October 6, 2016 Show with Dr. George Grant on “The 499th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation” PLUS “Becoming a Serious & Productive Reader (Wading Through Garbage in Search of Jewels)”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet

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Earth who are listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Thursday on the sixth day of October 2016.

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I'm so delighted to have back on the program Dr. George Grant, pastor of Parish Presbyterian Church, which is a congregation in the

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Presbyterian Church in America congregation and denomination I should say in Franklin, Tennessee.

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He is the founder of New College in Franklin, Tennessee and also president of the

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King's Meadows Study Center and founder of Franklin Classical School also in Franklin, Tennessee.

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Today we're going to be discussing two important topics. One is we're going to be addressing the 499th anniversary of the

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Protestant Reformation and then the following hour we'll have Dr. Grant discuss becoming a serious and productive reader wading through garbage in search of jewels.

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And it's our honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron, Dr. George Grant. Well good afternoon, how are you?

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I'm doing great and I'm very excited that our last interview has also led to a possible publishing project with Solid Ground Christian Books.

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Well I would love to see that happen, that would be a lot of fun. Yeah, well it looks like it's heading that way from my last discussion with Mike Gaydosh, the founder of Solid Ground Books.

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And first of all I know that you've already given our listeners in the past, the recent past, an explanation of Parish Presbyterian Church or a description of it, but we have new listeners all the time so why don't you let our listeners know about Parish Presbyterian Church.

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Well we are a church plant of the

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Presbyterian Church in America. We've been involved in church planting for a number of years and we're now in the midst of our third church plant from the original, and we're a very confessional

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Reformed congregation, meaning that we hold to the doctrines of grace and the principles of the

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Reformation, while at the same time communicating clearly to the 21st century.

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So we have a form of worship that we call confessional, it's neither contemporary nor traditional, but we hold to all of the patterns and forms of the

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Westminster Standards and three forms of unity and all of the rest, and are really committed to seeing the

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Gospel infiltrate the whole of life and all of culture, so we're very, very active in our community as Christians should be.

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Amen. And for those of our listeners who are unfamiliar with the Westminster Confession and the three forms of unity, those are basically confessional statements which are summaries of what you believe the

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Bible teaches. These are not inventions of men, but these are summaries of biblical teaching, correct? That is correct.

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It's a great way to sort of systemize our thinking. The truths of the

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Scriptures are interwoven all through the Bible, and so you don't go to the

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Bible and find the section on the Holy Spirit, or the section on the

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Church Government. And so what the Confessions and Cleves and Catechisms do, is they help us sort of sort through those topics, so we can understand them better and articulate them more clearly.

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But all of the best Confessions and Cleves all say the final standard is

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Scripture. Cleves and Confessions are man's interpretation of the

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Scripture. Scripture is the final authority and the final word. I love the way that the

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Westminster Confession says it right at the beginning, simply that the

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Scriptures are vademikum, they are our final authority, and therefore we rest solely on the

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Scriptures. But because we are thinking people and we have to communicate, the

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Cleves help us communicate those truths, the Confessions, the

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Catechisms, they help us to communicate those truths to a whole new generation. Amen.

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And as I have said on other programs, perhaps with other guests, but no matter how many times someone may criticize or condemn the use of creeds or confessions, they really, in ignorance or naivete, are confessional themselves, they just have bad confessions.

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Because every time you tell anyone what you believe the Bible teaches, you are basically declaring a creed or confession of faith.

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Yes, even when you say, no creed but Jesus, that's creed. That's right, yes.

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Well, it simply means credo. It simply means what I believe. Exactly.

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Yeah, I got a chuckle at a church Bible conference that I was at years ago when the guest speaker was talking about the specific group that I was

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I was visiting. They were saying that we have a history of believing in no creed but Christ, no confession but the

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Scriptures. And I said, this track that you have in your lobby, it lists a whole bunch of things that you do and things that you don't do, and it says that ministers don't wear clerical robes, you wear business suits, and you only allow men to be ministers, and there's a whole bunch of things in here.

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Don't you realize that this is a confessional statement, this pamphlet that you have in your lobby?

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And of course the answer to that is, no, we didn't realize that at all.

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And by the way, I did agree with some of the stuff in that pamphlet. But this is the 499th anniversary of the

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Protestant Reformation. This month marks that anniversary, and specifically for those listening who don't know,

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October 31st, which is more commonly known as Halloween, October 31st is the date that many churches around the globe celebrate as the anniversary of the

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Protestant Reformation because of Martin Luther's nailing the 95 theses to the church door at the

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Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, a Roman Catholic Church. He was an Augustinian monk, and a lot of people really don't understand what he was doing.

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They think that perhaps this was a more in -depth Protestant manifesto that he was nailing to the door, but it was really just a protest to the selling of indulgences at that time, wasn't it?

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Well, it was a protest for the selling of indulgences, but it did raise a whole host of other issues.

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After all, it was 95 theses, and you know, what

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Luther really was calling for was for a conversation to wrestle with some of the corruptions that he saw that were very evident to almost all in the late medieval church.

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And as the Renaissance really took off in Italy and started to spread throughout the rest of Christendom, those corruptions became more and more evident, and so he was calling for a conversation.

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One of the things that we have to remember is that Reformation literally means taking an existing form and bringing new life and health to that existing form.

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Luther wasn't trying to establish a new denomination, there was no notion of that.

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It was, what can we do to bring the gospel to bear on these evident corruptions?

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And the reaction that he got in 1517 to that call for discussion is really what caused the

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Reformation, the Protestant break with Roman Catholicism. It was his desire, it was

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John Calvin's desire, it was Martin Bucer's desire, it was all of their desire to actually see the church remain unified, but grow in grace and address the very evident corruptions.

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And so while 1517 triggered all of the things, the

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Reformation proper doesn't actually get underway for a number of years after that.

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So that's, you know, that's kind of a common misconception that Luther sort of nailed his break with the

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Roman Catholic Church at that time. It really was just the beginning of what he hoped would be a healthy discussion about how to bring about real change, and that really is one of the great distinctives of the

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Reformation, is the recognition that because we are all sinners, and because all human institutions are tainted by that sin, the

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Church always needs to be reformed. It's the principle eventually articulated by the

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Reformers later, called Semper Reformendum. We're reformed, always reforming.

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We are sinners and we're never going to arrive at the perfect sort of polity for Church and life and culture until that glorious day when we stand before the throne of God and the

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King of Kings and the Lord of Lords is before us. Yes, after all, we can't all be

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Reformed Baptists now. I have to take a jab at my

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Presbyterian brothers whenever I can. And of course, you know, a lot of Roman Catholics view

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Luther as a villain for causing a schism, but let's not forget he had to flee for his life.

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He would have been executed if he'd stuck around. Exactly. And we also have to recognize that Luther did not really start this dust -up.

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It was, there was one of the most brilliant scholars of the day,

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Desiderius Erasmus, who actually created this dust -up, because the thing that Erasmus did was he actually worked on an authoritative

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Greek text of the New Testament that brought clarity at a time when certain words, like repent or justify, had been corrupted by the traditions and the rites and rituals of the

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Church, rather than understood in their proper biblical context. He brought this authoritative new

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Greek text so that the people like Luther and other professors of theology could actually start to wrestle with the meaning of the

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Scriptures, uncluttered by the accretions of the Medieval Church.

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Erasmus really is the father of the Reformation in a lot of ways.

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There were great morning stars of the Reformation that preceded by 150 years Luther, who also pointed the way, people like John Wycliffe and John Husk, and some would even say

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Peter Waldo, and there were many before that, including many of the patristic

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Church fathers, including Augustine of Hippo. So we can't really isolate

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Martin Luther as the only guy who precipitates this change.

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Already by 1514, some three years before Luther, you have somebody like Ulrich Zwingli in the city of Zurich, who was wrestling with many of the same things, and who was taking

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Erasmus' Greek New Testament and starting to see remarkable new truths that had long been denied by the

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Medieval Church. Now you mentioned Erasmus before, although you may view him as someone who was a part of the snowball rolling in regard to the

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Reformation, he did, though, however, disagree with Luther on a very key point about the bondage of the will, did he not, the great debate from the

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Reformation that they had? He did, and you know, that came rather late in their correspondence.

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At first, Erasmus was very sympathetic, all the way up through the time when he carried on an extended correspondence with Luther's chief lieutenant,

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Melanchthon, and it was really only after Erasmus got cold feet that he began to distance himself from Luther, and then it was sometime after that, even, that the real breach between them occurred, which was not over the doctrine of justification, rather it was over the question of the sovereignty of God.

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And that was a whole different thing, but you know, eventually he showed his true colors, and he decided that he wanted to commit himself to the

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Roman Catholic Church. Some would say that he was actually bought off because of his relationship with the

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Medici family, which at that time controlled the papacy under Leo, Pope Leo, so there's a lot of personal stuff, as there always is, that goes into that, that then created the breach between Luther and Erasmus.

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We do have a listener in Kinross, Scotland, who apologizes that his question is somewhat off -topic, but I'm gonna let him ask it because of your background in politics and writing on politics and so on.

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Murray in Kinross, Scotland, says, with both current presidential candidates so unappealing, and with the

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Christian vote over there in the States being quite a sizable consideration, why hasn't there been more of a campaign to break the two -party system and support an independent

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Christian candidate? Most Reformed Christians I know will vote Trump just to stop

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Hillary from getting in, but why not vote for someone else? Am I missing something here? Yeah, no, you're not missing anything there at all.

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This is an incredibly disastrous time in American politics from a principled perspective, and I think in some ways my explanation has been that this has been a perfect storm, which is just another way of saying that we may be seeing the judgment of God.

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And so the answer to the question, why hasn't there been support thrown to another candidate, because of the peculiar and very convoluted ballot laws in all 50 of the

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American states, it is not very easy to get ballot access.

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The result is that you really have to be one of the four established parties in order to have universal ballot access in the

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United States. The four established parties are the Libertarians, the Greens, and then the

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Republicans and the Democrats. Small parties do exist. There's the American Party, there's the

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US Constitution Party, there are a number of other small parties that have limited access.

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Most of them are at best write -in possibilities, and in many states you even have to qualify and gain access to be able to write in.

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So what that means is that by the time it became evident that both major parties, the

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Democrats and the putting up objectionable candidates, it was too late for ballot access to be secured for all 50 states.

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It was really too late to gain ballot access apart from a massive infusion of wealth in any more than 25 states.

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And so that's a part of the reason why there wasn't a dramatic effort.

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There were several people, including the folks who run the

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Weekly Standard and the National Review, who tried to put forward an authentic conservative candidate to oppose

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Trump and Hillary, and those efforts failed simply because the logistics are so huge.

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I just got out of a meeting just a moment ago with a political consultant who is very savvy, and one of the things that I said to her was that if Hillary or Trump wins, we're in a position where we have to immediately begin the work of real reformation of the efforts of the evangelicals and reformed centers in America.

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And we're just looking at a terrible, terrible next four years.

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Well thank you Murray and Ken Ross Scotland, and I'm gonna ask a question that kind of dovetails what

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Murray asked into our main theme for the first hour. I have very conservative, traditionalist, real right -wing

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Roman Catholic friends and acquaintances, especially since I have been involved in orchestrating public moderated theological debates over the last 25 years or so, primarily between my friend

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Dr. James R. White, a reformed scholar and theologian and Roman Catholic opponents, although we haven't had one with a

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Roman Catholic in a few years now, but I'm hoping to revive those.

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But I've become friends with, as a result, with a number of traditionalist

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Catholics, even though they strongly oppose my views on major things, and one of the things that I have heard from some of them is basically they blame the

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Reformation for the liberalism in the United States and even, if you could believe this, the liberalism within the

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Roman Catholic Church. They blame Protestant influences on the

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Catholic Church to bring about Vatican II and to really start the snowball rolling to where we have

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Pope Francis, a quietly in their closets, very discouraged with, even though they still revere him in some extent as their

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Pope, unless you talk about a Sedevacatist or some extreme sect within Rome that does not believe that the current

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Popes are legitimate, like Mel Gibson used to be and so on. But these folks will say the

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Protestant Reformation is to blame and if the United States and the world were really under the yoke of Rome and that schism never happened in the 16th century, we would see a world that is much more

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God -honoring and moral. What is your opinion of that kind of rhetoric? Well, first,

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I think we're making brash, oversimplified statements about a whole series of rather complex things.

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There were opportunities for Roman Catholics to reform themselves in a more biblical, traditionalist fashion multiple times through history.

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The Jansenist movement was crushed by the

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Inquisition. Various other reform movements have been crushed by the ecclesiastical authorities through the years, long, long after Protestantism had departed from the

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Church. And so I think to blame Protestantism is overly simplistic, first and foremost.

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Secondly, I would say that whatever forces within the Roman Catholic Church brought

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Pope Francis to the fore can hardly be blamed on anything other than the ongoing trajectory of the

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Church. We had a brief aberration, I think, in Pope John Paul II and in Pope Benedict, an aberration where true traditionalists became authoritative in the

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Church. But, you know, what is not commonly known is that those traditionalists brought back all of the elements of Roman Catholic traditionalism, including all manner of bizarre mariology, mariolatry, asceticism, etc.

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And so, you know, my response to my Roman Catholic friends, and I have lots of them,

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I love them dearly, I stand with them on the pro -life issue,

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I yearn for them to be able to have a stronger voice in their own

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Church. But, you know, in terms of the ongoing plan for the renewal of culture,

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I do not believe that apart from the doctrines of grace, there really is a platform for balanced and free societies.

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You know, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding also that when

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Luther, very excitedly, enthusiastically, went on a pilgrimage from Germany to Rome before he nailed those 95

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Theses, when he was still a faithful Augustinian monk, he was appalled by the immoral sewer that he found in Rome, with priests routinely visiting prostitutes and all kinds of things going on.

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Right. He was appalled, and I think that was one of the things that, in the end, led him to begin to have the kinds of questions that he had.

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You know, leading up to, from the time of his pilgrimage to Rome, up to the time of the nailing of the 95

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Theses on the Wittenberg church door, he began to explore, in deep research and then eventually teaching, the

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Book of Romans. The questions that were lodged in his mind from that trip, and from his own tortured experience in realizing his own sinfulness and wickedness, and the impossibility of a righteous

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God ever seeing anything in him that could justify his sin.

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All of that caused him to read the Book of Romans with new eyes.

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And, of course, Erasmus' New Testament helped greatly because of the clarified language of words like repent and justify, which, instead of meaning to receive the doctrines and rituals of penance and to make righteous, he was able to see that the words actually mean to turn completely from sin, metanoia, to turn completely around, and the word justify literally means to declare righteous.

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When he saw that, he then began to see the unraveling of the whole authoritative system of sacerdotal theology in the

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Roman Catholic Church, and that was really the undoing for him. We have to go to a break right now.

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If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Dr. George Grant, our email address is

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ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

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Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the good old

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I'm Chris Arnzen, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and here's one of my favorite guests,

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Todd Friel, to tell you about a conference he and I are going to. Hello, this is Todd Friel, host of Wretched Radio and Wretched TV, and occasional guest on Chris's show,

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Iron Criticizing Iron. I think that's what it's called.

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Hoping that you can join Chris and me at the G3 conference in Atlanta, my new hometown.

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It is going to be a bang -up conference called the G3 conference, celebrating the 500th anniversary of the

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Protestant Reformation, with Paul Washer, Steve Lawson, D .A. Carson, Votie Baucom, Conrad and Bayway, Phil Johnson, James White, and a bunch of other people.

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We hope to see you there. Learn more at G3conference .com. G3conference .com.

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Thanks, Todd, I think. See you at the Iron Sharpens Iron Exhibitors booth.

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Solid Ground Christian Books is honored to be a weekly sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Welcome back.

32:32

This is Chris Arnson. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours is Dr. George Grant, pastor of Parish Presbyterian Church in Franklin, Tennessee, and also president of the

32:43

King's Meadows Study Center. We are discussing for the first hour the 499th anniversary of the

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Protestant Reformation, and then during the second hour, we intend to focus on becoming a serious and productive reader, wading through garbage in search of jewels.

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And if you'd like to join us on the air with your own question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

33:08

We have RJ in Westchester County, New York, who says, it seems to me that modern -day

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Lutherans of the conservative and confessional variety have maintained

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Luther's sacramentalism, but it appears that they have lost his concept of the bondage of the will and theologically appear to be more like Arminians.

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Can you address that issue? Yes. The thing about Luther was he was brilliant.

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He was visionary, but he was not a systematic theologian. You read his commentary on the

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Book of Galatians, and you see he's a careful expositor, and he was incredibly gifted at preaching.

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He was a wonderful translator. In fact, the German translation of the Bible has really shaped the

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German language more profoundly, even than the King James Version has shaped the

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English language. But what he was not was a systematic theologian.

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What he was not was an administrator and organizer. He left those responsibilities to a number of his lieutenants, including

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Philip Melanchthon, who in many ways shaped the systematic theology of Lutheranism more profoundly than Luther did.

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And I think that we can attribute many of the kinds of things like the departure from the sovereignty of God, the compromises on things like church -state relations, sphere sovereignty, jurisdictionalism, all of those kinds of things, we can attribute those to the masterful organizing and systemizing mind of Philip Melanchthon.

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Yeah, and of course, I think that the majority of Lutherans, though, would deny that that's the case.

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I've spoken to some of them, and I've mentioned that to them about Melanchthon being really the one with the dominant theology of third millennium

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Lutheranism, and they of course say that that's erroneous. Yeah, and you know, they say it's erroneous, but without evidence.

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You know, we can point to the historical record. We know who the authors of the primary works, the

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Augsburg Confession, for instance, were all under the leadership of Philip Melanchthon, and then there were huge controversies even following Luther's death, where you have a kind of splintering of Lutheranism.

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It's something that people like Joseph Allen, the famous scholar of the last generation of great evangelical

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Lutherans, he pointed to this fact. So while some

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Lutherans want to deny it, it's basically historical fact that the direction that Lutheranism went, in terms of systematic theology, was really determined by Philip Melanchthon.

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And Luther himself, I mean, we are all works in progress, but Luther himself was really a work in progress because he, for a number of years, was still retaining some

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Roman baggage. I think it wasn't until, you know, close to him departing the earth into glory with Christ, that he still was retaining some

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Mariolatry concepts and so on. Am I right on that? You're absolutely right.

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And of course, all of us, as you mentioned, we are all works in progress. We're all hopefully growing in our sanctification and in our understanding of the

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Scriptures. And so the fact that we are changing our views over time is a good thing, not a bad thing.

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But, you know, in the earliest days of the Reformation, Martin Luther was a traditional

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Augustinian Roman Catholic. And so there were lots of things that, sometimes by adversity, sometimes by study, sometimes by convincing, he was forced to change.

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And, you know, this is one of the reasons why I think that, in some ways, we ought to be equally celebrating some of the other figures of the

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Reformation when we have Reformation Sunday. Pierre Vuillet of Lausanne, and Martin Bucer of Strasbourg, and Guillaume Faro of Neuchâtel, and Heinrich Bollinger of Zurich, and Johannes Brüggenhagen of Denmark, and Hans Tausen of Denmark, and, you know,

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Zwingli in Zurich. These figures were parts of multiple

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Reformations that kind of came together to create the Protestant movement. If we use an athletic analogy, the

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Reformation wasn't just a race run by Luther against the

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Papists, it was a relay race. And it was a relay race that involved a whole, whole host of men that the

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Lord raised up for just that moment in time. Yeah, what a great idea for a conference where a different figure from the

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Reformation is basically taught about, expanded on, by different speakers who are knowledgeable experts on each of those men that you mentioned.

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You put a seed in my mind there for an idea for the future here. Yeah, I think that's a great idea.

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With the 500 coming up, you know, it's the kind of thing as time has come.

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Yeah, definitely. Let's see here. We have Christopher in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, who wants to know, in your opinion, do you think

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Ulrich Zwingli departed from Rome farther from any of the

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Reformers in regard to the ordinances or sacraments? Perhaps, although I think the most dramatic departure was

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Martin Brutzer, who helped shape John Calvin's thinking on the sacraments, because what you see with Zwingli is he sort of revolted in the polar extreme.

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He essentially said that the sacraments were mere memorials.

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What Martin Brutzer said was that the sacraments really mean something. They proclaim the gospel to us as means of grace, and so in the same way that the preaching of the

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Word is a glorious means of grace, so the sacraments are a means of grace.

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When we come to the Lord's Supper table, we're actually having the gospel preached to us all over again.

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That's a declaration about the sacraments that is of an entirely different order.

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So in other words, there's a linear progression between the two extremes of Zwingli and Roman Catholicism, but what

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Brutzer espouses is something wholly other, and that wholly other vision becomes the basis for Continental Reforms and Roman opposition to Protestantism focuses largely on that sort of departure that Brutzer created.

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Thank you, Christopher. One thing that is also said of the doctrines of the

42:13

Reformation, especially in regard to the Calvinist understanding of perseverance and the preservation of the saints, is that it has created a blueprint for licentiousness, and that the understanding that you cannot lose your salvation is the reason why we have rampant immorality in the world where people professing to be

42:41

Christian feel they can get scot -free with this kind of behavior, all because of this teaching of John Calvin that you can't lose your salvation.

42:51

Obviously, we would say this is a teaching of the Bible, but how do you respond to that?

42:58

Well, first of all, John Calvin did not phrase it in anything like that.

43:03

What he declared was perseverance of the saints, and that's a very different thing.

43:14

Once saved, always saved is a doggerel version of this notion that John Calvin did not teach.

43:26

What he taught was that those who are redeemed will continue to grow in grace, and when a person's name is written in the

43:37

Lamb's Book of Life, that continuing in grace will persevere all the way home.

43:46

That's a very different thing than once saved, always saved. Once saved, always saved basically says, sign your name on the line when you walk the aisle at the end of a service, and you've got fire insurance policy for the rest of your life.

44:01

Right. That might be better named, once you think you're saved, you are saved.

44:06

You know, that would be like another way of labeling that erroneous teaching, because even though you and I would believe if you are truly saved, you are going to always be saved, but the people that use that phrase, once saved, always saved, and even the term eternal security,

44:26

I believe is a true statement, but it's inadequate and insufficient.

44:32

That's why the perseverance and the preservation of the saints is a much more descriptive idea of the state of a

44:40

Christian. Would you agree or disagree with what I said about those phrases? Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.

44:48

What we've got to do is we've got to stop having pop versions of biblical doctrines and mischaracterizations thrown around, and if you want to say, here's what

45:03

John Calvin taught, or here's what the doctrines of grace are, actually quote

45:08

John Calvin. I've never seen anybody actually quote John Calvin as they criticize

45:15

John Calvin. Amen. We have

45:21

Harrison from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who says,

45:26

Chris, you have had guests on your program on both sides of the free offer of the gospel issue.

45:37

What is your guest's view on that? He is probably speaking specifically of the fact that I have had a couple of folks in the past who

45:46

I greatly admire from the Protestant Reform denomination, not that I agree with everything that they teach, and I have also had, specifically, men teach on the subject of the free offer of the gospel and common grace and so on.

46:04

So I've had both views expressed on my show. What is your view in those areas? Well, first of all,

46:12

I want to declare up front that all of the mystery of the proclamation of the gospel, the sovereignty of God, and the mechanism by which

46:24

God calls to himself the elect, that mystery is not entirely cleared up in the scriptures.

46:36

And so there is plenty of room for good brothers and sisters to disagree on the mechanics of this.

46:48

But what we do know is this. Scriptures clearly portray, both in decree and by example, that we're to go forth and proclaim the only hope of redemption in all of this world is in the finished work of Jesus Christ.

47:10

We're to proclaim it, we're to go forth to all of the nations proclaiming it, and we are to trust that the

47:20

Holy Spirit will do the work of bringing in the harvest. I think that that is about as clear as the scriptures make it.

47:33

Even the Protestant Reform folks agree with that. Even they do. Yeah, yeah.

47:39

I think, you know, there are some who believe that to offer the gospel freely and openly impinges upon the sovereignty of God.

47:52

I do not believe that. I believe that we are to proclaim the marvels.

47:58

I think we're to shout it from the rooftops. I do believe that God is sovereign, and he is going to redeem his own.

48:08

Do you think a lot of the dispute over these concepts is semantical? I think it's actually more in terms of ritual.

48:18

I think it has to do with things like altar calls. I think it has to do with the anxious bench.

48:26

I think it has to do with revivalistic techniques. Those infiltrate our conversation.

48:33

And so, yes, there's some semantics that's involved here, but it's semantics that has been muddied by 200 years of practice that we might want to quibble with the way the practices are carried out, and that kind of muddies the whole conversation.

48:52

We do have, let's see here, we have Murray from Kinross, Scotland again.

48:58

He wants to ask a question about the actual subject we're discussing now, rather than a political one.

49:05

Murray asks, if a church has limited resources and is able to perhaps stage just one event to commemorate the

49:13

Reformation, in your opinion, would it be more urgent to hold a teaching event to better inform believers of the truths of the

49:21

Reformation, or to have an evangelistic session giving the great ignorance around us in those who do not even usually come to church?

49:31

Wow. That's like saying, which of your sisters do you think is the prettiest?

49:43

I'm, you know, I think that it's a really good question, because we do have limited resources, and we do make choices about how we proclaim the truths of our day.

49:58

What I would say is, probably the answer to that question probably depends upon the unique circumstances of the community in which a local church exists.

50:13

I believe very strongly that we need to do everything that we can, in every way that we can, to proclaim the truths of the

50:25

Gospel in as an articulate, effectual way as we can to the communities that we live in, meaning that we've got to speak to the vernacular of our time and of our place.

50:41

So, if the local community is deeply rooted in a

50:50

Reformed tradition, obviously you're going to want to lean towards evangelism.

50:56

If, on the other hand, the churches are woefully ignorant, then you may need to have some just substantial teaching about the legacy.

51:06

But what I would say is start having that teaching right now, every single

51:11

Lord's Day, and inform your congregation of the richness of their legacy, right here and now, so that when we come around one year from now, you're able to stage an event that may meet all of the needs of the community.

51:31

Well thank you. Oh yes, and Murray just has one final question. Having had a quick look at your church's website, what on earth is

51:40

Kingdom Tide? Oh, that's a great question. One of the things that we tend to do in the church, if we think about seasons at all, is we'll think about the seasons of Christ's Nativity and of His Resurrection, but we rarely think about the extension of the

52:06

Kingdom. And from the book of Acts on, we're beyond the narrative of Christ's earthly life and death and Resurrection, and now we're seeing the things that Jesus continues to do and teach through the disciples.

52:25

And so Kingdom Tide is just a time when, as a church, we emphasize the work of the

52:31

Kingdom. It's not a time where we're reiterating the birth, the life, the ministry, the death, and the

52:41

Resurrection of Christ, but we're looking at how that birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension now applies to the work of the church.

52:53

So we're kind of working through the ideas of the book of Acts and the book of Romans, and all the way through,

53:02

I'm preaching right now through the book of Revelation. You know, and one of the things that is clearly lost in the minds of many

53:12

Roman Catholics is the fact that the Reformers were trying to recover and restore the teachings of the ancient church, of the

53:24

Apostolic Church, that they believed many of the church fathers had retained.

53:33

And whereas the typical Roman Catholic apologist, or even average Roman Catholic individual, will merely look at the

53:42

Reformation as a series of novelties or inventions that were introduced into Christendom for the first time in history.

53:52

And in fact, I can even remember my father back in the 1970s.

53:59

He was raised Episcopalian, my mother was Roman Catholic, and he converted to Catholicism, thinking that this would somehow bring greater unity to the family.

54:10

But in his mind, he said, Protestantism came after Catholicism, so therefore

54:18

Catholicism must be closer to the ancient truth and the Bible. And therefore, that's how he logically concluded that the

54:29

Protestant faith was a newer faith, and therefore more of a novel one, farther separated from the authors of Scripture.

54:39

But the Reformers were the ones trying to restore those teachings, weren't they, that had been abandoned by Rome, who covered the glorious Gospel with a mountain of ritual and sacerdotalism.

54:53

And not only buried the teachings of Scripture, but buried the teachings of the patristics, the early

55:00

Church Fathers. Again, people who criticize Calvin, I always want to just say, well, have you ever actually read

55:10

Calvin? Calvin quoted John Chrysostom and Basil of Caesarea and Gregory Nazianzus far more than Pope Leo ever did.

55:22

In fact, Pope Leo probably couldn't even pronounce Gregory Nazianzus. And Calvin worked through the

55:31

Church Fathers in great detail. You read Calvin's sermons, and they are filled with insights from Augustine, from Jerome, from the whole panoply of the early

55:47

Church. And that's really one of the great distinctives of the Reformation.

55:53

The Reformers really and truly did recover the teachings of the earliest

56:00

Church. And we are going to be going to another break in a moment.

56:08

If you'd like to join us on the air as well, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

56:16

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Please provide your first name and your city and state and your country of residence if you live outside of the

56:28

USA as well. And that's chrisarnson at gmail .com.

56:34

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And don't go away.

56:39

We're going to be right back with Dr. George Grant right after these messages. We look forward to hearing from you and your own questions for Dr.

56:47

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57:56

Chris Arnson here and I can't wait to head down to Atlanta, Georgia. And here's my friend, Dr. James White to tell you why.

58:02

Hi, I'm James White of Alpha Omega Ministries. I hope you join me at the G3 conference hosted by Pastor Josh Bice and Praise Mill Baptist Church at the

58:11

Georgia International Convention Center in Atlanta, January 19th through the 21st in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the

58:20

Protestant Reformation. I'll be joined by Paul Washer, Steve Lawson, D .A. Carson, Votie Balcombe, Conrad M.

58:27

Bayway, Phil Johnson, Rosaria Butterfield, Todd Friel, and a host of other speakers who are dedicated to the pillars of what

58:34

G3 stands for, gospel, grace, and glory. For more details, go to g3conference .com.

58:44

Thanks, James. Make sure you greet me at the Iron Sharpens Iron exhibit booth while you're there.

58:52

Paul wrote to the church at Galatia, For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am

58:58

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.

59:07

We are a Reformed Baptist Church and we hold to the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689.

59:13

We are in Norfolk, Massachusetts. We strive to reflect Paul's mindset to be much more concerned with how

59:18

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 apostles' priority, it must not be ours either.

59:29

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.

59:42

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

59:48

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

59:59

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

01:00:06

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

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01:01:25

Welcome back, this is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today is

01:01:31

Dr. George Grant, who is the author of numerous books, pastor of Parish Presbyterian Church in Franklin, Tennessee, and president of the

01:01:40

King's Meadow Study Center. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail dot com, chrisarnzen at gmail dot com.

01:01:50

We began our interview for the first hour discussing the 499th anniversary of the

01:01:56

Protestant Reformation, and the second hour we are going to be discussing an important issue, becoming a serious and productive reader.

01:02:06

So we welcome your questions on either of those issues, or anything that you happen to be perhaps aware that Dr.

01:02:14

Grant has an area of knowledge on that he's written about, and so on. In fact, we do have a first -time questioner,

01:02:23

Jeremiah in Dover, New Hampshire, in Stratford County, says, what is your favorite story about a

01:02:32

Reformed father's life? Ooh, that's a great question.

01:02:38

I love that question. I guess probably my favorite story of parenting at all comes from the life of John Calvin.

01:02:55

Following the death of his wife, he was left as the father to his adopted children from her previous marriage.

01:03:13

And the story is that following the funeral, he was grief -stricken and overwhelmed, but he determined that that night he would cook them all dinner, and he was going to focus on the family.

01:03:35

And he made a horrible mess of it because he was not exactly a good cook.

01:03:43

And the story is that they laughed themselves heartily through that day, obviously brokenhearted over loss, and yet here's this tenderness of home life.

01:03:59

I just love that snapshot. And that's a snapshot that hardly anybody would think was possible with John Calvin because of a preconceived, a false preconceived notion they have about him.

01:04:12

Indeed, indeed. And it truly is a shame because he was a man of such rich human tenderness.

01:04:24

And you see that, you know, he certainly had this intensity and focus that comes through in his writing and his sermons and everything else.

01:04:37

But the tenderness of his human relations are very evident. I really recommend that people read the life of John Calvin by his close friend and fellow worker

01:04:51

Theodore Beza. It's a marvelous thing, and all of that tenderness does emerge in the portrayal, even though, again,

01:05:01

Beza is much more concerned about all of the theological issues, the great battles of the

01:05:09

Reformation in the city of Geneva, the tenderness nevertheless comes through. By the way,

01:05:16

Jeremiah in Dover, New Hampshire, you, since you're a first -time questioner, you're getting absolutely free of charge a beautiful edition of the

01:05:26

New American Standard Bible. It is really practical because it's small enough to carry in a briefcase.

01:05:34

It's not quite pocket -sized, but in the winter you could certainly put it in a coat pocket, and your wife or your girlfriend or daughter or your sister or whoever who has a pocketbook or purse could easily fit it in there as well.

01:05:49

It's a gorgeous edition with an embossed cross on the cover, and that's compliments of the publishers of the

01:05:57

New American Standard Bible who have been sponsors of Iron Sharpens Iron since our inception, and that will be shipped out to you also free of charge by our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com,

01:06:10

cvbbs .com, that's cv for Cumberland Valley, bbs for Bible Book Service .com.

01:06:16

We thank Todd and Patty Jennings for being faithful supporters of Iron Sharpens Iron since we went on the air, and by the way,

01:06:24

Jeremiah, I need your full mailing address though to get that shipped out to you because all we have is

01:06:30

Dover, New Hampshire. So we look forward to hearing from you and sending out that free

01:06:35

Bible to you. That's great, Jeremiah, you're going to love that. Yeah, you should, and I'm very thankful beyond description to the publishers of the

01:06:47

New American Standard Bible because they have been amongst my chief means of support for many years, even before I started the broadcast,

01:06:56

Iron Sharpens Iron, when I began orchestrating the live public theological debates that I've done since 1995.

01:07:03

They have been right there behind me, helping me and sponsoring me and so forth, so I am forever grateful to them, and it's a great translation of the

01:07:13

Bible as well. We are now transitioning over to becoming a serious and productive reader, and this is a very important thing because, in essence, it is just as important what you're reading as it is who you're hearing preach, because a book is really just a sermon in written form.

01:07:41

You know, I mean, people don't even sometimes realize the importance of that, so if you're feeding your mind with junk and heretical nonsense six days out of the week and just hearing your pastor preach soundly from the

01:07:58

Word of God, or perhaps unfortunately you're in a bad church and you're hearing heresy there as well, but this is a very important issue, isn't it?

01:08:06

It is a very important issue, particularly at a time when we are bombarded with instantaneous and oftentimes erroneous information.

01:08:18

I oftentimes tell my students that one of the best things that they can do to sort of wean them from the consumption of media is to, every morning for about a week, just go first to the

01:08:34

Fox News website and then to the CNN news website and compare headlines.

01:08:43

Oftentimes what you'll discover is what purports to be news is clearly not news.

01:08:52

News is really just two different slants of propaganda.

01:08:58

It's a very disillusioning kind of exercise to do, and sometimes when they cover the same story, it's in opposite directions, and you realize, okay,

01:09:09

I'm not getting the straight story here. And of course, social media makes things even worse, and so what we consume, the way we shape our minds, and the opportunities that we have with books to slowly meditate on good truths, to have our souls nourished, to be stirred by great stories, is an invaluable exercise that's perhaps more important today than at any other time in Christian history.

01:09:41

By the way, I never thought that my friend over at Spoon's Café, the owner of Spoon's Café, who has catered some of my

01:09:50

Iron Sharpens Iron pastor's luncheons, I never thought when he said, fit this into your show today, that I was possibly going to be able to bring it up.

01:09:59

But because of what you just said, he shared with me a CNN news video of a woman in the crowd during one of the protests.

01:10:11

I think it may have been one of the protests in Chicago or perhaps in Maryland, I'm not really sure which one.

01:10:20

But a woman was introduced by one of the anchor women, saying that this woman that they were about to hear from was basically a modern -day hero calling for peace in a dangerous atmosphere of violence.

01:10:39

And you hear the woman in the crowd saying, don't bring violence in this neighborhood, keep your violence out of here, this is our community.

01:10:48

And she was going on and on with a strong, loud message of peace. And then the rest of the video was, but this is the whole film of this incident.

01:10:59

And the same woman goes on to say, you can go to the suburbs and burn their houses down, go to the suburbs, bring it over there.

01:11:07

She was, of course, using profanity to bring it all over there, burn down their grocery stores, burn down their gas stations, not ours.

01:11:14

So it was just really a fictionalized capsulization of what this woman was.

01:11:22

Half the time, it's hard to tell whether or not a news story that we see on CNN, it's hard to tell if it's the

01:11:33

Babylon Bee or the Onion or an actual story. It's so absurd.

01:11:40

Yes, it is. Well, I know we've already done an interview on Chalmers, one of your great heroes of the faith,

01:11:50

Thomas Chalmers. And I know that you wanted to intertwine his legacy into our whole discussion on becoming a serious and productive reader.

01:12:00

One of the things that every week, the folks at Iron Sharpens, Iron Listening audience, what they hear is that wonderful quote from Spurgeon about people who don't read will not have the opportunity to either read or later be read.

01:12:24

That's a great quote. It's actually something that Spurgeon lifted almost directly from Thomas Chalmers.

01:12:34

So Spurgeon was a plagiarist. He wasn't a plagiarist. All of us borrow the best things from our heroes, and Spurgeon loved

01:12:44

Chalmers. In fact, if you read Commentators, which is the third volume of his lectures to my students, he recommends several of Chalmers' works, including his magisterial commentary on the

01:13:02

Book of Romans. But one of the things that Thomas Chalmers constantly taught his students was that it was important to not only read good books, but to create an inheritance for future generations by collecting books into libraries.

01:13:25

It's one of the reasons why you can go to the ends of the earth, and wherever Scottish missionaries went, there are invariably libraries that were established right alongside the schools, the churches, and the hospitals.

01:13:43

The idea really is that we have to have deep, multi -generational discipleship.

01:13:53

And I know every parent desires for their children to be good readers.

01:13:59

The best way for children to learn how to be good readers is if they see moms and dads regularly making a priority of reading in the home.

01:14:11

Not just reading children's stories, but kids need to be able to see that dad comes home and he doesn't just flip on SportsCenter, he sits down and he's wrestling with the

01:14:23

Puritans, and he's thinking about the events of the day, and the application of the biblical worldview to all of that.

01:14:31

Thomas Chalmers had that kind of an effect on people like Spurgeon.

01:14:38

He also was a part of a really remarkable movement. He was close friends with Merle Dubigny, who was a great

01:14:47

Swiss preacher and historian who documented the history of the

01:14:55

Reformation at a time when much Reformation history was being lost in the middle of the 19th century.

01:15:04

And Merle Dubigny was a huge influence on Grosvenor Prinsterer, who in turn discipled and was a huge influence on Abraham Kuyper.

01:15:17

Each of these men wrote voluminously, created libraries of books that are incredibly valuable to this day.

01:15:26

I'm so thrilled that Lexham Press is returning to print virtually all of the of Grosvenor Prinsterer's young disciple,

01:15:38

Abraham Kuyper. Abraham Kuyper, in turn, was a discipler to men as widely diverse as Cornelius Van Till and even

01:15:54

Hermann Bavink. And they wrote voluminously and passed that vision on.

01:16:02

And one of Cornelius Van Till's students was Francis Schaeffer, who wrote voluminously and had a tremendous effect on the shape of modern evangelicalism and was one of my chief disciples.

01:16:17

And I'm sure it had a huge impact on many of Iron Sharpen's Iron listeners.

01:16:25

So this rich, long line and legacy of people who found books and ideas essential and helped shape them and shape the churches around them is at risk of being lost in our day if we don't inculcate good habits of consistent, deep, and effectual reading.

01:16:52

And it's one of my great passions to teach my students how to read well, how to journal, how to process the things that they learn, and then to actually collect their into libraries that they can then pass on to their children and to their grandchildren.

01:17:12

Yes, and just a bit of advice for our listeners, if you want to also help

01:17:18

Iron Sharpen's Iron, go to the Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service website, cvbbs .com,

01:17:24

cvbbs .com, and you can ask them about the

01:17:32

Banner of Truth books that they have published by Jean -Henri Merle d 'Aubigné, the

01:17:39

People's Historian of Philosophy of History and Historical Writing, and others.

01:17:47

And of course, you have the Banner of Truth website itself, banneroftruth .org. You can go to that, get the titles of the books, and then go to cvbbs .com,

01:17:59

cvbbs .com, and order the books from there, because cvbbs, as I keep repeating, is one of our sponsors of Iron Sharpen's Iron.

01:18:09

I go to Merle d 'Aubigné's Histories of the Reformation, and they are multiple, multiple volumes, eight volumes of one set and five volumes in the other.

01:18:24

I go to them and draw from them almost every single week of my life.

01:18:32

These are invaluable works. Well, I appreciate the advice.

01:18:39

And let's see, we have Linda in Hilltop Lakes, Texas.

01:18:47

What do you know about Dr. Martin Lloyd -Jones? This is only, we only have like 40 minutes left,

01:18:56

Linda. That's kind of a broad question. Oh, well, actually, she clarifies it a little bit.

01:19:05

Let's see. I have heard that he was interested in the charismatic movement.

01:19:10

Okay, there's a little bit more of a narrowed focus in regard to Linda from Hilltop Lakes, Texas, and her question on Martin Lloyd -Jones.

01:19:21

Yeah, Martin Lloyd -Jones was a man who was very interested in the reform and the renewal of the

01:19:29

Church of Jesus Christ. And like so many in the world of reforming the life of the

01:19:42

Church, he was not immediately dismissive of any of the new movements that emerged.

01:19:50

And so he was indeed interested in the sort of renewal of interest in the work of the

01:19:59

Holy Spirit. I wouldn't necessarily say that he was particularly interested in a charismatic movement as he was in desiring to see the full power of the

01:20:13

Holy Spirit at work in the whole Church. And while that may sound to our modern ears like exactly the same thing, it is most assuredly not.

01:20:25

He was interested in the Keswick movement. He was interested in people like Edward Irving, one of the pioneers of modern

01:20:34

Pentecostalism. And part of the reason he was interested in Irving, who interestingly at one time served with Thomas Chalmers, was precisely because of his high regard for Thomas Chalmers.

01:20:48

So, you know, I think a good, substantive, reforming mind is going to always look at the places where the

01:21:02

Holy Spirit is emphasized. Well, thank you very much, Linda, from Hilltop Lake, Texas.

01:21:10

And I have heard from those brothers in Christ who are not charismatic, although they have a great affection towards our charismatic and Pentecostal brethren, and who believe that Dr.

01:21:29

Jones was far less harsh against them than many of us can be prone to be.

01:21:35

I think that's absolutely true. I think the same could be said of John R. W.

01:21:41

Stott, who was contemporary of, was a young, young pastor when

01:21:47

Lloyd -Jones was in the, you know, halcyon days of his ministry.

01:21:54

They served together in the City of London. You know, I think that there, you know,

01:22:03

J. I. Packer, I think, in his work in which he surveys various views of the

01:22:09

Holy Spirit, keeping in step with the Spirit, I think he is quite generous in that work.

01:22:17

And it's oftentimes a difficult thing when we want to express concern about excesses, we tend to make blanket statements.

01:22:31

And that's usually not a very good way of dealing with an excess, is to throw the baby out with the bath.

01:22:40

And so I think what Lloyd -Jones did was he was very generous to other brothers and sisters in Christ, and I think that's something beautiful to be emulated in his character and his work.

01:22:57

And we have Seth from Randleman, North Carolina, who says, What books would you recommend for a lay preacher, someone who preaches two to three times a month, not a pastor?

01:23:10

Well, the first thing that I would recommend is that you have a handful of really good commentaries that will enable you to really wrestle with text that you will be preaching from.

01:23:30

I might actually start with a couple of good study

01:23:37

Bibles, like the Reformation Study Bible and the Reformation Heritage Study Bible.

01:23:43

Those are great places to start. But then, you know, I really, truly love and appreciate the series that was produced by InterVarsity Press, the

01:24:02

Bible Speaks Today series that was just completed a couple of years ago.

01:24:12

J .A. Motier was one of the editors of that series, and it's a really, really helpful, solid, biblical, evangelical series.

01:24:26

John R. W. Stott has several volumes in it. I also really like the WellWin series of Bible commentaries.

01:24:35

Those are quite excellent, and all in paperback and fairly inexpensive.

01:24:41

It's not necessary to go and spend just a ton of money in order to start to build a library.

01:24:50

But I would do that. I would also make sure that I have, you know, something like the

01:24:57

Reformation Heritage Study Bible has in the back a number of the great creeds, confessions, and catechisms, including everything from the

01:25:08

Westminster to the Tenants of George, the London Baptist Confession.

01:25:15

Those things are incredibly helpful in shaping the way we think about the

01:25:20

Scripture. So that's one start. J .A. Was that Bible the one that Dr.

01:25:26

Joel Beakey was involved with or with R .C. Sproul? J .A. There are two different ones.

01:25:31

There's a Reformation Study Bible, which is Sproul's, and then Joel Beakey's is the,

01:25:37

I believe it's called the Reformation Heritage Study Bible. J .A. And that's the one that you were just mentioning?

01:25:43

J .A. Yes, yes. J .A. Okay. Yeah, I knew that they had the two different ministries, which cooperate together on many things, had two different Bibles that were very closely titled, study

01:25:55

Bibles that is. And this is going to be our final break. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

01:26:07

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. We still have a couple of you waiting for your questions to be asked and answered, and I appreciate your patience.

01:26:17

We'll get to you as soon as we can. That's chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:26:25

Don't go away. We are coming right back after these messages with more of Dr.

01:26:31

George Grant. Transcription by CastingWords Solid Ground Christian Books is honored to be a weekly sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

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01:31:35

Chris Arnzen, and I apologize to our sponsors Lindbrook Baptist Church for accidentally cutting their ad short before.

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Their website is lindbrookbaptist .org, l -y -n -b -r -o -o -k, baptist .org.

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And we hope that you visit them if you're ever in Nassau County, Long Island, or if you live there and do not have a

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Bible -believing church, to pay a visit to Lindbrook Baptist Church. And I have a listener, a

01:32:06

Christian in Cumberland County, who says, give me a break, Chris. You actually asked us to look up Merle de

01:32:14

Abagnani on the Banner of Truth website. How on earth are we supposed to spell that?

01:32:23

Well, it's m -e -r -l -e -d -apostrophe -a -u -b as in boy -i -g -n -e.

01:32:31

And also you could just look up the book The Reformation in England, which is written by Jean -Henri de

01:32:38

Bonnier. So thank you very much for that good bit of advice to me, not to take for granted that people know how to spell certain very complicated last names.

01:32:53

Did I pronounce his name, by the way, correctly, Dr. Grant? You know, we're

01:32:59

Americans, and so we pronounce Paris, Paris instead of Paris. So if we get close to a

01:33:08

French pronunciation, I think that that's quite commendable. But this area of reading, it's funny how those who are enemies of Calvinism, Reformed theology, the doctrines of grace, however you want to describe them or nickname them, they will often say things like, no one would ever believe in that stuff unless they read it from a

01:33:42

Calvinist book. If you stuck with the Bible, you'd never come to that conclusion. Well, first of all, people really should be looking at books and authors as teachers.

01:33:56

They're either very good or they're very bad. They're either biblically faithful or they're biblically way off base or heretical or somewhere in between.

01:34:08

And the same thing goes true with pastors. The same thing holds true with Sunday school teachers.

01:34:14

The same thing holds true with disciples. So it's not just books. It's all of life.

01:34:21

You've got to be very careful and selective. The scriptures are the ultimate and final authority.

01:34:29

What teachers do, what books do, is help us understand the profound truths of scripture and make applications of them in accordance with the wisdom of the ages.

01:34:44

Yeah, at the risk of boring people who heard this story, I'll be brief with it, though. I came to the understanding, of course, by the

01:34:52

Holy Spirit, but I came to the understanding of Calvinism when

01:34:57

I read a booklet published by Chapel Library, George Whitefield's letter to John Wesley on election.

01:35:06

And I was such a new believer at the time, I didn't know who George Whitefield was, so his name had zero weight to me.

01:35:15

It was not some kind of influencing power where he was somebody that I viewed as a hero or anything like that.

01:35:22

I didn't know who he was. I could care less who he was. Didn't even know who John Calvin was. Didn't know who

01:35:27

John Wesley was. But it was the biblical arguments that Whitefield set forth in this booklet.

01:35:36

It was the scriptures that opened my eyes to the truths. It had nothing to do with the eloquence of George Whitefield.

01:35:45

He was demonstrating from the Bible that these things were true. And in fact, another story, which is actually quite,

01:35:54

I think, hilarious, is years ago, back in the 1990s, an anti -Calvinist fundamentalist

01:36:03

Baptist pastor purchased, well actually he participated in a two -hour radio debate, and the airtime was purchased by a retired

01:36:16

Orthodox Jewish journalist who considered himself an expert on the

01:36:22

New Testament, or a student at least of the New Testament. And when he was debating this anti -Calvinist fundamentalist

01:36:28

Baptist, and he began saying, so let me get this straight, according to the

01:36:34

New Testament, you believe that God chose a certain group of people before time began to go to heaven, that these would become

01:36:45

Christians, this certain group that he chose. And the pastor interrupted this Jewish man and said, oh, you got me wrong there, pal,

01:36:53

I'm not a Calvinist. And this Jewish man said, I'm not a what? You're not a what?

01:36:59

He goes, I'm not Calvinist. He goes, well, what's that? He goes, well, that's what you're talking about. He goes, no, I'm just talking about your

01:37:05

Bible. This elderly Jewish man, having read the

01:37:10

New Testament, was convinced that all Christians believed in unconditional election. Because he probably read

01:37:17

Ephesians chapter one. Yes, and Romans 9, and, you know, other parts of the scriptures.

01:37:29

But we really want to get, of course, before the time escapes us, what you believe are good safeguards when picking books to read.

01:37:42

Of course, time is a very valuable commodity in this day and age, perhaps more than any other.

01:37:49

The busyness that many individuals are enslaved by, and we're carrying cell phones around with us, which have computers on them, and we're looking at them constantly, and we're always distracted.

01:38:05

And we've got all these things that we're rushing around to do. You know, there should be a way to get straight to the good meat of the scriptures and avoid wasting time.

01:38:17

I don't know if you agree with this, but I have found it to be helpful. It's not foolproof, but I've found it to be helpful to turn the back of the book up and look who is endorsing this book.

01:38:34

And if you see some very strange names there, or names you've never heard, or perhaps a lot of Reverend Marys and things like that on the back of the book, that's a good idea that this is probably not a biblically sound book.

01:38:52

But like I said, it's not a foolproof method, but it's one way of weeding out some books. Yeah, I think one of the things we have to acknowledge is everybody judges every book by its cover.

01:39:05

And so what you've got to do is you've got to be discerning.

01:39:11

One of the things that I learned early on in my

01:39:16

Christian walk was I discovered that there were a few very reliable publishers.

01:39:22

Now, that can change from time to time. In fact, it has. When I was a brand new Christian, I used to make a beeline in the

01:39:30

Christian bookstore to what was called the InterVarsity Rack. And there I found the works of J .I.

01:39:37

Packer and Francis Schaeffer and a host of others. And that's where I got a lot of really good meaty material early on in my

01:39:47

Christian life. InterVarsity Press, alas, has drifted far from that rich legacy.

01:39:54

They still publish a few good books, but they're not reliable. But then later,

01:40:00

I discovered Banner of Truth. And I discovered Christian Focus.

01:40:07

And I discovered that there were reprint publishers like Solid Ground Christian Books.

01:40:16

They were wonderful, wonderful books that fed my soul, that shaped my heart.

01:40:26

And then I would become familiar with those who recommended those books and do just what you said, that there might be something that comes from Erdmann's or Thomas Nelson or Zondervan that are of value.

01:40:43

PNR Books is another publisher. I trust almost everything that they do.

01:40:50

Reformation Trust is another publisher. Ah, the Ligonier Ministries, yeah. Everything that they do, it's

01:40:56

Ligonier's. So you can not only go by who recommends a book, but who is it that is publishing these books?

01:41:06

Yeah, Reformation Heritage Books is another. Yes, yes. And... So...

01:41:14

Go ahead, I'm sorry. Yeah, you've just got to be very, very discerning and very careful.

01:41:20

The other thing is that there are a few websites out there that are really helpful in identifying good books and have great reviews.

01:41:29

For instance, Westminster Theological Seminary has a bookstore, and they recommend books.

01:41:38

There's a wonderful website called Monergism, and monergism .com

01:41:45

is a great place to get good, good recommendations.

01:41:51

So all of these are fine places. You just have to start somewhere.

01:41:58

One of the things I tell my students is that they should follow the footnote trail.

01:42:04

So in other words, you're reading along in, say, a Spurgeon book, and he starts quoting

01:42:12

Thomas Watson or Thomas Brooks, and you realize, oh, that's an old Puritan.

01:42:17

Boy, this is a really pungent quote. Excellent. And, you know, you then go from Spurgeon to one of the

01:42:29

Puritans, and you're reading through the quoting, so and so. You follow those footnote trails, and it's one of the ways that you make marvelous discoveries.

01:42:43

Amen. And unfortunately, you cannot always rely, even though I think that, judging from some things that my guest,

01:42:52

Dr. George Grant, has said, that he, like myself, would view

01:42:58

J .I. Packer as a sort of modern -day Christian hero, a great man of God who has contributed so much immense value to Christian literature, but at the same time,

01:43:11

I don't understand how he can endorse some of the books that he endorses.

01:43:17

My mind is spinning about that. Yeah, you know,

01:43:22

J .I. Packer of late has endorsed a lot of books.

01:43:31

Some of that is because he's just really generous. Some of that is because he has a lot of students who are now out there writing, and he tends to be very kind to his students.

01:43:46

You know, you have to be careful. If the endorsement from Packer is sort of a generic endorsement, this is a fine book of excellent writing and profound truth.

01:44:01

And that's all it says. Then you can say, okay, he probably just dashed this off.

01:44:10

And you have to consider, you know, these are busy men. They're teaching classes and writing their own books, and, you know, they get this pile of 250 pages of manuscript plopped on their desk, and, you know, they may not be paying really close attention to that.

01:44:30

And so, yeah, you have to exercise discernment even there. But I would say this.

01:44:37

J .I. Packer is not going to endorse a bad book. He may just endorse a few fluffy books here and there.

01:44:46

Well, actually, I thought that he did endorse a bad book. Ecumenical Jihad by Peter Kreeft was pretty bad, in my opinion.

01:44:54

But I was surprised that he endorsed that because, basically, Peter Kreeft was taking the position that even an atheist can go to heaven if he...

01:45:03

Yeah, I think every once in a while we have to say, all of us make big mistakes, even

01:45:11

J .I. Packer. And, obviously, one of the things that involves reading and becoming more effective at making use of that is your way that you schedule your life and time and so on.

01:45:36

Tell us something about that. Well, one of the things that you have to do in all of life is you have to make room for what matters by getting rid of the things that don't matter.

01:45:52

Unfortunately, we live in a time where time wasters proliferate.

01:45:59

And the chief time waster, quite frankly, is social media. It's just...

01:46:11

I went on Facebook real quick to check a few things, and an hour and a half later, I realized, oh my goodness,

01:46:18

I've been transmixed. I'm paralyzed. I'm still here. So what we have to do is we have to actually set boundaries.

01:46:25

I'm a very strong believer in setting goals and in planning. I don't always adhere to my plan, and I don't always achieve all of my goals.

01:46:35

But Dawson Trotman, the founder of The Navigators, always used to say, thoughts tend to disentangle themselves when they flow over the tip of a pencil.

01:46:46

Write it down. Write down what you intend to do. Block out time.

01:46:52

One of the things that I do is I actually schedule time for my family in my calendar so that I'm not ever tempted to allow stuff to intrude, to erode that really precious time that I have with my family.

01:47:12

I think we all have to be very intentional these days about the careful stewardship of our time.

01:47:20

And if we're not very intentional, our time will be gobbled up by wasteful, foolish things.

01:47:30

The other thing is I don't think most people approach their reading with a real clear sense of a plan or a program.

01:47:41

I think that we have to be very intentional in saying, okay, I'm not sure that I'm going to really enjoy plowing through a long book by one of the

01:47:55

Puritans, but I probably need it. Well, if it is just on the wish list, it's probably never going to actually happen.

01:48:04

So we have to schedule it. We have to put it in the queue. And so we ought to have a plan. We ought to have sort of a direction that we intend to go with our intellectual lives in the same way that we ought to have a

01:48:18

Bible reading plan. We ought to have a spiritual growth plan. We ought to know where we're going in our walk.

01:48:26

The Holy Spirit can interrupt us anywhere along the way, but we ought to at least have this intentionality about the hot pursuit of the things of God in every area of our life.

01:48:40

Amen. We have John in Augusta, Maine, who wants to know, you have had a guest on your program a few times,

01:48:51

Mack Tomlinson, who strongly believes that Reformed people need to break out of our

01:48:59

Calvinist niche on occasion and learn from men outside of our theological camp that happen to be

01:49:07

Arminian or not thoroughly Reformed. What is your current guest's understanding or view on that?

01:49:15

Well, I'm not familiar what he teaches on that subject. Well, for instance, my friend

01:49:22

Mack Tomlinson, who I've interviewed, he wrote a biography of Leonard Ravenhill, who was not Reformed.

01:49:27

And Mack, by the way, is a thoroughgoing Calvinist, but he values, obviously, things of men of God that were not in lockstep with the

01:49:37

Reformed faith. Sure, sure. Well, I do, too. You know, I've already mentioned

01:49:42

John R. W. Stott. I would not consider him Reformed at all.

01:49:48

I highly value his insights. I have collected and I've read widely all of the works of G.

01:49:57

K. Chesterton, who certainly was not Reformed. Roman Catholic. He, for most of his life, he was

01:50:05

Anglican. At the end of his life, he converted to Roman Catholicism, and so he most assuredly is not

01:50:14

Reformed. I read fiction, I read nonfiction, I read poetry,

01:50:20

I read as widely as I possibly can Christians and non -Christians.

01:50:26

One of the best books I've read recently, I had a long international plane flight last week, and I read

01:50:33

Tom Wolfe's new book, The Kingdom of Speech, which is a skewering of Darwinism and of current language theory as espoused by people like Noam Chomsky.

01:50:50

It's brilliant. I think anybody who's interested in the questions of evolution and creation, intelligent design, etc.

01:51:00

need to read this book, but he's not even a Christian. And so I read widely, and so of course

01:51:08

I'm going to have a deep affection for a lot of our

01:51:14

Arminian, Charismatic, and, you know, various other branches of the

01:51:22

Christian family. I'm going to read those brothers and sisters with great appreciation.

01:51:28

Yeah, another book that pops into my mind that was widely used and quoted from and strongly promoted was

01:51:39

Amusing Yourself to Death by Neil Postman, a Jewish writer. Who was -

01:51:45

Neil Postman was more of a transcendentalist than he was anything at all, but Amusing Ourselves to Death, as well as all of his books about the enlightenment and media theories, they're brilliant, and Amusing Ourselves to Death is just an out -and -out classic.

01:52:05

Yeah, yeah, that was also my friend, I don't know if you know, Pastor Bill Shishko of the

01:52:11

Orthodox Presbyterian Church, but he, oh yeah, yeah, he loves that book and uses it as well in different conference settings and so on.

01:52:20

Well, thank you very much, John, from Augusta, Maine. Keep spreading the word about Iron Sharpens Iron in New England.

01:52:28

And yeah, something that you said also with John Stott that dovetails into another thing is that, like, for instance, his classic

01:52:37

The Cross of Christ and other things we as the

01:52:42

Church of God should embrace, but that doesn't mean that when he may say other things that we have serious problems with, like,

01:52:52

I understand he at least became, if not an advocate of annihilationism, he believed it was a valid theory.

01:53:02

And, you know, so some people might just throw the baby out with the bathwater and have want nothing to do with John Stott because of that, but that would be an extreme reaction, wouldn't it?

01:53:11

Yeah, I think it would, and I think actually his views on, he never went as far as, say,

01:53:19

Edward Fudge did on annihilationism. What he did was he stated some ambivalence about eternal hell.

01:53:29

I don't have that ambivalence, but I understand why he wrestled with it.

01:53:35

Yeah, it's the only thing that I can think of that I do not agree with that I wish I did agree with, because it's obviously something that I can't even dwell on long if, when you consider lost loved ones that have left this earth, it's not something that you want to sit there and contemplate for long periods of time.

01:53:56

So the hell, eternal hell, is a very horrifying truth, and so it's no shock that people would try to find some way to be more comfortable with eternity when it comes to people they love.

01:54:13

But I really want you now to spend the last five minutes or so to really unburden your heart and leave our listeners with what you most want etched in their hearts and minds before we leave this program today.

01:54:26

Well, thank you, Chris. I tell you, I believe that we live at a strategic moment in history.

01:54:33

The Church of Jesus Christ is in disarray. The worship of God has been horrifically trivialized.

01:54:42

We have a changing of the guard where a whole generation of great

01:54:47

Christian leaders have now departed from the scene, or are rapidly departing from the scene.

01:54:54

When spokesmen for evangelicals can be someone like Pat Robertson, who believes that the sniffles of Donald Trump was actually the

01:55:06

Holy Spirit coming out. I never heard that one.

01:55:15

And this is not the Babylon Bee, and this is not the onion. That's for real. So we live at this very strategic moment when the

01:55:24

Church is in disarray. It is time for us to get busy about the work of Semper Reformanda, the ongoing work of Reformation.

01:55:35

Now, like never before, do we need the reforming work of the next generation of Calvins and Bootsers and Bases and Knoxes.

01:55:46

We need the kind of passion that John Knox had when he cried, God, give me

01:55:52

Scotland or I die. It is time for the Church of Jesus Christ to stop playing games and get busy in the great work of the

01:56:02

Kingdom. And that means discipleship. That means training up the next generation of our children in the ways of the

01:56:12

Lord. It means courage in the face of those who will call us every name in the book.

01:56:18

It means the time to risk persecution. It means boldness in missions. It means sacrifice and stewardship.

01:56:26

It means that the Church must be the Church. The Church is

01:56:32

Plan A. There is no Plan B. So let's get busy.

01:56:38

Amen. Amen. And one more note about Semper Reformanda.

01:56:46

There are people that distort that, that twist that, and come up with novel teachings trying to say that this is completely in harmony with flying under that banner.

01:57:00

The fact that you have all these new things even coming up, rising up from within theologically reformed circles that are frightening and so on.

01:57:12

How do you put the brakes on Semper Reformanda without bringing it to a complete screeching halt?

01:57:21

Well, it's like anything else. You can take something that is glorious and good and true, and strip it of its actual meaning, say that it means something else, and then propound that.

01:57:31

That will be, of course, dangerous. That's not what Semper Reformanda means.

01:57:37

Semper Reformanda does not mean, okay, now we can change our definition of marriage, or we can change our definition of who can or cannot be ordained.

01:57:46

It simply means going back to the Scriptures as our signpost to guide the shaping, the reforming, the clarifying, the raising up of a new generation of faithfulness in the

01:58:03

Church. There's a great book by a Scottish pastor from the

01:58:10

Cambridge Presbyterian Church in the UK, Ian Hamilton. He wrote this wonderful book.

01:58:17

It's published by Christian Focus. It's entitled The Erosion of Calvinist Orthodoxy, Drifting from the

01:58:25

Truth in Confessional Scottish Churches. And he addresses this whole question of what really is

01:58:33

Semper Reformanda, and calls out those who simply, in the guise of Semper Reformanda, are really propounding simple liberalism and the abandonment of the truth.

01:58:50

And so that's not Semper Reformanda. What Semper Reformanda really is, is building on the foundations of the

01:58:58

Apostles and Prophets for a whole new generation, a vision of the Gospel that changes everything.

01:59:07

Praise God. Well, the two websites I want you to remember now before you leave this broadcast is parishprez .org.

01:59:14

That's the website of the Church where Dr. George Grant is the minister. And also kingsmeadow .com,

01:59:23

K -I -N -G -S, meadow .com. No apostrophe in that Kings. Kingsmeadow .com.

01:59:31

And you can find out more about Dr. Grant, his ministry, and his writing. I want to thank you so much again for being my guest on the program.

01:59:39

You are certainly becoming one of my favorite guests, brother. Well, thank you, Chris. This has been a great delight.

01:59:45

Have a great, great evening. You too. And I want everybody to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater