August 3, 2022 Show with Dr. William Webster & David T. King on “Speaking the Truth in Love: One of the Bible’s Most Frequently Ignored Commands”

Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century Gospel Minister, George Norcross, in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the Church and the world today.

Proverbs 27, verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have a view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions. And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this third day of August 2022.

And I am so thrilled to have as returning guests two very dear friends of mine who are also very dear friends of each other. First, we have Dr. William Webster, pastor of Grace Bible Church of Battleground, Washington.

He's an author and the founder of Christian Resources, and we also have joining him David T. King, assistant pastor of Christ Church of Katy, Texas, which is a congregation in the Presbyterian Church in America, also known as the PCA.

And he is co-author, along with Dr. William Webster, of the monumental, groundbreaking, three-volume work, Holy Scripture, the Ground and Pillar of Our Faith. And today, the three of us are going to be discussing Speaking the Truth in Love, one of the Bible's most frequently ignored commands by Christians who should know better.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you both back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. William Webster and David T. King.

Thanks, Chris. Good to see you.

And first of all, Dr. Webster, please let our listeners know, for the sake of our listeners who are unfamiliar with you and your ministry, who have not heard you on this program before, tell us, first of all, about Grace Bible Church of Battleground, Washington.

Grace Bible is a small, Reformed, Presbyterian, or excuse me.

David just broke out in a big smile.

Yeah, yeah. It's, well, we agree on so much. It's just a couple of things we don't. But yeah, we are a Baptist church. We're located in Battleground, Washington. Been here 20 years. Very committed to the Word of God, to the Gospel, and have just a wonderful group of people here committed to the same things.

And you would be a Reformed Baptist church, correct? Adhering to the Doctrines of Sovereignty.

Correct. The London 1689 Confession.

Great. Well, if anybody wants more information about Grace Bible Church of Battleground, Washington, go to gracebiblebattleground .org, gracebiblebattleground .org. And now, Pastor David T. King, tell us about Christ Church of Cady, Texas, which is in, as I've already mentioned, the Presbyterian Church in America.

Yes, Chris, we're located in Cady, Texas, which is about 25, 30 miles west of Houston, and a very growing community, and having the opportunity to minister there each week to our people and to serve our pastor of the session and the church at large.

And there is a very much focus on the Gospel and meeting us where we are, and it's a privilege to serve at this church. The staff, I'm just thankful for all of them.

Well, if anybody wants to know more about Christ Church of Cady, Texas, go to cckpca .org, cckpca .org. Now, I would be amiss if I did not highlight, even though this is not our theme today, highlight the aforementioned groundbreaking, monumental three-volume work that both of you contributed to, known as Holy Scripture, the Ground and Pillar of Our Faith, which was published by Christian Resources, the publishing ministry of Dr. William Webster.

First of all, Bill, if I may call you that for the remainder of the program, let our listeners know about this astronomical work that involves translations, if I'm correct, of patristic evidence for the belief in sola scriptura by the church fathers prior to the Reformation.

And of course, not using that phrase, that Latin phrase, but the clear concept that long before the Reformation, many, if not most, of the faithful men of God that are highly regarded by both Roman Catholics and Protestants actually believed in sola scriptura, that scripture alone is our sole infallible and inerrant authority for the church.

Tell us about how this all came about.

To begin with. David and I were actually in a, what was that we were in, David? It was an old web board. It was a forum we were on with, it was populated by a number of Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholics.

And we would discuss various issues together. It was very challenging. It was, for the most part, a friendly engagement between all of us. And through that, David and I got to know one another pretty well and decided it would be very needful to try to put something together from a research standpoint on the biblical defense of sola scriptura and the historical defense of sola scriptura.

In terms of the view, first of all, of the Word of God towards itself, and then looking historically at what the church actually believed and taught about the written Word of God, all of that comes out of the context, of course, of the Reformation.

And the Reformation's called for men to come back to what they call ad fontes, that is the original source of all revelation, the Word of the living God, not church tradition. And what we were able, I think, to do is David handled the biblical aspect of it, of depending the doctrine of sola scriptura biblically, what does scripture actually teach?

And then I handled the historical question, what was the view of the early church towards the written scriptures in light of the tradition that had developed over time within.

Roman Catholicism? And what you find... Go ahead, I'm sorry.

No, what you find biblically is a very clear presentation, revelation of the fact that the written Word of God is the only special revelation that we possess today, not oral tradition, not tradition even in writing of men that's been handed down.

The ultimate authority for all men is the written Word of God. All tradition has to be validated, checked out by the written scriptures. And then we look at it historically from the very beginning, the universal belief of the church was that the written Word of God, the Old and the New Testaments are the ultimate authority.

They are sufficient, they are primary, and they are materially and formally sufficient to declare truth to men. And we documented that and think that we have been able to demonstrate fairly conclusively that the doctrine of sola scriptura promulgated by the reformers of the Reformation was just a call back to what the universal faith of the church had been during the patristic age.

And isn't it true, David, that although the Roman Catholic Church dogmatically exalts the non-canonical traditions of Rome to an equal, if not superior, point of authority to the scriptures, they still believe that only the scriptures are actually God-breathed,.

Don't they? Yes, they have not been able to give any other instances. And, of course, depending upon the particular Roman apologist to whom you're speaking, opinions there may differ. But as far as it goes, they cannot give us any instance of any tradition that is actually regarded as theanoustos, so really only scripture is God-breathed.

And how, David, did you come to know and start to cooperate in ministry with Bill Webster?

Well, as Bill said, we were both members of a forum, I guess it was back around 1995, 1996.

Oh, that's how you actually met.

Yes, we actually met on that forum, and it was on that forum that we began to collaborate about doing the work in defense of sola scriptura. The honest truth was is that personally I began to look around for some modern defense of sola scriptura, and everywhere I looked there was nothing really to be found.

And so, honestly, I thought that I could cooperate in producing such a work and research it, or I could sit around and complain for lack of resources, and that was really a big motivating factor for me to become involved in this.

So, I forget who gave the idea to who. I know that Bill and I began to speak about it, and we thought that maybe we would co-author a modest work, but once we got into it, given our research, it just began to expand and include many areas that we hadn't anticipated.

And the reason is because all the evidence pointed to scripture alone as the sole infallible source for authority for faith and practice in the church, and this was something that in my mind, as you began to look into the witness of the early church fathers, it was something that they all affirmed.

If there was any kind of patristic consensus, it was that the scriptures alone are the ultimate authority for the adjudication of faith and practice, and.

Even in the ancient church. And to my knowledge, I have not received an update from either of you, to the contrary, there has been no Roman Catholic response that has been published.

To this three-volume monumental work. Am I correct still? No published response. Some of the ones that have interacted with me indicated that they're not going to purchase our work to read it. Well, that's not a response to the work.

So, I mean, you can give all kinds of responses, but unless you actually read our work and interact with it, then it's really not a response,.

Not a meaningful response. Well, every serious student of not only the Reformation, but also the Church of Rome, cannot be without this very important—and I keep repeating monumental because it is—monumental three-volume, nearly 900 pages of patristic evidence and biblical evidence of sola scriptura being the way that any genuinely Christian individual or church should view the scriptures, that they are the sole infallible inerrant authority for the church today.

You have to have this in your library, and I'm going to give you the website where you can find out more about this. It is christiantruth .com, christiantruth .com, and once again, the title of this three-volume, 900-page set is, Holy Scripture, the Ground and Pillar of Our Faith.

And Bill, sometimes you have smart-aleck Roman Catholics that always try to mock anything like this, and of course, they are not the sole church that has wise guys in its midst. We have enough of our own.

We have a few.

But they might say, oh, these guys have written a book about, or a three-volume work, on Holy Scripture, and yet they don't even get the scripture right. The title is Holy Scripture, the Ground and Pillar of Our Faith.

If you could explain that title, even though there is a similar biblical text, but this has been reworded,.

And tell us why. It's actually a quote from Irenaeus. It is biblical, too, but the church father, Irenaeus, in the second century, uses that phrase to define the ultimate authority of the Word of God.

He makes the statement that initially the apostles preached orally, but then he says, by the will of God, what they had preached orally was then inscripturated, put in writing, and those writings are now the apostolic tradition.

That's how we know what it was. And that has become the ground and pillar of our faith. So I use that, you know, both from the standpoint of a biblical truth, as well as a patristic. So it's showing a biblical and a historical validation of the truth of Sola Scriptura.

In his mind, every single doctrine that was promulgated by the church had to be validated by the written Word of God. And if you look at the rule of faith in the early church, it's called, you know, the apostolic tradition.

It is a summation of the major truths of the written scriptures that the early church felt were essential to the belief of the church. Every single one of them is derived from the Word of God. And of course, what I was referring to earlier.

Is that the Roman Catholics have long distorted and twisted a biblical truth that we find in 1 Timothy 3 .15, that the church of the living God is the pillar and ground of truth. And the Roman Catholic apologists make that out to mean something, which it does not mean, because they seem to forget that a pillar holds something else up.

And they put a priority of the church over the scripture in this text, which Paul, the apostle, never intended in these God-breathed words. If you could comment,.

Perhaps, David, you could comment on that. Yes, and Paul in Timothy speaks of the church to be the ground and the pillar of the truth. But as you indicated, the church is there to uphold the truth. The church was born of the Word of God.

The Word of God was a gift from God himself that he gave to his church, and it became the church's responsibility to guard the Word of God and to hold it up as the truth. And so that's what Paul is basically teaching in 1 Timothy 3, when he speaks of the church as being the ground and the pillar of the truth.

What, as Bill indicated, Irenaeus, when he was writing, he indicates, and I love the way he puts it, he puts it in such a plain way that one can only misunderstand what he's saying if they're determined to misunderstand it.

He says, we have learned from none others the plan of our salvation than from those through whom the gospel has come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public. He says, at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the scriptures to be the ground and pillar of our faith.

And so what Irenaeus is affirming in no uncertain terms there is that the scriptures are proclaimed to us. What the apostles one time proclaimed in public, they later inscribed by writing and handed it down to us via the scriptures, and the scriptures were to be the ground and the pillar of our faith.

These are clear words from Irenaeus, and though people try to distort them, it's very clear. And so when Paul is speaking, it's—Irenaeus had no intention of trying to distort the words of the apostle Paul in 1 Timothy chapter 3, but 1 Timothy chapter 3, Paul is making it clear that it is the church's responsibility to hold forth the scriptures.

And in that sense, the church is the ground and the.

Pillar of truth. Now, before I move to the actual theme that we are planning to focus on today, speaking the truth in love, I just wanted to clarify a couple of things for our listeners in regard to this.

You have on the one end of the spectrum Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, who exalt the writings and importance of the church fathers to not only an idolatrous level, but even a historically incorrect level.

You will have phrases such as, the unanimous consent of the fathers, and they disagreed on quite a number of things. In fact, there are some of the church fathers that, although being exalted by the Church of Rome, believed things that the Church of Rome later would clearly identify as heresy.

So you have that on the one hand, and you have on the other end of the spectrum some evangelical Protestants, and especially perhaps fundamentalist Baptists, who totally reject the patristic writings as having any use at all for the church.

They inseparably link them with Romanism, even though Romanism didn't exist when these fathers were alive on the planet Earth. So Bill, if you could explain where we should find a secure balance when it comes to the writings of the church fathers that you and David have made much use of.

Well, you have the general principle.

Enunciated by the church fathers all through the patristic age, which, you know, that goes from the 2nd century all the way up to basically the 6th century. These men are all committed in a fundamental way to what they call the rule of faith.

You do have that rule that comes out of the Word of God. They are committed to the ultimate authority of the Word of God, the primacy of it, the sufficiency of it. Much of Roman Catholic tradition is an addition to the rule of faith.

I mean, you have certain doctrines that have been dogmatized in the Roman Catholic Church, meaning they are necessary to be believed for salvation. Vatican I in the 19th century decreed that it's necessary for salvation that every professing Christian be subject to the Bishop of Rome, that he is the ruler of the church throughout the universal church throughout the Earth, that he is also infallible when he teaches in his authority, it says ex cathedra from the chair, where he promulgates teachings related to faith and morals of the church.

That has been done relatively very little within the history of the church. But there are certain papal teachings that have been dogmatized, such as the immaculate conception of Mary, that she was born free of original sin, the assumption of Mary that she was raised into heaven, assumed in heaven, either before or shortly after she died.

Although it is not dogmatic teaching that results from that, she is now the queen of heaven and has a mediatorial role to play in the salvation of men and women. That is called the Mediatrix Doctrine of Mary.

That is subsequent to the dogmatizing of the assumption. The assumption is necessary to be believed for salvation according to Roman teachings. It was promulgated by Pius XII in 1950. So previous to that, you could be free to disagree with the dogma.

The problem is the assumption of Mary, that dogma originated with Gnosticism and was condemned as heretical by two bishops of Rome in the 5th and 6th centuries. So you have this fundamental contradiction.

There are other dogmas, such as the teaching of Matthew 16, the rock, you are Peter on this rock, I will build my church. That is the foundation to the entire edifice, if you will, of Roman Catholicism to its authority.

When you look at the patristic understanding of that verse, it is a complete opposite. It is an Eastern Orthodox Protestant view that the rock is not Peter as a man, it is Peter's confession, his faith pointing to the person of Christ.

Augustine makes the statement in exegeting that passage, Christ did not build his church on a man, but on Peter's confession. And he says, there is the rock for you. So when we come to seeking the ultimate authority for our lives, we have to come to the foundation, to the one revelation of the living God that we possess, which is the word of the living God that we possess in the Old and the New Testaments.

And as far as the teaching, the doctrine of co-redemptrix, of Mary being the co-redemptrix, that's the one that Rome has still been holding out on as far as a reluctance to dogmatize that, although there are significant Mariologists within Rome that are eager to push for the dogmatizing of Mary being a co-redemptrix, including Dr. Mark Miravalli of the Franciscan University of Steubenville and others.

So am I correct on that, that that's like a holdout that still hasn't gone through and has not become as popular and as universally accepted as Mary.

Being a mediatrix? Well, I think it would be similar to other dogmas like the immaculate conception and the assumption. It's a slow evolution. It becomes something that is implicitly taught in the church, but it is not dogma yet.

That was true, the assumption. It was true, the immaculate conception. And it becomes popular belief. And then it is, it becomes dogma. Now, whether it will actually become dogma or not, that is supposition.

But it would seem, given the popularity of the teaching, because there are vast numbers within the Roman Catholic church who do believe it, even though it is not dogma, it's probably just a matter of time before it will be.

Added to that list of dogmas. And when I have heard Roman Catholic apologists discuss this and are a part of the number that are reluctant to go that far, it seems the only reason they're reluctant is they don't want to form a greater wedge between evangelicals and their efforts for.

Humanism. Would you agree with that? I would think that's probably true of some. You know, it was also an issue when they dogmatized papal infallibility and the papal rule in 1870. There was great concern that this would be a great divisive issue between Protestants and Roman Catholics.

And the church moved forward with that anyway. So I don't see that necessarily being something that would be a great preventative, if enough people really wanted it to be dogmatized. And ultimately, it's really the bishop of Rome and the overall leadership of the church that has to agree to pursue it.

Well, we have to go to our first break right now. Please send in your questions for William Webster and David T. King to ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Don't go away. We're going to be right back right after these messages with more of William Webster and David T. King, and we are going to be entering into our discussion of speaking the truth in love.

Don't go away. We'll be right back.

Transcribed by https://otter .ai.

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So please go to ignitedbytheword .org, ignitedbytheword .org, subscribe, and tell them that you heard about them from Chris Armisen on Iron Trip and Zion Radio. We're now back with William Webster and David T. King, who are co-authors of the groundbreaking three-volume work, Holy Scripture, the Ground and Pillar of Our Faith.

They are friends, and they are colleagues in ministry, and they are dear friends of mine. And I have to say this before I forget. If you are ever looking for conference speakers, especially in the area of Roman Catholicism and even on the heretical error of many within modern evangelicalism who reject the vital teaching that repentance is a necessary element of salvation, either of those issues—and, of course, they can speak on a multitude of other issues, but those would be the core issues that they both are very familiar with and have written on and have spoken about—I would highly urge you to invite them, as I plan to do in 2023.

I plan to attempt to invite these two brothers to conduct a conference together here in Pennsylvania, and I strongly urge you to do the same thing. But, Bill, it was your idea, your desire to address the issue, speaking the truth in love, which is one of the Bible's most frequently ignored commands by Christians who should know better.

And I include myself in that. I have sinned grievously on many occasions, unfortunately some of them publicly, with the Internet and social media, when grappling with, when doing written battle with those that have not just pleasantly disagreed with something that I may have posted on the Internet, but very often it starts when somebody is mocking what I believe or saying things that are slanderous and cruel, but that does not give me a license to sin in my response.

But tell us, why is it? What was going on that you have been witnessing? What is going on in Christendom that has compelled you to want to discuss this today publicly in our.

Program? Well, you and I were talking and kind of bemoaning the state of discourse that goes on within the broad evangelical culture. And, of course, this is true throughout our culture at large. Where we are today, it is, it's just very sad to me, it's very grieving that it's so polarized.

There's so much animus between people. And then sadly, this was filtered down into the church. You see it displayed in social media, in posts that men make on different platforms. You see it publicly in the way men speak about and to one another.

And it's getting, it's not improving. We probably have all been the recipients in one way or another of some of that most unpleasant discourse. Sadly, we probably have crossed the line at times. As you just mentioned, I don't think anybody can look at what the word of God says about speech and hold their head up and say, yeah, I have never crossed that line.

But we're all in this boat together. But my concern is that, you know, we talk, we've talked far about the authority of the word of God and how important the scriptures are. They are the ground and pillar of our faith.

They are the foundation to the entire Christian life. They are the revelation of God to us. Paul says in Philippians one that we are to be, he says of the Philippians, and that would by implication include all believers, that by grace they share in his calling to proclaim and defend the gospel.

Well, that's words. It involves speech. And we are, in ministry, especially those who are leaders, who are pastors and teachers, we take that very seriously in the evangelical church. This call of Paul, for example, to Timothy to guard through the Holy Spirit who's been given to us the treasure entrusted, that is the word of God, the gospel.

We are called by Christ to proclaim the gospel in the Great Commission, to teach men the word of God, how to obey him, to walk in obedience to his commandments. It's very important that we understand we have a calling to speak.

But it's also equally important to understand that God expects us to do it in a righteous way. And there is a governing foundational principle to all that we're called to. It's called love. We are called to obey the word of God, not just defend it.

That means, then, that our life is meant to be governed by love for God, first and foremost, secondly, by love for people. And, you know, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. That includes all men, but especially it includes our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.

You know, Peter said, we are born again for a sincere love of the brethren. And so my concern is that we are not taking seriously enough what the word of God teaches.

Us about speech. And specifically, we're talking about Ephesians 4 .15, speaking the truth of love, we are to grow up in all aspects into him who is the head that is Christ.

Right. So looking at what the word of God teaches us about the manner in which we speak, and not just the words that we use, but the spirit behind them in the heart, that's equally as important. And I think that it is extremely necessary in this day in which we live to give a warning, a biblical warning to all of us.

We need to step back, take a breath, sit down, stop talking, and listen to what the word of God teaches us and exhorts us and warns us about righteous speech, because the Lord has very sober words to say about those who neglect to heed that word.

And if we do not heed it, it will be to our great detriment.

Now, David, there are many who will rebuke their brethren in Christ because we are, perhaps in a public forum, being stern in regard to somebody who is teaching heresy, somebody who is sinning in the way that they approach the scriptures.

They may be not only twisting the scriptures, they may be slandering great men of God. I could go on and on and on. But when we respond, we are not behaving like Mr. Rogers. We're not saying in a calm, quiet voice.

That's an interesting perspective, and I really value your opinions on things. You know, we can be very stern without sinning, can't we? I mean, this challenge that we have, this command to speak the truth in love, does not mean that we are to be mamby-pamby, especially when it comes to the correction and rebuke of serious error.

I agree. There's a way to rebuke or to speak or to address one's brother, and we have a real prime example of that in Holy Scripture. I can't help but think of Paul and his interaction with Peter in Galatians that we read of, and I'm sure that Paul was forced to actually get into Peter's face.

In fact, Paul says, I had to withstand him to his face. And of course, I think that Peter was overcome by Paul's arguments ultimately, and when Paul was rebuking him for his hypocrisy, but Paul did so in such a way, and this is one thing I'll never forget.

When I first read it in a sermon of Dr. D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, and he brought up this example, and he says, think of Paul, how he spoke to his brother Peter. He says he rebuked him in such a way so that years later, Peter could refer to him as our beloved brother Paul.

He says no matter how stern Paul's words were to Peter, they must have been words that were spoken in love to the end that Peter could make such a testimony concerning his brother, the apostle Paul. And I think that's a scriptural lesson from us, an illustration that just stands out and speaks to us in such a way.