August 20, 2018 Show with Dr. Thomas J. Nettles on “The Privilege, Promise, Power & Peril of Doctrinal Preaching”

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This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 20th day of August 2018.

I'm delighted to have back on the program an old friend of mine, a returning guest to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

Dr. Thomas J. Nettles is retired now from full -time teaching after 38 years in the classroom, including his most recent post as professor of historical theology at the

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1997 to 2014. Previously, he taught for 21 years at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Mid -American

Baptist Theological Seminary, and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he was professor of church history and chair of the department of church history.

He is an author and editor of a number of books, along with numerous journal articles and scholarly papers, and today we are going to be addressing the privilege, promise, power, and peril of doctrinal preaching.

And it is my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, my friend Dr. Tom Nettles. Thank you very much,

Chris, for having me on. It's always a privilege to be with you. And let me give our listeners our email address.

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Dr. Nettles, you have a long history of teaching and it primarily is focused on the issue of church history.

In fact, that seems to be what you've written on primarily over the years. I love your book,

By His Grace and For His Glory. It is an excellent tool to give,

I think, especially to either non -Calvinistic Baptists and Baptist pastors perhaps who wrongly think that Baptist history is either devoid of Calvinistic influence or it is a very rare stain on the history of Baptists.

According to them, it would be a stain. Obviously, we would not view it that way. And also for those who are

Baptists, who are theologically reformed, who need further encouragement and bolstering in their faith, knowing that they are not alone.

Yeah, I think that's true. It always helps us to know that we're not weird or we're not bringing something into the

Baptist faith that has not been present. The more aware we are that confessionally and biblically that has been a central commitment of Baptists, it strengthens our position and helps our faith and strengthens our preaching,

I think. Yeah, it is quite ironic that the Southern Baptist Convention today is in its majority, of course, many of them wouldn't use the label for themselves

Arminian, but it is in its majority evangelical Arminian or at the very least non -Calvinist.

And yet the history of the Southern Baptist Convention is steeped in Calvinism. In fact, we're not all the founders of the denomination

Calvinists. Yeah, every confession that the Southern Baptists had in their associations,

South Carolina through Virginia and Georgia and Alabama and so forth, all were Calvinist confessions of faith.

They were all built on the Charleston Association Confession, which was pretty much the same as the

Second London Confession of the particular Baptists in England. And that was their theological position without equivocation and virtually without exception of when people became dissatisfied with that confessional stance, normally they found a way to withdraw from the associations with which they had been connected.

And so from the founding of the convention in 1845 up through the first part of the 20th century, all the writings and all the confessional statements were very clearly and thoroughly

Calvinistic. One of the reasons I brought up your expertise in history and that being the primary focus of your studies for what appears to be the entirety of your life as a teacher and professor and author, that you have written this new book that appears to be something that should be written by a homiletics pastor.

The Privilege, Promise, Power and Peril of Doctrinal Preaching. If you could tell us why you, someone known as a historian, made a choice to plunge into this work, this excellent work, and to make it available to pastors and general

Christians alike. Well, I guess one of the truths about most people who teach in Southern Baptist seminaries is that they're sort of glorified preachers.

We teach New Testament and Old Testament and try to get scholarly degrees in that, theology and church history, but the seminaries are established to train men to be preachers in Southern Baptist pulpits, and so we all have convictions about preaching and what it is and what it should be, and that analysis comes from all the different disciplines in which we're involved.

So the New Testament professors try to talk about it from the standpoint of the exegesis of the

New Testament and how that goes into preaching in the same, you'd say, with systematic theology and Old Testament.

And then even the preaching courses, of course, give you a lot of theory but a lot of technique. But in history, one of the things that I've tried to notice and focused on is the impact that preachers have had on developing theology.

It wasn't until maybe the 19th century that you began to have professional theologians, but before that all the theologians in the church were also pastors.

I mean, you start with even Tertullian and Cyprian and Augustine and come up into the

Reformation with Luther and Calvin, and all of these people who made theology what it was were the preachers, and they convinced their flocks of the truth of this, and they developed their confessions of faith for the sake of enhancing the art of preaching and making it more effective for it to have a more effectual impact on those who heard.

So one of the things that I have noticed and that I focused on is the great influence that preachers have had in developing the theological ideas that have become current within any era of church history.

So this is not right outside the parameters of what I teach. I focus on people within it that I teach things about in church history, but have just given a fairly precise focus to the development of a particular aspect of doctrinal preaching.

I hope to get through all the four P's of preaching. In fact, the publisher of this work,

Free Grace Press, has nicknamed the book the four P's of preaching, even though that's not the official title.

But let's start with the privilege of preaching. It's an interesting aspect of the title because we have all heard about pastors, even in recent days, who have been caught or exposed in sins that would make them no longer eligible to hold the office of a pastor or preacher, at least for a season, if not for the remainder of their lives, depending upon the personalities, have acted as if the church, the body of Christ, and even

God needs them. They act as if it is their right to be a preacher, that we would not exist without them, or we would not continue our course in a safe path, in a biblical path, or an educated path, without their assistance.

They act as if this is not a privilege, but a right. But if you could tell us why you use that term in your title.

Yeah, well, I like that question, and I like the application you've made of it, even in the question, because it is true that we don't come and bring to God our talents and think that he is pretty blessed to have us on his side, which is what some of us have thought at times, that the kingdom couldn't do away, couldn't go along without us, and if we will just devote our talents to those things, then the kingdom will be much better off.

That shows a tremendous misinformation about who we are, and certainly a misapplication of the doctrine of sin.

The whole idea of privilege has to do with the entire enterprise of the Christian gospel as one of grace.

It's not one that we have earned. It's not one we deserve. Our worship of him is not something that comes by grace.

It is a very sober duty. Every person owes all of their worship to God, because he is infinitely excellent, but our hearts are turned away from him, and he is not incomplete at all without our being his worshipers, and so the restoration to worship is in itself a grace and in itself a tremendous privilege to be called as children of God, and then to be among those who are called upon and gifted by God to give an express call to sinners to repent of sin and have faith in Christ, to describe the cross, to describe the gospel, to describe the way in which

God restores sinners to himself, to assure people that if they come to him, he will in no wise cast them out.

All of these things arise from pure grace, infinite mercy, and so the call to be a

Christian, the call to worship, is one of great privilege and grace, and certainly the call to proclaim the gospel is a tremendous grace.

It's something that is bestowed by God and should be treasured as such.

It's not something that we should ever be flippant about. It's not something we should be careless with.

It's a very delicate thing because of the qualifications and because of the content, and so we have to approach it, first of all,

I think, as a great privilege to be entrusted with all these truths that we are to proclaim.

We don't add any luster to them. In fact, we struggle to find adequate ways to express the glory of them, and it is a high calling and a great privilege to be involved in that specific calling.

Now, what do you think, from the biblical data, of course, are the qualifications for one to be a preacher?

Because obviously someone who is not a pastor or elder or even a deacon in their church may, with the approval of their congregation, preach.

I, for instance, have been invited a number of times and am on a list of people in the church who has been requested to preach at a men's shelter in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the

Bethesda mission, and I have preached there, I would say, three times at least, and have another preaching engagement on my calendar for them.

I am not a pastor. I'm not even an elder. Of course, I believe, actually, that those are the same office.

Perhaps you agree. I don't know. But I'm not a deacon either. But obviously, there is not an identical requirement for one to be a pastor as it is to be someone who preaches, although I think that a preacher should not do so without the approval or request of his own elders.

But if you could. Yeah. Well, I think that we have examples in the book of Acts, of course, of the entire church.

When it was scattered, they went everywhere speaking the gospel. And so for Laman to be able to go into certain situations and speak the gospel is not at all outside the parameters of what we see practiced in the

New Testament. When we come to the epistles, though, that set forth the qualifications for those who are to be set aside as elders, as Paul told

Hinoth, you know, set aside people as elders. He told Timothy qualifications of those who were to be elders.

And we recognize that a person who is to be a pastor of a congregation, who is to be with them day in and day out, or as Paul told

Timothy, in season and out of season, there are specific qualifications that he has.

It seems that the sort of the two functional or the two maybe intellectual or doctrinal qualifications are one, he has to be apt to teach.

There has to be an aptness in his natural capacities and in the giftedness that the

Spirit has given him to be able to teach, to do exposition of Scripture, to apply it in a proper way, to understand the way that one part of it relates to the other, to be able to present a synthesis of ideas in a way that is truthful and meaningful at the same time.

And then the other qualifications all have to do with character. He must not be a brawler.

He must be a person who manages household well. He must be a person who can refute people, but who is not argumentative by nature.

So there are certain qualifications, but that doesn't mean that there cannot be people who are not pastors that are nevertheless called on certain occasions to preach.

Do you think perhaps that they should have all the qualifications for a pastor biblically, except for the fact that they may not have a call from God to be a pastor for that specific office?

I'm talking about somebody who's just a layperson, for lack of a better term, preaching. Yeah, I'm slow about this because I think that there are certain qualifications that a pastor has that a layperson does not have.

That doesn't mean that a layperson is not able to teach and not able to communicate truth, but there is a spiritual giftedness.

When a person is called to be a pastor of a church, God gives him a gift.

He gives him a desire for this that cannot be satisfied short of being a pastor.

He gives him an increasingly powerful sense of the worthiness of this call and the worthiness of the gospel itself.

Now, I think those who are not called to ministry should have that same sense of the worthiness of the gospel, but they don't have that drivenness to give their lives to this in a given situation.

So that's why I'm hesitant to say they must have the same qualifications, but just not have a call, because I think the call to pastoral ministry by the

Spirit of God and the gifting to that by the Spirit of God is a gift of God to the church.

Ephesians 4 talks about gifts, and it says he's given some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and then some to be pastor -teachers.

The one there that I think is the ongoing gift is the pastor -teacher, and he is the one who is to be equipping the saints to do the work of the ministry, to be continually teaching so that they all come into unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the

Son of God. So a layman who may have an aptness to teach and may have a real desire to see the gospel go forth may not have, in fact does not have, that sense of call to give his life to the training of the people so that they come into unity in Christ.

So there is that element of the giftedness of the Christ of the church that has to do with the pastor -teacher that is not common among all the people of God.

Right, and I'm assuming though it would be unwise for a group of elders or a congregation to approve of someone to publicly preach if there was scandal going on under their roof, or if there were other things that violated the requirements of a pastor, even though this person was not intending to be a pastor, was not desirous of being a pastor, but was called for the task of preaching.

There are still primary things involved in one's requirements to be a pastor that I think wouldn't apply for anyone representing

Christ's church publicly. Yes, I would agree with that. That's just a part of not being an embarrassment to the gospel, not being set forth as someone who carries the gospel message not only in word but in heart.

There are certain discretionary things I think should be used by every church before they point out someone as capable of making a public proclamation of the word even if they're not a pastor.

Now this question has come up from time to time in the past. I'm fairly certain you would agree with me in my convictions of complementarianism that men solely are to be leaders in the church and they are the leaders of their household, but obviously wives are to be leaders over their children as well.

Men and women share leadership in the household, but a wife is still submissive to her husband.

But at the same time, even amongst complementarians, there are divisions that come up where some might say that a woman, as long as she is preaching exclusively to women, if their audience is designed to be solely female, like if it's a woman's conference or a woman has a ministry to other women in prison, and you could go on and on with the settings that would be exclusively women.

Would you say that a woman at those events and in those venues is permitted to preach to other women?

And if not, what would you call it if she is exhorting and if she is bringing a biblical message to those women gathered there?

Yeah. Well, let's start with the easy one. First of all, yeah, I'm a full complementarian, and I think that there is straightforward, clear scripture in which women are not allowed to be the pastor -teacher.

I think the passage in 1 Timothy is very clear about that. He's talking about qualifications for elders or bishops and says he does not allow a woman to hold that position in the church.

And of course, he doesn't allow all men because he goes on to give specific qualifications as to the kind of men that are to be done too.

Now, in a prison ministry, for example, I'm involved in a prison ministry here, and we have a woman's prison and a woman's jail ministry.

And in a situation like that, we have women who are very good Bible teachers, and they have a classroom setting where they sit down with them and they teach them the

Bible. I don't think that that is the same thing as serving as a pastor or exerting authority over a man.

That is something that's a necessary function, because even the laws of the states would not allow men in that capacity.

Really? Yeah, I mean, I don't know, at least in our county jail.

I really haven't examined it, but I'm just working under the assumption that the women in the county jail, they would not have a man go in to the cell, to the room where they are to teach the

Bible. We have women that do that. I may be wrong about that.

Well, that may be legally different from county to county and state to state anyway. Right, yeah. So, I don't know, this is something that's really, really aggravated right now in a lot of different circles.

And even, as you pointed out, there are complementarians who are seeking to define very carefully and parse with great detail what it is to preach and to serve as a pastor.

And I personally think that any time the church is gathered as a worshiping congregation, that that is the time when the person who is the pastor or a man who is set aside should do that.

I don't think that that is the time for a woman to be doing the teaching ministry, even if, supposedly, if she's doing it under the authority of the elders of the church or with the permission of the pastor.

It is an authoritative teaching position, and I don't see that as a legitimate exercise for a woman.

Now, I know that to say that, you can be accused of misogyny nowadays and be apologizing to everyone, but I think that's just a biblical conviction.

It doesn't arise out of any devaluation of the raw talent of many women in teaching.

It is an implication, in my mind, of exactly what Scripture says about when Paul said,

I do not allow a woman to teach or to have authority over a man.

And any time you're in a situation where the church is gathered together and the word is proclaimed from the pulpit, that is a time of teaching and authority.

And Paul specifically prohibits women from having that. Now, how would you distinguish teaching from preaching?

And I know that preaching is always teaching, or should I say there is always teaching involved in preaching, but they are not necessarily the same thing.

Well, as you have said, preaching always involves teaching. You can't do any preaching unless you're teaching.

You can't preach things that you have not deduced from the text and you're not making affirmations about the truthfulness of that text and seeking to give information to those who hear that will expand their knowledge, expand their understanding, expand the cognitive breadth of their knowledge of Scripture.

And then with application and with seeking means of reaching the affections, knowing that only the

Holy Spirit finally does that. And so preaching involves all of that. Teaching, to me, is not a lot different except that teaching can be a dialogic.

Teaching can involve a time when you stop and you let people ask questions and you can even permit a challenge to some idea and seek to sort it out.

The dialogic aspect is something that goes along with teaching, whereas I view preaching as sort of an unchallenged presentation of truth that is not a time of dialogue and not a time of challenge.

Now, a pastor needs to be open afterwards to hear questions and to have people ask him about certain things he may or may not have said.

He certainly is open to criticism from his elders or perhaps a group that is supposed to make sure there's purity in the pulpit within a church, and he should always be answerable to them.

But in the time of worship, in the time of the actual presentation, I view preaching as sort of an unchallenged setting forth of the propositions of Scripture.

And one thing that I'd like to ask you about the title before we move on to the promised power and peril of preaching, the subtitle, or it's actually a part of the title itself, of doctrinal preaching.

And if you could tell me why you specified doctrinal preaching, you added that word or should

I say you included that word doctrinal in the title, if you could tell us why. Yeah, well,

I view all preaching as doctrinal preaching. If you're not given doctrine, you're not preaching.

It's because preaching is the proclamation of the truth of God. It is taking that which has been revealed to us, which we could not know in any other way, and setting it forth in credible propositions and syntheses, making application of it in relevant ways, urging the people both to believe it and to act according to it.

And so every time we set forth a proposition from Scripture, it is doctrine.

In fact, the Puritans, I don't know of any Puritan sermons at all that do not have a brief exposition at the first of a passage of Scripture, and then out of that they deduce a doctrine.

They set forth what is the doctrine of this sermon, and then they go about applying the doctrines showing the various uses of it and all of its applications to the rest of Scripture.

And so I call it doctrinal preaching because, on the one hand, I believe all preaching is doctrinal.

Even very weak and terrible preaching is doctrinal, because anytime someone stands with a sense of authority, and there are those who are hearing him to receive instruction, their worldviews are going to be formed by that.

If it's very weak on doctrine, or even has erroneous doctrine, nevertheless it's doctrinal preaching.

It's teaching people to think in a certain way. And, of course, when we get into it later and we talk about the peril of doctrinal preaching, that's going to be the point that I make, that preaching has this perilous aspect to it also because of the very status that God himself has given to preaching.

And when people hear preachers that are preaching wrong doctrine, preaching vacuous issues, or preaching in a way that does not instruct them in godliness, then they are learning things about God and about themselves and about their actions in the world that are not consistent with the truth, but it still is a doctrine.

And so I include the word doctrinal simply to emphasize that all preaching is doctrinal, and what

I'm calling for is a very self -conscious knowledge of and application of doctrine to the way we do exposition of Scripture.

We have to go to our first break right now. If anybody would like to join us on the air, 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, at least your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal private matter. I have a request.

I'm going to have to rely upon honesty here, but we are giving away copies of this book, a limited number of course, to those who write in questions.

This book that I am speaking about, of course, is The Privilege, Promise, Power, and Peril of Doctrinal Preaching by Dr.

Thomas J. Nettles, our guest today. I am saying that I need to trust your honesty here because we're only going to actually mail the books to those who are either pastors and preachers themselves, or if they promise to give it to a pastor or preacher or seminary student, somebody who is actually going to be at some point preaching and is going to be using the book for that reason.

So you can ask a question, regardless of who you are, you can ask a

Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or an Atheist, or a

Swedenborginist, but if you want the book, please only give me your mailing address to receive the book if indeed you are a preacher, a pastor, or intend, or should

I say promise, to give it to one who is a preacher or pastor. But we're going to our first break right now, and don't go away, we'll be right back with Dr.

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We are now back with our guest today, Dr. Tom Nettles. We are discussing his book,

The Privilege, Promise, Power, and Peril of Doctrinal Preaching. If you have a question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Also, I have an announcement. If anyone knows of anyone who is an egalitarian or so -called

Christian feminist who would like to have a debate on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio with a complementarian,

I would love to use this program as a venue at some point to have a debate on that subject since it does divide the body of Christ.

There is a dear sister in Christ with whom I strongly disagree on this issue, Cheryl Schatz, because of her health situation.

She is a cancer survivor and she cannot physically, in her opinion, do an adequate job these days.

She would have loved to have done it before this cancer invaded her life, but if you know of anybody that you'd like to recommend, send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com,

c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com. Well, we do have some listeners who have questions for you.

First of all, we have Chris in Runnels, Iowa, and Chris says, thank you for discussing this vital topic of preaching today.

I would like to hear Dr. Nettles' take on how doctrinal preaching and expositional preaching go hand in hand and whether they can also be mutually exclusive, meaning can doctrinal preaching be non -expositional and can expositional preaching be non -doctrinal?

I think you already answered that last question as far as any preaching being non -doctrinal,

Dr. Nettles. Also, if you have time, how do we preach doctrinally in a culture where most people have a two -second attention span?

Yeah, well, those are good questions, and that really is right at the heart of what

I'm trying to get at. As I've mentioned, that overall there is no such thing as preaching that's not doctrinal preaching.

It's either done poorly or it's done well. It gives a false worldview or a true worldview, and then there's a whole spectrum in between as to how that is handled in preaching.

I think that there is a tendency today, because of many of the advances that we've made in understanding language and literary style and how different books in the

Bible differ from one another and all that sort of thing, and some of the more perhaps detailed ways of looking at biblical theology, that there's a theology of Matthew and a theology of Mark, a theology of Luke, and we don't want to reject the good advances that are made in those kinds of things, but it has tended to fragment our understanding of the

Bible as a whole, that there is one message in the Bible. There's a covenantal framework to the

Bible that is carried on throughout from Genesis all the way to Revelation, and this appears within different styles of literature.

It appears within historical narratives and in poetry, and it appears then with this rapid exposition of the new covenant that comes in with the time of Christ and then the apostolic age.

And so we tend to forget that there is an overall doctrinal continuity that is occurring within Scripture, and my conviction is it's not wrong to bring in, when you're dealing with an

Old Testament text, for example, if you were dealing with something like 2

Timothy 23, where David's last words, when he talks about the covenant that is firm and sure and that sort of thing, it would not be wrong to bring in the idea that David is talking about the covenant that was made with him, that one would sit on his throne forever, that out of his house would come the

Messiah, the Anointed One, and to preach a Christocentric message out of that.

I think our best exposition is done of individual passages when we see how those passages relate to the entire corpus of Scripture.

We have to do our exposition carefully so that every person is learning what this text means in its context, but then we also have to show why that text is in the

Bible that is eventually leading us to Christ and his atoning work and the establishing of his people.

If we have not tied a text into that overall doctrinal framework, then we have not allowed the text to say what

God intends it to say by having it there in the first place. And so I think that doctrine always helps our exposition, and if we are doing real thorough exposition, then we will see the doctrinal sinews that give a strength to that text in light of the whole body of Scripture.

So that's the way I see the relationship between exposition and doctrine. The more doctrine a person knows, the more confessionally aware he is, the more he has a complete framework of the doctrines of Scripture in his mind,

I think that this is going to serve him as a hermeneutical tool for his preaching.

He's going to be able to see all the different parts that constitute the big doctrines of Scripture.

And so it's a balance between those two ideas, letting that text speak, doing the work, all the grammatical work, the syntactical work of how that text, what it means in itself, in its immediate context, but then also how does it contribute to the entire corpus of Scripture in setting forth all the big doctrines that lead us to see the glory of Christ in the

Gospel. Great. Well, thank you, Chris. And as I said, if you are either a preacher or pastor yourself or intend to give it to one, let me know in an email confirming that fact, and we will send you a free copy of The Privilege, Promise, Power, and Peril of Preaching.

Thanks to our friends at Free Grace Press, and also thanks to our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com,

who will actually physically be shipping the book out to you if indeed you are giving it to a pastor or are one yourself.

Let's see here, we have Gordy in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and Gordy has already told us that he plans to give this book to one of his pastors.

He has two questions, actually. Can and should passion in a sermon be

Christ? Oh, wait a minute, I think I have to enlarge this because I think that that was a cut -off sentence.

Here it is. Can and should passion in a sermon be calculated, or should it strictly flow naturally from a man of God, enthralled with and focused on the glory of Christ?

So, can passion be calculated, or should it flow naturally? Yeah, I guess there are some preachers who have been accused of using theatrics or putting on a show, but sometimes it might be that they do because they may be, by nature, very introverted and quiet people.

Maybe they have to in some way force themselves to be more powerful and passionate when they preach, but if you could, that's one of two questions he has.

Yeah, okay, it depends on what you mean by calculated.

Now, if a person doesn't love the gospel and he just tries to work up a froth, even though he doesn't love the gospel, then it's going to come across dead.

There's going to be no edification. Everyone can see that. That's not the kind of calculation that we need to have in seeking to reach the affections.

Certainly, a person who has been a beneficiary of the gospel, who sees the glory of Christ and the nature of the atonement and the purpose

God has to let us come into his presence and be conformed to the image of Christ, there is something that is deeply moving about that that is just intrinsic to the way that we begin to talk and preach, and so it just flows out of an ongoing sense of love for the gospel we have.

So that should always be present. If a person doesn't have that, he shouldn't be preaching. But preaching is also something in which every preacher theorizes about how he wants to reach the people to whom he's preaching.

Edwards was greatly criticized for the rhetoric that he used in speaking about hell or in speaking about sin and the filthiness of human beings.

Whitefield was criticized because of the passion with which he preached. Some people calculate not to be too emotional.

They calculate simply to be like lecturers in a classroom, to just say, one, two, three, four, five, six, two, and if the spirit wants to use it, then that's fine, but he's not going to try to reach the emotions or the affections.

And so there are theories that people have about preaching, and you can calculate to do one or the other without it being insincere.

Edwards said that he wanted to do everything that he possibly could to reach the affections of his hearers, provided it did not go beyond what the actual truth was.

And he has lots of lines in which he talks about how if hell is as bad as it is, he would be very thankful to someone for them to let him know precisely what dire circumstances he was going to be in if he ended up going to hell.

So there is a calculation that we can make that is based upon the nature of the subject matter.

Now, if we really believe it, it's not going to be insincere. It's not going to be contrived, but there is a certain purpose we need to have in our preaching that we are really going to seek to find ways of applying this.

We're going to seek illustrations. We're going to seek maybe even certain rhetorical devices that we use to do as much as humanly possible to reach the affections of the people, because that is the point at which conversion comes.

It comes in the alteration of the affections. Now, clearly, we can't convert them. We can't do that.

That's something that immediately comes from the Spirit of God. But the preacher is supposed to do those things that are consistent with the actual change that occurs when a person is converted.

So that has to do with the setting forth of cognitive understanding as much as possible in any sermon, and then with the implications this has for his eternity and the implications it has for the alteration of affections that must take place in true saving of faith.

So the idea of calculating, if it's just dead and not sincere, no, don't do it.

But by calculation, we mean actually thinking about the implications of something and deciding how it is we want to use this message to seek to create an impression about the glory of Christ or about the horror of hell or about the filthiness of sin, then

I think those are things that we do need to think about, and we do need to seek to implement in our preaching.

Gordy's second question is, David W. Wanders asserted that it is against this backdrop of revivalism that Edward's pastoral concern must be seen.

He was a heart, a pastor. He was at heart a pastor. Part of being a faithful pastor is being a faithful preacher.

Please share how Edward's balanced these two roles. Well, he's asking the question about one of my favorite people.

In fact, I'm going to be teaching a course in Edward this semester. I've been working today on a lecture for my class tomorrow, and his question reveals that he's got a pretty good grasp of Edward's also.

Yeah, Edward was a pastor, and he spent all of his time thinking about how he could reach his people with the truth and all of his philosophical thinking and all of his miscellaneous and all of the investigations of the affections and his doctrinal schemes of writing out in detail the doctrines and all the connections.

All of this was to improve his preaching, and so he was a pastor who saw basically his chief pastoral role as preaching.

That was the point at which most man -hours were involved. That's the point at which everyone was there.

If someone would seek him out for counsel, he was ready. It's amazing the number of people he actually counseled with individually.

You read his accounts after the first Great Awakening and the numbers of people he counseled with and all the different cases he knew about and how he was able to talk about so many different ways in which people respond to truth.

You know that he was not someone who isolated himself from his people and from individual times of counseling, but that time that was spent to the greatest value was when he had the entire congregation together.

He could speak to all of them at the same time. The number of man -hours involved in that is actually tremendous, and so that is the point at which he wanted to make sure that he was pressing upon the consciences of his people the truth of Scripture.

I've been reading through his parable on the virgins, that some were prepared and some were not prepared, and the way he applies those texts, the way he goes into the discussion of Christ and the

Church, and the Church being Christ's spouse, and all that that involves, and the labors that he gave to application of those things, and the amount of time he spent in just crafting sentences and crafting words and in expanding his understanding of the relationships of the husband to the wife and applying them to Christ's relationship with Church, it is just amazing what

Edwards did. And so all of his energies were given to this task of being a preacher, because that was the time in which he was the most effective pastor for his people.

Well, thank you, Gordy. You have won a free copy of The Privilege, Promise, Power, and Peril of Doctrinal Preaching by our guest

Dr. Thomas J. Nettles. Since you live in Mechanicsburg and you live so close to the Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service on North Hanover Street in Carlisle, please swing by there at your convenience later this week.

It is already there, or I should say the copies that we're giving away are already there, so you can swing by and pick it up.

Just tell them that you are Gordy from Mechanicsburg, who won a free copy of the program on Iron Sherpa's Iron Radio.

And we have a question. Let me see what time it is, because we may have to go to our midway break.

Oh, we do have to go to our midway break. We're going to go to our midway break right now, and before we do that, we'll remind you of our email address, and we'll get to you after the break, our listener

Brandon. We'll get to you after the break, so don't be too concerned. Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please, as always, give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA, and please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. That's chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

Don't go away. We'll be right back. This is our elongated break. I just wanted to let you know this is a longer than normal break, because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1

FM in Lake City, Florida, requires of us a longer break, because they air their own commercials and public service announcements during this break, so please use this time to write down questions for Dr.

Nettles, and also write down the information provided by our advertisers, so that you can successfully patronize them.

Don't go away. We'll be right back after these messages from our sponsors. Chris Arnzen, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio here.

I want to tell you about a man I have personally known for many years. His name is Dan Buttafuoco.

Dan is a personal injury and medical malpractice lawyer, but not the type that typically comes to mind.

Dan cares about people and is a theologian himself. Recently, he wrote a book titled

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Dan also has a master's degree in theology. Dan handles serious injury and medical malpractice cases in all 50 states.

He represents many Christians in serious injury matters all over the country. Dan is an exceptional trial lawyer.

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Dan Buttafuoco's number is 1 -800 -669 -4878. 1 -800 -669 -4878.

Or email me for Dan's contact information at chrisarnson at gmail .com.

That's chrisarnson at gmail .com. Charles Haddon Spurgeon once said,

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Hi, Phil Johnson here. I'm executive director of John MacArthur's media ministry, Grace To You, and I'm also an occasional guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

So, I'm delighted that from January 17th through the 19th, my friend Chris Arnzen and I will be heading down to Atlanta for the

G3 Conference, where I'll be joining James White, Steve Lawson, Votie Baucom, Mark Dever, Conrad Mbewe, Todd Friel, Josh Bice, and a host of other speakers to address the topic of biblical understanding of missions.

Chris Arnzen and I hope to see you all at this very important conference. Make sure you stop by the

Iron Sharpens Iron exhibitors booth to say hi to Chris. For more details, go to g3conference .com.

That's g3conference .com. See you there. Paul wrote to the church at Galatia, for am

I now seeking the approval of man or of God, or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man,

I would not be a servant of Christ. Hi, I'm Mark Lukens, pastor of Providence Baptist Church. We are a

Reformed Baptist Church, and we hold to the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689. We are in Norfolk, Massachusetts, and we strive to reflect

Paul's mindset to be much more concerned with how God views what we say and what we do than how men view these things.

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

We believe by God's grace that we are called to demonstrate love and compassion to our fellow man, and to be vessels of Christ's mercy to a lost and hurting community around us, and to build up the body of in truth and love.

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

You can call us at 508 -528 -5750, that's 508 -528 -5750, or go to our website to email us, listen to past sermons, worship songs, or watch our

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

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

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. In business ethics, contact me,

Mike Gallagher, financial consultant at 717 -254 -6433.

Again, 717 -254 -6433 to learn more about the

Thriving Difference. We were made to thrive.

Listening to Christian radio can be a big gamble spiritually. Even many of the major Christian networks that include excellent, biblically faithful teachers on their lineup, sadly often also include the worst of doctrinally dangerous heretics.

If you are a lover of the doctrines of sovereign grace, you need not fear listening 24 hours a day to firstloveradio .org.

They feature Christ -centered programming from Reformed pastors and teachers you can rely upon for theological soundness and biblical faithfulness, such as Dr.

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firstloveradio .org also live streams my Iron Sharpens Iron Radio program daily.

Please stick around on firstloveradio .org after Iron Sharpens Iron Radio is over to continue being blessed by the unwavering proclamation of the gospel of sovereign grace.

Spread the word about firstloveradio .org. Lynnbrook Baptist Church on 225

Earl Avenue in Lynnbrook, Long Island is teaching God's timeless truths in the 21st century. Our church is far more than a

Sunday worship service. It's a place of learning where the scriptures are studied and the preaching of the gospel is clear and relevant.

It's like a gym where one can exercise their faith through community involvement. It's like a hospital for wounded souls where one can find compassionate people and healing.

We're a diverse family of all ages enthusiastically serving our Lord Jesus Christ in fellowship, play, and together.

Hi, I'm Pastor Bob Walderman and I invite you to come and join us here at Lynnbrook Baptist Church and see all that a church can be.

Call Lynnbrook Baptist at 516 -599 -9402, that's 516 -599 -9402, or visit lynnbrookbaptist .org,

that's lynnbrookbaptist .org. Welcome back, this is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours with about an hour to go is

Dr. Thomas J. Nettles. We are discussing his book, The Privilege, Promise, Power, and Peril of Preaching.

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

We are giving away a limited number of copies of the book that we are discussing today, compliments of our friends at Free Grace Press and also compliments of our friends at cvbbs .com,

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, but these are reserved only for either pastors and preachers or for those who promise to give their copy to a pastor or preacher or seminary student, somebody who's actually going to be using the book for preaching.

So we have to obviously rely on your honesty for this, so please be honest as you always should be.

Before we return to Dr. Nettles, we just have a few announcements for special events that are coming up that you need to know about.

First of all, I have arranged a couple of events in Jacksonville, Florida that I hope that you join me in attending.

The first is being held at the Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in Jacksonville, Florida.

It's their Jacksonville campus, and they are having an event featuring my dear friend Dr. James R.

White of Alpha Omega Ministries and his dear friend Dr. Michael L. Brown of the

FIRE School for Ministry and also the Line of Fire radio program. They are going to be both lecturing on the theme,

A House Mended, Christian Unity in a Culture of Outrage. That's going to be

Friday night, September 7th at 6 30 p .m. at the Jacksonville, Florida campus of Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary.

For more details, go to SwitzerlandCommunityChurch .org. That's SwitzerlandCommunityChurch .org.

They are co -sponsoring this event with Iron Trip and Zion Radio. Then, the following night,

Dr. White and Dr. Brown are teaming up once again, this time for a debate.

They are debating two homosexuals who are ordained ministers and professing

Christians. The debate theme is, Is Homosexuality Consistent with New Testament Obedience?

That's Saturday night, September 8th at 6 30 p .m. at the Switzerland Community Church in Switzerland, Florida.

Once again, for more information, go to SwitzerlandCommunityChurch .org, SwitzerlandCommunityChurch .org.

Then, coming up in November on the 9th and the 10th, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is having their conference known as the

Quaker Town Conference on Reform Theology. The theme is, The Glory of the Cross, and the speakers include

David Garner, Ray Ortland, Richard Phillips, Timothy Gibson, and Carlton Wynn. That's November 9th and the 10th at the

Grace Bible Fellowship Church in Quaker Town, Pennsylvania. For more details, go to AllianceNet .org,

AllianceNet .org. And then, coming up in January, from January 17th through the 19th, that's

Thursday, January 17th, through Saturday, January 19th, the G3 Conference returns to Atlanta, Georgia, more specifically,

College Park, Georgia, at the Georgia International Convention Center. I will be there, Manning, in an

Iron Sherpa's Iron Radio booth for my third year in a row. I love being there. It is one of my favorite of all conferences of all time.

They are expecting between 4 ,000 and 5 ,000 people to be there. The theme is, The Mission of God, A Biblical Understanding of Missions.

Keep in mind, for your Spanish -speaking and bilingual friends, there is an exclusively Spanish edition of the conference on Wednesday, January 16th, so you might want to tell them about that.

But, as far as the English conference is concerned, the speakers include Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, John Piper, Stephen Lawson, Votie Baucom, Mark Dever, Conrad M.

Bayway, Tim Challies, Phil Johnson, whose voice you just heard advertising this event.

He is the Executive Director of John MacArthur's Grace to You ministry. Josh Bice, who is the founder of the

G3 conference. And we have Todd Friel of Wretched TV and Wretched Radio.

David Miller, who is a brother who endorsed this book that we're discussing today,

The Privilege, Promise, Power, and Peril of Doctrinal Preaching. He is a phenomenal preacher himself.

Jeremy Volo, a good friend of mine who pastors in Texas. Dr. Stephen J.

Nichols, who is the President of Reformation Bible College, the college founded by the late R .C.

Sproul and Ligonier Ministries. And the list goes on and on. It's a very long roster of impressive names.

If you would like to register not only to be an attendee of this event, but also to register for an exhibitor's booth, just like I will have, to have your business or ministry present in a crowd of between 4 ,000 and 5 ,000 people, then go to g3conference .com,

g3conference .com. And please tell all of these organizations that you heard about them from Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

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So I have lists of biblically faithful churches globally. If you're having a hard time, I can help you find a church.

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click support, then click, click to donate now, and you can donate instantly the debit or credit card. If you want to advertise with us, we would love to help you launch an ad campaign as long as whatever it is you're promoting is not somehow militating against what we believe here.

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and put advertising in the subject line. And you could also use that email address to send in a question to our guest.

That's Dr. Thomas J. Nettles. That's chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

And please, as always, give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside the

USA. By the way, this is a reminder to listeners that send in questions frequently.

Please always include your city and state or country of residence, even if you've written to me a million times.

I don't have that great of a memory. I'm not going to be able to remember where you're from, necessarily. So when you send in a question, we like to give an idea to our listeners of the breadth of our audience as far as where our listeners are from.

So please always include your city, state, and country of residence, unless you're writing in anonymously.

Now we will go to our listener in Franklinton, North Carolina. That is

Brandon. And Brandon says, I may be wrong in my assessment of most preaching today, and I am open to correction, but it seems to me that the focus has shifted from what is being preached to how it is being preached.

I do not mean to dismiss the importance of delivery and preaching and passion, but it seems we've lost our focus.

There's a sense in which preaching has become more of a performance than a communication of God's truth.

Could you ask Dr. Nettles if he agrees with this assessment? If so, how do we get there or get here?

Other than this book on this topic, are there men from history we can go to for guidance on this issue?

And that's Brandon in Franklinton, North Carolina. Yeah, well,

I would not be any kind of expert on what's going on across the whole country.

There are five or six preachers I listen to regularly, and I listen to those that edify me. And so I don't find them being people who are more interested in performance and method than in content.

I find each of the ones that I listen to to be quite adept in their delivery, interesting in their delivery.

They're able to maintain attention. They have a degree of passion that is genuine and sincere that I think is consistent with the message they're giving, but they're loaded with content.

Now, I know from just sort of going through television or radio, listening now and then, that there's a lot of histrionics out there that is not backed up with sufficient content.

And so if the brother, Brandon, who's asked the question is having a problem with someone who actually is more interested in the method of delivery than in the content, then

I'm afraid that he'll be able to find someone that is more edifying. I think that it is a temptation, though, for a person who is regularly before a large group of people to develop a selfish desire to be known as someone who is attractive as a speaker, who has voice qualities that are pleasant, who has an entertaining way of thinking.

He knows exactly when to put in a funny story. Sometimes even he'll put in a joke that may be unrelated because he knows people will laugh because he thinks that they're unable to listen with great attention.

And so there is that temptation that goes along with regularly being in front of people.

That's why the pastor must always be very sober in his understanding of what he's doing.

He must realize that he is being charged before God. If he would,

I think, read carefully what Timothy told, what Paul told

Timothy when he said, I charge you before God and the Lord Jesus who will judge the living and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom.

Preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort with all long -suffering and teaching.

If he realizes that that is the audience he has primarily, the

Lord Jesus who will judge the living and the dead and by his appearing in his kingdom, that will put a sobriety in one's preaching.

That will have a tremendous effect of disciplining of the way in which he preaches and making sure that the content is honor scripture and honors the

Lord Jesus. So there is a mentality with which a person can approach preaching that may be more audience -centered on the one hand and that will lead to the kind of entertainment value that he may want to present or is more

God -centered with the souls of people at stake that will make him operate in a different way.

And that has to make room for the different types of gifts and personalities people have.

But nevertheless, those understandings of who we're trying to please in our preaching has to be foremost as a matter of governing our delivery and our content.

So yeah, I think it's a serious matter and every time we preach we have to look at all of those motivational factors and content factors in order to honor the

Lord in what we do. Yes, and not everybody views theatrical, that adjective, in the same way.

For instance, someone might not view a pastor that is speaking like a motivational speaker or like a secular counselor, which

I've seen many modern speakers do because they think that that is what, in fact perhaps they're correct, that that is what a modern audience prefers.

But I think it's just as wrong if you are doing anything that takes away from the awe and reverence and urgency and power of the gospel of Jesus Christ by using a methodology that lessens those things or even avoids those things.

We need to be preaching to people knowing that many of them are going to be spending an eternity in hell.

We need to be warning them about this and we need to be rejoicing over the fact that we have been provided a remedy from this sin that is sending us to an eternity in hell and that is the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Am I right? I don't see how you could possibly be wrong, Chris. Well, some might say that the manner in which you tell people the facts of the gospel is not really important, but I disagree with that.

Oh, and that's what we were getting at a while ago when I was talking about Edwards and how he complained about the way he preached.

He said he wanted to do everything he can to reach the affections of his people so long as it didn't go beyond what the actual truth was, and he thinks that the most irrational thing for a person to do is to be very apparently unconcerned and low -key and almost disinterested when he's talking to people about their eternal soul and about the wrath of God and about the glories of Christ.

How can you be disinterested and dispassionate in something like that? He thinks that is a very irrational way of preaching.

And so, yeah, we have to be governed by the content and by what's at stake. I know that we have to know who we have and we can't sort of...

Spurgeon hardly ever preached more than 40 minutes. He said once you get beyond that, people simply can't hear and you do more harm than good, and so he recognized that we still are people that were in our bodily frames and we're frail children of dust and feeble as frail.

And so we have to be governed somewhat by the nature of the people to whom we are speaking, but the main governing thing is the text.

We have to make sure that we understand the text, that we go back to the text, that we want to communicate that text as it is a part of the whole context of the doctrine of Scripture, and we must exhaust ourselves in making sure that our people who hear that know what that text is, what that text means, and what that text says about God and what it says about them, what it says about eternity, and what it requires of them.

And so the governing thing in our sermon is not necessarily, first and foremost, the capacities of the people to whom we're speaking, but the demands of the text itself.

Now you mentioned something about Edwards, that he was being criticized for, did you say, pouring too much passion into his sermons?

Is that what you were saying? Yep. The thing that surprises me about that, and perhaps this is because sinners in the hands of an angry

God was a unique circumstance, but I had heard that he read the sermon from a piece of paper, or pages of paper, and he did not exert any passion in the message, and read it very deadpan, for lack of a better term.

Is that true, with that sermon at least, that he did read it in that fashion? Well, I've read those reports and all, and it comes from a description that Samuel Hopkins gives, but the description

Samuel Hopkins gives is, I think, misinterpreted frequently. Edwards knew he wasn't

Whitefield, and Edwards did have manuscripts, and he followed his manuscripts, but he also, his theory of preaching called for a deep involvement of the soul, of the preacher, and in his work, some thoughts concerning the revival, he has a major section which he talks about how people have complained about the exuberance of the preachers, and the fact that they tend to be engaging the affections of the people, and trying to gain emotional responses, and things like that, and Edwards goes into a long defense of that, and he seems to be defending himself, because he's writing this right after he had preached sinners in the hands of an angry

God, and criticisms began to come about that. So, I think that Edwards has been misrepresented somewhat in his manner of delivery.

In fact, he points to the prophets, he goes to Ezekiel, and to Jeremiah, and the places where they said

God told them to raise your hand, and raise your voice, and stomp your foot, and so forth, and he quotes those as instructions that God gave to the prophets in order to indicate the earnestness with which they were preaching their messages.

And I have a section in this book on the preaching of Jonathan Edwards, that's one of the first chapters in it, and I do talk about that particular reality.

It's a section on the theory, Edwards' theory of doctrinal preaching.

And I have a section called Stomping and Shouting. Hopkins says, he says, as he wrote out his sermons at large for many years, and always wrote a considerable part of most of his public discourses, so he carried his notes into the desk with him, and read the most of what he had wrote.

Yet he was not so confined to his notes which he had wrote at large, but that if some thoughts were suggested while he was speaking, which did not occur when writing, and appeared to him pertinent and striking, he would deliver them.

And that with his great propriety and fluency, and oftener with greater pathos, and attended with a more sensible, good effect on his hearers than all he had wrote, though as has been observed, he was wont to read so considerable a part of what he delivered.

Yet he was far from thinking this the best way of preaching in general, and looked upon using his notes so much as he did a deficiency and an infirmity, and in the latter part of his life was inclined to think that it had been better if he had never accustomed himself to use his notes at all.

And so his theory of preaching was one in which you should try to be free of your notes, you should engage your audience with all the pathos that the content calls for, and he himself defended that kind of preaching in his work on thoughts concerning the

Revival. Well, thank you very much. And now we go on to our next listener,

Angela in Poplar, Wisconsin. And once again, Angela, let us know if you are intending to give a copy of this book to your pastor.

The Privilege, Promise, Power and Peril of Doctrinal Preaching by our guest, Thomas J. Nettles. Angela says,

How providential that after being recommended to Dr. Nettles twice recently,

I saw the advertisement on Facebook for Iron Sharp and Zion Radio. Of course, either of you are welcome to answer my question.

I am wondering about the book referenced by Leonard Van Duren, and it is

The Reformers and Their Stepchildren. And she says,

More specifically, I am wondering about his claims regarding the

Donatists during the early centuries of Christianity. Verduin claims that they opposed civil involvement in the church and were opposed to taking up arms.

However, others have said that they merely curried the favor of the state and even asked for their involvement in taking up arms against their enemies.

I am wondering if it is possible to say which view is correct, or whether people have merely interpreted various events about the

Donatists in different ways. Unfortunately, this book was developed from lectures Verduin had given, and this section of the book is not well documented, which is the difficulty and the concern.

I do believe that the majority of the book, as it relates to the various Anabaptist groups and the Magisterial Reformers, is accurate and much more well documented.

I do believe that it can be determined that the Anabaptists were derogatorily labeled

Donatists due to the thinking passed down through the centuries about the group. But I am not positive that the original

Donatists were actually Orthodox. On the whole, I am not speaking of exceptions or cultic splinter groups.

I love the book, but I do not want to recommend this section if it is not accurate. I have heard very good things about this book.

Perhaps some of our Paedo -Baptist friends would not be as eager to promote it. But it is interesting,

Verduin was a Paedo -Baptist, and my friend James White heartily recommends it.

I do not know if he agrees with everything in it, but he does heartily recommend it. What are your thoughts on the book, and if you could comment on our listeners' questions about it?

Yeah, well just briefly, it was one of the books that I had in a seminar when

I was going to Southwestern Seminary, and my professor recommended it. We re -read it in class, and it was interesting to me also that it was written by someone who was in one of the

Reform denominations, was a Paedo -Baptist, but he was seeking to give what he thought was a more credible view of the historical background of many of the accusations that were made against the

Anabaptists. And I liked the book. I thought that it overall was accurate. I thought that it was transparent in the way he held to things.

We have to admit that these groups that had turned out to be noted as heretical by the state church, many of their writings were burned.

It's very difficult sometimes to come up with as many primary sources as we would like. That's the reason why you don't have as many on the

Donutists as you may have on some others simply because of the destruction of material.

But what I know about them is that they were not interested in the government forwarding their movement at all.

In fact, they were the ones who resisted the idea that Augustine was actually saying the emperor should come in and should use the sword against the

Donutists to make them conform to the church. The Donutists had separated because they did not like the way in which the ordination of ministers had been done and that they were allowing people who had actually denied the faith during certain times of persecution to perform these ordinations.

They felt that that was something that was not consistent with what a faithful call to ministry was, and so they had separated from the church on that basis.

They existed from the time of Cyprian up to the time of Augustine, and by that time he was fed up with their separatism.

My impression of them is that they were really wanting to have a pure church, a believer's church, that they thought that the use of governmental power was something that would in itself pervert the church, and so they were opposed to the intervention of the government in church affairs.

That's my impression, but I mean, as I say, it's been a while since I read that book, and as much documentation as you would like might not be available.

And would you agree that the Anabaptists have been sadly broad -brushed as one monolithic group when they had many different—there were, and in fact even still are—many different types of Anabaptists, those who have been labeled

Anabaptists against their wishes or those who welcomed the label. There are differences.

There are some that were anarchists. There were some that were polygamists. There were some that were very biblically orthodox in many respects.

So it's not one group of monolithic people. Right. Yeah. Yeah, and the book

The Radical Reformation by Williams goes into real detail on all the different groups that there were there, and it can probably be reduced to about three different types of Anabaptists, and then under each of those types are several different groups, but there are the rationalists who made man's reason as the final source of authority, and among those you have the

Sassanians and some others. There were the Spiritists who made the immediate operations of the

Holy Spirit the final source of authority, and it's under that that you have some of the anarchists and you have some of the polygamists and so forth.

And then you have those that really were true heirs of the Reformation, believing in the principle of sola scriptura and a non -sacramental understanding of salvation, and they emerged mainly out of the

Reformation with Zwingli, and so they're the biblical Anabaptists, and among those developed the

Amish and the Mennonites and some of the

Hutterites, and so they had some little quirky things they did, but they were seeking to make the

Bible their final source of authority. So yeah, it's a very complex thing to deal with the

Anabaptists and with all the various accusations that came against them, but there, as you've indicated,

Chris, there were certain central biblical doctrines that the biblical Anabaptists adopted that were good and healthy and their emphasis on missions and regenerate church membership and the separation of church and state and a believer's baptism, all of these things eventually became tremendously effective within the whole development of ecclesiology in Western society and even in political theory.

It is really amazing how this persecuted group and their views of separation of church and state and liberty of conscience eventually became leavened that had a tremendous impact upon the perceptions of so much of even political theory in Western society.

Well, thank you, Angela, in Poplar, Wisconsin. Please let us know whether or not you intend to give the book to your pastor or a pastor that you know or a seminary student or somebody who preaches, and we will then ship it out to you, or should

I say that Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com, will ship it out to you. And we thank, once again,

Free Grace Press for providing us with the free copies of this book.

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We are now back with our remaining 15 minutes of the show today with Dr. Thomas J.

Nettles on his book, The Privilege, Promise, Power, and Peril of Preaching. Dr. Nettles, if you could, let us know about what you mean by the promise of preaching.

Well, the promise is that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. There has to be a cognitive aspect to any conversion, every advance in spiritual life, every bit of sanctification.

Everything comes in accord with the revelatory truth that is in Scripture. And what the preacher can do is set forth that truth, set it forth in as convincing a way as possible with the promise that God will not allow

His Word to return void. And so, to the degree that we distrust the efficacy of the

Word of God, distrust the truthfulness of it, to that degree we're going to be ineffective as preachers.

Now, we don't say that there is in the Scripture itself the transforming power that only the

Holy Spirit has, but we do say that it is only the truth of the Scripture that is inspired by the

Spirit that is the same truth the Spirit uses to bring about the change in a person that is conversion.

So, Peter talks about that we were born again not through perishable seed but through imperishable.

And there he's talking about the Holy Spirit's operation.

But then he says that we were born not of corruptible seed but incorruptible through the

Word of God which lives and abides forever. And so the incorruptible seed, or the

Spirit, uses the Word of God to bring about the conversion of people and the transformation of people.

So it is in that that is the promise. If we think that we're going to add something to the Word of God or be more clever than the

Word of God or that our stories or anecdotes are going to somehow have a more transforming effect than the exposition of truth, then we're just deluded.

So the promise is that which is the truth of Scripture itself that is used by the

Spirit to perform His purposes. And now let's move on to what you mean by the power of doctrinal preaching.

Well, God has chosen through the foolishness of what we preach to save those who believe.

He doesn't do it in a vacuum. There are some preachers of fame who came to the position that people could be converted without ever hearing the

Bible if they were sincere in their own religion. I don't think the Bible gives us any view of that.

It is insistent that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. That where the

Word of God is absent, then there is no power for conversion.

And again, not that the Bible itself, in the sense that many people, like within the Church of Christ, may have.

They say, but it is the promise that this is the book, this is the truth, that the Spirit uses to bring about salvation.

So God will accomplish His purpose through His Word. And if a man wants to be a powerful preacher, it will not come through native ability.

It will not come through his rhetorical expertise, though that may be a good thing to try to develop.

But it will come in accordance with the exposition of passages of Scripture and of the holistic doctrinal truth that is present in Scripture.

That's where the power is. Now, it just went over my head for a second what you were speaking of in regard to the

Church of Christ, if you could repeat that, I'm sorry. Well, there was a movement in the 19th century led by Alexander Campbell in which he really doubted the emphasis that there was on the

Holy Spirit and the necessity of the Spirit bringing about conversion and regeneration. And he talked about that the

Bible itself is the power, that our only understanding of conversion is that if we give assent to the propositions of Scripture, that is saving faith.

If we assent to the proposition, Jesus is Lord, that's saving faith. And if we obey the command to be baptized, then that is the act of faith.

And so he made the power of the Word just an assent to its propositions.

Whereas I'm saying that the power of the Word is in the intention of the Spirit to use it because he has revealed it.

It is the preaching of the Word of God that is necessary, but it is only by the application by the

Spirit that it actually becomes effectual. I think this is exactly what Paul is talking about in 1

Thessalonians when he says that he knows their election of God because our gospel did not come to you in word only, but also in power and in the

Holy Spirit and in much assurance. So he was looking for the preaching of the

Word to be accompanied by power, not coming in word only, but in the power of the

Holy Spirit. Yes, and of course in the 21st century especially, the churches known as the

Church of Christ, the Campbellite movement, of course they don't use that phrase themselves, the

Restorationist movement they use. Today they are not monolithic, and they probably never were really monolithic, but they are far less monolithic today.

Right. And you have a wide range today of going from liberal to cultic, and you even have some that you could barely distinguish from your average evangelical church.

And believe it or not, I don't know if you have, but I've met, they are a minority, but I've met some sovereign grace believing ministers in the

Church of Christ. Yes, obviously, and I'm certain not to offend anyone because as you say there is a massive variety.

And right here in Louisville, Kentucky, we have probably the largest churches we have that do tremendous evangelical work are

Christian churches, which are also a part of the Campbellite movement. I was talking about the particular theology of Alexander Campbell during the first part of the 19th century where he was very specific in denying the doctrines of the

Philadelphia Confession of Faith and denying that regeneration precedes repentance and faith, but regeneration is simply the mind believing.

And that's a part of my theme of this book, is the peril of doctrine is when a doctrine goes wrong, the impact that it has on the entire, all the spectrum of other doctrines.

And I selected the doctrine of the will as it began to be changed during the time of Finney and how

Finney's impact on making the human will autonomous and it being the governing factor of the success of gospel preaching, denying the bondage of the will and denying the necessity of regeneration as the only thing that would produce repentance and faith.

He argues that the human will has resident within it the power to genuinely repent of sin, the power to believe savingly in Christ.

And he argued that from a very strong doctrinal standpoint. And that view just sort of flowed out into the rest of 19th century theology and became quite dominant and prominent so that what we observe today is the triumph of the human will.

You could even have a chapter on Joel Osteen where he sounds in the final pages of his books like he's giving an evangelistic invitation simply based upon the power of a person to pray this prayer and be saved when his book has absolutely no gospel doctrine in it at all.

Absolutely devoid of anything. Which heretical book by him are you talking about?

Well, I read two of them entirely. One of the hardest things I ever read. Your best life now, perhaps?

You can, you will is one of them. Let's see.

I've forgotten the name of the other one. That's all right. We don't expect to find any pearls of biblical wisdom in there.

I don't recommend it. As John MacArthur very aptly put it, if your best life is now, that means you're going to hell.

Yeah, that's right. If you can't take it logically and consistently without coming to that conclusion.

Well, let's go to the peril now of preaching before we run out of time. Yeah, well, my point there is that once you shift the doctrine, if you're even a strong doctrinal preacher like Charles Finney was, and yet you're opposing a biblical doctrine, and his understanding of repentance and faith as it relates to the human will, he developed it in a powerful doctrinal way, and he was a very clear, energetic doctrinal preacher, but he set himself against Edwards, against some of the leading points.

And against the Bible. Yeah, and that affected

Moody, it affected Billy Sunday, and it affected Billy Graham, and it became pervasive within evangelicalism.

Now, some of his doctrines didn't make it. And I'm glad. Like, he denied substitutionary atonement, he denied justification by faith by the imputed righteousness of Christ.

So there were other quirks that Finney had that didn't quite make it into evangelicalism.

But it was his arguments on the nature of the human will that did. And so I think that that is something that has had a tremendous impact on the purity of the

Church, on the nature of the preaching of the Church, and is that which has led to much of the sheer foolishness that we have in so many popular prosperity type preachers today.

Yes, and Jerry Johnson, actually, I don't know if you would agree with Jerry, but from what

I have read from Finney, I think he was accurate. He said that Finney was a monergist, not in a good way, believing that salvation is of the

Lord, but in the opposite way, that salvation is solely of man. Yes, that's a good characterization.

Yes, and we have time for one more listener. We have John in Bangor, Maine, who says that,

I know that there is a strong strain of hyper -Calvinism amongst the primitive Baptists, and I am also acknowledging that the primitive

Baptists today are a very small sect, but I think it is worthy to research their beliefs, so that we who believe in the doctrines of sovereign grace don't repeat the same errors that they teach, and of course

I do not intend to broad brush. But it seems to me that the preaching of the

Gospel, according to the primitive Baptists, since they completely remove man's will in any way, shape, or form, being a factor in the person becoming a born -again believer, that the preaching is not used of God to bring forth life from dead sinners, but is merely used to comfort the sheep.

Is this an accurate description of the predominant thread amongst them, and is this not a danger that we who believe in Calvinism, or reform theology, or sovereign grace must avoid at all costs?

Yeah, well that's a very good question, and the point is not that we need to emphasize freedom of the will, but the point that we need to emphasize is that our bondage to the will does not in any sense diminish our duty.

That's where the primitive Baptists went wrong in adopting hyper -Calvinism. As they said, if you do not have the ability, then you do not have the duty.

And so they do not admonish their people to repent of sin and to believe the gospel.

They don't preach that it is their duty to do so, even though they cannot, because their duty is to believe everything that God has said.

The gospel is that which restores us to righteousness. The gospel is that which says that Christ himself has obeyed the law, and there is a righteousness to be had in him.

And so the gospel is not a denial in any sense of the duty of our standing right before God according to a perfect obedience to the law.

It is just that Christ himself is the only one who has done it, both in its penalty and in its merit through obedience.

And so we can't fall into the trap of not preaching that it is the duty that we have to do everything we can to seek to know

Christ and to believe the gospel. That's the point at which I think the primitive Baptists have gone wrong.

Right, I think that they wrongly equate predestination and election with regeneration and justification and other aspects of salvation, because obviously our will had nothing at all to do with our being predestined or elected, but does not

God use as his means, his tool, the preaching of the gospel to regenerate the souls of the lost and those who are dead in their sin?

Absolutely, sure. Well, we are out of time. I want to make sure that our listeners have all the information they need to know in regard to getting this book.

You can get this book, The Privilege, Promise, Power, and Peril of Doctrinal Preaching from our sponsors,

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com, cv for Cumberland Valley, bbs for BibleBookService .com.

And by the way, if you order $50 or more worth of merchandise from them and mention Iron Shepherd's Iron Radio, you will get free shipping on the entire order and you will also receive a free book by Stuart Scott, From Pride to Humility.

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Do you have any other contact information or websites that you care to share? Me? Yes.

You're not talking to anybody else, are you? I'm talking to you, brother. Oh, well, no,

I don't. Okay. I just appreciate you having me on. I have no other things to give.

Yes, well, he is retired from his position at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, so you cannot contact him through there anymore.

Yes, I can. You can. Oh, you can. I'm a senior professor. I still have an email account.

Oh, okay. And would they get that from sbts .edu? That's right.

TNettles at sbts .edu. Okay, great. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Nettles, for being our guest today.

I look forward to you coming back on the show. In fact, we shouldn't wait so long to have you come back. I hope you come on frequently in the future.

And I want to thank everybody who listened today, especially those who took the time to write in questions. And I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater