(A continuation of C.J.’s interview with pastor and author Dr. Sinclair Ferguson)

C.J. Mahaney: Sinclair, I am going to ask you to elaborate on four quotes. I have chosen four quotes among so many that I have benefited from personally in my study and used consistently in messages and books. I want to read them and then simply want you to comment on them, noting anything about their origin, or anything from them that you want to elaborate on. I would be most grateful.

The first quote states as follows:

The evangelical orientation is inward and subjective. We are far better at looking inward than we are looking outward. We need to expend our energies admiring, exploring, expositing, and extolling Jesus Christ.

What’s the origin of this statement? You obviously were observing this evangelical orientation as being inward and subjective and then drew attention to that orientation, exhorting us to expend our energies admiring, exploring, expositing, and extolling Jesus Christ. Why?

Sinclair Ferguson: This comes from a course on the doctrine of the church and the sacraments, and therefore since I am not saying anything here about the church or the sacraments, it is probably an off the top of my head comment in passing and I am not able to contextualize it.

CJM: By the way, I find that a little discouraging. This is off the top of your head?

SF: Well, come on, now. C.J., you say things off the top of your head.

CJM: Oh, yes, but they never make their way into print.

SF: I think it has arisen from a variety of things I have noticed over the years in the evangelical world. If I were to explain in a technical sense, I would say that I think one of the places where the impact of the Enlightenment has come home to roost is in the way in which I see the impact of a man called Friedrich Schleiermacher on the church. He was reacting to the intelligentsia of his day who were demeaning the gospel. And he really, in a way, turned the gospel on its head by saying it’s what happens internally that’s important.

And I think over my Christian life I have seen more and more how that has become true of evangelicalism. I mean, evangelical Christianity has a very broad subculture that now, probably since the 1960s, has been the kind of “born again” generation, where the really important thing was that you had been “born again” and you had an “experience.”

I began to notice that often being “born again” in the teaching of John 3 was dislocated from the rest of John 3, which had to do with believing in the Lord Jesus Christ and, through him, having salvation. And so sometimes when you had people interviewed who had been “born again,” there was no connectedness to the person of Christ at all.

And so I think I saw the pervasiveness of that and also in my own subculture—the Reformed subculture (if that is the best way to put it). I have been in that subculture all my life. I am a Presbyterian. I have never been anything but a Presbyterian, and that’s been my world.

I noticed in the revival of Reformed theology a glorious worldwide phenomenon. The revival of Calvinism brought much of the interest in terms of literature. The books that people read and were encouraged to read (and rightly encouraged to read) tended to be the ones that dealt with subjective experience.

And so in my subculture we were somewhat critical of the rest of the subculture of evangelicalism, and maybe particularly critical of the charismatic subculture that was all taken up with experience. We didn’t notice that actually, in some ways, we were just using a different mathematics for our experience. One of the books to which many people referred was John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, a hammer on the top of an Arminian’s head. And I observed that people, as I would put it, changed their mathematics about the atonement. But perhaps hadn’t really grasped what this was saying about the Lord Jesus himself and his glory.

And I guess, too, many people became Calvinists through their understanding of the application of redemption (sometimes called the ordo salutis). I began to see and hear people speaking about this almost without reference to the Lord Jesus, saying things like, “Regeneration causes faith, faith brings repentance, faith leads to sanctification.”

You remember those Find Waldo books? In the midst of all this I was saying, “But where is Jesus here?”

CJM: Excellent!

SF: I remember on one occasion listening to a series of sermons through one of the Gospels. Here was the basic motif of the sermons: Where are you in this Gospel story?

Now, there is an authenticity about that, but the real question is: Who is Jesus in this Gospel story?

And so, watching all this, I realized by looking at the literature that was being produced (including the literature I was producing), that it had more about how to live the Christian life....And so I think that is what lies behind this quote.

Curiously, I think it was C.S. Lewis that gave me the clue to this. When an undergraduate, I remember reading his book A Preface to Paradise Lost (on Milton’s book). And that wee book is not a well-known book of Lewis’s, but it is a great wee book with some stunning quotes.

In that book Lewis discusses what I had noticed in the kind of discussions as a student: Why is it that in Paradise Lost, if you ask who the hero is, just in terms of the literary power, Satan turns out to be the hero? And the literary critics had discussed this a good deal. But Lewis said it very simply. He said it’s far easier to portray evil than it is to portray perfect good.

And the more I thought about that, the more I realized: For preachers it’s much easier to seek to bring about conviction of sin and expose sin than to magnify and glory in the Lord Jesus.

----------------

Photo © 2008, Lukas VanDyke