May
28
2012
What Does It Mean To Be Biblically Balanced?
I increasingly hear people talking about the need to be “Biblically balanced” and I think I’m starting to understand what they mean.
As I talk to people who speak about the need for our theology and preaching to be “balanced”, they mean that we need to spend the same amount of time talking about everything the Bible talks about.
So, for example, since the Bible talks about what God in Christ has done and also what we ought to do in light of what Christ has done, to be balanced we need to give both themes equal airtime. Since the Bible talks about Jesus and it talks about us, to be balanced we need to spend the same amount of time talking about both. The list could go on: since the Bible talks about x and y, to be balanced we need to talk about x and y the same amount.
But, this is NOT the balance of the Bible. While the Bible talks about a lot of things it does not give all of its themes equal airtime.
The overwhelmingly dominate message of the Bible is that God loves (and in Jesus) justifies sinners. There are tons of ways the Bible says this: the whore is made a bride, the dead are raised, the unrighteous are declared righteous, slaves are made sons, the blind see, the sick are healed, the unclean are made pure, the guilty are forgiven, sinners are saved, and so on. Obviously, no Christian denies that the Bible says more than this. But the work of Christ on behalf of sinners is clearly the emphasis of Scripture from beginning to end. What we do in light of what Jesus has done is important. But it’s not more important than (or even equally important as) what Jesus has done for us.
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures…(1 Corinthians 15:3-4).
Martin Luther said, “Remove Christ from the Scriptures and there is nothing left.” The emphasis of the Bible, in other words, is on the work of the Redeemer, not on the work of the redeemed. As important as how we live is, the spotlight of Scripture is on Christ, not the Christian. “The Bible is not fundamentally about us. It’s fundamentally about Jesus.” (Tim Keller)
My point is simply this: to be “Biblically balanced” is NOT to allot equal airtime to every Biblical theme. To be Biblically balanced is to let our theology and preaching be proportioned by the Bible’s radically disproportionate focus on God’s saving love for sinners seen and accomplished in the crucified and risen Christ.
25 Comments
Dear Pastor Tullian,
With the utmost respect for you and your ministry, I have just a few questions in response:
1. Who are you thinking of when you give your summary of what “balance” looks like? I personally have never heard someone say that the practice of balance is “equal airtime” but more like bringing up both themes (x & y); whether the time allotted is equal or not.
2. With all of the pictures of redemption found in the Bible, what do you believe to be the place of all the “therefore’s” found after most of these redemptive declarations? You have been made a bride, therefore, live like it. You have been raised, therefore, pursue holiness. You have been justified, therefore, work out your salvation (sanctification).
3. To say that one theme is, at the biblical level, more important seems to be a bit of dividing where the Bible fails to divide. The Bible seems to hold up these themes as two sides of the same coin (i.e. the redemptive work of Christ necessarily results in the reformed life of the believer). Perhaps you can help me think through that better.
Balance implies equality in some regard. If one side of the seesaw is given more weight or time or emphasis than the other, the seesaw is off balance. It can only be assumed that those pushing for some semblance of equality whether emphatically, systematically, conceptually, or presentionally (I realize I may have just made that word up).
The story of the Bible is about God in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. There are very real fruits and expectations of what the appropriate response to this grace should entail. In view of God’s mercies present yourselves as living sacrifices.
Perhaps culturally in our speech, we use “therefors” to point to what we were really wanting to get to. We mention to first part only to provide the listener with a frame of reference for the second (which follows the THEREFOR) and is THE point of what we wanted to say. Yet we feel the need to couch or frame it prior to getting to it.
If we believe this is how God is communicating to us, I could see a person reading the Bible and gleaning that the emphasis of all of it is the response. But the Bible also clarifies that responses are only as good as the work that precedes the “therefor.” Good works and devotion fall flat if not for Christ’s work for us.
Filthy rags and refuse seem to be the dominant characteristics of ours efforts to serve God (even in earnest).
Thank Pastor Tullian for faithfully preaching what Christ has done for us. It produces a rich harvest of desire and inertia to work out this salvation and honor God by our actions and thoughts. Far more so than any additionaly yoke of paying it back or now attempting to earn which has already been given to us.
http://onceforalldelivered.blogspot.com//
To use the word “disagree” may be too strong of a word, but I guess that’s more or less what I’m doing. I whole heartedly agree that the central theme that everything else in the bible must connect into is God’s redemption of mankind in Christ. Preach it Pastor Tullian! Amen!
Once you’ve established that foundation, however, you are then able to handle all the other sub-themes in the bible, as there certainly are many. The book of Proverbs is practically all sub-themes. There’s not a verse in Proverbs (that I can think of off the top of my head anyways) that talks about substitutionary atonement, justification, or the cross, but there are numerous passages about wisdom, the use of the tongue, handling finances, relationships, families, and a wide array of others. Certainly to preach any of those things in a Christless fashion is to not preach them faithfully, it’s just saying things. However, those texts must be handled according to their literary style, according to authorial intent, according to the cultural setting of the original reader. When that is done properly, it ought to lead us to Christ, as the very Wisdom of God, who taught more about money than hell, who redefined family, who ascended so we could receive the Spirit, and on and on.
So let’s handle the divinely inspired sub-themes in the bible in a faithful way that leads people to the gospel.
What a great many preachers lack is the ability to distinguish God’s law from His gospel.
There are purposes for those things. Many get them intertwined and backwards. They use the law to try and make the hearer a “better Christian”. The law is not for that purpose. It’s theological use is to kill us off to the self. To any pretensions of goodness.
We need both the law and the gospel. But there is not nearly enough dying going on (to self) in churches. Instead, preachers are throwing gasoline on the fire…with all the best of intentions.
Pastor Tullian,
I do strongly agree with the tenor of this post. The concept of “Biblical balance” most often times robs Christ of His supreme glory and attempts to “balance” out the equation by putting responsibility/onus back on man to do or become something.
I would affirm with you that Christ has done it all apart from us (cross) AND continues to to it all in us (resurrection-life) through His abiding presence in us via the Holy Spirit.
Justification is all of Christ. He satisfied the payment-in-full for sin transgression, once for all. And sanctification is all of Christ, by pouring His resurrection-life, via the Spirit, into the valley of dry bones. It is no longer my life, but His life, abounding in/through me. We are comprehensively and organically subsumed into a living-union with Him. We have been raised from the dead to partake as living members of His very Body. The old Body of Sin is dead and destroyed. So whatever good, whatever fruit of the Spirit, whatever growth is produced by the Body is ALL of His powerful resurrection-life working in us and through us, flowing from the Head, the Vine.
So whether we are talking about justification or sanctification the “balance” is always 100% about Christ. Christ For Us and Christ In us.
This is why the Church needs to put law-based moralism to death and reclaim a vibrant New Covenant theology of the Holy Spirit. Christian ethics (sanctification) will then become 100% Christ centered and Spirit centered, flowing from the fount of Calvary’s justifying stream.
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Tullian
I hope this comment comes across in the way I intend it, because I appreciate your ministry and think you’re doing lots of great work. However, I would be one of the people who are concerned that your message is not biblically balanced. I’m not sure if I understand your post, but what I mean by that is simply that as I read the NT, and as I listen to your sermons and read your books, I see a disconnect between your emphases and the emphases of the NT. For instance, while I think the antithesis between our works in salvation versus Christ’s work for us is an important theme, I feel like you emphasize that way more than the NT does, leading to a distortion in the overall message. Obviously you would disagree with this, as I’m sure we would disagree with the exegesis of many individual passages, which is perhaps where the difficulty lies.
Even though this is negative comment, I do want you to know how thankful I am that you preach Christ and would hope for every blessing on your ministry.
I agree with John Dunn.
The Lord Jesus Christ is resurrection life to us and in us (Gal. 2:20; Col. 1:27, 3:4; Phil. 3:10; Eph. 1:19-20; John 11:25; 6:57; Col. 2:19; Eph. 4:15-16) via the new covenant blessing of His Spirit.
Christ’s indwelling the believers–and hence the believers learning to live by His life rather than our natural life–is precisely what is in the Bible but is practically missing from the two “sides” of this present conversation: those who emphasize that our effort and hard work to please God (law-keeping) is necessary for Christian growth, and those who say that emphasizing our work distracts from grace and thus we should simply pay attention to justification by grace through faith.
In short, both “sides” begin by seeing the Bible in terms of the difference between law and gospel (seen in terms of justification by grace), and then disagree as to how to strike the right balance between the two. But both sides neglect the matter of the Lord Jesus Christ being our life subjectively in the Spirit, the overarching revelation in which many imperatives in the New Testament (e.g. pursue Christ, pursue holiness, pursue righteousness, walk by the Spirit, abide in Christ, look carefully therefore how you walk, add all diligence, exercise unto godliness, etc.) are rooted.
Those who emphasize effort and hard work in sanctification often make it sound like genuine Christian growth is a matter of perfecting our life with God’s help, when in actuality it is Christ’s life spreading and being manifested in us, and our attempts at improvement can actually be a distraction, replacement or substitute for knowing Christ as our life.
Those who emphasize justification by grace often make it sound like judicial forgiveness and freedom from the law are the exclusive content of the gospel, and the rest a mere afterthought,
as if God’s eternal plan of salvation was simply to correct the mistake that happened at man’s fall. In actuality the reason why God redeems and justifies us in His full plan of salvation is so that He can then impart Himself in Christ through the Spirit as the divine life into our being to transform us unto Christ’s glorious image and build us up together into His corporate kingdom, Body, dwelling place and bride that is one with Him and expresses (glorifies) Him, the final form of which is the New Jerusalem in the new heavens and new earth.
[...] professor of theology at Reformed Theological Seminary. This article was reprinted from his blog, On Earth As It Is In Heaven, with [...]
Pastor
I guess I need to think this out a little more.
[...] What does it mean to be Biblically balanced? [...]
I grew up in a church where the pastor taught in a way I would consider biblically balanced. The pastor taught from Genesis to Revelation verse by verse. Once Revelation was complete the pastor would start again in Genesis. In the early 1970′s it used to take five years to go from cover to cover verse by verse. As the years progressed the process took ten years or more. After thirty years under this pastor I moved to South Florida where I search for a pastor with a similar style of teaching verse by verse. When someone would ask me how I would describe the pastor that taught me I would simply use one word, “grace”. Although he taught from the entire bible, which God ordained to be balanced when he gave us His word, the resulting affect of my pastor’s teaching came down to one word that penetrated my heart, “grace”.
After a long search I did find a pastor in South Florida that taught in a similar verse by verse style. That pastor is Tullian and although he may not follow the same order of Genesis to Revelation he is young and has plenty of time to teach from cover to cover verse by verse.
What I found interesting in my comparison of my former pastor and Tullian is what happened on Sunday night. I was in the home of a Ukrainian Orthodox priest trying to describe Tullian and his manner of teaching. I began to explain how Tullian teaches from the whole bible and my summary was the exact same word I used for my previous pastor, “grace”; yes, simply grace.
The bible itself is balanced; I think that was the Lord’s intent. Yet the result of God’s word always finds its way to my heart with an unwavering theme of grace.
I too agree with John Dunn!
We find here two dear brothers who struggle to accept what John D. and Tullian are espousing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=L6ra84w6sIo. I dearly appreciate these men (Carson and Zaspel) but they’re found here speaking out of two-sides of their mouths. Much of what they say is both wise and loving.
This notion of “balance” is very misleading…sounds good at first, but a closer look with a careful eye will reveal the nature of things.
Keep it up, Tullian! Such liberty has not, is not, and will not likely ever be a majority-view. That’s not our concern. Our concern is with the fuller dynamics of the Christ-event.
[...] posted by Tullian Tchividjian at Gospel [...]
The term “Biblically Balanced” appears to be nothing more than an arrow pointing to Christ. One could look at it as one walking on a tightrope totally balanced when in practice it can and will never happen because of so many external and internal variables. Biblically Balanced is an absolute for humanity that can never be achieved within ourselves nor by ourselves. Its unachievable for any pastor nor anyone else to teach it with the expectation that it would be understood the same way in practice for all his congregation. It is truly a wall we continue to bang our heads into. Now when it comes to the Holy Spirit that balance becomes a reality to each believer depending up where they are at. Our comforter gives each individual what he needs and when he or she needs it. Balance can only be given by the Spirit in the same way that our faith is dependent upon Gods calling!
Pastor
still thinking
“While the Bible talks about a lot of things it does not give all of its themes equal airtime.”
This post was an direct copy of a post you made a few months ago, http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tullian/2012/02/20/what-does-it-mean-to-be-biblically-balanced/?comments#comments , and I’m surprised you completely copied it, especially this key sentence I quoted. Several commenters in the early copy of this post raised some pretty good objections to your definition of balanced, namely these two successive comments:
“Only a poor interpreter of scripture will do theology based on a “word count.””
“How do you come to a decision about what the focus of the Bible is without doing “word count”? Isn’t that kind of subjective?”
I hope you can clarify what you mean by “equal airtime”, because that sounds an awful lot like word-count theology, by which we will never see that redemption is the dominant theme of Scripture, but in fact will think money is the dominant theme of the gospels or death is the dominant theme of some OT historical books.
I think what you meant is something like “preaching biblical theology is much more important than preaching systematic theology” (one leads much more naturally into finding the biggest themes and the other buckles down into minor themes) but I couldn’t find that in what you wrote.
Pastor
I’ll use the word “centered” rather than balanced. Fr Timothy our priest seems to lean in that direction when trying to explain where the Protestant Episcopal church stands. catholic as in the Nicene Creed but protestant as it relates to theology.
Stephen-
Yes, Tullian copied this post from February. His post a week ago explained that it is his intention for the next few entries.
“Because this is a crazy week (39 interns arrive today), I’m going to be re-posting some important posts. Back to fresh blogging next week.”
No reason to be “surprised”. Keep the Gospel Bombs coming T.T.
Stephen,
My comment in this previous post “Only a poor interpreter of scripture will do theology based on a “word count” was in reference to some poor comments made against Tullian’s article. I actually agree with much of what Tullian is commenting on.
[...] What Does it Mean to be Biblically Balanced?Tullian Tchividjian, pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church “…to be ‘Biblically [...]
One of the reasons why this post is right on is that if you did a word count in the OT for “Jesus”, not only would you get nothing, but you would get matches for Joshua, which isn’t even right. However, Jesus Himself teaches that the scriptures give witness to Him. He is the main word God has spoken, and the primary word in that is the cross. So unless you are looking for it in the OT, it isn’t even there. The constant context of all scripture is Christ and Him crucified.
Jim: BINGO!
Jesus is the Reason of all Revelation.
Jim: BINGO! Jesus is the Reason of/for all Revelation.
Mitchell, thanks for the reply. I apologize for my late response, you may not even be checking here anymore. I realize your comment was in context and actually positive of Tullian’s post; the main reason I quoted you was to give enough context to the next poster whom I quoted.
Anyway, I agree with the main point Tullian is making, that all of our preaching and teaching and discipling and studying should be, as Spurgeon famously put it, a “beeline to the Cross.” I merely disagree and ask for clarification in his process of making the point, specifically in how he defines “balanced” as equal airtime.