January 5, 2017 Show with Dr. C. Matthew McMahon on “The Puritans As Precisionists”

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming.

This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this fifth day of January 2016 and before I introduce my guest and our topic today,

I want to remind you that before you know it, the dates of my two major events are going to be right here.

They're right around the corner next week actually, next Thursday and Friday, January 12th and January 13th.

Iron Sharpens Iron radio is having two major events here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The first is our

Iron Sharpens Iron Pastor's Luncheon at the historic Carlisle Vault, which is an early 20th century bank that has been transformed into a catering hall and restored to its really beautiful original grandeur and beauty.

We are expecting about a hundred men in ministry there. If you would like to join them, please register by this

Monday by emailing me at ChrisArntzen at gmail .com, ChrisArntzen at gmail .com,

that's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com and you could also email me at pastorsluncheoncarlisle at gmail .com

and Carlisle is spelt C -A -R -L -I -S -L -E and please put

Pastor's Luncheon in the subject line. This is absolutely free of charge. Our keynote speaker is going to be

Dr. Tony Costa, Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary in Canada.

He is a fellow Reformed Baptist believer and a brilliant young man and I am looking forward to what he has to say at this luncheon.

Every pastor there, every man there, because we have more than just pastors, we are accepting registrations from deacons and leaders of parachurch ministries, so every man there is going to leave there with a heavy sack of free books donated by major Christian publishers all over the

United States and the United Kingdom. Most of the major publishers every year donate books to this event.

In fact, we have about 20 or 21 so far major publishers who have each donated to us 100 copies of a specific title that I requested from them, so it's going to be a really wonderful event and it's all free of charge.

Nothing is for sale there and there's no hidden agenda. This is an event that began as the suggestion of my precious late wife back in the 1990s.

She recognized because I've been in the radio industry for so many years I have more friends that are pastors than anybody else and she suggested one

Christmas season that we start treating my pastor friends to lunch every year and this really blossomed and grew into a much larger event than either of us ever expected and after my wife went home to be with the

Lord for eternity I continued, I relaunched these events last year and I hope to continue on doing this in her memory.

So I hope that you can come to this if you are a man in ministry leadership and we do have people traveling as far away from Virginia and Washington DC and Maryland and New York to come to this so far.

But also the next night Friday the 13th of January at 7 p .m. at the Carlisle Theater, another historic building going back to the early 20th century that's been restored to its beauty and grandeur.

It is a really magnificent building and we are having the iron sharpens iron great debate between the aforementioned

Dr. Tony Costa of Toronto Baptist Seminary and Roman Catholic apologist Robert Syngenis of Catholic Apologetics International.

Their theme is Mary sinless queen of heaven or sinner saved by grace and tickets to this event are five dollars and for more details on that please email me and put a debate in the subject line you can email me at chrisarnson at gmail .com

or you can also email me at the great debate carlisle c -a -r -l -i -s -l -e at gmail .com

and put debate in the subject line and I look forward to hearing from you. Well today we have for the very first time on Iron Sharpens Iron Dr.

C. Matthew McMahon. He is founder of the Puritans Mind and our topic today is the

Puritans as Precisionists and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron for the very first time

Dr. C. Matthew McMahon. Well thank you for having me I'm excited to be here.

Great well as I very often do Dr. McMahon before we even go into the subject at hand which is a very powerful subject it's a subject that is near and dear to my heart due to my love for the

Puritans I would love for you to give a summary of how the lord in his sovereign providence brought you to himself what kind of religious atmosphere if any you were raised in and what were the occurrences providentially that the lord brought into your life that drew you to himself and saved you?

Okay that's a that's a tall order. There's a lot of providences that work in that particular way you know like with my wife she knows exactly the time that the lord saved her she knew where she was what the sermon was who was preaching it and so forth for me it was a little bit different I was one of those that was brought up in a moral house my grandfather was an

Assemblies of God minister and my mother was you know her her dad was the minister and so there was a bit of that moral aspect to it although I don't think my mother or my father being more recently converted would say that it was a

Christian home they basically sent my brother and I down the street to the little white church to go to church each

Sunday and we became part of you know the youth group there and such but it was quite a bit lacking it was a liberal church and you know you were lucky to hear the scriptures even read much less taught so it was more of a moralistic home and such so I can't give you a specific time in terms of when regeneration happened but I can give you a specific time when

I believe the gospel and I think those are a little bit different in the sense that you know

John the Baptist from when he was in his mother's womb was filled with the Holy Spirit but there was a particular time when he exercised faith and understanding the message of the

Messiah and so you know I don't know what it might have been when I was five years old it could have been when

I was 16 years old it could have been five minutes before I believed the gospel I'm not sure but what happened was is my parents kind of drove me to consider after high school you have to do something you got to go to college you got to go somewhere and I really wasn't settled

I didn't know what I wanted to do and so I said well I'm going to go to the agricultural school down the street it wasn't very far from us and I said

I'm going to go there I'm going to be a forest ranger and I thought that was a good choice because my friends and I in our little youth group enjoyed going camping all the time and so I figured if I like the outdoors maybe

I'd like to work in the outdoors so I went to agricultural school and I hated it every minute of it and after the first semester the teacher and I remember this distinctly the teacher was teaching a class on hydrology

I was bored to tears but then he started talking about needing to find a well in someone's yard and he said so we decided to hire a witch to use a dividing rod and find the well because we couldn't find it and so we hired her and we found it and he just kind of kept on with his lecture and when he said that for some reason providentially

I would just say the Lord just was like get up out of this class you're done with this you're going to come work for me that kind of thought process in my naive mind at that particular time was

I need to go work for God so I went downstairs in the library and I grabbed one of those big college books off the shelf and I said

I'm gonna I'm gonna find a Christian school to go to and I said I'm going to narrow it down to two states

I'm going to look in California and I'm going to look in Florida and I started just spending time looking for a school and this one school in Florida I just felt impressed to write down and put in my pocket and that was

Southeastern Bible College I'd never heard of it didn't know anything about it and so I went home in excitement and said mom dad

I know exactly what I want to do I'm going to go work for God I want to be a minister and they were like really

I was like yeah and I want to go to Southeastern Bible College have you ever heard of that and they were like no no idea why don't you call your grandfather he's in assemblies of God ministered maybe he would know you know so I gave my grandfather a call and I said

I want to come over and I want to talk with you about being a minister now my grandfather interestingly enough was a book collector and he collected so many books that they were everywhere in his house they were upstairs downstairs in the cellar in his study you name it my grandmother always went nuts with him and his thousands of books and yeah

I mean thousands of them so many so that he donated a large truckload of books to a

Christian school and a library that they were opening up and that's how many books he had and towards the time that I had an interest in the ministry he started collecting

Puritan works that in and of itself is interesting simply because of his background but in any case

I went to his house and I said grandfather I want to be a minister we talked about that a little bit and I said

I know exactly where I want to go have you ever heard of Southeastern Bible College and he looked at me and he was like well yeah that's where I donated all my books to now

I had never heard of Southeastern ever mentioned in our house he never mentioned it nobody ever mentioned it that providence in and of itself just kind of confirmed to me that I that's where I needed to go regardless of whether it was actually

God's providence in that particular manner that we might be thinking about it but I took it that way and so my grandfather said

I'm going to give the school a call and I'll make sure you get in and I'm like well I mean

I can I can do that he's like no no I'm going to do that so he gave them the call the next day and called me up and said listen the president's wife is going to give you a call and she's going to call you in about five minutes

I said oh okay and I had all these questions I was going to ask it was going to be the first time I was moving away from home and such and so she called me up and had a conversation with her which was pretty short she said since your grandfather donated those books we're going to let you come to school for free all you need to do is get down here and I was like I didn't know what to say

I said thank you that's amazing thank you and so off I went to Southeastern Bible College and started studying for a bachelor's in biblical studies and after the first semester

I was I was that guy who did not want to stop studying at that particular point so there was something happening in my spirit in that particular manner and summer school started and I was like oh well

I'm not gonna wait until next semester I'm going through summer school we're gonna take every class we can possibly take and so I signed up for all these summer school classes and such but they didn't start for two weeks so I said to myself well

I've got two weeks to do nothing I'm going into the school library and go to the school bookstore rather and I'm going to buy myself a book

I want to I want to buy a book on the cross I want to know something about the cross I want to understand that better something on the atonement so I went in the assemblies of God school which was what

Southeastern was in their assemblies of God bookstore you can imagine what was in there and I'm looking for something with a catchy title and I come across the death of death and the death of Christ by John Owen oh yeah wow right now why was that book in that particular store

I'll tell you what that book was there specifically for me and so I picked that book off the shelf with its catchy title and I read

Packer's introduction was fine with that and continued to read that for the next week or so I remember exactly where I was on page 300 of that book outside a particular building at that school and said out loud

I believe I said out loud I said who wouldn't believe this this is the gospel and so at that particular point that exercise of faith that exercise of belief the passage for me was

John chapter three Owen was dealing with that particular chapter for a good stint in his work and and I was at that particular point and I was thinking about the atonement

I was thinking about the death of Christ his blood sprinkled for me and I often thought about it like I'm standing before the judgment seat of Christ and I'm wrapped in the robes of his righteousness that he's given me and Christ comes in riding on the glory clouds of heaven and in front of him are all the books of my sin and he starts to open the books up and I'm standing there and as he turns page by page his wounds spill out blood and cover the pages of the book and when he gets to the end all the pages are covered he closes it and he says

I see no sins on his record and so that that passage of John 3

John 3 16 being born again God I mean I took that exactly the way that Owen explained it in his precision which was for me and that I think was the turning point for me and believing the gospel and understanding what

Christ had done for me and really empowered me spiritually to think about what

I was going to do in terms of working for God and I wound up meeting my wife the last semester to finish school there and we then went to the next school which is

I needed to go to seminary so at that time a number of different providences came up where he brought us to RTS, Reformed Theological Seminary, at the time it was in Maitland and it was the height of RTS.

All of the great teachers were there. Sproul was there, Sinclair Ferguson was there, Douglas Kelly was there,

Packer would come in and he would teach things on the Puritans, John Gerstner was there, so we had like at the time the best teachers and I was almost like I got two degrees there because not only did

I go in to get an M .A. but I wound up doing work study and how

God worked out being able to go to school and such and during work study one of the things that they had there were cassettes.

Back in the day they had cassettes and I would listen to all of the cassettes that they had stored there at the school and they were on absolutely everything that you could think of from all of the

Reformed teachers so it was like I got a double dose of Reformed literature at that time not only being able to sit in the classroom but also to devour all of that Reformed teaching, offer sermons from people, other classes that they didn't necessarily have at the school at that time and I listened to everything and so it was like devouring

Reformed literature of every make and model at that time. And the

Lord used that time to really ground me in the basics of Reformed teaching and then after graduating from there we wound up going back to Massachusetts where my parents lived for a short time because we weren't sure what the

Lord was going to do with us and the home church there wound up ordaining me for the gospel ministry.

Initially they were the first ones to do that and they sent me off in view of a pastorate that my first pastorate that I took in Georgia and that lasted all but four months because once we started preaching on sin the church

I found out was Pelagian and picked me out and that's okay. You know in terms of dealing with the truth we want to hold steadfastly to the truth no matter what and so at that point it's like well what are we going to do now?

We took a few months of respite from that off and then started looking to see where the

Lord would lead us and he led us to Celebration Baptist Church where it was basically a church plant and it was a church of fairly seasoned

Christians who were planting that church with a large group of people for a church plant and but they wanted somebody to come in with Reformed teaching, the doctrines of grace, and that's where they wanted to head.

So we saw that as God opening the door we went there but that lasted as a church plant for about three years and then

I and the other elders that were in the church just we didn't see God building a church out of that particular church plant and that was okay as well you know and that though is when

I started thinking about the Puritan's Mind and I mean at that particular point

I had read a huge portion that Banner of Truth had published with obviously many of the great works that they've put out and I read almost everything that and bought everything that Solidarity of Glory had been putting out and also a couple of other publishers,

Sprinkle Publications, International Outreach was putting out books at that time and I was reading everything that I could on the

Puritans because I was finding this really really rich deep content and I was thinking well if Turretin is blessing me and Christopher Love is blessing me and William Ane is blessing me then

I need to start telling people that they need to be reading some of this stuff too because this stuff is so rich and so powerful and the internet was just starting to come around to being popular so I thought well

I'm going to put together a website and my friend at the time he wanted he was saying to me he's actually one of the elders of the church he said to me listen you got to make something that's simple everybody's going to like and I was he's like you know something like reformtheology .com

or something simple and I was like well I'm going to do a Puritan's Mind and he was like Puritan's Mind?

And I'm like well I'm thinking about it in the way that I'm thinking about it I'm reading

Christopher Love and I'm coming away from his works on heaven or hell or the combat between the flesh and the spirit

I'm thinking like he's thinking and I'm reading Turretin and I'm agreeing with Turretin and so I'm coming away from reading that thinking like he's thinking and the same with William Anes and such

I think well I'm coming away with a Puritan's Mind and that's not a bad thing that's a good thing and it also gives me the ability to explain to people what

I mean when I say a Puritan's Mind. So I wound up taking little snippets from Turretin from Christopher Love from William Ames and they were the first three

I built this hodgepodge of a website at that time it was just you know new enough to be dangerous and bought the domain a puritansmind .com

and just started publishing little pieces of these guys that I thought were helpful and then amazingly

I started reading William Perkins. I started to put him out there it's like wow this guy's amazing let's put some of his stuff out there and then you start just building at that particular time with all of these different ministers of the gospel and the website just started to grow.

I started putting the standards out there the confessions all the creeds of the confessions started putting stuff out there on covenant theology and stuff out there on historical theology and all the

Puritan biographies because I was getting excited about them so I wanted other people to get excited about them because if they were excited about them they would want to read them and I thought that that was an important thing and in terms of in talking about the

Puritan and the Precisionist we'll see why that's an important thing but I thought that was a really important thing for people to begin to see and understand how great these works the preaching and such of these men and their sermons their book they were awesome and so I just kept expanding a

Puritan's mind in a million different directions started putting stuff out there on the Reformation expanded historical theology and subjects that people just weren't necessarily exposed to like they should be

I mean in my estimation I think like for example pastors should be exposed to historical theology to the hilt they should know a lot about historical theology especially being able to wade through all of the stuff that they get hammered with today and historical theology helps in that way so I was doing

I was doing book reviews I was throwing stuff out there on the doctrines of grace uh tulip it just it just started to expand once uh

I got what was about I would say it's about 2003 2005 somewhere in there

I started writing a lot of articles and as a result of a

Puritan's mind picking up speed on the internet because there wasn't anything out there I mean this was this was it

I registered a Puritan's mind for 60 years so I was like I'm putting this out there it's going to stay out there it's going to be out there even after I die it'll be out there as long as it can be there and so I was thinking

I want to get this information out as far and wide as possible and so I started writing a lot started putting articles uh out there and then

I had somebody email me and they said you you should start thinking about publishing some stuff and publishing some of the things that you've written publish some of the things that uh the

Puritans are written and so I started at that particular point with I think 10 titles or so that was back at like in 2005 and slowly from that point

I started gathering good texts my grandfather died in that time and my grandfather's library uh that that was a blessing to be able to go there my grandmother said to me she said listen there's going to be people coming out of the woodwork to come into your grandfather's library while you're here and I know this is a bad time he said but while you're here you need to go get whatever it is that you want to get and so I got some boxes and took some really choice stuff that he had collected and so from that librarian from gathering texts and so forth

I started publishing the Puritan and we wound up using

Puritan Publications as the name of the publishing house so to speak www .puritanpublications

.com and as it is right now we've gotten to the point where we've published over uh 60 of the

Westminster Puritans and we've done about 200 and over 200 books 215 or so so far most of them are rare I mean like they're they're nowhere and but here's the thing

I loved reading Owen's Death of Death I loved reading you know all of these old

English long in some cases very laborious works for certain reasons but you know my wife wouldn't read them necessarily maybe there was a passage or something or like a quippet that I would put out on a

Puritan's mind a little piece I was thinking you know what I need to do is in doing these books we need to make them readable and so that was the that was the characteristic that made these particular works important to me because not only did they keep the intent of the author but they were readable we updated them in modern

English we restructured the sentences so you know they to us they would be backwards in the way that they spoke uh so we we just updated it to make it more readable that way and that is what really

Puritan Publications winds up being about is not only to take some of these real awesome works and get them out there but get them out there in a way that the housewife is going to read them and some of the teenagers that have emailed me are going to read them as well as pastors and theologians and such who love reading that stuff anyway so having done all of that work up to that point uh reading them and thinking about their theology

I wanted to further my education and so that pressed me to consider further study with Whitfield, Whitfield Theological Seminary, and I worked on a doctrine on hermeneutics and then

I worked on a doctrine on Augustine and the Doctrines of Grace and both of those

I thought were important because we need really good books and really good teachings on hermeneutics and it has a particular slant to it and dealing with God's will and God's decree and so forth and I thought that was a really important topic and then

Augustine, you know, all of the Reformers quote Augustine all the time. You read the Institutes from Calvin and he's mostly quoting

Augustine. Right. And you know you go back and you read Augustine and you think you're reading something out of the

Reformation. Right. So you know I was like, wow, there's got to be a really good book out there that I'd just like to read on Augustine and the

Doctrines of Grace and there wasn't. And so I was like, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to put something together that surveys all of Augustine's writing and puts together his understanding of the

Doctrines of Grace. And he was called, you know, Dr. Grace in that particular manner because he so emphasized it.

And so all of those things complemented one another and I think by doing some of that really intense theological research that also helped expand a

Puritan's mind in a lot of ways and helped me to concentrate on important areas on Reformed theology and the

Puritan. And you know, at that particular point, I mean, even now, somebody may be listening saying, wow, you know, man, this guy, he loves the

Puritans to death. Yeah. Yeah. You know, for that, you know, sometimes people say to me, they've said to me in conversation stuff, you love your heroes, you know, and then they're referring to the

Puritans, oh, you love your heroes that way. And they think that because I enjoy reading the

Puritans and I talk about the Puritans and I publish books on the Puritans and I have a website dedicated to the

Puritans that they're my heroes. And I'm like, well, no, I think you're thinking about it in the wrong way.

As a matter of fact, I would say to them, I say my stance on the Puritans ought to be the same stance that everybody else should have of them who profess to be a believing

Christian, because that relates specifically to the

Puritans as precisionists and why that's important. So, you know,

I'm thinking about it like, the Lord Jesus has set down for me in Scripture certain unalterable truths that I need to follow in order to grow in the knowledge of Jesus Christ.

And that means that I need to understand what the Bible is telling me, and then the

Bible is going to be expounded by those God -ordained men that God has placed in the pastoral ministry to be able to tell me what

Scripture says. And the Scripture in and of itself, you know, we're supposed to consume it, we're supposed to have it on the tip of our tongue, it's supposed to be in our mouth, we're supposed to be meditating on it day and night, it's to be our delight, all of those things.

We memorize it, hide it in our heart, right? But at that point, I'm thinking, well, the

Lord tells me I'm to grow in grace and I'm to grow in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. That's what

I'm supposed to be doing. So, eternal life itself is predicated on the fact that this is eternal life, that they might know

Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you've sent. Christ said that. I'm like, okay, well if that's the case, then

God has given His people certain means by which they can grow in grace.

We generally call that the means of grace. And in a very precise document that the

Puritans put together, David Dixon and James Durham put together a subordinate standard to the

Westminster Confession called the Sum of Saving Knowledge. Basically what they did is they just summarized the

Confession on certain points, and they said the means of grace are the

Word of God and the sacrament and church government and prayer and things that will help

Christians grow in grace. So, but what they do is that once they say that, they explain then how that information, that biblical information, is going to be transmitted to us as Christians.

And this is a little quote I have. They said this, "...in the Word of God preached by sent messengers, the

Lord makes an offer of grace to all sinners upon condition of faith in Jesus Christ, and whosoever do confess their sin, except if Christ offered it to submit themselves to His ordinances,

He will have both them and their children received the honor and privileges of the covenant of grace."

And so what they did is they placed an emphasis on the creature bringing

God's message to the people. The Puritans, that's what they thought their job was, in terms of being a minister.

In fact, let's pick up after our first break on that. And by the way, I wanted to bring up a couple of providential things that you said that involve things you said in the beginning.

I was mentioning before the interview began, as you heard my pastor's luncheon, well, two of those publishers that have just shipped me books, two of the many publishers that have shipped me books, include

Sprinkle Publications, who have shipped me their book, The Salt of the Covenant, or The Biblical Doctrine of Salvation, and also

Don Kistler, who used to run Sillydale Gloria and now runs the

Northampton Press. He is shipping me books for all of the men, and so are quite a number of others.

The other providential occurrence is your repeating of the name

Christopher Love, who I had only heard years ago, in the early 2000s,

I think, from a message by Don Kistler. I had discovered who

Christopher Love was, and I don't know if you're aware of this, but I close every episode of Iron Sharpens Iron with a quote from Christopher Love, which is,

Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner. So I conclude with that quote every single day, so it's quite providence that you were mentioning those things.

But I have to go to a break right now. If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question for Dr. C.

Matthew McMahon, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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

USA. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr. C. Matthew McMahon. Chris Arnzen here, and I can't wait to head down to Atlanta, Georgia, and here's my friend

Dr. James White to tell you why. Hi, I'm James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. I hope you join me at the

G3 conference, hosted by Pastor Josh Bice and Praise Mill Baptist Church, at the

Georgia International Convention Center in Atlanta, January 19th through the 21st, in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the

Protestant Reformation. I'll be joined by Paul Washer, Steve Lawson, D .A. Carson, Vody Baucom, Conrad M.

Bayway, Phil Johnson, Rosaria Butterfield, Todd Friel, and a host of other speakers who are dedicated to the pillars of what

G3 stands for, gospel, grace, and glory. For more details, go to G3conference .com.

That's G3conference .com. Thanks, James. Make sure you greet me at the

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Iron Sharpens today. Paul wrote to the church at Galatia, For am

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

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

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

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

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

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

Body of Christ in truth and love. If you live near Norfolk, Massachusetts, or plan to visit our area, please come and join us for worship and fellowship.

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

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

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, inviting you to tune into A Visit to the

Pastor's Study every Saturday from 12 noon to 1 pm Eastern Time on WLIE Radio, www .wlie540am

.com. We bring biblically faithful pastoral ministry to you, and we invite you to visit the

Pastor's Study by calling in with your questions. Our time will be lively, useful, and I assure you, never dull.

Join us this Saturday at 12 noon Eastern Time for a visit to the Pastor's Study, because everyone needs a

Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned in, our guest today for the full two hours with 90 minutes or so to go is

Dr. C. Matthew McMahon, founder of A Puritan's Mind. We are addressing the theme, The Puritans as Precisionists.

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

that's c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com. And I do have a listener in Indianapolis, Indiana, who has already sent in an email with a question.

She says, this is Erin in Indianapolis, Indiana. Hi Chris, it is such a shame that the world has such a false view of the

Puritans. Please discuss whether there is anything we can do to reform the horribly maligned reputation of the

Puritans. That's a very good question because it's very true. If you could, Dr. McMahon, explain who these people that you have fallen in love with are or were, the approximate years that they arrived on the scene and when they seem to have disappeared from the map.

I believe that Jonathan Edwards may have been one of the last Puritans and other than those that revived the theology of those men like Charles Spurgeon and others.

And tell us a bit about those caricatures, those slanderous things that our listener in Indianapolis has brought up to the attention of our listeners.

Okay, yeah, like the Subaru commercial that said, you don't want to be like the Puritans who don't have any fun, you want to get one of our cars and drive a

Subaru. I didn't even know they had a commercial like that. Oh yeah, on television, you know, on some commercial in between the news at some particular point,

I was like, you gotta be kidding me, really? Of course not. They want to malign the Puritans in whatever particular manner they can.

Okay, in terms of time period, time period is really important because there are some boundaries that we need to kind of set up in terms of finding out why they were called

Precisionists and then why they were called Puritans. So at about 1558,

Queen Elizabeth inherits the throne in England and she restores

Anglicanism. And one year later, the Act of Uniformity requires that ministers of England are to use the

Book of Common Prayer for public worship, and then over the next couple of years, they'll throw in things like clerical vestments and things that they want specifically their ministers to do.

Now, Queen Elizabeth in and of herself, she wanted a stupid laity and a stupid group of ministers just to follow her in whatever particular way she wanted to turn the

Church. The Puritans were not going to have that. And so what they did is they started writing against the

Church of England. Thomas Cartwright was one of the first to do that, and he was actually ejected from his post of teaching at Cambridge for criticizing the

Anglicans. He criticized their liturgy, he criticized their church government, he called it, and this is where we start to get the word

Puritan from, he called it Pretended Purity. So the

Anglican Church was, in his mind, a facade that pretended to be the

Church of Jesus Christ, where the precisionists at the time, the

Puritan ministers, they wanted to bring the Church of England back to Scripture.

And there was a reason for them wanting to do that. But like Cartwright said, there's a little quote from Cartwright, he said, "'But alas, we have too much reason to complain.

The Christian religion is fallen from this, its primitive purity.'"

And so, in the beginning, they were called precisionists at this time, because they kept going back to Scripture.

They kept going back to the precision that they saw in the exactness of God's Word, because they had been brought up with a classical education and scholastic humanism.

And there's a bit that can get unraveled in there as well, when we start talking about, like, scholastic humanism, that was for the

Reformers, not like humanism today, humanistic beliefs and such, but it was more of a scholar's journey back to the original texts of whatever it is that you were studying in whatever discipline you were in.

So for the Reformers, previous to the Puritans, they were sticking to Scripture, they were going back to Scripture.

We'll talk about that in a moment. But in terms of the Puritans, they were precisionists because they kept going back to the

Bible as their objective standard of belief and practice.

And Queen Elizabeth and the Anglicans, they didn't do that. What they wanted to do was simply set a uniform happiness between the

Church at Rome and what she was trying to revive as some kind of Protestant religion.

And so, Cartwright and others started writing against that, said, no, no, no, we need to go back to the Bible, we need to hold to the

Bible, we need to get back to the purity of Scripture. So at that particular time, the

Anglican Church then puts out the 39 Articles of Religion, Parliament approves that, and then

Queen Elizabeth dies, and then King James comes in. And the

Puritans at that point saw, wow, we could have this unbelievable

Reformation if we can get King James to hear what we're trying to tell the

Church to get back to Scripture. And so, they gave him a petition, and the petition was called the

Millenary Petition. It was signed by a thousand

Puritan ministers, at least that's what the historical story is. Maybe it didn't have exactly a thousand, but that's what they called it, the

Millenary Petition, because supposedly it had a thousand signatures. And what they were doing is they petitioned him, and they sent it to him while he was on the road to go take the throne.

They sent it to him and said, listen, we need to get back to the Bible. We need the

Sabbath adhered to. We need to reform the way the sacraments are being handled by the

Church. They specifically said that the diverse Roman Catholic canon that the

Anglican Church were actually holding to, they need to be reversed. And so, the

Puritan goals were to be precise according to what Scripture said, and King James, he blew that off.

He's like, no, I'm not doing that. That at least gave a little bit of a push towards what's called the

Hampton Court Conference, and what that was ultimately was to put together a version of the

Scriptures that were in the King's language. And so, you know,

Tyndale, he tried to get an English Bible put out there, and King James killed him. And then a couple of years later, the

Hampton Court Conference occurred, and King James authorized the 1611 version of Scripture.

And so, at that particular point, there was a little bit of a reprieve, so to speak, in the way that the

Puritans could go about preaching and teaching and such. Now we have the Bible that's in the English language.

We could put that into the hands of people. All of the Puritan families at the time would have had a

Geneva Bible, which actually, the King James Version is an amalgamation between the

Bishop's Bible, the Geneva Bible, and about a 20 % translating effort to ultimately come to that edition.

So a lot of it came right out of the Geneva Bible with the Geneva Notes, which were exceedingly

Puritan. And so, at that particular point, there was a little bit of a reprieve.

And so, they were preaching, they were teaching, they were writing. Charles I then becomes king, and he was, for all intents and purposes, pretty much a wicked guy.

As much as people would like to say King James was, Charles I was as well. Lots of problems wound up occurring at that particular time, and the

English Civil War begins about 1642. And most of the

Puritans wind up siding with Parliament against King Charles, and at that particular point,

Parliament calls the Assembly of the Divines to come together and say, okay, here's what we need.

We need a precise and exact document that will take

England, Ireland, and Scotland and place them under whatever

God says in his word, and that you, as an assembly, come out with concerning the confession of faith, catechisms, and a directory of worship.

And so Westminster convened, and they were pretty exact in terms of, at any point that you read any of the confession at all, you see how dense and precise and theologically rich every word, phrase, sentence, paragraph was.

And so from 1643 to 1646 and a half or so, they worked together to create the 1647

Westminster Confession. Problem was implementing it, because what happened politically with Charles I, he was defeated by Oliver Cromwell's parliamentary army.

That wound up kind of throwing a wrench into what the confession was ultimately going to do for England, Ireland, and Scotland.

And yet, when Oliver Cromwell came in, there was again kind of a time here for the

Puritans simply to preach and minister to the people. And that happened for a good amount of time, almost 10 years, until Cromwell died.

And after Cromwell's death, Charles II came into play, and we call that the

Restoration. And then in 1662, the Act of Uniformity, again, another one passed, and that's when we have over 2 ,000

Puritan ministers ejected from the pulpit, including people like Richard Baxter and such.

And so when we say, okay, when did the Puritans specifically live?

If you want to be technically accurate, you would say 1559 to 1662.

That's like the Puritan era. However, that's the historical

Puritan era, because right in the midst of that whole era in 1620, you had the

Pilgrims. The Pilgrims were separatists who left England, they went to the Netherlands for a little while, and then they wound up going across the sea to our country here, out of the colony at Plymouth, and you have a lot of godly ministers coming out of this theological heritage from the

Puritans, although not, you know, Puritans in the sense, respective of, they stayed in the

Church of England to purify it, which really was what Puritans were about. So we make a distinction between the

Puritans who stayed in the Church and the Pilgrims who left and started over, because they were thinking, there's no possible way that we're going to be able to take the

Church of England, this giant political mechanism, and fix it.

We're not going to fix it. And the Puritans were like, no, no, no, the Word of God can do it.

We're going to stay here and we're going to fix it, which that brought them right into the Assembly, right through the

Confessions, right to the point where things got bad with the Act of Uniformity and they all got ejected from their pulpits, but they gave it the college try, so to speak.

So at that particular time, before they were even known, those guys who stayed, those ministers who stayed in the

Church, before they were even known as Puritans, they were all called Precisionists, and the

Precisionist is a very important term because it means that when you put something forth, it's sharply defined and sharply stated.

The actual word itself has this meaning to cut in it.

It retains the idea of being minutely exact in what it is that you're saying.

It pertained to somebody who strictly conformed to a particular standard, and in this case, it was the ministers that wanted to see

Reformation again holding to the Word of God. So the

Puritan, he was known as a doctrinal Precisionist, and when you read some of their works, you know, their sermons are dense, theologically dense, they're thick, they're rich, they're vibrant with thoughtfulness, with skill.

They skillfully meditated on the Scriptures to the point that they were able to unfold and unlock what the meaning was behind what it was that they were preaching, reading, or writing about.

So if one was going to be a good Precisionist, they would have to be trained in a manner that provides them with the necessary tools to study well, because if you can't study well, then you're not going to be able to be precise with whatever it is that you're studying.

So the Puritans, as a Precisionist, they basically stood on the shoulders of the

Reformers and on the Reformation. You know, right now we're in the 2017, we're 500 years now from the time when

Martin Luther put his theses up on the door of Wittenberg, and we've got 500 years of Reformation that we can think through and meditate on and look at historically and such, but the

Puritans, they specifically stood on the shoulders of those who were exact in their doctrinal formulation.

So William Cunningham, he has a great little book, it's called The Theology of the Reformers, and he talks about how the

Reformers were always increasing the fullness, exactness, and precision of the delivering on doctrinal matters.

We published a book called Sketches of the Covenanters that was written by J. McPeters.

It's a great book talking about the Covenanters, super rich, and one of the things that he says is concerning John Knox, and he said, he entered the field of conflict, clad in the armor of God, and wielded the sword of the

Spirit with precision. So, the Puritans took the doctrines of the

Reformation and the doctrines that the Reformers wrote about, all of the standard doctrines.

When you read Calvin, when you read Luther, when you read Knox, when you read

Columpadius, all of the Reformers, Melanchthon, to a certain extent, Abuser, Bullinger, they were precise about laying down and rescuing the

Gospel from darkness in all of the standard theological formulations that they wrote on.

And so, the Puritans said, well, okay, we have these doctrines, now we want to take all of this theology, and we want to apply it to every area of Christian life.

So, how did they do that? Well, they did that precisely as ordained and called ministers, whose job it was in their mind to take the mind of the hearer, whether it was in public sermons or whether it was in catechizing or what have you, and connect the mind of the hearer to the mind of the

Holy Spirit. In a passage or teaching of Scripture, through precision and clarity.

That's what they saw their job was. So, part of the reason that they did it as effectively as they did was a result of the tool that they had of their education in Ramian logic.

And they understood that God's Word takes time to study and understand, and they needed to take time to do that.

Now, a lot of people, I mean, I've gotten lots of emails and such on that phrase, Ramian logic, or what is

Ramian logic. All the Puritans were versed in this. Peter Ramos, he lived during the

Reformation, a little bit after Luther. 1515, he was born. He lived until 1572.

He was probably one of the most famous French philosophers of the century, and he stands with great educators and such.

He was a great speaker, and he actually had a tremendous influence on world history, because basically what he did is he broke away from the scholastic philosophy of his day, and the philosophy of Aristotle, which was a no -no in all the big universities.

And he was 21 years old, and he's like, listen, we need to go back to Scripture, and Scripture needs to inform the way that we think, and that includes all of these other disciplines and the arts that we have in our universities.

And so, once he was convinced of that, which he was convinced of at 20, 21 years old, he started pushing in opposition to everything else that was already in the universities, and he became a very ardent

Reformer, if not even a revolutionist in that particular manner. And so, the academic world, they absolutely hated him, because it meant that everything that they were teaching was wrong, and if Ramus was right, they were all wrong.

And so, they didn't like the fact that when he was barely 21 years old, he's becoming one of the most striking figures in the intellectual realm, because he's saying something which is amazingly profound for the time, but for us, even if we're just basically thinking, for us, it's a very simple idea.

He said, when we think about the way that we think, and when we think about philosophy, and when we think about understanding anything that we study, we should basically do it in a way that it is more, these are his words, more easily perceived and thought about.

Who wouldn't want to do that? Something simple should be understood in a simple manner.

Something complex should be brought down to the most simple form to understand it in a general way.

But this was against the way that most of philosophy, and most of logic, and Aristotelian thought was occurring in the universities.

So, using that approach, Ramus started writing on all sorts of stuff, topics, and a whole series of textbooks on logic, and rhetoric, and grammar, and mathematics, and astronomy, all sorts of things.

He was a genius in that particular manner. And what happened was, he basically adopted that term of ad fontes, go back to the sources.

That's what was happening with the Reformation. Everybody thinks, you know, when you think about the Reformation, that Martin Luther stood up and then suddenly the whole world followed him.

And it really didn't play out that way, because the Reformation was a number of little Reformations in different countries, in different places, with different people, all providentially by God's hand, being moved to go back to the sources.

One of the most popular humanists of the day was Erasmus. You've probably heard the quote, you know,

Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched. Erasmus went back to the sources. He wanted to go back to Scripture as authoritative, rather than reading it secondhand through the

Church Fathers. And that's all that Erasmus did. He was like, let's take all of this stuff that mediates between us thinking, and let's go back to the basics, and let

Scripture and theology move us to consider things in a way in which we can think rightly about whatever topic it is that we're studying.

Amen. And let's pick up right on that when we return from the break. And we do have some folks listening who have questions waiting to be asked and answered on the air, and we'll get to you as soon as we can when we return from the break.

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

Don't go away. We'll be right back after these messages with Dr. C. Matthew McMahon. So write in your questions as soon as you can, and we'll look forward to hearing from you very soon.

I'm Chris Arnson, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and here's one of my favorite guests, Todd Friel, to tell you about a conference he and I are going to.

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That's linbrookbaptist .org. Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, inviting you to tune into A Visit to the

Pastor's Study every Saturday from 12 noon to 1 pm eastern time on WLIE radio, www .wlie540am

.com. We bring biblically faithful pastoral ministry to you, and we invite you to visit the pastor's study by calling in with your questions.

Our time will be lively, useful, and I assure you, never dull. Join us this Saturday at 12 noon eastern time for A Visit to the

Pastor's Study because everyone needs a pastor. Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours with a little less than an hour to go is

Dr. C. Matthew McMahon. We are discussing the precisionism of the

Puritans. Dr. McMahon is founder of A Puritan's Mind, and if you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Dr.

McMahon, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com,

and please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence. Before we go to any of our listeners' questions,

I want you to pick up on your train of thought about Ad Fontes going back to the sources you were speaking about,

Erasmus laying the egg that Luther hatched, and Erasmus and Luther, of course, would also be involved in one of the most pivotal debates of the

Reformation on the bondage of the will, but if you could, continue. Okay, great.

Yeah, I mean, Erasmus was unfortunately wayward in a few ways. It's interesting because he did contribute certain things that were good, and yet, you know,

Luther just utterly destroyed him in the bondage of the will. I mean, just understanding the basics that men are under the imputation of Adam's sin and utterly incapable of doing any good and believing any good thing until the

Spirit regenerates them, Erasmus missed that completely and totally. But that was something that he still did desire was going back to the sources, and all of the

Reformers ultimately were doing that. So they had gone back to the sources to rescue the scriptures from the darkness of Roman Catholicism, and Remus did that as well.

They hated him so much, interestingly, that Remus died as a martyr. They assassinated him.

He was in a study, praying and reading, and these guys broke in, they shot him in the head, stabbed him in the heart, and threw him out a five -story window.

Because he was bringing people back to right thinking.

And so the Reformers, they laid down the basic fundamental doctrines that we find in Scripture and recovered the

Gospel in that particular way, made it more public in that particular way. And then the Puritans, they took their classical education, their scholastic education in that way, with their

Ramean thought, and they started then making things precise and clear, making things applicable to the

Christian from the Bible in every area of the Christian walk.

And that's why they were called precisionists. You know, they were always increasing with clearness, with precision, the testimony of what the

Church believes, and that aided the progressive development that doctrines had to make them more defined and more precise.

That's why, like I mentioned earlier, the Westminster Confession is super precise. When you read it, every word, phrase, sentence, idea, paragraph, it's so precise in everything that it says, and even proved out by Scripture in that particular way.

It always reminds me of an amazing story in thinking about how these men were as precise as they were, and their intellect and how they were trained.

There was a committee with the Assembly that was engaged in putting together the Shorter Catechism, and so they got to the question, you know, what is

God? Now, when we ask that question today, you gather up a group of pastors, put them in a room, and say, we need you to answer this question, what is

God? They'll all start talking, and they'll all start thinking about it. Well, that's not what these guys did.

These guys were like, gosh, we have to answer this unfathomable question.

How are we going to do that? And so, they asked George Gillespie to offer a prayer to help them with answering that question, and when he began his prayer, he prayed like this.

He said, Oh God, thou art a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in thy being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.

Now, as soon as he said amen, every single one of those guys was probably saying in there, grab a quill.

We need to write that down. And so that's what they did, and that's what the answer to that question wound up being.

It's one of the most scriptural and most complete answers in that unanswerable question that we have in any creed or catechism in the

Church. Now, Gillespie was very opposed to a lot of the Roman baggage of the

Anglican Church, wasn't he? Very much so, and he wrote quite a number of works that wanted to dispel that baggage.

I mean, Gillespie was, you know, in the 1640s, Cartwright was writing some of the same things almost 100 years before that.

And so, again, that actually proves the point that as these men were trained, ordained, and studied in these particular ways, that they wanted to be precise according to the

Scriptures. You know, even historians call the Precisionists, or the

Puritans in that way, masters of what they call formal precision.

And a lot of people have a difficult time reading the Puritans because of the

Roman influence, because of their logic, because of their diving so deep within the depths of a given subject.

You know, it's like you start reading John Owen on something, and he's on point eight of sub -point fifteen with corollary number four on use number eight.

You tend to sometimes get lost with that kind of thing. And so, because we haven't really thought through how we should be thinking and how we ought to train our minds today in our age, so that's one of the reasons why when we publish some of these works, many of them for the first time, we don't leave them in that old

English and all the difficult grammatical constructions and stuff. We've got to update them to make them a little bit easier.

That's a little bit more challenging for us, and it's more work, but it's more beneficial because then people start enjoying reading the

Puritans in that way instead of having a difficult time working through difficult grammar and language and stuff.

We do have a question. I just wanted to read a question from one of our listeners. Jeff in Clinton Township, Michigan asks,

I've heard that some Puritans practiced meditation and soliloquy in prayer.

Would your kind guest please expand upon these terms and how Puritan meditation was nothing like the

Hindu practices? Right, right. My, oh, my.

That is 100 % one of the more abused ideas and doctrines today.

Christians are thinking, I don't want to involve myself in meditation because that's what we're thinking.

We're thinking it's some kind of you sit with your legs crossed and your fingers in a certain position and you start humming and such.

Just like I'm doing right now. I'm only kidding. Yeah, you know, and so Christians are like,

I don't want to have anything to do with that, you know, and so when we talk about meditation, we're not talking about somehow things that are linked to new age ideas of transcendental meditation or something like that, or they think of like a

Buddhist monk chanting in a monastery in a mountain shrine, you know, or yoga or things of that nature that have those aspects built into them, and so when we think about meditation, godly meditation really is part of what the

Puritans would have called the three legs to the stool. So if you're going to sit down on a stool, you're going to have three legs at least that are going to hold you up, and you can't sit on the two, you need the three.

So when you have quiet time, you read the scriptures, you pray, and you meditate in a godly manner.

You ponder what the Word of God specifically says, and as you've studied, so then you work those ideas through your mind.

There had been calumny called godly meditation like when the cow chews the cud. He continually does it, and so the

Christian has to take a serious intention of the mind where they come to search out the truth of the

Word of God, and they settle it in their heart. That would really be a good way to think about godly meditation.

And so it stands between reading the scriptures and praying, because it improves

Bible reading, and it makes prayer effective. So it furnishes the mind with the best materials for prayer, and it fills the heart with a fervency that you're going to have for prayer.

Because people say, oh gosh, this is a whole topic in and of itself that we could talk about for a really long time, just in terms of godly meditation.

But to not go necessarily in that direction all the way, meditation is when you start thinking about what scripture says to the point that it's spiritually beneficial for you meditatively in your quiet time.

It's right thinking about God. And so our attitude,

I mean, if Christ speaks about us having a holy violence, right, in terms of living in the

Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force, then we've got to take

Heaven by storm in that particular way. Thomas Watson wrote a great book on that, Heaven Taken by Storm. But truth and pondering heavenly principles in that way, it's deduced from the

Word, it's worked into the soul, it's a glorious thing when

Christians pick up the duty of meditation in that particular way, and they join the

Word of God with godly meditation so that they understand what scripture says. That then fuels their prayer time.

Because prayer really is the Word of God formed into an argument and retorted back to God again.

That was the Puritan definition of prayer. Prayer is not, let me give you a big list of things that I need and want.

It was, here's what the promises say, I got to understand what the promises say, so then

I need to work that out in my mind and think through it, and then

I can take those promises and I can throw them back to God and say, here is what your Word says, here is what you've promised, here is what

I need in those promises. So it was a very different thing when the Puritans prayed, and when the Puritans had quiet time, than what we think about in terms of quiet time today, or you know, just in the fact of godly meditation.

So hopefully that a little bit answers the question. There are a number of works, by the way, a number of Puritan works that are on godly meditation.

We've actually published a couple of them. We did one by Thomas White, we did another one by Calamy, and we're actually working on a few of those, because when you deal with that particular topic, because it is so abused in the way that people think about it, that we really want to be able to put out there as much as we can on what that really means.

So things like The Wells of Salvation opened by Spurstone. It's a great book that helps the

Christian understand and meditate on the promises of God and how those are worked into our life in that particular way.

Thomas White's book is fabulous on instructions for the art of divine meditation.

And we just did John Ball's work, A Treatise of Divine Meditation. Now there are, if you look through like all of the

Puritan corpus out there, there's roughly about 40 books that have been written on godly meditation by them, whole works.

And I mean, how many do we have today? Very few. So we did a Gloria put out Nathaniel Rainey's Salted and Improved by Divine Meditation.

That was a great book. That's on godly meditation. So it's just that we need to take the

Puritan cue on that and say, we need to be precise about what scripture says concerning meditation and how to do that.

And if we implement that and employ that in the right way, it's going to be a benefit to our soul, because it should be a part of our devotion to him daily.

As Thomas says, meditate on his blood day and night. And so what does that mean?

Isaac went out in the field and he sat down and he meditated at night. Why did he do that? So in any case, there's a little bit on meditation.

And we do have another question for you. And I'm not sure if this is an inside joke between you and a friend.

I'm not really sure where this listener is coming from with this question.

But Scott in Margate, Florida asks, Dr. Matt, is there any truth to the fact that you often, when writing in the

Puritans, so that you are more fully inspired, put on medieval wigs and strange hats in your study?

Yes, that's an inside joke between my good friends Scott and Margate and myself. If I recall, the last time that he was here visiting me, he tried on every one of those wigs.

Yes, one of my favorite books by John Owen is a treatise on masculine attire, subtitled

The Proper Use and Maintenance of Powdered Wigs. But anyway, just kidding.

By the way, even though that was sort of a joke there, Scott, since you're a first -time listener, or should

I say first -time questioner, you may have listened before to the program, but you're a first -time questioner.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Orrins, and if you just tuned us in, our guest today with about 25 minutes to go is

Dr. C. Matthew McMahon. We have been discussing the Puritans and their precisionism.

If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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So we hope to see you there and also want to remind you once again that this

Saturday and every Saturday you can hear my dear friend Pastor Bill Shishko of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church who hosts a visit to the study.

You can hear that program if you live in the tri -state area of New York on the

AM dial on your radio at 5 40 a .m. on WLIE Adonai radio or you can hear it live streamed on the internet anywhere on the planet earth at wlie540am .com

and just keep in mind if you tune into that station on the radio or via live streaming early you may hear

Spanish programming, you may hear Hindu programming because that station is not exclusively

English or Christian, so I just want to have you keep that in mind in case you're puzzled when you tune in to 5 40 a .m.

but Pastor Bill's program is every Saturday 12 noon to 1 p .m.

eastern time on wlie540am .com. Well we have as our guest today as I mentioned

Dr. C. Matthew McMahon founder of the Puritans Mind and I just want to go back to something that Aaron in Indianapolis, Indiana brought up earlier before.

As you know Dr. McMahon the Puritans have been maligned and slandered. I think sometimes our

Arminian brothers in Christ are confusing the stories of the

Puritans with that of Count Dracula or Vlad the Impaler or something because we have these horrific and strange stories of men that are more like monsters and butchers than deeply thinking

Christians who enjoyed the world that God had blessed them with and also even more so lived according as best they could to his word and cherished it enough to want to be precise when they opened it and taught it.

This is quite a sad tragedy because a lot of people are missing out on a treasure trove of knowledge but of course we have to remember that these men were sinners just like we are and there were some unfortunate periods of history involving the

Puritans like some of the persecution of Baptists and so on but if you could separate fact from fiction here just to fully answer what

Aaron in Indianapolis, Indiana had asked earlier about how do we recover an accurate and wonderful reputation for the

Puritans that they deserve although of course as I said not perfect. Recovering that I think is going to begin in two places.

I think it's going to be in recovering it through the minister and recovering it in the family and when

I say that I mean that in this particular manner.

If somebody's sitting in a church and they're listening to someone preach and they're not precise or they're not expository or such as the

Puritans would have been, they tend to have then a certain color about what preaching is about and instead of hearing what the

Puritans actually did or reading some of their works and thinking about why that's important in terms of their contribution to the

Christian church overall, they're just basically going to be colored like the the Subaru commercial colors it.

Well you've always heard the Puritans were these drab people. They wore black and you know they didn't have any fun and they're not joyous people and they just lived this kind of aesthetic lifestyle.

Well the really the only way that's going to be combated is between dealing with it historically and factually which is completely and totally the opposite of the

Subaru commercial or the thought that they're not people who had fun or didn't enjoy life just as you had just said.

The Puritans were taking God's word and applying it to every area of life in such a way as to arrest it under the guise of the gospel.

So in whatever now if somebody says to me, well just to use this as a particular example, people who don't like the idea of the

Sabbath and the fourth commandment, the Puritans were sticklers for holding steadfastly exactly what

God's word taught concerning the Sabbath. So if somebody's more excited about the than they are the word or the day as a day of rest, they're not going to like what the

Puritans taught. But that's not really having an issue so much with the Puritans, it's really having an issue with their precision in understanding what scripture actually says.

And when I say theirs, I mean the Christian who's thinking that way. So they have to fall in love first with their

Bible. That happens in the family. And the family should have every single day family devotions where they're praying together and studying together and reading together.

Or if it's just, you know, obviously a single person, they're meditating and praying and reading scripture.

And then at the same time, the ministers that are trained up, that are leading all of these churches, they need to be educated in terms of who the

Puritans were and what their contribution is. Every single minister, we live in America, so I'm going to say every single minister in America, they ought to be familiar with the best works that will best get them and their congregations closer to Jesus Christ in the fastest way possible, so to speak.

It's like what I said in the beginning, people look at me and they say, well, they still say to me, the

Puritans are your heroes and that's why you like them. And no, no, that's not the reason. The reason is is because the Puritans are the ones who bring me to Jesus Christ the quickest.

And my life is supposed to be a conformity to Christ. And if I'm serious as a

Christian, and my life is supposed to be conforming to Him daily in that particular way, mortifying the deeds of the flesh, putting to death the deeds of the body, if I'm supposed to be doing those things, then

I need all the help that I can get. So I'm not going to go out and listen, you know, to a mediocre sermon, read a mediocre book, and think things in that particular way.

God tells me in Ephesians 5 that I'm supposed to be redeeming the time because the days are evil. And so if I'm redeeming the time, that means that I'm not going to listen to the mediocre stuff, and I'm not going to read the mediocre stuff.

I'm going to go for what is going to benefit me the greatest and the quickest. And the problem that we have today is it's not an unlike problem that the

Puritans had in their day, like as if everybody just loved everything that they did simply because they were the

Puritans. You know, Richard Baxter, he was told by one of the people in his church, the person says to him, you are so precise and tell us so much of sin and duty and make a stir about these matters.

You know, so there was a bit of that pushing against mortifying the deeds of the flesh in that way when the

Puritan minister was being so precise and exact. There's a great little quote, one of the same guys at the time of Thomas Cartwright, right in the beginning, one of the precisionists.

Someone said to Richard Rogers, Mr. Rogers, I like you and your company very well, only you are too precise.

And Rogers replied to him and said, oh sir, I serve a precise God. Amen.

You know, the ministers at that day were like, well, the scripture discriminates us in what we do, how we act, how we think, doing things one way or another.

And so what they wanted to do is they wanted to arrest the culture with the gospel and the

Bible in every way. And that means that the family has to do that.

That means that the minister has to do that as he preaches and as he teaches. So it's not just, I mean, it really wouldn't matter, so to speak, if we created a commercial that was the opposite of the

Subaru commercial, it's going to take a lot more than that. And that's one of the reasons why on this particular topic, when you had asked me about, you want to come on and talk something about the

Puritans, that I wanted to kind of deal with the idea of precision, because it directly relates to the pastoral office.

And they were all ministers. That's what they were doing. They were teaching the people in the most precise and biblically responsible manner.

You know, it's funny how you have these modern evangelicals who look upon precisionism as a negative thing, maybe even a sinful thing, because you are building up walls of separation, you are nitpicking over things and so on.

And they would claim that we are straining out gnats and swallowing camels and all that kind of thing.

But they would never want anyone to talk about their wives or their mothers or their children with a lack of precision and accuracy.

So why on earth, as evangelicals, as Bible believers, or self -professed Bible believers, why wouldn't they want precision when it comes to the

Word of God and God himself? Right, right, 100%.

We have Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. Harrison asks,

I understand that Richard Baxter, who you just mentioned, was not a thoroughgoing

Calvinist and had more Arminian leanings. How common was this among the Puritans?

Not common. There were only five or six reputable

Puritans that had some odd views on justification, and Richard Baxter was one of them.

He would be what we would call, you know, a four -point Calvinist, because in justification for him, he separated justification from faith, and that's an odd view.

And so it wasn't that he was Arminian, so to speak, it was that he messed up the doctrine of justification in certain ways that was not part of the regular thoroughgoing, this is what everybody believed concerning justification by faith alone.

And so because of that, that's where that comes up. Well, thank you Harrison in Mechanicsburg for that question.

And we also have Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who asks, and he really asks something that I touched on just in a comment.

Isn't it true that in spite of the wonderful contribution the Puritans have made to the body of Christ for all ages, that some of them have been known to have been harsh and even have been persecutory against Baptists even to the point of death?

Yes, some of them were, and that is a blight on the

Puritans in that particular manner. Yet in dealing with that and thinking about even the best of men are still men, and you touched on that as well in thinking about how sometimes in their zeal they take things sometimes too far, and that was definitely in that particular manner a case of that.

You know, as much as we want to stop things like that happening, at the same time you also want to think through the seriousness of their conviction.

And this went for the Reformers as well. You know, they were willing personally to die for what it was that they believed, and in terms of how they respected others, you know, sometimes people are like,

I don't want to read some of the Reformers and some of the Puritans. They call one another names and such, and they don't seem hospitable in those particular ways.

Well, when you start reading things in a larger capacity in terms of the breadth of all of that literature that can be read, you'll see over and over again they're maybe to a fault zeal to hold steadfastly so much to the truth.

So there's a proper balance that needs to be taken by us in terms of the way that we communicate and that we season all that we speak about with salt.

And of course this was not a widespread thing. We're not talking about Nazis here that were hunting down people and creating a massacre of humanity.

This was isolated, unfortunate, and tragic incidents, sinful incidents, but it was not something that was the common behavior of Puritans.

Right, no, it was not the common behavior of Puritans, but that's part of the caricature, because when you have the

Subarus commercial, what they're thinking is they're thinking, what is a

Puritan? A Puritan is one who runs around town looking for witches in order to torture them. That's what they're thinking, you know, and so it's colored them in a particular way, and that's unfortunate, because someone, even somebody listening now, may be thinking, well,

I just don't want to deal with, you know, people who do that. And you know, and I know, the breadth of solid, biblical, helpful material that they're known for is something that you don't want to throw away the baby with the bathwater, so to speak, because of certain caricatures that way.

And in fact, it speaks very loudly about the value of many of their writings that many

Baptists today love the Puritans and are willing to absorb and benefit from the truths that they taught, even in spite of the fact that their forefathers in the faith were mistreated seriously and harshly by some of them.

Right, right, 100%. I mean, in my early days, before, while being a

Baptist, Southern Baptist, Reformed Baptist, at different points in my Christian journey and walk, a great amount of material that I read was from the

Puritans, and that's where I got a lot of instruction from, because they brought me so quickly to the throne of grace, so to speak.

You know, my wife and I, just to give you an example of the exact opposite of that now, my wife and I, we were listening to a

Reformed preacher, and it doesn't matter who it was, a Reformed preacher, everybody would know who this person is, just a week ago.

And this was in a Sunday service, they read John 10, read a little scripture out of that, and then for 26 minutes, that's as long as it was, for 26 minutes, without any exaggeration, he spent the entire short time telling story after story after story after story, never explained the text, never went back to the text, simply used the text as a support for his illustration.

And in terms of the number of people that were sitting in the sanctuary listening to him, there were thousands of people there. So it comes to the end, my wife looks at me and she says, well that was a lot of nothing.

So what's happening is that in our churches, the ministers, who should be the precisionists now, they are giving into this kind of nothing of a

Church service, and people are thinking that just because they attend the Church services, that they've done

Church. But the Puritans, they don't allow you to be or remain complacent, or none of them had any kind of service like that ever.

You read, you can't read a solid Puritan pamphlet or even a short sermon by one of them and not be changed in some way.

And that doesn't mean that every single thing that they wrote was exceptionally unbelievable, but everything they wrote was a lot better than a lot of stuff that we hear today.

Right. And if you could actually, since we're running out of time, I want you to have five minutes to summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today about this subject.

All right, and this is what I think is really important. Um, it's not just that we want to talk about the

Puritans as precisionists in that way, because precise... precision isn't going to help if it's not practically employed.

Precision in preaching, precise, studied, expository preaching is going to draw people closer to Heaven or closer to Hell.

That's what it does. That's what the Puritans understood that it did. And so, every sermon that they studied, every sermon that they gave, every book that they wrote, oftentimes, which were compilations of sermons, they were masters of precision that way, because they're bringing people close to Jesus Christ.

That was what they were thinking through. So, can you imagine how if preachers...

if we just did this one thing, that all of the preachers in America would suddenly start being precise in preaching their sermons?

What would happen in America if that occurred? Granted, they would need to learn how to think well and to organize their sermons.

You can, you know, certainly, you know, have a really long bad sermon. But that, in turn, raises the question on hermeneutics, and that's a whole other topic for another time, how to employ studying well.

But whenever you read any of these great works, it sticks in your mind.

You know, when I think about some of the great works that I've read, and how precise they were, and how they helped me to be closer to Jesus Christ, it wasn't that, and this is what

I was saying in the very beginning about the Puritans are your heroes, it's not that they're my heroes, it's that they bring me closer to Christ.

So, when I read John Brinsley's, The Union, Communion, and Conformity to Jesus Christ and His Death and Resurrection, the first thing that comes into my mind is

Roman 6 -5. For we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection.

That is burned into my memory, because over and over and over again, he's going to show you all the different angles to what that actually means for the

Christian. Or I remember, even from some of the books that I read from my very beginning, some of my first Puritan books,

James Janeway, who wrote The Saints' Encouragement to Diligence in Christ's Service, which is a fabulous book, 2

Peter 1 -11, for so an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our

Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It's stuck in your head! That's what they do. They bring that precision in so that we can be conformed and washed and purified by the

Word. So, I don't think that we need another Reformation like the Reformation. I think, you know, we already have

Bibles, we already have books, we already have all sorts of resources to glean from, but what we need is really a spiritual revival.

We need a spiritual revival in the pulpit. We need dads and moms training their children, using the best resources they can, and the pastors, they need to be trained better, and the pastors need to be soaked in Scripture.

It was said of John Bunyan that if you cut them, he would bleed the Bible. Pastors need to bleed the

Bible, and I would say they need to start doing that by two things that would immensely help them, that all the

Puritans did, and every book that you would ever read on homiletics or preaching tells you to do, and that's write out your sermon.

You want to be precise? You write out your sermon. Even if you don't use it in the pulpit,

Spurgeon used to write out his sermon every Tuesday. The whole thing, word for word, before he would go and preach it that following Sunday.

All of the Puritans did that. Some of them preached from their manuscript. So, the reason they did that is because when that happens, the minister has the ability then to look at every section of the sermon and think through its precision in clarifying what

Scripture says and being able to state it in its exactness to the hearer so that their minds are connected to what the

Spirit intended in the Word. That's what I think we should glean from reading the

Puritans and studying the Puritans and so forth, other than being drawn closer to the

Lord Jesus Christ. I think those things need to happen for us today. Amen, and if anybody listening wants to find out more about the

Puritans, you can go to apuritansmind .com, apuritansmind .com.

You can also go to Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service's website, a very thoroughly reformed

Christian book ministry where you don't have to worry about purchasing things that they sell that are going to poison your mind with heresy or something.

Todd and Patty Jennings are very committed to the doctrines of sovereign grace and reformed theology, and their website is cv for Cumberland Valley, bbs for biblebookservice .com,

cvbbs .com, and also another sponsor of our Solid Ground Christian Books.

They have quite a number of Puritan titles available, and they sponsor Iron Sharpens Iron every week, solid -ground -books .com,

solid -ground -books .com. And Dr. McMahon, in addition to apuritansmind .com,

do you have any other contact information that you care to share with our listeners? The only other would be puritanpublications .com.

That's where we have all of our books and all of the reprints that we do, more modernized and such.

We're actually going to be launching another book tomorrow about the zealous Christian by a

Westminster Assembly member named Simeon Ash. Every Christian should be zealous, so Puritan Publications is another good place to go.

Great. Well, I want to thank you so much for being such a fountain of knowledge on our program today, and I definitely want to have you back on the program.

In fact, if you could hold on after the program goes off the air so I can open up my calendar and schedule you again.

That sounds great. It's a pleasure to talk with you. Yes, and I want to thank everybody who listened today, and for those of you who submitted questions especially.

I apologize to those of you who could not have their questions read on air because we've run out of time, but I hope you all always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater

Savior than you are a sinner, as the great Christopher Love once said.

And I look forward to receiving your questions for our guests tomorrow on Iron Sharpens Iron. And please remember to go to ironsharpensironradio .com

for more information on the pastor's luncheon and the great debate next Thursday January 12th and next

Friday January 13th. That's ironsharpensironradio .com and the banner ads are right at the top of the page.