How Piper Learned Reformed Theology
00:00:00.000 | Recently, Pastor John delivered the Gaffin Lecture on Theology, Culture, and Mission
00:00:09.000 | at Westminster Theological Seminary near Philadelphia. But the night before was a gathering at the
00:00:13.480 | seminary where Pastor John also spoke. The short message to the small gathering was not
00:00:17.220 | officially recorded, but a few guys in the room did record from their iPhones, and Jared
00:00:21.120 | Olyphant was one of them. Here is one clip from the message I want to share, and although
00:00:25.380 | the audio quality is not great, the excerpt is interesting because here Pastor John recounts
00:00:29.680 | his seminary days at Fuller, 1968-1971, and coming face to face with Reformed Theology.
00:00:36.280 | Here's what he said to the small gathering.
00:00:38.480 | I didn't learn my Reformed Theology mainly from John Calvin or even Jonathan Edwards,
00:00:45.480 | whom I esteem as highly as one can possibly esteem a non-divine being. I learned it from
00:00:53.960 | Romans 9 and Romans 1-8 and Galatians and the Sermon on the Mount and 1 Corinthians
00:01:00.440 | with Dan Fuller pushing my nose down in the nitty-gritty of the conjunctions and the connectors
00:01:07.900 | of "in order that" and "because" and "so that" and "although" and so on. And to this day,
00:01:18.120 | I find the theology inescapable in the Bible. Well, as I looked around as I was discovering
00:01:25.960 | these things and said, "What am I getting into? Where is this? What is this?" There
00:01:32.760 | was this bastion called Westminster on the other side of the country that had solidity
00:01:40.160 | about it. It wasn't like somebody woke up and said, "I don't think we'll believe in
00:01:43.560 | the sovereignty of God now." I mean, those of you who do historical theology will regard
00:01:50.920 | this as utterly naive because you know it goes back further than Westminster. But for
00:01:58.520 | me, casting about as a Southern Baptist kid, suddenly discovering that his mind was being
00:02:06.480 | dismantled, to have anything that looked solid on this felt very reassuring. The people at
00:02:16.840 | Westminster over the years, one of the reasons this institution has the staying power that
00:02:23.040 | it does is because of how long some of you and some of them taught. So there's Van Til,
00:02:32.640 | 33 years, and John Murray, 37 years, and Ned Stonehouse, 33 years, and Paul Woolley, 48
00:02:40.760 | years, and Ed Clowney, 40 years, and Dr. Gaffin here, associated now at least for almost 50
00:02:48.320 | years with the seminary. And I looked at this institution and I thought, "This is not a
00:02:55.000 | fly-by-night thing. These people have been thinking about this for a long time and have
00:03:01.840 | been teaching it for a long time." And then of course you discover, well yeah, and there's
00:03:07.200 | dead people who've been thinking about it for 5,000 years. So in my early days, Romans
00:03:17.920 | was the key watershed document to turn my world upside down. And you know who it was
00:03:25.560 | who guided me through Romans? John Murray. That is the most beautifully written commentary
00:03:33.800 | on the planet. People who write commentaries are not generally good writers. They just
00:03:39.760 | patch things together. I read a sentence and I just want to go back and memorize it because
00:03:47.800 | his eloquence is phenomenal. The work that must have gone in to the way he says what
00:03:53.840 | he says about the glories of Romans 5 and Romans 8 are amazing. So I thank God for John
00:04:03.480 | Murray. So I thank you for staying power and solidity and symbolic existence. Just always
00:04:15.480 | there. Westminster, the very name signifies the standard that is raised.
00:04:25.120 | That was Pastor John at a small gathering at Westminster Theological Seminary on the
00:04:28.280 | evening of March 11th, 2014. The next day he delivered the Gaffin Lecture on Theology,
00:04:33.240 | Culture, and Mission, which you can watch or listen to at DesiringGod.org. Search for
00:04:37.520 | it by the title, "The New Calvinism and the New Community." It was that message where
00:04:42.080 | he opened up with his 12 features of the New Calvinism, which made the rounds on the blogosphere.
00:04:47.160 | So how should this New Calvinism relate to the broader evangelical church? The question
00:04:51.520 | was posed to Pastor John recently and we'll hear his response tomorrow. I'm your host
00:04:55.200 | Tony Reinke. See you then.
00:04:56.120 | [END]
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