The Gospel and the Modern World (eBook)

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D. A. Carson’s Theological Method

Andrew David Naselli

How does D. A. Carson do theology? In other words, what is his theological method? That question is challenging to answer for at least two reasons.1

First, Carson has authored and edited a lot of publications. Here’s how Justin Taylor put it in 2009:

Dr. Carson’s sheer productivity is nothing less than astonishing. One could become tired just working through the latest numbers: he has written 50 books; 235 articles; 112 book reviews; and 46 edited books in the various series he edits. Average it out and it comes to about one book written or edited every four months, with one article and two reviews written every six weeks—for three decades.2

Nearly fifteen years later, those numbers are even higher.

Second, although Carson has written several works that explain his theological method,3 he has not written a book or detailed article that systematically presents his theological method.4 That is what this essay attempts to do.

This essay begins with a biographical sketch of Carson and then focuses on describing (not critiquing) his theological method by answering three questions:

1. What does Carson presuppose for doing theology?

2. What does Carson think the theological disciplines are?

3. How does Carson think the theological disciplines interrelate?

A Biographical Sketch: Carson’s Family, Education, and Ministry5

If postmodernism has taught theologians anything, it is that humans cannot interpret the Bible with complete objectivity. Theologians bring far too much baggage to the interpretive process, including language, culture, religion, education, upbringing, exposure, ethnicity, and sex. This biographical sketch mentions several factors that influence Carson’s theological method to some degree. As helpful as it is to mention these factors, it raises a methodological question that I am not sure anyone can answer: How does one objectively measure such influences? Carson raised that question himself when I inquired about influences on his life.6

Carson’s Family

Carson’s father, Thomas Donald McMillan Carson (1911–1992), was born near Belfast, Northern Ireland, and his family immigrated to Ottawa, Canada, in 1913. With the desire to plant churches in Québec, he graduated from Toronto Baptist Seminary in 1937. In 1938, he married Elizabeth Margaret Maybury (1909–1989), and the Lord blessed them with three children. Donald Arthur Carson was their second child, born on December 21, 1946.

Tom Carson faithfully ministered in Drummondville, Québec, from 1948 to 1963, a trying time in which he experienced persecution and little apparent fruit at his church.7 Don Carson, who entered McGill University in Montreal in 1963, spent his formative years in this environment. His family lived simply, too poor to own a home or pay for his university training. His parents loved him and set a godly example. Carson recalls,

My life has been blessed by some influential models. I must begin by mentioning my own parents. I remember how, even when we children were quite young, each morning my mother would withdraw from the hurly-burly of life to read her Bible and pray. In the years that I was growing up, my father, a Baptist minister, had his study in our home. Every morning we could hear him praying in that study. My father vocalized when he prayed—loudly enough that we knew he was praying, but not loudly enough that we could hear what he was saying. Every day he prayed, usually for about forty-five minutes. Perhaps there were times when he failed to do so, but I cannot think of one.8

Carson deeply respected his father and was especially close to his mother, who capably led ladies’ Bible studies and could use Greek and Hebrew.

Carson, reared in French Canada, is bilingual and remained a Canadian citizen until he became a United States citizen in 2006. While working on his PhD in Cambridge, he met Joy Wheildon, a British schoolteacher, and they married in 1975. They have two children, Tiffany and Nicholas.

Carson’s Education

Carson graduated from Drummondville High School (1959–1963) with the highest standing. He earned a BSc in chemistry and mathematics from McGill University (1963–1967), where he took extra courses in classical Greek and psychology. He received various scholarships and awards while earning his MDiv from Central Baptist Seminary in Toronto (1967–1970), and he took four units of New Testament study at Regent College (1970). His PhD is from Emmanuel College, Cambridge University (1972–1975), where he studied under the Rev. Dr. (later Prof.) Barnabas Lindars. His thesis is on God’s sovereignty and human responsibility in the Gospel according to John.9

Carson’s Ministry

Carson, now a world-renowned evangelical New Testament scholar, started as a part-time lecturer in French at Central Baptist Seminary in Toronto (1967–1970) and in mathematics at Richmond College in Toronto (1969–1970). He was an occasional lecturer at Northwest Baptist Theological College in Vancouver (1971–1972) while ministering as the pastor of Richmond Baptist Church in Richmond, British Columbia (1970–1972), where he was ordained under the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches of Canada in 1972.

After earning his PhD, he served at Northwest Baptist Theological College as the associate professor of New Testament (1975–1978) and academic dean (1976–1978). After hearing Carson present a paper at the Evangelical Theological Society’s conference in 1977, Kenneth Kantzer asked him to join the faculty at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS), where Carson has served as associate professor of New Testament (1978–1982), professor of New Testament (1982–1991), research professor of New Testament (1991–2018), and emeritus professor of New Testament (2018–present). From 1978 to 1991, he took a sabbatical every third year in England.10

He has taught over fifty different graduate courses—many of them multiple times—on various levels: MDiv, MA, ThM, DMin, and PhD. He has served as the book review editor for the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (1979–1986), the editor of Trinity Journal (1980–1986), and the general editor of Themelios (2007–2018). In addition to editing dozens of books, he is the general editor of three major series: Pillar Commentaries on the New Testament, New Studies in Biblical Theology, and Studies in Biblical Greek. And with Eric Tully, he is co-editing the Pillar Commentaries on the Old Testament. He is the founding president and theologian-at-large of the Gospel Coalition (TGC).

Carson frequently preaches and teaches internationally at a substantial number of churches, conferences, student groups, colleges, and seminaries, including university missions.11 He has been familiar with most of the major theological figures in evangelicalism on a first-name basis, and he is an avid critic of culture.12

He reads about five hundred books each year (in addition to hundreds of articles), and his reading expands far beyond theology into science, politics, and more. Ever since his days as a PhD student at Cambridge, he has devoted about half a day per week to read and catalog articles in about eighty theological journals, which he enters in a database with tags that enable him to locate and cite articles efficiently. His personal print library consists of about ten thousand choice volumes.

His reputation among the students at TEDS is legendary, and he upholds daunting standards for PhD seminar papers and dissertations. When I was his student, I was daunted to learn that he gives an A grade only if the paper is publishable in a first-rate journal. On a lighter note, he enjoys woodworking and hiking, and when the weather permits it, he rides a motorcycle.

The most prominent focus of Carson’s ministry is the gospel. He writes and speaks about it frequently,13 and he has said something like the following countless times:

Recognize that students do not learn everything you teach them. They certainly do not learn everything I teach them! What do they learn? They learn what I am excited about; they learn what I emphasize, what I return to again and again; they learn what organizes the rest of my thought. So if I happily presuppose the gospel but rarely articulate it and am never excited about it, while effervescing frequently about, say, ecclesiology or textual criticism, my students may conclude that the most important thing to me is ecclesiology or textual criticism. They may pick up my assumption of the gospel; alternatively, they may even distance themselves from the gospel; but what they will almost certainly do is place at the center of their thought ecclesiology or textual criticism, thereby wittingly or unwittingly marginalizing the gospel. Both ecclesiology and textual criticism, not to mention a plethora of other disciplines and sub-disciplines, are worthy of the most sustained study and reflection. Nevertheless, part of my obligation as a scholar-teacher, a scholar-pastor, is to show how my specialism relates to that which is...