Panel Discussion and Q & A with D. A. Carson, Stan Fowler, and Craig Carter

invite uh my a few people to join me here on the panel which is dr carson dr carter and dr fowler all going to come up and join me up here and as they uh come up it's a delight not only to have um don carson uh up here with us today but also to have uh stan balor and craig carter stan dr fowler is teaching at uh heritage college in seminary and dr carter is at tyndale university and seminary and um i'm going to do a bit of a some highlights here that's what's on my lap and then i'm going to walk us through some questions that have come my way but in terms of resources in in the bookstore kevin deyoung has written a book called taking god at his word it's an outstanding book i read it a couple of years ago it's accessible there's only a couple of copies left but if you want to order a copy of this book they'll give it to you at the discounted rate and um and they'll mail it to you for free they'll ship it to you for free um i know this is a book when you and i are going back and forth on email um dr carson that you appreciate any comment you want to make about it it's good okay okay um it it has potential for being in this generation what jim packer's little book was 60 years ago fundamentalism of the word of god it's not it's not erudite it's not complicated it's not long it's it's a generalist volume but it is readable accessible helpful for shaping a new generation good and then this is a book i've read as well it's it's by dr carson it's the collected writings on scripture it's an outstanding book covers a variety of topics and it's worth getting and and it again i think is quite accessible there's um some chapters at the end where uh where dr carson comments on some other works that are out there that is worth reading but a number of the chapters earlier on in here are just outstanding and then another book he's edited now speaking of kevin deyoung's being short this one isn't um it's a bit bigger now i haven't read this whole book i've read about 800 pages of it i'm not done but that tells you the length of this book it's edited there are a number of incredibly helpful chapters in here and at the end dr carson actually goes through i don't remember how many questions but you might you might go through 60 questions i don't know there's a lot and and i just wrote them i didn't count on scripture and they're actually quite helpful and so these two books if you're interested this is more of a resource i would say it's not typically one that you read cover to cover though i have i'm in i'm almost done that i guess but it's a resource where different chapters in the book reflect on different areas that you may come across and try to understand authority of scripture and what that looks like and it's a helpful resource that way and so if you're interested in getting that you can order it at the bookstore they'll ship it as well do you want to comment on either of those books that you've edited oh that book is full of hidden blessings i mean you can use it as a door stop for example you you can you can use it when you're when you're uh getting exercises it'll it'll improve your cardiovascular system and probably if you want to go to sleep at night you can use it for that too uh all kinds of blessings so so one if he's doing this just my my truck i live downtown and a few weeks ago my truck was broken into i was away in myrtle beach my son was home my truck was broken into and uh it was sitting in the back seat of the truck and they didn't take it i don't know why there was not much in the truck there was probably four dollars in change and whatever and they wrestled through they took bungee cords i had in there and a tarp and they left the book i i would have let them have they could have had my highlights you have a lower class of criminals here [Laughter] so i've i've had some questions that have been sent uh my way and then some have written out some and so we're going to just dialogue and there's we talk briefly ahead of time but there's not like a prescription here for who's going to answer what questions i'm just going to start tossing out questions and then we're going to see who wants to take which one first but um the first question i'm going to ask is this are are the terms inerrant and infallible still useful and how would you define them and in what context would you still use them well yes we're trying to define the full truthfulness of scripture um we have to have some words to use now obviously whatever word we use whether it's a fully truthful entirely true [Music] um um [Music] is but it's about saying we can trust scripture in such a way that whenever we understand well i think we can say that inerrancy and and authority of scripture are very important words and if we think about what inerrancy means when we talk about scripture being imprecise in certain ways it is nevertheless as exactly as precise as it needs to be and this is something that we we need to build up our understanding of scripture inductively by reading it and studying it and and comprehending it and as we do that we realize that the message that that god is speaking to us in the scripture is adequately and precisely conveyed in exactly the way that it needs to be conveyed sometimes in order to say it um [Music] sometimes as dr carson mentioned earlier sometimes the god dictates things exactly and the prophet writes them down or he shows the prophet something and the angel says write this down and that level of precision is apparently necessary at that point and it often occurs when there's a lack of understanding that when something is happening very foreign to the writer of scripture's experience something that the writer of scripture does not really understand or or appreciate easily but it's something foreign and different and new and startling and perhaps not fully comprehensible then god needs to specifically guide what is written in a way that is not as important for him to do when he has by providence prepared that scriptural writer through education and background and and so on to be able to say something that is exactly what god wants to be said but it isn't as necessary for god to be as precise and in the way that so it's all whether it's by miracle or by ins or by providence what we confess is that the final product is exactly what it needs to be in order for scripture to function authoritatively in the church and do the things that paul says it does to tells timothy that it does don many people want to respond at this juncture and say if you have to put in all of those explanations and qualifications why bother still using the word and the response to that is that's true of almost every word how about god now when you and i use it we may presuppose the god of the bible and so with lots of people in the world never use it that way which is why statements of faith say quite a lot of things about god in order to train up what the word is about so in other words it's no response against inerrancy that it has to be carefully defined that's true of all words that are involved in disputation but in essence inerrancy which simply means without error that's all it means is a way of insisting on the truthfulness of scripture that's all it is it's not insisting on the precisionism of scripture or that it has to be done in a certain form of genre it means where questions of truthfulness are applicable the bible is telling the truth there are some statements in scripture that are not propositional and they are not subject to the category of inerrancy but where a text is subject to the category of inerrancy the bible is always telling the truth that's all that is meant and that has always been the historic position of the confessing church it asserts there it's true infallible would would normally convey the idea that there's something qualitatively true of it which makes it incapable of of error i mean so in many ways you would think infallible is the stronger term but in the evangelical debate as it has developed let's say since the mid-1970s inerrant has become the stronger word and infallible is often used by those who would want to say the bible infallibly achieves its purpose of of leading us to salvation into the christian forms right forms of the christian life but makes erroneous assertions in some other ways so i i always have to ask with whom am i speaking here and and what what is there in your understanding about the term so we have to define our terms carefully that's true for all um all serious discussion in many parts of the southern us calvinist basically means not interested in evangelism in that corner of the world i don't like to call myself a calvinist because i am rather interested in evangelism so you either have to have time to define the word or you find another word do you see so so a text with a context becomes a pretext for a proof text could i just put in a plug here for the idea that we should not allow the receptor audience to which we are speaking to do all the defining yeah we have to say we sometimes we have to look back into history and see how words have been used and how they change but we can't always put everything we can't express every orthodox doctrine in language that is already known and understood and approved by the culture that we're speaking to necessarily there may be things that the cult there may be words that the culture will have to consider using in a different way in order to understand what is the message is as long as they don't do that then they're going to inevitably become confused so what i'm saying is we don't have to i use that we often hear this metaphor of translate uh christian truth into a language that is um comprehensible by secular people secular people need to learn how to how to understand the words as they are being used in the christian tradition just as like when you go to university and and study any subject you're going to have to learn the vocabulary of how it's commonly used in that subject area in order to understand what is being said could i add a footnote to that yeah i agree with that where the words in question are biblical words especially because it's part of learning to read the bible if it tends to be a theological term that has no deep biblical anchoring i'm a little more flexible so tim keller tells me that in new york city's elite communities evangelical means roughly protestant jihadist and you can get around that by insisting that they uh that they've got to learn what evangelical means and i would say that in that case yeah you better go at it because evangelical you angelion is is bound up with what the gospel really is on the other hand it's not for nothing that we call it the gospel coalition rather than the evangelical coalition nobody knows what gospel means but at least they don't think that means protestant jihadist so you want to preserve gospel evangelical you angelion because that's a biblical category you cannot lose that without losing something um intrinsic i'm gonna transition this that's great and um one of the questions that came our way is this morning dr carson talked a bit about different genres of scripture and so if i'm an untrained you know just just person here congregate who loves to read the word how do i understand the genre of scripture i'm i'm in and and what that should do in terms of of of god speaking to me and what that looks like how to understand the different genres and are there any resources i can look to that might help me with that well um don't make it more difficult than it is all of us are familiar with different literary genres to some extent if you're reading a computer manual you don't interpret it quite the same way as you would reading a book of limericks at least i hope not um and you don't read a book of limericks the same way you'd read a love letter or a love email nowadays or i'll love instagram [Laughter] so so we're familiar with with with hyperbole and so on already boy it took me a year to get here today was traffic was abominable nobody thinks it's a literal year no nobody would say that was an untrue statement because you you've made you've made allowances already for for for a different literary genre in this case a genre including a figure of speech that we call hyperbole so almost everybody has picked up some mix of figures of speech and have learned to to flex already the bible has some literary genres with which we're not deeply familiar like apocalyptic which is one of the reasons it's sometimes subject to the most screwball interpretations imaginable but nobody writes apocalyptic um a friend of mine was passing away free new testaments on the british university campus a few years ago and he passed one out to a chap who never read anything of the bible and uh some months later he asked him hey did you read that book i gave you yeah i said it's a bit it's a bit troubling at the front end it keeps telling the same story three or four times but i sure like that science fiction at the end and you can see what he's trying to do he's trying to to tag it with a literary category that he does know something about it's not science fiction but on the other hand it reflects an intrinsic effort to make the imaginative jump that enables you to understand it you know so a a bible reader even if not trained eventually begins to see through how the literary genres work you see you may not be taught a course on wisdom literature but you read proverbs long enough and you manage to pick up some of the ideas of how proverbs works you know and and so it's helpful to read some books that talk about these kinds of things uh i don't like every part of it but there's a book that's that's we're still worth reading today called how to read the bible for all its worth that deals with some important issues of literary genre for those of you who are older bernard rams protestant biblical interpretation has some stuff on literary genre that's still worth looking at though some of it's pretty dated there's a series of books published by zondervan on how to read the psalms how to read proverbs how to read you know and again it's got some good stuff in it so there are some helps around and and uh you know a pastor like dwayne klein would be glad to give you a list of books i've told you a million times not to use that hyperbole my my experience especially in in my 13 years of pastoral ministry tells me that people people do understand that that we communicate in diverse ways we use all sorts of figures of speech and and the phone book isn't written the same way as a book of poetry or a novel but but those of us who have responsibility for teaching in the church do need to help people think that through and i mean i still remember the time i was i was teaching a bible class in first church i served as a pastor and and i was and i said for example proverbs are true generalizations that's what they are there aren't mathematical formulas and so i said uh proverbs 15 1 for example says a general answer turns away anger but that's that's not a promise that on every occasion when someone speaks to you in anger and you respond gently that that person will cease to be angry and and a guy sitting in the class said yeah solomon didn't seem to know my wife and she was sitting beside him which made it a whole lot more awkward um but sometimes people they don't instantly warm up to it and in that same church i once said god's promise through jeremiah in the new covenant is i will i'll forgive their sins i will not remember them anymore and and one brother raised his hand and said pastor if the bible says god forgets our sin he forgets he was the church treasurer too which caused me some concern but so i mean i tried to help him and the group understand you you can't very well believe all the bible says about god and believe that he literally forgets you won't be able to bring every work into judgment if that's true but but people do need to be helped but but they are capable of receiving that teaching in my experience can i just say one thing about genre is that sometimes people say i don't take genesis literally and what they mean is i don't believe what that portion of scripture says and the problem of we're always looking for the literal meaning of the text we want to know what it says and just because a text is poetic does not mean that it is is not conveying anything that can be formulated into a proposition in fact poetry is more precise language than than prose in many ways um but the point is that that just saying that such and such a text of scripture is of such and such a genre particularly that pointing out that it uses a figure of speech or pointing out that it's poetic in nature does not mean that that text of scripture doesn't say anything and doesn't mean anything and that that it isn't possible to disbelieve it it just means you need to understand what is being said in that text in the right way taking account of the genre that is being used and so um the idea of recognizing different genres in scripture is not a way of dodging the meaning of the scriptures or saying in a polite way that we don't take them seriously it's it's one thing to take the bible literally it's another thing to take it seriously and in truth nobody takes everything in the bible literally and um and because but the goal should be to take what is literal take take literally what is intended literally and what is not intended literally not to take that literally that's the goal of good bible interpretation so i think that's a that's a great segue and uh dr carson mentioned a couple of books one of them was by stewart and free and stuart and fee how to read the bible for everything it's worth a few years later probably a couple of decades later they wrote another book um called how to read the bible book by book and it's actually an excellent resource as well for this but somebody wrote in and said um help me understand the use now they use the term anthropomorph anthropomorphic language i probably more use the term accommodation but how do we understand accommodation or anthropomorphic language and when is that being used in scripture how do we understand when that's happening so first we may need to take a moment and just define what those terms mean and then talk about how do we when we see that in scripture what does that mean for us and how do we understand that is describing god in terms of human bodily form the hand of god the eyes of god um god's arm etc a related term often sometimes not ex well sometimes identified this way anthropologism would be describing god in terms of human emotional experiences which the speaker may or may not intend to be understood straightforwardly so that's that's a bit of i think the basics of the terms and when we see them in scripture how do we understand them or how do we understand even like in terms of another term accommodation and what that looks like well all human language is human well amen brother it is preach it i mean all human language derives from our experience right we we are finite creatures and as a race we've accumulated experience and we we know the world that we live in the material world we our language reflects our experience of reality so our language will never be sufficient to contain the reality that is god it will never be able to express god's being fully that is not to say that it can't express it truly it can up to a point express it truly so the so in theology we have something called the doctrine of analogy where we say that language is an analogical that means that if it was univocal that would be one alternative then it would mean that if i'm a father and god's a father then then father the word father would be univocal that would mean that fatherhood for god was the same as fatherhood for a human being and so then if if you if you heard that god the father had a son you'd say well naturally who's his wife because if everything that's true of human fatherhood is true of divine fatherhood they must have a wife on the other hand if the language could be equivocal and that would mean that that when you would use a word of god it doesn't have anything in common with what you how you use the word of human beings and so the fatherhood of god would mean something completely and totally different than the fatherhood for a human being analogical goes down the middle and says well it's neither one or the other extreme there is a point at which the word that we use of god and this is true of all the words in the bible of all the words in theology there's a sense in which the word does reflect something of the truth about god there's a point at which it does but there are many more ways in which that word does not reflect the truth in other words there are there are analogies that we can develop between humans and god because we're made in his image and we're endowed with certain gifts like rationality but there are limits and so anthropomorphic language is a is a good example of how human language is used of god but it has limits so when you talk about the arm of god the arm of yahweh being sufficient to save that's reference to god's power and and it's true that god is powerful and god is more powerful than the gods of egypt and you can humiliate pharaoh and the gods in the red sea and and it's true to say that his right arm delivered israel and right arm there being a reference to his power so the language is fit for purpose it does work but you can't take you you can't say that that god has an arm in exactly the same way that a human being has an arm you can't say that the arm is a literal arm on a literal body um so there's so i think the i think that the problem with anthropomorphism to make a long answer short is simply the problem of human language in general when speaking about god and there is human perversity added on top um this whole discussion that has just been availably summarized is often called the doctrine of accommodation uh calvin has long long sections on accommodation how god accommodates himself to human speech so that so that we can understand him at least in part god himself cannot give us omniscient knowledge because omniscience is an attribute of god alone he can't do a dump and enable us to explain to understand everything as he understands everything we're finite we cannot take it so that inevitably the language that he uses is accommodated to our ears to our speech and so on so christians have said things like that for countless centuries the problem is that in the last century century and a half people on the liberal side of things have hidden behind the doctrine of accommodation so that at the end of the day they don't want to claim that they can say anything really truly about god oh that's just the language of accommodation oh that's just everything's just a language of accommodation which in their use basically means we can't really know anything about god god is just mysterious so you end up having a transcendent mysterious god about whom you can say nothing and then call out worship that's just going way too far so usually it's evangelicals with a high view of scripture and a deep grasp of the material principle who actually have the most sophisticated doctrine of accommodation that is they want people to be warned against the errors on both sides of the camp the kinds of of things that have just been articulated if god lays bare his arm we are not to presuppose that he has a literal arm or that he's wearing clothes um but we know what it means he lays bare his arm he's he's shuffing off his coat so that he can use all of his power to do whatever he's going to do well i've just used another one shucking off his coat ggc but we know what is meant by that it doesn't mean therefore we cannot say anything about whether or not god's got arms or how much power he's got so the doctrine of accommodation is important and it's useful to explain and and unpack some forms of scripture but boy don't don't let people terrorize you with the notion that you can't say or know anything about god you know just because the argument is is the language is analogical there's a difference between accommodation to human language and forms of expression on the one hand and accommodation to human erroneous assertions that's true on on the other now i i do think we need to recognize that i mean at some points um writers of scripture may they may use words that point to ideas that they might have believed that are not true but they aren't intending to assert those for example if david talks about the sun rising in the east going across the sky if they if they speak about movements of the sun and the moon etc they probably in their mind might have been thinking of a geocentric universe and the sun moving around the earth but they aren't intending to make a point about astronomy they're simply using the language of appearance and while so it doesn't mean that everything the biblical writers might have believed is true it means whatever they intend to assert is true could i do a follow-up on that one i love this this one i was about ten and we were living in drummondville at the time the roman ville d'allen canton in the eastern townships and my father was sitting in the armchair reading the montreal star and there there he was reading a letter to the editor which was bemoaning all these stupid christians who actually think the bible is true uh when it speaks of the sun rising and everybody knows the sun doesn't rise and he's even waxed very enthusiastic and is disdain for christians and so on and dad looked over the top of the newspaper and he said what do you think of that don i don't know he turned to the front page sunrise 5 43. in other words phenomenological language is found in every culture oh that was a great great column um i'm gonna i'm gonna transition to some practical questions that that came our way and one of them is basically you know i've got i've got some kids at home teenager and younger kids um how do i help them to learn to treasure god's word both at a younger age in a teenage age and specifically for my teenagers how do i help them to understand its authoritative nature be part of a good church that's not meant to be a smart mouth comment it really is important because it constitutes a body of brothers and sisters who are modeling things and working with things and who have older teenagers or teenagers have gone through the system they've often given a little more thought to sunday school classes and so on i remember at one stage my daughter was listening to a teacher in her high school making all sorts of really snide comments about the puritans and so on things that were historically nonsense and so on but in order to to to mock their morals and their integrity and and tag them all with witch burning and the whole bit but it just so happened at that time in our church we had uh a a guy who was teaching her sunday school class who did a whole series for about six months uh on the puritans she would go in there and argue with her teacher every day and that was good for her rather than being suppressed or or ignored or you know he was a competent man who knew the sources getting the kids to read the literature i'm not saying that our church always did wonderful things like that but that was gold no june that was gold i'll let stan and craig go but just that reminded me of um my brother and i are really different and i i would always read at night he hated reading he hated school i loved school my parents say i would cry we grew up in the country i would i would cry when the bus uh wouldn't come and he would be elated um and uh when he was 17 god saved him and he has three trades and i can remember after god saved him my brother who hated reading who had to get up to drive to burlington to his work every day would make sure he was up 45 minutes early he would sit at our dining room table and he would just have his bible out and he'd have this this binder and he would just write out the passage like the first passage you talked about this morning and um and he'd have a study bible and he would just be asking god to teach him things and he started that habit at 17 and he's 43 now and he still does that to this day and though he's never had any formal training i know a few people that can teach the bible as well as he can in a sunday school class and he's modeled that to so many people who would say you know i'm not a reader he would say neither he asked him how many books he read this year he'd say one the bible that's it occasionally he'll read something else but not not often he just said god has saved me this is his word i've just got to dig in and he's shown that to his four kids stan pray well i'm just going to say um i mean beyond the obvious of actually taking the time to to read scripture with kids or kids to talk with them about what it means both in formal and informal settings musing about a while traveling in the car and so on surely we teach volumes by example and and so it's maybe especially with kids and the teenagers having honest conversations with the kids about what scripture calls us to do and then talking about how we are doing our best to make that work out in practice to be open about the challenges of it to be open about the challenges of how do i keep myself from sexual temptation how do i obey god's commands to be generous with uh with what he's given us sometimes it's my my my youngest child is almost 40 years old so it's been a while since i had teenagers at home but now i'm into talking sometimes with grandchildren about it including my oldest granddaughter who's just started university 30 minutes away from us and it's interesting to see those conversations develop as we talk honestly about what scripture teaches and how that's how i've been called to work that out in practice admitting my failures along the way craig anything went out no that's okay um i'll say this in the next question one thing we found helpful in our home is when they're young we read the bible to our kids then we read the bible with our kids them and us together then they read the bible to us as they get a bit older and then we move to the place where we're asking them questions about what god's been teaching them through the word as they're being trying to cultivate their own devotional life and that's been helpful for us um someone asked how do we interact with other people who are believers or claim to be believers who've redefined authority and have done so in a way seemingly so that they can do what they want and believe what they want um at what point does that redefinition of authority bring them to the point where they're not sound and doctrine anymore or possibly even heretical where is the line of heresy and what do we do as we're engaging with christians that are leaning in that direction i'm glad i'm asking the questions to be honest yeah that's obviously a challenging one um we have to carry on a lot of painful and awkward conversations with people who claim to be believers but uh but who appear to be drifting away and their their refusal to to accept its teaching because it doesn't fit the lifestyle they personally they may want or are living or doesn't mesh with the wider culture which is always exerting its pressure i think ultimately we have to somewhere start by saying well if you profess to be a disciple of jesus then and you affirm him as lord then you're going to have to accept his understanding his attitude towards scripture so can we talk about what that obviously is and and if we start the conversation there and say you know if if jesus could quote scripture and say it is written clearly assuming that what is written there is true then how can we take any other approach to it that i think is the starting point to start with the attitude of christ toward scripture well the phenomenon of evangelicals accepting same-sex marriage these days is an interesting one to observe there are people who have grown up within the evangelical church and they they have switched their their view to adopt the the modern um cultural understanding that homosexuality is just fine and so on and and but they want to continue to believe be evangelicals they want to continue to profess to believe in christ and they want to profess to believe in the authority of scripture um one of the things that i've noticed about this is that the the degree of um biblical literacy is low today most people don't know their bibles very well and most people are not used to engaging in in doctrinal oral or ethical questions using scripture and so many people are easily led astray and some of the the um the arguments that are used are so shallow and so weak that it's astonishing that anyone could ever accept them to me it seems to me to be astonishing and so i have to ask why is that and i think that in many cases the problem stems from a lack of knowledge of the scriptures and lack of understanding of the scriptures but there are other issues that play into this we have to be very careful those of us who preach and teach the word because we have to be careful about how we how we handle the word um i had a call from a youth pastor who was a former student of mine and he was he wanted to tell me about an incident that happened recently and he said you know because in my class i i when i'm talking about egalitarian and egalitarian versus complementarian debates i i say that i i do believe that some people on both sides sincerely believe their view to be the teaching of scripture it's a little hard for the egalitarian side to say that when the church only you know was wrong for 1900 years or so and then and and and their view is so new it's difficult to argue that but it's still possible to argue that that the church just was wrong all this time and now we see it however we need we need to be careful and this is for people on both sides of the issue not to appear to be making the bible say whatever we want it to say and by appear in that sentence what i mean is when we preach people can get the impression that we aren't really basing what we say on scripture we're basing it on the cultural pressure to do what we want we're doing what the culture wants us to do and we're just basically putting on hold the exegesis of scripture and we're going to do it later and figure out a way to justify it later but we haven't got it figured out yet meanwhile we're proceeding with conforming to the culture this is very dangerous because when that happens the next thing that happened on the next issue if people become

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Length: 41min 48sec (2508 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020