John L. Dagg: Virginia Baptist

If you particularly if you're a pastor and you do not have a copy of Dag's Manual of Church Order, I cannot stress to you enough how useful you might find it. Not only is it written with piety and carefulness, but he writes about things that are very relevant for you as a pastor. And particularly the issues we were talking about when I talked in the last session about the requirements for church membership. He seems to anticipate all the reasons that Bunyan would have and others today would have for not requiring baptism for church membership. And he deals with them lovingly, fairly, but he deals with them thoroughly. And I think you'd find yourself helped by reading through Dagg's manual of church order. So you can get that from Lloyd Springle tonight for a fine price. But now, we once again turn from the exalted heights of theology where they have asked Father Tom to dwell, down to the little creeks and eddies of church history, where they asked me to dwell. So we presume that you're interested in this. We give it to you, hoping it will be encouraging to you. We want to talk about John L. Dagg. Now, in all honesty and humility, because you know, as today's pastors, it's good to be encouraged in humility. Raise your hand if you're layman, you don't have to play this game right now. We're just aiming at the pastors. If you've not heard of John L. Dagg before, pastor, please raise your hand. Well done for being humble, brother. Well, we're about to inform you about Donald Reagan. We just assume you're going to be interested. We'll see. Virginia Baptist Churchman is what we've called this. There's no doubt that denominations can be pernicious creatures. They can enshrine error. They can immortalize institutions. They can too easily be living shrines to doctrinal distinctives while obscuring the very essentials of the Christian doctrine and gospel. which alone is our salvation. Sad examples of this can be found on almost every street in our towns and cities. There is no human institution which remains untouched by fallenness that has humans involved with it. And yet, while eschewing a shallow triumphalism, we can still thank God for his mercies to us as individuals, as churches, and in organizations which are the result of God-inspired leadership. And just such an institution, I think, is the Southern Baptist Convention. born out of a combination of motives, which had only come from creatures fallen, but made in the image of God, the Southern Baptist Convention was born of a desire to spread the good news of Christ and to ensure, as terrible as it truly is, that slaveholders would not be excluded from this great task. The denomination which grew in the tumultuous middle decades of the 19th century, though itself new, was composed of men and women from churches with traditions of ministry which long predated the founding of the Convention in 1845. though the denomination might be described as being in infancy, the tradition of Baptist Christians in America is a comparatively long-established part of American religious life and of Virginia religious life. Part of the established tradition of these Baptists was a comparatively articulate, robustly reformed theology shared in large part with Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and many Episcopalian pastors around them. For all of the disagreements and even tribulations which established denominations had inflicted on those unestablished churches, particularly Baptist churches, the understanding of the Christian gospel, indeed of most of Christian theology, was not a contentious issue. Now, back during the 1980s, this matter was more contested than it is now. I don't know there's as much contest over this, but I remember being told, just a little side anecdote here, when there was a new pastor who came to my home church in Kentucky. that my beliefs, believing in original sin as I did, were just outside the pale among Baptists. I needed to go be a Presbyterian. And he was a graduate from one of our Southern Baptist seminaries. And as I kept asking questions about Romans 5, it became clear he didn't believe in original sin. And he had an M.D. and a Ph.D. from one of our seminaries. Well, I was, you know, trusted in the orthodoxy of our congregation. I thought sooner or later they'll figure it out. And they'll reject this. And I think eventually they did, particularly when he started talking about how he didn't believe in once saved, always saved. That was something that began to shunt him off to other kinds of ministry. But he was the man who was presiding over the council that ordained me a couple of years later, which is my home church. And so I'd gone back there, and I remember joking with him before we walked out to the council. I guess I'd better be careful not to quote Calvin. And I just said this in passing. And he said, oh, no, no, Mark. You can quote Calvin all you want. He said, these are country preachers. They all believe Calvin. It's only those who have been to seminary who don't like Calvin. Well, isn't that interesting? Isn't that interesting? He's a student at Dale Moody's. Well, I thought that was fascinating. And you know, it made me think of something my great aunt told me. My great aunt, back in the 1940s, had told my uncle. Isn't it interesting when I give you these side stories? Had told my uncle. When he had come back one day, very excited about going to the first Christian church with his Boy Scout troop, how much he liked the Christian church, how much it was just like the Baptist church. And my great aunt told him, no, she said, oh, he said, if the Baptist church ever burns down, I'm going to the Christian church. And she replied very strongly, you will not. She said, if the Baptist church ever burns down, you will go to the Presbyterian church. She said, the Christian Church may look like us, but the Presbyterian Church believes like us. Just little nuggets of Baptist life and history. Back to John L. Dang. Thinking specifically first about his biography, and then I want us again, as we did with Bunyan earlier, to look particularly at his ecclesiology. John L. Dagg's long list of services to church and to denominations alone should put to rest any idea of Calvinists being lazy or inactive. If you read his autobiography, you see he did an amazing amount of things. He was born on February 14, 1794 in Middleburg, not far from here at all. Dag's boyhood was largely uneventful. His formal education was scant. Religion was not a large part of the Dag household during his earliest years. Although his mother was raised as a Presbyterian, neither of his parents claimed to be converted until Dag's early teenage years. He recounts his own conversions having occurred in 1809, when he was 15 years old. Once converted, Dag felt it was his duty to undertake a study of the highly controversial doctrine of infant baptism. Another aside. I have somebody doing work on why it was, in the first two decades of the 19th century, everybody was arguing about baptism. Have you ever noticed that? There's a ton of stuff going on in the 1810s and 20s about infant baptism. It'd be a great thing for somebody to look into. I don't know why. There it is. Back to the text. Surrounded by Presbyterian literature. and friends dad thought that he needed to figure out what was going on with this idea that the baptism didn't seem clear to him in scripture. Well, he came to that specific conclusions and he was baptized into the Ebenezer Baptist Church by William Christo in the spring of 1812. After a few years studying medicine, dad was ordained to the ministry in November of 1817. He spent the next eight years here in Northern Virginia pastoring several small churches. And brother, which, those are all around your, or some of them are around your church. One of them was your church. Well, there it is. Apparently a preacher of some ability, Dag received calls for large city churches. The Baptist church here in Alexandria was interested in it in 1822, but he declined even to consider the matter. First Baptist Richmond, then the largest Baptist congregation in the whole country extended a call to him. In December of 1824, which he also declined, he declined these calls, however, and continue serving the small churches in which he'd been converted and ordained. So he ministered here in northern Virginia from 1817 to 1825 for eight years. During that time, he helped to begin his local association and he helped to begin the Baptist General Association of Virginia. In 1825, he moved to Philadelphia, where he took up the pastorate of the prominent Fifth Baptist Church. of philadelphia to the time of one of the largest congregations in the city he was an officer in the philadelphia baptist missionary society one of the founders of the pennsylvania baptist missionary society which is the forerunner of their state convention and with the host pastor for the eighteen twenty nine trineal convention which is the mother of the a b c s b c and other baptist denominations in america Dagg also served on the Board of Managers of the Triennial Convention for 10 years. He was Vice President of the Triennial Convention for 7 years. He was on the Board of Directors for the American Baptist Non-Missionary Society for 4 years. And he was Vice President of the American and Foreign Bible Society for 6 years. And he was President and Vice President and held other positions with the Baptist General Society for 20 years. He was particularly concerned for mission work in western Pennsylvania and then once he moved to the south for the evangelization of the Cherokee tribe in Georgia. In the province of God we know much of what we do about dad because of a failure in his ministry. In 1834 dad's otherwise successful pastorate in Philadelphia ended due to the failure of his voice. Apart from this failure would he ever have turned his efforts from preaching to writing. I doubt it. wanting to retain his service in the area the baptist of the philadelphia association approach about serving as president and professor of theology at a new school they divided over the bag accepted the position served there for a couple of years but then the school was dissolved dad then moved to alabama which at the time was not so much stout as it was west he served as president of the alabama female athenaeum in tuscaloosa alabama During this time, he was active in the Alabama Baptist Convention, serving on committees as an altar, also helping the Alabama Baptist Bible Society, and serving as its president for two of its first years. Once he moved out to Alabama, the great distance from the Eastern Seaboard made his continued participation in national Baptist meetings difficult. Expressing regret to Dagg about his absence from the troubled 1841 Triennial Convention in Baltimore, Spencer H. Cone, prominent Baptist minister in New York City and longtime friend, wrote, quote, I was much disappointed in not seeing you in Baltimore, that you lacked influence, which Daggmuth was addressing in a letter to Cone, either with the South or North, I cannot for a moment admit, for I know no one whose voice would have commanded more respect in our anxious and important session, end of quote. Dagg served at Mercer University in Georgia as president for 10 years and as professor of theology. There he labored to build the theological department until in the 1850s, before the founding of Southern Seminary, it was perhaps the most celebrated theological school in the South. During his tenure at Mercer, Dagg was still called upon for larger denominational service. As we had moved to Georgia, Dagg became active in the Georgia Baptist Convention. So this is now the fourth state convention that he'd become extremely active in trying to help the work of. He served on the executive committee there for 11 years. He was one of 10 people appointed to meet on April the 28th, 1845 in Providence, Rhode Island, to arrange for the dissolution of the American Baptist Home Mission Society. One month later, while attending the organizational meeting for the Southern Baptist Convention, Dagg was appointed as one of the vice presidents of the new Domestic Missions Board of the Southern Convention. He was also appointed to the committee to draw up the constitution for the new convention. Dagg again attended the Southern Baptist Convention in 1849. His activities there included chairing a committee on the China Mission and delivering its report to the convention and addressing the convention as a corresponding messenger from the American Sunday School Union. In 1856, Dagg retired from teaching theology at Mercer. His remaining years were spent in publishing material, much of which, no doubt, was taken from his classroom lectures. Throughout his long life, he had established many close relationships with religious leaders of the day. He was highly regarded. Virginia's J.B. Jeter, considered him an outstanding preacher. Dad counted, among his closest and oldest friends, some of the most influential Baptists in the nation, many with Virginia connections. William Christo, Spencer H. Cone, Noah Davis, Joseph Kennard, David Jones, Basil Manley Sr., P.H. His service at Mercer was well known and greatly appreciated. His writings also served to keep his thoughts often before the minds of thousands of his fellow ministers. In 1879, during a meeting of the Southern Baptist Commission in Atlanta, 1879, and consider that, how old Dag was at the time, how long he had been involved at a national level, in 1879, During a meeting of the Southern Baptist Commission in Atlanta, W.A. Quitson moves that, quote, a catechism containing the substance of the Christian religion be drawn up by the venerable J.L. Dagg. The resolution passed unanimously. Such was the respect and influence of John L. Dagg. His manual of theology saw widespread use throughout the rest of the 19th century, spreading his influence far beyond as many students, listeners, friends, and family. Evidence for the appreciation of Dagg's work can be seen by the fact that almost 40 years after his retirement, when a new theology professor was being appointed at Mercer in 1893, he would be endorsed by the simple statement that if this person, quote, needed any endorsement, it would be sufficient to say that he was a student under that incomparable theological teacher, the Reverend J.L. Dagg, and that he uses his systematic theology as a textbook, end of quote. I should just say that Lloyd has also reprinted for us his manual of theology. So you can get his Manual of Theology and his Manual of Church Order. Can you still get them in one volume? No. Well, sorry. But yes, you can still get both the Manual of Theology and the Manual of Church Order. Another aspect of Dagg's life that is often overlooked is his influence that he exerted beyond his own person, not merely through his preaching and teaching and writing and denominational service, but through his family. His son, John F. Dagg, served as pastor of the Baptist Church in Milledgeville, Georgia. and editor of the georgia baptist paper the christian deaths and clerk of the georgia baptist convention and pastor of cuthbert baptist church and professor and president of the cuthbert female college in cuthbert georgia president of bethel female college in hopkinsville kentucky the funds on f tag stepson by his second wife's first marriage was no okay davis since his father died when he's only a few months old and the only father davis ever knew Davis graduated from Mercer in 1849. He served as president of Bethel College in Ruffleville, Kentucky. He later became widely celebrated as professor of moral philosophy at the University of Virginia. And in this capacity, in fact, he delivered the first series of gay lectures at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1901. Dagg's daughter, Elizabeth, married S.G. Hilliard, a prominent Baptist minister in Georgia who served successively as professor of theology and president of Mercer University. Their son, J. L. Dagg Hillier, had a daughter, Georgia Hillier, who married John Roach Stratton, the famous fundamentalist Baptist pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in New York City. In 1926, their son, even the professor of church history is impressed with this, their son, Hillier Hawthorne Stratton, wrote the first thesis on Dagg at Southern Seminary. another daughter died mary jane mary roland the mallory some of the well-known for that the cd mallory also it was one of those would have to sell party now a graduate of the mercy of eighteen fifty one service president of the west end of the college proper toward the shorter college rome georgia and shelby penal college clearly it's not all that did not got married loyd sprinkle would have worked so much for dad's biography Am I getting any free books for all of us? I guess not. That's fine. That's fine though, I think. Let's turn to an even more edifying topic, which is doctrine of the church, his understanding of the church. That doctrine which is most distinctive of Baptists and yet which has been the most disputed within Baptist groups has certainly been the doctrine of the church. questions of structure of the forms of worship of the nature of the church, whether local and or universal, and of course of baptism, have been those which have repeatedly formed and divided and defined Baptist groups. The American frontier of the middle of the 19th century was the arena of Alexander Campbell and J.R. Graves. Denominational strife and pride were unusually prominent. It's not surprising, therefore, that John L. Dagg would choose to write a separate book, almost equal in length to his manual of theology, which dealt solely with ecclesiology, solely with the doctrine of the church. This reflected not only Dagg's historical situation, but also his commitment to the reality and the importance of obedience to Christ in all that is revealed. Dagg concluded his introduction to a treatise on church order by writing that, and I quote, Church order and the ceremonials of religion are less important than a new heart. And in the view of some, any laborious investigation of questions respecting them may appear to be needless and unprofitable. But we know from the Holy Scriptures that Christ gave commands on these subjects. And we cannot refuse to obey. Love prompts our obedience. And love prompts also the search which may be necessary to ascertain His will. Let us therefore prosecute the investigations which are before us. with a fervent prayer that the Holy Spirit, who guides in all truth, may assist us to learn the will of Him whom we supremely love and adore." End of quote. Dagg thought that a Christian church is, quote, an assembly of believers in Christ, organized into a body, according to the Holy Scriptures, for the worship and service of God. End of quote. Unlike the landmarkists of his day, Dagg used this word, church, to refer to local assemblies of Christians regardless of denominational distinctives. The members of the church are those who profess saving trust in Christ. Dag recognized that this was not equivalent to saying that only the elect are members of the local church, but it was denying, among other things, the practice of infant membership. This church was, by definition, an organized assembly. It was also a distinct, independent assembly, the New Testament having nowhere taught that one church was to be supervised by any organization or individual outside of the local church. The guiding rule for contemporary churches must always be the practice of the New Testament church. While not implying that every minute particular in the doings of a church is regulated by following the New Testament practice, in major matters the New Testament is meant as the church's pattern. Thus, baptism is still a prerequisite to church membership because it was so in the New Testament church. Dagg also taught that the word church was used in the New Testament to refer to a universal company of all of those saved by Christ, and this position was stringently criticized and teachings at the time that were new, the teachings of the landmarkists. Yet Dagg specifically defended this doctrine against landmarkism, even quoting from their own popular writings. Dagg did not equate the universal-local dichotomy with the invisible-visible dichotomy. He insisted that any who were to be truly considered members of either the local or the universal church must be visible to the world. Quote, notwithstanding the errors which human judgment may commit in individual cases, It still remains true that the light of piety is visible." Nor did he equate the Universal Church with any organization, though the Roman Catholic Church might insist on that, and strangely, the Landmarkists as well. The Church Universal was united not by organization, but by its spiritual nature. It will ultimately culminate at the end of the world. It will continue eternally. The word church, then, he says, applies to a local church because the members of it actually assemble, and it applies to the Church Universal because the members of it will actually assemble. in the presence and for the everlasting worship of God. As we've seen, baptism was one of the earliest doctrines with which Dagg wrestled. His early struggle with it left him with very clear opinions on almost every conceivable aspect of the doctrine and practice of baptism, though it's treated much more in that manual of church order than any other single topic. Baptism with water was certainly to be an ordinance for the Church of Christ until the kingdom of God should be consummated by the return of Christ. The Christian is not to seek merely a spiritual baptism, but is obligated to seek water baptism according to the command of Christ and his apostles. It may not be set aside as a matter indifferent to the modern Christian. And Dagg worked to great lengths to demonstrate this. He said that baptism has its only proper subjects, those who repent of their sins and trust in Christ for their salvation. Baptism was designed to be the ceremony of Christian profession, he wrote. with non-baptized persons properly than being admitted into the fellowship and membership of the local church to forego this would be to allow clear disobedience to the Christ one claims to follow. It's not surprising then to find that adamantly opposing infant membership in the church because infants incapable of faith and that the only only the claim of their only claim to the faith of the faith of their parents and they should not be seen as proper candidates for membership in the church. and just to be controversial here because we're mainly baptist pastor sitting here. I went on NAMM's website last night and clicked on statistics about numbers of baptisms of children in churches. And it's zero to eleven in our churches. And I don't think DAG would know how to understand any of those ages, but certainly not zero. I think we will be catching up with our Presbyterian brethren very soon. as the average age of baptism has been plummeting throughout the last century and as our churches show the great fruit of that. Infant baptism was wrong. The fact that those dying in infancy may in fact be saved by the grace of God is no argument, he said, for the unbiblical practice of infant baptism. It's nowhere commanded in the New Testament. Those examples of baptism which are presented as evidence for infant baptism include the fact that those baptized were disciples, which infants cannot be. The analogy of baptism to circumcision in the scriptures is an analogy that's made to circumcision of the heart, conversion, not circumcision of the flesh, Colossians 2. Indeed Dagg argued infant baptism is nowhere heard of earlier than the close of the second century. If Dagg gave a somewhat unconventional answer to the question of who may be baptized, he did not give such an unconventional answer to the question of who may baptize. admitting that his conclusion here was reached by more subtle series of reasonings from scripture and history, he suggested that, quote, the authority to administer baptism is conferred in the ordinary course of the ministerial succession when an individual called by the Holy Spirit to the ministry of the word is publicly set apart to this service, end of quote. Again, arguing against the landmarkists, Zagg insisted that unbaptized ministers be recognized as true, if erring, ministers and treated with respect. George Whitfield, Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Davies, Edward Payson are all examples, heralded by Dagg, of men who were indisputably used of God as ministers of the gospel, even if they were in error on the matter of baptism. Baptists, he said, must know and proclaim the truth of baptism and realize that this is not the essence of Christianity. To make this error is to fall, he says, into a new type of potpourri. Quote, it is our duty, while rendering punctilious obedience to all the commands of God, to regard the forms and ceremonies of religion as of far less importance than its moral truths and precepts. Because we differ from other professors of religion in our faith and practice respecting the externals of religion, we are under constant temptation to make too much account of these external peculiarities. Against this temptation, we should ever struggle. If we magnify ceremony unduly, we abandon our principles and cease to fulfill the mission to which the head of the church has assigned us. End of quote. So he's saying these distinctions of our denomination must never be confused with the essentials of our faith. So Dag, for instance, in the very last section of his manual of church order, meditates on the question, why is it then that you will refuse from membership people you admit to your pulpit? Why will you not have as a member of the church someone and yet allow those very people to come and preach from your pulpit? Which I should point out, one of the contemporary people we mentioned earlier in the last talk is one of his arguments. for admitting those who've not been baptized believers into church membership. Dagg understands that argument 150 years ago, writes about it. And what he says is, look, because they're at error on this one matter doesn't mean they can't know more than us on everything else. We should certainly, in humility, learn from them in every way that we can. And he said, you know, I have unbaptized ministers in my pulpit. He says that. His manual of church order. And he said, and I have sometimes had to correct a minister. who has preached publicly in my pulpit, and I've had to correct him publicly. He said, but I've never had to do that with one of the unbaptized ministers, only with one of our baptized brethren. He makes the point. Like baptism, communion is to be observed by the church until the end of the world because it was so instituted by Christ. While denying the automatic efficacy of the rite of communion, Dagg taught a fuller significance of communion than that which Baptists have often taught. This supper is to be understood as a memorial of Christ's, quote, a representation that the communicant receives spiritual nourishment from Christ and a token of fellowship among the communicants, end of quote. This supper is to be celebrated in local churches by baptized believers, members of any recognized churches there present. Dagg defended the vision known as strict communion, that is, while welcoming Christians of any denomination to the table, he would deny the table to any who had not been baptized as believers. He denied, however, that Pado-Baptist brethren should feel disowned by this restriction. Quote, there are surely many modes of testifying and cherishing the warmest affection toward erring brethren without participating in their errors. We may be ready in obedience to Christ to lay down our lives for our brethren, though we may choose to die rather than in false tenderness to them violate the least of Christ's commandments. End of quote. The rest of Roman Catholicism's seven sacraments, the foot washing of some fellow Baptist considered as an ordinance, DAG specifically rejected. Only baptism in the Lord's Supper were ordered by Christ to be perpetually observed by His Church. Dad dealt very briefly with the rest of the external matters of the Church. Public worship, he said, should be held on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. The Church's regular meetings should be characterized by, quote, prayers, songs of praise, and the reading and expounding of God's Word, end of quote. Prescribed forms of prayer, he says, are objectionable. Yet the use of hymn books is not, by prescribing doesn't mean you couldn't write them out ahead of time, but somebody printing them in a book and then giving them out for all ministers to use. He said that's objectionable. Those ministering the word should be those who have been specially called by God to do so. They should be set apart specifically for the work of preaching. Although apostolic ministry had ceased, God had continued, he said, to give the church ministers and missionaries to spread the gospel. Dag taught that the prophetic gift, too, had ceased and that this was simply one more attestation of the sufficiency of the Bible. The one called to the ministry should especially study the scripture, should be laboring in his call to be corroborated by the larger body of Christ in his church, because, quote, every man who believes alone that he is called of God into the ministry has reason to apprehend that he's under a delusion. If he finds that those who give proof that they honor God and love the souls of men do not discover his ministerial qualifications, he has no reason to suspect that they do not exist. He has reason to suspect that they do not exist. Deacons also, he says, will be recognized by the local church as necessity demands. Coordination, he says, is appropriate, but not obligatory, because it's nowhere ordered in Scripture. From among these ministers of the word, the church has to choose bishops or pastors for their local congregation, and such deacons and bishops or pastors are the only officers mandated for the local church in the Bible. Each member should labor carefully for the edification of all their brothers and sisters in Christ, and through punctual and regular attendance, of preaching, Bible study, and religious reading, discussion, good works, and prayer meetings. Even excommunication, he says, is a tool that's to be used in the church for the sanctification of the body of Christ. Well, Dagg's chief theological distinction among Baptists was his clear maintenance of what had been Baptist orthodoxy in the South, Calvinism, and his clear rebuttal of what was replacing it as Baptist orthodoxy on the frontier, Landmarkism. The landmarkism of J.R. Graves and A.C. Dayton and J.M. Pendleton was a theology which accepted Calvinism and yet de-emphasized it. The Baptists of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, whose theologies were distinctly Calvinistic, were often those who stressed their essential unity with other evangelical Protestants. The central doctrines of God, humanity, Christ, and grace were those around which these groups formed and by which they were defined and by which they divided. By the middle of the 19th century, the emphasis on the American frontier was increasingly shifting from those central issues, which united evangelical Christians, to those issues which distinguished one body of Christians from another. Landmarkism was the dominant form of this emphasis among Baptists. Dag was, I think, frankly courageous. And he was courteous, and he was uncompromising, in his defense of an earlier version of Baptistic Christianity. Uncompromisingly Baptist, but clearly fundamentally Christian over against the unwarranted claims of the landmarkists. Dagg rightly thought that God had owned the ministry of those who were in error in varying ways, including in their doctrine of baptism. He rightly called the church was used in the scriptures in a local and a universal sense, and that it could rightly be used even of those local assemblies which misunderstood baptism. In all of this, Dagg was writing against the screen, but he did so in such a clearly orthodox fashion that even the landmark is champion J. M. Pendleton would later come in dad's manual theology in church order and use it as a text at Union College in Tennessee. Dad's reputation faded with the end of the 19th century as his dissonant theology was replaced first by that of James P. Boyce and then by Boyce's revised by Kerfoot and finally by E. Y. Mullins and W. T. Conner. Yet with the republication of dad's theology in 1982, thanks to a brother sitting here in the room, A new generation of ministers and church members have come to appreciate Brother Dagg's gift for writing a theology which is faithful to the Bible, clear to the mind, and warming to the heart. If no other writer has been able to convince you that the true knowledge of God involves both head and heart in knowing the searching love of our gracious God, then get a copy of Don L. Dagg's Manual of Theology and let him have that privilege. He has been a trusted guide for many before and he can be trusted still. Even if Dagg is not a particularly notable doctor in the content of theology, and what I mean by that, he finds no new truths, he finds no novel expressions, he is almost unsurpassed among Baptists as a doctor in the purpose of theology. Dagg would teach that if the pursuit of theology is to be legitimate, its purpose must be clear. To pursue knowledge of the biblical God can only properly be done by seeking to know the biblical God. To be captivated by the knowledge of God is idolatrous, unless one is captivated by God himself. That Dag was so captivated himself is clear when you read about his life, that he may so teach us is, I think, his enduring legacy. Let me conclude by reading to you how he begins his systematic theology. And this is from the very beginning, book first, Study of Religious Truth, chapter one, The Obligation. That's how he begins. The study of religious truth ought to be undertaken and prosecuted with a sense of beauty and with a view to the improvement of the heart. When learned, it ought not be laid on the shelf as an object of speculation, but it should be deposited deep in the heart where its sanctifying power ought to be felt. To study theology for the purpose of gratifying curiosity or preparing for a profession is an abuse and profanation of what ought to be regarded as most holy. To learn things pertaining to God merely for the sake of amusement or secular advantage or to gratify the near love of knowledge is to treat the most high with contempt. Our eternal interests are involved in the subjects of religion, and we should study it with a view to these interests. Well, friends, I could keep going. It's all that good. I encourage you. I commend you the reading of our brother John Elbag. Let's pray. Oh God, you know how backward we are to give attention to you and your ways. There are other things that fill our minds, that draw our attention. We pray that you would give us hearts and minds taken up with you. And we pray this, Lord, for our good, for the building up of your churches, and for your glory. In Jesus' name, Amen.