Does God Really Care how You Worship? | Ligon Duncan

We are back with another episode of Room for Nuance. I'm Sean DeMars. And I'm Lick Duncan.

And didn't we just do this? We did just do this. We were at the Cross Conference in January. Yes, and the reason why we're doing it again is because we thought we only had you for a very limited window, and then

I foolishly failed to pick up on the social cues that said that we actually had much more time, so we let you go.

And then I beat myself up for the next two days. Like, I can't believe I let Lick go when

I didn't have to. And then I very kindly asked you, would you be willing to do round two? And you said yes, so thank you, brother.

I'm glad to be here. Would you mind praying and opening us up? Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for the opportunity to talk again.

Thank you for the conversation that we had last time, and we pray that our conversation would be equally edifying and glorifying to you this time.

We ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Amen. So I think the first question is probably the most important question.

Did we really go to the moon? I think we did. Good, okay, we're off to a good start.

No, last time, Luke was very kind, he was very gracious. He did not get on to me about the fact that we did not talk at all about the regulative principle stuff, and that was the only thing he was like, please talk to Lick about the regulative principle stuff.

Your book on the regulative principle, the name of which is? Just got to how we were, so the short book, the excerpt for the big book.

The big book is called? Give Praise to God. That's right. And it was edited by Phil Reichen and Derek Thomas in Yours Truly, and it was a festschrift, a posthumous festschrift in honor of James Montgomery Boyce.

It's still available today, and it's a great book. There are lots of things in that book that I don't cover in the short book.

The short book is essentially an edited version of my first two chapters, which just make a case for the regulative principle of worship.

And that changed Luke's life. Yeah, Luke used to be a music guy at a big 3 ,000 -member church where every

Sunday it was a show and lights and fog and all that stuff. Read that book, send him on a trajectory, and it completely changed his life.

The regulative principle has changed my life, but I remember the regulative principle was one of those terms, it was kind of like Calvinism.

The first time I heard that word, somebody said, are you a Calvinist? And I was like, shoot, I don't know. Like, am I and should

I be? Is that bad, is it good? And then I only ever heard that term used as a pejorative. And then when

I heard the regulative principle, I only ever heard it used as a pejorative. So can you do us a favor?

Tell us what are some mischaracterizations of the regulative principle, and then give us a good biblical definition for the regulative principle.

A lot of people will identify the regulative principle with proscribing or disallowing things that they like.

So for instance, during the time of the worship wars, when the main debate was traditional worship versus contemporary worship, very often people that wanted the church to utilize more contemporary forms would identify the regulative principle with a repressive instinct that's culturally bound, that keeps people from being able to be creative in the way that God made them to be.

And so it was sort of pitched as a traditionalist thing over against this more biblical, liberated, free sort of Christian expression of public worship.

When you get to define the other side that way, you can easily define yourself into victory.

And let me quickly say, the regulative principle is probably a relatively new term.

It's probably a 19th century or so term that came around to express something that had been around since the

Protestant Reformers in the 16th century. And in the 16th century, the Protestant Reformers were especially thinking about the

Roman Catholic Church and its practice of worship. So way back in the 1530s, when

Calvin wrote his little pamphlet on the necessity of reforming the church, he identified the number one reason why we need a reformation is because of the idolatrous worship of the

Roman Catholic Church. The way that the Roman Catholic Church was doing worship, Calvin argued, actually forces all its members to engage in idolatry because the worship is not in accordance with God's word.

And so Calvin was very concerned that we worship publicly in a way that is in accord with scripture.

And the regulative principle came to mean this, and you asked for a definition, here it is.

It is that our public worship must be warranted by scripture.

Guessing that word warranted is very particular. It is very particular. In other words, you don't have to have an express command for every discreet thing that you do in worship, but there has to be a biblical justification for it.

And biblical justifications come in more than just direct commands. By way of implication.

Correct, so good and necessary consequence. And so for many things, we do have direct commands.

We're directly commanded by Paul, for instance, in 1 Timothy to read and to preach the scripture in public worship.

But what about taking an offering? We can go through various things that are legitimate to do in public worship where there is not an express command, but there is warrant in scripture for us to do it.

So in Corinthians, the Corinthians laid aside on the first day of the week in order to give to the needy

Christians in Jerusalem. And so there's some things that you can learn by way of emulating what the early

Christians did where there is not a direct command. And so that's why the regular principle is best defined not as worshiping only as the

Bible directly commands, but worshiping according to the warrant of scripture.

That's what we're after. Let me get out ahead of a potential objection from someone listening to the way you've articulated the history of the development of the doctrine of the regular principle.

That's a mouthful. When you say it's sort of rooted in the Reformation, someone might hear that and go, well, you know,

Reformation here, there, whatever. Like I wanna know, is it biblical? What would you say to that?

I would say absolutely. The regular principle is trying to get us back to the way that worship was done in the

Bible. And if you look at public worship in the Old and the

New Testament, it all has the same basic components, whether there is a temple or whether there is a synagogue or whether the early church is just meeting in a home or in the open air somewhere, biblical worship always has these components.

And you can go all the way back to Exodus 24 to see this, the very first public worship service in the

Bible where the Bible is read is in Exodus chapter 24.

God gives Moses what is called the Book of the Covenant in Exodus 21 to 23.

Moses writes it down. And then in Exodus 24, Moses reads that special revelation from God that has been written down.

That's what scripture is, written special revelation. He reads it to everybody out loud.

And that's the beginning of the public reading of scripture in the worship of God's people in the

Bible. From then on, whenever God's people meet, the Bible is read. And you find this in Ezra and Nehemiah.

You find the Bible read and then expounded. And of course, when you get to the

Psalms, you hear the scripture, good truth about God, sung to God in praise in public worship.

Then you have prayer. In fact, the earliest description of public worship in the Book of Genesis is in terms of prayer.

Then men began to call out upon the name of the Lord. What's the name of the form of Anglican worship that is done on Sundays where the

Lord's Supper is not administered? It's called morning prayer. Well, the

Anglicans get that language from scripture because public prayer is such of the essence of public worship that sometimes you can actually refer to the whole act of public worship as prayer.

So there you have the reading of the Bible, the preaching of the Bible, the singing of biblical truth.

You have prayer. What about the final element, the sacraments or the ordinances in the

Baptist tradition? We'll take it. Thanks, brother. And by the way, both of those are good terms. You'll find both of those terms in the

Westminster Confession of Faith, which was written mostly by Presbyterians and Anglicans and Independents.

Ordinances and sacraments are both good terms, as long as you define them well. We don't wanna have the dripping down of grace view of sacrament, right?

I won't go there right now. Okay, all right, okay, okay. In the

Old Covenant, you had Passover and you had circumcision, both of which were signs of the promises of God to his people.

In the New Covenant, you have baptism and the Lord's Supper and when God's people gather, at least occasionally, those signs of God's promises are administered and that's a part of public worship.

Augustine called them visible words. So sacraments actually illustrate a verbal promise of God to his people.

And so all five of those elements, you will find transcanonically. Let's just sing the word, pray the word, preach the word, read the word and see the word.

There you go. Now, talking about the regulative principle and the ordinances real quick.

Do you believe in image, just yes or no, not a preacher's answer, a short answer, images in worship, yes or no?

No. Okay, except for, I think you would say. Baptism and the Lord's Supper. Exactly, exactly, except for the images that the

Lord himself has prescribed. Inspired drama in worship, baptism and the Lord's Supper. The image that he gives us is the only acceptable image.

We see one another when we sing, all of that stuff, okay. Okay, so going back to this idea of the word being fairly new, 19th century, so 1800s, right?

The word inerrancy is similarly, it's newer and people have tried to weaponize that fact.

The word inerrancy, B .B. Warfield, the Princeton theologians, they invented that. But we know that Scripture itself speaks to its own inerrancy.

Would you also say that not only can we see a pattern throughout Scripture of the regulative principle, but that Scripture itself commands the regulative principle?

Yes, I do, and that's the case that I try to make in that little book, Does God Care How We Worship?

And my premise is this, there are a lot of Bible -believing evangelicals out there who know that we need to worship

God from the heart. That is, we don't need to fake worship God. We really need to worship

God from the depth of our being and therefore, worship needs to be sincere.

It doesn't need to be faked. It doesn't need to be pretended.

It needs to be something that's expressive of a reality that dominates the whole of our inner life expressed in our outward public worship.

So they believe that worship needs to come from the heart, but they don't believe that God has said much about what we're to do outwardly when we're together.

But the Bible is very concerned with how we worship because it ties together two issues.

Greg Beal wrote a book a number of years ago on idolatry in Scripture, and it's called

We Become What We Worship. So good. And it is a very important book.

Ray Ortland has written on a very similar theme in his book, it's a tough title,

Whoredom, where it's the picture of God's people going after idols, which is spiritual adultery, and it's a similar kind of theme.

But the point is this, what you worship, you become like what you worship, and this is an argument that goes all the way back to the prophets, and the prophets would say, you worship stone and sticks, and you'll become like that.

Can't speak, can't see, can't move. You'll become captive to your idols.

But the Bible also makes it clear that you become like how you worship because how you worship will determine who you worship.

In other words, if worship is not a response to divine self -disclosure, if it's not a response to God telling us how to worship

Him, we will end up worshiping a God made in our own image. And so worship has to be response to divine special self -revelation, and that means it's gotta be in accordance with Scripture, or else we'll worship

God wrongly, and then we'll end up worshiping the wrong God. We'll worship a God that's made according to our ideas, to the thoughts of our minds, as opposed to thinking

God's thoughts after Him as revealed in the Word. And so worship becomes really, really important.

Another factor is this. Public worship, no matter how you do it, disciples people.

The way you worship disciples people. So what I tell people is when

I walk in to the public worship in your church, no matter where it is, it might be a burned down building, it might be a storefront somewhere, it might be a beautiful colonial space, wherever it is, it's my hope and prayer that it will be filled with Scripture, that there will not be anywhere that you can turn in that public service of worship and not hear

God's Word being read to you, preached to you, prayed back to God, sung in praise to God, and then visibly seen in the administration of baptism in the

Lord's Supper. When I was on sabbatical in 2009, I took my family to an area megachurch.

And when I walked out of the church, my daughter, who was, I don't know, she was maybe 12, 13 years old, she said,

Dad, never bring me here again. It was every caricature of a megachurch that you can imagine.

Now, the pastor is a Bible -believing brother. I mean, I know him, he loves Scripture, he believes in the doctrines of grace, he preaches for the conversion of sinners.

He wasn't there that day. The preaching loosely called that day was basically a

Rotary Club talk. But the best part of the public worship service was the administration of baptism.

It was a baptistic church, and during the baptism, not only did they get great brief testimonies of saving grace from the people who were being baptized, but the man who was administering the baptism explained the gospel.

It was the only gospel I got in the public worship that day. I wanna see the gospel and Scripture everywhere in public worship, not just in an incidental place stuck off in the corner.

So we want our public worship to be filled and formed by Scripture.

And that's vital because you disciple people that way. If the

Scripture is incidental to their discipleship, their discipleship will be stunted.

If the Scripture is essential and necessary to their discipleship, their discipleship will flourish.

That's gotta show in public worship. Because the Word is the only thing that works, right? Exactly. Okay, now on a spectrum, you have the regulative principle over here for Protestants, you have the regulative principle over here.

What's the name of the other principle on the other side? Well, there have been other names that have been developed.

People will call the Lutheran principle the normative principle as opposed to the regulative principle and then the

Roman Catholic principle is that the Roman church has the right and authority as it is the successor of the apostles and thus is invested with the authority of Peter.

It may make rules that are not found in the Bible for its people to practice in public worship.

So I don't even know what you call that, but that's sort of the spectrum that people will describe.

So one of the things that I heard from Mark that I thought was helpful a number of years ago is he says, you know, we're regulative principle guys, but the one thing we can appreciate about the normative principle guys is that we're both really still on the same biblical spectrum of trying to go to God's Word to figure out how we should worship his holy name.

We disagree about how to do that, but at least we're both trying to do that. Whereas the Roman Catholics say, you know, scripture plus tradition, and that just puts us in different categories.

The reformers, a big part of, have you read Ian Murray's yellow book?

It's like a compilation of all these documents from church history. Fantastic. I don't remember what it's called, but. It's like documents of the reformation or documents of the reformed confession.

I can't, I know exactly what you're talking about. If you're a halfway decent Googler, you can find it. I was struck by how much of their complaints were in some way connected to the regulative principle.

You know, the investment controversy, this, that, or the third. And I've also been struck recently, one of our pastors talks a lot about how, whether it's smells and bells on biblical stuff over here in Anglican churches or lights and laser shows over here, they're really doing the same thing.

One is just doing a highbrow version. One is doing kind of a Walmart version. But neither one of those is appropriate according to the clear commands of scripture.

Right, that's right. Again, there are things that can make worship feel holy, whether it's a high mysticism or whether it's sort of a consumer

Disney -fied mysticism that give you the feeling that you're closer to God, rather than appeal to what scripture says makes you closer to God or what scripture says matures you in Christ.

And all of us are looking for some sort of silver bullet or a red pill that we can take that can get us closer to God.

And the mystic sort of Anglo -Catholic, Roman Catholic, high traditionalist sort of thing, or whether it's the clowns and otters in the megachurch scene.

Honestly, that would be pretty cool. And what we have to do is not listen to the siren sound of either of those things, but say,

I believe that the Spirit works through His word. And I think that that and pragmatism,

I wrote the introduction to Matt Merker's excellent little book on corporate worship.

And in that, I said, one of the things that Matt highlighted to me as I read that manuscript was while one of the big things that we fight as evangelicals is simply the consumer mindset.

Our people tend to view public worship services as customers view a service being provided to them by a business.

And they sort of pick and choose what they like because what's the rule? The customer is always right. And what happens is ministers will accede to that by saying, give them what they want.

And when you adopt that consumer mindset, either as a worshiper going to church or as a minister, a pragmatist,

I'm just gonna give them what they want, you've already given away the store. Because God is the one who says, no, no, no,

I decide how you approach me. You do not decide how you approach me. I decide how you approach me.

And public worship needs to, it needs to scream from the rooftops, you come only by Christ.

That is the only way in. He is the temple. He is the one by whom you come to God.

He is the sacrifice. He is the one, I love the phrase that in public worship,

God is the one who determines how we approach him.

And he alone is the one who makes it possible. So he not only says, it's only by Christ, he provides

Christ. And he says, come to me by Christ. And our public worship needs to say that loud and clear to our people.

Wow, yeah. Let's talk a little bit about Uzzah because I think that the main takeaway, well, there's a lot there.

There's a lot to unpack. But one of the main takeaways is that good intentions are not enough, right?

I'm gonna keep the ark from hitting the ground. I think Shai Lin in one of his songs says, Uzzah thought that his sinful hands were cleaner than the dirt.

So I think a lot of times we give our brothers a pass on unbiblical worship because he's a good brother, his heart's in the right place.

And that's not wrong. You wanna be gracious. You wanna be, yeah, you wanna give people the benefit of the doubt. But at the end of the day, if God is the one who has made it possible, and if he is the one who has told us how we should approach him, there is a measure of you better be careful here because you're leading

God's people and you're proclaiming his name. And if you do it in a way that he hasn't prescribed, you're on shaky ground. You're in a dangerous place.

Elaborate on that. Well, amen to everything you just said. And one thing to add, when

I look at the whole flow of that passage in 2 Samuel 5, 6, 7, you're getting ready for the ark to be moved to its final central location in Jerusalem next to the king's palace.

And so it indicates that in Israel, God is going to rule. And if God is gonna rule, he's gonna rule by his word.

And it is very clear to me that David knows why Uzzah was struck down because the next time after they are taking the ark in on the cart and it falls,

David pouts for a while about it. And then the next time you see the ark coming into Jerusalem is coming in on poles.

And remember, the king had to write down the law, his own copy of the law. So David knew the law.

The law is the Levites carry it and they carry it on poles. The next time you see it, it's on poles.

So David knows why Uzzah is struck down. It's no mystery to David. David had not insisted that it be done according to God's word.

And disaster happened. And God has a reason for why he commands what he commands.

And so the Puritans would say about that, I think it is true that God gives us all kinds of latitude and mercy that we don't deserve.

That should never lead us to presumption, however. And there was presumption there. And no question,

God meant to send David a message. And the message is, if I'm really going to rule this people, it's gonna be by my word.

And if the king won't pay attention to my word, who will? And so I think that whole scene is about God ruling his people by his word.

And in the very central issue of worship in the, art did what? It symbolized the special presence of God with his people.

If you're not gonna treat that with respect, what are you gonna treat with respect? And just,

I can't help but hear that story through the lens of being a pastor and just thinking, if I mess this up, people get hurt.

This isn't a game. This is not theoretical. David's failure led to someone dying.

Hopefully that doesn't happen at Sixth Avenue, even if we mess up. It probably won't.

Well, again, but again, as a pastor, you know you wanna be careful with the word of God.

I remember as a youth director in St. Louis in the mid 1980s, teaching on a

Wednesday night and looking at some of my students writing notes in the margins of their

Bibles based on my little lesson that I was teaching that Wednesday night to high school age kids.

And it struck me like thunder. I better be telling them what the word of God is saying because they are writing notes in the margins.

All of us as pastors ought to have that attitude. I wanna be careful what I do.

These are God's people. And they're to be ruled by God's word, not by my goofy ideas.

So I want everything I do to be in accordance with God's word. Wow. Also trying to picture you as a youth guy.

I really was, Sean. Crazy haircut, ripped jeans. Never had a crazy haircut.

Always wore khakis. I was the most uncool youth guy that ever existed. But I had really amazing kids.

You were faithful. That's all that matters, brother. Let's talk a little bit about beauty in relation to the regulative principle.

I'll give you a little spiel and then you help me make it better or correct me. So we're thinking about the rebuild of our church.

And a lot of people in our congregation, surprise, surprise, have strong opinions about how we should do this out of the third.

And our congregation's great. It's not a big deal. We're not gonna split over the color of the carpet. But we did wanna say, okay, let's get ahead of this.

Let's do some teaching. Even when it comes to the architecture of a church, we think that the Bible, although it doesn't give us an exact plan or layout for the building, has a lot to say.

So here's the main thing that we said in relation to beauty. We said that beauty in the

Sunday morning gathering is what the people are doing in worship. The building itself is merely there to accommodate this divinely prescribed beautiful thing that's taking place.

And so Russell Berger, our assistant pastor, when he taught about it last Wednesday night, he said, our church building should be kind of like what a building like a doctor's office.

It should be nice. It should be well kept. It shouldn't be distracting or so ugly people don't wanna go into it.

But it should basically, once you walk in, you should forget about it so that you immediately focus on that which you are there to do.

And a doctor's office would be your medical stuff. In the church, it's worship. And so that's not to say that it's wrong to have a kind of beauty in your architecture, but the beauty in the architecture should not in any way be in competition with the beauty of the church.

And in addition to that, the beauty should not be such that we feel like we are in any Roman Catholic sense being led into the presence of anything.

Yeah, so basically that's our spiel on it. Anything you would add to or take away from that? Well, that's a huge discussion deserving of an hour conversation.

But here are a couple of thoughts. The minute that you build a building, that building sends messages whether you like it or not.

And so what you need to be aware of are what are the unintended consequences of messages that you send.

Now, I think that the rule for Protestant architecture has always been if public worship is centered around God's word, the architecture should facilitate the communication of God's word.

So Luther called the first Lutheran churches that were built in Germany, many of the

Lutheran churches in Germany had been Roman Catholic churches. So when they started - Pulpit off to the side, altar in the front.

So when they started to build Lutheran churches, he called them mouth houses.

That is - It probably sounds better in German. The design of the architecture was made to help the communication of the word of God in the public worship.

Whereas many Catholic churches are built in such a way that it is almost impossible to hear the preaching of the word in those spaces.

When I came to First Presbyterian Church in Jackson in 1996, the building that we were in had been built in 1952.

The acoustics in that room were so good, it would seat about 750, that the pastor could preach and everyone in the room could hear without any acoustical amplification.

So the architecture had been designed to allow a person to raise his voice, not to a screaming level, but to raise his voice to a higher than normal conversational level and everybody in the room be able to hear it.

So I do think we need to think about acoustics. I do think that there should be a simple dignity to a

Protestant church. And so there are gonna be degrees of beauty.

I think maybe the most beautiful interior room that I have seen anywhere in the world in a

Protestant church is Independent Presbyterian Church in Savannah, Georgia. It is an absolutely beautiful room, but it is very, very simple.

It is not ornate. You don't go in and think, wow, this is over the top, but it is a simple, gorgeous space for public worship.

Now, there will be other places that are far less attractive than that, but if they facilitate the ministry of the word in all of its aspects, reading, preaching, praying, singing, and singing is something you have to think about.

Will the room help my congregation sing? So acoustics that keep the congregation from being able to hear itself will discourage congregational singing.

So for instance, a man who was an engineer became the pastor of a church in St.

Louis many years before I was the pastor there or on the pastoral staff there, and he wanted to deaden the room's acoustics, and so he actually painted over a portion of the room that had been designed to make the acoustics more lively for singing, and then after them, there was modifications to the room that altered that effect where the room once again became a much better room for singing, and I said, don't let anybody know what we've just done because it turned that congregation into a great singing congregation because they could hear themselves.

So I think you do need to think about those sorts of factors. You know, you will see these memes out on social media.

You know, our Roman Catholic friends will post pictures of their building, and then they'll show the picture of the

Evangelical church in a strip mall between the Books a Million and the coffee shop, you know, and ha, ha, ha, you know, we build these beautiful places.

Well, there's a reason why Evangelicals and why Protestants have been more functional in their approach to church architecture.

It doesn't mean that we need to be indifferent to church architecture because again, once you start building a place for yourself, there are unintended consequences, both good and bad, that come along with whatever you do.

There's no perfect way to build a building. There are always gonna be some liabilities that come with that.

We need to be aware of that. If you wanna read on this, Hughes Old has written about Protestant architecture.

There are people that have thought through the philosophy of Protestant architecture that would be good for all of us to read and think about.

Wow, thank you, brother. That was more than I could have hoped and or expected.

Let's talk a little bit, let's talk a little bit about seminary stuff. You're the seminary guy.

We didn't talk really much about it at all last time. What is your greatest encouragement at the moment regarding seminary education, we'll say in the

United States and then what is something on the horizon or maybe that you're seeing right now that you're discouraged or concerned about?

Something that your listeners will be interested to know that is encouraging and given that we talked about complementarianism last time, worth mentioning, because complementarianism has been beat up pretty good.

You know, the only growing seminaries in North America are inerrantist, reformed -leaning, complementarian seminaries.

Right, yeah. So with all the blowback going out there on social media against all three of those things, from ex -evangelicals and deconstructionists and left -leaning, da -da -da, those are the only places growing in North America right now.

Those are accredited seminaries in the U .S. and Canada. And that is a very encouraging thing.

Now, something that ought to worry us is the number of men going into ministry, even in the evangelical world, is dropping who are going through seminary.

And we've wondered about that through the effects of the tensions of the last 12 years, through the pandemic, through the election of 2016, through all the pounding on men, toxic masculinity and all this kind of, and pastors are horrible hypocrites and terrible people.

Don't be a pastor. We've wondered, is that having an effect? Apparently so. There are fewer young men going to seminary and into the ministry through the route of seminary.

And I think, in general, that's a bad thing. And if you look at a lot of the large evangelical seminaries, the majority of students are women.

And one of the fascinating things - Sorry, how much of a majority? I mean, sometimes it's huge. Sometimes it'll be 60 % of the student body.

Will be female. But of course, the interesting thing is, even in the egalitarian world, the majority of pastors are not women.

So if you take the PCUSA, it's a tiny proportion of lead pastors that are females, even though you have a very large number of women studying in seminaries.

And so I had a friend of mine who taught at an undergraduate evangelical institution said it was very important to many of his women students that they be considered as potentially ordainable and potentially pastors, but they didn't wanna go into the ministry.

And so the dropping of men going to seminary, that's a problem we need to keep our eyes on.

I'm very thankful God has been kind to us at RTS. 80 % of our students are men. And the vast majority of those men are preparing for vocational ministry.

And I wanna see that fostered everywhere in the evangelical world. We need men that are ready to do the arduous, but glorious work of the pastoral ministry.

And that phrase comes from my friend, Dan Doriani, who teaches at Covenant Seminary and is a fellow member of the board of the

Gospel Coalition. Dan feels like we've gotta send a message to young men.

Yes, the ministry is hard, but it's also glorious and it's worth it. It's worth the sacrifices.

Yes, you're gonna have people that come after you in ministry. Yes, you're gonna have people that betray you in ministry.

Yes, you're gonna have your heart broken in ministry. Jesus is worth it and his bride is worth it.

And I wanna prepare my students to believe what they believe with such conviction and such comprehensiveness that it gets down to the level of their

DNA so that they can survive the next 30, 40, 50 years of ministry and not become cynical and not become bitter and not become apathetic.

I want us to cross the finish line, believing what we believe more than we started it, knowing that along the way, there are many dangers, toils and snares.

And so that's a concern I have is I do see an erosion of men.

Now, seminary is not the only way to prepare for ministry. There are other ways. Seminaries have been around for about 250 years, basically.

Before that, the formal process of education of ministers was often through universities, which had been started to prepare people for ministry, like Harvard was started to prepare people for ministry in the

Congregational Church in New England. But what about before that? Let's go before Oxford, Cambridge. Let's just say first 500 years of church history, trying to do the

Second Timothy to pass on. How were pastors trained and equipped?

Schools for ministry opened up almost immediately in early Christian. By the second century, you have schools of preparation for ministry.

Clement in Alexandria had one of the most famous schools for the preparation of ministry in early

Christianity. So formal processes of preparing ministers started early.

By the way, formal processes of discipling candidates for baptism developed very early.

Sometimes there would be two years of preparation before there would be a public baptism of a convert, and there were a lot of reasons for why that happened.

But early Christians were really, really concerned to convey the content of the faith, to test the character of both members and ministers, and to prepare them for life and service.

And so formal processes for educating ministers go back 1 ,900 years.

Can I pause you on that baptism question? Yeah. Not to do what Mark would do in this situation.

I'm thinking about this. We're about to have some cases of church discipline at Sixth Avenue, and I think our membership process is pretty slow.

I'm considering slowing it down even more, a la what you were talking about in the early church.

One of the reasons why they did that is because they were having so many people come in the front door and then go right out the back door, leaving the church for the world, and they wanted to double, triple, really be sure, like, do we have good evidence that this person is actually a regenerate?

I'm getting to a question. In light of the rapidly dechristianizing culture that we live in, do you think it would be wiser for churches to slow down, even healthy churches that are slow, to slow down even more?

I'm not saying we have to do a three -year thing like the early church did, but slow down even more on taking in new members to the church to really make sure that we're convinced that they're regenerate.

That's a judgment call for local elders that I trust in a Bible -believing, well -taught church to make, but I will say this.

We do have to be in the mode of continuous and never -ending discipleship of our congregations, and I've been at Capitol Hill Baptist Church enough to be in congregational meetings pretty regularly, and it's clearly discipleship about what

CHBC believes about membership doesn't stop in the membership classes. It continues at every members meeting.

It continues in every public worship service, and I think, again, this is where evangelical pastors who have adopted the, hey, whatever it takes to get people in the pews is what

I'm gonna do. You have given away the store already when you've adopted that because we have to be in the mode of continuous discipleship into what it means to be a

Christian, into what it means to be a fellow member, in what it means to serve the brethren.

We've got to constantly be new. So whether we, you know, if you only have a six -week membership process, maybe think about expanding what's entailed in the membership process, but no matter what you do on the front end, you've got to keep doing that down the line because especially with a congregational polity, your polity is only as good as the embrace of your membership of that polity, and by the way,

Presbyterians believe this too. Polity disciples. Polity disciples you.

And so, again, so many of our, you know, friends that we know are in Christ and believe the gospel and pastor congregations who do not care about polity, you've just, just by making that decision, you have decided to leave off a part of the discipleship of God's people because how we are and how we act together is a big part of the

Christian life. Look at the New Testament. So much of sanctification in the New Testament is how we relate to one another, especially in the church.

So you can't be sanctified without relating to people in the church in a certain way.

That's what you're teaching in membership classes, and that's what we're trying to disciple people in in every members meeting, in every meeting of congregational worship, and in all the other special activities that we do to edify the people of God.

So that is something for sure that we need to do in an ongoing way. That's good, brother. More stuff on seminary, because you are the seminary guy.

So many once faithful, biblical pastoral training centers, colleges, whatever, or theological

Christian universities have gone the path of liberalism.

What, I mean, if it can happen to Princeton, right? It could happen to RTS. So how do you keep measures in place to prevent that from happening?

The first thing I want to acknowledge is only God can keep us, unless the Lord builds the house, those who labor, labor in vain.

So we have to acknowledge every day God keep us. Now, we have certain responsibilities in that regard, and we know that the

Lord uses those kinds of commitments and responsibilities to keep us kept.

And by God's grace, 60 years later, RTS still believes exactly what we believed in 1966 when we first opened the doors.

What processes have we put in place to try and check ourselves there? One is the board of trustees of RTS is made up entirely of elders in local churches that are reformed, confessional, and inerrantist.

And they have to sign the statement of faith that I have to sign and that all the professors have to sign every year.

Every year, we have to re -sign our statement of faith, which entails that we hold to the authority, infallibility, inerrancy, sufficiency, clarity, inspiration of scripture.

Let's go. And reform theology as it's expressed in the Westminster Standards. And every trustee has to sign that again every year.

And that's a very sobering thing when we pass that around and we sign it again.

And we read it out loud at least once a year. Is that not traditional? Is it usually you sign on the dot -org and you get hired?

Very often, you know, like I know at Southern, the professors have to sign the abstract of principles when they become a tenured professor at Southern.

And I'm not sure what is required of the trustees of Southern. But at many institutions, the trustees themselves are not necessarily invested in the theology of the institution.

Very often, institutions will use trustees as major donors. And we just think it's very important to have elders.

That's like incentivizing compromise. Well, and let me say, capitalism and the need to finance theological education has been a source of real problems in higher theological education in America.

The need to pay for what you're doing has led to a lot of compromise. We gotta keep the doors open.

When instead it should be, let the doors close if they need to. Correct. And I've told people, we are accredited.

And I've said, if ever our accreditors were to require us to compromise our commitments to the sole final authority of Scripture, the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture, especially on controverted things like gender, marriage, and sexuality, or to compromise our commitment to reform theology,

I'd just say, that's it, we're ditching our accreditation. Now, I happily wanna say, our accreditors have been great with us.

Our accreditors have never pressured us to compromise on those things. Interestingly now, you should know that in the

Association of Theological Schools, which is the largest accreditor of seminaries in North America, the majority of students in ATS are in Bible -believing seminaries.

And so ATS knows they can't sort of just throw muscle around against evangelical institutions.

That's where most of their students are. And they've been actually great partners with us in theological education.

But if I should ever have a government agency or an accreditor pressure me to compromise our commitments,

I'm done, I'm out, we're gone. And again, I would rather RTS close our doors than not be faithful to what our founders committed us to with regard to the

Bible and reform theology. So that helps us. We do require all of our professors to sign that same statement every year.

And then all of our teaching we make public. I can remember being in seminary when a professor said, you cannot record my class.

And I remember thinking, now, that's kind of weird. Like, what are you afraid of?

And so when I became a young seminary professor, I said to my class, not only can you record my class, but if I say something that is inconsistent with the authority of Scripture or with the reformed faith,

I invite you to go back and tell your pastor and elders what I've done. Call me on the carpet, hold me accountable because I'm not

Caesar in this classroom. I'm just a servant of the word. And if I'm not faithful to what we've said publicly, we believe, call me on the carpet about it.

And so I want all of our professors to be accountable to the churches in that way.

All of my professors are involved in the life of the local church. Many of them are serving as pastors in local churches while they teach because I want my professors not to say, well,

I remember 30 years ago when I was a pastor, this happened. I would rather them say, you know, last week as I was serving in the congregation, this happened.

I want ministry to be fresh to them. Yes, they need to be experts in their fields, and they are.

But they're pastors. The best person to prepare a pastor for ministry is a pastor.

And so they've gotta have that academic expertise, but they also have to have their pastoral chops.

That helps you stay accountable too because you're serving in the churches, you're working in the same structures that your students are gonna have to go into, you're accountable to those things.

That really helps. The fact that we have a public statement of faith that we adhere to, that helps in many ways.

None of those things by themselves can keep us faithful. You know, it is true, there is a leftward drift, partly just because the culture is toxic to true faith.

It's not helping you believe out there. But we do try to do things that keep us faithful, and then we depend upon the

Lord to hold us. Two more things about seminary, and then we'll move on. Number one, seminary, more like cemetery, am

I right? No, I'm just kidding. What would you say to a cynical young man who sees kind of, you know, the

West collapsing, and he just goes, you know, institutions, who needs them?

What would you say to him? One, I would say this. Institutions are the vehicle that carry movements to the next generation.

If you don't have institutions, you're not going to carry a movement to the next generation. But they're gonna be compromised.

The institution that you love today is gonna be compromised tomorrow. Look what happened to Spurgeon's College. Look what happened to Princeton.

Yeah, but churches are institutions. They're not only organisms.

They are also institutions. That is, there's an organic life to a local congregation, but there is also an institutional aspect to a local congregation.

So congregations are gonna go liberal. You know, they're gonna be wonderful congregations that flourished for 100 years, and they're gonna die.

But does that mean that they are not worth investing in? No, it doesn't mean that. They are very much worth investing in.

And without those kinds of institutions, you cannot carry on the work of the

Lord in the world. And so there are always gonna be institutions. Al Mohler likes to say, even anarchists have leaders, you know?

And so there are always gonna be leaders, and there are always gonna be institutions. If you don't care about institutions, you have just decided that you are not going to have an impact on the future.

You're not gonna have an impact now. You're not gonna have an impact on the future. Do institutions go bad? Yes, they do.

Sometimes they go so bad that they are not reclaimable. But sometimes they're very happy stories like Southern Seminary in Louisville or Concordia Seminary in St.

Louis, where Bible -believing people recaptured an institution and now are teaching truth.

So sometimes institutions go bad, and they're recaptured. Sometimes you just have to abandon them.

I'm from a neck of the woods. The Southern Presbyterians lost our conservative resurgence.

The Southern Baptists won their conservative resurgence. So we lost all of our institutions, and we had to rebuild them.

That's why there's an RTS. RTS was established because there was not a single Southern Presbyterian seminary that held to the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture.

All of the denominational seminaries had fallen prey to either liberalism or neo -Orthodoxy, and RTS was started because of that.

So RTS is an example of an institution that was started because institutions had failed and they were unreclaimable.

Southern Seminary and Concordia Seminary are an example of seminaries that had drifted and were brought back by faithful men.

Either way, institutions matter. I was in the car with Dave Russell, who's a pastor here in Charlotte.

He's a landmarks guy. And there was no camera around. There was nobody there. It was just he and I.

And he was just riffing on his desire to fight for the SBC. And I thought that was convicting for me because I'm a part of ACMI.

I'm excited about that work. A lot of people who objected to it, they were like,

ACMI's gonna go sideways maybe. But he just said, this is the world's largest evangelical denomination.

And I don't wanna let that die easily. I wanna fight for it. And I said, oh, that's the right attitude,

I think. Okay, next and final question about seminary. Father me, counsel me, lead me.

37 years old, a pastor. You ready? Not only do I not have a seminary degree,

PhD or MDiv or anything else, I guess there's other things you can get, or a four -year degree or two -year degree.

I don't even have a high school diploma. Now, I'm pretty atypical. But when most people were getting their high school diploma,

I was selling drugs. When most people were going to college, I was carrying an M4 around Mosul, Iraq. And then life,

God's providence just never really afforded me the opportunity. And now life with pastoring is so busy.

I don't really wanna do online classes. And I don't even know if I would have the time to do it.

What would you say to a pastor who feels like, man, I really would have liked to gotten a seminary education, but it just doesn't seem like it's in the plan.

What should I do? How should I move forward? That's a tough question. And let me say, the answer is not the same for everyone.

People will often say, well, Spurgeon didn't have education. Well, not everybody is Spurgeon. People will say, my friend,

John Blanchard, who's now with the Lord, did not have. In fact, when John would come into my office at First Perez, I would look up at the diplomas on my wall and I would kind of be embarrassed because John did not have the academic privileges that I had to go to a

Bible -believing seminary and pursued PhD work. But John was a voracious reader and a prolific author and a very effective communicator.

So the answer is not the same for everybody, Sean. And seminary is not the only, seminary has never been the only way that people were prepared for ministry.

But I think that it is very important for at least some pastors to go the way, think of a

Mark Dever. I think Mark Dever, who was a smart guy, who didn't have to go to seminary in order to go into ministry,

I think not only was he helped by going to seminary, by doing a

THM, by doing a PhD, I think he was better equipped to lead a movement because of his formal theological education.

Not everybody is Mark Dever. Not everybody has to do that. So I think everybody has to figure out what am

I equipped to do, what would be most helpful in my service of God's people to do.

Every minister is doing ongoing education. Even if you are preparing a sermon series on James, I'll bet you're reading some really good commentaries while you're preparing that, and you know what's happening?

Not only are you being helped to prepare better sermons for your congregation, you're learning about the

Bible. So that's one of the things I love about pastoral ministry. It forces you, if you do it right, to learn, to grow, to mature, to be equipped to study.

So I think in our day and age, Sean, there has never been a greater need for some kind of ongoing education for pastors, not just seminary or whatever it is preparing you to go in, but ongoing education.

Conferences are a part of that. People make fun of conferences, but things like the Cross Conference, things like T4G, things like the various conferences that are put on by the

Nine Marks Network or some of the Midwestern or Southeastern, that kind of ongoing pastoral education

I think has never been more important than now, partly because the education system itself is failing.

Even people that did have advantages that you didn't have, students that went through high school, didn't learn how to read and write.

Students went to college, partied for four years. And what happens is those students will get to a seminary.

They know how to read. They know how to write. They know how to think. They know how to speak. And we end up remediating some of the things that they didn't get in those earlier forms of education.

But we don't have time in three years to fix all of that. Seminarians used to have to present a

Latin thesis to get into seminary, to get into seminary. Seminarians used to, it was assumed that they already had

Greek before they came to seminary. They were taught Hebrew in seminary, but it was assumed that they had

Greek. Nobody assumes that anymore in our world. And that means again - Do you know Latin? I do. And I had to work in Latin.

I started Latin in high school. Interestingly, my son -in -law is a Latin teacher at the high school that I attended.

And he was hired by the woman that taught me Latin at Greenville High all those years ago.

So I started Latin in high school, continued it in college, continued it in seminary. But there are not many of those folks around there.

And I'm not saying that there need to be. I'm just saying that all we can do now in seminary is help you over the course of three or four years to learn how to self -feed.

You know, because we all need to continue to grow. We all need to learn. We all need to push ourselves because the more we know, the better we will be able to help

God's people. I remember Sinclair Ferguson saying many years ago, if I had only known my

Bible better, I would have been a better pastor. And I thought, okay, if Sinclair Ferguson thinks he needs to know his

Bible better, I need to know my Bible better. And so every pastor needs to know

Bible better, theology better, church history better. Seminary is a very efficient way of getting at that.

When you are in pastoral ministry, time is at a premium. So one thing

I would say to this, I would say if you invited me to speak to your fellow elders and your congregation, what

I would say is, deliberately give Sean time away from his local pastoral responsibilities so that he can invest himself in ways of learning.

They may be one week intensive courses. They may be going to a conference.

They may be going off and doing a seminar. Some form, and then

I'll say this, that will come back to bless you because what he learns there, he will bring back to you.

When I was a youth director again, what I was learning in seminary was coming out in my

Sunday school lessons, in my discipleship, in my one -on -one, in my small groups. I was sort of translating that down to the high school level.

That happens with all of us as ministers. What we learn, what impacts our hearts and lives, we cannot wait to share that with the people of God.

So the more the people of God let you feed on the word of God, the more it's going to bless them.

All right, let's give some counsel to Luke. Luke, are we so good over there? Let's give some counsel to Luke. Luke is something of a musical prodigy,

Mozart level, I think. And he's redoing old hymns, modernizing them, making them more congregationally friendly for the church.

And we've been talking recently about his desire to pursue some kind of education in hymnody or the history of hymnody.

He's probably, as far as we can tell right now, not going to pursue a full theological education at seminary.

What would you recommend him? Just like find some really good subject matter expert, like maybe at one of your campuses, and take some classes from him on that?

That's one way that you can go. Interestingly, the wife of my academic dean has just finished a, it's either a

PhD or a DMA at New Orleans Baptist Seminary in hymnody. Okay. And she teaches music at a local university.

And so she's been working on hymnody. I actually teach the hymnody course at RTS Jackson.

So next time we teach it, I'll send you a note. We would love to have you come over. We'll probably do it in an intensive, because most of my students know zero about the history of hymnody.

They haven't thought through the whole, what about congregational singing? What does it take to really do that well?

So our hymnody course is designed to help in that process. So yes, there are good resources like that around that you can take advantage of.

Great. You got that locked in, ready to go? Yeah. But I mean, if he's going to teach it and he'll let you come, we're going to send you.

Yeah, I might go too. Well, I don't know who will do stuff at the church, but we'll figure it out. Who, I gotta stop saying um so much.

Sometimes I go back and I watch these videos and I just, um, um, um, okay. Let's leave that in.

And there we go. Let's have a little palate cleanser real quick.

You'll appreciate this, Luke. I think I found out the other day that ants, you know, like the insects, I found out that they're all females.

Did you know that? I had no idea. Yeah, I'll prove it to you. If they were males, they'd be called uncles.

Ouch. So moving on. Dad jokes. I got them all day. Honestly, it was really hard for me to get this far without doing one.

So, uh, slowly but surely, here we go. What you can, let's, let's say, uh,

I want to say most, but I know questions put in the form of a superlative aren't the easiest to answer.

Top three theologians that you are most excited about in the new generation.

I asked that because with the passing of Keller, MacArthur doesn't seem to be doing well.

Sproul has gone to be with the Lord. And every time I think about it, I just go buy five copies of the holiness of God and give them away.

You know, Piper's getting up there. Yeah. I'm thinking, okay, who, if we were to do 15 years from now, another

T4G, who would you hope to be on the stage? Well, it's not always the best theologians that are on the stages of conferences, right?

Because very often the guys that are equipped to think and write at the highest level are not necessarily the best popular communicators.

And so, you know, just because I'm on the platform of a T4G doesn't mean I'm a great theologian.

I view myself as a mediator or a translator of better, smarter thinkers to pastors, especially.

Which is huge. And, and I think that's an important role. I think Kevin DeYoung sees himself that way. I'm a translator.

I read these guys that pastors don't have time to read. And then I try and digest and convey what

I've gotten so that those pastors can use that material in practical ways in their life.

I've only gotten Turretin because of Kevin DeYoung. There you go. You know, so, you know, so if, you know, if we were around Turretin and Van Maastricht might not be on the platform of, of T4G, but they would certainly be informing us.

I mean, think of the impact of Berkhoff on Al Mohler. Berkhoff had a huge impact, reading

Louis Berkhoff's Systematic Theology had a huge impact on the formation of Al Mohler's theology.

So you've always got guys in the background that are shaping the more popular communicators.

And hopefully they're good, solid guys in the background. And there are a bunch of really good, solid guys out there.

And so I'm not even sure I can name the best or the top three, but let me tell you from some in the neck of the woods who've been very helpful to me.

Hopefully that we might get on even on Room for Nuance. Yeah, you could get. So I'll mention a guy that I mentioned last time,

Scott Swain, who is the president of Reform Theological Seminary in Orlando.

He's a professor of Systematic Theology. Scott studied at Southeastern, then was a professor at Southwestern.

And then he came over to the dark side and became a Presbyterian and became a professor at RTS Orlando and then the dean and then the president.

Scott's work in the doctrine of God and in particular in the doctrine of Trinity has just been transformative to me.

And so I would say to your listeners, pick up his short introduction to the

Trinity, but read everything that you can get your hands on by Scott.

And then his colleague, who is the academic dean at Orlando, is Michael Allen. And both

Mike and Scott are young Reformed theologians of the highest order that I learn from constantly.

They are at the top of their game. They're incredibly, incredibly prolific.

Mike is in the process of writing a four -volume systematic theology right now. So these are younger guys who

I am learning a lot from that I very much appreciate.

Another young theologian who is incredibly prolific is

Matthew Barrett, who is at Midwestern Baptist Seminary. And he cranks it out.

And Matthew, again, is one of these younger theologians committed to what's now being called in popular language, classical theism.

But all it is is historic, orthodox, biblical teaching on the doctrine of God.

But he's an expert not only in theology, but in historical theology. He's written a book on the

Reformation recently. Matthew is very prolific and very, very helpful.

So those are three names that I would mention. I could mention a bunch of guys in the Baptist world right now. Some of them out of the

Nine Marks. Bobby Jameson, for instance, is another guy who is doing really good work in terms of articulating a classical

Christian doctrine of God and of Christ. And I'm very thankful when

I look at this younger generation of theologians, they're teaching me. I'm trying to, oop,

I need to say that better than I've said that in the past. And I see there's a whole wave of guys behind them.

And that was not happening 30, 40 years ago. Who, do you, I know you probably read outside of Reformed circles.

Who would you say is the most influential non -Reformed thinker?

Like who's been most influential for you outside of the Reformed world? Well, that's a really hard, theologically,

I must say. Though I have professors like, again, Scott Swain and Mike Allen, who read a lot of theology outside of the

Reformed tradition because they are trying to interact at the highest level with the way that theology is being done in the academy and in the world today.

I don't read nearly as much as they read. I probably read Catholic authors.

And frankly, Benedict XVI, the former Pope, is one of the best traditional

Catholic thinkers of the last 100 years. And so that's somebody that I read and think about and try and interact with.

You'll love this story. A group of professors from the

Theological Seminary in Aix -en -Provence in France went to meet Pope Benedict before he was

Pope Benedict when he was just Cardinal Ratzinger. And as a gift, they brought him a copy of the

English translation of Francis Turretin, the three -volume

Institutes of Atlantic Theology. Cardinal Ratzinger turned around and pulled off of his shelf his

Latin copy of Turretin, which he had completely read and marked up.

So Ratzinger, and by the way, you can see his hand in the Catholic Catechism, which he was the head honcho in the writing of the new

Catholic Catechism. He is sneaky good in how he articulates things because he knows

Protestant theology. And so he can articulate error incredibly beautifully. And so that's an example of a person that I interact with, but I often am more interested in secular, non -Christian thinkers and interacting with their thoughts.

And people like Tom Holland, for instance, who - Yeah, Dominion. He's coming from sort of an atheistic worldview and he suddenly realizes, wow, all the things that I love really are rooted not in the classic

Greco -Roman tradition, they're rooted in Christianity. And so I'm gonna think of myself as sort of a cultural

Christian because that's the only way that I can justify the things that I care about.

So I love to read that kind of a guy as I think about reaching this sort of a skeptical, unbelieving world with the truth of Scripture and the gospel.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting you bring that up. Somebody that I've been reading recently is

Abigail Schreier. She wrote Irreversible Damage. I'm noticing as sort of Western civilization collapses on itself, the people who 20 years ago would have been very hostile to Christianity and to the

Christian worldview are starting to realize, oh no, things are going bad. Let's not give it all away.

Right. And they're making a lot of common grace conclusions that I am benefiting from as I'm reading their books.

Okay. This is not intended to be clickbaity.

I just have to say that out front. I loathe that kind of interview questions. It's not meant to be a gotcha question.

When I go on Facebook and I say, I'm gonna be interviewing Lick Duncan, round two tomorrow. What should I ask about?

We get a number of different things. But pretty consistently, people wanna know about your last message at T4G and how that was received.

Now that you're so far removed from that. And then your endorsement of Woke Church by Eric Mason.

I mean, that one is brought up a lot. So you take those in whichever order you please.

I have not had many comments made to me about my last message at T4G.

At T4G, the comments that I hear about are the message about Elijah, the message on numbers.

I can listen to that sermon right now. It's so good. The very first T4G, when I spoke about preaching the gospel from the

Old Testament, those are the three messages over the however many years that we did T4G from 2006 to 2022 that I hear most about.

From the last T4G, I've had more people comment on my prayers because Mark asked me to go up and do some examples of praying scripture.

And so I tried to do that two or three times during T4G as a way of encouraging pastors.

And I've heard more people comment about the prayers, frankly, than my last message.

That was a very poignant, wonderful T4G. I loved that T4G. And I remember more about what

Sinclair Ferguson said, interviewing Sinclair and Alex, what Mark said, walking off the stage the last time, and then

Matt Merker walking off the stage, and then there's nobody up front. And I just thought that is, Mark and I were talking about this after it was just so appropriate that there's none of us on the platform.

There's only God. There's only the gospel. There's only Christ. That was just so appropriate that no human beings were up there.

It was just left to the Lord. That was a beautiful way to end T4G. So I don't know, maybe you've heard something about the last sermon that you want to mention.

With regard to Woke Church, let me say if people wonder why

I wrote the foreword to Woke Church, this will not take you five minutes to do, read

Neil Shenvey's short review of Woke Church. It will take you less than five minutes.

Go to Neil Shenvey's site. He is no fan of Wokeness. He is no fan of Wokeness. Yes. Read his review of Woke Church.

You will know why I wrote the foreword to Woke Church when you read Neil Shenvey's foreword or review.

Now, let me just briefly explain because I love it when people that I respect ask me those kinds of questions because I believe that I owe clarity to good faith questions, even and especially from people who disagree with me.

So I want to paint the target on my back. I'm not trying to be shifty and avoid concerns.

I want to answer concerns directly. So I love it when people ask me questions like that directly.

Now, when neoconfederates who are podcasting from their mother's spare bedroom want to call me woke because of that, you know, then

I don't care what they say. And frankly, they influence very, very few people.

But I've had good questions about this. So let me say, here's the answer. I wanted to send a message that I thought guys in our theological neck of the woods who are inerrantist, who are unapologetically committed to reform theology, and who want to see the church shaped by Scripture, not by the culture, need to understand sympathetically what a lot of our brothers and sisters from black churches and in evangelical spaces are experiencing through that cultural transition that we started going through in 2012.

And Eric's book was the best one at that point to sort of, where's this coming from?

What's all the upset about? Why are people reacting the way they are to whether it's

Trayvon Martin or whether it's George Floyd or whatever? And I can't remember when that book came out.

Did it come out in 2019 or so, somewhere in there? It's trying to explain why did things blow up like this?

And the commendation is not, I agree with everything that Eric says.

It's go listen to somebody who in good faith both believes the gospel, believes the

Bible, wants to love the church and serve the church and doesn't want to give up on evangelicalism.

Listen to him trying to explain his perspective. Now, I think since then, there've been some even more helpful things written.

Shai Lin's New Reformation is maybe my favorite book on this. And Shai does a great job of explaining to you.

And so what I was saying - You don't have to agree with everything he says in that book. So Isaac Adams has written, there's so many other good things that have been written on this.

But what I'm saying to my guys is, guys, it would be helpful if you would be a little more knowledgeable and a little more sympathetic about what some of your brothers and sisters out there are going through right now.

It might keep us together because I had already seen by 2015, bad faith actors trying to drive

African -Americans out of white evangelical spaces because they hated the gospel and the

Bible. These bad faith actors did. And they were trying to drive what a unity no question had been building in the 2000s.

And then it got shattered in the 20 -teens. I saw that happening. I wanted to send a message, guys,

I think we need to be knowledgeable and we need to be sympathetic and we need to listen a little bit. And interestingly, that message landed more often than not.

I remember being in line at a new student reception at RTS Orlando and a young African -American guy comes through the line and he says,

Dr. Duncan, when I read your foreword to Eric Mason's woke church, I knew that RTS was a place where I could come and study and I would be nurtured and built up.

He believes in the inerrancy of scripture. He believes in reformed theology. He's committed to the gospel. He wants to have a biblical church.

And that was the message that he picked up. That was what I was trying to send to one audience and then to my guys,

I wanted to say, let's just listen. Yeah. And if we disagree on the interpretation of some sociological data, that's okay.

It's not the end of the world. Not the end of the world. We have about 15 more minutes with you before we got to get you to this speaker's lunch.

John Frame. He's coming under fire, particularly

Matthew Barrett, who is on a little bit of a rampage at the moment. He posted a quote from Frame saying some,

I think, unhelpful, if not dangerous stuff about the Trinity. And Matthew Barrett basically said, why does

John Frame continue to get a pass? I'm only asking you about this because you are the president of RTS.

I know that you know John. Yeah. I have greatly benefited from Frame's work over the years.

Help me think through this better. James Dolezal was on this years before Matthew ever published anything on social media.

You'll remember James uses the phrase, theistic mutualism. He says, as opposed to this classical theism that we've been talking about, evangelical theology in the 20th century, even in its most conservative quadrants, was dominated by what he calls theistic mutualism.

And that is a tendency to give up on doctrines like divine simplicity, divine impassibility, divine immutability, in favor of, not open theism, not that kind of thing, because John Frame critiques -

Not Greg Boyd level, yeah. Oh yes, not Greg Boyd open theism, but softening some of the historical

Protestant commitments to those attributes of God.

And it's not just John Frame. I studied under Bob Raymond, Robert L. Raymond, R -E -Y -M -O -N -D, taught at Covenant Seminary and then at Knox Seminary.

Dr. Raymond also questioned things just like John Frame did.

I knew that Dr. Raymond knew a lot more than I knew. I knew that he was a lot smarter than I was.

But I also know, okay, I think I just want to be confessional on things. So when I listened to Dr.

Raymond, I thought, I'm not sure what that means, but I'm going to stick with a confession. And I would just encourage everybody, stick with your confessions, because when people come up with formulations that contradict fundamental areas like the doctrine of God or the

Trinity, maybe we don't need to immediately call them heretics, but we also don't need to immediately adopt their ideas.

It's what I tell, I had a lot of students that got all excited about N .T. Wright in the late 90s.

And I said, wait around 100 years and we'll see how much of N .T. Wright's thought is still out there.

And so a lot of theologians, it's not just John Frame, it's Bob Raymond, who

I loved and studied under. It's my beloved Donald MacLeod that I studied with in Scotland.

It's Wayne Grudem, a dear friend of mine. I can go down a list of guys that made, in their articulations of, especially the

Christian doctrine of God, they made moves that were different from the classic

Protestant scholastic formulation of the doctrine of God. And we're living in the heyday of the resurrection of the classic

Protestant scholastic doctrine of God. So I would say, read John Frame with appreciation, but care on those points.

Watch what Matthew is drawing attention to. Matthew's right. Matthew's right about what he's articulating.

Doesn't mean you have to throw away all your John Frame books and just watch out in those areas. Go with where the confessions are on those issues.

If you could be stuck on a desert island for the rest of your life, you can only have one volume, not volume, set, if you will, of systematic theology, what are you taking with you?

That's really, really hard, but I might pick Petrus Van Maastricht.

It's Van Maastricht, you remember Jonathan Edwards said that Van Maastricht was the best uninspired book ever written.

I did not know that. And so Edwards loved Petrus Van Maastricht and that set is being translated into English by an

RTS graduate who now teaches at Westminster Seminary. It's being translated from Latin into English.

It's never been in English before and he's gotten four of the seven volumes out and I think they've got the last three translated now, but it's going through the editorial process.

So within a matter of a couple of years, we'll have all seven volumes of Van Maastricht and I think that might be what

I took with me. So Bavinck is about to be old news. No, I love Bavinck and Bavinck is the hot thing right now, okay?

And so again, there's a lot that you can learn from Bavinck because Bavinck is trying to figure out how to convey

Van Maastricht's theology in a pluralistic world. So Bavinck is helping you figure out how to translate historic reform theology in a modern pluralistic society.

So I love Bavinck for that reason. That's what Grace Sutanto and James Eglinton and Corey Brock and others are trying to do.

They're trying to show us how Bavinck helps us preach the old, old faith, the scriptures, the gospel, the historic reform faith in this modern skeptical culture because Bavinck helped us do that.

So Bavinck would be a great choice as well. You can only have one work of fiction with you on the desert island.

What do you take? Can I have all the works of Tolkien? Yeah. Okay, I want all the works of Tolkien.

So if I had to ask Tolkien versus Lewis. Tolkien, hands down. No, okay, but it's not

Narnia versus Lord of the Rings. It's all of the works of Tolkien versus - It's all of Tolkien versus all the works of Lewis, yeah.

And you're still taking Tolkien? Oh man, okay. And you sure the government wasn't involved in 9 -11?

The government was involved in responding to 9 -11. Okay, all right, rapid fire questions.

Tea or coffee? Coffee, black, strong. Black, strong, amen.

Like if I call it, it gets up and walks to me. If you could only listen to the preaching of one of these men for the rest of your life on a desert island.

Kevin D. Young, Dever, Piper, Sinclair Ferguson, Keller, Sproul, or John McArthur.

Oh, that is so mean. Yeah, I saw that. That is so mean. It's like Dever and Ferguson, neck and neck.

Interesting. Okay, what is the most slept on, which do you know what that means?

Okay, the most slept on work of theology. Like people aren't reading this and they should be reading this.

Why is nobody reading this? Oh, wow. Oh, that's a really, really good question.

I'm not sure I'm going to be able to give a really good answer to that. I will say this, when

I was at Edinburgh, I sat in on theology classes with Donald McLeod, and one day

Donald said, B .B. Warfield outread, outthought, and outwrote every man of his generation, and we didn't listen to him.

So I do think Warfield is incredibly helpful on so many things today, especially, of course, on the doctrine of Scripture, but also on Calvinism and Reformed theology.

And Warfield really anticipated Barthianism by about 25 years and answered it before Barth had ever written it.

And so Warfield is somebody and PNR, by the way, is in the process of releasing some new editions of Warfield's works.

And so Warfield is not easy to read. Okay, so if you read Warfield, get ready to take your time.

It's not going to be easy to read, but boy, what a great thinker. What hymn do you want to be sung at your funeral?

Oh, probably, can I say more than one? Yeah, of course. Guide me, O thou great

Jehovah. Great is thy faithfulness. How sweet the name of Jesus sounds.

That's good, brother. Mountains or beach?

Mountains. Champagne or wine? Champagne. Whiskey or bourbon?

Are those the same thing? I have no idea. I don't either. I'm not much of a drinker, so.

Yeah, okay. Android or iPhone? iPhone. Macaroni salad or potato salad?

Oh, that's hard, coleslaw. Okay, night out or night in?

Night in. What's your middle name? Ligon. My first name is

Jennings. My middle name is Ligon. My last name is Duncan. I'm the third. William Jennings Bryant?

Yeah, well, it's actually, I'm named after a circuit riding Methodist minister. My great -grandparents were in a congregation that on one

Sunday would be Presbyterian, the next Sunday it would be Methodist, the next Sunday it would be Baptist, and they would just rotate through.

And apparently, a circuit riding Methodist minister whose name was Jennings Ligon had a profound effect on them, and they named their third son after that minister.

And that name has been passed down. Now my son is Jennings Ligon Duncan IV, and he goes by Jennings.

That's pretty cool. Are we close enough now that I can just call you Jennings? You can call me, you know, very, very few people.

Devor would call me Jennings from time to time. I had an elder at the church in Jackson who would call me

Jennings. But yeah, you can call me whatever you want to call me, Sean. I needed that.

Concert or sporting event? If it were a concert with the original band of Earth, Wind, and Fire, it would be concert.

You're blowing my mind right now. You're an Earth, Wind, and Fire guy? Yes, I was a DJ in high school. Oh, wait a second.

Wait a second. We gotta go another hour. That's crazy. But I love college football.

So if I had college football, I'd just love it. Are you Mississippi State or? Clemson. In South Carolina, you either pull for Clemson or South Carolina.

And so my family was a Clemson family, even though I went to Furman. And so I know some coaches on the staff and I know a lot of the people around the program and I still go to Clemson games from time to time.

Okay. Morning person or night owl? Used to be a night owl.

Now I'm a morning person. Burger King or McDonald's? Let's throw in Wendy's too.

Let's get crazy. If it were Burger King and McDonald's, I'd pick McDonald's.

Just classic Americana? My order at McDonald's is a double hamburger, add mac sauce, and a small order of fries.

Wow. That's my order at McDonald's. I didn't even know you could do that. Yeah. Let's get crazy, okay? Burgers or barbecue?

Oh, that's so hard. Depends on the barbecue. Texas? Let's say Texas barbecue. Well, if you go to Four Rivers Smokehouse in the

Orlando area, you can get Texas brisket because that's where John Rivers learned how to do his brisket.

And some of the best barbecue you can imagine. I typically, I'm a South Carolina mustard based barbecue guy, but I love

Four Rivers barbecue in the Orlando area. So you'd take barbecue over burger? It's hard because I love burgers.

I mean, I live on burgers, Sean. I love burgers. Had a burger last night. We did too, and it was amazing.

French fries or onion rings? Again, if it's the right kind of, if it's the onion rings from Rooster's in Jackson, I'll go with the onion rings.

Okay. But I love fries as well. Chinese takeout and not the good kind.

I'm talking about the bad kind, like you know you're going to regret it. Bad Chinese takeout, right, yeah. Or sushi. Chinese takeout.

There we go. There we, a man of the people, ladies and gentlemen. Cold or hot? Cold. Rock or rap?

That's hard too, but rock. Okay. Did you ever come to appreciate any of like the, like the lyrical theology,

Christian rap? Oh yeah. Yeah, and through a dear friend of mine who's actually now the head of Mission Mississippi, Brian Crawford.

Brian came from a background where he had been sort of part of a Pentecostal health and wealth healing kind of thing.

He went to Mississippi State. While I was at Mississippi State, his younger sister whom he adored contracted a very virulent strand of MS and died.

He and his dad took her around to healing crusades. She never got healed. The theologians in that movement declared it was because she didn't have enough faith.

Brian knew that she trusted in Christ. She had a beautiful testimony all the way to her death. So he rejected the theology of his youth, but he didn't reject

Christ or Christianity. And he came across reformed theology from John MacArthur, R .C.

Sproul, and John Piper in the rap lyrics of this music that a friend gave to him.

That's how I found out about him. And so, you know, he really introduced me to that whole world.

I knew a little about it. You know, I was a DJ when rap first went top 40.

So Sugar Hill Gang, Rapper's Delight. The first group that goes top 40 with rap.

The rap world, of course, had been around for a long time. It just hadn't broke surface into pop culture.

And so I knew that stuff because I was a DJ and I liked a lot of it, but it's so crude, right?

So much of the lyrical content, you just can't listen to as a Christian and say, yeah, that's okay.

So discovering this other world was whoa, you know? And then the ability of some of these folks to articulate profound truths of theology in ways that get into your head and you can never forget it.

That's right. Oh my heavens, it's so good. So yeah, that's my quick answer to that question.

Last one, classical or jazz? I mean, I love jazz, but I also love classical.

I couldn't give either of them up. Really? Okay. I feel like jazz is the kind of music that people pretend to like because you have to, but you actually like it.

I am not, my younger brother John is a much better musician than me.

My mother was a professional musician. I know

I can sing, but I'm really not. I took piano for a while. I played bass for a while.

I've done some things instrumentally, but I'm not a musician, nor am I a musician like my son.

My son can play 15 different instruments and loves all kinds. He loves a lot of prog rock stuff because of the complexity.

And by the way, the jazz roots to a lot of what prog rock does. But I did a lot of sacred choral singing as a young man.

And so I love sacred choral music, but I also love the great classics. And I was introduced to a more pop jazz.

So I'm thinking of people like Bob James, Dave Grusin, that Earl Clu, George Benson, that kind of pop jazz drew me into the jazz world.

Now, J .I. Packer really knew jazz. He knew real jazz music.

I didn't know jazz at its roots. I was drawn in from sort of pop jazz and then appropriated bits and pieces here and there.

Last, last question. Favorite movie. That is so hard.

That is really, really hard. I might say favorite.

It might be as bad as it is when you go back and look at it.

The first Star Wars movie. Hey, I get it. That had such an impact.

I don't know how old I was. I don't know, maybe 14 or 15 years old, but I had never seen anything like that in my life.

The visual effects, you know, which look cheesy now. The acting, horrible.

The script writing stilted, but totally took me into a whole new world, you know?

And so that movie had a huge impact on me. Thank you for your time.

We're gonna get you out of here. I'm gonna pray. Lord, thank you so much for our brother, Leg. Thank you for providentially leading him to the place that you've led him to today, where he is able to influence so many people for the sake of the gospel.

We pray that you will protect him and keep him, that your face will always be shining upon him,

Lord. Help him to love you and your son, Jesus, more than anything else in the world.

And then as an outflow of that, let his ministry bear much eternal fruit to the glory of your name.

We pray that this episode will do that to some small degree. God, all we wanna do really is be faithful with what you've given us when you've given it to us.

And we know that the promise is that you will empower us to do that by your Holy Spirit. So with hearts full of great hope and thanksgiving, we say, amen.

Amen. Let me record my immovable conviction that this is the noblest service in which any human being can spend or be spent.

And that if God gave me back my life to be lived over again, I would, without one quiver of hesitation, lay it on the altar to Christ, that he might use it as before in similar ministries of love, especially amongst those who have never yet heard the name.

Of Jesus. At 10 of those, we want to serve the local church by equipping your church family with great resources that are gonna point them to Jesus.

So we'll come and set up a pop -up bookstore in your church. There's no charge. We'll come for your

Sunday services. Maybe you've got a weekend retreat or a conference. We would love to come and then make recommendations.

This is one I've read three times now. It's called Incomparable by Andrew Wilson. And he goes through 60 characteristics of God.

It just wonderfully takes our eyes off the world, off ourselves, and puts them on our savior.

Now we've got lots of things for families and kids. For parents, I want to recommend this series.

This one is Raising Kids in a Screen -Saturated World. Our passion is to get good books that hold to the

Bible, read by as many people as possible. We handpick our bookstore. It's curated so we know everything we sell will point to the

Lord Jesus. Everything's discounted. And as we make recommendations, we're seeking to serve your church family so that they may be excited and equipped to read good books.