Audio Transcript

Happy Monday as we get back after it here on the podcast. Pastor John, I know one of the things you really enjoy is answering questions in front of students — open-floor Q and As. You’ve been doing this for over fifty years, and you’re still at it — currently investing in the lives of students at Bethlehem College & Seminary. This time with students is built into your schedule now. And recently, in that context with BCS students, you had a chance to walk through the theological battles you’ve fought over the decades. And I was wondering, looking back on those battles, if you could share with us here on APJ what you said in private. Rehearse those battles, decade by decade. And, if you could, tell us what points you were trying to make in rehearsing this history with the students.

As part of my happy responsibilities as chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary, I regularly participate in what we call TableTalk, where the students gather to eat their lunch and ask questions of the leaders — and I’m one of those — related to life, related to ministry, how it relates to the issues of our day. I generally begin those sessions with some thoughts off my front burner just to prime the pump of questions and throw it open to whatever the students want to talk about.

“The best way to prepare for faithful, obedient, fruitful ministry in the next fifty years is to know your Bible deeply, thoroughly, confidently, joyfully.”

A few weeks ago, I tried to make this point in my introductory comments. I said something like this, looking at the students: “Since the issues that you will be facing in ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years from now — you’ll be my age in fifty years — since those issues that you’ll be facing are utterly unpredictable, and in some cases unimaginable, your best preparation right now in your teens and twenties and thirties is to gain the spiritual and intellectual abilities to interpret God’s never-changing word in Scripture according to its true, God-intended meaning, which will never leave you speechless, never, but always provide the profoundest wisdom for every new challenge, none of which takes God off guard.”

That was my main point to try to get across to them. And then to drive the point home, I gave them a glimpse into the controversies of the last fifty years of my life and how precious the Bible has become as an absolutely sure compass for staying the course of truth and wisdom, and as an anchor to keep me from being driven about by every wind of doctrine, and as a treasure chest of holy joy that satisfies so deeply that I’m not sucked into the seductive pleasures that, on the surface, change from era to era. (They don’t really change, but the form changes.)

Decades of Controversies

Here’s part of the glimpse that I gave them into my fifty-year history of dealing with unexpected issues. But let me say at the outset that I’m not going to focus on race and abortion as one of those issues, because they’re just pervasive. I mean, for the last decades of my life, I have lived every decade with issues of race that need to be addressed and issues of abortion that need to be addressed. So, understand that those are huge issues, and the fact that I don’t mention them in the list doesn’t mean they’re absent. It means they’re everywhere.

1960s: History and Criticism

In the 1960s, I was coming to terms with the controversy surrounding fresh historical arguments for the factual resurrection of Jesus Christ. Daniel Fuller’s Easter Faith and History had been published in 1965. Wolfhart Pannenberg was making waves with his 1968 book Revelation as History, where he argued that the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth was a historical event as real as your getting out of bed this morning, which in German Bultmannian circles in the ’60s was absolutely radical. He was one of the teachers I had, by the way, at the University of Munich in the 1970s.

Hand in glove with the controversy was the whole issue of the modern methodology of critical biblical scholarship. In 1966, George Ladd published The New Testament and Criticism, where he tried to sort out what was usable in so-called higher criticism and what was contradictory to the inspired nature of Scripture. Those were crucial days for me, crucial like crux, like crossroads. How I thank God, in the ways I could have gone, that he held on to me for his glory and for his word.

1970s: Eschatology, Anthropology, and Bibliology

Then came the 1970s and three huge issues. In 1970, Hal Lindsey published The Late Great Planet Earth. By 1999, that book had sold 35 million copies. In it, he virtually predicted the second coming by 1988 — I don’t know how that book stays in print unless they adjusted it — and he popularized the pre-tribulational rapture view of the second coming. And I wrote a paper in response to this. It became very personal because my father and I locked horns over this. There’s nobody I loved more than my father, and I didn’t want to alienate him. We got along pretty well, although that book brought a lot of stuff to the fore.

In 1975, Paul Jewett published Man as Male and Female, in which he said that when Paul instructed only men to teach and have authority in the church, he simply made a mistake. Paul just made a mistake and allowed his rabbinical background to silence his radical Christian newness. From then on to this very day, I knew that’s an issue I’ll never be able to get away from, because there are more critical things going on there, more reasons to be concerned than just one.

In 1976, Harold Lindsell published The Battle for the Bible and brought to public awareness how many Christian institutions were sliding away from a commitment to the inerrancy of Scripture. In 1978, the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy produced “The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.” I wrote a review of Lindsell’s book, and I’m very happy with what happened in Chicago. I’m happy to sign on to the Chicago statement on inerrancy.

1980s: Sovereignty and Missions

In the 1980s, two controversies stand out. Professor of philosophy Thomas Talbott and I went back and forth with articles in Reformed Journal over the sovereignty of God in Romans 9. I think the titles were like, “How Does a Sovereign God Love?” I published a book on Romans 9 called The Justification of God, which focused on Romans 9:1–23. And so, the understanding of God’s sovereignty in history and in salvation dominated the early 1980s.

Near the end of the decade, the missiological controversy surrounding the new language of “unreached people groups” and whether that was a biblical way to think or not was a huge issue for me. Does the Great Commission focus on reaching as many individuals as possible, which is what I had thought, or on reaching all the ethnolinguistic groups in the world?

1990s: Open Theism

Then much of the 1990s was dominated by open theism. Does God have an exhaustive foreknowledge of the future? Open theism said no, he doesn’t. Its chief spokesman was and is right here in the Twin Cities as a pastor, and so he and I debated back and forth. We had lunch together. I wrote much, and other people wrote very good books. Thankfully, I think open theism was basically marginalized, though it hasn’t gone away.

2000s: Emergent Church

In the 2000s, the emergent church flourished for a season and then morphed into other things. I don’t think it’s entirely gone away, but it’s not the movement it was. I took two of those leaders out to lunch one time, just to give our folks a flavor of what we’re talking about with the emergent church. I said to them, “Talking to you guys is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall,” to which they responded, “That’s not what Jell-O is for.” That really gives a good flavor of how doctrinally amorphous that movement was.

2010s: Justification and Ecumenism

In the 2010s, the doctrine of justification was very controverted and prominent. I wrote a whole book, The Future of Justification, responding to N.T. Wright. On the same front, friends of mine were involved relationally in some very difficult conversations called Evangelicals and Catholics Together, which broke some hearts over how good Reformed brothers didn’t relate to Catholics in the same way.

2020s: The Swirling Decade

Which brings us then swirling into the last decade with the splintering of evangelicalism because of Trump, the realities of so-called “same-sex marriage,” the realities of so-called “gender transition,” vaccination mandates, critical race theory, systemic racism, cancel culture. None of these things can be ignored by a pastor — I think, indeed, by a thoughtful layperson — and I’ve written on virtually all of them.

Go Deep with God

But the point for that TableTalk — and maybe for this moment in Ask Pastor John — is this: if you live long enough, you will be confronted by issues and controversies that are so many and so diverse and sometimes so complex that you cannot possibly predict or specifically prepare for them. The best way for our students and our listeners to APJ to prepare for faithful, obedient, fruitful ministry in the next fifty years is to know your Bible deeply, thoroughly, confidently, joyfully.

Other studies are important, absolutely important. This study of the Bible is essential. If you have gone deep with God by means of a rigorous and accurate understanding of his word, you’ll always be relevant, and you’ll never be speechless.

Audio Transcript

Andrea, a podcast listener in Jackson, Mississippi, writes in. “Hello, Pastor John! Thank you for your books and particularly your new book on providence. It has proven to be life-altering for me. Thank you! I was wondering if you could take a moment to address an entirely different topic — a marriage question. I have started to notice an emerging view of ‘complementarity’ online, and in my own circles, which seems a little off to me. It’s called complementarity and holds to the idea that the husband and wife take on different roles in the home, roles that mostly do not overlap. But to me it often sounds like simply a functional idea. So if the wife is a better teacher, she teaches the children the Bible and the husband doesn’t. Or if the wife makes more money, the husband takes the primary role in
caring for the daily needs of the kids.

“It’s called complementarity in the sense that each spouse is not duplicating the role of the other. Each complements what the other is doing. But I don’t know what else to call it except to say it feels like a genderless complementarity. The husband and wife do not overlap duties out of efficiency, not from deeper convictions. In fact, gender, rarely, if ever, is brought in to define which roles the man has that the woman does not, and vice versa. Do you see this functional ‘complementarity’? If so, how do you respond? And what roles in the home are most gendered? I would love your thoughts on this.”

I suppose it’s inevitable that the longer a label is used — like complementarianism or complementarity — the easier it is for the label to replace the reality. The label complementarian, as a designation for how men and women relate to each other, has been around for about 35 years. I would want to stress that labels are only valuable if they capture and communicate reality. It’s the biblical reality that we really care about, not so much the label.

Distinct by Deep Design

Now, I think Andrea is right that the label today is less clear and less precise in the reality it refers to than it used to be. She’s pointing to a particular use of the label where the reality behind it seems to have more or less vanished. People are calling themselves complementarian without any serious reference to what the essence of manhood and womanhood really are and what that essence calls for in life.

“Underneath these distinctions in roles are profound differences in the very nature of manhood and womanhood.”

From the beginning, in the late 1980s, the term complementarianism included, not just the biblical conviction that men should be the elders or pastors of churches and that men should be the heads of their marriages or homes, but also the conviction that underneath these distinctions in roles there are profound differences in the very nature of manhood and womanhood. Those differences in the unique essence of manhood and the unique essence of womanhood were designed by God in creation and were the foundation for why God assigned the differing roles that he did. What we are by God’s original design in making us male and female has always been the foundation for God’s design for how men and women relate to each other and what roles we take.

So, I would say it’s a fundamental mistake for husbands and wives, or men and women in the church, or men and women in general, to define our roles and how we function in them without any reference to the deeper design of God and who we are as male and female.

Male and Female in the Beginning

Let me try to show what I mean by referring to a couple of Bible passages. For example, 1 Timothy 2:12–14: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.”

Then he gives a foundation, an argument, a ground, that goes all the way back to creation and the ruin of that creation in the fall. He says in verses 13–14, “For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.”

I take Paul to be arguing something like this: the authoritative teaching role in the church — that is, the role of governance and teaching, the role of an elder — is to be filled by spiritually mature and gifted men because God established, in the first two chapters of Genesis, a peculiar responsibility and leadership for Adam as part of God’s design for manhood and what it means to be male in his family and in the world.

Deceiving Eve

Now, we can see this design for man’s peculiar responsibility in leadership confirmed by the way it falls apart in the moment of Satan’s temptation and the way God follows up with Adam and Eve after the fall. Genesis 3:6 says that Adam was with Eve at the temptation; he didn’t show up later. But Satan, being subtle and deceptive, totally ignores the person that God had made responsible for the life of the garden — the man. Thus, Satan attacks at this very crucial moment. He attacks and undermines God’s design and turns the woman into the spokesman and the leader and the decision-maker for humanity.

Now both Adam and Eve fall for this. Adam remained totally silent when he should have stepped in and taken responsibility for this horrifically dangerous moment. Eve willingly assumes the role of responsible leader, and the result is a catastrophic failure to be obedient to God for both of them.

Now when Paul says in 1 Timothy 2:13, “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor,” I don’t think he intends to say Adam is guiltless. We know that from Romans 5, where Adam’s disobedience in fact is the decisive disobedience that brings down the curse on humanity. The point, rather, of saying “Adam was not deceived” is that Satan undermined Adam’s leadership role by not targeting Adam for deception, but rather the woman. He made her the leader at the moment of deception. The point, in the context of 1 Timothy, is this: when the roles of men and women are reversed, at the very point where leadership matters most, things go very badly for families and churches and societies.

Where Is Adam?

Now God confirms that understanding of what happened by the way he calls the couple to account. A few verses later, God comes to find them in the garden. Genesis 3:9–11 says,

The Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree which I commanded you not to eat?”

Now, why didn’t God seek out the woman first since she ate the forbidden fruit first? Because God made man first and built into him a God-given sense of sacrificial responsibility for leadership and protection and provision. He is responsible for what just happened. That’s the price of leadership.

Male and Female in Marriage

This kind of built-in, creation-based leadership for man is confirmed in Ephesians 5. This is the second text I’m looking at: Ephesians 5:23–25, 28–29.

The husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. . . . He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church.

“How the husband and wife relate is to show the covenant love between Christ and the church.”

Paul describes the relationship as irreversible. The roles are not interchangeable. Christ and the church don’t get interchanged. They are the meaning of this relationship. How the husband and wife relate is to show the covenant love between Christ and the church, and Christ as the leader, savior, protector, nourisher, provider.

Paul roots those roles in the original pre-fall creation account in Genesis 2:24, which he quotes now in verse 31: “A man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Then he applies it like this: “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it [that is, the meaning of manhood and womanhood in marriage] refers to Christ and the church.”

That’s the meaning of male and female in marriage: male and female modeling Christ and the church in roles of headship and submission that cannot be reversed any more than Christ and the church can be.

Restoring the Foundation

I conclude from these two texts — 1 Timothy 2 and Ephesians 5 and others that I’m not mentioning — that the very nature of God-designed manhood and womanhood is the foundation of the roles we are given by God. A complementarianism stripped of its foundation in the God-given essence of manhood and womanhood is a label that has lost its reality.

When it comes to the hundreds of activities in the home and who does them, that will be sorted out best where husband and wife agree biblically that the man bears a special God-given burden of responsibility for leadership, for protection, for provision in the family — all carried out in the pursuit of the amazing model of Christ’s love for the church and the church’s glad submission to Christ.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast on this Monday. Last time we were together, you said, Pastor John, that “God enlists us into his service, which means he calls us to have a part in accomplishing his purposes, not in meeting his needs.” Yes. That’s really key. He uses us — and in using us, we meet no need in God. And if that’s true, then comes this question: What do we do with all the texts that talk about what we give to God?

That’s the dilemma in the mind of a listener named Jeff, thinking about Sunday mornings. “Pastor John, thank you for this podcast. You have taught that we are to come to corporate worship gatherings hungry to receive, not to give to God, as if he needed anything. That’s Acts 17:25. Yet there are other passages related to corporate worship that clearly use the language of ‘giving.’ Like: ‘Let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name’ (Hebrews 13:15). Or ‘bring an offering’ to him (Psalm 96:8). Or, ‘Give thanks to him; bless his name’ (Psalm 100:4). How do you harmonize these two seemingly opposite perspectives on our role in corporate worship? What do we give to God?”

It’s true that I have said very often that I think pastors make a mistake if they scold their people for coming to worship to get rather than to give. That’s a mistake. They shouldn’t do that. If I hear a pastor say, “If you people would just come to give to God rather than get from God, we would have meaningful worship services,” I think that’s a serious mistake. In fact, I don’t hear that so much anymore, which makes me happy.

Now, I do suspect that such a pastoral rebuke is really onto something true. People can come to worship to get the wrong thing. They can come to get seen for their new outfit — that used to happen on Easter at the church I grew up in. They can come to appear moral in the community as an upstanding churchgoer. They can come to merely see their friends. They can come to merely take their children to get some moral instruction. They can come in the hopes that their marriage will get better. And pastors sense this wrong coming to get, and they know it’s not healthy. “My people are coming to get all the wrong things.”

But when the pastor diagnoses this problem as a disease of wanting to receive instead of wanting to give, that’s the mistake.

Godward Longing

It’s not a disease to want to receive in worship. I have argued that the very essence of worship — and not just the outward acts of worship, but the inward essence of worship — is being satisfied in all that God is for us in Jesus.

Therefore, the way people should come to worship, if I’m right, is to come hungry to be satisfied in God, to see God more clearly, to taste God more sweetly, to be amazed at the way God is, to feel the admiration and the wonder of his greatness, and to feel hopefulness and thankfulness and confidence of heart welling up because of the bounty of his grace. All that is a way of getting, not giving. And the right posture of that kind of getting is a sense of hunger and neediness and desperation and longing and praying for more of God, more of Christ, more of grace, more power. That’s the kind of getting I’m talking about.

And my point is that when we assume that kind of needy, expectant, Godward posture, God gets glory, not us. And that’s the essence of worship. And worship services and preaching should aim to awaken and satisfy that kind of God-hunger, that kind of God-getting.

Giving in Worship

But Jeff is right to ask if I am contradicting the biblical language of giving to God in worship. Of course, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to contradict the Bible. I love the Bible. I believe the Bible. I’m getting all this from the Bible.

If we read our English Bibles, we will see texts like these:

“Give praise to [God]” (Joshua 7:19).
“We give thanks to you, O God” (Psalm 75:1).
“Bless the Lord” (Psalm 103:1).
“He gave glory to God” (Romans 4:20).
“[Give] power to God” (Psalm 68:34).
“Offer up a sacrifice of praise to God” (Hebrews 13:15).

“When we assume a needy, expectant, Godward posture, God gets glory, not us.”

I know these texts are in the Bible. I love them. I aim to obey them. And I don’t think they contradict what I just said about the essence of worship as being satisfied in all that God is for us, and coming to worship services hungry to get more of God.

So, here are five quick observations to support this claim that that’s not a contradiction.

1. ‘Giving’ to God rarely appears in Hebrew.

Now, this is just a pointer; it’s not a kind of absolute statement about the use of giving language in worship. If you look up all the uses of the word “give” (which I did to get ready for this) — the Hebrew word nathan, a super common word for “give” in a hundred contexts — there are nintey-five uses in the Psalms, and only three refer to giving to God. Two of those three deny that we should:

“No man can . . . give to God the price of his life” (Psalm 49:7).
“You will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it” (Psalm 51:16).

The single text says, “[Give] power to God, whose majesty is over Israel” (Psalm 68:34). Virtually all other places in the Psalms where we read in English that we should give to God praise or give to God thanks, the Hebrew has no word for give. It’s just the word praise and the word thank, and we use the word give and so create the problem for ourselves.

None of that says we should not use the language of giving to God; I don’t want to go that far at all. But it should be a caution that maybe the psalm writers were jealous not to put God in the position of being the main receiver in worship rather than the main giver in worship, since the giver gets the glory. That’s number one.

2. We ascribe rather than add to God.

That text in Psalm 68:34 that says, “[Give] power to God” is translated in the ESV, “Ascribe power to God.” And surely that is right. So, I think what we ought to mean when we speak of giving God glory — or giving honor or giving strength or giving wisdom or giving power — is that we are ascribing those things to God, not adding anything to God. We are, in essence, receiving those things as gifts for us to enjoy, and echoing back to God our admiration and enjoyment that we call, “give God glory.”

3. Our willingness to give is a gift.

The Bible teaches that all our gifts to God — whether ourselves or our resources or our praises or our thanks — are already God’s, and he himself is giving us the willingness and the ability to give him what is his. In 1 Chronicles 29:14, when the people of Israel gave generously, David says — I remember I used to use this over and over when I was a pastor to try to encourage the right kind of giving to the church — “But who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able thus to offer willingly?” In other words, the willingness was a gift. “For all things come from you, and of your own have we given you.” Now, that means that both the thing given and the act of giving are gifts to us.

4. We are always receivers.

Paul says in Romans 11:35, “Who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” Of course, the answer is nobody. And then he gives the reason: “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever” (Romans 11:36). In other words, the Bible really wants to discourage us from thinking of ourselves as originating any gift to God. We are always receivers, even in our giving, and we should love to have it so.

5. Giving is really getting.

C.S. Lewis expresses why it is that our giving in worship is really a getting. Our giving praise to God is really getting joy in God. Here’s this famous quote that I’ve quoted so many times. I love it. “The Psalmists,” Lewis says,

in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about. My whole, more general, difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards to the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can’t help doing, about everything else we value. I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment. (Reflections on the Psalms, 110–11)

That’s the key right there.

Okay, here’s Lewis again. Praise is the joy’s “appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed” (111).

So, I end where we started. Yes, we come to worship to give praise to God, but the essence of that praise is being satisfied in all that God is for us in worship, and the overflow in outward acts is the completion of the joy — joy in God — which is a gift from God to us.