Remembering Francis Schaeffer

I was at a Central Baptist Seminary faculty retreat in the Muskokas in May of 1984—Dr George Bell had become the President of the school that year and one of my best friends, Mr. Keith Edwards, had come on board to help me as my assistant registrar (what a joy to be working with him again!)—when I heard news of the death of Dr. Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984). He died on May 15, 1984. Schaeffer, along with C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), were my two earliest Christian mentors as authors. Schaeffer helped me realize that honest questions deserved honest answers. He showed me that being an intellectual was a definite Christian calling and indirectly helped confirm my calling as an historian, though the latter took years to work out. And he gave me a distinct preference for presuppositional apologetics, the only reasonable approach to apologetics for a Calvinist. I still have great admiration for his work, though I recognize that some of his discussion of philosophers like Kant and Kierkegaard was not terribly deep.

Manitoba Ministry

This past weekend I was in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, at Bible Baptist Church, where Larry Bird is the pastor. I spoke at the church three times and at the annual convention of the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches (FEBC) in Canada, Manitoba Region, on Saturday twice. The convention was also held at Bible Baptist Church. What a delight to be with these brothers and sisters. The fellowship and hospitality was tremendous. There are eight or so churches in the Region—the smallest of the FEBC regions. Again, it was a privilege to be with these Baptist brothers and sisters and meet a number who knew men that I knew. It is amazing to think that I have lived in this country for forty years and when it comes to going west I had never been outside of Ontario. The farthest west I had ever been was Blind River, Ontario! I have been much farther west in the US but not in my home country. So it was a privilege to fly into Winnipeg, where a brother, Ed Price, picked me up and drove me to Portage. Pastor Bird loves the doctrines of grace and it was a privilege to meet him again and minister to his people.

Sembeq

One of the greatest privileges of my life has been teaching at SEMBEQ, the French Evangelical Baptist Seminary in Montreal. The students that I have taught have taught me as much as I have them. And it is through my times at this school that I have made some deep and lasting friendships for which I will thank God for eternity. I thank God for so many of the brothers who are labouring in Baptist works in Quebec.

Bethge & Baptist Spirituality

I have been away at our annual faculty retreat for a few days. This weekend I am scheduled to speak on Baptist spirituality. I hope to do so, DV, through the medium of Baptist history. These words of Eberhard Bethge, friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, are an important reminder of why I am taking this approach: “Commemoration renders life human; forgetfulness makes it inhuman. …even when remembrance carries grief and shame, it fills the future with perspectives. And the denial of the past furthers the affairs of death, precisely because it focuses exclusively on the present.” [Friendship and Resistance. Essays on Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Geneva: WCC Publications/Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1995), 105].

Bonhoeffer & the Impact of Life Together

There are certain areas of the thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) with which I strongly disagree. But he is among my favourite authors of the twentieth century. I shall never forget the summer meditatively reading his Life Together at the beach of Port Elgin, Ontario, on the shores of Lake Huron, where I was vacationing with my wife Alison and her family. It has shaped my thinking on many aspects of the Christian life, especially those that deal with the nature of Christian community. Bonhoeffer wrote this work out of his experience of leading the Confessing Church’s seminary at Zingst by the Baltic Sea. This seminary was later relocated in 1935 to Finkenwalde, Pomerania. Finding myself now as the principal of a seminary, the book takes on added significance.

As I have noted, it is a excellent guide to the nature of Christian community. For Bonhoeffer, the students under his care had to be men who knew how to play formative roles in the Christian communities to which they were called. We live in different times with different challenges, but we have the same need: how to teach potential pastors to take seriously the call to be pastors and not only preachers. The Word is central. Of this there is no doubt. But its centrality is not only to be found in the context of weekly worship, but in the lived-out experience of the Church. It is only in such that genuine Christian community can be formed—and transformed.

Thanks to God for the Humfreys

In addition to saying goodbye to a number of graduates last night at the graduation ceremonies of Toronto Baptist Seminary, we also gave thanks for the ministry of Clint Humfrey  and his wife Christel (see her blog Coluratura Christian—check it out, she has been blogging on Christian marriage recently) amongst us. It has been a privilege to have them with us these past three years, Clint teaching first- and second-year Greek and Christel helping him and singing at various functions. She sang last night—it was excellent. Clint and Christel hope to move to Aberdeen, Scotland, where Clint will pursue doctoral studies in New Testament. May the Triune Lord go before you, brother and sister, and make his face to shine upon you and give you his peace.

Pan-Reformed Unity in Canada

The Together for the Gospel conference, which I attended two weeks ago, has stirrred in me thoughts about the necessity of expressions of pan-Reformed unity. During the time of the Reformation, there was a deep sense among those whom God was using to recover biblical Christianity of a unity in Christ. Scholars today call this International Calvinism.

Again, during the period of awakening in the world of transatlantic Evangelicalism of the eighteenth-century there was also a sense of unity that transcended ecclesiatsical polity lines. Witness the interfacing of Moravian and Anglican, Presbyterian and Baptist.

We need such expressions today. The Together for the Gospel conference was one fabulous expression of this. We desperately need something like this in Canada, where those who are Reformed and who love the gospel of free grace have a place where they can encourage one another and be encouraged. A place where we can build lines of fellowship and communication. I have no interest in producing some sort of institutional merger. Rather, what we need is an expression of the organic union that already exists by virtue of our common faith and heritage from the Reformation.

May God give us vision and boldness in this day of harvest!

Toronto Baptist Seminary Graduation and Dr Joel Beeke’s Address

Last night was the graduation ceremony of Toronto Baptist Seminary & Bible College, where I serve the Lord. Nine men graduated, with degrees and diplomas ranging from the one-year certificate in biblical studies to the M.Div. It was a great time of celebrating the goodness and grace of God in the lives of these men. Our guest speaker was Dr. Joel Beeke, President of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, where he also teaches Systematic Theology. Entitling his address “Cherish the Church,” he spoke on that much debated verse from Matthew 16, verse 18, specifically the words “I will build my church.” It was a great sermon to the graduates, and to all present, on the necessity of loving the Church.

Dr. Beeke developed what he saw as the biblical mean between the extremes of Roman Catholic clericalism and institutionalism, on the one hand, and the rampant individualism of modern Evangelicalism, on the other. He cited John Calvin to the effect that we ought to cherish the Church above all other interests apart from God and referred to Calvin’s own use of that statement from Augustine (who derived it from Cyprian) that no one can have God as Father who does not have the Church as his or her Mother.

He stressed that we are to love the Church because she is precious to Christ—he gave his life for her. We are to cherish the Church because she is built on the Rock Christ. He interpreted the phrase “on this rock” as a reference to the confession that Peter made and thus ultimately a reference to the Lord Jesus as the Rock on which the Church is built. Finally, he focused our thoughts on the fact that the Lord Jesus is building His Church and he will not fail to make her perfect. Citing John Flavel—“Bury not the Church before she is dead”—he gave us, as he closed, an eschatological vision of the Church in glory, perfectly arrayed for the Bridegroom Christ. Praise the Lord for his goodness.

Since my coming to Toronto Baptist Seminary in 2003, we have been involved in a time of rebuilding and re-rooting the Seminary firmly on the Rock, that is the Lord Jesus, and on the gospel once for all delivered to the saints. And this was a great word of encouragement.

Dr. Beeke is due to speak at Jarvis Street Baptist Church this Sunday morning (11am) and then this Sunday evening at Trinity Baptist Church - Burlington, Ontario, Canada (6:30pm)

Together for the Gospel Conference

This past week I drove down with five friends to Louisville, Kentucky, for the Together for the Gospel Conference, at which Mark Dever, Ligon Duncan, Al Mohler, R.C. Sproul, John Piper, C.J. Mahaney and John MacArthur—a who’s who of the conservative Reformed world—spoke. It was an awesome conference in so many ways—those who put together the conference served the 3,000 men who came with humility and joy, the messages delivered were all uniformly excellent and edifying, the worship solid and the fellowship tremendous. One message in my mind stood out, though, and that was John Piper’s word on Thursday night. It was one of those occasions when the Spirit of God powerfully moved throughout the congregation. There was a palpable sense of awe at the weightiness of God’s holy presence as God’s Word was pressed home with deep conviction.

I have heard Dr Piper speak on four other occasions—at Heritage Seminary in Cambridge in the mid 1990s and then at ETS in 2003 on Jonathan Edwards. The Lord has made him a remarkable preacher: serious and weighty, filled with joy and delight in the Triune God, deeply versed in the things of God and the words of Scripture. I looked forward to hearing him and God did not disappoint.

In his message, he mentioned his conviction that Martyn Lloyd-Jones was the outstanding preacher of the twentieth century. I would venture to say that history may well view Piper as one of the outstanding preachers of the twenty-first century.

Historical Reflections on Baptist Ordination

A few weeks ago I participated in the ordination of a dear brother, Scott Bowman. As I thought about what that event entailed I realized afresh the scriptural principle that leadership is vital to the people of God. I suppose it was a French-speaking pastor by the name of Jacques Alexanian, who has spent nearly all of his ministry in Quebec and who has been something of a father in Christ to me, who first drilled this into my thinking and convictions. Right from the very beginning of her existence the Church has had leaders. One thinks, for instance, of the Twelve appointed by our Lord to be witnesses to his life and resurrection. Or consider Paul’s admonition in 1 Thessalonians 5:12-13, among the earliest of the New Testament texts.

Moreover, formally or officially recognizing the call of God on a man’s life to be a leader among God’s people is clearly grounded in the Scriptures (see Acts 13:1-3 and 1 Timothy 4:14). And Baptists, convinced that ordination to pastoral ministry was indeed a biblical pattern for the good of the Church, have ordained men since they first emerged in England in the mid-seventeenth century. For example, on February 16, 1769, in a London Baptist congregation, Abraham Booth (1734-1806), just twenty-four at the time, was ordained “to the pastoral office…according to the primitive manner, by prayer and imposition of hands.” [William Clarke, Introductory Discourse in A Charge and Sermon together with an Introductory Discourse and Confession of Faith delivered at the Ordination of the Rev. Mr. Abraham Booth Feb. 16, 1769, in Goodman’s Fields (London: G. Keith et al., 1769), 9].

Or consider the ordination of Thomas Morgan (1776-1857) to the pastoral charge of Cannon Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, England, thirty-three years later in 1802. Morgan was twenty-five or so at the time. A fellow Baptist minister by the name of John Sutcliff (1752-1814), a close friend of William Carey (1761-1834), introduced the occasion. Sutcliff noted that the church was “satisfied that” Morgan possessed “a ministerial talent” and was convinced that Morgan’s “doctrine [was] sound, and his manner of life becoming the gospel.”

The church therefore wished to ordain Morgan as their pastor, an ordination “accompanied with prayer, and the imposition of hands.” Sutcliff was quick to note that the hands to be laid on Morgan were “empty.” The laying-on-of-hands did not convey any ministerial gift. Rather, hands were laid on Morgan as “a solemn and significant rite; a fit sign of his being set apart to a particular office.” [Introductory Discourse in The Difficulties of the Christian Ministry, and the Means of surmounting them; with the Obedience of Churches to their Pastors explained and enforced (Birmingham, 1802), 6-7].

It was a privilege to be involved in such a historic and meaning-laden rite as Scott Bowman was set aside for pastoral ministry.

Collect for St. Patrick’s Day

Found this collect—it sure reads like one—for St. Patrick’s Day on wyclif.net. A shame I found it after the day. But I can use it for next year. It is his blog for St. Patrick’s Day:

Almighty God, who in thy providence didst choose thy servant Patrick to be the apostle of the Irish people, to bring those who were wandering in darkness and error to the true light and knowledge of thee: Grant us so to walk in that light, that we may come at last to the light of everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and ever. Amen.