July 12, 2019 Show with Rutledge E. Etheridge III on “God Breathed: Connecting Through Scripture to God, Others, the Natural World, & Yourself”

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 in view in conversation, to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions. And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth, who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 12th day of July, 2019.

Salvation Story and Call to Ministry

And I am thrilled to have a first-time guest today. His name is Rutledge E. Etheridge III. That is one of the coolest names, I think, that I've ever heard in my life. I don't think I can say it without pronouncing it.

His name is Rutledge E. Etheridge III, but he likes to go by the name Rut, and he is an assistant professor of biblical studies at Geneva College, and today we are going to be addressing a book of his that is soon to be in print through Crown Covenant Publications, a very good friend of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, who routinely provides us with giveaway books for our listeners.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Rutledge E. Etheridge.

Thank you very much, Chris. I really appreciate the opportunity.

And this book of which I speak that is soon to be in print is God-Breathed, Connecting Through Scripture to God, Others, the Natural World, and Yourself. Before we go into the theme of the book, we have a tradition here at Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Rut, where whenever we have a first-time guest who happens to be a Christian, which would be the vast majority of the time, we do on rare occasions interview non-Christians over reasons that may be involving a debate, or this non-Christian individual may just have something very important to say for even Christians to hear and learn from.

But I'm not a modern-day ecumenist, by the way, I want to make that clear. But for the most part, we interview Christians on this show, Bible-believing Protestant individuals, and before we go into the theme, the tradition that we have is that you give a summary of your personal salvation story, let our listeners know what kind of a religious atmosphere, if any, you were raised in, and what kind of providential circumstances our Lord raised up in your life that drew you to Himself and saved you.

Sure. Well, I first began to be presented in a consistent way in a tiny little Christian school in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, where my sister and I were reared by our parents, and I had transferred out of a public school and into that school, largely just because of a bad experience at the public school, and day after day I kept hearing of Jesus and of my need for Jesus, and my family had been a little bit in and out of church, and I was quickly convinced of my need of a Savior, I had no objections whatsoever to Jesus being my Savior.

I think the thing that I struggled with most was whether, for years, really, I would choose one night, because it was only 74, the previous, and then by God's grace, through His Word, through prayer, through good Bible teaching, my salvation was not a matter of my continually grasping after it, but rather of the Lord Jesus Himself holding onto me, and passages such as John chapter 10 and so many others in Scripture, which really became very, very personal to me over the years, and also with the privilege now to...

Amen.

From Arminianism to Sovereign Grace

And how did you discover and come to believe in the doctrines of Sovereign Grace, also known as Reformed Theology?

Sure. When I was an undergrad at Cedarville University in Ohio, and one of the thinkers that we studied was John Calvin, and for a lot of different reasons, coming into my undergrad days, I absolutely hated John Calvin, a lot of animosity toward him.

The only problem is I had never actually read John Calvin.

So you hated a figment of your imagination, then?

Absolutely. I hated the stereotype, I hated the straw man, and it was some visceral hate of necessity, and, you know, not to praise a man, but, you know, the opening section, as he's often built up, the more I studied his life, the more I studied the context in which the Reformers ministered, and once you begin to grasp that, a number of other particular...

Amen.

Yes, the final straw that broke the camel's back of my own personal Arminianism as a very new Christian, even though I didn't even know what Arminianism was, I didn't know who John Calvin was, or Jacob Arminius, or Charles Spurgeon, or even George Whitefield, but it happened to be a tract that a friend, who was also a fellow member of Calvary Baptist Church of Amityville, Long Island, which is now Grace Reform Baptist Church of Long Island in Merrick, New York, but this tract was George Whitefield's letter to John Wesley on election, and it was Whitefield's biblical defenses of unconditional election that broke the straw, or that was the straw that broke the camel's back with me, and initially, I hated it.

I said, this is true, but I hate it, and I was, like, filled with fear about it, but then within, I would say, a couple of months, maybe less, I fell in love with those teachings. They radicalized my personal relationship with Christ, because Christ, no longer in my mind, died for a nameless, faceless sea of humanity with a hypothetical redemption.

I hope that those for whom he died would be redeemed. It was an actual accomplished act. When he said, it is finished, he redeemed me personally, and that just really revolutionized my whole understanding of the gospel and of grace itself.

Yeah, yeah, it took me several months longer, in fact, a lot longer. I remembered singing in chapel and just being so utterly disillusioned. I put my faith in, he seems like a tyrant, and the Spirit worked in my heart, and I gradually, and I still remember the night in my dorm room, sitting there sulking, epically and theologically sulking, and the Lord just banging my head up against the rock of my salvation, thinking that if I were in charge of the universe and salvation and all things, that I would be so much wiser and more compassionate, and it just makes no sense to say those kinds of things in the face of our God-level mysteries that count ourselves in a labyrinth.

As Paul does in Romans 9 -11, at some point, he's done answering arguments, and he in essence just says, now you just worship. And I think that, each of us, and only makes us want to hold out the gospel of Jesus Christ to everyone all the more fully and all the more frequently.

Yes, and although we are talking a lot about John Calvin right now, the thing that's interesting is that many non-Calvinists, and especially anti-Calvinists, because there is a difference, you can be a non-Calvinist without being malicious and being passionately in a hateful state against Calvinism, but many non-Calvinists, or should I say anti-Calvinists, say that we worship John Calvin, that we put Calvin above the scriptures, we put Calvin above Christ, which is a slanderous argument, because I've rarely ever met anybody that comes close to that from our theological camp.

But the interesting thing to me is, in my experience as a Reformed Baptist Christian, although Calvin does come up in sermons occasionally, especially when a pastor may be quoting from the institutes or something, and although we do regard Calvin very highly, we regard his contributions to theology very highly, it seems to me that, in my experience, in all the Bible conferences I've been to and all the Reformed churches I've been to, John Calvin is actually rarely mentioned.

I mean, you might more frequently hear Charles Spurgeon quoted, or if the speaker is quoting from a non-canonical, non-inspired, you know, earthly author, Calvin, I think, is quoted in the minority of times, so it's kind of ironic that they would say we worship him.

Yeah, and I think Calvin would, you know, bury an unmarked grave, and, you know, it's important for us to have thinkers as landmarks in church history to be able to look back on and to not elevate by any means above the Word of God, but I'm just struck by, again, not to praise a man, but to debunk a stereotype.

You know, stories that you hear of, or that you often don't hear of Calvin, you know, for instance, he would open the door in the middle of the night to a knock, and there, standing in front of him, was a woman in her nightgown in blood, and her children next to her, and what had just happened, and killed her husband in bed next to her, because her husband was dead, and so Calvin, and he would mobilize others in the town to take in these new widows, you know, and these semi-orphans, and he was deeply engaged in Gospel ministry on that level.

He would, you know, pawn his priceless theology books to supply the material needs of these newly destitute. When he was sitting in that day, he would die in the near future because of the Gospel. I think one of the things that's helpful for us, especially in our day, you know, for any of us who would not want to claim the mantle of Calvin, but a clarity in viewing Scripture, we need to remember what the lives of these Reformers were like, you know, and just the self-denial that they, by God's grace, in many ways, faithfully lived out, and I think that would be anti-Calvinist, so to speak, but would also temper, especially on social media.

Right. In fact, I could say with near certainty that in the Reform Baptist Church, where I am a member, my pastors quote far more frequently from Martin Luther than they do from John Calvin, even though we would have more in disagreement with Luther, we still seem to.

Be quoting him more often. Whoever serves Scripture the best. You know, if you're working with a particular text, and you want to get at what the Holy Spirit put there, and, you know, whoever it is who helped us more clearly see that, you know, we want to give proper attribution and not make discernment about them, but the goal is to get into the Scriptures, you know, the Scriptures alone, and to see in the Scriptures, you know, the incarnate.

Word. Yeah, and I think Martin Luther is also your go-to guy when it comes to shock value. He was a very earthy, earthy guy that didn't hold, he didn't pull back punches.

Yeah, our culture does not have a monopoly on shocking things said.

Geneva College and a Call to Ministry

Well, what particular branch of the Reform tradition are you in? I assume, since you were once on the faculty at the Reform Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I'm assuming you're Presbyterian.

I don't know if you're a Covenanter, but tell us where you are as far as your branch of the Reformation today.

Sure. In 2006, I was ordained as a teaching elder within the Reform Presbyterian Church of North America, and as you mentioned, I began to teach adjunct at our denominational seminary, from which I graduated in 2006 as well, and did that for a number of years, and did that until I began to serve at my current place of employment, which is the Denominations College at Geneva College.

So that's my background since 2006.

Now, how did you realize after becoming a Christian that God was placing a call upon your life to enter into the ministry and also to enter into the realm of academia?

Sure. Well, in college, due to a degree in professional writing, and I always loved to write, my dad was a writer, and more of that particular pursuit took on a technical writing aspect, you know, writing manuals for understanding my life.

You know, I was interested more in the creative side, and they didn't have something particularly conducive to it, and every student at my undergrad got a minor in Bible, but I had double-majored in Bible, and I remember one particular summer before my sophomore year thinking, you know what, I'm just going to go for it, and I'm going to focus in on Bible, I'll pick up a philosophy minor, and I got to work with a wonderful pastor who was faculty as well and just mentored me along, and told me in his office one day that in terms of pastoral ministry, I'm barking up the right tree.

You know, I love interacting with people on the basis of Scripture, I love serving them in the name of Christ and just diving deep into the Word of God and speaking, which pastors tend to have to do, being galvanizing and hearing it even as you're preaching it, sitting under it even as you're preaching it.

And the Lord really blessed that, not only the sense of internal call, but as I was developing more Reformed convictions, we landed in an RPCNA church, my wife and I, in the late 90s, early 2000s, and a number of the elders there recognized what they thought was the Lord's work in me, and I did what was called being taken under care of presbytery, where you're mentored by elders and put on a trajectory.

Geneva College and the Meaning of Theopneustos

Now, can you tell us a little bit about Geneva College, where you serve on the faculty? Sure, yeah, Geneva College is right here in Western PA, it's a liberal arts college, and one of the features that I love most about Geneva is that it is an open meeting that we do not require from any faith or no particular faith at all, which just makes it a wonderful mission field where the missional nature of the place is obvious, and we wear it on our sleeve, you know, as opposed to having to perhaps dig beneath the surface a little bit to find the same dynamics in colleges, which, so that's one of my favorite parts about it.

The website is.

Geneva .edu, geneva .edu. Now, let's begin our discussion on this book that you have written, God Breathed, Connecting Through Scripture to God, Others, the Natural World, and Yourself. In fact, since I have a very dear friend, a longtime dear friend, who is a New Testament Greek scholar, Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, one of the few Greek terms that I can remember since he's mentioned it so often is theanoustos, which means God breathed.

Tell us exactly what that means. And I know that most often we who are Christians, especially perhaps evangelicals, we will speak about the divine inspiration of the scripture, but in actuality, the scripture is expired.

We don't use that term because, yeah, we don't use that term because it connotates death in our minds. So we don't use that expired, but it is breathed out, it is not.

Breathed in. That's right, that's right. Yeah, Paul in 2 Timothy 3 .16 makes this really stunning claim about scripture. He says, all scriptures, as he says, theanoustos, it's breathed out by God, and then he goes on to enumerate the particular uses of scripture.

And it's just such a stunning claim that he makes. You know, obviously he has in mind the Old Testament scriptures, which were then extant, but is making a statement as to anything that would count as scripture.

It is God breathed, it is breathed out by God. It's, Lord Jesus says, by bread alone, but by some, the mouth of God. And in fact, it was a lecture James White was involved in where it really struck me, and I'm sorry, I don't remember the reference, but he pointed out that Jesus would refer to the written word dynamic of bread by God.

The written word is out to us right now, and Paul is a protege, a reminder. And when I read this entire quote, or this entire title,.

I should say, God breathed, connecting through scripture to God, others, the natural world, and yourself. I am reminded of a phrase, I think I first heard it years ago from Dr. Joel Beakey, president of Puritan Reform Theological Seminary, but the term that I heard years ago is experimental or experiential Calvinism.

Does that have something to do with what you're,.

Why you titled your book this way? Sure, though I'd never thought of it in those terms. I think the heart of what Dr. Beakey is communicating is very much there, and hearkens back to what I mentioned earlier about Calvin's own life in terms of his refusal to sit idle and pontificate, but rather actually get into the trenches of hands-on gospel ministry.

And the idea, as Dr. Beakey has recently written on it as well, is, you know, these are not dry academic theories. I think true theology is not theoretical and practical. And that's one of the things I love about scripture the most, and one of the things that really prompted me into the writing of this particular book, is that scripture has a built-in epistemology.

You don't really know unless you do. You don't really understand the Word of God. You're not reacting. It manifests itself in your life in discernible ways that look increasingly like God's law. And I love that, and it's such a, and by that I don't just mean the young adults, it has a common characteristic and maybe not a common chronology.

And ivory tower that Jesus summarizes as loving God with all that we are,.

And loving our neighbors as ourselves. Now you quoted a big fancy ivory tower word there, epistemology. That would be why we believe what we believe, would that be correct, a way of defining.

That? It gets into that as it explores issues of faith. Most basically it's the study of knowledge, it's how we know what we know, what we mean to know. Yeah, it's like you said, it's an ivory tower word that you can put in front of people and they might think you're smart.

Scripture, Revival, and Mysticism

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We are now back with our guest today, Rutledge E. Etheridge III, Associate, or should I say Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at Geneva College. We are discussing a book that is soon to be in print, written by our guest, God Breathed, Connecting Through Scripture to God, Others, the Natural World, and Yourself.

And Rut, I was interestingly and providentially having a conversation with my friend Buzz Taylor today, Buzz Taylor, who many of our listeners of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio will recognize that name because he, for quite a while, was my co-host.

And he has been spending a lot of his time lately writing his own book on eschatology, so he had to take a hiatus from being our co-host, and he may be back in the near future. But we were having a discussion on true and false revival, and Buzz was reminding me that from his study of revivals, both true and false, he said that the false revivals were not coming about through a connection to the scripture.

They were coming from one's personal emotions and through experience, primarily. And would you say that that is a valid statement that Buzz made, that from his understanding of history, the false revivals really have little to do with the God-breathed words contained in the inerrant.

Scriptures? Sure. You know, I'm no scholar on revivalism, but that, of course, is always the tendency of the human heart, and sometimes it comes garbed in the name of Christian faith that we look to when we try to, as it were, baptize that subject, and we end up not as he intended it, but as we want it to be.

And that whole lot of what feels like very sincere, emotively satisfying faith experiences, and yet hard to any actual... Amen. Now, another thing that seems to.

Remove scripture from the scenario is a lot of mysticism that goes on today, even within evangelicalism, where people want to connect with God by emptying their minds, but by seemingly waiting for some kind of a supernatural experience that may involve the reciting of mantras and things like that, even if they sound like very wonderful mantras that include the name of Jesus.

But it is not to do with filling the mind with scripture to connect with God, it is in their minds, emptying their minds to connect with God. This is a very dangerous trend, isn't it?

Yeah, you know, for all kinds of reasons and in all kinds of ways, the idea that the Bible is actually the breathed-out Word of God, and that through it and through prayer, we can have meaningful encounters with the...

It's fallen on very hard times, and, you know, with the rise of neo-paganism and other trends in culture, you can see a very deep, and yet we are any truth that is higher than yourself. And within Christianity, even allegedly Bible-affirming Christianity, we can very quickly gauge how quickly, you know, would our lives be that radically all persecuted?

Brethren, throughout the world, we no longer have direct and immediate access to our daily experience all that significantly. I tried to explore in my book is, what are the unbelievers in this idea that the Bible claims to be from.

Cover to cover? Well, we have a question from a listener that relates exactly to what you're saying. And I rarely give full names of listeners, but I'm making an exception this time because he has been a guest and co-host on Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

I'm referring to Charlie Liebert, who is an author and he is the founder of 6daycreation .com. He's a former colleague with Ken Ham, now operating as an independent apologist and author and itinerant teacher and evangelist.

Charlie Liebert asks, what is the most convincing argument for the inspiration of the Bible?

Wow, what a profound question. It begs other questions in terms of what does it mean to be convinced? You know, what is our criterion for being convinced? But, you know, this is going to sound to some like circular reasoning, although all thought plays some kind of presupposed predicate.

But as you look to this compelling Jesus about the scriptures, and again, some would say, well, you're going to the Bible, the Bible came into this world, and when you see Jesus' intro, when you read, you know, his heart's agony and his heart's triumphs, always framed in biblical terms, when he speaks to his father, even on the cross, from the Psalms, in several different places.

So the Lord Jesus in his own particular, I think is just utterly compelling, especially for anyone who has... By the way, Charlie, you have won a free copy of the book that we are addressing.

You're going to have to be patient because it's not in print yet, but God-Breathed Connecting Through Scripture to God, Others, the Natural World, and Yourself. That will be yours as soon as we have them in our hands, so make sure that you provide for us your mailing address again so that we can have that shipped out to you by our friends at cvbbs .com, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com, who sponsor this program and ship out all of the books and Bibles and other things that our listeners win when they submit questions to our guests.

Thanks a lot, Charlie, for the excellent question. It actually reminds me, when you were talking about circular reasoning, I had a humorous conversation years ago. It wasn't intended to be humorous, and it might not have been very humorous at the time, but when I reflect upon it, it strikes me still as being very humorous.

A friend of mine who was actually in a band for many years with my brother, one of my oldest brothers, Andrew, he was at one time a fire-breathing, King James-only fundamentalist. In fact, he was a disciple of Peter Ruckman, the late Peter Ruckman in Pensacola, Florida, and he became an atheist.

He was having this discussion with me with a pastor friend of mine sitting passively next to me, and this gentleman was getting frustrated that I had an answer for everything he had to throw at me regarding atheism and why I should reject Christianity.

He kept saying, you're basing your whole life on a book, and he kept repeating that. Eventually, I asked him, so what convinced you of atheism? He said, oh, I read so many books. I said, oh, so you're faulting me for basing my eternal life on a book, and yet you're basing your eternal life on many books that probably will be long forgotten within a few years, whereas the book that I am basing my life on is, I am totally convinced, God-breathed and is supernatural and is inerrant and has stood the test of time for millennia.