The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor: Reflections on Life and Ministry [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Piper, John & Carson, D.A. 2011. The Pastor as Scholar & The Scholar as Pastor: Reflections on Life and Ministry. Crossway: Wheaton, IL

I wish to thank Crossway for sending me this review copy. I also want to thank the editors Owen Strachan and David Mathis for bringing these wonderful lectures to print for all to consume via print and to mark up (like I did). The lectures were great via video and I would recommend that folks both read the book and check out the lectures.

The book is essentially a call for the unification of the mind and heart in pastoral ministry and academic training of future pastors. Piper and Carson mention how deadly the "guild" can become if one seeks to please the academic world. They also note the danger of anemic theology and right thinking from the pulpit. They both posses a love for the church and view their ministries as complementing each other in the worthy task of edifying the saints in Biblical truth. Here are some of the great quotes I marked in my review:

Never again did I play fast and loose with my attachment to the local church. To cut yourself off from a local church with a sense of self-sufficiency is, in the long run, suicidal (Piper 37).

Piper was making mention of his delay in finding a local church during his academic studies and the great edification Lake Avenue Congregational church was for him once he joined and ministered there.

Piper summarizes his personal vision for pastoral ministry as follows,

So for thirty years I have tried, with much imperfection and manifold failures, to live up to my own message, to penetrate the heart and awaken the kind of affections for God that would accord with his glory, and create lives that would make him look great. This has been based on the conviction that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him (Piper 48).

Piper adds,

Right thinking about God exists to serve right feelings for God. Logic exists for the sake of love. Reasoning exists for the sake of rejoicing. Doctrine exists for the sake of delight. Reflection about God exists for the sake of affection for God. The head is meant to serve the heart (Piper 50).

Piper had many other noteworthy things to say, but this is just a sampling of the things that I personally found encouraging. Moving on to Carson's essay, here are some great quotes:

So to love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength includes a high emphasis on what and how we think; the other two words - soul and strength - bespeak intensity, total engagement. Transparently, this means that using our minds in a lazy, slapdash, or arrogant was is not only pathetic, but it verges on the blasphemous....Whether you are tackling the exegesis of Psalm 110 or examining the tail feathers of a pleated woodpecker, you are to offer the work to God and see such intellectual endeavor, such scholarship, as part and parcel of worship (Carson 75).

Here is another Carson quote about the necessity of loving the church,

Love the church because Jesus loves it. let your students know you love the church; make sure that the fellow members of your church are deeply aware that you love the church, that you love them....such love for the church must find outlets in your prayer life, your priorities, your willingness to participate...(Carson 103).

I give this book 5/5 stars and would even boldly assert that every pastor must read this book.

Recently, I had a chance to read this work and found it to be not only engaging, but insightful and warm. The entire tone of this work actually is one of great warmth as both men open up their hearts and the things they have learned after many years of serving Christ. It is not a long book and it does not deviate into the tedious or the irrelevant. It is a straight and simple treatise that has a great deal of meaning for anyone who is working in the ministry in any capacity.

John Piper is the first of the two men to write his reflections. I cannot say that I have been a great fan of Dr. Piper in the past and I don't think that I will be one in the future. It is not so much that his works are bad but rather that he has never appealed to me. However, I gained a greater love and respect for the man and his ministry after reading this work. Dr. Piper is exemplary in his level of passion and commitment. The pathos that is evident in the writing brings his inner life into view. He preaches and teaches from a very warm heart. He is a scholar and a brilliant one at that. Yet he is also a very emotional man with deep feelings and sentiments. His love of poetry and literature balance out his quest for truth and exactness. He talks about some of the things and people who influenced him along the way. I believe that Dr. Piper shows us that a Pastor must have a strong intellectual life that is matched by his love and devotion to the cause of Christ. He illustrates rather nicely the importance of having a heart of love and a desire to warm the hearts of the hearer. For all his accomplishments he is an example of humility in many ways. This is a man who takes his doctoral diploma, looks at it once and stuffs it in a drawer. He is not pretentious or arrogant. To say it in short one can say that John Piper loves God and other people. His devotional life is the strength that makes him such a good pastor. His intellectual life does not take a backseat but it takes a secondary seat.

D.A. Carson was honestly my favorite of the two writers. D.A. is someone that I have developed a love and respect for over the last year or so. His commentary on the Gospel of John is the definitive volume that is must for any one who loves and teaches scripture. He is a very unique man and he spoke to me in a different way than Dr. Piper. Dr. Carson has an interest in everything. He has an active mind that probes so many different fronts. This quest to know does not devolve into a dead exercise. Just like John Piper, Dr. Carson has a strong devotional life that is full of love for God and his people. He writes as someone who is working with people differently than that of a Pastor. He is a Scholar with a Pastor's heart. He gives a list of 12 things which he feels are important to anyone who may be acting in a similar role as himself. The message that I took away from his section is simply that it is important to be intellectually engaged in ministry while not letting that devolve into something which has no value for others. It is important to stay active in other kinds of ministry than study. The purpose of study is lead people to the truths about the Gospel.

Again, this work is short and takes maybe a couple of hours at the most to go through. It is certainly worth having in your library. Both of these men as great example of genuine humility. Both have colossal accomplishments that could have caused their writing to be replete with narcissism, self-congratulation, and boasting. The fact is that the aforementioned qualities cannot be found in these pages. You could not find two men who are more self-deprecating and focused on others than these two. Humility and genuine honesty are the two qualities that make this book so rich and meaningful. They are both examples of Jesus and the thoughts expressed oftentimes reminds one of those expressed by the Apostle Paul. This is a worthy read!

The main idea behind this book is that a person can be a pastor and a scholar, not merely one or the other (Piper and Carson 2011, 13). The first chapter represents Piper's contribution to the book. The first half of the chapter describes his pilgrimage to the pastorate, and the second half of the chapter grapples with how scholarship relates to the theme of his ministry, which is that "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him" (Piper and Carson 2011, 21).

In 1966, Piper was asked to pray in summer school chapel. He was terrified. He said, "God, if you get me through this without my choking and becoming paralyzed, I will never again say no to a speaking opportunity out of fear" (Piper and Carson 2011, 34), and he has kept his vow ever since. One day, he listened to Harold Ockenga preach in chapel over the radio while lying sick at the campus health center. God created in Piper's heart a desire to study and understand and teach the Word, and that passion has never died (Piper and Carson 2011, 34).

He went to Fuller Seminary and learned that the task of a true scholar is to observe his subject matter thoroughly and accurately, to understand it, and to evaluate it (Piper and Carson 2011), 37). He did his doctoral studies in Munich and taught New Testament for six happy years. But all the while, he was listening to good preaching on Sunday mornings and thinking to himself, "Lord, I would love to do that." And if he heard a bad sermon, he would think "Oh, Lord, we've got to do better than that" (Piper and Carson 2011, 42-44).

He was called to Bethlehem Baptist Church in 1980 and has been there ever since. He concludes that "[r]ight thinking about God exists to serve right feelings for God. Logic exists for the sake of love. Reflection about God exists for the sake of affection for God" (Piper and Carson 2011, 48-50). We should use our minds to know and enjoy God so that we may make Him known to others (Piper and Carson 2011, 68).

Carson's original intention was to be a scientist and pursue a PhD in organic synthesis. He enjoyed working at the chemistry lab in Ottawa, Canada. But at the same time, he was helping a young minister with his Sunday school where he was trying to plant a church. The challenges of that ministry became more exciting to him than the chemistry (Piper and Carson 2011, 77-78). He heard a missionary named Richard Wilkerson speak on Ezek 22:30, which says, "I looked for someone among them who will build up the wall and stand before in the gap on behalf of the land, but I found no one." It hit Carson hard, and he entered the ministry, set on becoming a church planter (Piper and Carson 2011, 78).

But then Carson was asked to fill in from time to time at a small Baptist college, and he realized he had a knack for teaching. He got his PhD in New Testament at Cambridge, and a job opened up at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. There have been numerous times through the years he was tempted to leave Trinity and go into the pastorate, but Carl Henry and Kenneth Kantzer told him that if he did this, he would be disobeying God (Piper and Carson 2011, 78-80).

Carson concludes with some lessons for the scholar as pastor: Get outside and minister to people whenever you can, beware of the seduction of applause, fight with every fiber of your being the bifurcation between academic Bible study and devotional Bible study, never forget the people for whom Christ died, and don't push people to do what they are not gifted to do (Piper and Carson 2011, 82-95). He also says pray, love the church, don't be a lone ranger scholar (work with others), and take your work, not yourself, seriously (Piper and Carson 2011, 96-105).

We see God's providence, guidance, and sovereignty at work in the lives of Piper and Carson. Their stories would fit in a sermon about God's will or God's providence. The advice to pastors and scholars will be apt in a message addressed to church leaders. This was a very helpful book.