- 00:01
- Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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- No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the
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- Apostle Paul said, �But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.�
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- In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you.
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- By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her
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- King. Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry.
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- My name is Mike Abendroth, and as you know, we�re called No Compromise Radio for several reasons.
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- One, the Lord Jesus Christ never compromised, so we�d like to talk about Him a lot.
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- Secondly, at the cross, justice and grace not compromised. You think of all of God�s attributes simultaneously on display all the time, and especially at the cross.
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- And then lastly, in light of that, we don�t want to compromise. So because of this stance we have,
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- I like to have people on who I don�t think compromise either, or at least don�t want to. So today, I have
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- Chortle�s Weekly�s, Chortle�s Weekly�s! I can compromise on a name if I want.
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- I�ll call him Brad. Chortle�s Weekly is on. Chortle�s, welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.
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- Well, Bishop Abendroth, it�s good to get your brokenness right out on display from the get -go.
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- Now, years ago when I first started looking at you on Twitter, and I saw the little profile of Calvin and his beard and all that stuff, and you say you live in Geneva or wherever you say.
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- I thought, �Who is this guy ?� Tell me how you became, you know, such a phenomenon on Twitter.
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- Well, I think that�s overstating the case, but, well, I�m a
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- Presbyterian, I�m a PCA guy, and I guess I probably got on Twitter at a time when
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- I was not actively serving in my church as a ruling elder, so it was sort of an outlet for me,
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- I guess. And that probably meant that I spent too much time there, but I�ve been, since I became a
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- Presbyterian in 2004, I pretty quickly got plugged in to what was going on, what the trends were, what the issues were.
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- You know, I�m in a real good church, and the two pastors I�ve been under are just quintessential
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- Presbyterians, good to learn under. And I went to the General Assembly in 2010. A lot of important and momentous things happened there, and I sometimes say that radicalized me, but there are many good things about the
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- PCA, and, in fact, my partner and I, Resby, are about to do a show about all the things we love about our churches.
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- But it�s just, you know, just a fatal case of Presbyterianism, I think.
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- Now, the Twitter handle you have is at Chortles Weekly, C -H -O -R -T -L -E -S -W -E -A -K -L -Y.
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- Why did you pick that name? Well, you know, I don�t do Facebook at all, but years ago,
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- I was on Facebook, and a lady who I thought was very intelligent and I respected, she responded to something that I posted with LOL.
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- And I always thought that was ridiculous, so I thought, �What�s the opposite of LOL ?�
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- And I came to Barely Audible Chortle. So, I replied
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- BAC, lowercase, you know, instead of capital LOL. And I love
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- British television, I love Northern England, and somehow, I just thought, �Okay,
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- Barely Audible Chortle, Chortles Weekly.� And I thought Chortles Weekly sounded like a little guy in Yorkshire walking around with a flat cap on.
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- So that�s one of the reasons Chortles Weekly has a flat cap. There�s another reason. My Calvin avatar, if you look carefully, it has a flat cap in place of his normal hat.
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- So yeah, it was sort of a protest against social media sereneness like LOL.
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- Well, I�m glad you�re on the radio and have a podcast. It�s PresbyCast, and I was privileged to be a guest not that long ago.
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- Tell our listeners a little bit about the podcast, how they can access it, and what your strategy is in terms of philosophy of who do you interview and what do you talk about.
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- Well, it was the idea of my partner, who goes by Bresbyterian, which is
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- Bresbyterian with a W in place of a P because he�s a wrestling fan, for reasons I can�t understand.
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- But the podcast was his idea. We connected on Twitter, and it was his idea that we do the podcast.
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- And we sort of dug our feet on it, and I told my wife about it. And she encouraged us to proceed.
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- And of course, again, I have to always give credit, it was his idea from the get -go. So the credit is to him.
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- And really, the podcast is inexorably tied to Twitter, because I understand the limitations of social media, that it�s kind of unreal and, you know, disconnected.
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- So from the get -go, we said, �If we do this podcast, we�re going to bring regular people who we know on Twitter, and, you know, small church pastors, and people you�ve never heard of on, and we�re going to have call -in shows, and we�re going to interview people that are not famous in any way.�
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- So that�s a lot of it. Hey, by the way, let me just interrupt you for a second. Now you�ve made me feel bad.
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- I thought I was famous until you invited me on your show. Well, that gets back to a phrase that I�ve coined, �humilaxing.�
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- You know, there�s a famous Tim Keller quote, �There�s nothing more relaxing than humility.�
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- So if you�re properly, you know, humble, maybe you�ll even be relaxed.
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- So that�s humilaxing. And who are some of the folks you�ve had on PrisbyCast?
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- Well, I think I don�t know if it�s been put out, but you had Dan Blorvin on. He�s a friend of ours.
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- And we�ve had R. Scott Clark on several times, as you have, I�m sure. We�ve had
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- Daryl Hart, the church historian and a Machen scholar on.
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- I don�t have a bell. I�m about ready to ring a bell or something, you know. Well, we�re using an air horn now for Machen references.
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- And then I went down to a really good conference in Georgia and was able to interview some really well -known guys like Bob Godfrey and Terry Johnson and P.
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- David Gordon, guys like that. So that was probably the most legitimate establishment thing we�ve ever done.
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- But then, you know, just some small church pastors. Like there�s a small church pastor in Minnesota who�s actually moved from the
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- PCUSA to the OPC, which maybe it�s the first time it�s, you know, happened in the last 40 years.
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- But he�s just a very interesting guy. We�ve had him on. People like that. And then some people are just clowns, you know.
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- Well, I�m glad you have some of those. I didn�t say you fell into that category. Well, I quickly jumped in to try to distract our listeners.
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- Well, I like it that you have smaller church pastors on. Years ago, I wrote a book on preaching, and it was about following some of Christ�s examples for his preaching and what he did and how he preached.
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- And so I always had this little shtick, and I would ask men, �Who�s your favorite preacher ?� And not many of them said
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- Jesus. And it was kind of like, �Oh, yeah, he should be our favorite preacher.� But I was especially thankful when some of these men would say, you know, you�ve probably never heard of him.
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- It�s a church I attend. He�s my pastor. We�re out in the middle of nowhere, and he�s my favorite pastor.
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- He�s faithful to the Word. He ministers to our needs. And I think that�s an excellent illustration of how
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- God knits the heart of the pastor to the people there. And so I was always encouraged by that.
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- Let�s talk a little bit, Chortles, about�do you have a nickname besides Chortles? Is it Chort? Anything you like.
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- Tell us a little bit about�my guess is you were Southern Baptist, and now you�re PCA Presbyterian.
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- What was the�I can�t say the word �journey ,� because that�s verboten here at No Compromise Radio, but what�s the process?
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- How did you get from there to here? Well, I guess in the mid -90s,
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- I started to�I mean, I�ve been raised Southern Baptist and probably made a profession of faith at the age of 9, 7, 8, 9, something like that.
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- Fairly typical middle -of -the -road Southern Baptist churches. And I guess
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- I started to take that a little more seriously in the mid -90s, which I guess that would have been early, mid -20s, pushing 30 there.
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- And as with so many, I was reading a
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- John MacArthur book, and it�s probably not a book I would be a huge fan of today, but I have a bad habit of reading footnotes, and the footnotes mentioned
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- Martin Lloyd Jones. So I started searching the Internet, the early days of the
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- Internet, and ended up at some British website, a little bookshop.
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- And from there, I was reading wildly. About the same time,
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- I stumbled across a little book that was distributed, I think, you know, free of charge to almost every church and Southern Baptist convention called
- 10:16
- Southern Baptist and the Doctrine of Election by Bill Self, who is a reformed�I think now he�s in the
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- ARBCA. But so I don�t know which one of those came first, but I sort of became a
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- Calvinist. And the reason that was attractive to me, it explained a lot of things
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- I didn�t have a vocabulary for. You know, having grown up with what Ian Murray would call the invitation system, you know, you would see people do the things they were asked to do, pray the prayer and cry and all those things, and they were received joyfully into the church, and then you never saw them or heard them again.
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- Or you saw that sort of thing over and over. And, you know, the idea of election and predestination and sovereign grace began to explain why some of those things hit me wrong, but I didn�t know why.
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- I just knew what I�d been taught. But that opened up a whole new thing, and having a vocabulary for something is very important.
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- So that�s where it started. I guess I grew in my understanding somewhat, and around the time of 2003,
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- I guess I was frustrated with the Southern Baptist Church I was in over some things that were happening in worship.
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- And we had a guy for a while I called the disaster pastor, and also, you know, some excesses and things in youth ministry made me think that maybe
- 11:50
- I should just look elsewhere and ended up in a PCA church. Chortles, what do you recommend to Baptists?
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- You know a Southern Baptist friend, and you say, �Here�s the one book I want you to read.�
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- It doesn�t necessarily have to be on infant baptism, but you want a Southern Baptist to read one book outside of, you know,
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- Galatians or something, but a non -Bible book. What book do you say, �Oh, you should read such and such.�
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- Well, that is a really good question, and I think the thing that comes last, and it came last to me as a
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- Baptist, was the idea of covenant theology and the covenants.
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- And to be honest, I don�t know one great book to recommend on that, but to wrestle with the idea of covenant, to study, you know, the life of Abraham, and just read something good about covenant theology, but I don�t have one book that comes to mind.
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- But I guess, you know, I looked at Confessions, I looked at Berkhoff, probably
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- Hodge, different standards. I mean, I remember once talking � this was while I was still a
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- Baptist � I was talking to my Southern Baptist pastor, and I accidentally referred to the, you know, baptism and the
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- Lord�s Supper as sacraments, and he knew enough to quickly correct me and call them ordinances.
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- But, yeah, I don�t have one book. I don�t guess, because, I mean, some people, it�ll be the subjects of baptism.
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- Some people, it will be the idea of covenant theology and how that, you know, kind of intersects with life.
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- For me, a big issue was worship. And I often say that a book I read by Terry Johnson called �
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- I think it�s just called �Reformed Worship.� That�s what really made me a Presbyterian, when I began to understand how important worship was and, you know, how important it is that we worship properly, reverently, with awe, that sort of thing.
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- So, I guess worship is my number one thing, and covenant theology, you know, it�s tied to worship as well.
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- Right. Some of our listeners, if you would like to listen to Brad�s worship,
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- Sunday school classes that he taught at his church, I think the old, old PresbyCasts have some of those classes � have a few of those classes, if you�d like to listen.
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- For me, Brad, it was � Yeah, there�s two installments, and they�re back several months ago, but you can find them. And you asked earlier how to find us.
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- We�re on, you know, you can find us through iTunes. Right now, our web host is SoundCloud, and if you don�t really go through, you know, a podcast app or something, you can listen right off of SoundCloud.
- 14:40
- So, we�re easy to find. When I was thinking about theology and this idea of the
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- Reformation and everything else, once I figured out, Chortles, that it was two Adams, federal headship, first Adam, last
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- Adam, you know, probation in the garden, do this and live, you know, covenant of works,
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- Hosea 6, 7, and those, that kind of propelled me into everything else, right, to see the world covenantally, covenant of redemption, covenant of works, covenant of grace.
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- And so, maybe that�s why you actually had me on PresbyCasts, since I�m not technically a Presbyterian, but I just live and breathe in those circles.
- 15:22
- Oh, yeah, I�d say so. And, you know, the good thing about most Southern Baptists, Southern Baptists still have an idea of the substitutionary atonement.
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- And if you appreciate that idea and can grasp it, then the two
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- Adams makes a lot more sense. But most Southern Baptists were, and many still are, dispensationalists, and that, you know, that kind of chops covenants and revelation up and the subjects of this and that up,
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- I think, in unhelpful ways. So, but thank goodness that the doctrine of the atonement is often pretty good there.
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- We�re talking to Chortles Weekly today on No Compromise Radio. Chortles, here�s what we�ll do. Let me just throw out a phrase or a name, and then you can just push back on it.
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- You can just tell me whatever comes to your mind, right? So I�m hoping you have had some frijoles today, or what�s your favorite food you�re always talking about?
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- Is it Chick -fil -A or no? No, well, no. I�m sort of a�I�m sort of a�I prefer�I�m an
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- Appalachian American, so I prefer Bojangles to Chick -fil -A. Okay. All right.
- 16:36
- Tim Keller. Let�s start off with some fun. Tim Keller. Well, you think city when you think of Tim Keller, because he has a very high view of the city and thinks that cities, because of the growth in them and their international flavors, should be a prime focus of the church.
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- I mean, so far as to make a biblical case for that. But I�m not sure you can�you can look at Paul�s strategy in the
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- New Testament and compare those cities, you know, directly to the�well, what did the client call them, the megapolis, the huge places like New York City.
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- But so he�s all about the city. I would have a number of disagreements with him, but I don�t say that he�s a bad guy.
- 17:34
- But he is a huge celebrity, and he�s become so involved with the gospel coalition.
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- And, of course, we haven�t talked about this yet, but one of the things we often do is kind of skewer what we call the gospel industrial complex, which is sort of this new
- 17:49
- Calvinistic, coalitional, supra -denominational thing.
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- And because we are such fans of Presbyterian government and the connected church, we have some problems with the coalition.
- 18:04
- So I�ll throw that in there. All right. Well, let�s talk about that in a second. Let me interrupt you just for a moment, because I�m going to forget,
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- Chortles. You talked about Kline. You know, Kline had that comment, �Heaven is merited or heaven is earned.�
- 18:17
- Something like that. Which one was it? Heaven is merited? You know, heaven has to be...
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- I�m not sure exactly which work that comes from. So I think we have to change it to, �Heaven is merited.�
- 18:32
- I�ll let you go out on that one. Okay. All right. Now, back to Keller. You know, we�re not trying to say he�s apostate or anything like that, but he�s and hell and some things that were chronicled in a book written by a bunch of Presbyterians.
- 18:55
- Is it the city issue that you�re most concerned about when it comes to Keller�s influence, or what would your biggest issue be?
- 19:03
- No, I don�t think that the city issue per se is such a big deal, but it�s sort of a
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- Kuyperian, every -square -inch thing, which can blur the distinction between the church and the world in some cases,
- 19:19
- I think, and certainly can smooth out denominational distinctions, which
- 19:27
- I think are usually doctrinal distinctives and distinctions which are important. And, you know, we�ve been critical.
- 19:34
- I think we did a show where we criticized the fact that kind of a side organization of his church,
- 19:40
- Redeemer, which is now three churches. He�s retired, and there�s three particular churches, and that�s a great move in my estimation.
- 19:47
- But they have an organization called Redeemer City to City, and they planted many churches, which is, you know, good, but they plant � again, this is started with and corresponded by Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.
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- They planted Anglican churches, Lutheran churches, Charismatic churches, non -denominational churches,
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- Baptist churches, and that goes counter to my convictions as a
- 20:18
- Presbyterian, although I don�t say that it�s a bad thing that these churches have been planted, but it tends to �
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- I think it sort of � I don�t know. It�s a weakening tendency, in my opinion.
- 20:33
- It is interesting, Chortles, that you have, you know, a Presbyterian church planting other churches that could be having
- 20:41
- Charismatics, you know, leanings or Anglican or Baptist, for that matter, or Sovereign Grace, and so that�s where I think the concern lies.
- 20:52
- If I was a Presbyterian, I would be concerned that they were planting Baptist churches. Yeah, and you mentioned
- 21:00
- BioLogos, which is an organization that had, you know, some things to say about theistic evolution.
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- I don�t know that Keller�s ever just said flat out that he agrees with theistic evolution.
- 21:14
- There are three acceptable creation views in the PCA as a result of a study committee that was,
- 21:21
- I think, was adopted several years ago. You know, the 624 view, the day age view, which would have been maybe, what,
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- Orfield and some others would have held, and then there�s the framework hypothesis, and that�s associated with Meredith Klein.
- 21:39
- Now, when we did show Klein, we didn�t even talk about creation, so I don�t know that Keller might say he was a framework guy, but,
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- I mean, Keller has � because he�s in a city and tries to push the envelope, he has some associations and sometimes uses vocabulary that makes, you know, us old -school, curmudgeonly
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- Presbyterians uncomfortable. So, again, I don�t think he�s a bad guy.
- 22:10
- He�s just � he�s not my type of Presbyterian, but I am connected to him denominationally, and, you know, that�s just the way it is.
- 22:21
- I was reading 2 Corinthians the other day, chapter 4, verse 6, �For God who said, �Let light shine out of darkness� has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.�
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- And I was thinking, you know, here God ties salvation to creation in the sense of how it�s done, and God says, �Let there be light ,� and there just instantaneously, monergistically is light, and when
- 22:48
- God wants to save a sinner, he shines the light of the gospel in their heart, and they become a
- 22:54
- Christian. You�re a Christian. And the light turns on, and I thought, you know, that�s � it needs to be a one -to -one correspondence.
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- In other words, that�s not, you know, you don�t gradually become a Christian, or it�s not a framework or anything else, and so that�s my new go -to verse when it comes to 624.
- 23:11
- Okay. Well, that�s, you know, but the instantaneous nature of it,
- 23:17
- I mean, some people would say it was all in one instant, and the days describe how that happened, you know.
- 23:23
- I mean, there is the issue of, you know, there wasn�t a sun, but there was a day, and it�s complicated.
- 23:30
- And my position is, absolutely, God could create everything, you know, he did create everything instantaneously, or he did it in 624 -hour days, or he did it using definitions of days or days symbolically.
- 23:48
- But, you know, the special creation of Adam, ex nihilo creation, all those things
- 23:54
- I would hold to, and I�ve known good Presbyterians who have a variety of views on that.
- 24:02
- Although I live amongst a lot of 624s, and I certainly would never say that God couldn�t or didn�t do that.
- 24:11
- Yeah, let�s talk about that just for a second, because I don�t imagine you live in a huge metropolis. Do you think there�s any room for a hermeneutical approach that says, this is kind of a blue -collar hermeneutic, an agrarian, these people were farmers, and when you just read
- 24:26
- Genesis 1 -1, and let�s say he handed it to a, you know, they don�t exist but a Martian, hey, read this.
- 24:33
- Would anybody come up with something that was different than, let�s say, 6 days 24?
- 24:40
- Do you think that would just be a normal thing for them to construct a different hypothesis? No, I don�t, you know, that�s,
- 24:47
- I don�t know, I guess that would be called contextualization, and that�s a big thing with Keller, as we were mentioning before.
- 24:52
- He says that, you know, you have to contextualize things. Of course, you have to have common sense, and you have to have basic communication skills, but no,
- 24:59
- I don�t think that creation or salvation or anything else can be contextualized for the audience.
- 25:08
- You may speak in a different way and use a different vocabulary, but, you know, the facts are the facts, and, you know, we are a facts -based religion.
- 25:18
- We believe that the historical events of Jesus� life and Abraham�s life and creation, that those things really happened, and we don�t have to color that one way or another for a rural audience or a city audience or, you know, whatever comes next.
- 25:36
- You know, on space stations or the moon, it�s all the same. Amen. Well, I know one of the things you like to do is study and read
- 25:45
- Machen, J. Gresham Machen, and that book in 1923 that he published, Eerdman�s book,
- 25:51
- Christianity and Liberalism. Tell our listeners a little bit, as we kind of probably have to wind down the show pretty soon, tell our listeners why that�s such a relevant book.
- 26:01
- I mean, when you�ve got things about Jesus and liberalism and Christianity and liberalism,
- 26:07
- I mean, to me that�s just a timeless book. Why would that be good for our listeners to read today? Well, and again, we should say that the liberalism he�s referring to is
- 26:18
- Protestant liberalism, which, you know, the way he encountered it then, they clearly denied the virgin birth of Christ and the substitutionary atonement and, you know, the veracity of Scripture, many, many cardinal doctrines they were denying.
- 26:37
- And there was a razor�s edge in the mid -20s there when the Northern Presbyterian Church, it was about 50 -50 whether it would break, whether the conservatives would stay and the liberals would leave or vice versa.
- 26:51
- But what we found was there weren�t that many conservatives and probably not that many liberals. There were just a bunch of moderate evangelicals in the middle who would just kind of go with whatever seemed nice and made everyone feel good.
- 27:06
- And that�s how the Northern Church was lost. But we always have that tendency to want to compromise, and back to the title of your show, to compromise the hard, clear truths of Scripture and the supernatural.
- 27:23
- You know, he was dealing with anti -supernaturalists. And we�re not dealing with that today in my church or even too much in evangelicalism, but there�s always that, the fight with pragmatism and, you know, just the worldly wisdom of, well, let�s be nice and get along and, you know, surely people would like it if we said it this way.
- 27:48
- And just, it�s a religion of faith. We have, you know, we believe that the Bible is true.
- 27:53
- Now, we think it�s self -attesting and we have the witness of the Holy Spirit, but, you know, it�s not irrational, but there�s the element of faith, and the supernatural dimension of Christianity cannot be dispensed with or downplayed, and that was the essence of liberalism,
- 28:16
- I think. Chorles, it is fascinating to me, in our evangelical circles, just in kind of general evangelicalism, while they�re not anti -supernatural, and of course, as you said,
- 28:27
- Machen argues against anti -supernaturalism, but another thing that he brought up in the book is this
- 28:34
- Protestant liberalism that�s anti -doctrinal. They don�t want anything to do with doctrine, you know, let�s just plane all that out.
- 28:41
- And so, while modern evangelicals are supernaturalists, it seems like many of them are anti -doctrinal, wouldn�t you agree?
- 28:48
- Oh, yeah. Yeah, and that�s been�I mean, that�s what I grew up in, in many ways. I mean, with the
- 28:55
- New Calvinist Movement and the Gospel Coalition, you know, they�ve got their own statement of faith, they�ve got kind of a trimmed -down confession that�s not going to hurt anybody�s feelings on sacraments or church government or worship necessarily.
- 29:09
- They�ve done it. You know, they�ve recovered a great many good things, a lot of soteriological truths, but one of the things
- 29:16
- I would�and this kind of goes back to Presbycast�we always�we�re really an ecclesiology podcast.
- 29:24
- It all comes back to the doctrine of the church and what the church ought to be doing, and that�s why some people,
- 29:29
- I think, think we�re divisive or negative, is just because that�s where we see a lot of deviations from the biblical model we would think would be in the doctrine of the church.
- 29:41
- And what the church rightly should do. You know, should the church fix everything, or is the church primarily spiritual?
- 29:47
- Those questions are always relevant and not easy to wrestle with. There�s no one right answer, but we think they�re worth treating.
- 29:57
- Well, I love Presbycast for lots of reasons, but one of them is because compared to you,
- 30:04
- No Compromise Radio is loving and unifying. I always need somebody.
- 30:13
- My Twitter name is The Unificator. Now, I realized early on that I had some opinions and that they would be divisive, so I thought
- 30:22
- I would diffuse that or tip the hat to it and just call myself The Unificator, and of course that�s sort of a
- 30:28
- George Bush thing. Sounds like something, you know, George Bush would have said. I�m no smarter than George Bush, I can tell you.
- 30:37
- Well, for some of our listeners, they don�t know your Twitter handle. Your pinned tweet has Napark in jeans, and so you�ve got a bunch of Presbyterian type of jeans, and they�re
- 30:47
- OPC and PCA and everything, and so that�s kind of funny. I like your humor and the way you deal with things on Twitter, and so that�s why
- 30:54
- I think we got to know each other. Last question before we wrap things up. Reformed Charismatics, you�ve got a lot of these
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- Continuationists who are Calvinists, maybe we call them Neo -Calvinists. What do you think will happen within the next generation with people who are
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- Reformed Calvinist Charismatics or Reformed Continuationists?
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- Where do you think that eventually leads? Well, you know, somewhere goofy, wouldn�t you think?
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- I wouldn�t call them Reformed. I think, you know, I really don�t think there are any Charismatics.
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- There might be a hundred in all the conservative Presbyterian and Reformed denominations.
- 31:37
- I think that Charismaticism, I guess is the word, it�s always, almost always, bound up with Congregational Church Government and the
- 31:50
- Baptistic theology, although there are a lot of Charismatics in the
- 31:57
- Anglican churches, the conservative Anglican churches, and also in the EPC, the
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- Evangelical Presbyterian Church, which is sort of a moderate Presbyterian church, if you will.
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- And that, most people don�t know it, but there are a lot of Charismatics there. But in Maypark, you know, the conservative denominations,
- 32:17
- I just don�t know of any Charismatics. And it�s just dangerous when you think you can still get revelation or, you know, you can have experiences that are very individualistic and not, you know, not bounded always by the
- 32:33
- Word. So, I don�t know. I can�t see it going anywhere good, but I don�t see it affecting, you know,
- 32:40
- Presbyterian churches of the conservative variety. Fascinating, Brad, that Machen, as well, talks about Protestant liberalism experiencing things and making your claims on Christian experience versus the immovable
- 32:56
- Word of God. And so, to me, that�s kind of a theological liberalism that�s slept in, that�s crept in, rather.
- 33:03
- You think of the Gospel Coalition, they�ve got a lot of Charismatics. T4G, C .J.
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- Mahaney, Chandler, Piper, Platt. I think we�re going to have more of that to come in terms of these larger organizations, because I guess, you know,
- 33:20
- Christian continuationism is popular. Yeah, I mean, if you turn your TV on, you�re going to see
- 33:26
- Charismatics all over the place. You know, that sells, and that�s a market.
- 33:32
- People love experience, and of course, one of the things that troubles me is that we have a lot of Presbyterian churches,
- 33:42
- PCA churches, that have good doctrine and actually good liturgy, but their worship style looks much like a generic megachurch or a
- 33:50
- Charismatic church. I referred to that Terry Johnson book earlier, and one of the important things he said in that book about worship was, �It takes a
- 34:00
- Reformed bucket to carry Reformed water.� It�s sort of a �medium is the message� idea.
- 34:07
- So, I don�t think long � so you asked about Reformed Charismatics. I think long term, without proper worship, you can�t maintain the doctrine.
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- Worship, doctrine, and the church, the discipline and order of the church, they all go together.
- 34:28
- You can�t just say two out of three ain�t bad. Now, sometimes we should be happy to have two out of three, maybe.
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- But ideally, we want to get all those things right, because they work together. It�s organic, and it�s meant to work a certain way,
- 34:44
- I would say. I�m glad you just used the word �bucket� in Presbyterianism at the same time, so it sounds like you need a lot more water than just...
- 34:52
- I was glad of that. Chortles, thank you. Some pastors use quite a bit of water, even for the sprinkle -pour hybrid sometimes.
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- Okay. Brad, thanks for being on No Compromise Radio. This is a true story.
- 35:09
- On my desk here at the church, at Bethlehem Bible Church, I have my Bibles to study, and then
- 35:15
- I have � I�m looking at my desk right now � I have Vos, Beza, Vitsias, and Olivianus, and then now
- 35:22
- I�ve talked to Chortles Weekly all in one day, so that�s pretty good. Well, they�ll sanctify you much more than I will.
- 35:31
- All right. Add Chortles Weekly if people want to follow Chortles on Twitter and PresbyCast.
- 35:37
- You can go to at PresbyCast and pick up the podcast there. The interesting thing, too, before we quit,
- 35:43
- Brad, is I�m used to hearing you at 1 .5 speed, and so it seems like you�re much more sane at this speed.
- 35:52
- Well, I didn�t know that I talked slowly or that I had a deep voice until just a few years ago, but you just have to deal with what you�ve got.
- 36:02
- All right. Thanks for being on the show. Thank you. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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- Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible -teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God�s Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.
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- Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 10 .15 and in the evening at 6. We�re right on Route 110 in West Boylston.
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- You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.