June 14, 2018 Show with Steve Martin on “Confessionalism vs. Minimalism”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister

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George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now, here's our host, Chris Arnton. Good afternoon,

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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.

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This is Chris Arnton, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 14th day of June 2018.

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I'm delighted to have as a returning guest today Steve Martin, who is the coordinator of the

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Association of Reformed Baptist Churches of America, also known as ARBCA, and he's the

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Dean of Students at the new IRBS Theological Seminary, if you're wondering what

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IRBS stands for, that stands for the Institute for Reformed Baptist Studies, which was until recently a separate institution of higher learning and now has become officially

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IRBS Theological Seminary in Mansfield, Texas, with classes beginning,

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God willing, in the fall of this year. And today Steve is going to be addressing confessionalism versus minimalism, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Steve Martin.

02:13

Well thank you very much Chris, you're a gracious man, and I'm not sure it's an honor to meet with me, but I consider it a privilege to meet with you.

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Well I do consider it an honor and a privilege. And before we go on to our discussion, which a lot of our listeners who are not from confessional churches, they may be new

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Christians, they may not even be Christians at all, are perhaps wondering what on earth are they talking about confessionalism versus minimalism.

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They might even be thinking we're talking about the Roman Catholic sacrament of penance, which involves confession, but that is not at all what we're talking about.

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But before we get into that theme, please tell our listeners about the Association of Reformed Baptist Churches of America, also known as ARBCA.

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Well our association is a nationwide and North American association of confessional

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Reformed Baptist churches. We hold to the Second London Confession, and we have churches in Quebec and British Columbia and Canada, as well as the lower 48 states.

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And we're a small association as groups of churches go. We have between 70 and 80 churches right now, and we're growing by the grace of God, but we're not a mega association or some powerful denomination you're going to read about in the newspaper.

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But we're seeking to be faithful to the Lord and to Scripture, and let the Lord worry about what kind of notoriety or lack thereof we have, and our growth, and how he chooses to use us in our lifetime for his glory.

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Amen. In fact, you used a word that may have struck a little fear into Baptist listening.

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You used the word denomination, and ARBCA is not a denomination, am I right? No, we are an association.

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Each church is independent, but we believe that the Scriptures and our Confession of Faith, the

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Second London Confession, in chapter 26 of the Doctrine of the Church, talks about churches of like faith and practice holding communion together.

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That wasn't a call for joint communion services in the sense of the Lord's Supper, but it was a call for churches to unite to work together for common ends.

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So one church might be blessed to send out a single missionary, but would not be probably able to support sending out more than that.

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So we join together to send out missionaries, to train men for the gospel ministry, to do stateside church planners, as well as publishing materials for Christian education.

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So we cooperate, but each church is independent, and each church stands on its own bottom, so to speak.

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Yes, and the president of the IRBS Theological Seminary, the seminary that we will have you describe in just a second, he wrote a book specifically on the difference between denominations and associations, correct?

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Yes, I think it's correct to say he edited and contributed to a book.

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I think some other men contributed to it also, but the gist of the book is that the Bible teaches that churches should be joined together in associations or in denominations.

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Denominations tend to be structures that are top -down pyramid structures with people at the headquarters calling the shots.

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An association is that local churches are independent but can choose to join together with other churches of like faith and practice, and we are definitely an association and not a denomination.

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Yeah, there was a very primary interest in, when

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ARBCA was formed, in preserving the local autonomy of the local church in that there was no hierarchy outside of the local elders other than Christ himself in his inerrant word.

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Exactly. Christ mediates his lordship through the Bible by the Holy Spirit to the local congregations and through their elected officers, so we don't look to some headquarters ministry or some president of the denomination, so to speak.

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We have each church as an individual church that contributes, and they send messengers to our

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General Assembly, and each church has the same power and authority to conduct its own affairs and to participate in associational life.

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And now let's hear about the IRBS Theological Seminary, which is launching, God willing, this

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September. Well, back in 1998, we determined that we needed to have a theological seminary to promote distinctively

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Reformed Baptist confessional understandings of Scripture, that you could go to various Baptist seminaries, but most of them did not believe in the

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Historic Reformation and the Doctrines of Grace, or some that did, did not have a positive position on the

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Second Lenten Confession. And so we started our own institute in 1998,

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Westminster Seminary in California, a Presbyterian and Reformed seminary, invited us to join them.

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We would have our own Professor of Baptist Studies. We would offer courses distinct from Presbyterian or Dutch Reformed policy courses and church history, etc.

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So Dr. Jim Renahan was chosen to be the first professor and eventual dean of that school, and for 20 years we've had a harmonious and productive relationship with Westminster Seminary in California.

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We felt the time was right. We had the educated men who could teach at our own seminary. We wanted to be able to emphasize more clearly and cogently our differences with our

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Reformed brethren. So for various reasons, the time seemed right. So we voted as a

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General Assembly in 2017 to go ahead and fund a freestanding brick -and -mortar seminary, and we decided to locate it in Texas in the middle of the country.

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We thought the West Coast was kind of expensive. The East Coast was not where the concentration of Baptists were, but we felt in the middle of the country we could appeal to the whole country.

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Anyway, we have four core faculty members. Dr. Jim Renahan is our

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President -elect to be installed in September, but he's Professor of Historical Theology and has taught that for 20 years.

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We have Richard Barcellas, Professor of Exegetical Theology, who also has a PhD and pastors in the

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Bakersfield, California area. Third is Dr. Fred Malone, who's a

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PhD from Southwestern Seminary and pastors at First Baptist Church in Clinton, Louisiana.

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His specialty will be Pastoral Theology, and I'll be the Dean of Students and help teach a first -year course with Dr.

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Renahan on the importance of being a man of God and pursuing holiness, that whatever you get out of your seminary, if you don't pursue holiness and become a man of God, in many ways your time will have been wasted.

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So anyway, I'll teach a very little bit, but I'll seek to shepherd the students while they're here. Great, and I want to give a shout out to a listener in Imo, Ontario, Canada named

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Jim, who contacted me the last time Dr. Jim Renahan was on the show.

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Jim said that he had tears in his eyes because he has a burden to go to seminary and he has been encouraged to do so by at least one pastor who he highly regards, and I don't know if Dr.

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Renahan and Jim in Imo, Ontario, Canada have actually touched base with each other yet, but I just wanted to give a shout out to Jim in case he's listening and provide for him further encouragement to pursue a seminary education, especially since not only does he believe he has that calling himself, but he's been encouraged by others, including a pastor that he has high regard for.

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By the way, if anybody wants more information, I'll be repeating this later, but if anybody wants more information about ARBCA, which is the

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Association of Reformed Baptist Churches of America, that website is ARBCA .com.

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That, once again, is the Association of Reformed Baptist Churches of America, ARBCA .com,

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and if you are interested in finding out more about the IRBS Theological Seminary, go to IRBSSeminary .org

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and make sure you put the two S's in the middle there. Sometimes when there are two S's back -to -back, people leave one of them out when they're writing out a website.

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It's IRBSSeminary .org, so there's two S's in there. Well, let's move on to our discussion today, the theme of our discussion,

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Confessionalism versus Minimalism. Why don't you, obviously, for those of our listeners who are unfamiliar with those terms, why don't you define both confessionalism and minimalism?

11:35

Good point. Thanks, Chris. Certainly throughout the history of Christianity, from the

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New Testament itself, there are small passages, short passages of confessional material where the early church was making a statement, and this was a trustworthy saying, full of truth, worthy of truth and full acceptance.

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For example, Paul would tell Timothy, and then he would go on and have a particular set of doctrine.

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There was a fixed group of materials that Paul could tell Timothy that you're to hold on to the pattern of sound words.

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A certain inheritance, or a certain deposit, rather, has been given to you and you need to hold fast and guard it.

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Well, this pattern of sound words, this template, this outline, so to speak, or this deposit, is the core of the

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Gospel, and that the Gospel can be lost, it can be compromised, it can be altered, so to speak, and the thing is to know what the core is and to hold on to it.

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In the history of the Church, as it's sought to study the Scriptures, and in light of problems that come up within the lifetime of those writing these creeds and confessions, confessions have been a part of the

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Church since the early Church, but certainly after the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s, writing confessions of faith became more popular, and the idea is, what do we understand the

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Bible to teach? It's not enough to say, well, I believe the Bible. Well, that sounds good in a certain way, but it's actually kind of naive and doesn't really answer the question.

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When you say, well, you believe the Bible, what do you believe the Bible teaches? We have heretics who come to our door,

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Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, sometimes others. They say they claim to believe the Bible, but what they believe the

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Bible teaches is far different from what we historic Christians have understood the Bible to teach. Jesus is not fully

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God, there's not a biblical trinity, a lot of other errors come in from these cults. It's not enough to say,

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I believe the Bible, we must also add to that what we believe the Bible teaches. Even the evangelical theological society, discovered around the year 2000, it wasn't enough just to believe in the inerrancy of Scripture.

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They had a one -point doctrinal statement. For many years, they believed in the inerrancy of Scripture, thinking it would keep out deviant theologies, but Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses tried to apply it to the evangelical theological society, and they realized they had to beef up their theological grid, so to speak, so they added a couple of items on the trinity, the full deity and humanity of Christ, etc.

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So confessionalism is the view that we want to spell out specifically what we teach. Yes, we believe the

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Bible, and we believe the Bible teaches thus and so, or it doesn't teach these other things. And I believe that's intellectually honest, that I've participated in churches that had very small doctrinal statements, 10 sentences.

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You go, wow, I guess anything goes in that church, right? Well, no, not actually, because as you get inside the door, there's an invisible plexiglass shield that you bump your nose onto.

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We don't do that in this church. Well, it doesn't say that anywhere. Well, we know, but we don't do that in this church.

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And I saw that firsthand, and I go, well, this isn't right. We need to be specific about what we believe and what we don't, and save people from getting bloody noses from running up against the plexiglass shield.

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And so, to say I believe the Bible is insufficient, we need to spell out what we believe the

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Bible teaches. My first seven or eight years as a Christian, I spent with a parachurch ministry that had minimalist theology, and by minimalist,

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I mean they didn't want to be specific about very much. They had a short doctrinal statement.

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Their conveying of the gospel and of the Christian life was very short and minimalist. What's the least amount we can get away with to convey to others, and still, they will have believed enough to be true

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Christians and get on with their life. But that's really not a healthy way to look at the

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Christian life. And he wasn't saying, well, what's the least amount of calories and protein I can get away with in feeding my child so that it won't die, and technically be alive maybe to reproduce later in adulthood.

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Well, no parent takes that attitude. You want as much protein and vitamins and good things for the baby so it'll have robust health and do well and prosper.

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And so, one of my professors at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Dr.

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John Woodbridge, made the statement that confessional churches last longer than non -confessional churches.

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They have set up guards. They don't capitulate to the spirit of the ages quickly because they're committed to a body of truth, not just to a few principles or a half a dozen doctrinal points.

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And so, I think it's historically accurate to say that confessional churches are not immune from the struggles of going liberal or giving up the faith or losing the faith, but I think historically it can be argued that they're one of the last ones to do so because they're anchored in all these points that they hold to.

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Yeah, they would, a church, would either have to overcome the hurdle of abandoning altogether the confession that they once claimed to adhere to, or they would just give lip service to it and be, in actuality, they would be lying.

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And they would just have this as some kind of an official record of their faith, but they would be straying either far beyond it, or they would not be even recognizing a great majority of it.

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Correct. Gary North was a historian, and he wrote a history of 19th century

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Presbyterianism called Cross Fingers, and it shows a pastor with his hand on the

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Bible swearing something, but he's got his other hand behind his back with his fingers crossed. And what that was meant to show was that the

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Presbyterian Church in the North went down the drain in the 19th century because men who were sworn to uphold the

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Bible and the Westminster Confession of Faith were doing neither. They were professing something, but they proved to be hypocrites and liars, and they gave up major aspects of the faith to fit into the culture, and along the way they ruined the

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Northern Presbyterian Church. So if we are going to be listing what would primarily be the confessions amongst the

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Reformed, of course there were Lutheran confessions and others, but if you're talking about within historic

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Calvinism and the Reformed churches, you would be talking about the Westminster Confession, you would be talking about the

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Savoy Declaration, you would be talking about the three forms of unity which include the Heidelberg Catechism, the

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Belgic Confession, and the Canons of Dort, and you would also be talking about the 1689

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London Baptist Confession, which is the confession that you and I adhere to, and it has cousin confessions like the

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Philadelphia Confession of Faith and the New Hampshire Confession and there's some others. And we even have the 39

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Articles of Religion that historically Calvinist and biblically faithful Anglicans have adhered to, and a very small minority today still adhere to.

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That's correct. It's one of the tragedies. I grew up in the Episcopal Church and my church was more evangelical and Reformed perhaps than others, but it wasn't holding on too much by the time

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I came around, and most of the Episcopal Church in America has gone down the drain. Sad to say, a once great faith.

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There have been godly men, good men, J .C. Ryle in the 19th century comes to mind, J .I.

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Packer or Alec Motier or John Stott come to mind in the 20th century, but most

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Reformed evangelicals would not think of if they moved to a new city. What's the closest Episcopal Church that I can think of?

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Well, I can give a plug to at least two confessionally Reformed Anglicans that, in fact,

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I'm gonna have on my program this Tuesday, the 19th of June.

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Thomas Isham or Isham, I can't remember how to pronounce his name, he's been on the program once before, and my friend

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Jacob Smith, who is the rector at the parish of Calvary St.

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George's in New York City in Manhattan, and he is a low church 39 articles,

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Calvinist, Episcopal minister, and that church is also a very historic church.

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It was the congregation founded by Stephen Ting, and I had a tour of the building.

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It's very fascinating, and Ting had a lot to do with the input on the architecture of St.

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George's, and it is less ornate than many Baptist churches are.

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Well, that's a good thing, then. Yeah, he only had a simple wooden table for the communion table with no candlesticks, no golden chalices.

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He did not even have a barren cross on the wall. He had behind him on the wall the

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Apostles' Creed and the Ten Commandments. Wow. And so there you have an example of a low church

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Episcopalian, and he is a great man of God, and I'm sure, knowing Mike Gadosh and Solid Ground Christian Books, you must be familiar with some of the books that Solid Ground Christian Books brought into print or back into print by Stephen Ting, including

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The Law and Gospel and The Christian Pastor, as I believe is the other book.

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Well, there was a 19th century chaplain at Westminster who had gone to Princeton Seminary, and he was at Princeton College, and he had been best friends with Charles Hodge.

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When he graduated, he couldn't decide to become a Presbyterian or stay in his own

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Episcopal Church, and professors at Princeton encouraged him to stay in the

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Episcopal Church and be a force for good, which he did. He went to the

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Military Academy at West Point as chaplain, saw a revival there. He later became a

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Bishop of Ohio, and during the controversy in England between those who wanted to turn the

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Anglican Church back to Rome versus the conservatives and evangelicals who wanted to keep it as a

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Protestant denomination, he wrote some material that were greatly used and encouraging to the conservatives.

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He died while on a trip to England, and he was one of only two Americans ever to be put on display in Westminster Chapel.

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Excuse me, not Westminster Chapel. I'm having a brain freeze right now.

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The great Westminster Abbey, excuse me, and that was

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Winston Churchill. He was the other one. This man wrote a book called Preaching Christ.

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Charles McElveen was his name, and Solid Ground publishes some of his other material.

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He was a great and good man of God. Well, the man that I just mentioned before, Thomas Isham, he is the author of the very biography that you're talking about, about McElveen.

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Okay, there you go. Well, I had a copy of McElveen's book, and I got the banner of truth to republish his book,

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Preaching Christ, because he said, so many churches preach around the gospel, they preach around Christ, but they don't preach

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Christ. And he explained very clearly how to do so. Amen. Well, I'm going to repeat our email address.

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If anybody would like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

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Let's say you disagree with your own pastor over the subject matter that we are discussing today.

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We would want you to remain anonymous if that was the case. Perhaps you're a pastor, and you disagree with your own congregation or denomination or fellowship, and you want to remain anonymous.

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Obviously, we will grant you that request. But if it's not a personal and private issue, please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence.

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To start the ball rolling with the value and importance of confessionalism,

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I could just recall, and I know that my listeners probably have heard me repeat this story two or three other times, but I just find it very humorous when

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I think of the concept or the theme of confessionalism. I have a very good friend who is a fundamentalist, an anti -Calvinist,

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King James only fundamentalist, and despite those things, we still remain friends.

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He and some of his fellow pastors within that background of fundamentalism, they were clients of mine on the radio where I used to work,

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WMCA. It is now in New York City. It used to be in New Jersey.

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They had a program called the Fundamental Baptist Forum. And one day, this pastor was mocking me and Reformed Baptists in general, and he said one of the reasons he would never be a

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Reformed Baptist is because they have the 1689 London Baptist Confession where we fundamentalists think that the

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Bible is just good enough on its own. We don't need any man -written documents. And I said, oh, that's interesting because I happen to know that you and your friends who host the

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Fundamental Baptist Forum, you have a guideline as to who is permitted to be a participant on this radio program.

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And those things include you must be pre -millennial, you must not have rock and roll music in your churches, you must not permit women to wear pants.

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There was this long list of things that they made as requirements for people to be a speaker on the

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Fundamental Baptist Forum. I said, do you realize that this guideline is your confession of faith, whether you call it that or not?

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And it's about 10 times the size of the 1689 London Baptist Confession. Touché, touché.

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And as John Thornberry, the Baptist historian, once said, even to say

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I do not believe in confessions of creeds is a confessional or creedal statement.

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Exactly. That's like the atheist professor who says there are no absolute truths. And the student raises his hand and says, well, that's an absolute statement you just made.

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That's right. Well, tell us about if you want to get involved in a little bit of the history involving confessions among the

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Baptists, because most Baptists outside of our circles either are non -confessional or they perhaps never have even heard of the fact that there are

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Baptists that have something called a confession of faith. So why don't you tell us about that and why that proved to be an important thing in history?

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One of the questions that interested people ask is where did Baptists come from?

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And there's been some disputes among historians over the years. Did they come from the Puritan Revolution in England or did it go back farther to the

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Anabaptists of the Protestant Reformation a century earlier? And while there were people who called themselves

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Anabaptists, which means to be rebaptized, the Anabaptists do not share much with the

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Baptists who subsequently came a century later. And I think most responsible historians will take the

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Puritan Revolution as the period when Baptists came in England. The Presbyterians said that we're not

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Catholics and we're not Episcopalians. We believe you should do church government and spell out, we should do church government more clearly according to the scriptures and we should specify more clearly about salvation by grace through faith.

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And they had written their Westminster Confession of Faith to explain the Protestant beliefs.

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There were some equally committed men who, John Owen comes to mind or Thomas Goodwin, who were great in their day, who said, well, we agree with most of this, but we think their view of church government is wrong.

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We don't see Presbyterians. We don't see some of the details of their form of church government.

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So they wrote the Savoy Declaration a few years later. Now the Baptists had written their own

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Confession of Faith in the 1640s, a couple of years prior to the

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Westminster Confession of Faith. But it was small, but they wanted to establish, hey, we're not the

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Anabaptists because for over 100 years since the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, the word

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Anabaptist was a swear word among conservative Christians because the Anabaptist is a label assigned to all kinds of people, some of whom themselves didn't think of themselves as Anabaptists, but some of them were what has been called crazies or spiritual fanatics.

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And two in the city of Leinster claimed to be the two men of the Book of Revelation, the two witnesses, and they took over the leadership of the church and of the leadership of the city of Münster, which in medieval times, cities had walls around them to protect them.

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And so this walled city of Münster was taken over by some fanatics who had direct revelations from God, they said, and they began to outlaw marriage, and then they began to allow for open marriage, and then for nudity, which, you know, nudity in Germany in the winter would be a tough sell.

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But anyway, that was my one... Anyway, they were just fanatics.

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And the princes of the regions around Münster were horrified at both what was taught, what was practiced, how it was a slur on the

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Protestant Reformation, and so they formed an army, and they broke into the city of Münster, and there was a terrible battle, and there was a great slaughter, and that ended the reign of these two fanatical men.

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But for a hundred years, if you wanted to slander someone, you just called them an Anabaptist, or better still, raised the name of Münster, and that was meant to just disregard a person or a movement.

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So the Baptists in England wanted to show that they were not Anabaptist fanatics, but they were

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Protestants that they held to the great solos of the Reformation. So they revised their 1644

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Baptist confession after the Westminster and Savoy, and wrote another long confession like the other groups had done, and it was published in 1689, although it was written in 1677, but it was illegal to be a

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Baptist for a while. It was illegal to publish that document. They waited 12 years and finally published it.

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Anyway, the Baptist confession, Second London Baptist Confession, was published in 1689.

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It became the dominant Baptist confession in the Protestant world. In fact, moving to the

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States, the first associations of Baptists in Rhode Island and in Philadelphia and in Charleston, South Carolina, all were 1689 confessional associations.

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In the state of Georgia, where I ministered in Atlanta for 31 years, the editor of the

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Christian Index, which is a Christian newspaper still being published today by the Southern Baptists, but it's been published for what's been the longest -running religious periodical in America going back to the beginning of the 1800s.

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The president of the Georgia Baptist as well as the editor of the

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Christian Index read an article in 1829 saying that all regular Baptists in Georgia held to the 1689

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Baptist confession of faith, or their own local paraphrase of it. He said, now a lot of non -Baptists don't know what

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Baptists believe, and sadly too many Baptists don't know what Baptists believe, so we're going to serialize the 1689 confession here in this

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Christian Index newspaper and now magazine. So here he is testifying that all regular

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Baptists in Georgia are confessional men. Well, in that same state today, um, well, let me back up one more illustration.

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In 1855, a question came up at one of the state associations in Georgia. There's a pastor among us who claims to be

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Orthodox, and says he believes in the doctrines of grace, but never preaches them. Can he be considered an

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Orthodox man? And the uniform decision, unanimous decision of those Baptist pastors in that Flint River association was that no, that pastor is not

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Orthodox, who merely claims to believe them, but never preaches them. That same association today will not let you join if you're a

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Calvinistic Baptist church. They've gone, there's been a sea change in theology, and in many of these associations in southern states, they're out to purge any

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Calvinists from among them, or stop others from coming in, but that shows you how strongly it once was held, and it was not disproved it was simply set aside as inconvenient.

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We're on our way to building bigger and better churches, and we don't want anything that's going to slow us down, so if there's something in the 1689

34:11

Baptist confession that might be unsavory to current churchmen, the idea of a

34:20

Lord's Day, really? A whole day for the Lord? That's terrible. You should be happy we give them a couple hours a day, you know, or the regular principle of worship, that God directs how he wants to be worshipped, and we're to direct our worship according to scripture, not according to the creativity of the worship team, and that's considered to be unethical.

34:44

We want a big production. We want something like the old Ed Sullivan variety show.

34:52

You've probably lost about half of the audience with the Ed Sullivan reference. Well, there are no variety shows on TV anymore, which shows my age, but there used to be variety shows on TV that had...

35:05

Carol Burnett would probably be more contemporary, even though she's been off the air for a long time. Yes, exactly.

35:11

Yes, and so you can have dog and pony shows, and singers, and all kinds of things, and only in churches you have something called a sermonette, or a sermon.

35:20

Anyway, it's become very sad that across the South, as I have ministered in churches over the last 35 years, that so many churches have lost the truth, and it's become a good thing not to believe much, but the trouble is that you raise even jellyfish when you don't have any structural bones, that there are so many

35:46

Christians in churches today who don't know what to do if they come down with cancer. They've never been taught the doctrine of the providence of God.

35:54

They don't know what to do when their spouse wants to walk out of their marriage, and they're ill -equipped to deal with that heartache, or they face death, and they don't know much about eternal life.

36:04

They don't know much about heaven or hell. They don't know much about the intermediate state. They've never been taught about the victorious entrance into heaven that a practicing

36:13

Christian can have, and so the ignorance that exists among so many Christians leaves them ill -prepared to face the vicissitudes of life, the heartaches, the, as Shakespeare said, the slings and arrows of outrageous abortion, the tough things that we face in a fallen world.

36:29

Amen. In fact, we have to go to a break right now, but I want to, you just jogged my memory about something that I should promote to our listeners right on the heels of what you just said.

36:40

If anybody listening wants to hear a powerful testimony by a pastor who was facing a possible terminal prognosis in regard to cancer,

36:54

Earl Blackburn, who I know is a friend of both, not only myself, but my guest Steve Martin, if you go to ironsherpensironradio .com

37:02

and go into the search engine in the archive in the top right corner of that website, if you type in Blackburn, B -L -A -C -K -B -U -R -N, that interview, among other interviews with Earl Blackburn, will come up, and his interview on his own testimony of having victory over cancer is quite remarkable.

37:22

But we're going to a, and he also wrote a booklet about it, by the way, and that is published by Reformation Heritage Books, and when we come back from the break,

37:33

I will give you folks the website for Reformation Heritage Books, who published Earl Blackburn's booklet on cancer.

37:40

But we're going to a break right now, and if you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Steve Martin on confessionalism versus minimalism, you can ask also a general question about anything under the umbrella of being a

37:53

Reformed Baptist as well. Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

38:00

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

38:07

USA. Don't go away, God willing, we will be right back after these messages from our sponsors.

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Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, inviting you to tune in to a visit to the pastor's study every

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solid -ground -books .com. Also, our friends at cvbbs .com,

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That's the booklet I just mentioned to you before the break. How Can I Honor Christ in Fighting Cancer by Earl Blackburn, and it is only $2 .29.

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It's a small booklet, so you should order a case or more for your church and put them in the track rack than anywhere else in the narthex or lobby of the church, because who doesn't know somebody who has cancer?

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So obviously, cancer is something so widespread that it touches everyone's life, either their own lives or their own families personally, or you know somebody who is battling it or who has a family member battling it.

42:29

So other than tracks on the gospel and other important doctrines,

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I would strongly recommend that your church gets a case or more of fighting or How Can I Honor Christ in Fighting Cancer by Earl Blackburn.

42:43

We are now back with our guest today, Steve Martin. He is the coordinator of the

42:50

Association of Reformed Baptist Churches of America, and he is also the dean of students at the

42:56

IRBS Theological Seminary in Mansfield, Texas. We are talking about confessionalism versus minimalism, and this issue, especially amongst

43:08

Baptists, seems to have been a cause of division for centuries, whether or not to use confessions of faith.

43:18

And as we said earlier, it's really almost an artificial distinction to say that you don't have a confession when even saying that you should not have a confession is a creedal or confessional statement.

43:28

But tell us more about why a confession of faith is a very valuable and important thing for a church to possess, especially in the 21st century.

43:43

There has never been a time amid the religious pluralism and all kinds of compromise and division and apostasy within churches and denominations that historically were very faithful to the

44:01

Bible. I think having a confession is even more important today than ever in history. I would agree with you 100%.

44:08

I've been a Christian by the grace of God since 1969, and I've not seen a church in a weaker condition doctrinally or biblically than today.

44:17

And all kinds of heresies and misinterpretations of the truth are tolerated out there, and the rap that the doctrine breeds division is not true.

44:29

Heresy, error, ignorance breeds division, but doctrine gets the bad rap for exposing it.

44:36

In other words, some famous pastor of a large church utters some unbiblical comment or teaches an unbiblical doctrine, and conservatives would want to tell him, well brother, you're out of step with the history of how

44:52

God's people have understood the scriptures. And of course then there's a reaction, and people who hold to the historic position are called all kinds of names for pointing out the famous man, the great man's bad teaching.

45:05

But we need to have confessions of faith in order that we can teach our wives and children, teach ourselves what this historic faith is all about.

45:15

That we want to have bones and sinners to hold our faith together, and a confession of faith provides that.

45:23

It's not just simply five doctrines and seven taboos, don't drink, smoke, chew, go with girls who do, and see the trinity of the deity of Christ, and the independence of the local church.

45:37

That would be some church's statement of faith, or what they believe.

45:44

I actually had a man tell me who was responsible for a large section of the country with a parachurch ministry, and he told me he only believed in the trinity and the deity of Christ, and the inerrancy of scripture, and everything else was up for grabs.

45:59

And I said, inerrant scripture doesn't teach much, does it really? It only teaches you the trinity and the deity of Christ, and it apparently doesn't teach you anything else.

46:09

And you know, in this complicated fallen world that we live in, in this American culture, ignorance is not bliss.

46:17

And there are so many Christians who are hurting, so many Christians who are dishonoring Christ, who are miserable in their faith, because they've been raised on a diet of cotton candy and Kool -Aid, which is nice for little kids at the carnival or the fair, but you can't live your life on that kind of diet.

46:35

And it creates health problems. You're unable to face serious issues when they come, because you're ill -prepared.

46:43

And I can think of so many churches that will have Sunday sermons on how to keep your kids on your team, how to improve your marriage, how to get ahead financially.

46:53

Sadly, one church in Atlanta had a big billboard for a sermon series on good sex, and I was ashamed for being a

47:01

Christian and ashamed that they would put that on a billboard for all the kids driving by in their cars to see as if the church existed for no other reason than to show couples how to have good sex.

47:12

But who's for bad sex? Certainly nobody. But the Bible has a lot more to say on much more profound subjects, and yet those people who might come to hear about good sex are going to be ill -equipped to fight all the other battles they have to face in their life before they go to heaven or hell.

47:30

Now, some people use the terms confession and creed as synonyms.

47:38

They use them interchangeably, but others have said that a creed is typically a briefer document with the goal of having a greater spectrum of unity.

47:51

For instance, like the Apostles' Creed, you have unity amongst nearly everyone who professes to be a

47:59

Christian, at least one that would believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, and they would have as a basis the elements of the

48:06

Apostles' Creed. But then you have a confession which is more detailed, and its intention is not for a wide spectrum of unity, its intention is to have unity amongst a smaller group within Christendom that has more specific beliefs.

48:29

Would you agree with that differentiation of confession and creed? It's probably true, but you know, confessions or creeds, either one of them were written at a certain historical time and faced certain historical problems.

48:44

So the Apostles' Creed was facing issues about the Trinity and the deity of Christ, and that's well represented, and everybody who professes to be a real

48:53

Christian believes in the Trinity and the deity as well as humanity of Christ. It didn't go into details about salvation.

49:01

Was it by grace through faith? Was it by grace plus works? That didn't go there because it wasn't the burning issue at the time.

49:09

The burning issue was, let's get right, how many members of the triune God are there, and is

49:14

Christ holy God, holy man, or both? So sometimes the shorter ones reflected there were less issues to face at the time of the writing.

49:26

Reformation creeds were longer, and they reflect the battles of the Reformation. Post -Reformation creeds and confessions were also longer because they faced more problems after the

49:36

Reformation. The Roman Church teaches that you're saved by God's grace and your own efforts.

49:43

Condine and congruent merit. The Reformed confessions, the Protestant Reformed confessions, no, you're saved by God's grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

49:54

And so they have to go to the great trouble to spell these things out. So depending on who we're sword fighting with, that gets included in the confession so we can clarify, no, we were not saying what this group is saying, we're saying this is what the

50:07

Bible teaches. A confession today I think would need to be robust because there's so much heresy, so much false teaching.

50:15

Did Jesus come to make you rich? Did he come to, you know, so you can have your own planet and populate your own descendants like the

50:26

Roman Church teaches? There's all kinds of spurious things out there and I think for a robust spiritual health and a robust church you need a full -on confession and not just a few statements.

50:40

But even having said what you did, the great confessions are all reasonably brief and it would be probably, not even probably,

50:51

I think it would be wrong for the drafters and architects of those confessions if they were to make them massive tomes because then there would be a lot more speculation involved, a lot more things that would be demanded that are really areas of liberty and where differences of conviction are permissible and so on.

51:16

You don't have any confession that is a beloved, long -lasting, historic confession that is even near the size of, for instance,

51:24

Calvin's Institutes or something like that. You don't have anything. They're all fairly brief.

51:30

Well, to borrow an image from TV, there used to be this obnoxious gift you could get at certain times of the year called a

51:38

Chia Pet and you just put water on it. All this stuff came out of the Chia Pet and a confession is a very compressed document but to teach that document will require much more time and energy.

51:51

So yes, it is a compressed and short document but to explain it, to understand it's going to take some work and some maturity and so I agree with you, yes.

52:01

We have to go to our midway break right now. This is our long break. It's 12 minutes because Grace Life Radio 90 .1

52:08

FM in Lake City, Florida requires of us a long break because they air our program every day and during this break they air their own local

52:17

Lake City, Florida commercials and things and public service announcements. So please be patient as we take the elongated midway break.

52:25

Use this time to not only write down questions for our guest Steve Martin and I know that we have a number of you still waiting to have your questions asked to and answered by Steve Martin so please be patient but if you'd like to join those listening, you can send those waiting in line with a question,

52:43

I should say. You may send in an email at chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com

52:49

but also use this time in addition to writing questions to write down the information provided by our advertisers because our advertisers are the key individuals and organizations that are keeping this program on the air.

53:03

The funding of these organizations are helping us to actually be in existence and in fact

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I've got some exciting news that I'm waiting to officially announce tomorrow about the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies Theological Seminary, IRBS Theological Seminary, being among those supporters but that will be more officially announced tomorrow but I'm very excited about it.

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But don't go away because we're going to be right back after this fairly long but not too long break from our sponsors and we look forward to hearing from you and your questions for Steve Martin.

53:38

Don't go away. Paul wrote to the church at Galatia for am

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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

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

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

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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.

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

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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 Christ in truth and love.

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

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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

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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.

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

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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.

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Let Todd and Patty know that you heard about them on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. They man those phone lines, or that phone line,

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We also have some very important conferences and events coming up that we have to announce.

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First of all, the Fellowship Conference New England is coming up August 2nd through the 4th with the

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Deering Center Community Church in Portland, Maine. And the speakers include men, all of whom have been guests on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and they're all going to be back in the near future,

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God willing, to promote this conference. Pastor Tim Conway of Grace Community Church in San Antonio, Texas is on the roster.

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Pastor Mac Tomlinson of Providence Chapel in Denton, Texas, he's also an author and a publisher and book editor.

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Pastor Jesse Barrington of the Grace Life Church in Dallas, Texas, and that church is a sister church of Grace Life Church in Lake City, Florida, whose radio station,

01:06:17

Grace Life Radio, airs Iron Sharpens Iron Radio every day, Monday through Friday. Pastor Nate Pickowitz, who's been a guest a number of times on this program, he is not only an author, but he is the pastor of Harvest Bible Church in Gilmonton Ironworks, New Hampshire.

01:06:34

This is a different kind of a conference because there's not one major theme. All the men speak on whatever the

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Lord is leading them to speak, and the subject matter is that are burdening their hearts. So there will be different themes involved in this conference.

01:06:51

If you'd like to register, go to fellowshipconferencenewengland .com and please tell the folks there that you heard about the conference from Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

01:07:03

Then coming up in November of this year, November 9th through the 10th, the

01:07:09

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is having their annual Quaker Town Conference on Reformed Theology. I will be there,

01:07:15

God willing, with an Iron Sharpens Iron exhibitors booth, and I hope that you greet me there.

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The theme is the Glory of the Cross, and the speakers include David Garner, Ray Ortland, Richard Phillips, Timothy Gibson, and Carlton Winn.

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If you'd like to register, go to alliancenet .org, alliancenet .org, click on events, and then click on the

01:07:39

Quaker Town Conference on Reformed Theology, the Glory of the Cross. Once again, it's November 9th through the 10th, and it will be held at Grace Bible Fellowship Church in Quaker Town, Pennsylvania.

01:07:48

Please tell the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals that you heard about this conference from Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

01:07:56

Then we have, coming up in January of 2019, an event that has become very near and dear to my heart, where I have had an

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Iron Sharpens Iron exhibitors booth for two years in a row, and this will be my third year in January having an exhibitors booth there.

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That's the G3 Conference, the G3 Conference, which stands for Grace, Gospel, and Glory, and that is coming up in January the 17th through the 19th of January.

01:08:30

That's Thursday, January 17th through Saturday, January 19th, and the speakers on this long roster include

01:08:38

Paul Washer, John Piper, David Platt, Stephen Lawson, Vody Baucom, Mark Dever, Conrad M.

01:08:45

Bayway, Tim Challies, Phil Johnson, and Todd Friel of Wretched TV and Wretched Radio, and Stephen Nichols, the president of Reformation Bible College, which was founded by R .C.

01:08:56

Sproul and Ligonier Ministries, Don and Cindy Curran, Martha Peace, Chip Thornton, Chris King, Owen Strand, and more.

01:09:05

If you'd like to register, go to G3conference .com, G3conference .com, and then tell them, please, that you heard about the conference from Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and I'm going to be announcing some exciting news about an

01:09:19

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio event that will be held in a very historic church in Manhattan on July 9th, and when

01:09:28

I get more details, I will begin announcing this tomorrow, God willing, and this will feature guest speaker

01:09:34

Dr. Tony Costa, who is the professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary, and it will be right here in the

01:09:43

United States in New York City on July 9th, God willing, which is a Friday, but I'll let you know more about that tomorrow.

01:09:50

And last but not least, I have just a few minutes of time, or a couple of minutes, where I want to plead with you, if you love the show and you don't want it to disappear, please consider donating to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio by going to IronSharpensIronRadio .com,

01:10:05

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01:10:12

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01:10:36

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01:10:50

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01:11:03

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And that's also the email address, so you can send in a question to stevemartin, chrisarnsen at gmail .com, chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

01:12:01

and as always, please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside the USA. Steve, we have an anonymous listener.

01:12:08

He gives me his city and state, but since he wants to be anonymous, I'm not even going to announce the city and state.

01:12:15

He says, do you think the broadness of the

01:12:20

BFM allows infiltration of feminism ordaining women, and I assume he means the

01:12:28

Baptist faith and message when he says BFM. Okay, thank you. Do you think that the broadness allows infiltration of feminism ordaining women, critical race theory, and normalizing homosexuality?

01:12:45

Subtle, but I fear it is actually happening. And this is the anonymous listener.

01:12:50

Right. I've been watching what's been going on in the Southern Baptist Convention, which has a statement of faith, the

01:12:57

Baptist faith and message, but also the PCA, the Presbyterian Church in America, has been undergoing going through a lot of pressure regarding,

01:13:06

I think my caller or my questioner asked about critical race theory.

01:13:15

I think that's becoming a new hot button issue, or it's been a hot button issue that's creating a lot of pressure for certain denominations, and racism is the new trump card that no matter what you are, racism or nowadays if you're accused of something in the media by a person, you're guilty until proven innocent.

01:13:40

For example, if I used to work with students from 1970 to 1981, if a student said

01:13:50

I tried to do something in 1977, apart from jugging my memory, what recourse do

01:13:56

I have to defend myself? And the way the culture's moving right now,

01:14:01

I would be considered guilty until proven innocent. And that's certainly true about racism.

01:14:07

How can we listen to Jonathan Edwards on anything, because he owned a single slide.

01:14:14

I don't know the Baptist faith and message. I don't think it's very robust.

01:14:20

It's been played with over the decades. I'd like to see Southern Baptists adopt a more robust theological heritage.

01:14:28

The original men who came to the Triennial Convention all belonged to Baptist groups that held to the 1689.

01:14:37

That's no longer the case, and too many Baptist historians are wanting to rewrite history to make it seem that the traditional position, which is the position of non -confessional

01:14:48

Baptists today, was always the position of SBC. And that's not true. Feminism is part of the culture, and it seeps into the church because people who go into feminism come to Christ, or they come to church.

01:15:03

Same way with people who believe in critical race theory. And one of the biggest problems facing the

01:15:09

American churches are not letting American culture seep into the church and dictate how we do church.

01:15:17

I can think back 30 years ago when health foods and Christian schooling were hot -button issues, and you could be at a church potluck, and the person next to you says, you know, if you let your kids eat white sugar, it's a form of child abuse.

01:15:34

Or if you let your kids go to the public schools, it's a form of child abuse. I don't want the Food and Drug Administration or schooling to determine my standing before God, but too many

01:15:45

Christians have taken cultural issues, made them biblical issues, and then judge other people based upon how they think they should fall out.

01:15:55

I'm not competent enough to cite what's great or not so great about the Southern Baptist Convention other than they need to get back to their theological roots, and they need to preach the gospel faithfully, and not worry about what the surrounding culture thinks about them.

01:16:10

They need to worry about what Christ thinks of them at the end of the day. Amen. And there are obviously, as you know, some very fine confessional

01:16:20

Reformed Baptist churches within the Southern Baptist Convention, many of which are a part of Founders Ministries.

01:16:28

And of course, Founders Ministries churches are not all confessional, and they're not all adhering to the same

01:16:35

Baptist Confession, but there are quite a number of 1689 confessional brethren in that group.

01:16:42

Sure are. And the Southern Baptist Convention was founded entirely by Calvinistic Baptists.

01:16:48

Exactly. Well, thank you very much, Anonymous. And we now have Sika Lee, who, very, very unusual name.

01:16:57

He already informed me this is a Dutch name, but Sika Lee is from Ponoka, Alberta, Canada.

01:17:06

And he says, this may be a little off topic, but Mr. Martin mentioned the intermediate stage.

01:17:14

What does he mean? Purgatory? And he has five question marks and exclamation points.

01:17:20

Of course, you don't mean purgatory, but tell our listener what you meant by the intermediate stage as far as eschatology goes.

01:17:29

Yes. If I said stage, I meant to say intermediate state. But when we die, our souls go immediately to be in the presence of the

01:17:37

Lord, but our bodies go in the grave. And that's at that period of time between when our bodies are resurrected and rejoined with our souls, that period is called the intermediate state in,

01:17:49

I would say, most Reformed systematic theology texts. So that's what I was referring to. Well, thank you,

01:17:56

Sika Lee. Keep spreading the word about Iron Trip and Zion Radio in Ponoka, Alberta, Canada and beyond. Let me add to my brother's question.

01:18:04

There was a Baptist pastor in Atlanta, a very famous nationwide pastor who wrote a book,

01:18:10

Eternal Security. And in his book, he asked, well, what about Uncle Harry, who prayed a prayer at a youth meeting when he was 10 years old, but never lived a day for the

01:18:19

Lord, never went to church, never pursued holiness, never read his Bible, never did much distinctively

01:18:25

Christian. What happens to Uncle Harry when he dies? And so in this book, Eternal Security, he said, well, people like Uncle Harry go to a place the

01:18:34

Bible calls outer darkness, where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth. And in this place,

01:18:39

God will whip this person into shape over time. He'll get to see how the people who live for Christ are doing in the good part of heaven.

01:18:47

And eventually, after the Lord's whipped this guy into shape, he'll be able to join the rest of the believers in the good part of heaven.

01:18:54

And if you're following my, tracking me, you're thinking Protestant purgatory. That's what he taught.

01:19:01

Wow. That's what he taught. And his son, he thanks his son, who did the research for the book, but I suspect it panned most of the book.

01:19:09

At the time, the more famous dad put his name on it, but it's a terrible book. Well, you can already tell that it's a terrible book by what you just said.

01:19:18

Yeah, exactly. And he doesn't get the intermediate state. He doesn't see judgment.

01:19:25

He doesn't see salvation, clearly. The book's a mess. Wow. Now, did you mention the name?

01:19:30

I must have missed it if you did. I did not miss it. The name of the book is called Eternal Security. Oh, is this a very, very famous Baptist?

01:19:40

Very, very famous Baptist. Well, I know who you're talking about because I was shocked years ago when

01:19:46

I read some of that book. I didn't read it cover to cover, but in that book, if it's the same one, which

01:19:54

I'm pretty sure it is, there was a clear teaching that one could come to a genuine saving knowledge of Christ and then immediately become an atheist or unrepentant, evil, satanic person for the rest of their lives.

01:20:18

It could be decades, and that person will still go to heaven. There was a couple of books that taught things like that that came out about the same time.

01:20:27

Some of these books were actually written in response to John MacArthur's box bill on the dispensational playground,

01:20:33

The Gospel According to Jesus. Down the road from John MacArthur, there was another big evangelical church, and that pastor wrote a book in response.

01:20:44

Well, how holy do you have to be really to be a Christian? Let's not exaggerate personal holiness.

01:20:50

He tried to downplay MacArthur's book because so many of his people were gnashing their teeth at the idea that they might not be

01:20:56

Christians at all. And I think the guy in Atlanta did the same thing, that he had a large congregation of questionable people, and MacArthur's book would prove the lie to many of them.

01:21:07

So they tried to, in a sense, sword fight with John MacArthur and marginalize him and teach their own warped theology.

01:21:14

Well, you know, does it bother you if I mention his name? Because I think people should be warned. Yeah, go ahead.

01:21:20

All right. It's Troll Stanley that you're talking about. Exactly. And Andy Stanley did the research, quote unquote, and in the preface,

01:21:29

Charles thanks Andy for doing the research. Well, now Andy's proving to have all of his own theological problems as he makes one comment after another about, we don't need the

01:21:38

Old Testament, we need to downplay the Bible and upplay Jesus and things like that. They've become very problematic men, and I wouldn't recommend either one of them as sound teachers.

01:21:51

Right. And I think the reason why a warning is important is because Charles Stanley has a long history of being a very popular radio and television

01:22:04

Bible teacher. In fact, when I worked for Salem Media, he was,

01:22:10

I think for all the 15 years that I worked there, the number one program. And of course, not everything

01:22:16

Charles Stanley teaches is wrong. He does on many occasions preach the true gospel, but a lot of the baggage that surrounds that counteracts that.

01:22:27

It's just by the grace and mercy of God that he would use the preaching of Charles Stanley to actually save sinners, which

01:22:33

I know that he has. And in fact, when I was a young Christian, his TV show was a staple in my house on the

01:22:40

TV, but I was not very learned at that time. And when I grew to fall in love with the

01:22:45

Doctrines of Grace, I basically stopped listening or watching Charles Stanley. Andy himself has become a power.

01:22:53

I was reading a statistic that I'm not a person who tweets. I do send texts.

01:23:00

I do texting and things like that. I'm not a total Luddite, but when it comes to the area of tweets, the number three person tweeted about is

01:23:09

Andy Stanley. He gets that much play, but he's a very dangerous and he's a charismatic personality, not in theology, but his personality.

01:23:21

But false teachers don't have a big FT on their forehead, and false prophets don't have an

01:23:28

FP on their forehead. They're very winsome, and they just teach wrong doctrine.

01:23:33

And I'm afraid Andy falls under that category. Yes. We have

01:23:39

Joey in Clifton, New Jersey. Dear Pastor Steve, we met a few times a very long time ago.

01:23:46

I hope you are well, and may God bless your work at the seminary. I would like to ask, based on what you know about the

01:23:53

Baptist faith and message, and how the Southern Baptist Convention uses and applies it, does it create any issue for churches to be explicitly 1689 confessional?

01:24:05

So in other words, does the Baptist faith and message in any way, would that prohibit somebody from being a 1689 adherent, or is it broad enough where it would not exclude those that are more strongly confessional with a better confession?

01:24:23

No, it would not, because there are many churches that have dual alignments. They're members of the

01:24:28

Southern Baptist Convention, and they have membership in, for example, the Reformed Association like ARPCA.

01:24:35

So I can think of First Baptist of Clinton, Louisiana. I can think of Heritage Baptist in Shreveport.

01:24:42

There's several other churches that I'm not going to toss off the top of my head, but have dual alignments, and so it doesn't preclude you.

01:24:51

The sad thing is that so many Baptist churches do not pay any attention to what this Baptist faith and message teaches.

01:24:57

I know of two pastors who were fired by their deacons because they didn't like what they were teaching, and at the meeting, the pastors went with their

01:25:06

Bible and the Baptist faith and message, and when they were called on the cover for what they taught, they simply opened the confession and said, well, here's chapter 3.

01:25:15

It's on election. Well, we don't believe that. Well, then he proceeds to show them the Bible. Well, we don't care what that says.

01:25:21

We don't like what you're teaching, and that's not a story that's been told once or twice, but literally hundreds of times.

01:25:29

Hundreds of times, the SPC is riddled with people who view the local churches as their fiefdom.

01:25:35

They run it. They need a pastor to do things on Sunday, but a handful of people think they run the church, and it's been a tragedy because many good men have been run off by people who are ignorant, and they wouldn't know justification by faith or regeneration from the man of the moon, but they don't like what their pastor teaches, and it's threatening to them, so they thrust them out, so to speak, but they're going to get some hireling later.

01:26:03

It's such an irony and a tragedy that today and for quite a long time in the

01:26:09

Southern Baptist Convention, you are considered a traditionalist if you are an anti -Calvinist, and the reason why that's ironic is that, as I said earlier, the entire convention was founded by Calvinists, and so to call yourself a traditionalist is really disingenuous.

01:26:33

It's a misnomer. It's ahistorical, and these people really got to start not only learning their history but admitting to it because if they know it, there's no reason why some of these seminary professors and pastors who are on a war path against Calvinism, there's no reason that they cannot learn and discover what their history is in regard to Calvinism, and you cannot help but think that there's a lot of dishonesty going on.

01:27:04

Well, I can think of at least one professor and dean of the School of Theology who was fired because they thought he had doctored his resume, and he didn't have some of the credentials he claimed to have, but he had been hired, and one of the reasons was he was an outspoken anti -Calvinist.

01:27:22

Later he was hired by Baptist College in Georgia to be president, and it was pointed out that he had been fired before for lying and not being an honest man, and they said, well, we'd rather have someone like him than a

01:27:35

Calvinist, and we like him because he's an anti -Calvinist. How sad.

01:27:44

Only in America can you say with pride, I don't know nothing, I just love

01:27:49

Jesus, and I think, you know, there was a song that became popular in the 60s and 70s and 80s, don't know much about geography, don't know much about, but I know

01:28:02

I love you, is being loved by the village idiot, is that a great thing? I mean, do

01:28:10

I want an income poop to be my boyfriend? In the same way, it's an insult to the

01:28:16

Lord Jesus Christ that a person would say, I don't know anything, I just love Jesus. Well, really? The Mormon Jesus, the

01:28:22

JW Jesus, the biblical Christian Jesus, it's not a badge of honor, it's a badge of ignorance, and it's a badge of dishonor to say,

01:28:31

I don't know anything, I just love Jesus. We need to study our Bibles, we need to show ourselves as a workman who needs to be approved, and there's a higher standard for pastors and teachers, but laymen can't claim, well,

01:28:43

I'm just a layman, so I can just stew in my ignorance. That's not true, because life is too hard.

01:28:51

There's too many things going on. If you don't know your Bible and you don't know the Lord Jesus Christ with some depth, your life's going to be pretty miserable, because you're going to be knocked all over the place, and you won't know what the

01:29:01

Word of God says in order to live by God's principles, and you're just going to get shattered. Amen.

01:29:07

Well, we have to go to our final break right now. It's much briefer than the break that we had previously, so if you'd like to join us on the air, do so now or forever hold your peace, because we're rapidly running out of time, and our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

01:29:20

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01:29:26

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01:29:32

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Bill Shishko, that you heard about his program from Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Well, we are now back with our final 24 minutes of our interview today with Steve Martin, who is the

01:35:11

Dean of Students at the IRBS, the Theological Seminary in Mansfield, Texas.

01:35:16

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

01:35:25

chrisarnzen at gmail .com. And Steve, we have a listener in Bangor, Maine, John, who wants to know, can you recommend a

01:35:37

Baptist edition of the Heidelberg Catechism called an Orthodox Catechism by Hercules Collins?

01:35:46

Yes, I can. Well, that was a brief. Good. All right,

01:35:52

John. Well, thanks a lot for that contribution to the show. In fact, go to cvbbs .com

01:36:00

and order that if you don't already have it. Yes, cvbbs .com. And in fact, I slipped my mind, you have a very close relationship with the owners of cvbbs .com.

01:36:10

Well, I do. I knew the original owner, Fred Huebner, who then turned it over to his daughter and son -in -law,

01:36:16

Todd and Patty Jennings. And I worked with Cumberland Valley for about a decade.

01:36:22

If you go on the website, it says you can get expert book advice, and people would ask questions about Christian books, and I would answer them.

01:36:30

And also, I would write reviews of books as they came out. So there's 10 years of reviews of books, and there's 10 years of answering questions.

01:36:37

And one of the things I appreciate about Cumberland Valley is, you know, you order a book from Amazon, or you wanted to order a book from Amazon, and you order the book, but you can't get any counsel or input from Amazon.

01:36:49

And you can call up Cumberland Valley and say, I want to teach the book of Ezekiel, or I want to teach the book of James.

01:36:54

What are the best commentaries currently available on that? And they can give you intelligent feedback.

01:37:00

Amazon's, they're not going to give you anything. And so I've purchased tens of thousands of books from my church, and our church library, and from myself, from Cumberland Valley, as well as from Mike Gadosh and Solid Ground Books, who have two of the best purveyors of Christian books in the country as sponsors, and I hope your readers take advantage of it.

01:37:20

Amen. And I am very thrilled that many, many, many of my listeners, listeners that I've never even heard from with questions before, have been ordering from Solid Ground Christian Books, and have been telling

01:37:34

Mike Gadosh that they heard about him through this program. And Todd and Patty Jennings suspect that a lot of people have been ordering from them, from our audience, but for some reason our audience hasn't been so quick to let them know that.

01:37:50

They just see that there is a correspondence between the growth in their sales and their advertising with me.

01:37:59

So I hope that's a lesson to all of you. If you're ordering from cvbbs .com, please tell

01:38:04

Todd and Patty Jennings that you heard about cvbbs .com from Iron Trippin's Iron, as you have been doing with Solid -Ground -Books .com.

01:38:15

We have, let's see here, we have Christopher in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, who says, why did those that adhered to the 1689

01:38:30

Confession in the United States or in the Americas switch to the

01:38:37

Philadelphia Confession, even though they're largely similar? What are the differences? Well, that's a very good question, and it's an intelligent question, so I throw a kudo to my questioner.

01:38:50

The Philadelphia Confession added a couple of issues about singing hymns and psalms and things like that, and so after the

01:38:57

Revolutionary War, all things British were kind of suspect, like the Presbyterians in America dropped a couple of chapters from the

01:39:05

Westminster Confession because it had to do with the civil magistrate making people do the right thing and going to the right church.

01:39:12

And Americans, who had just been through the Revolution, said, we don't want the church telling us where to go to church.

01:39:19

We want to be able to make that decision on our own. So the idea of compulsion was dropped from the American edition of the

01:39:25

Westminster Confession. In the same way, Baptists, I think, wanted to give the idea that, hey, this isn't just a

01:39:33

London Baptist Confession, it's just not a British thing, but we see it in Scripture, we own it too, so people could adhere to the

01:39:40

Philadelphia Confession and not feel like they're going back to Britain, or the Charleston Confession in South Carolina, or the one in Rhode Island, the same way.

01:39:51

These were meant to be Americanized versions of the original one because people were kind of in rebellion still against Great Britain.

01:39:58

So to add a couple of issues about what we sing and to rebel against Britain were the reasons for the printing of the

01:40:06

Philadelphia and Charleston, etc. Was there something about the issue of divorce that's also in the

01:40:12

Philadelphia Confession? Not to my knowledge, but I'm willing to stand corrected. Okay.

01:40:18

For some reason that's stuck in the back of my head that there was something about divorce that was more clear in the

01:40:25

Framers' understanding or convictions. But, well, thank you very much for your excellent question,

01:40:33

Christopher, and keep listening to the program and spreading the word about it in Suffolk County, New York, and beyond.

01:40:39

Let's see here, we have Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, what's the difference between a church constitution and a confession?

01:40:50

That's a good question too, and I've actually been to Perry County, and I worship there and have great friends in Perry County, so people don't know that over the mountains from Carlisle, there is

01:41:01

Perry County. Scenic and beautiful. Anyway, getting to the point, a constitution is how a local church tells its members in the world how we run business.

01:41:14

This is how we elect officers. This is what we understand about X, Y, and Z.

01:41:20

This is the confession or creed that we hold to, etc. A confession of faith has to do with what is believed among a number of churches over a period of time.

01:41:29

So the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689, sometimes called the

01:41:34

Second London Confession, was signed on by a hundred representatives from different churches, whereas a constitution is normally just what one church says about itself.

01:41:46

It may have a confession that's been signed on to by many churches and many theologians, but the constitution itself is normally limited to that church.

01:41:55

This is what we have services, this is what we expect you to do, this is how you become a member, this is how we exclude people from the church, etc.

01:42:05

Properly understood, it might be one way of taking a confession and then bringing it down to, okay, this is how we flesh it out in this local context.

01:42:15

Yeah, a confession would connect Christians of a particular congregation to the saints of many ages, of many centuries, whereas the constitution would be more localized and may even have specific things in regarding the use of the building that involve tradition or things like that that are allowed within the freedom and liberty that we have in the

01:42:42

Christian faith to have certain rules about how we use our building, but it's not something that is establishing doctrine or something like that.

01:42:49

Correct, correct. We have C .J. in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, who says, can you please give in summary the best way to convince our fundamentalist

01:43:02

Baptists and other evangelical friends who are anti -confessional that these things are not a violation of sola scriptura, nor are they aberrant in regard to the history of Baptist and evangelical churches outside of the mainline and paedo -baptist congregations?

01:43:21

There are many people that seem to be perpetuating the myth that Baptists never were confessional people.

01:43:29

Well, that's a repeatable question in the sense that it comes up quite frequently. First of all, thank you for the question.

01:43:37

I would first of all pray for these people. You know, we see the truth as we understand it, not because we're more clever than these other people, but because God's revealed it to us.

01:43:46

Paul said, what do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast about it as if you came up with it on your own?

01:43:53

We see these things because God has been gracious to reveal them to us. I spent seven years as an

01:44:00

Arminian, or worse, a know -nothing Christian, before I came to see the doctrines of grace, and it wasn't because I was smarter than my friends who stayed

01:44:08

Arminian. It was just because God opened my eyes, and so I'm eternally grateful he didn't pass me by.

01:44:14

But he did show me the doctrines of grace, the historic and biblical understanding of salvation.

01:44:20

But having prayed for them, I would say that there's a book written, a dedication to Tom Nettles, the well -known

01:44:30

Baptist historian and a confessional. Yeah, he's a friend of mine, actually, and he's been on this program many times.

01:44:35

Very good. Well, there's a fresh script or a dedicatory volume written for him, and Jim Renahan has a contribution in that book.

01:44:43

Dr. Jim Renahan, who's the president of our seminary here, president -elect, about to be made president, and he wrote a chapter there on the place of tradition.

01:44:52

The Bible notes two kinds of tradition. There's a tradition that goes back to men, and there's a tradition, or carrying forward of truth, that goes back to God himself.

01:45:02

And so Paul can use the word traditions, or tradition in a good way, you know, hold on to the tradition that was given to you, because you received it by apostolic decree.

01:45:12

It wasn't, this is from God, this isn't something made up for men, whereas Jesus could give the

01:45:18

Pharisees a hard time, because their traditions originated in men that didn't originate in the Word of God, or the speech of God originated with men.

01:45:27

And I think the point can be shown that the idea of looking to historic tradition, or the handing out of the faith, is something that's not new, or wasn't invented by writers of the creeds and confessions, but rather in Scripture, it's expected that you would hold on to the best things.

01:45:49

One of the great leaders of the early, of the church in the early 20th century was

01:45:54

J. Gresham Machen, who was founder of Westminster Seminary, longtime professor of Princeton Seminary, and he never owned that name, a fundamentalist.

01:46:06

He was called Dr. Fundamentalist because he was considered to be the most learned among the conservative holders onto the truth, but he never owned the title for himself, but he said that fundamentalism was too small a ledge to stand on as the waves of modernity crashed upon the

01:46:23

American shore. You need full -orbed confessional Christianity to withstand all the pressures, all the false ideas that are just washing across America, and five fundamentals and seven taboos, seven fundamentals and five taboos are just not robust enough.

01:46:43

Much of fundamentalism has been washed away. Look how many churches have gone the way of contemporary worship because they don't know any better, and they're drifting.

01:46:52

There's no anchors. A confession gives you a robust, strong anchor that you won't be carried away by every wind of doctrine, by everything that comes up in American culture, whether it be feminism or racial identity or contemporary worship or all the things that have happened in the last 35 years.

01:47:12

We don't have to be carried away from them if we believe that we have the truth and we hold onto it. Amen, and wouldn't it be wise for the listener with the question to remind or inform some of these anti -confessional brethren of his that there are no doubt some of their heroes of the faith that were confessional, even whether or not they know this.

01:47:41

Like, for instance, Charles Haddon Spurgeon was an adherent to the 1689 London Baptist Confession. In fact, from what

01:47:48

I understand, the Metropolitan Tabernacle has sealed within the cornerstone a copy of the 1689

01:47:55

London Baptist Confession and Benjamin Keech's Catechism, and there are a whole army of great

01:48:02

Baptists of history that are very known and beloved by even the most ardent of anti -confessionalists that were themselves confessional.

01:48:12

Correct. You know, William Carey, Samuel Pierce, men like that, and Adoniram Judson were not make -it -up -as -you -go theologians, but they held onto the historic faith.

01:48:24

A book that I think is a very sad book in some ways is The History of English Particular Baptists by Robert Oliver, a

01:48:30

Ph .D. in Great Britain, published by the Banner of Truth, and while it does show the history of Calvinistic Baptists in Great Britain, one of the sad things is that they didn't pay much attention to their confession, and so you'd have a period, a hundred years of bad theology, and then a theologian would write a book, and there'd be some better theology, and it would go back and forth over the centuries between the 1689, and Spurgeon comes along in the 1850s, and he goes, men, and he holds up the confession, and he says, men, we have a confession.

01:49:01

We don't need to keep reinventing the wheel, and I think Baptists have been too often doing that.

01:49:07

Interestingly, for those fundamentalists, as they would call themselves, or arch -conservatives, the argument that they use is the same argument the liberals used to undermine the

01:49:18

Northern Baptist Confession, when in the 1920s, the battles were raging in Northern denominations.

01:49:26

Some of the leaders in the Northern Baptist denomination who were liberals said, look, we don't hold to any man -made creed.

01:49:34

We just hold to the Bible, and we hold to Jesus, and that's good enough for us, and I'm thinking people bought that, and so then they proceeded to dismantle the

01:49:44

Jesus, and dismantle the Bible, and they had nothing left. You know, heretics have always said, we believe the

01:49:52

Bible, and don't question us any further, but that's wrong. We need to question what they believe about the

01:49:58

Bible. Amen. In fact, my old friend John Thornberry, who

01:50:03

I believe I mentioned him earlier, now retired from the ministry, but for years, he was one of those holdouts in the

01:50:12

American Baptist denomination, which is very liberal today, at least for the most part, even apostate, but he was a faithful, confessionally

01:50:23

Calvinist Baptist in the American Baptist Association, and he was having that same battle with them that they were claiming to be non -confessional, and they were using that claim to justify and legitimize all kinds of horrible teaching and apostate teaching.

01:50:43

Exactly. Confessions are good. It keeps error out, and it means it's a compass to track.

01:50:51

Amen. Let's see here. Oh, by the way, I wanted to plug a book, another book, since you mentioned

01:50:58

Tom Nettles, that goes right along with that listener's question. By His Grace and For His Glory, a historical, theological, and practical study of the doctrines of grace in Baptist life.

01:51:09

This is a real eye -opener as far as the heroes of Baptist history, the majority of whom were strong, thoroughgoing, confessional

01:51:19

Calvinists, even those that are considered heroes by our anti -Calvinist brothers today, they seem to be uneducated about the full -orbed teachings of many of their heroes, because many of them were even more hostile to the unfettered free will notions.

01:51:42

I know that most non -Calvinist Baptists refuse to be called Arminians, but if you will,

01:51:48

Arminian Baptists, most of these men were far more hostile to Arminianism than I would even dare to be in some of my rhetoric.

01:52:00

Like even Charles Haddon Spurgeon and his criticisms of those that believed in universal atonement was so harsh at times that I would feel myself very hesitant to repeat exactly those words coming from my own mouth, if you will.

01:52:18

And you can get that book, by the way, also at cvbbs .com, cvbbs .com, that's

01:52:23

By His Grace and For His Glory. And I recommend that book even for our Presbyterian brethren who have

01:52:30

Arminian Baptist friends and loved ones that they want to convince that the doctrines of grace historically have been held by the greatest among their friends in the

01:52:40

Baptist circles. So I think it's even valuable for Presbyterians to get a hold of it.

01:52:46

It was once said that in Scotland, every Scottish Christian home had a copy of the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress and Christians Fourfold State by Thomas Boston.

01:52:56

I think every Calvinistic Baptist home ought to have a copy of the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress by a

01:53:02

Calvinistic Baptist, John Bunyan, but also they need to have a copy of By His Grace and For His Glory by Tom Nettles, because it gives them back their history.

01:53:12

Their history has been stolen from them by disreputable people who rewrote Baptist history, and they need to get it back.

01:53:20

Amen. Well, I want you to have three minutes now, uninterrupted, to summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners about confessionalism versus minimalism.

01:53:30

I grieve at so many of the laymen I've met whose lives have been made difficult because they were taught next to nothing.

01:53:37

We would have people visit our church in Atlanta, and they'd say, you know, we're not sure we agree with your theology.

01:53:43

We're still examining it. But you know, you have a big God. You have reverent worship.

01:53:49

The kids here aren't out of control. You sing classic hymns. Our souls are really being ministered to.

01:53:56

The jury's still out on whether we agree with your theology, but we have to admit the application of that theology and how you feed us makes all the difference.

01:54:04

And that's becoming a very rare thing, where churches are pastored by men who are pop psychologists on Sunday and manage programs during the week.

01:54:17

In 1956, Christianity Today said that was the number one criticism of liberalism, that they didn't teach anything.

01:54:24

They just gave you pop psychology messages and managed programs. Sadly, that's what broad evangelicalism has become.

01:54:31

But I think robust confessional Christianity, whether of the Baptist or Presbyterian or Dutch Reformed, is what this country needs.

01:54:39

It'll put iron in your bones. If you have a sock for a backbone, it'll put a steel rod up the sock and give you a backbone.

01:54:48

And it will give you great teaching to live your life by, to face death, to face life's hardest heartaches, to honor

01:54:57

Christ, and to look forward with great anticipation to glory. Amen.

01:55:03

Well, I want to make sure that our listeners have all of the contact information they need for you.

01:55:12

First of all, ARPCA, the Association of Reformed Baptist Churches of America, once again, their website is

01:55:18

ARBCA, which stands for Association of Reformed Baptist Churches of America, ARBCA .com.

01:55:25

And also, the IRBS Theological Seminaries website is

01:55:30

IRBSseminary .org, IRBSseminary .org,

01:55:37

and don't forget to put the two S's back to back in that website. Amen. And do you have any other contact information that you care to share with our listeners?

01:55:44

Well, you can reach me at either place, um, RevSteveMartin at Gmail. I could go by Dean Martin at Gmail, but that would confuse them.

01:55:56

That's right. You're the dean of students. You're Dean Martin. That's right. When you're putting on a hold, the music you listen to is,

01:56:02

Everybody Love. It's RevSteveMartin at Gmail .com.

01:56:09

By the way, speaking of Dean Martin, one time years ago, when I interviewed

01:56:14

Richard Bennett, a former Roman Catholic priest, who is now a Reformed Baptist, I think

01:56:21

I shocked him to a little bit of an embarrassment, because when I introduced him on the air,

01:56:27

I played before he came on, but he was listening, obviously. I played at the introduction,

01:56:34

Dean Martin singing Arrivederci Roma. Oh, that's great humor on your part, and he was probably flummoxed and had never had an intro like that.

01:56:45

No, he never had, and he's a very gentle spirit. Even though he's very, very tough on the everseas of Rome, he's got a very meek and gentle and kind spirit about him.

01:56:56

Well, I think if you've seen your depravity before a holy God, and you've seen the grace of God in saving sinners like you, it should make each of us very humble, very grateful, very, um, we are nothing,

01:57:08

Christ is everything. Amen. Well, thank you so much, Steve, for being on the show today.

01:57:14

I look forward to your frequent return to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio as a guest. You have an open door here, as do all the members of the faculty at the

01:57:23

IRBS Theological Seminary to be guests on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. I want to thank everybody who listened today, especially those who took the time to write in questions.

01:57:32

I want you to mark down on your calendars that tomorrow we have my dear friend Anthony Eugenio as my guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

01:57:41

He is a member of Hope Reformed Baptist Church in Medford, Long Island, New York, which is a

01:57:48

ARBCA congregation, Association of Reformed Baptist Churches of America, where my other dear friend,

01:57:57

Rich Jensen, is the pastor. But Anthony Eugenio of New York Apologetics will be on talking about starting a grassroots apologetics ministry.

01:58:06

And just to let you know, his website is NewYorkApologetics .com, NewYorkApologetics .com, that's

01:58:12

N -E -W -Y -O -R -K, it's not abbreviated, NewYorkApologetics .com.

01:58:18

And please stay tuned tomorrow because we have some exciting announcements to make, not only involving the

01:58:25

IRBS Theological Seminary, but also involving a Iron Sharpens Iron Radio event that I hinted at earlier that's going to be held,

01:58:33

God willing, in New York City on July 9th at a very historic church that dates back at least to the 1700s, maybe earlier, and a thousand -seat facility there in Manhattan.

01:58:46

And we are having, God willing, Dr. Tony Costa, who is on the faculty of Toronto Baptist Seminary, who is going to be discussing the invasion of Marxist socialism into the church in America and beyond.

01:59:04

And I think it will be an eye -opening event for a lot of those who attend. And so please mark your calendars to listen tomorrow when we make those announcements.

01:59:14

But I hope that you all always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater

01:59:21

Savior than you are a sinner. Amen. Amen. We look forward to hearing from you and your questions for our guests tomorrow on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.