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October 26, 2017:
JEFFREY C. WADDINGTON, Pastor of Knox Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Lansdowne, PA & board member of Reformed Forum to discuss “RESTORING REFORMATION PASSION”
Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.
It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions. Now here's.
Our host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.
This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 26th day of October 2017. And the only thing keeping me conscious right now since I am suffering from a very severe case of sleep deprivation, having not had any sleep, not even a minute sleep last night, the only thing that's keeping me riding on a high and conscious is the wonderful time I had with Pastor Jeff Waddington and about 100 other men at the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio pastor's luncheon which was just held today with keynote speaker Pastor Bill Shishko of Reformation Metro, New York, faculty member at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Teller, South Carolina, and also a retired pastor of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Franklin Square, Long Island, New York.
What a blessing it was and I have with me in studio today the aforementioned Pastor Jeff Waddington who is the pastor of Knox Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, and he's a board member of the Reformed Forum.
Today we're going to basically be picking up on the theme that Pastor Bill Shishko spoke on today, Restoring Reformation Passion, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back into the studio of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.
Pastor Jeffrey C. Waddington. Oh, very pleased to be with you, Chris, and as you said, the luncheon together was great. The food was phenomenal provided from the firehouse subs. Firehouse subs. Those of you in Carlisle and the surrounding area will know that the restaurant, and if you don't, you should.
They did a fine job providing all that gratis,.
Right? Not only gratis, but much more than we even agreed about or agreed on, I should say, or talked about. He never mentioned to me when I approached him to cater the pastor's luncheon for free. First of all, he agreed to do it in probably, and I'm not even exaggerating, about three minutes after the first time talking to him face-to-face about it, but he didn't tell me that he was going to provide dessert and salads and beverages and.
All the utensils. That's right. And forks and all that, and went over very well with the men. They were more than happy. The roast beef and the cheese and ham and cheese and turkey and cheese, so all three plus, they were well made, beautifully made, and I, not being local, but I can tell you that the next time I come into town, I may be looking for them.
I'll say, hey, Chris, let's go there. And not that this is a food critic program, but I know that you did enjoy Wenger's Meats and Ice donation as well.
Yes, the macaroni salad. It was very good.
And so we got to thank Brad Wenger, owner of Wenger's Meats and Ice for that as well. And in fact, the only reason I asked Brad to donate that is because I had no idea that.
Firehouse Subs was donating all those other things. Oh, but it was all good. And it's good outreach to the community. If we have Christians who are patronizing local establishments, you do create an opportunity at some point, perhaps, to plant the seed of the gospel.
Yes, and one of the signs of a successful event is when the majority of the people are still.
Lingering around talking long after it's over. Yes, which they did. I don't think I saw anybody dash out the door when it was over. Maybe there was.
I think there was a tiny handful of people that had obligations.
But it seemed like all the men that were there were happy to be there,.
Including Representative Steve Bloom. That's right. Pennsylvania State Representative Steve Bloom, who's running for Congress. He was there, and he is a very inspiring politician because of the fact that he is the real article when it comes to his Christian faith.
And I pray that more men like him are raised up into offices of power in this country, and especially I hope that one day even Steve might become president of the United States.
Well, there you go.
What a blessed brother he is, and I'm so glad that he enjoyed himself and stayed there long.
After it ended. I believe that he was there after the thing had officially concluded, when we remembered that we had a cake made in his honor.
That's right. That was donated by Carlyle Bakery. Eric, the owner of Carlyle Bakery, donated that. And it was good. Yep, it was good. But this is really, like I said, sounding like a food critic program.
But the message that Pastor Bill Shishko gave was quite powerful. But before we go into that, and that theme of restoring Reformation passion, I want you to tell our listeners, especially those who haven't heard you on this program before, who may be unfamiliar with you, about, tell our listeners about Knox Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Lansdowne, Pennsylvania.
Sure. Knox OPC has been in existence as a congregation from the beginning of the time of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which began in 1936. So it's, I believe, one of the original congregations to leave the mother church, the Presbyterian Church in the USA, PCUSA.
And then eventually took the name Knox OPC. They're a unique congregation in the OPC in that they are an exclusive psalm singing non-instrument congregation. There's only a handful of those within our denomination.
Were they always like that? No, I get, I could be wrong on that, but I get the impression that they came to those convictions at some point after they had left the mainline church to form a congregation of the OPC.
They had a pastor who was convinced of that, and I guess he was successful in persuading the congregation at the time, and they've kept with that.
And the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, for our listeners who are unfamiliar with that denomination, it was given birth to during the fundamentalist modernist controversy with J. Gresham Machen.
That's right.
And the church had become so liberal that a break was required. And now was J. Gresham Machen excommunicated?
Well, he was deposed from the ministry, defrocked we would say, over the issue of being involved, creating and being involved with the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. One of the problems that was arising was that the mainline Presbyterian Church Foreign Missions Board was sending people overseas who weren't believers.
They didn't even believe the message they were meant to convey. And so he, Machen, took the extraordinary step of establishing a private Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, the independent board. And the General Assembly ruled in 1937, I think, 36 rather, that he was wrong in doing that, founding it and then being involved with it.
So he was removed from the ministry, and that immediately led to the founding of the OPC, called originally the PCA, the Presbyterian Church of America. And they were sued over that name by the PCUSA, and the court sided with the mainline church.
And that's when the name Orthodox Presbyterian Church was eventually adopted.
I never heard that before. And it's interesting that they didn't sue the PCA Presbyterian Church in America.
Well, that's interesting. Admittedly, you've got 30 plus odd years between the two, the founding of the two denominations. But why did they go after us in 36 and not after, well, the PCA was born out of the Southern Presbyterian Church.
And at that point in 1973, the Northern and Southern mainline churches had not reunited. They reunited in 85, somewhere in that neighborhood. So that may be why they didn't go after them. Although I don't know that for sure.
Yes. Well, it is one of the very conservative, biblically Orthodox, pun intended, denominations within Presbyterianism because the more dominant Presbyterian body in the United States is the PCUSA. And although there are a remnant of faithful men who are either pastoring or members of congregations in that denomination, it is a denomination that has really gone apostate in many cases.
Oh, yeah. And gets worse with each passing day, I think, with all the issues that we're.
All familiar with out in the broader culture. And the message, as we keep referring to Pastor Bill Shishko's message at the Iron Shepherds, Iron Pastors luncheon, I could sense from the reaction of the pastors there that he really struck a chord with that issue.
And of course, that was, my suspicions were further proven to be true when people were clamoring around him to.
Talk about it. Yes, yes. I did notice that. Yes, it was not a historical lecture, although, of course, he did make reference to Martin Luther. But the whole drift of his sermon message was to be both an encouragement and a challenge to the pastor there, you know, in all the various points and sub points that he made.
And he's a very effective speaker, preacher. And I think a blessing to the men who came. So I think on all levels, whether it be fellowship, physical food, spiritual food, on all levels, Chris, I think it was a good day.
What, three hours altogether, 11 to 2? That was the time frame. Well, that was the time frame, but we didn't leave there until.
After 3, 3 .20. And Bill was still there. He was, he was. And the staleness, the indifference, the deadness that many, even true Christians, can fall themselves sliding into when something becomes commonplace, when these are things that, as Bill joked about someone behaving in a Pentecostal manner over truth, these are things that should be making us really praise for joy and thanksgiving and gratefulness from the top of our lungs, these doctrines that we say we love.
And yet people will, men in the ministry will very often drone on about them as if they are really just discussing the chemical properties of glue or something. You know, it's a very serious issue. And when someone, that honeymoon season of excitement over having discovered not only salvation, believing and finally coming to the glorious realization that you have been freed from bondage and also freed from death and damnation, when you know that every day and years go by and people can become seemingly bored with these realities, that's a dangerous area to be in and it's a destructive emotion to be carrying with you when you, especially when you're a pastor and an evangelist.
Yes, if you become complacent about these truths, about the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, it's really what we're talking, we're not talking about something in addition to the teaching of God's Word.
We see in the Old Testament, Israel often falls into this trap, whether you're thinking of the Old Testament as a whole or the book of Judges, you have the Judges cycle where you have the people sin and God sends a judgment in the form of a foreign nation domineering over, dominating over Israel, and they cry out for help.
He sends a judge, and for about 40 years they have peace and prosperity, and then they slide into complacency and then idolatry again, and the cycle recurs. And when you look at it, you realize, hold it, that's the whole history of Israel.
It's also the history of the Christian church. I don't know if it's necessary, but you do see the decline of church denominations and seminaries and other institutions and agencies. Years ago, I forget who it was, a professor at Westminster Seminary said that the average lifespan of a denomination was 70 years, and it was getting shorter.
Really, of a denomination? 70 years. Wow. And he said, well, how long will it take for Westminster to go bad? And of course, as you know, Westminster has been through a few of those challenges in the last 20, 30, 40 years.
Now, when you're saying 70 years for the life of a denomination, are you talking about before it begins to depart from its moorings and its roots, or are you saying before it disappears?
Before it starts departing from its norm, its commitments, doctrinal commitments, its spiritual commitments, expectations for how Christians are to behave in the world and in the church. This was something that was said, it might have even been Paul Woolley, who was one of the founding faculty members, so it was a while ago that he said this.
It would be interesting to see if that's gotten shorter, if it's now 50 years or something. I don't know. It does seem as though, just like empires and businesses have a life cycle, churches in God's providence seem to have that.
It happened to Israel. That's why Bill's presentation, his sermon, it was a preaching event, not a lecture, right? Why it was so key is that when we look at the Reformation, we're not just looking at something historically, we're not trying to be coldly analytical.
He was reminding us of what it was that was such a big deal and how we need to be able to, in God's kindness and providence, to recapture the passion that was unleashed at the time of the Reformation.
Why don't you tell us some of those reasons why it is such a big deal? Because there are a lot of people, both evangelical and Roman Catholic, who don't think it's such a big deal.
Well, yes, you may remember a couple, well, more than a couple, a few years ago, Mark Noll and Carol Nystrom came out with a book called, Is the Reformation Over? And they basically, at the end of the book, say, yes.
And those of us who are on the opposite side say, we beg to differ. Mark Noll is an evangelical at Notre Dame, right? That's correct. He has a history with the OPC and I think with the EPC, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.
I don't know what his affiliation is now. Carol Nystrom has co-written books with J .I. Packer. But this was a very, on the one hand, we can understand why someone might think the Reformation was over, because there are places for what we call co-belligerency in the issues of social issues out in the world, right?
In other words, conservative Catholics, Greek, Eastern Orthodox, and evangelicals might be able to come together. And atheists. And atheists and Muslims and Jews, right? Who recognize that, by common grace, recognize that marriage between a man and a woman for life is important, that abortion is wrong, is murder, those kinds of things.
So there is a place for that. But what's happened is, people, they don't demonize one another. So they go to the opposite extreme, where on one extreme is demonization, which of course is an error, and then on the other extreme, you have, well, we all like each other now, so doctrinal differences must not matter.
Or we won't let them matter. And the Reformation, specifically the Protestant Reformation, was a doctrinal Reformation. You see, at the time of the Reformation, you had many people calling for moral reformation, because you had popes who led immoral lives out in public.
You had immorality practiced in the streets of Rome. When Luther went for his pilgrimage to Rome, he saw priests taking advantage of the services of prostitutes out in public. It wasn't even hidden. It was that brazen.
But he recognized that the Reformation that needed to happen was doctrinal. It's doctrine that is at the foundation of life. A doctrine is simply another word for teaching. In other words, the Christian faith teaches something.
And when I read a book about a reformer like Luther or Calvin or Zwingli or Ecclampotius or Thomas Cranmer in England, I often come away recognizing that they were not infallible, not inerrant, sinful, saved by grace, saints.
I get excited in the sense that I say, if the Lord could do that through him, maybe he can do something through me. And that's why reading Christian biography and history is a good thing. And that's one of the points that, as you may remember, Bill made.
He made it almost in two ways. He talked about reading the lives of important saints, but also he talked about war stories. And in a sense, they're similar. Reading the biography has just happened to be of older stories, and war stories are significant.
We need to encourage one another in this race that Christians are running. The Reformation is not over. Yes, there are plenty of people, even in our own ranks, unfortunately, who think it is. They think that the Reformation was a tempest in a teapot.
And it wasn't. Now, if you go and you read the 39 theses, actually, Martin Luther probably didn't nail it. Someone else did, but to the door. That apparently is a misnomer. But when he had them posted, however they were posted, to the door, the 95...
You're confusing the 95 theses and the 39 articles of religion. No, no, I'm talking about the 95 theses. Right, yes. When you look at them... But you used 39 as a number. Did I say 39? Yes. Oh my goodness.
Because you were thinking of the 39 articles. Probably. The 95 theses, when they're nailed to the door of the castle church of Wittenberg, they are not the full-fledged doctrine that Luther is known for.
They are primarily a challenge to the penitential system of the Roman Catholic, the abuses of the penitential system. Sale of indulgence. Correct. That would be at the heart of that dispute. Those are key to the Reformation.
But Luther's discovery, crystallization, if you will, of the doctrine of justification by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone, that comes about because he was a professor of theology. And he was teaching on the Psalms and the Book of Romans.
And it was through that preparation for teaching those courses in the university that he became aware of the centrality of the gospel. And I would imagine at least most of our listeners have some familiarity with the outlines of his life.
How he had, before coming to faith in Christ, he had been training to become a lawyer. And then he got caught in a thunderstorm and got nearly zapped with lightning and called out to St. Anne, who was the patron saint of whatever.
And he said, if I survive, I'll become a monk. And he kept his vow. He became an Augustinian monk. And it's actually in that context where he discovers the sinfulness of his own personality. And there are somewhat comical stories of him driving his father confessor nuts with all of his confessions.
Will you get out of here or just go home? Yeah, do something. Come back when you've really committed some sin. And his father confessor, Johann Staupitz, it's interesting, it's another whole story. So there were people in medieval Roman Catholicism who were inching their way toward the truth.
Because if there were no Staupitz, there probably would have never been a Luther as we know him. But I find that exciting. I find history absolutely thrilling. Biblical history, secular history, church history.
I find it all because you're reading about people in biblical and church history. You're reading about what the Lord is doing through people. And you discover the Reformation was not a tempest in a teapot, but was over the doctrine of justification.
It was about the union with Christ. It was about the Reformation of worship. Things that we either take for granted if we're in churches that are sound, or we've forgotten and reverted back to almost quasi-medieval Roman Catholic concerns with smells and bells, as we like to call incense and robes, and all of the.
Accoutrements of formal liturgies. Yeah, the reason why people yawn over the why the Reformation needed to occur and the areas involved over that very cataclysmic break that reformers had with Rome, the reason why they are indifferent about it is because I think it is likely if you really are consciously, even after a thorough prayerful thought, still coming to the conclusion that this is no big deal, I don't believe that you can really have a regenerate heart.
No, I would agree with you. Yes, I would agree with you on that.
Because it is a huge difference. It's darkness to light. It is the treadmill, the never-ending, futile treadmill of man trying to merit favor with God that will never happen. And the fact that not only won't it happen, but the more he tries to do that, the more he tries to lift up his deeds and his goodness, his own goodness to God's face as some kind of payment to Him that would deem him or her worthy of entrance into heaven.
The more the person does that, the more they are worthy of hell.
Yeah, the interesting thing, as you pointed out, if you honestly understand the Reformation and the theological issues that were—biblical issues that were at stake, and you think and you yawn, not because you're tired physically—.
Like I am right now. But for lack of interest, I may have used this expression before, if this doesn't light your fire, your wood is wet. And I think I honestly believe that that is the case, biblically speaking.
You understand that at the end of the day, church history is a benefit because it brings to light biblical truth or aspects of biblical teaching that we may not have grasped. The Reformation is a reformation because it's a reforming, not in the sense of constantly reinventing yourself like postmodernism, but in the sense of going back to the original, or endeavoring to go back to the original form of the church to recover the lost riches.
In this instance, particularly the doctrine of justification with Calvin, it was union with Christ and the reformation of worship. What is proper worship? What are the elements of proper worship? Those kinds of things.
And let's look at justification and union with Christ because those go together. Union with Christ is the umbrella encounter. We can't be justified if we're not united to Christ. As Calvin points out in the Institutes, when we are by grace through faith united to the Lord Jesus Christ, we get a twofold blessing.
Justification and he would say either regeneration or sanctification, meaning how guilt is addressed and how corruption is addressed. In other words, when Adam fell, when Adam disobeyed God in the garden, the results of the disobedience was immediate guilt before a holy God and the corruption of our whole nature.
In fact, let's go to a break right now and pick up where you left off. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com.
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That's solidrockremodeling .com. Solid Rock Remodeling, bringing new life to your home. And it was such a joy to hear Pastor Bill Shishko speak at my Iron Sharpens Iron Radio luncheon today. And it had been a number of years since I had heard him preach, and this certainly was a sermon.
It wasn't merely just a dry, dull lecture. It was an impassioned sermon, and it was not only such a blessing to hear him preach, but it was also a blessing to enjoy some fellowship with him. And he is a very dear brother in Christ indeed, and somebody that has a very crucial role in my life personally, having known him since I was a very new Christian in the 1980s, and also having had been with him through thick and thin in my life after going through some dark times.
And it's just a joy to have a brother like him. And we are picking up basically on his theme that he spoke on at the pastor's luncheon, which was Restoring Reformation Passion. If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.
And you were talking about the consequences of the fall in the garden.
One of the beauties of covenant theology is you get to trace out how God has dealt with the consequences of the fall. As I said, as a result of the fall, Adam and all of us who have descended from him, use the language of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, who have descended from him by ordinary generation, we are guilty before God for breaking his law and we are corrupt.
In other words, with the fall, we have lost the holiness and righteousness and true knowledge that we had at creation coming from the hand of God. And the ministry of Christ, at which the Old Testament Israel was pointing forward to in types and shadows and ceremonies, right?
Christ comes and his work, both of holy life and his sacrificial death and then resurrection and ascension, these things are meant to address the consequences of the fall. And that's why Paul refers to, talks about a first Adam and a second Adam or a first Adam man and last man in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15.
He's showing how Christ answers the problems of the fall. Calvin, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, talks about being united to Christ by faith. The Holy Spirit enables us to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
And being united to him, we get all of the benefits that he himself has earned as our God-man mediator. Justification answers the problem of guilt. Sanctification or regeneration, what we would call transformation, these deal with the problem of corruption or, yeah, corruption.
Trying to think of a couple of other words. It's escaping me right now. But the power of sin is initially dealt with broken. The dominion of sin, the dominion of Satan is broken in Christ's resurrection.
And then you have, that's called definitive sanctification. And then you have progressive sanctification, which is then the life of the Christian where we grow in grace, where we increase in our obedience to God and his word.
This is where we look to the law of God to guide us as Christians. We're not trying to earn God's favor because we already, by grace, have his favor. That's what justification is about. Justification is about forgiveness of sins and we might say the double imputation.
Our sins are placed on Christ and his righteousness is placed on us. But what Martin Luther referred to as the sweet exchange, he used the analogy of a marriage, one that also Calvin and Jonathan Edwards and others have picked up on.
We marry Christ. You heard Bill Shishko say, the only biblically legitimate time when it's okay for a man to marry a man is when the man marries Christ. That's another way of talking about our union with Christ.
We notice in the New Testament that the apostle Paul frequently talks about being in Christ, being with Christ. Pastor Shishko talked about being a fellow sufferer with other believers in Christ. So we are united to Christ by faith and when we're united to Christ, we're also united to all of our brothers and sisters, past, present, and future.
It's a wonderful thing that happens. We call that the communion of the saints. Right? But what Christ has done addresses the issue of the consequences of the fall. So you can trace that out. You can look at how the life of Israel is meant in some ways to recapitulate Adam.
In other words, the law was given to Israel to force them into a corner, so to speak, so that they would recognize their need of a Messiah. And the Messiah finally comes, as Paul says, in the fullness of time, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law.
And he was born under the law. He who had no need to be subjected to the law and in fact is the one from whose hands it was given now submits himself to the law, not for himself, but for us. His obedience to the law in all of its details is what enables us to be found acceptable in the sight of God.
Christ dying on the cross, which is the culmination of his obedience, his being in what we would call in a state of humiliation, right? From the time of his conception until the resurrection, Christ is in the state of humiliation.
With the resurrection, he is now in the state of exaltation. We talk about the two estates of Christ. We talk about Christ being the prophet, priest, and king in the two estates. Those who are trained in the Westminster Shorter Catechism will be familiar with those categories.
And this, I find this absolutely captivating. It helps me to conceptualize the whole of the Bible as well as the details to get the big picture. And we need to have that in our day because we are now, as Pastor Sisko said, we're not in a pagan society.
We are in an apostate society, one that has been exposed to the gospel and has rejected it as a whole. In some ways, like the early Christians in dealing with Israel. Israel had been exposed to the gospel both in an advanced form in the Old Testament and then with the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Truth stood, you know, stood nose to nose and they didn't recognize it.
Yeah, and Pastor Bill also said that this is no longer an age of relativism, that the world actually has a specific agenda. That is really, I don't think Bill used this term, but it is really a religion.
They don't call it that. The secularists think that they can get away with their dogma that they insist upon all mankind adopting because of the fact that they don't call it a religion, but it is a religion.
It is, and of course, he is right. And we see this, this is why Christians are in a situation that in some senses we're not prepared for in this land, and I think it would be true in other parts of the world as well, where they not only are not relativists, they are totalitarian.
Okay, they're the opposite. They believe that a certain lifestyle is absolutely correct and we all have to get in line with it.
That's why even we who are conservatives far too often will use the label liberal when we are speaking to people on the left of us. And in reality, many of those whom we call liberal are really leftist totalitarians because liberals believe that all voices should have an equal place on the table of communication in the public square and so on.
But leftists don't want that. Technically speaking, conservatives in the United States are those who uphold classical liberalism in the sense of, as you've said, that people have the right to express their thinking on various issues like religion and politics, to be two examples, and the government doesn't have the right to silence them.
That's our First Amendment rights, those that are actually probably in most jeopardy of being tossed out the window in our day. But you're right, that's the culture that we're living in. And I think by going back and looking carefully at the Reformers, we can learn things from their own experiences dealing with the medieval Roman Catholic Church and other political situations also tied in there.
We can learn things that will be helpful for us. And again, of course, that's further establishing and confirming the teaching of Scripture. I meant to say this, if I may have gotten off on a bunny trail, but church history is, I did say this, is meant to help us to better, to clarify our thinking and understanding of what the Bible teaches us.
So that when I cite a favorite theologian, I'm doing so under most circumstances, I don't want to say every circumstance, but under most circumstances, it's a way of saying, I believe this teaching is biblical and this particular theologian, Calvin, Luther, Edwards, Augustine, Warfield, whoever mentioned, that they got it, they crystallized it in a way that's helpful.
And returning to the Reformation is, it will help us in dealing with issues that we're facing in this day as the church.
Now, one thing I didn't want to go on too much farther before I had you clarify something for me, on a couple of occasions in our conversation, you were using the terms sanctification and regeneration as synonyms, which I was wondering about that because obviously regeneration is something that occurs to a lost sinner, totally by the work of the Holy Spirit.
We are passive in that. We are not passive in sanctification.
Correct. Now, Calvin used them synonymously. If you read what we call historical theology, that is theology done in the past, you'll discover that precision, the theology gets more precise the longer we have to wrestle with the scriptures.
And that's true with almost any discipline. The longer the discipline exists, the more precise ideas become. So, but in Calvin's day, the word regeneration and the word sanctification were virtual synonyms.
They become after Calvin, especially at the Synod of Dort in dealing with the Vermonstrants, the disciples of Jacob Arminius, that we get further clarification. In other words, a better understanding of God's word on that.
So regeneration, and you'll actually see this in comments that are often made by theologians from that era. Regeneration is sanctification begun, or sanctification is regeneration furthered. And I would agree with that because we're not talking about gas that's filled into the tank.
That's a Roman Catholic medieval notion of grace. We're talking about the activity of God, right? Whether it be the declaration of our righteousness or if it's dealing with regard to regeneration, the new birth, the first instance of new life, right?
And sanctification would then be the further growth and development of that new life received in regeneration. See, that's a further refinement and development that comes after Calvin. And that doesn't mean that Calvin would disagree with our refinement.
It just means that it happened after, it happened to, as a matter of fact, happened historically after him.
Now, are you talking about semantical differences? I mean, he would have believed, I mean, I'm asking you this, wouldn't he have believed in the classic reformed understanding, even the order of solutus, for instance, that a dead sinner cannot even have faith.
Until he was regenerated? That's why I said the Spirit wrought or Holy Spirit created faith. That's regeneration, or at least that's the human reaction or response to regeneration is faith and repentance, right?
So he doesn't disagree with that, but we just have to recognize that the way, the technical terms that we use and have become comfortable with, which I think are very sound and biblical, but in previous eras of the history of the doctrine develops, our understanding of the teaching of God's Word develops.
We've had 2 ,000 years of church history to wrestle with issues, okay? For instance, just to give another example, the Chalcedonian formula about the two natures of Christ in one person, that's not something that occurred right after the Apostle Paul was beheaded.
That's something that occurred in 300, 400 and something, okay? So it occurs hundreds of years after the closing of the New Testament canon. That's not to say that what it's teaching isn't biblical. It's simply to say that it took the church that long to wrestle with the teaching of God's Word and come to clarity.
Once the church comes to that clarity, it settles that particular issue, and then we move on. You see, so that's what I mean by at the time of Calvin, the term regeneration and sanctification were synonymous words, terms.
He would have affirmed, I think on good grounds to say that, that he would affirm that what we affirm, which is that a dead person can't resurrect himself. A person cannot exercise faith who hasn't first been regenerated.
And also, unlike sanctification, which is an ongoing process, we are not being brought to new life and becoming new creatures every day and every moment of our life.
Correct, that's why we can say, I think with more specificity after Calvin, that regeneration is the first instance or implantation of the new life. Remember, we're not by nature children of grace, children of God.
We are by nature children of wrath.
We're made out of the same lump that the reprobate are made from.
Yes, and it's the work of the Holy Spirit which changes us, right? Which enables us to believe the gospel when it's proclaimed, when the word of God is preached. Again, these are things that are, we've been not in our circles, but in the broader evangelical church has been lost.
That's why there's a parallel in many ways between medieval Roman Catholicism and contemporary American evangelicalism.
And then pick up right there when we come back as we have to go to our midway break now. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.
Don't go away. God willing, we'll be right back after these messages with more of Jeffrey Waddington and restoring biblical passion.
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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnson. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours with an hour to go is Pastor Jeffrey Waddington of the Knox Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Lansdowne, Pennsylvania.
We are discussing restoring Reformation passion. And if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson 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 if you live outside the USA. Please only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter over which you are asking.
And before I return to our discussion, I have some important announcements to make. Coming up on November 17th and the 18th, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is conducting their annual Quakertown Conference on Reform Theology.
This is going to be held at the Grace Bible Fellowship Church in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. On the theme, For Still Our Ancient Foe, which is obviously a reference to Satan in the classic Reformation hymn by Martin Luther, Mighty Fortress.
The speakers include Kent Hughes, Peter Jones, Tom Nettles, Dennis Cahill, and Scott Oliphant. If you'd like to register for this event, go to alliancenet .org, alliancenet .org, click on events, and then click on Quakertown Conference on Reform Theology.
And then after that, coming up in January from the 17th through the 20th, the G3 Conference returns to Atlanta, Georgia, and the G3 stands for Grace, Gospel, and Glory. And this is going to be a conference that I am also intending to have a Iron Trip and Zion Exhibitor's booth there right on the premises of the conference, just like I am, God willing, at the Quakertown Conference on Reform Theology.
I hope that you can come to both of these events. And the G3 Conference, which is going to be on the theme, Knowing God, a Biblical Understanding of Discipleship, has a Spanish-speaking edition only on January 17th.
And then from the 18th through the 20th, the conference will be in English, and the speakers include Stephen Lawson, Vody Baucom, Phil Johnson, Keith Getty, H .B. Charles Jr., Tim Challies, Josh Bice, James White, Tom Askell, Anthony Matheny, Michael Kruger, David Miller, Paul Tripp, Todd Friel, Derek Thomas, Martha Peace, and Justin Peters.
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So we hope to hear from you soon at chrisorenson at gmail .com. And now we are returning to our discussion with Pastor Jeff Waddington of Knox Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, and we are talking about restoring Reformation passion, which was the theme of the Iron Trip and Zion Radio pastor's luncheon today.
And before the break, I believe you are comparing modern-day evangelicalism with medieval Romanism.
Yeah, thank you for reminding me. At my age, you know, those things kind of come and go.
And since I'm older than you, it's even worse for me.
Not to say that they're identical. I mean, certainly the technology is different, but you think, just to give you an example, you had morality plays, right, in the Middle Ages. You know, often they would be about the soul going to hell and facing eternal punishment and so on.
And they were done theatrically. They were not meant, they weren't done to remind or warn people that if they didn't come to faith in Christ, this is the future that awaited them. It was almost just a purely entertainment spectacle, right?
And things like that happen now in the evangelical church. You think about the sermon being replaced by the play. You think of male ballerinas performing on the stage of a certain church in New York City, which shall not be named during the offertory.
The video has been floating around on the internet.
Was floating a pun?
Not intentional, but I like it. So, I mean, we laugh, but we laugh because otherwise we'd cry. That kind of thing is that we might call it decadence. That's the kind of thing that was an issue in the Roman Catholic Church.
And as I already noted, there were many voices calling for moral reform. Erasmus, the Dutch scholar, is an example of someone who wrote on the various moral problem, moral failings of the papacy and the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church.
But he was not necessarily concerned with recovering the glorious nature of the gospel in terms of justification. Now, we know that in God's providence, his translation of the New Testament from the Latin into the Greek was a catalyst.
It was a catalyst for Luther to rediscover Paul's teaching. What is there in the Bible? But see, isn't that interesting that you can have the Bible? Well, that's another issue with regard to the time of the Reformation.
But theoretically, you could have the Bible, but the blinders could be on, almost in the way that Paul talked about Israel having a veil over their eyes when it came to the proper understanding of the New Testament.
That's lifted by God's grace, in Paul's case, for himself. And then, in many instances, through his own ministry as an apostle, people, even his own countrymen, came to faith in Christ, not just Gentiles.
But this decadence that we see in the Roman Catholic Church, the downplaying of the preaching of the Word, the reading and the preaching of the Word, and replacing it with stations of the cross. You're familiar with the seven stations of the cross?
I think it's seven, it could be more. That typically a Roman Catholic Church will have those pictured on the walls in a Roman Catholic chapel. Those were there because it was thought that the illiterate people needed to have the teaching of the Bible illustrated for them, and instead of teaching them to read the Bible, they used pictures in the place of the Word.
And we've seen that again, haven't we? In the general culture at large, there is the elevation of the image over the Word, or the elevation of feeling over against the use of reason. Now, I, being a student of Jonathan Edwards, I'm all in favor of holy affections.
You're a student of Jonathan Edwards? You're older than I thought.
That was good! You're coming back up to life there, brother! Whoa! I mean, I read his stuff, okay? I'm not old enough to have actually sat under his teaching ministry, as short as it was during Princeton.
No, I'm not that old. That would make me 300 and some odd years old. No, I'm not that old. I'll be 53 next month. So, that's what I mean when I say the modern-day church in many ways parallels what was happening in Roman Catholicism.
You have the loss of the Scriptures as the centerpiece of worship, of understanding the Christian life, of understanding salvation. What does it mean to be a Christian? How do Christians live in the world and in the church with each other?
All of these things. There were saints in the Medieval Roman Catholic Church, as I mentioned, Stauppitz, Luther's father confessor. And there were other instances of similar situations. And when Bill Shishko argues for or gives a plea for recovering the Reformation passion, what he's talking about is recovering biblical passion.
It's not as if the Reformation passion, whether it be reading the lives or history of the saints, or whether it's in war stories, things like that, as he talked about. It's basically a return to the Scriptures.
The expression in the era of the Renaissance was ad fontes, which means back to the sources. And that was an expression that epitomized the thinking of the Renaissance in all areas. And it understandably affected the study of the Bible.
He wanted to get back to the Hebrew and the Greek. Those are the languages that the Bible were given in, and Aramaic, right? And so there were great strides that were made during the era of the Reformation to learn the languages.
There were grammars, there were lexicons or dictionaries that were produced at this time. Great strides, improvements in our understanding of the original languages of God's Word. The passion, there's a sense in which you can't recreate a historical moment in the ultimate sense, nor would God want us to do that.
By that, I mean trying to repeat every aspect or element of the Reformation. Calvin wore that really neat little cap. I want to wear one of those. That's as bad as Jesus wore a toga and sandals, so that's what I want to wear.
That's what it means to be like Jesus. No, that's really not what it means when the Bible talks about being conformed to the likeness of Christ. It means to have your character molded to the likeness of Christ.
So the Reformation is a return to the Bible as the ultimate, you know, not the only authority, but the ultimate infallible, inerrant authority. We still like to learn from what Christians have talked about in the history of the Church.
Including, you know, the Old Testament Church. So we love to learn from Church history. We love to learn from theology written hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago. But the touchstone to which all of that is brought is the Scriptures.
Reverend Schisco talked about the five solas of the Reformation, right? Sola Fidei, Sola Gratia, Soli Deo Gloria, Solus Christus, and what am I missing?
Well, there's Sola Fidei, Sola Gratia, Sola Scriptura.
That's it, Sola Scriptura. Thank you, I knew it would come to me. Those five, and he talked about those. Those expressions, by the way, were not actually circulating at the time of the Reformation. Those are summaries of the issues that were at the heart of the Reformation.
But the expression, the Latin expressions themselves were not circulating at the time.
Well, at least not all together in one unit.
Right. That comes about, but it's still a faithful way to talk about the issues that were being hammered out at the time of the Reformation. So, Reverend Schisco's calling us back to, specifically, the issue was what he talked about, long suffering, and there were two aspects to long suffering.
The Greek word is hupomone, hupopone, hupomone, endurance, right? There was...
Was it patient endurance?
Patient endurance and expectant endurance. Those were the two aspects that he explained. Those were two sides of the one coin, how the Christian life is the life of endurance. And the Protestant Reformers understood that quite well.
If you learn anything about, for instance, Calvin, all the bodily ailments that he had, quite a few, you know, we would be horrified, I think, to think that we had to function in the world with all the various problems he had.
I think somebody's told... He had a problem with hemorrhoids. Someone told him to ride a horse. Oh, yeah.
As a cure?
As a cure. Yes. I don't know whether that's medically sound advice, right?
Maybe they just wanted to put him through further torment.
That could very well be. I would hope he'd have the brains to catch to note that. And Luther's the same way, and many of the other Reformers. Again, we don't like to read about them because we think they're perfect.
They're not. In fact, the better books you read on them, the more you'll understand their warts and all. The Scriptures is the same way, right? The Scriptures, the only person who is sinless is the Lord Jesus Christ.
Everyone else are dealt with in a very realistic way in the Bible.
Right.
One of the heroes of the faith that I find most fascinating, and it is a tragedy that this happened to him, but I cannot help but think that it makes his story more relatable to all of us. In that Thomas Cramner, who developed the 39 Articles of Religion that we mentioned earlier, when Rome once again seized power in the British throne after the death of King Henry VIII, Cramner, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury and a thoroughgoing Calvinist, had to recant his Reformed faith, or he was facing death.
And he recanted his faith. And then later, his conscience got the better of him, and he could no longer live with himself, having denied what he knew to be true. So he recanted his recantation.
And then when he was being put to death by being burned alive, he requested that his hand that signed his recantation of the Reformed faith be burned first.
Yes, I've read of it. See, that's the kind of thing that...
Now, when I say that we can relate to it, I'm not saying that I could relate to the bravery of that.
Part.
But you would pray that if necessary, you don't want to do what Peter did, which is say, Lord, I'll go with you and follow you wherever you want, and even if it means my death, what we do is we pray, Lord, give me the strength to do that, should that be what you call me to.
Right. And the relatable part is him denying what he knew to be true because of cowardice.
Yes.
And of course, I mean, cowardice of being burned alive. I mean, it is not something that trivial, just being made fun of or something. It's the threat of a gruesome, torturous death.
Which is what, you know, as you know, that was during the reign of Bloody Mary, who was the Roman Catholic daughter of Henry VIII. Edwards was in the middle. He only lasted about six years. But then Mary came to the throne.
She only lasted, thankfully, for five. And then Elizabeth came. That's a less clear story.
A less clear story about her religion?
Yeah, the...
She tried to accommodate both sides.
The equality of the Reformation. That's where you get the rise of Puritanism, is in the reign.
In a rejection or a dissatisfaction with her brand of Protestants.
Correct. We might call it a half-hearted Reformation. Well, also the act of uniformity and the act of supremacy, where the monarch was the head of the church. Uniformity. They all had to follow the same liturgy, same prayer book, that kind of thing.
Which was anathema. Well, Puritans were divided on this. But anyways, the study of church history brings these people to life, so that you're not just learning about names and dates. You're learning about flesh and blood people who, on occasion, failed.
But the good news with Cranmer, of course, is that he came to his senses. And then, of course, faced the death penalty anyway. But at least he went out, reconciled with the Lord, and he had a clear conscience.
Which is important. It's not a small thing.
Right. And these references that Pastor Shishker was using today, in regard to militaristic language, if you could comment on that.
Yeah, we talked about the war stories. Simply the idea that we need to be reminded of victories. In other words, we need to be encouraged in the Christian life by one another. And that would include older saints actually fellowshipping with younger saints.
Passing along the wisdom that, by God's grace, you've learned from life. Being a Christian, from your walk with the Lord, your study of Scripture, the preaching that you've heard, the books you've read.
These things you can pass on to your children and also to other younger Christians. That's what he meant by war story. He's using the analogy of a veteran of, say, World War II, not talking about all the carnage, but, say, talking about the liberation of France under Nazi control or something of that.
That's a positive story. That is a clear victory. The Nazis were kicked out of France where they had been for several years during World War II. That kind of a D-Day. We wouldn't talk about the storming of the Normandy beach, but we might talk about the war rolling through the countryside of France and clearing it of the Axis power.
We're going to our final break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com. And please give us your first name, city, and state and country of residence if you live outside the USA, and please only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter.
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Well, we are in our final 20 minutes or so of our 25 minutes or so of our interview with Jeffrey C. Waddington, the pastor of Knox Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, and a board member of the Reformed Forum.
And we are basically just talking about and expanding upon Pastor Bill Shishko's excellent message today on restoring Reformation passion, which was his keynote address at the Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio pastor's luncheon today at the Carlisle Fire and Rescue Banquet Hall in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
And it was such a joy and a blessing to be there and such a great turnout and such an enthusiastic crowd that was not just there because they wanted to eat for free or they wanted to get free books, but they hung around and they fellowshiped and they talked to Bill Shishko at great length.
Many of them were waiting in line to talk.
They were. I was encouraged just by watching, sitting back and watching how they were all interacting with one another.
They're a very diverse group, all evangelical, but still quite a diverse group. We had members of the Church of God, Finley, Ohio denomination there, which are for the most part, with some exception, they're very much like Wesleyan Baptists, I guess.
I've even heard some pastors agree with that kind of a description of them. And we had the Presbyterians of the Orthodox Presbyterian and the PCA and we had, I believe we had a Covenanter Presbyterian, if I'm not mistaken.
And we had all kinds of Baptists there. And we had the major in the local Salvation Army that it turns out you knew.
For many years.
John and I have known each other and my wife. And they were the, John was the pastor for my mom and dad in retirement. Pastor to retired pastor.
Because you are from a Salvation Army.
That's my background and my family. And it was nice to be able to, because I didn't know who it was. And then I remembered that he had been pastoring here in Carlisle. So that was a nice little treat of a reunion to get to talk briefly with him.
That brethren who drove out from as far as Kentucky and Virginia and Long Island, New York and Georgia.
And New Jersey and all over the place.
Maryland.
Yeah. That's ought to be encouraging, Chris. Because you see that it's both local pastors and pastors from a distance. So it's a regional, really is a northeast, actually in south, southern conference.
Isn't that encouraging?
Yeah, it certainly is. And what I'd like you to do is, for at least a considerable portion of this time that we have left, what kind of practical counsel do you have for especially pastors who, they find it hard to stir up these feelings of excitement and enthusiasm and passion that they had over these truths.
They may be fearing that they've lost their first love, perhaps. They are in a rut. They are really not passionate or excited about their faith. And it may be just a temporary season that they are going through, a temporary season of depression or despondency or rethinking if they're in the right field, if they really ever did have a calling from God.
What kind of things can you?
Well, first of all, I think that's a rather common experience for a pastor. Part of that being that unless you as a pastor cultivate friendships and accountability where people who know you well, you can go to them and deal with the frustrations that come with being a pastor, being a father, a husband, those kinds of things.
Unless you cultivate that, you're likely not to have it. So that I would say one of the first things you need to do is to make sure that you are cultivating friendships that involve accountability in the sense of the way you would normally be accountable to friends who know you well.
I don't mean people who are nosy, because I think you can go overboard that way. But first of all, this is not something that you can produce of yourself. This is only something that God can renew within you.
Now, God does that through means, right? We know that already, that the Holy Spirit works with the Word. He works with the sacraments, et cetera, the means of grace, right?
Prayer.
These things are, we know, those of us who are especially in the Reformed Baptist or Presbyterian or Reformed tradition, we understand that. That God uses, He has the end, that is the goal that He's aiming at, if I can use human language about God.
But He also ordains the end, that is the goal or the result. He also ordains the means. And really what we've been talking about in this episode of Iron Sharpens Iron are some of the means that God has used to rekindle biblical reformational passion for ministry.
Because whether you're reading about a Reformer or someone who was a lay person in the church, for instance, you might be reading about the Covenanters in Scotland who resisted the imposition of the political prelacy, what we call those who were made bishops who had political power.
Men and women went to their deaths for this, to resist this, the imposition on the church. They believed, Covenanters, that Christ was the head of the church. So therefore there were no, there was no Pope who was the vicar, which means representative, the representative of Christ.
We don't have that. And the king is not the king of the church. King Jesus is the king of the church. And there were women, for instance, who were put to death. They would be somehow chained, fastened to poles in riverbeds so that when the water would come in, you know, the tide, they would drown.
This was a public form of execution. It's as bad as torturing someone, right? Burning them at the stake, so they'd be drowning at the stake. We have stories like that. So it's not just men who are ministers.
It's also men and women, boys and girls who grasped or were grasped by the grace of God and it influenced the whole of their lives. This is from, this helps, this is not the Word of God, but it is a means that God uses to drive home to our hearts and minds the teaching of God's Word.
These folk who gave their life at various stages of church corruption, if you will, they had captured the vision of the passion of the Christian life. So the answer to the question is only God can restore the passion, the first love, but He does it through, He usually does it through means.
In other words, reading God's Word and then reading good books, good articles, good website, blog posts, it is a matter of our sanctification. We talked about progressive sanctification earlier. The Christian life cannot be lived in total absence of the study of God's Word and the study of good books.
By good books, I mean books of theology or doctrine, books about the history of the church, biographies, some also fictional literature like the Chronicles of Narnia or the Lord of the Rings, those kinds of things, and other Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan.
Those kinds of things actually build up the Christian to help him or her develop a Christian mind. Years ago, from the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, there was a big push to develop a Christian mind. There was an author by the name of Harry Blamires, who was a British author, who talked about the problem with the Christian mind that there isn't one.
Biblically speaking, what does Paul say? Paul says we are to take every thought captive to Christ, and that's what I'm talking about. Reading, you can't take every thought captive to Christ if you're opposed to thinking.
You can't take every thought captive if none of what you think about moves you emotionally. See, I read church history, and I get excited in the sense of, as I said earlier, if God could do it then, maybe He can do it again, and I pray that maybe He can do it through me.
I don't assume He'll do it through me, but I pray, Lord, if it be Your will, do it through.
Me.
Of course, the Lord is the one that has to fan the flame. He's the one that has to reignite our passion, our commitment. By using the word passion, we don't want to make it sound like there's no work that the Christian does in the sense of effort.
There is effort, but it's enabled by the Holy Spirit.
Right, and it's not meritorious.
Right, when I talk about effort, what I simply mean is, work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it is the will of God who is at work in you to work out—my brain is shot—as you know, the Philippians chapter 3, right?
Work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who is at work in you to will and to do His good pleasure.
Right, yeah, my brain is shot too, as you know, since I literally had zero sleep for.
The last—. That's not good, brother.
—going on 48 hours.
So you're one of the walking dead, apparently. So I mean, practically, it really does—it is a matter of, there are different things you can do. Read good books, go to—listen to good sermons, and we have no excuse with the internet.
You could listen to Sinclair Ferguson, R .C. Sproul. You could listen to Liam Gallagher at 10th Pres. You can listen to, I'm sure, Tom Chantry, Walter Chantry, all of these great preachers are on the web.
Martin Lloyd-Jones, you can listen to all the sermons that you used to have to order by mail on cassette tapes. They're all available on the web now. Just Google David Martin Lloyd-Jones, and you'll eventually find the website where you can download or just stream sermon audio.
Okay, so there's no excuse. And these, by the way, are not substitutes for attending the local church. They're an additional means of building up your faith. But, you know, it's a matter of making the time.
And it may take some time. As you alluded to this, that the Lord in His providence sometimes allows us to go through the seasons of dryness. Of the Westminster Confession and the London Baptist Confession talk about what the Lord does in His providence and allowing His children to go through, to be tried in its chapter on sanctification, right?
It talks about what the Lord will do to make us aware of our remaining sinfulness and so forth. So some of these are providential, or they all are providential. But if you keep, you say, Lord, you'd be like the man whose son was possessed by a demon who threw himself into the water, into the fire.
When Jesus and Peter, James, and John come down from the Mount of Transfiguration, right? The father goes to Jesus and says, I asked your disciples to help my son, but they couldn't do anything. I believe, help thou my unbelief.
Say to the Lord, Lord, I want to be passionate about the gospel. I want to be, but I'm not. He already knows that. You're not learning something new. He knows that. And you ask Him to help you. See, if we pray according to His will, He hears us and will answer us.
That's what the Apostle John says in 1 John. So that's very, I think that's very practical. Now, it may not be practical or pragmatic in the American sense, but it is very practical in the biblical and Christian sense, and in the Reformational sense, that we pray according to God's will, and we know that He will hear us and answer the prayer.
In His time, you know, His time is not the same as our time. I was just preaching on this last Sunday, so it's fresh in my mind. In terms of praying, how quickly God answers our prayers. There was the parable of the unfortunate widow and the unjust judge, and how Jesus says, God is, if this unjust judge gives this woman what the justice she's due, how much more will God, who is not the unjust judge, will He speedily answer your prayers?
We have a listener in Slovenia, Joe, who says, Dear Brother Chris, as was mentioned earlier, the state of theological error in the modern evangelicalism, the state of theological error in the modern American evangelicalism is as bad or worse than the condition present in the Roman Catholic Church that sparked the Reformation.
It seems to me that the vast majority in evangelicalism are oblivious of the truth. Do not recognize that anything is amiss. I can understand this on the part of your average church member in the pew, but what baffles me are pastors, elders, and seminary professors and denominational leaders who should know better.
Please explain if you can, why we don't hear a resounding call from a wide array of leaders in evangelicalism for a repeat of the Reformation in our day. For instance, where are the voices of theologians and denominational leaders calling out Dr. Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas for hosting Sean Hannity, a Roman Catholic, and promoting Roman Catholic Church members as brothers in Christ?
Please help us understand what it is we need to be seeing from church leaders to see the Reformation to take hold in our day.
Wow, that's a whole show.
Yeah, I'm not familiar with the Sean Hannity thing.
I'm familiar with the outlines of it. Robert Jeffress is the one who supported Donald Trump and made it a part of the worship.
Yeah, I know who he is.
He had Sean Hannity in his worship service, interviewed him. Oh, so it wasn't like it was a Friday night or a weeknight program. It was the Sunday worship, as far as I understand. The answer to the larger question is sin.
Why don't we see, you know how Satan works? He sows tares among the wheat, right? That's what our Lord told us. And as you might expect, and this is something else that Bill said today, is that Satan is busy at work.
If you're faithful, and he was speaking to pastors, if you're faithful in the preaching of God's Word and not your own sentiments, eventually the Word of God will have its effect. But Satan is also at work.
He doesn't want to see the Word of God proclaimed. And so we need to remember that there is spiritual warfare of a real sort. We ought not to deny the existence of spiritual warfare because of, you know, what I would call the Frank Peretti-ization of spiritual warfare.
In other words, there is a real form of it that Christians are involved with. However, but the other thing I wanted to say, that was the, you know, to explain the ultimate foundation is sin and the work of Satan in the church.
Related to that, you've also got the immediately after the Reformation, you have the rise of Arminianism in the Netherlands, right? And you have, which leads to the Synod of Dort in 1618, 1619, an international church gathering.
It wasn't just Dutch theologians. There were the English and etc. In German and I think French theologians were present for that Synod. So it was an international gathering of the church to deal with the issue of the remonstrance, those who were the disciples of Arminius.
Our acronym TULIP comes out of that. It's actually, TULIP is the response to the five points of the remonstrance. So what you, all of that to say that evangelicalism, I guess, sadly has never really been a homogenous movement.
It's been a mix of various Christian groups of varying orthodoxy, to put it bluntly. Yes, you know, obviously, we, you know, Chris and I, I'm Presbyterian, he's the Reformed Baptist, so we have some disagreements.
But we see each other, and I think rightly so, as orthodox. However, the broader evangelical church is what we call Big Tent. You've heard that language, I think, with regard to political parties, but it's also been suggested as a way of understanding the evangelical movement, that there are elements within the broader evangelical church which are not sound.
When open theism becomes an acceptable option for evangelicals, the word evangelical no longer has meaning. I'm not the first to say this. David Wells has produced five books dealing with this whole problem, you know, beginning with Whatever Happened to Truth.
Was it No Place for Truth?
Thank you. No Place for Truth. It might have been a subtitle, Whatever Happened to the Evangelical Church, or something like that. And then the last book was Courage to Be... No, The Whirlwind? Anyways, he finally came out with book number six, which was more of his positive assessment of how to deal with all the problems he chronicled in that series of five books that concluded with Courage to Be Protestant.
It was over, what, a 20-year period that he wrote those books? And then the sixth book, which you wouldn't necessarily connect with the others, it's got a bright red cover, and Whirlwind is in the title, but I can't remember the full...
Might have been God of the Whirlwind, but whatever. That was his positive program for addressing all the problems he saw, sees in the broader evangelical community. So there is a downplaying of doctrine.
There is an over or exaggerated emphasis upon experience, not in the biblical sense. I believe in the fact that if you're a Christian, you need to experience regeneration. You need to experience the Declaration of Justification.
You need to experience sanctification. That's not... But they make experience a standard, a foundation. In other words, we talk about reason, and at the time of the Enlightenment, reason became more authoritative than Scripture, right?
Well, in the broader evangelical community, experience and mysticism are given equal standing or sometimes even higher standing than Scripture. And all of that to say that evangelicalism has never been monolithic.
It's a patchwork quilt. It's a mosaic.
And even the Reformers were not monolithically.
That's correct. If you read the Reformers in detail, there are differences between them, and some of that is a matter of maturing. In other words, you know, Calvin is actually a second-generation Reformer.
Luther's a first-generation Reformer. I expect that a second-generation Reformer might have made some strides toward maturity that the first generation didn't make, simply by virtue of the fact that a second-generation Reformer builds on the insights of the first generation.
And that's exactly why we who are Reform Baptists consider ourselves third-generation. Oh, I knew where that was going!
And of course, not every difference is the result of maturing. Sometimes it's the result of going backward. Now, that's true, whether it applies to our differences or not, right? It's not the case that everything is becoming better and better in every way, every day.
So, really, at the end of the day, the problem with—and the questioner asked such a significant question, I wasn't joking when I said that could be an episode in itself, answering that question, maybe even several, because that gets to the heart of what we're talking about.
Why are we concerned with recovering Reformation culture?
Passion.
Well, because we believe that the Reformation was the rediscovery, not the invention, but the rediscovery of biblical truth that had been covered over a thousand years or more, right? And so far, Luther didn't invent the doctrine of justification.
He rediscovered what was in the Bible itself already.
Amen. And I want, before we go off the air, to talk a little bit about how you let our listeners know the exciting news about your work with Westminster Theological Seminar.
Oh, yes. I'll be teaching a class this spring, Lord willing, on the biblical and systematic theology of Johns and Edwards. So I'm doing what we would call adjunct professor work. So I'm excited about that.
Well, we have to have you back to talk about that.
Oh, I'd be happy to.
And I want to make sure also that our listeners have all of your contact information before we run out of time. The Knox Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Lansdowne, Pennsylvania's website is knox-presbyterian .org, knox-presbyterian .org.
And geographically, tell us a little bit about Lansdowne.
Sure.
Lansdowne is, if you think of Philadelphia as like a diamond, we're near the airport. If you know anything about the geographical area around Philadelphia, the airport is to the southwest of downtown city, what we call the center city, Philadelphia.
And so we're on the, if you were to think of Philadelphia as a diamond, we're at the bottom, we're somewhere near the bottom point to the left or to the west. So we're in the western suburbs. We're off what's called the Blue Route, which is Route 476, south of the 276 -476 interchange.
So we're not that far from Route 95, where 476 comes into Chester, Pennsylvania at 95. So that's the area. We're near Upper Darby, which is the most cosmopolitan community, either in Pennsylvania or in the whole nation.
There are 70 plus nationalities represented in that city.
Wow.
Well, an opportunity for the gospel for sure.
Absolutely.
Well, any other contact information you care to give?
Well, there's, you can get me through waddington .one at opc .org.
W-A-D-D-I-N-G-T-O-N dot one. Dot one.
At opc .org.
And it's that numeral one.
Yeah, it's the number one.
Well, I thank you so much for being in the program today. I look forward to you returning tomorrow when we continue our discussion on Roman Catholic baptism and the validity of it.
Very good. I'm looking forward to that.
I want to thank everybody who listened today, especially Joe in Slovenia, for taking the time to write in. And I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.