The Bible Is A Historical Document
In order for the Bible to be coherent, we really do need to have some insight into their world. It’s not that someone needs to understand their ancient setting in order to understand what the Bible is teaching, but many pieces of the full Biblical puzzle will remain missing until you start to dive into their world and thought. Which makes things much more messy and complicated than many conservatives are comfortable with.
The more I’ve thought about this simple statement—The Bible is a historical document—the more I’ve come to realize how simultaneously helpful and frustrating this reality is. On the one hand, it has tremendous explanatory power when thinking through how to read the Bible, but it is that exact same explanatory power that makes the Bible’s placement in history frustrating to both sides of the ideological spectrum.
In the conservative environment I was raised in, I was taught a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible. What you see is what you get. The “plain” reading is the most faithful reading and is all you really need. It may or may not be helpful to have some understanding of the culture at the time it was written, but it doesn’t do any good to try and get at the world behind the text because frankly, it doesn’t matter. Exactly what you read is exactly what happened, take it or leave it.
The issue here is that this isn’t how the Bible is written. The biblical authors wrote the Bible from their unique, individual perspectives, employing common and complex literary styles, and responding to the cultures around them. Before you think this is me falling off the liberal slope, this is exactly what the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy says.
Article VIII
We affirm that God in His work of inspiration utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom He had chosen and prepared.
We deny that God, in causing these writers to use the very words that He chose, overrode their personalities.
This isn’t a liberal view. This is within the view of biblical inerrancy. The Bible was written using various genres of writing, literary devices, and was aware of the world around it.
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Does Predestination Make the Problem of Evil More Pressing?
God sovereignly directs events according to his eternal and infallible plan, so that any evil that occurs—including human sin—does so only because it serves some greater good purpose. Arguably the two most striking biblical illustrations of this principle come from the story of Joseph (Gen. 45:7–8; 50:20) and the crucifixion of Jesus (Acts 4:27–28). It turns out that divine predestination is consistent with nearly every greater-good theodicy. After all, if God can have morally sufficient reasons for permitting an evil, then he can have morally sufficient reasons for ordaining that same evil.
This is a tough question to answer in a short space, not least because it ties together two complex and controversial topics! Let’s begin with some basic definitions. The problem of evil refers to the challenge of reconciling the reality of evil with the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God. If God is all-good, presumably he would want to prevent all evil. If God is all-powerful, presumably he would be able to prevent all evil. How then can God and evil co-exist?
As many Christian philosophers have pointed out, the apparent logical conflict can be resolved once we recognize that God could have morally sufficient reasons for permitting an evil; for example, if permitting that evil were necessary to accomplish some greater good. Thus, there is no inherent conflict between the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God and the existence of evil. This insight points us in the direction of a greater-good theodicy: a more detailed explanation of why God permits various evils within the world, whether natural evils (such as diseases and earthquakes) or moral evils (such as murders and rapes). Christian thinkers have developed and defended a variety of greater-good theodicies, but it’s enough for our purposes here to recognize that such theodicies exist and many of them are complementary (i.e., they can be combined to address a wide range of different evils).
So what does predestination have to do with it? The term predestination refers primarily to the idea that God, by some means, predetermines the final destinies of his creatures—either eternal salvation or eternal damnation. However, the term can also be used in a broader sense for the idea that God sovereignly directs everything that takes place in his creation. (As chapter 3 of the Westminster Confession puts it, “God, from all eternity, did […] ordain whatsoever comes to pass.”)
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A Pastor’s Public Persona
Remember that the church’s primary mission is spiritual.2 As much as you love them and as hard as it is to admit, not all your concerns are spiritual. Many are cultural. Learn discernment and wisdom about when to speak and when to be quiet. The words you might spend on your favorite candidate can quickly be redirected to explaining the Bible. You need not defend your politics as a pastor. Vote like you want. Support causes to which you are committed. But dispense with announcing it publicly. You are a herald of the king, not your own PR rep.
In many ways, the pastor lives his life in front of his people. Apart from mega-church pastors who might choose to isolate themselves from the people they shepherd (which notably does not apply across the board to every pastor of a large church),1 pastors are constantly in contact with the people of their church. This means that a pastor not only has a lot of space to influence people but also a major platform to speak about the concerns on his heart. This article essentially reflects upon the words of Spider-Man’s uncle Ben, “With great power comes great responsibility,” in application to the pastor’s public life.
My aim is not to lay out lots of prescriptive practices but to outline the ways that I have thought through this issue for myself in hopes that it might help other pastors do likewise. The reason that I think I might have a useful perspective on this issue is because of the nature of my pastoral call. I am an American, ordained in the PCA, serving overseas in London in a Scottish denomination. London being one of the world’s great cities—I am biased—it is as cosmopolitan in the literal sense as can be, filtering people from every part of the world right to our church’s doorstep.
There is a beautiful complexity, full of blessings and immense challenges, to pastoring a congregation that often has members from every inhabited continent. This complexity is owed to how every cultural assumption, every church background, and every personal opinion comes loaded with extremely different and at times opposing expectations from the church. In typical congregations, a pastor can never satisfy everyone. In our congregation, I spend immense amounts of time praying that people will be gracious and understanding as we try to keep everyone together while remaining faithful to the truth and our confessional practices. I am thankful for prayer, God’s sovereignty, and the ways that the Lord has been so deeply good to us in this respect, all the while not taking the continuation of this grace for granted.
One of the things this complexity has helped me realize, despite my failures along the way, is that the pastoral task is in no way about me. Every pastor must acknowledge this point. Yet there is a real sense in which sometimes we may need to learn the principle for our practice. John the Baptist’s words regarding the difference between himself and Christ remain the abiding guidance for every pastor after him: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” (Jn. 3:30) What does this mean in practice though?
Pastor, there are countless things that matter deeply to you. God has wonderfully made you to be who you are in all your skills and interests. We cannot discount that. Still, not every passion of our heart belongs to the public sphere, depending on how that affects the way we serve and minister to God’s people. We at times must filter even the things that matter deeply to us from our public persona in order to best serve the church.
Perhaps an example would help. As an American, I hold specific values according not only to my culture but also my political positioning within that culture.
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Of the Danger of Too Many On-Line Sermons
On-line preaching can be tremendously helpful. But it brings with it a few dangers. Watch out for false and novel teaching. Watch out for the temptation to find a teacher, any teacher, any teacher at all, who agrees with you and goes against what others are telling you. Use your resources wisely. But do not let your resources take you out of faithful Christian living in your local church. Do not daydream about having a legend for a pastor or feel the urge to reshape your pastor into your favorite conference personality. Be grateful for faithful teaching, but do not assume that simply consuming content has sanctified you.
Preach the word! The Lord commands it. The body is blessed by it. The sermon is a good and necessary thing for the life of the believer.
In today’s world, the believer has access to more of the preached word than ever before. We can read books of collected messages. We can stream our favorite Bible teachers. We can turn on RYM Radio and hear teaching all day long. We can Google the Internet (I hear that’s what the kids call it), and find videos of pastors of small churches we will never hear of in any other way.
But, as a pastor, one who preaches weekly (and hopefully not weakly), can I warn you of a danger or two in too much on-line sermon consumption? I’m quite grateful for the resources that the Lord has placed at our fingertips, but I fear that some believers may move from being helped to being harmed by their consumption of material on-line.
I Know a Secret
One danger of on-line sermons that I think we would all agree on is the risk of consuming false teaching. This is more likely when a believer is listening to a pastor or scholar about whom they know nothing. If you are listening to a message or reading an article written by someone whose scholarship is not being checked by others, you run the risk of novel and even dangerous teaching.
One of the attractions of many an on-line message is the fact that it teaches you something you have never heard before. It is possible to run across a man who is translating the Hebrew of Genesis for himself and saying things about what it means to be human that no faithful teacher has ever taught. If a believer is not careful here, he or she may come away with a damaging, false belief that was all the more dangerous for feeling like it was something secret that no other teacher has brought forth.
I’d bet that you have heard of the problem of Gnosticism in the early church. Among the dangerous beliefs of the Gnostics was the ego-boosting belief that they possessed secret knowledge that was not available to the general public. It was easy for folks to love the fact that they were let in on the stuff that other, ordinary people could not grasp. See any similarities to how some folks feel about that special teacher they have found on-line?
Choose-Your-Own-Doctrine
Do you remember choose-your-own-adventure books? These were popular before video games took the idea to a whole new level. A reader would follow the story of a hero until a particular turning point: enter the cave or climb the mountain? The reader would turn to a different page of the book to find out what happened to the hero depending on the choice the reader made for the hero. Perhaps the cave contained a dragon. Perhaps the mountain led to a castle and a princess. The point was to give the reader a sense of adventure by being able to pick the kind of story he or she wanted to read.
Similar to the draw of novel and dangerous doctrine is the temptation to pick and defend your own favorite teaching. Sometimes people will have a particular point of doctrine they want others to agree with. Instead of examining faithful teaching of faithful teachers, the eager learner will scour the Internet for the one teacher who says it just the way they want to hear. Want to find that Calvinist who dunks on your Arminian friends, no problem. Want to find that Arminian preacher who makes your Calvinist friends look like cold-hearted robots, piece of cake. Want to find somebody who interprets a particular passage in accord with your strange preferences? This one might take a bit more work, but the Internet is a big place, and lots of people have said lots of crazy things over the years; so it can be done.
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