The Pastor as Public Theologian

Reclaiming a Lost Vision

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Owen Strachan

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781540961891
• eBook ISBN: 9781441245724
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Top Ministry Book of 2015, The Gospel Coalition (TGC Editors' Picks)

Many pastors today see themselves primarily as counselors, leaders, and motivators. Yet this often comes at the expense of the fundamental reality of the pastorate as a theological office. The most important role is to be a theologian mediating God to the people. The church needs pastors who can contextualize biblical wisdom in Christian living to help their congregations think theologically about all aspects of their lives, such as work, end-of-life decisions, political involvement, and entertainment choices.

Drawing on the Bible, key figures from church history, and Christian theology, this book offers a clarion call for pastors to serve as public theologians in their congregations and communities. It is designed to be engaging reading for busy pastors and includes pastoral reflections on the theological task from twelve working pastors, including Kevin DeYoung and Cornelius Plantinga.

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Of Prophets, Priests, and Kings

A Brief Biblical Theology of the Pastorate

OWEN STRACHAN

In the middle of the world’s greatest city, he prayed.

It was 11:20 a.m. in London on June 18, 1944, the era of Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt—larger-than-life figures. It was a period of terrible, totalizing war, when all the world seemed a mix of fire and smoke. The British Empire had effectively ended. In recent decades, it had controlled nearly a quarter of the globe’s land area, making it the largest superpower in human history. Now the city at the center of it all was under siege. In the midst of the aerial invasion, with sirens blaring and chaos reigning, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones stood before his people. He was a few hundred feet from Buckingham Palace, but he sought the ministrations of a higher kingdom.

It was a frightening time in London. The Germans’ remote-controlled bombing of the city had begun only days before and had already caused tremendous casualties—over ten thousand in a week, according to historian Iain Murray.[1] It was the stuff of madness, catastrophic for the city. “The Doctor,” however, was not deterred. The whole church could hear the plane closing in, but Lloyd-Jones had begun his “long prayer,” his pastoral prayer, and did not stop. The whine overhead grew too loud, though, for him to continue, and so he paused. All the congregation held their breath.

Then the bomb fell. There was a massive explosion, debris fell from the ceiling, and the structure of the chapel cracked. One woman had closed her eyes moments before; she opened them, saw fine white dust covering her fellow parishioners, and thought she was in heaven. The congregation rose to their feet; panic was in the air. The church members waited to see how their pastor would react. Would he weep, or run, or panic?

He would not. With sirens screaming, the doctor resumed his pastoral prayer. At its close, he told the people that any who wished to do so could move under the gallery for safety. A deacon then went to the podium, dusted it off, and returned to his seat. Lloyd-Jones resumed his place at the chapel’s front and opened his Bible. Without missing a beat, he began to preach God’s Word to the people.

The text was Jude 20, which reads in context with verse 21: But you, beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.[2]

The Ministry of the Old Covenant in the Old Testament

In this remarkable scene, we witness a stunning portrait of public courage. We also find a memorable portrait of the nature of Christian ministry in a fallen world. Even as the world burns, the pastor leads the church to continually build itself up in the Spirit’s power.

We may not all minister in such a visceral setting, but there is indeed a battle in which every pastor fights. Pastoral ministry is a local campaign in the broader war between the living God and the principalities and powers of the air (Eph. 6:12). We see the effects of this conflict: Dispirited people. Fighting. Constant criticism of the staff. Adultery. Susceptibility to false teaching. Families riven by poor leadership. Once-vibrant disciples walking away from the faith. Despair at finances. Depression. Many modern battles are fought block by block; the spiritual conflict is fought person by person. The site of this conflict is the human heart, the inner core encompassing all the hopes, thoughts, dreams, schemes, and conflict of a God-imaging person.

If the site of this conflict is the human heart, standing at the center of the congregational battlefield is the pastor. In the momentous conflict between God and the devil, the pastor goes ahead of the people, representing them to God, protecting them from Satan. Yet despite the central role of the pastor in the church’s work to advance the kingdom of Christ in the great war of the ages, there has been relatively little biblical-theological reflection. Accordingly, there has been minimal effort on the part of exegetes and theologians to connect what one could call the “covenant officers” of the Old Testament to the pastor-theologian of the New Testament. This is not to say that priests, prophets, and kings have been left outside the doctrinal camp. Calvin and many others have used the term munus triplex (trifold office) to great profit, for example, in piecing together how Christ fulfilled these offices. We are all the richer for these cross-covenantal connections—conditioned, as they must be, by both Israelite expectation and realization in Christ.

With respect to Calvin and those who have followed in his wake, however, we must also ponder how the offices of priest, prophet, and king are connected to the pastor. In what follows, we invite the ancients back into the conference room. We make the crucial and rather commonsense point that the work of priests, prophets, and kings informs our understanding of the work of the pastor. It is true, of course, that the pastor of the new covenant does not directly fulfill these roles. The priestly line, for example, is both ended and fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus Christ. However, essential elements of the work of the old-covenant priest, prophet, and king have transferred to the pastorate of the new covenant. To put this more plainly, the threefold Old Testament offices show us the rough outlines of who, by virtue of biblical-theological inheritance, the pastor is and is to be: one who holds, before God and the people, the office of covenant minister.

In our reconstruction, then, the pastor is no recent innovation, but the occupant of the office that is the realization of the ministry of past figures. The pastor is the inheritor of the privilege and responsibility of leading the people of God, specifically, via the new-covenant ministry of reconciliation. As we shall see, this divine appointment too requires pastors—like prophets, priests, and kings before them—to speak God’s Word to God’s people, intercede to God on behalf of the people, and model the wisdom of salvation life.

The Priest: Set Apart for a Set-Apart People

As the Old Testament progresses, we meet three classes of covenant officers. Individuals filling this role might be a priest, prophet, or king;[3] the common denominator was that each played some crucial role in leading the people of God to live according to the gracious covenant made by God with Abraham in Genesis 12 and affirmed by God with Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and David.[4] “I will be your God, and you will be my people” is the capstone promise of the Old Testament, with Yahweh’s direction to Abraham to look at the stars and see the number of his descendants as the spectacular representation of the fulfillment of this promise. Grace is what Yahweh promised his descendants, and grace is what he provided.

Yahweh mediated his grace through a number of set-apart individuals. He did not have to act in this way, but he chose to use human mediators to bless and guide his people. The Lord has always desired a kind of holy kinship and partnership with humankind, the pinnacle of his creation, and he has always appointed stewards to serve his people and draw them deeper into the experience of his mercy and favor. Nowhere is this seen more prominently than in the three covenant offices. The priest was at the center of the divine-human relationship. The priest was a man set apart by the Lord to be an on-the-ground mediator of holiness between God and the people. The Levitical priests were charged with the performance, oversight, and even enforcement of numerous rituals, prescriptions, and ceremonies. When the people strayed from God’s law and failed to keep it, the priest called them back and made sacrificial provision to cure their unholiness. The driving concern of the priest’s ministry was the cleanness of the people. In all their duties, whether conciliatory or didactic, the priests sought the actualization, even the enfleshment, of God’s holiness, his set-apart nature, in the life of Israel. Yahweh was holy, and his people were to be holy.[5]

The priest was appointed to seize on this reality and make it practical. He was called to provide means by which an unclean people could share a vital bond with a holy God. In his teaching and ceremonial work, the priest brought the greater claims of the law to life in the everyday experience of the people. Holiness was no abstraction in ancient Israel. To be sure, it had been declared in summary form on Mount Sinai. The source of this declaration signaled its inherent character. What God had said was far above the earth, originating in the counsel of heaven. But the law itself was rigorously relevant to the life of God’s people. “You shall have no other Gods before me” was not only a directive, but also a statement about the way things are: there is no God other than Yahweh.

When Moses came down from the mountain, he brought the law with him. His descent symbolized the fate of God’s code: it was to travel into the bloodstream of Israel. It was to be enculturated in the life of the nation. Holiness was not only becoming to the people of God; they were also to become holy. They were to take on the character of God himself by setting themselves apart from the nations, by living the law, inviting it to shape every part of their lives. When they failed to do so, as they inevitably did, they needed the priest to atone for their sin. The law was designed to influence their lives by setting them apart for a holy way of life; when they failed to own this high calling by obeying the law, they depended (as we elaborate below) on the sacrificial ministrations of the priest. The law was thus an all-encompassing reality for the people of God; it was their standard and their steadfast guide. If we borrow from the book of Revelation at this point, we could say that the people were to eat the law, ingest it, and be made healthy and holy by it (Rev. 10:10). The priests were those, then, who came to the people and said “Eat this law.”[6]

The priest of the old covenant filled a high and holy office. No priestly servants more exemplified the set-apart nature of this work than the Levites. In Numbers 18:3–7, Yahweh’s words to Aaron, head of the Levitical order, demonstrated that the Levites directly served the Lord and stewarded the holy directives of God, under penalty of death if they failed to do so:

They shall keep guard over you and over the whole tent, but shall not come near to the vessels of the sanctuary or to the altar lest they, and you, die. They shall join you and keep guard over the tent of meeting for all the service of the tent, and no outsider shall come near you. And you shall keep guard over the sanctuary and over the altar, that there may never again be wrath on the people of Israel. And behold, I have taken your brothers the Levites from among the people of Israel. They are a gift to you, given to the LORD, to do the service of the tent of meeting. And you and your sons with you shall guard your priesthood for all that concerns the altar and that is within the veil; and you shall serve. I give your priesthood as a gift, and any outsider who comes near shall be put to death.[7]

Fulfillment of this momentous call meant that the nation would follow the Levites in worshiping the Lord in a holistic sense, on pain of death if they stray. All of life was to be normed by the law of God, and the priests were to ensure that the people embraced the gracious and beneficial rule of God’s law. The daily prohibitions and commands—what fabrics to wear, what foods to eat, how to handle cases of adultery, and much more—were not, contrary to the suggestion of some popular books, arbitrary.[8] The law initiated the people of God into a way of life distinctly different from all others around them. The focus of the law, then, was not the performance of certain bizarre rituals. All the people’s obedience to the law created a community that not only worshiped the Lord, but also was transformed by their worship into a righteous nation, a holy people who would do right as God does right. The set-apart God instituted a set-apart class, the priests, in order to administer a set-apart nation.

The instrument of this sanctifying process was the law. It was good, and good for the people (see Ps. 119). But though pure and righteous, the law could not save the people, and it never did (see Gen. 3:21; 15:6). As steward of the law, the priest was charged with overseeing the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, which provided symbolic cleansing of the sinfulness of the people. In this role, the priest “exercised a mediatorial function, standing between God and human beings.”[9] The priest, then, was no mere code enforcer of ancient Israel, no divinely instituted regulator buried in scrolls and stipulations. The Levites were heralds of divine grace.

This is clear in Leviticus 16. On the Day of Atonement, the Levites performed the central sacrificial rites of the believing community, stewarding annual ceremonies that in graphic detail pictured the evil nature of sin and the bloody nature of divinely provided atonement for sin. The Day of Atonement was a visceral affair, filled with blood and fire and death and, at the pulsing core of it all, the realized hope of forgiveness through repentance. The people could be pure. The priest symbolized all this as he made atonement for the pervasive uncleanness of himself, his surroundings, and his nation:

Then he shall kill the goat of the sin offering that is for the people and bring its blood inside the veil and do with its blood as he did with the blood of the bull, sprinkling it over the mercy seat and in front of the mercy seat. Thus he shall make atonement for the Holy Place, because of the uncleannesses of the people of Israel and because of their transgressions, all their sins. And so he shall do for the tent of meeting, which dwells with them in the midst of their uncleannesses. (Lev. 16:15–16)

We should read all of Leviticus 16, and beyond this the ministry of the law, as an early—though not ultimate—fulfillment of the Lord’s promise to make for himself a covenant people. Because of sin, this people needed cleansing. The priests provided ritual cleansing. As James M. Hamilton Jr. has said, “The transfer of guilt from the worshiper to the sacrificial beast, and then the death of the beast, cleanses the worshiper of sin.” Accordingly, “The worshipers are saved by faith through the judgment that falls on the sacrifice.”[10] It was not the ceremony that saved the worshipers in the old covenant, but faith in the one who staged the dramatic ceremony, trust in God’s gracious provision for sin. Following the symbolic enactment of atonement, the priest worked on a daily basis to ensure that this cleansed identity passed over into the daily life of the nation.

The ministry of the priests was thus a performance of hope. It was grace that the priests offered the nation, not in a physically deliverable way, but in the promise of cleansing offered all the penitent of the community. We must not miss, then, that this was directly theological work. So far from the mere observance of arcane rituals, the Levites acted out the very story of redemption before the people of God. They showed the people who they were, drawing their attention to their uncleanness and to the bloody solution to this problem. They showed the people, most importantly, who Yahweh was. He had not left his people in their impurity. Instead, Yahweh stipulated sacrifices so that they could stand in his presence and represent him to the nations.

Through a human mediator, Yahweh communicated his gracious action to his people. He did this not so that they would content themselves with their innate superiority, but that they might reach out in hope to others and “mediate his presence to the world.”[11] To be set apart in biblical terms is not an escape in any sense: it is actually a call to be plunged into the work of saving others. Israel was not created and chosen by God simply for their own edification. Even when the nation was just a glimmer in Abraham’s eye, the reflection of the unnumbered stars on the nighttime sand, Yahweh intended it to be a blessing to the world beyond (Gen. 12:2; cf. 22:18).

The Prophet: Proclaimer of Objective Revelation

What the priests offered the people in tangible form, the prophets rendered in speech. The prophet was set aside by the Lord to speak the will and announce the mind of God. Through declaration, exhortation, scorching rebuke, and entreaties to taste God’s lavish mercy, the prophets interpreted t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Pastors, Theologians, and Other Public Figures
• PART 1: BIBLICAL THEOLOGY AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY
• PART 2: SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY AND PRACTICAL THEOLOGY
• Conclusion: Fifty-Five Summary Theses on the Pastor as Public Theologian
• Notes
• Contributors
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover