The American Churchman: The New Sanhedrin?

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All right, welcome to the

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American Churchman podcast. I am not John Harris, but it doesn't mean you should turn it off immediately.

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I am related to him. I am his brother. I am the director of TrueScript, and I am pinch hitting for him today, as always, or unless we have a significant category five hurricane,

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Matthew Pearson is here with us tonight. Matt, how are you doing? I am doing great, David.

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As always, it's always a pleasure to be here, and it's even a greater pleasure to have you on now. It's kind of funny how last week

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I was not able to make it because I was stupid enough to go down to Tampa during the hurricane.

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So that was fun. But yeah, John recommended I probably shouldn't do the cast, and I was going to cancel anyways.

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But it's funny how you two did it, and now he's gone and I'm here. So but yeah, it's good to see you, good to be with you for this cast.

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I'm excited. Absolutely. I don't think you were stupid at all. I was texting with my father -in -law who lives in Florida and telling him, listen,

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I'm coming. I don't want to miss it. But I don't know. I'm weird like that as well. When there's significant weather events,

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I have a deep, I hope masculine urge to be present for them.

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Like I need to experience them with everyone else, which by the way, you're going to get into an attribute of God.

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But something about storms that's always struck me and how it relates to sort of the attributes of God is a storm, especially like a big storm is a strange thing because there's this thing that you have a fear of it because of the power, but you also kind of desire it like you want to see the power.

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And that's sort of like the Lord. So that's kind of cool. But we're going to talk about the unity of God.

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Can you tell us a little bit about the unity of God? Absolutely. I will do my best.

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I just also want to let the audience know every time we go through these, I do so with fear and trembling because attributes of God are something incredibly important to know, but they're also something very important to get right.

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So whatever you hear me talk about, I would highly recommend just looking into it yourself as well, because not just like fact check me, making sure that I don't spout any heresies, but these are just so important for helping us contemplate who

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God is and just showing us the glory of God. There's a C .S. Lewis quote in the beginning of On the

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Incarnation with Athanasius where he talks about how it's oftentimes like it's not from the devotional books that he really feels the closest to God, but sometimes it's just sitting in his chair, smoking a pipe and reading some hard hitting theology where he feels the closest.

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And I definitely can relate to that. So just for your own faith, study these as well.

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They're good. But our attribute today is going to be the unity of God, or as I like to term it, just for ease, divine unity.

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So before I even define this or get into what this is, I'm just going to read three short

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Bible verses for us. The first one is Deuteronomy chapter six, verse four, where the scripture says,

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Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. Next one is Isaiah chapter 44, verse six, where the scripture says,

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Thus saith the Lord, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts. I am the first and I am the last.

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And beside me there is no God. And those were both from the Old Testament. So our final verse, we could do a few more verses out of the

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New Testament, but I really like this one. It's from Ephesians chapter four, verses five through six, where the scripture says,

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One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and father of all who is above all and through all and in you all.

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So essentially, when we talk about divine unity, what is unity?

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Unity is a sort of there's oneness there. Unity is the opposite of plurality.

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Unity is one. So when we talk about divine unity, remember how a few weeks back we had discussed on the cast,

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John and I, at least, we discussed divine simplicity, that God is not he's not a composite thing.

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He's not like this is a part of God. This is a part of God. This is a part of God. And when you put them all together, you have God. No, each of each of the attributes which

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God possesses, God, each of these attributes are God. So God does not have love.

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God does not have the greatest amount of love. God is love and so forth with the rest of his attributes.

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So when we think about divine simplicity in relation to divine unity, we have to know that by virtue of God's simplicity, he's undivided.

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So God is not made of parts. He's undivided. And because God is undivided, he is one.

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So to get into a bit of a more complicated definition of divine simplicity, because these are something that we have to do,

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I kind of put together this little definition using primarily Richard Moeller's dictionary of Latin and Greek theological terms.

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This is excellent, especially if you're a seminary student, which we'll be discussing that topic very shortly.

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But Richard Moeller, I basically try to condense it down as best as I can. He basically talks about how the doctrine of divine unity is this idea that God ought to be understood to be one in an absolute sense due to there being no other

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God. And this one God is an absolute unity incapable of division.

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So there is no other God. God cannot be divided. When we talk about God, God alone exists as God.

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So that's why we always capitalize a G in God, because he is like no other. When you see a lowercase g,

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God, they're not even in the same category because God is there is no genus in God where you can label all these various species or whatever.

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I can phrase and other scholastic gobbledygook ways. But all that to say, God is one.

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Hermann Bavink says of this that there is but one divine being that in virtue of the nature of that being,

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God cannot be more than one being. And consequently, that all other beings exist only from him, through him and to him.

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Hence, this attribute teaches God's absolute oneness and uniqueness.

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And then for our final little quote for me to riff off of to read from regarding this, we're going to go to Thomas Aquinas, where he says in his

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Summa Theologica, he says, God, well, this is primarily this is an objection, basically, in which he is answering, saying why it is that God has to be there only has to be one

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God and why other gods cannot exist. He writes that God comprehends in himself the whole perfection of being.

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If then many gods existed, they would necessarily differ from each other. Something, therefore, would belong to one which did not belong to the other.

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And if this were a privation, so if one of them was lacking something, one of them would not be absolutely perfect.

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But if a but if a perfection, one of them would be without it. So if one of them was perfect, another guy would be without it.

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And so you can't have multiple gods for this very reason. So he continues saying so it is impossible for many gods to exist.

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Hence, also the ancient philosophers constrained, as it were, by truth when they asserted an infinite principle, asserted likewise that there was only one such principle.

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So God is in a unique category where he alone is the one God. And this is grounded in the fact that he is simple.

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He is not made up of parts. There is no other being like him. God's being is one and one alone.

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And there is only one divine being. And this is just going over the unity of God.

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This isn't going over unity in relation to the Trinity. That's a whole other conversation we can get into, though,

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David, you and I could discuss that a little bit if you feel like doing so. But that's basically divine unity.

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How do we sort of fit the concept of Trinity into the concept of God being unified?

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That's a great question. How would we how would we, I guess, I mean, the word might be reconcile.

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I don't know if that's the right word, but how do we how do we sort of jive those things together? Yeah. So the way in which you the two big, like stumbling blocks for this idea of divine unity in regard to the

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God of the universe, like the God of the scriptures, is the fact is two things, two primary doctrines which are key to our faith is the

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Trinity and the incarnation. So when it comes to the Trinity, what you have to realize is that there is only one divine being who is a unity.

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And these persons are not their own beings. They are simply different.

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The way in which you conceptualize them is you can you differentiate them by their relations to one another.

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So you don't divide them. They're united. You distinguish them. So we distinguish the father from the son and from the spirit.

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So we know that the father is he who begets the son. That's how we distinguish father and son. And we know that the son is begotten of the father.

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And we know that the spirit proceeds from the father alone. If you're Eastern Orthodox or if you're a

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Western Christian, correct, from the father and the son, he proceeds. And so these are ways in which we distinguish the persons who are still united in their very essence or being.

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They share the same divine nature and thus they are not divided. So that's how we sort of work our way through the

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Trinity in regard to divine unity is by the fact that we distinguish the persons, but we do not divide or separate them from one another.

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And within our Protestant context, obviously, it's the sort of the framework that we're approaching is we're taking everything within scripture and being so careful to not go beyond it really in any way.

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One of our directors, Russell Fuller, Dr. Russell Fuller, who is a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, talks a lot about this,

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I know, in just the trying to make very, very certain. I mean, to the point that he's actually made me afraid to just almost afraid to talk about the

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Trinity, you know, at all, which, you know, we shouldn't be because it's so clear in scripture.

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But just even by way of analogy, like even when we're trying to come up with analogy to explain the

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Trinity to to not to not go beyond what's clearly presented in scripture or add to that understanding in a way that maybe it makes maybe it helps, you know, make sense to to us, but isn't, you know, necessarily orthodox.

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The thing that comes to mind, I don't know if you'd remember this, you probably would have been maybe in your early teens, but there was a book that came out called

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The Shack. Oh, yeah. You remember The Shack? And it was, yeah, it was really, really big in the evangelical world.

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It was huge. And I know at the church I went to a bunch of people kind of were started reading it and, oh, this book is great.

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It really explains stuff. And some of the people in our church started to read it. And they're like, this is this is taking the analogous, you know, it's taking the analogy so far that it's like it's really treading into like blasphemy.

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And so just just being careful whenever we're trying to explain, you know, yeah, these concepts that are so integral to our understanding of God.

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And it's it's just so important because this because of who it is we're talking about, we're talking about God and we need to be very careful with how we speak of him, which is kind of why even before I got into the session,

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I was just saying I do that with fear and trembling because a great God of which we speak is, you know, in his grace and mercy, deigned something right to reveal himself to us in his word.

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You can know from the creative world in nature that there is a God out there, but it's only through his condescending to us through divine revelation or through special revelation that, you know, this

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God is trying. And so we have to be very careful when we speak about this. These things, that's why they were so hotly debated in the early church.

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This is why there were anathemas placed on those who didn't get this right or who erred, because this is God we're talking about.

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If you worship the wrong God, there is no salvation. So it's very important. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

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Good stuff. Good stuff. All right. So let us get into some of our pieces for this week.

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Let me just share the TrueScript website with all y 'all. Am I I want to I don't just want me.

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Oh, now it's just me. There we go. All right. That's what I was looking for, guys. I don't normally host this, but, you know, everyone's got to get their feet wet.

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So let's look really quick at this piece. Matt is not going to have quite as much to say probably about it because he is a single guy at this point, which has has a has, you know, there's a valuable perspective there.

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I'm going to just plug this piece a little bit. This is from a guy named Jonah Hewer. He is a young man who lives up in Minnesota and he's written several pieces for us.

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But he asked the question in this this article, should marriage and children wait until I'm established?

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And I'm you know, I'm married. I have two kids. So I'm sort of this is already determined for me.

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Matt, these are things that you will probably be thinking about. And the thing that kind of struck me as I was first going through this was just the fact of how much has changed in what it means to be established.

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So even if you if I just go back to when I got married, so I got married eight years ago, being established, especially economically, was a lot easier.

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It was it was a lot more straightforward in a lot of ways. And I when I got married,

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I we waited about five years to have kids and we were we were deliberately waiting for for about five years.

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And then we were kind of like, all right, we should we should go ahead and have kids now. And I don't know if I would say

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I regret so much as I wish we had just started having kids earlier because we were very young and we had, you know, there was a lot of freedom and it was really, really great.

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Like we really enjoyed being a young married couple. But children have made our lives so much have just made our lives so vibrant, like they've really added so, so much.

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So so he says in the beginning here, establishes a word that's frequently used when family questions are discussed. Young people are advised to establish themselves before considering getting married and having kids.

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After all, how could an inexperienced, naive, know nothing, 20 something possibly manage the responsibilities that come with a family?

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And I know for me, especially when I was in college, the predominant really what most people my age, the pressure that they sort of had was you need to you need to finish college.

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You absolutely need to be done with college before you even think about getting married. You really need to be established in a career. So you can't just be, you know, kind of doing a, you know, a side job or something that like you need to have a real career.

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You need to get you need to have medical insurance. There's sort of a list of things that you absolutely need to have, many of which in the past it actually might have been you need to have a house.

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And now now even people in their 30s, maybe in their 40s are kind of like, man, I sure hope one day

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I can have a house. I know. I know that's me and me and my wife. But what

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Jonah sort of talks about here is how the default assumption is that you wait, you wait to have kids.

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And that's just a given. And my wife was 20 when we got married. So she got a lot of I mean, from, you know, from extended family, from our immediate family was very supportive, but extended family and a lot of friends.

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So we're in upstate New York. People thought she was insane. Like you are crazy getting married at 20.

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It's you know, I think I think one person said, like, you're going to throw your life away like that. You're just you're throwing your life away by getting married young.

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And and that was before she even before we even had kids. But that's sort of become the default assumption.

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So so he so Jonah talks about in this piece about how they kind of like they started having kids and they didn't feel prepared for it.

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But he has a good little quote here. He says a few months later.

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So this is after he had already gotten married and they found out they were going to have a child. So a few months later at a get together with several men from my church, one of the guys asked me how it felt to be expecting a child.

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Our pastor was there and challenged me to answer in 17 words or less. That was the limit he taught to adhere to for sermon summaries.

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He was joking, but I accepted the challenge. And eventually I came up with this. There's no such thing as established. There's only there's only the challenge and God's grace to face it.

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So I think I think he makes a good case that marriage, but especially having children within marriage.

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Man, children are a blessing. I cannot describe to how

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I used to come home from work. I'm a teacher, so I used to come home from work every day and my wife would usually be at work and I would just do whatever.

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I would, you know, hang out with a buddy or maybe I'd read a book or something. When I come home now, I have a little two year old that runs and goes,

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Daddy, and runs. And it's it's a it's an unparalleled feeling because I think because it's the fulfillment of a role that God has designated to to me as a father that he's he's he's prepared, especially for for me and really for all men who get married.

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So I would commend that piece. I don't know if you had the chance to read that, man, if it made you think at all about that situation.

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You're sort of you're in the thinking about going ahead. I'm just curious, what do you you're a little younger than me.

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What pressure do you have you noticed, especially from like the world, but even within the church?

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What is the expectation, if that makes sense when it comes to marriage, but especially kids? Yeah, I did get the chance actually to read the piece.

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It was pretty brief, but I enjoyed I enjoyed it. And I actually related to it quite a bit because there is this girl that I was dating for about three years in college.

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And I remember us discussing marriage like about a year and a half in.

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And she was like, yeah, I tried to talk to my dad about it. And he was like, nope, not until he is making at least 50K, then

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I'll give him permission basically. And that kind of that lingered for like the rest of it.

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And eventually because of that, we had to call it quits because we just realized, like, look, that's just with what

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I want to do in the time frame and things like that, it's just not going to work. So we have we eventually had to call it quits because of that.

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So I've definitely experienced that as well. But there is this expectation. You know, you have the one side of things where it's like a lot of people like just get married young, you know, start pumping out babies.

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That's good. And, you know, I definitely would agree that. Yeah. If you have the opportunity to marry, if that's the providential circumstance in which

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God has placed you where you're with like a godly young woman and you two are able to do that, you're not fully established by all means.

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You know, don't put yourself in a circumstance where you like date for eight years or something without getting married, because that's just that's unnecessary and will obviously lead to issues and whatnot.

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But on the other side, you do have people that are very much like due to the economy being so bad and and all these other things, they do want you to get established.

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And I've definitely kind of seen both sides. And as I said, with my personal anecdote, I've experienced the latter quite a bit.

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I've heard a lot about that. So it is something I've thought a lot about and kind of just thinking like looking at my my bank account as it dwindles from paying tuition and rent.

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And I'm just like, man, if I find a girl or something, hopefully I can be able to get something going.

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I don't know. But I'm very blessed in that I have a very supportive family. So I think that, you know, if the

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Lord placed someone in my life for that with what I have and, you know, I'm probably going to get a job soon, you know, well,

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I'll keep looking right now. But one that works with my my seminary schedule, of course.

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But, you know, I'm not really too nervous about in the future. I think it's I think it's good to get married young and all that.

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But, you know, at the same time, too, there are benefits towards being single, you know. And so if you don't have someone right now and, you know,

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I'm 23 and, you know, I'm kind of just chilling. I'm not really like I'm not necessarily dying right now.

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It would be nice. Yeah, of course. But, you know, you can take advantage of where God has placed you.

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But I would definitely say, yeah, if you have someone, that's probably a good thing to pursue because there are good things that come out of it.

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Actually, my my roommate that I have is a really good friend of mine.

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Actually met him through Twitter, funny enough. And but we we've been hanging out like a lot in person for the past year. And but, yeah, we're roommates.

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And I'm actually so I have two other roommates besides him. And those two roommates are his wife and their one year old daughter.

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And it's great, honest, seeing that dynamic. And we're not we're not tired of each other.

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So that's good. But his daughter is very sweet. She she likes me a lot. So that's nice. I make funny noises at her and it makes her laugh and smile.

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And it definitely I'm just like, yeah, this is cool. I'll you know, Lord willing, I'll I'll have that.

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So it'll be good. But yeah, no, I thought it was an excellent article helped illuminate a lot of stuff for me.

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But yeah, I know that was a bit of a long winded answer to your question. But yeah, I definitely have seen what you described with discouragement towards getting married young, especially personally in my life with past relationship, a past relationship that I've been in.

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Yeah, you make a good point. And I can relate. I didn't get married till I was in my mid 20s. So my first especially my when

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I was 19, especially like 19, 20, 21, those were the most exciting years of my life.

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I mean, I was I was in I was in Southern Africa. I was able to travel all over the place.

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There were a lot of really significant benefits to to being that age and not being married for me.

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But I think I think you're kind of hitting on something. So from the world, you'll sort of get a pressure of, you know, it's all about you.

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So you need to make your marital decisions and your children decisions, right? Family planning. You need to make it basically all about you.

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And when you get married, you realize the first thing you realize is, oh, my goodness, this is not about me. This is.

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Yeah, this is about this is about sanctification. And it's a blessing, but it's work.

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It takes a lot of work. And it changes, you know, what what Paul writes in First Corinthians seven. It's very true.

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You now have worldly concerns. And not that that's bad. It's marriage is a he who finds a wife finds a good thing.

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But the temptation, I think, because we live in an age of John talks about this a lot, but we live in an age of ideology.

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The temptation is to just run to the other side and say, well, everybody needs to be everybody, right?

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We need to get everybody married by 19 or 20 or whatever it is. If you're not married, you need it. And the fact of the matter is

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God calls different people to different things. And I know we didn't mean to go as long on this on this piece, but my my best friend passed away when he was twenty five.

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He died in a hiking accident. He had just recently broke up with a girl, right?

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Like like a couple of months before he died. And this is a guy who really wanted to be married. He wanted to have kids.

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He used to say his dream was, you know, I want to get married. So I can come home and play football with the kids.

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And I almost would like make fun of him for it and say, like, oh, man, that's kind of lame. Like, don't you want to, you know, don't you want to be a mercenary in a foreign country?

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So he but, you know, he he's with he's with Christ now completely unexpectedly.

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But it was not God's will for him to get married. It was God's will for him to be a single man and to die that way and be a testimony for for others.

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So, you know, God calls us to different things. And I think that's very important to remember, especially when we're talking about marriage.

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And I would especially say that for, you know, maybe older people in the church who, you know, you may have lived a certain way or you may have things may have been a certain way when when you were going through that stage.

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And it may be different now. And, you know, God's God's calling, which is what we're going to get into now, may not be the same for everybody.

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So you're sort of using that as a I don't know if there's anything else you want to say about that, but using that as a segue into this next piece that I'm going to pull up about seminary.

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And I want to is there anything else I want to say? Uh, no, I think that we can move on.

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I think we're going to go by now. Yeah. So let's go to a probably more controversial piece.

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So I'm actually I want to just do a really quick disclaimer. I want to explain why why we published this piece at all, because I don't want

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I don't want anyone thinking that we are that this is true script taking a position of slamming seminaries, because we're not.

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We you know, we have people who are on so many boards on our director.

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So that's not at all what we're trying to do. My my intention and I've I've been corresponding with the author of this for a little while is to sort of bring to light and to have cause for,

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I think, discussions that probably need to happen, but aren't necessarily there's what

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I notice is there's sort of a there's a little division, not a little, it's a big division between often the between church leaders and those filling the congregation.

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And I don't I think this is because this is the same if you look all throughout society, you know, the for lack of a better word, expert class.

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There's a lot of dissonance between the expert class and the the people who are not, you your average layman in a multiplicity of fields.

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Obviously, we see that most in the political realm, but we see it in I mean, during COVID, we saw it in the medical medical community.

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We see sort of two different would often become echo chambers.

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And my my sort of interest is to, you know, hopefully create a bridge. And I don't even necessarily agree with everything in here.

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I know you don't. But we're going to discuss it and talk about it and and bring some of these things to light.

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So this piece is called the American Sanhedrin. I'm going to read the first two paragraphs, and then I'm just going to launch into a couple of questions.

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So the author's name is

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Alan Gertenson. Sorry. In the Bible, we find a young man named Timothy. He grew up in a believing family.

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He came to love the Lord at a young age. Timothy couldn't imagine a life where every waking minute wasn't dedicated to the service of the church.

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One day, Timothy told his youth pastor about his burning desire for ministry. For the rest of his young life, his church looked forward to the day when they could send

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Timothy off to be educated at the seminary in Jerusalem. After graduation, Timothy responded to a call from a small church in Africa that he'd never heard of.

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Timothy spent his first few years at that church learning the troubles of trying to lead older people. He held a few successful conferences, leveraging his contacts back in Jerusalem to periodically get a big name to come out from seminary there.

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He moved every five to ten years, beginning the same cycle and generally having a mostly uneventful ministry until he was in his mid -fifties.

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I'm just going to finish up with this paragraph. It was at this time that Timothy committed a disqualifying sin. His congregation was crashed at the revelation of another fallen evangelical leader who seemed so solid for so long.

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Do you remember that story? Does it represent how disciples have always been made since the earliest days of the

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Great Commission? Is that the biblical story or the modern version? Remember in 2 Timothy 2 where it says, entrust these things to untested boys who seem to be on fire for Christ in youth groups somewhere else and got a certificate from a seminary you agree with.

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Right? So dripping with sarcasm and very, very, very tongue in cheek.

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If it's not clear, sort of what this piece is saying is that the way that Timothy was trained is not the way that men are trained today.

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So to sort of launch into this, Matt, you are a seminary student now. Can you talk for a minute about why you decided to go to seminary?

30:35

Well, I decided to go to seminary because I felt there was an internal call towards the ministry, which was then externally validated by my pastors and elders.

30:51

And so the way in which you go about being able to pursue ministry within the context of the

30:59

PCA, the Presbyterian Church in America is, well, you have to have a seminary degree and show the session when you eventually go up to get ordained.

31:09

Or if you're going to go under the care of the presbytery prior to ordination that you're so going under care show that you're at least getting theological education or basically like guaranteed to do so.

31:23

And then getting ordained, you need to have a sort of theological education, which just happens to be done through the seminary system.

31:31

So I decided to do that. Something about the seminary I'm at, I'm at Reform Theological Seminary, Orlando, and I'm from Tampa, Florida.

31:40

So actually part of my decision in choosing that was not only I do think it's an excellent seminary with a lot of great professors.

31:47

I'm a big fan of Dr. Scott Swain and Dr. Michael Allen. And not just because they teach me,

31:52

I was a fan before, but because it was in Florida.

32:00

So that played a big part of it, which I know a lot of the guys that are more anti -seminary, they kind of go, oh, you're just shipping them off somewhere.

32:06

And I was like, no, I'm only two hours from home. I go home every three weeks so my dad can give me a haircut and I can have dinner with my family and things like that.

32:14

But yeah, I went there because that is what is required. But not only that, to get a theological education,

32:22

I'm largely self -taught theologically. And I think that's a perfectly good way to go about,

32:27

I mean, with the amount of resources that we have now due to the internet and due to all the publishing companies, it's good.

32:34

But I do want to learn there and I do want to grow in wisdom and knowledge. And just by virtue of what's before me, what my path is,

32:44

I thought seminary would be the best way to go about that in order to get ordained.

32:49

So that's sort of my reasoning. I want to be able to grow a knowledge of God. And we'll probably touch on this more as we go through the article, but I didn't necessarily go to seminary because, oh, that's a place where I may learn how to be a pastor.

33:05

Now that is going to be taught there. That is something important. There should be professors there that are also pastors.

33:11

If none of your professors are pastors, that does concern me a little bit, but that's not the primary reason.

33:18

And the reason why that's not my primary reason is because I think the best way that you learn how to be a pastor is not necessarily in the academic context, but more so it's going to be in an ecclesial context, in the context of a local church, which is why so many seminaries require a certain amount of field hours at a local church where you're a pastoral intern, who, if you're a

33:39

Presbyterian, is under the care of a presbytery. So, yeah, that's my reasoning, basically.

33:47

Yeah. So I'm going to talk for a second about why I chose not to go to seminary. And for direct context,

33:54

I've toured a number of seminaries. The last one that I did tour with the potential to attend was

34:02

RTS Oviedo, where Matt, where you going now? I was there a few years ago, and I considered moving to Oviedo from New York and attending.

34:10

And I wanted to go. So with me, circumstantially, the reason why I didn't go there specifically, because I took a tour of the school.

34:17

I talked to a bunch of people who knew a ton of things. And I was like, I want to learn this. I want to learn this, because I wanted to learn

34:23

Greek and Hebrew. And what I really wanted to learn was

34:29

I wanted to study Christian history from roughly the year 500 to the year 1500.

34:35

Because I always felt like the church history kind of regimen that I got from Sunday school from the beginning was, there was the disciples, and there was the apostles, and there's

34:49

Paul, and then there's the church in Rome. And Constantine makes Christianity legal.

34:56

Nothing happened for 1 ,200 years, then Martin Luther. Well, no, Augustine happened, and then

35:02

Martin Luther. Oh, that's right, Augustine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I had a good conversation with a guy at RTS. I was kind of like,

35:07

I know stuff happened. I want to know what happened. And I decided not to go because a lot of it was circumstantial.

35:16

I was already married, and I wasn't interested in a degree. I already had a master's degree. I didn't feel the need to add more credentials, basically to spend a bunch of money to get a credential, to study something that I knew

35:29

I could study if I just found the right. Honestly, if I found somebody like Dr. Fuller, who now teaches, he has his own theology classroom.

35:38

I knew I could find somebody. And then the Hebrew, I wound up working at an Orthodox Jewish school very shortly after.

35:45

And I was like, well, if I want to learn Hebrew, I suppose they could teach me Hebrew. It'd be kind of weird, but I suppose it's possible.

35:52

But I agree with what you're saying about pastoral ministry, so for a seminary to be pastoral ministry.

36:00

And I think that may be where some of the disconnect comes in, where a lot of seminaries,

36:05

I mean, a lot of seminaries have, you know, I mean, Harvard was a seminary, right? I think

36:11

Yale was a seminary. These places started as, you know, these were institutions to train people for pastoral ministry, and they still had divinity schools, but it's just, you know, like it says in Ecclesiastes, the writing of books is endless.

36:26

That's sort of what they've fallen into. You know, obviously, eventually they apostatized, and there's really nothing

36:32

Christian going on in those institutions. But I realized sort of that I'm the son of a pastor.

36:39

I grew up in a pastor's home. And I realized pretty early on that pastoring was about 80 % counseling.

36:45

And I'm like, I don't think I got the patience for this. Like, I don't know if I can sit down. I got my own problems.

36:51

I don't know if I can do that. But I definitely would not, you know, be closed off to it for the future.

36:58

But I had already, I had the good fortune of, or the, you know, providentially was raised in a home where I was taught theology.

37:08

I was taught the Bible from a very young age at a pretty deep level. So I got the chance to audit some seminary when

37:14

I was in my late teens at a seminary in South Africa. And by the time I got to the point to my late 20s, where I was like, all right,

37:22

I guess I could, I was interested in military chaplaincy. I thought maybe I can even go to seminary because I'll have to get an

37:27

MDiv to become a military chaplain. By the time I got to that point, I was kind of like, well,

37:32

I've already, you know, if I plug into a church, I can kind of, I can serve, you know, God willing, maybe one day I can be an elder.

37:38

I can serve the church in that way, but I'm a layman. I'm not a pastor currently. I don't have any, you know,

37:44

I don't have any opportunities. I don't feel really a calling in that way, which we'll,

37:49

I think we'll discuss a little bit more, but just to kind of get a little bit back into this particular piece.

37:56

So he writes in this piece, I just want to put it up on the screen. Sure. Yeah.

38:02

Let me, I'm very techie. I also can't talk.

38:11

It's called John on the screen. It was at this time that Timothy committed it.

38:17

Oh, not there. I'm sorry. All right. So second Timothy two, two, where it says, and trust these things to untested boys who seem to be on fire for Christ and youth group somewhere else and got a certificate from a seminary you agree with.

38:28

So I just put in the notes discuss. There was one thing that this did kind of get me to think a little bit about.

38:35

It's something that I noticed definitely in my teens. And I would be curious if you if you saw this as well.

38:44

I think you, didn't you go to a larger church when you were growing up? Yes, I attended a mega church.

38:51

Okay. All right. Perfect. So then, then you may be able to kind of speak to this even more because I went to a little bit of church, but what

38:57

I noticed within the context of youth groups and college ministries and stuff was it seemed a lot of the time when a young man would display some leadership skills, he that's, he would be sort of fast tracked into a, hey, you need to think about going to seminary, you need to think, and it would be like putting these, these responsibilities on that young man within the church, you know, which is obviously is appropriate.

39:23

But not always thinking, are there other areas? How else is this guy gifted?

39:29

Um, you know, I, I, my mind goes immediately to like the political sphere, because one of the issues that we've had within the church is just the complete lack of political engagement, often because I think that leadership is sort of reserved.

39:46

Well, you know, pastoral that has nothing to do with the world that has something that we need to, if you show leadership skills, then we need to get you on a track.

39:52

So you need to go to seminary, you need to go to usually like in the Baptist circles, it would be like Bible college, seminary, and then you take a church who knows where with no connection to your, your hometown away from all your people, and then it wouldn't necessarily go super well.

40:06

But, um, do what perspective do you have on that? I absolutely agree with you on the being sort of a plague of misplaced callings due to someone who is on fire for the

40:20

Lord, and does display certain leadership skills, because people assume that if you're like a young man, and you're interested in theology, and you're not like alone in the corner, just doing your own thing, oh, he needs to be a pastor.

40:35

But there's way more to being a pastor than theology. When we conceptualize theology, at least in the reform tradition, you know, as Van Maastricht lays out in his large work of systematic theology, he conceptualizes theology as theoretical practical.

40:51

So it's not just theoretical. It's not just musings about God. It's not just practical, but it's theoretical practical, which means that there's like theory involved.

41:00

There's theology about how we conceptualize God, how we conceptualize his words, how we interpret the scriptures. But then there's also the practical, how do we apply this to daily life?

41:08

And oftentimes from everything that I've heard from those that are in pastoral ministry, the practical is what is the most at play.

41:16

You just said like 80 % of ministry is counseling. And the thing is, is that there are a lot of people that are really into theology that couldn't really give much of a care towards pastoring in a way that's like involves counsel.

41:33

Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Lay people should read and study theology.

41:39

It's good. It's good for your growth. It's good for teaching your children, because whether they like it or not, everyone has to be a little bit pastoral, especially if you're a father, even mothers will teach their children the faith if dad's away and she's at home or something like that.

41:54

So that's an important thing for every Christian to have, but not everyone is necessarily called to the pastorate.

42:00

And part of the way that I realized I did have a calling was like, I've kind of been like a, I guess a theology nerd for a bit.

42:06

But I kind of realized that maybe there's a call to ministry when I kind of left my mega environment, got plugged into a much smaller church of about 120 congregants.

42:15

And I realized I'm like, okay, I could, I could talk to these old ladies about their flower gardens and not look absolutely bored out of my mind.

42:22

And Hey, I'm not actually that bored. I mean, could I talk about something else and enjoy it more?

42:28

Probably. But I mean, like feeling that unique love and care for the people in the body of Christ outside of just, oh, do you want to talk about infralapsarianism and superlapsarianism?

42:40

Do you want to talk about the differences between diachronic and synchronic contingency and all these other gobbledygook terms and all that?

42:48

That's kind of where I realized that. And not every young person who's into theology necessarily is called to do that.

42:55

Maybe they're just a Christian. Maybe they just really love Christ and want to learn more about them as every person in the church ought to want to do.

43:03

And so there's definitely like this plague of misplaced callings for that purpose. And it's important to be able to scope that out.

43:10

Even if you are considering going to seminary, going into ministry, it's something that you have to keep in your mind. And something that I do want to say kind of back when we were discussing

43:18

RTS Orlando is that you don't need to go to seminary to get theological education.

43:24

First off, you can read books on your own. But not only that, RTS actually has an app that has all of their lectures recorded for each class, except for the language classes,

43:35

I believe, because that's a little bit harder to track along with unless you're there in person or doing a very intensive online class where the professor can actually talk to you and things of that nature.

43:46

But you can download the app and listen to all the lectures. You can look up the syllabi and get all the books and just read them.

43:52

There's plenty of that. And RTS makes it clear. It's like, yeah, if you can't come here, look at this stuff. And you don't need to pay a dime for it.

44:00

So if someone's really into theology but doesn't feel called to that, they can get basically nearly everything from a seminary education can offer just off your phone.

44:08

That's part of the blessing of modern technology is that we can do something like that. But yeah,

44:13

I definitely believe that there is a mistaken calling for people that are oftentimes just seeking to pursue

44:18

Christ and learn more about him. So you're absolutely on the money about that. Yeah, I want to kind of get your thoughts specifically about one thing that I think that you don't agree with here.

44:29

I'm not really sure. I kind of get the analogy, but I think it's a decent analogy, but I'm not totally sure.

44:37

But before that, so when you're in a church, you're connected to a church.

44:45

I'm not really sure. I don't know what your plan is after you're done with seminary if you plan to go back to the church that you were at.

44:51

I know you're in a denominational system, so that will determine probably a lot of that.

44:57

But what I've seen over the years, I know, is especially,

45:02

I mean, I come from a non -denominational background. But what I've seen a lot of is there will be people in a church who will pour into that church, and they really will become integral.

45:16

And they really, you know, if they have good leaders, then they can learn theology.

45:23

Because if you have a good pastor, some good elders who really understand biblical doctrine, and, you know, maybe even languages.

45:31

Languages is harder because that's a very academic thing. I mean, I've wanted to learn Hebrew and Greek for a long time, but you have to sit down and hit the books.

45:40

And, you know, when you've got a full -time job and a family, you have to really prioritize for that.

45:46

Not too many people are going to be up at midnight studying Greek. It's just not going to happen.

45:52

I'm so glad that I am single as I went through my Greek 1 intensive and I'm currently trying to survive

45:58

Greek 2. It's very helpful, yes. Yeah, but I was,

46:04

I sat in a, and this is sort of, this is one of the reasons I think why I didn't go to seminary. I was already married, but, or I think at the time

46:11

I was about to get married, I sat in a very prominent seminary. I won't name the seminary, but a very prominent seminary.

46:19

And a, there was a guy sort of doing a pitch and he said, listen, all of you guys here, you all need to sell your house or get, you know, get out of your house.

46:30

You need to quit your job and need to come out here to this particular city where the seminary is, which is, you know, one of the most expensive places in the country.

46:39

And, and you need to, you know, you need to go here for three years and then you need to sort of heed God's call. And I remember thinking at the time, you know, like, you know, you're making a pitch for your seminary.

46:47

That makes sense. But you're going to take these guys like out of their churches who have been, you know, a lot of these churches, like these are, these are guys who are sort of lay pastors, like a lot of rural areas throughout the country.

46:59

A lot of the time there, there aren't a lot of options, you know, that's, you kind of, you kind of, you have to deal with the situation that you're in.

47:08

Taking those guys away a lot of the time is, you know, may actually be worse for their churches, especially if they, they may never be back.

47:18

But I've, I've seen a lot of that. And I wonder sometimes if, because I've also known quite a few guys who were, would be involved in a church and would, would go to seminary.

47:29

And then when they came back, you know, knowledge puffs up. It was like, they were a different person. It was a, now it was sort of like that down to earth was gone.

47:36

And now it's like, well, you know, I've been to seminary and then they, there would be this, like this disconnect.

47:42

So to sort of bring it back to this piece, let me put it back up here.

47:50

So he basically, what he's, what he's arguing in this case is that the seminary model, like the modern seminary model,

47:56

I think he makes a reference to like oppression school system. So sort of because our school system adopts a lot from, you know, it's a

48:03

Western European model sort of that we employ, which, you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with that, that we're in the

48:08

Western tradition, but that it doesn't necessarily, like it's, it's different than Jesus and his disciples.

48:14

Like that was sort of a life on life thing. Does that, does that analogy hold or are you not buying it?

48:22

Yeah. I mean, when we think about it historically, I don't really, I mean, I understand a lot of the critiques of the seminary system.

48:29

I think many of them are warranted. But this whole idea of going off to school, like to learn is nothing really particularly new.

48:38

I mean, I think about the call of the apostles. They had to abandon their jobs and their, and sometimes their families in order to follow

48:46

Christ. And, you know, some people would be like, oh, well, the apostles didn't go to seminary. Well, they were taught by the incarnate word.

48:53

That's, I mean, I think that that, that settles our seminary education, if you ask me. But, you know, to be taught directly by Christ in your presence where you could literally poke, touch him, things like that.

49:06

But, you know, so even then there were prominent schools established very early on.

49:11

Like there's the school of Alexandria that people from across like Christendom would go to attend to, to learn at.

49:19

I mean, Irenaeus came from or went to Gaul to teach.

49:24

And he was a, I think he was a North African. You can correct me if I'm wrong. If you know, I don't recall, but he traveled up to Gaul to teach the people there.

49:32

People were always traveling. You think of the Reformation period, John Knox from Scotland went to learn from Calvin, Peter Martyr Vermigli, who was an

49:41

Italian. He obviously had to flee because he was being persecuted, but he went, he uprooted himself and went all the way to England to teach at Oxford.

49:50

So this is nothing really that new. I understand why it can be concerned, especially if you're already in a pastoral position.

49:58

But this idea of traveling in order to get a theological education is nothing really that new in the

50:03

Christian tradition. But I would definitely say that there is a benefit towards being able to learn in your particular context, in a more local context, which again, as I stated before, is part of the reason why

50:16

I went to the seminary that I'm at. It's only two hours away from where I, from where I'm from.

50:23

I am living up here, but I can literally just, if I need to get to Tampa for some situation like Hurricane Milton, I was only able to drive,

50:32

I drove for two hours and I was here. Before I left for seminary,

50:39

I was given the opportunity to actually preach at my church and my pastor had told me, yeah, if we ever need you to fill in again, we'll give you a call or something.

50:47

And so I can just drive down two hours. So I think there is a benefit there. But yeah, there is an importance,

50:53

I think, in being able to travel to learn directly from people who are incredibly insightful theologically, who can teach you.

51:01

And this also gets into the purpose of seminary as well. I don't think, or like, as I was stating earlier, the primary context in which you learn how to be a pastor will be the ecclesial context,

51:12

I believe. And the thing is, is that you'll be learning a lot of wisdom principles when you're at seminary, but the primary place where you're going to be ingrained is the local church.

51:22

And I think that's incredibly important. And that's why pastoral internships and things like that are so important.

51:30

But yeah, that's what I would say about that. I don't know if there's anything else on there, but we can get on to the weak theology of calling portion unless you had any other comments you'd like to make.

51:42

Well, so there was one thing that he did discuss that I was like, oh, man, that's like spot on.

51:48

I know of so many examples of this, but he was talking about, hey, there's a guy who's in my town at the church that I go to, and he's saying he really wants to be on the mission field.

52:03

And I'm kind of like, well, hey, there's stuff to do here right now. Do you want to go? And he's like, no, I can't.

52:09

And his point was basically like, do you really expect that your calling is going to be realized if you are in a completely different context, which is why

52:20

I think it's important what you're saying about proximity and locality, because I wrote a piece last week about the flooding in North Carolina.

52:31

And I think one of the things I put in it was a lot of the time when you get on a plane and you fly to the other side of the world, which there's nothing wrong with that.

52:41

That's fine. Again, everyone has different callings. So God calls people to different missions and different ministries.

52:50

He didn't call Hudson Taylor to the same thing that he called John Calvin, right? John Calvin went to a very specific place, was in a very specific place teaching for a long time.

52:58

Hudson Taylor was in China, right? So callings are not the same for everybody. But we load up planes, we fly to the other side of the world, and we will be flying over all this ministry that we could be doing.

53:14

And I wouldn't want to make it about dollars necessarily, but we could do it right now.

53:20

We could all load up in vans and go. With the flooding, it's something that a huge portion of the country is really close to.

53:29

So I was kind of like, hey, let's go help with this thing. But there's nothing wrong with...

53:38

Missions is great. But I spent some time on the mission field, and I rubbed shoulders with quite a few people who really believe that that calling would be realized if they just got out of their local context.

53:53

And kind of what I learned was, no, you're going to be exercising your spiritual gifts in your local context.

54:04

And if you're not, don't expect that it's going to go well for you when you're on the other side of the world. So that was just sort of an aside that I took from his analogy.

54:15

But one thing I did want to just... I want to plug another piece, actually. So this is from... Because it kind of ties into this whole thing.

54:23

This is from Dusty Devers. So he wrote about this subject specifically last year. It's called Seven Categories for Evaluating a

54:30

Pastoral Calling. And he goes through... Constitution, he must be a he.

54:36

So if you're a woman, I'm sorry. You know, you can be a Methodist, I guess. But yeah.

54:43

Commitment, compulsion, right? So that's kind of what I was just talking about.

54:49

Character, that gets into deacon, elder qualifications as well.

54:55

Competency is vital. Confession, you need to be aligned with an orthodox confession.

55:06

And then circumstances. So the circumstances of your situation, which is sort of what you're talking about, are going to be different.

55:14

There are probably situations where maybe the best option for a pastor training up somebody in his church is to really just pour into a guy that could take over his role.

55:24

You know, you think of a pastor who has cancer. He doesn't have long left. Does it make more sense to just kind of grab a guy out of seminary?

55:31

Or that guy that he's been discipling for 20 years, who is ready to take over that role? What makes more sense in that circumstance?

55:38

Then there's other circumstances. Man, maybe it's a... This is going to be a cultural thing too, because some places, if you don't have a degree, if you don't have those letters, whether you like it or not, people just might not listen to you at all.

55:56

Other places, if you have them, they might not listen to you at all. So, you know, it's good to know your particular circumstances in your calling.

56:05

But it's not a merely mystical thing. There's very tangible things that God orchestrates in your life to make these things clear.

56:16

So I don't know if you have anything to say about that. I had one other thought. I absolutely agree on the circumstances part for sure.

56:25

But yeah, I don't think I have too much to contribute there. So one thing that you did mention, and I'm just going to...

56:32

So if you want to check out that article, go ahead. It's something worth,

56:38

I think, having a conversation about. That was one of the main points in running it. A lot of people are trying to figure out, do

56:44

I go to seminary, do I not? And a lot of churches are trying to figure out, man, where do I get pastors?

56:50

Like if I need a pastor for my church, where do I even... How do I know who to choose?

56:56

Should I just get some guy from some seminary? Who do I trust? One thing that...

57:03

In the beginning, I was kind of talking about how I think there's a dissonance, there's a kind of a divide between the expert class and the layman.

57:14

And we see that playing out in so many different facets of our society and our culture, but we see it in the church as well.

57:21

And one thing that I think I would just caution, because we have a lot of pastors who read

57:29

TruthScript and listen to this podcast. So one thing that I would just put out as something to think about, and maybe something to take away from this piece in particular.

57:38

So Matt, you talked about theology nerds. So like a place for... You do need this place for theology nerds to kind of do their nerding.

57:48

Yeah, then you just work out somewhere. Right, right, right. But within churches, you don't want that divide to exist, if at all possible.

58:02

And I think it's very, very tempting, or not tempting, but it's,

58:09

I guess, typical that your church leadership can very easily be orientated toward a particular type of Christian that fits kind of into that expert class.

58:28

What do I mean by that? If the only guys in your church are guys that...

58:38

This is sort of an economic thing in a way. The jobs... Now I'm just gonna come out, right?

58:44

I'm just gonna come right out and say it. The jobs that pay well in 2024 are tech jobs.

58:51

They are programming. They are coding, things like that.

58:58

So something that I think is happening, especially in suburban areas, is the guys who end up having time, because they're not crushed economically.

59:07

They're not out working two jobs, and so they tend to have more time. They can actually put into the church more, often tend to be guys who kind of will fit into the sort of theology nerd category.

59:19

Maybe they're more bookish. Maybe they're more... Maybe they just have more time to do those kinds of things.

59:26

But don't disregard or forget the more like blue collar guys in your congregation.

59:33

You actually, you need them to also be involved. And you may have guys in your congregation, I think that maybe they don't like...

59:40

Maybe they aren't capable of talking as lofty or expressing theological constructs and concepts to a certain level, but God still may have given them a lot of wisdom.

59:53

They may have a lot of life experience that's really valuable for your congregation. You really kind of need both.

01:00:02

You want the people in your congregation to... I don't know if representation is the right word, but I don't know if I'm making sense, but you wanna try to make sure that you...

01:00:17

I think that you're not specifically prioritizing a certain type of Christian in a cultural sense.

01:00:27

Yeah. Within your church leadership. I don't know if that makes sense. No, that makes perfect sense.

01:00:32

That's good. But yeah, I don't have anything else to contribute to the article other than adding the addendum that I am a young man and a seminary student.

01:00:41

So whatever words I've spoken, take with a grain of salt. This guy has more wisdom than me, most likely.

01:00:50

But yeah, no, I've appreciated this conversation. I enjoyed reading the article. It gave me a lot to think on and chew on, especially as someone who is in seminary right now.

01:00:59

So TrueScript, Mr. TrueScript right here, thank you for publishing. I enjoyed reading it.

01:01:07

Yes, and thank you for coming on, Matt. I'm just gonna do a quick plug for the website so that you find people know where to go for more.

01:01:18

So TrueScript is a 501c3 organization. If you go here to the bottom of the screen, if you're interested in publishing with us,

01:01:26

I can't guarantee you that you're gonna get published. But if you'd like to give it a shot, take a look at the guidelines and our content style guide.

01:01:35

I have tried to make this. We came up with this style guide. We've tried to make it as user -friendly as possible. We also give you ideas of the kind of things that we would like to publish.

01:01:47

If you want more specificity, feel free to shoot us an email at truthscript23 at gmail .com.

01:01:52

And I'll be happy to kind of, if you think, hey, this is a good,

01:01:58

I'd like to write about this, then feel free to shoot an email. We are also a 501c3 organization. If you would like to help keep our lights on, keep us continually expanding and doing bigger things.

01:02:09

We just had a conference. You can also donate to us with the donate tab.

01:02:16

Hopefully, we should soon have a rolling donation so that if you wanna go donate on a consistent basis, like a monthly basis, then you can do that as well.

01:02:25

I just wanna thank everybody who has donated. You have made a lot of this possible. You have made Matt's microphone possible.

01:02:31

It's been fantastic and I appreciate it so much. God bless everyone.