Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church (Foreword by Thomas R. Schreiner) (eBook)

A Guide for Ministry

Michael Lawrence (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2010 | 1. Auflage
240 Seiten
Crossway (Verlag)
978-1-4335-2463-9 (ISBN)

Infos

Capitol Hill Baptist Church associate pastor Michael Lawrence contributes to the IXMarks series as he centers on the practical importance of biblical theology to ministry. He begins with an examination of a pastor's tools of the trade: exegesis and biblical and systematic theology. The book distinguishes between the power of narrative in biblical theology and the power of application in systematic theology, but also emphasizes the importance of their collaboration in ministry. Having laid the foundation for pastoral ministry, Lawrence uses the three tools to build a biblical theology, telling the entire story of the Bible from five different angles. He puts biblical theology to work in four areas: counseling, missions, caring for the poor, and church/state relations. Rich in application and practical insight, this book will equip pastors and church leaders to think, preach, and do ministry through the framework of biblical theology.

Michael Lawrence (PhD, Cambridge University; MDiv, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) serves as the lead pastor of Hinson Baptist Church in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church.

Textauszug

Preface

This is a book for people who are passionate about ministry in the local church. It’s not a book for theologians and academics (though I hope both will read it and like it). It’s a book for pastors and church leaders who can’t even remember the last time they had a discussion using words like “compatibilism” or “theodicy” but who every week must help someone understand why we even bother to pray if God already knows everything, or why God hasn’t allowed them to conceive a child or find a job. In other words, it’s a book for people like me.

It’s for people like a fellow elder of mine who was recently having lunch at a burger joint with a friend. This man had lost his job in the latest economic downturn and his car had broken down just a few days before. And now he was looking at a savings account that was dwindling toward nothing.

However, he’d been listening to preachers on television. And they had promised that God would provide material blessings today, if only he would have faith today. The friend quipped, “You know, like in Deuteronomy, where God says that he will bless us in our homes and in our fields if we only follow him.”

How should my fellow elder have responded? Does Deuteronomy promise Christians that God will bless us in the city, bless us in the country, bless us when we are coming in, and bless us when we are going out? If you have a Bible nearby, look at the first few verses of Deuteronomy chapter 28. You’ll see that it certainly promises such blessings to the Israelites. And the talk of blessings there doesn’t mean warm spiritual fuzzies. The blessings God promises mean full barns and fruitful wombs, the praise of nations and the respect of enemies. It means their best life today!

Yet are those promises true for Christians? Can the unemployed Christian expect that God will quickly provide a job if only the Christian can muster up enough faith? What about the barren couple who longs for children? Should we say to them, “You just need to believe, and God will give you the child you long for”? Or do the blessings God promised Israel merely foreshadow the gospel-believing Christians’ promised inheritance in eternity?

The answer to these questions directly affects how my fellow elder should have ministered to his unemployed friend. It affects how you and I should minister to people around us.

I’m not going to tell you what my fellow elder said to his friend (we’ll come back to this story at the end of the book). Yet, this story illustrates the premise of this book: our theology determines the shape and character of our ministry. Theology is how we move from the text of Scripture to how we should live our lives today.

The Critical Importance of Biblical Theology

This is a book about theology. But it’s really a book about ministry, because I’m convinced that if we want our ministry to have a lasting impact and our churches to be healthy we must first do our theology well. In this book we are going to talk about how to do theology that will in turn help us do something practical, namely, pastoral ministry. Not only that, I hope to talk about doing theology in a practical way, so that you will know how to do it yourself!

You may have noticed that this book belongs to the 9Marks series. 9Marks is a ministry dedicated to equipping local churches and pastors, and it takes its name from Mark Dever’s book Nine Marks of a Healthy Church. The second mark of a healthy church, Dever says, is biblical theology.1 But what Dever means by “biblical theology” is theology that’s biblical, or theology that’s sound.

The word “sound,” Dever points out, means reliable, accurate, and faithful.2 And it’s the word “sound” that Paul uses over and over with his disciples Timothy and Titus to describe their doctrine and their teaching. Sound doctrine opposes ungodliness and sin (1 Tim. 1:10–11). Sound instruction opposes false doctrine (1 Tim. 6:3). Sound teaching is the pattern Timothy has seen in Paul (2 Tim. 1:13). Sound doctrine will be rejected by the churches who would rather hear what their itching ears want to hear (2 Tim. 4:3). And, again, sound doctrine will encourage those who hold firmly to the trustworthy message and refute those who oppose it (Titus 1:9). Over and over, Paul tells these two men to “teach what is in accord with sound doctrine” (Titus 2:1). Sound doctrine, or theology that is biblical, is a big part of what I want to talk about in this book. Chapters 4 and 5 are largely devoted to the topic, and the remainder of the book tries to work it out in practice.

But sound theology is not all I want to talk about. I also want to talk about biblical theology in a narrower sense. In this sense, biblical theology is about reading the Bible, not as if it’s sixty-six separate books, but a single book with a single plot—God’s glory displayed through Jesus Christ. Biblical theology is therefore about discovering the unity of the Bible in the midst of its diversity. It’s about understanding what we might call the Bible’s metanarrative. In this sense, biblical theology as a discipline has been around for a couple of centuries in one form or another. Lately, it’s become especially popular among evangelicals. I’ll describe how we do this in chapters 2 and 3, and then define it more carefully in chapter 4.

But here at the start, I want to make the point that the most practical thing we can do, the most important tool we need in ministry, is biblical theology. And I mean that in both senses of the phrase. Learning how to do biblical theology is no mere academic exercise. No, it’s vital to your work as a pastor or church leader. It shapes your preaching, your counseling, your evangelizing, your ability to engage wisely with culture, and more. You will not be a very good theologian, which means you will not be a very good pastor, if you do not learn how to do biblical theology.

Reading the Bible means learning how to use the tools of biblical theology, in the narrow sense of the word. Applying the Bible means learning how to use the tools of systematic theology. Strangely, the two disciplines of biblical theology and systematic theology are often pitted against one another. But the church and the pastor need both. And so here we will consider how to do biblical theology, so that we might be better systematic theologians, so that we might become better pastors.

What all this means is that you are holding in your hands a “how-to” book. Learning how to do biblical theology will help you learn how to pastor well. Or, if you’re not a pastor, it will help you learn how to better teach, disciple, and counsel other Christians. And that’s the work of every Christian. Through the course of this book we will think together about how to read and apply the Bible for ministry in the church. This book will follow that basic outline—from biblical theology, to systematic theology, to pastoral ministry. In my mind, that progression translates into really useful theology.

I realize that saying theology is useful, even necessary, for ministry is a bold assertion. I make it for two reasons.

Ministry Is Theology in Action

First, if you are a pastor or are involved in ministry, you should be a theologian. This doesn’t mean you need to write books of theology (though reading them can be helpful). This doesn’t even mean you need to know the inside and outside of every theological controversy on the radar screen (though you should know how to detect a false teacher when you see one).

Rather, your role as a theologian means:

• You have taught the church about God’s goodness and sovereignty, so that when a child is diagnosed with cancer, the parents will be grief-stricken but not completely undone.

• You have equipped the eighteen-year-olds heading off to college with the necessary tools for facing the radical relativism of their professors.

• You know how to help the man in your church who is struggling with whether or not God knows the future because his brother-in-law from another church gave him a bad book.

• You have helped a young wife and mother who struggles with perfectionism and people-pleasing to find her justification and worth in the gospel.

• You have prepared the engaged couple for the challenges of marriage through premarital counseling that focuses on God’s plan for our holiness and not just instantaneous happiness.

Now, I said that every pastor should be a theologian. It would probably be more accurate to say that every pastor is a theologian, whether he is conscious of that fact or not. We’ll talk more about this in chapter 5, but every pastor (and every human, really) relies upon some set of theological assumptions when addressing situations like these. The question is, are your assumptions sound? Are they biblical?

Biblical theology, then, is the discipline that helps us to be better theologians and, therefore, better ministers. It’s how you get from texts like Deuteronomy 28 to the theology of the gospel. It’s how you travel from the words of this ancient text all the way to how to encourage an unemployed Christian friend.

A Word-Centered Model of Ministry

The second reason theology is useful, even necessary for ministry is this: God’s Word has real power to change lives. Therefore, as people in ministry, we have a vested interest in knowing how to understand and apply the Word correctly.

God has spoken through his written Word. In his Word, he has revealed who he is, who we are, and how he calls humanity generally and his people...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.4.2010
• Vorwort: Thomas R. Schreiner
• Verlagsort: Wheaton
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Kirchengeschichte
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Pastoraltheologie
• Schlagworte: baptist church • Bible • Bible study • biblical teachings • Biblical Theology • caring for the poor • Christianity • Christian ministry • christian readers • Christians • Christian theology • Church leaders • collaboration ministry • Counseling • Exegesis • Faith • god and religion • ixmarks series • ministry • Pastor • Pastoral Ministry • politics and religion • practical importance • practical insight • Redemption • Religion • Religious • religious readers • separation of church and state • Spiritual • story of the Bible • Systematic Theology • Theology
• ISBN-10: 1-4335-2463-5 / 1433524635
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4335-2463-9 / 9781433524639