On Books with D. A. Carson (Part 2)

Don Carson discusses various aspects of book writing and theological studies. He reflects on the process of writing both academic and more accessible texts, the importance of context in systematic theology, and his views on exegetical rigor in modern theological works. Carson also explores his own projects and contributions to the field, including his thoughts on writing commentaries and the challenge of balancing scholarly depth with accessibility for a wider audience.

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Mark Dever: This is Mark Dever. It’s June 13, 2008, in Chicago, Illinois. We’re at the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and our guest is Don Carson. Don, thank you for giving us this time.

Don Carson: My privilege.

Mark: Don, we were talking last time about books you had read in your life and things that have been helpful or not helpful. We wanted to turn now to your own oeuvre, except your really academic stuff. We’re not going to talk about that because I’ve not read that. So guys, if you’re listening to this and you want a more sort of “Don’s observations on the world and life,” that’s the other interview we just did with Don. This is his “Books” interview. So fair warning. Is writing arduous for you?

Don: Sometimes. Sometimes I really have to force myself to get down and put in the time, but once I get going, it’s quite easy. If something is being written at a reasonably popular level, I can squeeze in 15 minutes here or 20 minutes there or half an hour there, do something on an airplane or in a hotel room, and once I get going it’s not bad. If something is really serious work, I need unbroken hours where the computer isn’t beeping at me and the phone is switched off. It’s the only way I can get enough pieces in my head to know what the next sentence ought to be.

Mark: Do you write on a computer?

Don: Yes, but my early books were all written with a fountain pen, believe it or not. Then I would edit the work with multicolored ballpoint pens.

Mark: Would you ever write a systematic theology?

Don: If the Lord sustained me to 140, yes.

Mark: We’ll take that as a no. Why are you dissing the systematic theology?

Don: Oh, I’m not. It’s just I have such a high view of what systematic theology should be. What I would like to do, if the Lord gives me enough birthdays, and this is just barely possible, depending on how many birthdays I get …

Mark: I can tell you what you’re going to say. You’ve said this to me so many times.

Don: A two-volume work on the unity of the Canon, on the mystery and fulfillment of the Old Testament and the New Testament. There is more and more of my stuff that moves in that direction. The book Greg Beale and I came out with last year …

Mark: And your introductory essay in the New Bible Commentary.

Don: That too, for example. The amount of space I give in my commentaries to where the New Testament quotes the Old is all a reflection of that, but that to my mind is still prolegomenon to a full-bore systematics.

Mark: I guess the implication of what you’re saying is there’s nobody who has been qualified to write one.

Don: No, not quite.

Mark: Not quite, but you’re really close to saying that.

Don: Most systematic theology that is done today, the first book or two, really isn’t constructive systematic theology. It’s an evaluation of somebody or other or a comparison of A and B. It’s a foray into something or other.

Mark: I don’t mean in somebody’s field. I mean a straight-up one-volume Berkhof, Erickson, Grudem theology, three-volume Hodge, Bavinck.

Don: Yeah, Bavinck is a much better model. One of the people who really could do it is someone like Henri Blocher because he really does have this mix of exegetical rigor and knowledge of historical theology across a surprisingly broad plane.

Mark: That’s sounding like you.

Don: But then also some knowledge of philosophy and contemporary issues and contemporary writers, because a good systematic theology has to interface with what’s going on today.

Mark: So basically, if you were being really candid right now, you would trash most systematic theologies that people sit around using in evangelical seminaries, as far as their exegetical abilities.

Don: Trash is much too strong. Some of them are stronger than others on their handling of Scripture, or they’re not bad in their handling of Scripture and they’re not bad in their synthesis, but they don’t interact with today’s world very well. They just feel old-fashioned, whereas a good systematic theology has to interact well with what’s going on today and not merely be an antiquarian book.

Mark: Okay, so if you’re going to teach systematic theology in a seminary or teach it when you’re in Africa or Asia or Europe …

Don: Which I sometimes do.

Mark: Do you recommend a textbook?

Don: I recommend readings from half a dozen textbooks.

Mark: And those would be?

Don: Some from Grudem. I like the doxological element there. Some from Millard Erickson. On epistemological and some other issues I often recommend Kevin Vanhoozer’s Is There a Meaning in This Text? He’s one of the few who understands contemporary postmodernism and treats it with respect but doesn’t succumb to the strongest weaknesses in an undisciplined postmodernism.

He’s careful that he doesn’t want to be either modernist or postmodernist, in one sense. In terms of older works, I do require the people to read some Calvin, and now that Bavinck is becoming more translated there’s a lot of Bavinck that’s …

Mark: Is Berkhof any use there? It’s just a summary of Bavinck.

Don: Yes, that’s right.

Mark: Summary is useful?

Don: Yes. It’s turgid style. It doesn’t make me pant for the glory of God.

Mark: Again, speaking to my listener for a moment. A warning to you. If you are nauseated by praise of a fellow creature, you’re going to really hate this interview as I talk to Don about what he has written.

Don: Before you go any farther, let me warn you. One of C.J.’s great strengths and his besetting sins is the desire to encourage people by praise.

Mark: I’m not going to do it nearly as much as he would.

Don: Good, because there would be a danger I’d walk out.

Mark: Yeah, I understand. C.J. and I have talked about that even among ourselves. You have written so many articles we can’t take time to mention them, but they generally to me seem like pure gold. I love it when I find one of your articles. If I could just mention one, your JETS article from ‘97 on “Reflections on Salvation and Justification in the New Testament.” That was superb. Have you thought of pulling together a volume or two or three of your collected essays?

Don: My students keep telling me I ought to, and maybe I should, but they are so diverse they don’t easily cohere into a themed book. They really are quite diverse.

Mark: But realize how inaccessible they are to most people, and you put a ton of work into those. It would be very easy for you or even to let somebody else just put those together, and people would go buy them because you wrote them, not because of particular topics, especially if you put a united Scripture index in the back and a topic index. Those could be extremely useful volumes. Just saying.

Don: I hear you, and perhaps that’s something to give to a graduate student.

Mark: It just multiplies the stewardship you’ve already put in writing those things. You seem to write popular expositional books as a part of your preparation for commentaries that will come out. Like you did your book on the Sermon on the Mount, and then several years later you came out with your Matthew commentary in ‘84, or your book on John 14–17, and then later your John commentary. Is that part of how you do it?

Don: Yes, although it wasn’t exactly intentional. I was preaching through these materials.

Mark: You were preaching through them because you were writing a commentary on them.

Don: No, I was preaching through them usually just as part of my preaching, and then a particular sequence I thought, “Yeah, it’s probably worth taking the time to put this into print.” For example, the Sermon on the Mount series was first a series I gave at CICCU, believe it or not, in 1975, and that was before I was invited to write the commentary. I wasn’t invited to do that until ‘79 or early ‘80.

Mark: So your commentaries don’t produce popular-level works in your own preaching.

Don: They can. They might.

Mark: Is that happening right now?

Don: Well, there’s sort of a symbiosis. I’m not that far away from the NIGTC commentary on the epistles of John, but then I was doing popular exposition of 1 John at New Word Alive.

Mark: When you say you’re not that far away, what does that mean?

Don: I have learned to decline invitations to pontificate about the deadlines of my books. So many things can come up … crisis, family, illness. That one got delayed by my wife’s cancer, and then other things have prevailed. I want to see that off my plate reasonably soon.

Mark: So that would be the commentary that’s in the works right now from you?

Don: Correct, but I have hundreds of pages of notes also on Galatians and Hebrews that I want to get done in the next three or four years.

Mark: Any popular expositions that are in the works right now?

Don: Again, I have notes on several, but they’re not high enough priority that I’m going to push really hard.

Mark: When you did When Jesus Confronts the World: An Exposition of Matthew 8–10, how did that come about?

Don: I was doing that series of sermons and decided it would make a good follow-up to Matthew 5–7. I actually considered doing five volumes of sermons that would cover all of Matthew.

Mark: For the five books of Matthew.

Don: For the five books of Matthew, more or less. I haven’t given up on that entirely. I may still do that but haven’t signed a contract on it.

Mark: If it does actually come out after your Matthew commentary, that would actually defeat the pattern I suggested was working.

Don: Correct. Actually, I’m almost finished revising that Matthew commentary. As you know, the whole expository series is being revised.

Mark: I didn’t know that.

Don: Yeah, it is. Some of the volumes have come out, some with the same authors and some with different authors. So I’m revising my Matthew and have been given an extra 10 percent of volume.

Mark: You already dominated that volume. Like 70 percent of the three books was just yours in that one volume.

Don: They’re breaking up the volume sequence.

Mark: Are they giving you a volume of your own for Matthew?

Don: No, Matthew and Mark, and Mark has been made much longer as well.

Mark: Oh good. One book that is on my short list of most often recommended books is your 1987 work Showing the Spirit: A Theological Exposition of 1 Corinthians 12–14. Given that you published that and a little later The Cross and Christian Ministry from earlier passages in 1 Corinthians, have you thought about a 1 Corinthians commentary?

Don: I have, but 1 Corinthians is pretty well served by several first-class commentaries. Fee’s commentary is well worth reading. Thiselton’s one on the Greek text is magisterial. Whether you agree with it all or not, it is really a first-class piece of work. So I think there are things that are more urgent, to be quite frank.

Mark: Then you went on and published another popular work on 2 Corinthians 10–13.

Don: And, again, with Murray Harris’ work out on 2 Corinthians and some others, 1 and 2 Corinthians are pretty nicely served.

Mark: So other good work out there causes you to pull back?

Don: Yes. If I were much younger and wanted to write on the whole New Testament.… I teach those things in Greek very often here, so as a result, I have hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes on them, but why just keep reinventing the wheel?

Mark: For listeners who might not be that familiar with your work or at least parts of your work, you’ve done two major commentaries: Matthew that was published in ‘84, that you now say is being revised, and John in ‘91.

Don: Correct.

Mark: And you maybe have one on the Johannine letters coming out soon.

Don: That’s NIGTC, correct. Which is a pretty small oeuvre, as you put it. My students sometimes chew me out just a wee bit for not putting out more first-line commentaries. They might be right.

Mark: You’ve put out more than Warfield did.

Don: And I have the notes for three more: Galatians, Hebrews, and Revelation.

Mark: Oh, we hadn’t mentioned Revelation.

Don: Yeah, I have hundreds of pages of notes on those.

Mark: How do you like Greg Beale’s commentary on Revelation?

Don: It’s again magisterial. Everything Greg does is very detailed, but in some ways it’s so detailed and his style tends to be just a wee bit heavy that unless you are already a pretty good student you won’t work through it all. But Greg owns the shop on that one. He really understands the sources, and if a person really has a good grasp of Greek and can read quickly, that’s the one I recommend. For pastors who are not so well trained, the one I recommend on Revelation first is probably Mounce.

Mark: William Hendriksen, More Than Conquerors?

Don: It was useful at its time as a foil to Walvoord, but for all that it’s helpful on many fronts, I don’t think he really understood Second Temple Judaism literature very well, and an awful lot of the genre of apocalyptic I don’t think he ever really understood very well.

Mark: So his basic recapitulation theme?

Don: There’s some of it there, but there are so many things, in my view, that he misses it would not be my first commentary recommended.

Mark: Dennis Johnson’s new one?

Don: I’ve looked at it and spent some time on it, but I haven’t spent enough time on it to want to pontificate.

Mark: That’s fine. Something very different than your exegetical works is your book Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility: Biblical Themes in Tension (1981). It’s a reworking of your dissertation.

Don: Yes, it was.

Mark: Was your thesis that compatibilism is the right description of John’s theology on this point?

Don: Yes, and that there are ways of working that out pastorally, theologically, in the lives of Christians, and that John is different from Second Temple Judaism in that regard. In this respect, he is harking back to the main streams of Old Testament theology updated in a Christological framework now that Jesus has actually appeared.

Mark: Just for pastors who are wondering about Second Temple Judaism, it’s just the Judaism of the time of Jesus and Paul.

Don: Roughly, yes. In one sense, their vocabulary, their figures of speech, their idioms do show up in the New Testament. That’s part of the fact that biblical Christianity is historically grounded. Paul and Jesus and the other New Testament writers actually sound like first-century Jewish people.

Mark: Which they are.

Don: Which they are. And taking up Greco-Roman stuff too, because Paul is also steeped in that literature. At the same time, that doesn’t mean they buy into all of their theology or all of their priorities or their ways of framing things. On this particular topic, I think they stand a long way away from most of that literature.

Mark: So your book has a continuing use. It’s still in print. I saw it in the bookstore this morning.

Don: It’s still in print. It still keeps churning out a few hundred copies a year, partly because it’s an ongoing issue. Now at the popular level, I sort of summarized that in How Long, O Lord? chapters 11 and 12.

Mark: Just for the listener, define compatibilism. What do you mean by compatibilism?

Don: It’s really a philosophical category for saying that these two statements are compatible. First, God is absolutely and utterly sovereign, but his sovereignty never functions to diminish human responsibility. Second, human beings are responsible before God. They choose, they believe, they disbelieve, they obey, they disobey, and their actions are significant, but their responsibility never functions to qualify or to mitigate God’s absolute sovereignty.

I think you can show that both of those things are true. How you put them together is another issue. That’s really complex. Compatibilism doesn’t say we can show exactly how it works. It does say we can show that there’s no necessary logical contradiction, and if there’s some mystery in it, so be it.

Mark: Sort of like Packer’s antinomy rather than paradox in Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God.

Don: Correct. The reason I don’t like the word antinomy is simply because of its usage in some philosophical discussion to mean exactly the opposite of what Packer uses it as.

Mark: But the idea is compatibilism.

Don: That’s right.

Mark: Your dissertation supervisor must have thought this was an unusual topic for a dissertation at Cambridge in the 1970s.

Don: My dissertation supervisor was Barnabas Lindars, SSF (Society of Saint Francis). He belonged to a monkish order within the high Anglican Church.

Mark: Monkish. I like hearing that as an adjective. Monkish is not used much anymore.

Don: He would still use it. He was a very old-fashioned man in many respects and wore a habit and rope around his middle.

Mark: He was Romish.

Don: In many, many ways. I could tell you a lot of stories here. He was brought up very, very high Anglican. He was about as Roman Catholic as you could be without being Roman Catholic. In his late 30s, he underwent a huge shift and became very liberal in his theology while still maintaining all the sacerdotalism.

Mark: So he must have thought you were from planet Mars.

Don: Well, I thought he was in some ways. I had a category for Roman Catholics and a category for liberals, but how do you become a liberal traditionalist? How do you become liberal in your basic structure of understanding of the biblical documents while still having an almost Tridentine view of the sacraments? From my point of view, it was almost bizarre. We did have some long, long conversations on those things together eventually.

Mark: What did he think of your dissertation? I know he passed it and probably said good things academically, but that you actually believed this was true and that you were going to do this much work on this topic.

Don: I remember when I had been there about six months. At first I was blown away by the atmosphere at Cambridge and probably intimidated by it, but after I had been there about six months, I was in a supervision one day, and his jaw fell open suddenly, and he said in utter disbelief, “You mean you think John wrote John?” Then we had a go-around for a long time.

Things were being challenged at a pretty foundational level. He just didn’t know people who believed silly things like that. Eventually, when I had done enough work.… He would read my papers very carefully. He was always very quick to return things. He would question things. He would direct me to sources. He was in many ways a very good supervisor, and his writing style was superb. I learned a great deal from him on that front.

He would say, “Quite frankly, Don, you know more about this subject now than I do. Keep going.” So he was a good mentor in many ways. The best of the British tradition does not require that your students follow you, unlike the German tradition, where you have to follow Herr Professor Doktor Schmidt. The best of the British tradition has never done that. It has allowed students to disagree with their mentors, and he was the best at maintaining that tradition.

Mark: My dissertation supervisor on a Puritan was a Roman Catholic, and he was a superb supervisor.

Don: Eventually, Hugh Williamson and I edited a Festschrift for him. Honor to whom honor is due, although we disagreed on so many things.

Mark: You also edited other things on controversial issues for evangelicals, like The King James Version Debate and From Sabbath to Lord’s Day.

Don: I wrote the first one.

Mark: You wrote the King James one.

Don: The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism.

Mark: Why did you take time to write that?

Don: Well, it was actually, I think, the second of my books, and I wrote it in four weeks. It was just a tract for the times.

Mark: It’s still in print.

Don: It’s still in print, and nowadays it’s read partly by some people who are still troubled by these things. It’s often read now in parts of the so-called Two-Thirds World, where denominations have sprung up planted by missionaries who come out of King James-only circles or the like, and now the new generation of Christians in those countries are wrestling with these things and they stumble across the book and it helps them. It was a tract for the times.

Mark: The other things you edited, though, the one on From Sabbath to Lord’s Day, and then the two volumes you edited on inerrancy, Scripture and Truth, in ‘83, and Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon in ‘86. Those were because of just pressing needs you saw at the time?

Don: The Sabbath one began …

Mark: The Sabbatarian crisis of the early 80s?

Don: No, not really. That one began as a Tyndale House project. There’s a long story to it, and eventually it fell to me.

Mark: It’s a fascinating volume. There’s not another one like it. I use it.

Don: Well, again, insofar as it reflects who I am …

Mark: The old and new covenant theme again.

Don: It’s how you put your Bible together, again. The two on Scripture.… I coedited those with John Woodbridge here at Trinity, and that was a singularly blessed association. We’ve done four books together. Those two became pretty standard in confessional evangelical circles all around the world.

Mark: They were helpful for me when I was a seminary student. The first one came out while I was at Gordon-Conwell, and it was very helpful.

Don: Am I allowed to talk about things that are coming out?

Mark: Sure, of course.

Don: I’ve now put together a proposal that has been accepted verbally by Eerdmans for two more volumes on Scripture.

Mark: Twenty years later.

Don: Well, 25 actually. There are so many new elements of discussion brought about in some respects by postmodern considerations …

Mark: The old volumes feel very modern.

Don: Not only modern. Some of the historical issues have changed. Issues on Canon have changed hugely. The confrontation of the new visceral atheists has changed.

Mark: When would these volumes be scheduled to come out?

Don: They’re not quite nailed down. All of the participants (there are 37 essays across the two volumes) have not quite all agreed, but I hope to get that all finalized within a month. I hope the essays will be in hand by 2010. The Henry Center here is funding everybody coming together for a week. We go over all of our essays together in the same place to strengthen them.

Mark: Like you did with the World Evangelical Fellowship.

Don: Correct, except that here I think the quality will be consistently higher, but the aim is to strengthen them all. Then another year for them to go through revision and my editing them and another year through the press, so I’m aiming 2012.

Mark: So the early teens.

Don: Yeah, probably. I hope they will become standard fare for confessional evangelicalism to think about Scripture for another 20 or 30 or 40 years.

Mark: Just to clean up concerning theology, is it fair to say that you’re not a Sabbatarian but you are an inerrantist?

Don: Yes. Although I’m not a Sabbatarian in the strict sense, I do think the New Testament does reserve Sunday as, at least by example, a designated time for corporate worship that should not be avoided. I don’t think the New Testament writers think of Sunday as the new Sabbath. I think that the drift, rather, is the ultimate fulfillment of Sabbath is the rest of God. I remember having a conversation with Jim Packer on this issue.

In actual practice, my practice of what I do on the Lord’s Day differs very little from what my more Sabbatarian friends do, but the Sabbath issue quite apart from practice, it seems to me, is a wonderful useful theme for how you put your Bible together. It shows up in creation. It shows up in the Ten Commandments. It recurs in the Prophets. It shows up in the Gospels. It shows up in the Epistles. It shows up in Revelation. It is a test case theme. Whether you think the theme itself is blisteringly important, it’s a wonderful test case for how you put your Bible together.

Mark: I want to make sure we cover what I have here to cover, but I can’t resist off-roading just for a moment. So you’re saying that the E-Free church in Libertyville biblically should not have a Saturday night service?

Don: No, I wouldn’t say that.

Mark: What if they have a Saturday night service as opposed to a service on Sunday?

Don: There is no passage that actually mandates you do a certain thing.

Mark: We don’t have passages that mandate that we believe in the Trinity, but we do.

Don: Oh yes, there are passages. They just don’t use the term, but I think there are passages that mandate belief in the Trinity.

Mark: You mean in order to make sense of Jesus speaking to his Father?

Don: Yes, that’s right.

Mark: Okay, but you see a practice of the New Testament church on the Lord’s Day?

Don: Yes, I do see that. On the other hand, even there there are enough ambiguities.… The church initially is certainly meeting on Sabbath Saturday and then probably meeting additionally on Sunday for believers only. It’s ambiguous right at the beginning. So if I have friends, as I do, serving in parts of the Muslim world who find it convenient for all kinds of reasons to meet on Friday, I’m not going to throw brickbats at them.

If you tell me that in due course, if they become a little freer, they probably should meet on the Lord’s Day to show a certain historical coalescence with the pattern of the New Testament documents.… I’m not sure they’re morally sinning if they meet on Friday.

Mark: You would just represent a gentle pressure.

Don: Yes.

Mark: In the two inerrancy books, before we leave them entirely, you’re not saying they’re so dated they’re of no use and people shouldn’t bother with them?

Don: No. I mean, the truth is still the truth, if I’m allowed to put it that way. The way you formulate it will vary with time, but if the Bible, like Jude, can speak of the “faith once for all delivered to the saints,” you have to have some category for transgenerational, transcultural truth, even if it’s shaped inevitably in a certain kind of structure.

Mark: As you were mentioning earlier, the perfectionism works by Warfield. Although you have all those specific battles we’re not fighting, it’s still really helpful what he lays out.

Don: Of course. There are all kinds of things in those two volumes that are perennial and are still being asked and talked about today. Nevertheless, there is a feel of datedness to them for people who know literature, and that needs to be handled.

Mark: It could be that your most widely read book by seminarians and preachers is.… Any guess? I have a guess.

Don: I honestly don’t know.

Mark: Guess. Just pick one. I have a guess. I want to see if yours is the same.

Don: Well, in terms of number of volumes sold, 10 years ago it was, believe it or not, still The King James Version Debate.

Mark: Really? Okay, other than that one.

Don: That’s no longer the case. Perhaps A Call to Spiritual Reformation.

Mark: Really? I would guess Exegetical Fallacies.

Don: In terms of textbooks constantly sold, yes.

Mark: When I go to seminaries, I almost always go through the textbook section, because I like to see what’s being assigned. I tell you, brother, that book is everyplace.

Don: But it is sold everywhere as a textbook, whereas some of these others are read more broadly by Christians.

Mark: Oh, I know. I’m talking about textbook for seminarians.

Don: For textbooks, yeah, that’s right.

Mark: Does it surprise you that it has been so well used for 25 years now?

Don: Well, I updated it. That helped. I might update it again. It was written at a pretty simple level for students to help students, and it is sufficiently shocking in some ways because it sort of exposes everybody’s exegetical sins, including my own, that I think a lot of teachers find it useful. At the end of the day, that book is going to sell only if teachers find it useful.

Mark: And it’s short.

Don: And it’s short, so it’s good collateral reading.

Mark: Yeah, if you’re a pastor and you preach expositionally and you haven’t read Don’s book Exegetical Fallacies, read it. You’ll profit from it.

Don: The letters from that one have been very interesting.

Mark: Have they? People giving you examples?

Don: Examples, and sometimes I file them.

Mark: You should put an appendix in for your next edition.

Don: I may, or just incorporate them with due reference to the source.

Mark: You’re going to be too tasteful to put in their real names, aren’t you?

Don: Well, I get letters from people saying, “You have no idea how much that book discouraged me.” I’ve had a lot of letters like that.

Mark: Because they feel they have been committed to the wrong way of reading their Bible?

Don: Correct. Some writing as a rebuke, and some saying, “Yeah, you discouraged me, but I’ll get there someday.” In each case, I write back and say something like, “If you agree the things the book talks about really are wrong, then, as a Christian, you ought to rejoice that it has been pointed out to you so that you will stop doing it.

This does not mean you stop preaching. It means you get down on your knees and thank God that you’re learning how to preach better. There’s no merit in being more dogmatically powerful while mishandling the Word of God. Your aim is to be a better workman of the Word of God.”

Mark: Don, when did the mustache leave?

Don: Oh, about 12 or 15 years ago.

Mark: It’s funny. I’m just now thinking of that. Anyway, there that is. Moving along.

Don: I have to tell you a story about that one. I just have to. Am I allowed stories?

Mark: Yes, of course.

Don: When our children were really small, when our youngest finally went off to school, my wife, bless her heart, went out and got her ears pierced. Now what you think about that I don’t really care, but the trouble is she came in and I didn’t notice.

Mark: Oops! Marital error number four.

Don: That’s right. My daughter, who is bubbling with enthusiasm, was sitting at the table saying, “Dad! Dad! Open your eyes,” because she had been sworn to secrecy. I said, “What is it, Tiffany? What’s the matter?” “Dad, look! Look!” Several cycles of this before I finally.… “Look at Mom! Look at Mom!” It finally dawned on me what had happened, and then I had to admire them. My wife and daughter have never let me forget that. Never. Years later, one Christmas Eve, I shaved off my mustache.

Mark: Which had been there for 30 years?

Don: Which had been there since my wife had known me. They didn’t notice for 10 days. I didn’t say anything. Finally, Tiffany noticed. “Dad! Where’s your mustache?” Well, the teasing on the front end has now changed a bit. Sort of reciprocal blindness, mutual encouragement along these fronts. Obviously, you’re the latest one on this chain. It has to be 10 years ago. I just love your detailed observational powers.

Mark: Big-picture guy, Don. One set of books you’ve edited that many of our listeners may not know of that I think they should is the five-volume set from the Theological Commission of the World Evangelical Fellowship that you did from the mid-80s to the mid-90s.

Just so our listeners know, they are: (1984) Biblical Interpretation and the Church: Text and Context; (1987) The Church in the Bible and the World; (1990) Teach Us to Pray: Prayer in the Bible and the World; (1992) Right With God: Justification in the Bible and the World; and (1994) Worship: Adoration and Action.

Peter O’Brien’s little essay on justification in Right With God was so useful for years for me. The first thing I really had critical of the new perspective to understand it well. Can you just describe this project, how it happened, and what might be particularly useful to pastors from any of these books?

Don: Some folks in the World Evangelical Fellowship, as it was then called (it’s now the WEA rather than the WEF), asked me to set up a study unit that would pull together pastors and scholars from around the world who were committed to a high view of Scripture but pretty diverse apart from that and work on a variety of projects.

The way we did it was I set out the frame of each project and assigned papers, which then came in to me, and I circulated them. This is before email, so it was all done with photocopies. Then we all went to Cambridge for a whole week and worked through all of the papers together.

Mark: I actually got to sit in a couple of those sessions once. You just invited me. It was fascinating to watch you guys working through them.

Don: With that amount of diversity.… It was fun just to watch them come into a room, the way they greeted each other. The styles of greeting are different. The styles of argumentation are different. I was always in the chair, and I would ask some dear brother from Japan, “Brother, we haven’t heard from you yet. What do you think about this question?”

Inevitably, in a culture where everybody is supposed to make sure no one loses face, he would begin with something like, “Well, is it possible that we might consider whether or not the blessed apostle Paul might have meant that …” All very low key and merely suggestion. Then somebody from Northern Europe would come back. “Oh no! It can’t possibly mean that. Clearly, what the apostle Paul is saying here is such-and-such,” and the Japanese brother would wonder what band of barbarians he had fallen amongst.

There are just differences in style that were really interesting in all of this, and differences in capacity too, in all fairness. Some were better trained than others. Then we took voluminous notes on all of that and sent back the notes with each paper. They would revise them. Then they’d come back to me. I’d edit them, and out would pop a book. One came out every two years for 10 years.

We also always tried to include two or three people in there of the caliber of Ed Clowney or Peter O’Brien. In every volume, there are some classic ones. His one on prayer and the Trinity is superb. I’ve referred people to that one again and again and again. He was not only knowledgeable, but he was very good at interacting with people from different cultures and styles with utmost respect but still bringing people back to confessionalism and to the truth of the Word and questioning their interpretations.

So Peter O’Brien was one of those stellar guys, and Ed was one of those stellar guys, but we really did have people from around the world. The books, like most books written by a variety of authors, have essays of different quality in them, but in each volume there are three or four essays that are really outstanding. Inevitably, anything that Ed wrote. So I was grateful for the opportunity.

Mark: Would there be an argument to pull together the best essays from those five and come out with it as a new volume?

Don: That’s a good thought. I hadn’t even thought of that.

Mark: It’s a good idea, Don.

Don: Yeah, it probably is.

Mark: Easy. It would make them available.

Don: Yes.

Mark: Along with Exegetical Fallacies, a book I think is a must for pastors is your little New Testament Commentary Survey, currently in its sixth edition. It feels like you do one every other year almost.

Don: It’s about every five years.

Mark: Do you ever have awkward conversations because of the trenchant comments you make? Like this. One whole series of commentaries you described it as “so elementary and so defensive on free will that it can safely be overlooked.” Don’t get me wrong. It makes it useful. I love it, but I’m thinking, “Don knows everybody he’s criticizing. What happens the next time he runs into them at an AAR meeting?”

Don: Most of them I’ve kept pretty good relationships with. There have been a few who have written very defensively. “Why did you say this?” In a couple of instances, I’ve gone back and looked, asking myself, “Have I gotten this one quite right?” I’ve tried not to be condescending or smart-mouthed but, nevertheless, to be interesting enough that the remarks are not boring.

Mark: I enjoy reading a section on Galatians or whatever, even if I’m not looking for a commentary right now. It’s just fun to see what adjectives you will put in public about somebody else’s work.

Don: I have had a few interesting letters, but most of these guys, if they’re still alive, I’m on a first-name basis with them.

Mark: Which I think makes it all the more interesting.

Don: The danger of blurbs is they don’t mean anything after a while.

Mark: That’s why I love this survey. By being willing to do that and put some strain on some personal relationships, you make it really useful, because not only do we assume you’re very knowledgeable on this topic, which I assume you are, but we also understand you’re being honest with us. That’s why, pastor, if you have not spent money on that book, that will help your preaching, because Don will save you a lot of time in looking at books and direct you to helpful ones. Honestly, when I begin a new series, I begin with that book.

Don: You’re very kind.

Mark: It’s been extremely helpful. In 1990, you came out with a little book we’ve already mentioned, which was unlike your previous books, except maybe your dissertation. How Long, O Lord? Reflections on Suffering and Evil. This has been another of those books of yours I most frequently recommend.

Don: It’s in a second edition now, somewhat updated. While I was writing that one, I was lecturing in Africa and managed to get typhoid. I was really quite ill. Then I had sarcoidosis about the same time. I was sleeping 12 hours a day. When I finally finished the book, my dear wife said to me, “Don, the Lord is telling you something. I don’t want you to write another book on suffering. I think the next book you should write should be on joy.”

Mark: Listen. We have very few minutes left, and there’s still a lot I wanted to cover. Let me see if I can do a few of these quickly. Thinking in for students, you and Doug Moo and originally Leon Morris came out with An Introduction to the New Testament in ‘92, second edition 2005. It’s my favorite New Testament intro. Not like I teach New Testament. Are you pleased with it?

Don: I’m very pleased with the second edition. Zondervan put a lot of money into it to make it look really professional. It has already gone into half a dozen other languages, more being added every year. In part, the reason it’s having this effect is because so many of the other New Testament intros.… There are dozens and dozens out there. Half a dozen come out every year.

So many of them are now so much into literary theory or into all kinds of strange things that the classic approach that actually looks at the sources is lost. There aren’t many people doing what we do from any point anymore. We’re one of the few who actually look at the fathers and quote the sources and evaluate the arguments.

Mark: It’s laid out so clearly and helpfully in each chapter. You all have done a superb job.

Don: I enjoy working with Doug too. He’s a great fellow.

Mark: In 1992, you published a book that I’ve seen have amazing effects, both from when its contents were preached.… You mention in your preface having preached them in Australia in 1990. I thought I remember hearing you give them to the CICCU in the spring of ‘88, but I’ve seen it used in amazing ways down to the very way we use it in our own church’s small groups.

The book is called A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers. Thoughts on that? What made you think of writing it? It has had a profound impact. Didn’t you preach that first at CICCU before you preached it in Australia? I think you did.

Don: I’d have to check my records, to be honest.

Mark: You say in your preface you preached it first in Australia, but anyway, people don’t care about that.

Don: That was just after my mother died. That’s another whole story too. My mother died on New Year’s Eve of 1989, and I canceled a trip. She died of Alzheimer’s. I was in England at the time, and I was supposed to fly to Sydney from England through Singapore on January 2. New Year’s Eve, my father phoned and said Mum had just gone. So of course I phoned and canceled the trip.

I was making arrangements to fly to Canada instead when my brother and father phoned and said.… Dad knew my schedule. He was the greatest prayer warrior. He said, “Jim and I have been talking.” Jim is my brother. He said, “You’ve already said your goodbyes to Mum.” She died from Alzheimer’s. By the end she didn’t recognize anybody or anything. “Would it still work if you flew here for the memorial service and then flew on?”

So I phoned Australia back, and that’s what happened. I flew west instead of east and spent two days in Canada, and then flew on and arrived in Sydney just a few hours before the first address. It really was a time of rare unction.

Mark: I remember, whenever you gave it, you giving those talks at the CICCU. I attended them, and I think I can honestly say in 30 years of watching things, I have never seen a series of sermons have such an immediate and lasting impact. The way the students prayed publicly changed from your first address. They began praying in scriptural concerns, in scriptural phrases. The sort of undisciplined, all kinds of made-up weird stuff vanished.

I continued to watch the CICCU closely for six more years after that. The culture had changed. That one set of talks completely did it. That is often the first thing we encourage small group leaders to use at our church, to just use your book A Call to Spiritual Reformation. We tell them, “Don just goes expositionally through the prayers of Paul, and they are extremely useful.”

Don: Well, it was a blessing to my own soul, and I’m grateful if God has used them.

Mark: Did your 1993 voyage into theological fiction, Letters Along the Way, fail?

Don: Yes. That’s the short answer. It failed in the sense it never was a great seller, yet probably some of the most delighted, rapturous approval letters have come from those who have read it. I don’t know what to do with that. There’s almost a cult following. Those who like it really like it, but it never really has taken off. I don’t know.

Mark: I remember you and me walking around the playing fields at Corpus in their gardens, and you were telling me about it. You were so excited about the idea, and I thought it sounded cool.

Don: John Woodbridge and I had a whale of a lot of fun doing it, and for those who have taken it on board as a kind of adjunct book for basic Christian discipleship in a novelistic setting …

Mark: “Paul Woodson.” Woodbridge-Carson.

Don: I know. And Tim Journeyman.

Mark: In 1996, you turned your Word Alive addresses from ‘94 into Basics for Believers: An Exposition of Philippians.

Don: That didn’t do well at first, and now it’s going like hotcakes. It’s almost as if it has come back to life and it has gone all around the world.

Mark: I do want to point out to people that intro essay you did on the New Bible Commentary when you revised it in ‘94, “Approaching the Bible.” I’ve again and again told people to read that as a sort of intro to looking at the Bible as a whole to biblical theology.

Don: I’ve had quite a lot of people in Britain ask if I would expand it, multiply it by a factor of three or four, and turn it into a small book for new Christians. It’s on my agenda somewhere. I just haven’t gotten around to it.

Mark: If you can find 15 minutes on a flight to do that, it would be useful. New Bible Commentary, ‘94. Is there going to be another revision soon? It’s 2008. Fourteen years.

Don: I don’t know.

Mark: Nobody has talked to you about it?

Don: No.

Mark: In ‘96, you came out with your longest work to date, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism. What prompted you to give such effort to addressing pluralism and especially deconstructionism, and did it work?

Don: I had been doing university missions for a long time, and when you do them you can’t help but observe the changes as you go. What triggered it finally was a young woman at CICCU who caught me at a Word Alive meeting and asked if I would please go and talk to some of her friends in the English department at Cambridge.

Mark: This is Sarah from Magdalen.

Don: Correct. It was Sarah from Magdalen, bless her heart. I can’t remember her last name.

Mark: Well, she married Lewis Allen, so she’s now Sarah Allen. He’s a pastor in London.

Don: In fact, I saw her a bit later and I’d forgotten her face, and I think she turned away from me before we actually talked, but in any case, she begged me to come and talk to some of her students at Cambridge at a time when the Cambridge faculty in the English department was up to its eyeball in the new literary criticism.

Mark: They were just giving Derrida …

Don: An honorary doctorate. They were all losing their faith, and would I please go along. So I said, “No, I don’t have time.” Well, she twisted my arm and twisted my arm, and I finally agreed. What I didn’t know was that Sarah, bless her heart, had put up signs all around the university. “Professor D.A. Carson: God and the Possibility of Truth.” She didn’t give me a title.

Mark: You’re talking ‘93, because I have the notes to it stuck in my Gagging of God copy.

Don: She rented the biggest hall in Magdalen College. I showed up expecting 15 students sitting around, and the place was packed. How many were there, 200 or 300? So many that they were sitting on the floor around the podium even. About 10 percent of the people in the room were dons too. They were faculty members. They weren’t just undergraduates. So I did my bit, and then the Q&A just hummed. I’ll never forget the first question.

The first question was from a don sitting on the floor behind me on the platform. He said, “So you’re saying, then, that if God knows everything and speaks the truth, it becomes something of an answer to the challenges of postmodernism?” It was so wonderful. That was the first time I decided I would do a book on it. The fact that it would draw a crowd like that with virtually no preparation, no banging the drum.… Mercifully, I had done enough work that I got through the talk all right.

Mark: Because I love pastors, I’m going to press on. We have a little bit of time left. In ‘98 and ‘99, you came out with two annual devotional volumes, For the Love of God, that because of your Scripture index I’m able to use as “Carson’s commentary on the whole Bible.” After I look at Carson on New Testament Commentary Survey or Longman on Old Testament Commentary Survey, I will inevitably go to Carson’s For the Love of God, look up the Scripture index in the back, and see what Don has said after I think I’ve figured out what it means.

Don: I’ve now committed to doing the other two volumes. If you recall, there are four columns in M’Cheyne’s reading guide. I have committed myself to doing the next two volumes too.

Mark: So pastors, this is a plug for those two: For the Love of God. They’re not just good devotional works. They are that, but they’re also really useful for you in showing you what Don says the point of a passage is, and he covers pretty much the whole Bible.

Don: While you’re on this business of indexes, pastors need to learn how to use indexes. This is really important. The volume that has come out, Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament.… Even if you’re preaching on the Old Testament, you ought to look at the index to see how those Old Testament texts have been picked up.

Mark: Of course you could, because even better than your commentaries are the New Testament comments on the Old Testament passages.

Don: That’s right, and this way you find them easily. Indexes are really crucial.

Mark: In 2000, you published a tiny little volume I have found very useful as a pastor, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God. It helpfully complexifies the Calvinist/Arminian debate, and you talk about five different ways the Bible speaks of the love of God. I use that a lot like I use Packer’s Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God. It’s a short, good introduction to the topic that will helpfully orient them in the right direction.

Don: That one has pulled in many letters from people who have really found the notion of the death and atonement not defensible, and then showing them how it can be fit into a larger framework without denying the generous, broad-open invitation to all and the sufficiency of Christ’s cross for all without exception, even if its intent is tied up with the peculiar love language of God.

Mark: Has Bruce Ware written a review of it?

Don: I don’t recall.

Mark: That would be interesting. Mark Driscoll, if you’re listening, it would be a good book for you to read. It’s a great book. I personally want to commend it to you, brother. That year you also came out with an edited volume called Telling the Truth from a conference on evangelism you organized here at Trinity. Did anything come from that conference or book?

Don: Well, just the book. The book came from it. We decided not to make this an annual event. It was a hugely fruitful time. You came and spoke on the nature of sin. I thought it was a good conference.

Mark: I thought it was a great conference.

Don: There were some people who pressed us to do it again and again, but it was one of those things that I thought …

Mark: Kind of a one-off.

Don: Yeah, it was a one-off. It did a lot of good and served a lot of people and the book is still in print, but I didn’t want to keep doing it and doing it just because the first one was fruitful.

Mark: Back to the more academic side of things, in 2001 and 2004 you came out with two edited volumes, Justification and Variegated Nomism, in which you basically tried to out-complexify the new perspective folks. Very clever academic move.

Don: Actually, there have been about eight or ten major volumes that have responded to the new perspective and dozens and dozens of shorter ones. Our two volumes were really our contribution to the whole thing. In the English-speaking world, despite Jimmy Dunn’s protest, the new perspective had largely constituted hegemony over the discussion.

What we were trying to do was say academically, “This really doesn’t work, either in the literature of Second Temple Judaism or in the New Testament.” It’s not that they’re wrong in every point. They’re right in quite a lot of points, but they’re wrong in enough points that you simply must not go down that route.

What has happened, I think, in the light of those two volumes.… They’re not light reading or devotional reading. Not every pastor should read them, to be quite frank. They’re just too long. They’re too complex. On the other hand, they had the effect, in the mercy of God, of contributing with other volumes to saying it’s not “new perspective or nothing.”

They don’t have the right to say, “This is the wave of the future.” It is now one small patch of scholars who hold that view, and meanwhile the discussion has moved on to other things. So although in some seminary circles the new perspective is still way, way up there on the agenda, in academic circles it’s now viewed as largely passÈ and shouldn’t be given too much attention.

Mark: I’ve read very little of those two volumes. I’ve read maybe six essays, maybe three out of one and three out of the other. Yours, Peter O’Brien’s, Timothy George’s, Simon Gathercole’s.

Don: Read MoisÈs Silva in the second one.

Mark: I didn’t read his. I heard it was good.

Don: It’s very good.

Mark: In 2002 we saw another helpful book come from you, your edited volume Worship by the Book. I think your introduction alone is worth the price of the book. For our interns each year, we assign them to read your introduction. Not the other chapters, though they’re interesting for pastors. Your introduction is a wonderfully balanced presentation of worship. That year you also published Love in Hard Places, which were ethical and theological meditations on the application of Christian love. Any comment on either of those two books?

Don: The worship one.… You might just assign the first essay, which was mine, but the other three were interesting as well, not least Tim Keller’s contribution in it. One contribution by a Presbyterian, one by an Anglican, one by a Free Church chap, trying to work out of the biblical theology to their own heritages. Obviously, I give a certain priority to the biblical theology, but nevertheless, the volume as a whole hangs together, and I’m grateful for the contributions of the others.

Mark: In 2005 you wrote Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church. Are you pleased with how that has done?

Don: That probably got me more hate mail than many things I’ve done.

Mark: I could tell you off-recorded stories of people in the conversation not liking the conversation.

Don: That’s exactly right.

Mark: Last year, 2007, you and Greg published the thing you just mentioned a few moments ago, your gigantic Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament. I love it. I have used parts of it. Like we were saying, the index at the back makes it so useful.

Don: We were just editors. We wrote our own bits, but there were a lot of good contributions from a lot of different …

Mark: But somebody had to have the idea and make it happen, so thank you for that. This year you came out with two very different books: Christ and Culture Revisited and Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor.

Don: Memoirs is really a book on my dad. It’s only 160 pages. It’s short. In some ways, it’s telling a story of what happened in French Canada, a part of the world that most people don’t know anything about. Although it’s telling the story, it’s designed as a book to help ordinary pastors. My father was a quintessential ordinary pastor.

Most of his life he preached to vast crowds of 30. He never wrote a book, he never preached at a national conference, he never served overseas, but he got so many of the basics right in terms of faithfulness and right priorities and concern for evangelism. He lived in very hard times. He nursed his wife, my mother, through the Alzheimer years.

You go to these big conferences, like Together for the Gospel, which are wonderful times of encouragement. There are stellar leaders there who are preaching, but a lot of ordinary pastors, about 98 or 99 percent of us, can go away feeling just a wee bit either jealous or even discouraged. “I can never do that.”

I thought it would be worthwhile to put together a book to help ordinary pastors encourage ordinary pastors. Dad would be mortified if he saw the book, but he has gone to glory. I still think that’s a good book for just helping people in the ministry get their priorities right.

Mark: I agree. By the way, Don, we’re planning to release this interview before you go to glory, if that’s okay with you, although I know it might mortify you. Brother, we’re out of time. Thank you for Memoirs. It is a good, good read. I encourage pastors to read it. I think it will be encouraging to them. And thank you for Christ and Culture Revisited. That’s a fine piece of work and really helpful in getting our minds around a very complicated topic.

Don: Thank you.