Between Sunday School and Seminary

You began seminary as a dispensationalist. What made you begin to question that system, and what ultimately led you to Reformed theology?

I had not been raised in any church, so I didn’t know where to go after becoming a Christian. I knew there was a Christian bookstore at the mall, so I went there and happened to grab some Hal Lindsey books.

That’s what pushed me in the direction of dispensationalism, and for all I knew, that’s what the Bible taught. I ended up attending Dallas Theological Seminary, which was the mecca of dispensationalism at the time.

The first thing that really started the wheels turning was my first Old Testament class. Our professor told us, “If you preach a sermon from the Old Testament, you should be able to preach that same exact sermon in a synagogue without raising an eyebrow.” And I remember thinking: “Paul raised eyebrows when he preached in the synagogue. The only way I could not raise an eyebrow would be not to mention Jesus and the gospel. There’s no way that can be right.”

Providentially, R.C. Sproul was invited to speak at Dallas in my first semester. At some point, somebody asked him, “What do you think of dispensationalism?” I don’t remember exactly what he said, but it was something to the effect of, “I just think it’s kind of silly.” That stuck with me.

Then in 1991, John Gerstner published Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth, and that was the first time I had seen a systematic critique of dispensationalism. By the spring of my second year, I became convinced that dispensationalism wasn’t biblically defensible and that Reformed theology was taught in Scripture. I started looking for another seminary and found out where Dr. Sproul was teaching: Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando. So we packed up our bags and moved in the summer of 1992.

What was it about Dr. Sproul and the ministry of Ligonier that resonated with you?

After I graduated, I found a nighttime job at Ligonier for the Tape of the Month; then I worked for Frontline, where we received incoming phone calls.

What attracted me to Ligonier wasn’t just the fact that they were hiring. R.C. had always talked about aiming between Sunday school and seminary and wanted to get that deeper theology to the laity. That’s where I felt my gifts were: taking the academic stuff, bringing it down to a level that anybody can understand, and getting it out there. That was something that Dr. Sproul was uniquely gifted at—being able to teach those deep truths with clarity and conviction.

When I read What Is Reformed Theology?, one of the chapters that struck me the most—and was the most unsettling initially, but the most helpful ultimately—was the chapter titled “Reformed Theology Is Catholic.” In my background, catholic meant Roman Catholic. The flags went up.

But then Dr. Sproul defines his terms—catholic means “universal, ecumenical.” It’s the church around the world and throughout time; it’s not Roman Catholic. And then reading that section where he’s showing the connections and continuity of the theology of the early and medieval church with the Reformation, and pointing out the fact that the Reformation isn’t just this completely new thing—it has precedents, it has continuity with the early and medieval church—that was mind-blowing to me.

The 1990s were a time of enormous change in how people accessed information. How do you think the internet and social media have changed the way that Christians do theology?

That’s one of the main things that changed in the ’90s for all of us who lived on both sides of that decade: the advent of the internet. It has really impacted a lot of these issues that might have been a little more containable before. With the internet, everybody has access to publish whatever they want and to read all of this material. Controversy happens, and it blows up and goes around the world in ten seconds. We have to be continually vigilant to maintain a no-compromise stand on that crucial doctrine.

I think social media has some benefits, but this is one of the downsides of the internet and social media. It’s one of the things I’ve tried to emphasize to my students in the classroom: If a lot of people doing this are seeking to glorify themselves—“Look at what a great internet debater I am”—and just ignoring the damage they might be doing to Christ’s sheep who come in and witness these things, they’re missing a very valuable element of traditional Reformed theology.

If you go back and read those early Reformed theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they understood the connection between the head and the heart and the hands, to use John Calvin’s metaphors, and the relationship between theology and godliness. The character of the theologian is as important as the content of the theology. If you’re not growing in your sanctification, then you haven’t really understood the theology that you say you’re fighting for. Many of them picked up on Titus 1, with the “truth, which accords with godliness” phrase.

That was something I believe R.C. emphasized: Theology isn’t just this academic game being played in journals. It involves real Christians with real issues in real churches. We need to do our theology with the understanding that this should not make us arrogant. It has to get from our head to our heart, where we meditate on the Word, and then it has to get to our hands—praise of God, service to the church, proclamation of the gospel.

That was made really clear as we sat under the preaching of Dr. Sproul at Saint Andrew’s Chapel. He was taking this theology and delivering it to the people in the pews. So that’s been a huge influence on me as well, watching how he did that.

You were still in seminary when the Evangelicals and Catholics Together controversy unfolded. What did you learn from watching R.C. respond to that controversy?

Dr. Sproul and Vesta came into the bookstore one day while I was working, and he was angry. I think it was very soon after the ECT document had come out. He was explaining to the people in the bookstore why this was so wrong and why he felt that he was going to have to do something. I believe that’s what led directly to his writing Faith Alone.

A lot of what was happening in the background was the culture war that was going on. What they ended up doing was putting together this theological document, Evangelicals and Catholics Together, trying to find these points of agreement. One of the points they said they had agreement on was the doctrine of justification. You had this claim that both evangelicals and Roman Catholics believe in justification by faith and by grace, but they didn’t really carefully define the terms. So it ended up being a very vague statement.

That’s what bothered Dr. Sproul. He knew that they had to understand that Roman Catholics mean something different when they say “justification” and “grace.” So it’s not just a matter of using the same words. It left out a lot of the key elements of the Reformed doctrine of justification, such as “faith alone” and “imputation.”

So just making this blanket statement that evangelicals and Roman Catholics both believe in justification by faith is not true if you actually define the terms. To say that we agree on that, you’re basically agreeing on audible sounds but not on the concepts behind them.

That was huge in what Dr. Sproul talked to us about: the need to define our terms. He went to great lengths and made great efforts to convince his friends to recant of this because, in reality, they didn’t actually agree. It was not something that he was willing to compromise on, and he was willing to do that at the cost of friendships.

If we compromise on that, there’s really no reason to remain Protestant. Honestly, if the gospel of justification by faith alone, by grace alone, is negotiable, then what are we doing? We’re not doing anything but being schismatic, if that’s the case.

And Dr. Sproul said: “Nope. We can’t compromise on this. We need to be crystal clear.” This is a matter of life and death—eternal life and death.

The Cambridge Declaration brought together a number of Reformed leaders around the five solas and a recovery of the gospel. Why does that message remain important today, thirty years later?

I reread it recently. The discussion of the five solas is so central. During the seeker- sensitive movement, churches had lost the concept of the sufficiency of Scripture.

It’s very well laid out in the Westminster Confession of Faith: Everything that is necessary for our faith and life either is expressly set down in Scripture or by good and necessary consequence can be deduced from Scripture. Scripture is sufficient for our Christian faith and life.

Many churches forgot that and started looking to the culture, to consumerist ideas and marketing ideas from Madison Avenue, for how best to sell their services to unbelievers.

If you’re basing what you do in church and your worship on what unbelievers want, rather than what Scripture dictates, you’ve got a serious problem—because unbelievers don’t want the truth. They’re suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. They want to be entertained. They want to be coddled. They don’t want to hear the hard truth of the law, and they don’t want the stumbling block of the gospel.

And so I think James Boice was right. The issue of sufficiency had been a problem with Rome, but we transposed that issue into a similar problem. We’re acting like Scripture’s insufficient; we need to supplement it with modern cultural ideas.

You now hold the R.C. Sproul Chair of Systematic Theology. What does that responsibility mean to you?

I’m very grateful. I remember that faithfulness was one of the key things that R.C. emphasized about the school. He didn’t want the college to continue if it didn’t remain faithful. If we depart from Scripture and start teaching unbiblical ideas, there’s no point in continuing.

So that’s the main thing that having the R.C. Sproul Chair means to me: remembering that call to faithfulness—not just for myself, but also reminding the other faculty of that.

Given my history and how I first met Dr. Sproul, there’s a surrealness to it that’s kind of strange. Looking backward, the providence that worked through all of it is absolutely amazing. Even when I first came back to Florida, the gentleman who told me that my wife and I could stay in his home while I looked for an apartment lived on Wayside Drive, which is where Ligonier eventually ended up. Of all the thousands of roads in the Orlando area, that’s where we ended up, right across from the cemetery down the road.

God’s providence is just astounding. It’s really remarkable to go from seeing R.C. Sproul as a guest lecturer, whom I’d never even heard, to now teaching at the school he started and serving in this role.

By God’s grace, I can remain faithful to his vision for the school. That’s what’s exciting about it. It’s an honor to be called to strive for my own faithfulness and to encourage others toward that same faithfulness—to the vision, to Scripture, and to our biblical theology.

What do you most want your students to take from their time at RBC?

The generation coming into RBC has grown up with a phone in their hand—it’s all they’ve ever known. It’s a constant flood of notifications and information. So we need to remind them that the authority of the Word of God is their anchor point in the midst of so much change and chaos. Everything else may be fluctuating. But you have a stable anchor point—a stone in the middle of this storm that’s constantly around you.

They’re going to have to learn how to depend on that, because unless the Lord returns, there’s no indication that this is going to stop anytime soon. Lord willing, as the gospel goes forth, people will be converted. But the enemy is also going to continue to intensify his attacks and seek to sow confusion. So we have to have confidence in the authority of the Word of God and in the goodness of God—that He is sovereign over all of this.

And I see that same confidence in my colleagues and in the younger people around us. When I talk to the younger people working at Ligonier now, or the twentysomething RBC graduates, and hear them express the same passion and vision that R.C. Sproul had for this ministry, and the same commitment to remaining faithful and continuing the work, that gives me a lot of hope and confidence.

When I’m gone and this ministry is in the hands of that generation, I believe it will continue to remain faithful. The young people here at RBC and on the staff at Ligonier give me a lot of hope that the Lord is going to continue to do this work through the ministry that Dr. Sproul started.