Podcast: D. A. Carson on His Life, Vision for Ministry, and Biggest Influences (D. A. Carson)

December 05, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

The Life and Ministry of D. A. Carson

In today's episode, D. A. Carson talks about his life and ministry, how God led him to the academy, the original vision behind the Gospel Coalition, and what it looks like to pursue simple faithfulness before God in his stage of life.

Letters Along the Way

Letters Along the Way

D. A. Carson, John D. Woodbridge

The novel Letters Along the Way follows the spiritual pilgrimage of Tim Journeyman, told through his correspondence with a Christian professor. Their letters contain wisdom and insight on maturing in Christ.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

02:00 - Early Life and Ministry

Matt Tully
Don, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

D. A. Carson
My privilege.

Matt Tully
Today I’m eager to ask a variety of questions about your life and your ministry, as someone who is well known in our circles—the Reformed evangelical circles that we operate in. Maybe just to start us off, when and where were you born?

D. A. Carson
I was born in the city of Montreal in 1946.

Matt Tully
What was your home life like? What did your parents do, and do you remember those growing up years and what things were like?

D. A. Carson
We moved from Montreal when I was at the ripe old age of eighteen months. We moved to a small city called Drummondville. Then, it was about 40,000 people. It is on the edge of what’s called the Eastern Townships. Drummondville had maybe 3% English speakers, and the rest were French speakers.

Matt Tully
Did you speak French primarily in the home?

D. A. Carson
I was going to say my parents were church planters. Both of them were brought up in English. One in England— in London—and the other in Belfast and then English parts of Ottawa and Toronto. So their background was all English. Dad had some French at school, but eventually became good enough in French to be a translator part-time for the federal government. He had planted a church—a French church—in Montreal before moving to Drummondville. And the church that he worked at in Drummondville was a bilingual church. There were English services, there were French services, and once in a while they put them together. I stayed in that city until I went to University. I went to McGill, which was mostly an English language university in Montreal. Today about 40% of its courses are taught in French. And even when I was there, I took the odd course in French, but it was mostly an English University.

Matt Tully
Are you fluent in French today?

D. A. Carson
Yes. I’ve had more education in English than in French, and I use my English more than my French, but if I go back to Montreal or go to Paris or Switzerland or somewhere, give me three or four days on the ground and I’m dreaming in French, counting in French, thinking in French, and so on.

Matt Tully
It all comes back.

D. A. Carson
It all comes back.

Matt Tully
Was your father bi-vocational, as he was a pastor but also doing other things

D. A. Carson
Initially, he wasn’t. But when he felt it was time to leave Drummondville, several English language churches offered him a post, and he wouldn’t take it because he felt called to French Canada. There wasn’t another French one that was opening up. They were all small. So he went to the federal government and started doing bilingual translation, always French-English. So he had a full-time job as a translator for another (I can’t remember) fifteen years until he retired. And then he did the missionary work on the side.

Matt Tully
As a kid, what were some of your favorite subjects in school?

D. A. Carson
I was the kind of kid who liked all things academic. It wasn’t that I was better at history and literature and hated mathematics or the reverse. Basically, I liked it all.

Matt Tully
You mentioned that you went to McGill University, and I believe you were on your way to study chemistry and science, but then at some point God kind of changed your mind and changed your path. I wonder if you could explain how that happened.

D. A. Carson
Well, the long story is too long to retain here. I worked part-time for the federal government in a lab in Ottawa in the summer months. I was enjoying what I was doing, but I noticed that in that lab, the lab workers basically fell into two groups. One group was a little older and a little more cynical. They were looking forward to retirement, and what they longed for was no more work. Some of the younger ones were bright, hardworking, industrious, imaginative, and were actually hoping that they’d find something that would earn them a Nobel or something equivalent. And I wasn’t in either camp. I was enjoying what I was doing, but at the same time, I was working with a pastor up the Ottawa Valley who was trying to plant a church. He was single and older than I was, but I tried working with him a little bit. What was capturing my interest was what was going on during the weekend at that church plant. So that was the first time I started thinking seriously about where I should be spending more of my time. There were other components. I heard a man preach from Ezekiel 22: “I sought for a man to stand in the gap before me for my people, but I found none.” I remember a chorus that everybody sang in those days in Sunday school. I couldn’t get it out of my head:

By and by when I look on His face,
Beautiful face, thorn-shadowed face;
By and by when I look on His face,
I’ll wish I had given Him more.

I wasn’t denying that you could be right at the center of giving God everything by serving as a chemist, but for me that wasn’t working out that way. So there were a lot of different factors. There wasn’t just one imaginative moment or anything like that.

Matt Tully
There wasn’t this one crisis moment. And then you first started teaching at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in, I believe, 1978. You were there for your entire career—40 years or so.

D. A. Carson
Before I went there I was in Vancouver for a few years. Before that I was in England and Germany, and before that I was pastor of a church in Vancouver. So there was a lot of other stuff that was packed in there before I got to Trinity.

Matt Tully
When you first arrived at Trinity, did you expect that you would be teaching at the same place like that for that long?

D. A. Carson
I hadn’t planned on it, but I hadn’t ruled it out. It’s not as if I was saying to myself, Well, that’s my plan now for the next four decades. I wasn’t thinking along those terms. But I wasn’t saying, Boy, I can hardly wait to get out of here and get back to Canada! So, I was open but not driven.

07:49 - The Story behind ‘Letters Along the Way’

Matt Tully
Was it at Trinity that you first met John Woodbridge?

D. A. Carson
Yes.

Matt Tully
And then in 1993 the two of you published this book together, Letters Along the Way, with Crossway, and it’s a fascinating book. The book is a series of fictional letters that you and John wrote together between a guy named Tim Journeyman and Paul Woodson. Tim, being this younger Christian man who is discerning what his life is going to be all about, and Paul Woodson is an older, more mature Christian who kind of becomes a mentor to him. It’s a fun and enjoyable read, but it’s also a little bit different in its format and style. Where did you two get the idea for that book?

D. A. Carson
Well, when we got together for lunch or something like this, we were often talking about books—what authors wrote, what books for what reason, important things, philosophical things, literary things, and so on. And somewhere along the line, we were talking about the contributions of C. S. Lewis, and one of us brought up The Screwtape Letters—letters from a senior devil to a junior devil. The senior devil was writing to the junior devil whose name was Wormwood. We made various jokes about it: Do you think you could choose a higher tone than writing from devil to devil? But we saw that it was a clever book and it was influential. And one of us said—I don’t even remember which one—We should write a book that is letters from a senior saint to a junior saint. The idea clicked and I said, Well, let’s talk about that. So, we met and eventually we agreed to do it. For virtually a whole year, on Tuesday mornings at six o’clock, we’d meet at a local restaurant for breakfast together and laid out the plan. Basically, besides nailing down specifics eventually, we had several lists. We had one list of things that needed to be covered in this book.

Matt Tully
Topics.

D. A. Carson
Topics. We had another list of the elements of Tim’s journey. And then to that, putting down dates so that our comments could be linked with things that were going on historically at the time, things that were going on in the newspapers, in politics, and in whatever. So we laid that out sequentially, covering a span of about fifteen years. And then into that we fit the storyline so that Paul and Tim fit into the storyline of those years. And once we had that nailed down, then we decided which of us was going to write which letter. We were presupposing about forty to forty-five letters. That’s what we presupposed to cover the relevant topics. The book started when Tim was not even a Christian, but in the story his father had just died and his father had been a university friend with Paul Woodson. So Paul came back into Tim’s life as a family friend sort of thing. And then it developed through Tim’s conversion, and ultimately his work in graduate school in Europe, and eventually his call to the ministry and the things that he studied and so forth until finally his first few years of ministry. So that’s how we put it together. And that took us about a year of early morning breakfasts.

Matt Tully
Every week, getting together.

D. A. Carson
Every week. It was for breakfast for an hour. We got back to Trinity by seven o’clock in the morning. And then I was on sabbatical the next year and John was at Trinity, but we agreed that whatever else we were doing that year, we would write our respective letters. And so I wrote in Cambridge and he wrote in Deerfield. And at the end of the year, I took them all and copy edited them so that they sounded as if they were more or less from the same guy. And then we hadn’t quite decided how to end it. I wrote a draft of a concluding chapter, John agreed, and the rest is, as they say, is history.

Matt Tully
How hard was it to “land the plane” on all the topics that you wanted to cover in the book? I’m sure there could have been a list a mile long of issues—theological, cultural, relational—that you might have wanted to cover there.

D. A. Carson
It wasn’t difficult. We could have made the book longer, but we also realized that this sort of book has got to be driven in part by the plot line. And the plot line is going to bog down if you have to keep talking about everything and its cousin and nothing happens. Some topics we listed, but eventually we collapsed into other topics. Initially, we had more than forty-five topics. We probably had closer to eighty or ninety, but then by the time that they were edited down it was a manageable list.

Matt Tully
I know in the book it opens, like you said, with Tim Journeyman’s father has just died, and that’s kind of what drives him to reach out to this old family friend. If my dates are correct, the year before, in 1992, your father had passed away. Was there anything autobiographical about the book and how both you and John thought about this man’s journey to maturity as a Christian?

D. A. Carson
That’s hard to answer. In one sense, flat out no, there’s nothing biographical about it. Both John and I became Christians by rather different routes. The biographical bit, if you wanna call it that, is that we moved Tim around in the storyline. We moved him around so that he was at various places that one or the other of us knew well. He went to France for a while; John did his PhD in France. He went to Cambridge; I lived in Cambridge for many years. In that sense, there’s background knowledge from personal experience of different parts of the world, different subcultures, different people that we listed—people that we wanted Tim to come in contact with. So in that sense, there’s biographical influence, but it’s not hard biography that I’m really talking about me here.

Matt Tully
It’s not one-to-one correspondence. As you reflect on your own life, have there been Paul Woodsons in your life who have played that kind of a role for you?

D. A. Carson
The kind of role that Paul Woodson played for Tim was major. He became, clearly, the dominant voice of Christian experience and reason in his life. Even if that wasn’t explicitly said, reading between the lines, that’s the way it felt. And I know that there are some Christians who have been blessed with a particular mentor or a close friend and so on. Whereas for better and for worse, my own experience is rather different. I’ve had many, many, many people who have, it’s too strong a word, but mentored me in some sense, that I’ve looked to for advice or criticism, suggestions, whatever, that I’ve looked up to for their preaching or their praying or their history of their wisdom or whatever. But it’s not as if I would say John Stott shaped my life definitively. Now, he certainly influenced me on several fronts, but he wasn’t a bosom buddy; he wasn’t that close a friend or anything like this, but I’m grateful for him. I could list a hundred people like that. That would be easier for me than to try to decide on one or two.

14:56 - The Gospel Coalition

Matt Tully
I’m sure that resonates with so many people. I hear regularly about the books that we’re reading, the articles that we read online, that can have a really huge influence on someone’s life and ministry, even if you don’t know the person directly, one to one. And it does make me think of the Gospel Coalition, which is something that you had a very large hand in creating. I wonder if you could just take us back a little bit. What was the original vision that you and Tim Keller had when you started the Gospel Coalition? How did that fit into how you were perceiving the evangelical church to be in America and what you were wanting to help address?

D. A. Carson
Tim and I worked together on a project or two before we actually met. He was in New York, of course, and was purposely not traveling very much. His concentration was on Redeemer.

Matt Tully
His local church.

D. A. Carson
His local church. And I was teaching at Trinity and bound up with Trinity. But I had this plan to edit a book called Worship by the Book (as it came to be called). It was written by a Presbyterian, Tim Keller, an Anglican from London that I knew, and a pastor of a free type church—it was Wheaton College Church, so that was Kent Hughes—and me, from a Baptist background. What we tried to do was to agree on a basic biblical theology that I wrote, and then to ask, How does that work out in your life as minister of such and such a church so that the theology is driving your choices and your music and your priorities, your structures, and so on?

Matt Tully
So each pastor was sort of providing the unique perspective on how that works itself out in their own context?

D. A. Carson
Correct. So that actually came out before Tim and I met. We met in Cambridge, I think, in 2002. At the end of the previous decade we had been working on the book, and the book came out about 2002, give or take a few months. In any case, when we met, there are some people you meet and you click; and we clicked. We were both talkers. We were both interested in cultural things. We were both in the Reformed heritage. We were both committed to expository preaching. We had so many things going in common.

Matt Tully
Was the Baptistic and the Presbyterian difference there ever really an issue for you two?

D. A. Carson
No. Not in the slightest. Enough to make jokes back and forth. That was about it. And then about 2003 I had to do something in Princeton—nothing to do with these projects—and Tim suggested I take the fast train from Princeton into New York and have lunch together. So that’s what we did. My wife was with me, so she came in and she went off with a couple of ladies from his church to do the town, and Tim and I and two or three of his offsiders met at a sidewalk cafe.

Matt Tully
In downtown New York City?

D. A. Carson
In Manhattan. And afterwards we went back to his office, but that was it. It was just a few hours. And then I took the train with my wife back to Princeton. But during that time, one of the things that we talked about was whether or not—in our perception of the needs of evangelicalism and its failures and the increasing fuzziness about its definition and the different parties and tribes that were erupting and so on—was there a place for starting a new organization that tried to address these things? And we all knew, of course, that the most recent attempt, which was ACE (the Alliance for Confessing Evangelicals, was, in all respect, having a rough go of it. We need not go over the reasons for it, but they did some things that in retrospect were probably not entirely wise. But it showed that there was a need, an interest. What should be done about it? So we thought we should probably try to do something, but to avoid things that we perceived to be mistakes in the ACE experiment. So there’s a lot of interplay back and forth there that we need not go into. But I drafted a letter that Tim approved, and we sent it to about forty pastors. Now, neither he nor I knew all the names on that list. Between us we knew a lot of them, but we also approached people whom we respected and said, If you were starting an organization like this, what names would you add?

Matt Tully
So you kind of crowdsourced the initial list?

D. A. Carson
We crowdsourced the initial list. We wrote forty people and invited them to come to Trinity for a close to three-day conference where we would spend most of our time in talking together and praying and asking ourselves, Is the Lord calling us to do something? In other words, we did not lay out a whole plan or program.

Matt Tully
Many of us think of the Gospel Coalition today and it’s a website with many different contributors and it’s a conference. But it sounds like it started very differently.

D. A. Carson
Yeah. We asked forty people to come. The first distinctive mark of God’s grace on this project was that all forty came.

Matt Tully
Everyone you asked came.

D. A. Carson
Everyone we asked came. And we told them, You’re coming for close to three days, you’re paying your own shot, your own airfare, your own hotel bill, and Trinity will throw in the meals and the facilities and so on.

Matt Tully
And what was the stated purpose of the meeting?

D. A. Carson
The stated purpose of the meeting was to explore together whether this is something which we collectively should address, in terms of the needs of the church, the call of the gospel; to address our divisions, our differences, and so on.

Matt Tully
So then you guys started meeting yearly after that—this same group of pastors?

D. A. Carson
Yearly. All we achieved the first year, we spent at least a third of our time listening to one another’s stories, where we’re from, what ministries we were in, and then gradually personal things and so on, and then stopping to pray and talk and pray and talk and pray. That was 90% of those first three days. And then we just threw the ball out there saying, What should we consider doing? Or should we consider not doing anything? Is this just empire building? Is this going to be another failure? If we should be doing something, what should we be doing?

Matt Tully
Yeah. What would that look like?

D. A. Carson
It immediately became clear that quite a few of the brothers would be happy to try something, but they didn’t want to form an organization unless there was doctrinal agreement. So we agreed that I would write one of two documents, and Tim would write the other one, for discussion the next year. I would write the statement of faith, which would be in the Reformed heritage; contemporary, but not clearly Baptist or pedobaptist. And Tim would write what we called the “Theological Vision of Ministry,” because, as somebody pointed out, you can sign the Westminster Confession of Faith and come out sounding like Banner of Truth, or sign the Westminster Statement of Faith and come out with guitars. In other words, there’s a vision of ministry that’s an issue rather than just a statement of faith. So we spent two or three years meeting together to work through these documents line by line, line by line, line by line, line by line. At various points, I was not sure the thing was going to hold together. But it did. And we agreed then to strike a committee to find a name for the organization and begin with a conference or two, just to see what would happen. So our first conference we held in the Trinity chapel in 2007. In those days you could crowd 650 in there, and it was packed out.

Matt Tully
Right from the beginning.

D. A. Carson
Right from the beginning. Packed out. And the average age was well under forty.

Matt Tully
Was that encouraging to you to see those young people coming to hear?

D. A. Carson
Very. And what they kept talking about was how—there were six or seven plenaries and some workshops—but these pastors on our council were well-known people that could be plenary speakers at a major conference, and they were just serving in a workshop. Clearly, they loved each other and cared for each other. The dynamic was superb, and it was genuinely of God. And that spoke volumes. We made two or three very quick decisions. We agreed on a name: the Gospel Coalition. The discussions around that are interesting, but that’s another detail. And we agreed that we would try to go digital.

Matt Tully
Because this is around 2006, 2007. I think the iPhone came out in 2007, so that was a lot of foresight there.

D. A. Carson
Correct. And the churches that were involved put together enough money so we could hire one person. So then the conferences started. Because we decided to go digital, it meant we needed a webpage and eventually a webmaster, and everything grew from that. So we now produce all kinds of paper material in books and this sort of thing. Our reach is what we’re known for in sixteen or eighteen languages around the world, including Farsi and Arabic and Hindi now and so on, besides French and German. Its reach is considerable. We have a lot to be thankful for. We’ve made some mistakes over the years, but the Lord preserved us, and eventually we created a council that was genuinely godly. When we meet together, still as a council—the council has turned over somewhat. Some people have moved on or retired or gone to glory or whatever. People will tell you—Tim will still tell you—that the favorite meeting he has every year is the council of the Coalition. We’ve worked very hard at having discussions that are sealed. We don’t talk about what we talk about.

Matt Tully
And that just preserves the ability for everyone to speak freely.

D. A. Carson
To speak freely. And to learn to trust one another. Early on, 2005 or 2005, we were around this big square table, and Tim was on one corner and I was adjacent to him around the corner. He suddenly chuckled under his breath, as he does, and turned his laptop so I could read what was on his screen. And it turned out that about fifteen minutes earlier, he had said something which somebody in the group thought was a bit surprising coming from Tim. I won’t even mention what it was, but it was one of those things. That other chap had emailed a couple of his offsiders back at his home church: Do you know what Tim Keller said? That person put it on their website saying, Tim Keller said such and such. And then one of Tim Keller’s offsiders read it on their site and wrote back to Tim and said, Did you really say that? All in fifteen minutes!

Matt Tully
All in fifteen minutes. So the goal is to avoid that from happening every time.

D. A. Carson
Tim thought it was funny. Somebody else could have been really upset. Tim laughed. But then we made it very clear after that that anything we say in this room amongst ourselves is only for this room.

Matt Tully
If I’m hearing you right, it seems like one of the main goals with the Gospel Coalition initially was to help to address some of the perceived weaknesses of evangelicalism and reinforce the church with sound doctrine and an emphasis on the gospel. And yet, as you look at the landscape of evangelicalism today, it’s pretty well established that we see a lot of fracturing. We see a lot of division in the church; division that maybe wasn’t even there back in the early 2000s. Do does that discourage you? Do you feel like we have gone in the wrong direction as evangelicals?

D. A. Carson
I think it’s complicated. When you say “we” as evangelicals have gone in the wrong direction, to whom do you refer?

Matt Tully
That’s a good question.

D. A. Carson
Because there are, in my view, millions of people who call themselves evangelicals who doctrinally aren’t. Part of the issue is that the sphere for defining evangelical varies from group to group. Some have a sociological background. To define evangelicals, you look at all the groups that call themselves evangelical, and do a sociological analysis and find out what they believe, whether they handle snakes or not, what they do with their hair, what good denominations they fill, and where they live and so on. But it’s all sociological, regardless of whether they’re believers or not, whether they’re liberal or not, whether they’re—whatever it is. Others try to define the term historically. What groups do they come from? Who is the first evangelical? There are half a dozen of those. Today, some of it’s political. You say you’re an evangelical; Oh, you’re for Trump, eh? And you can’t be an evangelical unless you’re for Trump for certain groups.

Matt Tully
Is that a dynamic that affects every label, or does it feel like evangelical is particularly slippery these days?

D. A. Carson
Well, slippery labels are part of culture, part of tribal struggles. But it’s particularly dangerous in this case because there is an offense around truth. I remember having long conversations with Carl Henry, who had gone before we started the organization, of course, and he was still wrestling in his mind with whether evangelical was still a useful term.

Matt Tully
Carl Henry?

D. A. Carson
Carl Henry. So that’s 80s.

Matt Tully
So this has been an issue for a long time.

D. A. Carson
Huge. Huge.

Matt Tully
That’s so easy for us, especially young people like myself, to be ignorant of some of those earlier conversations that have been going on.

D. A. Carson
Well, I’ve started writing a book called Evangelicalism where I try to handle all of this. But in my view, the only way you can provide a useful matrix in which you discuss evangelicalism or evangelical is theological. In other words, it’s not a term I’m eager to give up because the Bible uses it. Evangelical comes from evangel, which is simply one root of gospel. Gospel and evangel mean exactly the same thing. Good news, great news, powerful news. And so I don’t care if we lose the term fundamentalist because it’s not in the Scripture. I’d care if we lose the term evangelical because it is in the Scripture. So it’s worth holding onto. But that means you’ve got to defend the corner. So this is a Scriptural word; what does it mean? But at least then you have a biblical text to study together what it means. And there’s place for taking into consideration our backgrounds, our cultural analyses, our historical backgrounds, and so and so and so on. But in one sense, the first evangelical after the resurrection of Christ is the early church people, because they hold to the evangel.

29:46 - Issues Facing the American Evangelical Church

Matt Tully
So as you look at the future of the American church, the evangelical church in America, keeping in mind that there is so much variety there and there are different threats facing different quarters, are there any big struggles that you perceive that you think Christians would do well to be prepared for and think carefully about?

D. A. Carson
Well, first of all, I would distinguish between areas of struggle that are ubiquitous—they come back again and again and again.

Matt Tully
In every generation.

D. A. Carson
If not every generation, in a lot of generations. There will always be struggles on the authority of Scripture this side of the enlightenment. So I spent a fair bit of my life tackling one or the other of those things. Three years ago, I edited The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures. It’s a very fat book, and my colleagues wrote some marvelous papers. The one by Henri A. G. Blocher, for example, on human and divine authorship is superb. So these things continue and will have to be addressed again and again.

Matt Tully
It’s not enough just to look back at what’s already been said. You think every generation will need to sort of restate that.

D. A. Carson
It has to fight again. The New Perspective on Paul that governed an awful lot of debate twenty or thirty years ago, there’s still some of it around, but it’s now old hat. But on the other hand, what it did do, the benefit of it—there was lots of disadvantage to it—but the benefit of it is that it got an awful lot of evangelicals doing a lot of very good work on the nature of justification. So it’s sometimes a blessing from God to force the church into facing an issue that has been faced in the past, but we’ve forgotten about it and we need to think it through again. The doctrine of assurance, for example, comes back again and again in different formats, different problems, different structures. The Holiness movement, the role of the Holy Spirit—these things come again. What’s Reformed theology? Reformed is a word that has a huge semantic swing to it nowadays. A lot of Reformed people (so-called) today are miles from where Calvin was, but others not only start with Calvin, but move farther to the right after that. So to think these things through clearly has to be done in every generation. It’s why you need pastor theology people. It’s why you need seminaries, or structural organizations that are giving people a context in which to work these things out. But although most of the problems that are faced spiritually get passed on to another generation—that’s really what Letters is all about—nevertheless, there are some things that have developed since then that are distinctive. Nobody was talking about wokeness when we did our book. We probably didn’t say enough about race. Today, more would have to be said. The residue of the postmodern debate—we said some things in our Letters Along the Way, but thirty years ago, when students talked about postmodernism at university thirty or forty years ago, if you were studying in any of the arts courses—English, social science, poetry, history, and so on—you had to wrestle with the intellectual leaders of the postmodern movement. People read Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault and others. Today, as far as I can see at university, very few people are reading these people anymore. But that doesn’t mean that they’ve abandoned the postmodern epistemology that has erupted. They’ve bought into it now as part of the current culture. It’s part of the worldview. It’s part of the given. It’s what Charles Taylor points out five hundred years ago: the default position was that there is a God to answer to, a God who was there. Nowadays the default position is there really isn’t a God. And it’s because there’ve been huge shifts in epistemology.

Matt Tully
So things do change.

D. A. Carson
Oh, they do change. And how to address those changes is important. But you don’t want to address them as if we’re the first person to have invented this particular sin. It’s complicated. The forms in which these things shake out are going to be shaped by cultural siren calls.

34:00 - Humility

Matt Tully
You’re a well-known, influential person in our circles. Many people know you. Many people have read one of your, I believe, nearly two hundred books that you’ve written or edited. How do you stay humble?

D. A. Carson
I have so much to be humble about. It’s not that difficult. The older you get, the more things you remember of which you’re ashamed. Of course, you’re going to be humble if you stay anywhere near the cross. I remember, Oh, in the early 80s we organized something at Trinity in which we invited Carl F. H. Henry and Kenneth Kantzer to come and give, each one of them, a lecture on the current state of evangelicalism in North America, along with a further session with Q and A. They were superb. They knew their stuff. They were careful. They didn’t stick a foot wrong. They weren’t scoring points, but they were being frank and so on, and the students loved it. They just lapped it up. I was tasked with asking them questions the next day, and I didn’t tell them in advance what the questions were. I asked them a lot of obvious things. I asked them what they thought of the Southern Baptist Convention, which was at the time going through the throws of revolution. So I asked them about books and people and movements and what they saw happening and so on. And then finally, right toward the end, I said, A lot of Christian scholars and senior pastors in their old age become grumpy. They become cranky.

Matt Tully
How old were you at the time?

D. A. Carson
Oh, I was about thirty-five. But these guys were both in their eighties. Carl was older than Kenneth, but they were both in their eighties. And I said, All of us can think of certain elderly saints who built quite a lot in their youth and then in their old age became defensive and jealous and maybe a bit envious of young men coming along behind and began, actually, to destroy what they built. But both of you men have avoided that trap. Both of you, from my perspective, walk humbly, you’re models to listen to, you’re not arrogant. How have you avoided the traps? So basically, I was asking them what you just asked me. And both of them fumbled a bit, didn’t know what to say, looked embarrassed. And then finally Carl said very quietly, How can anybody be arrogant if he stands beside the cross? It was the best thirty seconds of the entire three hour project.

36:24 - The Impact of a Faithful Servant of God

Matt Tully
A number of years ago you published a book with Crossway called Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor. That book, I think, similarly stands as a testament to the humility of a Christian who walked closely with his God. It’s a book about your father, and you conclude the book with this beautiful paragraph talking about his life in ministry, reflecting on the impact of his life in ministry. I wonder if you could read that for us briefly, and then I’ll then ask a question about it.

D. A. Carson
"Tom Carson never wrote a book, but he loved the book. He was never wealthy or powerful, but he kept growing as a Christian: yesterday’s grace was never enough. He was not a far-sighted visionary, but he looked forward to eternity. His journals have many, many entries bathed in tears of contrition, but his children and grandchildren remember his laughter. He much preferred to avoid controversy than to stir things up, but his own commitments to historic confessionalism were unyielding, and in ethics he was a man of principle. His own ecclesiastical circles were rather small and narrow, but his reading was correspondingly large and expansive. He was not very good at putting people down, except on his prayer lists.

When he died, there were no crowds outside the hospital, no editorial comments in the papers, no announcements on television, no mention in Parliament, no attention paid by the nation. In his hospital room, there was no one by his bedside. There was only the quiet hiss of oxygen, venting because he had stopped breathing and would never need it again. But on the other side all the trumpets sounded.”

Matt Tully
Your life has been very different from your fathers. He was not well-known outside of his own church, and you helped to start a global ministry and are known around the world. And yet you would say his life has had a huge impact on how you think about what it is you’ve been called to do. If you had to summarize that, how did his life impact you?

D. A. Carson
That’s probably a question that’s better answered by a good historian two hundred years from now. I’m too close to the events to be a good judge. When the saints go marching in, it’s for God to say the “well dones” and decide who gets what. But just as I’m convinced that the widow with her two mites will be a lot closer to the front of the pack than some great Christian benefactors who have given away millions, so I’m pretty sure that pastors like my dad are likely to be a little closer to the front of the pack than people who speak to 10,000 people in a shot.

Matt Tully
Don, thank you so much for taking the time today to share a little bit about your own life, your own story, the insight that God has given you into the church and what the next generation can learn from you and others. We appreciate it.

D. A. Carson
Blessings on you.

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