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).
I just uploaded five new MP3s to the D. A. Carson archive:
Last Sunday afternoon D. A. Carson preached a sermon on 1 Timothy 1:1–20 for Josh Moody‘s Installation Service at College Church in Wheaton: “The Glorious Gospel of the Blessed God.” The sermon is an adaptation of an address that Carson has given once or twice before on this passage, but it is considerably adapted at points.
My blog’s most popular post has been “D. A. Carson MP3s” (December 17, 2006). It’s a compilation of links to about 200 Carson MP3s. I updated it diligently through the beginning of 2008, but I stopped because I knew that it would soon become obsolete.
For about the last six months, I’ve attempted to compile a comprehensive collection of Carson MP3s so that TGC could host them. So far I’ve uploaded 443 MP3s (and some MV4s, too), and the plan is to add more as they become available. You can browse most of them in the “sermons” category.
Here are some advantages to the Carson MP3s now hosted by TGC:
I’d highly recommend that you redeem the time and systematically and thoughtfully listen to these MP3s. I have profited immensely from them. Carson’s manner of speaking is just as articulate, thoughtful, and engaging as his publications. He exalts Christ by exegeting his words, tracing themes through the Bible’s salvation-historical storyline, addressing hot topics with clarity and nuance, and engaging and confronting bad theology as well as the culture.
Related:
I just noticed that the following article is available online:
D. A. Carson. “Challenges for 21st-Century Preaching.” Preaching 23:6 (May–June 2008): 20–24.
I have visited many parts of the world in which the challenges to the 21st-century pulpit look rather different. So part of the purpose of the rest of this essay is modest: to stimulate thinking that will help others flesh out this list and modify it for different cultural locations.
Preachers cannot responsibly ignore these things, for they stand between the speaking God and the listening people—people who are not empty ciphers but culturally located men and women who must be addressed where they are, even if our hope and prayer is that they will not remain where they are, but begin by God’s grace the march down the King’s highway, the narrow road that leads to life.
Our motivation to understand and address people in the 21st century is not to domesticate the gospel by constant appeal to cultural analysis, but to prove effective ambassadors of the Sovereign whose Word we announce. For one day the kingdom of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, and He will reign for ever and ever (Rev. 11:15). It is precisely because we are anchored in eternity that we are so utterly resolved, like Paul, to address lost men and women who must one day meet their God.
I don’t recall hearing this twist to the textile-imperial metaphor before (D. A. Carson, review of David Rensberger, Overcoming the World: Politics and Community in the Gospel of John, Themelios 17:1 [October–November 1991]: 27–28):
Somewhere along the line, the text has been left behind. Not only have too many speculations been built on other speculations, but the obvious features of the text, such as its Christology, its claims to bring witness, its insistence on the uniqueness and exclusiveness of Jesus the Messiah, its remarkable ability to distinguish between what happened ‘back there’ during Jesus’ ministry and what was discerned only later, are all lost. Many scholars doubt that John 3:3, 5 is primarily about baptism, and that John 6 is primarily about the eucharist; but at very least, the point must be argued, and not assumed on the basis of a doubtful assumption as to how easy it is to read the ecclesiastical realities of the end of the first century off the surface of the text. And how can the Johannine emphasis on the uniqueness of Jesus as the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, as the one who dies so that the nation may be saved, as the shepherd who gives his life for his sheep, be so quickly transmuted into a call that we in our turn take away the sin of the world by opposing injustice? I am not for a moment suggesting we should ignore injustice; I am merely saying that this is an extraordinary reading of John’s gospel.
Indeed, I have gradually come to the conclusion the Fourth Gospel was not written primarily for church consumption anyway, but as an evangelistic booklet. I realize this point is debatable; but the very fact that it is debatable but is not, by and large, being debated, is profoundly troubling and indicative of what is going wrong in Johannine scholarship. The hesitant suggestions of earlier scholars have now become the ‘givens’ of this generation of scholars, who feel free to build fresh, hesitant suggestions on top of them. I am tempted to say that the emperor has no clothes—or, more conservatively, he is down to his underwear.
Perhaps the most important truth that Jenni and I have especially internalized in the last couple of years is that the gospel is central to our Christian life—not simply step one. We immediately identified with the following paragraph when we read it recently:
For complex reasons many in the Western church came to speak of ‘the simple gospel’, by which they at one time meant the gospel summarized in convenient and simple form, usually for evangelistic purposes. The result is that for many today ‘the gospel’ or ‘gospel preaching’ refers not to the glorious, comprehensive good news disclosed in scripture but to a very simple (some would say simplistic) reduction of it. Some churches distinguished between ‘worship services’ and ‘gospel services’: one wonders which term, ‘worship’ or ‘gospel’, has been more seriously abused. Doubtless the motives behind these developments were often excellent. But the fact remains that a variety of serious problems were thereby introduced. For many, evangelistic preaching became identified with simplistic preaching. Worse, ‘the gospel’ came to be associated in their minds exclusively with the initial steps of faith rather than with God’s comprehensive good news that not only initiates salvation but orders all our life in this world and the next.
–D. A. Carson, “The Biblical Gospel,” in For Such a Time as This: Perspectives on Evangelicalism, Past, Present and Future (ed. Steve Brady and Harold Rowdon; London: Evangelical Alliance, 1996), 82.
Related: My review of Milton Vincent, A Gospel Primer for Christians: Learning to See the Glories of God’s Love (Themelios 33:1 [2008]: 102–3).
In the first weekend of December 2008, D. A. Carson preached five sermons in Seattle:
The videos are embedded below: