May 4, 2017 Show with Ryan McGraw on “By Good & Necessary Consequence: Explorations in Reformed Confessional Theology”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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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.

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Now here's our host Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon

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

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This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio wishing you all a happy Thursday on this fourth day of May 2017.

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I'm delighted to have someone back on the program who rapidly became one of my very favorite guests of all on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and that's

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Ryan McGraw, professor of systematic theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in South Carolina.

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He's the author of a number of published works such as The Day of Worship, Reassessing the

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Christian Life in Light of the Sabbath and today we're going to be discussing one of his books, By Good and Necessary Consequence, Explorations in Reformed Confessional Theology and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Ryan McGraw.

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Thank you Chris, it's always good to be with you. And in studio with me is my co -host the Reverend Buzz Taylor.

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Hello Ryan, I'm looking forward to this interesting subject. Thanks Buzz. And if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question for Ryan McGraw, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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chrisarnsen at gmail .com. And Ryan, I know that a lot of Christians, needless to say a lot of unbelievers, when they hear the term confessional

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Christianity, they may scratch their heads. Many may even think incorrectly that we are talking about Roman Catholicism because of their sacrament of confession or penance, which has nothing to do at all with what we're talking about.

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Can you give us a definition of confessional Christianity? Well, in terms of thinking about confessional

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Christianity, basically what we are dealing with is branches of the

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Christian church that use creeds or confessions to summarize what they believe the

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Bible teaches. And so if these confessions function properly, they should never be a replacement for the

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Bible or offer competition for the Bible, but simply explain what the

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Bible teaches or what we believe the Bible teaches. And the need for our creeds and confessions becomes apparent, at least when we realize that two people may say,

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I believe the Bible, but may quote the same Bible verse and say two radically different things.

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For example, you might have this encountering a Mormon or Jehovah's Witness or somebody like that, and suddenly we're brought back to something beyond just quoting

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Bible verses, but we have to actually interpret the Bible and say what we mean. Typically, our creeds and confessions especially serve as a standard of unity for gospel ministers, church officers, so that they can fulfill the purposes of Ephesians 4, that they would be able to prevent us from being tossed about by every wind of doctrine and to bring us to unity and maturity in the faith in Christ.

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And how can these officers do this if they're not united together in a common confession?

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So this series of books, actually, of which mine is just one part, namely

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Explorations of Reformed Confessional Theology, the series as a whole takes different phrases in our

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Reformed confessional standards and seeks to explain them and apply them from Scripture.

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And wouldn't you agree that every church, not necessarily every group of churches or fellowship or denomination, but they might not all be in lockstep agreement on a list of important things, but nonetheless, wouldn't you agree that every church is confessional, whether they recognize it or not, they just either have a written confession or a verbal confession, they either have a good, biblically solid, biblically orthodox confession or they have a bad confession, perhaps even a heretical confession?

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Yeah, when I was a new Christian, the church that I attended was allegedly non -denominational, which

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I kind of laugh inwardly about now because denomination just means, what are you called and what are you named?

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And obviously they do have a name, and they are associated with other churches that bore the same name, but they would always say, no creed but the

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Bible. And then when you would go on the website and look for one of their churches, one of the first things you see on the website is, what do we believe?

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Yeah, exactly. You know, you have to confess something so that someone looking at your website knows that you're not

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Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses or Roman Catholics or whatever else. So you've got something, but then they'll say, no creed but the

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Bible. The unfortunate side effect is that every church in this particular group ended up with a different summary of what it believed.

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They basically just had to make it up every time. Yes, you can either...

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Go ahead. No, you can either build on creeds that have stood the test of time and united a wider range of Christians, or we could just make things up in each generation and thereby diminish our unity as well.

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Yes, and even the statement, we have no creed but Christ, we have no confession but the scriptures, even that is a creedal statement.

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And I ran into the same situation though. This is the

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Reverend Buzz Taylor. My first pastorate was an independent

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Baptist church. And having come out of an interdenominational school, one of my first duties was to try to figure out, well, okay, as a pastor of a

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Baptist church, what makes us unique? And it was very difficult for me to find good information that agreed with other information as to what a

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Baptist was until I finally came across the 1689 confession. Like, oh, this is what it was about.

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Right. Well, it also reminds me of when some friends of mine within the independent fundamentalist

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Baptist circles united together to have a radio program on a station that I worked for years ago.

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And one of the pastors was having a little bit of a dispute theologically with me.

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And he said, well, one of the things I don't like about you Reformed Baptists is that you have the 1689

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London Baptist confession of faith. We have the Bible. We don't need anything like that.

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And I said to him, do you know that you, in fact, I know that you know, because you actually wrote it, that your group on this radio program, since you were involving multiple independent fundamentalist

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Baptist churches, you have a manual of who is eligible to participate on the show.

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And you have a list of things bound together in a volume that is probably five times the size of the 1689

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London Baptist confession of faith. And you have things in there such as all participants must be pre -millennial.

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All participants must not have rock music in their congregations.

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All participants must be Baptist and believe in the immersion of believers alone.

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And the list went on and on and on. And I said, this is your confession of faith. And it's five times the size of mine.

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And mine is at least exclusively involving theological matters.

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Yours is going into all kinds of issues, even the way people dress and so on. So, you know,

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I mean, it's really, people are often firing accusations or insults at others, and they don't even realize that they are guilty of the very things they're accusing others of.

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Right. Well, I have, I usually don't take questions this quickly. But there is a question

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I received that kind of will help set the stage for the rest of the interview that I figured I might as well take it right away.

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Daniel in Bakersfield, California says,

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Hello, Chris, I have a question for Ryan. I know that reform theology consists of more than just Calvinism.

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What do you believe is the essence of reform theology? Or what does one have to hold to in order to be truly reformed in their theology?

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I've heard it said that a person needs to hold to the three C's Calvinism, confession, covenant theology.

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Does that sound right? And he says, Thanks. That's Daniel in Bakersfield, California. And of course, you and I, Ryan might even have a different answer to that since I'm a reformed

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Baptist. But if you could answer Daniel's question. Sure.

10:57

That's a good question. And it's good to hear from a fellow Californian as well. I've given this question a lot of thought.

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And it's come up in a number of different contexts.

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I do think it's correct to say that reform theology must be a lot more than the five points of Calvinism, first of all.

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When we use the phrase life reformed, we are implicitly identifying ourselves with something historical, or at least something that arose in a historical context.

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The so -called five points of Calvinism were only singled out as such in response to the five points of Arminianism in the early 17th century.

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And clearly, reformed theology and reformed churches existed before that.

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And when the authors or the ministers gathering at Gort came up with what we now call the list of the five points, they were simply bringing out particular theological points that were excerpted, so to speak, out of a broader whole.

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So the question is, what is that broader whole and what identifies reformed theology?

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I tend to agree with Richard Muller in general that you have to define reformed theology in terms of its creeds and confessions, broadly speaking.

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Now, the obvious question is going to come up, what are the distinctive features of the creeds and confessions that distinguish them from other theological traditions?

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But I think that at a baseline, Roman Catholicism, for example, is defined by its creeds and its confessions.

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Reformed theology and reformed churches are defined by its creeds as well. Lutheran theology is defined by the

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Book of Concord, and historically speaking, I think we have to think along confessional lines.

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The real question then is, if our churches are divided along confessional lines, what are the particulars that distinguish the

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Reformed confessions from, say, the Roman Catholic and the Lutheran? And there are a number of ways to answer that.

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Some could be very expansive and include dozens of different elements.

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Others could begin more simply. So, aiming to be simpler, let me say this.

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I think what stands at the heart of the Reformed confession is the absolute sovereign supremacy of God and the absolute authority and sufficiency of Scripture.

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And those two principles, the doctrine of God and the doctrine of Scripture, were the two great presuppositions of Reformed prolegomena, or introduction to the whole system.

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And basically, with the foundation of the doctrine of God and Scripture, everything else developed in light of it.

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So I think what I'm getting at is, how is that distinct? Well, perhaps as opposed to Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism, which perhaps would retain some autonomy for the human will in contradistinction to God, where Luther fits in perhaps another question, and Augustine and others, but making a generalization that would be a distinction where we would see the absolute sovereign supremacy of God, not just with the will, but really with everything else.

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With the doctrine of Scripture, all three of the confessions I've mentioned would adhere to the authority of the

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Bible as divinely inspired, but in Roman Catholicism, not exclusively so.

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And then in Lutheranism, the rub would come with the sufficiency of Scripture, where, for example, a

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Lutheran approach to worship would be, as long as God hasn't forbidden it, that it's permissible.

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A Reformed approach to Scripture is that everything we need for faith and practice is given to us in the

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Word of God, either expressly by approved example or good and necessary consequence, which leads us back to the book.

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And basically, this full -on approach to the sufficiency of Scripture determines the way we approach questions.

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Now, these issues of the supremacy of God, the sufficiency of Scripture, are going to lead us into the five points of Calvinism, into things like Reformed worship and church government, and also into covenant theology as a unifying principle, tying the

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Bible together. I should add, by the way, that Lutherans had a covenant theology, and there's even a line of evidence that the language of covenant works developed from a

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Roman Catholic Counter -Reformation theologian named Caterino, who used the covenant of works to defend human merit.

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And so, even these covenantal terms are found in other traditions, but obviously not in the same direction and the same way they are in Reformed theology.

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So, I take it back to our confessions define who we are and connect us to the historical

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Reformed faith, and the core of those confessional documents takes us back to the absolute sovereign supremacy of God, sufficiency, and authority of Scripture.

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And just to make it clear, I would include my historic

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Reformed Baptist brothers there if that was the question you were alluding to earlier. Yes.

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And by the way, Daniel, you have won a free copy of By Good and Necessary Consequence, Explorations in Reformed Confessional Theology, Compliments of Our Friends at Reformation Heritage Books, and it will be shipped out to you,

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Compliments of Our Friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CV for Cumberland Valley, BBS for BibleBookService .com,

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CVBBS .com. So, keep your eye open in the mail for a package with a return address of CVBBS .com,

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and keep listening to Iron Sharpens Iron and contributing excellent questions. I am assuming that you would agree that the main or the major confessions of faith within the

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Reformed community would be the Westminster Confession of Faith, the

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Three Forms of Unity, which would be the Belgic Confession, the Canons of Dort, and the

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Heidelberg Catechism, the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith for the Baptists, and the

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Savoy Declaration for the Congregationalists, and the 39 Articles of Religion for the

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Anglicans. Anything that I left out that you'd care to add? The only major one that I would add that's still in use in parts of Europe is the

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Second Helvetic Confession that Heinrich Bollinger wrote. And let's go to the biblical foundations of these confessions, the things that are drawn from Scripture that are foundational for Orthodox Christianity.

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And of course, I'm using the term Orthodox for those of our listeners who are unfamiliar with the usage of that term outside of Eastern Orthodoxy.

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We're not speaking about that. Orthodox is a word that actually just means straight, and we are using that term to mean sound, accurate, biblical, and so on.

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But tell us about some of the biblical foundations of these confessions.

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Well, as a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, I guess I should know something about this.

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In terms of the biblical foundations of our creeds, this really leads into the heart of the book, where basically the premise is that we don't simply read and parrot the

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Scriptures, but we also interpret the Scriptures. And sometimes there are express statements that give us things that we need to think or do, such as, believe in the name of the

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Lord Jesus and you will be saved. That leads me to conclude that I need to believe in the name of the Lord Jesus that I might be saved.

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There are also examples that we see, such as throughout the book of Acts, we have much of the data in the

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New Testament on the practice of baptism, among other things, so we would look to some of those examples.

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But also, we have what the book is alluding to from the first chapter of the

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Westminster Confession of Faith, statements that come by good and necessary consequence.

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And basically, what this means is that there are certain things that are deduced from the general principles of Scripture and are necessarily required by Scripture, even if not expressly stated.

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Classical examples that would go across confessional lines would be things like the

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Doctrine of the Trinity, where you don't have any chapter and verse in the Bible that says that there's one

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God with three persons in the Godhead who are the same in substance and equal in power and glory, but at the same time, that doctrine is contained in Scripture and required by Scripture because of the texts that show the deity of the persons and the distinction of the persons and the unity of the

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Godhead and so forth. The same would be true of the two natures of Christ in working out the pieces there.

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So in terms of working out our creeds and confessions, what we're really trying to ask is, what does the

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Bible as a whole teach us? And the answer to that question, and even with respect to some very fundamental beliefs, is not necessarily limited to chapter and verse and expressed statements.

21:55

Well, thank you very much. Oh, actually, that was my question.

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I was going to thank somebody else for my question. I don't think

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I've ever done that before on this program. It's very difficult for me to thank anybody for anything, and here

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I am thanking somebody for something they don't deserve. Let's see, we have another listener in Slovenia.

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Joe in Slovenia says, I've never been a member of a church that had an official creed or confession that it overtly adhered to.

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I do remember in childhood seeing what was known as the church covenant hanging prominently on the wall, but I don't remember any attempts to hold to its statements across the board by the congregation.

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My denomination does have a statement of faith, but I've never witnessed any churches or individual church members overtly claiming fidelity to it in its totality.

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In the congregations you and Brother Ryan are familiar with, is this also typical?

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In churches that you are members of which do adhere to a specific confession, what level of affirmation does an individual member have to express in order to be a member in good standing?

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Do they have to affirm total agreement with all points in their totality, or is there room for having individual caveats and exceptions on specific secondary or tertiary issues?

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Thank you so much for dealing with such weighty topics with such discernment. That's a very good question, because I think,

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I don't know how much of a diversity you have in the Presbyterian churches that you have been a member of,

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Ryan, but Reformed Baptists are not cookie cutter on this. You will have Reformed Baptists insisting upon none of the, well

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I shouldn't say none, but no agreement with the 1689 confession outside of salvific issues to be a member, but they would say that to be a member you must submit to the fact that that is the authority under the scriptures, of course.

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That is the governing confession of the church, and they would tell people seeking membership that either don't know enough to agree or are in disagreement with some or a lot of it that they would have to promise not to undermine the teaching of the church.

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I don't know how diverse Presbyterians are on that issue, but if you could comment.

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You know, I think it's a very useful question, because I think at its basic level, a confession or a creed is meant to be a standard of unity.

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Just to give a basic example, I don't think there can be degrees of subscription to a creed.

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So, for example, somebody can't say, well, I fully adhere to a creed, and then I take all these exceptions to this creed and in good faith basically hold to the system as a whole, whatever that is, and then, you know, try to create different levels of subscription.

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And I think the problem comes to the surface if, for example, you and I are in a public worship service together, and we're reciting the

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Nicene Creed. If I say, I believe, and you say,

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I generally adhere to, then immediately the question comes up, well, what do you generally not adhere to?

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What issues do we agree on? What issues don't we? Regardless of the creed itself we're using, the purpose of the creed is to unify us, and if we're not confessing the same thing, then do we really have unity?

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Now, you know, unity can vary by degree as well, of course, and I'll get to that later,

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Lord willing, but let me say this. Some of our Dutch Reformed churches in our

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Christian heritage have required members as well as their officers to adhere to the three forms of unity.

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I don't think that that's an appropriate practice for a number of reasons.

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Well, first of all, don't they believe infants are members? How can they believe in everything in the three forms of unity?

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Sorry about that. That's another issue, but for that aside,

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I mean, you've got, you know, if you're coming and you're joining that church, you adhere to the three forms of unity.

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The difference that we've usually made in Presbyterianism, for example, in an older book on creeds and confessions by William Dunlop, he actually argues for different levels of creedal confession for different parts of the congregation, and the highest level he has for the elders, he's willing to make a slightly lower level for the deacons, and then the lowest common denominator being the congregation, and the rationale is something like this.

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As officers, as I alluded to earlier from Ephesians 4, our job is to prevent people from being tossed about by every winded doctrine.

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How can we do that unless we're unified in what we're training them in ourselves? So there has to be some objectively expressed unity among the officers, and then in training them in this way, we bring them to a unity and maturity of the faith.

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When we've had members come to the church, I've usually said to them something like, the only thing required to be a member of this church is to have a credible profession of faith in Christ and a commitment to the local church.

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And if you have those things, I don't want to make the standards of membership more narrow than I think

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Jesus Christ would make. Amen. So it has to be Catholic. Well, that's basically what

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I was trying to explain about what I have seen in most Reformed Baptist churches, and I can't speak for all of them because I am quite certain there are some that are much stricter on confessional agreement than my experience has been, but a lot of it would make perfect sense to be somewhat lenient to ordinary members, because if somebody has just come to faith in Christ, they would either be faking agreement if they said they immediately are in full subscription to the 1689 confession or whatever confession the church adheres to, or they would be given a task to learn and then agree with everything that could take years.

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And then you're basically saying, go and make disciples of yourselves, and then we'll come and take you when the process is over.

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Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. So I think the way we apply that, for example, is our officers subscribe to the

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Westminster Standards, and we don't take exceptions, and we're unified. Our members have five membership vows, which amount to something of a broader confession of faith to them, and basically it revolves around the inspiration and authority of the

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Bible, the Trinity, and the two natures of Christ, the receiving and resting in Christ's work alone, obeying

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Christ, and then being in subjection to the leadership of the local church. So I'll tell our new members, you know, these are the things you have to vow, these are the things you commit to, but in a membership class,

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I'll introduce them to Reformed thought more broadly and say, this is where we want to take you eventually, and Lord willing, we want you to be excited about it.

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But we do make that distinction. Yeah, I can remember, I'm chuckling, I've had it now, but I can remember when

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I first saw a movie about the founders of the

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Restoration Movement, the Church of Christ, and they had a depiction of Alexander Campbell witnessing a

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Calvinistic Baptist pastor doing baptisms in a creek, and when he approached the

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Baptist pastor to be baptized, the pastor said to him, before it was even wet from the water, the pastor said to him, do you adhere to the

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Philadelphia Confession of Faith? And he said, I don't even know what that is.

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Well, I can't baptize you. Now, I wonder if these filmmakers entirely made that account up, because I can't imagine any preacher refusing baptism to somebody who didn't completely understand and adhere to the confession of the

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Church. That seems a bit strange. You've got all kinds out there. Well, I was going to say, one thing

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I tell my students at the seminary is, if it can't happen in the Church, it probably will. Well, we're going to a break right now.

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If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. And by the way, Joan Slovenia, thank you for providing an

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American address where your daughter lives in Georgia, where we can ship out a copy of this book to you,

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By Good and Necessary Consequence, Explorations in Reformed Confessional Theology, by our guest

31:51

Ryan McGraw. And that's Compliments of Reformation Heritage Books, and it's being shipped out to you by Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com,

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cv for Cumberland Valley, bbs for biblebookservice .com. Thank you for that American address, because it makes things a lot more affordable for our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service to get that out to you.

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And if anybody else would like to join us on the air with a question, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

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Or go to BatteryDepot .com. That's BatteryDepot .com. Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, inviting you to tune into A Visit to the

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35:51

Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen, if you just tuned us in. Our guest today for the full two hours with about 90 minutes to go is

35:59

Ryan McGraw, Professor of Systematic Theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Taylor, South Carolina, and we are discussing his book,

36:08

By Good and Necessary Consequence, Explorations in Reformed Confessional Theology.

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

36:21

c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com, and please give us your first name, at least, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

36:32

USA, and I don't know how much of Baptist history you are aware of,

36:38

Ryan, but our listener in Greensboro, North Carolina, Seth, says,

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Most early American Baptist churches were confessional. Now it's safe to say most are not.

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What do you believe brought about this change, and when did this begin to take place? I know you're not a

36:56

Baptist, so this may be out of your scope of knowledge. This is Seth from Greensboro, North Carolina.

37:03

Would you be able to answer that in any way, shape, or form? Well, first of all,

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I'm actually, in God's providence, preaching at the OPC in Greensboro, North Carolina this coming

37:14

Lord's Day. Wow, well, Seth, why don't you pay a visit there? So that's an interesting coincidence, and then...

37:23

Don't convert him, though. Oh, well, actually, I don't even...

37:28

Seth might be asking this even if he's not a Baptist, I don't know, but anyway. Yeah, I won't comment on that.

37:41

In terms of the Baptist history, I guess the simple answer would be, I'm really not sure in terms of recent history.

37:50

I'm much more familiar with 17th and 18th century

37:56

Baptist theology, and as far as where modern Baptist theology has gone, it would probably depend on each denomination, and it might be a different answer in each case.

38:10

Yeah, I know that the confessional Baptists of the 17th century and later wanted to express commonality and unity with their

38:29

Pado -Baptist Presbyterian brethren, and they wanted to show that except for some matters of church polity and the ordinances, we have much in common with you.

38:42

They didn't want to be viewed as a cult, and they were very much in favor of confessions, just that as one of the side issues, not as the only issue.

38:53

And from what I can tell, learned, the Baptists that wanted to have a greater chasm of separation between themselves and Protestantism were typically not confessional.

39:08

They did not view themselves as a part of the Reformation or heirs of the Reformation, so they were typically more into the private interpretation of the local congregation and that kind of thing.

39:26

But I know that the next time we have Michael Haken on, Seth, he is specifically a

39:32

Baptist historian, so either he or Tom Nettles, who's another Baptist historian

39:37

I'm sure, would have a more thorough answer to that question. But I would strongly urge you to go visit the

39:45

OPC in Greensboro this Sunday and hear our guest

39:50

Ryan McGraw speak. And what are you speaking on there? I'm actually preaching on Isaiah 11 and 12.

39:58

Isaiah 11 and 12, and is it just called the Greensboro Orthodox Presbyterian Church? It's Providence Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

40:07

Okay, and well, perhaps before the end of the program, we can dig up some contact information for them so we can let our listeners know about that so they have more details on how to get there.

40:20

But thank you, Seth, and thank you for being a regular listener to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

40:26

And you are also receiving a free copy of By Good and Necessary Consequence Explorations in Reformed Confessional Theology, compliments of Reformation Heritage Books, and also compliments of our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com,

40:45

cvbbs .com. And if you could, let us know something about what took place with the

40:55

Westminster Assembly. This has a lot to do with the foundation not only of your

41:03

Confession of Faith, but also, as you know, the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, because the

41:10

London Baptist Confession of Faith, the second London Baptist Confession of Faith, is based largely on the

41:16

Westminster Confession. It wasn't plagiarism. They were openly and honestly borrowing much from that Confession, as I said, to demonstrate unity with the

41:26

Presbyterians. But they needed their own confession because of differences on church polity and the ordinances.

41:32

But if you could, tell us about the Westminster Assembly. Yeah, maybe in talking about Westminster, I could talk about just briefly the origins, not only of that Assembly, but of the content of their

41:48

Confessions, and then also then the relationship with some of these subsequent groups, because I think it helpfully illustrates the purposes of creeds in terms of unifying the

42:00

Church. The Westminster Assembly was actually called by the

42:05

English Parliament in the 1640s, and yet they gathered well over 100 of some of the best ministers at the time, including a small contingent of ministers and ruling elders from Scotland who participated in the debates.

42:26

And basically, the Assembly worked for over half a decade, framing the

42:35

Confession of Faith in larger and shorter catechisms. So one advantage of the

42:41

Westminster documents is that in the place that it occurs in history, you already have a strong move to codifying

42:52

Reformed thought in a much more precise and record way, and so there's an advantage of 100 years since the original

43:02

Reformation, even more than that, actually, to reflect and build upon earlier work, plus you have the fact that, to my knowledge, there really is no other

43:15

Protestant set of creeds and confessions that took as long to actually construct as the

43:23

Westminster Assembly. So more care and more time and debate and prayer was actually put into constructing these documents.

43:31

In fact, the only thing I can really think of that's comparable to it is the Counter -Reformation

43:36

Council of Trent in the Roman Catholic Church, which took nearly a decade. So there's an exceptional amount of care and labor put into the

43:47

Westminster Standards by a large group of godly men. Then in the 1650s, you had four of the members of Westminster, together with John Owen, ended up coming up with the

44:03

Savoy Declaration of Faith, which was a Congregationalist revision of Westminster.

44:10

They retained the original text, and again, most of the authors were members of the

44:17

Assembly, the Congregationalists, obviously, but then they made some modifications, not only at points where they disagreed, but even at some points to address new issues and new controversies.

44:31

So next to the chapter on the law, there's a whole separate chapter on the gospel that basically threads together a lot of the earlier parts of the

44:39

Standards to bring them to a head and set the context for talking about the law of God and really revealing their covenant theology.

44:49

There's a stronger emphasis on the eternal covenant between the Father and the

44:54

Son, and so some of the things in Savoy are not just revisions, but also expansions.

45:02

And then I would say the same thing with the London Baptist Confession, that there's still a desire to build on the significant work of Westminster while revising certain things in which they might differ with the

45:18

Presbyterians and even with the Congregationalists on some points, especially, of course, on sacraments, but trying to retain the broader confessional unity.

45:30

And the real issue there is, just to make two brief points, one is that I think the advantage here is that even if we have our differences of conscience as we read the

45:43

Bible in separate denominations at times, we have much more in common with one another because of our common creeds than we would otherwise, and so it still has a unifying factor in the

45:56

Church in drawing us together in fellowship. So this practice, in other words, is admirable and something that we've largely lost at the present day, and really the

46:08

Church suffers from it in terms of unity. Other things because of this, sometimes my opinion is when there are changes, for example, in the

46:18

London Baptist Confession, the section that talks about deducing things by good necessary consequence is missing, but it's replaced by a phrase, and I can't remember the exact language offhand, but it basically talks about things being necessarily required in Scripture.

46:41

Some Baptist historians and scholars, as well as myself, are convinced that in the context, the

46:49

Baptists that made the change were actually trying to strengthen, not weaken, this statement by basically saying things like the

46:57

Trinity that are deduced by good necessary consequence and the two natures of Christ are necessarily required in Scripture, and so the statement actually becomes stronger, and that's just to illustrate that sometimes the changes are not always revisions, but in the view of these other denominations, strengthening and furthering emphases.

47:24

And we have Ronald in Eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, who says that the

47:30

Lutherans had adopted the Augsburg Confession very early on in the Reformation, but what confession of faith did

47:39

Calvin and Zwingli adhere to since the Westminster Confession didn't come about till a century or more after the

47:47

Reformation began? That's a good question. Zwingli and Calvin, each in their context, wrote their own confession to faith, so I don't remember the number of articles with Zwingli, but he did write his articles of which was used in the

48:09

Swiss context for a time. His successor, Heinrich Bollinger, wrote the first and then the second

48:18

Helvetic Confession. The second Helvetic Confession was one of those confessions already immediately after Zwingli's death that was so well done that it continued to be used in the

48:35

Church for generations, and like I said, it's still used as a confessional standard today. So early, you already have that after Zwingli.

48:44

And then some of the French churches still use a

48:49

French confession of faith that's based on the Gallican Confession that largely came from Calvin, and his catechism came there in Geneva as well.

49:01

And so as these men were writing their own, these things basically became more popular than in the 1560s.

49:09

You have things like the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism. Dort comes along dealing with a narrow range of issues in the 1610s and so on.

49:21

And there's a host of others. The point was that there were a lot of Reformed confessions.

49:27

Only some of them stood the test of time, but they all had a basic theological unity.

49:35

I'm forgetting there in 1560 the Scotts Confession that John Knox authored as well.

49:41

And maybe one thing I should add there is I don't want to give the impression that these men were simply just starting from scratch, because you notice, for example, that in the early

49:53

Church, catechetical work and creedal teaching revolves around the

50:01

Apostles' Creed and the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer. And you'll notice, for example, that basically in Luther's catechism, that's exactly the pattern that he follows.

50:15

Even when you get later to Westminster, you see what's later called a

50:21

Ramest bifurcation or division into two, where half the catechism is what man is to believe concerning God.

50:29

The other half is what duty God requires of man. Well, that first half is still basically the content of the

50:35

Apostles' Creed. It's just greatly expanded. And then the next thing that follows is the

50:40

Ten Commandments, and then Word and Sacrament, and then the Lord's Prayer. So as our forefathers are building their confessions, these early reformers are often writing their own confessions, but the point is they didn't start from scratch, and they tended to build from earlier precedents, which gradually grew into the

51:01

Reformed tradition. Well, thank you, Ronald, and you are going to receive, free of charge, a

51:09

Buy Good and Necessary Consequence Explorations in Reformed Confessional Theology by our guest

51:15

Ryan McGraw. Thanks to our friends at Reformation Heritage Books, and also thanks to Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service.

51:25

We'll be shipping that out to you, cvbbs .com, cv for Cumberland Valley, bbs for BibleBookService .com.

51:33

And Ryan, I'm going to read a question for you, and then I'm going to have you answer it when you return.

51:40

In fact, I'll even email you. I'll forward the email that I received from our listener to you, so you have it right in front of you, and you can look it over during the commercial break as well.

51:55

But this is from, I believe, a very first -time listener, or at least a first -time questioner.

52:03

We have Greg in Greenville, Tennessee, and Greg asks,

52:11

Ryan, can you give a brief history of how, if I've heard it right, the dispensational viewpoint came via our

52:19

Presbyterian brethren from the UK to the U .S. originally, and what were the differences between that strain of Presbyterianism to the more biblical and covenantal view of Reformed Baptist and PCA churches today?

52:33

If I'm off base, I got this misconception from hearing a Q &A from a Ligonier video a few years back.

52:40

By the way, as God's providence would have it, I'm a Reformed Baptist who has joined a good PCA church in my area, and they support the seminary there in Greenville, South Carolina.

52:49

I was not forced to hold to infant baptism to become a member, so that speaks to an earlier question your listener had.

52:56

Thank you, and that's Greg in Greenville, Tennessee. So I've already emailed that question to you, Ryan, and you can look it over to answer it when we come back.

53:05

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

53:12

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And I hope you all visit me at the Faithful Shepherd retreat at Harvey Cedars Bible Conference Center in Harvey Cedars, New Jersey.

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This is taking place May 15th through the 17th, and the speakers are

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Carl Truman, Todd Pruitt, John Nielsen, and Amy Bird. If you'd like more information on the

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alliancenet .org, click on that, and click on events, and then click on the

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01:02:51

That will give you all the information that you need. Also, coming up shortly after that,

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Tuesday, May 30th through Thursday, June 1st, I will be attending the 2017

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01:03:18

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God willing, a sermon audios conference known as the Foundations Conference in New York City.

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And this is going to be an exciting event, I'm sure, featuring such guests as Dr.

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Stephen J. Lawson. Dr. Joel Beeky is also at this conference. Phil Johnson, who is the

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June 22nd and June 23rd, thefoundationsconference .com.

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Last but not least, August 3rd through the 5th, the Fellowship Conference New England is being held at the

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I would be grateful for any help that you can give. And now we are returning to our discussion on By Good and Necessary Consequence Explorations in Reformed Confessional Theology with our guest

01:08:21

Ryan McGraw, Professor of Systematic Theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Taylor, South Carolina.

01:08:28

And before the break, Ryan, as you know, I read a question to you and I'll read it again for the sake of our listeners, especially those who tuned in late.

01:08:40

Greg in Greenville, Tennessee says, can you give a brief history of how the dispensational viewpoint came via our

01:08:49

Presbyterian brethren from the UK to the U .S. originally and what were the differences between that strain of Presbyterianism to the more biblical and covenantal view of Reformed Baptist and PCA churches today?

01:09:04

And by the way, as God's providence would have it, I'm a Reformed Baptist who has joined a good PCA church in my area and they support the seminary there in Greenville, South Carolina.

01:09:13

I was not forced to hold to infant baptism to become a member, so that speaks to an earlier question your listener had.

01:09:20

That's Greg in Greenville, Tennessee. All right. Well as we think about the origins of dispensationalism, this is another question where I'm wondering if Michael Haken might be able to do it better.

01:09:38

He was actually the first person I thought of with the earlier question too. Well, in terms of the origins of dispensationalism and the crossover from Presbyterianism into other denominations,

01:09:53

I'm hesitant to say a lot about it. In areas that I've studied extensively

01:10:01

I'm more comfortable giving a full answer. I'll simply say as a generality,

01:10:07

I think that's accurate in terms of dispensationalism becoming popularized perhaps through a couple of key

01:10:17

Presbyterian ministers and then spreading elsewhere. In terms of the key differences, however, in terms of covenant theology,

01:10:27

I really think you can reduce them all almost to one thing, and that really comes down to the relationship between Israel and the

01:10:39

Church. And really one of the key marks of dispensationalism in its older and more modern forms is that Israel and the

01:10:48

Church are two utterly separate people with two separate destinies, and usually in classic forms of dispensationalism that means two separate destinies into eternity as well, whereas in classic

01:11:04

Reformed covenantal theology, in its Presbyterian, Baptist, and Congregational stripes, you would generally have a view that God's plan of salvation is being worked out in the

01:11:21

Church now, and even if there is a future for ethnic

01:11:26

Jews, it's not in a separate destiny as a separate people with a separate nation, but through ethnic

01:11:33

Jews being converted and reincorporated into the Church of Jesus Christ. So I think the issues surrounding

01:11:40

Israel and the Church would be some of the biggest ways where dispensationalism is pulled away from confessional viewpoints.

01:11:47

Well, thank you very much, Greg, and guess what?

01:11:53

Since you are a first -time either listener or at least questioner to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, you are not only going to be receiving a free copy of By Good and Necessary Consequence, Explorations in Reformed Confessional Theology by our guest

01:12:11

Ryan McGraw, published by Reformation Heritage Books, you're also getting a brand new free copy of the

01:12:18

New American Standard Bible, compliments of the publishers of the NASB, excuse me,

01:12:24

NASB, and we hope that you enjoy both, and I hope that you keep listening to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, keep submitting questions to us, and spread the word about the program in Greenville, Tennessee and beyond, and above all, please keep praying for Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

01:12:42

Thank you very much, Greg, and thanks for the very insightful, excellent question. Interestingly enough, we have a related question in some ways from our friend

01:12:56

RJ in White Plains, New York. He says, I have heard that Donald Gray Barnhouse was both

01:13:05

Presbyterian and Dispensationalist. Is this true? Yes, I believe so, but I'm not by any means an expert on his particular views.

01:13:24

I will say this, in terms of Presbyterianism, I think the biggest issues that are going to come out are going to relate to our doctrinal standards with regard to the nature of the

01:13:42

Church and the statements surrounding the Second Coming of Christ. It's easier, though still difficult, to be a

01:13:52

Presbyterian and a Premillennialist than it is to be a Presbyterian and a

01:13:58

Dispensationalist. I would say that Dispensationalism is absolutely incompatible with a

01:14:04

Reformed system and Reformed covenant theology, but Premillennialism may come into some implicit conflict with the timing of the

01:14:15

Second Coming of Christ, but in and of itself doesn't inherently contradict major doctrines like Dispensationalism does.

01:14:23

Well, thank you, RJ. You're also getting a free copy of the book we have been discussing,

01:14:29

By Good and Necessary Consequence, by our guest Ryan McGraw, so keep your eye open in the mail for that.

01:14:36

We have a question from Bruce in Center Reach, New York. Is it possible to find a

01:14:43

Reformed or Proto -Reformed confession of faith or catechism in Church history prior to the 16th century?

01:14:53

I'm assuming he means a good one, because obviously there were confessions of faith in the

01:14:58

Church before the Reformation, but if you could answer, Bruce, to the best of your knowledge.

01:15:06

Yeah, in terms of Reformed or Proto -Reformed, I'm assuming what he means is either having basically the same doctrines or something approximating what later came into Reformed thought.

01:15:18

Like did John Huss write anything that could be considered a creed or anything like that? Yeah, although he said before the 16th century, so that would seem like even before Knox.

01:15:33

I said John Huss. Oh, John Huss, I'm sorry. That's all right. Yeah, well,

01:15:40

I think the better way to look at it is to answer the question more broadly, like I did earlier, in terms of how did these

01:15:50

Reformed confessions come about. You may not find any single confession of faith that says everything that the

01:15:57

Reformed confessions later say, but you're going to find precedence for just about everything in earlier authors and earlier creeds.

01:16:06

So, for example, the obvious ones would be without things like Nicaea and Constantinople and then

01:16:17

Chalcedon and subsequent developments, there would be no

01:16:22

Trinitarian theology and no Christology in our Reformed confessions. And in the

01:16:27

Westminster Confession, for example, there are statements that are basically verbatim right out of Chalcedon describing

01:16:34

Christology. So there's an active and ready dependence on the ancient creeds.

01:16:40

Other things, such as the things that we would look at as, say, falling under the five points of Calvinism, you can find that in early church councils, such as the

01:16:50

Council of Orange, with a very high view of God's sovereignty and man's capability and absolute dependence on God's sovereign election and what we would later call effectual calling.

01:17:05

Those things are there. I think what you basically find is that among early

01:17:13

Reformed authors and into the post -Reformation period, these men were not just concerned to prove to their opponents that their views were biblical, but also that their views were historical.

01:17:27

So you often had major Reformed authors, and I could list them, who wrote commentaries on the

01:17:37

Church Fathers and basically developed a system of doctrine and saw all the seeds of Reformed thought in the

01:17:43

Church Fathers and the ancient creeds. And the idea was that the Reformation, while the way that they're stringing together these beliefs and thoughts was a fresh way of presenting the gospel, they bent over backwards to show that their views were not novel.

01:17:59

So there's a conglomeration of things. Another striking example is in the 1430s, there was the

01:18:06

Council of Florence. And this is, you know, right on the cusp of the

01:18:12

Reformation. And there are many things going on in the Council of Florence, such as reaffirming transubstantiation and sacramental views that, in our context, we would find unbiblical and unhelpful.

01:18:26

But simultaneously, they were addressing contemporary Trinitarian debates and the application of Trinitarian doctrine.

01:18:34

And I think there's ample evidence that many Reformation and post -Reformation authors drew material straight out of this

01:18:44

Roman Catholic conference. And I think what they're basically doing is saying that Christ has always preserved his

01:18:51

Church, and he's always worked in the context of the Church and through her officers, and we discern what we read with Scripture.

01:19:00

And so even in what we would view as, like, a Roman Catholic, partially corrupt conference, or Council, rather, there's still good things there that they're drawing.

01:19:13

And I think that the model of looking at the Council of Florence kind of illustrates the entire approach.

01:19:19

So it's not like you're going to find one creed that lays out everything exactly like a

01:19:24

John Knox or a John Calvin would later. But you are going to find basic approximations and precedents for all of the views these

01:19:35

Reformers held in earlier thought. And wouldn't you say that those earlier confessions or creedal statements were inadequate when it came to specifically the

01:19:48

Gospel of Jesus Christ? Yeah, and I think, you know, what strikes me there is in Francis Turreton's The Length of Theology in the mid -17th century, he deals with this question under the issue of Fundamental Articles, and he basically says, well, there are such things as Fundamental Articles, a bare minimum that we need to believe to be

01:20:13

Christians, but it's very difficult, if not impossible, to give an exhausted list of them, in other words, to say what the bare minimum is.

01:20:23

So we know it's there, but how little can someone know and still it's saving grace?

01:20:29

It's hard to say. And then he basically says it's the wrong question anyway, because what

01:20:34

Christian is satisfied at that level. But then he says Fundamental Articles increase over time.

01:20:43

And he doesn't mean, you know, we have new doctrines and new truth or anything like that, but when the

01:20:50

Church is debating the Trinity in the first couple of centuries, we're more accountable to get our

01:20:57

Trinitarian theology straight after Nicaea than before. We're more accountable to have our

01:21:04

Christology precise around Christ's two natures and one person after Celtic development before.

01:21:10

And after the Protestant Reformation, it's not that the doctrine of justification by faith and related issues were not there, but perhaps they lacked the sharpness and the clarity that we find after the

01:21:22

Reformation. And just like these other areas, we're more accountable now than we were before, because we have greater light and because of the debates that have arisen.

01:21:32

So I think when you read some of the Church Fathers, for example, you can find John Chrysostom in the

01:21:38

East saying, on the one side, that we're saved by the merits of Christ only, and we're trusting in His blood and in His finished work, and then he turns around and talks about putting out the fires of hell by our repentance.

01:21:55

You know, well, basically, our minds don't calculate how those statements stand by one another, and there are tensions there, but I think that these things gradually get resolved, especially in the time of the

01:22:08

Reformation. Yeah, I can't understand how Luther could have had as one of his watchwords of the

01:22:17

Reformation, one of his pillars, one of his battle cries, sola fide, and yet simultaneously believe in baptismal regeneration.

01:22:28

Right, and he obviously didn't teach that in the same way that that Rome did, but also he did teach it in a way that you and I wouldn't be happy with.

01:22:38

Right. By the way, thank you, Bruce, you've won our final copy of By Good and Necessary Consequence, Explorations in Reformed Confessional Theology.

01:22:50

Thank you very much for submitting that question, and please keep spreading word about Iron Sharpens Iron Radio in Center Reach, New York and beyond.

01:22:59

We look forward to hearing from you again with a question for our guests on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. I'm going to go to a break right now, and before I go to the break,

01:23:08

I want you to think about the importance of the church and why it seems that in modern church history that the church has become such an unessential, unimportant matter.

01:23:29

Membership in a church has become something on the lowest rung of importance for those professing faith in Christ.

01:23:37

It seems to me to be an over -exaggerated response to the heretical understanding of the church that the church of Rome has always taught, since Trent anyway, that the church is actually essential and required for salvation, and that the church dispenses the grace for salvation, and without the church of Rome you cannot have salvation.

01:24:14

And there seems to be an overreaction to that, where you have Protestants, or professing

01:24:20

Christians anyway, expressing the idea that we don't really need to be members of a church at all.

01:24:28

I can have my own private friendship and relationship with Christ, and I can pray to him in the woods, and I can pray to him while I'm riding my bicycle,

01:24:38

I can pray to him while I'm on lunch break at work, and I have my own private communion with him.

01:24:43

I don't need anything else. So you have this exaggerated response to the church of Rome's errors, it seems.

01:24:52

But we'll have you discuss that when we return from our final break. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:25:03

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01:32:07

Iron Sharpens today. Welcome back. This is Chris Arns, and if you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours has been and will continue to be

01:32:18

Ryan McGraw, Professor of Systematic Theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Taylor of South Carolina.

01:32:24

We are discussing, by good and necessary consequence, explorations in Reformed Confessional Theology, and if you'd like to join us on the air, now is the time to do so because we're running out of time.

01:32:37

Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

01:32:42

and if you could, Ryan, pick up where we left off. I was mentioning to you why is the church so important and why is this a dangerous thing when the importance of church membership and the submission to local elders, why it is so dangerous that this is deteriorating in our modern society where this is becoming such an unimportant thing in the lowest rung on the ladder of importance?

01:33:15

Well, it's interesting you ask the question because, on the one hand, the book, by good and necessary consequence, mostly deals with the principles giving us a foundation of all theology and practice in some examples, and I don't directly treat the issues with the church.

01:33:36

However, I wrote a subsequent booklet for Reformation Heritage called,

01:33:43

Is Church Membership Biblical?, that basically explores this question, and then

01:33:48

I just wrote a slightly larger book for them on the ordinary necessity of the visible church called,

01:33:55

The Ark of Safety, and that's under contract and they should be doing that. So I've been giving a lot of thought to this, in other words.

01:34:04

I think when we deal with questions like the nature and necessity of the church and the related question of church membership, again, people have different reasons why they may neglect the church and its importance.

01:34:26

Part of it may simply be that they don't understand any kind of divine warrant for the church and they think it's good enough for me to sit alone with my

01:34:37

Bible. Just to give an illustration of this, I have a dear friend who actually was an elder with Harold Camping at one point.

01:34:47

Wow. And he had a falling out with Camping over his predictions of the end of the world, but Camping had influenced him in the sense of thinking that the church age was over and he ought to not attend churches anymore.

01:35:06

So he went home and basically it was he and his wife doing family worship, and if I remember correctly, he was reading through Ephesians 4, which

01:35:15

I've quoted earlier today in the interview, where he said that Christ gave us not only apostles, prophets, evangelists, but pastors and teachers, and the purpose of these pastors and teachers is so that we wouldn't be tossed about by every wind of doctrine and that we grow to unity and maturity in Christ.

01:35:34

And my friend stopped reading and he looked at his wife and said, this is sinful, we need to be in church.

01:35:41

So in other words, he immediately realized that in the context of the church, if nothing else,

01:35:47

Christ has given officers in order to foster unity and maturity of the

01:35:53

Lord and give us stability, and that only occurs in the context of the church.

01:35:59

On that level, the first issue is that we need to understand our necessary connection to the church and our need to belong to the church.

01:36:13

If you look through not only the things that my friend discovered in Ephesians, but most of the

01:36:18

New Testament, it's actually striking how many of the commands of the

01:36:23

New Testament relate to how we deal with other Christians. I could actually invert that and put it negatively and say how few of the commands of the

01:36:34

New Testament address us without respect to other Christians. And so yes, we need to be born again and we need to know the

01:36:43

Lord for ourselves. But as Bannerman once put it, a solitary

01:36:48

Christian is worse than a contradiction. The Lord basically has purchased a church with his own blood.

01:36:57

The next issue then is going to be, some people will say, well,

01:37:02

I belong to the church invisible. I'm born again and I know

01:37:07

Jesus Christ and I don't need to be part of the church visible because the real thing that matters is that I'm born again and the church is an organism and it's living and it's not an institution and I don't need any part of the institutional church.

01:37:26

I think one of the difficulties here is, you know, when

01:37:33

Paul is referring to the church that is the visible church in Galatia to which he's writing in Galatians 5, he refers to the church as the

01:37:45

Jerusalem above and the mother of us all. On the basis of these statements in the ancient church and later with people like John Calvin, they would say things like, he who doesn't have the church as his mother does not have

01:37:57

God as his father. That's a strong statement and it's not a

01:38:02

Roman Catholic view of the church, but it's simply the view that you can't so separate what we call the visible and invisible church and act as though they're two churches.

01:38:14

We really have one church of the Lord Jesus Christ and there are aspects of this church that God alone sees and there are other aspects that are visible and external as well.

01:38:26

So when disciples are made in the book of Acts, they were added to the church by baptism in Acts chapter 2 and 3 ,000 souls were added to the church.

01:38:36

They counted them because that's how many people they baptized. That's not saying these people were all born again or no hypocrites were among them or they were all converted on the spot.

01:38:47

They all made professions of faith and they all joined themselves to the visible body of Christ.

01:38:53

Some, like Simon the Sorcerer, would later apostatize under different circumstances and prove that they were never truly of us, but you can't divide the visible and invisible in such a way that people choose the one they like and reject the other.

01:39:13

And then also the third issue that I think comes up here is, is there biblical warrant for church membership and membership roles?

01:39:22

Because people will say, well, show me in the Bible, and this relates to good necessary consequence.

01:39:30

Again, I wrote a booklet on this issue, is church membership biblical? And I think the issue here is, you know, you might have someone who believes that they need to have fellowship with Christians, they need to be in public worship, and they need to be ministering to other people, but they don't understand why they need to have their name on the membership roles.

01:39:50

Well, I think where the good necessary consequence comes in is without some sort of formal church membership, we won't be able to fulfill all the duties the scriptures require of us.

01:40:03

For example, if I'm to submit to my elders in the

01:40:09

Lord and those who are governing over me in the Church, I have to have some formal relationship to those elders, just like I wouldn't go and say to a young woman, go submit to a husband.

01:40:22

Well, she has to submit to her husband, one that she's committed to.

01:40:27

She can't just arbitrarily choose whatever. If I don't like this man to stay, then we're just not married, and I'm going to submit to this man over here.

01:40:36

Well, I think, you know, again, with church membership, isn't it the same? You can't just say, well, these elders know who

01:40:44

I am and I'm here, so there's no formal relationship. I mean, another aspect of this is in the

01:40:50

New Testament, in Acts 1, Acts 6, Acts 14, and other places, people elect their officers, whether it's an apostle, a deacon, or elders in each of those cases.

01:41:08

And how does a congregation elect her officers if you can't identify the congregation?

01:41:15

Is it just whoever shows up that day, and you have 100 people in your church, and now you're electing a pastor, and 300 show up and vote because they happen to be there?

01:41:24

There has to be some sort of tangible relationship between the pastor, the people.

01:41:30

There's implications for church discipline, and a number of other issues as well. But just to give a foretaste there,

01:41:37

I think there's a wide array of reasons why people might be tempted to denigrate the

01:41:45

Visible Church, and I'm only hinting at a few of them, but at least in addressing the necessity of living in community as Christians, not making a harsh distinction in a way that we divide the

01:41:58

Visible and Invisible Church, making them two churches, and then lastly, looking at the necessary consequences for membership.

01:42:07

Reverend Buzz Taylor has a question or comment. Well, it was just a comment. I was giving a thumbs -up all the way through, although you couldn't see my thumb,

01:42:14

I'm But I want to thank you for sharing what you just shared, and I trust there were many listeners who needed to hear what you just shared in the last five minutes.

01:42:25

Well, Buzz, why don't you, in a summary form, go through your own experience in regard to confessions, because you have not only been a

01:42:34

Christian in varying theological camps and churches and denominations, but you've been a pastor of a non -confessional, independent, fundamentalist

01:42:47

Baptist church, and you've been a pastor in a charismatic church, in a Church of God, Findlay, Ohio congregation, and a

01:42:54

Presbyterian church, so tell us about how you grew to appreciate confessions.

01:43:01

Did you ever specifically have enough awareness of their existence to disdain them before you came to embrace them?

01:43:08

Well, what's interesting, actually, is that just the way you listed the churches that I've pastored, you can see the progression of my theology, and of course the last one you mentioned was that I did pastor a

01:43:22

Reformed Presbyterian church, and I have been a Reformed Presbyterian now longer than I've ever been anything else, and it doesn't look like I'm going to be budging from that, but it was largely because of the fact that I knew nothing about Reformed theology or confessions or anything before that.

01:43:37

It was just me and Jesus pastoring a church. Those things just never occurred to me, and I knew something was wrong, and I knew that it was hard for identifying what we were as Christians and so forth, and when

01:43:51

I finally discovered the confessions, it's like, wow, this is tremendous, tremendous stuff, and it is unifying, and what you were saying about the church is so important because people don't think that they have to be part of, you know,

01:44:06

Jesus died for a body. We're saved into a kingdom. We're saved into a building.

01:44:12

We're saved into a temple, a kingdom, a holy nation, and we see all these things in the scriptures, and I never knew about those things before.

01:44:24

I was starting to come into these things. I was reading the Baptist Confession of 1689 while I was in an

01:44:29

Assembly of God church, if that tells you anything. Yeah. Well, Ryan, as you know, there have been churches throughout history, denominations or fellowships of churches that began faithfully and began biblically orthodox, biblically sound, who adhered to a confession, but then as years, decades, perhaps a century or so passed by, the confession became nothing more than a piece of artwork on the wall and lip service was given to it, and the actual belief system laid out in those confessions began to, in one way or another, be absent from those groups.

01:45:21

And for instance, one classic example that you as a Presbyterian are obviously aware of is the

01:45:28

Presbyterian Church USA. Although we have some friends who are faithful to biblical truth in that denomination, you have other congregations that are utterly apostate in that denomination.

01:45:42

But if you could talk about, perhaps warn even the listeners about the peril that awaits them when they abandon these solid biblical confessions that have stood the test of time.

01:46:00

Well, I think on a basic level, the last thing that you said is very key, that these are things that have stood the test of time.

01:46:12

And as our Reformed forefathers always used to say, antiquity doesn't make something true, it could just make it old falsehood, but at the same time, we recognize that we're not on an island, we don't interpret the

01:46:32

Bible by ourselves. I think to ignore the confessional tradition of the

01:46:38

Church is implicitly to impugn the faithfulness of Christ, because Christ promised that He would build

01:46:46

His Church and the gates of hell would never prevail against it, and He promised to give pastors and teachers to instruct

01:46:54

His people and to bring them to unity and to give them stability. And I think that there's an implicit and unintended arrogance in the

01:47:03

Church when we act as though it's good enough just to start over in our generation and our denominations, and we don't realize what we're doing, but we're actually reflecting poorly on Christ Himself and saying that He really hasn't done anything or said anything worthwhile in His Church until now.

01:47:24

Now again, that doesn't mean that the creeds are infallible, it doesn't mean that they're automatically right, but it does mean that we ought to take the time to investigate to see what

01:47:38

Christ has taught His people in the past. There are certain things too, such as the

01:47:46

Trinity and the two natures of Christ, where I've heard men in the pulpit try to refer to and preach these truths without the historic

01:47:56

Christian creeds, and the result has inevitably been disastrous in terms of confusing person and being language, and also in terms of Christ and virtually dividing

01:48:10

Him into two people instead of two natures and one person, and everything begins to fall apart at the seams.

01:48:20

And what we're talking about here is really the nature of God and the glory of our Savior, so these are not peripheral issues.

01:48:28

So these things are vital and very important. I will say at the other side, though, the ultimate issue is not being faithful to our creeds and confessions, but using our creeds and confessions as a tool to keep us faithful to Christ, because they basically help us interpret

01:48:49

Scripture. So you run into opposite extremes. You get a generation that simply holds to the confessions because that's what the

01:48:57

Church has always done, and they're not going back to the biblical foundation, and they cut the heart out of biblical faith and piety.

01:49:05

And so we need to go back each generation to the biblical foundations and use our creeds, our catechisms, our confessions as tools to bring our children and to bring our churches back to the biblical foundations.

01:49:22

And then you get people on the other extreme that basically say, well, you know, you're just trying to push these creeds and confessions, and you're elevating the confessions to the level of the

01:49:32

Bible, and that basically becomes a foil for any time you refer to the confessions at all.

01:49:39

You're elevating them above the Bible, as though I can't even talk about them anymore. Well, I think we do a great disservice to Christ if we elevate our confessions above the

01:49:54

Bible and don't go back to the biblical foundation. But I also think we do a great disservice to our churches and to our children if we neglect our confessions.

01:50:05

And I think that one of the reasons why people can say so little about Jesus Christ when they make their confessions at bay is that we have so little catechizing going on in our churches.

01:50:21

It's one thing to read the Bible. It's another thing to use something like a catechism that now connects some of the dots for you and helps you see what it means, for example, to be a prophet, priest, and king, and how

01:50:36

Christ fulfills those things, and how when you're reading the prophets, the Old Testament prophets address bad prophets, bad priests, bad kings, and now suddenly the door is open to talk about the

01:50:49

Gospel and to talk about Christ because of the catechism. And I think that this is a wonderful way to help us build our understanding of Scripture.

01:51:05

Maybe just to close that with one vignette, I remember hearing Sinclair Ferguson years ago describe a woman who had listened to one of his sermons on Acts 10 times, and she was still getting something out of it, and he was puzzled because he thought it was actually a very simple sermon and it was only about 30 minutes.

01:51:25

And then he went back and listened to it, and he concluded that if this woman had been catechized, she probably would have gotten everything after the first or second hearing.

01:51:35

And so I think we lose something significant without the creeds and confessions. We need a heartfelt, biblical piety and love to Christ, but we need to be using these historic resources as tools to help us foster this love for Christ.

01:51:53

Now how do you respond to the Roman Catholic who may have heard what you said earlier about how terrible it becomes when ministers have attempted to explain the two natures of Christ or the two wills of Christ without using the confessions?

01:52:14

They'll say, aha, there goes your sola scriptura for you out the window. How do you respond to a charge like that?

01:52:21

Because in fact, something very similar came up during a debate I just recently orchestrated between Dr.

01:52:27

Tony Costa of Toronto Baptist Seminary and Robert St. Genes of Catholic Apologetics International on the

01:52:35

Immaculate Conception of Mary. And the Catholic participant was trying to steer the debate away from the

01:52:45

Immaculate Conception of Mary and toward sola scriptura because he believed that is the

01:52:51

Protestant's heel, because he believes, as many Catholic apologists do, that we have an inability to adequately defend that dogma of the

01:53:03

Reformation above all else. But anyway, if you could comment on that.

01:53:10

Yeah, and it really depends on what you mean by sola scriptura. As many have said, there's a difference between sola scriptura and sola scriptura.

01:53:20

Right. And I think the difference there is actually embedded in some of the principles that I've already alluded to from Scripture itself, that we don't interpret the

01:53:31

Bible in a vacuum and simply as individuals. Another example to add to the ones that I've given is people will point to the

01:53:40

Bereans as the model for us because they search the Scriptures daily. What we actually forget in the context is that the

01:53:49

Bereans listened to the sermons and they read their Bibles, and then they listened to more sermons, and then they read their

01:53:55

Bibles. And because of that cycle, many of them came to the faith. And the searching of the

01:54:02

Scriptures in order to test what is heard and the combination of those things is what the

01:54:09

Lord blessed. It's not a Protestant principle that ignores the history and tradition of the

01:54:19

Church, at least not in a classic Reformed or even a Lutheran sense.

01:54:24

And I've already mentioned the quest of our forefathers to even develop their theology in light of the writings of the

01:54:32

Church Fathers and see precedence of where Christ has already been teaching these things and seen form of the

01:54:37

Church. The principle that the

01:54:44

Roman Catholic you're mentioning is picking up on may represent modern

01:54:52

Protestantism, but not its historic forms, and historically the closest approximation is really

01:55:00

Sassanianism, and the Sassanians denied the deity of Christ, they denied the doctrine of the

01:55:06

Trinity, they denied substitutionary atonement. In fact, Owen says that they deny everything, including the attributes of God, shy of the actual fact that the

01:55:18

Bible is inspired. And so they virtually have no Protestant beliefs, no

01:55:23

Catholic and Reformed beliefs whatsoever, and their basic idea was that we're simply reading our

01:55:30

Bibles, taking the literal sense, and we're throwing out all of the history of the

01:55:37

Church, all the creedal traditions, and everything, because it's man -made. Well, that led them into abominable heresies, and it wasn't a

01:55:48

Reformed principle that they were following. And in fact, there's evidence that, you know,

01:55:56

I already cited Owen, for example, and he responds to an English Athenian named

01:56:01

John Biddle, who just simply asks questions and quotes the Bible to answer the questions, and he says, well, obviously,

01:56:08

Biddle's problem doesn't lie in the text that he's citing, but in the questions he's asking. There's, you know, there's a philosophy behind these types of things that sounds like an innocent reading of Scripture coming to honest conclusions, but it's really driven by a whole philosophical system that's already precluded things like the

01:56:33

Trinity and the deity of Christ. So I think we just can't have this naive view that the

01:56:40

Lord has designed us to live on our own and be totally detached from the Christian tradition.

01:56:46

And in fact, he commands that we're not. We're not to forsake the assembly of the brethren, we're to submit to elders, we're not to lay hands on a teacher too quickly, you know, we're supposed to be very careful as to who we as a church appoint as teachers, so the very

01:57:08

Scriptures that we believe are inerrant have specific teachings in them that we're to follow as well.

01:57:16

Yeah, and basically the Scriptures are our only rule and authority, but that doesn't mean that we don't have aides in the church interpreting the

01:57:26

Scriptures. Right, right. As the Scriptures themselves command, we have. Yes. And we're out of time.

01:57:32

I want to make sure that our listeners have your different websites. First of all, the Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary is gpts .edu,

01:57:42

gp for Greenville Presbyterian, ts for Theological Seminary .edu.

01:57:48

I also found the website for Providence Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, North Carolina.

01:57:54

That is providenceegso .org.

01:57:59

That's providencegso .org, and I think

01:58:05

I added a letter there accidentally. ProvidenceGSO, G for George, S for Sam, O for October .org.

01:58:14

And Ryan will be there this Sunday, and do you have the times that you're going to be there? 10 a .m.

01:58:20

and 5 .30 p .m. 10 a .m. and 5 .30 p .m. for our listeners in the Greenboro, North Carolina area.

01:58:27

Their phone number, if you'd like to call, is 336 -553 -9991.

01:58:35

336 -553 -9991. And again, providencegso .org,

01:58:41

providencegso .org. They're on 4600 Lake Brandt Road in Greensboro, North Carolina.

01:58:49

That's Lake Brandt, B -R -A -N -D -T Road, Greensboro, North Carolina. You can get any book written by our guest

01:58:58

Ryan McGraw from Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service. That's cvbbs .com,

01:59:04

C -V for Cumberland Valley, B -B -S for BibleBookService .com. And we thank

01:59:09

Reformation Heritage Publishers, Reformation Heritage Books, for providing us with the books that we gave away today.

01:59:17

Thank you so much, Ryan, and we look forward to having you back on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Thank you, brother.

01:59:23

Good to be with you. And I want everybody to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater