Interview with Timothy George
Recently, the Helwys Society Forum had the opportunity to interview Dr. Timothy George, Dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. The interview covered everything from poetry to books to the reformers to Calvinism/Arminianism to ecclesiology to the Manhattan Declaration to seminaries to education to more. Check it out below.
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Helwys Society Forum (“HSF”): We understand that you are quite the fan of poetry. What draws you to poetry? Who are some of your favorite poets? Do you have any favorite poems?
Timothy George (“TG”): I had a high school English teacher, Lucille Johnson, who made poetry come alive to me. I can still hear her reading to our class William Blake’s “Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright,” and other classics by Milton, Wordsworth, Dickinson, and Frost. Poetry has an evocative power that speaks to the heart. Our hymnals contain some of the greatest Christian poems ever written. I love poetry of all kinds. Some of my favorites are T. S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickenson, John Donne, George Herbert, and the contemporary poet Mary Oliver.
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HSF: Dr. George, you have written numerous books and articles on Christian history, including (but not limited to) Theology of the Reformers (1988), “John Calvin: Comeback Kid” (2009), Reading Scripture with the Reformers (2011), “The Man Who Birthed Evangelicalism” (2013), and “Benedict XVI, the Great Augustinian” (2013). In the grand scheme, why do you believe that the great Christian tradition is important? What can we do to help remedy the “chronological snobbery” that is so often apparent in our church culture today?
TG: History is not just about dead people and stuff from the past. History shapes our consciousness today; it is part of who we are. I was privileged to study with some of the greatest Christian historians of the twentieth century, including my mentor at Harvard, George Huntston Williams, the great Reformation historian Heiko O. Oberman, and David S. Steinmetz at Duke. Jaroslav Pelikan also had a great influence on the way I understand and practice historical theology. In a profound way, all of these great scholars shared a common mission:
“They were committed to keeping truth alive as a holy calling.”
The heresy of contemporaneity is one of the greatest dangers faced by today’s church. A solid knowledge of church history is an antidote to that dead-end alley.
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HSF: Having done quite a bit of work on the reformers, what relevance do you believe they hold for Christians today? If there were a few obvious lessons we could learn from them, what would they be?
TG: The reformers of the sixteenth century wanted to be faithful servants of the one holy, catholic, and apostolic church. The word catholic here does not refer to the Roman Catholic Church, but rather to what the New Testament calls “the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 3). The church catholic is the church universal, the church that is the Body of Christ extended through time as well as space. The reformers certainly did not want to start a brand new church from scratch. But they did believe that the institutional church of their day had in many respects lost its way. So they wanted to re-form the church on the basis of the Word of God, to call it back to its true apostolic vocation.
Luther was fond of quoting St. Paul’s statement that “faith comes by hearing,” fides ex auditu (Rom. 10:17). He wanted to remove the wax from the ears of the church so that it could once again hear the clear word of God in Holy Scripture. Along with this focus on the Bible and its transforming power, there was also an emphasis on the sovereign grace of God and justification by faith alone. John Stott once said that Evangelicals are gospel people and Bible people. Those were the two major emphases of the Protestant reformers.
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HSF: In recent years, divergent Christian traditions have increasingly strived to find common ground. In fact, you’ve recently authored the article “Catholics and Baptists Together” (2013). In a similar way, despite their differences, reformational Arminians and Calvinists have also made recent efforts to find common ground. What do you think of these developments? In your opinion, how can these two groups best find common ground in Christian love and serve God together in their society and world?
TG: I have tried to practice what I have called an ecumenism of conviction, not an ecumenism of accommodation. Because truth matters, doctrine and theology matter as well. Guided by the Bible, and led by the Holy Spirit, we should make every endeavor to come together in visible unity, but not by overriding our consciences or ignoring our differences. I like my friend Tom Oden’s image of the Evangelical airplane with two wings, one Calvinist, the other Arminian. The airplane does not fly very well, if at all, with just one wing.
There are many things we can and should do together as brothers and sisters in Christ without being 100 percent in agreement on every matter. Worship, evangelism, and works of mercy should lead the way. The friendship between John Wesley and George Whitefield is a good model for this kind of cooperation without compromise. They strongly disagreed on some aspects of theology, but were united in the essentials of the faith. They held one another in great respect and worked together to advance the cause of Christ.
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HSF: At times, non-Baptist traditions have criticized Baptist ecclesiology for being too “individualistic.” Some have even claimed that Baptist congregational polity actually promotes individualism rather than communal living. Why do you think this has been the case? In what ways can the Baptist tradition show that this caricature is inaccurate?
TG: Au contraire, congregational church polity, when it is carried out according to biblical norms, is a corrective to rampant individualism. The covenanted community of believers is based on mutual responsibility and accountability. The atomistic character of modern culture is the seedbed for the destruction of community at all levels, family, church, and society. I don’t think that Baptists are more prone to this phenomenon than any other denominational group.
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HSF: In the spirit of bringing Christians of differing traditions together perhaps, you also helped draft the Manhattan Declaration alongside Chuck Colson and Robert George. Tell us a bit about your involvement with that document. Also, tell us what you believe is its relevance, especially as an interfaith document, in the present social and political climate in our country.
TG: Well, I would not call the Manhattan Declaration an interfaith document. In fact, it is a specifically Christian document, drawing from Evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox. Together we declare that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life and that no one comes to the Father except through Him (John 14:6). As persons of Christian commitment, we made the declaration on behalf of the sanctity of every human life from conception to natural death; the dignity of marriage as God intended it to be, a lifelong covenantal union between one man and one woman; and religious freedom for all persons everywhere.
Again, we do not pretend that important, church-dividing issues have all been solved by this document. But we thought it important for persons from across these three great Christian traditions to come together, stand together, and speak out together for life, marriage, and freedom. By the way, the Manhattan Declaration continues to grow as a movement. We have a wonderful new executive director, Eric Teetsel, who is twenty-nine years old and has a passion for reaching out and enlisting a new generation for this cause. If you have not signed the Manhattan Declaration, or want to find out more about it, check out our website here.
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HSF: Moving on to your deanship—Dr. George, what strategic role do you believe seminaries will play in the next generation? Is their only function to equip competent pastors, or do they have the responsibility to also train public intellectuals?
TG: I have been the dean of Beeson Divinity School for twenty-five years. Our mission here is clear:
“To prepare God-called men and women for the service of the church.”
Our focus is on “training pastors who can preach.” Above all else, I want our Beeson graduates to be men and women of God. But I also want them to be good students of the Bible and able practitioners of ministry. I also want them to be fully engaged with the world as it is, knowledgeable about the challenges Christians face in their lives today, and committed to justice, love, and peace. We do not have a separate track for training pastors and another one for training public intellectuals. We want to train the kind of pastor who can speak with clarity and passion to the great issues of the day but who, at the same time, does not neglect to love and care for his flock.
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HSF: What is your philosophy of education, especially in the Christian sphere? Should we be concerned that some schools are forsaking the education of the entire person? If so, why, and what can we do about it?
TG: Christian education begins in the home when the newborn child returns from the hospital for the first time. When my son Christian was several days old, I began to read out loud to him from the Psalms. We continued that exercise until the entire psalter had been covered. I reject the kind of bifurcation we sometimes see in certain schools where religion and spirituality are dealt with in one sector of the school while biology, chemistry, and English are taught in another. To avoid this kind of damaging divorce, we need to emphasize a Christian worldview in every aspect of the curriculum, across all faculties.
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HSF: As we conclude, what sort of music do you enjoy? Do you have any favorite composers or singers?
TG: I once played a baritone horn in my junior high school band, but that is as close as I have ever come to being a musician myself. But I do love music and listen to it often, especially on trips and while doing my daily walks. Johann Sebastian Bach is my favorite by far. No one else even comes close, though Mozart tries. But I also love country music, especially bluegrass. Give me a root beer and a couple of Louvin Brothers CDs, and I’m just fine!
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HSF: Most of our readers are not only Evangelicals but conservative Baptists as well. What piece of counsel would you say to them in closing regarding the prospects of Evangelical ministry in the days ahead?
TG: I’m glad to know that most of your readers are conservative Baptists. I would include myself in that family of faith. Every time I have the chance to preach at the installation of a new pastor, I always give these two words of advice:
“Preach the Word, and love your people.”
There is much else that pastors are called to do, of course, such as counseling, visitation, pastoral care, strategic planning, and on and on. But these activities of ministry, if really authentic, will flow from the two primary tasks of every pastor: proclaiming with clarity and faithfulness the written word of God in Holy Scripture and loving the flock of God the pastor has been called to shepherd.
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The HSF would like to thank Dean George for his willingness to offer us this interview. To find out him, check out his work at Beeson Divinity School or First Things.
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