Preaching and Biblical, Systematic, Historical, and Pastoral Theology (Part 3a)

Don Carson delves into the relevance of historical theology to preaching. He emphasizes how understanding the theological interpretations and systematic theologies of the past can expand a preacher’s horizons, connect them with the broader church history, and enable better engagement with different cultures. Carson argues that this historical awareness can also aid in understanding and addressing contemporary theological issues more effectively.

---

Last day I ended with some reflections on the nature of history, and now I want to talk about the relevance of historical theology to preaching. I’m going to go quite quickly so there’s time for discussion and then time to get to some similar reflections on pastoral theology in a few moments.

1. Historical theology as we’ve seen is the discipline that informs us of the exegeses and, especially, the systematic theologies of previous ages.

That’s what we’ve seen. Thus, the study of historical theology expands our horizons. It connects us to the whole church. It enables us to experience other cultures.

We live in a pretty mobile society so somewhere along the line most of you in this room, I’m sure, will visit other countries or even other parts of Australia that are different or.… Moreover, our big cities nowadays.… Let’s be quite frank. There are many different cultures within them so the cultures have come to us. We are exposed to a variety of different cultures already, but the potential for expanding our horizons is huge with the knowledge of a little bit of historical theology.

You are not going to meet a full-blown Gnostic on the streets of Melbourne; nevertheless, the Gnostic heresy was the biggest threat to the Christian church from centuries 2 to 4. That’s saying quite a lot, isn’t it? To know something about it is to know something about what kinds of questions were raised doctrinally and how people handled them and, maybe, even to read some of the primary sources which are all available in translation nowadays.

Thus, to spend at least a little bit of time on historical theology is to expand our horizons, to expand our knowledge of peoples and cultures and the movements of God in times past, and this can be focused in certain themes that might be of interest to us. For example, to spend a little bit of time studying the Great Awakening or times of revival or the impact of Wilberforce and Shaftesbury in the time of the Wesley brothers and Whitefield.

Even to read some really good biographies.… One of the greatest biographies I ever read was Arnold Dallimore’s George Whitefield. Two fat volumes, but superbly researched and written in an edifying way. There are not many research biographies that move me to tears, but that one did. You read some of what goes on and you start weeping and praying, “Lord, do it again!” Do you see?

You can get something that is all over the map and not very reliable, but this is really reliable. It’s primary source stuff all the way, so to be exposed to men and women and movements and periods of time and so on is very good for expanding our horizons and visions.

2. Historical theology teaches how certain issues become central in different ages and, thus, helps us understand our own age a little better.

I’ve just mentioned from centuries 2 to 4 Gnosticism, but that meant there were huge issues about Christology, the nature of Christ, how to understand him.

Of course, at the time of the Reformation the big issues included not only justification but authority. Where does the authority lie? The locus of revelation? Then a little later truth and epistemology questions and the authority of Scripture, which continue in some way down to our age.

It’s not as if justification was never thought about before. Tom Oden has come out with a little book called The Justification Reader, in which he collects a lot of material on justification in the patristic period and shows how many things were actually taught. It’s not as if the Reformers though up justification. Do you see?

You can find these things talked about in every age; nevertheless, the precision and the hard work and the detailed exegesis are likely to take place when things are being denied, so The Justification Reader shows there is a rootage all right in the fathers. That’s right. We should become aware of that, but for a whole lot of serious thought that is much more typical of the Reformation period.

So you start asking, “What is it that is dominating our concerns? What do we most have to think about in our age and time?” That’s a legitimate question to raise. There are stingers in the tail to this observation. This is not for the preacher, but I’ll throw it out as a bonus. A few years ago I read a book by James Burtchaell called The Dying of the Light. It’s over 800 pages.

It is an examination of the history of those American seminaries and universities that began as Christian institutions and became flat-out liberal. So Princeton, Harvard, Andover, Yale, and so on and so on all started off as Christian institutions. What were the steps that got them from here to here? Do you see?

It’s worth reading. Now 800 pages are probably too much for you to sit down and read right through. You might want to just skim bits and pieces of it, but one of the things that is interesting in the book is the observation that in every case the institutions were founded by pastor/scholar/entrepreneurs. Scholars, the good minds, who were pastors, they had pastoral care for people, and they were entrepreneurs so they managed to get something going. Do you see? A pastor/scholar/entrepreneur.

Eventually, the success of the institutions meant they needed administrators to run them. Pastor/scholar/entrepreneurs are rarely good administrators as well, so a generation, two generations, or three generations down, they need somebody who is a really first-class administrator.

Of course, the board is going to be careful and is going to choose an administrator who is orthodox, maintaining something of the vision, but when you start talking about orthodoxy, orthodoxy, by definition, is always measured by the past. It’s by a previous statement of faith, by an earlier set of debates, so an administrator may be trained well enough in that particular orthodoxy from the past, but that does not mean he has any sort of discerning experience and theological acumen to discern his own times, to understand what’s going on now.

For example, I don’t think at Trinity, where I teach, we’re in any great danger of getting a president who is a 1920s liberal. There’s not a chance! I mean, it’s just not going to happen, but unless people are extremely careful we could get a president who is completely undiscerning about the new perspective on Paul, let’s say, or on other things that are circling around in our generation. You allow in some of that, and out of that matrix you appoint your next guy, and within two or three generations you really can be heterodox and you’re not even sure how you got there. Do you see what I mean?

Which means Burtchaell is calling for keeping people at the top who are pastor-theologians and have the administrators under them rather than making the administrators at the top. Such a small point, but it’s another way of saying that different ages are debating, denying, or affirming certain kinds of things, and to have some feel for those changes can raise your consciousness enough to make you a better reader of your own times.

3. Historical theology teaches us that God has more light to break from his most Holy Word.

This is a direct quote from Benjamin Warfield. He has more light to break from his most Holy Word. That needs to be understood. It does not mean people are going to find stuff in the Bible that wasn’t really there. You’re just reading stuff into it. You’re bringing your own presuppositions and just bouncing your presuppositions off the text and so on.

Nor does it mean the Bible is an esoteric sort of book with magical little bits and if you just get the right key you’re going to find some new magical little bits. What it means is every generation tends to bring its own biases and questions to the text, and in part, you hear what the text is saying as a refraction of what you have asked the text to speak to.

Really, really good readers are trying to understand the text well enough so they ask the right questions about the wrong questions, but that was part of our discussion this morning from whoever it was at the back. That is, is it right to shape your sermon out of the felt needs of our age?

Well, yes. I mean, it’s not bad, but the real question is not where you start; it’s where you’re going. I mean, if all you hear from the Bible is how it answers the felt needs of our age, it’s going to diminish what the Bible is actually saying. You may not be listening to the Bible in its own terms.

In some measure we all do that, and in some measure we all ought to be fighting it and try to be as careful and open-eared as possible, but in some measure it’s an entailment of our finitude, and that means sometimes a new generation that comes along and asks slightly different things is going to be hearing slightly different things too. In that sense, there may be more light to break from the Word than is actually there that we just don’t hear very well.

A few years ago the Africa Bible Commentary was published. It’s a one-volume commentary on the whole Bible published by Zondervan and sold really cheaply in Africa. The majority of the authors of all of the commentaries on all the biblical books are Africans themselves, most of whom have some advanced training in this book, with a few Westerners who are missionaries, would have lived there for 30 or 40 years, and really think like Africans in many respects.

When this was published it was touted widely in the West as, “This is bringing new light and new perspective and fresh insight. This shows you how the Bible means different things to different people.” That’s the way it was advertised and pushed. I read it. I didn’t read every page, but I read dollops of it, and in fact maybe a quarter of the writers I knew. Some of them we had trained at Trinity at the end of the day.

It’s true there were some things you normally don’t find in Western commentaries … a lot more in the Gospels, for example, on demon possession and exorcism and, in Pauline material, biasing things toward the communitarian rather than toward the individual. There are some shticks like that, but what was of great encouragement to me was the overwhelming majority of the material was just plain straight good old-fashioned gospel truth that could be read in Africa or Australia or America.

After all, there is some solidity to the text. You don’t want to keep playing this postmodern game where you’re emphasizing the diversity all the time. The advertising was not really good advertising for what the book was actually doing. It was a pretty good one-volume commentary with a particular sort of flavor of application toward African countries.

Having said all of that, warning against this endless emphasis on diversity, nevertheless it is refreshing to read some slants on some things that come out of experience of the demonic world in the great continent of Africa that we don’t even think about here in our secularized society. Do you see? God has more light to break from his most Holy Word, and historical theology helps you see that.

4. Historical theology reminds us some errors and heresies recur, albeit with modification.

Well, you don’t want to spend a whole lot of time studying Arianism, do you? But most of us face JWs. Well, you don’t want to spend a whole lot of time on Gnosticism, do you? But Peter Jones writes about the new Gnostics all the time. He overdoes it just a bit, but there are some parallels all right.

You don’t want to spend a whole lot of time on Socinianism, do you? There’s a fair bit of contemporary liberal thought in their new understanding of accommodation and so on that is directly Socinian. And so on and so on and so on.

A bit of historical theology.… You face an error, and it is helpful to realize you are not the first generation to face that. People have thought this one up before. Sometimes they’re older books and older communities, older heritages of literature, and so on that can really say a huge amount that’s very helpful in this regard. What we have to do in our generation is update it.

5. Historical theology helps to show us what doctrines are paradigm-independent.

I’ll explain that. Historical theology shows us what doctrines are paradigm-independent or, better put, what doctrines show up under every paradigm. Let me give you an illustration that will explain what I mean.

In the last 30 or 40 years there have been quite a lot of books that have tried to argue that inerrancy, for example, is the product of.… Then you fill in one of the gaps. Some of them say it’s the product of Scottish Common Sense Realism. It wasn’t there at the time of the Reformation. It was invented in the 1800s because of Thomas Reid, and Scottish Common Sense Realism had an impact on the Princetonians.

Others say it’s the product of [whatever, whatever, whatever]. Do you see? Implication: You don’t need to hold to inerrancy. It’s a late addition to a high view of Scripture. Nobody held it before these guys came along, and they got things wrong because they had a certain kind of paradigm of how the universe works or how science works or how reason works or something. Then the doctrine is filtered through that, and the doctrine gets shifted.

There’s no doubt doctrines can get shifted because of the prevailing paradigm, but in this particular case, John Woodbridge wrote a book to respond to this called Biblical Authority. It has just been reprinted again. If this is a subject of interest to you, go and sell your shirt and buy that one too. John Woodbridge probably knows more about the primary sources of the history of the doctrine of the Bible than anybody on God’s green earth.

It’s a 250-page book, and all the sources are primary, so he works through what Jerome thought and what Augustine thought, and he quotes all the primary sources all the way through. He shows by different names, and so on, that what we in the sophisticated view call inerrancy was there in different paradigm after different paradigm after different paradigm.

In other words, the doctrine is there regardless of the paradigm. It’s paradigm-independent. Or, better put, it shows up in every paradigm. It’s not something that was invented by the Scottish Common Sense Realists and imposed on the Western church by the Princetonians. It’s bad history to do that.

Just as you can have good biblical theology and bad biblical theology and good systematic theology and bad systematic theology, you can have good and bad historical theology. Don’t be too quick to believe everything you read about history. Believe a little more closely those who rely most on the primary sources.

On the other hand, some knowledge of these sorts of debates will help you to become aware of major doctrines that keep showing up in every paradigm, in every worldview, in every period of the church. Why should that surprise us? Doesn’t Jude himself insist we are to hold on to the faith once for all delivered to the saints? Do you see? There is something stable about the whole thing.

6. Historical theology provides a plethora of moving and useful illustrations that enrich exposition while drawing believers into a bigger world.

In other words, all of our illustrations don’t have to come from the last five minutes … or even the last five years. They can go beyond what you can put in a tweet.

In the account of Athanasius moving to one of the councils (I think it was first Nicaea) where they’re debating on the nature of Christ. Is he truly God or not? He had been stalwart on what was called eventually the orthodox side. One of his friends told him as he traveled there, “Don’t you realize the whole world is against you?” He replied, “Then it’s Athanasius against the whole world.” That could be supremely arrogant or it could be merely the mark of someone who has done his homework and trusts the Word of God.

It’s the same with Luther, of course, when he’s asked at Worms to recant. He didn’t say, “I will not!” He said, “Could I have a night to think about it?” That’s what he said, because he realized he was taking on what seemed to him to be the whole world, and he spent the night in tears and prayer rereading Romans. The next morning is when he said, “Here I stand. I can do no other so help me God.” Do you see?

Those sorts of narratives can flesh out our appreciation for the importance of maintaining the truth and courage against prevailing views in the culture because we’re convinced of what the Word of God says and so forth. Or John Newton. Did you see the film, Amazing Grace? Did that circulate down here? A lot of it was pretty good. There was one part of it that was miserably wrong. It was wretched in that it pictured the call to serve Christ by working for the abolition of slavery.

It pictured it as that which took over the hero’s life, whereas historically, both Wilberforce and Shaftesbury, although they gave themselves to these sorts of things, they were first and foremost gospel men. Wilberforce had devotions morning and evening. He taught Sunday school classes. In teaching people to read, he was evangelizing constantly.

He wasn’t just interested in stopping the slave trade. His work was instrumental finally (although it happened just after his death) in ramming through the Great Reform Bill of 1832. He was interested in prison reform and debt reform and kids down in the mines and so on. In all of this, he was first and foremost a strong evangelical Christian, but you don’t get that from the film, although there were some bits that were terrific.

One was John Newton saying, “I know just two things: I am a great sinner and Christ is a great Savior.” That was preserved. That was Newton all right. Small wonder then when he describes how, in his nightmares, he still hears the 20,000 slaves screaming in his dreams. Out of that he writes, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.” To tell something of the background of the story enriches the whole hymn, too, doesn’t it?

Or one of my favorites from him. I don’t have it exactly, but I looked it up the other day and the exact form is too wordy and Old English, but it basically is saying, “I am not what I want to be, I am not what I ought to be, I am not what one day I will be, but I am not what I was, and by the grace of God, I am what I am.” I mean, that’s just invaluable. It understands Christian sanctification in one pithy statement better than anything I know. John Newton.

Or Irenaeus’ Against Heresies. The 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth was last year, and that gave lots of opportunities for more stories along these lines. I don’t know if you used any of them, but that was a great time to do it. The impact of that man on the world is just about past calculation. The way Calvin is presented as a bore, without sense of humor, dour, a fatalist, and so on, is historical rubbish of the first water, and to enliven it with a few stories is terrific.

I have a pastor friend. Most of you will know the name. Mark Dever. Does that name mean anything to you? Mark Dever is pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC. It’s about a 10-minute walk from the Supreme Court and a 5-minute walk from the Capitol. He’s an expositor through and through. His own PhD was on Richard Sibbes, so he’s one of the rare Puritan scholars who actually can address the twenty-first century.

He’s a good, solid, steady preacher, but his greatest strength, in my view, is his mentoring of young men. He’s one of the best mentors of young men I have ever seen. He’s absolutely terrific at it. He has various circles of young men with him. He takes six at a time … full-time, supported, and paid for through a foundation … through what he calls an ecclesiological boot camp. It’s really very impressive.

One of the things he does is he takes about 20 at a time through a whole year of meetings once a week where all they’re doing is reading primary sources through 20 centuries. For example, the first Tuesday they would read, let’s say, some Ignatius. The second week, maybe, some Irenaeus. By February they have three or four weeks on Augustine.

You keep working on so by the time you get to May you might be in Luther and Calvin. By the time you’re in September you’re into Edwards and Whitefield and people like that. By the time you come to December you’re into Packer and Stott and so on. All primary sources. No secondary sources.

Some of it they read in advance; some of it they read to each other. He mixes up the kinds of literature. Some of it is sermons. Some of it is theological treatise. Some of it is polemics. Some of it is devotional literature. Luther’s famous letter to his barber on how to have your devotions. He mixes this stuff up. Can you imagine the kind of theological education you’ve got in that?

Our students at Bible colleges don’t read that stuff. They’re so busy reading textbooks that dance over the top of things they never read the primary sources. Do you know what I mean? Can you see what that’s doing? At the end of the day they’ve come through an entire, massive education with a feel for being in contact with other minds in the Christian church.

You can’t do that in every church. There are some churches where there are no readers at all or very few readers, but even if you have two or three (that’s all, in your church) and if they have any interest in history, it’s pretty easy to set a schedule like that up. For a while we set up two or three schedules like that on The Gospel Coalition website.

I think it’s pulled down now, but we’re going to have to put it back up again … just what you might do over 52 weeks as something to read. You’re not going to bring your whole church through that. It wouldn’t be a good idea to bring the whole church through that. It wouldn’t be the best use of time, but for those who have potential for leadership and stretching.… It might be good for some of you too! It wouldn’t take all that much.

7. Historical theology helps us see how believers have lost the gospel, either by addition or by subtraction.

In other words, historical theology, if you’re looking at not only the great moments of the church (times of revival and reformation and great years of the faith) but also times of declension and what happened and why, then you start discerning sometimes the gospel can be destroyed by subtraction as people start denying this bit and then that bit and then another bit and then another bit until there’s very little left.

But you can destroy the gospel by a kind of addition, so that, “Yes, yes, yes, I believe the gospel, but for real, real maturity you have to have a certain kind of counseling technique, or for real growth in Christ you must have a certain kind of asceticism spirituality that becomes monastic at times, or you must have something or other.”

Then you’re suddenly adding in works righteousness to the gospel about how you really are accepted before God and so on. It’s not that there might be nothing to be learned from such things, but at the end of the day, suddenly you’ve destroyed the purity and the power of the transforming grace of the gospel itself, and a wise reading of historical theology can alert you to those sorts of things. At its best, combined with all the other kinds of studies, historical theology reminds us we serve Christ who says, “I will build my church.”

There is a lot to frighten us: Islam; astonishing birth rates in the Western world that mean, if present rates continue, Islam will take over Europe within 50 years; war; deaths; endless stupidities ecclesiastical and otherwise, and yet the whole history of the church reminds us, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

Are there any questions or comments about historical theology?

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: I read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs when I was a teenager. Just about nobody reads the original, because the original is about that thick, so it’s always some edited-down version, and the original book, of course, ends in the 1800s. I have forgotten just what date. There are some updated versions with extra little bits in, so I don’t mind passing that on to some people.

For people who want to know more about contemporary martyrdom the book Killing Fields Living Fields by Don Cormack on what takes place in Cambodia is very, very moving. The story still hasn’t been written, for example, in southern Sudan, so there are some contemporary things that need to be read. I’m gradually collecting stories on what is going on in Iran. I have some very close friends who work in the underground church there.

One does not want to work just on the far past. There have been more Christian martyrs in the last 150 years than in the previous 1,800 combined. There have been more Christian conversions in the last 150 years than the previous 1,800 combined. One needs to be aware of the scope and range of these realities.

The other thing is, although it is certainly helpful for some people to read some of these accounts (that’s right), people who read these accounts regularly or go to the websites where they’re keeping a constant track today on the persecuted church.… I’m glad somebody is doing it, and I go to some of the sites too, once in a while. If you do it all the time, you can get really depressed.

I mean, depressed so you’re not being faithful anymore. You start thinking, “Woe is me. I am undone.” You’re not seeing what God is doing. The fact of the matter is, though, the gospel is keeping ahead of population growth in every continent except Europe. There is a lot to be grateful for, too, so you want to mix your reading between the triumph of grace and the realities of persecution and so on.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Well, the response is really what I gave you. That is to say, this is not thinking up new things, making the Bible say something different, or making the Bible contradict itself or anything like that. It is merely admitting some questions we haven’t asked before, and then we may hear the Bible saying some things we haven’t heard because we haven’t asked.

In this particular case, just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s true, so you still have to do the exegesis to see what the Hebrew words are and the Greek words are and what the flow of the argument is. If it’s not homosexuality but it’s a certain kind of pedophilia and it’s not any kind of pedophilia but that belongs through a slave relationship, and so on.

You try and narrow it down so you wash it all away, and then somebody comes along and does some decent linguistic work and shows that’s a pile of rubbish. This isn’t Warfield. This isn’t where Warfield is going at all. That’s a manipulative use of Warfield to justify getting the Bible to say anything I want it to say with a contemporary agenda.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: I don’t have that one down here, but I bet you could plug it into a Google search and find it.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Yeah. Again, it’s very hard to predict the future. There is currently in preparation a Latin American one-volume commentary, and there is an Asian commentary series that is published in English because it’s the only common language but all written by Asians. There’s more of this stuff coming out, and in one sense you really want to applaud it because you don’t want theology or commentaries and so on to be dominated by the white Anglo-Saxon West.

This is good, but where it’s most encouraging to me is where you have such people who really are trained well in listening to texts and so on and so on. A few years ago I used to say.… I no longer say it because it’s no longer quite true. A few years ago I used to say it was very difficult to find a sub-Saharan, black African who could preach Romans. They could preach narrative texts superbly, but they couldn’t preach Romans.

Then Lloyd-Jones has something like 75 volumes of sermons published. Do you know how many of them actually treat narrative texts? One. So the Western tradition really loves the discursive and so on. Now he included all kinds of narrative snippets and bits of history and narration and so on in the sermon, but in terms of treating narrative texts (eight volumes on Romans and six volumes on Ephesians and so on and so on), that’s what he specialized in.

I just couldn’t find many Africans who could handle Romans, and Lloyd-Jones obviously either didn’t want to or couldn’t handle narrative texts. That’s changing today. It’s changing massively. It doesn’t mean every change has been all good. I mean, there have been some really bad handlings of narrative texts by Westerners and Africans both.

On the other hand, one of the best preachers I know in Africa, Conrad Mbewe.… We’re having him to speak as one of the plenary speakers at the next national conference of The Gospel Coalition. He’s superb, just superb, and he can handle Romans and narrative texts. He’s from Zambia. He’s just terrific, so if guys like that get more leadership then you’re going to get the best of rigorous exegesis, theology, confessionalism, and African flavor and Asian flavor and whatever.

It’s just too difficult to predict who the dominant voices are going to be down the road, but it’s never inappropriate to keep calling back to the Bible. “Hear the Word of the Lord. Hear the Word of the Lord.” Are you getting that from the Bible, or are you getting that from …? I mean, I was in South Africa two or three years ago and I was asked to speak at what I call the Grace Baptist Conferences. They meet in two or three centers.

I went to all of these centers, and nominally it’s for everybody … whites, blacks, and coloreds … those are still the categories they use, but there were relatively few blacks and coloreds at them, and I made sure on the way out I spent another week in Soweto working only with blacks and coloreds.

It was another world entirely, but there the temptations for false theology were different. You could hear people praying in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and the ancestors. Well, there’s no way you can justify that biblically. There’s just no way you can justify it. You just can’t.

So just because it happens to be African (and they might not like a white person telling them they can’t do that), at the end of the day it’s the Word of God that has to clean that one up. There’s only one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. It doesn’t get justified just because it’s African and in Africa, just as theology over here doesn’t get justified just because it’s Anglo-Saxon and was invented in Europe. It might be wrong.

You still have to test everything by God’s most Holy Word. I would like to think, ideally as you get more of a tilt, there will be more enrichment, better exegesis, and more colorful, expansive handling of Scripture, but on the other hand, constrained by what Scripture actually says. That’s what I’d like to think happens. In fact, it will probably be messy with lots of good and bad just as there’s lots of mess today from Europe for both good and bad.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: It’s not bad. I don’t always like his collection. It’s almost too narrowly theological, whereas the other thing of having some devotional stuff and some polemics and some sermons and some advice to a barber.… To my mind it was a more colorful thing to do, but you’re right. Alistair’s book is a good starting point. That’s exactly right.

Male: You mentioned Mark Dever’s gospel account, the ecclesiastical boot camp version of that. Is there a way we can get our hands on that?

Don: I don’t know for sure, but if you go to Mark’s site.… He is a counseled member of The Gospel Coalition, but the place where he does this on his own site is 9marks.org. It gets its name from one of the early books he wrote called Nine Marks of a Healthy Church. Normally, I detest books with that sort of title. You know? “Nine marks of a healthy church.” Or, “Fifteen ways to be happy though married.” Those sorts of things. They’re normally really revolting but, in fact, his Nine Marks of a Healthy Church is a very, very good book.

It’s chock-full of biblical theology. Are you familiar with that book here? If not, that’s another one you sell your shirt for. You’re not going to have any shirts left. It’s a very good book, so out of this came the organization, 9Marks, where he spends a lot of time.… He doesn’t go to big conferences very often, just once in a while, but he spends a lot of time with pastors helping them think through these sorts of principles.

If you go to his website you may find something posted there, and if not you’ll find a contact email. If you say you’ve heard about this sort of historical reading scheme and does he have a list somewhere that he’d be willing to share, or something like that, maybe one of his guys would get back to you.