July 2, 2021 Show with Marvin Olasky on “Lament for a Father: The Journey to Understanding & Forgiveness”

Proverbs 27:17 and the Purpose of Christian Conversation

Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 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 a 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 Friday, July 2nd, 2021, right at the beginning of the Fourth of July weekend.

I am so thrilled to have a first-time guest today that I have been wanting to interview for many years and now I finally have the opportunity. He is a brother in Christ whose name will not be unfamiliar or should I say not be unfamiliar to most of our listeners.

His name is Marvin Olasky. He's the author of over 20 books, an elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, an editor-in-chief of World Magazine, a dean of World Journalism Institute and he's also a Jewish believer in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Today, he's going to be addressing his latest book, Lament for a Father, the Journey to Understanding and Forgiveness and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Marvin Olasky.

Hey, Chris, thanks very much.

Hey, my pleasure, brother. Well, tell us first of all something about, I know it might be amazing if there were anyone listening that was not familiar with World Magazine, but there may be some because actually we do have not only new Christians on occasion listening, we even have non-Christians listening, we even have Muslims on occasion and atheists and others.

So why don't you give a brief description of World Magazine where you serve as editor-in-chief.

Sure, World is a biweekly news magazine. It's sometimes been called the Christian time magazine or perhaps like the Atlantic, we try to cover all kinds of things, not just church news, but politics, economics, sports, movies, books, music, all kinds of developments in American culture and we've been doing it for 35 years.

We have a staff of people located all across the country and also in Africa and Asia and Europe and our goal is to try to present a Christian worldview on all these topics, what we call biblical objectivity.

Since God created the world, God knows the nature of the world, we learn about the world by reading the Bible and we try to apply that in thinking through the news and issues of the day.

Well, I happen to highly value World Magazine and my relationship with World. They have been an advertiser on Iron Troupe and Zion Radio for several years and I always look forward to having my full-page print ad in World Magazine.

The next one will be this September and I am going to be getting a ton of that issue to give away at the upcoming G3 conference in Atlanta, Georgia, which is quite a spectacular conference. If anybody listening has never been there, I urge you to go and you'll be hearing ads for the G3 conference and for World Magazine coming up in the program.

Well, we have a... Actually, before I go to your testimony, which we always have our first-time guests give a summary of their salvation testimony, but before we do that, I forgot to mention or ask you to describe and explain World Journalism Institute.

Well, World Journalism Institute is our training mechanism for people who are going to come to work at World and also go on to write in secular publications or ministry publications. We have several parts of it.

The part that's been going the longest since 1999 is for college students and recent graduates. It's a two-week super intensive training course now at Doerr University in Iowa where we teach juniors and seniors in college and folks up to age 30 about how to be a journalist in print, in radio, and now on video also.

So that's been our main function all these years. We also have, which my wife and I particularly enjoy, we have a mid-career course for people typically in their 40s who have had good careers in law or teaching or all kinds of professions and they'd like to come to do some writing for World or improve their writing skills generally.

So we've been doing that since 2011 in our living room here in Austin, and that's lots of fun. We have, along with people from those occupations, we have people coming out of the military, jet pilots, sheriffs, ex-CIA, FBI people, and we all learn about journalism and spend a very intensive week doing that.

So those are the two major components. We have internships. My wife and I now have our 33rd and 34th interns living with us here in Austin. We spend two months of teaching, and those are the future staff members of World.

We've done things in China and would like to do more, but that's pretty closed down now. We have WJI coming up in Europe next year. So a lot of variety of things all dedicated to trying to teach people how to be biblically objective journalists.

Well, that's great. And if anybody wants more information on the World Journalism Institute, go to worldji .com, worldji .com. And even though you'll be hearing the ads for World magazine, let me plug their website, WNG, which stands for World News Group, wng .org.

From Atheist and Communist to Reformed Christian

Well, as I said just moments ago, Marvin, we have a tradition on Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio whenever we have a first-time guest, for them to give a summary of their salvation testimony. I know that there will be a lot of overlap with our main theme today because your book, Lament for a Father, actually details a lot of what went on in your life growing up in a Jewish family.

But if you could, before we discuss the heart of the book, let our audience know something about your upbringing and what providential circumstances our sovereign Lord raised up in your life that drew you to himself and brought you to saving faith in Jesus Christ as your Messiah.

Well, it's a story that's all too typical in Judaism now. Bar Mitzvah 13, Atheist 14. I read Sigmund Freud. I read H .G. Wells' History of the World, which was a straight materialist Darwinian history, and I believed it all.

So I became an atheist all through high school. I continued to scoff at God. Went to college at Yale University and kept being affirmed in my atheism, kept moving to the left. These were the Vietnam War days, so I was involved in lots of demonstrations.

Became a Marxist by the time I was in my last year at Yale. Bicycled across the country to Oregon. Worked on a newspaper there and joined the Communist Party USA. This is back in 1972. I actually was a card-carrying communist and pretty content in that.

Traveled across the Pacific on a Soviet freighter, went on the Trans-Siberian Railroad all the way across the Soviet Union to talk with my big brothers in Moscow. Came back, worked on the Boston Globe as a communist, and then went to graduate school at the University of Michigan.

Much to my surprise, actually astonishment, God, in his kindness and mercy, let me know about himself. On November 1, 1973, there was nothing spectacular or unusual about that day until 3 o 'clock in the afternoon.

I was sitting in my room just off the campus at University of Michigan. Was reading an article by my hero, Vladimir Lenin, called Socialism and Religion, where he talks about atheism as the basis of socialism.

And for whatever reason, started having thoughts coming into my head at that point. Well, what if there really is a God of some kind? What if I'm not right in this atheism that I've affirmed for 10 years now, just about?

What if, what if, what if? And then that led me into thinking, well, why exactly am I a communist? What exactly has America done to alienate me so? My grandfather left Russia to escape from the czars, and why am I pledging allegiance to czar Leonid Brezhnev?

Back in 1970, fall of 1973, eight hours I sat in that chair, wasn't doing drugs, wasn't hallucinating, just there sitting in that chair hour after hour thinking, well, what if I'm wrong? Got up at 11 o 'clock, wandered around the cold and dark University of Michigan campus for a couple of hours just thinking, what have I done?

Why am I doing this? And at 1 o 'clock in the morning decided, hey, I'm not an atheist. And if I'm not an atheist, then I'm not a communist anymore. And resigned from the Communist Party several days later.

I won't go through the whole convoluted next three years because it wasn't, I believed in a God of some kind, but what kind of God I didn't know. But all along I was trying to run from this. And one of the reasons I think I became a reformed Christian along with reading the Bible is just that I did nothing at all to move towards God.

It was always God and his majesty and mercy moving towards me. In order to get a PhD, you have to have a good reading knowledge of a foreign language. And the language, I had forgotten my childhood Hebrew.

I never really learned all that much of high school French. So my language was Russian, which I had learned to be able to speak to other communists. I had to keep working at Russian even though I was no longer a communist because that was the language I needed to get in order to get a PhD.

I had to have a good reading knowledge of something while it was Russian. I had a book, a little book that had been given to me in Oregon a couple of years before. I just held on to it as a souvenir, a copy of the New Testament in Russian.

And I started reading that just for reading practice. And reading very slowly and having to puzzle over the words, that basically made me think that there's something really from God in this whole Christian thing that I always scoffed at before.

I thought that Christians were kind of stupid people who worship Christmas trees. And this was really something. The New Testament, by the time I got to the Sermon on the Mount, I thought, wow, as a communist, I didn't believe in an eye for an eye.

I believed in two eyes for an eye, revenge and hit back. And here the Sermon on the Mount was saying, turn the other cheek. Where did this come from? I thought this is something special from God. But again, I wasn't doing anything.

I was reading it to get a good reading knowledge of Russian. The fall of 1974, the professors of the University of Michigan, in their wisdom, assigned me to teach a course in early American literature because they didn't want to teach it.

They wanted to teach Polynesian literature or LGBT literature or stuff. I had to teach early American literature and never studied it. What's early American literature? Puritan sermons. And they quickly made me understand that this idea I had that Christians were stupid was totally wrong.

You can love the Puritans. You can hate the Puritans. But they worked things out very logically. They looked at the Bible. They applied it. How did this all work out? I was really impressed with all these dead white males from three centuries ago.

So that led me also towards becoming a Christian, but I wasn't. I was very resistant to it. I knew it was suicidal in academic terms, given the way universities are these days. I got a job teaching at the California University at San Diego.

I started thinking, should I go to a church? Should I find out? I know now what the Puritans believed, but they've been dead for a long time. Should I find out what Christians today believe? So I looked in the Yellow Pages, looked under conservative, because I was no longer a Marxist.

I didn't want to deal with Marxist Christians. I thought, okay, conservative stuff. I saw a conservative Baptist. I knew Baptists were Christians. I had read about John the Baptist. That's about how much I knew about contemporary Christianity.

So I started going to this church, and it was a church that the preacher had the same sermon every week. You must be born again. That's what I needed to hear. One day, a minister of visitation, an old guy named Earl Atnip, came over to my apartment.

He didn't feel he had to give me any exciting intellectual arguments. He just said, well, you believe this stuff, don't you? I said, reluctantly, well, I guess I do. He said, you better join up, which meant professing faith in Christ and being baptized, and that's what I did.

That was 45 years ago, and I am very thankful for that. A year later, I won't go through the whole story, but a year later, there was a Reformed pastor in Indianapolis where I was giving a lecture on Marxism, and he had mercy on me.

He saw my theology was not very well developed. I stayed with him, and for four days, he talked me through Romans, and we studied Romans together. Then we went over to a bookstore, and he gave me a copy of two volumes of Calvin's Institutes, and then he said, you better get this and get this and get this, and so I wasted my budget.

I thought it might have been a waste, but actually it turned out to be hugely profitable, reading Systematic Theology by Burkhoff, reading some commentaries, reading more Reformed stuff, and reading Calvin's Institutes turned me into that, his analysis, his exegesis of Scripture, along with my own personal experience of not moving a muscle to become a Christian.

All God, all the time, I came out of that realizing that a Reformed understanding made a lot of sense and was true to the Bible. So eventually joined Presbyterian, Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and then Presbyterian Church in America.

Became an elder a couple of decades ago, and yeah, that's been my slow, continued learning.

Just out of curiosity, since you're only the second Marxist, or should I say former Marxist that I've ever met that has become a Reformed elder, I'm sure there are many more out there, and sadly there are many that are still Marxists, but there are only two of you that I've met personally, and the other, I was wondering if you knew him, is my dear friend of several decades, going back to the 1980s, Bill Shishko of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

I've heard the name, but I don't think I've ever met him.

He was in Franklin Square, Long Island, and now he's pastoring an OPC church plant called The Haven, a very unusual name for an Orthodox Presbyterian church, but I know that he has a high regard for you, and I'm glad to know that people who are Marxist aren't necessarily going to remain that way.

I don't know if he was ever a card-carrying communist, but he describes himself as a former Marxist beatnik in the 60s, got saved, I believe, somewhere in the 70s, went to Bob Jones University, then became a Calvinist at Bob Jones University, of all places, after reading Walt Chantry's book, Today's Gospel, Authentic or Synthetic, and has been a Reformed Christian ever since, but hopefully I'll be able to introduce you to you guys at some point in the future.

Please do. I'd like to hear his story.

Oh, I definitely will. Just before I go into our discussion on the book, have you gotten much feedback from fellow Jewish believers who, it seems, the majority really have a great distaste and greatly disdain Reformed or Calvinistic theology?

Have you gotten much negative pushback from your fellow Jewish believers on that?

As I'm thinking about it, I haven't gotten much, either positive or negative, from Jewish believers. The book's been out about three weeks, and I've gotten lots of feedback from Christians, but not much from Jewish Christians, not much from Orthodox Jews, some of whom are friends, some of whom tend to be very critical of me, thinking of me as a traitor.

But no, I'd be interested in responses.

I would love to see, by God's providence, if there could ever be a meeting arranged between you and Ben Shapiro and Michael Levin.

Well, you know, I knew Ben a long time ago. I don't think we ever actually met in person, but we were both columnists with Creator Syndicate back 20 years or so ago. He was just a young guy just coming out of Harvard Law or in Harvard Law.

So, yeah, we haven't had communication since then, but he's done great things, and I like his writing a lot. But no, I haven't had much discussion with Jewish believers recently. There are a few I know.

Just this morning, I was just being asked about contacts with my Jewish brethren, and it reminded me of a fellow named Irving Kristol, who was very significant in neoconservative circles back towards the end of the last century.

And he was a Jewish guy who welcomed me, saying, we need a smart Jew who's a Christian. So, yeah, that attitude I am perfectly happy with. But, yeah, sometimes there's been some animosity, I hope not coming from me, but coming from Orthodox Jews who don't like the idea of someone growing up in a Jewish family and becoming a Christian.

So, yeah, I'm interested in Jewish contacts. I would like to be a bridge between my people from heritage and my people in theology. Amen.

And I ask the apologies, or the forgiveness, I should say, from Mark Levin. I called him Michael Levin. Mark Levin is who I was referring to as the second person I would love to see you in a dialogue with.

He seems to be very open to speaking with Christians. Unfortunately, one of them in particular, who has a very heretical understanding of the Jewish people, John Hagee, believes that Jews do not need to come to Christ to be saved.

So that was an unfortunate encounter that he had. In my opinion, I'm sure Mark enjoyed it, but as a Christian witness to the conversation, I was very dismayed. But thank God that he is in control and can bring to Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro and all of the folks that God chooses to call to himself, and it's not all up to us.

Praise be to God.

Yes.

Well, is this book, Lament for a Father, The Journey to Understanding and Forgiveness, the first time that you've written something that is this deeply personal?

Yes.

In fact, I'm going to go to the first break right now because I don't want to interrupt you. I'm going to go to the first break right now and we'll plunge right into the contents of the book and the reasons that compelled you to write the book.

And I want to remind our listeners that if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

Don't go away. We'll be right back with Marvin Olasky after these messages from our sponsors.

I'm James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. My friend Chris Arnson, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and I are headed down to Atlanta, Georgia once again for the G3 Conference. This year's G3 will be held Thursday, September 30th, through Saturday, October 2nd on the theme, Christ is Supreme Over All.

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Why Marvin Olasky Wrote Lament for a Father

Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen, if you just tuned us in. We have a wonderful guest today on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio for the very first time, Marvin Olasky, and we are discussing his book Lament for a Father, The Journey to Understanding and Forgiveness.

If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Marvin, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N 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 the USA, and only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

That's chrisarnzen at gmail .com. I also just remembered somebody else I'd love to see. You have an in-depth meeting with. That's Dennis Prager. Share your faith with Dennis. I know that Dennis has had a number of interactions with Christians, and I would love to see someone really boldly address the issue of salvation with him.

But I want to just read a couple of endorsements for this book of yours published by PNR Publishing. Lament for a Father, The Journey to Understanding and Forgiveness. First of all, the world-renowned syndicated columnist Cal Thomas says,.

As a brilliant writer and thinker, Marvin consoles those who have had difficult parents and shows through his own experience they do not have to determine the course of the lives of their children. And Wayne Grudem, distinguished research professor of theology and biblical studies at Phoenix Seminary says,.

Anyone who has experienced a difficult parent-child relationship will appreciate the wisdom in this book, and there are many more who have provided accolades for this book. So tell us, Marvin, what made you think at this point in your life, after being in journalism for so many years and being a Bible-believing Christian for so many years that you had to sit down and share with the public something so personal, private and intimate?

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a column in World where I just told the story from my childhood. I started out referring to, and I suspect lots of listeners here have seen the movie at some point, Field of Dreams, which is in one sense a baseball movie, but basically it's a movie about father-son relationships that develops as an important theme of the movie.

And in the movie, the main character really yearns to have a catch with his dad, just throwing a ball back and forth. And so I told the story about the one bit of a catch I had with my father. He wasn't interested in baseball at all, and I was when I was 11 years old, still am.

We went outside and we lived in urban greater Boston, so didn't have a backyard. So we were out on the street and I really wanted to become a decent fielder. This was my first season. At 11 years old, my first season of Little League Baseball.

And so I've been begging him, give me some practice with ground balls. And so he threw a ground ball to me. I mean, it took a couple of bounces. I should have stopped it. I didn't. It went by me.

My error.

And so I went chasing it down the street, caught up to it, kept rolling and rolling, turned back, and there he was walking indoors, walking back up the steps into our apartment. And that was the end of our playing catch.

And I wrote that. I wrote that in a column just because in the column, I sometimes get personal with readers. I've been editing world for 29 years now, and a lot of them have written me letters over the years, and I sometimes write about family stuff and so forth.

The outpouring of mail in response to that column was the biggest, as far as personal letters, people describing their own experience that I had ever gotten before in all these years. Sometimes when we've written something that was unpopular politically, I'd get a lot of mail, but it wasn't like this.

It was kind of raw, emotional, personal mail. And I saw that a lot of people had experiences like that, difficulties with dads in particular. So I had been over the years, occasionally thinking about this, trying to understand more about my father and my mother and how they got along or did not get along.

I had talked with a lot of my cousins for their memories because my father died of cancer in 1984, and my mother died at age 90 in 2008. But over the years since then, I had been taking some notes occasionally.

But once I saw the reaction here, then I figured, OK, there are a lot of people who would find this interesting and could possibly be helped by it. So that's when I got to work actually writing this and communicated with one of my favorite publishers, PNR.

Those folks were interested in doing it, so got to work, wrote it, and it came out early, well, about a month ago, actually, in time for Father's Day. And there's been a lot of interest. So I'm glad to see that this could actually be helpful to some people.

So interesting for me just to write about it and think about it. But I don't write books the way I might write a diary if I ever got into that. It's the purpose is to communicate with other people. And I think I've seen that there is an interest in this because there are there are a lot of people who have had jagged relationships with their parents and fathers in particular.

Well, I actually want to thank Emily Etherton and Bryce Craig from PNR Publishing for bringing this book to my attention and requesting that I interview Marvin on it. They've been a good friend. PNR Publishing has been a good friend to Iron Sherpa's Iron Radio since our inception in 2005 and have always been very supportive of all the events associated with this program, as well as our interviews.

But if you could now get into some of the most life forming experiences and memories from your upbringing and your childhood that you care to share. We don't want to give away the whole store and leave no surprises that are going to be hopefully awaiting our listeners in your book.

But if you could share as much as you care to as far as some of these crucial experiences, not only perhaps ones that left scars, but even ones that are cherished memories, no matter how few they may be.

A Childhood Marked by Maternal Disappointment and Paternal Ambition

All right. Well, certainly what I remember the most because it was pretty much a weekly constant in our apartment over the years was my mother's disappointment in my father. He was faithful to her. He was kind to her.

But she had married him back in 1946 with the hope and probably the expectation that he would get a Ph .D., become a professor, become a famous anthropologist. She had had a very dismal and sometimes brutal childhood, and she had thought that he would whisk her away from all that and she'd be able to travel around the world and in a sense have reflected glory from his academic accomplishments.

He'd write books. He'd give lectures. He would be Dr. and Mrs. Olasky, and she would rejoice in that after years of sadness that she had had. And that, he disappointed her for a whole lot of reasons. He never achieved academically what she thought he would, did not get a Ph .D., did not become a professor, did not travel, and she resented that.

Until they were old, they never owned a house, or when they were old, they bought a condominium in Florida, but they never owned a house. My mother had sisters and brothers who were economically successful and had nice houses, so her regular once a week for a while, she would just make her disappointment known.

By the way, not to interrupt you, but were these personal goals and aspirations of your father himself to be an academic and actually specifically in anthropology? Were these things that he was studying for and striving for?

Yes, up to a certain point in his life, and then there was a decided change. So she was disappointed. I mean, she called him lazy. She called him he never tried to make her happy by giving her these things and so forth.

So, yeah, she didn't have a whole lot of respect for him, and she showed that, and that, I think, had an effect on my older brother and myself. But he hadn't been lazy. He was very ambitious. He grew up in Malden, Massachusetts, a working-class suburb of Boston, went to Malden High School, did well there, not spectacularly, but well, but applied to Harvard.

When he graduated from high school in 1935, he applied to Harvard and was turned down, a great disappointment to him. But it shouldn't have been a surprise. Malden was not at all a feeder school for Harvard.

It wasn't like a prep school like Exeter or Andover or those which send regularly a lot of their graduates to Harvard. It was Malden High School, kind of a dumpy high school, and I don't know if any people regularly from Malden High School got into Harvard.

And then his recommendations. I was able, after a lot of pushing and shoving, I was able to get his full file from Harvard, which included his applications, included a lot of correspondence between the Harvard administrators and him and professors and so forth.

And it was a revelation because when he applied to Harvard, he had no idea whatsoever how to get into Harvard. Harvard was anti-Semitic, officially. There were lots of smart Jewish kids, and Harvard had a cap on Jewish kids.

Sometimes 10%, sometimes certainly no more than 15 of their entering class, even though academically these kids were, for the most part, very, very good. And so his grades weren't, my father's grades weren't all that outstanding.

And his recommendations were from neighbors writing things like, he has all the wisdom of the rabbis. And what a fine Jewish boy he is, a credit to the Bible and everything. And this was exactly the wrong thing to write to get into Harvard.

My father had not a clue about that. So it was funny to read that. But here's what happened, and I'm still not exactly sure how he did it. He somehow managed to go to Boston Latin, which was the elite public school of Boston, and had a year, a postgraduate year at Boston Latin.

I don't know how he did it. There may have been one particular guy from a foundation who helped him do it. But it was very unusual at the time. But he remade himself. Boston Latin was a theater school for Harvard.

It was the elite public school, but he wasn't, he didn't live in Boston. He lived in Malden. How he did it, I still don't know, but he did it. And then the recommendations he got that year were totally different from what he had had before.

The recommendations from the headmaster at Boston Latin saying, what a fine manly fellow my father was. And what a gentleman and a scholar. I mean, these were all dog whistles, as we might say. These were all clues saying, he is not one of these Jews you don't like.

He fits in well in this elite Protestant, largely, some Catholics, this environment here in Boston Latin. And thus he'll fit in well at Harvard. And my father's interests when he applied the first time were, he was interested in the Hebrew scriptures.

He was interested in this. When he applied from Boston Latin, suddenly he was interested in football and astronomy and other things, never of which I saw him being interested in later. But he knew how to apply.

He had learned how to apply to Harvard, and he got in. Wow. So he had enormous ambition. His father at that point, his father was an immigrant from Russia. His father's aspirations for him were to become a Hebrew school teacher, which was a good white-collar application.