The Pastor as Scholar? An Interview with Owen Strachan

Posted By Jackson Watts on Dec 8, 2014 | 4 comments

Recently I had the opportunity to interview Owen Strachan, an emerging evangelical author, as well as professor of theology and history at Boyce College. We discussed a number of subjects that will be of interest to Forum readers. You may read a transcript of our interview below, or listen to the audio file below.

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Jackson Watts (“JW”): It’s my pleasure this afternoon to be here at the 2014 National Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in sunny San Diego (little bit nicer than Baltimore last year!). But it’s a special privilege to meet with Owen Strachan and to talk a little bit about some things which we’re mutually interested in, and I think our listeners and readers of the Forum will be interested in as well.

Dr. Strachan is assistant professor of Christian theology and church history at Boyce College, which many will know is the undergraduate arm of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He also serves as the president on the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW), and has authored or edited several books, including one that I have right here that I’m looking forward to reading, Risky Gospel: Abandon Fear and Build Something Awesome. The book I’m more familiar with The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor, which I believe you edited in 2011. I’ve also learned a lot about your work in other ways, included an upcoming volume on Charles Colson, and also one that you’re co-authoring with Kevin Vanhoozer entitled The Pastor as Public Theologian.

Owen, thanks for making time to talk with me today.

Owen Strachan (“OS”): Thank you Jackson, I appreciate it.

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JW: Tell us briefly a little bit (and this is kind of an unfair question) about your background, where you came from and how you’re now running all over the place at ETS—moderating, presenting, and so forth. In a nutshell, how do you go from where you came from to here? What does the middle of that look like?

OS: Well I guess I get bored easily. That’s the quick, one-sentence answer. ADD is maybe an undiagnosed condition of mine. Perhaps that’s the reason for my theological inquiries. So I’m from coastal Maine originally. I grew up in Maine, was born and raised there, then attended a secular college called Bowdoin College, which is probably best known for Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the Civil War general. I studied history at Bowdoin and then went to Washington, D.C. and interned under Mark Dever at Capitol Hill Baptist Church right on Capitol Hill. Then I went to Southern Seminary and did a M.Div. in biblical and theological studies. Then went to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) on the north shore of Chicago to study historical theology there. And in the middle of that in 2010 got a call from the good folks at Southern Seminary/Boyce College informing me that there was a position in systematic theology and church history that was open. Denny Burk was the guy who told me that originally, and so by God’s grace ended up teaching at Boyce. This is the fifth year now that I’ve been there.

I was also asked a couple of years ago to become the Executive Director of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood [“CBMW”], which is headquartered in Louisville. I had written for the journal and did some blogs on gender roles and issues, but had no thoughts that I would be in such a position. My father-in-law actually has been president of CBMW; that was the only connection I had with it institutionally. Now I find myself president. So yeah, I wear those two hats. Most importantly I’m the husband of Bethany, and the father of three little kids, though.

That’s the most important role that God has given me in life.

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JW: Excellent. And that’s actually a great segway, because while we weren’t going to spend a lot of time on this, I think it would be beneficial for people to know a little bit about what the purpose for the Council is. So could you speak a little bit about that?

OS: The purpose of the Council is to promote, and if necessary, defend the Bible’s teaching on human gender and sexuality—or perhaps in a more sturdily constructed sense, “manhood and womanhood.” What is our manhood and womanhood for? There is very little sense today of any kind of metanarrative for manhood and womanhood. So we have the brute facts of man and womanhood, but even that today is becoming very confused in our culture and churches in addition are becoming confused.

CBMW just exists, by God’s grace hopefully, to breathe clarity into this whole discussion, to help the church to understand the centrality of manhood and womanhood to God’s design, to God’s plan. And then as I was saying a minute ago, to lay out the storyline for our manhood and womanhood (whether we’re single or married, man or woman, old or young), God has a broader narrative He fits our gender into, and that’s what we exist for.

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JW: What’s the most common question you get asked in that capacity?

OS: The most common question would probably relate to women being pastors. Why does the Bible teach that they can’t be? And additionally, why are men heads of their homes? But you know, the deal today is that we’re getting all sorts of questions today about just what manhood and womanhood is. What does it mean to be a man or a woman? What does it mean to be a father or mother? How do I get myself to marriage if I’m called to marriage—basically the framework surrounding the family?

Part of America, and before America the West, has collapsed. And so I think Christians sometimes have an overly optimistic picture of how everybody has grown up with a familial structure. Increasingly people are going to be coming into the Christian church who have no training of any kind, of any kind, in manhood and womanhood. So we get lots of questions like that, and they’re increasing in number as we go on.

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JW: Absolutely. And that’s a subject unfortunately we might have to save for later. But I appreciate you speaking to that. Again, my interest in terms of how I came about you was that 2011 volume The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor, and it largely features these contributions from well-known pastor and author John Piper, and D.A. Carson, whose books I’m sure many who listen to this will have on their shelves. So can you say a word or two about how that project came about?

OS: That project came about because I was studying under Doug Sweeney at Trinity [“TEDS”] who has done some serious work on what’s called the “pastor-theologian,” what I would say is the historical model of Protestant pastoring. And Sweeney had been speaking about Jonathan Edwards as a pastor-theologian in classes I took and in conversations I had him at Trinity. And so he basically lit a fire for me (he wasn’t trying to, but this was just the effect that it had) for this for this kind of enhanced conception of the pastorate. In other words, the pastor is not a figure who simply offers life-trips and nice stories, and that sort of thing, you know some spiritual pragmatic advice. The pastor is a theologian. Every pastor (not just those who like reading 600-page dissertations with lots of footnotes, [but] every pastor) is appointed by God to be a theologian for His people, to interpret the Word and interpret the World for His people essentially.

Now of course there are going to be limits to the extent of that enterprise for any pastor. You know, there’s lots to do in a given week for instance. But that, nonetheless, I believe is the calling of a pastor. Let’s put it this way: The Gospel is a theological reality. The Word is a theological book. You cannot in anyway get away from the central reality of theology in the Christian calling and the Christian life.

Now in terms of the scholar as pastor, which Carson spoke to, I was also getting a sense at that time that scholars, really in some way, should serve the church. So that’s how Carson himself, while I was at TEDS, and others I trained under like Mohler and Ware and Schreiner and others at Southern—that’s the role they took. It didn’t mean that they didn’t do high-level theology, they didn’t think hard or write dense books or something like that. It did mean that in some way they were seeing all of that effort—whether it was high-level academic theology, which there’s definitely a place for that (and evangelicals struggle mightily to understand that), or they were doing mid-level theology, kind of church-level theology, or even popular—all of that is for the church in some way, and can be. And so both facets of that vision (the Piper side, the pastor-theologian) and the Carson side (the scholar-pastor) were exhilarating to me at that time. And that led to me pursuing both of them for an event after the 2011 National Conference of the Gospel Coalition. I reached out to them (I knew they would be there) and asked if we could hold an event through the Henry Center at TEDS in downtown Chicago at Park Church and they agreed. So they gave these wonderful lectures, wonderful talks I guess you’d say, and Crossway had interest in them and it became a book.

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JW: So, in short, you would maintain that the pastor is a theologian, and to maybe refine that a bit, the pastor should be as scholar, though their scholarship will certainly differ based on their gifts, opportunities, training and so forth. Is that an accurate picture of what you’re saying?

OS: Yes, and you’re just drafting off of the title. The title was “Pastor as Scholar.” Now scholar is a contested word. You know, some will say even a young professor like me shouldn’t say he is a scholar, and I usually don’t say that. So that’s the word that ended up in the title. You can work with it, though. The pastor is either a theologian of the Word, or a scholar of the Word. So I think when you restore that understanding of the pastorate to it, I think it really enlivens what it is that pastors really do. I think it ennobles pastors because all of a sudden they start seeing themselves fundamentally (again, and there’s a lot of work which proceeds from here), but they see themselves as stewards of theological mysteries of truth. And there is no other conception that I know of that so brings pastoral work to live. All of your counseling, all of your discipling, all of our teaching and training, all of that should be filtered through biblical theology, the theology of the Word, whether again you end up writing books or you don’t. You are stewarding theological truths and realities, and that is the greatest role I can imagine in the known universe. It’s a high and holy calling.

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Part two of my conversation with Strachan, in which we move more deeply into these subjects and other projects of Strachan’s, will be available on Wednesday.

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