Buzzing with theology!

Sinclair Ferguson is Professor of Systematic Theology of Westminster Theological Seminary in Dallas, Texas. He came to this year’s Keswick Convention to give five Bible readings on Romans, as well as the keynote Lecture which tackled many of the fashionable challenges to the doctrine of penal substitution.

In an interview at the Convention, he gave some background on his life and current concerns, starting with how he became a Christian.

‘I was brought up in Glasgow in the early 1950s and my parents didn’t go to church at all, but it was still the time when it was the decent part of a Scottish upbringing to go to Sunday school! So I was sent along the road to the Sunday school — and it was only later on that I realised that some of the Sunday school teachers I had were deeply committed Christians. I started reading my Bible at the age of nine, saying the Scripture Union prayer and trying to help old ladies across the street — and I thought that was what being a Christian was.

‘Then we had a new minister, and there was something of a spiritual awakening among people. That was the first time I had been able to make contact between what I had been reading in the Scriptures and real life. It came alive to me. I came under quite a deep conviction of sin, and happened to be reading John’s Gospel at the time and came to Jesus’s word: “You search the Scriptures because in them you think you have eternal life and you won’t come to Me”. It was like a self-description for me. There were people praying for me and one said: “You should go along to a meeting at St. Georges-Tron church”, which was in the centre of Glasgow. That was the night I date my spiritual beginnings from, where I got some sense of assurance that I was a Christian, when I was 14.’

A better pastor

EN: How and why did you become a professor of theology?

SF: I became a professor of Theology quite reluctantly. The atmosphere of a theological college was not one that attracted me. Also, all I ever wanted was to preach the gospel. But as someone said about Calvin, he became a theologian in order to be a better pastor. When I was in my early 20s, I thought, ‘I owe it to whatever my future ministry is going to be to do more study’. I did some teaching and then Westminster found out where I was, who I was, and came looking. It was probably in the early 1980s that they made contact with me and I started teaching in the academic year 1982-1983.

EN: Would you return to pastoring?

SF: It’s always been my preference — in both instances you are engaged in a biblical, formative, pastoral ministry. The differences are that in a theological seminary you have got part of the cake of the church but not the whole so not everything is represented. You are training minds rather than training a long-lasting community of people. There is much less immediacy about a seminary — the students are listening to a dozen lectures a week and putting down foundations — it is a long-term work that lasts just for three years in a very intense way. And so when I went to teach, first of all, it was a few years before I began to see what I was producing and to forge bonds with men in the seminary community that would last.

But now that I have been teaching for Westminster for over 22 years, there are men who have been in the ministry two decades, with whom I have had lasting contact and that is a tremendously enriching thing. I quite often say to the students, this is like an architect’s office, and the church is like a hardhat building site. It is the same truth, the same gospel — but here we are talking about it, there you are living inside it. And that is the difference between being a seminary teacher and being a pastor — being a pastor is like living in the very middle of the Bible, everything is happening all around you — in the seminary, you are just talking about it.

EN: The word ‘theological’ now has negative overtones — how would you encourage ordinary Christians to take theology more seriously?

SF: I would say that knowing God is what we are created for. I often go back to the first question in the shorter catechism — what is man’s chief end? ‘To glorify God and to enjoy him forever’. To enjoy a person, it is necessary to have knowledge — you cannot enjoy a person you haven’t got to know and theology is, essentially, knowing about God. Theology is just the well-ordering of the teaching of the whole of the Bible and, since God has given us the whole of the Bible to get to know him, that is our great privilege.

EN: What worries you about evangelicalism at present?

SF: One of the things I have noticed is that whereas when I was a young Christian, there seemed to be quite a lot of middle ground — there were liberals and there were evangelicals but there seemed to be — at least in Scotland — a lot of men in the middle who were not conservative in their view of Scripture, but they did at least preach about Jesus and they preached enough about Jesus for somebody to come and trust Jesus. Now that middle ground has dropped out. Now not only is there a clear-cut liberal theology and liberal agenda, but there may also be a movement towards evangelicalism just because it is a place to stand.

For example, where I live in Texas, I would say that evangelicalism is the default church, whereas in the UK probably that isn’t quite so true. It is the form of Christianity that seems the most interesting and to which people have gravitated; those without a very clear idea of what evangelicalism is. Because they have not had a firm grasp of what the old gospel is, it is not surprising that they have a tendency to chase after whatever the next or the new gospel is. Often they will be gripped by some kind of new perspective on something, when they didn’t really understand what the old perspective was.’

In my lifetime as a Christian, more than 40 years, theological positions that used to be ordinary evangelical convictions, that marked evangelicals, are in many spheres now regarded as right-wing, reactionary positions, and there has been quite a sea-change in evangelicalism, through the second half of the 20th century and now into the 21st century. I would hate to lose the word evangelicalism, but whereas when I was a teenager I knew what it meant, now it has to be nuanced and it is almost dying the death of a thousand qualifications.’

Shaking out

EN: What encourages you about contemporary evangelicalism?

SF: In the evangelical church, there are a number of really strong signs Ð one is the return to understanding the necessity of expounding the Scriptures. That is something of a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century, worldwide. Secondly, there is a much deeper sense among many evangelicals of the importance of Christian doctrine — the whole counsel of God.

Thirdly, the shaking that is taking place among evangelicals may also be leading men from somewhat different ecclesiological traditions to realise that the gospel is more important than their form of ecclesiology. We are all tied to our past traditions and in some ways the time is too desperate for us to be allowed the luxury of thinking that way. Also, I meet younger men of considerable natural ability who are devoting their ability to the understanding and exposition of the gospel. Another thing is the worldwide nature of an awakening of interest in good biblical literature and in thinking theologically in order to apply the gospel to whatever culture I live in or whatever secular employment I am involved in.

EN: You are involved in starting a new branch of the Westminster Seminary in Dallas, Texas. Can you tell us your vision for this work and how the project is going?

SF: We offer two different degrees, a Master of Arts degree in Religious Studies and a Master of Divinity degree. I think there are about 100 students there (a very different situation to Philadelphia, where the mother campus is). Students come from different backgrounds, and a number of them are already ordained ministers who have come to the conviction that they have got to relearn their theology. Often they come from a dispensationalist or charismatic background, and they have discovered biblical theology and the Reformed faith. I really admire their sacrifice in being prepared to start at the bottom of the building up. From that point of view it is going very well, but this has been a terrible time to start another theological institution, in terms of what happened after 9/11. Seminaries depend on major donors and a wise major donor, whose stock value went down, is thinking, when it all bounces back again, I will give the institutions some money.

I enjoy it — being part of a start-up has a dynamic of its own, a buzz about it. And the students are very patient and tolerant and there is a tremendous spirit on the campus at the moment.