November 14, 2017 Show with Phil Johnson on “The Evangelical Limbo: How Low Did We Go? (An Assessment of the Theological Health of Modern Day Evangelicals)”

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This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 14th day of November 2017.

I'm so delighted to have one of my very favorite of all time guests back on the program today,

Phil Johnson, Executive Director of Grace to You, the radio, TV and publishing ministry of John MacArthur, and today we are going to be speaking on the evangelical limbo, how low did we go, an assessment of the theological health of modern day evangelicals, and this is actually in response to someone who both

Phil and I highly regard, who we agree with on most things, Tim Challies, who wrote an article recently, a blog article, basically commending the theological health of modern day evangelicalism, of course, with some very notable exceptions, but it is my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Phil Johnson.

Thank you, Chris, my privilege to be here. And in studio with me is my co -host, the Reverend Buzz Taylor. Hello, Phil, it's good to talk to you again, it was good meeting you and spending some time with you there in the

Poconos, so I'm looking forward to today's program. Me too. Yeah, that was a great time in the

Poconos where Phil spoke at a pastor's conference for the

Bible Fellowship Church denomination and that was on the Protestant Reformation, and it was really a blessed time to see

Phil and hear Phil speak and preach and to share fellowship with him, and I hope that these occasions arise many more times in the future, and I hope to have

Phil as a keynote speaker for my own Iron Sharpens Iron Radio pastor's luncheon at some point in the future, and I would ask of you listening to join me in praying that that comes to fruition.

Well, the article that recently came out, a blog article, by Tim Challies, who, as I said, you and I both highly regard.

In fact, you two are going to be on the same roster at the G3 conference coming up in January.

That's right, I'm looking forward to that. That'll be a great conference. Yeah, I am too. I'm going to have,

God willing, an Iron Sharpens Iron Radio exhibitor's booth there, as I did the last time they had the conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

So I'm looking forward to meeting not only new faces who listen to this program, but also becoming reacquainted with faces

I've already met, and it was such a joy last time. I couldn't believe the number of people who

I had never heard from before who told me how much they love Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

It was really an encouragement to me. People from all over the world telling me this, and also meeting for the first time people that I have known for years through the program, including you, but I met for the first time face -to -face at that G3 conference when

I interviewed you. That's right. And that was certainly a privilege. But we have the humorous title of the blog by our friend

Tim Challies, The State of Evangelicalism in America and all that blah blah blah. And first of all, before we go into anything critical about either

Tim's article or about modern -day evangelicalism, why don't we start with things that you do find encouraging, things that you're optimistic about, things that you can applaud and commend as a whole or in general the modern evangelical church at large.

What healthy things can you cite or report? Yeah, by the way, also

Tim Challies. I love Tim Challies, and I think he's one of the one of the bright spots in the evangelical movement today.

He's not American, he's Canadian, and so he's much more polite than most of us Americans, and he's definitely trying to be polite here.

He's heard some of us say that, and I've said I think probably 50 times in the past two months as we've talked about the anniversary of the

Protestant Reformation, and I've done conferences on the subject, and I keep saying I think

American evangelicalism today, the broad evangelical movement, is far worse and in more need of reform than medieval

Roman Catholicism. And I really think the state of the evangelical movement is deplorable when you consider the movement as a whole.

I have a feeling that if we sat down and talked about it, Tim Challies would agree with me. He's looking for bright spots here in the evangelical movement, and there are some.

And he identifies, I think I agree with everything he commends. He's talking about how as he's gone around the world, he meets missionaries from America, and he's commenting on the generosity of American evangelicals who still are the major supporters of missionary work worldwide.

And all of that, obviously, I agree with. And I would also even add that when

I first became a Christian in the 1970s, churches where the Bible was preached, where you had expository preaching, the pastor would open the

Bible and preach through the text of Scripture. Back in the 70s, they were much more rare than they are today.

It is easier to find Bible expositors and sound preachers today. They tend to be a small remnant, however, and those tend to be small churches.

And if you look at the movement as a whole, the way any person outside the church would see it, the evangelical movement is seriously a mess, and it's a huge mess.

The boundaries of evangelicalism have moved and been moved deliberately by evangelical leaders, so that the movement is so broad now that pretty much anything goes.

And Christianity Today magazine, which often builds itself as the house organ of the evangelical movement, they see themselves as the representative and spokespeople for American evangelicalism.

And they celebrated their, I think it was their 50th anniversary or something about 15 -20 years ago, and they wrote an article in which they talked about what isn't evangelical, and they really couldn't define the term.

And they boil it down to say they think the distinctive feature of American evangelicalism now is its diversity.

And of course, diversity is a politically correct virtue these days, so they were going for something that everyone would commend.

But I think that's true, that what is identified as evangelicalism today is so broad and so diverse that even those who lead the movement have a difficult time defining it.

And it shouldn't be that way. The word evangelical comes from, it's derived from the word for gospel, and evangelicals were gospel -centered

Christians, Christians who saw the gospel at the center of everything, that was the center of their message, that was what they united around, and that was what they wanted to proclaim.

And now, if you polled all the people who self -identify as evangelicals, you'd find there's very little agreement even on what the gospel is.

So it has become a very diverse movement, but that's to its detriment, not to its praise.

Now, the side of the diversity that is positive, at least in my experience, is that, well,

I can remember when I first became a born -again believer in the 1980s, when I would attend

Reformed conferences or Calvinistic conferences, conferences that promoted the doctrines of sovereign grace, there would be a sea of white faces with maybe a couple of African Americans, and of course the

Asian community was typically always well represented in some degree at these conferences. But today, when

I go to Reformed conferences, I see quite a number of Black brothers and sisters there,

I see quite a number of Hispanic brothers and sisters there. So the doctrines of grace seem to be spreading in areas where they were hardly ever found just back in the 1980s, which is not all that long ago.

So that kind of diversity, I think, is obviously very much praiseworthy. Yeah, and I think there's no doubt that that's true.

It reflects the drift of the culture, too, which is a bit of a concern, because Evangelicalism, one of my criticisms of Evangelicalism from the beginning, all the way back to the 1970s, has been that Evangelicals seem to think that they have some sort of biblical mandate to follow the culture and its fads and styles and interests and all of that.

And as our culture, it seems to me right now, is becoming more tense about racial issues and more divided, actually, than we were, say, in the 1990s, it seems to me.

My fear is that if Evangelicals follow that, then we're going to lose some of the gains we've made in, you know, racial harmony.

Yeah, I know what you're talking about. You're talking about a politically correct hypersensitivity where people are beginning to hurl accusations of racism against innocent people just because they disagree with the way that they parse words and so on, and there's a new movement amongst even people who agree with us lockstep theologically who are mimicking the leftist agenda where racism is the hidden motive for nearly everything that a white person or conservative does.

Yeah. Yeah, and you see that just in the subject matter that's, I mean, watch the larger people with the largest following in the

Evangelical communities on Twitter, and you'll find they're obsessed, as I said, with whatever is stylish or, you know, a popular topic in the world at large, that's what they want to follow, and so you see a lot of, even in the

Evangelical Twitter community, you see a lot of comments about racism and rebukes against people for unintentional slights and things like that.

It just seems to me that tensions are building, and again, it's a reflection of what's going on in the culture at large.

I don't think racial tension begins in the church or or even the improvements we've seen in recent years.

I don't think that's because of anything other than a reflection of the cultures, the secular cultures' drift on that.

One thing, just to go back to positive things that are going on, I have heard from fellow believers who would agree with us theologically, not that you and I necessarily agree on everything theologically either, but the camp of conservative

Calvinism, sovereign grace, and so on, I have heard not only is there an encouraging resurgence of Calvinism, and I have experienced that myself,

I have seen the doctrines of grace spreading into denominations where they were nearly totally absent, even back in the 80s when

I first became a Christian, but also not only a resurgence of the doctrines of grace, but a resurgence of complementarian views of gender roles, whereas obviously the trend was moving towards the left for decades, where an egalitarian view was being adopted by denominations that were previously more conservative on the issue.

You have some of the new churches and fellowships and brotherhoods springing up where a return to complementarianism is a hallmark of how they operate their ministries.

Yeah, I hope that's true. I hope that's true. I don't know that there's any statistical proof that that's the case.

It at least shows that those with biblical convictions about gender roles are more outspoken and they're saying more and having more influence than they would have, say, 15 -20 years ago, which

I think is a positive development. Okay, now that we've exhausted every positive thing we have to say, one of the things that may immediately give a knee -jerk reaction to an attitude of disbelief in what you've said in regard to the modern evangelical church needing more reform than medieval

Rome. I mean, obviously medieval Rome, they were torturing and murdering

Protestants. They still are involved in grotesque idolatry, and that varies from country to country on how overtly present that kind of idolatry is present in the

Church of Rome. And you have all kinds of superstition that might have been more rampant in that day, but what do you exactly mean by evangelicals needing more reform than medieval

Rome? Yeah, well, I'm talking about the Catholic Church prior to the Protestant Reformation, so they weren't killing

Protestants yet. They were having inquisitions and things like that.

But what kicked off the Protestant Reformation was Luther's disgust over the sale of indulgences and the belief that the

Vatican was building its own wealth on the backs of German peasants. And you had

Tetzel going through Germany selling indulgences and making false promises that they could get their relatives out of purgatory, you know, if they gave him money.

Tetzel was one guy, and you have a whole lineup of people like that every night on TV, and people who are bilking.

Millions of people, I was going to say Americans, but really they're worldwide, offering miracles in return for your seed gift.

And it's the same exact kind of thing, people who are obsessed with money and material wealth taking advantage of superstitious, gullible poor people, in many cases people who cannot afford to give to them.

They promise them wealth and prosperity. The promises are even worse. I mean, it's not like people are looking for forgiveness of sins.

It's not like they even have any consciousness of their sins. But the people that are being taken advantage of today are people who actually are driven by materialistic motives and greed and a desire to be rich themselves.

And that's what TV preachers prey on all the time. And in the eyes of the larger world,

I mean, if you went outside of the conservative American evangelical community and asked pretty much anybody worldwide, who would be the chief representative of American evangelicalism?

It used to be Billy Graham. I think now it would probably be T .D. Jakes or somebody like that. And in the classical sense, in the historical sense,

T .D. Jakes is not even evangelical. He doesn't even believe in the Trinity. He doesn't preach the gospel.

And he fits every description that's given by Peter and Jude of the greed mongers that Scripture warns us against.

And that is the worldwide face of American evangelicalism. And because that's so large,

I mean, comparatively, just numerically, people who follow the televangelists and the prosperity preachers so far outnumber the conservative

Reform people that you and I and Tim Challies would identify with.

We have to see that we are just a small remnant. I'm encouraged by the remnant, and it's not anything different from the rest of church history.

God always deals with a remnant. But the mainstream, the large, aberrant movement that has taken the name evangelical in America, it's a monstrosity now, and it's huge.

By comparison, we are a very small remnant indeed. Yes. I guess with my use of the term medieval,

I perhaps carried it farther into the future than that word is intended to be.

That's pretty much the close of the 15th century, I'm assuming. But we still had John Huston people who were martyred by Rome.

And Reverend Buzz Taylor has something to say. Well, I think it's interesting to note that, though I can't remember his name, the fellow who played

Tetzel in the Luther movie said he learned his part by watching the modern

TV preachers. Yeah. Yeah, it's a fitting comparison, seriously. And, you know, when

I say we're more in need of Reformation than medieval Roman Catholicism, I don't mean to downplay the fact that Catholic inquisitions and inquisitors actually did put people to death and they martyred people.

And I'm not suggesting something of that nature is going on now, but I'm thinking more of the need for reform in the

Church itself, corruption, priestly corruption, and corruption among Church leaders who seem to be driven by, you know, greedy motives and care very little for biblical accuracy or sound doctrine.

If you just compare medieval Roman Catholicism with what's going on in the evangelical movement today,

I don't see how anybody can not say, yeah, it's worse. It's worse today, even among Protestant evangelicals, than it was in the

Catholic Church, say, in the time of Thomas Aquinas. Yeah, the umbrella of evangelicalism seems to be expanding as each year passes, where things under it are becoming more diverse.

Things that are considered to be evangelical are becoming more diverse. You brought up T .D.

Jakes before. I was mocked at a Christian radio station where I worked because I dared to complain and protest that we were hiring

Phillips, Craig, and Dean to perform at a major event that we were running.

And I said, excuse me folks, Phillips, Craig, and Dean are oneness Pentecostals, they're anti -Trinitarian, and the boardroom, the conference room where I was sitting with my colleagues, everybody was like rolling their eyes.

Are you kidding me? Are you going to nitpick about that? I'm like, what?

Nitpick? That's the price we pay for several decades of seeker -sensitive ministry philosophy, church growth philosophy, where church leaders have been obsessed with numbers and how to draw a crowd and how to make our church into a megachurch.

And it's the number of people that, I mean, they judge their success based on the number of people they draw, rather than the soundness of the doctrine they proclaim or the depth of education that they're giving their people, the depth of biblical training, and so on.

It's all about numbers, and the way to get numbers is through entertainment. And so evangelicalism has become just pathologically shallow, to the point where if all you really care about numbers, then it doesn't matter if an anti -Trinitarian guy, if he can fill the biggest auditorium like T .D.

Jakes can, then why would you exclude him? Because your entire ministry philosophy has been all about the numbers.

And you know, I was looking at the Christian bestseller list, which is another sign that the evangelical movement is in serious trouble right now.

Looking at the bestseller list, T .D. Jakes is on there, along with Sarah Young and Jonathan Cahn and other people who just show no signs of any understanding.

Joel Osteen is there, of course, and no understanding of Orthodox, Protestant, historic evangelicalism.

They wouldn't fit that category in the historical sense, and yet there are their books on the bestseller list at the top of the bestseller list.

T .D. Jakes wouldn't have even been considered by the Christian Booksellers Association back in the 1970s when

I was working in Christian publishing. He wouldn't have been considered an evangelical because he's not. But because he fits that category of someone who knows how to draw a crowd, evangelicals have embraced him, and they see him as a model.

And you know, that's another one of the many things I'm talking about when

I say, I think the evangelical movement today is as corrupt and in need of reform as medieval

Roman Catholicism was. Do you think that some of this is because, just like the growth of the co -belligerence movement, and I don't necessarily trash all of that either, where people see astoundingly satanic things that are becoming the norm in our society, that even a decade ago liberals would be shocked to hear someone affirming.

Keep in mind, some of our listeners may have amnesia, but even the

Clintons and Barack Obama were originally opposed to same -sex marriage. And the fact that now you have men not only marrying men and women marrying women, but you have people who are losing their livelihoods for criticizing that or for disagreeing with that.

But you have all this atrocious, abominable things, all of these things going on, and so there is perhaps more of a tolerance level for evangelicals to think that we have strength in numbers, that we shouldn't be so obsessed with doctrine and theology when we should be more concerned about having numerically more allies in these areas, which ironically has backfired because you have more and more evangelicals becoming softer and softer on those things.

But anyway, if you could comment. Yeah, well, I think that's a generational thing, too. I think we are reaping the fruit of two or three generations of evangelical churches that devoted their youth groups to, you know, very shallow teaching and lots of fun and games and entertainment, and they grew up, you know, separated from the main worship service and their own services, where nothing was handled seriously, doctrine wasn't taught, and so you've got a generation of evangelicals who've come up in the

Church and now are old enough to be in positions of Church leadership who've never seen the importance of sound doctrine.

They think any kind of dispute or disagreement over doctrinal points of doctrine, that's, to them, they see it actually as something bad, something both unnecessary and ungracious, inherently ungracious.

So they think doctrine is divisive, so they don't want to discuss doctrinal issues, they don't want to put boundaries on membership based on doctrinal beliefs, and so everything is necessarily shallow, and there just aren't voices who are willing to say, no, look,

Scripture commends sound doctrine, and the truth is far more important than the number of people we're drawing, and they take their cues from whatever's politically correct or currently popular, and that has begun to shape the evangelical message.

In fact, even the abandonment of basic morality you see in the way evangelicals lately have begun to, without getting too specific about politics, but you see this, that evangelicals have become apologists for the gross misbehavior of their favored politicians, so that if a guy's a

Republican and a Conservative, he can say or do anything he wants. In fact, I think it was

Trump himself who boasted that he could kill somebody on Fifth Avenue and still get the popular vote, and sadly, evangelicals are no different in that regard from the rest of the world.

They'll embrace their favorite politicians, right or left, regardless of what their private morality is like, and make excuses for that, and that lacks attitude towards morality and doctrine and everything else.

There's no way that cannot affect the purity of the Church. And Reverend Buzz Taylor, you have something to say? Back to what you were saying about the

Church becoming very seeker -sensitive, seeker -friendly, I think we have lost a lot of our identification as—we're saved to be a worshiping community, and we get together for Church for the purpose of worshiping our

God and Savior, and certainly where I believe a Church should have some form of outreach, that outreach has become so important that now, even if you go to a rock concert, it's considered a worship experience, and we've kind of lost our whole identity there.

Yeah, well, in fact, the typical evangelical thinks worship is an emotional state that you sort of get worked into in large crowd environments, and so I've met evangelicals who would insist that, look, a music concert is usually a more worshipful experience than a

Church service with preaching. And they say that because they have the idea that worship has to do with how

I feel about what's happening, rather than seeing worship as praise offered to God.

In their minds, real worship occurs when I'm emotionally stirred, and it doesn't matter what it takes to stir me emotionally.

If my emotions are touched, then I see that as a profound event, you know, a spiritual event, because it stirred my emotions.

And that's really all it takes these days to impress the majority of people who self -identify as evangelicals.

We have to go to our first break right now, and Phil, I just emailed you, or forwarded an email to you from a listener in Slovenia, Joe, who has a very lengthy question, so I thought it would be best to have it right in front of you so you could read it during the break and then respond to it when we return.

All right, will do. And if anybody else would like to join us on the air with a question for Phil Johnson, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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We are back to our discussion with Phil Johnson, Executive Director of Grace to You, the

Media Ministry of John MacArthur. We are discussing The Evangelical Limbo, How Low Did We Go?

An Assessment of the Theological Health of Modern -Day Evangelicals. And if you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And please, as always, give us at least your first name, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA. And before the break, Phil, Joe in Slovenia sent me an email which

I will now read, and which you have in front of you. Our end of—oh, I was just about to read the

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service commercial for tomorrow. Here we go.

Here's Joe in Slovenia. Dear Brother Chris, thank you so much for having Brother Phil back.

I am completely amazed that though you and I have the opportunity to interact with one of my favorite contemporary teachers of Scripture—oh, I see.

He said, I'm completely amazed that through you I have the opportunity to interact with one of my favorite contemporary teachers of Scripture.

How far have we fallen? One of the most telling indicators of the relative health of the

Church is her missionary activity. By far, the heretical and nominal

Arminian and semi -Pelagian missionaries around the world outnumber solid conservative, much less reformed missionaries.

American evangelicalism is, by and large, exporting NAR charlatans—and

I guess he's speaking about the new apostolic—and I can't remember what the

R stands for. The new apostolic— That's right. Word of faith, heresy, and prosperity, another gospel, hucksters rather than ambassadors of the true gospel of the reformers.

Sadly, it is very difficult for solid reformed Baptist missionaries to get reformed local churches behind them in direct partnership in the gospel for the nations.

I'm speaking from experience. I'm very thankful for a resurgence of reformed theology in some areas of evangelicalism, especially in the

Southern Baptist Convention, where it was almost absent in the recent past. Be that as it may,

Brother Phil, what do you suggest we do to get a vast increase in the solidly reformed missionaries around the world?

What do you suggest about how to get reformed churches to partner with reformed career missionaries already on the field?

Thank you, Brothers, for such an encouragement to me and many others around the world. Yeah, he makes a great point there, and I've experienced this as well.

I'm not an expert when it comes to missions and missionary strategy, but I've traveled the world.

I've been in at least 35 different countries and worked with missionaries on every continent, and I agree that even the missionary movement itself is reflective of significant problems in the evangelical movement.

I lay a lot of the responsibility for that at the feet of the Fuller School of World Mission.

That was a branch of Fuller Seminary that sort of organized in 1965 or so to have an influence on missions worldwide, and of course 1965 was at the peak of the time when

Fuller Seminary was moving away from its conservative roots and abandoning any conviction about the inerrancy of Scripture.

Fuller Seminary was probably the worst place in the world to become the anchor and the place people look to in world missions.

Now it's called the School of Intercultural Studies at Fuller, which I'm kind of thankful for the name change, and I hope it means they'll get their fingers out of missionary activity, and that missionaries worldwide would stop looking to Fuller for guidance in how to do missionary work.

But as I've traveled the world and worked with missionaries, there are a lot of conservative missionaries. Back to Tim Jally's article, one of the arguments he makes is that in his travels around the world he's encountered missionaries who he talks about one missionary in Rome that took him around.

In fact, I'm not even sure the guy was a career missionary. My impression was the guy moved to Rome specifically so that he could be a witness for the

Gospel there in that culture. And there are people like that who you deeply appreciate, good missionaries out there on the field who are doing important work, but the the body of missionaries considered as a whole, it seems to me there are a lot of people on the mission field who are being supported by churches and sent by churches to do missions work who really aren't doing anything to further the

Gospel or to deepen people's confidence in the authority of Scripture, to plant churches, or any of the things that you would traditionally think of as missionary work.

And that's a massive problem, and it contributes to the issue that people around the world, the average unchurched, unreached, non -Christian person in the expanse of the worldwide population, when they see the face of American evangelicalism, what they're seeing in many cases is either someone who totally corrupts the

Gospel or someone who just doesn't care about it. And I think the missionary, well,

I don't know what you'd call it, the predominance of the missions movement worldwide is as guilty of that as anyone.

You'd think that people who devote their lives to missionary work would be the most devoted to proclaiming the

Gospel, but in many cases that's just not happening. Well, does that mean that there is a reversal of missionary passion that Calvinists were once known for?

Are we actually becoming the caricature that Armenians paint us as being as a whole, hyper -Calvinists who are indifferent about the lost overseas and other parts of the world?

Yeah, I wouldn't go that far. I think the resurgence of Reformed theology and Calvinism, the sort of uprising of people who believe in the sovereignty of God and really are devoted to the

Gospel, is a fairly recent phenomenon, starting, I don't know when, maybe the early 1990s or so.

And I'm happy for it, I'm thrilled for it, and I think one of the things that it naturally produces is a desire to see the

Gospel spread throughout the world and see the Gospel proclaimed. So I think actually if there's going to be a cure for what ails the missionary movement, it is the resurgence of conviction about the sovereignty of God and His work in drawing people to Christ.

Calvinists do make the best missionaries in my view, there just aren't enough of us and enough

Calvinists who have been called into missionary work to have made the sort of influence on the movement as a whole that I'd like to see.

I think it's a slow transformation if it's going to take place at all. Yeah, historically those who believe in the doctrines of sovereign grace have been more patient in their missionary work because they realize that men only plant and water seeds and God brings the increase alone,

God alone brings the increase, so therefore missionaries were far less frequently yanked off of certain mission fields because of impatient sponsors of those missionaries.

Yeah, plus again I go back to the Fuller Seminary. From the beginning,

Fuller Seminary's goal was to sort of be a bridge between conservative evangelicals and the mainstream denomination's style of liberalism, and I think the

Fuller School of World Mission from the beginning had this tendency to redefine what missionary work looks like in a way that would sort of compromise and bring in some of the already discredited social gospel trends that had already destroyed the outreach of churches that went liberal.

And we just need to get back to the primacy of the gospel and the priority of proclaiming the gospel.

If we're going to send people into all the world to preach the gospel, then they ought to be preaching the gospel and planting churches where the gospel is proclaimed, rather than all sorts of other activities, research and demographic collecting and I don't know what, anthropological studies.

There are people who are being supported to be missionaries who are simply students of anthropology.

They're not doing anything to further the spread of the gospel. What, to make the message more palatable to a culture that they may be entering into?

You know, I honestly don't know what their long -term goal is. I think many of them have so lost sight of the gospel and what they should be there to do.

I don't know why they still call themselves missionaries, and in fact, I think they're moving away from that because there's a stigma attached to the word missionary, and that's one of the reasons

Fuller changed the name of the School of World Mission to the School of Intercultural Studies. Intercultural Studies, as I said, it's anthropological research.

That's what it sounds like now. Fine, because that's largely what they've been doing anyway.

And thank you, Joe, in Slovenia. Keep spreading the word about Iron Trip and Zion Radio in Slovenia and beyond.

We have Gordy in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who says, First of all, thanks to your faithful proclamation of the gospel in defense of God's sovereignty therein.

Question is, what do you believe is the answer to today's evangelical bankruptcy so far as the true gospel is concerned?

Is it just a matter of a person -by -person process? There are so many false gospels within evangelicalism, and it's so frustrating to hear people who profess

Christ and yet can't articulate a lucid soteriology. Yeah, and I think probably the solution does start at the grassroots with individual interaction.

When you have a neighbor or friend who professes to be a Christian but clearly doesn't understand the gospel, then you as a believer who does understand the gospel, you have a responsibility to give that person the gospel and make sure he or she understands it.

And it isn't evangelistic. That's evangelism, because a person who professes to be a

Christian but doesn't understand the gospel, has never really grasped what the gospel says, you can't regard him as a genuine believer, even though he professes faith in Christ.

If you can see that he doesn't understand the gospel, that he doesn't really have a first clue what the death of Christ means, and what the forgiveness of sins entails, and how a person becomes a

Christian, not by asking Jesus into his heart, but by believing in Christ as he's presented to us in Scripture.

And until a person really understands that, I think you have to regard him or her as an evangelistic prospect rather than necessarily as a brother or sister in Christ.

Treat them with kindness and all of that, but I think we haven't been provocative enough in dealing with nominal

Christianity, so that even the most conservative evangelicals,

I think, are too quick sometimes to accept the fact that someone who professes faith in Christ is truly believing in Christ.

It's one thing to profess faith in Christ, it's another thing to have truly embraced him by faith.

There were lots of, I mean, John 6 is all about, John chapter 6 is all about people who, it says, believed in one sense, and yet they turned away from Christ in the end.

And that's exactly what we're dealing with today, masses of people who believe only nominally, and if we accept that as true evangelical faith, we're sending the wrong message, not only to the world, but to those people who have ignorantly thought that they've embraced

Christ with saving faith, but they really don't have a clue what saving faith is. And, of course, the book that you edited, the classic book,

The Gospel According to Jesus, and a couple of the sequel books that came into print after that are just as needed today as they were when they were first written in the 80s.

Yeah, exactly, and that really is the heart of the issue. What is the gospel? How did

Jesus proclaim the gospel? When he offered salvation and talked about the forgiveness of sins, what was he saying?

What is the content of the gospel message? And as you said, there were two or three books that John MacArthur wrote about that subject.

The other side of the issue is, then, what is the calling of the Church? What is a legitimate ministry philosophy?

And John MacArthur also wrote several books on that, A Shame to the Gospel and The Master's Plan for the

Church. What is the Church to be doing? And if we can't sort out the answers to the most basic questions like that, what is the gospel and what is the

Church called to do? If we can't sort out the answers to those questions, we really have no right to commandeer the name evangelical in its historic sense.

And the Reverend Buzz Taylor has something to say. You came very close to doing what I'm about to ask you to do, but I'm just thinking that there may be people listening because, you know, you never know who is listening, so I'm sure it's not just with foreign people, and there could be people who are even considering Christianity, but you started to define the gospel.

Could you just take a few moments and explain what you were telling us about?

What is the gospel? What is the basic theology of the gospel? Right. Okay. The gospel is

God's promise of salvation to those who believe in Christ on the basis of what

Christ did, and therefore the historical facts of the gospel are that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.

That's a very loaded statement, because by saying, according to the scriptures, what the

Apostle Paul, who wrote that phrase, what he meant was that Christ's death was the fulfillment of what was pictured in the scriptures in the

Old Testament sacrificial system, that Christ died as a substitute for sinners to pay the price of their sins.

And not only that he died, but that he rose from the dead, and Paul goes on to say in 1

Corinthians 15 that his resurrection was verified by hundreds of eyewitnesses.

So what he's saying, and in fact the whole argument of 1 Corinthians 15, is that the historicity of the resurrection is a fundamental fact of gospel truth.

You can't doubt the resurrection of Christ and claim to be a believer in Christ. So the death, burial, resurrection of Christ are the historical facts of the gospel, and the meaning of the gospel is that Christ freely offers forgiveness of sins and a right standing with God to those who simply embrace him by faith, who believe the facts, the historical facts of the gospel, and turn away from their sins to follow

Christ. And we have to go to our midway break right now. It's a longer break than normal, because Grace Life Radio 90 .1

FM in Lake City, Florida requires a 12 -minute break in between our two hours, so please be patient with us.

And please, if you intend to send in a question, I would do so as soon as possible, because time runs out before you know it.

So if you have a question and you'd like to send it in, send it to chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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And before we return to our interview with Phil Johnson, I have some important announcements to make in regard to special events that are coming up.

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A Mighty Fortress. If you would like to attend this conference, which is an event sponsored by the

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alliancenet .org, click on events, and then click on Quakertown Conference on Reform Theology.

I urge everybody, especially my listeners in Pennsylvania or nearby, please don't let this conference come and go without attending it.

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Josh Bice, James White, Tom Askell, Anthony Mathenia, Michael Kruger, David Miller, Paul Tripp, Todd Friel, Derek Thomas, Martha Peace, and Justin Peters.

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I was in Atlanta, Georgia at the G3 Conference. So I am very excited about this event and looking forward to hearing and seeing

Phil Johnson speak once again there in Atlanta, and we are back now with our discussion with Phil Johnson.

Our theme, as you may remember, is the Evangelical Limbo, How Low Did We Go?

An Assessment of the Theological Health of Modern -Day Evangelicals. Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

We have RJ in White Plains, New York, who said, Chris, you conducted an eye -opening show yesterday on how soft evangelicals are becoming in regard to the sin of homosexuality.

Does Phil have any thoughts on that phenomenon as well in regard to the decline of the evangelical church?

Phil? Yes, well, that's one more evidence of what

I was talking about, how the evangelical movement tends to follow culture and imitate secular culture rather than being counter -cultural or biblical.

That's just one of the big evidences, and I think it's a problem that's going to get worse because that's the trajectory the movement is on.

Do you think a lot of that is because evangelicals are buying into a mythological

Jesus who is nothing but purely love and comfort and the open arms of a welcoming

Savior? He's that period. There is no wrath, there is no anger, there is no condemnation of sin, there is no discussion of hell.

The modern evangelicals are just trying to paint a picture of Christ that is one -sided, only focusing on some of his attributes, which happen to be wonderful and glorious attributes, but if they are focused on alone at the expense of all of his attributes, they really become fictitious.

You can't have an amazing grace if salvation really isn't that amazing.

If you're really not that bad and you're really not deserving of eternal torment, then being saved from whatever punishment people think that you're being saved from isn't really that spectacular.

Yeah, but again, I think the root problem is this philosophical idea, this misconception that evangelicals have had for now two or three generations that basically preaching the gospel is a public relations dilemma.

We have to, because if the goal is to draw people, the goal is to be attractional, the goal is never to offend anyone, then without even meaning to corrupt the gospel, preachers now for generations have left out the hard parts, the calls to repentance, the message about hell, the truth of God's wrath against sin.

Those things have been omitted from the evangelical message, so you've got now a couple of generations of evangelicals who've grown up and never heard that in church, and so they just don't think it's important that God is angry with the wicked every day or that God hates sin and threatens to punish sinners with eternal damnation.

Just to talk about those things will get you mocked in many evangelical circles. Yes, and we have

Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who says, isn't it ironic that when the

Pope of Rome is more liberal than any previous pope in history, evangelicals have warmed up to him and embraced him more than any other pope in history?

Yeah, in fact, that surprises even me. It sort of shocked me, because I thought that a lot of the sort of recent evangelical tolerance of Roman Catholicism, the deliberate detente that evangelicals have tried to forge with Rome, where we see them, we treat them as brothers and sisters in Christ rather than proclaimers of a different gospel,

I thought that was motivated by sort of conservative political values, our joint conviction that abortion is murder and our shared conviction that homosexuality is sin.

And yet, this pope really doesn't seem committed to either of those principles, and as you said, evangelicals seem more warm towards him than they have to any previous pope.

I don't understand that. But it's another sign of how degenerate the movement has become.

Yeah, I don't remember who the stand -up comic was, but there was a stand -up comic who said, is the pope

Catholic is no longer a rhetorical question. And yeah, it is really bizarre that you have evangelicals coming out of the woodwork to embrace this pope, and even have people like Rick Warren calling him his pope, where you have conservative

Catholics barely mentioning him in public because in their closeted discussions amongst each other, they are really disturbed by this pope.

They continue to believe in an infallible papacy because he hasn't declared anything ex cathedra yet that would disturb them, that would militate against their previously held convictions.

But the fact that he daily says things that embarrass them, it's kind of ironic how you have your conservative and traditionalist

Catholics being more disturbed by the pope than many evangelicals are. And let's see, we have another person from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

We have Harrison from Mechanicsburg, and Harrison has to say, do you think that one of the reasons why evangelicalism has plummeted to the depths it has fallen is because Calvinism is far less

Calvinistic than it used to be, and having far less of an influence on other denominations?

No, I wouldn't say that. Well, maybe I would.

Like, for instance, you have Tim Keller, who we've been critiquing in a couple of our interviews. I mean, he doesn't resemble—when

I first became a born -again believer in the 80s, you could hardly find someone that was representative of someone like a

Tim Keller back then, and you have people rushing to him as a mentor today.

Right. Yeah, no, I guess I see the point now, but my objections to Tim Keller and his ministry philosophies don't have anything to do with his brand of Calvinism.

I see what he's done as a departure from confessional Calvinism. Yeah, that's exactly what

I mean, and perhaps that's what our listeners mean. Yeah, and on the other hand, at the other extreme, it seems to me that there are some flavors of hyper -Calvinism floating out there today that are more virulent and more aberrant than even earlier varieties of hyper -Calvinism.

I've interacted with people on the internet, some extreme hyper -Calvinists who seem to want to make

God the instrumental cause of evil. Right, and I've had somebody unfriend me on Facebook—not that I really cared—but who publicly accused me of not being faithful to 1689

London Baptist Confession because—get a load of this—because I defended

Charles N. Spurgeon. He didn't think that Spurgeon was faithful enough consistently to the confession, and because I defended

Spurgeon, I was anathema to him. You have seen that kind of thing out there. I think it's an overreaction to the very thing we're talking about, that the evangelical movement has drifted so far away from anything evangelical.

A lot of Reformed people I know don't—they want to say that they're not evangelical. They're Reformed and make those things separate.

Actually, the term evangelical comes right out of the Reformation, and the Lutherans used it, and what it meant was somebody who proclaims and believes the gospel.

And there's no reason it should be seen as antithetical to Reformed, but in practice, it kind of has become that way, and I can understand why some of my

Reformed friends want to shed that label evangelical, because in the popular—it's like the word fundamentalism—in the popular consciousness, those words have become negative terms to describe movements and ideas that both you and I would reject.

Yeah, you very rarely today will find a theologically

Reformed person who will identify themselves as a fundamentalist because of the way that that term is immediately recognized today.

It has become synonymous with nastiness and— Right. And it's a shame, because the original idea, the idea of fundamentalism was a pretty simple one and a pretty obvious one, that there are certain truths that are so essential to the gospel, so fundamental to what we believe, that those truths just cannot be compromised on in any way.

I can fellowship with a brother in Christ who disagrees with me on a secondary issue, say the mode of baptism or whatever, but if he denies the doctrine of justification by faith, a fundamental doctrine, then you can't embrace his views or his religion as the same as mine.

There are fundamental doctrines that are essential in the sense that if you take them out of the equation, what you have is not the gospel anymore.

And that was the idea, and evangelical meant someone who proclaims the gospel, perfectly good word.

There was no reason you couldn't be one in the same time a fundamentalist, a

Reformed person, and an evangelical. All those were good words at one time, and all of them have been corrupted and commandeered by people who don't really believe the principles that gave rise to the name in the first place.

Yeah, Jake Reshamation, obviously, is a notable name on the forefront of the fundamentalist modernist controversy on the side of the fundamentalists.

Yes, but early on he began to shy away from calling himself a fundamentalist because he could see the direction the fundamentalist movement was going.

They began to argue over things that weren't truly fundamental and the kinds of things that most, even of today's self -styled fundamentalists, the people who self -identify as fundamentalists, the things they are most concerned with tend to be not fundamental doctrines.

But, I mean, there are still some good fundamentalists out there, I think, but the ones who, you know, have perhaps have been the sort of the leading characters in that movement, by and large, were people who made big issues out of things that were anything but fundamental.

Dress codes and hairstyles and all of that. Yes, where they really have, as the old saying goes, they have turned molehills into mountains.

You know, they have, you know, been sidetracked against or away from the gospel and have focused on things that are secondary or tertiary in importance.

And even at times, I mean, there's all different kinds of fundamentalists, and they have all kinds of infighting going on and internal wars going on.

But, well, that's one of the identifying factors that makes a person a fundamentalist is his willingness to fight for those truths that are uncompromisable.

They don't always agree on what those truths are, but there's a certain militancy involved in being a fundamentalist in the first place.

And I think, even from the beginning, fundamentalists tended to be too militant, even with one another, on secondary issues.

And so the movement became divided and divisive, and it's pretty much become very non -influential today.

But the same thing happened in a different way with the evangelical movement. The evangelical movement and the fundamentalist movement really began to part company,

I think, sometime in the 1920s. By the 1950s, you had neo -evangelicals who expressly repudiated fundamentalism and founded, you know, the whole philosophy behind Fuller Seminary and all that.

It was so opposite fundamentalism. It was based on the idea that compromise can be used for good, and so they're willing to compromise far too much.

And fundamentalists and evangelicals began to see themselves as competing movements rather than, you know, aiming at similar goals, and both movements have melted down.

Yeah, in fact, as you may know, a lot of fundamentalists would include you and I and many of our modern -day heroes in the camp of neo -evangelical.

Yes. They would broad -brush us and slander us in that way. On the other hand, there are a lot of evangelicals who would categorize me as a fundamentalist.

Yes, right, exactly. I'm rejected by both groups, but we need a new name for a different group that returns to the principles of the founding principles of those movements and keeps them all together, but doesn't suffer from the negative connotations that words like fundamentalist and evangelical have taken on themselves.

Well, what, before we go to our final break, can you give us some guidelines that you think would be wise counsel in what we can do as not only individuals and members of congregations, but what congregations can do in some way?

Obviously, sometimes we think that your own personal contribution to anything going on in the church or going on globally is so insignificant that it's not going to make a difference, but when more and more people are united in a godly -driven cause, that can do a remarkable transformation.

I mean, when you even look at the man that we've been celebrating during the 500th anniversary of the

Protestant Reformation, when you see what happened with Martin Luther and a simple thing like trying to spark a debate with Rome's intelligentsia and it turns into a global movement, what do you think that we could do to reverse for the better this trend that's been occurring?

Well, in the first place, I would say I'm content to be part of a remnant. I think one of the mistakes that all these groups have made is the idea that they could perhaps engineer a more effective influence.

They could have more influence and more clout if they could just maximize their numbers, and that's always kind of a bad move, because it forces you into a pragmatic philosophy where you're more concerned,

I think, with what people think and what's going to attract people, as opposed to, what does the Word of God say and what's true?

We've got to get back to a situation where the people in the churches are more concerned about what

God says and what God's Word says than we are about what the culture thinks or what's popular in the culture, and those sorts of things that all of us,

I think, tend to be too obsessed with. I don't exclude myself from that. It's a difficult thing in this era of speedy communications and you have the internet every day spitting at you lists of what's trending now, and we all watch those things, so we're aware of what's trending, and we have this innate sense that if we can leverage what's trending for the furtherance of our message, we can maybe be more effective, and yet that's a wrong way for a

Christian to think. The Gospel itself is the power of God unto salvation, and how we ought to be thinking is, what can we do to make the

Gospel clearer and get it proclaimed more widely? It's not a question of numbers and clout.

The Old Testament is full of languages like that. It's not by might or by power, and it's not by the number in the army but when the

Lord is doing something, He typically uses a remnant. Sometimes it's a small remnant, and so I think we have to get away from this sort of pragmatic thinking where we're concerned about how we can increase our numbers when what we ought to be concerned with is, how can we be more clear and more forceful in the message

Christ has given us to proclaim? We have B .B. in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania who says, how can we strike a balance when we look at all of the deterioration in modern -day evangelicalism surrounding us when we might be prone to fall into the category of one of these self -proclaimed discernment ministries where all we do is complain about others?

How can we see this deterioration and not go to that length? Yeah, and you know, although we start out with Tim Jolly's article,

I think nobody's done a better job of that than Tim. He's got a whole book on discernment, and he has managed for 15 years to be a critic of, and that's why

I know he would agree with most of what we're saying here, although his article that he published today tries to be positive and optimistic.

That's who Tim is, he's positive and optimistic and polite, and that's one of the ways that he's kept from becoming just a perpetual negative voice and a cynic, and yet talk a lot about discernment.

He's written a book on discernment that's really quite good, and I recommend it to anybody who contemplates discernment ministry.

I don't even like that term, and I don't like to think of discernment as a ministry.

Discernment is a quality that helps us in ministry, but ministry, true ministry, has to do with the proclamation of the

Gospel and the fellowship of God's people, and the building up of the Church.

That's true ministry. And people who never do anything but critique and criticize and tear down, there's no way they can have a balanced ministry if they're always negative.

We have to bear those things in mind. Well, we're going to our final break right now, if anybody would like to join us before we run out of time.

Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com.

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Iron Sharpens today. Paul wrote to the church at Galatia, For am

I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man,

I would not be a servant of Christ. Hi, I'm Mark Lukens, pastor of Providence Baptist Church. We are a

Reformed Baptist Church, and we hold to the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689. We are in Norfolk, Massachusetts.

We strive to reflect Paul's mindset to be much more concerned with how God views what we say and what we do than how men view these things.

That's not the best recipe for popularity, but since that wasn't the Apostle's priority, it must not be ours either.

We believe, by God's grace, that we are called to demonstrate love and compassion to our fellow man, and to be vessels of Christ's mercy to a lost and hurting community around us, and to build up the body of Christ in truth and love.

If you live near Norfolk, Massachusetts, or plan to visit our area, please come and join us for worship and fellowship.

You can call us at 508 -528 -5750, that's 508 -528 -5750, or go to our website to email us, listen to past sermons, worship songs, or watch our

TV program entitled Resting in Grace. You can find us at providencebaptistchurchma .org,

that's providencebaptistchurchma .org, or even on sermonaudio .com. Providence Baptist Church is delighted to sponsor

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, we have been interviewing

Phil Johnson, Executive Director of Grace to You Ministries, for the last 90 minutes, and we've got a half hour to go on the issue, the evangelical limbo, how low did we go in assessment of the theological health of modern day evangelicals?

If you would like to join us on the air before we run out of time, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, chrisarnzen at gmail .com,

and Reverend Buzz Taylor, my co -host, has something to say. Well no, Chris, I was actually going to say something to you during the break that just ended.

Oh, well you got to get your hand signals. Yeah, we got to fix our signals here. Okay, and believe me, some of his hand signals are really confusing, but anyway.

Phil, I would like to make sure that everything that you have to critique in our

Dear Brother Tim Challenge blog article has been stated on the program, because that was the catalyst behind your wanting to discuss this today.

Yeah, I read that this morning, and I thought, wow, you know, there's so much that he says that I agree with.

There's so much that's positive that is worth encouraging among conservative evangelicals, and particularly those younger evangelicals who've discovered the doctrines of grace and are suddenly interested in sound doctrine and the sovereignty of God and an accurate proclamation of the gospel.

He's pointing those things out. I definitely agree with him. I just think it would be too rosy and maybe misleading to say that this should nullify any concern we have about the health and well -being of the larger evangelical movement, which is a huge mess.

Everybody recognizes it. In fact, during the break, I was just looking at my email, and somebody sent me a link to an article that the

National Review published while we were on the air by David French, and it's called, let's see, the title is

The Enduring Appeal of Creepy Christianity. He starts out like this.

He says, speaking broadly, there are two great competing temptations that tug at the Christian church. Both of them are based on the fear of man, and he's right on that, by the way.

The first is one that the theologically orthodox discuss and battle the most, the temptation to forsake

Christian doctrine in order to seek the approval of a hostile culture. This is the old argument that the world would embrace the church if only the church were more like the world.

It's embraced by much of mainline Protestantism, and he says it is the path to religious extinction.

In the effort to appeal to the world, the church becomes the world, and the logic for its distinct existence disappears, thus the rapid decline of denomination after denomination that has decided to essentially merge with America's secular culture.

And then he goes on to say the second fear is the opposite, and that is the idea, the temptation to, he says, to run towards a form of hyper -legalism, to build a firewall to protect your family from the sins of the world.

And I agree with him on that as well. I think that hyper -legalistic tendency is likewise rooted in the fear of man.

But this first tendency is really what we're talking about, and the only thing I would disagree with David French on, as he writes in this article, is that while it is the pathway to extinction, it's not as quick an extinction as he seems to want to portray it.

We've been now a century and a half since modernism first reared its ugly head, and churches began aggressively to try to change the message or soften the hard parts of Christian truth to appeal to the world more.

And while it's true that it has strangled the mainstream denominations, and lots of those denominations have diminished in size, and a lot of those churches are empty shells of what they used to be, they're still functioning, and those ideas are still floating around in the evangelical conversation.

It's been less than a decade now since the emerging church movement was at its peak, and all that was was a revival, a kind of neoliberalism, a revival of modernist values, but couched in post -modernist arguments.

And that movement did die pretty quickly, but as I've often said, it's like killing a dandelion on your lawn.

You can kill that one weed, but it launches all those seeds out into the rest of the lawn, and where they just take root and take off.

And I think that's what's happened with the emerging church. The movement itself died at least five years ago or longer, but the ideas that they floated into the evangelical conversation are still out there, and younger people sometimes find those and think they're brand new ideas, when in fact all it is is a revival of Socinianism, the agglomeration of all heresies,

Socinianism, and theological liberalism, and it constantly rears its ugly head in places where you wouldn't expect it.

Formerly conservative organizations that, many times organizations that have stood by the gospel for a long time in the face of much opposition, and yet it seems today they're falling like dominoes because of this pressure to win the world's affections, and what it actually is causing them to do is become worldly.

Now you say that the emergent church, or emerging church, has died.

Now what did those advocates of those movements, or that movement, become?

I mean did they return to orthodoxy for the most part, or are they manifesting themselves in a different way?

Yeah, no, in fact a lot of them just left Christianity altogether. The emerging church movement spawned,

I would say probably hundreds, if not thousands, of people who abandoned the gospel completely and just became unbelievers.

Even some of the leaders of that movement notoriously have turned away from Christianity, and you had some of the celebrities in the movement, like Brian McLaren and Rob Bell, who have more or less made themselves odious to, or at least irrelevant to, mainstream evangelicals, and yet a lot of the ideas that they are, because of where they ended up, by the way, not because of the ideas they were promoting, but because Rob Bell has clearly moved away from Christianity to a kind of New Age Oprahism, you know?

He's a follower of Oprah Winfrey more than he is a follower of Christ, and Brian McLaren left his pastoral role, and he just philosophizes about religion.

But he's a universalist, and there's nothing that would make him appealing much anymore to mainstream evangelicals, even though a decade ago he was speaking at Dallas Seminary.

And his ideas haven't changed, but where it took him, away from the church and away from the gospel, really, that became obvious, and so the movement itself fragmented and died as a movement.

But the followers of those ideas, and most of them didn't become more orthodox.

I think there were some who did. I occasionally hear from people who say that the critiques of emergent religion that I blogged 10 years ago helped them get off that path and onto a better path.

So there were probably some people like that, but I think there are also a lot of people who, as the movement disintegrated, they moved maybe to more liberal churches or back into evangelical churches where they're still promoting the same ideas, but it's not a cohesive movement anymore.

No one's talking about the emerging church the way they were 10 -15 years ago.

Yeah, back, I think it was around 2006 or somewhere thereabouts,

I interviewed, one of the few times that I interviewed a Roman Catholic guest, and whenever I do that, on those rare occasions that I interview a

Roman Catholic, I am very clear, not only at the outset of the interview but throughout the interview, that I'm not an ecumenist in regard to relationships with Rome.

I believe that Rome has a false gospel, and I make that clear, but I wanted to interview this person because I wanted to get the views of someone outside of evangelicalism looking in to see what that person, how that person viewed the evangelical church, and this person, this specific person, happened to be a liberal

Catholic named Peter Feuerherd, and he wrote a book called

Holy Land USA, A Catholic Ride Through America's Evangelical Landscape, and one of the things that triggered my memory of that is your reference to Oprah Winfrey, when

Peter, in his book, said that in most megachurches that he had visited, you'll find much more thus saith

Oprah than thus saith scripture, and I agreed with that assessment.

I agreed with a lot of what Peter Feuerherd said in his book. Unfortunately, Peter thought that that was a wonderful thing.

He thought that all these developments in evangelicalism were positive movements because of the fact that he's liberal, but that is a pretty sad commentary when somebody on the outside looking in is viewing us in that light, and even though that was back in 2006 that he wrote that,

I guess not much has changed. Perhaps it's gotten worse. Yeah, well,

I think it has gotten worse, and you've got more people now at a level of adulthood that have entered leadership in the church who are less equipped to deal with those sorts of things.

I mean, I agree with the person who raised the concern about the negative tendency of, you know, full -time discernment ministry, but the backlash is even more deadly.

The idea that this is something unkind or unhealthy about discernment itself, and it's caused the quality of discernment which

Scripture commends to be looked upon with distrust and even contempt within the church.

You talk about discernment in some circles, and they'll immediately turn you off or even kick you out.

We have Kathy in Medford, Long Island, who says, May I please have the title of Tim Challey's book on discernment?

Thank you. Good program today. You had mentioned before Tim Challey wrote a book on discernment, and this listener wants the title, the full title.

All right, let me look it up. And while you're looking it up, I'll just repeat our email address one more time. That's chrisorenzen at gmail .com,

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA. It's called The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment, and it's available from Amazon.

Yeah, in fact, I interviewed Tim on that a year or so ago. It's a really very well -written book, very balanced about the need and the necessity of discernment, but also the dangers of, you know, going too far with negativity and, you know, becoming a full -time critic.

Well, Kathy, if you want to get that book, go to C -V -B -B -S -dot -com. C -V for Cumberland Valley, B -B -S for BibleBookService .com,

and I know that they carry a number of books by Tim Challies there, so that would be the best way to get it since you'll be helping

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio at the same time. And the people are probably getting tired of the doom and gloom and dark clouds that we are constantly bringing to the attention of my listeners.

I probably, unfortunately, have more bad things to say on my show than I have good things to say.

Do you have any more optimistic things that you care to share with our listeners? Well, I'm always optimistic because I know in the end, the truth will win out over error.

So people sometimes think I'm pessimistic because I tend to be a critic as well.

If you ever read my blog, you'd find, you know, that I frequently pointed out excesses and errors that I saw that were becoming popular in the evangelical movement, and nobody was speaking out against them, it seemed.

And so I started blogging with just that goal in mind, to be a critical voice of things that needed criticism, but people seemed reluctant to criticize.

And yet, if you listen to my preaching, I think you'd find I'm, you know, as positive as Scripture is.

And I'm very positive about the end of all things. The truth will triumph over error in the end, and the gates of hell are not going to prevail against the

Church, but in the meantime, we're commanded by Scripture to keep guard and to sound warnings and to be critical and to be like the

Bereans, who, you know, even when the Apostles were teaching them, they felt obliged to compare with Scripture to make sure these things are so.

That's a good discipline to cultivate, as long as it doesn't make you sour and negative.

Speak the truth, but speak it in love. We have Ronald in eastern

Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, who asks, can you give us between three and five major movements within Christendom that pose the most threat to modern evangelicalism?

Well, I think I'd have to start with the prosperity gospel, the prosperity preachers. That's a massive thing worldwide, and the billions of people who follow that and watch

TBN and think this is mainstream Christianity, the numbers are frightening. Occasionally, you do see statistics about how far -reaching the

TBN signal is and how many people follow T .D. Jakes and Benny Hinn and some of these people, and I'd have to say, just in terms of sheer numbers, that's got to be the biggest problem we've got.

And as I said, multitudes of evangelical leaders, even the soundest of our leaders, seem reluctant to criticize it or point it out or call it out by name.

They just think maybe if they ignore it, it will go away, and it has not gone away. It's grown.

So that would be one. Another would be the whole seeker -sensitive mentality, the notion that Christ is building his church by human strategies to make megachurches.

That the sheer size of a gathering of people is affirmation that God has blessed.

And when we know from Scripture, that is not the case. The multitude, the majority, is often wrong, and it's never wise to follow the multitudes.

So that's two. How many—he wants five? Well, he said between three and five.

You don't have to follow his request. Honestly, if in my lifetime

I could see a diminishment in the influence of the prosperity gospel and the seeker -sensitive movement,

I would be thrilled with that. Now, I remember Bill Hybels admitting that he had taken a wrong approach in his brand of seeker -sensitivism.

How did he make a correction, if at all, in his church's approach?

Yeah, he didn't. He went the wrong way. In fact, I blogged about this at the time, that he acknowledged after nearly two decades of following that seeker -sensitive philosophy at Willow Creek that they had failed to really disciple people or teach people.

So he said he really thought people should be self -feeders, and he announced that they were going to take a turn in direction.

But immediately then, they set up a conference with speakers like Brian McLaren, and I can't remember who all else, but a bunch of figures from the emerging church movement.

That was really at the end of the influence of the emerging church movement. So why he decided to turn that way,

I don't know, but they definitely turned in a more liberal direction rather than a more conservative one.

Willow Creek, going way back, since you bring them up, I wouldn't have mentioned them by name, but since you did,

I might as well talk about this. I used to live in Chicago, had lots of friends who went to Willow Creek, and going way back, they always had a policy of sort of shying away from voicing their opinion on abortion or homosexuality, because these things weren't politically correct in the culture to speak of homosexuality as a sin or abortion as murder.

And so they, you know, just pointedly didn't take a stand on that. I'm sure that most of the people who went to Willow Creek Church were opposed to abortion, and probably most of them would have agreed that homosexuality is declared sinful by scripture, but you would never get that from, you know, their preaching.

Yeah, and ironically, Lee Strobel comes out of that church, doesn't he? And I have heard him highly commended by men that you and I both embrace as gems in, you know, today's church.

Yeah, yeah. And one of the things that is interesting about something that you just said,

I think that there is an extreme on either end.

You have on one extreme something that I know that you and Dr. MacArthur are opposed to that's politicizing the gospel, and then you have on the other end of the extreme people wrongly relegating some crucial issues that are going on in the world today, such as homosexuality and abortion.

They're relegating them to political issues and saying we're not going to discuss those because they're simply political issues that divide and we don't want to unnecessarily divide people over these political issues, but these aren't political issues at all.

I mean, they are political, but they're not exclusively political. Right, they're moral issues, and that makes everything complex these days.

It used to be pretty simple to say, look, churches should just stay out of politics, you know, meaning local politics and government policies and stuff like that, but American politics have become so focused on these important moral issues that there's no way anyone in the church can leave the issues alone.

I agree that the church, I still would say the church should stay out of partisan politics. I don't want to become an apologist for the

Republican Party because I think the Republican Party is just as corrupt as the Democratic Party. So even though I'd be more conservative on all of these issues that have significant moral overtones,

I don't think the answer to our culture's downfall, moral downfall, is a political one.

I don't think you can pass a law that's going to that's going to change the hearts of American people and how they think about sins like homosexuality and abortion.

I think it's the gospel and the work of the Spirit of God in people's hearts that's going to have to change public perception on that, and if we don't get to preaching the gospel in a balanced and biblical way, then

I don't see how the church can expect to have any influence in the culture, because the church is never going to have influence in American politics.

I believe I remember having conversations with you about this in the past where you have no problem whatsoever with individual

Christians becoming actively involved in politics. Right, if that's your calling, it's like any other vocation.

That's political clout any more than it would be for the church to go to war with actual weapons.

That's not what God has called us to do. There is a place for that, and it's the government who wields the sword,

Romans 13, and that would be the sword of punishment to evildoers and the sword, you know, in military combat.

But the church has never been called to bear the sword. Christianity doesn't advance at the point of a sword like Islam has, and that's one of the things that sets us apart.

Our warfare is not against flesh and blood, and I think evangelicals have forgotten what all that entails.

Well, if you could, in about three minutes' time, just summarize uninterrupted what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our audience.

Well, I think we need to acknowledge that the visible church today, the broad evangelical movement that dominates

American religion, is not the sort of pure spotless bride that God is preparing for Christ, but it has become a monstrosity, which means that the true church is a remnant within the number of people who profess faith in Christ, and faithful Christians need to find one another, band together, and stand in opposition to every corruption of the gospel and every twisting of biblical truth that is out there.

And it's not an easy task, and too many Christians regard that as an odious task, because it requires discrimination and discernment and, at times, a bit of negativity.

But we need to be faithful to what we are called to do, and that is not only to proclaim the truth, but to wage war against error.

Our spiritual warfare is described for us in 2 Corinthians 10 as tearing down strongholds, and then

Paul goes on to describe the strongholds he has in mind as basically complex worldviews that are wrong, that keep people in bondage to their sin, and there's no better description for what ails

American culture right now. America has bought into worldviews, or a worldview that is secular and twisted and amoral and immoral, and it is our task as Christians to challenge that and proclaim the truth in the face of it, and call people to faith in Christ.

And if the church, if that remnant of faithful believers would do that faithfully, there are enough of us to make a difference.

It doesn't take many, because it's the gospel, which is the power of God and the

Holy Spirit working in that context that actually changes hearts and reaches people.

It's not our calling to change culture, it's our calling to proclaim the truth, and that, in turn, will change the culture.

And I know that Grace to You has an interesting offer, a booklet titled

How to Study Your Bible, which I think sounds like it's a very valuable tool, because a lot of people, especially new

Christians, you hand them a Bible, they really don't know where to begin. Yeah, that's right.

That's right. In fact, your listeners can contact us, if they like, through our website at gty .org.

And if you've never been on our website, it's pretty easy to find your way around there. All of John MacArthur's sermons, nearly 40 years of preaching, online there.

You can download them for free, and lots of other free, like, study aids, and we have answers to common questions.

It's just a website that is full of very helpful resources, and we don't charge for any of it.

So check out our website and just enjoy what we have put on there.

Yeah, that's gty, standing for gracetoyou .org, and I thank you.

I already thank you off -air, but I want to thank you again on -air for being so generous to the approximately 100 pastors that attended my recent

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Pastors Luncheon. You provided enough copies of a book on forgiveness by Dr.

MacArthur that we were able to give to each and every person who attended the conference. And we thank you so much for the past several years being so generous to us.

Well, thank you. Thanks for having me on. Hey, it's my pleasure. And do you have any other contact information you care to give other than gty .org?

No, actually, you can probably get in touch with me through that, and there's an email.

If you send me an email there at gty .org, I forget the address, but it's there.

Just comment there if you want, and you can reach me personally through that. And don't forget that Phil Johnson is on the roster at the

G3 Conference coming up in Atlanta, Georgia, January 18th through the 20th.

If you'd like to register for that conference, go to g3conference .com, g3conference .com.

I appreciate you praying for this conference, and I will be there, God willing. I am already registered and have an exhibitor's booth that the fine folks at Praise Mill Baptist Church have provided for me absolutely free of charge because I advertise them so heavily as far as the

G3 Conference is concerned. So I'm looking forward to meeting many of you, God willing, this

January in Atlanta, Georgia. I want to thank you, Phil, again for being on the program. I want to thank my co -host, the

Rev. Buzz Taylor, for being on the program as well. I want to thank all of you who listened today, especially those who wrote in questions, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater

Savior than you are a sinner. We look forward to receiving your questions for our guests tomorrow on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.