(upbeat music) - Pastor John recently led a Q&A with the students of Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. Here's one question from one of the students. - Hello, Dr. John Piper. I became Reformed after hearing you preach through John chapter six, 2009, I believe it was. So I probably wouldn't even be here at Westminster.

I wouldn't even have thought about this school if it wasn't for just listening to you. So I'm very much indebted to you. - You're welcome, Westminster. (laughing) - Just keeping in thinking along the lines of what you said this morning, I was very intrigued by you unpacking TULIP and connecting it to just racial harmony.

One of my goals in ministry is I think about doing theology. I want to connect, I want to bring Reformed theology to African Americans, black people. And one of the issues I'm thinking about is how does Reformed theology speak to certain issues, cultural issues in the black community? Some would say that we're going through a cultural crisis right now.

High unemployment, high abortion rates, a ton of things, crime rates through the roof, and certain issues that I want to speak to prophetically. And I'm wondering, I haven't thought about this because I've only been Reformed for a few years and I'm still growing in my theology and kind of thinking through the implications of it.

But you've been Reformed a lot longer than me, so probably you have more thoughts on this. Can Reformed theology speak to specific cultural issues that would you advise a budding, I guess, theologian to address specific cultural issues or maybe just preach the gospel and as people change, the issues kind of address, get addressed from a different perspective?

How fruitful would you say Reformed theology is to addressing particular issues? And can we expect to see real cultural change from an endeavor like that, if it's even worth taking on? Is my question clear? - Yeah, it's totally worth taking on. And the grain of truth in the prosperity theology, the grain of truth in health, wealth, prosperity theology is that when the gospel takes root in a community, it changes everything.

You know, it changes everything. Over the generations, a robust embrace of the gospel and its fullest and most biblical expression in Reformed theology will lift people out of poverty because the roots of poverty are moral roots. I mean, I watch it in my city. I live in the city, I look at the kids.

I know why these kids are gonna blow it. Mom and dad aren't there, right? It's just not rocket science. Look at the kids at Hope Academy and long for them to have anybody at home to say, "Do your homework." Because if you just do your homework, you'll flourish. You'll probably go to college.

You'll be able to make a life. And if you go home and you just watch TV and go out and goof off, you won't. It's a dead end street. But there's, I mean, the whole substructure that's there in the middle class to support efforts at success, where did those come from?

They came from John Calvin and the Apostle Paul and the Geneva commitments. The Reformed Protestant work ethic didn't come out of nowhere. So the grain of truth in prosperity preaching is not that he'll put gold rings and best cars in everybody's hands, but that he will transform the substructure of the way we think about life so that we don't shoot ourselves in the foot so often in life.

And so my answer is absolutely yes. Every problem, Reformed theology is relevant for every problem in every ethnicity of every stress and stripe. And the gospel is the core of it. And I think the way you should think about Reformed theology in the gospel is that the gospel of Christ crucified and risen, providing a righteousness we don't have, providing forgiveness we can't earn through faith alone is gloriously powerful when it addresses people who are the most broken, people who think they have not a prayer in the world to be right with God, let alone anybody else.

And Reformed theology are the deepest roots of that and the highest branches of that and the farthest extent of that and the best expression of that and the kind of whole counsel of God that surrounds and protects that. And so you focus on the gospel into broken people's lives and then you have resources out here in all this Reformed theology to bring to bear on the peculiar stresses they bring to life.

And it is, it is totally relevant. And the answer to the question, I think, about whether you just focus on the gospel or whether you tackle some of these things is you won't have a choice, right? I mean, the urban situation with a church full of unemployed, poor people, you have no choice.

You can't say, oh, we don't deal with that here. It's over. That's life. That's real life. Are they gonna eat? So we don't, we middle-class wealthy folks, we can sort of think that way. Like, we'll just preach the gospel because all the presuppositions of prosperity are in place. Kind of unspoken, being fed.

With a community that's been broken. And we've gotta be so careful. We're talking about African-American situation here because lots of books are being written right now that there is no such thing as black in America anymore. There are blacks, right? There are 50 black cultures in America. So you can't say the black situation or the African-American situation.

But the most dysfunctional core of fatherlessness, say, that is addressable wonderfully by the gospel. There is no other address. I mean, everything else has been tried, right? Everything else has been tried. Obamacare is not the solution. And neither was the Great Society. Neither was anything else that any president's ever brought.

War on poverty has never made a substantial difference. Whereas the gospel has lifted many people from the brokenness of their family, brokenness of their own personal heart. So more power to anybody who attempts to take on whatever aspects of American culture are presently broken and dysfunctional. Focus on the gospel, but yes, the Reformed theology as its larger expression and root and branch is an amazing resource for what you're gonna deal with.

- That clip was taken from Pastor John's recent interactions with the students of Westminster Seminary. And speaking of the social impact of the gospel Reformed theology in John Calvin, see Marvin Alasky's lecture, The Secular Script in the Theater of God, which was delivered at the 2009 Desiring God National Conference on John Calvin.

It was also later published as a chapter in our book titled "With Calvin in the Theater of God." The lecture and the book can both be found free of charge at our website, desiringgod.org. And if you'd like to ask Pastor John a question of your own, please email it to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.

As always, thank you for sending in thoughtful and great questions. And thank you for listening. I'm your host Tony Reinke, I'll see you tomorrow. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)