Fellowship focus 5 - August 1998
Teaching Preachers
As many of you know, I have been teaching at the London Theological Seminary this year, and plan to carry on doing so from October when their next term begins. It's a great privilege as well as pleasure and encouragement to do this. At the college, which is in Finchley, North London, the students have a language class (alternating between Hebrew and Greek) and then 3 lecture periods of about 45 minutes each, every morning from Tuesday to Friday. I've been doing roughly a quarter of this, i.e. one morning a week, but I've also been going over once a fortnight to teach a Greek class (so I've been doing 3 Greek classes per fortnight). When I do a morning there, it is usually 9.25-10.15 Greek, then tea break (! sounds cushy, but the students have had a morning worship service together immediately before Greek), then lectures from 10.40 till 1.00, or else I stop at 12.05 and someone else does the final period to lunch. It's a 2-year course, but everyone is taught together (about 25 students this year), which saves on teaching even though it's not ideal for the students. Greek and Hebrew have to be taught to separate years of course - I've been doing the first years' Greek. My lecturing has been mainly on New Testament; this year I've been doing Matthew, Mark, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, the "Synoptic Problem", and apologetics.
The college is thought of as "the Lloyd-Jones Bible College", and in many ways it is. The ethos of the founder is preserved to the extent of it being conservative evangelical and Reformed in doctrine, with a strong emphasis on the centrality of preaching in Christian work and also on the importance of felt experience of the truth - so it's not "anti-charismatic" in the way many Reformed people would be.
One of the best things about the college is the mix of types of student in terms of personality, nationality (across 5 continents) and church background (from "Church of England, Continuing" through Presbyterian and Baptist to Pentecostal!).
The lectures are not just lectures: I say a certain amount of course, but sooner or later people want to ask questions or make contributions - or I stimulate this process. One tricky issue that arises both in what I say in a lecture and even more in the "debates" that develop is what to treat as agreed, settled, taken for granted, and what to be "open" about. Sometimes things are raised by me or by one of the students that disturb another student, because he has always taken a certain point for granted. How far do we go, either in our own thinking, or in how much we unsettle another Christian?
In our own thinking, if we can see clearly that something is taught in Scripture, we must of course not call it into question, although we may want to think through the various reasons why it is true. But if we are not sure whether it's really taught in Scripture, that is a different matter. And sometimes we must be willing to re-examine whether something is taught in Scripture.
As far as teaching others, or unsettling them goes: my view is that some Christians, especially trainee ministers, can do with a bit of unsettling in a basically friendly, Bible-believing atmosphere - the more thinking through of what they believe and why they believe it, in college, the better! So I'm afraid I don't always regret making a student feel as though I'm pulling the rug from under him.
My point is: not "the more doubt and confusion, the better", but rather that the Spirit enlightens us and leads us further into the truth, yet we sometimes mistake mere opinions of ours for what he has shown us. And in this case, an unsettleing realisation that a certain cherished opinion is not the truth, or that we don't know why we believe it, is part of our way forward. We all need to find our mental security in the Lord Jesus himself, and in knowing the basic truths of the faith by the Spirit's illumination, rather than trying to find our security in having everything neatly worked out in our minds, in a system of ours that has every question answered. As Steve Brown says in his thought-provoking book Born free, (publ. by Kingsway) "The essence of Christian maturity is a high tolerance for ambiguity." (p116; a bit of an overstatement, like some other things in the book; but it's a fascinating and worthwhile read).
From my own point of view, it's been very good to be forced to study the background to some New Testament books and their overall teaching, structure, and purpose more than I otherwise would have. It has helped me to understand the Bible better, and I hope to preach a little better.
Furthermore, teaching intelligent and motivated trainee preachers is good because they ask questions that make me think and go back and study more, or they simply tell me things I didn't know! All in all, an enlightening experience. Please pray that God will continue to be with me in this work.
Chris Bennett.