Theology Is for God’s People

I am happy to announce that the good people at B&H Publishing Group and I have contracted for a major 3-volume popular-level systematic theology.

The Lord has long impressed me with the truth that theology is the responsibility of his people in the local churches.

This conviction began under the preaching of pastor Wayne DuBose, now of Minden, Louisiana.

It was then reinforced by the teaching of James Leo Garrett of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Research on the biblical and historical doctrine of the priesthood of all believers with the ThM at Duke Divinity (on the continental Reformation) and the DPhil at University of Oxford (on the English Reformation) cemented this conviction. (The latter was published by Oxford University Press).

Significant pastorates in Texas, Louisiana, and North Carolina showed in practice the truth that our people in our local churches want to know how to think properly about God, his work in the world, and his Word. These pastorates above all developed a deep love to teach God’s Word.

When Lakeside Baptist Church Granbury called me to be their Teaching Pastor, I was overwhelmed with joy to ground academic theology in church theology. The combination of the roles of Teaching Pastor and Research Professor have proved beneficial for both classroom and pulpit.

In important ways, the ongoing Baptist struggle with theological modernism has been exacerbated by a divorce between church and academy. The churches rightly claim theology is for their use in worship, mission, teaching. The academies serve best when we support the churches.

The theological construction undergirding this conviction was written up for academic theological audiences in “The Formation of Christian Doctrine,” a detailed methodology published by B&H Academic in 2007. Theologians in the academy may consult that work for more detail.

Now, in my writing ministry, I plan to turn in the direction that, as my wife Karen Searcy Yarnell recently reminded me, Leo Garrett long hoped I would do: popular theology.

The American Evangelical and Southern Baptist academy is maturing theologically by leaps. Let us now build on that.

Stay tuned for more details from B&H Publishers in the next few years. For now, however, you know where my focus will be dedicated.

Theology is for God’s People.

The Ontology of Jesus Christ: A Lament for Modernity

The widespread effort in modern biblical scholarship to downplay the ontological and metaphysical claims of the New Testament terms, and thus their Trinitarian and Christological implications, is particularly frustrating and damaging to orthodoxy, in the academy and the church.

Take, for instance, Jesus’s self-referential uses of ἥκω (“I have come”) and of ἐγώ εἰμι (“I am”) in John’s Gospel. The first “denotes the coming of the deity to men” in the Greek world (Schneider), while the second explicates the Hebrew Tetragrammaton. Both invariably reveal Jesus is the eternal God.

However, because of the downgrade in modern commentary on John in particular, as seen for instance in the highly influential New Testament Theology of Rudolf Bultmann, scholars are checked in their full-throated affirmation and inhibited from a deep appreciation of Christ as God.

Instead, the modern commentaries focus upon the function of Jesus rather than the ontology and metaphysics of Jesus. Let us be clear: Jesus was pursued to death by the Israelite religious leaders precisely because of his ontological claims, his theological self-identification.

And if Jesus was willing to state his deity so clearly, then his followers must state his deity clearly, not merely as a datum but as a thoroughgoing identification.

Christ does not merely function as the means to our salvation. Christ is God, the theological end of salvation!

On Christian Freedom: The Sausage Affair

The Affair of the Sausages is as historically significant among the Reformed churches as Luther’s Nailing of the 95 Theses is among the Lutherans. On Ash Wednesday in 1522, Christoph Froschauer and his publishing team were physically tired after printing a new edition of the Letters of Paul. So Froschauer served his famished crew what he had on hand: hard meat sausages.

However, the medieval church’s laws regarding Lent required Christians to fast from eating meat, eggs, and cheese. When the Catholic authorities found out, Froschauer was arrested. Ulrich Zwingli, the preaching pastor at the Grossmünster in Zürich, had been at Froschauer’s place when this all happened. He had not himself participated but was ready to defend the freedom of others to participate.

Zwingli’s sermon, On Rejecting Lent and Protecting Christian Liberty from Man-Made Obligations, addressed the crisis. For Zwingli, the eating of meat at Lent is a matter of Christian freedom, as is choosing not to eat meat. The gospel of Jesus Christ frees people from self-justification. This includes the tradition of fasting for 40 days prior to the celebration of Easter.

For Zwingli, the choice to participate in Lent is a matter of “Christian Liberty.” The Good News sets the believer free from any effort to make himself or herself acceptable before God.

Zwingli’s passionate defense of Christian liberty in the practice (or not) of the Lent tradition led to the First Disputation, which in turn sparked the Swiss Reformation. Switzerland long remained the center of Reformed Christianity. The Anabaptists and the Baptists emerged primarily from the Reformed and related churches, so the theological lessons learned in 1522 belong to those traditions, too.

I agree with Zwingli in this matter: Observe Lent if you feel led to do so, but do not demand others observe Lent. Don’t observe Lent if you feel so led, but do not demand that others reject Lent to satisfy your own conscience. Celebrating Lent won’t help save you; neither will rejecting Lent save you. 

Trusting in the Gospel of Jesus Christ alone saves you. Everything else in the Christian life is free gravy, including sausage gravy on your biscuits, if you like.