November 26, 2025 Show with Col. John Eidsmoe and Mary Huffman on “Who Really Were the Pilgrims?”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris 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 Wednesday on this Thanksgiving Day Eve, November 26, 2025.

I am absolutely thrilled to have a returning guest and a first-time guest, and we're going to be discussing a very appropriate theme being Thanksgiving Eve. Who really were the pilgrims, and do we owe a debt of gratitude to the Synod of Dort for the Thanksgiving holiday?

And to discuss this today, first of all, let me introduce a returning guest, Col. John Eidsmo, author of numerous books, an ordained minister in the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations, and director of the executive board of the Plymouth Rock Foundation.

It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Col. John Eidsmo.

It's such an honor to be with you and to bring a guest with me here, but what a work you do in sharing the Word of God and the principles of the Word with people throughout the world like you're doing, and it's just my privilege to be with you today.

Oh, it's my honor and privilege to have you back, and we also have joining us for the very first time Mary Huffman, the world's leading expert on the music of the pilgrims. She's also editor of the Pilgrim Psalter and secretary for the Plymouth Rock Foundation, and it's a joy to have you joining us for the very first time, Mary Huffman.

Thank you so much. It's a privilege to be here. I've listened to your program several times, and I appreciate what you do. I'm grateful to be here.

And please pass on my warm regards to my very dear friends, Joe and Becky Moorcraft of the Heritage Presbyterian Church in Cumming, Georgia.

I certainly will.

Well, first of all, Colonel Idesmo, please let our listeners know something about the Plymouth Rock Foundation.

The Plymouth Rock Foundation has been in existence for about probably four or five decades. It was founded by a New England cranberry farmer who had been very successful and really appreciated the New England heritage, John Talcott, and working with him was a man named Russ Walton and also Charles Wolfe.

But they've all passed away, and so the leadership of the foundation has rested with Dr. Paul Jaley, who I believe you know.

Yes, I've had another program to debunk Bill O 'Reilly's book, Killing the Witches.

And anyway, so we work together in the foundation, and a good way to learn more about the foundation would be to go to our website. The website is PlymouthRock .org, that's P-L-Y-M-R-O-C-K .org.

And I have a book here that I'll show you that Paul Jaley wrote. It's titled Journey of Faith. It's a very concise account of the pilgrim journey here and the things that happened to them while they were on the journey and while they were here and ultimately with the Thanksgiving feast.

And there is a narrative version of this that Mary and another member of the board and I have done together here. It should be out very shortly. And the other person that joined this was David Bradford, who is a direct descendant of William Bradford.

Mary, is that 12th generation?

I believe so, yes.

I usually said it wrong. But anyway, David has been a wonderful addition to the board as well. But the purpose of the foundation is to preserve and promote the vision of the pilgrims, which is the Christian and biblical vision, not only in their views of theology, their views of music, but also in their views of law and government.

And I'm sure we'll get into that a lot more. We have nine members of the board and that includes Mary. It also includes her brother, John. And John has been a wonderful addition as well. I'm going to say one thing about the Huffmans, if I may here, and that's that their father, Gary Huffman, is a Reformed Baptist pastor in Belleville, Illinois.

And I met him and his wife for the first time about probably nine or 10 years ago at a homeschool conference. And they were interested in the Oak Brook College of Law, where they teach constitutional law.

And one of their sons, Stephen Huffman, ended up going to Oak Brook, graduated summa cum laude. Only wanted his class to do so. And then went to work as a staff attorney for the first justice and then the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, Justice Tom Parker.

And so they are a remarkable family and just a privilege to be their friends and to work with them in so many things. Mary and I also are at Woodland Presbyterian Church. That's a PCA church where I serve as pastor and where Mary serves as organist.

I think I can say director of music.

And it is quite fascinating that you are a free Lutheran and yet you pastor a PCA church.

Well, we both believe in the inerrancy of the word of God. We believe in the five solas of the Reformation, you know, sola scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, sola Christus, and sola de gloria. We are close on the vast majority of things.

In fact, when Luther's assistant Melanchthon drafted the altered Augsburg Confession, you know, Luther was pretty much responsible for the Augsburg Confession. But Melanchthon, his chief lieutenant and kind of his successor, hoped that Lutherans and Calvinists could join together.

And so he made some alterations in it. And Calvin signed the altered Augsburg Confession. So they're not as distant as a lot of people might think.

Yes, well, the brethren that usually make a very big deal about our differences, in my experience, are my Missouri Synod Lutheran friends.

Well, we live in the shadow of the Missouri Synod in many ways. And I'm on the board of Lutherans for Life as well. And the Missouri Synod is the backbone of Lutherans for Life. But yes, we share their conservative theology.

And the free Lutherans are probably a little broader than they are in some ways. We practice open communion. They practice usually closed communion. And I say open communion. If we knew somebody was a heretic or an unbeliever or living a flagrantly immoral lifestyle, we would not let them take communion.

But other than that, we take the admonition in Corinthians to let each one examine himself, meaning that the person is to examine himself rather than us doing the examining for him. So we are a little broader in some ways in Missouri.

But as far as our theology, we are every bit as conservative and probably more so.

Well, I hope a friend of mine is listening who happens to be in your denomination, at least the denomination of your ordination, Will Cole, who is pastor of a free Lutheran congregation in Perry County, Pennsylvania.

And to be specific, it's St. Matthew Lutheran Church in Millerstown, Pennsylvania. And he attends the vast majority of my annual, biannual, free pastor's luncheons that I hold at the Church of the Living Christ in Lloydsville, Pennsylvania.

And he, God willing, will be at the next one on March 5th, 2026, featuring the great Reformed Baptist pastor from Zambia, Africa, Dr. Conrad Mbewe. But I'll be talking about that a little later in my announcements.

And we have, as I've already announced, Mary Huffman. Tell us about the Psalter Company, Mary.

The Psalter Company is a company that my brothers and I put together when I published the Pilgrim Psalter back in 2021. This was a project I did for the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrim arrival in the New World, and just reprinted the Psalter the Pilgrims used and sang from.

We also carry with our company the Scottish Psalter of 1650. So you can find historical psalters there on our website, psaltercompany .com.

Great. In fact, I'm going to, right off the bat, play a recording of you. And is that your brother singing with you in this recording?

Yes, that's me, my younger brother, Stephen, and his wife, Anna.

And this is a recording of the doxology. And Mary happens to be the world's leading expert on the music of the Pilgrims. And I thought it'd be appropriate to play this for us, to get the ball rolling in our conversation about the Pilgrims here today.

So here we go with Psalm 100.

Shout to Jehovah, all the earth Surround me, Jehovah, with gladness Before Him come with singing birth Know that Jehovah, He God is It's He that made us and not we His folk and sheep of His feeding. All with confession enter ye His gates, His courtyards with praising Confess to Him, bless ye His name.

Because Jehovah, He God is His mercy ever is the same And His faith unto all ages.

Hallelujah. I introduced that as the doxology, and what I meant was Psalm 100 sung to the melody of the standard doxology, but it could be very well used as a doxology at the conclusion of a worship service.

And was that partially in Dutch, or what was the language there?

That's the English language. We were trying to imitate, in part, the Pilgrim dialect that lengthened the ah sound for Jehovah, and they would stretch out the syllables in a word that ended in T-I-O-N, for example.

Instead of saying nation, you would say nation. And they had a slightly different dialect. They would often lengthen also the past tense, the E-D endings. They would pronounce them all, even if, like walked, they would say walk-ed.

So we were just trying to imitate that as closely as possible, since that's the way they would have sung it.

Yes. Well, I thought that was quite beautiful. Colonel John Eidsmo, why don't you give us an introduction to who the Pilgrims actually were? In fact, I think my flub earlier was very telling when I said Puritans, because they often are erroneously used interchangeably, I believe.

But tell us about the Pilgrims.

They are used interchangeably sometimes, and they're not that different, but they are distinct. And, for example, in the 1619 Project, which received a Pulitzer Prize, but one of the things, one of the many errors that the journalists who put together this 1619 Project did, they said that the Puritans came over on the Mayflower in 1620.

And because you don't believe there is such a thing as objective truth, then why do little things like that matter? But in England, you know, the Roman Catholic Church had been dominant in England for, well, probably since about the time of Alfred or even well before Alfred, actually, until it comes time for the Reformation.

And then you have King Henry VIII. Now, Henry VIII, pretty hard to say that he was a true Protestant. In fact, he wrote a tract refuting Luther on a number of doctrines. And for that tract, the Pope gave him the Defender of the Faith Medal.

But he broke away from the Roman Catholic Church, not for doctrinal reasons. He broke away from the Catholic Church because the Pope would not recognize a divorce or separation or annulment from his wife, Catherine of Aragon, so he could marry Anne Boleyn.

It wasn't over doctrinal issues at all. In fact, I put it this way. You know, sometimes in conservative politics, we talk about Republicans who are Republican in name only and don't really think or vote like Republicans.

What do we call them?

Reino.

Reinos. Well, I've said that Henry VIII was a Prino, a Protestant in name only. But anyway, one of his successors, Mary, Bloody Mary, was terrible. She was trying to bring back Catholicism. Elizabeth came along, and Elizabeth, she was a good monarch in many ways, not in all ways.

But with the Settlement Act, her desire then was to bring all of the Christians in England under one umbrella. And if you'd be under the Church of England, you could be free to embrace more Catholic doctrines or more Reform doctrines or a lot of things in between, but you had to be under that umbrella.

And so, within that umbrella, as we move into the 1600s, we find that there is a group of people that are called the Puritans. They are strict Calvinists, and they believe that the Church of England is not Protestant enough, it is not Calvinist enough, it's too lax on doctrine, morality, other issues like this.

And so, they were engaged in a battle to purify the Church of England. But then there's another group that we call them the Separatists. And I call them Separatists because they hadn't pilgrimed yet. They hadn't traveled.

So, in England at this time, they were known as the Separatists or the Dissenters. And their theology would be almost identical to that of the Puritans. And the assessment of the Church of England would be almost identical.

But as far as what to do about it, they said, don't try to purify the Church of England. That's a lost cause. We need to separate from it. And so, they faced persecution in ways that even the Puritans did not.

The Puritans were engaged in political and legal and theological and sometimes even military battles against the Anglicans who controlled the throne. And the Puritans controlled the Parliament much of this time.

But the Separatists had very little power. Along comes a boy by the name of William Bradford. And Bradford is so important to this whole movement. In fact, his work, The History of Plymouth Plantation, really is our primary source of information about the pilgrims or dissenters.

And it's an excellent work. We have it for sale on the Plymouth Rock Foundation's website. You can go to our store there. But Bradford had quite an unfortunate childhood in so many ways, and yet it was providential.

His father died when he was an infant. I mean, his father died when William was an infant, not when his father was an infant. But his mother remarried when he was four, and then she died when he was seven.

His grandfather died around that same time, so he was raised by uncles and raised out in rural areas where everybody else his age would be out working on the farms. But William couldn't do that because he was sickly.

Sounds terrible, but actually it was providential. Because William spent his time indoors reading the Bible, reading other works of theology. And as he studied theology, as he studied the Bible, he came to learn about this group nearby that were calling themselves the dissenters or separatists.

He attended some of their meetings. There was a man by the name of William Brewster there, an elder there, who befriended him and took him under his wing and had many discussions with him about the Bible and theology.

Bradford says by the time he was 17, he was a thorough separatist. But anyway, this group was finding themselves persecuted by the Crown and by the Church of England. They were not allowed to work at their chosen occupations.

Many times they would have property confiscated. They were not allowed to meet. So if they met and they met illegally, in which case they would be arrested or fined. And King James is so concerned about this.

In fact, James was concerned partly because of their style of church organization, that they did not believe in bishops and popes and so on. And James insisted no bishop, no king. What he meant by this is that he, as the king with divine right of kings, received his authority from God through the church.

And so if we do away with the bishop, that does away with the authority of the king. And so he was just adamant that we have got to crush this movement. And he said, I will make them conform or I will harry them out of the land.

And so the Cograms decided that they would have to leave England. They first went to the Netherlands. And there in the Netherlands, they found a greater religious freedom. There was a toleration act adopted there.

And the Netherlands had become a Protestant country after a war with Spain. And they were in a truthful Spain at the time. And so things were in some ways better there than in England, but not completely.

They too were, even though they were allowed to meet, because their theology was at least Calvinist, they weren't really part of the reformed church, and so they didn't have the full privileges. But as a result of all of this, they finally decided they had to leave the Netherlands.

One of the big reasons is this 12-year truce with Spain was about to end in 1621. And they weren't pacifists. This wasn't their war, and so they didn't want to be part of it. So 1620, they went back to England with the intent of migrating to America.

Maybe I should pause at that point and let you carry on the questions further.

The Pilgrims, the Separatists, and the Reformation Context

Well, I think this would be a good time to go to our first commercial break. When we come back, you can finish up anything you'd like to say about that point. And then I want to go to Mary to have a further dialogue on the worship of the pilgrims.

And if anybody would like to join us, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence, if you live outside the USA.

God bless you, and we'll look forward to hearing from you after these messages.

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That's royaldiadem .com, royaldiadem .com. Please mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. And we were just discussing the differences between the Separatists and the Puritans, and John, from what you were saying before we went to the break, the heart of the disagreement appeared to be ecclesiastical areas of church government that today might even be deemed as trivial by many.

Not completely. There are still people who are very staunch and serious about their ecclesiastical differences and liturgical differences. It actually reminded me of the Church of England's persecution of the Covenanter Presbyterians who denied or refused to worship with the Book of Common Prayer, if I'm not mistaken.

But anyway, if you could pick up from there.

And of course, with the Covenanters, you have the national issue of Scotland versus England, which is always a rivalry in addition. But yes, that's essentially correct. The differences are more theological, too.

The Church of England claimed to be Calvinist, but it was so loose about it that you could be very un-Calvinist and still be part of the Church of England so long as you'd accept the authority of the Church of England, including the king, or in some cases the queen, as being its head.

But yes, you're correct on that, that some of the differences are the use of the Book of Common Prayer, the church hierarchy organization, the Anglican or Church of England was very much a hierarchical church with the king as the head.

The Puritans were congregational, in other words, the autonomy of each local congregation. Then the Presbyterians, the Covenanters, they'd be more government-by-church synods. So that was part of it, and that wasn't just a matter of how we decided to organize things.

That was certainly also a matter of how the Bible says the church is to be organized. But another issue would concern the use of the Bible they would choose to use, and the Pilgrims particularly used the Geneva Bible.

And the Geneva Bible, one edition of it came out in 1599, and the King James Bible came out a little bit later than that. King James did not like the Geneva Bible. King James, by the way, was quite a scholar himself.

He was a Greek scholar, but he, of course, didn't translate the King James Bible. But what he probably didn't realize is the team of translators that he had for it, they took close to 20 of its verbatim from the Geneva Bible that the Pilgrims used.

Now, another thing about the Geneva Bible is that in addition to I'm just going to show you the text here. In addition to the text of the scripture itself, it also has many footnotes. And these footnotes, many of them are very anti-monarchy and pro-Republican government, and King James could not tolerate that at all.

So that led to King James. But the Pilgrims, when they came over to America, they used the Geneva Bible.

Interesting. So they were kind of like Geneva Bible onlyists before they were King James onlyists.

Yeah, I think you could say that. I'm not sure what they would say about other texts. I think they'd probably say that other texts are the word of God to the extent that they reflect the original manuscripts.

But the one that best reflects those original manuscripts was the Geneva Bible. And I think they would further say that their notes that the Geneva Bible had were very valuable. But they're very valuable and they would hate to part from those.

And they're valuable to read even today.

Now, were the separatists reasonably united and monolithic, or were there differences? Like, for instance, were there Baptists among the separatists, or at least those that were Credo Baptists believing in believer baptism by immersion only and so on?

I'll give you my opinion, and then I'm going to ask Mary if she'd like to join in on this. Mary is from the Reformed Baptist denomination, and she might have some information on this that I don't.

I knew I liked Mary for some reason.

Pardon me?

I said I knew I liked Mary for some reason. You just said she was a Reformed Baptist.

Well, anyway, there are other reasons to like her as well.

But, God, I just interrupted you.

The particular group, the ones we call the screwy separatists, they would, I'd say, be very united in what they would believe. And they would not be Baptists. And as they came to the Netherlands, that's one of the reasons they could be accepted there more, because they were Calvinist.

But as far as Baptists being among them, of course, we have Roger Williams coming among the Puritans in America, but not that I know of. Mary, could you expound on that further?

I did research that question fairly recently, and I couldn't find any Credo Baptists amongst the pilgrims. They had so recently come out of the Church of England, which was Credo Baptists. I think they just hadn't tackled that one yet.

As far as I can find, that's the case. They were all Credo Baptists.

And I don't know if you've finished in your overall summary of what the separation of the separatists was due to. But if you have pretty much completed that, I'd like to hear more about the worship and have Mary introduce a description of that.

Are you fairly complete with that description, John?

As far as the things that led to the separation, yes. And then one thing we probably need to mention, too, is that if they're coming to America, how are they going to get here? They're going to have to have a ship, but they don't have a ship.

They don't have money to buy a ship. And so they have to make arrangements with some financiers, a group called the Merchant Adventurers. And they're called Adventurers not because they went on adventures, but because they use venture capital.

And they saw colonies in North America as places where raw materials could be produced, lumber and furs and crops and fish and so on. And so they saw this as something that could be very profitable for them.

So they were willing to stake the pilgrims on this voyage. But in return for this, they wanted a return on the investment. And that's going to come into some real problems. One in particular is right at the last minute before they leave, the Merchant Adventurers put in a new stipulation.

They thought they'd have exclusive fishing rights. And when that didn't materialize, King James didn't grant them. Then they said, OK, well, then we're going to have to have you have all things in common and live as a communal experiment.

No private plots of land, no private ownership and so on. That way, you approve your profits and have more to send over to us. That's going to become more of a contentious issue as they get to America.

But with that, I think we can leave that aside and go to pilgrim worship.

All right, Mary, tell us about that worship. I'm wondering, due to the selection of music that you recorded that you shared with me to play today, if the pilgrims were exclusive psalmists. And I'm assuming that they were because from my own study of worship in the church, Protestants almost universally, except for the Lutherans, were exclusive psalmists and also exclusive a cappella worshipers all the way up until the 19th century.

A lot of people don't realize that. But if you could tell us about the pilgrim worship.

Yes, that's correct. What comes as a surprise to many people and was a surprise to me when I first started researching it was just how fresh the Reformation was at the time of the pilgrims. Some of the pilgrims lives overlapped with some of the reformers.

And so they follow very much in the Reformation tradition as far as their worship. The centrality of the word, the spoken written word, not visuals and images, but the centrality of the word was very important to them.

And also the congregational participation in the worship, especially in the music. That was something that was not so in the Roman Catholic Church. The music was not congregationally participatory. So that you see very strongly in the pilgrims worship service.

It consisted of just the simple elements of prayer and giving of thanks, then lengthy scripture reading, then singing the Psalms. And you're right, they were Psalm-inclusivists and a cappella only. And then there would be the sermon followed by more singing of Psalms.

And after that, they would administer the sacraments being the Lord's table and baptism whenever there might be a candidate. And then they would take a collection. That was a very simple worship service.

It was lengthy, could be two to three hours. Their reading of scripture was long. Their singing of Psalms was long. Their sermons were long. They prized that time because it had been so long denied them under the Roman Catholic Church.