The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor: Reflections on Life and Ministry by John Piper & D. A. Carson

Author:John Piper & D. A. Carson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Pastoral
ISBN: 9781433526473
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2011-03-29T22:00:00+00:00

Part One: Introduction

1) The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor—to begin by criticizing the title is usually a cheap shot, but in this case, there is an ambiguity that needs to be exposed. In England,

where I lived for nine years, this title might be thought pre-sumptuous. Over there, scholar is a not a word by which you would usually define yourself; rather, it is a word that

someone else might use of you, if you are exceptionally

gifted in your field. In other words, over there scholar tends to be a measure of one’s competence; the word for the corresponding role is probably academic. So could the title of this book morph easily into The Pastor as Academic and the Academic as Pastor?

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72 The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor

Now you can see that there is an issue at stake beyond

the word preferred by one side or the other of the Big Pond.

An “academic” is normally thought of as someone with a

post in an academic institution. In that sense, an academic

is not a pastor, unless a bi-vocational, part-time pastor;

conversely, a full-time, vocational pastor is not an academic, except perhaps in the sense of offering some part-time

courses in an academic setting.

Immediately the discussion becomes still more compli-

cated when we recall how some larger churches, not least

Bethlehem Baptist Church where John Piper serves, begin

their own parallel training schools, in this case The Bethlehem Institute, currently morphing into Bethlehem College and

Seminary. Is this department of Bethlehem Baptist Church

rightly called an academic institution? If so, when we speak of academic pastors or pastoral academics, must there be some

kind of institutional affiliation for the categories to take on meaning?

Lest we wallow in a semantic quagmire, we abandon

academic and retreat quickly to the word scholar and acknowledge that, even here in North America, it can refer

to either an academic role or a relatively advanced degree

of competence in a particular field. The title may sound

self-promoting to British ears, but the lovely ambiguity

means that when we talk about, say, a pastor-scholar, we

are not reduced to talking about institutional affiliations and the like (though we may include such reflections),

but about pastoral work in the framework of rather more

advanced technical competence than is customarily the

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Carson: The Scholar as Pastor 73

case—a competence that may or may not have an institu-

tional outlet.

He Gives Different Gifts

2) This is the time, I think, to recognize that God assigns

hugely different gifts, so that one of the things this book

must not do is give the impression that there is only one legitimate path to working out pastoral and scholarly voca-tions. Arnold Dallimore was a Baptist pastor who studied

theological training with my dad. His only degree, his ter-

minal degree, was a bachelor of theology. For forty years

he served one church in the small Ontario town of Cottam.

Nevertheless, he also set himself the task of mastering mate-

rial on George Whitefield. It became a hobby, a summer

challenge, a life goal. He traveled frequently to England, ran-sacked archives, found material that no one had ever used

before and wrote his magnificent two-volume biography of

Whitefield.

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