May 2, 2024 Show with Dr. George Grant on “An Experiment in Liberty: America’s Path to Independence”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 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 with whom we converse 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 two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your 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 second day of May 2024.

Before I introduce our returning guest for the day and our topic, I have a praise report and a request for further prayer. This is in regard to the little precious granddaughter of my very dear friend for many years, Dr. Joseph C. Moorcraft III, the pastor of Heritage Presbyterian Church in Cumming, Georgia.

Just very recently, a couple of weeks ago, the Lord brought into the world Joe and Becky's granddaughter, Rebecca Hope. And Rebecca Hope, the doctors knew this beforehand, has a life-threatening heart condition.

The baby was born at just over three pounds, and although has been in the hospital for a couple of weeks, apparently has not yet gained any weight, the baby has already outlived the doctor's expectations.

But the praise report is that the baby came home yesterday. So the baby is now in the home of the daughter and son-in-law of my friend Pastor Joe and Becky Moorcraft. So please continue to keep Rebecca Hope in your prayers, astonish the doctors further and all those that know the Moorcrafts by this child being rescued from this condition and growing up to be a strong Christian woman.

But in any event, whatever the Lord's will be in this circumstance, we ask of you to enable the Moorcrafts to give praise, honor, and glory to Christ, no matter what the providence that unveils in the upcoming days, weeks, and months.

And I will keep you updated as often as I get updates from the Moorcrafts. Well, today I'm very excited to have a returning guest. He's one of my favorite guests to interview, and I know, according to the responses of some of my listeners, knowing that he was going to be on today, he's a favorite guest of a considerable portion of my audience.

His name is Dr. George Grant, the author of numerous books, a leading pioneer in the classical Christian education movement, and pastor of Parish Presbyterian Church in Franklin, Tennessee, which is a congregation in the Presbyterian Church in America denomination.

Today we're going to be addressing his book, An Experiment in Liberty, America's Path to Independence. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Dr. George Grant.

It's my great delight, Chris. Good to talk with you again.

And I must say, I was richly blessed recently watching a video of an interview you conducted with our mutual friend, Rosaria Butterfield. What a blessing that was.

Oh, people of the world, and what a woman of courage and conviction and absolutely brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. That was a highlight of last summer, and I'm so glad you got a chance to see that interview.

Yeah, I try to watch as many of the videos or listen to as many of the messages she delivers at various places. And I had the honor of having breakfast in their home, Kent Butterfield and Rosaria's home, the morning before I attended worship services at their Reformed Presbyterian congregation in North Carolina.

So it was a blessing to be fellowshipping and sharing a meal with them in their own house.

Yeah, it's genuinely true in the Butterfield household that the gospel comes with a house key. So I'm glad you had that wonderful chance to be with them.

Amen.

What a delightful family.

Amen. Well, I'd like you to introduce to our audience, for the sake of those who have not yet become familiar with you—that would probably be a tiny percentage of my audience—but tell them about Parish Presbyterian Church in Franklin, Tennessee.

Parish is a congregation of the PCA, as you mentioned, the Presbyterian Church in America. We're evangelical and Reformed, and we planted the first iteration of Parish in 2006. We brought in one of my former students to be our next church planter.

And in 2011, we did kind of a reverse church plant, where we left the vast majority of the congregation with him, and that became a new congregation, Cornerstone Presbyterian Church. And we moved about 12, 15 miles to the east and planted a new congregation there, but that kept the old name.

And we are in the process of getting ready to do our third church plant. We're building a building at long last. The building we've been in has been sorely outmoded. It's more than 120 years old, and we have completely outgrown it.

We have to have three consecutive Sunday morning worship services, and even those are spilling out the door. So, the Lord has been very gracious to us, very kind, and we're just delighted.

Amen. And if anybody is traveling through Franklin, Tennessee—and by the way, I love Franklin, Tennessee. I was there once, and I look forward to heading back that way.

Yeah, we need to have you back. It's a great place to visit. Fabulous outdoors, beautiful hills, and of course, great southern hospitality, southern food, southern gospel music, and country music. It's just a great place to live.

Amen. Well, if anybody's traveling through there, or if you already live there, or have family, friends, and loved ones who live in or near Franklin, Tennessee, the website for Parish Presbyterian Church is parishpres .org.

Now if you could tell us about Franklin Classical School and the King's Meadow Study Center.

Well, Franklin Classical School was founded 32 years ago, largely out of the concern of a number of us here who had been homeschooling, who were desirous of taking our junior high and high school age students a little further than some of us as moms and dads could take our kids.

We developed a pretty thoroughgoing classical model based on the things that we had learned from C .S. Lewis, J .R. Tolkien, and Dorothy Sayers. Much later, about three years later, we became aware that there were others who were pioneering that same sort of vision for classical education and got connected with them, and I now serve as one of the two ex officio board members of the National Association for the Classical Schools, ACCS.

And we've been just really blessed to see a host of young Christian leaders emerge as they go back to those foundational disciplines that gave rise to the great flowering of Western civilization, reading great books and wrestling with the big ideas, learning basic principles of etymology with Greek and Latin and Hebrew and understanding the whole of history and science and literature through the lens of a biblical worldview.

And what we have found is that we're not only raising up a lot of really well-equipped young men and women, but it's reshaping our families. Moms and dads, little ones are all learning to think in a new way and to relish the beauty, goodness, and truth that is our inheritance in Western civilization.

So it's been really rich. King's Meadow is really the umbrella organization for all of our various ministries. We do some publishing. We have created curriculum for first our school and now a host of schools all around the world.

We have a missions arm that does missionary work in the Middle East, planting classical Christian schools in places like Iraq and Indonesia. We have 27 schools in Indonesia. So we've got all of these different sort of outreaches, and all of those are sort of under the hub or the protective accountability of King's Meadow.

Great. Well, if anybody wants more details on the Franklin Classical School, and that would be even if you just want to find out about classical Christian education, you can go to their website, and that is franklinclassical .org.

I was just looking at it. Oh, there it is, dot com, franklinclassical .com.

Dot com.

And that's F-R-A-N-K-L-I-N, franklinclassical .com. And if you want more details on the King's Meadow Study Center, go to kingsmeadow .com, kingsmeadow .com.

Or georgegrant .net. Georgegrant .net is probably the best and quickest way to King's Meadow stuff.

Oh, great, georgegrant .net. And, well, I'd like to give our listeners our e-mail address right away in the event that they have questions for you regarding our topic of the day, which is your book, An Experiment in Liberty, America's Path to Independence.

Our e-mail address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name, at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA.

Why George Grant Wrote An Experiment in Liberty

Well, first of all, let me start off with a question as to what compelled you to write this specific book, because, as you know, we could fill an entire library with books about the foundation of America, about the heroes that we consider, the great patriots that not only risked their lives but gave their lives for independence of this nation that we sadly take for granted far too often, and also the nation whose liberties are at stake at this moment in the 21st century.

We, who are conservative Bible-believing Christians, wonder how long is this great experiment going to exist. But what was it that said, that planted the idea in your mind, you know, I've got to add something of my own to this vast selection that we already have at our fingertips?

Well, the book actually began as a series of lectures that I gave at Franklin Classical School and at Bannockburn College, another one of our ministries that has been since renamed New College Franklin.

But I gave a series of lectures, and back in those days, cassette tapes were made of the lectures, and they wound up, you know, circulating among a number of folks. And both as I taught at Bannockburn and at Franklin Classical, and then later as the tapes started to circulate, people said over and over and over again, I have never heard any of this before.

And sometimes someone will say, I was a history major, or I've got a master's degree in American political theory, and half of this I've never heard before. So I kept getting those requests. So we kind of sat down and hammered out a little bit of an outline.

And Gary DeMar at American Vision encouraged me to turn it into a book. And I was hesitant at first, just exactly because of what you just said, Chris. We, you know, I have bookshelves full of books on American history, but there is no doubt that in our day and time, a lot of our story is being obscured by modern scholarship and new diversity standards and reactions and so forth, 1619 projects.

So I finally relented, and we created a small version of the book, and it got just a huge reaction. And so we revised it, a second edition went out, a little bit larger, a little bit more expanded. And then Canon Press contacted me and said that they would like to have a new edition.

Of it.

And so we revised it yet again and then launched it. And that's the book that we've got now. And, you know, some of the material in it is fairly familiar to Christians who have studied providential history.

But parts of it, even for many Christians who have a Christian perspective of the American founding era, are unaware of huge swaths of the story. For instance, most people are unaware that George Washington was the 16th, not the first, president of the United States.

The United States has actually had three compacts or constitutions, two of them readily recognizable, our current constitution and its immediate predecessor, the Articles of Confederation. And then prior to that, there was a compact that bound together Continental Congress prior to the Declaration of Independence between 1774 and 1776.

But the details of that and the fact that we had presidents starting with Peyton Randolph and then going through men like Elias Boudinot and John Hansen and John Jay and Richard Henry This is just a blank for most Christians, for most Americans.

And yet it's on those foundations that the great experiment in liberty was originally built. So I felt like it was needful for us to remember some of these things, to understand how we got to where we are so that we can either recover some of the things that we have lost or begin to rebuild and reform the American experiment in liberty, lest we lose it all.

The Founders, Christianity, and Christian Worldview

Yes. And there has been a view of the founding fathers that has not only been perpetuated by liberals and leftists, but even there is disagreement amongst those within our conservative and even reformed theological camp as to whether the founding fathers were deists or whether they could be rightly viewed as Christians.

And, of course, there would be extremes on both sides. I've seen evangelical Christians try to portray Thomas Jefferson as some kind of an evangelical. And I am fully aware that he is, in comparison to today's leftists, he was an independent fundamentalist Baptist.

But for his day, I don't believe, from my understanding of Jefferson, he would be considered an evangelical Christian. But tell us about your understanding of the theological makeup of those that we revere as our founding fathers.

Well, the vast majority of the founding fathers, if you count the signers of the Declaration or the signers of the Constitution, the vast majority of them were churchgoing, practicing believers, many of them engaged in their local congregations, many of them holding very orthodox views.

There were some, and a number of the prominent founding fathers, who held what today we would consider sort of evangelical progressive views. And I'm convinced, Chris, that if we look far down in the future, our great-grandchildren are going to look back on our day and wonder if many of us were actually practicing orthodox Christians, given the aberrant views that abound in the evangelical world today, and even in the Reformed world.

So I certainly would not be one to try and make the argument that every one of the founding fathers were orthodox, Bible-believing, redeemed Christians. However, all of them lived in a world shaped by a biblical worldview.

So if their doctrine of the Trinity was askew, they were still operating with a Trinitarian perspective. If their understanding of personal redemption was lacking, they nevertheless lived in a world where the ideas of personal redemption in Christ were the dominant cultural ideas of the day, and it shaped their thinking, it shaped the way they approached their work, and it shaped the documents that they created.

You can't read things like the Northwest Ordinance, the Constitution of the United States, and the Declaration of Independence without seeing the fingerprints of a Christian legacy at every turn. The Declaration of Independence, for instance, is modeled on the minor prophets and their covenant lawsuit sequences against tyrants and oppressors.

The structure of the Declaration of Independence, even the language of the Declaration of Independence, is taken directly from the minor prophets. In the Constitution, we have this extraordinary biblical vision of the separation of powers and of this jurisdictional separation between branches of government that's exceedingly covenantal and is drawn from a biblical perspective.

So were all of the Founders redeemed? Well, probably not, but we don't know. Were all of the Founding Fathers biblically orthodox? The vast majority of them were, but some of them weren't, but that does not negate the fact that they were operating out of a Christian worldview perspective.

Were they perfect in that? Absolutely not. Can we quibble about some of the perspectives in the constitutional debates? Of course. But the fact remains, they were seeking to build a city on a hill. They were seeking to walk in the richness of Christendom's legacy.

And that was what made the great American experiment in liberty so great.

Amen. And we are going to our first commercial break right now. And we have some listeners waiting to have their questions asked and answered. But if you'd like to join them and get online, our email address, again, is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

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So please go to royaldiadem .com today and mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Before I go to any of our listener questions, I wanted to ask you about some of the key figures from history that you contribute in your book to America's path to independence.

Cotton Mather and the Early Colonial Faith

The first I'll bring up is somebody who has been sadly vilified by historical revisionists, and that's Cotton Mather. What was so important about Cotton Mather's contribution to the foundation of America?

Well, Cotton Mather was one of the men that George Washington called the father of the founding fathers. He was a pastor, an intellectual. He wrote more than 400 books on a wide range of subjects. His great classic entitled Magnalia Christi Americana traced the story of the gospel in the early days of colonial settlements and came with this warning that prosperity might well be the undoing of the extraordinary experiment in faith and liberty that America represented.

He has been vilified because of the Salem witch trials, despite the fact that he lived in Boston, not in Salem, despite the fact that he actually condemned the proceedings of the trials because of irregularities in procedure, and despite the fact that afterwards he called for repentance on the part of those who had participated and advocated.

But facts rarely get in the way of ideologues, and he has been vilified nevertheless. He was just one of the most remarkable intellects that America has ever produced and ought to be upheld as one of the bright lights of that early founding period.

In fact, I'd like to highly recommend an interview I conducted on January 23rd of 2024 with Paul Jaley on the theme, A Critique of Bill O 'Reilly's book, Killing the Witches. Dr. Paul Jaley is a historian expert on the Salem witch trials and senior pastor of the New Testament Church of Cedarville in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and he did a remarkable job setting the record straight on this history of the Salem witch trials and really reveals the inaccuracies, to say the least, in Bill O 'Reilly's book.

So I highly recommend that. Just type into the ironsharpensironradio .com search engine Jaley, J-E-H-L-E, and that interview will come up. We do have a listener with a question. I didn't even know there was a Birmingham in Michigan, but we have Scotty in Birmingham, Michigan, who says, I have heard that John Calvin, the great reformer, and his Calvin's Institutes were used by the founding fathers in the establishment of America.

Is this true?

The Institutes were oftentimes quoted during the constitutional debates, so we know that a number of the founding fathers were not only conversant in Calvin, but used Calvin as a part of their political thinking.

They also quoted Calvin's best friend and one of the men who served with him first in Lausanne, then later in the city of Geneva, Pierre Viret. Pierre Viret was very, very instrumental in thinking through a reformational view of polity, submission to rulers, but also the principles of liberty.

And Viret, although almost unknown, even in reform circles today, was one of the men that the founders looked back to alongside Calvin. Viret was really instrumental in Calvin's thinking, as was Butzer.

But, you know, the founding fathers were widely read, and they were serious students. So how much of Calvin influenced those founding documents, we don't know. But we do know just from the constitutional debates that he was regularly quoted.

Well, I want to give a plug to Zurich Publishing, founded by my friend Tom Ertle. ZurichPublishing .org has books that they have brought back into print by Pierre Viret. And as I said, I'm sorry, as Dr. Grant said, he is sadly widely unknown today, even by well-read Calvinists.

And I urge you all to go to ZurichPublishing .org. In fact, Zurich Publishing has been extremely generous to Ion Sharpen's Ion Radio when we have our pastors' luncheons. For three years in a row so far, they have donated 100 copies of the books that they have brought back into print by Pierre Viret.

And we're looking forward to receiving more for this year's next pastors' luncheon. So ZurichPublishing .org. And by the way—.

Yeah, I really highly recommend R .H. Sheets' biography of Viret. It's really absolutely an incredible, incredible eye-opening look at the Magisterial Reformation. And then Zurich has also published a simple exposition of the Christian faith.

You read that and you start to realize, oh my goodness, so this is where the Heidelberg and the Westminster got so much of their wording and structure. So good.

Yes. In fact, since you mentioned Rebecca Sheets, she's also donated books by Pierre Viret to the Ion Sharpen's Ion Radio pastors' luncheon. And to plug her website, it's psalm78ministries .com. Psalm78ministries .com.

George Whitefield and the Great Awakening

Well, we noticed from your book that you do highlight some other heroes of the Christian faith, like George Whitefield. Most of our listeners should be very familiar with George Whitefield, one of my personal heroes.

But tell us about George Whitefield's contribution to America's path to independence.

Probably most will know was the spark that, along with Jonathan Edwards, led to the great fires of revival and reform that we now call the Great Awakening. He was ordained initially as an Anglican, was a pioneer of what came to be known as the Methodist movement, and was instrumental in helping to shape his friend John and Charles Wesley's faith, although they had a theological sort of departure in later years.

Whitefield was a remarkable preacher. Benjamin Franklin once said that standing in a pulpit, all Whitefield had to do was to say, Mesopotamia, and men would be redeemed. He was probably America's first celebrity.

In each of his tours of preaching up and down the coast, he became the uniting force between the various colonial settlements. And as a result, Whitefield was in many ways the precipitating factor that led to the really rich and robust vision of liberty that the Founding Fathers had.

In fact, let me give another plug to chapellibrary .org because I was brought to the Reformed faith through reading George Whitefield's letter to John Wesley on election. Not long after I was baptized in a Reformed Baptist church, while I was still anti-Calvinist, someone gave me that booklet, George Whitefield's letter to John Wesley, and I didn't know who either of those men were, and George Whitefield just blew my mind with the biblical evidence for the Calvinistic understanding of election.

And my first reaction was, oh no, this is true, but I still hate it. But within a couple of months, though, I absolutely fell in love with the doctrines of grace, and it revolutionized my understanding of the cross.

So I highly recommend that booklet that you can get very inexpensively from chapellibrary .org. And you already mentioned—.

Yeah, and I would recommend the big two-volume biography of George Whitefield by Arnold Dallimore.

Yes, that's the most famous one.

Walter wrote a fabulous little biography of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, but a massive biography on Whitefield. It's published now by A Banner of Truth. There is a single-volume condensed, abridged version of it that Crossway has done, but I really much prefer the big two-volume.

It's just so inspiring, and it was life-altering for me when I first read it.

Amen. Well, you mentioned Jonathan Edwards briefly, but if you could be more detailed on his contribution to the founding of this country.

Jonathan Edwards and the American Revival

Well, Jonathan Edwards has been widely acknowledged as perhaps the greatest genius that the American soil has ever produced. He was absolutely stunningly brilliant. He served as an assistant pastor to his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, and then became the pastor at Northampton, Massachusetts, and was used by God for an incredible outpouring of renewal and revival, both there and throughout the region.

His sermons, to this day, are held up as classics of the Puritan form. If you go to the Norton Anthology, for instance, his great sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, has a prominent place. I almost laugh every time I think about the Norton editors, including that, knowing that they recoil at the whole idea, but they can't get past its genius, both rhetorically, theologically, and in its literary form.

He was incredibly courageous, so courageous, in fact, that eventually a theological controversy regarding what's known as the halfway covenant was his undoing, and he was removed as the pastor at Northampton.

In a fit of frenzy, the congregation failed to realize that they'd just gotten rid of their pastor and they had no one to preach the next Sunday, and so very graciously, despite the brouhaha, Jonathan Edwards stood back up in the pulpit the very next Sunday, took up where he left off the previous Sunday, and didn't mention the controversy once.

Eventually he made his way to the frontier and became a missionary pastor to the Native Americans, and on his way to become the new president of what became Princeton, the log college that became the College of New Jersey, he contracted smallpox and succumbed, but he was just one of the most remarkable men in the American founding era.

One thing that...

And interestingly, he became, in generations afterwards, he became the means by which God drew to himself any number of other men. One of my theological heroes, Thomas Chalmers, was a schoolboy at St. Andrews University in Scotland a full generation later and read Jonathan Edwards, and his life was forever changed.

You know, before I move on with other questions about your current, or should I say the current subject, an experiment in liberty, you have written new volumes or edited them regarding Thomas Chalmers, have you not?

I have. I have. I've taken his discipleship method. He was a remarkable discipler of young men and helped to launch the modern missions movement, the modern Bible society movement. He sent out men like Robert Murray McShane, the Bonar brothers, Robert Chalmers Burns, and a host of others.

And so I became really curious, how did he disciple them? And I was able to sort of historical scavenger hunt, pull together his discipleship method. It's a way of reading the scriptures and memorizing key verses.

It's called the Keystones. And so there are three volumes of Keystones that I have put out. I've done a little volume of his perhaps most famous single sermon that was preached while he was a pastor in Glasgow, Scotland.

And this little sermon has, for many, many generations, been a means of life transformation for many. The title of it is The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. And then I just got through editing his Seven Discourses on Modern Astronomy.

In 1816 and 17, he began a series of lectures for businessmen at lunchtime and then collected the lectures together into a volume. And that volume became the best-selling book in the English-speaking language for the next five years, outselling Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen combined the first two years.