Yesterday was a glorious day before the Lord. Not only was it the Lord's day; but in the morning service, I was installed as the 10th pastor of First Christian Reformed Church of Seattle. It was a humbling and emotional time for me. I am thankful for the Lord's leading even as we as a family continue to deal with the feelings of loss from moving. May the Lord be glorified in my life and in this ministry!
Today I wish to share a thoughtful passage written by John Piper in a new book he co-wrote with D.A. Carson called, The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor. Piper writes,
Now, how does this relate to the pastor as scholar? On the one hand, its first effect is to protect the church from the dangers of a scholarly bent. Many pastors, especially those who love the glorious vision of God's being and beauty and plan of salvation, have a scholarly bent that threatens to over-intellectualize the Christian faith, which means they turn it mainly into a system to be thought about rather than a way of life to be felt and lived. Of course, it is a system as well as a life. But the danger is that the whole thing can be made to feel academic rather than heart-wrenchingly real. That's what Christian hedonism helps us to avoid.
Where the faith is over-intellectualized, many ordinary, authentic saints can smell the error. Rightly, they start drifting away, but sadly, often into the worst extremes of emotionalism. But if Christian hedonism is alive- I have found that many starving saints make their way home to a place where head and heart are more in balance, and the reality and power of the Holy Spirit are craved and cherished.
Piper, The Pastor as Scholar, 49.
As I was traveling across the country, I received an e-mail from someone who knew me tangentially as a scholar working in a seminary. This man would listen to the end of some of my classes. He never took a class, but he said he always found what I had to say interesting and thought-provoking. He often would conclude, "I should check this out." Unfortunately, he shared that he often did not go further in his enquiries!
What I found interesting about the e-mail was he shared that he thought I was some sort of Calvinist. He shared that he hated Calvin, Calvinism, and anything to do with this system of thought. He had been raised in a Reformed Baptist church and now he had no use for anything to do with Calvinism. He thought we would have some interesting debates.
Interesting debates, indeed. I am sure the discussion would have been rich and rather sharp at points. Yet, I wonder how could this rather anti-intellectual Christian man come to hate Calvin, Calvinism, and the entire system of thought? In place of a biblical system of thought that is primarily God-focused and grace-centered, he had embraced a strange emotionalism that passed as authentic spirituality.
My guess is that he rejected a balanced, biblical, and heart-transforming vision of Christian spirituality for emotionalism and Christian-lite platitudes because someone shared the glorious vision of God's being, beauty, and plan of salvation as nothing more than a system of thought. I know for years I was totally turned off to authentic spirituality because I encountered such an arrogant, heart-less presentation of biblical truth!
True spirituality, what some people would label Reformed/Calvinism as a form of thought, is joy producing and heart changing. It is also logical and according to reality. The key is that it should be both! Why would we ever wish to divorce joy from logic or heart-change/true transformation from truth grounded in creation? To be a believer, one does not need to check either their emotions or their brains at the door! Bring both because as Piper has written about for years, God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.
All of us have met people who have drifted to an extreme of being either too intellectual or too emotional. These folks do not represent the truth in its entirety! Keep looking for and striving for a faith that is both intellectually deep and emotionally transformative. This is the heart of true spirituality. It is the heart of the gospel. It is also the absolute heart of true and authentic Reformed/Calvinistic spirituality.
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