So writes Mark Dever in a new book based on a conference honoring J. I. Packer at Beeson Divinity School on September 25–27, 2006:

Timothy George, ed. J. I. Packer and the Evangelical Future: The Impact of His Life and Thought. Beeson Divinity Studies. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009. [Amazon | WTS Books]

Sample pages as a PDF include the TOC, preface, and opening chapter by Alister McGrath.

Here’s the opening paragraph of Mark Dever’s chapter, entitled “J. I. Packer and Pastoral Wisdom from the Puritans”:

There are some people for whom it is an honor to be asked to honor, and J. I. Packer is certainly one of them. And this is a surprising honor, considering that I disagree with him on baptism, church, and the resources of and prospects for rapprochement between Protestants and Roman Catholics. After all, I am a fundamentalist, Calvinistic, separatist Baptist—I barely believe in rapprochement with Presbyterians! (p. 87)

In the final section of his essay, titled “Puritans on the Definition of Justification and Questions of Church Cooperation,” Dever respectfully disagrees with Packer on Evangelicals and Catholics Together (pp. 93–96).

In Packer’s response to this book’s essays, he playfully picks up a metaphor in which he is Robin Hood, Timothy George is “Little George,” etc. He writes,

I saw in my Baptist brother Mark Dever a latter-day Sheriff of Nottingham, giving me a passing grade on the doctrine of grace but a firm “F” in ecclesiology. (p. 172)

Related: Mark Dever interviewed J. I. Packer ten years ago.

WTS Books just stocked this book:

John Wenham. Christ and the Bible. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994. Repr., Wipf and Stock, 2009.

Here’s what Mark Dever says about it in the last paragraph of his essay “Inerrancy of the Bible: An Annotated Bibliography“:

I’ve saved the best for last. If I could just recommend one book on the inerrancy of the Bible it would undoubtedly be this one—John Wenham, Christ and the Bible (Tyndale Press, 1972 [UK]; IVP, 1973 [US]). Wenham’s book has been through three editions and makes the simple point that our trust in Scripture is to be a part of our following Christ, because that is the way that He treated Scripture—as true, and therefore authoritative. (Robert Lightner, a professor of Systematic Theology at Dallas Seminary published a similar book a few years later, A Biblical Case for Total Inerrancy: How Jesus Viewed the Old Testament [Kregel, 1978].) Wenham had first put these ideas in print with a little Tyndale pamphlet in 1953 called Our Lord’s View of the Old Testament. In Christ and the Bible, Wenham, who taught Greek for many years at Oxford, an Anglican evangelical, has done us all a great service in providing us with a book which understands that we do not come by our adherence to Scripture fundamentally from the inductive resolutions of discrepancies, but from the teaching of the Lord Jesus. Only because of the Living Word may we finally know to trust the Written Word. May God use these resources of those who’ve gone before us to equip and encourage us in so trusting.

Dever concludes by giving Wenham his top recommendation:

To get up to speed on this issue, and to help you with your ministry, consider the following recommendations.

MUST READ: Wenham

SHOULD READ: Warfield, Packer’s “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God, Lindsell [The Battle for the Bible and The Bible in the Balance], any one of the edited volumes of your choosing!

Last night I listened to an MP3 of Mark Dever speaking on church membership to a group of pastors in South Africa in January 2007. (I’m not sure if this MP3 is available online.)

Dever concludes by presenting what he calls a twelve-step recovery plan for pastors to regain meaningful church membership in the congregation. Step two sheds some light on Dever’s recent controversial statement that it is wrong to include millennial views in a church’s statement of faith. In my radio interview last week, I mentioned that the viability of Dever’s statement turns on his view of the function of statements of faith. Here’s how he stated his view on that in 2007 (53:33 to 55:39 in the MP3; emphasis added):

2. Have and use a congregationally agreed-upon statement of faith and church covenant.

Now I’m aware we’re from different polities at this minister’s conference, and that’s great. If you have a denominational statement, depending on your structure you can take your denominational statement and use that. If you’re a congregational independent church, you can come up with one yourself or use one that other churches before you have used. But with membership in the congregation comes responsibility, and the statements of what the congregation together believes (and in our church we call that our statement of faith) and of how we will live (we call that our church covenant) are very useful tools. They are a clear ground of unity, a tool of teaching, [and] a fence from error and from the worldly who would erase such distinctions or [from] the divisive who want to see them more narrow. We can point to the fact that, “We’ll actually, this is what we’ve agreed on.”

So, for example, I’ll give you something else provocative. Our church’s statement of faith talks about the second coming of Christ, and it basically says, “He will come back; he will raise the dead; he will judge them; and they will go some to eternal felicity with God and some to eternal torment in hell.” That’s it! “But Mark, what about the rapture? What about the nation of Israel? What about the seven-year tribulation? What about the millennium?” You know, praise God, our statement of faith was written in the 1830s, so Christians hadn’t thought of all that stuff yet. They were just about to get divisive about that in the late nineteenth century, but our statement of faith is so old we only have this really clearly biblical stuff about the return of Christ. And then we can disagree—we can argue with each other—as best we see implications of these other precious truths.

So every Christian in the church should believe a lot more than what’s in your statement of faith, but what you’re trying to define in your statement of faith is “What do we need to have agreement upon in order to be a church together?” And I think we need to know that Jesus is coming back and that he told his disciples that he could be coming back at any time, so they need to be ready. Beyond that, well, you and I can argue about it. We can [dis]agree. We can read and write books.

Kevin Boling, host of “Knowing the Truth” radio program, contacted me a couple of hours before his hour-long radio program this afternoon and asked me to be his guest to discuss the issue I highlighted in my recent blog post on Schreiner’s and Dever’s positions on millennial views.

Kevin, a gracious host, entitled the program “Are Millennial Views Essential?“ The interview is available from SermonAudio as a 55-minute MP3.

Update: See “Mark Dever on the Function of Statements of Faith.”

D. A. Carson and Mark Dever ministered together to pastors in South Africa in January 2007, and they jointly conducted four edifying Q&A sessions:

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4

Related: Dever interviewed Carson on June 13, 2008:

• Part 1: “Observing Evangelicalism with Don Carson” (73-minute MP3)
• Part 2: “On Books with D. A. Carson” (56-minute MP3)

Mark Dever interviews D. A. Carson: “On Books with D. A. Carson” (56-minute MP3). The interview occurred on June 13, 2008 at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and 9Marks just released it.

This interview is part 2 of 2. Cf. part 1: “Observing Evangelicalism with Don Carson” (73-minute MP3).