In The Nick of Time

The opening chapter of the Fourth Gospel tells how two of John’s disciples turned aside from following the forerunner in order to follow Jesus. The story includes an exchange that is frequently overlooked. The two disciples asked Jesus where He lived, to which Jesus replied “Come and see.” The disciples followed Jesus to the place where He was living, but the day was fast waning. According to the text, the two “lived with Him that day” (John 1:37-39). Indeed, they never stopped living with Jesus—they became His companions throughout the rest of His ministry.

The idea of living with Jesus comes up again in John’s gospel. In John 6, Jesus used the metaphor of eating His flesh and drinking His blood as a way of referring to saving faith. He commented that someone who does these things “lives with Me, and I with him” (John 6:56).

This idea is deepened in John 14, where Jesus comforted His disciples in the face of His imminent departure. He stated that His Father’s house contains many “living places,” the future homes of His followers (John 14:2). Jesus also intimated that the Father lives with Jesus, and was the one who works through Him (14:10). He further stated that if someone loves Him and keeps His words, then the Father will love that person. Both the Father and Jesus will come to that person and “make our home” with him (14:23; the word for “home” is the same as the word for “living-places” in verse 2).

For over three years the disciples had been living with Jesus. Now that He was about to go away, this intimate relationship seemed to be threatened. Jesus assured His disciples that His temporary departure guaranteed a place where they would live together with Him forever. In the meanwhile, Jesus pointed to the inner, spiritual presence of the Father with Him as an analog for the spiritual presence of Jesus and the Father with the disciples. In other words, intimacy with Jesus was not merely an eschatological promise, but also an ongoing possibility during Jesus’ bodily absence.

Atheist blogger Hemant Mehta rose to some level of national prominence with the publication of his book I Sold My Soul on eBay. His blog, Friendly Atheist, is among the various mills of unbelief I read to stay current on popular atheism. In a recent post, Mehta upbraided New York Times editorialist Nicholas Kristof for “not getting” atheists. Kristof had commended a few skeptics whose books highlight religion’s power “as an ethical and cohesive force,” so that religious belief aids the building of societies. In this line of thought, even granting an evolutionary perspective, religion has been a profoundly helpful adaptation, despite the fact that ritual and ceremony have no obvious immediate survival benefits.

Mehta counters, indirectly:

No one ever argued religion wasn’t powerful…. But the “New Atheists” are right that religion is harmful and irrational. More importantly, religious beliefs are untrue. There’s no credible evidence Jesus rose from the dead, people go to heaven and hell, that your prayers get answered, or that God talks to you.

Religion may give you hope, but that hope rests on you accepting a lie. I, and many other atheists, don’t want to live that way.

Mehta’s argument is straightforward: even if a religious belief increases personal peace and goodwill within a community, we ought not believe it if we know is that it is false. The side benefits of a belief are never enough to justify holding false belief. His point is fair enough, as far as it goes, but Mehta’s problem is that he doesn’t go quite far enough.

Mark Twain is supposed to have said that everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Among Christians, almost the same thing could be said about prayer. We know that we ought to pray. We know it is important to pray. We talk about prayer, preach about prayer, and even publish books about prayer. For most Christians, however, not much praying gets done.

Indeed, most Christians have little idea how to pray. Usually they have been told that prayer is “talking to God.” That is true enough, but how many of us can carry on much of a conversation with an invisible, inaudible partner? Sure, we know that we are supposed to talk to God, but what are we supposed to talk about? What are we supposed to say?

This perplexity is not unique to modern Christians. Evidently Jesus’ disciples experienced something like it. After observing the Lord in His conversations with His Father, they presented Him with a petition: “Lord, teach us to pray” (Lk. 11:1).

Jesus did not despise their request. He neither rebuked nor ridiculed His disciples. Instead, He taught them to pray. He even provided them with a template, a model prayer into which they could insert their own concerns and locutions.

Jesus’ disciples had to be taught how to pray. Prayer did not come naturally to them. They did not intuitively know how to do it. If even the disciples had to be taught how to pray, then it is not unreasonable to suppose that Christians in the twenty-first century also have something to learn. Praying is not something that we do by instinct, the way that geese migrate to their destination. If we are going to pray effectively, we must be taught how.

“Just the facts, ma’am.” This line is widely believed to have been made famous by the character Joe Friday, detective sergeant in the famous Dragnet television series. Actually, Friday never spoke the line. It was popularized by Stan Freberg in his parodies of the show.

Proverbs 31:10 asks who can find a virtuous woman, implying that such women are rather rare. Interestingly, both the Hebrew word chayil and the Latin word that Jerome used to translate it (fortis) convey the idea of strength and power. The adjective in the Septuagint (andreios) actually means masculine or even stubborn. The subsequent description offers a biblical celebration of a woman whose genuine strength of mind and will is clearly on display. King Lemuel’s mother apparently wanted him to find a woman with strong character, determination, and the ability to rise above circumstances and to achieve great deeds. These traits have often been thought of as masculine, but they are entirely compatible with a biblical understanding of femininity.

When, during the summer of 1978, I stepped onto the campus of Denver Baptist Theological Seminary, the first person I met was the registrar, Ann Miller. She took the trouble to show me the school and to introduce me to several professors. Her encouragement was definitely part of the reason that I went to Denver instead of to a more prestigious seminary.

Later, as a student and then a professor at Denver, I learned more about Ann. The first thing that I learned about her is that she was a highly competent administrator. While her official position was registrar, her managerial ability was the glue that held the institution together. Whenever I needed to solve an organizational problem, Ann was the person to talk to. If she didn’t know the answer, or if the matter fell outside of her purview, she could always help me find the right person with the right answer. If the New Testament teaches that the Holy Spirit gives gifts to believers, then one of hers was the gift of “governments” (1 Cor. 12:28).

That was not Ann’s only gift, however. A couple of months into my first semester, Mrs. Miller called me to her office. She had my transcripts in front of her. “I see that you didn’t do very well during your first couple of years in college,” she said. “Then your grades took off. What happened between your sophomore and junior years?” I explained that during my sophomore year, God had broken my heart and will, bringing me out of rebellion and into a willing recognition of Jesus Christ as my Lord. I can still remember how Ann’s eyes lit up. “I knew it!” she said. “I knew that God was doing something with you!” For a few moments we rejoiced together in the goodness of God. From that moment onwards, Ann became an unceasing source of encouragement.

At the beginning of July, I became the first research professor that Central Seminary has ever employed. The transition from the presidency to the research professorship took a few months, but now I seem to be getting settled into a new routine. Frankly, I love what I’m doing.

During the years that I was president of the seminary, I continued to teach a full course load. That has not changed—I am still in the classroom and get to experience plenty of contact with students. When I get hungry for more, I park in a chair out in the hall and pretend to read. Almost invariably, one or more students will stop by for good conversation.

The administrative duties, however, have been taken away. In their place, I have been granted the opportunity to devote my time to research and writing. The terms of this arrangement are pretty flexible. I can work at home with minimal interruptions when I need to focus on writing. I can even work from a remote location if I wish. One of my doctoral advisers used to do some of his best work from a “writing shack” in the north woods, and I am giving serious consideration to that alternative.

This week I have been devoting myself to final edits on a book for Regular Baptist Press. The title has not been decided yet (titles typically belong to the publisher and not the author). The volume, however, is an overview of Baptist distinctives and polity.

This is the first time I’ve worked with Regular Baptist Press. Having worked with several other publishers, I have some standard of comparison. Regular Baptist Press is as helpful and easy to work with as any of them. While it has published few new volumes for several years, RBP was recently tasked with producing books that will promote the distinctive position of Regular Baptists. Consequently, RBP was looking for a book on Baptist polity and distinctives at the same time that I was beginning to write one.

In The Nine Nations of North America, Joel Garreau argued that the political boundaries between Mexico, Canada, and the United States are in certain respects less important than the economic and cultural differences between regions. Garreau re-drew the map of North America into nine cultural regions or nations which, he said, would provide a key to understanding the most important commonalities of each region. The nine regions were Quebec (for Garreau, a nation unto itself), New England (including the Maritimes), the Foundry (the industrial Northeast), Dixie (the Old South), the Islands (the whole Caribbean and much of Central America), the Breadbasket (the agricultural Midwest), Ecotopia (the Pacific Coast), Mexamerica (the desert Southwest and Mexico), and the Empty Quarter (the open spaces of the Rocky Mountain West and the far North).

Garreau wrote during the early 1980s. If he were to redraw his map today, I suspect that Mexamerica would extend far into the region that he characterized as the Empty Quarter. In 1981, he considered Denver to be the capital of the Empty Quarter, and it still dominates much of the Rocky Mountain West. Now, however, it has become much more Hispanic and Southwestern in its flavor. In other words, the boundary between the West (or what used to be the West) and the Southwest is not as clear as it used to be.

Another feature that might be more prominent than Garreau reckoned is the presence of a virtual Mormon nation in the middle of the Empty Quarter. As a cultural unit, the Mormon nation blankets not only Utah, but also much of Idaho and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, and Nevada. Some of the strongest (and, frankly, zaniest) Mormon influence is focused on all sides of the Four Corners area.

Ministry in the West and Southwest is different than ministry in the East, the Midwest, or the Old South. For one thing, distances are much greater, meaning that church congregations are likely to be more widely dispersed, as are opportunities for inter-church fellowship. People often value privacy and are accustomed to isolation, matters that require a unique pastoral approach. Western individualism and self-reliance can easily cross the line into colorful idiosyncrasy. History also has lingering effects: the people who settled the West were often looking to make a fortune or to have a good time, and pursuit of recreation often outpaces spiritual interests—even for long-time church members.

Among the recent criticisms of Bob Jones University, one of the strangest is that the university’s teachers are poorly paid. One critic even prepared a chart showing faculty salaries from independent four-year colleges and universities throughout South Carolina, locating Bob Jones University at the bottom of the salary scale. The (anonymous) critic took this lack of munificence as such an obvious scandal as not even to require comment.

Plenty could be said about the survey itself. Comparisons of this sort are rarely as helpful (or, in this case, as damaging) as they are meant to be. The variables are simply too significant for direct evaluations to be made.

A larger issue is at stake, however. The fact is that the published salaries at Bob Jones University are not greatly out of line with faculty salaries at most Fundamentalist institutions of higher learning (especially if regional cost of living is taken into account). Professors in Fundamentalist institutions are paid far less than their peers in comparable secular colleges and universities.

This situation extends further than just Fundamentalism. Many broadly evangelical schools do not pay their professors much more. I have degrees from two large, evangelical seminaries. In one of those institutions, a tenured professor told one of my classes that, in order to support his family, he had to make $10,000 to $15,000 of outside income every year. A recent reporting instrument shows that institution paying an average salary of only $25,000 per year, less than the reported average for the Bob Jones faculty.

While average salaries are low for Christian professors, they can be even lower for pastors. Many pastors receive no more compensation than professors at Bob Jones. In fact, many receive substantially less. Smaller churches frequently offer salary packages that virtually require pastors (or their spouses) to work outside jobs.

The people who take these positions—these professorships and pastorates—are obviously not taking them for the money. Some other concern is in play. That concern can be expressed in various ways: ministry, serving the Lord, the care of souls. Jesus called it “laying up treasures in heaven.”

The life of the mind—including the life of the theological mind—experiences rhythms in which attention waxes and wanes. At one moment a significant plurality of thinkers will be focused upon some particular topic, but at a later moment their focus will have shifted to a different theme. Those who work with their minds instead of their hands will find that these ebbs and flows determine at least a part of their task. Whatever one’s discipline, one constantly feels the pressure to respond to the questions that are being asked at the moment. For the most part, even theologians are not free simply to ignore the immediate in favor of more remote personal interests.

The present moment is especially propitious for theologians who wish to think about the Trinity. Through its brief history, American evangelicalism (including fundamentalism) has produced few minds that have given themselves to understanding Trinitarianism. More typical have been those who, like J. Oliver Buswell, were willing to jettison certain aspects of the traditional doctrine that they perceived as meaningless. For his part, Buswell tried to dispense with the eternal generation of the Son, even though he acknowledged that his proposal was “somewhat revolutionary” (Systematic Theology 1:111). One wonders at the “somewhat.”

While Buswell serves as a convenient illustration, he is hardly alone. During his generation, the greatest challenges to orthodox Trinitarianism came either from theological liberalism (which pantheized God and divinized humanity) or else the unreconstructed Arianism of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Both approaches represented a direct and immediate threat to the deity of Christ. In those days, reflection upon the Trinity occurred primarily in the context of defending the deity of Christ. Other Trinitarian questions tended to fade in importance.

Dear Stephen,

Because we occupy rather distinct corners of the Lord’s vineyard, it has been some time since I have given much thought to you or to the university that you lead. My attention was riveted a few weeks ago, however, by a public clamor that was being raised against Bob Jones University. It is not necessary to rehearse the details of that commotion here, except to say that it brought certain matters to my attention.

First, it made me aware that your ministry (by which I mean both yours personally and the university’s institutionally) is facing sustained and sometimes very harsh public censure. Second, it alerted me to the fact that, while your critics are of different kinds, the most vocal detractors will be satisfied with nothing short of the complete collapse of Bob Jones University. Third, it made me aware that some of the most vitriolic criticisms are being leveled through venues in which careful analysis and personal accountability are notably absent—namely, venues such as Internet weblogs and social media services.

While I am not close enough to Bob Jones University to judge much of what takes place in the institution, many of the criticisms themselves simply lacked credibility. Both the vehemence and the virtual incoherence of the critics left me thinking of a lynch mob. The degree of their speculation about what you must have known or done behind closed doors was—well, it was hardly the mark of fair-mindedness or even-handedness.

On the contrary, as I have thought about what has taken place at Bob Jones University over the past fifteen years, I find many reasons to rejoice. Beginning under your father’s presidency, the ministry seems to have followed a trajectory of moderation and increasing responsibility. It is a trajectory of which I sincerely approve.