Church History Matters

Most people don't understand the importance of church history, and that's a problem.

Well, today we're gonna talk about that on Conversations with a Calvinist, which begins right now.

Welcome back to Conversations with a Calvinist.

My name is Keith Mosky, and I am a Calvinist, and I am joined today by my new friend and guest and first-time person on the show, Troy Frazier.

Hi, Troy, how are you? Hey, I am doing very well.

Thank you for having me on.

I appreciate it.

Yes, sir, and we are excited to have you with us today.

Give you a little background on Troy.

Troy is a Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary graduate.

He is also the co-founder of Revived Studios, a church history podcast studio that focuses on telling the stories of God's church through the ages.

These encouraging stories of the past have been edifying and lifting up many and helping them to see the great cloud of witnesses their faith is a part of.

He currently serves as a missionary in Cambodia and is married with two young kids.

Again, Troy, I'm so grateful to have you on the program.

I'm excited to talk about your work as a missionary, also your work on the podcast.

And first of all, I just wanna say thank you for reaching out to me, because it was nice to hear that the show is reaching people and you heard about it and wanted to come on the show.

So thank you for that.

Absolutely, no, I saw you having conversations.

You've been putting up episodes for quite a while, and I was like, hey, I should reach out to him.

I love sharing about church history.

And as I mentioned before the show got going, you have a wonderful voice.

I was hoping maybe you could read a sermon for one of my shows, Revive Thoughts, which you agreed to do.

So it's gonna be, I'm excited for when that comes out.

So I thought it would be a great opportunity for us to collaborate and work together.

And so, yeah, thank you very much for having me on.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I'm excited for those who don't know, as I said, Revive Thoughts, it's a podcast and they do conversations like this.

You have a co-host that does the show with you, but you also have pastors who record shows, or I'm sorry, record sermons that are from the past.

The one that you gave me is from St.

Augustine, and then there are others.

I know some people say St.

Augustine.

I heard you guys say St.

Augustine.

I say St.

Augustine.

But you're from Jacksonville.

Which is why I say St.

Augustine.

Who was St.

Augustine the city named after, but St.

Augustine the person.

That's right.

In fact, I used to have an elder who really gave me a hard time because I would say Augustine and he would say, it's Augustine.

The liberals call him Augustine.

And he would say, you're saying it like the liberals.

So I said, well, I don't mean to.

I just, I guess I'm, I have a little bit of a sprole.

His sprole always called him Augustine.

Yeah, the famous phrase is that, you know, Augustine is the person, Augustine's the place.

But I always think, but the place was named after the person.

It wasn't like they were like, hey, you know what looks good? This word that looks just like Augustine.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, recently I listened to your podcast and I heard the John Calvin Passion Sermon.

That was really powerful.

And so I do encourage my listeners, if you have the opportunity, go over to Revive Studios.

The name of the podcast is, remind me.

Revive Thoughts is one of our podcasts.

So Revive Thoughts is the one that you were reading a sermon for.

And that podcast, we take sermons from the past and we record them again.

We edit the language.

We get the language out of, you know, the 1400s, 1500s KJV vernacular.

So it's very easy to listen to.

But the content stays the same.

You know, we don't change any of that.

We don't, you know, turn somebody, have them say things they wouldn't say, but we just take out the feet, vowels, and thighs and make it very easy to listen to.

And we get those recorded by different speakers and volunteers from all over the world.

And then we give you a little bit of backstory too on who the person was and help you to understand, you know, who was this person that was speaking? Because we found that a lot of people, you know, have heard of names like St.

Augustine, maybe Jonathan Edwards.

If you're a Christian for a while, or you've done any study or read any books, or, you know, you may know some of the names, but we found that most people don't really know the backstories and who the people are that have these famous names attached to them.

You know, what was John Calvin, you know, doing in Geneva exactly? What was Jonathan Edwards' ministry like, and why did he get thrown out of the church? You know, what was the Taiping Rebellion when Hudson Taylor sailed into China? You know, how long was Dietrich Bonhoeffer in jail? You know, and some of you may say, oh, I know some of these, but I promise you there's a lot of details we don't know, and that most people have not learned the biographies of these people, even people that they may respect.

Yeah, while you were saying that, I'm like, I want to know the answer to that question, because the one you were talking about with the Taiping, my wife loves Hudson Taylor.

She did, she was actually a English as a second language tutor, and she tutored Chinese students, and she did that for three years, and she became, she fell in love with the Chinese people while, because she had children, Chinese children that she would be on with, much like we are now, and she just fell in love with them, and Hudson Taylor is a hero of ours and our family, and so I'd love to hear that story sometime, for sure.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, my son's middle name is Hudson, and we lived in Hudson Taylor, or Hudson, we lived in Hudson, we lived in China for two years, and we were in Hangzhou for one of those years, which was like the headquarters he had for a little while, so we just, we love him, too, but Taiping Rebellion was one of the, was the bloodiest event in human history before World War I.

It happened in the 1800s.

This group of people decided, this one guy genuinely decided he was Jesus's brother, and then he was talking to this other guy, and this other guy was like, I'm the Holy Spirit, and this other guy's like, I'm Paul, and the three of them set up a cult army, rebelled against the empire, rebelled against the emperor, and it was a civil war that lasted during the same time as the American Civil War, but longer, from 1850 to 1865, and about five million people died, 30 million people were displaced.

It was horrible for the people, and Hudson Taylor sailed into China, into Shanghai, right while the port was on fire.

His early autobiography journals, you can see all these descriptions of bullets flying, cannonballs hitting people nearby him, I mean, just crazy stuff that he was involved with, and I just always try to imagine, you know, you're helping somebody who's bleeding, and you're telling him about Jesus, and he's like, Jesus, his brother is ruining this country.

Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, what would have been going on to try to tell people about the Lord in that environment? I imagine it was really, really crazy, and so there's stuff like that.

When you hear that, and then you look at what he did with China and La Mission, I think it makes it all the more just amazing how God moved through that one person, considering the circumstances he went, I mean, most, I mean, 99% of mission organizations today would not send you to a country in a war zone.

They would just straight up say, wait till the war is over.

Hudson Taylor was there for often on a lot of it, and he was right on the battlefield, and yet that was also, I mean, we're all very grateful that he was there today.

Wow, that's, see, I didn't know about that.

That is amazing, and that's the blessing, and we're gonna talk about this later in the program, but the blessing of church history is that knowledge and that understanding and knowing what our forefathers have gone through, the ancestors and the faith, and that's powerful.

Thank you for sharing that.

Now, since we're on the subject of history, before we get into church history, I wanna talk a little bit about your personal history, because something you've just said, as I said in the opening, you're a missionary in Cambodia right now, but you said you did some time in China.

How long have you been, well, let me even go further back.

How did the Lord save you? How did you know he was calling you to foreign missions, and how long have you been doing that? Okay, so the Lord, I got saved in youth group.

I'm not sure if it was, and this may sound ridiculous, but I'm not sure if it was when I was really left behind books or when I was in summer camp.

It happened in that kind of same summer, but I was just very much scared of, oh my gosh, I'm gonna go to hell, I don't know who Jesus is, and just kind of turning to him with my heart and soul and believing like, hey, that's not where I wanna go, you know what I mean? I don't wanna not be connected to God, and a lot of prayer and a lot of heart.

It took a while from the mental faith of intelligently saying, this is what I believe, the gospel, getting to my heart and like, no, I wanna live that out and have a passionate walk with God.

I would say I was 18 or 19 when that started to really happen, and then I went to Bible college when I was 20, and I just fully surrendered myself there, wanted to be involved in ministry, felt called to just spend my life following him because he'd done so much for me, how could I not spend my life following him and trusting in his ways? And that's kind of what we've been doing, but if you'd asked me in Bible college or even at any time early in my relationship with God or early in my marriage, if I would have been in foreign missions, I would have probably said no, just like if you'd asked me if I would run a podcast where we talk about church history and theology, I'd have probably been like, no, I don't need that stuff, right? Whatever, like that stuff's boring.

Who would wanna listen to that all day? No way, I'm not in, and the same way I was like, I don't wanna do foreign missions.

I'm very much interested in helping America.

I loved politics.

Politics actually helped bring me to God as well as reading.

I read a lot of conservative Republican books and stuff like that.

I probably have read more of those than anybody, especially when I was in high school, and they always mentioned God, so it kind of piqued my interest in that, but they went after evolution a lot, and I didn't like evolution as a kid, and science class, I thought it didn't seem to make sense, so these factors helped pull me towards God, so I'm like, I'm definitely gonna get involved in politics when I get older, or I'll serve in a church somewhere, it'll be fine, but God had us go through different things, and as I just followed his path, eventually we ended up in China as teachers, and then from there, we came back to the States when I went and get my seminary degree, and then we just felt like, especially last year during COVID, we just felt like God was saying, go back over, go back over, and when we asked him where, we were like, well, we don't wanna go somewhere bad or uncomfortable, but the Lord was like, Cambodia, which is both of those things in a lot of ways.

I love the Cambodian people, but it's a tough country, and we live in a very, we spent the last year in a very tough city, but the Lord is good.

We've been trying to be faithful to him, and yeah, just kind of trusting him for where he'll send us and what we'll do, and I, man, we just love teaching the gospel.

I've been able to be a Bible teacher this last year, and I love, love teaching the Bible, love just walking through it with students and seeing them learn more about it, having students tell me like, wow, I learned so much about the Bible this year.

I've been in a Christian school for 11 years, but it's completely different this year.

I'm like, that's awesome.

That's what I love to do, so.

Amen, amen.

Now, you and your wife are obviously there with your children.

Is she also engaged in missions work as well, or is she primarily with the children? No, she currently is.

We're actually planning to move soon, and she'll be able to be more focused on the children, but currently she was also a middle school social studies teacher in the current situation we are in, and she also is podcaster as well.

She runs one of our shows, Martyrs and Missionaries, which is wildly more popular than my show, Revive Thoughts, so people love that show.

The name itself just grabs them, and she does a really, really, really good job, and so, yeah, she's involved with the podcasting side of the ministry, and she's also involved with the work we're doing right now as well, so.

I have a question.

Now, this may be somewhat, I hope not too controversial.

You just mentioned Martyrs and Missions, and I know one of the most famous books of church history that is on the popular level is Fox's Book of Martyrs, but I also know that that book is criticized from Roman Catholics as containing some misinformation, and you being a church history expert, I would like to ask, do you think that that's a fair characterization, or do you think that Fox's Book of Martyrs is a good resource? Because, I mean, I don't know enough to say whether it is or not, so.

I, you know, and I'm not a scholar, so somebody might be able to just poke me apart from my research into that, because I have heard people say, well, you know, we think he was exaggerating.

So, when this actually kind of goes back to studying church history in general, I sometimes think this is why people maybe get turned off by history, but so Fox's Book of Martyrs puts out this book saying here's what happened, and here's from my perspective, here's the stories I've been collecting, and I feel like it's probably pretty good.

Maybe it's not perfect, but it's probably pretty good.

That's been my kind of educated research.

Most of the people at the time didn't have a problem with it.

The Catholics had a problem with it, but of course they did.

I mean, they're the bad guys in the story.

So, I mean, that makes sense.

And you could say, well, you know, Protestants persecuted Catholics back, okay.

But we know that the Catholics persecuted a lot of Protestants, so it's not unheard of.

That makes perfect sense, that what Fox was saying was true.

And then what happens is, you know, 200 years later, 300 years later, we're looking at this, we're trying to figure out, and neither of us are there, I think, but the people around Fox seem to believe it was probably pretty, you know, decent, pretty good version of it.

And the problem is, there's always this third group now that always goes in and goes, well, you know, Fox is probably exaggerating, but the Catholics can't be fully right too.

Let's just pick down the middle and say some of it's good, some of it's bad.

But I feel like that just basically says Fox was kind of lying, right? Well, we don't have any real evidence that he was, and we're just saying that because we don't wanna fully believe, we don't wanna take a side historically.

Another example is Charles Spurgeon's downgrade controversy, where I read several people who said, well, you know, Charles Spurgeon basically said at the time about history, if we don't stick to it, if church history shows that the church will start to decline if it does not continue to kind of like reinvest itself into, you know, conservative Orthodox values and stick with the truth, it will slowly just descend into liberal drift and just kind of wander off basically, which I mean, goodness gracious, we've lived through that.

We see that all the time, I'm sure.

And Spurgeon was very firm, like the church history shows us this is coming.

We have to stand firm against this.

And then other people said, you're out of line.

He got voted out of his denomination pretty much.

He left, but he was voted down and censured 2,000 votes to seven.

And I mean, these were his friends, people he had preached with, people he had done conferences for.

He had been to many of their churches.

He had had them speak at his church.

I mean, he was very close with the people.

And so to be voted down so, I mean, just hammered so hard by it, it was very hard on him.

His wife even said that this controversy, she believed was part of the reason he died younger.

The stress and the anxiety and the weight of it just crushed him in his final days, she said.

Now, he turned out to be absolutely dead on.

I mean, he's correct.

He had it all completely right, obviously.

And history has vindicated Spurgeon's position.

But there's another group out there that goes, well, Spurgeon was right to be concerned about liberal drift, but he went too far.

And his critics were, you know, so let's find that middle ground.

And there's always this group of historians that just thinks, I can't know for certain.

I don't wanna take sides.

So if I just say both sides are somewhat wrong and somewhat right, I'm doing history well.

I don't think that's accurate because you're always saying that everyone's half lying, but people do tell the truth, right? Yeah, that doesn't mean no one lies, but that doesn't also mean that everything we say is untrue.

What if Fox was telling the best version of the story he knew? Let's give him the credit he, I think, deserves.

So my approach is, generally speaking, not to be overly critical, using sources 300 years removed, if that makes sense.

If no one at the time is attacking it, I'm not going to be the person to start jumping in.

Sure, absolutely.

And one of the things that I hear, and I know I'm jumping ahead in the conversation, one of the things I hear a lot of times, is people will say, in criticizing historical works, is they will say, well, history is written by the victor.

And so you can't, and what that tends to mean, at least from my, and maybe you can correct me, what it tends to mean from when I hear people say that is I can't believe anything history says because it's the victor who's telling the story and therefore I can't have any confidence.

And you end up being able to say, we really don't know what happened.

That's almost what you have to say is we don't know what happened because all we have are the victor's opinions.

Yeah, no, history has become very much morally relativized.

In fact, I argue that if you're running a seminary and you're listening, or you're running a Bible college or whatever, I don't know why you would be listening to me right now.

But if you were listening to me and you clicked on this one, I highly encourage you, get ahold of your history department because I believe most of the time we think, okay, we're going to be attacked head on in theology by progressivism and this theological drift and all this stuff.

And I would say it's your history department is where it sneaks in first, actually.

They don't cut, you're gonna have progressives sure that come straight after the Trinity, but they don't normally start with the Trinity is false.

Here, we're coming straight into your, no, they're gonna come in through the back door through the history department and say, oh yeah, no, but really Jonathan Edwards has some problems.

And Voltaire is actually worth studying.

And actually we need to rethink our look on blah, blah, blah.

And we gotta remember Charles Virgil was bourgeoisie and they're gonna do these things where they just slowly chip away at our heroes and they slowly lift up the villains.

And before you know it, nobody's trustworthy in history.

They've completely relativized it all and turned all of church history into the, well, we don't wanna be, we don't wanna make, they'll say, we don't wanna make hagiographies or we don't wanna make too big a saint out of this guy.

And so let's just drag them through the mud.

And that's also false.

And I always say, look, we're gonna be in heaven with all these people.

Do you wanna have to go around heaven apologizing to them for ripping on them for your entire life? That doesn't mean we can't point out their flaws.

I do think we have to point out flaws.

But if you're just living in the flaws and you're not talking about the great things God has done through his church, you're studying church history wrong.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

So again, every time you talk, I have come up with a thousand questions and I don't wanna, I find you as a fascinating young man.

I appreciate the work that you're doing.

I appreciate you as a missionary.

My wife and I, as I said earlier, we love folks who do foreign missions.

If there were people who wanted to learn more about your missions work, is there a website or something that they can go to to find out if they wanted to? Yeah, you can come to our Facebook group, following the Fraziers.

That's kind of where we do all that.

We try to have a little bit private because we have to be a little bit careful, but we let lots of people in.

So if you look like a real Facebook profile, we'll let you in.

If you were created yesterday and you're in like 45 different groups, which sometimes they'll come in, I'll be like, I think you're a bot.

But we try to let people in, even if we don't know them who are listening to our shows, so they can follow us.

But we do have to be a little bit careful because we do go to country, I mean, actually every country we've been outside of America is not open to the gospel directly in a sense.

So we have to be a little bit, just a little bit more cautious.

So that's kind of where our little private group where we can share updates and tell you what's going on and be a little bit more forthright about the gospel and the ministry that we're doing there.

So yeah, following the Frasers, a little Facebook group, just join us.

And like I said, we have lots of listeners that come in.

So we're used to people who aren't, maybe necessarily people we know being in there.

Absolutely.

And that's F-R-A-Z-I-E-R-S? F-R-A-S-I-E-R, actually.

Like the old TV show, well, old to me, and maybe that may insult people.

It's Fraser, that was on when I was a kid.

So yeah.

Yes, absolutely.

I love Fraser.

Okay, so that way people will know how to reach out to you and how to get, follow you if they are so interested.

And I know as soon as I tell my wife, she will definitely want to, especially knowing that your wife has a podcast.

My wife, every once in a while, will do this show with me.

In fact, the number one show I've ever done, it's had more downloads, more hits.

It gets hits every day.

My wife and I did a show on Martin Luther's wife, Katarina of Bora.

And it was the, like I said, it's my claim to fame.

It's my one show that sort of almost, almost viral, you know, like everybody's- There you go.

And I always give her the credit for it because she was the one who researched it, did all the information for it and shared it.

So it's wonderful when you can do ministry with your best friend and the person that you love.

Absolutely.

Hey, we have a similar, we have an episode called Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Overcoming Fear.

And it is a sermon that has gone really well.

There's even a sermon jam up of it on Wrath and Grace app.

So people really like it.

So I got that one episode too, where I'm like, hey, if you have heard of us, it might be that one episode there too.

My wife, she does Martin Luther's missionaries.

She tells these incredible stories, Gladys Aylward.

She's currently working through Henry M.

Stanley.

You may not have heard of him, but he's the guy who discovered David Livingston in Africa.

He got saved from David Livingston.

Spoiler, my wife hasn't gotten to that part in the episode series she's doing, but it is a really, really, really good, if you want to jump in though, highly encourage you go.

If you listen to all of this and you don't want to listen to revive thoughts and listen to old sermons, but you're missing out, I'm telling you.

But if you go check out Gladys Aylward's episodes on Martyrs and Missionaries, if you don't already know them, go listen to Amy Carmichael or Darlene Rose.

Some of those, those people will deeply convict you and you will walk away going, I know my life's not so bad actually.

I've got food on the table.

I've got kids to talk to.

Nothing puts your life in perspective like hearing about these incredible, incredible people that have suffered for the gospel around the world.

And my wife, she's just a great voice for it.

She loves doing it.

And people are always, I feel like a lot more, I know my wife is very happy to run a woman and have a woman-led podcast that's not about theology or women's talk or something like that.

She loves doing shows about martyrs and missionaries.

Sometimes people are like, oh, we need more women in this space, but it tends to be like women talk shows and stuff like that.

And my wife is like, nah, I just wanna do Martyrs and Missionaries.

And the fact that I'm a woman is not really necessarily the highlight, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

Well, getting back to your podcast, getting with the sermons is, I know that there are a ton of pastors who are unknown.

Paul Washer even talks about the rose that blooms on the mountain that no one ever sees but God.

And he talks about, there's pastors that no one's ever heard of, but that God used mightily in there, wherever they were.

And that's encouraging to, especially to small church pastors like me, when you hear stories like that, it's wonderful to know that they did touch some lives, that there's guys out there that God used.

So if you were to say, here, I know you said you had your most popular one, but that doesn't always mean it's your favorite.

Because I know for me, like I know what's most popular isn't always my favorite.

Is there a sermon by somebody that none of us have probably heard of, but that you guys have done that you would say, y'all need to hear this? Yeah, no, go subscribe to Revive Thoughts and download all of them.

I feel like I've said that every single week.

One off the top of my head, Christmas Evans, whom you may have heard of, his name itself kind of stands out.

He was a kind of a Baptist Welsh gentleman from the early 1800s.

He has a sermon called the Triumph of Calvary.

It is so good.

He's very illustrative.

And so like he paints a picture using Isaiah of a battlefield and it's really cool.

And it puts the cross in a perspective that's really cool.

You mentioned the top, John Calvin's Passion of the Christ.

That sermon is actually a part of an eight part sermon that we've been dicing.

We've been doing one sermon a year around Easter time, except for this one that came out a little bit later, every year for three years.

So it's a part of a sermon series on the passion, highly, highly recommend it.

And some people may listen, I mean, on conversations with a Calvinist this won't happen, but some people may listen and go, I don't really like John Calvin.

Well, I'm telling you, listen to the sermons on the passion of the cross.

They're really, really, really incredible and really, really good.

Highly recommend Basil's To the Rich.

If you're not familiar with Basil, he's a kind of an old church father and he has a sermon called To the Rich and it will completely eviscerate your ideas of wealth and money.

And we've had more people write in and say like, ouch, that sermon stung more than any other sermon in pretty much all of our three years of running.

He's not as famous, but people felt very much convicted by it because he just basically lays it out how you use your money and why you're not giving it to God in reality.

And I think it just hit people really hard because of the truthfulness of it.

And especially how much it applies to people like us who are from America, who tend to have more money than we actually really need.

And we don't tend to ever really give away as much as we probably should.

Coming from an old church father who gave away everything, it's very, very convicting.

And you can see, I can just keep going.

There's What Will Happen to You by Henry, I believe Lydden, the first five minutes after death, which is just a really cool sermon.

There's, oh gosh, Soren Kierkegaard actually, who is not known for preaching, but he did sometimes.

And he has a sermon on the unchangeableness of God or the immutability of God.

Oh my goodness, it is so incredibly good.

His perspective on how to share the idea of God never changes.

It was very powerful for me.

It really made me look at immutability differently after that.

Just, he described God as the ability of God to be so patient while you sin.

Humans could never do it.

Only someone as perfect as God could let you sin and sin and sin and not basically get you what you deserve the second you do it, but just wait for you to finish before he's done with you.

It was such a good sermon and really, it really powerfully changed my outlook on immutability and how important it is.

It just, gosh, you can see there's so many.

There's Hudson Taylor's Compassion on the Multitude, which is a really good sermon, just him sharing.

And some of these are famous people.

Hudson Taylor's obviously pretty famous.

But I'm just saying, there's so many of these sermons where I just go, man.

Oh, Robert Murray McShane's sermon, Another Lily Gathered.

He preached it.

It's a funeral sermon for, I believe, a 14-year-old boy who died.

Very, very sad.

But he talked about how this boy is in heaven now and it's just very powerful.

Oh, David Livingston himself, actually.

No one knows this.

He gave a couple speeches.

He only gave two in his entire lifetime.

It was a back-to-back conference, I believe, at Cambridge.

And we have them.

We went to the Livingston Foundation, asked for them, edited them, recorded them.

We're the only place you can find them on the entire internet, pretty much.

And you can listen to them there.

So literally, they're pulled out of the archives.

And we have a few sermons like that.

George Matheson's Patience of Job was once preached before Queen Victoria.

And it's been completely lost to history.

But after searching and searching, we got a library to scan it to us.

And it's a really, really good one as well.

Gave me a much better appreciation for the Book of Job than I had before I listened to it.

And again, it's crazy, because it was once world-famous, read around the world in newspapers, preached before Queen Victoria, and then just completely lost.

No one knew about it until we brought it back out and put it back into recording.

So we have a lot of sermons like that, where you'll hear people like Jonathan Edwards, people you'd expect, Jonathan Edwards, John Calvin, Charles Spurgeon, big names that you would expect to be on a show like this.

But we have lots of sermons that you've probably never heard of.

No one's, everyone's completely forgotten.

And then for the first time in history, they're back, sermons by people like John Wycliffe, or people like Thomas Aquinas, people that have really truly been either forgotten or the fact that they were preachers has really been forgotten.

And we're bringing even a sermon by Boniface.

Yeah, and that's what's amazing is you can't, I mean, any of us could pull up a sermon by John Piper or John MacArthur or R.C.

Sproul.

And they have 1,500, 2,000 sermons, at least that are available in their own voice.

But the only thing up until now, and up until guys like you and your podcasts are doing, the only way we could do this is look at it.

We couldn't hear it.

We couldn't have, it didn't have a voice.

So I really appreciate what you guys are doing.

Like I said, listening to the sermon that was preached, the Calvin sermon, I don't know who the gentleman was.

He did a fantastic job.

And it was like, this is, I know that I'm not listening to Calvin.

I mean, I know it's not, obviously it's not being preached in his native tongue, but it's still like listening to a person.

And so I do think that's, like me, I tend to be an auditory learner anyway.

I tend to learn a lot by listening.

And so I find great value in it.

So I think others will as well.

Thank you.

We also, and this is kind of side, but we have, you may listen to, you may hear a show like Revive Thoughts, especially, and you may think, okay, that's going to be like, we had people when we told people about the show when we first started, and they were like, that's going to be really popular in the Ivy lounges of professors.

But we actually find that's not true.

Most of our listeners tend to be moms, tend to be kids, high schoolers, young people, because we take these ideas, sermons and stuff like that, that would be really unaccessible to most people.

And we make them accessible by taking them out of the archaic language and breathing that kind of life into them.

And we also have a lot of listeners who are not English as first language people.

We have a ton of listeners from the Philippines.

We have a ton of listeners from other countries like that, because for them, the Puritans are these great guys they hear a lot about, but they're not able, or, you know, not just the Puritans, the church fathers, et cetera, but they're not able to access them because the language is too archaic and they don't, you know, they may know English, but learning English and then learning a 1500s English is so hard for them, but they can listen to a sermon.

And so we have found, there are a lot of people who really appreciated the fact that we made them accessible to them again and made it easy for them.

They can sit and sometimes they'll, and we get messages like, hey, I may have to listen to the sermon more than once, but without your show, I could not hear from these people at all.

You've given me the ability to be accessed by so many of these people for the first time.

Awesome.

Awesome.

So as we begin to talk about church history, I kind of have a funny story to share with you.

I went to a very small seminary in Jacksonville.

You probably don't even know it, but even though you're a Jacksonville boy, it was called Jacksonville Baptist Theological Seminary.

Have you ever heard of it? No, I can definitely say I have not.

Yes.

It's a, I always jokingly say, I went to the, I went to pastoral trade school.

Unfortunately, I didn't, I wasn't able to go to a larger school, but I was thankful for the place I did get to go.

The men who were there loved the Lord.

They loved me.

They helped disciple me and train me and prepare me for ministry.

And they were not reformed, but I became reformed because they taught me how to study.

So I can say, I can say, I can blame them, even though they're not super happy about it.

But years later, cause I got my doctorate in 2008, years later, I went back to do some, I went back to take some refresher courses and stuff.

It was no big deal.

Just going and learning a little bit.

And one of the things that happened while I was there was, I was, I was asked to teach a class cause I had a doctorate.

So I was asked to teach a class while I was there.

And the class, the class we discussed was history.

And I said, oh, I would love to teach church history.

I would love to teach on the early councils.

And we could talk about Nicaea and what happened there.

We could talk about, you know, Chalcedon.

We could talk about these different things and how the church, how foundational these were in regard to Christian doctrines.

And they looked at me strange.

They looked at me and they said, but wait a minute, those are Catholic councils.

And I said, what do you mean Catholic councils? This is, this was church councils.

These were, these were ecumenical councils.

This wasn't Roman Catholic, but their view was all of that.

All of those councils were all Roman Catholic and our history, according to them, Baptist history was, was something that happened on the outside, something that wasn't going on during that.

And, and, and what would you, how would you respond to somebody if they said, you know what, we, councils like Nicaea and Chalcedon and creeds like Athanasius and the Nicaea Creed, we, those are Catholic.

How do you respond to that? So there's actually multiple, multiple layers, I feel like, of response to that.

So when we were on, my wife and I did an interview with Dallas Theological Seminary.

She said, one of the big reasons people do not study church history, they avoid church history, is because let's be honest, everything before 1500 is Catholic and people are scared of that.

We don't need to be scared of being Catholic.

Now, I am not a Catholic, right? I also, I grew up with Southern Baptist Church in Jacksonville.

I've, you know, I am a Baptist Calvinist person.

So no worries, not Catholic here, but that does not mean the Catholics were wrong about everything.

And that does not mean we don't come from that background.

And the Catholic church of the 1400s and 1500s is very different than the church of the 300s and 400s.

You know, just like living in New York today is very different than living in New York in 1617, or whatever, when it was first being founded.

I mean, obviously things change with time.

There are some great things that we can pull from the Catholic church.

That doesn't mean I want to become Catholic or that we should go back.

It's also important to remember that the Catholic church has not always been the Catholic church.

Even during the councils of Chalcedon, stuff like that, you had the Church of Ethiopia springing up over here.

You had the Church of the Far East, which many people like to discredit as an historian.

Some of them are, not all of them are out there in the Far East going off and doing different things.

And you have the Orthodox church as well over in the Greek side.

So the church has always been a little bit more fragmented than we like to play it as.

The Catholics like to pretend that everything was going great.

We were all under one umbrella until darn Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses.

That's not true.

Like the church has always been kind of spread out.

There were Hussites and people like that before.

At the same time though, we have to look at the situation and go, Baptists, you guys weren't outside of history.

Because if that's the argument, then the church was going to spread around the world and fail.

It was asleep for like 16 to 1700 years, living on the outskirts as exiles, having no real effect on anything while something masquerading as the church did all the real work.

And I just don't think that makes any real sense to me.

And it doesn't very look much like, I mean, how did it go from nowhere to exploding and 200 years? It doesn't make any sense.

And none of the Puritans, none of the Reformed, none of anybody would have agreed with that statement.

And this idea that you can claim only the people living outside of it.

Like you get to claim this group of people, the Hussites, or you get to claim, what are the ones before them? The Lollards.

The Waldensians and the- Yeah, and the Lollards.

And you can claim all these people are secretly your people running the Baptist strain of thought this whole time.

And maybe Anabaptists sometimes get thrown in there, maybe not, whatever.

But you're this other clique and this other strain of thought.

And I don't think you really want to be either.

Some of those guys got to some, I mean, the Anabaptists and Munster did some really weird things.

I don't know that you want to claim each of those groups as much as you think you are.

Because you're anti-Catholic, you're looking to pull this other train in.

But I don't know that you want that.

I don't know that you want to get what you're pulling in, if that makes sense.

Some of those things that they were doing and thinking and believing, some of them would have had women preachers.

Some of them were extremely wildly charismatic.

I don't know that you want to pull that in and say we're this group just because you need to find someone that's not Catholic throughout history to be.

It's far better that, you're gonna be pulling in imperfect people either way.

You might as well say, we did come from Catholics, like we all did at some point.

We do trace our history back to them.

Yet we broke away for very legitimate reasons.

Maybe there's stuff to learn from Aquinas and stuff to learn from Anselm and stuff to learn from Augustine and stuff to learn from Gregory of Nazianzus, these great early fathers.

Yet there's very real reasons Martin Luther and the reformers had to break away.

And let's also not forget, it's not like when Martin Luther suddenly learned the idea of justification, that he really got the proper understanding of it.

He immediately said, let us form a new church.

He was originally trying to reform the church from the inside, as were many of the other early, early reformers.

It just, over time, there was no reforming it and they had to break away, but they originally were planning to fix the church, not break it down.

Had they been successful, had maybe Jean Garrison and some of the people from the 1400s been listened to and the church had not continued swerving into idolatry, had Savonarola or some of those other people been maybe a little bit more successful, we might all still be Catholic today.

Now, I'm glad we're not, but I'm just saying that was the original goal.

And so the idea of just taking all of that and throwing it out and throwing it to the wastebin of history.

The reformers write very strongly about why the Catholic church is evil.

And most of them take revelation and they go anti-Christ, anti-Catholic, right? That's the Pope, right? But they were being killed by the Catholic church.

They were being persecuted by the Catholic church.

The Catholic church of the 1500s and 1600s is not the same Catholic church of today either, even though they would argue with me and say they are, they're not.

And so we need to not make the same mistake.

Of course, they saw everything through the lens of the Catholic church was evil.

They were under direct oppression by it.

But if we move them back, if we took some of them and move them back into the 800s, they would have found the Catholic church probably not as bad.

And that's just how it is.

I think this idea that we can, the Baptists can skip out of history, I think it's really foolish of them.

And also for the Baptists, I think it's actually better you don't do that anyway, because the reformed, the real reformed Presbyterian style reformed who are great in a lot of ways, but they love to act like, well, we have the great dominance.

And once everyone gets back to ideas from the Puritans in the 1600s, we will be dominating again.

And they're growing, the movement is very big right now.

But I ask you, well, why did you guys lose in the first place? Why didn't it just, the Puritans were very much involved in the founding of America.

How come 200 years later, America is mostly Baptist? What happened that caused you to lose that whole, they would obviously, a lot of them say, oh, revival, Finny, Arminianism, whatever they'll put out there.

Yeah, but I think there are real problems with the reformed idea.

I think Baptists actually did a better job of both holding the faith, but also sharing the faith.

It wasn't until the Baptists really got the heart of the American people that the Americans suddenly became the great missionary nation that she was from the 1800s and 1900s.

No other group of people have sent more missionaries and no other group of people have spread the faith around quite like the Baptists in America in the 1800s, 1900s.

That happened after they transitioned out of being the hardcore reformed Puritans.

Why? I think answering that question, instead of trying to remove yourself from church history, but figuring out what you learned from the Puritans and how you built on that is a far better thing for Baptists to be doing than to just try and cut themselves completely out of the cloth.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And just to be clear, I didn't teach the class.

I can see.

Last year, I read a book, The History of Baptists in America.

And I think that's a much better representation of the true history of Baptists because what I learned in reading that book was that because I'm fairly familiar with particular Baptist history in London, because of course of the first and second confessions that came out of London in the 17th century.

But at the same time, there were Baptist groups growing here in the United States.

And those were not loved by the Presbyterians.

They were not loved by that side because they were considered to be new.

They were considered to be something different.

And it's not as if they were pointing back.

Those guys weren't pointing back and saying, no, we're just the latest iteration of this old group.

Even the early Baptist, our church holds to the first confession, the first London confession.

And the whole point of the first confession is to say, we're not the Anabaptists.

This is not who we are.

We are particular Baptists.

We hold to particular Baptist theology, but we are not who you heard about in Munster.

We are not who you, we are not the radicals that everyone is afraid of.

And we do hold to an Orthodox view of Christ, of salvation, of the essential Christian doctrines.

And yeah, we don't baptize our babies, but yeah, yeah, so.

All right, so moving on then, I wanna, unless you have something else on that, I know you look like you.

No, it's more just my thought is I love, how do I say this? I both love that everyone gets their sides and their people into such a knicker about this.

And that is church history is these people fighting.

Because there's some people who go, we need to all stop these fighting and uniting.

Church history shows we're gonna be fighting forever over these little details.

Everyone we look up to is fighting with somebody over these details.

But at the same time, one thing I love about church history too, is if you study church history, honestly, you will find people from camps you don't agree with, and you will grow and learn from them.

And you will have to go, wow, I can't, we don't view things the same way, but that person really knew God.

Great example, GK Chesterton, he is a Catholic, not a person I would, but boy, his commentaries on social, on the world are as sharp as anything you could ever touch.

Another, his kind of descendant, C.S.

Lewis, most people are familiar with him, would say the same thing.

I wouldn't agree with his theology per se, but man, his commentary on human beings and their relationship with God is as sharp as anything you can touch.

And the same way, I don't come from this group, but there's no denying John Wesley, amazing, had powerful impact on the world.

A.B.

Simpson had a powerful impact on the world.

People whom I don't agree with, they led movements by God.

And even people I do agree with, like Jonathan Edwards or some of these other guys, they were, they did things I wouldn't expect.

Charles Spurgeon had, people are discovering, had kind of more of a healing ministry than people realize.

When Jonathan Edwards was preaching his famous sermons, people were rolling on the floor, making very charismatic sounds.

If that happened in a reformed church today, people would lose their minds.

And yet historically, that was pretty common in revivals.

And revivals, by the way, were originally a Puritan reformed thing.

Like that was their thing before it got taken over by other people.

And so we had to look around and go, history is more complex than I realize it is.

And that people in camps I don't agree with, God has used.

And that's one of the other problems with this idea that Baptists get to separate themselves from history is, I'm sorry, you're not the only people who had the spirit of God this whole time.

Like God has been moving and doing things, even in people like those Anglicans or like those Lutherans or those people you don't wanna agree with or don't like, I'm sorry, but perfect theology is not the requirement for God using you.

And even today, we do not have perfect theology either.

I think sometimes we think, if I think the perfect thoughts, then I know God and then God can use me.

Wrong, love many people to death.

They did not think about God the same way as me.

In fact, they probably had very imperfect theology.

God was still using them because they knew him.

They may not have known him this in the way I would have liked them to, but they knew God, that is the requirement.

Yeah, absolutely.

And as obviously a card carrying Calvinist, I'm convicted on what I believe, but I cringe when my fellow Calvinists would say that because someone's not a Calvinist, they're not saved.

And I do know guys who would go that far.

And I have one of my favorite guests on the program is a man named Matthew Henson.

He's a friend of mine.

He's a very intelligent, articulate young man.

And he's always joke, he's my not yet Calvinist friend because I'm always picking at him about being a Calvinist, but he's not.

And yet he's one of the people I respect most.

And I love the historical relationship between, at least from what I understand, between Wesley and Whitfield, which was a loving relationship between brothers, even though they stood on different sides of the question of predestination.

On George, we did George Whitfield's funeral sermon, which was preached by John Wesley in an episode of Revive Thoughts.

And we covered that back and forth they had.

They really did have, at one point, real tension.

And then they also really did recover and become quite good friends, especially George, I think, made up a little bit more with Charles than John.

I think that's just personality-wise.

John was a bit more of a hard-nosed guy in general.

I think he was closer with Charles in the first place, but him and John did bury the hatchet.

And George Whitfield and John Wesley's spiritual son, if you can, the guy who was influenced a lot by both of them, but more by George, was John Newton.

And once they buried the hatchet of theology, the person that came after them, the kind of spiritual descendant of that Methodist work, John Newton, who, I mean, look at all the good he did for Britain and look at all the good he did for the world because he was trained by the people who were trained by these two guys.

And because they put that theological disagreement to the side and came together, the world got rid of slavery.

It was not quite as simple as that, but I'm just saying you can see that deep connection.

Had they continued to just drive the ax into each other because of disagreements, would we have gotten a John Newton? Would we have gotten a William Wilberforce? I'm sure we may have, God would have moved, but I'm just saying you can see where good came from people saying, though we disagree on, and that's something too, we all have our beliefs.

And I think we all, and some of them are wrong.

I don't wanna get ecumenical and say, because that's a very real danger.

There are a lot of people who say, we all have beliefs we need to unite.

So put the axes away, but they're coming with very false intentions, even if they don't know it.

But at the same time, you can't perfectly understand the will of God and sovereignty and all these things.

And so we need to learn to quit trying to force it, right? I would much rather as a missionary be working with a couple of Armenians who love Jesus and really truly know God, than a couple Calvinists who've read all the great books and are sitting in their office and they refuse to come out and do the work.

You know what I'm saying? Like, give me people who have a fire for God and who are out here doing something or out there doing something, who are getting off their office desk chairs, but who maybe see God differently.

I'll take them over the guys who can tell me all the perfect justifications and doctrines, but they aren't doing it.

They're not doing anything.

That's right.

But they can get into a great Facebook comment argument with me.

Yeah.

And that's, yeah.

Yeah.

The keyboard commandos.

So if I were to ask you, what do you think the average church goer in America today, what do you think they, if you were going to give a grade for their knowledge of church history, average church goer, and you're a person who loves church history, studied church history, went to seminary.

If you were to give a grade for the average person, I'm not asking you to be ugly, but being honest, where do you think we are? I'm going to be ugly.

We're all at F minuses.

We are failing.

And I'm not saying that to be mean.

And somebody might've heard that and say, how dare you? But the point is, I thought I knew a lot about church history.

I went to Bible college.

I was a well-read guy.

I mean, I love reading books.

I thought I knew a lot before I started Revive Thoughts.

And when I started Revive Thoughts, I realized even the people I thought I knew, like a Charles Spurgeon or a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I did not know.

I did not know their biographies.

I did not know how they thought.

I didn't know who they really were.

And if you don't know the people of church history, you really don't know the story of church history at all.

And history itself is just one of the most, I think, understudied academic forces.

I think most people think they know more than they do.

And they'll hear that and they'll go, well, that's not true.

Martin Luther and the Puritans and then stuff happens and the Baptist show up and then here we are.

I mean, it's not hard to know.

That's not, that's, you know, I promise you, most of us think we know a lot more than we do.

And we're drifting or we're at that point of knowledge where we have like one or 2% of knowledge.

So we think we're really smart.

When in actuality, we haven't even begun to dip into the waters of how much we need to learn to get to where we need to go.

Even now I'm like, man, I've got a long ways to go before I feel like I actually know the story of how we got.

I spent the last year writing an episode of our, what we call our deep dives, where we spend two or three hours on a subject, writing and working through the story of the Church of Ethiopia.

And I gotta tell you, it's a wild, crazy story.

It was very complex, very difficult to kind of figure out how all the pieces fit together.

I learned so much that I had never known before.

I didn't have a scintilla of knowledge of how things were working and how Christianity in Africa was working.

For 2000 years, it's been there.

And I couldn't have told you what was going on during that time.

And I think we all are lacking just gigantic gaps in our knowledge of how we got to where we are.

And even the people who love theology, they know, you know, much like the Baptists, oh, well, I know theology, I know the Puritans or something.

You know one strand of it because it agrees with you theologically, but you've got these other strands going around you and, you know, and interventing in there, and you don't know how they all piece together.

But study it, learn it, listen to our podcasts, hear the stories, because the crazy thing is God has been using many, many of his faithful brothers and sisters, or our faith, sorry.

He's been using many of our faithful brothers and sisters in Christ for years and years and years.

And nothing will comfort you more than seeing God work through history.

Nothing, when nothing, man, you see war around the world.

We have so many people who have got, D.L.

Moody was a chaplain in war.

J.

Gresham Machen was a YMCA soldier.

Van Dyke was on a battleship.

B.H.

Carroll was literally a soldier trying to die in battle.

I mean, we have so many brothers and sisters who have been through war.

Oh, well, there's plagues out there.

Well, that's okay.

Martin Luther helped bring in plague victims.

John Wycliffe helped bring in plague victims.

We have so many people who have survived the Black Plague and so many other things, or who didn't survive it, and who were faithful all the way to the end.

Oh, well, there are hard economic times.

Well, hey, J.C.

Riles' entire family went bankrupt.

David Livingston grew up with six or seven brothers in a one-room apartment.

We have people who have survived poverty.

Well, I might be sick.

Well, we've had people who survived that.

Well, I have depression.

We've had people who survived that.

Charles Spurgeon.

We have people who lost their minds.

AB Simpson and Hudson Taylor both had mental breakdowns.

You can look to them for comfort.

Oh, we have people who have physical handicaps.

George Matheson was blind, but preached before the Queen of England.

We have people who've been through these different things.

We know what that's like.

There are, you know, David Brainerd got a debilitating disease, but look at what his missionary biography did for the world.

We can look to history and find, no matter what you think you're going through, someone has been through it already, and they can encourage you, and they can help you and strengthen you, and we have to start realizing that.

We are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses as this, and it's not just the Hall of Faith from the Old Testament or the New Testament Acts, but the church has been going for 2,000 years, and their stories deeply edify us today.

And as a church, when we learn that we're just a small part of church history, it frees us up and gives us so much courage to do what we need to do today.

Wow.

I just want to throw my headphones off and go preach.

That was very good.

That was very good, Troy.

And I appreciate your passion.

I appreciate your knowledge, and I would love to sometime just sit down and ask you 1,000 questions.

And I would try to answer them.

Well, maybe we can have you on in the future, and we can do this again, and we can- Let's do it.

Maybe if there is a listener who's out there right now who's interested in asking a question for a future episode, maybe they'll do that, and we'll kind of encourage that.

But also, like I said, I just want to say, one, I've been very encouraged by your ministry, by your podcast, and by you sharing with me today.

So I want to thank you for coming on the program.

Thank you very much for having me on.

I really appreciate it.

Absolutely.

And thank you, listener, for being with us today on Conversations with a Calvinist.

This has been a unique episode.

I'm so encouraged.

Like I said, I feel like I want to get up and go preach.

Awesome.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I hope that you've been encouraged as well.

And like I said, if you have a question that you would like for me to address on a future episode, or maybe you'd like me to invite Troy back and talk about a particular subject in church history, please send me an email at calvinispodcastatgmail.com.

Again, that's calvinispodcastatgmail.com.

If you're watching this on Facebook, go and join our Facebook group, Conversations with a Calvinist.

Just all you have to do is click on it and you'll get approved to come in.

You can ask questions right there and we can use those for future episodes.

If you're watching on YouTube, you can leave a comment.

If you're listening to us on Spotify or Apple, you can send us a message again through calvinispodcastatgmail.com.

And thank you again, Troy, for being with us.

Thank you for having me on.

Yes, sir.

Thank you audience for being with us.

Thank you for listening to Conversations with a Calvinist.

My name is Keith Foskey, and I've been your Calvinist.

May God bless you.