Jonathan Leeman - Unashamed of the Gospel

Copyright 2016 by B&H Publishing Group

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

978-1-4336-8897-3

Printed by B&H Publishing Group

Nashville, Tennessee

Dewey Decimal Classification: 248.5

Subject Heading: WITNESSING \ CHRISTIAN LIFE \ GOSPEL

Unless otherwise noted all Scripture is taken from the English Standard Version, ( esv ) copyright 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. esv Text Edition: 2007. All rights reserved.

Also used: Holman Christian Standard Bible ( hcsb ), copyright 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2009 by Holman Bible Publishers, Nashville Tennessee. All rights reserved.

Also used: Holy Bible, New International Version, niv , Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Also used: New American Standard Bible ( nasb ), the Lockman Foundation, 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977; used by permission.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 20 19 18 17 16

Foreword

Suppose you were suddenly to find yourself among seven thousand mainly young people. Suppose they were singing, without any band, Reginald Hebers Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty! Suppose after that singing you heard an hour-long sermon, and that all this went on for three days. You might well wonder where you were and why this was happening.

My own arrival in that situation was not entirely sudden, for I had heard and read of it beforehand. But it has still left me with a degree of wonder. The place was the Together for the Gospel conference in Louisville, Kentucky, in April of 2014. Until then, I had not been in a city before where I was stopped in the street, and at its airport, to sign Banner of Truth books.

What is happening in the United States? Too often an opinion is offered by those dependent on secondhand information. It is further regrettable that, due to one publishers subtitle nearly a decade ago, A Journalists Journey with the New Calvinism, the idea was launched that what is happening can be called the New Calvinist movement. That umbrella label is a misnomer. A movement suggests organization, staff, office, and, usually, its own magazine and conference. The phenomenon being described has none of these things. It is far more indefinite and diverse.

There is another reason why the name coined in 2008 should not be accepted: New Calvinist too easily suggests some kind of departure from the Old. But what is now occurring in many parts of the United States can clearly be seen to have sprung out of what is far from new. It is no more new than the doctrine that was heard under Whitefield and Edwards in the 1740sor, later, under Spurgeon and Lloyd-Jones. What was supposed to be as dead as Queen Anne is very much alive in what is happening today. Old authors are being read more eagerly than young ones, and yet it is not the literature, significant as it is, which can account for what is happening. The truth is,

Nobody on earth has managed this Reformed resurgence with all its diversity. No one on earth has planned it, and none can or should harness it. This is a work of God. It may be short-lived, or it may be deep and wide and long. God will decide. I make no triumphalist predictions. We dont control it.

Archibald Brown once told the declining congregation at the Metropolitan Tabernacle that, when God revives his work, popular solutions for a recovery would disappear: There will be nothing said from the pulpit or platform about up-to-date.... It will be Bible! Bible! Bible! And the people clamoring, Let us have the Word of God!

Of course, anything seen to be influential in the church scene gathers supporters, and it is to be expected that all kinds of groupings, churches, and conferences may wish to align themselves with a resurgent Calvinism. A mixture of participants is inevitable. It The adoption of a name is no proof of anything. Everything needs to be tested by the truth proclaimed, and the character of those involvedare they prayerful, humble before God, and loving to all men?

The United States is a large nation, and it would be folly to make generalizations about this resurgence. As I have already said, there is no one bloc organization to which either credit or blame can be given. The T4G conference is only one conference out of many similar ones across the States, yet to a considerable extent it may be thought of as representative of what some have dubbed New Calvinism. Of the nine men who preachedincluding Thabiti Anyabwile, Mark Dever, Ligon Duncan, John MacArthur, Albert Mohler, and John Pipernone used that name, but they have been so identified by others.

This Louisville conference originated in 2006, and has met biennially since. What it stands for is unambiguous. It has eighteen Articles of Faith printed in the conference program, and the addresses given at the earlier conferences are available online. They will make surprising reading for anyone who supposes that this is just another of the recurring cycles of evangelical enterprises intent on drawing a crowd. Instead of following a well-trodden evangelical pragmatism, T4G departs from much that has been near axiomatic in contemporary thinking. I had scarcely returned home to the United Kingdom when I ran into that thinking in an article which told me that the kind of worship service and preaching that was part of the ministry of Dr. Lloyd-Jones belonged to an age completely gone.

Such bold assertions received no reverence at T4G. Instead, the concern over what appeals to people, or turns them off, is traced to a lost confidence in the power of the gospel itself.

The role which Christian music is expected to play in influencing the world for the gospel is a prominent issue today. Here, also, T4G is out of step with popular thinking. I do not say that it has entirely clarified the issue, but it is addressing and emphasizing the right starting point. Namely, worship ought to be worship.

In Louisville, the words sung for praise were selected chiefly for the suitability of their biblical content. Some two-thirds of the hymns printed in the conference brochure were composed before 1900, and a number much earlier. But it was not only what was sung, but how it was sung, which stood out. Today congregational singing is commonly fast, and frequently almost drowned out by accompanying musical instruments. What else can possibly be popular? Slow singing, led only by a piano (and sometimes not even by that), is supposed to be something to be avoided. Certainly there is no merit in slow singing as such, and there has to be variation in pace, but when the tempo is always quick the strong likelihood is that the music has come to mean more than the words. Spurgeon represented what he called the new fashioned style of singing as, Let us rattle through it as fast as we can. Never mind about whether God gets any glory out of it or not; all we care about is the music. He recommended tunes that give you a chance of chewing it, not one that you must swallow, as if it were a pill.

There were other areas where the teaching or practice at Together for the Gospel cannot be said to harmonize well with contemporary thinking. No ground was given to the cry that we are in the visual age, not in the age of the spoken word; nor to the idea that the so-called generational divide should be reflected in the organization of church life. Young although the majority of the conference was, the leadership was not.

The leadership of T4G has varied little from its beginning in 2006, and the unity of the conference program reflects the unity among its planners. Although they are preachers from different denominational backgrounds, there is a strong friendship among them. One of the factors that has brought them together is the heritage of literature to which they have a common commitment. This literature was present at Louisville, and urged upon the attendees, in an unforgettable manner. Both the quantity and the consistent character of the books available in rooms the size of football fields were quite staggering. No reformed publisher seemed to be missing. In the course of the proceedings, when books were given to particular participants, the choice of titles was significant. The youngest pastor present was given Arnold Dallimores two-volume life of Whitefield; the longest-serving preacher was given Archibald G. Brown: Spurgeons Successor ; someone else received the 1,200 pages of William Gurnalls classic, The Christian in Complete Armour . By no means were all the authors commended deceased. Thabiti Anyabwile spoke of how reading Walter J. Chantrys book, Todays Gospel: Authentic or Synthetic? had been a turning point in his thinking and that he had lived in the wake of it ever since.