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Studying Theology for the Glory of God

Listen or read the following transcript as D.A. Carson speaks on the topic of the glory of God from The Gospel Coalition sermon library.


You’re listening to Table Talk, the podcast from Theology Network.

Michael Reeves: Hi. Welcome back to the next Table Talk. I’m Michael Reeves, CCF’s theological advisor, and I have the great honor of being joined around the table today by Don Carson. Don, thank you so much for giving up your time and joining us.

Don Carson: It’s my privilege to be here.

Michael: Thank you. We’re going to be speaking together about studying theology, but Don, you didn’t study theology for your first degree, did you? Wasn’t it chemistry?

Don: Chemistry. Yes, and some math and so on. Eventually, I threw in some extra courses in classical Greek and that sort of thing as well to extend my stay a little bit.

Michael: Do you still keep up with chemistry at all?

Don: Oh, marginally. I read a couple of scientific journals a month just to make sure I can still talk to scientists in their categories, but it would be presumptuous beyond degree to imagine I’ve kept up in any technical competence.

Michael: Well, you’ve got enough going on in the rest of your life, so we can understand that. When you did switch to formally study theology, why was that? Why did you switch?

Don: That would take some time to explain. The long and the short of it was that the Lord called me to ministry. My plan was to go from chemistry at McGill where I was studying to Cornell to do a PhD in organic synthesis. It was all laid out, but when the Lord called me to the ministry I shifted a number of pieces around and eventually went instead and studied for a Master of Divinity and was in church planting for a number of years.

Michael: How did you find it when you first did actually start sitting down to a course of study of theology? What were the struggles? What did you love about it?

Don: I don’t know that struggles were ever a part of it to be quite frank.

Michael: Really?

Don: There are some people who find the study of the hard sciences and mathematics very easy and the study of literature, for example, very difficult or vice versa, but I’ve always been a universalist. When I went to university …

Michael: You don’t mean theologically, do you?

Don: No. No. Well, maybe not, but on the other hand, when I went to university I was really torn between making English my major and making chemistry or physics my major, so I’ve always been a reader and a bit of an arts type in some respects.

Michael: No academic struggles? Anything about the nature of what you were studying that you struggled with in particular?

Don: It depends what you mean. There are always challenges in any discipline, but I was so convinced the Lord had called me to the ministry at that juncture that I wasn’t having a whole lot of second thoughts. (“Should I be at Cornell instead?”) I just wasn’t thinking in those terms, so I wasn’t wrestling through shards of self-doubt at that juncture. Those times of change I had already worked through before I actually started formal study.

Michael: So you’re getting a pretty good evangelical foundation in your studies of theology at this point?

Don: Well, yes, and that brings me, actually, to something pretty fundamental. I don’t think there is only one legitimate locus for studying theology, but at the risk of a generalization, I think for the majority of people it is overwhelmingly wise to do your first theological degree in a strongly confessional framework. In some cases, it may not be the best way to go and in some instances there may not be a strong evangelical institution around or whatever, but by and large, all things being equal (and they never are), that’s what I would strongly recommend.

Michael: That’s a really important thing, so can you unpack why exactly?

Don: Part of it is because, I think, on the whole (all things being equal, and they almost never are) you get a better education. If you go to a school with more secular, liberal tendencies.… If, for example, you’re going to do a course in New Testament introduction (that is the technical things having to do with date and providence and all that sort of thing), you will probably be introduced to an introduction by Raymond Brown or the like, but you’re not likely to be introduced to a conservative one if you go to …

Michael: Such as yourself.

Don: Yeah, the Carson one. If you go to a confessional school, you will be required to read a conservative one, but you’ll also be introduced to Raymond Brown, so who’s getting a broader exposure of the literature?

Michael: Strangely, yes.

Don: Moreover, the best of the confessional schools, because they still have a desire to make people expounders of the Word of God, are still teaching Greek and Hebrew to a reasonably high level, whereas many MDiv courses now have abandoned either Hebrew or both languages except as optional extras, and the standards, if they are taught, are very, very low (maybe one year of the stuff).

Well, first year Greek is a prerequisite even for entrance at Trinity where I teach, and everybody has to learn Greek and Hebrew, and then you can take advanced levels on it if you’re going to make it a sort of specialty. This is all a function of our vision of how important the Word of God really is, which is giving you more rigor and exposure to primary sources and this sort of thing.

Quite apart from the fact that a far smaller percentage of students wipe out theologically and spiritually in a confessional school than in a school of more liberal orientation, I think you get a better education, all things being equal. Beyond that, there are different models of education, like in-church educational systems, the kind of thing that sometimes in some parts of the world is called TEE, theological education by extension, or in-house things with regional courses and so on.

I don’t mind if some people want to do some of that or go to Cornhill for a year or whatever, but on the other hand, I worry about those who push those sorts of avenues as if they were the best options or the only exclusively good options.

Michael: That’s it, and when you’ve done that you’re done?

Don: That’s right. I’m happy for people to get theological education by almost any means they can, but you need a percentage of the people to be well trained, and that is going to require serious study with serious time in serious halls of learning, ideally, at least for the first degree or two, from those who are confessionally strong as well as being first-class teachers.

Michael: Can I put you up on that? Because I think that’s a very important issue for the UK especially, where I think we’ve struggled to have really good evangelical training at that kind of level for decades and decades (a long time), which means, I think, quite deeply embedded in the evangelical culture is this fear of studying theology.

So go in and do a bit of preaching training and so on, but that will probably do you. How do you address …? My guess is you almost certainly didn’t face that situation yourself, but for those in the UK for whom that is a part of the culture and they’re being addressed with those sort of concerns by friends and church, how do you address that?

Don: The reason for this stance in the UK is, in my view, multifaceted. Part of it is because quite a few people have done theology in university structures that have wiped out, so it becomes a suspicion of all theological study. That’s part of what you mentioned, and when I first came to this country in 1972, the only way you could get a degree in theology was through the university system.

You could go to LBC as it then was, but to get a degree you had to write the external exams from London University, which was one of the few places at the time that offered an external set of exams, but now the whole system has changed here. It has been revolutionized twice, in fact, so that kind of restriction no longer pertains, but there have been other influences here too.

There have been a handful of extraordinarily gifted preachers, like Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who never really studied formal theology at all. The problem sometimes with these really, really gifted preachers (a Spurgeon or a Lloyd-Jones and so on) is that, although they can be autodidacts (they can be self-taught people and read massively and learn a lot of these things on their own by the discipline of their own reading and so forth), the vast majority …

Michael: They’re very phenomenal readers.

Don: They’re both phenomenal readers and good students and poked away not only at, let’s say the Puritans, but also the Greek and Hebrew and things like that (at least a working knowledge), whereas the vast majority of ordinary pastors don’t have the skills or the time or the access to books or the drive or the mental powers and so on to do that sort of thing, so it’s always a mistake educationally, it seems to me, to make the exception the norm, and some of that has come down to us too, it seems to me.

In my view, almost any theological educational delivery system (almost any educational option) has advantages and disadvantages. You win some and you lose some. There is no ideal root. None. Each country has certain special challenges and certain special advantages, and if you’ve lived in the country long enough you can start articulating what they are. Nevertheless, the options you do have, each one has some advantages and some disadvantages.

It becomes the part of wisdom to learn what the advantages are and compensate for the disadvantages, so that, if for example, you decide you do want to go to a secular university for your first theological degree, for whatever reason (good, bad, or indifferent), one of the compensating things you need to do is to get into a fellowship or a local church somewhere with some really serious, well-trained, confessional Christians around who can provide you with alternative bibliography, check you up on things, make sure you’re well rounded, make sure you’re wrestling in responsible ways with the ideas that are coming your way, and so forth.

You can do that, but if you don’t do that, then there is much more likelihood you’ll come out with this kind of lowest-common-denominator theology and not being as useful as you might have been.

Michael: So many people do.

Don: Likewise, if you go to an academically really rigorous confessional school (a really good one, whether here or abroad or somewhere else), then there is a danger you come out sounding like an egghead and can only talk to fellow eggheads. You really do need to be deeply immersed in a local church involved in ministry during your training years and, ideally, beyond under the senior ministry of someone who provides you with a really good apprenticeship mentoring relationship for two to five years.

Then you’ll come out streets ahead, so you want to be under somebody like a (well, I’ll name some names from overseas but who are known here) a Mark Dever, who has a PhD on the Puritans but is training a whole group of young men around him all the time, and he stamps them with pastoral insight and skills and priorities and so on that really cannot be taught in the seminary. On the other hand, he can’t possibly teach them in the rigors of Greek and Hebrew exegesis and historical theology. He doesn’t have the time or the skills in one person.

Every choice has some advantages. If you go to The Crowded House and Tim Chester and that lot, there are advantages of in-house training of one sort or another, and some of them have high priority in Scripture, but there are also disadvantages, and it’s worth noting the teachers in that case themselves have advanced theological training at public institutions. I don’t want to take potshots at any of them.

You can benefit enormously, and the more flexible you are in theological educational delivery systems, the more people you can touch, and I want to say, “Amen! Go to it! Keep multiplying.” But at the same time, it is usually a mistake to start thinking that any one of them is the way that virtually everybody should go. You have to understand what the advantages and the disadvantages are for each system and enjoy the former and take steps to counter the worst of the latter.

Michael: How about Thielicke? Do you like his book, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians? In that, he talks about young theologians almost invariably going through this period of what he calls theological puberty in which they suddenly have access to this comparatively huge amount of theological information they didn’t know before and suddenly they become the rather prickly know-it-alls. That’s one instance of the kind of danger you can meet when you start studying theology. Are there others, and what would you advise to those who are starting out studying theology to protect themselves against those sort of things?

Don: That’s one, all right, but you have to see it for what it is. It’s arrogance. It’s pride in another form. It’s a particularly deadly form because it arrives in the guise of being peculiarly pious. Here you’re studying all these important things and you know more about it than some of your peers and, therefore, you know godly things, truthful things, theologically important things that they don’t know. Therefore, you’re wiser and better.

The particular deadly form of arrogance involved is the form that essentially apes humility. It really is quite vicious, and a lot of people go through it. One of the ways that’s countered, however, is if you’re in a strong enough institution where there are a lot of wise people around you who have also gone through it ahead of you and are checking you.

If you’re the only bright student in a small system, then the tendency toward pride is going to be much stronger than if, in fact, there are even brighter ones ahead of you and all around you who are also godly and pious in their relationships and are actually leading people to Christ and so on. Again, there are compensating things you can do.

In addition, most Christians who go to theological education start off because they really want to know more of the Word of God and want to be brought more knowledgably under its authority and sweep and teaching, but as you study you may subtly, without even realizing it, shift from desiring to be mastered by the Word to desiring to be masters of the Word, and that changes your motivation.

It means you want to be boss rather than letting Scripture be boss over you, and that is sometimes compensated for, not very wisely in my judgment, by having what Francis Schaeffer used to call an upstairs/downstairs arrangement so that downstairs you’re doing the hard, hard study and the Greek exegesis and whatever and upstairs you’re being pious and having your devotions, but the two don’t connect.

On the long haul, what you really want is to try to help Christians who, even when they’re doing difficult Greek exegesis, are doing it remembering God says he will look to those who revere him and tremble at his Word, so that when you’re reading so-called devotionally, you’re also thinking integratively, critically in the best sense, and when you’re studying something at a deep theological level (reading commentaries), you’re self-consciously, nevertheless, putting yourself under the Word, and the reason you’re doing the exegesis is to know the mind and heart of God better.

That takes a while, and ideally you need mentors who are checking you up on that, not just asking, “Are you having your devotions, brother?” but trying to encourage the handling of the Word of God so that you face challenges honestly while still, nevertheless, being desirous of being mastered by the Word much more than being masters of the Word. That’s a related challenge, but it’s a very big one and not everybody learns to handle that very well.

There’s a third danger. There are some who are just naturally very good students. They love studying whether it’s microbiology or the sex life of sea turtles or the Hebrew of Psalm 23. They’re just good students, and it’s possible to become so intoxicated by theological learning or detailed exegesis or historical theology or systematics or whatever it is that you forget that, in one sense, the study of Scripture must never become an end in itself.

It’s the better to know God than to make him known, and that means there ought to be a correlative improvement in relationships with people, in your concern for evangelism, in your desire and ability to teach the Word of God well to others and so on and so on and so on. There are some who are called to a peculiarly focused study of the Word of God who are going to spend more time writing the next generation of books and commentaries. You have to have people like that, but even they need to make sure they still know how to lead somebody to Christ.

Meanwhile, for the average pastor.… The average pastor is, by definition, a generalist who must know quite a bit about quite a lot of things, but by and large doesn’t have the time or the energy to be a real expert in anything. That means it becomes very important to watch his heart, his relationships, his care for people, his prayer life, and so forth as part of the discipline of study even while during the years of formal study there will necessarily be a disproportionate amount of time in the books.

Yet, this should be the beginning of a lifelong habit of study that is integrated with everything else that goes into Christian living and Christian ministry rather than a narrow period where study becomes god and afterwards you never crack another book. That brings me to a fourth problem, and that’s the problem of thinking that you …

Well, I knew someone some years ago who, when he was asked (he was about 50 at the time) what theological books he had read recently, he said, “I don’t read theological books anymore. I learned that when I was at seminary.” In which case, he didn’t learn much that was of worth. What you really get in a good theological education is the exposure to the beginnings of a lot of useful things for a lifelong ministry. If, in fact, it becomes the stopping point, the highest point of your study, it’s just desperately sad. One could mention other things, but those are at least some of the dangers.

Michael: On that, for pastors who are seeking to carry on doing theological studies to refresh and enrich their ministries, have you seen particularly helpful models for how to do that, because time pressure is the one always mentioned by pastors?

Don: Again, an awful lot depends on individual personalities and locations, whether you’re on a team where you can alternate taking times off or whatever. One remembers what John Stott did. Mind you, he was single, but nevertheless, he aimed to reserve a certain amount of time for reading apart from reading to prepare for the next talks and apart from his personal devotions. From the age of whatever his conversion was (16), that was bound up with the book M’Cheyne Bible Reading Plan, but he aimed to preserve an hour a day, a half-day a week, a day a month, and a week a year.

Now that might not be possible when you’re married, but unless you have some plan.… You rarely drift into good habits unless you plan. In any case, you set aside time for particular wider reading, and then a funeral comes along. Those things happen, but unless you plan to pray, you don’t pray. Unless you plan to read, you won’t read. Unless you plan to evangelize, you won’t evangelize. Part of it is setting up the kinds of priorities that reserve time for certain kinds of things, and then you start laying out a program of what you should be reading during that time so it’s not just haphazard.

Sometimes that can be facilitated by working with a group of guys in an area, or sometimes in a multi-staffed church you can actually ask certain people to read in certain domains. Let’s say one is going to read up on current literature on homosexuality, another on the new perspective on Paul, another on recent stuff on spirituality, and somebody else is keeping up with the recent prints of the Puritans and so on.

Then when they meet together once a month for a couple of hours, each shares what they’ve been getting. There are different ways, if you’re a bit imaginative, of keeping up in a pretty broad number of areas. Then rotate your fields of specialty every once in a while so you don’t have a whole life of reading nothing but what’s new on homosexuality.

There are lots of ways of doing that sort of thing to have ongoing theological upgrading apart from specific courses, if you’re close enough, or specific conferences. Nowadays there are things that can be downloaded from the Internet. There are a lot of different ways of keeping up if you have the discipline, but if you don’t have the discipline, nothing is going to work.

Michael: I’ve got a weird question for you. If you were to meet yourself when you just started studying theology, what would you tell young Carson?

Don: I would say, “Einstein was right.”

Michael: A weird question gets a weird answer.

Don: I’m always a bit nervous about these sort of “Now that I’m older what would I say to someone who is younger?” because when you’re younger you have certain strengths and abilities and weaknesses that are part of being younger, and it’s not always right to impose older stances on the younger person.

I don’t think I’ve always chosen wisely on what I’ve read, but on the other hand, I don’t have a whole lot of profound regrets either on what I’ve read. I remember some advice I got from my mother that pertains, I think, peculiarly to people in ministry. “Work hard, play hard, and never confuse the two.”

What she meant by that is when you’re working, when you’re studying, when you’re preparing, when you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing, focus on it so it has your full energy and drive and concentration. Don’t fritter away your time so that you’re not only preparing some text or other for a series that’s forthcoming, but the music is on and the latest magazine comes through the mail and you read that and then you want to go check what’s on TV for tonight. You just fritter.

Michael: With the Internet that’s especially easy, isn’t it?

Don: It’s very easy to do. You can fritter away an awful lot of time on the Internet. You put in a full day’s work and actually have about three hours of useful stuff done. Alternatively, when you play make sure it’s, as it were, hard play. That is don’t keep going back to be diddling away at the work.

Michael: You do woodwork, don’t you?

Don: Well, I like to do it. I haven’t done enough of it because I’ve just been too pressed by too many commitments, but I do enjoy it. Yes.

Michael: What have you made? This isn’t a serious question.

Don: That’s for another discussion. I have to tell you one thing. This was a few years back now. My son, at the time, was about 15. He was one of these chaps who could pick up an instrument and in a few hours be getting something decent out of it. He was already playing violin and guitar and one or two other things, but he picked up an Irish pennywhistle and downloaded some choruses.

Within a few hours he was making an Irish pennywhistle sound pretty good. Then he asked me if I would build a case for it, and I said, “Nicholas, what do you want a case for? You buy one of these things for 10 or 15 bucks. What do you need a good case for?” He said, “Yeah, but it would be cool.”

I bought walnut, an expensive wood I really like to work with, and put in an in-laid piano hinge and hidden magnets and shaped it, inlaid and routed out the center with velvet inlay and a bronze plaque on it with his name engraved. The whole bit. An expensive thing. I told him it was his anti-gospel Irish pennywhistle box, and he said, “What do you mean?” I said, “With the gospel, the treasure is on the inside and what’s cheap is on the outside. This is exactly the reverse.”

He was home at Christmas. He has been all around the world. He brought it back. He has carried it with him. He has been to all kinds of places where he couldn’t bring his violin, and one of the clasps has come off and so on. It’s scarred. He has been in Afghanistan with it and Iraq and so on, but he has brought it all around the world. That was one of the things I made that actually worked out pretty well.

Michael: Particularly thinking of those who don’t have the privilege or have landed themselves in a situation where they’re not getting a particularly evangelical training, especially for them when they have set reading lists and set lectures and so on, how do you, particularly in those harder situations, do evangelical theology with integrity?

Don: You have to read more than what they tell you. That’s why I said earlier on in this interview that you need the wisdom and friendship of somebody who knows your reading lists and can tell you what else you need to read. You have to read the reading lists you’re given, but you also need to read other reading lists on the same topics. You need to do more work than everybody else in the course. That’s the price you pay if you’re going to come out with an intellectual rigor and not slip into an upstairs/downstairs sort of spirituality, because on most of these topics …

It’s one of the great blessings of working in English. In some languages you can’t even approach this, but in English, on most controversial topics, there are strong confessional books out there as well as the ones that may be assigned that are a good deal less than that, and you need to become familiar with them and think things through. That’s part of the price you pay to retain your theological integrity in that kind of environment.

Michael: Can I end then on the most basic of questions? You’ve talked about being stuck in at your local church, making sure you have a pastor who can actually help you in these things or at least someone theologically capable and pastorally aware. You yourself have been well stuck in at local churches.

You’re known as a churchman, as a preacher. You’ve done university missions. I suppose undergirding that has got to be an understanding of what theology is doing in the local church, what theology is doing in the wider church. Could you nail it down for us? What exactly is the role of theological study (a basic question) in the wider church?

Don: First of all, in case this interview is going to be heard outside the UK, I think it’s important to say when that question is asked in the UK it means something different from what it means in North America and some other places. In the UK, when you speak of studying theology, you tend to mean the entire array of disciplines including systematic theology, biblical exegesis, biblical languages, historical theology, church history, spirituality (the whole array), whereas if somebody is listening to this in North America (“Why do you study theology?”) then it means, “Why do you study systematic theology?”

The answer to that could be given, but it’s a quite different answer from the answer to the much broader question. Let me, therefore, answer the broader question. At the end of the day, all of it has to do ideally with the knowledge of God, that aspect of theology that is training in understanding and reading and teaching the Bible, how the Bible is put together, what the Bible says about Christ, what the Bible says about the cross, what the Bible says about life to come, what the Bible says about justice, what the Bible says about reconciliation and forgiveness, what the resurrection was about, and so on and so on.

All of that in this understanding of theology is the study of theology. I cannot see how any thoughtful Christian would, therefore, not want to study theology. The trouble is the word theology itself sometimes has a negative overtone and means something like reading the Bible in as boringly and as distant way as possible, and who can put up with such rubbish, or something like that? But if anybody is reading the Bible at all, he or she is doing theology.

Whether he or she is doing it competently or understandingly or wisely or efficiently or faithfully, that’s another question, but you cannot be a Christian in any meaningful sense and not do theology in the broad British sense of theology. The purpose of studying theology then in a positive sense is to go deeper, to become more knowledgeable, to be a better reader of Scripture, to understand more about who God is as he has disclosed himself in Scripture.

That includes, then, how others have studied Scripture in the past, and now suddenly you are into historical theology. It includes how you put together things synthetically, and now you’re into systematics or dogmatics. It includes what bearing it has on your life and conduct, and then you’re into theological ethics. Whether you call it that or not, that’s what you’re into, so if Christians are in a church and they’re arguing about how elders should function, you’re into the doctrine of ecclesiology whether you call it that or not.

To argue about that in an informed way, yes, you begin with the Bible and you end with the Bible (there’s the final voice for Christians who have a high view of Scripture), but you’re not the first Christians to talk about these matters, and that means you are wise to learn from how others have talked about it. That means reading commentaries and reading the Puritans or whatever. It means being exposed to a wider variety of Christian input than falling into the trap of thinking all wisdom begins and ends in your local church.

In that sense, training in theology, studying theology, is bound up with the mandate to produce mature Christians which includes not only a better understanding of the Word but better ability to teach it, better understanding of your place in the stream of redemptive history, where the church has come from in this country and where it’s going, what constitutes faithfulness, and what are the historic confessional points Christians have agreed with in very large measure over the centuries, and on and on and on.

Obviously, in any church there are going to be some who are more informed on these points than others, but ideally, you want some, especially those whose primary task is the teaching and preaching of Scripture, to be as well formed and growing in such matters as they can possibly and responsibly be. Otherwise, they are not fulfilling their calling to be rightly understanding and interpreting the Word of God.

Michael: Amen to that. Don, thank you so much for joining us.

Don: My privilege.

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