March 17, 2017 Show with Stephen Garrick on “Independent Fundamentalist Baptists: Their Admirable Traits & Their Weaknesses (& One of Their Pastors’ Journey into Reformed Baptist Theology & Ecclesiology)”

The Program Opens with the Show’s Theme and a Call to Listen for Questions

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage, 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.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your.

Own questions. Now here's our host Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon. Cumberland County, Pennsylvania,.

Lake City, Florida and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 17th day of March 2017 and happy St. Patrick's Day to all of you who in any way shape or form celebrate that day or give any kind of honor to Patrick of Ireland and today I would strongly urge you to spread the word about yesterday's interview that I had with Dr. Michael Haken.

Dr. Michael Haken, who is on the faculty at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary of Louisville, Kentucky, was my guest yesterday and he did an amazing interview, two-hour interview, on the true St. Patrick.

We were examining his book Patrick of Ireland and I strongly urge you to go to ironsharpensironradio .com and you will find that interview in the archive of the website for past shows podcasts. If you go to that section in the top right corner, click on that, you will find an mp3 that you can you could cut and paste the URL and put it in an email and you can send that to anyone you please to tell them about the true Patrick of history.

There is a lot of superstition involving Patrick, a lot of false legends and tales, and in fact obviously the Roman Catholic Church has claimed him as one of their saints, but Patrick was clearly not a Roman Catholic because the Roman Catholic Church did not even exist in the 5th century despite their claims.

There was no papacy and there was no sacrament of the mass or sacrament of penance and many of the things that the Roman Catholic Church developed in later centuries to the point where it was a full-blown formal Roman Catholicism at the Council of Trent.

That did not even exist in the 5th century. But anyway, you'll find out a lot of fascinating things about Patrick of Ireland by going to that archived interview that we had yesterday with Dr. Michael Haken.

In fact, if you wanted to just put in the search engine H-A-Y-K-I-N, that will be one of the interviews that comes up because we've had Dr. Haken on the program several times. So I urge you to look for that program on Patrick of Ireland.

But today I'm delighted to have on the program for the very first time ever Patrick Stephen Garrick, a pastor of Emanuel Reformed Baptist Church in Georgetown, Texas. And today he is going to be addressing independent fundamentalist Baptists, their admirable traits and their weaknesses.

And we're going to be talking about his own journey into Reformed Baptist theology and ecclesiology out from independent fundamentalist Baptist circles. And it's my honor and privilege not only to welcome you to Iron, Sharp, and Zion for the first time, but to welcome you right in my studio, Pastor Stephen Garrick.

Well, thank you, brother. Enjoy being here. And first of all, before we even go into the.

Subject at hand, I want to know more about your own personal upbringing as a child, what kind of religious atmosphere, if any, you were surrounded by as a child, and how you came providentially by God's sovereign grace to embrace Christ and his atoning death on Calvary.

Garrick’s Early Life, Conversion, and Baptist Upbringing

Well, my interesting set of providences, my father was raised, for the most part, what we would call Missouri Baptocostal. Kind of a mix between Pentecostal and Baptists, in the rural areas of Missouri.

My mom was raised Benedictine Catholic, and in fact, considered becoming a nun at one point in time. After she got married? Only after she had us kids, and then wished she could go back in time and change.

She met my dad through a correspondence. My dad was in World War II, and they married afterwards. My very earliest memories were of the Roman Catholic Church, but those would have been very, very faint.

Probably about the time I was four or five, my parents began to argue over religion very, very vociferously. And eventually, we wound up going to a Baptist church. It was a Southern Baptist church. The pastor there was a gospel preaching man, the Reverend Dean Grelling in Kansas City, Missouri.

And this is a downtown church in a very poor area. And it was there at about age seven and a half that I made a profession of faith. What I appreciated about Pastor Grelling was that, as a young man, since I had made that profession of faith, he took the time to talk with me one-on-one, and then with my parents.

And about, spread over two weeks, we talked several times, and he asked me what it was I understood, and what was it about the gospel, and about Christ. And it wasn't just one of those walk the aisle, sign the card things.

He wanted to make sure that I understood what professing Christ was about. Baptized under his ministry, and then he left, took a church in California. And this is about the time that liberalism is making its inroads, or manifesting its inroads, I should say, in the Southern Baptist Convention.

And we had a liberal gentleman come and begin to pastor the church there, and it just wasn't the same. My parents moved shortly afterwards, and I wanted to go to church. Nobody else in the family was that excited about it, at least not my brothers and sisters.

And so I began walking to a nearby church that was an independent Baptist fundamentalist church. And I didn't know the difference. To me, Baptist was Baptist. I was all of about 12 years old at this time.

And so it was about a mile walk, and enjoyed it, was hearing the Bible preached, and was learning the scriptures from the fundamentalist background. Now what kind of a fundamentalist Baptist church.

Was that? Because as you know, having been involved in the independent, but fundamentalist movement, there are different wings of that group. You have some that would be very entrenched in easy believism, like Jack Hiles.

You would have others who would view that as heresy, who strongly affirm with Reformed Christians the concept of lordship salvation, or the fact that repentance is necessary for true salvation. You have, I mean, the fundamentalist friends that I have, independent fundamentalist Baptist friends I have, predominantly from New York, you would have most of them viewing the American poster boy for fundamentalism, Jerry Falwell, they would view him as a compromising liberal.

And you would have, even amongst those friends of mine, although some of them are Bob Jones University graduates, you would have others that would even view Bob Jones University as a compromising institution, and unworthy of the connection with fundamentalism.

So it was a bit of a, it was the Baptist Bible Fellowship International, and there's a history behind that. But the particular church I went to would have been one of the well-known and of a flagship church within the Baptist Bible Fellowship.

The college that I went to was the same college that Jerry Falwell graduated from, although he graduated a decade and a half before I did. And so Jack Hiles was spoken of highly in the church that I went to, but not imitated in everything.

So this church had a large bus ministry, it had an average attendance of about 1 ,200 every Sunday, and so it was a fundamentalist King James Version using, it was never preached King James Version only, but certainly if you used anything else you were looked down on for doing.

That. Yeah, the folks that I am friends with in New York, they would be a mixture of rabid King James-onlyists or those who just believe it's the best translation. For instance, obviously, Bob Jones University does not take a King James-only stance.

In fact, they even sell the King James-only controversy by my friend Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, who refutes King James-onlyism, they actually sell that at Bob Jones University. But you have others, of course, that would go to the extreme that every other translation is an imposter of the scriptures.

So you have a whole variety of views.

This particular church, what I found out when I went to college, which was the Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, is that this particular church was probably one of the more open-minded of the fundamentalist churches of that group.

So that when I got to BBC in Springfield, Missouri, there were quite a few professors who actually looked at Bob Jones University with a certain skepticism that they were becoming liberal. You know, they had seen it happen to Quentin, for example, they'd seen it happen to Biola, and now they were afraid that Bob Jones was going the same route.

And certainly they were worried about Jerry Falwell going the same route. So there was a militant wing of the Baptist Bible Fellowship, if I can use that term, and then there was a more lenient wing of the group, and of course I didn't realize that until.

Actually I got into the college itself. And was this an Arminian, even though I know that most independent fundamentalist Baptists would never identify themselves with the term Arminian, but would they be a freewill-believing anti-Calvinist group?

Because I know that there are some Calvinist fundamentalists, you have to typically search high and low for them, but they do exist. I've met pastors and spoken with pastors that would agree with my fundamentalist Baptist friends on nearly everything else except the doctrines of grace, but...

Yeah, the pastor of the church that I began attending I think had some, certainly had a good understanding of Calvinist theology, and I think even had a certain affinity for it, but to him it was not a major issue one way or the other.

Now again, after I got to the college, it was a different story. And so generally speaking, they would have been, you know, four-point Arminian, if you want to put it that way. They would have strongly believed that you could not lose your salvation, which later on actually posed a problem for me in an interesting sort of way, we'll get to that, but they strongly taught that you could not lose your salvation.

But as far as the other concepts of Calvinism is concerned, they would have denied all the others.

Right. And you said that this church was in a group called the IFBC, is that the group?

No, it's the BBFI, the Baptist Bible Fellowship International. It was a split off of a group from J. Frank Norris, if you know that, and the World Baptist Fellowship of J. Frank Norris in the South. And this group split off in 1950 and started their own college, missions fellowship, and then publications, the Baptist Bible Tribune.

Okay. Yeah, because there are some.

Fundamentalist Baptists, independent fundamentalist Baptists, that have an enormous capital I on that independent, and they would view any kind of fraternal of churches or association as even a violation of Baptist independence.

They would look at that as.

A denomination of some kind. Yeah, we used to jokingly refer to them as the independent independents.

And of course, I've heard some of them refer to the General Association of Regular Baptists, the GARBC, which is known to be a fundamentalist group, but I've heard them identified as the grand army of rebelling Baptists.

And they all go back to the same roots, the modernist fundamentalist controversies of the 1920s and the Baptist Bible Union, and out of the BB Union of the three great men, you know, T .T. Shields, W .B. Reilly, and J. Frank Norris, while the Baptist Bible Union split up and they formed their different groups from there, and the GARBC, and then of course in the South, the Baptist Bible Fellowship grew out of that as well.

I'm going to right now actually give.

Our email address if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question. Our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. Please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

And if you are asking about a personal and private matter, we will allow you to remain anonymous if that is your wish. Obviously, if you are in disagreement with your own pastor on something or a similar situation that compels you to be anonymous, we will obviously respect your wishes.

But otherwise, if you could please at least give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence, that would be very helpful. Now the word itself, fundamentalist, didn't that come about from articles by a secular journalist who was actually writing about the fundamentalist modernist controversy?

Isn't that how that term.

Became in vogue? Yeah, there's some debate as to how the term became in vogue, but most attribute it to, like you said, the secular newspaper journalist. But the more common reference is to a group of essays that was edited by, I think originally by A .C. Dixon and then later by R .A. Torrey.

It was 90 essays on the fundamentals of the faith, and in fact, they just came to be called The Fundamentals. They were originally published or later published in five volumes, and 250 ,000 copies of The Fundamentals, this is back in 1915, were mailed out for free to ministers and pastors all over the United States.

And The Fundamentals had articles in by Thomas Boston, for example, on regeneration, and J. Gresham Machen, and B .B. Warfield on inspiration of scripture. So men that you don't think of as fundamentalists in the strict sense of the word, but in the early years, it just simply meant that someone would define Christianity by its essentials.

If you did not hold to these essentials, you were not a Christian. If you did not agree with these fundamentals, you had stepped outside the bounds of orthodoxy. And that's.

The origin of the term. Yes, and it is interesting that there is a large stream of vehement anti-Calvinism within the fundamentalist movement, and yet you have some of the heroes of the fundamentalist modernist controversy on the fundamentalist side, like J. Gresham Machen, who was a thoroughgoing Calvinist, and a Presbyterian, I might add.

Yeah, and even in the.

Baptist wing of the fundamentalist movement, T .T. Shields in Canada, Jarvis Street Baptist Church, Toronto, and Toronto Baptist College and Seminary as a result of his influence. T .T. Shields was a thoroughgoing Calvinist and a non-dispensationalist.

And on the other side, you had some Presbyterians who were Calvinists who were dispensationalists. So the fundamentalist movement was a bit more varied in the 19-teens and 1920s than most people realize, I think.

The Value of Biblical Separation and Cooperation Among Churches

And before we go into some.

Criticisms, and before we even go into why you eventually left that movement, I'd like to have you demonstrate that there were and are some very valuable things that are to be admired about independent fundamentalist Baptists and independent fundamentalist Christians, because obviously there are even those among them that prefer to refer to their churches as Bible churches rather than Baptist, and they even have heated disagreement over that, because there are churches that say that you cannot be a legitimate church, or you are in serious error at the very least if you don't have Baptist in the very title of your church.

But if you could tell us something about those things that you still admire, respect, and seek to retain actually from those days of.

Independent fundamentalist Baptists. T .T. Well I'd mentioned that I was converted under the ministry of a Reverend Dean Grelling, and then when he was called to another church, the church we were attending was pastored by a young man who had just graduated seminary and had adopted a neo-Orthodox perspective, and of course I was far too young to understand any of that, but I could tell even then something was different.

He started asking us to use the Revised Standard Version. He talked about the virgin birth in a different context. He stopped using the word atonement, and even as a kid I remember Dean Grelling, my pastor, using Christ dying on the cross as a substitute or as an atonement for your sins.

And so when I got into the fundamentalist church, like I said age 12, there was a strong emphasis on the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and that rang a chord in me, because that's what I was raised with under Pastor Grelling.

I recognized that, and they helped hone that doctrine in me as a young man all through my growing up teenage years. So there's a strong emphasis on the authority of the Word of God. Ironically it was that authority that led me out of fundamentalism, but nonetheless it was strongly proclaimed the Bible is the final authority over all things.

And that comes from a long fight against liberalism, and fundamentalism is to be commended for holding to the authority of the Word of God as tenaciously as they do. And I'm grateful to it because it instilled that in me.

As well. Wouldn't you say that even though many who identify themselves as independent fundamentalist Baptists or independent fundamentalists, even though they at times distort this and take it to an extreme that could even be legitimately called sinful extreme, but there is a rightful separation that they have.

In fact, I don't know any theologically reformed ministers of today that I truly admire and recommend wholeheartedly who are not separatists in some fashion. The modern ecumenical movement disturbs me greatly.

I happen to be a former Roman Catholic as you were for a bit of your life. I was actually educated in parochial school for the first eight years of elementary school in a Roman Catholic school. I was an altar boy.

My mother was a devout Roman Catholic until she made it clear weeks before she went home to glory that she was not trusting in Roman Catholicism for her salvation, nor was she even practicing their more heretical, aberrant, idolatrous acts of worship.

She had abandoned prayer to saints and Mary and was trusting in the finished work of Christ alone by the time she went home to the Lord. But Catholicism was a very big part of my life, and I see how I was lied to and how my family had been lied to.

Perhaps not intentionally that the priests and so on were purposefully lying to them and to me, but the cores of the faith that we were prevented from hearing in those years amongst the Roman Catholics and attending Roman Catholic mass and so on, has within me, perhaps even more than the average Christian, a really urgent, or should I say a sense of urgency that we need to separate from Rome, not only for our own good and for the good of our own people within the congregations where we fellowship, but for their good, to evangelize them, to tell them to flee from that because there is no hope of salvation in that system.

And I am willing to admit that there will likely be many Catholics in heaven when we get there, God willing, but they will be there despite their theological system and dogmas that contradict the scripture rather than because of them.

But if you could, isn't there a right view of separation that we who are in theologically Calvinistic and Reformed circles really need to take a second look at because it seems that there is a lot of ecumenism drifting into our own ranks today in our day and age?

If you're going to.

Believe something by means of biblical conviction, then of necessity that makes you distinct from those who do not believe whatever it is you hold to. And that distinction doesn't necessarily have to be an acrimonious distinction, but it does separate you.

It does categorize you and define you. And fundamentalists were very good at that in terms of defining themselves on the inspiration authority of the Word. In Reformed circles, for the most part we are as well.

Our confessions of faith define us and separate us from those who do not hold to our confessions of faith, and there's a great history involved with those. We don't want to be harsh. There's a biblical ecumenism that should be practiced.

For about nine years in Fort Worth, Texas, I was part of a group. We called it the Fellowship of Reformation and Pastoral Studies, and it was just a very informal meeting once a month. But we had a Reformed Episcopal minister.

We had an Episcopal minister who was not Reformed. And when I say Reformed, I mean REC. And then also one who was a part of the Episcopal Church USA, but he was Reformed in his theology.

I have a friend just like that in Manhattan.

Yeah. This is St. Andrews, downtown Fort Worth at the time. And we had a very interesting group. We had an OPC, Orthodox Presbyterian Church, PCA, Presbyterian Church of America, pastor, had an independent, charismatic Presbyterian minister.

I'm still not sure what that is. But a beloved brother and a wonderful gentleman, and interesting history all his own. We had another church that was just simply a non-denominational. And we got together, but what we all had in common was the gospel and the sovereign grace of God in saving the individual.

And we had some fantastic papers and presented and theological discussions how our churches could impact the communities around us. That was biblical ecumenism, without being harsh or divisive, because we recognized the biblical things on which we could build together.

Now naturally that separated us from those who disagreed on what the gospel was and the authority of God's Word. We had that in common.

Well even though the churches that you and I are in fellowship with most predominantly, even though we would be less separatist than some of the more strident separatist fundamentalists, there are even the levels of separation that would make our distinctions even greater and our separation even farther when it comes to actual membership.

Like for instance, you and I have beloved heroes of the faith that are even alive today, like Sinclair Ferguson and other fine Presbyterian men, outstanding Presbyterian men, and other Pato Baptists. And although we would have great fellowship with them and even welcome them enthusiastically into our pulpits, we would not permit them membership in the church unless they had been baptized as believers by immersion, and we would not permit members of our congregations to have their infants baptized and so on.

So there is still a separation. We may have wonderful fellowship with some of our charismatic brethren, especially those who would join with us in abandoning or staying away from or condemning the Word of Faith movement and the more extreme heretical versions of Pentecostal and charismatic theology and so on.

But even though we might have delightful and wonderful and warm fellowship with our charismatic brethren, we're not going to permit the exercise of the gifts in our congregations. We're not even going to permit, most likely, in fact most of the pastors I know within our circles, would not even hire as a pastor someone who is a non-cessationist or somebody who even believed in the continuing gifts, the sign gifts, even if he didn't practice them.

So I mean we do still have a serious demarcation line when it comes to separation.

Yeah, and the width of that demarcation line will probably depend on the seriousness of doctrinal difference. The church of which I'm now one of the pastors, Emanuel Reformed Baptiste in Georgetown, Texas, we have cooperative ties with the local Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Our current deacon, or one of our current deacons, was a member of that OPC church for nine years because there was no Reformed Baptist church in the area. This is before our church began. And they actually asked him to be an elder at one point in time, and he stated to them that his difference on baptism would not allow that to happen.

So when we opened up and began services, he met with his eldership, and they gave their blessing for him to come to our church where he could follow his Baptist convictions. Conversely, when we have people who visit who are of Presbyterian persuasion because they're looking for a Reformed church, I will do my best to talk them out of their Presbyterian persuasion.

And then failing in that effort, I will say, here's a good church that you can go to. And so we have this camaraderie and this cooperation between us. And agree also that if one church has unfortunately had to exercise discipline over a member, the other church will cooperate in that effort, although there's nothing ecclesiastical about it.

But nonetheless, it's a cooperation between churches. That level of cooperation doesn't exist between me and some of my own Baptist brethren in the area. So there are some very staunch Arminian, walk the aisle, pray the prayer, you're going to heaven, Baptist churches in the area that don't even have the same view of the gospel that I have.

I have closer cooperative ties with the Orthodox Presbyterian church than I do with some of them. On the other hand, in that desire for cooperation, there comes a point where you say, I cannot cross that line.

There are certain things we cannot recommend, certain things that we cannot give our conscientious commendation to.

We're going to be right back after these messages. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Pastor Stephen Garrick, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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That's chefexclusive .com. Welcome back. This is Chris Orange, and if you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours with about 90 minutes to go is Pastor Stephen Garrick, a pastor at Emmanuel Reform Baptist Church in Georgetown, Texas.

We are addressing independent fundamentalist Baptists, their admirable traits and their weaknesses, and Pastor Stephen Garrick's own journey out from among their ranks into Reform Baptist theology and ecclesiology.

If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, whether you agree or disagree with our guest, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com. So we have been going through some very positive things about independent fundamentalist Baptists and independent fundamentalist Christians in general, and in spite of those very positive things, there were things that you were beginning to be confronted with in God's providence that made you begin to question things that you were hearing and seeing, and you were also being drawn into truths from the Scriptures that you had not been taught or preached about.

If you could give us a little bit of that background.

From Mechanical Evangelism to True Repentance and Assurance

Yeah, again, you know, the strength of the fundamentalist movement in part lie with their adamant defense of the Bible being God's inspired Word and the final authority. They also had a very strong emphasis on preaching, and in fact, it was my pastor there in Kansas City who challenged me when I had made it plain that I felt called to the ministry, challenged me the first and foremost that as a minister, I had to learn how to communicate clearly.

And that was one of the most pivotal moments in my life as a minister. And then a strong emphasis on evangelism. But evangelism was very methodical. It was very mechanical, or if I can even use a bit of a pejorative term, cookie-cutter.

Here's the approach. Here's what you say. Here's what you ask. When they say yes here, this is what you do, and very orchestrated approach to evangelism. So that if a person followed through these steps with someone, and they of course followed through with you and then prayed the sinner's prayer, you counted them as a brother in Christ who could never lose their salvation because they had once prayed a prayer asking God to save them and forgive them of their sins.

Probably the first chip in the bulwark of fundamentalism in my own life came when I was a senior in high school. And I took a class called sociology, and my teacher was a rabid atheist, staunch atheist, socialist in many respects.

She also had a psychological background or psychology background and was a firm defender of Freud. So this kind of tells you where she's at. And I'm witnessing to her one day after class, and she stops me and she says, I know where you're going.

And I did that when I was a teenager. She said, when I was 14 years old, she said, I walked the aisle of what turned out to be a fundamentalist Baptist church, and she was a devout Christian until her mid -20s when in studying for her master's degree in psychology, she began to lose her faith and eventually abandoned it completely, and now avowed herself as an atheist.

And I didn't know what to do with that because the fundamentalist approach to evangelism was once saved, always saved. And she knew the gospel. She knew it by heart. She knew the scriptures as well as I did, had been raised with them, and again, until her mid -20s, called herself a fundamentalist Baptist Christian.

And I didn't know what to say to her other than to say, well, I assume then that you are still saved. Because to not say that to her was a denial of everything I had been taught regarding the gospel, and once saved, always saved.