As I mentioned in a previous article on balancing our time, I’m slowly making my way through D. A. Carson’s Gospel and the Modern World with the hope of occasionally developing his thought in my writing. In this article I’m sticking with the Carson’s exploration of biblical balance. Only I’ll be turning from exhorting all Christians to those responsible for shepherding God’s flock. For when speaking about the necessary balance in our biblical diet, Carson casts “it in terms of the responsibility of pastors to feed the flock of God with the whole counsel of God.” This doesn’t somehow relieve believers of their responsibility to practise the spiritual disciplines. Christians must prioritise prayer, devotional Bible reading and reading theology. But pastors must help their people by both pursuing and modelling a balance in their teaching, so Carson argues.

At the close of John’s Gospel Jesus exhorts Peter to tend to his sheep, which surely extends to all those who serve as elders or shepherds in God’s church—overseers. Linked with loving the Lord, twice Jesus calls on Peter to feed his sheep (John 21:15, 17). Shepherding God’s people—indeed, any claim to love the church—is incomplete without a serious commitment to feeding them God’s truth. More than preaching, writes Paul, elders ought to “be ready in season and out of season,” to “reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Timothy 4:2). You can tell from those verbs that shepherding God’s people means more than mawkish homilies and spiritual pep-talks. Faithful eldership involves a diverse range of teaching—a biblically balanced diet—that urges and serves the flock in fidelity (2 Timothy 4:3-4).

However, in this article I’m going to apply Carson’s insistence on a more biblical balance in the other direction, back at myself and my own tradition or theological stable.

Don’t Just Teach the Bible

Most of those who frequent Rekindle probably agreed with everything I’ve said up to this point—though many of those same readers likely bristled at my first heading. Surely, many will insist, Carson’s point is just that: God’s people should taught as much of the Bible as possible. Perhaps. Of course faithful shepherding is impossible apart from a serious commitment to preaching the Bible. But another extreme exists here, the reductionistic and banal insistence that pastors need only teach the Bible.

I imagine Martin Luther’s famous quote is routinely wheeled out in support this over-simplistic view of shepherding. “I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word,” the Reformer preached, “otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.”

We can smile at Luther’s delightful bombast, but with that we must realise that the statement also typically sensational. Despite being persuaded himself—and ostensibly teaching others—that the Bible is sufficient, Luther’s Works contains 55 volumes; he wrote his Small Catechism; and far from merely sitting in some pub the Reformer lectured extensively and into exhaustion. Clearly, there is a difference between having a high view of the Bible and collapsing the task of shepherding into Bible teaching.

This brings us back to D. A. Carson’s insistence that elders “feed the flock of God with the whole counsel of God,” providing them with a balanced as well as broad biblical diet.

Carson’s Three Components for a Balanced Teaching Diet

Admittedly, I’m a little disappointed Carson opted for calling them components rather than ingredients. But let’s get to them.

Firstly, “pastors should be teaching and preaching from all parts of the Bible,” including the Old and New Testaments, different books as well as genres. But as I’ve covered above, this is often where our idea of balance ends: just preach from the whole Bible.

Thankfully, Carson adds his second component: “pastors should be checking up on themselves to see if they are covering all the major biblical themes.” This goes some way towards guarding preachers from defaulting to their favourite doctrines and theological themes. Without suggesting we abandon expository preaching, Carson calls for theological breadth and even occasionally exploring more technical, even minor, doctrinal points.

Thirdly Carson writes: “because the Bible is not a collection of miscellaneous religious texts that the preacher is honour-bound to cover but a God-breathed collection that establishes trajectories—trajectories of both narrative and theme—the balanced preacher will so trace out these trajectories to demonstrate how rightly handling the word of truth follows inner-canonical lines that bring us to Jesus and the gospel.” Better than blandly calling for biblical theology, Carson insists that preaching and teaching must centre on Christ (Luke 24:27; John 5:39).

Biblical exegesis is incomplete if we don’t draw people’s attention to the crucified, risen and reigning Lord. Preachers must trace out the “inner-canonical lines” and trajectories that find their Yes in Christ (2 Corinthians 1:20). Similarly, holistic and balanced preaching instructs the flock theologically. It informs them doctrinally. It doesn’t, to adapt something Carson writes elsewhere, lose the theological wood for the exegetical trees. All of this is grounded in exposition, of course. But balanced preaching doesn’t just teach its people the Bible.

Declare the Whole Counsel of God

Carson concludes this section in his essay by writing, “balanced biblical preaching does not take place where the preacher unpacks sentences in the narrow focus of the immediate context without keeping an eye peeled for the biblical-theological storyline, for the entire canonical context.” Balanced preaching is committed to furnishing the flock with theological categories, developing their grasp of Christian doctrine.

Though the rumours of Evangelicalism’s demise are being greatly exaggerated, deconstruction is certainly trending. Without laying the fault at anyone’s feet, I have wondered if a contributing factor to this spiritual fad has been the lack of biblical balance, as outlined by Carson. By this I mean, has the conviction that preachers simply teach their people the Bible left those same people unprepared for philosophical questions and existential confusion? This is certainly a question worth pondering.

Now let’s close with a fitting passage from Herman Bavinck’s What Is Christianity? Answering the question as to whether the Bible is enough, Bavinck says, “Scripture is the magnificent painting which, in a series of captivating scenes, brings before our eyes the works of God in salvation history. Well then, that powerful imprint which the Scriptures make on the Church, it must reproduce. What the church has seen through that wonderful book, what it has felt of the word of life, it must proclaim. The Church must try to put it into words and account for it. The Church has absorbed what the Scriptures tell it, lived it as it were, and now reproduces it in its confession.” But how are they to do this if they’re never taught it?