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‘Why Are You Here?’

By February 23, 2011June 17th, 2014No Comments

Dave Doran and Tim Jordan

LANSDALE, Pa.—On the second day of Calvary Baptist Seminary’s Advancing the Church Conference, most guests seemed to be waiting for an afternoon event billed as the Speakers’ Panel, where Mark Dever, Dave Doran, Kevin Bauder, and Tim Jordan responded to questions posed by Sam Harbin, seminary president.

Such events are de rigueur in fundamentalist conferences, and perhaps the format has become somewhat tired, with speakers repeating The Official Company Line for a new generation of (bored) guests. At their worst, some Q and A sessions are overly managed, carefully censored so important questions never see the light of day.

But such was not the case today. After several months of extended discussion about fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals “sharing the platform,” the Speakers’ Panel was the first event of the conference where all of the speakers actually appeared on the platform at the same time.

Sam Harbin began the discussion by asking questions about the nature of expository preaching, probing for differences between preachers who claim to embrace the idea, compared to preachers who actually practice Biblical exposition with any consistency. The responses were fascinating and well worth consideration for the audience, most of whom were church leaders or ministerial students. But then the speakers broke off-topic to explore the basic question everyone wanted to ask.

Tim Jordan: So, ah…[pregnant pause]….Obviously this is for us a rather new experience, to have this group of men sitting in this place at this time.

Mark Dever: Now when you say “this group of men,” you don’t mean Dave and Kevin [much laughter].

Jordan: Well, uh, no I don’t [even more laughter].

Dever: I just wanted to clarify!

Jordan: Everybody wants to know about this anyway, so I might as well ask… So, Kevin, why are you here? In all sincerity, you’ve been here before to speak, but obviously this is very different. And the only thing that is different is the fact that we have Mark here. Obviously there are some people who are very enthusiastic that you are here, and there some people that are less enthusiastic that you are here….So, why are you here?

Kevin Bauder: Several years ago I received my first invitation to participate in the National Leadership Conference as it was then called, and was very, very impressed with the level of conversation that was taking place. It seemed to be one of the places where very healthy things were happening within fundamentalism. There were important questions being talked about, that they were being talked about by reasonably thoughtful people, that they weren’t just shooting from the hip. And at that point I made a decision, that this is a good thing, and I’m willing to do whatever I can do to make this succeed. I want to support the kind of conversation that takes place here. I don’t want this to sound disrespectful, Mark, but whether Mark is here, for me, is not the issue. It’s the conversation. Now, I’m glad he’s here, I don’t mean to discount your presence. But the point of my being here isn’t to appear on the platform with Mark Dever or even with Dave Doran [laughter]. It’s to be part of the conversation, to encourage and keep it going, as we together grapple with the Scriptures and try to understand what the Bible means in terms of our obedience here and now. That’s what drives me.

Doran: I would say, like Kevin says, I’ve been to just about every one of these conferences, so it was really sort of a given that I would be coming. Really, there wasn’t any new issue for me this year. A few years ago when Ed Welch was here I was here I had to wrestle with my comfort level about someone outside our circles of support. I actually think that Mark is more separate than Ed, so that side of it wasn’t really an issue this year. The issue of why I feel it is important to have this conversation (which would be the way I would say it), is I think if you do not wrestle with the contemporary implications of what you believe, that if you let your applications fossilize, you actually will walk away from the principles that were driving those applications. And I think that part of the conversation has to happen. I doubt we all agree with each other on the right way to solve that problem, but I do think (I’ll speak for myself on this one) that we are committed to the same principles of separation that we have always been, yet I do and have tried to acknowledge that there have been changes that have forced me to think through the applications differently than I have since becoming a pastor 22 years ago…in the midpoint of the last decade, 2005-2006, there were some things that I thought were significant in a change of landscape, both internally and externally.

Dever: I’d be curious to hear—what were those changes?

Doran: In early 2005 there was a meeting in which Kevin and I were both speakers. Both of us tried to make a case (I’ll try to say this as tactfully as possible) for drawing a circle, to say that if you are going to identify with historic fundamentalism,  certain theological aberrations have to be rejected. We tried to make an earnest appeal, but I didn’t think that that was actually going to get traction. I would say that outside [fundamentalism] in March 2005, Phil Johnson did his presentation on “Fundamentalism: Dead Right?” We spent four or five weeks going back and forth about it. The month right before that I had asked the folks at Grace [Community Church, John MacArthur’s church] very specifically on the issue of secondary separation, an idea they never publicly accepted. But in his presentation, Phil Johnson said “we do believe it is valid, but has not been used properly.” So that was a significant change. And the concept of secondary separation (call it what you want)—we can’t grant Christian fellowship to those who deny essential Christian doctrines. Those who do that are violating Scripture and therefore compromising the gospel. And that, since the late sixties, has been the point of conflict.

Dever: And that is spelled out in Rolland McCune’s Promise Unfulfilled. Fascinating book. And Ian Murray’s Evangelicalism Divided is like a simpler version of that?

Doran: Right. And his book was beginning to talk about this. There’s probably a dozen books that began to talk about the problems of the evangelical left. Grudem in his book on Open Theism. Carson, Love in hard Places…the necessity of separating over the gospel. Mohler’s chapter in Horton’s book….so there actually was an uptick of talk about separatism among a certain segment of evangelicalism, that’s what I meant by a change in the landscape. [The evangelicals] were not as thorough and as consistent as I would have preferred…

Dever: But you weren’t hearing that in the 1970s?

Doran: Right. And still even in the 1980s [the evangelicals] were trying to figure themselves out, because they realized what had happened in evangelicalism. Both groups go through identity crisis every 15 to 20 years, seems like. That’s always been the problem. That’s why I personally tilt toward Hart’s position that evangelicalism is a myth, and I would say this is true for fundamentalism as well.

Jordan: [To Dever] So, knowing that this was a bit of an unusual group for you, and wasn’t even a “group,” it’s really not a homogeneous mindset here….So, why would you come?

Dever: I’m a local church pastor, so I’m mainly [preaching] in my local church. The congregation and the elders are fine with me going away to preach elsewhere. Generally I go away just to speak to pastors. Among the pastors conferences that I get invited to speak to, I tend to look for constituencies that I haven’t been to before. Instead of going back to the same places again, I tend to go to new places. I certainly asked friends and staff members who have been to fundamentalist colleges, asked them about this seminary and this conference, and they all encouraged me to come.

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