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Today we interview Mark Thompson...

Mark, how did you come to Christ?

I first heard the gospel in a Sunday School class at the local Baptist Church. However, my faith was nurtured by an ISCF group at High School, during a period when none of my family went to church at all. In the year of my HSC I began to attend the local Anglican Church and the adventure took off from there.

How do you occupy your time?

I spend a lot of my time teaching theology at Moore College. Apart from my time as a husband and father, almost all my other involvements spring in one way or another from my role at College. I am currently committed to far too many writing projects and I’m involved in the life of the Diocese of Sydney and Anglican evangelicalism more widely.

Tell us a bit about your background and other interests

I grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney and worked in churches in northern Sydney and the Illawarra. For three years Kathryn and I lived in the UK and we’ve made many great friends there. But for the past twenty years or so my life has been focussed in the inner city and the work of Moore College. Our family attends St Matthew’s Anglican Church, Ashbury.

My biggest interest and concern remains seeking to be a godly husband and a godly father to our four little girls.

What are five books that really helped you grow as a Christian?

Very early on John Stott’s little study Your Confirmation helped to put some important building blocks in place.

Jim Packer’s Knowing God and John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion helped me to see the contours of evangelical systematic theology.

Heiko Oberman’s biography of Luther, Martin Luther: Man between God and the Devil, while a little idiosyncratic at points, fuelled a longstanding interest in the German Reformer and helped me to see in fresh ways why urgency and passion are integral parts of being a theologian.

While not a book, a series of talks from a Katoomba Youth Convention in the early 1980s, John Chapman’s series on Guidance, provided a brilliant model of biblical theology and its practical import. When I first heard them, they revolutionised the way I read the Bible. (Buy the MP3s here: Talk 1; Talk 2; Talk 3; Talk 4.)

I should add that my time as a student at Moore College was life-changing as well.

What are you reading now?

An assortment:

Mark Driscoll’s Radical Reformission

David Hall & Peter Lilliback, Theological Guide to Calvin’s Institutes: Essays and Analysis

It’s been a while since I read a good spy thriller.

And what books would you recommend as must-reads right now?

J. Piper, The Future of Justification — an important engagement with a very popular challenge to a core Reformation doctrine.

L. Ryken & T. Wilson (eds), Preach the Word — important essays on expository preaching by people who know how (includes David Jackman, Wayne Grudem, John MacArthur, Bruce Winter, Wallace Benn, J. I. Packer).

J. Woodhouse, 1 Samuel — it will do your soul some good.

What would your friends say are your hobby horses?

My friends would undoubtedly say I am focussed on the doctrines of Scripture, the cross and justification by faith alone. Some would also come back to Luther. More widely though, I’m sure some have not missed my obsession with the critical marriage of clarity and profundity in Christian theology rather than the far more common habit of thinking only what is hard to understand is really worthwhile.

What’s something that makes you angry?

Betrayal of the gospel by those who ought to be defending it (church leaders in particular). There’s enough of it going about at the moment to keep me angry a lot of the time if I concentrated on it.

Who inspires you?

John Stott for faithfulness and perseverance.
John Chapman for fifty plus years of bold, clear and compelling Bible teaching.
Billy Graham for just keeping on saying ‘the Bible says’.
John Webster for rigorous and confident theological thinking.

What’s your ideal day off?

A mountain verandah, good coffee, a good book and my family to drag me away from it all.

Give us your top five chocolate biscuits!

Westons (now Arnotts) Chocolate Wheaten
Arnotts TV Snacks
Arnotts Tim Tam
Arnotts Monte
McVities Plain Chocolate HobNobs

Thanks Mark!

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Tahlia was born addicted to heroin, thanks to her mum Shae’s addiction.

Tahlia (not her real name) lives with her brothers and sisters and her Nan, in one of the toughest suburbs in South Western Sydney. Five times in the last few years, single mum Shae has given birth, handed the newborn baby to her own ageing mother, pocketed the Australian Government’s $4000 Baby Bonus payment and cleared out, only to later return, pregnant, to a different man and still enslaved to her drug habit. Tahlia is Shae’s baby number three.

When Tahlia started Kindergarten at the local public school (one of the toughest schools in New South Wales), she was at loggerheads from the beginning. Tahlia regularly kicked and punched her teacher in the shins, swearing her head off. Tahlia refused to come inside the classroom; refused to hang up her bag; refused to be anything other than disruptive. After a time, Tahlia’s young, but very patient and experienced class teacher Mel had just about given up - though had had some small success “bribing” her little student with zoo animal stickers.

Tahlia is now 8 years old, in Year 2 at school. It was Class 2/3’s Scripture lesson, and as the volunteer Scripture teacher was valiantly teaching her class, Tahlia sat up the front with arms tightly folded across her chest, saying over and over again, “I hate God! I hate God!”

Mel, who sits at the back of the classroom during Scripture (for extra crowd control), is a Christian. “Tahlia, come and sit back here with me”. Tahlia came and sat next to her class teacher, and resumed her muttering: “I hate God!” Mel turned and looked at this little urchin and said, “Well God loves you”.

Tahlia halted, then said “Well I’m bad!” Mel seized the opportunity before her. She calmly responded, “God still loves you”. Tahlia challenged: “But I swear!” Mel calmly continued, “God still loves you”. Tahlia argued, “I kick people. I’ve kicked you!” Mel had by no means forgotten all the bruises she’d sustained, and calmly replied, “Well God still loves you”. Tahlia then stated a fact that she’s learned in the eight short years of her life: “My own mum doesn’t love me”. At this point, Mel spoke the simple truth; “Tahlia, even if your own mum doesn’t love you, God still loves you.” Tahlia was quiet for some time after this, and the lesson ended.

Now, as before, Tahlia sits up the front in her Scripture class. But now she hangs on every word her Scripture teacher utters. She begs to be allowed to stay for Class 4/5’s Scripture lesson too. Mel has given Tahlia (with the permission of her Nan) a Children’s Bible. She knows that Tahlia is not a great reader, and also that she probably never will be. Tahlia’s little half-brother Taylor, who is in Kindergarten, came to Mel and reported, “She won’t share! Can I have a Bible too?”

Here is a little girl who thought she was unlovable, but because of the simple words of her Christian class teacher, has heard the news that God loves her. Mel, who attends church with us in Wollongong, reports that Tahlia is still a “handful” in class, and is by no means a reformed student in every way – but she has had her heart opened to receive God’s love in the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, the one who came to seek and to save the lost, including little Tahlia. Sola Gratia!

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person--though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die--but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:6-8)

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Thanks to everyone who contributed comments in answer to the question that I raised in my previous post about Paul and his fellow apostles in 1 Cor 4 and the woman described in Proverbs 31.  The particular, concrete detail that I zeroed in on was the contrast between how they dress ("poorly dressed” v. “fine linen and purple"), but I also had in mind the broader contrast between how they live and how they are seen by others ("held in disrepute” v. “praised in the gates"). 

I promised in the earlier post that I had “a few thoughts coming together”, which I would share, so here they are.  I’m very conscious as I do this that many of you have far, far more experience than I do in reading the Bible and thinking through how to apply it in the details of life.  Please don’t think for a moment that I’m offering up these few quick thoughts as the last word in the conversation! 

1. As I said in the first post, I don’t have the option of ignoring either passage in the way I live my life.  Both are Scripture, both are breathed out by God, both are “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness”.  Not only that: both are, in their own way, descriptions that are held out as in some way exemplary.  One is a kind of identikit picture of “the woman who fears the LORD”; she lives a life that is to be admired and praised and (presumably, as far as one is able) imitated.  The other is a real life, unique, flesh-and-blood individual - an apostle, no less - but still one who holds himself out explicitly as an example to be imitated. 

2. As a number of people have said, there are some important differences between the times and the places in which the Proverbs 31 woman and the apostle Paul lived:

- The city that gives the Proverbs 31 woman and her husband all that respect at the gate is (I think!) the city of the people of God, and possibly an idealised people of God at that, behaving as they ought to behave. (Notice the shift from the description in v.23 - “her husband is known in the gates...” - to the command in v.31 - “Let her works praise her in the gates.") The city that holds the Corinthians in honour and despises people like Paul is the pagan city of Corinth.
- The time that the Proverbs 31 woman lives in is one in which the people of God are still a nation, called to live out before a watching world the blessedness and the wisdom of fearing the LORD.  The time that Paul lives in is one in which the gospel of Jesus is going out with urgency and costly sacrifice into a world that is hostile to God: as several people pointed out, the time Paul describes is a “wartime” setting.  (I wonder whether it is significant, by way of contrast, that the whole exercise of wisdom-collection in the OT is associated with the time of Solomon, when Israel enjoyed “rest from all their enemies” and the king could spend his days entertaining the Queen of Sheba and swapping proverbs.)

In both of these respects, of course, it is Paul and the Corinthians that I have more in common with than the Proverbs 31 woman: my time is the last days and my city is Corinth (well, Sydney, but there’s not a lot of difference!).

3. But the differences are not so absolute that I should ignore Prov 31 altogether.  I may live in a different time and a different city, but I still live in the same creation and I fear the same God.  So I should still be wise enough to see that forethought and prudence and family and faithfulness and productiveness are deeply respect-worthy, compared with the selfish, individualistic, short-term, wasteful fads and fashions of the world.  It’s not a bad thing to aspire to all the virtues of the wonder-woman of Proverbs 31, even if my own frailty and folly and the unfairness of a sinful world mean I probably won’t always get the sort of success and respect that she gets.  (Compare the way that Proverbs-style wisdom works - kinda! - for Joseph in Egypt and Daniel in Babylon, and the way that the wisdom of Proverbs and the lifestyle of the last days are put together in 1 Peter 3-4)

4. Nor am I to imitate every single detail of 1 Cor 4.  When Paul tells the Corinthians to imitate him, the details do matter: otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered putting them in.  He doesn’t just give them an abstract principle: he gives them a real, tangible example of a lifestyle and how it is seen and responded to by the world.  But the details of how that lifestyle works out in Paul’s life may well be different in some respects from the details of how it works out for the people in Corinth. When he holds out himself as an example to them, he still tells them to take into account the various life-situations that they were in when God called them to follow Christ (cf. 1 Cor 7:17).  So, for example, while the description of Paul in 1 Cor 4 is of a “homeless” itinerant missionary, he knows that imitating him won’t mean that all of them suddenly abandon home and family and become similarly homeless. (In fact, when he writes to Timothy his advice even to young widows is not a blanket command to head off and become cross cultural missionaries but a very Proverbs 31-ish word about “marrying, bearing children and managing a household” - 1 Tim 5:14). 

5. The core of what I am to imitate in Paul’s example is his devotion to humble service rather than the competitive pursuit of worldly status (1 Cor 3-4), his other-person-centred love that seeks the good of others and their salvation (1 Cor 10:33 - 11:1), and underneath all that, his fear of God rather than the opinions of people (cf. Proverbs 31:30!) and his desire for God’s glory rather than his own (1 Cor 10:31). 

Will that make a difference to how I live the details of my life - including how I dress - in this war-time context, in this pagan, greedy, fashion-obsessed city?  Surely it has to!!  Not in an artificial, attention-seeking, ‘Gibeonite’ kind of way, as if Paul “muddied his suit” to cultivate an appearance of being poorly dressed.  Not in a self-righteous, superior, legalistic kind of way, inwardly glorying in how much daggier I am than my more materialistic Christian brothers and sisters.  Not in a foolish, short-term, wasteful kind of way, buying stuff that falls apart after a few weeks, just because it was cheaper at the checkout. But still in a real, practical, sacrificial, deliberate way that often (but not always) will make a visible difference in how I and my family look - in a thousand decisions to keep and mend rather than throw away and replace; to choose Op Shops over fashion shops; to cultivate “strength and dignity” and the “fear of the LORD” over deceptive, fleeting outward appearance; to save more money and give more away instead of hoarding it and spending it; to take more risks for the gospel in my school-gate conversations rather than staying trapped in my self-protective anxieties about how I am perceived.

Seems to me that I have some changes to work on!!

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This Saturday’s classic Briefing extract is about the indivisibility of truth. It’s from Briefing #8, August 1, 1988:

If we were to picture all the different things we know to be true as building blocks, what would they look like? Perhaps they would be like lego: little interchangeable bits that we could fit together in many ways, sometimes using some pieces, and sometimes others. We certainly wouldn’t need to use all the bits to make a successful building. Some Christians suggest that God’s truth is like this—there are many different aspects to it, and we needn’t accept it all to erect a successful building.

However, there are other kinds of blocks. My children have a jigsaw puzzle consisting of three wooden blocks. By themselves, each of the blocks has a strange almost bizarre shape, with no particular meaning, and no stability. When joined together, they form a stable and attractive kiwi. Only when properly joined do these blocks have any meaning and function—even two of the blocks joined together won’t stand up.

Christian truth is like these kiwi blocks, not like lego. The pieces are not interchangeable or irrelevant. Only when the total puzzle is assembled do each of the pieces assume their proper place, function and purpose. And only with all the pieces in place can the total picture be seen in all its truth.

Each of the truths of the gospel depend on each other. Consider, for instance, the following series of statements:

• Jesus is fully human
• Jesus is fully divine
• Jesus was our representative on the cross
• Jesus was able to make a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice for sins on the cross
• God’s word is true

Far from being distinct or separate (and dispensable), these truths are interrelated. We cannot dismiss one and still retain the others. If Jesus was not fully human, how could he stand in our place as a representative? If he was not fully divine, how could his death be sufficient payment for sins? If God’s word is not true, how can we put our trust in the Jesus that it reveals? To trust God is to trust his Word, is to trust his Son, is to trust his Son’s word … and on it goes. These are not interchangeable, independent lego blocks of truth. They stand, or fall, together. They are indivisible.

The indivisibility of truth has many implications. How does it affect, for example, our fellowship with those who agree on many things but deny or omit some of the truths of the gospel?

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Standing on the 5th tee at St Michael’s, in Sydney’s East, the golfer experiences a mixture of nervousness and dread. Here (with some translational notes for non-golfers) is what it’s like.

The hole is a 170 metre par 3 (translation: a long way for hackers). From the tee, there is a shute of dense scrub on either side for the first 80 metres or so, thus doing the golfer’s head in ("Whatever you do, don’t go right, I mean left, I mean left or right!"). Directly in front of the tee, between the forbidding walls of foliage, is 140 metres of low, scrabbly, gorsy stuff and sand—so a short but straight shot is also headed for serious trouble (translation: you hit it in there, and you might as well write 7 on your card and walk directly to the next hole).

And so you stand there, trying not to think of everything that could go wrong, and concentrating on just swinging the club and getting it past all the trouble and somewhere in the vicinity of the green. Very occasionally a minor miracle happens. You manage to remain calm enough to make a half-decent swing. There is a snink (translation: the beautiful sound, half way between ‘snick’ and ‘thunk’, that a golf ball makes when it comes sweetly off the centre of the club face), and the ball soars up and out and lands gently, like a little white bird, on the distant green.

What is the feeling when that happens? It’s different to elation, and more than satisfaction. It’s a warm, relieved joy that the dread judgement has been avoided, and that you are safe and home and right where you ought to be.

If you’ll forgive the irreverence of the comparison, I had a similar feeling this morning as I prayed my way through Morning Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer. You start by reading a few verses of Scripture like these:

When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth what which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive. (Ezek 18:27)

Rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil. (Joel 2:13)

Then you are exhorted:

“Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us in sundry places to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness; and that we should not dissemble nor cloke them before the face of Almighty God; but confess them with an humble, lowly, penitent and obedient heart; to the end that we may obtain forgiveness of the same, by his infinite goodness and mercy.”

And then you confess, using a series of brief phrases that shine a piercing light into every corner of your disobedient heart:

Almighty and most merciful Father, We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, We have offended against they holy laws, We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, And we have done those things which we ought not to have done, And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders …”

Then come these extraordinary words:

Almighty God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who desireth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may turn from his wickedness and live; and hath given power and commandment to his ministers, to declare and pronounce to his people, being penitent, the Absolution and Remission of their sins: He pardoneth and absolveth all them that truly repent and unfeignedly believe his holy Gospel …

Pardoneth and absolveth. This is not a minor but a major miracle. There is no health in us, but there is pardon and absolution in the gospel promises of God. And a feeling of warm, relieved joy spreads through your soul as you realise that judgement is avoided, and that you are safe and home and right where you ought to be.

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