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Fifty Years of Theological Battles · Pastor John Piper's answers

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  Happy Monday. As we get back after it here on the podcast, Pastor
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  John, I know one of the things that you really enjoy is answering questions
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  in front of students, open floor Q. And as you've been doing this
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  for over fifty years since still at it, currently investing your time into the
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  lives and students at Bethlehem College and Seminary, this time with students is built
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  into your schedule now and recently, in that context with BCS students, you
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  had a chance to walk through the theological battles that you have fought over the
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  decades, and I was wondering, looking back on those battles if you could
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  re share what you said in private with us here on APJ. Can you
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  rehearse those battles decade by decade and if you could tell us what points you
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  were trying to make in rehearsing this history with the students. As part of
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  my happy responsibilities as chanced Or of Bethleham College in Seminary, I regularly participate
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  in what we call table talk, where the students gather to eat their lunch
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  and ask questions of the leaders. And I'm one of those related to life
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  related to ministry, how it relates to the issues of our day. And
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  I generally begin those sessions with some thoughts off my front burner, just to
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  prime the pump of questions and throw it open to whatever the students want to
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  talk about. So a few weeks ago I tried to make this point in
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  my introductory comments. I said something like, since the issues that you will
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  be facing, looking at the students that you'll be facing in ten, twenty,
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  thirty, forty fifty years from now, you'll be my age in fifty
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  years. Since those issues that you'll be facing are utterly unpredictable and in some
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  cases imaginable, your best preparation right now, in your teens and twenties and
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  thirties is to gain the spiritual and intellectual abilities to interpret God's never changing word
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  in scripture according to its true God intended meaning, which will never leave you
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  speechless, never but always provide the profoundest wisdom for every new challenge, none
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  of which takes God off God. So that was my main point to try
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  to get across to them, and then to drive the point home, I
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  gave them a glimpse into the controversies of the last fifty years of my life.
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  And how precious the Bible has become as an absolutely sure compass for staying
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  the course of truth and wisdom, and as an anchor to keep me from
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  being driven about by every wind of doctrine, and as a treasure chest of
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  holy joy that satisfies so deeply that I'm not sucked in to the seductive pleasures
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  that on the surface change from era to era. They don't really change,
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  but they form changes. So here's part of the glimpse that I gave them
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  into my fifty year history of dealing with unexpected issues. But let me say
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  at the outset that I'm not going to focus on race and abortion as one
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  of those issues, because they're just pervasive. I mean, for the last
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  decades of my life, I have lived every decade with issues of race that
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  need to be addressed and issues of abortion that need to be address. So
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  understand those are huge issues and that I don't mention them in the lists in
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  their abstdemies are everywhere. So in the nineteen sixties, I was coming to
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  terms with the controversies surrounding fresh historical arguments for the factual resurrection of Jesus Christ.
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  Daniel Fuller's Easter faith in History had been published in nineteen sixty five.
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  Wolfhart Pannenberg was making waves by his nineteen sixty eight book Revelation as History,
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  where he argued that the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth was an historical event as
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  real as you're getting out of bed this morning, which in German Biltmoney and
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  Circles in the sixties was absolutely radical. He was one of the teachers I
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  had, by the way, at the University of Munich in the seventies.
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  Hand in glove with the controversy was the whole issue of the modern methodology of
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  critical biblical scholarship. In nineteen sixty six, George Ladd published The New Testament
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  and Criticism, where he tried to sort out what was usable in so called
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  higher criticism and what was contradictory to the inspired nature of scripture. And those
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  were crucial days for me, crucial like crux like crossroads, And how I
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  thank God in the ways I could have gone that he held on to me
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  for his glory and his word. Then came the nineteen seventies and three huge
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  issues. In nineteen seventy, how Lindsay published The Late Great Planet Earth.
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  By nineteen ninety nine, that book had sold thirty five million copies. In
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  it, he virtually predicted the Second Coming. By nineteen eighty eight, I
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  don't know how that book stays in printlessly adjusted it, and he popularized the
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  pre tribulational rapture view of the Second Coming. And I wrote a paper in
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  response to this, and it became very personal because my father and I locked
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  horns over this, and there's nobody I loved more than my father, and
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  I didn't want to alienate him, and we got along pretty well, although
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  that book brought a lot of stuff to the four. Nineteen seventy five,
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  Paul Jewett published Man as Male and Female, in which he said that when
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  Paul instructed only men to teach and have authority in the church, he simply
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  made a mistake. Paul just made a mistake and allowed his rabbinical background to
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  silence his radical Christian newness. And from then on to this very day,
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  I knew that's an issue I'll never be able to get away from because of
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  there's more critical things going on, there more reasons to be concerned than just
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  one. Nineteen seventy six, Harold Lindzel published The Battle for the Bible and
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  brought to public awareness how many Christian institutions were sliding away from commitment to the
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  inerrancy of scripture. In nineteen seventy eight, the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy
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  produced the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. And I wrote a review of Linzell's book,
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  and I'm very happy with what happened in Chicago, and I'm happy to
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  sign on to the Chicago Statement on Inherancy. Nineteen eighties, two controversies stand
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  out. Professor philosophy Thomas Talbot and I went back and forth with articles in
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  the Reform Journal over the sovereignty of God in Romans nine. I think titles
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  were like, how does a sovereign God love? I published a book on
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  Romans nine, called The Justification of God, which focused on Romans nine one
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  to twenty three. And so the understanding of God's sovereignty in history and in
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  salvation dominated the early nineteen eighties. Near the end of the decade, the
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  missiological controversy surrounding the new language of unreached people groups and whether that was a
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  Biblical way to think or not, was a huge issue for me. Does
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  the Great Commission focus on reaching as many individuals as possible, which is what
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  I had thought, or on reaching all the ethno linguistic groups in the world.
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  Then much of the nineteen nineties was dominated by open theism. Does God
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  have an exhaustive foreknowledge of the future? Open Theism said, no, he
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  doesn't. And it's chief spokesman was and is right here in the Twin Cities
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  as a pastor, and so he and I had debated back and forth,
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  we had lunched together, and I wrote much, and other people wrote very
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  good books, and thankfully I think open Theism was basically marginalized, though it
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  hasn't gone away. In the two thousands, the Emergent Church flourished for a
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  season and then morphed into other things. I don't think it's entirely gone away,
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  but it's not the movement it was. And I took two of those
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  leaders out to lunch one time, just just to give our folks a flavor
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  of what we're talking about with the Emergent Church, and I said to them,
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  you know, talking to you guys, it's like trying to nail jello
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  to the wall, to which they responded, that's not what Jello's for.
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  That really gives a good flavor of how doctorally amorphous that movement was. In
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  the twenty tens, the doctrine of justification was very controverted and prominent, and
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  I wrote a whole book The Future of Justification, responding to emtie right.
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  And on the same front, friends of mine were involved relationally in some very
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  difficult conversations called Evangelicals and Catholics together, which brokes some hearts over how good
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  reform brothers didn't relate to Catholics in the same way, which brings us then
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  swirling into the last decade with the splintering of evangelicalism because of Trump, the
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  realities of so called same sex marriage, the realities of so called gender transition,
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  vaccination mandates, critical race theory, systemic racism, cancel culture. None
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  of these things can be ignored by a pastor, I think, indeed by
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  a thoughtful lay person, and I've written on virtually all of them. But
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  the point for that table talk, and maybe for this moment in as Pastor
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  John, is if you live long enough, you will be confronted by issues
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  and controversies that are so many and so diverse, and sometimes so complex that
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  you cannot possibly predict or specifically prepare for them. The best way for our
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  students and our listeners to APG, to prepare for faithful, obedient, fruitful
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  ministry in the next fifty years is to know your Bible deeply, thoroughly,
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  confidently, joyfully. Other studies are important, absolutely important. This study of
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  the Bible is essential. If you have gone deep with God by means of
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  a rigorous and accurate understanding of His word, you'll always be relevant and you
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  will never be speechless. The breadth of theological controversies over the past fifty years
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  makes my head spin. Thank you, Pastor John for that rundown. And
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  I really can't hear this episode without thinking of your own theological development. Pastor
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  John, how you how you arrive at your convictions that you're at now about
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  knowing the Bible deeply and it comes from a precious text in Psalm one nineteen
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  one nineteen versus ninety seven to one hundred. That text played a huge role
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  in your own theological development while you were in Germany. Specifically, we talked
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  about that season in APJ seventeen thirteen in an episode titled John Piper's Ministry in
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  One Bible Text. Looking at that one texts one nineteen versus ninety seven to
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  one hundred. Really an essential APJA episode that you can find right now at
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  asked pastor John dot Com APJ seventeen thirteen. Well, God is happy in
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  himself, amen. And God wants us to be happy in himself. Amen.
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  And when you begin to apply biblical categories here, you begin to ask
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  the question, how does God's joy become my joy? That's our question next
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  time. From a listener in Chicago. I'm your host, Tony Rankie.
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  See you Thursday,