Interview
Dr. Robert Smith
by Art Azurdia
Dr. Robert Smith, Jr. serves as Professor of Christian Preaching at Beeson Divinity School. An ordained Baptist minister, he served as pastor of the New Mission Missionary Baptist Church for twenty years and has preached and taught in over forty schools in the United States, Great Britain, and the Caribbean. Having authored and contributed to numerous works, his most recent publication is Doctrine That Dances: Bringing Doctrinal Preaching and Teaching to Life (B&H Publishing Group), which was selected as the winner of the 2008 Preaching Book of the Year Award by Preaching Magazine. His research interests include the place of passion in preaching, the literary history of African American preaching, Christological preaching, and the theology of preaching. He and his wife, Wanda, are the parents of four adult children. Last summer I spent a couple of hours with Dr. Smith talking about the significance of the centrality of the gospel as it relates to pastoral and academic ministry.
AA: Dr. Smith, do you remember the occasion when you first understood the gospel – where you were, where you heard it, and how you responded to it?
RS: Yes, it was during a catechetical session. My pastor, E.L. Alexander (an old-timer, as we would call him today), insisted on us internalizing – knowing – the Baptist church covenant: “Having been led, as we believe, by the Spirit of God to receive the Lord Jesus Christ as our Savior, and on profession of faith, being baptized in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, we do now, in the presence of God, angels, and this assembly, most solemnly and joyfully enter into the covenant with one another as one body in Christ.” I also had to know, as a ten-year-old boy, the twenty-four articles of faith. Not only was I required to be able to recite them, but I was expected to be able to articulate a definitive understanding of each. Though I was unaware of it at the time, God was using Pastor Alexander providentially to help me to understand systematic theology as a ten-year-old junior deacon. I am in debt to him for that.
AA: There seems, today, to be a lot of controversy with regard to the gospel-proper. How would you define the gospel? How would you summarize it for one of your students?
RS: Well, perhaps I could talk about what the gospel is not. The gospel is not simply good news. It is bad news, as well. It is good news to those who will believe it. It is bad news to those who will reject it. In Romans 1:16, Paul states: “I am not ashamed of the gospel, the good news of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe, to the Jew first of all and also to the Greek.” Now, that’s good news. It’s bad news when Jesus says in John 3:36, “He that believeth the Son hath eternal life. The one who believeth not the Son, shall not see life because that one does not believe in the only begotten Son of God.” The rejection of Jesus Christ, since He is not a way, but the way – the only way to salvation – means that persons literally sign their eternal damnation note separating themselves from God forever. It is either good or bad news based upon how we respond to what God has offered. Therefore, I deny any claim toward universalism which alleges that all persons will be saved, regardless. The gospel is the good news concerning the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. In 1936, C.H. Dodd, talking about apostolic preaching in its earliest tradition articulated that the whole idea of what he calls kerygma, is: life, death, resurrection, ascension, enthronement, sending out the Holy Spirit, and repentance. I think that the sermon has to have at least some of those ingredients. Not every sermon, all the time will include these seven areas, but they must at least be in the background informing our preaching to ensure that we are being biblical. We see that Paul takes one whole chapter in 1 Corinthians 15 to talk about the significance of the resurrection – that “if Christ be not risen from the dead,” Christianity is the greatest hoax that has ever been voiced. So the gospel is good news about Jesus Christ in all of these areas that God talks about and it is bad news for a person who rejects it.
AA: Well, as evangelicals we would all agree that the gospel is essential for the inception of the Christian life. But what is the value of the gospel for the ongoing experience of the Christian life? RS: God is always the one who encounters us, who initiates the process. I must preach justification by the grace of God through faith. He initiates that. That gets me saved. I must not preach sanctification by works once a person gets saved. It’s God, by His grace, who justifies. It’s God, by His grace, who sanctifies. And it’s God, by His grace, who glorifies. It’s always God doing |
It’s God, by His grace, who sanctifies. And it’s God, by His grace, who glorifies. It’s always God doing it and so I must not allow my works to get involved as a salvific necessity. Works are there but only because they are the result of a heart truly regenerated. I work from salvation. I don’t work unto salvation. The love of Christ compels me to do what I do. So, the indicative preceding the imperative is important. |
AA: I’ve heard you say, on many occasions, that the Bible is a “Him” book. How would you talk to a student or to a fellow pastor about the relationship of the gospel to the Bible?
RS: I would tell students that the Bible is a Him book – it is about Him – and we are not to be adherents of bibliolatry. We don’t worship the Bible. There is the written word: the Bible. There is the spoken word: the gospel. There is the revealed word: Christ. Karl Barth would say that the highest revelation of God is manifest in the person of Jesus Christ. Therefore, I think it’s possible for us to preach a doctrine, but to separate the doctrine from the person of Christ that it points to, which creates a major deficiency in our preaching.
| Two examples: Helmut Thielicke, a German theologian, was speaking about Mark 4:35-41. He stated that Jesus was in the boat when the storm-tossed sea began to buffet the ship. The boat was not important. What made the boat important was the fact that Jesus was in it. The Scripture represents the boat. The Bible is important because Christ is in it. | Luther
would say that the swaddling clothes represent the Bible but the swaddling clothes would be nothing without the baby Jesus wrapped within. So I would say to a student, “Let the Bible be penultimate and let Christ be ultimate. The gospel serves to magnify and expose Christ. |
AA: Do you see, then, these “moralisms” driving us away from the gospel, thus compromising our preoccupation with the gospel?
RS: In a church, you will often see either extreme legalism or extreme libertinism. With libertinism you see anti-nominanism . . . no law. One might say, “If sin abounds, grace must much more abound and God loves to give us grace, so let’s continue doing what we want to do.” Paul deals with such attitudes in the book of Romans. Contrarily, legalism requires works. You’ll hear statements such as, “You’ve got to do this” or “You have to do that.” “Jesus is fine, but you need to be circumcised,” which in essence says, “grace is no longer grace because something must be added to it.” Moralism, I think, has hurt the church. Even though we say, “Come as you are,” when people are saved, we expect them to go immediately from infancy to full-grown adulthood. And it only deals with externals, rather than allowing people to be conformed to the image of God internally. I believe that moralism and legalism are deadly. They’re deadly because we lift up a standard that we can’t come up to and we tell people to do things that we’re not doing. It’s hypocrisy. I believe in those residing moral laws in the Old Testament – not dietary laws, but moral laws. They can never be kept unless Christ, by the power of the Spirit, enables us to live them out. Then they become a lifestyle because now we have a relationship with a person who has already fulfilled them.
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