Nathan Nocchi (NN): Brother, it is a pleasure to sit down and chat with you. Why not begin by saying a bit about yourself, your interests, and what brought you to Westminster?
Andrew Becham (AB): Thanks, Nathan, for the opportunity. I grew up in the greater Atlanta area down in Georgia, where I also met my wife. We moved to the Philadelphia area so that I could study in preparation for pastoral ministry. The story of how I ended up at Westminster is a good picture of God’s providence. There’s always more to the picture, so I’ll just focus on one area. At Georgia State University, I studied philosophy for the same reason as many people: I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. Well, that’s not entirely it. I had a desire to study philosophy, law, or theology at a graduate level, so philosophy seemed like a strategic path to develop skills and explore ideas. On top of that, an alarming number of college students at my church were philosophy majors, so they and their strange ways pushed me from curiosity to pursuit. So, by hubris or peer pressure, it was philosophy that I studied.
Early in the program, I took a philosophy of religion course. The professor and I had developed a good teacher-pupil relationship from a logic course I’d taken with him earlier. He knew I was a believer; he was, and remains, a skeptic. In the religion lectures, he’d pose the expected suite of questions and have us wrestle through them, often out loud. Unsatisfied with my improvisational responses, inspired though they were, I went home and asked one of those philosophical friends from church if he knew of any literature to help me work through objections to the Christian faith. Little did I know that he had written his senior thesis on the apologetic method of Cornelius Van Til. He shared his copy of Christian Apologetics. The rest is history. You read the introductions, follow the footnotes, keep reading for breadth and depth, and discover that there is still a Reformed theological seminary where they train people for ministry the old-fashioned way: biblical languages, historical sensitivity, and confessional trajectory all in an integrated curriculum. This, the Westminster way, is what pulled me here, and I continue to believe earnestly that it is at present the best program for seminary education one can receive.
NN: I, too, have a similar story. Thinking, for a moment, about the Westminster way, and Westminster’s namesake (i.e., Westminster Standards), creeds and confessions are at the forefront of our modern context. Christians, of course, recite creeds on the Lord’s Day, as a heartfelt expression of that which they believe. In recent days in the social and political sphere, however, we have seen the advent of new creeds, which are proclaimed in innumerable ways. “Co-existence,” “Love is love,” and “All religions are true” are some of the central terms and phrases of these novel creeds. This sort of “virtuous ignorance” was observed by Machen as absurd, saying “If all creeds are equally true, then since they are contradictory to one another, they are all equally false, or at least equally uncertain.” Many have said that pastors should refrain from being “political” in the pulpit. However, it goes without saying that nearly everything has become political. As you think about entering pastoral ministry, what do you think the place of the pulpit is in repudiating these new, pervasive creeds?
AB: It is interesting to come across these signs in front of old churches, typically the most beautiful and historic buildings in town. Rachel and I pass one frequently where we live. Churches following these sorts of cultural winds are on the way to being empty churches. When the gospel of Jesus Christ is confessed not as the pearl of great price but as nothing more than one form of religious expression or activism spurting out into the world among other worldly creeds, its core message is obscured, frustrated, and lost.
Machen, of course, saw this in his day. The motive for this ideology, pluralism, is to accept everything on equally untrue footing: False religions and acts of moral delinquency are all equally valid because none of them is really true at all; they reduce to expression of individuals’ personal opinions. They are not religioustruth claims after all, because who really knows religious truths? This modern commitment to pluralism cannot abide Jesus’s teaching that the gate that leads to life is narrow. He is the gate; none enters the pasture and joins the flock except through him. The true church confesses “One God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” This means he gets to define love. He gets to define who we are and how we are to live with one another. And in so defining it, he does not affirm every behavior and ideology humankind or American culture might generate. He will not coexist, per the First Commandment still on many of our civil buildings. Creedal Christianity is and must be courageous Christianity because it says “yes” only to what is true and “no” to what is false in a world enraptured with falsehood. So, to kindle that courage, pulpits need to thunder with the Christ revealed in all of Scripture who loves and governs his church with true love. And the men and women, boys and girls, young and old in the pew need to respond with a resonance and sturdiness.
NN: Amen! Venturing a bit further into causes of these new social movements, and more particularly, that which is desired by these movements, perhaps we can take a moment to consider man as a social creature, a creature woven into an intricate social fabric. What is the place of the church in signaling these basic facts of our existence? Machen himself said that “The Church is the highest Christian answer to the social needs of man.” What do you think Machen means by this statement, and how can we apply it to our current context?
AB: I think what Machen has in mind with the quote about the church answering all of the social needs of man is that there is a place, an institution, a nexus of relationships in this life whose ultimate aim is aligned with our ultimate aim. Family, government, industry—these furnish and enrich our lives on this earth, but they are designed to finish up at the coming of Christ after they have done their shaping of us. We don’t take them with us into the new creation. But the church as the Bride of Christ survives and enters into the coming age. So, practically, I cannot think of a better way for churches to address all of man’s social needs than the leadership of the church: a healthy diaconate and sessional oversight. I am talking about regular, historic Reformed polity. Nothing too crazy.
Your deacons are something of a limbic system for the body of Christ, working in the background to move goods around to where they need to be and cleaning up messes. Perhaps a better picture is that they’re the shock absorbers for when life comes crashing down on the church, which we see in part in Acts 6. The diaconate cannot be the only ones to address practical needs on a daily basis, since we all really need each other, but they are Christ’s gifts to the church who are able to serve those needs with wisdom. Additionally, elders need to practice the high honor of visiting members at home. This is how needs great and small can be seen and addressed.
During my internship at a local OPC congregation, we held a small worship service in the home of a seasoned saint no longer able to come to Sunday worship. A few of our elders and deacons were there, as well as a handful of members, and our pastor administered the Lord’s Supper after prayer, song, and homily. We saw each other face to face, hugged, ate and drank, and sang. This is not something that could have been streamed or held over Zoom. It was real. It was anti-Docetic.
Docetism is the old heresy that Jesus only seemingly took on a human nature but didn’t really. The orthodox faith confesses a real Christ who died for a real people who have real human natures, who are corporeal as well as spiritual in nature. This Christ who died for us, the real us, dignifies our physical needs by resurrecting from the dead not in a non-human form but in the selfsame human body he took on at the incarnation. Our social need for one another is given to us in the society of the church we confess as catholic and as the communion of saints under Christ’s lordship, not seemingly but in concrete, historical form that shapes who we are all the way down.
So, as we participate in this society called the kingdom of God, we are put in communion with one another because we belong to one Lord Jesus Christ who has raised us from the dead and seated us in the heavenly places. In him we truly belong to one another and are enabled and ennobled to serve even the most mundane of needs. Culture has catechized us in forging our own path in the chaos. As a result, people coming of age feel a degree of displacement and a desire for vision and mentorship which will only grow more acute as those social and institutional building blocks destabilize.
The church can help the scattered and hopeless by gathering them around the hope of the gospel in Holy Scripture. So as the church should remember God’s work in Christ the way he would have us remember it: with faith and repentance to do, say, and believe all that he has taught us.
NN: Considering for a moment this hope of the gospel, and the special task of preaching it in this modern tumultuous context, what tools and skills has Westminster given and fostered in you with this modern world in mind?
AB: One thing that Wesminster offers with respect to its distinctive of cooperative biblical and systematic theology is that Scripture commends to us not only a biblical worldview, which deals with our knowledge, but also the real world, the way things really are. Critical scholarship at the moment uses “the biblical world” to refer to what those superstitious pre-modern people used to think before we figured out what the world was really made of through methods of scientific inquiry rationally and skeptically conditioned. But what we see in Scripture is the world as it really is: ordered, cultivated, charged with song, angelic warfare, life, dignity, drama and wonderfully full. Have anyone read Isaiah 40 or Romans 8 and, even if they don’t believe it’s true, part of them will wish that it were. What the curriculum at Westminster gives you is a way to read that text as it was meant to be read: as referring to the way things are and to the One who is and who is gathering us to himself from this fallen world. Scripture talks about what God has done in creation and providence, what he has accomplished for our salvation in Christ, and what the meaning and goal of all things is as they find their place in relation to their Maker and Redeemer. Now we approach the text with all of this in mind. Our tools of grammar, discourse analysis, and biblical backgrounds help us to hypothesize a reading. That reading is refined through interaction with historical sources: you will often learn new questions to ask and discover a better answer than your own from reading commentaries of old. The resources of theology in turn help you to discern whether what you think the text is saying successfully and properly relates to the person and work of Christ.
NN: Brother, thank you for your thoughtful engagement and insight. It is our prayer that your studies continue to flourish in such a way that you are formed for the task of ministry, both in knowledge and in love. How else can we pray for you and your family?
AB: Pray for me as I prepare for graduation and ordination in this next season: I’m in the phase of exploring options for work post-seminary. Pray that Westminster’s faculty continues to thrive in its mission of forming ministers of the gospel able to serve the church faithfully and expertly, as the day demands with greater urgency. And pray that all of our efforts in Christ’s service would find their place in his plan and encourage the saints everywhere.