor of theology. I appreciate them joining with me. We’re going to have a lively conversation. Brothers, thanks for joining me.
Jim Hamilton:
Glad to be here. Thanks for having us.
Albert Mohler:
So let me just put the question out bluntly: Is it plausible that the Christian Church has misconstrued the gospel for two millennia?
Steve Wellum:
I would say no. The gospel has been clearly understood for 2000 years and, especially, we want to say that, even in the Patristic era, people were true believers in Christ––believed in his finished work, in it alone by faith alone, grace alone. Sometimes they didn’t clearly say that the same way as in the Reformation, but particularly since the Reformation it’s been clearly delineated––all the great souls of the faith––that is the gospel, and it hasn’t changed.
Jim Hamilton:
I think to assert that is really to indict the Holy Spirit as though the Holy Spirit has failed to inspire a sufficient and clear word in the Scriptures, and then, as though the Holy Spirit might fail to lead followers of Jesus, to regenerate their hearts so that they correctly understand the Scriptures, and then to lead them into a correct understanding of the Scriptures. So it really strikes me as an assertion very much opened a challenge on theological grounds.
Albert Mohler:
Tom?
Tom Schreiner:
And I think for someone to say, “After 2000 years, I understand what the gospel is. I’m proposing a third way”––it’s just historically, theologically, very implausible.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, let’s just say upfront that if the church has lost the gospel, we want to recover it . . .
Jim Hamilton:
No doubt.
Albert Mohler:
So morally and theologically, with urgency, we would read a challenge like this, not in order merely to dismiss it, but to take it seriously, at least at face value. And we’ve done that, and that’s why we’re going to have this conversation.
I guess the second question is, just in a summary, what is the gospel? Before we turn to looking at this author’s proposal, What is the gospel?
Steve Wellum:
Well, when we think of the gospel, we think of the good news. What is the good news? It’s what God has done. So it starts with him. It’s what he has done to redeem us, right? So his eternal plan brought about in the work of his son, all the accomplishment of that work––what Christ has done––and its response to us: that he brings us into relationship with him, that what Christ has done for us, we receive by grace through faith, that we are justified before God. That is the good news––the new life that we receive and all that he accomplishes and ultimately an entire new universe.
Albert Mohler:
Yes.
Jim Hamilton:
I’ve taught my children that they can summarize the gospel in four words: God, man, Christ, response. And these four words, they map really nicely onto the flow of thought in the book of Romans, where Paul starts with the Creator and explains how everyone is accountable to him. And then he moves into how all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God––and so this is kind of tracking with the Romans road. And then Paul moves to the provision that God has made in Christ and the good news that he has conquered sin, overcome it, and triumphed over death by his resurrection paid for our penalties through his death on the cross. And then our necessary response to that is to repent and believe in this Messiah as our Lord and Savior and in the message of what he’s done for us.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Tom?
Tom Schreiner:
Yeah, if we go back to Isaiah where we have the good news being proclaimed to Israel, Israel is in exile. Why? What does Isaiah tell us again and again? They’re in exile because of their sins. What is the answer to that? It’s the suffering Servant, who is Jesus Christ himself. And how do you avail yourself of the work of that Servant? Through repentance and belief. That is the gospel Paul preaches. Jesus begins his ministry by saying, “Repent and believe the good news.” He is the one who has come as the Son of Man, the Servant of the Lord, to die for the sins of his people and redeem them as they put their faith and trust in him.
Albert Mohler:
And then there is an order of salvation revealed in Scripture. And quite honestly, it’s the order of salvation the Reformers particularly clarified in theological controversy. And we don’t believe they invented it. We believe they, in one sense, rediscovered it in the Scriptures, and then reaffirmed it. And it is a simple-to-understand structure, right?
Jim Hamilton:
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that this order of salvation is laid out for us nicely in Romans 8 when Paul speaks about those whom God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed, and those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, those whom he justified he also glorified. And, of course, there are some necessary components in there. Those who are called must respond in repentance and faith. And I think that naturally leads to the idea that there is a power of God to call––just like he can call creation into existence, he can speak light into our hearts and open blind eyes and give life to dead people so that they see and believe in Christ.
Albert Mohler:
Steve, in order to describe this gospel rightly, we have used and do use language such as “imputation,” of “substitution,” even “blood atonement.” Are those negotiable terms or are those central to the gospel itself?
Steve Wellum:
Well, I would say they’re central to the gospel because behind them––Why do we need imputation? Why do we need blood? Atonement is because of who God is. He is holy and just. He is our Creator and Lord. In Adam we have fallen. We have sinned. We stand under his righteous judgment. We need a right standing before God. We cannot come into his presence apart from the forgiveness of our sins. Justification––a perfect righteousness––that’s imputation. We need a substitution. We need Christ to pay for our sin, to stand in our behalf. Without that we have no good news. We have no relationship with God. We have no overcoming of sin.
Albert Mohler:
Death––we’re still dead in our sins.
Steve Wellum:
Dead in our sins. To minimize any of those truths of substitution, imputation, justification, we have no gospel.
Albert Mohler:
Tom, so what is the order of salvation revealed in the Scriptures? The ordo salutis. How is it that salvation––God’s saving work––is appropriated by a sinner? How does that happen according to the New Testament?
Tom Schreiner:
Well, in terms of the order, I would say––picking up on what Jim has said––we have election. God elects us before the foundation of the world. I think it’s very clear in Ephesians 1, Romans 9, that this election is unconditional. That election Creates faith, it grants us faith. So we appropriate, we do believe we appropriate the salvation by faith as we believe, but we think the order of salvation is such that God grants us that faith. Even the texts that Jim mentioned––those who are called are justified. That can’t mean those who are invited to be saved are justified, because we know Romans 5:1––you’re justified by faith. So the calling has to create faith, though all those were called or justified, not some. So the calling is an effectual call. It’s a calling that creates faith.
Albert Mohler:
So let me ask you all three of you, is it plausible? Let’s just ask this honestly. Is it plausible that the Christian church has misconstrued the gospel for 2000 or so years? Is it plausible that that’s so?
Steve Wellum:
It’s not plausible. I mean if they’ve misconstrued the gospel, we have really no true saving faith, no relationship with God. I mean the gospel is . . .
Albert Mohler:
And haven’t had for 2000 years.
Steve Wellum:
And haven’t had for 2000 years. And Christians throughout the ages are already back with our credal confession and confessing rightly who God is, confessing rightly who the Savior is, rightly confessing his work, how we then receive salvation, forgiveness of sins. Think of all the way back to the Apostles’ Creed, the forgiveness of sins that involves justification and our right standing before God. There have been through the history of the church muddying with obviously the Roman Catholic debate and Protestant debate. Yet even in all of that, there’s clarity that’s come in the Reformation with justification, salvation by grace through faith, in all of these areas.
Jim Hamilton:
I think to suggest that for 2000 years we’ve been not quite right, that really manifests chronological snobbery. It really assumes that ancient people were stupid and that we have finally come along and we’ve brought to the world . . .
Albert Mohler:
Not mention our grandparents.
Jim Hamilton:
Oh absolutely. That’s right. That’s right.
Tom Schreiner:
And it would say something ultimately about God himself, that God has disclosed a gospel that we haven’t understood for 2000 years. That is so implausible and unlikely. God’s revelation is a revelation that communicates, that’s been effective.
Albert Mohler:
Right. In the course of the last century or so––and in a particular trajectory of English speaking theology, English speaking biblical studies––there’s been the rise of an attempt to offer an alternative reading of historic texts. There’s been even an effort to try to say, look, you look at the Protestant Reformation, you look at the Catholic Church and the Council of Trent, this is all base—at least in part—on either a misunderstanding or, on both sides, a misconstrual of the issues. And I don’t think it’s an accident that this has arisen largely in English speaking theology, because it kind of fits a trajectory here.
But now we arrive at a recent book published that’s arrived on the scene. The author is Matthew W. Bates, who’s now at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary. The title is: Beyond the Salvation Wars: Why both Protestants and Catholics Must Reimagine How We Are Saved. Now, I want to say right up front, I find that implausible, and I say that as a theologian, someone committed to history and historical theologies. It’s implausible to me that Protestants and Catholics are having a false argument, on a false misapprehension, or a false understanding of the gospel.
But this has been going on for some time. We have N.T. Wright and a number of others who have been about this. The achievement of this book, I think, is that it is a short summary which kind of distills all of this. And, in that sense, I thought it would be worthy of this kind of conversation. So it’s not just about this book, but this book does arrive as kind of the distillation. And I think Professor Bates presents it as the distillation of this new way of reading the Scriptures. So to what extent is this new or is it old? Where are the roots of this found?
Jim Hamilton:
One of the things that Bates affirms in this book is the so-called New Perspective on Paul
Albert Mohler:
Right.
Jim Hamilton:
Which I think fundamentally grew out of a rereading of ancient Jewish texts. And then the argument that those ancient Jewish texts properly understood do not lead to the conclusion that those Jews were actually legalistic. And so Bates, he follows in the wake of N. T. Wright, but E. P. Sanders, he’s sort of the leading figure of this. And Sanders acknowledged that the Apostle Paul thought that his contemporaries were legalists. And he said, this is where Paul fundamentally misunderstood his contemporaries, which itself is just so extremely implausible that this modern 20th century liberal New Testament scholar has a better understanding of the people with whom Paul was in dialogue than Paul himself did.
Tom Schreiner:
Yes, I think it’s, we’ve seen N. T. Wright talk about these things, Scott McKnight. I mean it’s interesting if we look at where it’s coming from, I think it’s coming more from the Main Line churches that are trying to, as he says, reimagine the Gospels. So I don’t think it’s coming from the evangelical gospel churches, but there is a danger that it would influence us and cause us to think, “Oh, has everything we said been wrong?” And that’s a concern.
Steve Wellum:
Yeah, I mean you mentioned a New Perspective. I think behind that are other historical issues. When I read Tom Wright, when I read Matthew Bates, we have a whole rethinking of the doctrine of God. We have a whole redefinition of divine justice. We have a definition redefinition of the atoning work of Christ, which are trends that you see prior to the Reformation, but post-Reformation era where you had the Socinians arise and redefine all of these issues. You had the Arminian debates where quickly they left Arminius and went to governmental theories of the cross. They redefined these matters of penal substitution. That’s what’s really going on in this book so that there’s no imputation, there’s no need for active obedience, there’s no need for penal substitution. Well, those are old debates that have gone on and they are post-Reformation debates. So it’s tapping into New Perspective––I’ve been convinced for a while that the New Perspective behind that has been really a re-tinkering with the doctrine of God.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I don’t think it’s an accident, and I say this with respect, but I don’t think it’s an accident that this comes out of at least partly an Anglican tradition, because Anglicanism in its mature form is really quite open to a third way of understanding just about anything, that via media, middle way. So I even think in the title of the book, it’s a way you have Protestants, you have Catholics––there’s got to be some middle way and they must both be wrong to some extent. Maybe to some extent they’re right. And I think that’s part of the cleverness of this book, and it is very interesting. I think it’s compellingly written. This is actually the most, I think, succinct and forceful form of this argument I have confronted. It is a lot more accessible than N. T. Wright and the others. I think for that reason it may be all the more important. That’s why we’re having this discussion. I think it also in some ways kind of creates a new baseline for the discussion of the alternatives and understanding Scripture, gospel, salvation, and whether the church has misconstrued the gospel for all of this time. At one point in his book he talks about gospel allegiance as his model. He puts it in different ways, but it’s gospel allegiance––very similar to, I think, what even 20 plus years ago N. T. Wright was talking about. And it sounds good. I mean we don’t want non-allegiance to the gospel, but that is set as an alternative to, or even a necessary corrective of, the historic Protestant understanding of the gospel itself.
Tom Schreiner:
So yeah, to say “salvation by allegiance alone” instead of “by faith alone,” it’s subtle, but it’s now putting the emphasis on what we do as human beings. Faith is fundamentally receptive––receiving what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. And now the word “allegiance” is emphasizing our response, our work. He does use the word––our works are foundational, even a basis of our justification, which I think speaks to what Steve was saying is rejection of imputation. So I think this is a whole reception of the gospel.
Albert Mohler:
In some ways that’s not even Catholic. In other words, Protestant hearing that is going to say, well that’s more Catholic. It is more Catholic. It’s not even exactly Catholic. And so I think it is interesting that Matthew Bates in this book is trying to say, “No, there’s a third way, a pox on both these houses.” And he says it, a bit friendlier than that. But he is not at all reluctant to say Protestantism is just the gospel off the rails and Catholicism, for instance, when he deals with something like penance, he’s very clear about the fact that he rejects that, sees that as a huge problem in the Catholic construal of the gospel.
But I think we have to go back and say foundational to this is reading the Scripture. So I want us to talk about that. I would really appreciate the three of you telling me how do we understand his interpretation of Scripture, and what is the corrective to this? If he’s right, he’s right. If he’s not right, we need to know why he’s not.
Jim Hamilton:
Yes. So I think that one of the things that characterizes Bates’s work, both in this book and in Salvation by Allegiance Alone and in his work in books like The Birth of the Trinity, it’s a disregard for the Old Testament and the meaning of the Old Testament in context. If you look at what he says about the gospel in this book, the title of one of the articles done in response to this really resonates. It’s a faith unlike that of Abraham. There’s no reference to Genesis 15:6 that I could find in this book or any concern with Paul’s argument that Abraham believed and it was reckoned to him for righteousness, as is asserted in Genesis 15:6. And so I would argue that, rightly understood, that’s what Moses is teaching, and what we want to do is we want to understand the New Testament in such a way that it resonates with the Old Testament. And we see that as Paul and Peter and John and the others in the New Testament are arguing, this is what the Old Testament was about all along. But for Bates, he doesn’t even want to use the terminology that’s found in the New Testament. He wants to change all the pistis terminology from faith and believe and trust and this kind of language to something new that he’s bringing in allegiance. And Genesis 15:6 is certainly not saying Abraham showed allegiance and it was reckoned to him for righteousness. In fact, you wouldn’t need it to be reckoned.
Tom Schreiner:
And just to add to that point, if you’re going to say faith, pistis, is allegiance, what do you do with the verb, pisteuo, believe?
Jim Hamilton:
Yeah, exactly.
Tom Schreiner:
Which he doesn’t deal much with the verb. So I think that’s a problem. Does the verb mean––I don’t know. How do you put the allegiance into a verb? So I don’t think it works.
Steve Wellum:
There’s all the use of Scripture, his exegesis and so on. Again, speaking more in terms of systematic theology, foundationally, I think he works with the assumption, which is totally unbiblical, that God does not require from us perfect obedience, that our standing before God is not, need to have that obedience, that righteousness, that proper justification, that God, in some sense, I think, and I don’t know what his doctrine of God is, but he grades on the curve, so that there is no demand for an atonement that fully pays for sin. This is why, this isn’t even Catholic or Protestant. I mean the reason the Catholic version, you still have to have a right standing before God. That may come through purgatory and something down the road, but he shed himself of all that.
So I want to ask, what is your view of God? Is he holy? Is he just, does he overlook sin? Because he doesn’t have any atonement that fully deals with sin. He doesn’t have a righteous standing that we need to have before God. Our faith now, our works, our allegiance, is the basis for our final justification, but our works are never enough. So he talks about spirit empowered works––fine––but there’s no ground to our justification. Our justification is not grounded in the work of Christ that actually accomplishes a full atonement for us.
Albert Mohler:
So the question I think is what is the righteousness that saves? What righteousness is acceptable to God? And I cannot come up with any construct in which it is anything other than God’s own righteousness, which is imputed to us by faith. And so Steve, I appreciate what you said. In other words, how much is enough? One of the practical questions that came to me in reading this, and I look for it, maybe I missed it, I try to be a careful reader, but I may have missed it, but how does the believer have any assurance in this system?
Jim Hamilton:
Well, I think he doesn’t want assurance. I think he throws it out, and he argues against once saved always saved.
Tom Schreiner:
Right. You can lose your salvation.
Albert Mohler:
Right, right. No, I get that. But at least you would think, pastorally, there has to be some concern . . .
Tom Schreiner:
I guess as long as you’re performing sufficiently.
Jim Hamilton:
I think he’s concerned that having assurance will actually lead to an easy-believism that he’s opposing with this salvation by allegiance alone.
Albert Mohler:
And we don’t affirm easy-believism.
Jim Hamilton:
Right, absolutely not.
Albert Mohler:
And I think the comprehensiveness of Protestant theology and the understanding of the gospel here is never more necessary, I think, when looking at this kind of proposal. And that’s why I just say upfront, I’m a conservative in disposition as well as doctrine. And that means, I think, I hope, a God-honoring conservatism, which is to say, I find it implausible that the church has lost the gospel for 2000 years. I find it implausible that it’s going to show up in a paperback book, published in an evangelical context in the 21st century. That doesn’t mean I’m not interested in what he has to say here, but I can’t get on his platform from the first point. I don’t believe that the gospel has been lost for 2000 years, to be recovered under a new term of allegiance.
Jim Hamilton:
Amen.
Steve Wellum:
Well, when you think of assurance, I mean I’m reading this, and because I work with the Bible’s view of God, I’m saying to myself, “Alright, when am I allegiant enough?” When I stand before God, who’s holy and just.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely.
Steve Wellum:
“Did I show enough allegiance? Did I obey enough? Did I obey in my life?” and so on. And it seems to me he’s not concerned with that question. He’s not bothered by, “How do I stand before a holy God?” So when you talk about reading Scripture, I don’t think he even understands at the heart of the main question of the Bible. The main question of the Bible, post-Fall, is “How do I stand right before a holy God?”
I don’t think that bothers him a whole lot.
Jim Hamilton:
I’d like to pull on that thread by talking about Noah. In Genesis 6:8, we’re told that Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord, and then in 6:9 we’re told that Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. And I think that so many biblical scholars, they don’t start from the assumption that Moses is a coherent thinker. And so, for many of them, as they read this narrative, you’ll find them saying things like, “Well, evidently, the way that Abraham was justified was of no concern to Moses,” or they won’t even attribute it to Moses when we’re reading Genesis 6, because evidently Noah was righteous apart from faith. But in the narrative flow, and in the inner coherence of the narrative, Noah is about to be told that there’s going to be this flood and that he is to build this ark. And what does he do? He believes what he’s been told. I mean, I granted the text doesn’t say, “Noah believed the Lord,” but he builds the arc and the undertaking was such that it probably required him leaving off everything else he was doing, devoting all his time, all his resources to the building of this boat and really investing everything that he had, everything that he was, in responding in faith to the word that a flood was coming. And then if we grant that the author of Genesis is a coherent thinker, when we get to Genesis 15:6, it’s natural for us to conclude, “oh, this is what happened with Noah.” This is how Noah got to be counted righteous. And Noah found favor, and then he was regarded as righteous because he responded in faith as it was also with Abraham.
Tom Schreiner:
And, of course, that’s how Hebrews reads the story, which is a canonical, inspired reflection on the story that Noah did these things by faith. Hebrews 11, it’s very clear.
I would want to add he defines justification. (So we have to look at what does Scripture say.) He defines justification as renovative, as infused righteousness, not declarative righteousness. So in some of these things we have to look at the text. What is the text saying? And I think he’s just mistaken on what justification actually is textually.
Albert Mohler:
Well, he knows that his rendering of justification is different than either the Catholic or the Protestant rendering of justification.
Tom Schreiner:
Well of course, I mean Catholics agree that it’s renovated but in a different way than he does.
Steve Wellum:
Yeah. He’s arguing for incorporation, isn’t he? So it’s not infused or imputed, which raises the issue, as I’m listening to this, I’m incorporated into this group.
Albert Mohler:
Well, maybe yes, maybe not. That also confuses me because everything’s corporate. Who is God’s redeemed people?
Jim Hamilton:
It’s the people that show allegiance.
Albert Mohler:
When and where?
Jim Hamilton:Well, this kind of goes back to what Steve was saying. Is God holy? Is God righteous? Bates, he’ll say, “Well, the Protestants have it wrong in these ways, but they’re really kind of okay. And the Catholics have it wrong in these ways, but we can sort of work them in.” And it’s kind of like what Steve said about God grading on a curve. Evidently for Bates, he’s willing to grade on a curve.
Albert Mohler:
Tom started out, and I appreciate this with the doctrine of election, the clear scriptural presentation of God’s electing purpose. And so we actually believe that the identity of the church is in the wisdom and purpose of God before time began. And thus we can speak of the church in a visible reality in our lifetimes in gathered congregations, but ultimately we’re talking about the elect of God. And that’s a theme in both the Old and the New Testaments. And yet I asked the question again, where is the church? In other words, because Steve, you made this point, are people moving in and out of this orbit all the time?
Steve Wellum:
Well, he says yes. He says, but I mean the church seems to be . . .
Albert Mohler:
Greater and lesser allegiance. How much is enough allegiance?
Steve Wellum:
And his concept of the church seems to be God has elected. So his view of election is a corporate election. It’s not individuals. So he’s elected the church. He doesn’t talk much in terms of Old Testament Israel.
Albert Mohler:
So let’s just go with that for a minute. We don’t believe that. We disagree. But let’s just for the sake of argument, go with that for a moment. So is it a situation and even in corporate election where the individual moves in and out, in and out, in and out, in and out, potentially?
Tom Schreiner:
Potentially.
Albert Mohler:
I don’t understand what allegiance means in this context.
Tom Schreiner:
Potentially, because you can lose it and conceivably, hypothetically, God chooses an entity, the church. If no one responds, there’s no one in the entity. He tries to fend off that objection.
Albert Mohler:
If no one demonstrates allegiance.
Tom Schreiner:
Right, if no one demonstrates allegiance, then God has chosen something with nothing in it. I think his whole conception of setting off the group from the individual is, ultimately, I think he speaks to this, but I think it’s incoherent. It really doesn’t make sense. If God has not chosen the individuals, how has he chosen a corporate group? And furthermore . . .
Albert Mohler:
We can only do this backwards. You can only do this backwards and say, I think I can see a coherent group and thus I can conform my understanding of election to that. But it doesn’t work the other way because, as you say, hypothetically, there could be no one in this group whatsoever.
Tom Schreiner:
Exactly. And I also want to say, he says, “Well, exegetically, it’s not there in the text.” Well, look at Romans 9. Romans 9 does use singulars, right? It doesn’t just use plurals. John 6, right? Those who are given by the Father to the Son, I will raise him on the last day. There are singulars in the text. Now I think he’s wrong, separating the corporate from the individual. But if you look at the text, there are singulars. We don’t just find corporate language.
Jim Hamilton:
Right. Years ago you wrote a review article of Brian Abasciano’s book, and you talked about how, in his view, essentially God has elected an empty set. No one is in it, and Bates cites Abasciano. He doesn’t mention that it was reviewed by Thomas R. Schreiner. It was a very convincing review.
Steve Wellum:
Well, I mean this is where Bates is not giving us anything new. He’s just tapping into theology that he’s not identifying as such. So this corporate sense . . .
Albert Mohler:
That’s why I mentioned that I think he summarized it well. The reason we’re discussing this is that it’s updated and summarized well.
Steve Wellum:
But the corporate sense, I’m not sure, I mean, Tom, you’ve worked on that, how far that goes back. But I mean that’s very, my understanding, very Arminian view, right? So it’s a way of avoiding––which he does not want––that God has chosen in election individuals because that then would ultimately bring a certain order of salvation that would then bring issues that would follow in terms of justification and so on, regeneration, proceeding faith. And he’s really operating with either––I could never figure out whether it’s a semi-Pelagian view of human sin or Arminian view, because he’s got some notion of prevenient grace here. But that’s all tied to the coming of Christ and the preaching of the gospel. I don’t know what ever happens to Old Testament saints in that. So he’s got this notion that we respond, then there’s regeneration. These are old debates that just sort of lays out here, and it’s an entire, but then his gospel eventually has no––in contrast to Arminian––has no atoning work of Christ that actually satisfies the full justice and holiness of God. There is nothing of that in him.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I guess that’s a crucial question. I can hear J. I. Packer coming alongside and saying, “Oh, here’s the question: For whom did Christ die?” What was actually accomplished in the death, burial and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ? Is there a defined people? And you say, Tom, that’s, conceivably, hypothetically, a set of none.
Tom Schreiner:
Absolutely.
Steve Wellum:
Well, when you look at his, I worked hard to try to figure out what is his view of the atonement. The only thing I can come up with, because of all of his kingly emphasis––so usually, all the way back to the early church, particularly since the reformation, Christ is prophet, priest and king, and particularly the role of priest, priest-king. That seems to fall by the wayside, so king comes. All I can see is with the dawning of the kingdom in Christ is it’s a kind of Christus Victor. So Christ now defeats the powers. He’s now the king. And there’s a kind of non-debt atonement he talks about. So the captives are liberated, the set of people that doesn’t involve anybody, they’re sort of set free. It’s a kind of old sort of governmental Christus Victor. And then we put ourselves in this. I mean, yeah, there is no gospel here.
Albert Mohler:
If you can put yourself in, you can take yourself out.
Steve Wellum:
You take yourself out. So I don’t know what is, the atoning work of Christ is in some sense minimal. It’s necessary to sort of defeat the powers, to have some kind of justice upheld, but not full payment of sin. It’s not payment of individual sin and then resurrection, ascension, and then our allegiance to Christ in this set of people, which then gives us what he calls justification. But that’s not justification before God, right?
Tom Schreiner:
Yeah. And he’ll say the kingdom is good news, and he responds to this, but I don’t understand what it means that the kingdom is good news if you don’t respond to it. He says on page 67, “It’s a power releasing event that moves unjust individuals into a righteous community.” What does he mean? It moves them. Because elsewhere he says over and over, it’s up to the individual decision and the gospel itself doesn’t transform and change people. But now he says it moves you into. So I don’t think it really ends up making a lot of sense, but I go back to what John Piper said. I think John is absolutely right. It is not good news that Jesus is king, if you’re alienated from him. That is not good news. That is bad news because you’re going to be judged. So I think that’s a huge problem here.
Albert Mohler:
I am a little puzzled by the way the book begins. He cites some New Testament scholars. He admires in, I guess, in whose intellectual company he wants to keep himself. But then it’s also interesting that he goes after some very interesting people: John MacArthur, John Piper, my own pastor, Greg Gilbert. Greg wrote a very influential book just asking the question, What is the Gospel? And he answers it. So it’s very interesting. And of course they’ve been in some exchange back and forth too, but it’s very interesting, very close to the section you read. On page 65, he says that “Piper and Gilbert’s position inadvertently taints the gospel with our culture’s narcissistic individualism. The gospel can’t count as good news unless I personally get something out of it.” That’s one of the most puzzling sentences I’ve ever read in theological literature.
Tom Schreiner:
I mean to call these people, even inadvertently, narcissistic.
Albert Mohler:
Well, what about the gospel writers? Are they narcissistic?
Jim Hamilton:
I think what he’s failing to understand is, it’s interesting in the Old Testament at one point when the Philistines have triumphed over the Israelites, they go and they proclaim the good news in the house of their gods, the gospel that their God has defeated the God of Israel. In that case, the gospel, the gospel of the Philistines is bad news for the Israelites. It means their God is triumphed. And it’s like he wants to deny that fundamental reality. That’s all these guys are saying. They’re saying the gospel is that Christ is triumphed and his people are delivered. And if you’re not part of his people, that’s not good news for you. Just like the Philistine good news was not good news for the Israelites. I don’t understand why he’s objecting to this.
Tom Schreiner:
And he says earlier on that same page, Dr. Mohler, that you cited, page 65, where that Gilbert and Piper say that your personal response is required. It doesn’t count as fully good news in their view. What God has accomplished in establishing a saved community. But in his view, what has God established apart from the responsive individuals?
Albert Mohler:
Well, that gets back to set theory, right? So I can’t get away from it. So where is the church? It seems to be a very porous entity, and allegiance is such an ambiguous term, and I know he loves it because, and he’s not alone. Like I say, there are others who follow the same kind of thing. Certainly we owe allegiance to Christ, to the King, but I cannot prove anything by my allegiance. I certainly can’t earn my salvation by that allegiance. And when you look at, I mean anyone who’s been a part of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, a part of a local congregation, if it’s up to us every week to keep ourselves in allegiance––I’ll just remind us of the old statement: if you can lose your salvation, you will.
Jim Hamilton:
And pastorally, this is devastating because what is a pastor supposed to say to his congregation? Presumably he’s trying to encourage those people to read the Bible, and they keep reading the Bible and they keep coming back saying, “I’m not seeing this word allegiance anywhere in the Bible. Where all am I supposed to overwrite the word allegiance?” And this comes back, a question I kept asking as I read this book is, who does Bates lead? Does he lead anyone? Does he pastor anyone? Does he represent anyone? And I think that the fundamental impracticality of this proposal is revealed when you start asking these pastoral questions.
Tom Schreiner:
Of course, what he wants to argue is the word pistis means allegiance. But I think there we can say that is an unconvincing construal of the word. And of course we don’t have time to get into this in detail, but I’d go back again to the relationship between the word pistis, faith, and believing. Paul toggles between those two.
Jim Hamilton:
The verb form pisteuo.
Tom Schreiner:
Meaning “I believe.” So, yeah, I think when it gets down to the details, his proposal fails as well. It fails in terms of a right reading of Scripture.
Steve Wellum:
Well, he doesn’t have, he’ll have Christ as king bringing the kingdom, bringing the new creation. I mean whatever that means to him. There’s no priestly act. There’s no dealing with the problem of sin, which is at the heart of the entire Bible from Genesis 3 on. And Christ doesn’t seem to be, because of allegiance, a proper object of faith, so that we look to him because of what he has done. He is my savior, my Lord. He did a work that I can’t do.
Albert Mohler:
But that’s substitution.
Steve Wellum:
That’s substitution. And so he has substitution in there in some Christus Victor sense, but it’s not as . . .
Albert Mohler:
It’s not objective.
Steve Wellum:
. . . Christ has paid for my sin. I need him as my redeemer, and yes, as a result of faith in him, I love him, obey him, serve him. But his allegiance is to Christ in his kingship and basically doing good works that will justify us and keep us in this set. It’s not what Christ has done in him alone, right? I mean, there’s no sola Christus. There’s no Christ alone, faith alone, grace alone. I mean these things are shed. So it’s really a kind of works-salvation.
Albert Mohler:
I don’t think it’s kind of. He says justification is not properly a part of the gospel and works are.
Tom Schreiner:
And works are a basis. They’re foundational.
Steve Wellum:
Well, that’s why I go back. I don’t think he has a concept of God that requires our perfect obedience to his commands and loving him with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength. I don’t think that matters to him, which is a real concern. There’s no need for a penal substitution. There’s no need for righteousness. There’s no need for my right standing before God, which is a horrible thought when I stand before God that I have no right standing. It’s just my works.
Albert Mohler:
Can I put this another way? I would say that pastorally, the greatest urgency with which questions come to me would be, How do I know that I’m saved? And so I find most helpful, the Scriptural promises, but I also find very pastorally helpful, and that includes this with students and others, just those who contact me, the Protestant syllogism. They’re the Puritan syllogism more properly. And the salvation comes to those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and repent of their sins. I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and repent of my sins. Therefore, I am a Christian. I am among the redeemed. God has forgiven me. I am in Christ. And the objective reality is based upon the objective work of God in Christ for our salvation. It is appropriated, but we can’t keep ourselves appropriated only Christ can, and it’s not about our works. I think the New Testament is just so clear about that. The sequence, I think I was rightly taught, the one who is saved by grace is the one who is to follow Christ in obedience. But how in the world can we be obedient enough to be saved?
Tom Schreiner:
Which is why I think the traditional reading––works are a fruit, works are an evidence, but they can’t be construed as a basis. Even after James says, we’re justified by works––by which I think he means as evidence––what does he say in James 3:2? We all stumble in many ways, which “stumble” there means sin. So James can’t mean our obedience is sufficient to be the basis of our salvation, which fits with everything you’ve been saying, Steve.
No imputation, no substitution.
Steve Wellum:
Bates picks up ideas that, you say, okay, we want allegiance. We want to obey, to obey Christ. We want to be part of his people.
Jim Hamilton:
We want to reject easy-believism.
Steve Wellum:
Yeah, and a lot of his description of classical Protestantism, when he, it’s just an individual faith thing. I mean, it’s like, okay, these are already distortions of what . . .
Tom Schreiner:
He defines faith as mental assent.
Steve Wellum:
No one defines that as historically Protestant. It’s always fiducia, trust, ascent, belief, all of those things round out. So he’s always caricaturing things. He wants obedience, he wants allegiance, he wants these things, but there’s no ground for it. So he’s made our works the ground, the basis, the foundation without making Christ’s work the ground, right? And there’s no priest-king here. There’s no . . .
Albert Mohler:
At least as I read his proposal, there’s an enabling grace, so to speak. I’m just using that term of my own invention here, so that it is certainly not all a human work. But on the other hand, this allegiance as a central category, that’s something that requires of the human being. I mean, just if I try to follow his argument, that requires of the human being infinitely more than I think the human being can produce.
Tom Schreiner:
It’s ultimately up to you, right? Even the enablement. So you have Philippians 1:6: “He who began a good work in you will complete it until the day of Christ Jesus.” Well, he must mean by that, he, you began a good work in you will complete it, if you obey sufficiently, right? If you agree to the day of Christ Jesus. But it’s no longer a promise, it’s a condition. So he turns promises in conditions.
Jim Hamilton:
A moment ago you were asking, how do I know I’m saved? And you pointed out that he doesn’t deal with the verbal forms, so I suspect he would say about Romans 10:9 and 10, that’s not the gospel. But listen to this verse, these two verses: If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and I mean believe is what it says, what are we supposed to slot in there? Show allegiance in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved, for with the heart one shows allegiance? No, one believes and is justified. And with the mouth one confesses and is saved.
Albert Mohler:
Even a text as simple and as common as John 3:16. I don’t think you can possibly turn that into show allegiance.
Steve Wellum:
Well, much of his argument on the king, I mean he is divorced from all the biblical categories and structures. Particularly, it’s divorced from the covenantal. So he’ll mention, he doesn’t really mention Adam, he doesn’t mention what’s going on there with the entrance of sin and death into the world. I don’t know what his view of sin is. I don’t know what his view of original sin is, if there’s even a problem there. He talks about our being sinful, but obviously we have the ability to respond.
Jim Hamilton:
Now, when you say you don’t know what his view is, he articulates in here, what you’re saying is you’re not satisfied because he’s not accounting for textual data, right?
Steve Wellum:
Well, he’s got a very weak view of sin.
Jim Hamilton:
Yeah. He’s leaving passages out that he’s not, he’s not addressing through what he says.
Steve Wellum:
We’re not dead in our sins. We can respond. There’s no need for regeneration first, right? I mean, that’s a whole view of human nature.
Albert Mohler:
Does he give us a proposed ordo salutis?
Tom Schreiner:
I don’t think so.
Jim Hamilton:
Well, he rejects, he rejects the existing one.
Albert Mohler:
I’ll start there, but I’m saying, does he offer an order of salvation?
Jim Hamilton:
Well, he claims that both regeneration and justification are false starts. Of course, that’s one of his chapters. And I think in the process of rejecting what would be our view, he offers an alternative. But it really, like we’re saying, it comes down to you have to show allegiance to put yourself into the empty set that God has chosen.
Steve Wellum:
Well, if you were to pick up his ordo, there is no eternal individual election. So it’s just this set.
Albert Mohler:
Does God even know?
Jim Hamilton:
Only on the basis of foresee faith.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, but does God exhaustively foresee?
Jim Hamilton:
He says at one point that the open theists, they went down a rabbit, the wrong trail. So he rejects open theism.
Steve Wellum:
But it’s an empty, empty set. So the ordo actually, Christ is given. So that’s his gospel. He comes as king, and then it’s we respond. So it would be faith tied to allegiance, which brings about regeneration, which brings about incorporation. I mean, that’s his ordo.
Jim Hamilton:
And it’s Christ who’s elected. And then you’re brought into Christ the elect one, I think. Isn’t that correct? What he argues?
Tom Schreiner:
Yeah, that sounds rather Barthian.
Jim Hamilton:
Yeah, I thought so too, as I read.
Steve Wellum:
Well, yeah, he is picking up on that.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and that also points back to the basic, I think, thesis and purpose of the book and of his system. It’s a third way, and that’s explicit in the title. It’s not Protestant, it’s not Catholic. I think by the end of the book, I was convinced it was more Protestant than Catholic, but it’s neither Protestant nor Catholic, a pox on both houses, that both have misread the gospel, misconstrued the Scripture, and this third way is the right way. And by the way, imports a term which is not biblical in order to describe this supposedly more biblical third way. And that’s not just a problem with the word allegiance as something that doesn’t have the direct bearing linguistically here. It’s also that it’s a category that just falls short of, I think, every biblical category.
Jim Hamilton:
I think there’s probably a connection between N. T. Wright defining God’s righteousness as covenant faithfulness and Matthew Bates wanting to say it’s not faith, it’s allegiance. I suspect that there’s some theological connection between allegiance and covenant faithfulness.
Steve Wellum:
Yeah, he does want to critique, right, a bit on the righteousness of God being covenant faithfulness because he wants to incorporate us into the response in terms of our allegiant response type of thing. But it’s very similar. He’s redefined justice, justification. A lot of similarities there to N. T. Wright. In the end, there’s just, when you think of Christology, I am trying to think of what he’s, Christ has come as king, he’s going to create a new world. He’s making a better action. Even now there’s social action he wants to bring as part of the gospel, whatever that means for him. And we then join in with Jesus. But there is the loss of sin, the loss of atonement, the loss of justification before God. All of that’s gone, which is at the heart of the Old Covenant Levitical system, the promise of the New Covenant, the forgiveness of sins, Romans, you think of Romans 3:21-26, God justified Abraham, justified David, justified Old Testament saints. Yet under those old covenant systems, they did not pay for sin. They pointed forward. Christ now comes as the propitiation, as the one who allows God to be both just and justifier. All of that is gone here because there is no finality of Christ and his priestly work.
Albert Mohler:
The other pastoral, theological, biblical issue strikes me having to do with assurance because there’s really no doctrine of assurance here. You have no idea whether you’re sufficiently allegiant or not. And by the way, my self-convicting thoughts would tell me I’m never allegiant enough. And I don’t know how you could, I mean, to me, even thinking you’re allegiant enough would be a sin. It’s the opposite of the Puritan syllogism. Now, you’re in the opposite way. I am not totally allegiant, therefore, I am not a Christian, and I’m not even sure I know what being totally allegiant means, demands of me at any given moment.
When I was a very young man, I grew up in a very different Christian musical tradition than gospel music. But I was surrounded by people who did listen to gospel music. And I was in a setting where I was getting ready to hear the preaching of the word, and the choir sang an old Stamps Baxter song. And in that song, the main chorus was “when he was on the cross, I was on his mind.” And it’s an amazingly rich song in terms of the doctrine of election. And I’ll just tell you, I’ll admit, I was a very young man when I heard it the very first time, and it just encouraged me tremendously. And I thought, this can be narcissistic. And there’s a sense in which Bates says it’s narcissistic. He uses that term even of John Piper and Greg Gilbert’s understanding of the gospel. It’s about me. But I think that’s the apostolic preaching as well. The apostolic preaching is about the elect, but it’s also about the declaration: salvation has come to this house. Salvation has come to me not because of anything I have done, but entirely what Christ has done on my behalf. I don’t know how you put this to music. Be allegiant, stay allegiant. Hope you’re sufficiently allegiant. If you’re not allegiant, become allegiant again, insofar as you know what allegiance means.
Tom Schreiner:
Yeah. And I don’t know if we want to talk about this further, but the social-political angle, I was just trying to figure out how this works practically. Because if the gospel is Jesus’s king, and you say that to the world, but it doesn’t necessarily have any effect because you may choose to reject it. So you say to the world . . .
Albert Mohler:
What kind of king is he?
Tom Schreiner:
Yeah, Jesus is king. And they’re like, well, no, thank you. That’s nice to hear. But I don’t, he uses the word establishing, but how is it established without individuals responding?
Albert Mohler:
Or on the day of judgment in the great judgment. Is it a judgment of who’s been sufficiently allegiant?
Tom Schreiner:
Then it’s not good news for you.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I don’t think it’s good news for anybody. I’ll just be honest. I don’t think it’s good news for anyone. I don’t think anyone could possibly be judged as being sufficiently allegiant to be included in the economy of salvation.
Tom Schreiner:
That’s why Machen said when he died, right, “Thank God for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.” When Machen who founded the Westminster Seminary, Orthodox Presbyterian Church, when he is dying, he didn’t think “I’ve been a really good person. I founded a denomination. I wrote books.” I think he thought of his sins and said, I trust in Christ righteousness that’s given to me, which I want to say by the way, it is there in the text 2 Corinthians 5:21, the parallel between Adam and Christ, and Romans 5, Romans four, it’s reckoned to us. So he says, it’s not in the text, but it is there.
Albert Mohler:
Steve, you’re a systematic theologian. I want to throw this to you in particular. I’ve started out by saying I find it implausible that the church has misconstrued the gospel for 2000 years, that Protestants and Catholics have been arguing about a misunderstanding for 500 plus years. Where does this effort to try to find a new gospel? Oh goodness. To clarify, he doesn’t call this a new gospel. He says this is the gospel, what he’s presenting. But where does this come from, this continual effort in the modern age to find some escape hatch from the theological dichotomies of the Christian tradition?
Steve Wellum:
Yeah, you’d have to probably mine his psychology at this point. I mean, it seems to me . . .
Albert Mohler:
But he’s not alone. This is third wayism it’s all over the place.
Steve Wellum:
I mean, I think there’s a kind of ecumenical thrust. Unite the church. We are divided, so we want a unified church. We want the holy Catholic, apostolic church, not in divisions. So there’s probably a good sense to that. And also I think there’s this correction. I can’t help but think when he ties Jesus is king, ties it to the social aspect because he criticizes that. There is a sense of, it’s a kind of, if we’re not careful, don’t want to attribute this totally to him, but there’s a kind of transformationalist, let’s get together, an ecumenical thrust. Let’s unite the church. Let’s transform society.
Albert Mohler:
That’s pretty explicit in someone like N. T. Wright.
Steve Wellum:
In some sense, they become political theologians. I mean, eventually, this is where it goes.
Albert Mohler:
And it fits the spirit of the age. That’s kind of where I was headed with the question. It would be nice to have an escape hatch from the dichotomies, from the thesis and antithesis. It would be apologetically, socially, politically, culturally advantageous to find a synthesis. I don’t think you can synthesize Protestantism and Catholicism in terms of our understanding of the gospel.
Tom Schreiner:
I mean, if it succeeded, you just have a third movement.
Jim Hamilton:
Something new
Tom Schreiner:
Because the Catholics and Protestants aren’t going away. So then if it succeeded, in part, it’s . . .
Albert Mohler:
It’s not a misunderstanding.
Tom Schreiner:
You’d just have a third way. You’d create a third group. I mean, he must know.
Albert Mohler:
That’s partly what is happening. So I think you put your finger on something. I think that is what’s happening. I think you’ve got, and by the way, maybe that third thing includes some who would be historically Catholic and some who would’ve been historically Protestant, and now they’re both a part of this third thing. And so it may be the last people on earth who can have an honest disagreement, would be a classical evangelical Protestant, and then say a classical credal Catholic, maybe be the last people on the planet who can have an honest disagreement.
Jim Hamilton:
I was looking for it, I can’t find it, but I think at one point, Bates positively cites Vatican II, particularly the section Lumen Gentium 16 or so. And what’s interesting about that is that in the development of Roman Catholic theology, you go from Trent, where all the Protestants are going straight to Hell, to now where separated brethren. And there’s really not an accounting for how we went from going to Hell to now being separated brethren. And we’re okay now. And I think that same almost postmodern flare is present in Bates’s work.
Steve Wellum:
And I think it’s going to be easier to connect to the secular culture in some sense. We are not talking about election, we’re not talking about sin and regeneration. We’re talking about the king. We’re talking about the transformation of society. Come join us. As I’m reading this thinking, what does this look like in everyday life? And it looks like a kind of, yes, there’s a future, but it’s transformation now. It’s let’s get involved in social action. Let’s get on with climate change. And he never tells us exactly where he goes. But I could just imagine where he’s going to go.
Albert Mohler:
Well, let me tell you a question I want to ask. I’m going to tell you a question I want to ask. Does allegiance to Christ allow you to declare you have married a man to a man?
Steve Wellum:
Well, that’s a good question because in there, as he’s talking about the Galatian controversy and the old covenant and any works of the law, which he ties to the Old Covenant, all that system is gone. So there’s works, but there is no specific law that we follow. It’s the Spirit working in us that gives us the law of Christ. And I’m thinking, what is this? How are you defining that? What does that look like? Because we know in our own day, people run trucks through that. And so I don’t know, maybe you’ve read some of you guys other parts of his work. I just don’t know where he is at on that. But it seemed like the works that we do, the allegiance that we have isn’t governed a whole lot by command, law.
Albert Mohler:
I’ve been doing my job for more than 30 years here, and I’ve had to learn how to do it in the heat of all kinds of controversy. And so oddly enough, I think one of the surprising things to me, in more than 30 years in this job interviewing, for instance, prospective faculty members, which I did just before this conversation. I have learned to go to the outer questions first. I want to know the person’s testimonial coming to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and all the rest. But then, unapologetically, I start asking downstream questions because that tells me everything about what’s upstream. And so, for instance, I asked the sexuality questions. People may say, well, that’s very odd. I’ll say, well, no, the point is I don’t need to have any more conversation with this person. Because if this is what’s downstream, then, because it’s so easy in an interview with a prospective faculty member, for example, to start out with the doctrine of the Trinity. And obviously that’s most fundamental. I want to get back to that––by the way, we require a written response to the entire confession of faith. But time is precious and opportunities are few. So I want to know, okay, downstream, beginning of the conversation, where are we? Then I’ll work back up. It’s kind of the opposite of the way I thought it would work. That make any sense?
Jim Hamilton:
Yeah, totally.
Tom Schreiner:
And I don’t think, we’re not saying he holds wrong views on this, because we don’t know.
Albert Mohler:
No, I’m going to be careful to stipulate that. I’m just saying, so that’s why I asked the question. But that’s the question I would ask if I were here. Is allegiance to Christ compatible with X, Y, Z? Because if so, given the clear teachings of Scripture, we’ll know where we are.
Tom Schreiner:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jim Hamilton:
Even apart from those questions, another reaction that kept rolling around in my head as I was reading this book was, this man could not join our church. I mean, the statement of faith of our church is the abstract of principles, the Baptist Faith and Message. And we tell people who apply for membership, you can only join this church if you have no settled convictions against what is taught in our statements of faith. And so here’s this guy who could not join our local church who’s trying to correct our understanding of the gospel. I mean, that’s not, that’s a nonstarter.
Albert Mohler:
It’s also interesting that he indicts Catholicism in terms of its requirement for the acceptance of all dogma. And that’s presented as in an enumerated set of problems. And again, we’re confessional Protestants. We’re not just Protestant as an adjective. We are confessional Protestants as a noun.
And so our understanding is not radically different than that. We require, for instance, to teach here, to teach in accordance with and not contrary to all that is contained to therein without hesitation or mental reservation or private arrangement with the one who invests him in office. And there’s a sense in which anything stepping back from that, it is not just, I’m not going to hire you as a faculty member. I’m not sure we can be the same church together.
Well, it’s been a good conversation. I appreciate each of you, and I think some people listening to this will say, well, you just picked out one book, and that just went at it pretty hard here. But it’s because we believe the gospel’s at stake. And as I said in the beginning, it’s not just this author. It’s not just this book. It is the effort to redefine the gospel in our age. And so I want to say, I think this book distills the arguments pretty well, and I appreciate the candor with which I think this author, Matthew Bates, has set out many of these arguments. We sincerely disagree, we energetically disagree. I think in the end, it’s important for us to say, we do believe the gospel is at stake. Is that right?
Jim Hamilton:
Amen.
Steve Wellum:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, as I finished this book, I don’t recognize the gospel, right? It’s not here. Everything is transformed. The language of, even when he speaks about justification, righteous, substitution, king, everything now means something different than what I understand Scripture to say and how it’s placed in historic theology. He’s picked up elements that, I mean, if he actually understood classic Protestantism, reformed thought, we would have a prophet, priest, and king. We would have a kingdom that comes through covenants that gives us forgiveness of sins.
Albert Mohler:
Belief no less in the glorious kingdom of Christ.
Steve Wellum:
He’s dropping all of what the heart of Christ has done and faith in him and the gloriousness of the Savior, that is, what he’s achieved for us. I mean, he’s got a king who’s achieved something but not justification, righteousness, forgiveness of sins, full payment of our sin before God, which if you don’t have that right, you don’t have the doctrine of God right, you don’t have sin right, you don’t have Christ right.
Tom Schreiner:
And he said, right? He said on page 6, he wanted a robust dialogue. And we appreciate his intention to try to communicate the gospel. But I think we’d say at the end of the day, through robust dialogue, we don’t think that you’ve succeeded in explaining clearly what the gospel is. We have fundamental, serious disagreements with what you’re proposing.
Jim Hamilton:
Sound theology should really open up the Scriptures for us. It should help us to see more in the Scriptures, help us to understand what’s stated in the Scriptures. And I think if we took his program, his ideas, his way of understanding things, and then read the Scriptures, again and again, we would have to say, well, I have to understand this just precisely the way that Matthew Bates explains it. And we would keep running into places in the Bible where this just doesn’t work.
Albert Mohler:
Right. Well, robust debate, maybe a debate that continues, and we’ll see where this debate goes from here.
I want to thank you colleagues for joining with me today in the library.
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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
1 Corinthians 7:17–40
May 4, 2025
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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
1 Corinthians 7:1–16
April 27, 2025
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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
1 Thessalonians 4:13–18
April 20, 2025
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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
1 Corinthians 6:1–20
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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
1 Corinthians 5:1–13
April 6, 2025
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Well, good morning. I greet you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. What a thrill to be together every single time, to sing songs as we have just sung, and to be in the fellowship of those called to be in this place at this time, to be able to express gratitude to so many here in this room who helped to make this possible and to welcome to this campus so many new friends who are here just for this week and period of time and most consummately to turn to God’s word. So we’re going to turn to God’s word together and we’re going to turn to Daniel chapter three, except we did that last time… But three is the magic number. In this case Frist Samuel three. Gotcha. First Samuel three.
Let’s follow together in the text: “Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord in the presence of Eli. And the word of the Lord was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision. At that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, was lying down in his own place. The lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was. Then the Lord called Samuel, and he said, ‘Here I am!’ and ran to Eli and said, ‘Here I am, for you called me.’ But he said, ‘I did not call; lie down again.’ So he went and lay down. And the Lord called again, ‘Samuel!’ and Samuel arose and went to Eli and said, ‘Here I am, for you called me.’ But he said, ‘I did not call, my son; lie down again.’
Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him. And the Lord called Samuel again the third time. And he arose and went to Eli and said, ‘Here I am, for you called me.’ Then Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy. Therefore Eli said to Samuel, ‘Go, lie down, and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant hears.’ So Samuel went and lay down in his place. And the Lord came and stood, calling as at other times, ‘Samuel! Samuel!’ And Samuel said, ‘Speak, for your servant hears.’ Then the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Behold, I am about to do a thing in Israel at which the two ears of everyone who hears it will tingle. On that day I will fulfill against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house, from beginning to end. And I declare to him that I am about to punish his house forever, for the iniquity that he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God, and he did not restrain them. Therefore I swear to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli’s house shall not be atoned for by sacrifice or offering forever.’
Samuel lay until morning; then he opened the doors of the house of the Lord. And Samuel was afraid to tell the vision to Eli. But Eli called Samuel and said, ‘Samuel, my son.’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ And Eli said, ‘What was it that he told you? Do not hide it from me. May God do so to you and more also if you hide anything from me of all that he told you.’ So Samuel told him everything and hid nothing from him. And he said, ‘It is the Lord. Let him do what seems good to him.’ And Samuel grew, and the Lord was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground. And all Israel from Dan to Beersheba knew that Samuel was established as a prophet of the Lord. And the Lord appeared again at Shiloh, for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord.”
This is the word of God, this incredible passage. I dare say those of us raised in the context of a Christian family, those of us with long experience in the Christian Church, those of us who were as toddlers and preschoolers and school children, read Bible stories by our parents, had them taught to us in Sunday school. We know this text, or at least we think we do. We certainly know this narrative. We know the story of the boy Samuel in the temple with Eli, the priest, but as is so often the case, we have to press back a bit and ask what we really know about what’s going on here. Because my guess is that even in the reading of this text, there were words that leapt out at you that you didn’t remember and may actually never have known.
This is one of those texts that reminds us that sometimes Scripture can reside in our memory in a way that reduces Scripture to something manageable. In one sense, this is a coping mechanism for human beings. We can’t take too much at one time, and so when we are given as children the account of Samuel, the boy there in the temple with Eli, we tend to reduce things down to something manageable. You don’t just tell children about fornicating, adulterating, priestly sons who are about to be massacred to the glory of God. That is not a Sunday school lesson you’re going to find in your local church. But that that kind of reductionism begins in the very beginning of this book.
I don’t think there are many Sunday school teachers who tell children that Eli thought that Hannah was drunk, that Eli confronted Hannah as she was in prayer because of the barrenness of her womb. She was experiencing a moment with the Lord. Her lips were moving and as she was there in the temple, Eli who was sitting at the doorpost saw her and thought she was drunk and went and scolded her for her drinking. Again, I wasn’t taught that.
Look at verse 13 of chapter one. In fact, go back a verse, go back to 12. “As she continued praying before the Lord, Eli observed her mouth. Hannah was speaking in her heart; only her lips moved, and her voice was not heard. Therefore Eli took her to be a drunken woman. And Eli said to her, ‘How long will you go on being drunk? Put your wine away from you.’ But Hannah answered, ‘No, my lord, I am a woman troubled in spirit. I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord. Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for all along I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation.’ Then Eli answered, ‘Go in peace, and the God of Israel grant your petition that you have made to him.’ And she said, ‘Let your servant find favor in your eyes.’ Then the woman went her way and ate, and her face was no longer sad.”
Okay, then look at the next verses: “They rose early in the morning and worshiped before the Lord; then they went back to their house at Ramah. And Elkanah knew Hannah his wife, and the Lord remembered her. And in due time Hannah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Samuel, for she said, ‘I have asked for him from the Lord.’”
Now remember that Hannah, in her prayer, prayed to the Lord that he would open her womb. And that the son that came from her womb, she would present to the Lord and she did so. And we know that she brought him so quickly to Eli that Eli had to tell her, “Uou must wean him first before you can present him to me.” And so Samuel, the emphasis here is he’s tiny, he is an infant. And of course the poignancy of this is that this sweet woman who was the wife of this man who was demonstrated to be understanding of his wife, even in her barrenness, she prayed to the Lord to open her womb and later as we know she had other children, sons and daughters. But when the Lord answered her prayer and she conceived and bore this boy and she gave birth to him, she named him Samuel for she said, “I have asked for him from the Lord.” And then she presented him back to the Lord and Eli had to say, just wait until he is weaned and then bring him to me. And then the boy grew in the service to Eli the priest.
Chapter two is one of the most remarkable chapters in all of Scripture. It begins with Hannah’s prayer. And again, what you have here is something very similar to the prayer of Mary in the New Testament. And you say, how could this young woman, how could this nomadic wife, how could this wife who we presume to be illiterate, unable to read or to write, which would’ve been the common state at that time, how is it that she is able to pray like this?
We don’t have time to look at the entire prayer, but know how it begins: “My heart exults in the Lord; my horn is exalted in the Lord. My mouth derides my enemies, because I rejoice in your salvation.”
Look at verse six: “The Lord kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up. The Lord makes poor and makes rich; he brings low and he exalts. He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor. For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and on them he has set the world.” The world is sitting on these pillars the Lord has set.
Okay, there’s the glory of that passage, the glory of Hannah’s prayer, the pillars on which the Lord has set the entire world, set the entire earth and this poetry, this praise and then we go immediately to the depravity of Eli’s worthless sons. And frankly, worthless is not an adequate adjective. They’re horrifying.
Look at verse 12: “Now the sons of Eli were worthless men. They did not know the Lord. The custom of the priests with the people was that when any man offered sacrifice, the priest’s servant would come, while the meat was boiling, with a three-pronged fork in his hand, and he would thrust it into the pan or kettle or cauldron or pot. All that the fork brought up the priest would take for himself. This is what they did at Shiloh to all the Israelites who came there. Moreover, before the fat was burned, the priest’s servant would come and say to the man who was sacrificing, ‘Give meat for the priest to roast, for he will not accept boiled meat from you but only raw.’ And if the man said to him, ‘Let them burn the fat first, and then take as much as you wish,’ he would say, ‘No, you must give it now, and if not, I will take it by force.’ Thus the sin of the young men was very great in the sight of the Lord, for the men treated the offering of the Lord with contempt.”
They were robbing the Lord. That’s the bottom line. They were robbing the Lord of his sacrifice. They were perverting the sacrificial system into a delicatessen. It is a piece of grotesque, heresy, arrogance, and robbery. As I say verse 12 saying they were worthless men, that seems hardly quite satisfying and then it gets worse. As you know there’s more sin. But notice verse 18 of chapter two: “Samuel was ministering before the Lord, a boy clothed with a linen ephod.” Okay, this is so sweet. This is where the Sunday school pictures got it right. Here’s a little boy and he’s wearing a priestly ephod.
The wearing of the ephod was a great honor as the Lord will remind Eli shortly, and you’ll recall that his mother made a new cloak for him every year. His mother has not forgotten him. He is still her son. But just notice this, you have a contrast. Just don’t miss the contrast between the worthless sons of Eli and Samuel. While the sons of Eli are involved in gross sexual immorality and they are robbing the Lord of his sacrifice. There is Samuel living in the temple with Eli ministering to the Lord.
Okay, there’s a shift here. Ministering to whom? Ministering to the Lord, not just ministering to Eli but ministering to the Lord.
His mother used to make for him a little robe and take it up to him each year when she went up with her husband to offer the yearly sacrifice, then Eli would bless El Cana and his wife and say, may the Lord give you children by this woman for the petition she asked of the Lord. So then they would return to their home. Indeed, the Lord visited Hannah and she conceived and bore three sons and two daughters and the boy Samuel, this is it grew in the presence of the Lord. He is ministering to Eli, he is serving Eli. Then he’s ministering to the Lord and now he’s growing up. He grows in the presence of the Lord.
Okay, so this is a boy. He is growing up. He grew in the presence of the Lord. Look at the contrast with the very next sentence: “Now, Eli was very old.” How old? Very old. You look at him and you say, now this isn’t just your usual old. This is very, very old. Alright.
He kept hearing that his sons were doing evil. He kept hearing all his sons were doing to all Israel. That’s as comprehensive of a statement as you can get. This is just depravity, it’s corruption, it is sensuality how they lay with women who were serving at the entrance to the tender meeting. So they were robbing the Lord of his offering and they were robbing the Lord of the dignity of his worship and they were robbing the Lord of his law, violating his law. Horrifying sin known to the public. And he said to them, remember this is Eli speaking to his sons: “Why do you do such things? For I hear of your evil dealings from all these people. No, my sons; it is no good report that I hear the people of the Lord spreading abroad. If someone sins against the Lord, God will…” Hold on… What’s he going to say? What have we been singing?
If Christ is the promise, do we not see him here? “If someone sins against a man, God will mediate for him, but if someone sins against the Lord, who can intercede for him?” Okay, do you not see it? Do we not see it? We don’t need merely a mediator for sins against each other. We need a mediator for sins against the Lord. Eli cannot even see such a mediator. We’ve just been singing his praises.
As for the sons, “they would not listen to the voice of their father,” Then notice the next words in the sovereignty of God, “for it was the will of the Lord to put them to death.”
Verse 26: “Now the boy Samuel continued to grow both in stature and in favor with the Lord and also with man.” Do you not hear it? Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man. Well, you know what happens in verses 27 and following it is the rejection of Eli’s household. It is the absolute condemnation of the priestly family of Eli, such that it shall be wiped out. It’s just horrifying. Just for one thing, imagine here at Shiloh, how is it that things could go so badly? So quickly? How is it that things can fall apart so comprehensively?
This is the way sin works. It’s the particular catastrophic nature of sin when we’re talking about the priest of God and we’re talking about his sons.
Okay, now notice the promise of the Lord. We can’t miss this. Look at chapter two and look at verse 35. And I will raise up for myself a faithful priest who shall do according to what is in my heart and in my mind, and I will build him a sure house and he shall go in and out before my anointed forever. That’s Samuel, right? Wrong. That is not Samuel. Hold that thought.
But go ahead and go to verse one of chapter three, back to the scene, back to Samuel: “Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord in the presence of Eli.” Okay, so Samuel is growing up. We’ve been told that two or three different ways. And at least in the context of the narrative and with the facts we’re given, we need to reconstruct just a little bit, because it matters how old Samuel is, right?
I mean, it’s you’re not going to have a 4-year-old prophet of the Lord. Now you may have one who thinks he is in your house, but that is not what’s happening. And we know he was brought so early that Eli had to tell Hannah that she had to wean him first. But he’s been growing in wisdom and in stature and in favor. He’s now ministering to the Lord in the presence of Eli.
The condemnation against not only Eli’s sons but against Eli for the behavior of his sons and the desecration of the priesthood. That all sets up the promise of a priest to come. And then all of a sudden the scene shifts back. And Samuel, who is still identified as the boy, the youth, was ministering to the Lord in the presence of Eli.
At two or three points in this passage, indeed, at least a couple of points within chapter three, there’s a fast forwarding. Time is compressed and all of a sudden there’s a leap of years. This happens here. It’ll happen at the end of the chapter as well. And now Samuel is evidently old enough that he is ministering on his own on behalf of Eli ministering to the Lord in the temple. The scene says Now to Samuel, the scene is not primarily on Eli and his depraved sons, it’s on Samuel. But notice how the context is set. Just don’t miss this. Look at verse one: “Now, the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord in the presence of Eli. And the word of the Lord was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision.” In the Old Testament, one of the key indicators of divine judgment is that the word of the Lord becomes rare. The word of the Lord becomes scarce. The word of the Lord is not heard in the land. It is an indictment of the people, but it is also a sign of the judgment of God. It’s an indictment of the people because they no longer deserve to hear the word of the Lord. And the Lord has withdrawn himself and the Lord has withdrawn his word.
The word is scarce. It’s rare in those days. But notice the next line. There was no frequent vision. Without a vision, my people will perish. So the absence of the word and the absence of the vision, this becomes the indictment of the people and a sign of God’s judgment upon them. Here at Shiloh, God’s judgment is falling upon the people of Israel because they no longer hear him and they no longer see his visions. And who do they have as their priest, Eli? And what’s the next thing we are told about Eli? His eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see.
The word of the Lord is rare. There is no frequent vision and the priest is blind. Okay, so you notice the dissent, God’s judgment. It’s just showing this is the way sin works. This is the way God’s judgment works. Things go from bad to worse to worst imaginable and then go beyond worst imaginable. But you also notice that in the literary structure of this book, the Lord is giving us a mixture of judgment and hope, a mixture of temporal references, past, present and future. Past, present, and future for Eli. Past, present, and future for Samuel. And yet Eli’s got a very short future. Samuel has a very long future. And when we go back to him, he is still a youth. He’s still a boy.
And then you look at this and you see the brilliance of what the Lord gives us in this text. Look again, and the word of the Lord was rare in those days. “There was no frequent vision. At that time, Eli whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, was lying down in his own place.” And then look at the next verse. Look at verse three: “The lamp of God had not yet gone out.”
This is just incredible poetry. You see, sight and blindness, light, darkness. But in this context, the reference to the lamp of the Lord has to do with the time of the night. This means that the light had not yet dawned. And so in the service of the Lord, this lamp of the Lord is still shining. It is the light and the Lord calls to Samuel.
How did the Lord call to Samuel? We don’t know. We don’t know. Did the Lord cry out “Samuel?” We don’t know, but it had to be something like that because Samuel thinks it’s Eli. And what else would Samuel will think? What else would Samuel think? And so he does what he evidently did when he heard Eli’s voice, he went to attend to him. And you’ll notice the instantaneous obedience. You just have this picture of instantaneous obedience.
Samuel thinks he hears from Eli, so he leaps into action and goes to Eli. But what he finds is an old blind sleeping priest who tells him “I did not call; lie down again. So he went and lay down” and verse six: “And the Lord called again ‘Samuel!’” So now we know it. He said, “’ Samuel!’ and Samuel arose and went to Eli and said, ‘Here I am for you called me.’ But he said, ‘I did not call my son. Lie down again.’”
Okay, now look at verse seven. It’s a bomb. It is one of those things that’s about to go off. We read over it. It’s shocking: “Now, Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.” Now what sense does it make that Samuel doesn’t yet know the Lord? What sense does that make? He’s ministering to the Lord. The text has repeatedly told us that he’s ministering to the Lord. He’s ministering to the Lord in the service of Eli, the priest. He’s there with the priest. He is a picture of perfect obedience, at this point, of covenantal faithfulness. At this point he is ministering to the Lord. And so it’s not just to Eli. We’ve already been told he’s been ministering to the Lord. How can it be said that he does not yet know the Lord?
Well, this is a problem with our language, even our religious language. We say, do you know the Lord? We don’t mean, “Have you heard of him?” We mean “Do you know him?” J.I Packer’s famous devotional work Knowing God. It is not about first and foremost knowing of him. It is a personal relationship knowing him. The distinction in this passage is that knowing the Lord in this sense means, I don’t even know what verb I can use here, it means somehow by God’s grace being given the favor of hearing the voice of God. Once Samuel hears God’s voice, he knows the Lord in an entirely different way because the Lord speaks to those whom he chooses. He chooses to speak to them and now they know him.
Okay, I spent some time looking at the background so you will notice something. And this is shocking to us. When you look at this verse, you see verse seven: “Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.” And you say, well, that’s the same thing that was said of Eli’s worthless sons. Look at chapter two verse 12: “Now the sons of Eli were worthless men. They did not know the Lord.’ Same thing, right? They didn’t know the Lord. Samuel didn’t know the Lord. It’s the same thing. No, it’s not. There’s one word, there’s one different word for Samuel has said. He did not yet know the Lord. He didn’t yet know the Lord. And then notice the next phrase. The Lord had not yet been revealed to him. Oh my goodness, what a difference yet makes. It’s all the difference for eternity. The sons of Eli, these worthless men, they did not know the Lord. But for Samuel, he did not know the Lord yet. They did not hear from the Lord. But Samuel will hear from the Lord and the Lord will call him, that second call, by his name.
You look at this and you say, well, okay, let me just say it is one of the signs to me of the absolute perfection and inerrancy, infallibility and inspiration of the word of God. I think only the Lord could insert “yet” in such a way to make the contrast, if we will catch it, all the more explosive. The world is divided, you might say all of humanity is divided between those who do not know the Lord and those who do not know the Lord yet. Our story as Christians is that there once was a time when we did not know the Lord. And then there was a turning, a metanoia, a repentance, a knowledge, a faith, a gift. And it came to us in such a way that we did not know the Lord at this point yet.
And on this other side of that “yet” is salvation and all that God has promised. And on the other side of that “yet” is an absolute dependence upon the word of the Lord. And you say, well, Samuel is in a privileged position here and he’s in a privileged position because he hears directly from the Lord. No brothers and sisters, we are in the privileged position because we hear from the Lord every time we open this book. We have the Scriptures. You can say of the disciples how privileged they were to hear Jesus speak these words. But we are in a privileged position as the church of the Lord Jesus Christ because we have the word of God for us as individuals is for Christians and as for the church, all the distinction is between the not knowing the Lord and not knowing the Lord yet. And our missions and evangelism is entirely premised upon the fact that we are preaching the gospel because there are so many who do not know the Lord yet.
But there’s more in the text. Samuel is called a third time, and the third time Eli perceives something. So remember here in the context, Eli is old, he’s frail, he’s incompetent, and he’s blind, but he’s not done. In chapter two, Eli is presented as a pathetic failure as a father. But I just want us to notice by the mercy of God, he is not presented as a pathetic failure as a priest in chapter three. There’s still something of dignity and service and devotion left in Eli. He still knows what it means that God speaks. He also knows, he must know the Lord is not going to speak to him again.
But on this third call, when Samuel runs to him in service, he says, I’m not calling you son, it’s the Lord. And then notice his instruction, he says, he says, “Go, lie down, and if he calls you, you shall say,” he gives him the word, “’Speak Lord for your servant hears.’” So Samuel went and laid down in his place and of course the Lord came and stood calling out as at another time. So this is a vision of the Lord. So just catch this. Remember the first verse told us that the word of the Lord was scarce and the visions were infrequent. Well, here’s both at once. Both at once.
“The Lord came and stood, calling as at other times, ‘Samuel! Samuel!’ And Samuel said, ‘Speak, for your servant hears.’” That’s what he was told to say. “Then the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Behold,’” shat is he going to say? “’I’m about to do a thing in Israel at which the two ears of everyone who hears it will tingle.’” Don’t you love that? I’m going to do something so that even speaking about it will make your ears move. “’On that day I will fulfill against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house, from beginning to end. And I declare to him that I am about to punish his house forever, for the iniquity that he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God, and he did not restrain them. Therefore I swear to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli’s house shall not be atoned for by sacrifice or offering forever.’”
Okay. I just want to tell you there’s more going on there than we see at first. There’s a lot more going on there than we know. There’s a lot more going on there than most Christians ever see. It’s right here in the text. God is speaking, he appears and he speaks to Samuel, and Samuel is given a message for another. Okay. At the end of this chapter, Samuel is going to be described as a prophet, but here he is already commissioned as a prophet who speaks for God. He is told what he is to say, and it is Eli who does not receive the prophecy directly from God. Eli is going to receive this horrifying prophecy through God’s prophet: Samuel, a boy.
The strangest part of the text to me is verse 15, “Samuel lay until morning; then he opened the doors of the house of the Lord.” How exactly do you go back to bed after that? The Lord spoke to him. The Lord appeared to him. The Lord basically makes of him instantaneously a prophet gives him a horrifying message of doom. You’ll notice it says he lay until morning. It doesn’t say he slept. Okay, so he does what he’s supposed to do. He opens the house of the Lord, he opens the doors of the house. And Samuel was afraid to tell the vision to Eli. You can understand that. But here is his prophetic role is demonstrated in an unusual way because it is Eli who senses that the Lord has spoken to Samuel and the message, the message must be for himself. And that’s made clear in the way he implores Samuel to tell him.
“’Samuel,’” he says, “’here I am.’ And he said, ‘What was it that the Lord told you?’” Remember Eli’s in his bed as well, and he knows the Lord is speaking to Samuel. What is the Lord telling him? Those were two interesting figures who lay in bed until morning. “Don’t hold anything back. May the Lord do to you and more if you hide anything from me of all that he told you.” And then look at the next verse: “So Samuel told him everything and hid nothing from him.” And he said, what is this old priest going to say? Eli says, “’It is the Lord. Let him do what seems good to him.’”
What a figure, Eli… Complete failure as a father. And by the way, complete failure as a priest in restraining his sons and correcting his sons because his responsibility as a priest is to produce priests in his sons. He’s utterly failed to do that. He’s not producing priests. He’s producing God, robbing, adulterating, well, just horrifying, worthless men. And retrospectively that means that Eli is fairly worthless in terms of his role, but not completely worthless, not completely worthless. There’s still dignity in his role. For he is the priest of the Lord. There’s still dignity in his role and he still knows the Lord to the extent that he knows what he must say. It is the Lord. Let him do what seems good to him.
And then in verse 19, another fast forwarding that comes at this point, the chapter comes to a close. And by the way, Samuel’s going to disappear for a couple of chapters thereafter. “And Samuel grew and the Lord was with him am and let none of his words fall to the ground.”
Okay. That verse is what captivates me most of all. This is a massive chapter. It takes some time to figure it out. But what it is said here of Samuel, “The Lord let none of his words fall to the ground” You know, brothers and sisters, I’m horrified by the thought that an awful lot of my words have fallen to the ground.
An awful lot of my words have fallen into the ground. I have said stupid stuff. I have said frivolous stuff. I have spoken words in frustration and in anger. I mean I’m 65 years old in a couple of days, I got 65 years of stupid stuff. An awful lot of stuff has fallen to the ground. But you know what? When the Lord allows me to preach his word, none of it falls to the ground. So I think of preaching here and I can’t help but think of preaching. And what I want to say to preachers is, whatever you say that’s not in the service of the word of God is going to fall to the ground.
If you take sermons and you figure out how much of this is going to last, well, what’s going to last is the Scripture. You’re not capable of saying anything that’s going to last. It’s all going to fall to the ground. So preach the word in season and out of season because everything else is going to end up in the dust. I want to say this not just to preachers, but to all of us who hear preaching. How should we listen to a sermon? We should listen to a sermon in order to hear the word of the Lord, and then we should let everything else fall to the ground.
We should be listening for the word of the Lord. We should be listening for the voice of God. If you hear something else, let it fall to the ground. Eli here is contrasted with Samuel, but it’s not just that because Eli is a priest, but Samuel was here, made a prophet. He’s a lad, he’s a boy, he’s a youth. And we don’t know how much time is compressed into these final verses. “And Samuel grew, and the Lord was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground. And all Israel from Dan to Beersheba knew that Samuel was established as a prophet of the Lord. And the Lord appeared again at Shiloh, for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord.”
How do they know that? Evidently, it was his compelling voice of the Lord as he shared God’s word, and God spoke through him that established him as a prophet. But here’s the interesting thing. He’s the first. They didn’t say of Samuel here comes another one, he is number one. “All Israel from Dan to Beersheba knew that Samuel was established as a prophet of the Lord. And the Lord appeared again at Shiloh, for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord.”
Thus, Israel survives. Israel only survives because God’s people only survive because the word is not withheld. The Lord appears again at Shiloh. The Lord reveals himself again to his people. But you’ll notice there’s a mediatorial role here. There’s a prophetic role here because what we’re told actually in verse 21 is that “the Lord appeared again at Shiloh, for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord.” As we close, it’s another, at least to our ears, strange construction. That last phrase, well, evidently it’s absolutely necessary, “the Lord appeared again at Shiloh, for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord.”
You want a vision? Read the Bible. You want a word? Turn to the Scriptures. How does God speak? Even through his prophet by his word. Brothers and sisters, let’s live on it. Let’s pray: Our Father, we thank you for every word. We live on, every word of Scripture. Father, we pray that to your glory you will draw us into your word, you will train us to hear your word, you will train us to let every other word fall to the ground because your promises your word will never fall to the ground. Father, thank you for your servant, Samuel, from whom we learn so much. May we also grow in grace to your glory. Amen.
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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Numbers 20-21
October 10, 2024
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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Numbers 16-17
September 22, 2024
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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Numbers 15
September, 15, 2024
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This isn’t a recent idea. We know that with the emergence of the university and the medieval world, and that was entirely in the context of Christianity. It was really, entirely, in the context of the Christian Church. The modern university as we know it, the university model even in the medieval age, really emerged out of the cathedral schools.
Thus you had a clergy, faculty and you had students gathered together and they were accustomed to worship together and most importantly, as they began a new academic term, the custom arose that there would be a special service to commit teachers, students, learners alike, scholars for the service of the church and to the glory of God. Now, the interesting thing is that the word convocation, it’s applied in another context of course, but it’s also interesting that the vestiges appear just there are vestigial appearances, shadows of the past that show up in schools like Ivy League institutions that are no longer in the context of the church in so many ways, openly hostile to biblical Christianity, institutions that are so pervasively secularized that they don’t even know what they’re doing in an historical context. They gather together for an opening convocation.
Now, I just want to tell you that at this stage in life, I look at that and wonder what exactly you say there. You know, in a secular context where you have an educational institution that just prides itself on learning and scholarship. But of course, there’s also in today’s highly politicized age, where quite frankly most university presidents are just absolutely frightened of the possibility of a new outbreak of protests on campus in today’s cultural moment.
So, even as you look at all of these events, I just wonder when you, you’re the president of one of these secularized universities, what do you say? Like, “good luck”? Seriously, “behave, don’t get arrested”? I mean it’s worse than that. When you look at actually the messaging. I’m not going to get into it, but on sexual issues, gender issues, a lot of it’s just a reminder of the sheer toxicity of the prevailing worldview. I have to tell you, I don’t know what I would do in that job, which is a sure sign that I don’t belong there. I don’t want to be president of an institution — I don’t have a clue of what it would be like. I have no sense of the importance of what it would mean to be president of such an institution and more or less say, well, let’s start this and let’s hope it ends with fewer arrests.
That is not my responsibility this morning. My responsibility this morning is to look, and I want you to look around this room and see the great joy. This is a packed room seminary students and college students in this place. This is a sign of God’s favor. This is the kind of sight that should cause your blood to course just a little faster, your heart to beat just a little faster, your joy to rise. When you look and see the presence of so many young people in this room, young men and young women in this room is a refutation of the wisdom of the world. It is a sign of God’s promise. It is what this faculty and the board of trustees of this institution and all of us have been praying for, and this is why we have this faculty, this is why we have this campus, this is why we have this curriculum.
This is why we have all of this, and your presence here is just a reminder to us that God is showing favor to his church. Praise be to God. And I don’t look at you and say, “let’s hope this turns out well.” I turn to you and say, let’s live every moment. “Let’s take every class. Let’s write every paper. Let’s read every book to the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. Let’s build relationships here that are going to last for the rest of our lifetimes.” And I say to the young people in this room, this is really honestly where almost all the older people I know will say many of their deepest friendships were rooted in the college and in the seminary experience and in particular on a campus like this where the commonality is not just we end up in the same place, in the same class, on the same campus. It’s because there’s one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and we are here in a sense of unity. It goes far beyond anything a secular institution could understand. I don’t say that just to take shots at the secular world. I say that just to remind us of our stewardship and of the faithfulness of God and of the joy that should mark this occasion — and it does.
The secularization of higher education also means that education in that context now has no particular aims. Just in the last week, an article appeared indicating that as secular university and college administrators get together, one of the topics of conversation is the fact that even on their campuses, there’s no agreement upon aims. This is also pervasive in a very hot discussion with the new labor government in power in Great Britain where all these billions of dollars being invested in higher education and now you have a new party in power and they’re saying this should produce jobs. That’s what this system is for, is to produce people who are ready for jobs. And I’ll say that is not irrelevant. I think in a Genesis 1 context, that’s something we understand with an even greater urgency.
But, there are people who are saying, well, the universities were not established first of all for jobs, but for the creation of a certain kind of person. It was the development of certain virtues, certain practices and a certain body of knowledge, that would be a matter of stewardship and those voices are still there. It is very interesting in the British context, this is now being argued in parliament — and I would say from what I can tell, not very well, — but if you do desacralize education, you don’t have an agreement upon what to teach. You don’t even have an agreement upon why to teach. I say that just to be thankful for the fact that we don’t have to gather together just to talk about what to teach. We also don’t have to gather together as a faculty just to remind ourselves why we teach. Now, we do remind ourselves of these things, but we do so seeking the best we know to be in continuity with every faithful generation in the history of the Christian Church. You know, oddly enough, I think that university administrators,most places, college presidents most places, college faculty and trustees most places, want to say we need to update our mission statement constantly. Well, a mission statement, is not the most important thing. I know in some planning systems it is the most important thing. The most important thing for us is the mission assigned to this institution by the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention. We don’t make it up. It’s assigned to us. And as I look here in this room today, look at the faculty, I look at the students, you’re here because you’re drawn by that mission.
Alright? Even as we begin a new academic year, I want to turn to an old text. I invite you to look to the Gospel of Matthew chapter 13. We’re going to focus on verse 35, but I’m going to read with you also verse 34. The Word of the Lord. “All these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables. Indeed he said nothing to them without a parable. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet. I will open my mouth in parables. I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.” It is an amazing passage. This is a short text. My focus is really on verse 35. “This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet. I will open my mouth in parables. I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.”
Matthew 13 has been something of a textual obsession for me for decades. But, I just want to share with you that there are certain texts you kind of say to yourself, “I’m saving. I’m not ready to preach that I’m waiting for the right moment, for the right opportunity to preach that text.” I’ve given so much attention in my ministry to the opening of Matthew chapter 13, when Jesus tells the Parable of the Sower and his disciples, ask him, as you see in verse 10, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” It’s an honest question. We’re told that Jesus taught in parables, so much so that he never taught that he did not use a parable. The disciples after hearing the Parable of the Sower, they simply ask, “Why do you speak them in parables?” And I focused for decades on the answer Jesus gave in verse 11, “To you, it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given for to the one who has more will be given and he’ll have an abundance, but from the one who has not even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables because seeing they do not see and hearing, they do not hear nor do they understand indeed in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled. That says you’ll indeed hear but never understand and you’ll indeed see, but never perceive for this, people’s heart has grown dull and with their ears they can barely hear and their eyes they have closed unless they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them. But blessed are your eyes for they see and your ears for they hear. For truly I say to you, many prophets and righteous people long to see what you see and did not see it and to hear what you hear and did not hear it.”
Okay, so the disciples ask, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” Jesus answers. And let’s just be honest. That answer is not. It’s not something that’s so simple. We can hear it and just think, well, okay, I understand it. That settles the matter conclusively because it’s a complex answer. And as a matter of fact, Jesus says, “I speak to them in parables because seeing they don’t see and hearing, they don’t hear and they don’t turn with their hearts that I might heal them.” But, then he says to the disciples, “Blessed are your eyes for they see and your ears for they hear. And he goes on to say, for I tell you, many righteous men long to see what you see and did not see it and to hear what you hear and did not hear it.” But, Jesus also said to you, speaking to the disciples, “It has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.” So here you have divine sovereignty and human responsibility located bilaterally in the eyes and in the ears, but focused ultimately to the heart. And so, Jesus says to the disciples, “I speak to them in parables because they don’t get it.
I speak to them in parables. You’ve been given eyes to see and ears here I speak in parables because this fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah.”
It’s an amazing passage. I think it’s an invitational passage. It’s a judgment passage in terms of the penalty, the consequence of not seeing and not hearing, and it’s also the judgment of God upon human sinfulness. The reason hearts are dull, eyes are blind and ears are deaf, but it’s also about grace. The grace extended in this case to the disciples, “Blessed are your eyes for they see and your ears for they hear.” An interesting turn takes place right in the very break after those words, because prior to this break, Jesus is speaking parables and we have accounts of Jesus speaking parables and in a public ministry of public preaching to the crowds. But actually right here, right now, there is a shift in which the teaching ministry of Jesus and for the remainder of the gospel, for the most part, it is directed to the disciples, not to the crowd. So there’s even more going on here than we recognize. Jesus then explained the Parable of the Sower. Jesus then told the disciples, what’s identified here ass the Parable of the Weeds, and then the Mustard Seed and the Leaven. And then verse 34, Matthew writes, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the words of Jesus have closed in this passage we’re now hearing from Matthew all these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables. Indeed, he said nothing to them without a parable. And then this verse, “This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet. I will open my mouth in parables. I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.” What an amazing text.
Matthew here says, “Look, this is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. This is the fulfillment of Scripture.” Well, what Scripture? The answer is Psalm 78. You look at Psalm 78, this is a Psalm of Asaph. Let’s start at verse one and we’ll read verse two. “Give ear, O my people to my teaching. Incline your ears to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in a parable. I will utter dark sayings from of old things that we have heard and known that our fathers have told us.” Verse four, “We will not hide them from their children but told to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord and his might and the wonders that he has done.” It’s verse two there that is picked up by Matthew. It’s the fulfillment of that text. Now in a larger sense, it’s already the fulfillment of the prophet Isaiah, but this is one of the Psalms by Asaph, Psalm 50, Psalm 73 through 83 in one Chronicles 6, we have the assignment to men including Asaph of the role they are to play inside the temple. Asaph here articulates this strange, strange statement. “I will open my mouth in a parable. I will utter dark sayings from of old, things we’ve heard and known that our fathers have told us.” Dark sayings from of old.
Yeah, I’ve never heard a preacher open Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, turn to the words of Jesus and say, “Would you please get ready to hear dark sayings, yeah, dark stuff coming folks?” The dark sayings appears in this case to mean something that’s enigmatic. And as a matter of fact, the words used even in Old Testament and New Testament scholarship looking at Matthew 13 and then looking at Psalm 78. It’s like a riddle and of course, the word parable is what shows up in the English translations here. I will speak to them in parables. “I’ll open my mouth in parables” in Matthew. It’s, “I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.”
Okay, so let’s just get to the bottom line. The bottom line is that the presence of Jesus means that things that were dark are now light. Things that were not understood are now understood. Things that were confusing are now clarified. Things that were hidden are now revealed. This is the big story and in this sense is kind of the climax of Matthew chapter 13. “Why do you speak to them in parables?” It is because he is the fulfillment of the prophets. He is the presence of the Messiah. He is the Chosen One. He is the Son of the living God. He is the Alpha and the Omega. The beginning and the end. The things hidden are now disclosed. The things opaque are now clarified.
I love the way Matthew does this. This was in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled. It’s sort of like we didn’t really know what this text meant for centuries. Let’s just be honest, folks. We didn’t know what this text was really ultimately about. We didn’t know who this text was ultimately about until the Lord has come and when they hear Jesus speak, when they see what Jesus does, even when they ask Jesus a question like, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” It becomes the opportunity not only for Jesus to say, “Here’s why I speak to them in parables,” but to speak the great truths of the gospel and to make very clear his singular purpose, his saving mission and to make very clear that the light of the world has come. “So there was darkness before and guess what folks, this text was not just difficult to understand, it was not just incompletely understood. You’re not even going to understand what this is about until I am come and I am here.” But, of course, there’s this great divide. “Blessed are your eyes for they see and your ears for they hear.” But there are so many who will not see and they will not hear. So the key word here is “blessed.” Riddles, hard sayings, parables, things hidden since the foundation of the world now reveal the things concerning himself, the things concerning his kingdom, the content of the gospel, the New Covenant in his blood.
Okay, this passage captivates me and I felt convicted because I’ve preached through Matthew 13 many times in many different contexts. It’s just pivotal in so many of my understandings, but I kind of saved verses 34 and 35 for future consideration. How would I preach that? What would I do with that? I mean, it’s not like someone invites you to the First Baptist church somewhere and you have one shot and you show up and say, “Let’s talk about things hidden since the foundation of the world, dark sayings from of old.” Now actually that is what you should do, but you got to be careful how you tell ’em what you’re doing. It is one of those passages, at least in my thinking, in my understanding of Scripture, it’s one of these passages that just kind of clarifies everything, but it takes some time to think about what everything is.
We can’t unpack it all this morning, but I believe the Lord led me to this passage for this day because as I was thinking some time ago about preaching this service, it struck me, I really think there may be an opportunity to encourage all involved in teaching and learning at Boyce College in the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary by saying we are here because the dark sayings of old have now been revealed. Things hidden since the foundation of the world. We get to teach, we get to learn. The stewardship of that is just spectacular, it’s just breathtaking. Every single day, in every single class, because of the mission of this institution, because of the centrality of Scripture to the glory of God, we get to say, “You know for most of all history, this was hidden.” It’s now revealed. Dark sayings from of old, now sweet light. I think it’s important we recognize that Jesus spoke the parable above and then it’s Matthew explaining it, and in Matthew’s characteristic way, as he’s inspired by the Holy Spirit, and as is characteristic of his gospel, “These things happen in order that the Scriptures might be fulfilled.”
It is like for Matthew, it’s like all of a sudden he realizes that what was hidden in the past, that’s exactly what’s going on, it’s now clarified. And then even in the Old Testament, even in the Psalms, this is exactly what Israel was told in its worship. But here’s the spectacularly obvious thing that is only obvious when you see it, and I feel the same perplexity. When you look at this and you recognize this bit, Israel is being told in the Psalm that there are things it’s not going to understand because not all had been revealed, the Christ had not come. What a gift that we are on the other side, I mean in every single way. Indescribably, eternally, infinitely, we’re on the other side of this.
So what does it mean? Just thinking about an opening convocation service on the basis of the authority and the power of this text. First, I would argue it means our faithful stewardship of the truth revealed in and about the Christ. It’s about our faithful stewardship. That’s what we are committing ourselves to in this service, tachers and learners together, the faithful stewardship. And this means that what we’re about here is not just a Christian education, as if Christian’s a modifier. It’s a Christian education if Christian truth is the whole point. Christian faithfulness is the entire point. That’s our aim.
So 12 points, have no heart attack, I can only mention them. This would mean, first of all, an education grounded in theism. I mean this is foundational, in theism. We’re not even to the gospel yet, but an education grounded in theism. Because if I could draw a dividing line between all the educational institutions in the United States and beyond, I would not make it between private and public. I would not make it between tax-supported and non-tax-supported. I would make it, first and foremost, between those that are established in a clear affirmation of theism and those that are not. Okay, education grounded in theism.
Two, education saturated with biblical truth. And that’s our acknowledgment that we’re not smart enough to come up with a curriculum. We’re not smart enough to come up with content. And furthermore, there’s no need for this institution unless what we teach is saturated in biblical truth. That’s the bottom line because otherwise Southern Baptists can save their money, and use it for something else. The reason for what we do is to produce an education saturated in biblical truth.
Third, education rooted in revelation. Again, this is not stuff we have discovered. It’s not stuff we have discerned. It is the revelation of God. Fourth, this education is directed to the church. So we belong to somebody. This board of trustees is elected by the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention. We are a church institution. It’s not just that we look like it. We better show up as a church-directed institution, accountable to the church and joining the church, serving the church, local congregations with great joy and producing graduates who are the future leaders of those churches, preachers of those churches, and deployed Christians through those churches in the world.
Fifth, education made joyful in the gospel. Joyful. I mean, I just want to say something and I mean this as heartfelt as I can say it, when I look at the passages we’ve shared, look at Matthew, look at the Psalm. I mean brothers and sisters, aren’t we glad we’re under the new covenant? Aren’t we glad we are hearing Matthew? Hearing Jesus? It’s a joyful gospel. We don’t deserve it. It’s unmerited favor, but by God’s grace, I’m so thankful we’re not trying in the dark to figure out a riddle. We’re joyful in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Six, it’s an education to serve the church. That is to say it’s not any good if this doesn’t produce faithful churches and if we’re not producing people who go into those churches and make a difference in the church and then in the ministry of the church in the world.
Seventh, it’s an education for the flourishing of human society. I think that’s the one thing that a lot of secular institutions can seize upon. They can say, “We’re here for our community.” Well, we’re here in a sense for our community and in this larger sense, our community is the world. We are committed to human flourishing. That’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited about Boyce College and the graduates we send out into the world and the difference they make in the world, in the community. That just excites me tremendously. And I look at the students, the seminary students, and the college students and I think there’s just something absolutely glorious here. You want to see ministry and outreach to the church and to the world. Just look here. Just look in this room. And we also know that the flourishing of human society is only going to come in accordance with the plan and purpose of God. Eighth, education for the cause of the Great Commission. What we’re doing here is not faithful until it is translated in the gospel being taken to the nations. Jesus himself makes that clear even in the same gospel.
Education that is unapologetically moral. There you go. Just imagine saying that, I’m not going to name a school. But just look, in the last academic year at how presidents of many institutions were toppled, because they couldn’t say this. They couldn’t say the truth. They were asked by congressional authorities in congressional hearings. They were asked, “Is this wrong?” Antisemitism being the key issue, “Is that wrong?” And they couldn’t say “Yes, it’s wrong.” They couldn’t say “Yes, it’s happening. And when it happens, it’s wrong.” They’re just morally paralyzed. Well, folks, we have no reason to be morally paralyzed. We have no excuse for being morally paralyzed. And not only that, we’re the people who know that it’s only by God’s grace that this is true, but it is by God’s grace that it is true. It’s unapologetically moral.
Education that is properly intellectual. Standards here are high. You want them high. Two o’clock in the morning before an exam. You may not be sure you want them that high. You do. Start earlier. We serve the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. What we do here had better be not only as excellent as the world but more excellent than what the world offers.
Education aimed at eternity. This is about as unsecular as you can possibly be because, no, I mean this wouldn’t even make sense in a secular frame. Can we just acknowledge this? If a secular institutional president got up and said “You know, all of this is going to be measured in eternity.” They’d just consider him hopelessly romantic in his literary illusions. We actually believe it’s true. We actually believe that what’s happening in hearts and minds here is preparation not just for usefulness in the world, but for eternity to the glory of God. That does change the frame.
Finally, education for the glory of God. Because ultimately that is the sole reason for the existence of anything. As God created the cosmos and we are the creatures. Imago Dei who alone know this. We aim for the glory of God.
Okay, that was point one. Again, worry not, point two. This reminds us of our common calling in the task of learning and teaching together. Now, learning and teaching, those are different verbs and learners and teachers, students and teachers have different assignments. But I want to suggest to you that things are not as clear in truth as they are on a chart. I want to tell you one of the greatest things I can say about this faculty, most cherished colleagues I could imagine in this great task. Every single one of them is more a learner than a teacher. If I just let the cat out of the bag, they are learners their entire lifetime. And I can tell you that someone who’s been teaching a class for a number of years, they fully recognize, they know more than when they began teaching. Their notes, class notes, get thicker and thicker and thicker and thicker. The questions they ask just get keener and deeper and more urgent. I say that as an encouragement to students. We’re all students, all of us, we’re all being taught of God, we’re all learners, all of us. Some of us have learned to a certain degree where that’s translated into the calling also to teach. And that’s glorious because those are the teachers we’re looking for. Those are the teachers that we elect to this faculty. Those are the teachers who sign the abstract of principles and that’s glorious.
But, I’ve got to tell you something else even as all the teachers are learners, I want to say to students, looking you in the eye, learners become teachers earlier than you think, like real soon. And by that I mean you’re learning together, you’re actually teaching each other. And in the mystery of things you just may not even understand, classrooms teach teachers how to teach.
Isn’t this great? Who could come up with this? James Petigru Boyce? No, not that smart. Peter? Paul? James? No, not that smart. This is God’s plan and purpose. It goes all the way back into the experience of Israel’s father’s teaching sons. And again, that comes up in the very passage. We don’t have time to see it, it’s there.
Third, our joy is in the light of Christ, the light of the world, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. The King of kings and Lord of lords, savior, master, Lord and Christ. Our privilege is to turn together, to learn dark sayings from of old things hidden from the foundation of the world. Isn’t that something? Isn’t that breathtaking? Don’t you want to get to it? Every day, every class is a joyful confrontation with what has been hidden from the foundation of the world now revealed.
These revealed things now we get to learn, we get to see them, to hear them, to learn them, to teach them, to live them, to pass them onto our children, to sing them in hymns, to exalt on them, to take these truths to the nations, to preach these things in our churches, to live these things out in every dimension of our lives. So let’s get to it. Let’s get to it with joy. Let’s get to it. To the glory of God, let’s pray.
Father, we pray that you use this time and you’ll use these words in such a way as to encourage your church unto faithfulness, starting here and now we pray in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Numbers 13-14
August, 18, 2024
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National Conservative Conference
July 9, 2024
It is an honor to be here at NatCon 2024, and we all know that we are meeting at an urgent moment and we can also see that the urgency has been made clear by some events just even over the last couple of years that have been very sobering. When last I had the opportunity to address this movement in late 2022, I spoke on the impossibility of a secular state. What I want to speak about today is the impotence of a secular conservatism. I don’t mean thereby to divide the room, but rather to speak honestly about where I think we are and what I think we should be thinking. I do speak as a Christian. I do speak as a theologian. I speak with a great deal of common concern and common cause among all of us here.
I appreciate the invitation to address this conference, but I also want to acknowledge a bomb on our moral landscape that reshapes our consideration, and that is the 2022 Dobbs decision and its aftermath. These developments force a new awareness on us.
I have been a part of the pro-life movement my entire adult life. I’ve had the privilege of being in rooms where major decisions have been made, strategies have been laid, and where facts and analytics have been considered. I can tell you that there are those now, and were those in the past, who were quite convinced that this is an argument we were winning. Many had convinced themselves that we were winning the argument for life, even if we were not winning that argument everywhere evenly. But the pro-life movement shared the confidence that if indeed all those years of work in conservative argument, and conservative organizing, and what became a conservative legal recovery, a constitutional recovery – if all that led to a reversal of Roe v. Wade, we would be ready for it and we would discover a pent-up, pro-life conviction on the part of the American people, certainly in key states painted red, where we would see pro-life conviction translated into pro-life legislation.
And of course, what we’ve seen is exactly the opposite. First in Kansas, but then also in my own Kentucky, suddenly the bomb went off, announcing to us that whatever commitment there was to the pro-life cause—commitment to the sanctity of human life, to the life of the unborn— was much less substantial than we had thought. It was much less convictional than we had thought. It was, most fundamentally, far less ontological than we had thought. And that leads me to the consideration for today. To be conservative is to hold allegiance to certain fixed truths and principles.
Now, I’m old enough to remember in my own adult lifetime the argument that conservative basically means holding to a conservative temperament and a conservative commitment to timeless tradition. But the truth I want to underline today is that the tradition without a fundamental commitment to truth – and that truth being fundamentally transcendent and theological – will soon evaporate.
I would take that argument further and insist that conservatism requires fixed religious truths as well as traditions. I would underline the fact that these fixed religious truths are grounded in specific acts of divine revelation, on which we are entirely dependent.
There are two points of urgency I want to make. Number one, conservatism is not just another form of liberalism, and then secondly, conservatism is not just liberalism or progressivism arriving later on the schedule with greater respect for the costs and challenges of what is defined as inevitable social and moral progress. Neither of these positions is genuinely conservative.
I believe the great challenge that now confronts conservatives, and I mean to include conservative Christians here, as well of course, all conservatives writ large in the United States, is the challenge of first things and fundamental truths. I do speak with a particular appeal to religious conservatives and American evangelicals. The great challenge is understanding that any worldview that does not ground itself in divine revelation, in the moral character of the self-existent, omnipotent, omniscient God – any conservative tradition that is not grounded in a prior commitment to ontology is going to evaporate. The only question is, will that evaporation happen quickly or more slowly?
One of the things we’ve witnessed in recent weeks, as a matter of fact, just in recent days, is the collapse of the Conservative Party in Great Britain. I follow that party and that Anglo-American tradition very closely, and the argument I made in an article published immediately after the election is that we should not be surprised that the so-called Conservatives lost, because the Conservative party had abandoned conservatism long ago. I would point to an incident that had taken place now more than a decade ago, when David Cameron, then the British Prime Minister and head of the Conservative Party, just basically came out and demanded that the party abandon what had been a very longstanding commitment to social conservatism. Indeed, he called for the party, and thus the government, to abandon the definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. In his memorable words: “I don’t do this despite the fact I’m a conservative. I do this because I am a conservative.”
At that point, it was just like the entire ontological structure of Creation Order was just denied by a party that still dared to call itself conservative. I don’t believe a party that does such a thing deserves a conservative reputation, much less conservative affirmation. This act, taken so brazenly, was a repudiation of Creation Order and the order that had made his civilization possible.
I’m not denying the importance of social traditions, morals, political principles, constitutional norms, and much more shared among conservatives and shared as a glad stewardship. I want to emphasize anew how important that stewardship is, but I do want to argue that if it all is a matter of constant negotiation and a process of accommodation to changing circumstances, we are losing and are destined to lose. There is no lasting conservatism that is not self-consciously grounded in revealed truth and in ontology. To be conservative is to affirm what is real. If we lose this conviction, we lose everything.
Now, when you consider the challenges we face at this moment, it’s impossible to say the challenge is not ontological. We’re living in a society that increasingly believes a boy can be a girl and a girl can be a boy. Just in terms of fundamental ontology, if we don’t understand anything else, we would just understand that it has been assumed rightly throughout virtually all human history that anatomy and ontology are definitive, and determinative, and, frankly, are not impositions but gifts.
But we now live in a time in which the progressive idea of personal autonomy has reached the point that many in our society (including a disproportionate number among the cultural elites) believe human beings to be autonomous from ontology. I think this cultural crisis underlines the fact that when you have a conservative movement that is not itself committed to ontology, everything collapses into a matter of endless negotiation. The ontological grounding of the American order was made very clear in the Declaration of Independence and in other founding documents. When the founders spoke of nature and nature’s God, when they claimed we are ‘endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights,’ that’s a language that is not just decorative, it is not just illustrative, but makes a truth claim. The language hearkens back to what in the Lutheran tradition is explicitly referred to as Creation Order, and I’m glad to say behind that the affirmation of what might rightly be called a Natural Law. The point is it is a created order. It is a revealed order, and it is an order. Behind that order is the God of the Bible, the God of Genesis. Behind Creation Order is the Creator. Behind the Natural Law is the supernatural Lawgiver.
Now, one of the interesting things we should note is that all I have stated there would have been noncontroversial at the time of the American founding. For one thing, the set of intellectual circumstances at the time was such that, prior to Darwin, there was really no other explanation for the existence of the world. The only explanation for creation was the prior existence of the Creator. Western civilization was the inheritance of Christendom, with a very clear biblical worldview, and there really was no alternative cosmology. At least not until Darwin. This is where Richard Dawkins’s interesting statement comes to mind – that it was impossible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist until Darwin. The dominant worldview of the age was not merely supernatural, not merely Christian, but explicitly Protestant. Historians even refer to the existence in North America of a Protestant Empire.
And we do see this great break in modernity with the arrival of a modern secular metaphysic and what was claimed to be a modern secular ontology, but it’s an empty ontology that comes with absolutely nothing determinative. What does it mean to affirm rights endowed by our Creator, when the Creator is denied? Our entire system of rights and reality is based in a Christian ontology and morality, which is based upon Jewish antecedents in both general and special revelation.
The secular experiment that is now underway, and has been underway for some time, is now seen in retrospect as that which is actually based upon nothing at all, nothing ontological, nothing in terms of reality, no particular metaphysic. You see this reference now in open arguments made among the Left. The ideological and political Left no longer shares any objective moral order. It seeks to impose a new morality (and view of reality) that explicitly rejects the ontology and the ontological commitments of the Christian tradition. But the Left brings to the table absolutely no ontological commitments of its own. It’s all just politics and power. It’s all they can see.
A conservatism that plays the same game and shares the same assumptions is no genuine conservatism. It just a language game or a way of playing for time.
You look at American history, at the Protestant empire, the longstanding Christian consensus, and then we understand the rise of conservatism, which came as a response to the early cleavages in our society and in particular to the Wilsonian period and beyond in the 20th century. Then, suddenly, there was this enormous appreciation among many conservative Americans for the work of someone like Edmund Burke, but it was a half-hearted appropriation of Burke. The appropriated right was Burke’s understanding of the importance of the tradition and the binding authority of tradition on society. The part many left behind was also essential to Burke. And that is the existence of an ontological order behind that tradition, truth behind that tradition. Ontology behind the tradition.
You look in the United States, and even much of what’s been called conservative turns out to be either a conservatism which is another form of liberalism, or conservatism that is nothing but an attempt at a delayed fuse. You look at back at previous Republican administrations and you understand that we can see that that’s exactly the strategy that was undertaken for so long. The post-Dobbs position now makes that very clear, even in conversations within the Republican Party. Behind all of this is also the experience of the Reagan Revolution, and behind that William F. Buckley, National Review, and fusionism.
Let me be clear: I’m not denying that Christian conservatives can have secular allies. I’m not denying that we can share vast areas of common agreement and common concern, but I am saying that at the end of the day, without an ontological commitment which is grounded in theological conviction, I don’t believe there’s any lasting conservatism to be found. Actually, I am certain that without ontological commitments (grounded in theism), conservatism is just an endless negotiation with progressivism and its progeny.
Conservatism has to be grounded in a commitment to truth. The fight to conserve reality is going to be very costly. If we are not contending for revealed truth, if our position and argument is just another theory to be placed alongside competing theories, an argument to be placed alongside other arguments – if that’s all there is to it, we are doomed.
That is not what I believe is at the very core of our argument and at the core of our convictions. An impotent conservatism that is grounded in no ontology cannot sustain itself, cannot perpetuate itself. It cannot accomplish its stated aims. It cannot defend its most basic principles and postulates. A secular worldview, consistently held, denies what we believe to be absolutely necessary and foundational.
Now, if you want to see evidence of what I mean, just look at the collapse of Protestant liberalism. Last year marked the hundredth anniversary of J. Gresham Machen’s famous book Christianity and Liberalism, in which he rightly argued that the conflict between the orthodox and the liberals in the churches was not a conflict among Christians, but a conflict between adherents of two different religions – the Christians versus the liberals. He was absolutely right, and the tragedy of liberal Protestantism is that it has become so endlessly accommodationist that it is merely a cartoon of the age. That is what accommodation produces. That is what denying ontology produces.
What we see in the larger society is the collapse of conviction, the replacement of Christianity with a new religion. That’s why we shouldn’t be surprised by the rise of Marxism in all its different forms, such as critical theory. It is a reminder to us that when Adolf Von Harnack, the paradigmatic German liberal, argued that modern Christians must learn to separate the kernel and the husk of Christianity, keeping the kernel and throwing the husk away. You keep the kernel, which is religious experience, and you get rid of the husk, which is the claims of divine revelation. What you end up with is not theological liberation but European decadence. A secular conservatism cannot meet the challenge of the day, and an accommodationist Christianity will do no better. A flimsy theism will disappear in the midst of modernity. Most has disappeared already.
In Robert Kagan’s latest book, he makes an amazingly honest argument: “Liberalism is not inherently about progress, therefore, except the progress that comes from the expanding recognition of people’s rights. It has no teleology, no final resting point toward which it aims.” What an amazing statement. He admits the bare fact that there is no end game to liberalism. It is an endlessly open game with no teleology at all. There is no ultimate goal to the unfolding of inevitable Hegelian progress. The revolution never ends. We have been warned.
My response is simple. The only answer to that argument cannot be anything short of ontological in force, and that ontology has to be grounded in theism.
Cardinal Manning, perhaps an unusual person for an evangelical Protestant Christian to cite, said something profoundly true and nearly irreducible in terms of words. He said famously, “All human conflict is ultimately theological.” I want to end by saying this is exactly right. The cardinal nailed it. All human conflict is ultimately theological. Many will claim there is no theology here, nothing remotely theological. Don’t believe your eyes.
But the reality is all human conflict is ultimately theological. It is good to know what the alternatives are. It is good to know the challenge we face. It is good to speak honestly.
We face the most insidious attacks upon human dignity and the sanctity of life, the goodness of marriage and family, the structures of human society, even the reality of good and evil. We live amidst a great rebellion against transcendent reality, the good, the beautiful, and the true. Our answer to that cannot be less than political. Our answer to that cannot be less than cultural. It cannot be less than strategic. And I also want to say it cannot be less than theological, and it is good and necessary that we acknowledge this truth
I speak as a Christian theologian. I do not want to confuse Christian theology with some vague idea of nationalism or conservatism. Vague ideas will not hold. I want to say that I do not believe this nation and all that it represents can survive abandoning its theological roots. We will recover those roots and commitments or lose everything.
May God Bless America.
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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Numbers 11
June, 16, 2024
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I have never known anything other than being a Southern Baptist, and to be honest, that means being a very happy Southern Baptist, happy that there is a Southern Baptist Convention, happy that I was raised from the time I was in cradle role within the context of the Southern Baptist Convention at its churches. And now for more than 30 years, I’ve had the privilege of serving as president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary here in Louisville.
From time to time, it’s pretty clear that an impending Southern Baptist Convention meeting comes with a little more importance and urgency than is sometimes the norm, and history tends to turn on such years as Southern Baptists meet together. Now, I want to start out by telling you I have a lot of confidence in Southern Baptists. I have so much confidence in Southern Baptists, that I am not going to let any one annual meeting determine what I believe to be the health or faithfulness of the SBC. I think in humility, we are all working out some things over time, but it’s that very context that leads me to want to at least share a word of encouragement, and I hope exhortation to the Southern Baptist Convention, as we get ready to meet in Indianapolis.
I think we do recognize that this year’s a bit different. There are so many issues on the table, and honestly many of them are very important, important not only to doing the business of the Convention within a two or three day period, but quite honestly setting the direction of the Southern Baptist Convention as we look to the future. I also have to speak from personal experience having lived through so much of the development of the SBC, the history of the SBC. I came to adulthood with the Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention raising so many issues of urgent concern, and it was clear to me that those were legitimate and urgent issues of concern. And now we’re at a very interesting point and I just want to speak directly to a couple of things that I think are particularly pressing as we look to the SBC meeting in Indianapolis.
One of them is that we face an escapable theological responsibility.
There are times when the SBC simply has to stand up and say, this is what we believe. This defines the boundaries of our cooperation. This is central and very important to our identity as Southern Baptists. The SBC when it was founded in 1845 was in a very different world in many ways, but I’m very thankful for the founding wisdom at that time of understanding that one of the key issues is churches that are in friendly cooperation with the Southern Baptist Convention. And I think we all know that in an increasingly secular society, all kinds of pressures are going to continue to come up against us, which means that Southern Baptists are going to have to be more clear about doctrine and about what we believe the Bible clearly teaches than was the case in the past. We’re having to say things out loud that previous generations of Southern Baptist didn’t even have to say.
One of the things we have to say is that the office of pastor is limited to men, as qualified by Scripture. There’s an entire pattern of biblical complementarianism, which is very important here. And we understand that Southern Baptists, I believe, still are quite aware and quite convictional about the fact that the Office of Pastor’s restricted to men. Now, here’s where confusion among us becomes very dangerous and very subversive to our ability to cooperate. That’s why I believe that it’s very important that we recognize, that our confession of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message comes with very clear assertions and it comes with consequences. Inevitably, we are going to have to define many of these issues by how much we really are in friendly cooperation with one another. Now, there are those who say this is just one of those issues that has arisen.
It’s not central and essential. Let me just say that the Southern Baptist Convention has been struggling with this issue and seeking to articulate this conviction for 40 years. This is not a suddenly developing issue. What has arisen is the fact that some churches are, quite honestly, straightforwardly telling us that they are basically out of sync with the Southern Baptist Convention on the issue of women preaching and women holding a pastoral office. And this is where honestly, I think the only way for the Southern Baptist Convention to deal with this is to do so by some mechanisms such as the bylaw amendment that was adopted last year and approved and now comes before messengers again. I really believe that this bylaw is very important. I believe that it isn’t developing anything new for the SBC in terms of conviction, but it’s basically just applying the convictions we’ve been saying for decades frame the reality of our cooperation.
I also want to say that even as I support the amendment and hope to see it passed again and overwhelmingly as a statement of common conviction, I want to point back to the convention just last year, 2023 in New Orleans when it came to dealing with this question with some specific churches, the SBC did so with clarity and with overwhelming consensus. That didn’t mean it was easy, but it did mean that Southern Baptists recognized it was important. I don’t want to set up the Southern Baptist Convention to have to do this year after year after year as if we don’t know where we stand on this issue. Southern Baptists really do believe in the autonomy of the local church. We can’t force any church to be a part of the Southern Baptist Convention, but the SBC also has the responsibility to define what are the boundaries, what is the basis, the foundation for the cooperation that brings us together for common work. And so the phrase, the autonomy of the local church is precious to us because a church that disagrees with us is free to go associate with churches with whom they’re in full agreement. The Southern Baptist Convention also has the equal right, and the responsibility to set the parameters of our own cooperation. Now, let’s be clear. No one said that’s going to be easy. Frankly, we don’t even know what issues we might face in a matter of just a few short years, but I do know this: given shape of the culture, given the secularizing pressures of the age, I don’t think anyone thinks that list is going to get shorter. I think in honesty, we all recognize it’s going to get longer. Southern Baptists just want to make sure we get the list right.
I also want to say that I think it’s really important we recognize that this is an issue of biblical obedience. This is not just a question of biblical interpretation and the moment we begin defining some issues as just matters of biblical interpretation, the question becomes, well, which are those? Obviously the liberal Protestant denominations put basically everything in that category. I think Southern Baptists know better than that.
Let’s be honest. There are hard things Southern Baptists sometimes have to face, but here’s the great good news. Think of how many Southern Baptist churches have been so faithful, so generous, so cooperative for so long. I want to make sure that continues in the future and I want to make sure our churches are excited about being a part of the work that binds us together: sends missionaries to the end of the world, trains, preachers to stand in the pulpit and has Southern Baptists on the front lines where it matters. I’m excited about that. I want to see that continue.
I’m looking forward to being with you in Indianapolis. I really do trust Southern Baptist when we get together to do the right thing sometimes, eventually. I am speaking to this today because I want to encourage Southern Baptist to do what I believe is the right thing, which is to arrive and uphold our convictions clearly, to send a very certain sound. To make very clear, not only for now, but for the future of the Southern Baptist Convention, we really are settled on this issue and we need to move on because I guarantee you there are other pressing challenges yet to come. I hope and pray Southern Baptist will be up for those as well. In the meantime, let’s pray together for the Southern Baptist Convention. Let’s talk to one another honestly and kindly about these matters and let’s show up with conviction in Indianapolis. I’ll see you there.
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Ask Anything Tour
Church on the Mill
Spartanburg, South Carolina
May 19, 2024
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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Numbers 9-10
May, 12, 2024
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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Numbers 4
March, 10, 2023
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Colin Smothers:
Good evening and welcome to Kenwood Baptist Church. My name is Collin Smothers and I am the director of the Kenwood Institute, which is sponsoring tonight’s event. The Kenwood Institute is a ministry of Kenwood Baptist Church and it exists to strengthen Christ’s church by promoting and defending the whole counsel of God’s word in the Baptist tradition. You can learn more at kenwoodinstitute.org. And tonight we have the honor and great privilege of hearing from Dr. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and I am joined by Denny Burk, who is a pastor here at Kenwood and serves on the board of the Kenwood Institute. So, thank you so much for both of you being here. And our goal tonight is to discuss the state of the Southern Baptist Convention, specifically, to hear from one of the foremost Southern Baptist statesmen on a variety of issues that are facing Southern Baptists as we approach our annual meeting in June. We’ve got a lot to discuss tonight, so without any further ado, Denny is going to kick us off with the first question.
Denny Burk:
Absolutely, and I’m going to go ahead and open us in a word of prayer. Father, thank you so much for your goodness to us through Christ. I do pray that you’d bless our time together and that you would help us to honor you in the way that we think about your work in this world. Father, we want to see your name made great. And Lord we pray that your name would be made great through the work of the Southern Baptist Convention, of which we are a part. We are thankful for what you’ve done. We pray that you would do more with us. So Lord, bless this time as we talk and we ask all this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Alright, we’re going to jump right into the questions, and at last year’s convention in New Orleans, the messengers overwhelmingly approved an amendment to the SBC constitution, and the amendment says this: it says, “The Convention will only deem a church to be in friendly cooperation with the Convention” which, and here’s the amendment part, which “Affirms, appoints, or employs only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture.” In order for this language to become a part of the SBC constitution [it] has to be voted on a second time in Indianapolis at the upcoming annual meeting. And what I wanted you to do was just tell us where are you on this amendment and why?
Albert Mohler:
Well, I’m for the amendment. I see it not only as something that we need to pass, but we need to just have it as a part of our bylaws in such a way that it settles a question. Because basically the bylaws are the means by which cooperatively we agree to work together, and in particular, to seek messengers at the convention is this key question. And so, if this amendment were to fail, I don’t think the issue would go away at all. I think it would continue and then every single year there will be some call to take action on this, to clarify this, and I don’t see that as healthy for the convention. I think this is where the convention is. I think this is the logic of complementarianism. I think this is the actual logic of our cooperation, especially since the conservative resurgence, because this is such a crucial issue.
And so, for instance, you look at the press coverage after the, say, the adoption of the 2000 BF&M, nobody’s confused about this! You know, the confusion is–I’m not going to put blame on this–I’m simply going to say the confusion is fairly recent, and it is somewhat abstract. The concrete reality is Southern Baptists believe that the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture. And so, once you get past the, say, senior pastor or the preaching elder, how does that apply? Well, the fact is if you want to argue about this at every Southern Baptist convention, ad infinitum, leave that an open question because it is not going to help Southern Baptists. I think this is where the vast majority of Southern Baptists are, and one of the reasons you adopt a bylaw is so that you don’t have to deal with this every year. And if it were convictionally out of step with Southern Baptist, I would say, well, that would be an overreaction. I think this is where Southern Baptists are, the vast majority, and I don’t think those same Southern Baptists want to have to deal with this issue every single year as if it’s an open question.
Denny Burk:
One of the reasons that we know it’s not an open question is because there’s a history to this. This isn’t the first time that we’ve had denomination-wide controversies over the role of women in ministry and who is qualified for pastor. Could you put this into context for us? Especially thinking about the last forty, fifty years since the conservative resurgence, what role has this played in Southern Baptist life? Especially, what I want you to communicate to listeners is that some people are just tuning in now here for the last nine, ten years and they don’t have a context for this.
Albert Mohler:
So, let me try to explain the context, and you may need to backfill a little bit here. But the context is this: If you go back to the sixties and seventies, that’s when in Southern Baptist life all of a sudden you have feminist arguments for women to serve as pastors. And theologically it’s not misidentified as egalitarianism. And so, it’s true that a lot of people hadn’t thought this through comprehensively, but the fact is, it was a movement, and when I arrived at Southern Seminary as a student, it was a major theme of the institution.
Denny Burk:
What year was that?
Albert Mohler:
1980, so you can do the math. So forty-four years ago, this was a major banner theme of Southern Seminary and of the kind of left wing of the Southern Baptist Convention. And there were others who weren’t ready to go there, which is by the way, still by and large true of main line Protestantism. The complaint of the women is, who are ordained, is that far too many churches in those liberal denominations aren’t calling women as senior pastors. But you look at that and you say, okay, so back in the eighties in particular, the issue was should a woman preach? And so, Southern Baptist had to think this through in the midst of other issues, especially during the eighties and the nineties. And by the time you get to the revision of the Baptist Faith and Message in the year 2000, everybody knows this is one of the issues that has to be addressed in the Baptist Faith and Message that wasn’t in 1963. Well why wasn’t it in 1963? It wasn’t a failure of nerve, it was the absence of necessity; no one would’ve understood what you’re talking about. But by 2000 it’s overwhelmingly adopted, and not only that, it’s not controversial inside the SBC. It was controversial in the press and controversial among those who were leaving or had left the SBC. But in the SBC, there’s a sense of relief. We said what we needed to say, now we’ve got the confession that clearly addresses this. And by the way, it wasn’t the only issue. Some of the LGBTQ issues and other things were there. Most importantly in 2000, the effort was to remove a neo-orthodox statement in the doctrine of Scripture. So again, that was all a part of it, but there’s a sense of relief–“ok, now we have that issue settled”–and yet it comes up again.
Now there is something new in all of this, and the new in all of this is not just kind of, to quote Calvin, “The transmogrification of the issue.” And I’m not talking about John Calvin, but Calvin as in Calvin and Hobbes. If you don’t understand that, you’re just illiterate; I can’t help you. But–he had a little box called the–and so the issue does transmogrify over time. And so, arguments are being made–you know, egalitarians and complementarians have had in another twenty something years to argue with one another–so, that at times has been clarifying, but the big development is that especially in some of the more pragmatically minded of our churches, there has been a somewhat intentionally blurred line when it comes, I think, to the teaching office. And so it’s not just the word pastor, but that’s the most important thing. And that’s the reason why I think the law amendment, just because that’s what we come to call it, I think it’s important because it immediately clarifies; it’s like Occam’s razor. Ok, we don’t have to deal with that. We understand that that expresses the conviction of the SBC and we will move on together.
Denny Burk:
You were on the committee in 2000 that pinned the Baptist Faith and Message. Was it unclear in 2000 what “pastor” meant?
Albert Mohler:
No, and this is a little bit of a frustration for me, in that I did not want just to use the word pastor in 2000. I think it’s fair to say that, I don’t think I’m violating any confidence. I liked the more comprehensive New Hampshire Confession of Faith language, but there were some, including the chairman of the committee, Dr. Adrian Rogers, who–absolutely dear friend, dear friend to me, and so I say this only the deepest respect–he didn’t like the word elder and because he associated it with the Bible church and that form of…
Colin Smothers:
Something not Southern Baptist…
Albert Mohler:
Well, and frankly, not something that most southern Baptists would see as an elder either.
Colin Smothers:
On this note though, for tonight, I was doing some research, and the 1925 BF&M uses that term. I don’t think many times…
Albert Mohler:
It’s because of the New Hampshire Confession tradition.
Colin Smothers:
Right, but it says that its scriptural officers are bishops, a word that Southern Baptist certainly would not today use, elders… bishop or elder…
Albert Mohler:
It’s safer as a Baptist to use episkopoi, just use the Greek.
Colin Smothers:
That’s right. And then it was 1963 that substituted the word pastor for bishop or elder. And then which the 2000…
Albert Mohler:
And the argument for that is usage–that’s what’s on the sign out front–that’s what you call… But the idea that you would have the word pastor applied to a woman in the Southern Baptist Convention, to the vast majority of Southern Baptist, I don’t think has ever made sense. And I would go all the way back to the seventies and eighties and say even then, I don’t think to the vast majority of Southern Baptist that made Biblical sense.
Colin Smothers:
Well, to follow up on that–so, bringing this vote that’s before us in June in Indianapolis–last year in New Orleans, we did vote out Saddleback and Fern Creek. And so some critics of the law amendment are basically saying, “Why do we need this? Look, our constitution and our confession, they’re working as they’re meant to.” So what’s your response to that?
Albert Mohler:
I would say the argument that the constitution and bylaws are working as they’re meant to was exactly right. The question is going forward, do we want to have to consider every one of these things on a case-by-case basis? Because, I think the answer to that has to be no. I don’t think any honest person says, I want us to come back to the SBC next year with six of these questions. I just don’t think Southern Baptists want that. I think without this amendment, that’s exactly what you’re going to have.
Colin Smothers:
Well, and if I’m correct, it was actually the credentials committee that had referred Saddleback, that came to the convention the year before and said, “We don’t know what a pastor is, we’re going to, we’re asking for a study committee,” which was overwhelmingly voted down at the floor of the convention,
Albert Mohler:
And I’m the one who made the main argument against it.
Colin Smothers:
I’m thankful for that.
Albert Mohler:
Well, would’ve done it again this year if I could have gotten a microphone. But I understand this is not ad hominem at all because I respect them all and love them all, but I think it’s just not accurate. I won’t say not honest, that’s a little too much. It’s not accurate to say that, “We don’t know who a pastor is.” Ok, I think we really know who a pastor is. And by the way, if we don’t know who a pastor is, that’s a great opportunity for some education on the use of the word pastor. So, I think again, the SBC has ways of dealing with things that do not set up this bylaw to be something you hit people over the head with, but rather, at least in part, certainly it’s a boundary policy, but it’s also a teaching statement. And so if an issue is ask about a church, there’s the opportunity for the convention to get clarification from that church and for the church to get clarification from the convention. And hopefully that would come out in a healthy way. I realize it will not every time, that’s what happened in New Orleans.
Denny Burk:
In that vein, some critics of the amendment have said, if this is passed, what’s going to happen is people are going to weaponize this and they’re just going to use this to go after churches and bully churches that are otherwise complimentarian. But maybe they’re a little mixed up in their terminology. And then that’s kind of a line of argument here. How would you respond to that?
Albert Mohler:
I do not believe that the Southern Baptist Convention as a body, and I’ve been going to that convention now for, I’ll just say between 40 and 50 years. But you look at that and you recognize, I don’t think Southern Baptists want nor would tolerate that kind of agenda on the floor of the SBC. I just think I know Southern Baptist as well enough to know Southern Baptists aren’t going to come if that’s what the annual meeting turns into, that’s not what they come for. So that’s one of the reasons I support the amendment as similar things such as the BF and M back in 2000. Let’s clarify what we believe. This is a very baptist act. This is voluntary Baptist associationalism. Let’s make clear the basis of that associationalism. And by the way, we’re going to have to clarify all kinds of things in the future.
We don’t have names for today, but let’s just get used to that. Let’s do it biblically. Let’s do it charitably. Let’s do it legislatively in the right way. But I just don’t think it’s going to be weaponized now. And by the way, you don’t have to have the law amendment, so to speak, for it to be weaponized. If someone wants to weaponize it, all you have to do is get a microphone. And when it comes to the report from the recording secretary or when it comes to the report from the committee and all some Southern Baptist has to do, or a thousand of them is go to microphones and say, I believe that this church is not in friendly cooperation with or contributing to the causes of the Southern Baptist Convention as messengers couldn’t be seated. So here’s something that I find very interesting. I find people saying, I oppose this because Southern Baptists need to say we’re not going to do X or Y. Well, here’s something about the Southern Baptist Convention evidently a lot of Southern Baptists don’t know: there are only three things by bylaw or constitutional arrangement. The SBC can’t do at an annual meeting with a super majority. If you get a super majority at the Southern Baptist Convention, you can do anything but start an entity shut down the convention or close an entity.
Unless I’m missing something, I don’t think there’s anything else you can’t do. Now, I don’t actually want to revise
Denny Burk:
Bylaws or constitution that takes,
Albert Mohler:
Right, right. That’s true. But I mean other than that, which is what we’re talking about. But I mean other than that, there’s just not much you can’t do with a super majority. Anyway, that’s my point. And someone may come up with another that I’m not familiar with. I don’t think so. But my point is the SBC, and by the way, you can’t bind a future Southern Baptist Convention. So in other words, the Southern Baptist Convention could not vote by a 99% majority to say that the Southern Baptist Convention will not apply this issue for the seating of messengers in 2027. That’s out of order. The SBC cannot bind a future meeting of the convention. So a part of this is just people don’t know how the SBC works.
Denny Burk:
Yeah, absolutely. Because really right now, if somebody wanted to weaponize our constitution, they could just do it. Right now, you don’t need the law amendment to bring up any church or any,
Albert Mohler:
Right. Four churches were removed from fellowship and by that specifically, were no longer qualified to seat messengers at the convention. And all four of those were successful. They went through the right kind of process and they were on grounds. The messengers understood, and the messengers knew it was an historic act. And I don’t think, again, they’re going to tolerate the SBC having to do this as if it’s never done it before year by year. And then they got on with the mission and the work of the convention. And so I don’t think Southern Baptists are amenable to weaponizing things. And the evidence of that, by the way, is the BF and M and how it’s operated now for 24 years. It has been clear, it has been a boundary. It has been a guiding document. I don’t know that it’s who would say that it’s ever been weaponized. It’s operated as it was intended to operate.
Denny Burk:
We want to ask you some questions about the co-op group, what we now call the co-op group at the convention in New Orleans. Dr. James Merritt stood with some other past presidents of the convention and made this motion. I’m going to read you the motion, Mr. President, I’m a complimentarian to the core. I am fully committed to every jot and tittle of the Baptist faith and message, but it’s become apparent to me that we are in desperate need going forward of two things, clarity and consistency. So I move that the convention authorized the SBC President to appoint a broadly representative task force from across our convention to study the issue of how this convention should deem churches to be in friendly cooperation on questions of faith and practice as laid out in Article 3.1 of the Constitution, referencing our adopted statement of faith and to bring back recommendations to the 2024 SBC annual meeting in Indianapolis for how we can move forward together in biblical fidelity, missional clarity and cooperative unity. That was the statement of the motion. And so now we have coming out of this, the messages approved this and we have what we now call the cooperation group studying how the BF and M should define Southern Baptist cooperation going forward. I just want your general thoughts on the cooperation group, this whole effort, and what would you think would be the best outcome for this group?
Albert Mohler:
Well, I guess I’ve already stated I was opposed to the formation of the group. It’s very similar to the same motion that was made in Anaheim that I opposed on the floor because I don’t like the idea of it. And I realize this is, I’m saying this in public, and so I want to be really, really careful. I believe it was formed in good faith. I believe it was adopted in good faith. I believe the committee is working in good faith. But if you think about how it’s set up, there are only a very limited number of options it can come back with. And I am very perplexed by how this is going to turn out. So I have to, in honesty, wait to see what the task force is going to propose. But before we even get there, as I said before it began or had its first meeting or it was appointed, I said, look, there are only really three options here.
Every word of the confession is important. No words of the confession are important or some words of the confession are important. It’s been that way from the beginning. That was a part of the argument that I made to SBC leaders in Anaheim. It’s all or none or some. Those are basically the only three options. I think none is just beyond comprehension. We won’t have a Southern Baptist convention. And then the sum I think is just untenable. I don’t know how in the world you would say, here’s our confession of faith, but we mean some of this we don’t really mean other parts of it, certainly in terms of our cooperation
Denny Burk:
Because that becomes the defacto confession, whatever the sum is. That’s your new confession.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I want to be really careful because I don’t want to give that confessional status, but it will effectively kind of operate as a way of reducing the confession of faith. And here’s where I also want to point out. If you do talk about reducing the confession of faith to something else, you better be really careful because I think the force of circumstances and the world as we know it today means you’re going to be adding to that list regardless of your own logic very, very quickly. Now, I also just want to come back and say, I just don’t think Southern Baptists want to go to every convention or for that matter, to any convention with the agenda of finding how many churches can be found to have shortcomings in any phrase or sentence of the confession of faith. I think what took place in New Orleans is a demonstration that what actually happens is it’s an egregious injury offensive to the denomination that causes its action.
The SBC loves happy endings. It’s part of the sweetness of the SBC. It loves when things are made right and in so far as things can be made right, that’s a wonderful accomplishment of the Southern Baptist Convention. But I hope I’m answering your question. I think there’s some things that this task force could do that could be very helpful in terms of even proposing, and I’m not even assuming what they might do here, but the current mechanism and the current committee structure I think is certainly open to review – structural review. I don’t think we’re open to confessional review. I hope that makes sense. As a distinction.
Denny Burk:
Could you talk to us a little bit about what do you think the role is historically of creeds and confessions in Southern Baptist life and how do you think, what should it be? I mean, we don’t know what the cooperation committee is going to suggest, but what should it be and what has it been historically?
Albert Mohler:
Well, that is one of those questions that has to be answered with, “it depends where you look sometimes.” So I want to be very honest. So there are times when you can find Baptists saying things that are rather minimally confessional, but even then you have to go back to the context and say, well, what’s going on here? So the address to the public of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1945 says, we take is the basis of our cooperation, no creed or it’s not a credal statement. And it’s because no one at that time thought that Southern Baptist Convention was going to be the main identity of any of these churches. The main identity was associational and state conventions and they had confessions. So at that point, the SBC didn’t have to have a confession simply because it could assume confessionalism at other levels. I’m not going to say lower levels, but other levels, general Baptist bodies in our polity.
But even that didn’t work. It didn’t hold for even 15 years. So at the special education convention of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1857 when what became the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is proposed, guess what? It has to be a confessional school. James Pettigru Boyce, in 1856 in three changes made very clear. One of the changes was it has to be confessional because otherwise it’s going to be theological disaster. And by that time you had already lost so many institutions in the North in particular. And remember both Boyce and Manley had studied in the north, and both of them had ended up at Princeton precisely because it was a confessional institution. And so by the time Boyce is making his argument in 1856, and it’s not just even just the founding board, it’s the education convention of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1857. They’re making a very clear statement that, okay, so we’re going to do theological education, then we have to be confessional.
But even then, it was more about what the school would have to have as this confession rather than the churches. Because the question wasn’t the fidelity of the churches, the question was the fidelity of the school. Okay, fast forward modernity brings all kinds of challenges. Theological debates in the northern denominations end up in what we would call the fundamentalist modernist controversy. Conservatives are made aware of the fact there are people that don’t believe in the trinity, don’t believe in the deity of Christ, don’t believe in the resurrection, deny the virgin birth, who are in their pulpits and in their seminaries. And so by the time this challenge and over evolution comes to the SBC, remember the year 1925 because in 1925, Southern Baptist changed the way we do business. The bottom line. That was a transformative year for the Southern Baptist Convention. First of all, it was the year of the establishment of the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention.
And it’s really three things. Secondly, it was the adoption of the cooperative program, and third was the adoption of the Baptist faith. The message, it’s not an accident. All those things happened. And so by 1925, the SBC wasn’t going to survive without a confession of faith. And that confession of faith was more declarative in 1925 because the logic of the SBC was this is what we believe. If you join us, then these are those beliefs and you’re supporting them. And so there was kind of an intentional effort in 1925 to say, we’re not going to go interrogate the churches on this. But there was the understanding this is a positive and it’s attractive and educational, but by 1963 that wasn’t working. And so you basically had a revision of the Baptist faith and message. I would argue that weakened it and made it worse trying to avoid a stronger confessionalism. And guess what? That resulted in the conservative resurgence in the SBC and total reformation throughout the SBC. In other words, that did not work. That does not work.
Denny Burk:
You explain how it was weakened? Just a couple key things.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I would say one key thing just for the sake of time, the statement on scripture was modified to insert that Jesus Christ is the criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted. And that sounds very sweet, but that is classic neo orthodoxy because it means, okay, now I can say this incident in first kings didn’t happen, but it doesn’t matter. Or this statement by God in the Old Testament inconsistent with what I believe to be my imaginary Jesus. And so I’m simply going to use this to nullify this text. And by the way, time I became a student, it was actually more routinely applied to Paul than to Moses.
Colin Smothers:
It seems like under this helpful reconstruction of the history, the Baptist faith and message 2000 then was a step toward Confessionalism in Baptist life and away from that kind of everyone doing what’s right in their own
Albert Mohler:
But there was a limit even in 2000. So when a statement was adopted, it was made very clear. This is obligatory upon the institutions. And even that had to be stated carefully because it was really officially, and this is because of our polity, it was really officially adopted by the convention. And the issue is, okay, now you’ve got all these boards trustees elected by the Southern Baptist Convention over a period of time they should bring their institution’s confessional accountability into line with this. And it happened very quickly. It happened very quickly.
Colin Smothers:
It seems like one of the boogeymen that’s being trotted out against a more robust confessionalism in Baptist life is that this step toward confessionalism violates church autonomy.
Albert Mohler:
Okay, now that is the most ridiculous statement. So I put up with all the nonsense you’ve said up front so far, but that as Churchill would say up with that, I will not put, no, I know exactly why you’re raising that. But autonomy functions within a voluntary association to say, we have no police power over you. We have no troops to send to occupy. You voluntarily cooperate with the SBC. We do not require you. We don’t send a bill. We don’t have a tax collector you voluntarily associated with us. So the principle of Baptist cooperation and associationalism is it’s a voluntary associationalism. So we’ve never violated the autonomy of local church because they don’t even have to answer our mail or take our phone call.
Colin Smothers:
Well, and that’s true even with the churches that were kicked out last year, Saddleback still has women pastors. They still are autonomous over their local body
Albert Mohler:
It was not a violation of their autonomy, nor was it a misunderstanding. It is really interesting to talk to a reporter not long ago who had talked to sources in California and simply said, “It said to me, evidently both sides understood each other last June.” I went, “Yep, that was exactly what happened.”
Denny Burk:
One key change that happened since the passage of the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message was in 2015, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to make it a defining issue of friendly cooperation within the convention to closely identify with the Baptist Faith and Message, which was, I think, the first time that BF&M was ever mentioned in the constitution. That was a change though. Could you explain that, and what the implications are of that? And what are we supposed to think about closely identifying?
Albert Mohler:
Well, it was a change in one sense, but not in another. Because, in my understanding, a main impetus behind that was how a church would demonstrate that it is a Southern Baptist church as in a church that had not been in the past but now wants to identify with the SBC. Aren’t we glad to be a part of the denomination? People want to join us. So that’s a great thing in itself. And the charter language is “In friendly cooperation with the Southern Baptist Convention and contributing to its causes”, to the causes of the convention. And so if you’re just thinking about in friendly cooperation with and contributing to the causes too, contribution is pretty easy to document. That’s an accounting issue. The “in friendly cooperation with” requires a little conversation. And so one of the things that was said is that, “Okay, we’ve adopted a Baptist faith”, the message, now I want to back up and say here’s why, for another reason, this conversation is a bit artificial. Not the conversation with you two, the conversation in the denomination. So here’s the thing. I really don’t know any sane Southern Baptist. I’ll go back to all the confession is our belief. None of the confession is our belief or some of the confession is our belief. I really don’t know any sane person who says we can operate with none of the confession as regulative. I don’t think anyone actually means that.
And evidence of that is that we not only had to adopt that in 2015, but at least twice, we’ve also had to adopt other language related to L-G-B-T-Q issues, to make clear that a church that makes a positive statement about homosexuality is not in friendly cooperation with. So all I want to say is the ability of Southern Baptist churches and institutions, state conventions – but I’m really concerned about the institutions because I’m president of one – the ability of Southern Baptist institutions to operate in a hostile, modern world of litigation and DEI, ESG, title IX and all the rest, and a very aggressive culture, the ability of Southern seminary to maintain its integrity in this depends, or at least is not unrelated to, the willingness of the Southern Baptist Convention to make very clear that is exactly what we believe.
Those are the beliefs that regulate the body of the Southern Baptist Convention. I’m in a weaker position if the SBC comes behind me and says, “We’re happy for Southern somebody to do that, but it’s not important to us.” Now, this is why I don’t worry about this. Because if Southern Baptists figure out that that kind of logic is at stake, I have no doubt Southern Baptist get to the right place, real quick, and then go have lunch. Alright, so I just want to make clear that they understand these are the kinds of things that are invoked when you’re talking about confessionalism. We can’t play with this.
Colin Smothers:
At the risk of quoting your own words back to you, you were on the committee that produced the Baptist Faith and Message 2000. You were the clerk, I believe.
Albert Mohler:
Effectively.
Colin Smothers:
Okay.
Albert Mohler:
It was an assignment but not a title.
Colin Smothers:
Gotcha. So the same people that are worried about violation of church autonomy, they go to the preamble, and they cite this one phrase that it has the confession. Baptist Faith and Message 2000 “has no authority over the conscience.” But I’ve noticed, which we all agree.
Albert Mohler:
Nor, by the way, does anything I say that is not holy scripture.
Colin Smothers:
But I’ve noticed that they avoid the other parts of the preamble that speak to exactly what you’re talking about. Such as, the preamble also says that confessions are, “for the general instruction and guidance of our own people and that they are instruments of doctrinal accountability.” So it seems like by appealing to parts of the preamble, we’re not taking into account the whole preamble.
Albert Mohler:
I understand that some of that’s probably a willful misrepresentation. Part of it’s probably just an honest misunderstanding, because, I mean all of us have heard somebody say, we know the Baptist position is no creed, but the Bible. No, that’s Alexander Campbell, thank you. That is not Baptist. But frankly an awful lot of Baptists in the 20th century would’ve made that, and by the way, many other bad arguments. The question is, what’s right in terms of Baptist polity, what’s right in terms of biblical truth, what’s necessary for the SBC to operate as a convention of cooperating churches?
Denny Burk:
Can you tell us how the confession shaped your ability to do what you did at Southern Seminary, just as an example of why confessions are important?
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, so what happened at Southern Seminary, in the reformation of just one institution, and as you know, it was pretty comprehensive. So we had a tenured elected faculty that was not teaching in accordance with and not contrary to the confession of faith. So we had to take action to remove one faculty and hire another that was Confessionally committed. Okay, so notice how I said that. How in the world could I have taken this action if there was not an objective document that said, This is what we believe”? Now thanks be to James Petigru Boyce for putting that in the charter and, all the way back in his Three Changes address in 1856, and then the Charter in 1859. And look, that language is absolutely plagiarized from the Presbyterians. So anyone who says that’s not Baptist. Well it’s Protestant, it’s Westminster, it is exactly what the Baptist in London would’ve believed. Especially in the second London confession, it’s what Baptist here believed. The language is that all who teach, who agreed to take the teaching, because this office Boyce said, “This office is imposed upon no man.”
Nobody’s put on this faculty at gunpoint. There are no hostages. So that means you accept employment. So you do so, agreeing to teach “in accordance with and not contrary to all that is contained therein, without hesitation or mental reservation or private understanding with the one who invests him in office.” That’s the exact quote. And I need every one of those words. So there wasn’t a person on the faculty who had not agreed, as a condition of employment, “to teach in accordance with and not contrary to all that is contained therein without hesitation or mental reservation”. That last part was so important. If it wasn’t in the charter and in the original documents, I would’ve been on weaker ground. “Or private arrangement with the one who placed him in office.”
That meant no president had the right to give anyone a pass on the confession of faith. You could pull out a letter from a former president saying, “I understand that you disagree with Article X or Y, but we’re going to hire you anyway.” No, that was forbidden from the beginning. So without that confession of faith, I wouldn’t have been able to do this. Look, right now you’ve got Christian institutions on the LGBTQ, in face of the LGBTQ aggression, and some other things as well. But just in terms of that issue, where they are all of a sudden realizing, “If this isn’t in our confession of faith, how are we going to show up in court and say this is what our churches believe?” I’m just very, very thankful that Southern Baptists have done that. And I just want to give Southern Baptist a friendly reminder: Issues we don’t know to articulate today, you’re going to have to take a confessional stand on at some point in the future if Jesus tarries. I hope that answers the question.
Denny Burk:
Oh, absolutely. So when you look from 1845 to 2024, every single step along the way seems to be getting more and more confessional.
Albert Mohler:
Well except 1963.
Denny Burk:
Well, yeah,
Albert Mohler:
I mean, and that is what I think, in retrospect, really set up the massive change in the SBC, the conservative resurgence. I think if in 1963, when there are people denying the Mosaic authorship of Genesis and denying the inerrancy of scripture, the SBC had answered that clearly and confessionally in 1963. Well, let’s just say it would’ve been a very different history the next 30 years.
Denny Burk:
So you could take 1963 as a setback, but then Southern Baptist reasserted themselves,
Albert Mohler:
But even in 63 they knew they had to have a confession of faith
Denny Burk:
And they reasserted themselves through the conservative resurgence. So we get the Baptist Faith and message 2000. 2015, we’ve got Southern Baptist voting really without controversy that we want cooperating churches too closely at this time.
Albert Mohler:
How could you not say that? It is one thing if we haven’t said it yet. So this is one of the things I teach in historical theology. There’s a constant tension in the Christian church between what can be assumed and what must be articulated. Okay, so the reach is a point in which you could assume that, until now, but now you got to articulate it. And so that’s where the SBC is. The SBC didn’t have a position on X or Y until, all of a sudden, it had to articulate it. But once you articulated it, did you mean it? I think that’s the testing point for us.
Colin Smothers:
One other significant action that happened last year was we amended the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 and we replaced the word pastor, particularly in the article on the church with the phrase pastor elder overseer, I think a doctrinal stance that we all agree with. But how concerned are you about the ability to change our confession so quickly from the floor of the convention?
Albert Mohler:
I’d say it’s a four-alarm fire. And it was I think an honest mistake. It should have been referred. It was not, I think understood by the governing authorities at the time as something that should require consideration, study, and a response at the very least from the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention. Now I’m pleased with the language, but I am not pleased with the fact that the next thing you know, we were lifting up ballots all in favor. That was a scary moment for me. And that is no way to maintain a confession of faith
Colin Smothers:
Because every entity is automatically bound by the new version of the Baptist Faith and Message 2000.
Albert Mohler:
That’s absolutely true. And it is just the kind of thing where we actually want the confession of faith as deeply embedded in the institutions as possible. And that often means in charters, and charters or state law issues. Let me just say that little trigger, I don’t know how much it’s going to cost Southern Seminary. We have to change a bunch of documents. Now, thankfully, thankfully, thankfully, we do have a protection we didn’t have before 2000. So in 2000 we were really smart enough to say that the Baptist Faith and Message, we revised our documents to say that the Baptist Faith and Message means whatever the Southern Baptist Convention says it means at any given time. But, still, I’ve got to reprint a lot of stuff. But all that to say it was a good change. It just was recklessly done.
Denny Burk:
We want to talk a little bit about the abuse reform implementation task force, but before we ask specific Southern Baptist policy things, the SBC has been in the national news over the past several years around the issue of abuse, with many outlets making comparisons to abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church. What are we to make of those kinds of comparisons? Is that fair? Is that, what do we make of that?
Albert Mohler:
Well, it’s not fair, but it is probably inevitable. It’s not fair because we do not see the kind of institutionalized abuse structures in Southern Baptist life that we have seen in some other situations, including the Roman Catholic Church. And, frankly, we could tie that to all kinds of issues including it’s not just priestly celibacy, it’s a sacerdotal priesthood. If you have a priesthood with priestly sacramental authority, you’re setting yourself up for an equation that’s meant for, and not to mention a mass with altar boys and all the rest, it’s just a different picture. But that’s not something that’s really, I think, very smart to say in public if it looks like we’re trying to minimize in any sense the horrors in our own situation nor our responsibility to deal with it. And, quite honestly, I think with every passing year we do come to a deeper understanding that there were a lot more problems in Southern Baptist life and in Southern Baptist churches than we knew.
Albert Mohler:
And so there is a corrective necessary. And I think part of that is shifting the mentality from how do we defend the SBC to how do we protect people? And that’s not as easy as just flipping a switch. But we also have a responsibility as a convention, as an institutions to operate as legal corporations. And so it’s a complicated thing in a fallen world. But, I believe that task force will come with recommendations about how Southern Baptist churches can be greatly assisted in understanding their responsibility, Southern Baptist entities understanding our responsibility, being very clear about how any knowledge of allegation of charge, of case, of any form of sexual abuse is to be addressed rightly with a concern to protecting all and in particular the vulnerable.
Colin Smothers:
So some background on the committee following those allegations in the press messengers of the 2021 SBC annual meeting commissioned an independent investigation first into the SBC executive committee’s handling of those sexual abuse claims. And, then in light of the investigation’s findings, the messengers created the ARITF, the Abuse Reform Implementation Task force to oversee the process of implementing reforms in June of 2022, which was then renewed last year. So what kind of recommendations do you might anticipate that are going to be before messengers to vote on in June of 2024 this year?
Albert Mohler:
I want to be very careful because I don’t want in any way to hamper the work of that task force nor to speak on its behalf. I have the right to do neither and the intention to do neither. But I would say look at their assignment. Their assignment was to come back as to how Southern Baptist can do several things. I think that’s what they’re going to do. And I think Southern Baptists will have time to look at these recommendations and deal with them. And so I would simply say, look at the charge that was given in 21, modified in 22. I really believe that task force is doing its best to respond to that assignment and to fulfill it on behalf of the SBC. And look, they’ve had to invest untold hours trying to figure some of these things out. And so I would also just cry out to Southern Baptist, assume that our fellow Southern Baptists are working in goodwill and in good faith towards bringing this about when they bring their recommendations. Southern Baptists have an opportunity to evaluate them. I don’t want to be evasive at all. I’m just trying to be careful and responsible.
Denny Burk:
Well, maybe you can speak to this or maybe not. One of the things they were tasked to do was to create a database of the credibly accused and the people that would be included on that list would be those who had made a confession in a non-privileged setting, those who had been convicted in a court of law of some sort of breaking law with respect to abuse, somebody that has a civil judgment against them with respect to abuse. And then this fourth category, a determination by an independent third party according to a preponderance of evidence. It seems like over the last couple of years it’s that fourth criterion which has been the most controversial. We don’t have the database yet. Is it possible to do it? Do we know can it be done or where are we on that?
Albert Mohler:
My commitment to you and to Southern Baptist is that I will never be reckless in how I speak. And so I’m not offended by the question, but I think it is really important as an act of integrity that I say we need to await the report of the task force and then respond to it. And so I want to try to honor that commitment.
Denny Burk:
In recent days, the SBC Executive Committee has settled out of court on allegations regarding Paul Pressler and abuse. Could you comment on the significance of that event?
Albert Mohler:
Well, I’ll do my best. So just to state the facts as we know them, there has been a settlement in the case. So a fact that the allegations in the case are beyond horrifying. As a matter of fact, they’re so horrifying that it’s actually very hard to imagine that they could be real. On the other hand, there was a settlement, and I think as a matter of record, there had been a previous settlement. And so I want to be careful to say at the very least there’s been a settlement in a case in which that was the allegation. And that means at the very least, we have what I think amounts to a massive scandal related to someone who had a lot of influence on the Southern Baptist Convention at some time, and obviously much direct involvement in the Southern Baptist Convention and served on the Executive Committee and on the International Mission Board and was so involved in the conservative resurgence of the SBC that his name is a part of the two name tandem.
And so you look at that and you go, okay, at the very least, this is humiliating to the Southern Baptist Convention. At the very least, the fact that there was not an absolute disavow and a determination here, I don’t want to overspeak, I’m in no position to know what happened. I know there was a settlement. And it is a scandal. So that’s the other thing. Biblically and in terms of church history, this is clearly a scandal. So even just judged by a minimal reading of the Pauline requirements, we’re talking about someone who is not beyond reproach. This is a reproach and it’s a horrifying reproach. And I think most of us who’ve been in leadership in the SBC are feeling the pressure and kind of the nausea of that reproach and trying to figure all this out. And I’ll say more, I can’t figure this issue out, and I’ll admit it. Because you’re talking about a man, Paul Presler, who’s lived a very public life and who had many enemies.
So I’m just old enough to remember that during the conservative resurgence and the great battles in the SBC, there were very prominent people who were very much opposed to Paul Presler and his agenda in the Southern Baptist Convention who were pastors of major, moderate churches in Houston. So I just want to state, here’s my assumption, they didn’t have a clue. They didn’t know, because it’s hard for me to believe that someone like a Ken Jin at South Maine Baptist Church in Houston who was a major moderate leader in the SBC, it’s just hard for me to imagine that if he knew or had heard a rumor or anything that it just wouldn’t have been addressed. I just find that implausible. Just also knowing some of the people I know in the SBC and have known for many years, I find it implausible that they knew anything like the truth of anything, like the allegations made in this report, in this lawsuit and just continued to do business as usual.
I find that implausible, and I’ll tell you what I find to be most problematic, and that is that in 1978 we’re now told, and I believe, I can’t say which report, but one of the documentary releases since say 2021, 2022, 2023, included reference to a 1978 action by a church, not a Southern Baptist church, but an independent church in Houston related to a similar situation. And in the release of documents, there’s an internal document from the First Baptist Church of Houston from I believe 2004 and references made to it again in 2017 in which someone knew something very troubling.
But I’ll just tell you honestly, I did not know about that Houston document until just a few weeks ago when it was brought to my attention by a colleague in the SBC who had not been aware of it until then. So I’ll just simply say, something’s broken in an SBC in which you can have someone fulfilling a public role when they have evidently some credible accusation that is known by people in a local church. One of the reasons why, yes. So if we need any evidence that we need some kind of structural system in the SBC, that won’t solve all the problems, but somebody’s got to be able to call somewhere and say, here’s a problem. So I’ll stop. But I want to say at least that much, if there’s something else I can say better point me in that direction.
Denny Burk:
Most of the people that I’ve talked to, including myself, I didn’t know about any of this until the allegations became public in 2017. I mean, that’s been the story that I’ve heard from most folks.
Albert Mohler
Well, and when the allegations are made public immediately, it was not clear what the response to them was going to be, and it was not known to many, I’ll say, I think probably to most of us, it wasn’t known to me that there was a background of some previous documentation. And so look, I mean we’re never going to resolve this in terms of having a perfect SBC made up of perfect churches with perfect policies, but clearly we’ve got some issues that genuinely do need to be addressed and I hope and pray that’s what we do.
Colin Smothers:
Perhaps related to the settlement, there’s been other settlements, there’s been reports about just general financial solvency with the SBC. I wonder if you could speak to, well, first of all, I think, like you said, it underlines the necessity of fixing this because there are some large sums of money
Albert Mohler:
That fixing the structural issues and educating and holding people accountable for their actions.
Colin Smothers:
Absolutely, absolutely. And I wonder if you would speak to just the financial realities of what’s facing the Southern Baptists Convention, not just as pertains to these issues, but just generally I think some people have questions about,
Albert Mohler:
I need you to point the question a little bit more because I’m not sure what you’re asking yet.
Colin Smothers:
Yeah, absolutely. We can pivot to the issues around the executive committee. For instance, just
Albert Mohler:
Ask me anything clear and I’ll try to give you a clear answer.
Colin Smothers:
Okay, I’ll try the executive committee. There has been some reports that potentially faces bankruptcy surrounding different liabilities and these kinds of things. Are those reports true? Is this something that we’re going to have to vote on in June? What are we to make of the financial realities of the Southern Baptists convention entities, particularly the Executive Committee? Some of
Albert Mohler:
These reports are public reports, so I’m going to very careful not to speak out of any private confidential knowledge. I’ll simply say some of those public reports include an auditor’s statement that the executive committee is facing a financial catastrophe simply because its liabilities are growing so large. And so yes, that’s something Southern Baptist is going to have to make some very hard decisions about going forward. And I have some strong beliefs and convictions about this. I think the Executive Committee right now, right now needs very competent, stable leadership that Southern Baptists will trust, who Southern Baptists will trust to guide that entity through a very difficult time and to help Southern Baptists figure all this out. I think structurally, and look, thankfully, I wrote an editorial when I was editor of the Christian Index with this title. So this is not based upon modern contemporaneous concerns or private information.
I published an article like in 1990 in which I referred to the executive committee as “a dangerous necessity.” That is what Messengers said when they adopted it in 1925. So it was necessary. Something was necessary in the sense that American corporate law had changed a whole lot. In 1845, the SBC could operate out of a simple Georgia charter, but it really is an entity that exists for a limited number of hours a year. And so by the time you get to the 1920s, the evolution and development of corporate law in the United States meant that a corporation had to be capable of suing and being sued. It’s a shorthand and had to have an operational existence. And so in 1925 Southern Baptist went from a corresponding secretary who basically had a desk and paper and wrote thank you notes to Southern Baptist with a fountain pen, had to go from that to having a corresponding secretary who became an executive secretary, the executive committee. I think there were two huge mistakes made in the executive committee. Number one, it is not an executive committee. It’s something like an administration committee. It’s an organizing committee, it’s a budget committee. It’s more than those things, but it’s not an executive committee. So for instance, people who get the executive committee, the SBC, they go, well, there’s the College of Bishops, there’s the Public Bureau of the Southern Baptist Convention. It’s not even close and it can’t be close. It’s not intended to be close.
Colin Smothers:
Is that because of mission creep or is that just a misunderstanding of what the executive committee is supposed to be charged with?
Albert Mohler:
I think it’s all that. It is mission creep. I think that’s going to be resolved. I don’t have any question that that’s going to be resolved because I don’t think the executive committee has any creep left. In all seriousness, they’re going to be very preoccupied with basic questions. And so I say that with sympathy and whoever goes there as president and whoever’s even right there right now, Jonathan Howe iss, interim president there right now, they’re bearing a very, very heavy burden on behalf of Southern Baptists. And frankly, it’s a thankless job. So I want to be the last person to throw a stone and the first to say, look, whoever takes these responsibilities is actually doing so in great and brave service to the Southern Baptist Convention. And so we need to work with them to try to make this work. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do believe there’s going to be some structural change necessary. I don’t think I’m a prophet in this. There’s going to some structural change necessary in a relatively short amount of time, not just in response to litigation, but just in response to the fact that now all of a sudden we’re in a different world in which the ongoing representation of the SBC 365 days a year is going to require a rethink of what that’s going to cost and how it’s going to be put together, and who’s going to lead it and what it’s necessary, but limited responsibilities are going to be.
Denny Burk:
Dr. Mohler, we invited you here because we feel like the Southern Baptist Convention
Albert Mohler:
Is because I answered questions so briefly.
Denny Burk:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. We invited you here though because we are just facing a lot of problems and we wanted a Southern Baptist statesman to come in and talk about the problems. But as we come to the end, can you talk about the possibilities for the convention and how we can get back to what we’re organized for, which is missions and theological education and church planting. What would you say?
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I think there’s a moral point to be made, and I think especially here talking to you guys, you’ll understand why I need to say this. There’s a moral responsibility to say, we don’t just want to kind of get over the sex abuse issue. We want to actually deal with it rightly and then move on together as a better denomination, as a more holy denomination, as a more protective denomination of churches. So I think that’s important to say, but here’s the, not a but, but an and, here’s the great news about Southern Baptists. So you guys have worked with me a long time. So you know about my rules about the SBC and Mohler’s second rule of the SBC is Southern Baptists will always do the right thing given enough time.
I mean, it’s sort of like a family, right? Or a church. You guys are part of this church because you believe it’s going to do the right thing. It may take some while to get there, and part of that’s because we’re Baptists, we’re congregationalists, we’re sola scriptura people. We have a limited number of arguments we can make. We have a limited number of coercive powers that we have. So we just kind of have to work with one another, being persuaded by the word and persuaded by what the puritans are called, plain reason, and then expect the best out of each other. Mohler’s third rule of the SBC, Southern Baptists will deal with controversy, but they don’t want to live in it. And so you’re going to see Southern Baptists. Yeah, we have hard things to deal with, but Southern Baptists don’t like to live in a hard place.
I don’t think the local church does either and nor does the family. And so you have to deal with some hard things, but then you need to go take a walk and have lunch. And Southern Baptists are better at having lunch than taking a walk. But you know what I mean? It’s just like, okay, this was a really hard meeting. I think we did the right thing. We took strides towards doing the right thing. That was hard. Let’s eat. And you know what? I love Southern Baptists. I wouldn’t trade Southern Baptists for anybody. And I have lived my entire life inside the environs of the Southern Baptist Convention, and it has loved me and nurtured me, taught me, and educated me, employed me, and deployed me. And all I want to say is I do not love them less for that. I love them all the more. So I just want to say yes, we’re having a hard time. We’re having a hard time. Well, who isn’t?
We have a wonderfully functional United States Senate, United States House. We have peace in the world. No, we’re in a tough time everywhere. Why do we think the SBC gets a holiday from history? And I’d rather be with Southern Baptist than with just about anybody else. So I just hope I can say that. I’m talking too long, but just all I got to say is especially younger people, look, if your idea of what you’d want to belong to means avoiding all these things, then you better go live on an island, sit under a palm tree and read your Greek New Testament, because that’s about the only way you’re going to avoid these issues, and you’re going to get lonely and hungry.
Denny Burk:
Dr. Mohler, would you close us in prayer? Before you do that, everybody, would you thank him for coming tonight? Join me in thank him. Best thing we can do is in with prayer, and we’ll let you lead us.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, it’s been an honor to be with you guys, and I really appreciate the intelligent, careful, and honest way you presented the questions, and I hope this has been God-glorifying and I hope it would be encouraging to the SBC.
Let’s pray. Father, we’re just so thankful for all you’ve given us, including the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention, including the people we know as Southern Baptists, including the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, including everything that is a part of our stewardship in the SBC. Father, we pray to be good stewards and Father, we know we are sinners, and we know we are limited in our perception. We know the wisdom to know what to do in all of this. It’s just not the case that our wisdom is sufficient. We need your wisdom. Father, help us to love each other, help us to speak the truth, really speak the truth clearly. Help us never to compromise the truth and help us to know what is wise every time we cast a ballot, every time we go to the convention, and every time we speak about these issues. Father, we entrust all this to you. I thank you for this church here, Kenwood Baptist Church. I thank you for its commitment to these truths and to Baptist identity and to the Southern Baptist Convention. I pray that you’ll bless this night and bless anyone who at any point in the future should hear what we have to say. May it simply glorify God and serve the cause for wish we exist. In Christ’s name we pray, amen. Amen.
Denny Burk
Amen. We are dismissed.
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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Numbers 2-3
February, 11, 2023
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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Numbers 1
February, 4, 2023
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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Hebrews 1
December, 24, 2023
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“Joy to the world, the Lord has come.”
It’s glorious to sing that Christmas carol, that great hymn of the faith. It’s also good for us to know it wasn’t written for Christmas, that it wasn’t written about the joy of the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ. That hymn was written in anticipation of the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ in glory to claim His church and to bring His kingdom in fullness. That actually doesn’t make it less appropriate to sing at Christmas. If anything, it makes it more appropriate to sing at Christmas because we’re declaring two truths simultaneously, the Lord has come and the Lord is coming.
Here we are at this time of the year. You look at this room, it’s the same room 365 days a year, but it’s deployed for some very special purposes just a few days a year. A service like this, the decorations in the room tell us that this is the time of the celebration of the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is Christmas and that makes this particular commencement just a bit special. We get to gather together just as the church of the Lord Jesus Christ and accompanied by at least part of the larger culture is paying heed to the fact that the Lord has come.
An occasion like this, just looking around the room you recognize reflects some kind of magnitude, some kind of moment. There’s a reason why we’re here. There’s a reason we are dressed as we are dressed. There’s a reason why there’s a particular joy in the room. There’s a reason why people have come from many different countries indeed to be here in this room today and why there are people of so many different ages in this room simultaneously. This is not an accident. This is a moment in the history of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is a moment in the lives of these graduates. It is a moment in the lives of marriages and families and congregations.
And so there’s a heavy sense of the meaning of this moment, and there is great, great gratitude that the Lord has allowed us and the Lord has given us even such a beautiful day for us to gather in this place, to declare the fact that the Lord has come and that the Lord is accomplishing His purpose in His church and in the world through the sending out of ministers of the gospel and missionaries of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. So as we gather together, we do what Christians do. We pray, we read scripture, we declare the faith, and we turn to scripture because in a moment like this, it’s not just the natural instinct that we turn to scripture, it’s the instruction of the apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ that we turn to scripture.
I want to direct our attention this morning to the Gospel of Luke in chapter 2, and in particular, I want to start reading in verse 22. By the Holy Spirit Luke tells us, “And when the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought Him up to Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord, as it is written in the law of God, every male who first opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord, and to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the law of the Lord, a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.
“Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him, and it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. And he came in the spirit into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him according to the custom of the law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said, ‘Lord, you are now letting your servant depart in peace according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation that you prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.’
“And His father and mother marveled at what was said about Him and Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, ‘Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel and for a sign that is opposed and a sword will pierce through your own soul also so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.’ And there was a prophetess, Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was advanced in years having lived with her husband seven years from when she was a virgin and then as a widow until she was 84. She did not depart from the temple, worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day, and coming up at that very hour, she began to give thanks to God and to speak of Him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem.”
What an incredible passage. I believe it’s one of the neglected passages for the Christian church, particularly this time of the year. Sometimes it’s read as a way of getting to somewhere else. I don’t think that’s adequate. Here in this passage where the parents of Jesus, that is to say His earthly parents, His mother, Mary, and Joseph, they have brought Jesus to the temple according to the law and He is coming as the firstborn son to be presented in the temple. You need to understand the background of this is that that is the command of God, that is the practice of all faithful Jews, and it’s happening with a lot of noise, it’s happening with a lot of families, it’s happening with a lot of activity there on the Temple Mount right up to the temple itself. But out of all of those babies and out of all of those celebrating families, out of all those moms and dads, out of all those infants, there is one, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ.
As Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the temple, what we find, who we find in the temple are two witnesses, Simeon and Anna. Now this is in fulfillment, of course, at least as an echo, of Deuteronomy 19:15, and that passage in the law code of Israel, it is said that one witness is not sufficient, there must be two witnesses. When Jesus is brought to the temple, there is not just one witness, there are two witnesses. Simeon is the first.
On this same occasion last year, I turned to that focus in this passage to Simeon. It is Simeon who utters some of the most amazing words found in the entire scriptures concerning the identity of the Christ. Simeon had come in the spirit into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for Him according to the custom of the law, Simeon took Him up in his arms and blessed God and remember those words, “Lord, you are now letting your servant depart in peace according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation that you’ve prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”
So here you have Simeon, and Simeon who is righteous and devout, knows the Bible, and what he accomplishes there is this masterful biblical theology in which by the Holy Spirit Simeon announces who this child is, and what is declared here is that He is both savior and messiah. He is a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel. Now look at verse 33. We’re told that His father and His mother marveled at what was said about Him. It’s such an incredible passage. We’re told here that even as Simeon made this declaration, do you realize Mary and Joseph are still learning who Jesus is? And do we understand that for both Mary and for Joseph that continues throughout the lifetime of Jesus, for Joseph throughout his entire lifetime, for Mary all the way to the cross and the empty tomb? It’s an amazing reality. Mary and Joseph are learning who this baby is progressively. Now Mary was told a great deal of course by the angel, but she’s still learning who this baby is.
And then Simeon speaking to the father and the mother, particularly to Mary, His mother, said, “Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel and for a sign that is opposed.” And then speaking directly to Mary, and remember Mary is this celebrating mother who has come into the temple with her firstborn son to make this presentation, and listen to what Simeon says to her, directly to Mary, he says, “And a sword will pierce through your own soul also.” Imagine being told as a young mother, “Your heart is going to be broken. This child is appointed for the fall and rise of many in Israel and is a light unto the nations, but He’s also a sign of contradiction. He’s also one who will be opposed, and a sword will pierce your heart also so that the thoughts for many hearts may be revealed.”
The next passage which is in this larger section is the focus of our consideration today, verses 36 to 38, because it’s not just Simeon who was there in the temple along with all the cacophony of all the things that are going on in the temple. Jesus, this one baby out of all the babies brought to the temple, Jesus is one baby boy brought to be circumcised among all the other baby boys who were there for the same reason from all of Israel. It’s not just Simeon who speaks to them, it is also Anna who is there. And if the entire passage I think is too often neglected, these particular verses are even more often neglected. I think they’re absolutely key to our understanding of the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ, the identity of Christ and His mission, the fulfillment of the promises of old.
We remind ourselves beginning in verse 36, “And there was a prophetess, Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was advanced in years having lived with her husband seven years from when she was a virgin.” Now we need to admit that’s a complicated sentence, okay? A complicated sentence. If we study this sentence minutely, we come to the conclusion that Anna is very, very, very old. Now how old is she? Well, it appears that at least by the strict reading of this text that she has been a widow for 84 years. All right? You consider how old she had to be when she was married, even if that’s 12, she’s a very old person and especially by the standards of this day. She could have been more than 100 years old, and there she is at the temple on this day.
But whether she’s 84 or about 100, it’s hard to tell. The fact is that she was married at one point as a very young woman and then she has lived for a very long time as a widow, and she becomes an illustration to us of a consecrated God-honoring widow. But it’s not just that, she’s identified in the most astounding way as a prophetess, and we know the role of the prophet and we know there are not that many prophetesses named in the scriptures themselves, but this is not a compliment being paid to Anna. This is a biblical identification of this woman as a prophetess. It’s an incredibly honored word. Here is this elderly woman, no doubt many people passed her and thought nothing of her. She is not speaking, and here’s the most amazing thing. We have all of these words spoken by Simeon. We have none of the words spoken by Anna, but Anna’s right here in this passage and we don’t have a word of hers to quote. But she’s a prophetess nonetheless, and we do know the substance of what she was saying.
She’s identified quite simply, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher, advanced in years having lived with her husband seven years from when she was a virgin and then as a widow until she was 84. Here’s the point. She did not depart from the temple, worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day. It’s the reason it’s hard to understand exactly how old she is because the reference to the 84 years could be the period she was in the temple after she was married.
In any event, she’s been there a long time, but the most important issue is who she is and what she was doing. She did not depart from the temple, worshiping and fasting. She was worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day. So it’s a picture of absolute consecration. Here’s this woman, Anna, and she is advanced in years, but she’s been in the temple a long time. Why is she in the temple? It is because she is in the temple waiting for someone. She is waiting for someone to appear, just as Simeon was waiting for someone to appear, and as Simeon was waiting for someone to appear, once he saw Jesus, he declared who the Christ is. Anna has been waiting night and day. She has been praying night and day. She’s been fasting night and day. She’s been worshiping night and day.
And then look at verse 38, “And coming up at this very hour.” Coming up, that means up to the temple. “Arriving at the temple this very hour, she began to give thanks to God and to speak of Him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem.” In the context coming immediately on the heels of the passage concerning Simeon, it appears that she was coming up even then. She observes what Simeon observes even then. She probably heard the words that Simeon spoke, but as Anna, the prophetess who immediately begins to connect the dots, she gave thanks to God and to speak of Him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem.
It’s a beautiful picture here of faithfulness, verse of the faithfulness of God. Here you have these two people in the temple, Simeon and Anna, and the one thing they recognize on this day is that God has done what He had promised, a savior who is Christ the Lord, a messiah, the consolation of Israel. If we’re not shocked by this, shame on us because how many could possibly recognize in an infant, in a tiny, week-old baby boy, the promise of all the prophets through the centuries, the consolation of Israel, the savior of the world.
It is an amazing passage. Anna becomes the second of the witnesses here, and even as Anna joins Simeon in this witness, behind them was waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting because we look at these lifetimes and we look especially at Anna who’s described as being so very old, but so many others had died so many centuries before having heard the promises but not seen the fulfillment of the promises. It is the glory of Anna and of Simeon, or in this case of Anna, the prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher, it falls to Anna to be the prophetess who recognizes the baby Jesus and immediately recognizes who she sees. No more waiting. And coming up at that very hour, she began to give thanks to God and to speak of Him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem. It’s a messianic promise. It’s a reference to the fulfillment of all the promises of God, the consolation, the redemption of Israel.
Well, here we are at a hinge of history. Everything in this passage is about before and after. Before and after, promise and fulfillment. They’re not exactly the same thing, but here all of a sudden the hinges are joined together. Before and after, promise and fulfillment. Israel had been waiting. Israel had been anticipating. Israel had been longing for the fulfillment of the promises, and here is the fulfillment of all of those promises, all the promises of God in a baby presented at the temple. All of history now is riven in two. There’s a before and there’s an after, and in all of human history there is no before and after that comes anywhere near close to before Bethlehem and after Bethlehem.
Well, as we look at this, we recognize that Anna is fulfilling a biblical role here. She is indeed functioning as a prophetess. She saw Jesus. She began to give thanks to God and to speak of Him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Israel. I want to point to those three phrases, number one to speak of Him. Now there’s another linguistic issue here. The context is extremely helpful. Without the context, it might be confusing. To speak of Him. Who is He? Because the passage says she began to give thanks to God and to speak of Him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem.
Well, no doubt she was speaking of God the Father who is the one who made the promise. She’s speaking of the covenant God of Israel who had redeemed Israel, had saved Israel, had chosen Israel, had protected Israel, and had given the promises to Israel. No doubt when she speaks of Him, she’s speaking of the Father, but she’s speaking of the Father’s accomplishment of His promises through the son, and the son is the baby who’s in the temple right now, to speak of Him, yes, the Father, yes, the son, yes, the one true and living God, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ and speaking of Christ.
She began to speak of Him, and notice the next phrase, to all who were waiting. You know, in the history of the Christian church, this has been a recognized challenge. The challenge is how exactly do we celebrate Christmas honestly. It’s because we try to work in to our anticipation of December the 25th or the Christmas Sunday closest to the 25th. We try to build in to our anticipation waiting, but we’re not very good at it. It’s because we’re not waiting the way that those who were in the temple that day had been waiting. We in our lifetimes have never been waiting in the way that Simeon was waiting. We’ve never experienced the waiting of Anna. We haven’t experienced the waiting of God’s covenant people of Israel for a messiah who was promised. We’re on the other side of that history, and as a matter of fact, all of us in this room are about two millennia on the other side of that happening.
No, we’re still waiting, right? And even singing that hymn, Joy to the World, reminds us that we are waiting. We are waiting for the fullness of the Kingdom of Christ to be made manifest. We are waiting for Jesus to come and to claim His church. We’re waiting for Jesus to come in glory and to come as judge. We are waiting for that, but we’re not waiting for a baby to be born in a manger. We’re declaring the truth that that baby who is none other than God in human flesh, the second person of the trinity, Jesus, the Christ, the Lord, we’re not waiting for that baby, but we kind of sing as if we are just to remind ourselves. We speak of Christmas as if we are, and people are rightfully doing scripture readings of the promises just to remind ourselves that Israel did wait, that sinners did wait, that the world did wait until the incarnation had happened and Jesus had come.
The unique historical moment of this end of the first week of the life of baby Jesus when He’s brought by Mary and Joseph to the temple and these two witnesses are in the temple, Simeon and Anna, I just think we are really helped as we think about Christmas. We’re really helped by thinking about Anna. I think as we think about the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ and what it means, we really are helped by Anna just as we’re helped by Simeon. I think that as we are celebrating this day with these graduates arrayed before us, we really are helped by Anna because there aren’t just two statements here. There are three. Number one, she began to speak of him. Number two, to all who were waiting. Number three, waiting for what? For the redemption of Jerusalem.
As we are here for this commencement ceremony, as I say, there have been a lot of these before. No doubt for most of you in this room, this isn’t the first you have ever attended, and every single one of them has some very familiar features, common features. Somebody is going to hand someone a representation of something. The graduates here are kind of counting on that, and all those diplomas are stacked up right there, all right? So between now and when we leave, those boxes are going to be empty and these hands are going to be full. There’s a sense in which we could do that in a hurry and just call out their names. We could just throw them at them and say, “Find yours and take it home.” But we don’t do that. We’ve gathered here to say some things, to hear some things, to sing some things, to declare some things because this moment is not going to happen again. We’re not going to have this same congregation in this room, and so we don’t want to misuse a moment of this.
So I want to speak to the graduates. Why are you here and what does all of this mean? Well, it means that we are here in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and it means that we are here in order that the truths that are declared in this passage, the truths declared by Simeon and the truths declared by Anna are the truths that you take to the church of the Lord Jesus Christ and to the nations hungry for the gospel. It is not only Anna’s task honored here, it is our task. It is your task to give thanks to God and to speak of Him to all who are waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem.
You know, it seems to me there’s a little category shift going on here and I think it’s good for us to mention it and that is this, a lot of the people who were in Jerusalem knew they were praying for the redemption of Jerusalem. A part of your mission, a part of the Christian church’s assignment is to take the gospel to people who do not yet know they are waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem, but we know, you know and I know they are waiting. They are waiting with a need that goes beyond anything they can describe. They’re waiting with a hunger that goes beyond anything that they may try it can’t satisfy. They’re waiting for good news of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. They are waiting. They just don’t know who, for whom they are waiting.
The task of Christian missions, the task of Christian evangelism is to take the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ, that good news that was declared by Simeon, that good news that was recognized by Anna, and to take it to the church and to take it to the world, to take it to the nations, to those who are waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem. This is taking place in the temple. It is taking place in Jerusalem. It is taking place with Simeon and with Anna, but they become paradigmatic examples for us. They become illustrations for us, so the faithful response to the truth of the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ, the great good news of the gospel, the news of, yes, Christmas in the festival of the incarnation.
But the important thing to recognize is that Luke wasn’t writing this in order for this passage to be read at Christmas. He was writing this for this text to be fundamental to the faith of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ 365 days a year till joy to the world, the Lord has come, let earth receive her king. We’re here today with such joy because we know that every single one of you has an absolutely crucial role to play in that great purpose. We’re here today with such great joy because we know that the Christian church has been gathering together in one way or another, in one place or another, by one name or institution or organization or whatever or another in order to celebrate that God is calling out ministers of the gospel, missionaries to the nations.
Now, we’ve come to this point of an academic graduation because the seriousness of this calling has been translated into the most serious courses of study, and every single one of you has fulfilled all the requirements of this course of study, and you and I know, we all know, that is a remarkable achievement. You could have gone to a far less demanding school. You could have ordered your degree by mail. You could have printed it up on a copy machine. Don’t do that. You didn’t do that. You’re here because you followed the call of God, and a part of that call was to prepare for a lifetime of service, to step into the pulpit, to lead a church, to feed and teach the people of God, to take the gospel to the ends of the nations, to plant churches and take the good seed of the gospel to the ends of the earth, and so we’re happy about that.
Everybody’s happy about that. People have come from all over the world in order to be here to make very clear how happy they are. I’m happy about that because if we don’t graduate students, we don’t have a reason to exist. I’m happy about this even as I presided at more than 60 of these ceremonies. I’m happy about this because I look at you and I realize that God is absolutely faithful to His promises, and the older I get and the longer I fulfill this role, the more in wonder I am at what God does through individuals like you. Redeemed by the blood of the lamb, called by the Holy Spirit, deployed for the glory of God in Christian ministry and missions and service, I’m more and more amazed at what God does.
I’m also able to speak with a joy and a happiness that comes from having come to know and having come to realize what God does over time with those who go out to take the gospel and to preach the word. And so you’re following a long line of those who come before you, and by that long line now don’t just press back to 1859 when this school was established, although we believe that was an important beginning of an important part of the story, but that long line goes back to Jerusalem. That long line goes back to prophets and apostles, and you have to understand the joy in this room to see that long line joined by the many who are here.
You look good in these academic robes. It’s a sign of seriousness. It’s a sign of the fact that we’re actually stating wearing very ancient outfits that something serious is taking place here, and that something serious has a history, it has a story, and this is a continuation of that story. My exhortation to you is be resolute. Be faithful because the church of the Lord Jesus Christ deserves and needs to be served and led and fed by those who will, in season and out of season, do nothing but teach the unadulterated word of God, who will do nothing but preach the gospel in all that saving power, who would do nothing but to maintain, to preserve, to protect, and to teach the faith once we’re all delivered to the saints.
Here we are in this room and it’s about time that we turn to handing out those diplomas. As I say, we can do it in a hurry. We could do it without fanfare, but brothers and sisters, this calls for some fanfare, but more than that it calls for worship, and that’s why we are here for the preaching of the Word of God, for the singing of these great hymns of the faith, for prayer, and for the joy of Christ’s people. I just ask you this day to look around this room. I ask you this day to look at these graduates and ask yourself, “Is God not faithful to His promises?” And then let’s just go back in memory by the power of God’s inerrant and infallible word to that day in Jerusalem when Simeon said, “Your servant can now depart in peace,” and when Anna said, “We must speak of Him to all who’ve been waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem.” Two good examples for all of us to follow.
Let’s pray. Father, we’re just so thankful for all you’ve given us in your word and the examples of Simeon and of Anna. Father, we pray that we will have full joy this day and these graduates will have full conviction, full passion, full commitment to do nothing other than to do nothing less than to serve you without reservation and with joy until the end of their days. Father, we pray this in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
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Third Avenue Baptist Church
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Luke 16
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Colossians 4:2-18 — Colossians Series
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