Why Piper Left (and I Won't)

Various people have been influential in my life and thinking. The one whom has had the most impact but whom I have never seen in person (and is still alive) is John Piper. Like many well-known pastors, Piper does not give lots of personal details in his messages. So while I’ve long known that Piper was a professor at Bethel College before he became a pastor, I never knew why he left. The reason why this was so important to me was because I wondered if I would ever do the same.

Piper gives his reason in a sermon recently sent out by his list and the answer is quite helpful to me. I excerpt a longer portion for a reason:

I was on sabbatical from teaching at Bethel College. My one aim on this leave was to study Romans 9 and write a book on it that would settle, in my own mind, the meaning of these verses. After six years of teaching and finding many students in every class ready to discount my interpretation of this chapter for one reason or another, I decided I had to give eight months to it. The upshot of that sabbatical was the book, The Justification of God. I tried to answer every important exegetical objection to God’s absolute sovereignty in Romans 9.

But the result of that sabbatical was utterly unexpected—at least by me. My aim was to analyze God’s words so closely and construe them so carefully that I could write a book that would be compelling and stand the test of time. What I did not expect was that six months into this analysis of Romans 9 God himself would speak to me so powerfully that I resigned my job at Bethel and made myself available to the Minnesota Baptist Conference if there were a church who would have me as a pastor.

In essence it happened like this: I was 34 years old. I had two children and a third on the way. As I studied Romans 9 day after day, I began to see a God so majestic and so free and so absolutely sovereign that my analysis merged into worship and the Lord said, in effect, “I will not simply be analyzed, I will be adored. I will not simply be pondered, I will be proclaimed. My sovereignty is not simply to be scrutinized, it is to be heralded. It is not grist for the mill of controversy, it is gospel for sinners who know that their only hope is the sovereign triumph of God’s grace over their rebellious will.”

I turn 34 years old in a few months, but the reason why I don’t think that I will leave teaching is because in my situation I teach about a God who is adored. Yes, we analyze, but we also worship. Sometimes maybe I “cross the line” in preaching (vs. teaching), but the students don’t resist; they respond. If it were not so, I cannot see enjoying my job.

I don’t know what Bethel College was like in 1980 (when Piper left), but I know what it was like in 1990 when my girlfriend (now wife) attended and graduated from there. I would say this: there are Christian colleges and there are Christian colleges. Do not trust the glossy flyers they send you in the mail. Be very careful where you choose to go to school, where you choose to teach, or where you choose to send your kids. After a while of observing graduates, you start to see patterns. School X produces spiritually confused graduates; School Y produces students with more freedom than the pagans; School Z produces narrow-minded, angry fools.

The Master’s College isn’t perfect, but it’s right on the main thing: we exist to proclaim Christ as Lord and to live for him. And the students at TMC know that and they’re there because of that. If they want the beach, or the big-city life, or the intellectual snobbery, they go to other schools. So I never have to fight students who want to scrutinize to the exclusion of submission, or to deliberate without delight.