The pastor of our church is retiring in April, and after going through his collection and taking home the books he wanted to keep, he graciously allowed three of us who are seminary students to pillage the rest of his library. We went to the office a few nights ago and began to mark out our territory. About half of Martyn Lloyd-Jones' series on Romans was there as well as Philip Schaff's 8-volume History of the Christian Church, which were the two sets I wanted most from all the books on the shelf. The other two guys did not mind, so I happily put them in my box. While I know Schaff's work is available online, I wanted it on my shelf, especially since my area of interest is church history and historical theology and Schaff's history is still an important one in the field. I was able to grab a few more worthwhile items as well, which you see in the photo to the left.

Collecting new books never gets old, but it does fill up our bookshelves very quickly—once I get these put into their proper places, we will almost be out of shelf space again.

Loading mentions Retweet

Hesitant as I am to raise this issue again, given the heated discussion it prompted last time, I still think it is an important one to talk about (in fact, the flurry of comments seem to indicate that). The question initially revolved around what beliefs people need to share in order to have fellowship with one another. This, in turn—and quite naturally, I think—brought the discussion around to what one needs to believe in order to be saved.

I was reading Martyn Lloyd-Jones' biography on the plane yesterday and was interested to find his perspective on the issue. In the 1950s, he dealt quite frequently with the question of whom to have fellowship with and whom to partner with in the work of the gospel. The religious climate in England in that time was, to say the least, not good, and Lloyd-Jones found evangelicals hard to come by. For this reason,

[Lloyd-Jones] was utterly opposed to making the theology which he believed to be true Calvinism a requirement for fellowship among Christians. For an 'orthodoxy' which prided itself on its exclusiveness he had not the slightest sympathy. He knew that a Christian, dependent on the death of Christ alone for salvation and trusting the Word of God, may have a very limited understanding of how God's grace came to him: 'What an impudence it is,' he says in one place, 'for any of us to expel or withdraw from a fellow sinner saved by the same grace because we believe that his deductions about how grace works are defective as compared with our deductions.' Accordingly...he was ready to give assistance to a number of agencies which did not endorse some of his most deeply held convictions. And he likewise sought to maintain friendships with Christian leaders...whose sympathies were much closer to the Arminian side of evangelicalism (194).

According to the conclusions of my previous post on this matter, you will know that I am in agreement with Lloyd-Jones here. I remain unconvinced that the conditions of Christian fellowship should be more restrictive than what he alludes to here (in light of Romans 10:9, among others). In our mission to further the gospel of Jesus Christ, there is simply too much at stake to draw the lines any sharper than this (Matt. 9:37).

Loading mentions Retweet

Martyn Lloyd-Jones made his first trip to North America in June of 1932, spending most of his nine-week trip in Toronto. While he had been invited to preach for nine Sundays at a Presbyterian Church, T. T. Shields, the pastor of Jarvis Street Baptist Church, asked to meet with him once. Shields was known for frequently engaging in polemical attacks against liberal theologians, and wondered if Lloyd-Jones did the same. From the first volume of Iain Murray's biography of Lloyd-Jones, here is a record of their conversation.

Shields came to fetch me and we had lunch. We talked on general subjects and then we went to sit in the garden. There, as we drank coffee, he suddenly turned to me and said, 'Are you a great reader of Joseph Parker?' I replied, 'No, I am not.' 'Why?' he asked. 'I get nothing from him.' 'Man!' he said, 'what's the matter with you?' 'Well,' I said, 'it's all very well to make these criticisms of the liberals but he doesn't help me spiritually.' 'Surely you are helped by the way he makes mincemeat of the liberals?' 'No, I am not,' I responded. 'You can make mincemeat of the liberals and still be in trouble in your own soul.' 'Well,' Shields said, 'I read Joseph Parker every Sunday morning. He winds me up—puts me right.' I felt my opening had come, so we began. We had a great debate. He was a very able man and we argued the issue about which I disagreed with him. In defence of his attitude he said, 'Do you know, every time I indulge in what you call one of these "dog-fights" the sales of the Gospel Witness go right up. What about that?' 'Well,' I replied, 'I have always observed that if there is a dog-fight a crowd gathers, I'm not at all surprised. People like that sort of thing.' Then he brought up another argument. He said, 'Now, you are a doctor and you are confronted by a patient who has got cancer. You know that if that cancer is not removed it is going to kill the patient. You don't want to operate but you have to do so because it is going to save the patient's life. That is my position. I don't want to be doing this kind of thing, but there is this cancer and it has got to be removed. What do you say to that?' I responded, 'What I say to that is this: I am a physician but there is such a thing as "a surgical mentality", or of becoming what is described as "knife-happy". I agree, there are some cases where you have got to operate, but the danger of the surgeon is to operate immediately. He thinks in terms of operating. Never have an operation without having a second opinion from a physician.'

At this point Shields got up, walked down the garden and then came back to re-open the conversation: 'Well,' he queried, 'what about this: you remember Paul in Galatians 2? He had to withstand Peter to the face. He did not want to do it. Peter was an older apostle, a leader and so on. Paul did it very reluctantly, but he had to do it for the sake of the truth. I am in exactly that position. What do you say to that?' 'I would say this,' I responded, 'that the effect of what Paul did was to win Peter round to his position and make him call him "our beloved brother Paul". Can you say the same about the people whom you attack?' Shields was finished...[and] I made a great appeal to him. I said, 'Dr. Shields, you used to be known as the Canadian Spurgeon...[but] you suddenly changed and became negatory and denunciatory. I feel it has ruined your ministry. Why don't you come back! Drop all this, preach the gospel to people positively and win them!' (272-273).

Sadly, polemical figures like Dr. Shields remain in the Church today, and not just in the Reformed camp (though they often seem to be especially vocal there). Time spent berating others for having different emphases on secondary or even tertiary points of doctrine will ruin our ministry, as Lloyd-Jones says. There is room for discussion on these matters, to be sure, but when they become the focus of polemical rants, we have lost sight of what is most urgent. The parable of the weeds in Matthew 13:24-30 serves as a helpful reminder, I think.

I am studying theology because I believe there is a right way of understanding the biblical revelation, but not because I want ammunition with which to attack other Christians. I'm doing so because I believe, to use John Frame's definition, that theology is the application of God's Word to all of life. I want to see people come to know Jesus Christ and to help them learn what it means to live for Him as Lord. If my focus shifts from this primary calling, I believe I have become unfaithful to the task Christ called His people to before He ascended into heaven (Matt. 28:16-20).

Jesus said it best: "The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few" (Matt. 9:37). The need is urgent, and the time is short.

Loading mentions Retweet

After finishing up Preaching and Preachers, I felt the desire—if not the urge—to begin to read Iain Murray's two-volume biography of Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Knowing that Lloyd-Jones had been influenced by the Puritans, I was not surprised to discover that already in March of 1926, before he entered the ministry (although at that point already having decided to), he was giving a talk to the Literary and Debating Society at Charing Cross Chapel on Puritanism.

One of the most significant reasons we ought to read the Puritans, he says, is because of the profound depth of faith they demonstrate, and their earnest desire to live a life reflective of the grace of God that had been at work in their lives.

'If you wish to know what Puritanism really is, don't read large volumes on the subject by men who may be scholars but never were Puritans, but rather read the life-stories of Puritans...and pray God to give you light not merely to see what is in print but also to see what is between the lines. The great truth in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is not that Christian endured great hardships on his way to the eternal city, but that Christian thought it to be worth his while to endure those hardships...The only people who have a right to say anything about Christianity are those who have felt its force in their own lives...'

The Puritan, [Lloyd-Jones] argued, is not 'the strong man'. He is: 'a very weak man who has been given strength to realise that he is weak. I would say of all men and women that we are all weak, very weak, the difference being that the sinners do not appreciate the fact that they are weak, whereas the Christians do' (98).

Growing up in Dutch Reformed circles, I did not have a lot of exposure to the Puritans, nor did I during my college years where I was surrounded by—and profoundly influenced by—neocalvinism (which I still primarily identify myself with). However, last year I took a course on the theology of John Owen taught by Sinclair Ferguson, which opened my eyes to the gold mine that is the Puritans.

I remember conversations in college in which we wrestled with the recognition that sometimes neocalvinism could be so focused on thinking about what it meant to bring all of life and creation under the lordship of Jesus Christ that we lost sight of the fact that our souls needed to be submitted to Christ as well. I think reading more of the Puritans may be a way for me to balance that out.

Loading mentions Retweet

Towards the end of the lectures on preaching by Martyn Lloyd-Jones recorded in his book, Preaching and Preachers, he devotes one session to discussing certain things preachers should avoid. Lloyd-Jones, as many know, was an advocate of preaching through books of the Bible as opposed to preaching a number of sermons on a specific subject. His reasoning behind this objection is that preaching according to subjects

has the tendency to isolate subjects from their context in the Scriptures; indeed ultimately it regards the Scriptures as but a collection of statements about particular subjects. So one atomises the Scripture and forgets the whole; and, surely, the whole is more important than the parts...one loses the sense of the wholeness of the biblical message (245).

Additionally, Lloyd-Jones makes the case that to preach according to certain subjects does not square with a proper understanding of preaching, which I mentioned in an earlier post. This, he argues, is an even more important point than the first.

Why are people interested in 'subjects'? The answer is that they think they know what they need, and they only want to hear about the things in which they say they are 'tremendously interested'.

You must have gathered already that it is a part of my whole contention that they are not in a position, ultimately, to know what they need; and our experience of ourselves in the past, and experience as pastors of souls, teaches that so often their idea as to what they need is quite wrong. Of course the preacher may also be wrong in this respect, but this applies much more to the congregations. It is, I repeat, a part of our whole approach to this matter not to allow the pew to decide the theme of preaching and not to encourage them at all along this line; but rather to give them the whole truth, and to bring them to see that there are vital aspects of which they are ignorant and in which they are apparently not interested at all. They should be interested in the whole truth and every aspect of it, and we must show them their need of this.

Interestingly, Lloyd-Jones remarks that features like this are the heir of nineteenth-century liberalism.

It has often amazed me to notice how churches and preachers hold on to nineteenth-century methods when they have long since bidden farewell to the great truths emphasised especially in the early part of that century. This habit and practice of announcing the subject, and of having a choir, and a children's address—all these things came in during the last century; they were not done before that time. It was all part of that pseudo-intellectualism of the Victorians; and we are now experiencing a kind of hangover from this. I am calling attention to this because I feel that the urgent need today is to break free from these bad habits, this false respectability and intellectualism that was so characteristic of the end of the last century. These things have been dominating our services; and I feel they detract from the preaching of the Gospel and the centrality of the preaching of the Gospel (246-247).

Disregarding the pot-shots he takes at choirs and children's messages, I think he again makes some very valid points for our consideration.

Loading mentions Retweet