September 7, 2017 Show with Nathan Pickowicz on “Why We’re Protestant”

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

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

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.

Now here's our host, Chris Arnson. 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 Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this seventh day of September 2017 and when

I mentioned Lake City, Florida, the city where Grace Life Radio 90 .1

FM is located, Grace Life Radio airs Iron Sharpens Iron Radio every day, twice a day in a pre -recorded form, in morning drive and in the evening from 8 to 10 p .m.

I would appreciate your prayers, all of you listening, for the folks at Grace Life Radio because of Hurricane Irma which is going to be no doubt doing some damage barring a miracle out there in Florida and obviously keep all of these citizens of Florida in your prayers and most of us,

I think, have at least somebody that we know who lives in Florida because it seems to be a very popular place for people to migrate from other parts of the country.

So I just wanted to let the folks specifically at Grace Life Radio know that our prayers are with all of you over there,

Brandon Ellickson, Justin Ellickson and everyone at Grace Life Church and Grace Life Radio.

Today we have returning to the program Nate Pickowitz. I'm so delighted that he's back.

He is pastor of Harvest Bible Church in Gilmanton Ironworks, New Hampshire. He's a writer for Entreating Favor and Servants of God and author of Reviving New England.

We are addressing today his new book, Why We're Protestant, An Introduction to the

Five Solas of the Reformation and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Nate Pickowitz.

Hello, thank you for having me back. It's great to have you back and in studio with me is my co -host the Reverend Buzz Taylor.

Hello once again, good to be here. And if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question for Pastor Nate, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA. One of the reasons why I love the title of your book,

Pastor Nate, is because it seems that the word Protestant has fallen out of use and I for one am glad to see it come back into vogue with conservative, reformed, bible -believing

Christians. I understand that very often we have to do a little explaining because of the horrific damage to the reputation of Christianity that mainline liberal

Protestantism has done, but nonetheless I happen to love the word and I was wondering if there was any specific reason you chose to use a word that is not necessarily popular.

Well I think that in lieu of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, at least in terms of Martin Luther's contribution,

I mean we're really remembering back to a very specific historical moment, a historical time when

I mean before 1517 there were no Protestants in the formal sense. I mean there's always been a remnant, there's always as far back as John Huss and Wycliffe and even beyond that there's been people who have been opposing false doctrine, opposing abuses in the

Church, but I mean really it's to point back to a historic point in time and say there was a time when we protested against abuses and against false teaching, and this is a marker of that.

So I recognize that you know within the Protestant label there's a lot of stuff that falls in there, but frankly if I could say this,

I don't really care. I mean it was used specifically to protest against a specific thing, and I don't have any problem with the fact that we have a right to try to claim that title back.

And you know as far as I'm coming, you read J. Gresham Machen, and you know in his book,

Christianity and Liberalism, there is no such thing as liberal Christianity. Either there's Christianity or there's not.

It's simple. So I have no problem just taking the title and running with it, and you know knowing that there have been some people who have concerns about what it entails, but you know read the book and see it's about the ends up being pretty clear where I stand on the issue.

And I'm going to read some endorsements from folks who have been guests on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio in the past, and I'm sure that many of our listeners will recognize these names from their interviews on Iron Sharpens Iron or from other events and books and things involved in the media where they have heard these people preach or teach or write.

We have, first of all, many of you have been hearing me promote every day the G3 conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

Josh Bice, who is the pastor of Praise Mill Baptist Church in the

Atlanta area, and he is the director of the G3 conference. He says,

We stand once again in desperate need of the burning and brilliant light of the gospel.

Nate Pickowitz does an excellent job of reminding us of the importance of the historic reformation and pointing out our place in the long line of our gospel heritage.

And Stephen J Lawson, who is, I'm sure, no stranger to most of my listeners, here is a desperately needed book for the dark days in which we live.

Why We're Protestant deals not with peripheral issues but with what is absolutely essential and non -negotiable to the

Christian faith. You cannot be wrong here and be right with God. I urge you to devour and digest this book.

And then Justin Peters, many of you may be familiar with Justin Peters. He not long ago was one of the speakers at John MacArthur's Strange Fire conference, and he has been on the roster for a lot of major conferences across the country and across the globe.

Justin Peters, who is an evangelist, apologist, and author, and he is the director of Justin Peters Ministries, he says,

Some have jubilantly proclaimed that Luther's protest is over. Is it over? Should it be over?

In this excellent and immensely readable work, Pastor Nate Pickowitz shows the absolute necessity for the

Protestant Reformation. If you want to understand the issues related to Roman Catholicism and the need to speak the truth in love to Catholics, I highly commend this book to you.

And last but not least, somebody who's been a guest a number of times on Iron Sharpens Iron, Mike Abendroth, pastor of Bethlehem Bible Church and host of No Compromise Radio, says,

Why We're Protestant wonderfully demonstrates what every Christian needs at the forefront of their mind.

You must be pro -Christ, pro -evangelism, pro -exposition, pro -Bible, and more.

My only protest is that this book is too short. You gotta love

Mike. Yes. I love his wit.

He's just such a sharp guy, and he's a very kind and very dear brother. I love him greatly. Yes, I do too, and I'm looking forward to his return to the program.

I was just telling you off air before the show started that I had an interesting morning. I had that unexpected debate with a

Roman Catholic, a former Anglican who converted to Roman Catholicism, and I gave my testimony of how

I, by God's grace and mercy, converted from Roman Catholicism to Evangelical Reformed Calvinistic Protestantism.

And so this morning at 7 .30, I had this, what unbelievable show in the

UK. I started with my testimony and then James Bogle, who is an attorney there in the

UK, who is the, as I mentioned before, he's a former Anglican who converted to Catholicism.

What I thought was going to be just us having a conversation after giving our testimonies turned into a debate, and a debate that got quite heated but never reached a realm of mean -spiritedness or nastiness or ad hominem.

I really enjoyed the time. I think that both the host, who

I believe is an Evangelical Protestant, Justin Brierley, and James Bogle, the

Roman Catholic, I believe they're very likable guys, and I truly did have fun as well as I think a meaningful exchange with them on the program.

But one of the frustrating things about Mr. Bogle's presentation is that he is repeating some or many of the tired propaganda phrases and statements that have been disproven over and over and over again by apologists with far greater capabilities than I possess in the debate arena, both in live public moderated debates and also in writing.

Mr. Bogle gave us his firm belief that has obviously been passed on to him by other

Catholics, that the Reformation that was ushered in by Martin Luther in 1517 was a pivotal time in history basically because Martin Luther, for the first time in over 1 ,500 years of church history, introduced things into the scholarly debate and the theological debate of the 16th century that never existed in the church prior to his arrival.

Now this is really something that could be easily disproven and could be documented as a false statement, a completely and utterly false statement, am

I right? Absolutely, I mean the funny thing about it when you read, you know, any biography of Luther, I would definitely commend to the listeners

Roland Dainton's excellent biography called Here I Stand. It's a couple years old for sure, but it's very good.

But if you trace Luther's life and thought, he came to a knowledge of saving faith by reading the very early church

Fathers that he was supposed to be reading for seminary. So he's reading Augustine, he's noting

Augustine's arguments about the gravity of man and the nature of sin, and he's tracing all this all the way back to the

Apostle Paul. Martin Luther didn't get saved until he started preaching through Galatians and Romans and looking at the

Psalms, especially the Psalms that deal with Christ and dying on the cross, you know, to make a penalty for sin.

So Luther was simply doing what he was supposed to do as a monk and study the

Scriptures and study theology. The difference is that Luther with his analytical mind was able to see through a lot of the dogma that's been slapped on these works over the course of time, and just read the text and say, what does this

Bible actually say? And even look at it in the Greek language. I think sometimes we don't give

Erasmus enough credit in his part played in the Reformation, but when Erasmus, who was a scholar, when he published the

Greek New Testament in 1516, that kind of blew the doors open, because now

Christians around Europe, really, are reading the

Bible in the Greek language, in the original language. And so when you start to see words like kaiosane, righteousness, you know, to justify somebody is very different than the

Latin word justificare. So, you know, Luther's using the stuff he's handed, and he's able to see the

Gospel clearly in the Scriptures and even through Augustine. So frankly, the argument falls flat.

I mean, it's just no, there's no way, if anything, you know, the Church had wandered away, and it was common knowledge that the popes and the councils contradicted themselves, and it was, you know, kind of a big joke, but as soon as it started to take a turn for the worse for the

Roman Catholic Churches when they had launched the Counter -Reformation. So I agree with you.

I mean, a lot of these arguments are very tired, and you know, the bottom line is that you have people that are caught in the crossfire who really need to just hear the

Gospel, and we understand that to the sovereignty of God, the grace and mercy of God, that when people hear the

Gospel, people get saved through the Gospel. So, you know, more than simply arguing back and forth with the same tired arguments, which

I think has some value, we simply need to preach the Gospel, and those who are going to believe are going to believe.

Amen. And if anybody wants to get a copy of Roland Baten's masterpiece,

Here I Stand, go to cvbbs .com. In fact, today's their final day of a two -day sale that they're running, where they're discounting everything in the store, even things that are already discounted.

They're having a further discount, and cvbbs .com is a sponsor of Iron Trip and Zion Radio, so we would love for you to patronize them.

And Roland Baten, he didn't have any kind of bias in trying to paint

Luther with a more attractive brush. I mean, he was not Lutheran. I recently,

I think, made the mistake of classifying Roland Baten as a Universalist, but he still may have been a

Universalist, but he was more in the realm of being a Quaker and a Congregationalist. He had connections in both areas, both denominational groups.

But this was no embellished work in order to promote a denominational hero of his own fellowship.

He was just really writing honestly as a historian, was he not? Yeah, I mean, that's the thing about it, is that a lot of times, you know, we have a tendency to put men like Luther and Calvin on pedestals, and certainly

I believe the Bible teaches us to honor those whom honors do. But, you know, this book by Baten is not a hagiography.

It's not trying to paint Saint Luther. I mean, in the book, you know, we see, he's able to trace his thought and trace his writings.

I mean, we see him having nearly having a nervous breakdown and struggling with sin and struggling with depression, and, you know, we see him as very human.

I mean, it seems like you said he's trying to write as a biographer and do a good job.

You know, and I think, you know, there are also other good biographies out there of Luther, certainly, but yeah,

I mean, the whole point is that these people were used by God for a purpose.

They're sinners just like everybody else, and, you know, it's almost, you know, without the sovereignty of God, it was almost dumb luck that Luther ended up where he was.

I mean, he really was not trying to do anything. He wasn't even trying to break away from the

Church in the beginning. He simply wanted to reform it. He wanted to make some needed changes because he cared about the

Church. In fact, the only reason he left Rome, or the Church of Rome, is because he was fleeing for his life.

Right, right. He had a price on his head for the rest of his life. At any point in time, somebody could have turned him in, and they could have arrested him, you know, paid the fine, and they would have killed him.

So, I mean, he really had no choice. I mean, he was saying things that were clearly laid out in Scripture.

He was calling out abuses. I mean, there was just rank extortion going on, and he was just simply calling it out.

I mean, when John Tetzel was, you know, selling indulgences and promising things that were not in the

Bible at all, promising things that had never even been orthodox in the Roman Catholic Church, he just lost his mind.

He's like, this is wrong. I mean, he was trying to do the right thing, it's just that Rome rejected it.

I mean, they did not want to have any part of his Reformation. They didn't even concede one point, not even a single tenant they conceded.

So, there was no choice but for him to split, and, you know, certainly that was the providence of God. And this topic, the five solos of the

Reformation, there are quite a number of books on the solos and on the

Reformation in general. Why did you find a need for this book to fill some kind of a void that was left open?

Yeah, so there's a few things to it. I mean, there is, you know, if you look at the book at the very back, my bibliography section's pretty long, because I wanted to give, you know, recognition to the fact that there is so much material that's very, very good.

Better scholars, better pastors have written better material on the Reformation than I could hope to do. So I recognize that this isn't going to be anything new or groundbreaking, but I was finding that as I'm reading a lot of material, again, not all of it, but a lot of it, it is written for those who are already kind of used to reading the

Reformation material. And there are some books that are for people getting into it for the first time.

There are a whole series of books, there's actually a brand new series put out by Zondervan on the

Five Solas, and they're fantastic books, but they're a little hard to swallow if you're just getting into studying the

Five Solas. You know, it's a lot of material. So really, I wrote it for my own church and mine.

I knew that a lot of them had probably not had access to this information, had never learned this before.

It's not something that you, you know, always learn in Sunday school. We don't really often talk about this stuff, certainly not in the region of area that I'm in.

And so I just presented this to them to give them sort of a history lesson to introduce them to the topic, and so if a person is new to the

Reformation or new to Protestantism, this could be a helpful resource for them. But also where I am is a very highly densely

Roman Catholic population in New England, and so there's a lot of people who are floating around, and they might go to wherever church is closest, but they don't really understand the distinction of why a person would be

Protestant versus Catholic. And so the book is also written as apologetic to try to give light to some doctrine and to say, this is the main difference between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, and wouldn't you know, it has everything to do with the gospel, how a person gets right with God.

And the Reverend Buzz... Go ahead. No, you can go ahead, I'm sorry. I was just going to say, there's a lot of levels that I'm trying to hit with this, but certainly this is not going to be the be -all, end -all, and I encourage people who are maybe going to read this to utilize the bibliography and to read some of the really rich, wonderful material that's been written about this, because it's just so rich and it's so good, and if I could just be a gateway to pointing them to sound often into some good historical theology and some good history,

I think the church would be blessed by that. And the Reverend Buzz Taylor has something to say. Yeah, well, having also spent a lot of time in New England, I moved here from Maine, I spent 10 years in Maine, and I've had a lot of discussions with a lot of people, largely, not so much

Catholic, although they were very Catholic around in my area, but even in Pentecostal churches.

And in the discussion, some things came out more than others. And I can just hear, you know,

I try to play the devil's advocate on behalf of our listeners, and I can just hear them questioning, well, why would you want to be known for what you are against?

You know, this is the word Protestant, protest. Why would you want to be known by what you're against instead of what you're for?

Sure. Well, you know, Jude talks about, Jude verse 3 talks about contending earnestly for faith.

Well, contending is really, if you think about it, it's really a wrestling term, a fighting term, a boxing term, and you know, the struggle for the

Christian life is that you are going to have to be fighting against what is false. False teachers are always trying to come in and destroy the

Church, and always trying to try to bring in doctrines that are contrary to the Gospel. So the Gospel's always under assault.

And so, you know, this is not just some static thing where we can be laxadaisical in our faith and just sort of let things ride.

Scripture calls us to be vigilant. Jesus said in Matthew 11, 12, he says, the kingdom of heaven suffers violent, and violent men take it by force.

Now, there's a lot of ways to see that, but there is an aggressiveness to it, to the Christian life, and so to protest and to say, no, this doctrine, this body of teaching is wrong, and here's what is true, here's what the

Bible teaches, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. And I think that to be faithful to Christ, we have to contend for the things that are most important.

And when it comes to things like the supremacy and the sufficiency of the work of Christ, the

Gospel, you know, the authority of the Scriptures, I mean, these are absolutely the tenets of the soundness of our faith.

This is the stuff that we have to fight for. And I mean, by God's grace, I'll go to my grave fighting for these things, because it's on these things that salvation hangs in the balance.

I mean, this is the important stuff. So it's not for the purpose of just debating for the sake of debating.

I care about people's souls. I care about people who would otherwise perish for a lack of knowledge that they need to know what they're for, and they need to know what they're against.

So I have no problem being Protestant in that regard. Now, the subtitle of the book is an introduction to the five solas of the

Reformation. I'm assuming that most of our listeners know the five solas, because I think just judging from the responses

I get by email, people seem to, for the most part, have a grasp of Reformed theology and so on.

But I also know that there are people outside of not only Calvinism and Reformation theology, but there are also

Roman Catholics. There are even occasionally a Muslim will contact me and let me know what he thought of a program.

And I've had people really from over the years across the spectrum of religious experience.

Why don't you at least summarize for those folks especially what the five solas are?

Well, state what they are, the five solas, and summarize what they are about. Yeah, so the five solas.

Sola is Latin for alone. And so the five solas are sola scriptura, which is scripture alone.

Sola gratia is grace alone. Sola fide is faith alone. Sola Christus is

Christ alone. And sola dea gloria is for the glory of God alone. And these five solas really became credos for the

Reformation. You know, no one sat down in a council and said, okay, these are the five things we're going to fight about.

But over the course of the writing and the ministry of the Reformers, these things kept on coming up, and these are really the non -negotiables that salvation was going to be according to the authority of the scriptures.

The scriptures alone, not creeds and councils and church tradition and the magisterium and the office of the pope, but the authority of the scripture, what

God actually gives us authoritatively. That is the basis of authority, and that our salvation is going to come by the grace of God alone.

Nothing we're going to add to it. Through faith alone, not by faith and then some other thing attached to it.

It's going to be through Jesus Christ alone that His work on the cross is sufficient for us, and it's going to be through Him that we get to the

Father. And that all of life, not just the things that we deem to be sacred or secular, but all of life is meant to be lived as a

Christian to the glory of God alone. There's nothing, you don't keep anything away from God. Your whole life is to be submitted to Him for His glory.

And so it really encompasses all of the Christian life, and these were really the five main credos that they abided by.

And they show up over and over again in all their writing, and it's become known as this is what the reformation was really about.

Yeah, these five solers were distilled from writings of all the major reformers.

They weren't compiled by one reformer like Luther or somebody who had them all together in some kind of list, just like Calvin didn't design the acronym for TULIP and so on.

These were just the gleanings from all of the reformers where all of these watchwords were in some form present in their writings and in their protest against Rome.

That's right. And in fact, if John Calvin knew that people were calling the doctrines of great

Calvinism, he'd probably lose his mind because that was not his temperament, not his desire at all.

Yeah, he doesn't even have a marked grave. No, that's right, that's right. And of all the...

Go ahead, I'm sorry. No, that's not what I was going to ask. I was waiting for your question. Oh, of all the solas, you will have the

Church of Rome, I guess perhaps it depends on who you talk to, but you will have many Roman Catholics try to claim that they have no problem with and support some of these solas, but it is just clearly without exception where they militate against sola fidei and sola scriptura.

Those are the two of the solas that they really make no bones about being in their minds and according to their own dogma, heresy.

That's right, that's right. And I think, you know, in the book I talk about this, but I borrowed this concept from lots of other places, from the

Reformation study itself, that sola scriptura, so scripture alone, is what's called the formal principle of the

Reformation. But if you don't have a basis of operation for how you're going to proceed in your discussion of theology and just in your discussion of Christianity, if you don't have a sole source of authority, which is the scriptures, then every other argument falls apart, because you have no basis.

Because as soon as you say, well, you know, John chapter 10 says this, then, you know, an opponent would say, well, yeah, but the says this.

So the first battle is over the battle of authority, which is really the Reformation, but the battle of the

Bible. And that's really what it boils down to. And then from that, the material principle, so the principle that was argued and fought over really viciously, has to do with the gospel and the gospel by faith alone, to the point where the

Council of Trent, in counteracting this, set up several canons to say that if you believe that you are saved and you are justified by faith alone, let that person be anathema, let them be a curse.

So they pronounced a curse on anybody who would claim that you are justified by faith apart from works of the law, except that the scriptures explicitly teach

Colossians chapter 2 verse 16, where the Apostle Paul says three times that we know, we maintain, that we are justified by faith apart from works of the law.

He says that in Romans chapter 3 verse 28, we are justified by faith apart from works of the law.

So this is not something that Luther invented, not something Calvin invented, not something

Wycliffe invented. This came from the pen of the Apostle Paul under the inspiration of the

Holy Spirit. So this is what this Reformation, what the Protestant Reformation, stands on, is the integrity and the authority of the scriptures and the gospel itself.

And we're going to go to a break right now, and when we come back, I want to touch a little bit more on those anathemas that were pronounced at the

Council of Trent, which was a council specifically designed to be a response to the

Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. But I wanted to clarify something as well.

When I said that many Roman Catholics will say they agree with three of the five solas,

I'm not saying that they are logically and consistently correct when they say that.

They cannot believe in sole deo gloria, for instance, even if they say they believe to God alone be the glory, because of the fact that they share or they try to share in the glory of God for their salvation, which you cannot escape when you have a system of meritorious works.

And that would go with sole gratia as well, grace alone.

Many Roman Catholics will claim that their theology is consistent with that statement, but it's purely not.

It's very easily refuted from their own documents. But we're going through our first break right now, and if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arns, and if you just tuned us in to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, our guest today is

Nate Pikowitz, and he will be on the program for the next 90 minutes as well.

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

We're discussing Nate's new book, Why We're Protestant, an introduction to the five solas of the

Reformation. And the email address, once again, is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

We already have several people waiting for you to have their questions asked and answered, and in a minute

I'm going to get involved in just a few questions on the anathemas of the

Council of Trent. But before I do that, I know that the Reverend Buzz Taylor has some announcement in regard to the

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service. If you're planning on buying that book or that Bible, today is the day to do it because this is the last day of the two -day sale, the after Labor Day sale, where everything is not only discounted, but there's an extra discount, and you can get details at CVBBS.

It's Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service. CVBBS .com. So even if something already was on sale, there's even an added sale on top of that.

Added on top. And then everything else also, even the things that weren't on sale before, also there's a sale. Yes. Everything they sell is on discount.

That's CVBBS .com. And tell Todd and Patty Jennings, if you contact them, that you heard about them from Chris Arnson on Iron Sherpins Iron Radio.

Oh, of course, and Buzz Taylor too. Yes, of course. But Pastor Nate, you were mentioning it before, the

Protestant Reformation evoked from Rome the Council of Trent, which declared dogmatically anathemas against all who believe in the specific doctrines connected somehow to the gospel of the

Reformation. And I, during my conversation slash interview this morning on Unbelievable Radio with the

Roman Catholic attorney from England, who

I have to keep repeating it. He was a very nice guy. I don't want people to think that I am unnecessarily belittling him or something.

I just obviously had a vehement disagreement with him and still do until he repents and becomes a

Bible -believing Christian. But James Bogle made the claim when

I brought up the fact that, you know, the question was asked of me, and basically in summary, you know, why do

I think that the Roman Catholic Church has a false gospel that offers no hope of salvation?

Why do I think that it is not a secondary or tertiary issue?

My guest, I'm sorry, my opponent in that discussion who was eventually debating me on the issues, he made it apparent that being an ecumenist, perhaps not an extreme one, but you will find that most conservative

Roman Catholics today, except for some of your traditionalists and more severely right -wing

Catholics, most mainstream Catholics, including conservative ones, are ecumenical with Protestants, at least with conservative evangelical

Protestants. And he basically was saying that he believes that folks like us are saved, kind of making me look like the bad guy.

I'm not saying that was his intention, but that's very often in the conversations that we have with Roman Catholics.

We will appear to be the bad guys because we're saying that they have a false gospel, therefore they are not our brethren, whereas they're extending an olive branch saying, well, even though we disagree on serious matters, we still believe you're separated brethren.

But the Council of Trent, those anathemas were intended to declare curses upon those that believed in the gospel of the

Reformation, and was not that a very serious declaration. It is not the declaration that the attorney, the

Catholic attorney, attempted to make the case for today on Unbelievable Radio.

He tried, as many Catholics do today because they don't want to look like the bad guys, he was trying to make the case that those anathemas, all that means is that you are not in communion with Rome.

That's either that you're excommunicated or you're not in fellowship fully with Rome.

It doesn't mean that you're going to hell. It doesn't mean that a curse has been declared upon you. He was adamant that there is no curse declared upon Protestants, but this is just a revision of history, isn't it?

Well, I mean, tell that to the victims of the Spanish Inquisition. I actually brought that up, and he mocked that when

I brought up the martyrs, I basically said, well, people in that century and others were brutally and gruesomely tortured and martyred for violating those anathemas.

Right. So yeah, I mean, we've anesthetized it today, and I've talked to other folks as well who, you know, hold to Roman Catholic doctrine, and you know,

I'll make claims, you know, as graciously as I can. I mean, I certainly am not angry or spiteful or hateful toward anybody who believes these doctrines.

I think that there's a deception going on. I think that they don't understand. I think that there's deception going on in their own minds, but you know, we like to think that the

Roman Catholic Church is this kinder, gentler church ever since Vatican II, and I'll tell you, you know, evangelicals and Catholics together back in the early 90s, mid -90s didn't help anything, because all of a sudden now we're shaking hands and saying, well, we agree on more than we disagree about, and it kind of makes the middle very squishy.

But the bottom line is that, you know, this doctrine, to say that if a person believes in justification by faith alone, apart from works of the law, to say that we believe that God declares righteous, even though guilty, declares us righteous before Himself because of the merits of Christ, and that it's simply by faith alone in Jesus Christ, to say that you are now accursed and condemned and anathematized, back then you were killed for it.

I mean, even into the Puritan days, I mean, again, go back to the Marian martyrs. I mean, these

Protestants from the Church of England, they refused to concede these things, and Mary had 200 of them killed.

They were burned. So, I mean, all along the trail of blood follows this body of doctrine where Protestantism has said, look, this is the

Gospel, we believe it, but they're trying to use power and influence, and now if they're switching it around and they're trying to say, well, you know, we're the more loving, we're accepting, we want you to come home to us.

But they're really calling us back to slavery. You know, it's an enslavement to a workspace system that does not save.

There is no hope. I mean, purgatory, there is no hope for the believer at all, because the best you can hope for is to get to purgatory, and hopefully people will be praying for you enough and giving enough money to get you out, and there is no love of God, there is no salvation from sin, there's not even assurance in terms of a relationship with God.

It's all out of fear. So, I mean, the doctrine, I think, speaks for itself, and I don't think you can't revise history.

You can't say that it didn't happen or doesn't mean that, and if Rome doesn't want to concede these things anymore, then fine, give them up.

You know, all 33 canons of the Council is trying to turn them over and say, we don't agree anymore, and we'll get rid of them.

But as far as I know, the last Council where the Pope was asked the question, he says, what was still is.

So they're not looking to budge at all on these things. And the Apostle Paul clearly did not have that modern definition of the anathema when he was declaring an anathema against the

Judaizers, who were actually more in a line with Rome today, other than perhaps some cultic charlatans that masquerade as messianic

Jews. But the Roman Catholic Church, even though the specific work they were adding to faith for justification is different, it's circumcision, it would still would fall under the same anathema of Paul.

But Paul did not mean anything remotely as soft, kind, and squishy as this

Catholic tried to insinuate today, or tried to affirm and actually very rigidly insisted upon that this had nothing to do with some kind of a curse.

And he kept saying, we're not witches, we don't cast curses upon anyone. Well, Paul wasn't a witch either, but it was certainly a declaration of being accursed.

Yeah. I honestly think it's just a change of tactic, because prior to Vatican II, you know, you filled the churches with fear, you know, that if you don't do

X, Y, Z, I fear for your soul, and so it was a fear -based thing, whereas now, you know, people have cast that off, and now they're trying to win them back over and say, well, this is kinder, this is gentle, it's all -inclusive, and you know, in the end, whether it's by fear or by supposed kindness, look at the doctrine.

I mean, look at what the Catechism says, and you can thumb through it and see what their stance is, and it's just as clear there, and they have the verbiage in the most recent edition of their

Catholic Catechism. So again, you know, I'm sure that there's a lot of apologists,

Catholic apologists who would mean well and they would say, well, we're trying to be kind and build a bridge and all that, and that's fine.

I appreciate the gesture. But in the end, we are talking about, how does a person get right with God?

How does a person get forgiveness for their sins and pardon for their sins and be saved into the arms of God?

I mean, how does a person go from death to life? These are vastly important questions, and we cannot afford to get these questions wrong.

And so, in truth, a person who holds the Gospel according to the Scriptures, a person who holds the

Gospel and extends the Gospel out to other people, that is the most loving thing you can do, is say,

I love you enough to tell you the truth, to say that if you don't repent and believe in Jesus Christ alone, that your future is going to be one of judgment, not one of blessing.

And so I think we have to be honest. Even if it makes us look like bad guys, the Gospel's foolishness to those who are perishing.

So I don't think it changes a bit on our end at all. We're going to be going to our midway break right now.

If anybody would like to join us, if you would like to get in line behind those who are already waiting to have their questions asked and answered, please do so as soon as possible.

Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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

USA and only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter. Perhaps you disagree with your own pastor or your own spouse.

Perhaps your loved ones or your family is predominantly Catholic or perhaps you are a

Catholic and for some reason you don't want to identify yourself. I can understand and we will grant your request to remain anonymous.

But other than that, please give us at least your first name, city and state and country of residence. Don't go away.

God willing, we'll be right back with Nate Pikowitz and why we're Protestant right after these messages from our sponsors.

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

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I would like to introduce you to my good friends, Todd and Patty Jennings at CVBBS, which stands for Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service.

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Let Todd and Patty know that you heard about them on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Welcome back.

This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Don't forget about the CVBBS .com sale.

The last day of the sale is today. There are discounts on everything they sell and added discounts on things that are already on discount.

You can't lose by going to CVBBS .com and make sure that you mention

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We are going to return to our discussion with Nate Pikowitz on why we're

Protestant momentarily, but there are special events being held that we must announce because they are events by folks who help keep

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio on the air, and they're also events that you should attend if you can, because I know that I'm going to be attending,

God willing, several of them. The Word of Truth Church and the Long Island Spurgeon Fellowship in Farmingville, Long Island, New York present the

Gospel of the Reformation 500th Anniversary Celebration. The keynote speaker is someone that I mentioned earlier,

Dr. Tony Costa, who is the Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary.

He was involved in a recent debate that I orchestrated on the perpetual virginity and perpetual sinlessness of Mary, the

Immaculate Conception. Actually, I think I mentioned that during my debate or conversation slash debate this morning on Unbelievable Radio.

He is a dear friend of mine. He is a genius. He's a brilliant speaker. I just highly commend him to all of you to try to get there

Friday, September 28th and Saturday, September 29th at the Word of Truth Church in Farmingville, Long Island, New York for this two -day celebration of the

Gospel of the Reformation's 500th Anniversary. If you would like more details on how to get to the

Word of Truth Church in Farmingville, Long Island, you can go to wotchurch .com.

That's W -O -T, which stands for Word of Truth, church .com, W -O -T, church .com,

or call 631 -806 -0614, 631 -806 -0614.

Then the very next day on Sunday, October 1st at 11 a .m., Hope Reformed Baptist Church of Medford, Long Island, New York is also having

Dr. Tony Costa speak at their Sunday morning worship service. If you would like to attend that event, go to hopereformedli .net,

hopereformedli, standing for longisland .net, hopereformedli .net,

or call 631 -696 -5711, 631 -696 -5711.

Then coming up in November, the Quaker Town Conference on Reform Theology is going to be held from November 17th through the 18th at the

Grace Bible Fellowship Church in Quaker Town, Pennsylvania. The theme is

For Still Our Ancient Foe, a line from Martin Luther's classic hymn, A Mighty Fortress, and of course,

Our Ancient Foe is in reference to Satan. The speakers at this event include Kent Hughes, Peter Jones, Tom Nettles, Dennis Cahill, and Scott Oliphant.

And again, that's November 17th through the 18th. If you'd like to register, contact the

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals at alliancenet .org, alliancenet .org,

and click on Events, and then click on Quaker Town Conference on Reform Theology.

I do plan to be there with an Iron Trepidant's Iron Exhibitors booth. Then in January, from the 17th through the 20th, the

G3 Conference returns to Atlanta, Georgia, and I plan to be there as well with an

Iron Trepidant's Iron Exhibitors booth, God willing. January 17th is exclusively a

Spanish -speaking edition of the conference, and the 18th through the 20th is the English -speaking edition of the conference, which includes speakers such as Stephen Lawson, Vody Baucom, Phil Johnson, Keith Getty, H .B.

Charles Jr., Tim Challies, Josh Bice, James White, Tom Askell, Anthony Mathenia, Michael Kruger, David Miller, Paul Tripp, Todd Friel, Derek Thomas, Martha Peace, and Justin Peters has just been recently added to the roster.

That's just today, I think he was added. I'm looking forward to that. The theme of the conference is

Knowing God, a Biblical Understanding of Discipleship. If you'd like to register, go to g3conference .com,

g3conference .com, and if you contact any of these organizations who are running these events, if you are either just getting more information or you're actually registering, please let them know that you heard about these events from Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio.

Now it comes to the time for that thorn in my side, that unpleasant task that I have to do to be respectful to my advertisers who have urged me to make these public appeals for donations.

They know that Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio will not exist very much longer if we don't get extra support, so they want to see

Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio last for many more years, as obviously do I, and we are running out of steam financially, so my advertisers have urged me to make daily public appeals for new donations.

We had run completely dry of them until just yesterday. I started to get, once again, a small trickle of donations coming in once again, and I'm so thankful to you, everybody who has sensed the urgency in my voice the last few weeks, and has put your money where your mouth is, and you've sent in a check, and I really appreciate that more than I can explain in the

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ironsharpensironradio .com, and click on support, and you will see an address there where you can make a mail -a -check -may -payable to Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio for any amount you can afford, and as I always say, never siphon money out of your regular giving to your local church.

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As long as whatever you're advertising is compatible with the theology expressed on Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio, I would be more than happy to pursue developing a campaign with you, because we certainly could use the advertising dollars.

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Well, now we are back with our guest today,

Nate Pickowitz, author of the book, Why We're Protestant, an Introduction to the

Five Solas of the Reformation. And before I take some of our listener questions,

I just wanted to ask you something that came up today, this morning, in the debate that I had, and it wasn't like a full -blown two - or three -hour debate.

I don't want to mislead people. This was a conversation that lasted no longer than an hour, and the debate portion of it was probably no more than a half hour.

It might have been a little less. But the guest, the Roman Catholic participant in this program, he insisted, in fact, this was in direct reaction to my statement after he was candy -coating the consequences of the anathemas by the

Council of Trent as merely being, well, you just can't be in full membership of the

Roman Catholic Church or you're excommunicated, but it's not like some harsh curse. When I brought up the fact, well, why were people being gruesomely tortured and murdered when they violated these anathemas?

He said, if you want to talk about martyrs, let me tell you, the Protestants who martyred

Catholics were far more gruesome, and there were far more examples in Church history of Protestants grotesquely murdering

Catholics. Now, I mean, I wasn't using his exact language, but it was very close to what I just said. Now, I don't know if you're at all knowledgeable in the realm of martyrology, but isn't that like a blatant false statement that the

Protestants who martyred Catholics far outnumber the Roman Catholics who martyred

Protestants? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know if I have the education in that regard to debate on solid facts.

My, you know, foray into studying history in that regard, it doesn't seem to be the case, because you have to remember, too, that Rome was the dominant power.

I mean, the Roman Catholic Church was the governing authority to which the kingships and the nations submitted themselves.

So it doesn't really historically make a lot of sense that the most fierce, you know, the fiercest opposition came from the underdog.

You know, certainly even in the English Reformation, you know, you have, you know, blowback after the... just in that case, you know, when the

Reformation turns and now the Protestants kind of become the ruling power, there's no doubt,

I mean, they were opposing people who were militantly against their theology as well. But I just don't think the answer is to go tit -for -tat through the course of history and talk about who persecuted who, because in the end, you know, you're going to find that it's going to be in all areas.

And the bottom line, too, is that you're also dealing with the fact that, you know, in the 15th and 16th century, you know, you have systemic things that are happening, because the governments at that time were tied to the religion, tied to the

Church. And so when a government would put a heretic to death, that's not necessarily the

Church doing this, it's the arm of government doing this instead. So, for example, a lot of times

I hear about the backlash in Geneva, talking about how John Calvin put all kinds of people to death, but in truth, it was the magistrates in Geneva that are doing this.

And actually, in many cases, you have people like John Calvin actually opposing the harshness of some of the treatments.

Yeah, but I don't know of any persecution in Geneva that was reaching thousands of victims like we had, clearly from the history of the

Roman Catholic persecution of Protestants. Yes, certainly not.

But I think at the same time, you know, a person who's going to make the argument that the Anathemas don't matter is also going to make the argument that persecution was worse for us.

And it just sounds like a strawman argument. But again, I don't have any verifiable facts, you know, stats and numbers and things like that, but it just doesn't seem accurate at all based on the limited amount that I've read on the history of it.

Yeah, like Monty Python once said, let's not bicker and argue about who killed who.

But the only place that I am aware of geographically in history, where Protestants were doing a lot of martyring was in the

Church of England. And because it was a lot, a lot of it was connected with politics as much as it was connected with religion.

And you had that pendulum swinging back and forth, whoever rose back into power, whether it was the

Protestants or the Catholics, going back and forth between King Henry VIII and Bloody Mary, and then to Elizabeth.

You know, it was like a constant cycle of revenge that was taking place. Yeah. I mean, if you look at it even farther back, though, just the best thing and the worst thing that's really ever happened to the

Church is when Constantine basically canonized Christianity as the official religion of the

Roman Empire. It was good because people stopped dying, and that was good for their livelihood. But in a sense,

I mean, the Church thrives, but the blood of the martyrs is in the seat of the Church. Tertullian said that.

So as soon as you start mixing religion and making that a political thing, you're going to get people who are likely unregenerate making political decisions in masculine and religious terminology.

So yeah, again, I'm kind of out of my wheelhouse at this point. That's all right.

Yeah, sure. I just wanted to bring it up because it was so fresh in my memory from this morning. Well, let me go to some of our listener questions.

We have Daniel in San Jose, California, who says, Hello, brothers. In light of today's ongoing discussion about the doctrines of the

Reformation and Protestantism, what are some of the differences and similarities between the

Reformers who were in defense of the Reformation doctrines, like the

Five Solas, and the Christians who are defending those doctrines today? Why is it that the

Reformers were able to spot the heresy within the Roman Catholic Church and return to biblical orthodoxy?

And yet today, we have these great doctrines of the Reformation, but it seems as though our churches are so theologically weak.

Lastly, what do you think stands out in why we're Protestant compared to other books about the

Five Solas? That's something I already asked you before earlier, that last question, but you could, perhaps if you think of anything else, you can comment.

So going to the first part of the question, why is it that the Reformers were able to spot the heresy within the

Roman Catholic Church and returned to biblical orthodoxy? And yet today, we have these great doctrines of the

Reformation, but it seems as though our churches are so theologically weak. For the

Reformers, you have to remember, too, in the time that they were living, they were just inundated with Roman Catholic theology and practice.

And so for them, you know, there was not a, when you're recovering the doctrinal justification, that's the main thing you're fighting over.

So for example, this argument gets brought up a lot, you know, the Reformers aren't fighting over eschatology, they're not fighting over, you know, the end times.

There's not a discussion, at least there's many discussions about Baptism, you know, even though there was a large, large ongoing discussion about the

Lord's table between Luther and Zwingli and others. But I think that, you know,

I could say it's easy to spot I think any believer who reads the

Scriptures has the mind of Christ has regenerated. The Spirit of God bears witness with our spirit that we're children of God, and so when we have the mind of Christ and we understand the

Scriptures, to know what's false, you have to know what's true. So I think any believer who knows the

Word of God and can, you know, rightly handle the Word of God is going to be able to spot heresy because they know what's true.

I don't think that's really changed much in the last 500 years. I think the problem now is, you know, we have biblical illiteracy through the roof.

You know, in those days, I mean, you were talking about people who were giving their lives to smuggle Bibles into countries, and so when you got a

Bible, you didn't just leave it on your nightstand and let it get dust on it. I mean, these people devoured the

Word of God, and so they could answer chapter and verse, and so the challenge is not,

I don't think, that, oh, the Reformers had it so much different than we do. I think that the call of Semper Reformanda, always reforming, always challenging ourselves to be contending earnestly for the faith, and that includes knowing our

Bibles. We have more resources available than ever in history for learning the Bible, learning it in the original languages.

Nobody in this country gets killed for owning a Bible, so I think the burden really falls to believers to just know the

Scriptures, and then the error becomes very clear when you know the Word of God, so I think that really is the point of demarcation right there.

And any, in regard to his last question, that you missed saying before about why your book is a little different than other books, or a lot different, on the five solos.

Yeah, I mean, I think, again, I think mine is, it's very accessible, it's easy to read, it's short.

I think it's, I try to capture all the best stories and the best points and the best parts of the

Reformation as much as I possibly could, and distill it down to a short book, and so the feedback that I've been hearing from people is that it's easy to access, people who've never studied this before, it really is just that, it's an introduction.

If you've studied Reformation theology before, this might just be a good refresher for you, might be helpful, but for people who've just never been to this before at all, or even people who don't know

Christ and who don't understand the differences, I mean, you get asked those questions all the time. Again, this is written as an apologetic to try to, you know, give the main points of Christianity in one short book, and so, again,

I'm not claiming that this is the be -all, end -all book. I could probably list to you about 25 other books that are probably better and more fruitful, but it's just my small contribution to try to help along in some way, give an introduction and give some encouragement to believers in this way.

So, yeah. That's a hard question to ask and answer, I think. And, of course, the book is a brief treatment which makes it more useful in many cases in the sense that it will reach a wider audience.

If you have a large tome on this issue, your neighbor next door who's saying to you, why are you celebrating

Reformation Day, is not necessarily going to read a large volume on this, nor are you going to be able to afford to give it to them.

That's right. That's right. Exactly. You know, and I, just case in point, last week

I was talking to someone who was, you know, visiting our church, and they were asking me questions about this distinction, and they're asking me questions that were in the book, and I said, well, you know, tell you what,

I just wrote about this, why don't you go downstairs and we're finished here, take one home with you, and, you know, let that be a resource for you.

And so, again, it's just a way to distill the information. You know, I really try to be as centered on the gospel as I possibly can.

The question that persists throughout the whole book is, how does a person get right with God? I mean, that really has to be our starting point.

You know, what is the gospel? What is the answer? So that's what I'm hoping to accomplish with the book.

Well, thank you, Daniel. You have won a free copy of Why We're Protestant. So make sure we have your full mailing address in San Diego, California.

And I'm starting to get a scratchy throat here. I'm sorry. And we'll have Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service ship that out to you as soon as possible.

So thank you very much for joining us today on the program. We have a first -time questioner,

Abraham in Meridian, Idaho. He says, I have increasingly encountered various Southern Baptists who have

Roman Catholic friends or family. I have been surprised at an increasing acceptance of Roman Catholicism as just a different manifestation of Christianity.

What would be a good way to introduce folks in a Sunday school setting to the distinctives of our

Protestant faith? Do you have experience in guiding folks in this manner? Well, I think one way would be to invite

Nate Pikowitz to do a conference at your church. But anything else you care to say?

And by the way, what he is saying about his ecumenist Southern Baptist friends, that goes far beyond just the

Southern Baptists. That's an epidemic in modern evangelicalism.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, that is exactly why I wrote this book, because I was noticing the exact same trend.

I'm not reinventing the wheel here. I'm just simply restating what I've seen from other people and questions that need to be answered as well.

So that's a growing problem. I mean, really, you go back to evangelicals and Catholics together, the

ECT, which I think it was founded or started right around 1993, but it was this ecumenism trying to bridge the gap, and it's like, yeah, you know, we use the same terminology.

We talk about Jesus, we talk about grace, we use the word Gospel, we read the Bible. But in the end, the message and doctrine is so wildly different.

It's almost like, you know, when you look at the doctrine, it's two different religions completely.

And I think that's one of the things that people don't understand. You know, aren't we all just Christians? Don't we all just love Jesus? Well, I'm sad to say

I don't think so, simply because of looking at what the actual faith statements are.

And again, I'm not saying that we go and be hostile to anybody. I don't say that we give people the cold shoulder.

My wife and I both have lots and lots of Roman Catholic family and friends. I care about them deeply,

I love them. But in the end, it's not just simply something you can stick under the carpet and say, oh yeah, it's all good with you, all good with me.

The Bible's explicitly clear about what it takes to have eternal life.

And what we're getting from the Catholic Church is not that Gospel, it's something very different.

So yeah, I mean, some ways to do it, I mean, again, I wrote the book for that purpose, and it could be that this might be a helpful resource.

You know, there's, I know that Mike Jenrin, I know you're probably familiar with him, I think he's been on a few times.

Mike Jenrin has a great ministry where he, it's called Proclaiming the Gospel. That's his entire ministry, is trying to minister to Catholics and try to help understand the distinctions between the two, and he's got a book called

Preparing for Eternity, which does exactly that. It really lays out, I used his book to help me in my research as well, because it was just so helpful.

So there's lots of good material that you can share. Again, small books, you can't give somebody a big fat 500 -page book and say, go read this and go back to me.

You know, smaller materials, introductory materials, that's going to condense the

Gospel and give them all the main points can be very helpful. So I would pray that this book might do something like that, but there are certainly others that can do it as well.

Well thank you, Abraham, and because you are a first -time questioner, not only have you won a free copy of Why We're Protestant by Nate Pikowitz, you've also won a free

New American Standard Bible, compliments of the publishers of the NASB, and compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, who will be shipping both of those items out to you.

And I thank you for beating me to the punch by providing us with your full mailing address there in Meridian, Idaho.

So thank you, and I hope that you keep listening to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, spread the word in Idaho about the program, and keep submitting questions for our guests.

We have Susan in Scottsville, Kentucky, and she asks a question that actually is another issue that came up this morning during my debate on the

Unbelievable Show with the Roman Catholic attorney from England. She says,

Protestantism is often blamed for the endless divisions and denominations and dogma.

Do you agree what needs to be done? Well, yeah. I hear that argument a lot, too.

And the truth about it is, and this is not indicative of her question, but the argument itself is false, because to say that the

Roman Catholic Church has 100 % unity because they're unifying around one doctrine or one body of teaching, well, they don't have a choice.

You know, they're held captive to that. They're held captive to the authority structure of the magisterium of the

Roman Catholic... excuse me, the office of the Pope and his ministers. So it's not a genuine spirit -filled unity.

It is a forced assemblance of unity. It's not true unity, because there are dissenting opinions, and you go to, you know, several different Catholic services, and you might hear very different things.

I've talked to people who are in some of these churches, and their understanding of the Gospel is completely different, what their priest says versus what this priest says.

So maybe it's not a systemic difference, but there are differences inside the Roman Catholic Church. But to the point of denominations,

I think that personally, this is my opinion, the vast number of denominations, and in some cases seem to be fighting over minutiae, may not be helpful.

But by and large, and this is actually something I heard from Todd Freel, denominations are actually a very good thing, because it gets us talking to each other, and it's actually an exercise in Christian conscience, because you know, you and I might understand a verse or a passage seems to be a little bit different, but across denominational lines, more often than not, you actually have unity, you have understanding, you have kindness, as long as the core tenets of the

Gospel are not jettisoned. You know, we can be in fellowship, I can be in fellowship with a Presbyterian believer, disagree with him on some points, but still have charity and love for them, and it's not a forced unity at all.

There's a genuine love, because I know that they're in Christ. So when you have the Gospel at center, the denominations don't actually hurt, in the end, a whole lot, as long as you're not forcing and anathematizing people just because they don't hold to your secondary position.

So I just think we have to be a little bit careful, especially with making broad statements like that, because in the end, we are called to be like Koreans in Acts chapter 17, and to examine and test everything by the

Word of God. And our conscience has to be Catholic, and I've known people who've crossed over denominational lines, and it's not a bad thing, they're just wrestling with the

Scriptures, because in the end, they need to have a clear conscience before God that what they believe is actually true, according to as far as they can go in their own

Christian conscience. So I don't think it's as big of a problem as we think it is, as long as the

Gospel and the core tenets of the faith are there, are in our presence.

Yeah, and the Roman Catholic Church is no monolith, and as I brought up to the

Roman Catholic participating in the Unbelievable show with me this morning, I said,

I am firmly convinced that if you compare the number of differences and divisions amongst conservative evangelical

Protestants, that you can't fairly mix into the stew liberal apostates that we don't even recognize as, we don't even recognize them as our

Christian brothers. We believe that they're a Christian in name only, that they're apostate, that they're false professors.

So if you just boiled it down to conservative evangelicals, I believe that we have far more in common than the

Roman Catholic Church has with its many branches, wings, and divisions of their own. I think that they outnumber our divisions, but they remain under that umbrella because you have evangelical denominations that will insist that a person leave if they are going way out of the bounds of those denominational lines of theology and doctrine, whereas the

Church of Rome, they're not going to discipline or excommunicate anyone unless they're extremely famous, or if their sins are notorious, perhaps.

But I mean, you don't have discipline going on in the Roman Catholic Church the way it does, you know, and it's lacking in our modern day and even conservative evangelicalism as well, but at least it exists in a lot of the more conservative

Reformed churches. And, you know, you would really have to be a well -known figure to be excommunicated from the

Church of Rome. I mean, you have politicians that have ashes on their forehead from Ash Wednesday, who everyone knows are aggressively trying to maintain the so -called rights of women to murder their unborn babies.

I mean, it doesn't make, you know, and these people are still Catholics in good standing. Right, right.

But thank you very much, Susan, for your question, and you have also won a free copy of Why We're Protestant, an introduction to the

Five Solos of the Reformation by Nate Pikowitz. So please make sure we have your full mailing address in Scottsville, Kentucky, so we can have that shipped out to you.

I will read a question and have you answer it when we come back from our last break here. It sounds like a similar question, but perhaps you can elaborate.

We have Joshua, I'm sorry, not Joshua, Josiah in Asante, Minnesota.

Hey, Chris, my question for Nate. It seems like there are very few pastors that first off understand the

Solos and secondly they, if they do understand, they don't seem to view them as important.

It seems that most pastors think as long as a Roman Catholic is devout, then that's enough and the

Solos are a secondary issue. Why is there so much compromise? And we'll have you answer that when we come back from our final break.

And if anybody else would like to join us on the air, and we do still have a couple of people waiting, but if you'd like to join us, please email us right away because we're running out of time.

Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

Don't go away, God willing, we will be right back with Nate Pickowitz right after these messages from our sponsor.

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Hi, I'm Buzz Taylor, frequent co -host with Chris Arnson on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

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And we have, going back to Josiah in Asante, Minnesota, he wants to know why there's so much compromise in your opinion, even amongst conservative evangelicals.

Well, I think that, I think part of the question, if I'm not mistaken, was, you know, pastors who don't want to use solar terminology and things.

They don't even understand it according to our listener. And I can remember, I can remember years ago when

I had orchestrated a debate with James White on sola scriptura. James White was debating a

Roman Catholic apologist on sola scriptura. And when I brought posters for the debate over to a very popular evangelical church on Long Island, New York, where I used to live, the pastor looked at the poster and said sola scriptura.

What does that mean? This was an evangelical pastor who had seminary education.

Right. Yeah, so in 2 Timothy chapter 2, verse 14 -15,

Paul specifically exhorts and encourages Timothy, who's a pastor, remind them of these things and charge them before God, not to quarrel about words which does no good but only ruins the hearers.

And then he says, do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has not any need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

The problem, I think, and again, I don't mean to broad -brush pastors at all, because I myself am one and I have lots of faults and bad habits and sins, but you know, we need to be men who are rightly dividing the word of God and rightly studying and showing ourselves approved.

The pastoral ministry, it's a high call, you know, not to become celebrities, not to be influential, it's a high call to be the first servant in your church and to be the first, you know, do -la -se, slave of God.

You know, we're working and laboring to understand and rightly divide the word of truth and the doctrine it contains.

And so it's not important that you know what a sola is, that's not important. What is important is that you understand what the gospel is, how we are saved, the actual process by which we are saved by God, that you understand the authority of the scriptures and can defend that.

You have people like Rob Bell, who just wrote a book not too long ago, basically undermining the entire canon of scripture and rewriting history and undermining doctrine, which is a person who started off relatively well in a

Baptist church, and everybody was praising him for how contemporary and how insightful he was, but you need to guard your life and your doctrine.

And so more than the five solas, more than Reformation history, all that stuff is garbage if you don't understand and can defend and explain the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And so I think the reason we have such a problem is because we do have, in some churches, pastors who probably shouldn't be there.

It's not enough to say, I love Jesus and have that be the end of it. What does that mean? You know, how do we know what the gospel is?

How do we know we're going to be saved? So I think that we've created a lowest common denominator of Christianity, and I don't think that it is ultimately honoring to God.

God does not want us to turn our brains off, to stop studying, to stop paying attention. He wants us to be filled with the knowledge of God's will according to Colossians chapter 1.

That's a high and lofty call, and it's a call that pastors should not be taking lightly, and by God's grace, we can actually strive and work to be workers who are not ashamed.

So I think it goes much farther than just learning what the buzzwords are. We need to be able to give an answer for the hope that we have within us.

Well, thank you very much, Josiah, and please give us your full mailing address in Minnesota, because you have won another copy, or should

I say, you have won a copy of Why We're Protestant? An Introduction to the Five Solos of the Reformation by Nate Pikowitz, and cvbbs .com,

Carmelin Valley Bible Book Service, will have that shipped out to you as soon as possible, God willing. And we have

Joe in Slovenia who says,

Thanks for having Brother Pikowitz back to bless us. From my perspective, it seems clear to me that the vast amounts of those who self -identify as evangelical have little to no understanding of the issues that prompted the

Reformation. That's basically echoing what the last questioner said. Apparently, even those who claim to fall within the

Protestant label are no longer protesting anything remotely related to any of the doctrines that characterize the framework of the

Reformers' work. How is it possible for churches and denominations that have long since ceased to embody anything approaching

Reformation identity, purport to celebrate this historic event this year?

What needs to happen to rekindle Reformation fire among evangelicals?

That's what needs to be recovered. Thank you both for calling us all to continual

Reformation. Is there anything in that question that was not duplicated in the last?

It seems very similar, but is there anything that you could say in response to Joe in Slovenia? I don't know if you're having phone difficulties, but you are really breaking up.

I can't understand you, Brother. I think you're going to have to hang up and call back.

Can you hear me? Yeah, you have to hang up and call back. I'm sorry,

Pastor Nate. You have to hang up and call back because I cannot understand a word you're saying.

All righty, as we wait for Nate's return call,

God willing, our email address is chrislarenson at gmail .com. If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question for him if he returns,

I hope that he returns. It's probably one of those situations where you have a dying cell phone battery or a dying cordless phone battery and hope that he calls back.

Yeah, I'm so close to the end of the program. Yeah, I know. Well, it is true.

Here we have Nate. Hopefully, we can hear him this time and understand him. Pastor Nate, can you hear us now and can we hear you?

Well, I can hear you just fine. How about this? Is this any better? That's much better. I don't know if it was a dying battery or something, but you could not be understood.

But anyway, go ahead. I live in New England, so that's what happens up here all the time. But what

I was going to say is in New England right now, we're struggling with a similar thing where we're trying to be faithful to God and we're praying for some kind of revitalization or revival.

And I think that the key, what we're starting to see is some churches are simply giving up on a lot of the tactics that they were told were going to work.

They're shunning liberal theology, they're shunning a lot of the things that were driving them into this mess and apostasy, and they're simply returning back to the

Word of God. And that's what precipitated the Reformation was when people started to read their

Bibles again. So I don't think that what happened then can't be done again now. I think we have to turn back to the

Word of God. Whenever God wants to send famine, that's a famine of the hearing of the

Word of God, and so we have to turn back to that of reading Scriptures, rightly dividing the

Scriptures, and I think it's only through that that anything is going to happen. So to the degree in which denominations and churches are going to assault the

Scriptures, that's the degree in which they're going to apostatize. So I think that revival is built on understanding and having the

Word of God preached. I think it's as simple as that. Well, thank you, Joe, in Slovenia, and thank you for giving us a mailing address for your daughter in Auburn, Georgia, where we will mail your free book, and it's the last book that we have to give away today,

Why We're Protestant, an Introduction to the Five Solos of the Reformation by our guest, Nate Pikowitz.

Thank you so much for contributing your question to our show today. I keep spreading the word about Iron Trump and Zion in Slovenia and beyond, and what

I want to make sure is that the next time you're on, in fact, when we go off the air, if you could hold on,

I would like to schedule you for another interview because I would like to put a magnifying glass with you over each of the five solos when we return.

Sure. But if you could summarize right now some of the theological climate of the world that was in existence when the

Protestant Reformation came to be. I've been seeing comments lately by Reformed scholars and historians saying that we should shift

Reformation Day to the next year because of the fact that when

Luther nailed the 95 theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, he was still a

Roman Catholic, and the 95 theses were purely a protest against the selling of indulgences.

They weren't even really a protest against indulgences themselves. It was the selling of indulgences and the abuse of that, and he still remained for the following year a faithful Roman Catholic, although having conflict with them.

Yeah, I mean, in truth, I think the date that we have here, you know, the 500th anniversary,

I mean, really it's just a mark on a calendar because in truth, you know, like I said earlier, you know, some have said that Erasmus' Greek New Testament being published in 1516, that was really the killing wood that was used for the fire.

Some have traced it back to the work of John Huss. Some have said it was back to Wickliffe as pre -Reformers.

I mean, in truth, you know, it's really hard to nail down exactly because, again, Luther's theology was changing over the course of time.

We don't really start to get to his real, germane thought until about the mid -1520s and beyond.

So it was a movement that was constantly growing and changing. You could even argue that it might have even been until Calvin writes the

Antiquities. I don't know. But I see the point to say that he was still

Roman Catholic, but, you know, the point is really not to glorify history or to, you know, to put a date on a calendar.

Really what we're protesting is a false gospel, a false doctrine, a false system of belief.

And so, I mean, in the end, it's a timeless pursuit. And I think one thing that needs to be made clear as well, and this is something that I get reminded of often,

I think it's a good point, is that God always has his remnant. You know, it's not that there was no gospel ever before Luther, because that's certainly not true, but, you know,

God has always had his remnant through the years. And so, you know, the gospel has never fully gone away.

The people of God have never gone away. He's always preserved the Church. It's just a matter of, this is a chance for us to celebrate something that was a flag that was planted in the ground and a body of teaching that was developed from the

Scriptures. And it's really our part in the history. Anybody who's English -speaking or derived from an

English heritage, I mean, that really is our story. It's part of our story. I mean, I live in New England, so we're descended from the

Puritans, we're descended from the English Reformers who all spent time in Geneva. So there's a heritage there, and I think that's really what this is about, is a spiritual heritage, not as much about really nailing down a specific date and time and a specific event.

This is Reverend Buzz Taylor speaking. Wycliffe was referred to once as the Morning Star of the

Reformation. So, you know, who's to say exactly when? But, you know, we look at it as a sovereign work of God, and we're thankful for it, that it actually happened, that people have returned to truth.

So I agree with you. That's right. Amen. And you're never going to get Lutherans to change Reformation Day.

Well, with all the celebrations going on this year, we dare not. I don't want to get stoned.

Well, you know, it presents us with a really good opportunity, because right now, I mean, the whole Protestant Church, really, and even the liberal denominations are still talking about this.

It gives us a God -ordained opportunity to talk about this topic, you know, to talk about, well, why did the

Protestant Reformation even have to happen, and what is the gospel, what are the...you know, all these conversations.

So whether we have it this year, next year, I don't care. I mean, we're going to talk about this until the Lord returns. But I think it's just a chance for us to re -declare this, to put the nails back in the door and say, this is what the

Bible teaches about how to come to God. So yeah, I don't know. I'm having fun this year, so I don't want anybody to spoil my fun, you know?

Well, going back to the question about the theological climate of the world prior to the Reformation, or when the

Reformation was just in its genesis, there obviously were proto -reformers before Martin Luther.

You had Hus, who was martyred by the Catholic Church while being still a

Catholic, and you had some division that was more notable before Trent, because obviously there were things that were still debated amongst

Catholics, at least in the scholarly realm, prior to the

Council of Trent putting an end to the debate over certain issues, at least in their their end, in their church, when the

Council of Trent, specifically in response to the Reformation, made those anathemas against us.

What was going on in regard to doctrine and theology in this dark time when

Luther was just really rising up on the scene, which led to his nailing of the 95

Theses? Yeah, so for maybe 100 or 200 years before Luther, there were sort of a bubble in the boiling over where people were starting to reject a lot of the abuses, and as far as the

Pope's reigns were going, they just kept on going farther and farther with their overreach of power. But specifically in Luther's day, you know,

Luther was a German, he was born there, that was his home, and in that time,

Germany was under sort of the heel of the Roman Empire, and they were imposing all kinds of taxes and mandates and things like that.

So in Luther's... after the 95 Theses, you know, after that, right around 15...

I think it was 1521, if my dates are correct, depends with what are known as the Three Treatises.

And these works are really a rejection of the oppression of the overreach of power, basically telling the country of Germany to reject this, and kind of laced in that sort of people's revolution was, look, you know, they're abusing the very tenets of what we know to be

Christian. These are not Christians that are acting this way, this is some kind of something else. And so, you know, really the thrust of it was not...

I don't think that the reason it caught fire so much was as much theological, but in the climate,

I think it was a people's revolution as well, because they recognized that the doctrine bore fruit that was the fruit of abuse and violence and, you know, thieving and things like that.

So they were really rejecting a system that they just were sick and tired of. So, you know,

Luther's part, he was certainly theologically minded, but I don't think we can take our eyes off the fact that there was a people's revolt as well.

And even when people started turning on the magistrates and actually polluting and trying to hurt people, Luther got angry about this and said, this isn't what this is all about.

So it was just gross hostility, really, on all sides, because of just the angst that this system produced.

A bad tree is going to bear bad fruit, and that's what we see happening there. So really, the time was right,

I mean, for Luther to do this. If he had done this 50 years before, he probably wouldn't have survived. He probably would have been murdered, just like the rest of them.

So the time was perfect, really, to have this happen. And the Rev. Buzz Taylor has another comment.

Just as you just said, though, he survived. And I think a lot of the credit for the Reformation being credited to him is because of the fact that he wasn't killed.

So really, a lot of the credit goes to his friends who rescued him so he didn't become a martyr.

And when he wasn't killed, he then proceeded to translate the

Bible into the native tongue, into the German language, to where the common man now had the scriptures as well as the clergy.

And you were talking about Erasmus publishing the Greek New Testament. Well, for people to get the

Bible in German was radical also. When you look at the whole thing, it's almost like reading the book of Esther.

God is behind the whole thing. He's definitely in charge of history.

God is the star of the Reformation. I think we need to not forget that. He used human beings to accomplish this work, but this is his truth, his doctrine, his

Reformation. So yeah, we would do well to not forget that. To your point, you're exactly right.

We have one more question from Tyler in Mastic Beach, Long Island, New York.

Do you find it funny that many Protestants end up bashing John Calvin, who was the greatest theologian since Augustine of Hippo?

Yeah, we laugh the night away hysterically. I think probably a better word might be, do you find it strange, right?

I mean, isn't it odd that John Calvin is so hated? And where you have

Martin Luther outside of Roman Catholicism is more universally looked upon with great favor.

You even have not all, but many Lutherans and other Protestants who despise John Calvin, and it's often a caricature of a fictitious character that doesn't resemble

John Calvin at all. Yeah, I think that one thing that I think we forget is that this body of doctrine,

I said it the last time we talked, but Luther was Calvinistic before Calvin was even a

Christian, and so the body of teaching didn't originate with John Calvin. It originated from the

Scriptures and was worked through in the hands of these men. But I think that what happens a lot of times is that, you know, if we want to reject what we think this doctrine is teaching, implications about salvation, implications about election, implications about the character of God, you know, instead of arguing against Romans 9, which we're not allowed to do, we argue against a person.

We argue against John Calvin because we slapped his name on this doctrine. But again,

I don't frankly care what people think personally about John Calvin. What I want to know is, what do people think about Ephesians chapter 1,

Romans chapter 9, John chapter 6? I mean, we have to deal with the doctrine. I think he's just a scapegoat, and people can easily hate him because he's long gone.

He's not here to defend himself. So yeah, I guess it is strangely ironic, but in the end, this isn't about Pistolas.

It's not about John Calvin, not about Luther. This is about, what does the Bible teach about how does the person get right with God?

If you want to focus on the teachings that John Calvin is known for, at least by those who accurately understand what his teachings were, which were the teachings of the

Scripture, he really took the Reformation to a farther level than Luther did.

And perhaps it's because that is one of the reasons he's so despised by those who are outside of the

Reformed faith, because he further clarified the purity, holiness, righteousness, and majesty and sovereignty of God and the lowliness and wickedness and helplessness and depravity of man to a degree where it is clear that God deserves a hundred percent of the glory from beginning to end for our salvation, where in some of the other

Protestant traditions, those lines are more blurred, are they not? Yeah, I think your answer is better than mine, actually, so I'm going to go with that.

I mean, I think there's a risk here. I think when we celebrate something like this and start putting these guys on t -shirts and banding their quotes around, yeah,

I think we do have to go back to, you know, what does the Bible really teach? And I think that one of the things I love about Calvin, you know, his institutes are fabulous, but I mean, every week

I use his commentary to help me in my study, because he just had a mind that was constantly trained on the

Scripture, and the man was an expositor, and I'm grateful to God not for all of the extraneous stuff people know him to be famous for, but because he was an expositor, and he wanted to teach people what the

Bible says. So, you know, that's really what it comes down to. It comes down to God's teaching,

God's Scripture, his doctrine, and so I think it's an unfortunate consequence that, you know, poor

John Calvin has gotten so much abuse in the last couple years, you know? Well, if you could hold on, I'd like to schedule another interview with you so we could delve back into this book to the actual solas, and perhaps, as I said, put a microscope over them.

And I know that your website for your church is HarvestBibleGilmanton .org,

G -I -L -M -A -N -T -O -N .org, HarvestBibleGilmanton .org. Do you have any other contact information that you care to give?

Yeah, people can follow me on Twitter at Nate Pickowitz. I have a public Facebook page,

Nate Pickowitz, so they can find me on social media, they can find me through the website, but yeah, you know, hit me up, find me on social media, you'll see me there.

Great, and if you want to order the book, go to Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, C -V -B -B -S -dot -com, C -V for Cumberland Valley, B -B -S for BibleBookService .com.

If they don't have it in stock, they will order it for you, and that's Why We're Protestant, an Introduction to the

Five Solas of the Reformation by Nate Pickowitz. God bless you, brother. I thank you so much for being our guest today.

I thank Reverend Buzz Taylor for being my co -host. I thank everybody who listened, especially those who took the time to write in, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater