Dear friends
Time for another Q&A episode, but with a twist this time. Regular Two Ways News contributor Marty Sweeney joins us from Ohio to pitch me a number of questions about the Bible, theology and ministry—questions that have come from his regular conversations and seminars with pastors and ministry people in the US.
The questions revolve around the Bible, theology, ministry and evangelism—all the good stuff. Questions like:
Is the Bible the only tool we need for ministry and evangelism?
What place should topical or systematic preaching or Bible study have?
Can our theology end up hampering our Bible reading?
What about courses or other study programs—do we really need them?
Hope you enjoy the to-and-fro!
Your brother
Tony
Bible only?
Marty Sweeney: One question I’ve gotten from a senior pastor of a church is this: “We want to use the book The Trellis and the Vine to persuade our people that they're all vine growers, that every Christian is a disciple-making disciple.” And then he said, “Our goal is then to equip everyone so that the only thing they need for their evangelism and discipleship is a Bible. They don't need anything else.”
And that struck me because I think the instincts are really good, but I'm also a little bit uncomfortable. Do you think we should equip people to need or use nothing but a Bible? Is there a downside of this kind of thinking?
Tony Payne: Well, you're right in saying that the instinct is absolutely spot on. As it says in the opening verses of 2 Peter, God has given us all that we need to know in the promises of Jesus Christ by his power and his glory. The words of Scripture, if we believe in the sufficiency of Scripture, are the final and complete place we can go for everything—for our knowledge of God through Jesus, and indeed, for our thoughts about ministry and what God has sent us out to do in the Great Commission. It all comes from there. It's our only source. It's our supreme authority. All those things are absolutely true. And so the instinct to say we really don't need much else in evangelism besides the Bible and discipleship, I absolutely love.
The question is, in what form or in what way do we share the completely sufficient teaching of the Bible with other people? And as we think about this question—that is, about the methodology of ministry and evangelism—the Bible again is our authority. And the Bible shows, by example, that having an actual Bible in your hand and reading a verse and talking with someone isn't the only way to communicate the message of the Bible, because that's not always what happens in the Bible itself.
In the book of Acts and in all the evangelistic and gospel events and episodes we read there, some of them involved a Bible. Say, wouldn't it be great if you were chatting with someone on the bus and they happened to be reading Isaiah 53 like the eunuch that Philip came across, and you’re off and running. You're going to use the Bible right then and there because it's open. But there are plenty of other times—say in the Areopagus, it doesn't seem like Paul was expounding a Bible passage to them when he explained the gospel. He was just explaining the gospel. Does this make sense, Marty?
MS: Yes. And even with the Ethiopian eunuch, he said I need someone to explain it to me. And so Philip's response wasn't just “Keep reading and rereading and you'll get it”, but rather he explained it. It's interesting then that in one sense, what a good, faithful, Christian book does is that it explains things that the Bible is saying. So would it be fair to say it this way: that the Bible is sufficient in absolutely being the Word of God breathed out, but at the same time we have human agency in this by explaining it, by passing it on, by talking about it? Certainly, we just don't quote only Bible verses to each other. We talk about it. We discuss it.
TP: Sure, and you see that also in the verses in Scripture that talk about the everyday gospel conversation of Christians, such as at the end of Colossians 4, in the midst of your interactions with outsiders. It talks about a conversation that's gracious and seasoned with salt, that knows how to answer people. There's clearly a back and forward in conversation. In 1 Peter 3 as well, it talks about being ready to answer for the reason for your hope, and so on. And so I think there's a nice little balance here to be maintained.
Yes, the Bible is the source book and the authority, and it's a great tool to be using in evangelism all the time, to be taking people back to the Bible. So I don't want to squash that instinct at all, especially since we have so many problems with people's evangelism on the other side, where the Bible kind of gets left behind, and we just try and figure it all out on our own and come up with an appealing message or something. It's the message of the Bible that's going to be powerful. But at the same time, the way we communicate that message will be as humans in different contexts, in the world that God's created—and as we interact with other people we won't always be opening the Bible itself and reading a verse.
All the same, I just want to say that reading the Bible with someone is one of the most powerful ways to evangelize! A good friend of mine used to say that there are nine very powerful words to use in evangelism: Would you like to read the Bible with me? And it's surprising how many people are willing to just sit down and read the gospel or read the Bible with you, and it's a wonderful way to evangelize. And when we do actually get to evangelizing, the Bible will keep coming up. We'll keep using the Bible to anchor and explain what we're talking about, because that's where the gospel comes from—just as long as we don't get too constricted or restricted methodologically that we can't ever have a conversation with someone without opening a Bible.
MS: Yes, I would say use the Bible, but feel no guilt about using tools that help summarize the Bible or have the words of Scripture accessible, such as even having different translations. So that's helpful, Tony.
Exposition v. theology?
MS: The next question is quite similar. We believe in the power of expository preaching and teaching. And I've heard some church pastors tell me that their church only does expository preaching. And so when we think of something like Learn the Gospel or any kind of topical study, they say, well, the Bible is all we need. And so their Sunday schools, adult Sunday schools, small groups, and so on only go through sections of Scripture. And similar to the last question, I would say I like the instinct, but is this too limiting?
TP: Again, if we were to say this is maybe a slight exaggeration or going a bit too far, I'd much rather people go too far in this direction than the other direction. It's a good problem to have that all you’re reading is the Bible because it is the source of everything and it's the powerful word of God.
What we’re really talking about is the place of theology–the place of drawing together the Bible’s teaching and saying something true about the world now. Just as we were saying about evangelism, when we evangelize, it should all be based out of the Bible, but it doesn't always have to involve opening an actual Bible text. Every time you share the gospel with somebody, you're making and sharing some theological judgments. You’re saying that certain things are true about reality—that Jesus is Lord; that he died for your sins; and so on. That’s what theology is: the discernment and statement of the truth according to God.
Even when we say that there's such a thing as ‘the Bible’, which is God's sufficient and powerful and authoritative word, we are doing theology. And those kind of statements are absolutely necessary for us to think and communicate. It's impossible for us to think and communicate about the Bible or anything without making those judgments—that declare something to be the case, to be true, to be true now and relevant to you. But this means that there'll be a need to summarize and draw together what the Bible teaches, so as to make those judgments accurately, and teach and discuss them together. As soon as you're doing that, you're doing something slightly different from exegeting a verse by verse passage. Does that make sense?
MS: It does. Some of the biggest leaps forward I made in my Christian thought in life came through reading something like the book you and Phillip wrote Guidance and the Voice of God or understanding Two Ways to Live, especially box two: understanding that sin is not breaking rules, but lawlessness and rebellion. Or reading The Trellis and the Vine. Those books all put together thought from the whole Bible in a way that was compelling to me, challenging me or answering questions I was having, or posing questions I never posed. For example with Guidance and the Voice of God, I don’t think you would come across a specific passage in Scripture that tells you everything you need to know about guidance, just doing expository verse by verse preaching. And that's not to denigrate Scripture; it's to say that there is still, as you said, work to do to help people think theologically.
TP: Another way to put this, Marty, is that the Bible comes to us exegetically, not arranged by topic. It comes to us as a big unfolding drama, a big unfolding history of all that God has done. So it comes to us that way, but life comes at us topically—when we confront something, when someone has just asked us a question about the nature of suffering in their lives, for example. In order to answer that question, I need to draw together in my mind all that I've read in the Bible about that and formulate it into a kind of position or summary or set of concepts, and then answer this person's question. That’s unavoidably the way we exist in the world.
And the same is true, of course, of all the moral choices we make as we go through life—as to what it means to live for Christ and to put on his nature and his life and and to love people like he does all the time. We're faced with those questions and we answer them from the Bible, but we have to draw together the Bible's teaching from various places where it might talk about this particular subject.
The other thing I'd say about this is that we need each other to encourage, exhort, remind, question, rebuke, admonish, and help each other to do that. And you know that this is one of my main hobby horses riding past and I'm tempted to jump on and ride it for a little while–the book I'm currently working on is all about this, about the place of the mutual word ministry of Christians, the one-another encouragement and exhortation of the Christian community. Often how we help each other live the Christian life is not in teaching each other the content of the Bible so much. That's what we do through teaching and preaching. But rather we encourage and help each other to think that through and practise it in the midst of the granular nature of everyday life, in all the challenges that confront us, and encouraging and helping each other to live out the truth of the Bible. We need that as part of the overall package of the Christian life and encouragement. It's certainly there in the New Testament; there's a lot of emphasis on the need for that mutual kind of speaking and encouraging which complements beautifully the preaching and teaching that gives us the framework for the whole thing.
MS: I’ve heard an observation that 30-40 years ago, you could preach only expository sermons, because many of your Christians were reading good quality Christian books. People were reading more and synthesizing on topics and getting fed that way through books. Today, perhaps that happens through podcasts, but we would say reading a longer Christian book is on the decline. So where are people learning to synthesize and understand the topics and ideas, and having these leaps forward? Ideally, as you say, it would be through conversations around Scripture and God's Word with one another. But that is still where I think the value of teaching topically will come in, if there is that void to fill.
TP: Sometimes the zone of church life in which you try to help people put things together topically and coalesce the concepts together in their mind might not be through Sunday sermons. I think that the move back towards exegetical expository preaching in the past 40-50 years has been fantastic, and it is what should dominate our pulpit. And I think in some ways your question is a consequence of the wonderful recovery of expository preaching. So it may be that the place for pulling things together topically happens when we go away for a weekend together on a church conference and we talk about a topic together, or in adult Sunday school or in small groups or in other sorts of ways. I certainly don't think it should dominate Sundays, though. I think the main diet should continue to be passage by passage exposition.
Can we use our theology to silence the Bible?
MS: I want to hone in on something you said to get to our next question in terms of helping us put together and have these theological discussions to enrich our mind and to then animate our hearts and our wills towards obedience and love of the Lord. I oversee our church's apprenticeship, and we recently read Don Carson's really helpful book on suffering: How Long O Lord? It's a bit old now, I think, almost 20 years old, but I still really enjoyed reading back through it. A paragraph stuck out to me, but before I read it out, in context Carson is talking about the issue of divine impassibility, which simply means that God cannot be acted upon by anything outside of himself. So no one can make God mad, so that he changes his plan or flies off the handle. Nothing can happen in his creation that can act upon God to get him to change. Is that a fair definition?
TP: Yes. Whereas humans have strong passions and emotions that will drive us to react to things, God doesn't have passions and emotions that drive him to react. He doesn't react to things and is acted upon by those things. That's not the nature of who he is. So yes, that’s the idea.
MS: Good, so here is the paragraph that stood out to me:
The methodological problem with the argument for divine impassibility is that it selects certain texts of Scripture, namely, those that insist on God's sovereignty and changelessness, constructs a theological grid on the basis of those texts, and uses this grid to filter out all other texts, in particular those that speak of God's emotions. The latter texts, nicely filtered out, are then labeled ‘anthropomorphisms’ and are written off.
And I'll just stop there, because the point really is not divine impassability. But what he said there struck me and I thought to myself, don’t we all do this? We take passages of Scripture, construct our theological grid based on those texts, and then filter out or minimize all other texts. And I just jotted down in my notes the debates and discussions I'm having with our apprentices and with wider church audience on, say, Calvinism and Arminianism, on social justice and gospel priority, or even men and women in ministry. I can just hear people lining up with their verses on one side, and then the other side has their verses.
So help us think theologically, Tony, because what happens is we're subtly undermining the power of the word by saying it might contradict itself. I was trained under a bunch of Barthians in seminary who all accuse evangelicals of having a canon within a canon—that we just take our text and run with it, leaving out these other texts. So help me out here.
TP: This is an excellent question, Marty, because the theological judgments we make—the way that we draw Scripture together and summarize it or apply it to a certain question or situation—we've got to always recognize that those are our judgments. We're summarizing the Bible and declaring that it says something true, on the basis of these texts. But we'll necessarily have to have a degree of epistemic humility as we make those judgments, and be ready to revise them. We should be ready to say, “Actually, I've failed to take into account this part of Scripture, or I've come to understand something more deeply”. We might learn more and understand more over time, and by God’s grace put the pieces together more effectively or more completely.
I think we have to recognize that this is the case, and that it's possible to kind of fall off the horse on both sides of this. On the one hand, you can have your theological system wrapped around you so tightly that nothing can penetrate it, not even the Bible. Not even the Bible itself is able to nuance or change or modify our position. And that's the kind of problem you're raising.
I always know that when I come to the Bible to read it, I already come with a set of theological ideas and concepts and teachings that I've learned. I come with a framework to the Bible all the time. You can't avoid that, but almost like it’s a coat you're wearing, just be prepared to kind of slip it off your shoulders onto the back of the chair for a little while, while you're reading, just to see if the Bible is going to actually change you, if it's going to challenge the way you think about a topic. Because our thinking and understanding grows over time—the transformation of our minds—as we try to integrate the Bible's teaching together, we need to not be so rigid in our theological framework that it's never open to challenge by the Bible itself.
But on the other hand, you can fall off on the other side by saying, “Well, therefore theology is impossible. It's just your text versus my text and it's just all interpretation.” But this to deny the fact that God speaks in Scripture, and declares to us what is true and what is to come, and that he speaks clearly and that he can be understood in what he says. There are many aspects of the Bible's teaching that you can draw together with absolute crystal clarity and confidence, even if there are some others that are a little harder to put together and kind of nail down quite as tightly.
I think the other thing I'd say on this question too, is that we need to be an apprentice to Scripture. I love this image because an apprentice is a ‘disciple’–a student, a pupil, an apprentice. And I think the way we should approach reading Scripture theologically is as an apprentice. We should try to use and gather together and apply the Bible's teaching in the way that the Bible itself does. We should look at what the big emphases of the Bible are, and make those the big emphases of our theology. It's not as if the Bible is just like a flat book of lots and lots of verses that you just go through and pick out verses to suit the theology, the theological system you're trying to defend or construct. The Bible itself has an emphasis and a shape. It has things that are incredibly important and things that are more on the edges, that it says less about. And so we should see how the Bible itself talks about a topic, where it talks about it, how it talks about it, and let that emphasis itself frame the way we talk about it and think about it. The classic example of this is where we want to talk about a particular subject, and we pick some verses that, in their context, aren't about that subject at all, and give them a whole lot of weight in deciding what we think about the subject, even though there are other verses that are all about that subject that we don't like as much or we want to minimize. Is that helpful, Marty?
Tensions in Scripture?
MS: Yes, it is. Let me just put one question back to you. Would you agree with the way of saying that there are ‘tensions in Scripture’?
TP: ‘Tensions’ is an interesting word and an overused word. Certainly, I'm struck by how frequently the Bible says two kinds of different things and asks you to hold them together in your mind as two sides of the same reality that both need to be affirmed, even though they're kind of paradoxical. So the number of times it says something like, for example, God is completely sovereign and in control of all things in salvation and creation, and yet humans are culpable responsible agents who are required to act and are accountable for their actions. And the Bible affirms both of those things very strongly and repeatedly throughout. So you need to hold those together even if you never completely integrate them into an answer, you must continually keep affirming both things. Likewise, the divine authorship of Scripture alongside the human character of Scripture—that it happens in history written by a particular people at a particular time. Scripture is both divinely authoritative and breathed out by God, and at the same time the product of human minds and words spoken in human languages about human things at particular times. There are so many of those kinds of dualities in the Bible, it seems to me that we need to kind of hold them together.
MS: I think of a fairly modern classic, Jim Packer’s Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God. He doesn't want to call it a paradox. He wants to call it an ‘antinomy’. Now the problem is no one knows what the word ‘antinomy’ means, but it is helpful. Antinomy is basically that two statements or beliefs are both reasonable but seem to contradict. And Packer's introduction, or first chapter in that book, is really helpful at that point to the actual topics of human free will, so to speak, and God's sovereignty.
TP: It also reminds me of a post I wrote when this podcast was called the Payneful Truth. I think it was called ‘Always two there are’—about the way the Bible is full of pairs of ideas that you have to hold together. You can check that out.
Evangelistic Bible study?
MS: I want to draw out one more thing that you said earlier. You said the nine best words in evangelism are “Do you want to read the Bible with me?” And that's really good. And I wonder, do we need to recover the evangelistic Bible study? It could be just simply saying to someone, do you want to open the Bible with me and read through Mark’s Gospel with me? Or it could go the other way and be a course that we do together like “Christianity Explored” or Michael Bennett’s “Christianity Explained”? Would you just comment on that?
TP: I think I'd say that's what “Christianity Explored” essentially is—it's an evangelistic, outsider-focused study through Mark's gospel. The one we did at Matthias Media several years ago, “Simply Christianity”, is the same thing. It's a walk through Luke's Gospel, reading key passages and discussing them. Or the evangelistic course that Dominic Steele wrote, “Introducing God”. It's an evangelistic discussion looking at different passages of the Bible over various weeks. And so certainly, what those different sort of frameworks have in common, even though you might think of them as more systematic or topical, they are actually opportunities for unbelievers, for non-Christians, to come together with Christians and to open the Bible together, look at passages, talk about them together, hear those passages explained, and talk through the implications and understand them together and ask their questions. In other words, it's an interactive Bible study, a Bible exploration for non-Christians, looking at key biblical passages that explain the gospel. And in that sense, you talk about recovering that idea, and I agree. I think we should recover that idea in all sorts of forms. There's the personal one that you mentioned, why don't we just read the Bible together? But there are other forms as well. In fact, I know that many churches here in Australia who might run an evangelistic series like this, a group-based study that we often call an evangelistic course, where you work through material over a period of weeks. It's really the formation of an evangelistic Bible study with a 4-7 week first step, but which then becomes a group of people who continue to meet together and read the Bible and discuss it, and very often become Christians in that whole process.
And so although we obviously are wanting the gospel to be preached in church on Sundays (so that church itself is an opportunity for the outsider to listen and hear the gospel) I think we also need bring the gospel of Scripture to people in different ways, in different contexts. It might begin with a conversation over coffee with someone and then become a regular get together where you're working through things together and opening the Bible together. And it might become an evangelistic Bible study of the kind we were just talking about.
So I think the evangelistic Bible study is based on the concept that we want to get people together to be in the Word with other people over time. That’s how people grow and become Christians and grow as Christians. And that’s what we want to see happen.
MS: My friend just recently finished reading Andrew Heard’s book called Growth and Change that really gets us thinking about leadership on this idea. Are we willing to change our ministry practices to reach the lost? And my friend said to me, “I'm not much of a gardener, but I do know this, that if I haven't scattered any seeds in my backyard, there's not going to be a garden.” And the evangelistic Bible study is actually not a bad way to try to get people together around the word over a length of time, to allow them to question, to ruminate, think, discuss, over a period of time. It’s a really good thing, and we should never give up on it. We just keep trying different variations of the same thing in terms of getting them together. In that sense, you wrote something a number of years ago that we have found very useful at our church called You, Me and the Bible. It's simple, it's six studies. It's getting people into about 10 or 12 key passages. And we love it. We've used it one on one. We've used it in groups, and it's very helpful because it's getting the Bible open, and getting people to use Two Ways to Live as a framework. We have a brother, Dave Jensen, who is writing a course for us at Matthias Media and is trying to do something very similar. And you and Dave will be talking about evangelism at a conference in Denver in the United States of America in October. Tony, why don't you say a little bit more about what you're hoping to accomplish there?
TP: I'm very excited about this, Marty, because even though evangelism is something that we're all in favor of, and we want to do more of as individuals and as churches, it's really common for us to struggle, as churches in particular, to sort of see that happening. And that's come out again and again in the workshops we've done over the years, hasn't it? As we talk with pastors, it's a desire that everybody has, but they look at what work they're actually doing and what's happening, and it's usually a fairly disappointing picture of what's actually happening. And so to get together and talk about that, and talk about how, as people who believe the Bible, who believe in in the ministry that comes out of Scripture, the people-oriented, Word-centered, prayerful, persevering, kind of ministry of the Word and disciple-making, what would that look like in evangelism, and how could we infuse that culture into our churches?
I'm really excited to get together and talk about that with pastors and leaders in the US. Dave Jensen's a great guy who's thought a lot about it out here and has been very helpful in our circles in continuing to challenge us to think about how all this works and how we can become more effective and more kind of focused evangelistically as churches. I'm hugely looking forward to it. It's always great to come to the US. I love coming over and looking forward to seeing a crowd of people there on October 7-9 in Denver.
PS
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Links
Evangelize 2024
Always two there are
by Tony Payne (when this podcast was called The Payneful Truth)
An article that discusses the way the Bible is full of pairs of ideas that you have to hold together.
