Fasting: A Seven-Fold Synthesis, Part III: DFK, a biographical background to a living exposition

Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth;

A stranger, and not thine own lips (Prov 27:2).

For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves: but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise (II Cor 10:12).

And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power:

That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God (I Cor 2:3-5).

A stack of books that were by my bedside table went missing for a number of months. Having literally no idea how they had could have disappeared, in time I simply forgot about them altogether. Then, while cleaning through an area of our room, they, as it were, “reappeared.” In the middle of one of the books on The Syriac Fathers on Prayer, there was a folded piece of notebook paper that I had been using as a book marker.

On it was the outline to a sermon, which I very distinctly remember hearing preached in a small county church to ten people or less at a Wednesday night prayer meeting on the theme of fasting. As the talk was not being recorded (and it was before Iphones and the like), I found a scrap of paper and began taking notes since it appeared to me to be a profound Biblical synthesis that could only be derived experientially. That is to say, there appeared in it a certain authority (ἐξουσίᾳ); for the preaching appeared to arise, not out of Biblical theory and Scriptural study alone but from the experience of the Living Word that reshapes one’s life.

This synthesis I present here as it has helped me over the years; yet before I do so, it may be helpful if I make explicit my reasons for presenting it. Yes, it is, at least in my view, a profound, Biblical synthesis, but beyond the theological dimensions of Biblical exegesis, I believe it offers three biographical insights into the life and ministry of Douglas F. Kelly.

1. It displays the rare combination of an uncommon brilliance with a deep inner life.

As to the former, as many of us have already come to realize, Dr. Kelly has an extraordinary mind. One of his former students took me aside at one point many years ago and asked me,

“Do you know how brilliant your dad is?”

“Not sure,” I replied, being a 16 year old, caught up in the short-sighted realities of high school, where my father’s pathway into ministry meant we would always have broken down cars and struggle financially.

“Well, do you know of ETS, the Evangelical Theological Society conference?”

“No.”

“It’s probably the biggest conference in a given year for people like your dad. At any rate, he was asked to speak at it a few years back and at the end of the talk someone in the audience pretty forcefully disagreed with him on of one of his points about Irenaeus of Lyon.

“And what did your dad do?

“Well, he closed his eyes and began speaking.

“A few minutes later, reopening them, he looked out on the audience, which was in total silence, completely dumbfounded. Realizing what he had done, he muttered out loud,

'I guess I better translate.’

“So, closing his eyes again, he translated the quote he had just recited in Latin back into English.”

Suffice it to say, the man who had disagreed with him backed down as the translated portion of Irenaeus perfectly answered his position.

As his son (now entering my fourth decade of life), it has been very rare that I have seen such displays of brilliance in my father. In fact, I have more often witnessed the opposite. When he would come home from a day of teaching, it was as if his ability to articulate was somehow spent.

“Um, could you pass me the uh, thing by the uh, thing,” he might ask pointing to a spoon and a bowl.

When I finished university, however, and began attending some of his classes (Systematic Theology II, Medieval Theology, The Trinity, etc.), I saw his ability to articulate complex spiritual realities on full display to a classroom of students hanging on his every word (especially when he would stand up from the front desk and begin walking around the front of the room, which signaled that he was about to drive his points home with an experience or an anecdote from ministry or a biographical or historical excerpt from the life of his parishioners or extended family).

Then, as to a word on his “deep inner life,” my father simply doesn’t reveal that much. And there are many reasons for this: a different generation (being born during WWII), a different upbringing, a particular understanding of what should be kept “private” or put out in the public space. And, as I should probably add, all of these historical dimensions are very different from my millennial, psychotherapeutic context where it’s pretty acceptable, even desirable, to put my whole life and history and emotional processing on display for all to see.

My father has never done that; but, interestingly enough, he has kept a diary for the past 50 years and at very rare points, he will show me an excerpt. Two of those I present to you.

The first occurred during his ministry in Dillon when, in the words of Rev. James Philip of Edinburgh in his book, Christian Warfare and Armour, the life of his early ministry was marked by such continual, embattled resistance that it was like a “relative Hell.” So it was in Dillon with things happening in the Church that, in Paul’s words, would not even be “named among the pagans” (I Cor 5:1). In the midst of these hardships, my father mentioned that sometimes when he would walk down the stairs from his upstair study, he would be so overwhelmed by the Presence of Christ with the Glory of God literally pressing down on him (in the kabod sense of spiritual weight and heaviness), that he would have to stop on the landing of the stairs and sit by the grandfather clock until the weight would release for him so that he could continue down to the first floor.

The spiritual world very near.

The second story occurred the night before his mother was scheduled for an operation. Having found a mass on CT imaging of her large intestines, the physicians believed it to be cancerous. My father, still a minister in Dillon, had introduced into the church a time where people could come up and be anointed with oil (not in some crazy charismatic way, but in the simple, Biblical sense of Jam 5:13-16). And so, he took some of the elders to the hospital in Lumberton, anointed my grandmother with oil and prayed.

That night, he awoke to his room filled, in his own words,

“with the holy angels singing praises to God.”

The next afternoon he went back to the hospital to hear the surgeon say,

“Well, we can’t explain this medically but we did the surgery and we couldn’t find the mass. It’s like it disappeared.”

The spiritual world present in a way that actually effects real change.

Could that explain to a certain degree why his students seemed to say that his teaching brought them in touch with the spiritual world, that his words somehow made it real to them?

And even more, that the presence of the spiritual world was able to break into our lives here and now to actually change things?

And is this what is happening in a faithful Gospel ministry?

To answer very briefly those who may be suspect of the orthodoxy of such happenings, I will relay a third story that is not in his diaries.

This was related to me by one of his favorite teaching assistants in the Charlotte days and concerns his time in Edinburgh. When studying with my mother under Thomas F. Torrance, they used to go to the library together nearly every day. When he would be reading Calvin’s Institutes, my mother said that he would take his eyes off the page and for seconds to minutes look up sometimes with his eyes open, other times with them closed.

“It was only later that I found out that he was praying through each section that he read.”

This was how he read John Calvin (whom, lest we reduce Calvin down to some sort of wooden figure that only scribed systematic, Reformational formulations for the modern evangelical church, was actually spoken of in his day as the “theologian of the Holy Spirit”). So my father, we might say, got in touch with this side of Calvin, who saw much powerful working of the Spirit in his time.

And with that, we move to the next point, which could be described as taking hold of the “common means of Grace.”

2. The synthesis reveals a lifelong commitment to Holy Scripture.

I believe my father began systematically reading through the Scriptures once a year in his early twenties, having been deeply influenced by an old Lumbee Indian preacher, whom he used to speak of as “the most spiritual man” he ever knew.” That is to say, “whatever he had, he gave away” and “he knew the Scriptures inside and out”—Word and Spirit were held together in this man’s life. And it was he who directed my father to read three chapters a day from Mon-Sat then five Psalms on Sunday (which reading plan he incorporated into the appendix of If God Already Knows Why Pray?). So he has done this for now the past 60 years such that, as one of his students said,

“I’ve never been able to quote a line of Scripture which you’re dad can’t finish.”

And this daily discipline, as he more recently related to me, has been the basis of the stability in his Christian life.

“How do we stay close to Jesus? How do we endure? How do we persevere? Very simple, read three chapters a day then five on Sunday.”

To this, however, given the theme of the Word being vitally combined with the Spirit, I would add that he makes it abundantly clear that the way we incorporate the Word into our life is through the Spirit of prayer. And this insight is to a certain degree laid the foundation for his recommendations in If God Already Knows, to include in our prayers a time of praise and waiting and confession and praying scripture and watching before moving to intercession and closing with thanksgiving.

The Word had to be prayed into one’s life, not abstracted out into the disembodied realm of theological theory, where it had no power to actually effect change.

Such vital union of Scripture and prayer, Word and Spirit, may be the “secret” to much of my father’s productivity over the decades. And even more, the discipline of keeping himself “under” the Word has, in my belief, kept him humble in the Latin sense of humilis—being “of” or “close to” the “ground.” In his words,

“I mean, how could a man be filled up with pride, when he’s coming into the Presence of the Holy God in prayer throughout the day?”

3. The centrality of faithful, weekly preaching as the leaven in the bread.

If you look back on my father’s ministry, literally from the time of his early 20’s when he went from UNC to Union Seminary in Richmond then Edinburgh for his PhD under Torrance, then RTS Jackson as a professor of Systematic Theology, then to his final years teaching in Charlotte, he was literally always preaching Sunday to Sunday. And for the past thirty years this has been in a small, ante-bellum country Church in Minturn, SC by the name of Reedy Creek Presbyterian Church.

And here he preaches to maybe five or ten or, at the most, 20 people.

But, sometimes he might preach at Reedy Creek to 10 in the morning then be asked to preach that same night to 1000 at a larger church elsewhere. But what I have seen over the years is that the number of people does not influence his preaching style nor communication of divine truths—He just preaches faithfully week by week, whether to a few at Reedy Creek or to more at Sovereign Grace in Charlotte, or IPC in Savannah or First Pres in Jackson or Augusta and on and on.

I would also add here that he has mentioned to me that when he was in his early ministry in Jackson, it became clear to him that there were those in the PCA that were “trying to make [him] a figure.” That is to say, getting him to preach at big national conferences, write in journals to a wider audience. And he said, very simply,

“I actually asked the Lord to keep me small. Because if I got too big, I’d probably fall away from Him.”

Which then leads us into the final point—The leaven. As is clear from Holy Scripture, the leaven is the Holy Spirit working silently and steadily in a hidden fashion in the souls of His saints to bring the Kingdom of God more fully into the structures of This Fallen Age. Christ makes this explicit in his parable in Matthew 13:33.

The remaining uses of leaven in the NT refer to it in a negative sense—as the “leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy” (Lk 12:1) or the “leaven of Herod” (Mk 8:15). Though we could say much more, this leaven is the hypocritical hyperstructure of religion, on the one hand, or the power structures of the fallen world systems, on the other, that ultimately seek to replace the working of the Holy Spirit with their own power and authority.

My father’s discipline in weekly preaching (when he was in full-time ministry, thrice-weekly preaching) combined with his daily discipline in Scripture reading and prayer, have been the means by which the Holy Spirit has been working in him to fulfill the work to which He has called him.

Not a system, per se, not a technique that will “guarantee” spiritual productivity. Rather it is a life lived before God in humility and dependence. It is letting, in his own words,

“all your prayers and actions be the outflow of a life hidden with Christ in God.”

And with that I present Dr. Kelly’s seven-fold synthesis of fasting…with two final preparatory remarks. The first is that fasting is not something very often preached on in evangelical circles; nevertheless, it is a practical discipline enjoined on us by Christ Himself in His three-fold synthesis of the Christian life given in the central section of the Sermon on the Mount.

And the second is, very simply, Christ-centered spirituality must be practiced before it can be understood. If so done then the understanding then becomes rooted in the practical experience, which is to say, not in the theoretical realm of the pnuenatika but in the flesh and blood incarnate realities of life. And this is exactly where Dr. Kelly can direct us.

In Part IV, we will present the seven-part synthesis.