Greg Bahnsen – Reflections on 30 Years without Him

It was thirty years ago today that my father, best friend, Pastor, mentor, and hero, Dr. Greg L. Bahnsen, went to be with his Savior. Though I have publicly spoken over the years about his legacy and impact, and though I write about him all the time in some form or another, it has been on my heart this year to use this moment of thirty years gone by since losing him to reflect on what I believe his loss has meant to, well, all of us.

This last weekend in San Francisco I publicly addressed what his loss meant to my own journey as a young adult, and how it all juxtaposed with a searching for my own purpose in life, and how that had to be integrated (and in some cases, separated) from certain elements of the associations in which my dad worked. This journey was never one of discontinuity with my father’s legacy but rather continuity - my disdain for the fringe elements of certain movements, and my deep contempt for Christian in-fighting - put me on the same page as Greg Bahnsen, not at odds with him. Of the five thousand reasons I wish the 47-year old Greg Bahnsen was now a 77-year old Greg Bahnsen, one of the top ones would be allowing his own voice to be heard for why the movement he had been connected to (as a “movement," not a set of various beliefs) had proven to be such a remarkable failure. But alas, projection as to what the 77-year old Greg Bahnsen would say on things is unneeded in this case - my dad, in his own flesh and blood, hated the inability of Christians to maintain friendships, hated the intense need for certain Christians to focus all their energies on fighting with one another, and modeled a truly catholic spirit with those whom he disagreed. This was not aspirational but actual, and I am grateful that God gave me the peace and conviction early in my adult life to separate from a world that was not what He would want for my own Christian life and journey. The process was complex and at times confusing, especially in the absence of my father, but as I discuss in the aforementioned speech, it was a crucial part of my own story to peaceably land in a place that reconciled my beliefs and proper Christian practice. I am grateful to have survived that identity crisis, of sorts, and certainly grateful for the ticket I got out of that world.

I did not merely inherit from my father I desire to see believers live at peace with each other, and to not make doctrine and theology the epicenter of one’s own social existence. I also inherited from him the various things that would become fodder for my professional life. I started adulthood as a 21-year old young man right as he passed, and thirty years later, as a 51-year old, I do have a business I am proud of and a belief system I have applied in the domain of capital markets that I believe is deeply connected to him. He did not function in the world of finance, business, or investments, but the tools and principles with which I have so navigated and functioned came from him. I am writing about this in my weekly Dividend Cafe commentary tomorrow, Dec. 12.

When I stop thinking about the loss of my dad in terms of what it meant to me - my sadness, my journey, my life, my career - and start thinking about what it has meant for the church, for society, for the Reformed niche in which I lived - it becomes a really heavy process of reflection. I don’t know how to say it other than that I believe his loss proved to be a truly unmitigated disaster for the niche of the Christian world in which his life and ministry flourished. If I can be more blunt, I often see a bunch of people that seem to me to desperately need Greg Bahnsen. Whether it be to help with their scholarship, or their presentation, or their messaging, or their seriousness of purpose, I feel like his world of Christendom lost grown-up supervision when he died, and never really replaced it, even thirty years later. This is not to say that there are no serious Christian thinkers, pastors, and intellectuals in his niche of the Christian world - there are - but it is to say that they are all worse off for not having him. Certain movies or TV shows sometimes comically depict a scene where parents leave and young people are left to make a mess of the house or not know how to do certain life skills without their parents there to guide them. I very often feel that we have been living in a 30-year scene of such a movie in much of the Christian world, where everything from our apologetics to our theological debates to our general conduct and principles are, well, sub-optimal in his absence. I am aware of my own biases, but I do not think I am wrong. I have witnessed a lot of adult Christian leaders do things or handle things or behave in a way that I simply think would have been far better if they had Greg Bahnsen’s supervision to guide them.

I have spoken in the past about the Christian apologetics world loss when he died, and how just a few years after his loss it actually mattered. Gordon Stein was sort of a nobody in the broad culture (and less of an atheist somebody after their debate), but the Hitchens/Dawkins/Harris world of the first decade of the 2000’s became mainstream, pop atheist sensations. They were blessed to encounter many Christian apologists on the debate stage who, shall we say, were not real threats to them (see what I mean by the Christian civility and grace I learned from my dad?). Some were more formidable than others, but Greg Bahnsen was not available when we needed him most. That saddened me then and saddens me now. He was unmatched in rhetorical, analytical, and philosophical skill. I am grateful for the resurgence of Van Tillian thought we are seeing and the mass scale at which presuppositional apologetics is growing. We’re just getting warmed up … But it would be better if he were here.

The more recent opportunity for abject tragedy because of the absence of Greg Bahnsen has been the debates over the last 5-10 years about the role of competing belief systems in a free society. I learned all I know about the need to reject relativism out of hand, while still embracing a pluralistic structure, from Greg Bahnsen. Not having Greg Bahnsen in so many of the current debates and discussions is like the 1994 and 1995 seasons for the Bulls when Michael Jordan was out (ironically, the same year he passed). We still have some good role players, but we need our star. The problem is that Greg Bahnsen has not been on a baseball diversion taking him just temporarily from the basketball court … he is not coming back. And I don’t see our team winning a three-peat any time soon without him. The moral clarity, the Scriptural fidelity, and perhaps most importantly, the basic wisdom needed for diligent navigation, that he would bring to this moment are lacking. It is sometimes unbearable to watch folks essentially wrestle with crucial matters of epistemology without the greatest epistemologist I will ever know.

We need far more wisdom, sobriety, and rigor in the current moment from Christian leaders. Those are three traits my dad had, in spades.

Greg Bahnsen has been falsely accused of things over the years since his passing (in some cases, cartoonishly so in terms of the absurdity and bald-faced delusion of the accusations), but that is par for the course for a man of his stature and significance, The enemy doesn’t want people like him working from the grave unscathed. But the enemy has failed, and will continue to do so, in besmirching the reputation and legacy of Greg Bahnsen. Truth conquers all. I learned that from my dad.

I understand that I may be pouring it on a little thick in how dire I feel the consequences are that we have not had him over these thirty years. I don’t mind anyone feeling that my hometown bias is getting in the way of objective assessment. But I should be clear that I do not feel it has to, or even will, stay this way. I have no doubt new leaders will surface and new situations arise where we can collectively do better. I am not speculating about the future, but describing the past. And what I can objectively say is that the last thirty years have gone worse than they would have if Greg Bahnsen were in the room. I feel it daily. And I really feel it on twitter, which frankly he would have avoided as if it were mushrooms wrapped inside of eggplant (if you know, you know).

I loved my dad as much as any son can love a father, and I think about him every day of my life. I have said it many times, but it is no less true than the first time the formulation ever came to me. There are things about me that I like, and things about me I do not like. But there is nothing about me that I like, that I did not get from him. I really mean that. My inheritance from Greg Bahnsen, though not financial, was far greater. And those things I inherited from him I have incalculable gratitude for. And though I am so, so unspeakably sad that my kids never met him, my wife never met him, and that a whole bunch of very needy Christians (myself included) don’t have him, I am profoundly grateful to my heavenly father, for the 21 years I did get with my earthly father. No one deserves better than I got.