June 10, 2019 Show with Ken Golden on “Presbytopia: What It Means To Be Presbyterian”

The Program Opens and the Guest Is Introduced

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You know, there's nothing rarer than a Jewish Reformed Baptist pastor than a Reformed and Presbyterian Jewish pastor, and today that is what we have as our guest today, or who we have as our guest today, a returning guest, one of my favorite guests to interview, Ken Golden, organizing pastor at Sovereign Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Davenport, Iowa.

He is a Jewish believer, and today he is going to be addressing his book, Presbytopia, What It Means to be Presbyterian, and I have a caveat, ladies and gentlemen, I am not converting from my Reformed Baptist roots here as a Christian into Presbyterianism, but I love my Presbyterian brothers and I recognize that the differences between us are very little.

They're important, but they're very little in comparison to what we hold in common, but it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Ken Golden.

Thanks, Chris. It's great to be back.

Yes, and I hope that you understand my little caveat there, because I know rumors amongst Christians spread like wildfire, and there'll be no doubt people saying that Chris Arnzen has converted to Presbyterianism, although not that that would be the most horrible thing in the world.

Well, tell our listeners about Sovereign Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Davenport, Iowa.

Yeah, so we've been a mission for Quad Cities since 2011, and we've ebbed and flowed, as many mission works do, but we've been doing a lot of outreach for the last eight years. We do fair booths, we do Harvest Parties, we do Cookies and Carols events at local centers, we've done conferences, all kinds of things to try to reach the community for the Gospel, and also for the Reformed Church.

Great. And by the way, folks, if you want to hear the fascinating testimony of Ken Golden's salvation story of having been raised in a Jewish home and coming to faith in Christ and also becoming a theologically Reformed Christian, after this show is over, you might want to go to www .IronSharpensIronRadio .com and click on the Past Shows Podcast section, and then type in Ken Golden in the search engine, G-O-L-D-E-N, and you will have his previous interviews on this program, including his testimony.

Why He Wrote Presbytopia

Well, this is an interesting title that you've given your book, this book published by Christian focus Presbytopia, obviously you're combining Presbyterian and Utopia, but if you could explain a little bit more why you felt the need to write this book, I can already think of some reasons, because I know amongst a lot of mainstream evangelicals, or perhaps a lot of even those outside of the evangelical or Bible Christian faith, there are a lot of Catholics and others who when they hear the term Presbyterian, they are immediately thinking of the Presbyterian church down the road that ordains women and homosexuals and is pro-abortion and all kinds of horrendous and horrible and apostate things, and obviously that is nothing that would be included in your description, but if you could tell us the driving force behind writing Presbytopia.

Yeah, well, let me just respond to your point about the title. The title was something that my publisher, Christian Focus, they were looking for something catchy, pithy, something memorable, and that was one of the hardest things to come up with in the whole process was finding the right title, and it came to me, I was just doing a lot of searches and looking at Soros and all kinds of things, and I thought about the word Utopia, and I thought about the word Dystopia, and I wasn't so much thinking of a Presbyterian Utopia, because Utopia literally means no place, and Dystopia means bad place.

So, this came together nicely in Presbytopia, which is a native word, doesn't exist, old places have value, we can learn things from old places, and then somebody pointed out to me that my title sounds too much like Presbyopia, which means old eyes.

So, perhaps I, but it has stuck, and people, as far as the reason I wrote the book, this is really a published development of an outline that I've been using ever since I began serving as a pastor back in 2005.

I kept it in an outline form, I was, I originally was introduced to the genre of membership classes using the Calvin Knox Cummings book, Confessing Christ, which is a good book. It's a little dated, it's been around since, I believe, the 1970s or 80s, and there were things in there that I appreciated, and there were things in there that I wanted to do differently.

So, I came up with my own outline, and I learned what I learned from that book, and I kept my outline, I had no intention of publishing, until I was asked to review a book some years ago, probably about five years ago, intended on a literature table.

And the book was well-written, solidly Reformed and Presbyterian, it made good arguments, and there was really nothing in the content that one could find fault with. However, the book was very heady and advanced for its purpose, for somebody walking into your church with really no background on what Presbyterian Reformed people believe.

There were long quotes from the Confessions, there were quotes from theologians and whatnot, which were fine for a more advanced work, but not really suitable for a beginner's work. I read that, and I really recommend it in a review article I wrote, but then I realized, well, maybe I should put my knee where my mouth is, and actually do the very thing that I feel that this book is not doing.

And that led me to turn my manuscript into a book that is really accessible to the laity, and also the pastors, but not really to theologians and academics as much, and our greatest weakness in our tradition is that we're very deep.

We have a very deep and well-thought-out system of theology and government and worship. We're very good at these things. But sometimes, your greatest strength is your greatest weakness, and sometimes we overreach and we go over people's heads.

And I think for beginners, we have an accessible primary reason I wrote the book.

What Counts as Presbyterian Identity

And I was wondering if you, before we go into some of the main hallmarks or pillars of what you believe must be included under the title Presbyterian, I was wondering if you believe that people who use the name in their church merely because of their governmental status in the body of Christ or in religion, because there are some that I just mentioned in the beginning who are outside of the body of Christ, I believe, who use the term Presbyterian, but those that are using it to describe their polity, but may have some differences ranging in severity from you.

Like, for instance, you have the mainline liberals, and of course there are a remnant of born-again, biblically faithful pastors and congregations within the PCUSA and perhaps other liberal mainline Presbyterian churches.

But you also have some of my brothers and sisters, our brothers and sisters, in the Free Presbyterian Church of North America and Ulster, who are Presbyterian in polity but who permit baptistic pastors in regard to the ordinance of baptism.

And you even have evangelical Presbyterians in the Cumberland Presbyterian denomination that are Arminian. In fact, I remember one time when I wrongly assumed that a congregation in that denomination was Calvinistic, I got a very, very nasty, volatile response from the pastor who was calling me a heretic because I was a Calvinist, which shocked me.

But to start off with, are people who use the Presbyterian title, in your opinion, who are only using it for a description of their polity, incorrectly adopting that as their title?

Presbyterianism obviously describes polity. The word itself has come to describe the Anglo-American side of our tradition, as opposed to the Continental Reformed, who primarily have historically been found in Holland and Switzerland and Hungary and in France and other places.

But I think this reminds me of a book that I appreciate very much, written by Daryl Hart and John Meather, called Seeking a Better Country, where people define Presbyterianism differently. It's very interesting, because we confessional Presbyterians and confessional Christians of any stripe tend to define our traditions based on our doctrine, and for that matter our polity, worship, and other things.

But Presbyterianism in the mid -20th century became known as, or became connected with, ecumenical churches, things like that. So it really depends on who you're talking to. If you talk to somebody on the left, they're going to define Presbyterianism differently, and my purpose in writing this book about Presbyterianism is to describe what we have historically believed, as Presbyterians, to be compatible, primarily to show that the reason we're confessional is because we believe.

So my task in writing this book was not to quote the confessions in every chapter, but—.

The Essentials: Scripture, God, Man, Sin, and the Spirit

Let's start with some of those things that are primary hallmarks, pillars, that you believe must be present for a church to properly call themselves Presbyterian.

Sure. So we've got—the book is divided into three parts. Let me go back a step here. There's three parts, and these are the things that—now there's language that I use in these chapters that other Christians might, you know, find a new thought or foreign language to them, but the essence of what's being taught here is something that should be common to all churches and Christians who call themselves Presbyterian.

And if you were using this book as a membership class, these seven chapters would be the primary chapters one would expect somebody to be able to make a credible profession of faith with. Essentials involves understanding the Bible.

I summarize that as God's word to man. I'm trying to keep it simple, which, in order to understand anything about Christianity, you have to be—and once you do that, there's a logical order that takes place in understanding how—what the Bible teaches.

And the second chapter is about who he is. And then we're introduced to man, who he was. Man did not live up to God's expectations. So the fourth chapter concerns sin, what man has done. And this is where the Gospel is really presented and developed.

And then I have two chapters on the Spirit, which apply to two different blessings that we find in the blessings of salvation. Spirit applying what God's expectations—we can talk more about them as we go.

Part two involves Reformed Distinctives. Now, I separate these from the Essentials because I truly believe that you can be of opinion as you—and I think things like TULIP, or Doctrines of Grace, the acronym that describes five distinct states of Calvinism, is a Reformed Distinctive.

I think it's very important. I think it's very healthy. But I do think the body of Jesus—there's nine and ten arguments for it that I don't believe are essential forms that describes how we grow—means of grace.

And here we're talking about means of God working salvation into our lives, and that involves preaching and sacraments.

Now, for the listener who is not really familiar with confessional Christianity, I know that the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Westminster Catechisms, large and short, are the primary summaries of Christian faith that Presbyterians—that is, conservative, Bible-believing, evangelical Presbyterians—view as their standard, which is a summary of what they believe the Bible teaches.

Some people might wrongly assume, as they do with Reformed Baptists and some others who are confessional, that we are putting another standard alongside the Bible as if they are equal in authority. And that is not at all what these confessions themselves even teach.

And I know that many Presbyterians and Reformed Baptists, perhaps to a lesser extent, uphold the three forms of unity that are brethren in the Reformed branch of Christianity that comes from the Netherlands predominantly—the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession, and the Canons of Dort.

Would that be what I just said an accurate statement as far as what would be the summary of biblical teachings—primary biblical teachings—that unites Presbyterians?

Yeah, like I was talking about earlier, the different definitions of Presbyterianism, the historic one that I hold to and have taken vows to uphold is describing our historical, doctrinal, governmental, liturgical tradition, which has been passed down to us through creeds and confessions—the Westminster Confession of Faith and the larger majority of the biblical teachings.

However, they're not—the Confession was revised in 1788, placed in Chapter 23, rebutting the civil magistrate, and there have been other changes over the years. These are human documents—theology from below.

We believe that it is useful theology. We believe that we can find our common beliefs and community in these creeds. And I would challenge anyone who finds these things suspect—challenge you to think about what you believe and how even a short summary, a short mission statement at the church you attend is still a creed.

It's still something that human beings have actively and have come to a common understanding of certain teachings, and that's a creed. And creeds are not perfect. We are—the Word of God is not written by man.

It is written by God. Or I should say the Supreme—even though the authors assume it's the primary standard, it's infallible. It cannot be proven wrong. But it needs to be interpreted, and how we interpret it leads to the creeds and conceptions that we make.

And we historically believe that 400 years of Presbyterianism is a very healthy end.

Confessions, the Papacy, and the Limits of Human Documents

Yes, I know one thing that I think most Presbyterians and Reformed Baptists today—although there are exceptions, but most do not any longer have an eschatological view of the Pope or the papacy being the Antichrist.

They may view him as an Antichrist, but they would not necessarily view him as the Antichrist as the confessions point to, and that is not considered an abandonment of the confessions. It's just showing the human nature of the confessions, as you just stated.

And also, I want to point out, that does not mean that conservative Presbyterians and Reformed Baptists have a more positive view of the papacy at all. It's just like if you were to say, I don't believe Adolf Hitler is the Antichrist, doesn't mean that you have some kind of a soft view of Adolf Hitler.

It is just that it is an eschatological doctrine many in your tradition and mine have abandoned the idea in our confessions that the Pope is the Antichrist. So that would be one area as well, right? Yeah.

Well, I think the other subject, I do think that John's appreciation of the Antichrist coming into the world, but then he goes on to say, many are here already, I'm paraphrasing, of course. And, you know, there are Antichrists and Protestants.

It really depends on how you interpret those teachings. Clearly, they're over the centuries. They're over the centuries who have been faithful brothers in the Lord, even, you know, in the Middle Ages, they've made big contributions.

Of course, we need to apologize for being Protestant. The reason I'm not an expert on why that clause was removed, it just goes interchangeable. We have not been, according to some, we have not been a creed-writing age, which I'm not quite sure what that means, because I don't think we're any less capable than previous ages and 400 years, which might warrant, you know, a newer confession, contradict the older confession.

The point of the matter is that confessions are our theology from below, and we believe that, as Presbyterians, we believe that our confessional system is the best understanding of Scripture. We believe that it's infallible, and I think humility would dictate that true branches of the Church of Jesus Christ have something to offer, and we can learn from each other in certain degrees, but we can also be, we can have unity, but we can't have unity apart from the truth.

The Nature of Scripture and Why Confessionalism Matters

Okay, well, when we come back from our first break, I'd like you to begin putting a magnifying glass over all three of the headings that we hope to address before the end of the program, all three of the divisions of your book on what makes up a Presbyterian or a Presbyterian Church, and if anybody would like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com, that's C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Please, as always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

Don't go away. We'll be right back with Ken Golden and our discussion on what it means to be a Presbyterian right after these messages from our sponsors.

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We were discussing his book Presbytopia, what it means to be Presbyterian. Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. Ken, if you could give us more of a microscopic view of what you were speaking about in regard to the first heading of what it means to be Presbyterian.

We talk about his natural world and his supernatural... And then I go on to the Bible. Some people are beginners, so I talk about biblical books, the composition of Scripture. Very, very briefly, I'm not writing a treatise.

I'm moving through these topics, covering what needs to be said, not overwriting, but giving an introduction to these things. And then I talk about the qualities. We use the word attributes of Scripture, things like Scripture being inspirable, how the Bible describes of itself and is a blessing to us.

And then I talk about the authority of Scripture, and I compare that with other authority standards that we have, things like reason and experience and tradition, and how Scripture trumps them all. And finally, how to do all of these things by making biblical arguments rather than simply assuming that they're true, as much as showing that the Bible is self-authentic.

Now, one of the reasons why I believe confessionalism is important is that when you have a clear summary of what a church or denomination or fellowship believes about what the Bible teaches, you will be more clearly alerted when that a group of believers has departed from what was once held historically by that group.

I can say, for instance, that the PCUSA, the much larger denomination from which the OPC during the modernist fundamentalist controversy sprung forth with the guidance of great men like J. Gresham Machen, and you have other churches that have come out of there, like the Bible Presbyterian Church and the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, and we could go on and on with some fine, biblically faithful, conservative Presbyterian churches.

But the PCUSA began to downplay, and if not outright ignore and abandon, the Westminster Confession of Faith, which should have been, and most likely was, and obviously was, actually, an alarm going off that the PCUSA was abandoning ship.

If you could just continue on that train of thought and respond to what I said.

Yeah, actually, the little church in the north had nine miracles and the virgin birth. Talking about confessional integrity there, we're talking about the very...

Right, well, the reason why I emphasized the confession in my statement was that you will have liberals and apostates often claiming that they hold a high regard for the Bible. People will say it is their favorite book, they've gained great wisdom from it, there is even a...

I learned a number of years ago from former PCUSA ministers, or actually they might have even been remaining in the PCUSA, but they were evangelical, that there are those that differentiate between the infallibility of the Word of God and the inerrancy of the Word of God.

They will...

These liberals will claim infallibility, but not inerrancy. They will say they believe the Bible is infallible because it never fails, but it is filled with errors, if you follow what I'm saying. So the reason why I emphasized the confession is because there's a clear list of things that these believers, such as the Presbyterians, have historically exegeted from the Bible, if you follow what I'm saying.

Yes,.

With time when the Orthodox, or the lowercase c, Catholics, were gathering their canonical books in light of Marcion's heresy, where he was rejecting biblical books and corrupting biblical books, and we had statements like the Apostles' Creed, which was written against, probably against Marcion as well, and certainly Gnosticism, which was denying the humanity of Christ.

And over the centuries, we have had... ...which has put out in the form of creeds and later to defend what people have always believed. But because our theology is from below, we sometimes have our differences, and even some of the earliest Christians would think they would be closer to being 100 right.

Others didn't get everything right either, and I think there were improvements based on meditation, and really in front of them to do the work they needed to do to come up with, not invent, but really uncover the Trinitarian doctrine, the two natures of Christ, Christology that we appreciate.

And all of these areas of doctrine that we hold dear were oftentimes defended in the face of serious threats to the Church. And I think those...

Covenant Theology, Baptism, and the Visible Church

We have a listener, a very faithful listener, Grady in Asheboro, North Carolina, has a question. Great show, Chris and Ken. One of my best friends and brothers in Christ is Presbyterian, and I'm a Reformed Baptist.

We attend the same church, a Reformed Baptist congregation, and the main difference we see between the two is Pado and Credo baptism. Do you see other differences between these denominations? We both agree that no matter the differences, we're to love one another.

Yeah, I think that's a great... The last statement that this brother makes is an excellent statement, and we have a Reformed Baptist, Sycamore Baptist Church, and they're great brothers. Pastor Chuck Rennie graduated from the same seminary that I did, and he and some other pastors at his church sometimes fill our...

I think we do have a lot in common. I do think, and I'm not an expert on these things, but I would say the Pado-Credo difference is the biggest one, but that is really a part of theology. I think there's a very big difference in covenant theology between Baptists and Presbyterians.

I think there are differences in church government. To my knowledge, Reformed Baptists are two Presbyterian churches, many of which are three or four.

Baptists generally believe in the autonomy and independence of the local church, meaning that there is no hierarchy outside of the local elders other than God himself and the holy scriptures that are over them, whereas as a Presbyterian, you would have, obviously, Presbyteries and so on.

Yeah, the interconnectedness is another difference, and this goes back to what I said earlier, is my book is in... What we're talking about here involves part two and part three. These are important differences, and they affect the health and well-being of the Church of Jesus Christ, but they're not essentials, and therefore, we can have fellowship with each other with the understanding that we don't want to minimize truth.

We don't want to simply throw away our distinctives for the sake of unity, because that's what the World Council of Churches did in the 20th century, and you can have unity apart from the truth as well.

So we believe in unity, distinctives, and diversity, and being true to who you are and gets to the issues of the value of tradition as long as tradition...

Presbyteries and Church Government

Now, do you think that Presbyteries were adopted by Presbyterians because of the absence of the apostles in our modern day? And when I say modern day, I'm even talking about any era of Christendom after the apostolic era.