May 25, 2018 Show with Brock Evans on “Fundamentalism: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly”

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May 28, 2018

May 25, 2018: Brock Evans, pastor of Pittsboro Baptist Church, Pittsboro, Indiana will address the topic: “FUNDAMENTALISM: The GOOD, the BAD & the UGLY”.

00:01: Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown
00:08: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,
00:16: Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
00:23: Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.
00:32: 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.
00:46: 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.
00:57: Now here's our host, Chris Arnton. Good afternoon,
01:05: 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.
01:14: This is Chris Arnton, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 25th day of May 2018, the first day technically of Memorial Day weekend.
01:28: Well I guess tomorrow would be the first day but a lot of people would consider tonight the first night of Memorial Day weekend.
01:36: And I am delighted to have on the program today somebody who made time for us today, very last minute,
01:44: I'm talking five minutes ago, to join us on the program. His name is
01:49: Pastor Brock Evans and he is the pastor of Pittsburgh Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, Indiana.
01:56: Today we're going to be talking about fundamentalism, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Brock Evans.
02:07: Yes, it's good to be with you, Chris, and I appreciate the show and the invitation.
02:13: Great, well why don't you, even though you've been on the program before, give our listeners a brief description of Pittsburgh Baptist Church there in Pittsburgh, Indiana.
02:22: Well actually, Chris, out here in Pittsburgh we're, you know, maybe about 20 minutes from Indianapolis and Memorial Day weekend means
02:33: Indy 500 times. Today is carb day. I grew up about four blocks from the track.
02:40: Wow. Spent most of my childhood running around the 500 in the wild glory days of it.
02:49: Wow. But I took the position here, I served at a church on the west side for about ten years, nine and a half, ten years, and I took the position here about eight and a half years ago, and Pittsburgh is a little farming community about 20 minutes west of the west side of Indianapolis, right out 74.
03:12: We're a medium -sized Southern Baptist Church, and we hold to the
03:19: Baptist faith and message. I'm a student of the seminary, Southern Seminary, and that's about it.
03:28: We have a lot of good people here, and it's great, it's a great church. And I'm assuming when you say you're a student of the
03:34: Southern Seminary, you mean the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
03:42: That's right. The only one that matters. I've had a number of the folks on the faculty on the show including
03:51: Dr. Al Mohler. In fact, God willing, I am going to be seeing a
03:57: Dr. Al Mohler next week at the Banner of Truth Conference, which is going to be held not very far from where I'm sitting at the
04:06: Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. And he is one of the speakers, and I will be giving our listeners more information about that in a bit.
04:17: But usually we only do this for first -time guests, and this is have you give your testimony of salvation, but but I don't believe the last time you were on, since you were only on if I'm not mistaken for a part of the program, only half of the program
04:41: I think, we did not have time to have you give your personal testimony. But even if you did, there's nothing wrong with giving it twice.
04:49: So why don't you let our listeners know what kind of religious upbringing you had, if any, and what providential circumstances our
04:56: Sovereign Lord used in your life to draw you to himself and save you. Well, I was baptized in the
05:02: Mormon Church just a few weeks ago. I'm kidding. They do baptism?
05:10: I don't know. Yes, they do. They baptize by immersion, and they even baptize,
05:16: I believe, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but obviously they don't believe. They have the same vocabulary very often with a different dictionary.
05:24: They don't mean what we mean by that. They don't believe in the Trinity, so. That's right. You know,
05:30: I had an interesting upbringing. I made a profession of faith at a young age, the age of five.
05:37: I remember the whole thing. I remember walking down and being baptized. I remember the meeting with the pastor.
05:42: I remember being baptized. I was raised kind of around, and not to blame anyone, but I was kind of raised around an easy -believest society of people, and that led me to really, and I was really counting on my confession more than anything to secure the deal, if you will.
06:13: I was raised in an Arminian situation. I lived away from the
06:20: Lord. When I turned 14, I really took a turn towards a rebellious path, and I went away from the
06:29: Lord for many years. When I was about 19, I tried to start seeking the
06:35: Lord again in my own way, on my own terms, and began attending church at that same church, and then another, and I really wrestled with this salvation, and for one thing,
06:51: I didn't feel saved, and that's not a determining factor, as we know, but I began to do some very odd things to gain assurance and gain salvation.
07:02: I almost took a monastic kind of turn, where I would begin to promise
07:08: God that I would be more holy and be faithful, and I was very fearful, almost to the point of schizophrenia.
07:17: I would stay up all night reading the Bible just to try to please
07:22: God and a lot of other things, and it wasn't until in October of 2000 that I was in the dormitory of the
07:35: Independent Baptist College I was going to, and I was dealing with this issue of salvation, really wondering, you know, if I had been converted, and being very fearful, and I was praying for several hours up until the wee hours of the morning, and the nature of my prayer was
07:58: I was just kind of promising God I wouldn't do this, and I wouldn't do that, and that sort of thing, and then all of a sudden
08:05: I realized intellectually and spiritually, because you know, people probably learn spiritually before they learn intellectually,
08:13: I realized that I wasn't going to do any of it, and so I started to tell
08:21: God that, I started to confess my sin and say, you know, I don't have the ability to keep these promises, and it was like a light turned on, and then
08:33: I asked God to save me out of desperation, you know, with this godly sorrow, realizing that, you know,
08:40: I didn't have, I couldn't muster up salvation, and to make the story a little shorter, when
08:46: I asked God for salvation it was like a light sprang in, and I'm not Pentecostal in any way, but I had a full assurance at that point that something had happened to me, something, a conversion had taken place, and I count that as a day of my salvation.
09:03: I was then baptized into the church, and I went right into the ministry the next month, which was not good, but we can talk about that a little later in the program.
09:16: Well, you might as well bring it up now. I mean, that seems like a very compelling cliffhanger that you left us with.
09:23: Why don't you continue with that story? Well, I was,
09:28: I began serving in an independent Baptist Church, and let me back up a couple months,
09:36: I started attending Bible College with no real plan other than to kind of dedicate myself further to the
09:43: Lord. When I did that, I started attending a fundamental
09:49: Baptist Church of a pastor, and you know, I won't judge him. I'm sure he did a lot of good things for the
09:58: Lord, but he had a very magnanimous personality, which in and of itself is fine, but he was very demanding, you know, my way or the highway, and I am rather docile in,
10:09: I'm outgoing, but I'm rather docile in my personality, and so that worked well in my opinion for a long time.
10:21: But it was this style, this independent fundamental pre -trib, you know, hyper eschatological focus, and that really unhealthy for a church, very,
10:40: I don't even want to want to call the preaching topical, because it was so sporadic. It was agenda after agenda, dogma after dogma, and you know, he saw that I was a pretty reliable person and useful for the ministry, and so he immediately put me in a position.
11:00: I began working with children, and a few months later I was essentially the youth pastor of the church, and I did the best
11:10: I could with that over time, but I learned in a lot of ways how to do ministry the wrong way, and part of my problem with coming out of that style of church about eight, nine years ago was
11:26: I let the pendulum swing too far the other way, and I was really a servant of a man instead of a servant of God, and it really hurt my family, it hurt my marriage.
11:41: I wasn't a good father in a lot of ways until I came out of that sect -like, almost cultish mentality, where you know, when he said jump,
11:54: I said how high, and you know, I would come to him with what classes
12:00: I should take each semester, how much time I should spend doing really virtually anything, and I lived in a church parsonage, but other than that I was unpaid from the church, but most of my life was consumed with church activity, so we were very poor, and that put a strain on my marriage as well.
12:26: So I kind of walked right into that one. Well, take us now in your journey, because I know that you came to discover and embrace and fall in love with the doctrines of Sovereign Grace, and we'll get in a little bit more into detail on what exactly that means, but tell us about that journey.
12:51: Well, there are a lot of lies and weaponized assumptions made by, you know, those who reject the doctrines of grace.
13:06: And by the way, let me just say, too, a little statistic. Kind of at the second phase of the
13:12: Great Awakening, there were about, by our best estimations, you know, this is data from Dr.
13:20: Wills at the seminary, but there were about 58 ,000 Baptists after that, either the first wave or second wave,
13:29: I can't remember, but nevertheless, 57 ,000 of those held to confessions like the
13:37: London Baptist or later the Philadelphia Confession. Let me say, too, also about that, of the 1 ,000 that did not, they only rebutted one point, which was definite atonement, and they kind of had a problem with that, and because of that one point, they were actually considered
13:58: Arminian. And so these are things that are hidden from, because they don't meet the narrative, they don't meet the agenda of these kinds of groups, and so these things are kind of hidden from the teaching in schools.
14:17: But I was brought up, you know, well, in Bible college and the associations
14:23: I was involved in, I was brought up in a very anti -Calvinistic group of people who were misrepresenting
14:33: Calvinism, misrepresenting the doctrines of grace, I hate to even call it Calvinism, but misrepresenting the doctrines of grace.
14:40: In fact, it would probably be good for us to summarize what those are, and then you could continue with the remainder of the story where you just left off there.
14:50: The way that I like to summarize the doctrines of grace is that that salvation is of the
15:00: Lord, that's a good one, and the fact that that God is in control sovereignly over all things, and that even our salvation is a gift to certain people whom he has elected before the foundation of the world, and that he leaves the rest of mankind to their own condemnation, because all of us are from the same clay of sinful, of depraved nature, of an inability to please
15:38: God in the flesh, even with a faith that we can somehow muster up or conjure up and present to him as something that pleases him.
15:47: We cannot do anything that pleases God while we are in the flesh, and God in his mercy rescues some of us out from that condition, and no one has the right to say that God is unfair because everyone who is going to be condemned deserves being condemned, and no one who was saved deserves being saved.
16:11: And of course, you could add anything that you'd like to that, that was just off the top of my head summary there.
16:17: No, I agree, and that's part of the straw man that Dr.
16:25: Moeller likes to talk about, you know, he says, one thing Dr. Moeller says is, you know, one thing you never find in Scripture is a person who wants to be saved but can't be, you know, and so they throw a couple things out there, one of them being the
16:41: Calvinists believe that God saves people against their will, and he doesn't, he changes their will, that's quite evident.
16:49: He takes away their heart of stone and gives them a heart of flesh, as you know.
16:57: But I, you know, people, a lot of people from my old camp truly did not believe this.
17:07: It is absolutely true. I became familiar and accepting of the Doctrines of Grace from reading the
17:14: Bible alone. I didn't pick up a Reformed Theology book or a
17:22: Doctrines of Grace book, they were all around me. I mean, even the systematic theologies, we used the old
17:29: Lewis Schaefer from, you know, the founder of Dallas Seminary. We used his systematic theology for a lot of different things, we used
17:37: Matthew Henry's, some of his stuff, I mean practically all the books we used because non -Calvinists don't write.
17:45: Ha ha, right. Well, you know, obviously that's not true, but I have heard from some honest men who even say they despise
17:58: Calvinism, that you can hardly have an adequate library without any books in there that weren't written by Calvinists.
18:08: Even from some really anti -Calvinistic people, they have admitted that. Right, right.
18:15: Yeah, and that's more than the camp I came from would probably admit. But as you read the
18:20: Scriptures, to sum that part, this section up, it's all over the place.
18:27: It's, you know, we don't just ethically take Romans 9 and try to prove something that isn't in Scripture.
18:35: I was reading John 10, preparing for a message at Wading River this next week, and I've got it here,
18:45: I give them eternal life and they will never perish, no one will snatch them out of my hand, and here's the kicker, my father who has given them to me is greater than all.
18:56: So election does not make me fearful, it gives me great confidence. It's the undergirding of the whole redemptive process,
19:06: I think. Right, and I can recall years ago when
19:14: I still worked for WMCA radio, I've worked there for 15 years, and on occasion
19:20: I would fill in for the talk show host Andy Anderson. He had a program that originally was called
19:27: New York Live, and then they changed it to Andy Anderson Live.
19:33: But I can remember when I would do a program on the doctrines of grace, aka
19:39: Calvinism, aka Reformed Theology, there would be people, especially one person in particular
19:45: I can remember, who would call in with an anonymous name, and he was terrified that he was not of the elect.
19:56: And when I asked him, well, have you repented and do you believe in Jesus Christ?
20:02: Yes, I do. You know, are you following Christ? Are you in love with Christ?
20:09: Are you immersed in his word? Are you a member of a local Bible -believing church?
20:15: And he affirmed all of those things. And I said, well, there is no way that a person on Judgment Day is going to be cast into hell who truly has come to embrace
20:31: Christ as his only hope for salvation, has repented of his sin, and even though he continues to sin, still has a life that is marked with repentance, an ongoing grief over sin, and an ongoing repentance for the remainder of his life.
20:50: Even if he falls into seasons of sin and backslides, he will get up and return to his
20:56: Lord and follow him. I said, there's no way that there's somebody going to be told by God on Judgment Day who fits that description, who's going to say, wait a minute, we're looking through our
21:07: Rolodex here, and you're not of the elect, I'm sorry, you're going to hell. The only people who manifest those character traits of their life are those who are of the elect, am
21:21: I right? Right, and that's what 1 John 5 says, and among other texts, everyone who believes that Jesus is the
21:31: Christ has been born of God. I mean, belief is a sign of salvation to us, election obviously is
21:39: God's, entirely God's side of it, but that's part of, in my mind, that's part of the lies that have been told and the mischaracterization of the doctrines of grace and those who believe it, and you know, they're always throwing around this, well, that's not fair argument.
22:00: And really the kicker there, as you said earlier, God could save no one and that would be completely fair, because none of us deserve to be saved, but you see the synergism coming out of that motif, if you will.
22:18: I think, though, you know, we've got to, as Calvinists, or as adherers to doctrines of grace, also understand that we have to be obedient to the
22:34: Word and those kinds of things, not, you know, salvation is of the
22:41: Lord, but there's a human factor in our sanctification, you know, we have to be obedient to the
22:47: Lord and evangelistic, you know, we have to kind of disprove those mischaracterizations of those who attack us.
22:59: Now, I think I interrupted you, though, where you were coming to the place where you discovered, by reading the
23:05: Bible alone, not through reading a book by a theologically reformed person, but by just reading the scriptures, but continue where you left off there.
23:15: Well, I mean, I would say as early as three or four years into the whole thing, I began to see inconsistencies, and to be honest, it was their side that brought the doctrines of grace up.
23:27: What do you mean by three or four years into the whole thing? What do you mean by that? Oh, I mean into my experience in fundamentalism and in a sect of fundamentalism that was unhealthy.
23:42: I began to notice inconsistencies with what they were saying, and began to read up on it myself.
23:50: I was a slow learner in the matter, but I'd say by 2008, which was eight years in,
23:58: I was fully in. I was all in. And just from reading scripture, reading
24:06: Ephesians, for one thing, that we are elect in Christ, and we are in Him before we do anything.
24:21: It's not an afterthought. You know, God's not, as Sproul says, there isn't even a maverick molecule.
24:30: You know, I think God's either Lord of all or not Lord at all, or however that's phrased.
24:36: But I began to read the scriptures, understanding that salvation is by grace through faith, understanding that faith is a gift, in my opinion, is the gift and the means by which we are saved, and belief is also a gift.
24:51: You know, when Peter was, or when Christ, I think it was in, was it in Caesarea Philippi when
25:00: Christ was, you know, he's walking by all of these statues to all of these gods, and then he turns to the disciples and he says, who do you say that I am?
25:10: And Peter says, or they say, some say John the Baptist, some say Elijah, some say a prophet.
25:16: He said, no, who do you say I am? And Peter says, you are the Christ, the Son of the Living God. You know, that obviously, flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my
25:25: Father, which is in heaven. All spiritual truth comes from God and is given by God.
25:32: And, you know, James White was in a debate with someone several years ago, and you would hear illustrations from this group like, it's like God throws a rope down and you're in a pit, and you grab on the rope and God pulls you up.
25:57: And White kind of corrected the individual and said, no, it's as if you're dead, you're a dead man lying in the bottom of the pit, and God comes down, breathes life into you, and then drags you out of the pit.
26:13: And, you know, there are several. No illustration is perfect, as you know, not perfectly representative of doctrinal truth.
26:20: But for me, I was in an environment that was totally isolated. I'm a very loyal person, so I did not want to cause a stir, but after a while I just could not deny that, you know, this idea of the doctrines of grace was all over the
26:37: Bible, and I still think that today. Amen. Well, we're going to our first break right now.
26:43: If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, send us an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com.
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27:03: Let's say you are in disagreement with your own pastor over what we're talking about, your own spouse, or perhaps you're a pastor, you disagree with your own congregation, or your own fellow elders, or your own denomination, fellowship, brotherhood, whatever the case is.
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27:32: USA. Don't go away. God willing, we'll be right back with Brock Evans and more of Fundamentalism, the
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32:07: We are now back with Brock Evans, pastor of Pittsburgh Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, Indiana. We are discussing fundamentalism, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
32:16: And basically when you came to see these truths,
32:23: I'm assuming since you got this directly from the Scriptures, you didn't even have a label for this, but you saw the truths of the doctrines of grace that we owe 100 % of our salvation to God, and even the faith that we present to him is a gift to us from him.
32:45: We cannot even say that we somehow were better than our neighbor because we eventually cried out to him in faith, whereas they didn't, because the only thing that we can respond to that is gratitude to God for giving us that faith.
33:04: We cannot say that we are smarter than our neighbor, more humble than our neighbor, more religious than our neighbor, more sensitive over our sin than our neighbor, more wise than our neighbor.
33:15: Whatever the case is, if someone takes any kind of an ounce of credit for the faith that they present to God, they are in some way saying that they are better than their lost neighbor, aren't they,
33:31: Brock? Right, yes, I agree. And that's the great thing about sovereign grace when it comes to salvation, is it's absolute security, because in our dark moments we do realize that we don't add up, but the fact that God by his grace has called us affectionately to salvation, and then to think that he elected us by his foreknowledge, and you know that that's where a lot of people get off the path,
34:03: I think, or get confused, that that idea of foreknowledge is certainly salvific, but it's also relational.
34:10: You can know someone in several different ways. You can know about them, you can know them intimately, you can know them as a friend, a brother, a family member.
34:19: There are several ways you can know someone, and God knew us in the way that he knew
34:24: Jeremiah before I formed the, before I formed, there I go with my Elizabethan English.
34:30: Does that bother your show, brother? Wait, can you say that again, what? Yeah, I said there
34:37: I go with my Elizabethan English. Oh. I said before I formed thee in the womb,
34:45: I knew thee. That shows my King James heritage. Well, there's nothing wrong with the
34:51: King James. I would say that most Christians who are 50 or over likely had their raising in the faith, their upbringing in the faith through the
35:05: King James, and that's been a precious gift from God that has led many to salvation for centuries.
35:13: Right, right. And that's one of the things that our King James only friends never seem to want to admit or recognize, just because someone believes that there are other modern translations, or should
35:28: I say that there are modern translations, not other modern translations, that are not only the
35:34: Word of God, but that are perhaps even superior in their rendering, the translation into English, just because we believe that does not mean we hate the
35:45: King James Bible. There seems to be only two options for King James only. It's either you love it and only use it, and consider all else satanic and rubbish, or you hate the
35:58: King James Bible. There's no middle ground for them. Right, right. But there's a perfect middle ground to take.
36:06: Right. But what God says to Jeremiah, before I formed you in the womb,
36:12: I knew you, and that's not a I knew about you, and there's no reason for God to communicate that for any functional or ontological or epistemological purpose.
36:24: It has specific salvific meaning, which is, I loved you. Before I made you,
36:30: I loved you, you were mine. That was clearly communicated. Now what do you do with that,
36:36: Chris? I think you have to come to the clear realization that God created the world to glorify himself through redemption, and through the consummation of the world, through this idea that Christ, the suffering servant, would die for our sins and then be later glorified over all creation for His gracious mercy towards us.
37:03: But I don't think you can get away from passages like that. So I, you get back to the original question.
37:12: No, I didn't really have a name for it, and I didn't want to be identified with a certain group necessarily, but when you start down this avenue of the doctrines of grace, it leads you to a lot of great spiritual places, and I don't mean that in a superior way, but just spiritual in the way of being a blessing.
37:40: But it also leads you to contention with many, and I'll admit that when
37:47: I first came to this, I was a little immature, and a friend of mine at Southern Seminary said, yeah, you went like the rest of us through Calvinist puberty, and so...
38:04: Is that what is also known as cage stage, Calvin? But I was argumentative,
38:13: I was rude to people, and I had to repent of that spirit, and also
38:21: I had to be forgiving, because my fundamentalism past was sovereignly appointed by God, and I had to accept that as part of his plan for my life, and because I have a lot of regret.
38:35: It's hard for me not to feel like those years were wasted, but in God's economy they have a meaning.
38:43: Right, and we should also say in the outset that there are fundamentalists who believe in the doctrines of sovereign grace.
38:54: I mean there's a divide amongst the landmark Baptists, for instance, and I know that not all fundamentalists are landmark
39:03: Baptists, in fact the landmarkers today would be a minority amongst fundamentalists, but they would, many of them would be in lockstep with other fundamentalists, except that their views that are uniquely landmark, and they are divided because there are some that are vociferous
39:26: Calvinists, although they may not use the term, they are vociferous and very strong adherents to the doctrines of sovereign grace, and are very critical of their other landmark brethren that are freewill believing in the sense that libertarian freewill, unfettered freewill, and so we have to make it clear that not everybody who identifies themselves as a fundamentalist is an anti -Calvinist or even a non -Calvinist.
39:59: Right, and when I say fundamentalist and when you say it, I know that we both mean a specific thing, because I don't, in its purest form,
40:10: I don't want to be associated, let me digress, with J .R. Graves or something like that, and modern -day landmarkers would have nothing in common with the old landmarkers and Graves Calvinism, but moving on from that, in its purest form,
40:28: I don't have a problem being identified as a fundamentalist if you're comparing me to a neo -orthodox theologian or someone that's on the outer realm of universalism or liberal theology.
40:44: I just don't want anything to do with fundamentalism and what it's become. And the term came about during what is known as the fundamentalist modernist controversy where denominations were being split because there were liberals going into apostasy and destroying the theological heritage of denominations and fellowships, so therefore you had the rise of what were known as the fundamentalists.
41:16: Right. And those included many Calvinists like J. Gresham Machen, who was one of the founders of the
41:23: Orthodox Presbyterian Church and Westminster Seminary after Princeton had come to collapse by the weight of liberalism and so on, so it is it is not necessarily an ugly word in and of itself.
41:37: Right, right. So that's, you know, words and names are used in different contexts, as you know, from that, depending on who's using the term.
41:53: So if Harvey Weinstein calls me a fundamentalist, I'm okay with it.
42:02: If you call me a fundamentalist, that's a problem. Yeah, well you you will often hear people in the media refer in a very broad -brushing way to anyone who is conservative and is a
42:17: Christian as a fundamentalist, and they will also mix together with that Baptists and Pentecostals and Charismatics and, you know, you will have fundamentalist
42:29: Baptists who, they vary in their opinion on Pentecostals and Charismatics, but you'll have a considerable number of them not even believing that Pentecostals can be saved in their state as a
42:42: Pentecostal. So it is a very, it's a term that's very broad -brushed, and it's kind of funny when
42:48: I hear of people in the media being described as fundamentalists that I know from just having some kind of knowledge of what they teach and believe and write about and preach about that they are really only moderately conservative.
43:03: Right, right, exactly. You know, I want to say too that kind of part of the unhealthy gear of fundamentalism, it was so man -centered.
43:15: And I have a quote here from Walter Martin that he defines a cult as a group polarized around some interpretation of the
43:27: Bible and is characterized by major deviations from Orthodox Christianity relative to the cardinal doctrines of the
43:36: Christian faith, particularly the fact that God became man in Jesus Christ.
43:42: Now, I wouldn't call fundamentalism a cult, but I would call it a sect.
43:48: And there are several characteristics of a sect and a cult, and sometimes they intertwine with each other.
44:01: Some of them are, they are heavy on speculation, date -setting, they take dogmatic stands on biblical obscurity, financial exploration of, or exploitation of their followers, they foster paranoia, they have an ambiguous hope or assurance of salvation, and that's used in a technical, or a technique for loyalty.
44:30: Now, that would be more cultish, but I think what has developed in fundamentalism is a sect -like mentality, where there's a lot of eisegesis, usually they're centered around the ideas of one man that does not come in check, and you know, it's just a platform.
44:52: You're talking about, as far as church polity, that they typically will deny plurality of elders and have one pastor.
45:00: Right, and it's a vehicle for scandal, and I mean, in almost every case where there is not a plurality of elders, not every case, but, well, and maybe
45:12: I wouldn't even go that far, I'll just say many cases where there is not a plurality of elders, where at least deacons are functioning as elders, you know, that can work.
45:25: I don't think it's biblical, but you know, where there's some kind of accountability, a scandal is inevitable, and usually there are many times it happens.
45:36: It happened in my church, in my previous church, you know, because it was so man -centered, and when the man left, the church fell apart.
45:47: It's not even there anymore because of that, and I was gone by that point. And of course, a lot of what you're saying, we have to be very careful not to be guilty of bearing false witness.
45:59: You're talking about what is among the ugliest of representatives of what is called fundamentalism, that would identify themselves that way, because you and I know precious brothers in Christ who are very humble, very
46:16: Christ -like, that would not fit the description that you're reading, or that, should
46:22: I say, that you're conveying at all. Right, yeah,
46:28: I would affirm that fully, and we're all on a journey, you know, not to sound mystic or mystical, but we're all on a journey.
46:38: We're all growing, and there are a lot of good brothers in fundamentalism that see this, and they see the problems, they're addressing it differently, but you know, it comes a point, though, when you have to, pardon my language, but put on your man pants and get over it and go on with your church, and that's what
46:58: I had to do several years ago was, what am I going to do for the
47:03: Lord? How am I going to serve the Lord? How am I going to represent His ministry through preaching and through administration?
47:11: Because, you know, I make a lot of mistakes as well. I'm a sinful person that has to repent daily of sin, and so, now if you would have had this conversation with me eight or nine years ago, you would have talked to a much more bitter person, and I had to go through a period of...
47:32: You said bitter, not better. B -I -T -T -E -R, right? Right, bitter. I was very bitter about the circumstances, and I was very immature, to be honest, about what was going on.
47:44: Yeah, well, one of the things that's ironic about what is bad about fundamentalism is that they have departed from the concept of what that term even means.
48:00: They have drifted from having the fundamentals of the faith being a primary concern, and of course, we always have to repeat ourselves.
48:10: I'm not broad -brushing, and I'm not saying everybody who calls themselves a fundamentalist, but I'm talking about the worst element of it.
48:17: They are more concerned about a lot of exterior superficial things, the things that even are important, but they are not of primary importance.
48:26: It is not of primary importance if a woman wears feminine slacks.
48:35: You know, to say that a woman who wears pants is a wicked woman in disobedience to God, and those kinds of things.
48:46: I know of a church that disfellowshipped another church because some of the men who were on the softball team of another church wore shorts to a softball game in the summer.
49:02: You know, you have these things that have nothing to do with the gospel, and churches can be caught up in being so focused on just those things that they're not even really preaching the message of Christ.
49:21: Am I right? Yeah, and I think we've got to strike a balance there, because when you talk about dress, that's an issue that I think people need some liberty with and on.
49:38: I think that, you know, with dress, there comes a point to where your modesty becomes immodesty.
49:47: By purist definition, modesty does not mean to blend in, in some regard, to not stand out.
49:59: To not be provocative sexually in the way you dress. Right. Not only that, but also modesty in its purest form, it's come to mean that, to not be sexually provocative and that kind of thing, and that's what they have in mind.
50:17: But sometimes when you're gaudy in your dress, you are technically immodest, and so modesty, what
50:27: I'm saying is modesty isn't, look how modest I am. You know, there's a level of humility that comes with modesty.
50:35: But having said that, I don't think that's our major problem in the evangelical world.
50:41: I think, you know, coming on the scene really more than that is this anything -goes mentality.
50:51: And while I rebuke fundamentalists for their tying things like that to the gospel, identifying with secondaries,
51:00: I guess, would be a good way to describe what they do. But increasingly more, you know, people have no idea how to make a secondary, accept the secondary from a clear doctrinal position.
51:17: And I think that's becoming, you know, with my generation, more and more the problem than even that.
51:24: And that's just, I just say that to be fair, you know. Right. Well, we have to go to our midway break right now.
51:30: This is our longer -than -normal break. It's 12 minutes long, because Grace Life Radio 90 .1
51:35: FM in Lake City, Florida, requires of us a 12 -minute break between the two major segments of the program.
51:42: So please take this time to write questions for our guest, Brock Evans, and also to write down information provided by our advertisers, so that you can patronize them.
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52:09: So send us an email, though, with your questions to pastorbrockevans at chrisarnsen at gmail .com.
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52:30: God willing, we'll be right back after these messages with Pastor Brock Evans and our discussion on Fundamentalism, the
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01:05:35: that you heard about them from Chris Arnsen on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Before I return to my guest
01:05:42: Brock Evans on our discussion of fundamentalism, the good, the bad, and the ugly, we just have some important announcements to make.
01:05:52: First of all, my guest this Monday, the 28th of May, live in the studio,
01:05:59: Memorial Day, we are going to be joined by Pastor Hensworth WC Jonas, who is presiding elder of the
01:06:10: East Caribbean Baptist Mission. He is here in the States over the weekend, will be preaching at Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where I am a member.
01:06:20: I'm looking forward to that, and hopefully I will be there in time to hear that, because I happen to be preaching earlier in the morning at the
01:06:30: Bethesda Mission, which is a men's shelter. I would appreciate your prayer for me as I am once again preaching there, and I take that responsibility very seriously, so I'm asking you please to pray for me and my wisdom and my discernment and my proper and accurate exegesis of the
01:06:51: Scripture, and just pray that the Lord uses whatever I have to say, no matter how feeble my words may be, to open the eyes, ears, and hearts and minds of lost sinners in that room
01:07:08: Monday. I'm sorry, Sunday, but Monday, as I said, Hensworth WC Jonas will be our guest, and he will be discussing his book,
01:07:17: Dancing with Idolatry, Are You Bowing to a False God? That's Monday, May 28th, 4 to 6 p .m.
01:07:26: Eastern Time, right here on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Then, from Tuesday through Thursday of next week, that's
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01:11:57: Brock Evans, pastor of Pittsburgh Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, Indiana. We were discussing about fundamentalism, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and Pastor Brock, before we run out of time and we fail to focus on something important,
01:12:11: I think that we need to right now begin to speak about good things, about fundamentalism, and of course we're talking about fundamentalism within Christianity.
01:12:21: The immediate thing that comes to mind is that there are multitudes, innumerable souls that have been saved by the mercy and grace and blood of Jesus Christ because they heard the gospel from a fundamentalist pulpit, and fundamentalists, the best of that element, are known for being a
01:12:44: Bible -focused group of believers, and it would be shocking if I heard that there was a person going to a fundamentalist church or belonging to one for a long period of time that did not hear often the bare elements, at the very least, of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
01:13:05: Wouldn't you agree with me on that? I certainly would, and you know, that's essentially how
01:13:10: I came to Christ, so I'm very thankful for that. You know,
01:13:16: I think with fundamentalism, and this is such a broad topic, and that word represents a myriad of different beliefs or different functional churches and the way they believe and the polity that they have, so you know, it's hard to broad -brush, but fundamentalism is geared towards spreading the gospel, and I'm thankful for that, and Paul was thankful for that as well.
01:13:52: Yes, and it's funny because I know folks who are dyed -in -the -wool
01:14:00: Calvinists who were students at Bob Jones University, for instance, and they weren't when they entered through the doors there, but when they left they were.
01:14:11: And a friend of mine who is an Orthodox Presbyterian pastor now, he said he was asked by a teacher there on the faculty at BJU, how did you become a
01:14:23: Calvinist? And his response was, because Bob Jones University teaches us to study the
01:14:31: Word of God. And that's how he came to become, as you did, from the
01:14:37: Word of God, a believer in the doctrines of sovereign grace. Yeah, and I might say, too, that several years ago when
01:14:45: I first came to the church, I called Dr. Bob III and asked him to come speak to our church.
01:14:51: At that time our church was very small, and he willingly came.
01:14:58: He charged us very little to come, and he had a gracious spirit the entire time he was here.
01:15:04: He preached an expositional message from the Scriptures, and you know, I wouldn't be in the same place that a lot of the
01:15:13: Bob Jones churches are in Indiana, and I won't go into that for the sake of, for the purpose of not wanting to be asinine, but Dr.
01:15:24: Bob III himself, my personal experience is that he's a very kind and gracious person.
01:15:32: Yeah, and also, I don't know how familiar you are with Steve Pettit, the current president, but he has a lot different attitude towards Calvinistic Brethren in Christ, and it was not long ago,
01:15:50: I guess it was about a year ago, he was on the panel of a conference that Sermon Audio orchestrated where every single one of the speakers was openly a
01:16:02: Calvinist, and Steve Pettit certainly sounded like one.
01:16:08: Right, and you know, coming out of Northland, it would be hard for him not to be, because they were trying to change things up.
01:16:17: As you know, they gifted Northland to the SBC, and Moeller went up with some other guys to see whether that was a profitable gift to accept.
01:16:31: They ended up not accepting it. I don't know all the legal details there, but they were trying to move in that direction, and he was on board to some degree with that.
01:16:44: I don't know that he agreed with, entirely agreed with, with Pat's and his vision and the president there at the time, but he's definitely open to that.
01:16:54: He gave an exposition of the life of Jonathan Edwards here a couple years ago.
01:17:01: It's a good sermon. I don't know if you'd call it a sermon, but a good lecture on the life of Jonathan Edwards.
01:17:08: So you've got to be very careful in fundamentalistic circles of the language that you use.
01:17:16: As long as you don't use, just as long as you preach from the Bible expositionally, most people don't have a problem with it.
01:17:24: Now, it's when you start using terms, because people that don't like to really study things out, they want people to give them answers for them, they watch out for terms.
01:17:39: So if I say the word Calvinism, red flags go up. But if I start talking about salvation by grace through faith and give a gentle exposition of that, most reasonable fundamentalists won't have a problem with that.
01:17:56: And that's been my experience. Yes, and not all of the secondary and tertiary issues that fundamentalists bring up in their pulpits and even as a part of church disciplinary matters or what -have -you are wrong.
01:18:15: I think that for instance, we should not have a totally ambiguous attitude towards the way people dress.
01:18:26: We should not have a totally nonchalant or indifferent attitude towards the music that is in the church and many other things that perhaps the fundamentalists are known to hobby horse on and to be too over the board in the strictness with which they view those things, because some of it really boils down to taste rather than something that you could prove biblically.
01:18:56: But even they themselves have their disputes and arguments over those things and in fact, obviously you know that there was a rule,
01:19:05: I don't know if it's still in place, but Bob Jones University used to require that their students be clean -shaven and there was some kind of an attitude of a superior morality if one were to look that way and yet you have heroes of the faith that they would even include on perhaps even on framed paintings on their walls like Charles Spurgeon with a full beard and so on.
01:19:31: Things that were you know I have friends who are graduates of Bob Jones who said that they believed it was in fact they had a ban on wire rim glasses because of the hippie error and I don't even know how anybody could bring that into relevance into the 21st century because nobody's gonna even know what you're talking about if you are opposed to wire rim glasses.
01:19:54: But just because the legalism that can be present in fundamentalist churches where those issues are hobby -horsed, where people are slandered because they may look a little different than the pastor and the predominant number of people in the congregation, just because that happens doesn't mean that those issues are totally unimportant.
01:20:22: Right, and I think that's a good point because I was with Dr.
01:20:28: Bob a few years ago and we were chatting about this and we were laughing and he was kind of talking about when in the 50s they were, and I don't remember entirely the conversation, but Bob Jones University required the women to wear white gloves.
01:20:48: Really? At all times? And there's an old joke from the guys at Cedarville in the in the 70s and that was about getting kicked out of Bob Jones because you had a hole in the knee of your bathing suit.
01:21:07: And so, in the knee of your bathing suit. Dr. Bob, he said, you know, there were things that there were things that we had to change because we looked silly out in public walking around, you know, and there was nothing wrong with that.
01:21:27: And that's what contextualization is all about, engaging the culture without losing the gospel.
01:21:35: And I think, though, what I'm facing now is less of that.
01:21:42: That was a strong force back in when I was growing up in the 80s and in the 70s, you know,
01:21:49: I was born in the late 70s, but it was a strong force in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.
01:21:55: But a lot of that is dissipating. Those large churches, Bob Jones' student body is about half of what it was.
01:22:03: They had major financial problems, but I think there's hope for them. I think they're doing well overall right now.
01:22:10: I think they're slowly trying to reform things, but anyway, my point there is that's not really the church's problem, in my opinion, anymore.
01:22:21: It is people that are not faithful to the, that aren't loyal at all to the church, and their commitment, their membership means almost nothing these days, and that has to really be addressed,
01:22:35: I think. So I think we have turned the corner. Years ago, my mother, you know,
01:22:43: I was born in a difficult situation. My mother was very young when
01:22:49: I was born, and my mother decided that we lived on the opposite side of town of the church, the fundamentalist church that we went through to from time to time.
01:23:00: My mother was really trying to serve God and love God. We lived in a very poor area.
01:23:06: We lived in a half a double, and on the east side of Indianapolis, and my mom moved mountains one time to go to a women's activity, and she told me this years later when
01:23:20: I went into the ministry, and I just kind of sat with the information, didn't do much with it, but really later bothered me, but she moved mountains to go to this lady's activity at the church.
01:23:31: My mother's a very quiet person. She's not a troublemaker at all, a very humble person, and she moved mountains to go and figured out how to get gas money to get the old car to the other side of town, and she's really happy that she's there.
01:23:48: She feels good about it. She walks in the door, and a few of the ladies pull her aside and say,
01:23:55: Linda, you're not allowed to wear pants to these things. This is like a
01:24:00: Thursday night women's activity, and that really burned her. Now, I don't know that she responded correctly.
01:24:07: I mean, she just kind of left the ministry over it, and you know, after some time, but you know,
01:24:15: I think of that as I'm a minister now, of all these different people in different places in their lives,
01:24:21: Christ takes people where they are. So there's, you know, this adage, this old adage, come as you are, leave as you were, with using that to criticize modernistic anything -goes churches in that style.
01:24:38: And we don't want people to leave as they were, but we do want them to come as they are. We want them to come in, we want them to receive the gospel, we want them to be converted.
01:24:48: You know, the worst thing in the world a person could do that's caught up in sin is push God away, or to stay away from the church.
01:24:56: We need to be helpers to those people that fall into sin. And the whole purpose of church discipline is the grace of God.
01:25:04: I mean, and the purpose isn't the grace of God, but the mode is the grace of God, and the purpose is to bring them back into the fellowship.
01:25:11: And there was a time, you know, according to Dr. Wills, when Baptist churches used to discipline 2 % plus of their members, thousands, thousands a year, and this is back in the days when
01:25:27: Baptists had really healthy churches, and that discipline was not...and
01:25:33: there were some bad cases there, but that discipline was to keep the church pure, but also to help the members of that church.
01:25:43: So you see how I've kind of switched gears there, you know, I began with that illustration of that rebuke in a wrong way, untimely, unkind, you know, to the fact that even though it's been done poorly in some cases, we still have to keep our churches pure.
01:26:04: And that's what I like about Nine Marks, you know, I don't swallow all of everything that every
01:26:10: Reformed guy puts out there, but I think we're getting back to what
01:26:16: Baptist churches used to be. And we're in an embryonic, infantile state of that right now.
01:26:24: I don't think, you know, we've got a lot of growing to do, so we've made some mistakes in our approach.
01:26:29: I know I have, but I think, you know, God's doing a good thing with this
01:26:36: Reformed resurgence in our churches. And of course, there are things going on within Reformed circles that are creating infighting and so on.
01:26:50: It's not like those who identify themselves as Reformed or Calvinistic or in some kind of bastion of perfection, where everybody's in agreement.
01:27:04: Exactly. Because of the fact that we are all sinners on this planet until we're in glory, there is always going to be unfortunate consequences like that, no matter how long you've been a
01:27:16: Christian, and no matter what church you belong to, no matter how faithful it is to the
01:27:23: Scriptures, there's still going to be unfortunate things that erupt. And in fact,
01:27:30: I spend a lot of time on this program, having thoroughly knowledgeable individuals critique some of what rises up in the name of Reformed theology, and giving loving rebuke to those who are perpetuating these things, because some of it's quite unnerving and scary.
01:27:54: And so, it's not like fundamentalists have, you know, owned the backyard on this phenomenon that we're talking about.
01:28:04: But, we are rapidly running out of time, so if anybody would like to join us, I would urge you to do it now or forever hold your peace, because we're going through our final break right now, and then we just have about 25 minutes left of the show.
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01:31:17: This is Chris Arnzen, and this is the final portion of today's program with Pastor Brock Evans of Pittsburgh Baptist Church, Pittsburgh, Indiana.
01:31:27: We are discussing fundamentalism, the good, the bad, and the ugly. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question, whether you agree with us, whether you disagree with us, or whether you're just not certain, even if you're not a
01:31:36: Christian, our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com ChrisArnzen at gmail .com
01:31:42: And Pastor Brock, let's get into the ugly now. We kind of went from the bad to the good, and now to the ugly, rather than the order of the theme of the show.
01:31:51: But I think what could be rightly categorized as ugly when it comes to fundamentalism, and of course we have to repeat, we're not broad -brushing everybody together who calls themselves fundamentalists, but that's actually one of the things that is in existence within fundamentalism, is doing that very thing, broad -brushing.
01:32:19: Going back to a good thing that can be unfortunately turned into an ugly thing is the concept of separation.
01:32:29: I believe that every born -again, Bible -believing Christian has to be, in some way or another, a separatist.
01:32:38: One of the good things about fundamentalism is that it has typically maintained the warning that we cannot have union with those with false
01:32:51: Gospels, like the Roman Catholic Church and other churches that clearly deny salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone.
01:33:02: So that's a good thing. But wouldn't you agree where this becomes ugly is where you have genuine brothers and sisters in Christ who are being denied fellowship and are being viewed as outcasts because of disagreements on tertiary matters, and they are being broad -brushed with others who are even further away, and perhaps even might be those that could be accurately called heretics or apostates?
01:33:42: There is a broad -brushing going on amongst a lot of these folks that identify themselves as fundamentalists, isn't there?
01:33:49: Oh, yeah. That's where it hurts for a person like me who, despite my words sometimes,
01:34:02: I don't like conflict, and I've done a lot of apologizing over the years.
01:34:09: I've called people and apologized for my sharp words, well, early on in this journey.
01:34:16: But when you condescend a name -calling, when you place people in categories with people, like you say, who are openly heretical, and then you overlook the problems of somebody like Finney, I believe it was
01:34:47: Finney who was a partaker in the new divinity. Finney clearly, in fact, people can go to my archive, and if they type in Finney, F -I -N -N -E -Y, in the search engine, they will be able to hear an interview
01:35:08: I did on Charles Finney with Jerry Johnson.
01:35:15: Who created a documentary on Finney, and it is all taken from Finney's own writing, so it's not speculation, it's not slander.
01:35:25: Finney was more of a Pelagian than the Roman Catholic Church is.
01:35:32: Finney involved grace in even a less serious level of activity in the salvation of sinners than Catholics do.
01:35:45: And it's amazing how fundamentalists, who are rightly vehemently opposed to the
01:35:51: Church of Rome and its heresies, especially on salvation, how they could adopt Finney as a hero, and it's clearly out of ignorance about what
01:36:00: Finney actually believed and taught. Right. And that's, you know, we criticize
01:36:06: Catholics for a lot of things, we believe Sarcedotalism for one thing, the papal authority, another, even the ecumenical nonsense of Vatican II, and just the inconsistency in their magisterium.
01:36:25: But we've got to be careful not to do the same thing as believers, and I think a lot of fundamentalists have done that.
01:36:34: They have the authority. One evangelist, I won't mention his name, but he's constantly talking about the fact that we should censor what we read, or in other words, that it should be, what we read should be censored by him or someone of his viewpoint.
01:37:00: And so they don't want people reading Calvinistic books and getting involved in the doctrines of grace or anyone that would be.
01:37:08: And I think that's a dangerous place because if your system of beliefs, if your doctrinal divinity is solid and biblical and holds water, you don't have anything to fear.
01:37:22: And just open it right up, subject it to any kind of criticism, and if it's consistent, then you will come out the victor.
01:37:32: If you really know what you're talking about, bring it on, because the doctrines of grace, in my opinion, as far as a salvation sense, salvific sense, is the only consistent theology.
01:37:46: I mean, I would say that Wesley's Arminianism is wrong, but I think it's more consistent than this
01:37:57: Baptist middle position where salvation is synergistic to begin with, but somehow that decision that you make is stamped for all eternity with eternal security.
01:38:10: It's entirely inconsistent. I would say Wesley's Arminianism is, and he had a little different version of the
01:38:20: Arminian view than Arminius with his belief that pervenient grace was introduced through creation as opposed to when the gospel was preached.
01:38:34: But I want to say, too, I want to say this, Chris. I have many Arminian friends that I think are not asinine.
01:38:45: They're preaching the gospel the best they know how. Sure, I have guests on this program that are Arminian, and if they happen to have an area of expertise that I think makes an important program for people to learn about,
01:38:59: I am more than happy to invite an Arminian brother in Christ on the program. Amen, amen.
01:39:04: And I think that's wise. I think where I want to say, too, that as a pastor, you know, we see a lot of people come in and out of our church, and I'm still growing and learning, obviously.
01:39:17: I'm fairly young, but I have some of my greater problems out of a closet or out of these
01:39:26: Calvinists who have no education, have read one book by somebody.
01:39:33: They come in with one idea, and they have no balance at all on anything.
01:39:41: And sometimes that's not the norm. But sometimes those people can be a real trouble in your church if they're not.
01:39:50: Oh, yeah. It's the doctrines of grace. I mean, we've got to be gracious with people.
01:39:56: It's a great blessing. It shouldn't be something we use as a weapon for people, because if people would adhere to it and adhere to the biblical teaching on it, they'd be greatly blessed by it,
01:40:08: I think. Well, I know they would be. And so really we ought to pray for their enlightening on the issue.
01:40:16: Yeah, well, I can clearly remember years ago at the former church where I was a member on Long Island that there were cage -stage
01:40:32: Calvinists in the congregation who were constantly being critical, overly critical, and even to a slanderously level of the preaching at the church because they were really hyper -Calvinists.
01:40:48: Right. And I can still remember one of them being vehemently upset that the pastor, in his opinion, used
01:40:58: Arminian language in a sermon which was heretical. And I said, well, he was actually quoting from the scriptures, choose this day whom you will serve, from Joshua 24.
01:41:15: So you've got to be… Hey, this Joshua wasn't
01:41:20: Arminian, so hey. But one of the ugly things that is very common amongst fundamentalism and fundamentalists is bearing false witness and out and out lying about people that disagree with you, either because you are sloppy and lazy and not doing your homework, and some of that comes from what you were talking about before, the banning of books.
01:41:55: Now, even a Reformed pastor, if he sees a young convert in the congregation reading something that is heretical, he's going to warn the person.
01:42:05: If he's a good shepherd, he will. Or even a person who's a seasoned
01:42:11: Christian who starts to change in a dangerous way the way they think and behave because of something they're reading, but to be overly cautious or to the point of being a dictator on these things, especially when you're talking about seasoned
01:42:26: Christians, you're going to have people who know nothing of what they speak when they are criticizing somebody from outside their church or group.
01:42:36: It is the routine. It's actually the rule rather than the exception for anti -Calvinist fundamentalists to merely quote other anti -Calvinists in regard to what we as Reformed believers believe.
01:42:56: You could tell very often that these people have never even read a page of a noteworthy
01:43:01: Calvinist. It's amazing how so many anti -Calvinists love
01:43:07: Charles Haddon Spurgeon. They can't have read very deeply in his recorded sermons, and I'm talking, of course, in writing, not voice recordings, but in the volumes of his printed sermons and books that he wrote.
01:43:27: If you really are going to be reading a lot of Spurgeon, you cannot walk away thinking that he was not a
01:43:35: Calvinist. He was clearly a Calvinist. But you have this slander of those outside your group because you just didn't want to take the time to really plunge into the depths of the people that you are critiquing.
01:43:50: And that's not only true with people like us who are being slandered.
01:43:57: I think it is very wrong, and it's still a violation of the command not to bear false witness against your neighbor, when you are sloppy in the way that you publicly declare the heresy of even a
01:44:13: Roman Catholic or somebody who is in a false church if you misrepresent what they actually believe.
01:44:20: And there's a lot of that. There's a lot of caricaturing and comic book -style critique where you're not going to win a
01:44:29: Catholic to Christ if he's listening to you and he knows you're lying or if he knows that you're just ignorant and you don't even know what he believes.
01:44:39: Right. And I think the ironic thing about that is when it comes to this
01:44:46: Calvinistic, Arminian, hyper -fundamentalist debate, whatever you want to call it, or ongoing dialogue that tends to get nasty from time to time, especially on Twitter, let me just say, by way of humor,
01:44:59: I think they've read Spurgeon's tweets. They haven't read his books. Ha ha ha! Probably not liking.
01:45:08: But I want to say, too, with that, I think that their position would go away by necessity if they would read what
01:45:19: Calvin actually believed. Calvin had some problems. Augustine had some problems. Ecclesiological problems and even baptismal problems.
01:45:29: So it's not like these guys are perfect. We'll admit that all day long. You know, they had some issues, and I'm sure
01:45:37: I have some issues if you were to look back on my theology, not that anyone would with my low position, but if they would just read what these people actually believed and then line it up with Scripture and have the ideology that this is just a man.
01:45:56: I'm going to agree with him where he's right and disagree with him where he's wrong. There are certain points that somebody like Karl Barth makes that I agree strongly with.
01:46:06: I mean, here's a guy that came from absolute liberal theology over to the position of neo -Orthodoxy.
01:46:15: That's a move. And so there are some things, there are some points that he makes against absolute liberal theology that I like.
01:46:24: But of course, you know, Barth is not in our camp by any means. But I agree.
01:46:29: I think that's a matter of integrity, and that's why with some of these people, you cannot have dialogue because of that lack of integrity on their part to do their homework on what we actually believe.
01:46:46: Yeah, and I think another element that could be categorized as ugly is when you are preaching to the choir and you are beating a drum from a pulpit regarding sins that those in your congregation are not typically guilty of.
01:47:08: You're bringing up all of these overtly wicked things from the world surrounding your building, homosexuality and adultery and fornication and all kinds of things, drunkenness and drug addiction.
01:47:23: You may be constantly beating that drum, but you are neglecting, pricking the consciences of the people that are sitting right there in those pews over the sins of pride, over the sins of other things that as Jerry Bridges would include in the book that he wrote, the late
01:47:42: Jerry Bridges wrote a book called Respectable Sins. And obviously, he was saying that tongue -in -cheek.
01:47:47: He didn't believe there was any respectable sin. But he was saying that the Christian church at large has categorized certain things as okay, which are still an abomination in the sight of God, just because they're not overtly scandalous.
01:48:03: Right, and strong words in your own camp or dogmatic words in your own camp isn't a brave stand.
01:48:13: You know, I mean, Paul stood up at different places and preached the gospel to heathens.
01:48:21: I mean, he was beaten for it. He was persecuted strongly for his preaching.
01:48:30: That's a strong stand. When you stand in the midst of the heathen and for the sake of the gospel, the love of Christ, you preach the gospel correctly, you say that their gods are no gods at all.
01:48:44: And I think another thing that's part of the ugly and what we've dealt with even in our context is the gods of fundamentalism, which sometimes include patriotism and things that are good things but are not gospel things and really have no place in the church in regard to worship.
01:49:07: Now, do they have a place in the church? Maybe, but they don't have a place in our worship service. And, you know, you take those things out, you're going to make a lot of people upset.
01:49:18: And I think that's a problem. That's why we've got to be reformed and always reforming.
01:49:24: We've got to be constantly checking what we do with the scriptures in purity.
01:49:30: And, you know, even though Zwingli may have taken it a little too far, he had good motives in that.
01:49:35: And he had a conscience of guilt that, you know, his association as a musician with the church was one of pride and vanity.
01:49:47: And so he really took a lot of things out of the church.
01:49:53: Maybe some of them weren't a problem, but he was, I think, in that time, there was a need for that absolute sanitation, if you will, of what was going on in their worship services.
01:50:08: And, you know, ironically, as anti -ecumenical or anti -ecumenism as fundamentalists claim to be as a hallmark of their existence, they very often are themselves ecumenical with the wrong people just because of surface -level commonality.
01:50:34: Like, for instance, you can have... And, of course, fundamentalists, it's not a monolithic group.
01:50:41: There's all different kinds of fundamentalists. But you could have a fundamentalist church that will only recommend people to attend services at another fundamentalist church that might be too far away for somebody local to the other church to drive elsewhere.
01:51:01: They might be recommending a church because they only use the King James Bible, they have old -fashioned music in the church, the women all wear dresses, and the men all wear shirt and tie to the church, and they have this bare -bones, surface -level things that they have in common.
01:51:21: And yet, they might have a totally different, 180 -degree understanding of repentance. Because that is a big thing that is divided over in fundamentalist circles, is where you have some who believe in the heresies of easy believism and cheap grace and decisional regeneration, where you go up for an altar call and you recite a prayer, you are, without question, with certainty, you are saved because you've recited this prayer.
01:51:51: Where you will have others who will be more on the same plane as those who are historically
01:51:57: Reformed and Calvinistic who believe that repentance is a necessity for salvation. So, those fundamentalists who agree with the concept of the necessity of repentance should actually be viewing that as a far more serious issue than the version of the scriptures that is being used, and whether or not women wear ladies' slacks or dresses, and whether or not somebody is strumming on an acoustic guitar in a church, or something like that, if you follow what
01:52:34: I'm saying. Right, and I think it all comes down to identity. Is your identity in those things or in the gospel?
01:52:41: And when you find your identity in secondaries, that's what it leads to. I know we're out of time here, but if we had more time,
01:52:49: I would actually, and I'll just mention this. Well, we do have six minutes, so. Okay, well let me just run up the clock here.
01:52:56: I'm kidding. Oh, you can do that as long as we have enough time to give your contact information, that's all.
01:53:03: Okay. I wanted to mention too, and we don't really have time to get into this, but what has developed, though, because of that, the consequence is the young fundamentalists have no basis for anything they do, and so they're doing anything they want.
01:53:23: Their methodology is unbiblical. They have one, really, doctrine, and that's reach people, evangelism.
01:53:31: And they have, you know, they understand that their parents' secondary standards were unbiblical, but they don't have the doctrine to address it.
01:53:45: So the pendulum has swung entirely the other direction, and they're embracing people like Andy Stanley.
01:53:52: Their churches are, and pardon me for using this word, almost erotic, metrosexual in the way they dress, and the doctrine, but the preaching is very weak, and you don't see an exposition.
01:54:09: You definitely don't see an exegesis by any account. That's what's happened to their children, and the people about my age and a little younger, maybe in some cases slightly older, are buying into anything and everything, because the only thing that will hold a person in difficult situations is a deep understanding of theology, of doctrine, and that's what
01:54:34: Paul told Timothy. He didn't tell him to do all of these methodological things.
01:54:40: Those things are necessary sometimes. That's what contextualization is all about, but he told him to hold fast to doctrine, to preach the
01:54:51: Word of God. Those are the means of changing people's lives, and so it's sad to see this now.
01:55:01: I think the young fundamentalists, the people that come out of certain schools, I could mention but won't, don't have the same hang -ups as their parents in the faith, and sometimes their actual parents, but they are just as weak, and you made a good point there about the doctrine is just not there, and they don't have to claim every term you and I claim about Calvinism, but at least adhere to the
01:55:30: Scriptures is my point. Yeah, the thing that is bizarre is they are as vehemently anti -Roman
01:55:37: Catholic as most fundamentalists are, most that would call themselves that.
01:55:44: Their soteriology is a lot closer to Rome than it is to ours as Reformed Christians.
01:55:51: Right. They seem to be oblivious to the fact that their understanding of the nature of man and the level of depravity and enslavement that he has because of the fall of Adam and other things regarding the will of man and the abilities of man in man's natural state prior to regeneration are so much closer to Rome than to what we would believe the
01:56:21: Bible teaches. So it's ironic, isn't it, that they very often even make the outlandish claim that we who are
01:56:29: Reformed are closer to Rome just because we may have Augustine as one of our heroes of the faith that we might bring up in a sermon or a book or whatever.
01:56:39: Even Charles Spurgeon loved Augustine and so on. But it is ironic, isn't it, that they are really, in some ways, a step -cousin of Catholicism.
01:56:50: Right, yeah, it's sad to see. I had to apologize Sunday for a statement that I made that I meant in a different way, but a lady called me that afternoon and said, this is how this sounded to me.
01:57:05: And when I thought about it, and I won't go into the statement because we've got a minute left, but I apologized that night to the congregation for how that sounded.
01:57:14: But I was very glad that someone was listening and then got into the word later and brought that up to me in a private phone call.
01:57:26: The word, the Bible interprets itself. Let me ask you a question since we have time, a lot more time than you thought.
01:57:36: One of the things that drives me nuts, and this is an example of something that recently happened, maybe a year ago it happened, where someone said that they were not going to an event.
01:57:46: A fundamentalist pastor said, I'm not going there because those folks endorse rap music in the church.
01:57:54: And I said, well, I know that most of those speakers involved in that conference in no way involve rap music in their churches.
01:58:03: What are you talking about? Well, I know a couple of them will preach at churches that think it's okay.
01:58:11: Now, isn't that you're bringing that to this, the separation to a level that's really straining the boundaries of credulity.
01:58:21: Right, and I got into a discussion with someone about this, about protesting certain products.
01:58:29: And I wasn't trying to make the point that they shouldn't protest certain products, but I think it was a popular coffee brand they were protesting, and I didn't have a problem with their protesting of it.
01:58:40: I didn't agree with the situation either. But I challenged them, and they were personal friends, so it was not an argument, but I challenged them that they're going to have to protest, if they really want to take that as far as they need to, they're going to have to protest every single grocery store that sells it, the people that shop there, the other food that is sold there.
01:59:06: I mean, you can take this really far if you don't have a balance. And I actually said to that brother, that fundamentalist brother,
01:59:14: I said, wouldn't you preach in a Catholic church if you were invited and weren't given, you weren't forbidden to say anything that was the truth of the scripture?
01:59:24: Wouldn't you preach in a Jehovah's Witness kingdom hall if you were invited to say anything that you wanted to say?
01:59:30: But anyway, we are out of time now, and I know that your website is PittsburghBaptist .com,
01:59:36: PittsburghBaptist .com. I want to thank you so much for being on the program, especially with such little notice, Pastor Brock. I hope you all have a safe, blessed, and wonderful Memorial Day weekend, and Lord's Day.
01:59:47: And I hope you will always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.