planting oaks for our grandchildren
When I was in seminary, John Piper’s exhortation to pastors to pick one theologian to study the rest of your life was pretty popular. A friend of mine had one of John Owen’s volumes on his desk, and I picked it up. I’m not sure if it was the size of the set (then 16 volumes plus his 7-volume commentary on Hebrews) or the Spurgeon blurb at the back to the effect of ‘mastering Owen makes one a profound theologian’, but I chose to study John Owen. He had four volumes dedicated to the church, and I wanted to study church history. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Hold my beer…
I paid far too much for that first 16 vol set (and later for the Hebrews commentary). Hey, I was new to the Reformed world and studying the Puritans. But opening the box from Banner of Truth autumn 2010, I felt I was lifting the lid on a treasure chest. The first book I opened was volume 13, dealing with some of Owen’s early pastoral theology and a few treatments on the topic of schism. I remember reading it at my parents’ house when my wife and I went over for lunch one November afternoon (yeah, I was the kind of guy who read Owen for fun), and this author from the mid-1600s was writing about how and when to leave your church, the very issue my parents were dealing with that that time.
Even expensive, it was money well spent. I bought and read everything I could find on Owen. I did two advanced degrees on his congregational theology and his theology of pastoral ministry. Here was this pastor, worlds apart from my own life and ministry context, and his writings–centuries after his own death–were speaking directly to my needs today. The deeper I went the more riches I found. At one time, I could say I read everything that was available in English from John Owen, and I’d even read several unpublished manuscripts of sermons locked away in an obscure London archive. Then Crossway started releasing a completely new series of Owen’s Collected Works and took that claim away from me (thanks guys!).
A couple years after finding Owen, I heard a megachurch planter comment something to the effect of, ‘Calvin was a nice guy for a murderer’. Out of sheer obstinance and outright irritation, I decided to read the Institutes. Why not? I’d purchased a set of his commentaries several years before, and the Institutes came with it free. Again, I was blown away. The depth of theology, the sheer relatability, the contextual transcendence of these older works! How had I not been urged to read them before? And I began to feel my theological and pastoral poverty.
It wasn’t just in Owen or Calvin, but the wealth in Gregory, and Baxter, and Augustine, and Tertullian (more on what not to do there), Luther, Sibbes, Anselm, Turretin, Aquinas, Bavinck, Mastricht, Perkins, Brakel, the list just kept going on. These guys had something to offer me and my pastoral philosophy today. And the questions I had about life and ministry I had because my church circle had abandoned historic Christianity in favor of something new and flavour-of-the-monthy. Something ephemeral rather than the weightiness of orthodox Christianity.
I bought and read as much from the historic church as I could find and afford, filling my shelves (and testing my wife’s patience) with priceless treasures, each work shining in the light with a particular glint and hue. I discovered languages and grammar and concepts and ideology–all hiding in plain sight–that I never knew existed. Ideas that changed my ministry now. Ideas that brought me to my knees in repentance. Ideas that fed my sheep. Ideas that grew my marriage. Ideas my heart longed to know but didn’t know where to find.
Then, because of a Pastor’s Academy Ethics Reading Group (New Geneva Academy needs something similar!) only a year or so ago, I came across Henry Bullinger and his Decades. His sermons on the ten commandments were fantastic. Thus this series was born.
So what have I learned from Bullinger’s 50 sermons?
1. Pastors need to study and write. Think ourselves clear. Communicate well. Study deeply. And leave a legacy, if not for the great-grandchildren of our churches, then at least for our current church members. Give them something to cling to as they deal with life in this complicated world. So few of us will be an Owen or a Gregory or a Calvin or a Bullinger; that’s not the point. But we can be a shepherd to our own sheep? And where else are they going to find the answers God’s word offers them if not through our care? Part of shepherding the flock among us is learning how to find the answers to the questions they have not just the questions we want to answer.
2. This means pastors need to work hard. I think we all think we work hard. Nobody thinks, ‘Hey, I’m just lazy,’ not really. But reading The Decades, how much time would this series of sermons have taken to write? How many late candle-lit nights? Look at works like the Institutes and its many revisions, or works like Baxter’s Directory, and all written without our modern conveniences. I think Reformed pastors historically had a much higher degree of devotion to pastoral care than we have today.
3. Resist fads. Build something that will last. Know when to hold em and when to fold em. Which fads require study and which require patiently ignoring. There’s plenty Bullinger doesn’t deal with in his sermons, topics and categories he could have addressed but that he chose not to because there were bigger needs. Sorting through which issues require our study and which require us to ignore is a discipline I’m so lacking in, but the sheep need it. Otherwise the diet we feed them will be unbalanced.
4. We need deeper theological and ethical categories. We’re so far behind. Can we please feel the poverty of the church of our own day? Can we recognize how much we have forgotten, how much time we have wasted? Can we learn to discern between good medicine in poison, between that which will grow us and that which will either kill us or distract us from what will grow us? Bullinger’s sermons are good medicine for a flighty age. Hearty food for a church addicted to thin soup.
5. See God’s grace at work in our midst today. Do we actually believe in grace, or do we just pay lip service to it? Bullinger’s concept of grace needed a bit of filling out, but the later Reformed tradition helped provide something of what he lacked. Can we see God’s Spirit at work in our own lives, in our own churches, in the lives of our fellow church members? If not, maybe the problem isn’t them; maybe it’s us.
6. See our own sin and cling to Christ’s grace. Reformed Christianity can respond to squishy Reformedish-Evangelicalism’s theological flippancy with a demoralizing focus on depravity. But surely if the truth of our sin needs to be proclaimed, it needs to be proclaimed along the even greater truth of our Savior’s grace. Amidst our recovery of deep theological categories, we must not lose a near-obsessive emphasis on redemption. Is this not the whole theme of scripture? Is this not why the saints shout their Savior’s praises in Revelation 5? ‘And they sang a new song: “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth.”’ May this be our own song as well.
7. Christ is still building his church, however bad of a state we think the church is in today. Can we please believe and even feel that Christ will succeed in our day, with or without us? That will relieve us, as Luther said to Melanchthon, of the burden of feeling we are ruling the world. God is, and he’s doing it according to his own ineffable wisdom. Praise his name for that! We can be busy about the responsibilities he’s given us today rather than tormenting ourselves with what we have no power to fix. Works like Bullinger’s Decades have no purpose if they’re not written in the hope–the sure and certain hope–that Christ will prevail. That can keep our own pessimistic spirits afloat in stormy seas.
In many ways, Bullinger taught me the same thing as every other faithful pastor. Look to the Savior, know yourself, feed the flock, and trust in God the Father to provide the increase. There’s something refreshingly boring about that.
Love my Lord, love my family, and love my sheep. Rinse and repeat. Till my Savior returns. So back to it.
Next…who knows? Maybe pastoral reflections on Richard Baxter’s Christian Directory or Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Ethics, but not for some time yet…
