Steller: I want to welcome you to the panel discussion. It’s the final thrust that we have at the conference, but it’s a very important time because God has been feeding us very profoundly through the unique instruments of each of these men. I hope that questions have been percolating in your mind. We just want this time now to be a totally free-for-all, of asking any questions to any of these men. They have the right to decline, of course, but I just urge you to ask them. If you could, step to the microphone, and then we won’t need to repeat the questions.

Questioner: When Dr. Wells was speaking about the problem of our therapeutic approach in the modern age and seemed to very clearly articulate that we have a problem with focusing on the self and the freedom is to get ourselves off of ourselves in that preoccupation and turn away. Yet at the same time, Dr. Piper, in your look at Augustine and in your writings, you mention the tension that exists in the Christian life between us pursuing God in a self-gratifying way. I wondered if you might share how we can seek God in the self, yet seek not to be self-centered. Is that understandable?

Piper: Yeah, it’s understandable. Your last little phrase was the answer. To seek God and to be self-centered are opposites. Now, I do put a spin on it that is vulnerable to misunderstanding, and it’s a risk I take in order to waken people out of the absolute deadness of their bondage to lesser joys than God. The spin I put on it is that I say, “Seek joy in God.” A good Reformed person would just say seek God. I think that’s a necessary spin because “seek God” just doesn’t cut it, it doesn’t mean anything. Where is he? What does that mean? Whenever we ate supper together, David Wells said the key to common ground is not culture but creation. Boy, did that ring true to me.

That means don’t look for trends, jump on them, and then try to steer the trend back to Jesus, but rather look for the deeper God-created realities. The key sentence I left out of Augustine and never mentioned it because everybody knows it is: “Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until we find our rest in thee.” The created hole in the human being is a God-shaped hole. The world doesn’t know it’s God-shaped. They think it’s TV-shaped and money-shaped and sex-shaped and power-shaped, and they’re laboring to get these shapes into this hole. They don’t fit. They’re mauling themselves in the process. I’m on a crusade to crawl into that hole with my message and just hack away at the misshapen conceptions people have used to define this hole that’s made for God. I believe that if people will hear me out it is a radical attack on self-centered life and on the health, wealth, and prosperity gospel. Not everybody will hear me out, and therefore they write crazy things about what I say. But he wouldn’t be here if I didn’t like what he said.

David Wells: I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t like what you said, John.

Questioner: Dr. Piper, I wonder if you could address a couple of things regarding doing these biographical sermons in our churches. What do you do differently in your presentation when you present them to the church here, which I think you’ve said you do on occasion? And then also just address the process. When do you start reading? How do you choose what to read out of someone who’s written a lot? And how do you deal with the tension of wanting to be a learner?

Piper: I don’t take an hour and 15 minutes when I talk to the church, that’s one difference. I’ve only done one in the church. I did William Cooper in the church because we don’t have an evening service anymore on Sunday, we do it on Wednesday. So I would do it just the same way I did it with you guys, only try to maybe do it in two weeks instead of one week. As far as the process goes, I ask my assistant Rick and anybody else, “What are the best biographies?” I can’t read but one or two. I have to read good ones. They have to be reliable, they have to have footnotes, and they have to be balanced. They can’t be hagiographical accolades with no serious criticism.

So he pointed me to Peter Brown and said, “That’s a classic now.” I stumbled on this Augustine biography that has all these neat anecdotes in it. And then I knew I had to read Confessions, and then I knew I had no time to read The City of God, so the rest of my reading was all topically oriented. I just searched for particulars because I knew my topic. I gave the topic after reading Confessions. I read Confessions early. I said, “I got to pick a topic because they’re all constantly on me for a title.” So I gave them the title, and then that shaped the rest of my reading. I was tracking down whether he said these sorts of things elsewhere.

Here is reality: Augustine is impossible to comprehend. Calvin is impossible. Luther is impossible. Edwards is impossible for any of you to get a handle on. They are Alps and you walk in the Alps. You don’t put the Alps in you, you put yourself in the Alps. So relax and enjoy it. Plan next fall or this summer that you’re going to do a series of biographies for your church, Sunday evening or Wednesday. Pick one solid biography and say, “That’s all I’m going to read.” Believe me, you can get an hour’s worth for anybody out of a biography. The danger is that you want to say too much. I came down the stairs the other day from Noël and passed my wife on the steps and I said, “I’m slaughtering Augustine,” meaning I have 70 single-spaced pages of notes and I’m hacking away at them mercilessly. I have to stop talking so much.

Questioner: The thing that I wrestle with as a pastor of a small church is always this tension between pandering to what is true of our age and wrestling with compromising, obscuring the gospel, missing what the true mission of the church is and on the other hand not wanting to be stilted or frozen or ineffective or small because of choices that I make. It seems to me that success is definitely at the level of pandering to modernism. I’m not saying that everyone that’s successful is pandering, but I’m wondering if you can help us pastors wrestle with the issue of how do you recognize when we’re pandering.

Wells: I wish I was more puzzled by the problem. Your question, when do you know whether or not you’re pandering, I take it you’re really asking, “How much and to what extent can you capitalize upon the practices, habits, assumptions, and worldviews of the people in the pew? How much can you take over in order to make the gospel message more successful?” I’d say it’s not a problem, you mustn’t do it. Your objective, and here is where you need skill, is to bring people in the pews into the worldview of the Bible. That is very simple to say but it’s harder to do because of some of the things that you have in mind. There will be people sitting in the pews expecting you to say certain things. They’ve got an agenda on their mind and they’re wondering why on earth you aren’t addressing it. They think, “When are you going to get around to addressing anxiety? This is what’s most important to me.”

But this is a slow process. People need to be translated from the kingdom of darkness in their heads into the kingdom of God’s dear Son through Scripture. It’s through truth. In one sense we are redeemed in Christ, and yet we are not fully redeemed until we are in heaven. That’s what you’re involved in, it’s a process of redeeming the way people look at themselves and their world and bringing them skillfully, maybe even charmingly, into the world of Scripture. So it’s easy to describe, but I know it’s harder to do. It’s harder to do because those people in the pews have their own agendas and they want you to do certain things. So over a process of time what you’re going to be working at is changing those internal agendas so that they begin to want something different. Allistair, you know about these things.

Allistair Begg: Actually, the question that you just asked was the question that I asked David last evening at suppertime.

Wells: You didn’t get a better answer last night either.

Begg: Actually, I didn’t get an answer last night either. That was because I talked too long and didn’t give you a chance to answer, which is a problem. I don’t know that I have anything to add except to say that I wrestle with that on a consistent basis myself. I have been greatly helped in the last week by, first of all, being in the company of Don Carson for a week in London and having the chance to ride in taxis with him and talk about this whole idea of preaching to the postmodern mind. His big thing is about the need for the meta narrative and establishing the big picture, which is what David is saying. We’ve got to bring people into a worldview to tell them that there’s the good, the bad, the new, and the perfect, and that the whole world can be understood in that framework.

It seems to me that what I was referring to briefly yesterday, this idea of fussing the two worlds of the cultural horizon and theological principles is the great skill package, which I think Paul does masterfully in Acts 17. I mean, he doesn’t walk in and say, “Jesus Christ is resurrected from the dead, and I think you ought to think about that for five minutes.” He walks in and he says, “I’ve been walking around here for a day and a half. You guys are really into religion, aren’t you?” People are going, “Yeah, I suppose so.” He says, “I mean, I never saw so many idols in my life. There are some really bizarre ones, aren’t there?” They say, “Yeah, there are.” He says, “I’ll tell you what I like best, that one you got to the unknown God.” They say, “Yeah, we put that up there just in case we miss him.” Paul said, “You did miss him. In fact, if you have a minute, I’d like to tell you about it.”

If you do that provided you’ve got somewhere to go theologically next, it’s legitimate. If you do that and then go to “US Airways Magazine” with seven principles on how to relieve stress, then you ought to jump out of a plane at 32,000 feet without a parachute. So for me, again, this whole idea of I know exactly that I’m starting from the Scriptures, but to say that I start from the Scriptures does not necessarily mean that I say, “In the Book of Malachi and in chapter one verse nine . . .” I may start and say, “Sting’s song is such and such and such and such,” depending on who I’m talking to. I find that the circles I move in, the guys are afraid to do that because they think it’s a capitulation, but it’s not at all.

So we need a wee bit of freedom in relation to that, I think, provided at our core we know that we’re beginning with God and his glory rather than with man and his need. I don’t mind talking about Camus’s God-shaped hole, or whoever came up with that one in the first place. Probably it was John. But I mean I’m a little bit wary of starting with, “I know you all have holes in your lives and I’ve got something to plug your hole for you,” because that can so easily become the 1960s thing — “I got the right one baby uh huh. I have Jesus Christ and he can add to the sum of your total happiness.” Well, big deal, so can transcendental meditation. I think that what we have to do is not simply scratch people where they itch, but we’ve got to bring the Word of God to bear upon their lives so that it makes them itchy. And then once they get itchy and start to scratch, then we can tell them why they’re scratching.

Questioner: How do you see the different evangelical mission organizations and missionaries working together to spread a passion for the supremacy of God around the world? Are we working together, the different organizations? And how are we doing in comparison with the cults that are out there spreading their false gospel?

George Verwer: Well, there’s over 26,000 denominations in the world, and that’s throughout the whole globe. Some people say there’s greater unity. I don’t actually see that myself. I think it’s because of various kinds of extremism. Whether we’re talking about the whole church or just those true believers is another complexity in talking about these things. But on a global scale I personally see an increase of disunity, not unity, but there are tremendous pockets of unity.

My greatest burden is that there might be unity just in that one local fellowship so that they can at least function in their own city. There’s big pressure on us in missions to have partnership, and we pioneered one of those among Afghans. Partnership on the mission field means people from different missions come and work together as one team, and they don’t emphasize their mission society, which is good. But we’re finding it hard to find the men or women who can lead those kinds of partnerships.

We have another one in Tajikistan, the flag country, but we’ve had some tension there because people come from different missions with different agendas. Different missionaries have different agendas. So working together in partnership, though we’re still doing that and there’s an increase of that, we’re talking about evangelical people, biblical people from evangelical societies or fellowships. But we must not presume that it’s easy. You need a higher level of leadership with greater communication skills.

Now, what I think is happening is that there is a grace awakening in missions. In general, missionaries have a pretty good attitude towards one toward another and are praying together and fellowshipping together often more than I find in home cities. It just blows my mind to find cities or towns in America where the ministers who claim to love Jesus and believe his Bible are not praying together and they don’t get together even once in a blue moon. So there is that increased unity among missionaries and workers. Out of that comes some synergy. Southern Baptists had made a tremendous confession about their past. We will do it on our own mentality. Southern Baptists are pacesetters right now and some fields are working more together.

I would just add to that, I think the key in this is esteeming others better than yourself. But in certain situations I believe if there’s a good team, they’re from the same mission, they ought to get on with it, get the churches planted, get the people reached, go for it, and not get too bogged down in trying to have some kind of unity that in the end they’re not going to get it anyway. But there would be people that wouldn’t be too happy about that statement.

Questioner: I wonder, John, if you’d like to offer any cautions about Augustine? Of course, the Alps are beautiful and breathtaking, but not without their dangers. I remember reading extensively in a couple of the Library of Christian Classics volumes, and I learned to flip ahead very quickly when he began allegorizing the Old Testament or when he talked about marriage and sex. In that second instance, he seemed to be advocating the asceticism that Paul warns against in 1 Timothy 4.

Piper: The one that I stumbled over most is his relentless appeal to baptismal regeneration, which I cannot understand. I just don’t understand it, in the context of Confessions *even, let alone what he writes at the end of his life in *To Simplicianus. Yet he talks endlessly about being reborn through the waters of baptism. That happened six months after the garden experience. He was baptized on Easter of 387.

I also don’t know what his own view of the Lord’s Supper was. That didn’t fall within my reading, but I would guess that’s why Warfield said that the Reformation was the triumph of Augustine’s vision of grace over his vision of the church — the church meaning a cluster of ideas that flowed into the Roman Catholic tradition. I would caution you to read him very carefully and make those distinctions. Read that essay in Warfield’s book called Calvin and Augustine. That’s the name of the book. I don’t know what he said about sex in marriage, but as I read Confessions and tried to answer that question yesterday, it seemed to me that he was walking on the precipice of disobedience to that verse in 1 Timothy 4 where the person admonishes not to marry or eat certain foods and Paul rebukes that person pretty severely and says that we are to receive these things as created if we receive them with the word and thanksgiving. So a warning is well-taken.

Wells: In defense of Augustine, although I get terribly uneasy with this talk about baptismal regeneration, his argument was that God’s electing decree is worked out through the means of the baptismal regeneration. So that’s how he was actually able to put together a view of the church which he had with the kind of soteriology which was later on to surface in all of its sort of fire in Luther and the Reformers. But I agree with you, it’s a very strange thing. And those, on the other hand today, who believe in baptismal regeneration really never link it up with the electing decree of God. I mean, that would be anathema to them.

Piper: Do you know whether he thought he was born again in the garden? In other words, is regeneration so tied to the ex opere operato of the water that he would not have looked back upon that critical moment as being born again?

Wells: No, I think he really is a forerunner of evangelical Lutherans who hold to both, both baptismal regeneration and also believe that regeneration takes place outside of the waters. I scratch my head at them. I just don’t understand it.

On the matter of sex and marriage, would you maybe think that this would be a place where perhaps his Platonism intruded a little bit unhelpfully? The great thing about that and the reason that he was able to marry it to his Christian faith I think very successfully — and over time I think it was subjugated to his faith — is that in Platonism you get this overwhelming concern for what is unseen and invisible, which is what we have in Christian faith too. But the problem with Platonism is that it is often carried out at the expense of the reality and the significance of what’s created. I think that’s the point at which when he came to talk about sex, he emphasized the good thing of desiring God, but the path or the means that he got there maybe wasn’t so good in this particular instance.

Questioner: In light of the context that we live in, in a culture that promotes the joy of getting stuff and having things, how do you find joy in God in possessions and money, particularly when it comes to retirement and savings and those sorts of things?

Piper: First, it’s by delighting in him so much that you don’t have much savings or much retirement, and thus you make giving an evidence of your superior allegiance to him. My God will supply all your needs in Christ Jesus. God is able to supply you with every blessing in abundance so that you may have enough of everything and may do every good work. Secondly, insofar as you have, you thank him for having, and he gets thanks, and you acknowledge that he gives to all men life and breath and everything and you are utterly and totally dependent on him for every heartbeat and every breath you take and every dollar you earn. Deuteronomy says, “It was God who gave you the power to get this wealth. Be careful” (Deuteronomy 8:18–20). Thirdly, by spending it either now or in retirement on values that will reflect his character, which probably doesn’t mean move to Phoenix but rather join OM at age 75 and do something that probably only old gray-haired people among Muslims can do. Do you have an illustration about that?

Verwer: Well, certainly without these older people who are captains and chief engineers, our two ships would not have been able to continue these 28 years. But there are other situations as well, and there’s a new movement that’s having a conference soon called “Finishers.” The whole thrust of Finishers is people taking early retirement and getting involved in missions.

Questioner: The biggest tension I think for me personally and biblically that I’ve wrestled through is just the radical call to missions and the responsibilities of the family. Even this morning as you were challenging us to send the chairman of our elder board overseas, my soul started to thrill. I thought, “He’d be a great missionary.” And then I thought, “He has six children, nine and under.” Would you want him to go to Tajikistan with Operation Mobilization? And how would you like to see pastors teach about that whole tension?

Verwer: I think that’s an excellent question. I think I was asking the question, what would happen if suddenly the chairman of your elder board sensed the Holy Spirit was sending him? Later on in the message you’ll remember that I pointed out very clearly that there’s already 30,000 people that have already volunteered to go. How many of those would be the kind of mature people that I was referring to earlier? Only the Lord knows. But I am convinced, of course, that much depends on whether that local church is ready to commend him and send him. And of course if there’s a lot of children and family, it often, humanly speaking, does become impossible because of the educational complexities and the financial mountains that have to be moved.

That’s one of the toughest issues we are facing in missions in the United States, the high cost, especially of American missionaries who are usually always at double the support level than people even from European countries. I don’t have a quick easy answer to that. I believe people should learn to live a simpler lifestyle. I believe that older people, like even that man, could be used, but it takes a lot of time, training, and preparation. A lot depends on their skills. If that man is a doctor, that door may open a lot easier than if he’s teaching water-skiing at the University of Florida. So there’s a lot of variety there.

Piper: Well, practically, Greg Peterson is sitting right back there. He’s the chairman of our missions board and has seven kids, and I hope he goes to Kazakhstan for a couple of years.

Questioner: Dr. Wells, in your first lecture, you talked about the abundance of PhDs. I was wondering what type of evangelical scholars are needed today? I’m not talking about jobs and that sort of job there today, will there be one tomorrow? But if you were looking and interested in evangelical scholarship, what areas of studies would most benefit the church?

Wells: I think the answer is that the kind of scholars we want has to do with quality and outlook rather than a particular field. With respect to the field, I can tell you that New Testament is simply flooded, followed by the Old Testament. If we put an ad out for a New Testament person, we could get 200 applicants. The sad thing is that many of these people have studied at fine universities and paid a lot of money and so forth. But I think the real issue is rather the quality of scholarship. You may know the so-called “new class thesis.” The argument is, amongst some sociologists, that we have emerging in America a new class. It’s the knowledge class. It’s all those people who are involved in the production and dissemination of knowledge and who live off knowledge. I belong to the knowledge class because I make my living off knowledge.

But what a lot of studies have shown and what you yourself have observed is that this knowledge class has a distinct tilt toward the left. If you have been on any college campuses or university campuses, you will see it. With the tilt toward the left not merely politically, but in all areas, you have rampant relativism and so forth. In the academic guild, if you want to make forward progress, you have to find acceptance within that guild. Now, this is a very, very insidious and threatening pressure to young scholars coming up. Not a great many of those graduates from our seminaries who go off to university and get their PhDs would be people you would want to come back and teach in your churches. A great many get washed down the drain. And if they don’t go down intellectually, they go down spiritually. So in answer to your question, what we need today, I believe, is men and women who know God and who have the courage to state that intellectually, even if it costs them in the guild. Nobody could have written the books I have written in a university and survived. It’s just a fact.

Questioner: What is your greatest challenge, bottom line, as a minister of the gospel, as a husband, and as a father?

Begg: Prayerfulness. To quote from the front of an OMF booklet, “If my prayer is meager, it is because I regard it as supplemental and not fundamental.” The challenge of prayer, both privately and publicly, in pastoral ministry is a supreme challenge to me. And along with that then in terms of family that we would live out of the very purity that we’re talking about with our wives and that we would be the father to our children in all that that means. I mean it doesn’t need any exposition. All the things that you’re supposed to do that we would at least try and do. When I travel I ask that people would pray that I would remain true to Christ, true to his word, true to my wife, and true to my kids, and true to my calling. And that would be good.

Wells: I don’t have any wisdom on this beyond what Alistair has said. I think probably we all face the same kind of thing. The difficulty I face is that I have too many things that too many people want me to do, and too many people who expect me to be involved in this and that. All of these possibilities and opportunities are good, but you always have to come back and ask yourself what it is you’re supposed to be doing. The thing that I fear, I think as much as anything else, is becoming launched on a career of being known in this and that place, because that’s the last thing in the world I want to do. What I want to do in the years that remain to me is simply to be a faithful witness to the truth of God to whoever wants to listen to me in this very difficult time. That may seem like a simple thing, but it’s actually very hard, and every day I find myself tempted in one way or another to deviate from that.

Verwer: I think we’re all so different and experience things in different ways, but my burden is that this reality of knowing God may grow greater and greater and impact every single aspect of my life while at the same time maintaining that reality of 1 Corinthians 13. Because without that we don’t have much. So that’s just my bottom line.

Piper: The prayer I go back to most often perhaps for my own self is Ephesians 3, that I might have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the height and depth and length and breadth and to know the love of Christ and be filled with all the fullness of God. That phrase, “Be filled with all the fullness of God,” is the biggest challenge of my life.

Questioner: In chapter six of Confessions, St. Augustine writes about the power of theater in moving people, and he writes exclusively about it in very negative ways. I was wondering what your attitudes were toward his thoughts on the theater. He implies that to be moved emotionally by a melodrama or a tragedy is folly or a waste of time. I wondered what your personal thoughts were on the matter as well as your thoughts on his.

Piper: I don’t remember it very well. He’s probably talking simply about pagan theater and the kinds of emotions that can elicit. For him, anything now as a believer that wasn’t done for God’s sake is going to be worthless. It could be anything. So that would be sweeping secular theater away.

My life exists to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things, including the theater, and therefore my critique is radical of contemporary cinema. It’s godless. All television is godless, and therefore Christians should handle it the way they do everything else that’s godless. You have to go out of the world to escape godlessness. It doesn’t mean you might not see any of it, but you bring to bear on it a radical critique. Walt Disney is as bad as anything else. Everything is godless. God is absent. He’s shrieking absent or he’s maligned. Those are the two possibilities. And therefore Christians should be weeping and enraged and bringing that critique to bear.

On the other hand, I think I’ll just pass on as to the role of drama in the church. I would just say in passing that I think it is not in the category of preaching and it’s not in the category of parables, because it’s make-believe. You’re posturing to be something that you’re really not. There’s a place for that. I doubt that it’s in the place of a sermon. This may be a place to say something radical. Let’s get really radical and fundamentalist here. I don’t think you should go see movies that have any nudity in them. Period. That means “Braveheart” and yes, most recently, “Titanic.” I got an email from a 12-year-old girl in this church last night saying she can’t believe that her friends are going to see “Titanic.” I haven’t seen it. Evidently there’s some nudity in it. And there’s one scene in Braveheart. Now here’s the reason, if you have a daughter, like I’ve got a two-year-old daughter. I’m going to say this to my people soon on Sunday, “Every one of you parents who decides to go to see a movie that has one 30 second bare breast must give an account to your daughter on why she cannot pose for that.” And you can’t do it.

I’m going to say to the little girls in the first service and the little boys, “Ask your parents, if you have a school play and they ask you to take off your clothes for just a minute for the school play — nobody will touch you but everybody would just look at you because it’s part of the play — would they let you do that? Ask them. And if they say no, then ask them why they go to a movie that necessitates somebody’s daughter taking off her clothes with men standing all around photographing her.” Don’t do it.

Questioner: I’d like your thoughts on the supremacy of God in contemporary worship. In the music that’s coming forth and the way it’s being expressed in many of our churches, we all deal with that. So much of it seems to be more oriented towards the pleasure of the people than the pleasure of God. Could you just speak to that and perhaps give us some guidelines and, if you would, be radical again.

Piper: I’m probably not going to be radical the way you want me to be. I’m not sure. Start with the content and make it absolutely non-negotiable. That is, the lyrics of the music should be biblical and probably you’ll want to push towards substance. Now, I do believe with all my heart that one phrase sung several times can be powerful and precious in the right place at the right moment to respond to some more substance elsewhere. If you start with the non-substance and you just assume that the music is going to create the necessary emotions that will bring some kind of content, the emotions can come, but that won’t be it. So content is king, I believe, here in these things.

Then I think the way you combine the historic and the contemporary will be an artistic work, a spiritual/artistic work that very few people have. You need to smell how it works and how it can flow in and out. You need to take the temperature of your own congregation about the ethos of their own musical understanding. Where are they? What’s their culture? I mean the music that comes out of China and Japan is absolutely unusable here. It means nothing to us. So culture is a crucial element in where the people are.

Then think in terms of how to help them move across the spectrum from folk to fine. The best thing I could do, I think, instead of talking here is direct you to the paper that we have available in some filing cabinet somewhere on my reflections on the values of folk and the values of fine. Folk life is ordinary life. Fine life is intellectual life. They both are absolutely precious and crucial. The dangers are opposite and great in both of them. The danger of fine tends to be elitism and intellectualism and snobbery, and the danger of folk tends to be the same at a different kind of level. And so you’ve got to take both though. God is the God of the Mount of Transfiguration and he’s the God of the Mount of Olives. On the Mount of Transfiguration they were on their faces and didn’t know what to say. He was absolutely transcendently, indescribably glorious. There’s music and lyrics that correspond to that.

Then on the Mount of Olives, he was putting his feet up, leaning on his elbow, saying to Peter, “How did it go today?” He said, “Terrible.” He said, “I love you anyway,” and put his arm around him, and there’s this intimate family thing. That’s a different kind of music. That’s not “A Mighty Fortress.” Rather, it’s Mount of Olive music. And then there’s music all over the place in between. God is that way. We are that way. We need to cross those spectrums. And it takes artists. It takes deep souls to know how not to mess up a service with trying to do everything at once.

Questioner: In all that I’ve read or heard when you go to missions conferences and read mission material, there seems to be often a gaping hole in understanding the church’s role and opportunity to minister to the international students here in the United States. That is to say that of the 400,000 international students today in the US, I find so little talk when it comes to missions for churches, pastors, and missionaries about the responsibility needed to do so. What are your thoughts to speak to us as pastors about our responsibilities, our privileges, and getting our people to think globally, perhaps by just walking next door and making friends with those who are international students? Comment if you would, on that kind of ministry and how it may help us to do missions in the big picture.

Verwer: It’s one of the things I actually spoke about last night. As I was speaking about Afghanistan I brought the attention to the people that we have many, many Afghan people living in Washington D.C. and in many other cities. In fact, we have most of the peoples of the 1040 window living in our own nation. And if we don’t respond to that, it is an unbelievable tragedy. It’s something I’ve been speaking on for 40 years. We have about 300 people full-time in the British Isles now, many different ministries. Europe is OM’s heartland. But one of our teams in London works exclusively among Muslims.

Now, that’s different from the student thing. There are groups working among students, there’s a whole organization committed to that and several other smaller organizations. But it’s minute compared to the challenge. Some of those organizations have the strategy of trying to get the church into this, and there have been some real encouragements with God’s people really befriending international students and seeing conversions, but it’s a small percentage of people who are into this and a small percentage of churches.

I believe that is a very important part of the missionary challenge to our nation at this time. We’re talking about a wide range of peoples, from our Mexican friends to others. There are tremendous prejudices against Mexicans in certain places and they’re all over the country. Our Native American friends, we know the complexity of that. But to me, all of these things are part of the challenge. Of course, we have to make sure we just don’t get overwhelmed by it all, intimidated by it all that we don’t do anything. I think with our congregations we need to be careful that we don’t just clobber them with so many challenges that they can’t function. They just turn against themselves and get discouraged. We need to be lifting them up and caring. With some of these people in our churches, we really do have to go quite slow, one step at a time. But we must at least keep going.

Questioner: Dr. Piper, you said specifically in other things I’ve heard you say that life is fundamentally war and that pastoral ministry, as we all know, would be no exception. I was just curious that given the fact that we’re as pastors faced with a multitude of opportunities to put the weight of our hope in something other than everything that God promises to be for us in Jesus, what kinds of particular things have you installed in your life to guard and to defend against that? That’d be one question. And the other one was something that you raised yesterday about the area of communication. You said that it was kind of a weak link in younger pastors’ preaching, not making the next step towards clarity and precision and communication. What kinds of things would you suggest doing to strengthen that?

Piper: Number one, we don’t have a television. Number two, I don’t take any royalties from my books. I’m answering the question, what safeguards do you build in? I’m scared of being wealthy, very scared. Wealthy people have an awfully hard time getting into the kingdom. I’m scared of my own temptation. If I were to watch the Super Bowl, I know that what I’d remember is Budweiser commercials. I know a friend who tapes the whole Super Bowl and erases the ball game so he can watch the commercials. They’re better, they’re genius, they’re hilarious, and they’re all laced with sexual innuendo. But the worst thing about television is not sex, the worst thing about television is banality. Most of my people I think live lives feeling like life is banal. Very few people have capacities for deep joy or high rage or indignation, except when they get stepped on or something. But for great moral vision, television is a killer of life.

So those are two steps, and then you build in radical disciplines of Bible reading. I’m a real stickler for believing that if you want fruit to grow in your garden you put the plow in and you push it rain or shine. You don’t wait until some emotion comes. You know emotion will or will not come if you’re looking at the book. So there are unflinching disciplines in my life. Then you get enough sleep and then you get exercise. You build non-negotiables into your life. Those are just a few. Go ahead, Alistair.

Begg: I do have a television and I do take royalties from my books. However, since I don’t sell any books, it doesn’t really pose a threat to me.

Piper: It will, brother. It will.

Begg: Well, if I sold as many as John, then I can understand his concern. Although I would say that interestingly and along the same line, being on the radio now as we are across the nation, there is no remuneration generated to me through anything that has to do with radio. I have no royalties from tapes or from the sale of books or even my own books or anything like that for the very same reasons. For one, it’s a fearful thing to me, and two, I think it diminishes credibility in being able to come and go amongst people. But everyone must work out their own salvation with fear and trembling in relation to these things.

I love watching sports, so I share the banality and everything, particularly with American television. You’ve got it down to a fine art here. There are some things on public television that actually qualify as drama, that qualify as art, that I think you can view with your grandmother or with your daughters. So I choose to walk the path of discrimination, which leaves you open to the risk of falling over the cliff on one side or the other. I do that.

In terms of clarity, I think what I was talking about was closing the gap between thinking that because I’ve thought it, I can say it. I was suggesting that it is, for me at least, in the process of writing it and reviewing it that I understand whether I have really said it or not or if what I’ve just written on the page I was to read would make any sense at all, or if the sentences are all polling in terms of their length or if I began in the past tense, finished in the future tense, and was in the subjunctive here and all over the place. I’m talking about that kind of precision in relation to the use of language.

Everyone acknowledged the tremendous ability of Churchill in the House of Commons. Only those who have read him carefully recognize that he stayed up half the night and sometimes all of the night, driving his secretary to destruction, as he reworked phrases again and again and again. I’m not suggesting that we emulate that example, but that is what I was making reference to. That’s why when you hear a number of people speak, they’re always correcting themselves. They’re wasting valuable time saying, “No, what I mean by that is . . . No, I didn’t mean that, what I mean is . . . I’m suggesting . . .” Well, work it out and then say it, but don’t include me in the process because life is short.

Questioner: I have been told that God is doing great things outside the United States, but I’ve also been told that often that’s much more charismatic, that maybe more of the miraculous is happening. Is that true? If so, why? Could you speak to that?

Verwer: I already did try to at least touch on that, and I believe it is not true that God is doing more outside of the United States. God is, of course, working all over the world. Some countries are completely left out, but there are other countries like, Korea, Brazil, Argentina, and a number of African countries where recently the church growth has been quite spectacular. Whereas in the United States, our bigger church growth has been more in the past. It’s leveled off a bit now. But the sheer size of the already existing church in the States is so huge that even if things are not so good right at the moment there’s this massive reservoir of committed people of all different degrees. I guess to make it short, I don’t know anywhere in the world where it’s that much better. I think the greater difference is between one church and another church rather than between Argentina and England, or Canada and say Korea.

I think some people, especially in their desire to get us more committed here, say certain things. We have a lot of prophets of doom, a lot of conspiracy people in America. In order to make us feel miserable, which they are hoping will then lead us to be more dedicated or at least put money in the offering, they tell these horrible stories about America and how terrible we all are in comparison to revival in Argentina or church growth in Korea. It’s just not that simple.

Now, internationally it is true that the bigger church growth tends to be in what some people call a charismatic side. That greatly varies from country to country. In Brazil that would be generally true, but there’d be other non-charismatic churches in Brazil that also would be phenomenal. In Korea it would be less true. In Korea, a lot of the big church growth has been among more somewhat staid Presbyterians. But sometimes when they pray, they all pray at once. So non-discerning Americans, which is most of us, think, “Oh, these must all be Pentecostals.” But they’re not, they’re Presbyterians who have that style of praying. I don’t know if that’s of any help.

Questioner: I’m interested in hearing, if you can narrow it down, one or two of the most significant books that have impacted your hearts and lives. If you were stranded on a desert island with a Bible and one or two other books, what would it be? Before you answer, George, I know you take your inflatable globe so you could play on the beach. What would those be?

Verwer: I would take with me the Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s book, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure. Unfortunately the title miscommunicates, but that particular book, which I’ve spent quite a lot of time in, I would classify as one of the overall great spiritual encyclopedias for people that are serious about following Christ and his word.

Wells: Well, I think actually there are two different questions there. To be on a desert island where you want spiritual sustenance is one thing. Those turning points in your life where particular books have been very significant, I think that’s a different question. For what it’s worth, I think the two books that have been probably most important to me because of the particular junctions I was at that time is, would be Edwards’s discussion of the Freedom of the Will. If you let him take you past about page 15, you’ll lose the argument with him. If you are with him up to page 15, then he’s got you, and he got me.

The other book, strangely enough, is Heinrich Heppe’s Reformed Dogmatics, which Carl Barth said reads like a table of logarithms. But it is actually a magnificent volume in which Heppe peruses the Reformed dogmaticians of the 17th and 18th centuries and collects together their statements under all of the loci, like the omniscience of God, for example. Then you have all of the statements. It really is an awesome thing to read it because it is a first-class piece of evidence that the human race is not developing. If you compare Heinrich Heppe and the depth and profundity and clarity that at one point we had in theological matters with what passes today and what pauses off our presses and even among some of our better authors, I think you’ll agree, we’ve taken about seven steps backwards.

Begg: Well, I think that I would definitely take No Place for Truth and probably Future Grace.

Wells: He’s very tactful, this guy.

Begg: May the Lord forgive me for telling lies. If I was on a desert island, one of the books would be a hymn book, without question. When I have the blues — and I have never known anything approaching clinical depression, or if I did, no one told me — I go to my hymn books. I take them in the car and I sing out by myself:

Before the throne of God above I have a strong and perfect plea A great high priest whose name is love Who ever lives and pleads for me

When Satan tempts me to despair And tells me of the guilt within Upward, I look and see him there Who made an end to all my sin

I would definitely have a hymn book. And then, I wouldn’t always have said this, but I think I would’ve Calvin’s Institutes as the other book with me. In terms of books that have impacted me, oh goodness, there are just so many of them. But I have to say that when I read both volumes of Lloyd-Jones, the biography, it stirred me, moved me, challenged me, enthralled me, just made me jump up and down. I read, as Murray suggests that you should, his letters to his wife, which are an appendix at the back of volume two. Murray says, “Read them first before you read the second volume,” which I did. When you have that picture of Lloyd-Jones on the front it is so austere.

I mean, I’ve introduced my pastoral team to Lloyd-Jones and they’re like, “Who is this man? I mean, does he ever smile, for goodness’ sake?” So when I got to the back of the book, and I can tell you’ve all been there by the glaze that’s on your eyes, and he writes, “My dear Bethan, I feel as though I have been gone from you already for a lifetime.” I said, “Hey, I got to read a little bit more about this.” And suddenly it opened another vista into Lloyd-Jones’s life. That book I love. There are so many others. I think just because we’re here as pastors, I think the same thing happened to me early on in the seventies in reading Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor, and particularly when he talks to those men and he says that you would starve to death with the bread of life upon your hands. Isn’t that chilling? Having a possibility of professionalism having squeezed out a heart for God. But if you ask me again in five minutes, there would be different books I’m sure.

Piper: I’ll mention three, not on the desert island side, but on the turning point side. The first would be The Unity of the Bible by Daniel Fuller, the second would be Validity in Interpretation by E. D. Hirsch, and the third would be The End for Which God Created the World by Jonathan Edwards. The latter is a book I owe so much that when I take a leave here in three weeks I intend to write an introduction for it, which will be as long as the book itself, and publish it with Crossway. It will be called God’s Passion for His Glory. The debt I owe Edwards is untold. That book is as close to the center as you can get, I think.

Validity in Interpretation was the most important book on hermeneutics in my life. It has a very simple thesis: The meaning of a text is the intention of the author, and the only possible way of ascribing validity to any interpretation is to make that your goal to find that intention.

Questioner: Dr. Wells, I hear and agree with your judgment of our culture’s gospel of psychotherapy and advertisement. It made me think of Paul in his day and I asked, “What were the prevailing soteriologies that he confronted?” I thought of the selfness and their love for wisdom, the God system, the epicurean pleasure of the body, the mystery religions. I asked how Paul presented the gospel to them, and it seemed that, in a cursory fashion at least, he affirmed sort of a common grace virtue present in these like we see in Acts 17 and then moved to the centrality of Christ in his life, death, and resurrection. My question is, are there common grace virtues existent within the gospel of psychotherapy and advertisement that we can affirm in order to prepare the hearers for the stark intrusion of the historical gospel?

Wells: Well, I’m not sure about your premise about the presence of common grace in Athens. Common grace is a Reformed construct, and what it is really trying to encompass might be distributed partly under the doctrine of creation and partly under the doctrine of providence. Because what it is saying is that the God who created everything has preserved everything and therefore has not yielded the creation to its rebel inhabitants. He’s not going to let us destroy entirely what he’s made. So he puts boundaries, but they are invisible boundaries. Paul in Acts 14 states, for example, that God established boundaries around the nations.

Now, we don’t know where those boundaries are. We don’t know where God has placed the boundary on America. Today it looks as though there is no boundary. It looks as though America is supreme forever. But we know in 1989 at least that the Marxists stubbed their toes on that boundary. That was the end, that was finished. Marxist regimes were over. But you and I don’t know where those boundaries are, and the very nature of common grace is that if it’s there, you can’t interpret it, you can’t get a handle on it. It’s God’s invisible working in the midst of fallen life.

So to go back to your question, of course it is true that when Paul brought the gospel to that ancient world there were all kinds of competitors, alternatives, and ways of looking at life. As Alistair mentioned, he showed imagination and thoughtful skill in knowing how to get those people from where they were to where he was with the gospel. However, I think there is a difference that we need to note. The difference is that the things that I talked about which are born by this culture are giving to those ideas a collective expression, which really wasn’t true of the intellectual opponents that Paul faced.

It is true there were little parties of Sophists and so forth, but what we are thinking about with television and with our commercialized atmosphere is a statement which simply fills the air so that it becomes part of the very air that we breathe every single day. Now, that it seems to me gives it an intensity which a simple intellectual argument doesn’t have. But more than that, when an intellectual argument is advanced, you know exactly what it is, somebody is advocating these ideas. The problem with the atmosphere that we are in now is that much of it operates sub rosa. There’s a subterfuge to it. There’s a concealed nature in the way that it works, and that I think is the great danger.

So in terms of understanding the gospel, it does seem to me that we need at some point to illumine quite clearly what it is that people are thinking about themselves and their world and their self before the gospel can be believed.

Questioner: Dr. Wells, you gave us this very helpful insight from Lord Moulton, the three things that we should preserve, the law, the freedom, and then the middle ground that you say is shrinking away in American culture, the morality beyond legality. As I was thinking about that, the first passage that came to my mind as Paul’s response to that shrinking away of the middle ground was 1 Corinthians 9. Your answer to the question how we get to that morality beyond legality was only by the holiness of God. Paul in that chapter says to the Corinthians who are watching that middle ground shrink away, “Here’s a better way of looking at strength. Going without your rights is stronger than hanging onto your rights, isn’t it?” That’s a fairly straightforward kind of a question, and he appeals to their opportunity to boast and to their reward. So this potentially could be a question about the word “only” in your solution — that only the holiness of God solves this, because the word holiness doesn’t occur in the chapter. But I think you’re going to want to incorporate Paul’s answer into your answer. How does Paul’s appeal to my opportunity to boast and to my reward fit within your description of the holiness of God?

Wells: Well, I think it’s a small part of it. What I was suggesting was that the cultivation of character, of moral character, is what is important. Now, we might want to make a distinction between character among those who know God and the practice of virtues in a society. Now, the latter becomes a much trickier matter because you’re getting into civil religion and so forth. But I would say, if you’re talking about character, it surely includes what you have just mentioned. If you’re talking about Christian, godly character, that includes the ability and the desire to yield rights when it’s important to do so.

It is a much more obscure matter as to how in a society you actually nurture virtues. Now, some people may say, “Well, it doesn’t matter if you do or don’t.” But it surely does matter because it is surely better if less people are murdered, if there is less promiscuity, if there’s less thievery, and if there’s more truth telling. It surely does matter in a culture. In our prayers I believe we should be concerned with that. But how to bring it about in the absence of regeneration is an obscure question.